The Right Coast

California state report: High speed rail faces $6.5 billion funding gap, new delays | California | thecentersquare.com

(The Center Square) - The California inspector general tasked with reviewing the state’s high speed rail program issued a new report stating the first segment is likely to be more than three years behind schedule and faces a $6.5 billion funding gap. 

 “Based on our review of the latest project information, the 2030 target date has been pushed back to 2031, in part because the Authority has extended the timeline for completing construction that is currently underway in the Central Valley,” wrote the Office of the Inspector General in its report. “With a smaller remaining schedule envelope and the potential for significant uncertainty and risk during subsequent phases of the project, staying within the 2033 schedule envelope is unlikely.”

Before the report’s release, Republican Congressman Kevin Kiley had announced a bill to eliminate further federal funding for the project. 

via www.thecentersquare.com

At least the the USAID scandal we know now how this works.

Betsy DeVos: Shut Down the Department of Education

Since its creation in 1979, the Department of Education has sent well more than $1 trillion to schools with the express purpose of closing the gaps between the highest and lowest performers. Today, those gaps are as wide as they have ever been, and by many measures, even wider.

Last week, the latest Nation’s Report Card came out, giving us a clear assessment of where student achievement stands. The report, published by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), tells us that in reading and math, most students were even further behind than they were in 2022. Which was worse than where they were in 2019. Which was worse than 2013.

How bad is it? Seven in 10 American fourth graders are not proficient readers, meaning they struggle with reading grade-level literature and comprehending informational texts. Forty percent graded out at “below basic,” meaning they struggle with basic comprehension. In math, the picture is similar: six in 10 fourth graders are behind in math.

The gap between the highest and lowest performers has grown by 10 percent since 2019. Don’t be fooled into believing this is a Covid-19 by-product. The lowest performing eighth-grade readers are significantly worse off than their peers were in 1992, the first year the NAEP was administered. In fact, their scores this year are the lowest in recorded history:

via www.thefp.com

The argument for shutting down the DOE just keeps getting better and better.

The End of ‘Palestine’ - Tablet Magazine

Yesterday, President Donald Trump single-handedly collapsed the most destructive idea of the last hundred years—Palestine. During meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, Trump said he was going to move 1.7 million Palestinians out of Gaza. And just like that, he broke the long spell that had captured generations of world leaders, peace activists, and Middle East terror masters alike, who had paradoxically come to regard the repeated failure and haunting secondary consequences of the idea of joint Arab Muslim and Jewish statehood in the same small piece of land as proof of its necessity.

Palestine was a misshapen idea from the beginning, engendered by an act of pure negation. The Arabs could have gone along with the U.N.’s partition plan like the Jews did, and chosen to build whatever version of Switzerland or Belgium on the eastern Med in 1948. Instead, they resoundingly chose war. That’s the storied “Nakba” at the core of the Palestinian legend—the catastrophe that drove the Arabs from their land and hung a key around the neck of a nation waiting to go home. The Arabs chose the catastrophe; they chose war, based on the premise that they would inevitably win and exterminate the Jews.

Yet despite repeated military failures, and the increasing distance between the first-world powerhouse that the Israelis built and their increasingly war-torn, third-world neighborhood, the global conscience was always predisposed to rebuilding what the Palestinians destroyed. Accordingly, the Palestinian Arabs became a tribe of feral children whose identity was carved out of the relentless vow to eliminate Israel and slaughter the Jews en masse—despite repeated failures, each one more crushing than the last.

Trump said, enough, we’re not rebuilding Gaza. Time for a new idea—the Gazans have to to go, they can try to start again somewhere else, in a land where every building still standing isn’t already wired to explode.

via www.tabletmag.com

Lee Smith.

Presumably a way to replace hatred and murder with greed and lust. Probably a win.

President Trump has made an appointment that has Big Tech panicked | Fox News

President Donald Trump made one of the best and most consequential decisions of his second term: tapping technology lawyer Gail Slater to lead the Antitrust Division of his Justice Department.

Chances are, you have never heard of Slater. But the lawyers, lobbyists, and woke billionaires of America’s largest tech firms all have. Rest assured that within minutes of Slater’s nomination, Silicon Valley flew into panicked Slack chats, Zoom calls, and emergency meetings.

Big Tech’s big hope for 2025 — that for all Trump’s populist rhetoric, a Republican president would never really challenge Big Business — was dashed. After years of consumer abuse, market manipulation, and political treachery, Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and the nation’s other tech giants will finally face their reckoning.

via www.foxnews.com

Rachel Bovard.

