DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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Something I have wondered about for years.

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Who could’ve seen it coming?

Just 101 days into his tenure as the Democratic Party’s youngest vice chair—and the first “Zoomer” to hold that office—party elites have already declared David Hogg’s election null and void, a complaint that sounds suspiciously like “election fraud.”

It’s the latest embarrassment from a spent political party that pales in comparison to President Donald Trump’s incredibly successful first 100 days. If Republicans are wise, they’ll take advantage of the chaos ahead of the 2026 midterms.

The complaint centers on broken parliamentary procedures—the preferred excuse of weasels and dictators alike to undermine democratic elections—specifically, DNC rules mandating “gender parity” to tip the scales in favor of female candidates running against men.

In other words, DEI did Hogg in.

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Birth rates are falling across the world, and no one seems to know why. But maybe the answer is simpler than we think: people don’t trust the future anymore. This essay introduces the idea of temporal inflation?—?a hidden force that could be reshaping civilization itself.

Navy Matters.

Currently, two of the three LCS supposedly based in the Middle East have been moved (evacuated?) to Singapore.[1] The whereabouts of the third is unknown. Why aren’t they in the Middle East, perhaps ensuring the safe passage of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz? Isn’t this kind of mission exactly what they were designed for? As you recall, the original LCS concept was that they would boldly enter littoral (hence, the ship’s name) waters and neutralize mines, subs, surface, and land threats so that larger, more expensive ships could operate in the area with less risk.

So, why aren’t they there? Well, we all know the answer. The originally envisioned modules were just flights of fantasy and never materialized. But, what if the original modules had become available as fully functioning equipment? Would such LCSes be useful in the Middle East today?

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Despite the complicated and heartbreaking situation, Sasha has been able to reconnect with her biological family, which has been an unexpected blessing.

Sasha said that meeting her family was,

…like walking into a house you’ve never been in, but knowing where the light switches are, like I know how to talk to these people.

The connection also extended to Sasha’s young children, who have instantly bonded with their biological grandparents.

Well, this pretty much settles the ‘nature vs. nurture’ debate.

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This is such a pure example of proglodyte self-absorption that I couldn’t resist.

There is a paradox running through politics today. Inequality is growing, but the demand for redistribution is decreasing.

Note the assumption that ‘inequality’ necessarily leads to ‘demand for redistribution’, as if everyone were as consumed by envy as the typical Leftist.

The working classes, historically leaning to the left, are increasingly voting for the right.

Perhaps because they’ve woken up to the fact that the Left wants to make them slaves of the government (run by the Left).

And election campaigns are won with symbolic battles over religion, immigration and “traditional values” rather than wages and welfare.

One of the delusions Marx left his spiritual children is the mistaken notion that politics is downstream from economics, when actually it’s the other way around. If the culture gets religion, immigration, and traditional values right, wages will get right by themseles, and there won’t be any need for ‘welfare’.

A new study (“Presidential lecture: identity politics”) by Nicola Gennaioli and Guido Tabellini of Bocconi University, forthcoming in Econometrica, offers a powerful and disorienting explanation: we are no longer divided into classes, but into cultural identities. And it is on these that the game of democracy is played.

That’s because ‘classes’ imply stratification within a single culture (‘nation’), and the Left has been devoted over the last half century to decomposing existing cultures (such as the U.S.) into identitarian tribes that no longer share a culture and therefore don’t constitute a ‘nation’ in any significant sense.

The heart of the model is simple and radical: people choose the identity they feel is most relevant to the social conflicts of the moment. When economics dominates the agenda, people split by class. But when culture becomes more salient—for example, because of immigration or ethical issues—people position themselves into opposing cultural groups.

Again, this is what the Left has been trying (with a lot of success) to do since the 1960s. Economics only matters within a particular culture, as the Left found out during World War I—the working class of Germany, Russia, France, Italy, and Britain were perfectly happy to go to war against workers from another nation (culture), and the Left just refuses to believe it.

Read the whole thing, and marvel at such cluelessness.

I’ll gladly pay for that kid’s Twinkies….

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Meeting under France’s 2026 G7 presidency at a historic abbey outside Paris on March 26–27, foreign ministers from the world’s leading economies issued a joint call for an immediate halt to attacks on civilians as the war in the Middle East intensifies.

They’re talking the wrong language to the wrong people. One side doesn’t recognize the notion of ‘civilian’—either you’re a Muslim, and so a Soldier of Allah, or you’re not, and so an Enemy of Allah. There is no room for ‘civilian’ in this worldview.

Representatives from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union said protecting civilian lives and infrastructure must be a top priority. They also stressed the need to limit the conflict’s ripple effects across the region and to better coordinate humanitarian aid. Deliberate strikes on civilians or diplomatic sites, they said, can never be justified.

They don’t realize that the other side in this conflict doesn’t care. Muslims play to win. Ripple effects across the region is the whole point. They don’t care abot ‘humanitarian aid’ except as a lever that uses the West’s own morality against itself. “Do what I say or I’ll shoot this dog” only affects the side that cares about the dog.

The talks also touched on concerns about global trade and energy security, including the danger to critical shipping routes, primarily the Strait of Hormuz, and the broader economic consequences straining energy markets and disrupting supply chains.

