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In the UK today, it’s sometimes safer to be the criminal than the victim of crime.

Take the perplexing case of Rob Davies. In Wrexham, north Wales, the frustrated shopkeeper was told off by police for complaining about the scourge of thieves in the area. Davies, who runs a vintage clothing store, had resorted to displaying a sign in the shop window that read: “Due to scumbags shoplifting, please ask for assistance to open cabinets.” He explained to the Telegraph that, due to an increasing number of thefts, he was forced to lock away some of his goods. “Over the past year,” he said, “I have caught five people shoplifting. The first one I called the police and they handed the shirt back to me and let him go. Now I don’t bother reporting them and I have had to put locks on my cabinets.”

You might think the fact that local business owners are publicly lamenting growing lawlessness would prompt police into action. But Davies instead received a visit from North Wales Police, who told him to take his sign down in case branding shoplifters “scumbags” caused offence. Offence to who, exactly? Criminals? Davies said officers told him it was a member of the public who reported the sign. North Wales Police would later be forced to admit that calling criminals nasty names isn’t actually against the law.

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Fearing the extent to which Nigel Farage’s Reform is biting into its support base, Labour is desperately trying to look tough on migration. But the truth is that it has absolutely no control of the issue.

Hence the ‘disappearance’ of 150,000 migrants in the UK on social care visas. Ministers admitted over the weekend they have no idea how many foreign workers hired by the sector in recent years are still working in it, and that they are unsure even whether they remain in the country.

Stephen Kinnock, the care minister, said it wasn’t even possible “to estimate the number or proportion of individuals who entered the UK on a social care work visa and who are still in the UK or working in the social care sector” (emphasis added).

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Finland’s celebrated education system is failing its brightest students, contributing to the country’s slipping performance in global rankings, according to a leading education expert.

Kirsi Tirri, Professor of Education at the University of Helsinki, told Helsinki Times that Finland’s emphasis on equality in schools has come at the expense of high-achieving students, who are not receiving the tailored support they need to thrive.

Tirri stressed that true equality in education does not mean treating all students the same but rather adapting teaching to individual needs, whether a student struggles or excels.

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Easing and tightening decisions move all assets from bonds to private equity. Their role is supposed to be to control inflation, provide price stability, and ensure normal market functions. However, there is little evidence of any success in achieving their goals. The era of central bank dominance has been characterised by boom-and-bust cycles, financial crises, policy incentives to increase government spending and debt, and persistent inflation. Recently developed economies’ central banks have taken an increasingly interventionist role.

The creation and proliferation of central banks over the past century promised greater financial stability. Nevertheless, as history and current events continually show, central banks have not prevented financial crises. The frequency and severity of these crises have fluctuated but have not declined since central banks became the leading figure in financial market regulation and monetary interventions. Instead, central banking has introduced new fragilities and changed the nature, but not the recurrence, of financial turmoil.

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Of course they are.

This is the first invasion in history in which the government of the existing inhabitants is greeting the invaders with welfare checks.

UPDATE: 1.3 Million Foreign Nationals Now Claiming UK Benefits

The Telegraph (UK).

Shoplifters are raiding pharmacies while police do nothing, chemists have said.

There has been an 88 per cent increase in the theft of drugs and other medical supplies from pharmacies in the past year, according to the National Pharmacy Association (NPA).

Pharmacy owners have been left “shocked” by the lack of help from police and resorted to putting up photos of burglars in their shop windows, wearing body cameras and hiring security guards at their own expense to deter thieves.

The NPA said almost nine in 10 of its members had suffered an increase in shoplifting and three in four pharmacies said the police response was insufficient.

The Californication of Britain proceeds apace.

The Times (UK).

More than 50,000 migrants have crossed the Channel in small boats since Sir Keir Starmer took office, official figures are expected to confirm on Tuesday.

The most recent Home Office figures showed that 49,797 people had arrived by small boat since Labour won the general election in July last year.

That total is expected to rise after a further 430 migrants made the journey from France on Monday.

Starmer came into power pledging to “smash the gangs” behind the Channel crossings. However, analysis shows that the number of people who arrived in the UK via small boats in the first half of this year was 48 per cent higher than in the same period last year.

Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, suggested that migrants housed in hotels could instead be held in “camps” to take them out of local communities.

Badenoch said people “don’t feel safe” as she visited Epping in Essex, where protesters have gathered in recent weeks near a hotel housing asylum seekers.

The term ‘feckless’ comes immediately to mind.

Why are they letting France do this to them? They’re no longer part of the E.U. They don’t have to put up with this shit.

Read it.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

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The things around us have become plainer. In 1923, or 1823, the fashion was for intricate and richly ornamented architecture, furniture, clothes, dishware, or whatever else. In 2023, fashionable objects are plain and minimalist, if not outright utilitarian. Steve Jobs believed that every object should look as much like a featureless white sphere as possible, and the rest of us follow in his footsteps.

…

When I ask people why this is, they usually tell me it’s because people can no longer afford ornamentation as a result of improved technology. This seems backwards—everywhere else, improved technology makes nice things cheap and plentiful. Why would this be the opposite for ornamentation? I’m often told it’s because of the Baumol effect—that when technology improves productivity in some fields, the cost rises in other fields where productivity remains relatively lower, such as live music performances. Because ornamentation must be handmade, improved technology does not improve productivity in this sector, and so prices rise and rise until it is unaffordable.

This is hot nonsense. Technology obviously improves the productivity of making and installing ornamentation. There is no law of nature which requires everything beautiful must be made by a seventy-year-old master craftsman peering through spectacles as he works with hammer and chisel. Men have used mass-production technology to make better and cheaper ornamentation since the first day of the Industrial Revolution—literally. James Watt, whose improved steam engine marks the Industrial Revolution’s beginning in 1776, was good friends with Josiah Wedgwood,1 an entrepreneur who used improved production techniques and advanced tooling to mass-manufacture decorative vases and tableware, including machine-made copies of ancient Greek and Roman works. Wedgwood sold to both middle-class consumers and the Queen of England.

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Andrew Beck has made a cogent case for why the U.S., like other countries, requires cultural and moral cohesion to protect its nationhood and act with a unified will on behalf of the common good. Beck correctly notes that the U.S. started out as a country with a well-defined collective identity. If we look back at America’s beginnings, we discover John Jay in Federalist2 defining this original American identity in a memorable observation:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

At the time this was written, the newly formed American nation-state was composed overwhelmingly of Northern European Protestants; its legal institutions were largely British. Its shared culture was shaped by, among other things, reading and revering the King James Bible. Among the professional class, the Bible’s authority was supplemented by that of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Shakespeare’s tragedies, and (to some extent) classical texts like Plutarch’s Lives.

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Finnish prosecutors have charged the captain and two senior officers of an oil tanker suspected of belonging to Russia’s “shadow fleet” with sabotage over the cutting of five Baltic Sea cables last December.

The Cook Islands-registered Eagle S allegedly dragged its anchor for around 90 kilometres in the Gulf of Finland, damaging a submarine power cable and four telecommunications lines linking Finland and Estonia. Prosecutors say the incident caused at least €60 million ($70 million) in repair costs and posed a “serious risk” to the country’s energy supply and communications.

The three defendants, barred from leaving Finland, face charges of aggravated criminal mischief and aggravated interference with communications. Authorities have not disclosed their nationalities, but many crew members were reportedly Indian and Georgian. The officers deny the charges and claim Finland lacks jurisdiction as the cables were cut outside its territorial waters. Prosecutors argue jurisdiction applies due to the scale of the threat.

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A Chinese navy vessel collided with one from its own coast guard while chasing a Philippine patrol boat in the South China Sea.

The crew of the Philippine patrol boat filmed the moment the smaller Chinese coast guard ship and the larger navy vessel collided head-on, with a large bang being heard as the ships make impact.

The Philippine coast guard said the collision happened near the Scarborough Shoal, a disputed collection of reefs and rocks in prime fishing grounds where their vessels had been deployed to help Filipino fishermen. China seized control of the shoal in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone in 2012.

The crash is the latest in a series of confrontations in the South China Sea, one of the most important shipping routes for global trade. Several countries lay claim to parts of the waterway, but China claims nearly all of it despite a 2016 UN tribunal challenging their claim.

