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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

It was the summer of sixty-nine….

Read it,

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.

Newsbusters.

Disturbingly, The View was under the ABC News umbrella and was not classified as an entertainment show. They’ve also bragged about being held to the same standards as every other ABC journalist. They flouted this on Wednesday’s episode when moderator Whoopi Goldberg falsely asserted that Republicans were clamoring to bring back slavery, and co-host Joy Behar falsely claimed Justice Samuel Alito was appointed by former President Trump.

Read it.

This time, journalists Chris Rufo and the Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak found that Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook appears to have plagiarized her academic work in violation of her former university’s policy.

ZMan turns the cynicism up to 11.

For fifty years abortion was a part of the national political debate due to the fight to overturn Roe v. Wade. Those who opposed abortion sought to overturn this court decision, thus returning the issue to the people. The pro-life side assumed they could win the argument and get laws passed to end most abortions. The pro-abortion people obviously fought to prevent this, even though they always claimed the vast majority of the people saw abortion as a holy sacrament.

Abortion was always a good money maker for Conservative Inc. because on the one hand, they only had to pay lip service to the moral issue. It was not as if they could pass legislation or change a regulation to meet the demands of their voters. The courts would just strike down those changes. On the other hand, the only path to victory was getting a majority of pro-life people in office, especially the White house, so the courts could be stocked with pro-life judges. That meant voting Republican.

The way the two party grift has worked since the middle of the last century was that the Democrats conjure novel ideas and find creative ways to normalize them with the progressive segment of the population. Once these ideas gain circulation, the Republicans pretend to oppose these new ideas. Both sides squabble over it, thus narrowing the options to their preferred positions. Then they aggressively fundraise off it as the novel ideas are slowly implemented.

The genius of this arrangement is the elites get what they want, while both parties protect themselves from outside threats by sucking all the oxygen out of the room in their endless media debates. With the oxygen comes the money, which keeps both camps in the lifestyle they think they deserve. Just as important, none of that money goes to anyone who has a third opinion. The political rackets rest on every issue being reduce to a binary choice.

Binary is bad.

Read it.

In January, FOX 26 reported on what police thought was a robbery turned homicide when a bystander shot the robber, but an investigation now shows that the robbery was fake.

22-year-old Rasshauud Scott was staging a robbery that two victims were in on when Jesus Vargas, a bystander, shot and killed him.

Court records say that Scott was working with William X Winfrey, who instructed Scott to stage the robbery in exchange for money.

The documents say the two victims were in on the robbery, so they could file for U-Visas. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a U-Visa is granted to victims of certain crimes to aid law enforcement in solving cases. It grants the victim temporary immigration status, including work authorization; temporary immigration status for qualifying family members of the victim; and the possibility of lawful permanent resident status.

This probably would have worked in New York or California.

Read it.

When a tool came along to decisively eliminate smallpox, it was gone within a few short decades. The immense human cost of caries has to make you wonder: why haven’t we eliminated them yet? Given the conditions that were needed to drive out smallpox and rinderpest, we have to ask: do we have tools for caries?

Brush your teeth. That’s what you’re supposed to do, but does it work?

I think it significant that the teeth are the only organ in the body that has its own brand of doctor (DDS) instead of being just a specialty of MD, like eyes and bones and the brain and whatever. (I also find it puzzling that ‘dental’ is a separate type of insurance than ‘medical’.)

Read it.

An amount of land equivalent to the Isle of Wight has been added to the shorelines of 13,000 islands around the world in just the last 20 years. This fascinating fact of a 369.67 square kilometre increase has recently been discovered by a group of Chinese scientists analysing both surface and satellite records. Overall, land was lost during the 1990s, but the scientists found that in the study period of three decades to 2020 there was a net increase of 157.21 km2. The study observed considerable natural variation in both erosion and accretion. Of course, the findings blow holes in the poster scare run by alarmists suggesting that rising sea levels caused by humans using hydrocarbons will condemn many islands to disappear shortly beneath rising sea levels. By means of such flimsy scare tactics, as we have seen in many other cases, desperate attempts are made to terrify global populations to accept the insanity of the Net Zero collectivisation.

Washington Free Beacon.

