Read it.

CPT codes are a way to explain what a clinician did during an interaction with a patient. For instance, the most common CPT code for psychologists is 90837, which is the number that means the clinician provided an hour of psychotherapy. To get payment, they will submit this code to health insurers, whether private, Medicare, or Medicaid, and everyone involved will know what it means. First developed in 1966 for use with Medicare, the demand for extensive medical documentation is now a serious contributor to physician burnout, as “[f]or every 8 hours of scheduled patient time, ambulatory physicians spend more than 5 hours on the electronic health records.”

CPT codes are developed by a panel of 21 medical professionals selected by the AMA Board of Trustees who meet three times a year to solicit input from across the medical industry on the latest medical care to create, revise, remove, and determine the relative value of the codes (these relative value units influence insurance reimbursement rates). Twelve panel members are nominated by national medical specialty societies like the American Academy of Thoracic Surgery, while several seats are occupied by representatives from the health insurance industry.

In other words, the AMA isn’t offering a software product. It just runs this process, keeping a list of codes that map to different medical procedures. You would think it would be free, a standard for everyone to use. But it’s not, and the AMA is able to charge a royalty for the license to use those codes. Every medical software company seems to have CPT codes and royalties built into their workflow.

Watch it.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Read it.

The UN Commission on the Status of Women concluded its annual meeting in New York last week. As always, sex radicals from the developed world did their best to push their agenda—under the cover of women’s equality—on rightly resistant countries in the developing world.

The meeting marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Fourth World Congress on Women, which took place in Beijing, China in 1995. There, delegates endorsed a Declaration and Platform for Action purportedly to achieve equality for women. And it was there that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton issued her rallying cry, “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights,” ushering in decades of debate on the world stage over the proper meaning of that claim.

The Beijing conference produced a progressive wish list, but negotiators kept abortion out of the final document. That battle didn’t end in 1995, though. Every subsequent meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women has witnessed a renewed debate over so-called sexual and reproductive health and rights, the Left’s umbrella term that includes abortion rights.

The UN has been run by bureaucrats that are either European or trained and educated by Europeans. These are the people who constitute the ‘TransGlobal Elite’. And it’s always going to be a problem. I personally think that we’d be better off outside of the UN than beating our heads against this particular wall.

Read it.

Nearly all of the 70 people charged in a massive $250 million fraud case targeting federal child nutrition programs in Minnesota are Somali immigrants, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Between March 2020 and January 2022, they allegedly stole funds meant for feeding children, funneled through a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future. So far, 37 have pleaded guilty, and 7 have been convicted; the rest await trial.

The scam involved fake meal counts, rosters, and invoices submitted to the Minnesota Department of Education. “Feeding Our Future” acted as a sponsor for daycares and other sites, making it easy to file false claims during the COVID-era program expansion.

Minnesota, home to about 100,000 Somali immigrants—mostly in the Twin Cities—has long attracted refugees with “some of America’s most generous welfare and charity programs,” according to journalist Kelly Riddell. She also quoted professor Ahamed Samatar, who said, “Minnesota is exceptional in so many ways but it’s the closest thing in the United States to a true social democratic state.”

NewsMax.

One-third of the 15 judges in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where many of the cases are being heard over President Donald Trump’s actions, were born outside the United States, according to a new report.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

Read it.

Look at all the ways that individual judges have hamstrung the Trump administration. A district court judge recently blocked Trump’s executive order removing transgender individuals from the military. Another judge ordered the Trump administration to send two men who are pretending to be women into a women’s prison. One federal judge ordered the administration to restore government webpages that promote the Left’s transgender narrative.

A different district court judge stopped the Trump administration from disbanding the wasteful United States Agency for International Development. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appointed Jeremy Lewin to a high-level position in USAID. The judge later ruled that Lewin wasn’t allowed to serve in that role.

Last weekend, another federal judge blocked the Trump administration from deporting illegal immigrant gang members. He even unsuccessfully attempted to force them to turn around flights that were already in the air. These examples are only the tip of the judicial overreach iceberg.

Now, all presidential administrations face lawsuits, but what’s happening here is well beyond historical norms. In his four years in office, former President Joe Biden’s administration received 14 federal injunctions. In less than two months, judges have already hit the Trump administration with more than that.

Of course, Biden wasn’t acting against the Deep State, either.

Read it.

For decades, K-12 schools have wandered away from a time-tested, research-based method of teaching reading: Phonics. Student scores have plunged to historic lows, but some states are turning back to the practice of teaching letter sounds—if teacher unions do not spoil the efforts first.

Phonics instructs children to identify letters and their pronunciation to construct words, supplying the tools needed to tackle combinations of letters. “Cueing” and its related methods, such as “look-say” and “whole word,” show children a picture with a word beneath it (such as a picture of a dog with the letters “d-o-g” beneath). Students are supposed to connect the visual with the word below. American Public Media reporter and podcaster Emily Hanford has documented the widespread failure of cueing that has haunted schools and students nationwide for generations.

