Russian soldiers in a Horsell Common Zaporizhia treeline got a very unpleasant surprise when a new Ukrainian drone unleashed a rain of fiery thermite death on them.
Leave it to the Ukrainians to make yet another terrifying innovation in drone warfare. I’m sure the Russian soldiers were none too thrilled to be targeted by this drone-based Martian heat ray. Thermite is easy to come by, being just powdered aluminum and rust, and burns at an infernal 4,000°F. But I do wonder how they’ve rigged it so that it does its Sparkler Rain of Death trick without catching fire itself. I suspect some sort of pressurized nozzle with a separate igniter.
I suspect this will prove a very effective tool at clearing trenches.
Now for a Brucie Bonus (as Suchomimus likes to say, based on a British game show), here’s the post title reference.
I’ve had several videos cluttering up my tabs, none of which I thought worthy of doing a separate post on, so I’m going to burn all of them off here. Think of it like a sampler plate at a restaurant.
Habitual Linecrosser lays out just how much more powerful the U.S. military is than China. It’s not remotely a fair fight…
From the RNC, why Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson left the Democratic Party to join the Republicans:
“Democrats in power demonstrate they don’t care about stopping the killers or the thieves who terrorize black and brown communities. They don’t care about securing our border, and they don’t care about dangerous homeless encampments. No, the heart of today’s woke Democrat Party is with the criminals, not with their victims.”
From across the pond, why the Labour Party loathes the actual working class:
As here, lefting wing activists want to talk about global warming, gay rights and illegal alien rights, while the actual working class wants to talk about boring old things like “jobs” and “crime.” “There’s a large swath of the Labour Party who feel complete and absolute contempt for white working class people in particular.”
It’s not just the UK: How luxury beliefs are failing all across Europe:
“Only a few years ago, every academic under the sun was telling us that we were going to have a green surge in European politics, largely because most academics support the greens or radical left movements. So they were very support of what was happening. It was quite obvious that this was going to end in election disaster because the policies that many green parties have been bringing forward are not realistically anchored in the life experiences of ordinary voters.”
Also:
“At the core of all of these parties is the immigration population nexus. That is what ultimately this is all about. The more immigration the better, these parties will do that.”
How the EU is killing Europe:
Europe used to thrive on innovation because of different competing nation statues. Now a Mandarin Ming class has taken over and stiffed that. “Europe has failed to produce any significant innovation in the last 30 years.”
How a 1995 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 eerily predicted the actual future of San Francisco in 2024.
Enjoy your sampler platter, and please tip your waitress…
“All the conspiracy theories come out around it, too. I don’t know what to believe. I do know is that if our government tried to do an assassination attempt, that’s kind of how it would look. It was very inefficient. That was the DMV of assassination attempts. That was not good. They had a very small budget.”
“You could tell they they wanted to do it with a grassy knoll at a parade like they were used. ‘We can’t swing, that we’ve got to do a tin roof at a town fair, that’s all we’ve got.'”
“‘Can’t get any ex-military people to take the shot. Let’s get the kid who came in last place on his marksman team.'”
“Dude, that was just one big government block of cheese.”
“I was hoping Trump was going to come out the same day, you’re still bleeding to do the press conference. ‘They tried to shoot me, they were too slow and I’m too fast. I dodged the bullet. I saw it coming from so far away, it was like the Matrix, it was all in slow motion. Call me Neo, I’m the chosen one.'”
“‘They say he was a republican, the shooter, but I’ll tell you right, now he shoots like a liberal. Not straight, so not straight.'”
“‘They said it was a fake bullet, that’s what they said. It was a real bullet. We found the bullets. Turns out the bullets, they were made in China, that’s where they were made. They were little teeny tiny Chinese bullets, so small, so tiny.'”
More bad Biden Recession news, Kamala Harris wants a $5 trillion tax increase, a power-mad Brazilian judge wants to punish Elon Musk for refusing to censor his political enemies, more Texans sue the Biden Administration for failing to secure the border, Texas trims the voter roles, Harris County gets closer election supervision, two DEI-infected video games tank hard upon release, and the Navy runs put of pants.
After tumbling in April, and rebounding modestly in June, analysts expected a continued gain in pending home sales in July, but it wasn’t meant to be: moments ago the NAR reported that in July, Pending Home Sales tumbled 5.5% MoM, a huge miss to the 0.2% expected gain (and down from a 4.8% increase in June), and also slumped 4.6% YoY, a modest improvement from the 7.8% plunged in June but also missing expectations of a -2.0% drop.
That dragged the Pending home sales index to 70.2%, a fresh record low.
The Pending Home Sales Index is a leading indicator for the housing sector, based on pending sales of existing homes. A sale is listed as pending when the contract has been signed but the transaction has not closed, though the sale usually is finalized within one or two months of signing.
“A sales recovery did not occur in midsummer. The positive impact of job growth and higher inventory could not overcome affordability challenges and some degree of wait-and-see related to the upcoming U.S. presidential election,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement.
Sales decreased in all four US regions, especially in the Midwest and South.
Vice President Kamala Harris wants to extract a $5 trillion tax increase from American households and businesses, her campaign confirmed on Monday.
The Harris campaign officially endorsed the laundry list of new and higher taxes included in the Biden-Harris administration’s fiscal year 2025 budget, a plan that would increase taxes by $5 trillion over ten years.
The burden of Harris’s tax increases will hit households in the form of diminished wage growth and higher costs of goods and services. These Harris tax increases will make the U.S. less competitive vs. our adversaries.
Harris also endorsed further increasing the size and power of the already-supersized IRS and erode taxpayer rights by watering down procedures designed to protect taxpayers from abusive and dishonest IRS agents (details below.)
Kamala Harris’s tax increases include:
Small business tax rate hike to 39.6%
Small business owners pay business taxes on their individual tax return. The Harris endorsed budget raises the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6% from the current 37%.
Corporate tax rate higher than the EU and communist China.
Kamala Harris wants to hike the current 21% federal corporate income tax rate to 28%, higher than communist China’s 25% and the EU average of 21%, her campaign said Monday.
The Kamala Harris federal 28% rate is higher than the Asia average corporate tax rate of 19.8%, the EU average of 21%, the world average of 23.5%, and the OECD average of 23.7%. (See the Tax Foundation’s comprehensive listing here.)
The Harris federal 28% rate is also higher than Canada (26.2%), the UK (25%) Sweden (20.6%), and even Russia (20%), Afghanistan (20%), and Iraq (15%).
