Read it.

Iranian authorities have executed at least 841 people so far this year, marking a major increase, the United Nations human rights office said on Friday.

One hundred people were executed in July, more than double the number of people executed in July of last year, according to the Office for the High Commissioner of Human Rights.

They included women, Afghan nationals, and ethnic minorities such as Baloch, Kurdish, and Arab citizens.

Opposition to executions, like opposition to slavery, is a Christian thing; Muslims have no problem with either of those.

Quillette.

One of the most viral memes of recent months is the image of the Andy Byron, the CEO of the company Astronomer and Kristin Cabot, the firm’s head of HR, caught on film embracing each other at a Coldplay concert. As the illicit lovers scrambled to hide themselves, the announcer remarked that they seemed like people who were having an affair. Indeed, they were. After the footage was leaked online, their lives were thrown into turmoil. That this irrelevant affair generated such a frenzy shows, as Matthew Gasda recently wrote in Unherd, that “our culture is obsessed with shame, surveillance, and control” and has a “desperate need for a new ethic of privacy.”

In her new book Strangers and Intimates, cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins provides a number of instances of people whose lives were similarly turned upside down by revelations of their private doings. She cites the example of British police officer James Watts, who in 2020 posted a series of racist memes to a WhatsApp chat group that included several of his former colleagues from his time serving as a prison guard. One meme showed an Islamic prayer mat printed with the face of George Floyd. Another featured a white dog in a Ku Klux Klan costume. Watts received a twenty-week prison sentence and a lifetime ban from holding any policing role.

What these cases have in common is the way they blur the distinction between the public and private realms. Can criminal prosecution be justified for sending messages, however odious, to specially invited members of a private chat group? Don’t we all utter things in private that we wouldn’t—and perhaps shouldn’t—utter in public? The treatment of retired police officer Julian Foulkes is another case in point. Foulkes received a visit from the police, who barged into his house and rummaged through his bookshelves searching for suspicious material after someone complained about a tweet he had posted. As someone whose personal library contains books by all sorts of figures, both Left and Right, who might be deemed extreme by some, the prospect of being shamed by the police for the books I privately read is chilling. Such encroachments on private life seem on track to become normal and thus banal. This is the urgent central message of the book Strangers and Intimates.

What is the basic difference between an authoritarian regime and a totalitarian regime? The first leaves you along as long as you follow the rules, however onerous those rules might be; the second does not, and attempts to root out ThoughtCrime. Many hand-wringers would say that this is a distinction without a difference, but it’s not; it’s the difference between Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Germany, and that difference is highly significant. (Hitler died in a bunker, Franco died in his bed.)

Many books that deal with the topic of privacy have the disadvantage of being boring. They often read like meandering legalistic treatises on how to protect your personal information in an online age. One of the immediate strengths of Jenkins’ study is it doesn’t focus on data and digital security, but on a much broader social conception of the distinction between private life and the public sphere—and it is anything but boring.

We live in a world of exteriority–people don’t deal with the world from themselves, but rather through an artificial self or persona that represents who they would like to be or who they want others to think they are. They are always worrying about what others think, and adjust their personalities accordingly.

I’m sure you’ve met people, as I have, who upon meeting you immediately start telling you all about themselves and their life story, whether you want them to or not. I suspect that the reason for this is  that they want you to see them as the person they want you to see, which they can (to a degree) control, rather than the person they actually are (which they can’t control as much and which they may not really like). The best way to stop this process in its tracks is not to tolerate it: “Why are you telling me this?” is rude but sometimes that’s what you have to do. Such a person has no respect for their own privacy and I’m willing to bet no respect for your privacy as well.

One of the worst aspects of Wokeness is its totalitarian nature. William F. Buckley was fond of saying that a liberal is somebody who reaches into your shower to adjust the water temperature.

Read it.

Canada is often portrayed as a land of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity. Reality, however, tells a different story.

Statist policies, crushing taxes, bloated bureaucracy, and a society overtaken by woke ideology have shattered Canada. This is a cautionary tale for those looking at Canada as an ideal living space. If you are asking yourself what living in Canada is like, let me explain: Canada is not a land of fulfilled dreams but of enduring harsh conditions and barely getting by.

As if economic hardships aren’t enough, Canadians are also oppressed by the Orwellian newspeak that woke culture is creating. If you speak your mind, you’re labeled a fascist. If you question social policies, you’re accused of microaggressions.

There are no best places to live in Canada anymore. As a Canadian, I see little chance of Canada becoming livable again. Since I founded Expat Money in 2017, I have been helping expats build their Plan-Bs to protect their wealth and freedom and leave countries like this one.

Let’s look at the unfortunate condition that Canada has fallen into.

The American Prospect, a Voice of the Crust.

The National Labor Relations Act—that pillar of American democracy that gives workers the right to bargain collectively with their employers—was enacted 90 years ago this summer. Its constitutionality was upheld two years later by the Supreme Court, and no successful challenge to its constitutionality has been brought in the subsequent 88 years. Until last week, when the avowedly far-right Fifth Circuit decided otherwise.

