Read it.

The newly formed Islamist regime in Syria, established as former Al-Qaeda commander Ahmed Al Sharaa—also known as Abu Mohamed Al Golani—was named Syria’s transitional president on January 31, 2025, following the ousting of former Syrian President Bashar

WIRED, a Voice of the Crust.

Because, as we all know, cancer research is TOTALLY the responsibility of the Federal government–and the Federal taxpayer.

And because, as we all know, THERE WILL BE NO CANCER RESEARCH if the Federal government doesn’t pay for it.

Statists, assemble!

Lifehacker.

There’s nothing more nerve-wracking than being pulled over by a police car, or answering the door to find the police on your front porch. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong and have never broken a law in your life, interactions with suspicious law enforcement officers are incredibly stressful. You’re supposedly innocent until proven guilty, but in these situations, the cops don’t always act like it.

But that stressful situation can become a real nightmare if the police seize your property. Whether it’s cash you’re bringing to the bank, your car, or other valuables you thought were safe on your person, it’s not uncommon for the police to seize your property during an encounter—even if you’re not ultiamtely charged with a crime. Worse, the cops can often legally keep your property and cash, again, even if you’re never charged with any crime, or are later found to be not guilty.

Jeff Somers is also a well-regarded speculative fiction author. Presumably Lifehacker is his Day Job.

Read it.

At the Cesare Beccaria juvenile detention centre in Milan, approximately seven out of ten detainees are Muslim, largely second-generation immigrants—a striking demographic imbalance that authorities describe as a ticking social time bomb, Italian daily Il Giornale writes.

These minors have typically been detained for robbery, drug dealing, or violent offences.

Many come from severely disadvantaged backgrounds, with low school attendance and deep alienation from Western norms, factors that increase their vulnerability to extremist ideologies.

Officials fear that exposure of these young people to inmates who promote radical Islamist beliefs could easily lead to indoctrination and violent extremism.

In response, prison authorities have recently introduced Abdullah Tchina, a moderate imam, into the facility. His mission: to counter radical narratives and support young detainees in navigating religious identity and social rehabilitation.

However, the move has sparked debate. MP Riccardo De Corato of the governing conservative Fratelli d’Italia party criticised the initiative, warning that the imam might worsen the situation rather than aid rehabilitation.

Read it.

On Sunday, July 20th, a demonstration outside Düsseldorf’s central train station erupted into a large-scale brawl involving approximately 50 to 100 Syrians and Kurds, resulting in injuries to four police officers.

The conflict erupted when a Kurdish group, estimated at 400 to 500 protesters rallying against Syria’s military actions toward the Druze minority, was suddenly confronted by a smaller group of around 200 Syrians, who moved over from a separate rally.

According to police, the Syrians initiated the confrontation, targeting the Kurdish protesters. The altercation quickly escalated, with both sides hurling bottles and stones at one another.

During the chaos, four officers sustained injuries while attempting to restore order. It remains unclear whether any civilians were hurt.

This incident is part of a broader pattern of tensions within Germany’s diaspora communities. A parallel riot also occurred in Berlin–Kreuzberg on the same day, where armed Kurdish militants attacked Turkish men near a convenience store using glass bottles, metal bars, and knives.

Foreign Affairs, a Voice of the Deep State.

The American foreign policy establishment lives in desperate fear that they won’t be allowed to sit at the Cool Kids Table any more.

Read it.

A Biden administration effort to electrify the U.S. Postal Service has produced just 250 electric mail trucks in over two years—far behind schedule and slammed by Republicans as a multibillion-dollar “boondoggle.”

The nearly $10 billion project aimed to roll out 35,000 battery-powered USPS vehicles by September 2028, with $3 billion funded through President Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), according to the NY Post.

But despite $1.7 billion already spent, only a small portion of the fleet exists, prompting Republicans to push for canceling the remaining $1.3 billion in funding.

Actually, this might be a good idea if handled properly–which the government is incapable of doing.

Newsbusters.

And why would they? After all, defending NPR is what all politically correct people do. Doesn’t even rate mention, it’s just normal.

After all, nobody they knew voted for Nixon….

Read it.

President Trump has doubled (or tripled) down on his insistence that Iran’s nuclear capabilities were completely obliterated by last month’s US bomber raid on three key Iranian nuclear facilities.

He wrote Saturday on Truth Social, “All three nuclear facilities in Iran are completely ruined and/or destroyed. It would take years to restore them to operational status, and if Iran wanted to do so, it would be much more advantageous for them to start everything from scratch in three different locations before these facilities are destroyed — if they decide to do so.”

