Read it.

We are hiring.

We received over 2,500 job applications. Fewer than 100 filled a form with open-ended questions. About 15 went on to complete a reasonably simple real-world challenge. We are a nation with the cheapest internet and a billion internet users. Where are all the self-directed learners? The eclectic ekalavyas?

We are 25 years into the MOOC era. We have near unlimited access to the world’s best teachers on YouTube, and yet our education system isn’t producing independent thinkers. How is this possible?

It struck me that our education system is not just “useless” it is actively hurting all learners. We keep devising ways and means to keep them in artificial bubbles where all learning is boiled down to information transfer.

Like wild animals raised too long in captivity, our students have lost crucial survival skills for the real world. Our education system isn’t just failing them — it’s domesticating them into helplessness, training them for a life of being spoon-fed.

Read it.

The al-Qaeda-affiliated Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces who took over Damascus in December killed hundreds of Syrian civilians over the last two days, targeting Alawites and Christians.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on March 7 that 240 people had been killed in two days of violence in the coastal region of western Syria, which is heavily populated by members of the Alawite minority. The victims massacred include many children and women.

Christians are also increasingly affected by the ongoing violence. In the city of Latakia, HTS terrorists murdered a Christian, Tony Khoury, in his home on March 7. He was originally from the Maronite village of Dahr Safra, according to social media posts. On the same day, jihadist regime terrorists also murdered Greek Christians Tony Boutros and his son, Fadi Boutros.

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

The Washington Poop, a Voice of the Crust.

Mob rule and mindless random violence is always a primary tool in the Left’s toolbox.

E.G.: Pro-Palestinian activists vandalise Trump’s Turnberry golf course (Peter Stubley/The Times)

Why everybody melts down over the prospect of ‘neo-Nazis’ but nobody seems concerned about ‘neo-Commies’?

Perhaps it’s because the Nazis went away but the Commies never did….

Read it.

The case for getting out of NATO encompasses four fundamental propositions:

First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.

Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.

Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser commitments elsewhere.

Fourthly, jettisoning NATO requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into the War Capital of the World, dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.

Read it.

Growing up in America through the 1980s and 1990s there was a general sense of “live and let live” among Gen X and Gen Y that truly defined the era and our notions of what a society should look like. We all knew gay people were a permanent fixture in society. For the most part nobody bothered them and they kept their gayness to themselves (and far away from children). Frankly, it was working just fine.

There were some protests and marches, but the only “individual right” straight people had that they didn’t was the right to legal marriage.

This is patently untrue. Homosexuals had exactly the same rights as heterosexuals when it came to marriage: they could marry a person of the other sex. What homosexuals did not have (and what they wanted), the right to marry someone of the same sex, was denied to heterosexuals as well. All of the handwaving in the world doesn’t affect this simple fact.

The Times.

n the days before the How to Survive a Warzone documentary was broadcast, BBC bosses were toasting their success in securing extraordinary access to war-torn Gaza.

However, they were left “head in hands” after a social media thread posted hours after it was broadcast revealed that its main contributor, 13-year-old Abdullah al-Yazouri, was the son of a Hamas minister.

The programme was pulled from iPlayer and this week the BBC chairman labelled the failures a “dagger to the heart” of the corporation’s impartiality.

Read it.

Artificial intelligence has discovered ancient civilizations over 5,000 years old hidden beneath some of the world’s largest deserts, including one in the heart of the Dubai desert, without the use of a single shovel. In the Dubai desert, remains of human activity over 5,000 years old have been detected, including a buried city.

The discovery in the Dubai desert revealed ancient settlements and communication networks, indicating the presence of roads and settlements.

Advancements in remote sensing and data analysis using artificial intelligence have transformed archaeology, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of excavations. The integration of AI and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) proved especially powerful. SAR technology provides high-resolution images of structures buried beneath the earth’s surface, capable of penetrating natural barriers such as sand, vegetation, and ice.

Read it.

On the wall of his living room in Lier, Belgium, Werner van Beethoven keeps a family tree. Thirteen generations unfurl along its branches, including one that shows his best known relative, born in 1770: Ludwig van Beethoven, who forever redefined Western music with compositions such as the Fifth Symphony, Für Elise, and others. Yet that sprig held a hereditary, and potentially scandalous, secret.

