Power Line.

Frontpage has proclaimed Tanya S. Chutkan number one in their series on the ten worst judges in America. An Obama pick for the DC District Court, Chutkan goes easy on Islamic terrorists and violent criminals but cracks down hard on the January 6 defendants. Her handling of the Imran Awan case failed to get the attention it deserved.

Of all the IT people in all the IT firms in all the world, House Democrats thought Awan was best man for the job. Sometimes working from his native Pakistan, Awan and his family team accessed the computers of some 40 Democrats, including those on the intelligence and foreign affairs committees. Without their consent, Awan and his team stashed the Democrats’ data on a server controlled by Xavier Becerra, chair of the House Democratic Caucus. Capitol Police sought a copy of the server but were handed a fake.

In February, 2017, Awan and his team got booted off the House computer network, but Becerra had already fled to California where Gov. Jerry Brown made him state attorney general. In July of 2017, Awan attempted to flee the country but the authorities busted him for bank fraud. For Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman, “this appears to be a real conspiracy, aimed at undermining American national security.” Some in Congress agreed but the IT man had his defenders.

Read it.

A roughly 2,000-person-strong migrant caravan left southern Mexico on Sunday in hopes of reaching the U.S. in the coming days, according to the AP. The latest caravan is so far the largest since newly-elected Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum entered office in October.

Among those in the caravan are individuals who expressed concern that a new administration in Washington, D.C., would lead to the end of a popular app that has allowed hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals to schedule appointments with Customs and Border Protection officials in hopes of entering the country.

“That is what makes us fearful,” Joel Zambrano, a Venezuelan national, said to The Associated Press. “They say this could change because they could both close the CBP One appointment and all the services that are helping migrants.”

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Read it.

For any foreign country to share its plans with the U.S. is beyond stupid. All it takes is one self-righteous ‘activist’ somewhere in the bureaucracy to make its ‘security’ a joke. (I remember a couple of Tom Clancy novels where this kind of misbehavior was a plot point.) ‘Progressive’ and ‘law-abiding’ is a Venn diagram with no intersections.

Politico.

Former President Donald Trump is weighing a go-it-alone approach to presidential transition planning, which could dramatically slow his takeover of the federal government if he wins in November.

The Trump transition team has yet to sign two agreements with the federal government to receive transition funding and planning assistance and to share information — a break with modern precedent. Instead, transition co-chairs Linda McMahon, who served as small business administrator in the Trump administration, and investor and GOP mega-donor Howard Lutnick are plowing ahead with their own processes for vetting potential political appointees and preparing policy plans.

The decision not to take federal assistance allows them to raise unlimited funds without disclosing their donors, while avoiding oversight from federal bureaucrats, whom Trump and his advisers deeply distrust. But if Trump wins the election and continues to drag his feet on signing the agreement with the White House, it will limit the information he and his team can access to understand current federal operations and challenges.

Naval Matters.

One of the foundational beliefs among US military planners is that our communications will be secure … despite no evidence supporting that belief and a fair amount of evidence to the contrary (see, “Communications Vulnerability”).

So many of our weapon systems depend on guidance signals, telemetry, data flow, and so forth and the security of those communications has been taken as an article of faith despite evidence to the contrary. For example, Iran has had success disrupting and/or capturing our UAV control signals resulting in loss or capture of UAVs.

The US military consistently refuses to test communications under realistic conditions during field exercises and, in a display of unbelievable illogic, has publicly stated that using our full capabilities would be too disruptive during an exercise. Do we not believe that China will have capabilities at least equal to our own? Should we not, then, subject our communications to the maximum disruption possible in exercises to see what works and what doesn’t and to learn how to work in the face of disruptions?

Read it.

A man from Honduras who has been deported from the United States twice received a 37-year prison sentence for a string of burglaries in Collin County.

Sergio Cardenas-Salinas pleaded guilty recently to leading a criminal burglary operation targeting gold, jewelry, and cash.

He and eight others were arrested last year after being linked to nearly a dozen high-profile burglaries in cities like Plano, Prosper, and McKinney.

Prosecutors said they targeted mostly immigrant families because they believed they kept more of their cash and other valuables in their homes.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Federal government did its job.

Your tax dollars at work–or not, as the case may be.

