Read it.

These digital tools aren’t simply interfaces that facilitate connection. The ease and expansiveness of online dating have commodified social bonds, eroded meaningful interactions, and created a type of dating throw-away culture, encouraging a sense of disposability and distorting decision-making.

…

Dating apps don’t sell love. They sell the feeling that it is one premium upgrade away. The platforms aren’t primarily designed for users to find love and promptly delete the apps from their phones. They’re designed to keep users swiping.

Dating apps don’t ‘help you to find that special someone’. They try to keep you looking for that special someone. This is particularly true for women, and is the root cause of the ‘loneliness epidemic’ among men.

People once dated locally, and your ‘catchment area’ was limited to the people you would (or could) meet in person. Social media generally, and dating apps specifically, have globalized the amount of exposure, to the detriment of all.

hoe_math points out that all women now see the best men as attainable, and so have developed unrealistic expectations.

Michael Sartain likes to cite a study where one hundred men were asked “If you met a woman that met 80% of your desired qualities, would you find that acceptable?” to which almost all of them said something like “Eighty percent? Hell, yes—that’s a win!” One hundred women, asked the corresponding question, answered “No, that would be ‘settling’.”

Sartain likes to say that there are actually three sexes: The top 20% of men, in whom women will admit an interest; all women; and the bottom 80% of men, who to women are effectively invisible, and might as well not exist.

(You can see the two of them lay it all out here.)

Read it.

Sure, the biometric security feature works as well as it ever does, using a face scan to unlock your iPhone, confirm mobile payments and generally an extra layer of protection between your digital data and the prying eyes of the outside world.

But we live in a time of increasing unrest, and with it comes a concern about biometric security features in general. Run afoul of what purports to be law-and-order these days, and your own face can be used against you by police who can compel you to use Face ID unlocking against your will. A security writer at PC Mag goes so far as to suggest you should stop using Face ID entirely.

All they need to do is hold you still and show the phone your face and they’re in.

Convenience and security are mutually exclusive.

The Telegraph (UK).

Palestine Action has won a legal challenge against the Home Office’s decision to ban it as a terror group.

The proscription, which began on July 5 last year, made being a member of the group, or supporting it, a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

Palestine Action remains banned as a terror group to allow for further legal arguments and to give the Government time to consider an appeal.

Gates of Vienna.

Yet another bystander has been shoved in front of an oncoming train, this time in Switzerland. It’s not clear whether a railway poster with a “no shoving infidels” pictogram might have prevented this tragic incident.

Grenchen is a town in northern Switzerland in the canton of Solothurn. Without warning, an unknown assailant pushed a pensioner in front of a train at the Grenchen Nord station. The victim was severely wounded, but survived.

The perpetrator has yet to be caught, so there is so far no indication of what ethnicity he is, or whether the attack was an instance of shoving jihad. It’s possible that there is no cultural enrichment involved in the case.

I’m betting that there is.

Read it.

“I always tell people the day Latinos, African-American, Asian and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning. Because we are the majority in this country. We have the ability to take over this country,” State Rep. ‘Gene’ Yuanzhi Wu, who serves as the Texas Democrat House Minority Leader, recently declared.

Who is oppressing Wu? The Chinese immigrant came here from Guangzhou, graduated from law school and became one of the top officials in the state. Good luck to any American who wants to move to China, become a lawyer and run for public office. And if a non-Chinese immigrant were to suggest that minorities in China should ally together against their Chinese oppressors and take over, his organs would be for sale on Temu in 15 minutes or less.

Rep. Wu represents a Houston district where a majority of the neighborhoods like Gulfton and Sharpstown are Hispanic and only a minority of residents are Chinese. Three out of four core neighborhoods have more black people than Hispanics so it’s understandable that Wu wants to point them at overthrowing their white ‘oppressors’ rather than electing a black or Hispanic man.

(Of course many of the ‘Hispanics’ in Wu’s district are illegal aliens. Wu admitted in an interview that at least a third are illegals, suggesting the real number may be much higher, and that his district is illegitimate. It also explains why Wu fights so hard to protect illegal aliens in Texas.)

But Rep. Gene Wu’s call for a race war isn’t representing Asian Americans either. Instead it hews suspiciously close to the Chinese Communist party’s agenda for tearing apart America.

CNBC, a Voice of the Crust.

And who could blame them? Governments these days look on rich people as mere deep pockets to be picked—or piggy banks to be smashed and rifled.

The Telegraph (UK).

A shooter described as a “female in a dress” killed nine people in a remote part of Canada on Tuesday.

