Read it.

Illinois politicians’ latest attempt to impose their will on homeschooling began with a single tragic story of one child’s abuse. Lawmakers took that case of parental neglect and twisted it, expanded on it, and turned it into an indictment of homeschooling in general. Now they want new legislation to control it.

Homeschooling risks truancy, they say. And abuse, educational neglect and poor accountability. That’s how lawmakers are fear-mongering about Illinois’ long-standing, hands-off approach to homeschooling in an attempt to gain more power over parents and children.

But if you know anything about Illinois’ public education system, you’ll recognize the rank hypocrisy immediately. Illinois schools are full of truancy, abuse, educational neglect and poor accountability. Yet lawmakers do little to nothing about that. Instead, they’ve turned their attention towards the last form of education they don’t control.

The bill at hand, House Bill 2827, would force homeschooling parents – and private schools – to annually submit a declaration form to their local school district, with the potential penalty of fines and even jail time if parents don’t comply. Among other items, the bill also requires administrative and curriculum standards.

Read it.

As it does.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia anyone can edit, distorted the descriptions of various Cabinet nominees after President Donald Trump named them “in an attempt to highlight damaging information,” according to the Media Research Center.

All it takes is for some ‘journalist’ or ‘expert’ to publish some slur about you for it to be enshrined in your Wikipedia bio, especially if you disagree in any way with the Woke Narrative.

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

First, of course, they have to repeat the Narrative that the guy was barred because of saying hateful things about the President (which I suspect is a better reason to bar some left-wing academic from entry to the United States than that he posted social media thoughts unbecoming of a Wokerato).

However, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement Thursday that “any claim that his removal was based on political beliefs is blatantly false.”

“The French researcher in question was in possession of confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory — in violation of a non-disclosure agreement — something he admitted to taking without permission and attempted to conceal,” she said.

The test will come if and when he gets sued for breaking this alleged non-disclosure agreement. In the meantime, this seems like an appropriate response.

The Narrative Media, of course, accept the Narrative without question:

French scientist denied US entry after phone messages critical of Trump found (The Guardian)

Read it.

One week after Infowars reporter Jamie White was murdered outside of his Austin apartment, followed by a pizza delivery under the name of ‘Jamie White.’

Shroyer posted pictures and footage of the swatting on X.

Shroyer’s swatting is not an isolated incident – as numerous conservatives have been targeted in recent weeks with similar swattings.

“It’s been dozens of people that have been swatted. What is going on? We know what’s going on,” said Shroyer. “The Democrat Party and all of their little street thugs funded by ActBlue, the stolen money from USAID, George Soros—all these different groups are behind it. They’re behind the terror attacks against Elon Musk.”

In recent days, Bill Clinton accuser and social media influencer Juanita Broaddrick was swatted.

Read it.

Within hours of Hamas’ appalling attack on Israeli civilians, the “settler colonial” paradigm inserted itself into public commentary. In this slim and approachable monograph, Kirsch leads readers into the topsy-turvy world of this academic theory. Zareena Grewal, an Associate Professor at Yale, phrased it with helpful candour on X: “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle”. How did this phrase come to be used by scholars and students in the most prestigious universities of the West to rationalise the slaughter of Jewish Israelis in their homes and at music concerts?

The Cool Down, a Voice of the Crust.

One Reddit user called attention to a strange-looking yacht off the coast of Milos, Greece, and a few commenters shared photos of other massive yachts they had spotted in the area.

In a yacht-focused subreddit, the user shared an image of the superyacht, which one person identified as Olivia O. The vessel measures over 290 feet long and is powered by two diesel engines.

It is indeed the Olivia O, which is somewhat famous for being the only ‘superyacht’ that has an Ulstein X-Bow, which is ordinarily used on offshore support vessels servicing oil platforms and such like.

The writer of the article doesn’t care to do the minimal research it would take to identify it, or explain why it looks that way; she just wants to use it as a hook on which to hang her Climate Change rant, which occupies the bulk of the article.

While the discussion centered around interesting yachts and sailboats users had seen near Milos, the elephant in the room is the negative impact superyachts have on the planet.

It isn’t the ‘elephant in the room’, it’s merely the elephant in her head.

The Times.

To be or not to be decolonised — that is the question vexing the charity responsible for William Shakespeare’s estates, which has been plunged into controversy over the playwright’s legacy.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which owns his homes and some archival material linked to his birth, has been urged to “purge” its vast collections “of Anglocentric and colonialist thought”.

After academics raised concerns that venerating the writer could promote white supremacy, the trust has agreed to “create a more inclusive museum experience”. This will involve exploring “the continued impact of empire” on its collections, how colonialism has warped perceptions of world history, and that “Shakespeare’s work has played a part in this”.

