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Another week, another historic church reduced to smoke, rubble. The former Saint Agnes Church on Martha Avenue in Toledo, Ohio went up early Saturday morning. The 116-year-old landmark’s steeple came down. The roof burned out. Nearby homes were evacuated. Once again the cause is listed as currently unknown.

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Being a psychotic murderer appears to be very profitable.

Power Line.

Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that “Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher.” He was right, for better or worse. Our court system is a part of our government, and trials, especially criminal trials, are also a great teacher. The spectacle of Lindsay Clancy murdering her children and perhaps getting away with it, while being supported by large numbers of sympathetic women, taught unfortunate lessons to many of the millions who followed the story.

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News reports say the woman “was threatening people with two knives near West 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue” before stabbing two victims. Even when the knife maniac is an obese middle-aged woman, a knife that hits a major artery can kill quickly.

After being confronted by police, she “refused to drop the knives when officers approached,” after which she charged officers and was brought down. As the videos show, officers attempted to use Tasers to stop the perpetrator, but they didn’t work, because Tasers often fail to stop crazy people amped up on adrenaline/drugs, especially when they are Felons of a Particular Body Mass.

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A 27-year-old Moroccan construction worker in an irregular immigration situation in Spain was released from custody on Monday after being caught in the act of raping a 22-year-old woman on Valencia’s Malvarrosa beach. The duty judge cited the victim’s failure to appear in court to formalize a complaint as the reason for granting him provisional liberty – a Spanish procedural requirement that is relatively unusual compared with many other Western countries.

You can’t make this shit up.

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“The best estimate we have made at the Center for Immigration Studies of the possible number of births to tourists is 20,000 to 26,000 a year, though that estimate is based on data from 2016 and 2017,” Steven Camarota, the center’s research director, told a House Oversight Committee task force hearing led by Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas.

“Some might think the number is small relative to the overall number of births in the U.S. annually; however, the effect is cumulative. Assuming the numbers we estimated in the past continued, some 200,000 to 300,000 children were born to birth tourists over the last decade — hardly a trivial number.”

The testimony comes weeks after President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the State and Homeland Security departments to take further action against birth tourism, defined by the administration as foreign nationals entering the country on nonimmigrant visas to give birth on U.S. soil.

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Italy’s political row over judges’ lenient handling of migrant criminals has intensified after a 42-year-old Bangladeshi shop assistant accused of raping a 13-year-old girl in the outskirts of Turin was released from prison after just two nights.

The crime occurred on Saturday, August 29th in Madonna di Campagna, a multi-ethnic district in the northern Italian city.

According to the girl’s account, she entered a minimarket to buy three fruit drinks for her younger siblings. She said the shop assistant gave her a drink, asked whether she had a boyfriend and how old she was, before sexually assaulting her.

Police arrested the man shortly afterwards, with surveillance footage from the shop forming part of the evidence. Prosecutors requested that he remain in custody. However, a judge ordered his release, only requiring him to report to the police.

The judge cited the suspect’s lack of previous convictions, his co-operation with investigators, and his expression of remorse.

The decision has provoked heavy criticism, particularly because authorities allege that the same man had sexually assaulted another woman around 40 minutes before the incident involving the girl.

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The Biden Administration enacted hundreds of punitive actions against the domestic oil and gas industry. The Trump Administration has worked to reverse this overreach. The latest reversal concerns a Bureau of Land Management’s proposal to lower statewide bonding on oil and gas leases from $500,000 to $25,000.

In protest, the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) and other left-of-center environmental organizations claim that companies will be incited to abandon wells and stick taxpayers with the cleanup bill. EEN misleadingly argues that “asking companies to cover their own cleanup costs is not a regulatory burden….”

To clarify, the BLM is proposing to shift the state bonding minimums back to what they were prior to 2024, consistent with the White House’s intent to reduce regulatory barriers to energy production. The higher minimums imposed in 2024 have not taken effect yet, as the BLM had extended the phase-in date to June of 2027.

