Read it.

The U.S. State Department has issued the highest-level travel warning for some Mexican towns next to the U.S.–Mexico border due to elevated risks over kidnappings, gun battles, and improvised explosives devices (IEDs).

A bulletin released by the U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Mexico said a “Level 4: Do Not Travel” advisory has been issued for parts of Tamaulipas state. It cites Reynosa, Rio Bravo, Valle Hermoso, and San Fernando, where IEDs have been found. The area borders the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

The warning also confirmed that officials are “aware of increasingly frequent gun battles occurring in and around Reynosa in the late night and early morning hours.”

“An IED destroyed a Government of Mexico (Conagua) official vehicle in Rio Bravo and injured its occupant on January 23,” the statement said. As a result, U.S. government officials were ordered to avoid travel near Rio Bravo and Reynosa outside of daytime and to stay away from dirt roads across Tamaulipas state, which shares a lengthy border with southern Texas.

‘Quad-demic’ Hitting US With Flu, COVID-19, RSV, Norovirus Surging (Forbes)

7 Charged In America’s Biggest COVID Tax Credit Fraud Scheme

The Largest Tuberculosis Outbreak in U.S. History Is Happening Right Now in Kansas (Charles P. Pierce/Esquire)

“No Consistent Patterns”: Scientists Find No Evidence That Closing Schools Materially Reduced Transmission

Kansas’ tuberculosis outbreak is now the largest in the U.S. since the 1950s (Bek Shackelford-Nwanganga/KCUR)

Senator Ted Cruz is trying to block Wi-Fi hotspots for schoolchildren (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

Scoop: Trump offering buyouts to all federal workers, source says (Axios)  Sure, I believe that.

D.C. federal judge temporarily blocks Trump plan to pause federal aid spending (Daniel Barnes/NBC News)

MSNBC’s Katie Phang Equates Trump on DEI to Woodrow Wilson on Segregation  Forgetting, perhaps, that Wilson was a … Democrat.

All undocumented immigrants are “criminals,” Trump administration says (Axios)  Which they are. A simple statement of fact.

Exhausted Media Begs Trump To Take A Day Off (Babylon Bee)

Read it.

Virginia Beach resident Jacob Hiles is a charter boat captain arrested for crimes related to the protests on J6. He ultimately plead guilty to one misdemeanor count of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building. In exchange for Hiles’ guilty plea, the Department of Justice dropped the remaining three misdemeanor charges against him. He was given two years probation.

However, Hiles says there’s a lot more to the story that he could not tell the public until he was officially pardoned by Donald Trump last week.

The boat captain tells a local NBC affiliate, WAVY-TV 10 that he has video proof of capitol police acting to incite the riots. At least 9 minutes of his video is posted to WAVY-TV 10, though it appears to be heavily edited.

Read it.

Prosecutors in California have reached a plea deal to end a nearly decade-long court fight with an anti-abortion activist and journalist who together exposed Planned Parenthood for allegedly trafficking fetal body parts.

David Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress, and journalist Sandra Merritt, said Monday the criminal cases against them have ended, with the California Attorney General’s office agreeing to a plea deal that includes no prison time or fines, Live Action reported Monday.

Videos taken by Daleiden and Merritt exposed the scandal after they went undercover at various locations, including the National Abortion Federation’s 2014 and 2015 convention and trade shows. The videos, some of which were also taken from inside Planned Parenthood offices, showed executives discussing price negotiations and sales of human body parts.

In a properly ordered society, such people would be celebrated, not prosecuted. But we don’t have that.

After some videos were released, former Vice President Kamala Harris, then California’s Democrat attorney general, met with Planned Parenthood officials in 2016, Live Action reported, after which she ordered criminal investigations into Merritt and Daleiden, including a search of Daleiden’s home.

Harris’ successor as attorney general, Democrat Xavier Becerra, who would become Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden, charged them both with violating California’s recording law. The state had never criminally prosecuted undercover journalists for recordings made in the public interest, according to Liberty Counsel, a Christian legal group that represented Merritt.

