Read it.

The army of Syria’s new government has released thousands of former members of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) who were being held in prisons in the country’s northeast. Many of those freed previously fought alongside Islamist militias that are now part of the power structure in Damascus.

The development, confirmed by multiple local and regional sources, marks a turning point after months of reassuring messages to the international community about the supposed “moderation” of the new authorities.

No extremist Muslim ‘government’ can be trusted to suppress other Muslim extremists.

Read it.

Sweden has officially stopped all taxpayer-funded grants to the aid organization Islamic Relief Sweden (IRS) following concerns that individuals within the group may have links to anti-democratic or violent activities. Over the past decade, the organization had received nearly 1.3 billion kronor (€121.2?million) from Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.

In 2024 alone, IRS received 191 million kronor (€17.8?million), which accounted for almost 70% of its total revenue from public funds and private fundraising.

Sida confirmed that the organization does not meet the criteria ensuring there are no ties to violent extremism or anti-democratic behavior. “Since the government’s guidance clearly states that such connections are not compatible with support under these strategies, Islamic Relief Sweden has had its applications rejected within the framework of the partner selection processes for the CSO and HUM strategies,” explained Inga-Lill Hagberg, press secretary at Sida.

The suspected links were identified in a review by the Centre Against Violent Extremism (CVE), which found that individuals connected to IRS or its networks had or previously had connections to “violent extremism or anti-democratic environments,” including links to the United Islamic Associations in Sweden (FIFS) and the Islamic Association in Sweden (IFIS). Some of these links were through relatives.

Non-Muslims see aid to Muslims as charity granted to poorer and more backward people.

Muslims see non-Muslim aid to Muslims as a form of jizyah, the tax that non-Muslims pay to Muslims in the Dar al-Islam, testifying to their inferior status. They don’t see it as charity for which they ought to be grateful; they see it as their right, mandated by God.

As Kipling correctly noted, “Once you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.”

Read it.

In the lexicon of polite political discourse, we are told that “kleptocracy” is a phenomenon reserved for the decaying regimes of the third world—banana republics where dictators in gold-braided epaulets stuff suitcases with cash while their people starve. This is a comforting fiction. It allows the American mind to believe that corruption is something that happens over there, in places without marble capitols or Ivy League economists.

But this definition is archaic. It fails to capture the sophistication of the modern predator state. A true kleptocracy in the twenty-first century does not require a dictator with a Swiss bank account; it requires a bureaucracy with a grant-making authority. It does not steal with a gun; it steals with a regulation.

The modern Democrat Party is not merely a political coalition; it is a syndicalist engine of wealth extraction. It has evolved beyond the crude graft of Tammany Hall, where votes were bought with turkeys and beer, into a highly complex “NGO-industrial complex” that launders public treasury funds into private political power. They are not governing. They are looting. And they have built a moral fortress around their theft so that to question the robbery is to be branded a heretic.

Read it.

President Donald Trump drew cheers Monday night as he attended the College Football Playoff National Championship game between Indiana and Miami.

Trump was spotted in a suite during the pregame festivities with his daughter Ivanka Trump and several of his grandchildren at Hard Rock Stadium in South Florida.

As the national anthem was performed, the president waved to the crowd, prompting applause from fans inside the packed stadium.

Read it.

For much of the past half-century, California benefited from a powerful first-mover advantage.

Dense networks of talent, capital, and research institutions allowed the state to absorb policy mistakes that would have crippled competitors. High spending and taxes, restrictive housing rules, and regulatory complexity were treated as nuisances rather than binding constraints, because growth could outstrip their costs.

That margin of error has narrowed dramatically.

Read it.

Keir Starmer’s government is playing directly into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, having on Tuesday given approval for Beijing to build its new embassy in London.

The huge (215,000 square-foot/20,000 square metre) site near the Tower of London has been suitably dubbed a ‘mega-embassy’ and is indeed set to become the biggest embassy in Europe.

Critics say it will amount to a “spy hub in the heart of our financial capital.” More than a week before the Labour government gave its seal of approval, The Daily Telegraph revealed what it described as “detailed plans for an underground complex below the vast diplomatic site in central London, which Beijing has sought to keep from public scrutiny.” This would be built alongside Britain’s most sensitive communication cables.

The Foundry.

