Read it.

More than 80 human rights and sport advocacy groups have called on the International Olympic Committee to abandon reported plans to introduce universal genetic sex testing for female athletes and impose a blanket ban on transgender and intersex competitors.

A joint statement released on Tuesday by the Sport & Rights Alliance (SRA), ILGA World, Humans of Sport, and dozens of other groups warned that the measures that will reportedly be recommended by the IOC’s Protection of the Female Category Working Group would set back gender equity in sport.

“Multiple sources have said the group has advised the IOC to require all women and girl athletes to undergo genetic sex verification and to bar transgender and intersex athletes from competing in women’s events. The IOC has not publicly confirmed the recommendations,” the statement said.

The SRA’s executive director Andrea Florence said sex testing and a blanket ban policy would be a “catastrophic erosion of women’s rights and safety.”

War Is Peace—Freedom Is Slavery—Sex Testing Violates the Rights and Safety of Women

Read it.

The career criminal, 36-year-old Joshua Sanchez-Lopez, has been arrested 35 times, with a rap sheet that includes involuntary manslaughter, drugs and car theft, according to the New York Post.

The legal standoff began in January, when police arrested Sanchez-Lopez on a warrant for grand larceny of a motor vehicle.

Justice Eric Goodman set Sanchez-Lopez’s bail at $25,000 and ordered his release with an ankle monitor once he posted bond.

Sanchez-Lopez reportedly posted bail on January 24, but the Las Vegas police refused to place him in the program, given his history of failing to comply with the rules. Attorneys for Metro filed a petition last week challenging the judge’s authority to release him, arguing that the Department has the authority to declare a defendant too dangerous to release.

Newsbusters.

Someone should do a wellness check on The New York Times. Looks like its journos read the portents wrong — AGAIN — on another one of its apocalyptic prognostications on the economic consequences of President Donald Trump taking out the Islamist regime in Iran.

Times business reporter Emmett Lindner nonsensically tried to dig up the corpse of the 1970s oil price shock following the Yom Kippur War as a comparative case study to what is transpiring around the Persian Gulf as Israel and the U.S. decimate Iran’s war machine. “Echoes of the ’70s in What’s Now the Largest Oil Shock Ever,” read Lindner’s overdramatic March 13 headline.

Lindner even had the temerity to suggest that the Iran War of 2026 was “worse” than the 1973-74 energy crisis, which was marked by a plethora of factors, which included the following: Bad domestic policy, dollar devaluation, and an oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC).

“Certainly, oil and gasoline prices are soaring,” cried Lindner like a soothsayer throwing fits as he pours over the portents. “The 1973 embargoed oil accounted for about 7 percent of global oil consumption, and targeted only a handful of nations … Now, closer to 20 percent of the world’s supply is threatened, and the disruption is caused by a war that has no end in sight.”

Lindner’s scareporn had a shelf life of about 3 days, as U.S. oil prices (WTI crude) would plummet over five percent back under $100 to $93.54, leading Wall Street toward having its best day since the war began, as the Associated Press reported March 16. As popular trading account NoLimitGains posted on X the same day, “Traders are betting this [war] ends soon.”

Think different.

Read it.

A shooting on Old Dominion University’s campus has left Americans asking how someone who pled guilty to helping ISIS was able to enroll at an American university.

The unsettling answer is that Virginia Democrats passed a law forbidding public colleges from asking applicants about their criminal history.

Read it.

The Service Employees International Union has sued the Trump administration over a new security clearance policy for immigrants working at airports.

The lawsuit against Customs and Border Protection is the second filed by the powerful union against the Trump administration in the same week.

The SEIU is joined by four former employees of Logan International Airport in Boston, who say they lost their jobs because of the policy.

The CBP adopted new guidelines last year that determined asylum applicants and recipients of Temporary Protected Status cannot qualify for security badges to access certain restricted areas at airports.

The previous policy made federal work permits for immigrants suffice to get a security badge—or Customs access seals—to have unaccompanied access to CBP security areas, such as airport inspection services areas where international flight passengers and their baggage are processed.

This new security clearance policy seems very reasonable to me. The SEIU, of course, is a pillar of the Democrat party.

Read it.

he White House has responded to former CNN host Don Lemon’s suggestion that President Donald Trump opposes the First Amendment and should be disinvited to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“President Trump is the most transparent and accessible President in American history to the media and his return to the White House saved the legacy media from going out of business,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday.

