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A study funded by the British government to the tune of almost a million pounds claims that William Shakespeare, one of foremost the literary icons in history, has been disproportionately represented and has enabled “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives” to dominate theatre.

StrategyPage.

Back in the early 1980s American warships began using VLS (Vertical Launch System) cells to carry the many different missiles ships used for attacking other ships, defeating air attacks, and bombarding land targets. Since 1982, over 11,000 VLS cells have been installed in nearly 200 American and foreign warships. The most common VLS user is the American Burke class destroyer, with 90 VLS cells.

The first ships to get VLS also received a strikedown crane so the cells could be reloaded at sea. By 1990 new models of missiles became too heavy for the strikedown crane and it wasn’t practical to install a larger and more powerful crane. Moreover, there were few opportunities for reloading the missile cells at sea anyway and the strikedown crane was omitted in new ships. This provides space for 3-6 more missile cells. Having to go to a port to reload VLS cells takes a ship away for several weeks or more from where it was needed.

After 2010, it became obvious that navy missiles capable of intercepting ballistic missiles were now more essential because Iranian and North Korean anti-ship ballistic missiles became a growing threat. This meant ships had to fire more missiles for missile defense as well as other tasks like anti-aircraft, anti-ship, anti-submarine, and land bombardment. It became increasingly likely that a ship would run out of some types of missiles.

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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.

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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.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, an outspoken climate alarmist, has a new $300 million mega yacht dubbed “Launchpad.” The billionaire’s ‘big boy’ toy collection continues to expand, which already includes a Gulfstream G650 private jet.

Bloomberg data shows the new 287-foot vessel arrived at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last Monday and has been moored ever since. The vessel departed from the Netherlands, where its well-known yacht builder, Feadship, is based, on February 29.

Lürssen is actually doing some interesting work in this area, including a system that uses methane to create hydrogen that is then burned to power the ship; the only products are CO2 and water.

The working poor are starting to wake up to the billionaires who push climate garbage initiatives that force them to buy costly electric vehicles, ban gas stoves, and replace meat with insects and plant-based foods while Zuck and other billionaires sail around the world in mega-yachts and fly around in private jets.

“Rich” means never having to give a shit about the environment.

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It is unfortunately typical that when government actions harm the environment, agencies spend more time deflecting blame than addressing the problem or being held accountable.”

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Qatari state-controlled news outlet Al Jazeera quietly deleted a story it had published for over 24 hours that featured fabricated allegations that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinian women at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Al Jazeera reported in the original article that Jamila Al-Hessi, a Gazan woman, said she saw Israeli soldiers “raping women then killing them and burning entire families alive” after entering the hospital where Hamas terrorists had barricaded themselves. The story quickly went viral on social media, prompting widespread condemnation of the Israeli government and the Israel Defense Forces.

But Yasser Abuhilalah, a columnist and former director at Al Jazeera, on Sunday admitted the story was fake, noting in an X post that “it was revealed through Hamas investigations that the story of the rape of women in Al-Shifa Hospital was fabricated.”

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Palestinian resistance.” Charlotte Kates, a member of the Israeli-designated terror group Samidoun, praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack for showing “the potential of a future for Palestine liberated from Zionism.” Khaled Barakat, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine activist, lauded airplane hijackings as “one of the most important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

While those speakers and other attendees were explicit in their support for terrorism against Jews, the event did not take place in Gaza, Doha, or Tehran. It took place in New York City, where an anti-Semitic Columbia University student group—Columbia University Apartheid Divest—invited the speakers to deliver a lecture on “the fight for liberation,” titled “Palestinian Resistance 101.”

The event, which the Washington Free Beacon attended virtually, reflects the extreme anti-Semitic activism seen on college campuses in the wake of Hamas’s attack. In some cases, faculty members have advanced that activism.

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The Chicago Board of Elections says it “mistakenly left out” 10,000 vote-by-mail ballots when tabulating the results for the Democratic primary race for Cook County state’s attorney that is currently separated by approximately 2,000 votes, the Daily Mail has reported.

Imagine that.

UPDATE: Election Fraud Never Happens. Election Fraud Never Happens. Election Fraud Never … Oh, Wait — Chicago?

The Spectator.

Since America’s disastrous scuttle from Kabul in August 2021, there had been rising concern that Afghanistan would once again become a crucible of international terrorism. The claim by the Islamic State group to have carried out the Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow appears to have justified that fear.