Merritt and Daleiden were each charged with 14 felony counts of unlawfully recording a conversation and one felony count of criminal conspiracy.

No good deed goes unpunished–by Democrats.

Read it.

As the tide of totalitarian wokeness recedes from the swamp, some of its ugliest and most toxic creatures will find refuge as employees or grantees of tax-exempt nonprofits. In our pluralist and democratic society, we must, to some degree, tolerate organizations with intolerant, inhuman, or wicked purposes, not least because we should have the intellectual humility not to judge every cause on our present knowledge. Who knows what valuable chemotherapy will come from the poison mushroom the Sierra Club is fighting to save?

True, we need, or at any rate must suffer, the plague of foundations—for fear of an unhealthy political monoculture in which our own miscues and misdeeds go unchallenged. That does not mean these foundations’ current powers and privileges should go unscrutinized. The Ford Foundation was set up in 1936 and now controls about $17 billion in assets, and long since passed out of the effective control of the Ford family. The Rockefeller Foundation controls a mere $6 billion but is so alienated from its roots in Standard Oil money that it is divesting from fossil fuels.

These foundations, and the endowed nonprofit sector more broadly, have been captured by a set of woke officers largely unsupervised by equally woke boards of trustees. They are globalist and frequently antihuman, but they benefit from tax privileges at the expense of the American people. The Ford Foundation has given hundreds of millions to Black Lives Matter and similar causes, and nothing to those whose homes and businesses were destroyed by BLM rioters. The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation pays anti-Semitic protestors on Ivy League campuses while claiming to be balanced because it funds the no less murderously intentioned astroturf organization, the Orwellian-monikered Jewish Voices for Peace.

Read it.

Even before the Los Angeles wildfires broke out, 6 in 10 Californians said the state was heading in the wrong direction. Add in the blazes that have since exposed Gavin Newsom’s incompetent governing, and it’s clear that Newsom’s flacks have their work cut out for them.

We can almost sympathize, then, with the Newsom administration’s pathetic response to a deeply sourced report from our Andrew Kerr and Susannah Luthi that detailed Newsom’s decision to disband a volunteer firefighting unit known as Team Blaze.

The move left the California National Guard without a complete firefighting force in L.A. for 10 days. We’re not the only outlet on the story. And yet Newsom’s press team responded not by disputing the facts but by calling Kerr—an award-winning reporter—a “pizzagate peddler.” They also called the firefighting unit “inadequately trained.”

“That’s weird,” our editors write, “because the Newsom administration tapped the group to help fight the 2021 Dixie Fire, the largest single-source wildfire in California state history, according to the transcript of a September 2021 National Guard press briefing, and the volunteer unit, which was funded by generous donors, met federal standards for combating wildfires set by a little-known federal agency known as the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.”

The Antiplanner.

Scientific American blames the Los Angeles fires on climate change. A Yale University publication agrees. An article in Quartz predicts that climate change is going to make housing “uninsurable.” Instead of insurance, a New York Times op-ed by a former California insurance commissioner argues that oil companies should be forced to pay for fire damages.

It’s a neat argument that appeals to homeowners eager to blame the loss of their houses on anything other than their own decisions to buy or build flammable homes with flammable landscaping in a fireplain. Yet there are valid reasons to believe that climate change is not the issue, and that even if climate change is occurring, it won’t make homes uninsurable. In fact, people who believe climate change is the problem should be all the more interested in making sure that homes and landscaping are fireproof.

A key weakness in most of the arguments for anthropogenic climate change is that they rely on data that goes back only about 55 years or so. The 1970s were one of the coolest decades in the 20th century, so any data that start from there will make it appear that temperatures are rising. The Yale article cites one study that uses data back to 1971 and another that goes back to just 2001.

Read it.