“There has never been a greater champion of the First Amendment than Donald J. Trump who has implemented an unprecedented expansion of press access to cover him,” Ingle added. “Don Lemon is a low ratings loser that no one takes seriously.”

That about sums it up.

Greg Strange:

One of the greatest attributes of human beings is the ability of pattern recognition. Without that ability, you’re just a kind of stumbling around imbecile unable to learn anything from patterns you’ve seen before. So, luckily, sentient beings are able to recognize patterns, like for instance, endless terror attacks from one specific religion. Or the pattern of the slow-motion Islamization of much of Europe. Or the pattern of daycare fraud committed by Somalians. And if those sentient beings aren’t brainwashed by the ideology of diversity and multiculturalism, but rather are able to still comprehend stark reality, then they quite naturally say something to the effect of, “We recognize that pattern and don’t want that here.”

Read it.

Even as Islamic terror attacks in America are becoming as routine as days of the week ending in “y,” Democrats are hurling the word “Islamophobia” as indiscriminately as Iran is lobbing missiles in every direction to create chaos.

In that vein, Democrat Senator Kirsten Gillibrand got herself all atwitter over an X post by Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville which contained juxtaposed pictures, one of the burning twin towers on 9/11 and the other of Zohran Mamdani sitting on the floor at a Ramadan iftar dinner purportedly inside city hall.

Since a picture, or two, is worth a thousand words, Tuberville’s tweet was linguistically parsimonious: “The enemy is inside the gates.”

Which is to say that after a mere quarter century, the same religion/ideology that took down the towers now inhabits the seat of government in our largest and most important American city. Tuberville’s short and sweet tweet suggests that’s not a good thing. Democrat sensibilities, however, are easily rubbed raw over such matters and Gillibrand’s response was: “This type of Islamophobia is disgraceful and unbecoming of a senator. Delete it immediately and apologize.”

Despite her command, as of this writing, no deletion or apology has been forthcoming.

Mamdani’s own response to Tuberville’s tweet, instead of being angry, was just passive-aggressively silly: “Let there be as much outrage from politicians in Washington when kids go hungry as there is when I break bread with New Yorkers.”

Ah yes, breaking bread with New Yorkers! What could be more New York than sitting on the floor cross-legged eating fattoush, tabbouleh, samosas, pakoras, bamya, biryani, kabsa/machboos, mandi and Arabic biryani with chicken or lamb? And as for the hungry kids, were any invited to the iftar dinner?

The best response to Gillibrand’s post was this tweet from @davemarkowitz: “It’s not Islamaphobia [sic], it’s pattern recognition.”

The American Mind.

The much-vaunted Cuban revolutionary model is on the verge of unceremonious collapse: the economy is in shambles, the electric grid is only occasionally functional, and the supposed achievements of the Cuban Revolution have culminated in near-universal penury and misery. As of 2024, 89% of Cubans lived in poverty, sometimes of an abject kind—and things have only gotten worse over the last two years. Revolutionary Cuba is a model only of what is to be avoided.

In Cuba, growing crowds denounce Communism and the dictatorship that has enslaved the island nation since 1959. Anti-regime voices bang pots and pans in public demonstrations, demanding freedom for Cuba for the first time in 66 years. Yet, Western leftists continue to express solidarity with the Cuban people’s oppressors and blame Cuba’s problems on an American embargo that is often flouted. More absurdly, they insist that the oil embargo imposed by the Trump Administration after its defenestration of the Maduro dictatorship at the beginning of this year is the cause of Cuba’s present discontents. Somehow, the administration is responsible for the deep-seated structural problems that confront a Cuba immiserated by decades of unaccountable Communist rule.

The dark empirical realities about Cuban Communism are finally making the revolutionary mirage look like the delusory wish-to-believe—or outright lie—that it has always been. A 2024 report from the Madrid-based Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, along with a useful summary published at VOZ News, made clear just how far the Cuban dictatorship has impoverished the Cuban people. As of the summer of 2024, 72% faced significant food shortages, with “seven of 10 Cubans” having “stopped eating breakfast, lunch or dinner due to lack of money or food shortages.” Western progressives (most egregiously and pathetically, the leftist propagandist Michael Moore) praise the Cuban health care system to the hilt even as 89% of Cubans “view Cuba’s public health system negatively.”

Read it.

li Larijani, Iran’s top national security official who threatened President Donald Trump’s life after the U.S.-Israeli strikes began, has been killed.

The high-profile elimination marks one of the most significant blows to Tehran’s leadership since the war erupted on Feb. 28, with Israeli officials confirming that Larijani was targeted and killed in a precision strike.

