DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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For years, the Left tried to gaslight Americans into thinking that Antifa was a fake threat, even though we could see the political violence before our own eyes. Now, the Trump administration isn’t just bringing charges against Antifa rioters, it’s taking aim at the potential funding networks behind the violence.

When Antifa agitators set cars on fire, threw Molotov cocktails and fireworks at the federal courthouse in Portland, and terrorized the streets of U.S. cities in the summer of 2020, many on the Left brushed aside the violence as “fiery but peaceful protests.”

Insurance analysts have estimated that the Black Lives Matter riots between May 28 and June 8, 2020 resulted in more than $2 billion in insurance payouts. The violence cost the lives of at least 26 Americans, including heroes like retired police Captain David Dorn.

The street violence has become more intermittent, but it hasn’t fully abated. Agitators have set Teslas on fire to protest Elon Musk’s work in the Trump administration. Anti-Israel demonstrations on college campuses have veered into antisemitic harassment. In some cases, groups that organized protests received grants from the Left’s dark money network.

Some radical leftists have even attempted or carried out assassinations. President Donald Trump survived two assassination attempts in 2024, as did Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk wasn’t so lucky.

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Belgium marked the 22 March 2016 terrorist attacks on Sunday, which killed 32 people and injured more than 300.

Official ceremonies began at Zaventem Airport, continued at Maelbeek metro station—another site of the attacks—and concluded at a central memorial in Brussels. Prime Minister Bart De Wever, King Philippe of Belgium, and Queen Mathilde attended the events.

Remembrance events had already begun on Saturday, when a human chain was formed at Maelbeek metro station to mark the tenth anniversary of the attacks.

The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks, which were carried out by the same network behind the Paris attacks a few months earlier, which killed 130 people. After retreating to safe houses in Brussels, the attackers launched a hastily organised operation days after the arrest of Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the Paris cell on 18 March.

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For many years the political left has dismissed all discussion about links between third world populations and low intelligence as “racism” and “xenophobia”. The well documented fact that low IQ populations are more inclined towards lack of impulse control and a higher crime rate does not matter to progressives. They assert that such claims are based on “rigged” and “biased” data.

For example, the data on Somalia’s low median IQ (which is 67 and far below the western average of 100) is often criticized as “incomplete” because the data is usually taken from refugees and migrants leaving the country rather than a population sample from within the country. However, populations in neighboring countries like Djibouti or Ethiopia have nearly identical test results.

It is simply a fact that IQ is largely genetic (around 80% of testing outcome). The rest is a matter of varied experiences and environment. This does not mean that a “disadvantaged” childhood results in a lower IQ score. In fact, high IQ individuals often come from significant struggles and studies on top “high achievers” show that around 75% of them come from difficult backgrounds including extreme poverty.

A game anyone can play.

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New York City spent about $368 million last year on services for people living on the streets, which equals roughly $81,000 per unsheltered person, according to the NY Post.

Spending through the city’s New York City Department of Homeless Services street outreach programs has increased sharply over the past several years. In 2019, the city spent about $102 million on these services, averaging around $28,000 per unsheltered individual. By the 2025 fiscal year, the average cost had risen to about $81,000 per person, close to the city’s median household income of $81,228.

Unsheltered homeless individuals are those who regularly live outside rather than in shelters or permanent housing. During this same period, the number of people living on the streets grew by 26 percent, rising from 3,588 in 2019 to 4,505 in 2025. However, spending increased far faster than the population itself.

Newsbusters.

If you have been watching the media coverage of the war with Iran, you can not help but be aware of the leftist agenda being driven home day after day, report after report. You hear that there was no imminent threat from Iran, Trump has no exit strategy, etc. And of course the one they really love to push is Israel as an evil player, whether it’s how they somehow made the U.S. start the war, or as a recent CNN report implied, how they are bombing Lebanon for no reason, and are responsible for the deaths of children.

