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France’s Aquitaine-class FREMM frigate Alsace has turned tail from the Red Sea after running out of missiles and munitions repelling attacks from the Yemeni armed forces, according to its commander, Jerome Henry.

“We didn’t necessarily expect this level of threat. There was an uninhibited violence that was quite surprising and very significant. [The Yemenis] do not hesitate to use drones that fly at water level, to explode them on commercial ships, and to fire ballistic missiles,” Henry told French news outlet Le Figaro in an exclusive interview published on 11 April.

The Houthis have a shooting gallery, and the ducks are stuck in a row. If this were a real war, or the U.S. had a real government, they would have gone in with Marines and cruise missiles and cleaned them out thoroughly. But that was yesterday … and yesterday’s gone.

The American Mind.

The U.S. Navy recently released a photograph on social media showing a sailor firing his M-4 aboard a ship. No doubt some public relations officer thought the picture looked great—a fit and ready sailor shooting his rifle, with spent cartridges flying. A perfect picture for a recruitment catalog, except for one crucial detail: the rifle’s scope—which the sailor appears to be looking through—is mounted backwards, and its lens covers appear to be closed. A swift social media uproar arose over the bizarre and glaring error. Someone with actual military experience in the Navy evidently noticed what this photo said without words, because the picture was quickly deleted.

Too late, for this image of bastardized military training is already the allegory for the collapse of the military profession and America’s deployment of military force around the world. The glaring deficiencies in this photo go a long way towards understanding the U.S. military in 2024. Outkick has a hilariously tragic rundown of all that is wrong with the picture, but there is a lesson for those Americans concerned about the institutional integrity of a military on the precipice of war in different regions of the world.

Many veterans will recognize the notion and verbiage of a “box check exercise,” that being a colloquial phrase used to describe drills a military unit undergoes to fulfill a prescribed process. Box-check exercises are frequently unrelated to easier or more functional parts of a unit training calendar. From a veteran Army infantryman, one would think shooting rifles aboard a Navy destroyer epitomizes the notion of a “box-check exercise.”

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Eventually the only people playing women’s sports will be men pretending to be women.

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Privileged progressives, donning their white knight armor, are in the next phase of a plan to end Seattle Public Schools’ gifted students program — known locally as its Highly Capable Cohort (HCC). They complained the HCC was too white.

The Foundry.

No, she didn’t ‘lose her son to fentanyl’; fentanyl isn’t a random occurrence of nature, like a typhoon or an earthquake. Her son chose to take fentanyl and did so until he died. Part of the failure is on his parents, who didn’t arm him with the mental and spiritual tools to avoid that sort of destructive self-indulgence.

Evolution works whether one wants it to or not. Natural selection, like gravity, works automatically, and specializes in removing from the gene pool the weak and the stupid. Our technological has permitted the weak and stupid to survive and breed, and such a defective system merely prolongs the inevitable.

Unfortunately, evolution is not a speedy process, which means that many of us will live out our lives before the proper balance is restored. Sucks to be us.

Newsbusters.

Hint: No.

On Tuesday, National Public Radio business editor Uri Berliner blew the whistle on the station’s “assembly line” of liberally biased reporting, which he said was being cranked out “one story after another” framed with the leftist worldview. The expose put NPR under the microscope and put a serious blemish on the organization. But the question now is: will that blemish finally force media-scoring agency NewsGuard to downgrade NPR’s perfect 100/100 rating?

NewsMax.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear oral arguments involving a federal obstruction law that has been used to prosecute hundreds of defendants involved in the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and the justices’ decision could affect former President Donald Trump.

The main charge that has sent so many 1/6 defendants to prison is one that had never before been prosecuted in such a context and (it is being argued) beyond the scope of what Congress intended with the law.

The New Neo.

The situation has the unintended effect of allowing terrorists to win wars by their tactic of putting civilians in harms’ way. The Palestinians’ entire war strategy rests on this, and most of the West cooperates. Thus, the unrealistic expectations held by so many modern Westerners about war end up enabling evil to flourish.

Definition: Propaganda organs of the ruling establishment masquerading as ‘jourlanists’ and ‘news’ organizations.

