Read it.

One of the most brazen terror attacks and hostage standoffs the world has ever seen played out on Tuesday into Wednesday. The shocking incident in Pakistan’s restive southwestern region involved a separatist Islamist group attacking and taking control of a large passenger train.

Some 450 passengers were travelling on the train from Quetta to Peshawar when it was attacked Tuesday by militants of the outlawed Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA). The group took a number of hostages after halting the train. Many bystanders are still missing.

Pakistani special forces were among the first to respond to the scene, also amid helicopter cover overhead, and a shootout ensued. But it ended in tragedy. While at least 35 militants were killed, some 100 civilians were reportedly executed by the terrorists.

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

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New Jersey gubernatorial candidate and Newark mayor Ras Baraka (D.) spoke Tuesday at an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement rally that featured the Council on American-Islamic Relations New Jersey (CAIR NJ), an anti-Semitic group that justified the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

Rallygoers gathered outside Delaney Hall, the Trump administration’s newly commissioned illegal immigrant detention facility in Newark, to protest its June opening. Several far-left groups participated, including the New Jersey Working Families Party, Make the Road New Jersey, and CAIR NJ, which has characterized Hamas’s attack as a prison break, calling it “inevitable” and “not unexpected.”

Read it.

Democrat governors have a “resistance” playbook created for them that includes draft executive orders to defy the administration’s immigration policies as well as instructions on deploying the National Guard.

The Governors Action Alliance, a Democrat organization that founded the group Governors Safeguarding Democracy, provided such guidance to the staffs of Democrat governors across the country after the election of President Donald Trump.

The 126 pages of the playbook—including emails, talking points, and a “Firewalling for Freedom – Template Gubernatorial Executive Order”—were obtained in a public records request from the office of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro by the private nonprofit watchdog group Government Accountability and Oversight, and shared wth The Daily Signal.

The Hill, a Voice of the Crust.

A conservative commentator on Wednesday asked Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin why he allowed American comedian Rosie O’Donnell to move to the country.

“Ireland is known for very happy, fun-loving people,” Brian Glenn, a conservative commentator for the digital media company Real America’s Voice, began a question to Martin during an Oval Office meeting with President Trump. “Why in the world would you let Rosie O’Donnell move to Ireland?”

“Thank you, I like that question,” Trump interjected as Martin nervously laughed while seated next to the president in the Oval Office. “Did you know you have Rosie O’Donnell? Do you know who she is?”

Martin did not respond before Trump added, “You’re better off not knowing.”

Read it.

In preparation for an international climate summit this fall, Brazilian state officials are clearing tens of thousands of acres of the Amazon rainforest to complete a new four-lane highway, the BBC reported.

The COP30 summit will be held Nov. 10-21 in the Brazilian city of Belém, and is expected to draw about 50,000 attendees, including world leaders and business people to discuss climate change. COP stands for Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

However, the development sparked controversy among locals that contend such deforestation of the Amazon rainforest and construction undermines the purpose of the gathering.

Do tell. I’m sure John Kerry will tool in on his private jet to wag his finger at the rest of us.

Read it.

In 2011, Brown University’s Choices Program, which develops curriculum on history and current issues for K-12 schools in all 50 states, taught high school students “of the historic Jewish ties to the land that is now Israel.” In 2015, anti-Israel academic Beshara Doumani, then a founding director of Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies, began advising the program—and the materials shifted in tone.

That year, the Choices Program released a revamped version of its unit titled, “The Middle East in Transition: Questions for U.S. Policy.” The unit, which included an acknowledgment of Doumani’s “invaluable” contributions, provided students with new definitions of “colonialism” and “imperialism,” according to an Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) review of the curriculum materials obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. It also included a map that listed Tel Aviv—not Jerusalem—as Israel’s capital.

Two years later, an updated edition of the same unit went further. Included alongside the map of Middle Eastern capitals was a quiz calling on students to “fill in the missing countries and capitals below.” Students received credit for writing “Israel” next to the listed “Country Capital” of Tel Aviv. The unit also eliminated a section on Israel’s creation, according to the ISGAP review, “instead moving the discussion about Israel’s creation to a few brief paragraphs within the section titled ‘Israel and the Palestinian Territories.'”

