DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Newsbusters.

On Thursday, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel tried and largely failed to clean up his Tuesday remarks, where he declared Markwayne Mullin is not qualified to be secretary of Homeland Security because he used to be a plumber. Kimmel’s damage control effort would fail because he tried to have it both ways as he tried to double down on the original comments while also implying his criticism of Mullin is just about ideas.

Kimmel began by observing how “the president and his pals in the MAGA media are not happy with me right now. Trump even called in to Fox to complain about me tonight. His apple polishers are all in a tizzy because I made light of the fact that his new head of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, before he was a senator, was a plumber. And now he’s the head of Homeland Security. Which is not necessarily the kind of resume you might hope for, for the person in charge of protecting us from terrorism.”

Once again, Kimmel omitted the management experience Mullin gained in that as he turned the family plumbing business into the largest in Oklahoma. Nevertheless, Kimmel continued, “Of course, they decided to twist that to say it was an insult to plumbers, which it was not. I wouldn’t put a plumber in charge of Homeland Security for the same reason I wouldn’t call a five-star general to pull a rat out of my toilet, okay? It has—we all have our areas of expertise. They went nuts about this. They went nuts on every channel. But I think that my favorite part—bit of performative outrage came from a person named Rob Finnerty of Newsmax.”

Newsbusters.

One of the most preposterous claims from liberals is that somehow, conservatives uniquely try to win elections by using “fear,” “hate,” and “division,” especially on race and religion. Democrats never use any divisive, negative tactics when trying to motivate voters. It’s like they’ve never heard Chuck Schumer saying a Republican voter-ID bill is “Jim Crow 2.0.”

On March 24, PBS stations debuted a long negative campaign commercial disguised as a documentary titled White With Fear, on how “America’s conservative political machine uses racial fault lines to gain power.” The 85-minute film starts with Nixon’s campaigns, then goes on a tear against Fox News, Islamophobia after 9/11, birtherism against Obama, the Tea Party, and then into the Trump era.

In a statement, the propagandist Andrew Goldberg oozed: “I’m grateful to PBS for giving White With Fear such a prestigious platform with an extensive reach of loyal viewers. It’s the ideal home for the film — timely, relevant, and deeply connected to where our country stands today.” This “prestigious platform” is always willing to be a source of vitriolic anti-conservative content. Conservatives are just lucky we’re not paying for this garbage any more….until Democrats get back in control.

The Los Angeles Times summarized the theme: “Goldberg’s film argues that the right, using the language of white supremacy and relying on distortions, lies and misinformation campaigns against Black people, then Muslims and immigrants, have turned the GOP into a racially driven, hate-filled party of grievances.”

Proglodyte Projection: When the Left accuses you of what they are doing.

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On Thursday, the European Parliament in Strasbourg delivered what many are calling one of the most significant setbacks in recent memory for the EU’s traditional bureaucratic and centrist consensus.

In a single day, MEPs advanced stricter mass deportation rules, rejected controversial mass surveillance of private communications (known as “Chat Control”), and moved forward on dropping tariffs on key U.S. goods as part of a broader transatlantic trade reset.

These outcomes reflect a pragmatic and unprecedented alliance between the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) and right-wing to so-called ‘far-right’ groups such as the Patriots for Europe (PfE), European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), and others. For the first time in years, traditional “firewalls” isolating nationalist voices have cracked, forcing Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s agenda into retreat on sovereignty, borders, digital rights, and economic realism.

Newsbusters.

The House Ethics Committee held their scheduled adjudicatory hearing, more commonly referred to as a “trial”, against Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-FL). Sadly, none of the main broadcast network newscasts saw fit to carry the story.

The networks continue their ongoing blackout of this story. Not a second of it aired on ABC, CBS or ABC’s evening newscasts. This major omission joins their omission of the IOC’s ban on “trans women” during the 2028 Games and onward thereafter.

The PBS item is not perfect, though. Viewers never once heard any detail of the egregious charges filed against Cherfilus-McCormick.

UPDAE: House Panel Finds 25 Violations by Congresswoman  Ever notice how black women try to make themselves look like white women as much as possible?

UPDATE: House Ethics Panel Finds Florida Democrat Congresswoman Committed 25 Violations

Read it.