California’s biggest union is once again up to no good. Dissatisfied with the piles of cash they’ve already stolen from California high-earning taxpayers, who are subject to a 14.4% income tax rate (the nation’s highest), double digit sales taxes, and the second-highest tax burden in the country, the SEIU is now clamoring for a “one-time” 5% tax on the net worth of “billionaires” to fund health care for illegal immigrants.

Yes, you read that right. Tax the rich even more to pay for ballooning costs of failing, state-run health care.

The initiative that voters will likely decide upon in November is the pinnacle of progressive envy. It’s not enough that the top 1% of taxpayers already fund half of the state budget. They’re greedy for more, and the initiative’s new authority to tax net worth is a harbinger of unprecedented government intrusion into our lives.

We can first look to the retroactivity clause, which ensures that any taxpayer who did not have the foresight to flee the state by Jan. 1, 2026, will be subject to the tax if voters approve it in November. Progressives are well aware of the millions of people, trillions of dollars, and multiple congressional districts that have already left California for the freer shores of Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and other zero-income tax states. This time around, the victims of their tax hikes won’t have the chance to vote with their feet.

The initiative also singles out the most successful entrepreneurs who built their companies from nothing into unimaginable success. For many founders, the tax could be well over 5%.

Read it.

Germany’s schools are experiencing a historic rise in students with a migration background, while the financial burden of unaccompanied minor asylum seekers continues to grow. According to the German Federal Statistical Office, in 2024, 29% of students in general education schools had a migration background, meaning almost every third pupil was either a migrant or a descendant of migrants. This represents a steady increase from 26% in 2019. Only 59% of students come entirely from non-migrant backgrounds.

Despite the growing number of migrant students, the teaching workforce remains predominantly native, with only 11% of teachers in general education schools having a migration background.

Meanwhile, the financial impact of unaccompanied minor asylum seekers (UMAs) continues to escalate. Figures obtained by AfD MP René Springer reveal that since 2015, Germany has spent at least €12.2 billion on accommodation, education, and care. These costs are typically covering housing, food, clothing, medical care, schooling, language courses, and youth services. In some federal states, the per-minor cost reaches nearly €100,000 annually, such as in Lower Saxony, while North Rhine-Westphalia and Thuringia exceed €80,000 per minor.

Read it.

The United Kingdom is facing an unprecedented surge in small boat migrant arrivals under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with more than 65,800 crossings recorded in his first 19 months in office. Since the start of the Channel crossing crisis in 2018, over 193,500 migrants have arrived, roughly equivalent to the population of Norwich.

In 2025 alone, over 41,474 migrants completed the 21-mile journey, with an additional 23,242 arrivals during Starmer’s first six months. Despite sub-zero conditions in Calais and Dover earlier this month, provisional figures indicate more than 900 have already crossed in 2026. Starmer’s daily average of 117 arrivals far exceeds Boris Johnson’s 58 per day, who reached 65,784 in 39 months.

The rising numbers have serious public safety implications. Analysis from the Centre for Migration Control (CMC) shows that migrants accounted for 79.3% of train theft arrests in 2024–2025, despite making up only 10% of the population. Migrants were also disproportionately involved in violent crimes, sexual offences, and drug-related arrests.

Read it.

The Somali diaspora behaves in roughly the same fashion wherever it washes up in the West. In this case, the Westerpark neighborhood of Amsterdam was culturally enriched by a mischievous Somali youth who imposed his amorous intentions on an unwilling young lady — to the point where he is now on trial for rape and attempted murder. It was only due to her fierce indomitable spirit that the object of his affections is still alive.

It needs to be noted that this case has a Mohammed Coefficient of 100%.

Import Turd World people, get Turd World problems.

Read it.

environment. At the same time, it is sending the message that it wants the world to be awash in fossil fuels sold by America, no matter the consequences.

Under President Trump, the United States has become the only nation to renege on a pledge to try to keep warming to 1.5 degrees. Its actions will make the global fight harder, scientists said.

“Emissions will be higher,” warned Justin S. Mankin, an associate professor at Dartmouth College who researches climate variability. “Trump’s greenhouse gas emissions will cause Trump’s heat waves, Trump’s droughts, Trump’s floods, and Trump’s wildfires.”

Trump! Is there anything he can’t do?

Daily Record (UK).

A woman who adopted her niece after her sister was jailed for seven years has been praised online for changing the child’s name as soon as the adoption was finalised

Read it.

The Democrat Left wants Americans to believe that excessively armed ICE agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere are kidnapping law-abiding immigrants en route to church or heading home from work.

