DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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t’s often said that there’s an audience for everything. In our very online age, previously niche pursuits seem to gain recognition at an unprecedented rate. One nineteen-year-old has amassed a following of 140,000 people by attempting to lift a large log over his head each day for almost a year; he has never succeeded. Another young man became an overnight sensation for his enthusiastic trainspotting videos; he has now gained over three million followers on TikTok, along with a modelling gig with Gucci and a Channel 4 documentary series. It is not uncommon for individuals to become well-known for unusual things. What is uncommon, however, is when the unusual interest itself becomes popular.

Out of all the cultural pursuits one might have guessed may have a resurgence in popularity in modern times, Gregorian chanting would not have been top of my list. However, it seems that this ancient and unorthodox (get it?) musical form has now acquired a new and surprising popularity.

For those unaware, Gregorian chant is the main form of unaccompanied sacred song practiced by the Catholic Church. It is monophonic, meaning there are no chords or harmonies other than the main tune, and it is sung in either Latin or, occasionally, Greek. It developed widely throughout Western and Central Europe in the latter part of the 9th century. In the increasingly secularised Europe of today, where the population of Catholics decreased by almost half a million people in 2022 alone, why is this old, seemingly anachronistic musical tradition coming back to the forefront? And why is it cool?

Because it just is. Vexilla regis prodeunt…. I have a Pandora channel set up for Gregorian Chant, and I use it as background music because it is very relaxing. I can imagine myself in an Irish monastery with nothing to do but eat, sleep, pray, and copy manuscripts by hand. If I could retire to such a monastery, I would.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

The Foundry.

Civil disobedience practiced by the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. is one thing. Crimes against people or property for political ends are quite another. The latter risks return to the law of the jungle, a cure worse than the disease.

That provides the framework to assess the proliferation of criminal attacks on Tesla vehicles to express opposition to Elon Musk’s politics, including his virtual duumvirate with President Donald Trump and affinity for Nazi-like memes, gestures, and ideas. For starters, there are multiple peaceful avenues to protest Musk. Boycott Tesla or sell Tesla vehicles. Criticize Musk and urge others to boycott his enterprises. Organize politically to oppose Musk, such as in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

Musk’s nemeses are disingenuous in their professed opposition to Nazis. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen have escaped their wrath. But all three profited from Jewish slave labor during the Third Reich. BMW’s Herbert Quandt was allied with the Nazi regime and benefited from the slave labor of at least 57,000 Jews. Gunther Quandt, Herbert’s father, acquired numerous Jewish-owned companies at forced, fire-sale prices. Quandt heirs are majority owners of BMW. An independent study from 2011 found that “the Quandts were linked inseparably with the crimes of the Nazis.” The specific value of BMW’s reparations to Israel is unknown.

Astral Codex Ten.

It would be facile to say that, just because technology has threatened our sense of meaning before, we shouldn’t worry when technology threatens our sense of meaning today. Some of the past apocalypses were genuinely bad. The semantic satiation of the previous forms gave us modern art and architecture, hardly known for their broad-based appeal. Do we really want Studio Ghibli anime to go the way of paintings that look like stuff?

When I contemplate these questions, I encounter a paradox. I acknowledge that my inability to marvel at a live Caruso opera in Naples has cost me something deep and beautiful. But I cannot wish that the phonograph was never invented. Does the increased variety and quantity of music compensate for the decreased profundity of each musical experience? Surely this is part of it, but I would never accept this excuse in other areas that have not yet been cheapened. A thousand moderately pleasant one-night-stands cannot equal one passionate love affair.

Maybe Progress repays us with interest for every medium it takes? Without mass-produced, mass-transmissible images, music, and bright colors, we couldn’t have Studio Ghibli. Dare we hope that, if anime becomes too cheap to appreciate, that very cheapness will open the door to new forms of art? But why should this always be true? If AI is better than all human artists, and you can run 100,000 inference copies at 10x serial speed in a data center, then why should anything be non-cheap ever again?