Both USAID And The CIA Were Behind The Impeachment Of Trump in 2019

The House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump on December 18, 2019, after a White House whistleblower went public with evidence that Trump abused his powers by withholding military aid to Ukraine in order to dig up dirt on his rival, Joe Biden. In the complaint, the whistleblower claimed to have heard from White House staff that Trump had, on a phone call, directed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. The whistleblower who triggered the impeachment was a CIA analyst who was first brought into the White House by the Obama administration.

Reporting by Drop Site News last year revealed that the CIA analyst relied on reporting by a supposedly independent investigative news organization called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which appears to have effectively operated as an arm of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which President Trump has just shut down. The CIA whistleblower complaint cited a long report by OCCRP four times.

via www.public.news

Michael Shellenberger and Alex Guttentag.

J.K Rowling on the end of the trans craziness

This 'why do you care about a tiny fraction of the population?' line is, and always was, utterly ridiculous.

Gender ideology has undermined freedom of speech, scientific truth, gay rights, and women's and girls' safety, privacy and dignity. It's also caused irreparable physical…

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 6, 2025

H/t JS.

Defunding USAID Is About Shutting Down Left-Wing Propaganda

The common theme in many of these grants is that they push LGBTQ, green, and woke ideologies under the pretext of fighting poverty and promoting democracy abroad. What began in 1961 as a way to promote stability and lure countries out of the Soviet orbit during the Cold War has over the past six decades transformed into an instrument of propaganda aimed at the foundations of western civilization. Everywhere you look in the USAID database, you see projects promoting LGBTQ ideology, mass immigration, multiculturalism, DEI, climate change-ism, and the like. You see programs that undermine the traditional family, that enable anti-free speech censorship, that strive to make the rest of the world just like urban liberal enclaves in the U.S.

Even more alarming, a significant portion of USAID funds appear to be nothing more than sinecures for connected establishment politicians in the U.S. The person who built the database, @DataRepublican, revealed that huge amounts of taxpayer dollars, through both the State Department and USAID (the former operating as a passthrough to the latter), go to NGOs stacked with establishment politicians from both parties — basically, the Washington uniparty.

via thefederalist.com

John Daniel Davidson.

Can't happen soon enough.

America’s Air-Traffic Control System: An International Disgrace

We still don’t know how many mistakes led to the collision of a helicopter with an American Airlines passenger jet making its descent at Reagan National Airport last week. But one thing has been clear for decades: America’s air-traffic control system, once the world’s most advanced, has become an international disgrace.

Long before the Obama and Biden administrations’ quest to diversify staff in control towers, the system was already one of the worst in the developed world. The recent rash of near-collisions is the result of chronic mismanagement that has left the system with too few controllers using absurdly antiquated technology.

via www.city-journal.org

John Tierney.

This makes me scared of flying.

Before Trump purge at USAID, memo warned agency it created 'vulnerabilities' doling out foreign aid | Just The News

ust days before Elon Musk began a purge at the U.S. Agency for International Develop (USAID), the foreign aid agency was warned in a stinging memo from its own internal watchdog that it had created serious "vulnerabilities" by doling out billions of tax dollars to overseas countries and groups without fulling vetting for terrorists and fraudsters or demanding transparency from recipients of America's largesse.

The memo, which was published by the Inspector General of the U.S. Agency for International Development in late January, details some long-standing concerns about how safeguards against misuse of funds and the proper authorities to hold violators accountable are missing from the Office of Inspector General’s toolbox. 

via justthenews.com

“Is this the end of the DEI regime?” by James Piereson

The collapse of the DEI regime might easily trigger a political realignment in the United States and a reorganization of progressive parties and political doctrines. After all, the progressive movement and the Democratic Party, along with the upper reaches of higher education, have organized themselves for decades around identity politics, while providing crucial support for the regime. The beneficiaries of DEI programs are in all cases members of key constituent groups of the Democratic Party. The advocates for identity politics captured the Democratic Party as long ago as the 1970s: the party is now completely in thrall to those groups and the ideological doctrines associated with them. They have also captured the faculties of leading universities and populated the federal government with countless enforcement bureaus and agencies staffed by fellow travelers in the diversity movement. The end of DEI will provoke confusion and crisis among progressives, Democrats, and left-wing faculty members and administrators at elite universities. How will they react—how will they organize themselves—as the movement that has provided their raison d’etre for a half-century collapses around them? It may take them years or decades to sort it all out.

