The foundational pillars of the American middle class have been crumbling for decades, crushed under the weight of unaffordable housing, …

Caused by government.

…runaway education costs, …

Caused by government.

… and the rising price of just about everything.

Caused by government.

This full-blown affordability crisis is hollowing out the middle class from within. Add years of mass migration of millions of illegal aliens, …

Caused by government. What do these things have in common?

… and the wealth and opportunities once available to the native population have eroded even further. It’s becoming impossible to ignore that many policymakers in Washington, seemingly aligned with the globalist billionaires, have deliberately waged economic war on America’s middle class. This is precisely why President Trump rose to power.

Note that the chart plainly shows the trend started downward in 1960, the introduction of hormonal birth control. Of course correlation doesn’t imply causation, but there is no causation without correlation, and correlation can point the way.

Watch it.

Tim Pool brings the heat.

Mark Steyn.

Four decades ago I was sitting having a cup of tea in Bramerton Street in Chelsea, just off the King’s Road. It was the home of Alan Jay Lerner, author of Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, Gigi, Camelot, and much else. Alan was not as wealthy as he’d been two decades earlier, because he’d carelessly acquired seven ex-wives and was in the umpteenth year of a long-running dispute with the IRS. But I couldn’t understand why, as a man awash in Oscars and Tonys and whatnot, he chose to live not in New York but in London, when the former seemed to me (as it did to Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and other impressionable types) far more glamorous. Alan replied that he lived in London because Britain was the most eminently civilised society on earth.

Well, it’s not anymore. A two-bedroom house in Bramerton Street will, for the moment, set you back over three million pounds, but no one except a gibbering lunatic would advance the proposition that today’s Britain is “the most eminently civilised society on earth”. England particularly is increasingly what Trump would call a bleephole – very literally. When its remnants finally go up in flames fifteen years (at most) from now, you’ll strain to believe that it could ever have been as Lerner characterised it.

Read it.

For many years, large segments of the American public were perfectly willing to go on Jerry Springer and admit to the world that they abused their spouses, molested their children, tortured their pets, and consumed every illicit drug they could get their hands on. Beginning with Alcoholics Anonymous, a plethora of Anonymous organizations has come on the scene to deal with these issues, along with an ever-increasing number of other social and psychological maladies. However, there is not one Anonymous chapter where a person can get in front of a supportive group and state: “Good evening. My name is Steve, and I’m stupid!” Don’t believe me? Google it!

Unlike substance abuse and other behavioral flaws that can be corrected, as Ron White has so famously said, “Stupid is forever.”

Watch it.

Tim Pool brings the heat.

Taking LinkedIn to the next level … so to speak.

Read it.

Although this is a typical ‘populist’ hit-piece on everybody’s favorite whipping-boy, the Billionaire, it does reveal (perhaps inadvertently) some interesting features.

Look carefully at the map. Each private island is marked, not with the name of the guy who owns it, but rather with the business with which that guy is affiliated. The socialist trope of “corporate greed” is so all-pervasive in modern society that we don’t even notice it any more–and, in this particular case, it’s as if the Usual Billionaire Suspects are merely sock-puppets directed by their companies.

Even a moment’s thought outside the box of newspaper-think suffices to demonstrate the absurdity of that approach: The man runs the company, not the company the man; indeed, if it weren’t for the man and his efforts, you would never even heard of the company. (Amazon is Amazon because Jeff Bezos had a dream and busted his ass to make it a reality. The tail doesn’t wag the dog In Real Life.) That reversal of cause and effect is, unfortunately, far too often these days, and tends to dominate the infosphere.

This bit was also interesting:

The Tech Billionaire Land Grab
Technology entrepreneurs have emerged as dominant players in the private island market. There are a few reasons behind this trend:

1. Unprecedented wealth accumulation: The tech boom has created liquidity that enables nine-figure recreational purchases previously reserved for oil barons and industrial magnates.

2. Remote work capabilities: Modern satellite communications and digital infrastructure allow tech leaders to maintain business operations from virtually anywhere, making isolated islands viable as working retreats.

3. Privacy and security concerns: High-profile tech executives increasingly seek refuges from public scrutiny and potential security threats, with private islands offering unparalleled isolation and control.

The characterization of billionaire land purchases as a “land grab” is signature with such hit-pieces. If you had a lot of money, what else would you do with it? From the beginning of time down to about 1700, land was the only productive asset. There were no stocks, there were no bonds, there were no easy secure ways to lend money–it was land or nothing. (Sure, merchants got rich, but they went broke more often than not.) Land was always there, always producing food that people needed to eat and other natural and animal products that daily life required.