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But over the next two years, Bruce came to realize that the reality of working at TSMC wasn’t exactly what he had envisioned. While working on nanometer-level processes to make state-of-the-art chips, he struggled with language barriers, long hours, and a strict hierarchy. Bruce soon began second-guessing what he had signed up for. The plant, which was originally set to begin operating in 2024, fell woefully behind schedule; production at the facility is now set to start in 2025. Bruce, who said he signed a confidentiality agreement with TSMC, requested anonymity for this story.

He wasn’t the only one disappointed with TSMC’s progress in Arizona — other U.S. workers who spoke to Rest of World echoed Bruce’s concerns. In the past two years, the company has relocated hundreds of Taiwanese workers and their families to Arizona. Instead of a gleaming new facility, these workers found an active construction site, and a company struggling to bridge Taiwanese and American professional and cultural norms.

A comprehensive case study in why ‘diversity’ is not a strength but rather a weakness.

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In a world where copying and pasting is as easy as moving a cursor from one place to another, it’s easy to underestimate the importance of the photocopier as a disruptive force.

After all, it wasn’t like we didn’t have ways to copy materials from one page to another previously. Just ask anyone who’s ever held a quiz created from the chemicals of a ditto machine

But the 1942 invention of xerography, the dry-photocopying technique that made it possible to easily reprint documents, had a strange effect on society. It made the reproduction of printed material not only easy, but cost-effective—particularly in offices.

And for businesses that relied on the scarcity of information as a business model, the photocopier was bad news—and, in many ways, it showed cracks in the copyright system.

So-called ‘intellectual property’ was an artificial monopoly easy to enforce when copying it took time and effort. The electron has removed the Clever Plastic Disguise from the whole scam.

Look, the essence of ‘property’ is that when I am using it, you can’t use it. That’s why it’s always a protected category of Stuff–fighting over who gets the use of Stuff that can only be used by one person at a time is one of the fundamental Bad Things that governments exist to prevent.

The fundamental myth of ‘intellectual property’ is that ideas and information are somehow entitled to that same level of protection. In economics, protecting the right to use something that could not be so protected without the coercive might of the government is called ‘rent-seeking’, and anybody other than a Crustian socialist who depends on such rent-seeking for what they say or what they write recognizes this as a Bad Thing. (The Crustian socialist is all about re-distributing YOUR property but would scream like a wounded water buffalo if you suggest re-distributing HIS/HER ‘intellectual property’. Try it on the next socialist you see. Wear ear plugs.)

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

When gunfire pelted the Atlanta-based headquarters of the CDC yesterday, hundreds of employees were inside the campus’s buildings. The experience was terrifying. But some of the employees were not particularly shocked. “I’m actually surprised it didn’t happen sooner,” a nearly 20-year veteran of the agency told me. (She, like others I spoke with for this article, requested anonymity out of fear of losing her job.)

I, too, am not surprised it didn’t happen sooner–like, in 2020.

This was, in one sense, the first attack of its kind on the CDC. The shooter, whom law-enforcment officials have identified as Patrick Joseph White, a 30-year-old resident of an Atlanta suburb, was reportedly fixated on the idea that the COVID-19 vaccine had made him depressed and suicidal. No employees were injured by the bullets that entered the buildings, according to a CDC representative. But an Atlanta police officer named David Rose was shot and later died from his injuries. White, too, was found dead—fatally shot—at the scene. (It is not yet clear if his wound was self-inflicted or if he was killed by police.) When he took aim at the agency on Friday afternoon, he was near a corner where a lone man stands holding anti-vaccine signs nearly every day, several CDC staffers told me.

Guess the wouldn’t take the hint.

In another sense, public-health workers have been facing escalating hostility since the early days of the pandemic. In 2020, armed protesters gathered on the Ohio Health Department director’s front lawn, and the chief health officer of Orange County, California, was met with death threats after issuing a mask mandate. She had to hire extra security and was eventually driven to resign. Anthony Fauci, who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the country’s initial COVID response, has faced regular death threats since 2020. Nearly a third of state, local, and tribal public-health workers reported facing some sort of workplace violence in a 2021 survey.