Brown has always been the most proglodyte of the Ivy League schools, being the preferred destination for Eurotrash who want a fancy American degree.

Read it.

Since 2016, after which France experienced a surge in mass migration, the figure is up by a whopping 86 per cent.

44 per cent of victims were located in the Paris region, with women being the victims on 91 per cent of occasions, with 75 per cent of victims being under the age of 30 and 36 per cent of those being minors.

“It should be noted that this data comes at the same time that France’s migration population has exploded,” reports Remix News.

“With 63 percent of those arrested for sexual assault and 92 percent for petty theft in public transport being foreigners, according to data from 2019. Similar data is seen in Germany, where 59 percent of all sexual assaults on German trains are attributed to foreigners, with sexual crimes doubling since 2019.”

Be careful not to step in the diversity. It’s impossible to get that stuff off of your shoes.

Read it.

In news that we’re certain will have Adam Schiff laying out a multi-national, multi-planetary conspiracy that can only be stopped by impeaching Donald Trump tomorrow, a new report from Bloomberg found that from 2017 to 2019, employees at Evraz North America Inc., a Russian-owned steel manufacturer, falsified quality control tests on armor plating used in the JLTV, according to an internal report and company officials.

The Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), the U.S. Army’s successor to the Humvee, is designed to protect troops from bullets, mines, and explosives. At its Portland, Oregon facility, workers skipped mandatory hardness tests and fabricated results for about 12,800 armor plates, which were falsely labeled as approved. Some of these plates later developed cracks, raising concerns about their reliability in combat.

Oshkosh Defense LLC, a major military vehicle manufacturer, was a key customer for Evraz’s armor plates. The company produces the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), marketed as a “go-anywhere, do-anything” light tactical vehicle. Primarily used by the U.S. military, the JLTV has also been provided to Ukraine, Israel, Brazil, and Lithuania. As of last year, over 22,000 JLTVs had been built, each expected to last around 20 years, the report says.

Newsbusters.

From watching the White House wrapup that aired on ABC World News Tonight, reasonable individuals can arrive at the conclusion that ABC is attempting to incite violence or some other adverse action against Tesla/SpaceX founder Elon Musk. An inflammatory intro from anchor David Muir led to an even more inflammatory report from former Chief Biden White House apple polisher Mary Bruce.

After spending years foisting electric cars upon the American public and gleefully promoting related mandates as enacted by the Biden administration, the media are now referring to them as “luxury cars.” What a difference an Elon derangement makes.

NBC News, a Voice of the Crust.

The ‘misgendering’ is this delusional politician pretending to be a woman. Keith Self is my Congressman, and I approve his message.

Read it.

Fireworks erupted during a House Foreign Relations Subcommittee meeting when Chairman Keith Self (R-TX) deliberately misgendered Representative Sarah McBride (D-DE), the first transgender congresswoman, referring to her as the “Gentleman from Delaware.” In response, McBride shot back, addressing Self as “Madam Chair.” The exchange sparked immediate protests from Democrats, with ranking minority member Bill Keating (D-MA) demanding, “Have you no decency?” Tensions escalated, and after continued objections, Self abruptly adjourned the hearing.

Keith Self is my Congessman, and doing a fine job.

Read it.

The Environmental Protection Agency canceled two $20 million environmental justice grants that the Biden administration awarded to its own advisers, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

On Monday, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency’s latest round of grant cancellations and cost-cutting measures. Included among the more than 400 canceled grants are 2 that the Biden administration awarded in December to Tennessee-based nonprofit Young, Gifted & Green and North Carolina-based nonprofit Democracy Green, a source familiar told the Free Beacon. Both groups had connections to the Biden White House and EPA—and neither had handled such a substantial amount of money before securing the taxpayer funds.

