In 2015, ISIS captured Palmyra and demanded its head of antiquities reveal where the treasures were hidden.
He was 81 years old. He refused.
Khaled al-Asaad had spent over 50 years excavating and protecting Palmyra, the caravan city that once rivalled Rome in the Syrian desert.
He learned Aramaic to read its inscriptions. He raised his children among its ruins and named his daughter Zenobia, after its rebel queen.
Before the city fell, he helped evacuate hundreds of artefacts to safety. ISIS interrogated him for weeks to find them. But he gave them nothing.
They executed him in the square and left his body among the columns he had spent his life defending.
Archaeology is not a soft profession. Sometimes the people who guard the past die for it.
I CALLED IT, ANIMALS, AND YOU LAUGHED!!! Months ago I told you ICE would buy facilities DIRECTLY from the prison companies at north of $150,000 per bed — and I was WRONG, folks, it was BETTER!!! ICE just bought TWO facilities from CoreCivic — $CXW — for $1.47 BILLION!!! That's $286,000 per bed in California City, $371,000 PER BED at Otay Mesa, $323,000 a bed COMBINED — DOUBLE what these things cost to build!!! Even I underestimated the beauty, and I NEVER underestimate!!!
AND WHO OWNS $CXW??? DONALD TRUMP!!! It's RIGHT THERE in the disclosure, folks — the man holds CoreCivic AND GEO Group, the two companies running America's ICE detention centers!!! Follow the bouncing ball: HE runs the immigration crackdown!!! HIS DHS just wired $1.47 billion to a company HE OWNS SHARES IN, at DOUBLE replacement cost!!! The buyer is his government, the seller is his portfolio, and the taxpayer is the ATM!!! That's not a conflict of interest, that's a CLOSED LOOP!!!
And the STRUCTURE is a masterpiece: DHS buys the buildings, but CoreCivic KEEPS OPERATING them under the same contracts!!! Sold the real estate, KEPT the revenue — like selling your house and the buyer pays YOU rent!!! Gain north of $1 BILLION on assets carried at PENNIES!!!
THE DE-LEVERING — exactly like I told you: $716 MILLION of debt GONE overnight!!! Credit facility, GONE!!! The 2027 notes, GONE!!! And that puts them under the covenant thresholds that unlock UNLIMITED BUYBACKS with the $400 million left over!!! Fewer shares, folks — and whose shares get more valuable??? DONALD'S!!!
AND THE SEQUEL IS COMING: CoreCivic says it's in talks with ICE to sell MORE facilities!!! The machine runs forever: sign the orders, fill the beds, sell the buildings to yourself at double price, buy back the stock, watch the disclosure GLOW!!! One catch the animals should know — ICE can cancel those operating contracts anytime, so read the covenants before you chase!!! Do your own research, NOT advice!!! Is ANYBODY looking into this??? The SEC??? He APPOINTS the SEC!!! I called the trade, the price, AND the de-levering — GREATEST prison analyst in American history, maybe ever!!!
Stuff I love about America:
1. Real freedom of speech.
2. Surprisingly rare government corruption.
3. An optimistic national attitude.
4. A justice system that tries hard to reach the right results, and generally does.
Happy to be here with y'all.
It turns out the great egg price increase that helped topple Joe Biden's presidency was <checks notes> due to an alleged conspiracy among egg producers to artificially increase prices and the coverage of that fact is a blink-and-you-miss-it story on the NYT website 🙃
American factory construction continued declining in official data released today as CHIPS Act projects finish, IRA projects get cancelled, and tariffs weigh on nearly all industries
Total US factory construction is down 30% from its 2024 highs and 20% over the last year alone
Discutiendo sobre un texto estoico escrito hace 2000 años en un rollo de papiro que quedó sepultado bajo 20 mts de lava en Herculano en 79 dC, rescatado en el s. XVIII y que finalmente podemos leer, sin abrir el rollo carbonizado, gracias a un sincrotron + machine learning
Just in case anyone was wondering about what happened with the mint, unfired Colt 1903 I inherited from my step-grandfather, Brig. Gen. Melvin Bookman:
@DavidShafer You stated that: "With verification, it is possible that we may be able to prove up to 5,000 dead people voted"
Trump said: "5000 dead people voted, minimum."
Trump knew this was not true. It was to an elected official. It was within his jurisdiction.
That is a felony.