Erick Erickson.

The president is still riding on global goodwill for the release of hostages from Hamas. On stage in Egypt, the president of Pakistan praised President Donald Trump for bringing peace to what could have become a nuclear war between Pakistan and India. The Israeli people love him more than they do their own leaders. But here at home, Democrats have kept voting to keep the government shut down.

Democrats, however, have been careful with their battle. Trump has moved defense funding around to make sure the military gets paid this week. He will not be able to keep doing it, but for now, our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines will get paid. Democrats are publicly protesting that this is unconstitutional. None of them are, so far, willing to fight the president on it. Democrats are refusing to vote for the same continuing resolution authored by and submitted by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer just last year. The resolution is the same, and Democrats are now killing what they themselves wrote last year.

Therein lies the problem for the Democrats. They want credit for fighting Trump and shutting down the government, but they don’t want any blame for shutting down the government. On Wednesday, the 15th day of the government shutdown, neither the New York Times, the Washington Post, nor the Wall Street Journal had a front-page story about the shutdown. If the press could praise the Democrats, they undoubtedly would. But at this point, few Americans are feeling the effects of the shutdown. Social security checks are going out, the military is getting paid, passports are being issued and life goes on.

Read it.

President Trump confirmed a “very productive” phone call with Russian President Putin on Thursday, according to a post on Truth Social. The two leaders are now expected to meet in the near term in Budapest, Hungary, with discussions centered on potential pathways to end the war in Ukraine.

Trump’s latest threat to supply Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles may have been a key driver prompting Moscow’s sudden willingness to engage in talks at the highest level. While full details of the call remain undisclosed, the tone shift signals possible upcoming breakthroughs in negotiations to end the three-year war in Eastern Europe, which has resulted in some casualty figures on both sides at 1.4 million, according to a recent New York Times report, citing U.S. and British government estimates, among other sources.

What comes out of Budapest remains to be seen. But already, Russian sovereign wealth fund head Kirill Dmitriev is posting on X about Elon Musk’s Boring Company potentially building a 70-mile undersea rail tunnel linking Russia and Alaska through the Bering Strait – a proposed $65 billion megaproject.

Read it.

The Democratic Party’s dark-money NGO network, bankrolled by left-wing billionaires, is reportedly preparing to activate a coordinated, color-revolution-style mobilization across the U.S. this weekend – a replay of failed agitation attempts seen earlier this year targeting President Trump and Elon Musk. The operation, marketed under the “No Kings” banner and portrayed publicly as a grassroots movement, in reality functions as a professionalized protest-industrial complex. Its composition includes a blend of paid activists, white boomers suffering from Stage 4 Trump Derangement Syndrome, and a smaller contingent of organic, unhinged leftists who recite MSNBC talking points by heart.

ATQUE: Soros foundations helping fund anti-Trump ‘No Kings’ protests nationwide (Fox News)

Read it.

Saturday, October 18, you might have heard, is this year’s culminating “No Kings” protest demo all over land.

We’ve been to a couple of these curious spectacles since springtime here in the Hudson River Valley, in the next town over.

The crowd there was just about entirely made up of aging Boomers, joyfully re-living the halcyon days of the Vietnam protests. It was kind of like a street production of the old Broadway hit Hair, only with a cast of 75-year-olds. Let the sun shine in! But this rural, small-town corner of America is overwhelmingly geriatric. There is next to nothing for young people to do around here, so they flee at the earliest opportunity. The catch is: turns out that opportunity is rather scarce elsewhere, too.

Read it.

A Democrat governor who called Republicans “Nazis” and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “Gestapo” accused the White House of hate speech Thursday.

Responding to a social media post of comments by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) accused the administration of inciting hate.

Read it.

Homeland Security’s border agency says it has fixed a loophole from the Biden era that let immigrants enter the United States illegally and claim asylum despite using fraudulent identification documents, according to a newly released audit.

The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general said in a report that agents at the border caught migrants using fake papers but failed to record the attempted fraud in the migrants’ official immigration files, known as A-files, reports The Washington Times.

As a result, authorities reviewing asylum applications had no idea the individuals had tried to deceive border officers, which could have disqualified them.

Read it.

Layoffs hit NBC News this week with the network division facing cuts ahead of Comcast’s spinoff of Versant. About 150 jobs have been eliminated so far which only represents 7% of the total newsroom staff. However, the company has been less forthcoming on where the jobs are being cut: The majority of layoffs are targeting Diversity and Equity teams.

DEI staff from specialized verticals focus on culture and identity-based stories. These teams were reportedly eliminated in their entirety, with only a handful of staff (up to 5) potentially retained for freelance contributions.