In addition to Hanford’s crucial work, research finds that part of cueing’s problem is that the teacher guides given to instructors to help teach cueing do not train teachers to regularly correct students when they misidentify a word. In fact, cueing allows for students to be “close enough” sometimes—say, using “wolf” for a picture of a dog, even if the letters do not spell wolf. This imprecision is not the only problem, but researchers have identified this tendency for years, which means the technique helps explain the low scores today.

Fortune, a Voice of the Crust.

How much money you need to make to be “rolling in it” has changed—earning nearly $200,000 a year isn’t even considered upper-class in some U.S. states. Being considered rich is becoming more gate-kept among the 1% raking in millions every day.

According to a recent SmartAsset analysis of 2023 U.S. Census Bureau data, a household making $199,000 a year in Massachusetts and New Jersey would still be considered middle-class.

Even in Mississippi, which has the lowest median middle-class income in the U.S., households would need to earn over $108,000 to be considered well-off.

The salary range of middle-class homes, representing about 52% of American workers, is of course huge. The lowest salary considered to be in the socioeconomic class is $36,132 in one state, while the highest hits a staggering $199,716 in another. But in every single state in America, a $100,000 salary is no longer enough to be considered “upper-class”—and families with six-figure incomes are even struggling to get by.

Thank you, Joe Biden. Thank you, Barak Obama. Thank you, Democrats everywhere.

ZMan says the quiet part out loud.

One of the features of the first Trump administration was the endless litigation that was intended to throw sand in the gears of the White House. Much of it was irrational and did not hold up under appeal, but that was not the point. The goal was to kill the administration with a thousand cuts. We are seeing a replay of this in round two, but the administration seems prepared for it. There is both a legal strategy and a public relations strategy for dealing with the lawfare.

This lawfare is possible due to one of the many carryovers from the post-Cold War period in which the Washington class was allowed to run wild. The inferior courts where this lawfare is being waged are packed with friends of Washington. Half of the judges were nominated by Republicans and the other half by Democrats, but all were on the list because they are friends of the Blob. Time and again we see that the judges issuing restraining orders on the admin have family in the Blob.

One result of this is the ground floor of the federal judiciary is now the first line of defense for the Blob. Anyone challenging the regulatory state knows they first must make it through this minefield. It is one way to make the cost of challenging the regulatory state prohibitive. Almost all litigation against the administrative state would fail at the first step and then go to appeal. For most potential litigants, dealing with the hyper-politicized district courts was cost prohibitive.

Quillette.

In a recent article for the New York Times titled “Why Composers Want to Write Operas for Children,” Jeffrey Arlo Brown profiles a group of contemporary composers who have found an unexpected refuge in children’s opera after years of working within the constraints of academic modernism. The composers describe the experience as “liberating,” but not for the reason you might expect.

In 1995, I received a commission to write a new work for the Australian National Academy of Music. So, I composed a small string piece called Diesque, which was neoclassical in style, melodic and structured. But when I arrived at the National Academy, I was summoned to a meeting with the Australian composer Larry Sitsky. He did not hide his reservations. “I don’t like what you’ve done or approve of it,” he said, “but I will defend to the death your right to write music like this.” A week later, the director of the National Academy, Trevor Green, sat in on a rehearsal. He went white, stood up, and walked out. Shortly after, I was informed that my piece would not be performed. When I confronted Green about this decision, he gave me a response I have never forgotten: “The audience cannot be allowed to hear this music. It will set the cause of modern music back a decade.”

By the late 20th century, audiences outside conservatories were weeping to John Williams’s Schindler’s List theme, thrilling to the melodies of The Lion King, and filling Broadway theatres for Les Misérables and Phantom of the Opera. But inside conservatories, contemporary classical music had become a severe and esoteric form, financed exclusively by taxpayers and performed for diminishing audiences.

Read it.

British chat forums are shutting themselves down rather than face regulatory burdens recently applied to internet policing laws.

On March 17, the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, a law that regulates internet spaces, officially kicked into force.

The price of living in a country with no Bill of Rights.

Read it.

The progressive media is swooning over a new miniseries produced in Britain and distributed by Netflix called ‘Adolescence’, and after reviewing the story it’s easy to see why. British government officials are hailing the show as a wake up call and are using it to promote online censorship of the “Manosphere”. Leftist journalists are seeking to drum up artificial interest, calling it a “masterpiece” that exposes the toxic nature of masculinity.

At a time when the political left is losing the culture war on almost every front it’s not surprising that they would hyper-promote an otherwise forgettable series that panders to the woke demographic. Its depiction of a teen murder, driven by the terrible “evils” of conservative influencers who expose the irrational zealotry of feminism and DEI, is pure propaganda fodder. A desperate attempt to to double down on woke arguments that have been debunked for years.

The creators of Adolescence cite a recent string of knife attacks against girls in Britain as the inspiration for the series, but in typical progressive fashion the production ignores the fact that the vast majority of these crimes were committed by minority and migrant males. The teen killer in Adolescence is a white British boy, not a minority.