Seven people died after being shot at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, while two more people were found dead at a nearby home

Another 27 people were hurt, including two with life-threatening injuries, in the country’s worst school shooting in more than 30 years.

…

The local police superintendent later described the suspect as a “gunperson” in a press briefing, without giving further details about their identity.

Being Woke doesn’t make you immune from crazy.

The 1989 murders of 14 women by a gunman at École Polytechnique in Montreal led the country to tighten its gun laws.

Well, that’s all right then.

The deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history happened in 2020 when a man shot dead 22 people across multiple rural communities in the province of Nova Scotia.

Guess those tightened gun laws really works.

UPDATE: School Shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia Leaves 10 Killed, Including Shooter – The “Gender” of Shooter Creating Angst

My, what a surprise.

UPDATE: SHOOTER IDENTIFIED AS TRANS (Tim Pool)

The Foundry.

Because of Democrat demands to prevent a government shutdown, House Republicans are accusing Senate Democrats of protecting illegal immigrants who vote in American elections.

Democrats are threatening to vote against legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which could force a partial shutdown of the federal government this Friday. Democrats have made several demands to keep the government open, including a measure to prohibit immigration enforcement operations near polling locations.

“If illegal aliens aren’t voting as Democrats claim, why would [Senate Minority Leader] Schumer and [House Minority Leader Hakeem] Jeffries be afraid of immigration enforcement near polling locations?” Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., told The Daily Signal. “I think the answer is pretty obvious to Americans.”

In a statement shared with The Daily Signal, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., added that those demands are being proposed by people “that don’t want any apprehensions of illegals.”

Rating Site Sues Trump Admin Over Probe of Alleged Suppression of Conservative Media

Judge Halts Order Requiring WH to Unfreeze Tunnel Funding

Chloe Kim, Eileen Gu speak out after President Trump calls Olympian ‘a loser’ (The Athletic)

Armenian PM Pashinyan Says Trump Deserves Nobel Peace Prize

Legality of Trump’s $400M in private funding for White House ballroom at issue (Washington Post)

Jasmine Crockett’s vulgar 6-word message for Trump in Epstein probe (Elizabeth Elkind/Fox News)

“Uptick in Abductions”: ICE Ramps Up Targeting of Minneapolis Legal Observers (Ryan Devereaux/The Intercept)

Feds Have Charged 158 Anti-ICE Agitators With Federal Crimes In Minnesota

Leftists Lose It As Pro-ICE Ad Plays During Super Bowl

Pete Hegseth’s Attack on Harvard (Tom Nichols/The Atlantic)

Trump’s Vile Obama Video Follows the White House’s Official White Nationalist Line (Berny Belvedere/The UnPopulist)

Republicans ask Supreme Court to block states from counting legally cast mail ballots (Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket)

MS NOW: ‘Paramilitary’ ICE ‘Buying Off’ Police to Help Steal Elections

Read it.

The decision by the Spanish government to grant legal status to more than half a million illegal immigrants has triggered an immediate reaction in Brussels and reopened a deeper debate on sovereignty, security, and the coherence of European migration policy.

Although presented in Madrid as an administrative measure aimed at economic growth and social cohesion, the initiative has been met with “serious reservations” by the European Commission, according to EU sources, who warn of potential frictions with the Union’s common framework and with the spirit that currently guides the bloc’s migration policy.

The decree announced at the end of January by Pedro Sánchez’s executive will allow the regularisation of foreigners who entered Spain before December 31, 2025, and who can prove a minimum stay of five months or a prior asylum application. Beneficiaries will receive a one-year residence permit and authorisation to work in any sector.

From the EU’s perspective, the main problem is not only the scale but the automatic effect this decision has on the Union as a whole. Spain is part of the Schengen Area, which means that regularised immigrants will be able to move freely across Europe for up to 90 days in any 180 days. In Brussels, there is concern that this mobility could facilitate de facto residence in other member states without authorisation, putting further strain on already overburdened asylum and control systems.

Read it.

This is a short rant.

I’m annoyed when you have to press one for English and two for Spanish when you call someplace. The default should be that you get an English message but have to press a button if you need Spanish. (Actually the default should be that a human answers the phone in English, but we’re long passed that point.)

But at the Super Bowl halftime show, you couldn’t even press one for English. You had to listen to Bad Bunny in Spanish. No choice. So I am told, I didn’t watch it. Could not have been forced to watch it.

