DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

Not just to put it on the market—to require that it be used.

A congressional task force soon plans to release a compromise between corn farmer and oil refinery interests that could reshape the American energy industry.

In D.C., it doesn’t matter what benefits the consumer—what matters is who wins the fight between two organized blocks of producers (and their sock-puppets in Congress).

The New Neo.

A textbook example is from CBS. In particular, the headline is misleading. There’s no question in my mind that this is purposely so, and perhaps the most important part of the game. The headline is often either the only thing people read, or the headline and the first paragraph or two, and articles are shaped by people who are well aware of that. Even if a person does read the whole thing, the headline tends to shape that person’s perceptions.

The headline of this particular article is, “Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s 1st year back in office had violent criminal records, document shows.” Wow, the reader is meant to think, I guess the right is lying when it says the focus right now is on criminals. How many people read articles with such a jaundiced eye that they’re aware of the trap there, the words “violent criminal records” and especially the definition of the word “violent”? Most of those who do read the headline with skepticism are probably not going to be Democrat voters and/or Trump haters, because of the phenomenon of confirmation bias.

I read all articles with skepticism, but that’s only because I have to write about them and need to try my best to get it right, and have learned over and over and over again how much of what we read is propaganda. It happens on both left and right, but more often on the left, and of course most of the MSM is on the left.

That’s why I immediately realized the key word there was “violent.”

I would rather focus on the key words ‘criminal record’. The constant drumming on ‘criminal record’ puts a false notion in people’s mind (especially the minds of those on the left side of the IQ bell curve) that somehow illegal aliens can’t be deported unless they have some kind of ‘criminal record’ (i.e. have been charged with, and convicted of, an actual crime). This ignores, of course, (and that is deliberate) that being in the country illegally is ipso facto a crime; these people are in actual fact criminals, whether they have a ‘criminal record’ or not.

But she certainly has a point.

The Foundry.

It is a journalist’s duty to report the truth, yet so many news outlets covered themselves in shame by bowing and scraping to honor the “transgender identity” of the man who carried out one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canadian history.

Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, was born a man and he died a man. He spent his last day on Earth killing his 39-year-old mother, his 11-year-old stepbrother, a 39-year-old teacher, three 12-year-old girls, and two boys, 12 and 13, before taking the coward’s way out and turning the gun on himself. He reportedly wounded about 25 others at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and critically injured two more.

Initial reports on the shooting described Van Rootselaar as appearing female, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police erased all doubt Wednesday at a press conference.

“I can say that Jesse was born as a biological male who approximately six years ago began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly,” Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald said.

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Sen. Josh Hawley accused Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison of having knowledge of massive welfare fraud in his state, yet enabling the fraud to continue.

“I should call you ‘prisoner’ because you ought to be in jail,” Hawley, R-Mo., told Ellison in a heated exchange during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing Thursday.

Hawley specifically pressed Ellison on an alleged conversation the attorney general had with leaders of the Minneapolis nonprofit Feeding Our Future, which orchestrated a massive fraud scheme.

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Sympathy for bums, homeless unhoused drug addicts, wanted criminals, violent illegal aliens, vandals, thieves, drug dealers and gang members can be a cost-free self-congratulatory, ego-boosting practice if one is wealthy enough live safely insulated from such theoretical objects of compassion.  However, when they are next door and attacking one’s home, person and property, it should be a distinctly different cost-benefit calculus.

A horror story out of Prince George’s County, MD raises the question as to why people who suffer from proximity to social dysfunction continue to vote for and echo the verbiage of self-congratulatory wealthy insulated white people. When majority black residents of a PG County condo community reached out to majority black police leadership under the direction of a majority-black county government to ask for protection and relief from theft, trespass and assault emanating from an adjacent illegal homeless unhoused, drug-riddled, gang infested encampment, a senior black police officer responded that “we’re not criminalizing the unhoused”, a response more fitting for a female college sophomore or an ICE-hating, climate-saving older AWFL than from a cop being asked by citizens to deal with actual criminal activities.

Read it.

Hell may not have frozen entirely. But a chill wind has blown through the Post’s editorial boardroom. When an institution long associated with climate alarmism writes “It’s about time” in response to a major deregulatory move, observers are entitled to raise an eyebrow.

The Foundry.

Republicans can “win big” in midterm elections if they “unwrap the gift of MAHA” that President Donald Trump has handed them, according to a new memo from Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action.

Four to six percent of former non-Trump voters cited the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement in explaining their decision to switch their support to him and the Republican Party in 2024, according to Trump’s go-to pollster, Tony Fabrizio.

But the Republican Party is just “renting” those voters, Lyons said, adding that every Republican needs to buy into the MAHA movement in order to keep those votes.

“The MAHA movement is here to strategically support President Trump,” Lyons wrote. “We’re eager to help cement this new coalition. We’re looking for Republicans who share the same vision.”

Read it.

