The Senate’s bad border deal goes down badly, Big Brother is (still) watching you, Netanyahu tells everyone calling for a Gaza ceasefire to stick it in their murder tunnels, more Democrats arrested for (or convicted of) fraud, and a tiny bit of Disney news. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Republicans took one look at the abomination of a “bipartisan” border deal and declared it dead on arrival.
In a key vote on Wednesday, Senate Republicans moved to block the long-anticipated bipartisan border deal, which ties border-security provisions to aid for both Israel and Ukraine.
The bill was blocked in a 49 to 50 procedural vote, with only four Republicans joining Democrats in backing the legislation. The bill needed 60 votes to advance.
This setback comes after months of negotiations between Senate Republicans and Democrats on a measure President Joe Biden strongly requested. While the GOP wants more resources allocated toward the southern border, House Republicans and former president Donald Trump have made it clear they don’t want the legislation tied to foreign aid.
Hours after the bill’s details were revealed Sunday night, House GOP leaders rejected the package and declared it “DEAD on arrival in the House.”
Trump, who has made the border crisis a central issue of his 2024 presidential campaign, also weighed in on the border deal earlier this week. “Don’t be STUPID!!! We need a separate Border and Immigration Bill. It should not be tied to foreign aid in any way, shape, or form!” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Before the Senate voted on the matter, Biden blamed Trump for Republicans’ fierce opposition to the bill.
“Now, all indications are this bill won’t even move forward to the Senate floor,” Biden said Tuesday. “Why? A simple reason: Donald Trump.”
Hey Biden, I’m already going to vote for Trump. You don’t need to keep giving me new reasons.
The $118 billion Senate proposal includes about $60 billion in Ukraine funding, $14 billion in Israel aid, and $20 billion in border-security improvements, among various other items listed in the legislative package.
Senators James Lankford of Oklahoma, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitt Romney of Utah were the only Republicans to vote in favor of the bill on Wednesday.
Lankford should be ashamed to be in such company.
Texas isn’t taking the Biden Administrations abrogation of the rule of law lying down. “Texas Attorney General’s Legal Challenge to Biden Administration’s ‘Asylum Rule’ Will Proceed. A federal judge ruled Texas raised a plausible claim that the federal government is violating the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”
The Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) announced a procedural victory in one of its many ongoing lawsuits against the federal government this week, after a federal district judge ruled against a motion by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to dismiss a legal challenge to its “asylum rule,” saying Texas had a plausible constitutional challenge.
According to the OAG, the federal government violated the Appointments Clause in the U.S. Constitution when the DHS granted power to review asylum cases to immigration officers — a power uniquely held under federal statute by immigration judges.
“This case offers a rare opportunity to litigate the application of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, which states that Congress may only vest the power to appoint “inferior Officers… in the President alone, the Courts of Law, or the Heads of Departments,” the OAG wrote in a press statement regarding the case.
The office explained that by using asylum officers to perform jobs Congress assigned to judges when said officers were not appointed in the same manner, DHS violated the Constitution.
The OAG also argues that asylum officers are granting more noncitizens asylum than otherwise would be entitled to it. This is causing surges at the border and population increases that are in turn increasing the state’s costs relating to the increases, the state says.
“It is tremendously important for Texas and for our Constitutional order that this case is allowed to move forward,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said regarding the case. “The Biden Administration must not be permitted to ignore Congress and violate the Constitution. We take every opportunity to hold Biden accountable for his unlawful overreach.”
Rank-and-file Border Patrol agents have slammed the Senate’s $118B Senate funding bill that would guarantee 1.5 million illegal migrants entry to the United States, while sending the majority of funds to Ukraine ($60B+) and Israel ($14.1B).
Snip.
“Now that I’ve seen more of it, they can respectfully go fuck themselves. The more I’m seeing the more it just puts what they’ve been doing in writing. You want to shut this down, it’s real easy. Team up [the Department of Defense] with DHS and let us enforce like we were supposed to,” one agent told the Caller, adding “I feel like we are the only nation in the world that is this dumb about the border. Maybe it’s because we haven’t.”
Oh, and “Aliens from noncontiguous countries shall not be included in the sum of aliens encountered.” Did America’s enemies write this thing?
Cruz went on to say he knew [the Biden border bill] “had zero chance of passage” and that the entire purpose of the bill was to give “political camouflage to Democrats running in November.”
“Joe Biden can secure the border any day he wants,” Cruz said. “He doesn’t want to.”
The Secure the Border Act, which passed in the lower chamber as as House Resolution (H.R.) 2, was introduced to the Senate by Cruz in September of 2023, a fact he highlighted Wednesday, saying to “give me Ukraine aid and H.R. 2 and I’ll vote for that.”
