Popular mythology to the contrary notwithstanding, ‘reform’ does not mean ‘improve’.

Nor does it mean ‘correct’ or ‘fix’ or ‘put right’.

All it means is ‘change’, and change can be bad or good.

That’s all it means.

Read it.

By the way, as I see it, the people being removed are being removed because they entered the country illegally. That they supposedly have violent criminal backgrounds or are members of violent gangs is the reason for prioritizing their removal, but not the sole reason for their removal. Some of the “due process” concerns I have read or heard pertain to whether or not these people are actually gang members. But I don’t see that distinction as relevant to the question of whether they can be removed because they entered the country illegally.

And I understand that the reason these people were removed to El Salvador rather than to their home country of Venezuela is that Venezuela refused to allow them back in.

I can kinda understand having a little more process when revoking previously granted permission to enter the country (i.e., revoking a “green card” or a visa) because the person violated the terms of the permission. But I still don’t see that those processes need to be as stringent as the full criminal due process requirements. Being sent back to your home country is categorically different from being sentenced to prison or to death.

Proglodytes chant ‘DUE PROCESS! DUE PROCESS! DUE PROCESS!’ as if it were an magical spell that will act as a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card (which is actually Habeas Corpus, but that’s law school talking).

What everybody is ignoring is the fundamental question of: What ‘process’ is ‘due’?

If you accuse someone of Not Following The Rules, then the immediate concern is, what version of The Rules are you talking about? Because the legal system has many different sets of The Rules depending on the circumstances, and nobody seems willing to do the heavy lifting of talking about which set of The Rules applies.

Read it.

Failed 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz was forced to embarrassingly walk back his unhinged comments about rooting for the death of Tesla Motors after realizing that more than a million Minnesota residents held shares of Elon Musk’s technology company through their state-run retirement accounts.

Burn the heretics! Unless the government, upon which all politically correct people depend, own their stock….

Read it.

“In 1997, Jeanette Vizguerra left Mexico City for Colorado, where she became a janitor and immigration reform advocate,” the Wednesday article in Time read. “Twenty years later, she was one of the most influential people in the world.” Celebrities often write these tribute articles. Vizguerra was championed by actress America Ferrera, who starred in the TV shows Ugly Betty and Superstore and the dreadful Barbie movie.

…

Team Biden’s administration allowed illegal immigrants to stay in churches or schools to avoid arrest, and when Team Trump revoked that on January 21, liberal journalists had a cow over how ICE agents would be able to go into public or sacred spaces and arrest people.

…

For added unintentional comedy, DelGuidice reported that Denver Mayor Mike Johnston (D) is hopping mad at this “controversial” detention. He called it “Putin-style persecution of political dissidents.” As opposed to the audacity of illegal immigrants publicly advocating illegal immigration. Democrats — including Time magazine editors and reporters — love that bold, risky “underdog” radicalism.

ZMan:

“Reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it” is a useful way of thinking about much of what makes up our politics. The Democrats and the people we call the left are running into this exact same problem as they struggle to deal with Trump. They are desperately trying to organize a resistance, but they are finding few takers. The “leaders” are now people like Ocasio-Cortez.

It is one of the rare occasions where the people we call the right were ahead of the people we call the left. The collapse of conservatism started in 2015 when the fossils in charge of it were pushed aside by a new movement and a new leader. The people we call the left continued on with business as usual, assuming that their dancing partner would eventually return.

That is what Chuck Schumer told people last year. He just assumed everything would return to normal. The old arrangement had been in place for so long that party leadership came to think it was the natural order. The Democrats now face a future in which their remaining talent is too old to make it up the stairs and its young talent is too crazy and stupid to be allowed near the stairs.

Follow the money.

Read it.

The “no-kid” trend—that idea that a woman, to truly flourish and be free, should refrain from having children—has become, in France as elsewhere, a real mania. Young women publish an increasing number of essays, more or less inspired, in which they try to convince themselves and others that the world would be so much better if we did not reproduce. The press piles on, explaining with a lot of statistical arguments why it is not a good idea to have kids. But the muses of navel-gazing, keen to preserve what they think is their own little individual happiness, are not very clear-sighted about the hell they are preparing for us all if everyone decides to follow their dubious advice.

