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A recent Washington Post article indicated that only 12% of the reading public were interested in reading science fiction.  A perusal of bestseller lists for science fiction shows an even more alarming truth: the science fiction books that do sell are a shrinkingly small number of reprints, classics and novels that had been adapted into movies.

The December 2023 bestseller list on Publisher’s Weekly contained only two novels published originally in 2023: Pestilence by Laura Thalassa (an odd addition to the Science Fiction list as it is marketed as fantasy / romance) and Starter Villain by John Scalzi. The bestselling SF novel in that time period, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, sold almost 17,000 copies. This puts it far below the bottom of the top 10 overall fiction bestseller list where Sarah J. Maas’ romantasy novel A Court of Mist and Fury sits at 19,097 copies sold.

Science fiction is not selling.

Read it.

Two high-speed military cargo ships are stuck in the Port of Baltimore following Tuesday morning’s collapse of the 1.6-mile-long Francis Scott Key Bridge. The major US East Coast port has been paralyzed for several days as the bridge collapse prevents inbound and outbound vessel traffic along the harbor’s channel.

Using the automatic identification system, or AIS, data that tracks commercial vessels, three bulk carriers, two general cargo ships, one vehicle carrier, one tanker, and four Ready Reserve Force vessels (RRF), along with the container ship Dali that struck the bridge, are trapped in the harbor, according to the shipping blog gCaptain.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

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An illegal migrant’s viral TikTok video that essentially explains how to “invade” unoccupied residences and assert squatter’s rights has brought attention to a “dangerous” trend that law enforcement fears is only going to worsen.

Gee, I wonder why….

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

For now, at least, I hope everyone has a blessed Good Friday and Easter weekend with your friends and family. For the Orthodox readers, you will have to wait another month this year, but that is how it goes some years. Catholics, of course, will be saying a special thanks for the Episcopal Church. It is a reminder that no matter how terrible things have gotten for Catholics, it can always get worse.

Amen to that.

The Foundry.

Over the past 18 months, The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen and I have visited the border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. What we saw in all our travels was the same: President Joe Biden’s deliberate abandonment of every measure that has worked in the past to reduce incentives for illegal immigration, combined with diminished enforcement of immigration law in the interior, has attracted economic migrants from all over the globe.

People from over 180 countries who want to enter the U.S. but have no legal basis to do so know that the Biden administration will let them in and allow them to stay, so they come. It’s as simple as that.

The American Mind.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was so supremely confident that his thumb on the scale can tip the U.S. presidential election that he just issued a cash demand to President Biden along with a threat: give me money or Donald Trump wins. The spectacle, shameful for all parties, played out on the grand stage of CBS’s 60 Minutes Sunday broadcast.

As my book Overrun shows, Biden launched and nurtured a mass immigration crisis for three straight years. The knock-on effects of this debacle are now being felt all over the country, and not just in conservative enclaves. These days, Biden’s immigration policy registers as so deeply unpopular with the American people that López Obrador offered the old “silver-or-lead” option to the Biden campaign on national television.

If President Biden wants his mass migration crisis to recede from public view before the election, López Obrador will slow the flow of migrants—for the ripe price of a $20 billion down payment. This cash would be sent under the paper-thin cover of the debunked “root causes” theory of mass migration, which proposes that money from the destination country can rebuild countries generating outmigration so that their citizens want to stay.

The American Prospect. (blue check member of the Narrative Media)

Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

‘Neoliberal’ is Narrative-speak for ‘classical liberal’ and pretty much always used incorrectly.

The American Mind.

The number of Americans who die each year from an opioid overdose has exploded over the last two decades. Each year, over 70,000 Americans succumb to synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl; that’s more than the total number of American soldiers who died during the Vietnam War. The rate of deaths per capita has quadrupled since the turn of the century.

Most of the fentanyl flooding the country is produced in Mexico by the cartels. These are the same cartels that also smuggle in weapons and traffic hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people across the southern border. The cartels are able to act so freely and with such impunity because the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known popularly as AMLO, has taken a laissez-faire approach to their dealings. AMLO has said he believes a “hugs not bullets” approach is the best way to deal with the cartels.

López Obrador recently reiterated his stance on not taking orders from America regarding combatting the drug cartels. Throughout his presidency, AMLO has provided various justifications for his approach of prioritizing dialogue over confrontation with these criminal organizations. He has emphasized that violence cannot be countered with more violence and has highlighted the importance of addressing the root causes of drug cartel violence such as poverty and limited opportunities. López Obrador explicitly states that his decision to refrain from pursuing the cartels aligns with his “Mexico First” policy, and that the issue of drug overdoses primarily affects the United States, not Mexico. In other words, your problem, not mine.