USAID gave more than $900,000 in taxpayer funds to the Bayader Association for Environment and Development, a humanitarian group based in the Gaza Strip that is said to be “in close cooperation with [the] Hamas regime,” according to a report by the Middle East Forum’s Focus on Western Islamism project. The United States awarded the most recent grant on Oct. 1, six days before Hamas launched a terror attack on Israel.

“Bayader is listed in federal spending data as a sub-grantee for USAID, with the government monies first routed through a sponsoring U.S. nonprofit, which are ostensibly required to vet their sub-grantees,” according to the report. In February 2023, Bayader reportedly organized an event in the Gaza Strip that included “senior Hamas officials,” such as Abdul Salam Haniyeh, the son of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Read it.

“Senate can’t eat until Gaza eats,” the protesters chanted as they took over a cafeteria in the Dirksen Senate Office building. The demonstration was organized by Christians for a Free Palestine and involved more than 60 anti-Israel activists, most of whom were arrested and charged with crowding, obstructing, or incommoding, according to The Hill.

Read it.

Seven Republican attorneys general filed a lawsuit Tuesday against President Joe Biden’s administration over a new student loan forgiveness plan rolled out this week.

Biden announced Monday that he was rolling out the plan, which would cancel a minimum of $5,000 for over 10 million Americans with student loans, despite the Supreme Court striking down Biden’s previous initiative in June 2023. Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey of Missouri filed a lawsuit alongside Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Dakota, Ohio and Oklahoma, arguing that the president’s plan was unconstitutional and “illegal.”

The debt isn’t ‘cancelled’, it’s merely assumed by the government and paid by the taxpayers.

The Foundry.

National Public Radio is the left-wing propaganda factory you always thought it was.

That reality was exposed in an enlightening piece published by The Free Press on Tuesday. It was written by Uri Berliner, who has worked for NPR for 25 years.

What he described is a publicly funded news network that went from having a liberal bias to one that would make Pravda seem like it was evenhanded. NPR now plays the same tired notes again and again for an extremely narrow audience with little inclination to inject even a drop of ideological balance.

The American Mind.

When presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told CNN last week that he sees President Joe Biden as a greater threat to democracy than Donald Trump, mainstream media, academics, and elected Democrats exploded in vitriol.

Speaking on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront, Kennedy said, “I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is…the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.” Kennedy added: “The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns but a President of the United States who will use the power of his office to force the social media companies…to open a portal and give access to that portal to the FBI, CIA, the IRS, the NIH, to censor his political critics.”

Biden is not actually the first president to use federal agencies to censor political speech. Presidents John Adams and Woodrow Wilson used the Sedition Acts of 1798 and 1918 to do so, and President Roosevelt censored opponents during World War II. Nonetheless, Biden has undoubtedly overseen the most massive censorship enterprise in U.S. history, and the first to be enjoined by federal courts. That progressives embrace Biden’s affront to a right central to our democracy underscores how far the Left has travelled from its once-avowed principles. While the attack line that Trump is a fascist is so well-worn that most of us ignore it, too little attention is given to authoritarians on the Left. Fascism is a vicious ideology that was responsible for millions of deaths in the twentieth century, but communist and other socialist systems are guilty for at least ten times more murders in the name of class warfare.

Read it.

The Amazon Labor Union burst onto the scene in 2021 with support from leading progressives and an endorsement from President Joe Biden. But the group could soon lose that prime placement as it grapples with financial troubles and controversy surrounding its founder.

The union had just $28,354 cash on hand at the end of last year, down from $95,437 in 2022, according to its latest filing with the Department of Labor. The union began 2023 with $118,463 in net assets, but ended up deeply in debt, with negative $48,006 in net assets. It has $43,581 in bills more than three months past due, including $12,098 owed to its landlord.

The financial hemorrhaging comes as union founder Christian Smalls faces blowback for his pro-Hamas rhetoric and criticism from union workers who sued Smalls last year over his alleged “scheme to suppress democratic dissent” by blocking votes for union leadership.

Read it.

New York City Hall on Monday indicated it will use taxpayers’ money to pay for a celebrity lawyer to defend New York City mayor Eric Adams against a lawsuit containing allegations of sexual assault dating back to 1993.

