Read it.

The American people have rightly been appalled at the outrageous expenditures Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been exposing at USAID, which not only demonstrates the striking wastefulness of our government but also an ingenious public relations strategy by the Trump administration.

When Americans learn that their tax dollars are going to fund egregious projects around the world, it lays a foundation for the public relations framework needed by the Trump administration to bring American public opinion along on the necessary journey of restructuring the government. It makes people’s blood boil. And it sets the tone for the effectiveness, and need for, the entire Trump efficiency program, even though the spending in absolute monetary terms on these insane USAID projects is fairly minor compared to the overall $6.9 trillion federal budget.

Read it.

U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman is now in port in Greece for repairs following a collision with the cargo ship M/V Besiktas-M this past week. The service is continuing to assess the full extent of damage to the flattop, which is in the middle of a deployment that has already included combat operations in and around the Red Sea.

The Navy announced yesterday that Truman had arrived at Naval Support Activity (NSA) Souda Bay in Greece for what it has described as an Emergent Repair Availability (ERAV). The carrier had made a port stop in Souda Bay just days before the collision, which occurred on Feb. 12 in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Egypt as it was about to enter the Suez Canal. The incident remains under investigation.

The photographs are better than one normally sees in such news reports.

Bloomberg.

I think a lot about what I sometimes call “abstract commodity space.” Sometimes you want to buy nickel or aluminum or coffee or cocoa to make batteries or beer cans or cappuccino or chocolate bars, so you go to some supplier and negotiate a contract for the delivery of a useful amount of a particular grade of the commodity to your factory. Sometimes, though, you want to bet on the price of nickel or aluminum or coffee or cocoa, to hedge some risk to your business or just as a speculative bet. So you buy commodity futures, financial assets that reflect the price of a commodity but don’t require you to store it or worry about it spoiling.

The way these futures often work is that there are big warehouses full of the commodity, and people write futures contracts that essentially transfer the entitlements to the commodities in the warehouse, without ever having to take them out. Your futures represent a claim on some nickel or coffee in a warehouse in abstract commodity space,1 and you don’t have to think much about the physical properties of the actual thing. The warehouse system has put a layer of abstraction on the messy commodity business, and you can treat the commodity as just a number on your computer screen.

We mostly talk about this when it breaks down, though. Sometimes the physical world tears through the layer of abstraction. The coffee or cocoa beans are stale, or someone discovers that the nickel in the warehouse is actually a bag of rocks.

Warning: This guy eventually starts wandering all over the map, so if you’re just interested in gold, stop when he starts talking about AI.

UnHerd.

Doubtless the fake nonconformist is an American type that goes back centuries, but we surely reached an apex of fraudulence in the early 2020s. How passionately the rioters of Antifa demanded the same things as Fortune 500 CEOs, how righteously millionaire celebrity “activists” raged for the machine. And there was something mournful too, about Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama’s coffee table book Renegades, heavy as a tombstone marking the spot where Rock n’ Roll was finally laid to rest. The counterculture had gone full Weekend at Bernie’s.

Of course, it had been green around the gills for a long time. Confronted with the hyper-commercialisation of radicalism in the early Nineties, the political historian Thomas Frank doubted that even its Golden Age amounted to much: “The Sixties was the age of postmodern fantasy and retailers’ dream, for each identity, each new phase of rebellion, necessitated a comprehensive shopping expedition.” The rejection of tradition, Frank argued, was simply the outcome of a desire to be free to flit between images: “They would be rebels, poets, perky-girls, English, hippies, and playboys in quick succession.”

But while there is much truth to Frank’s critique, the counterculture was not entirely bogus. Some hippies really did turn on, tune in and drop out. Hunter S. Thompson may have ended his days writing for Esquire, but all those drugs and guns weren’t going to pay for themselves. The cartoonist Robert Crumb really was a weirdo. And then there was Frank Zappa, guitarist, satirist, avant-garde composer, and writer of “Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?”

I have always had an affection for Frank Zappa. His Album Weasels Ripped My Flesh had a prize place in my record collection when I was young (until I had to sell them to help pay for law school).

Movin’ to Montana soon;
Gonna be a dental floss tycoon…

Read it.

It was the most brutal attack on a trade union event in the history of post-war Germany. Last Thursday, just days before the general election, a man drove a car into a group of striking members of the service workers’ union Verdi in Munich. The attack has so far claimed the lives of a mother and her two-year-old daughter, and injured at least 30 others.