NBC News eliminated the majority of teams dedicated to covering Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ groups as part of its layoffs, according to two sources familiar with the matter, a significant culling as the Peacock network separates from its sister news network, MSNBC. A number of media outlets have either refused to report these details or they have outright lied, claiming that the layoffs don’t focus on specific teams.

To admit that mass firings are now decapitating DEI related offices would be to admit that conservatives and the alternative media were right in their predictions over the past several years. Woke hiring has been a disaster for progressive news companies.

Read it.

Though much may separate Thucydides, Xenophon, Ephorus, Plato, and Aristotle from one another, on this fundamental point they and those who subsequently followed their lead were agreed: that to come to understand a polity, one must be willing to entertain two propositions.

First, one must presume that the form of government, the constitution, the rules defining membership in the políteuma or ruling order is the chief determinant of a political community’s character. Second, one must assume that pa?deía, which is to say, education and moral formation in the broadest and most comprehensive sense, is more important than anything else in deciding the character of a particular pol?teía. In one passage of The Politics, Aristotle suggests that it is the provision of a common pa?deía—and nothing else—that turns a multitude into a unit and constitutes it as a pól?s; in another, he indicates that it is the pol?teía which defines the pól?s as such. Though apparently in contradiction, these two statements are in fact equivalent—for, as the peripatetic recognized, man is an imitative animal, the example we set is far more influential than what we say, and it is the “distribution and disposition of offices and honors [táx?s t?ˆn arch?ˆn]” constituting the políteuma of a given polity that is the most effective educator therein.

For anyone interested in information technology, a study of the classics (Latin, Greek, and their associated cultures) would be very rewarding. It certainly worked for me.

Bloomberg,  a Voice of the Crust.

Vanderbilt University is asking local Florida officials to approve its proposal to build a $520 million campus in the wealthy Palm Beach area, tapping into a growing region transformed by new outposts of financial firms.

Follow the money!

The Nashville-based school envisions buildings totaling 300,000 square feet for 1,000 students and more than 100 faculty. The site in West Palm Beach was previously targeted by the University of Florida for a similar project that ultimately failed.

After all, who wouldn’t rather have a degree from Vanderbilt than from the University of Florida?

The first step took place this week. Vanderbilt officials asked West Palm Beach to donate city and county land for the campus. West Palm Beach is located on the mainland, directly across the Intracoastal Waterway from mansion-lined Palm Beach.

Very convenient for Children of the Crust.

A shortage of elite school options — from kindergarten to college — has been a major sticking point for a wave of younger wealthy families who’ve moved to South Florida from New York, California and elsewhere to work at firms such as Ken Griffin’s Citadel, Blackstone Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. And there’s a dearth of top-tier universities to build up talent to feed those firms.

What a drag!

Read it.

Have you ever heard the saying, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast?” It’s a mantra deeply ingrained in Navy SEALs operations. A counterintuitive concept that flips our usual understanding of speed and efficiency on its head.

Picture this: you’re part of an elite team executing high-stakes missions under extreme pressure. There’s no room for error, but there’s also urgency – every second counts. You feel the urge to rush. But what if running only leads to mistakes?

This phrase isn’t just about being slow or fast; it’s about finding a rhythm that balances precision and pace, ultimately leading to swifter progress. The SEALs swear by it… but how can we apply it beyond military contexts?

I got your attention, didn’t I? Let’s dive deeper into the roots of this idea and understand why taking it slow can be critical.

It is an elementary principle of most martial arts that one starts out practicing move slowly to get correct form, and then gradually increases speed once the muscle-brain connection is firm.

Richard Hanania.

When I started writing about the problems with civil rights law, few people had any idea what I was talking about, even in right-wing circles. Most understood the Civil Rights Act as the bill that got rid of Jim Crow and banned explicit discrimination. It did in fact do those things, but as I argue in The Origins of Woke, civil rights law has over the years expanded to mandate differential treatment based on race and sex, and institutionalize concepts like affirmative action and disparate impact.

It seems that I’ve succeeded in changing the conversation around these issues. Now, conservatives know that the whole thing is a con and understand that when someone is a “civil rights advocate” they’re not simply demanding equal treatment for women and minorities, but in favor of policies that lower standards, restrict freedom, and discriminate against whites, men, and Asians. “Diversity” and “DEI” have similarly become politicized terms.

I feel like the conversation around unions within many intellectual spaces is about where the civil rights discourse started. I’ve heard people defend organized labor on freedom of association grounds. Why can’t workers get together and engage in collective bargaining with their employers? Don’t they have a right to do so? This lack of understanding has coincided with people on the right starting to say nice things about labor unions, including JD Vance, Josh Hawley, and the intellectuals around American Compass. It may be that conservatives who have taken on organized labor in the last decades have been too successful, to the point that young people on the right don’t even know what unions are anymore.

Read it.

