Watch it.

Pearl Davis interviews an attorney who lays out how racial politics can put people in prison who don’t belong there.

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

Guess they’ll have to raise their wages to attract people other than illegal aliens. Like, say, Americans.

You know, what they ought to have been doing from the beginning, rather than ‘outsourcing in place’.

“It’s a wipeout,” said Gary Rohwer, the owner. “We’re building back up from ground zero.”

These are the very people that the Woke usually delight in trash-talking for ‘exploiting the poor workers.’ But because the Woke are Democrats, and Democrats need illegals to keep their numbers up, nary a word will be said in the Narrative Media.

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A North Carolina congressman is calling attention to an anti-immigration enforcement organization that gets its donations through the Democrat fundraising platform ActBlue.

“By teaching illegal aliens how to evade [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] detention, organizations like Siembra NC are actively promoting an invasion of our country,” Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., told The Daily Signal. Siembra is Spanish for “sowing” or “seed time.”

“Siembra and its financial backers should be held accountable for undermining the rule of law and making North Carolina communities less safe,” Harris said.

Siembra NC operates a hotline to report ICE activity in local communities.

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Yet over the past 40 years, the national debt has grown exponentially, with none of the dire consequences repeatedly predicted. Interest rates have fluctuated, political gridlock has persisted, and deficits have widened, but the U.S. economy continues to function, grow, and attract global capital. The reason is that the U.S. continues to enjoy what economists call the “exorbitant privilege” of being the issuer of the world’s reserve currency. Treasuries remain the deepest, most liquid capital market globally, and the dollar is central to global trade, investment, and reserves. This creates a structural advantage that allows the U.S. to run larger deficits than other nations without facing the same level of market discipline. So long as global trust in U.S. institutions and the rule of law remains intact, there is a deep and steady demand for U.S. debt, providing a long runway before any severe funding stress emerges.

Moreover, deficit spending is no longer a temporary tool used in times of crisis; it has become an embedded feature of the economy. Social Security, Medicare, defense, and other entitlements are politically sacrosanct. At the same time, fiscal transfers (like tax credits and subsidies) are now a regular part of household consumption and corporate support. In many ways, the U.S. economy is now structurally reliant on deficit-financed stimulus. Growth, consumer spending, and even corporate investment increasingly depend on a steady stream of government outlays.

While U.S. debt and deficit levels are elevated, there is no imminent risk of fiscal collapse. However, it is worth examining the impact of rising debt and deficit levels on future economic prosperity.

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The legalization and commercialization of marijuana edibles in the U.S. reportedly has coincided with an escalation in cannabis-related poisonings.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Think of it as evolution in action.

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Did you know that 99% of synthetic diamonds are currently produced using high-pressure and high-temperature (HPHT) methods? A prevailing paradigm is that diamonds can only be grown using liquid metal catalysts in the gigapascal pressure range (typically 5-6 GPa, where 1 GPa is about 10,000 atm), and typically within the temperature range of 1300-1600 °C. However, the diamonds produced using HPHT are always limited to sizes of approximately one cubic centimeter due to the components involved. That is—achieving such high pressures can only be done at a relatively small length scale. Discovering alternative methods to make diamonds in liquid metal under milder conditions (particularly at lower pressure) is an intriguing basic science challenge that if achieved could revolutionize diamond manufacturing. Could the prevailing paradigm be challenged?

A team of researchers led by Director Rod RUOFF at the Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials (CMCM) within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), including graduate students at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), have grown diamonds under conditions of 1 atmosphere pressure and at 1025 °C using a liquid metal alloy composed of gallium, iron, nickel, and silicon, thus breaking the existing paradigm. The discovery of this new growth method opens many possibilities for further basic science studies and for scaling up the growth of diamonds in new ways.

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But over the next two years, Bruce came to realize that the reality of working at TSMC wasn’t exactly what he had envisioned. While working on nanometer-level processes to make state-of-the-art chips, he struggled with language barriers, long hours, and a strict hierarchy. Bruce soon began second-guessing what he had signed up for. The plant, which was originally set to begin operating in 2024, fell woefully behind schedule; production at the facility is now set to start in 2025. Bruce, who said he signed a confidentiality agreement with TSMC, requested anonymity for this story.