The suspect is a 24-year-old Afghan national who arrived in Germany eight years ago as an unaccompanied minor and was subsequently granted residence status. According to police reports, he had previously shared Islamist content on social media. Upon his arrest, he shouted “Allahu akbar”, leading authorities to classify the incident as “most likely” Islamist-motivated.

Anger is surely the right response to such a barbaric attack on workers and their families who were exercising their democratic right to campaign for better working conditions. Yet, almost immediately after the incident made headlines, the Verdi leadership issued a statement condemning any “misplaced passion” that might arise from the act: “We stand for solidarity and togetherness. In its darkest hour, ver.di defends itself against the attack on ver.di colleagues during a token strike in Munich being used for division, hatred and incitement,” the statement said. A statement by Frank Werneke, the ver.di leader, which carefully avoided any mention of the word ‘Islamism’, was similarly muddled.

Read it.

In the latest, exciting episode of Liberty Doll, our eponymous heroine covers the grift of gun control in America. Thanks to DOGE and DataRepublican, we can see the network of government funds, funneled through “charitable” organizations, that fund what is clearly (and likely has always been) an astro-turf gun control movement.

Read it.

In 2006, after a Hezbollah invasion, Israel launched a military campaign against the Islamic terrorist group. After a month of fighting, the Bush administration forced a ceasefire under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that required the disarmament of Hezbollah and its replacement by the Lebanese Army and a United Nations ‘peacekeeping’ force.

How can Hezbollah claim victory, President George W. Bush wondered, when they were “going to be replaced by a Lebanese Army and an international force?”

The answer was quite obvious. The Lebanese Army and UNIFIL didn’t replace Hezbollah, they were co-opted by it. And nearly two decades later, Hezbollah had far more firepower and attempted to launch its own version of Oct 7 until Israel neutered it with its pager operation.

Read it.

The Biden administration put in a lot hard at work inflating the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), using exaggerated agricultural damage estimates to justify sweeping climate policies. But in a new study, economist Ross McKitrick—one of the sharpest minds in climate policy skepticism—has taken apart the foundations of these inflated numbers, revealing what happens when climate alarmism meets real data.

Read it.

If Florence Stoker had had her way, I wouldn’t be writing this post. Bram Stoker’s widow tried to destroy all copies of the 1922 film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, and she was very nearly successful. She did have her reasons.

The film is very clearly a rip-off of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. It’s a great novel, using the epistolary (letter writing) format very well. Not only can it still give a reader chills, it’s quite surprisingly a Christian story. Count Dracula as a character is still easily one of the most widely recognized characters in fiction.

Fred Saberhagen did a wonderful series of novels using Dracula as the protagonist.

German screenwriter Henrik Galeen and director F.W. Murnau made no effort to hide the fact that they were using the Stoker novel as a blueprint for their story. Not only is it a vampire story, but such plot elements as a real estate agent going to a foreign land, a death ship, and a Transylvanian count whose nemesis is a scholarly doctor are clear steals.

They did change names, such as Dracula becoming Orlock, but even the original credits acknowledge the debt to Stoker. They never officially sought permission or made payment to the Stoker estate. It was a naive but costly mistake.

Florence brought the filmmakers to court (I assume a German court), which ruled that all copies of the film were to be destroyed. Fortunately for cinematic history, not everyone followed the court order, and some copies survived. It is a black and white, silent film that holds up as a great work. The German Expressionist set design and cinematography are beautiful and unsettling. The villain, played by the mysterious actor Max Schreck, is hideous and imposing. (Another film worth watching is Shadow of the Vampire, a Gothic drama about the making of Nosferatu that theorizes that Schreck really was a vampire.) And the tale leads to a thrilling, sunlit conclusion.

Alma Boykin.

A Blast from the Past, from 2017. Some things have changed, others remain very current. Marx was still wrong.

The history of writing history, or “historiography,” includes a phase that is sometimes called the Whig School of history. Historians in the late 1700s and increasingly in the 1800s assumed that things were getting better, and had been improving since the Renaissance. If you were to draw their view of humanity as a line, it started on a high note with Creation, dropped into a hole after the fruit incident, climbed some, dipped with the Flood, crept up again to Greece and Rome, dipped after AD 475 “when the barbarians kicked in Rome’s door” as one of my mentors likes to say, then inched up again. The line begins to shoot near vertically after 1815 or so. Humanity was moving upwards and on wards and things could only get better. Of course, like most things in academia, counterarguments arose, mostly from the Marxist side of the aisle once there were enough Marxist historians to become well known.

