Read it.

Six people were injured in a stabbing inside New York’s Penn Station on Sunday evening, authorities said, less than a day before thousands of fans are expected to descend on neighboring Madison Square Garden for Game 3 of the NBA Finals.

A suspect was taken into custody after the attack, which unfolded around 7 p.m. in one of the nation’s busiest transportation hubs.

I predict that it will be a Person of Color, because

Authorities did not immediately release details about what led to the stabbing or whether the victims were targeted.

Read it.

We have known for some time that our federal employees have cushy lives compared to the people for whom they work (us). What is particularly infuriating is that so many of them either don’t pay their taxes or are seriously delinquent on what they owe their employer—the federal government.

Recently, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found in a new report showing that 6.9% of federal employees are delinquent on their IRS taxes. That amounts to about 215,000 employees. This is a marked increase in three short years from 4.9%. It is appalling that the rate was previously as high as it was, but it has now hit crisis level, seemingly with little or no consequences. This is in contrast to a 5% delinquency rate among the general population.

The number of delinquents exploded during the Biden administration, which was lax on enforcing anything for favored groups. We can only speculate as to why federal employees felt they had the right to forgo paying their taxes. It might be Biden allowing so many people to go without repaying their student loans that encouraged the government’s employees to skip payments.

The fascinating aspect of this is that these employees are W-2 wage earners who have withholding taken out of their paychecks. The government can easily enforce additional withholding to make sure its employees are in compliance. The feds can easily garnish workers’ wages, as they certainly know where they work. Indeed, the feds do this all the time to ordinary citizens.

I must confess that I am the last person to think ill of people who resist having the Deep State pick their pockets.

Read it.

When I was watching the following video, my first reaction was: “This is the future of British policing.”

That is, when civil authority collapses, fit young men who are not averse to violence will assume the job of enforcing community standards, whatever they may be. If the fit young men are Muslims, they will enforce Islamic community standards, i.e. Sharia. If they are native white Britons, they will enforce whatever remains of traditional British community standards. The latter is what you see in the video below.

The window of opportunity for such enforcement is closing rapidly, however. In five years or so there will no longer be a quorum of fit young white men to enforce traditional British community standards. From then on it will be the Pakistanis or the Jamaicans doing the enforcement, but mostly the Pakistanis, because they have the numbers.

In other words, what you see in the video won’t be possible for much longer.

Read it.

Kirtner, 75, has seen a lot in his time as a broadcast owner in the tri-state area of Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio along the Ohio River.

One of his AM station’s copper radials once fell victim to a copper thief cutting its wires.

But an FM transmission line being snapped and cleared in broad daylight? He couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

The alleged perpetrator — Paul Crisp of Catlettsburg, according to WSAZ(TV)’s reporting — had severed the main transmission line leading up to the broadcast tower of 93.7 WDGG(FM), a 100,000-watt country-formatted FM station licensed to Ashland, Ky., which goes by the moniker “The Dawg.”

Kirtner isn’t sure how the suspect is still alive.

Read it.

Be careful not to step in the Diversity. It’s hell getting that stuff off of your shoes.

Read it.

Once a Marine, always a Marine — so consider yourselves beyond lucky here, “teens.”

This happened in Oxon Hill, about 10 minutes outside of Washington, DC, on Wednesday. One shot went off during the struggle, yet somehow nobody was hit (though the truck’s bed now has a bullet hole in it).

I will never understand why these perps hold their guns so close to the people they’re trying to rob. Like, I have arms, dude.

This is Maryland, so we cannot be sure these “teens” will be given much more than a slap on the wrist for trying to rob a man at gunpoint in broad daylight.

I suspect that these were Youths of Color.

Well, I enjoyed it….

Freeberg nails it.