On Thursday’s Erin Burnett OutFront, the CNN host began her segment by talking over a video of an RT reporter in Lebanon, who just managed to avoid an Israeli air attack, while giving his report. She would then play it with sound, as she made her feelings known.

Burnett failed to mention that Israel has said that it issued explicit warnings the day before, citing Hezbollah’s use of the area for moving fighters and weapons. She then threw it to a report from inside Lebanon by Correspondent Isobel Yeung, who first showed us the funeral of what she says were four young siblings and a cousin killed in Israeli airstrikes.

The Narrative Media also wring their hands a lot when hospitals, mosques, and orphanages get targeted, without bothering to report that Islamic terrorists (like Hamas and Hezbollah) regularly use such places as command posts and staging areas with the “innocent” denizens as their human shields.

Newsbusters.

With the return of President Donald Trump to the White House, panicked liberals fearful of a Fascism that never seems to happen outside of their fervid imaginations are seeking an escape route via obtaining foreign citizenship. Also key to their escape from Orange Man Bad is getting foreign passports as chronicled on Monday in the New Yorker by Lauren Markham, “Seeking a Second Passport.”

For decades proglodytes have been whining that if so-and-so is elected President (or Governor or whatever) they would leave the country. And then they still stay. It’s gratifying to know that Trump is the incentive they need to get out for real. (Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.)

Iran Believes It’s Winning–and Wants a Steep Price to End the War (Yaroslav Trofimov/Wall Street Journal)

Trump’s unshackled presidency puts him at the center of the economy (Matt Peterson/CNBC)

Trump Is Hiding the Truth About the War in Iran (New York Times)

Capehart Tries To Cast Doubt On Claims Of Success In Iran

Three weeks in, Iran war escalates beyond Trump’s control (Reuters)

The Energy Supply Shock of the Iran War Changes Everything (Matthew Zeitlin/Heatmap News)  Everything?

On CNN, Democrat Discovers $200 Billion Is Too Much Money—When Trump Spends It

Iran war’s economic shocks could reverberate for a while (Courtenay Brown/Axios)

‘This is about attention’: Mike Lee’s MAGA crusade is driving his colleagues crazy (Jordain Carney/Politico)  MAGA is the New Nigger.

Chicago Transit Authority sues to restore billions in federal funding (Gregory Svirnovskiy/Politico)  Because, as we all know, funding local transportation is TOTALLY the responsibility of the Federal government—and the Federal taxpayer.

Trump Erupts in Fury Over His War Failures–and Exposes a Big Weakness (Greg Sargent/New Republic)  Gred Sargent loses his shit.

Trump Thinks Cuba is Another Venezuela. Here’s Why He’s Wrong (Achy Obejas/Politico)

Trump’s Iran War Drive Exposes Limits of ‘Yes Sir’ Cabinet (Bloomberg)

The Crust
The Clerisy
The Comfortable
The Constructive
The Contemptible

I’m sure you can do the sorting.

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Martin Hewitt, head of the Border Security Command, will leave his post at the end of March—well before the end of his three-year term—following mounting frustration inside the Home Office over persistently high migrant arrivals. His departure comes after more than 66,000 migrants have crossed the Channel in small boats since Labour took office 19 months ago, with last year alone recording over 41,000 arrivals.

Appointed in September 2024 to deliver on the government’s pledge to “smash the gangs,” Hewitt had been given sweeping powers modelled on counter-terror operations. Yet crossings continued at scale, exposing the limits of enforcement efforts without a credible deterrent.

Insiders said Hewitt had become increasingly frustrated with both operational constraints and a lack of decisive policy backing. He had previously pressed for tougher cooperation from France, including the interception of migrant boats at sea—a measure repeatedly delayed amid political and legal obstacles.

The Foundry.

I would have put it a little more bluntly.

New York’s desperate governor is turning to a well-known practice in New York City: aggressive begging.

While speaking at Politico’s “New York Agenda: Albany Summit” last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, admitted that the state’s tax base has eroded and that it faces a deepening fiscal crisis.