Attorney Alex Spiro will serve as co-counsel for Adams, according to a court notice filed on Monday by the New York City Law Department. Spiro is a prominent lawyer who has represented high-profile figures, including Elon Musk, Jay-Z, and Alec Baldwin.

Read it.

In one of the more dizzying episodes of controversy surrounding Jewish cultural events since the Israel-Hamas war, a court ordered a Philadelphia-area movie theater Tuesday to move forward with screening an Israeli film less than a day after the theater’s Jewish director tried to call it off.

The injunction issued by Montgomery County Court instructed the Bryn Mawr Film Institute to move forward with its planned screening of “The Child Within Me,” a documentary about the Israeli musician Yehuda Poliker. The Israeli Film Festival of Philadelphia had reportedly filed a last-minute lawsuit against the theater, alleging breach of contract after it announced Monday night that it was no longer planning on screening the film owing to what its director called the “current climate.”

Local Jewish groups, enraged by the cancellation, had planned to stage a protest against the nonprofit theater Tuesday evening. The protest was still moving forward, organizers told Haaretz, in a show of support for the festival.

Read it.

‘Right-Wing Feminist’?

A young woman was arrested in the eastern French city of Besançon and taken into custody for holding up a sign calling for the deportation of foreign rapists. She faces up to a year in prison. Her lawyer has stated that she intends to lodge a complaint for “infringement of personal freedom.”

During Besançon’s carnival on Saturday, April 6th, two young women, one of them a 19-year-old, held up signs in the street reading: “Violeurs étrangers dehors” and “Libérez-nous de l’immigration” (“Foreign Rapists Away”, and “Free us from immigration”). On one of the facades of the Grande Rue, one of Besançon’s main thoroughfares, they also unfurled a banner pointing out that “46 women could have been spared if the OQTFs (Obligation de Quitter le Territoire Français for Obligation to Leave French Territory) had been applied in 2023”. They both belong to the feminist identity group Némésis, which regularly denounces the increase in violence against women due to the massive influx of immigrants who do not respect the rules of Western society with regard to women.

The mayor of Besançon, a member of the Ecologist party, denounced the association made “between migrants and rapists,” and announced that she would be filing a complaint on behalf of the city for “incitement to hatred.”

Steve Sailer.

From a Pioneer Works issue that tells you more than everything you could possibly want to know about the impact of Adderall on 21st Century writers.

So Trump Derangement Syndrome may have a chemical basis.

Read it.

Two FBI agents who had their security clearances suspended after speaking to Congress about how law enforcement went after pro-lifers and concerned parents, now warn that the FBI has adopted a “Marxist culture” and called for its abolition.

“The type of recruiting events they have—they have adopted this Marxist culture to permanently change our institutions like the FBI,” Garret O’Boyle, an FBI agent whom House Republicans hailed as a whistleblower, said Tuesday at an Oversight Project event at The Heritage Foundation. “Remember, the FBI are the people with the guns and badges who will come after you.”

O’Boyle was referring to the FBI’s decision to publicly champion identity politics celebrations such as Arab American Heritage Month and to use race as a factor in hiring.

The Spectator.

You might expect a global human rights organization to wholeheartedly condemn a man involved in the brutal torture of a teenage soldier. Not the Amnesty International of 2024, it seems. On Monday night, the charity instead lamented the death of Palestinian prisoner Walid Daqqa, tweeting:

The death in custody of Walid Daqqa, a sixty-two-year-old Palestinian writer who was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails after thirty-eight years of imprisonment, is a cruel reminder of Israel’s disregard for Palestinians’ right to life.

Sorry? Amnesty International couldn’t possibly be talking about the same Walid Daqqa who, in 1984, led a group that abducted, tortured, castrated and mutilated Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam — before shooting the nineteen-year-old and dumped his body, could it? Er, well, it is.

Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology, under the guise of a religion, with which no co-existence is possible. There are none so blind as they who will not see.

Read it.