Young, Gifted & Green received its $20 million environmental justice grant after its CEO—LaTricea Adams—personally applied for the funding while simultaneously serving as a member of a top White House environmental justice council, the Free Beacon reported last month. The group has reported just $2.7 million in revenue—about 14 percent the size of the grant—since it registered as a nonprofit in 2020, tax filings show.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

A senior official at the main U.S. aid agency, which is being dismantled by the Trump administration, told employees to clear safes holding classified documents and personnel files by shredding the papers or putting them into bags for burning, according to an email sent to the staff.
The email sent by Erica Y. Carr, the acting executive secretary, told employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development to empty out the classified safe and personnel document files on Tuesday. “Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” Ms. Carr wrote, according to a copy of the email obtained by The New York Times.

…

It is unclear if Ms. Carr or any other official at U.S.A.I.D. got permission from the National Archives and Records Administration to destroy the documents. The Federal Records Act of 1950 requires U.S. government officials to ask the records administration for approval before destroying documents.

Read it.

Last week, President Donald Trump began keeping yet another of his promises—this time, to deport foreign nationals who support terrorism.

On Wednesday, the U.S. State Department “revoked the first visa of an alien who was previously cited for criminal behavior in connection with Hamas-supporting disruptions,” a department official told Fox News. “This individual was a university student. ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] will proceed with removing this person from the country.”

As we’ve explained previously, federal law allows both the denial of admission to, and the deportation of, foreign nationals who support terrorism. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, “Any alien—who endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization … is inadmissible.”

If a student visa applicant is known to “endorse or espouse” terrorism, the consular officer interviewing him at a U.S. Embassy or consulate overseas should deny him a visa.

But what if a foreign student already obtained a visa, and it later comes to light that he espoused or endorsed terrorism? For example, in the case of a foreign student on a college campus protesting in favor of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack in Israel. In that case, the State Department can revoke his visa. That means that the Department of Homeland Security can then pursue his removal because, under the Immigration and Nationality Act, he would be deportable for the same reasons the visa was canceled. It also means he can’t return to the U.S. without getting a new visa, which would be very hard, given the revocation on file.

Read it.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was able to convince most Republicans to vote for the bill, with the exception of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), while one Democrat – Jared Golden (D-ME) joined the Republicans in passing the measure which increases security spending by $4.4 billion, contains a $440 million boost for immigration enforcement, and cuts the IRS budget by $20 billion.

It also prevents Washington DC from spending $1 billion of its own tax dollars, and allows the Pentagon flexibility to buy new weapons – an odd provision in a stopgap bill that was demanded by GOP defense hawks.

The bill also has no new limits on DOGE, and does not prevent agency heads from firing federal workers or canceling federal grants and contracts – actions which are currently being challenged in the courts in what critics argue amount to illegal impoundments of money approved by Congress.

Read it.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is known primarily for two things: screaming into microphones at political rallies and making the teacher’s union an extension of the Democratic Party. However, Weingarten had an unintended substantive moment when she changed her earlier position on the elimination of the Education Department. Weingarten previously shrugged off the elimination of the department as not a big deal for education. Recently, she returned to her irate default in denouncing the elimination. The reason, however, was telling.

After Trump was reelected in November, Weingarten said that the elimination was not a big deal and that teachers had originally opposed the creation of the department: “I mean, my members don’t really care about whether they have a bureaucracy of the Department of Education or not. In fact, Al Shanker and the [American Federation of Teachers] in the 1970s were opposed to its creation.”

Read it.

Maine’s Democratic Gov. Janet Mills is facing a recall effort from critics of her transgender policies, but the citizen-led campaign is unlikely to result in her being removed from office.

An online recall petition calling for the removal of the first-term Democrat has gathered nearly 30,000 signatures since it was posted last week. The petitioner, Melissa Moulton, said she is “deeply disappointed” in Mills’ policies and the governor’s pushback on President Donald Trump’s efforts to prohibit transgender males from competing in women’s sports.

“I believe strongly that her policies are not in alignment with the wishes and values of the majority of Mainers,” Moulton wrote in the petition. “The feeling of disconnect between the populace and leadership is palpable and widespread.”

The recall effort comes as Mills battles the Trump administration over claims that the state is violating federal anti-discrimination laws for allowing transgender student athletes to compete in women’s sports.

NPR, a Voice of the Crust at your expense.

