Newsbusters.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

That is supposedly the official logo of The Washington Post.

In the interest of accuracy, that logo should perhaps be changed to “Democracy Dies in a Washington Post Fairy Tale.”

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

Federal employees from agencies across the US government say they’re “terrified,” “disoriented” and filled with anxiety as they brace for a possible shutdown that the Trump White House has threatened will pave the way for new rounds of fast-tracked mass layoffs.

There is widespread confusion and fear among federal workers as the Tuesday night deadline approaches for Congress to approve a spending package, according to more than a dozen employees from 11 federal agencies who spoke to CNN. Many are still waiting to find out who will be required to work through a shutdown — and who will be furloughed.

Complicating matters, the White House budget office has directed federal agencies to “use this opportunity” to prepare sweeping new layoffs, based on which programs lose funding in the event of a shutdown and which don’t align with President Donald Trump’s priorities, according to a memo obtained by CNN.

There’s a new sheriff in town.

“I’m absolutely terrified about going through the same thing all over again,” said one federal worker who was fired and rehired this year as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts. “This kind of treatment is inhumane. I don’t even know how to prepare for the complete unknown.”

The federal employee, like many others who spoke to CNN, insisted on speaking anonymously because they feared retribution by the Trump administration.

“My employer doesn’t have my back,” the employee said.

That’s because their ’employer’ is no longer a Democrat who relies on the Deep State playbook.

They realize that, under Trump, the old reliable Deep State playbook no longer applies. That’s enough to scare everybody.

The Foundry.

After President Donald Trump announced that the Department of Health and Human Services was recommending women abstain from taking Tylenol during pregnancy, some pregnant women with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” began taking the drug in videos they shared on social media.

“There is mounting evidence finding a connection between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and autism—and that’s why the administration is courageously issuing this new health guidance,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said following the president’s announcement.

Now, some pregnant women are ending up in the hospital after overdosing on Tylenol while, in defiance of Trump, aiming to prove that the drug is safe to take during pregnancy.

Think of it as evolution in action.

The Foundry.

As Republicans show no sign of giving in to their demands, Democrats are facing a difficult decision in the coming days—cave in and allow a Republican-backed stopgap funding bill to pass Congress and keep the government open or allow a partial government shutdown?

The U.S. Senate is currently scheduled to return to work Sept. 29, a day before Congress’ deadline to pass a new spending measure to continue funding government operations. A shutdown could lead to several categories of federal workers not being paid, at least temporarily during the shutdown, as well as interruptions to certain government services.

Republicans are looking to pass a seven-week continuing resolution, which would roughly extend current spending levels—the spending levels of the previous Biden administration. They need at least seven Democrat votes in the Senate to bring the bill to the floor.

Democrats, however, have made big demands to keep the government open, including undoing recently passed cost-saving Medicaid reforms, hamstringing the White House’s ability to rescind certain federal funding, and extending expiring Obamacare health care premium tax credits, which were enhanced during the previous administration.

But on Friday, President Donald Trump, having previously canceled plans to meet with Democrats about their demands, appeared unbothered while attending the Ryder Cup golf tournament in Farmingdale, New York.

Democrats appeared outraged as it became apparent that Republicans were inviting them to a game of shutdown chicken.

Yup, Trump doesn’t play the Deep State kabuki-dance.

Read it.

The U.S. State Department said on Sept. 26 that it would revoke Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s visa after he called on U.S. soldiers to disobey orders during his visit to New York.

“Earlier today, Colombian president @petrogustavo stood on a NYC street and urged U.S. soldiers to disobey orders and incite violence,” the department stated on X.

“We will revoke Petro’s visa due to his reckless and incendiary actions,” it added. The department did not provide further details about the incident.

Petro traveled to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, though it is unclear whether he is still in the city.

Actions have consequences.

Read it.

More and more people are turning their backs on the European Union. With them, the states are also losing economic substance. Exit taxes are being used in an attempt to counter this.

The states of the European Union are experiencing a veritable exodus. About 1.4 million EU citizens left their home countries in 2023, among them 265,000 Germans. Among the favored destinations are, alongside Switzerland and the United States, booming regions such as Qatar or Dubai.

Unmentioned in the article is the fact that the United States is one of the worst offenders in this space. If you want to renounce your U.S. citizenship, you have to pay an ‘exit tax’ calculated on the basis of as if you had sold every U.S. asset you own.

Read it.

Sounds like an ‘insurrection’ to me….