You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time. Muslim terrorists need to realize that there’s a new sheriff in town.

Read it.

It’s not enough to say they hated Trump. That’s the surface-level distraction they fed the public – tweets, tone, ego. But behind closed doors, the political elite weren’t clutching their pearls over Trump’s behavior. They were panicking over what he might expose…

The effort to sabotage Trump’s presidency—before he even took office—was not about protecting democracy. It was about protecting the machine.

From George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama, the same interconnected network of intelligence operatives, political dynasties, and global financial interests built and maintained a shadow system of power. Trump threatened to bring it all into the light.

Two Democrats, two RINOs, four tools of the Deep State.

Read it.

In 1988, Bill Gates purchased a Porsche 959 and had it shipped to the United States. There was just one problem. The 959 had never been crash tested for US regulations, nor did it comply with emissions standards. Porsche was unwilling to sacrifice one of these incredibly expensive cars for the required testing, and so the 959 was not approved for road use in the United States. When Gates’s car arrived at the Port of Seattle, US Customs had no choice but to impound it. Rather than destroy it or send it back to Europe, the car was placed in a Foreign-Trade Zone warehouse.

The problem here is government. Bureaucrats laid down that a certain number of production models of a car had to be crash-tested in order to become ‘street legal’. This is marginally understandable when you are talking about a Ford F-150 or a Honda Civic, but the whole logic of the requirement breaks down when you’re talking about a limited-edition very expensive sports car. But bureaucrats are bureaucrats, and You Must Follow The Rules No Matter How Stupid. No accountability, no reasonableness, just a stubborn cling to irrationality.

The rules of the Foreign-Trade Zone allowed Customs to charge a storage and handling fee for vehicles in limbo. At the time, that fee was $28 per calendar day. Gates, unwilling to part with the car or destroy a technological marvel, simply kept paying the fee. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. By the time the car was finally released, the meter had run for 13 years. The storage alone had cost him over $133,000. Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $300,000 today. And that’s not even counting the modest annual bond renewal fee of around 500 dollars that had to be paid to keep the car legally bonded.

When you’re the world’s richest man, you can do that. Ordinary people aren’t that lucky.

But the significant part is how the headline is worded by these ‘journalists’. ‘The Lawmakers Finally Bent to His Will’ incorporates the unacknowledge assumption that the ‘lawmakers’ were right and Gates was wrong and he merely got his way because of Rich Privilege or something, not the truth, which is that the ‘lawmakers’ were being dicks and that doesn’t work as well with The World’s Richest Man as it does for Joe Sixpack. When they write, ‘journalists’ are on the side of the Deep State every time, unless and until somebody calls them on it–and sometimes even then.

Government is why we can never have nice things.

The Telegraph (UK).

Bottles and pink smoke bombs have been hurled at police during a protest outside a migrant hotel in Essex.

On Sunday night, scores of police officers stood by in riot gear as the crowd gathered in the early evening outside The Bell Hotel in Epping, which was protected by a line of police vans and six-foot-high fencing.

The protest was the third outside the hotel in the last week following the arrest of an Ethiopian migrant who was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.

On Thursday evening, eight officers were injured and police vehicles were damaged as a demonstration at the hotel spilt over into violence.

The mood of the protest on Sunday was largely peaceful at first, with several people in the crowd draped in Union flags while others carried placards, including one that read: “You are paying billions to prop up a broken asylum system! Look after our own.”

People see proglodyte protesters getting away with violence and figure that they’re entitled to the same leniency.

This is how societies disintegrate.

UPDATE: Largest Epping Migrant Hotel Demonstration to Date

UPDATE: The Epping Protests: When Frustration Turns into Anger

CBS News, a Voice of the Crust.

An 80-year-old man pleaded guilty on Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes connected to his years-long efforts to create giant hybrid sheep using cloning and illegal insemination, federal prosecutors said.

Arthur “Jack” Schubarth was creating the hybrid sheep as a target for hunters at private facilities, officials said. He violated both international and federal law, Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division said.

“This was an audacious scheme to create massive hybrid sheep species to be sold and hunted as trophies,” Kim said in a statement.

Okay, somebody tell me why this is any business of any level of government, much less both ‘international and Federal law’.

Government is the reason why we can’t have nice things. Or even breathe freely.sd

Read it.

