Read it.

Emmanuel Macron appears to want the world to stop talking about the brutal beating in Lyon—by leftist activists—that led to the death of Quentin Deranque, a 23-year-old patriotic activist. And it’s no wonder, given that even establishment publications say it could result in a significant political shift—“completing,” as the BBC put it, “the ‘de-demonisation’ of the Rassemblement National so fervently pursued by its leader Marine Le Pen, and making new ‘demons’ out of the radical left.”

As such, the president’s team said on Sunday that it would summon the U.S. ambassador to Paris over comments made by Donald Trump’s administration about the killing.

The U.S. Embassy in Paris on Friday shared a statement from Trump’s Department of State Bureau of Counterterrorism, pointing to information that Deranque was “killed by far-left militants,” and that this should “concern us all.”

Read it.

Just because someone is wearing a black robe doesn’t mean they’re upholding the rule of law. Consider some recent judicial rulings.

Last November, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem published a notice ending Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. Leave aside the merits of that decision. The law is clear that this decision belongs to the Trump administration.

Congress created TPS in 1990. It applies to citizens of other countries living in the United States. It offers recipients temporary legal protection after their home country has been affected by a natural disaster or other hardship. Basically, the government says things in your home country are so terrible that it won’t force you to leave or deport you.

The secretary of homeland security decides which countries fit this description. The designation can last for six, 12, or 18 months. Before a designation expires, the secretary can choose to extend it or end it. In the case of Haiti, the impetus for this “temporary” status was a 2010 earthquake.

“There is no judicial review of any determination of the Attorney General with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state under this subsection,” the law states. After 9/11, Congress moved authority over enforcing immigration law from the attorney general to the DHS secretary.

The takeaway is clear. A judge doesn’t get to second-guess Noem’s decision. Doing so wouldn’t just violate the law. It’d run afoul of recent Supreme Court precedent. In a 6-to-3 ruling last October, the Supreme Court smacked down a California judge who told DHS it couldn’t end TPS for Venezuelan nationals.

Read it.

The Metropolitan Police has so far not commented on the viral video of a female police officer defending freedom of speech surrounded by a crowd of angry Muslim men in Whitechapel but it has questions to answer.

Read it.

The man, who has numerous criminal offenses on his record, remains in Germany despite being under a mandatory order to leave the country for 23 years.

Remarkably, the German justice system failed to find him and “suspended” criminal proceedings against him, while Bild newspaper then went on to find him with ease.

Despite Huso B. overstaying his welcome by decades, the state provides him €7250.77 every month to support his wife and eight children.

Read it.

If you watch any movie from the 1940s in the film noir genre, you will see a recurring theme. Someone does something bad but runs away to another state. He might put on a disguise. People try to find him but cannot. He checks in and out of hotels under an assumed name. The heroic detective works to put together clues to connect the dots.

So on it goes in many variations of this theme, all of which turn on technological limitations. The police did not have the data. Communications technology was limited to phones attached to walls. There was no national database of anything, no permanent records except paper with fading ink in deep storage.

Nearly every drama turns on this point. A man courts a beautiful woman of noble lineage only to find out later that she is really a tramp on the make. A woman loves a man who she thinks is a fine gentleman only to discover later that he is an indebted rake. The priest is actually a mobster, a mobster is really a policeman, a shopkeeper is really a spy, and so on.

It’s all about information asymmetry. A vast gulf separates what is known by the players who are making decisions based on knowledge flows. Trickery is easy, deception is not easily discovered, duplicity is rewarded, and all-around sneakiness becomes the desiderata of social functioning. This dark plot line was especially compelling during and after World War II.

Watching this now, it’s impossible not to notice the difference between then and now.

Read it.

After the 2024 presidential election, the Democratic National Committee conducted an autopsy of the party’s defeat and intended to release it.

It pledged an honest accounting of how Donald Trump reclaimed the White House. It assured its own officials, strategists, and donor class that a thorough post-mortem was coming.

However, after the autopsy was complete, the DNC clammed up and kept it under wraps.

There was something in the report they didn’t want the public to see, and Democrats weren’t happy about it.

Never Trump Republicans are still issuing dire warnings. Is anyone listening? (Steve Peoples/Associated Press) Uh, no.

Kash Patel Faces Backlash For Flying To Winter Olympics, Partying It Up With Team USA (Ben Blanchet/HuffPost)

Armed Man Shot Dead at Mar-a-Lago Was Fixated on Epstein Files, Text Shows (TMZ.com)

The Trump Administration Is Ending Aid That It Says Saves Lives (Hana Kiros/The Atlantic)  Just because something saves lives doesn’t oblige the taxpayers have to pay for it.