The core of progressivism is the fundamental belief that PROGRESS IS INEVITABLE (hence the name ‘progressive’). This is why progressives are always trying to change things, because if progress is inevitable, then anything that resists change (no matter what that change might be) is Delaying Progress and therefore evil. This is also the backstory behind the common trope ‘real communism/socialism hasn’t been tried’, because if it had been tried, then things would be better (because progress is inevitable), THEREFORE since things didn’t get better then real communism/socialism hasn’t been tried. It all travels in a circle and there’s no way for them to get off of this particular merry-go-round.

The American Mind.

American life today is characterized in no small part by nearly ceaseless exposure to LGBTQ propaganda. Everywhere you turn, you’re confronted with “the message,” be it in grade schools, on college campuses, while watching television or movies, or at work. There are no “safe spaces” sheltered from the deluge—not even FEMA’s hurricane recovery efforts have been spared.

How did such a small “community” capture America’s institutions? The answer is complex, but a new database by The Project to Expose Corporate Activism (PECA) shines a light on a significant part of the story.

PECA’s database shows that corporations have become the vanguard of the LGBTQ movement, donating vast sums of money to prop up an equally vast network of activists. The database does not merely rehash well-known examples like Anheuser-Busch’s support for transgender TikTok influencers but rather furnishes evidence of 1,588 companies’ support for more than 2,300 LGBTQ causes. These causes on the whole are quite radical. They range from Camp Brave Trails—a queer summer camp that has children’s drag shows and a “clothing closet for exploring gender expression”—to NGOs like Immigration Equality that facilitate the illegal migration of transgender and HIV+ “asylum seekers.”

ZMan draws from history.

This week Marco Rubio will meet with Russian officials to kick-off what Western media is calling Ukraine peace talks, but should properly be called normalization talks, as in the normalization of relations between Russia and America. The topic of Ukraine will be a part of the process, but not the focus of it. This is something that both sides have said regarding the hour-long talk between Trump and Putin. It was about much more than the war in Ukraine and how to end it.

This is what gets missed in Western media coverage. They are still operating by the old system where everything revolved around Ukraine. It was the lens through which all diplomatic relations were conducted. The new way of doing things is for the major powers to have a framework within which they can work out issues of common interest and settle issues where they are in dispute. For that to happen they must rebuild diplomatic relations between the major countries.

This is why Europe is not included. The EU is not a real place. It is a vague concept that has no sovereign authority. Ursula von der Leyen imagines herself as the empress of Europe, a managerial version of Napoleon, but in reality, she is a bureaucrat who failed up into a position that probably should not exist. As for the major powers of Europe, they will eventually play a role in the new security architecture, but they need to join everyone else in the 21st century before that can happen.

The Other McCain.

Six years ago (“The Media’s ‘Climate of Hate’ Myth,” American Spectator, Jan. 18, 2019), I examined the political forces behind allegations of an “epidemic” of violence against transgender people. The mainstream media were complicit in a propaganda campaign to convince the public that right-wing “hate” was responsible for this phenomenon. The propaganda campaign involved a running total of how many transgender people had been “murdered” during the current calender year, so that a news report about a recent death could include the fact that the victim was 14th (or 27th or whatever) such person killed in the U.S. that year.

Of course, the activists compiling those lists of transgender victims were not scrupulous about who got included in their totals — they wanted a big number to promote the EPIDEMIC OF HATE narrative, and relied upon the gullibility of journalists not to examine the details of these deaths on a case-by-case basis. Any reasonably curious person could do some basic research and realize that the “epidemic” narrative was bogus. The number of transgender victims whose deaths could be clearly attributed to “transphobia” was so close to zero as to be statistically neglible, a drop in the bucket in a nation where there are about 20,000 homicides a year. Let us stipulate that a drag queen who gets shot during an argument outside a bar at 3 a.m. may, in some vague way, be a victim of “transphobia,” but does it make sense to depict such an incident as evidence of a “Climate of Hate”? And yet this was the substance of the alleged “epidemic” of anti-transgender violence that the media kept hyping up during Donald Trump’s first term. Anyway . . .

Read it.

The European Commission has channeled billions of euros in public funds to finance NGOs and think tanks that, far from acting independently, have served as instruments to promote its political agenda. This is revealed by a newly published report from MCC Brussels titled ‘The Commission’s Propaganda by Proxy’, unmasking programs such as the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) one that aims to consolidate pro-EU narratives while marginalizing critical voices.