All the propaganda and social media manipulation in the world is not enough to compel average people to spend their precious time or cash on woke entertainment. All anti-woke critics had to do was watch and wait as the dismal numbers rolled in for each new progressive project – It was objective, undeniable proof that woke is a gigantic fraud.

That said, there are still a handful of far-left media bombs rolling into theaters and streaming services because production giants refused to see the writing on the wall until the end of 2024. Media endeavors that were greenlit at this time are just now being released to the public and the results are embarrassing. Watching these movies and shows feels like time traveling back to 2018.

As we covered in January, one such streaming series is Paramount’s new foray into the Star Trek franchise called “Starfleet Academy”. The show definitely doesn’t “boldly go where no man has gone before”. Rather, it goes where every other far-left vehicle has gone before, into the proverbial dumpster. We noted that “audiences are not watching or buying, but Hollywood refuses to learn”.

Well, it looks like they just learned.

FA, FO.

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Video from a protest outside Philadelphia City Hall shows a masked speaker making inflammatory remarks about U.S. service members and calling for violence, according to footage recorded by local conservative activist Frankie Scales.

In the video, the speaker says, “For every U.S. soldier that returns home in a casket, we cheer.”

“Until we have done everything in our power to bring the United States to its knees, let us not lose sight of the enemy,” he says, as people in the crowd can be heard cheering.

The individual refers to Hamas and Hezbollah as “resistance forces” and “popular forces,” and argues that Iran’s regime should remain in power because of its support for those groups.

“They rely on a strong Iranian state to maintain their fighting capacity,” the man says.

The comments come as tensions involving Iran and its network of allied groups — including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and other militias across the Middle East — remain elevated amid ongoing regional conflict.

When confronted by Scales, the speaker responds, “May a Hamas rocket blow up your family’s home.”

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America has spent more than $20 trillion on fighting poverty since the introduction of President Johnson’s Great Society program in 1964. Sixty years later, how are we doing?

Doesn’t seem to have reduced the number of poor people, for a start.

Last month, Senator Kennedy (R-LA) introduced a bill that would require the Census Bureau to report a new poverty metric as an alternative to the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) by including both cash and non-cash welfare benefits in its calculations.

As Kennedy points out, this is a much-needed fix. The OPM’s methodological weaknesses are well documented. Most notably, it ignores the hundreds of billions of dollars the government spends each year to assist low-income families through tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and in-kind transfers such as Medicaid, food stamps, and housing subsidies.

In short, the OPM paints an egregiously inaccurate picture of material poverty in America.

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But you know it won’t stay that low on that narrow a slice of ‘rich’ people, any more than the income tax did.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and progressive House lawmakers on Thursday unveiled a proposal to impose new annual taxes on the nation’s wealthiest households, arguing it would address inequality and generate significant federal revenue.

The Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act of 2026, introduced alongside Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., would apply a 2% annual tax on household net worth above $50 million and a 3% rate on wealth exceeding $1 billion.

The plan targets roughly 260,000 households, or about the top 0.15% of Americans, while leaving taxes unchanged for most taxpayers.

Democrats never saw a pocket that they didn’t want to pick.

Lawmakers backing the bill said the current tax system does not fully capture wealth held by the ultra-rich, allowing some high-wealth individuals to pay lower effective rates relative to their assets than middle- and working-class families.

Nowhere, of course, do they explain why it’s so important to ‘fully capture wealth held by the ultra-rich’; they just presume that their audience is as consumed by envy as they are. If the rich pay lower effective rates, that’s what the law allows them to do; rather than change the law to make things more ‘fair’ (which they can’t be bothered to do), the just want to do a snatch-and-grab on ‘wealth’ that represents investment that drives the economy. A classic case of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

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

According to a newly declassified intelligence report, U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted communications from Ukrainian government officials back in 2022 discussing a scheme to siphon off hundreds of millions in American taxpayer dollars. The funds, earmarked for clean energy projects in the war-torn country, were allegedly redirected to the United States to benefit Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

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Paid activists in Los Angeles, California, have been caught on hidden camera paying homeless people on skid row to forge signatures of registered voters on ballot initiatives.

O’Keefe Media Group (OMG) released part Two of its undercover investigation into the Democrats’ blatant election fraud operation in L.A. on Tuesday.

California’s Republican gubernatorial frontrunner Steve Hilton commented on X: “They paid homeless people cash and drugs on Skid Row to forge your signature. Your name. Your vote. Stolen by a crackhead with a clipboard — while Gavin Newsom looked the other way.”

