The Times (UK).

A lack of funding will force police to deprioritise crimes such as shoplifting and mobile phone theft and there will be fewer officers patrolling parks and attending schools, ministers have been told.
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, announced an extra £2.1 billion for policing over the next three years, a real-terms increase of 1.7 per cent each year between 2026 and 2029.
However, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) said the funding would leave a £1.2 billion shortfall and would not be enough to maintain the workforce, let alone cover the extra costs to meet the government’s priorities of halving violence against women and knife crime and recruiting 13,000 extra neighbourhood police officers.

Britain, the New California.

ZMan rips back the curtain.

The streaming story is a good example of how culture is too complicated to model with a green visor and excel spreadsheet. The bean counters just assumed streaming would follow the model of the rental market, which followed the pattern they saw in the secondary theater market. Low budget films, mediocre films and even terrible films made additional money in the secondary theater market. When take-home rentals came along, these films often got a second life in this market.

It has not worked that way with streaming. A film like the live action Snow White, which was torn apart by internet critics, was a massive flop at the theaters, but then had no life in the streaming market. In the old days, it would get rentals from people curious about it or for get-togethers with friends to have a good time laughing at a bad film. That is not the dynamic with streaming. People will watch nothing rather than sit down to watch a bad movie or something unknown to them.

What streaming failed to account for is the social aspect of films. In the old days, going to the theater for many people was like going to church. It was a thing you did every weekend, not because of the content but because of the social aspect. The theater was where men took their dates and the choice of film or how they selected the film to see was part of the courtship. Friends went to the theater, even if the films on offer were unknown or not good, because it was part of the social event.

Read it.

Looks like a trend.

Read it.

The EU is silently preparing to roll out major new treaty reforms before the end of the decade for the first time since the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, and most Europeans have no idea.

That’s deliberate, of course, since the current proposals—drafted primarily by the hardline eurofederalist Guy Verhofstadt—would give unprecedented control to the EU Commission in nearly all national matters, irreversibly damaging national sovereignty, and therefore, democratic representation, in the process.

Luckily, there is now also an alternative vision, even if it’s a long shot to expect the mainstream EU elites ever to agree with it. EU experts and Patriot MEPs presented a comprehensive reform proposal in the European Parliament on Wednesday, June 11th, with decentralization, sovereignty, and local decision-making at its core, titled “The Great Reset.”

Read it.

Democratic lawmakers in Annapolis—more focused on Marxist reparations schemes to fleece taxpayers, taxing the hell out of Marylanders, having margaritas with migrants, diverting public funds to illegal aliens, pushing radical woke agendas, attempting to install condom machines in elementary schools, and focusing on de-growth policies to neuter the state’s power grid—have finally done it.

Read it.

A former CIA analyst who pleaded guilty in January over a leak of classified Israeli plans to strike Iran was sentenced to 37 months in prison on Wednesday, the Department of Justice said.

In pleading guilty, Asif William Rahman, who had worked at the U.S. intelligence agency since 2016, acknowledged that he illegally downloaded, printed and distributed classified information on multiple occasions, including several in 2024.

Yet another failure of birthright citizenship.

Read it.

Federal authorities in Southern California filed a complaint charging three foreign nationals with conspiring to distribute nearly four tons of methamphetamine, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a June 5 statement.

Erick Arriola, 27, from El Salvador, and Mexican nationals Baltazar Rodriguez Reyes, 49, and Eugenio Lizama, 35, were charged with possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine and conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine. They face a minimum of 10 years in prison.

According to federal prosecutors, Arriola is a felon convicted of DUI, battery of a spouse, and false imprisonment.

Sure, send them to prison, where they will be welcomed by their fellow Mexican gang members, with which our prisons are currently overcrowded.

Read it.

It’s not about principle. It’s not about democracy. It’s not even about Trump.

It’s about stealing other people’s stuff. Democrats love to do that.

Time to leave.

ZMan does a deep dive.

Since Trump arrived for a second turn at the wheel, everyone has been wondering when the Blob would make its move against him. The one thing we know about these people is they never take no for an answer. Every setback is met with a new round of schemes against their enemies. The relatively muted response to this point has had many people scratching their heads. The invader riots in Los Angeles that are spreading to other cities appear to be the long-awaited response.