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Representatives on the House Oversight Committee Task Force on Protecting Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses, held a hearing today on the subject of Birthright Citizenship and immigration fraud [hearing below].

The committee subpoenaed Dr. Wladimir Lorentz, the owner and founder of Miami Medical Concierge Services, following his refusal to testify. The committee intended to ask questions about the company’s role in arranging births for foreign nationals. Following the subpoena, Dr Lorentz invoked the Fifth Amendment to every question, citing a pending federal investigation into his business, also known as “Have My Baby in Miami.”

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Today’s federal government employs over 2 million people. It is composed of over 400 agencies that often combine legislative, executive, and judicial powers. These agencies regulate nearly all areas of life from cradle to grave. We may take this arrangement for granted, but it is far from what the Founders envisioned. For them, the federal government was meant to have a limited range of power. And these powers were to be assiduously separated, checked, and balanced by the constitutional system they crafted.

How did we go so far astray? The progressive era marks a key turning point. Woodrow Wilson, foremost among progressives, offered a candid vision of a new form of government in his 1912 presidential campaign speech.

Actually, the rot started with Theodore Roosevelt, who (be it remembered) also claimed to be a ‘progressive’. If I could strangle at birth only one American historical figure, I’d do TR before I’d do WW.

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It’s true. A spoonful of sugar does help the medicine go down. But it’s the medicine we need, not the sugar. With this understanding, one may happily recommend Georges Tamer’s recently translated book, Islamic Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Leo Strauss’s Relationship with al-Fârâbî, Avicenna, and Averroes. The author makes clear arguments, and his translator writes good English prose. But the book is not light reading. It is a prescription dose of deep research and astute scholarship. Following two hundred pages of densely argued text are 120 pages of appendix, endnotes, and bibliography. Tamer draws information from a multitude of authorities, both primary and secondary. He uses sources written in Arabic, Latin, English, German, and French. Whatever this approach sacrifices in readability, it makes up for in credibility. Tamer knows what he is talking about.

The Hill, a Voice of the Crust.

Across the U.S., an increasing number of young adults are treating the traditional wedding altar like a hazardous waste site. Their mass refusal to pair up fuels a predictable spiral. Fewer marriages produce fewer babies, and a society without babies eventually ceases to exist.

Part of this transformation is being driven by a massive demographic shift in higher education. Women now earn roughly 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees. This educational imbalance directly feeds into the white-collar economy. A large cadre of corporate women now routinely out-earn their male romantic partners, creating a dynamic the old domestic playbooks never anticipated.

The problem is 150 years of feminism. Feminism attempts to turn women into fake men, men into fake women, and our culture into a biohazard site.

To be clear, nobody is asking Congress to subsidize bonnets or sourdough starter kits. But the harsh reality is that the legacy model of holy matrimony has run face-first into an economy that renders it functionally useless. The nuclear family structure was built for an agrarian or industrial landscape, leaving it ill-suited to a service economy driven by laptop-wielding professionals.

Proglodyte stupidity. The ‘nuclear family structure’ is based on impulses and preferences that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, and the blank-slate crowd think that they can just restructure this according to their latest Woke fad—and they’re always SO SURPRISED that the evolved impulses and preferences keep breaking through there proglodyte fantasy worlds.

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Last week, speaking to French business leaders gathered by Medef (Mouvement des entreprises de France—France’s leading employers’ organisation) in Paris, the Commission president lamented that such a large share of European household savings remains in bank deposits. “Unfortunately, these savings are lazy,” she said, before arguing that Europe needs to put that money “at the service of its companies.”

For now, there is no plan to confiscate deposits or withdraw money from individual bank accounts. Brussels’ proposal is different and, precisely for that reason, more politically significant: to use tax incentives, new financial products, regulatory changes, and more integrated supervision to push a greater share of private savings towards European capital markets.

