DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

The American Mind.

Much has been written about Trump Derangement Syndrome, that mental and emotional affliction that distorts its victims’ ability to make measured judgments about the doings of our past and present president. No doubt much more will be written about it, because this malady shows no signs of abating.

One of the worst side effects of TDS is the widespread circulation of bogus constitutional claims. As Trump, the astute politician that he is, has staked out popular positions on many issues of interest to the public, his critics, at a loss for other arguments, routinely say he is trashing the Constitution.

This is a serious problem. Preserving our constitutional system, and the many blessings that flow from it, depends on preserving a correct understanding of the Constitution’s various provisions among the public. But the public’s understanding of the Constitution is undermined by the TDS brigade’s continual reiteration of fanciful claims of constitutional violations.

TDS, regrettably, is not just a problem on the American Left. There are plenty of conservative sufferers who cannot evaluate Trump dispassionately and twist the Constitution to find grounds on which to denounce him. A prominent case is National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy, who recently condemned President Trump’s executive order regarding the law firm Perkins Cole.

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Dr. Leana Wen, a former CNN medical analyst who famously stated that “the unvaccinated should not be allowed to leave their homes,” is now admitting that Covid dissenters should have been allowed to ask questions.

Read it.

In the first 10 months of last year, more than 5,000 migrants arrived in Britain as ‘skilled workers,’ only later to claim asylum so as to remain in the country permanently. That’s about a 100-fold increase on the official 2022 figure of 53.

A new report by the National Audit Office says that the government “does not fully understand” what happens to those who come to Britain under this ‘skilled worker’ visa programme—the main route for workers to come to Britain, which Robert Bates, from the Centre for Migration Control, described as a “ghastly Frankenstein of a scheme.” There were more than half a million applications for skilled worker visas in 2023 alone.

And while the opposition Conservative Party said these figures were “deeply concerning,” Bates told europeanconservative.com that migrants have been able to game the skilled worker route thanks to the efforts of past and present “inattentive ministers in collaboration with free movement-loving civil servants.”

Gee, that sounds familiar….

The Telegraph (UK).

Immediately followed by all the French ‘super-rich’ moving elsewhere.

Europe is desperately scrambling for ways to fund greater defence spending as Donald Trump brings the era of US military dominance on the Continent to an acrimonious end.

Estonia has stripped its pensioners of valuable tax reliefs and imposed a 2pc “defence tax” on all its citizens – but France has floated perhaps the most radical solution yet.

Finance minister, Eric Lombard, last week opened the door to taxing just the country’s super-rich to fund France’s military build-up.

France is facing a unique quandary – it plans to boost its defence budget by €3bn (£2.5bn) a year until 2030 while managing an eye-watering national debt of €3.3 trillion.

Newsbusters.

CBC Chairperson Rep. Yvette Clarke, noting Black Caucus support for Green, then went into the usual refrain about refusing to accept spending cuts in “programs like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security while giving tax cuts to billionaires like Elon Musk.”

But there have been no discussions about cuts in Medicare and Social Security, nor are there tax cuts targeted to billionaires.

Regarding Medicaid, this is the usual Democrat distortion, calling reducing proposed increases in spending a cut.

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Leftist corporate media outlets have been running news headlines suggesting that Elon Musk’s DOGE “broke” into the U.S. Institute of Peace. In reality, however, fired and unhinged President and CEO George Moose denied access to Acting President Kenneth Jackson, a State Department official involved in neutering rogue U.S. Agency for International Development.

The DOGE team wrote on X, “Mr. Moose denied lawful access to Kenneth Jackson, the Acting USIP President (as approved by the USIP Board). @DCPoliceDept arrived onsite and escorted Mr. Jackson into the building. The only unlawful individual was Mr. Moose, who refused to comply, and even tried to fire USIP’s private security team when said security team went to give access to Mr. Jackson.”

That’s certainly a stark contrast to the conspiracy-driven narratives pushed by leftist corporate news networks.

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Within hours of Hamas’ appalling attack on Israeli civilians, the “settler colonial” paradigm inserted itself into public commentary. In this slim and approachable monograph, Kirsch leads readers into the topsy-turvy world of this academic theory. Zareena Grewal, an Associate Professor at Yale, phrased it with helpful candour on X: “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle”. How did this phrase come to be used by scholars and students in the most prestigious universities of the West to rationalise the slaughter of Jewish Israelis in their homes and at music concerts?