The trust, which was established in 1847, has stated that the historical materials it holds may represent “values and stereotypes that are not consistent with the current values and practices” of its organisation. It has warned those who view its manuscripts and artefacts that they “may encounter language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful”.

Read it.

Worth reading the whole thing, but BLUF:

So the contours of the “final judgment” in this case are coming into view. Mann will be awarded $1001 against Simberg, and $5001 against Steyn. NR will be awarded $530,000 against Mann, and Simberg and Steyn will be awarded some additional tens of thousands from Mann. Mann will be in a very substantial financial hole, with the defendants having little incentive to compromise with him, and every incentive to go after his bank accounts and his house. Probably, Mann will be able to stave that off for some substantial period of time by means of appeals. Or perhaps Mann’s angel funders, who have paid for this case on his behalf and never had their identities disclosed, will pay off the judgment for him. Publicly, Mann will go forth continuing to claim that he “won” the case by virtue of the jury verdicts.

For me the most disappointing aspect of the whole case has been the total inability of the court system to deal with Mann’s fake science. As described in detail in my post from February 6, 2024, the defendants, particularly Simberg, put on substantial and indeed definitive evidence of the flawed “science” in Mann’s Hockey Stick reconstructions — manipulation of data, incorrect error bands, suppression of adverse verification statistics, and so forth. Mann did not even feel the need to put on any scientific evidence in response. His lawyer completely ignored this entire issue on their rebuttal case, and then did not even mention it in closing argument. And yet, the jury still made an award against the defendants. The whole issue of the fake science went completely over their heads.

The most fitting end to this case will be when whoever in the federal government pays for the University of Pennsylvania “climate science” centers pulls the plug on all the funding. That can’t come soon enough.

The Providence Journal, a Voice of the Crust.

A federal court order that would have halted the immediate deportation of a Rhode Island doctor was issued Friday evening while the doctor’s departing plane sat on the tarmac at Boston Logan International Airport, said a family friend and colleague.

But the plane ultimately took off, carrying Dr. Rasha Alawieh out of the country for reasons still unclear to her family, her lawyer and Brown Medicine colleagues such as Dr. Basma Merhi.

“They did not do anything to stop the plane,” said Merhi, who was learning details of the event through information relayed by Alawieh family members. “So, clearly, they wanted to deport her regardless of if there was a judge’s order or not. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

Read it.

The Illinois Board of Higher Education runs a scholarship program for graduate students that explicitly excludes white applicants, a move lawyers say is unconstitutional and could jeopardize the federal funding of more than two dozen participating universities, including Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

The program, Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois (DFI), was established by state law in 2004 and provides financial aid to “members of traditionally underrepresented minority groups” pursuing masters or doctoral degrees. Those groups include “African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American, Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander,” according to the program’s landing page.

Students apply to the program through their universities, each of which has an “institutional representative” who helps “verify … that applicants for the fellowship meet all eligibility criteria.” That structure means that participating institutions, which include the top public and private universities in the state, are directly involved in an application process that violates federal law, according to five attorneys who reviewed the program requirements.

“This isn’t a hard one,” said Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a commissioner on the U.S Commission on Civil Rights. “The program was illegal and unconstitutional since its inception.”

The New Neo.

Bob Graboyes writes about what he calls “Trump-et blasts” – that is, gratuitous anti-Trump statements in emails on a wide variety of unrelated subjects:

My friend’s note was merely one car in an endless freight train of similar emails rolling and rumbling into my inbox each day. In them, one can discern empirical regularities. Trump-et Blasts are never offered as hypotheses, opinions, or topics for discussion. Rather, they are always stated as Euclidean postulates—self-evident Truths that we surely agree upon and which warrant no discussion. Recipients of Trump-et Blasts have five possible Supreme Court-like responses: affirm, ignore, concur, dissent, or defer.

I’ve noticed these Trump-et blasts more in conversation than in emails to me, probably because almost everyone I know is aware of my politics and doesn’t bother with the random snipes in emails. It’s in casual talking that it comes out, especially if I’m part of a group. In a group, even if people know I disagree, they’re not catering to me. And why should they, actually? Often, it’s a group bonding experience, a sharing of what is considered tautological and the mark of their agreed-on virtue. I’m grandfathered into the group, as it were.

Much like Cato ending every Roman Senate speech with “And also I think that Carthage must be destroyed.” … which worked.

Read it.

