Trump signs $70B bill to fund Homeland Security Dept. through 2028

From Yahoo.com:

June 10 (UPI) -- President Donald Trump signed a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security's immigration enforcement agencies through 2028 after months of battles to prevent it from happening.

"This morning I'm thrilled to sign the Secure America Act to immediately and fully fund the Department of Homeland Security through the end of my term, so we won't have to be talking about it anymore," the president said in the Oval Office.

The Senate passed the $70 billion funding package on Friday, and the House approved it on Tuesday.

Democrats fought the funding for months, refusing to agree to the bill unless there were reforms to the organization after two American citizens -- Renee Good and Alex Pretti -- were killed by federal agents in Minneapolis earlier this year. But the measure was passed via reconciliation, which only requires a majority vote instead of 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

"We'll give the heroes of ICE and Border Patrol -- and that's what they are, they're heroes, what they have to go through to keep us safe -- the support and resources they need to defend our borders, protect our homeland and to keep America safe," the president added He also gave House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., credit for passing the bill with a slim majority in the House.

"Despite Democrat efforts to shut down ICE and Border Patrol, Republicans have now fully funded these agencies through President Trump's entire second term to the tune of nearly $70 billion," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in a statement. "Thanks to President Trump, our border has gone from its weakest point to its most secure point in less than two years." [source]

Good. Now, if the Senate can get its act together and pass the SAVE bill so President Trump can sign that into law.

Trump Admin Ends Biden’s Organ-Transplant-By-Race Policy

From The Federalist.com (June 3):

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) ended a Biden administration policy that required racial considerations be made to determine who was eligible to get a kidney transplant.

CMS published a final rule Monday governing the Increasing Organ Transplant Access (IOTA) Model, a mandatory, six-year program that ostensibly sought to “increase access to kidney transplants for patients with end-stage renal disease.” However, the Biden rule, which took effect July 1, 2025, also required participating hospitals to consider race, ethnicity, and “equity” in the decision-making process for allocating organs to patients.

“CMS also wants to reiterate that allocation and transplantation decisions should be made based on objective and measurable medical criteria through the framework set up by the [Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network] OPTN … and should not be made on the basis of race or other criteria not laid out by the goals described in this section of the [Code of Federal Regulations],” the Trump CMS final rule, set to take effect July 1, 2026, states.

The rule came in response to public comment made by America First Legal (AFL) and others arguing that “transplant allocation decisions should remain grounded in objective medical criteria,” the rule states.

As AFL pointed out, the Biden rule encouraged transplant hospitals to “identify disparities among racial and demographic groups, develop Health Equity Plans, conduct resource gap analyses, establish equity-focused goals, and implement targeted interventions designed to preference selected populations.”

The Biden CMS said that “Health Equity Plans,” which were meant to determine areas where hospitals were not meeting its equity goals and then recommend remedial action, were “voluntary,” but AFL stated that they were actually embedded into the IOTA Model.

“The Biden Administration designed the IOTA Model to advance its broader equity agenda within the nation’s organ transplant system,” AFL attorney Megan Redshaw said in a press release. “Life-saving transplant decisions should be guided by medical criteria and clinical urgency — not race. We applaud CMS for removing this framework and restoring a transplant system grounded in medical need and clinical urgency.”

The Biden IOTA Model also sought to fast-track transplants and increase their raw number by paying hospitals to do more, while penalizing hospitals that are not performing to their specifications.

“Tying institutional revenue to transplant counts encourages aggressive procurement and transplant practices in a system already marred by ethical failures, oversight breakdowns, and documented patient-safety concerns,” AFL stated.

The Biden rule was an outgrowth of an executive order — “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government” — that claimed the “unbearable human costs of systemic racism” and forced government programs to have non-white racial preferences for program allocation across numerous initiatives, including in business, federal contracting, housing, health care, and much more.

The Biden administration even went as far as to suggest the necessity of “racial concordance” between health care workers and patients. “Racial concordance” is the theory that health outcomes are worse when the race of the doctor is different than the race of the patient, and that therefore patients should be race-matched with a doctor. It is also an artificial way of shoehorning tacit racial quotas into the medical profession, which was the goal of the Biden administration and many medical schools. [source]

Good!  Glad that Marxist policy was ended. Should have never started to begin with.

