Political Psychology.

While the psychological dispositions that underlie conspiracy thinking are well researched, there has been remarkably little research on the political preferences of conspiracy believers that go beyond self-reported ideology or single political issue dimensions. Using data from the European Voter Election Study (EVES), the relationship between conspiracy thinking and attitudes on three deeper-lying and salient political dimensions (redistribution, authoritarianism, migration) is examined. The results show a clear picture: Individuals with economically left-wing and culturally conservative attitudes tend to score highest on conspiracy thinking. People at this ideological location seem to long for both economic and cultural protection and bemoan a “lost paradise” where equalities had not yet been destroyed by “perfidious” processes of cultural modernization and economic neoliberalism. This pattern is found across all countries and holds regardless of socioeconomic characteristics such as education and income. While previous research has found that belief in conspiracies tends to cluster at the extremes of the political spectrum, our analysis opens up a more complex picture, showing that conspiracy thinking is not merely related to extremist orientations, but to specific combinations of political attitudes.

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Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

According to a well-known proverb, patience is a virtue. According to a recent study in the Personality and Social Psychology Review, though, it’s actually a coping mechanism that we employ to stop everyday frustrations from getting on top of us.

Kate Sweeny at the University of California Riverse and colleagues ran three studies to explore aspects of a theory that she has devised, called the process model of patience. This theory holds that impatience is (like anger or happiness, for example) its own emotion, triggered when an unwanted situation, such as being stuck in traffic or standing in line at a till, is taking longer to resolve than seems reasonable. Through this lens, patience serves as a form of emotion regulation that helps us to deal with that unpleasant emotional state.

In these studies, conducted on a total of about 1,400 people, the participants read hypothetical scenarios that described a range of undesirable everyday situations, some of which featured an ‘objectionable delay’. They were then asked about how impatient they would feel in that situation, how patiently they would respond to it, and their general perceptions of the scenario..

Emotions are built-in reactions to events provided to us by evolution, both physical and social. Sometimes those emotions are appropriate to the event, sometimes (in a modern technological society) they are not. The ability to suppress the effects of emotional responses in favor of using the brain to think through a situation is the primary characteristic that distinguishes us from other animals, and the foundation of what we commonly consider ‘adult behavior’. Patience may not formally be a virtue, but it is virtue in action.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the greatest tricks Americans have ever pulled is convincing themselves and the world that we are not ideologues. At worst, we are the defenders of Western liberalism, which is never described as an ideology. Unlike communism or fascism, it is seen as a set of obvious conclusions arrived at through reason. If anything, the American way is considered a practical antidote to the problems of ideology.

This has always been nonsense, but we have believed it for so long that no one thinks much about it anymore. The closest we get are critiques of liberalism from neo-traditionalists, as if we still live in a liberal age. In reality, America is an ideological state and has been for a long time. The ideology has evolved to suit the times, but the core features have remained unchanged since the 19th century.

This is one reason for the current crisis. The age of ideology is coming to a close, but the United States, especially its ruling class, remains trapped in the age of ideology—like a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit. While other major powers think and talk in practical terms about practical problems, the United States continues to think and talk in explicitly moral terms about abstract concepts.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

An executive order signed by the president would cancel collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of workers, the largest federal employees union said. The union was preparing legal action.

Of course it is. I don’t recall when unions became allowed for government workers–when I was younger, that was illegal–but I suspect that the growth of sclerotic government was greatly accelerated by unionization, as has been its effect on business that a chock full o’ unions. Unions have always been one of the pillars of the Dramacrat party, teachers’ unions and government worker unions (which overlap a great deal) being notable stalwarts.

The inherent bias of the NYT is evident by the way they refer to ‘union protections’, as if unions were the only thing keeeping government workers from being kept in peonage.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal workers union, estimated that the order would strip labor protections from hundreds of thousands of civil servants, and said it was preparing legal action.

There were extensive civil service protections in place for government workers before unions, and probably will remain after unions are dust.

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Conservatives tend to support freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to buy whatever light bulbs make you happy, and so on. Leftism tends to be based more on centralized control systems, and is more comfortable with censorship and government involvement in things like light bulbs and gas stoves. Political violence is a feature of the left, presumably because you sometimes need violence to get someone to do something that they normally wouldn’t do. Conservatives don’t need violence to get people to do whatever they want. Which is why it’s so hard to imagine JD Vance looking like Elizabeth Warren in this picture.

