CRAZY, WHO COULD HAVE KNOWN? Baltimore Rediscovers the Many Benefits of Arresting and Prosecuting Criminals.
Archive for 2025
July 16, 2025
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Jerome’s House Is a Very, Very, Very Fine House.
There’s been a bit of a building boom going on in D.C. that’s kind of run under the radar with all the sonic booms of the Trump administration reverberating in the air overhead, drowning out the sound of elven hammers hard at work.
Back in April, the NY Post broke the story that the Federal Reserve Chairman, who is so worried about inflation and the debt that he can’t lower interest rates to make your life easier, didn’t have a problem greenlighting a renovation of his admittedly aging digs over at the Fed.
The problem is that what Chairman Powell had in mind turned out to be more of something that got dubbed a ‘Palace of Versailles’ type home remodel, which, in this day and age, caused a few eyebrows to hit hairlines. Particularly since the American taxpayer will wind up footing the bill for it.
Read the whole thing.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:
Inbox: top Jill Biden aide Anthony Bernal pled the 5th today.
According to Comer’s office,
“Bernal pleaded the Fifth when asked if any unelected official or family members executed the duties of the President and if Joe Biden ever instructed him to lie about his health.” pic.twitter.com/eRMRZIDyXx— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) July 16, 2025
Just a reminder that when it’s a Republican, pleading the 5th is a tacit admission of guilt.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: AOSU Security Cameras Outdoor Wireless. #CommissionEarned
WHEN TDS MEETS PERFORMATIVE VICTIMHOOD MEETS MUNCHAUSEN SYNDROME: Late-Night Comics Pretend Trump May Come for Them Next.
TEXAS FLOOD COVERAGE BELIES PUBLIC RADIO’S BOAST OF UNIQUE, EMERGENCY REPORTING:
Texas Public Radio claims it should continue receiving taxpayer funding because it provides vital news and emergency alerts that “others don’t” – but, when it comes to the devastating floods of July 4-5, just the opposite appears to be true.
The National Weather Service issued the first flash flood watch for heavily-hit Kerr County at approximately a quarter to one in the morning (12:41 a.m. local time) on Thursday, the day before the flood. By 11:03 a.m., more than ten hours later, Texas Public Radio (TPR) had not yet alerted its Facebook page readers of the danger.
But, it had made dubious claims in a post urging readers to lobby Congress to ensure it keeps receiving taxpayer funding:
* * * * * * * *
Meanwhile, private media outlets actually were keeping the local public informed of the flood threat and the National Weather Service emergency alerts warning about it.
Given the ubiquitous nature cable and satellite TV, broadband Internet, and smartphones (the iPhone comes with Apple’s weather app pre-installed, and the Weather Channel app lists five million downloads in the App Store), why does public broadcasting continue to act like it’s still an era of mass media, circa 1975 or so?
ANOTHER ALT-ENERGY BUBBLE DEFLATES: Stellantis abandons hydrogen fuel cell development: Fast filling times are seductive, but they don’t compensate for H2’s many drawbacks.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD ONCE AGAIN DOING STRAIGHT-UP REPORTAGE:
Great moments in cognitive dissonance: Trump is Hitler because he’s attempting to shrink the size of government!
NEW LEOPARD, SAME SPOTS: Syrian Government: Once a Terrorist, Always a Terrorist.
DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE: Mamdani Defends ‘The Idea’ Behind ‘Globalize the Intifada’.
MIDTERM PREVIEW: Top takeaways from the latest 2026 midterms fundraising reports.
New York lawmakers gear up for 2026 midterm elections.
Multiple New York House lawmakers raked in more than $1 million ahead of the 2026 midterms, where races in the Empire State will determine control of the House.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) raised $5.8 million and ended the reporting period with $9.8 million cash on hand, an impressive feat for a Democrat who could potentially challenge Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for his Senate seat or even mount a 2028 presidential bid.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) is believed to be considering a gubernatorial bid, challenging Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY). The New York Republican raked in $4 million and ended June with $11 million cash on hand. Stefanik’s haul is the largest amount raised for a New York Republican for an off-cycle year.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), another possible gubernatorial candidate, raised just $1.3 million in the same period and ended the quarter with $2.2 million cash on hand. Lawler represents the 17th Congressional District, which Harris won in the 2024 election.
HEH:
To prove California isn't currently a "shithole," Newsom's office posted:
Two 8 year old pictures of CA
An 11 year old picture of CA
And a picture of Nevada https://t.co/l5dOiLMTMj— John Hasson (@SonofHas) July 16, 2025
JOEL KOTKIN: Far-Left teachers are indoctrinating children to hate the West. “The NEA is clearly taking political sides, claiming that it is pledging ‘to defend democracy against Trump’s embrace of fascism’. The union is also adamant in defending undocumented immigrants, opposing parental rights, and pledging to back mass demonstrations against the administration. This approach is seen by boosters as ‘social justice unionism’, adding political stances to the usual economic ones.”