Read it.

President Donald Trump’s threat to lay off federal employees during a potential shutdown is deepening divisions among Senate Democrats, who face mounting pressure over whether to hold firm against a House-passed short-term funding bill, The Hill reported.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York has insisted his caucus oppose the measure, signaling he will not back down even as some centrists seek a way out. Schumer, who faces the prospect of a primary challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2028, dismissed Trump’s threat as an overreach that courts would likely strike down.

“This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government. Their unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today,” Schumer said Wednesday.

The traditional kabuki-dance that is played out in these shutdowns is that most ‘essential services’ are exempted, so nobody is going to feel any serious pain from such a shutdown, and government bureaucracies focus on shutting down things like national parks that will provide the worst possible ‘optics’ for whoever the Narrative Media decide is the responsible actor, in this case obviously Trump. And when it’s all over everybody who didn’t get paid gets paid what they would have gotten paid, so no bureaucrat is harmed in the making of this picture.

Trump has signaled that, no, if we can’t pay people, they will lose their jobs. That’s not what the Democrats signed up for. Once again, Trump isn’t following the Deep State playbook, which is why Democrats are feeling a bit of agita.

ATQUE: Shutdown hostage taking (Don Moynihan/Can We Still Govern?)

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The United States depends heavily on physicians trained abroad.

Ask yourself why that is.

The key obstacle is the limited number of residency positions, which are essential for medical school graduates to become fully licensed physicians. Despite more students graduating from medical school, thousands of qualified graduates are unable to enter residency because the number of training slots has not kept pace with demand. This is largely due to a cap on Medicare-funded residency slots imposed by Congress in 1997, which has remained effectively unchanged for over 25 years and restricts hospitals’ ability to train more doctors.

Once again, government is the problem, not the solution.

Read it.

(a) It’s astonishing that it’s had to come to this.

(b) The EU apparatchiks are going to go ballistic.

Read it.

The Census Bureau plans to use U.S. Postal Service workers as census-takers in at least two locations in field tests next year for the 2030 census, which will determine political power and federal funding.

The statistical agency said Friday in a notice to be published next week that it will test and assess the feasibility of using postal carriers to knock on doors and collect information about households for the once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident.

The field tests will be conducted next year in western Texas; tribal areas in Arizona; Colorado Springs, Colorado; western North Carolina; Spartanburg, South Carolina; and Huntsville, Alabama.

Yeah, that’ll make everybody trust the census even more….

Read it.

Delaware has long reigned as the nation’s corporate capital, but not anymore.

Recent high-profile departures and growing criticism of its judiciary have put the First State under the microscope.

On CNBC this past Wednesday, “Squawk Box” anchors Joe Kernen and Andrew Ross Sorkin pressed Gov. Matt Meyer, a Democrat, on whether his administration is mishandling what could become a turning point in Delaware’s century-old dominance of corporate law.

Read it.

For millionaires and billionaires, it sure seems like money can buy happiness.

New research shows that ultra-wealthy individuals are more content than those earning six-figure salaries, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. That’s according to Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the Wharton School who studies the causes of human happiness. Killingsworth worked on a similar study last year, and he has now updated his findings to include the super-rich.

“The results suggest that the positive association between money and well-being continues far up the economic ladder, and that the magnitude of the differences can be substantial,” Killingsworth writes in his abstract.

Money means freedom, and if freedom doesn’t bring you happiness, you’re a lost cause.

Shanghaied? Reuters Praises Commie China’s Phony Climate Plans Just to Dig at Trump

Trump Personally Tried to Kill Story of His Birthday Letter to Epstein (Malcolm Ferguson/New Republic)  If you ran across him wandering through newspaper offices with a gun, now you know why.

ICE Facility in Trump’s Chicago Crackdown Draws Complaints

Fed Unions Slam Plans of Mass Firings If Govt Shuts Down  Hey, they can work for free if they want to.

CBS, NBC Still Touting Kimmel’s ‘Amazing,’ ‘Huge’ Return ‘Doubling Down’ on Trump Hate

Trump Nominee Quietly Deletes Post Calling for Liberal’s Execution (Malcolm Ferguson/New Republic)

Donald Trump Keeps Finding New Ways to Shock the World (Susan B. Glasser/New Yorker)  Ah, ah, ah, ah, yankin’ their chains, yankin’ their chains….