It occurs to me that we have a lot of loud, brassy people walking around among us, making lots of noise, giving off the impression they speak for everybody, who are especially loud when they’re agitated and apprehensive. And they deal with these apprehensions by passing judgment on what others are doing, micro-managing, propounding narratives about who’s building good things and who’s wrecking things. Who’s showing ultra-competence in what they do, and who’s wandering around going derp derp derp knocking things over like a bull in a China shop. Which Captain of a ship is steering the ship right, which one has hit the shoals and has to go down with the ship or is just about to, which one should be relieved of command the sooner the better…

…highly inaccurately.

The Unites States’ First Holy Emperor, Barack Hussein Replacement Jesus Obama, stands as perhaps the first and best example of this. The clear and uncontested dominant prevailing narrative is that He was the leadership we had long been needing, showing us all the wisdom we needed to be shown, picking us all up and carrying us to where we needed to be taken. And yet, nine years after He left office, what’s His legacy? Where? Someone tell me. It’s amazing when you take it all in and survey the…well, no other word comes to mind. Wreckage. He made health care more expensive. You can squeeze out some metrics of good things, tortured ones, if you work at it hard enough. The most popular one is “a record-breaking 73 consecutive months of economic growth” or some such thing, which I’ve long thought to be sadly amusing. We had such a record standing? We want it broken the way it was broken between 2009 and 2017, really? That’s the way we want to see ’em go?

Read it.

The Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act was brought to the Senate as an amendment by Lindsey Graham as part of the $70 billion budget reconciliation package funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol.

The usual senate suspects, Thom Tillis, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Mitch McConnell voted with Democrats to kill the SAVE America Act amendment. 75% of Americans support the requirement for voter ID, the Senate doesn’t want that.

Read it.

In the early days of the failed Moscow coup, one was bombarded by writing wherein the “conservatives” from the KGB and communist party wanted to block the path to a market economy and parliamentarianism. Many outlets that were once marked “Stalinist” or “orthodox communist” were attacked as “conservative,” blithely referred to as such often on the same page as political figures such as Reagan or Thatcher, Bush or Kohl. Thus the naïve reader, who wants to take the printed word at its nominal value, logically infers a common attitude and purpose among the previously named Western politicians and the soviet enemies of perestroika. Common sense could protect the sane man from such an absurdity, but this runs out of answers in the face of the schizophrenia of political vocabulary, proving insufficiently idiosyncratic; he seems to have resigned himself without grumbling. The common retort is that conservatives are defenders of the status quo, whatever that may look like in the particular case, so conservatives living in very different societies, unsurprisingly, advocate very different and even contradictory programs. But if political classifications are not backed by political substance, then these classifications must be grounded in psychological or anthropological factors, common attitudes towards life. Should one, in good conscience, impute commonalities among Helmut Kohl and the Russian putschists, this interpretational hypothesis brings little light to the concrete situations—because in such situations it is always about the implementation of particular matters or goals thereby defined, in view of the makeup of a national or international collective, wherein the friend-foe groupings are determined by the positions of each agent with respect to these matters and goals. The legitimation of political struggle often takes place by appeal to anthropological presumptions; political analysis, on the other hand, can infer no concrete substance from formal and inherently abstract anthropological constants without falling into bad metaphysics.

 

Read it.

The family of Vickrum Digwa has been accused of adding insult to injury after issuing a statement asking that Henry Nowak’s murder not be used to cause “further pain,” despite fierce public anger over the way the 18-year-old was stabbed, falsely accused, handcuffed and left dying in the street.

In a rightly-ordered society the killer would be executed and his family sent back to whatever Turd World shit-hole they came from.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ? Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World 

Read it.

I often wonder, not enough to pursue it though, but who pays for all those ugly statues outside big banks, big offices, etc. I thought it was mostly an American thing, but it’s common in Korea too. They’re usually quite abstract and to my eye, quite shabby and ugly. I assume money is being laundered or the artist is well-connected.

Too many people believe that art is what artists say it is, and too few realize that art is what viewers say it is.

Read it.

When Meta, Google and Apple agree on a “privacy” feature, watch out.