The most successful economics blog in the world is called Marginal Revolution. That is not an accident.

It could have been called Markets and Power, or Inequality Today, or Political Economy. It could even have been called Capitalism Explained. Instead, it is named after a nineteenth-century intellectual earthquake: the marginal revolution. A quiet reminder that modern economics begins not with slogans or moral postures, but with a way of thinking.

That reminder matters today more than we like to admit.

…

In the 1870s, almost simultaneously and largely independently, three economists overturned classical political economy. William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras broke with the Ricardian tradition that explained value through labor, costs, or embedded substance. Value, they argued, does not come from the total amount of work put into something. It comes from the last unit—from what economists would soon call marginal valuation.

[insert my usual rant about how ‘there is no such thing as capitalism’ here]

[insert my usual rant about how ‘economics’ is a Pretend Science, like psychiatry or Grievance Studies, here]

The Marginal Revolution site is run by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tubarrok, whom regular readers of this blog will recall my having cited many times.

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These digital tools aren’t simply interfaces that facilitate connection. The ease and expansiveness of online dating have commodified social bonds, eroded meaningful interactions, and created a type of dating throw-away culture, encouraging a sense of disposability and distorting decision-making.

…

Dating apps don’t sell love. They sell the feeling that it is one premium upgrade away. The platforms aren’t primarily designed for users to find love and promptly delete the apps from their phones. They’re designed to keep users swiping.

Dating apps don’t ‘help you to find that special someone’. They try to keep you looking for that special someone. This is particularly true for women, and is the root cause of the ‘loneliness epidemic’ among men.

People once dated locally, and your ‘catchment area’ was limited to the people you would (or could) meet in person. Social media generally, and dating apps specifically, have globalized the amount of exposure, to the detriment of all.

hoe_math points out that all women now see the best men as attainable, and so have developed unrealistic expectations.

Michael Sartain likes to cite a study where one hundred men were asked “If you met a woman that met 80% of your desired qualities, would you find that acceptable?” to which almost all of them said something like “Eighty percent? Hell, yes—that’s a win!” One hundred women, asked the corresponding question, answered “No, that would be ‘settling’.”

Sartain likes to say that there are actually three sexes: The top 20% of men, in whom women will admit an interest; all women; and the bottom 80% of men, who to women are effectively invisible, and might as well not exist.

(You can see the two of them lay it all out here.)

The Telegraph (UK).

Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein’s plan would have been ‘one of the worst atrocities’ ever seen, says Sir Stephen Watson

CNN, THE Voice of the Crust.

The Trump administration delivered a deadly blow to longstanding US climate policy on Thursday, finalizing rules that revoke the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate climate pollution.

No, it didn’t. It revoked the EPA’s excuse for over-regulation in the name of preventing climate pollution.

First issued in 2009, the endangerment finding determined that six greenhouse gases could be categorized as dangerous to human health under the Clean Air Act. It has underpinned the EPA’s authority to limit planet-warming pollution from the oil and gas industry, power plants and vehicles since the Obama administration and is considered the federal government’s most powerful tool to tackle climate pollution and the country’s contribution to the global crisis.

When you’ ve said Obama Administration, you’ve said it all.

“We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding,” President Donald Trump said on Thursday, calling the policy “disastrous.”

Trump said repealing the regulations “has nothing to do with public health.”

“This was all a scam, a giant scam,” Trump said on Thursday. “This was a rip off of the country by Obama and Biden.”

Indeed it was. The EPA is one of the reasons that Richard Nixon will burn in Hell for all eternity.

Read it.

Sure, the biometric security feature works as well as it ever does, using a face scan to unlock your iPhone, confirm mobile payments and generally an extra layer of protection between your digital data and the prying eyes of the outside world.

But we live in a time of increasing unrest, and with it comes a concern about biometric security features in general. Run afoul of what purports to be law-and-order these days, and your own face can be used against you by police who can compel you to use Face ID unlocking against your will. A security writer at PC Mag goes so far as to suggest you should stop using Face ID entirely.

All they need to do is hold you still and show the phone your face and they’re in.

Convenience and security are mutually exclusive.

The Telegraph (UK).

The Green Party is set to vote on legalising heroin in an attempt to make society more “inclusive”.

A motion drafted ahead of the party’s spring conference next month aims to update its existing policy to call for an end to the “prohibition of drugs”.

At the last general election, the Greens promised to set up a commission that would produce an “evidence-based approach” to changing the law around substance use.

However, Zack Polanski, who became the party’s leader last autumn, has since gone further and said he wanted to legalise all drugs.

Heroin and cocaine are included in the motion that calls for a blanket legalisation.

Some people have minds so open that their brains fall out.

The Telegraph (UK).

A thief used a forklift to break into a jewellery store before fleeing the scene on a getaway donkey, footage showed.

The man, known only as MC, made the escape after robbing a store in Kayseri, central Turkey, on Tuesday.

