Read it.

The currently closed Strait of Hormuz, situated between Oman and Iran, connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, and has emerged as a major flashpoint in the US-Iran war. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, off Yemen’s coast, has also remained a focal point among critical maritime chokepoints, given ongoing threats from Iran-linked Houthi rebels.

While both critical chokepoints have been in sharp focus in the news cycle and among US officials, institutional research desks, intelligence analysts, observers, the OSINT community on X, and even everyday viewers watching Fox News or CNN, there is also another set of regional and transregional straits that warrant additional monitoring given their importance to global energy flows and commercial shipping.

Shifting from the Hormuz chokepoint, the latest data from Bloomberg, citing AIS ship-tracking data, shows that tankers bound for China transiting from the Gulf area through the Strait of Malacca is yet another maritime chokepoint, especially for energy and trade flows into Asia.

The Strait of Malacca, at its narrowest point, is only 1.7 miles wide, creating a natural bottleneck. Most of the tankers transiting the tiny but very critical strait are hauling crude and LNG bound not just for China, but also for Japan, South Korea, and other countries in the region. This strait is a key link between Hormuz and China’s coastal refineries.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

A prison work programme has backfired, after two inmates in the US state of Ohio built computers from PCs they were supposed to be dismantling for recycling.

The unsupervised inmates later hid the PCs in the ceiling of a training room.

Investigators found software, pornography and articles about making drugs and explosives on the machines.

Oh, ya think?

Read it.

No trial needed this time, thank goodness.

Naomi Guzman abducted a child from Walmart and carried out her threat to stab him in front of police officers. She was shot and killed by Omaha PD for her troubles.

Guzman … Guzman … undoubtedly of Old Yankee stock.

Read it.

I guess they’ll just have to encourage native Germans to rape more, since nobody is going to touch ‘migrants’.

Read it.

Which tells you everything you need to know abut the ‘immigration crisis’.

Cheap labor. That’s what it’s all about. Your country not producing enough babies? Import them from the Turd World?

Read it.

For many years the US government maintained a strategic helium reserve, but this was sold off in 2024.

In June, before the election, by the Biden Administration.

The Times (UK).

Hundreds of NHS staff spend the majority of their time at work on trade union-related activities, data reveals.

Taxpayers have footed a £100 million bill for so-called facility time across the NHS since 2020 to allow union officials paid time off work for union activities.

Some 305 NHS employees had permission to spend more than half of their working hours on union-related activity, including 172 people who are full-time trade union organisers paid by a hospital or ambulance service.

Overall, 2,978 NHS staff received permission to spend at least some of their working hours on so-called facility time in the year ending March 2025, according to the latest available data published by the Cabinet Office.

U.S. government unions work the same scam.

Read it.

We’ve all become numb to the way the LGBT acronym has slowly expanded over the years until it’s hard to remember what all the letters mean, but an activist in Canada decided to prove once and for all that no one will ever rival our northern neighbor in the woke Olympics.

Get ready for “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.” It’s the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious of identity politics, one long string of oppression that uses 10 of the 26 letters of the alphabet (including several it uses twice).

Fortunately, I don’t have to use AI to try to parse this because a Canadian editor for Quillette jumped in to explain.

Read it.

A growing number of young Germans say they are actively planning to leave their homeland. According to a recent study entitled Youth in Germany, approximately 21% of surveyed youth reported they aim to move abroad in search of a better life. Furthermore, as many as 41% stated they could imagine moving abroad in the longer term.

And who could blame them?

UPDATE: Almost Half of German Benefits Go to Non-Germans

Read it.

In a chilling retaliation against an act of civic duty, a 39-year-old man was left with severe facial fractures—after he intervened to protect two young women on a Berlin commuter train.

The April 2nd incident was a display of violence which aboard an S46 train near the Wildau station in the Dahme-Spreewald district.

According to Federal Police, the victim noticed a group of approximately 12 individuals harassing two female passengers. When he attempted to de-escalate the situation and shield the women, the group turned their aggression toward him, delivering a brutal beating during the journey.

Despite sustaining significant injuries, the victim remained on the train until reaching the Treptower Park station, eventually calling for help only after he had returned to his home.

He was subsequently rushed to a hospital to undergo surgery for multiple facial breaks. While investigators have secured CCTV footage from the carriage, the identities of the assailants remain unknown.

Authorities are now issuing an urgent public appeal for witnesses, specifically calling on the two young women who were being harassed to come forward to provide crucial testimony.