Prices for housing are already at a record high, because of a pervasive long-term structural housing shortage in America. Since 2022, interest rates have increased, so homeowners with a locked in low mortgage rate don’t want to sell their homes and move, the result being fewer existing homes on the market. One would think that the response would simply be to build more housing, especially on the cheap end. And yet, that’s not happening. The traditional “starter home” for a young family just doesn’t exist anymore.

Technology exacerbates many problems. Just as in the current age all hot-looking girls leave their hometowns to move Las Vegas, Los Angeles, or Miami, local housing markets are being more and more subsumed into regional or even national markets, as this article relates.

Ars Technica.

Lead exposure sounds like a modern problem, at least if you define “modern” the way a paleoanthropologist might: a time that started a few thousand years ago with ancient Roman silver smelting and lead pipes. According to a recent study, however, lead is a much more ancient nemesis, one that predates not just the Romans but the existence of our genus Homo. Paleoanthropologist Renaud Joannes-Boyau of Australia’s Southern Cross University and his colleagues found evidence of exposure to dangerous amounts of lead in the teeth of fossil apes and hominins dating back almost 2 million years. And somewhat controversially, they suggest that the toxic element’s pervasiveness may have helped shape our evolutionary history.

Read it.

conquered. The storylines may change, from “this time it’s different” to “the Fed has our back,” but the psychology does not. When markets rise steadily and volatility remains low, investors confuse stability with safety. That’s precisely the illusion forming in markets today. The S&P 500’s relentless climb, paired with suppressed volatility and ample liquidity, has given the impression that downside risk has somehow been engineered out of the system.

This is where the trap begins. Behavioral finance tells us that people respond more to “how” risk feels than to what the data shows. When investors no longer feel anxious, they begin to take risks they wouldn’t otherwise tolerate. Rising prices reinforce optimism, optimism drives more buying, and the cycle continues until the most minor shock shatters the illusion. Low volatility environments create the psychology for instability by suppressing the healthy corrections that usually reset investor expectations. The longer the calm lasts, the more fragile the market becomes beneath the surface.

Read it.

A new round of tariff announcements from the Trump administration sent markets reeling, with gold dropping briefly only to soar back to new record highs above $4300 today, signaling collective doubt in the system itself as investors rush to protect themselves with hard assets.

Collectively, markets are reaffirming gold’s role at the center of sovereignty, monetary stability, and global reserve strategy, even as it has become a favorite target of Keyneseian ridicule as everything from a “barbarous relic” to a waste of physical and financial space in investment portfolios and balance sheets.

Yet, confidence in US debt continues to decline, with the “safe” status of Treasuries increasingly being questioned. That’s why now, for the first time in decades, collective central bank gold holdings have surpassed the value of their Treasuries. Central banks now hold 20% of all gold ever mined, protecting themselves from the effects of currency debasement even as they, ironically, cause it. Instead of earning yield by holding Treasuries, they continue stocking up on gold, which is a powerful statement against the results of their own monetary experiments.

“Who cares about money? It’s just dirty pieces of paper.” — Bugsy Siegel

Read it.

New data shows that foreigners account for a substantial share of people living in absolute poverty in Italy, even as the poverty rates of families with two Italian parents drops. One director of La Verita newspaper, Maurizio Belpietro, has run an opinion piece in his newspaper lamenting that Italy is “importing poverty.”

Read it.

On the eve of an emergency crisis summit with the steel industry, Germany’s ruling Social Democrats (SPD) have unveiled their “crisis roadmap.” If subsidies and protectionism fail, the sector will be nationalized. Just like that.

Germany’s steel sector has become the perfect parable for the pitiful state of the country’s broader industrial base. Its decline over the past eight years is almost without precedent in modern economic history. Output has plunged by more than 30% since 2018, with the first half of this year alone showing a brutal 12% year-on-year drop — a collapse accelerating at high speed.

In absolute numbers: crude steel production fell from its 2018 peak of 42.4 million tons to what will likely be only 29 million tons this year. It’s simple: producing in Germany no longer pays. So capital is fleeing to more profitable locations. China — and now increasingly the U.S. — is where business gets done.

Read it.

Billionaire investor Tom Steyer is spending millions on ads touting California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposition for redistricting — but his ads are starting to irk prominent Democrats, Politico reported.

Steyer’s ads were made without coordination with Newsom’s campaign team, according to Politico.

Steyer, who ran for president in 2020, has caused heartburn for Democrats with an ad that ties his support for redistricting to calls for President Donald Trump’s impeachment.

Read it.

There’s probably no more polarizing and outright catchy vehicle on the road than the Tesla Cybertruck. Depending on who you ask, the Tesla Cybertruck is either the future of American engineering or a stainless-steel political statement.