An Islamic prophecy says that when the Mahdi, the messiah, returns to herald the end of the world, he will come bearing black flags in the land of Khorasan

The four gunmen — who are said to have walked casually as they fired into the crowds, leaving more than 130 people dead — were citizens of Tajikistan, which borders Afghanistan to the north.

After their defeat in Syria and Iraq, Afghanistan is now Islamic State’s main base, and hundreds of Central Asian fighters have returned to regroup and train there. Intelligence sources say that Tajiks can easily pass in the northeast of Afghanistan as locals, since the people of the region are Afghan Tajiks.

For all that the Left hyperventilates and clutches its pearls over ‘Christian nationalism’, note that there are no terrorist organizations in the world calling themselves ‘Christian State in X’.

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A New York appeals court agreed Monday to hold off collection of former President Donald Trump’s $454 million civil fraud judgment – if he puts up $175 million within 10 days.

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A video shows Vice President Kamala Harris clapping along with a song during her visit to Puerto Rico, before being told that the song is actually a protest against her.

“Let’s go, Jambalaya!”

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Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party, is now more popular among male voters than the governing Conservative Party. Nearly one in five—or 19% of—British men back Reform.

The Tories, whose position in the polls has been in freefall amid constant failures to control the nation’s borders and manage the economy, are trailing on a meagre 17%. Twenty-nine per cent of men are either undecided or know they won’t vote, while 41% back Labour.

That is all according to a new YouGov poll reported in The Sunday Times, which also suggests that Reform is ahead of the Conservatives overall in the north of England—particularly in culturally conservative, so-called ‘Red Wall’ seats which leant their backing to the Conservatives in 2019 in the hope of “getting Brexit done.”

The news comes less than a fortnight after former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who is ‘honorary president’ of Reform, said Britain’s political class didn’t understand the significance of former Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson’s defection to Reform UK.

Stratechery.

This, we know, is the beginning of a long journey: there will be months or years of filings and discovery and preliminary rulings; eventually we will have a trial, and months after that a decision. Then there are the appeals, first with three judges, then perhaps en banc, and maybe even the Supreme Court. At some point, should the government win, there will be a hearing about remedies, themselves subject to the same grinding schedule. Only then can a proper determination be made about the validity of the legal questions in this case.

Still, I think the initial moment matters: antitrust is inherently political, and tech companies are generally popular; this makes it hard to build and maintain the momentum necessary to endure the grind. One would certainly have expected that to be an advantage for Apple: the company gains power in market after market precisely by making consumers happy.

Ben Thompson at Stratechery is one of the most respected technology analysts alive.

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.

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The abuse of our legal system for insidious purposes seems to be growing every day. The political rewards for the Left are abundant, and the costs for the Right are horrendous. And yet the outcomes from these acts continue, with no end in sight.

‘I refuse to say capitalism, because 1) Marx invented it as a stick to bash the free market, and 2) no one can define what capitalism is, aside from “I know it when I see it. Maybe, if I don’t look too closely.”’  — Alma Boykin

Washington Free Beacon.

For nearly two decades, President Joe Biden has told a story about why he devoted his life to politics. Speaking to Special Counsel Robert Hur in October 2023, he told it under oath.

Fresh out of law school and working as a clerk at a high-powered Wilmington, Delaware, law firm, Biden, in his telling, was tapped to defend a construction company sued by a 23-year-old welder who “lost part of his penis and one of his testicles” to a fire that broke out when he was working inside a chimney at a Delaware City plant. Thanks to Biden’s shrewd legal defense on the construction company’s behalf, the injured man lost the case.

“I wrote this memo. And son of a b—, it prevailed,” Biden told Hur on Oct. 8. “And I looked over at that kid…and I thought, ‘son of a b—, I’m in the wrong business, I’m not made for this.’”

Biden said he was so wracked with guilt that he concocted an excuse to avoid a celebratory lunch with one of the firm’s named partners and walked into the public defender’s office to ask for a job that very day. It’s “the only time I ever lied,” Biden told Hur on Oct. 8. Thus began, according to a New York Times report on the special counsel interview, “a career that would one day take him to the White House.”

But this story is almost certainly a complete work of fiction.

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In December of last year, the story broke in Germany of a Pakistani family targeted in an arson attack by right-wing extremists on Christmas Day.

It had the makings of a perfect story for use by the left, including “Nazis” targeting an innocent foreign family on Christmas day.

Police now say it was all a lie and that the arson attack was carried out by the foreign family against their own house for insurance money.

Power Line.