After adding state corporate income taxes, the combined federal-state tax burden in most states will easily exceed 30% under the Harris plan.
The Harris rate hurts the USA vs. China with its 25% rate. And note: Industry sectors of strategic use to the Chinese government pay an even lower rate of 15%.
American workers will bear the brunt of Harris’s corporate tax increase.
The non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation affirmed in congressional testimony that corporate tax rate hikes hit “labor, laborers.” A study compiled by the Tax Foundation found that “labor bears between 50 percent and 100 percent of the burden of the corporate income tax, with 70 percent or higher the most likely outcome.”
Capital gains and dividends tax more than twice as high as communist China
Here is a direct quote from the Biden-Harris budget: “Together, the proposals would increase the top marginal rate on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends to 44.6 percent.“
Yes, you read that correctly: A Kamala Harris capital gains and dividends tax rate of 44.6%
China’s capital gains tax rate is 20%. Is it wise to have higher taxes than China?
Under the Harris plan, the combined federal-state capital gains tax exceeds 50% in many states. California will face a combined federal-state rate of 57.8%, New Jersey 55.3%, Oregon at 54.5%, Minnesota at 54.4%, and New York state at 53.4%.
Unconstitutional wealth tax on unrealized gains
The Harris-endorsed budget calls for an annual 25 percent minimum tax on the unrealized gains of individuals with income and assets exceeding $100 million. Once in place, it won’t be long before the threshold is lowered to hit more and more Americans.
Americans overwhelmingly oppose taxes on unrealized gains, by a factor of three to one, including 76% of independents. Americans know that a “gain” isn’t “real” until it is actually realized, in hand.
This Harris tax is similar to the wealth taxes pushed by radical progressives such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Capital gains taxes should only be paid when a gain is realized. Harris’s wealth tax would break with current tax policy and impose tax Americans based on the value of an asset on a particular arbitrary date.
This unprecedented tax would give even more power to the IRS, encourage taxpayers to move assets overseas, and will only expand to hit millions of Americans over time.
I don’t agree with every single item on this new RFK, Jr. hit job on Democrats, but it is pretty brutal, and the perfect thing to post to really annoy your facebook friends the next time they post an anti-Trump meme:
A federal judge has ruled that Elon Musk’s lawsuit against leftwing pressure group Media Matters can go forward.
X, formerly known as Twitter, filed the suit in November after Musk threatened to bring a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against the left-leaning nonprofit and “all those who colluded” for “completely misrepresenting” the real user experience on X.”
According to the lawsuit, Media Matters – founded by Democratic operative David Brock, who left the organization in 2022, used manipulative and deceptive tactics to convince advertisers like Apple, IBM and Disney that ‘hateful’ content was being displayed next to their brands – leading them to pause their X advertising campaigns.
X claims Media Matters fabricated the results. From the original complaint:
Media Matters has opted for new tactics in its campaign to drive advertisers from X. Media Matters has manipulated the algorithms governing the user experience on X to bypass safeguards and create images of X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts adjacent to racist, incendiary content, leaving the false impression that these pairings are anything but what they actually are: manufactured, inorganic, and extraordinarily rare.
Media Matters executed this plot in multiple steps, as X’s internal investigations have revealed.
First, Media Matters accessed accounts that had been active for at least 30 days, bypassing X’s ad filter for new users. Media Matters then exclusively followed a small subset of users consisting entirely of accounts in one of two categories: those known to produce extreme, fringe content, and accounts owned by X’s big-name advertisers. The end result was a feed precision-designed by Media Matters for a single purpose: to produce side-by-side ad/content placements that it could screenshot in an effort to alienate advertisers.
But this activity still was not enough to create the pairings of advertisements and content that Media Matters aimed to produce.
Media Matters therefore resorted to endlessly scrolling and refreshing its unrepresentative, hand-selected feed, generating between 13 and 15 times more advertisements per hour than viewed by the average X user repeating this inauthentic activity until it finally received pages containing the result it wanted: controversial content next to X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts.
Pretty much everyone saw this coming. “Elon’s SpaceX To Rescue Stranded Astronauts After NASA Dumps Boeing.”
Speaking of Elon Musk, a Brazilian Supreme Court Judge has declared that Twitter/X must censor the accounts of political enemies he specifies, and Musk, citing the Brazilian constitution, is having none of it.
On Thursday night, X’s Global Government Affairs account posted a dire warning over service availability in Brazil, after dictatorial Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes punished them for not complying “with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents,” according to the post.
More:
When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts. Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored. Judge de Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him.
We are absolutely not insisting that other countries have the same free speech laws as the United States. The fundamental issue at stake here is that Judge de Moraes demands we break Brazil’s own laws. We simply won’t do that.
In the days to come, we will publish all of Judge de Moraes’ illegal demands and all related court filings in the interest of transparency.
Unlike other social media and technology platforms, we will not comply in secret with illegal orders.
To our users in Brazil and around the world, X remains committed to protecting your freedom of speech.
Meanwhile, Musk says that SpaceX is going to continue to provide Starlink in Brazil to schools and hospitals for free…
* * *
One day after Brazillian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes threatened to suspend social media platform X unless Elon Musk appoints a new legal representative in 24 hours, the judge – dubbed “Brazil’s Darth Vader” by Musk – issued a subpoena against the company.
Today, he blocked the financial accounts of Musk-owned Starlink Holdings, due to the absence of an attorney.
Alexandre de Moraes might be the second-most powerful person in Brazil.
He does not quite have the reach of the president. But as a judge on the Supreme Court, until recently the president of the Electoral Court, and especially as head of two sprawling investigations against groups spreading disinformation, Moraes has wielded a rare combination of judicial powers. He has unilaterally handed out fines, ordered arrests, social media bans and other sanctions, and even acted as investigator and judge at once.
Moraes, 55, has used those powers prolifically, including against several members of the right-wing opposition to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government.
Brazilian conservatives have long contended he is abusing his power. But “Xandão” (“Big Alex”), as he is semi-jokingly called by supporters and detractors alike, earned the gratitude of many members of Brazil’s political establishment who believed his actions were fundamental to defending democracy during and after Jair Bolsonaro’s tumultuous 2018-22 presidency.
Now, that goodwill is being put to the test. As international voices add to a swelling domestic chorus, criticism of Moraes is starting to break through into the mainstream of Brazilian discourse.
