The American Mind.

Zohran Mamdani is a 33-year-old New York State Assembly member from Astoria, Queens (Assembly District 36), the son of the academic Mahmood Mamdani and the movie director Mira Nair. Following a short-lived career as a rap musician, he emerged as a leading candidate in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary in 2025, running as a Democratic Socialist with a sweepingly left-wing platform. Mamdani’s campaign focused on economic policies: he vowed to freeze rents, establish city-run grocery stores, expand free childcare and transit, push a US$30 minimum wage, and replace traditional policing with a “Department of Community Safety.”

Mamdani quickly garnered support from prominent progressive figures and organisations. Senator Bernie Sanders endorsed him with the explicit aim of blocking former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s comeback bid. Cuomo, who entered the mayoral race following his 2021 resignation as governor, is Mamdani’s chief rival. Mamdani was also backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and allied leftist groups; US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also lent him her support. Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment coalesced behind Cuomo: Michael Bloomberg endorsed the ex-governor, as did many labour unions and centrist Democrats.

On 24 June, Mamdani shocked political commentators by finishing first in the primary, ahead of a crowded field, winning roughly 43.5 percent of first-choice votes, while Cuomo trailed at about 36 percent. Cuomo conceded on election night, as soon as the votes had been counted. The result was a political earthquake: Mamdani, a second-term assemblyman from Queens, had defeated a former governor and scion of a New York political dynasty. He is now the Democratic nominee for mayor, making him the overwhelming favourite to win the mayoral election in deep-blue New York City.

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The status quo has pushed everything to an extreme of hollowed-out instability to maintain a superficial appearance of normalcy and stability. But it’s all fake.

The phrase that best describes the present era is hollowed out. By hollowed out I mean the exterior facade still looks pretty much the same as it did in the past, but the internal structure has corroded / eroded to the point that little remains of what provided strength and stability. What’s left is the illusion of stability.

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George Soros’ influential Open Society Foundation (OSF) is under fire, following a new report alleging that the organization has financially supported groups with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist networks. The findings point to a complex web of civil society funding allegedly used to promote political and religious influence under the banner of human rights and anti-racism.

The report claims that “millions of euros in funding” from OSF was directed to organizations in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. The money originating from OSF has flowed to organizations that “function as front organizations or intermediaries for the Muslim Brotherhood in their respective regions.”

In some instances, the report claims the funding exceeded $1 million per group, The report states that part of the funding was instead used for “political or ideological influence” and, in certain cases, allegedly supported extremist networks.

In the Palestinian territories, organizations such as Al-Haq and Al-Mezan are cited as recipients of OSF money. The report notes that leaders of these groups have ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is designated as a terrorist organization by both the EU and the United States.

The American Mind.

The federal budget today resembles a time bomb with a Medicare card taped to it. Entitlement spending consumes the vast majority of federal outlays, and future obligations (mostly from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) far exceed $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Reform is overdue, but politically radioactive. The welfare state is no longer a safety net—it is a gravitational force pulling federal priorities inward.

Sixty-nine million Americans received $1.5 trillion in Social Security payments in 2024. Nearly $2 trillion was spent on Medicare and Medicaid combined. Welfare outlays were $1.6 trillion. The magnitude of these numbers is not simply staggering, but beyond comprehension. For comparative scale, the outlay for military salaries and housing was $176.2 billion for fiscal year 2024. Federal employees who weren’t military were paid $384 billion.

This is obviously irresponsible and unsustainable. Treating Social Security as anything other than a general fund and part of the federal income tax structure is dishonest. The program is a general fund in, and a general fund out. This was once an important debate—but it is no longer.

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Police in Berlin are urging citizens to report each other over suspected “hate speech” online, as part of a nationwide crackdown that critics say resembles East Germany’s surveillance state.

The clampdown comes amid growing public support for the anti-establishment Alternative for Germany (AfD), particularly in the east of the country, where the party has made significant electoral gains.

The latest escalation came on Wednesday, June 25th, when police carried out coordinated raids across the country, searching homes and confiscating the electronics of 170 people over social media comments that either fall in the general ‘hate speech’ category or just insult sitting politicians.

Just like the Nazis!

UPDATE: Germany vs. Free Speech: Three Thumbs Up? That’ll be €1,800

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No, the Constitution wasn’t officially suspended in 1933. But it was gagged, blindfolded, and tied to a chair while the federal government handed itself sweeping emergency powers and redefined “freedom” into a kind of bureaucratic improv comedy routine.

They didn’t declare martial law on paper because that would have looked bad. Instead, they declared it in practice and gave it a haircut, a press pass, and a desk job. Most Americans never noticed. Most still don’t.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you say, “WTF???”

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A major theft of copper signalling cables near Lille-Europe station has disrupted Eurostar services, causing cancellations and lengthy delays across routes from London to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam.

Around 600?metres of cable were stolen, prompting French railway company SNCF to impose speed limits and reroute high-speed trains onto conventional lines, extending journey times by up to 90?minutes.

