Not “tone deaf”, deliberate

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Mamdani Draws Outrage by Signing 9/11 Order — Then Giving Pen to Worst Possible Person

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order honoring the victims of 9/11 on Friday.

Then he handed the ceremonial pen to a lawyer who once represented an al-Qaeda terrorist.

The surreal ceremony unfolded at City Hall just one week before the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. 

Mamdani gathered senior administration officials to sign two executive orders related to the tragedy. 

The first “order” establishes September 11 as an official New York City “Day of Remembrance and Service,” complete with a citywide moment of silence honoring those killed in the attacks and those who later died from 9/11-related illnesses. 

The second updates the city's emergency preparedness and continuity plans.

… After Mamdani finished signing the documents, he handed the ceremonial pen to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and quietly instructed her, “Can you pass this?”

Tisch then gave the pen to Mamdani's chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem.

Kassem isn't an innocuous City Hall attorney. Before joining the Mamdani administration, Kassem spent years representing detainees at Guantánamo Bay and litigating national-security cases. 

His former clients included Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi al-Qaeda member who pleaded guilty before a military commission to terrorism charges arising from the 2002 bombing of the French oil tanker MV Limburg off Yemen.

And al-Darbi had a sinister connection to September 11: his sister was married to Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the five hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon.

So, naturally, this was the man who ended up with the ceremonial pen used at the mayor's 9/11 commemoration.

Video of the event shows Kassem grinning as he accepted the pen.

We all know exactly what it is. It's a couple of Islamist fellow-travelers sharing a private joke at the expense of gullible Americans.

The moment immediately drew fury from some 9/11 families and New York City officials.

“It’s bulls–t,” Dennis Warchola, whose firefighter brother Michael was killed in the North Tower, told the New York Post.

“How can you defend a guy like that who wants to do Americans or any innocent person harm?”

Republican Queens Councilwoman Joann Ariola called the episode “breathtakingly tone-deaf and disrespectful.”

“The families who lost loved ones on 9/11 have every right to be outraged,” Ariola told the Post. “On the 25th anniversary, City Hall should be honoring their sacrifice with dignity, not forcing those families to endure yet another insult.”

I’m with the professor:

Retired NYPD detective and John Jay College adjunct professor Michael Alazar went further, telling the Post he believed the gesture was intentional.

“It was calculated,” Alazar said.

“It happened during a ceremony meant to be about the victims, and no one else,” he added. “9/11 families didn’t come to City Hall to watch Mamdani spotlight someone whose work intersects with the very ideology that took their loved ones.”

The sequence was made stranger by the fact that Kassem is the mayor's chief counsel.

Kassem is also a prominent attorney and CUNY School of Law professor who founded the school's CLEAR clinic. According to CUNY, he and his students have represented 15 Guantánamo prisoners, and his litigation has included national-security, wartime-detention and war-crimes cases. 

And, surprise!

He also served as a senior policy adviser in the Biden White House from 2022 to 2024 before being tapped as Mamdani's chief counsel.

Judges vs America

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Convicted of murder in El Salvador, illegally entered U.S., convicted of machete assault on homeless man in Monterey in 2023, released, found and seized by ICE in San Diego in 2026, judge rules that he can’t be detained until he has his day before an Immigration judge – average wait, 4 years.

Machete-wielding MS-13 gangster wanted for murder walks free after Biden-appointed judge releases him: DHS

An MS-13 gang member convicted in a savage execution-style murder is out of federal custody in California after a federal judge ordered his immediate release, igniting fury from the Trump administration.

U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta ordered the release of David Antonio Aviles Perez, 35, aka "the witch," after finding that immigration officials held him for five months without giving him a bond hearing or determining whether he posed a danger to the public or a flight risk.

"This is now the SECOND time this dangerous illegal has been released back onto the streets in California," he added. "Because sanctuary politicians want to play politics from the bench, innocent Americans are in danger."

The case centers on a brutal 2014 gang killing in El Salvador and a legal fight over the Trump administration’s authority to detain immigrants while removal proceedings unfold.

Alvise Perez, identified by Salvadoran prosecutors as an active MS-13 member also known as "La Bruja," or "The Witch," was convicted while outside El Salvador in December 2025 and sentenced to 20 years in prison for aggravated murder.

Prosecutors said Aviles Perez and another MS-13 member chased a man through a mountainous area in La Unión before fellow gang members forced the victim to stop and kneel.

The victim was held by the shoulders as Aviles Perez and his accomplice approached, prosecutors said.

The gang members then shot the man in the chest, back and face before fleeing. Both defendants were tried and convicted while outside the country.

