Read it.

President Donald Trump took decisive action last year to halt crime in Washington, and the results have been spectacular.

But that success now looks even more impressive considering recent reports that high-ranking members of the Metropolitan Police Department had been previously cooking the books to create the mirage that crime was lower than it was.

The House Oversight Committee released a report in December uncovering that during their investigation of crime in the capital, they heard “testimonies from commanders that there are clear pressures placed on MPD personnel to lower the classifications of crime to present to the public the perception of low crime in the District.”

The police commanders said, according to the committee, that “on numerous occasions, they were not only pressured, but also instructed, to lower crime classifications to lesser intermediate offenses in such a way that those offenses would not be included in the DCR reported to the public.”

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said Friday in an interview with Fox News that her office conducted a review as well and found that 50 witnesses and more than 6,000 police reports backed up the claim that there was tampering with the crime stats.

Taste, a Voice of the Crust.

Come along with a scion of the Left Coast slumming among the proles.

Read it.

Over the last year, I’ve come to an unsettling realization—the upper middle class is caught in a trap, and many of them don’t realize it.

A few weeks ago I wrote about why private school isn’t worth the cost. My argument hinged on the fact that the upper middle class pays a lot for private education despite there being no significant impact on lifetime outcomes. In The Death of the Amex Lounge, I found the same thing—premium travel experiences had become crowded while remaining expensive.

And, after recently digging into the data on housing, I’m having déjà vu. Homes are getting smaller even as prices rise. LendingTree reported that, from 2014 to 2024, the average size of new single-family homes shrunk by 11% even as the price per square foot surged by 74%! This is just the average too. A home near a public elementary school with a GreatSchools rating of 9 or 10 costs 78.6% more than a home in the surrounding county.

All of these trends point toward the same thing—people are paying more and getting less. This is what I call the upper middle class trap.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

Associated Press, a Voice of the Crust.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

The Telegraph (UK).

“Game of Thrones” dire wolf pups, which were brought back from extinction, are healthy and ready to breed, the biotech company behind the breakthrough has said.

Last year, Colossal Biosciences announced that it had used DNA from thousands of years ago to alter the genome of modern wolves and resurrect the lost species.

Dire wolves became extinct towards the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago. They became well known among Game of Thrones fans after George RR Martin, the author, included them in his best-selling fantasy novels.

When he’s not being a rabid TDS socialist, Trudeau has the ‘stopped clock’ thing down.

The American Mind.

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Louisiana v. Callais may dramatically alter congressional districts in Southern states. Writing for a 6-3 majority, Justice Samuel Alito unraveled decades of confusing and misguided caselaw construing the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) to hold that states may not engage in racial gerrymandering—or be forced to do so by federal courts—when drawing congressional districts. The Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause forbids race-based discrimination, Alito pointedly declared, preventing Section 2 of the VRA from being interpreted to require the creation of “majority-black” districts to comply with the VRA.

Congress enacted the VRA in 1965 (pursuant to Section 2 of the 15th Amendment) to prohibit states from disenfranchising blacks through obstacles such as poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications, white primaries, and grandfather clauses—not to create electoral parity, a long-standing position of Justice Clarence Thomas’s that he repeated in his concurring opinion in Callais. As Justice Alito wrote for the majority, the “Voting Rights Act does not guarantee equal outcomes.”

Contrary to the claims of partisan critics, the decision in Louisiana v. Callais does not “gut” or “hollow out” the VRA. Nor, contrary to Justice Elena Kagan’s hysterical dissent, does the majority in Callais “eviscerate” the VRA or render Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” Justice Alito’s meticulous majority opinion merely prevents the VRA from being abused to dictate “proportional representation”—that is, racial quotas—contrary to the express language of Section 2, which states that “nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.”

Read it.

I have been unable to find out what “Elo” means, but the site itself appears to be tracking how often SF judges let off obvious criminals.

Read it.

Separatists in Canada’s oil-rich province of Alberta have taken a major step toward forcing an independence referendum—by submitting more than 300,000 signatures to election officials.

