“Rather than being a point and shoot offensive weapon, Leonidas is meant to provide defensive area coverage, creating less a contiguous force field in the surrounding area and more an area of denial where no unfriendly drone system can operate.”
“The core of the Leonidas system is its use of high power microwave energy fired in beams that create an electromagnetic pulse or EMP.”
“EMPs are nothing new in modern warfare, and their effects are well known, primarily their ability to disable electronic systems.”
“But rather than, say, the natural EMPs that come from lightning strikes, or the uncontrolled EMPs that result from the detonation of nuclear weapons, the EMPs that come from the Leonidas system are able to be channeled precisely.”
“Cutting in a wide beam, they can fry anything in their path neutralizing say an oncoming drone swarm all at once, orthey can focus on precise individual targets, sniping drones out of the sky one by one as soon as they violate perimeters.”
“Using specialized transistors rather than traditional magnetrons to generate its microwave beam, Leonidas is considered more compact than would otherwise be expected for a weapon of this kind, and at a relatively low cost of energy expenditure.”
“It can focus a beam for a relatively long duration of time, or fire off shots in Rapid succession relying on a digitally beamformed antenna that beam is kept tight and highly precise, such that it’s unlikely that nearby friendly drones will be impacted when the beam is targeted against a single foe.”
“Leonidas can fire very rapidly without overheating, and its effect on a target is near instantaneous, rather than needing to train the beam on the target for any length of time. It doesn’t require reloading, and its voltage is low enough that humans nearby aren’t in danger from its emissions.” All of this sounds almost too good to be true.
“It’s efficient, it’s easily transported, and by all indications it’s highly effective against the consumer grade drone technology that the US military is so worried about. Any drone of that sort that comes into Leonidas’s protective bubble will be fried, regardless of the specific internal electronics.”
It too can fit on a Stryker. It can also fit in the back of a pickup truck “without too much trouble.”
“The system has been adapted into an aerial attachment pot, giving it the option to be fitted onto a heavy lift drone of its own and defend in midair.”
“It’s just as successful in stopping fully autonomous drones that don’t require active operator control in order to function.”
Can also take out sea drones.
Designed to be modular and upgradeable.
“The ground-based version is ready for testing. In January of 2023, the U.S. cut the Epirus corporation a check for $66 million after it beat out six different competitors, with the expectation that the check would be used to develop four prototypes as soon as possible. 14 months later, all four prototypes have been delivered and for about half a year now, they’ve been in the hands of the US government.” Some are reportedly being tested in the middle east.
Called Indirect Fire Protection Capability (IFPC) Increment 2, the U.S. program will include a range of technologies—guided-missile interceptors, high-energy lasers and high-power microwave blasters—to shoot down multiple threats and provide a layered defense against weapons such as drone swarms. Each of these technologies is already in development and being readied for troops over the next two years.
IFPC’s high-power microwave component should be ready for operational use as soon as next summer. In January the Army tapped a Los Angeles–based company called Epirus to build four prototype microwave systems as one layer of its planned IFPC. These prototypes are versions of Epirus’s Leonidas system. Each one sits on a wheeled trailer that can be detached for remote operation and has a square panel that rests on a gimbal so it can pivot 360 degrees. This panel is packed with software-controlled radio frequency amplifiers that tailor the energy and frequency of the microwave blast.
“The Leonidas design incorporates a lot of lessons identified coming out of Ukraine and a lot of forecasting into what we think a fight in the Western Pacific might look like,” says Aaron Barruga, vice president of federal growth at Epirus.
Leonidas’ HPM prototype passed muster with Army evaluators in early November, and testing is underway as the Army develops tactics, techniques and procedures for the system’s operational use. The goal is to put the four prototype high-power microwave weapons into the hands of operationally deployed units—possibly in the Middle East—next summer.
All of this sounds a bit too good to be true. Designing microwave ICs means dealing with mixed signal and analog design, and analog is something of a dark art. RF engineers are in high demand and pricey when you find them. Various microwave weapons have been announced over the years, and none seem to have made it to volume production.
The Russo-Ukrainian War has nailed down the fast forward button on drone evolution. The success both sides have had with taking out expensive equipment with cheap drones has prompted a lot of the usual suspects to dust off their standard “the tank is obsolete” talking points.
But military technological evolution is always a two way street. Offense pulls ahead for a while, only for defensive countermeasures to quickly catch up. Such is the case with drone warfare, and now we’re seeing some promising approaches to cost-effective anti-drone weapons.
First up, in an “everything old is new again” war featuring static lines and trench warfare, it should be no surprise that a World War II staple, flak cannons (AKA ack-ack, AKA “Archie”) is making a comeback.
It uses a 35mm auto-cannon, and can use both an integrated radar and remote target acquisition (much like Patriot, etc.). I’m having trouble tracking down reliable cost per shell estimates (it uses the same AHEAD ammunition that’s been around a while), but I’m sure it’s considerably cheaper than using using ground-to-air missiles.
“Under a dozen are currently deployed with the US Army in classified overseas areas to take down unmanned aircraft.”
“Laser weapons are one of several relatively inexpensive responses to drone threats, but compared to traditional weapons, there are challenges. They have a shorter range and limited power and can be harder to fix when something goes wrong.” In the past, they were also demonstrably more fragile than traditional projectile weapons.
“The Locust laser weapon system is a palletized high energy laser, or P-HEL. Weighing in at 3,400 pounds and measuring seven feet high by seven feet long, the Locust can fit on the back of large Army vehicles like this Stryker.”
“The laser software is designed to look like a video game like Call of Duty, and it’s operated with an Xbox controller.”
“Here you can see those individual fiber channels that all come together. Each one of those represents a little bit of a different spectrum of light, all coming together into the beam control unit here.” Laser pumping has been around for a while, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in a field-tested weapon before.
“This white rectangle is an 18 wheeler truck about a half mile away. In just 1.5 seconds of beam contact, it melted this two inch steel coin glued to the side.”
Locust costs about $3 a shot, which is lower than even the cheapest drone, and range is about 3 miles.
The whole thing is modular, so presumably fresh batteries can be rotated in after heavy battlefield use.
Laser weapons have been in the works a long, long time, but the energy consumption was so high that nuclear power was required as an energy source for combat lasers (hence why the Gerald R. Ford class of aircraft carriers comes with two nuclear reactors). But battery and laser technology have continued apace, and now you can put it on existing military vehicles. Perhaps even the bed of a pickup truck for an anti-drone technical.
Defense analysts and science fiction have long wondered what the battlefield would look like when beam weapons could actually be deployed on it.
Harris plagiarizes Wikipedia and blows off Catholics, Gwen Walz assigns America homework, social justice groomers keep trying to trans your kids, Williamson County’s sheriff gets accused of pay-for-play corruption, another Hamas leader eats a last meal of kosher drone, Columbia U wants to silence a pro-Israel professor, and a meat recall expands to my local supermarket.
The Biden-Harris administration announced [last] Friday that it was filing a lawsuit against the state of Virginia for enforcing voter integrity laws in the state that aim to curb illegal voting in elections.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who has a history of espousing racist views, claimed without evidence that Virginia’s move to increase election integrity was an “eleventh hour effort” intended, in part, to “disenfranchise qualified voters.”
The DOJ claimed that it was doing so because it was “too close to the Nov. 5 general election” to remove voters:
Section 8(c)(2) of the NVRA, also known as the Quiet Period Provision, requires states to complete systematic programs aimed at removing the names of ineligible voters from voter registration lists no later than 90 days before federal elections.
However, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s executive order requiring that non-citizens be removed from voter rolls was signed on August 7, 2024 — exactly 90 days before Election Day.
The problem is the people who are being removed from the voter rolls are not, in fact, voters because they are not citizens, said Youngkin.
“With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls – a process that starts with someone declaring themselves a non-citizen and then registering to vote,” Youngkin said.
Youngkin said that the lawsuit was a “desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy.”
At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:
In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.
There’s more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:
High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.
