Read it.

President Donald Trump said Sunday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents would be sent to U.S. airports beginning Monday to assist Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said ICE would support TSA agents who have continued working during a partial government shutdown. He had also warned a day earlier that he would deploy ICE officers to airports if congressional Democrats did not agree to fund airport security.

Tom Homan, the White House border czar, confirmed the planned deployment, describing it as an effort to address long security lines during a busy travel period. Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Homan said ICE agents would help TSA manage passenger flow as staffing shortages have increased amid the shutdown, during which many TSA employees are working without pay.

The logic of government is, that if getting on an airplane requires TSA screening, and you don’t have enough TSA screeners, that doesn’t mean you can get on without screening (God forbid); it means you have to wait hours in long lines in order to be screened by however few may actually be available.

Democrats, knowing that this sort of bureaucratic bottleneck was impassible, are using their holdup of DHS funding to cause the maximum inconvenience to people who ordinarily don’t give a shit about politics but just want to get on the damned plane. Such people, unaware of the actual issues involved, whine to their elected representatives to JUST GET SOMETHING DONE, which works out to eventually requiring greasing the squeaky wheel of Democrat intransigence.

Trump, who is smarter than you and me in these matters, has brought his BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR stamp and is busily impressing it on the foreheads of the Democrats in Congress: Okay, if we need more screeners and Democrats won’t pay for it, then we’ll use ICE and put them there and (oh, by the way) arrest any illegal immigrants we may come across in the process. This puts Democrats in a cleft stick and uses them to play Lacrosse.

I really love this guy.

Read it.

New York City spent about $368 million last year on services for people living on the streets, which equals roughly $81,000 per unsheltered person, according to the NY Post.

Spending through the city’s New York City Department of Homeless Services street outreach programs has increased sharply over the past several years. In 2019, the city spent about $102 million on these services, averaging around $28,000 per unsheltered individual. By the 2025 fiscal year, the average cost had risen to about $81,000 per person, close to the city’s median household income of $81,228.

Unsheltered homeless individuals are those who regularly live outside rather than in shelters or permanent housing. During this same period, the number of people living on the streets grew by 26 percent, rising from 3,588 in 2019 to 4,505 in 2025. However, spending increased far faster than the population itself.

The Telegraph (UK).

When Donald Trump boasts that America’s military is bigger and better than anyone else’s in Nato, he can point to the USS Gerald R Ford. Costing nearly £10bn, the 100,000-tonne aircraft carrier is the largest and most expensive warship in the world. Its 25 decks carry 4,500 personnel and 75 aircraft, allowing it to project US air and sea power anywhere in the world.

It does, however, appear to have a weak spot: its laundry and toilet facilities. Having been sent to the Red Sea to act as a launch platform for Trump’s bombing campaign against Iran, it has now been diverted to Crete for repairs, following a fire in the ship’s launderette which raged for more than 30 hours before it was extinguished.

There are also reports that sabotage may have been involved – not by Iranian undercover operatives, but by crew members disgruntled that their standard six-month tour of duty has been extended for the Gulf operation. To make matters worse, the ship’s toilets have been constantly breaking down and clogging up with sewage.

The U.S. needs more carriers, and can’t afford to build more gold-plated crap like the Ford.

Read it.

The Center for Immigration Studies has a very interesting study out that will make you think again about all of the “immigrants” who are “contributing” to the United States.

These results shouldn’t be shocking, unless you’re still surprised that we pay for the welfare of people who aren’t even citizens.

Navy Matters.

Surprisingly, two of the Navy’s MCM configured LCS have been moved from the Middle East to a port in Malaysia despite the obvious possibility of Iranian mines in the Strait of Hormuz. The ships were relocated about a week or so before the US strikes began. If the Iranians do lay mines (there are no confirmed reports yet), we’ll desperately miss the LCS MCM capabilities … or will we?

From a Hunterbrooks website report, we learn that the LCS MCM capability is even more problematic and limited than we already knew. The report provides information from a US Navy briefing.

As you read it, bear in mind that the summarized information presented below is the Navy’s information, not mine. If you want to dispute anything, you’ll have to take it up with the Navy.

Watch it.

The USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) has abruptly withdrawn from Operation Epic Fury. A $13 billion supercarrier, entirely untouched by enemy munitions, has been neutralised from within. On 12 March 2026, a massive fire in the aft main laundry facility burned for over 30 hours, destroying primary berthing spaces and leaving 600 sailors without racks. The operational degradation forced US Central Command to order the carrier to Naval Support Activity Souda Bay in Crete, effectively binning the remainder of its deployment.

The failure of the Ford is rooted in a gruelling 10-month deployment that pushed the crew beyond physical limits. Severe infrastructure flaws in the vacuum plumbing system led to daily breakdowns, requiring 19-hour maintenance shifts. Exhausted personnel weaponised this vulnerability, flushing heavy cotton T-shirts and four-foot lengths of rope to deliberately destroy the sewage system’s suction capability. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) is actively investigating this sabotage, as well as examining whether the 12 March fire was an act of arson designed to force a mission abort.

The Pentagon has initiated a rapid substitution to maintain the offensive against Iranian targets. The USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) is deploying as the primary relief asset. Reinforcing the theatre is the USS Tripoli (LHA-7), operating as a light aircraft carrier with F-35B Lightning II strike fighters, whilst the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) sustains continuous strike sorties from the Arabian Sea. The sidelining of CVN-78 proves a brutal fact: high-end hardware remains completely subordinate to basic habitability and the physical limits of the personnel operating it.

Read it.

There was chaos aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford after a major onboard fire knocked out a big swathe of living quarters, leaving hundreds of US sailors without beds in the middle of a live war deployment, in what marks a much bigger incident than what the Pentagon previously disclosed

The modern U.S. Navy seems pretty much unfit for purpose.

Read it.

The Make America Healthy Again agenda just found its first serious legal challenger. This week, five food stamp recipients filed suit in Washington, D.C., federal court demanding the right to spend taxpayer-funded SNAP benefits on candy, soda, and energy drinks.

The MAHA movement would be applauded if it were pushed by a Democrat—as it has been in the past, when Democrats had a monopoly on Nanny State food propaganda (I’m looking at you, Michelle Obama).

I personally favor encouraging people on the dole to eat food that will kill them as soon as possible, in order to save taxpayer funds. But that’s me.

The War Zone.

The U.S. Navy Independence class Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) USS Tulsa and USS Santa Barbara, which are configured for minesweeping duties, have appeared in port in Malaysia. Both of these ships were last known to be forward-deployed in the Middle East, having arrived in Bahrain in the past year or so to take the place of a group of now-decommissioned Avenger class mine hunters. Now, as Iranian attacks on commercial ships have caused a virtual halt to maritime traffic through the highly strategic Strait of Hormuz, these ships have emerged thousands of miles away. The extent to which Iran has seeded naval mines in the Strait already is unclear, but this remains a huge threat to the future security of the waterway and will have to be taken into account in any future effort to reopen this critical waterway.

I guess the Navy figured out that the LCS are totally useless and so decided to get them out from underfoot.

Perhaps they will park them in the Taiwan Strait to give the Communist Chinese something to shoot at.

Read it.

Nearly $1 billion in U.S. federal research funds have been funneled into projects involving the Chinese regime’s defense laboratories that pose “critical risks” to America’s national security, according to a new study.

Read it.

“What we are looking at today is the perversion of aid: the use of aid money to attain political objectives which cannot be obtained openly by other means,” declared John O’Sullivan, president of the Danube Institute that hosted the conference “The Politicization of Aid,” held in Budapest on Tuesday, February 24th.

The speakers of the event elaborated on the central topic of the conference: how foreign aid has shifted from traditional humanitarian relief to supporting activist networks and the promotion of progressive causes. According to many of the speakers, aid has long been shaped by political and ideological interests, but in recent decades it has taken on a more explicitly political character.

Although this “perversion” has been apparent for quite a while, with the closing down of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the new U.S. president Donald Trump in 2025, public awareness of this transformation has accelerated.

Read it.

Just because someone is wearing a black robe doesn’t mean they’re upholding the rule of law. Consider some recent judicial rulings.