As long as Iran is a threat, these problems are going to remain problems. The simplest course, joining in to grind Iran’s terrorist regime into the sand, would require work, and they’re much more comfortable in their native habitat, the realm of talk.

Commonweal.

In his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, historian Erik Baker calls this self-help ideology “the rot festering at the core” of our national obsession with work. A comprehensive and sharply written intellectual history, the book traces the origins of several reputedly twenty-first-century maladies to an earlier age. Gig work, as it turns out, didn’t begin with Uber but with Avon direct-sales reps. The wacky metaphysics of today’s tech billionaires have their analogues in the “mind-cures” of nineteenth-century spiritualists. And the celebration of “charismatic” executives has its origins in German social science, with disturbingly fascist undertones. Baker also demonstrates how a fetish for entrepreneurs shaped both modernization theory during the Cold War and now-discredited market-based solutions to global poverty, especially microfinance. But the “marriage of positive psychology and the entrepreneurial ethic” is the book’s primary target. It’s a rotten worldview because it “enjoins us to work more intensely than we need to,” and more importantly, it “leaves us feeling devoid of purpose when we don’t have work.”

Petra Palusova.

The digital age brings a new economic epoch. Many say that traditional capitalism is ending, and by many, I mean plenty. It is said to be a result of the change of the social fabric and advance of technology – intertwined. The core of this is happening in the digital domain, or better said informational domain and through digital platforms, which will soon move into synthetic virtual spaces as a next step.

There is, of course, no such thing as ‘capitalism’. What most people talk about when they think they are talking about ‘capitalism’ is more accurately industrialism, and socialism needs industrialism more than than un-socialism ever did.

According to the former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis, value extraction has increasingly shifted away from markets and onto large digital platforms, which no longer operate like oligopolistic firms, but rather like private fiefdoms or estates.

The digital domain has expanded beyond communication and commerce infrastructure. Because an ecosystem of economic and social interaction is getting more and more complex, it has become a battleground for economic and social power. The digital realm – the realm of information and data – interconnects digital spaces governed by technology and those behind it. Some see them as the architects and custodians of a new equalizing infrastructure, others as behemoths that rule over the digital space with their algorithmic dictatorship. So what are they – the builders or techno-feudal lords?

In this article I will review the definitions and arguments, and present an insight, or perhaps a counter-insight, that highlights some major characteristics of today’s digital economy that I don’t necessarily see as feudal.

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Do you like information theory? Do you like molecular biology? Do you like the idea of smashing them together and seeing what happens? If so, then here’s a question: How much information is in your DNA?

When I first looked into this question, I thought it was simple:

Human DNA has about 3.1 billion base pairs.
Each base pair can take one of four values (A, T, C, or G)
It takes 2 bits to encode one of four possible values (00, 01, 10, or 11)
Thus, human DNA contains 6.2 billion bits.
Easy, right? Sure, except:

You have two versions of each base pair, one from each of your parents. Should you count both?
All humans have almost identical DNA. Does that matter?
DNA can be compressed. Should you look at the compressed representation?
It’s not clear how much of our DNA actually does something useful. The insides of your cells are a convulsing pandemonium of interacting “hacks”, designed to keep working even as mutations constantly screw around with the DNA itself. Should we only count the “useful” parts?

And that’s just your nuclear DNA. Your mitochondria have their own DNA, a relic of the independent microbe that they were before being symbiotically fused with eukaryotic cells.

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Now the thing that, in the last couple of decades, everyone has realized is wrong (I suspect some early Lindybeige videos had something to do with how widespread this notion is), is that you don’t tell archers to ‘fire’ because their weapons don’t involve any fire. But the solution in film has been to keep the arrow volleys – that is, the coordinated all-at-once shooting – and simply change the order to ‘release’ or ‘loose.’ Which isn’t actually any better!

Archers didn’t engage in coordinated all-at-once shooting (called ‘volley fire’), they did not shoot in volleys because there wouldn’t be any point to do so. Indeed, part of the reason there was such confusion over what a general is supposed to shout instead of ‘fire!’ is that historical tactical manuals don’t generally have commands for coordinated bow shooting because armies didn’t do coordinated bow shooting. Instead, archers generated a ‘hail’ or ‘rain’ (those are the typical metaphors) of arrows as each archer shot in their own best time.

More to the point, they could not shoot in volleys. And even if they had shot in volleys, those volleys wouldn’t produce anything like the impact we regularly see in film or TV. So this week, we’re going to walk through those considerations: briefly looking at what volley fire is for and why archers both wouldn’t and couldn’t do it, before taking a longer look at the problem of lethality in massed arrow fire.

This is a sure-fire laugh for any movie that tries to treat archers like musketeers.

Daily Record (UK).

Father Adelir Antonio de Carli, a priest from Brazil, had a rather unconventional idea to raise money for charity.

Natural selection is working overtime these days.

Daily Record (UK).

American model Ginger Meadows travelled to Australia after being inspired by Crocodile Dundee, but the 24-year-old from Colorado was tragically killed in a crocodile attack.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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of New York City near the mayoral residence, was being led out by an FBI agent, he raised his right finger upwards in what media accounts incorrectly described as an “ISIS salute”.