The three companies (along with Mozilla, which is on one of their “ad features in the browser” kicks again) are drawing up a built-in advertising measurement system, called Attribution Level 1, as a standard feature of web browsers. The system is intended to measure the effectiveness of advertising by enabling advertisers to correlate “impressions,” the occasions on which someone saw an ad, with “conversions,” when people bought something.

Don’t look for a section on permissions or consent in that document, by the way. There isn’t one. And nothing about nerd lawyer stuff like “opt out of sale” or “objections to processing” in there, either. The Big Tech companies want a two-track system, where other companies’ ad features are required to do all the privacy regulation hassles, but the browser’s own built-in tracking feature is something that people have to find the right setting for and turn off.

The Register.

Fresh college graduates frozen out of the job market shouldn’t blame AI for their struggles, says the New York Federal Reserve. Instead, get angry at the rise of remote work.

According to the Fed’s analysis, youth unemployment has risen significantly since the coronavirus pandemic, and hasn’t receded in the same way that unemployment numbers for older, more experienced college graduates has in recent years. The analysis notes that the prevalence of remote work has increased since COVID-19, and it believes those two trends have more than just a correlation.

“Our analysis suggests that these trends are related, with remote work making it more difficult for managers to train and mentor new employees,” the Fed said of its data. “Accordingly, companies may be reluctant to hire less-experienced workers in distributed work arrangements.”

Overall, youth unemployment has risen 20 percent since the pandemic, the Fed says, and the report estimates that 64 percent of that rise is attributable directly to remote work, not AI, though the study admits that could be a factor in the future.

Check it out.

What is a Beam Spring Keyboard? Before the Model F keyboard was the Beam Spring keyboard, a keyboard that was designed to be like the IBM Selectric electric typewriters but made to work with IBM’s mainframe terminals. Originals regularly sell for over $1,000 to $2,000 but now you can get one in various “normal” modern layouts and various color options for a fraction of that cost. The new beam spring keyboards are also compatible with MX keycaps (see below for details).

Note that this doesn’t tell you what it is, merely what it was used for.

There is, of course, a YouTube video.

If you’re eager to pay over $400 for a keyboard, here’s your chance.

Read it.

There is a lawsuit grinding through a federal court in Minnesota that every insurance executive in America should be reading instead of their quarterly AI roadmap.

The case is Estate of Lokken v. UnitedHealth Group. It was filed in late 2023 by the families of two deceased Medicare Advantage members, and it alleges that UnitedHealthcare used an artificial-intelligence tool called nH Predict to decide how much post-acute care its members were entitled to — and that the tool was wrong roughly nine times out of ten, a figure the plaintiffs draw from how often its denials were reversed on appeal. UnitedHealth denies that the tool makes coverage decisions at all; it calls nH Predict “a guide” and says the real decisions are made by clinicians following Medicare criteria. A judge will sort out who’s right. But this past March, that judge ordered the company to open its books and hand over a wide swath of documents about exactly how the thing works. The machine is going to testify.

I’m not here to litigate that case. I’m here because of the legal theory the plaintiffs were allowed to keep. The court tossed several of their claims but let two survive, and one of them should make every carrier’s general counsel sit up straight: breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Bad faith. The doctrine that turns a wrong coverage decision from a refund into punitive damages.

Hold onto that, because it’s the whole column.

Read it.

In case you needed further justification for denying your woman’s request for a vacation in Paris, hordes of migrants gave your position another boost over Saturday night, as they rampaged across the “City of Light” and other French locales, setting structures and vehicles ablaze, smashing the windows of occupied cars, destroying shops and unleashing other varied forms of mayhem. And they were doing this because they were happy…about a soccer game.

Import Turd World People, get Turd World problems.

Vox, a Voice of the Crust.

“I want AI to be a tool that allows human flourishing!” exclaimed Brad Carson, a former member of Congress. “There is an option out there where AI is just a tool for us.”

This is a normal thing to say in most circles. But Carson was speaking at an invite-only symposium dedicated to the idea of creating a “Worthy Successor” — an AI so impressive, so beyond the mere human, that we’d actually want it to replace humanity.