Which they won’t do, of course, for fear of being tracked down by the people who are harassing them once their identities are know publicly. They know the police won’t lift a finger to protect them, especially if (as I suspect) their assailants are ‘migrants’.

Read it.

It takes some people longer to wake up than others.

Watch it.

To be fair, the Orthdox service is Russian and the Roman Catholic service is Hispanic of some sort, so these may not be typical.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

The Antiplanner.

In the two decades I spent critiquing the Forest Service on behalf of environmental groups, I learned several things. I learned that the people who run the national forests were good people who truly loved the land and wanted to do the right thing for the American people. I learned that the managers of each of those national forests believed that their forests were particularly special and unique. And I learned that these good people managing unique resources somehow all decided to do exactly the same thing: clearcut as much of the timber as they could get away with each year.

The American Mind.

When Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins began writing The Golden Thread, their two-volume History of the Western Tradition, they were both Ivy League professors. By the time it was published, neither of them was. Hankins, whose first volume on The Ancient World and Christendom sweeps from Greco-Roman and Jewish antiquity to the European Renaissance, gave his last lecture as a history professor at Harvard late last year. Guelzo, whose second volume on The Modern and Contemporary West begins with the Protestant Reformation and ends hauntingly with images of the World Trade Center shortly before its destruction, left Princeton last fall. Both authors are now faculty members at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, established in 2022. The Golden Thread is a momentous achievement. It’s also a landmark event in the history of American letters. Its appearance signals that the country’s most prestigious universities have all but given up on maintaining the intellectual foundations of the West. For the time being, perhaps, the stewards of civilization will have to do their work outside the gates of the old academy. They will have to build something new.

The Register.

Datacenter protests have taken an ugly turn in the US, with gunshots fired at the home of an Indianapolis councilor who recently lent his support to plans for a server farm in the area.

Ron Gibson, a city-county representative for Indianapolis’s 8th District, was woken in the early hours of Monday by gunfire. He found that 13 shots were fired at his front door, and a note left on the doorstep reading “No data centers.”

In a statement posted on social media site X, Gibson said the bullets struck just steps away from where his eight-year-old son had been playing with Lego the previous day, and described the event as “deeply unsettling.”

The Telegraph (UK).

Ben Roberts-Smith, 47, is expected to be charged with five counts of murder which he allegedly committed while on deployment in Afghanistan.

The former Australian Defence Force member was arrested at Sydney airport on Tuesday morning.

The charges brought against Mr Roberts-Smith are in connection to the deaths of five people in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012, the Australian Federal Police said.

…

Mr Roberts-Smith was heralded as a national hero after being awarded several top military honours – including the prestigious Victoria Cross – for his actions during six tours of Afghanistan from 2006 to 2012.

The Telegraph (UK).

Adult chaperones are to take children to and from school to protect them from violence in knife-crime hotspots.

Up to 250 schools in the areas worst affected by knife crime will be identified by the Home Office using new mapping technology, which can pinpoint the most dangerous streets and when pupils are most at risk.

Adult volunteers from charities and teachers will be recruited to act as chaperones, replicating a scheme in Chicago, which cut crime on targeted routes by 14 per cent and helped students cross gang boundaries.

The Telegraph (UK).

No good deed goes unpunished.

Read it.

In a story that could only come out of West Virginia, a woman living in a chicken coop with her dad had to defend her home against a burglar.

I’ve been in chicken coops that had more room than my first apartment after college.

Apparently, a girl named Anna Groves was there to kick somebody’s butt over money, but that didn’t really work out for her.

But the daughter pulled a knife and stabbed Groves instead, and the invaders fled.

Officers found Groves at CAMC General Hospital being treated for stab wounds.

Watch it.

This is the year that the chickens of Progressivism came home to roost and all pooped on America at once.

Then Teddy Roosevelt’s ego gave the Presidency to the Democrats.

Then Woodrow Wilson got us into a war that was none of our business, using it as an excuse to head America down the long road to the semi-fascism we ‘enjoy’ today.

Then: The 18th Amendment (Prohibition)—and we know how that turned out.

After that: The 19th Amendment (Votes for Women)—and we’re still suffering from that one.

Daily Record (UK).

The first woman to die using a Sarco suicide pod in Switzerland was discovered with unexplained strangulation marks on her neck, with an alarm sounding during the procedure.

Read it.

