The Bulwark, a Sock Puppet of the Crust.

If you’re lucky….

The Hill, a Voice of the Crust.

In an era of global instability when fake news is the norm, America needs a reliable platform to control its own narrative internationally.

After all, it’s all about the Narrative. I am a patient reader of foreign news, and Voice of America has been singularly inept at ‘controlling’ how other people see the U.S. Inept organizations deserve to be shut down.

By ‘our story’, I’m sure she means the Wokerati Narrative espoused by Democrat administrations. No,  I don’t want my money going toward spreading that narrative.

(Note the proglodyte assumption that, if the government doesn’t do a thing, that thing Will Not Get Done. A natural thought for those who feed on ‘funding’.)

Pro Publica, a Voice of the Crust.

On a frigid winter morning in 2022, a stranger knocked on the door of a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, during Shabbat service.

Soon after he was invited in for tea, the visitor pulled out a pistol and demanded the release of an al-Qaida-linked detainee from a nearby federal prison, seizing as hostages a rabbi and three worshipers. The standoff lasted 10 hours until the rabbi, drawing on extensive security training, hurled a chair at the assailant. The hostages escaped.

‘Extensive security training’ means you throw a chair? This is Texas–where was his gun?

“We are alive today because of that education,” Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker said after the attack.

If he’d been carrying, he’d be alive today and the bad guys would know not to mess with him. He sounds like a Democrat, at best.

The averted tragedy at Congregation Beth Israel is cited as a success story for the largely unseen prevention work federal authorities have relied on for years in the fight to stop terrorist attacks and mass shootings. The government weaves together partnerships with academic researchers and community groups across the country as part of a strategy for addressing violent extremism as a public health concern.

In other words, the government funnels taxpayer money to left-wing hand-wringers who refuse to adopt the surest cure for terrorist incidents: A trained, armed citizenry. Sorry, apparatchiks, the gravy train is stopping.

Read it.

And to clarify, that headline ran on OUR planet Earth. Not on an alternate dimension or some MCU-ish multiverse version of Earth, where all the bad guys have goatees. To paraphrase “Seinfeld,” that headline is 100% real — and it’s spectacular!

Tim Walz made the startling declaration on the podcast of the equally manly Gavin Newsom, the well-coifed governor of California.

The alleged masculinity of Tim Walz is such a black hole that normal people are afraid of getting too near and being sucked in.

And, of course, MAGA is the New Nigger.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

New York’s top court has struck down a law that would have let noncitizens vote in New York City elections, with the court’s progressive majority overwhelmingly siding with Republicans who challenged the idea.

The law would have made more than 800,000 people eligible to vote in municipal contests such as mayoral races.

“We file some lawsuits that are stretches,” said Joe Borelli, the former Republican minority leader of the New York City Council and one of the plaintiffs who challenged the law. “This one was, from the beginning, an open-shut case.”

The times, they are a-changin’.

ZMan examines the culture.

If you look at the pop music charts for the last decade or so, one of the things you will not notice is the modern nature of the big bands. The reason you will not notice how bands have changed is that there are few bands on the charts. In fact, bands have just about disappeared from popular music. The few bands you see on the music services are those from a bygone era. The biggest selling bands are often those that no longer exist or still kick around playing for old people.

Instead, what you see are solo acts or the occasional dance group assembled like a Broadway play to perform to manufactured content. Even the “boy band” has faded from the scene for the same reason bands have disappeared. That reason is it is much easier for the music industry to create and produce a solo act than to find a band and then develop it into a top attraction. The same is true of “boy bands” which require some degree of organization and management.

Of course, as the doors to bands have closed in corporate music, the selection pressure for musical acts has changed. If a young person has any musical talent, she is better served investing her time in imitating the corporate acts, using software tools readily available to everyone now. She then posts her material to YouTube, hoping to get a following and then maybe catch the eye of corporate. Learning to play instruments and perform in front of a crowd is pointless.

We have the technology.

I quit listening to popular music in 1985, and have never regretted it.

Read it.

The new findings aren’t just a minor correction to the scientific record; they are a reversal of dangerous conclusions drawn from sloppy—perhaps even fraudulent—analyses. Everything we’ve been told about climate change and food security is wrong.

Follow The Science … until it changes….

Read it.

Francesca Padilla was awakened by the sound of screaming people and breaking glass. Soon she could hear the tortured howls of her neighbor’s dog Togo as the bungalow right next to her Venice home was engulfed in flames.

