I haven’t been covering the Ken Paxton impeachment because I don’t think I have anything novel to say about it that hasn’t been covered better elsewhere. Enjoy the Friday LinkSwarm!
U.S. credit card debt tops $1 trillion. Thanks, Joe Biden.
Truth about our current economic situation:
We went into a recession after two back to back quarters of -1.5 over a year ago. When this happened, the establishment changed the parameters that define recession. We’ve remained at a net loss with job creation and “Bidenomics”. This isn’t recovery and everyone knows it. https://t.co/RXltpBNxhp
The feature that really made The Daily Show famous was its masterful use of archival video clips to reveal the hypocrisy of the chattering classes. Stewart would set his target on some party shill or professional talking head being condescending, self-important, dishing out blame, kissing whatever ring he’d been paid to kiss. And then the show would play a clip of the same talking head’s appearance on a C-SPAN 3 four-in-the-morning call-in show from ten years ago, back when he’d been paid to kiss another ring, saying the exact opposite thing.
There was a clip, there was always a clip. And our righteous host would send these hacks packing.
Through all this, certain public figures would be transformed into storylines with narratives and characters, with inside jokes and recurring bits. The media’s storytellers became the subjects of a theater of the absurd. It got so that when certain figures would show up in a segment, you knew you were about to witness them receive their just comeuppance, a great spectacle of spilled archival blood. The audience would titter in excited anticipation.
It was a delight to watch.
Snip.
What had created a culture of “just talking on TV without any accountability,” as one Daily Show writer put it, was not only the sheer volume and speed of the news. It was this true fact that will sound insane to anyone under the age of thirty: People on television reasonably assumed that no one would hear what they had said ever again.
As essayist Chuck Klosterman records in The Nineties: A Book, the key characteristic of twentieth-century media was its ephemerality. You experienced it in real time and internalized what was important and what it felt like. Then you moved on. “It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.”
People used to argue with their friends about the plot of a show or what the score had been in the ball game because, well, how were you going to check? Unless you had personally saved the newspaper or recorded it on your VCR, you would need to go to a literal archive and pull it up on microfilm.
TV news was even shakier, as networks often recorded over old tapes. Some of this footage only exists today because of the obsessive efforts of one Philadelphia woman who recorded news broadcasts on 140,000 VHS tapes over forty years.
And so, if you were a pundit or a commentator or a “spin doctor” PR flak, you could say whatever suited your needs at the moment, or even lie with impunity — as long as your lie did not become its own pseudo-event. Your lasting impact was whatever stuck in viewers’ heads and hearts. And if you changed your tune in the months or years afterwards, who would remember?
The Daily Show would remember.
The explosion of live broadcast and cable news had created a new, completely under-valued resource for whoever thought to harness it: catalog clips. Soon, new digital technology could preserve content in amber, allowing for its retrieval, repurposing, or referencing at any time.
It’s a long essay, and I don’t necessarily agree with all the writer’s points, but it’s worth reading.
There was no state of emergency, no curfews, no orders to stay at home or shelter in place. Young Swedes were encouraged to continue with their sports training and events. Schools remained open, and so did offices, factories, restaurants, libraries, shopping centers, gyms, and hairdressers. As a rule, borders were not closed to fellow Europeans and public transportation kept running.
There were no mask mandates and not even a recommendation for the public to use masks—until January 2021, when they were recommended on public transportation during rush hours (7–9 a.m. and 4–6 p.m. on weekdays). While some other governments forced school children to wear face masks, Tegnell even warned against making children wear them, saying that “school is no optimal place for face masks.”6
One can see how Sweden’s path diverged from that of its peers by consulting the latest Human Freedom Index, which has data through 2020. During this first year of the pandemic, Sweden’s freedom rating only fell by 0.19 on a 10‐point scale, compared to 0.49 in Britain and 0.52 in the United States. The only rich country that saw a smaller decline in freedom than Sweden was Singapore, at 0.16.7
Snip.
Analysts from other countries—and even some Swedish scholars—predicted disaster. One influential Swedish model, inspired by the famous British Imperial College study, predicted that Sweden would have 20,000 COVID-19 patients needing intensive care by early May 2020 and a need for intensive care units around 40 times over capacity. By July 1, Sweden would have 82,000 COVID-19 deaths. The Imperial College model predicted between 66,000 and 90,000 deaths without mitigation efforts, and a peak demand of intensive care unit patients 70 times higher than capacity.
