FUN GIFT: Magnetic Fidget Pen – Stress Relief Toy & Multifunctional Writing Pen. #CommissionEarned

EXPERTS WARN OF POTENTIAL DANGER OF BETTING FIRM WITH TRUMP TIES: If you’ve never heard of Kalshi, Inc., you likely will be soon because it’s unlike any other betting enterprise ever. Kalshi makes it possible to bet on any “event” that happens or may happen. In other words, it makes it possible to bet on everything.

But here’s what really makes Kalshi interesting: One of its board members, Brian Quintenz, was nominated by President Donald Trump to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in February, a month after Donald Trump Jr. was signed on as a consultant.

In an exclusive report today, The Washington Stand’s S.A. McCarthy lays out the details of what could easily become a major scandal in Trump’s second term, including the fact that “economists, attorneys, and both advocates and opponents of predatory gambling are sounding the alarm over Kalshi’s potential to radically destabilize the U.S. economy if one of its board members is placed on the commission that’s supposed to regulate the betting company.”

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Pelosi raked in millions last year — and her portfolio out-performed every large hedge fund with stunning returns.

JOEL KOTKIN: Wars are won on the factory floor.

China, the most important ally of Tehran’s beleaguered mullahs, cannot be easily dismissed. Since its accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2000, China has grown to the point where it boasts as many factory exports as the US, Japan and Germany combined. In 2023, the Middle Kingdom forged roughly half the world’s steel and became the world’s largest automobile market – including for electric vehicles, whose batteries are linked to an industrial economy that’s highly dependent on coal-burning power stations. It also accounts for more than half of all shipbuilding.

The impact has been devastating on the West. Europe’s industrial sector continues to decline, shedding one million manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023. In the US, a study by the Economic Policy Institute found that China’s export surge alone cost up to 3.7million American jobs since 2000. Between 2004 and 2017, America’s share of global manufacturing fell from 15 per cent to 10 per cent, even as its reliance on Chinese inputs doubled, while those from Japan’s and Germany’s fell.

CHANGE: ‘Education, not indoctrination’: Texas governor signs higher ed reform bill.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Would you pay $95 for a bottle of water?

The water sommelier Cameron Smith is going through his list of stills and sparklings. We should start with the Berg, he says.

It is what is sometimes called a “fine water” and it is $95 a bottle. We will be sipping the melted remains of a 15,000-year-old iceberg, harvested off Greenland and once part of its ancient glaciers.

“It’s very aromatic, for an actual water,” he says. I should be getting snow, he says. “When you swirl this water, it’s very light-bodied. You have a very mysterious, very ancient, earthly kind of quality.”

Smith works at The Inn at Little Washington: a three Michelin-starred restaurant in the rolling countryside of northern Virginia that regularly hosts Washington’s power players, Supreme Court justices and the occasional European monarch.

“We had the vice-president here just last month,” Smith says.

Did he drink any good waters, I ask.

“I wasn’t actually able to go to that table,” he says, with an air of sadness.

He could have given JD Vance the full waterworks: his list of seven stills and seven sparklings, their story, their mouth-feel, their finish. Vance probably does not know about the Vellamo, which is the run-off of a Finnish glacier ($42), or the Three Bays — water that fell as rain 2,000 years ago on mountains in New Zealand, then seeped through an undersea aquifer and emerged thick as olive oil on a hillside near Melbourne ($45).

In his 1980 non-fiction anthology In Our Time, Tom Wolfe wrote, “In the fifties there was the martini. In the sixties there was vodka on ice. In the early seventies there was the glass of white wine. In the late seventies there was the bottle of Perrier, a French soda water. The fashionable American expense-account lunch drink became lighter and lighter, but not cheaper and cheaper. The soda water sold for $2.50 a glass in Manhattan restaurants.”

Even someone as brilliant at spotting societal tends and obsessions as Wolfe had no idea of the insane heights where this fad would end up in the 21^st century.

THE DOOR WAS LOCKED: When Pain Clinics Disappear and Lawmakers Dismiss the Fallout.

BE PREPARED: NOCO Boost GB20: 500A UltraSafe Jump Starter. #CommissionEarned

CHANGE: Education Department unveils grants to teach Founding documents ahead of America’s 250th birthday.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: FDA, CDC advisers say lost pregnancies higher than expected following early mRNA vaccination.

Not yet peer-reviewed, the study analyzed hundreds of thousands of Israeli medical records on pregnant women in the three years before and after SARS-CoV-2 emerged in China, finding 43% more “observed-to-expected” fetal losses per 100 pregnancies — 13 instead of nine — when the first mRNA dose is taken between 8-13 weeks’ pregnancy.

Pregnant women who took a booster between 8-13 weeks lost an additional two pregnancies per 100, a “potential dose-response relationship,” the study said.

By using pregnant women who got flu vaccines between 8-27 weeks and women who received either vaccine before their pregnancy as “comparative controls,” the authors said they were able to show the association is unique to COVID vaccines.

All to protect young and apparently healthy women at low risk from COVID.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: TikTok Meth Heads Have More Credibility Than CNN. “Let us move now to CNN and what seems to be a concerted effort to self-destruct. The network’s travails of late have been well-documented. Its ratings are disappearing faster than a bottle of Jack Daniels on Keith Richards’ breakfast table and, with the exception of Scott Jennings, the people who work there aren’t doing anything to correct the situation. In fact, they are all doubling-down on the brand of awful that has chased away all of their viewers.”

SOME VERY SHADY CITATIONS IN LOWER-COURT SECOND AMENDMENT CASES: Seth Barrett Tillman: A Phenomenon in Search of a Theory / Recent Citations to Michael Bellesiles’ Publications.