That Beethoven, Werner learned to his dismay in 2023, is biologically unrelated to Werner and his contemporary kin. This uncomfortable fact was brought to light by Maarten Larmuseau, a geneticist at KU Leuven who specializes in answering a question relatively few others have explored: How often do women have children with men they’re not partnered with?

In most societies, kinship is at least partly socially constructed, and for example can include adoption and stepfamilies. Yet questions about biological paternity have roiled families and fueled cultural anxieties for eons. Male authors have written about hidden paternity for millennia, including in Greek dramas and The Canterbury Tales; William Shakespeare and Molière wrote plays about it. Knowing a child’s biological father is also important for forensically identifying cadavers, recording accurate medical histories, and charting the manifold ways in which people structure families around the world.

SSRN.

We provide evidence that local preferences for neighborhood characteristics play an important role in shaping the political economy of residential land-use regulations and their distributional consequences. We leverage a land-use regulation reform in Houston, TX that reduced the minimum lot size-permitting denser single-family housing-while allowing incumbent property owners on individual city blocks to opt out of the change and adopt higher alternative minimum lot sizes. Initially wealthier, whiter neighborhoods were more likely to opt out and adopt higher minimum lot sizes after the reform. Supply of denser housing increased in areas that did not opt out. We develop a model where incumbents set minimum lot size. Incumbents trade off potential gains from redevelopment and local spillovers from housing density. The local nature of block-level regulatory decisions allows us to distinguish between preferences for neighborhood density and alternative political economy motives for regulation. Model estimates reveal large, negative local externalities from density that vary across incumbent socioeconomic groups. Our results suggest that local control can tailor regulation to heterogeneous incumbent preferences, possibly making reform more politically feasible. However, doing so will likely limit supply in areas where housing demand is the highest.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Mr. Renn’s schema is straightforward. Modern American history, he argues, can be divided into three epochs when it comes to the status of Christianity. In “positive world,” between 1964 and 1994, being a Christian in America generally enhanced one’s social status. It was a good thing to be known as a churchgoer, and “Christian moral norms” were the basic norms of the broader American culture. Then, in “neutral world,” which lasted roughly until 2014 — Mr. Renn acknowledges the dates are imprecise — Christianity no longer had a privileged status, but it was seen as one of many valid options in a pluralist public square.

About a decade ago, around the time that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, Mr. Renn says the United States became “negative world.” Being a Christian, especially in high-status domains, is a social negative, he argues, and holding to traditional Christian moral views, particularly related to sex and gender, is seen as “a threat to the public good and new public moral order.”

Yale School of Medicine.

Mireille Serlie, MD, PhD, loves fast food. Her research seeks to understand why.

“Fast and ultra-processed foods do something to our brains that make us overeat,” says Serlie, a professor of medicine (endocrinology and metabolism) at Yale School of Medicine.

Serlie studies the effects of eating patterns and specific nutrients on the brain and the functional differences between the brains of people with obesity and those with a healthy weight.

In a Q&A, Serlie discusses eating patterns, fasting, and the importance of diet and exercise in retaining muscle mass after weight loss.

Anand Sanwal.

When I was in high school, students divided into two camps: those who “got” math and those who believed they simply weren’t “math people.”

I was one of the “got” math people who spent countless hours doing trigonometry and eventually doing AP Calculus where I was doing derivatives and all sorts of ‘fancy’ math. Deep down, I knew what this was really about – it wasn’t about practical skills but about signaling I was smart, just like the other high-achiever types. It wasn’t about learning. It was just another credential for the college application rat race.

Meanwhile, some of my friends struggled with math not because they lacked ability, but because the content was so disconnected from anything they cared about. When any of us asked the teacher when we’d ever use this stuff, she gave the standard response about college preparation and developing abstract thinking skills.

But looking back now, I realize we were all learning the wrong math – both the students who excelled and those who gave up. It is yet another example of how schools fail teenagers.