The New York Post called it “a universal salute for ISIS”. But there is no such thing as an ISIS salute. It’s the traditional Islamic salute used during prayers to their deity and, much like “Allahu Akbar” is used by Islamists proclaiming that they represent Allah and are combating infidels.

ISIS beheaders held up one finger after beheading their non-Muslim victims, but so do most Muslims. The ISIS flag, a terrifying black and white chimera to most westerners, simply declares that Allah is the only deity and Mohammed is his messenger: the founding premise of Islam.

The persistent myth of an ‘ISIS salute’ continues to crop up when media outlets try to distinguish between Islam and some imaginary ‘extreme’ version of it represented by Islamic terrorists. The BBC and a UK police force previously apologized for calling the ‘Allah finger’ an ISIS salute.

What the ‘ISIS salute’ lie really reveals is the length to which authorities and the media will go to cover up the Islamic theology behind Islamic terrorism. What the Gracie Mansion bombing suspect likely meant to convey was that the murderous attack had been carried out in Allah’s name, that he was operating under Islamic law, and had no regard for our justice system.

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Politico published a cartoon on Friday featuring anti-Semitic imagery in an attempt to criticize the war in Iran. The image depicts President Donald Trump, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Republican members of Congress wearing blood-covered Jewish prayer shawls and yarmulkes.

The cartoon, drawn by former New York Post cartoonist Sean Delonas, depicts the lawmakers aboard a rowboat labeled “Ship of Neocons”—a play on the Hieronymus Bosch painting Ship of Fools—that is about to plummet over a waterfall. A bag of blood-smeared money crowns the mast, and the word “Amalek,” a reference to a historical enemy of the Jewish people from the Hebrew Bible, appears in the background.

Netanyahu, depicted with an exaggerated nose, is also shown wearing a blood-covered Jewish prayer shawl and eating from a table covered in blood, while Trump, also in a Jewish prayer shawl, is drawn underneath the word “Amalek.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who is not Jewish, is depicted wearing a yarmulke and a Jewish prayer shawl and holding a bottle of blood. Graham and Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), also drawn in a blood-covered Jewish prayer shawl, have supported the Iran war and are longtime supporters of Israel.

The cartoon plays on classic anti-Semitic tropes about Jews covertly controlling events, in this case the decision to launch the war in Iran, and using financial exploitation to do so. The exaggeration of Netanyahu’s nose in a grotesque, caricatured style plays on age-old efforts to dehumanize Jews.

The drawing was published as part of Politico‘s “Cartoon Carousel,” which Politico describes as a round-up of the “best” political cartoons of the week.

A spokeswoman for Politico did not respond to a request for comment. Delonas declined to comment, saying he “charge[s] $500 for a 1/2 hour interview and $750 for a full hour.”

Newsbusters.

The Washington Post is a Democrat rag. On Thursday’s front page, the below-the-fold headline on the left was “Democrats continue to reel in victories in special elections.” The subscribers surely loved it.

In the same spot on Friday was “Young conservatives’ bigotry has GOP on edge: Radicalization of youth on the right has set off bitter debate in the party.”

Democrats love a “bitter debate” on the other side.

The online headline was similar, but the subheadline was more specific: “Many Republicans dismiss such party members even as white supremacists like Nick Fuentes gain popularity, but there’s growing unease at their presence in the rank and file.”

Let’s not deny the Republicans have a problem with antisemites in their ranks. Reporter Hannah Knowles quotes Sen. Ted Cruz: that he has seen more prejudice against Jewish people “in the last 18 months on the right than at any point in my lifetime,” and that “it is gaining real purchase, especially with young people.”

But surely Knowles and the Post is not unaware that “groyper” Nick Fuentes has been out there raging against Trump. On March 16: “He needs to go. Like, I really believe that he needs to be impeached under the Democrats. And I don’t even want him to be removed from office because I don’t want Vance to become president either. I want Vance to burn down with all of it.”

On December 28, 2025, Fuentes posted on social media that he’d vote for Gavin Newsom over “fat subhuman” Vance for president in 2028 “100x over just because he’s handsome.”

Why is this nowhere in the story? Because the Post is a Democrat rag.

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Whether it was the head of a left-wing nonprofit reportedly linked to a Marxist propaganda network connected to a China-based billionaire last week, or Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders on Friday afternoon, there was one common denominator among these “champagne” socialists: their obsession with living an affluent, elitist lifestyle, including flying first class.

When they fly commercial at all.

Sanders has been identified with socialist politics for roughly half a century. He was involved with the Liberty Union Party in Vermont in the 1970s, later became mayor of Burlington in 1981, and by the time he entered Congress in 1991, he was already widely described as a democratic socialist.

Recall last year, the boomer socialist and another unhinged Democratic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were spotted flying around the country in private jets that cost upwards of $15,000 per hour during their tour to fight billionaires.

Poverty for thee but not for me.

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There is nothing new under the sun.

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That “diversity is our strength” is one of those obvious contradictions that people with common sense instantly recognize as hooey. It is poisonous hooey, mind you. As the British historian Arnold Toynbee said, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

But the people selling diversity know that.

