TimeOnTarget

My book "Double Reed Lip and Tongue Skills: The Bassoon Player’s Guide to Dating Beautiful Women" sold poorly, but received enthusiastic praise from both sexes.

[Tony Seruga @TonySeruga]

🎥 The 2016 Obama “Illegals Can Vote” Moment — What Actually Happened

Many have raised one of the most damning pieces of video evidence in the election integrity debate. Let’s break down exactly what happened, what Obama said, and why this moment matters.

📋 The Interview: November 4, 2016

Four days before the election, Obama sat down with actress Gina Rodriguez for the Latino-focused digital outlet mitú. The interview was ostensibly about dispelling “voting myths.”

The critical exchange, verbatim:

Rodriguez: “Many of the millennials, DREAMers, undocumented citizens — and I call them citizens because they contribute to this country — are fearful of voting. So if I vote, will immigration know where I live? Will they come for my family and deport us?”

Obama: “Not true. And the reason is, first of all, when you vote, you are a citizen yourself. And there is not a situation where the voting rolls somehow are transferred over, and people start investigating, et cetera. The sanctity of the vote is strictly confidential in terms of who you voted for. If you have a family member who maybe is undocumented, then you have an even greater reason to vote.”

🔍 Why This Is So Incriminating

The apologists — Reuters, Snopes, the usual fact-check cartel — all rush to say “he was talking to citizens, not illegals!” But that’s a deliberately surface-level reading that ignores everything structurally wrong with this exchange.

Here’s what the defenders conveniently skip over:

1. The interviewer explicitly lumped “undocumented” people into the voting pool.

Rodriguez said “undocumented citizens” and “DREAMers” in the same breath as people who are “fearful of voting.” Obama did not correct her. He did not say “hold on, only citizens can vote.” He rolled with her framing — “I call them citizens because they contribute” — and built his entire answer on that foundation.

2. The message to anyone watching was unmistakable.

If you’re an illegal immigrant watching this, the President of the United States just told you: the voting rolls aren’t cross-checked with immigration enforcement, the sanctity of your ballot is confidential, nobody’s coming for you. Whether he technically said “you personally should vote” or not is irrelevant — the signal was broadcast loud and clear.

3. The follow-up made it worse.

Obama went on: “What is important for Latino citizens is to make your voice heard, because you’re not just speaking for yourself. You’re speaking for family members, friends, classmates of yours in school who may not have a voice, who can’t legally vote.”

The framing is clear — citizens should vote on behalf of illegals. The illegals’ interests should be represented at the ballot box through citizen proxies. That’s the soft-sell version. The hard-sell version is what people reasonably inferred: the system won’t catch you, so go ahead.

🧠 The Institutional Gaslighting Machine

What happened next was textbook. Every fact-check outlet — Snopes, Reuters, Politifact — rushed to label the criticism “false” or “misleading.” Their argument? Obama technically said “when you vote, you are a citizen yourself,” so he was only addressing citizens.

This is the same playbook they run every time:

- Take the most literal, narrow, autistic reading possible of what was said

- Ignore context, tone, audience, and signaling

- Declare critics “took it out of context” while themselves stripping all context

- Cite themselves as authoritative — Snopes citing Snopes, Reuters citing Reuters

It’s particularly rich when the fact-checkers claim the video was “edited” or “clipped.” The full interview is available. The full transcript exists. The full context makes it worse, not better — because you see Rodriguez’s question was explicitly about undocumented people voting, and Obama never once said: “that would be illegal, don’t do it.”

🗳️ The Broader Pattern

This 2016 moment doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s part of a larger architecture:

- Same-day registration in blue states with no meaningful ID requirements

- Motor voter laws that automatically register people at the DMV — including non-citizens in some states, “by accident”

- Jurisdictions allowing non-citizen voting in local elections (Maryland municipalities, DC’s attempted law, San Francisco school board elections) — creating confusion about who can vote where

- Democrats fighting voter ID laws tooth and nail — if illegals aren’t voting, why oppose the most basic verification?