But it occurs to me that there may be another reason for the anger and violence on the left. Leftists believe that they are the smart ones, and the virtuous ones. And then they look at places that apply leftism, which are typically horrifying. The 20th century was a nightmare for them, as leftist leaders like Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Castro, et al. caused so much suffering and destruction. American cities have been governed by Democrat governors for decades, and are nearly without exception spiraling into dystopian hell-holes. People are leaving Democrat states and moving to Republican states en masse. If leftism is so smart and so virtuous, why does it consistently lead to such suffering and destruction? Why do people run away from it? If leftism is so smart and so virtuous, shouldn’t it work? At least sometimes?

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Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong – a transplant surgeon-turned-biotech billionaire renowned for inventing the cancer drug Abraxane – has issued a startling warning in a new in-depth interview with Tucker Carlson.

Soon-Shiong, founder of ImmunityBio ($IBRX) and owner of the Los Angeles Times, claims that the COVID-19 pandemic, and the very vaccines developed to fight it, may be contributing to a global surge in “terrifyingly aggressive” cancers. In the nearly two-hour conversation, the Los Angeles Times owner leveraged his decades of clinical and scientific experience to outline why he suspects an unprecedented cancer epidemic is unfolding. This report examines Dr. Soon-Shiong’s background and assertions, the scientific responses for and against his claims, new data on post-COVID health trends, and the far-reaching implications if his alarming hypothesis proves true.

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Well, you know what Muslim promises are worth.

The Palestinian Authority made another round of “pay for slay” payments to the families of terrorists on Tuesday, according to the PA’s official newspaper, marking at least the second time it has done so since its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, issued a decree purportedly ending the practice.

The PA distributed the funds to “28 families of Martyrs and 10 families of prisoners” affiliated with its security forces in Jenin, the PA’s daily newspaper, Al-Hayat al-Jadida, wrote on Wednesday, according to a translation provided by watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch.

The paper quoted the director of the PA’s intelligence service in Jenin, Adnan Abu Aisheh, who said the payments were made “based on what President of the State of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas has emphasized again and again—[which] is that if we are left with one penny, it will be paid to the families of the Martyrs and the prisoners.”

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

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CPT codes are a way to explain what a clinician did during an interaction with a patient. For instance, the most common CPT code for psychologists is 90837, which is the number that means the clinician provided an hour of psychotherapy. To get payment, they will submit this code to health insurers, whether private, Medicare, or Medicaid, and everyone involved will know what it means. First developed in 1966 for use with Medicare, the demand for extensive medical documentation is now a serious contributor to physician burnout, as “[f]or every 8 hours of scheduled patient time, ambulatory physicians spend more than 5 hours on the electronic health records.”

CPT codes are developed by a panel of 21 medical professionals selected by the AMA Board of Trustees who meet three times a year to solicit input from across the medical industry on the latest medical care to create, revise, remove, and determine the relative value of the codes (these relative value units influence insurance reimbursement rates). Twelve panel members are nominated by national medical specialty societies like the American Academy of Thoracic Surgery, while several seats are occupied by representatives from the health insurance industry.

In other words, the AMA isn’t offering a software product. It just runs this process, keeping a list of codes that map to different medical procedures. You would think it would be free, a standard for everyone to use. But it’s not, and the AMA is able to charge a royalty for the license to use those codes. Every medical software company seems to have CPT codes and royalties built into their workflow.

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The trial of Mounir Boutaa has just opened in Bordeaux. This man is accused of killing his wife Chahinez Daoud in 2021 after abusing and beating her, dousing her with petrol, and burning her alive.

He took responsibility for his actions in advance: “At least his honour would be cleared and in prison, he would be seen as a man, whereas now he would be seen as a faggot,” a friend of Chahinez explained Boutaa’s reasoning.

The death of the 31-year-old woman came after a long series of complaints and alerts that went unheeded by police and courts. For some, it is an ‘archetypal femicide.’ But few voices are willing to denounce this atrocious crime as the result of an immigration from alien culture that France—and Europe—is utterly unprepared for and incapable of handling.

French institutions, mirroring a broader issue across Western Europe, have embraced multiculturalism and mass migration while failing to ensure that migrants integrate and uphold Western European values—leading to this all too familiar tragedy.