The Robot That Beat Iran To Two American Pilots

From Daily Wire.com (June 9):

An AI-powered U.S. Navy drone boat played a key role in rescuing the crew of a downed American Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, marking what military officials say is the first real-world rescue operation involving an unmanned surface vessel.

After the helicopter went down, the two American crew members remained stranded in the waters off Oman for nearly two hours as the U.S. military rushed to reach them before Iranian forces could.

On Tuesday, President Trump revealed that Iranian forces had shot down the aircraft and vowed that the United States would respond.

“I have just been informed by our Great Military that last night the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache Helicopters while patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump said on Truth Social. “There were two pilots involved, both are safe and uninjured. Nevertheless, the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack.”

The unmanned vessel responsible for rescuing the crew is a Saronic Corsair, Capt. Tim Hawkins, spokesman for U.S. Central Command, told the Wall Street Journal.

“When it comes to search and rescue, you utilize the best asset that is the closest and the quickest, and that was the case in this instance,” Hawkins said.

The drone boat transported the soldiers to a safer location at sea, where they were later hoisted aboard a helicopter and evacuated to receive medical care. Both are in stable condition, according to Hawkins.

While such sea drones have been used in exercises, they have not been used in real-life, he added.

The vessel, which was deployed to CENTCOM in March shortly after the conflict with Iran began, is operated by the Navy’s Task Force 59, which has evolved rapidly since its creation in 2021.

The unit specializes in integrating artificial intelligence and autonomous systems into real-world maritime operations and has already tested more than 23 different unmanned platforms across the Middle East.

According to the Journal, Ukraine has used these types of vessels to target Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

The incident comes just days after Iran struck Israel with at least 24 missiles for the first time since the ceasefire went into place about two months ago. In response, Israel fired back before both sides agreed to halt attacks at Trump’s request. [source]

Nice.  Cool American tech.

Islamic extremists disguised as military separated Christians from crowed, slit their throats: bishop

From Christian Post.com (Oct. 7, 2022):

Suspected Islamic extremists disguised in military uniform gathered a crowd of people in Mozambique’s Nampula province, then separated the Christians from the group and tied their hands before slitting their throats, a Catholic bishop said.

Bishop Alberto Vera Aréjula of Nacala told the Catholic group Aid to the Church in Need this week about the killings that occurred last month as was told to him by one of the Christian survivors who managed to flee.

The survivor told the bishop that the terrorists were dressed in military uniform and they gathered people saying they were there to save them.

“When they were all gathered, they started asking who is Muslim and who is Christian. Those who identified as Christian, they started tying their hands behind their back and they cut their throats,” the bishop was quoted as saying.

The bishop said the killings took place on the night of Sept. 6 and the following day, and that “11 people were murdered in total and they left a trail of destruction and a lot of fear.”

On Sept. 6, an 83-year-old Italian nun, Sister Maria de Coppi, was killed in Chipene city when gunmen stormed a Catholic mission compound and set fire to buildings, including the church and hospital, according to reports.

The attack lasted five hours as the militants ransacked and burned the Diocese of Nacala’s mission church, school, health center, dwellings, library and vehicles, Aid to the Church in Need reported earlier.

Aréjula said he knew the nun, “and she was the image of a mother, she was really helping everyone with simple love and humility.”

“Sister Maria de Coppi was a nurse who would help malnourished children in a little room where there was milk and flour, and they destroyed that room as well.

According to reports, the gunmen were likely running away from security forces from Mozambique, Rwanda and the Southern African Development Community.

At least 24 countries have sent troops to support the fight against insurgents in Mozambique, whose army has been accused of being corrupt and having 7,000 “ghost soldiers,” according to the BBC.

Islamic State-affiliated insurgents in northern Mozambique, a Christian-majority country, have internally displaced more than three-quarters of a million people, according to the United Nations.

In the coastal province of Cabo Delgado, Islamic extremists have been exploiting the crisis after a civil war started in 2017. The area is rich with gas, rubies, graphite, gold and other natural resources. Protesters demonstrated at the time against what they say is profits going to an elite in the ruling Frelimo Party, with few jobs for local residents.

“In 2017, jihadist insurgents began in the Cabo-Delgado province, winning over some locals due to the fact that they gave back resources to villagers from the government and killed no one,” the U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern reported earlier. “This did not last, however, as IS started setting fire to Christian villages, and killing those who lived there.”

