Read it.

For many generations, government has been a ratchet. It only grows, never shrinks. Trump flipped the switch. He is actually reducing the size of government. The process starts by cutting parts of government doing mostly harm, and very little good. USAID: send food to the starving, cut everything else. Department of Education: keep standardized testing, cut everything else. The EPA: End the War on Carbon, let the marketplace determine the future of electric cars and optimal miles per gallon, and quit moving the goal posts regarding clean air and water standards.

The next stage will be much harder. Don’t just cut bloated, wasteful, and ineffective, replace it with something lean, useful, and effective.

Read it.

The Justice Department filed three lawsuits Monday against states that offer in-state tuition for illegal aliens, after securing victories in five similar cases.

“Congress long ago made clear that states cannot put illegal aliens over our nation’s own citizens,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a statement first provided to the Daily Signal. “By granting illegal aliens in-state tuition, New York, Vermont, and Connecticut are doing just that. No more.”

“Our efforts will not cease until President [Donald] Trump’s promise is fulfilled: illegal aliens will not receive benefits denied to our nation’s own citizens,” he added.

The American Mind.

For 80 years, American science has operated under the Vannevar Bush model that was established in the wake of World War II. In his 1945 report, Science, the Endless Frontier, Bush argued that the government should fund “curiosity-driven basic research,” with panels of peer scientists choosing which projects deserved financial support. His goal was not merely to subsidize scientists’ intellectual whims without regard for visible applications, but to secure American technological supremacy by developing fundamental knowledge before its practical uses were apparent. In practice, however, Bush’s vision mutated into a bloated, risk-averse bureaucracy split between government and universities, stifling the very innovation it was designed to foster.

I’d even vote for a Democrat to get rid of one of these clowns.

Hours After Murkowski Predictably Sides With Dems, Cassidy Unblocks Blanche AG Nomination

Read it.

Her husband was freaking out back when she slapped the teenage Trump fan at the Jersey Shore and was detained.

Read it.

Well, now at least someone is being charged: The principal and athletic director who refused to report high school wrestler Kallie Keeler’s claim of sexual assault by a male wrestler pretending to be a female.

Read it.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was shut down about a year ago. Since then, I’ve noticed a couple of things:

1) Latin American and other countries around the world are electing more pro-American leaders.

2) America’s Democratic National Committee is out of money.

It’s hard to say for sure, of course, but I don’t think that these two events are coincidences. I think they are direct results of USAID’s money spigot being turned off.

The vast majority of USAID money was used for leftist and other anti-American causes. So around the world, leftist and anti-American leaders are suddenly underfunded. And here in America, our leftist and anti-American party (the Democratic Party) is suddenly underfunded.

Read it.

A Smithsonian Institution exhibit featuring 250 objects claiming to tell the story of American history is overwhelmingly dedicated to promoting liberal causes, including controversial sexual themes, a review of the exhibit’s catalog reveals.

The Smithsonian’s “Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness” exhibit at the Museum of American History features three times more liberal than conservative items, the Fox News Digital review found. Several of the liberal items were overtly sexual items.

Read it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) Homeland Security Investigations carried out a nationwide operation between June 22 and July 10 that dismantled “SIM farms” run by transnational criminal organizations.

Read it.

Moderate Republicans in the Senate Committee on Health, Education and Pensions have introduced two bills that would prohibit outsourcing certain education programs from the U.S. Department of Education to other federal agencies, blocking a complete shutdown of the federal agency.

Under bill S. 5046, sponsored by Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the Education Department could not transfer offices that oversee special education, postsecondary education, elementary and secondary education, and Native American education programs.

“Moderate GOP Senators” = RINO minions of the Deep State. The fact that it was co-sponsored by former Democrat VP-nominee Tim Kaine tells you all you need to know.

Thank God Mitt Romney is no longer in office, and John McCain is dead.

ATQUE: Keep Dismantling the Department of Education

The Antiplanner.

I thought that spending $4.7 billion on a passenger train from Fort Collins to Pueblo was a crazy idea. Yet that sounds positively cheap compared to a new proposal for a train from Denver’s airport to Eagle, Vail and other Colorado ski areas, which is estimated to cost $33 billion. As usual, this humongous amount of money is justified based on the claim that it will relieve traffic congestion.