New Jersey congressional candidate Analilia Mejia moaned that “grandmothers and gardeners are being targeted by federal enforcement agencies with no accountability.”

Attorney General Keith Ellison, D-Minn., called the people his ilk are shielding, “the most vulnerable neighbors in our community.”

“They haven’t been able to produce any evidence that they are finding people who are undocumented who have committed crimes,” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., told MS NOW’s evening anchor Chris Hayes. “It is unleashing complete terror on the residents of Minnesota.”

A fresh serving of facts swiftly refuted these Leftist lies.

Under Patel, F.B.I. Scours Its Records to Discredit Trump Opponents (New York Times) Just like a Democrat!

ICE Is Imposing Autocracy in Minnesota (Damon Linker/Persuasion)  If that were so, you’d be in jail.

Trump’s Greenland Threats Will Boomerang on America (Wolfgang Ischinger/New York Times)

Trump suffers major losses in his war on offshore wind (Politico)

7 predictions for how MAHA will change how Americans eat (Vox)

MAGA Is Discovering the Downsides of X (Ian Ward/Politico)

Minnesota killing pushes ICE to center of midterm campaigns (Politico)

A stunned Europe finally wakes up to Trump’s Greenland threat (Tim Lister/CNN)

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey says it would be a ‘shocking step’ for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act (NBC News)

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey says federal agents are an “occupying force” (Kaia Hubbard/CBS News)

The president of the United States is at war with his own country (Paul Waldman/MS NOW)  No, just the Left part.

Bruce Springsteen Dedicates ‘Promised Land’ to Renee Good, Decries ‘Gestapo Tactics’ Leading to Citizens Being ‘Murdered’: ‘ICE Should Get the F– Out of Minneapolis’ (Chris Willman/Variety)

Violent Left Wing Mobs In Minneapolis Hunt For ICE And Attack Counter Protesters

NYC Socialists Prepare Mass Mobilization Of 4,000 Anti-ICE Army

Don’t Back Down, Europe — Trump’s tariff threats against allies should be the last straw. (Francis Fukuyama/Persuasion)

One Year of Trump. The Time to Act Is Now, While We Still Can. (M. Gessen/New York Times)

Trump’s Plan to Seize Greenland is Simultaneously Evil, Illegal, and Counterproductive (Ilya Somin/Reason)

In Minneapolis, a Pattern of Misconduct Toward Protesters (Stephanie Saul/New York Times)  No mention of protester misconduct, of course.

WATCH: Somali Woman Robs Independent Journalist Nick Sortor in Minneapolis Then Drives Off, Dragging Him Down the Street Before Leftists Surround and Threaten Him – FBI Responds! (Jordan Conradson/The Gateway Pundit)

Big Business Should End Its Faustian Bargain With Trump (Paul Krugman) The vacuum speaks.

There’s a reason Trump Is Targeting Minneapolis (Lydia Polgreen/New York Times)  Yeah—it’s a hotbed of Democrat fraud and corruption.

Media’s 20 Worst Anti-Trump Quotes From His First Year Back In Office

Celebrate a King, Not a Trump (William Kristol/The Bulwark)

‘You Have To Make People Uncomfortable’: How Don Lemon Helped Anti-ICE Activists Storm a Minnesota Church (Chuck Ross/The Washington Free Beacon)  Name one time that Don Lemon has ever made a Democrat uncomfortable.

ABC, CBS REFUSE to Cover Anti-ICE Mob Harassing Christians at Minneapolis Church

Trump’s Insane New Threat Leaves No Doubt: It’s Time for the 25th Amendment (Janna Brancolini/The Daily Beast)

WHAT A NUT: Paul Krugman Tells Businesses to Cut Ties with Trump or ‘You’ll Hang’

The New Neo.

Hordes of leftist activists are roaming Minneapolis and some other areas of Minnesota, attacking anyone suspected of having something to do with ICE, and the police have apparently have been told to stand down. No doubt the hordes believe themselves to be virtuous, so what they’re doing is A-OK.

Read it.

Yet another example of why American parents are increasingly pulling their kids out of public institutions and turning to home schooling. Parents at an elementary school in Kansas are upset after students were reportedly told that they were not allowed to list President Donald Trump, late conservative activist Charlie Kirk and even Jesus Christ as their role models for an assignment.