H.R. 2 would have continued construction of the border wall, reinstated the “remain in Mexico” policy, and added border patrol agents and technology for both the southern and northern borders.
“Democrats do not want to secure the border; they want this invasion,” Cruz continued. “The Americans who are dying as a result, they’re [Democrats] willing to look the other way.”
A few weeks ago, Ohio congressman and Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan’s office released a letter to Noah Bishoff, the former director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, an arm of the Treasury Department. Jordan’s team was asking Bishoff for answers about why FinCEN had “distributed slides, prepared by a financial institution,” detailing how other private companies might use MCC transaction codes to “detect customers whose transactions may reflect ‘potential active shooters.’”
The slide suggested the “financial company” was sorting for terms like “Trump” and “MAGA,” and watching for purchases of small arms and sporting goods, or purchases in places like pawn shops or Cabela’s, to identify financial threats.
Jordan’s letter to Bishoff went on:
According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of “extremism” indicators that include “transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,” or “the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.”
During the Twitter Files, we searched for snapshots of the company’s denylist algorithms, i.e. whatever rules the platform was using to deamplify or remove users. We knew they had them, because they were alluded to often in documents (a report on the denylist is_Russian, which included Jill Stein and Julian Assange, was one example).
However, we never found anything like the snapshot Jordan’s team just published:
The highlighted portion shows how algorithmic analysis works in financial surveillance.
First compile a list of naughty behaviors, in the form of MCC codes for guns, sporting goods, and pawn shops.
Then, create rules: $2,500 worth of transactions in the forbidden codes, or a number showing that more than 50% of the customer’s transactions are the wrong kind, might trigger a response.
The Committee wasn’t able to specify what the responses were in this instance, but from previous experience covering anti-money-laundering (AML) techniques at banks like HSBC, a good guess would be generation of something like Suspcious Activity Reports, which can lead to a customer being debanked.
If Facebook, Twitter, and Google have already shown a tendency toward wide-scale monitoring of speech and the use of subtle levers to apply pressure on attitudes, financial companies can use records of transactions to penetrate individual behaviors far more deeply. Especially if enhanced by AI, a financial history can give almost any institution an immediate, unpleasantly accurate outline of anyone’s life, habits, and secrets. Worse, they can couple that picture with a powerful disciplinary lever, in the form of the threat of closed accounts or reduced access to payment services or credit. Jordan’s slide is a picture of the birth of the political credit score.
Tiabbi says worse revelations are to come…
“Netanyahu Rejects Hamas Cease-Fire Demands, Vows to Fight until ‘Absolute Victory.'”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Hamas cease-fire demands on Wednesday, vowing to fight on until “absolute victory.”
Netanyahu made the comments shortly after meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who arrived in the region Tuesday night after meeting with leaders of Qatar and Egypt in the most serious diplomatic push of the war to secure a cease-fire agreement. Through these diplomatic channels, Hamas presented Israel with a proposal for a three-stage cease-fire that would last for 135 days and culminate in the end of the war.
“Surrendering to Hamas’s delusional demands that we heard now not only won’t lead to freeing the captives, it will just invite another massacre.”
Indeed.
The Special Counsel’s report on Biden’s mishandling paints a picture of Biden’s mental decline we all know is true but which the media refuses to report.
President Biden couldn’t even remember when he was vice president or when his son Beau had died, leading special counsel Robert Hur to conclude that he could not bring charges for mishandling of classified documents, because a jury would see the president “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
In a report, Robert Hur concluded that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” But he declined to issue any charges, in part because Biden’s poor recollection would make him hard to convict.
If you want to see Fani Willis taken down only the way Ace of Spades can, then I direct your attention to “CashApp Cougar Fani Willis: Okay, Fine, So I Used Taxpayer Money to Hire a Human Meat-Mallet to Pound My Snizz Into Thin Tender Strips Like Veal Scallopini.” (Hat tip: Reader Tig if Brue.)
Members of the Austin American-Statesman took one look at the vast wave of layoffs hitting newsrooms across the country and decided “Now is the perfect time to go on strike!” (Note: Elon Musk should buy the name, fire everyone, and build a national quality newspaper from scratch.)
Dell demands all workers (no matter how far away) return to the office. Those who don’t will be “placed on a ‘career limiting’ fully remote contract. In my experience, working for Dell is itself career limiting…
Budget drag race community comes together to help fan with terminal brain tumor who’s also the happiest guy they know. “Don’t feel bad for me. Everyone’s terminal.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy replaced his top army general on Thursday in what amounts to a major shake-up of the country’s war strategy as the conflict with Russia grinds into its third year and Ukraine grapples with shortages of ammunition and personnel.