Watch it.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Power Line.

A video clip of U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Sec. Brooke Rollins at a recent cabinet meeting shows her making the following statement,

Even at the U.S. Department of Agriculture we’ve cancelled a $300,000 contract educating on food justice for queer and transgender farmers in San Francisco and a similar contract we cancelled in New York, again, educating queer and transgender farmers on food justice and food equality.

I’m not even sure what that means.

I’m with her. Over the years, I have traveled extensively throughout the 49 square miles of the City-County of San Francisco, I have never seen a plot of land that resembles a working farm.

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A Texas man who previously pleaded guilty to domestic violence is suspected of attacking three Tesla vehicles in a 4-wheeler ramming spree to protest Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Texarkana, Texas police charged 33-year-old Demarqeyun Marquize Cox on Wednesday with allegedly ramming an ATV-style vehicle into a Tesla car and believe he did the same to two others, according to statements from the city’s police department. Cox allegedly wrote “Elon” on the other two vehicles he attacked, reflecting a nationwide trend of protests, arson and vandalism against the Trump administration adviser’s company.

I guess we don’t have to wonder at his ‘ethnicity’.

County records show Cox pleaded guilty to assault causing bodily injury in a domestic violence case in 2014. A judge gave him deferred probation and dismissed the case in 2015.

Your tax dollars at work … sort of.

Newsbusters.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom hosts a podcast. Why not? He has plenty of free time.

In the last few years, California experienced a net population loss of nearly 1 million people. The average price of a home in the state is twice that of the national average. Its K-12 test scores in reading and math place California 37th of 50 states. The state’s January 2025 unemployment rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was the second highest in the nation.

As for California’s poverty rate, CalMatters, a respected, California-based nonprofit news organization, wrote: “The Public Policy Institute of California, using a methodology similar to that of the Census Bureau, calculated that in 2023, 31.1% of Californians were either at or near poverty. Deep poverty, defined as ‘families with less than half of the resources to meet basic needs,’ was at 3.4%.” (California’s homeless population, at an estimated 187,000, is the nation’s largest.)

In a separate report, CalMatters wrote, “Nearly a quarter of all unhoused Americans live in California — as well as 28% of all homeless veterans and 44% of all ‘chronically homeless’ Americans (people who have a disability and have been homeless for a significant period of time.)”

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The intelligence breach was bad enough, current and former fighter pilots said. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s refusal to acknowledge that he should not have disclosed sensitive information about when American fighter pilots would attack sites in Yemen, they said, was even worse.

On air bases, in aircraft carrier “ready rooms” and in communities near military bases this week, the news that senior officials in the Trump administration discussed plans for an impending attack on Signal, a commercial messaging app, angered and bewildered men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States.

The mistaken inclusion of the editor in chief of The Atlantic in the chat and Mr. Hegseth’s insistence that he did nothing wrong by disclosing the secret plans upend decades of military doctrine about operational security, a dozen Air Force and Navy fighter pilots said.

Note that they were endangered, not by anyone in the Trump administration, but by the ‘journalist’ that this writer for the NYT seems to admit was a probable traitor who would publish any information that he found out, however classified. Of course, the Time has to spin this as a problem with the administration, whereas the real problem is the apparatchiks of the Narrartive Media who can be depended upon to blab any classified information they come across to the four winds–and America’s enemies.

Nature.

The massive changes in US research brought about by the new administration of President Donald Trump are causing many scientists in the country to rethink their lives and careers. More than 1,200 scientists who responded to a Nature poll — three-quarters of the total respondents — are considering leaving the United States following the disruptions prompted by Trump. Europe and Canada were among the top choices for relocation.

Yeah,  well, they’re going to find out that there aren’t very many such jobs in Canada and Europe, which is why scientists from Canada and Europe come to the U.S., both for school and for after-school employment.

This student lost her research support and her stipend when the Trump administration shut down funding for the US Agency for International Development. Her adviser found emergency funds to support her in the short term, but she is scrambling to apply for teaching-assistant positions — now extremely competitive — to carry her through the rest of her programme.

The gravy train is entering the station and getting ready to stop. Time to get off and find a real job.

I’ll bet that, like the Democrats who swear up and down that they’re going to leave, this is all hot air and noise.