When the NFL starts doing a classical halftime, then I’ll tune it. Think how grand it would be to listen to the Triumphal March from Verdi’s Aïda, Handel’s “La Réjouissance,” or Chaikovskii’s 1812 Overture at the Super Bowl instead.

End of rant.

Hear, hear….

Read it.

People are posting all over on X about how they themselves or their 20 something offspring are filling out hundreds of resumes, with no responses as the usual result. What gives? Several memes crop up, which explain in detail what crystal clear realities are causing these results. The following reality detailed below explains how H1B visa workers are those who are preferred by companies.

Read it.

Thousands of protesters demonstrated across Australia on Monday against Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who traveled to the country at the invitation of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese following the Bondi massacre.

Upon arrival, Herzog visited the site of the antisemitic terror attack in Sydney, where 15 people were killed while attending a Hanukkah event in December. There, he laid a wreath and met with the family members of the victims of the attack.

“Standing here at Bondi – an iconic symbol of Australian life, now scarred by the December 14th massacre – I embrace our Australian Jewish sisters and brothers still reeling from this trauma,” wrote Herzog in a post on X. “My visit to Australia, to all of you, is one of solidarity, strength, and sincere friendship from the State of Israel and the people of Israel.”

I am disheartened to see that Australia has changed from almost-as-good-as-America to almost-as-bad-as-Canada.

Plato Understood Why Masking Would Turn ICE Agents Into Devils (Paul Rosenzweig/The UnPopulist)

The Aftermath of Feeding America’s Credibility Into the Woodchipper (Jeremy Konyndyk/New York Times)  Too late—that happened under Obama. Trump is trying to glue the pieces back together, with mixed results.

Crypto revolt exposes fragility of Trump’s coalition (Zachary Basu/Axios)

A Raid in a Small Town Brings Trump’s Deportations to Deep-Red Idaho (New York Times)  Illegal immigrants can be anywhere. The focus is not kjust on Blue staes.

The blowback to Trump’s racist video reveals his weakness (Noah Berlatsky/Public Notice)  Geez, that was so fifteen minutes ago….

New York GOP’s midterm problem: No money, no bench — and Trump (Emily Ngo/Politico)

1 big thing: Trump’s crypto revolt (Axios)

Libertarians Tried to Warn You About Trump (Katherine Mangu-Ward/New York Times)  And nobody listened BECAUSE NOBODY LISTENS TO LIBERTARIANS nor do the have any reason to. Libertarians, like Marxists, live in their own little world that doesn’t resemble the real world in any significant respect.

Democrats Flip-Flop On ICE Agents And Body Cameras  Be careful what you wish for….

Irish man detained by ICE for 5 months  I guess it would be disingenuous to point out that foreigners don’t have the same rights that American citizens do. The guy has been in America for 20 years; if he’s not a citizen by now, that’s a deliberate choice. I suspect that if he told them “Hey, I want to go back to Ireland”, they’d hand him a plane ticket and wish him good luck.

Ice Kid Prisons  More tendentious twists from the Usual Suspects.

Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show: Less Political Than Expected But More Meaningful | Zing Tsjeng (Times News UK) The point is that it ought not to be political at all. It’s a sports event; intruding politics into it is just another Woke virtue-signal.

They’ve Always Known He is A Racist… (Jennifer Rubin/The Contrarian)  Jennifer Rubin loses her shit.

Why Trump Voters Are Torn Over Minneapolis (New York Times)  More proglodyte wishful thinking. Trump voters aren’t torn over Minneapolis; they just wish that the AWFULs in the city would quit trying to impede law enforcement.

How Trump is rigging immigration courts against Somali migrants (Judd Legum/Popular Information)

Trump, Extreme Wealth Concentration, and Our Societal Crisis (John Ripton/Common Dreams)  The Left really hates the fact that people who actually produce value are not having their earnings confiscated (as much) and given to the (Democtat dependent) underclass.

NY Times Columnist Says Vance’s Mother Should Have Sold Him To Feed Her Addiction  Democrats have never gotten over ®epublicans freeing their slaves.

NPR TV Critic Snipes at Trump’s Super Bowl Ads, Plus One Based on Helping ‘White People’  If Trump doesn’t help white people, who will?

Two judges on the Fifth Circuit gave Trump exactly what he wants to enact mass detentions (Chris Geidner/Law Dork)

Trump has a plan to steal the midterms. It will probably fail. (Eric Levitz/Vox)  Proglodyte Projection: The Left always accuses their hate-objects of doing they they are planning to do.

Read it.

German police have uncovered a large-scale fraud network that enabled migrants to obtain language certificates and naturalization documents without meeting the required standards.

