Read it.

In 1831, President Andrew Jackson dispatched the USS Lexington to the Falkland Islands to respond to attacks on American fishing vessels in the area. The Lexington rescued the American vessels and American citizens, and took some of the locals, loosely aligned with British and other local authorities, prisoner as punishment for seizing the American ships.

Jackson did not pursue a declaration of war which, in any case, would have involved a fairly nebulous authority in Buenos Aires, or more dangerously, with London, although after having already dispatched the USS Lexington, he suggested to Congress that “they may clothe the Executive with such authority and means as they may deem necessary for providing a force adequate to the complete protection of our fellow citizens fishing and trading in those seas.”

The Falklands Incident, as it was known, 194 years ago, was one of many interventions by American forces against, as Jackson put it, “bands” linked to governments, without being part of them that were attacking, looting, smuggling (including carrying slaves) or otherwise causing injury to our national interests. President Trump’s attacks on drug trafficker boats follows almost two centuries of military interventions against non-state forces beginning with President Thomas Jefferson’s war against the Barbary pirates who attacked American ships in the name of Islam.

TimesNow.

A recent surprising discovery has revealed that eating Oreo cookies may be twice as effective at reducing LDL or bad cholesterol compared to high-intensity statin therapy. The ground-breaking experiment, conducted by Oxford University, aimed at testing the Lipid Energy Model – a potentially revolutionary theory that can make experts understand the metabolism of lipids better.

The innovative experiment, held by Nicholas Norwitz – a Harvard medical student with a doctorate in metabolism and nutrition from the University of Oxford – focused on observing the diverse effects of Oreo cookies and statins on cholesterol levels in a unique group known as Lean Mass Hyper-Responders.

Nick Norwitz was valedictorian of his class at Dartmouth, then went to Oxford and got a PhD in metabolism, then returned to Harvard Med School for an MD. He is both smarter and more educated than you or me. I trust what he has to say about metabolism. His YouTube channel is one of the most entertaining on my playlist.

Read it.

Welcome immigrants. Many, but not too many. Mostly educated and skilled. Always legal.

That is the answer. Or at least a short version of an answer. What’s the question? I’m coming to that.

For decades, Canada enjoyed all-party, across-the-spectrum support for immigration. The arrival of new people at consistently higher rates than in Western Europe or the United States did not drive political polarization. This country took in far more immigrants than America relative to the size of its population, and had been doing so for decades, without signs of backlash. Instead of a Left-Right clash on immigration, there was a boring all-party consensus.

When Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency for the first time, visceral anger over immigration was central to his campaign. Perhaps his success with so many voters should not have surprised. By 2016, the share of the American population born outside the country was 13.5 percent, the highest level in more than a century. Maybe a backlash was inevitable.

In Canada, however, it has been well over a century since immigrants were that low a share of the population. In 2016, immigrants were 22 percent of Canadians and rising. That was higher than the U.S. at any time since the Civil War.

Read it.

Scott Adams, the 67-year-old Dilbert creator, will publicly ask President Donald Trump on Monday to intervene and save his life. In a post on X, Adams said he is “declining fast” from metastasized prostate cancer and needs Trump, who once offered help, to force Kaiser Permanente of Northern California to schedule a critical treatment immediately.

Kaiser has approved Adams for Pluvicto, a newly FDA-approved radioligand therapy that targets advanced prostate cancer cells, but has failed to book the brief IV infusion, according to Adams.

I subscribe to Coffee With Scott Adams. Today there was a note saying “No show today. At ER.”

NBER.

(Remember: If you can’t measure it. it’s not Science.)