Yeah,  that sounds about right.

The Telegraph (UK).

Parents are fighting governors to save an all-girls private school in Cheshire’s Premier League footballer enclave.

They were told on Feb 24 that the £20,000-a-year Alderley Edge School for Girls, which currently has 330 students aged from two to 18, would close at the end of the academic year.

Rachel Reeves’s 20 per cent VAT on private school fees, introduced in January last year, has led to increased fees, falling pupil numbers and many school closures.

Trump’s TV-Warped Brain Is Putting the World in Danger (Chris Lehmann/The Nation)

The Republican Collapse Has Begun — And Trump Is Leading It (Dan Pfeiffer/The Message Box)

How Trump is complicating TSA funding (Cameron Peters/Vox)

Trump housing chief Bill Pulte seeks new DOJ probe of New York AG Letitia James (Vaughn Hillyard/MS NOW)

ICE Lied About Its Authority to Make Courthouse Arrests (Whitney Curry Wimbish/American Prospect)

Senate locked in staring contest on DHS as insults fly (Hans Nichols/Axios)

Jack Smith memo includes ‘damning evidence’ about Trump’s handling of classified documents, top Democrat says (NBC News)

Trump Draws Bipartisan Backlash for Easing Oil Sanctions on Russia and Iran (Robert Jimison/New York Times)

California Sues Trump Administration Over Offshore Drilling Order (Chevron Warns California Facing Historic Fuel Crisis As Diesel Hits Record $7)

Trump Says GOP Is the ‘Hot Party’ Despite Midterm Headwinds (Bloomberg)

Trump says Justices Barrett, Gorsuch ‘sicken me’ after Supreme Court tariff ruling (Dan Mangan/CNBC)

More US Counties See Population Drops Under Trump’s Immigration Crackdown (Bloomberg)  How many are Blue counties? Place your bets….

Trump’s Threats to Europe Put Its Leaders in a Double Bind Over Iran (Mark Landler/New York Times)

Russia plays chicken with Trump (Megan Messerly/Politico)

The Thug of War — Pete Hegseth’s colleagues at the Pentagon are calling him ‘Dumb McNamara … (Zeteo)

Stewart Claims Iran War Violence Is ‘Almost Sexual’ For Hegseth

‘I’m a military expert and Donald Trump ‘wilfully ignorant’ on conflict with Iran’

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A brother and sister have been indicted after authorities say one of them planted a potentially deadly explosive device outside MacDill Air Force Base in Florida — then fled to China, while their mother is now in ICE custody after allegedly telling investigators her son confessed to the plot.

The FBI said Alen Zheng, who is believed to have planted the device, is currently in China. He is facing charges of attempted damage to government property by fire or explosion, unlawful making of a destructive device and possession of an unregistered destructive device, which carry a potential sentence of up to 40 years in prison.

FBI Tampa also arrested his sister, Ann Mary Zheng, who is charged with accessory after the fact and tampering with evidence, facing up to 30 years in prison.

She is accused of hiding or damaging a 2010 Mercedes-Benz to prevent its use in legal proceedings, court documents show.

Prosecutors allege that on March 11, the day after the bomb was planted, the siblings attempted to cover their tracks by selling the vehicle to car dealer CarMax. Despite being vacuumed and cleaned, investigators later discovered trace explosive residue inside the vehicle.

New York Post.

The 83-year-old US Air Force veteran who was randomly shoved onto the subway tracks by an illegal migrant on the Upper East Side has died from his injuries — and his alleged killer has been charged with murder.

Grandfather Richard Williams succumbed to his injuries March 17 after he was allegedly pushed onto the tracks with another man while waiting for a train at the Lexington Avenue-63rd Station just before noon March 8, authorities and sources said.

His alleged attacker, Honduran national Bairon Hernandez, 34, was arrested March 10 at a homeless shelter — and his charges have been upgraded to second-degree murder following Williams’ death, court records show.

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Remember the good old days when the only religious ceremony you’d expect to see in Texas would be a baptism?

But this is Denton, Texas, in 2026.

Denton, just north of Dallas, has many nearby waterways, including the Elm Fork Trinity River, Lewisville Lake, Lake Ray Roberts, Denton Creek, Grapevine Lake, and Buck Creek.