Three weeks after President Trump’s Executive Order reinstated enforcement of English language proficiency requirements for American truck drivers—regulations that had been waived by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in 2016 under President Obama—a growing number of unsafe and non-English-speaking drivers are being removed from U.S. highways and placed ‘Out of Service’ until they can demonstrate basic English communication skills.

This is a great start to helping clean up America’s roads and preventing unvetted and mostly untrained insourced labor from causing any further carnage on our highways. There remains a lot of work to do, however, as the issue of ‘Ghost’ and ‘Chameleon Carriers’ who employ low skill and low quality drivers remains. It is also being reveled that the Electronic Logging Device mandate, which placed a Fourth Amendment shredding piece of Surveillance Technology in American Big Rigs under the pretext of increasing safety by digitally tracking truckers Hours of Service compliance, has been circumscribed by ‘Backdooring’, where ‘ELD’ services located in Eastern Europe log into these devices and alter truckers hours. This allows shady companies in America, often owned by Serbian or Russian gangsters, to employ their co-nationals in what amount to literal ‘slave driving’ operations.

Read it.

Somewhere between the death of our favorite aggregator websites and the world surviving a pandemic, the modern internet was reduced to four companies in a trench coat. On the breast pocket of that trenchcoat is a name tag that reads “The Cloud.” Under that name tag is an older name tag that reads “The Internet.” And under that name tag is a frayed embroidery that reads, “ARPANET (non-commercial use only, motherfuckers),” in a lovely script typeface and craftsmanship you just don’t see nowadays.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta (GAMM) now own most of the steel and glass that makes the internet go vroom. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft control seventy-five percent of the cloud computing market[1]. Meta and Google own half of the fiber optic cables supplying internet services across continents[2]. Most of our favorite productivity apps, retail websites, and social media platforms are beholden to proprietary infrastructure controlled by these four corporations. They own the most heavily trafficked server networks, all the GPUs, and gigawatts, and whatever.
They call it the cloud, but really, that’s just the internet.
So, what we know as the cloud doesn’t actually exist. It’s a euphemism that obfuscates the consolidation of critical infrastructure. The cloud is metaphysical porn for wild-eyed technocrats in Allbirds who say things like, “I’m making a dent in the universe” without a whisper of irony. It’s bullshit. It’s fugazi. There is no spoon, Neo.
The cloud is a lie.

Proglodytes live in desperate fear of any situation in which the biggest players are anything beyond two people banging rocks together.

Read it.

Airline deregulation in the United States didn’t mean that airlines were no longer regulated. In fact airlines are one of the most heavily regulated businesses in the country. Instead what it meant was that the government would no longer be the one to decide which routes airlines could fly, and what prices they had to charge.

The Civil Aeronautics Board focused on eliminating ‘ruinous’ competition and ensuring prices were high enough, and competition limited enough, that airlines could earn a consistent profit.

However when you set prices high, airlines compete for customer business in other ways. Each ticket was lucrative, so they’d spend money on customers – for instance on service and food and beverage – to attract more ticket sales.

Airlines also colluded to limit inflight drink service. U.S. airlines entered into an agreement not to serve customers more than two drinks back in 1956, but the agreement fell apart in 1971 as carriers competed for business.

The CAB actually discussed whether they needed to regulate the thickness of sandwiches on board, because airlines were getting too competitive on food. They were charging high prices for tickets, but spending that money right back on the customer – and the government meant to stop it.

Somehow I had forgotten that there were, once, actual regulations on inflight sandwiches – at least for international flights.

That’s not all he forgot. He is totally oblivious to the fact that all of this is caused by government interference in the industry; he just ignores it on his proglodyte way to bashing the airlines. (Proglodytes live in fear that somebody somewhere is making a profit.)

offGuardian.