At this point, it is clear that the Los Angeles riot is synthetic. The internet is full of images and videos showing professionally trained rioters. For example, whenever you see college aged white girls with whistles at one of these things, you know the army of not-for-profits has their people on the ground training protestors. The whistle is a common, low-tech item for professional protestors. It is often used to alert the lawyers stationed at the protest to come to the area.

There is also the fact that the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, was on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. This is one of the main hubs of the Blob, primarily used to stage color revolutions around the world. When Bass was in Congress she was on a committee that had the job of overseeing NED, while she was also their most senior board member. Of course, the color revolution queen, Victoria Nuland, is currently a senior Blob person at NED.

It appears that the plan is to replay the Summer of Floyd, but this time with little brown guys as the fig leaf for the project. The George Floyd riots were also a manufactured crisis, organized by white activists. They caught fire and became a series of race riots, where blacks burned down their own neighborhoods, but the general operation was run out of Washington. This time they are trying get the migrants and brown activists worked up into a ghetto riot.

Read it.

The total number of migrants illegally crossing the English Channel by small boat hit 15,000 for this year to date, new figures show.

Wednesday, June 11th, saw approximately 120 individuals brought ashore in the early morning, with more predicted to follow. These arrivals are the first since a record 1,195 migrants in 19 small boats made ‘successful’ crossings on a single day, June 3rd. This followed another record total for 2025, making the last day of spring awkward for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

Hundreds more are expected to attempt the journey today, with warm weather and calm seas on their side?mirroring the government’s excuse for its failure to ‘smash the gangs.’

Read it.

The life of a  proglodyte consists of pestering normal people.

Read it.

A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the U.S. at the Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said Monday.

The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit.

“The guidelines for importing biological materials into the U.S. for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field operations at U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Read it.

Confirmation that this is actually an invasion. Mexico is shipping its citizens north in the sure and certain knowledge that once there they will send large amounts of money back to Mexico.

Daily Record (UK).

A stunned couple were forced to steal back their own Jaguar after police told them they couldn’t offer immediate help.

Mia Forbes Pirie, 48, and partner Mark Simpson, 62, were shocked when they discovered their £46,000 Jaguar E-Pace had vanished from outside their Brook Green home In West London on Wednesday morning, reports the Mirror.

The pair had fitted the SUV with an Apple Airtag, allowing them to trace it to a street in Chiswick by 10.30am. However, after calling 999 they were not able to confirm when police would investigate.

With no help on the horizon, the furious couple decided to take matters into their own hands. Mark said he was “nervous” as he and Ms Forbes Pirie made the four-mile journey to the car’s new location.

They discovered the car abandoned on a quiet back street, with the carpets and interior stripped by thieves who had attempted to access its wiring.

The car was also fitted with a ‘ghost immobiliser – an ant-theft device that prevents the car from starting unless a specific sequence of buttons is pressed on the dashboard.

Ther pair, both legal professionals, made the decision to install multiple layers of security after a previous car theft. The last AirTag signal had gone off outside their home at around 3.20am, suggesting the car was likely taken overnight.

Neighbours then reported hearing unusual noises during the night. Mia and Mark believe the theft was “reasonably sophisticated” and likely involved a tow or flatbed truck.

It is cold comfort to realize that the UK is worse than the US … for now. But for how long? It would not surpriseme to have something like this happen in New York or L.A. or Chicago or Detroit or San Francisco.

The New Neo.

This is the way it goes.

First you realize that summer is coming, and it’s the best season for riots. Next, you prepare the ground by choosing your favored cause, and make sure the MSM misrepresents it properly. Protecting criminal illegal aliens and opposing their arrest and deportation is a cause that’s a mite tricky to convince people to rally around. But after all, you don’t just want disruption and chaos – although you do indeed want that – but you also want the ordinary Democrat voter and even a few Independents to be sympathetic to your side. If the MSM does its job the way you want, they have delivered the message over and over that ICE is deporting ordinary illegal aliens (you call them “undocumented workers,” of course) and not dangerous people or criminals.