The most public clash has been between Moraes and the South African billionaire Elon Musk, who has vigorously resisted the judge’s efforts to control speech on his X platform and other social media. Late Wednesday, Moraes used X itself to send Musk an ultimatum to appoint a new legal representative for his company in Brazil, and threatened a total ban of the platform in Latin America’s largest country unless he complied. Several Brazilian legal experts told Estado de S.Paulo newspaper that Moraes was overstepping his powers—that his use of social media to deliver the order was invalid, and that any suspension would be illegal.
Also recently, reporting by Fabio Serapião and Glenn Greenwald, the well-known American journalist who lives in Brazil, in Folha de S.Paulo newspaper indicated that Moraes and his lieutenants skirted official procedure in preparing sanctions for targets of his investigations.
These controversies have put renewed focus on several questions: Is Moraes censoring the opposition, or guarding Brazilian democracy? What should be the balance between allowing political speech on social media—and fighting back against disinformation and other threats? And finally: Has Moraes’ power outlived its usefulness, placing due process and the rule of law under threat in a different but also harmful way?
“It’s clear he’s pushing the limits,” said Conrado Hübner, a professor of constitutional law at the University of São Paulo and columnist at Folha. “There’s no precedent, nothing remotely similar to having a minister leading … investigations that almost become permanent institutions.”
“It’s been a year and a half since the 2022 election and the departure of a president who threatened institutions,” wrote the editorial board of Folha on August 26. “But for minister Alexandre de Moraes and his colleagues at the Supreme Court, it’s as if it was still that time—at least as a pretext for maintaining the anomalous concentration of power in this magistrate and his court.”
Snip.
Moraes banned the social media accounts of right-wing influencers Rodrigo Constantino and Paulo Figueiredo, for allegedly spreading Covid-19 misinformation and casting doubt on the Brazilian electoral system. He also banned the accounts of department store chain owner and right-wing influencer Luciano Hang, allegedly for agitating for a coup in a pro-Bolsonaro message group. Blogger Allan dos Santos, in self-imposed exile in Florida, had his passport revoked after calling for the dissolution of the STF, and being accused of involvement in an “organized crime network” that operates through monetized videos online. The U.S. refused an extradition request—reportedly because it determined Santos’s actions aren’t considered a crime in the U.S.
“It’s persecution, pure and simple,” Santos said.
The political temperature has moderated in Brazil over the past year, as a degree of institutional harmony has returned under Lula’s watch. But Moraes has remained on the offensive, threatening earlier this year to block Telegram, an encrypted messaging service, for refusing to comply with his orders. (Pavel Durov, the service’s founder, was arrested in France earlier this week for failing to prevent illegal activity on the platform.)
As part of the reporting on leaked documents from Moraes’ office in August, Greenwald wrote that former Bolsonaro advisor Filipe Martins had been detained under an order by Moraes for almost six months without charges, based on evidence that (Greenwald wrote) had been disproven. Less than a week later, Moraes ordered him released.
In reporting over the last several weeks, Greenwald and a co-author have used leaked messages to level accusations that Moraes directed his aides to compile reports on individuals, setting them up for social-media bans and other sanctions, and pass off the reports as having come from other legal organs or as anonymous complaints. The reports exacerbated concerns that Moraes was blurring the lines between legal roles—and so did his response, which was to order an inquiry into the source of the leaks.
Some of those actions sound familiar… (Hat tip: Glenn Greenwald.)
Hamas terrorist official Ghazi Hamad said during a recent interview that the terror group views its October 7 massacre as an enormous success because it damaged attempts to establish diplomatic ties between Israel and the Arab states.
Hamad, who previously said that the terror group aims to repeatedly carry out October 7-style attacks, said during an interview earlier this summer that was only translated this week that the terrorist attack — in which 1,200 were murdered, 5,300+ wounded, and hundreds more taken hostage — was “able to slap at the progress of the normalization of effort, and this is, of course, a very important political success.”
He said that the attack has also been successful in creating divisions among Israelis and uniting other Islamic terrorist organizations to attack Israel.
“US Strike Eliminates Senior Al-Qaeda-Linked Terrorist Leader In Syria. A U.S. military drone strike has killed a senior leader of Hurras al-Din, a group in Syria aligned with the al-Qaeda terrorist group, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said in an Aug. 23 statement. The strike targeted Abu-‘Abd al-Rahman al-Makki, a prominent figure within the group’s Shura Council, responsible for overseeing terrorist activities from Syria, according to the statement.”
Are you an senior citizen living in Communist Cuba? Good luck surviving on $10 a month.
Cubans continue to flee a worsening economy in record numbers while the elderly have been left behind, fighting to survive on the communist regime’s $10 monthly pension and a critical lack of basic supplies.
Food, power, medical equipment, and pharmaceutical shortages have ignited persistent protests this year and driven Cuba’s ongoing exodus of working-age adults.
The result has been nothing short of devastating for the country’s retirees.
“It’s a nightmare in every direction. This is an SOS. Cuba is about to collapse in a fatal way,” said Ramon Saul Sanchez, a long-time anti-Cuban regime activist and president of the Democracy Movement in Miami.
“People can’t really imagine, especially from outside, making elderly people live in such inhumane conditions,” Sanchez told The Epoch Times.
“Because of the deterioration of the economy and the lack of interest of the Cuban regime, they aren’t helping those who need it,” he said. “Retirement pension maybe allows you to buy a dozen eggs a month. That’s it.”
Another lawsuit from Texas over the Biden Administration’s refusal to secure the border, but this one wasn’t from Ken Paxton. ” Border Counties, Residents Sue Biden Administration, Alleging Refusal to Enforce Immigration Laws.”
A grim scene of death, destruction, and crime is described among the harms suffered by two Texas border counties in a lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging that the “willful and unconstitutional” refusal to enforce federal law has resulted in unprecedented harm inflicted upon the rural communities.
Kinney and Atascosa counties, Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, and rancher Dr. Michael Vickers are the plaintiffs in the petition filed in the federal district court for the Southern District of Texas this past week naming President Joe Biden, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Majorkas, and other federal immigration officials as defendants.
The plaintiffs raised unique arguments not yet seen in other legal disputes over the border crisis, including that the Biden administration violated the U.S. Constitution’s Take Care Clause and a law requiring environmental impact studies.
The Take Care Clause in Article II, Section 3 states that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
“Immediately upon being sworn into office, the current Administration has pursued immigration policies that are not only at odds with Congress’s statutory scheme and directives but are objectively calculated to dismantle proven border security programs or craft novel administrative processing ‘pathways’ to permit inadmissible aliens to enter and remain inside the country,” the lawsuit alleges.