He wasn’t the only one disappointed with TSMC’s progress in Arizona — other U.S. workers who spoke to Rest of World echoed Bruce’s concerns. In the past two years, the company has relocated hundreds of Taiwanese workers and their families to Arizona. Instead of a gleaming new facility, these workers found an active construction site, and a company struggling to bridge Taiwanese and American professional and cultural norms.

A comprehensive case study in why ‘diversity’ is not a strength but rather a weakness.

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In a world where copying and pasting is as easy as moving a cursor from one place to another, it’s easy to underestimate the importance of the photocopier as a disruptive force.

After all, it wasn’t like we didn’t have ways to copy materials from one page to another previously. Just ask anyone who’s ever held a quiz created from the chemicals of a ditto machine

But the 1942 invention of xerography, the dry-photocopying technique that made it possible to easily reprint documents, had a strange effect on society. It made the reproduction of printed material not only easy, but cost-effective—particularly in offices.

And for businesses that relied on the scarcity of information as a business model, the photocopier was bad news—and, in many ways, it showed cracks in the copyright system.

So-called ‘intellectual property’ was an artificial monopoly easy to enforce when copying it took time and effort. The electron has removed the Clever Plastic Disguise from the whole scam.

Look, the essence of ‘property’ is that when I am using it, you can’t use it. That’s why it’s always a protected category of Stuff–fighting over who gets the use of Stuff that can only be used by one person at a time is one of the fundamental Bad Things that governments exist to prevent.

The fundamental myth of ‘intellectual property’ is that ideas and information are somehow entitled to that same level of protection. In economics, protecting the right to use something that could not be so protected without the coercive might of the government is called ‘rent-seeking’, and anybody other than a Crustian socialist who depends on such rent-seeking for what they say or what they write recognizes this as a Bad Thing. (The Crustian socialist is all about re-distributing YOUR property but would scream like a wounded water buffalo if you suggest re-distributing HIS/HER ‘intellectual property’. Try it on the next socialist you see. Wear ear plugs.)

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In the latest step towards the future of food, one company has launched what it calls the world’s first factory that can grow food out of thin air.
Key food industry players and innovative start-ups are racing to develop more sustainable methods to produce food for an ever-growing global population.
Some companies are leaning into traditional plant-based proteins like pulses, beans, and legumes. Others are creating ‘real’ cultivated meat, in a process that typically takes animal cells and cultivates – or grows – them in a laboratory setting, not dissimilar to the way that beer is fermented.
Now, Finland-based Solar Foods has announced its unique approach to making a more sustainable food system: growing protein out of air.
The company has just opened the world’s first air protein factory, based near the Finnish capital of Helsinki. At the facility, Solar Foods will operate a commercial-scale production of Solein, its signature air protein, which combines a tiny but mighty micro-organism with CO2 – known simply as air – to grow it into a nutritious yellow powder. The bioprocess is said to resemble winemaking.

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I am not an official Cheesehead. I have never been to Wisconsin, but I am a cheese addict. If life were a choice between chocolate and cheese, I would rather be a cheesehead than a chocoholic.

Cooking with cheese seems simple. I mean, everyone except Chuck Schumer knows that you cook a burger and then put cheese on top.

Manchego. Ummmmm.

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There’s this thing about USB-C that nobody really talks about. Not the part where we all had to buy new dongles (RIP my dongle drawer, 2010-2023). The other part.

See, we all thought USB-C was just going to be about charging things and moving files around like the other USBs. Very serious. Very purposeful. But because of the way it is it can do… other things.

…

The protocol doesn’t judge your life choices.

If you eat something, even a substantial snack, you will feel the urge to poop within 30 minutes–sometimes within ten.

Listen to your body. Take your first opportunity to poop.

You’ll be glad you did.

Just sayin’.

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To gender-critical feminists, the social contagion of transactivism (enforced mainstreaming of trans ideology) is all down to perverted men and their “misogyny.” Men started it; men must stop it. It’s a (white) male supremacist, men’s rights movement, privileging the reality show of ‘gender’ over the reality of sex, while normalising paedophilia, porn, prostitution or their variants. Women have nothing to do with it. After all, misogyny is what’s done to—not by—women.