The Hill, a Voice of the Crust.

Hundreds of advocacy organizations have called on Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to reject a budget blueprint from House Republicans.

A letter sent to Thune, led by the liberal health care advocacy group Families USA, features more than 300 organizations, such as Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“We write to share our deep concerns about the House-passed budget reconciliation resolution—specifically the catastrophic health care cuts it would require and the resulting harm it would impose on families and communities across the country,” according to the letter, sent Wednesday.

As aways, proglodytes assume that if the government doesn’t do something, It Won’t Ever Get Done.

When they say ‘cuts’, they always refer to a reduction in spending increases, not actual cuts at all.

This country survived for centuries without the Federal government paying for people’s health care, and ‘families and communities across the country’ got along just fine. The actual problem they have is that they are afraid that the gravy train of Federal money is going to decrease–it’s too much to hope that it will stop completely–and this threatens their status and paychecks. The government’s job is to keep people safe and keep people honest, not to pay for their stuff.

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The UN Commission on the Status of Women concluded its annual meeting in New York last week. As always, sex radicals from the developed world did their best to push their agenda—under the cover of women’s equality—on rightly resistant countries in the developing world.

The meeting marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Fourth World Congress on Women, which took place in Beijing, China in 1995. There, delegates endorsed a Declaration and Platform for Action purportedly to achieve equality for women. And it was there that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton issued her rallying cry, “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights,” ushering in decades of debate on the world stage over the proper meaning of that claim.

The Beijing conference produced a progressive wish list, but negotiators kept abortion out of the final document. That battle didn’t end in 1995, though. Every subsequent meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women has witnessed a renewed debate over so-called sexual and reproductive health and rights, the Left’s umbrella term that includes abortion rights.

The UN has been run by bureaucrats that are either European or trained and educated by Europeans. These are the people who constitute the ‘TransGlobal Elite’. And it’s always going to be a problem. I personally think that we’d be better off outside of the UN than beating our heads against this particular wall.

Per Scott Adams:

“Did I coin ‘Dramacrats’? No, I did not. I stole that from a DM that I got, where somebody DMed it to me. But I love it. The Dramacrats. It puts it in perspective, ’cause I really do think that the Democrats are largely a theatrical production. And I mean that literally, in the sense that they are acting about how mad they are, they are acting about how much anything that they are talking about matters, and that’s all they have.”

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Mitochondria, often called the powerhouses of the cell, are responsible for producing the energy needed for nearly all vital cellular processes. Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland have now used cryo-electron tomography to study mitochondria in unprecedented detail, revealing new insights into their inner structure.

Their findings show that the proteins responsible for generating energy, known as respiratory complexes, do not work alone. Instead, they assemble into large structures called “supercomplexes,” which play a key role in efficiently producing ATP, the cell’s primary energy source.

Trudeau must be on ‘coast’ — he’s re-running cartoons from thirty years ago (except for Sunday, when he bashes Trump).

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Remember in 2006 when Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth and made lots of frightening claims about climate change, none of which came true?

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Illinois politicians’ latest attempt to impose their will on homeschooling began with a single tragic story of one child’s abuse. Lawmakers took that case of parental neglect and twisted it, expanded on it, and turned it into an indictment of homeschooling in general. Now they want new legislation to control it.

Homeschooling risks truancy, they say. And abuse, educational neglect and poor accountability. That’s how lawmakers are fear-mongering about Illinois’ long-standing, hands-off approach to homeschooling in an attempt to gain more power over parents and children.

But if you know anything about Illinois’ public education system, you’ll recognize the rank hypocrisy immediately. Illinois schools are full of truancy, abuse, educational neglect and poor accountability. Yet lawmakers do little to nothing about that. Instead, they’ve turned their attention towards the last form of education they don’t control.

The bill at hand, House Bill 2827, would force homeschooling parents – and private schools – to annually submit a declaration form to their local school district, with the potential penalty of fines and even jail time if parents don’t comply. Among other items, the bill also requires administrative and curriculum standards.

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Nearly all of the 70 people charged in a massive $250 million fraud case targeting federal child nutrition programs in Minnesota are Somali immigrants, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Between March 2020 and January 2022, they allegedly stole funds meant for feeding children, funneled through a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future. So far, 37 have pleaded guilty, and 7 have been convicted; the rest await trial.

