Read it.

The German federal government spent nearly €900,000 on organizations involved in Mediterranean migrant rescues in early 2025, according to official disclosures.

Organizations receiving state funds included SOS Humanity (€215,000), SOS Mediterranee (€201,694.50), Sea-Eye (€169,156), RESQSHIP (€34,994.40), and Italy-based Sant’Egidio (€279,000). The payments were made from January 1st to March 31st under the previous traffic light coalition of SPD, Greens, and FDP—and were subsequently halted by the new Union-SPD government.

During this period, 5,555 migrants were “rescued” in the Mediterranean.

They game the system very effectively. The migrants, coached by the NGO personnel, row in makeshift boats out beyond African or Middle Eastern territorial waters, whereupon the “rescue boats” swoop in, pick them up, and take them the rest of the way to E.U. territory, where they receive “asylum”.

Gothamist.

When Ian Davey of Davenport, Florida, filed an insurance claim for a 2023 car crash with a day care bus in Queens, he filled in a section asking whether the incident was staged with a definitive answer: “Hells F–ing NO.”

But there were some red flags.

The doctor who declared Davey “totally disabled” by his injuries was a urologist practicing at a hospital in Bangladesh, according to court documents. Records show the only witness to the collision owned a personal injury consulting firm and later retracted his statement to investigators. And the surgeon who operated on Davey was named in a civil racketeering case as part of an alleged criminal network that staged crashes and exaggerated injuries to inflate insurance claims.

“This case is a fraud from top to bottom, an entirely manufactured claim,” said attorney Dan Johnston, who’s representing the bus driver. “The most horrifying part is that this is a set of circumstances that repeat over and over again every single day in the courts of New York.”

Read it.

A gay rights/LGBT parade was abruptly cancelled based on the credible risk of an extremist attack, it has been revealed. Security authorities identified a “concrete threat” just one hour before the Christopher Street Day (CSD) parade in Gelsenkirchen, scheduled for May 17th last year, was set to begin—forcing approximately 600 registered participants to abandon the march.

The alarm was raised after the North Rhine-Westphalia State Criminal Police discovered a TikTok video in which a male user announced an impending assault. Investigators linked the threat to Islamist extremism, noting that the suspect’s profile featured a black flag and the “Tawhid finger”—symbols frequently associated with radical groups. The investigation has since shifted to Switzerland, where the Lucerne juvenile prosecutor’s office is conducting proceedings against a young male suspect believed to be the author of the video.

The organizing association, “Together,” made the difficult decision to call off the festivities to protect attendees.

Be careful what you wish for.

The Washington Poop, a Voice of the Crust.

Barely a year ago, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) came close to becoming the Senate’s most powerful Republican. A former top lieutenant to Sen. Mitch McConnell while the Kentuckian was majority leader, Cornyn has built a reputation over more than two decades in the Senate as a staunch conservative who could still compromise with Democrats, an enormously prolific fundraiser and an architect of the Republican takeover of what is now the country’s biggest red state. He demolished every primary challenger he faced in three reelection races.

On Tuesday, he could lose it all.

Cornyn, 74, is facing formidable Republican primary challenges from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt despite Cornyn’s enormous spending advantage. Cornyn and his allies in Washington have poured $69 million into ads in his defense, helping to make the primary one of the most expensive on record, according to AdImpact.

Still, polling shows Cornyn lagging behind or running even with Paxton, despite the attorney general’s numerous legal and personal controversies, such as his 2023 impeachment by the state House of Representatives on charges including bribery and abusing his office to cover up an affair.

The question that never gets asked, by Cornyn or anyone in the political establishment, is why? Why does a senior Republican in a presumably safe seat come to be in trouble? Why is he coming so close to losing to a rival who would seem to have several strikes against him?

But the one endorsement that could save Cornyn — President Donald Trump’s — has eluded him.

And there’s a reason for that. But nobody is asking what it might be.

Gregg Keller, who runs a super PAC backing Paxton, said much of the Republican base in Texas detests Cornyn and could stay home in November if Cornyn ekes out a primary victory.

“These Texas MAGA voters — they will not turn out in the general election for John Cornyn,” Keller said.

And there we have it. Cornyn isn’t an outright RINO like Murkowski or Romney or McCain, but he’s been coasting for far too long. He’s become the anchor on the ass of the Republican party in Texas, at a time when we need wind in our sails.

Many of Cornyn’s vulnerabilities in a Republican primary stem from what made him a formidable character in the Senate. His work on a bipartisan gun safety bill has been panned by the right in a state where the Second Amendment is politically sacrosanct. Paxton also blasted Cornyn’s work helping refugees settle in the United States and for calling Trump’s border wall “naive” in 2016.