He was filmed riding through town on the animal after taking goods from the store before being caught and arrested.

At modern prices, worth about $24,000.

Sometimes the old ways are best … when they work. Otherwise, not so much.

The Telegraph (UK).

Kim Jong-un has chosen his teenaged daughter to be his heir, South Korea has claimed.

Seoul’s spy agency told parliament on Thursday that Kim Ju-ae had been selected to lead North Korea when her father dies.

Ju-ae, the only publicly known child of Kim and his wife Ri Sol-ju, has become an increasingly present figure during tightly choreographed official appearances, provoking suspicion that she was being groomed to be her father’s successor.

I wonder whether she’ll need to get a Stalin haircut like her dad.

The Telegraph (UK).

Palestine Action has won a legal challenge against the Home Office’s decision to ban it as a terror group.

The proscription, which began on July 5 last year, made being a member of the group, or supporting it, a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

Palestine Action remains banned as a terror group to allow for further legal arguments and to give the Government time to consider an appeal.

The War Zone.

An AeroVironment LOCUST laser directed energy weapon owned by the U.S. Army was central to the chain of events that led to the recent shutdown of airspace around El Paso, Texas, according to Reuters. Though many questions still remain to be answered about how the flight restrictions came to be imposed, LOCUST was designed to respond to exactly the kinds of drones that regularly fly across the southern border from Mexico.

Multiple outlets had already reported yesterday that the use of a laser counter-drone system was a key factor in the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) sudden decision to impose the temporary flight restrictions over El Paso. Reuters‘ report says “two people briefed on the situation” identified the laser system in question as LOCUST. TWZ has reached out to AeroVironment and the U.S. Army for more information. U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), which oversees U.S. military operations in and around the homeland, declined to comment.

Last July, the U.S. military released a picture, seen below, showing Army personnel assigned to Joint Task Force-Southern Border (JTF-SB) conducting sling-load training with a LOCUST mounted on a 4×4 M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV) at Fort Bliss. This had prompted some speculation that LOCUST systems might be in use along the U.S. border with Mexico. JTF-SB was established in March 2025 to oversee a surge in U.S. military support to the border security mission. Fort Bliss, situated in El Paso, is a major hub for those operations. It is also home to the 1st Armored Division and a significant number of Army air defense units.

The War Zone.

The Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Truxtun collided with the support ship USNS Supply while the two were conducting an at-sea replenishment yesterday, U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) has confirmed. Both ships have continued to sail safely, but two sailors were injured.

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the collision, which is said to have occurred somewhere in the Caribbean Sea.

The full statement from SOUTHCOM, as provided to TWZ, is as follows:

“Yesterday afternoon, the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Truxtun (DDG103) and the Supply-class fast combat support ship USNS Supply (T-AOE-6) collided during a replenishment-at-sea. Two personnel reported minor injuries and are in stable condition. Both ships have reported sailing safely. The incident is currently under investigation.”

Some captain is going to get relieved and some watch officer is going to be encouraged to go into another line of work.

Trump administration working to expand effort to strip citizenship from foreign-born Americans (NBC News)

Trump Plans Denaturalization Crackdown

Canadian separatists optimistic after meetings with Trump officials (NBC News)

The less voters knew, the more they liked Trump in 2024. Not Anymore (G. Elliott Morris/Strength In Numbers)

Bondi refuses to apologize for DOJ handling of Epstein files during heated hearing (CBS News)

Trump Can’t Cancel Elections. He Could Undermine Them. (Sean Morales-Doyle/New York Times)

Elon Musk’s X Appears to Be Violating US Sanctions by Selling Premium Accounts to Iranian Leaders (David Gilbert/Wired)

‘Zionism’ Is Splitting MAGA in Two (The Bulwark)  They hope, they hope, they hope….

About 6 in 10 think Trump has gone too far when it comes to deploying federal immigration agents in major U.S. cities. (AP-NORC)  According to the Narrative.

U.S. judge rejects BBC’s stay application in Trump defamation case (Reuters)

ICE Is on a Dark Path. Congress Must Act Now. (New York Times)

Americans think everyone is corrupt (Matthew Yglesias/Slow Boring)  Gee, I wonder why?

Making America Stagnate Again (Paul Krugman)  The vacuum speaks. Since Krugman’s predictions have failed every single time so far, this makes me optimistic.

Illinois AG sues to prevent Trump admin. from cutting $600M in public health funds from 4 states (ABC7)  Because, as we all know, public health is TOTALLY the resposibility of the Federal government—and the Federal taxpayer.

Elon Musk posted about race almost every day in January (Nick Robins-Early/The Guardian)

Lawmakers demand DOJ stop tracking lawmakers’ Epstein files searches (NBC News)  Gee, I wonder why?

Senate Democrat aims to put members on record opposing Maxwell pardon (Jordain Carney/Politico)  Because they, not knowing Trump but knowing their fantasy version of Trump, assume that he will pardon her, and want to get their preemptive virtue-signal on record.