They champion diversity not because it is a societal bonding agent but because it is the opposite. A culture made up of discordant groups with little in common—neither religion, habits, nor, especially, language—is no culture. Without these sinews tying it together, a body cannot rouse itself and undertake common endeavors.

A nation of groups is thus an oxymoron. In the best of times, it will be a festering federation. In the worst, it will dissolve into warring tribes.

People used to get this. It was part of our popular understanding.

Toward the end of the 1952 Hollywood classic “Ivanhoe,” King Richard the Lionheart asks those assembled before him to kneel as Saxons, Normans, Danes, and Jews and then commands them to rise as “Englishmen.” Nobody had to explain why.

Today, we have set up a system in which we seemingly ask Americans to kneel and then rise as members of groups.

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When President Trump returned to the White House, he didn’t just get to work cleaning up Joe Biden’s mess—he set his sights on dismantling decades of entrenched bureaucratic bloat, waste, and corruption. With a relentless series of executive orders and policy directives, Trump reignited his mission to drain the swamp—this time with laser precision and zero patience for the status quo.

Predictably, the left went into full-blown panic mode. Liberal legal groups immediately launched a barrage of lawsuits, cherry-picking friendly courts in a shameless attempt to stall Trump’s agenda. They’re terrified of losing control over the bloated regulatory state they’ve used for years to push policies they could never pass through Congress.

But that strategy just hit a major roadblock. In a landmark ruling on Saturday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals handed the Trump administration a decisive legal victory—one that could fundamentally change how activist judges and forum-shopped cases interfere with executive authority.

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In 2008, genetic researchers studying Ötzi’s mitochondrial DNA concluded that his direct maternal lineage was extinct. No living person appeared to share the same genetic signature. The conclusion was blunt and widely cited: it was highly unlikely that Ötzi had any living maternal relatives.

That assumption has now been overturned.

Through modern genetic genealogy, FamilyTreeDNA researchers have identified a living man whose maternal DNA traces back to the same ancient lineage as Ötzi, reconnecting a family line believed lost for millennia.

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Criminals are exploiting weak points across the West Texas oil production region, which accounts for 15% of the world’s energy resources. This emerging wave of oil theft is burning a multi-billion-dollar hole in the budgets of oil and gas operators across the Permian Basin and is becoming a national security threat.

Bloomberg reports that oil and gas producers are losing at least $1 billion, if not more, per year due to oilfield theft in what the outlet describes as something straight out of a “Mad Max” movie.

The outlet spoke with Sheriff Randy Cozart, who estimates that about 500 barrels of crude are stolen each week. Industry groups say statewide losses are accumulating and range from $1 billion to $2 billion annually.

Trump imagines negotiation with Sharpie maker for $5 signature pens (Isaac Arnsdorf/Washington Post)  Jesus told stories about laborers in a vineyard and prodigal sons, too, and I’m pretty sure he’d never labored in a vineyard or been a prodigal son. I guess he just imagined them. (Journalist: Someone paid money to write stuff displaying how dumb they are.)

Trump To Put His Signature On US Dollar Bills, Breaking Tradition Since 1861 I’m happy they have nothing more important to write about.

Trump considers renaming Strait of Hormuz after either America or himself — once he evicts Iran (New York Post) Sure, I believe that.

Trump’s signature is coming to U.S. currency — as cash use fades (Kelly Tyko/Axios)  Perhaps we can get proglodytes to make burning money fashionable because it has Trump’s name on it.

Will Iran Break Trumpism? (New York Times)

Tell Your State To Pass This No-ICE-At-Our Precincts Model Law. NOW. (Josh Marshall/Talking Points Memo)

CPAC Host Stunned as Crowd Erupts in Cheers for Trump Impeachment (Marin Scotten/New Republic)

On CPAC’s Main Stage, Fissures in the Party Trump Remade (Kellen Browning/New York Times)  The equation of CPAC with the Republican party is merely the latest of instances where Narrative Media journalists demonstrate their utter ignorance of anything outside of the proglodyte bubble.

The war in Iran is driving a generational divide between MAGA men at CPAC (Liz Crampton/Politico)  MAGA is the New Nigger.

MAGA’s eruption has so far kept Trump from endorsing in key Senate race (Natalie Allison/Washington Post)  MAGA is the New Nigger.

Donald Trump Impeachment: Democrat Warns President’s GOP Support Cracking (Steve Mollman/Newsweek) But that trick never works.

49 States Enact Legislation Banning Immigrants From California (Babylon Bee)

The Epstein class thinks it runs America. Today, No Kings protesters send their response. (Rep. Ro Khanna/MS NOW)  The not-very-subtle implication is that Trump is part of “The Epstein Class”, hence the linkage with the explicitly anti-Trump “No Kings” demonstrations.

You can’t hide your lying ICE (Radley Balko/The Watch)

Trump’s conflicting messages sow confusion over the Iran war (Steven Sloan/Associated Press)  And probably intentionally so.

Troop deployments test Republicans’ nerves on Capitol Hill (Politico)  And Democrat bile ducts.

The Latest Front in Stephen Miller’s Personal War (Jamelle Bouie/New York Times)  One of the ugliest symptoms of TDS is the compulsion to destroy not only Trump but anybody who is even vaguely connected to Trump.

