ZMan does a reversion.

One of the things lost in the excitement of the first month of the Trump administration is the pending reform of the FBI. When Kash Patel was grilled by the Senate, he repeatedly made clear that reforming the agency was his top priority. This is one reason Senate Democrats are stalling his nomination. This paramilitary wing of the Blob is calling in every favor to preserve itself. That lawsuit seeking to prevent the DOJ from getting the names of the J6 agents is a similar move.

There is little questioning the underlying premise of the reform cause. The FBI has lost all credibility with the public after a string of scandals. Framing people is a terrible thing but creating elaborate traps for not-so-bright people, as we saw in the Michigan kidnapping hoax, is monstrous. Most people do not know this has been common practice for decades, but many people know it. Of course, you have the outlandish behavior of the FBI during the first Trump term.

The topic of reform starts with looking at how an organization reached the point where reform is required to save it. That is where the FBI is now. Many people think it might be best to just close it down entirely. The few necessary things it does could be transferred to other agencies or maybe to a new agency with a severely limited portfolio, something like an FBI-lite. When forty percent of the agency was used to go after the J6 people over the last four years, the agency is rotten to the core.

Quillette.

Widely believed falsehoods erode the cohesion and resilience of societies and can threaten the national security of the United States and its allies. Unfortunately, as a new administration arrives in Washington, elite opinion on what to do about America’s social-media swamps and general epistemic disorder resembles a national-security debate that includes only warmongers and appeasers. The United States needs to adopt a pragmatic deterrence strategy instead.

Good luck with that. Not holding my breath….

Read it.

Here is the crazy part. Civilian supersonic aircraft have been banned in the United States for over 50 years! In case that wasn’t clear, we didn’t ban noisy aircraft we banned supersonicaircraft. Thus, even quiet supersonic aircraft are banned today. This was a serious mistake. Aside from the fact that the noise was exaggerated, technological development is endogenous.

We have the same problem with local housing (and other) codes: They don’t mandate desired performance, they mandate the technology that supposedly produces the desired performance. So when new technology comes along that also produces the desired performance, it has to overcome the curb of the interests (commercial and political) that are invested in the existing technology. And government winds up the fly in the ointment once again.

UnHerd.

JD Vance caused a firestorm on Sunday when he posted on X, formerly Twitter: “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

The vice president’s remarks came in response to the growing list of lower-court judges who have attempted to halt the new administration’s agenda with a slew of injunctions. They have directed Team Trump to release federal grants to nonprofits that the administration has frozen for auditing, for example, and blocked the administration from applying its interpretation of the 14th Amendment, according to which children born to illegal immigrants aren’t automatically entitled to US citizenship.

Vance hit back at the judges for trying to restrict the president in his own sphere and overriding his decisions as to how best to carry out the law (the execute in the “executive branch”). As the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule put it an X post, reshared by Vance, “judicial interference with legitimate acts of state, especially the internal functioning of a co-equal branch, is a violation of the separation of powers”.

But the judges’ actions raise another vexing constitutional question: can a lower court with narrow local jurisdiction render so-called nationwide injunctions that purport to bind every American citizen? By seemingly refusing to comply, the Trump administration is effectively answering: no. In doing so, according to The New York Times, the Trumpians have triggered an unprecedented “constitutional crisis”. In recent years, as legal progressives have sought to limit presidential power when it’s held by the other side, it’s become a sort of truism that a lower court in Hawaii or, say, New Hampshire can put a stop to a federal policy covering the whole nation.

Sarah Hoyt.

I had no clue what USAID was. Like perhaps most people, I thought it was a way for the US to do “charity” abroad.

I had a ton of philosophical problems with it, obviously. For one, I don’t know what the purpose of a government, which takes money from is own people via taxes, but foreign charity is not it. I mean, there’s nothing in our constitution that says the Federal government has the right to take our money and do stuff they consider good abroad, for any purpose, including because they think it someone obscurely benefits us.

For another, because I have noticed for a long time now, that everything the left does abroad is something that will benefit someone else, and preferably is bad for us. Everything including war, the left does for the benefit of someone else. And they like it better if it’s bad for us.

So, on those principles, I disapproved of USAID. But even I was shocked when the full can of worms was open, and they all came crawling out. First because I didn’t know the amounts of money they’d spent in the US and there are things like the fact they funded the Tides Foundation which in turn funded BLM — meaning in essence we paid in taxes to have our own cities burned — which just stick in my craw. But then…. then i found out how it was founded, and why.

Quite a bit to Muslims, it would seem. Why are we sending money to Afghanistan? Or Somalia? Or Yemen?

Read it.

Thousands of British farmers descended on London on Monday, bringing tractors—and even a tank—to the streets of Westminster. The protest, organised by Save British Farming, was aimed at the Labour government’s controversial inheritance tax reforms, which will see a 20% levy imposed on farms worth more than £1 million starting in April 2026.