Rightly, these women denounce transactivism. But framing it as ‘woman-hating’ disingenuously classes women as nothing but victims, men as the only villains. It lets women off the hook, projects them as helpless, without agency in ‘a man’s world.’ It glosses over women’s complicity in co-shaping this contagion, making it harder to undo or prevent harm to billions of ordinary women who wanted nothing to do with the virtue-signalling of influential women. Without so much as an apology from the latter, it’s the former who are paying the price: forfeiting friends, family, and jobs, and being censored or cancelled for being ‘conservative.’

Unless ordinary women confront transactivists within their ranks, they’ll keep losing ground that celebrated women first ceded.

Not all transgenders are naughty or nefarious, but many are both. What perverts do in private matters less, but transactivism insists that everyone genuflect to gender ideology.

Transwomen aren’t women. They’re men, pretending, or pining, to be women. Trouble is, too many prominent people who’ve said or implied the opposite, in practice or policy (if not phrasing), are women, not men. It isn’t just perverted men who shouted down women (and men) protesting trans-tyranny; it’s prominent women too.

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For years, some of the world’s sharpest minds have been quietly turning your life into a series of games. Not merely to amuse you, but because they realized that the easiest way to make you do what they want is to make it fun. To escape their control, you must understand the creeping phenomenon of gamification, and how it makes you act against your own interests.

If you can be fooled into acting against your own interests merely by something disguised as a game, you deserve everything that happens to you. Think of it as evolution in action.

This guy needs to stop whining and  get over the belief that it’s his job to rescue the world.

Well, at least he wasn’t shouting “Melon! Melon!” That would be a weird pizza….

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A rise in antisemitic harassment and crime is pushing more and more Jews in France to consider moving to Israel, the leader of France’s largest Jewish organization told allisraelnews.com.

“Wherever they live, I guess the Jewish population is feeling insecure today in the French environment,” Robert Ejnes, head of CRIF, the umbrella organization for France’s Jewish community, said. “I don’t know a family that is not speaking about [leaving France] now.”

France has the largest Jewish community in Europe, with around half a million people. It’s also home to an estimated six to seven million Muslims, or about 10% of the population. As in other Western countries, people with Muslim immigrant backgrounds have been involved in a disproportionate number of antisemitic incidents, especially the more serious or high-profile ones.

Antisemitism has increased sharply since Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, Ejnes said, and President Macron’s recent decision to recognize a Palestinian state has contributed to legitimizing antisemitic and anti-Jewish sentiments. While Macron has previously been supportive of the Jewish community, today, “we believe he’s promoting antisemitism by doing what he’s doing,” Ejnes stated.

But with a long history in France, many Jews are still hesitant to leave, he said. “Many know the resilience of the community after all the bad events that ever happened to us in France, especially in recent times: the Dreyfus Affair, or the Vichy government, or the Shoah, and Jews have still continued to live and belong to the French environment.”

Now if only that worked with Muslims.

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Just a few weeks ago, it was widely thought that Israel and the terrorist group Hamas were nearing a deal to end the war in Gaza. In that deal, Hamas leadership would agree to go into exile, Israeli hostages would be freed from their hellish captivity, and surrounding Arab nations could help fund the rebuilding of a more peaceful Gaza Strip.

That, at least, was the hope.

And then it all fell apart.

It fell apart for one simple reason: Hamas understands the West far better than the West understands Hamas. Hamas understands that if it forces the suffering of its own people, if it maximizes and even falsifies media coverage of that suffering, then the West will rehabilitate Hamas and grant it its demands. Hamas understands that Westerners are utterly ignorant to the true evil of Hamas, their willingness to multiply the suffering of Palestinians and Israelis alike, to starve their own citizens as well as Israeli hostages, to sacrifice Palestinian children by placing them in the line of fire, all for the cameras; Hamas understands that myopic and self-centered Westerners will simply project their own biases and values onto Hamas, thus granting them unearned innocence and sympathy; Hamas understands that the media would facilitate all of this, elevating a false oppressor/oppressed narrative above the truth.