The United States was born of a desire to leave behind monarchial government and instead live under a republic. Although the structure of the United States was explicitly crafted to have both democratic and anti-democratic elements, the perils of democracy have been part of the American discussion from the beginning (“When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest, both the public good and the rights of other citizens”). The allure of democracy is simple: by allowing people to collectively express their collective will, a representative government should be entitled to rely on their support in carrying out its political agenda. This social contract between the governed and those who govern should, in most cases, be a recipe for broad acceptance of the program of government.

Nevertheless, in the 20th Century, as the memory of monarchies faded and the threats of fascism and communism blossomed, Americans have gradually come to believe that democracy embodied the American project. Despite America’s traditional suspicion of pure democracy (and James Madison’s plea for a government run by enlightened delegates), “democracy” came to stand for all that is good and holy in a world threatened by godless collectivism and/or authoritarianism. Beginning with President Wilson’s exhortation to “make the world safe for democracy” our Founders’ strong philosophical misgivings about mob rule appear to have been discarded as part of America’s search for common ground with allies against authoritarian alternatives. Unlike the Founders, 20th Century Americans weren’t trying to rise above the shortcomings of western European governments in such as those in France or Britain, but rather trying to find common cause with them.

Indeed, in the present moment we now call anything we favor “democratic” and anything we oppose “un-democratic.” We do this even when the problem we are concerned with is itself an inherently democratic one, only reluctantly acknowledging the very significant role played by the pervasive (and anti-democratic) “checks and balances” built into our own federal constitution. The fault lines inherent in democracies—so well known to the Founders—can be showcased by (mostly) contemporary examples. All have lessons for armies—as the premier land force at the disposal of national governments. As military professionals, it is incumbent on soldiers to consider at least a few of the pitfalls which may beset a democracy and ponder the involvement of armies therein.

Quillette.

It is not normal to hear objections raised when universities award honorary doctoral degrees. The distinction, often conferred at happy graduation ceremonies, brings attention to exemplary achievement by the recipient. The aim is to nominate recipients who, in the tradition of the university, elevate all of us. This is true with academic recipients who represent the best of scholarly inquiry, but also with popular figures who represent universalist aspirations.

Francesca Albanese has been the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur for occupied Palestinian territories since 2022. In every medium, she leads the accusation that Israel has been committing genocide in the Gaza Strip since Hamas’s 7 October 2023 massacre. And on 2 April, in Antwerp’s Queen Elisabeth Concert Hall, Albanese will receive an honorary doctorate from not one, but three Flemish institutions in Belgium: the University of Antwerp, the University of Ghent, and the Free University of Brussels. The universities say they wish to honour Albanese’s “outstanding commitment to human rights and international justice.”

It is the first time that universities have jointly conferred such an honour, and this curious event will overshadow simultaneous awards by the University of Antwerp to a pulmonologist, a toxicologist, and a scientist of learning. But the illusion of unanimous acclaim has been punctured already. The Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium’s highest ranked university, rejected an invitation to join the others. “The stance of KU Leuven at this moment is sickening,” wrote a professor emeritus at the university’s faculty of law and criminology in response. “It is a direct mockery of the calls from the International Court of Justice to do everything possible to end the genocide in Gaza. It makes KU Leuven complicit in this mass murder.” Not only did Leuven not wish to honour Albanese; it had also awarded research grants to Israeli scholars engaged in academic work.

Read it.

Europe is literally paying Indians hundreds of euros a month to “study” while its own students can’t afford rent and are drowning in debt.

In a now-viral video, an Indian student in Europe boasts about the arrangement. He explains how the EU provides him with 1400 euros every single month that covers rent, travel, and meals, with zero student debt, while he still saves 600 euros every single month.

He walks through what he calls “elite scholarship secrets,” noting that a simple bachelor’s degree, a valid passport, and basic English proficiency suffice — adding that “IELTS is not always mandatory” and a certificate from some random school abroad will do.

Read it.

The recent news that one in eight children are now reported by their parents as being disabled ought to prompt an immediate national inquiry into what on earth is causing a large proportion of the population to sicken.

Not hard to tell: The government will give you money if you say you’re disabled.

How to Smuggle a Million Barrels of Oil

How the U.S. Navy Clears Live Sea Mines in the Straight of Hormuz  Too bad the LCS is a worthless piece of shit.

SOMEONE’S DAUGHTER-gate [What happened with Sarah Stock and why does it matter?]  hoe_math at his best.

