Over the years Cummins has produced a series of innovations, such as the first automotive diesel, in addition to being the first to use supercharging and then turbocharging. All cylinders are commonly served through a low-pressure fuel line. The camshaft control of the mechanical injector controls the timing of injection throughout the operating range. This design eliminates the timing-lag problems of high-pressure systems. To meet Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) exhaust emissions standards, Cummins offers the Celect (electronically controlled injection) system. Since the Celect system did not start production until 1989, there are literally thousands of Cummins with pressure-time (PT) fuel systems. //

A major feature of the PT pump system is that there is no need to time the pump to the engine. The pump is designed simply to generate and supply a given flow rate at a specified pressure setting to the rail to all injectors. The injectors themselves are timed to ensure that the start of injection will occur at the right time for each cylinder.

The UK has announced it is giving up sovereignty of a remote but strategically important cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean after more than half a century.

The deal – reached after years of negotiations - will see the UK hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a historic move.

This includes the tropical atoll of Diego Garcia, used by the US government as a military base for its navy ships and long-range bomber aircraft.

The announcement, made in a joint statement by the UK and Mauritian Prime Ministers, ends decades of often fractious negotiations between the two countries.

The US-UK base will remain on Diego Garcia – a key factor enabling the deal to go forward at a time of growing geopolitical rivalries in the region between Western countries, India, and China. //

Half a century or more after the UK relinquished control over almost all its vast global empire, it has finally agreed to hand over one of the very last pieces. It has done so reluctantly, perhaps, but also peacefully and legally.

The remaining British overseas territories are: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands. There are also two sovereign base areas on Cyprus under British jurisdiction.

Iran had already been concerned for years that Mossad, an Israeli intelligence agency, had infiltrated Tehran’s ranks, the outlet reported. Following Nasrallah’s death, that concern has grown larger — and Iranian officials have become worried about Khamenei’s safety, officials and sources close to the matter told Reuters.

“The trust that held everything together has disappeared,” an Iranian official told Reuters.

“[Khamenei] no longer trusts anyone,” another source close to the Iranian regime told Reuters. //

Authorities have opened investigations to see whether some Iranian officials or members of Iran’s military are compromised, another Iranian official told Reuters. The investigations are particularly centered around officials who travel or have family outside the country.

Authorities are reportedly suspicious of Iranian military members who have recently been in Lebanon, one of the officials told Reuters. One of the military members had recently been asking about Nasrallah’s location, raising eyebrows among other officials. That individual was arrested, along with several others, the official told Reuters. //

Chillypod anon-ymous99 an hour ago

Mossad is freaking the Iran leaders out and it's probably by design. They will not trust their most trusted people right now and it's great. Think about them arresting their own close people, it's bound to make quite a few other ones very nervous. //

KJSpeed Chuck in TX 2 hours ago

It would be like Israel to plant incriminating evidence on anyone they want taken out. Let the Ayatollah be the means to his own end. //

veritaseequitas 2 hours ago

Mohammad nowhere to be found. No comfort, no peace, no absence of fear.
Islam is a cult, worshipping a man. //

DonH-Texas 2 hours ago edited

Isn't it odd that the ayatollahs are not so ready to be martyred as they are to send off their flunkies to die? They act a whole lot like godless politicians in secular states.

If you want to know what people really are, don't rely on what they say, look at what they do. //

Hurricanes in the United States end up hundreds of times deadlier than the government calculates, contributing to more American deaths than car accidents or all the nation’s wars, a new study said.

The average storm hitting the U.S. contributes to the early deaths of 7,000 to 11,000 people over a 15-year period, which dwarfs the average of 24 immediate and direct deaths that the government counts in a hurricane’s aftermath, the study in Wednesday’s journal Nature concluded. Study authors said even with Hurricane Helene’s growing triple digit direct death count, many more people will die partly because of that storm in future years.

“Watching what’s happened here makes you think that this is going to be a decade of hardship on tap, not just what’s happening over the next couple of weeks,” said Stanford University climate economist Solomon Hsiang, a study co-author and a former White House science and technology official.