The report denounces the way in which the European Commission allocates funds to NGOs aligned with its values and objectives. “The Commission funds organizations that are economically dependent on its grants and that act as spokespersons for its agenda,” the document states, highlighting a clear distortion of civil society’s traditional role. It also criticizes the Commission itself, which, as an executive body, has evolved into an ideological entity in recent years, moving away from its original role of mere political management for which it was created.

Among the cited examples is the financing of the Young European Federalists (JEF), which has received more than 1.2 million euros between 2021 and 2025 to mobilize young people in favor of European federalization. Another case is the European Policy Centre (EPC), a think tank that has received nearly 30 million euros in the last decade and openly advocates for greater supranational integration.

Read it.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk, has revealed data exposing the misuse of funds within the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), confirming what many have long suspected.

The Culture Wars are taxpayer funded.

It shows that monies went to places few Americans would ever have wanted their dollars to go.

What is true for USAID will also hold for much larger US government departments.

Free from real scrutiny, absent any consequences, and deeply unpatriotic, the permanent and amoral taxpayer-funded class has mastered the art of hiding its greed behind the suffering of the working class.

The Antiplanner.

The residents of Maumee are so thrilled with the street’s reconstruction that they have submitted more than 10,000 signatures to the election board seeking to recall the mayor and six members of the city council. Their real goal is to fire the city administrator, who they believe has run roughshod (with the support of the city council) over citizen interests. Among other things, they are upset that the administrator “was the mastermind that created the stricture reducing Conant Street traffic flow to unbearable levels during peak driving times.”

“Our main uptown area has become a headache to navigate,” reports a resident on Strong Towns’ Facebook page. “The Strong Towns experiment has resulted in traffic cutting through neighborhoods where children play because drivers grow tired of waiting for traffic lights and traffic backs up. In an attempt to promote walking, the city placed a concrete island in the middle of the road. That island has been hit by cars at least four times if not more in the last year resulting in thousands of dollars in damages. The transition to the Strong Towns initiative has also resulted in the closing of some businesses in our uptown region. Our current leaders may think they did a great thing by sending a bunch of our tax dollars to Strong Towns, but talk to most citizens and they will tell you the truth of the negative impact this ponzi scheme has had on a once enjoyable town to live in.”

Read it.

President Donald Trump is calling for the reversal of several Biden-era green energy regulations on household appliances.

Trump announced in a Tuesday post on Truth Social that he was directing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Secretary Lee Zeldin to begin reversing water standard regulations on household appliances including sinks, dishwashers, showers and washing machines. Trump’s announcement comes after he has enacted a slew of executive actions since returning to the White House aimed at overturning many Biden-era green energy policies.

Quillette.

Last month, I received a tip from a nursing student at University of Alberta who’d been required to take a course called Indigenous Health in Canada. It’s a “worthwhile subject,” my correspondent (correctly) noted, “but it won’t surprise you to learn [that the course consists of] four months of self-flagellation led by a white woman. One of our assignments, worth 30 percent, is a land acknowledgement, and instructions include to ‘commit to concrete actions to disrupt settler colonialism’… This feels like a religious ritual to me.”

Canadian universities are now full of courses like this—which are supposed to teach students about Indigenous issues, but instead consist of little more than ideologically programmed call-and-response sessions. As I wrote on social media, this University of Alberta course offers a particularly appalling specimen of the genre, especially in regard to the instructor’s use of repetitive academic jargon, and the explicit blurring of boundaries between legitimate academic instruction and cultish struggle session.

One of the most tedious aspects of The New Puritanism is that you must confess your sins before you will be allowed redemption, and “I have no sins to confess” is not an acceptable answer.

Dems concede Republicans ‘running circles’ around them online as Trump remakes Washington (Elena Schneider/Politico)

Democrats confront their powerlessness as Trump flexes authority (Edward-Isaac Dovere/CNN)

US Drops Website Wording on Not Supporting Taiwan Independence

As US recedes, NATO scrambles to find a new leader (Politico)  More accurately, a new souce of ‘funding’.

“Washington Recession Begins”: DC Active Home Listings Soar, Jobless Claims Spike As DOGE Drains Swamp

Trump’s true enemy isn’t China or Russia but liberal democracy (Nick Cohen/Writing from London)  More acc accurately,  Liberal ‘democracy’.