To the Left, there is no right but the ‘far-right’. Savor the irony of a ‘pillar of American democracy’ that involves ‘collective’ bargaining–i.e. you have to join the collective (or at least pay them) whether you like it or not, because you are ‘enjoying’ the purported benefits that a union brings you. Even if it costs you your job because the union insists on wages+benefits that the company can’t afford to pay.

Today, the NLRA hovers somewhere between de facto and de jure nullification. It’s been slowly eroding for at least half a century, as employer resistance to it has heightened, and as the penalties to employers for violating its terms have weakened. Currently, the fact that the five-member National Labor Relations Board is down to just two members—not enough to constitute a quorum—means the Board can make no rulings. This enables employers who’ve been found to have violated workers’ rights by lower NLRB administrative courts to appeal those findings and penalties to the Board, which cannot rule on anything—essentially, giving those employers leeway to keep on doing what they’re doing, however illegal it may be.

Ponder the nature of a governmental organization that is specifically designed to favor one side of a ‘negotiation’ over another. Check out the history of the ‘Department of Labor’.

Ponder the existence of ‘administrative courts’ with no basis in the judicial provisions of the Constitution. Read Philip Hamburger’s seminal book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

Ponder a system in which ‘workers’ have rights but employers apparently do not. That’s ‘American democracy’ for you.

The reason America is NOT a democracy, but rather a representative republic, is precisely this sort of democratic tyranny–in Jonah Goldberg’s pithy phrase, democracy means that 51% of the population can pee in the soup of the other 49%, and there is no recourse. This is not a new thing; Thucydides is full of instances where democratic Athens indulges in atrocities and pursues policies that can change from day to day because of the whims of their ‘democratic’ government.

Read it.

In Dundee, Scotland, a male migrant whose face we don’t see, but whose accented voice we hear off camera, videotapes two young teenage Scottish girls. The girls tell him to leave them alone. One girl, whose name we now know is Mayah Sommers, brandishes a knife in one hand and a hatchet in the other. She yells at the man holding the camera, telling him that he is “f***ing battering kids, mate… You’re f***ing kid bashers.” Her companion screams at the migrant, “Don’t f***ing touch my little sister! She’s only twelve! She’s only twelve, and you’re f***ing badgering me!”

“Show the knife,” the foreigner says. “Show the knife.” He moves toward them, apparently trying to goad the frightened children into doing something that will get them in trouble. In the 44-second clip, we glimpse two male adults standing nearby, unwilling to come to the girls’ aid.

Get them in trouble it did. The weapons-wielder—blonde, pony-tailed Mayah Sommers—was arrested by Scots police and charged with having blades.

That’s right: the British state, unwilling or unable to protect little girls from migrant sexual predators, arrested one who tried to protect herself and her sister. If there is a more potent image capturing the utter shame and disgrace of Britain today, few of us could bear to see it.

Read it.

The $250 million ‘Feeding Our Future’ free food fraud in which Somali groups stole a quarter of a billion dollars while claiming to feed hundreds of thousands of children who never existed seemed like the biggest case of welfare fraud in Minnesota, but it may be just the beginning.

Somali autism fraud, partly linked to the ‘Feeding Our Future’ scam, may be even bigger and after the FBI raids of autism clinics last December, the scale of it is still being put together.

The pattern in both Somali meals for children and autism treatment for children is similar.

In 2019, Feeding Our Future distributed $3.4 million in taxpayer food aid funds to the non-profits it was sponsoring, In 2020, that shot up to $42 million and then up to $197 million in 2021.

EIDBI autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota similarly shot up from $3 million in 2018 to $54 million in 2019, $77 million in 2020, $183 million in 2021, $279 million in 2022, $399 million in 2023, and nearing $400 million most of the way through 2024 for a total of over $1.4 billion.

How did autism claims rise from $3 million to $400 million a year in just 4 years?

One of the persistent excuses for massive immigration in First World countries is that, because of plummeting birth rates, such countries need lots of immigrants in order to produce the necessary laborers to keep the economy running. Persistent and pervasive welfare and other fraud schemes among immigrants from Muslim countries, notably in both the U.S. and U.K. demonstrate that, while some immigrants are coming here to work, many of them are coming here to leech off of native taxpayers. Muslims find this especially attractive, since they can justify such welfare leeching as a form of the traditional jizya, the tax non-Muslims pay for being non-Muslims in a Muslim society.

New York Post.

The mother of transgender Minneapolis mass shooter Robin Westman is not cooperating with police in the investigation, authorities announced on Thursday.

Mary Grace Westman, who worked at Annunciation Catholic School, which was targeted by the deranged 23-year-old gunman Wednesday morning, has not contacted police — nor responded to their attempts to reach her, Minneapolis police announced at a press conference Thursday.

“We have not been successful in talking to the shooter’s mother,” Police Chief Brian O’Hara said.

Read it.

When Taylor Lorenz breaks a story on Democrat dark money, you know something strange is happening. Lorenz, who has made a career as the poster child for progressive social media culture, finally turned her reporting lens onto her own side. And what she uncovered in Wired is pretty dark: a secret program bankrolled by one of the largest Democrat dark money machines in America, designed to quietly pay off dozens of high-profile influencers to steer young voters toward the left.