She then put out a call for wealthy, former New Yorkers to come back to the state so they can be robbed again by beneficent government overlords.

The Other McCain.

You are an intelligent, responsible adult, which is why you’ve never heard of Taylor Frankie Paul. Until Thursday, I hadn’t heard of her either because — as an intelligent, responsible adult — I pay zero attention to “reality TV.” But before getting to her recent failed attempt to break out from that entertainment ghetto, let’s start at the beginning: By 2022, when she was 28, Taylor Frankie Paul had accumulated a massive following on TikTok. She was a married mother of three, and a lot of her content featured her and her husband, Tate Paul, doing silly stunts, sometimes with their two young children. Then in mid-2022, Taylor “went viral” with a video announcing that she would be getting divorced. Her “life was falling apart,” she said and then she dropped the bomb: The breakup was because she and her husband (and many of their friends in their Utah community, allegedly) were involved in “swinging.”

Don’t know who needs to hear this, but . . . BAD IDEA!

Newsbusters.

When a military expert’s opinion is different than a politician’s, how are fact-checkers like PolitiFact supposed to adjudicate the politician’s claim? If a Friday article by Zoe Weyand is anything to go by, the answer is not at all, or at least if the politician is Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren. However, Weyand’s standard for giving Warren a “true” rating for a recent claim she made about President Trump is different than the one PolitiFact has traditionally applied to Republicans.

Warren claimed that Trump has dropped more bombs on more countries than any president in the modern era, which was defined as since 9/11. In the “If your time is short” summary, Weyand wrote, “From the start of his first term to now, Trump has authorized military strikes in 10 countries, more than any other president in the 21st century. He has also authorized a higher number of military strikes than any other modern president.”

However, she also observed how “An expert said the use of ground troops is a better way to analyze military activity. Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush deployed a far greater number of American troops during their tenures.”

That expert was Mark Cancian, who Weyand described as “a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Defense and Security Department.” Cancian’s opinion that ground forces are a better way to measure military activity did not dissuade Weyand from giving Warren a straight-up true rating, but historically, Republicans have not been given that benefit.

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On Tuesday’s Fox & Friends, the show gave coverage to the story of how anti-ICE agitators blocked ICE agents from arresting a sexual predator in Boston, leading it to take a month to finally catch him.

Co-host Ainsley Earhardt set up the segment by recalling that Fox reporter Bill Melugin was informed by an ICE agent about the incident that happened in Boston. Reading from Melugin’s post on X, co-host Brian Kilmeade filled in viewers.

Newsbusters.

As the military uses up expensive weapons in the war with Iran, it naturally seeks to replenish them. However, CNN’s Saturday host of First of All, Victor Blackwell, suggested that the money being used to protect our troops means that the government isn’t concerned with “you” as he rattled off several welfare programs he claimed the money should go to instead.

 

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The authoritarian COVID lockdowns and stay-at-home orders sold as life-saving measures have been unmasked once again as a deadly failure of big government overreach.

A new UK Covid-19 Inquiry report has concluded that the relentless “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives” messaging likely cost thousands of lives by convincing people they could not get access to health services.

The inquiry, led by Baroness Hallett, slammed the slogan created by Cabinet Office officials without input from health leaders. It “led some people to feel they must avoid burdening the NHS” and “may have inadvertently sent the message that healthcare was closed,” contributing to a sharp decline in A&E attendances for life-threatening emergencies such as heart attacks.

UnHerd.

I hate to pass along such news, but it’s the 30th anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the preeminent MFA novel, which in the heady days of the Clinton surplus passed through the aforementioned burning hoops of the publishing-industrial complex with flying colors. In fact, it introduced many of the colors as it leapt and gamboled. Three decades of nimbus have grown round its obsolescence, and yet its publishers insist on goading us every 10 years with a freshly introduced reissue of the dead horse. This time, the publishers have tapped singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, an introductress who has gone into the belly of the beast cognizant of her “own innate and internalized misogyny,” an obligatory non-sequitur that lets the reader know they’re in the good, coercible hands of someone in way over their head.