OMISSION: Sunday Shows Mostly Ignore Latest Trump Assassination Attempt

Trump’s Netflix threat is a warning to every CEO (Peter Kafka/Business Insider) Dunh dunh DUNHHHHHHH….

A Voice Sounding Like Trump Called Into C-SPAN And His Name Was A Pseudonym Trump Has Reportedly Used (Paige Skinner/HuffPost) Reportedly! That proves it!

Neil Gorsuch has Elena Kagan dead to rights (Jason Willick/Washington Post)

Trump’s law is crushing the next generation of RFK Jr. disciples (Amanda Chu/Politico)

The Human Cost of Trump’s War on Science (Jeneen Interlandi/New York Times)

Judges Grow Angry Over Trump Administration Violating Their Orders (New York Times)

Fact-check: Trump’s Latest Claims on Jobs, Inflation and Crime (New York Times) Come get your Narrative…

What Trump Sells Is Impunity (Katherine Alejandra Cross/Liberal …)  What are they going to do—impeach him?

Call Them What They Are — The Republican Party has become a haven for Nazi sympathizers. (Tom Nichols/The Atlantic)  If they were Communist sympathizers, they’d be Democrats.

DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin’s replacement is even worse (Amanda Marcotte/Salon)  Amanda Marcotte loses her shit.

Trump’s approval rating with independents hits a new low ahead of the State of the Union (CNN)  Come and get your Narrative, right here.

Trump won’t blink on tariffs ??? because he can’t (Stephen Collinson/CNN)

Trump: High Court ‘Accidentally’ Boosted Presidential Powers  Every action Trump makes that is overturned by the courts is an action that a future Democrat President can’t take. It’s a win either way.

Why Tariffs Aren’t Shrinking the U.S. Trade Deficit (Wall Street Journal)  The sol-called ‘trade deficit’ is a made-up thing. All trades have two sides, and all trades are balanced. The so-called ‘trade deficit’ only looks at one part of trade: goods in versus good out. The ‘trade-deficit’ hand-wringers pretend that if imports exceed exports, somehow that is a bad thing. But every trade is balanced; if imports exceed exports, it doesn’t mean that we are giving stuff away—those imports are being ‘paid for’, if not in goods then in capital flows. When imports exceed exports, that means that foreigners are sending us goods in exchage for ;pieces of paper, which is all ‘dollars’ really are these days. Who gets the better of that deal? (You’d think that a writer for the WSJ would know that—and, before they went Woke, a writer for the WSJ would know that.)

Trump Reverts to First-Term Tumult as Republican Fears Mount (Bloomberg)  Or so they would have you believe.

The UK and Other Democracies Hold the Epstein Elite Accountable (Jennifer Rubin/The Contrarian)  No, just the ones they don’t like. Jennifer Rubin losing her shit doesn’t change that.

Trump’s new interest in war will end badly (Gideon Rachman/Financial Times)  For Iran, perhaps. For Islam, certainly. War is a bad thing, but it’s not the worst thing, although you wouldn’t know that from listening to the Narrative media.

FLASHBACK: Media Elitists Despised Trump’s Addresses to Congress

Judge permanently blocks release of Jack Smith’s report on Trump classified documents case (Jacob Rosen/CBS News)  What are they afraid of?

The SAVE Act is Christian Nationalism in Action (Pamela Herd/Can We Still Govern?)  Apparently not letting Democrats cheat in elections is now ‘Christian nationalism’. I have no problem with that.

At the Spot Where Alex Pretti Was Killed (Sam Stein/The Bulwark)  The Bullshitwark will preach the anti-Trump Narrative until you fall asleep.

Nicki Minaj’s social media propped up by thousands of bots, analysis finds (Jason Beeferman/Politico)  If she weren’t a Trump supporter, nobody would give a shit.

Major Update: Bombshell Epstein Developments as Trump Support Falls Ahead of State of the Union and FBI Director Faces Calls to Resign (Aaron Parnas/The Parnas Perspective)  Come and get your Narrative.

You Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, Gotta Hand It To Chief Justice Roberts (Liz Dye/Law and Chaos) He’s still not a prog, and that means he’s evil.