In a post on X, Zelenskyy said he thanked Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi — a military leader popular with troops and the general public — for his two years of service as commander-in-chief. “The time for such a renewal is now,” Zelenskyy said.
Zelenskyy appointed Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, to lead the army. Syrskyi, 58, has since 2013 been involved in the Ukrainian army’s effort to adopt NATO standards.
Snip.
Zaluzhnyi was highly regarded by his troops and by foreign military officials. Some analysts warned that his exit could bring unwelcome disruption, potentially driving a wedge between the Ukrainian army and politicians, and fueling uncertainty among Kyiv’s Western allies.
There has been little change in positions along the 1,500-kilometer (900-mile) front line over the winter, though the Kremlin’s forces have kept up their attacks at certain points. Faced with a shortfall in anticipated supplies of Western weaponry, Ukraine has been digging defenses, while Moscow has put its economy on a war footing to give its military more muscle.
At this remove, it is impossible to say whether the move is justified or not, or whether it will pay dividends. Ukraine certainly punched above its weight for the first year and a half of the war, but the last half year has been a slog for no significant gains on the ground.
Though I’ve liked what I’ve seen of their attacks on Russian logistical and naval targets, an awful lot of Ukrainian action has been a more competent version of those of their Russian enemies: small scale attacks on small tactical objectives. I am also critical about how some western weapons have been used in a piecemeal fashion against tactical targets; for example, using HIMARS against individual tanks or MLRS systems. Someone with a NATO weapons background might more successfully utilize combined arms attacks for punching through enemy positions. But that’s still probably going to require more western weapons (especially air assets, SAM systems and combat bulldozers) than Ukraine currently seems to have…
The U.S. Department of Justice investigated firearm violence from 1993 through 2011. The report found, “In 2007–2011, about 1 percent of nonfatal violent crime victims used a firearm in self-defense.” Anti-gun zealots attempt to use this statistic to discredit the use of a gun as a viable means of self-defense, and by extension, to discredit gun ownership in general.
But look deeper into the numbers. During that five-year period, the Department of Justice confirmed a total of 338,700 defensive gun uses in both violent attacks and property crimes where a victim was involved. That equals an average of 67,740 defensive gun uses every year. In other words, according to the Justice Department’s own statistics, 67,740 people a year don’t become victims because they own a gun. (I suspect that if more states allowed concealed carry to be widespread, the number of instances of defensive gun uses would be even higher.)
Is it significant that at least 67,740 individuals use a gun in self-defense each year? Well, in 2016, 37,461 people died in motor vehicle accidents in the United States; in 2015, the number was 35,092 people. Mark Rosekind, administrator of the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration (NHTSA), called those road fatalities “an immediate crisis.” If the NHTSA administrator considers it a crisis that approximately 37,000 people are dying annually from car accidents, then saving nearly twice that many people each year through the use of firearms is simply stunning.
In reality, the Department of Justice findings about defensive gun uses are very conservative. A 2013 study ordered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and conducted by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council found that:
Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence… Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008… On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey…”
The most comprehensive study ever conducted about defensive gun use in the United States was a 1995 survey published by criminologist Gary Kleck in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. This study reported between 2.1 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses every year.
The City of Midland tells NewsWest 9 that a suspect burglarized a north Midland home Saturday morning and was killed by the homeowner who used self-defense.
According to the Midland Police Department, at about 4:09 a.m. on Saturday, officers responded to the 1400 block of Daventry Place due to a “disturbance with weapons.”
Upon arrival, officers found a man identified as 37-year-old George Samuel Butler located at the scene, deceased.
MPD determined that Butler entered the residence “by force with a rifle,” and then the homeowner placed Butler in a choke hold some time during the burglary.
Butler was killed by the homeowner in a case of self-defense, according to the city.
Bartlesville Police say a woman shot and killed a man who broke into her apartment.
Police say the man was 23 years old and that the woman told police she didn’t know him.
Neighbors say the thing that surprised them the most is they didn’t expect something like this to happen in broad daylight when families are getting ready for work and kids ready for school.
Bartlesville Police say a woman called 911 this morning and said someone was breaking into her apartment, then said she’d shot the intruder.
The piece is light on shooting details and heavy on neighbors “I never thought such a thing could happen here blah blah blah” reaction quotes, so I’m chopping it off there.
A Phoenix homeowner shot a strange man last week when the intruder forced his way into the residence last week.
According to the Arizona Family, it was just after 8 p.m. that night when the intruder attempted to force entry into the home.