The incident at Marshall Elementary School in Eureka, Kansas occurred in October and only recently came to light because students were originally instructed not to tell their parents about what happened. The American Center for Law & Justice, described as “a politically conservative, Christian-based legal organization,” has filed a formal civil rights complaint with the school.

The complaint accuses the district and Marshall Elementary School of religious discrimination, political or viewpoint discrimination, violation of free speech rights and retaliation. Students say a school guidance counselor, Kacey Countryman, gave sixth-graders an assignment called “Find Your Voice” as part of their “Leader In Me” program. They were asked to identify their role models, but conservative role models were apparently not allowed.

“When a student identified Charlie Kirk as a role model, the guidance counselor got very uncomfortable and refused to allow this name to be written on the board, yelling that he was ‘not a hero,’ and that he was not a role model,” the complaint says. When a student chose Trump as their role model, the guidance counselor reportedly had the same response.

Read it.

Remember the viral video of a woman screaming ‘I’m a U.S. citizen’ as ICE agents pulled her from a car in the Florida Keys? The media and politicians pounced – ICE ‘arrested an American citizen’. Turns out this person was detained by ICE because she refused to identify herself and was driving her boyfriend’s vehicle. Afterwards, reports disclosed that the boyfriend was in the country illegally. She chose not to comply. Perhaps she wanted the situation to escalate? Much of the debate about ICE has become political theater.

Read it.

Import Turd World people, get Turd World problems.

Daily Record (UK).

An imam who signed off on an illegal marriage ceremony involving two teenagers has been sentenced for his part in the crime. Appearing before Northampton Crown Court, Ashraf Osmani pleaded guilty last year to two counts of causing a child to enter into a marriage in November 2023.

The court heard Osmani, who presided over the Islamic Nikah service, agreed to allow the ceremony between two 16-year-olds to take place after learning they had been turned away from another mosque. Osmani, an imam at Northampton’s Central Mosque, claimed he was ignorant of a law change that had come in months before he allowed the youngsters to tie the knot, which hiked the legal minimum requirement of marriage to 18.

The court was told the 52-year-old agreed to marry the couple, who cannot be named for legal reasons, and charged them £50 for a certificate. Following the non-legally binding ceremony, the court heard how the couple celebrated with friends afterwards.

Michael Barone.

Minnesota? Somalis? Nine billion dollars in alleged welfare fraud?

To understand what’s going on from a distance, it helps to understand basic culture. Minnesota was settled largely by people of Scandinavian and German ancestry.

In survey after survey, Minnesota has ranked No. 1 or No. 2 among states, often just behind neighboring and much smaller North Dakota, in social connectedness, civic participation, workforce participation and voter turnout. It has traditionally led the nation in levels of trust and conscientiousness.

This has been coupled with political behavior that resembles Scandinavian patterns. Minnesota, like North Dakota and fellow neighbor Wisconsin, had lively socialist-leaning third parties in the 1930s. It’s still the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, the result of a fusion engineered by future Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1944.

As you might expect, Minnesotans have built a high-tax, high-spending state government. Like Scandinavians, they have trusted the state to provide services and have trusted individuals not to cheat in claiming benefits. Public support for these programs, as in Scandinavia, has traditionally been founded on confidence that aid goes only to the genuinely deserving.

The Foundry.

Writing at Axios, energy writer Amy Harder says, “The climate agenda’s fall from grace over the past year has been stunning—in speed, scale and scope.” Harder quotes oil historian and S&P Global vice-chairman Dan Yergin as saying, “There’s no handwaving about how ‘We want to cooperate on climate.’ It’s, ‘We’re slamming the door on that issue.’ We’ve gone from over-indexing it to zero-indexing it.”

Polling has never shown climate change as being an issue of primary concern to American voters. Americans have consistently been more worried about issues that impact their daily lives today than about warnings from modern-day P.T. Barnums like U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres about some nebulous “highway to hell” and “the age of global boiling.

The issue had been slowly losing its effectiveness during the Biden years even as that administration tried to memorialize the movement’s objectives in policy.

Read it.

A German opponent of Islam may face a reduction in his salary following a proposal from Bundestag President Julia Klöckner (CDU).

Michael Stürzenberger—who survived a jihadist knife attack in May 2024—currently works for Erhard Brucker, an Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Bundestag member. The Bundestag administration has classified Stürzenberger, along with six other employees, as “unreliable,” prompting Klöckner to call for their pay to be cut.