Read it.

Transgender weightlifter Vicki Piper’s first place win in the Masters National Weightlifting Championships in Reno, Nevada, resulted in outrage from some concerned about fairness in women’s sports.

Read it.

New Mexico’s top election official won’t disclose key information about a new electronic signature-verification system for putting candidates on the ballot, a lawsuit alleges just months after she settled a court case over lack of transparency.

Last August, New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver settled the public records dispute with a think tank over voting information for $22,000, after initially blocking access to documents.

Last week, the same organization—the Southwestern Public Policy Institute—sued again in New Mexico’s 13th Judicial District in Sandoval County over records regarding the state’s signature-verification portal.

New York Post.

The “migrant influencer” encouraging others to invade the US and squat at the homes of citizens skipped out on authorities shortly after arriving in the country and is on the run from immigration officials, The Post can reveal.

Venezuelan national Leonel Moreno crossed the southern border illegally in April 2022 at Eagle Pass, Texas, and was enrolled in the Alternatives to Detention program, which allows federal authorities to track migrants using ankle monitors or other technology.

However, Moreno didn’t follow the rules and is now listed as an “absconder” from the program, according to internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents seen by The Post.

Read it.

The New York Post is speculating that the infamous ‘knockout game’ could have made a return after numerous women reported being punched in the head by “strangers” in New York City.

Note that they wisely don’t try this on men.

The American Mind

A disturbing new trend emerged recently of publishers altering and modifying various literary works to make them more consistent with contemporary attitudes. Puffin Books, the publisher of Roald Dahl’s works, decided that his description of a character in Matilda as “fat” and “ugly” was offensive, and replaced them with terms deemed to be more sensitive. References to Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad were replaced with John Steinbeck and Jane Austen. The adoption of such practices has led to the creation of a new career field—like community organizers and social media influencers—of “sensitivity readers,” who examine manuscripts in search of words and phrases which need to be changed to avoid offending modern sensibilities. The works of Agatha Christie have also been subject to this mutilation, and Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels are about to undergo the same treatment. This type of thing appears to be a growing trend in the U.K., but U.S. editions of Roald Dahl’s books have not yet been changed.

Read it.

A United Nations report released Tuesday detailed allegations of Russia having executed 32 Ukrainian prisoners of war and using them as human shields to hunt mines.

“If there is no boogeyman, no one gets paid.” — Rollo Tomassi

Read it.

Homeowners who go on vacation or a business trip, even for just a week, are returning to find their house overtaken by trespassers who fraudulently claim a right to be there. It’s happening to tens of thousands of homeowners from New York City to Atlanta and Los Angeles.

When owners call the police, they’re told police can’t help. It’s a civil matter, and they have to file an eviction lawsuit, which can drag on for months or years because housing courts are backlogged.

Meanwhile owners are out on the street while squatters are living free, destroying houses and even selling off owners’ belongings.

Read it.

People who receive Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine have a greater risk of developing chronic hives, according to researchers in Denmark.

Most activities in schools are merely training people to be ‘good losers’. Eventually you wind up with a country full of losers, with results as you see them.

Read it.

It’s not easy being green.

Power Line.

Last March 27, in the run-up to the April 1 “Trans Day of Vengeance,” Audrey Hale shot her way into the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. There Hale murdered Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Mike Hill, 61, William Kinney, 9, Katherine Koonce, 60, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Hallie Scruggs, nine years old and the daughter of Covenant Presbyterian pastor Chad Scruggs. The victims died of multiple gunshot wounds and Hale also applied blunt force trauma to William Kinney and Katherine Koonce.

A former student at the school, Hale carefully planned the attack for months. Police and the FBI blocked release of her “manifesto” and trans activists were adamant that the material not be released. The Trans Resistance Network proclaimed that Audrey Hale “had no other effective way to be seen than to lash out by taking the life of others.”

Over at the White House, Joe Biden failed to identify or condemn the shooter, failed to name a single murder victim, and did not attend any of the funerals. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said “our hearts go out to the trans community as they are under attack right now.”

The Foundry.

Traditionally, teachers unions have kept a laserlike focus on improving members’ pay, benefits, and working conditions.

Although not educational outcomes for the children they’re supposed to teach. Let’s not get crazy here.