“He’s been doing this for 24 years. People are just ready for a change, ready for someone that has more energy and that has the ability to go fight for them in Washington,” Paxton said shortly after a Saturday rally in Fort Worth. “John Cornyn doesn’t do that.”

Exactly.

Read it.

In borderless Britain, it seems as if barely a day goes by without some monstrosity being committed by a migrant who should never have been in the country in the first place. The world is now familiar with the ongoing scandal of Britain’s predominantly Pakistani rape gangs. Yet what is also unfolding right now is a wave of brutal sexual violence committed by illegal arrivals, often asylum seekers from Afghanistan.

Read it.

It took some time for the supposed difference between Annalena Baerbock’s feminist foreign policy and the approach that the diplomatic corps under Chancellor Friedrich Merz would take to become clear. What has changed is less the substance than the performative act. Under the Sauerland-born Merz, tone and gestures shifted—the staging is meant to appear more masculine, sober in style, perhaps more professional, less embarrassingly activist—but the content remains largely unchanged.

Jonathan Turley.

“Respectfully, f–k off.” Those words by California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s spokesperson, Izzy Gardon, summed up the current race to the bottom of American politics.

And that race has been spearheded, at least during my lifetime, by Left wing degenerates—in addition to everything else they’ve done to corrupt our public social space.

Democrats appear in a competition of the profane where voters are now subject to a virtual carpet-bombing of f-bombs and other indecent language.

Gardon’s response was to a standard media inquiry after Newsom’s controversial statement to a black interviewer.

And there it is.

There was a time when political leaders maintained basic standards of civility and avoided profanity in public.

That ship has sailed.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

Perhaps because ‘incels’ now include the majority of young men? (Thank you, progressive feminism….)

A recent tweet from the US Department of Defense boasts about the killing capabilities of the US military as follows: “Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing”. To many, that will sound as indecipherable as the teenagers that discuss “high-tier Beckys” or the New York Times warning of “Tate-pilled” boys.

Well, to a writer for The Guardian, at least.

I understood it, and I’m 76.

Sounds like somebody needs to get out more.

Many will have now seen the 6 February tweet that went globally viral, viewed more than 24m times and since discussed in endless analyses and explainers:
Clavicular was mid jestergooning when a group of Foids came and spiked his Cortisol levels. Is Ignoring the Foids while munting and mogging Moids more useful then SMV chadfishing in the club?

I understood that, too. Somebody REALLY needs to get out more.

In 2026, this kind of language is appearing more frequently, from America’s most prominent newspaper to the highest tiers of the US government. Why has this disfigured way of speaking become so normalized?

Because a corresponding disfigured way of thinking has also become normalized. Watch any ‘progressive’ protest march or demonstration. These Are Not Normal People, no matter how much Narrative Media organs (like The Guardian) depend on such for their daily bread.

It starts with the rise of “incels”, a growing cohort of men who are “involuntarily celibate” and think women are to blame.

Women are to blame, by definition. Think about it. “I’m looking for a guy in finance—6’5″, trust fund, blue eyes…”

The remainder of the article gives a good overview of the rot that has settled into our culture because of the Leftist March Through the Institutions.

Watch it.

Want to know why the world is turning to shit? Give a listen.

Read it.

China has been maintaining at least two facilities — one in California and the other in Nevada — that are part of a biological weapons program.

A Declaration of Arrest Report, issued by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in connection with the detention of Ori Solomon on January 31, states that there is a “deeper conspiracy” between an illegal biological lab in Reedley, California and a residence containing apparently dangerous substances in Nevada.

On January 31, Las Vegas SWAT and federal agents raided a home on the eastern outskirts of the city and seized over a thousand vials of an unknown substance or substances. Those vials have been sent to an FBI lab in Maryland for analysis.

A housecleaner tipped off authorities after she and others temporarily residing at the home got “deathly ill.”

Associated Press, a Voice of the Crust.

For months, callers to the Washington state Department of Licensing who have requested automated service in Spanish have instead heard an AI voice speaking English in a strong Spanish accent. The agency has since apologized and says it fixed the problem.

Washington resident Maya Edwards learned of the AI-accented voice last summer after her Mexican husband tried using the Spanish-language option while seeking information about his driver’s license. He is bilingual but saw that the wait time for speaking to a customer service representative in English was long, so he hit 2 for Spanish.

For Edwards, it was a like a scene out of “ Parks and Recreation,” a mockumentary-style comedy show that satires local government.

Now that’s comedy.

Read it.