CNN Panel: ‘No Evidence’ to Far-Left Motive in ICE Attack, Trump to Blame for Violence

Trump Gets the Retribution He Sought, and Shatters Norms in the Process (New York Times)  Said norms being “Democrats always get to win”.

World Leader Compares Trump to Hitler in Front of Entire U.N. (Robert McCoy/New Republic)  Why not? Everyone else is doing it.

4 Takeaways From Trump’s Securing of an Indictment Against Comey (Maggie Haberman/New York Times)  Come get yer Narrative, right here.

FBI had 274 plainclothes agents embedded in Jan. 6 crowds, congressional source says (Steve Baker/Blaze Media)

FBI Bombshell: 274 agents sent to Capitol for J6, many later complained they were political ‘pawns’ (Just The News)

Trump’s Eruption of Rage at Texas ICE Shooting Hints at a Darker Story (Greg Sargent/New Republic)  Greg Sargent loses his shit. (Jennifer Rubin must be on vacation.)

Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in Ice detention (The Guardian)  They’re still ileegal, and still ipso facto felons.

Trump’s prosecution of a Democratic lawmaker is a test run for authoritarian rule (Ian Millhiser/Vox)  I guess black female Democrat politicians are above the law. Good to know.

‘Vulgar, Like Trump’: Critics Pan ‘Grotesque’ Image Of Planned White House Ballroom (Ed Mazza/HuffPost)

Trump Doesn’t Care If You Think He’s Corrupt (William Kristol/The Bulwark)  Yup.

A Broad Wave of Firings Followed Charlie Kirk’s Assassination (New York Times)  Once the roaches crawl out they can be stepped on.

Trump Is Lying About Left-Wing Terrorism (Michelle Goldberg/New York Times)

As Trump orchestrates James Comey’s indictment, the corruption is the point (Steve Benen/MSNBC)

Trump Golf Course Displays Gold Presidential Seal–Here’s Why That Could Violate Federal Law (Zach Everson/Forbes)

Military.com.

Over 30 years ago, a scandal rocked the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, launching an investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and uncovering evidence that more than 130 midshipmen might have cheated on an exam.

The events surrounding the 1990s cheating scandal have resurfaced decades later to embroil a former mid. The military records of Democratic U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a Navy midshipman then and now a New Jersey gubernatorial candidate, were released by the National Archives in what Rep. Robert Garcia called an “illegal and likely politically motivated disclosure,” according to Politico.

Garcia, a California Democrat and ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, on Thursday called for an investigation into the release that appeared to implicated Sherrill in the academy cheating debacle.

Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, told The New Jersey Globe that she was not allowed to walk with her midshipmen mates at her 1994 graduation because she “didn’t turn in some of my classmates” during the cheating scandal.

“I will  not lie,  cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do.” Sounds pretty clear to me.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said in a post to the social media platform X on Thursday that the leak of Sherrill’s unredacted military records was “a betrayal of everyone who’s ever worn the uniform.”

Here are five things to know about one of the biggest scandals in recent history to unfold at the Naval Academy.

Read it.

President Reagan famously said that the closest thing to eternal life on this earth is a government agency. Surely that aphorism applies to the Federal RESERVE. And most especially when you put a Trumpian ALL CAPS focus on the “reserve” part of its title.

That is to say, the purpose of the 1913 act had nothing to do with the Fed’s present-day “goals” with respect to inflation, unemployment, economic growth, housing starts, business capex, or any other aspect of the ebb and flow of commerce on Main Street. Instead, the Federal Reserve Act’s far more modest remit was to fix the badly flawed “reserve” arrangements of the National Banking Act that good old Abe Lincoln and his Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase had put into place to finance the civil war.

What the latter actually did was to nearly tax out of existence the honest free enterprise state banks that had prevailed during America’s growth explosion prior to the Civil War in favor of a system of federally regulated “national banks”. But the latter were just thinly disguised servants of the US Treasury. In that capacity, they were required to hold US Treasury bonds as collateral to back the issuance of their own bank notes—the latter being the essence of the 19th-century banking business.

I can never tell them apart.

Power Line.

Yesterday Acting United States Attorney for Minnesota unveiled the first charge in what is expected to be a case involving a billion-dollar Medicaid fraud in Minnesota’s EIDBI benefit program. The defendant — Asha Farhan Hassan — is also the defendant number 76 in the massive Feeding Our Future fraud case. She will plead guilty some time soon.

