Read it.

While opposition politicians demanded resumed deportations in the wake of the deadly knife attack by an Islamist in Mannheim on Friday, the German government doubled down on not deporting failed asylum seekers. Instead, representatives for the traffic light coalition called for national unity, placing blame on the ‘far right’ for ‘instrumentalising’ the political violence to call for tightening immigration laws.

Anti-terrorism prosecutors have taken over the investigation into the knife attack committed by an Islamist asylum seeker from Afghanistan. German Justice Minister Marco Buschmann said there are clear indications of an Islamist motive for the attack. The federal prosecutor’s office said the attack may have been religiously motivated: the perpetrator is suspected to have wanted to prevent critics of Islam from exercising their right to freedom of expression.

Gothamist.

Assistant Chief Scott Henderson of Brooklyn North told reporter that the girls, ages 9 and 11, were playing at the Hilltop playground on Dean Street and Thomas S. Boyland Street in Brownsville, as the older girl’s mother watched from a park bench.

Just after 9 p.m., two people apparently opened fire— shooting six rounds at someone else whom officials are working to identify, Henderson said.

The 9-year-old girl was shot in the right leg, and the 11-year-old was shot in the back. Both were transported to Brookdale Hospital by a family member, “conscious and alert,” Henderson said. Officials said they were later transferred to Maimonides Medical Center, and the younger girl was released early Tuesday morning.

Harvard Crimson.

The worm turns.

Read it.

New York City hotel prices have never been higher. Illegal immigration is part of the reason why. Mayoral graft is another…

• Uncontrolled immigration
• An alleged right to shelter
• A corrupt mayor purposely removes listings to benefit a favored political group.

The cost to the city is $10 billions. Taxpayers are on the hook for the cost.

Read it.

Research is showing that many of our contemporary problems, such as the rising prevalence of mental health issues, are emerging from rapid technological advancement and modernisation. A theory that can help explain why we respond poorly to modern conditions, despite the choices, safety and other benefits they bring, is evolutionary mismatch.

Mismatch happens when an evolved adaptation, either physical or psychological, becomes misaligned with the environment. Take moths and some species of nocturnal flies, for example. Because they have to navigate in the dark, they evolved to use the moon for direction. But due to the invention of artificial lighting, many moths and flies are drawn to street lamps and indoor lights instead.

My mother had the same habit.

Read it.

During the pandemic, the American people started to feel that Big Government was very cozy with Big Pharma. Now we know just how close they were.

New data from the National Institutes of Health reveals the agency and its scientists collected $710 million in royalties during the pandemic, from late 2021 through 2023. These are payments made by private companies, like pharmaceuticals, to license medical innovations from government scientists.

Almost all that cash — $690 million — went to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), the subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and 260 of its scientists.

Read it.

I’m absolutely shocked — shocked! — to learn that the mujahid who murdered a cop and wounded Michael Stürzenberger in Mannheim was a failed asylum seeker. I mean, who would have guessed?

The Spectator.

Grocery store Harris Teeter’s DC locations started implementing a receipt check at the door. Giant Foods recently banned duffel bags or those measuring more than 14 x 14 x 6 inches, which disqualifies most backpacks, in their stores. And Safeway instituted a glass barrier at self-checkout, requiring customers to scan their receipt before they can leave.

Shoplifting has become a major issue across the country. Retailers lost almost $100 billion to theft in 2021. These numbers are more than just a slip-a-candy-bar-into-your-pocket kind of theft. Most grocery stores attribute their loss to organized shoplifting, or “boosting.” People will steal goods and then sell them for cheaper.

“Items that are typically ‘boosted’ and then sold to stolen merchandise dealers (aka ‘fences’) are mostly health and beauty products, over-the-counter medications, and even food,” reported Jared Klickstein. He recounts his experience “working” just four hours a day and earning up to $350 in untaxed cash, allowing him to keep up his drug addiction, claiming that many boosters are drug addicts. Klickstein was boosting back in 2015, and with the disasters that accompanied Covid in 2020, defunding police departments especially, the boosting problem has only increased.

Power Line.

It’s been a long time since we’ve had fresh entries in our “Civil War on the Left” series, partly because they became redundant and therefore boring, but also because the left has become so un-civil. Still, as I have been remarking (most recently over at The Pipeline), it must be infuriating to be a climate change protestor setting out in the morning to block a road or deface a statue, only to find the pro-Hamas protestors got up earlier and beat you to it. The solution to this was simply to merge the issues, and voila: Climate Justice for Gaza!