Police reports say this was when the homeowner shot the man.
The intruder, later identified as 24-year-old Isaiah Roggenbuck, ran away from the home. Police found him in a nearby part of the neighborhood.
Reports from the Arizona Family claim that Roggenbuck was found near a marijuana dispensary.
This is my shocked face.
Roggenbuck was charged with criminal trespassing.
In Houston, somebody robbed a guy at a gas pump and was promptly shot and killed by another guy, who then took off.
Good on you, red car guy. I think the victim showed poor situational awareness, and should have doused the perp, which tends to make any halfway sane thug think twice.
In Indianapolis, a homeowner wrestled the gun away from an intruder and shot him.
A baller move, to be sure, but it’s far better to rely on your own gun…
I haven’t been updating every twist and turn of the Evergrande collapse, but we’re going to look at it again because this Peter Zeihan video has a fairly staggering statistic. He asserts that there are 1.5 BILLION (with a B) unoccupied housing units in China. Even though we already knew about the ghost cities, that’s like an entire ghost nation for a China that was already headed down the economic crapper.
“A Hong Kong court has ruled that China’s largest property development group, Evergrande, is bankrupt and needs to be broken up. This is something that the Chinese government has spent a lot of effort on the last two years not happening.”
“There’s two big things that dominate the Chinese economy. The first is something I call hyperfinancialization: The idea that the government both de facto confiscates the savings of the citizen population so it can only go into projects funded by Chinese State Banks, as well as massively expanding the money supply to a tune of like almost triple what we have here in the United States.”
“It’s a public stability political control approach to finance. It’s not about profit, it’s about throughput, because throughput requires a lot of bodies.”
“Number one, you get companies like Evergrande, who gorge on all this bottomless supply of debt to build build, build, build, build, even if there’s no demand.”
“Second, you get a population who knows that their private savings is almost worthless, because the Chinese government is forcing them to keep it in the state banks, and they want to put it into a hard asset that preferably the state can’t control. And if they can’t get their money out of the country, then the next best thing is a hard asset in the country, which typically is property.”
“You have somewhere probably in the vicinity of 1.5 billion units in the country that have never been lived in, never will be lived in. So you’re talking about 100% overbuild, conservatively. Some estimates say it’s as high as three billion, which is just so far beyond stupid.”
“How many vacant homes are there now? Each expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme believing the current number of vacant homes are enough for 3 billion people,” said He Keng, 81, a former deputy head of the statistics bureau.
“That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can’t fill them,” He said at a forum in the southern Chinese city Dongguan, according to a video released by the official media China News Service.
That’s people, not homes. Still, even if you cut it in half, to 750 million vacant condos, that’s a huge number. That’s the equivalent of 30 empty Shanghais.
Back to Zeihan:
“Evergrande going down means that their debts aren’t going to be serviced anymore, and the physical assets they have are going to be parceled up and foreign investors are going to be coming in seeing what bits that they can get.” Any foreigners investing in Chinese real estate need their heads examined.
“These things are things that the Chinese Communist Party would not normally allow to happen, so there’s a couple ways that this can go, none of them are good.”
“Option number one is we follow a western style bankruptcy and restitution program where this system is broken up and a lot of their assets are sold at pennies, maybe dimes, on a dollar.”
“You can count on private citizens being up in arms. I mean, the best estimate I’ve seen out of China is at 70% of total private savings is wrapped up in real estate, and most of these assets are worth no more than 10 cents on the dollar.”
“You have a fire sale of the single largest player which controls one sixth of the market, holy shit, things are going to get real very, very, very quickly.”
“Option number two is that the Chinese step in and abrogate the Hong Kong ruling. Now legally this cannot happen, but the Chinese Communist party is not really big on legal details when it comes to Hong Kong in particular.”
“Then Evergrande goes on some sort of state drip and everything with the system just kind of limps on, with the understanding now that Hong Kong has no legal authority over its own holdings, which will start an exodus of what few international firms are still there.”
“Regardless how this goes, don’t expect anything in the market to get better.”
“Evergrande may be the biggest player in this market, but it is by far not the only one who’s been doing stupid things like this, building condos that have no demand or running it like a Ponzi scheme. Every development company in the country basically operates this this way, and the second and third largest players in the industry are state-owned.”
“Even if all of a sudden this place were run by a bunch of Austrian economists, it’s too late.” Because of the one-child policy, there simply aren’t enough people of home-buying age.”
“I don’t want to say anything overly dramatic as ‘This is where it all starts to fall apart,’ because we’ve had a lot of things like that go down in the last 18 months. But this cuts to the core of what enables the average [Chinese] citizen to actually support the government, and there’s no way we move forward from this without a lot of side damage.”