“After each storm there is sort of this surge of additional mortality in a state that’s been impacted that has not been previously documented or associated with hurricanes in any way,” Hsiang said.

Hsiang and University of California Berkeley researcher Rachel Young looked at hurricane deaths in a different way than previous studies, opting for a more long-term public health and economics-oriented analysis of what’s called excess mortality. They looked at states’ death rates after 501 different storms hitting the United States between 1930 and 2015. And what they found is that after each storm there’s a “bump” in death rates.

It’s a statistical signature that they see over and over, Hsiang said. Similar analyses are done for heat waves and other health threats like pollution and disease, he said. They compare to pre-storm times and adjust for other factors that could be causing changes in death rates, he said. Complicating everything is that the same places keep getting hit by multiple storms so there are death bumps upon death bumps.

Just how storms contribute to people’s deaths after the immediate impact is something that needs further study, Hsiang said. But he theorized it includes the health effects of stress, changes in the environment including toxins, people not being able to afford health care and other necessities because of storm costs, infrastructure damage and government changes in spending.

“When someone dies a few years after a hurricane hit them, the cause will be recorded as a heart attack, stroke or respiratory failure,” said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who wasn’t part of the study but has done similar studies on heat and cold deaths. “The doctor can’t possibly know that a hurricane contributed/triggered the illness. You can only see it in a statistical analysis like this.”

It has been nearly a week since Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina, and Joe Biden has finally announced on behalf of whoever is running the country that he has authorized 1,000 federal troops from Fort Bragg (I will never call it anything else), North Carolina, to assist in disaster relief operations a mere 250 miles away in Western North Carolina.

These 1,000 troops will constitute the overwhelming federal military disaster response in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.

According to the Department of Defense, the federal military involvement in this five-state catastrophe is minimal:
...

• Four helicopters with para-rescue teams are at McGhee Tyson Airport in Knoxville, Tennessee.
• Eight Army helicopters and ten Navy helicopters were available at Fort Bragg on Monday.
• Thirty high-water vehicles are at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for reasons that are unclear.

The critical resources needed in the hardest hit areas of Western North Carolina are helicopters for getting stranded people out of danger and bringing supplies to areas cut off by flooding. As of this afternoon, the only military aircraft available are 11 from Florida, two from South Carolina, seven from Tennessee, and one from Virginia. Some of those may be in use in North Carolina as both Florida and South Carolina have sent National Guard contingents to North Carolina.

A lot of hard questions are being asked.
//

As an aside, Howard's story of petty bickering among local officials seems to be spot on; see Pilot flying Helene rescue missions in NC ordered out, threatened with arrest.

The Civil Rights Lawyer @johnbryanesq
·
People are flying their own helicopters in and actively rescuing people in NC and local government officials are threatening them with arrest. You don’t hate your government enough.
Last edited
7:01 AM · Oct 1, 2024 //

To qualify for federal military assistance after a disaster, the Stafford Act must be invoked. This requires a governor to request assistance under that law. Biden declared a state of emergency in North Carolina on September 26 which released some federal aid. Governor Roy Cooper made a Stafford Act request on September 27), but Biden delayed invoking the Stafford Act until today, Wednesday. //

Note the tasking includes a single Forward Support Company. This is rather astounding as that unit has extremely limited capabilities. It has an aid station, a field kitchen, about a half-dozen trucks, and vehicle repair section. What is needed in Western North Carolina is emergency generators, communications, heavy engineering equipment, medical support, cargo haul capability, and helicopters. Even though Fort Bragg has well over 100 helicopters, only eight have been tasked to assist in recovery and relief operations.

Why has the tap been turned off to military assistance for North Carolina and other battered states? One can't help but remember this statement by Biden.

Greg Price @greg_price11
·
Reporter: "Do you have any words to the victims of the hurricane?"

Biden: "We've given everything that we have."

Reporter "Are there any more resources the federal government could be giving them?"

Biden: "No."