We characterize the distribution of suburban homeowners’ preferences for housing unit density. To measure welfare changes under counterfactual increases in density, we first construct a novel house-level measure of exposure to density and identify its price effects in a boundary discontinuity design. On the borders of municipalities with larger minimum lot sizes, lots are 3,000 ft² larger and houses are $40,000 costlier. We exploit the systematic variation in density exposure induced by these discontinuities to estimate price effects. We then connect these estimates to a structural hedonic model of housing choice to retrieve individuals’ preferences for density. Overall, we find an average welfare loss among incumbent homeowners from a 1/2 unit per acre increase in density (which is equivalent to a 0.3 standard deviation in density) of about $9,500, with significantly larger losses under counterfactual increases solely from rental units. There is other noteworthy heterogeneity in these preferences, too. Most households have only a moderate preference over density. The median welfare loss is only 55% of the average, implying a long, left tail of those with more extreme aversions to density. This tail disproportionately contains households in affluent, low density neighborhoods. In sum, our results document an important foundation of the demand for density regulation across U.S. suburbs that we hope serves as a valuable input into future research into the considerable costs of that policy.

Read it.

When I read biographies, early lives leap out the most. Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14 years old. Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, by 11. Vladimir Nabokov published his first poetry collection at 16, while still in school. Andrew Carnegie finished schooling at 12 and was 13 when he began his second job as a telegraph office boy, where he convinced his superiors to teach him the telegraph machine itself. By 16, he was the family’s mainstay of income.

Readers (and some biographers) tend to fixate on the celebrity itself, the inflection point when people achieved fame. But their early lives often contain something more revealing than their successes. Before you grasp, you have to reach. How did they learn to reach?

In my examples, the individuals were all doing from a young age as opposed to merely attending school. And while they may not have wanted to work, the work was nonetheless something that they, their families, and society felt was useful, purposeful, and appreciated. In a sense, they had useful childhoods.

Do children today have useful childhoods?

PNAS.

Using a dataset linking administrative government data to the online behavior of Danish Twitter users, this study estimates the associations between hostility in social media interactions and offline individual-level dispositions and childhood environments. The study shows that users with many more criminal verdicts, more time spent in foster care, better primary school grades, and higher childhood socioeconomic status are more hostile on social media, in part, because such factors predict online engagement in political discussions, which is a major correlate of hostility. This research not only broadens our understanding of the drivers behind social media aggression but also suggests that interventions to reduce online hostility must consider the complex interplay of online and offline lives.

Check it out.

I doubt that most college graduates (especially Grievance Studies majors) today could pass it.

Read it.

“Cadillac Desert” (1986) by Marc Reisner correctly pointed out that within the limits of natural precipitation, we’ve expanded habitation in the West close to its maximal extent. Nearly 40 years after he wrote, however, the answer to shrinking flows of the Colorado and ever more demand for living space is not to stage some kind of retreat from land otherwise blessed with climate, solar power potential, mineral and human capital wealth. The answer is to flex our industrial might and finish what the irrigators began a century ago, and bring water in vast quantities to the high desert, to terraform a few select valleys in Nevada, and build a 21st century aesthetic vision.

 

Read it.

Generative AI commodifies the manipulation of digital information. It may take half a century, but I believe it will eventually lead to the extinction of office and administrative support jobs like administrative assistants and financial clerks. The entire purpose of these jobs is to lower the cost of transmitting and storing information. In the long-run, AI will drive the cost of “routine” information processing down to nearly zero, eventually eliminating the need for most human labor in those jobs (although we will need a lot more energy efficiency to get there!)

There is a clear analogy here to the impact of mechanization on farm labor. For most of human history, the bottleneck to increasing food production was physical power. Steam and electricity eventually relaxed that constraint, and farm work mostly disappeared because we only need so much food.

Similarly, the key bottleneck in business decision-making for most of modern history was a lack of information. Advances in information collection, storage and retrieval eventually relaxed that constraint, and now we are awash in data. Routine office jobs were created in a time of information scarcity, and they may no longer be needed.

Read it.

I wish people wouldn’t use the term ‘capitalism’ in the sense of ‘anything that isn’t socialism’.