I must confess to having attempted to read INFINITE JEST on multiple occasions without success. I am persauded that the title references the scam that Wallace managed to perpetrate on his agent, his publisher, and the Usual Literary Suspects.

Watch it.

Just in case you were wondering.

Helps explain why Britain is such a shit-hole, and why my great-grandfather was willing to spend a couple of months seasick.

I got yer affordable housing, right here….

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The Department of Homeland Security shutdown entered its 36th day on Saturday after Senate Democrats blocked yet another funding bill for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, and other federal agencies, triggering weeks of chaos at airports nationwide, including long TSA checkpoint lines during the peak of the spring break travel season.

Early Saturday morning, Elon Musk, closely tracking the DHS funding lapse, wrote on X that he would personally pay the salaries of TSA agents to get them back to airports and help avert further chaos.

“I would like to offer to pay the salaries of TSA personnel during this funding impasse that is negatively affecting the lives of so many Americans at airports throughout the country,” Musk said.

Pay attention, all of you Democrat billionaires who keep screaming that you want your taxes raised: All you have to do is write a check. Alex Soros—ball’s in your court.

On the other hand, the Airline Gestapo TSA is one of the ugliest manifestations of the Security Theater State soaking up taxpayer dollars. How about we Defund the TSA? Sounds like a win-win!

Newsbusters.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is a case study in liberal media hypocrisy regarding intervention in the Middle East. His opinions on the Iraq War (led by Republican president George W. Bush) were hateful, but when Democratic president Barack Obama invaded Libya (also without congressional approval), a newly war-mongering Kristof beamed that we were (yes) greeted as liberators. Now with Donald Trump in charge, going to war in the Middle East is once again dangerous and bad.

Kristof’s March 18 column, “How Trump Should Extricate Himself From His Iran Quagmire,” opened “The ongoing debate about whether the Iran war will become a quagmire misses the point. President Trump and America are already in one.”

In his March 14 column, “Does Trump Risk Turning America Into a Rogue State?” he lamented (after forward United Nation’s lies about Israel targeting children in Gaza): “Now in Iran, I fear we may be retreating even further from the principles we once proclaimed, loosening the shackles that civilized nations place on themselves to protect our shared humanity.”

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Radical leftists want a new Department of Migration to push open borders propaganda in schools and fast-track voting rights, free housing and citizenship for illegals.

A leaked Green Party dossier has blown the lid off plans to brainwash British schoolchildren into believing they have a ‘moral duty’ to embrace endless immigration.

The document, hidden behind a password-locked policy archive normally only accessible to party members, calls for a new Department of Migration to work hand in glove with education chiefs. Its stated goal is to “disseminate knowledge” about immigrants directly into classrooms.

Progressivism Green in Hoof and Mouth.

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For 15 years the FBI was engaged in a landmark investigation into the largest Islamic-based charity in the United States, called The Holy Land Foundation. The organization was operating as a front for Muslim terror groups, funneling cash from western countries to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, until they were finally put on trial in 2008.

Convicted leaders were known as the “Holy Land Five,” and included Shukri Abu Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader, Abdulrahman Odeh, and Mohammad El-Mezain. Among the documents seized from these individuals during the investigation was a strategic paper drafted by senior Muslim Brotherhood operative Mohamed Akram in 1991.

The paper was titled: “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America”. It outlined an agenda called the “Civilization-Jihadist Process”, also known as “Stealth Jihad”.

The memorandum gave detailed methods for establishing Islam as a “civilization alternative” in the West and a “grand Jihad” for eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within. It called for the ‘sabotaging’ of the west and its “miserable house” by domestic hands AND the hands of the believers so that the west is eliminated and “God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

The plan explicitly referred to using western society’s own people, institutions, laws, and unwitting allies (progressive groups and NGOs, media, politicians, academics, or civil-rights organizations) to advance the Islamic agenda.

And it appears to be working.