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

Prior to the start of the Ukraine war, it was assumed that the Russians, if they desired, could quickly smash the Ukrainian army. Russia is a big country with a big army and Ukraine is not as big, but few understood that it had a big army. At the start of the war, it had an army of 350,000, with a similar number in reserve. Fewer anticipated the hundreds of billions in NATO weapons and money. Everyone, including the Russians, expected a short war, but instead it is a long war.

One main reason for this is technology. The Russians badly miscalculated how the war would unfold, but they also failed to adapt to new technology, specifically the use of drones in frontline battles. Their first taste of drone warfare was the Bayraktar TB2 drones supplied by the Turks to the Ukrainians. This is a medium-altitude long-endurance vehicle that allowed the Ukrainians to precisely aim their artillery at Russian formations, as well as directly attack those formations.

The Russians have proven to be quick learners. They rushed to embrace the new technology and have now taken it in directions few anticipated. First person video drones are now the primary weapon in the Russian arsenal, used to not only attack Ukrainian men and material, but used to shape the battlefield. This new use of drones came to the fore in the Ukrainian Kursk offensive, which concluded last week with a stunning Ukrainian defeat.

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“They patrol L.A.’s streets in search of ICE, Trump immigration raids,” is how the Los Angeles Times described the pro-illegal alien activists sabotaging the arrests of illegal alien criminals. The newspaper breathlessly described how ‘community patrols follow ICE vehicles and alert illegal aliens that federal law enforcement is on the way.”

The pro-illegal alien activists use megaphones to make noise, hoping to scare away the criminals that ICE has come to protect the community from, to the applause of the media.

During one recent raid in Alhambra where ICE, the FBI and DEA were preparing to arrest dangerous criminals, Union del Barrio activists began shouting through megaphones, and alerting any nearby criminals that law enforcement was here.

But who are they?

The Antiplanner.

The Baltimore Peninsula was supposed to be a $5.5 billion walkable city of residences, shops, and offices built on a former industrial site. Promoters convinced the city of Baltimore to put up well over $600 million in subsidies for the project. Now, most of the construction is done and it looks like one of China’s many ghost cities.

Sometimes the old ways are best,

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Democrats just had their egg-related misinformation and disinformation campaign against the president scrambled, as new USDA data reveals a third consecutive week of price declines at supermarkets. The drop follows President Trump’s recent countermeasures to stabilize national supply after the Biden-Harris administration’s reckless culling of 150 million egg-laying hens plunged the industry into turmoil and sparked egg-flation.

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The general purpose in this latest phase of lawfare is to choke the federal courts with so many restraining orders and injunctions that the White House lawyers find themselves locked into an endless Chinese fire drill of counter-filings, motions, writs, and appearances. It’s all that the so-called “resistance” has left, what with DOGE breaking up the racketeering operation that has funded the Dem’s defense of the blob for a decade. By which I mean the government funding of non-governmental orgs (ha!) to distribute payola to Dem foot-soldiers who do all the dirty work of protecting the rogue bureaucracy in a circle-jerk of power and payoffs. This includes the dirty work of Dem-blob lawyers such as Mark Zaid, Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, Marc Elias, Barbara McQuade, Joanna Lydgate et al.

The history of Judge Boasberg in particular presents a disturbing picture of a tool covering-up every act of the shadowy blob’s war against American citizens.

Trump is aware of this, and he’s made it quite clear that he’s not going to play their silly games.

UPDATE: GOP Lawmakers Push to Impeach Obama-Appointed Judge for Trying to Block Deportations

Slate, a Voice of the Crust.

The Trump administration pushed forward into a new phase of the rolling national constitutional crisis over the weekend, reportedly defying two different federal court orders imposing limits on its deportation of immigrants without due process. First, immigrant authorities deported Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University, despite a judge’s Friday order halting her removal. Second, authorities deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants, flouting another judge’s explicit directive to turn around American planes that hadn’t yet landed in El Salvador, where the migrants were being sent. The Justice Department claimed that it could not comply with the order barring Alawieh’s removal because it arrived too late. But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrants—and that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens.

Taken on their own, these claims would be chilling enough. But they were coupled with another novel late-night claim of presidential power: On Monday, Donald Trump purported to reverse President Joe Biden’s pardons of Jan. 6 committee members. In a Truth Social post that came just after midnight, Trump claimed the pardons are now “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” asserting the power to undo their clemency because Biden allegedly signed it “by Autopen.” (It is the official position of the executive branch, unchallenged by the courts, that autopen qualifies as a valid presidential signature.)