The reasons put forward for not having children are well-known, so much so that they are repeated ad nauseam by the mainstream media, especially the women’s press. The press reminds us with forceful figures that a child is tremendously expensive and that, for the same price, we could have several dogs (eight, to be accurate [sic]). Indeed, you do have to spend money to have children: on a car, housing, school. But why would it be one of the only areas where we would do the math, in the world of unlimited welfare state and public spending?

Having children, they say, also prevents women from having a career and developing professionally—the arguments are starting to get a bit old. More in vogue is the idea that children are anti-environmental: they consume, they produce waste, and the use of washable diapers and recyclable toys will not be enough to stop the cataclysm that is coming to sweep us all away. More ‘intellectual’ and more elaborate is the argument that bearing children is the attitude expected by the dominant patriarchy to keep women in a state of eternal subordination.

The thing is that, long-term, this is a self-correcting problem. Everybody alive today is the descendant of women who had children. If a woman doesn’t have children, her genes are flushed from the gene pool and all that are left are the descendants of women who had children. Natural selection works whether you want it to or not; sure, it takes a while, but evolution has all the time in the world.

Read it.

“Donald Trump has officially declared war on America’s students,” Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., posted on X.

Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, responded to the news by accusing the administration of aiming to “demolish the nation’s public education system.”

“I’m so mad, I’m spitting mad about this, because it’s hurting the people who can’t vote, children don’t vote!” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said on MSNBC.

These people know, of course, that eliminating the Department of Education doesn’t actually mean “declaring war on America’s students” or demolishing the “public education system.” (Even school choice, which may weaken public schools by allowing tax dollars to follow students to home schooling and other options, will only introduce competition for public schools, not destroy them.)

President Trump didn’t order the demolishing of schools—he ordered the Department of Education to begin the process of turning its functions over to state education departments and to other federal agencies.

The Department of Education wasn’t ever doing any education, much less the education of children. It’s function was to funnel money taken from taxpayers to various education-related Democrat groups, like teachers’ unions, ‘education’ think-tanks, and left-leaning colleges and universities.

“Teacher unions benefit from access to a central place where they can advocate for programs that benefit them,” Butcher told The Daily Signal in a Friday interview. He mentioned Title II spending, which funds teacher training and recruitment. “Any increase in federal Title II spending allows them to promote the idea that they need to hire more staff, which potentially gives them more members.”

“Having access to a central office from which they can lobby for large sums is more cost-effective to them than 50 different states,” he explained. However, having a central office may become a two-edged sword.

Follow the money….

Read it.

Pretty much every day, another customer clutching an old typewriter will walk into Mike Marr’s shop in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Marr carefully looks the machine over. Invariably, it will be a total mess. Made decades ago, the hunk of heavy metal bristling with moving parts is now laced with years of grime. The keys are too stiff. Or maybe the paper that’s supposed to glide through it keeps getting stuck.

“Do you think you can get it going again?” the customer will ask, a touch of anxiety in their voice. Marr, who has been repairing typewriters for more than 20 years, will say he’ll give it his best shot.

“When they come in and pick that typewriter up, just seeing their smile is everything to us,” he says. Even in the year 2025, a century and a half after the first commercially successful typewriter was introduced to the American public, surprising numbers of people in the US are still using these machines. And not just for fun – many of Marr’s customers are businesses. “We’re still servicing probably 20 to 25 typewriters a week,” he says. He employs three other people in his shop to keep up with the demand. “Isn’t that crazy?”

…

It’s very hard to hack a typewriter since they are not connected to the internet.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.

And then the doors shut.

By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.

Read it.

Found throughout the British Isles under corner shop heat lamps and behind service station windows, the jumbo breakfast roll occupies an important place in the contemporary zeitgeist, a steadfast sentinel unmoving throughout this changing world. Cheap, ultra-processed, and unhealthy, viewed by an outsider this humble food might be regarded as little more than a culinary cry for help. But that is missing the point.

Immortalised by the Irish comedian Pat Shortt in his surprisingly catchy 2006 number one hit of the same name (yes, really), the jumbo breakfast roll is defined as including two eggs, two sausages, four pieces of bacon, and one piece each of black and white pudding, squashed into a bread roll, often with sauce, butter, or both. While ingredients vary from place to place and the precise name of such provisions can differ, the sentiment of this sandwich is the same everywhere. It exists to provide answers when you do not have enough energy left to ask any questions.