Authorities in Nuremberg said several suspects organised German-speaking deputies to sit language and naturalization tests on behalf of applicants who were unable to pass the exams themselves. The forged certificates were sold for between €2,500 and €6,000 and later used to secure residence permits or German citizenship.

The main suspect is a 39-year-old Iraqi national. During searches in Nuremberg and Hamm, police seized forged residence permits, falsified language tests, data carriers, cash and small quantities of narcotics.

Read it.

White House officials have used “terrorist-grade sanctions” to target officials from the International Criminal Court (ICC) and UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, freezing assets and disrupting war crimes investigations,Reuters reported on 6 February.

According to interviews the news agency conducted with U.S. and UN officials and sanctioned individuals, Washington is seeking to penalize the ICC over investigations into US and Israeli war crimes.

The effort to target the UN and ICC came in response to requests from at least two US tech companies involved in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

As you can tell by the writing, this article is by a Voice of the Crust. There is and was no ‘genocide’ in Gaza, because Muslims are not a ‘genos’. There were no ‘U.S. and Israeli war crimes’ (a) because Hamas is not a ‘lawful combatant’ under the Geneva Accords, but rather a terrorist group, (b) Hamas started the game with their targeted attacks against Jews (an actual ‘genos’) on October 7th, and (c) the use by Hamas of the population of Gaza as hostages and ‘human shields’ makes Hamas, not the U.S. or Israel, the actual malefactors. That’s not the Narrative, of course, in which the U.N. is deeply invested: Every terrorist act by Muslims is justified and legimate, every attempt to suppress terrorism is a ‘war crime’ or a ‘crime against humanity’.

The Times (UK).

Once only seen in the wealthier parts of London, civilian patrols are moving into the home counties in a trend driven by fears of a slow police response to crime.

The War Zone.

The U.S. government has accused China of secretly conducting at least one “yield-producing nuclear test” in recent years despite the country having a stated moratorium on such activities. Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans to engage in new nuclear testing “on an equal basis” with China and Russia, but it remains unclear what that might mean and what action has been taken. The new test allegation also comes as American officials continue to call for a new nuclear arms control treaty that includes China to succeed the New START agreement with Russia, which sunset yesterday.

“Today, I can reveal that the U.S. government is aware that China has conducted nuclear explosive tests, including preparing for tests with designated yields in the hundreds of tons,” Thomas DiNanno, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, said during a speech at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland this morning. “The PLA [China’s People’s Liberation Army] sought to conceal testing by obfuscating the nuclear explosions because it recognized these tests violate test ban commitments.”

Read it.

Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler announced Friday her agency has suspended 111,620 borrowers in California over alleged fraud related to pandemic-era loan programs.

These borrowers had secured a total of 118,489 Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans loans which amounted to more than $8.6 billion, according to an SBA news release. Loeffler said in a statement that the SBA is “taking decisive action” in an effort to “deliver accountability in a state whose unaccountable welfare policies have created a culture of fraud and abuse.”

“Once again, the Trump SBA is taking decisive action to deliver accountability in a state whose unaccountable welfare policies have created a culture of fraud and abuse at the expense of law-abiding taxpayers and small business owners,” Loeffler said. “Today, we announced we have suspended nearly 112,000 borrowers tied to at least $9 billion in suspected fraud.”

Read it.

It may seem that it’s impossible to get anything done in Washington these days.

Nevertheless, the free spirit of Americans cannot be suppressed.

Americans are voting with their feet.

Per the Census Bureau’s just released annual report on population growth and migration in the U.S., Americans are packing up and moving from anti-growth blue states to pro-growth red states.

The Foundry.

Women who have experienced transgender-identifying males invading their private spaces at work have grounds to file a claim with the government’s civil rights agency, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas told The Daily Signal.

“I do think that it’s important for women to realize that they could have a claim if they are in a workplace, and they find that a male is in their private space,” she said. “That’s something I would take really seriously if someone was to file a charge about that.”

Read it.

Southampton today is as busy as ever. The football club plays at St Mary’s Stadium on the dockside, where the fans sing the club’s adopted anthem ‘When the Saints Go Marching in’. Like other clubs, the vast majority of Southampton supporters are white Britons, and this is not representative of the present populace.

Priestley mentioned a few ‘brown faces’ in Southampton, which was not unusual in port towns, but on my recent visit almost half of the people I passed on the pavement were of African, Oriental, South Asian or Middle-Eastern ethnicities, and among schoolchildren hardly any were of Hampshire stock. Back at the turn of the millennium Southampton remained well over ninety per-cent white British, but today every large town or city in England is assumed to be multicultural, as we are reminded on notices and advertisements that suggest extinction of the white man.