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The Federal Trade Commission is investigating tractor manufacturer John Deere over long standing allegations that Deere makes its farm equipment hard to repair. The investigation has been ongoing since 2021, and we know more about it now thanks to a court filing made public on Thursday.

A data analytics company called Hargrove & Associates Inc (HAI) who works for the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM), of which John Deere is a prominent member, filed a court brief in an attempt to quash the FTC’s investigation. The FTC wants HAI to turn over data submitted from AEM about sales, but HAI is saying that the FTC’s request is too broad and could hurt its business.

Court drama aside, HAI spelled out exactly what the FTC is looking for. “The stated purpose of the FTC’s [investigation] is ‘[t]o determine whether Deere & Company, or any other person, has engaged in or is engaging in unfair, deceptive, anticompetitive, collusive, coercive, predatory, exploitative, or exclusionary acts or practices in or affecting commerce related to the repair of agricultural equipment in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act,’” HAI said in the court records.

Read it.

“It is a very clear conflict of interest, and no one is going to be providing objective advice, or they’re going to be skewing that advice so it makes them more competitive to receive millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer benefits,” Gunasekara told the DCNF.

Read it.

As if Nevada parents didn’t already have their hands full, including helping their children navigate the waters of adolescent sexuality. Now gender activists increasingly are using the public schools to lead students down a path their parents may know nothing about.

Nevada is hardly alone. Nearly 20,000 public schools across the country, attended by 11.5 million students, now have policies that cater to kids’ current sense of “gender identity” but that deliberately keep parents in the dark about that same thing.

The Elko County School District’s gender policy, like many others, defines “gender identity” as “a student’s inner sense of being male or female.” That sense might be nothing more than a fleeting feeling, prompted by a suggestion on social media, or a clinically significant diagnosis of gender dysphoria requiring medical intervention.

Moral: Don’t send your kid to a government school.

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Over the years, the critics of the United Nations have multiplied in number. Its inability to be effective, to act with integrity, its anti-Semitic actions and its refusal to intervene in some of the world’s worst tragedies are well-known. Some people would say that it does accomplish some things, such as data collection and sharing, but its most prominent councils and agencies are fraught with political agendas and ineptitude.

The U.N.: As ineffective as the League of Nations but far more expensive. Not bad for a body that had Alger Hiss as its organizer.

Naval News.

The Ultra Heavy-Lift Amphibious Connector (UHAC) was a revolutionary half-scale amphibious tractor test prototype that used foam flotation pad blocks on its tracks to tread over water and land. In 2014, it was a revolutionary new way of moving Marine Corps vehicles from ship to shore, as a cargo deck was between the two gigantic tracks. But what happened to the UHAC, and why hasn’t it been tested since 2014 or entered active U.S. Marine Corps service?

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The Pentagon is stating that B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, along with other U.S. forces, conducted a strike on Houthi underground weapon storage sites in Yemen. This it the first operational strike mission for the Spirit in years and the first into Yemen. It sends a very specific and powerful message that only the B-2 can to the Houthis’ benefactor, Iran. It also occurred on what appears to be the precipice of an unprecedented Israeli retaliation strike. As to why the B-2 was used against the Houthis, who have only rudimentary air defenses, we will address that in a moment, but it was by design a very ominous and potentially historic act that might have featured the first use of an incredibly rare weapon. Even if it did not, the message was the same.

Federal Trade Commission.

The Federal Trade Commission today announced a final “click-to-cancel” rule that will require sellers to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up. Most of the final rule’s provisions will go into effect 180 days after it is published in the Federal Register.

“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” said Commission Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

Good luck with that.

Read it.

When Kathy Alexander started managing a lunch program at a Vermont school with 200 children in the late 1990s, she was shocked by how much the cafeteria felt like a business.

Her staff spent significant amounts of time on paperwork to track students’ incomes and collected money from kids at a cash register. They faced grueling decisions over whether they should raise prices and calculated the debts of families who barely missed out on eligibility for discounted meals yet struggled to pay the full price.

“Within a year I said to myself, ‘This is insane.’ What is happening? Why do I have to run this business in this school?” Alexander says.

Decades later, the model for Alexander, who’s now the director of the food service cooperative in the Mt. Abraham United School District, has changed. Vermont is one of eight states providing universal free meals to public K-12 students rather than charging different price points based on income. In lieu of onerous administrative work, Alexander’s staff spends more time brainstorming how to maximize federal dollars to support the program and trying out new recipes for pulled pork flatbread with pineapple sauce and Vietnamese rice bowls.