Stürzenberger and other AfD staff had their parliamentary passes revoked after the administration expressed concerns that access to the Bundestag could be abused for “unconstitutional purposes.” Stürzenberger, known for his criticism of Islam prior to joining the AfD, has been previously listed in the Bavarian Report for the Protection of the Constitution under a special category concerning “Islamophobia relevant to constitutional protection.”

The May 2024 Mannheim attack left police officer Rouven Laur dead and five others wounded. The assailant, 26-year-old Afghan national Sulaiman Ataee, was sentenced to life in prison for murder and attempted murder. Ataee had been radicalised over several years, strongly identifying with the Islamic State group, and specifically targeting Stürzenberger and attendees of his rally.

Read it.

While we watch the insanity in Minneapolis unfold, Floridians have to take comfort, at least for now, that Gov. Ron DeSantis and all of law enforcement are not going to tolerate the attacks on ICE or the police.

A few days ago, a bizarre woman was stopped and pushed back on state troopers:

Jennifer Cruz was arrested outside Mi Pueblo, a Mexican grocery store and meat market in Jacksonville, Tuesday morning after she allegedly jumped out of her car and punched a state trooper in the face while officers were working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said in a post on X.

In case anyone has any misplaced sympathy for this woman, you should know more about her. For starters, she had a traffic violation:

According to a police report reviewed by Newsweek, the encounter began when a Trooper observed Cruz, 40, driving a white Dodge Ram 1500 while recording on her cellphone and tailgating a vehicle and then a marked patrol car in a manner that interfered with her ability to safely operate the vehicle,” Jacksonville Sheriffs Office said.

[snip]

When officers attempted to address Cruz’s traffic violation, a records check revealed her driver’s license had been suspended since June 17, 2025, prompting a tow request.

Cruz, an American citizen, allegedly attempted to flee the scene in her vehicle at around 08:22, but was stopped by patrol cars using emergency equipment. After exiting her vehicle, Cruz refused to surrender the keys and threatened officers, then allegedly struck a trooper in the face with a closed fist, causing injuries to her nose and fingers.

She continued resisting arrest, kicking at multiple officers, including ICE agents, and required deployment of a Taser in drive-stun mode and a hobble restraint to secure her safely.

Footage shared on X shows Cruz kicking and screaming as officers tried to place her in a patrol vehicle, at times laughing, taunting law enforcement, and calling one officer a ‘weak?ass motherf—ker.’

When Gov. DeSantis heard about the incident, his response was not only a class-act but appropriate for the situation:

‘This is not Minneapolis. This is not going to end well for you in Florida. You have a right to go out there and criticize government policy. You can go out there and protest within respected zones, but the idea that you’re going to assault one of our troopers is unacceptable, and you are going to face consequences as a result of that.’

Let’s hope any looney tunes who are prepared to defy the governor’s message will be stopped in their tracks in Florida.

Read it.

Germany in 2025 recorded a significant imbalance in politically motivated violent crime—with left-wing attacks against right-wing targets occurring far more frequently than violence in the opposite direction—according to official data from the Federal Ministry of the Interior.

Figures released in response to a parliamentary inquiry by Alternative for Germany (AfD) show that 606 violent crimes classified as “PMK-left” were registered with the subtopic field “against right” in 2025. By comparison, 182 violent offences were recorded as “PMK-right” with the subtopic “against left.” While authorities note that the final crime statistics for 2025 are not yet complete, the data indicate that left-wing perpetrators carried out more than three times as many attacks against political opponents as right-wing offenders did.

The figures also reveal a sharp year-on-year increase in political violence overall. In 2024, authorities recorded 416 cases of left-wing violence against right-wing targets, meaning the 2025 figure represents a rise of more than 30%. During the same period, right-wing attacks against left-wing targets increased from 147 to 182 cases.

Daily Record (UK).

Former ISIS bride Shamima Begum ‘could be freed’ from the Syrian detention camp where she is beig held, it’s been reported.

The move has been mentioned after violent clashes have reportedly erupted outside the prison walls, reports The Daily Star.

Begum, 26, was stripped of her British citizenship in 2019. She had travelled to Syria to join the terrorist group as a teenage ISIS bride.

She is currently being held in the al-Roj detention camp in north-east Syria, but may be released as struggles with Islamic State continue.

Read it.

Well, first time that they know about it, anyway….