“It was yelping so loud—the sound isn’t the usual dog sound—it was suffering,” another neighbor told a local newspaper. “It was suffering.”

The homeowner, Dr. Courtney Gillenwater, a pediatrician, was at work when the fire started around 3 a.m. Her neighbors tried and failed to break into her bungalow to rescue Togo. But the Husky-mix ultimately died, and Gillenwater’s home in this Los Angeles neighborhood was destroyed.

Gillenwater suspected that drug addicts from the growing homeless encampment nearby started the April 2021 fire because she had asked city officials to remove a dumpster behind her house where they would congregate.

Her neighbor, Padilla, also believes the homeless were the culprits. “Anyone can see the correlation between homeless encampments and the rise of fires,” she said. “We have people cooking drugs out in the open right across the street. Is that not a recipe for disaster?”

Read it.

The People’s Liberation Army has unveiled the first of what are expected to be as many as five special barges with bridges capable of overcoming minefields during a potential future invasion of Taiwan.

“Anyone wondering what an invasion of Taiwan might look like now has a fresh visual clue,” wrote Naval News analyst H.I. Sutton about the new barge.

The first barge was photographed at a shipyard in Guangzhou, China, with PLA forces shown conducting exercises. The barge lays out a road-like structure above the water that produces a 2,500-foot causeway capable of handling military vehicles and troops.

Read it.

“There are all kinds of proteins congregating at the cellular membrane, and if we want to understand what a protein does, how it’s regulated by its environment, and specifically how it triggers the spread of a disease, we need to understand what surrounds it,” explained Gupta, whose lab is part of the Nanobiology Institute at Yale’s West Campus.

Lacking the spatial nanotechnology required to understand the molecular context of how membrane proteins are regulated in health and diseases, the scholars developed a novel platform that provides access to around 2000 membrane proteins as well as a chemical tool to examine areas that surround proteins of interest.

Note that these are all Turd World cities, not the Usual Suspects perennially castigated in then Narrative Media such as America, Europe, and China.

Read it.

Gosh. I looked up to them in the ’70s and ’80s when they were saving whales from those seemingly evil Japanese fishermen. They used to take on noble causes with honorable intent. Or so it seemed to my youthful perspective.

But then, they started acting more and more fringe, becoming more destructive and aggressive—the opposite of the second half of their name, “peace” . Looking at some of the historical accounts, it appears they were always pretty aggressive and destructive, but the media, even then, portrayed their actions with glossy noble terms and portrayed their actions as honorable and justified. The leftist propaganda was less overt then, but it still sucked me in. Most courts agreed. Internationally, Greenpeace “activists”* were arrested and charged with assorted crimes of trespass, assault, vandalism, destruction of property, etc. And courts decided these were “acceptable actions” because they were performed by those with a noble cause – that is, “environmentalism”.

Well with all human interactions, if you remove barriers and consequences to actions, you get more of and more extreme actions than were permitted and excused.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Chuck Schumer went on The View, apparently in search of friendly interlocutors. He preached the Democrats’ old-time religion:

“We are united in going after Trump, and showing the American people that he is making the middle class pay for the tax cuts on the rich. …

“He wants to use that money for tax cuts for the billionaires. The Republican Party is a different kettle of fish than it used to be, and that’s why we’re fighting them so hard,” Schumer continued. “They are controlled by a small group of wealthy, greedy people, and you know what their attitude is? ‘I made my money all by myself. How dare your government take my money from me? I don’t want to pay taxes.’”

Never mind that most billionaires (most who are active in politics, anyway) are Democrats. The Democratic Party is rolling in dough, mostly because they are the party of the rich. And, billionaires aside, the Democrats’ best demographic is voters who earn more than $200,000.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Andrew Roberts has presented a 318-page report to the British Parliament on Hamas’s extensive atrocities in Israel on October 7, 2023. The report was prepared under the auspices of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for UK-Israel. The report can be accessed and downloaded here. The report’s executive summary is posted here.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Attorneys in the Feeding Our Future trial of Aimee Bock and Salim Said made their closing arguments to the jury yesterday. This is the second trial of defendants charged in the massive $250 million fraud, the biggest Covid fraud discovered in the United States. Of the 70 defendants indicted, 37 have pleaded guilty. Trials of other defendants are scheduled through the rest of this year.