Oh, wow: You lie about there being a pandemic, you push politicians into sending the economy into a death spiral, you lie to people about the effectiveness of masks, you push politicians into mandating experimental vaccines that actually kill people, and you’re surprised that somebody might decide to resort to violence? Clueless in Atlanta….

Baltimore Sun, a Voice of the Crust.

Baltimore Police say six victims, including one young girl, were shot Saturday night in the Central Park Heights neighborhood near Pimlico Race Course.

Around 8:46 p.m., officers responded to the intersection of Queensbury and Spaulding avenues for reports of a shooting, said Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley during a Saturday night news briefing.

Worley said that the officers found four male victims and two females, including a five-year-old girl who was shot in the hand. The girl’s injuries do not appear to be serious, he said.

He also confirmed that the adult victims were between the ages of 23 and 52 and that one of the male victims is in critical condition and currently undergoing surgery at a nearby hospital.

According to Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings, the high number of wounded without fatalities suggests that the perp was a Person of Color.

Watch it.

Aaron Clarey is an economist like no other. He doesn’t just parrot what the Usual Suspects say, but looks at the numbers and just paints what he sees. I recommend that you also read his books. I especially recommend Curse of the High IQ.

Read it.

Three people were shot and wounded in New York’s Times Square, the New York Police Department said Saturday.

The people — an 18 year-old female, 19-year old male, and a 65-year old male — are in a stable condition in hospital, an NYPD spokesperson said.

A 17 year-old male is in custody, the NYPD added. The police also recovered a firearm.

Read it.

Zman, a long-running dissident blogger known for his relentless output and paleocon worldview, died suddenly at age 58. In this layered eulogy, I reflect on his legacy, his limitations, and what his death signals for the vanishing world of independent political writing. Drawing comparisons to Lawrence Auster and archetypal closure in Jung’s Liber Novus, this post becomes not just a farewell to a man, but an elegy for a dying form of thought – and a meditation on fate, generational death, and symbolic time.

I received bad news yesterday morning from a post by AMRX Mark II about the passing of the blogger Zman. I wasn’t sure if he meant it metaphorically (as in: Zman was dead to him ideologically) or literally. But a check of Zman’s blog confirmed it – no post yesterday, a silence where there had always been signal. Zman was a machine: five posts a week, premium content on Sundays, no lapses for a decade. His discipline was impressive, and even when I disagreed I respected his rhythm. He was the last of a type, which we’ll get to. As I noted in the immediate aftermath, the abruptness of Zman’s silence felt off – like static interrupting a long-wave transmission that had never missed a beat. In some ways his consistent dissident output reminded me of the late and great Lawrence Auster of View From the Right fame, whose passed away in 2013 and whose website is still preserved in amber here. I have a bunch of drafts ready to post (including one about Auster), and I already did a recent eulogy about my former stepfather, so I’m kind of bummed that I have to do another so soon thereafter.

I had wondered about his sudden month-long silence. He will be missed.

Obituary.

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California is going to keep having devastating fires until the Democrats who rule the state government get their shit together (which will be never0.

Time to leave.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Look, we’re all tired of the Sydney Sweeney discourse. But if it’s going to cost Democrats politically — and cost all of us brain cells — we should at least understand why it mattered. Let’s get through this together.

For the blissfully uninitiated: The actress Sydney Sweeney was the face of a new ad for American Eagle where they say she has “good jeans.” This is obviously a play on “good genes,” which to most people was a reference to how she is good looking, and to a small cadre of extremely online lefty posters and SEO-chasing online media outlets was a reference to Nazism and eugenics. The right made a whole thing about it, accusing Democrats of being out-of-touch scolds, and somehow Democrats have found themselves on the defensive. The episode caused confusion, consternation and a wave of Democrats performatively affirming that yes, they too think Sydney Sweeney is beautiful. Welcome to 2025.

You might be wondering why anybody cares about this. But here’s the thing: The fact that this moment became a thing at all — that a stupid pun could metastasize into a full-blown political moment — says something real about the media ecosystem we’re all trapped in. And it says even more about why Democrats keep losing the culture war, and with it, the narrative war that inevitably shapes who wins elections.

Democrats keep thinking that their problem is a communications problem. They need to realize that they don’t have a communications problem; people are getting the message–it’s just that their message sucks.

