DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

The Antiplanner.

In the two decades I spent critiquing the Forest Service on behalf of environmental groups, I learned several things. I learned that the people who run the national forests were good people who truly loved the land and wanted to do the right thing for the American people. I learned that the managers of each of those national forests believed that their forests were particularly special and unique. And I learned that these good people managing unique resources somehow all decided to do exactly the same thing: clearcut as much of the timber as they could get away with each year.

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In my last Wyoming wind power article I noted a National Audubon Society warning that the growing masses of wind farms could be “population sinks” for golden eagles. This means that many eagles will be attracted to them, to then be killed by them.

Digging into the scientific literature I found that this is a well recognized wildlife management issue. It usually goes by the name “ecological trap.” Since being trapped means being killed I think ecological death trap is more appropriate.

In fact Wyoming wind power is a double death trap for golden eagles. First, as Audubon says, when the local eagles are killed this creates a sparsely populated area which other eagles will then come into. Eagles like most birds try to spread out, probably to maintain the local food supply for their hatchlings. These new eagles are then also killed and the cycle is repeated in a true death spiral.

In addition wind farms kill a lot of other birds as well as a huge number of bats. Golden eagles are scavengers so they are attracted by this abundant food supply. In fact being struck by cars while eating road kill is a major cause of golden eagle death.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Gov. Josh Shapiro keeps repeating the claim that Pennsylvania is the only growing state in the Northeast. But that’s not true.

Residents continue to leave Pennsylvania for greener pastures. New data from the Internal Revenue Service shows that Pennsylvania lost 15,000 residents on net to other states in 2023. Those residents took with them $2.3 billion in annual income.

This outmigration spans all age groups, but it is especially pronounced among working-age professionals and higher-income earners. These are the very people who drive economic growth. And they are leaving for more-competitive states, such as Florida, Texas, and the Carolinas.

The Foundry.

On Sept. 3, 2011, in the parking lot of the Delaware Park Racetrack, a woman named Bridget Wismer handed her newborn son to a man named John Gavaghan in exchange for $15,000 in cash and a money order.

Gavaghan had never met Wismer before the pregnancy and had no genetic connection to the child, but he listed himself as the biological father on the birth certificate anyway. Wismer’s grandmother tipped off police.

Both were arrested and indicted by a grand jury on charges of dealing in children. Wismer eventually pleaded to a lesser charge and was sentenced to five years in prison.

What Wismer did in that parking lot is now being legalized across the country, and Delaware is one of the states leading the charge.

Delaware’s Senate Bill 250, introduced on March 5, is the latest in a growing wave of state legislation built on the 2017 Uniform Parentage Act, which expands surrogacy frameworks to include paid “genetic surrogacy.”

The American Mind.

When Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins began writing The Golden Thread, their two-volume History of the Western Tradition, they were both Ivy League professors. By the time it was published, neither of them was. Hankins, whose first volume on The Ancient World and Christendom sweeps from Greco-Roman and Jewish antiquity to the European Renaissance, gave his last lecture as a history professor at Harvard late last year. Guelzo, whose second volume on The Modern and Contemporary West begins with the Protestant Reformation and ends hauntingly with images of the World Trade Center shortly before its destruction, left Princeton last fall. Both authors are now faculty members at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, established in 2022. The Golden Thread is a momentous achievement. It’s also a landmark event in the history of American letters. Its appearance signals that the country’s most prestigious universities have all but given up on maintaining the intellectual foundations of the West. For the time being, perhaps, the stewards of civilization will have to do their work outside the gates of the old academy. They will have to build something new.

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Never before have more Americans attended college. Today, roughly 57% of Gen Z enroll in some form of postsecondary education after high school.

Yet at the very moment participation has peaked, confidence in higher education is eroding. The traditional four-year degree, once a hallmark of intellectual formation and social mobility, is increasingly questioned, both for its cost and its purpose.

Part of this decline stems from a shift away from classical liberal arts education, which once emphasized the pursuit of truth through disciplines such as philosophy, literature, history, and rhetoric. This model aimed not merely at job preparation, but at forming well-rounded, critical-thinking individuals.

In contrast, much of modern higher education has become narrowly utilitarian, focused on credentialing, specialization, and workforce outcomes, often at the expense of intellectual depth and coherence.