Last November, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem published a notice ending Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. Leave aside the merits of that decision. The law is clear that this decision belongs to the Trump administration.

Congress created TPS in 1990. It applies to citizens of other countries living in the United States. It offers recipients temporary legal protection after their home country has been affected by a natural disaster or other hardship. Basically, the government says things in your home country are so terrible that it won’t force you to leave or deport you.

The secretary of homeland security decides which countries fit this description. The designation can last for six, 12, or 18 months. Before a designation expires, the secretary can choose to extend it or end it. In the case of Haiti, the impetus for this “temporary” status was a 2010 earthquake.

“There is no judicial review of any determination of the Attorney General with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state under this subsection,” the law states. After 9/11, Congress moved authority over enforcing immigration law from the attorney general to the DHS secretary.

The takeaway is clear. A judge doesn’t get to second-guess Noem’s decision. Doing so wouldn’t just violate the law. It’d run afoul of recent Supreme Court precedent. In a 6-to-3 ruling last October, the Supreme Court smacked down a California judge who told DHS it couldn’t end TPS for Venezuelan nationals.

Read it.

It has been 60 years since The Beatles released their album Revolver with the lead song “Taxman.” Its lyrics have become classic:

If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street; If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat; If you get too cold, I’ll tax the heat; if you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.

Government is the most rigid construct man has ever invented, with one exception: taxes. Just like George Harrison’s lyrics so amusingly point out, there is no limit to how creative government will get if it thinks it can squeeze more taxes out of us.

At the time the song was written, British income tax topped out at 95% (‘It’s one for you, nineteen for me’). Under a Labour government, of course; socialism is based on robbing people.

One of the most absurd tax inventions is the idea that people should pay taxes on financial hot air, also known as ‘unrealized capital gains.’ These are increases in the value of assets that you have not cashed in. In other words, unrealized capital gains are assessments of how much your assets would yield in cash if you were to sell them today.

This tax already exists in Europe and is fervently debated in America….

Proglodytes and other dimwits think that ‘billionaires’ are Scrooge McDuck, with a big Money Bin in which they swim around in their cash. In fact, ‘billionaires’ have all their supposed wealth invested in productive assets, providing goods and services (and employment for thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of people).

Read it.

A disturbing video has surfaced showing middle school students delivering a classroom presentation that openly attacks U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and promotes unchecked immigration.

Dressed in black hoodies, the boys stand before their peers, chanting profanities and gesturing defiantly against the agents protecting America’s borders.

The footage captures the students declaring “F*ck ICE” while raising their middle fingers to federal immigration enforcement.

The Register.

They’d be fools not to Microsoft proved that last century—you may not be interested in fucking politics, but politics is interested in fucking you.

Read it.

Topline: Eight Massachusetts state agencies and 13 colleges spent $6.8 million to settle grievances, partly in secret, brought by their own employees from 2019 to 2024, according to a Jan. 16 report from State Auditor Diana DiZoglio.

Watch it.

You’d think they’d figure this out and do something about is. But no. Busness As Usual, until Arlington disappears in nuclear fire and the finger-pointing starts.

Read it.

The chaos caused by millions of illegal immigrants flooding across the southwest border under the Biden administration left scars on this border town.

?The constant high-speed chases, buzzing helicopters, screaming emergency sirens, hurried school lockdowns, torn barbed-wire fences, and decomposing bodies on ranches and along the Rio Grande all took their toll on Texas towns near the Mexican border.

?The border crisis drained resources and changed the lifestyle of Brackettville, a little town with two traffic light intersections in Kinney County. Residents of the county and beyond said the madness stopped almost overnight after President Donald Trump took office.?

The Antiplanner.

One argument against rail transit is that rail vehicles cost a lot more than buses, even when adjusting for numbers of seats and vehicle lifespans. The transit industry is trying to fix that — by spending more on buses. As shown in the table below, table 24 of the American Public Transportation Association’s vehicle database says that an intercity bus costs less than $300,000, but in 2023 and 2024 transit agencies spent an average of more than $1.1 million for 40-foot buses to use for bus rapid transit.

Politicians (especially Democrat politicians) love to spend money (your money, not their own money).

