[Townhall] Six weeks after Great Britain signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War and acknowledging the independence of the United States of America, the Continental Congress passed a resolution asking the states to set aside a day for Americans to give thanks to God for this providential outcome.
"And whereas," says this resolution approved on Oct. 18, 1783, "in the progress of a contest on which the most essential right of human nature depended, the interposition of Divine Providence in our favour hath been most abundantly and most graciously manifested, and the citizens of these United States have every reason for praise and gratitude to the God of their salvation. Impressed, therefore, with an exalted sense of the blessings by which we are surrounded, and of our entire dependence on that Almighty Being from whose goodness and bounty they are derived, the United States Congress assembled, do recommend it to the several States to set apart the second Thursday in December next, as a day of Public Thanksgiving, that all the people may then assemble to celebrate with grateful hearts and united voices the praises of their Supreme and All bountiful Benefactor, for his numberless favors and mercies."
Before that recommended day of Thanksgiving arrived, the last British troops deployed in a U.S. city evacuated Manhattan on Nov. 25, 1783. Gen. George Washington then marched his triumphant army down the length of that liberated island.
Nine days later -- on Dec. 4, 1783 -- Washington gathered his officers in Fraunces Tavern at the southern end of Manhattan. One of those in attendance that day was the 29-year-old Benjamin Tallmadge -- who was born on Long Island in 1754, graduated from Yale in 1773, and joined the Continental Army in 1776.
Washington, according to the Mount Vernon website, had named Tallmadge his director of military intelligence in 1778.
In a memoir he wrote at the request of his children, Tallmadge described the profoundly emotional meeting Washington held with his officers at Fraunces Tavern and what that Founding Father said there.
"At 12 o'clock the officers repaired to the Fraunces Tavern, in Pearl Street, where Gen. Washington had appointed to meet them, and to take his final leave of them," wrote Tallmadge. "We had been assembled but a few moments when His Excellency entered the room. His emotion, too strong to be concealed, seemed to be reciprocated by every officer present. After partaking of a slight refreshment, in almost breathless silence, the General filled his glass with wine, and turning to the officers, he said:
"'With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.'"
Tallmadge than noted: "After the officers had taken a glass of wine, Gen. Washington said: 'I cannot come to each of you, but shall feel obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand.'"
All the officers then did as Washington had asked.
"Such a scene of sorrow and weeping I had never before witnessed, and hope I may never be called upon to witness again," wrote Tallmadge.
"The simple thought that we were then about to part from the man who had conducted us through a long and bloody war, and under whose conduct the glory and independence of our country had been achieved, and that we should see his face no more in this world, seemed to me utterly insupportable," he wrote. "But the time of separation had come, and waiving his hand to his grieving children around him, he left the room, and passing through a corps of light infantry who were paraded to receive him, he walked silently on to Whitehall, where a barge was in waiting.
"We all followed in mournful silence to the wharf, where a prodigious crowd had assembled to witness the departure of the man who, under God, had been the great agent in establishing the glory and independence of these United States," wrote Tallmadge.
"As soon as he was seated," wrote Tallmadge, "the barge put off into the river, and when out in the stream, our great and beloved General waived his hat, and bid us a silent adieu."
Two-hundred-and-forty-two years after those British forces evacuated Manhattan, the United States of America remains a free and independent country.
And we still ought to be giving thanks to those brave and wise Americans who fought to win that freedom and then set up a constitutionally limited government that has maintained that freedom to this day.
[Federalist] After winning the New York City mayoral election earlier this month, Zohran Mamdani declared “New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and as of tonight, led by an immigrant!”
It’s become commonplace among liberals to say things like this. They have gone far beyond the “we’re a nation of immigrants” trope, such that we now routinely hear assertions that “America was founded by immigrants” or “America was built by immigrants.”
But of course the truth is quite nearly the opposite. America was actually founded and built by seventeenth-century English colonists and settlers who, arriving in a largely depopulated wilderness, were so anxious about retaining their English cultural identity and folkways it would not be too much to call them ethno-nationalists.
This is especially true of the English colonists we most associate with Thanksgiving — the Puritans of New England, or Pilgrims. For decades now American schoolchildren have been given a potted history of the Pilgrims and our early colonial history that goes something like this: Seeking the freedom to worship God according to their conscience, the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in England and landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, almost perishing that first hard winter. But the local natives helped them, Squanto the friendly Indian taught them how to plant corn, and in the fall of 1621 the Pilgrims and the Indians celebrated a great feast of friendship.
It’s not that this narrative is untrue, exactly, just incomplete. By the time the Puritans decided to sail for the New World in 1620, they had already fled religious persecution in England a decade earlier and secured religious freedom in the Netherlands. Once it became clear that King James I was going to continue Queen Elizabeth’s policy of religious persecution of Puritans and other separatists, a group of English Puritans from East Anglia moved to Holland in 1608, settling in the city of Leiden the next year. Leiden was then a growing industrial center where the Puritans were able both to support themselves and worship free from persecution.
But after about a decade in Leiden they began to fear that their situation in Holland was untenable. In addition to economic and political concerns, there was growing anxiety about retaining their English identity and religious traditions in a foreign land. William Bradford, a founder of Plymouth Colony who sailed on the Mayflower, wrote about the “the great licentiousness of youth” in Holland, and decried the “evil examples” and “manifold temptations of the place.” Nathaniel Philbrook, author of the 2006 bestseller on the Pilgrims, Mayflower, has said, “Their biggest concern after a decade in this foreign land was that their children were becoming Dutch.” In addition to losing their Puritan religion, they were afraid they would also gradually lose their English culture.