How Young Men View Trump 2.0 After One Year (Lucas Holtz/Third Way)  At least according to the Narrative.

Minnesota AG: Feds still not cooperating on Pretti and Good investigations (Eric Bazail-Eimil/Politico)  Seeing as how the Minnesota AG is a pro-terrorism pro-crime Black Muslim, I can’t say that I blame them.

Read it.

Domestic robots have been a fixture in science fiction novels for more than a century, but in the real world we’re still all doing our own domestic chores barring vacuuming.

While a number of companies are working on humanoid robots, with Apple reportedly among them, all we’ve really had so far are promises and extremely limited demos. But you can (maybe) buy a laundry-folding robot today for $8,000 or rent it for $450 a month …

Isaac 0 is available to purchase, with delivery promised for this month – but only if you live in the Bay Area of California.

Doing things badly at great expense is pretty much the California way these days.

Read it.

into the position of Virginia’s governor. In spite of her record as a progressive, people believed that she had gone through a major transformation and had become a moderate. Or, they were your typical low-information voters, and simply paid no attention.

Don’t say ‘low information voters’; say ‘low brain voters’, which is more accurate.

The chief defect is that the vote of a moron and the vote of a genius are worth exactly the same.

Read it.

Jim Ratcliffe, co-owner of the football team Manchester United, has apologised for his previous comments claiming Britain is “colonised” by immigrants after facing backlash from the political left for his views.

Radcliffe issued a statement expressing regret over his remarks, saying, “I am sorry that my choice of language has offended some people in the UK and Europe … It is important to raise the issue of controlled and well-managed immigration that supports economic growth.”

Note that he didn’t retract his remarks; he merely expressed regret that ‘some people’ were offended. This is the non-apology ‘apology’ people put out when they aren’t really apologizing but want to appear polite.

The Football Association (FA) launched an investigation into his comments to see if they breach the organisation’s ‘hate speech’ policies, despite the apology. Another statement by Ratcliffe—”You can’t have an economy with nine million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in”—is also under evaluation for potentially breaching the FA’s policies.

He still may get cancelled, since the Football Association appears to have some pretty Woke rules in place. If I where him, I’d look to sell his interest in the team and focus on other hobbies.

Read it.

“The inmates are running the asylum.”

There’s an expression we’ve all heard, particularly in more recent times.  According to TheFreeDictionary.com, it means the following: The people least capable of running a group or organization are now in charge.  Said especially when the result is total chaos or calamity.  Example: the Biden administration.

Okay, that last sentence wasn’t in the dictionary, but it could have been.  In any case, inmates running the asylum is something that could fairly be said about many of our cities, states and institutions these days.  (See, Minneapolis, California, public education, science, medicine, sports, Hollywood, et al.)

And then there’s New York City, one of the biggest “asylums” of all.  It just elected as mayor a guy who is in love with the most miserable, failed and murderous ideology in history: collectivism.  But neither he nor the people who elected him are much impressed by historical statistics that tallied up something in the neighborhood of one hundred million corpses that were the cost of his beloved collectivization.  Those were just the proverbial “cracked eggs” necessary to make the proverbial “omelet.”

And we can be sure that a misguided collectivist like Zohran Mamdani is not going to make wise personnel choices regarding the governance of the city he has so foolishly been put in charge of.  Case in point: Mamdani has appointed Stanley Richards, an ex-con, to run the city’s — guess what? — Department of Correction.  So . . . inmate running the asylum.

“Stanley will make history in this role as the first-ever formerly incarcerated person to serve as commissioner,” said the mayor.  “I will turn to Stanley as we work to build a city where justice is at the heart of our corrections system.”

So, another historical first!  Yay!  But when he uses the word “justice,” what exactly does he mean?  Well, of course, he means “social justice,” and there’s your cracked-egg recipe for disaster.

Read it.

The Swiss government and parliament both oppose a proposal to cap the country’s population at 10 million until 2050 by limiting migration. But voters will have their own say this June after a petition linked to the ‘No to a 10 million Switzerland’ initiative crossed the 100,000-signature threshold needed to initiate a nationwide referendum in record time.

Establishment media outlets, including those outside of Switzerland, have focused in particular on the opposition from big business to this significant measure. But referendum backers from the right-wing Swiss People’s Party stressed on Wednesday that while “a small economic elite profits from uncontrolled immigration, the majority of the Swiss population suffers.”

Gee, where have we heard that before?

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The teenager is accused of the attempted murder of two boys, aged 12 and 13. He is also charged with possession of a knife on school premises without good reason or lawful authority, and also accused of unlawfully and maliciously administering a noxious thing to a third child with a harmful, unidentified liquid. Reports say that the defendant shouted “Allahu Akbar”—or something similar—during the attack.

Probably just a coincidence. In the old days British schoolboys were drilled in Latin and Greek; nowadays they are drilled (if they are drilled at all) in Arabic and Urdu.