Read it.

Phillips 66 will begin shutting down its 139,000 bpd Los Angeles-area refinery as soon as next week, sources told Reuters, moving forward on a closure plan announced last year. Units at the plant will idle in phases through Q4 2025, with the facility permanently offline by year-end.

The decision isn’t a surprise—Phillips 66 said in October it would exit the site, citing “market dynamics.” But it comes with fallout: about 600 employees and 300 contractors will lose their jobs by December, with only a handful reassigned to the company’s marine terminal. The company insists it will support workers through the transition, though local officials remain worried about the economic hit.

California, meanwhile, is staring at a bigger problem. Between Phillips 66’s LA facility and Valero’s Benicia refinery, scheduled to close in 2026, the state is set to lose roughly 17% of its refining capacity. That’s a dangerous haircut in a state already paying the nation’s highest pump prices. Analysts warn that by late 2026, California gasoline could top $8 a gallon if supply disruptions collide with fewer in-state refineries.

The Telegraph (UK).

Dozens of people tried to swarm the Bell Hotel, which houses migrants, on Thursday evening as police formed a line to prevent them getting closer to the building.

Chants of “send them back” and “go home” could be heard, whilst flares were set off. One demonstrator told The Telegraph: “It’s all kicking off. We are so angry. We won’t stop.”

The hotel became the focus for anti-immigration protests after the alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old schoolgirl by an Ethiopian asylum seeker living there.

At Epping St John’s, a primary school nearby, locals called for the migrants to be removed and the hotel to be closed to them.

Lindsey Thompson, 58, questioned how children will cope when local schools reopen next week.

She told The Telegraph: “We have no choice. This is children’s safety. It’s really scary. It’s a terrifying time.

Read it.

As reported in the news feed over the last few days, the Swiss city of Lausanne has experienced several nights of riots, in which mischievous youngsters blocked the streets with burning containers and rubbish while throwing debris and shooting off fireworks at the police.

The sequence of events is similar to those we’ve become accustomed to in France over the past fifteen or twenty years: a “youth” was killed while fleeing from police, and his co-ethnics responded by rioting and burning stuff.

Early reports failed to mention the ethnicity of the unfortunate tyke. The only indication I could find was the visible melanin content of some of the boisterous rioters seen in photographs of the festivities.

Read it.

The GOP announced the plan Wednesday as its response to Democrats’ congressional redistricting efforts.

“I want to take a step back from all of the chaos we had and talk about the forgotten people of California,” Assembly Minority Leader James Gallagher said, presenting a map during a news conference in Sacramento.

Gallagher and his co-authors are proposing Assembly Joint Resolution 23, also known as “The Two State Solution.” It would allow the creation of the state under Article, Section 3, of the U.S. Constitution and would require approval by the state Assembly and Senate as well as Congress. Democrats hold supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature, meaning Republicans would have to sway a number of Democrats to back it.

As I wrote earlier, this will never happen. (1) No state will give up any of its territory unless (like Virginia) it is engaged in a civil war and loses; (2) California Democrats wouldn’t split the state east-west, because it would allow Republicans some power in the state, and they will resist that to the death.

I have no idea what these people are attempting to accomplsh, unless it’s just making a lot of noise because that’s all they can do.

Read it.

Munich police are hunting five young men after a brutal street robbery on Lerchenauer Straße, where a 38-year-old was stabbed in the foot and robbed of cash and documents when he refused to hand over his phone.

On Wednesday afternoon, a 38-year-old man was attacked by a five-member migrant gang on Lerchenauer Straße in Munich. Police reported that the group confronted him and demanded his mobile phone. When the victim defended himself by kicking one of the assailants, he was stabbed in the foot area with a knife. The attackers then overwhelmed him together, stealing his personal documents and several hundred euros in cash before fleeing the scene.

The victim also left the area and only later contacted police with the help of a passerby. Despite the knife wound, he declined medical treatment. The case is now being investigated by the police.

Authorities describe the suspects as around 25 years old, with a southeastern European appearance. One of them is said to be approximately 1.90 meters tall, heavyset, with short black hair and a full black beard.

Read it.

A new annual report from Austria’s Documentation Centre for Political Islam (DPI) shows a sharp rise in Islamist activity, both online and in public spaces.

According to the report, extremists are becoming increasingly visible in everyday Austrian life, often adopting youth culture codes to attract young people.

In 2024, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution recorded 215 Islamist offences—an increase of 41.5% on the previous year.

DPI director Lisa Fellhofer warned that extremist groups exploit global events to push their agenda, reframing any criticism of political Islam as an attack on all Muslims. Particularly troubling is the growing display of Islamist symbols in public, including the red triangle used by Hamas.

The report stresses how extremists combine online propaganda, street activism, and lifestyle products to spread a worldview that demonises Western democracies, fuels antisemitism, and justifies violence. Islamist influencers on social media specifically target young audiences, using conflicts in Israel-Palestine and Syria to promote extremist narratives. Content that glorifies terrorism circulates widely online, while dissent is routinely dismissed as “Islamophobia.”