So the Pilgrims did not sail to America in search of religious liberty, but in search of something more. Edward Winslow, also a founder of the Plymouth Colony, wrote that God had given them “much peace and liberty” in Leiden, and they hoped to find “the like liberty” in the New World.
The “like liberty” they sought was not simply freedom from religious persecution by the state, which they had secured in Holland, but liberty in a place where they could be fully Puritan and fully English, and pass their religious and cultural ways on to their posterity.
This they did with gusto once they were established in New England. The Puritans were not just English, they were self-consciously English, hyper-English. As the historian David Hackett Fischer explains in his magisterial 1989 book Albion’s Seed, the Puritan fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, being separated from their English homeland by a vast ocean, feared what Cotton Mather called “Criolian degeneracy.” A mood of cultural anxiety persisted in Massachusetts, where the Puritan colonists, fearing the loss of their identity, preserved the folkways of the mother country and in some cases modified or exaggerated them in accordance with Puritan beliefs. For centuries after their arrival in America, they referred to themselves simply as “the English.” Writes Fischer:
Change of any sort seemed to be cultural disintegration. In consequence, the founders of Massachusetts and their descendants for many generations tended to cling to the cultural baggage which they had carried out of England. This mood of cultural conservatism created a curious paradox in colonial history. New settlements tended to remain remarkably old-fashioned in their folkways. They missed the new fads and customs that appeared in the mother country after they were planted. They tended also to preserve cultural dynamics that existed in the hour of their birth. It was as if they were caught in a twist of time, and held in its coils while the rest of the world moved beyond them.
In everything from how they dressed, spoke, recreated, engaged in economic activity, and even how they laid out their villages and settlements, the Puritans of New England reflected not merely English folkways and practices but specifically those of East Anglia, from whence most of the Puritans came in the great migration of the 1630s.
#2
When you have a vast, unsettled frontier immigrants may be welcomed...if they behave themselves.
When you have big, dirty, crowded cities like New York and Los Angeles you don't need ever more illiterate peasants from Third World countries to compete with your own citizens for scarce infrastructure, resources, jobs and housing...especially if they refuse to behave themselves.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
11/27/2025 11:55 Comments ||
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Text taken from the Live Journal page of (c) Alexander Maysuryan
[ColonelCassad] On November 21, 1905, the most famous Black Hundred organization, the Union of the Russian People (URP), was founded. It was led by the equally famous Dr. Alexander Dubrovin (1855–1921).
In addition to orchestrating Jewish pogroms, the venerable doctor became famous for a new and, for his time, unexpected phenomenon known as "Black Hundred individual terror." Thus, in 1906, by decision of the URP leadership and Dr. Dubrovin, State Duma deputy Mikhail Gertsenstein from the Kadet Party was assassinated. This became the most famous of the Black Hundreds' terrorist attacks.
Gertsenstein incurred the fierce hatred of all right-wingers when, from the rostrum of the State Duma, he uttered the derisive term "illuminations," as he called the peasants' burning of haystacks and estates.
Writer Vladimir Korolenko recalled:
"This was Gertsenstein speaking, a man with a typically Jewish face and a mocking manner. It's hard to imagine the storm of anger that erupted on the right benches at these words. A literal roar was heard. Clenched fists rose above heads, curses erupted, people rushed toward the speaker with threats, while on the left side they applauded."
According to monarchist Vasily Shulgin, "Gertsenstein uttered a careless word that cost him his life." On July 18, 1906, while out for a walk, Black Hundred militants ambushed him. One of the two bullets fired wounded the deputy's daughter in the arm.
As Gendarme General Alexander Gerasimov recalled, St. Petersburg mayor von der Launitz not only knew about the planned assassination attempt but also paid the militants two thousand rubles for it. Of course, bringing Launitz to justice was out of the question.
According to Gerasimov, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, upon learning of the incident, "grimaced with disgust":
"I'll tell Launitz to drop this..." (that is, stop assisting the militants). Three years later, three of the perpetrators of the assassination attempt were arrested.
A Finnish court sentenced them to six years in prison. However, a few months later, two of the convicted were pardoned by Tsar Nicholas II.
"Main Directorate of the Black Hundreds and True Russian People. Certificate. Issued to the bearer to certify that he is neither a student nor an intellectual, and therefore is not subject to beating, which we personally certify with our official seal."
And yet, the Black Hundreds were unable to truly unleash terror. They sorely lacked the most essential element—passionate individuals willing to risk themselves in such actions. Risk at least a short prison sentence followed by a sovereign pardon. :)
Well, so... reasoned Dr. Dubrovin and his colleagues, if such people were unavailable, then they could... be borrowed from others. From the revolutionaries, the socialists. :) There was even an overabundance of such people in those circles!
The organizer of the next assassination attempt was Black Hundred member and undercover police officer Alexander Kazantsev. He chose two revolutionary-minded but rather naive workers, V. Fyodorov and A. Stepanov, as the perpetrators. He identified himself as a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Maximalist Party (!).