For some reason or other, Ms. Farhan is not described as a “Minneapolis woman” in the local media coverage of this monumental scandal. KARE 11’s Lou Raguse does not even mention the involvement of the Twin Cities Somali community in the ripoff. His story is “Feds charge first Autism Center fraud case stemming from Feeding our Future investigation.” (“Asha Hassan, owner of Smart Therapy Center, is accused of stealing $14 million in taxpayer money by bribing parents to enroll their kids for phony autism services.) I have posted the video below.

The Feeding Our Future fraud scandal, the Housing Stabilization Services fraud scandal, and the EIDBI autism benefit scandal have all taken place under the nose of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Walz too is conspicuous by his absence in the media coverage of these scandals.

Read it.

Something strange has happened with Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (D-Dallas).

For years, Crockett has spoken with what some described as a “ghetto accent.”

Yet in her latest MSNBC interview about the Comey indictments, her ‘ghetto’ accent appeared to revert to her normal voice.

Read it.

The National Guard has exceeded its recruiting goals for fiscal year 2025, the Department of War (DOW), formerly the Department of Defense, said in a Sept. 24 statement.

“Since November 2024, the War Department has achieved its strongest recruiting performance in 30 years, with fiscal year-to-date accessions as of the end of August reaching 106% of active-duty targets,” the department said.

“The Army National Guard and the Air National Guard have combined to enlist almost 50,000 new members this fiscal year as of this month, bringing total National Guard end strength to over 433,000, surpassing each component’s goals and marking one of the most successful recruiting years in over a decade.”

Air Force Gen. Steven Nordhaus, National Guard Bureau chief, highlighted the value provided by the National Guard, which accounts for 20 percent of the country’s joint force at just 4 percent of the department’s budget.

Read it.

A California solar power facility once hailed as a renewable energy breakthrough is shutting down two decades ahead of schedule after killing tens of thousands of birds and failing to meet electricity output goals, Blaze Media reported.

The Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert was once the largest solar plant in the world. Built on 3,471 acres of public land, the $2.2 billion project included three 459-foot power towers and more than 173,000 heliostat mirrors, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Launched with $1.6 billion in federal loan guarantees from the Obama administration, Ivanpah began operations in 2014 with an expected lifespan of 30 years. But it is now scheduled to shut down in 2026 after failing to generate solar power efficiently, the New York Post reported.

Read it.

Documents declassified by FBI Director Kash Patel directly link former FBI chief James Comey to false statements he made before Congress, independent journalist Catherine Herridge reported Thursday.

Further, Herridge reported that the indictment against Comey had been “ready to go,” but that former U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert had been “blocking” or “slow-walking” the charges.

Lindsey Halligan, whom President Donald Trump named interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, removed the blocks.

Read it.

This week I landed myself smack dab in the middle of a real-life example of just how piss-poor of a capital allocator the government is compared to the free, for-profit market.

Usually, when I want to mail something, I walk a block or two to either the UPS Store or the FedEx store. Both are pretty similar: fairly busy (especially around the holidays), offering print and copy services, and staffed with employees who—while not saints—are at least competent enough to get your package labeled, shipped, and tracked with as little fuss or bullshit as possible.

The price is slightly costly, but at least the service gets the job done.

Cut to this week, however, when I had to mail something to a PO Box. Turns out you can’t do that through UPS or FedEx, which meant I was grudgingly forced to venture into the local post office. Always crowded. Always understaffed. Always a line out the door.

Within minutes of going in, I was reminded exactly why I avoid the place.

Read it.

The number of right-wing terror attacks in the U.S. plunged dramatically in the first half of 2025, while the amount of political violence from the left creeped up, a new study found.

The report on terrorism and political violence by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan research group, found that, through July 4, “2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right.”

The study noted there had been one right-wing terrorist incident this year — the June murder of Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband.

The report, written by the Washington think tank’s Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe, called that number “a remarkable drop off.”

Their analysis reviewed terror attacks and plots, which they defined as “the deliberate use or threat of premeditated violence by nonstate actors with the intent to achieve political goals by creating a broad psychological impact.”

Newsbusters.

This past Sunday, some 90,000 people attended the memorial for Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. One of those in attendance was Chicago Cubs rookie third baseman Matt Shaw. Shaw missed his club’s 1-0 loss in Cincinnati. The Cubs are assured of making the playoffs which begin next week, and hold a small lead over the San Diego Padres for the first Wild Card spot in the National League, but the whole situation did not sit well with New York Mets veteran announcer Gary Cohen.

