Read it.

“Europe’s own regulatory architecture turned off Europe’s own energy supply. And America. . . on the other side of the Atlantic with a full tank of gas, watched it happen.”

– Jeff Childers

Let’s pause for a moment amid all the excitement to address an abiding mystery of these times: why does the news media seem to be rooting for American failure in the Iran operation? Or more generally, how did the media become handmaiden to the Lefty-left and all its ancillaries? How were they lured into their Cloward-Piven bunker of crypto-Marxian “resistance”?

Ben Shapiro.

Don’t fall for the propaganda. Iran is not holding its own in this conflict. It is being systematically dismantled.

One by one, the senior figures of the Islamic Republic have been eliminated: generals, security chiefs and regime power brokers. The country’s leadership has been decapitated at the highest levels, leaving behind a hollowed-out command structure struggling to function.

Even the regime’s attempts at continuity appear shaky. A successor was hastily elevated, but reports suggest instability, absence and internal disarray at the very top. Whatever facade of order Tehran hoped to project has given way to uncertainty and silence.

Meanwhile, the military picture is equally stark. Iran’s command-and-control systems have been fractured. Its missile and drone capabilities – once touted as pillars of deterrence – have been severely degraded. What remains is not a coordinated campaign but sporadic, diminished retaliation.

Newsbusters.

The media’s love for Republicans who become Democrats is not confined to the Trump era. Before the Trump era there was former GOP senator-turned Obama Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, and he joined CNN International/PBS anchor Christiane Amanpour on Thursday’s Amanpour and Company to discuss current Secretary Pete Hegseth’s record as a wartime leader. As Amanpour invented a non-existent scandal about executing prisoners of war, Hagel alleged the U.S. is “manufacturing a whole new generation of young terrorists in the Middle East.”

No, Islam is manufacturing a whole new generation of terrorists in the Middle East. It does so automatically.

Newsbusters.

On Saturday’s The Weekend: Primetime, MS NOW co-host Catherine Rampell made a stunning admission, recalling that 90 percent of the anti-Semitic hate mail she receives comes from the left. This revelation came as she made an unusual effort to provide balance during a segment focused on anti-Semitism within the Republican party.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

As left-leaning New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg appeared to discuss her recent article on the subject, she accused President Donald Trump of causing a surge in anti-Semitism in young Republicans:

Proglodyte Projection: When the Left accuses you of doing they they do … and when they accuse you of planning to do what they’re planning to do.

Science News.

The sperm whale is an endangered species. A major reason is that the whale oil is heat-resistant and chemically and physically stable. This makes it useful for lubricating delicate machinery. The only substitute is expensive carnauba wax from the leaves of palm trees that grow only in Brazil … [but] wax from the seeds of the jojoba, an evergreen desert shrub, is nearly as good.

After sperm whale oil was banned in the early 1970s, the United States sought to replenish its reserves with eco-friendly oil from jojoba seeds (SN: 5/17/75, p. 335). Jojoba oil’s chemical structure is nearly identical to that of sperm whale oil, and the shrub is native to some North American desert ecosystems, making the plant an appealing replacement. Today, jojoba shrubs are cultivated around the world on almost every continent. Jojoba oil is used in hundreds of products, including cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, adhesives and lubricants. Meanwhile, sperm whale populations have started to recover under international anti-whaling agreements (SN: 2/27/21, p. 4).

Read it.

There is something unique about the color purple: Our brain makes it up. So you might just call purple a pigment of our imagination.

Yuk yuk yuk….

It’s also a fascinating example of how the brain creates something beautiful when faced with a systems error.

To understand where purple comes from, we need to know how our eyes and brain work together to perceive color. And that all begins with light.

Read it.

tl;dr:

1. Defer US taxes by reinvesting your taxable income into the economy as business expenses, depreciating assets, etc.
2. For your leveraged investments, pay yourself in refinanced cash when your investments appreciate and/or credit rates drop.

Think of the Tax Code a evolution in action.

Read it.

No matter where you look, a bell curve is close by.

Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will conform to a bell curve. Record 100 people’s guesses at the number of jelly beans in a jar, and they’ll follow a bell curve. Measure enough women’s heights, men’s weights, SAT scores, marathon times — you’ll always get the same smooth, rounded hump that tapers at the edges.

Why does the bell curve pop up in so many datasets?

Read it.

There are over a hundred million online shops. That number is not a typo. Between Shopify stores, WooCommerce sites, regional marketplaces, and every DTC brand that set up a storefront in the last decade, the supply side of e-commerce is enormous.

And yet, when you want to buy something, you go to Amazon. Or Google. Maybe you open three tabs, compare prices, squint at shipping policies, and give up. The experience of actually exploring what is out there is terrible.

This always struck me as strange. The internet was supposed to make everything accessible. Instead it made everything available but almost nothing discoverable.

Check it out.

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

I recommend channel 18. Channel 19 is not bad, either.

Channel 24 looks the way MTV used to. Sometimes the old ways are best.

Newsweek, a Voice of the Crust.

Contrary to what you might have seen in the Narrative Media.

ScienceAlert.

A seismic shift in the selection pressures acting on humans may have brought us to a major turning point in our evolutionary journey.

According to multiple teams of scientists, human culture – technology, medicine, and our remarkable collaborative problem-solving skills – may now be shaping human evolution more than environmental pressures and the limitations of our bodies.

This is because the solutions we invent to make our lives easier, from central heating to contact lenses, can solve biological challenges far faster than evolution can, reducing the pressure for genetic adaptation.

“Human evolution seems to be changing gears,” said cultural evolution researcher Tim Waring of the University of Maine, who co-authored a study on the subject published in September 2025.

“When we learn useful skills, institutions, or technologies from each other, we are inheriting adaptive cultural practices. On reviewing the evidence, we find that culture solves problems much more rapidly than genetic evolution. This suggests our species is in the middle of a great evolutionary transition.”

Unmentioned in the article is the fact that our stupid people are outbreeding our intelligent people. Advanced technology and cultural softheartedness interferes with natural selection weeding out the unfit and the inferior.

New York Post.

A ritzy Los Angeles enclave is seeing their wealth wiped out as bungling Democratic state leaders have failed to act while a massive landslide accelerates — leaving their homes teetering on the edge of a cliff.

Residents of the posh coastal city of Rancho Palos Verdes tore into Gov. Gavin Newsom for sinking critical legislation that would help protect properties in the idyllic community 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

Peter Pettler, 83, told The California Post that he’s seen the value of his sprawling 2,700-square-foot ranch-style home plummet in value from $2.5 million to just $515,000.

He was once even offered a pathetic $5,000 for his four-bedroom, four-bathroom manor.

The Telegraph (UK).

American A-10 attack jets screamed low over the Strait of Hormuz to hunt Iranian speedboats racing through the narrow waterway.

Apache helicopters joined the assault, and 5,000lb bombs struck underground weapons sites across southern Iran, the US said.

They wanted to destroy Iran’s fast-attack boats and missile bases, which had been targeting passing oil tankers, with the goal of reopening the vital shipping lane and ending the global energy crisis.

But the main threat to shipping may be one that American jets cannot see or easily target: a small fleet of Iranian midget submarines designed for the shallow, murky waters of the Gulf.

Iran has up to 10 Ghadir-class midget submarines, which are roughly a tenth the size of conventional attack submarines at 120 tons in weight and 29m in length.

About the size of a narco-sub.

The Telegraph (UK).

An Islamic leader has backed the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage after they criticised a mass prayer session for Muslim men in Trafalgar Square.

Writing for The Telegraph (see below), Dr Taj Hargey said he found the open-air worship on Monday, attended by hundreds of men, including Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, “disturbing”.

He agreed with Nick Timothy, the shadow justice secretary, who described the event, organised by the Ramadan Tent Project, as an “act of domination and division” in an article for The Telegraph on Tuesday.