Well, this incel wasn’t ever going to get laid anyway, so why not Embrace the Dork?

The military applications are of course obvious.

The Washington Poop, Paper of Record of the Deep State.

President Donald Trump on Friday evening said the United States was considering “winding down” its military efforts in Iran even as thousands of Marines sailed toward the region, leaving unclear whether the White House planned to walk away or escalate its three-week-old war.

Trump’s announcement on social media that he may step back from the war in Iran sought to escalate pressure on allies to assume a greater role in securing the region’s oil shipments — an increasingly urgent concern as energy prices spike. Trump has complained in increasingly bitter terms that U.S. allies are dragging their feet about joining a fight that he launched without consulting them.

“The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other Nations who use it — The United States does not!” he wrote Friday on Truth Social, adding that he would be open to helping other countries “in their Hormuz efforts.”

The Straight of Hormuz is a European problem and an Arab problem. It’s not an American problem, especially with Trump as President unlocking oil exploration and exploitation offshore of California, in the Gulf, on the Alaskan North Slope, and in the many oil shale resources within America itself.

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Artificial intelligence has become the latest excuse for reviving one of the oldest bad ideas in economic policy: a universal basic income. Recent pieces in Newsweek, the LSE Business Review, and Fortune have all helped push the idea that AI may soon wipe out so many jobs that Washington will need to send everyone a check.

And vote for the Democrats upon whom those checks depend. They don’t tell you that part.

That makes for a catchy headline. It also makes for terrible economics.

The right question is not whether AI will disrupt work. Of course it will. The right question is this: after more than 100 local guaranteed-income experiments, what have we actually learned?

The answer is much less flattering to UBI than its promoters would like.

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“Europe’s own regulatory architecture turned off Europe’s own energy supply. And America. . . on the other side of the Atlantic with a full tank of gas, watched it happen.”

– Jeff Childers

Let’s pause for a moment amid all the excitement to address an abiding mystery of these times: why does the news media seem to be rooting for American failure in the Iran operation? Or more generally, how did the media become handmaiden to the Lefty-left and all its ancillaries? How were they lured into their Cloward-Piven bunker of crypto-Marxian “resistance”?

Ben Shapiro.

Don’t fall for the propaganda. Iran is not holding its own in this conflict. It is being systematically dismantled.

One by one, the senior figures of the Islamic Republic have been eliminated: generals, security chiefs and regime power brokers. The country’s leadership has been decapitated at the highest levels, leaving behind a hollowed-out command structure struggling to function.

Even the regime’s attempts at continuity appear shaky. A successor was hastily elevated, but reports suggest instability, absence and internal disarray at the very top. Whatever facade of order Tehran hoped to project has given way to uncertainty and silence.

Meanwhile, the military picture is equally stark. Iran’s command-and-control systems have been fractured. Its missile and drone capabilities – once touted as pillars of deterrence – have been severely degraded. What remains is not a coordinated campaign but sporadic, diminished retaliation.

Newsbusters.

The media’s love for Republicans who become Democrats is not confined to the Trump era. Before the Trump era there was former GOP senator-turned Obama Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, and he joined CNN International/PBS anchor Christiane Amanpour on Thursday’s Amanpour and Company to discuss current Secretary Pete Hegseth’s record as a wartime leader. As Amanpour invented a non-existent scandal about executing prisoners of war, Hagel alleged the U.S. is “manufacturing a whole new generation of young terrorists in the Middle East.”

No, Islam is manufacturing a whole new generation of terrorists in the Middle East. It does so automatically.

Newsbusters.

On Saturday’s The Weekend: Primetime, MS NOW co-host Catherine Rampell made a stunning admission, recalling that 90 percent of the anti-Semitic hate mail she receives comes from the left. This revelation came as she made an unusual effort to provide balance during a segment focused on anti-Semitism within the Republican party.

