Read it.

A Pfizer-funded, peer-reviewed paper authored by Pfizer scientists reveals that the company’s antiviral COVID medication Paxlovid completely sucks, confirming what everyone’s known since it came out.

Power Line.

When I was growing up, most families I knew had four children. More, if they were Catholics. That is one of the fundamental ways in which our society has changed: today, people generally have fewer children. And now, if you show me a family with four children, I will lay heavy odds that they are Republicans.

In the New York Post, Glenn Reynolds writes about the fact that the world needs more babies. Beginning in the 1960s, fueled in part by the prophecies of Paul Ehrlich, an entomologist who had an almost unbroken record of being wrong about everything, fears grew of a population explosion. Governments tried to reduce fertility, but in the West, social trends no doubt contributed more to the ensuing baby bust.

Today, most countries outside of Africa face an uncertain future due to a lack of fertility.

It’s not a lack of fertility–people can still have as many kids as they want to. The problem is that far fewer want to. Children used to be an economic benefit, but now they are merely an expense, an expense that increasingly only the relatively rich can afford.

The Guardian.

NK Beale knew something was wrong when her boss started sending her listings for other job openings.

“My manager was advising me to put in my notice,” said Beale, who is 40 and lives in Washington DC. “It was kind of weird, because we had a pretty good relationship, and I felt as though he was someone I could trust.”

There had been a shift in leadership at her tech company during a tumultuous time in the industry, with mass layoffs at Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Beale wondered if maybe her boss had encouraged her to put in her notice before they had a chance to officially lay her off so the company wouldn’t have to pay severance. The stress of it all started to affect her sleep and wellbeing.

When it got to be too much, Beale’s partner suggested that she speak to an old colleague named Cierra Gross, who founded an independent human resources consulting firm called Caged Bird HR.

Read it.

In the post-pandemic period of Covid, there’s now a concerted effort to comprehend and explain the damage that was caused by our capitulating to the hysterical overreaction and overreach of the ‘experts.’ There’s a long list of policy failures to examine; mask mandates were a disaster that accomplished absolute nothing of value, but instead led to tremendous harms, many of which continue today.

Read it.

President Obama often said that he was confident in the success of his leftist policies because modern progressives “…are on the right side of history”.  I always thought that was just a clever way to acknowledge the obvious flaws in his thinking, while convincing people to do as he says anyway:  “Yeah, I know this goes against your ethics, patriotism, experience, religion, and logic.  But all those things are temporary.  Once we change all those things to something else, then believe me, you’ll wish you had just agreed with us initially.”

The concept that there is a ‘right side of history’, and that they are on that side, is the essence of the creed of progressivism. It stems from Hegel (as lifted and polished up by Marx) that there is an inevitable arc to history and that you all had better get on board the train if you don’t want to be left by the side of the tracks.

New York Post.

Starting last summer, vagrants – believed to be from Oakland’s homeless encampments – used small boats to raid the large ships and steal valuables. Homeowners fought back and chased would-be thieves across San Francisco Bay.

Read it.

In a mandatory course on “structural racism” for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles, a guest speaker who has praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel led students in chants of “Free, Free Palestine” and demanded that they bow down to “mama earth,” according to students in the class and audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, who has referred to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks as “justice,” began the March 27 class by leading students in what she described as a “non-secular prayer” to “the ancestors,” instructing everyone to get on their knees and touch the floor—”mama earth,” as she described it—with their fists.

At least half of the assembled students complied, two students said. Gray-Garcia, a local activist who had been invited to speak about “Housing (In)Justice,” proceeded to thank native tribes for preserving “what the settlers call L.A.,” according to audio obtained by the Free Beacon, and to remind students of the city’s “herstory.”

USA Today.

The Bradford pear tree, with its fluffy white early-spring blossoms, is a looker. Even the tree’s putrid aroma emitted at full-bloom hasn’t kept it from becoming a go-to ornamental option for developers and landscapers for decades.