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England witnessed a day of protests on Saturday, August 9th, aimed at the national policy of housing asylum applicants close to local communities.

The form of the problem varies, from the Home Office filling entire hotels with migrants to local authorities renting ‘houses in multiple occupation’ (HMOs) from private landlords which they then fill with asylum seekers. This growing population primarily involves undocumented young men, whose alleged crimes fuel local safety concerns.

The most notorious current cases are in Epping, Essex and Nuneaton, Warwickshire, where an Ethiopian and two Afghans respectively are charged with serious sexual offences. While the Nuneaton protest was covered by the press as something of a national flashpoint, there were also protests in the cities of Bristol, Leicester, and Birmingham. At the Liverpool protest, counterdemonstrators now stand accused of assaulting GB News Reporter Sophie Reaper, whereas the Bournemouth anti-migrant hotel protests coincided with the launch of local ‘vigilante’ patrols.

Following the pattern established in Epping, the protests are typically set up by concerned parents—and fronted by mothers—and backed by town councillors from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

In contrast, echoing the various out-of-town counterdemonstrators that show up, the British media focuses on the supposed involvement, even leadership, of the ‘far Right.’ In the absence of Tommy Robinson, the Guardian claimed the Nuneaton protest was organised by “the extremist nationalist group Homeland party,” adding snootily “some protesters could be seen taking turns to sing karaoke on the street outside the Wetherspoon’s pub.”

J D Wetherspoon is a popular, reasonably priced pub chain reviled by the political elite in Britain. The barely coded barbs directed at it in the Guardian are symptomatic of the wider disconnect between the establishment and the British people who, in the face of illegal ‘small boat’ migration, are saying ‘enough is enough.’

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London’s Metropolitan Police detained at least 474 people on Saturday, August 9th, targeting expressions of support for Palestine Action. The actions were in keeping with the protestors’ previously announced strategy of provoking the arrests in order to ‘break’ the criminal justice system.

Many of those arrested produced handwritten signs at an agreed time to support the proscribed group, banking on it forcing a police response. Following a warning, arrests began. Those successfully prosecuted could face anything up to 14 years’ imprisonment under anti-terror laws.

Keir Starmer’s Labour government pushed through the policy after Palestine Action members vandalised a UK military facility. By grouping ‘direct action’ vandals in with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—but weirdly not the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper have made a rod for their own backs. This is clear from the Met Police’s current commitment to arresting people for holding specifically worded placards.

This is what happens when you don’t have a written Constitution with a Bill of Rights.

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So they have spent $300 million for a project that will inevitably fail at its stated mission, while ruining what was previously a perfectly nice park. This is not really much different from spending hundreds of billions of dollars on an energy transition that can’t possibly work. Or, for that matter, from spending a trillion or so dollars per year on the project to cure poverty, without ever putting a dent into the poverty rate.

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The official designation of a recession comes from a committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private, nonprofit research organization.

The committee considers a wide range of economy-wide, monthly data points, but the NBER views GDP as “the single best measure.”

The committee calls a recession once there is a significant decline across these measures for more than a few months.

The NBER’s official designation of a recession, then, doesn’t happen until there are several months of data, allowing it to be sure both that a recession happened and when exactly it started.

In other words, as Voronoi notes, the NBER looks backward, not at the present moment.

“Oh, yeah, looks like you’ve been shot. Sure sucks to be you.”

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

When gunfire pelted the Atlanta-based headquarters of the CDC yesterday, hundreds of employees were inside the campus’s buildings. The experience was terrifying. But some of the employees were not particularly shocked. “I’m actually surprised it didn’t happen sooner,” a nearly 20-year veteran of the agency told me. (She, like others I spoke with for this article, requested anonymity out of fear of losing her job.)

I, too, am not surprised it didn’t happen sooner–like, in 2020.