The title of the article seems (at least to me) to be a reference to Jean Respail’s prophetic 1973 book Camp of the Saints, which was the first warning bell about the replacement of native Europeans by Turd World immigrants. (If you haven’t read it, I would strongly urge you to do so.) The predominant reaction among the Chattering Class to his book was ‘Oh, this is nonsense! Some far-right racist conspiracy theory!’—but, as we have learned to our sorrow, yesterday’s ‘conspiracy theory’ is today’s ‘spoiler alert’.

The Foundry.

The singer-songwriter who famously declared that “no one is illegal on stolen land” now faces pushback from people who appear to be taking her statement literally.

Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, won the “Song of the Year” Grammy Award for their hit “Wildflower” Sunday, and Eilish used her speech to condemn the Immigration and Customs Enforcement surge to Minneapolis.

“No one is illegal on stolen land,” she declared. Her later remarks revealed the clear connection to immigration issues. “We need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting,” she added. “F— ICE!”

The statements connect two leftist ideas: that illegal immigrants should not face deportation despite breaking the law to enter the country, and that the U.S. government effectively stole land from Native American tribes.

So far, straight virgtue-signaling. No surprises here.

While many on the left celebrated Eilish’s remarks, others appear to have taken her statement as an invitation.

“I am flying to the USA next Friday to attempt to move into Billie Eilish’s beachside Malibu mansion,” Australian influencer Drew Pavlou announced on X. He launched a crowdfunding effort to support his travel expenses, but GoFundMe deleted it.

“Your fundraiser has been removed because we’re unable to verify your connection and plan to transfer donations to the person you’re raising money for,” the company sent in an email explaining the campaign’s deletion.

An obvious lie. GoFundMe is one of the major de-platforming actors on the Left.

Pavlou sought to squat in a mansion located in the greater Los Angeles Basin, the ancestral territory of the Tongva Native American tribe. The tribe celebrated Eilish’s “stolen land” claim but suggested that she should directly name the “true” owners of the land.

“Eilish has not contacted our tribe directly regarding her property,” a spokesperson for the Tongva tribe told the Daily Mail. However, the spokesperson added, “We do value the instance when public figures provide visibility to the true history of this country.”

“It is our hope that in future discussions, the tribe can explicitly be referenced to ensure the public understands that the greater Los Angeles Basin remains Gabrieleno Tongva territory,” the tribe representative concluded.

Much of the discussion of Eilish’s mansion is hypothetical, however, since her brother, Finneas O’Connell, sold the beachfront property for $5.6 million in 2022, according to the Los Angeles Times. The building then burned down in the Palisades Fire last year, the New York Post reported.

Eilish reportedly lives in an equestrian ranch in Glendale, California, which would still be part of the Tongva’s ancestral land.

This could prove to be very entertaining.

SATNEWS.

On February 4, 2026, reports from European intelligence and space agencies surfaced detailing a series of aggressive “satellite interceptions” by Russia that have placed NATO’s orbital infrastructure at unprecedented risk.

European security officials believe that at least 17 key European satellites have been shadowed or compromised by Russian signals intelligence (SIGINT) spacecraft over the past three years, sparking fears that Moscow could not only steal classified data but actively hijack the satellites to send them “hurtling back to Earth”.

The primary actors in this orbital espionage are the Russian satellites Luch-1 (launched in 2014) and Luch-2 (launched in 2023). According to tracking data from the French space situational awareness firm Aldoria, Luch-2 has engaged in risky close-range maneuvers, lingering within 20 to 200 kilometers of sensitive geostationary (GEO) assets for weeks at a time. Major General Michael Traut, head of German Space Command, confirmed that these Russian vehicles are likely intercepting “command links”—the unencrypted communication channels used by older satellites to receive instructions from ground control.

Read it.

Today, Wikipedia celebrates its 25th anniversary. What began as a promising vision for shared knowledge and a free internet encyclopedia has devolved into a battlefield. Today, interest groups orchestrate disinformation and chaos, erasing narratives, deleting documented historical evidence, and even distorting facts in the exact sciences.

Why does this matter in 2026? Beyond its average of 3.5–4 billion monthly visits (according to SimilarWeb) and its dominance as the top Google result for countless terms, Wikipedia is a primary training source for LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others.