There are several answers to that question, but start with the fact that it is mostly the “elite” universities, and to some extent the larger ones, that have seen severe outbreaks of anti-Semitism. What is different about these institutions? For one thing, they have large numbers of foreign students, many of them from the Middle East and China. This has become a financial racket: the top universities post sky-high sticker prices for tuition, but hardly anyone pays them. In fact, almost the only people who pay full freight are rich Middle Easterners and Chinese who send their offspring to the U.S. to be “educated.”

These international students, the large majority from countries with little freedom of speech and little or no tradition of academic freedom, are the shock troops of anti-Semitism. True, they bring some leftist students along with them. But the most anti-Semitic universities, like Harvard, Penn and MIT, are also the ones with the most foreign students from anti-Semitic countries. This was illustrated by the fact that when violently anti-Semitic students assaulted Jewish students at MIT, isolating them in the library and trying to break down the doors to get at them, MIT declined to expel the anti-Semitic thugs. Why? For fear that they would be deported.

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The Indian Navy took 35 Somali pirates back to India for prosecution. The Somalis were captured in the Red Sea and face long prison terms if convicted. Pirates can also be given a life sentence or death sentence if their piracy activities included murder, rape or a pattern of depraved activity.

Somali pirates returned at the end of 2023 and captured Almeraj 1, an Iranian ocean going fishing ship that was headed back to Iran. The pirates were unable to get the $400,000 ransom they demanded. The pirates then said they would use the Iranian ship to go after other ships. Two days after Almeraj 1 was seized, pirates boarded and captured a tanker. The tanker crew issued a distress call and a nearby American warship soon arrived and arrested the Somali pirates. The Somali pirates persisted and at the end of 2023 seized the MV Ruen. The crew of this ship was forced to operate the ship for the pirates who used the Ruen to find and attack other ships. An Indian warship began following the Ruen, waiting for an opportunity to take the Ruen back from the pirates before the pirates could kill any of the Ruen crew they were holding as hostages.

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Let us examine the 2024 Democrat political narrative surrounding abortion, including efforts to leverage the 2022 Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that has roiled American politics for 50-plus years and counting.

Power Line.

Let’s assume the House of Representatives votes to impeach Joe Biden. Assume further that Fox News were to hire conservative Hollywood actors–both of them–to do dramatic readings from the Articles of Impeachment, with sinister background music. What do you suppose the reaction would be? The stunt would be ridiculed as the dumbest political move in history, and rightly so.

But, amazingly enough, that is exactly what the Democrats have done. MSNBC, one of the Democrats’ captive media outlets, hired Liam Neeson, Glenn Close, Peter Coyote (no idea who that is) and Renee Elise Goldsberry from the play Hamilton to read aloud from indictments of Donald Trump, to accompanying background music. You literally can’t make this stuff up.

Power Line.

Of all the inroads the Left has made into our institutions in recent years, the most puzzling is its increasing dominance of the business world. One aspect of this is the movement for “ESG”–Environmental, Social, Governance–investing. ESG basically means swearing fealty to the craziest of left-wing schemes. Why it became a fad is beyond me.

Happily, the ESG craze may be coming to an end.

UnHerd.

International diplomacy requires countless decisions: the large, small, mundane and monumental. Some turn out to have been wise and some not; some can be corrected, while others bring consequences that must be survived. A few are so pivotal that they reset the course of history.

We can’t be certain how the world would be different had a different course been chosen, but we can identify turning points and their cascading tumbles of consequences. And we can hypothesise an alternative history that, absent some fateful step, might have unfolded instead. Such “Planet Ifs” are more than thought experiments; if we can uncover what these wrong turns have in common, we can try harder to avoid them in the future. To see how, let’s consider four.

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After spending more than 20 years fighting in the wars in the Middle East, U.S. special operators are pivoting to other environments. With the potential for a conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific looming ever larger in the background, the US special operations community is focusing more and more on jungle operations.

A relatively recent exercise involving Marine Raiders highlighted the challenges and unique requirements of jungle warfare.

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A former high school girls’ volleyball player who was injured in a game by an opponent identifying as transgender is calling out a Democrat congresswoman who claims that having transgender athletes in female sports doesn’t hurt anyone.

Payton McNabb, a 19-year-old from North Carolina, was struck in the face by a male who identifies as transgender in her varsity high school volleyball match in September 2022. The male knocked Ms. McNabb unconscious in a spike—a move intended to hit the ball in the game.

The incident forced Ms. McNabb to spend months recovering from headaches and concentration problems. She also missed the remainder of her volleyball season.

Ms. McNabb said she suffered from a neck injury, concussion, lasting vision impairment, and partial paralysis in the right side of her body, as well as mental anguish.