She wants universal free lunch to “sweep the country.”

I’m sure she does. She wants the whole country to become dependent on government-provided benefits — overseen by educrats such as herself.

Read it.

On 15 December 2021 Larry Lowe’s life changed.
He was 54, rarely ill, fit, healthy and running 10km most days – until he got the Pfizer Covid booster.
Within days he developed numbness in the right side of his face and started experiencing pain.
“I had lost all the feeling in my face, teeth, nose, tongue, eye, that whole side of my head,” he said.
These symptoms have spread through his body and intensified over the years, with doctors across the UK saying the vaccine is to blame.
Pfizer said patient safety was paramount and it took reports of adverse reactions very seriously.
It said hundreds of millions of doses had been administered globally “and the benefit-risk profile of the vaccine remains positive for all authorised indications and age groups”.
Mr Lowe said that while he was not opposed to vaccines, his life had been destroyed.

OffGuardian.

Has anyone else noticed strange things happening? Odd things that seem out of place? Like more incidents of weird dopey driving or seeing more ambulances or fire trucks in the neighborhood? I have. But I don’t know if it is just due to my paranoia.

In preparation for this article, I did a Yandex search for: “Is personality and cognitive function affected by the Covid vaccine?”

I was astounded by the pages of related articles, some of the titles include:

“Scientists have confirmed that mRNA vaccinations ‘drastically alter’ the personalities of recipients due to extensive damage they do to the small capillaries in the brain,”

“Do the Covid vaccines affect your ability to think?” “We now have proof the Covid vaccines damage cognition,”

“Personality changes in vaxxed people,” and “Covid injections continue to provoke cognitive decline.”

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The California Coastal Commission on Thursday rejected the Air Force’s plan to give SpaceX permission to launch up to 50 rockets a year from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County.

“Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” Commissioner Gretchen Newsom said at the meeting in San Diego.

The agency’s commissioners, appointed by the governor and legislative leaders, voted 6-4 to reject the Air Force’s plan over concerns that all SpaceX launches would be considered military activity, shielding the company from having to acquire its own permits, even if military payloads aren’t being carried.

Newsom (no relation to the Governor so far as I can tell) is one of those tiresome people who go directly from college into government employment and NGO ‘policy’ positions. Woke is their brand.

Read it.

His salary was $70,000 and his rent $2500 a month. That’s 43% of his salary, which is high for housing cost but, hey, it’s California. He want to live in Westwood and commute to school. I recommend he also wish for a pony, while he’s at it.

Considering what is being taught in California schools these days, I’d say he’s probably being paid what he’s worth.

If you can’t afford to live on what you make, it’s time to move. It’s not as if he were a Professor of Grievance Studies who can’t get a real job outside of the Left Coast.

Read it.

The inability to do this so far has been a major factor in the Navy’s unreadiness to participate in a major military conflict, for which they have been heavily criticized by knowledgeable people.

One of the largest concerns regarding the U.S. Navy’s ability to persist in a peer conflict in the vast Pacific is the ability to keep its prized major surface combatants — destroyers, cruisers and soon frigates — stocked with weapons. The conflict with the Houthis in and around the Red Sea has only underscored the need to figure out how to reload vertical launch systems (VLS) without coming into port. If an Iranian-backed rebel group can make a big dent in American warships’ weapons stocks, China would be exponentially worse. You can read all about this glaring issue in our previous feature here. But now, the Navy has just demonstrated its fast-tracked possible solution to this pressing issue.

USS Chosin (CG-65), a Ticonderoga class cruiser, came alongside Military Sealift Command’s dry cargo ship USNS Washington Chambers (T-AKE 11) and transferred an empty VLS weapon container to the cruiser while sailing off the southern California coast on October 11th.

Read it.

And Obama before that.

New York Post.

Can’t let good sushi go to waste. Who cares about a bunch of rubes in flyover country, anyway?

Tyler Cowen.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation minority staff (Committee), which oversees federal science agencies including NSF, analyzed 32,198 Prime Award grants NSF awarded to 2,443 different entities with project start dates between January 2021 and April 2024.