Israel Defense Minister Israel Katz announced the development, calling it a major step in dismantling what he described as Iran’s “axis of evil.”

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North Korean operatives are quietly working inside U.S. companies through remote technology jobs, funneling millions of dollars back to Pyongyang and potentially gaining access to sensitive corporate systems, according to investigators and U.S. officials, according to NBC News.

The scheme relies on workers posing as American job applicants using stolen identities and fake credentials to secure high-paying remote roles, particularly in software development and artificial intelligence. Authorities warn the tactic allows the regime to bypass international sanctions while embedding operatives inside Western companies.

An investigation by the Virginia-based cybersecurity firm Nisos found that suspected North Korean IT workers apply to thousands of jobs using fabricated résumés and multiple online personas. Once hired, the workers often operate from overseas — frequently from China — while U.S.-based facilitators help maintain the illusion that they are located domestically.

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Irish President Catherine Connolly marked her first St. Patrick’s Day in office with a message that reframed Ireland’s patron saint as a symbol for open borders and ‘global citizenship’, urging the Irish to embrace migrants amid ongoing surges in arrivals that have sparked nationwide tensions.

The last time Ireland had ‘open borders’, it led to 700 years of English occupation and oppression. No, thanks.

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The Make America Healthy Again agenda just found its first serious legal challenger. This week, five food stamp recipients filed suit in Washington, D.C., federal court demanding the right to spend taxpayer-funded SNAP benefits on candy, soda, and energy drinks.

The MAHA movement would be applauded if it were pushed by a Democrat—as it has been in the past, when Democrats had a monopoly on Nanny State food propaganda (I’m looking at you, Michelle Obama).

I personally favor encouraging people on the dole to eat food that will kill them as soon as possible, in order to save taxpayer funds. But that’s me.

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The U.S. is examining laser weapon systems as a way to counter Iranian drone attacks and protect U.S. and allied forces in the Middle East, as the conflict places increasing strain on existing missile defenses.

CBS reported that Iranian Shahed drones, which can cost $20,000 each, have been used in attacks across the region.

U.S. and allied forces typically intercept them with missile defense systems that can cost millions of dollars per shot.

The cost imbalance has drawn attention to directed energy weapons, including lasers, that could neutralize drones at far lower cost.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

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There is something rather uncomfortable about the Hunger Games aesthetics of Hollywood and the Oscars these days. The pomp is tinged and the glamour faded. The glitter and velvet curtains no longer hide the stinking rot that hides underneath. The fact that a bunch of washed-up and histrionic celebrities are still swimming in the fantasy that they matter is simultaneously alarming and hilarious.

Most of the world is celebrating the ongoing demise of Tinseltown, certainly after a long decade of endless woke propaganda. This includes blatant attempts to indoctrinate children with LGBT ideology. Bombarding the public with insufferable feminist prattle and “girl boss” delusions. Open discrimination against white people through DEI policies and race swaps of almost every significant white character in every franchise imaginable.

As a result, Hollywood is dying. According to recent numbers, Hollywood productions have imploded by 50% or more since 2023. Even covid was not able to destroy the movie industry the way wokeness did. In fact, it was the pandemic that allowed Hollywood to dismiss their dwindling numbers through 2023, but that scapegoat is now gone.

Fortune, a Voice of the Crust.

Peter Thiel isn’t just skeptical of The Giving Pledge—he’s been actively working to dismantle it from within, telling signatories to walk away from their commitments and calling the organization an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”

Silly, of course, but effective with the portion of the population that has Epstein! on the brain, which has (as you might expect) a significant overlap with the portion of the population who has hatred for rich people on the brain—using the latter term loosely, of course.

In an interview with The New York Times, Thiel claimed The Giving Pledge, or the philanthropic campaign to get the world’s wealthiest to commit to giving away 50% or more of their wealth, has fallen out of style. “They got an incredible number of people to sign up those first four or five years, and it somehow has really run out of energy,” he said. “I don’t know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join.”

They plucked all of the low-hanging fruit (rich people who are also Democrats).

The U.S. wealth divide has progressed to new extremes, with the top 10% of households holding more than two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, according to Federal Reserve data. The majority of the country’s wealth remains in the hands of older generations. And the wealth accumulation has hollowed out the middle class over the last few decades.

Welcome to the Narrative, in which Fortune is a willing accessory. What has ‘hollowed out the middle class’ is taxes and government regulations that make housing unaffordable and one-income traditional families impossible.