And … they love having juicy contracts to pass out among … friends, let us say.

Read it.

Not just to put it on the market—to require that it be used.

A congressional task force soon plans to release a compromise between corn farmer and oil refinery interests that could reshape the American energy industry.

In D.C., it doesn’t matter what benefits the consumer—what matters is who wins the fight between two organized blocks of producers (and their sock-puppets in Congress).

Ars Technica.

The National Labor Relations Board abandoned a Biden-era complaint against SpaceX after a finding that the agency does not have jurisdiction over Elon Musk’s space company. The US labor board said SpaceX should instead be regulated under the Railway Labor Act, which governs labor relations at railroad and airline companies.

The Railway Labor Act is enforced by a separate agency, the National Mediation Board, and has different rules than the National Labor Relations Act enforced by the NLRB. For example, the Railway Labor Act has an extensive dispute-resolution process that makes it difficult for railroad and airline employees to strike. Employers regulated under the Railway Labor Act are exempt from the National Labor Relations Act.

In January 2024, an NLRB regional director alleged in a complaint that SpaceX illegally fired eight employees who, in an open letter, criticized CEO Musk as a “frequent source of embarrassment.” The complaint sought reinstatement of the employees, back pay, and letters of apology to the fired employees.

SpaceX responded by suing the NLRB, claiming the labor agency’s structure is unconstitutional. But a different issue SpaceX raised later—that it is a common carrier, like a rail company or airline—is what compelled the NLRB to drop its case. US regulators ultimately decided that SpaceX should be treated as a “common carrier by air” and “a carrier by air transporting mail” for the government.

One of the difficulties in living in a comprehensive administrative state is figuring out which bureaucrats you have to bribe to get anything done.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why.

The United States has fallen to its lowest-ever rank in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), a leading global index that measures perception of corruption in the public sector among independent experts and business people. In 2025, the U.S. fell down one spot to 29th place (out of 182) with a score of 64/100 on a 0 to 100 scale, where 0 means highly corrupt and 100 completely clean. This ranking puts the country on the same level as the Bahamas, and below Uruguay (17th place), Bhutan (18th) and the United Arab Emirates (21st). The United States had been on a slow decline in the index since 2017, when the country scored 75/100.

Several factors have impacted the U.S.’ score, including measures put in place last year by the Trump administration that have severy hindered the federal government’s ability to fight public corruption, such as pausing investigations into corporate foreign bribery, weakening institutions or curtailing enforcement of a foreign agent registration law.

According to recent aggregated data from the Pew Research Center based on series of national polls, trust in the government was nearing historic lows at the end of 2025, with only 17 percent of Americans trusing the government to do what is right just about always or most of the time. As our infographic shows, trust in the government has been on a slow decline since it peaked at 54 percent in October 2001, during George W. Bush’s first term (such a high level of approval hadn’t been recorded since the early 1970s, under President Nixon). The lowest level recorded since 2000 was in October 2011, under President Obama. Trust in the government hit a low of 15 percent, which coincided with the announcement of the official withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of the year and the expansion of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Read it.

One of the hottest commodities in the military, or even for civilian contractors, is having a vehicle down range when you are deployed in the Middle East. Anyone who is someone has their own Ford F-150, especially those in leadership, as a work vehicle for driving around a military base. If you were deployed in Afghanistan, you were lucky if you had a truck to share to get from your dorm to work; if not, you were stuck either walking for 20 minutes in your battle rattle gear with your weapon or riding a packed school bus with your fellow service men and women.

While everyone would have preferred their own vehicle, like back in the US, it would have cost too much. Even still, the United States spent nearly $10 billion on vehicles and aircraft in Afghanistan between 2010-2020, which does not even cover the cost of fuel, parts, maintenance, or even the shipping of the vehicles. Therefore, it was generally accepted that dragging your feet through the desert or sweating your butt off on the bus ride was a logical part of the “suck” in deployments. Yet, then, on the American Forces Network news, you would see an Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) caravan consisting of hundreds of Toyota trucks parading through the deserts. These vehicles were not the stereotypical filthy beat-up trucks but shiny new Toyota pick-up trucks and SUVs, particularly the Toyota Hilux. Violent non-state actors (VNSA), such as ISIS, were capable of acquiring Westernized vehicles through various means of raising funds and global logistical networks. The Toyota Hilux was particularly preferred due to its performance and looks.