During Tuesday night’s Mets-Cubs game, Cohen decided to use his SNY platform to weigh in on Shaw’s decision. “Shaw had Cubs world in a tizzy this weekend when he was not here for the Cubs game with the Reds. A game they lost 1-0 and in which his lack of presence was felt.”

Cohen makes it sound as if the Cubs might have won, if only Shaw had played. I’ m not sure exactly how that was the case. The Reds did not score their one run on an error by Shaw’s fill-in at third base. Shaw is only hitting around .225, with an OPS near .680. Nothing great by any means.

Texas Tribune, a Voice of the Woke.

Party insiders said the way the move was handled undercuts Chair Kendall Scudder’s rhetoric about winning back working class voters, who lurched to the right in 2024.

Read it.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday defended London Mayor Sadiq Khan following President Donald Trump’s statement that Khan was “terrible” and wanted to put Britain’s capital under Islamic religious law, calling the claim “ridiculous.”

Trump made the comments during his address at the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday.

“I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor,” the president said.

Read it.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., is accusing Stanford University of punishing a graduate student who refused to pay dues to a union that supported abortion rights and gender transitioning procedures, Blaze News reported Thursday.

In a letter dated Thursday, Cassidy wrote that he was “seriously concerned” over the plight of a graduate student who was threatened with termination as a teaching assistant if he did not pay dues to the Stanford Graduate Workers Union, which sends two-thirds of its dues to the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America.

At issue is that UE “supports abortion and taxpayer-funded gender transition procedures, positions that run contrary to the religious beliefs” of the affected student, Cassidy wrote.

Read it.

One thing that they won’t say, because nobody dares collect information on it, is what proportion of those crimes are committed by non-whites.

Read it.

A new survey released on Sept. 21 reveals that a significant number of college students view socialism more favorably than capitalism, with some even praising countries like Cuba over the United States.

The poll, conducted for Yale University’s William F. Buckley Institute, asked undergraduates whether they agreed with the statement, “While socialist countries like Cuba and the Soviet Union have not been perfect, they offer a better economic model than capitalist countries like the United States.” 

Nearly half of respondents, 46 percent, supported the statement placing socialistic model of government above our capitalistic one, according exclusive early information about the poll in an exclusive by The New York Post. 39 percent disagreed, while 15 percent said they were unsure.

The problem is that there is no such thing as capitalism, which is a term invented by socialists in the mid-19th century to have a smear-term for the people they don’t like, and which has been swallowed hook, line, and sinker by people who ought to know better. All of the things that people find objectionable about ‘capitalism’ are problems with industrialism, which exist under socialism just as much as under non-socialism.

Bear in mind that, by definition, half of the population is below average in intelligence. The stupid, like the poor, we have always with us.

Washington Examiner.

Thus validating Trump’s designation of them as a terrorist organization.

Nick Norwitz.

“Ask yourself if you want to let scientists harvest your eyeballs for their next study.”

We now know why blue light at the wrong time of day is a bad thing.

The Dirty Move Republicans Could Pull to Keep the House (Steve Posner/The Bulwark)  If it weren’t for Trump, the Kristol Krew would have nothing to write about–or, even, to do.

MSNBC Cues Up Pritzker to Call Trump’s Crackdown on Crime ‘Authoritarian Rule’

Vance, Who Called Trump “Hitler,” Says Calling People Nazis Is Bad (Edith Olmsted/New Republic)

Judge: Trump Firing of IGs Unlawful, but Will Stand  You can’t make this stuff up.

Trump Official Gave Free Tickets to GOP Group to Heckle Black Artist (Malcolm Ferguson/New Republic) “Gay conservative”? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?

Trump calls for ‘triple sabotage’ investigation over UN escalator, teleprompter, audio issues (Brett Samuels/The Hill)

Labor groups warn of ‘gaping hole’ in First Amendment if court OKs Trump’s anti-union orders (Erich Wagner/GovExec.com)

Trump “Walk of Fame” trolls Biden with autopen signature in place of portrait (Jason Lalljee/Axios)

The Wildly Unqualified Lawyer Trump Just Named to Prosecute His Enemies (Mother Jones)

Inside the White House Struggle to Tame the Epstein Crisis (Wall Street Journal)  What crisis?

September 24, 2025 — Hours after delivering his delusional and offensive speech … (Heather Cox Richardson/Letters …)

The Story of DOGE, as Told by Federal Workers (Wired)  Carefully curated by the Narrative Media, of course.