As concerns swirl over the impacts of steep new tariffs on U.S. companies and consumers, so too does talk about how certain businesses try to avoid them.

‘Certain’ businesses? ALL businesses will try to avoid them; some more successfully than others.

President Trump’s long-threatened taxes on imports from China, Mexico and Canada took effect Tuesday, prompting retaliatory measures on American exports, roiling the stock market and fueling fears of an economic downturn.

Underscoring the fact that interference with trade is always an Unfriendly Act.

On Wednesday, Trump granted automakers a one-month reprieve from the tariffs, underscoring the unpredictability — and potential wiggle room — in his administration’s trade policy. On Thursday, he signed executive orders lifting tariffs on many Mexican and Canadian goods until April 2.

Trump is not a politician, and therefore not concerned much with ‘predictability’. He’s a businessman, and ‘wiggle room’ is what business is all about.

“I’m really interested to see how much of these threatened tariffs stick, and how many of our big industries will be able to get immediate reprieves like the auto industry has already done,” says Mary Anne Madeira, an assistant professor of international relations at Lehigh University. “And I’m hopeful that industries will get a lot of big carveouts and exemptions in a way that will really reduce the potential pain.”

Looks as if they had to reach way down the academic food chain to find somebody who would give them the credentialed comment they were looking for.

Read it … if you can….

A Connecticut college student is suing the Hartford Board of Education and the city of Hartford for negligence.

Nineteen-year-old Aleysha Ortiz says she graduated from high school with honors and earned a college scholarship, but she can’t read or write.

In some ways, Ortiz is living an American dream.

The 19-year-old began her freshman year at the University of Connecticut in Hartford this past fall.

U.Conn. has never been known as an educational powerhouse. At least she’s got her DEI to keep her warm.

ZMan pulls back the curtain.

In the 2016 election cycle, the majority of the American people signaled that they were done with the ideological politics that had reigned since the Cold War. While Trump did not win a majority in the general election, the election as a whole, including the primaries, made clear that the public was ready to move on. The way to view the last three election cycles is as a long struggle by the public to drag the economic elites out of their isolation and back into politics.

That is what we saw in 2024 and what we are seeing now. What is happening in Washington is both revolutionary and just the start. The cutting of government payrolls is one part of a bigger change in how America operates. The United States is about to end its empire phase and return to being a big powerful country. It is a long overdue transformation that has been made possible by the economic elites realizing things had to change if they were going to remain elites.

Left out of this is what it means for Europe. The issue of Ukraine, for example, has the Europeans on the sidelines, muttering mad ideas to one another about how they will get along as American vassal states without America. They are drawing up grand schemes for re-arming Germany and developing their own nuclear arsenal, so they can pretend Brussels is an imperial hegemon and the political classes of the European states can continue as dysfunctional flunkies.

Been there, done that.

Read it.

Equality before the law (the only form of equality worth entertaining) has long been a bad joke in Britain. Whether it’s Jews interfering with the latest jihad march by looking ‘openly Jewish,’ fathers arrested for objecting to the multicultural gang rape of their daughters, or the policing disparity between the BLM and Brexit, COVID, and Tommy Robinson marches, anyone with a pulse realises that the likelihood of getting your collar felt in 2025 rests largely on your ability to identify as anything other than a white male.

Up till now, the powers that be have at least pretended this is something they do not approve of. Even as he emptied the prisons of rapists and murderers to make room for native Brits who tweeted things he disapproves of, Keir Starmer told us categorically: “There is no two-tier policing. There is policing without fear or favour—exactly as it should be, exactly what I would expect and require.”

We all enjoy a giggle now and then, which is presumably why The Sentencing Council for England and Wales has chosen April 1st to enact its overhaul of the sentencing guidelines—the principles that magistrates and judges must follow when imposing community orders and custodial sentences.

Quillette.

It was predictable that Hamas officials and their radicalised international supporters would deny that sexual violence against Israeli women and men was committed on 7 October 2023. But denials from the academic field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies are more surprising because they appear to violate two of the field’s salient principles: support for women’s sexual autonomy and insistence that women who lodge charges of sexual violence should be believed. Instead, a number of academic feminists have not only rejected Israeli claims, they have also embraced Hamas, along with all the reactionary patriarchal baggage of radical Islam, thereby abandoning their own stated values.