Critics of Big Tech often describe ‘surveillance capitalism’ in grim terms, blaming it for all kinds of political and social ills. This article counters this pessimistic narrative, offering a more favorable take on companies like Google, YouTube, and Twitter/X. It argues that the downsides of surveillance capitalism are overstated, while the benefits are largely overlooked. Specifically, the article examines six critical areas: i) targeted advertising, ii) the influence of surveillance capitalism on politics, iii) its impact on mental health, iv) its connection with government surveillance, v) its effects on the rule of law and social trust, and vi) privacy concerns. For each area, it will be argued that concerns about surveillance capitalism are unfounded or exaggerated. The article also explores some benefits of the services provided by these technology companies and concludes with a discussion of the practical implications. Throughout, the article draws on empirical evidence relating to the societal and political impact of digital technologies.

Read it.

The 2024 election season featured an unprecedented number of Asian Americans, from Vivek Ramaswamy’s rise in the Republican primary to soon-to-be second lady Usha Vance, to the Democratic candidate herself, Kamala Harris. Just a few years ago, this would have been a cause for celebration on the political left: Asian Americans have reliably voted for Democrats for decades. But the election results revealed that racial and ethnic minorities are not as loyal to the Democratic Party as previously believed. Much like Hispanics, Asian American voters made a major shift to the right.

Asians are denigrated as honorary white people rather than as fellow fashionable minorities by the Left.

Nationally, 2020 and 2024 exit polls from the Washington Post show a 9-point shift to the Republicans in the presidential race among Asian American voters relative to 2020. In some states, such as Nevada and Texas, the polls suggest that Trump won the Asian American vote outright. The NBC News exit poll found a 5-point shift to the right nationally among Asian Americans relative to 2020. And in their survey of Asian American voters prior to the election, Asian Americans Advancing Justice saw a 7-point shift away from the Democrats relative to 2020.

Read it.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose says he’s found 1,084 alleged cases of noncitizens who appear registered to vote and is referring them to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) after county prosecutors failed to act.

LaRose said his office has also uncovered instances of 167 people who have allegedly voted in a federal election as far back as 2018.

“In these cases, the county prosecutor has decided for whatever reason not to take them up. In some cases they’ve been referred to the attorney general as well, and we’re sending them along to the federal government to see if they want to prosecute these cases,” LaRose said.

LaRose had asked county prosecutors to act on 633 cases of suspected voter fraud last year but prosecutors took up just 12 of them, saying the others lacked evidence to pursue indictments.

The number of election fraud allegations in Ohio are a direct challenge to Democrat claims that noncitizens registering to vote in U.S. elections never happens.

Read it.

A new report by watchdog group Americans for Public Trust (APT) alleges that billions in foreign funds have flowed into U.S. organizations engaged in policy and advocacy work, blurring the lines of political influence.

The 31-page report, which includes financial records and receipts, traces nearly $2 billion from foreign-based charities to American groups active in what APT describes as “politically charged” initiatives. While foreign entities cannot contribute directly to U.S. political candidates, APT says their money is reaching election-related efforts such as voter mobilization campaigns, lobbying, research, and issue advertising.

“There’s not a question about where it’s going and where it is coming from,” said APT executive director Caitlin Sutherland. “We know that it’s foreign money coming into our U.S. policy fights, climate litigation, research, protests, lobbying, you name it. Foreign money is coming in, and it’s trying to erode our democracy.”

Read it.

Walmart has denied claims circulating online that it plans to close stores in response to potential looting tied to the federal government shutdown and a possible pause in federal food benefits.

Breitbart reported that a Walmart spokesperson told Fox News the rumors were “false,” and that stores “will continue to be open for business.”

The rumors stemmed from social media posts alleging that Walmart locations might shutter ahead of expected disruptions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food assistance to roughly 42 million Americans.

RELATED: SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown (Alba Cuebas-Fantauzzi/Fox News)

Read it.

