DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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Allah likes it when you stab people.

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21-year-old Abdul Ballout was named as the suspect who drove a white van through a crowd at an LGBT festival in Berlin, then stabbed more people as he fled the scene.

Ballout is the son of Shia-Muslim migrants from Lebanon. He was born in Berlin.

In 2024, Ballout left Germany to go fight with ISIS. He ended up back in Lebanon.

Instead of classifying him as a terrorist, denaturalizing him (canceling his German passport), and reporting him to the Lebanese authorities, German officials brought Ballout back to Germany for trial.

And the slow suicide of Europe proceeds apace.

ATQUE: Liberal women express sympathy for Muslim who plowed car into LGBT festival, blame white Christian men instead

Babylon Bee.

Across the globe this past weekend, dozens of people had the great fortune to hear someone shouting “God is the greatest!” in Arabic, a sure sign that something really good was happening.

People in Berlin, New York City, and Paris were treated in recent days to the happy Arabic proclamation of God’s greatness, leaving passersby looking around for what wonderful thing was transpiring.

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The International Criminal Court (ICC) has voted to dismiss its chief prosecutor for alleged sexual misconduct.

British lawyer Karim Khan, elected in 2021, was facing serious allegations of sexual misconduct. Members—the 125-state Special Session of the Assembly of States Parties—cast 82 votes in favour of removing him, based on findings in June that he had committed a “serious breach of duty and serious misconduct,” prompting his suspension.

Not the Bee.

Democrats: Party of the Noseless.

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Is “suicidal empathy” the real cause of the western world’s immigration crisis? Or, is the political left completely devoid of empathy? Is the multicultural agenda so important to them that they’re willing to sacrifice their own people to protect it?

The problem of “intersectionality” and engineered mass immigration is that progressive ideals are not shared or respected by most cultures. Leftists envision a sweeping coalition of socialist and minority groups joining forces to destroy the “evil colonial west”, but they seem to be ignoring the fact that foreign elements entering Europe and the US hate liberals as much as they hate conservatives.

This might not be stupidity – it might be a calculated risk on the part of woke leaders who are happy to throw a few of their “comrades” to the third world wolves in the service of the “greater good.” A common tactic of Antifa and related organizations in the face of a terror attack or criminal event that makes them look bad is to counter by diverting the public discourse. The pattern is undeniable and undoubtedly well planned.

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A newly revealed internal memo from the final days of the Biden administration exposes a calculated scheme to grant de facto amnesty to more than 3 million foreign nationals through Temporary Protected Status expansions, explicitly designed to block President Trump from carrying out the mass deportations the American people voted for.

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A Baltimore-area contractor operating under the names “Squatter King Removal” and/or “Eviction King” has emerged as one of the premier, go-to property recovery services. This reflects a growing enforcement gap in Maryland, a one-party-ruled state controlled by the Democratic Party.

 

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And there you have it: From the horse’s ass’s mouth.

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The WNBA only has two real stars with any meaningful popular following – Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham. Both of them built reputations as underdogs in a sport traditionally dominated by minority players espousing far-left politics. Both of them have been mistreated in the past by a league that tends to play nursemaid to those same players.

The WNBA has long been a cultural joke, not just because its reputation for low standards of athleticism, but because they are constantly whining about “equal pay”, “social justice” and LGBT issues. The league spends so much energy on activism that they’ve forgotten about the game and the fans. No one likes a bunch of crybabies making demands.

The national interest in Caitlin Clark transcends politics; people like her because she takes the game seriously and plays at a level far above most of her peers. Her mere presence on the court now often brings in double or even triple the normal WNBA viewership.

On the other hand, Sophie Cunningham has gained a reputation as an enforcer. While Caitlin Clark is being persistently battered with flagrant fouls disguised as “accidents”, Cunningham has decided to dish out some fouls in return. The Martial Arts trained player has decided to “sweep the leg” on the league and she’s no longer letting the abuse slide.

ATQUE: USA TODAY Sports Activists Faceplant with Fake News on Caitlin Clark

Newsbusters.

Sunday’s edition of MS NOW’s The Weekend staged a kvetchathon over President Trump ordering the installation of signs outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History warning visitors that the museum does not accurately reflect American history.