10:36 PM · Sep 29, 2024

And private helicopters flying rescue missions still outnumber military ones in the storm-blasted areas. //

Taxpayer-funded data locked behind insurance firm's paywall //

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cannot reveal weather forecasts from a particularly accurate hurricane prediction model to the public that pays for the American government agency – because of a deal with a private insurance risk firm.

The model at issue is called the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP) Corrected Consensus Approach (HCCA). In 2023, it was deemed in a National Hurricane Center (NHC) report [PDF] to be one of the two "best performers," the other being a model called IVCN (Intensity Variable Consensus).

The Biden administration has announced plans to reignite a shuttered Michigan nuclear power plant with a $1.5 billion loan that, combined with other nuclear announcements yesterday, suggests the US federal government is right now all in on nuclear energy.

The 800-megawatt Holtec Palisades plant, located on Michigan's southwest coast in a relatively low-populated area, shut down in 2022 mainly due to it struggling to afford to stay operational while competing against cheaper fossil fuels.

Gabriel Noronha
@GLNoronha
·
Follow
The missiles hitting Israel right now are the same ones Biden and Harris worked to lift UN sanctions on the first month he took office.

They said it would help promote diplomacy with Iran.

12:54 PM · Oct 1, 2024 //

Brytek
36 minutes ago
Wars end when you annihilate the opposition or force an unconditional surrender, wars on end begin with proportional responses. Perhaps Israel has learned anyone pushing a proportional response is not their friend and is in fact the worst kind of enemy to have, as all it does is bleed both sides whilst the “allies” military industrial complex sell weapons to both sides, while draining their own populations of wealth to fund it.

China has been conducting intelligence-gathering operations in the United States for some time now. From spy balloons to fake students, China has been penetrating American institutions, monitoring American military operations, and pushing aircraft and ships closer and closer to American territorial waters. Those aren't the acts of an ally. These are the acts of a nation that is up to something. It's not clear what; China can surveil American military bases in the continental United States until their eyes bleed but, barring intercontinental ballistic missiles, they have no capacity to strike at those bases.

It's worth remembering China continues to make overtures to Russia - and Iran.

Around 0800 hrs of 22 December 1992, the Boeing 727 of Libyan Arab Airlines, registered as 5A-DIA, underway on Flight 1103 from Benghazi to Tripoli, was approaching the Libyan capital. The ground control advised the crew per radio to hold its position at 1,067m (3,500ft) above the Papa Echo beacon, about 10 kilometres (5.4nm) from Tripoli International for three minutes, due to military traffic. The ‘military traffic’ in question was a MiG-23UB of No. 1023 Squadron, crewed by Captain Abdel-Majid Tayari and a novice pilot. Following the take-off from Mitiga AB, the ground control advised Tayari to climb, turn and head towards Papa Echo.

Unaware of the airliner ahead of him, the seasoned fighter-pilot followed instructions of his ground controller to the dot and comma.

Moments later, Tayari and the student in the front cockpit were shocked to sense a detonation on the underside or below their aircraft. A fire broke out. A friction of second later, they saw the big fin of the Boeing 727 right in front of them, already separated from the airliner – and then Tayari initiated an ejection. The airliner disintegrated while still on approach to Tripoli International, killing all 157 of its crew and passengers.

The ‘negative effects of international sanctions’
Barely surviving this tragedy – Tayari suffered multiple fractures in his right hand during ejection – the crew of the MiG-23UB was shocked to find itself jailed in the hospital of Mitiga AB. The investigation of the Libyan authorities – unfairly – blamed them of either colliding with the Boeing 727, or opening fire and shooting it down: many of their superior officers and civilian servants wanted them hung on the Green Square in Tripoli.

….actually: Gaddafi ordered the flight to be shot down to demonstrate ‘negative effects of international sanctions’ – imposed on Libya after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1989: because of numerous embargos, Libyan Arab Airlines could not fly its planes safely, and thus the victims of the crash were supposed to be presented as victims of ‘Western terrorism’. A bomb with a timer had been placed on board the Boeing 727: when this failed to detonate, Gaddafi personally ordered the aircraft to be knocked out of the sky….