He didn’t get the message in 2016. He had come out of the tea party imbroglio, the big midterm defeat of 2010. He had that reelection in 2012, but people didn’t like his border policies, they didn’t like Obamacare, and he was polling where [President Donald] Trump is, or even a little bit lower.

And then a big, bright light bulb went off in his head once Hillary [Clinton] started to square off against Trump, and it said, “You know, people don’t like me. I am a phony. They’re sick of me. But Donald Trump and Hillary are polarizing people. So, my last year in office, I’m just going to phone it in. Like I once said that I wanted a third term if I could just phone it in from the basement. So, I’m just gonna do that. I’m gonna go play golf. You’re not gonna see me, you’re not gonna hear me.”

And the more people do not see or hear Barack Obama, the more they’d like him. They like the idea of a suave, charismatic, first African American president. But they don’t like to be lectured, hectored, sermonized by him, and they’re sick of his stupid voice, his modulating it. When he talks to an African American class, “Oh, what you be doing?”

So what should we make of this week’s sudden explosion of Internet interest in penny auctions and the minatory noose?

First of all, the frequently-repeated text was almost certainly deliberately planted on social media. I’m not skilled enough to be able to track down the first instance of the duplicated post. Maybe some of the Internet sleuths among my readers can figure out where it came from — if so, please leave your conclusions in the comments.

Most of those who posted it, if they evidenced any political bias, passed it on for Progressive reasons. But not all of them — I saw of couple of instances of it on alt-Right or nativist paleocon sites.

My guess is that it is being thrown into the current political churn surrounding the Great Shutdown and the immigration madness to serve a leftist agenda. Somehow, everything that the Evil Orange Man is doing right now is like those evil rapacious bankers who screwed over all those virtuous Midwest farmers in the 1930s. The angry penny-auction farmers with their nooses should be seen as righteous dudes who were sticking it to the Man, part of the Resistance. They are the Depression-era equivalent of Antifa.

Or something of that nature.

Anyway, that’s my take on the matter. We right-wing curmudgeons have the misfortune of seeing the venerable Chinese curse fulfilled: we live in interesting times.

James Sexton.

“It’s really hard to define intelligence, but you can recognize stupid from a mile away.”

Watch it.

Dr Jones is a linguist and has an interesting idea.

Black American speech is already as incomprehensible as Chinese, so why not? After all, the Chinese were oppressed by “wypipo” as well.

The Foundry.

Over the past several weeks, President Donald Trump’s counternarcotics strikes in the Caribbean and now the Pacific have marked a turning point for Washington, directing the U.S. security apparatus to confront the deadly narco-terrorist threats in our hemisphere.

The outcome has been undeniably positive, effectively collapsing narcotics trafficking across the Caribbean and sending a clear message to both friends and foes. But that hasn’t stopped critics from making outlandish claims about the dangers of the U.S. military’s highly targeted strikes against narco-traffickers.

One of the more prominent talking points from far-left critics is that the U.S. military is actually mistakenly striking fishing boats instead of narcos. Despite its absurdity, this claim continues to be parroted by the media and the far left, who suggest that the military lacks the capacity to differentiate between fishermen and narco-boats.

In reality, there are several ways that the military, and even the casual observer, can identify a narco-boat. Unlike humble fishing boats, narco-trafficking vessels are typically specially outfitted and customized with expensive equipment that makes them ideal for drug running. This includes multiple top-level engines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars as well as expensive customized structures or hulls ideal for avoiding detection and carrying large quantities of narcotics.

Watch it.

Kate the Opera Singer looks behind the curtain to explain something that *I* have always wondered about (and maybe you have, too).

To be fair, staccato languages like German (e.g. Mozart or Wagner) are easier to understand when opera-sung than mush-mouth languages like French (e.g. Gounod or Bizet). Italian and Spanish can go either way, depending on the composer (I can understand what’s going on in a Mozart Italian opera easier than what is going on in the work of somebody like Rossini or Puccini). But maybe that’s just me.