The Denver West Express was first unveiled in an article in the Colorado Gazette by Bob Loevy. Loevy is a retired professor at Colorado College, so you know he has the expertise to offer such a proposal.

Of course, he was a professor of political science, not engineering, transportation, or economics. But that’s okay because, he claims, the project “is supported by a group of professionals with engineering, architectural and business training.” The only one Loevy names is Jay Branch, who is presumably the Jay Branch who has a masters degree in management and runs a management consulting firm — still a long way from engineering or economics.

DWE would not be a high-speed rail line. The trains would go as fast as 90 miles per hour “in places,” says Loevy, but no train is going to climb the Rockies at 90 mph. The proposal calls for a two long tunnels in the mountains, one 5.0 miles and the other 6.5, but otherwise the route will go around lots of curves that will slow down trains even if they are on the level. Moreover, the route from DIA to Eagle would be 17 miles (more than 10 percent) longer than I-70, making it even harder for the train to compete with driving.

Read it.

In an effort to gain the financial support of a public sector union before an election, Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education in 1979. Its first year in operation was 1980, when it had a budget of $14 billion (a little over $50 billion in today’s dollars). That $14 billion in taxpayer dollars was enough to get him significant campaign contributions from teachers’ unions. So it was a successful policy, politically. Although he still lost the election. Oh well. Still, $14 billion is a lot of money. Today the Dept of Education’s budget is around $260 billion. That is absolutely remarkable growth. The Dept of Education is doing better than nearly any company in the private sector.

The one major accomplishment of Joe Biden was to bump Jimmy Carter into being only the second worst President ever.

If you look at the list of Fortune 500 companies from 1979, 40% of them no longer exist. Only around 14% of those companies are still on the Fortune 500 list today. The Dept of Education has grown exponentially over this time, but only 3% of 1979’s Fortune 500 companies have moved up that list since that year.

Which means one of two things:
1) Perhaps our government is much, MUCH better at managing things than private companies.
2) Perhaps we have a very serious problem.

Tough call. What do you think? Hard to say.

But I think we may have a very serious problem…

I’m told that Ronald Reagan used to say that the closest we’ll ever come to eternal life on this earth is a government program.

Read it.

The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as early as January 2020 did not believe that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese wet market. He later publicly insisted that a wet market was the likely origin of the virus while dismissing a theory that the virus had a man-made origin.

That was among the many revelations uncovered by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who on Saturday released portions of Fauci’s diary from the pandemic. The diary posts occurred between December 2019 and December 2022.

My, what a surprise.

The Foundry.

For at least 30 years, the American welfare state has become a global magnet for immigrants, both legal and illegal, despite longstanding law to prevent exactly that.

Since the late 19th century, federal law has barred any immigrant likely to become a public charge from entering the country. In 1996, with bipartisan support, Congress declared self-sufficiency the explicit policy of the United States and required many legal immigrants to have a sponsor sign a legally binding contract that they would support the immigrant to prevent their enrollment on welfare programs.

But, to put it mildly, Democrats have changed in the years since. Most recently, the Biden administration’s 2022 “public charge” rule gutted a principle as old as the Republic itself: Those who come to America should get to work, not get on welfare.

Yet, half of all households headed by noncitizens use at least one welfare program—a rate much higher than that of households headed by the American-born, according to census data analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies. Some countries’ immigrants, like those from Somalia living in Minnesota, receive welfare at more than a 70% clip when they show up in the U.S.

The Foundry.

According to a recent report from the Utah legislative auditor general, the state’s higher education system lost over $830,000 in recent years to “ghost students” who apply to receive financial aid and run off with the money without pursuing a degree.

“Institutions reported disbursing $834k to suspected fraudulent applicants and spending over 15,000 hours working to mitigate enrollment fraud,” the 2026 Performance Audit on Enrollment Fraud in Higher Education report noted.

Salt Lake Community College alone saw at least 2,000 fraudulent applications in recent years, the report highlighted.

The community college did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment.