At least six London–Paris departures were cancelled during the morning on Wednesday, June 25th, while other services continued with significant delays.

Passengers were offered free exchanges, refunds, and onboard water supplies, and urged to postpone travel due to ongoing disruptions.

The delays followed the previous day’s tragedy when two people were struck by trains on the same line, forcing a temporary shutdown and stranding passengers overnight.

Think of it as Diversity in action.

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As rents skyrocket and the cost of living keeps climbing, a new study from Highland Cabinetry aims to answer a simple but critical question: are America’s most expensive cities actually worth it? Spoiler: not really.

The study analyzed a wide range of metrics — including housing costs, income, safety, traffic, pollution, and unemployment — using data from sources like the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Zillow. The goal? To identify the cities where people are paying a premium and getting a whole lot of hassle in return.

Newark, NJ claimed the dubious honor of being the most overpriced city in the U.S., earning a perfect — and in this case, perfectly awful — score of 100, according to Highland Cabinetry.

Living here will cost you over $5,100 a month, and for what? A safety index barely above 24, one of the worst in the country. Median household income is a modest $53,818, far below cities with similar costs. If you want the luxury of paying big-city prices for small-city problems, Newark’s got you covered.

Coming in hot at number two is New York City, which scored 98.17. It has the highest real estate price tag in the country — a staggering $18,402 per square foot in the city center. But with its famously clogged streets, questionable safety (index: 49.16), and a median income lower than in L.A. or D.C., you’re not exactly getting what you pay for. As the report shows, “Cost of living alone doesn’t define the value of a city.”

The Times (UK).

Almost a third of Scottish households have used private healthcare in the past two years, a survey reveals, as doctors’ leaders warn the NHS is “dying”

The majority of those who paid for treatment said they did so because waiting times on the NHS were too long.

Iain Kennedy, chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) Scotland, will tell a major UK conference on Tuesday that Scottish society is divided between those “languishing” in line for treatment and those who can afford to pay to access care more swiftly.

Imagine if your doctor’s office were run like the DMV. That’s what government-provided healthcare is like.

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Investigations by the newspaper Welt am Sonntag reveal that millions of euros in public funds have been allocated to organizations participating in an initiative by Germany’s Ministry for Family Affairs to promote social cohesion. Some of these organizations have made openly antisemitic statements or maintain ties to extremist environments.

One of the most striking cases is that of the group Teilseiend, based in Heidelberg. Its founder, Isa Koray Panz, went so far as to describe “Jewish Zionists” as “a disease” and rhetorically asked on social media whether Germany was becoming “a Jewish state,” accompanying his words with images of the Hanukkah menorah in front of the Brandenburg Gate. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Panz described the German Chancellor’s statement as “disgusting.” Despite these expressions, the Teilseiend project received, up to the end of 2024, part of a €2.8 million grant as part of the CLAIM alliance against Islamophobia, which continues to receive public funding in 2025.

Another organization under scrutiny is BIWOC Rising, which received €800,000 for a coworking space aimed at migrant women. Its director, Loubna Messaoudi, celebrated the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7th as “resistance against colonialism” and compared a police operation in Germany to practices of the Nazi regime. Members of her advisory board deny Israel’s right to exist and refer to Israeli settlers using dehumanizing language.

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On Sunday, June?22nd, a significant anti immigration protest swept through Dublin, with thousands of people voicing their strong discontent with the ruling government’s pro-migration stance.

Police had to set up barriers in the Irish capital to separate the protests from a simultaneous anti-racism march.

Protestors carried Irish tricolour flags and waved banners reading “Ireland is Full” and “Ireland for the Irish.”

The protest was fueled by growing anger toward government policies, which many blame for exacerbating housing shortages, overstretching healthcare, and inflating living costs.

Organisers said that it was the largest march to date on the issue, estimating that tens of thousands took part.

Three women attending the march told Gript that they had lived in inner city Dublin most or all of their lives and they felt “ordinary people are being pushed out of the city.”

BioRxiv.

Writers from Darwin to Dawkins have noted that, in humans, women are considered the “beautiful sex,” whereas in most species, it is the males who display more elaborate and visually striking traits. This reversal of typical sex roles is a peculiarity of the human species and has been the focus of extensive theoretical debate. Yet, it has never been systematically examined or empirically verified. Here, we present a comprehensive cross-cultural meta-analysis of same-sex and opposite-sex ratings of facial attractiveness from around the globe. Our findings confirm the existence of a robust “Gender Attractiveness Gap” (GAP), with female faces rated significantly more attractive than male faces across rater genders, cultural backgrounds, and portrayed ethnicities. Notably, the effect is more pronounced among female than male raters, suggesting gender-specific modulation. We show that approximately two-thirds of the GAP is mediated by structural facial sex-typicality. However, this mediation is asymmetric: controlling for facial dimorphism substantially reduces the attractiveness of female—but not male—faces, indicating a specific aesthetic preference for structural femininity by both male and female raters. This suggests that attractiveness judgments are driven by general aesthetic evaluation processes that extend beyond heterosexual mate choice. We also observe a general tendency for greater stringency among male raters. Overall, these findings contribute to evolutionary psychology and social perception, offering new insights into mate selection theories and underscoring the importance of accounting for gender-specific and cultural influences in attractiveness judgments.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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As they do.