Quillette weekly podcast.

I’m your host this week, Iona Italia. My guest is William Costello. William is a PhD student in Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is part of a lab run by the eminent evolutionary psychologist David Buss. His research focuses on incels—involuntary celibates—and the community of men who identify in that way. I wouldn’t always turn to someone at such an earlier stage in his research career to provide expert opinion for Quillette, but William is exceptional, as I think you will quickly notice.

We focus on the recent Netflix mini-series, Adolescence, which first aired less than three weeks ago and which is already on track to be their most-watched series ever. The series depicts the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who views himself as an incel (i.e., someone who will never have success with women) and murders a classmate after she rejects his attentions. It has attracted widespread media and political coverage and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer—who has repeatedly mistakenly referred to this fictional story as a “documentary”—has suggested that it should be shown in all British schools, to combat a supposed epidemic of misogyny. We discuss what the show gets both right and wrong about incels and William helps counter some of the overheated responses to this emotive, exquisitely filmed fiction with facts and statistics that provide a much more accurate picture of the situation. I hope you enjoy my conversation with William Costello.

ALSO: What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong – William Costello  Interviewed by Chris Williamson.

The most dishonest show every made? At least a good candidate.

The Times.

The exodus of wealth from Britain has accelerated since the turn of the year, fuelling fears that the abolition of the non-domiciled tax regime will wipe billions of pounds from the economy.

Inquiries about moving overseas were nearly three times higher in the first three months of this year compared with the same period last year, claims Henley & Partners, which offers global relocation services.

The company said the exodus was being led by non-doms before their privileged tax status ends this weekend. But wealthy entrepreneurs were also heading for the exit.

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Turning Point USA was holding an event on the campus of UC Davis featuring a black conservative named Brandon Tatum. Just prior to the event, the group set up a pop-up tent and a table outside to promote the event. But a group of Antifa goons dressed in black block marched in and tore down the tent and ran off with it. There were campus police standing there watching but they did next to nothing.

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The only resistance that matters.

I love Navratilova’s phrase ‘the gender bullshit bus’.

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Democrats in Colorado have introduced legislation that would recognise ‘misgendering’ and ‘deadnaming’ as forms of abuse of children who have decided to identify as transgender.

Colorado Newsline reports that the bill, called “The Kelly Loving Act” after a transgender-identifying individual killed in a 2022 club shooting in Colorado Springs, would ensure such ‘abuse’ be considered in child custody disputes.

The legislation defines ‘deadnaming’ as “to purposefully, and with the intent to disregard the individual’s gender identity or gender expression, refer to an individual by their birth name rather than their chosen name.”

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On March 26, 2017, Jeffrey Ansted herded his family into a private plane bound for the Cayman Islands. The owner of an Ohio-based telecommunications company, Ansted had purchased the Cessna 525C jet one year earlier for $8 million. It had since become his go-to method of commuting to Florida, where he owned a condo and belonged to yacht and country clubs, as well as to his son’s lacrosse games in Towson, Maryland. For local travel, he drove a $250,000 Ferrari.

The trip to the Caymans was the last junket Ansted took before he was busted for fraud in 2018 by the Federal Communications Commission, which found that he had paid for his lavish lifestyle, including the jet and Ferrari, by embezzling millions from the agency’s Universal Service Fund (USF), a little-known program that subsidizes phone and internet access for low-income customers.

Ansted had signed up dead people for service and even fabricated social security numbers in order to obtain subsidies from the program. Then he’d transferred those subsidies from his company, American Broadband, into a personal account, according to a public notice from the FCC.

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In my line of work, I get asked a lot of questions. Sometimes they are on pretty heavy topics and other times they are on things that are downright bizarre. More often than not, they are driven by the news cycle. Over the last week, the one question I am suddenly getting all the time is if the United States is really preparing to go to war with Iran, and if so, why now?

