Read it.

Gergen was a dyed-in-the-wool apparatchik of the Deep State, as David Brooks is increasingly becoming.

This was so obvious that Rush Limbaugh invariably referred to him as “David Rodham Gergen”.

Read it.

President Donald Trump announced Fannie Mae’s Financial Crimes Division has evidence of Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., committing mortgage fraud, a claim that was also levied against New York Democrat Attorney General Letitia James.

Read it.

All three members of the United Nations’ anti-Israel inquiry have resigned, citing personal—or, in one case, no—reasons.

The commission’s most recent report was released in May and made what Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration described as “abhorrent and immoral accusations” against Israel, including that it was carrying out acts of “extermination” in Gaza.

Monitoring group UN Watch has celebrated the resignations, expressing hope that “the dominoes are falling.” Hillel Neuer, the group’s executive director, said the emptying of these positions was “long overdue.”

Read it.

Administration officials on July 13 defended President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement operations, including one on a California marijuana farm last week that a worker advocacy group alleges led to a man’s death.

Yeah, he was running away and managed to fall off a building. Yet somehow Trump is to blame.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem told NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on July 13 that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained 361 illegal immigrants and encountered 14 unaccompanied minors during a July 10 operation on two marijuana farms in Southern California.

“At the California marijuana facilities, ICE and CBP law enforcement rescued at least 14 migrant children from what looks like exploitation, forced child labor, and potentially human trafficking or smuggling while facing assault and even gunfire,” DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

Among those arrested were “criminals with convictions for rape, serial burglary, hit and run and DUIs,” she added.

Both marijuana sites are operated by and licensed to Glass House Farms, which confirmed the operation and said it was fully complying with the search warrants.

Read it.

All three commissioners leading the United Nations’ anti-Israel inquisition panel resigned this week, just days after the State Department sanctioned a pro-Hamas U.N. investigator.

The U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory’s chairwoman Navi Pillay, commissioner Miloon Kothari, and commissioner Chris Sidoti all announced they are stepping down, according to the watchdog group U.N. Watch.

The exodus comes less than a week after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced U.S. sanctions against U.N. special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese for her “illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt [International Criminal Court] action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives.”

Washington Free Beacon.

An academic center at Georgetown University that sits within its prestigious School of Foreign Service has a history of fostering support for Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamist groups, a Washington Free Beacon review found.

Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), founded in 1993, has hosted scholars sympathetic to Islamism since its inception. John Esposito, the center’s founder and a professor of religion and international affairs and of Islamic studies at Georgetown, has long defended terrorist groups and collaborated with jihadist figures.

As the Free Beacon reported in June, approximately 25 percent of all graduates from the ACMCU—which operates within the School of Foreign Service—enter government positions around the world after receiving their degrees. The ACMCU’s history appears likely to draw congressional scrutiny during a Tuesday morning House Education and Workforce Committee hearing featuring Georgetown interim president Robert Groves, as does the funding it has received from the Muslim Brotherhood-linked International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT).

Read it.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Monday said he would reissue his criminal referral to the Department of Justice for Dr. Anthony Fauci after his pardon was confirmed to be issued by a late-night autopen.

Tucker Carlson leads MAGA’s worried warriors in questioning Trump (Allan Smith/NBC News)

MAGA media’s conspiracy theories put Trump in power — and now they’re coming back to bite him (Brian Stelter/CNN)

July 13, 2025 — This weekend saw the development of an extraordinary rift in MAGA world. (Heather Cox Richardson/Letters …)

MAGA Demands Trump Use Teen Sex Accused Gaetz to Probe Epstein (Farrah Tomazin/The Daily Beast)  Accused! That proves it!

Read it.

Metrics such as KPIs may be adequate in narrow circumstances such as approximately evaluating an employee’s ability to do a specific type of job, but they have a ceiling of complexity they are able to measure. Highly complex tasks with many dimensions of competency (often including an unknown number of unknown dimensions) cannot be adequately legibilized by quantitative metrics. There is also the matter of who gets to decide what performance indicators are used, how they are measured, and how they are used to inform decisions which are ultimately made by humans. You could design a purely mechanistic system which attempts to cut out human decision-making, but such systems lack flexibility and nuance and are typically abandoned quickly for good reason. In the end, simply having good quantitative metrics isn’t enough on its own. It is the ultimate decision-making process itself that must be improved.