“You’re a brave man for entering this room!” Dan Faggella, an AI market researcher and organizer of the symposium, told Carson. “You’re in probably the only room in the country where most people disagree with you.”

The attendees at the symposium, which took place at the New York Academy of Sciences last September, are part of a subculture that is growing in importance: the AI successionists, who think that artificial intelligence is our rightful heir — the next step in cosmic evolution. Since they believe AIs could become our moral superiors, they argue it’s actually wrong to try to keep the machines down, or even to align them with human values, as most AI companies aim to do. Instead, we should usher in artificial intelligence as a successor to humanity and hand over the world to it. Even if that means we go extinct.

As opposed to the people like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, who would prefer that humanity just go away and leave no trace of its presence.

Read it.

In 1961, New York City commenced a new urban plan that included massive downzoning. To give a sense of how much urban growth has been stunted compared to previous trends, before the downzoning, Manhattan had 7 Congressional districts. Today it has 2.5.

Mamdani is going them one better. He’s chasing all of the productive people out of the city; by the end of his term, New York will have about a million freeloaders and politicians (but I repeat myself) and not much else.

Read it.

Today we will pour one out for the vaunted technical interview process, which is on its last leg. And we’ll talk a little about what’s replacing it.

This post has been almost 35 years in the making; that’s how long I have been conducting technical interviews. And for a few of those decades, I also worked to try to improve the process itself. I’ve had to care a lot about it, because it’s so broken.

It turns out interviewing was broken long before I learned the trade, and despite the many attempts to band-aid it, it’s still broken today. It has managed to survive in spite of that. But it is finally dying on its own. People are a bit unclear on what’s next, so we’ll talk about some of our options.

But it’s not an easy path I bring you, no silver bullet. Remember that, grasshopper, when you get to the end and come back to yell at me.

Read it.

Repellents are central to personal protection and to reducing transmission of mosquito-borne diseases. Although substantial effort has been devoted to identifying the sensory and molecular pathways underlying repellent detection, the diversity of reported modes of action has hindered the development of a unified framework. It is generally assumed that insects respond to repellents in a fixed, aversive manner. However, an unexplored possibility is how plastic the innate meaning of repellents may be. We present experiments testing whether the innate response of Aedes aegypti to DEET (the gold-standard repellent) can be shifted from aversion to attraction. First, we identified and validated an appetitive behavioural response in mosquitoes equivalent to PER conditioning in flies and bees: the biting attempt response (BAR). Next, we trained individual mosquitoes to associate DEET with a blood meal using Pavlovian conditioning. We then examined whether mosquitoes trained with blood as a positive reinforcer would display the BAR when presented with DEET alone or on host skin. Finally, we trained females to associate DEET with sugar and tested their subsequent response to DEET alone. Across all experiments, trained mosquitoes showed a reversal in the valence of DEET, shifting from innate avoidance to a learned appetitive response. These results demonstrate that experience can render DEET attractive by establishing associations with two rewarding contexts: vertebrate blood feeding and plant sugar feeding. We discuss the implications of this learned attraction for understanding repellent mechanisms and for designing strategies to improve personal protection.

The War Zone.

Members of Congress are moving to push the U.S. Navy to develop a containerized version of its High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system. Containerized designs could help accelerate the service’s fielding of laser directed energy weapons on a wider array of ships, providing added layers of close-in defense. The Navy has already been experimenting with palletized designs as part of its larger laser development efforts, which have faced continued hurdles in recent years.

An early draft of the annual defense policy bill, or National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), for the 2027 Fiscal Year, would authorize the addition of $5 million to the Navy’s budget for work on a containerized HELIOS. It would also add $2.5 million for a “Containerized Maritime High Energy Laser Weapon System,” which does not otherwise appear to be mentioned, at least by that name, in the service’s proposed budget for the 2027 Fiscal Year. The House Armed Services Committee released this draft NDAA earlier this week.