Equality before the law (the only form of equality worth entertaining) has long been a bad joke in Britain. Whether it’s Jews interfering with the latest jihad march by looking ‘openly Jewish,’ fathers arrested for objecting to the multicultural gang rape of their daughters, or the policing disparity between the BLM and Brexit, COVID, and Tommy Robinson marches, anyone with a pulse realises that the likelihood of getting your collar felt in 2025 rests largely on your ability to identify as anything other than a white male.

Up till now, the powers that be have at least pretended this is something they do not approve of. Even as he emptied the prisons of rapists and murderers to make room for native Brits who tweeted things he disapproves of, Keir Starmer told us categorically: “There is no two-tier policing. There is policing without fear or favour—exactly as it should be, exactly what I would expect and require.”

We all enjoy a giggle now and then, which is presumably why The Sentencing Council for England and Wales has chosen April 1st to enact its overhaul of the sentencing guidelines—the principles that magistrates and judges must follow when imposing community orders and custodial sentences.

Read it.

Recently, after the speech of Vice President J.D. Vance in Munich, various European leaders went public to express their shock and disbelief that they would be accused of rolling back on free speech. For many of us, it was a laughable display of denial, particularly from UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

In a country that has eviscerated free speech, Starmer told Bret Baier that the UK “guards” free speech and “we don’t believe in censoring speech.”

Now, the government is continuing this month with its effort to regulate and criminalize speech.

The effort to crack down on “Islamophobia” could create a type of blasphemy standard if it encompasses criticism of the faith or its practices.

The Left loves to tag things they don’t like with the ‘-phobia’ sticker, suggesting that rational concern with degenerative cultural trends are somehow arbitrary and irrational. ‘Islamophobia’ is a very popular one that seeks to exclude from the Overton Window the very rational aversion to the existential threat to Western civilization that Muslim terrorism has posed for hundreds of years.

Read it.

A Wisconsin school district on Friday agreed to pay out $20,000 to a teacher who was terminated for refusing to use preferred names and pronouns for transgender students.

Jordan Cernek, an English teacher, sued the Argyle School District in July 2024 after his contract was not renewed, alleging the district violated his right to free exercise of his religion and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“Mr. Cernek has a sincerely held religious belief that God makes no mistakes when it comes to sex and gender and that calling a transgender student by a name or pronouns at odds with their biological sex would cause Mr. Cernek to affirm that God made a mistake in creating a transgender person as a male or a female,” the lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty stated. “In Mr. Cernek’s religious view, affirming a transgender person’s identity through the use of preferred names and pronouns would be speaking a falsehood and violate his religious beliefs.”

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust,

A natalist conference featuring speakers including self-described eugenicists and promoters of race science, apparently including the man behind a previously pseudonymous race-science influencer account, and the founder of a startup offering IQ screening for IVF embryos, will be held at a hotel and conference venue operated by the public University of Texas, Austin.

Details of the conference have emerged as a prominent supporter of pro-natalist positions, the tech billionaire Elon Musk, lays waste US government agencies under the banner of his “Doge” initiative, with the blessing of Donald Trump.

Natalism in its current often rightwing iteration encourages high birth rates, and Musk has been a vocal proponent. He also maintains a large compound home near Austin, where reportedly he plans to house some of his children and two of their mothers.

The implication, of course, is that ‘natalists’, ‘race-science promoters’, and ‘eugenecists’ are part of the Axis Of Evil that all politicaily correct people disdain. Proglodytes have always been disgusted by people having children, from the ‘population crisis’ that was going to bring us to  Malthusian hellscape (before the numbers showed that, actually, the population was stabilizing) to the Wokerati who ‘refuse to bring a child into this world’ in order to Save The Planet.

Proglodytes are congenitally seething with arrogance. They are conviced that, of anything bad happens in the world, it is because of Bad People (other than themselves of course; you know, Other People, Ignorant People), and that if anything good will ever happen it will happen it will depend on the efforts of Good People (like themselves). They forget that the natural world is HUGE and people just don’t count for all that much — we’re just another species, and reality has been dealing with species for billions of years and really doesn’t need our help ,,, but thanks for playing.

(FOLLOW THE SCIENCE! except when it’s race science….)

Read it.

Mob rule has always been the Left’s first recourse.

NBC News, a Voice of the Crust.