House Republicans Drafting Impeachment Articles Against Activist Judges Blocking DOGE

Utah Bans Collective Bargaining for Public Workers (Orlando Mayorquín/New York Times)

Hundreds of Maga Afrikaners rally in support of President Trump in Pretoria

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Refuses to Apologize, DOUBLES DOWN on Sharing CEO Shooter Support Site After Deleting X Post

EEOC Seeks To Drop Transgender Discrimination Cases, Citing Trump’s Executive Order (HuffPost)

Saturday Night Dead

“Taking Away Everything We Have”: Democrats & Unions Launch An Existential Fight Over Buyouts

Boycotting President Elon (Scott Lemieux/Lawyers, Guns & Money)  Oh, like Elon cares.

More Like ‘Inaction Network’: Nationwide Tesla Protest Flops As ‘Rent-A-Protester’ Goes MIA

CBS Host Says Hitler ‘Weaponized Free Speech’ To Commit Holocaust, Gets Shut Down By Rubio

NPR, a Voice of the Crust.

Protests are set to take place in several major cities across the U.S. on Monday, the Presidents Day holiday, according to activists.

These demonstrations are being organized by the 50501 Movement, which stands for “50 protests. 50 states. 1 movement.” The protests are a response to what organizers describe as “the anti-democratic and illegal actions of the Trump administration.” This marks the second nationwide protest by the group, following an event held on Feb. 5.

The protests follow a series of executive orders signed by President Trump, including actions led by billionaire Elon Musk, which have been criticized for their aims to diminish the role of the federal government.

So these are essentially statists who don’t like the fact that government might be shrinking.

Simce neither Trump nor Musk give a shit about demonstrations and protests, except as signals that they are on the right course, the true answer to ‘why?’ is a combination of virtue signaling and the warm fuzzies the Left get from making a lot of noise rather than actually, you know, doing’ something that might require work (other than marching around and making a lot of noise).

Read it.

The U.S. Agency for International Development wasn’t just spending your hard-earned tax dollars on transgender operas overseas—USAID also has troubling connections with the leftist pressure groups that infiltrated and advised the Biden administration.

My book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” exposes the woke activist groups that fed staff into the administrative state and pushed woke policies on the bureaucracy.

As President Donald Trump released information about USAID’s corruption, I started to notice a few familiar names from my research.

The American people should understand just how connected the woke enterprise is to the federal bureaucracy, and USAID provides a powerful example of those ties.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

I suppose they’ve finally woken up to the fact that an aggregation of greedy crooks is not the best vehicle for instituting socialism.

Read it.

Actually, it’s more specific than North vs. South, because Minnesotans don’t necessarily use the same vocabulary as New Yorkers or Vermonters. And there are going to be variations across the South as well, so more specifically, I want to write about the linguistic differences between Minnesota and Tennessee. Some of you know that after living all my life in Minnesota, I moved to Tennessee about three years ago. Even before reading this fine post on Ricochet, I knew that Southerners drank “soda,” not “pop,” so I was ready for that one. But here are a few examples that took me by surprise.

I was raised in northern Indiana, almost Michigan, and I’ve said ‘soda’ all my life; but I guess that’s just me.

Read it.

Four years ago, Storm Uri caused Texas’s centrally planned wholesale electricity market (ERCOT) to buckle, vindicating warnings about the state’s wind/solar reliance. The mainstream media implicated natural gas instead, failing to explore the why behind the why. Rather than deregulation, Texas has chosen to add wind, solar, and batteries, while subsidizing natural gas plants to counter intermittency. This duplicated grid is now driving rates up in a state that could have relied on surplus natural gas instead.

Government acts like government, even in red states. My wife and I bought a backup generator (powered by gas) so we’ll never have to rely on such unreliable people again.

Read it.

In the following interview, a “German” imam explains to the interviewer the Koranic rationale behind the hudud punishments prescribed by Islamic law, notably the killing of homosexuals and the flogging of adulterers.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

Read it.

You’ll never guess what happened in France on Thursday evening…

A Moroccan culture-enricher got to work with a knife in the lobby of an apartment building. In an unexpected twist, the alleged assailant is said to have a history of mental problems.

Read it.

After saying it would run out of funds by March, California’s last-resort fire insurance provider will impose a special charge of $1 billion on insurance companies — which will in turn pass the costs along to homeowners — the first such move in more than three decades.

The state Insurance Department today approved a request from the provider, the FAIR Plan, to impose the charge and ensure it stays solvent as it covers claims from victims of the Los Angeles County fires, the department said in an order by Commissioner Ricardo Lara.

Most California home and fire insurance customers will see temporary fees added to their insurance bills as part of the charge, known as an assessment — marking the first time insurance companies will have imposed an assessment directly on customers.