Cabo Delgado is a mostly Muslim region where at least 300 Christians have been killed for their faith, according to ICC. There have also been over 100 attacks on churches in the area.

In March 2021, the United States labeled Islamic State-Mozambique as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists.” ISIS-Mozambique is also known as Ansar al-Sunna and known locally as al-Shabaab. The group reportedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State as early as April 2018 and has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians.

In November 2020, Islamic State-linked militants beheaded over 50 people, including women and children, and abducted others in weekend raids in the Miudumbe and Macomia districts of the Cabo Delgado province.

Last December, Human Rights Watch revealed that insurgents had enslaved more than 600 women and girls, many of which had been abused and sold as sex slaves for as low as $600. [source]

Pure intentional evil.

Malcolm McLean: The Unsung Capitalist Hero Who Changed the World One Container at a Time

From Mises.org (Aug. 25, 2022):

Ask the average person what they believe to be the most economically important innovation of the twentieth century, and they’ll probably point to the internet. The internet has certainly disproved Paul Krugman’s prediction that it would have no greater impact on the economy than the fax machine, but even this transformative technology may only warrant a silver medal when compared to something much more banal: the intermodal shipping container.

The shipping container was the brainchild of Malcolm McLean. A twentieth-century rags-to-riches story, McLean began his foray into the transportation business with only a high school education. Working as a gas station clerk, he’d saved up $120 to purchase a used truck by age twenty-one, and in 1944, he founded his first company, McLean Trucking. In the booming postwar economy, McLean was able to expand his business in an increasingly integrated global economy.

McLean’s business primarily involved shipping freight to and from ports for overseas exchange, and he was bothered by a transportation bottleneck that had impeded foreign exchange since the ancient world: every piece of freight had to be unloaded from the truck and reloaded onto ships, dramatically increasing the overall cost of long-distance trade.

McLean had the idea to simply ship the truck itself, but this traded the freight-transfer bottleneck for an inefficient use of space. McLean’s next idea was to load only the truck’s container.

Unfortunately, the Interstate Commerce Commission stood in his way. McLean owned a trucking business, and federal regulations would not allow somebody to own both a trucking and shipping company. McClean sold his trucking company in 1955, which by then had grown to 1,770 trucks, for $25 million dollars.

With the capital he received from the sale of his company, he secured a loan for $22 million and purchased a pair of World War II tanker ships to carry his patented containers, which he designed to stack on top of each other for overseas transportation. The containers could easily be transferred to eighteen-wheelers or railroad cars. By the 1960s, McLean’s new venture was turning a profit, and shipping costs were dropping rapidly. In 1969, he sold his company for $530 million, which he reinvested in further ventures to improve containerization. By the end of the 1970s, he owned a fleet of forty-four hundred container ships.

McLean also realized that his business did not depend on the monopoly protection of his design, so he released the patent for his container to the International Organization for Standardization, royalty-free. He understood that holding jealously to his patent would only slow trucking, railroad, and shipping companies’ adoption of his technology, and he had nothing to fear from competition.

The effects of McLean’s innovation are hard to capture in mere numbers, as it helped entire economies—such as Singapore and Hong Kong—leapt from preindustrial to modern seemingly overnight (coupled, of course, with the freest markets in the world, as even the most transformative technology cannot overcome the barriers imposed by a controlling state).

McLean received his flowers in the business community, taking his place in the Forbes Business Hall of Fame in 1982. But he remains largely an obscure figure, despite being perhaps the single most important force behind the explosive growth in global wealth of the second half of the twentieth century. Thanks to McLean’s seemingly simple idea, the cost of loading a ship fell from nearly $6 per ton in 1956 to only 16 cents by 2006 (adjusted for inflation, that would be a reduction from nearly $60 to roughly a quarter)!

McLean is the unsung hero of containerization, the revolutionary economic change that, as Marc Levinson put in the subtitle of his book The Box, “made the world smaller and the world economy bigger.” [source]

American innovation at its best.

'Tired' brain cells may distort your sense of time

From Live Science.com (Sept. 28, 2020):

Time in the brain doesn't follow the steady ticking of the world's most precise clocks. Instead, it seems to fly by at one moment and practically stand still at others. This distorted sense of time may be caused, in part, by brain cells getting tired, according to a new study.