The positions that proglodytes take are always less about principle and more about political fashion.

Read it.

When the Trump administration announced it was investigating California’s long-troubled high-speed rail project, the top official overseeing it pressed back. Though the project has more than tripled in price to $106 billion, the official said that “every dollar is accounted for.”

While the money is indeed accounted for, that accounting does not paint a rosy picture for the Golden State. State audits over the past 15 years, which the Washington Free Beacon reviewed, have found a litany of wasteful and bizarre spending and financial commitments, ranging from $177,000 for PoliticoPro subscriptions to $5 million for graffiti removal. One company received more than $50,000 to head diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, while active environmental service contracts total $537 million.

The high-speed rail project launched in 2008. It promised to offer 220 mph trains between Los Angeles and San Francisco, with an estimated completion date of 2020 for $33 million. Construction didn’t begin until 2015. Since then, no track has been laid, no stations have been built, and there’s no estimate on when it will be finished. Even the shorter-term goal that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) announced in 2019—a 171-mile rail in the Central Valley—will likely miss its 2033 deadline, according to the project’s inspector general.

Read it.

Recently, after the speech of Vice President J.D. Vance in Munich, various European leaders went public to express their shock and disbelief that they would be accused of rolling back on free speech. For many of us, it was a laughable display of denial, particularly from UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

In a country that has eviscerated free speech, Starmer told Bret Baier that the UK “guards” free speech and “we don’t believe in censoring speech.”

Now, the government is continuing this month with its effort to regulate and criminalize speech.

The effort to crack down on “Islamophobia” could create a type of blasphemy standard if it encompasses criticism of the faith or its practices.

The Left loves to tag things they don’t like with the ‘-phobia’ sticker, suggesting that rational concern with degenerative cultural trends are somehow arbitrary and irrational. ‘Islamophobia’ is a very popular one that seeks to exclude from the Overton Window the very rational aversion to the existential threat to Western civilization that Muslim terrorism has posed for hundreds of years.

Newsbusters.

The networks had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into coverage of the virulent antisemitic protests at major universities across the United States, beginning with those at Columbia University in New York. The protesters’ worst excesses were often left off of reporting, lest people get the idea that they were materially supportive both of Hamas and of the atrocities they committed on October 7th, 2023. But there is, at long last, an angle worthy of thorough media coverage.

Astral Codex Ten.

The NAEP is a nationwide standardized test of reading and math proficiency. The 2024 scores are out, and they’re not good.

Most headlines have said something like New NAEP Scores Dash Hope Of Post-COVID Learning Recovery, which seems like a fair assessment.

I feel bad about this, because during lockdowns I argued that kids’ educational outcomes don’t suffer long-term from missing a year or two of school. Re-reading the post, I still think my arguments make sense.

Read it.

A Wisconsin school district on Friday agreed to pay out $20,000 to a teacher who was terminated for refusing to use preferred names and pronouns for transgender students.

Jordan Cernek, an English teacher, sued the Argyle School District in July 2024 after his contract was not renewed, alleging the district violated his right to free exercise of his religion and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“Mr. Cernek has a sincerely held religious belief that God makes no mistakes when it comes to sex and gender and that calling a transgender student by a name or pronouns at odds with their biological sex would cause Mr. Cernek to affirm that God made a mistake in creating a transgender person as a male or a female,” the lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty stated. “In Mr. Cernek’s religious view, affirming a transgender person’s identity through the use of preferred names and pronouns would be speaking a falsehood and violate his religious beliefs.”

Read it.

… Except that it isn’t Sussex, it’s Mountbatten-Windsor, and has been every since she married Prince Harry (unless she’s officially changed it, which of course she can do, but of which there is no credible evidence). If she wants to go around calling herself Megan Sussex, she’s certainly entitled to do that, at least in the U.S., but that’s not her legal name. (She still “shares a last name with Harry and her two kids”, but it’s Montbatten-Windsor, not Sussex.)