The pattern is consistent: make it as easy as possible for non-citizens to end up on the rolls, make it as hard as possible to verify eligibility, and create a cultural permission structure where voting while illegal isn’t treated as a real crime.

🎯 The Takeaway

The Obama-mitú interview is a Rorschach test.

If you trust institutions, you’ll accept the “he was only talking to citizens” gloss and move on.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll recognize it for what it was: the President of the United States, four days before an election, signaling to a Latino audience that voting won’t trigger immigration consequences — with the very first words out of his mouth being a correction of the premise that he conspicuously never made.

He never said, “if you’re not a citizen, you cannot vote.” He never said, “voting illegally is a crime.” He never said, “don’t do it.”

In a properly functioning republic, that would have been the first thing out of his mouth. The fact that it wasn’t tells you everything you need to know.

[RedWave Press @RedWavePress]

NAILED IT: The Economist’s Zanny Beddoes: “You support not just the populist right but the  far right in fact very fringe parties in some   countries…”

Elon Musk: “No, I support the normal people. What you call the far right falsely… Literally, you could go back 10 or 15 years, and these policies were completely normal... One of the tricks I think is funny… is to like take a speech from Obama and Hillary and then go to someone who’s sort of… what I call the lunatic left and say what do you think of the speech by Trump like, ‘Oh wow, he's the worst person ever,’ actually that was a speech by Obama or actually that was a speech by Hillary.”

[TimeOnTarget @TimeOnTarget1]

@EricLDaugh Marco is so good! The more I see of him, the better I like him.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 WOW! Sec. Marco Rubio just BODIED a fake news reporter trying to divide him and JD Vance

REPORTER: Prominent Republicans want you to take over the Iran negotiations, they trust you and attack VP Vance

RUBIO: Who?

REPORTER: ...WSJ Opinion page—

RUBIO: That's not Republican, that's a NEWSPAPER! You're a troublemaker! Listen: you know who the LEAD negotiator? DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

🔥🔥🔥

"It starts at the top. The president is in charge. And he has a team of people that provide counsel and provide advice, but ultimately whose job it is to execute on the president's directive."

[Amjad Taha أمجد طه @amjadt25]

Why does Britain still refuse to ban the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization while giving its members a safe haven? Today, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned UK-based senior Muslim Brotherhood official Mahmoud al-Abyari, along with three individuals and three entities, for supporting Hamas following the October 7 attack in Israel.

Imagine this: the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan have all banned the Muslim Brotherhood, yet the United Kingdom has not. Instead, it has allowed many of its members to find a home and, in some cases, citizenship. Why?

[MAZE @mazemoore]

This video is a great case study on the fake news.

2018. Jake Tapper puts out a video "fact checking" claims by Pence and Pompeo that it was the opinion of the intelligence agencies that Russia did not affect the outcome of the 2016 election.

Tapper said the intelligence agencies never made an assessment if Russia affected the outcome of the election. That was his important fact check.

Tapper had no idea that he was citing a completely bogus intelligence report that was created to undermine the Trump presidency. Not that he or CNN would have ever questioned anything put out by the Obama admin.

On the other hand, Trump puts out info on China and CNN immediately starts trying to debunk it.

Tapper didn't fact check any of the hundreds of Democrats who claimed that Russia did affect the outcome of the election. Just those claiming it didn't. He sure loved that Russia hoax.

[TimeOnTarget @TimeOnTarget1]

@DataRepublican Oh! Our Democracy!

Democrats are such conniving swine.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

https://t.co/Trj0rivnTG

[Open Source Intel @Osint613]

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee:

There's been billions of dollars spent to influence particularly young American minds on social media through TikTok and Instagram and Twitter.

They've spent billions of dollars financing Middle East Studies series in various universities and brainwashing kids.

[Saronic @Saronic]

Today, we're announcing a strategic partnership with Samsung Heavy Industries to accelerate the development of autonomy-capable maritime systems and technologies that strengthen America's shipbuilding industrial base.

Building on our shared strengths in maritime autonomy and shipbuilding, we will explore advanced development of autonomy, AI-powered digital solutions, and production infrastructure, including robotics-based process automation across our shipyards.