Taken together, these actions and declarations amount to a significant escalation in Trump’s transformation of his own presidency into an autocracy or, perhaps more accurately, a monarchy. His Justice Department has taken vague claims of “Article II authority” to new extremes, ascribing to him an unchecked right to expel immigrants with no semblance of due process—and as his defenders have asserted all weekend, to ignore lawful court orders that stand in his way. Meanwhile, Trump himself has made it clear that this extreme and dangerous new vision of executive power does not apply to the presidency, but only his presidency: It is not a set of neutral principles, but an ever-evolving pretext for his own personal whims and cruelties, dressed up in legalese concocted by the conservative legal movement for precisely this purpose.

So, We can see here the fully developed Narrative that the proglodyte media will be pushing until Trump leaves office four years from now. None of what Trump is doing differs at all from what Biden or Obama did as President, except that their judges didn’t pretend to have the power to interfere with their activities (because why would they?). Tossing around terms like ‘autocracy’ and ‘monarchy’ are merely attempts to stir up the mob, and have no significance other than to demonstrate that the writer doesn’t know what those terms actually mean. The ‘neutral principles’ espoused by Trump are quite clear to those who don’t have their Progressive Goggles on: (a) the President has plenary power in foreign affairs and doesn’t answer to the judiciary in that area, which has a long and consistent history in the law (vide the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, which the courts allowed), and (b) employees in the Executive branch work for the President and can be taken on or dumped as he sees fit, so long as he follows the Constitutional and statutory requirements, which so far he has. Every time he makes a move, he states clearly the authority on which that move is based, which the Narrative Media invariably ignore and don’t address, being too busy mouthing things like ‘autocracy’ and ‘monarchy’ for their NPC followers.

Metropolitan Review, an obscure Voice of the Crust.

In which a Modern Woman attempts to cope when reality intrudes:

This was the first time it crossed my mind that a young woman like us — a knowledge worker, a writer, a leftist — might regret her independent youth and wish she had married a loving person at a young age. I’d associated this idea with a type of womanhood we considered totally outside of our zone of interest: anti-intellectualism, a belief in the primacy of motherhood. I was blindsided by the suggestion that we might be better people if we were recused from formative independence and struggle. I looked around at my friends and acquaintances, especially the married ones, and wondered if there was any truth in the idea that the years they spent as poor captains of their own ships, unmoored and often lonely, were in fact not remotely necessary or enlightening.

Read the whole thing, although the cluelessness is very tragic.

Read it.

Since al-Qaeda-affiliated Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) conquered Damascus with the help of Turkey in December 2024, HTS fighters and Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) militants have committed massacres against religious minorities in the country. Social media posts show Alawite or Christian men, women, and children barbarically shot at close range. And the death toll is increasing.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

The American Mind.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. City of New London is undoubtedly one of its worst decisions in the past 20 years. The Court gave state and local governments the option to transfer private property from its rightful owner to another private owner, justifying this as a “public use” since it will supposedly promote “economic development.” Kelo is a classic example of activist judges rationalizing a predetermined result—in this case, overturning the Constitution’s protection of private property rights.

The Court’s decision stripped Susette Kelo and her neighbors in the historic Fort Trumbull neighborhood of their property in order to build an “urban village”—a fact Justice John Paul Stevens breezily dismisses in his opinion, which is a thoroughly unimpressive piece of legal legerdemain. Stevens failed to note that the neighborhood would be bulldozed even though he acknowledged that not only had Kelo lived in her house since 1997, and had made substantial improvements to her property, but that “Wilhelmina Dery was born in her Fort Trumbull house in 1918 and has lived there her entire life.” The continued existence of what was apparently a very stable residential area, however, could not be allowed to stand in the way of “progress.” Stevens held that the residents and their homes must be sacrificed in the interest of a supposed greater good.

The thousands of new jobs and millions of dollars in new tax revenue that were promised, however, never materialized. Instead, an extremely expensive vacant lot now sits where the neighborhood once stood. The City of New London even tried to charge the former residents for five years of back rent as punishment for having contested what was essentially nothing but municipal extortion for the benefit of Pfizer.

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Despite all the leftist and mainstream media wailing and gnashing of teeth about the new administration, fresh polling from two major mainstream news outlets paints a truly bleak picture for Democrats and a relatively rosy one for President Trump.