Aviles Perez entered the U.S. at an unknown date and location, according to DHS.

He was arrested in Monterey, California, in 2023, after allegedly swinging a machete at a homeless man at Laguna Grande Park near Monterey State Beach. He allegedly hid the weapon before officers recovered it from a nearby Holiday Inn parking lot.

Aviles Perez was charged and convicted after the incident but later released from custody. DHS blamed California’s sanctuary policies, which limit cooperation between local authorities and federal immigration officials.

ICE agents arrested him again in San Diego on March 26 and took him into custody pending his removal to El Salvador.

He was held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center pending removal to El Salvador until Ohta ordered his immediate release Aug. 26, federal court records show.

After nearly five months in immigration custody, Aviles Perez filed a petition challenging his detention and seeking his immediate release.

Ohta ruled that immigration officials violated his Fifth Amendment due process rights by holding him without an individualized assessment of whether he was dangerous or likely to flee.

"Although Petitioner appears to have previously been convicted following a fight with another individual in May 2023, the government has offered no evidence that it detained him after considering those facts and making an individualized determination of his danger to the public or flight risk," Ohta wrote.

Ohta ordered his immediate release and barred ICE from detaining him again unless an immigration judge first holds a bond hearing and determines that renewed detention is warranted.

…. The ruling did not clear Aviles Perez of wrongdoing or find that he posed no danger. It focused on whether immigration officials followed the required process to justify keeping him detained.

…President Joe Biden nominated Ohta to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in September 2021. The Senate confirmed her that December, and her judicial commission was issued later that month, according to the Federal Judicial Center.

Very much related to the preceding post

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Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century. Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who invented the long march through the institutions. Everything that followed — the Frankfurt School, the Fabian Society’s operational model, the WEF formation pipeline, the captured university, the HR department enforcing approved speech — is downstream of what he wrote in a prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, in code, between 1929 and 1935. 1. His central question: why hasn’t it happened? The working class was supposed to rise. The contradictions of capitalism were supposed to produce the revolution. They hadn’t – not in the West. Gramsci’s answer was precise and devastating: because the ruling class does not maintain power through force alone. It maintains power through cultural hegemony – the control of the ideas, values, and frameworks through which people understand the world. The worker who accepts that the existing order is simply how things are will not revolt, regardless of his material conditions. The revolution requires cultural change first.

2. The instrument was the long march through the institutions. Not the barricade. The school, the university, the media, the judiciary, the civil service, the cultural establishment – every institution through which a civilization transmits its values to the next generation. Capture these, fill them with people who share the counter-hegemonic project, and the cultural assumptions that maintain the existing order gradually dissolve. No barricades. No visible moment of rupture. Just the slow replacement of one cultural hegemony with another.

3. The educational capture was the masterpiece. Control the curriculum and you control the categories of thought available to the next generation. Not by telling them what to conclude – by shaping what questions they think to ask, what they consider obvious and what they consider unthinkable. The generation educated after the long march does not need to be told what to think. It thinks what it was formed to think – and experiences that thinking as its own.

4. He also theorized the organic intellectual – the person who translates the theoretical framework into stories and assumptions that circulate through the culture without appearing ideological. The film that makes the existing order seem absurd. The journalist who frames every story within the approved assumptions. Gramsci understood that culture is politics by other means – and that the side that controls the culture wins, regardless of who wins the elections.

5. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a published, documented, widely taught strategy that the left implemented consciously across the entire Western world. The 1968 generation put it into practice in the universities. They became the professors, the journalists, the civil servants, the judges, the HR directors of the decades that followed. The march took fifty years. It worked.

6. Mussolini’s prosecutor said at his trial: "We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years." The brain did not stop. It produced thirty-three notebooks – smuggled out, published, and became the most widely read Marxist text in the Western academy after Marx himself. Gramsci died in 1937, six days after his release, at forty-six. He did not see the march he theorized. He did not need to.

7. Every captured institution, every transformed curriculum, every HR department enforcing approved speech, every content moderation policy suppressing the unauthorized voice – all running the program Antonio Gramsci designed in a prison cell, by a brain that was supposed to have been stopped. It wasn’t. And neither was the march. Until now – because the distribution monopoly that made its outcomes enforceable is cracking. The counter-march has begun. It just doesn’t have a name yet.

As England hurtles towards disintegration, Europe accompanies it

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And there’s this: 1,200 male “asylum seekers” being deposited on Piddington, England, pop. 350. Ironically, here’s the story, presented by a non-traditional Englishman who is appalled by what’s happening to his country:

And Across the Pond:

David Strom: Europe Is Sacrificing Its Citizens for an Ideology

…. I have pretty much concluded that most Western countries have had disastrous immigration policies, and much of the disaster centers around opening the floodgates to refugees and non-Western immigrants.

