With one week before the presidential election, a Biden-appointed judge has reinstated voting rights to non-citizens legally purged from the Virginia voter rolls.

Yes, you read that correctly. A Biden-appointed federal judge has given more than 1,600 self-identified non-citizens voting rights after they were legally removed with a Virginia law passed in 2006 and signed by then-Democrat Governor, now Senator Tim Kaine. This illustrates just how much Democrat orthodoxy has moved in less than a decade.

The judge's action was precipitated by an injunction request by the Biden administration's Justice Department that claimed that the voter registrations were wrongly canceled.

As explained by current Governor Glenn Youngkin:

"The law mandates certain procedures to remove non-citizens from voter rolls, with safeguards in place to affirm citizenship before removal...the ultimate fail-safe of same-day registration for U.S. citizens.

"This law has been applied in every presidential election by Republicans and Democrats since enacted 18 years ago.

"Almost all of these individuals had previously presented immigration documents confirming their non-citizen status, a fact verified by federal authorities."

Thomas Sanford, an attorney with the Virginia attorney general's office, told the judge at the conclusion of Friday's hearing that the state intends to appeal her ruling. But with the election only a week away, can a legal response succeed in time? (On Monday, Virginia appealed to SCOTUS to reinstate the ban on non-citizens voting.)

Alleged off-the-books investigation predated FBI's Russia collusion probe.

The House Judiciary Committee is examining a whistleblower report that the FBI targeted Donald Trump soon after he announced his presidential campaign in June 2015, an off-the-books operation ordered by FBI Director James B. Comey that predated the Crossfire Hurricane operation.

An FBI agent involved in the probe revealed the off-the-books criminal investigation on Tuesday in a protected disclosure sent to the committee.

The whistleblower disclosure said two female FBI undercover agents infiltrated Mr. Trump's 2016 campaign at high levels and were directed to act as "honeypots" while traveling with Mr. Trump and his campaign staff on the trail.

According to the disclosure, which The Washington Times reviewed, the investigation differed from the later Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence operation targeting Russian collusion. It said the early off-the-books probe was a criminal investigation targeting Mr. Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign staff.

The agent "personally knew" that Mr. Comey ordered an FBI investigation against Mr. Trump and that Mr. Comey "personally directed it," according to the disclosure. The off-the-books investigation did not appear to target a specific crime but was more of what agents would describe as a fishing expedition to find something incriminating about Mr. Trump.

The Times reached out to the FBI and Mr. Comey for comment. A House Judiciary Committee spokesman said the committee received the whistleblower allegations and "plans to look into them."

Conflict with the US and its allies may be inevitable, but it's not the aim of the group's members.

The BRICS Summit in Kazan was a global event of the highest order, both in terms of its representativeness and the scope of the issues discussed. Having listened with pleasure to the well-deserved fanfare of the organizers, let us try to capture, as far as possible, how the forum differed from its predecessors and what its significance was.

Firstly, Kazan was the first experience of the event in an expanded format. When the association had four and then five participants, the meetings, despite the always high level of attention, were informal and somewhat chamber-like (if that term is appropriate when applied to a group of huge countries). The current composition, even without the dozens of partners and observers, is already a large group of very different states. Managing such a community requires considerable effort and is unlikely to be possible without coordinating institutions. So far, the organizing role has been played by the current chair (Russia this year, South Africa last year, Brazil in 2025). And it was felt that such a rotating and flexible format was better suited to a complex organization than recognized administrative bodies.

Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, or X as it's now called, has brought an abrupt shift in the dynamics of the platform. For years, X functioned as an echo chamber where progressive academics freely exchanged ideas, often without much opposition. It was an exclusive club, and Musk's open-door policy shattered it. With censorship dialed back and banned accounts reinstated, Musk's version of free speech drove many academics away, leading to a marked decrease in engagement among their ranks.

An article titled 'The Vibes Are Off: Did Elon Musk Push Academics Off Twitter ?' documents this retreat. It shows a significant drop in activity, especially among verified users, following Musk's acquisition. Emphasis below is mine.

This article addresses a narrower empirical question: What did Elon Musk's takeover of the platform mean for this academic ecosystem? Using a snowball sample of more than 15,700 academic accounts from the fields of economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, we show that academics in these fields reduced their "engagement" with the platform, measured by either the number of active accounts (i.e., those registering any behavior on a given day) or the number of tweets written (including original tweets, replies, retweets, and quote tweets). We further tested whether this decrease in engagement differed by account type; we found that verified users were significantly more likely to reduce their production of content (i.e., writing new tweets and quoting others' tweets) but not their engagement with the platform writ large (i.e., retweeting and replying to others' content).