How many people are alive today merely because you didn’t want to go to prison?

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The challenge: If you enjoy hiking, camping, or any other sorts of woodsy activities, you’ve probably been warned to watch out for ticks — tiny bloodsucking parasites that can transmit Lyme disease and other infections to people and animals through typically painless bites.

To protect your pet, you might make sure they get a Lyme disease vaccine and give them a preventative med that quickly kills any ticks that bite them (a tick typically needs to be attached for at least 36-48 hours to transmit the disease).

Power Line.

Robert “Beto” O’Rourke—remember him?—appeared on Bill Maher’s comedy show Friday night, and accused Big Retail—”the Walmarts, the Amazons, the Krogers of the world” of price gouging. But it is O’Rourke’s explanation that earns him an entire feature display in the Museum of Leftist Stupidity:

“They were jacking prices in the middle of inflation and blaming it on the economy.”

Imagine! Raising prices during inflation! Who ever heard of such a thing? I’m sure his solution will be government price controls, because when you are this dumb, it is too much to expect even a minimal grasp of economics.

Rolling Stone.

Long before Trump began leading in battleground-state polling — and years before he was a declared 2024 candidate — the ex-president and many of his influential allies were already busy plotting ways to tilt the election in his favor. These yearslong efforts, conducted both secretly and out in the open, have already yielded tangible results for Trump and the conservative election denier movement. These wide-ranging operations have alarmed the Democratic Party elite, who aren’t just worried about Biden’s sagging poll numbers. Numerous Democratic lawmakers, operatives, Biden campaign advisers, and administration officials tell Rolling Stone that if the president does ultimately beat Trump this November, the election will be exceedingly close.

Over the past year, Team Biden has been conducting war games, crafting complex legal strategies, and devoting extensive resources to prepare for, as one former senior Biden administration official puts it, “all-hell-breaks-loose” scenarios. The preparations include planning for a contingency in which Biden’s margin of victory is so razor-thin that Trump and the GOP launch a tidal wave of legal challenges and political maneuvers to rerun his 2020 election strategy: declare victory anyways, and try to will it into existence.

The Law of Progressive Projection says that this indicates that the Left is intending to steal the election, and how it intends to do so.

“Our society, after all, operates on guilt, which often serves only to obscure its real workings and to prevent obvious solutions. An adrenaline high can be just as addictive as any other kind of high.”  — Frank Herbert

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ZMan uses the terms Cloud People and Dirt People.

It sounds too obvious to be profound: we trust what we own / control. Of course we do. But it becomes profoundly consequential when we add the shadow half of the statement: we don’t trust what we don’t own / control without constant feedback providing verifiable evidence that it is worthy of our trust.

Absent this positive verifiable (i.e. factual evidence based on both data and personal-anecdotal experience) feedback, we have good reason to assume whatever we don’t own / control is primarily serving the interests of those who do own / control it. And since this means the product/service’s trustworthiness is suspect despite claims that it serves our interests, we must seek a steady flow of feedback substantiating that the product/service is still providing the value the owners / managers are claiming, either explicitly or implicitly.

In other words, hands-on knowledge about the inner workings of the product/service generates trust. Absent this experiential knowledge, we’re flying blind as to the true value of the product/service. If the actual value is less than the owners / managers claim, both the owners / managers and the product/service they’re providing are unworthy of our trust.

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It’s been hard to watch the effects of forced diversity, multiculturalism, and mass immigration on the tiny island of Great Britain—the most densely populated nation in Europe. At least in America we still have so much land area that most people are not yet feeling the effects of large-scale population displacement stemming from all forms of immigration.

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Until I read Catherine Pakaluk’s fascinating new book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, I was unaware that I had grown up in what is now considered to be a “large family.” I am the oldest of five children, but my father came from a family of 11 and my mother was one of 7. In the rural Reformed church communities where I live, a family of five children is considered “average” rather than “large.” But communities with large families are now a social aberration. With the exception of a few religious pockets, the birth rate is cratering in every single Western country.

Pakaluk, a social scientist and mother of eight, decided to investigate why, as small families, “DINKs” (dual income, no kids), and overt anti-natalism become the norm, some 5% of American women choose to have five or more children. She traveled across the country and interviewed 55 college-educated mothers with large families to ask them why they chose to have children and why they chose to have more. Pakaluk also explains why, despite concerted efforts at pro-natalist policies by governments, none have successfully boosted the birth rate to replacement level.