This type of inquiry isn’t uncommon during times of great international tension, but this one is different. The situation seems more nebulous, and the idea that a U.S. attack on Iran could soon occur feels out of the blue for many, especially set amongst the ‘ludicrous speed’ news cycle that has been a hallmark of the first and now second Trump administrations.

Adding to people’s confusion is that there has not been one singular event to prompt the buildup to a potentially unprecedented and extremely volatile military action. This makes it harder for the public to wrap their heads around the possibility that this could really happen, and soon.

Trump, like much of the American people, is tired of Iran being the itch that nobody has the courage to scratch. He’s going to get out the hydrocortisone and take care of it once and for all.

UPDATE: Congressional Republicans Prepare 10-Bill Sanctions Package To ‘Gut’ Iran and Punish Its Supreme Leader

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Half of all women murdered in Spain so far in 2025 were killed by foreigners, even though foreigners make up just 13.4% of the country’s population. This figure is alarming, especially given that the proportion of foreign-born perpetrators has tripled since data started being recorded in 2003.

This trend raises serious questions about the effectiveness of the migration and integration policies of successive governments over the past few decades. Of particular concern is the high rate of femicides committed by individuals from Morocco, who are statistically almost six times more likely to commit such crimes than Spaniards. The Romanian community also shows a troubling pattern, with a rate 3.4 times higher than the national average relative to its population size..

Moreover, the high concentration of these crimes in specific regions is also worrying. Andalusia and Catalonia stand out in particular, regions with a significant increase in their foreign population in recent years. Andalusia has had the highest absolute number of murders of women since 2003, closely followed by Catalonia and the Valencia region. A particularly alarming fact is that foreign perpetrators in the Madrid region now outnumber Spaniards.

Off-Guardian.

We’re mere inches away from actual legislation based almost entirely on the made-up events of a fictional TV show.

People are rightly pointing this out as ludicrous – and it is – but that’s seeing it backwards. We’re not getting laws passed because of TV shows, we’re getting TV shows made so they can pass laws.

The studio behind Adolescence gets government funding, as does Tender, the charity that was also invited to that absurd meeting.

Netflix’s finances have been a source of speculation for years, but its political associations, alongside a track record of producing content that perfectly fits a mainstream agenda, really speaks for itself.

Government, charities, corporate media. It’s all one organism.

Does that mean the show itself was cynically produced to fill a need and sell an agenda?

Absolutely certainly yes.

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More than a year later Judge Irving responded. He did not order a new trial, but given how expensive and time-consuming that would be, arguably did something more useful. He ordered the punitive damages against Steyn, which he called “grossly excessive,” reduced to a mere five thousand dollars, the “maximum” sum Steyn’s attorney had suggested was reasonable.

But there was more good news to come. A week later, Judge Irving responded to Steyn’s motion that Mann pay legal fees. While only partially granting the motion, Judge Irving’s rhetoric was scathing.

What especially infuriated him was the Mann team’s false claims of a huge loss in grant money– which Judge Irving called “an affront to the Court’s authority.” The team had offered “plainly false evidence” and were guilty of “bad faith misconduct “… “extraordinary in its scope, extent, and intent.” Judge Irving said he would issue sanctions to cover the costs the defendants had in countering these “outright misrepresentations.” Steyn and Simberg have been told to submit their costs by the end of March and it is highly probable they will exceed the $5,000 Steyn owes in punitive damages. Simberg is already ahead when it comes to his punitive damages, since the court in January affirmed a sanctions award to him and CEI of $9,000 for other Mann team misbehavior during discovery.

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The Trump administration’s Health and Human Services Department has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants dedicated to researching illegal sexual behavior in children, pregnancy prevention for “transgender boys,” and so-called sleep inequality affecting black sexual-minority men.

In March, HHS canceled at least $530 million of funding for LGBTQ+ health research programs, according to a grant tracker from Noam Ross of rOpenSci and Scott Delaney of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

HHS previously provided more than $990 million of grant funding to LGBTQ+ health research programs, according to the tracker.

