21 May 2026
H.I.T.s - Confusion abounds
We’re back to just H.I.T.s today, because almost everything in this post was collected before the weekend. It’s difficult to read page after page of news stories when you can barely see. 😝
I would have liked to cover the San Diego mosque shooting in detail, but information has been slow to emerge, partly (I strongly suspect) because it does not support the Left’s preferred narrative: that the shooters were MAGA and/or Jewish. Although they’re still trying to position it as a ‘hate crime,’ it now seems evident that the young men involved were “accelerationists”—a nihilist philosophy that hates pretty much everyone and everything, and has the aim of collapsing society. Despite one of them being Hispanic, they embraced White Supremacist and neo-Nazi rhetoric and symbols, and apparently hated Trump in addition to everything else. The other shooter has a feminine appearance, but so far no one has been able to confirm whether he was trans. Confusion abounds.
IED found at Alabama dam
Most fishermen would consider reservoirs an obvious place to go fishing. But the J.B. Converse Reservoir in Alabama, commonly known as “Big Creek Lake,” is the sole source of drinking water for the city of Mobile and surrounding towns; in fact, it is federally designated as “critical infrastructure.” Consequently, the Mobile Area Water and Sewer System (MAWSS) began prohibiting public access, due to fear that invasive plant and fish species (specifically giant salvinia and zebra mussels) may be brought into the reservoir, threatening “water quality and infrastructure.” But the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has been fighting to have it considered a “public waterway.”
The issue came to the forefront last year, after a local man was charged with trespassing for fishing on the reservoir in a kayak. The charges were dropped last month as part of a settlement with MAWSS that restores fishing access but limits boats to the facility’s own rentals and privately owned kayaks that have paid a fee for a cleaning process.
But it seems that the controversy is not entirely over. Last week, a diving team working on “routine repair and maintenance” on the reservoir’s dam found a “grenade-type IED.” Fortunately, it was able to be removed and safely detonated. It is not clear how long the device had been there and whether it was related to the recent conflict over fishing or whether it was an unrelated infrastructure attack.
Adoption scammer sentenced
Gabryele “Gabby” Watson (age 30) of Athens, Georgia is a serial adoption scammer. Since around 2015, she has been targeting would-be adoptive parents, pretending to be a pregnant teen, often using names and pictures she found on social media to create a persona.
According to Watson’s father, her mother died when she was a teenager, which her father says set off “severe mental problems.” Then she discovered that she would not be able to have children, due to a heart condition, and became obsessed with the unfairness of it. It was around this time that she started conducting her scams.
Unlike many adoption scammers, who extort as much money as possible from the would-be parents before disappearing, Watson appears to have run her scams almost exclusively for the purpose of emotionally abusing and terrorizing people. Once she sucked a couple in, she would lead them on a roller-coaster of fake health scares, and then threatening to harm the baby or herself. Eventually, she progressed to making death threats against the couple.
In February 2020, her father staged an intervention on the Dr. Phil program, after which Watson promised she would stop. But she did not. Indeed, she sought more media attention, communicating with Lifetime and Netflix.
In the spring of 2023, she targeted two different Tennessee couples, stealing a 16-year-old Pennsylvania teenager’s identity to lure in one couple and pretending to be an 18-year-old Arkansas woman pregnant with twins to lure in the other couple. In both cases, she made death threats, and it was these cases that led to federal charges of cyberstalking, interstate transmission of threats to kidnap or injure, and unlawful use of a means of identification, to which she pleaded guilty in July 2025.
Although she was facing up to 5 years in prison, she was ultimately sentenced last week to just 20 months in prison and 3 years of probation.
Waymo robo-taxis continue to create problems
Back in April, a (fortunately empty) Waymo self-driving taxi was swept away in flood waters in San Antonio, leading to a recall of nearly 4000 of the vehicles. Evidently, a glitch was discovered that allows the cars to drive into standing water. And this is far from Waymo’s first problem: in 2025, the robo-taxis were caught illegally passing school buses in Atlanta and Austin, and in 2024, two of the robo-taxis collided, within just a few minutes, with a truck that was being towed backwards in Phoenix.
Now a northwest Atlanta neighborhood is being terrorized by empty robo-taxis that keep circling through cul-de-sacs. Residents report as many as 50 per hour, creating fear for children and pets on the normally quiet streets. When one resident attempted to use a sign to block the entrance to their cul-de-sac, multiple robo-taxis ended up in a traffic jam as they tried to figure out how navigate the obstruction. It is unclear why the empty vehicles are being routed through this residential neighborhood, and residents say they have tried contacting the company without getting a response. ABC News reported last Friday that Waymo said they “have already worked with our fleet partner to address this routing behavior.”
NC man draws swastikas, points gun
Taquon Jameek Vereen (age 18) was arrested on May 6th, after being identified as the person who had painted swastikas on two stop signs, a traffic light control box, and the side of a convenience store in Fayetteville, North Carolina earlier in the week. He was held on $1,500 bond.
A week later, on the 13th, he posted that bond. He then immediately went out, that same day, and began pointing a handgun at cars and pedestrians in roughly the same area of town. After a brief foot chase, he was taken into custody (again) by police. This time he is being held on a whopping $2,500 bond, charged with “going armed to the terror of people and assault by pointing a gun.”
Greek coin found in Berlin-area field
A 13-year-old boy playing in a field on the west side of Berlin found one of those artifacts that reminds us how little we really know about the ancient world: a 12mm (1/2 inch) bronze coin that appears to have been minted in Troy in the third century B.C. Note that this was not the Homeric Troy; the city site—which had been occupied pretty continuously since the Neolithic Era—was held during this period by Greek colonists. The coin depicts the goddess Athena, in bust form on one side and standing on the other.
Archeologists, baffled at the unlikely location of the coin, initially wondered if it might have been lost by a collector. But investigation revealed the area had been used for burials since the early Iron Age, making it likely that the coin—which was probably used as a keepsake instead of being circulated—was part of someone’s grave goods.
Although it is known that there was trade between northern Europe and ancient Greece—evidenced by the presence of Baltic amber in Bronze Age Greece—the details of that trade are sparse. Another ancient Greek coin was found by a German farmer in the 16th century, but Roman artifacts are more common. How the tiny Greek coin got to Berlin is a journey for the imagination.
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About the San Diego teenage shooters: funny the hundreds, maybe thousands, of teenage shooters per year in Chicago don't get this attention.
The Mosque shooters should not be casually dismissed as white supremacists or the spawn of Democrats. They are the Droogs of the post Covid world. They are mostly young males some with a trans twist. They are London’s rape gangs, the locusts that swarm public beaches and the urban thugs who takeover malls. They are much more dangerous than Russian collusion delusion, the Epstein files even the auto pen. Comparatively those are distractions. Their scripture is the dark recesses of the internet. They strive to destroy society and none of us will thrive in the world they desire.