So, is the current model losing its authority? And what does this transformation mean for the future of colleges and universities?

Newsbusters.

National Public Radio recently aired two frankly sexist episodes of its race-based podcast Code Switch , hosted by B.A. Parker and Gene Demby. The April 1 edition was titled “’Mar-a-Lago face’: MAGA’s aesthetic loyalty test.” Anti-Trump sexism is acceptable in “public” radio.

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Over the past few days, Fox News has continued to keep their viewers informed about the problem of illegal aliens committing violent crimes in the U.S. that MS NOW and CNN viewers don’t get to hear about.

Several shows not only recounted that, in the sanctuary county of Fairfax in Virginia, three out of four murders from this year were allegedly committed by illegals, but the far-left D.A., Steve Descano, recently sought only five year sentences for a pair of illegals who committed a murder in 2024.

The Register.

Datacenter protests have taken an ugly turn in the US, with gunshots fired at the home of an Indianapolis councilor who recently lent his support to plans for a server farm in the area.

Ron Gibson, a city-county representative for Indianapolis’s 8th District, was woken in the early hours of Monday by gunfire. He found that 13 shots were fired at his front door, and a note left on the doorstep reading “No data centers.”

In a statement posted on social media site X, Gibson said the bullets struck just steps away from where his eight-year-old son had been playing with Lego the previous day, and described the event as “deeply unsettling.”

The Telegraph (UK).

Ben Roberts-Smith, 47, is expected to be charged with five counts of murder which he allegedly committed while on deployment in Afghanistan.

The former Australian Defence Force member was arrested at Sydney airport on Tuesday morning.

The charges brought against Mr Roberts-Smith are in connection to the deaths of five people in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012, the Australian Federal Police said.

…

Mr Roberts-Smith was heralded as a national hero after being awarded several top military honours – including the prestigious Victoria Cross – for his actions during six tours of Afghanistan from 2006 to 2012.

The Telegraph (UK).

Adult chaperones are to take children to and from school to protect them from violence in knife-crime hotspots.

Up to 250 schools in the areas worst affected by knife crime will be identified by the Home Office using new mapping technology, which can pinpoint the most dangerous streets and when pupils are most at risk.

Adult volunteers from charities and teachers will be recruited to act as chaperones, replicating a scheme in Chicago, which cut crime on targeted routes by 14 per cent and helped students cross gang boundaries.

The War Zone.

Bleeding from injuries incurred ejecting from his F-15E Strike Eagle fighter and climbing a craggy mountain to escape, the U.S. Air Force Weapon Systems Officer (WSO) hid out in a crevice as both rescuers and Iranians frantically searched for him. Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump and Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered new details about the complex and dangerous missions to rescue the WSO and pilot – call signs DUDE44 Bravo and DUDE44 Alpha – whose Strike Eagle had been shot down April 3, the first loss of crewed aircraft to enemy fire during Epic Fury. While they offered the government’s narrative of events, and it should it should be treated as such, other details emerged that we will address later in this story.

These rescue missions involved hundreds of troops, scores of aircraft and diversion operations over more than a half dozen different parts of Iran. It required risking the lives of many of those personnel to recover the two airmen.

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This program has been running since 2011, so it’s not some new George Floyd program thought up during the woke era. Boston was way ahead of the woke stuff.

And now an officer has been stabbed after taking advice from a social worker.

Here’s what happened. First, a mentally ill man called police because he thought four people with guns were trying to kill him. When police got there, they couldn’t find the four people, but they did speak with the alleged caller through his apartment door.

They would soon call in the social worker to calm the situation down, and it did not go well.

My instinctive reaction would be to pull out my gun and shoot the social worker. ‘Oh, gosh my finger slipped.’

Byt that’s me.

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I mean, you and I know that a lady would have to be certifiable to marry Gavin Newscum, but, honestly, I didn’t think it could be worse than Gwen Walz.

Somehow, Jennifer Siebel Newsom gives Gwen a run for her money.

Newsom’s wife is speaking from experience, as a former close friend of Harvey Weinstein, so she’s got that going for her.

The release of this video from the “First Partner” of California (she won’t go by “First Lady” because she is THAT woke) led people to look into Mrs. Newsom a little more.