Among the examples contained in the complaint, the Biden administration is accused of abusing prosecutorial discretion to effectively rewrite immigration law, paroling more illegal aliens into the nation in the past year than lawful aliens.
The administration also adopted a policy allowing illegal aliens with criminal backgrounds to remain in the country, contrary to laws that require deportation.
“Collectively, Defendants’ actions signaled to potential border crossers—and to the human trafficking and drug cartels that coordinate illegal border crossing—that the Administration is unwilling to secure our border,” the lawsuit states, adding, “Defendants have completely abdicated their statutory responsibilities, allowed or encouraged the southern border to be overrun, and are violating their duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
The plaintiffs then described the harms they have suffered as a result of the alleged policies, with Vickers noting illegal aliens have caused $50,000 worth of damages on his ranch since 2021, not including trash the aliens have left behind that has harmed both livestock and the environment.
Vickers said he must also constantly remain armed, noting that with the increased illegal immigration, numerous gang members are also coming to his ranch, including MS-13, Tango Blast, the Pistoleros, and the Mexican Mafia.
Citing another shocking result of the policies, he said that since 2021 over 270 dead bodies have been found within 15 minutes of his home.
The counties also described the unprecedented burden the crisis places on local government.
The lawsuit explains that in 2020, before the Biden administration implemented its current border policies, Kinney County handled 134 criminal charges.
From there, it skyrocketed within a year to 2,708 criminal cases and continued to climb to 6,800 in 2022. Most recently, it faced 5,826 cases in 2023.
The crime has strained the rural communities’ limited financial resources.
The lawsuit asks the court to enjoin the Biden administration’s policies that run contrary to federal law, citing causes for relief under both an administrative rule-making statute and the Take Care Clause.
State Rep. Shawn Thierry (D-Houston) is switching parties to the GOP, she announced Friday at an event in Washington, D.C. held by Moms for Liberty.
“The Democratic Party has veered so far left, so deep into the progressive abyss, that it now champions policies I cannot, in good conscience, support — policies like promoting sex changes for vulnerable children and dismantling Title IX protections for women in sports. That’s why I am leaving the left and joining the party of family, faith, and freedom,” Thierry said in a release.
“I now stand with colleagues, friends, neighbors, women, and mothers in the Republican Party.”
Thierry lost her primary runoff to Lauren Simmons, and the legislature is out of session, so no change in the legislative status quo.
Current rate per megawatt hour: $36. What New York pays for wind power $155 per megawatt hour.
Here’s an interesting ruling: “US judge tosses machine gun possession case, calls ban unconstitutional.”
A federal judge has dismissed charges against a Kansas man for possessing a machine gun, saying prosecutors failed to establish that a federal ban on owning such weapons is constitutional.
The decision, by U.S. District Judge John Broomes in Wichita on Wednesday appeared to mark the first time a court has held that banning machine guns is unconstitutional after the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 issued a landmark ruling that expanded gun rights.
In that ruling, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court established a new test for assessing firearms laws, saying restrictions must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
The Supreme Court clarified that standard in June as it upheld a ban on people subject to domestic violence restraining orders having guns, saying a modern firearms restriction needs only a “historical analogue,” not a “historical twin,” to be valid.
Broomes, an appointee of Republican then-President Donald Trump, said prosecutors in Tamori Morgan’s case failed to identify such a historical analogue to support charging him with violating the machine gun ban.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office (SOS) will send multiple staff members to Harris County to inspect records and procedures and assist the elections division during the 2024 general election, citing multiple issues uncovered in a state audit of the county’s management of past elections.
According to a press release from Secretary of State Jane Nelson, the SOS “will assign state inspectors to Harris County to perform checks on election records, including tapes and chain-of-custody, and will observe the handling and counting of ballots and electronic media during the November 2024 election period.”
SOS will also send staff to assist the county for the duration of the election period, from early voting to Election Day and through tabulation.
The SOS announced the planned “enhanced presence” along with the final results of an audit of the 2022 elections, which included findings the county had not followed state law in maintaining voter registration rolls and in providing the required minimum amounts of ballot paper to all polling sites.
Ballot paper shortages halted voting at multiple locations on Election Day 2022.
According to state law, officials must provide each polling site with ballots equivalent to 125 percent of voter turnout in the last corresponding election. Under former Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum the county only provided 600 ballots to locations that had processed twice that many voters in 2018; a former county employee has been charged with six felonies in relation to the ballot paper allocation.
SOS Elections Division auditors also found that the county had not provided adequate training to election workers, which contributed to widespread equipment failures across multiple elections, and had failed to comply with state paperwork requirements.
During a Texas House Committee on Elections hearing on Monday, SOS Elections Director Christina Adkins briefed lawmakers on the results of the audit. She noted that after moving from a paperless system to paper ballots in May 2021, Harris County had not provided hands-on training for election judges and clerks.
As a result, Adkins said voting ceased for an hour or more at multiple polling locations during the November 2021 elections, with 17 sites not processing any voters until more than an hour after the scheduled opening due to equipment problems. Despite the issues, then-County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria did not revise training procedures prior to the March 2022 primary election, which had similar problems.
Adkins also noted that Harris County failed to include 10,000 ballots in preliminary counts after the March 2022 primaries, a discrepancy that was identified by a reconciliation report required by election reform legislation enacted in 2021. The ballots were kept on a thumb drive, but Adkins noted that counties develop their own tracking procedures for the devices.
”I don’t recall that they had a lot of paperwork to show us on tracking that process,” said Adkins.
The county has also struggled to maintain voter registration rolls. Adkins told lawmakers that Harris is one of 33 counties that use a third-party vendor for management of voter rolls, leading to significant discrepancies between state and local databases.
The final audit noted that while the discrepancies “may seem minor in comparison to the total number of registered voters, the inconsistencies make it difficult to validate election data.”
In his stated effort to uphold election integrity in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott announced that more than one million people have been removed from the state’s voter rolls.
As part of the announcement, Abbott provided a chart that shows over 1.1 million voters in various categories are flagged as “removed,” including over 457,000 deceased individuals and over 463,000 voters on the “suspense list.”
Additionally, over 134,000 voters failed to respond to an address confirmation notice, while over 6,500 are noncitizens and over 6,000 have felony convictions.
Abbott highlighted Senate Bill (SB) 1, which was signed into law in 2021, that added provisions designed to prevent fraud by adding criminal statutes, prohibiting unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, and setting additional ground rules for early voting and voter registration.