The High Point Strategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, North Carolina; in Providence, Rhode Island; and in Rockford, Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional cities.
In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris’s language, with duplicated material in italics, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:
The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service, while at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.
To make matters worse, in duplicating Wikipedia’s language, Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail. She claims, in prose identical to the online encyclopedia’s, that “illegal vending was down 24 percent” as a result of the court’s policies. Early in the paragraph, Harris cites the Bureau of Justice Assistance report to substantiate the figure. But she made a mistake: On Wikipedia, the “24 percent” figure was apparently tied to a different report, which found that “arrests for unlicensed vending,” rather than unlicensed vending as such, “fell by 24 percent” (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.
While the BJA report was not the proper source for the “24 percent” claim, it did appear in the Wikipedia entry’s list of citations, and apparently was a fruitful resource for Harris and her coauthor, as they reproduced substantial portions of its sentences.
Nothing says “commitment to rigorous academic scholarship” quite like not just quoting verbatim from Wikipedia, but doing so incompetently.
Host of Fox News “Special Report” Bret Baier finally snagged that interview with Vice President and selected Democrat nominee Kamala Harris. Harris was campaigning in Washington Crossing, PA and was proud of the former Republicans and Trump administration people who took the stage with her and happy with their endorsement, delighted in their support of her as a presidential candidate.
The entire interview was a train wreck, but there were particular moments that were exceptionally cringeworthy, damaging, and proved with glaring certainty why she is unfit to lead.
Baier started off with the topic of illegal immigration, and you could visibly see Harris deflate like a balloon before the first question was asked.
Immediately Harris tried to filibuster Baier and do this interview’s version of “I’m speaking.” Harris brought up the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which she claimed addressed the flaws in the asylum system with more judges, 15 million more border agents, increased penalties, stemming the flow of fentanyl, shore up entry points, and how she has worked toward bipartisan efforts to strengthen the border.
Baier gently pushed back with documented facts, and Harris briefly got that deer in headlights look she gets when she is desperately trying to find her talking points. Then she jumped on her supposed record as California Attorney General (not her current position as VP) as proof that she knew how to handle this crisis. Failing to understand that the fact that a crisis exists is proof that you have no ability to correct it.
But the most purely evil and damning part of this topic of illegal immigration was the fact that Harris could not even form the words to apologize for allowing criminals into the country that resulted in the senseless deaths of Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin.
Former president Donald Trump poked fun at vice president Kamala Harris during the Al Smith dinner on Thursday evening, criticizing his political rival for failing to show up at the charity event in person.
Harris addressed the crowd at the white-tie event, which raises funds for Catholics charities, in a pre-recorded video – a highly unusual move for a presidential candidate. It has become a tradition for presidential candidates to speak at the event since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy appeared together in 1960.
The vice president is the first presidential contender to skip out on the dinner since Walter Mondale in 1984.
There’s an auspicious precedent.
“I guess you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the looters and rioters in Minneapolis and she would have been here, guaranteed,” Trump said.
He went on to joke that Harris must be “out receiving communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” a reference to a viral video from earlier this month of the Michigan governor feeding a chip to a leftist influencer on her knees.
Trump accused the vice president of being “disrespectful to Catholics.”
He also quipped about the Democratic nominee’s odd’s of winning the election, saying, “There’s a group called White Dudes for Harris but I’m not worried about them. Their wives and their wives’ lovers are voting for me.”
Does Kamala Harris need a mea culpa in PA? Or does her disconnect from voters in the Rust Belt go beyond state lines and religion?
That question has rolled around in my head since reading William McGurn’s column yesterday at the Wall Street Journal. McGurn uses Gretchen Whitmer’s bizarre mockery of the Catholic Eucharist while wearing a Harris-Walz hat to argue that the Democrat anointee for the presidency now has a Whitmer-created problem. But is that entirely true, or does it go beyond Whitmer’s blasphemy?
McGurn recognizes a broader problem, but perhaps not its scope. First, he outlines the direct issues with Catholics, who comprise 30% of Pennsylvania:
As California’s attorney general, Ms. Harris signed several friend-of-the-court briefs opposing religious exemptions for private employers such as Hobby Lobby and religious nonprofits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor. She said she was “proud” to have co-sponsored California’s Reproductive FACT Act, which compelled pro-life pregnancy centers to display notices about where women could get an abortion. The Supreme Court in 2018 rejected the law as a likely violation of the First Amendment.
But perhaps Ms. Harris’s most notorious Catholic moment came after she was elected senator. When Brian Buescher was nominated for a federal judgeship, she grilled him about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s fraternal organization. Although President John F. Kennedy was also a Knight, Ms. Harris treated the group as though it were the Ku Klux Klan.
She would later co-sponsor the Equality Act, which the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops said could force doctors and hospitals to perform abortions they oppose. Last month she snubbed New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan by declining to attend this Thursday’s Al Smith dinner, an election-year staple that has brought Democratic and Republican candidates together in a civil setting for decades.
Those are the direct issues, and those aren’t limited to Pennsylvania. Overall, Republicans now have a statistically significant edge in party ID among Catholics, according to Pew polling this year, 50/44. Nationally, Catholics accounted for 25% of the vote in 2020, although apparently pollsters didn’t include data on religion in state-level exit polling. One can expect a similarly significant number of Catholics in Wisconsin and Michigan, and perhaps slightly lower levels in states like Arizona and Georgia. In every state, however, Catholics make up a far larger part of the electorate than the Arab-Americans did in Michigan, and yet both Biden and Harris obsessed over their support all year long.
That’s one problem, but that’s not the only problem. A more recent Pew poll shows Harris trailing Donald Trump with Catholics by five points, even worse than Hillary Clinton performed in 2016. But the issue isn’t entirely religious:
Mr. Biden may be the last of the big-time Democrats whose base was the white working class. But it confers a sensibility Ms. Harris is conspicuously lacking. …
Politico reports that Ms. Harris’s prospects are “considerably dicier” because of a “cultural dissonance” between her progressive San Francisco persona and white working-class Catholic Pennsylvanians.
That gets closer to the real danger for Democrats, but it has less to do with “white” and “Catholic” than it does to working class. Biden had a political and cultural connection to working-class voters, not just because of his Catholicism but because of his background. He fit into that milieu even if that mainly came as a conceit, especially after fifty years in Washington DC, but he could talk in their language too … at least before his brain turned to jelly. People keep overlooking his 2012 address to the Democrat convention, which turned out to be the best of the week, in which he artfully bridged the gap between the working class and the Academia-drenched elite that had mainly taken over the party in the current generation.
Harris simply can’t do that. Not only is she incapable of connecting at anywhere near that level, she only recently even showed a desire to do so. Her lame attempt at repeating the mantra “I was raised in a middle-class household” ad nauseam is about as close as she gets. Culturally, she comes from the Academia-drenched elite and speaks their language, to the extent she speaks any political language effectively at all. Harris tosses around clichés as a means to connect to working class voters, which initially appeared to appeal to them but have turned into a major liability now.
The Democratic Party’s naked contempt for both religious believers and the actual working class has been evident for a long, long time.
More on the subject: “Blowing Off the Al Smith Dinner Might Have Cost Harris Pennsylvania — and the Election.”
The Catholic vote is not as monolithic as it used to be. In 1928, the Catholic vote was overwhelmingly Democratic, concentrated in urban centers. By 1960, the Catholic vote was fracturing through intermarriage and economic issues, but Kennedy still received about 65% of the vote from his co-religionists.
Today, Donald Trump can expect to get about 60% of the Catholic vote. In Pennsylvania, The Catholic vote might be pivotal in a state that Harris absolutely, positively has to win.
“Her San Francisco progressive persona isn’t a good fit for Joe Biden’s native state,” William McGurn wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday.