In the most striking read on the pulse of America, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating has collapsed by a whopping 20 percentage points in just four years, and now stands at just 29%, according to CNN. That’s the lowest in the history of CNN’s poll, which goes back to 1992. NBC News had a similar reading: 27% positive against 55% negative. “In more than 30 years of this poll, we’ve never seen either party hit a number this low, in terms of negatives,” said NBC’s Steve Kornacki.

There are still, of course, a solid core of zombies that will vote Democrat until they die … and often after.

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Imagine my surprise when, Sunday, I read a New York Times editorial admitting that “We Were Badly Misled” about Covid as it was happening.

The op-ed matter of factly concluded what we’ve all known for years — that despite being the overwhelmingly most “common sense” place to look, the Covid-19 lab leak theory was dismissed by scientists and public health officials, who suppressed discussions and misled the public to maintain the appearance of consensus.

Influential studies downplayed the lab leak theory, while private communications among scientists revealed they actually considered it likely, with key figures, including a senior adviser to Fauci, attempting to erase records.

It admits EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, withheld critical information about its research, and only after persistent investigations was it finally banned from receiving federal funding.

It also stipulates that after Covid-19, controversial virus research, including experiments on bat coronaviruses, continues under inadequate biosafety conditions, raising concerns about future accidental outbreaks.

ZMan channels Nietsche.

Over the weekend there was a poll released that said only seven percent of Americans have a high opinion of the Democratic Party. It also said that the party is enjoying its lowest approval rating ever recorded. The events of last week suggest that the party is a disorganized mess at the moment. This is due in large part to the fact that what we call the left has collapsed into chaos. They no longer can explain what they oppose, much less what they claim to offer.

This is due to the transformation of the left over the last thirty years into a grab bag of conspiracy theories and grievances. The American left has always been a conspiracy theory, of sorts, owing to its roots in American Protestantism, but it had a positive agenda through most of the twentieth century. The long list of things it opposed stood in the way of the things it desired. Over the last thirty years, those desires have largely faded, leaving just a list of enemies.

The most obvious example is the antifascist conspiracy theory that was dominant with self-identified leftists for the last decade. The fact that there are no fascists in this age has been used as an opportunity to create them. The same thing happened with conspiracy theories around race. Instead of Hitler hiding behind every bush, it is men in white hoods ready to pounce. The dominant subcultures of the left over the last few decades are all conspiracy theories of some sort.

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Ten days or so after the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project disclosed that nearly every document bearing former President Biden’s signature during his first term had been signed by an autopen—except for one—questions arose over whether executive orders and pardons could be deemed invalid, as we noted that Biden’s staff likely leveraged his rapid cognitive deterioration to sign those documents via autopen.

This raises some very fundamental questions that I’m afraid will have to be answered by the courts.

Overnight, President Trump declared that the 11th-hour pardons, including those given to members of Congress who investigated the January 6 insurrection, were “void, vacant, and of no further force or effect, because of the fact that they were done by autopen.” Some of those last-minute pardons include Deep Staters, such as former Representative Liz Cheney, retired General Mark Milley, and government scientist Anthony Fauci.

I’m not sure that’s correct. All that needs to happen is for Biden to testify, in open court or by affidavit, that the signature in question is, in fact, his signature for it to be valid, same as with ‘electronically signed’ documents.

Now, if it can be shown that at the time they were ‘autosigned’ he was non compos mentis, and there appears to be a good chance that such can be shown, then that calls the whole shebang into question. Again, the courts are going to have to break some new ground here.

Interesting times….

Quillette.

As the world transitions from a values-based international order to a transactional, multipolar framework, Western militaries outside the US are going to have to rearm rapidly following the withdrawal of US security guarantees. While the military lessons from Ukraine have been widely discussed, those from Israel’s 7 October war have largely been overlooked. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have faced intense scrutiny and a steep learning curve since Hamas launched its surprise attack on 7 October 2023. During the punishing months of fierce urban combat in Gaza, the IDF made significant military advancements but also encountered critical challenges.

Gaza’s densely populated neighbourhoods and Hamas’s guerrilla militias are, respectively, very different from Eastern Europe’s open plains and Russia’s armed forces. Nevertheless, Western commanders can draw a number of important lessons from the IDF’s successes and setbacks that may be useful to future operations on Europe’s eastern flank and further afield. From drone warfare and the use of armour to urban command-and-control and civilian protection, Israel’s experience in Gaza provides a sobering preview of what high-intensity urban warfare can entail, and how modern militaries must evolve to achieve decisive and ethical victories in any future conflict.