…

The minority crime problem was becoming so pervasive that it was damaging the leftist government’s pro-immigration position, so they stopped reporting the ethnicity and migrant status of people arrested for such crimes.  British police refrain from cataloging ethnicity in almost 40% of all cases in what the government argues is an effort to “stem racism”.  If the perpetrator is white, their ethnicity is generally recorded.

Young white males have been the subject of an ongoing character assassination program stretching back to the height of the third-wave feminist takeover of media in 2015.  Open demonization has become the norm and boys growing up in this period of cultural warfare in the west have been told for most of their lives that they are the cause of most of the world’s ills.  Leftists claim that “toxic masculinity” is a social construct and that white males in particular need to be “reeducated” to embrace feminist values before they become “incels” (involuntary celibates) with the potential for mass murder.

Rollo Tomassi, in the latest episode of his podcast THE RATIONAL MALE, spent three hours pointing out the defects of this series (‘Netflix ADOLESCENCE is a DUMPSTER FIRE of Lies‘), and apparently it’s pretty bad. The elephant in the room is that the perpetrator of the crime that inspired the series is not a white British teenager but actually a oung black immigrant from Rwanda (named ‘Hassan’), and that ‘knife crime’ in Britain isn’t a ‘white male incel’ problem but a ‘Muslim immigrant’ problem, but of course nobody in the Wokerati can admit that.

Read it.

Surely you know the old joke: “What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea?” (Answer: “a good start!”). There’s a reason why lawyers are so broadly despised. Law is humanity’s instrument for creating order out of the terror and chaos of nature, where anything goes. The result of law theoretically, is a civil society, where only the good, true, and right things can go.

These days, lawyers are hard at work to replace civilized order with the terror and chaos of nature — which is to say, the seeking of raw power: this is what I can do to you! That primal despotism is the motivating engine of the Democratic Party in its terminal phase, a feral, power-seeking monster. It was why, in case you hadn’t noticed, the essential drive of Woke politics was the sadistic pleasure it took in exacting its endless punishments — cancellation, personal ruin, censorship — not correcting alleged injustices against marginalized minorities. And that tells you, by the way, exactly why the J-6 defendants were treated so harshly by the likes of Judge James Boasberg, Tanya Chutkan, and their colleagues of the DC federal district.

The enabling device for that monstrous power-seeking of the Democratic Party was the colossal racketeering operation they implanted in every corner of the federal government, an insidious process that accelerated during the Obama years, eluded discipline during Trump One — with the many distracting ruses such as RussiaGate — and surged into final overdrive during the perfidious term of “Joe Biden,” America’s first false-front president.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

When you see pasta, your brain probably doesn’t jump to the secrets of the universe. But for almost a century, physicists have puzzled over spaghetti’s counterintuitive properties.

You might think physicists only ask the big questions.

No,  physicists will research any question that they can get ‘funding’ for–preferably from the government.

The Register.

After blowing deadlines and budgets for years, the Pentagon has finally pulled the plug on a troubled project to overhaul its outdated civilian HR IT systems.

Like many government projects before it, the Defense Civilian Human Resources Management System (DCHRMS) promised big things when it was kicked off nearly a decade ago.

According to a memo signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth late last week, the program was intended to streamline a large portion of the DoD’s legacy HR IT systems, but it’s being axed after officials concluded pouring more funds into it would be “throwing more good taxpayer money after bad.”

DCHRMS started in 2018 with a planned development timeline of one year and a budget of $36 million, “but instead it’s taken eight years and is currently $280 million over budget – that’s 780 percent over budget,” Hegseth said in a video announcing the DCHRMS and other spending cuts. “We’re not doing that anymore.”

Read it.

A National Health Service (NHS) nurse is taking legal action against her employer—after she was punished for calling a convicted criminal ‘mister,’ in contravention of his preferred (female) pronouns.

Jennifer Melle filed her legal claim against Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals Trust following its pursuit of her in an October 2024 disciplinary action, resulting in a final written warning and a referral to the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC). The trust also placed her on restricted duties, resulting in a loss of overtime payments.

Melle’s ordeal began when ‘Patient X,’ who had been admitted earlier from a men’s prison with a urinary problem, attempted to discharge himself from the hospital. ‘X’ overheard the nurse discussing his case—involving a catheter and his objective medical records—on a telephone call, and reportedly lunged at Ms. Melle while shouting racial epithets.

Melle responded by saying she would use the 6’ (183 cm) tall convict’s chosen female name, but that her Christian beliefs meant she would not be calling him a woman. After saying, “Sorry I cannot refer to you as ‘her’ or ‘she’, as it’s against my faith and Christian values but I can call you by your name,” the nurse was threatened, both physically and with an official complaint.

In response, her employer accused her of “not respecting the patient’s preferred identity” and concluded her actions could “be seen as a potential breach” of the NMC Code of Conduct.