Snip. “In an election in Pennsylvania that will almost certainly be decided by less than 100,000 votes, Harris skipping the Al Smith Dinner was not only stupid but might be the mistake that cost her the White House.” Eh, probably not. Harris will probably lose the election because she’s part of an administration had presided over a wretched economy and let in millions of illegal aliens. Plus she’s a horrible candidate that literally nobody voted for. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Google is up to its old tricks, “hiding Conservative news on election 23 pages deep.””When using the search term “donald trump presidential race 2024,” researchers had to scroll through 23 pages of results before they come to a U.S.-based right-leaning news source, a single Fox News video six results down on the 23rd page.”
An excerpt from the book Walz' wife was reading to children shows them all riding the gay dad while he puts a vacuum cleaner up to his mouth. I'm sure it's nothing. From: Bathe the Cat. pic.twitter.com/2npr5s6mDN
Gwen Walz also seems to feel that the best way to get men to the polls is assigning them homework.
Can you put some really money behind that and put it on air? Maybe during college football?
There are still men out there who don’t hate this campaign with every fiber of their being, and I think this ad could be enough to nag them right into Trump’s arms. https://t.co/vk6jwJY9oM
Yes, social justice warrior teachers do want to trans your kids. “Court Shuts Down BLM Teacher Trying To Force Trans Ideologies On Kids.”
Megan Williams is a first-grade teacher who forced her 6 and 7-year-old students to “observe” so-called Transgender Awareness Day. This Black Lives Matter activist subjected these small children to non-curricular propaganda about “gender identity” and sex changes.
Williams disturbingly went so far as to tell these kids that their “parents ma[d]e a guess whether they’re a boy or a girl” and may have been wrong. Parents complained, but Williams was backed by her school principal and superintendent.
Three mothers fired back by filing a lawsuit against Williams, the school, the district, and district officials in June of 2022. Their goal was to obtain a moratorium “on gender dysphoria and transgender transitioning,” parental notice and opt-out rights on the topic absent such a prohibition, compensatory damages, and punitive damages.
Thankfully, Judge Joy Conti of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania just ruled largely in favor of these mothers.
Judge Conti stated that “parents have a constitutional right to reasonable and realistic advance notice and the ability to opt their elementary-age children of noncurricular instruction on transgender topics and to not have requirements for notice and opting out of those topics that are more stringent than those for other sensitive topics.”
Here’s the remarks in the aired clip shared by Johnson:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%…The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
And here — I’ll put it in bold — is what CBS edited out for the broadcast:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%, and when I was there on the ground, and you should go, I mean, bring the cameras and talk to the people there, they’ll tell you, don’t- don’t take politicians words for this or the administration’s word, talk to the people there on the ground they had not been provided the resources almost two weeks out from the storm that they desperately needed. And when I was there 13 days, post- you know, post the storm hitting that state, people are still being rescued. They’re stuck in the higher elevations in the mountains because the roads are down and all the rest. So they need every- every available resource and all hands on deck. The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
Issues in the debate ranged from abortion to the border crisis, and allowing boys in girls’ sports.
On abortion, Cruz said he supported Texas’ pro-life laws while acknowledging that other states would make different decisions.
“In Texas, we overwhelmingly support that parents should be notified and have to consent before their child gets an abortion. In Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that late-term abortions in the eighth and ninth months, that’s too extreme. And I’ll tell you, in Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that taxpayer money shouldn’t pay for abortions,” said Cruz.
He went on to attack his opponent’s position on abortion as extreme, noting that Allred “voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental notification law. He voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental consent law. He voted to legalize late-term abortions, including the eighth and ninth months.”
Allred, meanwhile, said he would fight to “restore a woman’s right to choose” and to “make Roe v. Wade the law of the land again.”
Snip.
One of the biggest issues playing out in the campaign thus far has been Allred’s position on allowing boys in girls’ sports. The issue has been the target of Cruz’s campaign ads and led to Allred denying the accusations, despite voting against legislation to protect girls sports.
“I know a lot of y’all at home, for example, saw two biological men competing in women’s boxing at the Olympics,” said Cruz. “That was wildly unfair. You know, my youngest daughter plays volleyball. It’s not fair for a biological boy or man, a teenage boy, to spike the volleyball at her, and he has voted repeatedly in favor of that.”
FEMA’s entanglement with the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous open southern border policies by diverting storm relief funds ($1.4 billion, according to NYPost) for illegal and legal aliens may have undermined the federal agency’s ability to effectively manage emergencies, such as the Katrina-like disaster unfolding in the US Southeast.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas dropped the bombshell [two weeks ago]: FEMA “does not have the funds” to see Americans through the rest of this Atlantic hurricane season. The federal agency drained the funds by prioritizing taxpayer funds for illegal and legal aliens versus US citizens as the Biden-Harris globalist team rolled out the red carpet to anyone, even terrorists, via the open southern borders.
Connect the dots, if you can,” Tim Murtaugh, an adviser to former President Trump’s campaign, wrote on X, adding, “DHS says FEMA might not have enough cash to help people through hurricane season. But in 2 years of a new Biden-Harris program, they’ve spent $1 BILLION on housing and other services for migrants.”
Shedding a whole heck of a lot of color on the situation, Savanah Hernandez, a reporter for Turning Point USA, wrote on X that she has uncovered some of the “first looks” inside fully furnished luxury apartments for migrants that received free rent and utilities for two years.
Hernandez wrote in a note on The Post Millennial:
The Brunswick Landing apartments in Maine sparked controversy earlier this year when it was discovered that homeless migrants in the area were getting the opportunity to live in the units rent-free for up to two years. Migrants living in the apartments shared that not only is the rent-free, the utilities are paid and we got an inside look at the furnished apartments that would run the average American about $2,300 dollars.
“FEMA: Disaster Relief No Longer About Emergency Response, It’s About ‘Disaster Equity.'”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is supposed to be the government’s premier emergency relief organization in times of disaster, like the situation now faced by victims of Hurricane Helene’s aftermath in North Carolina and Tennessee.
But according to the FEMA website, the agency now places higher priority on instituting Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity guidelines than on easing the suffering of Americans displaced by disaster.
Among the goals listed in FEMA’s strategic plan are to:
Instill equity as a foundation for emergency management
Lead whole of community in climate resilience
Promote and sustain a ready FEMA & prepared nation
What does that look like in action?
Here’s an example of a FEMA disaster preparedness meeting where participants discuss how LGBTQIA individuals were suffering disproportionally before the storm compared to other disaster victims.
Notice how the focus shifts from doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people to ensuring that they are promoting “equity in disaster relief.”
Social justice is racist poison that ruins everything, and now it’s costing Americans their lives.
Here we go again. “Report: Migrant Caravans Leaving Southern Mexico Headed Toward US Border.”
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has declared a “blood feud” against three federal lawmakers from neighboring North Caucasus republics in his first comments on last month’s deadly shooting outside the Moscow headquarters of Russia’s largest online retailer Wildberries.
Kadyrov has vowed to help Vladislav Bakalchuk, the estranged husband of Wildberries CEO Tatiana Kim — Russia’s wealthiest woman — to return his wife and block the merger of their e-commerce giant with the smaller outdoor advertising group Russ.
The family and business dispute escalated last month when Bakalchuk led a group of men to Wildberries’ Moscow offices and allegedly tried to force their way into the building. Two security guards, who were ethnic Ingush, were killed in the shootout and multiple felony charges, including murder, were filed against Bakalchuk and several other ethnic Chechens involved in the incident.
Kadyrov is a piece of work, but one with a sufficiently strong independent power base that Putin has felt compelled to buy him off. Kadyrov declaring a blood fued against Russian officials probably isn’t a sign of harmony in Russia’s government…
Sinwar is only the latest high-profile terrorist to meet his fate at the hands of the IDF. His predecessor at the top of Hamas’s hierarchy, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in Tehran when a bomb covertly smuggled into an Iranian diplomatic safehouse exploded in July. Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, was neutralized in a July airstrike after seven unsuccessful IDF attempts to deliver him to justice. Hamas deputy commander Marwan Issa met his fate in March, two months after his deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, was cut down in the suburbs of Beirut by an Israeli drone.