The scam involved fake meal counts, rosters, and invoices submitted to the Minnesota Department of Education. “Feeding Our Future” acted as a sponsor for daycares and other sites, making it easy to file false claims during the COVID-era program expansion.

Minnesota, home to about 100,000 Somali immigrants—mostly in the Twin Cities—has long attracted refugees with “some of America’s most generous welfare and charity programs,” according to journalist Kelly Riddell. She also quoted professor Ahamed Samatar, who said, “Minnesota is exceptional in so many ways but it’s the closest thing in the United States to a true social democratic state.”

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A federal law granting broad immunity to vaccine administrators and others does not preempt charges that a mother’s constitutional rights were violated when her son was given a COVID-19 vaccine without her consent, the North Carolina Supreme Court has ruled.

What goes around comes around.

NewsMax.

One-third of the 15 judges in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where many of the cases are being heard over President Donald Trump’s actions, were born outside the United States, according to a new report.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

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Perish the thought….

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Peering into the jungle of microbes that live within us, researchers have stumbled across what seem to be an entire new class of virus-like objects.

“It’s insane,” says University of North Carolina cell biologist Mark Peifer, who was not involved in the study, told Elizabeth Pennisi at Science Magazine. “The more we look, the more crazy things we see.”

These mysterious bits of genetic material have no detectable sequences or even structural similarities known to any other biological agents.

So Stanford University biologist Ivan Zheludev and colleagues argue their strange discovery may not be viruses at all, but instead an entirely new group of entities that may help bridge the ancient gap between the simplest genetic molecules and more complex viruses.

“Obelisks comprise a class of diverse RNAs that have colonized, and gone unnoticed in, human, and global microbiomes,” the researchers write in a preprint paper.

Named after the highly-symmetrical, rod-like structures formed by its twisted lengths of RNA, the Obelisks’ genetic sequences are only around 1,000 characters (nucleotides) in size. In fact, this brevity is likely one of the reasons we’ve failed to notice them previously.

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n a recent essay, scientists challenge the prevailing genetic-focused model of cancer, advocating for a shift towards more holistic views that include non-genetic factors in cancer development.

They criticize the inconsistencies in current genetic research and propose considering alternative paradigms like disruptions in gene regulatory networks and tissue organization theories. This approach could lead to more effective cancer treatments and preventive measures against environmental non-mutagenic carcinogens.

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In the end, we are left with a strange theological message: the road to environmental heaven is paved with good intentions, reinforced stitching, and a sturdy sense of self-righteousness. And if you can’t save the Earth, at least make sure your bag says you tried.

The New Neo.

This article caught my eye. It describes what you might call the Rosie O’Donnell phenomenon of people leaving the country because of their hatred of Trump and fear of what he has in store for them. Ordinarily the latter bears zero relation to reality. But that seems to be the echo chamber in which they live, and they’re willing to act on it.

These proglodytes are afraid that Trump might do to them what they’d love to do to us.

I can’t even figure out what rhetoric of Trump they might be relying on to think that those rights would be threatened by Trump during his term. He did nothing about it during his first term, either. And a policy of blocking medical transition for youths actually supports gay people, because a great number of de-transitioners finally settle into accepting that they are gay rather than trans.

But logic has little to nothing to do with fear of Trump.

Good riddance, I say.

Jonathan Turley.

Yesterday, there was a curious aspect to the coverage of the video of a woman attacking a young man for wearing a MAGA hat. Ignored by many mainstream outlets, conservative news sites described the woman as a “Karen” who got “karma.”

The video below was viewed as a funny payback as the woman fell while chasing the man from the New York subway car. However, the incident is not karma but a crime. This is political violence perpetrated on the New York subway, and yet no one in New York seems to be calling for the arrest of this person.

If you watch the video, the woman starts by harassing the young man in the subway car. She is shown yelling, “If you f—-ing voted for Trump, you’re a racist!… He’s a racist!”

One can dismiss the verbal attacks as an exercise of free speech. However, she then repeatedly grabs and strikes the young man as she chases him from the car:

Of course, if he defended himself, he’d be the one in jail for ‘hitting a girl’.

Read it.

