Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Somalisota
2. Pipe Bomber
3. Drug Boats
4. Aftyn
5. Space
6. Granholm
1. Somalisota. The breathtaking scope and reach of Somali fraud against taxpayers was fleshed out a bit more last week, with MN Governor Tim Walz taking most of the immediate heat. As the festivities continue, never forget this entire mess was enabled by his Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is currently skating beneath the waves of criticism crashing on the flanks of Tampon Tim. Best continuing reporting on this I’ve seen is on PowerLine, which blogs out of MN.
- What happened? This is little more than an object lesson in what happens when you import large chunks of people who do not share your values. When you import tens of millions of people from the third world, places where Rule of Law is a suggestion rather than actual guidance or an extended social compact between people of that nation, don’t be surprised if they bring their animal act to the US along with them.
- How big was the fraud committed? Low end estimate is $1 – 2 billion, with the upper end near $8 billion. What did they do? Somalis set up companies that billed state agencies hundreds of millions to billions of dollars of social services that were never provided. The scam stretched from childcare to nutrition to Medicare / Medicaid and COVID money. They were in business before the free COVID money hit the banks/ The COVID money supercharged the fraud.
- Why did it continue before the first few prosecutions went to court? It continued because the Somalis brilliantly took advantage of democrat do-gooderism, a friendly media and a state law enforcement / justice apparat controlled by a Muslim. Remember that Muslims don’t prosecute Muslims when the complaint comes out of the Infidel world. And who is in charge of state law enforcement? None other than former Nation of Islam member Keith Ellison. While most criticism has been aimed at MN Governor Tim Walz, in my mind, it is Ellison who is smoothly and quietly being allowed to hide his malfeasance. It is almost as if the democrat apparat has decided that Walz is expendable (old white guy) while Ellison must be saved at all costs (ticks several intersectional boxes). My guess is that the war on whistleblowers happened as much because of Ellison as it did because of Walz.
- Remember that one of the things that allowed this cancer to metastasize was the May 2020 death of George Floyd, which helped to spark the Summer of Love in Minneapolis. Blocks of the city were burned. Tough to investigate, much less prosecute or convict black perps in that climate being orchestrated by media, slavering democrats and all the Usual Suspects on the left. Turn everything over to criminals, regardless of their color, and the criminals will run rampant. Which they did and in some ways are continuing to do.
- The Somali fraudsters also brilliantly played the race and religion card for years in fending off prosecution, claiming they were untouchable because they were both black and Muslim. The common response was that if you investigate me for any of this, you are racist.
- The first of the frauds prosecuted was the Feeding Our Future fraud. Court records charge over $240 million in fraudulent claims. The fraud may be four times that. 78 have been charged, two trials so far, 7 guilty verdicts, and 50 guilty pleas so far. Ilhan Omar is closely connected to a Somali restaurant at the center of the fraud. Some of the owners were convicted on 21 felony counts. Of course, we always have the prototypical female democrat judge who blithely tosses guilt verdicts of Somalis like Hennepin County Judge Sara West did with a $7.2 million home healthcare fraud case the week before Thanksgiving. If the state and local law enforcement and justice apparat actively supports and enables the fraud, it will continue until either the feds step in or the citizenry starts standing up Vigilance Committees.
- Finally, just to demonstrate that no good deed goes unpunished, it turns out that Somali remittances to Somalia are the largest source of funding for the Somali terrorist group al Shabaab.
2. Pipe Bomber. Last week saw the arrest of a perp in connection with a pair of pipe bombs left on Jan 6 in front of the RNC and DNC headquarters. The arrests were the culmination of a 5-year long investigation that really didn’t need to take 5 years. The perp ends up being a 30-something black, single, loner, who lives in his parent’s basement. Jake Tapper reported him as a white guy, which worked right up until the FBI released his photo. He was then described as MAGA, a Trump supporter who reportedly claimed he built the bombs in response to the 2020 election. Great gaslighting, that. The feds have his phone records which put him at the locations where the bombs were placed when they were placed. They also have his Home Depot receipts for parts purchase. He was buying parts in 2019 well before the 2020 election. There were initial reports that he was associated with AntiFa, something that has not panned out as yet. The FBI / DoJ briefing made a point that no new evidence was gathered, that the FBI had everything in hand since early in 2021. They pointedly blamed the Wray FBI for burying the investigation mostly because it was not supportive of an insurrection by white, conservative MAGA supporters. As such, the investigation was slow-rolled and evidence buried. Thankfully, it was not destroyed. The FBI has a history of messenger shooting and burying anything that would be embarrassing to leadership, which seems to be what happened here.