Once that’s done, you organize the riots. There’s no dearth of people willing to riot for money and/or for fun and/or for the leftist cause du jour. The venue is a blue city in a blue state, so that the mayor and governor won’t rein you in very much or very hard, if at all.

Brown skins rather than brown shirts, but it’s still the same old play-book.

ZMan points the finger.

The most vexing problem of the current crisis for most people is why nothing gets done to address the known issues when the solutions are fairly obvious. On the one hand, there is an industry that exists to explain why the politics of each issue is such that the right answer can never be considered. On the other hand, there is libertarianism and conservatism that offer escape from the reality of the problem. These are the people who start every sentence with “all we need to do is…”

The corruption and escapism surrounding the question of why the issues that plague the country are never addressed are not explanations. They are part of the set of things that are caused by the core issue. We have gotten a hint of this in the first months of Trump’s second attempt at the wheel. He simply did things, like void longstanding executive orders on affirmative action. Suddenly, a man with the will to act was acting on a problem of politics, and the problem stopped being a problem.

What the first months of the new Trump term show is that leaders can simply act, and their actions can change the rules of the system. The racial rackets are suddenly in crisis because one man signed his name on some paper. We are seeing the same thing with immigration, where the political center is now speeding so quickly in the direction of the patriotic position that people are struggling to keep pace. It is as if there is a revolution going on in elite opinion.

Read it.

A group of Dutch citizens staged an unauthorized border control operation this weekend between Ter Apel and the German village of Rütenbrock, citing frustration with what they describe as uncontrolled illegal immigration.

Wearing reflective clothing and wielding torches, the group of around 12 men began stopping vehicles on Saturday evening along the N366, a key route between Germany and the Netherlands.

The vigilantes, who pulled cars over and even inspected trunks, say they took action because authorities are failing to secure the border and stem the flow of asylum seekers entering the country. “Nothing is happening. Then we’ll do it ourselves,” said one activist, as cited by Algemeen Dagblad.

The primary job of government is the safety of its people. When government refuses to do that job, citizens have to do it themselves.

Read it.

As anti-ICE rioters torched cars and clashed with police in Los Angeles on Saturday, CNN described the chaos as “lawful protests” with “some unrest.” The comments came after the network cut away from its broadcast coverage of the violent protests to air George Clooney’s journalism-themed Broadway musical.

“So there’s unrest. Let’s start with, there’s protests, lawful protests, which is allowed in this country,” said CNN senior national security analyst Juliette Kayyem, who is also a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “There is some unrest, generally dealt with by local law enforcement and if there needs to be state support through state police, and sometimes even national guard under a governor’s authority.”

The Foundry.

During his 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump correctly assailed elite universities like Harvard as controlled by “Marxist maniacs and lunatics.” He received a popular mandate to take them down. They deserve it.

The bill of indictment against Harvard is long. It is teaching students to hate America, to become modern-day Benedict Arnolds. It is teaching students to love Hamas and terrorists. It is instructing students to provide them with material assistance—a federal crime. It is promoting antisemitism, hatred of Israel, and the canard of a genocide in Gaza.

The president of Harvard, Alan Garber, has repeatedly acknowledged an epidemic of antisemitism at the university: “It is present on our campus. I have experienced antisemitism directly, even while serving as president, and I know how damaging it can be to a student who has come to learn and make friends at a college or university.”

Read it.

A bank connected to leftwing billionaire Tom Steyer is giving loans to illegal immigrants using a financial loophole—claiming it’s a way to fight “systemic racism”, according to the Daily Wire.

Beneficial State Bank, based in Oakland, California, offers loans to immigrants without legal status by using Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) instead of Social Security numbers.

The bank says this is part of its mission to promote fairness. “Beneficial State Bank is committed to addressing financial inequalities that disproportionately affect communities of color, a result of centuries of systemic racism,” the bank said in its 2022 impact report.