I’m sure Democrats are tired of it. Me, I’m having a great time.

CASE IN POINT: NY Times Blames Right for Sydney Sweeney Denim Venom Spewed by NPR, MSNBC

The Telegraph (UK).

Jeffrey Epstein “loved life too much” to kill himself and was confident of securing bail before he died, his butler for 18 years has told The Telegraph.

In an interview that will heap renewed pressure on the Trump administration to make the Epstein files public, one of his closest aides said he had spoken to the paedophile financier before he died and insisted he had been in good spirits.

Valdson Vieira Cotrin, who ran Epstein’s Paris home, told The Telegraph he could not accept the official verdict of suicide and feared that his own life was in danger.

He also said he believed that Virginia Giuffre, the Epstein victim who accused Prince Andrew of rape and died by suicide in April, was a victim of foul play.

Read it.

Most kids I know fall into one of two buckets. Let’s call them America First nationalists and hardcore socialists.

Girls are more likely to be on the far-left, while young men are increasingly right-wing. This gender divide couldn’t be clearer, at least in my area.

This shift to the extremes is understandable. Both sides are angry, and for good reason. The system isn’t working for them.

So the choice is between those who are dedicated to the principles of the American Founders, and those who depend on a foreign ideology to justify stealing all of our stuff. Good that we cleared that up.

Power Line.

Dueling headlines from the New York Post. A dispatch from our nation’s capital,

Minors account for half of DC’s carjacking arrests since 2023 — including pint-sized perps as young as 12.

Yet, Democrats continue to lecture me about “local control.” The Post notes,

Since August 2023, DC police have collared 333 carjacking suspects and 56% of those busts were of kids under 18, figures from Metropolitan Police Department show.

And 60% of the juveniles arrested for stealing cars were 15 or 16 — but ages ranged from 17 to as young as 12, according to police records.

The Post notes that DOGE-sensation “Big Balls” was recently the victim of a vicious assault at the hands of around 10-or-so “youths” as he attempted to prevent a DC carjacking. Two 15-year-olds have been arrested in that case.

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t was a warm summer night in New Jersey, and Maria Santos Pleitez was driving her 11-year-old daughter and her daughter’s friend to get milkshakes when a drunken driver slammed into Pleitez’s vehicle, killing her and her daughter.

The other girl was injured, but survived the July 26 crash.

The man charged with driving the other vehicle was 43-year-old Raul Luna-Perez, an illegal alien from Mexico. Luna-Perez has been charged with two counts of vehicular homicide and assault by auto following the crash.

Pleitez, 42, and her daughter, Dayanara Cortes, are just two of the more than a dozen victims of illegal-alien crime the Department of Homeland Security is honoring the memories of this week.

“Behind every one of these crimes is a victim and their family left to rebuild their lives after unimaginable loss, suffering, and brutality,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said.

Elected officials who put non-citizens (and especially illegal invaders) ahead of citizens deserve to be in jail.

The New Neo.

Everyone wants to fiddle with DC. The left wants to make it a state, or many states, since it is almost 100% Democrat and could easily tip the balance of Congressional power to the Democrats. Trump wants to federalize it, undoing what was done in 1973 (which totally escaped my notice at that time).

Give it back to Maryland, as they gave the Virginia half back to Virginia.

Read it.

When President Trump fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, most people considered it an instance of Trump’s petulance. This is how Trump himself explained it:

In 2024, it was believed by many people–including me–that the BLS was trying to help first Joe Biden, then Kamala Harris, by releasing good jobs numbers, which would get a lot of publicity, and then quietly revising them downward when the next month’s numbers–again positive, but wrong–came out. If that was deliberate, it was a reprehensible practice.

But what is happening now is the same thing, only more so: an excellent jobs report, followed by a downgrade. Stephen Moore puts it in graph form that is easy to understand:

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The amount of cash being sent home by Mexicans living in the United States cratered in the first half of 2025 – with June marking the third consecutive monthly increase.

According to Banxico, Mexico’s national bank, remittances from the United States have fallen by nearly 6% since January, and 16.2% during the month of June – when only $5.2 billion was sent back to Mexico, vs $6.207 billion in the same month in 2024.