Two of Sen. John Fetterman’s longest-serving staff members are leaving his team as the senator takes a more open approach to President Donald Trump than many of his Democratic colleagues are.
Charlie Hills, Fetterman’s communications director, and Tré Easton, his legislative director, are set to soon depart the Pennsylvania Democrat’s office.
Both men worked on Fetterman’s 2022 campaign and have been with him during his two-year Senate career.
“Working for John afforded me the opportunity to build a diligent policy team from scratch,” Easton said in a statement to NBC News. “Together we created a legislative body of work that I think is a blueprint for how Democrats should be governing when they have power. I’ll forever be grateful.”
The departures come one month after Carrie Adams left as Fetterman’s communications director. She had garnered attention when she was quoted in a Free Press article disagreeing with the senator on Israel and the war in Gaza. That followed Fetterman losing three of his top communications staffers last March, before his chief-of-staff, Adam Jentleson, stepped down.
The senator’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Zman examines the Narrative Media.

For a long time now, there have been people on this side of the great divide arguing that the real source of power in American society is the media. The media has power because they control the moral framework and the discourse within it. If the media declares a set of facts unacceptable, then no one talks about them, unless they have a desire to be hurled into the void. The media controls what is allowed to be said, so they control how things are done and by whom.

On the surface, this was true, and it was always true to some degree. A popular political quip from the analog days was that “You should never pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.” If the New York Times decided to declare a fatwah on you, there was a very good chance you were going to lose. This was why so-called conservatives and Republicans would crawl on their bellies to talk with the press, even though the media treated them as the official punching bag.

The model for this was Watergate. If not for media pressure, the political class would not have done anything about Nixon. The reason for that is they had no reason to hate Nixon, even if they disagreed with him. It was the media that made Nixon into a villain and then demanded the political class do something. Congress did not force Nixon out of office because they hated him or they believed he violated the rules of politics, but because they feared the media.

Quillette.

Last month, I received a tip from a nursing student at University of Alberta who’d been required to take a course called Indigenous Health in Canada. It’s a “worthwhile subject,” my correspondent (correctly) noted, “but it won’t surprise you to learn [that the course consists of] four months of self-flagellation led by a white woman. One of our assignments, worth 30 percent, is a land acknowledgement, and instructions include to ‘commit to concrete actions to disrupt settler colonialism’… This feels like a religious ritual to me.”

Canadian universities are now full of courses like this—which are supposed to teach students about Indigenous issues, but instead consist of little more than ideologically programmed call-and-response sessions. As I wrote on social media, this University of Alberta course offers a particularly appalling specimen of the genre, especially in regard to the instructor’s use of repetitive academic jargon, and the explicit blurring of boundaries between legitimate academic instruction and cultish struggle session.

One of the most tedious aspects of The New Puritanism is that you must confess your sins before you will be allowed redemption, and “I have no sins to confess” is not an acceptable answer.

Read it.

Sabine is a high profile Physics YouTuber who creates brilliantly skeptical videos about the latest science claims – except when it comes to climate change.

Trump is not making ‘us’ give up on climate goals; he is merely making it more difficult for climate Chicken Littles to force their ‘climate goals’ on the rest of society.

MIT Technology Review.

In trying to make sense of the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE, it may be helpful to think about the Evil Housekeeper Problem. It’s a principle of computer security roughly stating that once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop, all bets are off. Because the intruder has physical access, you are in much more trouble. And the person demanding to get into your computer may be standing right beside you.

So who is going to stop the evil housekeeper from plugging a computer in and telling IT staff to connect it to the network?

What happens if someone comes in and tells you that you’ll be fired unless you reveal the authenticator code from your phone, or sign off on a code change, or turn over your PIV card, the Homeland Security–approved smart card used to access facilities and systems and securely sign documents and emails? What happens if someone says your name will otherwise be published in an online list of traitors? Already the new administration is firing, putting on leave, or outright escorting from the building people who refuse to do what they’re told.

No mention, of course, of the Evil Housekeepers with which the Deep State has populated the governmental bureaucracy since FDR.

Read it.

Wikipedia has been accused of favoring left-leaning media sources while almost completely blacklisting major conservative outlets, according to a new report by the Media Research Center (MRC) released Monday.

The report reveals the self-proclaimed online encyclopedia disproportionately dismisses right-leaning news organizations as unreliable while granting credibility to liberal sources.

Wikipedia, one of the world’s most widely used online information sources, faces scrutiny over claims of political bias in its treatment of news organizations.

Read it.

A French doctor in the city of Pau serving as a gynecologist has now been sanctioned for declaring himself “incompetent” to treat a man who had transitioned to a woman, which triggered the rage of LGBT associations.

The case dates back to August 2023, but the doctor, Victor Acharian, has only been sanctioned now by the Order of Physicians with a one-month ban on practicing medicine. In total, Dr. Acharian was given a six-month ban on practicing medicine, but five of the six months are a suspended sentence. If he were to violate the sentence, the gynecologist would be suspended for the full six months.