But now it is Pride Month again (you’ll just have to contain your excitement), and yesterday a pro-Hamas mob blocked Pride parades in both New York and Philadelphia, and also over in England, as it will be difficult to harmonize the pro-Hamas and the pro-Pride movements, because gravity from building rooftops.

The American Mind.

Following Donald Trump’s conviction in New York—for allegedly causing 34 incorrect purpose tags to be entered in the Trump Organization’s private, internal account register with an intent to defraud and unlawfully interfere in the 2016 presidential election—Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg took a victory lap. He calmly explained that the trial was an ordinary example of what his office does every day, without “fear or favor,” and had simply done its job. Bragg lied.

Bragg ran for office on the promise he would get Trump. To do so, Bragg charged him with a low-level misdemeanor, for which the statute of limitations had already run, alleging that the Trump Organization “falsely” recorded $430,000 of payments to Trump attorney Michael Cohen in its accounts as “legal fees” or “legal expenses” rather than as “hush payments” or “repayment of hush payments.” Then he added 33 counts by separately charging each entry. Finally, he revived the statute of limitations and upped the potential crime to a Class E felony (the lowest of New York’s five felony classes) by alleging that Trump had “falsified” these business records with the intent to “commit another crime.” The indictment did not disclose that crime.

Read it.

What does it look like when the woke snake starts eating its own tail? This weekend in Philadelphia may have offered up a glimpse..

Pro-Palestine protestors clashed with a Pride Parade in the city’s “Gayborhood” area on Sunday. And to think, it’s only 3 days into “Pride Month”.

In a video shared online, Pride participants in leather and lace were stopped by pro-Palestinian LGBTQ+ members, some wearing keffiyehs, who disrupted the parade to confront fellow community members, as the Daily Mail detailed.

The protest, led by Queers4Palestine, highlighted the perceived parallels between Palestinian oppression and historical prejudice against LGBTQ+ people.

During the disrupted Philadelphia parade, they chanted “The more you try to silence us, the louder we will be!” along with “From the River to the Sea.”

Jonathan Turley.

Below is my column in the Hill on the most compelling grounds for an appeal in the Trump case after his conviction on 34 counts in Manhattan. There has been considerable criticism of the defense team and its strategy in the case, including some moves that may undermine appellate issues. However, after the instructions became public, I wrote a column that I thought the case was nearly un-winnable, even for those of us who previously saw a chance for a hung jury. Clarence Darrow would likely have lost with those instructions after the errors in the case by Judge Juan Merchan. At that point, it became a legal canned hunt. So the attention will now shift to the appellate courts. While it may be tough going initially in the New York court system for the former president, this case could well end up in the federal system and the United States Supreme Court. The thrill kill environment of last week may then dissipate as these glaring errors are presented in higher courts.

Forbes.

Direct File will be a permanent, free tax filing option—that’s the word from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and IRS.

The announcement, which was made jointly by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen and IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, made clear that not only would the program be permanent, but it would be available to all 50 states and the District of Columbia for the 2025 filing season. However, not all taxpayers will benefit immediately. The pilot was limited to those with simple returns. Yellen acknowledged the challenges in rolling the program out to all taxpayers, saying, “over the next few years, we will expand Direct File so that it supports all of the most common tax situations.”

“Meeting your tax obligations and claiming the credits and deductions for which you’re eligible should be easy,” said Yellen, noting that “the IRS has been underfunded for decades, so taxpayers haven’t gotten the support they deserve. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, we’ve been changing this.”

Read it.

It will take some time before the Biden administration’s highly touted pier in Gaza is usable again after breaking apart in heavy seas. Humanitarian aid deliveries via the sea have subsequently ground to a halt and criticisms are growing about how the technically ‘no-boots-on-the-ground’ mission has proceeded to date. Yet the U.S. has a robust capability to conduct outsized deliveries from ship to shore without any of this infrastructure. So, if this is such a high-priority humanitarian mission, where are the U.S. Navy’s Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) hovercraft?

Read it.

The death of Nazir Masih, a Christian in his 70s, was announced Monday, nine days after he was attacked by a mob in Sargodha, a city in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

Read it.