When you find yourself trundling into a fuel forecourt after a four hour drive, a far-cry from the Gloucester services, you can count on one thing to be there. When you have an unexpected meeting right when you were planning to take lunch, you can’t waste time waiting for your meal to be cooked fresh. It is both nostalgic and fulfilling, reliable and constant yet easily customisable. Like a bridge over troubled water, the jumbo breakfast roll is there for you in your weakest and weariest moments.

Read it.

A few days after the anniversary of Oct 7, the New York Times reported that Columbia University Apartheid Divest officially endorsed terrorism against Jews and withdrew an apology by one of its members for threatening to kill Jews.

Over the past weeks, the paper and the entire Democratic Party, including 103 members of Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Minority Leader Chuck. Schumer, the Jewish Democratic Council of America led by Kamala’s former foreign policy advisor, went all in on fighting for Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in CUAD who had defended terrorism, from being deported.

The signatories to a letter standing up for a Syrian national who had taken part in a pro-terrorist group’s harassment of Jewish students and faculty included half of House Democrats, not only extremists like AOC and Rep. Ilhan Omar, but Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking House Judiciary Democrat, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with multiple House Democrats of Jewish ancestry and those who represent large Jewish districts including Rep. Jerrold Nadler in New York, as well as Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove and Rep. Laura Friedman who holds down Sen. Adam Schiff’s old seat, in the LA area. The same Democrat politicians who had remained silent when Jewish students and faculty were being terrorized on campuses in their areas now rushed to the barricades for a member of a group that had openly celebrated the murder of Jews.

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Let’s clarify one important issue up front: Progressives do not believe in democracy. They use the term frequently as a Pavlovian bell to whip useful idiot activists into a frothing frenzy, but there is no measure by which they have proven they care about Democracy or even know what it is. And since this is the case, we have to ask – What do they really mean when they use the word?

If we consider the traditional definition of “majority rule”, then this is clearly not what leftists support. That is to say, they only support majority rule when they represent the majority. In the case of the 2024 election Donald Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, which means he does in fact represent the majority. Yet, Democrats and their ilk continue to accuse him of being a “threat to democracy”, and they have openly and actively refused to accept the will of the people.

Therefore, one can only conclude that leftists want something other than democracy. And, given their track record over the last four years in which they attempted mass online censorship and a global authoritarian coup using pandemic hysteria as a weapon, there is little doubt who the true autocrats really are.

They also love to attach the tag ‘watchdog’ to their busybody organizations set up to make sure that everybody is getting with their program. Whenever you see the word ‘watchdog’ in a headline, it refers to an organization set up by proglodytes to bitch and moan about people who aren’t being Woke enough for them.

Read it.

The “autopen” is in vogue. On March 17, President Donald Trump announced in a late-night social media post that he would ignore several pardons issued by his predecessor, President Joe Biden, because they were allegedly signed by autopen.

An autopen is a machine that reproduces handwriting. In the case of elected officials, who are expected to sign thousands of official documents on a regular basis, autopens are often used to reproduce their signatures in lieu of them signing each paper by their own hand.

The use of autopens has raised constitutional questions for some after Trump’s accusations of autopen use by Biden. They say that autopen use casts doubt on whether Biden knew the documents were being signed at all, thus implicating their validity.

NBC News, a Voice of the Crust.

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s sweeping federal layoffs aren’t just wreaking havoc on tens of thousands of employees across the country.

Lawmakers in both parties are warning the cuts will harm the government’s ability to recruit young people out of college — as well as highly skilled candidates from the private sector — causing a ripple effect that could be felt for years or even decades.

“The recruiting challenge they’re creating for themselves is enormous,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., whose state is home to hundreds of thousands of federal workers, said of the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts. “I don’t think that’s an accidental byproduct. I think that’s a known consequence — and they don’t care.”

That’s not a bug,  it’s a feature. The last thing we need is another generation where getting a government job is the height of their ambtion.

Read it.

At their most basic, seed oils are extracted from seeds. This might seem harmless—after all, olive oil comes from olives, and coconut oil from coconuts.

But not all seed oils are the same. Some, like sesame and flaxseed oil, have been integral to traditional diets for centuries and are extracted through natural, cold-press methods that preserve their nutrients and antioxidants.

Others, however, are highly processed. Industrial seed oils—like soybean, corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, cottonseed, grapeseed, and rice bran—are mass-produced through high-heat extraction and chemical refining.