“A key initiative is lending to immigrant customers who may not have Social Security numbers but possess Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers.” In 2022, it issued $25 million in auto loans to 707 ITIN borrowers

The Daily Wire writes that in 2023, the bank continued to push this strategy. “Because many financial institutions require social security numbers, people without them, such as recent immigrants to the United States, can face barriers to qualifying for the loan they need to purchase a car,” the report reads.

Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

Many trainee teachers in Belgium—who may stand before classrooms in the near future—are failing primary-level tests for mathematics, French, and Dutch.

That is according to the results of teacher training starting tests, seen by Flemish daily De Standaard. The paper revealed that one in three trainees score less than 50% in maths tests designed for 12-year-olds. An even higher 43% score less than half marks in French tests, and 27% are ‘advised’ to take extra lessons. (But who will teach them?)

Perhaps even more concerning is that just 2.91% of the almost 7,000 participants scored between 85 and 100%.

Researcher Wim Van den Broeck said there has been a “silence” around this issue for some time, adding that “the drop in level is a massive and widespread problem, also at colleges and universities.” It is also by no means limited to Belgium.

Read it.

Yet another reason not to take public transportation.

Read it.

A federal judge issued an order on June 3 preserving a previous preliminary injunction that had blocked the Department of Education from rescinding extensions given to states for accessing COVID-19-related funds for school districts.

Read it.

No situation is so bad that the government of California can’t make it worse.

Time to leave.

Read it.

The strains on America’s power grids are easy to explain. After remaining relatively flat for a decade, electricity demand is now projected to jump 50% over the next 10 years. Investments in server farms, artificial intelligence, crypto-mining, and a revival of manufacturing activity account for most of this growth. For example, a recent study by the Berkeley National Laboratory found that data centers consumed 4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 but will account for 12% of power demand by 2028.

At the same time, construction of new base-load power plants—natural gas, nuclear, and coal—has plummeted. Driven by federal, state, and local tax incentives, wind and solar have accounted for the lion’s share of new installed generation in recent years. The problem, of course, is that these power sources are intermittent, which is why New Orleans lost electricity in May and why the Iberian Peninsula suffered a blackout in April.

Although several states—most notably Texas—have adopted programs to encourage new construction of natural gas plants, for the near term it’s critical to keep the nation’s remaining coal plants online.

Since 2010, 300 “always on” coal-fired power plants have been closed, reducing its share of generation from 45% to 16% nationwide. Only about 200 remain on the regional grids today.

The Trump administration has taken several steps to enhance power grid reliability and resiliency by keeping these coal plants on-line, including a series of executive orders signed by the President in early April. One of these orders allows a number of aging coal plants slated for closure to continue producing power.

Read it.

Ukraine’s unprecedented drone assault on Russian airfields is sending shock waves through Washington, exposing vulnerabilities in U.S. military infrastructure and prompting urgent calls from lawmakers and defense officials for enhanced base protection.

Wakey-wakey.

Telegraph (UK).

European countries have blamed the EU’s environmental regulations for hindering their preparations for defending against a possible Russian invasion.

In a leaked letter obtained by The Telegraph, the nations’ defence ministers argued the rules had stopped the expansion of military bases and prevented fighter jet pilots from training.

“EU legislation may not prevent member states’ armed forces from carrying out necessary activities to become operationally ready. But right now, it does,” they wrote in a letter to Andrius Kubilius, the defence commissioner.

“Mainly (but not exclusively) in the areas of procurement legislation, nature conservation and environmental protection, and more generally the administrative burden on defence organisations deriving from various EU legal acts.”

Read it.

With immigration laws once again being enforced, ICE agents have become prime targets of the left—harassed, doxed, and threatened simply for upholding the law.

At a recent press conference, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons laid bare the growing danger his agents face—not from violent criminals, but from radical activists hell-bent on exposing and intimidating them into silence.

The tense exchange began when reporters questioned why some agents had been wearing masks during recent operations.

Speaking of Nazis….

Read it.

In a plot that reads like a Tom Clancy novel crossed with a dystopian agribusiness nightmare, two Chinese nationals, Yunqing Jian, 33, and Zunyong Liu, 34, have been slapped with federal charges for allegedly smuggling a biological ticking time bomb into the U.S.