Historically, when Muslims conquered some place, they would mark the occasion with public prayers in the conquered territory. They expecially love turning Christian churches into mosques, as with Hagia Sopia in Constantinople.

The Telegraph (UK).

When Donald Trump boasts that America’s military is bigger and better than anyone else’s in Nato, he can point to the USS Gerald R Ford. Costing nearly £10bn, the 100,000-tonne aircraft carrier is the largest and most expensive warship in the world. Its 25 decks carry 4,500 personnel and 75 aircraft, allowing it to project US air and sea power anywhere in the world.

It does, however, appear to have a weak spot: its laundry and toilet facilities. Having been sent to the Red Sea to act as a launch platform for Trump’s bombing campaign against Iran, it has now been diverted to Crete for repairs, following a fire in the ship’s launderette which raged for more than 30 hours before it was extinguished.

There are also reports that sabotage may have been involved – not by Iranian undercover operatives, but by crew members disgruntled that their standard six-month tour of duty has been extended for the Gulf operation. To make matters worse, the ship’s toilets have been constantly breaking down and clogging up with sewage.

The U.S. needs more carriers, and can’t afford to build more gold-plated crap like the Ford.

Read it.

The Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one miles wide. Two shipping channels, each two miles across, separated by a two-mile buffer. There is no alternative. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline to Yanbu and the UAE’s pipeline to Fujairah can handle maybe five million barrels combined. The math doesn’t work. The bottleneck is not political. It is geological and hydrographic.

Every TV analyst in America is talking about minesweepers and carrier strike groups. They are asking the wrong questions. The binding constraint on Hormuz was never a minefield or insurance. It is the US Navy’s willingness and ability to reopen it.

Every talking point suggests the White House and Navy are working hard to reopen the strait but progress is slow. A new posts on Truth Social suggests we may have to considet a new hypothesis.

“I wonder what would happen if we “finished off” what’s left of the Iranian Terror State, and let the Countries that use it, we don’t, be responsible for the so called Strait?” wrote President Trump in a psot this morning. “That would get some of our non-responsive “Allies” in gear, and fast!!!”

Read it.

Between 5,000 and 14,000 years ago, the Sahara Desert looked nothing like it does today. It was lush and green, with lakes and rivers supporting a variety of animals—including humans.

But who were these ancient ancestors? And where do they fit on the human family tree?

Researchers think they finally have some answers to these questions. They’ve successfully analyzed the DNA of two naturally mummified livestock herders who died roughly 7,000 years ago in present-day Libya, which was part of what’s known as the “green Sahara.”

Their analyses revealed a previously unknown—and largely genetically distinct—population of ancient humans, according to a new paper published this month in the journal Nature.

The individuals who lived in the green Sahara showed “no significant genetic influence from sub-Saharan populations to the south or Near Eastern and prehistoric European groups to the north,” says study co-author Johannes Krause, a geneticist at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, to Reuters’ Will Dunham.

“This suggests they remained genetically isolated despite practicing animal husbandry—a cultural innovation that originated outside Africa,” Krause adds.

Read it.

Familiar to anyone who pays attention to vintage aesthetics, I’m embarrassed to say it’s taken me 40 years to learn the name of the beloved typographic symbol that been guiding the way for centuries. Alas, that beloved inked symbol in the shape of a pointing hand (often used to draw attention to a section of text) is known as the manicule. Elegant name, n’est ce pas. Once you know the name, this little hand that has survived the march of time can take you down the rabbit hole from the age of quills to the era of cursors. So let’s follow the hand…

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Geothermal power stations are mature technology with proven performance, reliable operation and ideal for baseload generation. The units are synchronous, so they support the grid. The production from them is considered by most to be renewable. They do not use fossil fuels to provide the heat. It is not “carbon free”, but no generation truly is. It has a relatively small footprint, environment harm is low, and it can coexist with farming or industrial development. Most developments have a cheaper energy cost than onshore wind, using published accounts for analysis. For countries or areas where the resource is there, geothermal generation is very viable.

Read it.