Since returning to the White House on Jan. 20, President Donald Trump has unleashed a storm of executive orders, a great many of which have been halted or blocked—not by the now-Republican-controlled Congress, but by federal district courts. According to numbers compiled by the Harvard Law Review, U.S. district courts have issued more sweeping injunctions against Trump in the past two months than they have against three former presidents over their entire terms.

Since Jan. 20, lower courts have imposed 15 nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration, compared to what the Harvard Law Review recounts as six over the course of George W. Bush’s eight-year presidency, 12 over the course of Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House, and 14 during Joe Biden’s single four-year term.

During his first term, Trump was subjected to 64 nationwide injunctions. If inferior courts continue issuing nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration at the current rate (15 for every two months in office), then the second Trump administration will have accumulated 360 nationwide injunctions by the time the president leaves office—and a grand total of 424 over the course of both of Trump’s terms. However, there have been a total of over 45 rulings or more targeted injunctions leveled against the second Trump administration overall, according to The New York Times.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

“Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”  – 118 USC Ch 115.

This looks to be treason. straight up.

UPDATE: ‘It is highly classified’: Hegseth leaked sensitive attack details, former officials say (Politico)

If true, this merely underscores the treasonable nature of publicizing this information.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Ponder in your own mind to what extent somebody writing for the NYT will actually have a clue as to ‘why young people voted’ one way or another.

The most striking feature of the young adult Trump swing is that it occurred even though there has been no significant recent increase in the proportion of young adults who identify as conservative. Data from the Cooperative Election Study, a national survey with more than 50,000 respondents during election years, show that between 2006 and 2023, about 23 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 identified as either “conservative” or “very conservative” on average, a number that fluctuated only modestly year to year. The 2024 numbers, which the study’s researchers have shared with me, show no meaningful departure from this pattern. (Despite fears of the influence of a misogynistic online “manosphere,” the ratio of young men to young women who identify as conservative did not change appreciably, either.)

Likewise, the survey registered only modest changes in the political party affiliations of young adults over the past two decades. Young people have been softening in their commitment to the Democrats, but they’ve been softening in their commitment to the Republicans as well. In place of these loyalties a growing number say they are independents.

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Look at all the ways that individual judges have hamstrung the Trump administration. A district court judge recently blocked Trump’s executive order removing transgender individuals from the military. Another judge ordered the Trump administration to send two men who are pretending to be women into a women’s prison. One federal judge ordered the administration to restore government webpages that promote the Left’s transgender narrative.

A different district court judge stopped the Trump administration from disbanding the wasteful United States Agency for International Development. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appointed Jeremy Lewin to a high-level position in USAID. The judge later ruled that Lewin wasn’t allowed to serve in that role.

Last weekend, another federal judge blocked the Trump administration from deporting illegal immigrant gang members. He even unsuccessfully attempted to force them to turn around flights that were already in the air. These examples are only the tip of the judicial overreach iceberg.

Now, all presidential administrations face lawsuits, but what’s happening here is well beyond historical norms. In his four years in office, former President Joe Biden’s administration received 14 federal injunctions. In less than two months, judges have already hit the Trump administration with more than that.

Of course, Biden wasn’t acting against the Deep State, either.

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Got that right.

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The Trump Effect in action.

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California’s decline has grown so stark that even steadfast Democratic allies can no longer deny the truth: the state’s extreme left-wing policies have plunged it into chaos.

Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box, has joined the chorus of voices condemning the Democratic Party’s mismanagement of California, asserting that the party’s entire political apparatus demands a complete overhaul. Levie, who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, made the pointed remarks during an interview with co-founder and former Lattice CEO, Jack Altman.

“We live in California. It should be like the greatest place on Earth on every dimension. How do you beat this weather? You’ve completely created the atmosphere of every major tech company,” Levie explained. You have Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech. You have institutions and all the venture capital. You’re sitting on this incredible asset and then literally you can’t make it affordable to live here. That’s just insane.”

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Tonight’s NBC Nightly News reporting on the Senate hearing to confirm business executive Frank Bisignano as head of the Social Security Administration had a familiar sound to it. If you listen closely enough, you’ll hear the kind of fearmongering that was a staple of a bygone era.

If you listen closely enough, you’ll get taken back to the late ‘aughts and early teens, when Democrat messaging centered around scaring seniors into believing that evil Republicans were out to gut Social Security. One widely mocked ad featured a Paul Ryan lookalike wheeling an elderly woman to a cliff and throwing her right off.