The Navy’s proposed budget for the next fiscal cycle does already include a request for $75.6 million for a separate Joint Laser Weapon System (JLWS) effort. The development of a containerized 150-kilowatt-class laser directed energy weapon, along with work toward 300 and 500-kilowatt-class designs, are part of the stated plans for JLWS. It’s unclear whether the Maritime High Energy Laser Weapon System mentioned in the draft NDAA is related to JLWS.

HELIOS, which the Navy has also designated Mk 5 Mod 0, is a 60-kilowatt-class laser directed energy weapon. At that power level, it is able to destroy or at least damage certain targets, such as drones or small boats, a capability that has now been demonstrated in multiple tests. There has been talk in the past about scaling HELIOS’s power rating up to 150 kilowatts.

Read it.

Regulation follows regulation. On August 12, the so-called EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) will enter into force, reorganizing the recycling framework for packaging across Europe. Adopted last year, the regulation becomes binding for all EU member states and companies on August 12 and, as an EU regulation, does not require transposition into national law. The PPWR will replace the current patchwork of national packaging recycling laws with a unified framework for the EU single market. Until then, Germany’s existing Packaging Act (VerpackG) remains in effect.

Brussels always tells the same story: regulation is supposed to strengthen the European single market and harmonize economic and environmental objectives. A beautiful narrative — especially for those who stand to profit from it. Similar dynamics have already emerged in other sectors, such as carbon emissions trading. In the end, compliance costs for affected businesses rise, the bureaucratic apparatus expands through new control and sanctioning mechanisms, and the overall economy loses competitiveness.

Read it.

People are beginning to understand that those who rule in their name have long been working to eliminate the nation-state.

The United Nations is not neutral ground for national governments to discuss their differences; it is a governmental construct meant to replace national governments. The World Health Organization is not an international body meant to coordinate complex responses to global health emergencies; it is an institution vested with vast power and authority to track and regulate every human on the planet. The Bank for International Settlements, the World Bank Group, and the International Monetary Fund don’t exist to expand free trade, open markets, and assist developing nations; they exist to centralize control over all economic transactions in the world.

The onslaught of “green new deal” laws in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, and New Zealand have nothing to do with preserving the environment or “saving the planet”; they are part of a broader U.N. initiative to track every person’s so-called “carbon footprint” in order to monitor, tax, and regulate all human activity. The U.N.’s “climate reparations” policy has nothing to do with “justice” or “science”; it exists to justify the redistribution of wealth from Western nations to non-Western nations under the guise of “international law.”

The message we have heard all our lives is loud and clear: Nations do bad things. International organizations do good things.

The Other McCain.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly known as Zaire, and before that, the Belgian Congo, is one of those Third World nightmare hellholes that I describe as being “worse than Baltimore.” However, since a new federal prosecutor has brought Baltimore’s homicide problem under control, I’ll describe the DRC as worse than Memphis.

Joseph Conrad famously used the Belgian Congo as the scene for Heart of Darkness, with the madman Kurtz dying of fever, his final words being: “The horror! The horror!” The situation has not much improved lately, as the State Department warns: “Do not travel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) due to crime, civil unrest, and health. Some areas have increased risk due to armed conflict.”

Welcome to the Turd World. Be careful not to step in the Diversity.

Steve Magness.

ATQUE: Bubble-Wrapped World: How Safety Culture Has Destroyed Our Sense Of Adventure

The Telegraph (UK).

I see that The Telegraph has adopted the American spellling of ‘jail’.

A girl who was raped by two teenage boys has attacked a judge’s decision to spare them jail sentences as being like a “rock straight in my face”.

The victim was 15 years old when she was raped in an underpass near the River Avon in Fordingbridge, Hampshire.

The two defendants, who are now 15, were also convicted of attacking a second victim, who was raped in a field in January 2025 at knifepoint. Another boy, now 14, was also convicted for aiding and abetting the second attack.

The boys filmed the attacks on their phones and later shared some of the footage online.