The Chinese economy is already sucking. If the housing oversupply is really as bad as Zeihan makes out, China is in for an economic upheaval that makes 1929 look like a mild case of the hiccups.
Longtime readers will remember that I used to do a regular Texas vs. California roundup of the respective directions of the two biggest states in the union, until that just became too big a pain to keep doing. We now have enough data of how Democrats have ruined single party California to just take it for granted that its slide into the toilet will continue unabated.
But the latest data on how Texas continues to grow by leaps and bounds is worth taking a look at.
New population estimates have been released, and once again Texas gained far more residents than any other state. The US population increased by a little more than 1.6 million people during the 12 months ending in July 2023. That’s a rise of just 0.5%, but it’s better than the 0.4% increase in 2022 or 2021’s 0.2% gain. Migration was up, and there was a drop in deaths (though they remain well above pre-COVID levels).
About 87% of the increase was concentrated in the South. More than 706,000 people were added to the region due to net domestic migration, with almost 500,000 from net international migration.
The increase in Texas was 473,453 (about 1,300 people per day), followed by Florida (up 365,205). South Carolina and Florida were the two fastest-growing states in percentage terms, increasing by 1.7% and 1.6%, respectively. The Texas pace was just slightly under 1.6%.
Eight states saw their population fall in 2023 including California (‑75,423), Hawaii (‑4,261), Illinois (‑32,826), Louisiana (‑14,274), New York (‑101,984), Oregon (‑6,021), Pennsylvania (‑10,408), and West Virginia (‑3,964).
Next up: Texas is the second youngest state in the union. At an average age of 36, Texas is only behind Utah at 32 (which I’m presuming is all those marriage and children-minded Mormons).
Finally, in an important economic indicator for the state, the Texas oil and gas industry set new production records.
Texas’ oil and gas industry continued to one-up itself in 2023, setting new records for production, exports, taxes paid, and more, according to a new report.
The Texas Oil and Gas Association’s (TXOGA) 2023 annual report showed the state’s industry produced 5.5 million barrels per day of crude oil and 31.8 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d) of natural gas — both the highest in the U.S. If it were its own country, Texas would place fourth on the hierarchy of oil-producing nations behind the U.S., Russia, and Saudi Arabia.
“American energy leadership starts in Texas and our nation, our economy and our world are better because of the unparalleled stewardship of Texas oil and natural gas companies,” said TXOGA President Todd Staples.
“2023 was such a blockbuster year that the Texas oil and natural gas industry effectively rewrote its record book, clocking unmatched economic and energy achievements across the board.”
According to TXOGA, members of the industry paid over $9 billion in oil and gas severance taxes to the state in 2023 — revenues that fund the state’s savings account and highway fund. Overall, $26.3 billion in state and local taxes were paid by oil and gas companies last year, edging out 2022’s previous record high.
TXOGA listed out property taxes paid by the industry broken down by county and school district.
The industry continues its strong rebound from the global turmoil wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which West Texas intermediate prices plunged to negative levels. In 2022, the industry accounted for 6 percent of the state’s gross domestic product.
The industry employs over 480,000 people in Texas with an average annual wage of $124,000.
Just as in previous years, the Texas formula of freedom, low taxes, low regulation, the rule of law and small government continues to pay dividends.
Two videos on increasing Russian logistics difficulties in the Russo-Ukrainian War. First up: A video that suggests Ukraine has switched from a territory recapture strategy to an attrition strategy.
“Russia is burning whether it’s oil terminals on the Baltic and the Black Sea, factories in far-flung Siberia, or military bases in Crimea, it seems almost every day something bursts into flames in Putin’s backyard. And Ukraine is thought to be the one behind it.” It’s an open question whether structure hits in places like Siberia are Ukrainian “werewolf” teams operating behind enemy lines, or native anti-Putin/anti-war (or even anti-Russian) partisans, but the effect seems the same: Russia now has to worry about attacks to its military, transport, energy, and manufacturing infrastructure far from the frontlines in Ukraine.
Zelensky warned Putin that if Russia attacked Ukrainian cities with indiscriminate missile attacks again, Ukraine would hit back. When it did, “Ukraine struck back a fire at the electrical substation outside Moscow, plunged three districts of the capital into darkness. Water pipes also burst, leaving people freezing in their homes. The plague of accidents soon spread to the cities of Omsk and Novosibirsk, deep in Siberia, which were left without heating as temperatures fell below -2.” Actually, Omsk and Novosibirsk aren’t “deep” in Siberia, because the place is so vast there another five time zones east of there.