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A celebration in Turin of the Islamic festival of Eid Al Fitr descended into chaos as the Muslim community celebrated the end of Ramadan at Parco Dora on Sunday, March 30th. From here, an unauthorised march began, condemning Israel, Italy and the European Union. Firecrackers were thrown, targeting the local migrant detention centre. In the absence of effigies, official portrait photos of President Giorgia Meloni were torched.

All of them ought to be identified and deported back where they came from.

“Eid Mubarak! To all the women of Turin and to all the Muslims of Turin, my best wishes on this day of celebration”, was what centre-left Democratic Party Mayor Stefano Lo Russo told the crowd from a stage in the park. After the disorder, Galeazzo Bignami, leader of the Fratelli d’Italia group in the Chamber of Deputies, noted that “unfortunately we are forced to condemn the umpteenth round of intimidation against Giorgia Meloni, whose images are once again set on fire and destroyed.”

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

ZMan does the music scene.

That is the strange thing about Taylor Swift. Everyone assumes that her core audience is young females, but in reality, it is middle-aged single white women. Taylor Swift is a middle-aged woman performing hits from over a decade ago. She is a strange mix of current fads and recent nostalgia. Look at her audience and it is the young-ish females you see kicking around the cubicle farms of corporate America, and thirsty males who think a Taylor Swift concert is an opportunity for them.

As to the lyrics of the songs, there is nothing to suggest they are the hook that reels in her core audience. They are echolalic babbling. Pop music at its best is doggerel set to a simple but catchy tune. Most pop songs, especially female power pop, have a simple chorus that expresses a simple emotion, while the rest is gibberish. That is what you see with Taylor Swift songs. Her music also comes with helpful expositions so the listener can contextualize the simple chorus.

The point here is that there is nothing unique about what Taylor Swift is doing to explain her massive popularity. Her formula is the same as every female pop star when it comes to the music itself. Watch a Swift concert, however, and it is clear that the audience is not there for the music. They are there to see Swift. Like Elvis seventy years ago, Swift is popular for being Taylor Swift now. Her popularity rests on being a social phenomenon to her audience.

The Other McCain.

When I first encountered the online buzz around the new Netflix series Adolescence, I didn’t have a strong reaction. Streaming services have replaced TV and movies as the primary pop culture sources of entertainment, but it’s been many years since I paid much attention to such things. My idea of “entertainment” is YouTube videos of Arkansas State Police doing PIT maneuvers — reality being far more interesting to me than the fictional product of some screenwriter’s imagination.

What I did know about Adolescence was that it is set in England, and that the screenwriters had essentially reversed the races of contemporary crime trends in the United Kingdom, by making a white boy the knife-wielding killer. Despite the news media’s reluctance to deal with this honestly, anyone who pays attention to crime news out of Britain knows who is implicated in the surge of stabbing sprees there. It’s not a secret.

Read it.

The following report refers to a judicial verdict in Sweden in which a father and one of his sons were convicted of “honor-killing” the father’s 22-year-old daughter.

The case bears a remarkable resemblance to the honor-killing of Saman Abbas in Italy in 2021. Two brutal murders so far apart in space and time, and yet so similar. What could they possibly have in common? I can’t think of anything — can you?

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

Read it.

The Left, for all its protestations about the travails of the working class, is a movement of radical intellectuals, effete upper-class dilettantes and professional activists who are detached from the ‘plight’ of the ‘proletariat’ whose rights they claim to be campaigning for. Its academic theories, from Marxism on down, are not grounded in anything except abstract sophistry marshaled on behalf of the perpetually oppressed who are to benefit from the totalitarian rule of the Left.

The inauthenticity of the Left, its power and privilege, its detachment from what it considers to be ordinary life, leaves it forever searching for authentic victims, whose lives follow the patterns of socialist theories, rather than being the ones who stand apart and make those theories.