Whitehall, the road which is the centre of government power in Britain, was completely blocked as farmers honked their horns and displayed banners condemning the policy as an existential threat to British agriculture. Signs reading “No Farms, No Food, No Future” and “Labour Are Liars” captured the anger and desperation of a community that feels abandoned by the government.

Lifehacker, a well-disguised Voice of the Crust.

The Department of Labor (DOL) is a critical federal agency that protects workers’ rights, ensures workplace safety, and promotes employment opportunities across the United States. Around since 1913, the DOL is the latest government entity currently facing scrutiny from the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

On Friday, a federal judge declined to limit DOGE—which is not an official government department, but a task force led by Elon Musk—from accessing the DOL’s systems and sensitive information. Not everyone is happy about that, because they are worried Musk might gut the agency in similar fashion to what is being done with USAID.

But what does the DOL do? It’s worth knowing, because the labor department impacts everyone who has an employer of some kind.

No, that’s what its supposed to do. What it actually does is spend taxpayer money on things that are not the proper business of the Federal government. This includes propping up labor unions (a basic part of the Democrat coalition of the fringes) and promoting regime ideology like DIE.

Lifehacker offers occasionally useful advice in areas that don’t deal with politics, but when touching on politics they purvey the proglodyte Narrative, of which this article is a good example.

An example of them doing something useful is here: I Made the Perfect Boiled Egg, According to Science

Read it.

After Oklahoma approved a request by the Catholic Church to open a charter school in 2023, lawsuits quickly followed. Courts at both the state and federal levels ruled against the church, finding that a publicly funded school promoting religion would be unconstitutional.

Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken up the case, signaling that the justices are willing to consider overturning a longstanding legal precedent protecting the separation of church and state. If the court allows St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School to become the first government-funded religious school in the country, the consequences for religious education — including for Jewish schools — could be far-reaching.

The school’s backers argue that charter schools should be allowed to teach religion because they are not technically government institutions. They also contend that as long as a state permits charter schools — and nearly all states do — excluding only religious ones violates the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.

In St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, the fate of the school will be decided by a court whose conservative supermajority has steadily expanded religion’s role in public life. The court previously ruled in favor of a public high school football coach who wanted to pray with students on the field, and has allowed government voucher funding for religious schools.

Read it.

As I argued in Banalysis: The Lie Destroying The West, the single most virulent disease afflicting Britain and the West generally is not mass immigration, gender ideology or even Islam, but the lie which facilitates them: ‘equality’. That’s not to say of course that people should not be treated equally, or even as if they were equal – but the insistence that they are de facto equal, regardless of the insurmountable evidence to the contrary, would not pass muster in a nursery school playground.

…

None of these come close however to the infantile babbling of the actor Idris Elba, who has decided that the solution to the uptick in stabbing is to blunt the knives. Ironically, Elba was once famously considered ‘too street’ to play James Bond, but perhaps he isn’t nearly ‘street’ enough. If he were, he would realise that that the problem isn’t knives, but lawless London, failed Utopian policies, and in this case the black community which (alongside its many other shortcomings) has a problem with knife crime.

Read it.

After President Trump proposed resettling the Arab Muslim settlers currently living in Gaza, there was an outbreak of furious objections from politicians, activists and media outlets.

The objections could be roughly divided into the moral and the practical. The ‘moral’ objection was that it was ‘wrong’ to resettle the population currently occupying Gaza, and the ‘practical’ objection was that it would be impossible to accomplish.

Both objections do not hold up.

Scott Johnson at PowerLine.

Following up on John’s post regarding the terrorist attack outside the Trump International Hotel yesterday in Las Vegas, I want to note that police now say camp-fuel canisters and large firework mortars were stuffed into the back of a Tesla Cybertruck. These materials caused the explosion that killed the driver and inflicted minor injuries on seven others.

Elon Musk and Tesla immediately provided assistance to law enforcement in the investigation. Elon himself reported on X that he had “confirmed that the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself.” In fact, the design and integrity of the vehicle prevented the explosive materials from doing wider damage.

I’d consider buying one if I could get it as a hybrid. All-electric cars are simply rich-people-toys at this point.

Read it.

“The data make it clear that the only possible rationale for renewable energy—making significant reductions of CO2 emissions—cannot be achieved. The costs of attempting to do this are already imposing heavy costs on economies across the world.”

Read it.

Anderlecht is a populous district in the city of Brussels. It is heavily culturally enriched: only 18% of the population is considered to be of Belgian ethnicity, i.e. Flemish or Wallonian. 82% of the people in Anderlecht are “Belgians with foreign background” or “Non-Belgians”.

In recent days Anderlecht has seen a rash of shootings. At first there were no fatalities, but that changed last Friday, when one person died from his or her wounds.

The Times (UK).

Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.

Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest.

However, NHS England said that figures it had calculated showed that the service had improved, leaving ministers unclear whether the most expensive and politically significant public service will actually make best use of a £22 billion budget boost.