The panel repeatedly asked: Who gets to tell America’s history?

They never answered that question, other than to make clear they don’t want Trump doing it.

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On the heels of liberal artist Bruce Springsteen’s TDS-laden political rants during his “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour earlier this year, two Rock and Roll Hall of Fame legends have spoken out against pushing political propaganda during shows. Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger said fans should be entertained, not lectured, while Journey’s iconic pianist/keyboardist and songwriter Jonathan Cain was more blunt, insisting “The Boss” needs to “shut up” and sing.

In a New York Times podcast interview, Jagger was asked what his audience means to him. The question was disingenuous as the interviewer qualified it with an inaccurate description, claiming Springsteen “engages in in a meaningful back-and-forth with his audience.”

We all know there’s no “back-and-forth” with the Born to Run singer when he’s ranting about politics. It’s strictly a one-sided, self-righteous lecture. Still, Jagger answered politely:

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Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, a Democrat, was indicted by an Oahu grand jury on Friday on charges of criminal conspiracy to commit bribery, bribery, and falsifying candidate committee reports. The charges stem from an alleged 2022 scheme, dating to her time as a powerful state lawmaker, to steer state money toward COVID-19 testing contracts during the pandemic. Hawaii News Now reported that legal experts are calling it the biggest bribery scandal in state history.

Luke was one of five people named in the 12-count indictment. The others: Ryan Yamane, a former state representative and ex-director of the Department of Human Services; Tobi Solidum, a businessman and lobbyist; Ford Fuchigami, a Transportation Department official; and Leo Asuncion, a former chair of the state Public Utilities Commission. Luke turned herself in Friday afternoon; her bail was set at $80,000.

Gov. Josh Green did not wait for the case to develop. “The Lieutenant Governor needs to consider formally resigning to address this matter and so that the state of Hawai?i can move forward,” Green said in a statement Friday.

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Genociding commuinism is a genocide I can get behind with a clear conscience.

(What’s next in the proglodyte term-twisting contest? Culinary genocide? Arboreal genocide? Hello Kitty genocide?)

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Many people begin to notice the arrival of spring with the large, beautiful blooms of the magnolia flower. Magnolia trees can be found in many parts of the world, and their beautiful forms have symbolic, medicinal, and visual meaning across cultures—and have for centuries. If you’re ever near a magnolia tree, though, look closely: you’ll notice that beetles, instead of bees, will be moving amongst the flowers.

So, why beetles over bees? The answer is simpler than you might think. Magnolias are so ancient that they were around long before bees came into existence. They’ve been around for over 100 million years, in fact, and beetles have existed for even longer , approximately 300 million years.

Named after the French botanist Pierre Magnol, magnolias belong to one of the oldest lineages of flowers on Earth. (Dinosaurs still walked the Earth at this time, to put it into perspective!) Given this ancient setting, the pollinators we’re most familiar with, butterflies and bees, had not yet evolved. Beetles were the primary insect pollinators for the time, and so they became the de facto agents for the magnolia’s survival.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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Objectivism is Red Pill? Who knew?

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

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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I guess nobody reads the Fifth Amendment any more, much less the Fourth.

A federal case in Atlanta is raising questions about a privacy-focused mobile operating system, with prosecutors arguing that its features were used to erase evidence. The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute Atlanta resident Sam Tunick under a federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized.

The case centers on Tunick’s use of GrapheneOS, an open-source operating system that works on Google Pixel phones and lets users enter a passcode to wipe a device clean.

Experts said the legal approach is unusual and may be the first time the law has been aimed at an operating system. “It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,” said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a similar case.

…

Tunick was taken to a secondary screening room, where multiple agents questioned him. A motion filed by his defense argues the interrogation focused on child sexual abuse material as a pretext for investigating his connections to the protest movement. The motion also states that Tunick asked four times to speak with a lawyer and was denied each time. According to the same filing, agents did not present a warrant or read him his rights.

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Of course she did.