Philanthropy has long acted as a de facto realization of trickle-down economic theory.

Welcome to the Narrative. ‘Trickle-down economic theory’ is a myth pushed by people who hate wealth accumulation and can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that wealth accumulation is necessary for investment and jobs and progress. Philanthropy is merely the expression of the common human impulse to help other people, which The Usual Suspects think ought to be the job of the government (under their political control, naturally) rather than something done by people who might not have the right Woke views.

A shift away from that philanthropic framework—and one of the most organized efforts in modern history to transfer wealth out of the pockets of the country’s richest—could signal that the money spigot is tightening.

Not all wealthy people are stupid enough to be progressives.

The Telegraph (UK).

Corner shops are being forced to impose an 11p “crime tax” on every sale, to combat a shoplifting epidemic.

Shopkeepers spent a record £313m to keep their stock secure and their staff safe in the past year, up from £265m in 2024.

Many have had to put up prices to fund CCTV, security tagging, protective screens, facial recognition cameras and AI store monitoring, while also covering the losses they suffer from theft.

Socialist governments make no effort to prevent ‘property crimes’ because they don’t believe that people ought to have a right to private property, much less private property used in business.

Watch it.

Supposedly every cloud has a silver lining. One might say that the ‘silver lining’ of the Pandemic Panic is that companies woke up to the fact that, with modern technology, they didn’t have to cram all of their employees into a single location. From the beginning of the world down to 2020, the unconscious assumption that everyone in business made was, that efficiency was a Good Thing, that efficiency depended on ease of communications, and that ease of communications required physical proximity. COVID forced people away from each other, and a lot of companies discovered that this assumption no longer held true. As a result, dense urban cores such as those that characterize places like New York and San Francisco lost a lot of their value, and lose more and more of it as dense urban cores turn increasingly socialist in fact if not in name..

Socialism is inherently totalitarian. You can be a socialist in a free country, but you can’t be free in a socialist country, because freedom is based on legally-enforced property rights, and socialism is based on the destruction of any meaningful property rights.

Businesses that had been stuck in progressive hellholes like Seattle discovered that, hey, we don’t need an urban core to have a productive business. So we’re not stuck here subject to socialist leeching; we can decentralize and put our people where it’s best for them personally and for the organization as a business.

“Socialism works … for those who don’t.”

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A blast late Friday outside a Jewish school in Amsterdam has Dutch police racing to safeguard Jewish institutions after two attacks in two days.

As in a blast outside a synagogue in Rotterdam the day before, there were no injuries in the Amsterdam explosion, which caused damage to the school building’s outer wall.

“This is a cowardly act of aggression towards the Jewish community,” Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema said in a statement. “I understand the fear and anger of Jewish Amsterdammers. They are increasingly confronted with antisemitism, and that is unacceptable. A school must be a place where children can receive lessons safely. Amsterdam must be a place where Jews can live safely.”

Read it.

I posted yesterday about a German ethnologist named Susanne Schröter and a study by the BKA (Bundeskriminalamt, the German federal investigative police agency) showing that almost half of young Muslims in Germany support “Islamism”, i.e. the full, devout expression of their religion.

The video below is a follow-up to yesterday’s translated article. Inge Bell is a German human rights activist, business consultant and entrepreneur, and in this clip she talks about the BKA study and the work of Dr. Schröter. She’s less timid in her terminology than the author of last night’s article, and doesn’t refer to “Islamism”. However, she still pulls her punches a bit by talking about “political Islam”, which is tougher, but still tiptoes around the ghastly truth.

It’s very difficult for people to refer to what menaces us as simply “Islam”. To identify Islam without any obfuscating modifiers as the source of what threatens us — to say that Islamic doctrine commands that we unbelievers must be killed or enslaved — is to risk losing one’s job, or being cancelled, or, in certain jurisdictions, even being prosecuted for “hate speech”.

Additionally, it’s devastating to one’s inner equilibrium to realize that the entirety of Islam — however many billions of people the Muslims claim to have nowadays — is a mortal danger to us. It’s a horrible fact to contemplate, as I know from my own experience. I would really have preferred to combat “Islamism”, or “radical Islam”, or “political Islam”, rather than Islam itself. Unfortunately, once you see the reality of it, there’s no going back.

Back in 2007, when confronted with the phrase “moderate Islam”, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan famously responded: “These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.”

