The War Zone.

On Sunday evening, commentator Tucker Carlson made a chilling claim: U.S. President Donald Trump may soon use nuclear weapons against Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain facility. Carlson’s comments were posted on X just two days ahead of the Nov. 3 U.S. midterm elections, which Trump has frequently used as a timeframe for when he would conduct a new wave of airstrikes on Iran if he so decides. However, earlier on Monday, Trump downplayed that deadline, answering “no” when asked by reporters whether he was considering attacking after the election is over.

Regardless, Carlson’s claim runs counter to the president’s previous stance on the nuclear weapons issue. Trump has publicly eschewed their use, and while he has discussed attacking Pickaxe Mountain, he’s made it clear it would be by a conventional weapon if he made the call.

Monday afternoon, the White House dismissed Carlson’s asssertion.

Tucker Carlson is blowing smoke out of his ass, as usual.

Read it.

Over the years I have written frequently about what I call the “Pillager Class” and the “Producer Class” in an attempt to explore the reasons why certain people, groups and cultures always seem to turn to looting and destruction rather than building anything of value of their own.

It is a threat the west has been dealing with for thousands of years: We engineer and create and plan for the future, and instead of doing the same, the pillager class decides it’s easier to take what we have. Sometimes they are subtle like a parasite, and sometimes they’re not so subtle, like a swarm of locusts.

There are numerous theories on why this happens. Some think it stems from genetics, others from low IQ, others think it’s purely a cultural phenomenon, and some people argue that it’s a mere reactionary response to poverty. I suspect it’s a combination of all these things. At bottom though, it seems that certain groups are simply born with the pillager instinct; a subset of the populace perpetually stuck in scavenger limbo.

A good comparison to understand this is the classic “lottery winner” dilemma. Data suggests that around 70% of all lottery winners lose every dime they won in 5 years or less. It doesn’t matter if it’s thousands of dollars or millions of dollars; they can’t seem to keep their hands on wealth.

They go from cash windfall to bankruptcy and financial failure so quickly, winning the lottery is often treated like a curse rather than good luck. This happens because they are incapable of planning for tomorrow. Their brains are ostensibly stunted, and they can only think in terms of the present moment. They are doomed to live in poverty because they are incapable of growing beyond their most base desires.

The pillager class is very similar. You can take them out of the global ghettos, bring them to your home and give them every opportunity imaginable to improve their circumstances, and yet, they will always choose thievery and barbarism instead. The only thing that might change is the complexity of their crimes.

New York Post.

iHope you weren’t planning on getting away with it.

Looters who descended on a French Apple Store during the chaotic riots were reportedly greeted with warnings from their ill-gotten gains that the merchandise was being locked and tracked.

Viral video from the aftermath of the looting of the Lille Apple Store on Oct. 17 shows one of the thieves flashing the security warning on the stolen iPhone.

“Please return the device to Apple Lille. This device has been disabled and is being tracked. Local authorities will be alerted,” the alert read.

Apple’s products famously flash such warnings when they detect that they have been stolen from stores, with many on social media mocking the thieves who were seen rummaging through the seller over the weekend.

“Protesters raided an Apple Store in Lille France yesterday, dumbest move ever,” one person posted on X.

“Taking iPhones that will get blocked 2 minutes later, the morons,” another person added.

These guys are not the sharpest pencils in the box.

The Telegraph (UK).

A man killed by a tiger appeared to “dance” while listening to music before jumping into the animal’s enclosure, a witness claimed.

In footage of the incident shared online, the man was heard crying “no, no” during the fatal attack and screaming “stop” as he pointed his finger at the animal.

Obviously a progressive.

Visitors also heard gunshots fired and shouting at the animal in an apparent attempt to distract it.

Yup, definitely a progressive.

Think of it as evolution in action.

New York Post.

Chris Rock – How not to get your ass kicked by the police!

“There are no words to fully describe the heartbreak of watching our daughter being hurt by someone entrusted to protect and serve our community,” the family said.

Hmmm. The entitlement is strong in this one. How about the heartbreak of your having raised a daughter too stupid to know not to interfere with a police arrest? That ought to be the first concern.

Read it.

One lesson governments never seem to learn is that when taxes push the legal price of something high enough, a black market will eventually show up to collect the difference.

Australia is now getting a particularly ugly demonstration of that principle. After more than a decade of relentlessly increasing tobacco taxes in an effort to crush smoking, the country has created an enormous price gap between legal and illegal cigarettes, and organized crime has rushed in to fill it, according to the Financial Times.