Four more male hostages held in Gaza since Oct. 7 are believed to be dead, according to an announcement Monday by the Israeli army that drew an immediate plea by a group representing the family members of the dozens of remaining hostages to make a deal for their release.

The army on Monday named the hostages as Chaim Peri, Yoram Metzger, Amiram Cooper and Nadav Popplewell and said that Hamas was holding their bodies. The army also announced on Monday that a man who had been thought to be a hostage, Dolev Yehud, had in fact been killed on Oct. 7.

The revelations mean that more than a third of the 120 hostages thought to remain in Gaza are known to be dead.

Read it.

A migrant who crossed the southern border illegally in July was arrested after the shootings of two New York City police officers early Monday.

Bernardo Raul Castro Mato, 19, a Venezuelan migrant who entered the U.S. through Eagle Pass, Texas, was arrested, ABC 7 reported. He was taken to New York Presbyterian Hospital in Queens after being shot in the lower leg.

The teen, who has been living at a migrant shelter near LaGuardia Airport, has no criminal history in New York City, but is a suspect in several “snatch and grab” robbery investigations in Queens, police said.

I pick Fauci too. Empty the magazine.

Read it.

I now make a distinction between education and learning. With education someone else decides what they’re going to teach you, and they push it onto you. With learning you get interested in a questions and pull the answer from books, people, videos, and other resources, and the information sticks.

I don’t think there’s much overlap between education and learning. Rarely a student will be interested in what the teacher is teaching (by coincidence or because the teacher is good at generating interest), and when that happens, the information sticks. But most of the time the two are unrelated and the student remembers little.

We’re all told that education and learning are the same—if education is happening, then learning is happening. And students go through years of education. No wonder they think that learning is something to be avoided! They’ve rarely actually experienced it. We all figure out that education (and, incorrectly, learning) is a game where the teacher tries to get you to remember something and you try to do as little work as possible while getting acceptable grades.

…

If you decide to homeschool, the most common question you’ll get from friends is, “What curriculum are you going to follow?” As soon as you use the word “curriculum”, you’ve already lost. You’re doing education, not learning, because the student isn’t pulling information they’re excited about, they’re having your curriculum pushed on them.

Read it.

Arguing that the EU’s recently adopted flagship migration management policy (the Asylum and Migration Pact) does next to nothing to address the challenge of illegal migration and to protect the bloc’s external borders, the national conservative Sweden Democrats (SD) have unveiled a complimentary package that they dubbed “European Deportation Pact.”

The proposed reform package is intended to create EU-wide instruments to externalize the asylum and deportation procedures to third countries (like the Italian-Albanian agreement); force countries of origin to accept back their citizens or face sanctions; and implement a version of the so-called ‘Australian model,’ denying EU residence permit for anyone who’s been caught attempting to enter illegally.

Gothamist.

The Fiscal Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, released new data showing families with children aged 6 or younger are twice as likely to move out of the city as families without young kids. Households with young children make up 14% of the city’s population but 30% of those fleeing the five boroughs, according to the group’s findings.

The analysis underscores the affordability crisis gripping New Yorkers who are caught between escalating rents, child care costs, rising food prices and inflation.

The new data comes as city officials fight an ongoing battle over proposed cuts to early childhood education programs. Education-focused nonprofits and some members of the City Council are urging Mayor Eric Adams to fully restore proposed reductions to popular programs.

ZMan navigates the shifting sands.

Political science claims to have sorted the various types of political systems that have existed and could exist in the world. As a practical matter this means reducing Aristotle’s list of regimes down to “our democracy” and “fascism.” What is called “our democracy” looks nothing like democracy and it has long ago lost its liberalism. As Paul Gottfried noted many years ago, we now live in post-liberal societies. The trouble is, we lack a label that seems to fit what we are seeing.

The reason we lack a label is our socio-political system is amazingly good at disguising itself by shifting focus away from how it acts onto something else. Every month brings the official celebration of some designated victim group. There are many remembrance days for bad things that may or may not have happened. Of course, there is the perpetual foreign bogeyman who threatens our democracy. Russia is currently the bogeyman, but China is warming in the bullpen.

The Other McCain.