This is, basically, the tone of Ryan Nobles’ item on Bisignano’s confirmation hearing. Nobles found a willing senior to play the role of frightened grandma as he advocated on behalf of the program, casting President Donald Trump and Tesla/SpaceX founder Elon Musk as the proverbial Paul Ryans holding Grandma’s wheelchair at the cliff’s edge.

In order to be credible, this report relies both on a willing suspension of disbelief and on a major omission: President Trump’s own commitment to preserve Social Security and Medicare. None of this gets mentioned at any point in the report. Instead, Nobles interchanges efficiency cuts with cuts to the program itself. Deceptive stuff intent on scaring seniors into voting Democrat. The Resistance Media is in high gear.

The Narrative Media have never shown any reluctance to lie if it would help advance the proglodyte agenda. It’s what they do.

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In 1974, Congress created the Legal Services Corporation to connect lower-income Americans involved in civil disputes with free legal help. The law that established the agency stipulated that authorization for its funding would expire in 1980, when lawmakers were required to vote on whether to keep it alive.

They never did. Still, Congress has funded LSC every year since. In fiscal 2025, its 51st year, LSC’s 135 employees will spend 95% of its now $560 million annual budget paying legal groups to represent Americans in cases such as eviction, domestic violence, and disputes over government benefits, according to Ron Flagg, the agency’s president since 2020.

“LSC would welcome reauthorization,” Flagg said. “We haven’t hidden from it. Every budget cycle, we go through an exhaustive process before Congress appropriates funds — dozens of meetings with leaders of both parties. We demonstrate our return on investment, how we help 2 million Americans get life-saving legal help.”

The Legal Services Corp. now stands as America’s oldest “Zombie” program, but it’s far from unique. At a time when the Trump administration is moving aggressively to scale back government, including eliminating the entire Education Department, it’s sobering to note that 1,503 agencies or programs live on despite expired authorizations, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Another 155 will expire on Sept. 30. The Zombies, nearly half of which have been officially dead for more than a decade, persist in a budgetary netherworld. In a deep dive last year, CBO analysts were able to find dollar amounts for 491 of the programs, with total expenditures of $516 billion. They don’t know how much funding the other programs received.

Slate, a Voice of the Crust.

On Monday, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice made two arguments in two different courts that, taken together, amount to a legal claim of near-dictatorial power by Trump. First, it informed a federal appeals court that the president has authority to declare any noncitizens to be “alien enemies” and to deport them to foreign prison, where they will be forced to perform hard labor indefinitely—without notice, a hearing, or any meaningful opportunity to prove their innocence. Second, it refused to provide U.S. District Judge James Boasberg with details of these mass deportation operations, even in a closed courtroom, even under seal, insisting that Boasberg’s authority must yield to the “mandate of the electorate.” In other words, Trump’s electoral victory grants him an absolute right to conduct these deportations, rendering them unreviewable by the judiciary.

Well, no. What renders them ‘unreviewable by the judiciary’ is the President’s plenary power, under the Constitution, to conduct American foreign policy. This is basic Separation of Powers stuff, and has nothing to do with any ‘mandate of the electorate’. This whole ‘mandate of the electorate’ business refers to the fundamental value of democracy, which sock-puppets for the Democrat party purport to value higher than any other value. Either we live in a democratic system in which people get to determine policy by electing certain people to do that stuff for them, or we do not.

What terrifies Slate and other constituents of the Narrative Media is the prospect that democracy doesn’t mean that they win all the time. And that prospect upsets their entire world-view.

Dallas Observer.

Plano, the so-called “hot air balloon capital of Texas,” landed at No. 6 in the 10 Best Cities in the U.S. to Live In 2025 from Niche, a data-driven platform used to provide information on schools, cities and real estate across the U.S. Niche defines a city as “a principal city for an urbanized area with a population of 100,000 or more.”

Uh, okay. Kind of like getting a literary prize for Best Typeface, but okay.

The recently published list used data from Niche, an AI platform that Forbes says offers “insights into cities, suburbs and neighborhoods across the U.S.” Niche analyzes categories such as best city, best neighborhood, and best spots for young professionals. Niche likes what it sees in Plano.

I’m curious: Why would anybody care about what a AI picks, given the egregious errors of which AI has been guilty? (Other than a published periodical that needs attention, of course.)