Patel sparks outrage partying with Team USA as MAGA cheers him on (The Hill)  Outrage from the Usual Suspects, that is, although why anybody ought to care certainly escapes me. (The Left Is Big Mad at Kash Patel for Celebrating the Gold Medal Win With USA Hockey (Tim O’Brien/PJ Media))

First Draft: Time for Trump to Go? ??? Our president is too dangerous, too unwell, too much of a fascist. (Andrew Perez/Zeteo)

MS NOW’s Velshi Whacks Trump For Criticizing SCOTUS, Leaves Out Left Doing Worse

C-SPAN: Caller ‘John Barron’ Was Not Trump

Trump Gets Back at ‘supreme court’ by Revoking Capital Letters (Margaret Hartmann/New York Magazine)

U.S. Women’s Hockey Team declines Trump’s invitation to the State of the Union (NBC News)  Hating Trump is the most important thing.

Dem AGs plot to thwart Trump election interference (Lisa Kashinsky/Politico)  Proglodyte Projection: When progs accuse you of doing what they do—or plan to do.

Read it.

Over the past week or so, many on the political Right have understandably enjoyed a laugh or two at the expense of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, N.Y.). AOC went to the Munich Security Conference to provide “balance” to the Trump administration’s presence and to burnish her own credentials on the global stage. Instead, she mostly just made a fool of herself. Not only did she stutter, stammer, and offer a Kamala Harris-esque non-answer when asked about American interests in and obligations to Taiwan, but she also demonstrated a comically poor grasp of geography and a righteously ignorant understanding of history. In an effort to rebut and embarrass U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, AOC embarrassed only herself, showing that historical facts mean far less to her than identity-inspired fiction.

But while it’s inarguably fun to chuckle at and mock the ignorance of the smug congresswoman and presumed presidential aspirant, it is also important to acknowledge that her historical and political illiteracy extends beyond the superficial and touches on matters of real and critical importance. Notably, this purported champion of the working class does not know the history of working-class politics, does not understand the reasons for the collapse of the working-class-centered ideology, and, as a result, has never contemplated the dangers inherent in attempting to resuscitate that failed doctrine.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez has long emphasized her biography and working-class roots to enhance her political status—and justifiably so. Her childhood may not have been quite the struggle she pretends it was, but she nevertheless endured economic hardships—especially after her father’s death—and was unable to find employment commensurate with her education. She was, famously, a bartender and a cocktail waitress before her election to Congress and, as a result, has long fashioned herself a champion of the working class and its purported priorities.

Read it.

A majority of Virginians oppose Democrats’ efforts to rig the state’s redistricting process in the name of “fairness” – then change it back to the original system they claimed was unfair – results of a new Roanoke College Poll released Monday show.

The Democrats’ April 21, 2026 special-election ballot measure – which Democrat Governor Abigail Spanberger rejected during her campaign but supports now that she’s in office – would reportedly turn Democrats’ congressional district advantage from 6-5 currently to 10-1.

If the amendment to the state constitution is passed, the 46.05% of Virginians who voted for Republican candidate Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election would be grossly underrepresented. What’s more, Republicans wouldn’t be able to restore balance by employing the same method Democrats used to give themselves the distorted advantage.

Read it.

The nation’s Democrat attorneys general are preparing legal and strategic responses to potential Trump administration actions related to federal election oversight ahead of the midterm elections.

Read it.

Don’t hold it in—tell us how you really feel.

Read it.

When Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor, he sold New Yorkers a vision of relief. Free childcare. Free buses. A rent freeze. A city that would finally tilt toward the struggling rather than the secure. What he did not campaign on was a nearly 10% property tax hike affecting more than three million residences and over 100,000 commercial properties. Yet, days after his election, here we are.

The proposal, floated as leverage in a standoff with Kathy Hochul, is being marketed as a reluctant last resort. But for a mayor elected on affordability, threatening one of the broadest tax increases available to City Hall is not just ironic—it’s revealing. When the numbers got tight and Albany didn’t comply, Mamdani’s idiotic grand promises collided with fiscal gravity. And instead of rethinking the scale of the agenda, the answer was to reach for the biggest local tax lever available.

Read it.

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) needs to work on his pandering skills – after telling a crowd of black people that he’s just like them because he can’t read and got a low SAT score.

I can believe it.

UPDATE: Newsom’s office rebuffs ‘MAGA-manufactured outrage’ on his SAT score statement (Asher Notheis/Washington Examiner)  At least that MAGA guy can read. He probably got a good SAT score as well.