Seidhom said he tried to de-escalate and asked the official for instructions on how to communicate with the Lake Lure Fire Department while he was flying a rescue mission near the town. Seidhom said the fire official ordered him to leave and not come back.

“If that’s what you want us to do, we’ll leave no issue. 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.”

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

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

Seidhom said the official called over two law enforcement officers and again threatened him with arrest if he flew back up the mountain.

“At that point, I had to make a decision. I have a victim, I have my son, and I politely asked the officers, told him the situation again, explained everything, told them who I’d been coordinating with, and I said, ‘Hey if I go back up and get this victim and bring him down to this landing spot that other emergency personnel have designated, am I going to be arrested? And the officers’ response was, ‘Man, I really don’t know what to do in this situation.’ I said, ‘So you can’t tell me if I’m going to get arrested or not?’ And he said, ‘Man, I’m not sure what to do.'”

The out-of-state chief and fire captain Seidhom said he encountered at the landing zone spoke with him before he took off.

“They came back over and said, ‘Hey, man, we can’t tell you to go get the victim. We can’t even ask you to go get the victim, but we can tell you if you come back with the victim, we’ll have you a designated landing spot and we’ll make sure they don’t come over here,” Seidhom told WJZY.

“So, at that point, I felt like the other person was going to pressure him to arrest me when I come back with the victim and then my son would have been left on the side of a mountain with this person to go and rescue him,” Seidhom said. //

The fire official told Seidhom to report to the Rutherford County Airport and wait for Federal Aviation Administration officials to meet with him, according to Jordan Seidhom.

The father of two got back into his chopper, turned it in the direction of the mountain and lifted off right back to where he left his son and the woman’s husband. He picked his son up and told the husband what happened at the drop-off with the Lake Lure fire official.

Seidhom took off and looked back at the husband, standing helpless in his crumbling driveway as the help he thought would come for him flew away. Seidhom said the fire official told him the fire department’s ground crew would walk up the mountainside to rescue the man “in a few hours.” Seidhom said it was a three-minute flight from the couple’s driveway to the landing site where he left the woman with first responders.

Seidhom and his son flew to the Rutherford County airport, just as they were directed.

“I did leave the Rutherford Airport. I knew at that point he had no jurisdiction, I was legal in what I was doing, and I was following all FAA guidelines and airspace guidelines. I was on private property,” Seidhom said.

The Seidhoms spent three hours at the airport, but no one from the Federal Aviation Administration came.

Within a half-hour of the fire official and the arrest threat, Seidhom said a Temporary Flight Restriction was set up over the Lake Lure gap, right in the center of where he and the fire official faced off minutes earlier. //

Seidhom said the fire official told him to tell any other pilots he knew that they would also be arrested if they came back. Seidhom said he was the only helicopter within 40 nautical miles of Lake Lure at the time.

After the encounter with the fire official, Seidhom decided to fly back to his home in Pageland, South Carolina, and call off his efforts to help. //

“I’m sorry, if I had to do it over again, I would have stopped and I would have rescued as many people until they decided they were going to arrest me,” said Seidhom.

AkronMike 2 hours ago edited

Clearly, this malicious antipathy is intentional. So, the trillion dollar question is: why?

The Occam's Razor answer is that these suffering folks are mostly white, mostly Republican voters. So, the government doesn't care . . . or worse. If they die or are stuck wallowing in their destroyed homes, then they won't vote and key states go blue next month.

But my Spidey-senses tells me there might be something else going on. Maybe Joe Biden is getting payback against Harris-Pelosi-Shumer-Deep State for forcing him out. He's slow-walking all this aid to drive outrage in key swing states to ensure Harris loses those states.

Only the President can invoke Taft-Hartley to end a strike of national importance. But Brandon's not invoking the law . . . and it's going to bring lots of pain to lots of people ahead of the election.