Snip.
When you look at excess deaths during the three pandemic years, 2020–2022, compared to the previous three years, you get a very different picture. According to this measure, Sweden’s excess death rate during the pandemic was 4.4 percent higher than previously. Compared to the data that other countries report to Eurostat, this is less than half of the average European level of 11.1 percent, and remarkably, it is the lowest excess mortality rate during the pandemic of all European countries, including Norway, Denmark, and Finland.
“Poland Aims To Create Largest Army In Europe Within Two Years.” Golly, who would need a large army with such historically peaceful neighbors as Germany and Russia?
e Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) declared a statewide lockdown of all its correctional facilities on Wednesday morning, citing increased contraband-related incidents and drug-related inmate homicides.
TDCJ said most inmate-on-inmate homicides “are tied back to illegal drugs … and over the last five years, the volume of illegal narcotics entering the system has substantially increased.”
In response to the drug and murder epidemic in Texas jails, TDCJ is implementing the following strategies to restore order:
Systemwide Lockdown: Each facility will limit the movement of inmates and their contact with those outside the prison. Inmates and staff will undergo intensified searches to intercept and confiscate contraband.
Digital Mail: TDCJ is completing the rollout of the digital mail program. Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in paper soaked in K2 or methamphetamines coming into our facilities. The digital mail program will halt this contraband being sent through traditional mail. Effective September 6, 2023, all inmate mail should be addressed and sent to the Digital Mail Center. All mail received this week will be delivered to the digital mail processing center. More information about this program can be found here: TDCJ News – TDCJ Digital Mail Rollout.
Increased K9 Searches and Other Technology: To assist in contraband detection and outside funding related to contraband, TDCJ will be deploying additional resources. Specialized search teams and narcotic dogs will be deployed to units and staff will be subject to enhanced search procedures.
Comprehensive Searches: All persons entering our facilities at all locations will undergo comprehensive searches.
“Due to the fact staff will be concentrating on these search efforts, visitation will be canceled until further notice. Inmates will still have access to the phone system and tablets,” TDCJ said.
If drugs are getting into Texas prisons, there’s over a 90% chance correctional staff are getting them in there.
“There is no climate emergency,” the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) said in its World Climate Declaration (pdf), made public in August. “Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”
A total of 1,609 scientists and professionals from around the world have signed the declaration, including 321 from the United States.
The coalition pointed out that Earth’s climate has varied as long as it has existed, with the planet experiencing several cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age only ended as recently as 1850, they said.
“Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming,” the declaration said.
Warming is happening “far slower” than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools,” the coalition said, adding that these models “exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases” and “ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.” For instance, even though climate alarmists characterize CO2 as environmentally-damaging, the coalition pointed out that the gas is “not a pollutant.”
Carbon dioxide is “essential” to all life on earth and is “favorable” for nature. Extra CO2 results in the growth of global plant biomass while also boosting the yields of crops worldwide.
CLINTEL also dismissed the narrative of global warming being linked to increased natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and droughts, stressing that there is “no statistical evidence” to support these claims.
“There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are,” it said.
“California mom Jessica Konen won a $100,000 settlement from her daughter’s school district, Spreckels Union School District, after Buena Vista Middle School had socially transitioned her 11-year-old daughter, Alicia, without her knowledge or consent.”
Remember how the UK was economically lagging other countries in Europe and Remainers blamed Brexit? Yeah, not so much.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) now says that the UK economy actually recovered from the pandemic recession back in 2021. It turns out that wholesalers and the healthcare sector, in particular, had produced much greater output than previously thought.
These updated figures suggest that the UK economy is as much as two per cent larger than previously believed. This means that the UK can no longer be considered the worst-performing economy in the G7. In fact, post-Brexit, the UK recovered from the pandemic at a similar rate to France and at a faster pace than Germany, Europe’s largest economy.
The ONS’s revision is extraordinary. As one leading economist put it: ‘The entire UK economic narrative – post-pandemic – has just been revised away.’ The very basis for the Remainer elites’ narrative of doom has now been shattered before our eyes.
Mark Felton visits Buckingham Palace, and is Not Amused. “The rooms open to the public are, of course, lavishly decorated. The amount of gold painted furniture, pianos and urns, similar to what I imagine Liberace’s house look like. The walls are hung with the usual assortment of well-fed Hanoverians.” Plus: No bathrooms for you, lowly peasant!