The mimicry of working-class attire by leftists had been mocked as far back as Orwell. Radicals who didn’t work loved adopting the costumes and accents of the working class as if they were ideological method actors who could discover the authenticity they lacked by playing a part. (It is no coincidence that acting is a profession rife with leftist politics and that so many of those who play the embodiment of the ordinary man or woman on screen proved to be nothing of the sort. To paraphrase Shakespeare, all the Left’s a stage and its activists mere players.)

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Journalist Matt Taibbi is suing Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove for libel, after the California Democrat claimed during her opening remarks in a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing on Tuesday that he’s a “serial sexual harasser.”

…

While Taibbi wouldn’t have been able to sue due to lawmaker protections under the Speech and Debate clause of the constitution, Kamlager-Dove was stupid enough to then post those claims on social media; both on X and Blue Sky.

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In his address to Congress this month, President Trump boasted—and justly so—of his administration’s astonishing success in stopping illegal border crossings over just six weeks. “Since taking office, my administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history. And we quickly achieved the lowest numbers of illegal border crossers ever recorded.” This is no Trumpian bombast: A 94% year-on-year reduction in illegal entries really is an unprecedented accomplishment. It is also a popular one: a majority of Americans approve of controlling the border.

An even larger majority—some 76%—approve of his policy of deporting undocumented aliens who have committed felonies. Even some on the Left like Jon Stewart have been wondering: if ICE knew exactly where to find all those murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and human traffickers, as clearly they did, why then did the Biden Administration never act to deport them? Good question.

I think the question answers itself.

ZMan looks at the war.

After a flurry of peace talks in Saudi Arabia, the Trump peace initiative regarding the war in Ukraine seems to have run out of steam. The last round of talks stalled over the conditions required to create a Black Sea ceasefire. The Russians laid out the conditions they would require, the conditions they agreed to in 2022 under the Black Sea grain deal. Ukraine flatly rejected those terms this time. The Europeans have also made clear that they will never agree to peace.

After Ukraine and the EU rejected the terms, Putin said some things that got little note in the West but were clearly a signal to the Trump administration. The first was at a meeting of Russian industrialists where Putin told them that despite talks with Washington, they should not expect the end of sanctions. The new world order, so to speak, is one in which the Russian economy will operate independently of the West and within the framework of BRICS.

That was a clear signal to the Trump people that ending sanctions was not a carrot and new sanctions are not a stick. The Russians have moved on from the old model where their economy was connected to the Western model. Despite the last three years, the West remains convinced that sanctions are working, and that Russia desperately wants back into the Western economic model. Until the Trump administration sees the folly in this, negotiations with Russia will go nowhere.

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Far-left Maryland lawmakers, sitting high in their Annapolis castle, are completely detached from reality. They masquerade as public servants but are merely progressive activists who cannot govern properly. Instead of addressing the state’s incoming financial crisis and worsening power crisis, these woke lawmakers have focused on condoms for kids and other disastrous left-wing policies. It’s as if these politicians are sabotaging the state…

Democrats in the state have been spending taxpayer monies like drunken sailors, driving the state to the brink of a financial crisis marked by a $3.2 billion deficit, heightened credit downgrade risk, and a worsening power crisis. Compounding the situation, DOGE-related cuts to the bloated federal bureaucracy threaten to trigger a devastating recession in the state, whose economy is mainly dependent on the federal government and produces little value in the private economy.

On Wednesday, instead of addressing the mounting problems, Democratic lawmakers passed a bill in a 101–36 vote to establish a commission tasked with studying and recommending potential reparations for slavery and the lasting effects of racial discrimination in the state.

I think Democrats ought to be the ones to pay reparations, since they were the ones who owned the slaves.

Newsbusters.

Are NPR and PBS biased? Should they receive taxpayer funding? Don’t ask Google. The company’s AI chatbot showed its bias when it answered by simply pushing the leftist legacy media outlets in question.