Standing in line at a Target, I glanced at the books for sale. Every work of fiction, with the exception of those two elderly stalwarts, James Patterson and Stephen King, came from a female author. While older male writers still have a large presence on bestseller lists and in the book world, newly published male fiction authors have become rarer than blue moons.

This phenomenon reported on in stories like NPR’s “Women Now Dominate the Book Business” and “Women Are Now Publishing More Books Than Men” (which describe it as a sign of progress) helps shed light on another phenomenon that the media has been rubbing its head over in articles like The Atlantic’s “How Gen Z Came to See Books as a Waste of Time” and Psychology Today’s “Why Aren’t College Students Reading?”

There is a generational decline in reading across Gen Z, but it’s also a gender divide. While there’s always been a gender reading gap, by 2018, 44% of girls loved to read, while only 24% of boys did. One study found that adult women were reading 39% more than men did.

The Guardian.

That’s because the Crust keep trying to make it like Britain’s NHS or the Canadian mandatory government-provided health care, both of which are abject failures.

UPDATE: Since 2018, Over 75,000 Canadians Died Waiting For Health Care

Read it.

The latest spotlight on the crisis in American manufacturing may be on steel, but our nation has traded its manufacturing might for financial gains across all sectors – making the same fateful mistake that has befallen great civilizations throughout history. As a founder, CEO, and advocate for American industrial renewal, who’s building the world’s most advanced, efficient factories to counter China’s chokehold on manufacturing, I can tell you that America has just three years – not 10 – to rebuild our industrial base before falling critically behind.

Read it.

Sure, open up the border! Let ’em all in! What could possibly go wrong?

Read it.

Critical race theory, social and emotional learning, DEI, social justice, and other forms of wokeness are nothing new to the American education system.

Some buy into the divisive concepts, but most parents simply want their children to be proficient in math, reading, science, and other subjects when they graduate high school.

The past four years saw the public square become overtly obsessed with sexual and gender rhetoric. News cycles have been dominated with divisive education issues, such as attempted changes to Title IX, transgender rights, and the use of locker rooms and restrooms.

Read it.

‘You basically have auto workers across the nation subsidizing these trust fund graduate students’

Unions are run by activists, whose lives revolve around politics. This is not a surprise.

Read it.

delman has once more released its annual Trust Barometer, capturing a snapshot of how people around the world feel about today’s leaders.

The findings are hardly positive, with survey data revealing that an increasing proportion of respondents across the 28 polled countries worry that government and business leaders as well as journalists and reporters are purposely misleading people by saying things they know are false or are gross exaggerations.

Gothamist.

Seven men have been indicted for what authorities say was their involvement in a deadly, gang-related shootout in front of young children at a Richmond Hill baby shower last year. One of the men has yet to be apprehended.

The shooting resulted in the death of 24-year-old Great Neck, Long Island resident Jefari Dobie-Reinhardt and injuries to three others in attendance, according to Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz’s office.

More than 40 people, including four children, were in attendance at the baby shower, which took place on May 4 at the Volume Seventeen event venue on Atlantic Avenue, the DA’s office said in a statement Friday. It said two people first opened fire at a crowd of about a dozen people outside, before panicked attendees ran indoors, and then several people fired guns back out through the venue’s windows to the sidewalk.

At least 35 bullet casings, one fired bullet and two live cartridges were recovered at the venue, authorities said. In the statement, Katz described the shooting as “a scene out of the Wild West.”

Imagine how low the crime rates would be if young black males were prohibited from possessing firearms.

Read it.

Last year, the British government decided to end tax breaks for wealthy foreigners, a decision that may have contributed to 10,800 millionaires fleeing the U.K. in 2024, Bloomberg noted. Now, though, Reeves is considering an amendment that would lessen the impact of those plans, multiple people familiar with the matter told the outlet, requesting anonymity as the details have not yet been publicized. That amendment would allow some people to more easily access the temporary repatriation facility (TPF), which lets non-doms bring in previously earned foreign income and gains at a reduced tax rate.