3. Drug Boats. Democrats continued to double down on the ongoing military action against narco-terrorists carrying narcotics from Venezuela to the US. Strikes were variously described by democrat US Senators as war crimes, murder and / or extrajudicial killing. Nice to see democrats in full-throated defense of terrorists using chemical weapons to murder 100,000 Americans via overdose a year over the last three years. Note that the overdose tally includes both the Venezuelan (cocaine and heroin) and CCP (fentanyl) contributions. Those contributions go into the cartels where they are imported and distributed to their victims. This chemical warfare is an active policy choice by both the governments, which is one of the reasons Trump is now targeting Maduro. An examination of the notion that the strikes are war crimes or murder is in order. War crimes is a term that has been around since at least 1474, mostly applied to those who were particularly brutal in combat, committing atrocities. They were most recently agreed to in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Those Conventions only apply to signatories. And the cartels aren’t signatories, meaning they have no legal top cover outside elected democrats in the US. Worse, their cargo is the very definition of a chemical munition, responsible for killing 100,000 Americans a year in recent years. What would our response be if those deaths were due to poison gas, biological weapons, or a nuke in a shipping container? The funniest part of the last week was when Trump responded to democrat demands for an investigation of the Sept drug boat sinking. They took particular exception to the double tap, the second strike when the boat was only disabled and survivors calling home for a new boat to carry its cargo. Trump agreed to have an investigation, though with a different starting point, not starting this year with the 20 or so boats the military has splashed so far, but starting with O’Bama drone strikes starting in his first week in office Jan 2009. Depending on whose BS numbers you believe, that number ranges 1,900 – 3,000+. And as I noted in past issues, he was particularly fond of the double tap targeting first responders after the initial strike. Democrats are once again going to get a lesson in being careful what you wish for.
4. Aftyn. The special election for the newly redrawn (2022) TN 7 congressional district was held last Tuesday. The election was necessary after the incumbent unexpectedly resigned. Republican Matt Van Epps won over democrat Aftyn Behn by 9 percentage points. The Usual Suspects were highly entertained by the outcome, chortling that a Republican had won a district that previously went for Trump by 22%, gleefully reporting that Trump’s support was slipping. First, the actual numbers. TN redistricted in response to the 2020 census. Legislation was passed and signed in early 2022. After the requisite lawsuits were settled, the new map governed the 2022 midterms. One of the changes made in this map was to carve Nashville into three chunks, leaving TN 7 as around a 10% Republican majority. Note that redistricting is a zero-sum game, as every time you make something less blue, you make the neighboring more blue. The chunk of Nashville carved out and added to TN 7 made a very red rural district less red. Media’s game with this is to intentionally conflate 2024, which was a massive turnout in favor of Trump with a normal, run of the mill midterm. Democrats were positively giddy with the notion that the AOC of the West was going to sneak into congress for a year by virtue of complacent Republican voters. That didn’t happen, as turnout was pretty strong. Word of warning to all Republican state parties and districts. Democrats are fired up. They have been brainwashed to the point where they will turn out to vote for anything labeled “not Trump,” a list which includes some truly awful people. Take the local and down ballot elections seriously or you will end up with your very own version of an entrenched democrat governing majority in your favorite big city dragging the entire state blue as they have managed to do in every single blue state in the nation.
5. Space. Three bits of space news this week for your consideration.
- One of the warnings by Michael Chriton in Jurassic Park was the notion that “life finds a way” and will end up doing unexpected things, portrayed disastrously in the 1993 movie. We found our example of that warning a couple weeks ago on the International Space Station (ISS) after astronauts recovered moss spores that had been exposed to space on the outside of ISS for the last 9 months. The recovered spores were grown. The spores were viable and grew, astounding everyone. Life, at least at the cellular level, has the ability to survive the conditions of space. You can add moss to tardigrades as earthbound life capable of surviving space unaided. Ultraviolet (UV) light was thought to be the most stressful of conditions encountered.
- On Thanksgiving Day, Russians launched a Soyuz with a three crew onboard to ISS for a rotation. The pad was damaged during launch to the point where it is no longer able to support future Soyuz flights. The Baikonur pad is the only one capable of supporting Soyuz launches. This means the Russians have a serious problem supporting manned missions until they either repair the pad or come up with an alternative.
- Final space story comes from China, which has been juggling Shenzhou capsules (based on the Soyuz design) since they discovered one connected to their space station with a cracked window. After a 9-day delay, the old crew used the newest capsule to rotate back to China. This left the new crew stranded for a week until an empty spare launched on Nov 25. That capsule is now attached and ready for immediate use. Looks like they are in the process of deciding when and how to return the capsule with the broken window. Expect that to take place sometime in the next few weeks. Will be interesting to see how it survives the trip.
6. Granholm. One of the (many) economic problems in NJ leading to unpopularity of the previous democrat governor, Murphy, was sky high energy costs (both vehicular fuel and electricity) caused by idiotic green energy policies. As if to demonstrate her complete cluelessness (along with those who voted for her), NJ Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill tabbed former Energy Secretary under Biden Jennifer Granholm to co-lead her transition team focus on making energy more affordable and reliable, two things Granholm was singularly unable to do while Biden’s Energy Secretary. OTOH, she did make herself very, very rich slopping at the green, free money trough. New Jersians are about to get what they asked for, and get it good and hard, not unlike what neighboring NYC is about to get with Mamdani. But at least neither elected one of those Republicans (/sarc).
More later –
- AG