The legendary Jack Bogle was referring to the financial market, but his sentiment also applies to crime statistics: Nobody really knows the actual crime rate — or who’s committing the crimes.

For about 10 years, I did PR for a fintech company that specialized in cybersecurity. You’d think online crimes would be the easiest to verify, but most of the crime stats were manufactured: We’d extrapolate data from Category A and project it to Category B.

They were almost always statistical projections.

Look, if we can’t accurately quantify crime stats in a closed ecosystem like cybersecurity, we don’t have a prayer of tabulating crime rates everywhere else. Too many variables.

This raises the question: What’s the true rate of illegal immigrant crime?

Nobody knows. Too many variables.

The history of people, including government, depending on bogus or inaccurate statistics is long and deep.

Read it.

A conference held on Friday, February 27th, at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Budapest examined the growing role of European courts in driving the EU’s progressive agenda.

The event, titled “Courts at the Forefront of Europe’s Value Conflicts,” focused on the expanding influence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Issues such as gender identity, same-sex marriage, media regulation, and freedom of expression are increasingly being decided by judges in Luxembourg rather than by elected national parliaments.

Martin Mendelski, a researcher at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, argued that different EU member states have developed their own historical and cultural understanding of the rule of law. By contrast, EU institutions promote a more universal interpretation.

Read it.

The recent brutal killing of the nationalist student Quentin Deranque in Lyon by suspected far-left ‘anti-fascists’ has provoked serious questions in France regarding the inconsistencies between reactions to left-wing and right-wing extremism. Also, various journalistic outlets in the United Kingdom have pored over the tragic tale, some with the tacit perspective that this sort of thing doesn’t happen in Blighty. While such lethal left-leaning violence rarely occurs in Britain, we do, of course, have various groups on the hard left, and, just as in France, the responses to the very notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ are extremely different.

The overlooked reality is that far-right extremism is treated as one of the primary domestic threats (viewed on a par with Islamism), while far-left extremism is consistently minimised, excused or rebranded as activism. The result is a political and media culture that sees right-wing violence as ideological terrorism but often treats left-wing violence as understandable, even romantic, protest. The issue is not whether far-right extremism exists—it clearly does—but whether left-wing extremism is judged by the same yardstick. Many of us would argue that the answer is no.

Read it.

For decades, the narrative surrounding the Sahara was one of unstoppable desertification—a vast, arid landscape slowly swallowing everything in its path, including Europe alarmists have warned.

In the past, satellite imagery was often too “blurry” to detect individual trees in arid regions. Sparse vegetation was frequently overlooked, leading to an underestimation of the actual biomass.

By using high-resolution satellite data and deep-learning algorithms, scientists have now been able to count individual trees and shrubs. The results are stunning: there are billions of trees in areas previously thought to be mostly barren. This isn’t just a correction of old data; it’s evidence of a real ecological shift.

Just wait—in another 5000 years, the Sahara will be green again.

Read it.

In almost every description of a declining civilization we find the same tropes: an excess of liberty, a confusion of social norms, and the weakening of authority that soon descends into lawlessness. The medieval Muslim sociologist Ibn Khaldun, who developed one of the first theories of anacyclosis—the rise and fall of political regimes—explained this phenomenon as the loss of ¢a?abiyyah (group consciousness or social unity). Exactly what it is that undermines cohesion in the first place, however, has been the subject of almost mythic speculation. Some accounts attribute it to the presence of foreign cultures and the “confusion of tongues”; others to the spread of witchcraft or deviant spiritual forces that cast doubt over religious and natural laws. A popular anthropological theory, proposed by J. D. Unwin, is that social breakdown begins with an increase in prosperity and the weakening of sexual restraint.

Hmmm. Sounds familiar…,.

But another theory, perhaps overshadowed by these, once exerted a powerful influence over the premodern world: that the decline of a civilization can begin in the decline of its music. Indeed, unhealthy societies are often described as “discordant” in figurative terms. But in ancient civilizations—especially classical Greece and China—the relationship between musical and social harmony was much more than a metaphor. It was believed that exposure to disorderly music could lead directly to the collapse of the political order. This degeneration, Plato warned in his dialogue the Laws,3 occurs when the taste for sensational music creates a “theatrocracy”: a society ruled by the irrational whims of the audience rather than any objective standard of the good.

“Take but degree away, untune that string / And hark what discord follows!” —Ulysses, Troilus and Cressida, Act 1 Scene 3.