The data points to a familiar pattern: When left-leaning narratives lose control of the conversation, proponents either cry foul or flee​. Now, if you combine this exodus with the insights from Mitchell Langbert's 2018 study on the political affiliations of elite liberal arts college faculty, the story becomes even clearer.

Donald Trump wants the tycoon to lead his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and audit the federal government.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has made an appearance at a Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden where he promised to save American taxpayers trillions of dollars if the Republican candidate wins.

Despite previously having proclaimed political neutrality, Musk has leaned towards the former president in recent months, publicly endorsing him after the first assassination attempt. Following this, Trump promised that if he wins the November election, he will establish a "government efficiency" commission headed by the billionaire entrepreneur.

As he walked on stage in New York on Sunday, Musk was asked, "How much do you think we can cut from this wasted $6.5 trillion Harris-Biden budget?"

The move will be a mirror response to the actions by the US and its allies, according to Anton Siluanov.

Russia will respond in kind to the West's use of the income generated by its [Russia's] frozen central-bank reserves, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov has said.

The US and its allies have blocked an estimated $300 billion in assets belonging to the Russian central bank since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. The bulk of the funds, around €197 billion ($213 billion), are being held at the Brussels-based clearinghouse Euroclear. On Wednesday, Washington announced a decision to use the proceeds from the frozen assets to repay a multibillion-dollar loan to Kiev.

Siluanov told reporters:

"If Western countries have begun utilizing the income from the frozen Russian reserves, we will do exactly the same. We have frozen money from 'unfriendly' companies and organizations. We keep this money in our accounts in the same way and will use the income from these assets similarly. The income from these funds will be allocated to the needs of the economy, the needs of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation."

He noted the corresponding decisions have already been made.

Stop the presses. A Bloomberg story reverses course on the whole Ukraine affair. The business newspaper that told the world Russia was weak and sure to lose everything over military intervention in Ukraine now says Zelensky and the Ukrainians will be sold out.

Sir Max Hastings, a journalist and historian who writes for Bloomberg, The Times, The Sunday Times and other major media, says advanced Russian weaponry and dwindling Ukraine forces make it clear the Europeans and Americans will soon abandon Kyiv. With the EU facing major energy problems and Winter coming on, and with the potential for the lunatic liberals to lose the presidential race in the U.S., Ukraine is a lost cause. The military historian fails to point out that Ukraine never stood a chance in the first place. American companies with vested interests in war and business takeovers in Ukraine never wanted Kyiv to win.

Not Even a Drunk President

Even if the mumbling, bumbling, drunken Kamala Harris does become President of the United States, the American people won't stand for throwing good taxpayer dollars after the bad $175 billion in US aid that Washington has already sent Ukraine's comedian leader. I predict Russia will make a few more critical advances in Ukraine and that a deal will be struck to partition the country as was done between North and South Korea. The taxpayer monies used to prolong the war will be considered free seed money for investment firms like BlackRock to make hundreds of billions rebuilding what Americans paid to have destroyed by the Russians. The whole affair is not so complex. If we look at history as Russia's President Putin does, everything becomes much more straightforward. Take the media's approaches to the Russia/Ukraine issue from the propagandist of all propagandist's manifesto:

"The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925)

As you can see, history is repeating itself right under our noses, only the United States is not on the winning side this time. Western fake news is directed at a population less aware of world affairs than an Iowa dirt farmer during the Great Depression. Propaganda says "this" about Ukraine, while the truth lies light years away in another galaxy. The level of piracy and malfeasance in this Ukraine mess is staggering if everything is considered. For instance, EU brokers have raked in record profits by buying cheap grain from Ukraine and cutting the rug from other European farmers like those in Poland. While the leadership of EU nations seem unwavering in their support for the Ukraine proxy war, the people in those countries are affected by mafia-like policies and are not happy. Furthermore, America and other countries selling energy to Europe at premium prices cannot continue. The whole continent is on the verge of going dark if a hard Winter hits.

The much-awaited BRICS heads of state meeting in Russia's Kazan did not disappoint. The multilateral institution has finally brought bite and substance to many of the global financial and political conundrums that have long-challenged a genuine reshaping of the global order.

The Russian presidency of BRICS 2024 could not have chosen a more multicultural and multi-nodal site to host a summit laden with enormous expectations by the Global Majority. The southwestern Russian city of Kazan, on the banks of the Volga and Kazanka rivers, is the capital of the semi-autonomous Republic of Tatarstan, renowned for its vibrant mix of Tatar and Russian cultures.

Even though the BRICS summit took place in the Kazan Expo - a sort of multi-level station connected to the airport and the aero-express link to the city - it was the Kazan Kremlin, a centuries-old fortified citadel and World Heritage Site, that imposed itself as the global image of BRICS 2024.