A little over a year after the war Hamas inaugurated against Israel on 10/7 in the deadliest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the terrorist organization has been entirely decapitated. Its fighters are scattered, disorganized, and reduced to chaotic rearguard actions against the Israeli troops busily rolling them up. Critics of Israel’s campaign like to insist that Hamas is an idea and therefore cannot simply be dispatched like the thousands of its fighters the IDF has cut down. True enough, but an idea cannot shoot at you or launch rocket attacks on your cities. That requires well-connected, deeply embedded commanders with years of experience conducting asymmetrical insurgent attacks on a superior force. Those commanders are all dead.
The Israeli officials who have pursued Hamas’s barbarians until the end have done so without much encouragement from the West. Indeed, the death of every Hamas commander was fretted over in the West as though it created a new impediment to peace and to the negotiations over the hostages Hamas itself captured on 10/7 — 97 of whom still have not yet been located. Joe Biden’s administration withdrew almost all rhetorical support for Israeli operations in places like Rafah, where Sinwar himself was taken out. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government deserves the gratitude of the civilized world for rejecting these entreaties seeking Israel’s surrender in its righteous war.
The Israelis did not choose the way this war began, but they will be the authors of its conclusion. And the end is near. The Israelis have brought the Gaza Strip closer to its day of liberation from the tyranny of an illegitimate terrorist regime than all the combined efforts of the peace processors in the global diplomatic corps ever achieved. It is a shame that the American administration that stood so stalwartly with Israel at the outset of this campaign willingly sacrificed its ability to celebrate alongside its Israeli counterparts. This should be America’s victory, too. But by spending months on end agonizing over how Israel was achieving its honorable objective, the Biden White House and its allies lost sight of our shared strategic goals.
We hit the Houthis with B-2s. I didn’t have that on my 2024 dance card…
“Williamson County’s Democrat Sheriff Accused of Accepting Pay-to Play Donation. On September 24, the Williamson County Commissioners Court issued a contract for over $500,000 to Family Hospital Management Company for ‘Jail Inmate Psychological Services’. Just four days before a county contract was issued, [Democrat Sheriff Mike] Gleason received a $20,000 campaign donation from the founder and CEO of the company that received the contract.” “Jail Inmate Psychological Services” sounds like a great avenue for leftwing graft…
“A North Carolina Democratic county leader, who is also running for a seat in the state House, was arrested after allegedly stealing Trump signs near a road last week. Moore County, North Carolina, County Chair Lowell Simon, 68, was charged with two counts of misdemeanor larceny of political signs after he admitted to removing Trump signs and keeping them in his car.”
“The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian says she ‘woke up’ after being molested by LA homeless man and ‘the good people’ slammed her for talking about it. Kasparian described feeling “politically homeless” and shared how the backlash she received from liberals after the assault played a key role in her reevaluation.” Seems like social justice warriors feel that being molested by a homeless man or raped by an illegal alien is a small price to pay for taxpayer-subsidized abortion…
Boy dressed as girl assaults actual girl, gives her a concussion and blurred vision. You know what the school administrators did, don’t you? That’s right, they suspended the victim.
“Edgewood ISD Superintendent Gets Raise While Students Are Failing. Edgewood ISD extended Superintendent Eduardo Hernández’s contract until 2029 and raised his annual salary to $291,923.””Only 23 percent of Edgewood ISD students can read, write, and do math at or above grade level.” Edgewood is on the west side of San Antonio.
Columbia U is trying to make their campus Judenfrei.
Columbia University is temporarily suspending a prominent pro-Israel business professor’s access to campus after he publicly criticized school officials for permitting anti-Israel campus demonstrations on the anniversary of the October 7 massacre.
Columbia notified Israeli-American business professor Shai Davidai on Tuesday that he will be banned from campus for violating university policy on harassing school employees.
On Tuesday night, Davidai posted a video on social media accusing Columbia of retaliating against him for posting a video of himself asking Columbia’s chief operating officer Cas Halloway why he allowed pro-Hamas demonstrators to protest on the anniversary of October 7.
“Right now I was supposed to be at the school of social work at Columbia, where the Jewish students are holding their own memorial service for the senseless violence of October 7th. But then I got a call from my lawyer, who says the university has decided to not allow me to be on campus anymore,” Davidai said.
“Why? Because of October 7th. Because I was not afraid to stand up to the hateful mob. And because I was not afraid to expose Mr. f**king Cas Holloway for not doing anything about it.”
Davidai should sue them over equal rights violation for millions. Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.
Researchers have unearthed two sophisticated toolsets that a nation-state hacking group—possibly from Russia—used to steal sensitive data stored on air-gapped devices, meaning those that are deliberately isolated from the Internet or other networks to safeguard them from malware.
One of the custom tool collections was used starting in 2019 against a South Asian embassy in Belarus. A largely different toolset created by the same threat group infected a European Union government organization three years later. Researchers from ESET, the security firm that discovered the toolkits, said some of the components in both were identical to those fellow security firm Kaspersky described in research published last year and attributed to an unknown group, tracked as GoldenJackal, working for a nation-state. Based on the overlap, ESET has concluded that the same group is behind all the attacks observed by both firms.
The practice of air gapping is typically reserved for the most sensitive networks or devices connected to them, such as those used in systems for voting, industrial control, manufacturing, and power generation. A host of malware used in espionage hacking over the past 15 years (for instance, here and here) demonstrate that air gapping isn’t a foolproof protection. It nonetheless forces threat groups to expend significant resources that are likely obtainable only by nation-states with superior technical acumen and unlimited budgets. ESET’s discovery puts GoldenJackal in a highly exclusive collection of threat groups.
Then there’s this: “The basic flow of the attack is, first, infecting an Internet-connected device through a means ESET and Kaspersky have been unable to determine.” There’s a 99% chance that these air-gaped systems are being attacked through the usual human engineering or security lapse vectors. Which leaves a 1% chance of some form of electromagnetic witchcraft…
“WeightWatchers Squeezes Higher After Unveiling New Low-Cost GLP-1 Treatment…WW announced the addition of a new compounded semaglutide to its lineup to beat America’s obesity crisis sparked by the processed foods industrial complex. The new treatment starts at $129 per month, and each additional month will cost $189. This is significantly less than GLP-1 obesity treatments from big pharma, which cost north of $1,000 a month.”
Fiat/Stellantis merged with Chrysler in 2014, and now they’re threatening to shut it down in two years.
BrucePac listeria meat recall expands, now includes some HEB items.
Disney plans to slash budgets on Marvel movies going forward. On the one hand, that’s probably prudent, since it gets harder and harder to turn a profit with soaring budgets. On the other hand, Marvel’s recent problems aren’t a product of big budgets, they’re a product of wokeness and crappy scripts.
Rick Beato has an interesting video with R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills. I didn’t realize that the other three members wrote the music then handed it off to Michael Stipe, who would go off and create the lyrics by himself.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ordered the case of M.D. v. Abbott be reassigned, in addition to vacating a contempt order [Clinton appointee Janis] Jack entered.
The panel released a 36-page opinion that found Jack has shown an extensive and well-documented pattern of antagonism toward the State of Texas and its counsel, and a bias favoring plaintiffs who have strived for years to get the state to comply with orders for timely investigations into abuse allegations.
Although the panel recognized Jack’s institutional knowledge and the complexity of the civil case, the court said, “It is necessary to reconsider the continued adversarial nature of this proceeding.”
Circuit Judge Edith H. Jones, in her analysis of the history between Jack and the Texas agencies she oversees, also strongly indicated Jack erred in not recognizing the state has been “substantially compliant” in recent years with the court’s orders.
The opinion, anticipating reassignment, gives notice to that regardless which jurist inherits the case, “as a general rule of law federal judges are not allowed to become permanent de facto superintendents of major state agencies.”
Jones said it is not appropriate “for federal court intervention to thwart the state’s self-management, where the state is taking strides to eliminate the abuses that led to the original decree.”