UPDATE: Gavin Newsom Slammed for ‘Bigotry’ With SAT Remark Must be that MAGA guy again. He sure gets around.

Read it.

There’s an obvious growing failure at the center of modern markets that, as a former short seller, has become beyond obvious to me over the years.

It isn’t just fraud or aggressive accounting. It’s the ecosystem that allows both to thrive: financial media that won’t press, and a sell side that won’t risk upsetting management teams they depend on for access.

We’ve seen this movie before. Enron did not implode because there were no warning signs. It imploded because the warning signs were inconvenient. There were whistleblowers. There were people inside the system who knew the numbers didn’t add up. But complexity was treated as brilliance, and skepticism was treated as cynicism. Analysts admired the innovation. Television hosts admired the executives.

And the stock went up—until it didn’t.

Covered-call option funds and ETFs are paying pretty nice dividends these days.

New York Post.

Abigail Spanberger, the new governor of Virginia who has been tapped to deliver the Democrats’ State of the Union reply Tuesday night, is the perfect avatar for her party’s deception.

As her campaign for Governor, and subsequent Left-turn, revealed.

With her long blond bob, minimalist makeup, pinched face and brisk air, she looks like the sort of competent working mom you’d encounter at school drop-off in any affluent suburb. In other words, she seems like somebody you instinctively trust.

Actually, she looks like a typical Karen teacher-union apparatchik.

But don’t be fooled by appearances. Spanberger is an expert at subterfuge, having spent eight years as an undercover CIA case officer, aka a spy, under Barack Obama and John Brennan, in the era when Democrats turned national security back on itself.

In other words, an experienced agent of the Democrat Deep State.

Like Joe Biden, she posed as a moderate to fool willfully gullible voters and then showed her true colors the minute she took office.

My, what a surprise.

The “national security mom,” who is being touted as a future presidential contender, immediately signed off on unlimited abortion and a gerrymander plan to entrench Dem rule, ordered law enforcement not to work with ICE and presided over the introduction of dozens of new taxes on everything from dog walking to Uber rides.

My, what a surprise.

Read it.

The Plenary of the Spanish Congress will debate this week a non-binding motion presented by the far-left party Podemos that seeks to implement mandatory comprehensive sex education at all stages of the education system, from Early Childhood Education —starting at the age of three— through Baccalaureate and Vocational Training.

…

It also proposes that the content be developed in collaboration with specialists in “sexual health, feminist pedagogy and LGBTQIA+ rights,” and that teachers receive specific and ongoing training in “sexual and reproductive health.”

According to the document, the objective is to avoid territorial inequalities and ensure that these contents do not depend on occasional or voluntary initiatives by individual schools.

The aim is to continue indoctrinating not only children but also teachers, and to standardize content across all regions so that parents cannot have options to educate their children according to their own values.

Read it.

When former President Barack Obama announced plans for his presidential center on Chicago’s South Side, he described it as a privately funded investment in the city that would give back to the community that shaped his political career.

And while construction of the brutalist eyesore itself remains privately financed through the Obama Foundation, taxpayers are footing the bill for massive infrastructure costs.

A review by Fox News found that state and city agencies have not produced a unified accounting of total public expenditures tied to the project’s surrounding infrastructure. While individual agencies have disclosed partial figures, no single office has reconciled those totals or clarified how they overlap.

Your tax dollars at work.

PsyPost—”The latest psychology and neuroscience discoveries”.

Oh, ya think?

Check it out.

Allegedly.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

Rituals come in many different forms and are practised in cultures the world over, but why have they become such an important part of our lives?

Because they reduce uncertainty. If you’ve done something once and it worked out well, you’d be stupid not to do it the same way that worked before. Duh.

When the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski visited the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea in the early 20th Century, he noted the elaborate preparations fishermen would make before setting out to sea. They would carefully paint their canoes with black, red and white paint, chanting spells as they did so. The vessel would be struck with wooden sticks, the bows stained with red ochre and crew members would adorn their arms with shells.

Malinowski recorded a long list of ceremonies and rituals the islanders would perform before venturing out onto the open sea. But when the fishermen went out into the nearby calm lagoon, they did not use these rites. Malinowski concluded that the “magic” rituals performed by the islanders were a response to help them cope with the unpredictable might of the Pacific Ocean.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

May was trying to ease public anxiety. Families were frightened for their sons in the submarine service. He told the assembled reporters that American submariners were surviving at high rates. The reason, he explained, was that the Japanese were setting their depth charges too shallow. The enemy’s weapons were going off well above where the submarines ran.