A Russian microchip factory likely producing technology for sophisticated weapons has been targeted in a significant strike, Daily Express US has heard.
A drone downed over the Bryansk region in Russia this week fell on the Kremny EL factory, dubbed “Silicon El”, according to the Mash Telegram channel.
Military blogger Romanov Light said a fire broke out at the plant’s 16th building and was extinguished around an hour later – at 1.50am local time. Staggering footage shared online shows the shocking moment the plant was struck.
Michael Bociurkiw, global affairs analyst and senior fellow at The Atlantic Council, told Daily Express US the microchip factory was a significant target.
It was one of several Russian sites struck in one of the biggest waves of attacks on Russian soil since Putin’s illegal war began.
So it was a military target. Could they use it for smart weapon guidance systems? Yeah, you could build something as powerful as, say, a 386 on it, and that’s plenty sophisticated enough to guide bombs and missiles with.
How long will the strike set Russia back? Hard to say, but the contamination means the entire fab will need to be decontaminated before they can process wafers again. Maybe a month. Debris may have damaged some of the machines, though the tech is so old that there are probably lots of spare parts for things that can be had despite sanctions. If they hit the power center, the air-handling system, or the DI water system, that could take a while to repair, especially if they need modern western parts. And if they took out the power, all the wafer processing machines will have to be requalified, which is a gigantic pain in the ass and quite time-consuming. But most of the in-process wafers will be safe inside FOUPs, and can probably continue processing, once the fab is up and running again.
Still, it will be a setback for Russia. It’s just unclear how large a setback.
Beset with controversy that has culminated in a looming removal trial for incompetency, Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzales resigned his office, mooting the case, and immediately announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for United States senator with the intent to challenge incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
For those unclear on Texas geography, Nueces County is on the Texas gulf coast, and includes Corpus Christi. Trump beat Biden there by a few points in 2020, but Gonzalez won the DA race by three points.
Gonzales has faced criticism from law enforcement organizations and other groups who have described him as “soft on crime,” dismissing high rates of criminal cases and facing a barrage of other accusations such as failing to qualify for office by properly executing a bond and being suspended by the State Bar of Texas for failing to pay annual dues.
The removal lawsuit, brought by attorneys with Citizens Defending Freedom (CDF) on behalf of CDF State Director Colby Wiltse, was endorsed by Nueces County Attorney Jenny Dorsey and was set to go to trial after a district judge approved the case to move forward.
“This is a great day for justice in Nueces County,” Wiltse said in a press release. “Mark Gonzalez, like many of the Soros-aligned District Attorneys across the country redefined the role of the district attorney in the name of social justice, often at the cost of public safety in the communities they swear an oath to protect.”
Gonzales was quick to pivot out of the controversy and into a new political endeavor: launching a campaign for U.S. Senate. He published a campaign video on YouTube wherein he briefly characterized the effort to remove him as “bull—” and stated, “I was such a threat, they tried to remove me from office.”
He joins front runner candidates state Sen. Roland Gutierrez (D-San Antonio) and U.S. Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX-32) in the Democratic primary race for Texas’ U.S. senator, as well as nine other contenders.
Gutierrez only joined the race in July, so I’m not seeing any polling on him yet. Having two candidates with Hispanic surnames probably helps Allred.
Vacancies in the office of district attorney are filled by gubernatorial appointment for the remainder of the unexpired term, meaning Republican Gov. Greg Abbott will decide who the next Nueces County district attorney will be.
Hopefully he’ll appoint someone who will actually, you know, indict criminals.
Speaking of Soros stooges, Dwight made me aware of GarzaWatch, aimed at Soros-backed Travis County DA Jose Garza and backed by some of the Save Austin Now people (Cleo Petricek and Matt Mackowiak), among others. We’ll see if that effort bears any fruit…
The Austin City Council’s partial defunding of the police back in 2020 continues to hurt law-abiding Austinites. Continued understaffing has left APD unable to fulfill what were previously considered basic police functions. Case in point: APD now asks robbery victims not to call 911.
Austin police in Texas are asking residents to call 311 if they get robbed near an ATM as the department struggles amid an increase in urban crime and staffing shortages.
The Austin Police Department posted a graphic in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, to urge residents to call 311 or make an online report if they’re robbed – 311 is a number usually used for non-emergency requests, as opposed to 911.