Working in the field of genetics is a bizarre experience. No one seems to be interested in the most interesting applications of their research.

We’ve spent the better part of the last two decades unravelling exactly how the human genome works and which specific letter changes in our DNA affect things like diabetes risk or college graduation rates. Our knowledge has advanced to the point where, if we had a safe and reliable means of modifying genes in embryos, we could literally create superbabies. Children that would live multiple decades longer than their non-engineered peers, have the raw intellectual horsepower to do Nobel prize worthy scientific research, and very rarely suffer from depression or other mental health disorders.

The scientific establishment, however, seems to not have gotten the memo. If you suggest we engineer the genes of future generations to make their lives better, they will often make some frightened noises, mention “ethical issues” without ever clarifying what they mean, or abruptly change the subject. It’s as if humanity invented electricity and decided the only interesting thing to do with it was make washing machines.

I didn’t understand just how dysfunctional things were until I attended a conference on polygenic embryo screening in late 2023. I remember sitting through three days of talks at a hotel in Boston, watching prominent tenured professors in the field of genetics take turns misrepresenting their own data and denouncing attempts to make children healthier through genetic screening. It is difficult to convey the actual level of insanity if you haven’t seen it yourself.

As a direct consequence, there is low-hanging fruit absolutely everywhere. You can literally do novel groundbreaking research on germline engineering as an internet weirdo with an obsession and sufficient time on your hands. The scientific establishment is too busy with their washing machines to think about light bulbs or computers.

Read it.

f active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

It is the same story across top publishers today.

Read it.

The democratization and subsequent ubiquity of 3D printers have enabled almost any home enthusiast to produce utilities and products previously only attainable to large factories with big equipment. “You can 3D print those nowadays” has become a common utterance. Even still, it’s safe to say that our bingo cards did not predict a techie making a shoulder-mounted, 3D printed guided missile system for all of $96.

In a five-minute YouTube video, Alisher Khojayev goes over the basics of this Stinger-like creation, comprising the launcher, the actual missile, and even an optional camera node tracking system for added tracking capabilities. Most of the missile’s major parts are 3D printed, while the electronics bits are cheap, widely available microprocessors and sensors. All the gear is tied down and wired with off-the-shelf hardware store parts, too.

Q: Does a bear shit in the woods?
A: Apparently not.

Read it.

Yep, Karen here allegedly took a piece of lumber with a rusty nail and attempted to scratch the crap out of the dude’s Cybertruck. The owner was shocked because this happened well after all of the Tesla attacks last year.

Looks transgender to me…

Read it.

Belgium’s coastline has become the latest front in a high-stakes game of tactical evasion, as human traffickers appear to be shifting operations away from heavily monitored French border zones.

During a major joint operation on Thursday night, federal and local police rescued 19 migrants from a dinghy in difficulty off the resort of De Haan—an unusual location far east of traditional launch points.

While arrests were made and smuggling equipment, including outboard motors and fuel, was seized, the “cat-and-mouse” nature of the crisis is increasingly stretching local resources.

Governor Carl Decaluwé of West Flanders has issued a blunt warning: with the Easter holidays approaching, he refuses to allow a situation where “small boats carrying migrants are sailing among the surfers.”

Citing reports that around 80 migrants travelled from Dunkirk into Belgium by public transport, Decaluwé has floated closing the border with France or introducing systematic checks.

Read it.

I would like to propose that we all agree that American military leadership is not stupid, and that Israeli military leadership is also not stupid. We should all agree they would not undertake any mission without a plan. This should not be a difficult debate. The military does not undertake the mission of going to lunch without 3 contingency plans.

The military leadership knew better than anyone that history is without an example of a regime being brought down solely by air power. They duly informed political leadership of this historical fact, and political leadership instructed them to do the best they could.

Will they succeed? Too soon to say. It is not too soon to say, however, that political opponents sound like morons when they accuse the military of not having “a plan”. They sound like defeatists in proclaiming failure because total regime collapse has not happened in 3 days, 10 days, or 18 days.