During sentencing at Southampton Crown Court on Thursday, the judge stressed the “seriousness” of the crimes and said the filming of the assaults had made them even “more serious”.

However, he said he wanted to avoid “criminalising” the “very young boys” and praised their behaviour during the trial.

The Telegraph (UK).

Sergei Krajev, 64, who was described by his family as a “wonderful husband, father, and grandfather”, died following the incident on Battersea Bridge.

Police were called to the scene at 12.33am on Monday. Officers performed emergency first aid on Mr Krajev, who was then taken to hospital by London’s Air Ambulance.

The Transport for London bus driver died on Tuesday. His family are being supported by specialist officers.

Gary Jones, 32, of Twickenham, was arrested at the scene.

The TImes (UK).

ergey Frolovichev, 46, is describing his “bat cave”. It is beneath the garden of his mansion in Hampstead, north London, which he has just spent £15 million — and more than five years — dismantling and rebuilding.

The room, the Anglo-Russian software supremo explains, can be accessed via a staircase from a corner of the living room, concealed by retracting floorboards — with the design inspired by his favourite film, The Dark Knight.

“It [the 2008 Batman film] was amazing, amazing special effects, everything,” says Frolovichev, who made a windfall by developing dating apps with his billionaire business associate, Andrey Andreev.

The Foundry.

This past December, whistleblowers came to me, and they started warning about what they believed to be massive Medicaid home health care fraud here in the state of Ohio. They weren’t just talking about a few bad claims. They were actually describing what they believed to be a systemic fraud pipeline right here in Columbus.

These whistleblowers told me providers were being pressured to rubber stamp home health care paperwork, and for people who actually didn’t medically need it. They said individuals would come into their office, ask for home health care services. Some appeared to be actually coached on what to say to get those services, with somebody many times who didn’t even speak English, so you had a translator in the office, and they were pushing aggressively for paperwork to be approved.

But these providers did the right thing. They conducted physical exams, they evaluated the person that was pushing for home health care services, and when the person didn’t qualify, they flat out denied them. They refused to rubber stamp Medicaid paperwork, which was the right thing to do.

I suspect this guy would not be inclined to pay any attention to Democrat-favored ‘gun control’ laws.

New York Post.

And women wonder why men don’t want to date them any more.

Read it.

The United Kingdom is no such thing.

The disingenuous promises of the recent past, such as devolution, multiculturalism, and “gender” (also known as the politics of biology), have disunited the country.

These have created irreparable fissures across our country’s body politic.

The carefully laid mortar, built over centuries between the state’s institutional building blocks, is coming off.

Sad, but there it is. Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

A Marina del Rey woman has admitted to running a voter registration scheme that allegedly exploited homeless people living on Los Angeles’ Skid Row in exchange for cash, cigarettes, and other small items, according to federal prosecutors.

Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64, known as “Anika,” agreed to plead guilty to a felony charge of paying people to register to vote in federal elections, the Justice Department announced Monday.

Authorities say Armstrong spent years working as a paid petition circulator for California ballot measures before allegedly turning the operation into a voter registration scheme targeting vulnerable homeless individuals.

I’m willing to bet that she isn’t a Republican.

Read it.

The surveillance state has found its newest frontier: your car’s dashboard. What used to be a symbol of American freedom and independence is rapidly morphing into a high-tech cage that watches your every move and can override your decisions at will.

In a widely shared post on X, users detailed complaints pouring in about Subaru’s upgraded AI ‘EyeSight’ system now featured on the latest models.

Drivers report the system pouncing on brief glances away from the road – while Biden-era federal mandates prepare to make this level of surveillance mandatory in every new vehicle by 2027.

“Biden” and “fascism” seem made for each other.

The New York Times, Paper of Record of the Crust.