But to some at a Cybertruck meetup in Palm Springs, it’s simpler than that, according to a new profile by Wired. “To me, it’s just a vehicle that I love,” says Andrew Castillo, a stock trader from Los Angeles. “It has no political affiliations at all to me.”

The event was organized by Michael Goldman, who runs the 53,000-member Facebook group Cybertruck Owners Only. Goldman, who nicknamed his truck “Beastie,” says reactions are often strong — both positive and negative. “When I first got it, my wife really made fun of me for it,” he says. “She actually made a T-shirt. It says ‘It looks like a brick and moves like a beast.’” Her opinion changed after seeing it in action towing dump trailers and hauling equipment. “Now she says it’s actually pretty cool.”

Read it.

San Francisco Democrat District Attorney Brooke Jenkins reiterated she would not “hesitate” to bring charges against federal agents or National Guard troops if she had a “provable case,” Politico reported Thursday.

Jenkins made her latest comments Wednesday, hours after President Donald Trump again said he’s considering deploying the National Guard to San Francisco, which he called “a mess.” She first warned federal agents of possible charges in a social media post last week.
Jenkins said she would take the unprecedented step of bringing charges, such as excessive force, if U.S. troops or immigration agents broke local laws.

“If I believe, and have conviction, that we can meet our burden and charges are appropriate, that I won’t hesitate to do so,” she told Politico.

Two words: Qualified Immunity. This affirmative-action hire apparently has about the same legal competence as Justice Brown.

Read it.

such as cocaine into the United States from Central and South America.

The operation aims to stop drug trafficking and human smuggling by cartels and criminal organizations.

The Coast Guard has seized an average of about 1,600 pounds of cocaine every day since starting the operation, prohibiting about 34 vessels from reaching the United States and apprehending 86 suspected drug traffickers.

Read it.

After 10 years and nearly $1 billion in total project costs, the Barack Obama Presidential Center is finally nearing completion and has been opened for limited public tours. The facility is set to officially go into operation in the spring of 2026, however, at least $230 million in construction costs still remain and the Obama Foundation simply doesn’t have it. Total reserve funds are $116 million and this does not take into account the cost of paying staff to maintain the center.

Not only is the future of the site in limbo, the building is also being called “the tomb” by many locals in the South Side of Chicago where it is located. Though the media frequently refers to the design as “warm and inviting”, it looks more like a concrete bunker nightmare that one might find in Soviet era Russia.

The center’s notably harsh aesthetics are oddly similar to many pieces of architecture constructed in Russia during the height of communism using methods that seem to suck the life out of the surrounding environment. One cannot help but notice the dystopian similarities. Some might ague that buildings can’t really be “political”, but these are people that don’t understand architecture.

Read it.

Federal prosecutors in Texas have for the first time filed terrorism charges targeting antifa, FBI Director Kash Patel said Thursday, citing President Donald Trump’s recent designation of the far-left anarchist movement as a terrorist organization.

Cameron Arnold of Dallas and Zachary Evetts of Waxahachie, Texas, were charged on Wednesday with providing support to terrorists for their alleged role in the non-fatal shooting of a police officer at an immigration detention facility. Both were arrested in July with eight others and charged with attempted murder and weapons offenses.

None of the defendants has entered a plea in the case, court records show, but Arnold and Evetts are set to do so at an Oct. 22 court hearing.

Venture Capitalist Ron Conway Resigns From Board Over Benioff National Guard Comments (Heather Knight/New York Times)

Senate Democrats tank military funding bill amid shutdown feud (Connor O’Brien/Politico)

Vulgar Pro-Hamas, Anti-Trump/Netanyahu Messages Broadcast at Pa. Airport by Hackers

Woman invoked Charlie Kirk’s killing while threatening immigration agents, US charges (Nate Raymond/Reuters)

Trump’s Unilateral Spending Cuts Complicate Shutdown Deal (New York Times)

Harvard posts biggest operating loss in 14 years as Trump cuts bite (Dan Primack/Axios)

Multiple GOP congressional offices received flags with ‘optical illusion’ swastikas earlier this year (NBC News)

Chamber of Commerce Sues Over Trump’s New $100,000 H-1B Visa Fee (Wall Street Journal)

Pritzker: Stephen Miller ‘abusing the fact that Donald Trump has diminished capacity’ (Ryan Mancini/The Hill)

President Trump envisions D.C. arch to mark 250th anniversary of U.S. (Anastasia Tsioulcas/NPR)

California AG vows to sue if Trump sends troops to San Francisco (Noah Baustin/Politico)

Trump’s Long-Awaited IVF Policy Falls Far Short of His Campaign Pledge (NOTUS)

US ‘on a trajectory’ toward authoritarian rule, ex-officials warn (Lauren Gambino/The Guardian)

In Governor J.B. Pritzker’s Illinois, Illegal Alien Is Working as a Sworn Police Office with Badge, Gun, and a Pension (Department of Homeland Security)

Inside Trump’s DOJ: Punitive firings, public scoldings and pressure to prosecute foes (MSNBC)  Sounds a lot like the Obama DOJ and the Biden DOJ to me.