Iran is a country twice the size of Texas with 90 million educated, smart people, who have financed a state-of-the-art oppressive regime with billions of dollars from oil sales. Only a cockeyed optimist (such as myself) could believe regime change could ever be achieved. Only a disingenuous idiot would insist that final judgement on the project should be proclaimed after two weeks.

One rule of warfare is keep your plans secret. That also means never tell your plans to the Armchair Generals in Congress.

And never—no, NEVER—tell your plan to a Democrat.

Quillette.

Iran has never confined its interference in other countries to the Middle East, nor have its activities been restricted to attacks on Israel. Long before the horrors of 7 October 2023, Argentina had already become a target of the Islamic Republic.

On 17 March 1992, a suicide bomber drove a Ford F-100 pickup truck packed with explosives into the Israeli embassy in the Retiro neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. The blast destroyed the embassy building and surrounding structures, including a Catholic church and a school, killing 29 people and injuring more than 200. The victims included both Israeli embassy staff and Argentine citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.

Responsibility for the attack was immediately claimed by a group known as Islamic Jihad Organisation, a Lebanese Shia militia widely believed to have links to Hezbollah and the Iranian state. Their stated motive was revenge for the assassination of Abbas al-Musawi, Secretary General of Hezbollah, which Israel had carried out a month earlier, on 16 February. (Musawi was replaced by Hassan Nasrallah, who was also assassinated by the Jewish state, on 27 September 2024).

Read it.

And there was much rejoicing.

Different people believe in different things. Some believe that we go to paradise after we die. Others that we disappear into cosmic dust. But environmentalist prophet Paul Ehrlich believed mankind would be reduced to cannibalism unless we stopped having children. Right away.

And Ehrlich never gave up hope of seeing cannibalism in his lifetime.

In ‘The Population Bomb’, the 1968 bestseller that became one of the foundational texts of the environmentalist movement and helped inspire the population reduction industry, Ehrlich opened with the statement that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

After going through a dozen printings, later editions postponed the mass deaths and Armageddons to a safely more ambiguous, at least for the era, time “the 1970s and 1980s”.

It got less cheerful from there.

Read it.

A reminder that “Somaliland” is the breakaway northern region, ignored by the rest of the world, where law and order prevails and people are relative ly prosperous—not “Somalia”, the poverty-stricken and clan-warfare-ridden eastern region, where there is no government to speak of but the UN keeps wasting money on ‘humanitarian aid’.

Let’s see – it’s been close to seven years since I wrote my first post on the subject of Omar’s marriage to her alleged brother. I deemed the evidence very plausible although unproven. The Powerline bloggers had already been on the case for quite some time and were quite convincing. But it was still treated as a wild and nasty slur.

Now we have the breakaway country of Somaliland saying that yes, it’s true – and also that her father was one of the oppressors, not the oppressed. I had started hearing that charge more recently; maybe a year or two ago?

I don’t think anything will come of this. One reason is that, even if there was fraud involved on Omar’s immigration application, it would have been on the part of her family, since she was about thirteen when she came to this country (at least according to Wiki). Even if proven, her immigration fraud in marrying her brother to help him would not invalidate her own status, according to my understanding of the law.

Nevertheless, it’s not a good look. Somaliland posts some documents here.

The New Neo.

I think many “high net worth” people are immune to Hochul’s guilt-tripping. If you make taxes too high for the wealthy, a significant number will leave. They are rich, and it’s relatively easy for them to do. Why not try to attract them instead? It might even raise more revenue if you more of them at a lower tax rate rather than fewer at a higher tax rate.

Bloomberg, a Voice of the Crust.

Residents exiting Massachusetts took a net of $4.2 billion in adjusted gross income with them in 2023, one of the largest totals in the country, after a tax on millionaires took effect.

FA, FO.

Read it.

The Orwellian horror of Hochul’s New York led directly to an unprecedented flight of intelligent citizens and wealthy business owners. NY experienced a net lost of nearly 1 million residents from 2020 to 2023. But it didn’t stop there.