“Even if you are cautious & follow all the safety advice, you may still become the unfortunate victim of a robbery,” the Austin Police Department wrote on X. “Do you know what your next steps should be?”
“Make a police report & provide as much information as possible so we can recover your property quickly and safely,” the post added. The graphic included advice to mention the bank in the 311 report and include the date and time of the cash withdrawal.
The new protocol comes as the Texas capital grapples with an increase in crime. Compared to 2020, Austin has had a 77% increase in auto thefts, an 18% increase in aggravated assaults and a 30% increase in murders.
Thanks, Mayor Adler!
Austin Police Association President Thomas Villarreal told “Fox & Friends” in August that the department is sorely lacking the resources it needs to tackle crime.
“We’re a growing city, a city that should be up around 2,000 officers and growing right now,” Villarreal said. “I’ve got about 1,475 officers in our police department and, you know, we’re moving in the wrong direction. There’s less and less and less resources to go out and do the job.”
The understaffing is a direct result of the defunding effort. The defunding effort is a direct result of Austin’s hard-left, Democratic Party, Social Justice Warrior City Council’s ideology, and their desire to rake off the money for the hard left.
Without serious efforts to start and graduate more cadet classes every year, the understaffing (and the resulting crime hikes) will continue indefinitely.
As shown by Ukraine, cardboard drones are a very cost-effective way to destroy much more expensive military equipment.
And you know who has more expensive military equipment than anyone else in the world?
That’s right: Us.
Uncle Sam is the operator of billion dollar B-2s and fleet supercarriers. Enemies capable of getting cheap drones within striking distance of those assets could put a world of hurt on the Pentagon, as indicated by this cheap and crude YouTube satire:
Can U.S. military radar see cardboard drones? Either nobody knows, or only a small handful of U.S. military researchers know. Either way, I have to think they’re frantically researching that question right now.
A low-cost “cardboard” drone that arrives flatpacked and is held together with rubber bands is giving Ukraine an unexpected edge on the battlefield.
It’s called the Corvo Precision Payload Delivery System, or PPDS for short, and is made by the Australian company SYPAQ.
It has been in Ukrainian hands since March, when the Australian government announced it would send at least 100 per month as part of a $20 million aid package, The Australian reported.
According to SYPAQ, the drone arrives in a package some two and a half feet long — and isn’t much more complicated than an IKEA product.
But the low-tech framework is packed with a military-grade guidance system.
SYPAQ says it’s quick to assemble the drone from its parts: a lightweight board frame, a propeller unit, and an avionics system which soldiers can program with a target location.
The drone can carry up to 6.6 pounds, making it useful for dropping off medicines or ammunition.
To adapt it for reconnaissance, soldiers simply “cut a hole” in the drone for a camera to see through, SYPAQ manager Michael Partridge told IT-focused news outlet The Register.
The finished build has a wingspan of around six and a half feet. It is so light it can be launched by catapult, or literally by being thrown like a giant paper plane, according to Australia’s 7News.
At a reported cost of around $3,500 each, they’re cheap by military standards.
Depending on its payload, it travels at around 37 miles per hour, and has a range of up to 75 miles. And when it arrives, soldiers can simply retrieve the cargo, detach the propeller and avionics module, and throw away the frame.
Although it’s known as the “cardboard drone,” there’s conflicting information as to what its main framework is actually made of.
Partridge told The Register that it’s made of waxed cardboard — a description repeated in nearly all media reporting so far. In a recent announcement the company coyly said it’s “known as the ‘cardboard plane.'”
But a product specification uploaded on the company’s website, likely in late August, describes it as being made from lightweight foldable foam board, which appears to match some images.
So the cardboard drone isn’t actually cardboard. C’est la guerre.
Cardboard is “transparent to radar, so harder to spot,” Oklahoma State University drone researcher Jamey Jacob told Popular Mechanics.
“The radar will pick up things such as electric motors, batteries, and propellers, but not the cardboard,” Jacob said.
That potential capacity for extra stealth gained media attention this week when Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia echoed claims by a prominent Russian military blogger that they were used to attack a Russian airfield.
Several details of the attack remain unconfirmed — including whether Corvo PPDSs were even involved — but the airfield was just within the drone’s reach from Ukraine.
Per the pro-Russian Telegram channel @fighter_bomber, Ukraine used a swarm-like formation of several unarmed Corvo PPDSs amidst drones packed with bombs, helping the swarm evade radar.