But let’s look at the list in detail.

1. Unprecedented wealth accumulation. The plain reason for that is that tech companies have made our lives enormously easier and more convenient. If need a new pair of gym shorts, all I have to do is go to Amazon, look up the brand that I bought five years ago and really liked, and order some new with the click of a button. Then I go about my day (rather than traipsing all over town trying to find a place that carries that brand, has it in stock, and can sell it to me for a price I can afford). That is an orders-of-magnitude increase in my personal productivity. I bless Jeff Bezos every day for the ease he has brought to my life. And yet the author of this article just ignores all that to focus on the fact that some people got rich providing products and services that other people beat down their doors to buy. (The swine!)

2. Remote work capabilities. Before I retired, I could (every day at 2:30 a.m. when the production data warehouse load crapped out, as it regularly did) drag myself to my desk, remote into my computer at work, and do pretty much anything I could have done at the office–all without getting dressed and driving half an hour to work, while being pounded by phone calls “Is it fixed yet? Is it fixed yet?” Again, enormous increase in productivity, to my benefit and to the benefit of the people who depending on my efforts. All of it due to modern technology, the internet and its tendrils. Do the people who created such a system (and maintain it) deserve to get rich? Fuck yes, in a rightly-ordered world. We are greatly blessed to live in times like these, in spite of the very obvious drawbacks that we trip over every day.

3. Privacy and security concerns. Rich people have always been targets for the envious and the crooked, and the problem is, it’s not always possible to see them coming. “Did he have any enemies?” is the classic detective flick question, to which the only reply can be: No, other than the 95% of mankind who didn’t have as much money has he did, and resenting the shit out of him for it. When any random sociopath can find a weapon (knife, gun, bomb, nasty chemicals) and destroy you, your home, and your family, SURE AS SHIT you will get the finest “security” you can find, and HOPE TO GOD it’s enough. Nobody kidnaps the kids of poor people. Nobody wanders up to a shoemaker on a public street and shoots him in the back because of the way he runs an insurance company. Nobody sends death threats to the wife and parents and third-cousins-once-removed of a welder because he is a Jew or is not a communist.

And nobody thinks of the elementary economic fact that investment requires accumulated surplus wealth. If everybody had the same amount of “wealth”, nobody could afford to get the things that rich people buy us, like museums and art galleries and, hell, railroads and airplanes and maybe a cure for cancer and (more to the point) freedom from malaria because there wouldn’t be enough money sitting in one place to do so.

Rich people don’t put their money in a bin like Scrooge McDuck and swim around in it for kicks. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet don’t keep their riches as pallets of cash tucked in the basement somewhere. That money is out there working, providing jobs, producing products, advancing knowledge, and making life better for everybody. Sure, rich people convert a little bit of it into cash now and then–by selling it to somebody else who is glad to pay them for it–to put a little luxury into their lives. (The amount of money that Jeff Bezos spends on himself, compared to his nominal “wealth”, is the equivalent of the sweat on a racehorse.) That doesn’t take any money out of my pocket; indeed, if Jeff Bezos had kept all of his Amazon stock, all of the other Amazon-stock-rich would have been left sitting on the curb wondering where their next meal come from, and it wouldn’t have done either him or them any good. Thank God for the rich, I say, and may they live long and prosper.

The Foundry.

While President Donald Trump nixed funding for California’s “train to nowhere,” taxpayers remain on the hook for other projects that are billions of dollars over budget and more than a decade behind schedule, according to a new Senate report.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, issued “Off the Rails: The Billion Dollar Boondoggles Taking Taxpayers for a Ride,” a report that details projects such as Minnesota’s costliest project in history and a project that is more than half of Hawaii’s entire state budget.

“From poor planning and mismanagement to red tape, there are a laundry list of reasons why these projects are delayed,” Ernst told The Daily Signal. “Somehow, the solution is always more tax dollars, but enough is enough. As I continue to work with the Trump administration to restore accountability to Washington, there is no better place to focus than on these projects that have cost run-ups totaling more than $160 billion.”

As part of the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act during the Biden administration, Ernst got an amendment passed that requires the Department of Transportation to issue a public report each year disclosing any taxpayer-funded project that is more than $1 billion over budget or is five years or more behind schedule. (Ernst voted against the bigger bill).

Read it.

Jean Respail predicted all of this back in 1973. Buy the book here.

Each day brings ever more jaw-dropping news from Great Britain, otherwise known as Starmerstan.