Indians have been criticized across America and Canada for polluting, pooping, and washing in local waterways like these.

Be careful not to step in the diversity. It’s hell getting that stuff off of your shoes.

I have never understood this impulse.

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The mayor of America’s third-largest city wants you to know his priorities.

(I’ll give you a hint, it’s not the residents of Chicago.)

Read it.

A scandal at a Berlin youth center has escalated after a sworn affidavit alleged that staff failed to report serious sexual assault claims to police over concerns about “stigmatizing” Muslim suspects.

The affidavit, submitted to Senate and district authorities, was filed by employees of a neighboring facility who said they repeatedly urged staff at the Wutzkyallee youth center in Neukölln to contact police. According to the document, staff declined to act despite being told that a 16-year-old girl had been raped and that videos of the assaults were being used to blackmail her. A coordinator reportedly justified the decision by saying the “Muslim boys” involved were already known to police and that further reporting could contribute to their marginalization.

The girl was allegedly raped at the youth center in November and later sexually assaulted again by a group of up to eight teenage suspects. The affidavit also describes a wider pattern of misconduct over several months, including groping, unwanted physical contact, and girls being pulled onto boys’ laps.

Quilettte.

Despite an ongoing crimewave, Melbourne was recently named the world’s best city by Time Out magazine, to a mix of celebratory headlines, crowing by the Victorian state government, and general bemusement among everyone else. Sure enough, just two days later, the city reminded the world of its recent sad decline.

On 13 March, Vietnamese international student Bao Phuc Cao pleaded guilty to secretly filming a woman under the cubicle walls in the toilets of a shopping centre in the city’s Docklands area. His camera was found to have similarly intrusive images and videos of more than 100 women on it. Their identities are unknown. And he was already on a community correction order (a form of community-based punishment involving monitoring and other conditions) from two previous prosecutions for similar offences. The victim in this case has been left anxious and traumatised. While Cao pleaded guilty and has reportedly abided by his order, at the time of his arrest he also apparently offered the baffling excuse that he was in the women’s toilets because he was “unsure” about his gender. Despite all this, Cao was not sentenced to prison, much less deported from Australia (though his visa is reportedly being reviewed); in fact, no conviction was recorded, and Cao was released into the community with no further punishment at all, beyond an undertaking of good behaviour and continued compliance with his existing order. The seemingly bizarre leniency of the judgement raises larger questions about the administration of criminal justice in Victoria, the alignment of the judiciary with public standards and expectations and the function of criminal law.

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The Trump administration scored a victory on Wednesday as an appeals court ruled that it can detain illegal immigrants without bond.

A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 in favor of the Department of Homeland Security’s detention policy, in the case of illegal immigrant Joaquin Herrera Avila.

All three judges on the 8th Circuit panel were Republican appointees, one appointed by President George W. Bush and two by President Donald Trump.

Read it.

Growth rates in U.S. metro areas dropped the steepest in communities along the U.S.-Mexico border last year because of declines in immigrants while counties along Florida’s Gulf Coast lost residents due to a series of hurricanes, according to new population estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The estimates showed that a majority of metro areas and counties had slower population gains last year, which the bureau attributed primarily to a slowdown in international migration, compared to the previous year when an influx of immigrants had helped urban areas recover from the COVID-19 pandemic a few years earlier.

The average growth rate for metro areas fell from 1.1% in 2024 to 0.6% in 2025.

Governor of Massachusetts: Female.

Governor of New York: Female.

Governor of New Jersey: Female.

Governor of Virginia: Female.

If I were Gavin Newsom or Fatso Pritzger, I’d be looking over my shoulder….

New York Post.

Loyola University Chicago’s student newspaper is facing backlash for apologizing for its coverage of freshman Sheridan Gorman’s murder — because editors labeled the alleged murderer an “illegal immigrant.”

The Loyola Phoenix originally reported — accurately — on accused killer Jose Medina-Medina‘s status as an illegal alien after he was charged on Monday with the execution of 18-year-old Gorman.

“Immigrant man charged in murder of Sheridan Gorman, DHS involved,” the student paper’s headline originally read, referring to Venezuelan national Medina-Medina, 25, as an “illegal immigrant.”

 

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

• Graver then the Mongol conquests after 1206.
• Graver than the massive die-offs produced by European diseases in North and South America after 1492.
• Graver than the millions killed under socialism and its psychotic brother, communism.