Democrats Lay Out ‘Damning’ Examples of ICE’s Tactics in Chicago (Amelia Benavides-Col??n/NOTUS)

The Telegraph (UK).

A university is teaching students that JRR Tolkien demonises “people of colour” in the Lord of the Rings books.

A history module called Decolonising Tolkien et al, taught at the University of Nottingham, uses a text that says orcs and other dark-skinned characters in the trilogy are the victims of “ethnic chauvinism”.

Dr Onyeka Nubia, a historian and writer who leads the module, argues that eastern races in the fictional realm of Middle Earth are depicted as evil while fairer-skinned peoples of the west are shown as virtuous.

In academia, “decolonising” usually means re-examining or moving away from white, western viewpoints.

In the module’s core text, Dr Onyeka writes that maligned peoples include Easterlings, Southrons and men from Harad. The trilogy also features the dark-skinned orcs, evil creatures that do the bidding of Sauron, known as the “Dark Lord”.

Carl Benjamin (“Sargon of Akkad”) has some fun with this.

Watch it.

Skip the first half, which is all about how great the program is (an a Catholic ad for a way of earning a ‘plenary indulgence’), and hit the second half, which actually explains the system.

The secret: High standards, rigorously enforced. No ‘social promotion’, no ‘equitable grading’, no educational fads. Holding teachers responsible for their ‘product’. Training teachers on phonics and other traditional, reliable methods.

Newsbusters.

n what will hopefully be the first of many welcome changes at CBS News in this Bari Weiss era, senior vice president for standards and practices Claudia Milne announced Thursday she would be leaving the company after having played leading roles in what our friends at the New York Post noted were “some of the network’s recent controversial, woke reporting” in recent years.

For reference, the Post’s indefatigable media reporter Alexandra Steigrad explained the standards and practices unit at news organizations are “responsible for the moral, ethical and legal implications of CBS programming,” so her departure marked the “the first senior executive to leave the network since Weiss” was named editor-in-chief on October 6.

Steigard, as always, came armed with sources. She found one who said Milne “was part of the woke mob at CBS News” and thus “Bari’s first scalp” as she seeks to move CBS back towards the center.

Read it.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. (Well, it is Milwaukee….)

Read it.

China’s major expansion control measures on its rare earth minerals appear to be backfiring, as on Thursday Japanese Finance Minister Katsunobu Kato called for the Group of Seven nations to “unite and respond” to China’s actions from last week. This after the Trump administration slammed the “global power grab” efforts by China as it seeks to have a “chokehold on the world of rare earth and rare earth materials.”

Germany’s finance minister has as a result signaled that a coordinated response from the bloc is likely coming, and Australia’s Prime Minister is expected to hammer out an agreement on critical mineral supply chains during an upcoming trip to Washington. China’s ‘retaliation’ is fast alienating those Beijing thought it could rally to its corner after Trump first unveiled steep tariffs, marking a sharp reversal from the global mood of six months ago.

Read it.

A federal judge has lifted travel restrictions for Mahmoud Khalil, allowing the Palestinian activist to speak at rallies and other events across the U.S. as he fights his deportation case brought by the Trump administration.

Khalil, who was freed from a Louisiana immigration jail in June, had asked a federal magistrate judge to lift the restrictions that limited his travel to New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Louisiana and Michigan.

“He wants to travel for the very significant First Amendment reasons that are at the bottom of this case,” his lawyer, Alina Das, said during a virtual hearing Thursday. “He wants to speak to issues of public concern.”

Let him do it back where he came from.

Read it,

While the federal shutdown grinds on, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) have clearly perfected a strange new art form: performative politics, where each word is a cue, every accusation a prop, and every tweet an audition for those who can look the most indignant while working the least.

In the meantime, President Donald Trump isn’t playing along; he’s rewriting the script in real time, walking over Schumer and Jeffries online, each dropping posts and videos that make Democrats look like out-of-work actors fumbling through a forgotten scene.

Democrats? More accurately “Dramacrats” … inventors of the slogan “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

Read it.

Fifteen journalists have agreed to the Department of War’s new press policy, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post.

The department had set a Tuesday deadline for news outlets to sign a new Pentagon access policy or lose access to press credentials and Pentagon workspaces.

At least 30 news organizations, including Reuters and Newsmax, declined to sign the new policy, citing a threat to press freedoms and their ability to conduct independent newsgathering on the world’s most powerful military.