Is Iran a Political Problem for Trump? Tell Me How Long the War Lasts. (Nate Cohn/New York Times) Apparently Cohn can’t let it go.

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March 11, 2026: The day Washington state died.

John C. Wright.

The name comes from the famous film GASLIGHT (1944) starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, where a young bride’s new husband slowly manipulates her into believing that she is descending into insanity, to distract her from seeing evidence of his crimes (including that the gaslights through the rest of the house dim when he sneaks into a attic at night and turns on the lamp there — from this comes the film’s name).

Gaslighting is a sophisticated technique, pioneered by the Nazis when the radio was still a new invention, perfected by the Soviets over many decades of Cold War, studied and copied by the CIA, and installed secretly into all the mass media in the United States, and in the world, by Project Mockingbird and other secret operations.

In brief, gaslighting involves two cooperative groups: perpetrators and willing victims, or, as I like to call them, following HG Wells’ names for the post-humans more highly evolved than we, Morlocks and Eloi.

The Morlocks who know it is a lie repeat it endlessly, relying on the sheer fact that it is outrageous to make victims pause to doubt it.

The lie is surrounded with all the normal evidences of ‘social’ proof, that is to say, the cues and labels used by groups of men to confirm to each other that they are saying and hearing the truth, such as, for example, the confidence of delivery, coming from a trusted source, coming from an expert, from the celebrities and “cool kids” and hearing that the opposite is heresy, a sign of mental and moral inferiority.

The lie is packages to be easily memorized and repeated, usually a phrase or word “conspiracy theory” or “islamophobia” that is smugly used by never actually defined. The smugness with which they utter perfect nonsense or repeat absurd lies even after being caught is a social proof of truth: instinct says liars should hesitate, or seem nervous.

The perpetrator rarely says the conclusion to be drawn, merely implies it, and leaves the victim to draw the conclusion himself, so that the normal skepticism used for statement coming from others is never triggered: the victim is under the illusion that he came up with the idea independently.

The Eloi have their self-esteem and their worldview wrapped intimately about these lies, so that to question them would invite the downfall of every point of pride.

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Per the most recent report, in 2025, of the Social Security and Medicare board of trustees, Social Security is capable of paying out the entirety of promised benefits through 2033. After that, there is only the capability of paying out 77% of promised benefits.

That’s seven years from now.

Anyone who got a letter from their investment fund or insurance program that said, “We’re sorry, but in another seven years we won’t be able to pay out what was promised,” would immediately be on the phone to their lawyer,

Why does this very bad news about Social Security not seem to trouble Americans?

One reason is that we have no control. It’s not yours despite the fact that you paid for it.

You would immediately be on the phone to your agent or your lawyer if your insurance company declared bankruptcy because it’s yours. You own it.

Have you ever called Social Security or the IRS to ask a question? You will sit on the phone for hours, and in the end, most likely you won’t connect. Try it and you will understand what hopeless means.

My Social Security income just about pays my income taxes, so I’m good.

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Actress Jane Fonda stopped by Friday’s edition of The Briefing with Jen Psaki on MS NOW in an attempt to hype Saturday’s No Kings protests. Naturally, Fonda would paint a dire picture of the state of democracy in America, but her evidence consisted of defeats for liberal budget priorities and false narratives about the erasing of history. Nevertheless, Fonda would also suggest that the state of democracy is so perilous that things are currently worse than they were in the Jim Crow days because now everybody is affected.

Psaki led Fonda by misusing the word “all” when she invited her to promote the cause, “I watched your event today. We all watched your event today. And I should note for the audience, you were in Washington, D.C. today speaking outside the Kennedy Center for an event—that’s what I’m referring to—in defense of free expression. So tell us about the event and the message you were really trying to get across to people watching.”

I suggest that Hanoi Jane is worse than Benedict Arnold. Arnold was at least a patriot before he switched sides.

Huffington Post.

Possibly the only occasion on which The Huffington Post would publish something by someone like Jesse Ventura is one where Trump is being attacked.

“Because how can you send somebody else’s kids to a war if you won’t send your own?” he asked.

Easy. You just do it, as governments have been doing for time out of mind. You only ‘send your kids to a war’ when they are conscripted to do so, under an authoritarian regime. Everybody in the current American armed forces is a volunteer.

Trump isn’t ‘sending kids to war’, he is commanding the armed forces, of which he is commander-in-chief, in pursuit of foreign policy goals, which is what Americans elected him to do.

Jesse Ventura’s attitude is the exact same attitude as the Chinese Communists under Mao, who thought that everybody ought to put some time in hoeing crops and shoveling dirt. Jesse has always been about imposing his values on other people, which negates any respect he may have earned from his military service.

If Barron Trump wants to put in some military service, which I would certainly encourage him to do, that is his decision to make—not that of a blowhard like Jesse Ventura.

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Introduction
The modern nation-state is not natural nor permanent. It’s a technological product of the industrial era’s logic of mass warfare, bureaucracy, and centralized taxation. That logic is breaking down. In a world of cyberspace, mobile capital, and digital commerce and geography, brute force lose much of their leverage. You cannot conquer the internet with tanks, nor can a government easily tax a truly digital wallet whose private keys are hidden in someone’s mind. The Information Revolution is a shift in the logic of power as fundamental as gunpowder was to medieval knighthood. Every institution built on yesterday’s logic of violence will either adapt or crumble. This was the original thesis of the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997). And in 2026—with the rise of China, the regional military conflicts now underway, and the polarization of politics both within nations and between them—that shift is no longer speculatory. It is existential.