The government cannot gain control of the migrant boats ferrying invaders daily like a dinghy armada. A thousand years ago and more, when Viking longboats carried ferocious Scandinavian war bands across the waters to conquer the British Isles, the natives had no difficulty seeing what was happening and doing what they could to defend themselves.

Today, though, the new invaders come without weapons, knowing with certainty that the mush-brained Brahmins of Britain’s ruling class will not only fail to resist them, but will put them up in fancy hotels, give them smartphones, put them on the dole, and extend benefits to these illegal entrants that would have been unimaginable to previous generations of Britons. Has there ever been a nation in history that offered such succor to its would-be colonizers?

The Foundry.

Just minutes into a special Vacation Bible School Sunday service at CrossPointe Community Church in Wayne, Michigan, on June 22, parishioners found their morning worship interrupted by the terrible crack of gunshots outside.

A man clad in a tactical vest and carrying numerous firearms had driven erratically onto the premises of the church, apparently intent on killing as many worshippers as he could that morning.

Fortunately for the nearly 150 people inside—including numerous young children—some of the gunshots they heard were, in fact, the sounds of two armed church members returning fire and killing the gunman before he could enter the sanctuary.

The men who heroically defended their fellow worshippers are part of CrossPointe’s safety team, which they and other members founded about a decade ago in response to acts of violence committed in places of worship around the United States.

Remember: When seconds count, police respond in minutes … if you’re lucky.

The Times (UK).

The population of England and Wales has experienced its second-biggest annual jump in 75 years because of surging immigration, figures show.

There were an estimated 61.8 million people living in England and Wales as of June last year, an increase of 706,881 on mid-2023, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The Times (UK) 

Dejaun Campbell, 15, lay bleeding to death from a stab wound on a London street he pleaded to a stranger, “call my mum”.

Among the friends who brought flowers to his shrine was Kelyan Bokassa, 14. Four months later and just a mile away, Kelyan cried “I want my mum” as he bled to death after being stabbed on a bus.

Two teenagers were convicted at the Old Bailey on Wednesday for Daejaun’s death, a week after two other teenagers were jailed for his friend’s murder at the same court.

The War Zone.

First-person view (FPV) attack drones have been so successful in Ukraine that now Mexican drug cartels are reportedly seeking first-hand lessons on best practices. Intelligence agencies in Kyiv and Mexico City are investigating whether cartel members – fighting on behalf of Ukraine – are doing so to learn more about how to operate FPVs against rivals, according to Intelligence Online, a French investigative news outlet. Learning how to operate and maintain FPV drones from the world’s leading practitioners could drastically speed up the learning curve for cartels, which are in the early stages of using these weapons.

The investigation centers on cartel members who allegedly joined Ukraine’s International Legion, created at the beginning of the all-out war to allow foreigners to fight against Russia.

Read it.

Virginia councilman Lee Vogler was set on fire Wednesday by a man who forced his way into his office, according to media reports.

The man, identified as 29-year-old Shotsie Michael Buck Hayes by WBTM, is currently in police custody.

Hayes reportedly dumped a five-gallon bucket of gasoline on Vogler after forcing his way into his workplace at Showcase Magazine. Vogler ran to the front of the building to try to escape, and Hayes followed him and set him on fire.

The Times (UK)

Letting in a lot of Turd World migrants will do that to you.

UPDATE: Migrant avoids deportation by showing he met his partner in a gay club

UPDATE: Revealed: London’s worst streets for knife crime

Read it.

A major strike is looming at Boeing’s St. Louis defense hub after unionized factory workers rejected a contract offer on Sunday. A seven-day “cooling-off” period is now underway, offering a narrow window to revive negotiations. If no deal is reached, the labor action could disrupt critical supply chains for fighter jets and other critical military aircraft, at a time when global conflict is escalating, inventories for weapons are running low, and defense preparedness has been a top priority across Western nations.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local 837, which represents 3,200 Boeing defense workers in Missouri and Illinois and is affiliated with the AFL–CIO/CLC trade union, said its members overwhelmingly voted down a new labor contract with Boeing on Sunday.

“IAM Union members delivered a clear message: the proposal from Boeing Defense fell short of addressing the priorities and sacrifices of the skilled IAM Union workforce,” IAM Local 837 wrote in a statement on its website.

“There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” — Calvin Coolidge.

Babylon Bee.

No. You never have enough swords.

Read it.

One, an executive order by President Trump, issued shortly after he assumed office, is to dismantle the Department of Education. Outright closing of the department is only possible by an act of Congress. However, the president is moving to accomplish the same objective administratively by closing down offices and major staff elimination. The U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld the president’s authority to do this.