My conclusion isn't based on racism, although I will be accused of that no matter what I say. So be it. It's 2026, and accusations of racism are now so common that they have almost become noise — the equivalent of inarticulate grunts from people unhappy with what you say. 

The problem with arguments for generous refugee policies that seem to classify everybody who wants to move to Europe or America as an asylum seeker is that the "asylees" are turning Western countries into third-world countries. 

Of course, not all refugees are created equal. For instance, the influx of Ukrainians into Western Europe and some Eastern European countries hasn't been a huge problem. What has been is asylum seekers from the "MENA" countries. MENA stands for Middle East and North Africa, and you can toss pretty much every Muslim country into that category. 

When I saw Nate's X post, I wasn't surprised by anything but the scale of the increase in sexual violence, not the direction it went. And when I did a bit of digging, I found that the comparison between Poland and France is not an outlier, but representative of the split between countries that have imported MENA "asylum seekers" and those in Europe that haven't. Countries like Poland and Hungary have accepted financial penalties from the EU rather than take in those MENA refugees, and it's obvious that it was worth every penny. 

According to Eurostat, the differences between countries that allowed large numbers of MENA asylees in and those that didn't are really stark, even when you account for changes in how sexual violence crimes are counted. 

A 100 percent to 300 percent increase in sexual crimes is hardly a statistical artifact or an easy thing to explain away, especially given that we know that in some of these countries there is a growing underreporting problem due to a sense that the police will do nothing about it. 

You can't argue that any of this is a surprise or that policymakers couldn't have guessed that this would happen. Of course they could have, because they were warned before it happened and people have been screaming at the top of their lungs about it for years. Even calling it an open secret is wrong: there really wasn't any secret about it. Policymakers simply denied it was happening and swept it under the rug because reality didn't match their hopes and dreams. 

The transnational elite didn't like what reality was dishing out, so they put an Instagram filter over reality and called what was on the plate gourmet instead of a big pile of poison. 

It's racist to point out reality; don't you know? 

Except...it's not racism. It's reality, and countries of origin, ideology, and religious values aren't race. Nobody would say that it is racist to say that importing Nazis or communists is a bad idea, despite the fact that a huge chunk of them are white. I wish we were better about excluding people with horrible ideas and behaviors, whatever their race. 

Approximate recent immigrant or foreign-born shares:

  • Sweden, Germany, Austria, Belgium: high teens to about 20 percent, with large Middle East / North Africa / Afghanistan / Horn of Africa components after 2015.

  • France: immigrants roughly 12–17 percent depending on definition; Maghreb plus rising sub-Saharan Africa; plus a large second generation.

  • Poland: under 1 percent in 2008, now about 5–7 percent, overwhelmingly Ukrainian and Belarusian after 2022.

  • Hungary: still a low non-European share; asylum grants near zero after 2015.

  • Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria: very low non-European stocks.

And so on. Nothing new here, but the decline of Europe and our former colonial master do give a good picture of where we’re heading ourselves.

UPDATE

Speaking of which, this could very well be our next U.S. Senator from Michigan:

Sure, provide relief funds as a humanitarian matter, but not as some sort of global warming "reparations".

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Nepal is on the boundary of the geological collision between the Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate, a process that’s been going on for 50- 100 million years, and is pushig the Himalayas higher every day. The result is earthquakes, many of them, and despite what global warming profiteers and idiot news readers say, has nothing to do with global warming. But admitting that won’t sell ads or generate grants, so we get this instead:

ABC: Nepal flood disaster sparks concern over glacier-related events amid climate change

CNN admitted that the exact cause of the disaster wasn’t known, but it could have been the result of global warming

The type of event that’s ‘triggered by climate change’

Glacier collapses and landslides are complex can be caused by a number of factors, but climate change often plays a role, scientists say. Nepal, in the rapidly-warming Himalayan region, is home to thousands of glaciers which are melting and destabilizing as temperatures rise.

And then, from another rag:

The Guardian: Climate injustices have been laid bare in the Nepal-Tibet flood disaster

The recent glacial collapse and catastrophic floods in Nepal and Tibet are not isolated tragedies (Report, 28 August). They reflect accelerating climate disruption that disproportionately affects the countries and people that are least responsible for global emissions.

As climate change intensifies, glaciers around the world, including in the Himalayas, are melting at unprecedented rates, destabilising ecosystems and causing glacial collapse and ice-and-rock landslides, destroying settlements, villages and livelihoods in minutes. No one died when a Swiss glacier collapsed last year, owing to early-warning systems that were in place. But a lack of early-warning systems means that the disaster in Nepal and Tibet has led to hundreds of deaths and thousands missing.