Watch it.

I love Bob Hope. Sure, it’s glib, but it’s true.

“I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” — Will Rogers

Office of the Reviser of Statutes, Minnesota Legislature.

A bill for an act relating to mental health; modifying the definition of mental illness; adding a
definition for Trump Derangement Syndrome; amending Minnesota Statutes 2024,
sections 245.462, subdivision 20, by adding a subdivision; 245I.02, subdivision
29, by adding a subdivision.

…

Sec. 2. Minnesota Statutes 2024, section 245.462, is amended by adding a subdivision to
read:
Subd. 28. Trump Derangement Syndrome. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” means
the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies
and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump. Symptoms may include Trump-induced
general hysteria, which produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy
differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump’s behavior. This
may be expressed by:
(1) verbal expressions of intense hostility toward President Donald J. Trump; and
(2) overt acts of aggression and violence against anyone supporting President Donald
J. Trump or anything that symbolizes President Donald J. Trump.

I am not making this up.

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A professor of physics and gender studies who has argued that “white empiricism” undermines Einstein’s theory of general relativity now sits on a top physics advisory panel within the Department of Energy, raising questions from fellow scientists about the panel’s integrity and providing a potential target for the Trump administration as it seeks to stamp out DEI within the federal government.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire who has suggested that string theory “failed to succeed” because the field has too many white men, was appointed to the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) under the Biden administration in 2024. The panel advises the Energy Department on research and funding priorities for particle physics, giving it significant say over which projects receive federal support.

Prescod-Weinstein will remain on HEPAP until 2027 unless the Trump administration takes action to remove her. Her role at the Energy Department has rankled some scientists, who say that an institution tasked with directing federal research should not be advised by a woman who, in one 2020 paper, wrote that “Black feminist theory intersectionality should change physics.”

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A little-known law in Illinois requires private companies to finance the DEI industry if they wish to do business with the state—giving a lifeline to an unpopular industry that currently finds itself on the ropes as major companies across the country ditch their DEI programs and President Donald Trump works to eradicate its influence across the federal government.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D.) signed a bill into law in 2021 that essentially requires businesses that seek to do business with the state of Illinois to bankroll the DEI industry. The law, which went into full effect in 2024, established a “commitment to diversity” factor in all state contracts that grades companies in large part on how much money they donate to DEI nonprofits and how much time their leaders personally volunteer to promote DEI in their communities. The higher the score companies receive on Pritzker’s DEI factor, the more likely they are to secure contracts from his administration.

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Canada’s Liberal Party selected central banker Mark Carney to lead the country as prime minister.

He only recently became a politician, but already he’s sitting at the head of the class! No worries, though. He has the kind of résumé all globalists in good standing with Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum would envy. He ran not only the Bank of Canada, but also the Bank of England. He’s a central banker extraordinaire! He loves printing funny money and manipulating markets. Artificially created inflation is his jam, man!

Carney is the most recent iteration of the World Economic Forum’s standard operating procedure for captured governments (and Canada is most definitely WEF-captured): Whenever possible, put bankers in charge of those pesky territorial designations nostalgically known as nation-states. France’s petit fromage, Emmanuel Macron, was a Rothschild & Co. investment banker. Former U.K. prime minister Rishi Sunak was a Goldman Sachs and hedge fund guy. Don’t be surprised when more transnational bankers seemingly come out of nowhere and immediately dominate the politics of other pseudo-sovereign countries. Investment banking — and more specifically, central banking — is the lifeblood of globalism. Why? Because once a bank is big enough, it gambles with the futures of entire nations (and the millions of individual lives therein) as if they were mere poker chips.

Civil Discourse, a Voice of the Crust.

On March 12, there was reporting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was preparing to lay off more than 1,000 workers as part of the Trump administration’s “reductions in force” directive to federal agencies. Cuts like that call into question whether NOAA will continue to provide the early warnings and predictive modeling that help people prepare for weather emergencies in advance. People who live in hurricane and tornado country keep their “NOAA weather radios” handy, and they are especially important for events that occur, as they frequently do, when most of us are asleep.

In theory, it sounds like one more bad thing to worry about. In practice, it’s much worse. We’ve just had a demonstration of precisely how effective NOAA is and what we stand to lose without it.