Perplexity says:

Toyota has never sold the Hilux new in the United States since the 1990s, when it shifted focus to the Tacoma midsize pickup, which fills a similar role but is tailored for U.S. regulations and preferences. The main barriers include the 25% “Chicken Tax” tariff on imported light trucks, which makes it uneconomical, plus differences in safety standards, emissions rules, and Toyota’s strategy to produce the Tacoma locally.

As always, the government is the reason we can’t have nice things.

The War Zone.

God knows that the train wreck of an LCS needs all the help it can get.

The Antiplanner.

California’s high-speed rail project has become increasingly embarrassing for the state. Originally, a 494-mile line connecting the state’s two most populated urban areas, LA and San Francisco, was supposed to cost $40 billion. Now the state is spending $40 billion on a 171-mile line from Bakersfield to Merced, the state’s ninth and 82nd largest urban areas, while the full Anaheim-to-San Francisco project is expected to cost as much as $135 billion and to open at least 20 years late.

Now, the state has come up with a way to minimize this embarrassment: censorship. Under a proposed new law, the state inspector general could withhold from the public any high-speed rail records that would “reveal weaknesses” in its program. Although similar language was part of the state’s proposed budget submitted to the legislature by the governor’s office, Governor Gavin Newsom denied knowing anything about it a a press conference last week.

They just have to hide it long enough for Newsom to get the Democrat Presidential nomination.

Read it.

Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler announced Friday her agency has suspended 111,620 borrowers in California over alleged fraud related to pandemic-era loan programs.

These borrowers had secured a total of 118,489 Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans loans which amounted to more than $8.6 billion, according to an SBA news release. Loeffler said in a statement that the SBA is “taking decisive action” in an effort to “deliver accountability in a state whose unaccountable welfare policies have created a culture of fraud and abuse.”

“Once again, the Trump SBA is taking decisive action to deliver accountability in a state whose unaccountable welfare policies have created a culture of fraud and abuse at the expense of law-abiding taxpayers and small business owners,” Loeffler said. “Today, we announced we have suspended nearly 112,000 borrowers tied to at least $9 billion in suspected fraud.”

Read it.

There was recently an attempt by an independent journalist to expose fraud in a Minnesota social program. It was deeply frustrating; the journalist had notably poor epistemic standards, which secondary media seized upon to dismiss their result.

The class-based sniffing almost invariably noted that prestige media had already reported stories which rhymed with the core allegation, while sometimes implying that makes the allegations less likely to be true, through a logical pathway which is mysterious to me.

The journalism went quite viral anyway, in part because of sensationalized framing, in part because of signal boosting by an aligned media ecosystem and aligned politicians, and in part because the journalism develops one bit of evidence that has a viscerality that paperwork dives often lack: these purported childcare operations routinely have no children in them.

Fraud has become quite politicized in the United States the last few years. We had a poorly-calibrated federal initiative led by a charismatic tech entrepreneur which believed it would unearth trillions of dollars of fraud that focused substantial effort on large programs which are comparatively fraud-resistant. Across the aisle, we have reflexive dismissal that fraud happens in social programs, which functions as air cover for scaled criminal operations which loot many varied social programs [0] and are sometimes run out of geopolitical adversaries of the U.S. including by ambiguously-retired members of their clandestine services.

Read it.

The massive hospice fraud racket thriving under California’s lax oversight is finally getting the spotlight it deserves, as the Trump administration’s CMS chief Dr. Mehmet Oz hits the streets of Los Angeles to call out the billions in stolen taxpayer dollars.

With organized crime rings, including Russian-Armenian mafia elements, infiltrating the system through ghost patients and fake companies, the scam highlights how globalist policies have opened the door to foreign exploitation of U.S. resources. As fraudsters traffic beneficiaries like commodities, real Americans suffer denied care while the deep state looks the other way.

Los Angeles County alone accounts for 18% of the entire country’s home health care billing, a staggering figure that screams foul play.

The Telegraph (UK).