You will never see a government statistic that shows that government is worse. They have no incentive to do that, and every incentive to do the opposite. “We’re doing great here! Everything is looking up!” Britain’s NHS is the poster child for dysfunctional government services, of which Obamacare is a pale reflection. Medicare in this country is only tolerable because it doesn’t provide health care, it merely pays for it (which is bad enough).

An example of NHS failure is here: Pensioner dies after refusing A&E trip due to agonising wait with broken back

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

When Dr. C. Michael Gibson, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, goes to heart disease meetings, he can’t help noticing a change.

“We will sit around at dinner and halfway through the meal, we will simultaneously push our plates away,” Dr. Gibson said. “We look at each other and laugh and say, ‘You, too?’”

They share what is becoming an open secret: They tried for years to control their weight but are now taking the new obesity drugs manufactured by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.

Dr. Robert Califf, the former chief of the Food and Drug Administration, says he hardly recognizes his colleagues. So many are now so thin.

“Looking good,” he says he tells his fellow cardiologists at conferences and meetings.

Read it.

The Palestinian Authority will no longer pay stipends to the families of convicted terrorists and other prisoners, in a gesture to President Donald Trump.

The longstanding program determined the size of the stipend based on the length of a prisoner’s sentence, meaning that those who were convicted of the worst offenses often received the largest stipends. While Palestinians often view the thousands of prisoners with admiration as the front line of resistance against Israel, the payment program had been maligned for years by Israeli and American officials.

Pro-Israel advocates dubbed it “pay-for-slay,” and pointed to it as evidence that the Palestinian Authority, while itself disavowing armed conflict, incentivized terrorism. During Trump’s first term, Congress passed legislation cutting aid to the P.A., which governs Palestinian areas of the West Bank, based on the payment program.

The Trump Effect in action.

The Times.

Crowds booed Taylor Swift while they cheered for President Trump at the Super Bowl. He later took to his Truth Social account to mock the pop singer.

Trump shared a clip to Truth Social of the audience giving him and his daughter Ivanka a rousing applause beside footage of Swift being roundly booed when she appeared on the stadium’s jumbotron.

In a separate post, Trump quoted a celebratory quip from the hard-right Libs of TikTok account, who wrote: “Trump gets massive cheers at the Super Bowl while Taylor Swift gets booed — the world is healing!”

Swift endorsed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the past two presidential elections.

Read it.

The French justice system has now prevented for the second time attempts to deport Algerian TikToker Doualemn after his antisemitic and pro-terrorism remarks on social media, defying the Ministry of the Interior. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau has announced that he would appeal the decision.

The most recent chapter of the bizarre saga goes back to beginning of January, when the minister of the interior decided to put an end to the deeds of the Algerian TikTokers based in France who are waging a veritable war on France on social media on behalf of the Algerian government, advocating for murder and making antisemitic statements. Minister Retailleau requested an emergency deportation procedure against one of them, named Doualemn.

The problem is that there is an overt feud between the services of the minister of the interior and the other ministries. Under the previous government of Michel Barnier, Retailleau had been openly contradicted by the minister of justice, who publicly stated that there was no major problem of crime in France and that the link between immigration and criminality was greatly overestimated. When Retailleau called for a reform of the free of charge medical services granted to migrants, it was the minister of health who opposed it.

Watch it.

Quillette goes Red Pill.

New Atlas.

This is just all kinds of outrageous. Last November, a skydiver jumped out of a helicopter, glided down into the Grand Canyon wearing a wingsuit, turned around to face the sky, and hooked up to a plane flying above him so it could tow him up and away into the air.

The Register.

All malicious attacks on digital systems have one common aim: taking control. Mostly, that means getting a CPU somewhere to turn traitor, running code that silently steals or scrambles your data. That code can ride into the system in a whole spectrum of ways, but usually it has to be in memory somewhere at some time, making it amenable to counter-attack.

There’s a far worse scenario, when the CPU itself is brainwashed into highly dangerous behavior like a mouse infected by a parasite that makes it completely unafraid of cats. This is a microcode attack, something that’s remarkably hard to pull off. Google just found one that works on some AMD processors, which is bad enough, even though it’s now patched and under control. There is another far, far more terrifying example underway right now – so let’s look at how it works.

Read it.

In the coming years, AI systems will have a major impact on the ways people work. For that reason, we’re launching the Anthropic Economic Index, an initiative aimed at understanding AI’s effects on labor markets and the economy over time.

The Index’s initial report provides first-of-its-kind data and analysis based on millions of anonymized conversations on Claude.ai, revealing the clearest picture yet of how AI is being incorporated into real-world tasks across the modern economy.

AI is going to be important from now on; no way around it. The question is: Will it be useful?

Read it.

Officials in the Brdy region of the Czech Republic were at an impasse.

Despite securing more than one million dollars’ worth of funding for a new dam to address water issues, the project had stalled after seven years of planning because the necessary building permits for such a structure couldn’t be acquired.