You can watch the video of the incident in which Trooper Londregan shot Ricky Cobb and see that any reasonable person would determine that the shooting was justified, even if they didn’t know that Rick Cobb was a lifelong menace to the community. But this happened in Minneapolis, where St. George of the Blessed Fentanyl is considered a civil rights martyr, and the usual suspects demanded “justice.”

…

In January, Mary Moriarty charged Trooper Londregan with three felonies — second-degree unintentional murder, first-degree assault, and second-degree manslaughter: “Our hearts are with Ricky Cobb’s family today, who are grieving an unimaginable loss. I know that they are devastated and will continue to feel this loss for the rest of their lives.”

“I wouldn’t mind living in a world ruled by software. What I actually live in is a world ruled by crappy software.” — John Derbyshire

Read it.

Background: A Muslim terrorist went on a stabbing spree. Two bystanders wrestled him to the ground. The police arrived and went to work on the bystanders, releasing the terrorist, who promptly stabbed one of the officers in the neck. See above photo.

Read it.

There was a nasty incident of enricher-vs.-enricher violence yesterday in North Rhine-Westphalia: a man shot his pregnant wife in the head, and also several other people. As a matter of interest, the case has a Mohammed Coefficient of 100%.

Read it.

Every few years we get another media piece about the “first climate refugees”. I’ve written about the latest one below.

Here are the first through sixth first climate refugees, and the seventh, ninth, and eleventh-tenth first climate refugees. Where are the eighth first climate refugees? No clue, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Oh, and here are the twelfth first climate refugees.

So where are the 13th first climate refugees? They are some of the Kuna (or Guna) people. They live in Panama, on a tiny island named Gardi Sugdub. And by tiny, I mean minuscule. It is about 1200 feet (366 meters) long and 450 feet (137 meters) wide. The media piece about them is called “Panama prepares to evacuate first island in face of rising sea levels“.

Power Line.

For readers still puzzled about exactly how the Trump trial went down and why Alvin Bragg’s case was so convoluted, Brad Smith, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission whose testimony on this point was disallowed by Judge Merchan, offers this primer in two long threads on Twitter/X.

UK Daily Mail.

Republicans put out the full transcript of their sit down interview with Fauci from January just days before his highly-anticipated public testimony on Monday.

They plan to grill him about COVID restrictions he put in place, that he admitted didn’t do much to ‘slow the spread’ of the virus.

Read it.

One day after Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in his ‘hush money’ trial, a court-appointed officer overseeing the Infowars bankruptcy apparently went rogue on Friday and tried to seize and shut down Alex Jones’ studio without a court order, despite having a reported “path with the [bankruptcy] judge to continue on for years.”

Read it.

Two state supreme courts are considering whether workers who administered COVID-19 vaccines to minors without parental consent should be shielded by a federal law.

The North Carolina Supreme Court agreed to take up an appeal from Tanner Smith, one of the minors, and his mother, according to an order dated May 23.

Tanner, who was 14 at the time, went to a clinic at a school in his district, Guilford County Schools, in 2021 to receive a COVID-19 test. Instead, his mom and stepfather learned later, he was injected with a COVID-19 vaccine even after he told workers at the clinic he didn’t want it.

Emily Happel, Tanner’s mother, and the boy sued the district and the organization that was running the clinic, alleging battery and violations of constitutional rights.

Newsbusters.

This Wednesday (June 5) marks 20 years since the passing of Ronald Reagan, the conservative Republican President whose policies led to record economic prosperity and laid the foundation for the peaceful end to the Cold War. In the years since his death, some in the media have used Reagan’s memory as a weapon to bash today’s Republican Party.

In 2015, for example, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell juxtaposed the Gipper with his would-be successors: “Reagan’s message was infused with sunny optimism, the flip side of today’s angry rhetoric…. Reagan saw America as a shining sit on the hill. A country welcoming people in, not shutting them out.”

But that’s not how Mitchell (NBC’s White House reporter in the 1980s) and her colleagues characterized Reagan when he was implementing his successful conservative program. As NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham documented 20 years ago, the liberal media harshly, and wrongly, portrayed Reagan during his life “as an unintelligent airhead who lived in a fantasy world, a mesmerizing Music Man fooling the public with a phony bill of goods, a man who was cruel or uncaring to poor people, and a puppet for the greedy rich.”

Slate.

Every now and them, Voice of the Crust SLATE puts out something interesting.