Manufacturers frequently use solvents like hexane to extract the maximum amount of oil. These oils are refined, bleached, and deodorized, earning them the label “RBD” oils. This process makes them neutral in taste and more shelf-stable, but it also removes beneficial compounds like vitamin E and antioxidants.

Many industrial seed oils were never intended for human consumption. Canola oil began as rapeseed oil, primarily used as a machine lubricant until Canadian scientists modified it in the 1970s to remove toxic compounds. The name itself—a blend of “Canada” and “oil”—was a marketing invention. “Vegetable oil” is another misleading term—it’s often a blend of industrial seed oils marketed to sound healthier than it is.

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One of the seven small federal agencies that President Donald Trump ordered downsized or eliminated on Friday was rife with corruption, with its employees hiring friends and relatives, commissioning paintings of themselves, and using government credit cards to indulge in constant luxuries.

The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) occupied a nine-story office tower on D.C.’s K Street for only 60 employees, many of whom actually worked from home, prior to the pandemic. Its managers had luxury suites with full bathrooms; one manager would often be “in the shower” when she was needed, while another used her bathroom as a cigarette lounge. FMCS recorded its director as being on a years-long business trip to D.C. so he could have all of his meals and living expenses covered by taxpayers, simply for showing up to the office.

FMCS is a 230-employee agency that exists to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses. As an “independent agency,” its director nominally reports to the president, but the agency is so small that in effect, there is no oversight at all — and it showed, becoming a real-life caricature of all the excesses that the Department of Government Efficiency has alleged take place in government.

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Most Americans have absolutely no idea how we got into the mess that we are in today. The reason why the U.S. government is 36 trillion dollars in debt and our society as a whole is 102 trillion dollars in debt is because the system is performing exactly as it was designed. We have a system that was literally designed to create colossal amounts of debt. But if you ask most Americans about this, they cannot tell you what the Federal Reserve is or why it is at the heart of our economic problems. When Americans get into discussions about the economy, most of them still blame either the Democrats or the Republicans for our rapidly growing economic problems. But the truth is that the institution with the most power over our economic system is the Federal Reserve.

So exactly what is the Federal Reserve? Most people would say that it is an agency of the federal government. But that is not entirely accurate. In fact, the Federal Reserve itself has argued in court that it is not an agency of the federal government. The truth is that the Federal Reserve is a privately-owned banking cartel that has been given a perpetual monopoly over our monetary system by the U.S. Congress. This privately-owned central bank has been destroying the value of the U.S. dollar for decades, it has run our economy into the ground, and it has driven the U.S. government to the brink of bankruptcy. The Federal Reserve operates in great secrecy and it acts as if it is not accountable to the American people. Yet the decisions that the Federal Reserve makes have a dramatic impact on the lives of every single American citizen.

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You’re cutting yourself a single slice of cake. You grab a butter knife out of the drawer, hack off a moist wedge, and munch away to your mouth’s delight. The next day, you’re cutting forty slices of cake for the whole office. You grab a large chef’s knife, warm it with hot water, and cube out the sheet cake without causing too much trauma to the icing. Next week, you’re starting at your cousin’s bakery. You’re supposed to cut a few thousand slices of cake, week in, week out. You suspect your haggardly knifework won’t do.

In the home kitchen, any old knife will do the job when it comes to slicing cakes, pies, and pastries. When it comes to commercial kitchens, though, presentation is everything and perfection is the bare minimum. Thankfully, there’s a better grade of cutting tool out there—and it’s more high tech than you might think.

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One moment a flounder lies hidden in the sandy bottom of the ocean, the next it vanishes in the bloody frenzy of a shark’s dinner. The shark didn’t see or hear the fish; it pinpointed it from the infinitesimal electrical signals of the flounder’s beating heart.

This seeming superpower is called electroreception. It allows sharks to locate electric fields from a few feet away using sensory organs in their skin.

The flounder’s signal sparks a “little jolt in the shark’s brain,” says Chris Braun, who studies animal sensory systems at Hunter College in New York. To appreciate how the shark zeroes in on the flounder, says Duncan Leitch, who researches sensory adaptations in vertebrates at the University of California, Los Angeles, imagine “navigating toward a hot lightbulb with your eyes closed and hand outstretched.”

Electroreception is an extra sense, not a substitute. Sharks hear well, have good vision, and can smell blood in the water from a quarter mile away. But within a few feet, electroreception is the go-to sense. You don’t want to challenge a shark to a game of hide-and-seek.