…

Clay Blair served as a submarine officer during WWII before becoming one of the most respected military historians of his generation. His 1975 book “Silent Victory” remains the definitive history of the Pacific submarine campaign. Blair documented Lockwood’s full assessment of what had happened.
After the war, Lockwood stated, “I consider that indiscretion cost us ten submarines and 800 officers and men.”

…

Early in the war, he developed a working relationship with Henry and Murray Garsson, two New York businessmen with no background in munitions who wanted defense contracts. May used his position as chairman to push Army ordnance officials and federal procurement figures toward the Garssons.
The brothers secured substantial contracts during the war. Cash payments found their way back to May. A Senate investigating committee uncovered the arrangement in the years after the war.
The investigation found the Garssons had made excessive profits while delivering faulty ammunition to the military. Their 4.2-inch mortar shells were fitted with defective fuses that caused premature detonation in the field. Those faulty rounds killed an estimated 38 American soldiers.

Sounds like a typical Democrat Congressman—both careless and corrupt.

Read it.

The commander of the Navy destroyer USS Truxtun was removed from the ship on Sunday, “due to a loss of confidence” in his ability to command, following the ship colliding with a supply vessel earlier this month.

This afternoon the Navy said that the head of Naval Forces Southern Command, Rear Adm. Carlos Sardiello, relieved Cmdr. James Koffi of command of the Truxtun. Cmdr. Taylor Auclair, previously with the U.S. Fleet Forces Command was named the interim commander of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. Koffi has been reassigned to Commander, Naval Surface Group Middle Atlantic.

As i predicted.

The USS Truxtun is only a few weeks into its deployment to the Caribbean, having left Naval Station Norfolk near the beginning of February (after a brief return to port for repairs). On Feb. 11, the ship was being replenished at sea by the oil supply ship the USNS Supply. Video taken onboard the Supply, and verified by the BBC, showed the Truxtun veering to starboard during the replenishment, hitting the oiler. The crash remains under investigation, the Navy said on Sunday.

Times News (UK).

“It’s really important that we protect British heritage. Christianity is a really important part of that heritage.”

Reform’s home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf outlines his party’s plan to block former Christian churches from being converted into other religious buildings.

Read it.

In a quiet corner of Lyon, a young man lies dead, his skull fractured by the boots of masked militants. Quentin Deranque, a nationalist student whose only crime was to stand in defence of women exercising their right to peaceful protest, has become the latest offering on the altar of left-wing fanaticism. The suspects charged with his murder are not lone wolves or aberrant criminals; they are the uniformed enforcers of La France Insoumise, men with direct ties to a far left wing parliamentary party and funded, indirectly, by the French taxpayer.

But as the French establishment begins to question its fifty-year-old assumption that the pariah of politics must always be the far right, we in Britain would do well to cast our gaze closer to home and begin rounding up the trolls of the far left for closer inspection by Prevent.

For the beast that stalked the streets of Lyon has a long pedigree on these shores. It often wears the mild-mannered guise of the Fabian, the academic Marxist, and the well-heeled Labour Party activist. And its philosophy, whether dressed in the tweed of the don, the Palestinian keffiyeh or the combat jacket of the Antifa thug, leads inexorably to the same destination: the doxxing, the intimidation, and ultimately, the grave.

Read it.

As the world watches unchecked immigration fundamentally transform the West, a growing backlash has gained a foothold – and it’s made it to the ballot box.

In Alberta, Canada, Premier Danielle Smith announced a referendum this fall to decide whether the province should limit the number of new international, temporary foreign workers and asylum seekers – as Alberta seeks to take charge of the issue amid a surge of proud Canadians who do not embrace change.

…

Meanwhile in Switzerland, a landmark vote is set for June 14 that would cap the nation’s population at 10 million from its current 9.1 million.

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
‘Til Turd World migrants swarm us all and murder in the street.

Read it.

The Spanish Government spent nearly €233,000 of public money on producing and printing 55,000 copies of a primary school book series titled Discovering Islam, according to documents released following a transparency request.

The material was commissioned under a 2009 agreement between the Pluralism and Coexistence Foundation and publisher Ediciones Akal. The foundation—created in 2005 under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist government and attached to the Presidency—covered the full cost of the project, which totalled €232,588 and was financed until 2012.

The print run included 5,000 copies for first-year pupils and 10,000 for each year from second to sixth grade. Distribution was handled by the publisher, meaning the foundation does not hold records of which schools ultimately received the books.