This was, in one sense, the first attack of its kind on the CDC. The shooter, whom law-enforcment officials have identified as Patrick Joseph White, a 30-year-old resident of an Atlanta suburb, was reportedly fixated on the idea that the COVID-19 vaccine had made him depressed and suicidal. No employees were injured by the bullets that entered the buildings, according to a CDC representative. But an Atlanta police officer named David Rose was shot and later died from his injuries. White, too, was found dead—fatally shot—at the scene. (It is not yet clear if his wound was self-inflicted or if he was killed by police.) When he took aim at the agency on Friday afternoon, he was near a corner where a lone man stands holding anti-vaccine signs nearly every day, several CDC staffers told me.

Guess the wouldn’t take the hint.

In another sense, public-health workers have been facing escalating hostility since the early days of the pandemic. In 2020, armed protesters gathered on the Ohio Health Department director’s front lawn, and the chief health officer of Orange County, California, was met with death threats after issuing a mask mandate. She had to hire extra security and was eventually driven to resign. Anthony Fauci, who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the country’s initial COVID response, has faced regular death threats since 2020. Nearly a third of state, local, and tribal public-health workers reported facing some sort of workplace violence in a 2021 survey.

Oh, wow: You lie about there being a pandemic, you push politicians into sending the economy into a death spiral, you lie to people about the effectiveness of masks, you push politicians into mandating experimental vaccines that actually kill people, and you’re surprised that somebody might decide to resort to violence? Clueless in Atlanta….

Baltimore Sun, a Voice of the Crust.

Baltimore Police say six victims, including one young girl, were shot Saturday night in the Central Park Heights neighborhood near Pimlico Race Course.

Around 8:46 p.m., officers responded to the intersection of Queensbury and Spaulding avenues for reports of a shooting, said Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley during a Saturday night news briefing.

Worley said that the officers found four male victims and two females, including a five-year-old girl who was shot in the hand. The girl’s injuries do not appear to be serious, he said.

He also confirmed that the adult victims were between the ages of 23 and 52 and that one of the male victims is in critical condition and currently undergoing surgery at a nearby hospital.

According to Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings, the high number of wounded without fatalities suggests that the perp was a Person of Color.

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Hiroshima University researchers have found that fermented stevia extract may fight pancreatic cancer without harming healthy cells—potentially making it more than just a zero-calorie sugar substitute.

The Times (UK).

Small boats and fateful decisions on asylum have shifted polite opinion firmly to the right. It risks moving further if the tap isn’t turned off.

Note how ‘shifting right’ is automatically characterized as being a ‘risk’. (Oh, no, we don’t want to shift right!)

On Tuesday morning, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, went on the BBC’s Today programme to be interrogated about the government’s new “one in, one out” plan to deport illegal migrants back to France. It is the “right principle”, she said, that people who arrive on small boats should be returned.

Amol Rajan, the host, pressed Cooper. “The trouble is, a year on from being in power, the numbers are going up, not down,” he said. “Don’t you think, if you said … ‘we hope to return 5,000 a year through this scheme’ it would help win the public over?”

You could hardly hope for a better encapsulation of just how far the liberal consensus on migration has shifted in this country. Neither the Labour home secretary nor the Today show host interrogated the assumption that illegal migrants should be deported; it was merely a question of how many and how fast.

Reality is what hangs around even if you don’t believe in it.

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Aaron Clarey is an economist like no other. He doesn’t just parrot what the Usual Suspects say, but looks at the numbers and just paints what he sees. I recommend that you also read his books. I especially recommend Curse of the High IQ.

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The major problem is that ‘Chinese’ isn’t a language but a language group, each of which uses the same ideographic symbols but ‘pronounce’s each of those symbols differently. (In fact, one could add Japanese to this category, since kanji are these same ‘Chinese’ characters [more or less] with Japanese ‘pronunciations’.)

So some representation of Chinese sounds in, say, the Latin alphabet would merely apply to one of the Chinese languages (typically Mandarin) and leave the others behind–unless you used it to ‘write’ those others as well, which would ‘say the quiet part out loud’ that these are actually separate (though related) languages. And this would break the culutural unity of which the Chinese are so proud and which is one of the bases of their national identity.

Got no idea how this will work out, but it will be interesting to watch.