It’s easy to defraud the government because nobody has a vested interest in pursuing such fraid—after all, it’s just Free Government Money. If education were paid for by the consumer (student/parents), such fraud would be far less frequent, and more likely prosecuted.

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

Modern War Institute.

The United States Army spent the last two decades optimizing sustainment for permissive environments defined by uncontested supply lines, contractor support, and static forward operating bases. As the National Defense Strategy shifts toward strategic competition and multidomain operations, however, this efficiency-driven model has become a liability. In large-scale combat operations, victory will depend less on which force fields the most advanced weapons and more on which can sustain combat power under persistent attack. A lethal maneuver force without a survivable logistical backbone is simply a stationary target waiting to culminate.

 Not the Bee.

The Deep State Uniparty struts its stuff.

Read it.

States across the country saw steep drops in the number of people covered by the Affordable Care Act over the past year, with Ohio and Oklahoma each losing nearly one-third of enrollees, according to new federal data that provides the first complete 50-state breakdown of sharp enrollment declines following the January expiration of enhanced subsidies.

The data, posted in late June by the Trump administration and first reported on by The Associated Press, reveals how changes in each state’s insured population led to around 2.6 million fewer Americans having Obamacare plans in February compared with the same time last year.

It captures not only how many people signed up for or were automatically reenrolled in plans in 2026, but how many paid their first monthly premiums to keep coverage, according to Cynthia Cox, a vice president and director of the ACA program at the healthcare research nonprofit KFF, who reviewed the dataset. She said it accounts for people who were retroactively removed from coverage after a nonpayment grace period ended

People are realizing what a shitty program Obamacare was, and is, without the back-door-socialism of whacking great Federal subsidies.

The Antiplanner.

As of June 23, 2026, Brightline trains had killed 214 people, an average of one every 13 days since the passenger trains began operating in 2017. Make that 215, as Brightline killed a pedestrian on July 2.

In August 2022, Brightline announced that it had received a $25 million federal grant to fence its lines and make them safer. The state of Florida also contributed $10 million and Brightline itself agreed to match that, providing a total of $45 million for safety.

Now, nearly four years later, Brightline says it is still “in the midst” of installing those safety measures. There is no explanation for why this is taking so long or why it is spending money on some measures, including “No Trespassing” signs and suicide prevention signs, that seem unlikely to do much.

Read it.

One of California’s wealthiest and safest cities descended into chaos over the Independence Day weekend after a social media-fueled “teen takeover” led to more than 400 arrests, an officer being struck by a mortar firework, and the looting of a grocery store.

According to Newport Beach city officials, thousands of unruly juveniles and young adults gathered near the Newport Pier on July 4. As the crowd grew, fireworks were launched into the crowd and at police officers. An officer was struck by a mortar, roadways were blocked, emergency vehicles were delayed, and a nearby grocery store was looted.

When Muslims profit from welfare and other fraud, they think of it as jizya. When Ebonics loot and destroy without being prosecuted, they think of it as ‘reparations’.

Watch it.

Your Friends in Government, of course, are attempting to ban them by law—and have succeeded with new ones, but a loophole regarding used ones is being (as you might expect) heavily exploited. As you might (als0) expect, the charge on that is being led by the Usual Suspects in the Usual Blue States. As the video points out, “You do not need a conspiracy when you have an incentive.”

I am reminded of a story I heard when I was young; I have no idea whether it’s actually true, but it’s too good not to share.

Supposedly Bill Gates, in the halcyon days when he was newly The Richest Man in the World, bought a brand new high-end Porsche sports car. Unfortunately, he couldn’t drive it in the U.S. because part of the process laid down by Your Friends in Government was that in order to be certified as street-legal a manufacturer actually had to crash a couple of cars to test whether they were sufficiently safe to be on America’s roads. Porsche responded, “Fuck that. We’re not deliberately destroying a couple of $900,000 cars just to slake your appetite for bureaucratic micro-management.” So Bill had to keep it in storage while he attempted to work his way around Our Democracy.

For all I know, it’s still there.

ATQUE: The Real Reason Why You Can’t Own a New Kei Truck or Hilux Champ in the US

As always, government doesn’t provide solutions, it just creates more problems.

Read it.