The second front is advancement of parental choice in education. Give parents the power and authority to educate their children as they choose and send their children to a school that reflects their values.

One need not look further than the so-called Nation’s Report Card, the biannual test results administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, to see the problem.

Public education was once a great deal, especially for the poor and immigrants (who tended to be poor). Back in the Good Old Days when communities actually had standards and teachers reflected those standards in their teaching and discipline, everybody was happy with it except the Crust, who would much rather their children not mix with the offspring of Dirt People.

Since the Marxist Long March Through the Institutions, however, public schools have devoted their time to attempting to destroy community standards of which the union-infused alphabet-soup-loving proglodyte teachers disapprove, trying (and often succeeding) to send little Woke clones of themselves out into the world to wreak havoc.

As a result, more and more parents have been voting with their feet, searching out alternatives and trying to wrest control of the educational institutions using their tax money to persuade their children to hate their parents.

The Guardian, the paper of record for UK Wokery.

Notice that the article starts off with fulminations about an anti-white racist Person of Color not getting a New York street named after him, to which he obviously (in the Left Brain) had an indefensible right.

My street address obsession began when I learned for the first time that most households in the world don’t have street addresses. Addresses, the Universal Postal Union argues, are one of the cheapest ways to lift people out of poverty, facilitating access to credit, voting rights and worldwide markets. But this is not just a problem in the developing world. I learned that even parts of the rural US don’t have street addresses.

West Virginia has tackled a decades-long project to name and number its streets. Until 1991, few people outside of West Virginia’s small cities had any street address at all. Then the state caught Verizon inflating its rates and, as part of an unusual settlement, the company agreed to pay $15m (£12.4m) to, quite literally, put West Virginians on the map.For generations, people had navigated West Virginia in creative ways. Directions are delivered in paragraphs. Look for the white church, the stone church, the brick church, the old elementary school, the old post office, the old sewing factory, the wide turn, the big mural, the tattoo parlour, the drive-in restaurant, the dumpster painted like a cow, the pickup truck in the middle of the field. But, of course, if you live here, you probably don’t need directions; along the dirt lanes that wind through valleys and dry riverbeds, everyone knows everyone else anyway.

Note the upside-down machinations of the Left Brain: Because rural people don’t have street addresses, as has bene the case since Adam and Eve left the Garden, they are thereby ‘stripped of their rights”. One might almost say (and I’m sure some Left Brain people have said) that people living  in poverty, which is the natural state of mankind, are thereby “stripped of their wealth”. You really can’t make this shit up.

It really started with Rousseau: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” No, man is not born free; man in born weak and helpless and in bondage to his parents,  his family, his community, and his political unit. If he achieves freedom, it is by dint of hard work, much luck, stubborn determination, and almost always a hard fight.

Rousseau started the whole proglodyte Make It Up And Pretend That It’s True method of thinking. Who are you going to believe, my principles or your lying reality?

Read it.

Last week it was Moroccans who were prominently featured in the cultural enrichment of Italy. This week finds Nigeria in the forefront of the news on the vibrant diversity of Modern Multicultural Italy.

Read it.

Not to mention places in the First World where the electrical grid is, shall we say, in the hands of government employees and therefore, shall we say, less that completely reliable.

I love Texas but it’s electricity supply is afflicted with Bureaucrat Disease as much as any place whatsoever.

Read it.

In what has been described as a terrifying encounter with a pro-Palestinian mob, a group of Israelis on vacation report dealing with a vicious attack.

The alleged incident on the Greek island of Rhodes saw the youths chased and attacked by a knife-wielding group in the early morning of Wednesday, July 23rd, when a pro-Palestinian crowd ambushed the Israelis outside a local nightclub.

As it attempted to leave the area, the group was further pursued on motorcycles and on foot. Once they were caught trying to hide, the Israelis were beaten. Eventually the group was able to establish contact with parents, who contacted Israel’s Foreign Ministry for assistance.

This incident came the day after an Israeli-owned cruise ship was blocked from docking at the Greek island of Syros and rerouted to Cyprus. A large anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protest at the port proved able to turn the ship away.

Authorities in Rhodes have dismissed Israeli reports of the attack, claiming there was no violence and any confrontation, involving a larger Israeli group, was purely verbal. Whether or not a more concrete account of the event emerges, it’s clear that Jews in Europe are increasingly under attack.

Washington Free Beacon.

The message is, “We are your enemies. Better start acting like it.” Trump, at least, will see that message clearly.

You would think that Iranians would learn from their mistakes, but, like many Muslim terrorists, they don’t.