Boxes filled with petitions were delivered on Monday, May 4th to Elections Alberta by independence supporters, as a crowd of several hundred gathered waving provincial flags and cheering the campaign.

The organizers claim they have gathered enough support to trigger a vote on whether the western province should break away from Canada.

The Telegraph (UK).

A South African hotelier is believed to have been eaten by a 15ft crocodile after human remains were found inside the swollen reptile.

The animal was shot from a helicopter and airlifted from the crocodile-infested Komati River in a daring police operation before a post-mortem examination was carried out.

A ring was found inside the belly of the 500kg apex predator and is thought to have belonged to Gabriel Batista, 59.

Read it.

The Force has once again made it all the way to the high seas this May 4th.

British design studio ThirtyC has unveiled another superyacht concept in honor of Star Wars Day, continuing a tradition that it started over a decade ago.

“We did our first one when we opened the studio in 2015,” studio founder and creative director Rob Armstrong previously told Robb Report. “We felt like we were injecting a bit of fun into our industry. Most of us knew Star Wars while growing up, so it seemed like a good way to add some light humor to what can sometimes become very serious superyacht projects.”

Read it.

Reform UK has pledged to build new detention centres for illegal migrants in areas that vote Green if it wins the next general election, in a proposal it says is designed to ensure “democratic consent” for its mass deportation policy.

Nigel Farage’s party said it would “prioritise” locating facilities in areas with Green councils or MPs, arguing this reflects the Green Party’s position on migration.

The announcement comes as both Reform and the Greens are expected to make significant gains in upcoming council elections. The Greens are projected to perform strongly in major cities including London, Newcastle, Cambridge, and Manchester, while Reform is targeting former industrial towns such as Walsall and Hartlepool, as well as Conservative strongholds like Essex.

Reform says it will deport all illegal migrants in Britain—estimated by the party to number up to 600,000—if it forms a government. It also plans to detain up to 24,000 people at any one time in new facilities while they await removal.

Read it.

Europe is in far greater economic trouble that most people realize. In an April 2026 report by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), it was reveled that the UK’s GDP per capita is lower than all 50 U.S. states, including the poorest, Mississippi. While the majority of Britons mistakenly believe the UK is as wealthy or wealthier than the US, data shows the UK’s average income lags behind the lowest-performing US states, highlighting a significant economic gap.

The quiet decline of the once mighty British Empire right under the nose of the general populace is just one of many examples of Europe not understanding their own precarious economic circumstances.

Far-left governments on the other side of the Atlantic have openly sought to sabotage conservative political movements, imposing authoritarian lawfare and mass censorship in order to prevent losing their grip on power. The globalist leadership in these countries has designated the Trump Administration and US nationalist groups as a “bad influence” on their own citizens.

Read it

Yeah, probably.

I’m sure thieves love them.

Read it.

Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee….

“If two weird things happen so close together, they are usually connected somehow.” — April Lewis

Read it.

The financial industry understands itself to be an arm of the government. We were inducted into this service other-than-willingly through the ordinary operation of law and regulation.

This is uncontroversial and unsurprising to insiders.

A claim which will be more surprising: some regulated financial institutions have delegated authority for account- and transaction-level decisioning to a non-profit.

Another: that non-profit includes a private intelligence agency, which runs covert assets, publishes intelligence estimates, develops target lists, and communicates them to decisionmakers.

Still another: the non-profit organized a coalition of the willing as an outgrowth of its intelligence agency. The willing non-profits, that is. The coalition engaged in a years-long campaign to coerce financial infrastructure and other firms to give them the ability to direct accounts to be closed. The infrastructure built to do this against domestic terrorists was applied to an American politician’s fundraising efforts, and no one seemed to think that was odd.

Last week, the DOJ unsealed an indictment against the organizing non-profit for bank fraud. This was based, in part, on how it paid the intelligence agency’s covert assets.

They likely developed evidence for that indictment using the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) mandatory reporting regime.

We begin, as always, with the bank fraud.