The weapon? Fusarium graminearum, a fungus dubbed a “potential agroterrorism weapon” by scientific literature, capable of wreaking havoc on America’s wheat, barley, maize, and rice crops while poisoning humans and livestock with its toxic byproducts.

The stage? Detroit Metropolitan Airport, where Liu’s clumsy attempt to sneak the pathogen past Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers unraveled faster than a cheap yuan store sweater.

Francis Fukuyama.

We are reproducing below excerpts from a lecture given by Leo Strauss in 1941 at the New School for Social Research on “German Nihilism.” Strauss, a German Jew, was at that time a refugee from Hitler’s Europe; he would go on to become one of the most important teachers and interpreters of philosophy at, among other places, the University of Chicago.

Read it.

The world’s a screaming match—doctors, economists, influencers, all clawing for their slice of truth. Nobody’s listening, and nobody’s seeing the whole damn picture. We have more information than ever, but we’re dumber where it counts, stuck in a loop of shouting past each other. This isn’t just politics or algorithm nonsense; it’s the cult of specialization—our worship of experts who know everything about nothing. Doctors pushing Covid shots didn’t see the fraud. Economists missed the heist. Engineers built surveillance without blinking. Each turned their screw, blind to the machine they were feeding—a Moral Assembly Line where systemic evil thrives. The system’s not broken; it’s built to break us, and we’re all complicit until we start connecting the dots. As I explored in The Illusion of Expertise, we’ve confused credentials with wisdom, compliance with intelligence. Now we see the deadly consequences: we’re not failing because of bad experts—we’re failing because specialization itself has become the operating system of institutional evil.

Newsbusters.

The Trump administration sent its rescission package to Capitol Hill today, asking Congress to claw back $9.4 billion in approved spending, including $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. A rescission occurs when a president proposes to cancel previously appropriated funds, but only with the approval of Congress. Essentially, it’s a way to undo a spending decision already made through the appropriations process.

Russ Vought, head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, told Will Cain on Fox this afternoon that “We have chosen what we think are the easiest [cuts]…some of the worst examples you can come up with.” In an official statement, Vought said “These funds would be used to subsidize a public media system that is politically biased and an unnecessary expense to the taxpayer.” House Republicans are promising to take it up next week.

While the evidence of “public” broadcasting tilt is overwhelming, the liberal broadcasters will rely on the vaguely positive sound of their mission to win over enough moderate Republicans to keep their money (as usual). Kate Riley, CEO of the lobbying group America’s Public Television Stations, stated: “We urge Congress to reject the destructive recissions of public broadcasting funding, respect the clear will of the American people and the long history of bipartisan support for our work, and continue the federal government’s investment in local public television stations’ essential missions of public safety, education and community connections.”

UPDATE: CBS Evening News: How Dare Pete Hegseth Rename the USNS Harvey Milk, DURING PRIDE MONTH???

The Times (UK).

hree mothers stand on the sun-drenched sand dunes of Gravelines beach, Dunkirk, showing their toddlers the strait directly below — a sweep of grey-green ocean separating France from the UK — which they plan to cross in the coming days
The Arab women were among thousands of migrants brought to the shoreline by smugglers on Saturday morning from the makeshift camps of Loon Plage, also known as the “jungle” of northern France. About 18 boats then crossed to the UK, carrying nearly 1,200 people — the most migrants recorded in a single day this year.
The mothers — like hundreds of others at the beach — did not board but said that they would try again next week. The French maritime prefecture said it had rescued another 184 migrants at sea on the same day and returned them to France.

Feminist ‘journalism’ – start with a tear-jerking anecdote and then try to make it serve as data to support the partisan point you intended to push all along.

On Saturday 1,200 migrants crossed from France in small boats — the most recorded making the trip in a single day this year.

This is what uncontrolled immigration looks like. This is what Democrats want to inflict on the U.S.

Read it.

Democrats lost the plot. First, it was among men, especially young men who were tired of being labeled “toxic” or “a cisgender male,” instead of simply men. Now, the Left is doubling down on an ideology that also could isolate one of their most reliable voting blocs—young women and suburban moms.