“Soon after attacks began on critical infrastructure, including oil refineries upon which Putin’s economy relies. To date, three refineries have been blown up or set on fire, including two which were hit by long-range Ukrainian drones. One of those the Ust-Luga oil refinery near St. Petersburg, is almost 600 miles from Ukraine.”
“Railways and factories have also been blown up or burned down at the same time the Ukrainians have stepped up their campaign against Crimea.” Naval successes we’ve covered here already skipped.
At this point the video argues that Ukraine’s strategy was to liberate Ukrainian territory, no matter the strategic value. I don’t think that was the case.
Following the “failure” of the summer offensive (I would say “limited gains”), “Ukraine is digging in and refocusing liberation of territory is no longer the main goal hitting Russia where it hurts most.”
“Ukraine knows that victory in a long war depends on two things above all else: The will of people to keep fighting, and the ability of the country to provide weapons for them to fight with, and that’s where these drone missile and sabotage attacks come in.”
It then argues (as many others have) that Crimea is Putin’s main weakness, and that losing it will cripple his prestige and ability to stay in power and continue the war.
I think there has been a shift in Ukrainian strategy, but that shift has mainly been driven by the development and availability of longer-ranged weapons Ukraine lacked earlier in the war, combined with the effects of a long-term campaign to degrade Russia air power, naval assets and SAM systems, opening up avenues for longer range strikes. Ukraine focused on attacking Russia’s logistics systems right after the Battle of Kiev was won, but now they have the capability to hit much deeper into Russia’s logistics infrastructure.
Actually, I’m surprised there haven’t been any reported attacks on the Trans-Siberian Railway, given what a long, slender link that is. A few medium-to-long range drone teams inserted into northern Kazakhstan or Mongolia could wreck real havoc on trains, lines, bridges, etc.
Next, a video from Kanal 13 (very much a pro-Ukrainian source) suggests that the war and sanctions are cratering Russia’s military industrial complex.
“The Russian military industrial complex is being destroyed because of the war against Ukraine.”
Dimitri Fidive, CEO of the Muram Machine Building Plant, wrote in an email intercepted by the activists, that inflation and the shortcomings of Russia’s bureaucratic approach prevents plants that form the country’s military industrial complex from fulfilling government orders.”
“Plants are forced to sell their goods at prices set in 2019, but are at the same time expected to purchase details at market prices and in advance.”
“The money received from the government was not enough to cover the interest on the credit that his firm would need to take out to pay its suppliers.”
“Money is tied up until the completion of the government contracts, which normally last 3 to 5 years, meaning during this time the money is effectively frozen.”
“There is a shortage of staff at the plants due to both mass mobilization and a lack of accommodation [housing] in the area.”
Hell of a way to run a railroad. One wonders how extensive these problems are with other companies in Russia’s military industrial complex
Ukraine’s strategy has shifted more in relation to the way the war developed, and the changing availability of western weapons, than any fundamental shift in strategy. It became apparent that this was going to be a war of attrition in the first year, and the question of which would break first: The west’s willingness to send Ukraine weapons, or Russia’s economy and ability to wage it’s illegal war of territorial aggression?
Nothing about that strategy has changed, only Ukraine’s greater reach to affect the latter.
Farmers blockaded Paris to protest the impossible mandates being handed down to them by both Paris and the EU in the name of fighting “global warming.”
“Farmers are laying siege to Paris, as they put it, at eight points around the capital. And they say they won’t budge until the government gives them more concessions.”
“We need one of our French celebrities to do the same thing as Jeremy Clarkson.”
He said Clarkson “exposed the red tape in relation to the environment. Everything he explained, we’re going through in France.”
“It’s about bureaucracy, it’s about the European Union.”
He says farmers in the UK are still waiting for promised post-Brexit support.
“Everything in relations to environmental requirements is exactly the same in France, maybe even worse.”
“We are fed up with the admin, which is excessive in our country with regards to our work, the red tape that France adds in addition to the EU requirements.”
The farmer interviewed says they (i.e. FNSEA, the largest French farming union) have a list of 140 demands. Try as I might, I can’t find a list of those demands, in English or even French. This seems to hit on key grievances, but there’s a fair amount of highfalutin generalities in the English translation. This seems to be a key point: “In Europe, the very philosophy of the Green deal which assumes degrowth needs to be reviewed to restore visibility to farmers.”
If previous demands from other Eurostrikers are any guide, the demands are probably a mix of good (stop with the green insanity, lower taxes and eliminate red tape) and bad (more subsidies).
The French farmers said President Emmanuel Macron’s government now needed to act fast on its pledges, which have included scrapping plans to raise tax contributions on tractor diesel, an easing of pesticide regulations, a pause on new fallow land rules, and more safety checks on food imports.