But the tree is now planted smack in the dab of a growing problem across the U.S.: It’s contributing to the spread of related invasive trees that are taking over some urban green spaces and pastureland and encroaching on forests.

“It’s really easy to just drive down the road and see how much it is spreading,” Lori Chamberlin, forest health program manager for the Virginia Department of Forestry, told USA TODAY. “It really does well along disturbed areas so along roadsides, along fields and along forest edges. In some cases we are seeing it actually invade forests. It’s displacing native tree species and preventing native trees from growing.”

The American Mind.

The internet has a lot to say about whom we should marry. From memes about the ideal woman to viral posts about how much money a man should spend on a first date and pseudo-scientific lectures about why women break up with their boyfriends, we are inundated with pronouncements about how to find (or be) the perfect mate. While it would be easy to dismiss all this as the shallow-minded mishigas of the very young, that misses the point: everyone is desperate for love, but no one seems able to find it.

…

The young want to be loved the way that Mr. Rochester loves Jane in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It’s my favorite love story, and I’ve been rereading it lately. Every time I get to the proposal scene—that moment where Rochester tells Jane, “You—you strange, you almost unearthly thing!—I love as my own flesh,”—I feel an almost unbearable yearning. Happily married and settled as I am, I feel a heart-cracking ache that is both exquisite and devastating.

But the problem is, no one can see and know and love us the way Rochester loves Jane. Because Rochester is Jane. He’s a creation of the same mind that created her. This is true for any great fictional love story—Pride and Prejudice, Cinderella, Romeo and Juliet, take your pick. We look at these lovers and think, “Yes! That! That is what I want!” And then we look at our actual lover—or some potential lover—and think, “Why can’t you be that?”

Read THE RATIONAL MALE by Rollo Tomassi. Then search for ‘red pill’ on YouTube.d

Read it.

Spike protein could remain in immune cells for more than 245 days following vaccination, according to a recent preprint. The study evaluated 50 patients who developed long COVID-like symptoms after the COVID-19 vaccine; none had been infected with the virus.

Read it.

A candidate for mayor of a violence-wracked city in Mexico has been killed just as she began campaigning.

No wonder so many ‘migrants’ are heading north.

Read it.

Preventive mental health therapy for children may be doing more harm than good—and there’s research to prove it, author Abigail Shrier suggests in her new book “Bad Therapy.”

“What you might not know is that the stuff that travels under the headline ‘mental health’ is really harmful for kids,” she said at a recent book-signing event hosted by the Lincoln Club at Newport Beach. “I’m telling you that according to the best psychological research available, it’s exactly what you would want to do if you wanted to break kids down.”

In “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up,” which hit The New York Times’ best seller list, Ms. Shrier investigates the mental health industry and its negative impact on children, and concludes that when it comes to preventive therapy—especially for children—more is not always better.

Washington Free Beacon.

To hear the Biden White House and their allies tell it, Third Circuit judicial nominee Adeel Mangi—whose nomination is all but dead following three Democratic defections—is the victim of a vicious right-wing smear campaign.

White House chief of staff Jeff Zients charged that “some Senate Republicans and their extreme allies are relentlessly smearing Adeel Mangi with baseless accusations.” Mangi, Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.) told the Senate chamber on the verge of tears, has been “trashed and smeared and maligned.” And in the Atlantic, Mangi’s law colleague, Gregory L. Diskant, recently seen filing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court pressing the justices to toss former president Donald Trump off the ballot, writes that Mangi faces “opposition grounded in hate.”

Sounds bad.

Read it.

A Russian intelligence unit that specializes in assassinations may be behind “Havana syndrome,” a mysterious condition that afflicted U.S. diplomats, according to a report.

A joint investigation by CBS’s 60 Minutes, along with Der Spiegel and The Insider, revealed links between Russia’s GRU Unit 29155 and suspected attacks on U.S. government officials both in the United States and abroad.