Even the most capable autocrats cannot rule alone.
In Russia, Vladimir V. Putin needs his circle of handpicked oligarchs; in Iran, the Revolutionary Guards and its allies in the business world protect the regime’s power; Viktor Orban transformed Hungary into an “elected autocracy” with the help of a few crucial judges, political enforcers and friendly tycoons. But to actually carry out the dirty work of consolidating and maintaining power, such leaders rely on help from a far greater number of lower- and midlevel people: military officers, secret police and bureaucrats.
Yet until recently, researchers paid little attention to how leaders convince and recruit ground-level workers to go along with their demands. The incentives for elites to stay loyal have been studied extensively, but the rank and file have remained something of a black box. In the absence of real data, researchers have tended to assume that they cooperate because of ideological extremism, fear of persecution or some combination of the two.
New research, drawing on an extraordinary data set from Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s and ’80s, suggests a very different explanation. It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality. The people who make those decisions, the research suggests, are neither extremists nor victims. They are often just middling workers looking for a way to get ahead.

Quillette.

Even before war broke out in Iran, the US military was strained. In early March, the Government Accountability Office reported that readiness had diminished over the past two decades. In the recent past, support for Ukraine, the defence of Israel, and air strikes against the Houthis have all depleted critical munitions. The present high-intensity conflict in Iran is only aggravating this already dangerous situation. There is little doubt that the United States, which faces its most consequential military challenge in the Pacific, will need to husband resources more carefully if it is to deter China in the coming years.

Full dress rehearsals for the siege and subjugation of Taiwan have raised the possibility that America may be unprepared for a clash with the world’s strongest authoritarian state. To make matters worse, should a direct confrontation with Beijing be necessary, time may not be on America’s side. In a protracted battle between great powers, as the historian Paul Kennedy put it, “victory has repeatedly gone to the side with the more flourishing industrial base.”

At this precarious historical moment, The American Edge by Seth G. Jones delivers an ominous warning but also a hopeful message. Jones, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wastes no time in laying out the strategic stakes. “The tragedy today,” he writes, “is that the United States is in a wartime environment, but its defence industrial base is operating on a peacetime footing.” To drive home the point, Jones channels the British naval historian Andrew Gordon who believed that policymakers in peacetime needed to act more like rat-catchers (those who effectively cut regulatory corners to win wars) and less like regulators (who tend to be stymied by excessive bureaucracy).

The Telegraph (UK).

An Albanian triple murderer who was granted asylum and citizenship in the UK while he was on the run has been apprehended in the US.

Sokol Hoxha, 50, fled mainland Europe for Britain after killing his 19-year-old wife in 1997 in Belgium and murdering two brothers in Albania in the same year.

He came to Britain using a false identity, fraudulently claiming that he was a Kosovan refugee, which allowed him to claim asylum and ultimately British citizenship.

Read it.

Summer is nearly here and a hard-left Los Angeles city councilmember has proposed something that the people have surely been yearning for: banning backyard barbecues.

Yes, really.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, who is also running for mayor, introduced a motion on Wednesday to ban backyard barbecues during certain high fire danger days in the city, the California Post reported.

Obviously, some fires are more equal than others.

Read it.

And about time, too.

The Telegraph has published a piece so tone-deaf it reads like self-parody. According to the outlet, the “far-right” is no longer the domain of bald men in boots and tattoos. No, it’s now being led by “strikingly telegenic young women” who dare to look good on camera while warning about mass migration, grooming gangs, and cultural replacement.

Make no mistake, the chicks have tattoos more often than not. That’s the world we live in.

Watch it.

Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) revisits Enoch Powell’s famous “Rivers of Blood” speech and shows how it was not only prescient but actually understated.

Read it.

A teenage stabbing victim bled to death on the street in Southampton after British police arrested and cuffed him rather than his alleged Sikh attacker, after the suspect claimed he’d been racially abused, according to court testimony.

Henry Nowak, 18, a finance student at the University of Southampton, was walking home from a night out in December 2025, chatting with some friends on Snapchat, when he was encountered by Vickrum Digwa, 23. After a brief exchange, Digwa stabbed Nowak with an eight-inch Sikh ceremonial shastar blade, according to court testimony reported by BBC. A post-mortem examination showed Nowak had four stab wounds, BBC reported.