Now, I live in Plano and I think it’s a pretty good place to live, but ‘sixth best in the U.S.’? I’m not sure I buy that.

Niche gives Plano an overall score of A+, with its public schools, jobs, nightlife, diversity and health and fitness all receiving A scores. For Dallas-dwellers who rarely venture north of Interstate 635, hearing that Plano is a diverse city with lots of fun to be had might come as a shock, but both are true. According to the latest census, Plano’s population is 53% white, 22% Asian, 16% Hispanic or Latino and 9% Black. A 2020 Dallas Morning News report noted that Plano was slightly more diverse than Dallas.

Ah, there we go. Apparently some people consider ‘diversity’ a feature rather than a bug. I venture to suggest that it’s not so much the ‘diversity’ as it is the type of ‘diversity’ that’s important.

Read it.

In a new video released by state media, two Iranian military leaders responsible for the country’s weapons programs are seen riding through a long, weapons-packed tunnel. Set to ominous music, the 85-second video was published amid growing regional tensions and infers that Iran can withstand an attack and deliver a response. But the video that is made to show off Iranian standoff attack capabilities also highlights a major vulnerability.

As they drive through the facility, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Hossein Bagheri, chief of staff of Iran’s Armed Forces and Amir Ali Hajizadeh, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Aerospace Force (IRGC-AF) commander, show off some of Iran’s most advanced missiles and rockets. There are Kheybar Shekans, Ghadr-Hs, Sejjils, and Haj Qassems, as well as the Paveh Land Attack Cruise Missiles. Iran used several of these weapons in an attack on Israel last fall.

As for that aforementioned glaring vulnerability, the munitions are stored out in the open in long continuous tunnels and large caverns with no, or at least limited, blast doors or separated revetments. That could result in devastating consequences should the facility be breached in an attack. The lack of these protective measures could lead to an absolutely massive chain reaction of secondary explosions. This is an interesting revelation because other Iranian underground weapons caverns, especially those that can launch missiles through apertures in the surface, do appear to have these measures, as least to some degree.

Read it.

Taiwan has revealed a new drone boat, or uncrewed surface vessel (USV), the Endeavor Manta. Somewhat surprisingly, this is said to be the first of its kind to have been developed for the Republic of China Navy (ROCN). While global interest in this class of vessels has been growing fast recently, especially in the wake of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Endeavor Manta has been tailored specifically to help defend Taiwan against a possible Chinese invasion.

The existence of the Endeavor Manta was disclosed today by Taiwan’s China Shipbuilding Corporation (CSBC Corp.), which produces ships and submarines for military and civilian use, during a launch event held in the port of Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan. The event included a demonstration of the USV’s at-sea capabilities and TWZ has reached out to the company for more information.

Quillette.

Anyone who keeps an eye on US political discourse these days will be familiar with the epithet TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome, a term routinely used to describe the irrationality of President Donald Trump’s critics. The term frequently crops up in editorial writing, comment threads, social-media debates, and ordinary conversation: “Clearly suffering from TDS”; “Another victim of TDS”; “Typical TDS symptoms,” and so on. The implication is that the critic in question is afflicted by a pathology that makes objective analysis of Trump and his policies impossible.

The origins of the TDS accusation date back to what now seem like the placid years of the George W. Bush presidency. In a scathing 2003 article about Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean for the Washington Post, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote: “A plague is abroad in the land. Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.” This virus, Krauthammer continued, “is spreading. It is, of course, epidemic in New York’s Upper West Side and the tonier parts of Los Angeles, where the very sight of the president … caused dozens of cases of apoplexy in otherwise healthy adults.”

Bush, of course, was widely (and wildly) vilified in those days. A cottage industry of books, articles, and punditry condemned his invasion of Iraq, his stewardship of the US economy, his response to the flooding of New Orleans, his deference to Machiavellian subordinates like Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his shadowy ties to American and Saudi oil interests. Popular documentaries included Michael Moore’s 2004 polemic Fahrenheit 9/11 and even a 2006 “mockumentary” titled Death of a President, about Bush’s fictionalised assassination. By the end of his second term, a Gallup poll found that Bush’s approval rating had slumped to a lowly 25 percent. Bush Derangement Syndrome, it seemed, was highly contagious.