In practice, this means that when fake news is injected by anonymous users who have accumulated enough permissions, it flows directly into AI engines. This cycle perpetuates lies until they effectively erase reality.

Net Migration of UK Millionaires 2014-2025

The Register.

State and federal lawmakers have stepped up their efforts to prevent the creation of 3D printed guns. But Adafruit, a maker of electronics kits, warns that the proposed legislation is so broad it threatens everyone involved in open source manufacturing and technology education.

Recent bills attempting to grapple with this issue include New York’s FY 2026–2027 executive budget bill (S.9005 / A.10005), Washington State House Bills 2320 and 2321, and the 3D Printed Gun Safety Act introduced last June in the US House and Senate.

The renewed enthusiasm for clamping down on 3D printing technology follows allegations that Luigi Mangione killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024, with authorities saying a 3D-printed “ghost gun” recovered after his arrest was consistent with the weapon used.

Adafruit, which previously raised concerns about the Washington State proposals, said on Tuesday that the New York bill is also problematic.

Read it.

When 38% of students at one of America’s most elite universities claim disability status, the system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as designed. And that’s the problem.

…

This thesis nails it. The gaming has become normalized, and it’s not limited to DraftKings and crypto—it’s metastasizing through our most prestigious institutions.

The War Zone.

The U.S. Navy has shown no signs of reversing course on major changes to its pipeline for new naval aviators in its latest draft requirements for a replacement for its T-45 Goshawk jet trainers. The Navy has already axed carrier qualifications from the syllabus for prospective tactical jet pilots and has plans to significantly alter how other training is done at bases ashore. These decisions have prompted concerns and criticism, but the service argues that advances in virtualized training and automated carrier landing capabilities have fundamentally changed the training ecosystem.

This is a very disturbing development. No ‘virtualized training’ can match the effectiveness of actually Doing It.

Read it.

Federal and local authorities are investigating suspected illegal biological laboratories in Las Vegas and California’s Central Valley linked to a Chinese national accused by Congressional investigators of ties to a PRC military-civil fusion enterprise, who spent a decade operating what Canadian courts found was a systematic technology-theft operation from British Columbia before fleeing south with a $330 million fraud judgment against him.

The FBI and Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department executed search warrants over the weekend at two residences connected to Jiabei “Jesse” Zhu, a 62-year-old Chinese citizen already under federal indictment for operating an illegal biolab in Reedley, California that contained labeled samples of at least 20 infectious agents including HIV, tuberculosis, and what the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party described as “the deadliest known form of malaria.”

Las Vegas Metro Sheriff Kevin McMahill confirmed Monday that investigators recovered over 1,000 samples of biological material “consistent in appearance” with items found in the California facility.

Read it.

Hint: No.

The stream of Tories jumping ship to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK shows no sign of abating. Amid Reform’s fresh new recruits, the defection of Suella Braverman stands apart. In my opinion, she is likely to add several percentage points to Reform’s vote share immediately—not through any sudden mass conversion, but by crystallising the disillusionment among the Conservative base that has been building since the 2024 wipeout.

There is tentative evidence to support this, for instance, a recent YouGov poll suggesting that around a quarter of 2024 Tory voters now view Reform more favourably following the Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick defections. Furthermore, Rishi Sunak’s sacking of Braverman back in November 2023 coincided with a sharp rise in the Reform vote.

Those who ‘switch sides’ in any walk of life can expect a degree of censure, but political defections are almost impossible to pull off without violent condemnation. For we ask a great deal of our politicians: loyalty to country, to party, to a manifesto they likely had little or no hand in drafting, and above all to principle—even when many if not all of those things are unaligned. Few of us would satisfy such a test in any 24-hour period. Braverman, however—a paid-up Conservative for the best part of thirty years—might just make the grade.

The British Conservative party hasn’t been worth a shit during my lifetime, certainly, and probably within the lifetime of my father, who was born in 1918. Time to take Old Yeller out back and shoot him.

Read it.

Identity thieves are now using college enrollment to take out student loans in victims’ names. This so-called “ghost student” scam capitalizes on limited verification for online class sign-ups and the federal aid application process to steal millions in funds while assigning the debt to unsuspecting targets.

I personally have been a victim of this scam, which I discovered only after an outstanding student loan debt landed on my credit report in 2024. Here’s how the scheme works.

Read it.