“The temporary repatriation facility is designed to encourage non-doms to bring their funds to the U.K., encouraging them to spend and invest this money here,” the Treasury said in a statement cited by Bloomberg. The current program is available for three tax years from 2025, with a tax rate of 12 percent for the first two years and 15 percent for the third year. The planned amendment wouldn’t change the tax rates or the length of the TRF, people familiar with the situation told the publication.

While the proposed changes to the tax regime may be celebrated by some high-net-worth individuals in the U.K., they may not largely affect the outflow of millionaires.

Once the government gets the idea that your money is its money, it’s hard to go back.

The Other McCain.

He must be a white supremacist, right?

I’m sure the analysts at the FBI will have fun trying to discern some kind of coherent ideology in his manifesto, but it’s really just a collage of nihilistic craziness — “soyjak” memes, tributes to various mass murderers, “groyper” stuff, etc., and honestly what I want to say to these kids is simple: Y’ALL NEED JESUS!

Seriously. These kids see no meaning or purpose in their lives, which is an inevitable consequence of the de-Christianization of our culture. Our education system is openly hostile to Christianity, based upon the liberal secular humanist belief that Christianity is harmful, but if our Soros-funded cultural overlords were ever to make the mistake of inviting me to speak at one of their confabs at Davos or Aspen, I’d wake them up from their secular pipe dream: You think the “Religious Right” is dangerous? Wait until you get a look at what the Atheist Right has in store for you.

UPDATE: Antioch school shooting: Nashville suspect, 17, posted alt-right paraphernalia, photos from past school shootings (Angele Latham/The Tennessean)  Who are you going to believe, a journalist or your lyin’ eyes?

UPDATE: Alleged Nashville school shooter appears to have praised Hitler and shared neo-Nazi content

Read it.

Three weeks of intense wildfires have ignited speculation on X, with many questioning whether arsonists may be to blame for the ignition source of the wildfires. There have been several instances where arsonists were arrested. Meanwhile, mainstream far-left media outlets have struggled to convince the public that evil ‘global warming’ is the primary cause.

When government workers spend their time focused on who gets the spoils rather than on doing their jobs, dystopia arrives on big iron-shot hooves.

Quillette.

In January, the world’s second-largest restaurant chain, McDonald’s, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, both joined the long list of multinational corporations that have announced they are discontinuing their formal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. It’s a trend that also includes such household names as Amazon, Walmart, Molson Coors, Ford Motor Co., John Deere, Lowe’s, Harley-Davidson, Toyota Motor Corp, and, as of this week, the U.S. federal government: Donald Trump’s administration has ordered all federal workers staffed in DEI roles to be placed on paid leave.

In explaining its move, McDonald’s cited the “shifting legal landscape”—specifically, a June 2023 US Supreme Court decision that struck down race-based affirmative-action programs in college admissions as unconstitutional. In its memo to employees, Meta likewise cited Supreme Court jurisprudence, as well as the fact that “the term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”

While Trump’s name doesn’t appear in these memos, the president’s previous comments likely played a role in corporate decision-making. This week’s anti-DEI executive order was no surprise, as Trump had pledged to “eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the entire federal government”; and his most vocal conservative supporters typically attack DEI as being inspired by “woke” or even Marxist principles—an affront to the merit-based ethos.

Read it.

Like the Left Coast, the Ivy League has descended into a dystopia of wokery that will, unless they come to their senses, eventually destroy them.

Read it.

The United Kingdom has confirmed that one of its Royal Navy nuclear-powered submarines surfaced close to the Yantar, a notorious Russian spy ship late last year, to make it clear it was being observed. The revelation came as the Royal Navy was once again closely tracking the Russian ship after it returned to British waters. According to the U.K. defense secretary, the Yantar has, in recent months, been “mapping the U.K.’s critical underwater infrastructure,” at a time when NATO, in general, is increasingly concerned about apparent sabotage to undersea cables.

The Yantar was sailing in British waters in November last year, during which time U.K. Defense Secretary John Healey said it had been “detected loitering over U.K. critical undersea infrastructure.”