Points that the UN will neither mention nor consider:

1. All African slaves were enslaved by Africans. The surplus were sold to Europeans, a lucrative source of revenue.
2. Muslims processed more African slaves than Europeans.
3. Slavery was a universal component of human society until Christians decided to stop it in the 18th century.

UPDATE West African nation famous for selling fellow Africans into slavery demands reparations for slavery after UN vote

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The climate science world (‘settled’ division) is in shock following the discovery in ancient ice cores that levels of carbon dioxide remained stable as the world plunged into an ice age around 2.7 million years ago. Levels of CO2 at around 250 parts per million (ppm) were said to be lower than often assumed with just a 20 ppm movement recorded for the following near three million-year period. In addition, no changes in methane levels were seen in the entire period. Massive decreases in temperature with occasional interglacial rises appear to have occurred without troubling ‘greenhouse’ gas levels, and this revelation has caused near panic in activist circles.

 

Newsbusters.

There was once upon a time when the news media pretended to care about congressional ethics, and made an effort to cover alleged violations of the public trust. Nowadays, the Elitist Media appear to deploy an obvious double standard when covering these.

Consider the case of Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-Mccormick (D-FL). McCormick has been indicted by a federal grand jury on multiple charges related to the alleged theft of FEMA funds. The sole evening newscast item on her charges came last fall, a quick brief on the NBC Nightly News.

There has been no coverage on the evening news or anywhere else since, and the House Ethics Committee is set to hold a public hearing tomorrow.

Read it.

One week ago, when fears that the Strait of Hormuz blockade would mean a permanent collapse in oil supply (we have since seen that Iran is allowing “friendly” ships to cross the strait, especially if they grease the toll-keeper with $2 million per crossing) hit a fever pitch and pushed the price of Brent to $120, we said that “Saudi Arabia Has Already Revived More Than Half Its Oil Exports Via Hormuz Bypass.”

With Iran blocking Saudi ships from cross Hormuz for the time being, the Kingdom had drastically ramped up its oil exports to more than half of normal levels despite the disruptions from the Iran war, a successful sign for the kingdom’s ambitious contingency plan to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. To do this, Saudi Arabia has ramped up crude shipments from Yanbu export terminals on the Red Sea coast as it diverted supplies away from the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz via the East-West pipeline.

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There is perhaps nothing more revealing about the desperate state of Hollywood than its obsession with digging up old franchises in a futile race to capitalize on audeince nostalgia. In fact, it has been widely understood in the film industry for the past decade that almost no project will be greenlit unless it is a reboot, remake or “re-imagining” of a previously popular story property.

The problem, which everyone except Hollywood executives understands, is that you cannot recapture the magic of older hit movies, especially when your stable of writing talent is populated by an army of left-wing, pill popping ideological lunatics with no moral standards to speak of. These kinds of people are simply incapable of relating to the common moviegoer.

This dynamic has led Hollywood down a path of financial destruction, with dozens of big budget films bombing at the box office in the past year alone. Some projects have lost hundreds of millions of dollars and the smell of napalm is heavy in the air.

One disastrous reboot attempt that set Hollywood on the path of total defeat is Amazon’s ludicrous Lord Of The Rings project, “The Rings Of Power”. A non-canonical adaptation of limited parts of The Silmarillion, the show turns Galadriel, the personification of the pure feminine, into a spitting, angry feminist girl-boss that slaughters orcs by the barrel. The show’s writing was saturated with sad approximations of Tolkien-style dialogue written by people with no life experience or wisdom.

The Antiplanner.

The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA) wants to build 28 bus-rapid transit lines in the four counties (Fairfax, Loudoun, Arlington, and Prince William) and five cities (Alexandria, Fairfax, Falls Church, Manassas, and Manassas Park) in its jurisdiction. As described in the agency’s Bus Rapid Transit Action Plan, these lines total to 170 miles of bus routes.

I used to think bus-rapid transit was a smart and economical alternative to light rail, but the NVTA expects to spend $4.2 billion on this plan. The actual cost will almost certainly be more: one line that is already underway, the Richmond Highway route, was supposed to cost $638 million, but according to the Federal Transit Administration it is costing $730 million. That route is 7.4 miles long, which means the line is costing almost $100 million per mile.