The foundation lists among its objectives the “recognition and accommodation of religious diversity.”

Read it.

As I reported last night, a Moroccan culture-enricher in the Italian town of Scandicci recently attacked and beheaded a woman from Germany.

Note: The weapon used in the grisly murder is said to be “a knife similar to a machete”. If the perpetrator had been a sub-Saharan African, we might reasonably assume it was an actual machete. However, when such killings are carried out by North Africans or Middle Easterners, a knife that looks like a machete is in most cases a kebab knife, so in this case that’s what it probably was.

The following video accompanied the article posted by the Italian TV news channel Sky TG24. It contains additional information, including the names of the perpetrator and his victim.

Read it.

Did the far left ever really believe its own rhetoric when it came to climate change? True, when it comes to the positions staked out by any politician on the issues of the day, the age-old question is constantly in the back of everyone’s minds: How much of what they claim to believe is based on heartfelt, core convictions, and how much is due to outside political pressure or geared toward generating contributions?

But nowhere is this question more pertinent than when it comes to politicians and their advocacy for climate change. Why? Because it’s difficult to think of anything that comes close to rivaling the number of government mandates implemented and the amount of taxpayer dollars allocated to reshape society as has happened in the name of climate change. Surely, it wasn’t all based on empty rhetoric and misdirection, was it?

Far-left environmental and climate change groups have significantly increased their political spending over the years. In turn, election after election features liberal politicians hammering away on the alleged damage done by the fossil fuel industry. In 2024 they were at it again, highlighting the latest scary predictions about the worst-case climate change scenarios, and fervently warning of the untold horrors that would happen if Donald Trump and Republicans won in 2024.

Guess what? Once more, it all fell flat with most voters. Trump won the presidency, Republicans kept control of both the House and Senate, and across the nation GOP dominance continued in state government.

Read it.

This will one day link with the existing “military Schengen” between the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland, which Belgium and France plan to join, for creating a contiguous zone of free military movement between the Pyrenees and the approach to St. Petersburg.

The Baltic States’ Defense Ministers signed a statement of intent in late January for forming their own “military Schengen”, which refers to the agreement signed two years ago in January 2024 between the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland for expediting the flow of troops and equipment. Belgium and France are also expected to join the original “military Schengen”, whose members aim to slash to 3-5 days the estimated 45 days that it currently takes to send the aforesaid from the Atlantic to the Eastern Flank.

Upon their modernization, both in terms of infrastructure and legal coordination, the two “military Schengens” will form a contiguous zone of free military movement between the Pyrenees and the approach to St. Petersburg. To be sure, this is a work in progress that won’t be completed anytime soon, especially its Baltic portion. Poland only just opened the portion of the “Via Baltica” highway between itself and Lithuania, while the “Rail Baltica” between them and Estonia is even further behind schedule.

Newsbusters.

The Telegraph (UK).

France has condemned the United States’s intervention over the killing of a hard-Right activist in Lyon and will summon its ambassador, the foreign minister said on Sunday.

Jean-Noël Barrot said he plans to summon Charles Kushner, 71, whose son Jared is married to Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, after the US state department said the death of Quentin Deranque “should concern us all”.

“We refuse to allow this tragedy, which has plunged a French family into mourning, to be exploited for political ends,” Mr Barrot said during a TV interview with Franceinfo on Sunday.

Touched a nerve, did he?

The Times (UK).

The government’s head of propriety and ethics was appointed without external competition in apparent breach of government hiring rules, The Times can reveal.

Jobs in the “senior civil service” must be advertised openly and be subject to a competitive recruitment process under rules introduced by the previous government. The policy is designed to attract more talent and to avoid top mandarins being drawn from a small group of officials.

Ellen Atkinson, who previously served as the government’s head of major events, was appointed as the new director general, propriety, ethics and constitution, replacing Darren Tierney, who moved to run the Office for National Statistics last year.

While the appointment was not advertised, the rules allow for a minister to give written permission to circumvent the policy if circumstances require the role be filled immediately. No such permission was recorded, an FoI request by The Times reveals.

Britain under Labour is a good preview of what a future Democrat administration would look like.

JPMorgan Concedes it Closed Trump’s Accounts after Jan. 6

JPMorgan Admits It Shut Trump’s Accounts After Jan. 6 Capitol Attack (Rob Copeland/New York Times)  Probably seemed like a safe thing to do.