This is the so-called Savings and Investments Union, presented in March 2025. The Commission estimates that around 70% of EU household savings, roughly €10 trillion, remains in bank deposits. The measures under consideration include investment accounts with tax advantages, changes to securitisation rules and regulations intended to facilitate greater participation by banks, insurers and funds.

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A man in his 50s has died after being seriously assaulted outside a restaurant in Sweden after trying to defend his daughter from a group of young men who had been groping her.

Authorities have not yet released information about the suspects’ nationality, ethnicity, or background, raising the suspicion among social media users that the perpetrators may be migrants.

Police were called to the centre of the Swedish city of Karlstad at about 1.25 a.m. on Sunday, August 30th after a violent disturbance broke out outside a fast food restaurant.

Officers found a middle-aged man seriously injured at the scene. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital, but doctors were unable to save his life.

Two men in their 20s have been arrested and detained on suspicion of manslaughter, after the police initially treated the case as aggravated assault. Reports have also suggested that a third man may have been arrested, although authorities have not confirmed the exact number of suspects.

The Telegraph (UK).

Suspected travellers have bulldozed a wildlife haven in an alleged bank holiday land grab.

Heavy machinery was used to destroy the field in the town of Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, over the weekend.

The unauthorised work in Sheering Mill Lane began early on Saturday morning, apparently to clear space for mobile homes, and prompted an angry response from residents.

Hundreds of people protested as diggers tore up the “wildlife hotspot” and builders installed fencing.

The work was carried out without planning permission and has since led to the council successfully appealing to the High Court for an injunction to halt all construction.

Councillor Greg Rattey, a former Sawbridgeworth mayor, said residents were dismayed by the “illegal settlement” that he said had been “built by travellers”.

Wikipedia:

Itinerant groups are communities that travel habitually from place to place rather than living in one permanent location. The origins of the traditionally itinerant groups in Europe are not always clear. The largest of these groups is the Romani people (also known as Roma or Gypsies, with the latter being increasingly taken as derogatory). They left India around 1,500 years ago, entering Europe around 1,000 years ago via the Balkans. They include the Sinti people, the second largest group. Travellers, assumed to have begun travelling from necessity during the early modern period, are unrelated to the Romani, and are assumed not to be ethnically distinct from their source population. However, recent DNA testing has shown that the Irish Travellers are of Irish origin but are genetically distinct from their settled counterparts due to social isolation, and more groups are being studied. The third largest group in Europe is the Yenish, an indigenous Germanic group.

Many itinerant groups speak their own language or dialect, though with outsiders they will use the language of the surrounding settled population. Such insider languages are often a blend of the regional settled language and Romani language, but sometimes a cant based on a regional language without Romani influence. As opposed to nomads, who travel with and subsist on herds of livestock, itinerant groups traditionally travel for trade or other work for the sedentary populations amongst which they live.

Watch it.

Much of the world sucks, by design.

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You know, call me crazy, call me a xenophobe, call me whatever you want, but I think it’s a little important for our elected officials to view the places they’re representing as their homeland.

So he’s a foreigner, proved out of his own mouth. Don’t vote for foreigners. Don’t let foreigners vote. For God’s sake don’t let foreigners run for U.S. elective office.

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This sort of scam has been going on in California for decades; I first heard of it a long time ago, when a friend was a victim.

Now, though, with the advent of dashcams, it’s easier to prove it and even to find the perps.

A crew of bozos targeted unsuspecting drivers in a series of staged crashes on busy Big Apple highways — scoring more than $80,000 in insurance payouts before a viral video brought the fraud ring down.

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The family of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, who was fatally stabbed on a North Carolina light rail train last year, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the City of Charlotte and a private security firm.

The lawsuit, filed on Aug. 21, alleges that Zarutska’s death was entirely preventable. It claims the city and Professional Police Services – a security company contracted by the Charlotte Area Transit System – failed to implement reasonable safety measures despite being well aware of violent crime along the 9.6-mile LYNX Blue Line.

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Maybe all that “global warming” was dangerous, after all.