If she were an ordinary (non-Royal) duchess, her legal signature in Britain (and by courtesy everywhere else) would be “Megan Sussex” to indicate that she is the wife of a peer whose peerage title was “Sussex”, just as Harry’s legal signature (if he were a non-Royal Duke) would be simply his title, “Sussex”.

But Harry (and Megan, legally) come within the ambit of the Letters Patent issued by King George V, under which Harry, as the son of  the sovereign (and Megan, as his wife) are “His/Her Royal Highness” and their legal signatures are just their Christian names, “Harry” and “Megan”. Charles can change that, if he wants to, but every indication is that he doesn’t want to (and hasn’t, at least so far).

I wish these scribblers would do some research….

Read it.

Mark Carney, the former central banker infamous for his Brexit scaremongering and deep ties to globalist institutions, will be Canada’s new prime minister—despite not even holding a seat in Parliament. The former Bank of England governor won the battle to lead the country’s ruling Liberal Party with 85% of the vote of the 151,899 Liberal party members who voted, replacing ‘King of Woke’ Justin Trudeau.

In his victory speech on Sunday night, Carney’s rhetoric was incendiary, portraying U.S. President Donald Trump as a dire threat to Canada’s “way of life” and vowing to push back against American economic power. “They want our resources, our water, our land, our country… If they succeeded, they would destroy our way of life,” he claimed.

However, critics question how long he can survive in office: he has no seat in Parliament, his mandate is shaky, and an election must be held by October—one that polling suggests the Liberals will likely lose to the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre.

Canadians are responsible for voting for the statist Liberal Party and the Liberal Party is responsible for handing over power to the statists Trudeau and now Carney. They have no one to blame but themselves when the shit hits the fan. Trump ought to craft an immigration support plan for Canadians like that he’s doing for South Africans.

Read it.

It’s only March, and we have yet another declaration of a “constitutional crisis.”

The latest dire declaration comes from roughly 950 law professors, who refer generally to actions and policies implemented by President Trump as “beyond his constitutional or statutory authority.”

So — what happens if the “experts” hold a crisis and no one shows up?

After years of such claims, the perpetual crisis has left a dwindling number of people inclined to panic. Many simply have more pressing matters at the moment and have the same reaction of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: “There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.”

The latest letter follows a familiar pattern that has played out like a political perpetual motion machine since the first Trump impeachment. It works something like this: A legal academy composed of largely liberal academics announces a “constitutional crisis” caused by conservatives, and then a largely liberal media runs the story with little scrutiny or skepticism. On most echo-chambered media sites, the public rarely hears an opposing view.

Read it.

A new wave of refugees are fleeing Syria amid several days of sectarian-driven killings mainly targeting Alawites, and in some cases Christians, along the coastal areas in Tartus and Latakia governates.

Fresh reports say that over 10,000 Syrians have entered the Lebanese region of Akkar as nearly 20 villages have opened up to the displaced. More are said to be headed further south to the large Lebanese city of Tripoli.

Remember: It’s not enough to be Muslim–you have to be the right kind of Muslim

Read it.

Last May, Columbia student activist Mahmoud Khalil said his status as a foreign national made him “nervous” to participate in the encampment that roiled campus.

“Since the beginning, I decided to stay out of the public eye and away from media attention or high-risk activities,” he told Al Jazeera. He apparently did not consider blabbing to Qatar’s media mouthpiece either media attention or a high-risk activity. Oops.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked Khalil’s visa—he is a Syrian national, according to ICE—and sent immigration enforcement officials to detain him. When Khalil’s attorney said Khalil had received a green card, one of the officials told the attorney the State Department had revoked that as well. A senior State Department official told us Rubio pulled both the visa and green card.

The arrest, which came to light on Sunday, is the first high-profile action under Rubio’s “Catch and Revoke” effort targeting foreign Hamasniks causing trouble on college campuses. Khalil became one of the Columbia encampment’s public faces last spring when he led negotiations with administrators and demanded they divest from Israel. Columbia suspended him shortly thereafter before dropping the disciplinary charges. Khalil pledged to secure Israeli divestment by “any available means necessary” and participated in Wednesday’s occupation of the Barnard library.

Read it.