Why Anti-Blackness Runs Deep in Morocco  Note the assumption that African = black. (WHY THE KHOISAN LOOK ASIAN.(Are They Related?))

Why CPAC Was a Total Disaster  The old Brett Cooper makes a brief re-appearance.

Cancer Proteins Are a New Weapon Against Alzheimer’s  Nick Norwitz.

Muji – The Brand That Designed “Nothing”

Read it.

Had the common-sense provisions of the Expatriation Act of 1907 or even the milder Nationality Act of 1940 been in force today, we wouldn’t have the farce of cartel and terrorist leaders who still hold our citizenship, active traitors with citizenship, “refugees” who spend most of their time back home or a Somali senator linked to fraud who is still voting in Minnesota elections.

The Warren Court’s deliberate misreading of the Fourteenth Amendment’s awkward attempt to define all black people as citizens, “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power… are declared to be citizens,” somehow trumped the clear language of Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 that Congress has the power “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization”.

In a series of bad decisions, Supreme Court rulings argued that serving in a foreign military, desertion, marrying foreigners, and voting abroad did not merit denaturalization.

Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu is a birthright American Citizen, as is Prince Constantine Achilleas of Greece.

As is

Everything she actually cares about.

Read it.

Mexico is home to 68 officially recognized Indigenous languages, spoken by nearly 7 million people, including Mayan and Náhuatl. Yet, despite their historical significance, many of these languages are in decline. Urbanization, globalization, and the dominance of Spanish and English are slowly but surely pushing them to the brink.

To preserve Mexico’s rich linguistic heritage, Mexican authorities have kick-started an initiative to offer Indigenous language classes, and, in some cases, fully bilingual curriculums.

In Yucatán, efforts to teach the Maya language in schools are gaining momentum as 35,000 students from 75 municipalities now have the option to study Yucatec-Maya, beginning as early as grade school.

I am reminded of a Richard Pryor video I once saw in which he was telling about a visit he made to Africa. Once there, someone asked him, “What language do you speak at home?” Pryor answered, “English.” The African that he was talking to said, “Yes, of course, everyone speaks English, but what language do you speak at home?” And Pryor was stunned.

Read it.

Do you like information theory? Do you like molecular biology? Do you like the idea of smashing them together and seeing what happens? If so, then here’s a question: How much information is in your DNA?

When I first looked into this question, I thought it was simple:

Human DNA has about 3.1 billion base pairs.
Each base pair can take one of four values (A, T, C, or G)
It takes 2 bits to encode one of four possible values (00, 01, 10, or 11)
Thus, human DNA contains 6.2 billion bits.
Easy, right? Sure, except:

You have two versions of each base pair, one from each of your parents. Should you count both?
All humans have almost identical DNA. Does that matter?
DNA can be compressed. Should you look at the compressed representation?
It’s not clear how much of our DNA actually does something useful. The insides of your cells are a convulsing pandemonium of interacting “hacks”, designed to keep working even as mutations constantly screw around with the DNA itself. Should we only count the “useful” parts?

And that’s just your nuclear DNA. Your mitochondria have their own DNA, a relic of the independent microbe that they were before being symbiotically fused with eukaryotic cells.

Daily Record (UK).

American model Ginger Meadows travelled to Australia after being inspired by Crocodile Dundee, but the 24-year-old from Colorado was tragically killed in a crocodile attack.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Criminals are exploiting weak points across the West Texas oil production region, which accounts for 15% of the world’s energy resources. This emerging wave of oil theft is burning a multi-billion-dollar hole in the budgets of oil and gas operators across the Permian Basin and is becoming a national security threat.

Bloomberg reports that oil and gas producers are losing at least $1 billion, if not more, per year due to oilfield theft in what the outlet describes as something straight out of a “Mad Max” movie.

The outlet spoke with Sheriff Randy Cozart, who estimates that about 500 barrels of crude are stolen each week. Industry groups say statewide losses are accumulating and range from $1 billion to $2 billion annually.

John C. Wright.

The name comes from the famous film GASLIGHT (1944) starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, where a young bride’s new husband slowly manipulates her into believing that she is descending into insanity, to distract her from seeing evidence of his crimes (including that the gaslights through the rest of the house dim when he sneaks into a attic at night and turns on the lamp there — from this comes the film’s name).