Symptoms of Havana syndrome—which the U.S. government terms “anomalous health incidents,” or AHI— include sudden headaches, vertigo, ringing in the ears, nausea, and in some cases blindness or hearing loss. The syndrome was named after U.S. officials in the Cuban capital first reported experiencing these symptoms in late 2016.

Read it.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty member who last month went on an anti-Semitic tirade—in which he called House Education and the Workforce Committee chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) a “treasonous Zionist tool” and referred to Israelis as “parasites”—is now urging his followers to shut down an Israeli company in Cambridge, saying, “No stoping [sic] until liberation.”

Afif Aqrabawi, a postdoctoral associate working in MIT’s Tonegawa neuroscience lab, encouraged his Twitter followers to shut down an Israeli company located in Cambridge, Mass. The MIT faculty member was responding to a Twitter follower’s suggestion to shut down a Raytheon facility in Bedford, Mass., to which he responded, “Elbit in Cambridge as well. No stoping [sic] until liberation.”

The call to action followed pictures Aqrabawi posted of a pro-Palestinian protest in Boston that blocked traffic Saturday evening.

Read it.

Author JK Rowling could be prosecuted for “misgendering” trans people under Scotland’s odious new hate crime law that comes into force today, an SNP minister has admitted.

Senior police officers are expecting a deluge of complaints over online posts after the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 created a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.

A person could now be imprisoned for up to seven years if they engage in “insulting” behaviour towards ‘protected’ groups, and the prosecution only needs to prove that the hatred was “likely” rather than “intended”.

Read it.

Police arrested 27-year-old Xavier Israel, who has three prior arrests all from January 2022, without incident at the Russian Consulate, we’re told.

Read it.

When unemployment and inflation cause skyrocketing incentives for thieves to steal industrial metals like copper, criminals rush for some of the biggest sources: critical infrastructure. That includes cell towers, water pipes, street lights, and rail lines. These copper heists threaten transportation, communication, municipal services, urban safety, and other essentials of modern life.

The chaos they can cause can cost lives, too — for example, copper heists from railways can cause warning lights, intersection gates, and turnouts that divert trains to other tracks to go offline.

Read it.

Three climate demonstrators arrested this evening after interrupting Easter services at St. Patrick’s Cathedral with a banner reading, “Silence = Death.”

As they were shoved out, one yelled out, “Free Palestine!”

If they had so interrupted a prayer service at a mosque, the congregation would have beaten them to death before the police could arrive.

Christians … not so much.

WABC-TV.

Eyewitness News captured what a growing number of property owners and police are dealing with on a daily basis – a squatter standoff.

“It’s not fair that I, as the homeowner, have to be going through this,” Adele Andaloro said.

Andaloro inherited her family’s home in Flushing, Queens after her parents passed away. She was in the process of selling it when she noticed a problem. Someone changed the entire front door and lock of her home.

Read it.

On Thursday, March 28th, Donald Trump attended the wake of a New York police officer who had been killed in the line of duty. That same day, Democrat President Joe Biden was joined by two former Democrat presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, at a fundraiser where attendees had to pony up $500,000 to get in the door.

The stark difference between the two events illustrates with painful clarity the divide that has gradually emerged in American society over the past 30 years. It is a divide between an increasingly arrogant elite and the American people they look down their noses at with contempt in their eyes.

The American Mind.

Dr. John Eastman is a patriot, a constitutional scholar, a lawyer, a husband, and a father. He is our friend, colleague, and fellow board member of the Claremont Institute, who has spent his life defending the principles upon which this great nation was founded. After a ten week travesty of a trial, a California Bar Court judge, seeking to criminalize disagreements in constitutional interpretation, recommended that John should lose his license to practice law in California.

The term “lawfare” has become part of the American vernacular in the past few years. It means the manipulation and corruption of the legal system to gain political advantage and attack and destroy one’s political opponents. The most famous example of lawfare is, of course, the shocking abuse of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Attorney General’s office in the state of New York, and the District Attorney’s office in Fulton County Georgia in an attempt to destroy the current Republican candidate for the presidency, Donald J. Trump. But the assault on Trump is just the most widely publicized example of this evil practice, which is destroying the rule of law in America.