Google showed a clear bias when MRC researchers asked “Are NPR and PBS biased?” and “Should NPR and PBS be defunded?” on March 25 and April 1. In its answers to the two prompts, Gemini cited NPR, PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which both NPR and PBS are funded by in part) as sources nearly 59 percent of the time (a combined total of 17 times out of 29 sources listed). Gemini’s responses included only six links that did not favor taxpayer-funded public media like PBS or NPR. This is a continuation of a similar tactic used by Gemini last week, the day before NPR and PBS executives were brought before members of Congress to answer for their networks’ biased reporting. Neither prompt cited a single article by the Media Research Center, which has produced countless reports on the bias at NPR and PBS over the last 30+ years.

“When it comes to NPR and PBS, Google’s bias could not be more clear here,” said NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham. “Aside from perhaps NPR itself, no media entity has expended more ink over the decades on the question of NPR and PBS’s bias than the Media Research Center, and yet, at no point did Google even deign to mention the MRC as a source for either prompt. But this is just Google’s usual modus operandi, isn’t it?”

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I once stood within the halls of academia, benefiting from the generous funding of the National Institutes of Health. I was part of the system, a researcher fueled by grants that were supposed to propel scientific progress.

But after years inside the machine, I have come to a sobering conclusion: The NIH is fundamentally broken and morally corrupted. Corruption, waste, and fraud are not occasional lapses but systemic failures. The agency must be gutted and reformed if we are to salvage scientific integrity.

One of the most damning indictments against the NIH is the reproducibility crisis. Science is supposed to be built on verifiable, repeatable results, yet the vast majority of research funded by the NIH fails this basic test.

A widely cited survey in the journal Nature found that a staggering 70% of scientists surveyed reported failing to reproduce published research. Worse still, in a landmark study by Dr. Glenn Begley, only 11% of oncology studies that were reviewed could be replicated—meaning that 89% of these supposedly groundbreaking cancer studies were essentially worthless.

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Contrary to widespread media reports, the investigation said that no manifesto existed.

“In this case, a manifesto didn’t exist. Hale never left behind a single document explaining why she committed the attack, why she specifically targeted The Covenant, and what she hoped to gain, if anything, with the attack,” the Nashville police report states.

Instead, the shooter, Audrey Hale, left behind “a series of notebooks, art composition books, and media files created by Hale documenting her planning and preparation for the attack, the events in her life that motivated her to commit the attack, and her hopes regarding the outcome of the attack,” police determined.

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Perhaps if they are deported to Gaza they will finally be satisfied.

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The general in charge of defending U.S. skies from drone incursions wants the authority to be able to shoot them down near the Mexican border. Current law greatly restricts U.S. military counter-drone responses, which you can read more about in our deep dive here.

Air Force Gen. Gregory M. Guillot testified to the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that since President Donald Trump took office, he “proposed…a change to the rule of force.” It would “allow us to shoot down or bring down drones that are surveilling over our deployed and mobile troops…not just that are in self-defense, but anything that’s surveilling and planning the next attack on us within five miles of the border.”

“Because they’re mobile,” U.S. troops on the border are not allowed to take down drones under current law, Guillot, the commander of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and the joint U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), added.

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Defense contractor Anduril has rolled out a new, readily deployable undersea surveillance system called Seabed Sentry, which uses networks of small and relatively low-cost modular sensor nodes. A novel sonar array with a design influenced by the extendable arms on satellites is the main sensor being paired with it now. Expanding fleets of quieter and otherwise more modern submarines, especially in Russia and China, as well as growing threats to critical undersea infrastructure, are driving demand for more and better ways to monitor what happens beneath the waves across the Western world.

Anduril has already been working on various elements of Seabed Sentry for around a year. The system leverages various prior developments, including Lattice, the company’s proprietary artificial intelligence-enabled autonomy software package. The Seabed Sentry name is a callback to Anduril’s first product, the land-based Sentry, which is designed to monitor for threats in the air and on the surface.