NOTHING SAYS “ACADEMIC STANDARDS” LIKE “RESISTANCE CREDIBILITY.” Harvard Considers a Deal with Trump but is Worried About Losing Its Resistance Credibility.

BUT IS THERE AN AUTOPEN?

I have a feeling Iran's regime already changed. All the Supreme Leader's underlings needed to do was lock him in a bunker and take away his phone "for his own safety."

Then tell anyone who asks that the Supreme Leader isn't meeting with anyone in person but they know his…

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) June 25, 2025

LOVE TO SEE IT: Joe Rogan Destroys Bernie Sanders’s Climate Hysteria to His Face.

HE MAY BE RIGHT: House Speaker Johnson argues the War Powers Act is unconstitutional.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., argued Tuesday that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional, and vowed that a pending resolution to bar U.S. military action in Iran under that law will not pass the House.

Johnson told reporters that President Donald Trump’s decision to order strikes on Iranian nuclear targets over the weekend was “clearly” within his powers under Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution.

Many constitutional scholars believe that the Nixon-era law, which limits the president’s power to unilaterally wage war, violates Article 2, Johnson said.

“I think that’s right,” he added.

And yet neither the executive branch nor the legislative branch has ever pushed hard enough for (or against) the law to get a definitive decision from the Supreme Court, probably for fear the court might decide the “wrong” way and permanently hamper its authority.

TROLLING TIME: Vance Congratulates Zohran Mamdani as ‘the New Leader of the Democratic Party’ on Bluesky.

SUPREMES: Three Years Later, We Still Don’t Know Who Leaked The Supreme Court’s Dobbs Decision.

AND YET NEW YORKERS VOTED FOR HIM IN DROVES:

mamdani is heir to a form of third-world socialism and decolonialism that totally failed. it resulted in immiseration for billions. india is two generations behind where it could be.

mamdani's middle name is from kwame nkrumah, who cripped ghana's economy for a generation

— Razib 🥥 Khan 🧬 📘✍️📱 (@razibkhan) June 25, 2025

The commentary about NYC Democrats nominating an anarchist-socialist for Mayor omits one point: how unchecked migration fundamentally remade the NYC electorate. Democrats change politics by changing voters. That’s how you turn a city that defined US dominance into what it is now.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) June 25, 2025

Related: NYC Trades Prosperity for Socialism. Here come the bond vigilantes. “These huge cities just shoot themselves in the foot. The Democratic Party is a far left wing party now. LA has a communist mayor, and Newsom isn’t far from one. SF had one, but has a new mayor trying to bring it back from the ungovernable and unlivable depths. JB Pritzker in Illinois governs as a fascist, and Chicago has a Marxist for a mayor. Now, NYC joins the party.”

UPDATE:

Mamdani is winning the college-educated white areas that are transplants… Cuomo won the ethnic white neighborhoods. There is a difference

— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) June 25, 2025

Maybe it was a mistake to let enemies of our civilization educate our youth.

The single biggest step we can do to slay the Leviathan is to attack their incubators – the universities.

University funding is a big part of the "soft power" playbook for both Western and anti-Western nations. Career activists are groomed in universities. Zohran Mamdani, Karen… https://t.co/nvRfatvfdj

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) June 24, 2025

BUT ARE THEY CAPABLE OF LISTENING? LGBTQ Group to Dems: Cool It on the Trans Issues.

NO SURPRISE: What ‘Split’? 9 in 10 MAGA Voters Back Trump Strikes on Iran, Poll Shows.

IMMIGRATION DETENTION CENTERS:  We’re hearing a lot about inhumane conditions at detention centers again.  For the record, when I visited a couple of detention centers a few years back, things looked pretty good.  You should have seen the look on my colleagues’ faces when they saw one of the centers from the inside.  It was nice.

INSTANT REGRET HITS BERNIE SANDERS AS JOE ROGAN INTERVIEW BACKFIRES SPECTACULARLY:

The big finale came when Rogan raised a topic no politician wants to touch: the legitimacy of taxes.

Sanders tried to score points by insisting the ultra-wealthy should pay their “fair share”—but Rogan flipped the script and challenged the very premise of taxation itself.

BERNIE SANDERS: “The people who own that [AI] technology… are becoming phenomenally richer… which gets back to things like tax reform…”

JOE ROGAN: “But the problem with that is the taxes go to what, an incompetent, corrupt government? This is the issue that people have.”

SANDERS: “Fair enough. All right.”

ROGAN: “Look, I’d be more than willing to pay more taxes if we lived in a better country. I’d be like, this would be great if I felt like if I pay more taxes… [and] everybody’s doing well.”

Sanders grew even more visibly uneasy when Rogan pointed out that the government holds a monopoly on power, with no competition or accountability.

Sanders was left scrambling, resorting to phrases like “okay,” “alright,” and “let’s back up.”

His face couldn’t hide how uncomfortable the subject made him, as Rogan calmly poured coffee and waited to hear more.

As always, Rogan welcomed his guest with grace. But his curiosity and quick wits pulled the conversation into territory most politicians run from—including Sanders.

No wonder Kamala Harris dodged the chance to reach millions.

Related: Joe Rogan Destroys Bernie Sanders’s Climate Hysteria to His Face.

IN A NUTSHELL:

It’s ironic that Democrats want Iran to have nukes but don’t want you to have a gun.

— Tim Burchett (@timburchett) June 24, 2025

Tells you who they see as friends and enemies, I guess…

IF SO, THEN HAMAS IS GUILTY OF IT: Weaponisation of food in Gaza constitutes war crime, UN rights office says.

Reuters — home of “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” — uses this report as an excuse to repeat Hamas propaganda without question.