Viewers of MSNBC and CNN have recently noticed more frequent appearances by Reps. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York). With the Democratic Party lacking clear leadership in a rudderless motion—still confused about how many genders—its strategists are testing the waters to determine which unhinged and crazed progressive lawmaker will be the party’s new face.

“I have heard from Democratic operatives is that Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez are trying to fill the vacuum created by Harris’s loss, the absence of a clear 2028 frontrunner and a coherent agenda,” Douglas MacKinnon, a former White House and Pentagon official, recently penned in an op-ed featured in The Hill.

Crockett’s latest appearance on far-left conspiracy network MSNBC resulted in a Community Note on X after she claimed: “It is not a criminal violation to enter the country illegally… it’s not a crime.”

I’ll bet it did….

Polar Bear Science. (I am not making this up.)

New evidence indicates that Arctic areas with the thickest ice today probably melted out every year during the summer for about 1,600 years during the early Holocene (ca. 11.3-9.7k years ago), making the Arctic virtually ice-free. As I argue in my new book, this means that polar bears and other Arctic species are capable of surviving extended periods with ice-free summers: otherwise, they would not be alive today.

 

Read it.

More than a century before the Eurostar and LeShuttle, a group of engineers and statesmen dreamed (and fretted) about connecting Britain to France with an underwater tunnel. Peter Keeling drills into the history of this submarine link, and finds a still-relevant story about the cosmopolitan hopes and isolationist panic surrounding liberal internationalism.

Read it.

A huge ancient city has been found in the Amazon, hidden for thousands of years by lush vegetation.

The discovery changes what we know about the history of people living in the Amazon.

The houses and plazas in the Upano area in eastern Ecuador were connected by an astounding network of roads and canals.

The area lies in the shadow of a volcano that created rich local soils but also may have led to the destruction of the society.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

One of my biggest fears is that the manufacturer of a smart home product I use will go bankrupt and disappear overnight. It’s not an unfounded fear — just last year, smart home company Insteon abruptly announced that it would shut down its servers over financial difficulties. The servers would later return from the dead, but only because some loyal users acquired the entire company to keep its products alive. This isn’t a one-off example either — Philips stopped supporting its first-gen Hue Bridge in 2020 and MyQ’s garage door openers became incompatible with the Google Assistant without warning in 2023.

Many also care about the privacy implications of having cheaply made devices connect to the internet, but that’s a relatively smaller concern for me. Nevertheless, an offline smart home setup insulates me from both potential bankruptcy and privacy invasions.

The Spectator.

The rise of digital communications has been a boon but has also opened society to grave risks through cyber war. Ukraine found this out in the first years of its war with Russia. Just as worrying has been the penetration of television, the internet and streaming radio by hacker groups, both military and criminal. Attempts to change the narrative of society and sow discord through fake news and false information, denial-of-service attacks and interference with GPS signals have all been a serious challenge in the ongoing war. Ukraine has hit back with its own hacktivist networks, even disrupting Moscow television stations, and the cyber war continues.

Last year, in the United States, the FBI revealed the existence of a massive penetration of American telecommunications networks by China, conducted by a threat group dubbed ‘Volt Typhoon’. It had taken vast amounts of data about Americans, including text messages, and perhaps inserted malware into networks. This complex cyber-attack against routers and switching networks could have been ongoing for years. More recently, the spate of sabotage against data cables on the floor of the Baltic sea, involving Russian-linked or Chinese vessels, has raised alarm about communications and internet vulnerabilities for Nato allies.

Somtimes the old ways are best.

Nature.