The last thing the “world’s most powerful military” ought to do is let “independent newsgatherers” anywhere near their facilities. One of the least effortful ways of gathering intelligence on one’s enemies is simply reading the product of “independent newsgatherers” who just can’t wait to show everybody how in-the-know they are, no matter whether or not it damages national security.

Reporters who signed the document include those who work for The Federalist, The Epoch Times, and One America News.

“After thorough review of the revised press policy by our attorney, OAN staff has signed the document,” Charles Herring, the company’s president, said in a statement.

Federalist CEO Sean Davis and Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway said on social media they found no new restrictions on the ability of journalists to report on or criticize the government.

“If the new guidelines result in fewer professional con artists and media hoaxers roaming the halls looking for new lies to peddle, so be it,” they said.

And that says it all.

Read it.

n air traffic controller told lawmakers that he’s been delivering food for DoorDash to make ends meet amid the ongoing government shutdown, which has paralyzed Washington since Oct. 1.

Jack Chris of Dallas told a panel of lawmakers on NewsNation’s “Cuomo” Wednesday that he has worked for the Federal Aviation Administration for 16 years and has “been through the Obama shutdown and also the Trump shutdown.”

“And my question is: Under the current political climate, do you think that this shutdown could actually be longer than the previous shutdowns due to the external pressures, political pressures that we’re having effect right now?” he asked the bipartisan group, which included Reps. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa.; Jim Jordan, R-Ohio; and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and former Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.Va.

Ask yourself why all of the air traffic controllers in the U.S. work for the Federal government, with their jobs subject to political pissing contests such as the present one.

Ask yourself why they don’t work for individual airports, as the employees of other institutions would.

Remember this when the Common Fringe bitch and moan about “capitalism” and its “oppressions”, never mind that “capitalism” doesn’t exist and hasn’t since FDR.

Read it.

What do they know that you don’t?

Read it.

Episcopalians? Are they still around?

Despite overseeing a denomination that’s been cratering in support for its far-left views, celebration of genital mutilation, and downplaying the Word of God (among other things, making its Christian bona fides questionable), Episcopalian Bishop Marianne Edgar Budde was heralded on Thursday’s CBS Mornings for her new young adults book about bravery and her January scolding of President Trump at an inaugural interfaith service.

And, to make it even more palatable for the liberal hosts and viewers, Budde never mentioned God, His Son Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, or any character in the Bible as examples of bravery. Rather, Budde and the co-hosts focused on her selections of Martin Luther King Jr. and Harry Potter.

“Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde was brave enough to tell President Trump to welcome refugees to America. She’ll tell us why she is bringing that lesson of bravery to kids in a new book,” gushed featured co-host Vladimir Duthiers in one of two teases.

Of course, the interview itself began with the snippet of her homily ripping into the President from the National Cathedral pulpit as xenophobic.

Read it.

Too bad that how much money they spend has no connection to how much money they bring in.

Read it.

Conservatives are nowhere to be seen in a Harvard University course focused on black women in politics, according to a copy of the syllabus obtained by The College Fix.

‘History 167: Race, Gender, and the Law Through the Archive’ praises First Lady Michelle Obama, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and Vice President Kamala Harris for having “left their mark on 21st-century politics and grassroots organizing.”

The course says it will examine black women in the 20th century who “shap[ed] politics, grassroots organizing, the legal profession, and higher education during Jim (Jane) Crow and beyond.” Topics include “reproductive rights,” “non-binary people,” and “Black Feminism,” according to the syllabus.

But the course leaves out prominent conservative black women, including one who even made history at Harvard.

After all, they’re not REALLY black….

Read it.

Grace Jin Drexel hadn’t expected her father’s final message before his disappearance to be a call for prayer.

“He told me to pray for another pastor who had gone missing,” she said.

Hours later, her mother called to say she could no longer reach him.

Read it.

Donald Trump is the master of memes — and of the media. No modern political figure understands better how to energize the long-humiliated conservative-patriotic soul that has been crushed for decades by a left-liberal media zeitgeist. His Gaza performance is the latest chapter in the ongoing media revolution of our time.

Peace in Gaza. The guns have fallen silent between Israel Defense Forces and Hamas. What was unthinkable for decades has happened: a historic breakthrough. Hostage and POW exchanges — all brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump.

The achievement alone commands extraordinary respect. But with Trump now mediating in Armenia-Azerbaijan, between Israel and Iran, and pressing ahead with unfinished work in Ukraine, a Nobel Peace Prize would seem almost inevitable.

And Trump, ever the media virtuoso, translated this geopolitical power move into the perfect, iconic imagery.

Financial Times.