The United Nations is on the brink of bankruptcy after Donald Trump cut funding, its secretary-general said.

Antonio Guterres said the organisation was at risk of “imminent financial collapse” and could run out of cash by July.

He blamed unpaid fees and a budget rule that forces the global body to return unspent money, according to a letter seen by Reuters on Friday.

The UN has struggled for cash after the US – its largest contributor – cut voluntary funding to the body’s agencies and refused to make payments to its regular and peacekeeping budgets.

Earlier this month, Washington announced the US would withdraw and cease funding for 31 UN entities, including a climate treaty and body promoting gender equality.

The U.N. has long since degenerated into a vast mechanism for transferring money from U.S. taxpayers to foreign parasites.

This is one of Trump’s main accomplishments.

The Antiplanner.

The key to building a large bureaucracy is to concentrate the benefits of that bureaucracy on a few people who will lobby for more money while spreading the costs to so many people that no one has an incentive to lobby to cut the budget. In the case of transit, helpful reporters will always seek out the hard-luck cases of people who claim to depend on transit subsidies without ever looking for hard-working people who are having to pay for those subsidies.

The Foundry.

government spent $1,827,134,000,000—and, according to the Treasury Department, ran a deficit of $602,376,000,000.

The federal debt closed the calendar year at $38,514,009,184,232.72. That equaled approximately $285,733 for each of the 134,790,000 households there were in the United States in 2025, according to the Census Bureau.

What did Congress do when it came back from its Christmas break? It passed a spending bill full of earmarks.

Read it.

Newly released emails reveal that senior Biden administration health officials privately grappling with research suggesting recovery from Covid-19 infection provided stronger protection than vaccination alone – at the very moment the federal government was preparing sweeping vaccine mandates in 2021.

The correspondence, released under the Freedom of Information Act to the watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust and shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation, offers the clearest documentary evidence to date that top officials recognized scientific uncertainties around one-size-fits-all vaccination policies, even as they publicly dismissed the value of natural immunity.

At the center of the internal debate was a massive Israeli study of nearly 800,000 people that found prior infection conferred substantially stronger protection against reinfection than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. In private emails, Dr. Anthony Fauci described the findings as “rather impressive,” acknowledging both the scale and rigor of the research, which had received prominent coverage in Science.

Read it.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s interview with Christopher Rufo last week highlighted that there is still unfinished business at DOGE, where fraud, waste, and abuse may account for as much as 10% of the total federal budget. We even joked that the scale of recent fraud uncovered in Democratic states could compel Elon Musk to return to DOGE in some capacity, as his recent X posts targeting dark-money NGOs suggest renewed interest.

Read it.

As of 2025, a stamp for a letter costs $0.78 in the United States. Amazon Prime sells items for less than that… with free shipping! Why send a postcard when you can send actual stuff?

I found all items under $0.78 with free Prime shipping — screws, cans, pasta, whatever. Add a free gift note. It arrives in 1 or 2 days. Done.

You’re not only saving money. It’s about sending something real. Your friend gets a random can of tomato sauce with your birthday note attached. They laugh. They remember you. They might even use it!

I think I’ll send My Brother the Socialist a lemon for his birthday.

Read it.

The unusually high total stems from Biden’s ability to draw benefits from multiple federal retirement programs, reflecting his long career as a U.S. senator, vice president, and president.

Of course. Joe Biden never had a real job—he’s been suckling on the government teat all his life.

Rory Sutherland: “Every politician knows what to do, they just don’t know how to be re-elected after they do it.”

Read it.

Reading and math scores are abysmal across the country, as national testing results keep documenting. Illiteracy rates are rising: The number of 16- to 24-year-olds reading at the lowest literacy levels increased from 16% in 2017 to 25% in 2023, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

In some inner-city schools, less than half of kids are reading or doing math at grade-level proficiency. Many high school grads can’t read their diplomas.

As an economist, I would submit that this is our greatest crisis. It puts the future of American prosperity in grave danger. Also, the learning gap widens income and wealth disparities.

The apparent solution among the education establishment is not to challenge kids to stretch their minds and hit the books but rather to dumb down the curriculum so everyone passes. I call this the “make everyone below average” solution.