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A Turkish-Kurdish schoolgirl is said to have been groped by nine boys of Arab descent in the back room of a Berlin youth center in Gropiusstadt, Neukölln. It then came out that she was raped in November, in the youth center garden. A scandal has erupted after it was reported that the youth center staff did not file a police report, reportedly out of fear that the suspects would be labeled as the “typical Muslims.”

For months, there were already troubling reports from Berlin youth center in the multicultural neighborhood of Neukölln: involving unwanted embraces, girls having their breasts and buttocks touched without consent, and being pulled onto boys’ laps.

All of these incidents were allegedly happening in plain sight of staff.

Read it.

The exodus of Silicon Valley titans from California is gaining momentum as the state weighs a proposed wealth tax aimed at billionaires, including potential levies on unrealized gains, a measure that has stirred significant concern in the tech sector.

Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick revealed this week that he relocated from California to Texas last winter.

Time to leave.

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On today’s installment of ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, a preferred media narrative was laid waste in real time. A retired Navy admiral exposed the ridiculousness of the notion, pushed heavily across the Elitist Media, that military planners somehow failed to plan for contingencies along the Strait of Hormuz.

Watch as former Fifth Fleet Commander Kevin Donegan (VADM, USN-RET) tells ABC’s Martha Raddatz that such contingencies were “built into it from the beginning”.

The Hill, a Voice of the Crust.

(When have Democrats ever given a shit about the National Debt?)

House and Senate Democrats have introduced bills promising to eliminate income taxes for broad swaths of Americans. Generally, these plans accompany proposals to soak the rich, provide guaranteed cash payments and expanded tax credits, and somehow end up deficit neutral.

Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

Although the goal of increased progressivity and fairness is noble, these plans concede too much ground to the slop-populism of the Trump administration and fail to confront fiscal reality. Instead, policymakers should focus on raising revenue and stop pretending the national debt is not already ballooning out of control.

Damn, this boy sounds like a Republican. No wonder Democrats are ignoring him.

Fortune, a Voice of the Crust.

After a grueling 25 hours of debate on the House floor, complete with an almost show-stopping filibuster effort of more than 81 amendments by Republicans to stop the bill from moving forward, Washington made history this week with the passage of a millionaires tax bill, which would create the first income tax in the state’s history.

On March 9, lawmakers passed a 9.9% tax on personal income above $1 million per year—a first for the income-taxless state. The final vote was 52–46, and involved the longest floor debate in Washington history, far exceeding the previous record of nine hours.

“We knew it was going to be a pretty major endeavor,” Rep. Brianna Thomas, a Democrat who supported the measure, told Fortune. “We’ve got 93 years of precedent in front of us, behind us, around us at all times on the conversation around an income tax.”

…

For Thomas, the economy has simply outgrown the code. Washington has now become the home of global multitrillion-dollar organizations Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing, and it’s staring down a projected budget deficit of $10 billion to $12 billion over the next four years.

The Telegraph (UK).

Britain has one of the harshest inheritance tax regimes in the Western world, research claims.

Rachel Reeves is being urged to scrap the levy after a new report found the UK’s system is “far more punishing” than it looks on the surface.

In Britain, inheritance tax is set at 40 per cent on all assets above a certain threshold, regardless of who they are left to.

You will note that the U.S. is considered even worse.

The War Zone.

The U.S. Navy Independence class Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) USS Tulsa and USS Santa Barbara, which are configured for minesweeping duties, have appeared in port in Malaysia. Both of these ships were last known to be forward-deployed in the Middle East, having arrived in Bahrain in the past year or so to take the place of a group of now-decommissioned Avenger class mine hunters. Now, as Iranian attacks on commercial ships have caused a virtual halt to maritime traffic through the highly strategic Strait of Hormuz, these ships have emerged thousands of miles away. The extent to which Iran has seeded naval mines in the Strait already is unclear, but this remains a huge threat to the future security of the waterway and will have to be taken into account in any future effort to reopen this critical waterway.

I guess the Navy figured out that the LCS are totally useless and so decided to get them out from underfoot.

Perhaps they will park them in the Taiwan Strait to give the Communist Chinese something to shoot at.

Tatler.

When the Marquess of Bath, Ceawlin Thynn, and his wife Emma Thynn turned to the court this month amid ‘uncertainty’ as to whether their son would be entitled to the family inheritance, the case of peerages and modern pathways to parenthood came under the spotlight once again. The couple’s younger son, Lord Henry Richard Isaac Thynn, now nine, was born via a US surrogate. He is the biological child of the Marquess and Marchioness and has been recognised in law as their legal child following the grant of a parental order in England and Wales. Yet a Bristol hearing revealed questions over whether he currently falls within the class of beneficiaries of historic family trusts.