Read it.

The European Commission is facing a criminal complaint over allegations that it wasted billions of euros in taxpayer money by funding NGOs without sufficient oversight.

The Taxpayers Association of Europe (TAE) has filed charges against two former EU officials: ex–Vice President of the Commission Frans Timmermans—the architect of the European Green Deal— and Virginijus Sinkevi?ius, former Commissioner for the Environment.

The complaint accuses the Commission of funneling over €7 billion between 2019 and 2024 to NGOs whose operations and objectives—some of which included influencing the European Parliament—were poorly monitored.

The Register.

There are ten people in the world who could decide tomorrow to make IT better, and it would become better. Not better for some, not better for a while, but better for all and forever.

Those ten people are those who sign off on the Settings menus on desktops, mobile and consumer at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and Sony. The decision would be to create a standard that says three things: what are the user adjustable features common to every device with a screen, what single place are they to go in the Settings menu and where, and what common data structure could store them.

This single action would save everyone worldwide time and solve so much error when setting up a new device or using a shared or public system. That alone should be enough reason. For those who have trouble here, it would instantly fix the Catch-22 of needing to change UI settings before being able to use something, but the settings are locked behind an unusable UI.

For app developers and website designers, the presence of that standard data structure on a system means their products can instantly know how to be most usable to each individual, without reinventing any wheels or complicating their own UI. Preferred text size and style, icon size and spacing, good and bad color combinations, language – if a machine could pick that up from your phone through Bluetooth, a USB key, a web service, you name it, then it is instantly and optimally ready for you. The more precise your needs, the better that is.

Read it.

Dozens of schoolchildren were punished with “isolation” after they wore Union flags to celebrate a school ‘culture day.’ Pupils at Ormiston Sandwell Community Academy in Oldbury, West Midlands were invited to wear something reflecting their heritage for the day—not realising British heritage is now seen as controversial.

It is claimed head teacher Peter McKinniss withdrew pupils wearing British flags from class and had them detained in a separate meeting room. One pupil who challenged the ‘no flags’ policy, Isobelle Wehrle, 15, was sent home for arguing—and suspended from school for five days.

Read it.

Why not?

Read it.

A man accused of deliberately driving his car into a crowd of pedestrians outside a Los Angeles nightclub over the weekend, injuring dozens of people, some critically, was charged on Tuesday with 37 counts of attempted murder, prosecutors said.The suspect, Fernando Ramirez,…

Well. There it is.

Read it.

There are plenty of comments about the death of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. These tend to appear when the dollar index declines. However, these “dollar death” reports are greatly exaggerated and fail to answer a simple question: What is the alternative?

If you want to bet on the euro as a global reserve currency ahead of the imposition of the digital euro, which will obliterate all limits to central bank surveillance and excess, be my guest.

Furthermore, the enormous military spending and public expenditure plans that have been announced in 2025 add to the giant committed unfunded liabilities of member states, moving from 350% in the case of Germany to 500% of GDP in the case of Spain.

The Chinese yuan is only used in 4.5% of global transactions. With capital controls, exchange rate fixing and significant legal and investor insecurity due to government control of institutions, it is difficult to believe that China’s yuan will be an alternative to the US dollar. Additionally, I do not believe that the Chinese government wants to eliminate those barriers and, as such, has no desire to be a world reserve currency. This is a similar problem with the currency of Brazil, Russia, India, or South Africa. Would you accept your salary and savings in a currency issued by countries with capital controls as well as significant legal and investor security challenges?

Read it.

operations during one of the deadliest migrant shipwrecks in Italian history, prompting a furious backlash from government officials who say the smugglers are to blame, not the rescuers.

More than 90 people were killed by the 2023 disaster near the town of Cutro, including at least 30 children. Many others were injured.

Reports on those being sent to trial—for negligent shipwreck and multiple manslaughter—have somehow failed to mention that joint efforts of the Italian Coast Guard and Frontex, the European border agency, resulted in more than 80 people on the ship being rescued. That was thanks to the deployment of many motorboats, vessels, and a helicopter.

Frontex said in a statement shortly after the event that those who lost their lives did so “due to the actions of unscrupulous people smugglers who crammed people on board in bad weather conditions.”

Responding to the news of these trials, Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini—currently being pursued himself in a separate migrant case—said he had “one single word: SHAME.”

unHerd.

I wish I didn’t know who Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot are. As you no doubt know by now, the Astronomer CEO and his firm’s HR chief were caught on the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert. He tried to sneak away, while she covered her face, but it was too late. Someone posted the footage online. A pile-up ensued. And their lives were turned upside down.