Maybe Brandon has just enough grey matter left to get his revenge on those who crushed his dream of remaining President before he goes into a full vegetative state. Just maybe. //

Political-Paige 2 hours ago edited

NOBODY. Nobody on the planet is this incompetent. The only possible conclusion is that this is intentional.

Why?

NC is a critical swing state next month. The Dems are all clustered in the Piedmont to the east, where the academic & research triangle sits. The mountain side of the state (except for the lunatic clownshow of Asheville itself) is the Republican stronghold.

People with no power or water or livelihood don't vote.
Dead Republicans can't vote.
People who have been taught a lesson that failing to bend then knee has consequences are afraid to vote.

The only American disaster in my long life that would have bodies hanging in trees and underwater in cars a week out, that has no govt helicopter or supply support, that has government trying to actively BLOCK civilian rescue flights, is this one.

That can NOT be an accident.

So what's happening in WNC right now? Well, the sun has just come up, but:

• Yesterday, private NC & SC pilots airlifted 26 tons of food to us.
• Yesterday, the skies were full of private helicopters... not government.
• Yesterday, utility trucks from a plethora of southern states worked 24 hours to try to get power against massive odds.
• Yesterday, our local restaurants with any power or water at all gave free meals to everyone.
• Yesterday, donated water trucks pulled up in parking lots all over NC and people carried whatever they could: jugs, bottles, bins, even cat litter boxes, to scoop up some lifesaving water for their families.
• Yesterday, volunteers tried to clean up 500 mentally & physically disabled people left to rot in their own waste in a low-income complex in Asheville, but were deterred by looters.
• Yesterday, farmers from SC & north GA brought what feed they could to starving herds wandering WNC.
• Yesterday, animal shelters across the south desperately tried to find airlifts & transport for starving, stranded, & lost pets, but all the volunteer vehicles are needed to rescue people who are running out of time.
• Yesterday, police were ordered to stop anyone not local from taking passable interstates into the hard-hit areas, so volunteer relief supplies are stymied. One assumes they're acting on directives from the Democrat governor or FEMA bureaucrats. Social media was full of ways to out-fox them by taking passable back roads (scarce as those are).
• Yesterday, volunteers seeking FEMA in both SC and NC were turned away, but only after the FEMA workers took the meager cash donations they carried with them. FEMA, you see has smugly announced that it's out of money for this hurricane season, despite their 29.2 BILLION dollar budget and their decision APRIL 2024 to give 640,000,000 to DHS for illegal aliens.

Illegals will vote Democrat, now or later. 640 million.

WNC folks will vote Republican.

What's that tell you? //

Grumpy Right Seater 2 hours ago

Keeping the CNN crew out of a hard hit area is the same tactic used to keep news folks away from the Maui fire. Is this a new type of censorship? //

Random US Citizen 41 minutes ago

It’s on purpose. All those rural voters are cut off… but the big blue cities will be voting just fine. Harris was behind in NC… but there’s a very real chance she wins if actual Americans can’t submit ballots while those who are no longer our countrymen can stuff drop boxes like there’s no tomorrow. This could definitely swing the election.

As a side note: somebody should graffiti over the “Liberty” with Bragg on all the off post signs. //

Cafeblue32 2 hours ago edited

Biden: "We've given everything that we have."

If that's your best, then no wonder your party looks like a Chinese fire drill.

A smart party trying to win an election would have seen it as an opportunity for their candidate to take command of a tragedy dropped in her lap and show off her decision making and administrative chops, her being VP and all. But because they're rural folks, they must be Trump heads, so the instinct to punish them overides anything that might happen to be sane and logical. My granny used to call it cutting off your nose to spite your face. //

Ed in North Texas an hour ago

"...this is NOT the National Guard; it is the organization Ron DeSantis formed that caused some to befoul themselves over the thought that he may be going full Mussolini or something."

Texas formed the Texas State Guard in 1871 with Federal recognition starting in WW II. Among other missions, the State Guard takes over securing and operating the TXNG facilities on activation of the TXNG units to Federal service.