Draconian pandemic mandates were not the only reason for the exodus. The state’s crushing tax requirements post-covid have also inspired another 250,000 net loss of citizens from 2024 through 2025. The state taxes are nearly three times higher than the national average. Property taxes are 45% higher and the cost of living is around 50% higher than the national average.

Furthermore, depending on the market sector, taxes on businesses run 50% to 100% higher than the national average. On top of all this, Democrats in the legislature have consistently pushed for a wealth tax or “millionaires tax”; an action which Hochul opposes, but only because she sees the writing on the wall and is a bit smarter compared to fanatical socialists like Zohran Mamdani.

During a Q&A last week at Politico’s New York Agenda: Albany Summit, the Governor surprised with a rare moment of clarity (or honesty) when she admitted that the state’s tax base had been eroded. She essentially begged for wealthy taxpayers to come back from red states like Florida and support New York’s social welfare programs. Recent data shows that NYC spent $81,000 per homeless person in 2025 – That’s higher that the annual income of 65% of all hard working NYC residents.

Hochul also lamented the fact that high income taxpayers are “no longer captive” and are able to relocate with ease.

Read it.

A British Physical Education teacher has been indefinitely banned from the classroom after daring to state that migrants should respect Britain’s laws, culture, and way of life — or leave.

Sam Everett taught at Haughton Academy in Darlington for two years. Someone identified his X account, reported him to the school, and triggered an investigation into his political views.

The independent Teaching Regulation Agency panel that heard the case cleared him of racism and sexism, praised his unblemished teaching record, noted colleague endorsements, and recommended he keep his job. Publication of the findings alone would suffice as punishment, they ruled.

Read it.

It was a case that captured the nation’s attention 20 years ago. In March of 2006, a black stripper accused three members of Duke University’s nearly all-white lacrosse team of rape. The only evidence for the crime was her own testimony, which changed repeatedly. It didn’t matter that every other eyewitness disputed the rape claim. An opportunistic district attorney, a vengeful cop, a feminist nurse, and a ravenous media were all ready to believe the Duke lacrosse rape, and that was enough to make it “truth” in the public eye for much of 2006.

The Duke lacrosse hoax offered a preview of America’s coming social conflicts in the age of woke. Imagined racial grievance, feminism, and belief in “white privilege” all fueled this story. The media was all too eager to buy it. Journalists wanted to believe it was true to show that white men are the real menace to society. It was a story too “good” to pass up. It was also a story too “good” to be true.

No lessons were learned from the Duke lacrosse case. We would see similar lies play out with Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Rolling Stone’s infamous “A Rape on Campus” story. While District Attorney Mike Nifong paid a high price for his reckless pursuit of the case, the media and activists who aided him suffered no real consequences. Hate hoaxes would flourish as a result.

Read it.

Throughout the First World, and, particularly in the US, there is an increasing consciousness that fiat currency, far from being the solution to economic problems, is, in fact, a cause of them.

There are even those who, over the years, have predicted that the continued massive creation of fiat dollars may well lead to price controls, destruction of savings, looting, riots and, possibly, even revolution. A decade ago, such predictions were regarded by most as nonsense. Today, all of these eventualities seem more likely, although there still remains a strong contingent (possibly even a majority) who believe that, “It can’t happen here.”

What is ‘money’? Money is two things:

1. A store of value. When people produce more than they need, or more than they can trade for something they need, they put the extra aside for a rainy day. If I grow more tomatoes than I can eat, or that I can trade to my neighbors for potatoes or strawberries, then I can ‘can’ them (put them up in mason jars) so they will keep longer and be available should I want to eat them or trade them in the future.
2. A medium of exchange. If I have ‘canned’ tomatoes that will keep for a while, then later on I can trade them to my neighbors for stuff that they have and for which they are willing to accept ‘canned’ tomatoes in exchange. My neighbor might hate tomatoes but know people who don’t and might take them in trade, so the ‘canned tomatoes standard’ is an effective currency.