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

As left-leaning New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg appeared to discuss her recent article on the subject, she accused President Donald Trump of causing a surge in anti-Semitism in young Republicans:

Proglodyte Projection: When the Left accuses you of doing they they do … and when they accuse you of planning to do what they’re planning to do.

Science News.

The sperm whale is an endangered species. A major reason is that the whale oil is heat-resistant and chemically and physically stable. This makes it useful for lubricating delicate machinery. The only substitute is expensive carnauba wax from the leaves of palm trees that grow only in Brazil … [but] wax from the seeds of the jojoba, an evergreen desert shrub, is nearly as good.

After sperm whale oil was banned in the early 1970s, the United States sought to replenish its reserves with eco-friendly oil from jojoba seeds (SN: 5/17/75, p. 335). Jojoba oil’s chemical structure is nearly identical to that of sperm whale oil, and the shrub is native to some North American desert ecosystems, making the plant an appealing replacement. Today, jojoba shrubs are cultivated around the world on almost every continent. Jojoba oil is used in hundreds of products, including cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, adhesives and lubricants. Meanwhile, sperm whale populations have started to recover under international anti-whaling agreements (SN: 2/27/21, p. 4).

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There is something unique about the color purple: Our brain makes it up. So you might just call purple a pigment of our imagination.

Yuk yuk yuk….

It’s also a fascinating example of how the brain creates something beautiful when faced with a systems error.

To understand where purple comes from, we need to know how our eyes and brain work together to perceive color. And that all begins with light.

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tl;dr:

1. Defer US taxes by reinvesting your taxable income into the economy as business expenses, depreciating assets, etc.
2. For your leveraged investments, pay yourself in refinanced cash when your investments appreciate and/or credit rates drop.

Think of the Tax Code a evolution in action.

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No matter where you look, a bell curve is close by.

Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will conform to a bell curve. Record 100 people’s guesses at the number of jelly beans in a jar, and they’ll follow a bell curve. Measure enough women’s heights, men’s weights, SAT scores, marathon times — you’ll always get the same smooth, rounded hump that tapers at the edges.

Why does the bell curve pop up in so many datasets?

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There are over a hundred million online shops. That number is not a typo. Between Shopify stores, WooCommerce sites, regional marketplaces, and every DTC brand that set up a storefront in the last decade, the supply side of e-commerce is enormous.

And yet, when you want to buy something, you go to Amazon. Or Google. Maybe you open three tabs, compare prices, squint at shipping policies, and give up. The experience of actually exploring what is out there is terrible.

This always struck me as strange. The internet was supposed to make everything accessible. Instead it made everything available but almost nothing discoverable.

Check it out.

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

I recommend channel 18. Channel 19 is not bad, either.

Channel 24 looks the way MTV used to. Sometimes the old ways are best.

Newsweek, a Voice of the Crust.

Contrary to what you might have seen in the Narrative Media.

ScienceAlert.

A seismic shift in the selection pressures acting on humans may have brought us to a major turning point in our evolutionary journey.

According to multiple teams of scientists, human culture – technology, medicine, and our remarkable collaborative problem-solving skills – may now be shaping human evolution more than environmental pressures and the limitations of our bodies.

This is because the solutions we invent to make our lives easier, from central heating to contact lenses, can solve biological challenges far faster than evolution can, reducing the pressure for genetic adaptation.

“Human evolution seems to be changing gears,” said cultural evolution researcher Tim Waring of the University of Maine, who co-authored a study on the subject published in September 2025.

“When we learn useful skills, institutions, or technologies from each other, we are inheriting adaptive cultural practices. On reviewing the evidence, we find that culture solves problems much more rapidly than genetic evolution. This suggests our species is in the middle of a great evolutionary transition.”

Unmentioned in the article is the fact that our stupid people are outbreeding our intelligent people. Advanced technology and cultural softheartedness interferes with natural selection weeding out the unfit and the inferior.

New York Post.

A ritzy Los Angeles enclave is seeing their wealth wiped out as bungling Democratic state leaders have failed to act while a massive landslide accelerates — leaving their homes teetering on the edge of a cliff.