Metastasis is the spread of cancer cells from primary tumours to distant organs and is the cause of 90% of cancer deaths globally1,2. Metastasizing cancer cells are uniquely vulnerable to immune attack, as they are initially deprived of the immunosuppressive microenvironment found within established tumours3. There is interest in therapeutically exploiting this immune vulnerability to prevent recurrence in patients with early cancer at risk of metastasis. Here we show that inhibitors of cyclooxygenase 1 (COX-1), including aspirin, enhance immunity to cancer metastasis by releasing T cells from suppression by platelet-derived thromboxane A2 (TXA2). TXA2 acts on T cells to trigger an immunosuppressive pathway that is dependent on the guanine exchange factor ARHGEF1, suppressing T cell receptor-driven kinase signalling, proliferation and effector functions. T cell-specific conditional deletion of Arhgef1 in mice increases T cell activation at the metastatic site, provoking immune-mediated rejection of lung and liver metastases. Consequently, restricting the availability of TXA2 using aspirin, selective COX-1 inhibitors or platelet-specific deletion of COX-1 reduces the rate of metastasis in a manner that is dependent on T cell-intrinsic expression of ARHGEF1 and signalling by TXA2 in vivo. These findings reveal a novel immunosuppressive pathway that limits T cell immunity to cancer metastasis, providing mechanistic insights into the anti-metastatic activity of aspirin and paving the way for more effective anti-metastatic immunotherapies.

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The two videos below from RAIR Foundation report on two different fronts in the struggle against the Great Jihad in Spain.

The first concerns a Muslim-led political party in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa, which is surrounded on its landward boundary by Morocco.

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Dr. Peter McCullough told The HighWire’s Del Bigtree that the current strain of bird flu likely resulted from gain-of-function research conducted at the USDA Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Georgia.

“This strain of bird flu is different. This looks like it actually came from serial passage research done at the USDA Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Georgia … We’re so sure of it that we’ve published this in a peer-reviewed paper … and it hasn’t been disputed by any of the public health officials. We cite the USDA research.” McCullough told Bigtree.

McCullough continued, “Serial passage is when a blend of viral strains is intentionally put in a mallard duck. They were trying to see which strain would pass to other mallard ducks. The mallard duck is studied because its gullet is where the virus attaches and doesn’t go into the lungs. And indeed, they found CLADE 23446 that looked like it transmitted … and sure enough, Athens was where the first cases were found.”

“The mallard ducks could spread it all over and in migratory waterfowl. It quickly spread into mammals, and now up to 40 different species of mammals,” McCullough said.

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The audit was commissioned by federal U.S. District Judge David O. Carter and completed by Alvarez & Marsal Public Sector Services, LLC. (A&M).

The report noted that A&M found it challenging to completely quantify how Los Angeles officials spent approximately $2.3 billion in funding meant to shelter, feed, and serve homeless people due to the incomplete and inaccurate manner the city’s homelessness program recorded and collected data.

The report painted a grim picture of Los Angeles’ homeless program managed by Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which was established in 1993.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised….

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On Saturday a group of French feminists – who we’re sure are absolute peaches to be around, did what any woman trying to be taken seriously would do – whipped out their tits and finger paints, then decorated each other with various flags, swastikas, and the message “FASCIST EPIDEMIC.”

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On Saturday night, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents entered a student residential building at Columbia University in uptown New York and detained Mahmoud Khalil, one of the lead negotiators on behalf of pro-Palestine protesters at 2024’s Gaza solidarity encampment. In a sweeping attack on the First Amendment, the Trump administration said this week it would begin revoking visas of “Hamas sympathizers,” specifically citing Columbia University students. The detention followed a two-day targeted online campaign against Khalil by pro-Israel groups and individuals, including Columbia’s high-profile pro-Israel professor, Shai Davidai.

Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian origin and an American green-card holder, was detained by DHS officials around half past eight as he was entering the Columbia residential building he lives in. He was returning from an iftar, breaking the day-long fast observed by many Muslims during the month of Ramadan.

Khalil’s wife, who is eight months pregnant, was with him at the time. A statement by the pro-Palestine group Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) stated that he was “abducted and detained without the physical demonstration of a warrant or officially filed charges.” At the time of writing, Khalil is still being detained at a DHS facility in New Jersey, according to a database for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

What goes around comes around.

ZMan:

I hate daylight savings time. The main reason is every year it means a week where it feels like I am late for everything, like I overslept by an hour. As a person who likes to get an early start, this is the worst feeling in the world. Sure, I get that wonderful vibe in the autumn where it feels like I gained an hour, but it is not a trade-off I favor. The spring forward misery far outweighs the fallback benefit that is long forgotten by the time spring arrives.

Concur.