This trial is of particular interest because Aimee Bock was the executive director of the Feeding Our Future nonprofit that sponsored the admitted liars and cheats who operated the “sites” participating in the federal child nutrition program they defrauded. Salim Said ran the Safari restaurant at which the business model of the fraud seems to have been pioneered starting in April 2020.

In its totality, the fraud committed in these cases is gross, disgusting, despicable. What did the lawyers have to say? Their arguments ran over four hours. Here are highlights.

UPDATE: Feeding Our Fraud: Guilty

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

President Trump’s angry call on Tuesday for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against his administration on deportation flights has set off a string of near-instant social media taunts and threats, including images of judges being marched off in handcuffs.

Compare Chuck Schumer’s threats against Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

The call came against an ominous backdrop. Nine days earlier, police officers in Charleston, S.C., had been dispatched to the home of one of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s sisters because of a threat that there was a pipe bomb in her mailbox. “The device’s detonation will be triggered as soon as the mailbox is next opened,” the emailed threat read.

The pipe bomb proved to be a hoax, but the threats and intimidation faced by judges and their families in recent weeks are real, judges say. At a moment when the judiciary is weighing pivotal decisions on the legality of Trump administration policies, the potential for violence against judges seems to be rising.

Trump is merely talking about impeachment, a legitimate mechanism under the Constitution; Woke mobs pick violence first, and don’t even bother with legal remedies. (Note that the Justice in question is nominally conservative, and how the NYT cleverly casts a situation involving left-wing judges as if it were a universal problem.

Wall Street Journal, a Voice of the Crust.

President Trump has adopted Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” theme to echo the Gipper’s successful foreign-policy realism. But what Mr. Trump ignores is the idealism that was the other half of Reagan’s message: the promotion of human freedom that undermined dictatorships from within.

Not our government’s job. Trump is not an idealist. Idealism costs money … and lives. Idealism is what gets us into neo-con Forever Wars.

On Saturday Mr. Trump ordered the termination of grants for Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Voice of America, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and Television Marti), the Open Technology Fund and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks are also being dismantled. This is a retreat in the global war of ideas.

This ‘global war of ideas’ is also not the job of our government. As Thomas Jefferson famously said: We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guarantors only of our own.

The news agencies were created to counter communism and spread the truth in countries where media are controlled by governments that lie about the world. As Natan Sharansky and other former prisoners of communism attest, Radio Free Europe was a source of inspiration as it broadcast throughout countries like Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union. It’s the same in China, Cuba and other dictatorships today.

The fall of Soviet Communism, which represented an existential threat to the U.S., made this sort of propaganda obsolete–not to mention the fact that Democrat administrations used it to propagate Wokeness around the world. America has no difficulty getting its message across; the Internet allows people around the world to see what America is truly like, the good and the bad. It doesn’t need taxpayer subsidies.

Read it.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D., Texas) declared in February that the government is “not in the business of giving out money” to taxpayers. But when it comes to the simple luxuries in her own life, the firebrand lawmaker is happy to let the public foot the bill.

That includes her taxpayer-funded car. Crockett has billed the public $999.96 every month since she assumed office in January 2023 to pay for a “vehicle lease,” according to House disbursement records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. It’s unclear the make and model of Crockett’s publicly financed whip—lawmakers are not required to disclose that information and her office did not return a request for comment—but it’s enough to pay for a Tesla Model S, Elon Musk’s luxury sports sedan, which leases for $998 per month.

Crockett obtained her taxpayer-funded vehicle through a little-known fringe benefit that allows representatives to bill the public for a fresh set of EPA-approved wheels to traverse their congressional districts. Some 42 lawmakers participated in the program in 2024, including 15 Republican participants who represent geographically expansive districts that average 18,100 square miles each. The Republican participants primarily leased economy vehicles from American manufacturers, with several of their offices telling the Free Beacon that leasing a vehicle is a far more cost-effective way for the lawmakers to traverse their massive districts as opposed to paying for airfare or using their personal vehicle at the IRS reimbursement rate of 67 cents per mile.

My, what a surprise. I doubt that Republicans are significantly better.

Read it.

In just one year, over a million migrants in Britain received more than £7.6 billion in welfare, an analysis of government data has found.

The Centre for Migration Control (CMC) estimates that around 1,158,000 foreign nationals received universal credit for low income individuals, after collating Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) data.

The figures are from 2023 when a supposedly conservative government was in power, and before the current far left Labour government was elected.

I guess the question to ask in Britain is: Are you a Right-Wing Socialist or a Left-Wing Socialist?