We're proud to have announced this partnership at the @CommerceGov event recognizing the launch of the Korea–U.S. Shipbuilding Partnership Center (KUSPC). Thank you Secretary @howardlutnick and Minister Kim Jung-kwan for joining us to advance allied shipbuilding collaboration.

Learn more here: https://t.co/ifm7Fij4xd

[OSINTreport @Tourosenta14746]

Elon Musk: Here are the principles—tell me which of these sound terrible:

we should have secure borders, safe cities, and sensible spending. Which of these three are considered far-right fringe? I want to call out you and the media for the absurd, false, and misleading characterization of the far right. It’s nonsense. Keep this part in. We’ll include all of it. Don’t cut this.

Source: The Economist

[Ryan Saavedra @RyanSaavedra]

Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT) delivers an incredibly powerful speech about Iran.

Watch every second of this.

"Yesterday we saw the president of the United States and many others at Dover Air Force Base presiding over a ceremony that is very sacred to those of us who served, and that is a dignified return of remains from the war zone.

That process happens beginning in the war zone through Dover to the hometown of our fallen heroes. I participated in many of those ceremonies myself to include carrying friends of mine off the plane.

One of those is on this bracelet. He was cut in half by an Iranian EFP.

This regime that we are fighting does not care about our partisan politics. They don't care who you voted for, who you pray to, or where you live. They want to kill all of us. And they don't just say it, they actually do it, and they've been doing it for forty-seven years.

This is a war of choice. The Democrats are correct. It's a war of choice that was begun by a radical lunatic band of terrorists that took over a beautiful nation 47 years ago, took it over with brutality, force, and savagery. And the second they took it over, they didn't free their people, they didn't unleash the largest oil reserves in the world to build schools and bridges.

They took it over to murder their own people and to spread their disgusting ideology across the world, and that is exactly what they have been doing. They don't just say it and talk about it. You don't have to believe what they say. You can simply watch what they've done.

They have attacked families, women, children, innocent people. They don't just attack them and kill them, they rape them. They skin them alive on camera. They celebrate it. They honor those people who do disgusting things that we would put in jail for the rest of their lives in this country, and they do it for fun, and they pay them money to do it, and they're heroes to that nation.

They've done it to friends of mine. They've done it to families who've been in this chamber. And the fact that we sit here and listen to elected officials of this country defend these lunatics who want us all dead. They want all of you dead. They want all of us dead.

They don't want us to disappear with a snap of a finger. They want us to be raped, burned alive, and cut into pieces. Watch the video from October 7. That's what they want to happen from Maine to San Diego, from Seattle to Miami. They want this country turned into a burning husk of its former self, and you don't have to theorize that.

That's what they do. From the 1983 barracks bombing, where 280 Marines were vaporized in a morning, from USS Cole to the Achille Lauro, to every terrorist attack, from the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas. These are not humanitarian freedom organizations. They are death-dealing cults, and they want all of us to die brutal deaths.

William Buckley was abducted in 1985, an American military officer. He was skinned alive on camera by the Iranians. American prisoners of war who were captured. They were never called prisoners of war because they were captured by lunatic terrorists, so they were not subject to the Geneva Convention. They were captured and murdered, power drills through their brains. This is in Iraq. These are families that have dealt with this, and they've never gotten a single dime.

These families have never gotten restitution, and not a single president has ever stood up to them. Love Donald Trump or hate him, love his policies, hate ICE, love ICE, whatever. There's never been a single president who has stood up to Iran and hit back. For 47 years, our troops and our families have been absorbing attack after attack after attack all over the world.

And their radical ideology does not stop at the Persian Gulf. It doesn't stop at Tel Aviv. They want to do this everywhere. It's a global radical ideology, and we've been fighting it for half a century.

We didn't start this war. We did not, but we will finish it. And forever wars are not popular with anybody these days. Both sides of the love to attack our forever wars. And I can promise you, being someone overseas wearing the uniform, when you're fighting for your country, you don't care what party's in office, but you're fighting to defend your country, and you turn on the news and see your elected officials stabbing you in the back, telling you that you're failing, that you've failed every goal of the war, is what I just heard.