ZMan jerks back the curtain.

reaction of Europe to his peace initiatives. The European “leaders” are, on the one hand, horrified by his peace push, and on the other hand they have rallied themselves to various schemes to stop them. The latest scheme is to create a peacekeeping force that they will insert into Ukraine, something the Russians have repeatedly said is a deal breaker and perhaps even an act of war.

On the surface this looks insane. There are about twenty million Ukrainian refugees in Europe with more trickling in daily. Social welfare rolls are now littered with refugees, who do not speak the local language, so they cannot work. Of course, the EU has been shipping Ukraine billions of Euros plus all its military gear. The war has become another factor eroding social trust and most importantly, trust in the political elite that insists the war must go on forever.

None of this makes any sense until you think about what it means to be in the European political elite in 2025. It means a lifetime of having been very good at winning favor with America or winning favor with the politicians close to America. The dominance of the United States since the war, but especially since the end of the Cold War, has turned the European elite into a slave class. They are the house slaves, who defend the master’s prerogatives against the field slaves.

Read it.

Democracy dies in darkness… or so the Trump-era Washington Post would have us believe. That’s a nice-sounding sentiment (and one that should have applied to the paper and its reporting long before Donald Trump arrived in the White House), but it’s also trite and naïve. It is far closer to the truth to say that democracy dies out in the open, in the daylight, right in front of our faces, and with the approval of most of the people working at The Washington Post. In reality, democracy dies in the courtrooms and judges’ quarters of our nation.

Read it.

Transgender activists tried to hound a Georgia real estate agent out of business because the realtor urged a public library to move a sexually explicit book out of the children’s section. When she sued, the judge dismissed her case and ordered her to pay the activists’ legal fees.

Now, the Georgia Court of Appeals has taken up her case and her attorney just filed her official brief Thursday, a copy of which was exclusively provided to The Daily Signal. Her supporters say the case may set a precedent that gets to the heart of cancel culture.

“They completely misstated, misquoted me in order to try and cancel me,” Julie Mauck, the realtor, told The Daily Signal in a Friday interview. “They actually filed an ethics complaint for hate speech against me” based on the misquote.

ZMan:

“Reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it” is a useful way of thinking about much of what makes up our politics. The Democrats and the people we call the left are running into this exact same problem as they struggle to deal with Trump. They are desperately trying to organize a resistance, but they are finding few takers. The “leaders” are now people like Ocasio-Cortez.

It is one of the rare occasions where the people we call the right were ahead of the people we call the left. The collapse of conservatism started in 2015 when the fossils in charge of it were pushed aside by a new movement and a new leader. The people we call the left continued on with business as usual, assuming that their dancing partner would eventually return.

That is what Chuck Schumer told people last year. He just assumed everything would return to normal. The old arrangement had been in place for so long that party leadership came to think it was the natural order. The Democrats now face a future in which their remaining talent is too old to make it up the stairs and its young talent is too crazy and stupid to be allowed near the stairs.

Read it.

The “no-kid” trend—that idea that a woman, to truly flourish and be free, should refrain from having children—has become, in France as elsewhere, a real mania. Young women publish an increasing number of essays, more or less inspired, in which they try to convince themselves and others that the world would be so much better if we did not reproduce. The press piles on, explaining with a lot of statistical arguments why it is not a good idea to have kids. But the muses of navel-gazing, keen to preserve what they think is their own little individual happiness, are not very clear-sighted about the hell they are preparing for us all if everyone decides to follow their dubious advice.

The reasons put forward for not having children are well-known, so much so that they are repeated ad nauseam by the mainstream media, especially the women’s press. The press reminds us with forceful figures that a child is tremendously expensive and that, for the same price, we could have several dogs (eight, to be accurate [sic]). Indeed, you do have to spend money to have children: on a car, housing, school. But why would it be one of the only areas where we would do the math, in the world of unlimited welfare state and public spending?

Having children, they say, also prevents women from having a career and developing professionally—the arguments are starting to get a bit old. More in vogue is the idea that children are anti-environmental: they consume, they produce waste, and the use of washable diapers and recyclable toys will not be enough to stop the cataclysm that is coming to sweep us all away. More ‘intellectual’ and more elaborate is the argument that bearing children is the attitude expected by the dominant patriarchy to keep women in a state of eternal subordination.

The thing is that, long-term, this is a self-correcting problem. Everybody alive today is the descendant of women who had children. If a woman doesn’t have children, her genes are flushed from the gene pool and all that are left are the descendants of women who had children. Natural selection works whether you want it to or not; sure, it takes a while, but evolution has all the time in the world.

Read it.

It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.

And then the doors shut.

By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.

Read it.

A few days after the anniversary of Oct 7, the New York Times reported that Columbia University Apartheid Divest officially endorsed terrorism against Jews and withdrew an apology by one of its members for threatening to kill Jews.

Over the past weeks, the paper and the entire Democratic Party, including 103 members of Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Minority Leader Chuck. Schumer, the Jewish Democratic Council of America led by Kamala’s former foreign policy advisor, went all in on fighting for Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in CUAD who had defended terrorism, from being deported.

