Read it.

The $15 billion USS Ford was forced to cut short its deployment due to a 30-hour laundry fire that did millions of dollars in damage. And it has been revealed that even while it remained on station in the Gulf, Ford could not generate combat sorties for two days due to the raging 30-hour laundry fire that drove some 600 sailors out of their sleeping quarters. Thirty hours to get a laundry fire under control raises a couple of questions. Why would a laundry catch on fire, and why did it take the firefighters and damage-control personnel of the USS Ford so long to put out the laundry fire? Sadly, the answers can be found in some wrongheaded decisions the Navy made in its effort to be viewed as being “green.”

Design for the Ford-class carrier began in March 1996, and finally, more than $15 billion later, the USS Ford was fully certified for combat in April 2023. Due to a misguided green initiative, instead of installing inherently super energy-efficient steam-based laundries, the Ford-class carriers have standardized on more expensive, more complex, inherently fire-prone, ozone-based systems.

Read it.

In a long-awaited release that sent ripples through Washington on Monday, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) has declassified closed-door 2019 transcripts from briefings with then-Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) Michael Atkinson. The documents, withheld from the public for over seven years, reveal critical details about the anonymous “whistleblower” whose complaint about President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky triggered Trump’s first impeachment – details that directly contradict the narrative of a neutral, non-partisan civil servant acting in good faith.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The Foundry.

On July 4, American taxpayers are set to resume funding one of the nation’s largest providers of so-called gender-affirming care for children, which also just happens to be the nation’s largest provider of abortion. If that’s not a killjoy for America’s 250th birthday, I don’t know what is.

Last year, President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act defunded Big Abortion providers like Planned Parenthood of almost $800 million in taxpayer-funded Medicaid reimbursements, dealing a significant blow to the nation’s largest abortion franchise.

In July 2025 alone, Planned Parenthood shuttered 25 clinics across the country, and the total number of closures has reached 47. Planned Parenthood cannot seem to survive on its own without a $792.2 million crutch from hard-working Americans who, by and large, do not want to be complicit in its practices.

While the one-year defunding of Big Abortion businesses in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” demonstrated one of the largest legislative wins in pro-life history, the defunding is set to expire on July 4, 2026. Come America’s 250th, taxpayers will be footing the bill for the nation’s largest abortion franchise once again.

Little do many realize, however, that funding Planned Parenthood also means propping up one of the nation’s leading providers of so-called gender-affirming care: cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and referrals for mastectomies and other sex-rejecting procedures.

The War Zone.

The U.S. Navy has abandoned plans to return the Los Angeles class attack submarine USS Boise to active duty. This brings an end to the saga of a still-incomplete major overhaul of the boat, which has lasted more than a decade now. In that time, it has become a poster child for the Navy’s worrisome struggles to tackle huge maintenance backlogs, as well as larger concerns about the availability, or lack thereof, of naval shipyard capacity in the United States.

The Navy announced its decision to inactivate Boise, which was first commissioned into service in 1992, earlier today.

“After a rigorous, data-driven analysis, we’ve made the tough but necessary decision to inactivate the USS Boise,” Navy Adm. Daryl Caudle, Chief of Naval Operations, the service’s top officer, said in a statement. “This strategic move allows us to reallocate America’s highly-skilled workforce to our highest priorities: delivering new Virginia and Columbia class submarines and improving the readiness of the current fleet. We owe it to our Sailors and the nation to make these tough calls to build a more capable and ready Navy.”

UPDATE: Criminal Negligence – USS Boise

Read it.

The fate of the country is being decided by a person who doesn’t know what a woman is.

Read it.

The Washington Post first reported that Patel was considering releasing files to the public after reopening the investigation of California congressman Eric Swalwell’s relationship with a Chinese honeypot named Fang Fang.

I guess dating a Chinese spy isn’t technically against the law, as long as there’s no proof he divulged any secret information to the commie spy.

Navy Matters.

Currently, two of the three LCS supposedly based in the Middle East have been moved (evacuated?) to Singapore.[1] The whereabouts of the third is unknown. Why aren’t they in the Middle East, perhaps ensuring the safe passage of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz? Isn’t this kind of mission exactly what they were designed for? As you recall, the original LCS concept was that they would boldly enter littoral (hence, the ship’s name) waters and neutralize mines, subs, surface, and land threats so that larger, more expensive ships could operate in the area with less risk.