Many researchers have tried to understand longevity in humans and what could be done to improve it. However, this is a difficult topic to study because it takes a long time to collect data on human life spans, and many different factors can contribute to mortality. One key distinction is between extrinsic mortality (violence, accidents, infections, etc.) and intrinsic mortality due to genetic mutations and/or aging-related diseases. Shenhar et al. analyzed more than a century’s worth of data from three different Scandinavian twin cohorts and concluded that the current estimates of longevity heritability are much too low (see the Perspective by Bakula and Scheibye-Knudsen). In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when these study cohorts were born, extrinsic causes played a large role in mortality, but once those are excluded, longevity appears to be about 50% heritable, similar to many other traits. —Yevgeniya Nusinovich

Read it.

The markets have been rocked by news of a possible intervention to control the Japanese yen slump, after it reached a forty-year low relative to the US dollar. Fixing the yen and any other fiat currency is simple: Implement an Austrian approach; eliminate constant deficit spending and monetization of government outlays; and implement clear, sound money policies that support the purchasing power of the currency.

Letting rates float and having zero deficit would help.

However, no government seems to want to control spending and eliminate constant artificial currency creation, even knowing that, by doing so, they would limit the risk of financial crises, excessive risk-taking, and erosion of citizens’ wage purchasing power.

The best a citizen can expect today is a mild form of Keynesianism that aims for lower taxes, relatively lower spending, and a constant expansion of money supply as the driver of economic growth. Even this “lesser evil” approach ends with malinvestment, financial crises, and more politicians demanding “public investment” as the solution.

Governments avoid sound money and controlling spending because these choices can hurt them politically right away, while using inflation and interventionist methods allows them to take a lot of wealth from citizens and give it to themselves and their favored industries.

Read it.

And, like the last one, it was started by Democrats.

History rarely “repeats” but our modern political dynamic rings rather familiar. Many of the tactics used by the leftists in Russia in the early 20th Century are being used today in the US. In fact, I would argue they are almost exactly the same and that a Bolshevik-style revolution is happening right now.

Interestingly, the Bolsheviks were a tiny minority within the Russian population. At their peak in 1917 they had only 400,000 “official” members. They were supported politically by an estimated 23% of the population, but that is still a small movement compared to the 150 million Russian citizens trying to live their lives from day to day.

Read it.

Last Saturday night a mob of leftists went on a rampage in the Italian city of Turin, burning vehicles, throwing stones, and attacking police. A group of Antifa thugs beat a policeman severely, sending him to the hospital.

The events in Turin brought to mind an essay I had just read by JD Hall (hat tip WRSA). He was writing about the actions of Antifa in Minneapolis and other American cities, but the process he described is identical to what is unfolding in Italy….

The Telegraph (UK).

Lord Cameron has accused Labour of taking a “spite-laden wrecking ball” to British education..

In a rare intervention, the former prime minister claimed Sir Keir Starmer was “systematically dismantling” reforms by successive governments that had made English schools world-leading.

The Tory peer also condemned Labour’s decision to scrap dozens of planned free schools in some of the country’s poorest regions, including one backed by Eton College, his alma mater.

Watch it.

Carl Benjamin (“Sargon of Akkad”) explains it as clearly as I have ever heard anyone do.

Read it.

Following the release of immigration figures for 2025, the French Interior Ministry has published crime statistics for the past year. These figures dramatically coincide with the French people’s perception that they are living in an increasingly dangerous and violent country. Furthermore, cross-referencing this data with immigration figures confirms another intuitive observation: foreigners are over-represented in crimes of all kinds.

Apart from burglaries, absolutely all crime indicators rose between 2024 and 2025: 5% on average for physical violence and homicides, and up to 8% for sexual violence. This increase is not new: it is a significant trend, as analyst Marc Vanguard points out. As far as assaults are concerned, there has been a 25% increase since 2017, when Emmanuel Macron came to power. For sexual violence, the increase is as high as 132%.

Import Turd World people, get Turd World problems.

Read it.

What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks:
“How are you enjoying your drive so far?”
Annoyed by the interruption, and even more behind schedule, you dismiss the prompt and merge back into traffic.
A minute later it does it again.
“Did you know I have a new feature? Tap here to learn more.”
It blocks your speedometer with an overlay tutorial about the turn signal. It highlights the wiper controls and refuses to go away until you demonstrate mastery.
Ridiculous, of course.
And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.
I’ve started to think of this as backseat software: the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software as a channel that operates on you. Once a product learns it can talk back, it’s remarkably hard to keep it quiet.

The Telegraph (UK).

Labour announced plans earlier this month to deny millions of people the vote, leaving some with no say over who controls their local services and council tax for up to seven years.

Elections have been cancelled at 30 councils over claims that a looming reorganisation of local government makes holding ballots expensive, complicated and unnecessary.