Beginning on Friday, violent, long-track tornadoes with damaging winds of up to 80 mph and large hail materialized across the Midwest and South. This was the news Friday night. NOAA’s early warning system, transmitted on social media, radio, television, and by word of mouth, kept it from being much worse.

NOAA? The same guys that are making and faking the models and ‘data’ that pros up the WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE FROM CLIMATE CHANGE Narrative?

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AI & Crypto Czar David Sacks says that this immature display, widely derided by conservatives, provides a revealing glimpse into the Left’s underlying mindset – exposing their belief that they alone should control American taxpayer funds, in opposition to the Trump administration’s clear mandate to eliminate financial waste and abuse across the federal government.

“I was at the State of the Union and up in the balcony. I was looking down at the Democrats holding up these silly little signs and the sign that I saw the most was one that said ‘Musk Steals,’” Sacks began in his Saturday evening interview with Fox News’s Lara Trump. “I really thought about that.

How is Elon stealing? He’s returning money to the Treasury. Then it hit me, they actually have come to believe that this taxpayer money is theirs and by returning it to the Treasury, Elon is stealing from them. That’s my best explanation of why they’re in such hysterical state about this.”

Yup. Got it in one.

Read it.

Johns Hopkins University said on Thursday that it will lay off over 2,000 workers worldwide following the Trump administration’s termination of $800 million in federal funding for the institution.

In the coming year or two it will astonish all of the people who haven’t been paying attention just how much of their money is being spent on toys for the Crust and their minions.

The Cool Down, a Voice of the Crust.

One Reddit user called attention to a strange-looking yacht off the coast of Milos, Greece, and a few commenters shared photos of other massive yachts they had spotted in the area.

In a yacht-focused subreddit, the user shared an image of the superyacht, which one person identified as Olivia O. The vessel measures over 290 feet long and is powered by two diesel engines.

It is indeed the Olivia O, which is somewhat famous for being the only ‘superyacht’ that has an Ulstein X-Bow, which is ordinarily used on offshore support vessels servicing oil platforms and such like.

The writer of the article doesn’t care to do the minimal research it would take to identify it, or explain why it looks that way; she just wants to use it as a hook on which to hang her Climate Change rant, which occupies the bulk of the article.

While the discussion centered around interesting yachts and sailboats users had seen near Milos, the elephant in the room is the negative impact superyachts have on the planet.

It isn’t the ‘elephant in the room’, it’s merely the elephant in her head.

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Using cannabis may cause changes in the human body’s epigenome, a study of over 1,000 adults suggests. The epigenome functions like a set of switches, activating or deactivating genes to change how our bodies function.

“We observed associations between cumulative marijuana use and multiple epigenetic markers across time,” explained epidemiologist Lifang Hou from Northwestern University when the research was published in 2023.

Cannabis is a commonly used substance in the United States, with 49 percent of people trying it at least once, Hou and a team of US researchers report in their published paper.

Some US states and other countries have made cannabis legal, but we still don’t fully understand its effects on our health.

Even if we did, history demonstrates that the self-indulgent chemically-inclined would ignore it. How many people still smoke tobacco? But evolution has a way of taking care of such things.

The Times.

To be or not to be decolonised — that is the question vexing the charity responsible for William Shakespeare’s estates, which has been plunged into controversy over the playwright’s legacy.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which owns his homes and some archival material linked to his birth, has been urged to “purge” its vast collections “of Anglocentric and colonialist thought”.

After academics raised concerns that venerating the writer could promote white supremacy, the trust has agreed to “create a more inclusive museum experience”. This will involve exploring “the continued impact of empire” on its collections, how colonialism has warped perceptions of world history, and that “Shakespeare’s work has played a part in this”.

The trust, which was established in 1847, has stated that the historical materials it holds may represent “values and stereotypes that are not consistent with the current values and practices” of its organisation. It has warned those who view its manuscripts and artefacts that they “may encounter language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful”.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, also asserted that the federal courts “have no jurisdiction” over President Trump’s conduct of foreign affairs or his power to expel foreign enemies.

So. The lines are drawn.

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America’s public high schools are strange places to find displays of the alphabet. Perhaps with plummeting standardized test scores and a substantial increase in English-as-a-second-language students in sanctuary districts, high school educators feel the need to review kindergarten basics. In Fairfax County, Virginia’s West Springfield High School, located just 17 miles from the White House, school administrators and teachers have decorated the history hallway this month with a special, leftist rendition of the alphabet.