The trans patient had scheduled an appointment though Doctolib and went to the doctor’s office with a partner.

“The lady explained to me that she was in transition,” the secretary of the doctor’s office told Le Figaro newspaper. “I immediately notified the doctor by internal messaging. He replied: ‘I don’t deal with that; there are specialists in Bordeaux or Toulouse,’ a message that I forwarded to them. But they became very aggressive and called me ‘transphobic.’”

The fantasy is strong in this one….

Read it.

Máté Kocsis, the leader of the Fidesz faction, announced after a meeting of the National Security Committee that, according to information obtained by the Hungarian secret services, the Ukrainian state had launched a smear campaign against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

“It is not news that a Ukrainian intelligence operation has been launched to discredit Viktor Orbán, as the Hungarian intelligence services reported on it at the meeting of the National Security Committee of the Parliament,” ??Levente Boros Bánk, director of political analysis at the Néz?pont Institute, told Magyar Nemzet.

Read it.

A proposed law in Washington state would require priests to violate Catholic Church law by breaking the seal of confession.

The bill would amend the current state law that requires law enforcement, teachers, medical professionals, or child care providers to report cases of child abuse or neglect to include church clergy that hear about abuse during the sacrament of confession, according to the bill’s text. Priests that break the seal of confession are automatically excommunicated from the church, according to Canon law.

The bill was proposed by Democratic Washington state Sens. Noel Frame, Claire Wilson, Jessica Bateman, Manka Dhingra, T’wina Nobles, and Javier Valdez.

“Washington State has no right to force a priest to break the sacred rite of confession,” Tom McClusky, director of Government Affairs at CatholicVote, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This is nothing but an attack on the authority of the church laced by anti-Catholicism, seeking to put all things under the state’s own authority.”

While the proposal offers an exemption in cases where information is obtained “solely as a result of a privileged communication,” such as legal communications with an attorney, it explicitly excludes members of the clergy and offers no other exemptions. Noncompliance with the law could result in jail time.

“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” — Benito Mussolinis

Read it.

When you as a liberal Democrat have lost CNN’s Abby Phillip and your protest gets LITERALLY laughed at live on CNN air, it may be a sign that your ability to influence coverage of the day’s events is waning. This was the reaction garnered by Congressional Democrats’ protest outside the headquarters of the dying United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

WATCH Phillip describe the protest as “a piñata in search of a stick”, which was met with an outburst of laughter by the guests at the table.

Read it.

As they do.

Read it.

An activist group is suing an Oregon city over its public camping policies after the city prevailed in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed municipalities to enforce homeless camping bans.

The new lawsuit comes after the Supreme Court in June 2024 upheld a local ordinance banning public camping, which activists claimed criminalized being homeless. The court rejected 6-3 the novel argument that the local law in Grants Pass, Oregon, violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The new legal complaint in Disability Rights Oregon v. City of Grants Pass was filed on Jan. 30 in the Circuit Court for the State of Oregon for Josephine County. Grants Pass, with a population of 39,000, is in southwest Oregon near the California border.

The city has one overnight shelter that adults may access, called the Gospel Rescue Mission.

Read it.

First they came for your cars, then your gas boilers, travel, food and farms. Now the Net Zero nutters, using their preposterous and invented climate emergency scare, have medicines, anaesthetics and painkillers in their crosshairs. Moves are afoot to reduce the use of popular, cheap, safe and effective nitrous oxide in the UK and replace it with substitutes such as methoxyflurane, a gas long banndhat disputes climate Armageddon is of little intertest to political activists, but the rest of us might be interested to note recent findings that found any ‘global warming’ caused by gases used by anaesthetists was “negligible and cannot be measured or felt”.

Nitrous oxide, sometimes known as laughing gas, is in common use in dentistry and maternity wards. It is carried on ambulances and is considered a very safe and effective analgesic medicine. But the UK National Health Service (NHS) has made a very silly pledge to be carbon Net Zero by 2040. According to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), the use of anaesthetics, which also include isoflurane, desflurane and sevoflurane, has been identified as a “carbon hotspot“. The NHS Long Term Plan is said to highlight these gases “as an area for action” and the RCEM says consideration should be given to the use of alternatives “where feasible and safe to do so”. The Royal College of Anaesthetists recently reported that many practitioners had moved away from routine nitrous oxide use in general anaesthesia, including in previous “high-usage” areas.

Read it.

Senior civil servants—permanent state employees—advising Britain’s elected home secretary would widen the range of targets for counter-extremism policy, all while downplaying the proven, lethal challenge posed by Islamist groups. While institutions often fail to prevent actual violence, ‘the blob’—the nickname given to the current crop of woke, publicly funded yet largely anonymous policymakers—has been revealed as keen to redefine thoughts and words as dangerous.