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In a startling exposé, Lachlan Phillips, a former member of Extinction Rebellion (XR), has lifted the lid on what he claims are the true motives behind the climate activist group. Phillips, who spent several years with the organisation and produced over 60 videos for their campaigns, has revealed that XR’s agenda is not about saving the planet but about controlling the population and inciting a Communist revolution.

Read it.

Poland is preparing to lay up to one million anti-personnel mines along its eastern border as part of its newly announced East Shield defense initiative, according to Pawe? Bejda, secretary of state at the Ministry of National Defense.

The decision comes as Poland, alongside Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, withdraws from the Ottawa Convention, which bans the use, production, and transfer of such mines.

“We have no choice. The situation at the border is very serious. Mines will be one of the elements of the East Shield,” Bejda stated in an interview with RMF FM, highlighting Poland’s increasing focus on fortifying its defenses against potential threats from Russia and Belarus.

Poland, along with its Baltic allies, recently announced its withdrawal from the Ottawa Convention, citing the need for stronger border security.

“We do not have anti-personnel mines. They have to be produced — we have such capabilities. We want these mines to be manufactured in Poland,” Bejda said, revealing that the state-owned PGZ Group will oversee their production.

Read it.

Even the most opinionated become circumspect when the discussion turns to The Addiction Economy, for the term The Addiction Economy calls things by their real name, which disrupts our protective shield of denial.

Yes, denial, for ours is an Economy of Denial, where the surface stability of normalcy demands we avoid calling things by their real name at all costs, for that lays bare the core mechanisms of the Economy of Denial: addiction, extortion, deception. This is a jarring, disturbing mirror, for we see our own reflection.

We become quiet when The Addiction Economy comes up, for the core concept here is that highly profitable addictions have been normalized to the degree that the majority of the populace is addicted but doesn’t identify their addiction as an addiction because the words addiction and extortion have such negative connotations that they threaten both our sense of normalcy (i.e. belonging to the safe, stable, acceptable majority) and our self-pride that we’re far above the poor lost souls who succumb to addiction.

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

A host of federal government agencies have overseen massive spending for years while greatly expanding their workforces, according to an OpenTheBooks report.

Annual spending across multiple federal government agencies has exploded over the past several years, often outpacing growth of staff and even inflation rates, according to a report from OpenTheBooks first obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The report comes amid President Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to crack down on wasteful spending across the federal government and reduce the federal workforce to save American taxpayers money.

The Department of Commerce’s annual spending grew from roughly $13.1 million in 2021—the year former President Joe Biden took office—to an estimated $20.5 million in 2024, OpenTheBooks’ report found. Meanwhile, the department’s workforce declined from 53,939 in 2020 to 47,650 in 2024.

“Time after time, at agency after agency, we see spending skyrocketing since 2000, even when headcounts grew modestly and stayed flat,” OpenTheBooks wrote in the report. “In this most recent batch of examples, we also saw Biden administration spending priorities reveal themselves through the outlays at key agencies”

Jerry Pournelle was fond of saying that the actual function of government is to hire and pay government em,ployees . These guys have got it down.

Read it.

As it does.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia anyone can edit, distorted the descriptions of various Cabinet nominees after President Donald Trump named them “in an attempt to highlight damaging information,” according to the Media Research Center.

All it takes is for some ‘journalist’ or ‘expert’ to publish some slur about you for it to be enshrined in your Wikipedia bio, especially if you disagree in any way with the Woke Narrative.

Watch it.

We have the technology. This appears to be more efficient than the normal evaporative operation using nasty chemicals like freon.

Read it.

The evolutionary path of modern humans is more complex than previously thought, as new evidence suggests an ancient human ancestral population split into two separate groups that eventually reunited.

According to a new genome sequence analysis conducted by the University of Cambridge, these ancient populations split around 1.5 million years ago before diverging genetically and then reconnecting roughly 300,000 years ago. The modern humans that first arose in Africa between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago were not an even mix, though, as one of these ancestral populations donated 80% of the current genome.

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Advances in the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 over the past 15 years have yielded important new insights into the roles that specific genes play in many diseases. But to date this technology — which allows scientists to use a “guide” RNA to modify DNA sequences and evaluate the effects — is able to target, delete, replace, or modify only single gene sequences with a single guide RNA and has limited ability to assess multiple genetic changes simultaneously.