Businesses with Salafist backgrounds now market clothing and literature with extremist slogans both online and in physical shops, forming part of a wider ecosystem that ranges from everyday cultural products to open support for terrorism.

Read it.

Two Afghan asylum seekers have pleaded not guilty to charges over the alleged abduction and rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.

The incident is said to have taken place in the Cheverel Street area between 8 and 10 p.m. on July 22, with CCTV footage showing a man walking with the girl shortly before the attack.

Ahmad Mulakhil, who arrived in the UK by small boat, has denied three counts of rape of a minor, two counts of sexual assault, and one count of abduction. A second man, Mohammad Kabir, has also pleaded not guilty to aiding and abetting rape, intentional strangulation, and attempted child abduction.

The case has sparked political controversy after it emerged that police advised councillors not to reveal the men’s immigration status, prompting accusations of a cover-up. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has since called for greater transparency.

Both men were living in taxpayer-funded asylum housing managed by Serco and remain in custody. They are due to appear in court again in November, with a trial scheduled for January 26, 2026. The victim is receiving specialist care.

MAGA Takes Sick Victory Lap Over ‘Trans’ Minneapolis Shooter (Josh Fiallo/The Daily Beast)

MAGA’s Newest Meltdown With Trump (Will Sommer/The Bulwark)

Doug Casey on the Shadowy Forces Behind JD Vance’s Rise and Grooming as MAGA Successor

Newsbusters.

In what appears to be a perverse “don’t say transgender challenge”, the legacy newscasts went out of their way to mention that the coward who entered into the Annunciation Catholic Church and opened fire on an ongoing Mass was in fact a transgender individual. The networks were equally circumspect about divulging the shooter’s motives.

“The name of President Trump on the guns” is not even in the same tonal universe of what the shooter ACTUALLY wrote, which was “Kill Trump.” This deceptive description, paired with descriptions of the shooter as a racist antisemite, seeks to create the illusion of the shooter being a Trump supporter, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Read it.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates, race-based hiring, and safe spaces are just a few of the noxious turns that have become the standard in American colleges and universities in recent times.

Examples of universities practicing preferential treatment are countless. John Sailer, director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute, reports on a faculty job rubric he obtained from the University of Texas at San Antonio, which listed “female/URM” (underrepresented minority) as a scoring category.

Similarly, in an email he received from Northern Illinois University, a computer science professor shared the department’s search committee evaluation rubric, which scored applicants on their “diversity” and awarded points for those who were “non-male or non-Caucasian.”

Newsbusters.

With a long career in both the news media and the highest echelons of the New York Police Department (NYPD), John Miller has been one of the top media experts in everything from terror attacks to mass shootings like Wednesday’s massacre at Minneapolis’s Annunciation Catholic School.

It’s with that foundation that Miller beclowned himself all afternoon by watering down and dismissing the transgender shooter’s hatred of Christians, Jews, and President Trump (in addition to having attended the school and the shooter’s mother having recently retired from the school).

From one of his first hits to analysis just after 6:00 p.m. Eastern, Miller offered one mealymouthed excuse after another, declaring there “won’t” ever “be a specific motive” since the best explanation for the attack was that “he was in pain” and “hated everybody.”

Read it.

The prime directive of Western medicine, its golden rule, is expressed by the Latin maxim primum non nocere – first, do no harm. Unfortunately, the Covid era taught us that from the patient’s point of view, a better motto for our times might be caveat emptor – let the buyer beware.

Every medical student is taught that, first and foremost, they should not cause harm to their patients, and every doctor is familiar with this maxim. It is echoed in the Hippocratic Oath, and it forms the basis for the four pillars of medical ethics: autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice.

This rule, and the core tenets of medical ethics that it underpins, were all abandoned during the Covid era. They were replaced with a brutal, inhumane, and unethical martial-law-as-public-health approach to medicine. The results were unconstitutional lockdowns, prolonged school closures, suppression of early treatment, mandated vaccinations, and silencing of dissenting views. These abuses were justified by constant propaganda and lies from public health authorities, the medical establishment, the mainstream media, and medical professional associations.

The Independent (UK), a Voice of the Crust.

They mean it as a criticism, of course, snidely implying that Hannity was acting juvenile for leaving New Yawk just because he was getting ‘mean looks in restaurants’.

It’s pretty obvious that Hannity looked around, saw that NYC was becoming an increasingly hostile environment for people like him, and acted accordingly. He probably ought to have headed south when Rush Limbaugh did, and regrets waiting too long.

As Arthur Henderson likes to say, “Go where you’re treated best“. A reasonable position.

Newsbusters.

Yet another transgender extremist (biologically male) targeted a religious school and killed two children in a Catholic church during mass, on Wednesday. Despite the monstrous actions and the anti-Catholic messages written on the shooter’s equipment (like “Where is your God now?”), CNN’s Jake Tapper took to his show, The Lead, and wanted to make sure people were using the school shooter’s preferred pronouns and to make sure he wasn’t ‘dead named.