The display, titled “The ABCs to ME,” is decorated with the school’s colors: a blue background lined with an orange border. Featured in the display is a sign that reads, “A is for Abortion” with an image of a coat hanger with a positive pregnancy test.

Democracy Docket, a Voice of the Crust.

One of the most alarming developments in the second Trump administration is agencies’ apparent defiance of court orders barring them from implementing illegal executive orders. As agencies including the State Department have ignored, evaded or slow-walked judicial decrees, courts have issued increasingly stronger warnings that compliance with their orders is not optional, and litigants have urged them to hold the responsible government officials in contempt of court.

Alarming indeed, to the Usual Suspects. Proglodytes have been stuffing partisan judges onto the Federal courts for decades, and know whom to depend on when things require a bit of undemocratic action. If this fails them, they’re back to persuasion, and democracy, in both of which they have proven incompetent.

Yet the prospect of holding executive branch officials in contempt threatens a fresh constitutional crisis.

Only to those who think that judges get to have everything they want, and that elected officials (whose job it is) must bend the knee.

As Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky argues, “the hard truth for those looking to the courts to rein in the Trump administration is that the Constitution gives judges no power to compel compliance with their rulings — it is the executive branch that ultimately enforces judicial orders.”

As President Andrew Jackson once reputedly said, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Neither the Federal government nor the government of the State of Georgia enforced that decision, and it had no effect.

Courts depend for their effectiveness on the popular appreciation that their decisions are just. When, as with Trump, their decisions are patently partisan and not rooted in either law or justice, they’re going to find themselves on a very windy ledge, ith no friendly hand available. Hence this author’s frantic grasping for some way, any way, to permit the partisan judiciary to have its way other than through the branch of government entitled by the Constitution and empowered by that Democrat bugaboo, the election that they could not steal.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to be.

Read it.

Boarding schools, offering an alternative residential arrangement to the traditional home environment, have been under-studied regarding their impacts on students’ non-cognitive development. This study presents findings derived from a quasi-experimental design where changes in local educational policy caused a transition from voluntary to compulsory boarding. Results indicate that boarding students outperform their non-boarding counterparts in both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, with disadvantaged students exhibiting the largest gains. We attribute these effects to increased teacher engagement in course preparation, closer teacher-student interactions, and heightened student effort toward academic pursuits. These findings underscore the potential of boarding schools as a powerful catalyst for enhancing students’ human capital.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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The basic externalities story goes like this: Some things, like air quality or scientific discoveries, have effects which spread to millions of people without cost or reward to the creator. Actions with unpunished costs are over-produced and actions with uncompensated benefits are left undone.

The story continues that if only we could coordinate, we could fix the misallocation caused by externalities. We might get the government to tax and subsidize externalities or else we might try to lower transaction costs so that people can bargain to solve externalities on their own.

The basic story over-focuses on social coordination as the solution to externalities. Our institutions cannot be relied on to optimally correct externalities or even to avoid making them worse. Usually, the costs of an externality subside only after we’ve invented a technology which makes it cheap or privately beneficial to do the socially optimal thing. Most importantly, technology shifts out the production possibilities frontier making it possible to get outcomes beyond what even perfect social coordination could attain.

Economics should emphasize the importance of technology as a solution to externality problems and focus less on social coordination.

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The great objective of DEI was to tribalize our institutions, recruiting government and corporate employees into affinity groups based on their race, sex, sexuality and other factors, and then defining institutional goals around the ‘right’ tribal mix through selective hiring and promotions.

The complete inversion of civil rights, from race-neutral to race-conscious, also transformed the intended purpose of government and all lesser institutions, from tribal neutrality to tribal partisanship, and it was impossible to achieve this without tribalizing government.

Government and other institutions stopped being merit-based or democratic, and came to reflect the tribal coalition politics that had come to define the Democratic Party’s urban machines. Tammany Hall’s old corrupt apportionment of government offices based on political favors was smoothly supplemented with racial and ethnic coalition quotas in major cities.

‘Tribalization’ is a big step backward, civilizationally, and a major reason why African and Asian countries that had been controlled by colonial powers before independence pretty much all imploded after they were cut loose.