And don’t get me started on Russian opera….

Read it.

It’s natural to feel anxious as we approach the inevitable automation of all human labor. Economic theory suggests that full automation will cause wages to collapse, potentially below subsistence level: the bare minimum needed to sustain human life.

Yet the full automation of the economy will probably also make most people vastly better off. Plummeting wages will coincide with sharply rising standards of living, rapid medical progress, and an explosion in the variety of goods and services that people can choose from.

This may appear paradoxical. How can people prosper even as their wages collapse?

The answer lies in recognizing that wages are just one source of income. People also earn income from investments, collect rent from property, and receive government transfers like pensions or welfare payments.

Today, the majority of people get most of their income by selling their labor. This is what makes wages a good proxy for the standard of living in a given region—at the moment. But full automation will break this pattern. Future humans will likely have low wages, yet they’ll command vastly greater wealth and wield far superior technology than we do today.

To get a glimpse into what this future may look like, it helps to first understand how similar technological revolutions have unfolded in the past.

The American Mind.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk puts to rest the dreamy hope that President Trump’s 2024 election was the final word on identity politics in America. The revolutionary faction he defeated at the ballot box walks not by argument, but by faith. It is a faith that the innocent victims of the world cannot rest until the racists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, Islamophobes, extremists, fascists, authoritarians, Nazis—and now the (Israeli) colonizers—are purged.

For more than a decade, we called this faith “cancel culture.” But cancellation was never going to be enough. In the end, the dark inner logic of identity politics requires a literal purging of those identified as “toxins” from the body social. Identity politics is, as I have written, “the spiritual eugenics of our age.” To achieve this always-receding goal of purity, a scapegoat must be found upon whom to lay the sins of the world. Charlie Kirk became that scapegoat.

The Republican political victory of 2024 notwithstanding, identity politics remains the reigning theodicy in all of our public American institutions; it is the established church of the American elite, whose parishioners rage and mock the majority of impure American citizens, who themselves are awakening to its bloody logic. One America mourns a martyr for Christ. Another America celebrates the purging of a scapegoat.

What HE said….

Read it.

Animal rights group PETA issued a statement following the crash, calling the escape a clear example of what it described as the risks of the “greedy monkey experimentation industry.”

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there even was a ‘monkey experimentation industry.’

The original article said that all of the monkey’s but one had been ‘euthanized’, suggesting that one had been held back for interrogation. Fortunately, that appears not to be the case.

When life gives you lemons, monetize!

Read it.

An 18-year-old transgender teen has admitted to plotting a school shooting at an Indiana high school on Valentine’s Day, reports the IndyStar.

Trinity J. Shockley, 18, who is being held in the Morgan County Jail in Martinsville, Indiana, without bond, will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit murder, a Level 2 felony, according to court documents.

Shockley’s attorney is requesting the teen serve no more than 12.5 years in jail and no more than five years on probation as part of the plea agreement.

Read it.

Historically, cities in industrializing countries were often identified with the things they produced. Manchester is where they made textiles, Pittsburgh is where they made steel, and Detroit is where they made cars. These urban identities weren’t confined to heavy manufacturing: New York is synonymous with finance, Los Angeles with movies, and Milan with luxury goods. Nor has the tendency to identify urban areas with specific economic activities fully disappeared: Today, the Bay Area is where they write software and Taipei is where they fabricate semiconductors.

These are all examples of what the sociologist Max Weber called, in a 1921 article The City, 1 producer cities: urban areas organized economically around some specific trade or particular manufactured goods that could be exported to other areas.