Some schools are now no longer requiring kids in English class to read cover to cover the classic books that students have been reading for decades. Perhaps the students don’t have the attention spans. Perhaps their reading skills aren’t up to par. Perhaps they are too busy texting or playing video games on their cellphones.

Moral: Don’t send your kid to a government school.

Read it.

In December 2024, Congress did something unusual: it introduced a bill that openly acknowledges tobacco harm reduction. The POUCH Act of 2024, sponsored by Rep. Jack Bergman (R-MI) and co-sponsored by Rep. Don Davis (D-NC), aims to prevent states and cities from banning or restricting FDA–authorized lower-risk products, including modern nicotine pouches and vaping products.

It is a modest bill, but one that finally moves federal policy in a sensible direction. The basic premise is straightforward: if the FDA has determined that a product is appropriate for the protection of public health, states should not be allowed to ban it for political, fiscal, or ideological reasons. This should not be a radical idea, but within the chaos of American nicotine regulation, it almost counts as revolutionary.

However, the bill also reveals a deeper truth about why the United States struggles so badly with harm reduction. It exposes the forces that keep smokers tied to cigarettes, protect government revenue streams, and effectively eliminate smaller innovators who cannot survive the regulatory gauntlet.

The world is full of people who feel entitled to use the coercive power of government to keep YOU from doing something THEY feel is stupid. After all, what is your wisdom compared to theirs?

Self-rightous pricks….

The Foundry.

Jupiter Christian School, located 22 miles north of Palm Beach, Florida, has 700 students on their waiting list. The head of Grandview Prep, also near Palm Beach, reports that the number of applications to private schools in the area increased by almost 50% between 2017-2018 and 2022-2023. A charter school that serves students in grades K-8 near the heart of Orlando reports just three open seats and only across the 6th-8th grades.

In sum: There is high demand for private schools and public charter schools in Florida.

Meanwhile, at least two traditional school districts in Florida are reporting thousands of open seats, and taxpayers are paying for school buildings with declining enrollment.

Last week, Orange County Public School officials announced that so many students are leaving the district that administrators could close seven buildings—paving the way for private and charter school operators to gain access to the facilities. One Orange County middle school on the list of underused buildings has more than 900 open seats.

However, around the country, public school districts have been notorious for holding on to underused or even vacant facilities so private schools and charter schools cannot use the buildings. Heritage Foundation research has documented examples from Detroit, where the city’s public school district blocked charter school operators from accessing a building the school district did not even own.

Between 2010 and 2017, the Tucson Unified School District was maintaining at least a half-dozen closed district school buildings, even as the district had some 13,000 empty seats.

Unfortunately. government employees soon become convinced that government action is in every case and in every way preferable to private action, however stupid and inefficient that might appear to people who don’t live on a government paycheck.

The Antiplanner.

Taxpayers in Highland Park, Texas pay $10 million a year to the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) system, which carried 22 Highland Park commuters to work on a typical weekday before the pandemic, but only 11 in more recent years. This raises an important question: is the purpose of public transit to provide efficient transportation, or is the purpose to transfer money from wealthy suburbanites to transit bureaucracies?

Read it.

In a recent analysis gone viral, financial blogger Michael W. Green traced how modern American families can earn anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000 and still fall further behind. The argument is devastatingly simple: the mathematical parameters defining “poverty” are built upon a benchmark drawn in 1963, multiplied by three, and only lightly adjusted for inflation. Everything else—childcare, healthcare, housing, transportation, and the structural design of the welfare state—has transformed beyond recognition. The result is a system in which the official poverty line tells us less about deprivation than it does about starvation. And once you trace the math, the inescapable metaphor emerges: America’s working households require escape velocity to break free from the gravitational well of modern costs of living.

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When the Department of Transportation’s September 29, 2025 emergency rule exposed 200,000 fraudulently issued non-domiciled CDLs—many held by individuals with no legal work authorization—most of the trucking industry braced for a painful but necessary correction. The U.S. Postal Service did something far worse: it threw a tantrum and refused to comply.