The bomb caused runway damage and cancelled 80 flights. Thankfully it did not hurt anyone. //

Blackwing1 | October 2, 2024 at 2:36 pm
I so much want to insert a clip from “Falling Hare” where Bugs Bunny meets the Gremlin, who is pounding the nose of a bomb with a giant sledgehammer, and tells him, “To make these block-buster bombs go off, you have to hit them JUUUUUST right.” //

Hodge in reply to scooterjay. | October 2, 2024 at 3:06 pm
Nice math but you are way under-estimating just how many bombs were dropped during the War.

“World War II ended more than 79 years ago. But remnants of the intense airstrikes across Japan keep surfacing occasionally. The Self-Defense Forces reported that during the fiscal year 2023 alone, they disposed of 2,348 bombs, weighing a total of 41 tons.”

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/travel/travel-news/japans-miyazaki-airport-shuts-after-wwii-era-bomb-explosion-87-flights-cancelled/articleshow/113876737.cms //

TargaGTS in reply to Joe-dallas. | October 2, 2024 at 1:38 pm
The wife and I went sailing around Denmark & Germany (through the Kiel Canal) in 2019. We tied up next to a weird looking Danish navy ship. So, I introduced myself to one of the sailors and asked what kind of ship it was. It was a bomb disposal ship. It’s outfitted with MADs (like what we use to detect subs underwater) and specialty sonar and it spends the year looking for unexploded WWII ordnance…and finds a LOT of it every year. They’ve even found WWI mustard gas shells. They apparently have similar land-based units that do the same thing. The ground is so soft in that part of Europe (probably not unlike where that airport sits), that these 500-lb would simply bury themselves meters-deep into the soil and sit there until some unsuspecting farmer or developer hit it with machinery. //

Hodge in reply to Joe-dallas. | October 2, 2024 at 2:52 pm
“Quite a few” is quite an understatement –

The zone rouge (English: red zone) is a chain of non-contiguous areas throughout northeastern France that the French government isolated after the First World War.

The zone rouge was defined just after the war as “Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible”.

Each year, numerous unexploded shells are recovered from former WWI battlefields in what is known as the iron harvest. According to the Sécurité Civile, the French agency in charge of the land management of Zone Rouge, 300 to 700 more years at this current rate will be needed to clean the area completely. Some experiments conducted in 2005–06 discovered up to 300 shells per hectare (120 per acre) in the top 15 centimeters (5.9 inches) of soil in the worst areas.

Then it was time for the individual interview. The head of training and the HR guru sat me down and weren’t quite sure what to make of me. I was clearly the first (and probably only) F-14 pilot they’d ever interviewed, so they fumbled with questions like “Um… what makes you think you can handle a 250-knot turboprop?”

‘Then came the clincher: “So, why should we hire you versus all those other people out there?” They expected an answer involving hundreds of carrier landings, flying supersonic, blah, blah so I must be a great pilot. Instead, I thought for a second and said “I’m sure any of us can fly your planes just fine. I’d like to think I’m the sort of person who you can sit next to for ten hours, and not want to slug.”

‘The interview screeched to, a halt. Director of training looked at the HR dude and said “Write that down.” HR said “Already got it.” They thanked me, shook my hand, and I knew I had the job.’

Steve Sailer’s ‘Noticing,’ collects decades of the politically incorrect journalist’s columns, conclusively demonstrating that he is one of our most astute and farseeing pundits.

Mark Moyar’s story shows why Trump has to prove to the people he needs for an effective presidency that he will not leave them twisting in the wind. //

In advance of Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, the Democratic National Committee put up a billboard outside Madison Square Garden calling Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, the “Poster boy for Project 2025.” As predicted by campaign email blasts, during the debate Kamala Harris’ running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, name-checked this blueprint for conservative federal governance, yet again proving the Harris-Walz campaign has zero policy accomplishments to run on.