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The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way on Monday for the Justice Department to move forward with dismissing a criminal case in which Steve Bannon, an influential ally of President Donald Trump, was convicted after defying a congressional subpoena.

Bannon was convicted by a jury in Washington in 2022 on two counts of contempt of Congress for failing to provide documents or testimony to a Democratic-led House of Representatives panel that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a lower court’s decision to uphold Bannon’s conviction.

Trump’s Justice Department, in urging the Supreme Court to toss the lower court’s decision, told the justices in court papers it has determined that dismissal of Bannon’s case “is in the interests of justice.” The department already had filed a motion to dismiss the case at the trial court level.

More accurately Trump groupie Steve Bannon. I’m sure Bannon thinks that the relationship is closer than Trump does.

Newsbusters.

On Monday’s CNN This Morning, the panel on the Audie Cornish-hosted program started with more accusations of U.S. war crimes from panelist Sarah Fitzpatrick of The Atlantic and Kim Dozier, a CNN Global Affairs Analyst. Fitzpatrick said the US will be “turning off incubators for babies,” while Dozier claimed the US is about to violate the Geneva Conventions like Russia had in Ukraine.

I wasn’t aware that Russia was a signatory to any ‘Geneva Conventions’.

Furthermore, at the end of the hour-long morning show, a discussion ensued between Cornish and Fitzpatrick, which worried almost only about the “cost” of the rescue mission of a U.S. Military pilot.

In the opening salvo of the show, Cornish asked if the original “sense” of the U.S. and Israel’s desire to preserve the infrastructure of Iran had shifted, and Fitzpatrick turned to the “ramifications” of possible strikes.

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ampaign in the state with Hasan Piker — a streamer accused of antisemitic rhetoric — is prompting unease among Jewish leaders and fellow Democrats.

Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and former county health executive, is set to appear with Piker at two different Michigan universities on Tuesday.

The Hillel at Michigan State University said it was “deeply troubled” by Piker’s planned visit to campus, calling him a “known antisemite,” while at least one planned speaker, a state representative, backed out of the rallies citing the concerns of her Jewish constituents.

National Jewish leaders also criticized the planned events, with some comparing Piker to Nick Fuentes, the openly antisemitic livestreamer who has divided Republicans and others drawing a connection to the attack last month on Temple Israel.

“Abdul El-Sayed’s decision to host campaign rallies with Piker is not just alarming; it’s absolutely shocking. It reflects a broader trend: the dangerous normalization of antisemitism in our politics,” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League. “That this is happening in Michigan, where Temple Israel was targeted in a violent antisemitic attack … makes it even more egregious.”

I’ve been to Michigan. I’d rather live in Saudi Arabia.

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Rima Hassan is a well-known “Frenchwoman” who serves in the European Parliament for the far-left La France Insoumise, the party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Ms. Hassan has gained notoriety for her vigorous public support for jihad in Palestine, and now she is facing trial for “justifying terrorism”.

I’m an American with an atavistic attachment to the First Amendment, so the idea of prosecuting someone for justifying terrorism (or anything else) is repugnant to me. However, France is a foreign country, and they do things differently there.

Quillette.

Every communist state in history has either collapsed, reformed into something unrecognisable, or survived only through external life support. The Soviet Union lasted 69 years before structural decay outpaced its capacity to maintain coherence. Maoist China killed tens of millions of its own citizens through policy-induced famine before quietly abandoning the economic model that caused it. Cuba persists on foreign subsidy and remittance income. North Korea sustains itself through nuclear extortion and a prison-state apparatus that would be unsustainable without Chinese patronage. Venezuela’s Bolivarian experiment collapsed an oil-rich economy into hyperinflation and mass emigration within two decades.

The standard explanation for these failures is ideological. Communism is bad because it denies freedom, punishes ambition, and consolidates power in the hands of corrupt elites. That explanation is not wrong, but it is incomplete. It treats communism as a moral failure when the deeper problem is structural. Communism does not collapse because bad people run it. Communism collapses because it is architecturally incapable of surviving its own contradictions.

The argument is straightforward and does not require ideology. Any system that suppresses internal deviation, eliminates meaningful feedback, and centralises all decision-making into a single loop will accumulate errors faster than it can correct them. This is not a political claim. It is a structural one. It applies to corporations, organisms, software architectures, and governments alike. Communism simply represents the purest political expression of this failure model because it suppresses deviation by design rather than by accident.