The Telegraph has launched a Campaign for Democracy, calling for ministers to be stripped of their legal powers to cancel local elections without a full vote in Parliament.

A remionder that it’s the Left, not the Right, who love to cancel elections—and, considering that Britain is about five years closer to disaster than the U.S., what might happen if Democrats control the national government aftert Trump steps down.

Read it.

man was arrested after repeatedly crashing his car into the Chabad Lubavitch world headquarters in New York City on Wednesday night while people were gathered for prayer at the deeply revered Hasidic Jewish site.

No one was injured when the driver struck a door of a building in the complex before reversing and striking it several more times. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that while it was too early in the investigation to speculate on the driver’s motives, the incident was being investigated as a possible hate crime.

“This is deeply alarming, especially given the deep meaning and the history of the institution to so many in New York and around the world,” said New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who called the crash “intentional.”

Video of the crash that was posted online shows a car with New Jersey license plates moving forward and backward on an icy driveway leading to a building in the complex and ramming its basement-level doors.

The driver, who is wearing shorts, emerges, shouts to bystanders that “It slipped” and says something to police about trying to park.

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.

Atlas Press.

Take history books. The average ancient historian led troops, tutored a prince, governed a province, advised a king, made a fortune, fell from favor, was exiled, and buried 7 of their 10 children. The average modern historian passed a few tests then wrote a book on their laptop next to their cat. And worse, they all passed the same tests at the same institutions. And they all wrote the same statements on their applications to get into those institutions. And while attending those institutions, they all adopted the same opinions. Anyone who did otherwise was filtered out before they could become a professor with a publishing deal. Everything is like this now.

Meanwhile Xenophon was an Athenian student of Socrates who joined a Greek mercenary group that marched 1000 miles into Persia to overthrow the King of Kings on behalf of the King’s brother. When the King’s brother died and the group’s commanders were all killed by Persian treachery, he led the troops 1000 miles home himself while being constantly harried by hostile armies. He then tried to establish a colony on the Black Sea, survived a mutiny, raided the Thracians, fought for the Spartans, was exiled by Athens, and settled down to manage an estate and write it all up.

Contrast Xenophon with Mary Beard, who studied at Cambridge and now teaches at Cambridge. She holds the same opinions as everyone else at Cambridge. She’s remarked before that, “I actually can’t understand what it would be to be a woman without being a feminist.” This seems like a peculiar failing for an ancient historian. After 9/11, she wrote an article saying that many people thought “the United States had it coming,” and that “world bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.” That caused some controversy on the world stage, but earned her a promotion at Cambridge. I don’t know if she’s ever talked publicly about religion or democracy or climate change or immigration, but I could tell you exactly what she thinks about these things anyway. So why would you bother reading what she thinks about Rome? The answers are just as predictable.

Times News (UK).

As immigration rules have tightened in recent months, some migrants already working in the UK, whose visas have been cancelled, find themselves in a precarious position. Agents are selling a workaround, offering to arrange fake jobs which can be used to obtain real visas, in exchange for exorbitant fees. The Times went undercover, posing as a migrant facing deportation, to expose how this black market is operating.

The Telegraph (UK).

Sir Keir Starmer led a legal case that opened the door to hundreds of British soldiers being pursued for alleged war crimes, The Telegraph can disclose.

The now Prime Minister worked free of charge alongside his close ally, Lord Hermer, now the Attorney General, and the now disgraced solicitor Phil Shiner on a human rights claim in 2007 that reshaped the law governing troops in war zones.

Court documents unearthed by The Telegraph reveal Sir Keir was a lead barrister on the case, which ultimately led the Ministry of Defence to order fresh inquiries into deaths in Iraq. It triggered years of criminal investigations into soldiers who had been wrongly accused, at enormous cost to the taxpayer.

Johnny Mercer, the former veterans minister, accused Sir Keir of “unleashing the witch hunt against British troops”.

As part of the 2007 case, Sir Keir and Lord Hermer urged the courts to order a fresh inquiry into a British soldier who had already been cleared twice of murder over the death of an Iraqi man in 2003 (see extracts below), telling judges that earlier investigations had been “perfunctory” and “wholly inadequate”.

My, what a surprise.

Read it.

Where have the amateur researchers gone, and how do we bring them back?

We used to have a broad class of people who didn’t Have To Work For A Living, and the Left has devoted the last 150 years to make such people impossible. (They haven’t succeeded yet, but they’ve reeduced it to a bare remnant.)