It was a late Sunday afternoon like any other on San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island. The day was winding down, and Aidan Moore, a guest relations employee for Alcatraz City Cruises, was at the dock of the tourist attraction helping visitors disembark. Suddenly, one of the tourists approached him, wide-eyed: They had just seen a coyote swimming to shore, something that has never been recorded before.

Read it.

Dutch students forced to live side-by-side with 125 refugees in a woke government plan to aid the refugees’ ‘integration’ were subjected to years of sexual assault and violence, according to an investigation.

The experiment – held at Stek Oost located in the Watergraafsmeer district of Amsterdam – placed a total of 125 students and 125 refugees together, where they were encouraged to ‘buddy up’ so that the migrants would quickly assimilate into life in the Netherlands.

Instead, the refugees started raping.

The Other McCain.

It’s been nearly 12 years since #GamerGate happened, and I’ve got grandchildren nearly that old. Must we rehash the whole thing — which began with the Tattoo-Covered, Mentally Ill Ex-Stripper Whose Real Name Is Chelsea Van Valkenburg — to explain the comic role played in that saga by John Walker Flynt a/k/a “Brianna Wu”?

Read it.

Irish teacher Enoch Burke has been returned to Mountjoy Prison after defying a High Court order concerning a school policy on transgender students.

Burke, a teacher of German and history and an Evangelical Christian, was arrested by Gardaí at Wilson’s Hospital School in Co. Westmeath on the morning of January 19th and taken to the High Court in Dublin.

Burke had been released from prison just days earlier to prepare legal proceedings against a disciplinary appeals body reviewing his dismissal from the school. His release was conditional on avoiding the school premises, but he appeared there multiple times, stating that it was “my duty to be at my workplace.” The High Court ordered his immediate return to prison after finding that he repeatedly breached the court injunction.

Enoch Burke has been imprisoned multiple times since late 2022 for breaching a High Court injunction that barred him from the school.

The dispute originated when Burke objected on religious grounds to a request from school management to address a transitioning student by a new name and the pronoun “they.” Burke has consistently argued that complying would violate his Christian beliefs and constitutional rights. Over the course of the legal proceedings, he has spent more than 560 days in prison and faced fines totaling €225,000.

Read it.

The Trump administration is reportedly considering offering asylum to British Jews, citing concerns over rising antisemitism in the United Kingdom. Robert Garson, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and a board member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, told The Telegraph that he had been in talks with the State Department about providing sanctuary for Jews fleeing hostility in the UK. Garson, who was born in Manchester and now resides in Florida, said he believed the UK was “no longer a safe place for Jews.”

The discussion follows a series of incidents, including an Islamist attack on a Manchester synagogue and antisemitic demonstrations in the wake of the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel. Garson argued that a lack of enforcement by British authorities and perceived political inaction has left many Jewish people vulnerable. He also criticized the Crown Prosecution Service and Prime Minister Keir Starmer for failing to address antisemitism effectively.

Garson accused the Crown Prosecution Service for not taking legal action, saying it had failed to uphold the law in its refusal to bring charges against protesters “on the streets of Britain who had glorified in the rape or death of Jews” after the 2023 Hamas attacks.

Read it.

Following the dramatic Africa Cup of Nations final between Senegal and competition host Morocco, clashes broke out in several European cities late Sunday evening after the game ended with Senegal’s 1–0 victory in overtime. Unrest was reported in Belgium, the Netherlands and France, with riot police intervening in multiple locations.

The Antiplanner.

As I’ve pondered the linkage between housing affordability (meaning the ability of the general public to afford housing) and affordable housing (meaning subsidized housing for people too poor to afford any housing), I’ve sometimes wondered if there isn’t a deliberate effort to make housing unaffordable in order to force more people to live in government-owned or subsidized housing. Clearly, making housing expensive through growth boundaries has the support of those who want to densify cities. But does it also have the support of socialists who want to end private homeownership?

Read it.

What was Renee Nicole Good thinking when her girlfriend yelled, “Drive baby, drive” and grinning she drove her 4,000 lb Honda Pilot SUV at an armed federal law enforcement officer?

Her last thoughts were likely of her imaginary white privilege and why it failed to protect her.

Good had supported BLM and had inhaled its mythology of ‘the talk’, the idea that law enforcement is a racist institution, that police started out as ‘slave catchers’ and that they exist to persecute black people while giving white people a pass. This would have come as a surprise to the over 2,000 white people who have been shot by police officers since 2020.