Gaslighting is a sophisticated technique, pioneered by the Nazis when the radio was still a new invention, perfected by the Soviets over many decades of Cold War, studied and copied by the CIA, and installed secretly into all the mass media in the United States, and in the world, by Project Mockingbird and other secret operations.

In brief, gaslighting involves two cooperative groups: perpetrators and willing victims, or, as I like to call them, following HG Wells’ names for the post-humans more highly evolved than we, Morlocks and Eloi.

The Morlocks who know it is a lie repeat it endlessly, relying on the sheer fact that it is outrageous to make victims pause to doubt it.

The lie is surrounded with all the normal evidences of ‘social’ proof, that is to say, the cues and labels used by groups of men to confirm to each other that they are saying and hearing the truth, such as, for example, the confidence of delivery, coming from a trusted source, coming from an expert, from the celebrities and “cool kids” and hearing that the opposite is heresy, a sign of mental and moral inferiority.

The lie is packages to be easily memorized and repeated, usually a phrase or word “conspiracy theory” or “islamophobia” that is smugly used by never actually defined. The smugness with which they utter perfect nonsense or repeat absurd lies even after being caught is a social proof of truth: instinct says liars should hesitate, or seem nervous.

The perpetrator rarely says the conclusion to be drawn, merely implies it, and leaves the victim to draw the conclusion himself, so that the normal skepticism used for statement coming from others is never triggered: the victim is under the illusion that he came up with the idea independently.

The Eloi have their self-esteem and their worldview wrapped intimately about these lies, so that to question them would invite the downfall of every point of pride.

The Telegraph (UK).

Parents are fighting governors to save an all-girls private school in Cheshire’s Premier League footballer enclave.

They were told on Feb 24 that the £20,000-a-year Alderley Edge School for Girls, which currently has 330 students aged from two to 18, would close at the end of the academic year.

Rachel Reeves’s 20 per cent VAT on private school fees, introduced in January last year, has led to increased fees, falling pupil numbers and many school closures.

Read it.

A brother and sister have been indicted after authorities say one of them planted a potentially deadly explosive device outside MacDill Air Force Base in Florida — then fled to China, while their mother is now in ICE custody after allegedly telling investigators her son confessed to the plot.

The FBI said Alen Zheng, who is believed to have planted the device, is currently in China. He is facing charges of attempted damage to government property by fire or explosion, unlawful making of a destructive device and possession of an unregistered destructive device, which carry a potential sentence of up to 40 years in prison.

FBI Tampa also arrested his sister, Ann Mary Zheng, who is charged with accessory after the fact and tampering with evidence, facing up to 30 years in prison.

She is accused of hiding or damaging a 2010 Mercedes-Benz to prevent its use in legal proceedings, court documents show.

Prosecutors allege that on March 11, the day after the bomb was planted, the siblings attempted to cover their tracks by selling the vehicle to car dealer CarMax. Despite being vacuumed and cleaned, investigators later discovered trace explosive residue inside the vehicle.

I have never understood this impulse.

Quilettte.

Despite an ongoing crimewave, Melbourne was recently named the world’s best city by Time Out magazine, to a mix of celebratory headlines, crowing by the Victorian state government, and general bemusement among everyone else. Sure enough, just two days later, the city reminded the world of its recent sad decline.

On 13 March, Vietnamese international student Bao Phuc Cao pleaded guilty to secretly filming a woman under the cubicle walls in the toilets of a shopping centre in the city’s Docklands area. His camera was found to have similarly intrusive images and videos of more than 100 women on it. Their identities are unknown. And he was already on a community correction order (a form of community-based punishment involving monitoring and other conditions) from two previous prosecutions for similar offences. The victim in this case has been left anxious and traumatised. While Cao pleaded guilty and has reportedly abided by his order, at the time of his arrest he also apparently offered the baffling excuse that he was in the women’s toilets because he was “unsure” about his gender. Despite all this, Cao was not sentenced to prison, much less deported from Australia (though his visa is reportedly being reviewed); in fact, no conviction was recorded, and Cao was released into the community with no further punishment at all, beyond an undertaking of good behaviour and continued compliance with his existing order. The seemingly bizarre leniency of the judgement raises larger questions about the administration of criminal justice in Victoria, the alignment of the judiciary with public standards and expectations and the function of criminal law.