Read it.

Covid-19 Inquiry they were forced to form their own support systems after being ignored by the authorities and made to feel like “an uncomfortable truth” of the rollout.

Kate Scott, speaking on behalf of the group Vaccine Injured and Bereaved UK (VIBUK), said they felt they were “almost being pushed into the shadows” as the overwhelming official message continued to be that the jabs were ”safe and effective” in spite of their experience.

Last week’s hearing also heard from a victims’ group in Scotland which raised concerns that the vaccine had been rolled out at such speed that public safety had been sacrifice

Read it.

On Friday’s Erin Burnett OutFront, the show played a report by correspondent Natasha Chen in which she informed viewers of the difficulties caused by electric cars during the Los Angeles wildfires.

It turns out that the batteries used by electric cars have their own environmental consequences when they catch fire, creating hazardous pollution and a blaze that is much more difficult to extinguish than in gas-powered cars.

Gothamist.

A man died in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening after police say he was beaten and robbed in the back of a ride-hail car by two men who got into the car at an intersection.

Michael Shelonchik, 53, was sitting in the back of the vehicle around 6:15 p.m. at the intersection of West 5th Street and Neptune Avenue in Coney Island when the men opened the door, began assaulting him and snatched a chain off his neck, NYPD officials said on Wednesday.

The driver tried to drive away from the perpetrators but only made it a few blocks before Shelonchik lost consciousness, police said. First responders were called and took him to Maimonides Medical Center, where he died.

NYPD officials said it was still unclear whether Shelonchik knew the suspects, and police made no immediate arrests. The NYPD was investigating the case early Wednesday as a potentially suspicious death, while Shelonchik’s cause of death was being determined.

Time to leave.

Read it.

As you may recall, just before Christmas a Saudi psychiatrist drove his vehicle at speed through a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg, killing six people and wounding hundreds more.

Now comes word that the federal Prosecutor General does not identify the incident as an act of terrorism, because… Well, just because. Maybe it’s because the perpetrator wasn’t a “neo-Nazi”.

A Red Rebound

This map shows the percentage point change in 2024 results from 2020 in counties where votes are nearly all counted. At least 2,630 shifted more Republican and 301 turned more Democratic.

Read it.

EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit that Dr. Anthony Fauci used to offshore risky gain-of-function research 6 months before the Obama administration banned it, has finally been cut off by the US Government – along with its former president, Peter Daszak, for a period of five years following scrutiny over its work in Wuhan, China ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Read it.

How about that Sustainable Green Energy? Doesn’t it make you want to go out and buy an Electric Vehicle? Or maybe a Tesla Wall?

Read it.

Underscoring the depths of these degenerate modern times.

Read it.

By 2022, Yuval Noah Harari would announce its dark fulfillment:

“Humans are now hackable animals. The whole idea of free will… that’s over. Today we have the technology to hack human beings on a massive scale. Everything is being digitized, everything is being monitored. In this time of crisis, you have to follow science. It’s often said you should never allow a good crisis to go to waste, because a crisis is an opportunity to also do ‘good’ reforms that in normal times people would never agree to. But in a crisis, you have no chance, so you better do what we – the people who understand – tell you to do.”

Like Truman Burbank in ‘The Truman Show,’ we inhabit a world where reality itself is increasingly engineered. And like Truman, most remain unaware of the extent of this engineering until shown the patterns. But unlike Truman’s physical dome with its obvious cameras and artificial sets, our manufactured environment operates through sophisticated technological systems and invisible digital constraints. The mechanics of this reality engineering – from media manipulation to social programming – were explored in detail in our previous analysis. Now we turn to the driving force behind this manufactured world: technocracy, the system of control that makes such reality engineering possible on a global scale.

Read it.

Over the past half-century, tens of millions of Americans have poured into sunny states like Florida and California that are catastrophically unsuited for large populations. Specifically, the former is in hurricane alley and is guaranteed a direct hit from a Cat-5 one of these days, while the latter is a desert prone to droughts and raging wildfires (see today’s news).