White leftists go into confrontations with law enforcement officers wearing their imaginary white privilege like the emperor’s new clothes. This ideological fiction that underpins Marxist identity politics works about as well in real life tests as Marxism does. That’s what Renee found out.

The Foundry.

Global warming has gone cold as an issue. Despite decades of panicked predictions of doom, it’s never been a high priority for voters, and Preident Donald Trump’s bold expressions of “climate denial” went unpunished by voters.

The media still sound allied with the Green New Deal pushers, but the thrill is gone. Last November, leftists blasted ABC, CBS and NBC for barely touching the COP30 global climate summit in Brazil. (PBS gave it nearly 16 minutes, and 10 of it was a John Kerry softball interview.)

Now Axios.com posted an analysis by Amy Harder on this trend, titled “The world’s great climate collapse.” Greenpeace gang, beware: “The last year has seen an epic reversal that spread quickly from governments to boardrooms to pop culture.”

Not only has Trump dismissed climate panic, but Harder noted Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, “once one of the world’s most vocal climate advocates,” is now repealing some of his country’s climate policies. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also issued a memo questioning the wisdom of pursuing “net zero” emissions policies.

Read it.

“Trump, and all the bottom-feeding morons…” will be targeted, prosecuted and jailed. The Supreme Court will be packed to insure the pogroms are ruled Constitutional.

Beware. Be advised. Midterms are vital.

Read it.

n May 2017 a sculpture was displayed at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, believe it or not, in honour of the great secular-rational god Peer Review. The sculpture takes the form of a die displaying on its five visible sides the possible results of review — “Accept”, “Minor Changes”, “Major Changes”, “Revise and Resubmit” and “Reject”.

Peer review. What is it? Why does it matter? Where did it come from? How old is it?

A fairly solid academic article – Noah Moxham and Aileen Fyfe, ‘The Royal Society and the Prehistory of Peer Review, 1665-1965’, published in The Historical Journal 61 (2018), pp. 863-889 – begins with an untruth stated by the House of Commons committee on Science and Technology in 2011.

In one form or another, peer review has always been regarded as crucial to the reputation and reliability of scientific research.

Always? Fact-check: False. It’s a lie, or an error. Apparently, many people think that peer review was invented in the 17th century. Not so.

Daily Record (UK).

Piers Morgan, 60, shared a picture to his social media from his hospital bed and told fans that he had fractured his femur so badly, he required a hip replacement.

The former Good Morning Britain host explained he had tripped while at a restaurant and would have to use crutches to aid his mobility for several weeks. He’s also not allowed to take long-haul flights for the next three months and in a rather unexpected twist, placed the blame on his long-term friend, President Donald Trump.

The Telegraph (UK).

A conservative American influencer has claimed he was stabbed at an anti-immigration protest in Minneapolis.
Jake Lang, who previously served four years in prison after storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, said he had been attacked by a “commie Leftist rioter” after taunting Muslims and Somalis.
Minneapolis has been gripped by demonstrations in recent days following the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an immigration agent on Jan 7.
Donald Trump, the US president, is prepared to deploy hundreds of paratroopers to the Minnesota city, which has become a target for his mass deportation programme following revelations of fraud by its Somali population.
Lang had attempted to mount an anti-immigration protest outside City Hall on Saturday, where, according to The Washington Post, he used a microphone to shout “Go home, Muslims” and “Send the Somalis back”.

Watch it.

Vanessa Wingårdh details how our world is degenerating.

Read it.

The rise and spread of AI brings along endless discussions of what constitutes intelligence. A debate which, even if we limit ourselves to computer science, goes back not just to Weizenbaum’s Eliza, but to Turing and von Neumann.

It is also a debate that technical people should not abandon to others. Scientists and engineers are often wary of philosophizing, preferring problem-solving and action. The risk, however, is to relinquish the discussion to people who do not necessarily understand the technology. Current discussions of AI put this phenomenon on display. A typical example is the definition of intelligence. As I will discuss in this post, in the hope of helping to clarify and focus current debates, the source of many disagreements is that people rely, often implicitly, on two radically different notions of “intelligence.”

Read it.

When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes, any more than a mouse that loses its tail in an accident should give birth to tailless mice.

If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet as novel ideas flood in from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology, most evolutionists agree that their field is in flux. Much of the data implies that evolution is more complex than we once assumed.