Residents of the posh coastal city of Rancho Palos Verdes tore into Gov. Gavin Newsom for sinking critical legislation that would help protect properties in the idyllic community 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

Peter Pettler, 83, told The California Post that he’s seen the value of his sprawling 2,700-square-foot ranch-style home plummet in value from $2.5 million to just $515,000.

He was once even offered a pathetic $5,000 for his four-bedroom, four-bathroom manor.

The Telegraph (UK).

American A-10 attack jets screamed low over the Strait of Hormuz to hunt Iranian speedboats racing through the narrow waterway.

Apache helicopters joined the assault, and 5,000lb bombs struck underground weapons sites across southern Iran, the US said.

They wanted to destroy Iran’s fast-attack boats and missile bases, which had been targeting passing oil tankers, with the goal of reopening the vital shipping lane and ending the global energy crisis.

But the main threat to shipping may be one that American jets cannot see or easily target: a small fleet of Iranian midget submarines designed for the shallow, murky waters of the Gulf.

Iran has up to 10 Ghadir-class midget submarines, which are roughly a tenth the size of conventional attack submarines at 120 tons in weight and 29m in length.

About the size of a narco-sub.

The Telegraph (UK).

An Islamic leader has backed the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage after they criticised a mass prayer session for Muslim men in Trafalgar Square.

Writing for The Telegraph (see below), Dr Taj Hargey said he found the open-air worship on Monday, attended by hundreds of men, including Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, “disturbing”.

He agreed with Nick Timothy, the shadow justice secretary, who described the event, organised by the Ramadan Tent Project, as an “act of domination and division” in an article for The Telegraph on Tuesday.

Historically, when Muslims conquered some place, they would mark the occasion with public prayers in the conquered territory. They expecially love turning Christian churches into mosques, as with Hagia Sopia in Constantinople.

The Telegraph (UK).

When Donald Trump boasts that America’s military is bigger and better than anyone else’s in Nato, he can point to the USS Gerald R Ford. Costing nearly £10bn, the 100,000-tonne aircraft carrier is the largest and most expensive warship in the world. Its 25 decks carry 4,500 personnel and 75 aircraft, allowing it to project US air and sea power anywhere in the world.

It does, however, appear to have a weak spot: its laundry and toilet facilities. Having been sent to the Red Sea to act as a launch platform for Trump’s bombing campaign against Iran, it has now been diverted to Crete for repairs, following a fire in the ship’s launderette which raged for more than 30 hours before it was extinguished.

There are also reports that sabotage may have been involved – not by Iranian undercover operatives, but by crew members disgruntled that their standard six-month tour of duty has been extended for the Gulf operation. To make matters worse, the ship’s toilets have been constantly breaking down and clogging up with sewage.

The U.S. needs more carriers, and can’t afford to build more gold-plated crap like the Ford.

Read it.

The Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one miles wide. Two shipping channels, each two miles across, separated by a two-mile buffer. There is no alternative. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline to Yanbu and the UAE’s pipeline to Fujairah can handle maybe five million barrels combined. The math doesn’t work. The bottleneck is not political. It is geological and hydrographic.

Every TV analyst in America is talking about minesweepers and carrier strike groups. They are asking the wrong questions. The binding constraint on Hormuz was never a minefield or insurance. It is the US Navy’s willingness and ability to reopen it.

Every talking point suggests the White House and Navy are working hard to reopen the strait but progress is slow. A new posts on Truth Social suggests we may have to considet a new hypothesis.

“I wonder what would happen if we “finished off” what’s left of the Iranian Terror State, and let the Countries that use it, we don’t, be responsible for the so called Strait?” wrote President Trump in a psot this morning. “That would get some of our non-responsive “Allies” in gear, and fast!!!”

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Between 5,000 and 14,000 years ago, the Sahara Desert looked nothing like it does today. It was lush and green, with lakes and rivers supporting a variety of animals—including humans.

But who were these ancient ancestors? And where do they fit on the human family tree?