There has clearly been trillions of fraud over the last several decades, and politicians in both parties have shown very little interest in rooting out the fraud until Trump. Somehow, most of the media and other Democrats aren’t too concerned with saving taxpayer dollars—they spend their time attacking Trump.

The media and other Democrats were outraged when Trump spent $16 million dollars fixing the reflecting pool problems, and there was endless reporting, but there is virtually no outrage and minimal reporting on the endless fraud, no matter how many billions have been legitimately stolen from the taxpayers.

The following is a small sample of what crooks have gotten away with, which is only the tip of the iceberg.

Navy Matters.

More and more, the Western naval ship acquisition world is reverting to ‘existing designs with only minor modifications’ instead of new ship designs. This is due to fear rather than combat requirements: fear of runaway costs, fear of schedule delays, fear of bad publicity and criticism, fear of innovation, etc. Fear. The Western naval world is acquiring ships as a reaction to fear of their own ineptitude

Instead of honestly and objectively assessing the reasons for acquisition failures and fixing the problems, Western navies have opted for the perceived path of safety over that of combat effectiveness.

Navy Matters.

You probably know that the Air Force has attempted to kill the A-10 Warthog, the best close air support aircraft ever built, for many years now but has been repeatedly thwarted by Congress.

The Navy faced a similar situation with the Ticonderoga class cruisers. They attempted to early retire them, multiple times, only to be thwarted by Congress. The Navy’s solution was to agree to a blatantly bogus “modernization” program which, in reality, was a way to remove funding for the cruisers while they literally rotted pier side until the Navy could claim that they could no longer be economically upgraded.

Like the Navy, the Air Force has, yet again, been prevented by Congress from retiring the A-10 but, ignoring the intent of Congress, has settled on the tactic of simply no longer funding the operation, maintenance, and support of the A-10. As Redstate website reports,

… by the end of this year, the A-10 will be without depot support, without a training pipeline, without weapons-school instruction, and without operational-test capacity.

With no funding for support, the aircraft will rapidly fall into unflyable status. The Air Force will have, technically, kept the A-10 but will have achieved practical retirement.

Congress should fire every Air Force general and withhold all Air Force funding until A-10 support is restored.
The military seems to feel it is above the will of Congress. It is past time for Congress to re-exert its authority.

Not the Bee.

You can’t make this shit up.

Not the Bee.

People are allowed to poison themselves with junk food AND you have to pay for it!

At least that’s the latest from our federal courts.

You can’t make this shit up.

Meet (Obama) judge Amy Berman Jackson:

NavyMatters

Helicopters are generally recognized as the best ASW platform above the surface; another submarine being the best ASW platform below the surface, of course. Unfortunately, this leads to the widespread mindset that every ship must have helos embarked for ASW.
The problem with the concept of helos on every ship is that the aviation element of a ship is shockingly expensive. A helo needs a flight deck (something on the order of 80ft x 50ft), hangar (another 80ft x 50 ft), dedicated weapon magazines, fuel storage, maintenance shops and parts storage, pilot and maintainer berthing (and food, water, etc.). The extra 160ft x 50ft of ship size means more power is needed to move the ship which means bigger engines which requires more ship size which … You get the idea.

Another problem is that helos are only sporadically available, being notorious for needing maintenance at inconvenient times.

Sure, there’s a penalty to be paid for putting helos on every ship but, really, what’s the alternative since we need ASW? Well, one alternative is ASROC (anti-submarine rocket). ASROC began back when submarines still had to get fairly close to their target in order to attack. Today, submarines can attack with torpedoes or missiles from far beyond ASROC range (vertical launch ASROC has a range of around 12 nm). What’s needed is a much longer range ASROC, perhaps on the order of a hundred miles. Given that we have thousand mile cruise missiles I can’t see any problem with developing a hundred mile ASROC.
In the past, ASROC used arm launchers, box launchers, and common VLS cells. The flexibility in launch mechanism means that some kind of suitable launcher can be placed on any ship tasked with ASW.

Read it.

Canadian citizens never voted in favor of socialized medicine. Why would anyone do that? It makes sense to vote for bad health care for other people, if you’re a sociopath or a leftist. But why would anyone vote for bad health care for themselves?