While this ill-fated mass migration was happening, the federal government was inflating away the dollar, causing the prices of financial assets like homes — especially in popular coastal cities — to soar to stratospheric highs.

Read it.

Texas A&M University is in legal and political trouble.

It faces threats of civil rights liability, the loss of federal funding, and the firing of its president, Mark Welsh III, all because its general counsel, Ray Bonilla, gave the university legal advice that he should have known was unsound.

Journalist-activist Chris Rufo revealed on X that Texas A&M University is sponsoring employees’ travel to a racially segregated diversity, equity, and inclusion conference on March 20 and 21 in Chicago. The conference lists Texas A&M among its “university partners” and excludes Asian and white people from attending.

Even in red states, the rot is everywhere.

The Foundry.

It’s time to make Washington, D.C., safe again. Washington is one of the most dangerous capital cities in the civilized world. Tourists, diplomats, members of Congress and their staffs, and residents—especially in minority neighborhoods—have all been victims of crime.

If Washington, D.C., was a state, it would have the highest per capita homicide rate of any state in the United States.

It’s a disgrace.

As are all other Democrat-ruled urban areas.

Read it.

A high-ranking military appointee of California Gov. Gavin Newsom diminished the state’s emergency response volunteer firefighting units, according to Maj. Gen. Jay Coggan, retired commanding general of the California State Guard.

California is now struggling to contain destructive wildfires, which have killed 25 people and displaced more than 80,000 in the Los Angeles area.

Newsom appointed Matthew Beevers to serve as adjutant general of the California Military Department in May 2023. Beevers has a history of marching in LGBTQ pride parades and was investigated for alleged antisemitism against a subordinate, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Beevers denied making the antisemitic comment.

Read it.

America’s first gender-deluded congressman apparently believes it’s his job as a public representative to make his sexual dysphoria the problem of impressionable young children.

A viral video shows “transgender” Rep. Tim “Sarah” McBride (D-Del.) telling elementary school kids it’s “society’s” fault that people considered him a boy when he “knew” he was “really a girl.”

The problem ain’t what you know, it’s what you ‘know’ that ain’t so. Biology picks whether you are a boy or a girl. If you want to be something else, well, why not wish for a pony while you’re at it?

Read it.

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

Well, it’s coming….

Read it.

And why is that?

Well, this may have something to do with it:

Read it.

revoke Swedish citizenship for dual nationals involved in gang-related crimes. The move comes in response to rising organised crime and security concerns, which Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer has described as threats to democracy.

The reforms will enable parliament to strip dual citizens of their Swedish nationality if they are found guilty of crimes threatening state security or linked to organised criminal networks. This aligns with similar policies in Denmark, where citizenship can already be revoked for actions harmful to state interests. By targeting gang leaders orchestrating violent crimes from abroad, the government aims to disrupt networks responsible for a dramatic rise in shootings and bombings.

The centre-right government, supported by the right-wing Sweden Democrats, points to alarming statistics of 363 shootings and numerous bombings in 2024 as evidence of the need for reform. Migration Minister Johan Forssell said it was “far too easy” to become Swedish.

Gothamist.

Police are searching for an unidentified man accused of setting multiple fires across the city last week, including inside two subway stations and a police car.

The NYPD said the man set a police car on fire shortly after 2 a.m. Friday before igniting a second fire that damaged a vehicle in front of 14 Murray St., near City Hall. The suspect then reportedly traveled to the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall subway station, where he set a paper cup on fire and tossed it into a garbage can around 2:55 a.m., police said. The spree concluded around 3:40 a.m. when the man set fire to a pile of garbage next to a sleeping passenger aboard a northbound J train at the Woodhaven Avenue station in Queens, according to officials.

Read it.

Was one of them named Climate Change?