The FAIR Plan is a pool of insurers required by law to provide fire insurance to property owners who can’t find insurance elsewhere. Its customer base has grown dramatically in the past several years as insurance companies have increasingly refused to write or renew policies in the state, citing increased risk of wildfires. It now has more than 451,000 policies.

Many LA fire victims have insurance through the FAIR Plan. Residents of the Pacific Palisades, where thousands of structures burned last month, held 85% more FAIR Plan policies in September than they had a year prior.

Read it.

The New York Stock Exchange, part of Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE: ICE), a leading global provider of technology and data, today announced plans to launch NYSE Texas, a fully electronic equities exchange, headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Pending the effectiveness of regulatory filings, NYSE Chicago will reincorporate in Texas and be renamed NYSE Texas, offering companies the opportunity to list their securities on NYSE Texas.

“As the state with the largest number of NYSE listings, representing over $3.7 trillion in market value for our community, Texas is a market leader in fostering a pro-business atmosphere,” said Lynn Martin, President, NYSE Group. “We are delighted to expand our presence in the Lone Star State, which plays a key role in driving our U.S. economy forward.”

Building on the NYSE’s 230 years of experience as the world’s leading exchange operator, the launch of NYSE Texas will provide public companies with a listing and trading venue centered within the vibrant economy of the southwestern U.S. With this launch, NYSE Texas will deliver a listing exchange to companies incorporated both in Texas and around the world that are attracted to Texas’ growing population, strong economy and business-friendly regulatory agenda. The NYSE plans to make regulatory and corporate filings to effect the reincorporation in the near term.

Everybody’s moving from blue states to red states.

Financial Times.

The Financia Times is Britain’s analog to the Wall Street Journal — if the Wall Street Journal were put out by the staff of Mother Jones.

Recent weeks have provided a stark reminder of Europe’s vulnerabilities. The eurozone barely grew at the end of last year, underlining the fragility of the domestic recovery. And the US began imposing tariffs on its major trading partners, with the EU next in its sights. This prospect casts further uncertainty over European growth given the economy’s dependence on foreign demand.

Two major factors have led Europe into this predicament — but they can also lead it out again if it is prepared to undergo radical change.

The first is the EU’s long-standing inability to tackle its supply constraints, especially its high internal barriers and regulatory hurdles. These are far more damaging for growth than any tariffs the US might impose — and their harmful effects are increasing over time.

Reducing tariff and other trade barriers was the foundational purpose of the European Union, just as the foundational purpose of the United States was democracy and individual liberty.

Neither one appears to have survived in a recognizable form.2

Pity.

Navy Matters.

Where does perception come from, if not from reality? How is someone’s perception formed? Well, it comes from many sources: one’s own experiences, media news sources (you can instantly see, here, the danger posed by a biased media that presents an altered reality as true reality, but, I digress), social networks, etc. If those various sources are not constantly presenting and explaining the true value of a navy then the perception quickly becomes that the navy has no value.

I can’t address the UK situation specifically but I can note that the US Navy makes almost no effort to talk to the citizenry and present its accomplishments and value in terms that the average person can understand and relate to. Instead, the Navy resorts to blocking the media, circling the wagons, hiding behind bogus classification labels, misleading Congress and, generally, looking down at the general population.

The Navy’s actions off Yemen involving missile attacks and defense should be made into near-movie type adventures to be presented to the public. The exploits of our fearless sailors, fighting off relentless missile attacks so that Americans can get their oil and goods should be the stuff of growing legend. It almost doesn’t matter how precisely true the accounts are. That’s not the point. The point is to present the Navy’s value to the public.

Once upon a time, moviegoers were routinely treated to newsreel highlights of our armed forces. We need to bring back the updated version of that on TV, streaming channels, social media, podcasts, influencers, etc. We need to continuously show the public the value of the Navy. If we do that, the Navy won’t have to beg Congress for ships, the people will do it for them. If we do that, the recruiting problem will solve itself.

Don’t hold your breath.

On a related note, if the US is providing the security for global shipping, then what true value does the RN offer?  Why should the UK citizenry pay for a navy when the US is providing their security for free?  One could see this as a powerful argument for the US to stop providing global security which would, in turn force other countries to increase their naval forces to fill the gap and result in an increase in their true (and perceived?) value.  Thus, one could make the argument, it is in the UK’s best interest for the US to stop providing international shipping security.  Interesting perspective, huh?

Indeed.

Gothamist.

“OK! If you’re monogamous, come on this side of the room. If you’re figuring it out, stay in the center. And if you’re polyamorous, then all the way on this side.”