As I say, I wish I didn’t know who they are. And that’s because any of us might, for any particular reason, become Andy Byron or Kristin Cabot: flawed people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anybody can make a bad-but-irrelevant-to-the-rest-of-us mistake on camera and face personal destruction. What such episodes reveal is a pathology in the social body, and the desperate need for a new ethic of privacy.

The “Coldplay-concert-couple” story is fundamentally irrelevant and effectively contentless, telling us nothing about the world, about ourselves; it isn’t particularly funny or tragic or profound. There is no pathos, no insight. True, the current culture on X and other social-media apps is perhaps less immediately destructive than it was during peak woke (circa 2017 to 2021). Still, the viral potential of these kinds of stories is a warning sign that our culture is obsessed with shame, surveillance, and control. An obsession with other people’s private lives is a sickness.

Yeah, well, in the modern world, there’s a lot of sickness going around. Other people aren’t seen as actual, you know, people, but rather as prey.

The Telegraph (UK).

Bottles and pink smoke bombs have been hurled at police during a protest outside a migrant hotel in Essex.

On Sunday night, scores of police officers stood by in riot gear as the crowd gathered in the early evening outside The Bell Hotel in Epping, which was protected by a line of police vans and six-foot-high fencing.

The protest was the third outside the hotel in the last week following the arrest of an Ethiopian migrant who was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.

On Thursday evening, eight officers were injured and police vehicles were damaged as a demonstration at the hotel spilt over into violence.

The mood of the protest on Sunday was largely peaceful at first, with several people in the crowd draped in Union flags while others carried placards, including one that read: “You are paying billions to prop up a broken asylum system! Look after our own.”

People see proglodyte protesters getting away with violence and figure that they’re entitled to the same leniency.

This is how societies disintegrate.

UPDATE: Largest Epping Migrant Hotel Demonstration to Date

UPDATE: The Epping Protests: When Frustration Turns into Anger

Read it.

Three weeks after President Trump’s Executive Order reinstated enforcement of English language proficiency requirements for American truck drivers—regulations that had been waived by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in 2016 under President Obama—a growing number of unsafe and non-English-speaking drivers are being removed from U.S. highways and placed ‘Out of Service’ until they can demonstrate basic English communication skills.

This is a great start to helping clean up America’s roads and preventing unvetted and mostly untrained insourced labor from causing any further carnage on our highways. There remains a lot of work to do, however, as the issue of ‘Ghost’ and ‘Chameleon Carriers’ who employ low skill and low quality drivers remains. It is also being reveled that the Electronic Logging Device mandate, which placed a Fourth Amendment shredding piece of Surveillance Technology in American Big Rigs under the pretext of increasing safety by digitally tracking truckers Hours of Service compliance, has been circumscribed by ‘Backdooring’, where ‘ELD’ services located in Eastern Europe log into these devices and alter truckers hours. This allows shady companies in America, often owned by Serbian or Russian gangsters, to employ their co-nationals in what amount to literal ‘slave driving’ operations.

Washington Examiner.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) expressed her optimism for the Democratic Party as the midterm elections draw nearer.

Klobuchar is fresh from a campaign trip to New Hampshire, where she sought to help Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) ahead of his bid for the Senate. The Minnesota senator dismissed what CNN host Jake Tapper referred to as the Democrats’ “dismal approval ratings” while appearing on State of the Union Sunday.

Feels before reals. Republicans believe it when they see it; Democrats see it when they believe it.

UPDATE FROM REALITY: Democrats Continue To Flounder As Approval Ratings Sink To All Time Lows

The Foundry.

That people get the government they deserve is a cruel adage, too cruel if you live in dark places where a small minority with guns terrorizes an unarmed population—see “Cuba, socialist state of.” But in a democracy, the maxim holds firmly.

Which means that if the citizens of New York City vote in Zohran Mamdani as their mayor come November, and things go badly, then Gotham really can’t ask for our sympathy. That Democrats voted him as their candidate in the primary on June 24 is one thing, but if voters of all parties ratify that decision on Election Day, that’s another.

Then it’s Pottery Barn rules: If you break it, you own it. Sure, it’s only natural to spare an initial thought for our compatriots from the Bronx to Staten Island if things go south, but after that, sit back and get the popcorn. I plan to do so wearing my threadbare Yankee cap.

Let’s see what communism does to a major, modern metropolis—the world’s financial center, no less.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Newsbusters.

Yes, so bipartisan that, as NewsBuster Alex Christy has reported, in the first half of 2025, Colbert hosted 14 partisan officials, more than any of the other daily late-night comedy shows. All 14 were Democrats, none were Republicans.