Source: Chris Rufo on the plagiarism accusations against black female professors

An apparent variant of ‘media’ based on the French word ‘merde’.

The Foundry.

Today’s standard-issue body shields leave officers exposed to perpetrators’ increasingly lethal weapons. But groundbreaking innovations like liquid armor and ultra-high-strength composites could revolutionize police protection, creating lightweight, flexible equipment that lets cops operate more securely.

AI-powered sensors and real-time data analysis could enhance authorities’ situational awareness and decision-making. On the horizon: lighter and more comfortable “smart long johns” that officers could slip beneath their uniforms.

Breakthroughs in smart helmets also could prevent deaths. Advanced composites of Kevlar, carbon fiber, and thermoplastics could help craft headgear that are more nimble, easier to wear, and far tougher on hostile fire.

Sorry–all our money is going for ‘reparations’ and into the pockets of politicians and their cronies.

Axios.

“Latine,” a gender-neutral way to describe or refer to people with Latino origins, is surging in popularity on university campuses, in museums, and among researchers and media.

You can’t tell the Woke jargon without a scorecard, and Voice of the Crust Axios is here to keep you up to date.

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Sen. Jacky Rosen says she’s committed to cracking down on the corporate landowners jacking up housing costs for her constituents. But the Nevada Democrat has no problem raking in campaign contributions from executives at America’s largest corporate landlord.

Rosen’s campaign and leadership PAC have accepted $83,250 in 2023 from executives of Blackstone, a leading corporate investor in the U.S. housing market, Federal Election Commission records show. Blackstone is the largest landlord in the country, with over 300,000 housing units in its portfolio, and is a direct contributor to the affordable housing crisis, according to a 2023 report by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. Among Rosen’s donors is Frank Cohen, the chairman and CEO of Blackstone’s flagship real estate investment fund, which is heavily invested in Nevada. Cohen gave $13,200 to Rosen in August.

Now, Rosen says corporate landowners like Blackstone are responsible for driving up the cost of living for everyday Americans by monopolizing residential housing markets. Rosen introduced legislation in January that she said would limit the ability of companies like Blackstone to acquire an excessive amount of single-family residences in a single market and prohibit them from renting homes at an “unreasonable price.”

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on the U.S. Census, support for the measure could be growing in the backdrop of the border crisis and its potential impact on congressional reapportionment.

Heritage Action, a policy advocacy arm of The Heritage Foundation, announced Friday the Equal Representation Act would be scored as a key vote. The bill is S 3659 in the Senate and HR 7109 in the House. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Under current law, foreign citizens living in the United States are counted in the Census, and thus toward congressional apportionment. Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., publicly admitted, “We have a diaspora that can absorb a significant number of these migrants. … I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.”

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I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

Progressives are using legal loopholes and the power of the federal government to maximize Democrat votes in the 2024 election at taxpayers’ expense, RealClearInvestigations has found.

The methods include voter registration and mobilization campaigns by ostensibly nonpartisan charities that target Democrats using demographic data as proxies, and the Biden administration’s unprecedented demand that every federal agency “consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.”

A dizzying array of overwhelmingly “democracy-focused” entities with ties to the Democratic Party operating as charities and funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from major liberal “dark money” vehicles are engaged in a sprawling campaign to register the voters, deliver them the ballots, and figuratively and sometimes literally harvest the votes necessary to defeat Donald Trump.

Read it.

An Afghan migrant, who is on the terrorist watchlist, was taken into custody crossing the southern border and released by authorities last year, NBC News reported.

The network, attributing the information to U.S. officials, said Mohammad Kharwin, 48, was taken into custody again in February and released last month by an immigration judge, who was not informed of the security risk.

Kharwin had been ordered free on bond pending a 2025 immigration hearing in Texas. No restrictions were placed on his movements inside the U.S.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

OffGuardian.

We want to know why something is the way it is. It is in our nature. It is why, now presumably understanding the movement of celestial things, we can rest watching an eclipse with the quietened birds and the colours drifting to dark, saturated. Watching as it gradually returns to normal and not be afraid.