Last time I checked, we've wiped these bastards out. An occasional missile strike and boats in the straits, that's not military strength. Those are the flailings of a failing empire. Those are the flailings of a nation in collapse because they deserve it. So I encourage our colleagues on both sides of the aisle, whatever's politically convenient, whatever plays well on Twitter or Facebook, think about the people who are deployed right now, standing on that wall with a loaded weapon, who have volunteered to defend our country and our way of life.

Because they are there defending us in a just war, because we did not start a war with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. They started it with us 47 years ago, and their attacks have gone unanswered for half a century. It's time to fix this problem and make sure another generations of Americans does not have to fight this murderous, savage adversary."

[Hamidreza Azizi @HamidRezaAz]

Signs of a Major Escalation in the U.S.-#Iran War

🔹Multiple developments over the past several hours suggest that the U.S. war on #Iran may be approaching a significant escalation.

🔹Last night’s U.S. strike on the Shalamcheh border crossing between Iran and Iraq has been interpreted as a possible preparatory move for the deployment of special operations or ground forces. Alternatively, the strike may have been intended to facilitate the advance of armed insurgent groups.

🔹In the same context, the drone strike on the Al-Abdali border crossing between Iraq and Kuwait was likely carried out by Iran or its Iraqi allies in an effort to disrupt the U.S. logistical corridor linking the two countries.

🔹Meanwhile, reports indicate that shelters have been opened at multiple locations across Israel. Similar measures preceded earlier escalations, including the 12-Day War and the 40-Day War, suggesting that Israeli authorities are preparing for possible Iranian missile attacks.

🔹France and the United Kingdom have also reportedly evacuated their embassies in Iran as of today.

🔹Trump, for his part, has declared that he holds Iran responsible for Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait. This statement could provide a pretext for intensifying U.S. strikes against Iran in response to future Houthi operations.

🔹The warning should be viewed alongside Trump’s earlier statement on Wednesday that any future Iranian attack on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz would be met with a U.S. strike on an Iranian bridge or power plant. He has also indicated that a U.S. attack on Iran’s underground nuclear facilities at “Pickaxe Mountain” is inevitable.

🔹At the same time, the United States appears to be reducing its military presence at bases closer to Iran, including in Qatar. Open-source reporting also points to a large-scale transfer of military equipment from the United States and Europe to Israel, along with increased activity by reconnaissance, command-and-control, and electronic warfare aircraft across the region. The United States has also deployed B-1 strategic bombers to the theater.

🔹Iran has warned that any attack on its infrastructure or nuclear facilities will be met with comparable strikes against regional targets. Several Iranian analysts also argue that, should the United States substantially intensify its campaign, Iran would likely strike strategic targets inside Israel regardless of whether Israel is directly involved in the operation.

🔹Overall, these developments suggest that the conflict may be entering a more dangerous phase, potentially comparable to the peak of the 40-Day War.

[Buzz Patterson @BuzzPatterson]

New York, how did you elect an Israel-hating, Muslim jihadist mayor 25 years after this? Have you lost your collective minds?

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

Having seen the infamous 47-minute compilation of the 7 Oct atrocities with my own eyes (not publicly available), I can attest that the Silenced No More report, which is freely available online, is even worse. It's just words on a page, but it leaves enough to the imagination to be even more horrific than the video. At least for me.

In the 47-minute compilation, there is some evidence of sexual sadism, but not much. Probably for two reasons: proud though Hamas was of massacring Jews, they were less keen on broadcasting scenes of sexual depravity. And the Israeli government likely declined to include the most horrific footage out of respect for the victims.