Communism doesn’t fail because it’s bad; it fails because it’s stupid.

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In yet another jaw-dropping display of elite hypocrisy, Barack Obama’s Chicago Presidential Center – long derided as the “Tower of Doom” – now requires proof of U.S. citizenship or lawful permanent residency just to enter a ticket giveaway for its grand opening ceremony on June 18, 2026.

While Democrats in Washington relentlessly push policies that treat America’s borders like an open invitation, the Obama Foundation has quietly imposed strict eligibility rules for its own high-profile event.

The sweepstakes for two free tickets, complete with a potential $1,500 travel stipend for winners living 100 miles or more away, is explicitly limited to U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents who are legal residents of the 50 states, D.C., or Puerto Rico and at least 18 years old.

The Telegraph (UK).

No good deed goes unpunished.

The Telegraph (UK).

The remarkable rescue of an American airman shot down in Iran partially lays to rest the ghost of one of the great calamities of recent US history. In April 1980, an attempt to recover 53 embassy hostages held captive in Tehran went disastrously wrong, leaving eight US servicemen dead. Having taken place a few years after the Vietnam War, the failed mission was a humiliation for the Americans and ensured the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

The prospect of another hostage crisis, if the missing airman had been captured and paraded by the Iranians, was a potential propaganda coup for Tehran that Donald Trump intended to avoid.

The Other McCain.

So if you hate America, support our enemies and think of the United States as “the Great Satan,” where else would choose to live except in Gavin Newsom’s California, “enjoying a lavish lifestyle” among the liberal Hollywood snobs who hate America as much as you do? But why bring up Robert De Niro at a time like this?

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In a story that could only come out of West Virginia, a woman living in a chicken coop with her dad had to defend her home against a burglar.

I’ve been in chicken coops that had more room than my first apartment after college.

Apparently, a girl named Anna Groves was there to kick somebody’s butt over money, but that didn’t really work out for her.

But the daughter pulled a knife and stabbed Groves instead, and the invaders fled.

Officers found Groves at CAMC General Hospital being treated for stab wounds.

Andrew Tate: “Sucky are where they are because they suck.”

And that about covers it.

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Every elementary particle falls into one of two categories. Collectivist bosons account for the forces that move us while individualist fermions keep our atoms from collapsing.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

You might want to save this article in case we have to recreate the universe later.

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The truth is, most light sources flicker; very few people perceive it directly, but we still feel its effects. You may have noticed that some light bulbs emit a warm glow that somehow doesn’t feel cozy. Often, what we’re unconsciously reacting to is that subtle flicker.

It’s important to note that many people don’t consciously notice PWM flicker, and for most people, modern LED lighting poses no issues. However, for those who are sensitive, whether due to migraines, eye conditions, or individual variation, understanding these technical differences can be helpful.

The technical source of the issue is called pulse-width modulation (PWM), a method of controlling how much electricity a light source (in this case) receives at any given moment; it causes the light source to be off for a split second. Hence the flicker.

Microwave ovens use the same trick. If you’ve ever used a microwave on a setting less than 100% power, you will notice that this reduction is achieved by running the microwave at full power for a certain amount of time and then turning it off for another period of time. “Eighty percent power” doesn’t mean 80% of full power, it means full power for 80% of the time and off for 20% of the time.

PWM is an often-used default for OLED digital displays (smart device screens, computer monitors, etc), LED lights, and some incandescent bulbs.

Flicker is all around us. We usually don’t see it, because our eyes are generally good at averaging out artificial light sources, similar to how we see a rapid series of individual images as a single moving picture. But it’s still a force that causes eye strain or discomfort.

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Those who crit­i­cize so-called “AI doomers” often over­look that there is a broader, intel­lec­tu­ally serious tradi­tion of tech­no­log­ical doomerism that goes back decades. To revisit these works is to wonder whether AI really presents new risks, or if it is simply the mani­fes­ta­tion of a risk previ­ously fore­told.