A legal pack of cigarettes now costs close to A$60, or roughly US$42, making Australian cigarettes the most expensive in the world. Excise taxes account for more than 70% of that price, and the cost of legally purchased tobacco has roughly tripled since the end of 2016. Meanwhile, contraband cigarettes can be bought for around one-fifth of the legal price.

Markets will exist even when somebody in power doesn’t want them to.

Read it.

“Kamala Harris just accused Republicans of ‘cheating’ for doing something most Americans call basic election integrity: removing ineligible voters and illegal immigrants from the rolls,” Fox News Channel Host Sean Hannity explained Wednesday.

“At a Detroit NAACP event, Harris told the crowd Republicans ‘took’ the tools Democrats ‘relied on for the last 50 years’ and are ‘cheating by purging voter rolls.’ Watch her make the case herself,” Hannity wrote in an Instagram post of Harris’ comments.

Read it.

The only positive thing I can say about George W. Bush is that a Democrat would have been worse.

Read it.

Remind me what ethnicity is Fat People, that they can be subject to genocide.

Read it.

This woman was riding an e-bike in a town 10 miles outside Philly and cut in front of a classic Volkswagen Beetle.

New York Post.

Few people have done more to destroy our culture than she has.

A child of divorce (of course). Fortunately she never had children and her defective genes are now expunged from the gene pool.

UPDATE: Powerful: Gloria Steinem Refuses To Allow Satan To Hold Door To Hell Open For Her (Babylon Bee).

Read it.

This man was arrested for raping one woman (he’d allegedly sexually assaulted several), and then, when police let him out on bail, he went and raped another woman.

He is, of course, described in the Narrative Media as “Welshman” because he lives in Wales, but  in fact he is Nigerian.

The British criminal justice system has a serious case of The Stupids these days.

I thank God every day that I don’t live in Britain.

The American Mind.

Widespread use of the word “meritocracy” may only be possible in the world it describes. British sociologist and former Labour Party official Michael Young coined the term in a 1958 satire as a sly alternative to aristocracy, clumsily mixing Latin (mereo: to deserve) with Greek (kratos: power, rule). Young’s friend, a classicist, warned he would be “laughed to scorn” for employing such a barbarism. Her caution was, sadly, optimistic.

Nonetheless, meritocracy’s advocates have attempted to supply it with a noble lineage. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio and former presidential candidate, is convinced the 20th-century term is central to the American experiment going back to 1776. Palantir’s Jordan Chandler Hirsch likewise argues that America was “born meritorious,” defining meritocracy as when government and society operate through objective measures of “quality and talent, open competition based on fair play, and ruthless disinterest in any other factor.”

Yet by Hirsch’s own definition, today’s “objective” meritocracy has little to do with the founding generation’s ideas. As his own source, historian Joseph Kett, describes, “The Founders viewed a man’s public character, his reputation among his peers, as the outward measure of his essential merit…. Nothing would have astonished the Men of Merit more than to be told to take an examination to measure their character.” Indeed, in the founding era there were no standardized examinations, grades, or entrance exams for public service. When Thomas Jefferson spoke of a “natural aristocracy,” he meant one distinguished by “virtue and talents,” not paper credentials and background checks.

The ‘competitive examination’, as satirized in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe, especially for the civil service, started Britain on the road to being ruled by Sir Humphrey Applegate and his brethren.

The economic flaw with meritocracy is that it implies a labor theory of value. Markets reward scarcity and demand, not deservingness. As George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok explains, “A wage is a price”—it does not signify moral worth but guides action. Forcing markets to become genuinely meritocratic therefore would require a powerful administrative state to direct the economy, much like China’s own allegedly meritocratic system.

The world doesn’t owe you anything for your merit. The world has needs; if you can meet those needs, whatever your ‘merit’, you will be embraced by the world. If not, the world will pass you by.

It is no accident that the Democratic Party’s most radical constituency consists of post-grads with relatively modest incomes.

Exactly so.

New York Post.

‘Virginia Man’? No. He was a Tajik. From Tajikistan. That’s like arresting an American in Mexico and calling him “Mexican Man”.

Who the fuck gives a mental patient, an actual murderer, a 48-hour pass? Who?

Did they leave him his passport? How else did he ‘flee the U.S.’?

Read it.

I thank God every day that I don’t live in Britain.

Fox News.

California voters are set to decide whether to slap a new tax on the state’s billionaires as IRS data show thousands of taxpayers, and billions of dollars in income, are already flowing out of the Golden State.