Anyone who dares to oppose the reigning progressive regime, at any level and in any way, is a potential target of this lawfare. Especially targeted are those who dared to raise any question about the legality of the 2020 election. Prominent among these is John Eastman.

Read it.

A recent Washington Post article indicated that only 12% of the reading public were interested in reading science fiction.  A perusal of bestseller lists for science fiction shows an even more alarming truth: the science fiction books that do sell are a shrinkingly small number of reprints, classics and novels that had been adapted into movies.

The December 2023 bestseller list on Publisher’s Weekly contained only two novels published originally in 2023: Pestilence by Laura Thalassa (an odd addition to the Science Fiction list as it is marketed as fantasy / romance) and Starter Villain by John Scalzi. The bestselling SF novel in that time period, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, sold almost 17,000 copies. This puts it far below the bottom of the top 10 overall fiction bestseller list where Sarah J. Maas’ romantasy novel A Court of Mist and Fury sits at 19,097 copies sold.

Science fiction is not selling.

Read it.

Two high-speed military cargo ships are stuck in the Port of Baltimore following Tuesday morning’s collapse of the 1.6-mile-long Francis Scott Key Bridge. The major US East Coast port has been paralyzed for several days as the bridge collapse prevents inbound and outbound vessel traffic along the harbor’s channel.

Using the automatic identification system, or AIS, data that tracks commercial vessels, three bulk carriers, two general cargo ships, one vehicle carrier, one tanker, and four Ready Reserve Force vessels (RRF), along with the container ship Dali that struck the bridge, are trapped in the harbor, according to the shipping blog gCaptain.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Read it.

An illegal migrant’s viral TikTok video that essentially explains how to “invade” unoccupied residences and assert squatter’s rights has brought attention to a “dangerous” trend that law enforcement fears is only going to worsen.

Gee, I wonder why….

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

For now, at least, I hope everyone has a blessed Good Friday and Easter weekend with your friends and family. For the Orthodox readers, you will have to wait another month this year, but that is how it goes some years. Catholics, of course, will be saying a special thanks for the Episcopal Church. It is a reminder that no matter how terrible things have gotten for Catholics, it can always get worse.

Amen to that.

The Foundry.

Over the past 18 months, The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen and I have visited the border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. What we saw in all our travels was the same: President Joe Biden’s deliberate abandonment of every measure that has worked in the past to reduce incentives for illegal immigration, combined with diminished enforcement of immigration law in the interior, has attracted economic migrants from all over the globe.

People from over 180 countries who want to enter the U.S. but have no legal basis to do so know that the Biden administration will let them in and allow them to stay, so they come. It’s as simple as that.

The American Mind.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was so supremely confident that his thumb on the scale can tip the U.S. presidential election that he just issued a cash demand to President Biden along with a threat: give me money or Donald Trump wins. The spectacle, shameful for all parties, played out on the grand stage of CBS’s 60 Minutes Sunday broadcast.

As my book Overrun shows, Biden launched and nurtured a mass immigration crisis for three straight years. The knock-on effects of this debacle are now being felt all over the country, and not just in conservative enclaves. These days, Biden’s immigration policy registers as so deeply unpopular with the American people that López Obrador offered the old “silver-or-lead” option to the Biden campaign on national television.

If President Biden wants his mass migration crisis to recede from public view before the election, López Obrador will slow the flow of migrants—for the ripe price of a $20 billion down payment. This cash would be sent under the paper-thin cover of the debunked “root causes” theory of mass migration, which proposes that money from the destination country can rebuild countries generating outmigration so that their citizens want to stay.

The American Prospect. (blue check member of the Narrative Media)

Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

‘Neoliberal’ is Narrative-speak for ‘classical liberal’ and pretty much always used incorrectly.

The American Mind.

The number of Americans who die each year from an opioid overdose has exploded over the last two decades. Each year, over 70,000 Americans succumb to synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl; that’s more than the total number of American soldiers who died during the Vietnam War. The rate of deaths per capita has quadrupled since the turn of the century.