Every recent immigrant and their offspring declare the superiority of American law and culture with every breath they take, with every moment they remain. There is no Soviet-like wall preventing departure. Immigrant community Muslims in America bear witness to the undeniable superiority of American life and freedoms simply by (a) remaining and (b) enjoying opportunities and rights that do not exist in Shariah-shaped cultures.

Is there some programmed psychological barrier that prevents Muslim reflection, cultural self-appraisal, and needed reform? The bizarre need to deny the sheer atrocity of Oct 7 indicates a shared cognitive war against inconvenient facts and the warped realities of Palestinian culture and the peculiarities of Arab national fantasy life.

Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology, under the guise of a religion, with which no co-existence is possible. There are none so blind as they who will not see.

Read it.

The Biden administration is on a hunt for systemic racism. Thus far it’s found systemic racism everywhere from the highway system to the military, but the one place it hasn’t looked is among the ranks of the teachers unions who provide much of its cash and its election foot soldiers.

But new data reported by the New York Times shows that the pandemic school closures demanded by teachers unions were the single greatest act of systemic racism in 50 years.

During the pandemic, members of the corrupt teachers union machine demanded school closures to “save lives”. Unwilling to do their jobs, they instead marched around brandishing coffins at political protests while warning that if they had to go and teach, everyone would die.

Read it.

One would think the liberal broadcast networks would be eager to give President Biden a counterterrorism win during an election year, or at least praise the FBI for finally stopping an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack before it happened. But during Tuesday morning’s newscasts, CBS News and NBC News ignored the story of the FBI foiling a plot to target Christian parishioners in multiple Idaho churches last weekend.

Power Line.

The IDF has released video of the highlights of its interrogation of Palestinian Islamic Jihad spokesman Tariq Salami Otha Abu Shoulf. As IDF Lt. Col. (reserve) Peter Lerner puts it, “In his interrogation he reveals in simple terms how they organize the mass manipulation of the media.” As we have all seen over the years, it’s not too difficult. The terrorists and their allies have had it worked out for some time.

Lt. Col. Lerner is frustrated that this video will not get the publicity it deserves. I am posting the video further to my point that the site formerly known as Twitter covers a lot of news that you won’t easily find anywhere else, if at all.

Read it.

That cackling sound you hear is the ghost of Orval Faubus and all his Jim Crow buddies.

Read it.

If you take a look at a map of the world’s Blue Zones — the areas with the highest concentration of centenarians — every one of them is situated along a coastline. Little wonder: settling down by the sea, in a so-called “blue space,” has been linked to a 17% reduction in mortality rate. One study suggested that living within 250 meters of a seaside environment helps reduce stress levels, with the smell and sounds offering a “wonderful tonic.”

…

That’s according to Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, a marine biologist who coined the term “blue mind theory.” (Ted Talk here, book here.) After years spent researching and protecting sea turtles, Nichols started studying the impact that water has on the human body and brain. “When you see water, when you hear water, it triggers a response in your brain that you’re in the right place,” he said in an interview.

ZMan cuts to the chase.

One of the enduring truths about war is that the side that wins is usually the side that starts with a clear objective. That understanding of the goal allows for a strategy to accomplish the goal, which then becomes the framework for the tactics required to implement the strategy and win the war. Starting with the end in mind also allows for changes in strategy and tactics to account for the unknown unknowns that are always a part of a military conflict. No plan survives contact with the enemy.

We may be about to see this in the Ukraine war. From the start the Russians have had a very clear understanding of their interests in Ukraine. This predates the war by about a thousand years. Russia is a land power without natural barriers between itself and its neighbors, so the goal of Russian foreign policy since forever has been to maintain space between Russia and its neighbors. The Ukraine has always been part of that space controlled by the Russians.

This is why the Russians had clear demands at the start of the war. They wanted the Russian speaking areas liberated from Ukrainian control, they wanted Ukraine demilitarized and they wanted NATO out of Ukraine. When the war started, these goals did not have to change as they were the reason for the war. The Russians would simply have to do what was necessary to impose these ends. In other words, once the war started, the question was how not why.

Read it.

Less than a month after it claimed responsibility for the major terror attack on Moscow Concert Hall, which saw at least 139 Russian civilians killed, Islamic State (IS) has threatened to target a list of major football venues.