When it came to journalists and celebrities, Colbert again led all hosts with 29. All 29 were liberals–zero conservatives.

It don’t git no more bipartisan than that!

Spoke Narrative to the NPC herd, to be more accurate.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

BLUF: Government, and the irresistible compulsion of bureaucrats to regulate.

Read it.

Swedish police have launched a criminal investigation into whether a pro-Palestinian demonstration in the northern university town of Umeå constituted incitement against an ethnic group. The protest featured hanged skeletons dressed in concentration camp uniforms beneath a banner reading “a genocide is a genocide,” according to social media footage circulating Saturday.

The skeletons were suspended execution-style, wearing blue-and-white striped uniforms marked with Stars of David and prisoner numbers—evoking Holocaust imagery.

Also visible in the image was a person wearing a keffiyeh and holding a baby doll standing near the display. Palestinian flags were also displayed at the manifestation, shown here in a post on X by Sofie Löwenmark, Swedish journalist and columnist dedicated to exposing extreme ideologies and defending civil liberties:

The Times (UK).

John Waters, a director of the independent buying agency Robert Bailey Property, said: “Many of the wealthy owners we have seen leave the UK recently have not in fact chosen to sell their London homes — instead deciding to rent overseas in the hope that the UK tax system will in the future become less unfavourable.

“Often they are very sad to be leaving, but they feel they have little choice due to the end of non-dom status and the prospect of all their global assets being subject to UK inheritance tax.”

Read it.

Some of the Afghan nationals deported from Germany to Kabul on Friday have already said they plan to return, according to media reports. The flight, from the city of Leipzig, carried 81 Afghan men, all either convicted criminals or considered security threats.

Upon arrival in Kabul, several deportees told Afghan journalists they would soon try to return to Germany, underscoring the difficulty Berlin faces in enforcing long-term expulsions.

Making return after deportation a capital crime would solve a lot of the problem. Modern politicians are just too soft to do what is necessary.

UnHerd.

Is it possible to write a satirical campus novel anymore? Satire requires exaggeration and the pointed introduction of absurdity, but it is hard to see how modern university life could be further embellished in these respects. As usual, there were some classic stories served up this week for civilians to laugh at.

In the Daily Mail we read that policies at Glasgow University and Imperial College London now direct staff and students to avoid the phrase “the most qualified person should get the job” because this counts as a microaggression. Over in the US, yet another professor resplendent in beadwork and buckskin has admitted to falsely claiming possession of Native American ancestry. And an article just out in the Applied Linguistics Review provides a brand new excuse to lazy researchers: the requirement of a literature review in some disciplines imposes “particular configurations of privileged knowledge” amounting to an “enactment of symbolic violence”. Or, at least, that’s what students will be telling linguistics lecturers from now on.

Read it.

Terrorist Georges Abdallah is to be released from prison after forty years of imprisonment. The Left is hailing the “liberation” of a “resistance fighter,” while the Right is outraged that a dangerous man is once again free, benefiting from numerous political and media supporters.

Following a court ruling, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, a Marxist and pro-Palestinian Lebanese terrorist who has been in prison since 1987 and is now 74 years old, will be released on Tuesday, July 25th.

At the time of his conviction, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for complicity in the 1982 assassination of two diplomats, one American and the other Israeli. After twelve years in captivity, he began to request early release, which was systematically denied until now. He has since become known as one of France’s longest-serving prisoners.

Read it.

Democrats; Party of liars, crooks, and thieves.

Read it.

Richard Grenell, President Donald Trump’s envoy for special missions, called out Gavin Newsom on social media, slamming the California governor for lying to residents about his administration’s intentions for their properties, which were devastated by the Palisades and Eaton wildfires earlier this year.

“@GavinNewsom lied,” Grenell wrote Wednesday night on X. “He said he wouldn’t grab the land where homes burned down in the Palisades to build low-income housing facilities – but he and Karen Bass just did.

“They are changing the character of the Palisades and Malibu to fit their woke agenda,” he continued. “They don’t care what residents want. They can’t even deliver building permits properly.”

I delineated the Democrat playbook on this Tuesday.

CNBC, a Voice of the Crust.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has formally terminated $4 billion in federal funding for the California High-Speed Rail Authority, weeks after putting the CHSRA’s bullet train project on notice

In a termination letter to the authority’s CEO, Ian Choudri, dated Wednesday, Federal Railroad Administration acting Administrator Drew Feeley wrote that the CHSRA “breached the commitments” it made in its original agreements, specifically by displaying an “inability to complete” the goals it set out to reach.