The math most useful in real life isn’t calculus or advanced trigonometry – it’s probability and statistics. And yet our education system treats these subjects as afterthoughts, typically confined to a single elective course typically in senior year, if taught at all.

This is backwards.

Exactly so. I suspect that this is reflective of the modern attitude of “everyone must go to colleege”, so by God they’re going to try to prepare for college whether you need it or not, and to Hell with stuff that might be practical for non-college people.

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist.

I’m a professor of economics at George Mason University and today I’m going to share my screen and we are going to be talking about President Trump’s crypto executive order and what it means for American innovation, crypto taxation, and the global dominance of the dollar. Okay, so let’s get going. I’m going to pull several key sentences from the crypto order, including the first promoting and protecting the sovereignty of the United States dollar, including through actions to promote the development and growth of lawful and legitimate dollar backed stable coins worldwide. So first of all, what’s a stable coin? Well, we all know the price of Bitcoin and Bitcoin fluctuates. It’s 120, it’s 80 today. It goes up and down. It’s actually not a good transactions medium for that reason. So despite what Satoshi Nakamoto wanted, it’s not a good transactions medium. Stable coins, in contrast to Bitcoin are designed to maintain a stable value, typically relative to an already established currency.

Read it.

According to the report, The TSA has more people doing “full-time union work” vs. performing actual screening functions at 86% of US airports. Put another way, 374 out of 432 federalized airports have fewer than 200 TSA Officers to perform screening functions, while the rest are paid by the government but work “full-time on union matters” and do not retain certification to perform screening.

What’s more, DHS cited a recent TSA employee survey which found that over 60% of “poor performers” are allowed to stay employed and “not surprisingly, continue to not perform.”

(Also, maybe get rid of the nut-grabbers in the TSA patdown area when we don’t want to submit to those Total Recall scanners made by Leidos – formerly SAIC).

Read it.

An illegal immigrant who served as deputy communications director for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) has fled the United States for Colombia, saying he finally has “freedom of movement.”

Diego de la Vega, who arrived in the United States from Ecuador at age seven and overstayed his visitor’s visa, began working for Ocasio-Cortez in October 2022, according to his LinkedIn. Last December, de la Vega left the United States and relocated to Bogotá with his wife, another illegal immigrant, the Substack “Migrant Insider” reported.

Ocasio-Cortez praised her former aide on Wednesday, saying he was “amazing” and that “we love him.”

Read it.

Of course it does.

Read it.

On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump stood in the House of Representatives and introduced DJ Daniel, a 13-year-old boy battling brain cancer who desperately wants to be a police officer. His local police department made DJ an honorary officer. Last year, a video went viral of people ridiculing DJ for proudly wearing his uniform. He went viral for the second time on Tuesday night when Democrats refused to applaud him for his struggle with cancer.

At the not-quite State of the Union, President Trump heralded DJ’s valiant fight against cancer and made him an honorary member of the United States Secret Service. On Wednesday, DJ got to roam the White House, and reporters videoed him hugging President Trump in the Oval Office. On Tuesday night, Democrats could not muster the normalcy or decency to just clap for the kid.

On MSNBC, the rich, white, neurotic women who hold the Democratic Party captive let loose. Nichole Wallace openly hoped DJ would not grow up to be like the police officers who committed suicide after Jan. 6, 2021. Rachael Maddow called it “disgusting” that Trump would invite DJ to the ceremony. On CBS, Stephen Colbert blasted the Democrats for failing to do anything significant to protest Trump even as Americans watched Congressman Al Green get dragged out of the House Chambers. Democrats held up signs and dressed in bubblegum pink. All that was missing in the Democrats’ circus was a flaming trapeze. They resorted to a metaphorical flaming bag of poop in their conduct.

UnHerd.

As all such proglodyte “X-ophobia” constructs do.

What do Tommy Robinson, LBC Radio, the Conservative Party and Sadiq Khan have in common?

The answer is that they have all been shortlisted for Islamophobe of the Year awards by the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), a British campaign and advocacy group with close links to the Iranian government.