In contrast to these producer cities are what Weber called consumer cities. These were places organized economically around a specific set of residents with rights or privileges to some stream of income, like land rents or taxes. Weber used historical Beijing, which was centered on government officials, and Moscow, centered on landowners collecting rents from peasants, as examples. A contemporary example is Dubai, which grew rapidly around oil revenues. 2

Weber attributed the economic development of Europe relative to Asia to the predominance of its producer cities. The advantage he posited wasn’t because producer cities were necessarily larger?—?Beijing was perhaps 10 times as large as Manchester on the eve of the industrial revolution?—?but because producer cities had a higher capacity for innovation. They were dynamic.

Because producer cities are dependent on trade with other cities or countries, they have more incentive to innovate to gain market share. Consumer cities, on the other hand, are more likely to rely on rent seeking?—?and therefore experience economic stagnation. Moreover, innovations in one producer city can spill over to other producer cities through supply chains (cheaper steel in Pittsburgh makes for cheaper cars in Detroit)?—?but anything that benefits a consumer city likely comes at the expense of another city or region (like higher rents for agricultural tenants).

The better keyboard layout your fingers already know.

I would dearly love to learn a more efficient way of typing. The Dvorak and Colemak keyboards are very attractive, but the problem is that one doesn’t type consciously but rather reflexively–kinesthetic or muscle memory is the key. Once you train your fingers on a system, you literally don’t have to think about it, but ‘let your fingers do the typing’. Re-training my fingers to that degree of virtuosity would mean losing my facility with an ordinary QWERTY keyboard; that’s fine if all I do is work with my new keyboard layout, but I’m screwed if I have to go back to using the keyboard layout that everybody else uses.

I’m going to try this new method and see how it works.

Let us count our blessings every day.

Read it.

It is easy to say, “Nuclear should be regulated more sensibly!” But what if you had a blank slate to redo all nuclear fission regulation? How would you harness the power of fission while keeping the public safe?

There are two paths I find interesting. I’m sure there are many more possibilities, but I chose these because they also help explain a lot of the difficulty (and promise) in regulating fission power plants.

Read it.

Bukele is now a verb. To ‘Bukele’ something is to fix a problem that liberals say is ‘too complicated’ by simply ignoring their long-winded excuses and just doing the obvious. It is named after the leader of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who has turned a country that was once dubbed the murder capital of the world into one of the safest.

Meanwhile, Britain, once Europe’s most orderly nation, is mired in rape gangs, knife crime, and shoplifting. The UK doesn’t need Bukele-style mega-prisons, but it certainly needs his clarity.

The problem is that our elites in Westminster have mastered the art of inaction, cloaking their cowardice in excuses about complexity and human rights. They wring their hands over ‘systemic’ issues, treat illegal migration like an unsolvable cosmic mystery, and turn a blind eye to the mass rape of British girls in the name of diversity.

Read it.

2025 has been a great year for noticing things that would have gotten one censored, canceled, or debanked just a few short years ago.

In today’s episode, former DOE nuclear engineer Matt Von Swol notices something that’s been floating around for years; the insane number of minorities (mexicans and blacks) who are booked as “WHITE” when they get arrested – something which obviously manipulates ‘inconvenient’ crime stats – something that TPUSA’s Andrew Kolvet noted have been “widely corrupted to serve a racist agenda.’

“I searched through thousands of arrests in my county and every single Hispanic individual who has been arrested is labelled as “WHITE”” Van Swol posted on X.

“Latino”, like “Muslim”, is not a “race” as most people understand the term.

Read it.

We used to play this game in graduate school: find one, lose one. Find one referred to finding a lost ancient text, something that we know existed at one time because other ancient sources talk about it, but which has been lost to the ages. What if someone was digging somewhere in Egypt and found an ancient Greco-Roman trash dump with a complete copy of a precious text – which one would we wish into survival? Lose one referred to some ancient text we have, but we would give up in some Faustian bargain to resurrect the former text from the dead. Of course there is a bit of the butterfly effect; that’s what made it fun. As budding classicists, we grew up in an academic world where we didn’t have A, but did have B. How different would classical scholarship be if that switched? If we had had A all along, but never had B? For me, the text I always chose to find was a little-known pamphlet circulated in the late fourth century by a deposed Spartan king named Pausanias. It’s one of the few texts about Sparta written by a Spartan while Sparta was still hegemonic. I always lost the Gospel of Matthew. It’s basically a copy of Mark, right down to the grammar and syntax. Do we really need two?