Randomness helps address these problems because it eliminates most marginal advantage from subversive scheming. With random selection, no action or investment can meaningfully improve one’s chances, rendering efforts to manipulate the system worthless. This nullifies political capital and ensures that authority is not seized by those adept merely at influencing outcomes through charm, money, or connections. Instead, it creates a system where competency and merit have a genuine chance to rise naturally, unhindered by strategic manipulation. Moreover, randomness systematically dismantles entrenched crony networks by constantly disrupting established relationships.

How might meritocratic institutions actually harness randomness in practice though? The possibilities are virtually limitless, but here are some ideas.

Ancient Athens used it. Of course, they were more committed to democracy that we are.

The Foundry.

The so-called autopen scandal appears to be getting worse for former President Joe Biden as more information comes to light.

Biden, some of his former staffers, and a handful of thought leaders in the Democratic Party have attempted to triage the message about the inner workings of the previous presidential administration. But tangible evidence is mounting that it was effectively run like a kind of politburo.

The New York Times released an interesting report Sunday afternoon that included a short interview with Biden saying he made decisions on clemency that were carried out with an autopen. In the final month of his presidency, Biden pardoned a number of high-profile people and granted clemency to an additional 1,500.

High-profile examples included his son, Hunter Biden, members of the Jan. 6 committee, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley.

“Everybody knows how vindictive [President Donald Trump] is, so we knew that they’d do what they’re doing now,” Biden said in theTimes interview. “I consciously made all those decisions.”

Some of the people on the 1,500 person list were violent criminals including virtually everyone on death row.

Biden insisted that he was “conscious” of all his administration’s decisions (a contention not helped by his rambling responses).

Read it.

In 1883, when the Pendleton Act was passed, creating the US civil service, it must have seemed like no big deal. The forgotten Chester A. Arthur was the president. The fear of being assassinated like his predecessor James Garfield convinced him to back the legislation. The case for passage: government needs professionals with institutional knowledge. Technicians were changing the world, so why not government too?

Science and engineering were the rage – electricity, steel bridges, telegraphic communications, internal combustion, photography – so surely public affairs needed the same level of expertise. Who could deny that civil service could do a better job than the cousins and business partners of professional politicians?

That’s how it started. What was once called government of, by, and for the people was derided as the hopelessly corrupt “spoils system,” a phrase that reflected genius marketing. So it was overthrown in favor of “merit-based” hiring in the executive, a staff not yet permanent or huge, but the proverbial camel now had its nose under the tent.

Through two world wars and the Great Depression, and then the Cold War, what landed on the other side was something the Constitution’s Framers never imagined. We had huge governing systems in giant bureaucracies staffed by employees who could not be fired. It was left to them to implement, but really create the operational framework for the whole of civil society.

It was a state within a state, one with many layers, including that which was and is classified.

The Foundry.

Media accounts have cast departing Justice Department lawyers as principled nonpartisan civil servants too conscientious to serve a politicized Trump administration. But several of these lawyers have taken up very political roles after they’ve left the department.

Dan Freeman, the litigation director for the Democratic National Committee, touted his time in the Justice Department in a fundraising email this week, asserting the Trump administration “forced out brilliant lawyers” and “directed us to drop crucial cases.”

“I spent almost 15 years at the DOJ as a voting rights lawyer. I was a civil servant, and I loved enforcing the Voting Rights Act on behalf of the American people,” Freeman’s letter says. “I helped stop voter purges in Alabama and gerrymandering in Texas. But everything changed when President Trump returned to the White House.”

Freeman vowed the DNC is “going to use legal action to enforce voting rights laws when states around the country violate them, and we’ll intervene and defend your right to vote when the Republican Party tries to make it harder for you to cast a ballot that will be counted.”

In response to an inquiry from The Daily Signal, Freeman said in a written statement, “This isn’t about party, it’s about democracy.”

When a Democrat uses the term ‘democracy’, he means ‘Democrat power’.

Read it.

Hint: No.

When asked why the current Department of Justice might be investigating him, former CIA Director John Brennan answered, as was his wont, with a complete lie: “I am clueless about what it is exactly that they may be investigating me for.”

Clueless? Hardly.

Brennan knows full well that his fingerprints are on some of the greatest scandals of the last decade.

These machinations have threatened the very integrity of our institutions and elections.

He has a record of serially lying to Congress, the public, and the media, and doing so emphatically.

Newsbusters.