What matters now is what kind of order will emerge from it. The battle is no longer between rival “-isms” competing for control of the same nation-state, but between two fundamentally different civilizational logics: an empowering future that facilitates progress and an authoritarian one that dooms humanity.

A civilization can survive poverty. It can survive corruption. It can survive decadence for a time. What it cannot survive indefinitely is the slow freezing of criticism, the politicization of truth, the administrative management of thought, and the suppression of the independent mind. If centralized authoritarian models become the dominant operating system of the twenty-first century, then the danger is that humanity becomes less capable of discovering what is true, building what is new, and expanding beyond its present limits. In other words, stagnation. And stagnation necessarily leads to extinction.

This manifesto therefore renews the sovereign individual thesis under harsher conditions. The survival argument is simple: decentralization is the only civilizational trajectory that does not end in extinction. The individual mandate follows. Do science. Build technology. Start or fund companies at the frontier—AI, DeFi, fintech, data science, space, neurotechnology, anything that compounds intelligence and autonomy.

For every unit of wealth created, disperse it: into offshore jurisdictions that compete for your presence rather than conscript you, and into cryptographic infrastructure that answers to mathematics rather than to ministers.

Newsbusters.

The Friday evening newscasts of ABC’s World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, and CBS Evening News continued their streak of ignoring Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick’s ethics probe as the House Ethics Committee found her guilty of 25 ethics charges. However, the Saturday editions of NBC’s Today and CBS Saturday Morning did manage to ever so briefly acknowledge the scandal’s existence. The same could not be said of ABC’s Good Morning America.

CBS’s coverage was limited to the “Eye Opener” segment at the beginning of the show, where reporters rattle off several headlines without further discussion. In this case, one narrator reported, “A Democratic House lawmaker is in hot water, facing expulsion from Congress.”

Had it been a Republican, it would have been front page news 24/7.

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We get the government we choose to elect, hence the government we deserve. Voting for ever-higher punitive taxes on the rich is arguably a form of civic suicide.

Consider that a wealthy New Yorker can get a raise of almost 40% just by moving. That’s right. If moving eliminates a 14.8% top state and local tax rate, our top-tier taxpayer gets a 36% raise, not a 14.8% raise, by leaving. It’s doubtful if any of our city and state leaders have done this math, but it’s shocking. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to take the top rate up another 2%, if not by the state then by the city, which would mean that our rich neighbor can get a 42% raise.

Here’s how the math works. A rich New Yorker pays a maximum state and city income tax of 14.8%, on top of a maximum federal tax of 37%. But there are hidden taxes. Uncapped Medicare and Medicaid taxes push the marginal federal tax to 39.4%. If the income is earned on investments, the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT, another gift from Obamacare) adds another 3.8%, pushing the top federal tax above 43%.

So, top-tier New York taxpayers may soon pay a marginal tax of 43% to the IRS and 17% to the city and state of New York. The combined 60% marginal tax rates mean they have the privilege of keeping 40 cents of each new dollar they earn. A move to one of the nine states with no income tax allows our taxpayer to keep 57% of every additional dollar of income, instead of 40%. Do the math. That’s a 42% raise.

Forget the argument about “paying their fair share.” “Fair” is an entirely subjective term. Your fair share of someone else’s money might be seen as a ripoff by them, especially if the money is spent less wisely than we might spend our own money. If you are rich and believe you’ve earned your money, will you consider leaving a state for a permanent 40% raise? Of course.

Read it.

A viral video circulating on X appears to show a young developer unveiling a 3D-printed proof-of-concept prototype of a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile system, or MANPADS, built for less than $100.

According to the project page on GitHub, the five-minute video showcases a “proof-of-concept prototype of a low-cost rocket launcher and guided rocket system built using consumer electronics and 3D-printed components.”

The project description says the system uses an onboard flight computer, inertial measurement hardware, and a sensor stack that includes GPS, compass, and barometric modules to determine orientation and transmit telemetry.

Oh wrist, make me an instrument of thy peace….

Read it.

A new report backed by European conservative lawmakers is sounding the alarm over what it describes as the spread of “no-go zones” across the European Union, linking the phenomenon directly to mass immigration, Islamization, and the breakdown of state authority in major urban areas.

The report was presented at a press conference on Wednesday by Sweden Democrats MEP Charlie Weimers, French nationalist MEP Marion Maréchal, and Brothers of Italy MEP Nicola Procaccini. Published by New Direction, the foundation tied to the ECR parliamentary group, the study argues that large parts of Europe are witnessing the rise of “parallel societies where the laws of the State are increasingly replaced by the codes of radicalisation and the rule of violence.”

Read it.

Left-wing Maryland Gov. Wes Moore was greeted Thursday afternoon by a stadium full of boos at Camden Yards on Opening Day for Orioles baseball, a striking public rebuke of the struggling governor and the one-party rule of Democratic Party kings and queens running the state into the ground.