“After over a decade of failures, CHSRA’s mismanagement and incompetence has proven it cannot build its train to nowhere on time or on budget,” Duffy said in a statement. “It’s time for this boondoggle to die.”

From the Antiplanner (2018, SEVEN years ago):

Finishing the high-speed rail line from San Francisco to Los Angeles is now expected to cost $77.3 billion, says the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s latest cost estimate. This is a big jump from the 2016 estimate of $64.3 billion and an even bigger jump from the $25 billion estimated in 2000, which was the only one available when voters approved the project in 2008. Completion has also been pushed back from 2020 in the 2000 plan to 2029 in the 2016 plan to 2033 in the latest plan.

While the cost increase has gotten a lot of media attention, less noticed is the fact that this $77.3-billion plan is for trains that will go at “speeds exceeding 200 miles per hour” and “typically” take “under three hours” to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The 2000 plan called for trains going 220 miles per hour and taking two-and-a-half hours from LA to San Francisco.

Of course, 220 “exceeds” 200 and two-and-a-half hours is “under” three hours, but the softening of the language makes it clear that the authority doesn’t expect to meet the original 2000 targets. This is partly because of a 2013 law effectively limiting speeds in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. A further quibble is that the “under three hours” estimate is for non-stop trains, and most trains “typically” won’t go non-stop.

Calling this a ‘boondoggle’ is being kind. It is the poster child for Blue State Incompetence.

Government is the reason we can’t have nice things.

UPDATE: Trump Ends Boondoggle on Rails (PJ Media)

Newsbusters.

It takes a lot of confidence for NPR CEO Katherine Maher to testify in front of Congress and claim with a straight face that her “trustworthy” taxpayer-subsidized outlet “serves all Americans” in a “non-partisan fashion.” That’s a funny way to describe cheering on the Chinese Communist Party and justify looting and terrorism on behalf of left-wing radicals. And who, exactly, is NPR serving when they broadcast mothers murdering their pre-born children? I recap just a few of their worst moments in the video here.

Read it.

This will not end well.

Read it.

A 17-year-old girl is in critical condition after being set on fire in an occupied building in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria early Wednesday morning. The alleged attacker, a 20-year-old Moroccan national named Abarrafia, had arrived in Spain by boat in June and was subject to an expulsion order. He had escaped from an immigration centre and was living in the squat with the victim.

The girl, who had run away from a youth care facility, suffered burns to 95% of her body. Before losing consciousness, she told witnesses: “It was him.” She will be transferred to a specialist burns unit in Seville.

Police arrested the suspect shortly after the incident. He remains hospitalised for smoke inhalation. Authorities are investigating the circumstances of the attack, which occurred during a dispute around 4 a.m. The Canary Islands’ child protection agency confirmed the victim had recently been reported missing. Investigators are also considering the involvement of a second person.

Read it.

This time, Sigma Dos, which conducted its poll for Spanish newspaper El Mundo, found that 70 percent of Spaniards support the deportations of illegal immigrants from Spain. The pollsters referenced the “flagship” Vox party proposal which called for mass deportation of all illegal immigrants, with the pollsters asking respondents whether they would support such a proposal.

For voters of the conservative PP party, 92 percent supported the proposal, which shockingly, is even higher than amongst Vox supporters, who support the proposal at a rate of 89 percent.

Even among Socialist party (PSOE) supporters, 57 percent said they backed mass deportations.

Perhaps we could make some money by renting them Trump for a couple of months.

Lifehacker.

Never buy a home that is subject to an HOA. You’ll regret it if you do.

Read it.

Brussels wants to slap a new tax on big companies—not based on what they earn in profit, but simply on what they take in. A leaked report by the European Commission, obtained by europeanconservative.com, proposes a sweeping reform of how the bloc funds itself. At the centre of the scheme is the so-called Corporate Resource for Europe (CORE), which would force large companies—including foreign ones that operate in the EU—to hand over a chunk of their annual turnover to Brussels, regardless of whether they made a profit or not.

Reminder: Companies do not pay tax. Companies merely collect tax. Tax, for a business, is just another expense–and, like every other expense, is rolled into the price that its customers pay. The people who actually pay the tax are those customers, who get to feel all warm a fuzzy about how the government is ‘sticking it to the man’. (Call it a tax on stupidity.)

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Stand by for articles describing, in shocked tones, how foreign companies operating in the EU are no longer operating in the EU because they can’t make any money. (In the U.S. we call that ‘Californication’.)