Committee analysis found 3,483 grants, more than ten percent of all NSF grants and totaling over $2.05 billion in federal dollars, went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle. The Committee grouped these grants into five categories: Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, and Environmental Justice. For the purposes for this report, “DEI funding,” a “DEI grant,” or “DEI research” refers to taxpayer dollars NSF provided to a research or engagement program that fell into one of these five groups.

Read it.

An Afghan man accused of plotting a terror attack on Election Day previously worked as a security guard in Afghanistan for the CIA, NBC News reported Wednesday.

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The Columbia Broadcasting Systems CBS, one of the U.S. ‘Big Three’ networks, appears to have edited an interview with Democratic presidential candidate and current VP Kamala Harris, replacing a meandering response characterized by critics as “word salad” with a more succinct answer.

In a Sunday promotional preview of the full interview, scheduled to air the following day, reporter Bill Whitaker asks Harris why it seems like Israeli PM Netanyahu is not listening to the U.S. Harris’s response is:

Well Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.

The clip was also shared on X by the “60 Minutes” program, which calls itself “the most successful news magazine in TV history.”

Read it.

research projects that are spurring Chinese advancement in cutting-edge military technologies, including “hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, fourth generation nuclear weapons technology, and semiconductor technology,” a new congressional report has found.

“Due to a lack of legal guardrails around federally funded research, hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. federal research funding over the last decade have contributed to the PRC’s strategic goals by helping the PRC achieve advancements in dual use, critical, and emerging technologies,” the House Select Committee on China wrote in a report published late last month.

The findings, compiled as part of a year-and-half-long investigation, show how major American universities are using federal funds to partner with Chinese institutions on a range of research projects that feed the communist nation’s military. The bulk of this work is fueled by taxpayer grants from the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community, providing “back-door access to the very foreign adversary nation whose aggression these capabilities are necessary to protect against,” according to the committee.

And YOU are paying for it. Aren’t you proud?

Read it.

The Pentagon has provided more details on its latest strike against Houthi targets in Yemen on Friday, but as the rebel group’s attacks continue, the goal of making the Red Sea safe for merchant ships still seems out of reach.

Read it.

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said that poor welds were found on the aircraft carrier USS George Washington as well as the attack submarines USS Hyman G. Rickover and USS New Jersey.

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The pilots of what appears to be an unmarked Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter generated a massive downwash, also known as rotor wash, that sent tents and aid flying in all directions at a volunteer supply zone operated by private citizens in western North Carolina.

This action by the helicopter pilots is up for debate, with many on X believing this was an intentional act of sabotage by the federal government.

Read it.

A lament about the demise of AM radio has been rising in the halls of Congress.

Several automakers, most notably Tesla and Ford, have decided to stop putting AM radios in their electric vehicles. They claim their electric motors interfere with the audio quality of the signal and insist that FM and satellite radio are enough.

Given that people who listen to radio tend to primarily do so while driving, a trend like this could threaten the commercial viability of the over 4,000 AM stations currently broadcasting in the U.S.

Which is why they’re doing it. Every AM station in my area is doubled by an FM sub-station that is typically a few seconds behind it, timing-wise. We don’t need AM radio; anybody who wants to listen to the “AM station” can tune into its FM replica and get the same programming with higher quality sound.

The radio industry has been fighting back, lobbying for legislation that would force carmakers to install AM radios as a matter of public interest.

I.e. fat donations to politicians to mandate an obsolete technology for commercial purposes. Your democracy at work … and play. To paraphrase Samual Johnson, legislation is the last refuge of the uncompetitive.

U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who sponsored the bill in the Senate, described free AM radio as “an essential tool in emergencies, a crucial part of our diverse media ecosystem, and an irreplaceable source for news, weather, sports, and entertainment for tens of millions of listeners.”

Democrats: Best legislators money can buy. If he wants to support “an essential tool in emergencies”, he ought to support ham radio, which I notice that he doesn’t mention. “Diverse media ecosystem” is Woke-speak for “let’s continue what we’re doing so long as it brings in lobbying money”; there is no such thing as a “media ecosystem”. Nor is it an “irreplaceable source” for anything — people have been listening to FM radio for new, weather, sports, and entertainment since I was a kid in the 1960s. This is just bought-politician boilerplate that fools nobody.

As a media historian, I welcome hearing AM radio described as a public utility, particularly after decades of free-market orthodoxy dominating discussions of its fate.’