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At the heart of everything from the debate over the Gaza War to DEI to toxic interpersonal relationships is a disastrous loop known as the “self-reinforcing victim/villain” cycle.

The self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle is a deceptively simple and incredibly destructive paradigm for any kind of relationship, national, communal or personal, in which one party constantly attacks the other while claiming that it is the victim fighting against oppression.

The paradigm is guided by the idea that there is a permanently fixed victim and villain, that the victim is constantly suffering attacks from the villain and that anything the victim does is justified because he or she has no agency except to resist the assaults of the villain.

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Crime victims don’t have rights under the Constitution, former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was recalled by voters in 2022 amid an escalation of crime, said during a conference here at UC Berkeley School of Law.

Boudin’s surprising comment came as part of a larger debate between the Left and Right on criminal justice issues at the March 8 gathering, called “Justice Unveiled: Debating Crime and Public Safety Conference.”

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The following video reports on illegal mosques that are operating in the Italian city of Monfalcone, one of them in the oratory of a church.

It’s important to note that the church facility could not be used for Muslim prayers without the permission of church officials, who are at least nominally Christian. The issue here is not what the Muslims are doing, but what the Christians are doing — that is, their pre-emptive surrender to the hosts of Mohammed.

L.A. Times.

The insurance giant announced Wednesday that it would not renew homeowner insurance policies for 30,000 customers, including owners of condominiums. It also plans not to offer commercial apartment policies and won’t renew the 42,000 now in place.
Although the number of people affected is large, the company said the cuts represent less than 3% of its policies in the state.
“This decision was not made lightly,” State Farm wrote in a statement. The company “takes seriously our responsibility to maintain adequate claims-paying capacity for our customers and to comply with applicable financial solvency laws. It is necessary to take these actions now.”

When the government will not act to protect property, then property insurance is a losing business. These companies aren’t charities, however much the state government is attempting to force them to act like it.

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Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, the third-wealthiest woman in the US, has awarded $640 million in new charitable donations – with most of it going to far-left nonprofits pushing left-wing causes, including assisting migrants who commit crimes and promoting transgender biological males who compete against women, the NY Post reports.

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Receiving blood transfusion from COVID-19-vaccinated individuals could pose a medical risk to unvaccinated recipients since numerous adverse events are being reported among vaccinated people worldwide, according to a recent study from Japan.

John C. Wright passes on the wisdom of Scott from Twitter (to which I do not subscribe, so I had to see it second-hand).

Next week, Trump could make over $4 billion when his media company goes public, removing all doubt about his billionaire status.

And you can stop asking if he would have been better off putting his inheritance in a savings account in the 70s.

I expect Trump to leave a 15% tip for Leticia James and the Democrats because they made his windfall possible by hunting him and censoring him for years. You can call it a bond, not a tip, if you prefer.

When the Supreme Court tosses out the unconstitutional fine, Trump gets most of his “tip” back.

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But here is the point: a federal judge ruled that there is nothing wrong with illegals voting in local elections (District of Columbia,in this case).

So I need to show ID at the airport, to vote, and prove my citizenship to get a driver’s license, but illegal aliens can fly without ID, obtain driver’s licenses in some states and even vote. All without citizenship. It’s like bizarro planet.

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As air traffic is on the verge of breaking records heading into the summer, Newark, New Jersey’s airspace is being turned over to Philadelphia.

The move, prompted by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, seeks to “address staffing issues and congested traffic in the New York City area”, according to a new Reuters report.

We hope it’s more of the latter than the former – because with all these Boeings in the air every day, it isn’t necessarily a great time to be understaffed. And we’re only half joking.

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You know, as they do.

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That has always puzzled me.

The patient’s teeth appeared to be well cared for, but dentist James Mancini did not like the look of his gums. By chance, Mancini knew the man’s physician, so he raised an alert about a potential problem — and a diagnosis soon emerged.

“Actually, Bob had leukemia,” says Mancini, clinical director of the Meadville Dental Center in Pennsylvania. Though he wasn’t tired or having other symptoms, “his mouth was a disaster,” Mancini says. “Once his physician saw that, they were able to get him treated right away.”

Oral health is tightly connected to whole-body health, so Mancini’s hunch is not surprising. What is unusual is that the dentist and doctor communicated.

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High school students at a New York high school staged a massive walk-out protest this week in opposition to the district’s attempts to force them to share restrooms with the opposite gender, in the name of “transgender” acceptance.

Apparently they don’t love Big Brother.

How come we have biological males who ‘identify’ as female competing in women’s sports, but no biological females who ‘identify’ as male competing in male sports?