The signatories to a letter standing up for a Syrian national who had taken part in a pro-terrorist group’s harassment of Jewish students and faculty included half of House Democrats, not only extremists like AOC and Rep. Ilhan Omar, but Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking House Judiciary Democrat, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with multiple House Democrats of Jewish ancestry and those who represent large Jewish districts including Rep. Jerrold Nadler in New York, as well as Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove and Rep. Laura Friedman who holds down Sen. Adam Schiff’s old seat, in the LA area. The same Democrat politicians who had remained silent when Jewish students and faculty were being terrorized on campuses in their areas now rushed to the barricades for a member of a group that had openly celebrated the murder of Jews.

Read it.

Most Americans have absolutely no idea how we got into the mess that we are in today. The reason why the U.S. government is 36 trillion dollars in debt and our society as a whole is 102 trillion dollars in debt is because the system is performing exactly as it was designed. We have a system that was literally designed to create colossal amounts of debt. But if you ask most Americans about this, they cannot tell you what the Federal Reserve is or why it is at the heart of our economic problems. When Americans get into discussions about the economy, most of them still blame either the Democrats or the Republicans for our rapidly growing economic problems. But the truth is that the institution with the most power over our economic system is the Federal Reserve.

So exactly what is the Federal Reserve? Most people would say that it is an agency of the federal government. But that is not entirely accurate. In fact, the Federal Reserve itself has argued in court that it is not an agency of the federal government. The truth is that the Federal Reserve is a privately-owned banking cartel that has been given a perpetual monopoly over our monetary system by the U.S. Congress. This privately-owned central bank has been destroying the value of the U.S. dollar for decades, it has run our economy into the ground, and it has driven the U.S. government to the brink of bankruptcy. The Federal Reserve operates in great secrecy and it acts as if it is not accountable to the American people. Yet the decisions that the Federal Reserve makes have a dramatic impact on the lives of every single American citizen.

Zman’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Joe Sobran is arguably the first person hurled into the void in a process that eventually was called cancel culture. His primary sins were skepticism about Israel as our greatest ally and suspicions about the motivations of the neocons. It was the neocons who successfully campaigned to have Sobran branded a heretic and run out of the conservative movement.

Looking back four decades on, you see all the ingredients for what became a widespread form of domestic terrorism in the last decade. Interestingly, all of it is in what Bill Buckley thought was his best book. It is a collection of his essays on the topic of antisemitism, as well as his famous finking on friends like Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan at the request of his new benefactors.

Reading Buckley’s version of the Sobran affair, what comes through is that all politics in a democracy are theater. Buckley felt he had to debase himself, his friends and even his own family in order to remain on the stage. The reason for that is the stage managers had an agenda that agenda was anathema to the human spirit and traditions conservatism allegedly represented.

Buckley and his crew originated the current trend of what one might call ‘DavidFrenchism’ among purported conservatives in public media. The poster child for this trend is, of course, William Kristol, whose Kristol Krew at The Bulwark are among the best friends the ‘Invade the World Invite the World’ crowd ever had.

Read it.

The following video and article provide a follow-up to the earlier report on the dystopian “White Giant” high-rise apartment building in the German city of Duisburg. The building was raided last fall, resulting in the discovery of massive child welfare benefits fraud.

Read it.

A left-wing group battling the Trump administration to maintain lucrative taxpayer-funded immigration contracts has called to defund police departments and abolish the federal agency that deports illegal aliens.

Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), a nonprofit chaired by Department of Justice employee Marisa Arrona, has received $17 million in federal funding since last year to provide legal services to illegal aliens facing deportation, according to federal records. ImmDef is a subcontractor for a $769 million program to provide services to minors apprehended at the border without parents.

ImmDef and its allies are desperately fighting against the Trump administration in an attempt to maintain funding for that program and others that provide services to illegal immigrants. ImmDef has accused the Trump administration of “playing games with children’s rights and their safety” and says the program is needed to “protect due process” rights for illegal immigrants facing deportation.

And ‘funding’ again raises its ugly head….

ZMan examines the culture.

If you look at the pop music charts for the last decade or so, one of the things you will not notice is the modern nature of the big bands. The reason you will not notice how bands have changed is that there are few bands on the charts. In fact, bands have just about disappeared from popular music. The few bands you see on the music services are those from a bygone era. The biggest selling bands are often those that no longer exist or still kick around playing for old people.

Instead, what you see are solo acts or the occasional dance group assembled like a Broadway play to perform to manufactured content. Even the “boy band” has faded from the scene for the same reason bands have disappeared. That reason is it is much easier for the music industry to create and produce a solo act than to find a band and then develop it into a top attraction. The same is true of “boy bands” which require some degree of organization and management.

Of course, as the doors to bands have closed in corporate music, the selection pressure for musical acts has changed. If a young person has any musical talent, she is better served investing her time in imitating the corporate acts, using software tools readily available to everyone now. She then posts her material to YouTube, hoping to get a following and then maybe catch the eye of corporate. Learning to play instruments and perform in front of a crowd is pointless.

We have the technology.

I quit listening to popular music in 1985, and have never regretted it.