Now, though, teachers unions are diverting their energies from fighting for the well-being of teachers to fighting over a host of unrelated issues. Teachers unions now have foreign policies.

Because they’re unions and therefore a part of the Democrat base.

Read it.

Who could possibly have seen this coming? California’s minimum wage for fast food workers is going up next week and some chains are already planning layoffs in response. Newsom signed the bill raising the minimum wage last September.

The businesses will eventually move to business-friendly places like Texas and Florida.

The (former) employees will be unemployed and dependent on government benefits, thereby ensuring more votes for Democrats, the Party of Government Dependency.

Don’t think that this happens by accident.

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“A sound Conservative government,” said Taper, musingly. “I understand: Tory men and Whig measures.”

—Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby 

In American terms, Republican men and Democrat measures.

Sound familiar?

Read it.

The Ven Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, Archdeacon of Liverpool wrote on X “I went to a conference on whiteness last autumn. It was very good, very interesting and made me realise: whiteness is to race as patriarchy is to gender.”

Threlfall-Holmes, who is white, added “So yes, let’s have anti-whiteness, and let’s smash the patriarchy. That’s not anti-white, or anti-men, it’s anti-oppression.”

Read it.

The radical leftists in control of Baltimore City Hall have plunged the metro area just north of Washington, DC, into apocalyptic levels. We advise readers to entirely avoid the metro area as violent crime spirals out of control.

Failed social justice reforms, defunding the police, and widespread mistrust of the police have resulted in a skeleton police force that will no longer be able to protect residents in some regions of the city.

Fox Baltimore reported last Tuesday that only three police officers were on duty for the Southern Police District, which includes more than 61,000 residents.

ZMan, who refers to Baltimore as “Lagos on the Chesapeake”, recently moved to West Virginia and says that he is very pleased to have done so.

Read it.

Fewer hurricanes, for one thing. Fewer Latin American drug dealers, for another. Fewer illegal immigrants, for a third. People who speak reasonably understandable English, for a fourth.

ZMan connects the dots.

Whenever there is a terrorist attack, the main question immediately after it is who conducted the attack. This is not just for the mundane reason of apprehending the people responsible, but also for understanding why they did it. Terrorism, by definition, exists within the context of a larger political cause. A crazy person opening fire at a mall is a different thing than an Antifa member opening fire at a church school. The former is simply crazy while the latter has a political motivation.

After the attack on the Moscow music venue over the weekend, the first thing people naturally asked is who did it. The Russians quickly apprehended the four gunmen and then the question shifted to who sponsored it, as it was clear that these four people could never have done this alone. The Russians have arrested a dozen other suspects they think may have been involved, but the four Tajiks have been identified as the shooters and they have confessed.

Read it.

The abuse of our legal system for insidious purposes seems to be growing every day. The political rewards for the Left are abundant, and the costs for the Right are horrendous. And yet the outcomes from these acts continue, with no end in sight.

Washington Free Beacon.

For nearly two decades, President Joe Biden has told a story about why he devoted his life to politics. Speaking to Special Counsel Robert Hur in October 2023, he told it under oath.

Fresh out of law school and working as a clerk at a high-powered Wilmington, Delaware, law firm, Biden, in his telling, was tapped to defend a construction company sued by a 23-year-old welder who “lost part of his penis and one of his testicles” to a fire that broke out when he was working inside a chimney at a Delaware City plant. Thanks to Biden’s shrewd legal defense on the construction company’s behalf, the injured man lost the case.

“I wrote this memo. And son of a b—, it prevailed,” Biden told Hur on Oct. 8. “And I looked over at that kid…and I thought, ‘son of a b—, I’m in the wrong business, I’m not made for this.’”

Biden said he was so wracked with guilt that he concocted an excuse to avoid a celebratory lunch with one of the firm’s named partners and walked into the public defender’s office to ask for a job that very day. It’s “the only time I ever lied,” Biden told Hur on Oct. 8. Thus began, according to a New York Times report on the special counsel interview, “a career that would one day take him to the White House.”

But this story is almost certainly a complete work of fiction.

Power Line.

There are several answers to that question, but start with the fact that it is mostly the “elite” universities, and to some extent the larger ones, that have seen severe outbreaks of anti-Semitism. What is different about these institutions? For one thing, they have large numbers of foreign students, many of them from the Middle East and China. This has become a financial racket: the top universities post sky-high sticker prices for tuition, but hardly anyone pays them. In fact, almost the only people who pay full freight are rich Middle Easterners and Chinese who send their offspring to the U.S. to be “educated.”