As with all proglodytes, the Agenda comes first.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

The Voting Rights Act ought to have been ruled unconstitutional when it was first passed: It violated the longstanding but unwritten right of Freedom of Association and attempted to correct race-based voting by turning it upside down while still enshrining race-based voting.

Politicians always try to fix problems by applying force to the symptoms rather than searching out the root causes and dealing with them first. This is a perennial problem with ‘democratic’ governance that I guess we’re going to be forever stuck with.

Read it.

Time to leave.

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

Dr. Susan Monarez, who was sworn in as director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on July 31, has been removed from the position, the White House said Wednesday.

Her departure was quickly followed by the resignation of several high-level veteran agency officials, leaving the CDC leaderless at a perilous time.

Typical Narrative Media fearmongering. “OH MY GOD WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” No we won’t.

“Susan Monarez is not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement. “Since Susan Monarez refused to resign despite informing HHS leadership of her intent to do so, the White House has terminated Monarez from her position with the CDC.”

The typical passive-aggressive bureaucratic playbook doesn’t work with Trump. Get with the program or hit the road. Eventually the rest of them will get the message or get the boot.

Unlike most career politicians who wind up in the oval office, Trump is an experienced CEO and is going to do what he would do to a company he has taken over. America will be the better for it.

I wish Steve Jobs had run for President. That would have been entertaining.

UPDATE: CDC Chief Says She’s Not Leaving

Read it.

Two years before a shooter opened fire on students attending daily mass in Minneapolis, the leaders of independent and Catholic schools in Minnesota begged Democrat Governor Tim Walz for help securing their schools, according to a 2023 letter reviewed by The Daily Wire. The funding was never authorized.

In a letter dated April 14, 2023 that specifically addressed “school safety in nonpublic schools,” Tim Benz, the president of MINNDEPENDENT and Jason Adkins, the executive director of the Minnesota Catholic Conference, stressed an “urgent and critical need in Minnesota to make sure our schools are secure and safe” in light of “recent, and continuing attacks, on our schools in this country and in our state.”

The letter says there are about 72,000 students in Independent, Catholic, Jewish, Christian and Muslim nonpublic schools within the state of Minnesota. It came just weeks after the shooting at a Christian school in Tennessee, which was also carried about by a transgender-identifying individual in their twenties.

My, what a surprise.

Keep an eye on ‘transgender’ people. Trans people are crazy, and crazy people are dangerous.

Read it.

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) over the department’s focus on racial equity when hiring, promoting and retaining employees.

The government on Wednesday sent a letter to the agency claiming that CalEPA “may be engaged in employment practices that discriminate … based on race, color, sex, and national origin” due to a document titled “Practices to Advance Racial Equity in Workforce Planning,” which advocates for diverse interview panels and for “applying a racial equity lens to every phase of workforce development.”

“In publicly available guidance documents, CAL EPA highlights ‘hiring, promotion and retention practices and policies’ that indicate it may be using protected characteristics to ‘advance racial equity,'” the letter stated. “Further, [the California Air Resources Board] CARB, a division of CAL EPA, appears to use these policies to engage in discriminatory employment practices in its ‘Racial Equity Framework,’ which aims to advance race-based decision-making within the agency.”

Trump is obviously going to keep the pressure on Blue States to eradicate as much DEI nonsense has he can. Once he breaks the seeming right-side-of-history inevitability of Wokeness, we might be able to keep things on a more even keel … but it will take work and constant vigilance.

Remember, Trump hasn’t even finished his first year of this term. I suspect that Democrats are going to become very tired of losing before he passes the torch in 2028.

Bloomberg, a Voice of the Crust.

(a) This will never happen, certainly not at the instigation of a Republican.

(b) If California does split, it will be east to west, not north to south; Democrats aren’t going to do anything that will give non-proglodytes ANY increase in political power. A North California around San Francisco and a South California around Los Angeles will merely give Democrats two more Senators to beat Republicans with.

Read it.

Time to Pick a Nit: Such people are not ‘tradesmen’ unless they own a firm.

‘Tradesmen’ are people engaged in ‘trade’, i.e. trading goods for money.

People who trade services for money are ‘mechanics’ (or, I suppose nowadays, ‘technicians’). You can look it up (if you can find a dictionary that doesn’t just follow what people do as opposed to what they ought to do).

I believe that this is the fundamental premise of the book The Millionaire Next Door, which came out in 1996. So it’s been a long time coming, but it’s still good to see that the trend is continuing.

One hopes that eventually young people will realize this, get back into vocational training, and we can all watch colleges shrink back to where they ought to be.

Read it.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is no longer defending a Biden administration program that gave preferential treatment to farmers based on race and gender for loans, commodities, and conservation assistance, the Washington Examiner reported.

The USDA submitted a motion in a legal case declining to stand behind the initiative, according to a court filing obtained by the Examiner.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty had sued the USDA on behalf of a Wisconsin dairy farmer who said he was being discriminated against because he was white, the Examiner said.