Any group of human beings who are supposedly in a free society and who have a leader (or a council of people who lead), assigned by that group to make decisions for the common interests of the group, must rely on their own “self-regulation,” above and beyond the leaders’ government, in order to survive.
This is imperative as a “check and balance” criterion for a healthy society.
In most democratic societies this is done through the elective process. People are put into power, and taken out of power if need be, through elections, i.e., the popular vote. The people have to keep a keen eye on what is happening in their communities, at the local level, and in their nations, at a national level. And of course, they must exercise due diligence concerning global happenings as well. Only then will they know who to vote for that best serves their community.
This is how we have control, albeit sometimes not enough, of our government. We have little control over non-government organizations (NGOs) through the elective process. But we do have control, again to some degree, on social norms, moralities, values, and other things that may grate against our own “community standards” as a mass, through protest and other demands for accountability. In this regard, our society is somewhat kept in check through a nation’s constitutional requirements, as well as our personal assertion as to what is “right” and what is “wrong.”
Human beings have traditionally been on the same page with some of these very basic tenets. For example, there are very few cultures, if any, that advocate, as a foundational tenet, murder. Very few, if any, that advocate child sexual abuse, or physical abuse (of course, what determines either one of these things can be rather subjective.)
Regardless of the outliers always present when making sweeping statements (which certainly there are, and a discussion of these outliers would take enormous time and attention), human beings share many fundamental tenets of “good humanness.”
Unless, of course, they are pushed away from these fundamental tenets by some external force—corrupt government, con men, evil…Satan. Some will say we have a natural tendency to turn to amoral ways (think Moses stepping out for a moment to collect the Ten Commandments and what then ensued).

As economics is essentially about trade, politics is essentially about morality.

Gabbard Feeds MAGA an Obama Conspiracy Amid Epstein Blowback (Emell Derra Adolphus/The Daily Beast)

Desperate Trump Tries to Get MAGA Not to Care About Epstein (Corbin Bolies/The Daily Beast)

A MAGA bot network on X is divided over the Trump-Epstein backlash (Kevin Collier/NBC News)

The Times (UK).

Over the weekend thousands of people attended anti-immigration marches organised in at least 50 Polish towns and cities by Confederation, a far-right party, and various football hooligan groups. In Warsaw rival rallies took place near by.

Washington Examiner.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) expressed her optimism for the Democratic Party as the midterm elections draw nearer.

Klobuchar is fresh from a campaign trip to New Hampshire, where she sought to help Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) ahead of his bid for the Senate. The Minnesota senator dismissed what CNN host Jake Tapper referred to as the Democrats’ “dismal approval ratings” while appearing on State of the Union Sunday.

Feels before reals. Republicans believe it when they see it; Democrats see it when they believe it.

UPDATE FROM REALITY: Democrats Continue To Flounder As Approval Ratings Sink To All Time Lows

Read it.

The problem of leftist activist judges is growing more worrisome by the day, and one has to wonder how may crimes these officials have facilitated in their efforts set criminal illegals free and “stick it to Republicans”.

Immigration authorities in Chicago have arrested a Mexican illegal immigrant this week accused of decapitating a missing Illinois woman.

Jose Luis Mendoza-Gonzalez, 52, of Waukegan, Illinois, was arrested in April and charged with concealing a corpse, abusing a corpse and obstruction of justice, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Gonzalez reportedly claims that the victim, 37-year-old Megan Bros, had “died of an overdose” at his home.

However, instead of reporting the death to authorities, Gonzalez allegedly broke her cell phone and is accused of abusing the corpse, decapitating her and storing her body in a storage container of bleach on his property (The kind of precaution a murderer might take to hide evidence, though the suspect has not yet been charged with murder).

I am in favor of deporting his corpse.

Read it.

The author appears to believe that just showing up at a doctor’s office entitles you to medical treatment.

No surprise. Leftists (of whom ‘journalists’ are a significant subset) all believe that.

However, this isn’t Britain or Canada, where you are entitled to government-provided health care.

This is America. Doctors aren’t your slaves. They don’t have to treat you if they choose not to.

Read it.

On Thursday, the United Stas Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) issued a “Duty to Warn” notification concerning a credible terrorist threat targeting retired senior Department of Defense officials with prior involvement in operations within the Syria/Iraq theater. The geographic focus of the threat is Florida.

Where are the Gestapo when you really need them?

Read it.

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

The Foundry.

Following a years-long surge in illegal immigration, the President Donald Trump administration is poised to challenge a longstanding but legally fraught practice: counting illegal aliens in the U.S. census.

Trump tried to end the practice during his first term, but President Joe Biden overturned his predecessor’s policy before it was implemented. Now, buoyed by red state attorneys general and Republican legislators, the second Trump administration is determined “to clean up the census and make sure that illegal aliens are not counted,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller said last month.

What Miller didn’t mention are the political implications of the administration’s move. It could have significant political implications because the census count is used to apportion House seats, determine the number of votes each state gets in the Electoral College for selecting the president, and drive the flow of trillions of dollars in government funds.

The Foundry.

Jeff Baran, a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, failed to secure enough support in the Senate to keep his job when his term expired in June 2023, but he found another job in the federal bureaucracy and stuck around long enough to take the buyout offer under the Trump administration.