UPDATE: Blowtorch-Wielding Illegal Immigrant Has at Least Three Prior Los Angeles Arrests—and a History of Violence

Read it.

We had an inexpensive life-saving solution both before and during the pandemic…

The inconvenient truth is that even at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a very simple, inexpensive and effective treatment was available that could have saved the majority of lives lost (1-3). All that the WHO and public health bureaucracy had to do was to recommend and support people taking sufficient Vitamin D3.

I took D3 throughout the Pandemic Panic, didn’t wear a mask unless forced to, and still have never had COVID (though my  wife, whom I smooch whenever I have an excuse, has had it twice).

This failure to act traces back to the unscientific bias and pro-vaccine obsession of Dr. Anthony Fauci. And once again the legacy media, while being paid by the US government and the pharmaceutical industry to promote vaccination, acted by censoring, defaming and suppressing the ability of physicians to inform people of scientific truth. The disease you suffered, the loss of life among your family and friends, could have been greatly reduced by simply getting enough Vitamin D3. This is another example of what happens when unelected bureaucrats are allowed to control free speech. Crimes against humanity.

Still waiting for some justice-obsessed individual to Do The Right Thing re Fauci. I’d do it myself but it would be Too Much Like Work.

Read it.

For the latest proof that we’re all living in a black comedy about the leftist-led destruction of the West, cast your eyes on a woke theater in “gay Paree.”

In December, the Gaîté Lyrique theater held a conference titled, “Reinventing The Welcome For Refugees In France.” Fittingly, more than 250 African migrants showed up, were welcomed — and then refused to leave. Five weeks later, they’re still there, along with 50 more who’ve piled inside.

Read it.

Why does nobody care about anything? The world is full of stuff that could be excellent with just 1% more effort. But people don’t care.

Have you been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.

Ever used a piece of software that’s buggy as hell, looks bad, but still costs money, presumably because the company behind it has found some regulatory capture to justify their existence? The programmer who wrote it probably doesn’t care. Their manager definitely doesn’t care. The regulators don’t care.

You might think “something something incentive systems”. No. At my big tech job I had the pleasure of interviewing a few programmers who worked for a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture. Let me assure you: They. Do. Not Care.

I’ve met a few people that work for municipal governments. Not politicians, just career bureaucrats deep in the system. I ask them what their favorite part of the job is. They all say “stability” or “job security” as their #1. It takes 18 months to get the city to permit your shed? They. Do. Not. Care.

Read it.

Is your home on fire because your local fire department is run by three lesbians named Kirsten and there’s no water because that department is also being run by a diversity hire?

Sorry, maybe you should have bought diversity insurance.

Biden Races to Cement His Legacy Through a Series of Actions (New York Times)

Certification of Rescission of Cuba’s Designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (The White House)

Biden moves to lift state sponsor of terrorism designation for Cuba, part of deal to free prisoners (Associated Press)

Biden Administration to Lift Cuba’s State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation (NewsMax)

Biden Throws Cuban Curve Ball Days Before Trump Enters White House

Florida Dems: Mistake to Remove Cuba as Terrorist State (NewsMax)

Sen. Cruz Rips Move to Lift Cuba Terror Designation (NewsMax)

Biden Solidifies Anti-Oil Legacy With Flurry of Lame-Duck Attacks on Drilling and Mining

No One Wants A Biden Presidential Library (The Federalist)

‘Sinking the Democratic Party’: Florida Dems Rip Biden for Delisting Cuba as Terrorism Sponsor

Larry Correia.

Listen, epic fantasy readers, real talk time. I know you had a good thing going with George. At the beginning of your relationship there seemed like there was so much potential there, like he really cared, and he’d provide a satisfactory end to your relationship. Only George is fat and lazy, and once he got that sweet sweet HBO money, he didn’t need you anymore. So then you turned to Pat, only he was even sleazier, gas lighting you, promising you a new chapter if you paid his rent, stringing you along for a decade.

The swine.