Every day, in every way, Britain is reminding Americans of the value of a written constitution with a Bill of Rights.

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I’m thinking that Ukraine really wishes they’d kept those nukes they gave up after the fall of the Soviet Union.

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Africa, a continent rich in resources and resilience, is a mostly silent battleground in a geopolitical contest. While global attention fixates on the Middle East, Ukraine, or Taiwan, China, under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is reshaping Africa’s future through loans, infrastructure, and control of critical minerals. This isn’t just Africa’s story—it’s a test case for a global model that trades sovereignty for dependency. Democratic nations must counter with partnerships that prioritize African agency, learning from past mistakes to avoid repeating them.

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June 17, 2025, the recent 53rd anniversary of the Watergate break-in, should remind us of the scandal’s scurrilous aftermath. What was promised to be a new millennium of aggressive, yet punctilious, journalism turned out to be a continuation of the Washington Post‘s reckless, essentially untruthful, Watergate reporting, clearly biased in favor of Democrats.

No surprises there.

While Republicans in the wake of Watergate vowed to be beyond reproach, like Caesar’s wife, they were indeed generally rectitudinous but yet continued the same stupidity that ruined the Nixon administration. Because neither side addressed these failures, they persist today.

We have written extensively about the Post‘s fraud during Watergate, but not enough about the Nixon Administration’s idiocy in dealing with what should have been nothing more than an embarrassing dustup.

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Need more evidence to prove how much influence the Soros empire wields over the media? Then The New York Times’s, er, heart-throbbing excuse for a news item over crown prince Alex’s wedding to corrupt former Hillary Clinton aide and disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s ex-wife Huma Abedin could probably serve as Exhibit A. Times writer Tammy LaGorce spent a whopping 2,010 words trying to twist the union of two of the most notorious people in American politics into some kind of fairy tale.

Fortunately she’s too old to breed, so we won’t be faced with the prospect of a third generation of Soroses getting busy making our country into even more of a shit-hole than it already is.

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America’s highways have become not just a mess but a national security threat, as the Biden–Harris regime oversaw a four-year surge in migrants obtaining non-domiciled Commercial Driver’s Licenses (CDLs). The situation has grown so dire that President Trump recently signed an executive order requiring all CDL holders to demonstrate English proficiency—a policy slated to take effect next week.

The latest chaos unfolded on a stretch of highway in northern Baltimore County, where a truck driver identified as Christian Ramos, 28, of Aurora, Illinois, went on an alleged shooting spree Wednesday night, according to Maryland State Police.

Been there. Suffered that. I still wake up every morning at 2:30 a.m. expecting a production support call.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

A French member of Parliament has urged American authorities to reverse a decision to deny him entry to the United States, after he said they rejected his request for a visa to meet with progressive lawmakers and intellectuals about life under the Trump presidency.

Pouria Amirshahi, a member of the Green party, said he had planned to travel to Washington D.C., New York and Boston this month. The trip was supposed to be the first taken by a member of La Digue, or The Dike, a group that he created a month ago with a handful of other leftist and centrist French lawmakers, to “counter the spread of neo-fascism” in liberal democracies.

At a news conference at the French National Assembly on Thursday morning, Mr. Amirshahi said he had told U.S. authorities that the purpose of his trip was to ask lawmakers, activists, professors and journalists to understand “what the new situation was in the country since Mr. Trump came to power.”

He was set to meet with progressive lawmakers, he said, including Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, and Representative Maxine Dexter, Democrat of Oregon. But, he said, on Tuesday, he was told that his visa application had been rejected.

Does anyone doubt that he wants in the U.S. to meet with Trump-haters and cause trouble? Why not just let an ayatollah come in and wander around for a few weeks?

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The health and well-being of Americans are under attack from Mexico. We have spent hundreds of millions of federal dollars in a largely futile effort to block the billions of gallons of raw sewage and toxic chemicals dumped into the Tijuana River by an irresponsible third-world neighbor. The Mexican government has pledged, but not yet delivered, a reduction of only a fraction of that amount.

Mexico’s inefficient water use now routinely puts them in violation of their obligations to Texas agriculture under the 1944 Water Rights Treaty.

On immigration, crime and mutual security, Mexico’s current president seems to believe that the 5% of her country’s economy comprised entirely of remittances from Mexicans living and working (certainly not all legally) in the USA is an entitlement with zero reciprocal obligations.