It all sounds like a bit of a joke. The “Commission” used to promote the Awards in a semi-comedic style: as an irreverent swipe at those who have shown hatred to Muslims in public life. But there was always a bad smell about all this: having a laugh, about hatred. The apparently light-hearted format enabled fierce denunciations of others for the same reasons that are getting people killed. In 2015, the IHRC gave another of its Islamophobia Awards to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — just two months after jihadis slaughtered 12 people at the magazine’s offices in Paris.

The origins of this unsavouriness are no secret. In his 2023 review of the Prevent anti-extremism programme, William Shawcross described the organisation as “an Islamist group ideologically aligned with the Iranian regime”, with a history of “extremist links and terrorist sympathies”. Until recently, the IHRC’s director was Saied Reza Ameli, also secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution.

Nevertheless, thanks to its campaigning on Islamophobia, the IHRC has had a notable influence on British public life. And Islamophobia is now a pressing concern of the British state and Labour government.

“Islamophobia” depends on the modern understanding of “phobias” as irrational fear — and ignores the historical fact that fear of Islam is totally rational, as demonstrated over the past 1400 years.

Know the feeling.

OffGuardian.

In December 2024, a Romanian court cancelled the second round of the planned Presidential election and annulled the completed first round, citing (totally theoretical) “Russian interference”.

This caused massive protests in Romania, as you can imagine. The first round had been won by right winger C?lin Georgescu following a social media-based campaign, and he was predicted to quite easily win the second round as well.

The Romanian opposition – denied a likely victory – took their case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Then, earlier today, the ECHR threw the case out without even hearing it. Apparently, the Romanian courts were perfectly within their rights to simply indefinitely postpone their election on the basis of unproven allegations, and all those people who already voted and wanted to vote again can just go to hell.

This is the ECHR, which lectures the world on rights and democratic norms on the regular.
And everyone is apparently just fine with it. It’s crazy.

Zman’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the interesting things about the shift in foreign policy initiated by the Trump administration is that it is a break from what has been policy for a century. This sudden lurch into realism is a departure from Wilsonian democracy. Trump wants to center policy on the material interests of the country. Up until now, policy was centered around moral claims about how the world ought to be ordered.

Through the Cold War it was assumed that pragmatism was the rule because of the threat of nuclear annihilation. The better way to view it is that Wilsonian democracy was on a leash for forty years. Once the Cold War ended, it was like a hyperactive dog that got under the fence. The last thirty years has been an explosion of Wilsonian democracy playing catchup for lost time.

Even during the Cold War, American policy makers and politicians had a fondness for moralizing about the world. There were endless debates over the morality of dealing with dictators who happened to be anti-Soviet. This was finally resolved in the 1980’s with the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian. The former was a temporary compromise, while the later was a forever enemy.

Read it.

On Feb 14, 2025, Muslim terrorists kidnapped 70 Christians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, took them to a church, tied them up and beheaded them. Their bodies were left there to rot by the Muslim killers who did it to show the supremacy of Islam over Christianity.

Pope Francis made no mention of this bloody massacre of Christians in a church, instead in a meeting with the Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic, he spoke about “the serious humanitarian emergency in Gaza.”

The fake famine invented by Muslim terrorists in Gaza somehow had priority over the mass killing of Christians.

Read it.

The big story this month is the information being uncovered by Elon Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.) about the millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars that have been routed by USAID to terrorism. Money sent to the Taliban may be just the tip of the iceberg. Fortunately for all of us, President Trump and the D.O.G.E. team are identifying these funds and putting a stop to them.

Read it.

It’s an absolute disgrace: the Climate United Fund, a shady nonprofit slapped together in November 2022, somehow wangled a jaw-dropping $7 billion grant from the Biden administration’s climate slush fund in April 2024—the largest nonprofit grant in U.S. history. This money, ripped from taxpayers’ pockets, was supposed to fuel clean energy projects under the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) of the Inflation Reduction Act. Instead, it’s become a glaring symbol of political cronyism, grift, and utter mismanagement, leaving Americans furious and demanding answers.

Read it.

In the Italian city of Cremona, a bus driver and one of his passengers were culturally enriched by two teenage girls during the holy month of Ramadan, when the Religion of Peace is at its most peaceful.