If you had told some one five years ago that “French farmers will be hailing Jeremy Clarkson as a hero,” no one would have believed you…
Tons of Fani Willis’ crooked shenanigans come to light, Ukraine bags another warship, all those things they said the vaccine wouldn’t do it’s doing, and an anger management therapist who was very poor at his job. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Business partners of District Attorney Fani Willis’ alleged lover Nathan Wade, whom she appointed to work on the case against former President Donald Trump, made donations to her campaign before receiving lucrative contracts from her office.
Terrence Bradley, Wade’s former partner, and Christopher Campbell, his current partner, have collectively contributed more than $5,000 to Willis’ campaign, contribution disclosure reports show. Moreover, both men have each raked in tens of thousands of dollars from contracts with the district attorney’s office, according to county records.
Campbell is a partner at Wade & Campbell Firm, where he works with Wade. Bradley formerly worked with Wade at Wade, Bradley & Campbell Firm, and also represented Wade in his divorce case until Sept. 2022.
The donations add another wrinkle to Willis’ already-scrutinized relationship with Wade.
Willis was accused in a motion earlier this month by Trump co-defendant Michael Roman of benefiting from the “lucrative” contract she awarded Wade when he took her on vacations using money earned from the position. Wade filed to divorce his wife on Nov. 2, 2021, the day after his contract with the district attorney’s office began, and has earned nearly $700,000 from the Fulton County District Attorney’s office since his appointment.
More Willis shenanigans: “DA Fani Willis fired a whistleblower who informed her about the intentional misuse of federal funds and there’s audio of their conversation.”
BREAKING: @FreeBeacon has obtained audio of a whistleblower privately warning Fani Willis in 2021 that her top aide was trying to misuse federal funds.
Willis did not dispute the allegations.
56 days later, Willis fired the whistleblower and perp walked her out of the office. pic.twitter.com/YEkKIB2L5f
Resident Biden appears to be in serious trouble with black voters ahead of the 2024 election, and black lawmakers and organizers are starting to panic.
“What I’m hearing in my district is how ‘Bidenomics’ hasn’t really hit them in the pocket,” New York representative Jamaal Bowman told National Review earlier this week on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. “I need him in the barbershops. I need him on the basketball courts. I need him talking to the hip-hop community. I need him talking to the sports and athletics community to really get at what is troubling black men.”
Polling suggests Bowman is right to be concerned. Just 50 percent of black adults said they approve of Biden in a national AP-NORC poll last month — a 36-point drop from July 2021. An October Siena College/New York Times poll found that 22 percent of black voters surveyed in six competitive presidential battlegrounds say they will vote for Trump over Biden in 2024, a stunning polling shift from a reliably Democratic coalition that helped Biden win the White House in 2020. That same survey found Trump’s numbers were even higher among black men.
In the 40 years he’s spent in political activism, National Black Farmers Association president John Boyd Jr. says the Biden administration has done worse than any other administration in his lifetime in opening its doors to black voters. That lack of outreach, Boyd warns, may come back to bite him in November.
Wait, black people like jobs and safe neighborhoods and dislike inflation and illegal aliens sucking up welfare benefits? Who knew?
The U.N.’s agency for Palestinians said that it fired several employees after receiving information from Israel showing that they had taken part in the October 7 terrorist attacks. The State Department indicated that twelve U.N. employees allegedly took part in the attacks and announced that it had temporarily paused funding for the agency while it reviews the situation.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) delivers aid to Palestinians across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The U.S. is UNRWA’s largest donor, providing $343 million of its budget in 2022.
In a statement Friday morning, UNRWA commissioner general Philippe Lazzarini disclosed that Israel had presented his agency with evidence of its employees’ involvement in Hamas’s massacre of Israelis.
“To protect the Agency’s ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay. Any UNRWA employee who was involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution,” he said.
Sure they will. The question is why the United States ever funded UNRWA, since the funds seem to go straight into rockets and murder tunnels to kill Israeli civilians with?
The Trump administration cut off all funding to UNRWA in 2018, saying that the U.S. shoulders a disproportionate share of its budget. Blinken resumed funding to UNRWA three years later, pledging that the U.S. would seek reforms to the organization.
You know all those crazy “fringe” “conspiracy theories” about the Flu Manchu vaccine? Yeah, about that.
We found the number of myocarditis reports in VAERS after COVID-19 vaccination in 2021 was 223 times higher than the average of all vaccines combined for the past 30 years. This represented a 2500% increase in the absolute number of reports in the first year of the campaign when comparing historical values prior to 2021.