And Dr. Dubrovin decided to target former Prime Minister Sergei Witte. The Black Hundreds held him responsible for the introduction of the "constitution" in Russia in October 1905. For example, a Black Hundred newspaper called "Vittova Plyaska" (Witt's Dance) was even published, which venomously ridiculed the "constitution." Of course, the revolutionaries also, to put it mildly, disliked the former tsarist prime minister, but they did not plot assassination attempts against him. On January 29, 1907, Count Sergei Witte (1849-1915), a stoker, discovered a box in the stove in his house, suspended by a long rope descending from the chimney. The box turned out to be an "infernal machine" with a clockwork mechanism. A similar device was found in the neighboring chimney.
Economist Alexander Guryev, who was in Witte's house at the time, described what happened:
"It so happened that I did not come to the Count's house for three or four days. When I returned and entered my room, it was so cold that I could not write. I rang the bell and called for the servant to light the fireplace, finding that the wood was already there, and opened the damper.
I was sitting in the center of the room at a round table covered with papers lying in front of me. Suddenly, I heard the servant muttering something. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “I don’t understand who needed to put a rope in the fireplace,” he replied.
I looked into the corner where the fireplace was and saw a long rope on the floor, the other end of which disappeared into the fireplace. Then he pulled something out of the fireplace, which at first I took for a brick. “Sir!” the servant exclaimed, “look, it’s a box!” I approached the stove. And, sure enough, what the servant was holding in his hands was not a brick, but a box wrapped in a rag.
At first, I thought one of the servants had stolen silver from the house and hid it in the fireplace. I asked the servant to bring me a pair of scissors and began to cut the cloth to open the box. When the cloth was removed, I saw that there was a hole in the corner of the box, from which a small bottle was sticking out. “It’s a bomb,” I cried in horror.
“Go downstairs and report to the Count that we found a bomb in the fireplace,” I said to the servant.
He stood there, pale and motionless.
"I dare not report this to His Lordship," he mumbled.
Then I went down to Count Witte's office myself and told him of the strange find and my hypothesis.
"It's definitely a bomb," I said.
"How could a bomb have ended up there?" Count Witte asked calmly.
"I don't know, but the box looks very suspicious.”
"Let's go up and take a look," said the Count.
We climbed the stairs. Remaining completely calm, the Count examined the box and agreed with me that it was indeed a bomb.
The head of the capital's secret police, General Alexander Gerasimov, immediately arrived at the scene. He recalled:
"The clock mechanism was faulty, which is why the explosion could not have happened at all. A quick glance at this 'infernal machine' was enough for me to understand that this was not the work of revolutionaries. Only the SRN vigilantes could have handled the matter so crudely and ineptly."
However, there were no arrests or trials in this case. However, Witte tried to repay Dubrovin in his memoirs. In them, he repeatedly called him a "mazurik," "a convict," "a court tavern keeper," "a hero of the stinking market," and so on.
After the failure in the Witte case, the terrorists went to Moscow, where Kazantsev declared that it was necessary to execute the "traitor" who had stolen party money. On March 14 (27), Vasily Fyodorov shot this man—the editor of the liberal "Russkiye Vedomosti" and also a former deputy of the First State Duma, Cadet Grigory Iollos. At the time of the assassination attempt, he did not even know his name.
The killer, Fyodorov, later described the event as follows:
"Iollos walked thoughtfully, not paying attention to what was happening around him. Fyodorov, three or four steps away, stands directly in front of him and looks him straight in the eyes. He shoots Iollos right in the face, lip, and head. Iollos continues to stand in front of him for a few moments, but a black hole already gapes on his face...
Then he falls like a sheaf at the feet of his killer. The killer quickly escapes, soon finding himself in the arms of the security guard, Kazantsev, who congratulates him, thanks him, and showers him with kisses.
It was after this murder that the workers, despite their naivety, began to suspect something was wrong. They read the name of the man they had killed in the newspapers; it somehow didn't fit with Kazantsev's legend. They began to question Kazantsev's inability to speak like revolutionary agitators.
"Here I realized a little," Fedorov said, "that it seemed I'd ended up with the Black Hundreds instead of the Maximalists."
Finally, the workers discovered lists of members of the Union of the Russian People in their leader's papers... Everything became clear.
In May, the terrorists went to the forest on the outskirts of St. Petersburg to load dynamite bombs for future assassination attempts. When Kazantsev was busy filling the bombs, Fedorov approached him from behind and killed him with a dagger. Fedorov soon went abroad and published a detailed account of the affair...
Until the February Revolution, Dr. Dubrovin and his Union remained a kind of bully for the liberal intelligentsia and both major liberal parties: the Cadets (considered left-liberals) and the Octobrists (right-liberals), close to the government. The prominent Octobrist publicist Gromoboi wrote in November 1909:
“The uncertainty that weighs upon all of Russia, hanging over us like some kind of nightmare... What if tomorrow the entire government is replaced by another and we find ourselves under the boot of Doctor Dubrovin? Which way are we sailing? Any day we can wake up... on the other side of October 17th.”
Curiously, by a coincidence, Dr. Dubrovin witnessed the explosion at Prime Minister Stolypin’s dacha on Aptekarsky Island. The explosion was carried out in August 1906 by the very same Maximalist Socialist Revolutionaries whom Dubrovin’s comrades in the SRN later claimed to be.