While presidents appoint more than 3,000 people for political positions, the federal government directly employs roughly 2.3 million people, most of whom serve in purportedly nonpolitical, career positions. The Office of Personnel Management tracks when political appointees transition to career positions—a process often referred to as “burrowing in” to the bureaucracy—and Baran did so last year.

OPM approved on Sept. 8, 2024, Baran’s transition from a commissioner on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to become deputy assistant secretary for waste and minerals management at the Department of Energy. He went from making $165,300 annually to $193,819 annually.

Baran took President Donald Trump’s offer of “deferred resignation,” which allows bureaucrats to receive their paychecks through Sept. 30 without doing any work, as an incentive to leave the government early. Exchange Monitor reported on Feb. 20 that Baran accepted the offer.

Baran is likely to receive his paycheck for about 7 months without doing work, costing the taxpayer approximately $113,061.08.

To quote John Derbyshire: “Get a government job!”

The Foundry.

That people get the government they deserve is a cruel adage, too cruel if you live in dark places where a small minority with guns terrorizes an unarmed population—see “Cuba, socialist state of.” But in a democracy, the maxim holds firmly.

Which means that if the citizens of New York City vote in Zohran Mamdani as their mayor come November, and things go badly, then Gotham really can’t ask for our sympathy. That Democrats voted him as their candidate in the primary on June 24 is one thing, but if voters of all parties ratify that decision on Election Day, that’s another.

Then it’s Pottery Barn rules: If you break it, you own it. Sure, it’s only natural to spare an initial thought for our compatriots from the Bronx to Staten Island if things go south, but after that, sit back and get the popcorn. I plan to do so wearing my threadbare Yankee cap.

Let’s see what communism does to a major, modern metropolis—the world’s financial center, no less.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

More than 100 protesters were arrested during Gaza demonstrations alleged to support the proscribed terror group Palestine Action. It’s the third consecutive weekend of protests against the ban, which was instituted in late June.

The arrests, on Saturday, July 19th, stem from campaigning coordinated by ‘Defend Our Juries,’ which seeks to push back against the criminalisation of ‘direct action’ group Palestine Action. There were 65 arrests in London, 17 in Bristol, 16 in Manchester and six in Truro, Cornwall. Many of those arrested had displayed placards or T-shirts that were worded or typeset in ways that implied support for the illegal organisation and were designed to test the law.

Previously, local police have been criticised for their ‘two-tier policing’ of pro-Palestine marches. Now, one problem of using the serious vandalism committed by Palestine Action to group it with Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS in English law is becoming clear: its supporters can present themselves as ‘free speech martyrs’ when arrested (despite having zero commitment to free speech themselves, including for that of their ally Peter Tatchell). Meanwhile Iran’s murderous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still remains legal in Britain.

Read it.

Marches under the slogan ‘Stop Immigration’ took place across Poland on Saturday, July 19th, including in Bialystok, Krakow, Poznan, Warsaw, and Wroclaw.

More and more Poles are demanding the closure of the borders with Belarus, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. This relates to both the alleged actions of Minsk weaponising releases of migrants into Polish borders as a form of hybrid warfare, and the wider sense that migration has led to a deteriorating crime and security situation within Poland itself.

Newsbusters.

Yes, so bipartisan that, as NewsBuster Alex Christy has reported, in the first half of 2025, Colbert hosted 14 partisan officials, more than any of the other daily late-night comedy shows. All 14 were Democrats, none were Republicans.

When it came to journalists and celebrities, Colbert again led all hosts with 29. All 29 were liberals–zero conservatives.

It don’t git no more bipartisan than that!

Spoke Narrative to the NPC herd, to be more accurate.

Read it.

Reeling from their 2024 election loss, Democrats are scrambling to reconnect with the working class—yet their brilliant strategy of embracing socialist and communist candidates, doubling down on un-American woke ideology, shielding criminal illegal aliens, and supporting dark-money NGOs that fuel insurrectionist behavior like the Los Angeles riots—isn’t a comeback plan but just political suicide.

The party of leftist social justice warriors is cracking under the weight of its own failures. Woke culture is imploding, “green” fantasies are backfiring, and nowhere is this more evident than in the Democrat stronghold states of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, where the retirement of stable, affordable fossil fuel power in favor of unreliable solar and wind is driving up energy costs to the highest in the nation this summer and breaking the pocketbooks of working-class families they claim to champion.