What would you choose? Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a ‘river of gold’. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. There are literally lost texts that, if we had them, would in all likelihood have made it into the biblical canon.

Read it.

Michael LaRosa, who served as former first lady Jill Biden’s press secretary, said Friday the demolition of the White House’s East Wing was “probably needed.”

“It’s sad. I had a really wonderful office that I squatted in an hour or two after the inauguration ended, and remained there for nearly two years,” LaRosa said during an appearance on “The Sunrise on The Hill.”

“It’s heartbreaking, and I’m sentimental about it and sad,” LaRosa said. “At the same time, I think every first family, every president, should play a role in evolving the White House and updating it and modernizing it and sometimes expanding it.”

Donors for Trump’s $300m White House ballroom include Google, Apple and Palantir (The Guardian)

A Pile of Rubble: After 123 Years, the East Wing Is Gone (Elisabeth Bumiller/New York Times)

The Ballroom and the Bubbles ??? As shocking as it’s been to see the innards of the East Wing this week … (Meghan Houser/The Contrarian)

White House Stops Press From Documenting Trump’s Disaster Renovation (Hafiz Rashid/New Republic)

All The Donors Financing Trump’s Ballroom As He Demolishes The White House (HuffPost)

A Virginia couple is asking a judge to block Trump from tearing up the East Wing (Josh Gerstein/Politico)  Too late.

Interior Dept to Reuse Dirt From WH Ballroom Build

THE DUMBEST CYCLE: The Legacy Nightlies Are Still Covering the Ballroom Build Like It’s Watergate

White House Makeover: Trump’s Big Ballroom Blitz

D.C.’s newest tourist attraction is a demolition site. (Yeah, that one.) (Paul Schwartzman/Washington Post)

Shock — the White House is still there (Hugo Gurdon/Washington Examiner)

Chelsea Clinton: WH Rennovation a ‘Wrecking Ball to Our Heritage’  What little we have left after the efforts of your parents.

Trump is wrecking the People’s House | Exclusive (Chelsea Clinton/USA Today)

Big Tech Helped Bankroll the East Wing Destruction (Tim Murphy/Mother Jones)

Fmr. White House Usher: Build the Ballroom

Kooky Leftist Actor Claims ‘Heartbreaking’ East Wing Demo Is Distraction From…Epstein?

Trump demolishes the East Wing — and White House norms (MSNBC)  “Norms”, of couse, meaning “The way Democrats always did things.”

LiveScience.

For about seven minutes in 2003, scientists reversed extinction.

The resurrected lineage was the Pyrenean ibex (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica), and the last known member of the subspecies, a female named Celia, had died three years earlier.

Scientists had collected DNA from Celia’s ear before her death and injected her genetic material into a domesticated goat egg cell with its nucleus removed. The resulting clone — the first and only extinct creature to have been revived at the time — died soon after birth due to a lung defect.

Read it.

Ted Nordhaus deserves a nod for doing what few in the climate establishment ever do: admitting he was wrong. In his essay “I Thought Climate Change Would End the World. I Was Wrong” (The Free Press, Oct. 19, 2025), Nordhaus concedes that his worldview “was built on apocalyptic models sprung from faulty assumptions”. That sentence alone marks a watershed moment in the long, strange saga of climate alarmism. It’s rare to see one of the movement’s own architects confess that its foundations were exaggerated, its projections implausible, and its tone hysterical.