The idea of theatrocracy, or “rule by the audience,” finds itself curiously relevant to nations in the modern West that are no longer, at least in the classical sense, strictly democracies. In a genuine democracy, there may be a diversity of individuals and communities—being, as Plato described it, “a coat of many colours”⁴—but the state must be unified by a shared consensus about virtue and justice. It follows that democracy requires the participation of rational, autonomous citizens who will always act in the interests of the common good. With the rise of individualism and a thinning definition of “citizenship,” this has ceased to be the case. Especially in an age of technology—when algorithms prey on our most irrational whims and political opinion is swayed by emotional reaction—the conditions that make for rational citizenship, and thus for genuine democracy, have been compromised. What we have instead may turn out to be much closer to the quasi-anarchic theatrocracy that Plato warned against in the Laws.

Ain’t that the truth.

One might even say that our society started turning to shit when our music started turning to shit.

Most people these days would count ‘classic rock’ (the kind of music that was popular when I was a young man) as still being popular today—a time span of about fifty years.

None of my contemporaries when I was a young man gave a shit what was popular in music half a century before.

Music went from ‘big band’ to ‘doo-wop’ to ‘rock & roll’ in the span of about ten years; rock & roll still dominates among the general population, however much ‘rap’ and ‘hip-hop’ attempt to displace it. (Try to find ‘rap’ or ‘hip-hop’ that is as musically compex and harmonious as the Beatles, CSN/Y, the Moody Blues, or even Styx or Kansas. Can’t be done.)

About the only thing that has remained constant is the American Bandstand Criterion: “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.”

But all of this changed, so goes the dialogue, with the arrival of a certain kind of poet. Much confusion surrounds Plato’s criticism of poetry, which the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch attempts to resolve.7 Murdoch explains that Plato did not, contrary to a common misconception, condemn genuine poets: men of technical skill who received divine inspiration from the Muses. He did, however, condemn another kind of poet who had “native genius”8 but abused his talent to subvert order and harmony—much like a sophist who abused language to distort the truth. Such were the poets who took to the Attican stage, and thanks to them, “an unmusical licence set in.”

Two words: Maya Angelou. ‘Nuff said.

The Telegraph (UK).

Russia is sending migrants through underground tunnels from Belarus into Europe as part of its hybrid war on the West.

Belarus, a Russian puppet state led by dictator Alexander Lukashenko, has used specialists from the Middle East with “a high level of expertise” to design the tunnels, Polish officials have told The Telegraph.

The Great Escape-style tactic marks a new escalation in the Kremlin’s hybrid war on Europe, in which Minsk has tried to send tens of thousands of migrants across Poland’s eastern frontier.

The Telegraph (UK)

Britain is facing “a social, moral and economic disaster” because billions of pounds are being wasted by the NHS, a former health minister has warned.

Lord Bethell said a doubling in NHS spending in the past 17 years had had “no impact” on the nation’s health, with outcomes getting worse for many and life expectancy flatlining.

The Conservative peer made the comments during a joint interview with Prof Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, a former deputy chief medical officer (CMO), who said the health service was failing to address a “demographic timebomb”.

This is what happens with all government programs—witness the same result in America of throwing more money at public education. Government programs are a money sink in which any increase in funding creates a matching increase in waste, fraud, and abuse.

The Times (UK).

Parked outside Longsight Market, a big-screen-topped van shows scenes of humanitarian aid being delivered to Gaza. Trestle tables filled with badges and pamphlets on ending “British support for Zionism” crowd the pavements.

This is one of the most ethnically diverse parts of Manchester. According to census data, more than half of Longsight residents are Muslim. It holds the city’s lowest percentage of white residents — 23 per cent — and the highest number of residents who do not speak English — some 371 people.

To target these voters, who form part of the Gorton & Denton constituency heading to the polls on Thursday, the Green Party has been producing material in languages including Urdu and Bengali, which calls on residents to “punish” Labour over Gaza.

Britain under Labour is what Democrats are attempting to create in America.

Daily Record (UK).

Cuba claims its military fired on a US speedboat that entered territorial waters, killing four people and injuring six in a confrontation on Friday.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Recent internal data from the Berlin police department for 2024 and 2025 reveals a significant challenge in recruitment: a large portion of prospective officers are struggling to meet basic linguistic standards. According to official figures, 4,271 out of 10,874 candidates failed the mandatory German language examination, marking a total failure rate of 39.3%.

Interestingly, higher academic qualifications do not guarantee success. Even among those with high school diplomas or university degrees, 30.1% failed to pass the test. This trend has created a ripple effect in personnel planning, leaving approximately 25% of the 1,224 planned training positions unfilled last year. The department maintains that language proficiency is non-negotiable, as “written reports, protocols, and effective communication with citizens” are essential core competencies for daily police work.