I wonder what an equivalent review for the U.S. would find. I suspect it would be in the hundreds of billions.

Read it.

L.A.’s financial problems exploded into a full-blown crisis on Wednesday, with the city’s top budget official announcing that next year’s shortfall is now just shy of $1 billion, making layoffs “nearly inevitable.”

City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo advised the City Council to focus on cost-cutting measures, including a potential reduction in the size of the workforce, to bring the budget into balance for 2025-26.

Szabo, in his presentation to the council Wednesday, attributed the city’s financial woes, in part, to increased spending on legal payouts, which have ballooned over the past few years. Tax revenues have been coming in much weaker than expected — and are expected to soften further in the upcoming budget year, which starts July 1.

Pay raises for city employees that are scheduled to go into effect in the coming budget year are expected to consume an additional $250 million. On top of that, Szabo said, the city needs to put hundreds of millions into its reserve fund, which has been drained in recent months in an attempt to balance this year’s budget.

As Margaret Thatcher famously said, the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.

Read it.

The first of what is expected to be many deportation flights has landed in the crisis worn country of Haiti this week, carrying 46 aliens including 25 convicted felons expelled from the US.

The Trump Administration has revoked protections established during the Biden Administration that shielded roughly half a million Haitians from deportation. They will lose their work permits and could be subject to removal from the country in the near term. Many of the Haitians deported Tuesday had crossed into the United States illegally or were waiting for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) approval, which grants individuals legal authority to remain in the country but does not offer a long-term pathway to citizenship

Apparently the era of America as the Dumpster of the World is over.

Read it.

The vice chief of the U.S. Space Force said Chinese satellites have been observed rehearsing “dogfighting” maneuvers in low Earth orbit, a display of the communist nation’s ability to perform complex maneuvers in orbit.

The maneuvers, referred to as rendezvous and proximity operations, involve not only navigating around other objects but also inspecting them, the Air Force Times reported Tuesday.

“With our commercial assets, we have observed five different objects in space maneuvering in and out and around each other in synchronicity and in control,” Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said Tuesday at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington, D.C.

Steve Graham: “No one ever starts to worry when whites, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese move in next door.”

Read it.

internet searches provide copious anecdotes. News outlets generally interview repair technicians, who tell a convincing and consistent story. Appliances built in the 1970s generally lasted thirty to fifty years, they say. Today, domestic mainstays like washing machines, ovens, fridges, and dryers get replaced about every decade. Technicians blame an industry push towards computerization, an increase in the number of individual components, and the use of flimsier materials like plastic and aluminum rather than steel. The results of these trends are appliances that break more often and are harder and more costly to repair.

Read it.

A North Dakota jury on Wednesday found Greenpeace liable for defamation and other claims brought by a pipeline company in connection with protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline.

The nine-person jury awarded Dallas-based Energy Transfer and its subsidiary Dakota Access hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

The lawsuit had accused Netherlands-based Greenpeace International, Greenpeace USA and funding arm Greenpeace Fund Inc. of defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy and other acts.

Actions have consequences, and the Woke Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card no longer works.

Read it.

One week after Infowars reporter Jamie White was murdered outside of his Austin apartment, followed by a pizza delivery under the name of ‘Jamie White.’

Shroyer posted pictures and footage of the swatting on X.

Shroyer’s swatting is not an isolated incident – as numerous conservatives have been targeted in recent weeks with similar swattings.

“It’s been dozens of people that have been swatted. What is going on? We know what’s going on,” said Shroyer. “The Democrat Party and all of their little street thugs funded by ActBlue, the stolen money from USAID, George Soros—all these different groups are behind it. They’re behind the terror attacks against Elon Musk.”

In recent days, Bill Clinton accuser and social media influencer Juanita Broaddrick was swatted.

Read it.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit recently determined that the efforts of a Florida middle school to help a minor child socially transition to a different gender behind her parents’ backs were not sufficiently egregious to “shock the conscience” and allow the parents’ claim to proceed. But in granting the school officials’ motion to dismiss the case, the panel’s ruling in Littlejohn v. Leon County wasn’t just bad policy, it was bad legal analysis as well.

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation, and most children were relegated to virtual school, January and Jeffrey Littlejohn’s 13-year-old daughter told January that “she no longer felt like a girl.”

This revelation appeared at the same time that three of their daughter’s friends at her local middle school had also suddenly declared a transgender identity, and while their daughter was struggling with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder that made online learning challenging.