Now, however, Yale scientists have developed a series of sophisticated mouse models using CRISPR (“clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”) technology that allows them to simultaneously assess genetic interactions on a host of immunological responses to multiple diseases, including cancer.

The New Neo.

These judges apparently consider themselves the firewall against Trump and the troglodytes who elected him.

…

So it’s The Left Strikes Back. Problems at the ballot box? Send in the judiciary. What failed to be accomplished through the kangaroo court lawfare to which Trump was subjected prior to his election – the goal being to prevent him from being elected to a second term at all – could possibly be accomplished by tying his hands whenever he tries to do much of anything as president. These are not unbiased decisions for the most part, but these judges consider it their duty to stop the right from changing things in any big way.

It’s somewhat similar to Russiagate during Trump’s first term, which was an attempt by the intelligence community and the FBI, DOJ, and press to hamstring Trump and if possible remove him from office. That didn’t work, either. Will this? It really depends on SCOTUS, and many people are worried about how Roberts will see his role and that of the Supreme Court.

Read it.

Craig Iffland, an expert on the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, says the files released Tuesday evening show the CIA went to extraordinary lengths to hide embarrassing details about its operations in the 1960s.

It is Iffland’s expert opinion that “[m]ost of the major documents long sought by researchers can be found in this release, including the identities of a CIA-directed infiltration team of anti-Castro Cuban exiles tasked with the assassination of Fidel Castro; a list of CIA assets operating in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 who may have interacted with [Lee Harvey] Oswald during his stay there; a series of reports on the technical capabilities of the Mexico City CIA station that monitored Oswald during his visit to the Cuban and Soviet [embassies] in late September 1963; as well as previously redacted testimony of CIA officials who were involved in monitoring Oswald from the time of his defection in October 1959 until the assassination.”

It is expected to take weeks for researchers such as Iffland to comb through the approximately 64,000 pages of material that were released Tuesday evening. So far, however, the 1960s-era CIA has not come away looking particularly ethical.

My, what a surprise.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning….

UPDATE: JFK files biggest bombshells from CIA’s chilling claim to UK’s attempts to save him (UK Daily Record)

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Food banks across the country are scrambling to make up a $500 million budget shortfall after the Trump administration froze funds for hundreds of shipments of produce, poultry and other items that states had planned to distribute to needy residents.

And, as we all know, if the Federal government doesn’t do something, it will Never Get Done. (Funding! We need Funding!)

We have the technology.

Read it.

The degree to which Musk derangement has taken hold among Democrats is fascinating. It wasn’t too long ago that Barack Obama was regularly praising Tesla for saving the environment and creating American jobs. Maybe all the hysterical shrieking about climate change wasn’t entirely genuine. Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) recently ditched his clean-driving Tesla because it was “built and designed by an a–hole.” He traded it in for a Chevy Tahoe SUV that gets about 15 miles per gallon. Lincoln Project cofounder Rick Wilson was temporarily banned from X, which Musk also owns, for encouraging deranged leftists to “attack” and “kill” Tesla, which he breathlessly described as “a bank for fascists, a goose-stepping hedge fund bankrolling the political fever dreams of Elon Musk and his DOGE dreams of controlling the ruins of the American government.” The Lincoln Project sent out a fundraising appeal minutes later

Zman’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Joe Sobran is arguably the first person hurled into the void in a process that eventually was called cancel culture. His primary sins were skepticism about Israel as our greatest ally and suspicions about the motivations of the neocons. It was the neocons who successfully campaigned to have Sobran branded a heretic and run out of the conservative movement.

Looking back four decades on, you see all the ingredients for what became a widespread form of domestic terrorism in the last decade. Interestingly, all of it is in what Bill Buckley thought was his best book. It is a collection of his essays on the topic of antisemitism, as well as his famous finking on friends like Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan at the request of his new benefactors.

Reading Buckley’s version of the Sobran affair, what comes through is that all politics in a democracy are theater. Buckley felt he had to debase himself, his friends and even his own family in order to remain on the stage. The reason for that is the stage managers had an agenda that agenda was anathema to the human spirit and traditions conservatism allegedly represented.

Buckley and his crew originated the current trend of what one might call ‘DavidFrenchism’ among purported conservatives in public media. The poster child for this trend is, of course, William Kristol, whose Kristol Krew at The Bulwark are among the best friends the ‘Invade the World Invite the World’ crowd ever had.