Everything proceeds from those two facts. Of course, tomatoes have intrinsic value—I can eat them, and people that I trade them to can eat them—unlike a paper dollar. BUT I can’t eat gold or silver, either; popular mythology aside, neither gold nor silver has any use value (unless you are an artist). Just like a paper dollar, gold or silver are ‘valuable’ because a lot of people will accept them in trade for stuff that is actually useful.

When I was a young man living in New York City in the early 1970s, I usually carried a pocket full of ‘New York money’: subway tokens. Such tokens cost 25 cents and were good for a subway ride. Almost everybody in New York rode the subway every day, so almost everybody in New York would accept a subway token place of a quarter. By itself, a subway token was useless—a pretty piece of metal. But it would get you a subway ride anywhere in the city, and so it had a kind of use value.

The problem with ‘fiat currency’ is that producing it is always cheap and easy; it’s basically just an IOU.  The problem comes when the government wants to trade them for actual goods and services, in effect trading what is effectively nothing for what is actually something. This works because the government has guns and if you won’t ‘trade’ your goods and services for government paper, they will just take them anyway and leave you with the paper.

The Telegraph (UK).

Channel migrants deported to France under the “one in, one out” deal have returned to Britain hidden in lorries.

Yeah, saw that coming.

At least four people who were flown back to France after reaching the UK on small boats across the Channel re-entered in lorries in the past two weeks.

Two have been detained by Home Office immigration enforcement officers and two are living at unknown locations in London, according to The Guardian, which first revealed the returnees.

The British government has descended to Turd World levels of incompetence.

The Telegraph (UK).

Australia’s prime minister was forced into a back-door escape from one of the country’s largest mosques on Friday after being called a “genocide supporter” and a “putrid dog”.

Rather ironic, Muslims calling a non-Muslim ‘genocide supporter’.

The confrontation at Lakemba Mosque, in Sydney’s southwest, turned a religious celebration marking the end of Ramadan into a political revolt.

Anthony Albanese, the prime minister, attended alongside Tony Burke, the home affairs minister, and sat in silence as the event descended into chaos.

Video footage shows a man shouting “genocide supporters!” directly at the leaders, while others scream: “Why is he in here? Get him out of here!” Some of the other attendees, however, appeared welcoming to the political leaders.

The War Zone.

Few people know the Middle East as well as Joseph Votel. From March 2016 to March 2019, the retired Army general served as the commander of U.S. Central Command, overseeing American military operations in the region. A big part of that job was planning for contingencies like what would become Operation Epic Fury, and especially how they would affect the massively strategic waterway that joins the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman — the tumultuous Strait of Hormuz. This waterway, in which about 20% of the world’s oil passes, is currently shut down by Iran.

In the first part of our wide-ranging exclusive interview with Votel, we focus on what is happening in the Strait. The author transited the Strait with Votel, now a Distinguished Military Fellow at the Middle East Institute, in 2016 and got a first-hand look as Iranian ships shadowed the USS New Orleans.

Check it out.

Human tissue is inherently hierarchical with cells, tissues and organs organised into intricate structures at many levels.

The Human Organ Atlas bridges cellular and whole organ scales with images of whole intact organs at 8-20 ?m resolution and region of interest zooms at 1 ?m.

These images are released openly to allow exploration and reuse, with the hope that they will provide new insights into our biological makeup in health and disease.

The Atlas is powered by an advanced imaging technique called Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT), developed thanks to the capabilities of the ESRF’s Extremely Brilliant Source, a major Upgrade Programme funded by the ESRF Member and Scientific Associate Countries.

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A story about Paul Conyngham, an AI entrepreneur from Sydney who treated his dog Rosie’s cancer with a personalized mRNA vaccine, has been circulating on X since yesterday. What makes the story inspiring is the initiative the owner showed: he used AI to teach himself about how a personalized vaccine could work, designed much of the process himself and approached top researchers to take it forward.

Whether the treatment itself was curative and how much of an improvement it represents over state-of-the art is not the main focus of this essay. Others have already debated that question at length, and I recommend following their discussions1.