When you’re airframe only has to last 75 miles to hit a target, all sorts of cheap material possibilities open up: Foam, cardboard, wax-paper, Mylar.
Hell, maybe even that crappy hemp paper the potheads are always pushing will finally have a real use-case: Make war, not love.
In any case, the radar guys are going to be very, very busy over the next few months…
Sometimes I stumble across something that just boggles my mind. Such as this video that explains that Israel, the most technologically advanced country in the Middle East, wasn’t just slow to adopt color television, but actively fought its adoption, going so far as to create a device that stripped out color.
Israel resisted instituting a TV broadcasting service in the first place, and first Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion was opposed to the idea.
But wealthy Israelis still bought TVs, which could pick up signals from Cyprus (which started TV broadcasting in 1956), Lebanon (1959), Egypt and Syria (1960), and Jordan (from 1968).
Despite Ben-Gurion’s opposition to TV, the Israeli government wanted to use TV for educational purposes, and was worried that the Arab-language TV broadcasts that could be found in cafes contained propaganda.
When Levi Eshkol took over as prime minister in 1963, he reversed the no TV policy. In 1965, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA) was formed, and in 1966 B&W Israeli TV was finally introduced by Israeli Educational Television (IET). (In America, the 1966-1967 season was when networks finished their transition to all-color programming.)
IBA launched its B&W broadcasting on May 2, 1968, Israeli independence Day, sharing a frequency with IBE, and only broadcasting three hours of programming (two hours in Hebrew and one in Arabic) three days a week.
France, the Soviet Union and Lebanon started broadcasting color in the SECAM format in 1967. Israel, like the UK and much of Europe, used PAL format.
Jordan and Egypt used PAL, and they started broadcasting in color in 1974. Jordan even broadcast a news program in Hebrew!
So Israel quickly greenlit color TV to combat the Arab color menace, right? Wrong. PM Golda Meir was opposed, describing color TV as “artificial and unnecessary.” Despite IBA investing in color equipment!
“Yitzhak Rabin and his government continued to double down on their anti-color stance. They attempted to crack down on the import market. Their fears even extending to a drop in value of the national currency, the Israeli Lira. However, the stance was firmly rooted in the belief that color television was a luxury expense reserved for the few rich and wealthy, leaving the vast majority behind black and white TV was seen as a sort of social equalizer.” No color for you, bubbe, because Social Justice!
“The Israeli government of the day felt it necessary to invent a new system to neutralize color television for good. The Mekhikon, or the color eraser or color killer, is an invention that is unique to Israel’s television history.”
When a receiver is tuned to a monochrome transmission, the displayed scene should have no color components. However, if there is a hardware failure in the color killer stage, false color patterns may be displayed even during monochrome transmission.
In normal color reception, high frequency luminance is mistaken for color, causing relatively invisible false color patterns. The reason for this invisibility is due to a key feature of NTSC/PAL, chroma/luminance frequency interleaving, where these false patterns are in complementary colors for adjacent video frames, allowing the human eye to average out the false color patterns. If, during a monochrome transmission, a color killer failure allows the color processing to be activated when it shouldn’t, a chroma subcarrier in the color processing stages is regenerated with no reference, causing that subcarrier to have enough frequency error that the chroma/luminance interleaving feature of NTSC/PAL no longer works, allowing the aforementioned false color patterns, overlaying the otherwise monochrome picture, to be much more visible by the human eye….
In a color TV waveform, a reference pulse, called the burst, is transmitted along the back porch portion of the video signal. If the transmitted signal is monochromatic, then the burst is not transmitted. The color killer is actually a muting circuit in the chroma section which supervises the burst and turns off the color processing if no burst is received (i.e. when the received signal is monochromatic.) The main purpose of the color burst in the first place is a reference for the receiver to regenerate the chroma subcarrier, which in turn is utilized to demodulate the color difference signals….
The government ordered the Israel Broadcasting Authority to cease broadcasting in color. As it was impractical to remove the chrominance signal from programs previously recorded in color, this was accomplished by simply omitting the burst phase signal from the broadcast. The “damaged” signal triggered the “color killer” mechanism in color television sets which prevented the appearance of color pictures. This method was named Mehikon (Hebrew: מחיקון “eraser”).
Note that all this was only happening at Israeli broadcasting stations. It didn’t do jack squat about those Arab broadcasts they seemed so worried about.