“Starbucks Employee Opposed to Unionization Sues to Declare National Labor Relations Board Unconstitutional.” “The National Labor Relations Board should not be a union boss-friendly kangaroo court run by powerful bureaucrats who exercise unaccountable power in violation of the Constitution.” This is another post-Chevron lawsuit that has the potential to completely dismantle the administrative state.
Proposition 2 allowed counties to create transportation reinvestment zones (TRZs), a power they did not previously have. According to the Texas Department of Transportation, a TRZ is a kind of tax increment financing district where a “zone is created, a base year is established, and the incremental increase in property tax revenue collected inside the zone is used to finance a project in the zone.”
The proposition did not include language about the use of increased ad valorem taxes to pay bonds or notes issued by the county in the TRZ district. A similar measure in 2011 that included such language was voted down.
“Anger management therapist loses his temper and murders a homeless man.” To be fair, the transient did try to fark with his dogs…
Woman with Master’s degree finds out that her trade school husband is quadrupling her salary with no debt.
A San Diego federal judge on Wednesday again struck down a state law that required background checks for nearly all purchases of firearm ammunition and barred California residents from bringing home ammunition that they purchased out of state.
U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez ruled that such restrictions violate the Second Amendment. He also ruled that the portion of the law restricting out-of-state purchases violated the dormant Commerce Clause and is preempted by federal law regulating interstate transportation of firearms.
Benitez had previously struck down the same law in April 2020, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the law just days later while the government appealed the ruling. Before the 9th Circuit could rule on that appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion in a New York gun case that upended Second Amendment case law.
After the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, the 9th Circuit sent the case back to Benitez to be relitigated under that new framework, which holds that modern gun laws must be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Benitez found that the “ammunition background checks laws have no historical pedigree and operate in such a way that they violate the Second Amendment right of citizens to keep and bear arms.” He issued an immediate injunction barring the state from enforcing the law.
The California Rifle & Pistol Association, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement that Wednesday’s ruling represents “continued progress in rolling back decades of attacks on the rights of lawful gun owners.”
Chuck Michel, president and general counsel of the group, said the ruling showed, once again, that the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision has greatly impacted how courts must analyze “these absurdly restrictive laws.”
Snip.
“In the end, the State has failed to carry its burden to demonstrate that the ammunition background check laws ‘are consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,’ as required by Bruen,” the judge wrote. “… A sweeping background check requirement imposed every time a citizen needs to buy ammunition is an outlier that our ancestors would have never accepted for a citizen.”
He also wrote that state data showed too many people seeking to lawfully purchase ammunition were being rejected because of flaws in the system. He said that according to state statistics, when the system was first implemented in 2019, the rejection rate was 16 percent. That has since fallen to 11 percent, “but is still too high,” he wrote.
When a circuit court as notoriously liberal feels compelled to send cases back to lower court in light of Bruen, the the Second Amendment is winning.
On the downside, the Democratic Party in general, and California Democrats in particular, have proven that no amount of rulings will prevent them from pursuing the goal of complete disarmament of law-abiding citizens.
Expect California Democrats to respond by passing a whole slew of gun-grabbing legislation that continues to ignore the clear guidelines of Bruen.
“Christine Lee she was named by the MI5 back in 2022 as an agent of influence…British Security Service issued an alert earlier this year stating that a UK-based lawyer had been engaged in political interference activities for the Chinese state.”
This marked a shift in approach “being taken against the security threat posed by China.”
“She has personally met with Xi Jinping back in Beijing.”
“This is a bunch of people in a conference room. This is called the political consultative conference. They invite a bunch of people living overseas back to China to get greeted by Xi Jinping for to thank them for their effort in conducting influence operations overseas.”
“It’s also possible that CH Lee doubles as somebody from one of the intelligence bureaus.”
“On the surface she’s a lawyer in the UK, and she is also a political influence campaign, specialist and also she could also be a secret agent doing something even worse.”
“The entire thing started because Christine Lee did not want her face to appear on camera, but she was not able to go up directly to confront Dr K [Brendan Kavanagh], being that she’s publicly known by the MI5 as an agent of influence.”
“I think Dr K needs to be aware that this was not just against a series of random CCP nationalists, he’s actually against a systematically planned out series of influence operations. And this, in my view,escalates the situation entirely. I think he should do something to protect himself, protect his family, and also be aware of who he dealing with. This is not a regular group of people.”
Meanwhile, the Chinese communists are threatening to sue Kavanagh for “defamation.”
The story started out looking like it was just “Little Pinks” acting like assholes in another country, but the truth appears to be stranger and more sinister.