Zohran Mamdani, the Democrat Party’s anti-Semitic, socialist nominee for mayor of New York City, apparently proved he’s extremist enough to earn the backing of the political machine of America’s most notorious billionaire.

The New York Post reported July 12 that George Soros poured $37 million into a litany of leftist groups backing Mamdani, which is ironic given the latter’s phony, public dog-and-pony show disdain for billionaires. As the Post summarized, “[I]t’s unlikely [Mamdani would be] be the front-runner to become the Big Apple’s next mayor if it wasn’t for” the left’s “kingmaker” Soros.

The Soros fortune went into a collective of at least 10 groups behind get-out-the-vote efforts that helped Mamdani upset former New York governor Andrew Cuomo in the NYC Democratic primary, including the infamous Working Families Party (WFP). MRC Business profiled WFP in its most recent report documenting George and his son Alex’s financing of the radical, global climate change movement.

The New York Times, paper of record of the Narrative.

Did you ever wonder why Leftists are so outraged by the prospect of anybody saving money on taxes?

Reminder: Companies, big or little, don’t pay taxes. They merely collect taxes. Taxes are, to a business, and expense, and wind up being included in the price of their product–or they go out of business. The people who actually pay the taxes are their customers. This fact of elementary economics is beyond the mental reach of the morons who commit ‘journalism’.

Read it.

While President Donald Trump may have poured gasoline on the Epstein fire – calling it a Democrat psyop and telling MAGA ‘not to waste time and energy’ on such matters in a massive wall of text on Truth Social – something in his message may have hinted at what’s next on the DOJ’s agenda…

“Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me,” Trump wrote.

And while his post didn’t exactly help the massive wedge in his base after spending the 2024 campaign promising to release the actual ‘Epstein Files’ – it appears that the administration is turning their attention to the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” – and will launch a criminal conspiracy probe into its plotters.

Instead of calling them ‘conspiracy theories’ we ought to call them ‘spoiler alerts’.

Read it.

When Israeli strikes hit Iran on June 13, it wasn’t only nuclear sites and senior Iranian commanders that were taken out: A covert army of bots meddling in British politics went dark, too.

That’s according to Cyabra, a Tel Aviv-based disinformation detection company that uncovered the operation.

For 16 days, the network — which began operating in May — vanished, according to Cyabra’s report published last week. No posts, no replies, no trace of the 1,300 fake profiles that had posed as British users and fueled online debate around Scottish independence, Brexit and institutional collapse.

The accounts had already reached more than 200 million people through over 3,000 posts, the company said.

Read it.

Remember former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) who got censured for pulling the fire alarm in the Capitol Building as lawmakers prepared to vote to prevent a government shutdown? He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, paid a $1,000 fine and lost the next Democrat primary.

He’s back.

Bowman, appearing June 25 as a panelist on MSNBC, said, “The reason why heart disease and cancer and obesity and diabetes are bigger in the black community is because of the stress we carry from having to deal with being called the n-word directly or indirectly every day.”

In my experience, the N-word is used mostly by other black people. Black comedians use it all the time. Why no complaints there?

Read it.

Torre Pacheco, Aranda de Duero, Almería, Torrevieja. Four names that, in recent days, have been added to Spain’s map of public outrage. The spark ignited in the Murcian town of Torre Pacheco, where a 68-year-old man was brutally beaten in broad daylight by a group of Maghrebi immigrants, allegedly just “for fun.” The assault has triggered an explosion in a pressure cooker that has been simmering for years: illegal squatting, drug trafficking, threats, machetes, and crime entrenched with near-impunity in many Spanish neighborhoods.

For three consecutive nights, residents of Torre Pacheco have taken to the streets, fed up with being ignored by authorities. Groups of local youths mobilized to find those responsible for the attack, while gangs of illegal immigrants responded armed with knives, sticks, and machetes. The result: riots, police charges, burning trash containers, reciprocal assaults, and six arrests—five Spaniards and one of Maghrebi origin.

The security operation deployed by the Civil Guard and Local Police, reinforced by special units, has served more to shield migrant-heavy neighborhoods than to restore calm to a terrified population. The Government’s delegate in Murcia, Mariola Guevara, has insisted that “racist behavior” will not be tolerated, while failing to condemn the attack on the elderly man that started it all.

Washington Free Beacon.

New York City socialist Zohran Mamdani has pledged to target “negligent” landlords and seize their properties if elected mayor. Local real estate experts told the Washington Free Beacon the policy would mark a significant expansion of city power—and lower the quality of affordable housing for New Yorkers.