The Canadian government may not have cared about health care, but it cared a great deal about power. So they simply seized the health care industry, using men with guns. Just kidding, of course. They didn’t seize the health care industry. They regulated it. They couldn’t pass laws, so they passed regulations that were impossible to satisfy (or even understand). This made the entire health care industry so inefficient that after a while it didn’t work, forcing the government to step in and save the people from the rich corporations who were ostensibly to blame. Obamacare is based on a similar model. Works every time.

Read it.

Americans are used to handouts for favored groups. Affirmative action in university admissions, corporate “diversity” initiatives, and minority-owned contracting requirements direct opportunities, resources, and contracts to supposedly “oppressed” groups, such as women, Native Americans, blacks, and Hispanics.

In California, state Democrats have embraced another kind of favoritism: contracts for state-certified gay-owned businesses.

The scheme operates through the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which regulates privately owned utility companies. California utilities spent more than $43 billion in 2024 on contractors—fuel suppliers, surveyors, engineers, and others—whose work helps deliver water, gas, electricity, and internet service to California’s 39 million residents.

Being a pervert has never been more profitable.

Not the Bee.

Because, as we all know, paying to support criminal immigrants and their families is TOTALLY the responsibility of the Federal government—and the Federal taxpayer.

Read it.

A North Carolina school district agreed Monday to pay $95,000 to settle a student’s lawsuit after her school painted over her tribute to Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk shortly after his assassination.

A high school junior at Ardrey Kell High School secured permission to paint “Freedom 1776” and “Live Like Kirk—John 11:25” on the school’s “spirit rock,” a large boulder that often features messages on political topics. Yet, within hours, she learned from social media that officials had ordered the “Live Like Kirk” portion painted over.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education agreed to adopt a new student speech policy, issue a public statement exonerating the student, and pay $95,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees, Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the student, announced Monday.

The Antiplanner.

In 2014, a 13-mile extension to Minneapolis’ Blue light-rail line was projected to cost $1.0 billion and open for business in 2020. The latest word is that it is going to cost more than $3.5 billion and won’t begin operating until 2032.

Minneapolis is, of course, run by Democrats.

The line is a northern extension of the region’s first light-rail line, which connected downtown Minneapolis with Bloomington. That line was sold to the public based on claims that it would relieve congestion, but it actually made congestion worse. As reported in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the light-rail line was given priority at traffic lights. Because those lights were coordinated with traffic lights on the para

lel Hiawatha Avenue, the trains interfered with signal coordination on the avenue, a major north-south route in the city.
Engineers tried to fix it but gave up. Moreover, state Representative Phil Krinkie uncovered documents showing that the state knew all along that the light-rail line would make congestion worse, and ignored the problem because “transit had to have an advantage” over driving.

This is why you don’t have rail lines sharing ground level street space. Dallas has the same problem.

Read it.

Peptides are amino acids that are used to issue instructions to the body’s various systems. Ozempic, Mounjaro and Retatrutide are all peptides. These GLP-1s have a ridiculous number of things they do in terms of measurable results of reduction: cancer rates, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, obesity, even aging. Some countries are considering making GLP-1s available to all (not just the obese or diabetic) because of these benefits.

There are a host of other things that “biohackers” are injecting. I am posting this here because I think anyone with knee or joint pain would do well to check out BPC-157. I have personal knowledge of people who have cured chronic knee pain with 1-3 injections of the peptide. Old muscle pain? Totally fixable with a trivial injection.

Any search on X will show a host of other peptides in the market, offering or suggesting help for a huge range of maladies. Memory loss? Check. Big drug companies are working on peptides for cancers. Some peptides give you a tan, others are key ingredients in skin rejuvenation (potentially making the Botox world a dead end in human anti-aging treatments). There are peptides in development to cure myopia, and even regrow the optic nerve! Things that we knew could not be done are being done. The peptides can tell the body to do something in old age that it usually would only do at a much earlier (or even foetal) stage of development.

None of the non-GLP-1 peptides (as far as I know) is FDA-approved. Most of them probably never will be, because there is no financial incentive to jump through the hoops for something that cannot be patented and which can be purchased inexpensively.