In other words, the author is a progressive media shill who is quite happy to see “free-market orthodoxy” displaced by government-regulated behavior under the Clever Plastic Disguise of “public utility”.

Read it.

We have seen this illustrated daily over the last week in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Recovery involving the rescue of thousands of people in remote mountain areas is a complex problem. Yet government – on most levels, from federal to county – all offer the same clear and simple answer to the problem: let us run everything. Do not assist without prior permission and clearance from us. Most of all, respect my authoratah!

That this delays response matters not. Process uber alles. It may cost lives, but better a few people be rescued properly than many get rescued in an unseemly manner, without procedures being followed.

This bureaucratic ineptitude is not universal. In Texas and Florida, the government knows enough to get out of the way of helpful volunteers. They even facilitate them. Apparently not so much elsewhere, especially on the federal level. I would say FEMA is turning in a Keystone Kops performance, only that is unfair to the Keystone Kops.

Read it.

A new study co-authored by Tracy Beth Høeg delves into the side effects of masking, a subject completely ignored by experts and politicians desperate to exert control over individual behavior.

And in their discussion, it’s immediately obvious why their research and conclusions will be completely ignored by the mainstream media.

“There is a lack of robust evidence of benefit from masking children to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 or other respiratory viruses,” they explain.

Read it.

The Biden-Harris administration is facing several disasters this week.

From FEMA’s botched response in the hurricane-ravaged US Southeast to elevated WW3 risks in the Middle East, one major and ongoing crisis that went underreported this week was multiple attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels on commercial ships in the critical maritime chokepoint of the southern Red Sea.

On Wednseday we penned a note, citing intelligence firm SynMax, which specializes in maritime and energy intelligence, about two commercial vessels targeted by Houthis:

“Two ships targeted by Houthis in the RedSea yesterday—Panama-flagged CORDELIA MOON and Liberian-flagged MINOAN COURAGE—the first such attacks since September,” SynMax wrote on X.

Muslim terrorists are doing their best to get Trump elected, although I’m sure that’s not their intent.

New York Post.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas set off outrage Wednesday when he told reporters that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) “does not have the funds” to see Americans through the rest of this Atlantic hurricane season — after the agency spent more than $1.4 billion since the fall of 2022 to address the migrant crisis.

“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” Mayorkas said during a press gaggle on Air Force One en route to tour damage from Hurricane Helene in South and North Carolina.
“We are expecting another hurricane hitting,” he added. “We do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and what — what is imminent.”

This Is Why You Should Never Trust The Government (Brett Cooper)

Read it.

“If that’s what you want us to do, we’ll leave, no issue,” he told WJZY. “And I explained to him that I left my son on the side of the mountain, and I left another victim. I was going to go back and bring them. It was already set up for the landing spot and then I would get out of his area. He told me I wasn’t going to go back up the mountain to get them; I was going to leave them there.”

When he asked the official for a specific reason why he was ordering him to stop his rescue efforts, Seidhom said the man said, “You’re interfering with my operation.”

Seidhom said he told the official he was going back to get his copilot.

“He said, ‘If you turn around and go back up the mountain, you’re going to be arrested,'” Seidhom said. “I said, ‘Well, sir, I’m going back to get my copilot, I don’t know what to tell you.'”

No good deed goes unpunished.

Read it.

When Joe Biden became president, the Middle East was calm. Now it is in the midst of a multifront war.

So quiet was the inheritance from the prior Trump administration that nearly three years later, on September 29, 2023 – and just eight days before the October 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis – Biden’s national security advisor Jack Sullivan could still brag that “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

So, what exactly happened to the inherited calm that led to the current nonstop chaos of the present?

In a word, theocratic Iran—the nexus of almost all current Middle East terrorism and conflict—was unleashed by Team Biden after having been neutered by the Trump administration.

The Biden-Harris administration adopted a 5-step revisionist protocol that appeased and encouraged Iran and its terrorist surrogates Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Read it.

Nothing useful will result, but they’ll spend the money anyway, rake in donations from the favored firms, and forget it sooner rather than later.

For fun, ask Kemala what happened to all of those electric car charging stations they were going to build.

Note that David Turk, the bureaucrat involved, is a lawyer who has worked for politicians all his life. Who better to accomplish this major feat of engineering and project management?

Read it.

And who could blame them?