The outflow is adding fuel to the debate over California’s proposed billionaire tax, with Mark Cuban warning Saturday the measure could drive not only wealthy residents but investment and startups out of the state.

Cuban’s warning came amid a heated back-and-forth with Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who has defended the proposed tax. The billionaire investor threatened to steer future investments away from California if the measure moves forward.

The clash comes as California is already experiencing significant taxpayer outflows, according to the latest IRS data compiled from federal tax returns.

The Telegraph (UK).

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Boy, she’s right on top of it.

Read it.

I’d tell them: Hope you brought food.

But Spain’s socialist government wouldn’t dare do that, even if they wanted to, which they don’t.

As a result, Spain just got a big batch of Turn World trouble. I wish them the joy of it.

tReason magazine, a Voice of the Looney Libertarian Left.

When you add it all up, 150 of this year’s congressional races featured no meaningful competition, according to a new report from Unite America, a nonprofit advocating for election reforms.

“These 150 candidates, mostly incumbents, ran unopposed in the dominant party primary for districts that the Cook Political Report rates as uncompetitive in the general election,” the report explains. “In other words, we already know not only which party is all but guaranteed to win these seats in November, but which person will win.”

This is an underappreciated problem plaguing American democracy—and one that contributes to other, more visible problems, like gerontocracy and Congress’ general flaccidity in the face of executive overreach. In those 150 districts where there are no competitive elections this year, over 84 million Americans have been effectively disenfranchised. Those voters can’t make a different choice, no matter how badly they might want one.

They could move. Nobody has nailed their feet to the ground. People who “can’t make a different choice” in California and New York have been moving to Texas and Florida for quite a while now. People in ‘competitive’ districts who lose the election can “make a different choice” all they want to, but their views still aren’t represented by the winning party’s candidate. How does this improve their lives? This is not rocket science.

I am constantly scratching my head about this fetish certain people have for ‘competitive districts’ for Congress. On the part of ‘journalists’ I can understand it, because political sturm und drang pays their bills, but for people who in theory actually follow (and allegedly think about) politics don’t have that excuse. The cure for ’84 million Americans have been effectively dis[en]franchise’ is to increase the percentage of the minority so that when the election is over even more people are ‘dis[en]franchised‘? How does that make any sense?

THE PURPOSE OF CONGRESS IS REPRESENTATION. The more ‘uncompetitive’ a district is, the more accurately the resulting winner will represent the existing inhabitants of that district. A district that is 95% Democrat or 95% Republican will represent the viewpoint of the overwhelming majority of the people. If the district becomes ‘competitive’, meaning it drops to, say, 55% of one party and 45% of the other, THAT INCREASES THE PERCENTATE OF PEOPLE IN THE DISTRICT WHO, WHEN THEY LOSE THE ELECTION, ARE ‘DIS[en]FRANCHISED’ (in the sense that their ‘representative’ represents the viewpoint of the other side).

The best representation is when 100% of the people in a district favor one party; the only questions that arise in an election are internal differences within the broad range of what that party stands for. That’s democracy pure and simple.

Read it.

Genociding commuinism is a genocide I can get behind with a clear conscience.

(What’s next in the proglodyte term-twisting contest? Culinary genocide? Arboreal genocide? Hello Kitty genocide?)

Read it.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said U.S. criticism of Canadian efforts to stop the “terrible scenario” of spreading forest fires in his province and choking smoke across a broad swath of the United States was “absolutely unacceptable.”

Fortunately, our criticisms are not subject to your acceptance. ‘Unacceptable’ is a term used by a superior to a subordinate, and reflects an absurdly over-inflated notion of the speaker’s importance.

That’s an Aggie for you.

Not the Bee.

I am not making this up.

Note to self: Do not approach police who have drawn weapons unless specifically instructed to do so, and then move very slowly.

(I thought rabbis were supposed to be smarter than that….)

Not the Bee.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but laugh at the “Radical Queer Feminist” sign in front of the waving Palestinian flag.

Or maybe that ought to be “Palestinian fag”.

The Telegraph (UK).

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

There’s dumb, and then there’s Jasmine Crockett.

Read it.

Ebola has spread to a health zone more than 100 miles from the mining town where the Democratic Republic of Congo’s latest outbreak is believed to have originated, Bloomberg reported.

Health officials confirmed the virus has been detected in a distant health zone from Bunia, the capital of Ituri Province in northeastern Congo.