FCC’s Brendan Carr fails to cancel Kimmel (Liz Dye/Public Notice)  He never tried to ‘cancel Kimmel’. That was done by his employers and sponsors. These people just lie because they can’t help themselves.

America’s Zombie Democracy (George Packer/The Atlantic) Except that America is not a democracy,  and was never intended to be one except in prog dreams.

Epstein Investigator Taped Admitting Trump ‘Covered Up’ Files (Laura Esposito/The Daily Beast)

Q2 GDP Revised Sharply Higher To 3.8%, Best Quarter In Two Years

Feeling Green? NY Times Nauseous Over Trump’s Rebuke of Climate Hysteria at UN

This Is Trump’s Best Troll Ever

Transcript: Trump Accidentally Wrecks MAGA’s Dumb New Jimmy Kimmel Lie (New Republic)

Democrats Go After Law Firms Doing Free Work For Trump, Warn Of Law-Breaking (Jennifer Bendery/HuffPost)

It’s Watergate, Every Day (William Kristol/The Bulwark)  Bill Kristol is off his meds.

Charlie Kirk, Martyrdom, and America’s Authoritarian Apostles (Alan Elrod/Liberal Currents)

Armed Guards and Muscle Milk: Senate Investigation Reveals DOGE Takeover Details (Wired)

House Democrat introduces articles of impeachment against RFK Jr. (Joseph Choi/The Hill)  Apparently she wants her fifteen minutes of fame.

ANTI-ICE: MAGA’s Desperate Attempt to Create Another Reichstag Fire (Danielle Moodie/The Left Hook …)

For Trump, Data Is Often ‘Phony,’ Unless It Supports His Views (Linda Qiu/New York Times)  That’s because data that doesn’t support his views, especially from Democrats and the Narrative Media (but I repeat myself) IS often phony.

Read it.

Bill Gates has thrown his weight – and his money – behind a Californian startup that believes it can make a rich, fatty spread akin to butter, using just carbon dioxide and hydrogen. And ‘butter’ is just the start, with milk, ice-cream, cheese, meat and tropical oils also in development.

The San Jose company, Savor, uses a thermochemical process to create its animal-like fat, which is free of the environmental footprint of both the dairy industry and plant-based alternatives.

They started with the fact that all fats are made of varying chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms,” Gates wrote in a blog post. “Then they set out to make those same carbon and hydrogen chains – without involving animals or plants. They ultimately developed a process that involves taking carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heating them up, and oxidizing them to trigger the separation of fatty acids and then the formulation of fat.”

Many of us know the stats – according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), livestock are responsible for 14.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, and animal-fat alternatives that use palm oil contribute to widespread deforestation and biodiversity loss – but also know how delicious dairy products are. So will Gates’ enthusiastic support be enough to get people excited about butter made from CO2?

(a) Can it scale?

(b) How much will it cost?

The Investigative Project on Terrorism.

This past week, Canada, the UK and Australia have formally recognised the State of Palestine. There is now a decent possibility that the declaration of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank is likely to follow. Hamas is now further from agreeing to a deal than ever, as they are rewarded for 7th October and riding high in Palestinian polling. Peace in the Middle East looks further away than ever, thanks to this foolish and premature move.

There is more to it, though. How did these three countries align and synchronise in this manner?

An influential progressive think tank, aligned with Qatar’s agenda, has been quietly orchestrating a significant shift in Western policy towards Israel and Palestine. The Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington, D.C.–based NGO described by critics as a “pro-Qatar” organisation, has used its global network to encourage allied governments to recognise a Palestinian state and adopt more hardline positions against Israel.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

Anthony Bourdain was beloved for his openness to new experiences, for his willingness to eat anything—brains; shark; cobra heart, still beating—with anyone. But he did reserve one bias: The man hated vegetarians. “Serious cooks regard these members of the dining public—and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans—as enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit,” he wrote in The New Yorker in 1999. “To live life without veal or chicken stock, fish cheeks, sausages, cheese, or organ meats is treasonous.”

For which a good case could be made–humans evolved to be omnivores, and vegetarianism will sooner or later subtract you from the gene pool.

Read it.

ikipedia had faced trouble from the Kremlin before, with Russian censors threatening it almost from the start of the Ukraine war in 2014. But it was only in late 2023, with the appearance of glitzy ads across Moscow, that a serious plan to replace it became clear. RuWiki, as the censors’ project is known, is mostly a straightforward copy of Wikipedia. But the most sensitive moments of history have been left out or rewritten. The Kremlin’s ideologues hope that millions of Russians will now embrace these new versions as the truth.