Local leaders, including the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and Brent Council leader Muhammed Butt, expressed their shock over the incident. The mayor also urged anyone with information to contact the police, adding: “There is no honour in staying silent.”

Such English names….

Gates of Vienna.

Yet another bystander has been shoved in front of an oncoming train, this time in Switzerland. It’s not clear whether a railway poster with a “no shoving infidels” pictogram might have prevented this tragic incident.

Grenchen is a town in northern Switzerland in the canton of Solothurn. Without warning, an unknown assailant pushed a pensioner in front of a train at the Grenchen Nord station. The victim was severely wounded, but survived.

The perpetrator has yet to be caught, so there is so far no indication of what ethnicity he is, or whether the attack was an instance of shoving jihad. It’s possible that there is no cultural enrichment involved in the case.

I’m betting that there is.

Read it.

“I always tell people the day Latinos, African-American, Asian and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning. Because we are the majority in this country. We have the ability to take over this country,” State Rep. ‘Gene’ Yuanzhi Wu, who serves as the Texas Democrat House Minority Leader, recently declared.

Who is oppressing Wu? The Chinese immigrant came here from Guangzhou, graduated from law school and became one of the top officials in the state. Good luck to any American who wants to move to China, become a lawyer and run for public office. And if a non-Chinese immigrant were to suggest that minorities in China should ally together against their Chinese oppressors and take over, his organs would be for sale on Temu in 15 minutes or less.

Rep. Wu represents a Houston district where a majority of the neighborhoods like Gulfton and Sharpstown are Hispanic and only a minority of residents are Chinese. Three out of four core neighborhoods have more black people than Hispanics so it’s understandable that Wu wants to point them at overthrowing their white ‘oppressors’ rather than electing a black or Hispanic man.

(Of course many of the ‘Hispanics’ in Wu’s district are illegal aliens. Wu admitted in an interview that at least a third are illegals, suggesting the real number may be much higher, and that his district is illegitimate. It also explains why Wu fights so hard to protect illegal aliens in Texas.)

But Rep. Gene Wu’s call for a race war isn’t representing Asian Americans either. Instead it hews suspiciously close to the Chinese Communist party’s agenda for tearing apart America.

Quillette.

In some of the most beautiful and prosperous places in America, a curious paradox has taken hold: the people who benefit most from capitalism increasingly appear to resent it. They live in high-amenity cities and mountain towns with preserved open space, reliable infrastructure, advanced healthcare, abundant leisure, and the freedom to choose where and how they live. These conditions did not arise spontaneously. They are the cumulative result of markets, private investment, innovation, and long-term economic growth. Yet in these same environments, it has become socially fashionable to describe capitalism as immoral, exploitative, or fundamentally broken. This is often dismissed as hypocrisy. That framing is too simple. What we are witnessing is not merely individual inconsistency, but a structural paradox produced by success itself. Capitalism generates abundance, and abundance reshapes human priorities.

[insert usual rant about There Ain’t No Such Thing As Capitalism here]

The Foundry.

When it comes to the Olympics, certain things are no-brainers. Don’t ski jump in high heels. Don’t do mixed doubles curling with an ex-spouse. Don’t do a two-man luge with JB Pritzker on top.

I would add, “Don’t trash the nation you’re there to represent.”

Apparently, several members of Team USA don’t have brains.

Ars Technica.

The National Labor Relations Board abandoned a Biden-era complaint against SpaceX after a finding that the agency does not have jurisdiction over Elon Musk’s space company. The US labor board said SpaceX should instead be regulated under the Railway Labor Act, which governs labor relations at railroad and airline companies.

The Railway Labor Act is enforced by a separate agency, the National Mediation Board, and has different rules than the National Labor Relations Act enforced by the NLRB. For example, the Railway Labor Act has an extensive dispute-resolution process that makes it difficult for railroad and airline employees to strike. Employers regulated under the Railway Labor Act are exempt from the National Labor Relations Act.

In January 2024, an NLRB regional director alleged in a complaint that SpaceX illegally fired eight employees who, in an open letter, criticized CEO Musk as a “frequent source of embarrassment.” The complaint sought reinstatement of the employees, back pay, and letters of apology to the fired employees.

SpaceX responded by suing the NLRB, claiming the labor agency’s structure is unconstitutional. But a different issue SpaceX raised later—that it is a common carrier, like a rail company or airline—is what compelled the NLRB to drop its case. US regulators ultimately decided that SpaceX should be treated as a “common carrier by air” and “a carrier by air transporting mail” for the government.

One of the difficulties in living in a comprehensive administrative state is figuring out which bureaucrats you have to bribe to get anything done.

The Telegraph (UK).

The transgender teenager responsible for Canada’s worst school shooting in nearly 40 years struggled with his physical appearance and was fixated with guns and drugs.