The development underscores the challenges facing response teams working to contain the disease in a region marked by armed conflict, population movement, and mistrust of authorities.

The outbreak has been declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization, and the death toll has risen to more than 100.

Two cases, including one death, have also been reported in neighboring Uganda.

Contact tracing is considered one of the most critical tools for containing Ebola.

And why is that? Because Ebola doesn’t just spread by itself—it requires human contact.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Criminals get caught when they brag. They seemingly cannot help it.

All these “hidden camera” interviews where government workers or politicians let the cat out of the bag to a perfect stranger over a drink (with perhaps some sexual attraction thrown in for good measure) are pretty much the same thing. Look at all the leaks to journalists by people whose job it is to keep a secret, yet are somehow incapable of doing it.

Or even consider Hunter Biden, who blabbed endlessly to prostitutes. Wow. Using beautiful women to get powerful men to talk is a technique as old as time. What is astonishing is that it works.

Why?

My wife is fond of a program that uses bodycam footage of traffic stops to document people talking themselves into jail.

Example.

dickover?n.?:?a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.

Thanks to Daring Fireball for this PSA.

Read it.

Automobiles have been around for well over a century. During that time, we’ve gotten pretty good at designing and building their basic components and controls: seats, doors, pedals, steering wheels, mirrors, etc. But when today’s automakers decide to make an electric vehicle (EV), they seemingly forget much of what they once knew, creating new versions of features that are objectively, obviously worse than the time-tested designs they replace.

When Tesla ushered in the modern EV era in the early 2000s, some of these changes made sense, at least from a marketing perspective. To convince a cautious public to consider an EV, the vehicles had to appear “futuristic.” Flush door handles that automatically extend when you approach the car are definitely cool and fancy! But electronic door mechanisms like these have also proven to be unreliable, and possibly dangerous.

On the interior, Tesla settled on a minimal design dominated by a large touch screen. Touch screens provide a lot of flexibility. This is why our phones no longer have physical keyboards on them. Touch screens are also, perhaps surprisingly, less expensive than the array of physical buttons and switches that they replace in car interiors. This savings is especially important on EVs, where the cost of the vehicle is dominated by the battery (yes, to an even larger degree than an internal-combustion car’s cost is dominated by its engine). But despite their cost savings, the over-use of touch screens in cars has proven unpopular. They’re also not great for safety.

In 2026, we’re well past the time when EVs need to compromise safety and functionality in order to appear futuristic. As for the cost savings, well, that’ll be harder to shake. Once automakers got a taste for cheap touchscreens, they spread to all cars, not just EVs.

To help the industry get back on the right track, I’ve created a checklist for car designers. Make sure your new car—EV or otherwise—checks all these boxes to avoid making the same stupid mistakes that have plagued modern cars for years.

Read it.

Germany’s Left Party is calling for a major expansion of voting rights that would allow long-term foreign residents to participate in elections. The change would apply after five years of legal residence, regardless of nationality.

The proposal, submitted to the Bundestag, also urges cooperation between federal and state authorities to extend similar rights to regional and local elections.

The party argues that Germany faces a ‘democratic deficit,’ as millions of people who live, work, and pay taxes in the country remain excluded from political participation. According to figures cited in the proposal, around 14 million foreign nationals currently live in Germany, including roughly five million European Union citizens. Many have resided in the country for years, with the average length of stay estimated at around 15 years, yet still lack voting rights in most elections.

Easily fixed: Become citizens. If you’ve lived in a country for five years or more and you have made no effort to become a citizen, then you’re not committed enough to that country to be trusted with the vote. It’s just that simple.

Read it.

People set fire to an Ebola treatment center in a town at the heart of the outbreak in eastern Congo on May 21 after being stopped from retrieving the body of a local man, witnesses and police said.

“The police intervened to try to calm the situation, but unfortunately they were unsuccessful,”Alexis Burata, a local student who said he was in the area, told The Associated Press.

“The young people ended up setting fire to the center. That’s the situation.”

An Associated Press journalist saw people break into the center at Rwampara Hospital and set fire to objects inside, and also to what appeared to be the body of at least one suspected Ebola victim that was being stored there. Aid workers fled the treatment center in vehicles.

The crowd set fire to two tents fitted with eight beds run by a medical charity called The Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA), said Deputy Senior Commissioner Jean-Claude Mukendi, head of the public security department in Ituri Province.

Welcome to the Turd World. Be careful not to step in the Diversity.

Read it.

With Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez legalizing what could amount to as many as 1.6 million migrants, other EU member states are getting worried, and not just neighboring France.

While the Socialist prime minister’s announcement originally aimed to naturalize some 500,000 migrants by handing them residency permits and work permits, German authorities estimate that there could be as many as 850,000 applicants in Spain, writes Bild. Leaked internal Spanish police documents have already put this estimated number even higher, at 1.6 million.

Since the announcement in mid-April, hordes of undocumented migrants have been overwhelming local offices across the country, with nearly 130,000 applications in the first week alone. Remix News posted videos of these crowds.

The Register.

The terms “blindingly obvious,” “logical consequence,” and “that is not how it works” appear nowhere in the government handbook of internet legislation. In particular, the discovery that imposing age access controls on websites has pushed users to VPNs has come as a huge surprise to legislators in the UK, the EU, Canada, and Australia. Nobody here knows how old VPN users are, be they kids unwilling to lose access or adults unwilling to disgorge personally identifying data to who knows what.

As they recover from this shocking discovery, these fine people are looking at ways to control VPNs, whether by adding age verification here too or by some magical “digital age of consent” technology that somehow evades the paradox that demanding more personal information in the name of safety itself reduces safety. Yet here, as in so many ways, the rest of the world is lagging behind America – more specifically, the great state of Utah, which has just enacted an anti-VPN law.

This law makes it compulsory for any site that the state says needs age verification – porn, basically – to impose those checks on anyone physically in Utah whether or not they are using any VPN. Those would be the same VPNs whose sole purpose is to prevent the geolocation of their users. Which would seem, and is, another paradox.

ATQUE: Mozilla warns UK: Breaking VPNs will not magically fix Britain’s age-check mess

Read it.

What a great grasp of the obvious.

I’m wondering what’s wrong with the other 40%.

ATQUE: UK Schools Pushing Books On Kids Telling Them “There’s Plenty Of Room” For Small Boat Migrants

Read it.

House pets won’t stab your son or rape your daughter.

ATQUE: Spanish Woman Attacked by Immigrant after She Says She’s a Christian

ATQUE: Ireland Warned: Islamist Terror Now Top Threat  Strange pets you got there, Paddy.

Paul Krugman.

Since it’s an eternal truth that Krugman Is Always Wrong, let’s see how he’s wrong today.

Donald Trump wants to stop the renewable energy revolution. But he can’t — it will continue to advance around the world because the economics and the science are compelling.

An obvious lie to anybody who has been paying attention. Renewable energy fails almost every time it’s tried, and causes unceasing problems for those who stupidly depend upon it. Not to mention all the birds and whales that it kills.

Trump can, however, ensure that the revolution passes us by.

That’s why we elected him.

And the big geopolitical winner from Trump’s hostility to the energy revolution will be China, which dominates the production of renewable-energy infrastructure.

Only so long as people are stupid. It’s no surprise that a Communist regime would dominate a communist enterprise.

Furthermore, the China-led energy future will arrive ahead of schedule thanks to the debacle in Iran.

“China-led energy future”? These are the people who have more coal-fired power plants than any other nation, and whose air pollution in its capital city is notoriously bad.

Also, Trump’s decision to counter Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by blockading the Strait of Hormuz surely adds to the perception that relying on U.S. oil and LNG, which is what countries will have to do if they don’t turn to solar and wind, isn’t safe.

The available evidence seems to indicate pretty clearly the U.S. is actually the only ‘safe’ place to get oil and LNG.

Who can guarantee that an erratic America won’t try to weaponize other countries’ dependence on our energy?

‘Erratic’? Far less ‘erratic’ than Krugman’s brain. I suspect that ‘weaponizing’ other countries’ dependence on our energy is what it’s all about.

While China is strong in many industries, it is utterly dominant in electrotech, the cluster of industries — solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles — at the heart of the renewables revolution. Or as the Wall Street Journal puts it, China’s “green industrial complex” rules. China accounts for more than 80 percent of global production in all these sectors with the exception of wind turbines. In the wind turbine sector, China’s share is “only” 60 percent because Europe retains a significant role.

And of course I’m sure that NOBODY is worried that COMMUNIST CHINA will ‘weaponize’ that reliance on ‘green tech’.

Looks like Krugman came through for us again.

Daily Star (UK).

A 39-year-old man suffered a tragic and premature death, leaving his family desperately searching for him for several days, in a peculiar fatality that was ruled a dreadful accident.

It is thought the man was attempting to recover his mobile phone when he became stuck inside a giant dinosaur sculpture.