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

olumbia, the first victim of Donald Trump’s assault on America’s grandest universities, has an endowment of roughly $15bn. Mr Trump’s administration withheld a mere $400m in federal funding when it handed Columbia its peremptory list of demands. Why, indignant alumni ask, did Columbia not simply tell Mr Trump to get lost and fall back on its plump cushion of billions?

Alas for Columbia and other rich universities, the calculus is not so simple. Their endowments are not easy to access. Research grants are not the government’s only leverage. And the chaos Mr Trump has created in the markets makes it a bad time to be selling or borrowing. Indeed, even if research funding were still flowing, the Ivies’ accountants would be losing sleep.

Federal research grants account for a double-digit share of the revenue of most prestigious private universities, so losing them permanently would be a body-blow for any of them. They make up 11%, 15% and 18% of the income of Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities respectively. Columbia, at 20%, is especially vulnerable.

Even for those institutions still receiving such disbursements, the government is imposing arduous new rules. The National Institutes of Health (nih), which dispense most funds for medical research, announced in February that they will cap the portion of grants that can be spent on overheads at 15%. Previously, about 26% was spent in this way. Universities have challenged the change in court and on April 4th a judge threw out the cap. But the administration has said it will appeal, so all universities may soon have to find extra cash to keep their labs operating.

Universities’ endowments are not as much help as their billion-dollar valuations would suggest. For a start, much of the money is reserved for a particular purpose, funding a specific professorship or research centre, say. Legal covenants often prevent it from being diverted for other purposes. In any case, the income from an endowment is typically used to fund a big share of a university’s operating costs. Eat into the principal and you eat into that revenue stream.

The ‘ivy-league’ universities (which commonly refer to similar universities not belonging the the actual Ivy League, like Stanford, MIT, Chicago, and Rice) aren’t really educational institutions (as a glance at the supposed qualifications of their faculty members and administrators makes clear) but rather a jobs program for the Clerisy. Much like the Welfare State, there are always more Good Causes and Undeniable Human Rights to fund, so the money is never enough.

Read it.

New York Times bestselling author Peter Schweizer is once again speaking out against China’s sinister role in fueling America’s deadly fentanyl crisis, as President Donald Trump seeks to punish the communist regime for its involvement.

“There are 2000 Chinese nationals in northern Mexico working for the Sinaloa drug cartel,” Schweizer, citing DEA data, told The Cats and Cosby Show on Friday. “They’re basically chemists.”

“They take the precursor chemicals that, of course, arrive from China and they turn it into the deadly cocktail, which is what people are dying from. They produce pills. People who die of fentanyl overdose, they think they’re talking a Vicodin or Adderall,” he added.

UPDATE: DOJ: Chinese Firms, Nationals Charged in Fentanyl Plot

Read it.

Tatler is a British vehicle where the Comfortable and Constructive classes can read about the doings of the Crust and the Clerisy under the illusion that it will unlock the secret achievement badge for fame and fortune. America doesn’t really have an equivalent; perhaps if one did a mashup of Vogue and Vanity Fair run by the editors of Hello! magazine.

Entry to the world’s top universities is increasingly becoming a long-term strategy rather than a final-year push. For high-net-worth families, preparation now begins earlier, stretches further and involves a level of planning that mirrors any other major investment decision.

The decoupling of famous-tier university life from actual education that began with the progressive march through the institutions in the 1960s and transformed them into Woke DEI indoctrination factories is pretty much complete.

Note that the most important characteristic of “the world’s top universities” is not the education they provides but the credential as a member of the Clerisy—and, ultimately, of the Crust—for one’s children, justifying full-court-press helicopter parenting.

Figtree Learning describes the shift as a far more layered process than it used to be. ‘It’s no longer enough to achieve top grades and write a strong personal statement. Securing a place at a top university is now akin to completing a pentathlon, which demands success across five distinct elements: outstanding grades, rigorous entrance tests, demanding interviews, compelling references, and a persuasive personal statement. Falling short on any one of these can cost a candidate their place, no matter how strong they are in the others.’

Needless to say, none of these elements has much to do with the efforts of the child, any more than success in the Olympics can be achieved without an extensive support team of coaches and nutritionists to act as pit-crew.

I would be prepared to argue that any 18-year-old who could demonstrate “outstanding grades, rigorous entrance tests, demanding interviews, compelling references, and a persuasive personal statement” could pretty much skip the rather tedious step of actually attending university for four years and just parachute into whatever nepo-baby slot has been prepared for him/her since he/she were conceived (probably by genetically-screened IVF). (And increasingly it’s going to be a “she”, since the Deep State world has pretty much agreed that Men Are The New Hitler upon whom it isn’t worth wasting a lot of time and effort.)