Naturally, this stupidity brought about its own technological reaction: The Anti-Color Killer, “a device to go with your new set restoring the damaged burst phase signal and allowing you to watch color programs exactly as they were filmed.” But you had to fiddle to get the color right, and then fiddle again every 15 minutes or so.
“Store owners who sold the device reported that nearly everyone who bought a color set from them also purchased the anti-eraser.”
Despite all the effort to keep color out, the Israeli government permitted a few color broadcasts: The visit of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1977, and (I kid you not) The Eurovision Song Contest in 1979.
IBA finally started allowing color broadcasts to go out in 1981, and the Mekhikon was finally retired in 1982…just before the World Cup.
Israel finally went to full color on all broadcasts in 1983.
If you were worried that the United States military hadn’t picked up on the importance of drone warfare in the Russo-Ukrainian War, it appears that someone in the Pentagon was indeed paying attention.
The Pentagon committed on Monday to fielding thousands of attritable, autonomous systems across multiple domains within the next two years as part of a new initiative to better compete with China.
The program, dubbed Replicator, was announced by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, speaking at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies conference here.
“Replicator will galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap and many,” Hicks said.
Hicks and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Christopher Grady will oversee the program, with support from Doug Beck, director of the Defense Innovation Unit. Further details, Hicks said, will be released in the coming weeks.
Replicator rests on two assumptions. The first is that China’s core advantage is mass — “more ships, more missiles, more people,” as Hicks said — and that the United States’ best response is to innovate, rather than match that pound for pound.
The second is that attritable, autonomous systems are the right form of innovation. Hicks pointed to the war in Ukraine, in which cheap, often commercial drones have proven indispensable on the battlefield for reconaissance, targeting, and attacks. Russia too, she said, appeared to have a similar mass before launching its invasion last February.
However, this program is squarely focused on China. Hicks called this moment a “generational challenge to American society.”
”We’ll counter the [People’s Liberation Army’s] mass with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat,” she said.
Even so, Hicks noted the Pentagon will remain focused on its core systems. “America still benefits from platforms that are large, exquisite, expensive, and few,” she said. Instead, she said, Replicator is particularly focused on accelerating DoD’s recent investments in autonomous systems.
Replicator’s goal of fielding small drones in high numbers and on a rapid timeline echoes calls from former DIU director Mike Brown for the Pentagon to better leverage commercial innovation to deliver capability at scale — an approach he called a “hedge strategy.”
House appropriators have backed that idea in their fiscal 2025 defense spending bill. The legislation would allocate $1 billion toward establishing a DIU-managed hedge portfolio made up of low-cost drones, agile communication and computing modes and AI capabilities.
The Department of Defense requested $1.8 billion for artificial intelligence for fiscal 2024 and was overseeing more than 685 related projects as of 2021. Replicator is intended to pull those investments together and further scale production, Hicks said.
Insert your own hedge funds and Skynet jokes here.
The strategy makes a good deal of sense…up to a point. The fast and cheap portion makes a lot of sense, given Ukraine’s use of dirt cheap flatpack cardboard drones we talked about earlier this week.
It’s the out of control/autonomous portion of description, combined with the aggressive timeline, that I question. As far as I can tell, all of Ukraine’s drones have been human guided rather than autonomous.
Lots of work on AI has been done over the last few years, and its entirely possible that AI drone tech is farther along than we know, but having been involved in numerous large software projects for multiple companies, I can tell you things always seem to take longer than they should even when the federal government isn’t involved. Long term, having autonomous or semi-autonomous drone will give you a lot of extra capabilities, but I’m very skeptical about that two year timeline.
Also, unless we plan to launch those drones from Taiwan itself, I’m skeptical that we’ll have suitable naval launch platforms ready. Flying a few drones off the deck of destroyer is easy, flying thousands for a real drone swarm is probably impossible. You don’t want to try running drone and manned planes off fleet carriers at the same time.
Can you run them off an amphibious assault ship? Probably, as a temporary expedient, but that’s going to limit your helicopter and F-35B takeoff and landing windows. Longer term, you’re probably going to need to construct ships designed with specialized launchers to send a whole lot of drones in a short space of time.