$100 million a mile is cheaper than light rail, which is averaging more than $300 million a mile for lines now under construction or in planning stages. But it is still a needless expenditure of money, as most of it is going for dedicated bus lanes that will be occupied by ten buses an hour during rush hours, five buses an hour the rest of the day, and no buses an hour at night (midnight to 6 am). Thus, entire lanes of traffic will be dedicated to just 125 vehicles per day.

Of course, mass transit systems aren’t really about providing convenient transit for people who would otherwise drive cars (or who can’t afford cars in the first place). They’re actually jobs programs for Fashionable Minorities—spend a day in the offices of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system, or a day riding their buses and trains, and I’ll give you five dollars for every non-brown face you see—and lucrative make-work jobs for politically-connected construction and supply companies (all of whom have to be women-owned or minority-owned, naturally).

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

olumbia, the first victim of Donald Trump’s assault on America’s grandest universities, has an endowment of roughly $15bn. Mr Trump’s administration withheld a mere $400m in federal funding when it handed Columbia its peremptory list of demands. Why, indignant alumni ask, did Columbia not simply tell Mr Trump to get lost and fall back on its plump cushion of billions?

Alas for Columbia and other rich universities, the calculus is not so simple. Their endowments are not easy to access. Research grants are not the government’s only leverage. And the chaos Mr Trump has created in the markets makes it a bad time to be selling or borrowing. Indeed, even if research funding were still flowing, the Ivies’ accountants would be losing sleep.

Federal research grants account for a double-digit share of the revenue of most prestigious private universities, so losing them permanently would be a body-blow for any of them. They make up 11%, 15% and 18% of the income of Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities respectively. Columbia, at 20%, is especially vulnerable.

Even for those institutions still receiving such disbursements, the government is imposing arduous new rules. The National Institutes of Health (nih), which dispense most funds for medical research, announced in February that they will cap the portion of grants that can be spent on overheads at 15%. Previously, about 26% was spent in this way. Universities have challenged the change in court and on April 4th a judge threw out the cap. But the administration has said it will appeal, so all universities may soon have to find extra cash to keep their labs operating.

Universities’ endowments are not as much help as their billion-dollar valuations would suggest. For a start, much of the money is reserved for a particular purpose, funding a specific professorship or research centre, say. Legal covenants often prevent it from being diverted for other purposes. In any case, the income from an endowment is typically used to fund a big share of a university’s operating costs. Eat into the principal and you eat into that revenue stream.

The ‘ivy-league’ universities (which commonly refer to similar universities not belonging the the actual Ivy League, like Stanford, MIT, Chicago, and Rice) aren’t really educational institutions (as a glance at the supposed qualifications of their faculty members and administrators makes clear) but rather a jobs program for the Clerisy. Much like the Welfare State, there are always more Good Causes and Undeniable Human Rights to fund, so the money is never enough.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

The picture of electrons “orbiting” the nucleus like planets around the sun remains an enduring one, not only in popular images of the atom but also in the minds of many of us who know better. The proposal, first made in 1913, that the centrifugal force of the revolving electron just exactly balances the attractive force of the nucleus (in analogy with the centrifugal force of the moon in its orbit exactly counteracting the pull of the Earth’s gravity) is a nice picture, but is simply untenable.

I have to confess that I never gave it much thought.

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Researchers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and Lehigh University have developed a groundbreaking nanostructured copper alloy that could redefine high-temperature materials for aerospace, defense and industrial applications.

Their findings, published in the journal Science, introduce a Cu-Ta-Li (Copper-Tantalum-Lithium) alloy with exceptional thermal stability and mechanical strength, making it one of the most resilient copper-based materials ever created.

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New York Times bestselling author Peter Schweizer is once again speaking out against China’s sinister role in fueling America’s deadly fentanyl crisis, as President Donald Trump seeks to punish the communist regime for its involvement.

“There are 2000 Chinese nationals in northern Mexico working for the Sinaloa drug cartel,” Schweizer, citing DEA data, told The Cats and Cosby Show on Friday. “They’re basically chemists.”

“They take the precursor chemicals that, of course, arrive from China and they turn it into the deadly cocktail, which is what people are dying from. They produce pills. People who die of fentanyl overdose, they think they’re talking a Vicodin or Adderall,” he added.

UPDATE: DOJ: Chinese Firms, Nationals Charged in Fentanyl Plot

The Robb Report.