Government is why we can’t have nice things.

The War Zone.

The saga of the Constellation class frigate is emblematic of so many chronic issues with the Navy’s way of procuring warships. The vessel that was supposed to make the wrongs of the Littoral Combat Ship debacle right failed spectacularly and the timing couldn’t have been worse. Now Constellation is dead and the Trump administration is building a different frigate from a different yard. While the Navy has said why it is moving on, we wanted the other side of the story. We recently had a conversation with George Moutafis, CEO of Fincantieri Marine Group, to get exactly that.

Before we get to the questions and answers, however, here is the backstory.

The U.S. Navy needed the Constellation class frigate, badly, and the program to construct it seemed built to deliver. Rather than a clean-sheet design, the service chose the proven Franco-Italian FREMM as its parent design, betting that adapting an existing platform would be far faster and cheaper, and overall less risky than starting from scratch.

It wasn’t. Among the issues plaguing the program, constant change orders pushed the design far from its origins. Two years into construction, the first ship was barely 10% complete while its design was still being finalized. Meanwhile, costs and schedules blew well past original projections.

As a result of these issues, the Navy late last year cancelled the program. That left Fincantieri’s Wisconsin yard sidelined while a contract to replace the Constellation class frigate went to rival Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula.

In the wake of the program’s implosion, the Navy created the Vessel Construction Manager (VCM) system. It uses a hired manager to hold the prime contract and run the show, overseeing shipyard performance, controlling subcontracts, and acting as a buffer between the service and the builder to keep costs and schedules on track.

In a wide-ranging, hour-long exclusive interview, Moutafis – appointed CEO on July 1, 2025 as the wheels were already falling off this project – gave us unique insights into Fincantieri’s version of how Constellation turned into a debacle and what needs to change as a result. He also touched on an array of other topics, which we will address in future installments.

The Foundry.

For years, most Americans’ retirement savings plans have been locked out of certain investment choices, including some of the market’s best-performing assets. That makes it harder to save for retirement. Fortunately, though, this is about to change, giving savers new—and better—options for their investments.

At issue are not only the many rules and regulations surrounding what can go into 401(k)s and similar savings plans, but also the flimsy legal framework governing fiduciaries—the ones who manage your money. Many investment options are excluded, either by law or by common practice, as fiduciaries try to avoid both legitimate and frivolous lawsuits.

Asset classes like private equity, digital assets, and real estate effectively became the purview of “accredited investors” with very high net wealth and government workers with public pensions. Most Americans—those private-sector workers on Main Street—were left out.

For folks with a typical 401(k) retirement plan, this meant lower returns on their investments. U.S. private equity has delivered the highest long-term returns compared to public equities and other asset classes—even after fees—averaging 3 percentage points (about 20%) better annual growth than the S&P 500.

The Poster Child here is Social Security, which BY LAW has to put its money in U.S. Treasury debt, which famously pays the worst return on the planet because it is also popularly believed to be the most secure investment you can make Supposedly Social Security payments go into a ‘trust fund’, but that fund consists of U.S. debt, which means that the money has already been spent. Social Security is depending on the ‘full faith and credit of the United States’ to get its money back, which means that the situation is no different than if the SS system depended on current tax revenues for its payments. It is, in short, a Ponzi scheme.

Read it.

After decades of steady growth, attendance in U.S. K-12 public schools has shifted drastically. Over the past five years, registration has fallen by 2.3 percent, or 1.18 million students, and schools show no signs of rebounding. Lower birth rates are the primary driver of the downturn. The number of births has decreased steadily in recent years, with 690,000 fewer children born in 2024 than in 2007.

You can believe that if you want to. I suspect it’s more being driven by parents realizing that if they want an educated child they’re going to have to do it themselves rather than hand it off to the government. Roman Catholics have been doing this for centuries and the cost-effectiveness and superiority of that education over what one gets at a government school is common knowledge.

The loss of enrolled students has prompted some desperate measures. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is offering “free” childcare for 2-year-olds regardless of their parents’ income. In 2024, parents of toddlers spent an average of more than $23,000 on center-based childcare, according to the NYC Comptroller.