Victor Davis Hanson has chronicled the uniformly negative impact of the importation of Mexican cultural dispositions towards law, vehicle liability insurance, property rights and waste disposal. Cartels run Mexican towns and regions with impunity.

Parasitic losers waving Mexican flags while rioting in our decaying urban centers are more reflective of their nation of origin than they realize.

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One of the defining aspects of Ukraine’s strategy in the war against Russia is escalation – Not so much in terms of damage to Russia, but in terms of western involvement. Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky has made it his primary mission to convince western allies that their direct intervention in the war is absolutely necessary. Why? He asserts that Ukraine is the “guardian at the gate” supposedly preventing Russia from steamrolling through Europe.

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I don’t recall that a Democrat Congresscritter was ever run off the road, even by a Republican.

Violence is the Left’s toolbox.

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Whether they’re doing it on purpose or out of just plain ineptitude, Illinois’ political leaders have been slowly destroying this state. More recently, they’ve moved into overdrive.

What we’re talking about is all the wealth the state is giving up by pushing out wealthier taxpayers and inviting less wealthy people in. Not to mention the flood of illegal immigrants that have been “welcomed” to Illinois, many fully dependent on the state.

Not only is Illinois a net loser of people to other states, but the people leaving Illinois make far more than the people coming into Illinois, making things even worse.

The taxpayers that left – about 156,000 of them in 2022 – made on average $124,000 in income, according to data based on the IRS’ annual taxpayer migration report. In contrast, the 111,000 taxpayers that moved into Illinois made on average only $86,000.

That’s a massive $38,000 difference per person lost – a gap that has accelerated significantly in recent years. Compare that to 2010, when the difference was about $5,500. Illinois is increasingly chasing out its wealthy.

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A large-scale drug smuggling tunnel that connects Tijuana to San Diego was discovered and disabled by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents this week, the agency reported.

CBP agents who were assigned to the San Diego area first discovered the tunnel while it was under construction. The exit point was set to be in a nearby warehouse in Otay Mesa, about 1,000 feet inside the U.S. border. The tunnel was shown to have an electrical system, ventilation, and a railway track for moving large quantities of narcotics.

“As we continue to strengthen the nation’s air, and maritime border security, it’s not surprising that foreign terrorist organizations would resort to underground routes,” said Jeffrey D. Stalnaker, acting chief patrol agent of the San Diego sector. “Disruption of narcotics smuggling tunnels is critical to protecting American lives. I’m grateful for the exceptional work of the tunnel team agents who placed themselves in danger, as well as the cooperation of our Mexican law enforcement partners.”

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Last week, a young Dutch woman was arrested outside an abortion clinic in Utrecht in the Netherlands. Thirty-five weeks pregnant herself, she had offered leaflets to two people; one took a brochure, the other declined. The police arrived and, without evidence, arrested the woman on fictitious allegations of “disturbing the peace.” It was the ninth recent arrest made for peacefully engaging in pro-life outreach outside an abortion facility, even though it is not against the law to do so.

It is the third arrest for the young woman—who chose to remain unidentified—and at times she has been held in jail for three to six hours. Two other Dutch women have been similarly arrested three times each. Dirkje de Ruiter, for example, was arrested last year outside a clinic in Utrecht before she had even passed out a single leaflet; the police informed her that, despite doing nothing illegal, her mere presence constituted “disorder.”

De Ruiter had been previously arrested in Rotterdam; a couple turned away from the clinic as the officers were confronting her. “When I arrived at the police station, all my things had to be handed in, and I was put in a cell measuring 2 metres by 1.5 metres,” she told me. “Some of my clothes had to come off, and I was given a blanket against the cold. In the cell I thanked God for the life that had been saved… I was not afraid.” Again: De Ruiter had not broken any laws.

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As unrest once again disrupts parts of Los Angeles, many small business owners are asking a painful question: should we leave California?

For some, the answer is yes. But for a growing number, the real problem is they can’t.

According to a February 2024 survey of 80,000 small business owners by PublicSquare and RedBalloon, only 13% of California small businesses say they’re happy with their current location — nearly 40% lower than the national average. Nationally, almost half (47.7%) of business owners report being satisfied and having no plans to relocate.

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The German city of Bargteheide has scrapped plans to demolish a senior citizens’ residential complex on Nelkenweg after vacating all residents, opting instead to house asylum seekers in the building.

Former residents had been told the building was uninhabitable and were forced to relocate. However, following an inspection, just five units will undergo renovation, while the remainder will be used as-is by the new arrivals.

The Times (UK).

Rachel Reeves is considering watering down plans to scrap the non-dom tax regime amid concerns about an exodus of wealthy individuals.

Oh noes! The sheep are no just haning around waiting to be fleeced! Who could have predicted tha?!

The chancellor is weighing up reversing her decision to charge inheritance tax on the global assets of non-domiciles: UK residents whose permanent home is abroad.

All of your money belongs to the government, unless they benevolently allow you to keep some.