Energy policies should balance three key objectives: affordability, reliability, and environmental sustainability — often referred to as the “energy trilemma.” Yet Democrats rammed through climate policies that torched two objectives, affordability and reliability for the environment.

Read it.

British government figures have revealed that a whopping 1.3 million foreigners are receiving Universal Credit benefits at the taxpayer’s expense.

I’d guess it’s three times that in the U.S.

The stats from the Department of Work and Pensions show that in June 1.26 million people, out of a total 7.9 million claimants, received the welfare subsidies.

While Conservative MPs attempted to jump on the Labour government over the findings, Reform leader Nigel Farage noted that it was the Conservative government that introduced the Universal Credit system and facilitated mass immigration for years.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

BLUF: Government, and the irresistible compulsion of bureaucrats to regulate.

Read it.

In the wake of the terrorist attack that claimed 25 lives at the Mar Elias Greek Orthodox Church in the Syrian capital of Damascus on June 22nd, reports confirm that the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) forces and affiliated groups are escalating their campaign of persecution and violence against Christians, Druze, and other ethnoreligious minorities.

Currently, the Druze towns are being attacked by Islamists, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, or Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the former head of the Syrian al-Qaeda, who conquered Damascus last December.

The violence erupted in the predominantly Druze city in the province of Suwayda (also known as Sweida) on July 12, two days after a Druze merchant was reportedly abducted on the highway to Damascus. Suwayda is known for its Druze majority but also has a significant Christian population, primarily Greek Orthodox and some Catholic Christians.

It is the latest outbreak of deadly jihadist violence in the country since al-Qaeda-affiliated HTS forces—with the help of Turkey—overthrew Syria’s Assad regime.

Read it.

Swedish police have launched a criminal investigation into whether a pro-Palestinian demonstration in the northern university town of Umeå constituted incitement against an ethnic group. The protest featured hanged skeletons dressed in concentration camp uniforms beneath a banner reading “a genocide is a genocide,” according to social media footage circulating Saturday.

The skeletons were suspended execution-style, wearing blue-and-white striped uniforms marked with Stars of David and prisoner numbers—evoking Holocaust imagery.

Also visible in the image was a person wearing a keffiyeh and holding a baby doll standing near the display. Palestinian flags were also displayed at the manifestation, shown here in a post on X by Sofie Löwenmark, Swedish journalist and columnist dedicated to exposing extreme ideologies and defending civil liberties:

The Foundry.

In their attempts to thwart federal enforcement of our immigration laws, politicians like Democrat state Rep. James Hawkins of Massachusetts apparently want to make it even easier for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (and their families) to be doxed, harassed, and attacked.

It’s hard to come to any other conclusion when, in the face of the open defiance and violence against these agents, Hawkins drops a bill in the Massachusetts Legislature that would force those federal agents to unmask so they can be identified by hostile mobs.

House Docket No. 4886 would apply to all “local, state, or federal law enforcement” agencies (except for SWAT officers) and make it a crime for them to “wear any mask or personal disguise while interacting with the pubic in the performance of their duties.”

Hawkins has tried to justify his interference with, and endangerment of, federal agents by claiming that “police officers never wear masks and they are dealing with much more dangerous situations. They’re dealing with gunfire, with violent people, and they don’t wear masks.” Really?! Has Hawkins not been watching and reading the news lately?

Attacks on ICE agents are up 700% over last year. While the rest of us were celebrating Independence Day, an armed group ambushed ICE agents and local police at a detention center in Alvarado, Texas, wounded an officer, and sprayed anti-ICE graffiti. On the same day, violent protesters in Portland, Oregon, hurled incendiary devices at ICE officers and tried to burn down a government building. Only three days later, a Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, was shot at, and two agents and a staffer were injured.

Two days later, ICE agents in California were physically attacked and blocked from enforcing federal immigration laws. There has been massive mob violence in Los Angeles, so severe that federal troops had to be called in to restore order and protect federal agents and facilities.

Democrat politicians and organizations are supporting and encouraging this defiance and violence.

UPDATE: California Mayors Urge Cops, Gang Members to Fight ICE

Read it.

During the Cold War, Soviet communists reportedly referred to American liberals as “useful idiots.”

Although the origin of the quote has been challenged (and attributed to both Lenin and Stalin), it captured many of the adherents of communism after World War II. From higher education to Hollywood, dilettantes on the left embraced Marxism with little real understanding of the philosophy or its implications.