Berlin Police Recruits Struggle With German
The selection process utilizes a 200-word computer-based dictation exercise where candidates must accurately transcribe text read with pauses. Under current internal guidelines, anyone making more than 14 errors fails the assessment. Despite the availability of online practice materials, the need for linguistic support remains high even for those who pass; many trainees require supplemental German instruction during their first three semesters.

The federal government refuses to offer preparatory courses before the application phase. State Secretary of the Interior Christian Hochgrebe emphasizes the need for individual accountability, stating: “Applicants are expected to prepare for the selection process independently, as they are entering a profession characterized by a high degree of personal motivation.”

Read it.

The National Border Patrol Council is blaming the Biden administration for a Mexican criminal cartel obtaining “military-grade weapons.”

“For the entire [four] years of the Biden administration’s destructive term, his team allowed unfettered access and ceded complete control of our border to the Mexican cartels, so it’s no surprise to anyone that the cartels were able to obtain the military-grade weapons [and] equipment that they currently possess,” the National Border Patrol Council, the official union of the U.S. Border Patrol, wrote on X.

Mexican authorities discovered and seized rifles with grenade launchers, rocket launchers, and mortar shells during a raid Sunday that left a top cartel leader dead, Reuters reports.

Read it.

President John F. Kennedy once said, “We must find ways of returning far more of our dependent people to independence.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson sought to meet that challenge by launching the War on Poverty in 1964, insisting that its purpose was not to make people “dependent on the generosity of others,” nor merely to “relieve the symptom of poverty,” but to “cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”

Sixty years and some $20 trillion in welfare spending later, that message appears to have gotten lost. Rather than helping the poor climb out of poverty toward self-reliance, government handouts have instead pulled the ladder away by supplanting work as their primary source of income.

Navy Matters.

Clearly, today’s Navy is badly broken in almost every respect but that wasn’t always the case. In WWII, the Navy was an efficient, deadly, fighting force that knew how to produce warriors and ships on a routine basis. What changed between then and now? Where did it all go wrong?

Let’s start with the “what changed”.

From the early 1900’s (pre-WWI) on, the Navy had an intense focus on combat effectiveness (with a few notable exceptions such as the WWII faulty torpedo fiasco). After the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, the war veterans (those who understood combat and designed ships to meet that requirement) retired leaving people whose focus shifted from combat to career. The focus became empire building, budget pursuit, and career enhancement rather than combat-effective ship and fleet design and procurement. Without the crucible and filter of combat to weed out the incompetent, idiots who were politically adroit took over and foolish policies became the norm.

Read it.

Several New York Police Department officers were pelted with snowballs in Washington Square Park on Monday, and some sustained minor injuries, according to police and video circulating on social media.

Proglodyte undermining of law enforcement advances toward its inevitable target.

UPDATE: Idaho woman accused of attempting to set fire to DHS building with stolen ambulance (Michael Dorgan/Fox News)

Read it.

Emmanuel Macron appears to want the world to stop talking about the brutal beating in Lyon—by leftist activists—that led to the death of Quentin Deranque, a 23-year-old patriotic activist. And it’s no wonder, given that even establishment publications say it could result in a significant political shift—“completing,” as the BBC put it, “the ‘de-demonisation’ of the Rassemblement National so fervently pursued by its leader Marine Le Pen, and making new ‘demons’ out of the radical left.”

As such, the president’s team said on Sunday that it would summon the U.S. ambassador to Paris over comments made by Donald Trump’s administration about the killing.

The U.S. Embassy in Paris on Friday shared a statement from Trump’s Department of State Bureau of Counterterrorism, pointing to information that Deranque was “killed by far-left militants,” and that this should “concern us all.”

Read it.

The man, who has numerous criminal offenses on his record, remains in Germany despite being under a mandatory order to leave the country for 23 years.

Remarkably, the German justice system failed to find him and “suspended” criminal proceedings against him, while Bild newspaper then went on to find him with ease.

Despite Huso B. overstaying his welcome by decades, the state provides him €7250.77 every month to support his wife and eight children.

Read it.

If you watch any movie from the 1940s in the film noir genre, you will see a recurring theme. Someone does something bad but runs away to another state. He might put on a disguise. People try to find him but cannot. He checks in and out of hotels under an assumed name. The heroic detective works to put together clues to connect the dots.

So on it goes in many variations of this theme, all of which turn on technological limitations. The police did not have the data. Communications technology was limited to phones attached to walls. There was no national database of anything, no permanent records except paper with fading ink in deep storage.

