ICYMI: Tulsi Stares Down UK, Scoring Another Big Win for American Consumers.

SHOT: D.C.’s Murder Rate Is More Than 500% Higher Than The Average State. “D.C.’s murder rate ran 169 percent higher than Louisiana’s, the deadliest state, and an astonishing 523 percent higher than that of the average state.”

Chaser: DC just had a murder-free week, and yes, Dems, Trump did that.

As the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Trump administration’s takeover of the Washington DC police force begins to fade, the results are coming in, and they are nothing short of extraordinary.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the nation’s capital has had no murders for seven days, something that had not been achieved since March and something I can find no recent record of in summer months when the murder rate is typically at its highest.

Last Monday, when a man was tragically gunned down in Logan Circle just hours after the Trump takeover, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., took to social media to say that “Trump owns this. No word if the congressman agrees Trump also owns the lives saved this past week.

And it’s not just murder, according to the local police union. Robbery dropped 46% in the week after the takeover, carjackings were down a whopping 83%, and violent crime down 22%. Who could possibly argue against that?

Democrats “committed to leg-humping criminals,” as Kruiser put it yesterday — that’s who.

But it’s the kind of change DC’s majority-minority residents might appreciate.

IT REALLY IS: Stephen Miller’s Rant on ‘White, Crazy Communist Hippie’ Rent-a-Mobs in D.C. Is Standing-O Worthy.

CORN, POPPED:

🚨 BREAKING: Microsoft employees and "community members" calling themselves the "Worker Intifada" have established a "liberated zone," also known as an encampment, on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. pic.twitter.com/X4hHO2DroA

— Stu (@thestustustudio) August 19, 2025

CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘Elephant in the Room’ Is the Perfect Rom-Com for Trump Era. “What if a dyed-in-the-wool liberal met a handsome MAGA man and, gasp, felt butterflies with every glance?”

Happens more often than Hollywood thinks.

“OUR MAGNIFICENT BASTARD TONGUE,” AS JOHN MCWHORTER CALLED IT, IS ALWAYS GROWING: Cambridge Dictionary adds ‘skibidi’ and ‘tradwife’ among 6,000 new words.

“Skibidi” is one of the slang terms popularized by social media that are among more than 6,000 additions this year to the Cambridge Dictionary.

“Internet culture is changing the English language and the effect is fascinating to observe and capture in the dictionary,” said Colin McIntosh, lexical program manager at Cambridge Dictionary, the world’s largest online dictionary.

“Skibidi” is a gibberish term coined by the creator of an animated YouTube series and can mean “cool” or “bad” or be used with no real meaning as a joke.

Other planned additions including “tradwife,” a contraction of “traditional wife” referring to a married mother who cooks, cleans and posts on social media, and “delulu,” a shortening of the word delusional that means “believing things that are not real or true, usually because you choose to.”

An increase in remote working since the pandemic has created the new dictionary entry “mouse jiggler,” a device or piece of software used to make it seem like you are working when you are not.

Still curiously absent, even after all these years, is one near and dear to my heart:

C’mon, Cambridge — it’s time.

PREDATOR WATCH: Your Weekly Roundup of Terrifying Animal Encounters.

PODCAST: The Invention That Changed Everything. “Salvatore Basile is the author of Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything, a deeply researched book on air-conditioning—not just as a machine, but as a force that completely changed how we live. Salvatore has deep insights into how AC has affected our architecture, urban development, and work habits.”

I’M STILL NOT TIRED OF ALL THE WINNING: Tulsi Stares Down UK, Scoring Another Big Win for American Consumers.

LAW AND ORDER: Trump’s D.C. Takeover Drives Crime Down…And Even Democrats Notice. “Who Trump, Republicans and police can’t work with as ‘positive partners’ to reduce crime are social justice-infected Democrats, because they don’t want to reduce crime. Some cadres believe high crime rates are key to radicalizing minorities and fomenting revolution against capitalism. There are others that believe that ‘whiteness’ and ‘structural racism’ mean that no black person should ever be punished for any crime against any white person. There are others that want to completely defund the police so they can rake off all police funding for their own graft and left-wing causes. Still others refuse to deport any illegal aliens, even rapists and murderers, because they still believe that amnestied illegal aliens are their key to achieving permanent electoral majorities.”