Of course, with hereditary peers getting the boot from the House of Lords (now an oxymoron), culmination of at least a hundred years of invidious Labour resentment, the question loses much of its relevance.

Read it.

Every crop we consume came from a wild ancestor. Through breeding, people selected for bigger grains, juicier fruit, more branches, or shorter stems – gradually turning wild plants into improved yet recognizable versions of their originals. The rare exception is Brassica oleracea, wild cabbage: the origin of cabbage, bok choy, collard greens, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and much else.

Wild cabbage is unassuming: some untidy leaves and a few thick, coarse stems on the browner side of purple that poke out from the soil. Nothing about it looks appetizing.

Nothing about any of its cultivars looks appetizing, either.

British Broadcasting Company, a Voice of the Crust.

China has approved a sweeping new law which claims to help promote “ethnic unity” – but critics say it will further erode the rights of minority groups.

I find it amusing for anyone to talk about ‘rights’ in a Communist system.

On paper, it aims to promote integration among the 56 officially recognised ethnic groups, dominated by the Han Chinese, through education and housing. But critics say it cuts people off from their language and culture.

The Han Chinese have never given a shit about anybody else’s language and culture. Communism didn’t change that.

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Research points to a key bone-strengthening mechanism at work in the body, which could be targeted to treat the bone-weakening disease, osteoporosis.

Led by scientists from the University of Leipzig in Germany and Shandong University in China, the 2025 study identified the cell receptor GPR133 (also known as ADGRD1) as being crucial to bone density, via bone-building cells called osteoblasts.

Variations in the GPR133 gene had previously been linked to bone density, leading researchers to turn their attention to the protein it encoded.

The team ran tests on mice in which the gene was either absent or could be activated using a chemical called AP503.

In the absence of the GPR133 gene, the mice grew up with weak bones, resembling the symptoms of osteoporosis. However, when the receptor was present and activated by AP503, bone production and strength improved.

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It’s something that would have seemed impossible just a few decades ago, but somehow, smoking a cigarette has become thoroughly uncool. Research out this week shows how the smoking rate in America has plummeted to a record low.

Scientists studied nationally representative survey data. Based on this, they estimated that less than 10% of U.S. adults smoked a cigarette in 2024—the first time this rate has ever dropped to single digits. Despite the astounding success, more is needed to further discourage the use of cigarettes and tobacco products in general, the researchers argue.

“Maintaining a centralized federal capacity for tobacco prevention and control is essential to sustaining progress in reducing smoking prevalence,” they wrote in their paper, published Tuesday in NEJM Evidence.

Check it out.

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

Read it.

Some good news, for a change.

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Lawyers representing alleged Antifa members who set off fireworks outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas and who later shot a police officer tried to discredit an anti-Antifa witness by citing a group that carries water for Antifa.

Federal prosecutors have charged nine defendants with various crimes for their July 4, 2025, riot outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas. A federal grand jury convicted eight of them on the charge of riot and providing material support to terrorists on Friday. While most charges did not rely on the claim that rioters were part of Antifa, the indictment describes the defendants as an “Antifa Cell.”

During the trial, prosecutors brought in Kyle Shideler, director and senior analyst for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, as an expert witness on Antifa. Defense lawyers objected, citing the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left activist group that has carried water for Antifa, to delegitimize his testimony.

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Republican-led states are moving more aggressively to cut or eliminate personal income taxes, while Democratic-controlled states are pressing to raise taxes on top earners.

The disparity has widened a divide that is reshaping state budgets, economic strategy, and the political fight over who should bear more of the tax burden.

The split has accelerated in recent years.

The New York Times, paper of record of the Crust.

Jon Feldhammer, like many Californians, often passes canvassers holding clipboards at the grocery store or on his commute to work. They’re part of an effort to collect the nearly 900,000 signatures required to put a proposed state billionaire tax on the ballot in November.

But Feldhammer isn’t tempted to add his name to the list: He’s on the other side of the fight.

A partner at the law firm Baker Botts, Feldhammer is one of the many high-powered lawyers, lobbyists and business leaders working against the initiative, which would place a one-time 5 percent levy on Californians with a net worth north of 1 billion dollars.