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This all sounds reasonable, but where is the “first, check your premises” caveat? Greater speed to the wrong destination is not a virtue, as the late founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Fred Smith, stated. Path dependency and “the tyranny of the status quo” in climate research and understanding can ruin a student’s time and subsequent career path.

Lisa Sachs repeated refusal to address intellectual diversity and the need for balanced debate on open climate questions speak for themselves. It is climate propaganda at Columbia U.

The Antiplanner.

On her first day in office, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed an executive order calling for the construction of 36,000 new homes per year. She was especially hoping for lots of new apartments because, as everyone knows, driving is evil and people who live in apartments drive less than people who live in single-family homes.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who understands how well central planning works that apartment construction in Portland, where close to half of Oregonians live, is now at its lowest level in more than a decade. There are several reasons for this, but among them are several idiotic government policies that have discouraged more construction.

Read it.

The following video and article provide a follow-up to the earlier report on the dystopian “White Giant” high-rise apartment building in the German city of Duisburg. The building was raided last fall, resulting in the discovery of massive child welfare benefits fraud.

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That seems to be the case as social media has been abuzz in recent days over the university’s choice to offer a new Math course, called MA5, heading into the new year. The Harvard Crimson first wrote about the introduction of the new course back in September of last year, but discussion over the course has caught fire on X in recent days.

The course is called Math MA5, and it is an introductory course addressing gaps in students’ algebra skills, according to Brendan A. Kelly, Director of Introductory Math.

Which begs the question: why are students getting into Harvard incapable of doing algebra, which generally starts in junior high or high school?

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A left-wing group battling the Trump administration to maintain lucrative taxpayer-funded immigration contracts has called to defund police departments and abolish the federal agency that deports illegal aliens.

Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), a nonprofit chaired by Department of Justice employee Marisa Arrona, has received $17 million in federal funding since last year to provide legal services to illegal aliens facing deportation, according to federal records. ImmDef is a subcontractor for a $769 million program to provide services to minors apprehended at the border without parents.

ImmDef and its allies are desperately fighting against the Trump administration in an attempt to maintain funding for that program and others that provide services to illegal immigrants. ImmDef has accused the Trump administration of “playing games with children’s rights and their safety” and says the program is needed to “protect due process” rights for illegal immigrants facing deportation.

And ‘funding’ again raises its ugly head….

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The Trump administration is mulling plans to sanction the international funders behind pro-Hamas protests, including prominent Qatari nationals who have vast financial holdings inside the United States, current and former U.S. officials familiar with the internal discussions told the Washington Free Beacon.

The effort seeks to build upon President Donald Trump’s January executive order authorizing the deportation of foreign students engaged in often illegal anti-Semitic demonstrations on college campuses across the country. Instead of targeting the protests’ participants, it would target their funders. The administration could, for example, slap sanctions on foreign individuals who provide groups like Students for Justice in Palestine with significant funding. In cases where those individuals enjoy U.S. visas, it could revoke them.

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The drones these shotguns are being used to defend against are most often cheap and fragile. Sure, even cheap quadcopter-style drones are faster than a foot soldier and faster than most military ground vehicles, but at 30 to 46 mph they fly at the same speed, or slower than many game birds. A good example of a widely used commercial drone that is regularly weaponized is the $3,000 DJI Mavic 3. It weighs just under two pounds and has a no-load (no weapon) max level flight speed of 46 mph with a max flight time of 41 minutes. That means it is slower than a duck, a pigeon, quail, pheasant, or even a turkey. And when weighed down with an explosive device it is even slower, and its endurance and range greatly reduced.

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

First, of course, they have to repeat the Narrative that the guy was barred because of saying hateful things about the President (which I suspect is a better reason to bar some left-wing academic from entry to the United States than that he posted social media thoughts unbecoming of a Wokerato).

However, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement Thursday that “any claim that his removal was based on political beliefs is blatantly false.”

“The French researcher in question was in possession of confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory — in violation of a non-disclosure agreement — something he admitted to taking without permission and attempted to conceal,” she said.

The test will come if and when he gets sued for breaking this alleged non-disclosure agreement. In the meantime, this seems like an appropriate response.

The Narrative Media, of course, accept the Narrative without question:

French scientist denied US entry after phone messages critical of Trump found (The Guardian)

Axios, a Voice of the Crust.

President Trump signed an executive order to close down the Department of Education on Thursday — an unprecedented move that presents big questions for student loan borrowers.