Between 35,000 and 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers, sheltering on the fringes of the frigid mammoth steppe that shrouded much of the European landmass, entered limestone cave networks, such as Altamira in northern Spain and Chauvet and Lascaux in southern France, carrying pigments. Yellow and red ochres, black manganese oxides, white kaolin clay. On the walls, they rendered images of the beasts that filled their world. Mammoths and bison in heart-thumping lifelikeness. Aurochs and horses. Reindeer and salmon.

Since the 19th century, archaeologists have been fighting over what the pictures might have meant. Initially, priests and gentleman scholars believed they might be a sort of magic for supercharging hunts. Later, some researchers believed they related to shamanic rituals; trances performed in the flickers of animal-grease lamplight. Others argue that whatever meaning there might have been will remain inaccessible to us for ever, holed up in the dark.

Read it.

Kitchen sponges — a network of soft polymeric rods — can act as memory devices, an experiment has shown. The memory can also be erased and rewritten, potentially helping mimic the architecture and functioning of the human brain, allowing memory storage and computation in the same location.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

That may explain why my head is full of useless trivia.

Judge temporarily blocks the Trump administration from firing workers during the government shutdown (Janie Har/Associated Press)

Judge temporarily blocks firings by Trump administration during shutdown (Michael Sainato/The Guardian)0

Judge Extends Ban on Trump Deploying National Guard in Portland

Overthrow: Trump Authorizes CIA Covert Ops Targeting Venezuela’s Maduro  No beating around the bush.

Federal firings could reach 10,000 during shutdown, Vought says (Emily Peck/Axios)  Let’s get a head start on draining the swamp.

New York Magazine: ‘How Did Trump Get a Peace Deal Done Where Biden Could Not?’  Trump Republican, Biden Democrat. Seems obvious to me.

Trump is considering sending National Guard to San Francisco (Faith Wardwell/Politico)  I hope they make sure to wear a flower in their hair.

Trump Invites Ballroom Donors to Glitzy White House Dinner (Wall Street Journal)  They say that like it was a bad thing.

Trump tells CNN Israeli forces could resume fighting in Gaza ‘as soon as I say the word’ if Hamas won’t uphold ceasefire deal (Jake Tapper/CNN)

Judge Pauses Transfer of Florida Land for Trump Library

Trump vows federal ‘surge’ in more American cities to combat crime (Alexandra Hutzler/ABC News)

RINO ALERT! Murkowski Joins Democrats in Push for Federal Worker Back Pay

Don’t Blame the Democrats for Trump’s Revenge Tour (Jonathan Chait/The Atlantic)

The Conservative Justices Have So Many Ideas For How to Kill the Voting Rights Act (Madiba K. Dennie/Balls and Strikes)

Democrats float a new shutdown demand: Reversing Trump’s mass firings (Politico)  Sounds as if they’re feeling the pinch right in their base.

NY Times Furious Trump Wants Balanced Refugee System

Trump Team Plans IRS Overhaul to Enable Pursuit of Left-Leaning Groups (Wall Street Journal)

Reporters leave Pentagon en masse after refusing to sign on to new rules (Scott Nover/Washington Post)  That gets rid of a major pain in the ass.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump May Launch Missiles from Warships into California this Friday and Saturday as Part of “Vanity Parade” (Aaron Parnas/MeidasTouch News)  The derangement is strong in this one.

The Hatch Act? Wassat? Who cares? (Robert Reich)  Certainly no Democrat, much less Robert Reich.

The Last Days of the Pentagon Press Corps (Nancy A. Youssef/The Atlantic)  Speed the day. Why we even have a “Pentagon Press Corps” escapes me.

Trump Administration Decimates Birth Control Office in Layoffs (Caroline Kitchener/New York Times)  The horror! The horror!

Oval Office Becomes a Diorama of Power Dynamics as Trump Goes After Rivals (Glenn Thrush/New York Times)  As they went after him. Quod abit circum venit circum.

When the Trump Guardrails Fall (Michael S. Schmidt/New York Times)

Special Counsel Jack Smith: Trump Persecution Was Not Political  Liar Liar Pants On Fire.

I resigned from the military because of Trump (Doug Krugman/Washington Post)  Sometimes the system works.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is on the way out – prez’s alpha-male greatness shines after peace deal (Miranda Devine/New York Post)

How the Trump companies made $1bn from crypto (Financial Times) That’s why he’s a billionaire, and you’re not.

Trump’s Empire Rakes in Over $1B in Colossal Crypto Cash Grab (Janna Brancolini/The Daily Beast)

Extreme Leftist Democrat Crockett Claims Trump Had A Stroke And Cannot Function I’m sure he’d be able to whip your ass.

Top White House official selling Arlington home after activists write chalk messages on sidewalk (ARLnow)

Trump Rule Sidelines 6,000 Truckers Over English Tests  It frightens me that there were 6,000 truck drivers on the roads who can’t pass an English test.