Jesse Van Rootselaar, an 18-year-old from the remote town of Tumbler Ridge who was born a male, wrote online about his 6ft frame and his desire to be a “petite” woman.

He shot dead his mother, Jennifer Strang, and his 11-year-old stepbrother on Tuesday afternoon before walking to his former school 10 minutes away and opening fire on pupils and staff, killing eight before taking his own life.

Police initially described the shooter as a “gunperson” and a “female in a dress”. They later revealed that Van Rootselaar had begun transitioning at the age of 12 and publicly identified as female.

‘Trans’ people are crazy. Crazy people are dangerous. That’s pretty much all that needs to be said.

The Times (UK).

The prime minister has asked Sir Jim Ratcliffe to apologise after Manchester United’s co-owner said Britain has been “colonised” by immigrants. But who is the billionaire businessman?

Sir Jim Ratcliffe: Britain has been colonised by immigrants

Ratcliffe led The Sunday Times Rich List in 2018 and has since dropped to 7th last year with an estimated net worth of £17.046 billion.

The 73-year-old founded the global chemicals company Ineos in 1998 and acquired a significant minority stake in Manchester United football club in February 2024, taking control of football operations.

It would appear that billionaires not named Soros have a realistic view of the immigration problem. One of the nice things about being a billionaire is that you can tell Woke statists like Starmer to fuck off.

Raised on a council estate in Greater Manchester as the son of a joiner, Ratcliffe moved his primary residence to the tax haven of Monaco in 2020 to avoid up to £4 billion of tax.

Well. There it is. People who have made their own fortunes tend to dislike the government stealing from them.

UPDATE: Farage backs Ratcliffe over claims UK ‘colonised by immigrants’ (The Telegraph [UK])

U.S. Ski Team Awarded Gold Medal For Synchronized Screaming About Trump (BabylonBee)

Alarming Study Shows Average Somali High School Senior In Minnesota Committing Fraud At Just A 5th Grade Level

Trump Is Trying to Change Voting Control Because He Is Nervous He Will Lose | Karin Von Hippel

NYC officials vow to fly Pride flag at Stonewall, after Trump admin takes it down (Trump administration removes Rainbow Flag from Stonewall National Monument (Matt Tracy/Gay City News))

Dad who shot Brit daughter dead after ‘Trump argument’ releases statement

Trump, corruption, crypto, and the UAE (The New Neo)

‘Going to Hell’: Democrats Press DHS Officials on Immigration Action  Like being called ugly by a frog.

Trump dropped a dime on Epstein way back when (The New Neo)

10 Threats Against Trump Admin Officials in 2026

The Man Who Always Has Proof Tomorrow: Adam Schiff Cries Election Fraud Again

In the New Jersey Primary, ‘Abolish ICE’ Looks Like a Winning Message (Michelle Goldberg/New York Times)

Trump’s tariffs cost American households $1,000 last year: Research group (Elizabeth Schulze/Associated Press)

Trump administration’s changes to the CFPB cost Americans $19B, a new report says (Ken Sweet/Associated Press)

A Campaign to Revoke the Endangerment Finding Appears Near ‘Total Victory’ (New York Times)

The Nation’s Most Democratic State Might Elect a Trump-Friendly Governor (Harold Meyerson/American Prospect)

Trump’s Doomed Drive to Rename Penn Station and Dulles Airport (Michelle Cottle/New York Times)  That was never serious. But proglodytes have no sense of humor and so can’t detect it in others.

After Greenland, it’s the micro-agressions (Politico)

Republicans are pushing to drastically change the way you cast ballots (Amber Phillips/Washington Post)  Yeah—you actually have to be alive and a citizen. Shocking, I know.

Trump set to repeal landmark climate finding in huge regulatory rollback this week (Reuters)

Republicans can’t afford more presidential distractions right now (Washington Post)  They hope.

The death of the CIA Factbook and Trump’s war on usefulness (Paul Waldman/Public Notice)

Newly Unbound, Trump Weighs More Nuclear Arms and Underground Tests (New York Times)

Immigrants Who Say Their Detention Is Illegal Have Filed More Than 18,000 Cases. It’s a Historic High. (ProPublica)

Raging MAGA Rep Demands Consequences After ‘Depraved’ Bad Bunny Show (Ewan Palmer/The Daily Beast)

How ICE defies judges’ orders to release detainees, step by step (Kyle Cheney/Politico)

ICE Arrests Raise Questions About Following Federal Agents

Trump to Repeal Landmark Climate Finding in Huge Regulatory Rollback (Wall Street Journal)

Trump set to gut U.S. climate change policy and environmental regulations: White House official (Associated Press)

Universities are sending Trump a dangerous message (Washington Post)

Stewart And Beshear Strategize On How To Combat Trump’s Immigration ‘Body Count’

A “Zahltag” Moment, in a United States of “On To Cincinnati” (Greg Olear/PREVAIL)

Maxine Waters is the newest target in Democrats’ intergenerational war (Melanie Mason/Politico)  Congresswoman Bitter Beer Face on the rocks? Say it ain’t so!