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Back in 2020 and under President Joe Biden, the institutional Left would tell anyone foolish enough to listen that we needed to add seats to the Supreme Court. In October 2024, however, much of the court-packing rhetoric vanished, almost on cue.

Now, it’s back, as Democrats strain to find any reason to claim they’re getting slighted while President Donald Trump seeks to restore fairness by correcting the errors of the 2020 census.

James Carville, the Democrat political strategist best known for helping Bill Clinton get elected, decided to remind Americans why they can’t trust the Left. He brought up court-packing and more.

“If the Democrats win the presidency, the Senate, and the House in 2028 … they are just going to have to unilaterally add Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia as states,” Carville said on the show “Politics War Room” Thursday. “The Constitution gives Congress power over federal elections, I don’t think they can redistrict, but there are things they can do. … And they may have to expand the court to 13 members.”

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Welcome to Londonistan. Be careful not to step in the Diversity.

Media Freakout Over ‘Horror’ of Dictator Trump and His MAGA Supporters

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Three people were shot and wounded in New York’s Times Square, the New York Police Department said Saturday.

The people — an 18 year-old female, 19-year old male, and a 65-year old male — are in a stable condition in hospital, an NYPD spokesperson said.

A 17 year-old male is in custody, the NYPD added. The police also recovered a firearm.

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A police officer is dead after a surgical-mask-wearing gunman riddled the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with bullets. His parents think it was an act of revenge, saying their son believed he had an illness caused by the controversial Covid-19 vaccine. The attack ended with the shooter’s own death, but it’s unclear at this point if his mortal wound was self-inflicted.

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One of the most important developments this century has been a major increase in energy access across the globe: Billions of people have gained access to modern energy, a precondition for rising from poverty.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region of the world not benefiting from this transformation. In Africa, energy poverty is growing. For the first time since World War II, access to electricity is also backsliding in Africa.

Over the past year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has sought to address Africa’s rising energy poverty, through organizing conferences and publishing reports. The IEA and global leaders gathered in conferences in Africa. The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation was a major funder of the endeavor. Yet, the IEA did not offer any practical solution to address the rising energy poverty in Africa because it is unable to utter the essential words: fossil fuels.

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The Islamification of the West continues unchecked. Millions of third-worlders have been funneled into Western nations, especially France, Spain, Ireland, England, and Germany. Globalist rulers in Brussels have remained silent about the intentional invasion, while anyone voicing concern is immediately thrown into the state-run government censorship gauntlet and labeled a “racist.”

It comes as no surprise that Brussels’ failed open-borders experiment since 2015, flooding Europe with millions of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees from countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, has sparked not only a deepening identity crisis for Europe, but also fueled a powerful resurgence of nationalism across the continent.

We’ll get you a Satanic … Mechanic….

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A French national who has legally changed his name to Lucifer Of-Darkness has been sentenced to nine months in jail for punching a man unconscious in a train station lavatory.

The 41-year-old, previously known as Berkani Nahim, attacked Christopher Jamieson at Waverley station in Edinburgh this year before handing himself in to British Transport Police officers, claiming self-defence.

Footage of his arrest, shows Of-Darkness approaching the officers on the station concourse and telling them: “I knocked someone out, he pissed me off.”

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A drunken 43-year-old culture-enricher in France tried to strangle a 7-year-old child because he believed that the little boy had insulted him. The indignant fellow also sprayed the boy’s family with tear gas.

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Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued Robert Francis O’Rourke and his radical organization, Powered by People, for unlawful fundraising activity, including potentially operating a misleading financial-influence scheme to fund runaway Democrats who fled Texas to break quorum.

“Democrat runaways are likely accepting Beto Bribes to underwrite their jet-setting sideshow in far-flung places and misleadingly raising political funds to pay for personal expenses,” said Attorney General Paxton. “This out-of-state, cowardly cabal is abandoning their constitutional duties. I will not allow failed political has-beens to buy off Texas elected officials. I’ll see you in court, Beto.”