“Election integrity is essential to our democracy,” said Abbott in his recent press release.
“I have signed the strongest election laws in the nation to protect the right to vote and to crack down on illegal voting. These reforms have led to the removal of over one million ineligible people from our voter rolls in the last three years, including noncitizens, deceased voters, and people who moved to another state.”
Abbott added that the Texas Secretary of State has “an ongoing legal requirement to review the voter rolls, remove ineligible voters, and refer any potential illegal voting to the Attorney General’s Office and local authorities for investigation and prosecution.”
“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated.”
In addition to SB 1, Abbott has signed multiple other bills to crack down on illegal voting. This includes House Bill (HB) 1243, which increases the penalty for illegal voting to a second-degree felony; SB 1113, which empowers the Secretary of State to withhold funds from counties that fail to remove noncitizens from voter rolls; and HB 574, which criminalizes knowingly counting invalid votes.
Whereas O’Rourke spent much of his time on the road doing a glorified whistle-stop tour of the state, Allred’s camp has opted for carpet bombing the Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Beaumont, and Rio Grande Valley media markets with ads.
According to the Cruz campaign, the television spend breakdown so far is $5.9 million for Allred and $265,000 for Cruz; Allred’s campaign declined to confirm any numbers. National political ad-tracking firm AdImpact put the Cruz deficit among all entities and groups at a much larger figure: $21.7 million to $2.2 million.
I expect Cruz to win by more than he did in 2018, especially in a Presidential election year, but I’m sure Ted could use more money.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit held that a novel type of search warrant used to collect digital record data is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.
The case arose from the robbery of a postal service worker in Mississippi, where surveillance video showed one of the robbers checking his cell phone during his escape after taking a mailbag containing $60,706 at gunpoint from the postman.
After coming up short of other ways to identify the perpetrators, postal inspector agents obtained what are known as geofencing warrants, which ultimately led to Gilbert McThunel’s arrest and conviction for the crime.
Geofencing warrants, the court explained, are different from normal search warrants that are based on probable cause and allow the police to search a known specific person or thing. Instead, law enforcement uses geofencing warrants when the identity of the suspect isn’t known, such as in this instance.
The warrants work in reverse from traditional search warrants. Most commonly, as with this case, investigators ask Google to search a database containing data from every one of their users who has their location history enabled on their smartphones.
Approximately one-third of Google’s 592 million users have their location history feature turned on, which silently tracks the location of the device through cell signals, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth every two minutes, uploading that location data to a “Sensorvault.”
When Google receives a geofencing warrant, the company must search all records in the Sensorvault for location data that corresponds to the warrant — for all accounts that were within a certain geographic location at a certain time.
I’m conflicted on this. I can see situations where a geofence warrant may be justified for serious crimes, but they also offer a real possibility of government abuse (such as January 6th defendants).
California continues to California: “Dems Pass Bill to Give Illegal Immigrants $150,000 Home Loans — but the Program Is Broke.”
The latest business slammed by the Biden Recession: RVs. Also, holy crap, have RVs gotten ridiculously expensive. I guess they’re pricing them against owning a home these days…
Dwight alerted me to this story last week, and I told him “I’m waiting for the followup when the police capture the man and it turns out his name is Abbas Mohammed Jihad.” Well: “3 people were killed and 6 others injured at a diversity festival in Solingen, Germany, when a man with a knife went on a rampage…According to reports from the scene, and according to a German newspaper, witnesses heard the unidentified attacker shouting “Allahu Akbar” during what is being called a potential act of terrorism.” Sometimes it sucks to be so psychic…
Dispatches from Tim Walz’s Minnesota: CBS News was running a segment on car thefts and a car theft happened while they were filing.
She dug deeper into the nonprofit’s bank records and found much more that concerned her. Mansion rentals. Vet bills. Luxury clothes. Finally, a stay at a Cancun resort. Ms. Banks scrolled back through Facebook to the week that resort bill was paid. She saw her boss, [Raheem AI president] Brandon D. Anderson, posing in a pool.
The photo was tagged: “Cancun.”
Snip.
They investigated and questioned more than $250,000 in charges since 2021 alone, internal documents show.
Among them: Mr. Anderson — who was paid a salary of $160,000 — had spent $1,500 of the charity’s money at a chiropractor; $5,000 on veterinary care; and an astounding $46,000 on ride-share services like Uber and Lyft. Most confoundingly, the nonprofit had paid $80,000 for luxury vacation rentals, including a service that let members stay in luxury mansions around the world, according to the board’s accounting.
And since Raheem AI is an anti-police organization, no one wanted to go to the cops… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
A teacher in Round Rock Independent School District was arrested for sex crimes involving children.
Domingo Perez Jr., also known as Dominic, was a science teacher at Stony Point High School through the 2023-2024 school year.
Perez was arrested and booked into the Williamson County Jail on August 21.
He is facing charges of indecency with a child by sexual contact—a second-degree felony punishable by 2 to 20 years in prison—and possession of 50 or more images or videos of child pornography, a first-degree felony punishable by up to life in prison.
Yes, they are trying to Trans your kids:
These images were reportedly taken inside @MMSDschools in Wisconsin.
This school is trying to destroy "heteronormative thinking" and replace it with a "queer affirming network?"
Concord and Dustborn were two AAA gaming title that had three things in common: they both cost a lot of money, they both pushed social justice, and they both tanked hard on release. Unlike Black Myth Wukong, which social justice game journalist sites criticized relentlessly and which sold 10 million copies…
Critical Drinker calls The Crow reboot the worst film of the year. “A violent, grimy and bleak exercise in stupidity.”
Comedian Gary Gulman on how the states got their abbreviations. Conan O’Brien said this was one of the funniest bits ever on his show, and it’s pretty good.
We had previously covered the various failures of Austin’s toy train Project Connect light rail project to achieve its stated goals. Now a lawsuit has been filed to put the light rail tax out of our misery.
A new class action lawsuit filed in Travis County 126th District Court claims that the City of Austin is collecting annual property tax illegally to fund Project Connect since the project is not following through on delivering the public transit development that voters agreed to in 2020.
As KVUE reported, voter-approved Project Connect has faced legal action in the past from taxpayers and is now facing another lawsuit brought by the same group of plaintiffs who want to prevent the city from continuing to collect millions of dollars in property taxes to fund the now reduced Project Connect plan.
The plaintiff’s lead counsel, Bill Aleshire, said, “They’re pursuing what I call a ‘miniature’ Project Connect that’s not city wide.”