Some evolutionary biologists, myself included, are calling for a broader characterisation of evolutionary theory, known as the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). A central issue is whether what happens to organisms during their lifetime – their development – can play important and previously unanticipated roles in evolution. The orthodox view has been that developmental processes are largely irrelevant to evolution, but the EES views them as pivotal. Protagonists with authoritative credentials square up on both sides of this debate, with big-shot professors at Ivy League universities and members of national academies going head-to-head over the mechanisms of evolution. Some people are even starting to wonder if a revolution is on the cards.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is grinning from beyond the grave.

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If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The TL;DR was that old open source was the cathedral of exclusive developers and groups. Then the Bazaar showed up (which was the Linux Kernel for example) and that freed us from the shackles of the cathedral.

Except if we look at how things evolved, it wasn’t actually a bazaar. It was a bunch of roadside churches that are now megachurches. But there is still a bazaar, and it’s holding up our modern infrastructure.

Back in the early days there was a person named esr. Don’t look him up, he’s not exactly role model material. [Eric S. Raymond—Who doesn’t know that?] He didn’t like some people who called themselves GNU. Which is an acronym for “Gnu’s not Linux”. The GNU project was also started by a person who isn’t role model material. [Richard Stallman] esr was big mad that GNU wouldn’t just take any open source contribution, you had to follow their rules. But in Linux there were no rules!!!

Well, except all the rules a person named Linus made up. History will probably remember him as LTT, “Linus The Torvalds”.

But anyway, so esr told us not using GNU was cool and we should all just create whatever we wanted. And this mostly happened because it’s what everyone was already doing. There is an obscene amount of open source. Most of it is on GitHub now, which is owned by Microsoft. Who we haven’t mentioned in this story, but they hated Linux more than a toddler hates naps. After being visited by 3 ghosts one evening, they decided to like Linux and open source. It’s a long complex story but it could be summed up as if you can’t beat them, join them. But that’s not important right now.

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Epoxy resin is a clear, robust polymer that is widely used – especially as part of fiber-reinforced materials in aviation, the automotive industry, and more. Until now, however, it has not been possible to recycle it. Researchers at Empa have developed an epoxy resin that can be reprocessed and chemically recycled, in addition to being flame-retardant and easy to manufacture.

Read it.

It is harder to automate harvesting of lettuce than to send a human to the moon, to get any product in the world shipped to you within a few hours, to get vaccines for mumps, chicken pox, etc, to get a computer and connectivity in almost every person’s pocket, and many others.

I had the privilege to visit multiple harvesting operations during my visit to Yuma, Arizona, last week. I also had the chance to connect with other players in the ecosystem who have worked on various aspects of the problem.

These included forward-thinking Farm Labor Contracting (FLC) companies, local manufacturers, AgTech adoption services companies, research institutions, and, of course, many growers, shippers, and packers. Just as with any population, I encountered people with extremely strong opinions about how things should be done!

Harvesting lettuce (and many other specialty crops) is still very much a majority human-driven endeavor.

Watch it.

Apparently China has a “cosplay boyfriend industry”.

When Chinese girls say, “I don’t need no man”—well, maybe they don’t.

This all takes money, of course, but money talks louder in China (and always has), and what (really) can you do with money in a Communist country (if they let you have it) than consumption spending? It’s not as if you’re going to run for office.

Watch it.

Sophia Miller does a deep dive.

Why Tesla’s Fremont expansion was canceled despite aligning with California’s climate goals

How state regulations and net-zero mandates added billions in hidden costs

The ripple effect on suppliers, small businesses, and working families

Why manufacturing jobs are leaving California — and where they’re going

How climate policies can backfire when ideology replaces economic reality

Thousands of jobs vanished. Billions in tax revenue disappeared.

And the state that wanted to lead the clean energy revolution may now be falling behind it.

Get Woke—go broke.

NOTE: I have no reason to believe that this video isn’t AI-generated, and something about it makes me suspect that it is. Nevertheless, the information is spot on.

The New York Times, Paper of Record for the Narrative.

Vocal Trump supporters are demonizing Renee Good, her partner and their allies, with some even using an acronym: AWFUL, or Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.

That acronym has been in common use among The People Paying Attention for years.

The Times,  of course, thinks that this is just ‘awful’, never entertaining the notion that, like most ‘derogatory’ terms, it might have some basis in reality.

UPDATE: MSM Melting Down Over New Term For Liberal White Women