Perhaps you hold the currently popular notion that medieval witch hunts targeted wise old women who made herbal remedies for their ungrateful peasant neighbors? Incorrect, according to Stanmore and most historians of the period. In the first place, witch hunts were rare during the Middle Ages. They proliferated in the early modern period, and while Stanmore does not explore theories about what caused this in Cunning Folk, historians increasingly view Europe’s witch hunts as a symptom of social upheaval and competing faiths following the Reformation. Witch hunts occurred within all Christian denominations and served as a kind of advertisement for a particular church’s ability to secure both salvation and protection from evil for its members. They were dramatic demonstrations of purity in a highly competitive ideological marketplace.[emphasis added]

Which tells you everything you need to know about the Trump trials.

Read it.

Google pours millions into development of their email service called Gmail. Its operating costs are insanely high. Yet, the service is offered free of charge to billions of users.

Gmail is not even a Freemium service. It does not have a paid tier with which it compensates the free tier. Even if it did, we have learned through our own experience here at Migadu that free email services do not work without a catch.

We offered free email services between 2015 and 2020 to more than 200.000 email accounts. The free tier was responsible for more than 80% of our costs, both in infrastructure as well in support. This has led to sunsetting the free tier in October 2020.

On the other hand, Gmail offers its free service to billions of users worldwide. Where is the catch?

TANSTAAFL. If you are not paying for a product, then you are the product. (This maxim also applies to the American welfare state. The outcome of getting free stuff from the government is more votes for the Party of Free Stuff, i.e. Democrats–with results as you see them.)

Ars Technica.

The battle formations included the “promachoi”—the foremost fighters who formed the first line—and the “plithos,” men that were staying in the rear. The warriors took turns in the first line and then retreated to the rear to rest. Toward the end of the day, the armies disengaged and returned to their camps. The army operations lasted 11 hours each day.

During those 11 hours, a typical warrior in Homeric tales would go through 31 one-versus-one duels, 10 encounters with the enemy on a chariot, two chariot-versus-chariot engagements, and one chariot-versus-warrior-on-ship encounter (a ranged battle where the warrior defended beached ships from charging chariots). The composition of this ordeal was inferred from statistical analysis of fights in The Iliad. Each of those scenarios included a fair share of spear throws, sword strikes, shooting arrows, and spear strikes, all performed in full body armor. Overall, the whole day was effectively a long, high-intensity interval exercise.

“So, we asked a group of special-armed forces personnel wearing a replica of the Dendra armor to complete this protocol,” says Flouris. The 13 marines who volunteered were trained in historical combat, fitted with sensors that monitored their performance, and fed roughly 4,500 calories worth of goat cheese, roasted meat, olives, bread, water, wine, and other Bronze Age culinary delicacies. And then they had a go at it.

“Sing, goddess, of the sweat of Achilles Peleus’ son….”

Read it.

Evolution is often thought of as a haphazard process acting on an assortment of traits that randomly appear through genetic variation.

So much so that if we were to wind back the clock on evolution and “replay the tape of life,” the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said, he doubts “anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.”

But a new study of stick insects suggests that evolution may sometimes repeat itself in a predictable manner, which could help our understanding of how organisms may change in response to selection pressures.

Why this comes as a surprise puzzles me. Environmental conditions favor certain traits over others; this is the whole basis of the notion of ‘convergent evolution’. Modern epigenetics demonstrates that environmental factors will influence gene expression, and so it takes very little brain to realize that similar environments will promote similar epigenetic changes.

What passes for ‘science’ these days is very weak beer.

NavalNews.

Fincantieri are the folks from whom the U.S. Navy took the design for the new Constellation-class frigates and proceeded to FUBAR it.

There are 50 years’ worth of advances in shipbuilding technology that the U.S. government has resolutely refused to adopt; the poster child for this is the Littoral Combat Ship, which has failed and is failing even as we write, despite Austal being the premier successful builder of high-speed catamaran transports in the world. (The only ships Austal has ever built that have serious problems are the Independence-class LCS, with the Navy pissing in the design process constantly from day 1.)

UPDATE: Shipbuilding 4.0: Using Digital Twins to Enhance Efficiency (MarineLink)

Read it.