Worst of all, a lot of them vote Democrat.

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This week marks the 55th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s 90-day wage and price order of August 15, 1971. With extensions, maximum prices caused oil shortages beginning in 1972. More shortages with the Arab Embargo of October 1973 ensured passage of the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act of 1973, which continued federal price and allocation controls until President Reagan’s decontrol order in early 1981. This post adds to the historical record of one of the greatest peacetime energy policy failures in U.S. history.

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The first is fiat-currency inflation. Intervention in 1912-1913,  creation of the Federal Reserve and the 16th Amendment enabling Congressional unlimited spending.

The second is the socialization of old-age support. Intervention in 1936 creating the Social Security Program.

The third is medical monopoly. Intervention in 1965 creating Medicare.

The fourth is the nationalization of education. Intervention in 1979 creating the Department of Education.

The fifth is the stripping of housing sovereignty. Intervention into housing policy and finance spread over most of the 20th century.

The sixth is administrative relief. Government takes over management and control of permanent poverty.

Full article: The Six Nooses: How Interventionism Is Strangling The Family’s Will To Reproduce

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British men who protested outside an Essex asylum hotel have been locked up for far longer than the migrant whose sexual assaults on a 14-year-old girl and a woman triggered the demonstrations.

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

Watch it.

Tim Pool lays it out for us.

I find myself in substantial agreement with what he has to say.

Newsbusters.

On August 10, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey signed a bill allowing abortion at any point in pregnancy. Abortion advocates call it “closing the gaps” in “abortion rights protections.” Abortion foes call it “abortion until birth,” making it legal to dismember fully formed babies, limb from limb.

The “mainstream” media called it nothing. You couldn’t find that story on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, or NPR.

What about print? The New York Times noted this bill when it passed the state House in July, and The Washington Post ran an AP dispatch when it passed the state Senate. But I found nothing on the bill-signing.

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Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) is as totally baffled as the rest of us normal people.

If you don’t know what ‘forensic astrology’ means, you’re lucky.

The AWFLs are on the march.

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The Fourth Estate is constitutionally illiterate…

No, they are constitutionally ignorant. They could read the constitution if they wanted to but they just don’t want to.

On Sunday morning’s Meet the Press, NBC News hack Kristen Welker pressed newly sworn-in Attorney General Todd Blanche to “pledge that the Justice Department will always act independently of the White House.” The fake “journalist” performed this bit of moralizing theater with her “very serious” face, as if to suggest that the nation’s survival depended upon Blanche’s answer. Blanche calmly swatted Welker’s solicitation away, while pointing out that no competent, law-abiding attorney general should ever make such an absurd pledge.

As I recall pointing out recently on this very blog.

It was another ridiculous moment in “journalism” and reminded viewers that the biggest names in corporate news are stupid, partisan, and duplicitous. Why would Welker believe that she is entitled to demand some kind of public oath from the attorney general? Why does she think the United States should have an “independent” Department of Justice? Does she not understand that the DOJ is part of the Executive Branch? Is she not aware that AG Blanche serves in President Trump’s cabinet? Does she not realize that Trump is his boss? Does she not grasp that AG Blanche is now seventh in the presidential line of succession?

Oh, are we making a list?

Many idiot “reporters” ran to social media so that they could be seen collapsing on their digital fainting couches. “Pretty amazing confession here by the AG,” moron Chuck Todd whimpered before further whining, “Still can’t believe he was confirmed. I guess he gets points for being honest?” Yes, Chuck, it is stunning that the attorney general recognizes his constitutional obligation to serve the president of the United States. AG Blanche has “confessed” that he is not a rogue dictator empowered to run the Department of Justice by kingly prerogative. (Be careful kids: Mixing too much Kristen Welker and Chuck Todd in the same Kool-Aid punch bowl will kill millions of brain cells.)

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I doubt that there are any Republicans in that group.

Worse on Purpose.