It’s a dream many might share: turning a scrap of tropical land into a luxury paradise, a rarefied riff on Robinson Crusoe. And the appeal of such an idea—not to mention the practicalities of it—has only been enhanced in the Covid pandemic’s wake. “When you’re in the middle of Zoom calls, no one knows where you are, as long as you’re not doing it on the beach with palm trees in the background and staff bringing you spicy margaritas,” says Edward de Mallet Morgan, who runs super-prime sales at Estate Prestige Knight Frank and has carved out a particular niche in island-brokering. “Nothing about it feels like normal life,” he adds. “Its incredibly peaceful and good for the soul.” As soon as you’ve tamed the landscape enough to build somewhere to sleep, that is.

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

First, of course, you need to watch the film The Punisher to be aware that living on a tropical island can go very wrong very quickly.

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Nature magazine is at the front of the pack in the New Scientific Journalism: First, they have to tell you how to respond to what they’re going to tell you, then they can actually give you the information—without, apparently, being conscious of the fact that quite often the data don’t support their conclusions.

I’m not sure whether this is related to Fembot Journalism, in which the writer (typically female) first has to relate a tear-jerking anecdote before describing whatever the subject is that you’re supposed to wring your hands over.

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Most Democrats want their party to “become more progressive,” and say they agree with the more aggressive stance being taken by lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who are calling on the party to take a “more aggressive stance” against President Donald Trump and his administration, according to new polls.

A poll from Survey USA, taken from April 2-6 of 859 Republicans and 885 Democrats, showed that 50% of Democrats want their party to become more progressive, with 24% wanting it to stay the same, and 18% calling for it to become more moderate, reports Real Clear Polling.

Among Republicans, 40% said their party should become more conservative while 44% said it should remain the same.

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In 2021, dermatologist David Ozog was on holiday with his family in the Bahamas, when his 18-year-old son had a massive stroke. The teenager was airlifted to Florida, and then to Chicago for surgery. As his son was lying partially paralysed in a hospital bed, Ozog got a call from a colleague who had an unconventional suggestion.

The colleague, a dermatologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, told Ozog about research he was conducting with the US Department of Defense. Early results hinted that red and near-infrared light applied to the head might protect neural tissue after brain injury. He urged Ozog to consider trying it on his son.

Ozog stayed up until 4 a.m. that night reading scientific papers and, ultimately, ordering several panels made of red and near-infrared light-emitting diodes (LEDs). “I started sneaking them into the hospital,” says Ozog, who works at Henry Ford Health in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Today, his son is walking and back in university. Ozog cannot prove that light therapy made a difference, but he thinks that it helped. He has since become a convert to an idea that, at the time, was considered fringe. “I thought the same thing,” he says, “How could shining this thing on you possibly have any biologic effect?”

Some of you will get this, and you are my tribe.

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Tatler is a British vehicle where the Comfortable and Constructive classes can read about the doings of the Crust and the Clerisy under the illusion that it will unlock the secret achievement badge for fame and fortune. America doesn’t really have an equivalent; perhaps if one did a mashup of Vogue and Vanity Fair run by the editors of Hello! magazine.

Entry to the world’s top universities is increasingly becoming a long-term strategy rather than a final-year push. For high-net-worth families, preparation now begins earlier, stretches further and involves a level of planning that mirrors any other major investment decision.

The decoupling of famous-tier university life from actual education that began with the progressive march through the institutions in the 1960s and transformed them into Woke DEI indoctrination factories is pretty much complete.

Note that the most important characteristic of “the world’s top universities” is not the education they provides but the credential as a member of the Clerisy—and, ultimately, of the Crust—for one’s children, justifying full-court-press helicopter parenting.

Figtree Learning describes the shift as a far more layered process than it used to be. ‘It’s no longer enough to achieve top grades and write a strong personal statement. Securing a place at a top university is now akin to completing a pentathlon, which demands success across five distinct elements: outstanding grades, rigorous entrance tests, demanding interviews, compelling references, and a persuasive personal statement. Falling short on any one of these can cost a candidate their place, no matter how strong they are in the others.’

Needless to say, none of these elements has much to do with the efforts of the child, any more than success in the Olympics can be achieved without an extensive support team of coaches and nutritionists to act as pit-crew.