The Department of Family and Protective Services, in a prepared statement, said, “We are pleased that the Fifth Circuit recognized the significant efforts DFPS and HHSC have invested in serving the children and families of our state. We remain committed and are grateful to Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas Legislature for their continued support in furthering the well-being of our most vulnerable Texans.”
TDFPS is hardly free of sin. At one point Abbott had to instruct them to stop requiring Critical Race Theory classes. Somehow I have a feeling that wasn’t something Jack objected to…
Yetter Coleman partner R. Paul Yetter, lead counsel for the plaintiffs and appellee advocate during the Aug. 5 oral argument, has worked the case since it was first filed.
“We respectfully disagree with the panel ruling and will ask for reconsideration by the whole circuit,” Yetter said, adding the case will stay with Jack at least until the reconsideration petition is decided.
When litigation began, Jack’s role involved addressing abuses within the entire foster care program and more than 10,000 children.
In 2014, Jack issued her ruling after trial and the remedial measures were appealed to the Fifth Circuit. Although the Fifth Circuit provided the state some relief in a series of orders over a period of years, Yetter said the merits of the case have been thoroughly adjudicated and the focus has been on compliance for the past five years.
The issues before the appeals court this time are primarily focused on 38 unresolved cases involving children with intellectual disabilities that are in the state’s permanent custody.
Wait, 13 years and $100,000 in fines over 38 cases? I would imagine that most of them have aged out of the system by now. Every life is sacred, but $100,000 a day in fines for 38 cases seems…disproportionate.
Speaking in Jack’s defense, Yetter argued the judge has been “incredibly patient” with the state for the past seven years, and the Fifth Circuit did not credit Jack where she praised state officials on progress made.
“There’s been improvement, and she’s called them out and praised state officials for that,” Yetter said.
In an amicus curiae filed by Alexander Dubose & Jefferson attorney Marcy Hogan Greer on behalf of National Disability Rights Network, Center for Public Representation, New Disabled South, and Disability Rights Mississippi, Greer argued Texas has continued to fail foster children with intellectual disabilities.
The Texas Health and Human Services Commission created a special “Provider Investigations” unit to investigate alleged abuses of children with disabilities “who are often incapable of advocating for themselves,” but that unit “has been plagued by incompetence, ineptitude, insensitivity, and backlog,” Greer noted.
Texas appealed a Jack contempt order in April that came with a $100,000-a-day fine. The Fifth Circuit stayed the fine and late Friday vacated it with the reassignment order.
The actual decision is here, and near the end it notes:
We take no position on issues that have not yet matured into appealable orders. However, as a general rule of law federal judges are not allowed to become permanent de facto superintendents of major state agencies. Horne v. Flores, 557 U.S. 433, 453, 129 S. Ct. 2579, 2597 (2009) (“[T]he longer an injunction or consent decree stays in place, the greater the risk that it will improperly interfere with a State’s democratic processes.”); United States v. Mississippi, 82 F.4th 387, 400 (5th Cir. 2023)(“Micromanagement, enforced upon threat of contempt, does not reflect the principles of comity” in prison context.). Nor, under the federalist structure created by the Constitution, is it appropriate for federal court intervention to thwart the state’s self-management, where the state is taking strides to eliminate the abuses that led to the original decree. Horne, 557 U.S. at 448,
129 S. Ct. at 2593–94 (“Federalism concerns are heightened” where “a federal court decree has the effect of dictating state . . . budget priorities.”).
Nor are federal judges even suited, by training or temperament, to manage institutions, personnel, or the provision of vital state services, even if counselled by monitors. In this case particularly, the integrity of oversight may have been further put at risk by the trial court’s creation of a “fund,” based on plaintiffs’ attorneys’ foregoing their court-approved fees, that the court may evidently disburse at its discretion. Federal judges should not be personally allocating resources from the state’s taxpayers for purposes not directly tied to and controlled by the state itself in order to abide by a court decree.
Indeed.
I’m sure there probably were some significant cases of abuse at the heart of the case, but 13 years seems like a ridiculously long time for a case to drag on (though far from the longest).
The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has granted the State of Texas’ request to pause a district court’s injunction against a 2021 Texas election law, citing the Supreme Court’s guidance against altering election laws close to an election.
The order notes that the “law has been on the books for over three years, but the court did not see fit to enjoin until now.”
In 2021, Abbott signed into law Senate Bill (SB) 1, which added provisions designed to prevent voter fraud by creating additional criminal statutes, prohibiting unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, and setting more ground rules for early voting and voter registration.
The law creates an offense for “vote harvesting services” and specifically bans “in-person interaction with one or more voters, in the physical presence of an official ballot, a ballot voted by mail, or an application for ballot by mail, intended to deliver votes for a specific candidate or measure.”
The “Election Protection and Integrity Act” was a centerpiece of Texas GOP legislation and received significant pushback from Democratic lawmakers at the time it passed, sparking a quorum bust as many members of the Democratic caucus fled to Washington D.C. The U.S. Department of Justice even went as far as filing a lawsuit to challenge two provisions of the law.
Six progressive organizations sued the state over the election integrity laws, with a federal judge issuing a ruling last month that declared the law unconstitutional and enjoined state officials from enforcing it.
Funny how Democrat-appointed judges always seem to want to let Democrats cheat. We covered the stay here.
La Union Del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) was the lead plaintiff, along with the League of Women Voters of Texas, the Texas American Federation of Teachers, the Texas Alliance for Retired Americans, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and OCA-Greater Houston.
All of these, including the teacher’s union, are merely appendages of the social justice-infected Democratic Party.
Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has launched voter integrity investigations into a number of Texas counties, promised to appeal the ruling to the 5th Circuit Court.
Days later, the 5th Circuit issued a temporary stay of the federal judge’s ruling.
Circuit Court Judge James Ho, who authored the court’s decision, explained, “The district court issued this injunction after counties have already started to mail absentee ballots.”
“So Texans are about to cast ballots not subject to voter privacy protections currently on the books but rather subject to the injunction issued by the district court.”
Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez, in the concurring judgment, wrote, “Because of the proximity of the injunction’s issuance to the upcoming election, issuance of a stay is consistent with both Supreme Court and this court’s precedent.”
Democrats have previously used politiquerasall across south Texas to wheedle, cajole, steal, and fake votes for Democrats. This ruling should prevent at least this one avenue of Democratic Party voting fraud for this election.
Authorities have arrested a confirmed Tren de Aragua gang member, after he allegedly recruited students from two Houston middle schools to join the Venezuelan gang.
According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Jorgenys Robertson Cova—an illegal alien from Venezuela—entered the United States two years ago.
Cova is suspected to have recruited students from Jane Long Academy and Las Americas—both of which are located in the Houston Independent School District. He was arrested last week after being wanted in Pearland for theft and was accused of recruiting the students.
The Texas Department of Public Safety confirmed Cova was part of the Venezuelan gang after observing known tattoos related to the gang on his arms that included a five-point crown and a clock and roses. Other known tattoos include stars, Ak-47s, and trains.
Via FAIR, here are some of the tattoos DPS seems to be focusing on.
Cova was scheduled for an asylum hearing in Houston on the same day he was taken into custody and booked into the Brazoria County Jail.
A Houston ISD spokesperson told Texas Scorecard that they have not been made aware of any activities related to the gang member, but will work with law enforcement to provide any information they need.
The gang has also been spotted in North Dallas, with Dallas Police officers confirming they have infiltrated the city. Members of the Tren De Aragua gang have congregated with other Venezuelans in the northern part of Dallas, nicknamed “Villa Dallas.” Since the gang’s arrival, the neighborhood has become riddled with illegal street racing, beatings, shootings, and extortion attempts.
It was bad enough when gangs recruited high schoolers, but now their dragging middle schoolers into a life of crime. Thanks, Joe Biden.
As I noted before, I never read about Tren de Aragua until the Biden-Harris Administration decided to flood America with illegal aliens, and now they seem to be popping up everywhere. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has designated Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization and is offering up to a $5,000 reward for information leading to capture of members.