INDEED:

I mean, what could wrong with voting by phone? https://t.co/9KifO4HqMO pic.twitter.com/1UMBVosBSA

— Frank McCormick (@CBHeresy) August 19, 2025

FASTER, PLEASE: Glow, Baby Glow! U.S. Nuclear Industry Ready to Dominate the World.

BLUE STATE BLUES:

Official statement regarding @BedBathBeyond

We will not open retail stores in California.

This isn’t about politics — it’s about reality.
California’s system makes it nearly impossible for businesses to succeed, and I won’t put our company, our employees, or our… pic.twitter.com/G5dSaigB3y

— Marcus Lemonis (@marcuslemonis) August 20, 2025

From the replies:

Nice to see BB&B trying to make a brick and mortar comeback. Not surprised to see it won’t happen in California.

On the flip side, Gov. Gavin Newsom decided to use today’s news to tout his state’s business-friendly climate: “FUCK YOU. BYE.” his press office account tweeted in response.

I wrote yesterday about the overgrown children who actually write Newsom’s tweets, so today’s message came as no surprise, either.

Exit Question: Are you surprised that, just like most everything else he does, Newsom’s Trump impersonation — tone-deaf though it is — is staged on his behalf?

UPDATE, CORRECTION, AND APOLOGY:

The F-U quote was fabricated by Magills, and my apologies for mistaking it for real.

Here’s what Newsom’s “team of pros” actually tweeted:

After their bankruptcy and closure of every store, like most Americans, we thought Bed, Bath & Beyond no longer existed.

We wish them well in their efforts to become relevant again as they try to open a 2nd store.

That amounts to the same thing, which is bad on them. But bad on me for mistaking Magills’ fake screencap for the real thing.

INSURRECTION, STRAIGHT UP: Massachusetts Colleges Protect Illegals From ICE.

I GUESS THEY FINALLY FIGURED OUT WHAT “LAWFUL” MEANS: DC Will No Longer Prosecute Lawful Carriers of Rifles and Shotguns.

DON’T TRUST GOOGLE: Google Accused of Sending GOP Fundraisers Directly to Spam.

UNTIL IT COMES BACK UNDER A NEW NAME, PERHAPS: Is This Finally the Dawning of the End of the Woke Corporate Era? “Bloomberg Law published a column, ‘DEI Chatter Plummets Among Previously Vocal Corporate Advocates’ that spells out how corporations are abandoning policies that discriminated against businesses that didn’t bend to the woke agenda. Author Drew Hutchinson wrote that woke language decreased by 68 percent year-over-year among S&P 100 companies. That includes woke policies that targeted and discriminated against firearm and ammunition businesses.”

FAIR: Trump Blasts Obama for Ukraine War. “If I ever did that, the fake news would be writing about me day and night for years.”

THE RAMANS ARE UP AND MAKING COFFEE: Mysterious Object Hurtling Toward Us From Beyond Solar System Appears to Be Emitting Its Own Light, Scientists Find.

While there’s been a growing consensus among astronomers that the latest object is a comet, Loeb has continued to entertain the idea that it may have been sent to us by an intelligent species from outside of the solar system — and he’s far from backing down.

In a blog post over the weekend, Loeb pointed to observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which showed a “glow of light, likely from a coma, ahead of the motion of 3I/ATLAS towards the Sun.”

A coma is the hazy and luminous cloud that surrounds the nucleus of a comet.

However, there’s “no evidence for a bright cometary tail in the opposite direction,” he wrote, with scientists suggesting it was evidence that dust was evaporating from the object’s Sun-facing side.

The observations led Loeb and his colleagues to an intriguing, albeit far-fetched possibility: is the mysterious space object generating “its own light?”

After deliberations with his colleague and Harvard astrophysicist Eric Keto, Loeb suggested that the “simplest interpretation” of 3I/ATLAS’ observed “steep brightness profile” is that its nucleus “produces most of the light.”