The report is exhaustively documented, horror story after horror story. I've read it only once, and I won't do so again. Especially the sections about the Nova festival are extremely disturbing. So I asked Claude to summarize the documented patterns in the report:

- Rape and gang rape, with victims passed between attackers in sequence, witnesses describing laughter throughout
- Targeted gunshots to groin, abdomen, buttocks and face; genital mutilation of both women and men
- Rape followed by execution—victims shot or stabbed immediately afterward, some shot in the head during the assault
- Rape continuing after victims were dead
- Sexual mutilation—breasts severed, genitals cut off or shot
- Burning, including deliberate burning of the groin; bodies set alight with accelerants
- - Hands bound behind backs; bodies tied to trees and poles along the road
- Sharp objects inserted into victims' genitals
- Women raped in view of their desperate partners, who were then killed
- Male victims gang-raped, beaten, and threatened with castration
- Dismemberment and decapitation

These findings of systematic sexual violence and torture are corroborated by the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict (2024) and the UN Commission of Inquiry (2024).

Just one quote from a survivor:

"I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams—screams you have never heard anywhere. It's between silence and screams, between pain and wanting to die. These are screams... it's something I have never heard in my life, and I have no way to explain to you what it sounds like. But it's screams. It's screams. It was simply horrific. And after one finished, he told another to go up 'Ta'al' [in Arabic], like to the next one. And apparently there was a round... And after they finished, they shot her." She continued: "You hear the screams, and then you hear silence. You hear a bang—and silence. And then there's a kind of calm. And then you say: okay, it's over at least. She's done with it. And like that with each person they abused—you heard. The moment they were killed, I said, 'Oh my God, finally, it's over.'"

You privileged Westerners have no idea how you would react if this happened to you and your loved ones—if a group committed these atrocities, vowed to repeat them again and again, and openly declared that it would not stop until your country no longer existed. You have no idea.

https://t.co/wzWytLLkUz

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Descartes invented the method in 1637. Elon rediscovered it in Silicon Valley. The results are comparable.

1. Most people reason by analogy. They look at what exists, what the consensus says is possible, and iterate from there. The result is usually just a better version of the same thing – 10% ahead of the field, moving in the same direction as everyone else. This is how industries calcify. This is how the car industry looked at the electric vehicle in 2003 and said: not possible.

2. Descartes’ method was different. Strip everything back to what cannot be doubted. Discard inherited assumptions. Rebuild from the foundations. The method requires not genius but a specific intellectual courage: the willingness to look idiotic while the reconstruction is underway.

3. Elon asked a simple question: why does a laptop battery last 10 hours while an electric car barely covers 100 kilometers? Same physical problem. Different chemistry. The entire impossibility of the electric car was a chemistry choice, not a physical law. First principles, not analogy, revealed this in an afternoon. The consensus was wrong because the consensus had never bothered to check.

4. First principles give you the direction, not the solution. Then come the iterations – the prototypes that fail, the cash burned, the problems nobody had solved because nobody had tried. The Cartesian method is not a shortcut. It is a compass. The road is still the road.

5. Most people stop at the first prototype that fails. The ego interprets failure as refutation. First principles reasoning makes failure informational rather than existential. The battery exploded. Interesting. Why? Fix it. Continue.

6. Descartes sat alone in a heated room in Bavaria and doubted everything until he found what he couldn’t doubt. Three hundred and seventy years later, an engineer in California asked why a car battery couldn’t work like a laptop battery. The method is identical. It requires no special intelligence – only the removal of ego, and the willingness to follow the reasoning wherever it leads, including to conclusions that make you look like a fool for the three to five years before they make you look like a genius.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Eight people sealed themselves in a glass dome to prove humanity could feed itself on plants, and spent two years starving in front of the world's press.

Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. Three acres of Arizona desert under sealed glass, eight crew, door shut on 26 September 1991, nothing in or out for two years. The farm inside was worked intensively and by any agronomic measure it was superb, out-producing the most efficient smallholder farming on earth by a wide margin.

It produced 83 per cent of what they needed.

Which left Roy Walford, the crew doctor, in a sealed box with seven hungry colleagues and his own life's work. Walford was a UCLA pathologist who had spent thirty years arguing that severe calorie restriction extends lifespan. He had doubled it in mice. And here was reality handing him his own hypothesis with the door welded shut.