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Large staffing companies that thrived during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars under the Bush-Obama years retooled their business models as the US involvement and war funding in the Middle East wound down. Now, these staffing firms seem to be profiting off the Biden-Harris administration’s open-border migrant invasion by providing essential services, such as private security, transportation, and many other services, to ensure the fed’s migrant network nationwide operates smoothly.

These companies are likely awarded handsome federal contracts, paid for by the US taxpayer.

Bussing and housing millions of illegal and legal aliens is big business for staffing companies and non-profits. Americans have to realize their tax dollars are paying for all of this while the migrants displace and replace blue-collar workers in small-town factories nationwide. The folks in Springfield, Ohio, and Charleroi, Pennsylvania, know firsthand just how devastating globalist open border policies can be for them.

Check it out.

Every Dime. Online. In Real Time.

At OpenTheBooks.com, we work hard to capture and post all disclosed spending at every level of government – federal, state, and local. In 2022, we filed 50,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and captured 25 million public employee pension and salary records. We also broke open the California state checkbook for the first time in American history. We are rapidly growing our data in all 50 states down to the municipal level. We won’t stop until we capture every dime taxed and spent by our government.

As a government watchdog organization, we accept no government funding.

Read it.

Part of what makes the Regime Media the Regime Media is their propensity to hide stories that cast the Regime in an unfavorable light. One such story is the announcement, made by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that, with a month remaining, FEMA lacks the funds to make through hurricane season.

Read it.

A new law forcing the British owners of one or more chickens (and pigeons and birds of prey) to register each bird individually has met with resistance.

Not everyone thinks the government should be counting their chickens (even after they’ve hatched). It was reported on X, formerly Twitter, that enough scamps have successfully registered their store-bought roast chickens to crash the government website.

While the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) enjoys some support for its anti-bird flu measures, poultry owners are concerned about the excessive bureaucracy the new system now involves (and no doubt also concerned about the threat of fines and even imprisonment for non-compliance).

Read it.

The ravages of Hurricane Helene had left parts of Asheville, North Carolina underwater, but it wasn’t just the homes and roads that were underwater, but FEMA’s botched response..

Criswell, who had been appointed to head FEMA by the Biden-Harris administration as a reward for coordinating New York City’s horrendously botched response to the pandemic, posed in a starched FEMA blouse and gold necklace on a morning show even as private volunteers were once again having to step in because the Federal Emergency Management Agency had failed.

FEMA was unprepared for the flooding because under Criswell, a DEI hire whose resume included being “the first woman commissioner of New York City Emergency Management”, the agency had shifted from disaster management to DEI disasters.

Navy Matters.

The supposed savings is estimated at $1B. In the aggregate, that sounds impressive. A billion dollars! Wow! However, across four ships that’s just $250M savings per ship. That’s not nothing but it’s not a miraculous savings, by any means. More importantly, you know those savings will never materialize. With 100% certainty, the ships will come in over budget and behind schedule with a litany of excuses like supply chain disruptions, parts shortages, design modifications, and all the other usual suspects. There won’t be any savings. The absolute best case is that the ‘savings’ (let’s be optimistic and assume there will be actual savings) will slightly reduce the magnitude of the inevitable cost overruns. Again, better than nothing but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking we’re actually going to save money.

Read it.

When 19-year-old Aleysha Ortiz told Hartford City Council members in May that the public school system stole her education, she had to memorize her speech.

Ortiz, who was a senior at Hartford Public High School at the time, wrote the speech using the talk-to-text function on her phone. She listened to it repeatedly to memorize it.

That’s because she was never taught to read or write — despite attending schools in Hartford since she was 6.

Ortiz, who came to Hartford from Puerto Rico with her family when she was young, struggled with language and other challenges along the way. But a confluence of circumstances, apparent apathy and institutional inertia pushed her haphazardly through the school system, according to Ortiz, her attorney and district officials.

Those officials, in statements that her attorney says display “shocking” educational neglect, have acknowledged that Ortiz never received instruction in reading.

Government schools. Union teachers. Results as you see them.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Yeah, they all voted straight Democrat. Mission accomplished.

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Charles Piller and the team here at Science dropped a big story yesterday morning, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should. It’s about Eliezer Masliah, who since 2016 has been the head of the Division of Neuroscience in the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and whose scientific publication record over at least the past 25 years shows multiple, widespread, blatant instances of fraud. There it is in about as few words as possible.