Why the ‘desperation’? Because all public schools depend for their funding on Federal ‘education’ programs, such as free breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner, which money is shelled out based on enrollment.

For those still attending public schools, chronic absence—the percentage of students missing 10 percent or more of a school year—is a growing problem. As of January 20, the latest data show that chronic absenteeism, which surged from 15 percent pre-COVID to 28 percent in 2022, remains elevated at 24 percent.

The assumption here, of course, is that when a child is ‘absent’ from the local government school, they are wandering the streets getting into mischief. That’s certainly a possibility in The ‘Hood, but more and more it reflects homeschooling and other alternatives. But no—if the government is not ‘educating’ your kid, your kid is not getting educated. QED.

Marc Oestreich, an education policy consultant and strategist, writes that in many cases, students are responding to schools that fail to teach them to read, fail to adapt to their needs, and fail to demonstrate that another day in the building is worth their time.

Oestreich asserts, “The honest version of the absenteeism story is not that American parents have suddenly become uniquely irresponsible, or that students have collectively misplaced their work ethic somewhere between TikTok and the bus stop. The honest story is that a substantial number of families, concentrated among the poor, the male, and the badly served, have concluded from direct experience that what their local public school offers is not worth the time.”

And there you have it. Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

While public schools are struggling, private school attendance has remained steady. However, as more parental choice bills advance, the number of children attending private schools will very likely increase. There are currently 75 private school choice programs in 34 states, serving more than 1.5 million students.

Also, the Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which takes effect on January 1, 2027, is likely to substantially increase the number of students leaving public schools for private schools.

A step in the right direction.

The Antiplanner.

In recent posts, I’ve noted that the nation’s transit agencies are carrying far fewer riders than in 2019 and yet since that year the size of the transit bureaucracy has grown by more than 50 percent. Two MIT researchers, Vicky Yang and Levi Grenier, have offered a new explanation for such bureaucratic bloat. Instead of looking at transit, they were struck by MIT, whose faculty has grown by 9 percent and the number of students has grown by around 30 percent since 1985, but the number of administrative staff has almost tripled.

The Foundry.

State auditors across the country were unable to verify billions of dollars in unemployment spending, Medicaid payments, and pension obligations in federally-funded programs, according to a new report by a government watchdog group.

The findings in the 2026 Financial Transparency Score report, released by the government watchdog Truth in Accounting, found that 13 states failed to earn clean audit opinions. The report comes as the Trump administration is cracking down on how states are spending federal dollars.

The organization used data from annual comprehensive financial reports, or ACFRs, produced by each state as a requirement for getting federal funding.

Read it.

All money is debt. It indicates either that somebody owes you a certain quantity of a commodity, or that the government promise to accept it to pay your taxes and other imposts.

Read it.

Bizarrely, in many states, if you want to start a business, you first must convince bureaucrats that your business is “needed.”

Four years ago, Louisiana blocked social worker Ursula Newell-Davis from helping kids with special needs. Bureaucrats said she hadn’t proved her business was needed.

“Why does the state of Louisiana have the right to stop me from doing what I love?” she asks in this update video.

Good question. Ursula has a master’s degree and a social work license. For two decades, she’s helped kids with special needs.

One, Kamal, told us he struggled to make friends, until Ursula “helped teach me how to talk to people.”

Kamal’s mother is grateful: “She explained to me things that I didn’t understand about my kids. It allowed me to go back into the community and work.”

Ursula helped many families. But four years ago, she tried to help more kids by doing short-term respite work.

Louisiana wouldn’t let her.

Read it.

A new report argues that an independent Cyber Force should be staffed by only commissioned officers and warrant officers to better develop the highly technical skillsets that digital conflict demands.

Published Wednesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, two Washington, D.C. think tanks, the report proposes a blueprint for standing up a Cyber Force, should Congress decide to do so.

Policymakers in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill have debated for years whether the U.S. military needs an independent Cyber Force. Opponents say it would lead to unnecessary bureaucracy and confusion, but some current and former cyber troops say readiness suffers without a service that prioritizes recruiting, training, and equipping cyber troops above all others.