But then, everyone woke up one morning in January to find that the job had been completed—by eight beavers. For free.

Sometimes the old ways are best. Come, follow the Way of the Beaver.

Read it.

Frugality is a virtue. The art of doing more with less, making sharp trade-offs, and keeping waste at bay so the good stuff – innovation, growth, maybe even a little joy – has room to thrive. Any engineer worth their salt knows the power of an elegant, efficient solution. A few well-placed optimizations can turn a sluggish system into a rocket.

But frugality has a dark twin – a reckless, shortsighted impostor that mistakes cost-cutting for efficiency and penny-pinching for wisdom. Enter frupidity, or stupid frugality – the obsessive drive to save money in ways that ultimately cost far more in lost productivity, morale, and sanity. It’s the engineering equivalent of “optimizing” a car by removing the brakes to improve gas mileage.

I like the Rule of Twenty: If you run across something you’re not using that can be replaced in twenty minutes or less for twenty dollars or less, throw it out.

Read it.

After a set of strict emissions limits was voted down at the polls on Sunday, Switzerland’s Young Greens—who unsurprisingly brought the proposals forward—complained that “defenders of the status quo” had been victorious. Clearly, the opposite is the case: Swiss voters signaled a small yet decisive shift away from Europe’s destructive green drive.

Brussels is, however, more likely to pay attention to those Swiss lawmakers desperately searching for other ways to legislate ‘for the environment’—and, as issues surrounding the EU’s Green Deal show, against competitiveness.

Among other measures included in the ‘Environmental Responsibility’ proposals, voters rejected reducing greenhouse gases emitted through consumption to 10% of their 2018 levels within the next decade. Bloomberg says they did so—with 69.8% voting against, no less, and with none of the country’s 26 cantons voting in favour—because of “economic concerns.”

Alma Boykin.

I’ve been reading about the English government’s ideas for making England Net-Zero by … ten to twenty-five years from now, depending on the version of the plan. In addition to phasing out hydrocarbon fuels (diesel, gasoline, natural gas), it requires the reduction of agriculture by ten percent or so, and installing lots of solar farms and wind turbines in order to eliminate “dirty”sources of electricity like coal and gas-fired power plants. Part of the thinking behind this taxation aspect of this environmental plan is to redistribute the farmland away from the traditional owners and encourage newer families to move out of the larger cities and take up farming. Higher-intensity agriculture will also be needed, in order to replace the crops and livestock that will no longer be grown or raised because of the Net-Zero requirements.

I‘m a conservationist, not an environmentalist. Team Wise Use is my group. I”m not opposed to preservation of parts of the landscape and wildlife. I’m not opposed to careful development of other resources, either. The key is the balance, and thinking long term. We as a society have seen solar farms and wind turbines in action for several decades now, and … they are not living up to the ideal of producing electricity efficiently for large-scale applications. Small scale? Absolutely, and wind energy works very well in some places and applications, solar likewise. But it has not scaled up thus far, and the tradeoffs in damage to the landscape and biota should give one pause.

Read it.

This fall, prospective students and parents should be looking at university recruitment materials with one question in mind: what exactly is a university education worth in the AGI era?

The AI systems of 2024 were tools, limited to tasks like writing essays or analyzing data. Artificial General Intelligence is different. The AGI systems launching now can reason, learn, and solve problems across all domains, at or above human level. If universities cannot articulate in detail how their faculty exceeds AGI capabilities, what value are they offering to tuition-paying students? Traditional arguments about the value of a college education collapse without faculty expertise.

The usual, comfortable rhetoric about “irreplaceable” human elements of education—mentorship, hands-on learning, community building, and critical thinking—might suffice for a four-year social networking summer camp, and some parents may still value that. But in the AGI era, the only defensible reason for universities to remain in operation is to offer students an opportunity to learn from faculty whose expertise surpasses current AI. Nothing else makes sense.

Marketing that touts traditional benefits of a university education while ignoring AGI actively harms the sector, suggesting that higher education either fails to grasp the AGI revolution or is trying to hide from it. Universities must instead lead with brutal honesty: students should pay precisely for the “last mile” of human knowledge that surpasses AGI’s capabilities. The true value of a university lies in faculty who can offer advanced education, mentorship, and inspiration at the highest level, while every other aspect of college life becomes a secondary consideration that no longer justifies tuition on its own.

ZMan does some structural analysis.

As expected, the lawsuits are quickly piling up as the regime tries to buy time to regroup after the initial attacks from the Trump administration. There are multiple cases involving the Treasury, all aimed at preventing Trump appointees from doing their jobs, at least without permission from the court. There is one case involving the FBI, where the judge is asked to stop the Justice Department from looking into J6 cases. There is at least one case challenging the buyout system.

All these cases have been launched by activists trying to halt the Trump agenda, but they all have something important in common. They revolve around a set of core questions about these executive agencies. Who controls these agencies, by what means do they control them and by whose authority? The activists are challenging the Trump admin on the claim that these are independent agencies. They do not report to the President, so he cannot take these actions.