Researchers think they finally have some answers to these questions. They’ve successfully analyzed the DNA of two naturally mummified livestock herders who died roughly 7,000 years ago in present-day Libya, which was part of what’s known as the “green Sahara.”

Their analyses revealed a previously unknown—and largely genetically distinct—population of ancient humans, according to a new paper published this month in the journal Nature.

The individuals who lived in the green Sahara showed “no significant genetic influence from sub-Saharan populations to the south or Near Eastern and prehistoric European groups to the north,” says study co-author Johannes Krause, a geneticist at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, to Reuters’ Will Dunham.

“This suggests they remained genetically isolated despite practicing animal husbandry—a cultural innovation that originated outside Africa,” Krause adds.

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Familiar to anyone who pays attention to vintage aesthetics, I’m embarrassed to say it’s taken me 40 years to learn the name of the beloved typographic symbol that been guiding the way for centuries. Alas, that beloved inked symbol in the shape of a pointing hand (often used to draw attention to a section of text) is known as the manicule. Elegant name, n’est ce pas. Once you know the name, this little hand that has survived the march of time can take you down the rabbit hole from the age of quills to the era of cursors. So let’s follow the hand…

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Geothermal power stations are mature technology with proven performance, reliable operation and ideal for baseload generation. The units are synchronous, so they support the grid. The production from them is considered by most to be renewable. They do not use fossil fuels to provide the heat. It is not “carbon free”, but no generation truly is. It has a relatively small footprint, environment harm is low, and it can coexist with farming or industrial development. Most developments have a cheaper energy cost than onshore wind, using published accounts for analysis. For countries or areas where the resource is there, geothermal generation is very viable.

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Working in the field of genetics is a bizarre experience. No one seems to be interested in the most interesting applications of their research.

We’ve spent the better part of the last two decades unravelling exactly how the human genome works and which specific letter changes in our DNA affect things like diabetes risk or college graduation rates. Our knowledge has advanced to the point where, if we had a safe and reliable means of modifying genes in embryos, we could literally create superbabies. Children that would live multiple decades longer than their non-engineered peers, have the raw intellectual horsepower to do Nobel prize worthy scientific research, and very rarely suffer from depression or other mental health disorders.

The scientific establishment, however, seems to not have gotten the memo. If you suggest we engineer the genes of future generations to make their lives better, they will often make some frightened noises, mention “ethical issues” without ever clarifying what they mean, or abruptly change the subject. It’s as if humanity invented electricity and decided the only interesting thing to do with it was make washing machines.

I didn’t understand just how dysfunctional things were until I attended a conference on polygenic embryo screening in late 2023. I remember sitting through three days of talks at a hotel in Boston, watching prominent tenured professors in the field of genetics take turns misrepresenting their own data and denouncing attempts to make children healthier through genetic screening. It is difficult to convey the actual level of insanity if you haven’t seen it yourself.

As a direct consequence, there is low-hanging fruit absolutely everywhere. You can literally do novel groundbreaking research on germline engineering as an internet weirdo with an obsession and sufficient time on your hands. The scientific establishment is too busy with their washing machines to think about light bulbs or computers.

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f active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

It is the same story across top publishers today.

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The democratization and subsequent ubiquity of 3D printers have enabled almost any home enthusiast to produce utilities and products previously only attainable to large factories with big equipment. “You can 3D print those nowadays” has become a common utterance. Even still, it’s safe to say that our bingo cards did not predict a techie making a shoulder-mounted, 3D printed guided missile system for all of $96.

In a five-minute YouTube video, Alisher Khojayev goes over the basics of this Stinger-like creation, comprising the launcher, the actual missile, and even an optional camera node tracking system for added tracking capabilities. Most of the missile’s major parts are 3D printed, while the electronics bits are cheap, widely available microprocessors and sensors. All the gear is tied down and wired with off-the-shelf hardware store parts, too.

Q: Does a bear shit in the woods?
A: Apparently not.