The new rules are due to take effect in April but there are concerns that it will lead to wealthy people leaving the UK for regimes with lower taxes.

Oh, ya think?

The imposition of inheritance tax is viewed as particularly onerous.

As indeed it is. That money has already been taxed once, and you’re going to tax it again just because you can. “Oh, you died. Well, then, give us half.”

American Bar Association sues Trump administration over executive orders targeting law firms (Gregory Svirnovskiy/Politico)  I’d love to know what argument the make for having standing for such a suit.

ABA sues Trump over series of orders targeting law firms (Rebecca Beitsch/The Hill)

MAGA Whips Up Conspiracy Theories To Muddy An Act Of Right-Wing Violence (Kate Riga/Talking Points Memo)  MAGA is apparently a large movie villain like the Pillsbury Doughboy in GHOSTBUSTERS. Makes you wonder what these guys are smoking.

The Trump Mobile T1 Phone looks both bad and impossible (David Pierce/The Verge)

CNN Finds Trump’s Birthday Suspicious, Upset Speech Was Non-Political

It sure looks like anti-Trump protest fatigue has vanished (Zeeshan Aleem/MSNBC)  I’m sure they like to think that.

White House denies reporting by Guardian on VA benefits: ‘Totally FALSE story’ (Joseph Choi/The Hill)

Judge orders many NIH grants restored, calling cancellation unlawful (Joseph Choi/The Hill)  Because, as we all know, once someone has received money from the Federal government they are ENTITLED to that amount (or more) forever after.

Scoop: U.S. tells allies it won’t join war unless Iran targets Americans (Barak Ravid/Axios)  Kinda shoots the “Trump the Warmonger” meme right square in the ass, doesn’t it? Not that the Narrative Media are going to spend more than a trivial effort reporting it.

Trump Has Reawakened the Resistance (Michelle Goldberg/New York Times)  I’m sure he might even notice.

Trump’s Cuts to N.I.H. Grants Focused on Minority Groups Are Illegal, Judge Rules (Zach Montague/New York Times)  Ah, ‘minority groups, God’s Chosen.

FIFA Club World Cup Ticket Sales TANK After DHS Says Agents Will Be At Stadium (Ryan Grenoble/HuffPost)  A lot of guilty consciences out there.

Former Coast Guard officer charged with threatening to kill President Trump (Scott Macfarlane/CBS News)

Home-goods companies prepare new Trump-linked products (Shelby Talcott/Semafor)  Can’t let Trump get all the merch sales.

Trump Renews Embrace of Putin Amid Ongoing Rift With Allies (New York Times)  Embrace!

Trump’s Trade and Tax Policies Start to Stall U.S. Battery Boom (Rebecca F. Elliott/New York Times)  OH NOES! WHERE WILL WE GET OUR ELECTRIC CAR BATTERIES?

Trump Wants Iran to Give Up Entirely on Nuclear Weapons  As does any same person.

Only Nonviolence Will Beat Trump (New York Times)  Not even that.

Republicans Fight Uphill in Virginia Race That Will Test Anger at Trump (Reid J. Epstein/New York Times)  Because everything is All About Trump. If they didn’t have Trump, the wouldn’t have anything.

Trump ‘Reamed Out’ Hegseth for Flop Birthday Parade: Author (Julia Ornedo/The Daily Beast)  And of course some random ‘author’ talking to the Daily Beast can mind-read Trump perfectly.

White House Eyes Rarely Used Power to Override Congress on Spending (Tony Romm/New York Times)

Playbook: Trump’s moment of truth (Politico)

Trump Mobile Joins the Oval Office Sales Parade (Timothy L. O’Brien/Bloomberg)  Making money is okay (10% for the Big Guy!) unless it’s Trump doing it.

What happened to “states’ rights”? (Stephen Robinson/Public Notice)  Democrats. Starting with Wilson.

Trump is deporting way fewer people than Obama did. Why? (Nicole Narea/Vox)  Because many of them are self-deporting, fearing that Trump will eventually get around to kicking them out; nobody thought that about Obama.

Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA’s Gamble on America’s Drugs (ProPublica)

Isolationism is the same as appeasement – and it’s keeping Trump, Netanyahu from transforming the Middle East (Mark Levin/New York Post)

South Africa Built a Medical Research Powerhouse. Trump Cuts Have Demolished It. (Stephanie Nolen/New York Times)  Because, as we all know, medical research in South Africa is TOTALLY the responsibility of the U.S. government–and the U.S. taxpayer.

Trump says he won’t call Gov. Tim Walz after Minnesota shootings: ‘He’s a mess’ (Megan Lebowitz/NBC News)  Not his circus, not his monkeys.

‘It would ‘waste time’: Trump says he won’t call Minnesota Gov. after lawmaker shootings (Sarah D. Wire/USA Today) What’s he gonna say? “Tim, I think you suck.” “Donald, I think you suck.” “Nice talking to you.”