So, there was an explosion. They shouted, “Doctors!” And one of those present said, “I am a doctor. ”
And indeed it was a doctor... Doctor Dubrovin, chairman of the Union of the Russian People. :) Both Stolypin and Dubrovin survived the explosion.
Monarchist Vasily Shulgin wrote: “Forty people died in that explosion. The house was reduced to rubble. Corpses and groaning people were carried out from under these ruins. A soldier carried the minister’s seriously wounded daughter, Natasha, in his arms. Waking from a faint, the girl asked: “Is this a dream?” Stolypin himself emerged from the rubble bloodied, covered in shreds of walls and people, but unharmed. When he was recognized, a random doctor rushed to him:
“Are you wounded? ”
“No, no, I’m not wounded...”
A random doctor (it had to be Dubrovin, the famous founder of the Union of the Russian People, the leader of the extreme right, an opponent of all reforms) scooped up some water from the river and helped the minister wash. And perhaps it was precisely because Stolypin recognized Dubrovin that he said, wiping his hands with a towel and looking at the shapeless heap that had been his home a few minutes earlier:
“And yet they will not be able to disrupt the reforms!!!”
At least, that is how Dubrovin himself recounted this scene...
Eventually, a split occurred within the SRN. More "moderate" Black Hundreds—such as the well-known State Duma deputies Nikolai Markov II and Vladimir Purishkevich—split from the supporters of Dr. Dubrovin and his... harsh methods. In 1911, Dubrovin founded a new Black Hundred organization, called the "All-Russian Dubrovin Union of the Russian People."
After the February Revolution, Dubrovin was arrested. The poet Alexander Blok was a member of the Provisional Government's investigative commission, which interrogated Dubrovin, among others. He visited him in the Peter and Paul Fortress and wrote:
"Dubrovin, who burst into sobs and rushed to kiss the hand of [the chairman of the Extraordinary Investigative Commission Nikolai] Muravyov, then fell sobbing onto his cot (the old man's eyes were vile)."
Well, the look of someone's eyes is, of course, a purely subjective impression...
But what happened to the venerable doctor after October?
Oddly enough, at first... nothing. He was released from prison for health reasons on the eve of October 25th. During the first years of Soviet power, he worked as a doctor at the 1st Lefortovo Soviet Outpatient Clinic. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which confidently claimed in 1972 that Dubrovin was executed in September 1918, immediately after the declaration of the Red Terror, was clearly mistaken.
In fact, the Bolsheviks only got their hands on the old Black Hundred member at the end of 1920, when he was arrested again. And only in 1921 was he sentenced to death for "murder, pogroms, and fighting the liberation movement in Russia."
[YouTube] A single threat from China’s Osaka consul ignited a diplomatic firestorm with Japan—unleashing retaliations, boycotts, and record-high support for defending Taiwan. Now Beijing is scrambling, Japan is pushing back harder than ever, and the diplomat who started it all has vanished from view. This is the inside story of China’s Japan meltdown—and why it’s blowing up in Beijing’s face.
China admits they overcounted population by 100 million in the under-40 demographic, 2/3rds of the missing would likely have been female. Best guess current population only 1.3 billion, peaked a decade ago, by 2030 more retirees than workers, by 2050 expect population halved. From Pre-industrial to postindustrial collapse in 45 years.
Commentary from Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics.
[ColonelCassad] Many in Russia have heard the name Palantir, but it's usually portrayed as a Silicon Valley "tech star" or a "tool for fighting terrorism." In reality, this company is a nexus of American intelligence agencies, the Israeli military establishment, and big business building the infrastructure of digital warfare and total control. It's important to understand that these people are behind the current political configuration in the US, including the circles of Trump and J.D. Vance, and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Hidden Hands, Jews, and genocide. I think hysteria is the only possible answer.
Palantir was initially launched not by "idealistic startups," but by entities closely tied to the CIA and the US military: its initial capital came through the venture capital fund In-Q-Tel, which works for US intelligence. Today, the company has become a key supplier of analytical and predictive AI systems for the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, police, and immigration authorities, and is also active in Ukraine and Israel.
Back in 2021, Israel called one of its operations in Gaza the world's first "AI war," in which a significant portion of airstrikes were targeted using algorithmic systems. Since October 7, 2023, Palantir's ties with the Israeli military have only strengthened: the company entered into a strategic agreement with the Israeli defense industry and the Ministry of Defense; the parties explicitly state the goal as using Palantir's "advanced technologies to support military missions". Palantir's key partner in Israel is Unit 8200, the country's equivalent of the NSA, which collects vast amounts of data on residents of Gaza and the West Bank, including phone calls, movements, and digital traces. On this basis, the Israelis built the Lavender system, which assigns almost every one of Gaza's 2.3 million residents a rating from 1 to 100—the likelihood that they are affiliated with armed groups.
Teenagers are also targeted: officers themselves admitted that the age limit of 17 and older was not a strict cutoff, and some minors were included. In the first weeks of the war, the algorithm flagged up to 37,000 people for targeting, and officers admitted that the army treated these findings almost as human decisions rather than machine prompts. An even more cynical system, "Where's Daddy", tracks when a "target" marked by Lavender returns home, and strikes the house at that very moment—along with the family. Western observers describe the logic of the cycle as follows: from the moment the algorithms begin searching for the target until its destruction, 2–3 minutes pass; previously, a similar cycle, according to them, could take up to six hours.