Read it.

Mexican cartel members are “running scared” and fearful of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, according to the sheriff of Tarrant County, Texas.

Like many local law enforcement officials, Sheriff Bill Waybourn has witnessed the sharp spike in illegal immigration over the past four years. He welcomed the increased enforcement from the federal government.

The Tarrant County jail currently holds over 300 illegal aliens suspected of criminal activity.

“They represent 22 different countries,” Waybourn said recently at a Heritage Foundation event in Dallas. “Some of them are going to be known terrorists, some of them are going to be known cartel soldiers, and the like.”

Federal judge indefinitely blocks Trump's ban on transgender service members, saying it's 'soaked in animus' (Devan Cole/CNN)

Judge bars Trump’s EPA from taking back $20B in climate grants — for now (Politico)

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty sue over grant termination (Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing/Politico)

America’s “Constitutional Crash” (Doomsday Scenario)

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty sues Trump administration over canceled contract (David Folkenflik/NPR)

Judge Slams Trump For Putting Fired Probationary Workers On Paid Leave (Dave Jamieson/HuffPost)

Judge blocks Trump administration from terminating $14 billion in ‘green bank’ grants (Associated Press)

Democrats Turn to Legally Dubious Ruling Coauthored by DEI Activist To Protect California’s EV Mandate

Republicans want to make ‘Trump derangement syndrome’ an official mental health disorder (Minnesota State Senator Arrested In Sting On Same Day He Introduced ‘TDS’ Bill (David Moye/HuffPost))

Emails Reveal Top IRS Lawyer Warned Trump Firings Were a “Fraud” on the Courts (Pro Publica)

Federal Judge Orders Price Of Eggs To Go Back Up (Babylon Bee)

Susan Quinn: Israel Re-Starts the Bombing of Gaza: Blame Trump

The court-case presidency – With help from Eli Okun, Garrett Ross and Bethany Irvine – Embed: (Jack Blanchard/Politico)

Trump Has Gone From Unconstitutional to Anti-Constitutional (Jamelle Bouie/New York Times)

The Constitutional Crisis May be Upon Us (Jennifer Rubin/The Contrarian)  Jennifer Rubin loses her shit.

Trump defies court orders to dump Venezuelans in Salvadoran slave jail (Liz Dye/Public Notice)

How major law firms are responding to Trump’s attacks (Daniel Barnes/Politico)

Trump administration pushes back on judge’s request for answers about deportation flights (NBC News)

Judge denies Trump administration’s attempt to dismiss Mahmoud Khalil’s challenge to his deportation – live (The Guardian)

Trump’s Sister Declared The Immigration Law He Used Unconstitutional (Stuart Anderson/Forbes)

Trump doubles down on attack against judge after Roberts rebuke (Brett Samuels/The Hill)

Biden-Appointed LGBT Judge Blocks Trump’s Military-Transgender Ban

Supreme Court to Decide if States Can Withhold Medicaid Funding From Planned Parenthood

Trump’s Military Transgender Ban Blocked by Federal Judge Facing Misconduct Complaint

Judge Blocks Policy That Would Expel Transgender Troops (Dave Philipps/New York Times)

Blitzer Tries To Push Breyer Into Saying Trump Is Causing ‘Constitutional Crisis’

U.S. Institute of Peace sues to block DOGE ‘takeover by force’ (NBC News)

Poll: As Trump and courts clash, voters weigh whether each branch of government has too much power (Ben Kamisar/NBC News)

Judge rules DOGE’s USAID dismantling likely violates the Constitution (Associated Press)

Obama-Appointed Judge Temporarily Blocks EPA From Canceling Climate Grants

Judge Orders Trump to Return 2 Trans Inmates to Women’s Prisons

OffGuardian.

This is only the digitized ones, the undigitized ones are all available as well, you just have to go to the national archives in Maryland to see them. They’ll put those on the internet too, just as soon as they’re done digitizing them. Honest.

Of course, the process of “digitizing the records” and the weeks it’s expected to take “historians and experts” to go over the files keeps the narrative open. They can add new files as they see fit to steer the conversation.

So far the media coverage has been exactly as you’d expect, with a quasi-religious repetition of the Official Story best exemplified by the pathetically predictable New York Times, where Adam Nagourney headlines simply:

Here’s what to know. (Oswald still did it.)

Propaganda so laughable you wonder if they’re really trying…and perhaps they’re not.

Read it.