Aleshire explained that Project Connect “started as a $7 billion plan that included 30 miles of rail, a route to the airport and downtown, now has a more than an $11 billion price tag and half the routes.”
He also argued that the city “miscalculated” its 2024 tax rate and that the funds already collected are not being spent on the transit project.
“Not including this year’s $187 million, Austin’s Project Connect tax levy has been for over $630 million. But there is $476 million on hand, unspent, uncommitted,” Aleshire said.
Project Connect managers, the Austin Transit Partnership, described the lawsuit as “baseless” and stated the funds collected would be utilized in the future, according to KVUE.
Lead plaintiff Cathy Cocco referred to the transit project as “an unaffordable, outdated, yesterday idea not suited for the 21st century city that needs to be efficient, agile, affordable, and more equitable for all Austin residents.”
While Project Connect had the potential to benefit the Austin community, Cocco sees the plan as a “bait and switch scheme.”
The group wants city leaders to stop the tax, revisit the project, and ask Austinites to vote on it again.
At this point it’s obvious that Austin voters were sold a bill of goods. They’ve coughed up a lot of taxes and gotten an underutilized toy train that doesn’t meet the promises made in the bond language. The entire project should be scrapped and money returned to taxpayers. Of course, that would mean Austin’s ruling political establishment would have to admit they were wrong and give up control of a big bucket of money, so we know that’s not happening without a fight…
On Patrick Bet-David’s podcast, mugged liberal evolutionary psychologist Bret Weinstein calls the modern Democratic Party “an existential threat to the republic” and says the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. endorsement has him willing to vote for Trump.
It starts with a clip of RFK, Jr. denouncing the DNC and the mainstream media (“They [his relatives and old school Democrats] would be astonished to learn of a Democratic party Presidential nominee who like Vice President Harris has not appeared in a single interview or an unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days”) only to have CNN fade out the audio.
Patrick Bet-David: “The moment he’s about to criticize Kamala they do this.”
Bret Weinstein: “It was classic Robert F Kennedy, Jr. You know, he has encyclopedic knowledge on a wide range of subjects and he covered a great many of them.”
BW: “What he was effectively saying was that the presentation that we all receive is pure stagecraft, and he’s right. And then to have CNN cut away, not able to engage in their usual level of stagecraft, because they don’t know what he’s going to say, is incredible. They validated exactly what it was he was describing, which was a fake world that’s presented over our screens by these mega monolith corporations that decide what we get to know and when we get to know it.”
PBD: “At the RNC, the name Joe Biden was mentioned two times during the entire convention, but at the DNC, Trump was mentioned 400 times, not because of policies, just trashing him.”
BW: “I think [RFK, Jr’s endorsement of Trump] absolutely monumental, because I think there is we are in a novel moment in American political history, where many of us who hold different positions on the political spectrum have different priorities with respect to policy are finding that none of our differences matter in light of the jeopardy that the that the republic is in.”
BW:”[RFK, Jr] is emboldening a movement that is more widely recognizing that those differences have to be put aside until the main job is done.”
BW: “I was very interested in the way he navigated the idea this was not a simple endorsement of Trump, this was an endorsement of retaking the White House and using that position to restore the republic to its proper course.”
BW: “The DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon, oh, nothing no policies. No interviews, no debates, only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus.”
BW: [On whether RFK’s support makes him consider voting for Trump] “Oh, absolutely let me just be perfectly clear about that. I think the modern Democratic Party is an existential threat to the republic.”
BW: “Although I am a Democrat, I’ve been a Democrat my whole life, the party that I see in front of me today is literally the inverse of the party I signed up for. This is now the party of war, this is the party of racism, this is the party of censorship. I don’t recognize this party. There is no conceivable scenario in which I would vote for Kamla Harris.”
BW: “I am open to voting for Trump. I’m especially open to it if he is partnered with Bobby Kennedy, because what that tells me is that my values, which are a much closer match for Bobby’s, are represented in that Administration, and that’s really what I want.”
BW: “I want a coalition to redefine American politics, because, frankly, we have a long-standing problem with corruption, which has now turned into something else with with the modern Democratic Party.”
BW: “We need to rethink the way we govern ourselves, so that corruption is not the dominant force, and a coalition is the way we’re going to do that.”
The interview is interesting for several reasons:
Weinstein is dead on about the corruption and totalitarian tendencies of the modern Democratic Party. Indeed, if you removed the corruption and social justice from the Democratic Party, I doubt there’s anything left.
The appeal of RFK, Jr. continues to elude me, seeming a mishmash of ecowhackjobism, pre-social justice liberal nostrums and healthy serving of conspiracy theories who receives outsized media attention for a man who’s never held elected office. But Weinstein is hardly an unlearned rube dazzled by the faded ghost of Camelot. Clearly the cadres of disaffected old-school liberals and soft-left squishy independents who feel deeply alienated from the modern Democratic Party is bigger than I thought it was, and Kennedy and former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard seem to have become the totems for this group.
That both Kennedy and Gabbard have endorsed Trump may be more significant than I thought at first. In the wake of the Twitter files and other revelations about just how badly the Democratic Media Complex has deceived people on a wide range of issues, I think many in this group have come to the realization that their Trump Derangement Syndrome is a false worldview imposed on them by systemic preference falsification, and have gradually come to regard Trump as the lesser evil compared to the endemic corruption and disasterous policies of the modern Democratic Party. I think many in this group see the Kennedy and Gabbard endorsements as giving them permission to vote for Trump, a sort of Get Out of Liberal Guilt Free card. Clearly Kennedy isn’t doing it for the money. “If Bobby’s endorsed him, how bad can he be?”
Even if Kennedy only brings over 3% of voters, that could be a huge swing in November.
Lots of people are hurting due to the Biden Recession, but it’s not just people. Dogs (and cats) are suffering too in what’s being called “The Great Shelter Crisis.”
Summer is always a tough time for animal shelters and rescues, but this year is the worst it’s been in a decade. Pets are being surrendered much faster than they can be adopted. From Arizona’s desert to New York City, shelters are reaching maximum capacity — forcing them to stop intakes or euthanize animals for space. The Dodo spoke to rescuers across the country about the shelter crisis and what people can do to help.
“When I first started 9 years ago, we always had open spaces in our shelter. Now we fill spaces within about 90 seconds,” Natalie Thomson, chief communications officer of Stray Rescue of St. Louis (SRSL), told The Dodo. “Saying ‘no’ to an animal in need is one of the hardest things in the world, but when there is physically no place to put them, you have to.”