I would be prepared to argue that any 18-year-old who could demonstrate “outstanding grades, rigorous entrance tests, demanding interviews, compelling references, and a persuasive personal statement” could pretty much skip the rather tedious step of actually attending university for four years and just parachute into whatever nepo-baby slot has been prepared for him/her since he/she were conceived (probably by genetically-screened IVF). (And increasingly it’s going to be a “she”, since the Deep State world has pretty much agreed that Men Are The New Hitler upon whom it isn’t worth wasting a lot of time and effort.)

I am reminded of the famous “Machine That Goes Ping” scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life, where the pregnant woman lying on the gurney awaiting the birth of her child watches the team of doctors walk the visiting Corporate Bureaucrat through their array of high-tech medical machinery, and eventually is moved to say, “What am I supposed to do?”, to which Graham Chapman responds, “Nothing my dear; you’re not qualified.”

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Useful nuggets of information can be found in the most unlikely of places—even The Hollywood Reporter.

Cutting-edge technology was once a de rigueur residential amenity for any eight-figure listing, along with elaborate home gyms, zero-edge swimming pools and 12-car garages. It’s becoming nearly impossible to find a fridge, toaster or LED light that isn’t Wi-Fi-enabled or voice-activated. But the fully loaded tech compound is suddenly falling from favor as high-end homeowners frantically reset the password to escape the $100 billion home-automation industry.

“Just like the arts-and-crafts movement was a reaction against industrialization, we’re now experiencing a reaction against the smart home. People are looking for more manual, less complicated places to live,” says interior designer Jamie Bush, who has worked on some of Los Angeles’ most iconic architectural residences for studio heads, celebrities and tech titans.

While celebrities like Sofía Vergara were once the smart home’s most vocal advocates — the Modern Family actress gushed about how she controlled her home’s security, appliance and media systems from her phone — the honeymoon period with digital domiciles is now facing the reality of unintelligible interfaces, endless updates and forgotten passwords.

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The Sifraniyah, whose name loosely translates to “those of the cipher,” operated not merely with books and balances, but with an internal trade-language that bore all the hallmarks of early programming logic. This was not a language of poetry or politics, but a kind of economic compiler, designed to streamline, automate, and encode trade transactions across nodes in the Mediterranean-African lattice.

Called Al-Khatt al-Tujjari (The Commercial Line), this cryptic syntax resembled a curious fusion of abjad notation, Berber numerals, and Nabataean counting gestures. But its true novelty lay in its structure: conditional statements, looped inventory management, abstract commodity representations, and even primitive error-checking glyphs.

Imagine this: a caravan master receives a wax-sealed scrolllet from the coastal guildhall in Mahdia. On its surface, not a letter of Arabic or Greek, but a modular script indicating: IF salt > 50 kantar AND camels ? 20 THEN delay; ELSE proceed to Ghadames via Node-B. This wasn’t mere instruction — it was compiled logic, a kind of analog execution framework.

I’m wondering whether this sort of encoded procedural logic might be used for compact tactical communications and orders in a battlefield situation.

LifeHacker.

Sure, the refrigerator can keep food fresher longer, but for serious life extension, the freezer is where you should focus your attention. Preserving food isn’t just better for reducing food waste, it’s crucial for staying on budget, especially as grocery prices hit new highs. Stop the pattern of bulk buying and bulk tossing spoiled food, and get comfortable with freezing more of your grocery haul. Here are the best ways to pack your freezer, the best things to freeze, and how to do it.

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

SciTechDaily.

A newly identified cellular system monitors subtle variations in genetic coding, hinting at a hidden level of control over how genes are expressed.

Human DNA stores instructions for life in sequences built from just four nucleotides. Those instructions are read in three-letter groups called codons, and each codon tells the cell which amino acid to add when building a protein. Since several codons can specify the same amino acid, these alternative spellings were once thought to be mostly interchangeable.

That view has changed. Scientists now know that some of these synonymous codons help messenger RNA, or mRNA, remain stable and get translated efficiently, while others do not. In effect, two genetic sequences can encode the same protein but still behave differently inside a cell. mRNAs rich in non-optimal codons are translated less efficiently and are often broken down more quickly, but the mechanism human cells use to detect this difference has been unclear.

Researchers at Kyoto University and RIKEN, led by Osamu Takeuchi and Takuhiro Ito, set out to solve that puzzle. Their work points to a protein called DHX29 as a key part of the system cells use to read this hidden layer of genetic information.