Nowak tried to escape over a fence, but was “aggressively pursued” by Digwa, jurors were told.

However, when Hampshire Constabulary police officers arrived at the scene, they arrested the dying Nowak rather than Digwa after the suspect claimed he’d been “racially abused and attacked by a drunken man,” prosecutor Nicholas Lobbenberg KC said, ITV News reported.

Nowak was handcuffed and police administered first aid before he fell unconscious, according to Lobbenberg. He died a short time later at the scene. “Put simply,” the prosecutor told jurors, “Henry drowned in his own blood, with his lung having been cut by the knife going eight centimeters into him.”

Lobbenberg acknowledged that Sikh males are allowed to carry a knife as part of their religious obligation. Digwa did have a small ceremonial knife called a kirpan in his possession. However, the knife used to stab Nowak was an “extremely large knife” openly displayed over Digwa’s clothing, ITV News reported.

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In 2005, a Hong Kong conglomerate bought Milwaukee for $626 million and poured money into it. In 2017, an American conglomerate bought Craftsman for $900 million and built a factory that couldn’t stamp its own name on a socket.

Same playbook. Opposite results. This is the story of what happened to every tool brand on the shelf.

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He ought to be executed and his family sold into slavery for the benefit of the skater’s family.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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The Department of Labor keeps careful track of employment and the demographics thereof. Their latest report on men in the labor force is both mysterious and deeply alarming. It turns out that the labor force is missing about 7 million men who would otherwise be working. Close to a third of working-age men have vanished from the labor force.

 

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In July 1998, the Rome Statute created the legal basis for the International Criminal Court (ICC), a body designed to “guarantee lasting respect for and the enforcement of international justice.” The Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) was also created to initiate investigations and seek arrest warrants for anyone charged with crimes within the Court’s jurisdiction. Article 70 of the Statute empowers the Court to prosecute individuals for bribery, intimidation, or corrupt influence, but no one seems to have entertained the possibility that the prosecutor himself might be guilty of one or more of these offences. This oversight looks spectacularly naive in retrospect.

On 28 April, the Wall Street Journal reported allegations that the Qatari government had said it would “look after” ICC prosecutor Karim Khan if he indicted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Khan sought arrest warrants for both men on 20 May 2024 and denies receiving any such assurances from Qatar or any other state prior to doing so. Arrest warrants were also sought for Hamas leaders, but not for the Iranian and Qatari officials who financed and armed the group for years. In November 2025, the Guardian reported that Qatar had allegedly hired a private intelligence firm in Britain to discredit a Malaysian ICC staffer who has accused Khan of sexual assault. If substantiated, this conduct could raise questions about the applicability of Article 70. Notably, Khan’s decision to pursue Israeli leaders for war crimes was taken shortly after the emergence of the assault allegations, which he also categorically denies.

Allegations like these highlight the threat that financial incentives and judicial activism can pose to the pursuit of international justice. The notion that international courts are impervious to foreign influence is a delusion that The Hague has nurtured for decades, and it helps to explain why the system has failed to deter the commission of atrocities. This is a problem of institutional design. These courts were forged in debates about competing state interests and their independence from the UN Security Council, which baked power politics and reputational management into their architecture from the outset. A decade ago, these courts were widely depicted as neo-colonial instruments, advancing Western political interests against African states under the guise of human rights. Today, they have overcorrected into postcolonial theory, and like virtually every other liberal institution in the modern West, they have been captured by self-destructive ideologies and hostile foreign interests.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Police in Toronto have arrested a man they say shot at “visibly identifiable members of the Jewish community” on two occasions a week apart.

Ruslan Novruzov, 18, is charged with assault with a weapon and possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose in conjunction with the shootings, which took place on April 30 and Thursday, one week later.

In both incidents, people experienced minor injuries, according to the Toronto police. The shooting on Thursday targeted three people standing outside of Congregation Chasidei Bobov, an Orthodox synagogue.