The remark was made during a vigil held in Berlin for the victims of the attack on the Christopher Street Day (CSD) parade on Saturday. The woman who spoke revealed something more telling than a mere emotional reaction: a desire for the terrorist to fit a politically convenient frame.

She was not hoping that the attacker did not exist. She was hoping he was someone else.

As they do. If we all hope really really hard, Tinkerbelle will live.

The attack took place on July 25th in Berlin’s Tiergarten park. A man drove into the crowd, and then attacked people with a bladed weapon. One woman was killed and another 29 people were injured.

The suspect was later identified as Abdul B., a 21-year-old German of Lebanese origin known for his Islamist connections. German authorities classified the incident as Islamist terrorism. The attacker was shot dead by police the following day.

The facts forced part of the Left to confront its own reflection. A white Christian attacker would have allowed the assault to be presented as a direct consequence of supremacism, the far Right, or Western intolerance. A radicalised Islamist, by contrast, forces an acknowledgement that there are religious and political currents incompatible with the rights the LGBT movement claims to defend.

The CSD organisers, predictably, called for the attack not to be politically “instrumentalised” and insisted that no community should be placed under general suspicion. The principle is reasonable: no citizen should be held responsible for another person’s actions because of their origin or religion. The problem arises when caution is used to prevent any discussion of the terrorist’s specific ideology.

The attack must not be politicised, they say—except to decide in advance which interpretation is forbidden.

Apparently that’s a thing.

God preserve me from being that cool.

The Foundry.

One reason pharmaceuticals cost so much: The Food and Drug Administration’s approval process takes up to 12 years to bring a new drug to market. The Trump administration has launched Operation Trialblazer to shorten that timeline.

It’s one of Trump’s best healthcare proposals so far, one that reduces the government’s footprint in U.S. healthcare. It is a welcome departure from some of the Trump administration’s other prescription drug initiatives that, unfortunately, expand the role of government.

The FDA approval process is divided into three phases. Phase 1 determines if a drug can be used safely in humans and, if so, at what dosage. Completing Phase 1 takes an average of 380 days and, in some cases, can stretch?to 700 days.

Other countries are taking advantage of the FDA’s slower pace. China has reduced its Phase 1 process to 60 days while Australia’s is about 70 days. The U.S. has lost its competitive edge as a result. In 2024, the number of drug trials registered in China was over 16,600 versus 9,100 in the U.S., according to the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology—the first time China has exceeded the U.S.

Once again, government bureaucracy is the reason why we can’t have nice things.

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Former President Barack Obama recently gave America another reminder of how his presidency—once expected to bring the country together—left us more divided on race.

Obama compared America under President Donald Trump to the tumultuous period after the Civil War that gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan. He said the U.S. is “having the same arguments” we did in the 1860s and 1870s, when Union troops occupied the former Confederacy and attempted to secure real freedom for former slaves.

“These issues are still here,” Obama told author Malcolm Gladwell in an interview for the podcast “Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise.”

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In most states the jury duty summons process comes from registered voter rolls. As a consequence, when a person is called for jury duty and is then disqualified as a non-citizen, we have another way to judge the scale of non-citizens on the voter rolls.

Reviewing lists of disqualified non-citizen jurors is now taking place in many counties led by citizen inquiry. The disqualification records, “non-juror” lists are public records in many states and counties. These reviews are turning up tens-of-thousands of non-citizens who are on juror lists, which means they are also on voter rolls.

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Centuries before semioticians decided it was exceedingly clever of them, Shakespeare’s fourteen year old protégé, Juliet, argued rather more elegantly than any academic, that the connection between a word and the physical object it represents, is arbitrary. If we all decide tomorrow that the often exquisitely scented, gracefully shaped flower that comes in an endless variety of colours is called a nose, and not a rose, it really doesn’t matter. In spite of endlessly trite and tedious efforts by academics to tell Ferdinand de Saussure what he actually meant when he claimed, The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, onomatopoeia remains the only example of a word which real people think has some kind of integral connection to the physical world they inhabit. Bees really do buzz and wind chimes really do tinkle.

The insidious spread of sociolinguistics across educational institutions, and the cultural chaos it has fuelled, is a topic I’ve frequently written about, and so I thought I’d take a leaf out of these linguistic anarchists’ textbook and ask myself a particularly current question. What words might we now use, to accurately identify our major political parties?