The data for these systems is not only local intercepts, but also information from US intelligence agencies. Snowden's revelations also showed that the NSA transmitted raw Palestinian communications to Israel, including conversations between Palestinian Americans and their relatives.
Former 8200 employees described how information about debts, sex lives, and illnesses was used for recruitment and blackmail, as well as to divide Palestinian society. Taken together, this turns Gaza into a laboratory for testing mass surveillance technologies and simultaneously into a zone of total digital control, where AI and big data not only aid the army, but determine the life and death of every Palestinian.
Fair enough. Hamas had plans and personnel in place before 10/7/2023 to conquer and rule the entirety of Israel and the West Bank, including lists of who lived where and what to loot. We admire both sides for the thoroughness of their oppo research, if nothing else.
Palantir is not just another Pentagon contractor, but a company owned by Peter Thiel, one of the main sponsors of the American right. It was Thiel who invested $15 million in promoting J.D. Vance. Israel in this scheme is a showcase and a testing ground: the country receives military support and political immunity, and the US and its corporations receive a well-oiled business case for exporting "new" warfare technologies. Therefore, when politicians with the image of "anti-globalists" and "peacemakers" appear on the American stage, it is worth looking not at the rhetoric, but at the structures like Palantir behind them and the specific future of warfare they are already programming.
How much of this analysis is sour grapes because, one assumes, Russia does not have a similar partner, nor similar knowledge about its Ukrainian opponents?
The future is approaching quickly. In our lifetime, we will see drones controlled by AI.
#1
Back in 2021, Israel called one of its operations in Gaza the world's first "AI war," in which a significant portion of airstrikes were targeted using algorithmic systems.
The CARVER matrix was developed by the United States Army Special Forces during the Vietnam War. CARVER is an acronym that stands for Criticality, Accessibility, Recuperability, Vulnerability, Effect and Recognizability and is a system to identify and rank specific targets so that attack resources can be efficiently used. CARVER was developed in World War II by the OSS for the French field agents as a simple, uniformly and somewhat quantifiable means of selecting targets for possible interdiction.
During the Gaza war that began in October 2023, the scale of Israeli airstrikes drew increasing international scrutiny.
By October 2024, Israel said it bombed 40,000 locations in the Gaza Strip (which is 360 km2). By one estimate, the bomb tonnage dropped on Gaza is more than 70,000 tonnes, which academic Robert Pape noted surpassed the combined bomb tonnage dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London in World War II. He also stated that "Gaza will also go down as a place name denoting one of history's heaviest conventional bombing campaigns." Satellite imagery showed at least 69% of all buildings were damaged or destroyed, which surpasses the scale of destruction in Cologne and Dresden and approaches that of Hamburg during World War II.
#5
It's important to understand that these people are behind the current political configuration in the US, including the circles of Trump and J.D. Vance, and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
You could have fooled me. I thought the military/industrial complex hated Trump especially since he's doing everything in his power to stop the wars in Ukraine and Gaza thereby posing a threat to their profits. I must confess, I didn't read very far after that statement.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
11/27/2025 12:16 Comments ||
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[ZeroHedge] Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and the investigative journalist who broke the Clinton Cash corruption story, has uncovered what may be one of the most brazen grifts operating inside the Capital Beltway. His new reporting exposes deep cronyism and corruption inside the Small Business Administration's 8(a) Business Development Program, where DEI-driven preferences opened the door for fraudsters to siphon off lucrative no-bid federal contracts.
Instead of supporting legitimate small business development, the 8(a) program has been a massive pipeline for pass-through entities that collect bidless contracts on silver platters while quietly outsourcing the real work to major consulting firms.
The result: Merit-based competition gets sidelined, and tens of billions in taxpayer dollars flow through shell operators, allowing the corrupt Beltway economy of parasites to loot taxpayers. The looting went into hyperdrive during the Biden-Harris regime years.
Remember the 'Gold Bars' corruption story with the EPA? - Well, this 8(a) corruption turns out to be very similar: loot taxpayers as much as possible with Biden in the White House, who had no idea what was happening.
Schweizer has built a career exposing this kind of institutional rot, and the developments in the news cycle so far suggest the Trump administration is preparing to slam down the accountability hammer and smash parasites across the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia.
"For years, DC insiders have exploited a federal DEI contracting program that provides windfalls to beltway elites. This open secret isn't about helping the downtrodden; it's about bagging no-bid paydays. The SBA's 8(a) program is long overdue for reform," Schweizer began the X thread post on Tuesday night, as well as publishing a report on The Drill Down.
🚨 MASSIVE FRAUD ALERT: For years, DC insiders have exploited a federal DEI contracting program that provides windfalls to beltway elites. This open secret isn’t about helping the downtrodden; it’s about bagging no-bid paydays. The SBA's 8(a) program is long overdue for reform.🧵 pic.twitter.com/G7X0hCQdYt
📸 Example? One executive bragged on hidden camera about winning a $100 million contract while doing only 20% of the work. The rest went to an unqualified partner. They called it a “pass-through.” I call it what it is: legalized fraud. Well done, @JamesOKeefeIII! pic.twitter.com/rI8SkAYqzw
Now, @SecScottBessent has ordered an agency-wide probe into potential fraud stemming from the 8(a) contracting program which drains billions from taxpayers, military, & real small businesses. Sunlight is coming & the era of racial pass-through contracting is coming to an end. pic.twitter.com/jYfmoVIuIH
If you don't follow Mark Levin, you should. A gold mine.