O’Rourke and Powered by People intentionally misled donors to fund runaway Democrats’ personal expenses, despite advertising it as political fundraising. By knowingly blurring the distinction, O’Rourke and Powered by People sought to take advantage of uninformed donors by directing them to explicitly political fundraising platforms, all while intending to use the funds for purposes they understood to be constituted as personal expenditures. Texas law prohibits organizations from engaging in false, misleading, and deceptive acts, such as the fundraising scheme operated by O’Rourke and Powered by People.

Attorney General Paxton has requested a temporary restraining order and an injunction preventing O’Rourke and Powered by People from continuing to raise or distribute money for the purpose of funding the runaway Democrat House members. Attorney General Paxton previously demanded documents from Powered by People and opened an investigation into a Soros-funded group that is also underwriting the quorum break.

UPDATE: Judge blocks Beto O’Rourke from financially supporting Texas Democrats who left the state

Apparently Paxton’s theory is that O’Rourke financially supporting the Democrat exodus constitutes a species of bribery. We’ll see where that goes.

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Zman, a long-running dissident blogger known for his relentless output and paleocon worldview, died suddenly at age 58. In this layered eulogy, I reflect on his legacy, his limitations, and what his death signals for the vanishing world of independent political writing. Drawing comparisons to Lawrence Auster and archetypal closure in Jung’s Liber Novus, this post becomes not just a farewell to a man, but an elegy for a dying form of thought – and a meditation on fate, generational death, and symbolic time.

I received bad news yesterday morning from a post by AMRX Mark II about the passing of the blogger Zman. I wasn’t sure if he meant it metaphorically (as in: Zman was dead to him ideologically) or literally. But a check of Zman’s blog confirmed it – no post yesterday, a silence where there had always been signal. Zman was a machine: five posts a week, premium content on Sundays, no lapses for a decade. His discipline was impressive, and even when I disagreed I respected his rhythm. He was the last of a type, which we’ll get to. As I noted in the immediate aftermath, the abruptness of Zman’s silence felt off – like static interrupting a long-wave transmission that had never missed a beat. In some ways his consistent dissident output reminded me of the late and great Lawrence Auster of View From the Right fame, whose passed away in 2013 and whose website is still preserved in amber here. I have a bunch of drafts ready to post (including one about Auster), and I already did a recent eulogy about my former stepfather, so I’m kind of bummed that I have to do another so soon thereafter.

I had wondered about his sudden month-long silence. He will be missed.

Obituary.

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A federal appeals court Friday shut down Judge James Boasberg’s attempt to pursue criminal contempt charges against figures in the Trump administration.

In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that Boasberg’s orders were overly “ambiguous” and left too much room for interpretation. The panel also found that Boasberg’s attempt to hold administration officials in contempt for failing to follow an order that was later overturned by the Supreme Court was unprecedented.

“The district court’s order exceeds the contempt power and intrudes on the powers of the Executive Branch,” Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, wrote in the ruling obtained by The Washington Times.

CBS News, a Voice of the Crust.

The watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund, led by a former Obama administration ethics official, has formally requested a federal investigation into the Pentagon’s acceptance of a Qatari luxury jet on behalf of President Trump.

According to a memo obtained by CBS News, the group asked the Department of Defense’s inspector general and the Government Accountability Office to probe whether the Pentagon broke laws and engaged in impropriety by accepting the gift on Mr. Trump’s behalf from the Qatari royal family. The memo was sent to the inspector general and GAO on Friday.

The Democracy Defenders Fund is a nonpartisan advocacy group founded by Obama ethics czar Norm Eisen. Its memo said the agencies should investigate whether the Defense Department had improperly invoked its authorities to accept the jet aircraft and to reportedly transfer $934 million in funding from a nuclear missile program to help retrofit the aircraft.

As is obvious, this group is not a ‘watchdog group’ but rather a bunch of Democrat activists looking for some way to cause trouble for Trump. CBS calling it a ‘watchdog group’ is a transparent attempt to paint it with a level of credibility to which it is obviously not entitled. This is a constant theme with the Narrative Media: Any clump of Democrat activists is a ‘watchdog group’; any Republican group, of whatever nature, is a bunch of ‘conspiracy theorists’. (Instead of calling them ‘conspiracy theories’ we ought to call them ‘spoiler alerts’.)