Over the past two centuries the things we buy were quietly rebuilt so that most of what determines their quality exists where no buyer can see it. At the same time, we lost the skills that enabled us to judge quality on the parts that still show.

Both losses have a single cause.

On the maker’s side, production withdrew into factories and distant trades. When things were made in the household or the town, the manufacturing processes sat in plain sight. We knew what went into the objects we owned because we saw them being produced. Now the things that determine whether a product will last are completely hidden from view.

Meanwhile, the same forces pushed each of us deeper into narrower fields of work. We do one thing for a living and outsource the rest. But the ability to judge how well a thing is made comes from having made things. The fewer kinds of things we make, the fewer kinds of things we can judge.

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At first glance, a car factory hardly seems like a matter of military security. But the possible establishment of Chinese manufacturer SAIC in Ferrol, on Spain’s Atlantic coast, raises a major security concern. What happens when a company linked to the Chinese state sets up operations next to infrastructure used by NATO forces?

=> cunning Chinese, stupid Europeans.

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An Italian jeweler was recently convicted for shooting to death two of three thieves who had just ransacked his shop.

The video report below says that the thieves “attacked” the jeweler during the robbery, and also tied up his wife and daughter. Under Italian law, however, that was not enough to excuse his lethal response as an act of self-defense.

Suppose the robbers had, say, pistol-whipped one of the women. Would that be enough to justify the shooting? Or what if they had raped his daughter?

I don’t know the answer to those questions. In the more northerly parts of Europe, the state generally holds an absolute majority on violence, so that nothing ever justifies a lethal act of self-defense. But Italy may not be that insane — not yet.

Watch it.

Britain’s descent into Turd World status is paved with wasteful spending of taxpayer money.

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Yes, it’s AI content. That doesn’t make it wrong.

The Foundry.

It has never been easier to feel virtuous without making much of an effort.

Put pronouns in an email signature, repost the slogan of the day, or join the online denunciation of someone who used the wrong word. In many circles, such gestures are expected. A person can take part with little at stake and still come away feeling that he has done something morally worthwhile.

The trouble begins when support for fashionable causes is treated as proof of good character.

The Foundry.

Government schools depend on Federal giveaways, and those depend on how many students schools can sign up for the programs, even if they have to lie about qualifications.

“The total fertility rate in California has dropped from 2.21 children per woman in 2007 to 1.48 in 2023, well below the replacement level of 2.1 necessary to keep a population from declining.”

Migration has also played a role. Nearly 10 million Californians have moved to other states since 2010, and California currently has the nation’s largest net domestic outflow.

The implications extend beyond California schools facing potential downsizing. A shrinking younger population could eventually mean fewer workers supporting a growing older population, potentially straining the state’s economy and contributing to labor shortages.

If California’s population continues to lag behind growth in other states, Lafortune said, the state could eventually lose congressional representation.

And Lafortune does not expect the trend to reverse anytime soon.

Read it.

Tell me you’re a conquered country without telling me you’re a conquered country.

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Tim Pool pulls it all together.

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The King is dead; Long live the King!

Or so the media declare as Britain faces up to its seventh Prime minister in a decade. The seemingly ritualistic axing of our head of government has been accompanied by all the usual rites. The choir of voices declaring “The grownups are back in charge”, the scuttling of MPs as they preach the virtues of their latest leader with the new gospel in their hands and hopes of promotion on their mind; and the insistence by all that this will herald a new age of politics. That this time things will be different!

But in and among these rantings and ravings is the same essential diagnosis. Britain doesn’t work. Its institutions are out of date; its practices out of step and its state model out of time. And aren’t they right? Isn’t it true that in place of efficient execution we’ve had unparalleled chaos at every level of government, with most ministers lucky to last two years at the head of their departments? That instead of a state that builds, we’ve got a state that consults, one that spent fifteen years planning a railway to Manchester before abandoning it, having sunk £2.3bn on a stretch of the railway that got cancelled. A railway which, in the stretch we are still building, will cost more than Britain’s entire nuclear deterrent.