The most important thing to note is that Muslims will enforce the strictures of Ramadan on non-Muslims in their immediate vicinity, to the point of applying corporal punishment when required.

Read it.

The Biden presidency might have been the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the American people. A shocking investigation by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project has revealed that virtually every document bearing Joe Biden’s signature during his presidency was signed by an autopen — except for one.

What makes this revelation particularly damning is that the only document confirmed to have Biden’s actual signature was his letter announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race. Let that sink in for a moment.

Remember when House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) revealed his discussion with Biden when Biden couldn’t recall signing the executive order halting LNG exports? Now we know why — he probably didn’t. The real question is: Who did? Who was running the country while Biden was not all there?

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

Every major element of the official COVID narrative has been proven false: The origins of the virus, the validity of PCR tests, the suppression of early treatments, the denial of natural immunity, the so-called “safety and effectiveness” of vaccines, and the utility of masks, lockdowns, and vaccine passports. Yet those who questioned any part of it faced unprecedented ostracism and persecution.

The manufactured panic ignored fundamental reality: COVID posed minimal risk to healthy people under 70, but was significantly more dangerous to the elderly and immunocompromised. Rather than focusing resources on protecting vulnerable populations, we destroyed economies, stole childhoods, and enforced measures that made no epidemiological sense. This wasn’t just about control – it was an engineered economic coup, the largest financial consolidation of power in modern history. While small businesses were forcibly closed, Amazon’s profits soared. As working-class neighborhoods struggled, Wall Street celebrated record gains. The laptop class posted about ‘we’re all in this together’ from their home offices while essential workers were forced into what was portrayed as dangerous conditions to deliver their groceries. The same corporations trumpeting their commitment to “equity” through DEI initiatives were destroying economic mobility for the very communities they claimed to champion.

Read it.

Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project, an initiative funded by the left-wing William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, quietly deleted online references to its deputy director, Helyeh Doutaghi, who is also a member of the U.S.-sanctioned terrorist fundraising entity Samidoun.

The entirety of the Yale Law School webpage for the project was inaccessible just before noon on Thursday. It came back online a few hours later with an updated “Directors and Staff” section that no longer includes Doutaghi. The Samidoun member’s Yale Law School biography, which describes Doutaghi’s research on “Marxian and postcolonial critiques of law, sanctions, and international political economy,” has also been pulled from the web.

Read it.

I guess that doesn’t happen on Planet Proglodyte.

Read it.

It’s been almost six years since the delinquent child activist Greta Thunberg promoted a so-called scientist’s warning that “climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels” by 2023. The scientist in question, Harvard University professor James Anderson, also predicted “there will be no floating ice remaining” in the Arctic Ocean by 2022 absent a “Marshall Plan-style endeavor in which all of the world takes extreme measures to to transition off of fossil fuels completely within the next five years.” That didn’t happen, but climate activists are still warning that the Arctic could be ice-free at some point between 2035 and 2067.

Not surprisingly, there is a long history—dating back to the 1970s—of so-called climate scientists and government bureaucrats making catastrophic predictions about the environment that never materialized. Here are 10 of the most egregious examples.

Read it.

NATO is turning to the ongoing war in Ukraine for lessons as the alliance works to shift its strategy going forward. Tom Goffus, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Operations, presented five such lessons during a panel this week at the Air and Space Forces (AFA) Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado.

“I got to NATO one month before the invasion, so [I had a] front row seat watching the whole thing,” Goffus told the audience. “I think it’s a critical topic.”

Prior to that, Goffus, a former U.S. Air Force F-15 pilot, served as Policy Director on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy, National Security Staff Director for Strategic and Eastern European Affairs, and Senior Military Advisor for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department.

Before unveiling his own takeaways, Goffus talked about the value of Ukraine’s acoustic sensor network for the detection of low-altitude detection of drones and cruise missiles.

“Essentially, Ukraine is covering its entire nation, 1,000 meters and below, with acoustic sensors for less than 50 million euros (nearly $54 million),” Goffus gushed. “It’s crazy what they’re doing with this.”

Read it.