Federal immigration officers in Chicago area will be required to wear body cameras, judge says (Christine Fernando/Associated Press)  I’m not sure she has the authority to do that.

The Supreme Court Left No Doubt: It Will Gut the Voting Rights Act (Elie Mystal/The Nation)  More guts!

San Francisco DA says she ‘won’t hesitate’ to bring charges against federal agents (Politico)  The magic words are Qualified Immunity.

Photo Shows Trump Backstage At Rally With Republicans In Racist Texts Scandal (HuffPost)  Trump! Backstage with REPUBLICANS! AT A RALLY! What is this world coming to?

Norwegian Nobel Socialists Snub Trump, Give Prize to Eco-Extremist Economist

In Supreme Court Land, Fixing Discrimination Against Black Voters Is The Real Racism (Kate Riga/Talking Points Memo)

Judge Blocks Trump Cuts, Restores $34M in NYC Anti-Terror Funds

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France’s demographic profile is shifting: new data shows that more than one in three babies born in 2024 had at least one foreign-born parent.

According to national statistics agency INSEE, 34.1% of the 660,787 babies born last year had a parent born abroad while 19% were born to two foreign-born parents—the highest proportion ever recorded.

Some 65.9% of babies were born to two French-born parents, but this is down from 71.8% in 2013—a steady decline in line with rising immigration.

Of the babies born to two foreign-born parents in 2024, 114,325 had parents from outside the European Union while 7,434 had parents born in other EU member states. Another 100,151 babies had one French-born and one foreign-born parent.

France now hosts a record 6 million foreign residents—nearly double the number in 2006. Immigration from Africa accounts for 59% of arrivals in the past five years, compared to just 22% from elsewhere in Europe.

Demographers expect the trend to continue as France becomes increasingly fragmented.

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Fueled by the explosive rise of artificial intelligence and the data centers that power it, America’s demand for electricity has surged to record highs. Meeting that demand will require unprecedented investment in reliable, affordable energy. Yet just as the need for dependable power grows more urgent, radical climate activists are working to choke off the very projects that promise to supply it and are threatening the integrity of the American judicial system in the process.

The clearest example of this troubling trend came earlier this year, when Greenpeace International filed a lawsuit in the Netherlands against the American company Energy Transfer, an extraordinary attempt to overturn a verdict issued by an American court. In the case, a North Dakota jury ordered Greenpeace to pay roughly $660 million in damages for its role in the disruptive 2016 and 2017 protests targeting Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access Pipeline.

During the North Dakota trial, jurors heard how the organization engaged in a campaign of defamation, disruption, and property damage that led to costly delays in the pipeline’s construction. One of Greenpeace’s central falsehoods was that the pipeline would cut through sacred tribal lands. In reality, Energy Transfer worked directly with tribal leaders and routed the pipeline to avoid such areas, a fact Greenpeace chose to ignore.

Greenpeace was also found to have dispatched paid protesters to the construction site who were carrying tools that were later used to lock agitators to equipment. These “hired guns” trained protesters who assaulted law enforcement officers, set fires, and caused untold environmental damage by leaving behind 48 million pounds of garbage.

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Two Israeli jurists investigating Hamas’ October 7 attacks say the massacre revealed a horrifying new pattern of violence—families deliberately targeted, parents forced to watch their children die, and homes burned alive.

Speaking in Brussels at an event hosted by the European Jewish Association (EJA), Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy and Adv. Merav Israeli-Amarant said the scale of the crimes against women and children was “unprecedented,” yet rapidly denied by much of the international community. Their Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children has spent two years compiling a secure war crimes archive of survivor testimonies, medical reports, and even Hamas’ own recordings to ensure the atrocities are documented for future prosecutions.

During their visit, both women spoke with europeanconservative.com about the scale of the atrocities committed by Hamas and their ongoing efforts to ensure that justice is done.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

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An Afghan man will stand trial on Thursday, October 16th in Germany over a knife attack that killed a two-year-old boy and a 41-year-old man in Aschaffenburg, leaving three others injured. This year’s January 22nd assault targeted a group of toddlers riding in a wooden cart with their teachers.

The suspect, partially named as 28-year-old Enamullah O., has a history of mental illness. Prosecutors said a psychiatric assessment found him not criminally responsible and they are seeking permanent confinement in a psychiatric facility. Authorities found no evidence of extremist or terrorist motives following the violence, which fits into a wider pattern of European security failings.

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The academic performance of German pupils has fallen sharply, according to a report by Berlin’s Humboldt University.

Of the 48,000 Year 10 pupils (15-16 year olds) tested, 34% failed to meet the minimum standards required for secondary school graduation.

This marks a steep decline compared with previous studies in 2012 and 2018.