ZMan:

It is not that the suburban dad wants to be a he-man construction worker, so he buys the gear of the he-man construction worker and wears it like a costume, but that men naturally want to be in a world where they make things and fix things. Ten thousand years of selection pressure for that has had its effect and no amount of feminization will extirpate that instinct from the males of our species.

Modernity, however, means most men live lives of quiet desperation, to borrow a phrase from Thoreau. Necessity requires them to work in cubicles and offices, playing office politics and adhering to the highly feminized work structure. They live lives that are at war with their nature. It is no wonder that home improvement is a multibillion-dollar industry that caters to the office drone.

The Financial Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The Financial Times is the British equivalent of the Wall Street Journal – if the Wall Street Journal were run by the staff of Mother Jones.

The German government is drawing up plans for a 10 per cent tax on global internet groups such as Meta and Google in a move that could further fuel transatlantic trade tensions.

Germany’s federal commissioner for media and culture, Wolfram Weimer, told Stern magazine on Thursday that the new government was drafting a digital levy on global internet platforms, although alternatives such as a voluntary commitment by the affected tech companies to pay more tax in Germany were also still under consideration.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-left coalition agreed to “evaluate” a tax on internet platforms in its treaty signed in early May, agreeing that the proceeds should be used to strengthen the country’s media landscape.

It ought to come as no surprise that the first concern of any government is “Can we tax this?” Unspoken is how they are going to enforce this tax – Google and Meta aren’t German companies, and if they get seriously annoyed they’ll just remove any physical presence from Germany (or its running dogs) and they can whistle for their money.

From what I’ve seen, there is no ‘centre’ in this alleged ‘centre-left coalition’.

The New Neo.

Of course, he doesn’t say “I lied.” He’s such a good and virtuous person, you see. He meant well, and he just needs to be more precise….

Read it.

Democrats: The face of fascism.

Read it.

Where is the sympathy for him while the Usual Suspects are hand-wrining about all of the foreign babies in danger from Trump’s spending cuts?

Nowhere, that’s where.

Read it.

Washington is upping the ante against censorship, warning foreign officials that they will be banned from travelling to the U.S. if they limit the free speech of Americans. Government departments that (over) regulate U.S. tech companies could also face repercussions.

European officials were clearly in mind during the creation of these plans. Figures in Donald Trump’s administration have spent months criticising Continental leaders for imposing censorship—most memorably JD Vance who told the February Munich security conference about Europe’s “enemy within”—and Secretary of State Marco Rubio specifically mentioned Europe when outlining the measures in a social media post on Wednesday.

Read it.

After a belated crackdown on campus antisemitism, some were surprised to see the Jewish Council for Public Affairs leading a campaign in support of college Hamas enthusiasts.

Observers of Jewish organizational life remembered the JCPA as a representative of local Jewish ‘federations’, the organization had always been liberal, but it had never taken so blatant a stance in defense of antisemites or so overt a stance.against the American Jewish community.

In reality though the JCPA had not existed since 2022. The organization using the JCPA name is a leftist activist group funded by George Soros and headed by a member of his anti-Israel lobby. The crucial break came when the JCPA endorsed the Black Lives Matter racist hate group whose associated mobs attacked synagogues, assaulted Jews and denounced Israel.

Read it.

At least six Mexican soldiers were killed when a homemade explosive detonated on a roadway at the Michoacán-Jalisco border—territory controlled by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), according to one of Mexico’s top newspapers.

El Universal reported that the incident occurred as Mexican troops were conducting an operation to dismantle CJNG operations and a training center in Santa María del Oro, located in eastern Michoacán near the Jalisco border.

Sources said at least one cartel member was armed with a “Minigun machine gun at that location, along with an arsenal and hitmen.”

Welcome to the Turd World – right on your doorstep.

Victor Davis Hanson.

But here’s the real backstory to the whole thing. Why did he want to meet Trump? He wanted to meet Trump because he had a free trade agreement with the United States with no tariffs placed on South African agriculture—everything, metals, everything. And he was running a $9 billion surplus. And in addition to that, he was getting $500 million in foreign aid from the United States.