So, why aren’t they there? Well, we all know the answer. The originally envisioned modules were just flights of fantasy and never materialized. But, what if the original modules had become available as fully functioning equipment? Would such LCSes be useful in the Middle East today?

Read it.

Per the most recent report, in 2025, of the Social Security and Medicare board of trustees, Social Security is capable of paying out the entirety of promised benefits through 2033. After that, there is only the capability of paying out 77% of promised benefits.

That’s seven years from now.

Anyone who got a letter from their investment fund or insurance program that said, “We’re sorry, but in another seven years we won’t be able to pay out what was promised,” would immediately be on the phone to their lawyer,

Why does this very bad news about Social Security not seem to trouble Americans?

One reason is that we have no control. It’s not yours despite the fact that you paid for it.

You would immediately be on the phone to your agent or your lawyer if your insurance company declared bankruptcy because it’s yours. You own it.

Have you ever called Social Security or the IRS to ask a question? You will sit on the phone for hours, and in the end, most likely you won’t connect. Try it and you will understand what hopeless means.

My Social Security income just about pays my income taxes, so I’m good.

Read it.

The city of Louisville, Kentucky, has agreed to pay $800,000 in attorney fees to settle a case with a Christian photographer who fought to protect her religious and free speech rights over the years of litigation.

Louisville ultimately spent a fortune to force Chelsey Nelson to photograph same sex marriages under its nondiscrimination laws.

When combined with its own litigation costs, the case likely cost the city and the courts millions to deny Nelson her constitutional rights.

What to they care? It’s not their personal money.

The Antiplanner.

The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA) wants to build 28 bus-rapid transit lines in the four counties (Fairfax, Loudoun, Arlington, and Prince William) and five cities (Alexandria, Fairfax, Falls Church, Manassas, and Manassas Park) in its jurisdiction. As described in the agency’s Bus Rapid Transit Action Plan, these lines total to 170 miles of bus routes.

I used to think bus-rapid transit was a smart and economical alternative to light rail, but the NVTA expects to spend $4.2 billion on this plan. The actual cost will almost certainly be more: one line that is already underway, the Richmond Highway route, was supposed to cost $638 million, but according to the Federal Transit Administration it is costing $730 million. That route is 7.4 miles long, which means the line is costing almost $100 million per mile.

$100 million a mile is cheaper than light rail, which is averaging more than $300 million a mile for lines now under construction or in planning stages. But it is still a needless expenditure of money, as most of it is going for dedicated bus lanes that will be occupied by ten buses an hour during rush hours, five buses an hour the rest of the day, and no buses an hour at night (midnight to 6 am). Thus, entire lanes of traffic will be dedicated to just 125 vehicles per day.

Of course, mass transit systems aren’t really about providing convenient transit for people who would otherwise drive cars (or who can’t afford cars in the first place). They’re actually jobs programs for Fashionable Minorities—spend a day in the offices of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system, or a day riding their buses and trains, and I’ll give you five dollars for every non-brown face you see—and lucrative make-work jobs for politically-connected construction and supply companies (all of whom have to be women-owned or minority-owned, naturally).

Gothamist.

The argument came in response to a claim filed by Amanda Luci, who alleged NYPD officers failed to protect her from a mob of young men and boys who attacked her in Crown Heights in 2025.

Read it.

Since the end of the Cold War, for 30 years, the U.S. Navy has sustained a third of its fleet deployed on the backs of sailors and sometimes taking shortcuts at the shipyard—this approach is breaking down, according to the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office.

But with what is being called a New Cold War with China potentially heating up, the luxuries of the past are now urgent necessities—needed are more sailors, warships, and shipyards.

Each week, the U.S. Naval Institute Fleet Tracker has for years been reporting roughly 100 U.S. Navy warships deployed overseas. This total of warships deployed has remained remarkably consistent from the 1980s through today. But the fleet supporting that presence has been halved. In the late Cold War, the Navy peaked at 594 battle-force ships in 1987. Today’s fleet hovers around 293 ships, which is well below what is assessed as necessary by The Heritage Foundation’s 2026 Index of U.S. Military Strength.

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.