That would also mean that its actual size is much smaller than currently thought, roughly in line with the size of the first two interstellar objects we’ve observed, ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.

So not a massive cylindrical interplanetary habitat then?

CHRIS QUEEN: These Days, ‘Christian Nationalist’ Means Nothing More Than Faithful and Conservative.

PROMISES KEPT: State Department revokes over 6,000 student visas, citing law breaking and overstays.

The vast majority of those violations or alleged violations entailed assault, driving under the influence, burglary, and “support for terrorism,” according to a State Department official, although the State Department didn’t say whether those were accusations, arrests, charges or convictions.

Two-thirds of the recently revoked visas were because the students violated the law, the official said. Fox News first reported the student visa revocations.

Those roughly 6,000 students represent a fraction of the 1.1 million foreign students who studied at colleges and universities in the U.S. in the 2023-2024 academic year, the most recently available data.

The State Department official said between 200 and 300 of the visas pulled were over accusations that they engaged in “support for terrorism” under federal statute.

Guests should be polite.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump the Peacemaker Is Truly Magnificent to Behold. “Because they’re committed to leg-humping criminals, the Dems are mad that Trump wants to make our nation’s capital a place where people aren’t afraid to take their children.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: After recent tests, China appears likely to beat the United States back to the Moon. “An expert explains why this will be enormously bad for the United States.”

Ars: How likely is it that China lands humans on the Moon before NASA can return there with the Artemis Program?

Cheng: At the rate things are going, sadly, it seems quite likely that the Chinese will land on the Moon before NASA can return to the Moon.

Ars: What would the geopolitical impact be if China beats the United States back to the Moon?

Cheng: The geopolitical impact of the Chinese beating the US to the Moon (where we are returning) would be enormous.

Ars: How so?

Cheng: It means the end of American exceptionalism. One of the hallmarks of the post-1969 era was that only the United States had been able to land someone on the Moon (or any other celestial body). This was bound to end, but the constant American refrain of “We’ve put a man on the Moon, we can do anything” will certainly no longer resonate.

It means China can do “big” things, and the United States cannot. The US cannot even replicate projects it undertook 50 (or more) years ago. The optics of “the passing of the American age” would be evident—and that in turn would absolutely affect other nations’ perceptions of who is winning/losing the broader technological and ideological competition between the US and the PRC.

I certainly hope we beat China to the Moon — the prime real estate will go to whoever can plant their flag on it.

But Cheng is wrong when he says that the “US cannot even replicate projects it undertook 50 (or more) years ago.” China’s lunar program, at least from what we’ve seen so far, is essentially a repeat of Apollo.

It’s the US trying something new. If SpaceX can get Starship performing as promised — “At SpaceX, we specialize in converting things from impossible to late.” — we might not beat China back to the Moon, but we’ll be able to get there with a lot more of the stuff needed to establish a permanent settlement. Faster and much cheaper, too.

Still, I’d hate to lose the race back.

ICYMI: Wait a Minute… ‘U.S. Institute of Peace’ Does WHAT???

RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU VOTED FOR THIS: In his first 200 days, Trump 2.0 has overturned Biden ‘climate agenda’ at breakneck speed, report shows – 200 actions to unleash American energy.

President Donald Trump had campaigned on promises to undo many of the Biden administration’s climate policies. He called climate change a “hoax,” vowed to stop offshore wind projects, and promised to overturn former President Biden’s electric vehicle mandates.

Immediately after being sworn into office, Trump went about making good on these campaign promises and more. In 2022, The American Energy Alliance began keeping a tally of all the actions Biden and the Democrats had taken to make it harder to produce oil and gas. Only two years into Biden’s term, the AEA had 125 items on its list. By the time Biden left office, the list had doubled in size.

On his first day back at the White House, Trump signed dozens of executive orders, including his order “Unleashing American Energy.” The AEA started a new list that tallied up the actions that Trump and Congressional Republicans were taking to unleash America’s energy potential. The first edition, released in March, contained 50 actions. Last week, they updated the list for Trump’s first 200 days in action, and the newest list contains 200 items.

Here’s a link to the full report in PDF format.