Dems Plot to Stop Trump’s ‘Pocket Rescission’

‘Trump Is America’s Hitler’: The Left’s 10 Most Outrageous Comments About LA Riots

House Republican, Democrat move to limit Trump from entering Iran war (Andrew Solender/Axios)

Anti-ICE Riots Cost Los Angeles Nearly $20 Million  “We’ll show you! We’ll burn our own stuff down! So there!”

The White House Wants to Numb Voters to This (Ronald Brownstein/Bloomberg)  Narrative Media lies?

Trump’s $4 Trillion Plan to Raise Your Energy Bills (Joseph Romm/Rolling Stone)

The violence and incitement are coming from Trump (Jennifer Rubin/The Contrarian)  Yeah, he personally popped those three Democrats in Minnesota. (Jennifer Rubin loses her shit.)

NAACP Announces President Trump will not be invited to 116th National Convention (NAACP)  Good. Saves him the trouble of refusing to attend the meeting of an explicitly racist group.

MAGA voices spread falsehoods to link Minnesota shooter to Democrats (Avery Lotz/Axios)  I wonder what part of “Appointed by Tim Walz” he doesn’t understand.

Donald Trump Ripped As Vladimir Putin’s PR Guy After G7 Whine (Lee Moran/HuffPost)

Trump tries to smash sports team owners’ tax break (Alex Isenstadt/Axios)  Okay, explain to me why billionaire sports team owners ought to have a special tax break.

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President Donald J. Trump is right. Too many pharmaceuticals are too damn high, especially compared to the flea-market prices that foreign patients pay for the same drugs. Dr. Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow with the Pacific Research Institute, estimated last month that a 30-day supply of the weight-loss drug Ozempic costs $418.98 in the USA. But it’s a mere $95.30 in the UK—a 77.25% discount. Jardiance, for cardiovascular diseases $256.66 per month here. In Canada: $57.65. That’s roughly 77.5% off.

Trump’s new Most Favored Nation policy aims to bring U.S. drug bills closer to those overseas. Simply put, this initiative demands that these manufacturers sell “all brand products” at their lowest prices among major Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries.

This illusionary bargain would karate chop the revenues of American drug companies. They typically spend $2.9 billion to bring each new drug to market. These firms also try to recoup losses fueled by the countless once-promising potential therapies that die anonymously in their test tubes. Most Favored Nation is like telling Hewlett-Packard that its $1,500 laptops must sell for just $200— the price that MS-13 quotes for such a freshly stolen computer.

ZMan points the way.

Thirty years ago, when Bill Clinton was caught chasing interns around the Oval Office, many assumed it was the end of him. Instead, he not only wriggled free of the scandal, and many other scandals, but he seemed to be stronger for it. The reason is Clinton was an extraordinarily clever man. He was not a smart man, in the sense that he could anticipate and avoid problems. Smart men do not have sex with interns. He was clever like a fox in that he could always find a way to slip out of a trap.

The Clintons, of course, set the tone for post-Cold War politics. They brought to Washington the style of politics that is now normal. They formalized both narrative politics, which relies on abductive reasoning to win debates. They also introduced things like media spin and media jamming where they sought to control the narratives at any given moment by overwhelming the system with their messaging. The Clintons made politics into a guerilla media war.

This sort of politics selects for clever over smart. When everything is done in the moment, there is no patience for deliberative politics. In the current Middle East crisis, for example, the information space is controlled by actors chanting rehearsed lines to the other actors in the media. The mainstream media is a Greek chorus and whoever can get the chorus chanting their chants wins. In such an environment there is no room for well thought out arguments and serious debate.

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Well, the tensions over mass illegal immigration in the US are finally coming to a boil after 4 years of open borders under the Biden Administration and six months of obstruction by Democrat politicians and judges interfering with deportations.

…

Think about it for a moment and ask yourself: Why is the rest of the world in our business? Why do they care if we have tighter controls on borders and stricter vetting for immigration? Why don’t foreign governments also complain about Chinese immigration standards, or Saudi Arabia’s standards, or even Australia’s standards? Why does everyone else think they have a say in how America handles immigration?

There are, of course, ideological agendas at play here, but I believe the primary reason for foreign meddling is economic, specifically when it comes to Central America and South America.

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A man will sacrifice his happiness for his family. A woman will sacrifice her family for her happiness. “Live. Laugh. Love. Divorce husband and take half of his stuff.” Soon to be a major motion picture … NOT.

And people wonder why men aren’t getting married and having kids.

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Over 150 years the concept of the Great American Novel was invented in The Nation magazine. The mission of this proposed literary “American epic” was to capture “the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence.” Today, The Nation is a hodgepodge of woke rants. The magazine no longer believes in the greatness of America. And how can there be a great American novel without a great America?

America, as a recent essay at the magazine mocking the idea of the Great American Novel puts it, is an “absurdity.” The American novels that the magazine and its leftist ilk praise are either outrages or absurdities. The topics under discussion are identity, race and class, that indeed appear to make any notion of a single America singularly absurd.