Nearly every drama turns on this point. A man courts a beautiful woman of noble lineage only to find out later that she is really a tramp on the make. A woman loves a man who she thinks is a fine gentleman only to discover later that he is an indebted rake. The priest is actually a mobster, a mobster is really a policeman, a shopkeeper is really a spy, and so on.

It’s all about information asymmetry. A vast gulf separates what is known by the players who are making decisions based on knowledge flows. Trickery is easy, deception is not easily discovered, duplicity is rewarded, and all-around sneakiness becomes the desiderata of social functioning. This dark plot line was especially compelling during and after World War II.

Watching this now, it’s impossible not to notice the difference between then and now.

The Telegraph (UK).

France has condemned the United States’s intervention over the killing of a hard-Right activist in Lyon and will summon its ambassador, the foreign minister said on Sunday.

Jean-Noël Barrot said he plans to summon Charles Kushner, 71, whose son Jared is married to Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, after the US state department said the death of Quentin Deranque “should concern us all”.

“We refuse to allow this tragedy, which has plunged a French family into mourning, to be exploited for political ends,” Mr Barrot said during a TV interview with Franceinfo on Sunday.

Touched a nerve, did he?

The Times (UK).

The government’s head of propriety and ethics was appointed without external competition in apparent breach of government hiring rules, The Times can reveal.

Jobs in the “senior civil service” must be advertised openly and be subject to a competitive recruitment process under rules introduced by the previous government. The policy is designed to attract more talent and to avoid top mandarins being drawn from a small group of officials.

Ellen Atkinson, who previously served as the government’s head of major events, was appointed as the new director general, propriety, ethics and constitution, replacing Darren Tierney, who moved to run the Office for National Statistics last year.

While the appointment was not advertised, the rules allow for a minister to give written permission to circumvent the policy if circumstances require the role be filled immediately. No such permission was recorded, an FoI request by The Times reveals.

Britain under Labour is a good preview of what a future Democrat administration would look like.

Christian Heilmann.

Tell that to OnlyFans.

As part of my job, I have to keep up with the social media space and I’m worried, bored and annoyed in equal measures. There is not much social about it any longer. Instead it’s become a race to the bottom of lowest common denominator content. And interaction bait. Or rage bait. Or just obvious spam disguised in seemingly sophisticated sound bites generated by AI. I never thought I would miss listicles and “50 things you didn’t know about X – number 16 will surprise you” posts, but these at least were obvious.

The problem is that social media has become a game of numbers much like SEO used to be. Posting because you learned something, found something interesting or created something has given way to feeding the machine for more clicks and interactions. The reason is monetisation. The rules of the platforms discourage creativity and authenticity and prefer short-lived bursts of emotion. Keep the noise flowing, signals are not in fashion any longer.

When I had some highly successful posts on Facebook, I automatically got “promoted” to “digital creator” which is such a generic term, it makes me want to stop altogether.

I don’t want to be a “digital creator”. I also don’t want to be a “content creator”. Either sound to me like you should create anything to fill up the platform. It’s stacking digital shelves with empty boxes, not creation. And it’s about deception. Take the following examples that should be punished and removed by Facebook but despite reporting them over and over again, you keep seeing them.

The advantage of ‘content creator’ is that it’s an anodyne term that sounds as if it tells you something without being at all specific about what that thing might be. It hides the role of the paid vagina on OnlyFans as well as the ‘influencer’ whose only ‘content’ is make-up videos or sponsored shopping expeditions. It would be like me descibing myself, during my data-warehouse-developer days, as a ‘writer’.

The Times (UK).

Down a pedestrianised alleyway in an affluent London suburb, as residents enjoyed their morning coffees, two men walked up to a family-run jewellers and smashed a sledgehammer into the front window.

Within 60 seconds, they had accessed the rows of jewellery on display in Gregory & Co, throwing handfuls of silver and gold into a bag as bewildered staff, who hadonly recently opened up, tried to save what they could.

The attack in Richmond upon Thames was one of a string of “smash and grabs” that have taken place across London in recent months. The Metropolitan Police says the “spike” is down to rising prices of precious metals, as well as a strong second-hand market for designer goods, particularly in Dubai.

In America, that would get you shot. But Britain banned personal firearms long ago.

Read it.

For decades, Germany operated its rail system on an honor model. There were no turnstiles, no barriers. Passengers bought tickets, boarded trains, and conductors performed random spot checks to make sure everyone had paid.

It was a system built on trust— and for a long time, it worked, because Germany was a fundamentally law-abiding society.

That system has been fraying over the last several years as Germany aggressively imported millions of migrants who don’t respect the law.

The most egregious example took place earlier this month, when a train conductor asked a passenger— a 26-year old migrant— for his ticket.