Because it’s quite obvious today that Blair and Campbellson’s attempt to rename the Labour Party Nu Labour has been an abject failure. All it took was Corbyn’s spectacularly brief rise and fall to demonstrate their rebranding had not even been skin deep, even as the sight of all that ugly anti-Semitism on display made decent folks’ skin crawl.

But you would have to be a linguistic eunuch not to think that calling the party Burnham has just usurped, the Labour Party, is a lexical felony worthy of a life sentence. To plunder Blair’s painfully slim legacy volume, I’d suggest we all start referring to Burnham’s bourgeois, Glastonbury tent as the Not the People’s Party, because the idea that they represent working people and not their own peculiarly idiosyncratic hang ups and interests, is risible.

Fortune, a Voice of the Crust.

For decades, the story of American higher education has been about women pulling ahead. Now a new study shows that shift is also reshaping who marries whom—and it’s women without college degrees who are paying the price.

Fortune has been chronicling how money shapes marriage since long before this study — the magazine’s Julie Connelly coined the term “trophy wife” itself in a 1989 cover story, a phrase that’s since become an inescapable shorthand across pop culture for wealth-driven pairings. Now, new research suggests the more consequential story about marriage and money is happening in the opposite direction: not among the wealthy elite, but in the widening gap between non-college women and the shrinking pool of “marriageable” men.

A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper tracked marriage patterns across U.S. birth cohorts from 1930 to 1980 and found that college-educated women have kept their marriage rates stable even as their pool of similarly educated men shrank dramatically. The ratio of college men to college women fell from 1.8 to 0.8 over that span, and there are now 1.6 million more women than men enrolled in four-year colleges nationwide, according to the study by economists Clara Chambers of Yale, Benjamin Goldman of Cornell, and Joseph Winkelmann of Harvard.

“Four-year college rates for men stagnated essentially many decades ago, whereas for women, it’s been a steady increase,” Goldman told Fortune. “That’s really been the key factor that’s led to the changing ratio over time.”

The paper, “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates,” complicates the mutation of the “trophy wife” era into the “power couples” era: as wealthy Americans increasingly marry within their own income and education tier. This new research shows the opposite pattern playing out further down the income ladder, where college-educated women are increasingly pairing with men who skipped college altogether.

The Telegraph (UK).

A charity that is an alleged outpost of the Iranian regime in London has the right to bring migrants to Britain, The Telegraph can reveal.

The Home Office has given the Islamic Centre of England, based in Maida Vale, powers to sponsor visas for “skilled workers” and religious ministers.

The centre remains on the official register of visa sponsors despite accusations that it forms part of Iran’s propaganda machine in the UK. It has successfully issued a number of certificates of sponsorship, the document necessary for migrant workers to apply to enter the UK.

The Telegraph (UK).

A police force is placing biological men in women’s cells despite the Supreme Court ruling that transgender women are not legally women.

Staffordshire Police says its custody policy means “detainees may be placed in accommodation consistent with their gender identity”, The Telegraph can reveal.

That means biological men who identify as transgender women can be placed in women’s-only custody cells.

…

Staffordshire Police has also been accused of providing “contradictory” guidance on whether an officer of the opposite sex can carry out strip searches.

The Telegraph (UK).

The Villiers Revealed project includes an exploration of Care Bears as “a symbol for the LGBTQA+ community”, and says some of these bears are “transgender or gender fluid”.

The project was developed by Culture Leicestershire, backed by public funding from Arts Council England, to highlight “trans narratives erased by colonialism”.

Care Bears, spanning children’s toys and cartoon characters, were launched by the American Greetings card company in 1981, becoming highly popular throughout the decade.

The exhibition said one bear, called Funshine, had been variously depicted as male and female since the launch of the toys and could be considered “a symbol for the LGBTQA+ community” and a role model.

The Telegraph (UK).

Dozens of armed police officers and emergency services rushed to the Seattle Center complex at around 6pm local time on Sunday after rapid gunfire broke out during the event, named the Bite of Seattle.