There’s just no end to the vibrant diversity that Democrats have inflicted on ordinary Americans…
This is a pretty startling tidbit via Texas Republican congressman Chip Roy:
BREAKING: according to @TxDPS – 2,824,613 non-citizens have DL’s, CDL’s, or ID – after working with my friend @brianeharrison to run this to ground. That’s why this matters – a lot. https://t.co/OxC125vWaF
Given that the entire population of Texas is some 31,000,000 people, that means that just under 10% of the population are non-citizens, the majority of which are probably illegal aliens, and most of them have probably been imported under the Biden-Harris administration.
In a major reversal from her guidance just days ago, Secretary of State Jane Nelson now says non-citizen driver’s licenses may not be used as a form of voter identification.
The Texas Department of Public Safety issues driver’s licenses and personal identification cards to lawfully present noncitizens, which are clearly marked “Temporary Visitor” or “Limited-Term” and expire after one year or when the individual’s period of lawful presence ends.
An advisory from the Secretary of State issued Tuesday afternoon stated that while citizens should not use these types of IDs to vote, poll workers should nonetheless offer a regular ballot to people on the voter rolls who present a noncitizen ID. This contrasts with previous guidance from the Secretary of State’s office in 2018, which specifically stated that DPS-issued driver’s licenses and personal identification cards “should not be used if ‘Limited Term’ or ‘Temporary Visitor’ appears on the face of the card, as this indicates the person is not a U.S. Citizen.”
Instead, voters with such IDs were urged to show other forms of identification, including naturalization certificates or passports.
After backlash, Nelson has issued “updated guidance” reversing the decision:
When an individual attempts to vote by presenting a temporary or limited-term driver’s license (which federal regulations say must be issued only to non-citizens who are lawfully present in this country) election workers must require that the individual produce a naturalization card or naturalization certificate demonstrating U.S. citizenship to receive a regular ballot.
I still expect Democrats to try to harvest illegal alien votes (and pursue other avenues of voting fraud) in deep blue cities, but state vigilance has helped forestall this particular avenue of illegal alien voting fraud.
The Biden-Harris administration allegedly redirected funds meant for securing the southern border to advancing its open borders agenda.
The Center for Renewing America reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been using funds allocated to U.S. Customs and Border Protection to spur illegal border crossings.
Specifically, CRA Executive Director Wade Miller levied accusations against the Biden-Harris administration for propagating the illusion that CBP had enough taxpayer funding, but then moving those dollars to FEMA to advance open-border policies.
He described this process as being even more scandalous than FEMA funding illegal aliens with its own money.
“It appears that much of the money used by FEMA to fund illegal immigration was transferred to FEMA from CBP,” Miller posted on X. “The Biden/Harris admin is defunding border security to facilitate open borders.”
Miller explained later that “Democrats set up the CBP funding levels to make it look like CBP had non-laughable funding levels, with the intent of then later transferring those funds to fund the open borders agenda through FEMA.”
While U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed that FEMA is running out of money amid the ongoing hurricane season, FEMA actually spent exorbitant amounts of money on welfare for illegal aliens.
For example, in the past two years alone, FEMA covered approximately $1 billion worth of food, shelter, and transportation for illegal aliens.
Now, not only is FEMA allegedly out of money, but the federal government has also been accused of taking taxpayer dollars from CBP’s pockets and transferring it to FEMA to continue its spending on illegal aliens.
“Absolutely nothing that Border Czar Kamala Harris and President Biden do – or intentionally fail to do – surprises me,” State Rep. David Spiller told Texas Scorecard. “They continue to consciously endanger every Texan and American by their indefensible open border policies.”
Having this many illegal aliens running around lose is an active threat to Texas and the United States. A second Trump presidency is necessary to secure the border and start the deportation of all illegal aliens.
In a world where Democrats can read and understand the plain text of the Heller decision elucidating the fact that the Second Amendment “protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia,” we wouldn’t the following video. Sadly, so powerful is the Democratic Party’s lust for complete civilian disarmament, that doesn’t seem to be the world we live in. Hence this succinct Nick Freitas video.
“Why, in a country founded on the principles of individual liberty and rights, is there such a huge debate over the second amendment?”
“Critics argue that the founding fathers never intended for the Second Amendment to apply to individuals, and today many politicians and political activists try to claim that ‘well-regulated’ means government regulation, and that the word militia means that only those serving in a state militia have the right to keep and bear arms.”
“But when we look back at the debates over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, a few things show up.”
“For starters, the American Revolution was fresh in the minds of the founding fathers. They knew that an armed populace was instrumental in securing America’s Independence.”
“The notion that the Second Amendment was solely about militias doesn’t quite hold up when you dig into the writings of the time. Take James Madison, the father of the Constitution and one of the chief writers of the Federalist Papers. In his own words, he explained that the right to bear arms was an individual right essential for the personal and collective defense of America.”
“And he wasn’t alone. George Mason perhaps said it best when he said ‘Who are the militia? They consist of the whole people, except a few public officers.'”
“And what’s more, there are literally dozens of similar quotes from the men who debated and ratified the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Virtually all of them recognize that the Second Amendment conveyed an individual right to keep and bear arms.”
“The reason for this is actually quite simple: Because the founding fathers recognize that rights are, by their nature, something that only individuals can exercise.”
“Because many of the same politicians who claim that the Second Amendment doesn’t protect an individual’s right to keep and bear arms also believe that some rights only belong to groups of people. But the concept of group rights runs into some major problems, because it suggests that a group collectively holds rights or privileges that an individual cannot have.”
“But this just begs the question if a group of people can collectively hold rights that an individual doesn’t have any claim to then. Where on Earth did the right come from in the first place?”
“Consider this when we talk about the freedom of speech, religion, or assembly, we don’t frame them as group rights. These rights belong to individuals and their exercise within the law doesn’t infringe on others rights. The Second Amendment should be no different, but still some claim that these rights need to be restricted or even abolished due to the undeniable fact that many have abused these rights.”
“But this begs the question: Are your rights forfeit the moment someone else abuses theirs? If so, we might as well just stop calling them rights and accept the fact that you don’t have rights as much as you do privileges which can be granted or take away as soon as a political elite decides you don’t need them, or it’s too dangerous for you to have them.
“But ironically, that’s exactly what the Second Amendment is supposed to prevent, and maybe that’s why certain politicians would like to see it gone.”
This loses style points for overuse of “begs the question” but is otherwise accurate.
Replacing individual rights with collective is of course precise poison social justice warriors want to force down America’s throats…
One of the more useful, long-time websites on the Internet is the Internet Archive, aka The Wayback Machine, which contains captured, iterative versions of a vast amount of the World Wide Web.
Except that, right now, the site is offline and under attack by hackers.
“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and stones and is constantly on the verge of a major security breach? It just happened.”
“The Wayback Machine [is] one of the most important websites in the history of the Internet, because it literally archives the history of the Internet. It’s been taking snapshots of websites, including their HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images since 1996, allowing us to remember the worldwide web in its peak form, when Amazon looked like this and weird people made weird websites just for fun. Unlike nowadays where everybody just chases algorithms on cringe factories like Tik-Tok and Instagram.”
It was founded by digital librarian Brewster Kahle.
“Unfortunately, the fate of this website hangs in the balance, as it’s currently getting pwned, boned and owned from multiple angles.”
“A data breach exposed 31 million email addresses and password hashes. Its Open Library lost a critical legal battle. Its website was defaced with some JavaScript graffiti. It’s been getting DOSed non-stop, and its current status is offline as we speak. What the hell is going on?”
“The Wayback Machine contains over 890 billion archived web pages weighing in at nearly 100 petabytes. It’s an unimaginable amount of data. If you look at one web page every second for the next 100 years, you would have looked at less than 1% of the total archive.”