Mamdani’s housing policy memo vows to punish landlords who “repeatedly put New Yorkers at risk,” including by forcing them to sell their property “through a public foreclosure process.” Mamdani would, in theory, have the power to do so: The mayor’s office can temporarily seize buildings under New York’s Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law.

The city used that law in the 1970s and ’80s amid a housing crisis to take over abandoned buildings and work with local nonprofits to rehabilitate them. Mamdani’s plan, however, appears to cast a much wider net by applying the law on a “case-by-case basis” to “non-compliant” buildings rather than abandoned ones.

Mamdani says doing so will see the city turn “poor quality housing” into “deeply affordable” and “safe” homes. New York City real estate professionals disagree. They point to the poor quality of the city’s already existent public housing, which is known for “dreadful living conditions” and high rates of violent crime. By “supercharging” the public housing system, New York Apartment Association CEO Kenny Burgos argued, Mamdani will reduce the quality of affordable housing, not improve it.

Newsbusters.

Caleb Howe at Mediaite reported that on Saturday’s Velshi, MSNBC contributor Joyce Vance said ICE agents wearing masks during enforcement actions could face “lawful” violence against them by people who mistake raids for a “kidnapping.”

As one would expect from a Trump-hating MSNBC pundit, Vance guessed that everything ICE was doing was based on zero evidence except for skin color: “You can’t simply racially profile or profile people based on their national origin and start pulling them off the streets.”

She stuck to routine MSNBC phrasing: “That, by definition, is a police state.”

Vance further insulted the people who have effectively sealed off the border as more loyal to Trump than the rule of law and the Constitution: “the people in charge are no longer the career officials with training who understand loyalty to the Constitution. These are quite literally people who understand loyalty to Donald Trump.” That’s rich coming from the Biden open-borders allies.

After the typical “anti-fascist” Canadian political science professor lamented the descending authoritarianism, Velshi then nudged Vance to claim ICE deserves whatever violence they receive.

UPDATE: ‘The View’ Host Declares Violence Against ICE Agents Is Part Of A Justified “Reckoning”

Read it.

A Yemeni culture-enricher in Bavaria stabbed his wife to death and is currently in custody. His six children, now motherless, have become wards of the state. Such is life in the Best Germany of All Time.

Read it.

There have been numerous ‘back to Africa’ movements over the years, usually promoted by leftist activists. Often these movements are driven by fantasies within the black American community of exporting the best of US life, economy, technology and infrastructure into Africa and far away from the “oppression” of white people.

Of course, it’s white people that created the majority of the marvels that define western civilization; the rest of the world simply seeks to imitate this model, often with limited success.

Back to Africa travelers most often come to this shocking realization after encountering a multitude of struggles when trying to assimilate into African societies. The limitations and lack of easily available resourced in Africa are stark. There is no monolithic culture with unified ideals in African nations, they are deeply tribal and view black Americans as distinctly separate and alien despite sharing similar skin color.

Black Americans also run up against the social disapprobation of their being descended from slaves.

Instead of accepting this reality and moving on, activists have proposed new projects that seek to build a kind of isolated bubble of wealth within an African enclave – They are so desperate for Wakanda to be real that they are hoping to conjure it into being.

The Right believe it when they see it. The Left see it when they believe it. Guess which one Reality favors.

Rap artist Akon, real name Aliaune Damala Bouga Time Puru Nacka Lu Lu Lu Badara Akon Thiam, launched such an endeavor seven years ago with the intent to “free black Americans” from the racism of the west and bring the Marvel movie Utopia to life.

The $6 billion construction effort, called Akon City, was started with the support of the government of Senegal in 2018 and was also supposed to adopt a new cryptocurrency called “Akoin” (the imagination of modern artists is truly staggering). Sitting on Senegal’s Atlantic Coast, Akon’s high-tech, eco-friendly city was supposed to run entirely on renewable energy.

Of course, rappers are known for their opportunism, not their grand vision or leadership. Both Akon City and the Akoin project have met with failure, with Akon city being scrapped by Senegal and the cryptocurrency facing investment setbacks and accusations of mismanagement.

Of course, rappers are perfectly qualified to run major projects and organizations successfully–do they not have the Magic Skin Color that instantly makes them experts in everything?

Newsbusters.