Needless to say, this article merely repeats the same old tropes: Wealth inequality is a Bad Thing per se and somehow (never specified) being wealthy is oppressing the non-wealthy; wealthy people, no matter how much they do pay, are never paying their ‘fair share’ (said fair share never specified); if the wealthy pay a lesser percentage of their income in tax, they are somehow ‘cheating’, whether or not that payment complies with the tax laws.

Some people are just congenitally butt-hurt if someone else has something that they don’t. There is a reason that Envy is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Case in point: It’s Good to Be a Billionaire, Even at Tax Time (also New York Times), which rings the changes on the Fair Share smear. His other assertion, that The Rich ‘play by a different set of rules’ and take advantage of ‘loopholes that aren’t available to the rest of us’, is just a bare-faced lie—the Tax Code is the Tax Code, and the same Tax Code applies to everybody—what he calls ‘loopholes’ were deliberately put in the Tax Code (by people smarter than him) so as to encourage the sort of investment that leads to productivity, economic growth, and (oh, by the way) more jobs.

Watch it.

designed this John Wick room/man cave for my friend who wanted to redo a part of his basement. Even got to get my hands dirty on this one, which I love. Modeled after Winston’s vault room in the Continental Hotel from the movie John Wick 3. Packed with guns (gun replicas), wall art, and a pool table, this is the quintessential man’s room.

Worth doing, I think. If I had a basement (which I don’t; Texas for some reason doesn’t do basements), I would certainly consider it.

Read it.

You don’t need to sell.

You pay the tax annually on your home equity.

Example in their proposal:

Homes over $2M ? ~$14,700 per year.

Your home becomes a taxable asset.

In Texas we pay such a tax, nominated “property tax”, and that’s a major component of support for local government, especially schools, municipal services, and other infrastructure.

That’s not what’s happening in Canada. What’s happening in Canada is more akin to the Sanders/Warren ‘wealth tax’.

The way we used to be:

Are we better off now than we were then? Well….

Read it.

On his native country’s 250th anniversary, Pope Leo XIV will visit Lampedusa, an Italian sovereign territory off the North African coast that has long been a destination for migrants seeking to enter Europe. In 2013, Pope Francis made it his first papal destination outside Rome. Publication of Pope Leo’s official calendar recalled Vice President JD Vance’s personal invitation to the United States for the anniversary festivities, an invitation the pope seems to have declined. Adding fuel to the fire, unconfirmed Spanish media reports soon thereafter claimed that Pope Leo “warned the [Spanish] bishops that his greatest concern in Spain is the far right that is trying to ‘instrumentalize the Church.’”

To be sure, any conceivable U.S. administration in this political climate would make such an anniversary uncomfortable for a pope—even more so now than when the Vatican released this schedule a couple weeks ago. Pope Leo is probably wise to skip the transatlantic voyage in July. The Lampedusa symbolism, though, is unmistakable as it is deeply misplaced. It also has sparked comparisons to French Catholic writer Jean Raspail’s dystopian 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints.

The novel describes a grotesque armada of one million migrants from the Ganges that sails to the French Riviera. It is a searing indictment of the Western cultural institutions that have grown too nihilistic and narcissistic to perpetuate their civilization. Among the characters is a South American pope more concerned with social justice PR stunts than shepherding the Church. (Interestingly, this “red bishop of Bahia” is named Benedict XVI: “It goes without saying that the pope mentioned in this fictional account is in no way to be taken for Our Very Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI, to whom I pledge my trust and my respect,” clarified Raspail in 2006.) “He was a pope in tune with the times, and this was much appreciated by the media,” asserts Raspail’s narrator.

You can find Camp of the Saints on Amazon. I encourage you to buy it and read it. (No, you won’t find it in your local public library.) Then ponder the fact that it was published fifty years ago. At the time, everybody was saying “Nah, this is just exaggeration for the sake of effect.” Little did we know….

Read it.

As the wise man once said, making predictions is hard, especially about the future.

Nonetheless, success comes to those that predict they will be successful. What is happening in Iran today is 47 years overdue because we were afraid to predict success. We are winning. We will win. The bad guys are losing. They will lose.

I will not spend time on why it is foolhardy to assume someone else will react to a certain situation the same way as you would. It is foolhardy, but, some situations are so compelling that a prediction regarding how someone else will react can and should be made confidently.

Read it.

The following report cites a study showing German Muslims’ growing support for “Islamism”. Young “radicals” are increasingly following “Islamist interpretations of Islam”.