A post circulated by the Al-Azaim Foundation, the terror group’s de facto media outlet, called for attacks on UEFA Champions League football games ahead of the event’s quarter-finals.

Spanish officials say they have activated all of their “alert” and “response systems” ahead of Manchester City’s match against Real Madrid tonight, on April 7th. Threats have also been made against Arsenal’s home game with Bayern Munich at the Emirates Stadium, also tonight.

Read it.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent string of rulings – including a 2022 New York case – that placed clear limits on how much state and local governments can restrict firearms ownership and possession, Democrat-run jurisdictions seem intent on persisting.

Real Clear Politics.

President Joe Biden keeps lecturing corporate America to “pay your fair share” of taxes. It turns out he’s right that some companies really are getting away scot-free from paying taxes.

But it isn’t Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley or the Wall Street financial company “fat cats” or big banks or Walmart. They pay billions in taxes.

The culprits here are the very companies that Biden is in bed with: green energy firms.

Read it.

Two Bay Area railway workers gave new meaning to “transit oriented development” – when they allegedly built two illegal apartments inside train stations for a combined $50,000.
San Mateo prosecutors allege that two former Caltrain officials built two secret office-to-apartment conversions in two Peninsula stations south of San Francisco, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
Former Caltrain Deputy Director Joseph Navarro and contractor Seth Andrew Worden face felony charges for misusing public funds to build the mini apartments in the historic Burlingame and Millbrae stations. Neither facility is being used by the public.

Newsbusters.

“Death To Israel And America” chants broke out on Al-Quds Day, a day instituted by the Ayatollah Khomeini to protest against America and Israel. Had these protests happened throughout the Middle East, it is highly likely that they would’ve garnered significant airtime across the evening network newscasts. But the chants in question happened on American soil, and so there was no coverage whatsoever, despite White House condemnation of the chants.

Read it.

Entirely as predicted, Police Scotland has been deluged with vexatious and politically-driven ‘hate crime’ reports, with one top official complaining “we cannot cope.”

Under the new legislation, anyone deemed to have been verbally ‘abusive’, in person or online, to a transgender person, including “insulting” them could be hit with a prison sentence of up to seven years.

That instantly led to a flood of bad faith reports, including from conservatives making a mockery of the system and from deranged left-wing activists trying to punish their ideological adversaries.

Read it.

In November 2022, Los Angeles voters approved a so-called ‘mansion tax,’ which slaps a 4% sales tax on properties sold for over $5 million, and 5.5% for those over $10 million.

The scheme (Measure ULA), put forward by Democrats, was projected to raise roughly $672 million in its first year, to be used for affordable housing.

Not only did the plan fall short by hundreds of millions of dollars (raising just $215 million), the measure caused residential building construction to plummet, raising housing prices even further, the Washington Examiner writes, noting that the tax doesn’t just apply to large homes in Bel Air, “but also gas stations, commercial real estate, condominiums, and apartment complexes.”

Newsweek.

Coastal areas along Texas’s stretch of the Gulf of Mexico could be vulnerable to being consumed by water as sea levels rise due to the effects of climate change, modeling suggests.

By the year 2100, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates there will be between 43 and 84 centimeters (1.4-2.8 feet) of sea level rise, but that an increase of 2 meters (6.6 feet) “cannot be ruled out.”

According to projections by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a sea level rise of around 3 feet would still see receding coastlines near Houston, Galveston and Port Isabel.

Note: Headline ‘will’; text ‘could be’, ‘suggests’, ‘estimates’, ‘projections’.

Call me when property prices in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard start dropping.

Read it.

A Nebraska state legislator is transitioning from blue to red after his own party censured him for having a pro-life stance. Nebraska state Sen. Mike McDonnell officially left the Democratic Party last week after 40 years and became a Republican.

In a written statement explaining his decision, McDonnell wrote: “I have asked the Democratic Party to respect my religious based pro-life position. Instead over the last year they have decided to punish me for being pro-life.”

Last month, the Nebraska Democratic Party voted to censure McDonnell, a Catholic, over his pro-life record, contending that his stance “adversely affected the reproductive rights of Nebraskans and the rights of transgender individuals in the state.”