The trouble with that is there is nothing in the Constitution defining a fourth branch of government under which these agencies are organized. At best, it is a bit of make-believe Washington has indulged since Nixon. The mythology of Watergate says Nixon used these agencies to terrorize his political opponents, so he was driven from the temple of the people. Ever since, permanent Washington has waved around the bloody shirt whenever they did not like what a President was doing.

Read it.

“It is really, really a sad day in America,” Rep. Ilhan Omar declared at a rally protesting the reconstruction of USAID.

It wasn’t a sad day for America, but it was so for Somalia.

Over the last two years, USAID doled out $2.3 billion in “humanitarian assistance” to Omar’s native Somalia. Last year it reported a request for $1.6 billion in aid and even in December 2024, with the Biden administration on the way out the door, it sent an additional $29 million.

Read it.

As reported here earlier, an 11-year-old girl was murdered by a culture-enricher last week in Utrecht. Now the slaughter of 11-year-olds has spread south to France: a little girl named Louise was murdered Friday night and left in a forest in Essonne. Once again, cultural enrichment is a factor: based on surveillance camera images, the perpetrator is said to be of “North African” appearance. A suspect was later arrested, but then released.

Read it.

Sabine is a high profile Physics YouTuber who creates brilliantly skeptical videos about the latest science claims – except when it comes to climate change.

Trump is not making ‘us’ give up on climate goals; he is merely making it more difficult for climate Chicken Littles to force their ‘climate goals’ on the rest of society.

Read it.

A Syrian mujahid for ISIS came to Germany as a “refugee” in 2015. He was later prosecuted and imprisoned. When he was released, he couldn’t be deported, because it is forbidden to deport people to Syria. So he’s still floating around Germany, along with Allah knows how many of his fellow mujahideen.

The situation has gotten so dire that even the Socialists are criticizing the country’s migration policy.

Read it.

Believing that Trump (ironically, one of the two most pro-gay presidents in American history) wants to kill or imprison homosexual couples gives meaning to their lives. A perverse meaning, to be sure, but meaning nonetheless. Strangely, this desire to be oppressed only happens in a decent and tolerant society.

If this were the 1950s America or a Muslim country today, this lesbian couple couldn’t afford their beliefs. In a similar fashion, children of super-rich people who are secular tend to be Marxists because they can afford nonsense beliefs that spiritually fulfill them.

Now, modern Marxism (Wokism) doesn’t make people very happy. Wokists are similar to the most miserable type of Christian imaginable, one constantly hating this or that group of people. I recall in Angela’s Ashes a Catholic in Ireland watched a lovely Protestant family enjoying Christmas Eve through a window as he was working as a mailman. Watching a happy Protestant family celebrating Christmas day, he thought to himself, “How can these Protestants be so happy? Don’t they know they are going to hell?”

New York Magazine.

Although it may not look like it when you walk into your artist friend’s Cobble Hill brownstone, there are limits to how much a parent can bestow on their child. Designed to thwart the wealthy’s attempts to circumvent the estate tax, which after death gobbles up to 40 percent of one’s assets over $13.99 million, the IRS’s “gift tax” stipulates that each taxpayer can give only $19,000 per year to any individual, including their kids. Any more than that and a parent must file Form 709, which alerts the IRS that the giver is eating into the lifetime maximum (which is also $13.99 million) they can grant to one person tax free. Yet rich parents often want to give more. Here are the (sometimes barely legal) ways they get it done.

Whenever the statists of the world find a program that goes against basic human nature (prohibition, drug laws, inheritance taxes), people will make or find a way to get around it. As there are more non-statists than statists in the world, guess who eventually wins?

The problem is, when governments enact stupid laws that almost everyone tries to get around (or just ignore), it undermines the socially-inculcated respect for law that supports such things as the aversion to murder, rape, arson, robbery, etc. This is not good. Prohibition gave us organized crime. Drug laws gave us murderously violant drug cartels. Inheritance (and gift) taxation gave us a vast army of accountants and lawyers that arguably contribute very little to actual human progress.

When I was in law school taking a class on basic tax law, our professor came in the first day carrying a stack of paper about two feet tall. He put it on his desk and said, “This is the Internal Revenue Code. It runs about then thousand pages.” He picked up the top sheet and showed it to us. “This tells you what tax you have to pay.” He put that on the desk and put his hand on the rest of the stack. “This tells you how to get around paying that tax.” He patted the stack and said, “This is what we teach here.” And that about sums it up.

BEAR IN MIND that trade always balances — Crustian talk about ‘balance of trade deficits’ to the contrary notwithstanding — and if China ships more goods to the U.S. than the U.S. ships to China, then the balance is made up by China taking dollars from the U.S. that they aren’t spending on U.S. goods.

Read it.