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Friday that the U.S. Treasury was working to cut off federal benefits to “illegal aliens” at President Donald Trump’s direction and preserve them for U.S. citizens.

Treasury “announced that it will issue proposed regulations clarifying that the refunded portions of certain individual income tax benefits are no longer available to illegal and other non-qualified aliens, covering the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Additional Child Tax Credit, the American Opportunity Tax Credit, and the Saver’s Match Credit,” Bessent said on X.

And about time, too.

Watch it.

In a move that studded the global defense community, the United States Navy has effectively scrapped almost its entire Constellation class frigate program.

Read it.

Topline: In 2007, California invested $468.4 million of its pension funds into private companies through its Clean Energy and Technology Fund. Today, the money is worth just $138 million, and the state won’t explain why its investment performed so poorly. Several open records requests filed by The Center Square were denied by the California Public Employees Retirement System, citing legal exemptions.

Edward Luttwak:

The clearance mechanism of CIA rejects all possible candidates of any value. If you are the kind of young American who could serve your country in the CIA, they won’t let you into the CIA. That’s a simple fact. Everything else follows downstream.

Then there is the fact that people who do get into the CIA are like municipal employees with handsome pensions before the city goes bankrupt. These people come in who cannot deliver and do not deliver, and they make demands, and one of the demands is that they refuse to serve under cover.

…

In fact, one of the fundamental aspects of the CIA is that their people don’t know languages. I was in Kazakhstan many times. And one time in Astana, I ran into the CIA director of the station and said, “How many of you people speak Kazakh?” “We don’t. There’s no need for it. Everybody here speaks Russian.” That’s what they said.

…

At our station in Tajikistan, nobody knows Tajik; our station in Turkmenistan, nobody knows Turkmen; our station in Kazakhstan, nobody knows Kazakh; and in Uzbekistan, nobody knows Uzbek, because “they all speak Russian,” except they don’t, and the CIA guy doesn’t even speak Russian! We have lived with this scandal.

And I blame the State Department, because these Foreign Service officers of the State Department, who do have the qualifications they need for their jobs, they do a cover-up. They cohabit in these missions all over the world with CIA people, and they know they’re clowns.

But somehow, they don’t talk about it. They’re the ones who should find a proper, legitimate way to inform their fellow citizens that the CIA is a fraud, that the so-called human intelligence, all the people they send overseas, all their so-called CIA officers overseas, and their NOCs are frauds. They’re all frauds and I’ve never met one who is not a fraud.

And that is why we can’t ever have nice things.

The Foundry.

On Tuesday, the media was filled with stories that a three-judge panel had voted 2-1 to issue a 160-page order blocking the Texas legislature’s new congressional redistricting plan.

The order claimed the redistricting was unlawfully based on race as opposed to partisanship—a claim at odds with what we all saw happen in the partisan political fight within the state legislature, which included a walkout by Democrat legislators.

What wasn’t attached to the order was the dissenting opinion by Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith, a 37-year veteran of the federal judiciary who is greatly respected for his legal acumen. His 104-page dissent came out a day later and marks the most scathing denunciation I have ever read of another judge.

In this case, the judge being denounced is Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown, who wrote the majority decision, along with Judge David Guaderrama, who joined the opinion.

I know Jerry Smith. I would not want to be on the other side of him in an argument. I have seen it done; it is not a pretty sight.

The intersting thing is that this is a District Court decision but included on the panel Judge Smith, who sits on the Fifth Circuit. I can only assume that he was there to help out with the District Court load.

I have no doubt that this will be moved for a rehearing en banc, and I doubt that it will survive. If it survives that process, I am sure that it will be appealed to the Fifth Circuit; and, if I were a betting man, I would be that the Fifth Circuit will beat it into the ground like a tent peg.

What were they thinking?

The Foundry.

In the last two years, taxpayers spent $524 million in food stamp payments mostly for fast-food restaurants, according to data from the office of Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa.

Of that, about 90%—or $475.2 million—was spent at fast-food restaurants in California from June 2023 through May 2025, according to Ernst’s office.

Ernst, who regularly calls out government waste, is the chairwoman of the Senate DOGE Caucus, short for Department of Government Efficiency—an office within the White House that has targeted spending reductions.