When the brain has been exposed to the same exact time interval too many times, neurons or brain cells get overstimulated and fire less often, the study finds. However, our perception of time is complicated, and many other factors may also explain why time moves slowly sometimes and quickly at others.

We have only very recently begun to understand how our brains perceive time. It was only in 2015, that researchers found the first evidence of neurons whose activity fluctuates with our perception of time. But it wasn't clear if these neurons, found in a small brain region called the supramarginal gyrus (SMG), were keeping accurate time for the brain, or creating a subjective experience of time.

In the new study, the researchers used a "time illusion" on 18 healthy volunteers to figure it out. They hooked participants up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine that measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.

The volunteers then went through an "adaptation" period, in which they were shown a grey circle on a black background for either 250 milliseconds or 750 milliseconds, 30 times in a row.

After this, the participants were shown another circle for a set period of time as a "test stimulus." They were then told to listen to white noise for a certain amount of time and asked if the test stimulus was longer or shorter than the white noise. (They used white noise as a reference because an auditory stimulus isn't affected by the visual adaptation but the visual test stimulus is.) [read more]

So, if someone is late to an appointment or meeting can they use that as an excuse? You know, “Sorry, I’m late. My brain cells might have been tired.” Probably not. Also, I wonder if tired neurons possibly could effect other senses too. So, do they eventually go to sleep? May explain Sen. Mitch McConnell’s brain freezes. Good thing he is retiring.

IRS Chief: I Didn't Retaliate Against Hunter Biden Probe Whistleblowers—It Was the DOJ

From Bob Hoge on Red State.com (May 23, 2023):

In response to the whistleblowers who alleged that the IRS gave preferential treatment to first son Hunter Biden being abruptly taken off the case last week in what appeared to be an obvious retaliatory move, Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Daniel Werfel said that it wasn’t his call.

Instead, it was the Department of Justice.

No surprise there, considering we’re living under probably the most politicized DOJ in our history, one that routinely applies two different standards depending on which side of the political aisle someone stands on.

In a letter to the House Ways and Means Committee dated May 17 and obtained by Fox News, the commissioner explains what went down:

“I want to state unequivocally that I have not intervened—and will not intervene—in any way that would impact the status of any whistleblower,” Werfel said.

“The IRS whistleblower you reference alleges that the change in their work assignment came at the direction of the Department of Justice. As a general matter and not in reference to any specific case, I believe it is important to emphasize that in any matter involving federal judicial proceedings, the IRS follows the direction of the Justice Department.” [Bolding mine.]

I love that phrase, “change in work assignment.” We know that means the whistleblower was punished and given some junk job like mopping the closets. Werfel proceeded to use the tactic that it seems all agency heads who appear before Congress use. Namely, cite the desperate need for secrecy:

“When I first learned of the allegations of retaliation referenced in your letter and in media reports on May 16, 2023, I contacted the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). In light of laws and policies designed to protect the integrity of pending proceedings, I am unable to provide details on this matter,” Werfel wrote.

As Red State‘s Bonchie reported last week, a whistleblower claimed that the entire IRS team working on the Hunter Biden probe was removed from the case. The whistleblower’s attorneys formally alleged that the move was “clearly retaliatory” in a letter to Congress soon after.

n an April 27 appearance before the committee, the commissioner said “I can say without any hesitation there will be no retaliation for anyone making an allegation or a call to a whistleblower hotline.”

That didn’t age well.

As I reported in April, an IRS watchdog turned whistleblower alleged that federal prosecutors engaged in “preferential treatment and politics” in their treatment of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter—and even tried to block criminal tax charges against him. On Monday, a second whistleblower was revealed who worked under the original informant and who backed his claims. He was immediately threatened with prosecution from IRS brass. Meanwhile, there are multiple whistleblowers over at the FBI alleging corruption within its ranks.

It’s apparent that Attorney General Merrick Garland and the DOJ aren’t even bothering to pretend anymore that their raison d’être is to pursue equal justice for all. They—the very people in charge of upholding the law—think they’re above it. [source]

Makes sense. The stooge Attorney General Merrick Garland is Crooked Joe's John Mitchell.