Read it.

The new findings aren’t just a minor correction to the scientific record; they are a reversal of dangerous conclusions drawn from sloppy—perhaps even fraudulent—analyses. Everything we’ve been told about climate change and food security is wrong.

Follow The Science … until it changes….

Read it.

internet searches provide copious anecdotes. News outlets generally interview repair technicians, who tell a convincing and consistent story. Appliances built in the 1970s generally lasted thirty to fifty years, they say. Today, domestic mainstays like washing machines, ovens, fridges, and dryers get replaced about every decade. Technicians blame an industry push towards computerization, an increase in the number of individual components, and the use of flimsier materials like plastic and aluminum rather than steel. The results of these trends are appliances that break more often and are harder and more costly to repair.

Read it.

Mexican cartel members are “running scared” and fearful of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, according to the sheriff of Tarrant County, Texas.

Like many local law enforcement officials, Sheriff Bill Waybourn has witnessed the sharp spike in illegal immigration over the past four years. He welcomed the increased enforcement from the federal government.

The Tarrant County jail currently holds over 300 illegal aliens suspected of criminal activity.

“They represent 22 different countries,” Waybourn said recently at a Heritage Foundation event in Dallas. “Some of them are going to be known terrorists, some of them are going to be known cartel soldiers, and the like.”

Read it.

While Mayor Brandon Johnson showed up to defend Chicago’s sanctuary city policies before Congress, federal immigration authorities were expelling Prince Knox, a ‘refugee’ affiliated with the Revolutionary United Front, which chopped off the arms of tens of thousands of people with machetes to take over and provide them with free health care, back to his native Sierra Leone.

Prince Knox was one of the many illegal aliens, criminals and assorted monsters protected by Chicago’s ‘Welcoming City’ ordinance and the Illinois Trust Act which form its sanctuary system.

And Chicago’s sheltering of illegal alien criminals has forced ICE to carry out ‘raids’ to get them.

Read it.

NATO members Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia said Tuesday they are abandoning the 1997 Ottawa convention treaty outlawing the use of anti-personnel landmines (APL) amid the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

The Ottawa convention sought to outlaw APLs, which target humans in explosive blasts and have killed thousands of civilians. The treaty also notes that the minds can cause “unnecessary suffering or superfluous injury.”

“Military threats to NATO Member States bordering Russia and Belarus have significantly increased,” the four countries wrote in a statement.

“In light of this unstable security environment marked by Russia’s aggression and its ongoing threat to the Euro-Atlantic community, it is essential to evaluate all measures to strengthen our deterrence and defense capabilities,” they added.

Hmm. All of a sudden cheap passive defenses that can’t be detected or attacked by drones become very popular. Verrrryyy interrrresting….

UnHerd.

Here and there you can still see evidence of the collective madness of the Covid era. Some “social distancing” markers still linger on pavements or shop floors. Occasionally I find a face mask in a coat or handbag I haven’t used for a while. There was a feeble official “day of reflection” recently. But for at least some of us, life is sort of back to the way it was: four in ten workplaces are back in the office full-time, dog walkers are no longer hunted by drones, and the shops and churches are open. We mostly don’t talk about the Scotch egg thing, or being forced to say goodbye to dying loved ones by videolink.

But the kids are not alright. Back in 2020, we had no idea what the impact of lockdown would be on those young people whose normal development was so casually interrupted. And while every parent has a lockdown horror story, it was the most vulnerable children who were worst afflicted. Lockdown widened the school attainment gap, delayed children’s development, and plunged a generation of tweens and teens into psychiatric turmoil. But it didn’t just harm children; it also formed them. Especially for those who came of age concurrently with lockdown, the sheer strangeness of that period was itself a worldview-shaping experience — in ways we’ve scarcely begun to grasp.

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In the first 10 months of last year, more than 5,000 migrants arrived in Britain as ‘skilled workers,’ only later to claim asylum so as to remain in the country permanently. That’s about a 100-fold increase on the official 2022 figure of 53.

A new report by the National Audit Office says that the government “does not fully understand” what happens to those who come to Britain under this ‘skilled worker’ visa programme—the main route for workers to come to Britain, which Robert Bates, from the Centre for Migration Control, described as a “ghastly Frankenstein of a scheme.” There were more than half a million applications for skilled worker visas in 2023 alone.

And while the opposition Conservative Party said these figures were “deeply concerning,” Bates told europeanconservative.com that migrants have been able to game the skilled worker route thanks to the efforts of past and present “inattentive ministers in collaboration with free movement-loving civil servants.”

Gee, that sounds familiar….

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The general purpose in this latest phase of lawfare is to choke the federal courts with so many restraining orders and injunctions that the White House lawyers find themselves locked into an endless Chinese fire drill of counter-filings, motions, writs, and appearances. It’s all that the so-called “resistance” has left, what with DOGE breaking up the racketeering operation that has funded the Dem’s defense of the blob for a decade. By which I mean the government funding of non-governmental orgs (ha!) to distribute payola to Dem foot-soldiers who do all the dirty work of protecting the rogue bureaucracy in a circle-jerk of power and payoffs. This includes the dirty work of Dem-blob lawyers such as Mark Zaid, Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, Marc Elias, Barbara McQuade, Joanna Lydgate et al.