Read it.

The city of Louisville, Kentucky, has agreed to pay $800,000 in attorney fees to settle a case with a Christian photographer who fought to protect her religious and free speech rights over the years of litigation.

Louisville ultimately spent a fortune to force Chelsey Nelson to photograph same sex marriages under its nondiscrimination laws.

When combined with its own litigation costs, the case likely cost the city and the courts millions to deny Nelson her constitutional rights.

What to they care? It’s not their personal money.

New York Post.

Controversial comedian Druski has triggered fresh outrage over his latest mega-viral skit in which he dressed up as Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika — with many calling him “disgusting” and “completely disrespectful” to a grieving widow.

I’m pretty sure that ‘grieving widows’ don’t go on stage in leather pants. Just sayin’.

A War No One Wants to Defend (William Kristol/The Bulwark)  This is possibly the first war that Bill Kristol hasn’t liked.

Trump interrupts a Cabinet meeting dealing with the Iran war and rising prices to talk Sharpies (Will Weissert/Associated Press)  Comforting to know that they don’t have anything more important to talk about.

As Trump skips CPAC, MAGA’s rifts over Iran war are on display (Natalie Allison/Washington Post) At least that’s what they’d like you to believe.

Standoff With Iran Raises Fresh Doubts About Trump’s Freestyle Diplomacy (Michael Crowley/New York Times) Among the Narrative Media and the Usual Suspects.

Exclusive: Donald Trump to Add His Signature to US Currency, a First For a Sitting President (Aidan McLaughlin/Vanity Fair) Ah, ah, ah, ah, yankin’ their chains, yankin’ their chains….

DHS Won’t Comply With New Jersey ICE Mask Ban

Education Dept. to leave headquarters, give building to Energy Department (Washington Post)  Trump is doing what Reagan talked about but never did.

Where Trump Has Installed Election Deniers in Government (New York Times)

MAGA is growing anxious over Orbán’s fate (Ian Ward/Politico)  MAGA is the New Nigger.

After markets rattle, Trump once again punts on following through with threat on Iran power plants (Aamer Madhani/Associated Press)  Just because you don’t understand the plan doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

Donald Trump Is Breaking Up with Europe (Susan B. Glasser/New Yorker)

Republicans Know This War Is Going Badly (Michelle Goldberg/New York Times)  Badly for Democrats’ Muslim clients.

As Trump feels pressure to end war, allies fear what Iran may do next (Washington Post) And rightly so.

Hegseth Strikes Two Black and Two Female Officers From Promotion List (New York Times)  Purging the DEI hires.

Some Republicans Raise Questions About Iran War Plans (Jonathan Tamari/Bloomberg)  The Narrative Media would like nothing more than to promote division among Republicans. Unfortunately for them, they don’t hold a monopoly on the News any more.

For Trump, a Deadline Isn’t Always a Deadline (Aruna Viswanatha/Wall Street Journal)  The problem seems to be that most journalists are unable to keep up.

Poll: 1 out of 8 Trump voters has buyer’s remorse about 2024 (G. Elliott Morris/Strength In Numbers)

Bruce Springsteen Says ‘I Don’t Worry’ About Losing Fans Over Slamming Trump and New Tour Is ‘Going to Be Political’: ‘Blowback Is Just Part of It. I’m Ready’ (Zack Sharf/Variety)  I guess everybody needs a hobby.

Russian jailed in UK for attacking woman after Trump’s son alerted police (Michael Holden/Reuters)

Two More Giant Ls for Trump (Andrew Egger/The Bulwark)  And two more giant Lies for the Bullshitwark.

A war of regression: how Trump bombed the US into a worse position with Iran (Patrick Wintour/The Guardian)

Nothing Works in Trump’s America–Except for Racism (Elie Mystal/The Nation)  Hey, racism has worked for Democrats since the Sixties.

Johnson: No Warren-Pocahontas Joke At Mullin Ceremony Shows Trump ‘Has Dementia’  I’m sure he was thinking it. I know I was.

TIME Finds an Ideal Anti-Trump Angle: ICE Detains Infirm Gay Iranians

The End of Immigration — Americans despise ICE, but it’s “succeeding” nonetheless (Paul Krugman)  The vacuum speaks.

TSA Agent Keeps Skills Sharp By Groping Mannequin At Home (Babylon Bee).

The Robb Report.

A loophole that allows supercar and luxury car owners to register their vehicles in Montana to save on taxes could be endangered because of a new bill in the California legislature.

The workaround costs the Golden State some $20 million a year in lost tax revenue, according to the bill’s sponsor, Jerry McNerney, a Democrat from Pleasanton. Montana has no car registration fees or state sales tax, allowing car buyers to set up shell companies to register cars there and avoid taxes in their home states. The loophole is well-known among car collectors, which is the reason why one often sees Big Sky Country license plates on cars at shows in many places that aren’t Montana.

“The Montana Loophole is widening, with increasing numbers of tax evaders creating bogus shell companies so they can avoid paying sales taxes on Ferraris, Porsches, and pricey RVs, costing California tens of millions in revenue,” McNerney said in a statement.