The RuWiki project might be called Orwellian, if the author were not himself occasionally censored. The entry on “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, for example, omits the regular site’s description of Winston Smith’s Ministry of Truth, where historical records are “corrected” (though Smith’s job gets a mention elsewhere). RuWiki’s rewriters hack their way through the sensitive zones of Putinist ideology: lgbt rights, oral sex, Soviet history and the war in Ukraine.

Russian atrocities in Bucha, near Kyiv, in 2022 are reimagined as a “Ukrainian and Western disinformation campaign”. Kherson, a Ukrainian city being destroyed by Russian bombs, is mentioned without a word about the war. The execution of 22,000 Polish officers at Katyn in 1940 is rewritten to cast doubt on the archive documents proving it was done by Soviet secret services. And all references to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was killed in prison in February 2024, are altered to describe him as a mere “blogger”.

Read it.

The “Rulers of the Ancient World” is a metrology/design/production project, based around producing a range of period correct rulers from various ancient empires.

Stemming from a personal fascination with the creation and development of systems of measurement, this project seeks to highlight the artfulness of handmade tools and the capability of handwork and CNC milling to complement one another and create a unique, novel product.

The original series of four rulers (Egyptian Span & Cubit, Roman Cubitus and Japanese Kanejaku) are each locally sourced Hard Maple, hand planed, French polished and waxed, and etched by CNC with a 0.1 mm engraving bit, which is then inked with India Ink, applied by hand. The Limited Edition ruler set, an Egyptian Span, Roman Cubitus and Japanese Shaku, were made with local and historically accurate woods for their respective cultures, and created by similar means. The French “Roubo” Fathom was made with flamed maple, and similarly polished and finished, though etched by hand. Lastly, like the Limited Edition ruler set, the French “Roubo Pied du Roi” ruler is made of European Sycamore, a geographically correct and culturally relevant wood.

The goals of this project are far-reaching- to illuminate the use of these ancient measurement systems, to enable a physical, tactile engagement with a piece of history, and highlight the possibility of beauty and novelty in toolmaking in the presence of traditional techniques and CNC machinery.

Off-Guardian.

Agroecologist and environmentalist Claire Nasike Akello says that, in legal terms, the sharing and selling of indigenous seeds is a criminal offence in Kenya. In effect, Kenya’s Seed and Plant Varieties Act demolishes self-sufficiency among smallholder farmers who use indigenous seeds to grow food.

Writing on her website, she says that the legislation seeks to create a dependency on multinational companies by smallholder farmers for seeds thus giving an upper hand to these firms that continue to steal biological resources from local communities with a profit-driven mindset.

Read it.

Britain’s “one-in, one-out” migrant deal with France is off to a rocky start, with new figures showing that arrivals continue to vastly outnumber deportations despite government claims of progress.

Under the scheme agreed between Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, migrants arriving illegally by small boat are to be returned to France in exchange for allowing approved asylum seekers to enter the UK via a legal route.

But while the Home Office confirmed the first family of three—including a small child—arrived in Britain after applying in France, just six people have been deported so far, compared to 1,157 arrivals in the same week.

Ministers insist the deal will deter dangerous Channel crossings. Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy described the pilot programme, running until June next year, as “just the beginning” and promised to increase deportations in the coming months.

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In Amsterdam Nieuw-West, a 24-year-old man with an intellectual disability was assaulted and robbed during the night by two Arabic-speaking youths. The attack took place between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning in a park near Pieter Calandlaan, local AT5 reported.

According to police, the victim was first approached around 11 p.m. in the park. Armed with knives, the attackers forced him to hand over his phone, ID card, and PIN, and even compelled him to increase the spending limit on his account. He was beaten and intimidated throughout the night.

The abuse escalated further: the suspects compelled the victim to lie among stones near a skate park, holding him there until daylight. At one point, a passerby confronted the pair and asked what they were doing. Police noted that the youths reacted casually, after which the man walked away. The victim remained trapped until morning.

Newsbusters.

After Charlie Kirk was assassinated there was some nice-sounding talk about toning down the inflammatory political rhetoric, but some on the left didn’t get the memo. After Kirk’s memorial service, some internet-dwelling lefties compared Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s speech to that of future Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s 1932 speech about Horst Wessel. Snopes’s Nur Ibrahim set about fact-checking this claim on Thursday, but couldn’t bring herself to give it a false label. Instead, she just observed how there are “rhetorical similarities.”