CNBC, a Voice of the Crust.

And who could blame them? Governments these days look on rich people as mere deep pockets to be picked—or piggy banks to be smashed and rifled.

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Rep. Becca Balint stormed out of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday after Bondi deflected questions about the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and instead criticized Balint’s record on antisemitism.

Lawmakers called the hearing to press Bondi on a range of issues, including Epstein and the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.

Balint, a Vermont progressive, asked Bondi during her questioning whether Trump had been aware of billionaire financier Howard Lutnick’s ties to Epstein when he was appointed as commerce secretary. The most recent files released last month showed that Lutnick had visited Epstein’s private island and dined with him years after he said he had cut off ties — and after Epstein pled guilty to sex crimes.

After Bondi refused to answer Balint’s question, the congresswoman replied, “I’m going to conclude that the president, in fact, did know about his ties.”

At the end of Balint’s questioning, which devolved into shouting as Bondi consistently interrupted Balint, Bondi then raised Balint’s record on antisemitism.

I guess Democrats can’t stand to be treated like Republicans.

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This is one step further than simple Lawfare, this story is about lower court judges openly strategizing ways to stop the enforcement of laws they are supposed to uphold.

Last week the Fifth Circuit Cout of Appeals ruled that detaining illegal aliens during the deportation proceedings is entirely following current immigration law [SEE HERE]. Now, according to Politico, federal judges in Texas are openly strategizing ways to work around that higher court ruling and keep giving bond releases to illegal aliens under the guise of “liberty interest.”

To be clear, these are Federal judges, many of whom were appointed by Democrat Presidents, not state judges, who know better.

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My, what a surprise.

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There is a reason for this sudden interest in things military: Russia. Let’s be honest, Russia is currently losing the war in Ukraine. That doesn’t mean to say Putin will give up. If he does, he’s dead. Russia is not big on accountability, but having 1.5 million men killed in a five years’ long three-day ‘special military operation’ requires accountability. Even for Putin. In the unlikely case a temporary peace agreement can be reached favoring Russia — any other agreement is not going to happen — Ukraine is just a stepping stone, about half way. It is no coincidence Finland and Sweden have joined NATO.

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Gee, I wonder why.

The United States has fallen to its lowest-ever rank in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), a leading global index that measures perception of corruption in the public sector among independent experts and business people. In 2025, the U.S. fell down one spot to 29th place (out of 182) with a score of 64/100 on a 0 to 100 scale, where 0 means highly corrupt and 100 completely clean. This ranking puts the country on the same level as the Bahamas, and below Uruguay (17th place), Bhutan (18th) and the United Arab Emirates (21st). The United States had been on a slow decline in the index since 2017, when the country scored 75/100.

Several factors have impacted the U.S.’ score, including measures put in place last year by the Trump administration that have severy hindered the federal government’s ability to fight public corruption, such as pausing investigations into corporate foreign bribery, weakening institutions or curtailing enforcement of a foreign agent registration law.

According to recent aggregated data from the Pew Research Center based on series of national polls, trust in the government was nearing historic lows at the end of 2025, with only 17 percent of Americans trusing the government to do what is right just about always or most of the time. As our infographic shows, trust in the government has been on a slow decline since it peaked at 54 percent in October 2001, during George W. Bush’s first term (such a high level of approval hadn’t been recorded since the early 1970s, under President Nixon). The lowest level recorded since 2000 was in October 2011, under President Obama. Trust in the government hit a low of 15 percent, which coincided with the announcement of the official withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of the year and the expansion of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

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The ‘Rules Based’ International legal order, that convenient phantom, had its coffin nailed at Nuremburg in 1945. Yet the accepted mainstream news take on Venezuela was that Maduro’s flight of fancy to the US was something crashing the norms of the ordered world of modernity. A usurpation of the decent normalcy of the twentieth century. Please. As Cicero opined “In time of war, the laws are silent” (Inter arma enim silent leges).

On 3 January 2026, United States armed forces carried out a military operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were transported to the United States to face federal criminal charges. The intervention has since generated intense legal debate, centring on whether the actions violated international law, constitutional constraints on the use of force, and longstanding principles of sovereignty and immunity.

Legal scholars and international law authorities rolled out the usual verbatim responses. That the use of force by one state against another is tightly circumscribed by the United Nations Charter, particularly Article 2(4), which prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state absent Security Council authorisation or a valid claim of self-defence. According to international law expert Geoffrey Robertson KC, the operation’s conduct “was contrary to Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter” and constitutes a ‘crime of aggression’, describing it as ‘the worst crime of all.’

Unfortunately they can’t take their football and go home because their football is imaginary.