Trump has other tariff tricks up his sleeve (The New Neo).

CBS News is convulsing as Larry Ellison tries to please Trump (Margaret Sullivan/The Guardian)

Trump’s Trade Gamble Will Continue, Despite Supreme Court Rebuke (Ana Swanson/New York Times)

60% disapprove of Trump ahead of State of the Union, Post-ABC poll finds (Washington Post)  Of course they do.

Global Watchdog Claims US Could Lose “Democracy Status” Because Of Trump These self-appointed ‘watchdogs’ think quite a bit of themselves.

Secret Service: Armed Man Shot and Killed after Entering Mar-a-Lago Secure Perimeter

21-Year-Old Male Identified As Shotgun-Wielding Mar-a-Lago Intruder

Can the pardon power be saved from its own abusers? (Mike Fox/The Hill)

Is This the Most Important Supreme Court Case of the Century? (David French/New York Times)  David French cements his Woke credentials.

“Devastating” Discovery: New Docs Confirm JPMorgan De-Banked Trump Shortly After Jan 6th Capitol Chaos

The hidden ICE blueprint that should horrify every American (Will Bunch/The Philadelphia Inquirer)  Will Bunch loses his shit.

Read it.

God is angry at the Other Left Coast. When will they take the hint?

Christian Heilmann.

Tell that to OnlyFans.

As part of my job, I have to keep up with the social media space and I’m worried, bored and annoyed in equal measures. There is not much social about it any longer. Instead it’s become a race to the bottom of lowest common denominator content. And interaction bait. Or rage bait. Or just obvious spam disguised in seemingly sophisticated sound bites generated by AI. I never thought I would miss listicles and “50 things you didn’t know about X – number 16 will surprise you” posts, but these at least were obvious.

The problem is that social media has become a game of numbers much like SEO used to be. Posting because you learned something, found something interesting or created something has given way to feeding the machine for more clicks and interactions. The reason is monetisation. The rules of the platforms discourage creativity and authenticity and prefer short-lived bursts of emotion. Keep the noise flowing, signals are not in fashion any longer.

When I had some highly successful posts on Facebook, I automatically got “promoted” to “digital creator” which is such a generic term, it makes me want to stop altogether.

I don’t want to be a “digital creator”. I also don’t want to be a “content creator”. Either sound to me like you should create anything to fill up the platform. It’s stacking digital shelves with empty boxes, not creation. And it’s about deception. Take the following examples that should be punished and removed by Facebook but despite reporting them over and over again, you keep seeing them.

The advantage of ‘content creator’ is that it’s an anodyne term that sounds as if it tells you something without being at all specific about what that thing might be. It hides the role of the paid vagina on OnlyFans as well as the ‘influencer’ whose only ‘content’ is make-up videos or sponsored shopping expeditions. It would be like me descibing myself, during my data-warehouse-developer days, as a ‘writer’.

The Verge.

Accessory maker Elecom has announced what it’s claiming to be the first consumer-ready power bank that uses a sodium-ion battery instead of a lithium-ion one, as spotted by Notebookcheck. In addition to being more environmentally friendly to manufacture, the 9,000mAh Na Plus can be used in extreme temperatures with less risk of overheating, and has — Elecom claims — a lifespan of almost 5,000 charges. Even if you’re recharging it every single day, after 13 years it should still be providing power.

Jeff Geerling.

This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died.

I bought a Bosch 500 series because that’s what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock.

After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that that, along with features like delayed start and eco mode, require an app.

Not only that, to use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to WiFi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then, and only then, can you start using all the features on the dishwasher.

I always check for that before buying something. I would not buy such a product. (I do have a Bosch dishwasher, because I think them one of the best brands going, but the one I have works without an app.)

The Gothamist.

As far as enduring New York City icons go, sky-high sandwiches are right up there with pizza, the Statue of Liberty, rats and Carrie Bradshaw. And right now, they’re having a major moment.

Let’s begin with the Mama’s Too Chicken Alla Vodka sandwich — arguably New York’s current social media champ in the big-sammy category — which combines cutlets, vodka sauce, pesto and burrata for a “messy and beautiful” handheld that could get you “a bit turned on.”

I’ve also seen and heard talk of the “dumb-good” Gargiulo Burger, a roast beef plus patty plus broth creation at Brennan & Carr in Sheepshead Bay that had one guy invoking the Sign of the Cross and murmuring about the “terrible things” it made him want to do.