Notice that, although there are fewer Blue states, they have almost as many Reps as the Red states. (D.C. doesn’t count as a ‘state’ and has only a non-voting Rep, a Democrat.)

The Left Coast and the Lake Coast states have hinterlands that manage to elect the odd Republican, although who knows how long that will continue?

Read it.

Nearly half a million years ago – far earlier than researchers once believed – early human ancestors were already building wooden structures.

A research team from the University of Liverpool and Aberystwyth University, reporting in Nature, excavated remarkably well-preserved wood at Kalambo Falls in Zambia.

The finds date to at least 476,000 years ago, long before modern humans, Homo sapiens, evolved.

Shortly after making this discovery, Professor Larry Barham from the University of Liverpool and his team identified a wedge, a digging stick, a log cut with the help of tools, and a branch with a deliberate notch.

Such woodworking extends far beyond what was once thought possible of early humans living so long ago. These artifacts were preserved thanks to the waterlogged conditions at Kalambo Falls.

The shit the government buys is all crap.

Read it.

Law is an incrementally maintained system authored by distributed agents with partial authority over time, requiring stable fine-grained addresses for external reference.

Every element of this definition is load-bearing.

Read it.

There’s a passage in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs that gets quoted less than the famous ones. Jobs talked about how great companies die, and his theory was that the rot has nothing to do with competition or markets or innovation cycles. The rot starts when the salespeople end up running the company.

He named names. He pointed at IBM under John Akers. He pointed at Microsoft under Ballmer. He even pointed at the Sculley era of his own Apple as the cautionary tale. The phrase Jobs kept circling back to was that the people running these companies eventually “have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.” They can’t tell the difference. They can run a supply chain better than anyone alive, but they couldn’t tell you whether the radius on a button looks right.

That’s not a small criticism. That’s the founder of Apple, on the record, naming the disease and warning the company against catching it.

Then, in 2011, Apple promoted its head of operations to CEO.

I’m not saying Cook was a bad pick at the time. He was the right person to keep the trains running while everyone caught their breath after losing Steve. But fifteen years later it’s worth asking the question Steve himself would have asked. What kind of products are we shipping now?

ScienceDaily.

Scientists have uncovered a surprising new picture of human origins that challenges the long-held idea of a single ancestral population in Africa. By analyzing genetic data from diverse modern African groups—especially the highly distinct Nama people—and comparing it with fossil evidence, researchers found that early humans likely evolved from multiple intermingling populations over hundreds of thousands of years. Rather than a clean split, these groups stayed connected, exchanging genes even after beginning to diverge around 120,000–135,000 years ago.

Read it.

Tell the truth: Who hasn’t wanted to do that?

Yes, that truck is so high, and the Lambo is so low that the lady couldn’t even see it down there.

Back to the parking lot party: That’s a three-ton raised Chevy Silverado versus a $325,000 Lamborghini Huracan. And I don’t think I have to tell you who won.

 

The Telegraph (UK).

Royal Mail has launched an investigation into allegations that a postman boasted he had “dumped” Reform UK leaflets in a dustbin.

The postal service said it would look into claims that one of its employees attempted to sabotage a door-to-door delivery of the party’s local election campaign literature.

Lawyers acting for Reform UK wrote to Alistair Cochrane, the chief executive of Royal Mail, to raise the “suspected serious incident of apparent deliberate misconduct”.

It doesn’t take a conspiracy. All government employees know which side their bread is buttered on.

The Telegraph (UK).

Pubs in a seaside town are refusing to serve councillors on a climate change committee who voted to impose charges at a formerly free public car park.

At the start of April, a fee of £1.60 an hour was introduced by Labour-led Swale borough council for spaces at Park Road in Queenborough, Kent, despite petitions opposing the move.

Now pubs in the town, on the Isle of Sheppey, have put up signs announcing that they have barred nine councillors who voted in favour of the charges in November and one who abstained.

If I had a shop, I’d post a sign “Dogs and Democrats Not Allowed”.