Critics also point to wider implications for sovereign immunity and the protection afforded to sitting heads of state under international law. As articulated by the panel of UN human rights experts, the unprovoked use of armed force on Venezuelan sovereign territory is a breach of international law and may ‘also constitute the international crime of aggression attributable to the individual political and military leaders involved.’ They further noted that under international law, a sitting head of state like Maduro enjoys immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of foreign courts while in office, complicating the legal basis for his abduction and prosecution.

And yet the “International Community” (specifically the U.N.) has done fuck-all about it. They recognize that Trump knows that the football is imaginary and has decided to rub their noses in the dirt.

The broader concern among legal scholars is that permitting such actions without robust legal justification weakens international legal norms. If one state can use force on another’s territory based on indictments or alleged criminal conduct, the prohibition on the use of force that underpins the UN Charter would be severely eroded, potentially inviting reciprocal interventions by other powers. These are the juridical arguments for and against the intervention.

Remind me how long the Russian war against Ukraine has been going on. I read somewhere that the Russians have been fighting the Ukrainians longer than the Russians fought the Germans during either World War.

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Move over, Golden State. You’re being replaced by the Sunshine State.

The wealthiest people in the U.S. are forsaking California in favor of Miami to escape a looming wealth tax that might be coming to the West Coast state. And as these affluent folks head to the 305, they’re giving the real estate market a seismic shakeup upon their arrival by snatching up luxe mansions in South Florida, Bloomberg reported.

Larry Page, the cofounder of Google, is one of many people making the move. He reportedly just snagged a $101.5 million manse and another $71.9 million property in the luxe enclave of Coconut Grove last month, according to Bloomberg. Another adjacent $15 million home was also allegedly snapped up by an entity connected to Page in January, too, completing his property trifecta (and following the trend of billionaires amassing luxe compounds in Miami). Fellow billionaire Mark Zukerberg has also stepped into the Miami fray, reportedly buying a property on Indian Creek, a man-made isle that’s also known as Billionaires Bunker. If the Facebook founder has actually purchased a home there, he’ll count Jeff Bezos (who has a $90 million spread there) and Tom Brady (and his blinged-out watch collection) as his neighbors.

The Telegraph (UK).

To say that grammar schools are competitive would be a gross understatement: with more than 30 candidates for each place at some schools, getting a place for your child now requires military-style levels of strategy and ruthlessness.

There are stories of children as young as six being privately tutored for the 11+ exams, and families applying for schools hundreds of miles away (some as far away as China). The average house price in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, which is in the catchment area of several outstanding grammar schools, now exceeds £1.1m.

Grammar schools are no longer just about serving local talent; they are a national – and increasingly international – race for an elite educational opportunity. One that is, crucially, free.

Free because they are paid for by the taxpayers. Yet another thing that in America would be private but in Britain is controlled by the government.

Many have been quick to blame the under-representation of white children in grammar schools on anti-white discrimination, but the idea that entrance is awarded on the basis of some sort of ethnic favouritism is nonsense.

Firstly, grammar schools are often located in quite demographically diverse areas. Secondly, students sit the same test regardless of background. For most schools, there is no pass threshold, so places are simply allocated in descending order of exam mark (although around two thirds of grammar schools have policies prioritising candidates from disadvantaged homes or on free school meals).

Apparently, these people don’t even read what they write, or are so steeped in cognitive dissonance that obvious inconsistencies don’t even register.

The Telegraph (UK).

Everybody goes to Ricks; everybody moves to Florida.

Indian Creek Island is a very interesting place; look at it on a map and you will see why billionaires like it.

None of the world’s five richest people live in California, despite four having founded their companies there.

Gee, I wonder why.

The Telegraph (UK).

A shooter described as a “female in a dress” killed nine people in a remote part of Canada on Tuesday.

Seven people died after being shot at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, while two more people were found dead at a nearby home

Another 27 people were hurt, including two with life-threatening injuries, in the country’s worst school shooting in more than 30 years.

…

The local police superintendent later described the suspect as a “gunperson” in a press briefing, without giving further details about their identity.

Being Woke doesn’t make you immune from crazy.

The 1989 murders of 14 women by a gunman at École Polytechnique in Montreal led the country to tighten its gun laws.

Well, that’s all right then.

The deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history happened in 2020 when a man shot dead 22 people across multiple rural communities in the province of Nova Scotia.

Guess those tightened gun laws really works.

UPDATE: School Shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia Leaves 10 Killed, Including Shooter – The “Gender” of Shooter Creating Angst

My, what a surprise.

UPDATE: SHOOTER IDENTIFIED AS TRANS (Tim Pool)

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Yesterday, the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.

From a financial perspective, each Seahawks player will take home $178,000—payment for that particular game.

Now, given that the Superbowl was played in California—and the players earned money playing in the game— it’s reasonable for the state of California to tax that specific income.

But that’s not the way California looks at it.

Instead, the state will go back in time, all the way to the start of the NFL season in September, and take their ‘fair share’ of the players’ ENTIRE salaries over the entire season.