Shelters on the East Coast, like Animal Care Center of NYC (NYC ACC), are also overwhelmed with the number of pets being surrendered or returned. NYC ACC volunteer Manisha Shah explained how shelter overcrowding and intake freezes can lead to more devastation.
“What happens when shelters tell people, ‘We can’t take your dog?’ This is where strays come in,” Shah told The Dodo. “People are leaving their dogs in places, like tying them outside the police station, leaving them in a crate in a park, etc.”
Snip.
Animal shelters like Wisconsin’s Dodge County Humane Society (DCHS) usually jump to take in any animal in need. However, due to the capacity crisis this year, they’ve also had to pause new admissions altogether.
“It is our mission to help animals. But what happens when we simply don’t have any more room?” DCHS wrote on Facebook. “With kennels full, there is simply no room to help those in need. At this time, DCHS is unable to help in an emergency. This leaves us unable to fulfill our mission and potentially leaves hundreds of animals without any [resources].”
Another shelter in Aiken, South Carolina, has made unusual rooming arrangements to accommodate its overflowing list of residents.
“The Aiken County Animal Shelter is at full capacity, and we are doubling up dogs in our kennels.”
Snip.
Unfortunately, shelters across the country are faced with euthanizing pets to make space for more.
A study by Shelter Animals Count found that of the 6.5 million animals who entered the shelter and rescue system in 2023, 4.8 million were adopted. Sadly, 850,000 pets lost their lives before finding homes.
“In recent years, there has been a notable rise in non-live outcomes for dogs,” Shelter Animals Count wrote on their website. “Cats are also witnessing an uptick in non-live outcomes, albeit at a slower rate.”
The reason for the crisis is no mystery. The Biden Recession has people struggling to feed and shelter their own children, much less their dogs. (And finding a place to live is made much harder by the Biden Administration letting some 10 million illegal aliens cross the border.)
You can find adoptable dogs and cats in your area at Petfinder.com.
While I think about adopting another dog every now and then, two large leashed dogs is probably the physical limit I can comfortably handle while walking, and my current bout of unemployment hasn’t exactly left me flush with cash. But those in a position to adopt should definitely look into adding a faithful companion to their life.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued the Biden administration over a policy he alleges would allow illegal immigrants to “Parole in Place” (PIP) and receive therwise unpermitted benefits.
The lawsuit alleges that the Biden administration is violating the U.S. Constitution in a new agency rule, established on August 19. That rule establishes a process for “certain noncitizen spouses and noncitizen stepchildren of U.S. citizens” to get around federal prohibitions against certain immigration benefits being obtained until after leaving the country and returning in a legal manner, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) press release.
“These provisions of law established by Congress serve as powerful disincentives for individuals to cross the border unlawfully. Indeed, were they not present, there would be no practical reason for any alien to abide by the law, wait his or her turn, and only come to the United States when the law provides,” the filing argues.
“DHS has announced the creation of a program that effectively provides a new pathway to a green card and eventual citizenship.”
In the lawsuit, Paxton requested the court grant injunctive relief to ban the DHS from implementing the new PIP rule while the policy is on trial.
“Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the federal government is actively working to turn the United States into a nation without borders and a country without laws. I will not let this happen,” Paxton said in a press release.
“Biden’s new parole workaround unilaterally grants the opportunity for citizenship to unvetted aliens whose first act on American soil was to break our laws.”
The lawsuit is a coalition of sixteen states — Texas, Idaho, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming — along with conservative legal organization America First Legal (AFL).
It was filed against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ur Jaddou, Customs and Border Protection Acting Commissioner Troy Miller, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Patrick J. Lechleiter, and Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young.
Stephen Miller, president of AFL, said, “Today, we are proud to represent a coalition of 16 states in filing a lawsuit to block an unconstitutional Biden-Harris amnesty program. This executive amnesty gives over one million illegals legal status, work permits, and a path to voting citizenship.”
“It is brazenly unlawful, a deadly accelerant to the ruinous border invasion, and we will use every lawful tool to stop it.”
Texas and its co-litigant states have racked up a pretty good record against the Biden Administration as of late, winning cases over border wall construction, the unilateral transexual rewrite of Title IX, and even vaccine mandates for the National Guard. Expect Paxton and his state coalition to win this case, too, but the real remedy for the Biden Administration’s willful defiance of border security laws will have to come from American citizens voting in November.
YouTuber GameWatcher has supplied a side-by-side timelapse of Russia’s fairly minimal gains in its respective offensive push.
“This animation is made from a collection of static analyst maps and represents my interpretation of the movements of armies and frontlines. Therefore, it should be viewed as an approximation rather than an exact depiction. The numbers represent the aproximate [sic] troops count for both sides.”
One wonders if Vladimir Putin knew that not only would his three day “special military operation” in Ukraine drag on for at least two and a half years, but that Ukraine would launch a successful invasion of Kursk oblast, if he might have reconsidered ordering it.
Ukraine’s Kursk incursion continues to take territory in Russia.
A lot of observers (myself included) were puzzled by what endgame Ukraine is seeking in Kursk. So here are a couple of theories.
Peter Zeihan thinks the invasion is to cut off supplies to the city of Belgorod (one of the two major logistical hubs for Russia’s war effort).
“No one invades Russia on a whim.”
“The problem that the Russians have always had expanding for Moscow is that there’s no logical place to stop that’s within a thousand miles of them. So they expand, they conquer some minorities, they occupy them, they try to Russify them, they turn them to cannon fodder, and they throw them in the next line of minorities. They continue this process over and over and over and over and over until they eventually reach a geographic barrier that they can actually hunker down behind.”
“It works until it doesn’t. And what we’re seeing with Russia right now is that the demographic decline among the Russian ethnicity is so high that within a few years they’re going to be having problems occupying their own populations.”
“The incursion that the Ukrainians have made into Russia proper isn’t all that impressive from a territorial point of view. Basically in the last two weeks the Ukrainians have invaded Russia proper. They’ve taken over about a thousand square kilometers in the province of Kursk. And the question is why, and what is next.”
“They have already destroyed the three permanent bridges over the river Seym, which is a east-west river that cuts through Kursk province, and by doing that they’ve made it very difficult for the Russians to reinforce the territories around where this incursion has been.”
“The Ukrainians are currently expanding on at least four different axes, northwest, northeast, north and east, and in doing so they’re basically looking to swallow, at least temporarily, about half the province, about 6,000 square mile.”