THE WOKE LEFT – AND THE WOKE RIGHT. Let’s start with the latter. At the Free Press, Rebeccah L. Heinrichs of the Hudson Institute outlines what she calls “The Right’s 1939 Project:”
The results of this post–World War II international order are astonishingly positive. There has been a dramatic drop in wartime fatalities as a percentage of the world population. Economic prosperity for Americans has steadily improved. Life expectancy has grown longer and of a higher physical quality.
But if the 1939 Project people are right, and Churchill was in fact the warmonger, and if Hitler really wanted peace and perhaps had a point about the outsize and nefarious impact of Jewish people, and if the United States was wrong to drop the atomic bombs, then NATO was a mistake, the ties to the nation of Israel is a mistake, and none of the post–World War II international order is worth maintaining today, let alone restoring or defending.
The moral foundation of America’s global role since 1945 has been victory in World War II. It has shaped our modern defense strategy, and asserted our moral claim for global leadership. Thus, the 1939 Project has turned its focus toward undermining the righteousness of the U.S. and America’s participation in the war itself.
They need to retcon the past in order to loosen the affection and support Americans feel for and have for our allies in Europe and Israel. This is necessary to weaken the American people’s support for U.S. statecraft in the world, whether in the form of sanctions, military deployments, or military action in defense of its allies and stated and official interests. Their increasingly casual antisemitism is not simply evil—it is strategic. It has become the glue that binds the various strains of the insurgent ideology.
Last year, Carlson called amateur historian and podcaster Darryl Cooper “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper, appearing on Carlson’s and Joe Rogan’s podcasts, judged Winston Churchill “the chief villain of World War II,” blaming Churchill’s stubborn insistence to free Europe from Hitler—rather than the Nazis’ conquest of the continent—for the bloodshed that followed. (To this day, Carlson persists in calling Cooper “the most august historian in America.”)
In January, Carlson speculated openly to an aghast Piers Morgan whether modern Europe would have been better off under Nazi rule: “I’m not defending Nazis. I’m just saying, where is Western Civilization? What did [Churchill] preserve?”
Implicit here is the grotesque suggestion that defeating Hitler’s Germany directly led to Europe’s modern “woke” culture—in other words, that a Nazi victory might have preserved traditional, Christian civilization. Carlson suggestively raises the question, but Cooper and others on social media answer explicitly:
Meanwhile, Patrick West of Spiked notes “The left’s reactionary turn:”
The cry that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are no longer meaningful political labels has been a feature of our yet-to-be named epoch, an era ushered in around 10 years ago – one marked by woke ideology, overclass detachment and populist insurrection. As author Michael Lind succinctly put it in his 2020 book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite: ‘The old spectrum of left and right has given way to a new dichotomy in politics among insiders and outsiders.’ Five years on, Andrew Doyle, author of The End of Woke, broadly agrees that ‘the terms “left” and “right” have lost much of their utility’.
Events in Britain in recent weeks appear to add weight to the argument that this simple, old division no longer makes sense. When UK prime minister Keir Starmer gave his ‘island of strangers’ speech last month, this suggested to many that he had moved to the right, or even that he was channeling the right-wing Enoch Powell. To compound the confusion, a fortnight later, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage pledged that his party would reverse Labour’s cuts to winter-fuel payments and end the two-child benefit cap.
It cannot be disputed that we live in convulsive times. But commentators have been heralding the end of ‘left’ and ‘right’ politics ever since the end of the Cold War, an era when most people understood these concepts because they could readily see which kind of country they lived in: either a capitalist democracy or a Communist one-party state. Yet still the terms persist. And they will continue to do so.
They have survived because we all intuitively know what they stand for. To be left-wing is to have an optimistic view of people and humanity, while to be a conservative is to be pessimistic and assume the worst in others. Taken to extremes, progressives believe humanity can be perfected, while conservatives maintain that to assume the best in others is positively dangerous. ‘Be Kind’ naivety will only let the worst specimens rise to power, they argue.
This is what made wokery such a quintessentially left cause, not merely because it was obviously a turbocharged form of political correctness. Some leftists, such as American philosopher Susan Neiman, author of the 2023 book Left Is Not Woke, have protested that woke is the antithesis of the old left belief in the Enlightenment values of universalism and progress. What the woke calls ‘anti-racism’, for instance, is really a reactionary sanctification of ethnic tribalism.
The left’s increasing wokeness over the past decade resulted in Trump’s second term victory. His TV commercials last fall repeating the slogan, “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you” was a killer elevator pitch that sealed the deal. So why are many on the right creating their own version of woke in response?
“Look at what you’ve become.”
George Bernard Shaw toured the USSR. Tucker Carlson praises Putin’s Russia. Different politics, same authoritarian awe.
When ideology takes over, the extremes on the left and right meet in the same place.
The ‘woke right’ is real. pic.twitter.com/yUXHTEJTpL
— Konstantin Kisin (@KonstantinKisin) May 27, 2025
BELMONT CLUB: The Red Sea Sharks.
For more than 48 hours, two merchant ships in the Red Sea tried to fight off repeated attacks by Houthi fighters who used rocket-propelled grenades, missiles, and drones to sink them both, kill at least three crew members, and take others hostage. No U.S. or allied warship was around to help.