On the night before Valentine’s Day, comedian Naomi Karavani was on stage corralling the packed crowd at “Thots & Trots,” a “socialist singles mixer” hosted by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The sold-out event was held at Silo, an airplane hangar-sized music venue in industrial Bushwick, with more than 300 registered attendees mingling to talk politics and love.

THOT means ‘that ho over there’. (Compare ‘304‘.)

“?If you have a pet, over here,” Karavani announced, directing traffic. “The polyamorous people do not have pets. You guys can’t afford pets. You’re spending all the money on your girlfriends.”

Note that it’s not ‘You’re spending all your money on your boyfriends.’ Even in the socialist world, men are the ones doing the spending, and women are the ones getting spent on. (How sexist.)

Read it.

DNA is often compared to a written language. The metaphor leaps out: Like letters of the alphabet, molecules (the nucleotide bases A, T, C and G, for adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine) are arranged into sequences — words, paragraphs, chapters, perhaps — in every organism, from bacteria to humans. Like a language, they encode information. But humans can’t easily read or interpret these instructions for life. We cannot, at a glance, tell the difference between a DNA sequence that functions in an organism and a random string of A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s.

“It’s really hard for humans to understand biological sequence,” said the computer scientist Brian Hie (opens a new tab), who heads the Laboratory of Evolutionary Design at Stanford University, based at the nonprofit Arc Institute (opens a new tab). This was the impetus behind his new invention, named Evo: a genomic large language model (LLM), which he describes as ChatGPT for DNA.

The Other McCain.

Late Friday the political world was shaken when MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair revealed that last year she gave birth to Elon Musk’s 13th offspring. Quickly, I sought out Rollo Tomassi’s take on this development, which was of course highly amusing.

Rollo (a pseudonym) has long pointed out that “Red Pill” is not ideology, but praxeology (“the study of human action and behavior”). It’s not about dictating what you should do, but rather about understanding what you actually do. And when you consider what Ashley St. Clair actually did — clawing her way to prominence in MAGA world, in order to get herself inseminated by The Richest Man in the World — you’ve got to tip the cap to Rollo, who has lectured endlessly about hypergamy as the motive force of female behavior. It doesn’t get more Red Pill than this.

Not a bad strategy on her part — Elon has always been generous to his offspring and their baby mamas.

I have all of the Rational Male books (a sixth is in progress) and recommend them without reservation. (Also recommended: The books by Aaron Clary.)

Read it.

“Are ultraprocessed foods harmful?

“Most research linking UPFs to poor health is based on observational studies, in which researchers ask people about their diets and then track their health over many years. In a large review of studies that was published in 2024, scientists reported that consuming UPFs was associated with 32 health problems, with the most convincing evidence for heart disease-related deaths, Type 2 diabetes and common mental health issues like anxiety and depression.”

And it is true, consumption of UPFs have been “associated” with a lot of health problems – through the kind offices of epidemiology. Remember:

World-class statistician, William “Matt” Briggs, author of the book “Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability & Statistics”, tells us, in no uncertain terms, that: “Epidemiology is the field which officially mistakes correlations for causations.”

And that is the most basic statement we can make about the faddish battle against Ultraprocessed Foods.

UK Daily Mail.

‘Squad’ congresswoman Ilhan Omar told friends years ago that the man who went on to become her second husband was in fact her brother, DailyMail.com can confirm.

And now for the first time one of those friends has come forward to reveal exactly how Omar and Ahmed Elmi scandalized the Somali community in Minneapolis.

Abdihakim Osman is the first person to go on record to speak of how Omar said she wanted to get her brother papers so he could stay in the United States, at a time when she was married to her first husband Ahmed Hirsi.

But hardly anyone realized that meant marrying him.

‘No one knew there had been a wedding until the media turned up the marriage certificate years later,’ Osman, 40, exclusively told DailyMail.com.

Osman’s revelations are sure to renew calls for an investigation into the Minnesota freshman representative who has repeatedly refused to answer questions on her marriage to Elmi.

She originally said the idea that the spouses were also siblings were ‘baseless, absurd rumors’, accusing journalists of Islamophobia, but has since stayed quiet.

Let’s see: Multiple felonies, citizenship revoked, deportation back to the Turd World, perhaps after a prison term…. I like it; it has texture, and scope.

Watch it.

C’mon, admit it, you’ve always wanted to do that.

What goes around comes around … and sometimes piles up.

Tyler Cowen.

House Republicans this week announced their “Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.” This follows an executive order issued last month by President Donald Trump ordering the release of records about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The broad idea is to get the federal government to reveal all its information about these assassinations as well as topics like Jeffrey Epstein, the origins of Covid-19 and UAPs (formerly known as UFOs).