“The thousand square kilometers that the Ukrainians have captured so far is greater than the entirety of what the Russian army has achieved in the Donbas in the last 18 months.”
Ukraine has taken out all the bridges, leaving Russians to use pontoon bridges for resupply, which are much more easily destroyed. And, as Suchomimus has shown in his recent videos, they seem to be rebuilding those bridges in the same spots, presumably because they’re the only suitable spots for building them, making it that much easier to take them out.
“I have always identified the city of Belgorad as one of the cities that the Ukrainians have to neutralize if they’re ever going to win this war, because it’s the tip of the spear for Russian forces. This is where, in the northern theater, all of their armies and all of their artillery are concentrated, because it’s at the end of the logistical lines. It’s a big rail and road hub. Well, if the Ukrainians are capable of basically taking the southern half of Kursk province, they take out most of the infrastructure that feeds into Belgorad.” Maybe, but there’s a whole lot of territory to take before Belgorad gets cut off.
“This took the Ukrainians scraping up the last of their reserve units, along with some advanced units that were training with NATO for future operations. I don’t think they’ve got a very deep bench beyond this.”
Invading here has allowed Ukraine to outflank Russia’s deep system of trenches, minefields and artillery. “The Ukrainians have been able to basically locate a battlefield that plays to their strengths rather than the Russian strengths and they’re kicking some serious ass.”
“The problem is they just don’t probably have enough men to fully take advantage of it, but neither do the Russians have the men necessary to eject the Ukrainians. Russia is also nearing the end of what they can scrape up through conscription of ethnic minorities. “The cupboard is getting dry.” They’re also extremely low on capable leadership (such as it is). Putin “just assigned one of his former bodyguards to run the operation in Kursk, and you can imagine how well that’s going.”
“What we’ve seen them do in the last two weeks is basically mobilize every military force that they have left in the country, which is not a lot.”
“They haven’t been able to find the 30,000 to 70,000 troops that they need in order to retake Kursk, and with the bridges gone they can only approach from the east, so the Ukrainians are having a bit of a heyday at the moment.”
The biggest fallout of the Kursk incursion is a dog that didn’t bark. “Nukes haven’t flown. Throughout this war, the Russians have, at every stage, identified a series of red lines, saying that if you cross this line we’re going to nuke Washington and Warsaw, Berlin and Paris and London and the rest, and at every stage it’s turned out to be a bluff. Well, now the Ukrainians have crossed the international border in force. They have castrated the Russian military in the area.”
“The Russians are showing an inability or an unwillingness to go to that level, and that tells me that the conservatism in Western capitals about challenging the Russians is about to evaporate. Because if the Ukrainians can do this without that sort of counter reaction, then pretty much every Russian threat to this point is meaningless.”
Next up: The Russian Dude, an anti-Putin and anti-Ukrainian War YouTuber who fled Russia just as the first conscription orders were coming down. He thinks the Kursk invasion may be a way to force Putin into calling up a second general conscription, something he has been loath to do since the first was so unpopular.
“The initial reaction to Ukraine’s move into Kursk was mixed. Many, especially those in the Russian military establishment, dismissed it as a mere PR stunt or a psychological operation, a distraction intended to draw attention away from other fronts. But as the days progressed, it became clear that this was no mere show of force. The Ukrainian Army was committed, and their objectives were far more strategic than anyone had anticipated.”
Even “Z propagandists” in Russia are admitting that ejecting Ukraine from Kursk oblast will take time. “This was a wakeup call. The country’s military and political leaders had long been accustomed to dismissing Ukrainian operations as inconsequential. The belief was that Russia’s superior military power would always be enough to repel any significant threat. But the events unfolding in Kirsk challenged this assumption.” Even some of the most pro-war Russian milbloggers began to express doubts.
“Russian president Vladimir Putin is facing a very scary decision. For years Putin has positioned himself as a strongman, a leader who would stop at nothing to achieve his goals. But the events in Kursk revealed the limits of his power. The Russian military, once his unstoppable force, was now struggling to respond to a determined and well-coordinated Ukrainian offensive.”
“Putin’s dilemma is rooted in the fact that he has few good options left. The Russian military is stretched thin, its resources depleted by years of sustaining conflict the invasion of Ukraine, which was supposed to be a quick and decisive victory, has instead turned to a grinding war of attrition. And now, with the Ukrainian forces pushing into Russian territory, the weaknesses of the Russian military are becoming more apparent than ever.”
“One of the key indicators of this is the absence of a new mobilization effort, despite the heavy losses Russia has suffered. Putin has not ordered a new wave of conscription [because] another round of mobilization would likely would like destabilize his regime. The last call-up in 2022 was deeply unpopular, sparking protest and unrest across the country.”
“Many Russians who had previously been indifferent to the war suddenly found themselves directly affected and the backlash was significant. Putin knows that another mobilization would likely provoke a similar response, potentially undermining his hold on power, but without new recruits the Russian military is running out of manpower.”
“Russia’s defense industry is struggling to keep up with the demands of the war. Missiles fired at Ukrainian cities bare markings from 2023 and 2024, indicating that they were produced recently. This suggests that Russia has managed to bypass some of the sanctions imposed by the West to acquire the components needed to build these weapons. But it also means that there is no surplus. Every single missile produced is immediately sent to the battlefield. The same is true for other military equipment like tanks, drones, and ammunition.”
Everyone who could be tempted by a sign-up bonus has already joined, even though they keep increasing. “If you do announce another round of mobilization and start grabbing people from the streets and sending them to fight in Ukraine for free, well, I don’t think that’s going to sit well with these people.”
“While Russia grapples with these challenges, Ukraine’s western allies have been surprisingly quiet, in a good way.”
“This raises the question: Have they finally realized that Putin’s ability to escalate the war further is limited? The answer appears to be yes. After nearly two years of watching Russia’s military strategy unfold, it seems that western powers have concluded that Putin is already operating at his maximum capacity.”
“Now Western leaders seem more willing to allow Ukraine to use the weapons as it sees fit. The focus has shifted from preventing escalation to supporting Ukraine in its efforts to defend itself and reclaim its territory.”
“Ukraine is now receiving more advanced technology, including long-range missiles and sophisticated drones. These weapons are designed to not just defend against Russian attacks, but to strike deeper inside Russian-held territory, disrupting supply lines and targeting key military objects.”
Thus far Putin has avoided seriously conscripting soldiers from the only two areas of the country he cares about: Moscow and St. Petersburg. Ukraine’s Kursk gambit may force him into doing so, possibly triggering his downfall.