Have you ever seen a ‘black farmer’? Ever heard tell of one? I was born and raised in Indiana farm country, and I never have. I suspect that this program was another race-based grift: Hey, black people! Pretend to be a farmer so we can give you money we don’t have to give to white people!

Read it.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has started an investigation into alleged organized attempts to inject bias into Wikipedia entries and the organization’s responses, The Hill reported Wednesday.

Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., and Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., chair of the panel’s subcommittee on cybersecurity, information technology and government innovation, on Wednesday sent an information request concerning the issue to Maryana Iskander, chief executive officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia.

In a letter containing the request, the legislators wrote that the committee is probing “the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion.”

That Wikipedia is biased in a Woke direction is obvious to the most casual observer.

That this is any business of the government is less obvious. I see no reason for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to concern themselves with something that isn’t oversight of a government entity or related to government reform. We have to break these people of sticking their noses into the affairs of private organizations whenever they get the itch, although I suspect that anything short of the public impalement of Senator Lindsey Graham will be effective.

Read it.

The Department of Education has put the Burlington, Massachusetts, public school district on notice that it is reviewing the district’s actions of forcing students to take a sex and risk behavior study despite parental decisions to opt their kids out of participation.

The DOE posted that some parents denied the district permission to include their children in the survey, which included the sensitive topics of sexual behavior and gender. But those parental wishes were ignored by the district, and their children were still forced to complete the survey.

The survey was shared by the DOE. It involved extremely personal questions about sexual activities with graphic descriptions, including forced sexual activities. A question regarding gender included the statement: “Your sexual orientation is not the same as your gender identity.”

Newsbusters.

With the alleged shooter in Tuesday’s the massacre at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis having been transgender and filled with anti-Christian and anti-Semitic views plus calls for President Trump to be assassinated, the liberal media have stuck to their usual patterns with ABC calling for mass gun control and CNN ironically also smearing Christians for praying.

During the second ABC News Special Report about the massacre, chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce grew emotional on the verge of tears as she attacked President Trump and anyone who’s stood in the way of “meaningfully address[ing]” “gun reform,” seemingly ignoring the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act they celebrated at the time.

Bruce — who was the Biden administration’s chief apple polisher — dropped any pretense of facts when she seemed on the verge of sobbing when she smeared Trump for focusing on crime in Washington D.C. but not demanding “gun reform” (i.e. European-style gun control).

Newsbusters.

Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook may soon be out of a job following mortgage fraud accusations — but that has not stopped Google from propping up leftist sources in her defense, the Media Research Center can confirm

An MRC study found on Wednesday that Google almost entirely excluded right-leaning sources from search results related to President Donald Trump’s move to fire Cook. The embattled Biden appointee is under DOJ investigation for allegedly claiming two properties as her primary residence to secure favorable loans.

Huffington Post, a Voice of the Wokerati.

Mayor Muriel Bowser on Wednesday praised President Donald Trump’s surge of federal police into the city, saying it had significantly reduced carjackings.

Officers from various federal law enforcement agencies have backed up the city’s Metropolitan Police Department on patrol in the city for the past two-and-a-half weeks, with the White House taking credit for more than 1,000 arrests assisted by federal officers.

“We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” Bowser said at a press conference. “The difference between this 20-day period of this federal surge and last year represents an 87% reduction in carjackings.”

You can almost see the raised eyebrows….

Read it.

new study has re-examined the famous “Wow!” signal, finding that it likely has an extraterrestrial origin after all, and may have been even more intense than previously believed.

On August 15, 1977, at the Big Ear radio telescope observatory at Ohio State University, a narrowband radio signal was received. A few days later, astronomer Jerry Ehman reviewed the data and noticed the signal sequence, which lasted for a full 72 seconds. In the margin next to the printout, he simply wrote “Wow!”, and thus the puzzling signal had a name that would stick for the next 43 years at least.

The signal has, so far, defied explanation, and that’s not for a lack of trying. Researchers argued the case for it being a comet passing through the area Big Ear was listening to, only for that to be completely refuted about two days later by the team that detected the Wow! signal in the first place, as a comet would have produced a diffuse signal given the large area they cover, rather than the abruptly cut-off signal that was received.

The signal has been a source of speculation in the “aliens are out there” community, and not without reason. No other signal like it has been detected before or since. It was in a range of frequencies close to the hydrogen line, which is relatively free from background noise, making it a good range to pick were we to try and communicate with other civilizations ourselves. On top of that, the team themselves believed it to be a good candidate for extraterrestrial life.

LiveScience.

Chinese astronauts have just created rocket fuel and oxygen in space using a new type of “artificial photosynthesis.” The breakthrough technology, which used fairly basic equipment and minimal energy, could one day be put to use on China’s proposed moon base, which is scheduled to be completed within a decade.

The new experiments were carried out by members of the Shenzhou-19 crew living on board China’s Tiangong space station (meaning “heavenly palace” in Chinese), which has been fully operational in low-Earth orbit since November 2022

The artificial photosynthesis technology, which has been in development since 2015, converts carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and rocket fuel ingredients using a simple “drawer-like” apparatus and a “semiconductor catalyst,” according to Interesting Engineering. This is a similar reaction to photosynthesis in plants, which produces glucose instead of rocket fuel.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

Japan has opened its first osmotic power plant, in the south-western city of Fukuoka.