Sarah Hoyt.

In a short story a few years ago, my husband coined the term Feffers as a short hand for all the sad mouths who yell “Fix Earth First” every time anyone tries to escape the crab bucket this our native rock.

It is the perfect term, since without the first F it’s a pejorative anyway. And heaven knows, I start using it, in a tone like a spitting cat, when I’m following some cool event or development on X and find myself mired in comment after comment of “We could eliminate poverty” (Spoiler: Poverty always wins wars on poverty.) Or “We have so many problems here on Earth” or similar stupidity.

They are wrong. No, I can’t absolutely prove it for the reason that sociological experiments are really hard to run on an entire society. This could be solved by having a portal that allows us to observe parallel worlds that took alternate paths, but younger son refuses to invent the technology. Out of contrarianess I’m sure.

However we have a similar thing, called history.

Watch it.

Tim Pool looks at the Dead Scientist story.

Read it.

Joshua LeBlanc, 29, a team lead on NASA’s most cutting-edge nuclear thermal propulsion projects, was found charred beyond recognition inside his burned Tesla after vanishing from his Huntsville, Alabama home. His family immediately feared abduction. He left his phone and wallet behind—an act they called completely uncharacteristic.

“Charred beyond recognition” is a nice touch.

Tesla Sentry Mode data later showed the vehicle sat motionless at Huntsville International Airport for four hours the morning of July 22, 2025. The car was discovered that afternoon after colliding with a guardrail, slamming into trees, and erupting in flames.

What a great assassination tool: Just give somebody a Tesla and let nature take it’s course.

The Telegraph (UK).

We saw two very different approaches to maritime enforcement operations on display at the weekend.

On the one hand, we have emerging reports that one of the reasons we have yet to board-and-search any of the dark fleet ships that are passing through British waters is that the cost of finding a port for them to reside in after the seizure takes place is too high.

On the other, we had the USS Spruance enforcing the US blockade of Iran by engaging a commercial container ship with her five-inch gun.

Read it.

The Navy is telling sailors to lock down their phones and social media accounts as online threats increase during the current conflict with Iran. Officials said that “adversary cyber actors” are increasingly targeting sailors online with a wide range of hack attempts and psychological operations.

The message even says to “??beware” of dating apps that share too much personal information.

The April 17 Navy-wide notice recommended that Navy personnel set their accounts to the “highest level” of privacy on social media, turn off their phone’s location tracking, microphone, and camera use, and scrub search engines like Google of personal information.

“In response to Operation Epic Fury, adversary cyber actors are conducting a social engineering campaign actively targeting Department of the Navy (DON) personnel and their families via spear phishing and social media contacts. These actors seek to psychologically influence DON personnel and their families, and also seek to trick personnel into clicking on/opening potentially malicious links and files,” officials wrote in the NAVADMIN.

Jewish Telegraphic Aency.

Maybe he was an Iconoclast. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

Forgot why you even bother to get up in the morning?

Read it.

We’ll get to that soon. But first, some physics!

I supposed something that looked as if made from Legos but it actually looks pretty good.

Navy Matters.

The Middle East, and the Strait of Hormuz, in this case, is a clear example of the regional sensor network concept being applied against a third rate enemy over a very small region. This should be as dominating an effect as is possible to get. Iran has no sensor countermeasures. No jamming. No signal disruption capability. No reported cyber attack capability. Nothing to hinder our sensors or the regional network. Our networked sensing should be flawless. Perfect. Omniscient.

So … how did Iranian boats manage to attack two merchant ships and return safely to wherever they came from? How did we not see them? How did we not kill them seconds after they emerged from wherever they were hiding? For that matter, how could they hide from our all-seeing, all-knowing, regional sensor network? These are not some kind of uber-stealth vessels aided by sophisticated electronic warfare equipment. These were some Iranians in a speedboat sailing around, pretending to be a navy – the equivalent of Boy Scouts pretending to be an Army. The Navy claims to be able to spot periscopes at vast distances … but not speedboats racing around confined waters?