That now ancient essay calling for a Great American Novel in the aftermath of the Union’s supremacy in the Civil War had assumed that there was to be a unified America, but the Confederacy’s multicultural great-grandchildren reject the Union as anything but a tool for forcing their preferred radical policies on the country.

But if indeed there is no America, if we’re just Yugoslavia with a variety of unhappy warring tribes struggling against oppression, why not break the whole thing up? Without the rationale of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the conviction that America is a grand experiment worth fighting for, why fight for her at all?

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California’s soft-on-crime approach, along with pandemic-era actions, may have contributed to a rise in retail theft from 2014 to 2023, according to a report published by the state Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) on June 12.

In the report, “Retail Theft in California: Looking Back at a Decade of Change,” the LAO found that retail theft in the state rose after a slight decline during the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in an overall increase of 11 percent during the nine-year timeframe.

Time to leave.

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Following California Democrat Senator Alex Padilla’s unhinged meltdown where he aggressively confronted DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Democrats all apparently received a firmware update with a fresh talking point.

Padilla lurched unannounced toward Noem, ranting and raving about mass deportations, before security quickly intervened.

Padilla’s behaviour was so insane that even CNN denounced it, praising the security officials who confronted him and took him down.

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California’s soft-on-crime approach, along with pandemic-era actions, may have contributed to a rise in retail theft from 2014 to 2023, according to a report published by the state Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) on June 12.

Time to leave.

The Times (UK).

Breakthrough drugs for Alzheimer’s will be refused for use on the NHS this week, denying the treatments to about 70,000 patients in England.

Lecanemab, made by Eisai, and donanemab, made by Eli Lilly, are the first drugs proven to slow the underlying cause of dementia, clearing toxic amyloid protein from the brain and delaying cognitive decline.

How about that great government-provided health care, eh? Don’t you wish we had a system like that here in the U.S.?

Well, it’s coming….

UPDATE: After 77 years and another £29bn, NHS chiefs fear public losing patience

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Friday 13 June may prove to be a turning point in the history of the Middle East, with significant repercussions for global history. For the first time since the Islamists under Ruhollah Khomeini took power in Tehran—from whence they have exported Islamist doctrine, revolution, and terrorism around the world—a Western power, Israel, has attacked the Ayatollahs’ regime on their home turf and shaken it to the core. Israeli fighter-bombers continue to pound strategic sites, targeting Iran’s military and scientific elite with virtual impunity, humiliating the regime and instilling hope in the country’s urban masses, who despise and fear their theocratic masters. At the same time, Israel is completing the process of dismantling Iran’s proxy “ring of fire”—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi rebels, and the Assad regime in Syria—that has harassed Israel for decades. The continuing Israeli aerial assault is steadily demolishing Iran’s nuclear weapons project, installation after installation. Over the coming weeks, Israel may well devastate the country’s oil industry, which is the economic mainstay of the regime. Regime change in Tehran is definitely in the air—and the fact that they have significantly reinforced the police and security presence in Iran’s towns and cities is a clear indication that the regime fears for its life.

As long as Islam exists, ‘jihadis’ will be a problem. It’s been that way for 1400 years, and there is no indication that it will change. Whether our Ruling Class will continue prating how ‘peaceful’ Muslims are while ignoring the mass murder, or whether they will wake up and decide to do something about it, is an exercise left for the reader. 

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‘Dormant’ means ‘Democrats ignored it’.

Federal law enforcement officials are using a long-dormant law to detain immigrants and charge them with willfully failing to register with the government.

Under the Alien Registration Act, passed in 1940 because of fears about immigrants’ loyalty to the United States, almost all noncitizens must register with the government and submit fingerprints, reports Politico on Saturday.

The law has remained on the books since that time, but has remained dormant until President Donald Trump issued orders to enforce the law. As a result, since April, people have been arrested in Louisiana; Arizona; Montana; Alabama; Texas; and Washington, D.C., and charged with willful “failure to register” under the federal registration law.

The New York Times, the Narative Paper of Record.

Iran’s senior leaders had been planning for more than a week for an Israeli attack should nuclear talks with the United States fail. But they made one enormous miscalculation.

They never expected Israel to strike before another round of talks that had been scheduled for this coming Sunday in Oman, officials close to Iran’s leadership said on Friday. They dismissed reports that an attack was imminent as Israeli propaganda meant to pressure Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program in those talks.

Perhaps because of that complacency, precautions that had been planned were ignored, the officials said.

It’s pretty obvious that Iran had no intention of working toward peace, but rather (a) making nuclear weapons and (b) using those weapons on Israel.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

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Fembot journalism with Initial Anecdote.

Nevertheless, it has some Inconvenient Truths to relate.