As if normal existed now.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

On the Sunday show I said I was swearing off any Trump news until the summer, as there is only so much screeching and squealing, I can take. I needed to take a break in order to train for the coming election. I plan to stick to that for the most part but looking at the clips of Trump stopping into a Chick-fil-A and the reaction to it, I thought it may be a good time to talk about the meaning of Trump.

Read it.

Four years have passed since the onset of COVID-19 and the global mishandling of its spread. Now, the same governments and international organizations that lied about the last pandemic are negotiating a new pandemic agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) at the World Health Organization (WHO).

RealClearPolitics.

Is National Public Radio fair and balanced? Do they care what you think?

NPR has a “public editor” to monitor listener complaints and concerns, but as we all know, the majority of their listeners are going to complain they’re not “progressive” enough. In 2021, Public Editor Kelly McBride appeared on Brian Stelter’s CNN podcast to praise NPR’s decision to allow their journalists to go to (leftist) public protests so they can “bring their full humanity to work with them.”

When Stelter asked about NPR’s critics, McBride dismissed any conservative complaints about a leftist tilt because they are not “genuinely interested in improving NPR.” McBride claimed her job was to coach NPR “to achieve its own internally stated goals. It doesn’t help to be magnifying disingenuous criticism.” To balance NPR is to harm NPR?

Read it.

Garret O’Boyle and Stephen Friend dedicated years of their lives to serving their country in the FBI. But when they began to question some of the decisions being made within the bureau, they were suspended.

After joining the FBI, O’Boyle says he “immediately saw that other agents [and] supervisors didn’t have a solid grasp of people’s civil rights.”

“Having sworn that oath to the Constitution multiple times—twice in the Army, once as a police officer, once as an FBI agent,” O’Boyle said, “it actually meant something to me—which, I think, it doesn’t to many, maybe even to most at this point. It’s just a job.”

Read it.

Japan’s unique keitora class of compact truck has proven a hit among American imported car fanatics, and thousands of the tiny little guys have been brought into the country. Unfortunately for fans of Liliputian work machines, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators recommended states to ban non-FMVSS compliant cars, including everything keijid?sha, back in 2021. The Texas DMV has issued a ruling that these cars are now, and will remain, street legal for use on Texas roadways. Can I get a hell yeah?

Read it.

The use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 is an ongoing debate. The central conflict is that while many doctors have reported success in using ivermectin, some studies published in major journals suggest it is in fact ineffective.

Even as the FDA recently has been removing misinformation it posted about ivermectin, the agency has maintained its original position regarding its effectiveness, namely that there isn’t evidence.

People who trust ivermectin claim the studies showing ineffectiveness are fraudulent, while people who are skeptical of its use for treating COVID-19 view it as an anti-science conspiracy theory.

The Foundry.

The Democrat-run city of Denver plans to defund its Police Department to pay for illegal immigrants.

Colorado’s capital, commonly referred to as a “sanctuary city,” announced Wednesday that it will spend $89.9 million on services for incoming illegal migrants, pulling some funding from roughly $45 million in public programs and services. The Denver Police Department will be hit with a reduction of $8.4 million— about 1.9% of its total operating budget, the city confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

UnHerd.

By now, you will surely have seen the video of actress Sydney Sweeney at the end of her Saturday Night Live hosting debut last month. She’s enthusiastically waving goodbye, her breasts barely contained by a dress that looks like it was designed to reveal as much of their surface area as possible, while also preventing them from floating away into space — which seems, in this case, a genuine risk. There was no reason why this moment should have been so remarkable, this being neither the first plunging neckline nor first set of boobs to grace the SNL stage, and yet, a consensus swiftly emerged that Sweeney’s physique was more than the sum of its perfectly spherical parts. Conservative writer Richard Hanania summed it up when he tweeted the video with a three-word caption: “Wokeness is dead.”

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Washington Poop.

Harvard College will require applicants to submit standardized test scores once again, becoming the latest Ivy League school to reinstate the requirement after making the choice optional during the pandemic.

The university had previously said it would remain test-optional through the 2025-2026 application cycle. But on Thursday, it said students applying to the college for fall 2025 admission — hoping to join the graduating class of 2029 — will now have to submit standardized test scores as part of their admissions package.