Of course, predic­tions of global apoc­a­lypse are as ancient as humanity. Given the histor­ical track record—no global apoc­a­lypse yet!—those predicting apoc­a­lypse have tradi­tion­ally had a rough time being taken seri­ously. Still, there is a big differ­ence between predicting the arrival of apoc­a­lypse ex nihilo vs. a reasoned argu­ment that it neces­sarily emerges from specific human deci­sions and habits.

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Silicon is king in the semiconductor technology that underpins smartphones, computers, electric vehicles and more, but its crown may be slipping, according to a team led by researchers at Penn State. In a world first, they used two-dimensional (2D) materials, which are only an atom thick and retain their properties at that scale, unlike silicon, to develop a computer capable of simple operations.

The development, published today (June 11) in Nature, represents a major leap toward the realization of thinner, faster and more energy-efficient electronics, the researchers said. They created a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) computer — technology at the heart of nearly every modern electronic device — without relying on silicon. Instead, they used two different 2D materials to develop both types of transistors needed to control the electric current flow in CMOS computers: molybdenum disulfide for n-type transistors and tungsten diselenide for p-type transistors.

“Silicon has driven remarkable advances in electronics for decades by enabling continuous miniaturization of field-effect transistors (FETs),” said Saptarshi Das, the Ackley Professor of Engineering and professor of engineering science and mechanics at Penn State, who led the research. FETs control current flow using an electric field, which is produced when a voltage is applied. “However, as silicon devices shrink, their performance begins to degrade. Two-dimensional materials, by contrast, maintain their exceptional electronic properties at atomic thickness, offering a promising path forward.”

Democrats, in their native habitat: with their hands in your pocket.

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This is the year that the chickens of Progressivism came home to roost and all pooped on America at once.

Then Teddy Roosevelt’s ego gave the Presidency to the Democrats.

Then Woodrow Wilson got us into a war that was none of our business, using it as an excuse to head America down the long road to the semi-fascism we ‘enjoy’ today.

Then: The 18th Amendment (Prohibition)—and we know how that turned out.

After that: The 19th Amendment (Votes for Women)—and we’re still suffering from that one.

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California Democrats have a problem with their leading candidates. One doesn’t live in the state but allegedly lived, in the euphemistic sense, with a Chinese spy. Another has the looks and personality of a distempered boar and can’t stop screaming at staffers, reporters and anyone late with her lunch. A third is a billionaire who convenes events at luxury hotels to explain how he’ll fight against the billionaires for the working class he sometimes reads about in the paper.

And those are their most popular candidates.

But since this is California, the real problem is that all of those candidates are all the wrong color. Their skin lacks melanin. Two of them can’t even tan. Their distant ancestors probably came here on the Mayflower or some other European sailing vessel. Basically they’re white.

Much too white.

There are other more ‘diverse’ candidates like a Latino former Los Angeles mayor, a Chinese State Controller, a Black Jewish school superintendent, and Biden’s former Latino Secretary of Health and Human Services (he’s still Latino, but a former secretary), but the public isn’t interested in voting for them or giving them money and so they’re not viable candidates.

What are the Democrats to do when their voters just aren’t interested in diversity?

The New Neo.

When is an alliance not an alliance? When it’s NATO. I propose a new acronym: NATOH, for Not About To Offer Help. The help being asked right now is the bare minimum, and against an enemy that threatens most of the countries of NATO, too – if not as obviously in the verbal sense as it threatens the US, then even more in the geographic sense.

The nations of NATO other than the US have long been lacking in terms of financial support for the organization. In addition, in the shadow of America’s protective umbrella they mostly decided that they don’t need a robust defensive military capability of their own. They also decided to let in enough Muslims from foreign countries to make a difference in their internal politics. But I think even without the latter pressure, many of them would still be balking at helping – and by “helping” I mean something as simple as letting us use their airspace.

They really do think the crocodile will eat them last. And several of them really hate Donald Trump. Do they not even see Iran as dangerous? They probably consider their own Muslim populations and their own Jew-haters more immediately dangerous – and may also think that, if push ever came to shove with Iran, the US would help them anyway as it did big-time in the days before there even was a NATO.

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California is a cash machine. The state collects some of the country’s highest income, business, and fuel taxes, and now spends more than $300 billion per year. And yet, everywhere you look, California seems to be falling apart.