Last week Home Secretary Yvette Cooper denied incorporating an extensive and now-public rogues’ gallery of types of wrong-think (and worse) into policy. Yet it was she who in August 2024 commissioned a “Rapid Analytical Sprint” approach to extremism, prompting her advisers to cook up a hit list of problematic ideas. Security minister Dan Jarvis also briefed Parliament that, while he didn’t know which Whitehall materials had been made public by the think-tank Policy Exchange, he would still distance them from current government policy.

Regardless of precisely which draft of the report was leaked to authors Andrew Gilligan and Dr Paul Stott, it is clear that Whitehall chiefs are seeking to centralise greater power for the authorities. Extremely Confused: The Government’s new counter-extremism review revealed

Read it.

President Donald Trump on Thursday directed the Federal Aviation Administration to assess safety standards, including evaluating hiring practices, in the wake of the midair collision over Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Wednesday night.

The presidential memorandum comes after Trump suggested the military helicopter that crashed into an American Airlines regional jet may have been due in part to the FAA’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

All 67 people aboard the two aircraft were killed.

“President Trump swiftly signed a memorandum directing an immediate assessment of the Federal Aviation Administration to ensure the federal government is maintaining the highest personnel and policy aviation-safety standards,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

UPDATE: December FAA Report Cites “Urgent Need To Modernize Air Traffic Systems” I remember Newt Gingrich, at that time the new Speaker of the House, pointing out on television how far behind in technology the FAA was — and that was thirty years ago.

UPDATE: On MSNBC, Former Biden FAA Boss Doesn’t Dispute Trump’s Hiring Claims

Read it.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been undermined by repeated leaks of his comments and policy changes since agreeing to dismantle the censorship regime at Meta. That’s not a coincidence.

Zuckerberg announced on Jan. 7 that his platforms would cut ties with pro-censorship fact-checkers, allow free speech on “topics like immigration and gender,” and make other changes to reduce censorship on the platform. Since that announcement, Meta employees have repeatedly leaked Zuckerberg’s internal communications to the media.

Among the leaked content are announcements of additional changes to dismantle woke elements on Meta platforms and even Meta’s plans to step away from discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has waded into the politicized debate over NPR and PBS, ordering up an investigation that he said could be relevant in lawmakers’ decision about whether to continue funding the public news organizations.

Brendan Carr, the chairman, said in a letter to NPR and PBS on Wednesday that the inquiry would focus on whether the news organizations’ member stations violated government rules by recognizing financial sponsors on the air.

Mr. Carr said that NPR and PBS stations operate as noncommercial broadcast organizations, but that they may be airing “announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”

“To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for-profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements,” Mr. Carr wrote, “then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars.”

Note: No mention of ideological bias. Just focusing on those nasty smelly slimy ‘for profit’ connections.

UPDATE: FCC Chair Brendan Carr Opens Up Probe of NPR/PBS Advertising, or ‘Underwriting’

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

She obviously misses the good old days in East Germany.

She just couldn’t stay silent.

Angela Merkel — three years after stepping down as chancellor — lit a fire under Germany’s election campaign by choosing now to finally speak up.

And it was to criticize her own side.

In publicly chastizing the leader of the party that she spearheaded for more than two decades, and barely three weeks before voters go to the polls, Merkel faces questions over whether her intervention will end up doing the very thing she warned against: boosting support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

For Politico, there is no right but the far-right.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

As Mark Zuckerberg and other tech titans have embraced President Trump and muffled internal dissent at their companies, their mostly left-leaning employees have objected with subtle acts of defiance.

Read it.

I guess even climate activists like Sigourney Weaver aren’t safe from the green mob.

Read it.

Ah, California lawmakers are at it again, pushing the boundaries of legal absurdity with a bill that would allow victims of natural disasters to sue oil companies for damages. Yes, you read that correctly—wildfire victims could now take ExxonMobil to court as if hurricanes and forest fires suddenly started appearing the moment someone filled up their SUV?.

Read it.

A French newspaper boss has been forced to quit after ‘liking’ posts on LinkedIn written by right-wing politicians like Sarah Knafo and Marion Maréchal. The thought police did their work: after being forced to self-criticise in Stalinist mode, he ended up resigning.

The alarm was raised by the investigative newspaper Mediapart, notorious for its left-wing activism. In an article, Mediapart ‘revealed’ that Philippe Carli, head of the Ebra press group, France’s leading regional daily press group, which manages large-circulation titles such as Le Progrès and Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, regularly liked posts on his LinkedIn account from Reconquête MEP Sarah Knafo, personalities from the Rassemblement National (RN), and reposted videos from the CNews news channel.