Events like these are not “natural disasters”. They are due to global warming and climate injustices, and also flawed development policies, including rampant property developments on vulnerable floodplains. They call for better disaster preparedness and investment in early-warning systems. Most importantly, they require global action.

And so on –

Now for the rest of the story

Leslie Eastman, September 1: The Ghoulish Race to Turn Nepal’s Flood Victims Into a ‘Climate Crisis’ Talking Point

The political talking point ignores tens of millions of years of plate tectonics and its consequences, and completely dismisses well-established mountain-weather dynamics.

And September 4: Nepal Wants a $5 Billion Climate Handout from UN for a Himalayan Bedrock Collapse, but …

Nepal’s request should be rejected unless the U.N. would likewise fund U.S. recovery from a San Andreas earthquake or Cascadia tsunami.

As it turns out, I was right to focus heavily on the geology of the Himalayas in my earlier piece. The root cause of that landslide was weak bedrock that took the overlaying glacier with it.

Geomorphologists Kristen Cook and Dan Shugar said initial images from Nepal were obscured by clouds and dust from the debris, so they could only see that part of a glacier had broken off from Langtang Lirung peak, near the border with Tibet. In clearer images from Thursday, they said they could see that the bedrock underneath the glacier had collapsed, taking the massive chunk of ice down with it and sending boulders and ice into the valley.

“It shows the whole area without anything hidden, and we could see that, yes, it looked like there was not only this glacier that had failed, but a much larger chunk of the bedrock of the mountainside itself that had given way,” said Shugar, associate professor at the University of Calgary. “You have this big bedrock failure that took part of the glacier with it.”

Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki, Director of the US Global Change Research Program, says this information changes the story.

That distinction matters. This was fundamentally a geologic mass-failure event involving bedrock, which then mobilized ice, rock, sediment, and water downstream… not simply a glacier spontaneously collapsing because of warming.

Tectonic forces along colliding plate boundaries can substantially weaken rock, creating dense networks of fractures that leave slopes far more vulnerable to failure. This fact helps explain why landslides can be so frequent and destructive in active plate collision zones….like the Himalayas.

The Nepal landslide was an Earth-caused disaster.

Nepal’s request should be rejected unless the United Nations is prepared to apply the same standard consistently, such as providing the United States with climate-recovery money after a catastrophic San Andreas Fault earthquake or a Cascadia Subduction Zone rupture and tsunami.

The Earth does not need climate change to produce earthquakes, landslides, and tsunamis, and turning every natural disaster into a climate-money shakedown is neither science nor justice.

(If you can put up with the sing-songy voice of this woman who calls herself “Geo Girl”, this is actually a pretty good presentation on what’s going on over at “The Roof of the World”.)

Good looking new listing on Sidney Lanier Lane

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I’m embarrassed to admit that, in all these years of driving by and even showing houses on Sidney Lanier, I never thought to ask who he was, until now. Turns out, he was quite the fellow.

AI Overview

Sidney Lanier (1842–1881) was a prominent male 19th-century American poet, author, and musician. [1, 2]

Known as one of the most significant Southern voices of his era, he was celebrated for his unique ability to weave the structural rhythms and meter of music directly into his poetry.

The street Sidney Lanier Lane in Greenwich, Connecticut, is actually tied to his immediate family. While the poet himself was born in Georgia, his son, Sidney Lanier Jr., and his grandson, Charles Day Lanier, became established residents of Greenwich. Sidney Lanier Jr. even ran a school in the region, cementing the family name into local history before his passing.

Who was Sidney Lanier?

  • The Musician: He was a virtuoso flautist who served as the first flutist for the prestigious Peabody Symphony Orchestra in Baltimore. He believed that poetry and music governed the same exact laws of sound and rhythm. [

  • The Poet: He authored famous American poems such as "The Marshes of Glynn" and "Song of the Chattahoochee". Later in life, he became a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University. [1, 2]

  • The Soldier: During the Civil War, he served in the Confederate Army. He was captured by Union forces while piloting a blockade-running ship and held in a federal military prison.

  • His Tragic End: While imprisoned, he contracted tuberculosis. He spent the remainder of his life traveling to different climates to find relief, but ultimately succumbed to the illness at the young age of 39.

Because of his legacy, his name was widely memorialized across the country—most notably attached to Georgia's massive Lake Lanier, various schools, a 1972 U.S. postage stamp, and the quiet residential cul-de-sac in Greenwich.