The problem was clear right away, as the first part of Miller’s speech Ibrahim chose to compare was when he said, “The day that Charlie died the angels wept. But those tears had been turned into fire in our hearts. And that fire burns with a righteous fury that our enemies cannot comprehend or understand.”

That was supposedly comparable to Goebbels’s, “So our dead comrade Horst Wessel wrote, and we are fulfilling his prophecy. The others may lie, slander, and pour their scorn on us — their political days are numbered.”

The supposed parallels got even more tortured from there. Nur noted how Goebbel’s speech was called “The Storm is Coming” and then quoted Miller, “When I see [Kirk’s widow] Erika and her strength and her courage, I’m reminded of a famous expression: ‘The storm whispers to the warrior that you cannot withstand my strength, and the warrior whispers back, I am the storm.’ Erika is the storm. We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion.”

Newsbusters.

On CNN This Morning, former Obama DHS official and CNN analyst Juliette Kayyem tried to claim that Dallas ICE shooter Joshua Jahn couldn’t have had any leftist political connections. Her evidence: that he got the message on a bullet wrong:

She has developed a new niche: dismissing the political connections of leftist shooters. Earlier this month, our Alex Christy caught Kayyem doing that in the case of Tyler Robinson.

Now Kayyem is claiming that Dallas ICE shooter Joshua Jahn couldn’t have had leftist political connections.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism.

activist class in the West either have no knowledge of — or choose to forget — one of the bloodiest internal conflicts in the modern Arab world: Algeria’s war against the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. After the FIS won the first round of parliamentary elections in 1991, the Algerian military intervened. What followed was a decade-long civil war — Algeria’s “Black Decade” – that left more than 200,000 people dead, many of them civilians.

This was not a remote or tidy struggle. It was marked by massacres of entire villages such as Rais, Bentalha and Sidi Hamed, where men, women and children were slaughtered. Armed Islamist factions used children as human shields. The state responded with mass arrests, secret detention camps, torture and widespread disappearances. Human rights groups estimate that 7,000–20,000 Algerians simply vanished after being picked up by the security services. It was a conflict of unrelenting terror that scarred Algerian society for a generation.

This was not an isolated episode in the Arab world. Across the Middle East and North Africa, — secular Arab governments — have repeatedly been forced to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood when it has threatened to seize state power. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, the Persian Gulf states (except Qatar), and of course Algeria have all confronted the movement. In each case, the lesson has been the same: when the Brotherhood is allowed to operate unchecked, the consequences are catastrophic for civil society, women, minorities and political pluralism.

Newsbusters.

President Trump’s designation of antifa as a domestic terrorist entity has the corporate media seething. In a vacuum, journalists expressing outrage at a president quelling domestic terrorism would probably sound insane. But for anyone familiar with the leftist press’s longstanding affection for antifa, the media’s response has been all too predictable.

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If California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting plan is approved, a large rural district that once proposed seceding from the state will be merged with northern San Francisco, causing the residents to fear they are losing their voice in Congress.

Modoc County is closer to Oregon than San Francisco and more closely resembles Texas in terms of its politics and agricultural lifestyle, yet the nearly 8,500 residents may be swallowed up by Newsom’s own district in Marin County. The small rural community voted 78% in favor of recalling Newsom and a reformed district would eliminate their small conservative voice represented by Republican Congressman Doug LaMalfa.

“It’s like a smack in the face,” local rancher Amie Martinez told CalMatters this week. “How could you put Marin County with Modoc County? It’s just a different perspective.”

Thus disfranchising them forever. So much for democracy.

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Sept. 22 that it will defy California’s new law banning federal immigration agents and other law enforcement personnel from wearing face masks while on duty.

“To be clear: We will NOT comply with Gavin Newsom’s unconstitutional mask ban,” DHS said in a social media post.

DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom of “fanning the flames of division, hatred, and dehumanization of our law enforcement” by signing the ban.

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Two sisters have turned to GoFundMe after being arrested for defacing a memorial for Charlie Kirk in Arkansas.

Kerri Rollo, 23, and her sister, Kaylee, 22, were arrested after they vandalized the memorial for the slain conservative leader, which was erected outside the Benton County Courthouse, the Benton County Sheriff’s Office said in a release.

The sisters are charged with criminal mischief, while Kaylee was also charged with obstruction of governmental operations.

AWFUL times are here.