That spelled out, graphically, a continuity from the 10th century onwards through Bulgar culture, the Golden Horde, and the 15th-16th-century Khanate all the way to modern Tatarstan.

The Kazan Kremlin is the last Tatar fortress in Russia with remnants of its original town planning. The global Muslim Ummah did not fail to observe that this is the northwestern limit of the spread of Islam in Russia. The minarets of the Kul Sharif mosque in the Kremlin, in fact, acquired an iconic dimension - symbolizing a collective, trans-cultural, civilization-state effort to build a more equitable and just world.

It has been an extraordinary experience to follow throughout the year how Russian diplomacy managed to successfully bring together delegations from 36 nations - 22 of them represented by heads of state - plus six international organizations, including the United Nations, for the summit in Kazan.

These delegations came from nations representing nearly half of the global GDP. The implication is that a tsunami of thousands of sanctions imposed since 2022, plus relentless yelling about Russia's "isolation," simply disappeared in the vortex of irrelevance. That contributed to the immense irritation displayed by the collective west over this remarkable gathering. Key subtext: there was not a single official presence of the Five Eyes set-up in Kazan.

The various devils, of course, remain in the various details: how BRICS - and the BRICS Outreach mechanism, housing 13 new partners - will move from the extremely polite and quite detailed Kazan Declaration - with more than 130 operational paragraphs - and several other white papers to implement a Global Majority-oriented platform ranging from collective security to widespread connectivity, non-weaponized trade settlements, and geopolitical primacy. It will be a long, winding, and thorny road.

This week's UN witchcraft is that a half a degree of global warming will kill babies and pregnant women, give us your money.

The UN COP29 meeting starting Nov 11th, fights for relevance in the shadow of the US Election, like a suckerfish under an aircraft carrier.

The latest confected attempt to get attention is to guilt trip the West — telling us that women and babies will die if we don't install enough solar panels. This is despite humans being mammals which evolved to cope with the heat and the cold. We live a more closeted, protected existence than any time in the last million years. Not many people give birth in caves these days. Indeed we're a species that inhabits towns with monthly temperatures that vary by 90 degrees Celsius and we are supposed to panic about another half a degree?

The truth is that being cold, poor and hungry increases stillbirths just as much as any heatwave, and the thing that saves babies on a hot day is an air-conditioner. The answer to all four killers thus, is cheap electricity and fossil fuels.

One day history students will study how the UN uses biblical paraphrasing to demand their tithe and control:

Miscarriages due to climate crisis a 'blind spot' in action plans - report

The report follows an ultimatum from the UN secretary general, António Guterres, on the climate emergency: "We're playing with fire, but there can be no more playing for time. We're out of time." He said global heating was supercharging monster hurricanes, bringing biblical floods and turning forests into tinderboxes, and said governments had to rapidly wean the world off its fossil fuel addiction.

Naturally, only babies that die from heat stress are politically marketable, the UN doesn't care about the ones that die from the cold:

Increasing climate extremes are causing more lost babies, premature births and cognitive damage to newborns, the report said. For example, a study in India found a doubled risk of miscarriage in pregnant women suffering heat stress, while another in California found a significant association between long-term heat exposure and stillbirth and premature birth.

Awkwardly, cold temperatures also cause stillbirths and miscarriages (Ruan et al) so if man-made climate change is warming the world, it must be saving babies too. Shh!

Since the end of WWII, there's been a campaign to criminalize the Soviet Union, its descendants and partners.

Historical revisionism began as soon as the Second World War had ended. Both the Serbs and Russians were involved in this process and allowed history to be reinterpreted in front of their eyes. We had once believed that evil wouldn't repeat itself if we acted like "gentlemen" and graciously turned a blind eye to the actions of our neighbors, compatriots, and allies during WWII. Even today, we often talk about "Nazi Germany."

But this is not true. There was no "Nazi Germany" - it was simply Germany. You won't find Wehrmacht stamps with the word "Nazism" written on them; the decisions to execute Serbs, Russians, and Jews weren't made in the offices of the Nazi Party - they were made by regular German officials; the German state was not called "Nazi Germany" but was referred to according to the Constitution and laws; and Hitler was not a "Nazi dictator" but a legitimately elected representative of the vast majority of the German people.

And so, whenever we talk about "Nazi Germany" or "fascist Italy," we allow people whose ancestors had committed those atrocities to convince us that the crimes had been committed by someone else. Seven million German soldiers fought on the Eastern Front - and how many of them were members of the Nazi Party? Seven million German citizens consciously, voluntarily, and legally killed Russians, Serbs, Jews, and the Roma, since the ruling ideology of the German state called these individuals 'subhuman' and decided that they should be annihilated.