Nordhaus co-founded the Breakthrough Institute, an organization that has long tried to make climate activism sound reasonable by marrying environmental rhetoric to talk of innovation and modernization. For years, he and his colleagues accepted the central dogma—that the planet faced an existential crisis unless humanity swiftly abandoned fossil fuels. They were not content to question the science; they amplified it. “The heating of the earth,” Nordhaus once wrote in 2007, “will cause the sea levels to rise and the Amazon to collapse and… trigger a series of wars over basic resources like food and water”.

Now, almost two decades later, he confesses that such scenarios were never plausible. The old models assumed “high population growth, high economic growth, and slow technological change”—a trifecta of contradictions that cannot coexist. He points out that fertility rates are falling, economies are decarbonizing on their own, and technological progress accelerates efficiency regardless of political slogans. His admission is blunt: “I no longer believe this hyperbole.”

Read it.

Switzerland has announced a significant tightening of travel restrictions for asylum seekers. Under a new decision by the government, such individuals will generally no longer be allowed to travel to their home countries or to other states.

…

Austrian right-wing party FPÖ called the Swiss decision “absolutely right,” adding that “those seeking protection certainly do not need to travel to the country from which they are seeking protection.”

If you can go back to the country from which you are requesting ‘asylum’, do you really need asylum? Survey says: NO.

Read it.

Russia secretly acquired Western technology between 2013 and 2024 to build an underwater surveillance system in the Arctic designed to protect its nuclear submarine fleet, according to an investigation published Thursday by The Washington Post in collaboration with European news organizations.

According to financial records, court documents and Western security officials, Russia purchased sonars, underwater robots, and fiber-optic cables as well as research vessels and other sophisticated technology worth more than $50 million from companies including Norwegian defense giant Kongsberg, Japanese tech conglomerate NEC and U.S. sonar manufacturer EdgeTech to build a sensor surveillance system dubbed “Harmony.”

Purchases were also made from companies in Sweden, Italy, the United Kingdom and other NATO member countries.

The New York Times, paper of record for the Crust.

n the outskirts of Wyoming’s capital, two advertisements about a minute apart offered starkly different paths.

A nonprofit group’s billboard promoted a way to earn money for college. The other, from Walmart, dangled pay exceeding $30 an hour.

The dueling choices underscored a fundamental tension for the nation’s teenagers and adults alike, one that has become vivid in the Trump era: Is college something all Americans need?

For decades, it was close to an article of faith among education leaders, scholars and politicians, regardless of political ideology, that most people should go to college. But in many places, most jobs do not require college degrees, and doubts over the value of higher education have metastasized as student debt has soared and the ranks of dropouts have grown.

College has become a sharp dividing line in American life, and the disconnect between higher education’s promises and its sometimes-frustrating reality has helped fuel a conservative movement to upend academia. Over the last decade, though, nearly every state tried to get more people to earn a certificate or a degree after high school.

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On the afternoon of March 8, a petroleum tanker named Torm Agnes entered the Port of Ensenada on Mexico’s Pacific coast carrying almost 120,000 barrels of diesel.

Such a vessel was a rare sight in that port, which mainly hosts cruise liners, luxury yachts, and container ships. Ensenada lacks the infrastructure needed to unload cargos of flammable hydrocarbons safely – making what happened later that day odder still.

Waves of fuel-hauling trucks rolled up to the dock to cart away much of the Torm Agnes’ load. Workers scurried about filling the vehicles’ cavernous tanks, up to six at a time, using hoses springing from a larger hosepipe affixed to the vessel. The operation, while risky, ran like clockwork, according to an eyewitness and a photo and video from the scene shared with Reuters.

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A man was taken into custody late Tuesday after driving his car into a security barrier outside the White House, authorities said.

The U. S. Secret Service said the man crashed into the security gate at a White House entrance at 10:37 p.m. Tuesday. The man was immediately arrested by officers from the Secret Service’s uniformed division, the agency said.

Investigators searched his car and deemed it to be safe, Secret Service officials said in a statement.