While Mayor Brandon Johnson showed up to defend Chicago’s sanctuary city policies before Congress, federal immigration authorities were expelling Prince Knox, a ‘refugee’ affiliated with the Revolutionary United Front, which chopped off the arms of tens of thousands of people with machetes to take over and provide them with free health care, back to his native Sierra Leone.

Prince Knox was one of the many illegal aliens, criminals and assorted monsters protected by Chicago’s ‘Welcoming City’ ordinance and the Illinois Trust Act which form its sanctuary system.

And Chicago’s sheltering of illegal alien criminals has forced ICE to carry out ‘raids’ to get them.

Read it.

Musk contended that Biden had turned down his offer to rescue them back in September, fearing a disaster prior to the election.

Musk used to be a hero to the left, and Teslas were the virtue-signaling wave of the future. Once he threw in his lot with Trump, he became an enemy.

Democrats hate easily, and are quick to concoct lies to justify it.

Read it.

European Union leaders fear that Islamic State (IS)-linked detainees being held in two Syrian camps might soon be freed and headed their way.

Senior figures are meeting tomorrow to discuss plans after U.S. president Donald Trump paused funding to the Kurdish-run Al Hol and Roj camps. These hold around 55,000 people, many of whom are the families of IS fighters.

One Brussels official told Politico that at the top of the agenda is ensuring “the terrorists don’t come to Europe”—something that could well happen if the funding gap is not plugged and control of the camps is handed to the new Syrian government, which has “difficulties controlling its territory.”

Amnesty International has pointed to the fact that many in these camps are women and children, and that some actually fled from IS. Almost 4,000 are also understood to be European nationals. Yet Brussels will resist America’s proposal to repatriate their nationals because, as one official put it,

The EU citizens there are not necessarily people member states will be rushing to welcome back in a disorganised manner.

Read it.

The pardon authority is the president’s alone and cannot be delegated, according to a legal analysis by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.

The watchdog group—which first conducted an analysis of former President Joe Biden’s White House use of autopen—released a memo late Monday night on the matter, bringing the numerous acts of clemency into question.

“Every leftist who shrieked, whined, and moaned about defending democracy is a complete hypocrite if they are not outraged by the antidemocratic action on the scale of presidential actions enacted by people who were never elected to anything,” Oversight Project Executive Director Mike Howell told The Daily Signal Tuesday.

Read it.

Four Muslim men were convicted on Wednesday, March 19th for crimes committed during the horrific antisemitic attacks in Amsterdam in November last year.

The court was extremely lenient towards the perpetrators: the harshest sentence handed out was a 12-week stay in prison.

Three of the men were sentenced on charges of inciting violence in a WhatsApp messaging group, where they insulted Jews and shared information about the whereabouts of Israeli football supporters, who were in Amsterdam to see their club, Maccabi Tel Aviv play Ajax Amsterdam.

A fourth man was found guilty of committing violence in public, after chasing an Israeli supporter through the streets of Amsterdam.

As the court heard, participants in the WhatsApp group encouraged each other to “hunt down Jews.”

ZMan says the quiet part out loud.

One way to look at the last ten years is as the struggle of the United States to finally close the books on the Cold War and the 20th century. The reason Trump exists, and the managerial system has reacted in such a violent way toward him, is that he represents the end of the conditions that made it all possible. The return of a strong executive and the normal functioning of government is the end of the managerial system and everything around it.

The comparisons to the late Soviet times are compelling because the Russians went through a similarly violent process to escape their own managerial system and the ideology that controlled it. Like the Soviets, America is now run by old people trapped in the past, lacking the talent to adjust to new realities. Like the Soviet system, the American system barely performs basic functions. Like the Soviets, American political actors can only break things.

That last part is important. Reform by its very nature calls into question the legitimacy of current processes. The reason for reform is that the system is not working to the satisfaction of the users, so it must be changed. Good reformers, however, do not attack the core logic of the system, but focus instead on the parts of it that implement that core logic to maintain the legitimacy of the whole. Maybe it means new people or possibly changes to parts of the system.

Read it.

NATO members Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia said Tuesday they are abandoning the 1997 Ottawa convention treaty outlawing the use of anti-personnel landmines (APL) amid the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

The Ottawa convention sought to outlaw APLs, which target humans in explosive blasts and have killed thousands of civilians. The treaty also notes that the minds can cause “unnecessary suffering or superfluous injury.”