Most of the fentanyl flooding the country is produced in Mexico by the cartels. These are the same cartels that also smuggle in weapons and traffic hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people across the southern border. The cartels are able to act so freely and with such impunity because the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known popularly as AMLO, has taken a laissez-faire approach to their dealings. AMLO has said he believes a “hugs not bullets” approach is the best way to deal with the cartels.

López Obrador recently reiterated his stance on not taking orders from America regarding combatting the drug cartels. Throughout his presidency, AMLO has provided various justifications for his approach of prioritizing dialogue over confrontation with these criminal organizations. He has emphasized that violence cannot be countered with more violence and has highlighted the importance of addressing the root causes of drug cartel violence such as poverty and limited opportunities. López Obrador explicitly states that his decision to refrain from pursuing the cartels aligns with his “Mexico First” policy, and that the issue of drug overdoses primarily affects the United States, not Mexico. In other words, your problem, not mine.

Read it.

Transgender weightlifter Vicki Piper’s first place win in the Masters National Weightlifting Championships in Reno, Nevada, resulted in outrage from some concerned about fairness in women’s sports.

Read it.

New Mexico’s top election official won’t disclose key information about a new electronic signature-verification system for putting candidates on the ballot, a lawsuit alleges just months after she settled a court case over lack of transparency.

Last August, New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver settled the public records dispute with a think tank over voting information for $22,000, after initially blocking access to documents.

Last week, the same organization—the Southwestern Public Policy Institute—sued again in New Mexico’s 13th Judicial District in Sandoval County over records regarding the state’s signature-verification portal.

New York Post.

The “migrant influencer” encouraging others to invade the US and squat at the homes of citizens skipped out on authorities shortly after arriving in the country and is on the run from immigration officials, The Post can reveal.

Venezuelan national Leonel Moreno crossed the southern border illegally in April 2022 at Eagle Pass, Texas, and was enrolled in the Alternatives to Detention program, which allows federal authorities to track migrants using ankle monitors or other technology.

However, Moreno didn’t follow the rules and is now listed as an “absconder” from the program, according to internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents seen by The Post.

Read it.

The New York Post is speculating that the infamous ‘knockout game’ could have made a return after numerous women reported being punched in the head by “strangers” in New York City.

Note that they wisely don’t try this on men.

The American Mind

A disturbing new trend emerged recently of publishers altering and modifying various literary works to make them more consistent with contemporary attitudes. Puffin Books, the publisher of Roald Dahl’s works, decided that his description of a character in Matilda as “fat” and “ugly” was offensive, and replaced them with terms deemed to be more sensitive. References to Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad were replaced with John Steinbeck and Jane Austen. The adoption of such practices has led to the creation of a new career field—like community organizers and social media influencers—of “sensitivity readers,” who examine manuscripts in search of words and phrases which need to be changed to avoid offending modern sensibilities. The works of Agatha Christie have also been subject to this mutilation, and Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels are about to undergo the same treatment. This type of thing appears to be a growing trend in the U.K., but U.S. editions of Roald Dahl’s books have not yet been changed.

Read it.

A United Nations report released Tuesday detailed allegations of Russia having executed 32 Ukrainian prisoners of war and using them as human shields to hunt mines.

“If there is no boogeyman, no one gets paid.” — Rollo Tomassi

Read it.

Homeowners who go on vacation or a business trip, even for just a week, are returning to find their house overtaken by trespassers who fraudulently claim a right to be there. It’s happening to tens of thousands of homeowners from New York City to Atlanta and Los Angeles.

When owners call the police, they’re told police can’t help. It’s a civil matter, and they have to file an eviction lawsuit, which can drag on for months or years because housing courts are backlogged.

Meanwhile owners are out on the street while squatters are living free, destroying houses and even selling off owners’ belongings.

Read it.

People who receive Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine have a greater risk of developing chronic hives, according to researchers in Denmark.