What interests me instead is the bureaucratic absurdity the dog’s owner encountered while trying to pursue the treatment. He described the long and frustrating process required simply to test the drug in his dog: “The red tape was actually harder than the vaccine creation, and I was trying to get an Australian ethics approval and run a dog trial on Rosie. It took me three months, putting two hours aside every single night, just typing the 100 page document.” Even in a small and urgent case, where the owner was fully willing to fund the treatment himself, the effort was slowed by layers of procedure.

Check it out.

Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

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The Center for Immigration Studies has a very interesting study out that will make you think again about all of the “immigrants” who are “contributing” to the United States.

These results shouldn’t be shocking, unless you’re still surprised that we pay for the welfare of people who aren’t even citizens.

Read it.

She is, of course, a Woman of Color. And a Democrat, naturally.

Read it.

A few years ago, we mocked Gavin Newsom for his total lack of understanding about pew-pews when he called a .22 caliber rifle a “weapon of mass destruction,” and then flagged his camera crew with it.

As Newsom said in that 2022 video, he signed a bill to ban “sick marketing ploys,” AKA allowing companies to advertise guns that parents can buy to teach their kids to shoot.

After signing AB 2571 into law, Newsom was immediately challenged in court by the Firearms Policy Coalition, Safari Club International, the United States Sportsman’s Alliance Foundation, the Congressional Sportsman’s Foundation, and others.

The law was then struck down TWICE by the Ninth Circuit.

On March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, California finally took the L and said it would pay the court fees of those who had challenged its unconstitutional law, totaling $1.38 million.

Navy Matters.

Surprisingly, two of the Navy’s MCM configured LCS have been moved from the Middle East to a port in Malaysia despite the obvious possibility of Iranian mines in the Strait of Hormuz. The ships were relocated about a week or so before the US strikes began. If the Iranians do lay mines (there are no confirmed reports yet), we’ll desperately miss the LCS MCM capabilities … or will we?

From a Hunterbrooks website report, we learn that the LCS MCM capability is even more problematic and limited than we already knew. The report provides information from a US Navy briefing.

As you read it, bear in mind that the summarized information presented below is the Navy’s information, not mine. If you want to dispute anything, you’ll have to take it up with the Navy.

Read it.

The surreal case of an Albanian criminal who tried to dodge removal from the UK in part by claiming his son disliked foreign chicken nuggets—yes, really—reached its inevitable conclusion this week, when he won the right to stay in Britain.

Klevis Disha entered the country illegally under a false name, lied in his asylum claim, and was later jailed for two years after being caught with £250,000, known to be proceeds of crime.

An immigration tribunal previously said it was “unduly harsh” for the lawbreaker’s son—named in legal documents only as ‘C’—to be forced to move to Albania because of sensory issues. The case was then overturned on appeal, which ruled: “We can only see in the decision a single example of why C could not go to Albania: C will not eat the type of chicken nuggets available abroad.”

The American Mind.

Feminism is sometimes presented by its proponents as something with which only an inveterate misogynist could disagree. “It’s just about fairness for women, allowing them the same freedoms to pursue their heart’s desire that we allow men,” it is claimed. “How can you be against that?!”

Some perhaps genuinely believe this. But it is nothing more than a rhetorical strategy to put critics on the defensive and to deflect attention from the radical core of virtually all contemporary feminist thought, at least of the kind one encounters among the cultural elite. The contemporary feminist worldview can be concisely summarized: men as a class oppose women as a class, and the only way to advance the cause of women in the face of collective patriarchal repression is to reduce or ignore the differences between the sexes altogether.

Where did such ideas come from? Some would have it that the basic ideas of feminism consist of the simple liberal principles articulated in the opening claim about freedom, and more radical divagations are of recent origin. Not true. You can find the extremism in the foundational sources of modern feminist thought. A consideration of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book, The Second Sex, which is widely acknowledged as an essential early inspiration of what would become modern feminism, proves the point.