“Military threats to NATO Member States bordering Russia and Belarus have significantly increased,” the four countries wrote in a statement.

“In light of this unstable security environment marked by Russia’s aggression and its ongoing threat to the Euro-Atlantic community, it is essential to evaluate all measures to strengthen our deterrence and defense capabilities,” they added.

Hmm. All of a sudden cheap passive defenses that can’t be detected or attacked by drones become very popular. Verrrryyy interrrresting….

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

After long nights spent on problem sets, the most aimless and ambitious of us will forgo grad school and become interns and employees at the shiniest, slimiest corporations in America – big banks, the military industrial complex, big tech, big pharma – where we will solve interesting, difficult problems on cushy salaries.

Working at the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) seems to require the same skillset. Fueled by unbridled techno-optimism and edgy cultural capital, Doge seems less like a government agency and more like another one of Elon Musk’s shaky startups. While bewildered pundits including Fareed Zakaria struggle to diagnose and process the new technocracy in DC, our new Doge overlords are infinitely familiar to my classmates and me: they might as well be guys we knew from school.

This is the new generation of young technocrats who helped lift Trump into office: they are the crypto-obsessed love-children of Musk and Donald Trump, of Silicon Valley and the Heritage Foundation, of “effective altruism” and “effective accelerationism”. Meanwhile, graduates who lean left are simply out of luck: outside of academia, it can feel nearly impossible to find a progressive job in tech. Progressive Data Jobs, a major hub for jobs in this space, currently lists 96 open positions across all experience levels. By contrast, the careers portal at Goldman Sachs alone boasts 1,943 open jobs

The basic problem appears to be that proglodytes concentrate on spending other people’s money rather than on making money that can then be spent, which means that proglodyte organizations are dependent on ‘funding’ (other people giving you money for you to spend without any profitable result), which means that the jobs are always going to be more plentiful in organizations devoted to making money than organizations devoted to just spending money. Proglodytes are basically beggars (or thieves) rather than makers.

Reuters, a Voice of the Crust.

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday affirmed that a work of art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed, opens new tab with the U.S. Copyright Office that an image created by Stephen Thaler’s AI system “DABUS” was not entitled to copyright protection, and that only works with human authors can be copyrighted.

UnHerd.

Here and there you can still see evidence of the collective madness of the Covid era. Some “social distancing” markers still linger on pavements or shop floors. Occasionally I find a face mask in a coat or handbag I haven’t used for a while. There was a feeble official “day of reflection” recently. But for at least some of us, life is sort of back to the way it was: four in ten workplaces are back in the office full-time, dog walkers are no longer hunted by drones, and the shops and churches are open. We mostly don’t talk about the Scotch egg thing, or being forced to say goodbye to dying loved ones by videolink.

But the kids are not alright. Back in 2020, we had no idea what the impact of lockdown would be on those young people whose normal development was so casually interrupted. And while every parent has a lockdown horror story, it was the most vulnerable children who were worst afflicted. Lockdown widened the school attainment gap, delayed children’s development, and plunged a generation of tweens and teens into psychiatric turmoil. But it didn’t just harm children; it also formed them. Especially for those who came of age concurrently with lockdown, the sheer strangeness of that period was itself a worldview-shaping experience — in ways we’ve scarcely begun to grasp.

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Today marks the moment, 63 years ago, that France finally ceded control of Algeria. But speak to many in both countries and the war might have finished yesterday, with tensions between Paris and Algiers now higher than they’ve been for years. Consider, among other things, France’s recent decision to re-examine the “special” pact of 1968 that made it easier for Algerians to settle in France, with the Quai d’Orsay also presenting its former colony with a list of nationals it wants to send back home. Algiers reacted indignantly — but Algerian terrorists have attacked several French citizens over recent years, while many French Arabs continue to fiercely resent the land they call home.

And if what Frantz Fanon called the “red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives” of decolonisation are as vicious as ever in politics and the banlieue, France’s bookshelves aren’t being spared either. One of the most vivid examples of recent times is A Counter-History of French Colonisation, a fusillade in paperback. Written by Driss Ghali, a novelist and essayist, and published in English late last year, it promises to provide “an antidote to the poison distilled in bad faith” by “apostles” of postcolonial thought, those who’ve distilled the complexities of French colonialism into a game of heroes and villains.