And in addition to that, his ambassador had just been fired or expelled by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Why? Because in a performance art fashion, he made a video and said Donald Trump was a white supremacist. This is the ambassador, just before this visit, not too long earlier. And then said that he was part of a white victimhood movement. So, they kicked him out. Was he embarrassed? No. He had a hero’s welcome when he went back.

And then we have the larger context of South Africa. It usually votes at the United Nations against the United States. It’s signed onto the International Criminal Court’s farce that was going to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal. We had the video that was shown about the leader of the third-largest party in South Africa saying that they wanted to “kill the Boer, kill the farmer” to a big crowd.

Read it.

The Department of Health and Human Services sent a letter to health care providers urging them to discard discredited research on child gender transitions.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy told health care providers, risk managers, and state medical boards to heed his department’s recent review of child sex changes, which determined the irreversible procedures can cause significant harm, including sterilization.

“The Hippocratic Oath lays down the foundational commitment for the medical profession: ‘First, do no harm,’” Kennedy wrote. “The Review makes clear that ‘the evidence for benefit of pediatric medical transition is very uncertain, while the evidence for harm is less uncertain.’ For this reason, the Review states that when ‘medical interventions pose unnecessary, disproportionate risks of harm, healthcare providers should refuse to offer them even when they are preferred, requested, or demanded by patients.’”

Washington Free Beacon.

Jake Tapper, the CNN host who promoted false Democratic talking points about Joe Biden’s mental acuity before writing a best-selling book about the “cover-up,” slammed his beloved political party this week for behaving like a bunch of woke scolds who are obsessed with racism and routinely denigrate normal men. Tapper discussed his belated epiphany—many years after the Democratic Party started hating men and denouncing everything as racist—on a podcast with tech baron Scott Galloway, recounting his appearance on a “left-leaning podcast” where one the hosts made a “joke” about how his teenage son might be racist because he wants to be a police officer.

“They asked me about my son, and I said he’s a football player and he wants to be a policeman, and their joke was, about my 15-year-old son, ‘Oh, how does he feel about minorities?’ Like the idea that he wants to be a policeman, therefore he’s racist, my son,” Tapper recalled. “That was the big laugh, and then I got dragged in the comments and all that stuff, and I thought to myself, ‘This is why you fuckers are losing elections.'”

Tapper argued that the liberal podcaster who joked about his son being a racist—since identified as Jason Stewart, a semi-professional DJ and cohost of the How Long Gone podcast—had exemplified “how the Democratic Party talks to men.” Indeed, they have been doing this for quite some time before Tapper decided to notice. “Like, my football playing son, who has no political views, he’s 15, he thinks about World War II and gaming and playing linebacker. That’s his world. You’re deciding he’s a racist because he wants to be a cop,” the journalist said. “And why does he want to be a cop? He wants to be a cop because he wants to help people.”

Read it.

Good riddance.

However, the legacy of the penny will last in our language. We will still ask a penny for thoughts. We will still throw in our 2 cents in discussions. A penny saved will even be a penny earned. We can still be penny-wise and pound-foolish. In tight times, we will still pinch pennies.

But pricing will likely shift. The old psychological trick of pricing things at 99 cents will persist. I saw a bag of chips the other day marked at $11.99. The memorable part is the 11, not the masked 12. That habit will likely go away. Even though only one in five transactions are in cash, it is likely that pricing habits will adapt in time.

However, aside from all these seeming trivialities, there is a gravely serious matter here. What it ultimately reveals is the monetary system’s mass theft of the public’s wealth. Here’s why.

Back in 1913, if you had 3 cents, you had the spending power that you would have if you had a dollar today. That’s a 33-fold increase in prices over a century and a decade of central banking and money printing to sustain an ever larger government and an ever bigger debt burden.

The loss of purchasing power in the money is the equivalent of a tax, a sneaky, surreptitious tax that masks its coercion in monetary depreciation.

By the way, I’m pretty sure that these numbers don’t capture the whole of it. They are drawn from the Consumer Price Index (CPI). I no longer trust it.

Say good-by to the dollar, really.