What navies were supposed to come to their aid? While Biden-era and EU policy was ostensibly to keep the Red Sea open to everyone, the new Trump rules of engagement are only to respond to the Houthis if American ships are attacked. That left only the European task force Aspides to ride to the rescue.
But the EU task force Aspides needs a minimum of 10 naval ships plus land bases to cover the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, Gulf of Oman, Persian Gulf, and northwest Indian Ocean. Only France, Germany, Italy, Greece, and Belgium actually provided a handful of ships to the freedom of navigation mission — and no land bases — while the rest provided only “support staff.” With Aspides’ limited capability, it had no chance of covering its AO and could not sail to the rescue of the two ships, both of which were Greek-owned.
Exit quote: “The simple reason the pirates sail the seas is that the relative weakness of Europe has returned.”
DETAILS TRICKLE OUT: Minnesota Killer Claims, ‘Tim Walz Wanted Me to Kill Amy Klobuchar’
Honestly, I suspect if he’d just kept his tinfoil hat on, Walz couldn’t have reached him, But on the other hand, after the last year…
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Vaping better at helping smokers quit, study finds.
TOP SELLER: Apple Watch Series 10 [GPS 42mm case] Smartwatch. #CommissionEarned
DECOUPLING: Chinese-made iPhones could be banned in US over theft of trade secrets.
Back in 2023, both Samsung Display and China’s BOE were filing multiple suits against one another, each concerning alleged theft of technologies. As part of this, Samsung Display also filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission (ITC), and that regulator has now made a preliminary ruling.
According to ET News, the ITC has sided with Samsung over the allegation that BOE has violated trade secrets concerning the manufacture of OLED screens. Specifically, the ruling says that Samsung Display “has proven by a preponderance of evidence” that BOE has been making OLED panels through “misappropriation of trade secrets.”
The ruling is preliminary, however reportedly the ITC rarely overturns its initial findings in its final judgement. That final judgement is currently expected to be issued in November 2025, when as US President, Trump will have two months to decide whether the exercise any recommended ban.
If the ITC follows its preliminary recommendations, and those are approved, then the ban would cover the import of products, such as certain iPhones, which use BOE OLED panels.
The lesson is an old one: Don’t trust China; China is asshoe.
ALREADY TERRIBLE WHCA APPOINTS A NEW HEAD, AND SOMEHOW MANAGES TO GET COMICALLY WORSE:
If the name Weijia Jiang sounds familiar, that’s because you’ve probably heard of her. Back during the early days of COVID-19, she was notorious for accusing the Trump administration of anti-Asian racism. Sometimes that came in the form of unevidenced claims that Trump officials insulted her to her face. Other times, she would take mundane statements and torture them until she got the required narrative.
For example, Jiang was the journalist who claimed a Trump official said “Kung-flu to my face.”
And was asked in mid-March of 2020 by Kellyanne Conway, former Obama White House Cabinet Secretary Chris Lu, far-left gun control activist Fred Guttenberg, anti-Trumper Bill Kristol, Netflix producer Krister Johnson, and conservatives Benny Johnson, Dan McLaughlin, Nick Searcy, future second term Trump assistant attorney general Harmeet Dhillon, and others to name the name, which she refused to answer. Which very likely means it never happened, and to paraphrase Tom Wolfe, Jiang simply piped this “story” straight out of her skull.
Flash-forward to today, and as Bonchie of RedState writes, “Who was the official? It’s 2025, and we still don’t know because she’s never provided any evidence that happened, much less given a name. That might be understandable if this were a situation where a source needed to be protected. That wasn’t the case, though, leaving no excuse for her not to just tell us who supposedly said that to her. Crying racism became a bit of a thing for Jiang during that time.”
Her bias hasn’t just been relegated to COVID-19 coverage, though. She was also a stalwart defender of Joe Biden during his presidency, and after his disastrous interview with Robert Hur, Jiang falsely claimed that it was Hur who had lied. She screwed the story up so badly that her own network had to debunk her.
Unexpectedly:
MIDDLE EAST UPDATE: ‘That Building Is Gone’ After Israel Hits Syrian Defense Ministry.
OUT TOMORROW FROM KURT SCHLICHTER: AMERICAN APOCALYPSE : The Second American Civil War.
DECOUPLING: Apple Agrees To $500M Deal To Buy Rare Earths From American Company, Reduce China Dependence.
MP Materials said that the deal with Apple means it “will significantly expand the capacity of its Fort Worth magnetics facility,” adding that “Magnet shipments are expected to begin in 2027 and ramp up to support hundreds of millions of Apple devices.”
“We are proud to partner with Apple to launch MP’s recycling platform and scale up our magnetics business,” said James Litinsky, Founder, Chairman and CEO of MP Materials. “This collaboration deepens our vertical integration, strengthens supply chain resilience, and reinforces America’s industrial capacity at a pivotal moment.”
MP Materials’ stock reached an all-time high on Tuesday following the deal with Apple, jumping 28% and surpassing $62 per share as of Tuesday morning. Apple stock was also up 0.5% at the time this article was published.
More like this, please.