Since most voters don’t care about this pretty unremarkable effort to slim an ungovernable federal bureaucracy and staff the next Republican administration with effective people loyal to the United States, it’s telling that Democrats have turned it into the only other issue they’re running on besides abortion until birth. It shows Democrats believe growing the unelected bureaucracy that undermines elected officials such as Congress and the president is their top priority (competing with murdering mostly black and brown babies in the womb).

It’s also yet more evidence they always push Republican defeat even in the event of Republican victory, because Project 2025 proposals are nothing more than simple common sense. A majority of voters, and three-quarters of solid Republicans, think the federal government is corrupt. And it is. It’s now obviously a far cry from early progressive fantasies about “apolitical experts.” It’s a politicized fifth column enacting regime change by substituting unelected, unconstitutional government for elected, constitutional government of, by, and for Americans. //

A book out this year, Masters of Corruption, by former Trump appointee Mark Moyar, provides yet another vivid illustration of why. In it, Moyar, a former Trump appointee to the U.S. Agency for International Development, details how career bureaucrats sabotaged his whistleblowing on their corruption. His story shows that Trump has to prove to the people he needs for an effective presidency that he has their back, and that if they work to achieve Trump’s goals in office they will not be left twisting in the wind.

That’s effectively what happened to Moyar. A researcher with military and foreign policy experience, plus a PhD, Moyar wrote his sixth book in 2016. He submitted the manuscript for Defense Department review, in multiple ways going far above the legal and regulatory standards for ensuring he didn’t release classified information. After the department failed to review his manuscript despite receiving more than six times as much time to do so as court precedent allows, Moyar informed them he was moving forward with publication.

The book was published, and that was the end of it — until Moyar became a Trump appointee at USAID two years later and started to blow the whistle on corrupt employees. Then the manuscript review resurfaced. It was used as a pretense to deny Moyar the security clearance he needed to do his job, then ultimately to kick him out of the job on the grounds that he couldn’t do it without a security clearance. In a recent speech, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, started USAID to benefit U.S. policy, but it’s become a CIA front organization for regime change.

The entire time, no one ever provided any evidence that Moyar had published any classified material in his book that the Defense Department had failed — or refused — to review. And higher-level Trump appointees refused to defend Moyar against the bureaucratic jackals, leaving him defenseless. While his security clearance was held up simply out of spite, he couldn’t be hired for the majority of jobs for which he is qualified.
Torture by a Thousand Bureaucrats

That sounds Kafka-esque enough, yet it is a very brief gloss on the labyrinthian twists and turns that Moyar’s book relates. Reading them imparts a horror of ever getting caught in such a system embedded with people with the power to screw with you while they trap you there, all out of sheer hatred for political commitments that represent half the country. //

Moyar points out that anti-Trump bureaucrats worked furiously to sabotage the work voters had elected Trump to accomplish. They organized within agencies like an internal spy ring. They used their government positions to — often illegally — leak half-truths to media in a way that would damage Trump’s ability to govern. In Zoom meetings, they “offered the federal employees tips for thwarting Trump appointees, such as concocting excuses for procedural delays, demanding protracted legal reviews, leaking information to sympathetic journalists, and bringing complaints to the inspector general,” Moyar writes.

Thousands of good people who risked their careers to advance Trump’s policy agenda were not only backstabbed by agency colleagues, like Moyar was, but also placed on Democrat target lists and personally and professionally harassed to this day. //

Trump’s September promise to appoint Elon Musk to “conduct[] a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” also is the right direction. A week later, Musk gave more details, according to a RealClearPolitics transcript: “We do have an opportunity to do kind of a once-in-a-lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of government. Because the other thing besides the regulations, America is also going bankrupt extremely quickly.”

When asked if federal agencies could be cut by “two, three, four, five percent,” Musk replied, “I think we’d need to do more than that.” Yes, more — try at least a factor of ten.

Smith’s filing comes just in time for the Harris-Walz campaign to try and make Jan. 6 a top campaign issue. Vice President Kamala Harris made a post on X about Jan. 6 just hours before the filing was unsealed.