UPDATE: it turns out that, just like so many other topics, I know nothing about the history of this section of Greenwich. Here’s more on the family:

Charles Day Lanier (1868–1945), the eldest son of the poet Sidney Lanier, lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, for over 50 years. [1]

[He] became a prominent publisher, a major real estate developer, and an active community leader who deeply shaped the social, educational, and recreational landscape of Greenwich.

His most notable contributions to Greenwich include:

1. Developing the "Rock Ridge" Neighborhood

Charles Day Lanier was one of the largest original landowners of the Rock Ridge section of Greenwich. Around the turn of the 20th century, he acquired a massive country estate there and played a critical role in developing the exclusive residential area off Zaccheus Mead Lane. It is directly because of his property ownership and estate layout that Sidney Lanier Lane was established. [1, 2]

2. Pioneering Progressive Education

In 1910, Charles and his wife, May Field Lanier, were looking for a progressive, outdoor-centric education for their five children. Dissatisfied with the traditional schools available at the time, they founded their own school right on their Greenwich estate. [1]

  • Originally called "The Little School in the Woods," it began in a small log cabin in Rock Ridge.

  • It grew rapidly, integrating nature study, woodwork, and literature. It eventually evolved into the progressive Lanier School (and later the Wabanaki School), attracting children from all over Greenwich and drawing the attention of famous American educators like John Dewey. [1, 2]

3. Founding the Greenwich Riding and Trails Association (GRTA)

Lanier was a passionate equestrian and a "leading horseman" in Connecticut who won numerous blue ribbons. In 1914, he teamed up with a small group of prominent local landowners (including Raynal Bolling and James Perkins) to form the Greenwich Riding Association (now known as the Greenwich Riding and Trails Association or GRTA). [1, 2]

  • The group built a stable at the Field Club and preserved extensive open-space bridle paths so residents could ride horses throughout Greenwich.

  • Lanier's efforts helped establish the rich equestrian culture that Greenwich is still famous for today. [I’d say “was formerly” famous for — ED]

4. Cultural Preservation (The Robert E. Lee Foundation)

While this was a national endeavor, it was run directly out of their Greenwich home: Charles and his wife May led the high-profile efforts to rescue and restore Stratford Hall, the historic birthplace of Robert E. Lee in Virginia. May Field Lanier served as the president of the Robert E. Lee Foundation, and together they hosted countless high-society charity galas, teas, and historical societies in Greenwich to fund the mansion's transformation into a national shrine. [1, 2]

Charles Day Lanier passed away at Greenwich Hospital in 1945.

Looks like the sellers did well here

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94 Londonderry Drive, listed in July at $3.1 million, has sold for $3.150. The owners picked it up from a bank for just $1,102,500 in February 2017 after two Countrywide mortgages totalling $2.4 million had been foreclosed on. (Just to illustrate the genius of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, those mortgagees had borrowed the money in 2006, were almost immediately thrown into foreclosure, and a bank auction was ordered in 2009. Final transfer of ownership from the borrowers to the successor to Countrywide wasn’t accomplished until May 25, 2016.)

I'll take things that never happened, Chris, for $1,000

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Chris Murphy's Sob Story About 'Jason and Keri' Losing Their Food Stamps Goes REALLY REALLY Wrong

Chris Murphy was out on his annual Walk Across Connecticut, which is the political equivalent of a farmer’s market for anecdotes, and he came back with a pair named Jason and Keri who, he says, lost SNAP and now spend an entire workday on a bus just to eat at a New Haven soup kitchen. 

A WHOLE DAY FOR A SINGLE MEAL.

Cute contrast, until you remember Waterbury to New Haven is about 22 miles — a one-hour bus, half an hour in a car — not a transcontinental pilgrimage. 

Then he tied the whole thing to Elon Musk “just” becoming a trillionaire, which happened in June off the SpaceX IPO and has already slipped back under that line. Connecticut even stood up a $300 grocery-card program for people who lost SNAP under the new work rules. A sitting U.S. senator could have bought lunch, pointed them to that card, or called a constituent with a job. He posted the parable instead.

What does Elon Musk (briefly) becoming a trillionaire have to do with Jason and Keri being such lazy fucks? Murphy doesn’t say.

Not to be THAT person but if they have the energy to get on a bus and go get food surely they can work or volunteer for 20 hours a week so they can once again qualify for Food Stamps.

Fortunately for Chris’ new friends, there are at least a half-dozen soup kitchens and food pantries in Waterbury — here’s just one — so they can work in their hometown, drop by the soup kitchen for lunch, and go back to their job, saving both the time and money they’d otherwise expend travelling to New Haven. There, Chris: fixed it for you.