Okay. What rights to women not have? Give me a list.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom stands behind his claim that “Big Oil” is responsible for California’s higher gas prices and vowed on April 1 to continue his fight against the industry. The pledge comes after new research put the blame on state regulations and policies for the high prices at the pump.

,,,’

A new study published March 16 by Michael Mische from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California says the evidence contradicts Newsom. Mische’s research indicated California’s high gas prices were caused by the state’s regulations and policies.

“There is no economic data to support the allegation of price gouging,” Mische told The Epoch Times. “It just doesn’t exist.”

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To look at the Pacific Northwest today one would never know that 25 years ago the region was an economic powerhouse at the forefront of technology and business innovation. At the time Portland and Seattle were known for constant rain as well as raining cash, and the “millionaire density” of the Seattle area was at historic highs. The tech boom and international trade with Asia had created a Silicon Valley of the northern coast.

Companies like Nike, Starbucks, Microsoft and Amazon established corporate offices and generated tens of thousands of jobs, and many of those jobs were considered high income. People can debate the overall effects of the population surge to the region; there are many who would argue that Washington and Oregon were better off when they were considered backwoods fishing and lumber states. That said, it’s undeniable that for a time the Northwest was one of the most desirable and lucrative places to live in the US.

That’s all gone now. The wealthy are leaving Seattle like it’s a leper colony and all that’s left are millions of broke activists, poverty stricken residents and illegal immigrants. Some blame the constant riots or the steady stream of welfare recipients. Others say that the draconian covid mandates caused people to jump ship. However, a primary factor in businesses (and money) leaving the city was the institution of a progressive “Payroll Expense Tax”.

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green energy loan in November warned investors this week that it’s at risk of going out of business.

Li-Cycle Holdings’s annual report filed with the SEC on Monday states that it has “incurred significant losses since inception” and that there is “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue operating.

The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office finalized the loan for Li-Cycle just two days after former president Joe Biden lost the November election. It was part of a flurry of last-minute loan approvals, totaling over $20 billion, issued by the Biden loan office in the final weeks of the administration.

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Imagine that.

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The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal told “The View” co-hosts on Tuesday that all laws passed before the 1965 Voting Rights Act should be deemed “presumptively unconstitutional.”

Mystal claimed that the U.S. was “functionally an apartheid country” before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, a Civil Rights-era law that prohibited racial discrimination at the ballot boxes. The Supreme Court ruled in June 2013 that a part of the law allowing for federal review of proposed election-related changes before they took effect is unconstitutional.

The justice correspondent accused President Donald Trump’s administration of citing so-called racial laws passed before the Civil Rights Movement to justify the arrest of non-citizens who may pose a threat to the U.S.

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California under Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom has funneled around $18 million to the Tides Center, a dark money nonprofit that directs donor cash to various leftist projects, The Washington Free Beacon reported.

The San Francisco-based Tides Center and its sister nonprofits, the Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy, direct money to in-house projects known as “fiscal sponsorships,” alongside separate nonprofit entities. This enables Tides to cloak which projects receive the money. The Golden State’s spending database shows that 18 agencies sent payments to the Tides Center, but the database does not reveal which projects received the money, the Free Beacon reported.

California officials told the Free Beacon that the database is missing information from some departments, meaning total payments to the Tides Center likely add up to more than $18 million.

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You mean,  besides George Soros?

Former Wall Street Journal reporter and propaganda expert Asra Nomani teamed up with the Fairfax County Times to create a chronology of the protest actions, building a public database of anti-Tesla protests published on ActionAlert.com and Mobilize.us. According to Nomani, the Seattle-based protest organization Troublemakers and the Philadelphia-based group Disruption Project have sponsored about 70%, or 220, of the protests. Local chapters of Indivisible Project, a Washington-based nonprofit, have organized about 29%, or 87, of them, according to Nomani.

Watch it.