He whom the gods would destroy, they first make proud. Hopefully in the end Mr. Carlson will not, like Oedipus, feel the need to put out his own eyes in recompense.
[X]
The Qatarlson litmus test
Going forward, I’ll insist that every Republican who wants our votes declare if they stand with or against lunatic Tucker Qatarlson.
#3
Levin is one of the smartest guys I know when it come to the constitution. His gaslighting, hyping divisiveness and screeching make him unwatchable.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
11/27/2025 10:46 Comments ||
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#4
If you don't follow Mark Levin, you should. A gold mine.
Yeah, yeah. Hannity calls him "The Great One". But I could never follow him. Gaslighting, hyping divisiveness and screeching seems to me like an apt description.
I haven't watched much of Carlson since Fox fired him but then I haven't watched much of Fox since then either. I can't stand Hannity. So I don't understand this charge of antisemitism against Carlson. I dunno. He may be antisemitic but I never detected it when he was on Fox. I haven't followed this quarrel between Levin and Carlson. I don't know what started or what keeps it going and I never cared much at all for anything that Levin has to say.
I will say this for Carlson: He went to Moscow and interviewed Putin when everybody else was spewing nothing but hatred for all Russians. To me, it doesn't matter if you like Putin or not. I'm no great fan of ruthless dictators either. But he is the leader of a great nation and has proven himself to be a formidable opponent when guys like Hannity were making unsubstantiated claims about his weakness. Whether you like Putin or not, you might want to listen to what he says and Carlson was the only Western media representative who would.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
11/27/2025 12:35 Comments ||
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#5
Who litmus test whom?
Never heard of either ones and from what I've been reading here, neither one are worth paying any attention to!
#6
And since Joe Biden didn't want Carlson going to Moscow, I thought it was all the more reason for Carlson to go.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
11/27/2025 13:12 Comments ||
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#7
When "Old Yeller" Levin is right (often), he's unwatchable - for his voice, shrieking, and dramatics. Carlson's embrace of Fuentes and other unacceptable hacks is a no-go
Just my $0.02...with pennies
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/27/2025 13:18 Comments ||
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#8
I guess I have to take your word about Fuentes. I never heard of him and I've pretty much lost track of Carlson. Oh well. I think it's best not to get too heavily invested in any of these people but that also means I don't pay attention to Levin...or anybody else on Fox these days.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
11/27/2025 14:06 Comments ||
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#9
Carlson is a zero. Just a "preacher" who zeroed on a specific audience.
#10
Nick Fuentes is the idiot Tucker Carlson recently interviewed at length: a young man with supposedly a huge GenZ social media following, who riles up his audience by claiming to love Hitler and Stalin, and glories in exercising his free speech by reciting white supremacist, anti-Israel, and anti-women nonsense. Reportedly a large portion of his X followers, at least, turn out to be propaganda accounts posting from abroad.
Tucker Carlson appears to have been chasing viewer numbers by veering ever deeper into Jew/Israel hate with concomitant hate of Christian Zionists and the Trump wing of the Conservative Republicans, even those who for sentimental reasons have continued to defend him.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] President Donald Trump's new executive order targeting branches of the Muslim Brotherhood marks the first serious attempt by any Western leader in decades to confront the Islamist networks that have embedded themselves across the free world.
While Britain, Europe, Canada and Australia look the other way — or worse, appease them — the United States has finally taken a step toward identifying and sanctioning the organizations that fuel radicalization from the Middle East to Western capitals.
And that is precisely why this moment matters. Because the pattern now unfolding across the West is unmistakable — and the executive order exposes it.
For years, the radical left in the West insisted that the highest virtue was 'multi-CULT-uralism,' the belief that all cultures must be treated as morally equivalent, even those that openly reject democracy, pluralism and individual rights. Under this doctrine, Western governments welcomed Islamists into their societies without asking a single hard question. No vetting. No scrutiny. No regard for the long-term consequences.
The result is now painfully clear. Across the UK, Europe, Canada and Australia, Islamist organizations have entrenched themselves in schools, universities, unions, charities, and political parties. They have become powerful voting blocs. They have reshaped the civic and cultural life of entire cities.
And they have made those cities hostile — openly hostile — to Jews.
Across London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Toronto and Sydney, Jews are told to hide their identities, avoid certain neighborhoods, or simply leave entirely.
Synagogues require fortress-level protection. Jewish students are hounded off campuses. Families who believed they were fully at home in the West now live with a fear they never imagined would return.
And instead of reversing course, Western governments have bent further. Rather than confront the Islamist networks they empowered, they appease them — adopting harsher anti-Israel rhetoric, tolerating antisemitic agitation, and pretending it is all 'legitimate political expression.'
But Jews, as history never tires of teaching, are merely the first in line.
Christians and non-Islamist Muslims — particularly those who fled Islamist regimes — are now facing the same pressure. Women who refuse to veil, Muslims who reject extremism, Christians who speak openly about their faith: all increasingly find themselves targeted in cities transformed by the very intolerance Western elites insisted was compatible with liberal democracy.