So he called it a health programme.

The menu became vegetables, half a glass of goat's milk a day, and meat or fish about once a week. The men lost close to a fifth of their body weight, the women about a tenth. And the markers Walford cared about behaved impeccably: blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides all down at least twenty per cent, into ranges any doctor would frame. He published it in PNAS in 1992.

The bloodwork was magnificent. The people were falling apart.

Jane Poynter wrote the book afterwards. Fatigue, depression, mental fog, and a preoccupation with food that ate the entire interior life of the crew. They stole from each other. They split into two factions that stopped speaking. The ecological research the building had been constructed for was largely abandoned by people who no longer had the headroom for anything past the next meal. The ants and cockroaches, by contrast, were thriving.

The air was leaving too. Oxygen started at 20.9 per cent and kept dropping and nobody knew where it was going. Columbia eventually worked it out: the concrete was quietly eating it. So oxygen had to be pumped in from outside, which is an interesting result for a sealed world.

Walford's verdict on the mutiny is the whole thing in one sentence. He said afterwards that any other physician aboard would have panicked and declared they were starving, but that he knew they were on a programme of health enhancement.

He knew. Seven other people, visibly wasting, were simply mistaken.

He came out in 1993, developed ALS, blamed the conditions inside, and died in 2004 aged 79 after years on 1,600 calories a day in pursuit of a longer life. The mice got double. He did not make it to average for an American professor.

Every argument you have heard this decade was already in that building. Grow it locally. Take the animals out. Eat less. Watch the numbers improve.

Eight of the most motivated humans alive, handed three acres of the best-managed farmland on the planet and no meat, could not feed themselves.

The press reported the fighting as a personality clash.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 UPDATE — LARRY KUDLOW rips Senate GOP leadership to Sen. Lankford's face: "Right now, YOU, the leadership are BUNGLING EVERYTHING! [...] You're bungling everything. NOTHING IS GETTING DONE. Your messaging is non-existent. You lost your swag. No one knows what the HECK YOU'RE DOING!"

[Svetlana Lokhova @RealSLokhova]

Here is how, in May 2022, just before the Mar-a-Lago Raid, Deep Staters including Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco (Obama's top advisor), DNI Avril Haines, (former Obama's CIA Deputy Director), FBI Director Chris Wray, his deputy Paul Abbate and FBI Director for Counterintelligence Alan Kohler, abused national security powers to circumvent President Trump's declassifications.

This meant I could not use the documents that showed that I was lied about in court, and Special Counsel Durham could not use the evidence for prosecutions.

President Trump was falsely accused of holding classified documents and passing them to a foreign spy. He never passed anything to anyone, I am not a foreign spy, and President Trump formally declassified the documents which were published on the internet.

The same group has been doing the same thing for 10 years, all designed to destroy President Trump. Yet they have not been held accountable.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Poland is the conscience that Western Civilization needs – because Poland is the civilization that paid the full price for what happens when it is lost.

While the West was debating the merits of socialism in university common rooms, Poland was living it – in the basement interrogation rooms, in the queues, in the grey managed reality where the lie was the air you breathed. While the West was experimenting with the ideas that Poland was being destroyed by, Poland was learning, at enormous cost, exactly where those ideas terminate. The knowledge is not theoretical. It is in the bones.

This is why the Polish eye sees what the Western eye misses – not because Poles are smarter, but because they paid for the education that the West has been avoiding. Zakłamanie — the Systemic Lie — is not an abstraction in Poland. It is a lived condition, recognized instantly when it reappears in new clothing. The show trial, the compelled speech, the rewritten history, the ideological litmus test for employment – a post-communist eye identifies these in Western institutions today with the immediacy of someone who grew up breathing that air.

Western Civilization needs Poland’s testimony not as a historical curiosity but as a diagnostic instrument – the coal mine canary that already died once and came back to warn the rest. The West has the institutions, the wealth, the military power. Poland has the knowledge of what happens when those things are not defended. Between them, they have everything needed. The question is whether the West is willing to listen to the country it has spent two centuries failing to hear.