If you thought that we were going to start with jobs data, you are mistaken. Today, “inflation expectations” deserve some attention. Right around 10am ET Friday, the stock market started to decline. Until that moment, it had done fairly well even as yields increased on the back of the jobs report. Then out came the University of Michigan CONsumer CONfidence data, showing 1-year inflation expectations jumping from 3.3% to 4.3%! This was lucky for us, as we had pointed out in our NFP Instant Reaction – What to Do With Data You Don’t Trust that we were moderately bearish risk assets. Consumer inflation expectations were not on my bingo card of what could turn stocks, so I guess that we can classify that under “better lucky than smart.” We should just run with it, but we cannot help ourselves.

…

In physics, what we consider rules are termed laws. But for most people, rules are a set of “things” that need to be followed. Whether they are laws or axioms, they are things that are clear and explicitly define and control actions. On the other hand, conjectures, educated guesses, and “rules of thumb” are general guidelines that often work or point you in the right direction. But by no means are they immutable rules that must be followed.

So why do economists insist on terming certain things rules that are really conjectures? Probably because it sounds better, especially if you want people to believe that they work. Or maybe it just makes it easier to win prestigious economic awards?

But we revisit this subject today, not to focus on how inaccurate it is to call many of these things rules, but to highlight that the so-called rules definitively don’t work when they are based on inaccurate data!

Capehart Gets Triggered At Suggestion Biden Abused Executive Power

Newsom Approves $50 Million To Help Migrants, Boost California’s Legal Defense

Obama-Appointed Judge Blocks Trump Admin Officials’ Access To ‘Sensitive’ Treasury Records, Cites “Cybersecurity Risk”

Why would a ‘Christian’ destroy the world’s largest relief agency? (AlterNet) Because he realizes that everyone in the U.S. isn’t Christian, and he has to act for the benefit of ALL Americans.

Ed Martin is the wrong person to investigate Biden-era prosecutors (The Hill)

This senator says Democrats need to invoke villains, namely Elon Musk (New York Times) A Democrat Senator, of course.

Trump threatened college research, culture and funding. Confusion reigns. (Washington Post)

“We Need To Go Gangster Here”: NY Mag Editor And Scott Galloway Demand Doxxing And Prison For “Little Pricks” From DOGE

In a harbinger of illiberalism, Trump fired the Archivist of the United States without telling her or Congress why (Alexander B. Howard/CIVIC TEXTS)

Trump rules out deporting Prince Harry: ‘He’s got enough problems with his wife’ (Miranda Devine/New York Post)  Boy, does he ever.

In chaotic Washington blitz, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal becomes clear (Washington Post)

Trump stripping the security clearances of numerous antagonists – including NY AG Letitia James, DA Alvin Bragg (Miranda Devine/New York Post)

Democrat Rep. Sterilizes Herself To Protest Trump  Another win.

Trump’s Conquest of the Kennedy Center Is Accelerating (The Atlantic)

Protesters denounce Trump immigration policies outside his Florida golf club (Reuters)

Children’s Wisconsin hospital reinstates gender-affirming care for trans teen after canceling in wake of Trump’s executive order (Phoebe Petrovic/Wisconsin Watch)

After Indulging Unilateral Biden, PBS Frets Over Strongman Trump, ‘Guardrails’

Researchers decry ‘disastrously bad idea’ as NIH slashes payments for research infrastructure (Katherine Dillinger/CNN)  Oh noes! The gravy train has stopped!

U.S. intelligence, law enforcement candidates face Trump loyalty test (Washington Post) No executive can tolerate employees who are ready to undermine his  policies.

American farmers ruined by Musk killing USAID: Check this map (Deepak Puri/The Democracy Labs)  Of course ‘American farms’ are a proper target of U.S. foreign aid funds — a demonstration of how dysfunctional USAID actually was.

A Tent City Is Rising at Guantánamo Bay (New York Times) Cuba ought to feel right like home.

The Recruitment Effort That Helped Build Elon Musk’s DOGE Army (Wired)

FEC Chair Weighing Options After Trump Moves to Fire Her

NIH Cuts Billions, Alarming Scientists, Academics  Hee hee hee….

Trump Names New Group to Revoke Security Clearances

Lebanese PM Forms New Government, Includes Hezbollah, Rejecting Trump Envoy’s ‘Red Lines’

‘The feel of a coup’: Elon Musk said to be poised to ‘defy’ major judicial order (David McAfee/Raw Story)

Federal Financial Watchdog Ordered to Cease Activity (New York Times)

Politico ‘Note to Our Readers’ on Funding Falls Flat With Readers

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: World Leaders ‘Make Fun’ of Trump Granting Press Access (Unlike Biden)

GOP laws aimed at very rare noncitizen voting could hit eligible voters (Washington Post)

As the Trump upheaval continues, are there restraints that could slow him down? (Dan Balz/Washington Post)