Rather than speculate about whether Trump and Congress will follow through, I would like to focus on the question of how this disclosure process should [ought to] work.

Read it.

Human capital—encompassing cognitive skills and personality traits—is critical for labor market success, yet the personality component remains difficult to measure at scale. Leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and comprehensive LinkedIn microdata, we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate that this novel “Photo Big 5” predicts school rank, compensation, job seniority, industry choice, job transitions, and career advancement. Using administrative records from top-tier MBA programs, we find that the Photo Big 5 exhibits only modest correlations with cognitive measures like GPA and standardized test scores, yet offers comparable incremental predictive power for labor outcomes. Unlike traditional survey-based personality measures, the Photo Big 5 is readily accessible and potentially less susceptible to manipulation, making it suitable for wide adoption in academic research and hiring processes. However, its use in labor market screening raises ethical concerns regarding statistical discrimination and individual autonomy.

Read it.

On “cisheteropatriarchy” and the ugliness and obscurity of cultural discourse.

Read it.

BLUF:

In 2019, Spicer was appointed by Trump to the Naval Academy’s Board of Visitors. Trump’s current OMB director Russell Vought was also made a member then.

In 2021, both were told by Biden’s White House personnel office that they had the option of resigning their board positions or being fired. Spicer realized an opportunity in the making, so both of them refused to resign and they were fired. They filed suit, alleging an unjust firing. The lawsuit was denied and their dismissals were upheld (as he expected).

Spicer wrote an op-ed before Trump’s recent inauguration, laying out the case for dismissing presidentially-appointed boards and mentioned a specific one: the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees. On February 7, Trump dismissed the entire Kennedy Center board and put in place a new one. One of the fired board members was Katherine Petrelius, who had sent Spicer and Vought the emails in 2021 telling them to resign or be fired.

Read it.

“Exterior damage of USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) viewed from a ship’s rigid-hull inflatable boat following a collision with merchant vessel Besiktas-M, Feb. 12, while operating in the vicinity of Port Said, Egypt. USS Harry S. Truman, the flagship of the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group (HSTCSG), is on a scheduled deployment in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of operations supporting U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa to defend U.S., Allied and partner interests.”

The picture, a full uncropped version of which is seen below, shows multiple large tears through a sponson on the starboard side of the stern end of the ship near one of the aircraft elevators. Whether there is damage elsewhere on the ship is unknown.

Read it.

An American-Israeli released from Gaza during the current Israel-Hamas ceasefire is exhorting President Donald Trump to press for the release of the remaining hostages.

“President Trump, you are the reason I am home alive. You are the reason I was reunited with my beloved wife, four children and five grandchildren. Thank you,” Siegel says in a video released by his family and hostage advocacy groups. “Thank you for your continued fight against terror and for your bold leadership that has brought me and many others back home, to our families, to safety and to security.”

Siegel, 65, moved to Israel from his native North Carolina as a young adult and was abducted from his home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza along with his wife Aviva, who was released during a weeklong ceasefire in November 2023. He remained in dire conditions for 14 more months.

7 Examples That Show Why There Is Such A Conspiracy To Stop Elon Musk

Federal judge pauses President Trump’s order restricting gender-affirming care for trans youth (Lea Skene/Associated Press)

14 states sue to challenge Musk’s ‘unchecked power.’ (Madeleine Ngo/New York Times)

14 States Sue To Block DOGE From Uncovering Government Abuses, Slashing Waste

Judge orders Trump administration to restore funds for foreign aid programs (Politico)

Judge orders Trump administration to temporarily reinstate foreign aid funding (Megan Lebowitz/NBC News)

Judge Orders Trump Administration to Resume Foreign Aid Spending (Michael Crowley/New York Times)

Attorney General Bonta Sues Trump Administration, Challenging Elon Musk’s Unconstitutional Exercise of Power (State of California)

Who Are the Leftist Groups Suing to Block Trump’s Reforms to Root Out the Deep State?

‘Rogue judges must go!’ MAGA panics after Musk DOGE lawsuit handed to Judge Chutkan (Tom Boggioni/Raw Story)

CBS’s Crawford Breaks News to Liberal Viewers: No, We’re Not in a Constitutional Crisis

Trump’s Halt to Trans Gender-Affirming Care Paused Again

House Republicans plot impeachment against judges blocking Trump, DOGE (Emily Brooks/The Hill)

Trump v New York

Read it.

Funny how that works.