“The boss of Ebra cherishes the far-right,” concluded Mediapart, expressing its indignation. Philippe Carli, caught in the act of thoughtcrime, offered several explanations in an attempt to defend himself. First, he claimed that his LinkedIn account was managed by another person, with whom he said he was “very unhappy.” However, he then changed his tune and launched into a full-scale self-criticism. An article signed by him appeared on Sunday, January 26th in the nine regional titles published by his group by way of apology: “Yes, my hasty use of social media was clumsy. I’m sorry about that. This is not who I am as a man and as the head of an independent press group,” it read.

Read it.

The decision to bring back Mt. McKinley’s name touched off outrage from those who insist that Mt. Denali was the original ‘indigenous’ name for Mt. McKinley.

But which “indigenous” name?

The National Park Service notes that, “no fewer than nine Native groups… used unique names for the mountain. There are five Athabascan languages surrounding the park, each with its own oral place name.”

And Mt. Denali is not even the right tribal name.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who co-sponsored the bill to change Mt. McKinley’s name to Mt. Denali, attacked President Trump’s decision to rename the mountain because Mt. McKinley “must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial.”

But the Athabascans don’t call themselves that, they use the name ‘Dena’. Athabasca is actually a lake in Canada. The name was wrongly applied by Albert Gallatin, President Jefferson’s brilliant but erratic French immigrant Treasury Secretary.

But ‘Dena’, like ‘Denali, has no great significance. Dena means ‘people’ and Denali means ‘tall one’. The Koyukon were giving pragmatic names to the world around them. It’s Westerners who romanticize them as exotic and spiritual antidotes to industrialization and development.

No one ‘stewards’ a 20,000 foot mountain and “time immemorial”, a phrase often used in land acknowledgements, would only date back to the tribal crossings across the Bering Strait. The history of this group of the Athabaskans traces back around a thousand years, “time immemorial” turns out to be around less than 500 years before the European discovery of America.

The fact that the Wicked Witch of the North is pig-ignorant is no surprise.

Read it.

After years of “unprecedented man-made global boiling” propaganda pushed by woke scientists, far-left corporate media outlets, grifting ‘green’ billionaires, and climate change warrior non-profits, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg have a lot of explaining to do after this January across the Lower 48 could shape up to be one of the coldest in years if not decades.

“With an average temperature running 3.6 degrees below normal, this is currently the coldest January nationally (lower 48) since 1994,” meteorologist Kevin Williams and founder of private weather forecasting firm Weather-Track, wrote on X.

Still rooting for a new ice age….

Read it.

On the first day of his administration, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders which promise to end hysteria over fearful narratives.

The American Mind.

hijacking the review process for K-12 history and civics curricula. Educators and radicals, in league with one another, are conspiring to turn students against America’s traditional cultural and political institutions.

Now that Critical Race Theory (CRT) is being exposed as ahistorical indoctrination, a new permutation of neo-Marxist theory is gaining currency in our schools. It’s called postcolonialism. Its stated mission is to fight “settler colonialism,” a term used to describe any society supposedly built upon the oppression and genocide of indigenous people. Examples of “settler societies” include Israel, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the United States. The recent student activism against Israel, which denied the country’s right to exist and celebrated terrorist attacks against it, demonstrated the true nature of postcolonialism and its power to inspire hatred on campus.

Whereas CRT is largely an American phenomenon, postcolonial ideology developed within a broader global context, emerging out of the various movements to end empire around the world—much as CRT emerged as a mutation of the movement to end racial segregation in America. What the civil rights movement is to CRT, the decolonization movement is to postcolonialism. The intellectual forefather of postcolonial ideology is the Marxist intellectual Frantz Fanon, whose writings glorified Algeria’s violent resistance to French control in the middle of the 20th century.

Read it.

In January 2020, the top law enforcement agency in the state of Oregon launched a “Bias Response Hotline” for residents to report “offensive ‘jokes.’”
Staffed by “trauma-informed operators” and overseen by the Oregon Department of Justice, the hotline, which receives thousands of calls a year, doesn’t just solicit reports of hate crimes and hiring discrimination. It also asks for reports of “bias incidents”—cases of “non-criminal” expression that are motivated, “in part,” by prejudice or hate.
Oregonians are encouraged to report their fellow citizens for things like “creating racist images,” “mocking someone with a disability,” and “sharing offensive ‘jokes’ about someone’s identity.” One webpage affiliated with the hotline, which is available in 240 languages, even lists “imitating someone’s cultural norm” as something “we want to hear” about.
It is not entirely clear what the state does with these reports. While the hotline cannot “sanction a bias perpetrator,” according to its website, it does share “de-identified data” with the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, a body that develops “public safety” plans for the state, and connects “survivors” with “resources” like counseling and rent relief.