WashPost: US Intelligence Candidates Face Trump Loyalty Tests

Designating Cartels As Terrorists Will Have Huge Consequences, Say Analysts

Federal Courts Are the Frontline for Those Opposing Trump Executive Orders (Mattathias Schwartz/New York Times)

As Trump steamrolls Washington, courts flex their power to slow him down (Kyle Cheney/Politico)

More Profiles of Courage, Patriotism and Resistance in standing up to Trump (Dean Obeidallah/The Dean’s Report)

Musk Team’s Treasury Access Raises Security Fears, Despite Judge’s Ordered Halt (David E. Sanger/New York Times)

The Observer view: Vengeful and reckless, Donald Trump must not go unchallenged (The Guardian)

White House: WashPost ‘Lying’ on NIH Indirect Costs Policy

Musk Calls For Impeachment of ‘Corrupt’ Judge in Treasury Ruling

CBS News poll – Trump has positive approval amid “energetic” opening weeks; seen as doing what he promised (CBS News)

Only Half DOGE Workers Have Musk Ties

Trump Voters Angry at ‘Chaos’: ‘Not What We Signed Up For’ (Joey McFadden/The Daily Beast)

Trump’s Shameful Campaign Against Transgender Americans (New York Times)

Musk calls for impeachment of judge who blocked DOGE access at Treasury (Ian Swanson/The Hill)

A Quick Guide to the Lawsuits Against the Trump Orders (New York Times) Can’t understand the Narrative without  score card!

Trump Doubles CBS Lawsuit Damages To $20 Billion Over Harris’s 60 Minutes Interview

Democratic senator: We are on ‘the cusp’ of a constitutional crisis (Lauren Irwin/The Hill)

CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS: “Constitutional crisis” in news stories means “a Republican is doing something other than the way a Democrat would do it.”

San Diego Supervisor Says Border Now Ghost Town Under Trump’s New Policies  Another win.

Visualizing the international reach of U.S. funding cut by Trump (Washington Post)

Democratic senator says they are ready to shut down government over Trump actions (The Hill)  They say that like it was a bad thing. (No, they won’t; half of government activities stay funded under various ’emergency need’ statutes.)

Elon Musk is Working His Hardest to Make a Chinese Century (Liberal Currents)

CBS News Poll: Trump’s Job Approval at 53 Percent

Jim Jordan backs Elon Musk’s authority to cut federal government (Amanda Friedman/Politico)

NYT Hypocrisy: Outlet Criticizes Trump’s Attacks On Trans People That They Helped Usher In (Erin Reed/Erin In The Morning)

Trump to Revoke Security Clearances for Prosecutors and Biden Officials (New York Times)

DOGE Moving On to Bigger Govt Targets

In Breaking USAID, the Trump Administration May Have Broken the Law (ProPublica)  They hope, they hope, they hope.

Trump’s ‘mass deportation’ TV reality show is both fake and incredibly dangerous (Will Bunch/The Philadelphia Inquirer)  Will  Bunch loses his shit.

NY Times Lies About Trump’s ‘Conspiracy Theory’ on Land Confiscation (It’s Real)

How Trump Is Uprooting Radical ’60s Foundations of Poisonous DEI and CRT Programs

JD Vance Suggests Judges ‘Aren’t Allowed’ To Control Trump After Courts Block His Policies (Alison Durkee/Forbes)

Consumer watchdog ordered to stop fighting financial abuse and to work from home as HQ temporarily shuts down (Matt Egan/CNN)

Prebunking Elon Musk’s Super Bowl Propaganda (Asha Rangappa/The Freedom Academy …)  Gotta get that Narrative out.

Vance and Musk question the authority of the courts as Trump’s agenda faces legal pushback (Jill Colvin/Associated Press)

Read it.

Mr. Pritzker is essentially claiming the superiority of his welfare-state, public-union governance model. But fewer people are buying it. Since 2020, 33 Illinois counties have voted to consider breaking away from the state.

Read it.

The most dramatic narrative shift in this post-lockdown period has been the flip in the perceptions of government itself. For decades and even centuries, government was seen as the essential bulwark to defend the poor, empower the marginalized, realize justice, even the playing field in commerce, and guarantee rights to all.

Read it.

NOAA’s year 2024 updated Relative Sea Level Trend data measurements continue to demonstrate that climate alarmists claim of hugely growing rates of sea level rise acceleration are completely out of touch with NOAA’s overwhelming data reflecting measured rates of relative sea level rise.

Read it.

If the Senate confirms Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary, he has his work cut out for him. His quest to make America healthy again won’t be easy, but it should include tackling Big Sugar, an industry that has substantially increased Americans’ grocery prices—and significantly decreased their health.

In the U.S., sugar costs 40 cents per pound, double the global price of 20 cents. These high prices are the result of Big Sugar’s monopoly on the sugar market, a monopoly that receives vital support from government intervention.

Federal government subsidies for domestic sugar production have existed since the 1980s and consistently contribute to these high sugar prices. Annually, sugar companies receive around $4 billion in increased revenues from subsidies and tariffs. This allows for noncompetitive practices and contributes to a system of cronyism instead of capitalism.