Ever notice how every delivery service except the Post Office delivers your stuff to your front porch—the way the Post Office used to do?

Read it.

The nonprofit Feeding Our Future claimed to have served 91 million meals to children across Minnesota. But as Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca Kline described in a recent court hearing, they were not feeding kids—they were instead “feeding the bank accounts of fraudsters.” FOF founder Aimee Bock was sentenced to nearly 42 years in prison for stealing close to $250 million in taxpayer dollars, orchestrating what the DOJ called the largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the country.

Seventy-eight defendants and counting set up shell companies and phantom sites to feed nonexistent children. Former prosecutor Joe Thompson described the urgency of the FBI takedown: “I remember we took down the case on a Thursday because the following day, on a Friday, is when [the Minnesota Department of Education] paid out the money. Every Friday, they paid out about $20 million.” Twenty million dollars every Friday for meals the system never independently verified.

How exactly did a $4.1 billion federal program pay a quarter of a billion dollars for meals that were never served—and never notice?

CBS News, a Voice of the Crust.

Roughly 2,000 U.S. diplomats have been laid off or forced to retire, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, crisis response experience and highly specialized language skills.

Raise your hand if you think that the Federal tovernment needs more of the type of peiole who ran American foreign policy prior to Trump’s election in 2016.

Read it.

Racing through dinner cleanup after a long day? Your dishwasher sits empty while you scrub plates by hand, joining millions of Americans quietly abandoning an appliance once considered essential. Despite smarter features and energy improvements, dishwashers are losing their grip on daily routines across the country.

Federal efficiency standards transformed dishwashers into marathon cleaners. Modern machines take 2.5 to 4 hours per cycle—a far cry from the quick turnarounds families actually need. The Department of Energy’s push for water conservation limits new models to 5 gallons per cycle, with proposals dropping that to 3.2 gallons by 2027. You get cleaner dishes eventually, but “eventually” doesn’t work when kids need their lunch containers ready for tomorrow morning.

Once again, government screws up everything it touches.

Read it.

In September 2025, then-US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr Marty Makary publicly acknowledged that the agency was investigating reports of child deaths following Covid-19 vaccination.

“We do know at the FDA…that there had been children who have died from the COVID vaccine,” Makary said during a CNN interview.

By that stage, however, a fierce internal dispute had already emerged inside the FDA over what investigators believed the evidence showed – and whether the public should ever see the full findings.

“It really did feel like there was some sort of cover-up going on about the Covid-19 vaccines,” said one individual familiar with the discussions.

MD Reports spoke with several current/former agency officials, advisers, and individuals briefed on the discussions, all of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorised to publicly discuss internal FDA deliberations.

Don’t call them ‘conspiracy theories’—call them ‘spoiler alerts’.

Read it.

Food stamps and food pantries are intended to keep struggling Americans fed.

What we found is that, in some communities, that food never reaches an American table. Instead, it gets shipped overseas and sold for profit.

Read it.

“What the judge did was double harm,” former Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins said, commenting on the arrest of a man who wouldn’t have been free to go on a second shooting spree if a judge hadn’t ignored her sentencing request in 2020.

The second shooting spree took place on May 11 of this year, as CBS News Boston details, noting that a private citizen helped a state trooper end the threat:

“The shooting on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts Monday left two men in critical condition Tuesday as police tried to piece together what happened.

“Investigators said 46-year-old Tyler Brown of Boston walked down the street with a rifle and randomly shot 50-to-60 rounds at people and cars. He was later shot by a state trooper and a Marine veteran.”

In 2021, since-retired Suffolk Superior Court Judge Janet Sanders ignored requests by Rollins and police for Brown to be given a 10-12 year sentence after he was convicted for attempting to kill Boston police officers by firing 17 rounds at them during a shootout – while he was out on parole from his 2014 sentence for a knife attack and just days after he had been released from a psychiatric hospital.

Brown, who also had a cocaine conviction in 2008, pleaded guilty to eight charges, including armed assault with intent to murder and attempted assault and battery by means of discharging a firearm.

Babylon Bee.

Parents of high school graduate David Simpson helped their son sound out the words on his diploma after the teen expressed frustration at not being able to read the words on the piece of paper.