The annual three-day festival is one of the city’s busiest events, having drawn more than 280,000 visitors last year.

Authorities have not yet confirmed the exact number of casualties.

However, Harborview Medical Centre was forced into a sudden lockdown to manage the influx of victims and a heightened police presence, according to an internal staff email seen by The Seattle Times.

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What if Illinois were two states? Rep. Brad Halbrook lays it out.

Jim Acosta Falsely Accuses Trump of Jailing Journalists

More than 1 million children lost access to food benefits after Trump bill passed (Marina Dunbar/The Guardian) Because, as we all know, feeding children is TOTALLY the responsibility of the Fedral government—and the Federal taxpayer.

Brazil Denies Visas to U.S. Officials Over Election-Interference Fears (Samantha Pearson/Wall Street Journal)  Democrats in America aren’t the only ones stealing elections, and fearing getting found out.

Trump Seems Trapped by Iran War, Even as He Wields the World’s Biggest Hammer (David E. Sanger/New York Times)

UK’s Burnham Would Call Out Trump If in Britain’s Interest, He Tells BBC  Good luck with that.

Trump Is Pushing Nuclear Energy. His Family and Supporters Could Benefit. (New York Times)  Becaise. as we all know, nobody but Trump’s family have ever benefited from public office.

UK journalists ‘self-censoring stories about Trump and the right over safety fears’ (Michael Savage/The Guardian)  Because, as we all know, ‘journalists’ never have to censor stories about the left over safety fears.

Nobody’s cashing in on the presidency quite like Donald Trump Jr. (Paul Waldman/MS NOW)  Because, as we all know, every Trump is a crook—unlike Democrats. (Catherine Herridge Uncovers Shocking Revelations About The Biden Family)

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The Hodge Twins demonstrate what’s wrong with black culture.

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July marks the critical window for cotton topping in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. In cotton fields across Xinjiang, farmers are racing against the farming schedule to carry out topping operations with fleets of robotic cotton toppers, replacing traditional manual labor with digitalized, precision farming work.

If we can ever figure out how to have robots pick crops, one of the chief incentives for winking at illegal immigration will go away.

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Iran knows that if they are losing they can call for a ‘truce’ (hudna) and they will get one, giving them time to re-build and re-arm before attacking again, which history shows they will always do.

I keep waiting for American politicians to catch on to this scam but they never do. Failure to learn from history is the main reason why we can’t have nice things.

The Foundry.

There are only two lanes to the Democrat presidential nomination two years from now, and one of them is already blocked—by Kamala Harris.

Get ready for the Kamala comeback, followed, in all likelihood, by a replay of her crushing defeat by the Republican nominee.

Believe it or not, the ex-VP occupies what counts as the “center lane” within the party, and for most of the last three decades, that’s the one that’s led to the nomination.

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At 4:00 AM, while most people were sleeping, Christopher Bruton-Frazier was having the time of his life, driving a $300,000, 4-ton, armored, tactical S.W.A.T. BearCat.

If he was a S.W.A.T. officer that might have made sense, but Frazier was just some guy off the street who was walking by the NJ Transit Emergency Services Unit headquarters parking garage in Newark and saw an opportunity.

Apparently, no one was around to notice him strolling through the facility, opening the door, and driving out.

New Jersey. What can you say?

They then pulled the security footage and ran it through facial recognition software, which pulled up Frazier’s profile. When they showed up at his house, they found the BearCat’s backup camera in his room as well as some stacks of heroin.

Blue State Blues.

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A family summer beach event in the UK city of Nottingham now sits behind portable anti-ram steel barrier, the latest admission that open borders have turned public spaces into soft targets.

Local authorities across Britain are quietly installing more of what critics now call “diversity barriers” – heavy portable steel devices designed to stop vehicles being driven into crowds.

The annual artificial “Nottingham Beach” event opened this week behind a line of bright red Husson H-Stop units.

Import Turd World people, get Turd World problems.

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Institutions built to prevent atrocities eventually face the question of what they actually protect. For the United Nations, voting patterns, internal investigations and its own decisions this year no longer support the fiction of neutrality. An UNRWA school in Gaza sat above a Hamas tunnel shaft and three anti-tank positions, and its own principal was on the payroll of both institutions at once – a fact that American investigators, not the UN, brought to light.