The roads are crumbling. Mismanaged wildfires have turned neighborhoods into ash. Drug addiction and homelessness have metastasized, turning parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco into no-go zones. And the cost-of-living crisis is pricing middle-class taxpayers out of basic necessities like groceries and gas, even as the state spends billions on welfare programs that never seem to lift anyone out of poverty.

Californians are beginning to ask: Where is all this money going? On paper, it funds hospitals, universities, schools, prisons, infrastructure, and other public services. But beneath the surface, something else is happening that California Governor Gavin Newsom does not want you to see: massive, systematic, brazen fraud.

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Lawyers in the Mile High State are now being strong-armed by Democrats into signing a radical anti-immigration-enforcement pledge just to do their jobs.

Starting March 30, 2026, every private attorney logging into Colorado’s official Courts E-Filing system (CCE) must certify – under penalty of perjury – that they will never use or share non-public personal information from court records to assist federal immigration authorities. Refuse? You’re shut out of the system entirely. No filing lawsuits, no checking case files, no representing clients in state court. Period.

The certification reads in part: “I certify under penalty of perjury that I will not use personal identifying information obtained from the database… for the purpose of investigating for, participating in, cooperating with, or assisting in federal immigration enforcement, including enforcement of civil immigration laws and 8 U.S.C. sec. 1325 or 1326, unless required by federal or state law or to comply with a court-issued subpoena, warrant, or order.”

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Mark Moran, who is running for Virginia’s U.S. Senate seat, announced Thursday that he is leaving the Democratic Party and will continue his campaign as an independent.

Moran had been one of four challengers seeking the Democrat nomination to unseat incumbent Sen. Mark Warner.

Moran, 34, a former investment banker, made the announcement in a video posted on X and recorded outside St. John’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, the site of Patrick Henry’s 1775 “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech.

He cited a desire to put “Virginia and America first” above party divisions.

Good luck with that.

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Moore’s approval rating tumbled to 48% for the first time since he took office two years ago, as the Democratic Party is likely freaking out that even in one of the bluest states in America, ruled by the kings and queens of the progressive party in a one-party fashion, their rising star (now sinking star) is seeing mounting voter backlash as the state descends into multiple crises, from a fisical mess to power bills to crime and even a massive exodus of residents.

My, what a surprise.

Daily Star (UK).

A 39-year-old man suffered a tragic and premature death, leaving his family desperately searching for him for several days, in a peculiar fatality that was ruled a dreadful accident.

It is thought the man was attempting to recover his mobile phone when he became stuck inside a giant dinosaur sculpture.

Preliminary enquiries by police indicated he was trying to find his phone, but when his remains were initially found, numerous questions remained unanswered.

I’ll bet there were.

Daily Record (UK).

The first woman to die using a Sarco suicide pod in Switzerland was discovered with unexplained strangulation marks on her neck, with an alarm sounding during the procedure.

The War Zone.

The F-15E Weapons System Officer (WSO), missing since his plane was shot down on Friday, has been rescued after a very risky combat search and rescue operation and fierce firefight in southern Iran. The pilot had already been retrieved during the rescue operation in which two HH-60H Jolly Green II combat search and rescue (CSAR) helicopters were reportedly damaged by incoming fire, injuring several troops.

So that’s a load off of everyone’s mind.

Watch it.

What do they know that you don’t?

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In its fight for survival, Israel is not only facing Islamist extremists in the Middle East but also an army of hostile Western NGOs, many funded by European governments. Following the standard pattern for the past 25 years, the network of influential political advocacy NGOs claiming to promote human rights and other moral agendas has launched a propaganda campaign against Israel’s defensive strikes to prevent the Iranian regime from acquiring nuclear weapons. Their unified message condemns Israel and calls on governments and the UN to pressure and sanction Israel. With a few notable exceptions, tens of such organizations have produced a chorus of allegations based on invented evidence while massively distorting the language of morality and international law.

In contrast to the relatively supportive statements from many European leaders who highlight Israel’s right to self-defense and the danger of a nuclear Iran (alongside the usual slogans of restraint and peaceful solutions), the NGOs they fund under the labels of civil society and human rights continue with their propaganda campaigns.

Armstrong Williams.