I like Steve Jobs’ trick fo buying a new car, driving it with the temporary tag until that expired, and then trading it in on a new car, rinse, repeat. A very good way for a billionaire to preserve his anonymity.

McNerney’s bill would target the shell companies used to facilitate the Montana registrations. “SB 1406 would close the Montana Loophole by expanding California’s definition of who is a resident under state use tax law to include a shell company when at least one member of the business is a California resident. SB 1406 would also authorize CDTFA to impose tax liability on the individual members of a shell company,” according to a press release.

So you back up one—the shell company that owns the car is in turn owned by a shell company that doesn’t own a car but is owned by a California resident. Then the use tax law applies to the near shell company but not to the far shell company that has no California resident owners.

No Democrat drone legislator is as clever as a billionaire-employed lawyer. I guarantee it. Certainly not Jerry McNerny.

New York Post.

“We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America,” Vance told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on the latest episode of his show.

Omar has previously called the allegations “disgusting lies.” Reps for her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The allegations have dogged the congresswoman since even before her House campaign in 2018.

Omar has two ex-husbands, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the latter of whom was first accused at least a decade ago of wedding the future US congresswoman.

“The people we care about most, the undocumented migrants…”

– Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT)

Newsbusters.

On Thursday, law enforcement and the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida announced charges against a brother and sister in the placement of a bomb at MacDill Air Force base, a key U.S. base amid the war in Iran as it’s home to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and U.S. Special Operations Command. This national security bombshell was of no interest to NBC (and barely at all to ABC) on their flagship newscasts Thursday night and Friday morning.

While 27-year-old Ann Mary Zheng was arrested, her brother Alen Zheng remains at large and fled to….China (which opens up a dangerous set of possibilities vis-à-vis the Chinese regime). At a Thursday press conference, the U.S. Attorney said they were not yet sure whether the two Americans have dual citizenship in China.

Thursday’s CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil provided a welcome contrast with a full story on this and aired prior to the ongoing lead story of the last few weeks in the (Democrat-created) Homeland Security shutdown that has caused mass chaos at American airports with TSA workers remaining unpaid.

Daily Record (UK).

A leading American infectious disease specialist who had travelled to the African country of Botswana in order to help tackle the country’s HIV crisis was killed in front of his helpless wife when a massive crocodile pulled him from a canoe and into a river.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

An Afghan asylum seeker who crossed the Channel in a small boat has been jailed for 15 years after abducting and raping a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.

Ahmad Mulakhil, 23, carried out the attack just four months after arriving in the UK, targeting the schoolgirl before luring her into a secluded cul-de-sac where he repeatedly assaulted her.

During a 10-day trial at Warwick Crown Court, jurors heard how Mulakhil filmed the attack on his phone while laughing and threatening to kill the girl’s family. He was later convicted of rape, child abduction, sexual assault and taking indecent images of a minor.

Read it.

What do you call it when a politician tells you to put elections “back on a level playing field” by voting for a redistricting map gerrymandered to give Democrats 10 seats to Republicans’ one?

“Lying” doesn’t quite foot the bill. “Rank deception” is closer, but I think this kind of rhetoric calls for the big guns.

I’ll settle on “shameless Orwellian gaslighting,” because supporting the Virginia redistricting push in the name of “fairness” involves redefining basic words in the same manner as the oppressive government in George Orwell’s “1984,” and this rhetorical strategy seems designed to make people with rational concerns about the ballot initiative question their sanity.

This particular shameless Orwellian gaslighting comes from America’s 44th president, Barack Hussein Obama.

Read it.

It’s amazing how much California does these days to roll into its stereotype as a dysfunctional, woke-ified political wasteland.

On Tuesday, the University of Southern California canceled its scheduled gubernatorial debate after several top Democrats reportedly waged a pressure campaign to put a halt to it.

The field is currently wide open with Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom being term-limited out of office. One would think that would be a reason to give voters a chance to learn about the policies of the new candidates, a mix of Republicans and Democrats competing in the state’s “jungle” primary that lumps the parties together.

Nope.

You see, the leading candidates set to appear on stage had a BIG problem. They were all WHITE. None of the non-white candidates crossed the polling and fundraising thresholds set ahead of time by USC.

Read it.

So-called “teen takeovers” in Chicago are becoming increasingly violent, to the point that even little boys are being savagely brutalized, says the founder of a “violence interruptor” group that intervened during Wednesday’s teen mob outbreak.

“Well, we got about two or three hundred kids just running back and forth, jumping on cars, just fighting, taunting the police,” Chitown Crime Chasers Founder Justin Peters, who was at the scene of the teen takeover at Chicago’s Loop, said in an interview with Fox Chicago 32.

Peters described how his group intervened to help one little boy who was being stomped on by some of the teens in the mob:

“Unfortunately, viral video is circulating showing me rendering aide to a teenage boy who was violently jumped and stomped on unconscious,” Peters reported, sharing Chitown Crime Stoppers video from the teen takeover on X.com.

Judging from the video, they all look to be Teenagers of Color.

Imagine how low the crime rates would be if young black males were prohibited from possessing firearms.

Daily Mail (UK).

I understand that soldiers used to shoot themselves in the leg to avoid duty they didn’t like.

Alternatively, perhaps he wanted her to feel as if her husband were still President.