Not only did the passenger not have a ticket, but he beat the conductor so severely that the man died of his injuries the next morning.

The government’s response is extraordinary.

Rather than establish law and order and rain holy hell upon the criminals, Deutsche Bahn— which is owned by the German government— has told conductors to NOT approach passengers who present a “high risk of escalation.”

In short, the new policy is— if someone looks dangerous, don’t bother checking their ticket.

Import Turd World people, get Turd World problems.

Say what you will about Hitler, he wouldn’t have put up with that shit.

Read it.

So, a country neighboring the United States, that is a NATO ally, will be recruiting foreign nationals to bolster the ranks of the Canadian military – including pilots. Will Canada properly vet these highly skilled foreign military applicants and pilots to ensure that they won’t come from or are agents of countries like China, North Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, or other adversaries of the United States or NATO? Will Canada share the background information of these new recruits with NATO or American intelligence agencies?

What could possibly go wrong?

Read it.

A lawyer picked by judges to serve as the top federal prosecutor for a Virginia office that pursued cases against foes of President Donald Trump was swiftly fired Friday by the Justice Department in the latest clash over the appointments of powerful U.S. attorneys.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the firing of James Hundley on social media shortly after he was unanimously chosen by judges to replace former Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. While the law says that the district court may choose U.S. attorneys when an initial appointment expires, the Trump administration has insisted that the power lies only in the hands of the executive branch.

“EDVA judges do not pick our US Attorney. POTUS does. James Hundley, you’re fired!” Blanche said in a post on X.

The fucked around, and found out.

The Telegraph (UK).

Sir Keir Starmer has blocked Donald Trump from using RAF bases to strike Iran.

The Government is yet to give consent for the US to use military bases in the UK to launch bombing runs, because of concerns they would breach international law.

The US is putting together contingency plans for a direct attack on Iran, with long-range bombing and refuelling aircraft sent to the Middle East in recent days. It is the largest US military build-up in the region since 2003, when the country went to war in Iraq.

We ought to remove all of our military assets from Britain and leave them twisting in the wind. Allies act like allies. If you aren’t going to act like an ally, then piss off.

Watch it.

If you receive spam calls, you will have noticed the gap between your answering a phone and the point where the robodial system connects you to a Real Person.

What scammers want to do is to start a conversation in which they can elicit a recording of you saying “yes” or some sort of affirmative statement that can then be weaponized against you.

Proper phone protocol is for the person who calls you to identify themself and tell you who they are and why they are calling. If, instead, they give you something like a breezy “Hey! How ya doin’?”, either hang up or become rude. My invariable practice is to say “Who are you and why are you calling?” Any word-salad you get in response ought to be the signal to hang up.

Hot Air.

There is major drama brewing in the Lone Star State, and the Democrats just got caught playing dirty. In this episode, we spill the tea on why Stephen Colbert and CBS refused to air an interview with Democrat James Talarico. They claimed it was because of “Trump” and the FCC—but the truth is they are terrified of giving equal airtime to Jasmine Crockett. We break down the Democrat party’s “white guy preference,” why the establishment is actively sabotaging Crockett’s Senate run, and why Republicans need to rally behind John Cornyn to save the majority. Plus, we look at the latest UpOne Insights poll that shows 82% of Americans—including 66% of Democrats—demand stricter immigration enforcement.

Read it.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s statement that Britain has been “colonised by immigrants” has sparked a fierce reaction. From Starmer to Bluesky, to the Athletic and all the football social media pundits in between, the co-owner of Manchester United has been bombarded with the same attack lines repeatedly. He has been called a tax dodging, racist immigrant hypocrite.

Such an uproar has flared up in such a short space of time because Ratcliffe is radically different from those who have issued similar statements before. Ratcliffe is not a political figure: you do not see billionaires nor football club owners voicing discontent like this. The pushback has been fierce because Ratcliffe has no political incentive to say any of this. He isn’t running for office, seeking favour, or chasing votes — which makes his intervention harder to dismiss. Part of the backlash, too, reflects an unease that his diagnosis may be accurate.

The remarks came from an initial conversation regarding the economic challenges Britain faces in general, not solely on immigration. The snippet that has been so widely shared is merely part of a wider statement of the economic problems Britain faces; Ratcliffe refers to the issues of “immigration” and “nine million people” on benefits simultaneously.

Read it.

I ought not to be obliged to point out what a bad idea this is.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

Wealthy Americans are dominating applications for New Zealand’s “golden visa”, driven by a love for the country’s natural beauty and entrepreneurial spirit, as well a desire to escape Trump’s administration.

More likely they just want to escape the U.S.’s oppressive tax system.