I am reminded of the famous “Machine That Goes Ping” scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life, where the pregnant woman lying on the gurney awaiting the birth of her child watches the team of doctors walk the visiting Corporate Bureaucrat through their array of high-tech medical machinery, and eventually is moved to say, “What am I supposed to do?”, to which Graham Chapman responds, “Nothing my dear; you’re not qualified.”

Read it.

As most Americans are now well aware, national retail theft has seen a significant spike since 2021, with total shoplifting incidents increasing by roughly 53% between 2021 and 2024 based on industry data. This has led to sweeping policy changes to retail businesses, specifically in urban locations, and long aisles of locked glass cases are only the beginning.

In the case of Walgreens, the company has closed a significant number of locations in high crime areas since 2024 as part of a broader plan to shutter underperforming stores nationwide. The company announced in October 2024 that it would close approximately 1,200 stores across the U.S. over three years (through 2027), with about 500 targeted for fiscal year 2025.

This decision is not unique. Hundreds of larger retailers are also shutting down stores in risky neighborhoods, and critics argue that these closures are directly targeting areas in predominantly black and minority neighborhoods. They complain that this trend is leading to “food deserts” where minorities do not have easy access to convenient shopping.

The problem, of course, is that these are the areas with the worst crime rates. Furthermore, to keep said stores open in such places also puts employee safety at risk and makes the companies vulnerable to liability.

Read it.

he two-year anniversary of the catastrophic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge at the Port of Baltimore is on Thursday.

Gubernatorial candidate Ed Hale criticized Democrats in the one-party-ruled state for their inability to properly manage the reconstruction of the Key Bridge, which is critical to the port and local economy and regional supply chains across the Mid-Atlantic region.

Hale described the Democrats as exhibiting a “failure of leadership” and cited “unacceptable delays” in rebuilding one of Maryland’s major freight networks, which links to broader regional supply chains.

“Two years. And what do the people of this community have to show for it?” Hale asked reporters earlier.

He said, “As a Maryland developer, I know what it takes to move projects forward. These delays are unacceptable, and Maryland families and businesses are paying the price every single day.”

Read it.

In just about a month, three NATO states arrested or imposed some form of civiliter mortuus on the biggest political threats to their respective regimes. Romania forbade Georgescu, who won last year’s presidential election, from participating in May’s re-run; Turkey, with Istanbul’s mayor; Macron’s France, with Le Pen. In Poland, the Europhile regime of Prime Minister Tusk forces—for the first time since the dark days of communism—the opposition into exile and subjugates newspapers and TV stations through a series of brazen police raids; in Germany, the nation’s largest party, the AfD, is under the confirmed, official surveillance of the intelligence services while its legislation remains under consideration by the authorities, even after they lost the recent federal election and their popularity continues to implode; in Italy, a deputy prime minister nearly got arrested for upholding—rather than breaking—the law of the land. In Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia, protests—obviously sold by the mainstream media as spontaneous and innocent—erupted almost simultaneously: the targets are, of course, all governments known to be opposed to—and loathed by—the Brussels mandarinate. Fico, in Slovakia, nearly died at the hands of a terrorist hostile to the Prime Minister’s Ukraine policy.

Read it.

Last year the Trump administration designated Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) as a terrorist group allowing the military to carry out strikes against it and its leadership, but the massive drug cartel across the border understands the weaknesses of our system all too well.

That’s why its new leader has American citizenship.

Law enforcement, intelligence agencies and the military will have to jump through all sorts of legal hoops to spy on, target or take out Juan Carlos Valencia Gonzalez, who has a $5 million bounty on his head, but the best protection in the world because he was born in California.

The new cartel leader’s drug dealing Mexican parents had a baby in America. That child became a Mexican citizen who runs a Mexican drug cartel that the government has designated as being at war with the United States, and yet we can’t simply remove his citizenship.

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Federal prosecutors in Virginia have charged four men — a Bulgarian arms trafficker with ties to the notorious Russian weapons dealer Viktor Bout, and several African co-conspirators with connections to the governments of Uganda and Tanzania — with conspiring to supply the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación with a $58 million military arsenal that included rocket launchers, surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft drones, and high-powered explosives the brokers boasted could bring down helicopters.