The pattern is old: during the oil-for-food scandal, a mid-level program director faced US prosecution while the officials who managed the program from above kept their positions. When UN failures surface, line staff absorb the exposure. The people who set the policy rarely do.

The arithmetic alone dismantles the pretense of balance. In 2025 the UN General Assembly (UNGA) adopted 15 resolutions targeting Israel, and only 11 addressing the rest of the planet combined – a tally covering North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, Russia and the United States together. From 2015 through 2024, the total reached 173 resolutions against Israel, compared to 80 for all other member states combined. The UN Human Rights Council has run comparable numbers since 2006, adopting 112 resolutions against Israel compared to 45 against Syria, despite a civil war there that killed hundreds of thousands.

Harvard Magazine.

DURING THE LAST 50,000 years, human beings have transformed from nomadic hunter-gatherers roaming savannas to a species that traveled to the moon, invented the internet, and created an artificial form of intelligence. Yet many scientists believed that, during the same time frame, human DNA hadn’t changed much. Most research during the past two decades hinted that human evolution has largely slowed or changed so subtly that existing tools couldn’t detect it; evidence seemed to suggest that civilization put humans beyond the reach of natural selection.

“It’s like we had in our heads that a few hundred thousand years ago we had reached some kind of evolutionary optimization,” says professor of genetics and human evolutionary biology David Reich.

That changed with Reich’s latest work. Using the largest collection of ancient human DNA samples ever compiled, paired with new statistical methods, Reich and his colleagues discovered that the human genome has actually evolved rapidly during the past 10,000 years. The study, published in Nature in April, showed hundreds of genetic shifts in 16,000 individuals who lived in modern-day Europe across an 18,000-year period. The longer timespan provided a baseline that allowed the researchers to see how genes evolved during the most recent 10,000 years.

Natural selection is still working; it’s just selecting for different characteristics. It’s an automatic process, like gravity.

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The Nazi salute. As soon as you look up anything at all about World War II, you’re bound to come across the so-called Nazi salute within a few minutes, or even seconds. Although today it primarily symbolizes Nazism and reverence for Hitler, the Nazis were not actually the ones who invented this salute. Its origins go back much further, as it was based on the Roman salute, which was first adopted by the Italian fascists under Mussolini. But why did the German Nazis also adopt this salute?

The Hitler salute can actually be traced back to the Roman Empire. There is even a painting of it, often considered one of the earliest depictions of the salute, which is now primarily recognized as the Hitler salute. The painting is “The Oath of the Horatii” from 1784. It illustrates a Roman legend: three brothers swear to protect Rome. And the symbolism behind this is more significant than you might think.

It was Benito Mussolini who had one key motivation: restoring the Roman Empire. Or rather, restoring the power and glory of the ancient Roman Empire. Italy was to be transformed into a dominant military power in the Mediterranean. He therefore called this sea Mare Nostrum, or “our sea.” But what does this have to do with the Hitler salute?

It was precisely this desire that prompted Mussolini to create a salute derived from the Roman salute. It became a salute with an outstretched arm, long before Hitler began to use the salute officially within the NSDAP. Mussolini and his Italian fascists began using this Roman salute around 1920 to 1922. In 1925, Mussolini also made the salute officially mandatory for civil servants in Italy.

The Guardian, the Mouth of Sauron in Britain.

These black cameras, which are hooked up to a rectangular solar panel and typically mounted on a pole, snap photos of passing vehicles and run the pictures against large databases. They have sparked nationwide backlash from pro-privacy critics, who point to public records suggesting that these devices can help law enforcement keep tabs on specific license plates and the people driving these cars. That they can sweep in so many people’s location from an innocent act in a public space – regardless of whether the target is a suspect in a crime, and without a warrant – has led to fears of mass surveillance.

Flock, based in Georgia and valued at $8.4bn, says its cameras scan license plates billions of times each month in about 6,000 communities in nearly every state in the US.

The company said in a February blogpost that its ALPRs are “not mass surveillance tools” and that it “cannot track vehicles, much less individual people”.