Thursday’s edition of Amanpour & Co., which appears on taxpayer-funded PBS after airing on CNN International, veered even further left than usual with a glowing interview of Mr. Socialist himself, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Host Christiane Amanpour’s set-up for the interview, which launched the show, left no mistaking where she stood on Trump’s big bill: On the hard left.

My, what a surprise.

Unmentioned in any of this discussion is where the poor got all of this money that is being ‘transferred to the rich’.

Newsbusters.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the failed assassination attempt against President Donald Trump, a transcendent event in our nation’s politics and history that demands reflection. However, the anniversary of the shooting was mostly met with indifference on the legacy media’s Sunday political talk shows.

NBC’s Meet the Press didn’t touch Butler until close to the end of the show, as a subject matter for a panel discussion segment. What is striking about the discussion is that it was centered on the politics of the day and the state of the campaigns- as opposed to a reflection on political violence.

NBC would have you believe that the truest, purest victim of that day was the electoral aspirations of President Joe Biden and not the unmentioned Corey Comperatore, who gave his life in order to protect his wife and daughter from the assassin’s bullets- or, for that matter, the other two gentlemen who were wounded on that day. These three didn’t warrant so much as a mention on the NBC panel, which instead focused on that day.

The Narrative Media love to focus discussions on abstract notions of ‘violence’ rather than the specifics of who is being violent to whom. That way they can avoid any mention of the fact that most ‘violence’ in this country is perpetrated by leftist political activists and criminal elements among fashionable minorities.

The Telegraph (UK).

Anti-migrant violence broke out in a town in south-east Spain late on Saturday after an attack on a 68-year-old man earlier in the week.

Five people were hurt and police made one arrest during fighting between far-Right groups, locals and North African migrants in Torre-Pacheco, local officials told Reuters.

Apparently is is now ‘far-Right’ to protect your friends and neighbors from being attacked by foreigners. Well, that simplifies things.

The Telegraph (UK).

Middle class workers will face higher taxes later this year, a Cabinet minister has suggested.

Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, said the Government had promised not to increase taxes for “people on modest incomes”, and that Labour would base its policy on the “principle of fairness”.

Apparently it’s ‘fair’ to take your money if you have money, and not to take your money if you don’t have money.

The Telegraph (UK).

Diversity and inclusion experts can come to the UK on skilled work visas, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Home Office has also safeguarded visa application routes for the vocations of poet and blogger on a list of protected occupations.
Labour has made tackling migration one of its key targets, with a crackdown on work visas announced earlier this year after net migration neared one million.
Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, vowed to ensure that the immigration system was “linked to skills and training”.
But critics have said that ministers are protecting the wrong professions instead of focusing on importing workers who will contribute to the ailing economy.
Under the “crackdown” announced in May, a temporary list of “shortage” occupations was drawn up outlining who would continue to be eligible for skilled work visas.
Among these roles is “equality and diversity manager”. In recent years, such jobs have become controversial for pushing concepts such as the idea of “white privilege”.
The profession has been described as a “plague” on the public sector, and the Civil Service alone has spent £27 million of taxpayers’ money on diversity officers in a year. More than £13 million is being spent on the salaries of diversity officers by NHS trusts each year.

The Crust take care of their own.

Proglodytes just love to have a catchy tag that they can use to label people; after all, they tend to think in slogans.

Trump Calls Epstein List A Democrat Psyop, Tells MAGA ‘Not To Waste Time And Energy’

Trump faces a revolt from his MAGA base over the Epstein files (NBC News)

Trump Defends Bondi Amid MAGA Backlash Over Epstein Files

How the Trump shooting supercharged beliefs in a divine right of MAGA (Isaac Arnsdorf/Washington Post)

MAGA ‘Cruel Kids’ Reject ‘Silent Majority’ Label at Party of the Summer 

MAGA Is Tearing Itself Apart Over Jeffrey Epstein (David French/New York Times)  As if David French knows anything.

Former Obama Speechwriter Admits Shunning MAGA Didn’t Work

Who Goes MAGA? (TechDirt) Few make the connection this explicitly.

MAGA world erupts over Trump’s defense of Bondi amid Epstein files fallout (Emma Colton/Fox News)

MAGA cares more about Jeffrey Epstein than dying without Medicaid, which explains everything (Will Bunch/The Philadelphia Inquirer)  Will Bunch loses his shit, which is pretty much his job description.

Economy and Epstein: Gen Z MAGA wants results (Tal Axelrod/Axios)

Power Line.