The history of Judge Boasberg in particular presents a disturbing picture of a tool covering-up every act of the shadowy blob’s war against American citizens.

Trump is aware of this, and he’s made it quite clear that he’s not going to play their silly games.

UPDATE: GOP Lawmakers Push to Impeach Obama-Appointed Judge for Trying to Block Deportations

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Canada’s Liberal Party selected central banker Mark Carney to lead the country as prime minister.

He only recently became a politician, but already he’s sitting at the head of the class! No worries, though. He has the kind of résumé all globalists in good standing with Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum would envy. He ran not only the Bank of Canada, but also the Bank of England. He’s a central banker extraordinaire! He loves printing funny money and manipulating markets. Artificially created inflation is his jam, man!

Carney is the most recent iteration of the World Economic Forum’s standard operating procedure for captured governments (and Canada is most definitely WEF-captured): Whenever possible, put bankers in charge of those pesky territorial designations nostalgically known as nation-states. France’s petit fromage, Emmanuel Macron, was a Rothschild & Co. investment banker. Former U.K. prime minister Rishi Sunak was a Goldman Sachs and hedge fund guy. Don’t be surprised when more transnational bankers seemingly come out of nowhere and immediately dominate the politics of other pseudo-sovereign countries. Investment banking — and more specifically, central banking — is the lifeblood of globalism. Why? Because once a bank is big enough, it gambles with the futures of entire nations (and the millions of individual lives therein) as if they were mere poker chips.

Democracy Docket, a Voice of the Crust.

One of the most alarming developments in the second Trump administration is agencies’ apparent defiance of court orders barring them from implementing illegal executive orders. As agencies including the State Department have ignored, evaded or slow-walked judicial decrees, courts have issued increasingly stronger warnings that compliance with their orders is not optional, and litigants have urged them to hold the responsible government officials in contempt of court.

Alarming indeed, to the Usual Suspects. Proglodytes have been stuffing partisan judges onto the Federal courts for decades, and know whom to depend on when things require a bit of undemocratic action. If this fails them, they’re back to persuasion, and democracy, in both of which they have proven incompetent.

Yet the prospect of holding executive branch officials in contempt threatens a fresh constitutional crisis.

Only to those who think that judges get to have everything they want, and that elected officials (whose job it is) must bend the knee.

As Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky argues, “the hard truth for those looking to the courts to rein in the Trump administration is that the Constitution gives judges no power to compel compliance with their rulings — it is the executive branch that ultimately enforces judicial orders.”

As President Andrew Jackson once reputedly said, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Neither the Federal government nor the government of the State of Georgia enforced that decision, and it had no effect.

Courts depend for their effectiveness on the popular appreciation that their decisions are just. When, as with Trump, their decisions are patently partisan and not rooted in either law or justice, they’re going to find themselves on a very windy ledge, ith no friendly hand available. Hence this author’s frantic grasping for some way, any way, to permit the partisan judiciary to have its way other than through the branch of government entitled by the Constitution and empowered by that Democrat bugaboo, the election that they could not steal.

NPR, a Voice of the Crust.

The Trump administration deported more than 200 people who it claims are members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang, to El Salvador this weekend, multiple members of the administration said on social media on Sunday.

It was not immediately clear if the deportations happened before or after a federal judge in D.C. on Saturday issued an emergency order that told the administration to stop using wartime powers to deport people, and turn around any planes already in the air.

The deportations to El Salvador also included 2 alleged leaders of the MS-13 gang, which has its origins in El Salvador, and 21 other members of the gang, according to posts from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and from El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele.

Looks like Trump is no longer impressed with Democrat judges.

Read it.

On a quest to find loved ones who’ve gone missing in Mexico’s years-long plague of gang-driven disappearances, a group of volunteers has discovered a ghastly, bone-strewn “extermination camp” in a rural village near Guadalajara, complete with cremation ovens. Their shock was compounded by the knowledge that police first learned about the site months ago but did little to investigate it. Some witnesses say the site was used to hold men who were abducted with the intent to force them into joining a criminal cartel — and to teach torture techniques.

The first of an unknown quantity of human remains have yet to be identified, but the site near the village of La Estanzuela holds at least 700 personal items, including some that appear have belonged to women and children — such as a blue summer dress, a small pink backpack and high-heel shoes, the New York Times reports. Those and other shoes may offer one of the best indications of the potential number of people killed and/or processed at the site: There are hundreds of them.

Life in the Turd World doesn’t get the coverage in the Narrative Media that it really ought to … they’re too busy complaining about Trump.

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What if the America you pledge allegiance to isn’t the one running the show? This investigation examines how America’s governance system fundamentally transformed since 1871 through a documented pattern of legal, financial, and administrative changes. The evidence reveals a gradual shift from constitutional principles toward corporate-style management structures – not through a single event, but through an accumulation of incremental changes spanning generations that have quietly restructured the relationship between citizens and government.