These international students, the large majority from countries with little freedom of speech and little or no tradition of academic freedom, are the shock troops of anti-Semitism. True, they bring some leftist students along with them. But the most anti-Semitic universities, like Harvard, Penn and MIT, are also the ones with the most foreign students from anti-Semitic countries. This was illustrated by the fact that when violently anti-Semitic students assaulted Jewish students at MIT, isolating them in the library and trying to break down the doors to get at them, MIT declined to expel the anti-Semitic thugs. Why? For fear that they would be deported.

Power Line.

Of all the inroads the Left has made into our institutions in recent years, the most puzzling is its increasing dominance of the business world. One aspect of this is the movement for “ESG”–Environmental, Social, Governance–investing. ESG basically means swearing fealty to the craziest of left-wing schemes. Why it became a fad is beyond me.

Happily, the ESG craze may be coming to an end.

Read it.

A former high school girls’ volleyball player who was injured in a game by an opponent identifying as transgender is calling out a Democrat congresswoman who claims that having transgender athletes in female sports doesn’t hurt anyone.

Payton McNabb, a 19-year-old from North Carolina, was struck in the face by a male who identifies as transgender in her varsity high school volleyball match in September 2022. The male knocked Ms. McNabb unconscious in a spike—a move intended to hit the ball in the game.

The incident forced Ms. McNabb to spend months recovering from headaches and concentration problems. She also missed the remainder of her volleyball season.

Ms. McNabb said she suffered from a neck injury, concussion, lasting vision impairment, and partial paralysis in the right side of her body, as well as mental anguish.

Power Line.

Robert “Beto” O’Rourke—remember him?—appeared on Bill Maher’s comedy show Friday night, and accused Big Retail—”the Walmarts, the Amazons, the Krogers of the world” of price gouging. But it is O’Rourke’s explanation that earns him an entire feature display in the Museum of Leftist Stupidity:

“They were jacking prices in the middle of inflation and blaming it on the economy.”

Imagine! Raising prices during inflation! Who ever heard of such a thing? I’m sure his solution will be government price controls, because when you are this dumb, it is too much to expect even a minimal grasp of economics.

Read it.

ZMan uses the terms Cloud People and Dirt People.

It sounds too obvious to be profound: we trust what we own / control. Of course we do. But it becomes profoundly consequential when we add the shadow half of the statement: we don’t trust what we don’t own / control without constant feedback providing verifiable evidence that it is worthy of our trust.

Absent this positive verifiable (i.e. factual evidence based on both data and personal-anecdotal experience) feedback, we have good reason to assume whatever we don’t own / control is primarily serving the interests of those who do own / control it. And since this means the product/service’s trustworthiness is suspect despite claims that it serves our interests, we must seek a steady flow of feedback substantiating that the product/service is still providing the value the owners / managers are claiming, either explicitly or implicitly.

In other words, hands-on knowledge about the inner workings of the product/service generates trust. Absent this experiential knowledge, we’re flying blind as to the true value of the product/service. If the actual value is less than the owners / managers claim, both the owners / managers and the product/service they’re providing are unworthy of our trust.

Read it.

It’s been hard to watch the effects of forced diversity, multiculturalism, and mass immigration on the tiny island of Great Britain—the most densely populated nation in Europe. At least in America we still have so much land area that most people are not yet feeling the effects of large-scale population displacement stemming from all forms of immigration.

Read it.

Crime victims don’t have rights under the Constitution, former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was recalled by voters in 2022 amid an escalation of crime, said during a conference here at UC Berkeley School of Law.

Boudin’s surprising comment came as part of a larger debate between the Left and Right on criminal justice issues at the March 8 gathering, called “Justice Unveiled: Debating Crime and Public Safety Conference.”

L.A. Times.

The insurance giant announced Wednesday that it would not renew homeowner insurance policies for 30,000 customers, including owners of condominiums. It also plans not to offer commercial apartment policies and won’t renew the 42,000 now in place.
Although the number of people affected is large, the company said the cuts represent less than 3% of its policies in the state.
“This decision was not made lightly,” State Farm wrote in a statement. The company “takes seriously our responsibility to maintain adequate claims-paying capacity for our customers and to comply with applicable financial solvency laws. It is necessary to take these actions now.”

When the government will not act to protect property, then property insurance is a losing business. These companies aren’t charities, however much the state government is attempting to force them to act like it.

Read it.

Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, the third-wealthiest woman in the US, has awarded $640 million in new charitable donations – with most of it going to far-left nonprofits pushing left-wing causes, including assisting migrants who commit crimes and promoting transgender biological males who compete against women, the NY Post reports.

Read it.

Receiving blood transfusion from COVID-19-vaccinated individuals could pose a medical risk to unvaccinated recipients since numerous adverse events are being reported among vaccinated people worldwide, according to a recent study from Japan.

Read it.

As air traffic is on the verge of breaking records heading into the summer, Newark, New Jersey’s airspace is being turned over to Philadelphia.

The move, prompted by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, seeks to “address staffing issues and congested traffic in the New York City area”, according to a new Reuters report.

We hope it’s more of the latter than the former – because with all these Boeings in the air every day, it isn’t necessarily a great time to be understaffed. And we’re only half joking.

Read it.

High school students at a New York high school staged a massive walk-out protest this week in opposition to the district’s attempts to force them to share restrooms with the opposite gender, in the name of “transgender” acceptance.

Apparently they don’t love Big Brother.

Read it.

Eighty years on from both the completion of C.S. Lewis’ classic science-fiction parable That Hideous Strength, and the Dumbarton Oaks Conference which led to the creation of the UN, have the worst totalitarian nightmares of Lewis’ imagination finally come to pass for real?

Try to imagine a world in which democracy is wholly dead, having been replaced by its own deliberate inverted simulacrum, a surface-deep regime—an atheistic, science-worshipping, globalist technocracy—in which hideous non-human creatures tempt a fallen elitist ruling class into entering irrevocably into the satanic realm of post-humanity, facilitated by hubristic feats of industrial and mechanical engineering.

If this all sounds like something stolen from a science-fiction novel, then that’s because it is—the novel in question being 1945’s That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, which (publication schedules being what they are) he had actually finished writing some time prior to the end of WWII. It is a horrific and satirical prediction of what Lewis presciently perceived the post-war world most likely had in store for an unsuspecting humanity that naively thought democracy was about to triumph forever with the looming twin defeats of Germany and Japan: namely, a new form of ‘benign’ globalist dictatorship in disguise.

Read it.

Europe’s illegal immigration crisis shows no signs of slowing, with the first two months of 2024 showing 31,200 irregular border crossings, which is the same level as last year’s near-record numbers, according to data from Frontex, the EU’s external border agency.

Read it.

As regular readers are aware, an inverted yield curve has been the best predictor of a US downturn of any variable through history: the yield curve has always inverted before all of the last 10 US recessions, with a lag that is usually 12-18 months, but some cycles – certainly this one – take longer…. much longer.

Read it.

A virologist who had a “clandestine relationship” with Chinese agents and was subsequently fired by the Trudeau government has popped back up in China – where she’s conducting research with Chinese military scientists and other virology researchers, including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where she’s allegedly studying antibodies for coronavirus, as well as the deadly Ebola and Niaph viruses, the Globe and Mail reports.

Read it.

Just in time for the 2024 election cycle, leftist activists seem to be ramping up their targeted harassment campaigns of popular conservative figures in what we’re sure will be another “fiery but mostly peaceful” year. This week, a mob of people disrupted a Kyle Rittenhouse speaking event at the University of Memphis, then rushed at attendees while making threats, spitting and attempting to block them from leaving the campus. Clearly, these people didn’t learn their lesson from what happened the last time a mob chased after Rittenhouse.

Read it.

A Venezuelan migrant has gone viral after he posted a video to social media that explained how illegal immigrants can take advantage of squatting laws and stay in American homes.

“I have thought about invading a house in the United States,” a man identified as Leonal Moreno said in the TikTok video. “I found out that there is a law that says that if a house is not inhabited, we can seize it.”

The man told his followers in Spanish that he anticipated his next business would be “invading” abandoned houses. He claimed that some of his African friends have told him they have already taken seven homes in the U.S.

Moreno also said that for migrants to avoid living on the street and not be a “public burden,” the law says deteriorated homes can be acquired by others, repaired and lived in. The man also claimed the new inhabitants can then sell the house.

Read it.

A California school spent $250,000 in federal funds to hire a teacher training service called Woke Kindergarten, but after two years student performance got even worse, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

An audit by researchers at OpenTheBooks.com revealed that almost two-thirds of employees at the low-income, underperforming Glassbrook Elementary School are making six-figure salaries. Retired educators are also collecting pensions of more than $200,000.

Read it.

Britain takes another step down the road to totalitarianism. Sad.

UPDATE: Scotland’s Hate Speech Act and Abuse of Process