Harvard becomes the latest Ivy League school to reinstate the requirement after making the choice optional during the pandemic. Dartmouth College, Yale and Brown universities announced similar changes in recent weeks, after officials cited data suggesting that SAT and ACT scores were the best predictors of students’ academic performance at their schools — and that making the tests optional could further disadvantage applicants from more challenging backgrounds.

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Following a path blazed by the once and future Republic of Texas, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Wednesday signed into law a measure making it a state crime to enter the Hawkeye State after being deported or denied entry into the country. As an “aggravated misdemeanor,” it would subject illegal immigrants to imprisonment for up to two years.

Reynolds raced to sign the bill just one day after it cleared the state legislature. In a statement issued after the signing, she said President Biden’s neglect of border security made it imperative for Iowa to step up and fill the void.

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Oh so now in America we can’t even display the American flag without triggering people?

The Borderline Dance team was kicked out of a Seattle dance convention called the Emerald City Hoedown for wearing American flag-themed shirts, which reportedly made others feel “triggered and unsafe.”

Nope, this isn’t a joke.

Read it.

North Carolina’s highest court could determine whether election officials retain special legal privileges that allow them to defame individual voters and set a precedent for how voter fraud claims are pursued.

ZMan is fed up.

If you have paid any attention to British politics, you will note that what passes for the political right in Britain is more feckless and ridiculous than what passes for the political right in the United States. It is one of those things that should be impossible, but once you look at the recent string of Prime Ministers, you have to accept it is reality, which means things will inevitably get worse in America. No matter how much you hate the Republicans, you will have reason to hate them more.

The Tories are facing what many predict could be a party ending election this year, as current polling has them winning just a handful of seats. The Tories currently have a 35% approval number, an all-time low. As a result, there is a movement afoot to wipe out the party entirely. The “zero seats” campaign started as a joke but as is often the case, this joke could turn out to be reality. Italy’s Five Star movement started as a gag and eventually overturned the political establishment.

The New Yorker.

BLUF:

• They were spending too much time on their phones and, like children, didn’t have the willpower to cut it down or cut it out.
• They couldn’t get what they considered to be an adequate amount of information on ‘dumb phones’.
• They decided to start a side hustle supplying ‘dumb phones’ and information to people similarly situated.

You can read the whole article if you like–The New Yorker has good writing if it has nothing else–but the whole situation is merely further confirmation of the mental neoteny that pervades modern American society.

On the other hand, their pivot to entrepreneurship is encouraging. Apparently the American spirit is not dead, merely deeply hidden; it will arise when conditions warrant.

Read it.

A judge ruled that a convicted Afghan sex offender should stay in the UK because his crimes meant he could face “mob violence” if he returned to his home country.

An immigration tribunal judge awarded the 31-year-old offender refugee status after agreeing with lawyers that his mental illness meant he would likely offend again—something that would expose him to “ill treatment” if he were deported to Afghanistan.

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If an investor bets big on Apple, that investor will have a good reason to carefully monitor Apple’s performance, carefully consider how to vote in shareholder elections, and serve as a watchdog on management because of their investments. With index funds, every investor can end up so diversified the performance of each company matters little to investors. It also means that a few investment companies can end up controlling a large or sometimes majority share of every major company. In 2019, the Harvard Business Review pointed out that “either Blackrock, Vanguard, or State Street is the largest shareholder in 88% of S&P 500 companies.”

This common ownership discourages competition.

…

It also means that ideological crusades can be driven by a few investment companies. It’s hard to imagine small firms going all in on DEI or ESG investments. What small family company wants to abandon hiring the best job candidates in the name of diversity or adopt unproven “green” practices in the name of sustainability?

But if a few investment managers become passionate about such trendy left-wing ideas they can rapidly disseminate through the market.

Read it.

You would be forgiven for thinking that “Civil War” was a movie about the bloodiest U.S. conflict dating back to the late 19th century. Instead, it’s a prescient look at a fictional, fractured, near-future America.

Directed by Alex Garland (“Ex Machina”) and produced by independent entertainment company A24, the film opens with an unnamed president (Nick Offerman) practicing a self-assured speech about the strength and unity of the United States juxtaposed against scenes of chaos, violence and destruction erupting across the country.