Preliminary enquiries by police indicated he was trying to find his phone, but when his remains were initially found, numerous questions remained unanswered.

I’ll bet there were.

Read it.

And there was much rejoicing.

Different people believe in different things. Some believe that we go to paradise after we die. Others that we disappear into cosmic dust. But environmentalist prophet Paul Ehrlich believed mankind would be reduced to cannibalism unless we stopped having children. Right away.

And Ehrlich never gave up hope of seeing cannibalism in his lifetime.

In ‘The Population Bomb’, the 1968 bestseller that became one of the foundational texts of the environmentalist movement and helped inspire the population reduction industry, Ehrlich opened with the statement that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

After going through a dozen printings, later editions postponed the mass deaths and Armageddons to a safely more ambiguous, at least for the era, time “the 1970s and 1980s”.

It got less cheerful from there.

Read it.

It’s something that would have seemed impossible just a few decades ago, but somehow, smoking a cigarette has become thoroughly uncool. Research out this week shows how the smoking rate in America has plummeted to a record low.

Scientists studied nationally representative survey data. Based on this, they estimated that less than 10% of U.S. adults smoked a cigarette in 2024—the first time this rate has ever dropped to single digits. Despite the astounding success, more is needed to further discourage the use of cigarettes and tobacco products in general, the researchers argue.

“Maintaining a centralized federal capacity for tobacco prevention and control is essential to sustaining progress in reducing smoking prevalence,” they wrote in their paper, published Tuesday in NEJM Evidence.

Read it.

The Washington State Senate has voted to approve a new tax on residents who make more than $1 million per year.

Gov. Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, has vowed to sign the bill.

The bill, approved Wednesday by the Democrat-led Senate, will impose a 9.9% tax on state residents who earn over $1 million annually.

Supporters say the tax would affect only a small share of taxpayers — roughly 0.5% of high-income residents — while generating billions annually for programs including education, healthcare, housing, and tax credits for working families, as well as eliminating sales taxes on personal care items such as shampoo.

I predict that when this tax goes into effect, there will be no more ‘millionaires’ in Washington state to be affected.

I predic that they will spend vast sums of money on Woke vote-buying projects in anticipation of revenues that will not arrive.

I predent that eliminating sales taxes in anticipation of the revenues (that will not arrive) will leave the state budget full of holes that, since they can’t conceive of reducing spending, will have to be filled with more taxes on non-‘millionares’.

These people are Just Plain Stupid.

Time to leave. (I’m looking at you, Bill Gates.)

Here it is.

Think of it as evolution in action.

ATQUE: Suspected terrorist defiantly flashes ISIS salute after he’s busted for tossing explosive device near Gracie Mansion (New York Post)  Didn’t know that ISIS had a salute. Well. Learn something new every day….

Watch it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

The Foundry.

When it comes to the Olympics, certain things are no-brainers. Don’t ski jump in high heels. Don’t do mixed doubles curling with an ex-spouse. Don’t do a two-man luge with JB Pritzker on top.

I would add, “Don’t trash the nation you’re there to represent.”

Apparently, several members of Team USA don’t have brains.

Daily Record (UK).

No one should ever be faced with such a decision, but for the rescuers trying to save a cave explorer, it was a matter of life and death.

John Jones suffered what has been described as the most horrific death imaginable when he became trapped upside down in a tiny, confined cave for over 24 hours.

The rescue team was confronted with a difficult decision: attempt to save his life, knowing it would cause him immense pain.

Brandon Kowallis was the last person to see the young man before his tragic end after becoming stuck upside down inside a cave. The details of that night continue to haunt him.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Dealing with terminally stupid people is often occasion for people to demonstrate laudable heroism, but you really have to wonder about some of them.

Watch it.

I have never understood the urge to get tattooed.

It strikes me as a species of narcissism, walking around shouting “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” all the time

The military have a technical term for people who attract attention to themselves.

They are called “targets”.

Read it.

The European Union has issued new guidance affecting asylum decisions in Sweden and across the bloc, particularly concerning applicants with links to terrorist groups such as ISIS.

According to internal directives sent to staff at the Swedish Migration Agency in early January, individuals with affiliations to ISIS in Syria are now considered to potentially have a “well-founded fear of persecution.”

The guidelines, distributed to case officers in early January, mean that individuals with ISIS membership in Syria can potentially be granted asylum. To deny protection, the agency must prove involvement in war crimes, which is considered highly difficult.