“This data is practically irreplaceable. The only company that might be able to replace it is Google, but Google recently stopped using its own cached archive, and its search results now points to, you guessed it, the Internet Archives Wayback Machine.”
“We don’t know if the hackers have access to the archived website data, but if they do, and they might, they have the power to erase the history of the world wide web.”
“The Internet Archive will remove personal data and comply with GDPR [the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation], but some people want legitimate content to be memory-holed forever.”
Section on their Open Library project losing a lawsuit to publishers snipped.
“HIBP (which is not an STD, but rather a website that helps people find out if their data has been compromised in a data breach) was informed of the Internet Archives data breach on September 30th. It’s confirmed on October 5th. The Internet Archive gets notified on October 6th [before] making the data breach public on October 8th.
“The Internet Archive has been been facing aggressive DOS attacks going all the way back to May.”
“The website is defaced with some JavaScript library which triggers an alert message about the data breach before it’s been officially disclosed.”
“Right now on October 10th, the website is still being attacked and is completely offline. Things are not looking good.”
“What sort of sick, twisted hacker would want to mess with the Internet Archive, and why? Well, a hacktivist group called Blackmeta is claiming responsibility.”
“They say they’re not a bunch of teenagers, which means that they’re probably just a bunch of teenagers.”
According to this post, “Attributed by Radware to SN_BLACKMETA, a pro-Palestinian hacktivist with potential ties to Sudan that may operate from within Russia.” YouTuber Fireship (whose video this is) thinks that’s a false flag, but his reasons are “This doesn’t make sense and won’t get people to like you,” which hasn’t stopped those End Oil idiots. Indeed “this is stupid and makes people hate you” describes a vast array of real “activist” actions going all the way back to the Symbionese Liberation Army and attempts to levitate the Pentagon back in the 1960s, so I think Fireship’s deduction here is off-base.
Could be pro-Palestinian sorts, who have never seemed to care about “making friends” while raping women and beheading babies. Or it could be any number of social justice types, whose Khmer Rouge-esque “Year Zero” vibe jibs nicely with wiping out the Internet’s history. Or maybe they’re trying to erase Kamala Harris’ obvious past idiocies.
In any case, let’s all hope this attack fails, and that the Wayback Machine has robust, rotating offline backups…
More than 200 people have been confirmed dead as a result of Hurricane Helene, and that total is expected to rise as search-and-rescue crews reach more remote communities. Roads have been destroyed, many towns are still without power, and people are beginning to run out of food as trucks cannot get in to provide aid.
Amid all of this, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the architect of the migrant invasion, warns that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is running out of money to aid hurricane victims. Meanwhile, thanks to the migrant crisis his catch-and-release policies created, FEMA has spent over $1 billion feeding, housing, and transporting illegal immigrants across the United States in just the last two years.
Before he was elected, President Joe Biden said of migrants wanting to enter the U.S. illegally, “We could afford to take in a heartbeat another 2 million.” Thanks to Biden’s subsequent policies, all supported by Vice President Kamala Harris, including the end of former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program, the temporary suspension of all deportations, and the creation of the CBP One app parole program and the Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans parole program, the number of illegal immigrants allowed into the U.S. by Biden has been closer to 4 million.
Unfortunately for communities across the U.S., the ability of this country to take in millions of illegal immigrants has not been as smooth as Biden predicted. Cities, many of them controlled by Democrats, have been begging the federal government for assistance in housing, clothing, feeding, education, and providing healthcare for the flood of migrants who are straining budgets in their communities.
In response, the Biden administration has spent tens of billions of dollars helping to ease the pain caused by their illegal migrant invasion. Local governments are required to provide education to all children, regardless of legal status, and the Department of Education helps local governments pay to educate these children. Hospitals must provide emergency care to all patients, even illegal immigrants without health insurance, and so the Department of Health and Human Services helps local hospitals stay afloat by reimbursing them through Medicaid.
And the Department of Homeland Security helps provide food, housing, and transportation to illegal immigrants through FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program and Shelter and Services Program Awards program. When the influx of migrants was bankrupting cities across the country this past winter, Democratic mayors traveled to the White House to beg Biden for more FEMA money to help their communities “meet the growing needs of these individuals.”
And the White House gave them the FEMA money they wanted. In just the last two years alone, the Biden administration has spent over $1 billion in FEMA funds giving local communities the resources needed to deal with the migrant crisis that the Biden administration created.
if Joe Biden had said he wanted to let 4 million illegal aliens into the country, and subsidize their food and clothing, do you think he would have been “elected” in 2020?
CBS lies, altering interview of Kamala Harris on Israel:
Here are the two different 60 Minutes edits layered on top of each other in full. You will hear where Whitaker's questions line up, and the different edited answers from Harris.
SC 1842 (bottom) is what aired on Monday night. SC 1843.5 (top) is what the Face the Nation X account… pic.twitter.com/FEuQp2o0kn
Beyond the word salad that people pointed out, CBS and 60 Minutes edited out everything she says about providing aide to Israel in order to defend itself from attacks.
Now when you contrast that with the fallout from the Coates interview, this all stinks. This is a CBS agenda…
On September 30th, anti-Israel author Ta-Nehisi Coates sat down for what turned out to be a spirited six-and-a-half-minute interview on CBS Mornings, during which co-anchor Tony Dokoupil challenged some of the claims made in Coates’ new book, “The Message.”
The book contains several essays about some of Coates’ travels, with the longest one being about his trip “to Palestine.” It was claims made in that essay that Dokoupil zeroed in on for closer examination during their exchange:
“I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards, the acclaim, took the cover off the book, publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” Dokoupil said.
“So then I found myself wondering, why does Ta’Nehisi Coates, who I’ve known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy, leave out so much? Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and the second Intifada, the café bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits. Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?” the CBS anchor continued.
Perhaps because Coates’ word is viewed as sacrosanct by woke leftists in the media, academia, and beyond despite his deeply flawed logic on issues like reparations, eruptions began almost immediately in the CBS newsroom, with tensions boiling over a week later during an editorial call:
During its editorial meeting on Monday at 9 a.m.—the morning of October 7—the network’s top brass all but apologized for the interview to staff, saying that it did not meet the company’s “editorial standards.” After being introduced by Wendy McMahon, the head of CBS News, Adrienne Roark, who is in charge of news gathering at the network, began her remarks by saying covering a story like October 7 “requires empathy, respect, and a commitment to truth.”
After quoting extensively from the CBS News handbook, she said, “We will still ask tough questions. We will still hold people accountable. But we will do so objectively, which means checking our biases and opinions at the door…”
Presumably, the “bias” accusations stem from the fact that, according to the New York Post, Dokoupil is “a convert to Judaism whose ex-wife lives in Israel along with their two children.”
“During its editorial meeting on Monday at 9 a.m.—the morning of October 7—the network’s top brass all but apologized for the interview to staff, saying that it did not meet the company’s ‘editorial standards.’”
Though Shalt Not Question the Holy Social justice.
A US judge has sentenced a disgraced Black Lives Matter leader to federal prison after he was convicted at trial in April on wire fraud and money laundering charges. Sir Maejor Page, 35, of Toledo, Ohio, who uses the alias Tyree Conyers-Page, was found guilty of running a “fake charity scheme” for personal profit, defrauding donors of more than $450,000 they had given to his nonprofit Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta.
US District Court Judge Jeffrey Helmick of the Northern District of Ohio sentenced Page on Thursday to 42 months in federal prison. He was also ordered to pay a $400 special assessment fee, according to a press release from the Department of Justice.
Prosecutors accused Page of defrauding 18,000 donors who collectively gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to his fraudulent charity, Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta. Page took the donations and used them for his own personal benefit. He purchased entertainment, hotel rooms, clothing, firearms, and a property in Ohio that he intended to use as his personal residence, court documents showed.