Writing these words on the American holiday, Memorial Day, in an election year, whilst sitting in an Austrian apartment is a poignant experience. It is always sobering to contemplate the legions who have died for the well-being and safety of the United States of America, but never more than in an election year, when everyone in public life is out for themselves, and very few appear to think about the common good for which the honoured dead gave their lives. This year, the very nature of the country is part of the debate. Indeed, I cannot help thinking—as an American in Europe often must—about the identity of my country and its relationship with the Mother Continent. In some ways, we Americans, a race of exiles, can never be truly content. We unconsciously yearn for a completion, a wholeness, that often eludes us, whether we be immigrants just naturalised or Mayflower descendants. The song The Girl I Left Behind Me was brought over the Atlantic in the 17th century; like the Ashokan Farewell, I think it captures that yearning perfectly. We may cross the water as much as we like (and I often do), but it is an ocean of time as well as space that separates us from our origins. Even the America that we more consciously seek to regain is increasingly remote.

It is fair to say that there have been—in time—four Americas, the last three of which occupied roughly the same space. We are currently making the transition to a fifth, and this coming election and its accompanying dramas will play a large role in that transition. After a look at the first four, we can speculate on what the next might be like.

Wait until you see whether he can successfully monetize it….

The New Neo.

Here’s the way the left’s game is played. It’s not just about the Trump verdict – for example, they have used the same technique in connection with accepting the results of the 2020 election. But it is very much in evidence right now in regard to the NY verdict against Trump:

(1) The left alters or ignores the usual rules, which destroys trust in an institution in order to “get” their opposition.
(2) The institution can be almost anything: the FBI, presidential elections, or the legal system, to take a few recent examples.
(3) The right responds by criticizing the compromised institution and the left.
(4) The left acts shocked, SHOCKED that the right has stopped respecting the hallowed institution that is a pillar of our government and society.

Read it.

Following its abrupt closures in El Dorado Hills and Folsom, 13 additional Rubio’s Coastal Grill locations in San Diego are closing by the end of the day on Friday.

“… The closings were brought about by the rising cost of doing business in California. While painful, the store closures are a necessary step in our strategic long-term plan to position Rubio’s for success for years to come,” a spokesperson with Rubio’s said in an email.

Politico.

Donald Trump’s conviction has raised many political and legal questions, but at least one issue is not in doubt: whether he will appeal.

He might even win.

Watch it.

This disturbing legal trend with firearm training is on the rise in the courtroom. Could your firearm training affect you in a disturbing way? What does this mean for firearm training, police officers, military members, license and permit holders, gun owners, and gun enthusiasts? Armed Attorneys Emily Taylor and Richard Hayes discuss the legal trend they’re seeing more frequently with firearm training.

Read it.

Sweden’s Security Service Säpo confirmed on Thursday that the Iranian regime is recruiting criminals to conduct attacks on Jewish targets in the Scandinavian country. This corroborates earlier intelligence reports from Israel’s spy agency Mossad.

At a joint press conference with the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm, Swedish counter-intelligence chief Daniel Stenling described Iran as wanting to use “criminal networks” as “proxies.” He indicated Iran’s chargé d’affaires would be summoned to a meeting on Friday to answer the claims.

Stenling was short on exact details but confirmed that security measures were being increased on potential Jewish targets. Mossad has already indicated that underworld networks in Europe could be weaponised against the upcoming Summer Olympics in Paris.

Navy Matters.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report on the Constellation class frigate construction program delays and it’s an eye opener even for ComNavOps who predicted exactly these kinds of problems long ago.

To review, the contract delivery date is April 2026. Current estimates by the Navy put delivery sometime in 2029, three years late and seven years after the Aug 2022 start of construction (seven years to build a frigate?!), and you know that date is going to continue to be pushed further out with more delays.

As with all sizable ships, the Constellation is being built in sections, called blocks (although the Navy now calls them ‘Grand Modules’ in their typically PowerPoint-ish, pointless churn style; someone undoubtedly got a promotion for coming up with the phrase, ‘Grand Module’) and, according to a diagram in the report, the Constellation has 31 blocks. Of the 31 blocks, 11 are currently being manufactured despite not having completed design documents

Freeberg nails it.

“Symbol(s) of hate.” I’m not quoting any one particular thing. It’s the concept. Progressives see a S.O.H. and they want it covered, removed, preferably destroyed. You put up text or an image on Facebook expressing a “hateful” idea, their cops will see to it the display is as temporary as possible. Get rid of those symbols.