Meanwhile, veteran Reuters journalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) sits in a New York City hotel room as an explosion erupts outside her window. Her team, which consists of alcoholic thrill-seeker Joel (Wagner Moura), her elderly mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a stowaway newcomer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), plans to make the treacherous drive from Manhattan to Washington, D.C., to try to confront the president, who has held three terms in office but nary a press conference.

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A meme has taken hold in the online right ahead of this year’s UK general election: Zero Seats. It is both a wish and a promise: to repay the Conservative party for 14 years of betraying the British public. Although the Tories look to retain some true-blue constituencies, they are forecast to suffer their worst election in a century. But Zero Seats is more than a call to desolate the Conservative party electorally, as they have Britain culturally, economically, and demographically. Refusing to vote for the Conservative party in its current form is an ambition to lift the post-war paradigm that lies like a dead hand upon national politics.

The Guardian.

It was billed as a glass-walled city of the future, an ambitious centrepiece of the economic plan backed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to transition Saudi Arabia away from oil dependency.

Now, however, plans for the mirror-clad desert metropolis called the Line have been scaled down and the project, which was envisaged to stretch 105 miles (170km) is expected to reach just a mile and a half by 2030.

Dreamed up as a linear city that would eventually be home to about 9 million people on a footprint of just 13 sq miles, the Line is part of a wider Neom project. Now at least one contractor has begun dismissing workers.

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Cmdr. Cameron Yaste, the Commanding Officer of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain (DDG 56), was recently photographed shooting a 5.56×45mm M4 carbine with the optics installed backward.

The now-deleted image and press release on the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service website featured Yaste shooting the M4 with the Trijicon VCOG scope installed backward while pointed at a giant target balloon.

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Bound and determined to drive people with money, upon whom their incipient welfare state depends, out of the state.

CNBC.

Wealthy U.S. families are increasingly applying for second citizenships and national residences as a way to hedge their financial risk, according to a leading law firm.

The wealthy are building these “passport portfolios” — collections of second, and even third or fourth, citizenships — in case they need to flee their home country. Henley & Partners, a law firm that specializes in high-net-worth citizenships, said Americans now outnumber every other nationality when it comes to securing alternative residences or added citizenships.

“The U.S. is still a great country, it’s still an amazing passport,” said Dominic Volek, group head of private clients at Henley & Partners. “But if I’m wealthy, I would like to hedge against levels of volatility and uncertainty. The idea of diversification is well understood by wealthy individuals around what they invest. It makes no sense to have one country of citizenship and residence when I have the ability to actually diversify that aspect of my life as well.”

Recent high-profile examples of second citizenships include billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, who added a citizenship in New Zealand, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who applied for citizenship in Cyprus.

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Celebrities look on their kids like some sort of hominid pets, so they never hesitate to experiment on them.

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Last week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court heard arguments between the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board and the Oklahoma Parent Legislative Advocacy Coalition (OKPLAC).

On one side, the school board defended its decision to include St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in their network and fund it like any other public charter school. As a charter, the school operates independently of public school systems and is funded based on its enrollment. Lawyers defending St. Isidore claim it’s simply an option for families who desire that kind of education: “They’re a Catholic school, but they welcome everyone. Nobody is required to go to St. Isidore. That’s very important. It’s an option among many.”

On the other side, the lawyers for OKPLAC argued that this was mixing church and state and could result in “discriminatory practices, such as students being treated differently for their religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability—as well as not providing adequate services for students with disabilities.” Essentially, by funding St. Isidore, the state was funding Catholic bigotry.

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It was the summer of sixty-nine….

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Two suspected members of the Islamic State (IS) group have been arrested in Germany accused of enslaving and sexually abusing a pair of Yazidi girls in Syria and Iraq, prosecutors said on Wednesday.

The Iraqi suspects, identified only as Twana H. S. and Asia R. A., are accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership of a foreign terrorist organisation, the federal prosecutor’s office said.

Islam has never had a problem with slavery. Saudi Arabia didn’t abolish slavery until the 1960s.