George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss have totally fucked over an entire generation of new authors. That will be their real legacy. They wrote some books that got super popular. These books dominated their genres for a lot of years, and hundreds of thousands of readers were glued to them, waiting for the next installment. Only because they are both apathetic sacks of shit with zero work ethic, their fans have been left waiting for over a decade for them to fulfill their promises.

Only this post ain’t about them. I don’t know what makes up the assortment of their particular bag of nuts, or why they suck at doing their jobs now. As a writer who has retained his dairy farmer roots interpretation of what it means to have a work ethic, fuck those guys.

I second that emotion.

ZMan:

Anyone who has had anything to do with the American healthcare system knows that it is both amazingly good and amazingly insane. If you have a treatable form of cancer, you can be cured of something that within living memory killed people. On the other hand, if they find some trivial ailment during your physical, you can be subjected to endless hustles to pump you full of prescription medications.

From my limited experience with the system, it appears to be a system created by organized crime, but some of the members found Jesus and wanted to help people, so the compromise was gangsterism mixed with altruism. The frustrating part of it is you are never sure which end you are experiencing. Often it feels like it is both at the same time, which should be impossible.

One reason for this is we do not treat medicine as a business. The medical professions, even the bullshit administrative stuff, are full of people who have nailed themselves to the cross as a sacrifice to the rest of us. Any suggestion that they are acting from anything other than the your best interests is treated as blasphemy. They are “care givers” who sacrifice for the rest of us.

Popular culture does not help, as it is full of movies and television shows that portray these people as altruistic angels, sent here to serve humanity. This took a massive hit during Covid, when we learned that the chubby nurses were making TikTok videos in empty hospitals when they claimed to be saving lives. This change in public perception had no impact on their view of themselves.

…

This confusion about the reality of the medical business lies at the heart of the debate of health care reform. The “universal medicine” people are sure that the problem is the profit motive, so they want to remove it. They think this will turn everyone into angels who live to serve us. Instead, it will turn them into the sorts of people who will never be fired for the Los Angeles wildfires.

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist.

It’s well known that the voting methods we use are highly defective, as they fail to meet fundamental criteria like positive responsiveness, the Pareto principle, and stability. Positive responsiveness (monotonicity) means that if a candidate improves on some voters’ ballots, this should not reduce the candidate’s chances of winning. Yet, many voting methods, including runoffs and ranked-choice voting, fail positive responsiveness. In other words, candidates who became more preferred by voters can end up losing when they would have won when they were less preferred! It’s even more shocking that some voting systems can fail the Pareto principle, which simply says that if every voter prefers x to y then the voting system should not rank y above x. Everyone knows that in a democracy a candidate may be elected that the minority ranks below another possible candidate but how many know that there are democratic voting procedures where a candidate may be elected that the majority ranks below another possible candidate or even that democratic voting procedures may elect a candidate that everyone ranks below another possible candidate! That is the failure of the Pareto principle and the chaos results of McKelvey–Schofield show that this kind of outcome should be expected.

Almost all researchers in social choice understand the defects of common voting systems and indeed tend to agree that the most common system, first past the post voting, is probably the most defective! But, as no system is perfect, there has been less consensus on which methods are best. Ranked choice voting, approval voting and the Borda Count all have their proponents. In recent years, however, there has been a swing towards the Borda Count.

UnHerd.

Vaccination rates against childhood diseases have been on a downward slide for the past few years in the United States. Nationally, for example, the share of kindergarteners with completed records for the measles vaccine dropped to 93 percent last year, down from 95 percent in 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Polio, whooping cough, and chickenpox vaccination rates have likewise slumped since the pandemic.

Vaccines are one of the marvels of modern science, allowing our species to overcome some of our oldest microscopic adversaries. The erosion of public support for childhood immunisation is thus lamentable, not to mention dangerous. Yet public-health and government authorities looking for someone to blame for growing vaccine scepticism might wish to look in the mirror: Their Covid and gender excesses have done a great deal to sow distrust among parents.