The U.S. remains puzzled about how many weapons the Houthis have or where they get them all, a senior U.S. defense official told The War Zone, adding that the militants are highly innovative when it comes to developing their arsenal. Meanwhile, numerous airstrikes by the U.S. and its allies on Houthi targets in Yemen have not halted the rebel group’s ability to produce the weapons and use them at will, the official said.

“There’s some debate as to what’s in their magazine,” the official told The War Zone during a media engagement at the Air and Space Forces Association Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. “There’s a good bit right now we don’t know about the Houthis.”

Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

Oversight Committee chairman James Comer found himself having to yell over extremist Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley Wednesday in the House as she attempted to kick up a fuss and get media attention.

Comer denied her request for unanimous consent to enter articles into the congressional record, including one from 2018 claiming that American citizens commit more murder and rape than immigrants.

Pressley announced that she was submitting the articles “as a survivor of sexual violence myself,” going on to scream that it was her procedural right to enter the articles.

“Okay, this trend that you’re all trying to get thrown out of committees so you can get on MSNBC is gonna end,” Comer interjected, asserting “We’re not gonna put up with it.”

Pressley attempted to continue reading the article, screeching at Comer “You do not get to dictate how I recite the articles for the record.”

“No, no,” Comer shouted over her, explaining “It is [Democratic Virginia Rep. Suhas] Subramanyam’s time. No, you know the process of unanimous consent, you’re not recognized.”

Read it.

He’s a Democrat. He doesn’t care.

Read it.

ActBlue, the Democrat online fundraising organization that Republican lawmakers have targeted as a money-laundering operation, faces internal chaos after the recent departures of at least seven senior officials, The New York Times reported.

Further, a lawyer at the firm accused ActBlue executives of a retaliation campaign, according to the Times report Wednesday.

It’s unclear what prompted the departures, which began on Feb. 21, according to the report.

The gravy train is stopping. Wise passengers get off when that happens.

Read it.

President Donald Trump pushed border encounters to historical lows, and did so without signing into law a bipartisan border deal relentlessly lauded by his Democratic opponents.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed that there were a mere 200 migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border on Feb. 22, marking the lowest single-day apprehension number in over 15 years. This milestone was followed up by Trump’s announcement that there were only 8,326 migrant apprehensions at the border during his first full month in office, a figure dwarfed by the regular monthly averages seen during the previous administration.

The southern border is becoming so quiet that Tom Homan, who is leading the Trump administration’s deportation operation, says he doesn’t recall activity this calm in his entire career in federal immigration enforcement. The border czar first began working for the Border Patrol in 1984.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a pioneer for LGBTQ+ rights who decades ago upset leaders in his own party when he defied state law and issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples, suggested Democrats were in the wrong in allowing transgender athletes to participate in female college and youth sports.

“I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness — it’s deeply unfair,” Newsom said in his debut podcast episode of “This is Gavin Newsom.” “I am not wrestling with the fairness issue. I totally agree with you.”

Newsom’s comments on the issue roiling political debates nationwide came in a conversation with influential MAGA-world figure Charlie Kirk, the campus culture warrior who leads the organization Turning Point USA and is a close ally of President Donald Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Read it.

The anti-Trump media have certainly pushed the angle that Trump’s attempts to cut the federal work force are horrible and chaotic. The poll by the taxpayer-funded networks found 56% agreed Trump has rushed it without considering everything, while 43% said he’s doing what’s needed.

PBS reporter Lisa Desjardins pushed this finding: “So we did ask, do you think checks and balances, that system, is working now? Right, today, 56% in the last week or so believe, no, our checks and balances system is not working.” They were secretly cheering because this is the message they are pushing. There’s no checks of balances for these taxpayer-funded networks.

NPR touted the poll under the headline “Majorities say state of the union is not strong, and Trump is rushing change.” NPR political analyst Domenico Montanaro pushed other negative poll findings for Trump: “Most said the cuts to the federal government are doing more harm than good (55%), and 60% said federal employees are essential, including two-thirds of independents.”

Associated Press, a Voice of the Crust.

New Zealand’s most senior envoy to the United Kingdom has lost his job over remarks he made about U.S. President Donald Trump at an event in London this week, New Zealand ‘s foreign minister said Thursday.

