News Vérité

The Pentagon, aka the Department of War, aka the Department of Defense, is recruiting corporate executives to the tune of $400,000 annually to help it fund the underbelly of the nation’s defense readiness through a multibillion-dollar loan program. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) is hiring savvy professionals to support its $400 billion lending program, ensuring the nation has the strategic infrastructure for all its military needs. Instead of providing grants, OSC is giving out loans for everything from mineral mining to missile production — and more. Started under Joe Biden with a much smaller budget, OSC is now overseen by Under Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, who himself hails from an executive-suite background with Cerberus Capital Management, a private-equity firm. Feinberg has already hired 30 former corporate executives and plans to add 40 more. “These are people, many of whom have taken seven-figure pay cuts to do this,” OSC Director David Lorch, also formerly with Cerberus, told the Wall Street Journal. He said the deals involve “highly complex, multibillion-dollar transactions that require the deep transactional expertise that’s only found in the private sector.” Loans so far total $5 billion this year, with another $14 billion ready to go. The goal

Turnabout is fair play, as they (whoever they are) like to say, so it wasn’t too surprising tonight that President Trump basically credited Joe Biden’s election as president to Chinese election interference. This follows the 2016 Democrat mantra that Russian election manipulation got Donald “Hitler” Trump elected. Which Trump cleverly labeled  — and dismissed — as the “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax. Trump took to the airways tonight to lay out his case for Chinese involvement in our election process, but never came out and proclaimed that Xi Jinping et al. got Biden his White House throne. “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost,” he said. He even suggested that no third-world country would tolerate the election vulnerabilities that we do. Except for rigging them outright, I guess. The president, in his talk, referred everyone to the WhiteHouse.gov website, which he said contains documents proving not only Chinese interference but also U.S. Swamp complicity and cover-up. I looked and the site does contain documents under four categories: election vulnerabilities, Chinese exploitation of voter info, Michigan election irregularities, and noncitizen voter registrations. The files are in zip format, however, and

After two fatal shootings involving suspects in cars driving away to elude capture, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are now being ordered not to chase or stop illegals in their moving vehicles. Most ICE apprehensions begin by searching the suspected alien’s residence, but the illegals, sensing or seeing their approach, often just hop in their cars and speed away. So the new policy represents a major shift — and hurdle — for field agents. In the past, ICE agents would stop or pursue the vehicles to apprehend for deportation any illegal they found. Now, what? Follow their vehicles and hope they run out of gas first? The policy shift comes on the heels of two incidents of aliens trying to flee in their vehicles when agents came to their location to apprehend them. One incident happened last week in Houston, and just this week, a similar shooting of a fleeing alien took place in Biddeford, Maine. The Wall Street Journal attempted to verify the policy shift but got only a vague response from a department official:  “We are always evaluating our procedures to keep our officers safe and criminals off our streets.” The new policy, when agents are

“Go West, Young Man” was a rallying cry by newspaper editor Horace Greeley for America to achieve its manifest destiny and build farms and communities in the nation’s then-vast unoccupied areas. Now, many of the farms spawned by that rallying cry are being gobbled up by developers of data centers. Data centers also require lots of electricity and water, so remaining farmlands can run dry and out of wattage. The American Farm Bureau Federation is sounding the alarm that this trend is not only threatening the livelihood of farms, but also of the very supply of agricultural products upon which the nation depends/According to its website: “Farmland is the foundation of agricultural production and a generational asset for farm families. Once converted to industrial use, it is rarely returned to production. In regions experiencing rapid development, the cumulative loss of prime farmland is a growing concern.” Modern agriculture heavily relies on the digital economy—using precision ag, GPS, and cloud-based data to optimize crop yields. However, farmers are increasingly asking if the digital infrastructure meant to optimize their future is actively swallowing up the land and water needed to sustain it. The data center threat is moving some areas to enact