Read it.

For months, daring bands of thieves linked to South American gangs have been making off with piles of jewelry and cash from the homes of the biggest superstars in sports, targeting the likes of the NFL’s Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.

Sure! Open the border! Let ’em all in! What could go wrong?

Read it.

“I don’t know how many different ways you can say these results are bad, but they’re bad,” University of Washington researcher Dan Goldhaber told The Washington Post. “I don’t think this is the canary in the coal mine. This is a flock of dead birds in the coal mine.”

For a close look at this educational carnage, consider Baltimore and Chicago, two cities where school dysfunction merits serious prison time for the adults who perpetrate institutional child abuse against their students.

As of September 2023, 13 of 32 Baltimore high schools had zero students who were proficient in math, according to Maryland’s state exam.

To be clear: It’s not that less than 1% were proficient. Far worse: Not one individual student—not one teenage male, nor one teenage female—could compute at grade level in 13—or 40%—of Baltimore’s high schools. “The results are hard to believe,” wrote Chris Papst of WBFF-TV, Baltimore’s Fox affiliate.

Kansas Refletor.

‘Starving people worldwide’ are not the responsibility of the American taxpayers.

Feeding ‘starving people worldwide’ is not the job of the U. S. government.

Read it.

The scandal of the week might be called Subscription-gate. It was unveiled that the currently shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development was spending millions of dollars in lavishly priced subscriptions to “Politico Pro,” one of those government-insider news products no one outside the bureaucracy reads.

Over there at The New York Post, Real Clear Investigations contributor Benjamin Weingarten snagged attention with this headline:

Obscene $8M Politico payout just one way feds reward their lapdog media

I’ve always wondered about that.

Read it.

In total, 78 convoys sailed to or returned from Soviet ports, but it was only on 19 December 2012, after lobbying for sixteen years, that David Cameron’s government finally awarded convoy veterans their own official Arctic Campaign Star, by which time an estimated 400 were still alive. In 2015, the Kremlin subsequently awarded these ancient mariners their Ushakov Medal (named after the patron saint of the Russian Navy), and until recently they appeared as honoured guests at May Day parades in Red Square. Alas, too late for Able Seaman MacLean who died in 1987, but he would have heartily approved. So it is each winter, that I picture and honour the crews who took part in those Arctic runs, a job I would not have wished for all the lottery wins on earth.

The Other McCain.

We do not know why the initial gunshot was fired — robbery? assault? just another Friday night in Canarsie? — but it so happened that at least four cops were within earshot of this incident, and considering how it played out, the suspect is lucky he didn’t get shot dead. Where I come from, you point a gun at a cop, let alone four cops, and you’re likely to die in the proverbial “hail of police gunfire.” What kind of place is this, where gunfire goes off randomly on a Friday night and the perp thinks it’s a smart idea to point his gun at cops? That’s how my curiosity about Canarsie got started; the description included a street address — 754 East 80th Street — and I was able to do a Google “street view,” which showed a pleasant-looking tree-lined street, with brick apartments or rowhouses.

Just looking at it, you wouldn’t think of East 80th Street as “ghetto,” and in terms of its physical appearance, this Canarsie neighborhood probably hasn’t changed much since the days when, as Wikipedia says, it was “a largely Italian American and Jewish suburb.” Alas, the Jews and Italians cleared out decades ago because of a school-zone dispute, and the more recent “gentrification” that turned neighborhoods like Park Slope into hot spots for yuppies never got as far east as 80th Street. OK, so who is this suspect walking around with a pistol? “Moonra Durham” is a sufficiently unique name that I figured it was worth a Google search.

Moonra Durham is a registered sex offender who was convicted of first degree sexual abuse in 2013. Details of his full criminal history were not available, but the fact that a registered sex offender armed with a pistol was just strolling through Canarsie on a Friday night — well, that would be scary, if you happened to be in Canarsie, but my advice is to stay the hell away from there. The New York Times published an interactive map of the 2024 presidential election, which allows you to search results down to the precinct level, and in this particular part of Canarsie, the results were Kamala Harris 93%, Donald Trump 6%. This neighborhood is part of New York’s 8th Congressional District, represented in Congress by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who won reelection last year with 75% of the vote.

J. D. Vance:

My kids, god willing, will be risk takers. They won’t think constantly about whether a flippant comment or a wrong viewpoint will follow them around for the rest of their lives.

They will tell stupid jokes. They will develop views that they later think are wrong or even gross. I made mistakes as a kid, and thank God I grew up in a culture that encouraged me to grow and learn and feel remorse when I screwed up and offer grace when others did.

I don’t worry about my kids making mistakes, or developing views they later regret. I don’t even worry that much about trolls on the internet. You know what I do worry about, Ro?

That they’ll grow up to be a US Congressm[a]n who engages in emotional blackmail over a kid’s social media posts.