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

More to the point, why would we care? Climate Change, of course!

When astrobiologist Adam Frank walked into the office of NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt, he had what he believed was the weirdest question: do aliens experience climate change? It took just moments for Schmidt to out-weird him.

Frank, a University of Rochester professor who looks for signs of life in the universe, was digging into whether advanced civilizations would inevitably trigger climate shifts, just as humans are doing now. He was looking at other planets, he told Schmidt that day back in 2017, “because, of course, we know that there have been no other civilizations on Earth.”

Schmidt immediately cut him off. “How do you know that?” he asked.

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The Iran-U.S. conflict is threatening to widen dramatically after Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels opened a new front by targeting Red Sea shipping, raising the prospect of a broader regional war involving Saudi Arabia, Israel, and potentially Pakistan.

The Houthis have declared a blockade on Saudi oil shipments through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and claimed responsibility for attacks on two Saudi-linked tankers, further escalating tensions as President Donald Trump weighs military action against Iran.

The strategic waterway, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, carries roughly 12% of global trade and has become even more critical as Iran’s actions have disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

The video of the Houthis giving Nazi salutes while standing on a mock American flag is a nice touch—not that any of the Usual Suspects of the American Left will ever mention it.

Washington Poop, a Voice of the Crust.

Ben Nelson was a senator and governor of Nebraska. He is a senior adviser for Saving America’s Family Enterprises.

He explains how most advocates of ‘wealth taxes’ are ignorant of the way ‘wealth’ is measured these days and are dealing in superficial indicators that can only cause disaster.

WorseOnPurpose.

Fall back on “I just like it” and you sell the knowledge short, because standing in that store I wasn’t just voicing an arbitrary preference, I was detecting something. “This is a thing of quality. It is the one I want.” Fifteen years of ownership keep proving my instinct that day right.

That gap, between knowing good on contact and being able to say what good is, is one of the oldest open problems in Western philosophy. It is also the fundamental question this newsletter is attempting to answer.

Every investigation I’ve published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can’t check from the aisle.

That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen.

So this essay is about what quality is and where it actually lives, which makes it the philosophical foundation under every investigation this publication will run.

New York Post.

The ex-GOP aide accused of staging a politically motivated hate-crime hoax in New Jersey by slashing her body with scars is now dating a career criminal with an ankle monitor and a rap sheet spanning three states, sources told The Post.

Natalie Greene, who faces federal charges for allegedly orchestrating a fake 2025 attack in which “Trump whore” was carved onto her body while working for Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew, recently shared a smiling Fourth of July selfie with the heavily tattooed man.

People familiar with the relationship identified him as her boyfriend, 34-year-old Dylan Wayne Goetz, whom she allegedly met on the dating app Hinge.

You can’t make this shit up.

The Telegraph (UK).

Minnesota is planning to hand out transgender dolls to children as young as four years old.

The paper dolls, which feature removable genitalia, were created by the University of Minnesota Medical School for children under ten to “learn about the different options that exist for who they can be”, according to The New York Post.

Each doll has a gender-neutral name, removable internal and external genitals, and more than 100 pieces of clothing, accessories and hairstyles.

Governor Tim Walz reportedly funded the controversial project, which has prompted anger from conservative groups.

The Telegraph (UK).

Islamic bookshops selling anti-Semitic texts have been granted the right to bring “skilled” migrants to Britain, The Telegraph can disclose.

The Home Office has given powers to sponsor “skilled worker” visas to a string of bookshops, which are thought to have used them to bring dozens of people into the UK.

Books sold by some of the stores claim that Jewish people had a “wicked nature”, while other texts are deemed a radicalisation threat by UK prisons.

One book on sale is Milestones by Sayyid Qutb, the influential Muslim Brotherhood leader whose work rails against Western civilisation and “world Jewry”.

Other works on offer include those by Hasan al-Banna, the Brotherhood’s founder, and by Bilal Philips, a cleric banned by the Home Office, whose writings offer advice on beating wives. All the books reviewed by The Telegraph can legally be sold in the UK, and there is no suggestion the bookshops have broken any rules.