Read it.

Let me think, I seem to remember that there’s a term for that sort of thing … I believe it starts with an “R”….

Read it.

Amy Wax, the tenured law professor who was sanctioned for her controversial remarks about racial issues, sued the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday for breach of contract and race discrimination, putting a dispute over tenure and academic freedom that has dragged on for almost three years into the hands of a federal court. The complaint comes after Wax was suspended for a year at half-pay and stripped of her named chair, penalties the lawsuit says are “illegal multiple times over.”

“The imposition of academic discipline violates the University’s contractual promise to Professor Wax to abide by the principles of the First Amendment,” the lawsuit reads. And “the University’s Speech Policy, which is the basis of that discipline, unlawfully discriminates based on the race … of both speakers and targets of speech.”

The complaint advances a novel legal theory that could have major implications for universities as they brace for the incoming Trump administration. Wax argues that Penn engaged in race discrimination by punishing speech that offended racial minorities but not speech that offended Jews, citing a litany of cases in which the school declined to discipline professors who deployed anti-Semitic tropes and called for the destruction of Israel.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

In the year preceding the devastating Los Angeles county wildfires, big oil fiercely lobbied to kill a “polluter pay” bill that moved through the California senate and would have forced major fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate disasters.

Fossil-fuel industry lobbying in California spiked to record levels during the 2023-24 legislative session, and the polluter pay bill was among the most targeted pieces of legislation, a Guardian review of state lobby filings found.

…

The measure would have required the state’s largest carbon polluters to pay into a fund that would be used to prevent disasters or help cover cleanup efforts. The effort to thwart it leaves taxpayers for now shouldering much of the cost of catastrophes in part fueled by big oil’s pollution.

“The latest fire shows exactly how Californians are paying for climate destruction, not just with budget dollars, but with their lives, and it shows exactly why we need … to put the cost back on polluters” said Kassie Siegel, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, which has lobbied in support of the bill.

So there’s no real attempt to show that ‘Big Oil’ (does it have a membership card) was responsible for the wildfires, except the bogus Narrative about ‘climate change’ and the proglodyte dogma that anyone who (a) has lots of money and (b) is in a line of business which (though legal) proglodytes don’t like, is ripe for government-enforced plucking.

I have a thought: Democrat-supported proposals have to be paid for by those who vote for Democrats, and Republican-supported proposals have to be paid for by those who vote for Republicans. Put your money where your mouth is.

Read it.

Three doctors are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent a California agency from investigating them over their opposition to state-approved COVID-19 policies.

Persecution for non-government-approved views? What persecution?

Read it.

You know, as they do.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

Joe Biden’s final address to the nation struck an ominous tone after warning of the growing power of America’s ultra-wealthy, and cautioning that an emerging oligarchy threatens the foundations of US democracy.

The Wednesday prime-time Oval Office speech came as Biden prepares to hand the presidency back to Donald Trump, who he defeated in 2020 only to see return to power after Biden’s own dramatic exit from politics last summer.

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said.

In WokeSpeak, ‘oligarchy’ means ‘influence of rich people who aren’t proglodytes’. Biden himself is responsible for the advancement of Democrat ‘extreme wealth, power, and influence’, but of course that’s all right.

UPDATE: Biden’s Poignant Farewell Dwells on His Fears for the Country He Loves (CNN) And almost destroyed. Biden Narrative Media Tongue-Bath #1.

UPDATE: President Joe Biden Warns of Big Tech and Social Media Manipulation in Final Address: ‘The Truth Is Smothered by Lies Told for Power and for Profit’ (Variety) The head of the Biden Crime Family is surely an expert in that. Biden Narrative Media Tongue-Bath #2.

UPDATE: Liberal media raves over Biden’s farewell address: ‘Put a chill down my spine’ (Fox News) Mine, too,  but for different reasons.

UPDATE: ‘Speech for the History Books’: ABC, CBS, NBC Hail Biden’s ‘Extraordinary’ Farewell  Biden Narrative Media Tongue-Bath #3.

UPDATE: MSNBC Fawns Over Biden Farewell, Bolsters Fake ‘Oligarchy’ Narrative  Biden Narrative Media Tongue-Bath #4.

Raw Story, a Voice of the Crust.

And the Woke Witch Hunt contines.