California has long prided itself on being a symbol of progressive governance, a supposed beacon of tolerance, opportunity, and inclusivity. But behind the glittering curtain of Hollywood dreams and Silicon Valley innovation lies a troubling reality—a self-inflicted crisis stemming from policies that defy economic logic and common sense. As California grapples with an unprecedented immigration surge, ballooning homelessness, and mass exodus of residents and businesses, the question arises: Should the federal government intervene?

The answer is unequivocally no. In fact, the federal government—particularly under President Donald Trump—should stand back and allow California to confront the consequences of its own ideological delusions.

Between July 2021 and July 2022, approximately 400,000 residents left California. The state, once a magnet for dreamers, is now hemorrhaging taxpayers and employers. Major corporations such as Tesla, Oracle, and Chevron have relocated to more business-friendly states like Texas and Florida. The exodus is not coincidental—it is a direct reaction to California’s punitive tax structure, suffocating regulations, and increasingly chaotic public order.

And yet, while residents and businesses flee, California continues to double down on the very policies driving its collapse. It remains a sanctuary state, offering sweeping protections and incentives to undocumented immigrants. It has issued more than a million driver’s licenses to those here illegally and expanded health care coverage to include undocumented adults. These moves, while morally framed by their proponents, come with significant and unsustainable costs.

Fiat justitia pereat California.

Mike Riggs:

In the early 1900s, one of my paternal great-grandfathers moved from urban Illinois to a homestead in Oklahoma. Our only picture of him was taken shortly before the Dust Bowl destroyed his farm. After his farm failed, he abandoned my great-grandmother and their children and migrated to California with thousands of other Okies. When my crops fail, I go to Whole Foods.

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The influential philosopher Jason Stanley, until now a professor at Yale, will—together with renowned European historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore—leave that elite US university for Canada’s Munk School at the University of Toronto.[1] This, says Stanley, protests Trump, who harasses universities with accusations of antisemitism and coerces them with financial threats. When asked whether he would speak of the present-day US in terms of “fascist conditions,” Stanley’s answer was equally succinct and definite: “Yes, of course.” He sees no other, more fitting concept: “Trump is a fascist. His movement is fascist.”

But things are not quite so clear, as the testimony of one of the leading researchers on fascism shows. Robert Paxton, a professor at Columbia University and decades-long luminary of comparative-historical research, stresses that Trump, in contrast to historical fascists, neither wants a strong welfare state nor commands uniformed paramilitaries: “this is not the style of Americans.” Most German historians agree. They are not very visible in comparative fascist studies, since they reference Nazism above all else and often compare the present with Hitler’s dictatorship. Unsurprisingly, this method reveals more differences than similarities. Opposing such a national fixation, David Remnick, editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, put it with inimitable sharpness: “Hitler ruined fascism.”

Many historians consider the term “fascism” to have become vague and worn out by polemical overuse, for example in the GDR or the student movement. Leading intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas see few similarities between the present situation and historical fascism because “no uniformed marching columns” accompany right-wing populism today. The fact that Trump or Meloni do not indulge in the celebration of war or the use of paramilitary violence is, indeed, one of the best arguments against the choice of this term. Nevertheless, even Jürgen Habermas is by no means certain of his judgment, having seen in the new right-wing populism of 2016 the “breeding ground for a new fascism.”

The thing is that ‘fascism’, however defined, has more in common with the Left than with the Right—Mussolini began as, and always claimed to be, a socialist, and Hitler’s party had that right in its name. The only substantive difference (and, as we all know, small differences can lead to the worst fights) is between nationalist socialism and internationalist socialism.

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The developing human brain gains billions of neurons while in the womb, and tacks on some more during childhood. For most of the 20th century, the conventional wisdom was that the brain cells grown before adulthood would be the only ones we would have for the rest of our lives. But over the past few decades, more and more research is challenging that belief.

So is it actually possible for adults to grow neurons? While some experts believe there’s strong evidence that we can gain brain cells after childhood, others are still skeptical of this notion.

The process of creating new brain cells is called neurogenesis. Researchers first observed neurogenesis after birth in lab animals of various ages, including mice, rats and songbirds. In adult mice, they found new neurons growing in parts of the brain collectively called the subventricular zone, an area closely linked with sense of smell, as well as in the hippocampus, a structure that’s central to memory.