Only the second power plant of its type in the world, it is expected to generate about 880,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year – enough to help power a desalination plant that supplies fresh water to the city and neighbouring areas.

That’s the equivalent of powering about 220 Japanese households, according to Dr Ali Altaee from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), who specialises in the development of alternative water sources.

While it is still an emerging technology being used only on a modest scale as yet, it does have an advantage over some other renewable energies in that it is available around the clock, regardless of the wind or weather or other conditions.

It relies simply on the mixing of fresh and salt water, so the energy flow can continue day and night, providing a steady source of electricity.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the richest of rich Americans pay an average tax rate of 34 percent, higher than any other cohort’s. In reality, as everyone has long known, they pay less than that. A new study by some of the country’s most preeminent economists has finally put concrete numbers to the disparity. The average rate that the richest Americans pay, they find, sits at just 24 percent. That number has fallen markedly in recent years and will remain low for the foreseeable future, thanks to Donald Trump.

Think about that. A quarter of someone’s income is taken from them BY FORCE so that government bureaucrats can waste it. Yet the author of this article doesn’t even blink at it; he’s more focused on being one of the crabs in the bucket bringing potential escapees back into the muck.

The new study is a technical feat, combining data on corporate earnings, private wealth, and individual tax payments. And it confirms that the country’s tax code is regressive, not progressive, at the very top. Every year, America’s richest citizens paper over their earnings with losses and use other creative accounting strategies to shelter their fortunes, as the tax code allows them to do. As a result, the country’s billionaires pay lower tax rates than many of its millionaires do. Indeed, they pay lower tax rates than many middle-class professionals.

Why this comes as a surprise comes as a surprise. The reason billionaires pay lower tax rates than many middle-class professionals is clear to anybody who looks at the tax tables: Middle-class professionals pay tax on wage income, which is rapidly regressive and tops out at 37%, while billionaires pay tax (when they pay tax) on capital gains and dividends, which top out at 20%. This doesn’t take any ‘creative accounting’ at all, just enough brains to perform some elementary optimization. This is the reason Warren Buffet pays tax at a lower rate then his secretary, which all of the hand-wringers and finger-pointers are either too stupid to find out or too evil to bother to mention.

The study, by the UC Berkeley economists Akcan Balkir, Emmanuel Saez, Danny Yagan, and Gabriel Zucman, examines the wealth of Americans on the Forbes 400—not the 1 percent or even 0.01 percent, but the 0.0002 percent, a group including Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Trump himself. As of this year, these individuals have a minimum net worth of $3.3 billion.

And are therefore the verbal whipping-boys of mere small-change millionaires like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Whenever a Democrat says “TAX THE RICH!” they mean “TAX THOSE RICHER THAN ME!”.

The Existential Republic, a Voice of the Crust.

Behind closed doors, blue state leaders are planning. They’re war-gaming scenarios where federal agents show up and continue to transgress further and further past what is “legal.” Daily the courts are showing that that something is legal when Trump wants it to happen, and illegal when he doesn’t. How does a government function under these circumstance?

For many state Attorney Generals and Governors, the legal briefs are already drafted. The strategy sessions have been running since December. “We saw this coming, even though we hoped it wouldn’t,” former Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum told The 19th days after Trump’s inauguration.

This is what American federalism looks like in 2025: Democratic governors holding emergency sessions on encrypted apps, attorneys general filing lawsuits within hours of executive orders, and state legislatures quietly passing laws that amount to nullification of federal mandates. Oregon is stockpiling abortion medication in secret warehouses. Illinois is exploring digital sovereignty. California has $76 billion in reserves and is deciding how to deploy it. Three sources on those daily Zoom calls between Democratic AGs say the same phrase keeps coming up, though nobody wants to say it publicly: soft secession.

Not the violent rupture of 1861, but something else entirely. Blue states building parallel systems, withholding cooperation, and creating facts on the ground that render federal authority meaningless within their borders.

Gee, right-wingers used to talk about such a system and the Wokerati (a) trash-talked it as being unAmerican and (b) made sure to come down like a ton of bricks (using their control of the levers of power) on anybody who tried it.

Sauce for the goose….

Quillette.

Civilisations seldom collapse because of a single drought, battle, or angry god. Such events dominate chronicles because they are spectacular, but they are more symptom than cause. What usually undoes a complex society is the loss of surplus energy—the margin that makes coordination across distance possible and that keeps interdependent parts working in sequence. When that margin narrows, systems fray first at the edges and then at the centre, until the framework that once held them together can no longer carry the weight of its own complexity.

The decline usually begins with smaller problems in daily life: first, deliveries arrive late; then they stop; then workshops fall idle for lack of fuel. In tightly coupled economies built on just-in-time logistics, one interruption can bring transport to a standstill and darken cities. The crisis is not only material—it touches institutions like law and bureaucracy, which also rely on steady flows of energy to function.