Page continued to collect donations for his “social justice” charity through its Facebook page after the organization’s tax-exempt status was revoked for failing to submit IRS Form 990 for three consecutive years. He consistently shared content on Facebook relating to social justice and racial issues in order to establish the legitimacy of his nonprofit organization, despite the fact this it was no longer tax-exempt. The convicted fraudster used Facebook to communicate privately with donors, to which he falsely claimed that their contributions would be allocated to “fight for George Floyd” and the “movement.”
In a recent podcast interview, the political analyst who first predicted that Joe Biden would withdraw from the presidential race revealed that private polling he has seen appears to suggest that Vice President Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is in serious trouble ahead of the November election.
According to Breitbart, Newsmax commentator and former political director for ABC News Mark Halperin gave his analysis on The Morning Meeting with Sean Spicer and Dan Turrentine. Halperin said that internal polling could see Harris lose all but one of the seven swing states in this election, as her current lead in the national popular vote is not enough to win the electoral college against former President Donald Trump.
“So the new New York Times poll shows her up three nationally,” Halperin explained. “We all know that three is like the bubble point, right? If she’s up three, she’s got a chance to win the Electoral College, but they’d rather be at four, and they don’t want to be at two. So three is right at the bubble. I’m not saying this Times poll’s right. But it’s in line with international polls.”
“We all know from our contacts in both campaigns that Pennsylvania is tough for her right now. And without Pennsylvania, there are paths, but there aren’t many. There’s no path without Wisconsin,” Halperin continued. “So you see here, Tammy Baldwin’s Senate campaign poll shows Harris down three in Wisconsin. We all said yesterday, Wisconsin and Michigan are looking worse for Harris than before.”
Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin’s (D-Wisc.) campaign had previously shared internal polling with both the Wall Street Journal and Axios, showing Harris losing to Trump in the state and Baldwin herself with a mere 2-point lead over her Republican challenger, Eric Hovde (R-Wisc.).
Such results in private polls align with the trend reflected in public polls, with pollsters such as Quinnipiac University and Emerson College showing President Trump gaining momentum in most of the swing states, now either leading Harris or tied in enough states to win the electoral college.
“I just saw some new private polling today that’s very robust private polling. She’s in a lot of trouble,” said Halperin. “The conversation I’m having with Trump people and Democrats with data are extremely bullish on Trump’s chances in the last 48 hours, extremely bullish. You think of the seven battleground states; which ones is Harris in danger of losing? I would say Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia. I’m not saying she’ll lose all six, but she’s in danger.”
If Harris were to lose these six states but hold the seventh swing state, Nevada, then the result would be an exact repeat of the 2016 election, with President Trump winning 306 electoral votes to Harris’ 232.
“Law enforcement has arrested Estefania Primera, an illegal alien from Venezuela, following reports that she was the ring leader for a gang’s sex trafficking operation in El Paso. Primera was named by a sex trafficking victim as the leader of a Tren de Aragua sex trafficking ring.”
People have been asking about the Texas temporary ID ruling in other threads, and now we have an update.
Secretary of State Asks Attorney General to Rule on ‘Limited Term’ Driver’s Licenses as Voter ID. Paxton received a request from Secretary of State Nelson to rule on the validity of “limited term” driver’s licenses as voter ID.
Texas Secretary of State (SOS) Jane Nelson issued an advisory on Tuesday that describes “limited term” driver’s licenses as an acceptable form of voter ID, though recommending other forms of photo identification if possible.
While the Texas Election Code does not specifically designate “limited term” ID cards as a permissible form of voter ID, it does describe “a personal identification card issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety” (TxDPS) as an approved form of identification.
As Nelson’s advisory acknowledges, TxDPS distributes “temporary term” driver’s licenses to noncitizens, provided they are an individual with lawful temporary status in the U.S.
The SOS’s guidance concedes that if an individual is registered to vote and presents a “limited term” driver’s license or ID card, they may receive a ballot after being fully informed by the election judge or clerk of the “eligibility requirements” necessary to vote in Texas.
The issue cited by the SOS is that while the limited term ID denotes noncitizen status at one point, it doesn’t mean that the individual has not since been naturalized. Transportation Code also includes the limited term ID as a valid form of identification, creating a small window for a potentially legitimate use of the document to vote.
Additionally, if an individual presents a “limited term” ID card but is not registered to vote, they may receive a provisional ballot after election officials fully evaluate what their lack of registration and unique form of identification suggests.
Nelson recommended using language such as, “The limited-term driver’s license/identification card you presented suggests that you are not a United States citizen. Your name does not appear on the list of registered voters. Per the Texas Election Code, to be eligible to vote in the State of Texas, you must be a qualified voter of this state,” when explaining the situation to the unregistered voter and prior to distributing a provisional ballot.
Nelson requested on October 9 that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton rule on whether a limited term driver’s license that “generates questions of voter eligibility” is a valid form of voter ID and if an election official must present a ballot to an individual who only provides such ID in person. The request is for a non-binding opinion by the Office of the Attorney General.
Nelson also asked Paxton how ballot workers ought to treat mail-in ballots that only list an ID number or driver’s license card that is “limited term,” in regards both to “counting” the vote and for investigating “instances of fraud.”
So Paxton will be able to nip this potential avenue of voting fraud in the bud.
“A former Democrat member of the Texas Senate is throwing his support behind a Republican candidate for the seat he once held. Former State Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. of Brownsville announced his endorsement of Adam Hinojosa in the race against freshman Democrat State Sen. Morgan LaMantia, pointing to their shared pro-life values as a key reason.”
“The most fun I had going to see the new Joker movie was in the car ride and from it, because I was listening to Warhammer 40K lore on the Horus Heresy. And just listening to that was better than seeing Joker Folie a Deux.”
Finally, a non-insulting use for AI? They’re going to use AI to create dubs of original Japanese anime in voices that sound like the original Japanese voice actors. This would be a big improvement on a lot of the early crappy dubs, but I can’t imagine American voice actors being thrilled at losing those gigs…
“Electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer Fisker Inc. is under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and faces formal objections from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) over its Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. The company filed for bankruptcy earlier this year after halting production in March…The DOJ contends in filings that Fisker’s proposed $750,000 cap on recall expenses in its bankruptcy plan is insufficient to cover both parts and labor costs required for vehicle repairs.”
Also: “New York-based company called American Lease was less deterred by this warning and in June agreed to purchase the remaining Fisker inventory—approximately 3,300 cars for a total of $46.3 million dollars. By October, American Lease had paid Fisker $42.5 million and had taken delivery of about 1,100 Oceans. That was the plan until the end of last week, at least. Last Friday evening, Fisker informed American Lease that the Oceans ‘cannot, as a technical matter, be ‘ported’ from the Fisker server to which the vehicles are currently linked to a distinct server owned and/or controlled by’ American Lease.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Also from Instapundit: Fisker left their California headquarters trashed when they vacated.
The issue originated in one of the Kia web portals used by dealerships. Long story short and a hefty bit of API abuse later, [Sam] Curry and his band of far-more-capable Kia Boyz managed to register a fake dealer account to get a valid access token, which they were then able to use to call any backend dealer API command they wanted.
“From the victim’s side, there was no notification that their vehicle had been accessed nor their access permissions modified,” Curry noted in his writeup. “An attacker could resolve someone’s license plate, enter their VIN through the API, then track them passively and send active commands like unlock, start, or honk.”
Bungled. “A founding member of the experimental rock band Mr. Bungle was found guilty Friday of first-degree murder in the killing of his girlfriend after prosecutors in California found an audio file the victim recorded on her phone as she fought for her life. A jury in Santa Cruz deliberated for a day before finding Theobald ‘Theo’ Lengyel guilty of first-degree murder in the killing of his girlfriend Alice “Alyx” Kamakaokalani Herrmann on the night of Dec. 4, 2023, inside her Capitola home.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
The pianist cashed his ticket and drove an exhausting 500 miles to the concert venue on the only night he could play, only to find a broken, out-of-tune piano. The restaurant couldn’t get his order right before he had to leave to perform. He refused to play multiple times before finally relenting and, still in pain from the drive, improvised the best-selling solo piano album of all time.