The international arms trafficking conspiracy deepens an already troubling portrait of the military reach and intelligence ties of the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación. Court documents unsealed by the Department of Justice, in an investigation first reported by The Bureau, revealed that Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security publicly issued threats directing the cartel to execute Goldie Ghamari — a prominent Iranian-Canadian activist and former Ontario politician — at her Ottawa home, offering a $250,000 bounty. The arms case suggests that the cartel Iran chose as its instrument of political assassination was simultaneously seeking the weapons inventory of a mid-tier military force.

The investigation was carried out by the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division — an elite, little-known counternarcotics unit that deploys high-grade intelligence tradecraft and has built its reputation targeting criminals of international reach, including those with connections to senior officials in hostile and corrupt states.

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Hospital prices are out of control. We know this.

A patient recently posted a bill showing a hospital charge of $17,813 for an MRI. Her insurance absorbed most of it, but she was still left owing about $2,600 herself. This is not some isolated curiosity. In the recent House Energy and Commerce hearing on health care affordability, Rick Pollack of the American Hospital Association defended hospital finances by arguing that “Medicare and Medicaid payments generally do not cover the full cost of providing care.”

That is the standard hospital defense. Privately insured patients, they say, must make up the difference. They are the cross subsidy.

But the same MRI can often be purchased in a competitive cash market for a fraction of the hospital charge. That alone tells us the hospital bill is not simply the price of an MRI. It is an opaque financing mechanism for the hospital’s broader cost structure.

Hospitals, by law, are not allowed to deny care to people who can’t or won’t pay. They’ve got to cover that cost somehow.s

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It’s not easy being Green.

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For years, the Left tried to gaslight Americans into thinking that Antifa was a fake threat, even though we could see the political violence before our own eyes. Now, the Trump administration isn’t just bringing charges against Antifa rioters, it’s taking aim at the potential funding networks behind the violence.

When Antifa agitators set cars on fire, threw Molotov cocktails and fireworks at the federal courthouse in Portland, and terrorized the streets of U.S. cities in the summer of 2020, many on the Left brushed aside the violence as “fiery but peaceful protests.”

Insurance analysts have estimated that the Black Lives Matter riots between May 28 and June 8, 2020 resulted in more than $2 billion in insurance payouts. The violence cost the lives of at least 26 Americans, including heroes like retired police Captain David Dorn.

The street violence has become more intermittent, but it hasn’t fully abated. Agitators have set Teslas on fire to protest Elon Musk’s work in the Trump administration. Anti-Israel demonstrations on college campuses have veered into antisemitic harassment. In some cases, groups that organized protests received grants from the Left’s dark money network.

Some radical leftists have even attempted or carried out assassinations. President Donald Trump survived two assassination attempts in 2024, as did Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk wasn’t so lucky.

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Martin Hewitt, head of the Border Security Command, will leave his post at the end of March—well before the end of his three-year term—following mounting frustration inside the Home Office over persistently high migrant arrivals. His departure comes after more than 66,000 migrants have crossed the Channel in small boats since Labour took office 19 months ago, with last year alone recording over 41,000 arrivals.

Appointed in September 2024 to deliver on the government’s pledge to “smash the gangs,” Hewitt had been given sweeping powers modelled on counter-terror operations. Yet crossings continued at scale, exposing the limits of enforcement efforts without a credible deterrent.

Insiders said Hewitt had become increasingly frustrated with both operational constraints and a lack of decisive policy backing. He had previously pressed for tougher cooperation from France, including the interception of migrant boats at sea—a measure repeatedly delayed amid political and legal obstacles.

The Other McCain.

You are an intelligent, responsible adult, which is why you’ve never heard of Taylor Frankie Paul. Until Thursday, I hadn’t heard of her either because — as an intelligent, responsible adult — I pay zero attention to “reality TV.” But before getting to her recent failed attempt to break out from that entertainment ghetto, let’s start at the beginning: By 2022, when she was 28, Taylor Frankie Paul had accumulated a massive following on TikTok. She was a married mother of three, and a lot of her content featured her and her husband, Tate Paul, doing silly stunts, sometimes with their two young children. Then in mid-2022, Taylor “went viral” with a video announcing that she would be getting divorced. Her “life was falling apart,” she said and then she dropped the bomb: The breakup was because she and her husband (and many of their friends in their Utah community, allegedly) were involved in “swinging.”

Don’t know who needs to hear this, but . . . BAD IDEA!