Race-based government policies predictably and inevitably produce inter-ethnic animosity, resentment, friction, and conflict. When laws are based on ethnicity or descent, people develop an unhealthy obsession with skin colour, blood lines, and other ancestry-based features—their own and those of their neighbours. This obsession is alive and well in Canada today. Canada’s race-based laws and privileges have been implemented with the good intention of helping the disadvantaged, but this discrimination based on ancestry nonetheless damages harmony, unity, and friendship within society. Today in Canada, legislators, law enforcement, university admissions and awards departments, and school boards carve the people of this country into ethnic categories, and mete out different privileges to each, supposedly to advance “social justice.”

This divisive and destructive conception of “social justice” is fiercely protected, to the point of silencing alternative views in the public square.

ZMan:

One of the unique and strange aspects of this age is how our rulers operate from narratives rather than reality. The managers, in their committees and work teams, come up with a scenario that leads to a desired result. It just needs approval by management to set it going. Once a narrative is accepted, the decision makers set it in motion and then they just assume it will work out exactly as expected.

Note that they do not monitor it, assuming that they will have to adjust as reality fails to comport with the narrative. They just assume it will go as expected. In fact, they will often act as if it played out according to the narrative, before events have reached anything resembling a conclusion. It as if once the narrative is accepted, it then displaces actual reality in the shared mindscape.

One of the best examples of this was back in the Obama years when they passed a big spending bill to fix the economy. They passed a trillion-dollar stimulus bill and sold it as something like the Civilian Conservation Corp in the FDR years. The White House prepared marketing material for the foretold “summer of recovery” that they were sure would be the result of the spending bill.

In May they had warehouses full of signs and posters to distribute to publicity stunts around the country to showcase the millions of Americans coming together to restore the country after the Bush years. By June it was clear the summer of recovery was not happening, but they went ahead with the celebrations anyway. The joke at time was that the only people stimulated by the bill were the sign makers.

The funny part about that is it took until July for the White House to realize that reality was something different from their reality. At that point, the summer of recovery stuff celebrations stopped. That is when the other thing you see with these narratives happened, which is the memory hole. After the narrative collapse phase of the story, the whole thing is then erased from their shared mindscape.

s

If not, it’s working on it.

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Missing your tax return check and living near Philadelphia? We might have an idea of what’s gone wrong…

That’s because two former employees of the U.S. Postal Service in Philadelphia have been indicted for their roles in a scheme involving the theft of over $80 million in U.S. Treasury checks, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday.

According to federal prosecutors, Tauheed Tucker, 23, and Saahir Irby, 27, both previously employed as mail processing clerks at the USPS Philadelphia Processing and Distribution Center, are accused of stealing thousands of envelopes containing Treasury checks, according to NBC Philadelphia.

‘Tauheed’? ‘Saahir’? I guess we know what ethnic identity they espouse. I always have to laugh at black people adopting Arabic or otherwise Muslim-adjacent names, as if that were more ‘authentically’ African in some sense, given the prominent place Arabs and other Muslims played in the African slave trade. They might with equal logic name themselves after Jefferson Davis or John C. Calhoun.

I guess the Postal Orifice doesn’t do criminal background checks on potential employees. (That would destroy their ‘diversity’.) Scott Adams used to tell the story of why he quit mailing his cartoons to his publisher via the Postal Orifice: People in the local post office would invariably steal them during transit.

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Come to Britain! Get free stuff!

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Erythritol may impair cellular functions essential to maintaining brain blood vessel health, according to researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder. Findings suggest that erythritol increases oxidative stress, disrupts nitric oxide signaling, raises vasoconstrictive peptide production, and diminishes clot-dissolving capacity in human brain microvascular endothelial cells.

Erythritol has become a fixture in the ingredient lists of protein bars, low-calorie beverages, and diabetic-friendly baked goods. Its appeal lies in its sweetness-to-calorie ratio, roughly 60–80% as sweet as sucrose with a tiny fraction of the energy yield, and its negligible effect on blood glucose. Erythritol is also synthesized endogenously from glucose and fructose via the pentose phosphate pathway, leaving baseline levels subject to both dietary and metabolic influences.

Concerns about erythritol’s safety have escalated following epidemiological studies linking higher plasma concentrations with increased cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events. Positive associations between circulating erythritol and incidence of heart attack and stroke have been observed in U.S. and European cohorts, independent of known cardiometabolic risk factors. A causal mechanism for the link has remained elusive.

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French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau has decided to dissolve the anti-fascist organisation La Jeune Garde, founded by far-left MP Raphaël Arnault, due to its repeated and explicit calls for political violence.

The threat had been looming for several weeks, and the minister’s decision was made public on Thursday, June 12th, after approval by the Council of Ministers the previous day.

The La Jeune Garde was founded in 2018 in Lyon. It claims to fight the “far right” in public spaces and openly promotes violence. It sees itself as a “tool of popular self-defence against the far right”. In June 2024, eight members of the group were charged with assaulting a 15-year-old on the Paris metro after a pro-Gaza event led by Franco-Palestinian activist Rima Hassan.