We are now seeing the rise of a new generation of armchair revolutionaries who are calling for everything from the overthrow of the U.S. government to the seizure of factories and homes.

SciTechDaily.

New research indicates that erythritol, a sugar substitute commonly recommended for individuals with obesity or diabetes, may carry unexpected health risks.

From low-carb ice creams and keto-friendly protein snacks to “sugar-free” sodas, erythritol is a widely used sweetener found in countless diet and specialty food items.

However, new findings from the University of Colorado Boulder suggest that this commonly used sugar substitute may carry unexpected health risks. According to the research, erythritol can affect brain cells in ways that may increase the likelihood of stroke.

The study was published in the Journal of Applied Physiology

Just use sugar … or, better yet, don’t.

New York Post.

A new study scrambles the long-held belief that eggs are bad for your heart, finding that eating a certain number daily might actually improve your cholesterol levels.

But it’s not all sunny side up. While one breakfast staple has been eggsonerated, researchers warn that another could spell serious trouble for your ticker.

Eggs are a nutritional powerhouse, packed with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, protein and healthy fats. But they’ve long been in the hot seat because they’re naturally high in dietary cholesterol.

For years, health officials and medical groups have recommended limiting egg consumption, concerned it could raise blood cholesterol levels and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease — the leading cause of death in the US.

“Eggs have long been unfairly cracked by outdated dietary advice,” Dr. Jon Buckley, a professor at the University of South Australia and lead researcher on the study, said in a statement.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE! … until it changes….

The Cool Down, a Voice of the rabid left.

What the article doesn’t mention, of course, is that the Resniks are prominent Democrat donors.

Read it.

What if you could inject a drug into a “problem area” – like abdominal fat – that could kill off fat cells and reduce fat stores in that localized spot? That’s what a novel drug from Taiwan’s Caliway Pharmaceuticals offers, the world’s very first injection that triggers programmed fat-cell death in a targeted area, like the belly or the thighs.

Known as CBL-514, this small-molecule drug induces adipocyte apoptosis, which kills fat cells rather than starves them, meaning different regions of subcutaneous fat stores can be rapidly reduced in just a few weeks after a single dose. It’s currently being tested for three uses: Non-surgical fat reduction, Dercum’s disease – which causes painful fatty tumors to build up around the body, and cellulite.

“Administered via subcutaneous injection, CBL-514 has demonstrated a favorable safety and tolerability profile, enabling significant localized fat reduction without surgery and delivering results comparable to liposuction,” Caliway has stated.

While it’s being investigated for various applications, the leading one – and the one expected to be on the market first – is for the non-surgical reduction of problematic abdominal fat.

And, in about twenty years, we’ll discover that it has some appalling side effects.

The Times (UK).

John Waters, a director of the independent buying agency Robert Bailey Property, said: “Many of the wealthy owners we have seen leave the UK recently have not in fact chosen to sell their London homes — instead deciding to rent overseas in the hope that the UK tax system will in the future become less unfavourable.

“Often they are very sad to be leaving, but they feel they have little choice due to the end of non-dom status and the prospect of all their global assets being subject to UK inheritance tax.”

The Wall Street Journal, unfortunately nowadays a Voice of the Crust.

“I’m on my way out,” said Bassim Haidar, a Nigerian-born Lebanese businessman who moved here in 2010. “There comes a time when you don’t feel welcome anymore, and it’s time to just start packing and leaving.”

Haidar is one of the estimated 74,000 who used a centuries-old tax loophole, abolished in April, that catered to the global rich. The nondomiciled—or non-dom status, as it is known—allowed foreigners living in the U.K. to pay tax only on what they earned domestically. Profits made abroad were ignored unless brought into the U.K.

Beset by high public debt and crumbling infrastructure, the U.K. hoped eliminating non-doms would bring in about $45 billion by 2030. But instead of paying up, wealthy expats are rushing for the exits, sparking questions about whether the effort will raise any money at all.

Funny how that works.

The British experiment has laid bare the difficult politics of taxing the rich. Taxing high earners has become a rallying cry on the left as a solution to income inequality and fraying social-safety nets. Low-tax advocates say taxes on the wealthy are counterproductive, driving away job creators and big spenders.

In the U.S., New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has proposed a “millionaires tax” on New Yorkers making more than $1 million a year, prompting vocal rich people to say they will leave for lower-tax jurisdictions such as Florida or Texas.