This isn't integration. It's capitulation.
And now the United States stands on the brink of the same self-inflicted disaster.
Here at home, the threat comes from two extremes simultaneously: the Zohran Mamdani–Bernie Sanders Leninist left, which insists Islamists including Hamas are simply 'oppressed' actors who must never be criticized — and the Tucker Carlson 'Reich' right, which has drifted into isolationism, conspiracism, antisemitism, Holocaust and WWII revisionism as well as the demonization of Israel. Both sides sanitize the forces that threaten the West.
These two camps, though they claim to despise each other, are creating precisely the conditions that have already poisoned Europe and threaten Canada and Australia.
This is why Trump's executive order matters. It is a recognition of reality: that the Muslim Brotherhood is not merely a political movement but the ideological backbone of the Islamist project worldwide — one with tentacles reaching into the West. By designating specific branches, the US can finally begin identifying operatives, cutting off financing, and countering the influence networks that Europe, Canada and Australia allowed to metastasize.
No other Western leader has had the courage to take this step.
If America fails to learn from the collapse into Islamist appeasement, the consequences will be the same: Jews pushed out, Christians intimidated, non-Islamist Muslims abandoned, and the very fabric of Western society slowly unraveling.
The question now is whether the United States will seize this moment — or follow our Western allies into the abyss.
God help America — because the warning signs are already flashing red.
Mark Dubowitz is the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Most people hear “Muslim Brotherhood” and think of something distant—old political battles in the Middle East, not something unfolding quietly in Western institutions. But the report titled The Muslim Brotherhood’s Strategic Entryism into Western Society: A Systematic Analysis put out by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), argues the opposite.
It paints a picture of a movement that’s been working slowly, steadily, and mostly under the radar inside the United States and Europe for decades. Not through violence, but through influence, shaping conversations, building organisations, and positioning itself inside the places where ideas, policies, and public narratives take shape. Whether someone ends up agreeing with all of this or not, the report’s core message is that the Brotherhood’s long game is far more ambitious than most Americans realise.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Kirill Zolotarev
[REGNUM] One hundred years ago, on November 26, 1925, an airplane, outwardly unremarkable, took off from an ordinary airfield near Moscow. No one expected a sensation, and there wasn't much time for celebratory speeches. But this flight became a milestone in the history of Russian aviation.
The Tupolev TB-1, also known as the ANT-4, made its maiden flight—the world's first mass-produced twin-engine all-metal bomber. This aircraft helped the USSR (which had emerged less than three years before the TB-1's flight) not only strengthen the Red Army Air Force but also establish itself on the international stage far beyond the country's actual capabilities.
CHIEF OF CHAINMAIL-ALUMINUM AIRPLANES
A little over two weeks before the flight, on November 10, design engineer Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev turned 37. He had graduated with honors from the Moscow Technical School, which ceased to be called the Imperial Technical School in 1918 but only became the Bauman Technical School in 1930.
True, Tupolev entered the school at age 20 and graduated at 30. In 1911, he was forced to take an academic leave from studying aerodynamics and the theory and practice of aeronautics. Participation in student unrest, arrest, and administrative exile from Moscow under police supervision—all these biographical facts would be considered valuable to this "valuable specialist" after the revolution.
But in the career of engineer Tupolev, it was as if the February and October revolutions had never happened.
On the eve of World War I, he resumed his studies, and in 1916, he began working at the first aviation design bureau in the Russian Empire. In 1918, he graduated from the now-Imperial Moscow Technical University. At the same time, under the guidance of Nikolai Zhukovsky, the founder of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, he began working at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI, now named after Zhukovsky).
It was Tupolev and his group who demonstrated through experimentation that kolchugaluminum, as duralumin was then called (after the Kolchuginsky non-ferrous metals plant in the Vladimir province), was optimal for the production of aircraft bodies.
This alloy is a worthy alternative to fragile wood and heavy iron structures, the designers explained in reports to the Supreme Council of the National Economy and other authorities.
ROUGH BUT STRONG
When Tupolev and his team began promoting the idea of switching to all-metal aircraft, their industry colleagues were rather perplexed. Wood and fabric are familiar materials, proven in the World War II and the Civil War, and inexpensive to produce.
The metal required a completely different approach: new machines, new riveting methods, calculations that had never been done on such a scale before. But KB-ANT, the design bureau of Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev, decided to take a chance.
The first TB-1 aircraft were produced at Plant No. 22 in Fili. There, methods for riveting large panels and working with duralumin (or, more accurately, chainmail aluminum) profiles were gradually perfected—all of which would later become the foundation of an entire branch of Soviet aircraft manufacturing.
Later, Kazan Plant No. 124 joined in, and there the design was brought to serial production.
The plane's appearance is austere, even angular. No frills: smooth surfaces, straight joints, clean lines.
But this crudeness only served to improve durability. For technology of that era, the most important thing wasn't so much to look spectacular as to fly and withstand the stresses.
It's no surprise that the Tupolev design bureau's product was praised not only by the national economy but also by the People's Commissariat for Military and Naval Affairs. And even more so—Tupolev's design was even taken note of by the Kremlin.
REPLY TO CHAMBERLAIN
The international context is important here. The mid-1920s was a time of stabilization for the Soviet regime after the Civil War, but also a time of heightened tensions in relations with European states, something akin to the Cold War of that era.