Most activities in schools are merely training people to be ‘good losers’. Eventually you wind up with a country full of losers, with results as you see them.

Read it.

It’s not easy being green.

Power Line.

Last March 27, in the run-up to the April 1 “Trans Day of Vengeance,” Audrey Hale shot her way into the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. There Hale murdered Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Mike Hill, 61, William Kinney, 9, Katherine Koonce, 60, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Hallie Scruggs, nine years old and the daughter of Covenant Presbyterian pastor Chad Scruggs. The victims died of multiple gunshot wounds and Hale also applied blunt force trauma to William Kinney and Katherine Koonce.

A former student at the school, Hale carefully planned the attack for months. Police and the FBI blocked release of her “manifesto” and trans activists were adamant that the material not be released. The Trans Resistance Network proclaimed that Audrey Hale “had no other effective way to be seen than to lash out by taking the life of others.”

Over at the White House, Joe Biden failed to identify or condemn the shooter, failed to name a single murder victim, and did not attend any of the funerals. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said “our hearts go out to the trans community as they are under attack right now.”

The Foundry.

Traditionally, teachers unions have kept a laserlike focus on improving members’ pay, benefits, and working conditions.

Although not educational outcomes for the children they’re supposed to teach. Let’s not get crazy here.

Now, though, teachers unions are diverting their energies from fighting for the well-being of teachers to fighting over a host of unrelated issues. Teachers unions now have foreign policies.

Because they’re unions and therefore a part of the Democrat base.

Read it.

Who could possibly have seen this coming? California’s minimum wage for fast food workers is going up next week and some chains are already planning layoffs in response. Newsom signed the bill raising the minimum wage last September.

The businesses will eventually move to business-friendly places like Texas and Florida.

The (former) employees will be unemployed and dependent on government benefits, thereby ensuring more votes for Democrats, the Party of Government Dependency.

Don’t think that this happens by accident.

Read it.

“A sound Conservative government,” said Taper, musingly. “I understand: Tory men and Whig measures.”

—Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby 

In American terms, Republican men and Democrat measures.

Sound familiar?

Read it.

The Ven Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, Archdeacon of Liverpool wrote on X “I went to a conference on whiteness last autumn. It was very good, very interesting and made me realise: whiteness is to race as patriarchy is to gender.”

Threlfall-Holmes, who is white, added “So yes, let’s have anti-whiteness, and let’s smash the patriarchy. That’s not anti-white, or anti-men, it’s anti-oppression.”

Read it.

The radical leftists in control of Baltimore City Hall have plunged the metro area just north of Washington, DC, into apocalyptic levels. We advise readers to entirely avoid the metro area as violent crime spirals out of control.

Failed social justice reforms, defunding the police, and widespread mistrust of the police have resulted in a skeleton police force that will no longer be able to protect residents in some regions of the city.

Fox Baltimore reported last Tuesday that only three police officers were on duty for the Southern Police District, which includes more than 61,000 residents.

ZMan, who refers to Baltimore as “Lagos on the Chesapeake”, recently moved to West Virginia and says that he is very pleased to have done so.

Read it.

Fewer hurricanes, for one thing. Fewer Latin American drug dealers, for another. Fewer illegal immigrants, for a third. People who speak reasonably understandable English, for a fourth.

ZMan connects the dots.

Whenever there is a terrorist attack, the main question immediately after it is who conducted the attack. This is not just for the mundane reason of apprehending the people responsible, but also for understanding why they did it. Terrorism, by definition, exists within the context of a larger political cause. A crazy person opening fire at a mall is a different thing than an Antifa member opening fire at a church school. The former is simply crazy while the latter has a political motivation.

After the attack on the Moscow music venue over the weekend, the first thing people naturally asked is who did it. The Russians quickly apprehended the four gunmen and then the question shifted to who sponsored it, as it was clear that these four people could never have done this alone. The Russians have arrested a dozen other suspects they think may have been involved, but the four Tajiks have been identified as the shooters and they have confessed.