Why it matters: The department plays a key role in managing some $1.5 trillion in student debt for more than 40 million borrowers, and a vast majority of its budget is allocated to the agency that oversees the federal student loan system.

And there you have it. The virtue of the Department of Education, in the eyes of the Deep State and its minions, is not that it actually did any ‘educating’ but as a source of funds for what might be called the Education Establishment, from teachers’ unions to those who have PhDs but no chance of gainful employment and depend on government ‘funding’ in the form of research grants. That’s why the cost of higher education has risen at many timers the rate of inflation–such institutions know that the taxpayer will pick up the tab, whether they want to or not.

This $1.5 trillion in student debt didn’t just rise from the swamp like Godzilla, but came about because of the proglodyte conviction that every child is from Lake Woebegone and therefore Above Average, and so deserves to go to college. Hence the government (without which Nothing Will Be Done) must pay for it, disregarding the fact that (by definition) half of the population is Below Average and can’t cope with college-level work (which, research shows, requires an IQ of at least 110).

As with housing, the government makes it possible for people to do something that, in reality, they have no business doing. All of these situations arise because politicians and government employees set the table with cheap pies and cakes and donuts and then wring their hands because we are undergoing an Obesity Epidemic that came from nobody knows where but which will require more Government Money (‘funding’), taken from the taxpayers, to fix.

As here, the purpose of loyal Minions of the Crust, especially in the Narrative Media, is to wrap this hand-wringing in appropriate tender-hearted clichés so that Low Information Voters will acquiesce in signing off on this great redistribution of ‘funding’ from those who work for a living to those who merely Study and Think Deep Thoughts.

That’s the basis for all of the hate and discontent toward Elon Musk (and, behind him, to Trump): He is threatening the gravy train of taxpayer ‘funding’ upon which al of these drones depend for their BMWs and houses in Chevy Chase.

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Well, what did she expect? Flowers and a box of candy?

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I had the privilege of lending Barry Strauss my Greek Selectric type ball when he was a grad student and I was an undergrad at Yale.

[Drop name]

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If you tuned into CNN and/or MSNBC on Thursday morning, the message was clear based on their coverage of supposed “anger” at congressional Republicans over the Trump agenda and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and hits from the left at Democratic town halls: Blue wave incoming!

Nevermind these protests at GOP town halls — including one Wednesday night they were warm and fuzzy inside over out in Wyoming for Congresswoman Harriet Hageman (R) — have been stacked with the bluest of blue partisans and organized by far-left groups, including some with ties to George Soros.’

Porglodytes always go with mob rule off the bat. From lynching black people then to shouting down white people now, a mob is always a Democrat signature.

Gothamist.

Marketing experts aren’t surprised. The surprise saturation, they say, has been building for years alongside another growing trend: the algorithm-based predictability of online shopping. And they say that New Yorkers are increasingly drawn to the unknown, and even paying more for it, because they’re exhausted by all the choices and control available to them in other areas of life, particularly online. Some predict that this trend is only beginning.

“?Surprise is an emotion intensifier. It’s a way to just kind of turn up the volume on the vibrancy of life,” said psychology researcher and “surprisologist” Tania Luna, who co-authored the 2015 book “Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected.”

“We’re living an increasingly algorithm-driven existence that really is catering to comfort, predictability, ease, convenience,” she said, noting that many of us experience a “numbness” from spending so much time scrolling and looking at screens. Surprise can function as a balm, she said.

Since, as Democrat voters, they have no idea what their tax dollars are paying for (or into whose pockets they’re landing), they ought to be used to it by now.

Q: Where is Bruce Wayne when you really need him?
A. He moved to Florida with the other billionaires to escape high taxes and ungrateful Underclass scumbags.

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Why are eggs cheaper in Canada and Mexico than in America?

One reason is that Mexico and Canada have culled chickens on a smaller scale than we have. Mexico began vaccinating its chickens in the 90s and doesn’t cull chickens unless the outbreak is severe, while the Biden administration wiped out huge numbers of chickens with little pretext.

“The Biden administration and the Department of Agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said back in January.

The actual number is now over 150 million when including ducks, turkeys and other birds.

The mass cullings haven’t stopped the spread of bird flu. Ever since the Biden administration launched that policy in 2022, the virus is now present in every state and the cullings actually helped infect human workers who handled the disposal of millions of dead chickens.