Soviet Russia, and from 1922 the Soviet Union and its instrument, the Comintern, did not abandon plans to export the revolution.
In 1923, there was an attempted communist coup in Germany, which culminated in fighting in Hamburg. The following year, there was a pro-Bolshevik uprising in Estonia, and two attempts to undermine the monarchy in Bulgaria (in 1923 and 1925, when the Holy Week Cathedral was blown up ). At the same time, Moscow established contacts with two forces in the protracted civil war in China—the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, which emerged in 1921.
Poland, its closest neighbor, supported by Britain, was willing to see out the successful Soviet-Polish War. The "war scare of 1927" was looming, when Britain severed diplomatic relations with the USSR established in 1924, and the assassination of Soviet envoy Pyotr Voikov in Warsaw nearly sparked war.
The expression "our answer to Chamberlain" remains from this historical episode: in February 1927, British Foreign Secretary Joseph Austen Chamberlain demanded that Moscow stop supporting the Chinese communists and "anti-British propaganda."
The Soviet government gave the same answer—in a note dated February 26, refusing to comply with these demands.
The crisis had been brewing even before 1927. The London Cabinet's analytical reports included scenarios of pressure, ranging from trade restrictions to military action against oil hubs. His Majesty's Navy controlled key routes, and the USSR simply lacked the capacity to counter this with anything comparable.
Developing aviation proved faster and more feasible. And not just any aviation, but one that could threaten the enemy fleet where it least expected. The idea of torpedo bombers in the USSR was no accident: aircraft of this type could approach ships at low altitude and attack them in a way no boat could.
ALMOST COMBAT SORTIES
The TB-1 became the first production platform capable of carrying a torpedo weighing up to 800 kg. To achieve this, the design was equipped with reinforced mounting points, separate torpedo locks, and a modified target approach pattern.
After the Civil War, under constraints and a tight budget, it was a bold decision.
The first full-scale tests of the torpedo variant took place in 1926–1927. The TB-1 saw extensive service in the Baltic, Black, and Caspian Seas.
There they practiced maneuvers over water, simulated strikes on naval formations, and worked at high altitudes, where the pilots had never flown before.
The pilots had to adapt to the aircraft's unique characteristics: its heavy body, its inertia, and the need for precise target approach. This was rough, practical work, not a show-off.
The West took notice. British reports began to report an "unpleasant trend" in the USSR: long-range aviation, they claimed, could threaten not only warships but also trade routes.
The Germans later proved this in practice—during World War II, they sank British merchant ships on the approaches to their island. The actual capabilities of the aviation of that time were, of course, limited, but the logic behind its use was sound.
METAL "BIRDS" FOR THE ARCTIC
The emergence of the world's first aircraft of this class was a milestone not only from a military but also from a purely technical point of view.
The aircraft's significance lies in its role as a starting point for the development of metal aircraft manufacturing technology. The TB-1 served as a bridge between early attempts to design heavy aircraft like the Ilya Muromets and the mature design school that would later create the TB-3, ANT-20, and a whole line of long-range aircraft.
It was during work on the first Tupolev that four problems were solved—two purely technical and two organizational. A new riveting technique was perfected, and large all-metal panels were produced.
At the same time, teams of engineers were formed who would later move on to more complex projects, and an industrial culture was established, without which neither attack aircraft nor jet fighters would have been possible.
These people would later build machines that would serve for decades. But their school began right here—with the first metal truss, the TB-1.
TB-1 became part of a completely different history – the northern one.
Machines of this family took part in polar expeditions, where their durability and resistance to frost were especially valued.
Unlike wooden planes, the metal didn't crack due to temperature changes. This was crucial when flying over ice and tundra, where any mistake could be fatal.
The Sh-2 seaplanes were developed based on the TB-1's technological solutions. They operated on northern routes, provided communications, and participated in the development of hard-to-reach areas. At that time, this was an important advancement—not only military, but also practical and economic.
WHY WE SHOULD REMEMBER THE TUPOLEV TB-1
The Western aviation press greeted the aircraft with unexpected interest. On the one hand, there was skepticism, as the USSR was still too young to build heavy aircraft.
On the other hand, it was acknowledged that the all-metal body of the Soviet design looked far more sophisticated than expected. One way or another, the myth of "technological backwardness" was debunked.
The TB-1 proved that the USSR was capable of independent development in an area previously dominated by Germany, Great Britain, and the United States.
As for the Americans, they were able to see firsthand what the Russians had at their disposal when, in 1929, a production TB-1 (ANT-4), piloted by Honored Pilot of the USSR Semyon Shestakov, made a record-breaking flight from Moscow to New York. Unarmed, of course.
A century later, the history of the TB-1 reminds us that great technological leaps are often born not from an abundance of resources, but from a lack of them.
The aircraft was created in a country still recovering from the Civil War, lacking a fully-fledged navy and having virtually no allies. But it was then that a strategy was chosen that would later give our country a talented aircraft manufacturing school and strengthen its position in the world.
Today, as the importance of technology rises again, the story of the TB-1 sounds surprisingly contemporary. It's an example of how a decision made almost on the fly can shape the development of an entire technological field for decades.
And most importantly, it is a monument to the determination to do one’s job, even when circumstances are not favorable to success.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