Chris Williamson interviews Andrew Schutz and brings out a major difference between civilized nations and the Turd World.

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U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer announced on Monday that her department will return over $1 billion in unused COVID-era funding back to the taxpayer amid the Trump administration’s push for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.

In a press release, the Labor Department said $1.4 billion of unspent COVID funding will be “returned to taxpayers through the U.S. Department of Treasury’s General Fund” and added that “action” is “being taken to recover the remaining $2.9 billion.”

“The roughly $4.3 billion was intended for states to use for temporary unemployment insurance during the pandemic,” the press release states. “Instead, several states continued spending millions of dollars despite no longer meeting necessary requirements, which was uncovered in a 2023 audit conducted by the department’s Office of Inspector General.”

Except that they won’t ‘return it back to the taxpayers’, they’ll just spend it on something else. Once money is in the hands of the government, taxpayers don’t ‘get it back’ unless they use a crowbar through the legal system.

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Roger Severino sued then-President Joe Biden in 2021 for dismissing him before the end of his term on an independent agency called the Administrative Conference of the United States.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s decision against Severino laid the groundwork for the court’s decision on Friday that President Donald Trump can fire holdover Biden appointees at “independent agencies.”

The appeals court paused a U.S. District Court’s orders restoring fired members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board to their jobs.

Quod abiit circum venit circum.

Jonathan Turley.

… which tells us who the real Nazis are.

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On Tuesday morning, former Biden administration “disinformation czar” Nina Jankowicz repeatedly refused to disclose who’s funding her new gig – the ‘American Sunlight Project’ – which cropped up after a stint at the USAID-funded UK-based Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) – for which she registered as a foreign agent while serving as their Vice President.

To review – Jankowicz, who previously served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship, and was then selected to head the Biden DHS’s newly formed Disinformation Governance Board – which was quickly dismantled amid criticism over censorship under the guise of fighting disinformation.

Four months later, she launched “The Hypatia Project” for CIR – where she was the Vice President until April 2024, at which point she co-founded the American Sunlight Project.

Fast forward to this morning, Jankowicz was evasive when asked by Republicans during a congressional hearing on disinformation about her funding…

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You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

To paraphrase Stilgar from Frank Herbert’s DUNE: It is foolish to put yourself in the way of the government fist.

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As President Trump’s long-anticipated reciprocal tariff deadline approaches tomorrow, early signals suggest that the global trading system may soon undergo disruptions and structural shifts. These changes eventually set the path for the administration’s ‘America First’ trade agenda to flourish and raise barriers for foreign automakers seeking to access the U.S. market. In turn, domestic automakers like Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and Tesla will have massive competitive advantages.

One of the first major changes is that Mercedes-Benz Group AG will potentially stop flooding the U.S. with cheap entry-level cars after spending the last three decades shifting down-market to attract younger and broader demographics.

I can think of many things to say about Mercedes, but ‘cheap’ and ‘entry level’ aren’t included.

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

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Not to get all Old World on you, but the Oxford Dictionary defines “lawfare” thusly: “Legal action undertaken in order to exert power or control, esp. as part of a hostile campaign against a particular country or group.”

In New World parlance? Author Malcolm Feeley in 1979 published a tome with a title that best sums up the point of lawfare: “The Process Is the Punishment.”

It’s death by a thousand cuts—of red tape. You are bled out by government.

This is why big companies were so quick to adopt DEI–they didn’t want to get lawfared out of existence by Democrat administrations. And that is why they’re dropping DEI like a live hand grenade–they don’t want to get lawfared out of existence by the Trump Revengers.

This is why we need to get away from the current system of ‘If we get in, we’ll shit on your people the way you shat on our people when you were in’, and start working on putting a plug in the government’s ass.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

They say that like it was a bad thing.

In this particular case ‘will lose access to’ actually means ‘can’t get the government to pay something that they ought to be paying for themselves’. To those who believe that people ought to take responsibility for their own actions, this is a feature, not a bug.