For those of us who don’t subscribe to the artificial “Islam/Islamism” dichotomy, what the study seems to have measured is the tendency of young Muslim culture-enrichers in Germany to study the core scriptures of their religion and practice the prescribed behaviors as decreed by Allah and revealed to his messenger Mohammed. They learn that Allah has commanded them to wage jihad against the non-believers until the infidels submit to Islam or are killed. If a soldier of Allah is killed during his jihad, he is rewarded with all the perquisites of Paradise, including the well-known 72 virgins.

Such is “Islamism”, which is indistinguishable from Islam. The “Islamist” is simply acting in accord with the central tenets of his religion.

I have often described Socialist regimes — Communism, Nazism, Islam — as political religions, but I think we still underestimate the danger of these regimes because they blur the lines that separate religion and state, which are at the foundations of modern civilization.

That separation grew out of the horrors of the Inquisition, the excesses of Torquemada and the persecution of so-called heretics. Islam today does exactly that, and we tolerate it because we are scared of being labelled ‘racist’.

Religious Socialist entities bypass separation of church and state by pretending to be ‘political’ rather than religious, and thus flying below the constitutional radar.

The French revolutionaries chose the ‘Goddess of Reason’ as their deity. In her name the tumbrels rolled, the guillotines chopped and the ‘Committee for Public Safety’ executed hundreds of thousands, all for their own good. Mass murder comes with the territory.

Read it.

Gov. Gavin Newsom had helped set up a state government agency for his wife and then a quasi-government non-profit to which he has directed millions of dollars which in turn helped promote yet another non-profit that puts millions of dollars in the pockets of the Newsoms.

That convoluted arrangement may explain why Newsom won’t turn over his tax returns.

Gov. Newsom promised to be the first California governor to release his tax returns every year, but media outlets have been grumbling that the last time he released a tax return was quite a few years ago when he was legally required to because he was running for reelection.

The questions got louder when he bought a $9 million house in addition to their $6 million house. The new 5,609 square foot estate comes with a spa, sculptures and Brazilian decks, and was bought from a member of the billionaire Pritzker clan, who have been one of Newsom’s major donors, and carries a $6.5 million mortgage with $600,000 in annual payments plus over $100,000 in property taxes. Some have been asking where all that money was coming from.

This may only be the tip of the iceberg considering that in 2019, the Newsoms had paid their household staff $288,000 alone. Assuming that the staffing costs have kept pace, California’s first family should be looking at very some very huge bills to maintain their outrageous lifestyle.

Read it.

There was a time when environmental stewardship meant conservation grounded in gratitude rather than condemnation. It reflected a belief that a prosperous and confident society could protect its natural inheritance without repudiating the very progress that made such protection possible. The American conservation tradition grew from strength, not shame. In recent decades, however, much of what is presented as settled “climate science” has drifted from practical environmental management toward a sweeping moral narrative that indicts industrial civilization itself. The debate is no longer confined to atmospheric chemistry or predictive modeling; it has evolved into a broader philosophical claim that humanity’s advancement is inherently suspect.

Science, properly practiced, is iterative and self-correcting. It advances through questioning, testing, and refinement. Yet public climate discourse increasingly exhibits the traits of ideological orthodoxy. Skepticism about model assumptions or policy prescriptions is often met not with counterargument but with moral denunciation. The language of heresy—“denial,” “anti-science,” “existential threat”—is deployed to narrow the field of acceptable opinion. When a discipline presents itself as beyond debate and frames policy disagreement as ethical failure, it ceases to resemble open inquiry and begins to resemble doctrine. This transformation warrants scrutiny not because environmental concerns are illegitimate, but because intellectual humility is essential to credible science.

The philosophical undercurrent of contemporary climate activism reveals a deeper unease with human progress. At its more radical edges, the movement portrays mankind not primarily as steward but as contaminant. Human industry is described as invasive, consumption as pathological, and growth as inherently destructive. Advocates of “degrowth” openly argue that reduced economic output and lower living standards constitute moral improvement. Discussions about limiting childbirth in the name of reducing carbon footprints have moved from fringe to mainstream academic settings. Such arguments rest upon a pessimistic anthropology that views human flourishing as environmentally incompatible.

Newsbusters.

National “Public” Radio can NOT find the story of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife Rama Duwaji putting “Likes” on pages celebrating the October 7 massacre in Israel. But it CAN find stories where Mamdani is the victim of cruel Republican social media posts. GOP ‘Islamophobia’ is hot news, and Muslim Democrat antisemitism is not.

And that’s why we call it ‘Narrative Media’. They have a point of view and they push it continuously.