The Bronze Age Collapse, which occurred around 1200 BC, involved not only the fall of cities but the unravelling of an entire way of life, as palaces burned, trade networks across the Aegean and Near East dissolved, and populations fragmented into modest rural settlements. For centuries afterwards, much of the Eastern Mediterranean retained only a much smaller repertoire of skills and a more rudimentary set of institutions, which is why archaeologists have traditionally described the period as a “dark age.”

Read it.

Artificial intelligence-powered harvesters, drones, and precision farming systems are quickly entering the mainstream of American agriculture. At its core, the technology promises efficiency and sustainability and carries a potential solution to a decades-old farming problem: the need for physical labor.

As the capabilities of robotics evolve, many jobs that once required human hands are being delegated to machines. Some artificial intelligence (AI) developers working on integrating this technology into America’s farms say early data support the possibility of a major farm labor force reduction.

The American Farm Bureau Federation estimated 17 percent of all U.S. agricultural labor in fiscal year 2024 comprised temporary migrant workers brought in under the H-2A visa program.

There are also millions of illegal immigrant workers, who, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) made up 42 percent of farm workers from 2020 to 2022.

Roman Rylko, chief technology officer of Pynest, said his company has worked with vegetable growers in the Midwest to deploy AI systems.

“We built the onboard model that lets an autonomous weeder separate spinach seedlings from pigweed in real time. A single rig now clears a 50-acre block in about eight hours. Before, that job meant a crew of 10 walking the rows for two days,” he told The Epoch Times.

Historically, agricultural labor required a lot of intelligence, judgment, and dexterity that only a human being could supply. (Agricultural laborers are smarter than the Crust would have you believe.) This made automation difficult and gave rise to modern ‘factory farms’ where farms were laid out to suit the available machines rather than how they would have been laid out when manual labor was paramount. Increasingly, however, machines are becoming smaller, cheaper, and more capable, and someday we may have the world envisioned in Asimov’s CAVES OF STEEL in which small robots take care of agriculture as well as a human but more efficiently.

The Telegraph (UK).

A transgender gunman who killed two children after opening fire during a Catholic school church service scrawled “Jew gas” and “for the children” on weapons used in the attack.

Robin Westman, formerly known as Robert, fired dozens of rounds of bullets through the stained glass windows of Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where children from the adjacent school were attending a start-of-term Mass.

Westman applied to change his name to Robin by deed poll in documents seen by The Telegraph. In the deed poll request, his parents justified the name change by saying Westman “identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”

The request was granted by Dakota County in January 2020.

Read it.

A decade ago, the fifth revision of DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) was published by the American Psychiatric Association. This diagnostic system has been called the “Bible” of psychiatry. The metaphor suggests some cultural realities. It tends to be worshipped; some view it as the literal truth; it can inspire, but it can be used to suppress dissent. The problem is that DSM can’t be a Bible and science at the same time.

In this article, I examine what the DSM system is and what it isn’t. The brief summary is that it has become more like a religion, and less and less scientific. (Much of the source evidence for the details of the DSM-III history can be found in this book by Hannah Decker.)

Psychology is like economics, a shamanistic magic system masquerading as a science. All you need to know is how often either of them makes a prediction that comes true. A real science makes predictions that come true Every Single Time. Medical doctors, who also deal with chaotic complex badly-understood systems, at least don’t pretend that theirs is a science–it has scientific aspects, of course, but (again) it cannot make predictions that come true Every Single Time.

Republican Mike Collins caught on hot mic saying Trump is ‘in’ the Epstein files (Samantha-Jo Roth/Washington Examiner)

Watch it.

Explains a lot.

The American Mind.

Conservatives often imagine that winning statewide elections means gaining control over the machinery of government. But this is wrong—and dangerously so. For far too long, red states have confused the two. The assumption that political victory automatically confers political authority is one of the chief falsehoods circulating on the Right. It is the reason Republican states often look like Democratic ones, only with different bumper stickers.

This is an uncomfortable but necessary message for conservatives to hear: red states are facing a major crisis of governance.

The State Leadership Initiative’s new Index Report lays out the evidence in extensive detail. By the most basic measures of lean, accountable, and ideologically grounded government, red states are failing. Many of the policies their representatives are voting for and their governors are signing into law are profoundly out of step with the wishes of voters. Bureaucracies are bloated, universities multiply administrators faster than scholars, there are fewer teachers than administrators in schools, New York-style regulations pile up in red states like Texas, and seven of the ten most federally dependent states wear the Republican label.

Read it.

Britain’s newspapers, pointing this week to a rise in the number of children being sent home from school due to alleged ‘racist behaviour,’ would have their declining readerships believe there is a real problem with child racism.

But critical commentators have highlighted that some of those children being suspended are as young as four, and that even in cases involving older pupils, the problem often lies more with the teachers themselves.

More than 15,000 suspensions for ‘racism’ took place last year, compared to 7,400 in 2021—a more than 100% increase. Almost 2,500 of the 2024 suspensions related to children at primary school, attended by those aged four to 11.