The most recent data released by the government showed that investors from the US made up nearly 40% of applicants, followed by China and Hong Kong. Since August 2025, the number of applications from China more than doubled, from 45 to 95.

The Telegraph (UK).

In an operation room in Charing Cross Police Station, a dozen or so officers are hunched over terminals, relaying a constant stream of information and instructions to their colleagues on the ground.

Huge, high definition screens on the wall display live CCTV images from vantage points across London’s West End. A crackle of energy fills the room as word filters through of an incident on Vauxhall Bridge Road, close to Victoria.

A suspicious looking moped has been spotted and Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras suggest it does not have valid insurance. When challenged by officers on the ground, the rider refuses to stop, making off at high speed.

Governance Cybernetics.

Everyone who reads this publication knows what needs to get built. More grid transmission. More nuclear plants. More housing. More automated industrial capacity. The policy conversation has gotten good at identifying the demand side: permitting reform, regulatory overhaul, federal lending, emergency declarations. All essential, all should continue.

What almost nobody talks about is the supply side of capital. Scratch that, a lot of critics keeps talking about how YIMBYs, industrial policy wonks, and the rest don’t have a clue how to finance their proposals (despite the mountain of literature saying otherwise). That capital exists. There is roughly $6 trillion of it, sitting in American public pension funds, currently being allocated in a way that serves nobody.

Oren Cass’s recent New York Times column describes an American financial sector that has stopped fueling the real economy and started consuming it. Dean Baker, writing at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, endorsed Cass’s diagnosis and added a complementary set of regulatory reform proposals. Both focus on constraining finance: transaction taxes, bankruptcy reform, cultural stigma. Neither addresses where the capital should go instead, or why the largest pool of patient capital in the American economy is the right place to start.

Read it.

Three of America’s largest banks filed 7,474 Labor Condition Applications for foreign workers. Public records expose the playbook: file at scale, pay the legal minimum, and lock workers in with green card sponsorship.

Quillette.

When news of the tragedy was first reported to Canadians on the afternoon of 10 February, it appeared to include a striking anomaly: The killer, we were told, was a “woman.” There are scattered examples of female killers in the annals of Canadian crime. But this would be the first time in the recorded history of Canada and its colonial antecedents—going back more than 400 years, to the early seventeenth century—that a woman had gone on this kind of murderous rampage.

…

It soon became clear, however, that Van Rootselaar wasn’t a woman. He was an eighteen-year-old man—a gun-obsessed, middle-school dropout whose many mental-health afflictions happened to include gender dysphoria. The mass murderer called himself a woman. But that doesn’t mean he was, or that the rest of us have to live in the imaginary universe he (literally) built for himself.

The Telegraph (UK).

Vladimir Putin is moving nuclear missiles to the border of the European Union, Belarus’s exiled opposition leader has warned.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said Belarus was helping Russia to escalate its war in Ukraine and told Europe to pay “more attention to what is happening” in the territory.

She said Alexander Lukashenko, Putin’s ally and strongman in Belarus, was facilitating the Russian leader’s aggression in Ukraine by allowing him to intensify Russia’s military presence in the country.

“We see how on Belarusian territory, Mr Lukashenko’s regime intensifies the presence of Russia. They are about to deploy nuclear weapons [to Belarus], Russian missiles,” Ms Tsikhanouskaya said.

Thank you, Barack Hussein Obama. Your ‘red lines’ in Syria that were crossed with impunity by Russia led to the invasion of Ukraine under Sleepy Joe Biden, with the results that we see now.

Oh, and by the way: Poland considers building nuclear weapons (The Telegraph [UK]). Only Britain and France, in the E.U., have nuclear weapons, and God alone know whether they are actually operable.

Read it.

The “ultra-left” in France was behind the fatal beating of a French youth aligned with the far right, the justice minister said on Sunday, after the killing inflamed political tension in the country ahead of elections.

Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin also accused hard-left politicians, including from the France Unbowed (LFI) party, the largest left-wing faction in parliament, of fuelling violence with their language.

The victim, Quentin Deranque, aged 23, had been hospitalised and placed into a coma on Thursday after being attacked in the southeastern city of Lyon. The office of the Lyon prosecutor on Saturday told AFP Deranque had died of his wounds.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed using a poison developed from a dart frog toxin, the UK and European allies have said.

Two years on from the death of Navalny at a Siberian penal colony, Britain and its allies have blamed the Kremlin following analysis of material samples found on his body.

There is no innocent explanation for the toxin, called epibatidine, being found in samples taken from Navalny’s body, the UK Foreign Office said.

There are more poisons in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio. So watch your back.