The obvious quibble is that these aren’t ‘too big to eat’, merely ‘too big to eat at one time’. This is like the ‘giant economy size’ packages of Stuff in grocery stores—businesses like to sell in what are to them profitable quantities, so they either give you a break on the price-per-component-unit or just make the minimum size from which they can profit into the minimum size that you can buy.

Mr & Mrs Psmith’s Bookshelf:

LLMs, when working exactly as intended, enable human falsehood — because our society relies on written records as proof of work. Until recently that was fine, because writing down lies actually used to be pretty hard: putting together a convincing false report from scratch — maintenance records for the airplane you’re about to board, say, or a radiologist’s report on your brain scan — was almost as time-consuming as actually checking the things that were supposed to checked and then documenting them, and the liar had to spend the whole time aware of their own dishonesty. (Not that this stops everyone, of course.) But now that it takes about two clicks to generate an inspector’s report for the house you’re considering buying, or the pathologist’s findings in your biopsy, how much are you going to trust that they actually looked?

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it.

California’s ‘train-to-nowhere’ program started with a $10 billion budget in 2009 which shot up to $135 billion with no end in sight. The Trump administration has tried to cut off billions in federal funds for the money pit on rails and there are signs that even state voters are growing sick of it.

But California Democrats had an answer.

Around the same time that the CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, was arrested on suspicion of domestic battery after an appearance with Gov. Gavin Newsom celebrating the progress of the ‘train-to-nowhere’, Democrats were moving forward a bill to ban the public from getting crucial information about the project whose budget is more than 5 times that of NASA.

Read it.

For reasons that are not yet clear, a Moroccan culture-enricher attacked and beheaded a woman in the Italian town of Scandicci, which lies just southwest of Florence. According to this English-language article (hat tip Reader From Chicago), the victim is a German woman, but her identity has yet to be confirmed.

The article below does not identify the perpetrator. However, a video accompanying the article says he is a 30-year-old from Morocco named Issam Chlih. It’s possible that I may eventually post a subtitled version of the video.

Read it.

“Public” broadcasting demonstrates how dramatically one-sided it is by allowing only one side of the “LGBTQIA+” debate — because they believe there should be no debate. There is no defensible position in opposition. On Saturday’s Consider This podcast, National Public Radio spent more than 11 minutes mourning the Trump administration’s decision to remove transgender troops from service.

The star of the story was Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former general in charge of troops in Afghanistan under President Obama — until he ripped the adminstration in a Rolling Stone profile. Then he had to go. But since then, McChrystal has become an opponent of Trump, and endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024, so he’s good again.

You’ll notice that these ‘transgender troops’ are almost always men pretending to be women, rarely women pretending to be men.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism.

When The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that up to 20,000 ISIS-affiliated detainees had disappeared from Syria’s al-Hol camp, it wasn’t describing a routine breach. It was describing the possible unraveling of one of the most consequential counterterrorism containment systems built after the fall of the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate in 2019.

I’ve been conducting interviews over the past ten months with various communities in Syria. And in the past two weeks—based on interviews with U.S. and European intelligence officials, military liaisons, and observers inside Syria—I confirmed that between 15,000 and 20,000 individuals formerly held at al-Hol are no longer under centralized control. In counterterrorism terms, that is not a leak; it is a structural rupture.

Al-Hol concentrated a dangerous ecosystem—families, facilitators, recruiters, and children raised inside extremist ideology—into one place that could be monitored. The camp was volatile and often inhumane, but containment prevented dispersion into fragile terrain where ISIS cells still operate.

The Times (UK).

Down a pedestrianised alleyway in an affluent London suburb, as residents enjoyed their morning coffees, two men walked up to a family-run jewellers and smashed a sledgehammer into the front window.

Within 60 seconds, they had accessed the rows of jewellery on display in Gregory & Co, throwing handfuls of silver and gold into a bag as bewildered staff, who hadonly recently opened up, tried to save what they could.

The attack in Richmond upon Thames was one of a string of “smash and grabs” that have taken place across London in recent months. The Metropolitan Police says the “spike” is down to rising prices of precious metals, as well as a strong second-hand market for designer goods, particularly in Dubai.

In America, that would get you shot. But Britain banned personal firearms long ago.

Read it.

Faced with that, I’d just stay home. He can shovel the snow himself.

Read it.

The U.S. Department of Education has agreed to rewrite the exclusionary race-based eligibility rules of a federal student scholarship program, resolving a lawsuit filed against the program.