A whole lot more Biden Recession hits the economy—unexpectedly! The poor go hungry, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor confirms Biden corruption, people keep flocking to Texas and Florida, McConell’s brain blows up (again), and a whole lot of Texas laws take effect. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Poor people are buying less food because they can’t afford it. “Among households using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s boosted pandemic benefits, 42% skipped meals in August and 55% ate less because they couldn’t afford food, more than double last year’s share, according to a Wednesday report from Propel Inc., a benefits software developer.”(Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)
Victor Shokin, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Biden family corruption (that Donald Trump was impeached for asking about) has spoken out for the first time since 2019 – and says the Bidens did it.
To review – Shokin had an active and ongoing investigation into Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, according to a 2020 US Senate Committee report.
Zlochevsky, who hired Hunter Biden to sit on his board, granted his own company (Burisma) permits to drill for oil and gas in Ukraine while he was Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. Shokin stated in a 2019 deposition that there were five criminal cases against Zlochevesky, including money laundering, corruption, illegal funds transfers, and profiteering through shell corporations while he was a sitting minister.
Now, Shokin tells Fox News that be believes the Bidens were taking bribes.
“I do not want to deal in unproven facts. But my firm personal conviction is that yes, this was the case. They were being bribed,” Shokin told the outlet. “The fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal – my firing – isn’t that alone a case of corruption?” he asks in another clip.
“Young High Income Earners Are Flocking To Florida And Texas, New Study Shows…”To the surprise of likely no one, Florida and Texas are once again No. 1 and No. 2. Florida gained a total of 2,175 high earners aged 26 to 35 after accounting for both inflows and outflows, while Texas gained a net 1,909. Despite the losses, New York (-5,062) and California (-4,495) still have the highest count of young high earners of any state by a wide margin.
Katy ISD rejects the radical social justice agenda. “The agenda item included policy updates in regard to requiring sex-specific spaces to be ‘safeguarded,’ which include bathrooms and locker rooms. Policies were also updated on pronoun usage as teachers and staff will not be required to use student “preferred pronouns” and content prohibiting ‘gender fluidity’ instruction.”
Texas laws that take effect today, including a ban on child sexual mutilation (AKA “gender affirming care”), banning men from college women’s athletics, and banning DEI from public universities.
Relations between the coup junta in Niger (which observers want you to know is pronounced knee–J) and France gets spicier. The junta is trying to expel the French ambassador and he’s not going. The tiff might very well turn kinetic, and I doubt the Wagner Group mercs are up to taking on French regulars.
Also, investors are suing them over “Alleged Chapek Era “Cost-Shifting Scheme” to Hide Streaming Losses.” Maybe everyone lost the streaming wars. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Brandon Herrera, a YouTube influencer with a focus on firearms, has announced that he is challenging incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales for Texas’ congressional district 23 seat.
Herrera, who has over 2 million YouTube subscribers, had been hinting towards a congressional run for weeks on his YouTube channel. He previously made an appearance at a congressional hearing earlier this year after being invited by U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) to testify against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
Congressional District 23 is a rural, majority-Hispanic area that encompasses western San Antonio and contains a large span of the Texas-Mexico border—including Uvalde, Eagle Pass, and El Paso county.
Herrera first announced his run at the Young Americans for Liberty conference and then in a YouTube video.
“Several Republicans who swore to defend gun rights, to protect borders, just in general, putting the rights and interests of the American people above their own, turn their back on these values,” Herrera said.
“There can be no more incumbent politicians who vote time and time again against the interests of the American people without fear of losing their positions,” he continued.
Herrera calls himself a “Second Amendment absolutist” and has repeatedly criticized Gonzales for being the sole Texas Republican member of the U.S. House to vote for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a Biden-backed law meant to enact stricter background checks for gun purchases.
Here’s his campaign announcement (which looks like it was filmed in a hotel room):
“I have a deep love for the values that this country was founded on, the ideas of freedom of self-governance. You see, America was never supposed to be the country that gave you everything you always wanted. It was simply a place that gave you the freedom and the opportunity to chase those things for yourself to pursue happiness to build great things.”
“I’m working with groups like The Firearms Policy Coalition, National Association for Gun Rights, and Gun Owners of America.” Notice who’s missing?
“Tony Gonzalez claimed to be in favor of gun rights, but he voted in favor of Biden’s post-Uvalde gun control and claims he would do it again.”
And here he is at Young Americans for Liberty:
“ATF is out of control.”