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California is going to keep having devastating fires until the Democrats who rule the state government get their shit together (which will be never0.

Time to leave.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Look, we’re all tired of the Sydney Sweeney discourse. But if it’s going to cost Democrats politically — and cost all of us brain cells — we should at least understand why it mattered. Let’s get through this together.

For the blissfully uninitiated: The actress Sydney Sweeney was the face of a new ad for American Eagle where they say she has “good jeans.” This is obviously a play on “good genes,” which to most people was a reference to how she is good looking, and to a small cadre of extremely online lefty posters and SEO-chasing online media outlets was a reference to Nazism and eugenics. The right made a whole thing about it, accusing Democrats of being out-of-touch scolds, and somehow Democrats have found themselves on the defensive. The episode caused confusion, consternation and a wave of Democrats performatively affirming that yes, they too think Sydney Sweeney is beautiful. Welcome to 2025.

You might be wondering why anybody cares about this. But here’s the thing: The fact that this moment became a thing at all — that a stupid pun could metastasize into a full-blown political moment — says something real about the media ecosystem we’re all trapped in. And it says even more about why Democrats keep losing the culture war, and with it, the narrative war that inevitably shapes who wins elections.

Democrats keep thinking that their problem is a communications problem. They need to realize that they don’t have a communications problem; people are getting the message–it’s just that their message sucks.

I’m sure Democrats are tired of it. Me, I’m having a great time.

CASE IN POINT: NY Times Blames Right for Sydney Sweeney Denim Venom Spewed by NPR, MSNBC

The Telegraph (UK).

Disney has settled a lawsuit with Gina Carano, an actress who was removed from a Star Wars television show after implying that being Republican was comparable to living as a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Ms Carano was removed from The Mandalorian in 2021 for what Disney said were “abhorrent and unacceptable” comments that “denigrated people based on their cultural and religious identities”.

Ms Carano, who also appeared in Marvel’s Deadpool film, hailed news of the settlement, posting on X: “I hope this brings some healing to the force.”

She was removed from the Disney+ streaming show in 2021 after posting on Instagram: “Because history is edited, most people today don’t realise that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbours hate them simply for being Jews.

“How is that any different from hating someone for their political views.”

The Telegraph (UK).

Police officers told a shopkeeper to take down a sign calling shoplifters “scumbags” because it could cause offence, sparking a free speech row.

Rob Davies put up a handwritten note in his shop after repeated thefts that read: “Due to scumbags shoplifting, please ask for assistance to open cabinets.”

But officers from North Wales Police attended his retro shop in Wrexham and told him to take down the sign as it could cause offence.

This is what Britain has come to.

The Telegraph (UK).

Jeffrey Epstein “loved life too much” to kill himself and was confident of securing bail before he died, his butler for 18 years has told The Telegraph.

In an interview that will heap renewed pressure on the Trump administration to make the Epstein files public, one of his closest aides said he had spoken to the paedophile financier before he died and insisted he had been in good spirits.

Valdson Vieira Cotrin, who ran Epstein’s Paris home, told The Telegraph he could not accept the official verdict of suicide and feared that his own life was in danger.

He also said he believed that Virginia Giuffre, the Epstein victim who accused Prince Andrew of rape and died by suicide in April, was a victim of foul play.

The Times (UK).

Nigel Farage is drawing support from five distinct voter groups — including younger, affluent and progressive voters — according to a new study that reveals deep public disillusionment across traditional political lines.

Commissioned by Best for Britain and conducted by YouGov and the research agency Faster Horses, the study combined polling with video diaries to examine why voters are turning to Reform.

It found potential Reform voters are united by a sense of betrayal, hopelessness and anger, though they differ sharply on issues such as the NHS, climate change and the welfare state.

They’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it any more. So to speak.

Unfortunately, they still haven’t discovered Reagan’s Law: Government is not the solution, government is the problem. Britain has too much government, and has had since 1945.

White House Did Have Secret Talks on Epstein Crisis (Erkki Forster/The Daily Beast)

Trump administration faces first lawsuit to force release of Epstein files (April Rubin/Axios)

Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the Epstein files are failing (Sidney Blumenthal/The Guardian)