In a vivid riposte to these activists, Ghali says he can offer a fresh and “dispassionate” view of this still-urgent moment of history, arguing that it’s time to move on from 19 March and everything it stands for. It’s a position increasingly echoed across France and Algeria, a shift with potentially revolutionary consequences for the politics of both countries. All the same, we shouldn’t necessarily expect Paris and Algiers to bury the hatchet just yet, especially given the incentives Arab elites have to perpetuate hate — and the underlying tensions that endure right across France itself.

Before everything blew up, Algeria was legally a part of ‘metropolitan’ France, as much as Provence or Brittany. Losing Algeria was about like the U.S. losing Alaska.

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“During the Biden administration, federal agencies spent millions bargaining sweetheart collective-bargaining agreements that imposed significant costs on the American taxpayer while impeding effective and efficient agency operations,” acting OPM Director Charles Ezell wrote in the memo. “Agencies paid for both the costs of their and their unions’ bargaining teams.”

While the federal government has previously tracked “official time”—the time government employees spend working for the union but for which they get paid by the taxpayer—Ezell noted that the government has not systematically tracked the specific cost of federal collective bargaining negotiations.

Collective bargaining negotiations may cost a great deal. “The Social Security Administration, for example, reported that it cost the agency over $1.8 million to negotiate [collective bargaining agreements] with two of its bargaining units,” Ezell noted. This number did not include the cost of another round of bargaining in the middle of the time covered by the agreement.

The American Mind.

Much has been written about Trump Derangement Syndrome, that mental and emotional affliction that distorts its victims’ ability to make measured judgments about the doings of our past and present president. No doubt much more will be written about it, because this malady shows no signs of abating.

One of the worst side effects of TDS is the widespread circulation of bogus constitutional claims. As Trump, the astute politician that he is, has staked out popular positions on many issues of interest to the public, his critics, at a loss for other arguments, routinely say he is trashing the Constitution.

This is a serious problem. Preserving our constitutional system, and the many blessings that flow from it, depends on preserving a correct understanding of the Constitution’s various provisions among the public. But the public’s understanding of the Constitution is undermined by the TDS brigade’s continual reiteration of fanciful claims of constitutional violations.

TDS, regrettably, is not just a problem on the American Left. There are plenty of conservative sufferers who cannot evaluate Trump dispassionately and twist the Constitution to find grounds on which to denounce him. A prominent case is National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy, who recently condemned President Trump’s executive order regarding the law firm Perkins Cole.

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Dr. Leana Wen, a former CNN medical analyst who famously stated that “the unvaccinated should not be allowed to leave their homes,” is now admitting that Covid dissenters should have been allowed to ask questions.

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In the first 10 months of last year, more than 5,000 migrants arrived in Britain as ‘skilled workers,’ only later to claim asylum so as to remain in the country permanently. That’s about a 100-fold increase on the official 2022 figure of 53.

A new report by the National Audit Office says that the government “does not fully understand” what happens to those who come to Britain under this ‘skilled worker’ visa programme—the main route for workers to come to Britain, which Robert Bates, from the Centre for Migration Control, described as a “ghastly Frankenstein of a scheme.” There were more than half a million applications for skilled worker visas in 2023 alone.

And while the opposition Conservative Party said these figures were “deeply concerning,” Bates told europeanconservative.com that migrants have been able to game the skilled worker route thanks to the efforts of past and present “inattentive ministers in collaboration with free movement-loving civil servants.”

Gee, that sounds familiar….

The Telegraph (UK).

Immediately followed by all the French ‘super-rich’ moving elsewhere.

Europe is desperately scrambling for ways to fund greater defence spending as Donald Trump brings the era of US military dominance on the Continent to an acrimonious end.

Estonia has stripped its pensioners of valuable tax reliefs and imposed a 2pc “defence tax” on all its citizens – but France has floated perhaps the most radical solution yet.

Finance minister, Eric Lombard, last week opened the door to taxing just the country’s super-rich to fund France’s military build-up.

France is facing a unique quandary – it plans to boost its defence budget by €3bn (£2.5bn) a year until 2030 while managing an eye-watering national debt of €3.3 trillion.

Newsbusters.

CBC Chairperson Rep. Yvette Clarke, noting Black Caucus support for Green, then went into the usual refrain about refusing to accept spending cuts in “programs like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security while giving tax cuts to billionaires like Elon Musk.”

But there have been no discussions about cuts in Medicare and Social Security, nor are there tax cuts targeted to billionaires.

Regarding Medicaid, this is the usual Democrat distortion, calling reducing proposed increases in spending a cut.