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Worth reading the whole thing, but BLUF:

So the contours of the “final judgment” in this case are coming into view. Mann will be awarded $1001 against Simberg, and $5001 against Steyn. NR will be awarded $530,000 against Mann, and Simberg and Steyn will be awarded some additional tens of thousands from Mann. Mann will be in a very substantial financial hole, with the defendants having little incentive to compromise with him, and every incentive to go after his bank accounts and his house. Probably, Mann will be able to stave that off for some substantial period of time by means of appeals. Or perhaps Mann’s angel funders, who have paid for this case on his behalf and never had their identities disclosed, will pay off the judgment for him. Publicly, Mann will go forth continuing to claim that he “won” the case by virtue of the jury verdicts.

For me the most disappointing aspect of the whole case has been the total inability of the court system to deal with Mann’s fake science. As described in detail in my post from February 6, 2024, the defendants, particularly Simberg, put on substantial and indeed definitive evidence of the flawed “science” in Mann’s Hockey Stick reconstructions — manipulation of data, incorrect error bands, suppression of adverse verification statistics, and so forth. Mann did not even feel the need to put on any scientific evidence in response. His lawyer completely ignored this entire issue on their rebuttal case, and then did not even mention it in closing argument. And yet, the jury still made an award against the defendants. The whole issue of the fake science went completely over their heads.

The most fitting end to this case will be when whoever in the federal government pays for the University of Pennsylvania “climate science” centers pulls the plug on all the funding. That can’t come soon enough.

NPR, a Voice of the Crust.

The Trump administration deported more than 200 people who it claims are members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang, to El Salvador this weekend, multiple members of the administration said on social media on Sunday.

It was not immediately clear if the deportations happened before or after a federal judge in D.C. on Saturday issued an emergency order that told the administration to stop using wartime powers to deport people, and turn around any planes already in the air.

The deportations to El Salvador also included 2 alleged leaders of the MS-13 gang, which has its origins in El Salvador, and 21 other members of the gang, according to posts from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and from El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele.

Looks like Trump is no longer impressed with Democrat judges.

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So far, poetic justice seems the theme of this political year. And there’s nothing more poetically just or ironic than what the Donald Trump administration just did: Turned an app used to mass parole millions of aliens into an app to help those aliens leave the U.S.

In October 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol launched the CBP One mobile application to help commercial trucking companies schedule cargo inspections at land ports of entry. Starting Jan. 20, 2021, the Biden administration deliberately opened U.S. borders and encouraged mass migration—causing a rapid increase in the number of illegal aliens encountered by CBP.

Following December 2022’s then-historic high of over 302,000 inadmissible alien nationwide encounters, the Biden administration rolled out its shell game. In January 2023, then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that rather than illegally cross the border between ports of entry, illegal aliens should instead use the revamped CBP One app to make an appointment at a port of entry.

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Of course they do. Color beats facts every time.

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After years of breathtaking incompetence and failure under Joe Biden, Donald Trump decided once again to put his very comfortable private life on hold and embark on an unprecedented rescue mission to save America. And as President Trump campaigned for re-election, he was hounded by four bogus indictments from weaponized prosecutors seeking to jail him, as his political enemies simultaneously tried to bankrupt him and remove him from the ballot.

Democrat politicians, the biased liberal media, activist judge, and deep pocketed leftist think tanks relished in throwing everything they could muster at the man. Then, the American people got involved and made it clear who makes the decisions in our constitutional republic.

On Nov. 5 voters rejected the vile actions of the radical left and propelled Trump back to the White House with a clear mandate to govern. Trump’s amazing, against all odds victory created hope for America’s future just when we needed it most.

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SpaceX delivered four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) early Sunday as part of a NASA crew rotation mission that will bring home two Boeing Starliner astronauts stranded on the ISS for eight months. The lengthy delay occurred because the Biden-Harris regime sought to avoid optically displeasing headlines about Elon Musk rescuing the astronauts before the presidential election last November.

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For two decades, the public has been bombarded with dire warnings of an impending climate-induced agricultural apocalypse. The claim is that a climate warmed excessively by the carbon dioxide emissions of human activity will ravage the food supply and plunge humanity into famine and chaos.

For many reasons, none of this ever made sense. Now, a new study published in Scientific Reports has turned this narrative of catastrophe on its head, revealing that a global temperature rise of even 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) would not reduce crop yields—and might even increase harvests.

The paper, written by economist Ross McKitrick, dismantles a key pillar of the Biden administration’s always-suspect upward revision of the “social cost of carbon”—a metric used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to quantify the supposed economic damage of carbon dioxide emissions. The fivefold increase of the social cost of carbon—from $51 per ton of carbon dioxide to more than $250—was based partly on the assumption that warming would devastate agriculture.

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

Gee, I wonder why.