I’d love to see some research on how much of the U.S. GDP gets sent overseas in the form of “remittances”. This practice effectively makes us one big colony of the Turd World.

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A group of migrants was intercepted by holidaymakers as they tried to reach the shore in southern Spain, with several tackled and held until police arrived.

The incident occurred on Sunday afternoon at Sotillo Beach in the Andalusian town of Castell de Ferro. According to local authorities, 13 men believed to be from North Africa jumped from a boat just offshore and swam toward the crowded beach, prompting an immediate reaction from those present.

Video shows bystanders, including both locals and tourists, restraining some of the migrants until officers from the Civil Guard arrived. Lifeguards had raised the alarm after spotting the vessel heading for the beach.

Police confirmed that nine individuals were taken into custody and are now being held at a nearby migrant facility. The whereabouts of the remaining four are unknown, with officials suggesting they may have fled into the town.

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Nearly 60% of Germans would likely not take up arms to defend their country if attacked, according to a new survey conducted for German broadcaster RND, The Telegraph reports.

The way Germany has been going for the last fifty years, I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t either.

The Telegraph (UK).

Russia has formerly pulled out of a treaty prohibiting the deployment of short and medium-range nuclear missiles, warning the West to “expect further steps”.

As missiles continued to rain down on Ukraine, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president, blamed Nato countries for their withdrawal from the Cold War-era agreement.

Medvedev, who has been exchanging barbs on social media with Donald Trump, made his comments after Russia’s foreign ministry said Moscow no longer considered itself bound by the moratorium on the deployment of short and medium-range nuclear missiles.

“The Russian foreign ministry’s statement on the withdrawal of the moratorium on the deployment of medium- and short-range missiles is the result of Nato countries’ anti-Russian policy,” Medvedev posted in English on X.

“This is a new reality all our opponents will have to reckon with. Expect further steps.”

UPDATE: Russia Abandons INF Missile Limits in Wake of NATO, Trump Moves

The Telegraph (UK).

‘Travellers’ are groups of wandering vagrants, typically ‘gypsies’ and the like, that increasingly infest the British (and Irish) countryside because law enforcement is too busy enforcing the ThoughtCrime laws.

Furious farmers have sprayed squatters with manure in a bid to drive them off their land in eastern France.

A convoy of tractors spread a mixture of faeces and water across fields where caravans were parked in Hautes-Vosges after reportedly receiving no help from police to remove what they described as an “illegal gypsy camp”.

Footage posted to YouTube shows the farmers’ tractors circling rows of white caravans, leaving a trail of slurry in their wake. Some people from the caravans can be seen chasing the tractors, trying to halt the stinking onslaught.

…

Local media reported that about 400 travelling caravans had set up camp in the area without permission at the beginning of July.

The caption on the video said the farmers had sprayed manure on the fields around the encampment to prevent it expanding further.

Pascal Claude, the mayor, said the travellers returned every year despite repeated requests to leave.

“The problem is that we find ourselves alone, powerless. They come back every year. We asked them to leave, but they won’t. There have been clashes with the farmers. We understand why they are not happy,” Mr Claude said.

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A culture-enricher in Portugal (an engineering student, no less) became upset with an acquaintance, so he murdered him, cut his head off, and took it to a police post. One assumes that cultural differences most likely account for his actions.

The victim is said to be an African, but the ethnicity of his decapitator is not specified — we only know that he is a foreigner. However, if he were white, you can be sure we’d hear about it, because that fact would be in all the news headlines.

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Bureaucracy is flourishing in Germany and the EU like never before. Budget planning in Berlin and Brussels offers a clear glimpse into the state of the public sector—and at the same time, points toward the end of the economic cycle.

A saying is making the rounds on social media that captures the European relationship with the state: Europeans love to be governed so much, they’ve even installed a government for their governments in Brussels. It’s a reference to the European Union’s bureaucracy—a sprawling administrative apparatus that is gradually disempowering national governments and shifting the burdens of centralization onto the citizenry.

The latest example: a ruling by the European Court of Justice that weakens the definition of a “safe country of origin,” effectively removing any effective legal instrument EU states might use to stop the overwhelming wave of illegal migration.

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.

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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.