Phil Goff, who is New Zealand’s High Commissioner to the U.K., made the comments at an event held by the international affairs think tank Chatham House in London on Tuesday.

Actions have consequences. You’d think that a career diplomat would know enough to be more, how shall I say it, diplomatic.

The Washington Poop, a Voice of the Crust.

Tano Tijerina spent a decade as the Democratic chief executive of Webb County here in South Texas. But when he was honored recently by the local chapter of the country’s oldest Hispanic civil rights organization, it was as a converted Republican touting a second Trump administration.

“Sometimes we need to break things down to build them up,” Tijerina declared to enthusiastic applause.

Democrats’ hold over Texas border counties is waning, with rising stars like Tijerina switching parties and GOP candidates flipping traditionally blue seats. Political experts credit the resurgence of Donald Trump, as well as a huge influx of campaign dollars, and foresee a lasting shift that could have major implications in coming years.

“The Republicans have a great opportunity,” Tijerina said in late February. “There’s a lot of people like myself that are changing parties. You can change our minds.”

They don’t care about labels–they just want the money. The danger to Republicans is that they will bring their socialist ways into nominally Republican government. We have an oversuply of RINOs as it is.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Voters still have a sour view of Democrats six weeks after President Donald Trump and Republicans swept into Washington with control of all branches of the federal government, according to a new poll.

A plurality of voters — 40 percent — said the Democratic Party doesn’t have any strategy whatsoever for responding to Trump, according to the survey by the liberal firm Blueprint that was shared first with POLITICO. Another 24 percent said Democrats have a game plan, but it’s a bad one.

A paltry 10 percent said that the party has a solid technique for dealing with Trump. And that’s coming from a Democratic outfit’s survey.

Gee, I wonder why.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

So secret that it came to the attention of so incompetent a rag as Politico.

Trump, unlike the Democrats, isn’t locked into supporting Zelensky, so this ought to come as no surprise.

Read it.

Satellite images obtained last month from western China show the People’s Liberation Army apparently practicing for attacks on U.S. electronic warfare planes and aircraft carriers, according to a private intelligence company.

The company Allsource Analysis stated in a report made public Thursday that a satellite image from the desert in Xinjiang, western China, shows two mockups of what appear to be U.S. E-2 Hawkeye airborne warning and control aircraft.

Other warplanes have been spotted as targets in the past but not the E-2, which is a critical command-and-control aircraft for coordinating aircraft carrier strikes.

Outlines of the carrier-based propeller planes were spotted on the ground along with mockups of two aircraft carrier targets and one warship target.

This comes at a bad time, what with U.S. weapons stocks seriously depleted due to the Democrat adventures in Ukrain.

Many problems fix themselves, if given enough time. Think of it as evolution in action.

Watch it.

An interesting approach to creating an artificial ‘fossil fuel’.

I find their approach of trying to keep things as low-cost as possible, without worrying about nominal efficiency, very attractive.

Much of the discussion in the video seems to riff off of the concept “Making energy out of thin air”, and that’s a bit exaggerated. The process depends on inputs of electricity from solar energy and materials like limestone, but compared to the complexities of modern fossil fuel production, it represents (if they can scale it up) a beneficial improvement.

I intend to keep my eye on this company.

Watch it.

The transition from expensive materials to inexpensive materials is key to advancing productivity.

Quillette.

Anyone wanting to take the pulse of progressive America can consult the opinion pages of the New York Times. That’s where, earlier this year, I found Ezekiel Kweku, one of the paper’s editors, complaining bitterly about Hamilton. A decade after the musical about America’s neglected founding father became a Broadway sensation, Kweku wants his readers to know that it has not aged well. Kweku’s critique repays attention, not only for its revisionist interpretation of a popular piece of political art, but also because it crystallises the dilemma facing the political Left in the (second) age of Trump. Kweku’s polemic is emblematic of the unease—if not outright resentment—with which the Left regards American patriotism. And until it outgrows that defect and embraces national solidarity and pride, the Democratic Party will continue to flail in the political wilderness.