“They are a regulatory body that does not have the Constitutional authority to write the law, yet they write the law. They’re banning FRTs [forced reset triggers], they’re banning arm braces, they’re banning bump stocks. All things, I will remind you, comply to the letter of the law and were actually previously approved by the ATF for sale.”
“The American experiment was about having the freedom to be who you want to be, to live how you want to live to do what you want to do. Unless that means you want to fuck kids. That’s that’s when the wood chipper gets hungry.”
Here’s his website. His six highlighted issues (gun rights, immigration, budget deficits, censorship, leftwing control of education and abortion) are all solidly conservative, but he might want to throw up paragraphs about the lousy Biden economy and protecting the oil and gas industry (TX-23 includes big chunks of Eagle Ford and Permian Basin fields).
Herrera is one of the biggest gun bloggers in Texas, but sometimes it’s difficult to translate “internet famous” into electoral success. (In 2015, Fark’s Drew Curtis drew a paltry 3.7% of the vote as an independent in Kentucky’s gubernatorial race.)
On the other hand, Second Amendment rights are a hot-button issue for Texas Republican voters, and Herrera has just under 3 million subscribers on YouTube. If 1/10th of them sent him $5 each, his campaign would have enough money to run a competative race.
TX-23 used to be a full-blown swing district, with Will Hurd and Gonzalez winning by narrow margins, but it’s gotten redder thanks to redistricting and a Hispanic swing toward the GOP thanks to Biden’s feckless border policies. Swing districts tend to produce squishy congressmen like Hurd and Gonzalez.
Pretty much nothing about Herrera makes me think he’d be squishy.
When radical leftwing city officials push insane, impossible policies, are they merely engaging in virtue signaling, hope to profit off graft for the issue, or want to inflict as much pain on ordinary Americans as possible?
Two Texas cities are participating in an emissions-cutting program that seeks to end meat and dairy consumption.
According to the organization, “C40 is a global network of nearly 100 mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis.”
Although largely funded by Democrat billionaire Michael Bloomberg, C40 has other donors including FedEx, Google, and the Clinton Foundation.
Both Austin and Houston are listed as participating cities, with “membership operat[ing] on performance-based requirements, not on fees.”
Houston is a “Megacity,” according to the C40 membership ranking. Megacities are “Cities that show exceptional climate leadership at the global level, and have an urban population that currently/is expected to exceed 3 million or more people by 2030.”
Austin is in the “Innovator” membership category, which includes “cities that show exceptional climate leadership at the global level, but do not meet the population/size criteria of a Megacity.”
Altogether, the participating cities make up a quarter of the global economy.
According to C40 Cities Executive Director Mark Watts, “As always, C40 has adopted a science-based approach and that science is clear: average consumption-based emissions in C40 cities must halve within the next 10 years. In our wealthiest and highest consuming cities that means a reduction of two-thirds or more by 2030.”
Watts stated this in a report from C40 Cities in 2019 entitled, “The Future Of Urban Consumption In A 1.5°C World.” The report lays out “ambitious targets” for cities to meet regarding the urban consumption of building materials, food, clothing and textiles, private transportation, electronics, and household appliances, as well as private aviation travel.
The report defines “ambitious targets” as the following:
“Target level of ambition for consumption interventions that is more ‘ambitious,’ based on a future vision of resource-efficient production and extensive changes in consumer choices. This level was typically informed by expert judgment rather than existing research.”
Under meat and dairy consumption, the ‘ambitious target’ would be 0 kilograms of either for all citizens.
Of course, the idea that a large city in Texas is going to give up meat is absolutely bonkers. Barbecue is one of the biggest civil religions in Texas, only slightly behind football. You might as well ask Frenchmen to give up wine. And I’d really like to see leftwing apparatchiks attempt to close down every taqueria in Houston, as the beat-downs they’d receive would be epic.
We could ask why liberals continually push policies that they would hate living under themselves, but we all know the answer to that: They’ll never live under the rules they apply to others. You have to give up private vehicles and all air travel in the name of global warming, but they’ll feel no compunction in continuing to jet off to Davos because they’re special. The Gavin Newsoms of the world will always eat at the French Laundry, no matter how much they slam you for daring to leave your house to buy a hamburger.
Rules are for the little people. Nancy Pelosi will never give up here freezer full of high-end ice cream, but she’ll happily castigate you for daring to ignore the dictates of the ruling nomenklatura.
Those pushing eating the bugs will never have to eat the bugs themselves. The point is to make you eat the bugs…