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

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A young British man walked out of a Manchester shop with a brand new baseball bat still sealed in its factory plastic packaging. Within moments, multiple police officers were on him, treating the purchase as a weapon and detaining him in full view of the street.

The footage, which spread rapidly on Sunday, captures the absolute state of policing in modern Britain. Officers challenge the lad, physical contact follows, backup including motorbike units arrives, and he ends up in a police van.

The bat’s plastic covering remains clearly visible throughout. No claim has emerged that he brandished it, threatened anyone, or used it for anything other than carrying it home after a legitimate purchase.

Under the Prevention of Crime Act 1953, officers can stop and check items that could be used as offensive weapons in public if there is no clear reasonable excuse. A brand-new bat still in its shop packaging, purchased moments earlier, is the definition of a reasonable excuse for any ordinary person. Yet the response was immediate and multi-officer.

This incident does not stand alone. It fits a documented pattern that has played out repeatedly under the current climate of policing.

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

Read it.

Jesús Domínguez pushes through thick brush lining a rugged mountainside with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and a grenade fastened to his leather belt.

He marches alongside a pack of camouflage-clad men patrolling the rural stretches of Mexico against one of the country’s most powerful drug cartels.

Armed with military-grade weapons smuggled from the U.S., the 50-man force is one of dozens of “autodefensa,” or “self-defense,” groups that have emerged over the past decade in Mexico to fight increasingly sophisticated cartels in areas far out of the reach of security forces.

“The government doesn’t care about us, and it’s impossible for our arms to compete with (the cartel’s),” said Domínguez, 34, from a watch post overlooking the mountains of Guerrero state. “They come at you with a ton of force, so you need to respond with force…If you don’t, they’ll overwhelm you.”

The Telegraph (UK).

A driver has been denied car insurance because he put “Jesus loves you” stickers on his car.

Simeon Chandra was told his insurer had “declined the modification” and needed photographic evidence that they had been removed.

Photographs show the 35-year-old’s 2009 Nissan Pixo with the words “Jesus loves you” on one side, and “Jesus loves you v much” on the other.

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

Read it.

Perhaps shooting them in the leg would have got the message through.

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When the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order in Trump v. Barbara, it settled for now in the courts who becomes a citizen at birth. It did not settle—and could not settle—whether American citizenship may be bought and sold.

It remains well within the power of Congress and the president to shut down the contracts, clinics, agencies, and visas that convert foreign money into American citizenship—without amending the Constitution or defying the Court. Until the Court revisits the issue, the political branches are solely responsible for overseeing the marketplace, and they have no excuse to delay.

If you doubt that such a marketplace exists, meet the Simpson triplets.

The Telegraph (UK).

So that is that, apparently. Crisis over. Nothing to see here.

That was the smug verdict in much of the commentary over the weekend. Tens of thousands of people may have crossed illegally into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta.

But when Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, declared shortly afterwards that “practically all” of them had returned to Morocco, relief quickly gave way to mockery – even though almost nobody had bothered to verify Madrid’s claims.

Giorgia Meloni’s outrage, and her suggestion that Schengen free movement with Spain might have to be temporarily suspended? Wildly overblown, apparently. So too was the criticism coming from other European capitals.

German liberal weekly Die Zeit denounced what it called “fact-free Spain-bashing” and went further still: “The new arrivals were returned quickly and without bureaucracy, so precisely what conservative and Right-wing parties always demand has happened.”

It would be comforting if that were true. It is not.

The Telegraph (UK).

Ministers have been accused of launching a “stealth clawback” of military pensions, leaving veterans who claim benefits thousands of pounds worse off.

Hey, they gotta get the money they spend from somewhere.

Officials at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have informed veterans that their military pension is considered “unearned income” and will therefore result in a pound-for-pound reduction in benefits.

In some cases this has resulted in veterans being ordered to repay tens of thousands of pounds, as well as having their monthly benefit payments reduced.