One challenge of taxing the wealthy is that they are highly mobile, with houses around the world, private jets and an army of advisers who can sort out visas and bureaucratic paperwork quickly. Jurisdictions such as Dubai, Italy and Monaco have rolled out the red carpet, offering no taxation or structures similar to the U.K.’s old non-dom status.

Politicians think that they can just pass a law and reality will fall in line with it. They have no clue that people react to incentives and oppression by voting with their feet.

Mika and MAGA!—Epstein Case Makes The Strangest Of Bedfellows

MAGA’s New Target: Trump (Maureen Dowd/New York Times)

New Atlas.

Following on from their breakthrough human trial that successfully reprogrammed the immune system to overpower glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor, the same scientists have now further developed the mRNA vaccine to fight not one but any cancer. It has the potential to do away with chemotherapy, surgery and radiation treatment.

University of Florida (UF) scientists have developed an experimental vaccine that dramatically boosts the immune system’s ability to fight tumors – even without targeting a specific cancer type. This “general purpose” mRNA jab works in a similar way to a Covid-19 vaccine but with a different target; it instructs the body’s immune cells to rally and hit any kind of tumor in the same way they would attack a viral spike protein.

“This paper describes a very unexpected and exciting observation: that even a vaccine not specific to any particular tumor or virus – so long as it is an mRNA vaccine – could lead to tumor-specific effects,” said Elias Sayour, a pediatric oncologist and principal investigator at the RNA Engineering Laboratory at UF. “This finding is a proof of concept that these vaccines potentially could be commercialized as universal cancer vaccines to sensitize the immune system against a patient’s individual tumor.”

Don’t hold your breath expecting it to show up at your local doctor any time soon.

Government is the reason we can’t ever have nice things.

Read it.

Harvard University “refused to take any reasonable action to punish” its two students who faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate and instead “did everything it could to defend, protect, and reward” them, according to a new lawsuit from the Israeli student.

Video footage of the incident showed the assailants, law student Ibrahim Bharmal and divinity school student Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, shoving and accosting Israeli business school student Yoav Segev at an October 2023 “die-in” protest. Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo eventually faced criminal charges, which came to a head in April when they agreed to take an in-person anger management class and perform 80 hours of community service as part of a pretrial diversion program.

Former Harvard president Claudine Gay testified to Congress that the school would complete its own disciplinary process after the criminal case’s conclusion. Instead, both Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were allowed to graduate in good standing from their respective schools shortly after they agreed to the diversion program. They were also “rewarded” for their anti-Semitic behavior, the lawsuit notes: Bharmal received a $65,000 “public interest” fellowship from the Harvard Law Review shortly before graduating, while Tettey-Tamaklo was made a class marshall for the divinity school’s graduation ceremony.

The New Neo.

I’ve noticed that, ever since Trump’s 2024 election and especially since he took office in January, some of my Trump-hating friends and acquaintances have gotten even angrier at Trump and angrier at those who support him, as compared to Trump’s first term. Here are my ideas about why that’s happened.

(1) Trump’s first term victory was considered a fluke and this one was not. Therefore they believe the electorate has become more evil and/or stupid.

(2) In Trump’s first term, they could claim that he didn’t “really” win because he didn’t win the popular vote. In the second term, he won the popular vote.

(3) Efforts to sabotage Trump’s first term – such as Russiagate – were immediately successful in that they convinced a lot of people and also had a restrictive effect on Trump in terms of what he could accomplish and how much energy he could devote to his policy aims versus fighting the lies.

(4) There were many people in Trump’s first administration who either weren’t onboard with his goals or were actively against them. This is far less true in his second term.

(5) He hit the ground running in his second term.

(6) During the Biden administration, Democrats watched Biden undo a great deal of what Trump had done in his first term. And now they’re having the nightmarish experience of watching Trump II undo what Biden did, or re-do what Biden had undone.

(7) One of the most awful things about the 2024 election, as far as the Democrats are concerned, was their loss of support in several of the groups on which their power depends: black and Hispanic voters. They’re not sure what to do about that.

(8) The Trump assassination attempt in Butler galls them, because it was such a close call and many really really wish Trump had been killed. His seemingly miraculous survival is especially frustrating.

(9) They thought that their lawfare against Trump would work either to put him in prison or at the very least to turn more voters against them. Instead it had the opposite effect, another dramatically and deeply frustrating result. It’s something like the classic scene in a horror movie in which the hero or heroine thinks the monster is gone and is finally able to relax and then bam! The monster pounces.