As far as I can tell from my deep dive into the illegal immigration issue, the Feds really are concentrating their efforts on the worst cases. Yet, the typical media headline, this one from NPR, reads,

Sharpest growth in ICE detention population: people with no criminal convictions.

Obviously, this definition excludes any convictions having to do with the illegal immigration itself. By “no” they refer to convictions only in the United States.

And by using “convictions” they exclude a huge population of aliens charged with other serious crimes but deported before the local judicial system has run its course.

Illegal entry into the United States is a criminal act, as the name implies. But it is considered a misdemeanor, and usually prosecuted as a civil matter through Federal Immigration Court, a division of the U.S. Dept. of Justice.

If you return to the U.S. after being previously deported, that is a separate crime, a felony under U.S. law. For the past few weeks, I’ve been tracking such cases in the U.S. District Court of Minnesota.

I’ve been tracking 60 of the cases filed in the District since Pres. Trump began his second term. Which is admittedly a drop in the bucket considering there are easily more than 100,000 illegal aliens in Minnesota. The last rigorous study of the phenomenon (using 2019 data) counted only 81,000. Of those, the plurality are from Mexico. Add in illegals from El Salvador and Guatemala, and you have the majority.

Associated Press, a Voice of the Crust.

What goes around comes around.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Of course, were Biden (or Harris) President instead of Trump, this wouldn’t be anything to worry about.

The Sunday Times (UK).

Al-Shamahi, 41, who describes her politics as “wokey-progressive — definitely left-wing”, said scientists who do not fit the political mould increasingly keep their heads down for fear of the response. “A lot of them feel that they have to hide their thoughts and their opinions.”

Gee, I wonder why that would be?

Read it.

On June 26th, the Turkish satirical magazine LeMan published a cartoon that featured a city that appears to be Gaza. Islamists interpreted the figure of Mohammed in the cartoon to be Islam’s prophet Mohammed. In response, President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s regime and the country’s Islamists have started a witch hunt by arresting four employees of the magazine, including its editor-in-chief and the cartoonist, with a seizure order of the issue in which the cartoon was featured.

Istanbul’s Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office launched a judicial investigation into the magazine on the grounds that it “denigrated religious values.” An investigation was also launched into the magazine’s managers’ finances.

The cartoon in question depicts two people in the sky, identifying themselves as Mohammad and Moses while missiles rain down on buildings. One of the characters, Mohammad, says in Arabic, “Salaam alaikum (Peace be upon you), I am Mohammad,” to which Moses replies with the same phrase in Hebrew, “Shalom aleichem, I am Moses.”

Turkish government officials condemned the magazine in unison.

Once upon a time, Christians were as tender about their faith as Muslims are all the time. But that was then; this is now.

Read it.

Things are not happy in Monterey County. The California county, which Kamala won by 63%, is considered a ‘sanctuary’ for illegal aliens by the Department of Homeland Security.

But that sanctuary status was recently violated and local officials are outraged. So is the Solidarity Network: a pro-illegal alien group that ‘monitors’ immigration enforcement arrests.

Monterey County Board of Supervisors Chair Chris Lopez responded by announcing that a maternal health walk was cancelled. “Monterey County deeply values the contributions of our immigrant workers and families that strengthen our local communities and economy,” Monterey County Supervisor Luis Alejo posted. The Monterey Solidarity Network promised to fight.

“A family man was taken from the street as he was taking his son to school,” the pro-illegal organization that had vowed to fight against President Trump’s immigration enforcement fumed. “How is ripping a man from his family, outside of his home, terrorizing his children, considered ‘compassionate’?”

Considering the arrested man’s past relationship with a child: it might be very compassionate.

Read it.

Like many other Western European countries, Sweden hands out citizenship like candy to “New Swedes”. For that reason, a culture-enriching Afghan rapist of an elderly mentally disabled woman in a nursing home can’t be deported — he’s a Swedish citizen.

Ed Kilgore, Narrative scribbler at New York magazine, a Voice of the Crust.

An extended disquisition on how stupid Democrats were to rig the election to put two incompetents in charge of the Federal government, all while blaming Trump. “You know, maybe if we hadn’t messed with the bull, we wouldn’t be getting the horns so badly right now.”

That’s what Narrative scribblers do: Nothing is ever ort side’s fault, nothing that happened ever happened because of something we did, shit just happened and we wish it had happened on somebody else’s watch, or at least so that we could paint it that way.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE: Democrats Lost Voters on Transgender Rights. Winning Them Back Won’t Be Easy. (Charles Homans/New York Times)  Damn, I know those voters are around here somewhere, what could have happened to them?

YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE: From Science to Diversity, Trump Hits the Reverse Button on Decades of Change (Peter Baker/New York Times) Change just happens, and Trump is picking the Wrong Side of History and screwing things up for everybody, the swine.

Read it.

I wrote recently about the chilling jurisprudence of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has drawn the ire of colleagues in opinions for her rhetoric and extreme positions.

Many have expressed alarm over her adherence to what has been described by a colleague as an “imperial judiciary” model of jurisprudence. Now, it appears that Jackson’s increasingly controversial opinions are serving a certain cathartic purpose for the far-left Biden appointee.

On ABC News, Jackson stated, “I just feel that I have a wonderful opportunity to tell people in my opinions how I feel about the issues, and that’s what I try to do.”

Her colleagues have not entirely welcomed that sense of license.

We’ve seen this movie before: Revenge of the Affirmative Action Hire.

Read it.

Vance Boelter, the man accused in the political assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the shootings of another lawmaker and his wife, refused to discuss a potential motive but insisted his case “didn’t involve” either President Donald Trump or abortion.

“You are fishing and I can’t talk about my case,” he wrote to The New York Post in an exchange of messages, using the jail’s internal messaging system from his cell at the Sherburne County Jail in Elk River, Minnesota.

“I am pro-life personaly [sic] but it wasn’t those,” Boelter added. “I will just say there is a lot of information that will come out in future that people will look at and judge for themselves that goes back 24 months before the 14th. If the gov ever let’s [sic] it get out.”

So much for the Narrative.

The Foundry.

Former CIA Director John Brennan is one of the most contemptible and shady people in public life. Few people have abused their position, power, and access with such impunity and hubris.

So, it was a pleasure to read a Fox News report that the FBI has launched a criminal investigation into Brennan, along with former FBI Director James Comey, for possible wrongdoing related to the Trump campaign-Russia collusion probe, including making false statements to Congress.

No, I’m not under the impression Brennan will end up in prison, where he likely belongs, or even see an indictment. The statute of limitations has largely sunset. And even if they hadn’t, the notion there will be any reckoning is remote.

My modest hope is that perhaps a better accounting of his corruption for the historical record will destroy Brennan’s reputation forever, which shouldn’t be a heavy lift.

Read it.

Whenever government fails (or refuses) to do its primary job, keeping people safe, people then have no alternative but to organize and do it themselves. This is typically tarted with the smear-term ‘vigilantism’, which like ‘black market’ or ‘price gouging’ is a tool used by the Ruling Class to denigrate things they don’t like.

Power Line.

Biden appointee — issued a temporary restraining order yesterday preventing the government from using certain characteristics (like race, ethnicity, language, or location) as the sole basis for reasonable suspicion to stop individuals in immigration enforcement actions. The order also includes requirements for record-keeping, developing official guidance on reasonable suspicion, and implementing mandatory training for agents.

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Germany’s highest administrative court has dealt a major blow to the government’s migration policies, ruling that Berlin must grant entry visas to thousands of Afghan migrants.

Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul confirmed that the ruling is “legally binding,” therefore Germany has to “honour its promises.”

The decision follows a landmark case brought by an Afghan woman and her family, who were guaranteed relocation to Germany under the federal resettlement programme in October 2023 but have since been stranded in Pakistan.

The programme was introduced by the previous, leftist government which issued visas to Afghans at risk after the Taliban seized power in 2021.

More than 36,000 Afghans have entered Germany through these programmes, most of them via Pakistan.

While the initiative was intended for former local staff of the German army and other high-risk groups, internal government reports show that the system was exploited on a large scale, as the government allowed thousands of migrants to enter Germany with fake documents and fabricated stories.

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Well, actually, it doesn’t. Money is anything of value that can be used in trade (the ‘value’ of paper fiat currency is that governments will accept it in payment for debts to the government, which in modern society are almost inevitable). Tobacco products are famously used as ‘money’ in prisons; when I lived in New York City, subway tokens were almost universally accepted as being worth the nominal value of a subway fare (25 cents at the time). If people wanted to use gold and silver, whether in the form of coins or even of bits and pieces, they could do that. (The fact that doing so would be inconvenient and that most people are bone-lazy would generate enough friction to prevent it in most circumstances, but it could be done.)