This analysis prioritizes primary sources, identifies patterns across multiple domains rather than isolated events, and examines timeline correlations – particularly noting how crises often preceded centralization initiatives. By examining primary sources including Congressional records, Treasury documents, Supreme Court decisions, and international agreements, we identify how:

Actually, this started with the Civil War, which overthrew the original Constitutional order and massively empowered the Federal government in all areas of life. This was perfected a hundred years later in the Federal civil rights laws, which eliminated the previous right of free association in favor of the government telling everybody who to live near, who to do business with, and where to send their kids to school.

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Over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal—and suicidal.

They did so with impunity.

Apparently, confident administrators assumed that the brand of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite universities was so precious to the nation’s elite movers and shakers that they could always do almost anything they wished.

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Since 2016, after which France experienced a surge in mass migration, the figure is up by a whopping 86 per cent.

44 per cent of victims were located in the Paris region, with women being the victims on 91 per cent of occasions, with 75 per cent of victims being under the age of 30 and 36 per cent of those being minors.

“It should be noted that this data comes at the same time that France’s migration population has exploded,” reports Remix News.

“With 63 percent of those arrested for sexual assault and 92 percent for petty theft in public transport being foreigners, according to data from 2019. Similar data is seen in Germany, where 59 percent of all sexual assaults on German trains are attributed to foreigners, with sexual crimes doubling since 2019.”

Be careful not to step in the diversity. It’s impossible to get that stuff off of your shoes.

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Last week, President Donald Trump began keeping yet another of his promises—this time, to deport foreign nationals who support terrorism.

On Wednesday, the U.S. State Department “revoked the first visa of an alien who was previously cited for criminal behavior in connection with Hamas-supporting disruptions,” a department official told Fox News. “This individual was a university student. ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] will proceed with removing this person from the country.”

As we’ve explained previously, federal law allows both the denial of admission to, and the deportation of, foreign nationals who support terrorism. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, “Any alien—who endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization … is inadmissible.”

If a student visa applicant is known to “endorse or espouse” terrorism, the consular officer interviewing him at a U.S. Embassy or consulate overseas should deny him a visa.

But what if a foreign student already obtained a visa, and it later comes to light that he espoused or endorsed terrorism? For example, in the case of a foreign student on a college campus protesting in favor of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack in Israel. In that case, the State Department can revoke his visa. That means that the Department of Homeland Security can then pursue his removal because, under the Immigration and Nationality Act, he would be deportable for the same reasons the visa was canceled. It also means he can’t return to the U.S. without getting a new visa, which would be very hard, given the revocation on file.

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American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is known primarily for two things: screaming into microphones at political rallies and making the teacher’s union an extension of the Democratic Party. However, Weingarten had an unintended substantive moment when she changed her earlier position on the elimination of the Education Department. Weingarten previously shrugged off the elimination of the department as not a big deal for education. Recently, she returned to her irate default in denouncing the elimination. The reason, however, was telling.

After Trump was reelected in November, Weingarten said that the elimination was not a big deal and that teachers had originally opposed the creation of the department: “I mean, my members don’t really care about whether they have a bureaucracy of the Department of Education or not. In fact, Al Shanker and the [American Federation of Teachers] in the 1970s were opposed to its creation.”

Been there, done that.

Astral Codex Ten.

The NAEP is a nationwide standardized test of reading and math proficiency. The 2024 scores are out, and they’re not good.

Most headlines have said something like New NAEP Scores Dash Hope Of Post-COVID Learning Recovery, which seems like a fair assessment.

I feel bad about this, because during lockdowns I argued that kids’ educational outcomes don’t suffer long-term from missing a year or two of school. Re-reading the post, I still think my arguments make sense.

ZMan:

I hate daylight savings time. The main reason is every year it means a week where it feels like I am late for everything, like I overslept by an hour. As a person who likes to get an early start, this is the worst feeling in the world. Sure, I get that wonderful vibe in the autumn where it feels like I gained an hour, but it is not a trade-off I favor. The spring forward misery far outweighs the fallback benefit that is long forgotten by the time spring arrives.

Concur.

Read it.

We are hiring.

We received over 2,500 job applications. Fewer than 100 filled a form with open-ended questions. About 15 went on to complete a reasonably simple real-world challenge. We are a nation with the cheapest internet and a billion internet users. Where are all the self-directed learners? The eclectic ekalavyas?

We are 25 years into the MOOC era. We have near unlimited access to the world’s best teachers on YouTube, and yet our education system isn’t producing independent thinkers. How is this possible?

It struck me that our education system is not just “useless” it is actively hurting all learners. We keep devising ways and means to keep them in artificial bubbles where all learning is boiled down to information transfer.

Like wild animals raised too long in captivity, our students have lost crucial survival skills for the real world. Our education system isn’t just failing them — it’s domesticating them into helplessness, training them for a life of being spoon-fed.