“On January 6, the former president incited an attack on our nation’s democracy because he didn’t like the outcome of the election,” Harris said in a post on X. “If you stand for country, democracy, and the rule of law — our campaign has a place for you.”

It also doesn’t hurt that Smith’s filing was conveniently unsealed hours after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz bombed in the vice presidential debate against Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.

Smith had to walk a fine line in creating this filing after the Supreme Court shot down his earlier lawfare attempts. That’s to say, the high court could once again squash Smith’s lawfare efforts if the charges he brought against Trump impinged on the established presidential immunity guidelines.

But Smith doesn’t care whether the substance of his motion is just, accurate, or even legal, because it’s never been about the rule of law — it’s always been about interfering in the election.

In April 1991, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave the Alexander Meiklejohn Lecture at Brown University, in which he explored the idea of the U.S. Constitution.

“Unlike any other nation in the world, we consider ourselves bound together, not by genealogy or residence but by belief in certain principles; and the most important of those principles are set forth in the Constitution of the United States,” Justice Scalia said.

Referring to the Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1787, Justice Scalia added,

When else has a government been established, not by conquerors dividing up the spoils, or even by political parties parceling out the power, but by a four-month seminar consisting of many of the most erudite and politically experienced individuals in the nation?

The justice went on to remind his listeners why it’s critical each generation of Americans learn, know and love our Constitution.

“[The U.S. Supreme Court] cannot save the society from itself – because in the last analysis the Court is no more than the society itself,” Justice Scalia said, adding,

The Constitution will endure, in other words, only to the extent that it endures in your understanding and affection.

Howard said that his congresswoman was able to get two contracted helicopters for search and rescue, but he also pointed out that local authorities are stopping even the media from seeing how bad the destruction is. He related a story that sheriff’s deputies in the Lake Lure area wouldn’t let CNN video the devastation.

He also gave an example of the buck-passing that’s going on in North Carolina: //

Howard pointed out that some of his colleagues are funding their rescue missions out of their own pockets. At the same time, Air Force helicopters are grounded and personnel aren’t working because they’re awaiting Title 10 orders that aren’t coming from above. //

Howard said that he doesn’t “know what kind of conspiracy” is behind this bureaucratic nightmare. In my more cynical moments, I can’t help but wonder if Gov. Roy Cooper (D-N.C.) and the Biden-Harris administration are willing to let Republican voters in a reliably red part of the state fend for themselves — and die. I don’t want to believe that, but it’s hard to shake that gut feeling. //

“I hope these politicians get fired,” he concluded. “I hope people get pissed off. They'll probably kick me out of the state of North Carolina for doing this. But you know what? I don't care. Because if I can save one more life for it, it's f***ing worth it to me.”

If only politicians in D.C. and North Carolina cared this much.

[If only churches cared this much about saving people!]. //

Jeroboam Maximus Decimus Cassius
7 hours ago edited
Those in power do care about one aspect of this, though. If they slow walk rescue and recovery efforts, no actual polling [voting at polling places] can take place in the worst affected counties, all Republican, a mere month from now. This could give the swing state of NC to the Democrats and probably would hand the Senate seat in Florida to them as well. It might also make a difference in Georgia.

President Joe Biden was speaking at the National Safer Communities Summit in Connecticut, calling for tougher gun control laws when he seemingly confused the audience by closing his speech with the phrase "God Save the Queen".
Videos of the president's unusual sign off quickly started circulating online, with social media users questioning what he meant.
The White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary, Olivia Dalton, later responded to reporters by saying the president was "commenting to someone in the crowd".
16 June 2023

PM tells world to choose peace and battle ’Iranian curse’; vows to keep hitting Hezbollah; says Hamas must go; denounces UN; promises Israel ’won’t go gently into that good night’ //

The full text of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly, September 27, 2024, as provided by the Prime Minister’s Office.

https://youtu.be/AkZREiWcrpQ

If the election were held today, Atlas calculates that Trump has a 75% chance of winning in the Electoral College. His odds improve if you take historical polling error into account.