There are lessons here: certainly that “elections have consequences,” which is true in this case but not always so—and also that the most deeply entrenched programs and policies are sometimes built on foundations of sand.

via newcriterion.com

Here's hoping.

Leo Sapir on gender medicine cut backs

Illinois Taxpayers to Pay Millions in Damages for Pritzker’s “Gender Affirming” Politics - John Kass

In Europe, trans-activists had the upper hand, with parents who opposed such barbarism unable to withstand the social onslaught and shaming. censorship and silencing from the left. In recent years however, European nations have pulled back, rethinking the approach toward “gender-affirming” care. The United Kingdom, Sweden and Norway are changing guidelines.

But not in Pritzker’s progressive paradise of Illinois, the Democrat state dominated by the politics of the Chicago Teacher’s Union, a state that ranks as one of the highest tax states,  a state where public school students of all races rank at the bottom when it comes to math and reading. But Illinois has no shortage of lawyers who’ll swoop in like vultures when it is time for them to feed on taxpayers.

Those who support such gruesome horrors are  desperate to rationalize their behavior. They are perfectly modern. And in their pride, they fashion themselves as their own gods. They strike out at all who dare say otherwise and continue striking because they must. All they leave behind is chaos and pain.

But castrating a little boy or removing the fertility organs of a little girl is something only the monstrous Mengeles would understand. And any government that allows such a thing will be forced someday to pay reparations for what they have allowed.

via johnkassnews.com

John Kass.

Abigail Shrier: How the Gender Fever Finally Broke

If it seems, suddenly, that only a fool would fall for this, then it is worth pointing out that millions of us were fools for a while. This social contagion spread far beyond teenage girls. It touched corporate executives who rushed to put pronouns in their profiles, pastors who raised the transgender Pride flag at their churches, and school administrators that actively deceived parents about the new gender identities they had selected for the parents’ children.

A lot of bad actors—pediatricians, surgeons, endocrinologists, therapists, teachers, even clergy—took advantage. No reason to let them off the hook: The science is, and always was, shoddy. When I published Irreversible Damage in 2020 and became, overnight, socially radioactive even among many conservatives, the medical risks were as plain to the experts then as they are today. One only needed to take an interest.

Desperate parents who transitioned their own children during this period, against their better judgment, made an understandable, if devastating, error. Harmonizing one’s views with the powerful reflects the oldest social survival instinct. We are engineered to stay within the herd and get along.

Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.

But we served a vital function: Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff. None of us ever expected to be welcomed back into the same elite circles that, only recently, had cheered or looked away as a generation of tormented girls took themselves apart.

via www.thefp.com

"Disagreeable contrarians . . . Obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail party guests . . . " That's me!

Abigail Shrier: How the Gender Fever Finally Broke

On that day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing that the federal government would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” and that it would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

To the practitioners and promoters and numberless devotees of pediatric “gender affirming care”—a euphemism for the vast apparatus pushing junk science on vulnerable children and confused families—it came as a much-needed slap in the face.

If it seems odd that the spell of pediatric gender medicine should have been ended by politicians and not physicians, consider that in America, politics is how it began. Specifically, it began with Obamacare.

Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislation incentivizing and coercing private insurers to offer their products on a government exchange, prohibited those companies from discriminating on the basis of sex. And in May 2016, six years after the bill’s enactment, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services added this fateful qualification: Discrimination on the basis of “sex” was to include discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.”

“Obama effectively wrote into law, through healthcare, that gender identity is a protected class,” healthcare executive and gender-medicine researcher Zhenya Abbruzzese told me. And that opened a huge new source of funding for these treatments. “Because once these insurers feel like they have to cover it, that’s it. You have just turned on the engine,” Abbruzzese said.

via www.thefp.com

In addition to Obamacare, there's also the loathsome Pritzker clan.

F.C.C. Chair Orders Investigation Into NPR and PBS Sponsorships - The New York Times

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has waded into the politicized debate over NPR and PBS, ordering up an investigation that he said could be relevant in lawmakers’ decision about whether to continue funding the public news organizations.

Brendan Carr, the chairman, said in a letter to NPR and PBS on Wednesday that the inquiry would focus on whether the news organizations’ member stations violated government rules by recognizing financial sponsors on the air.

Mr. Carr said that NPR and PBS stations operate as noncommercial broadcast organizations, but that they may be airing “announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”

via www.nytimes.com

Notable & Quotable: The Right - WSJ

Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics in a Jan. 29 Twitter thread:

The move to allow podcasters and bloggers into the Press Corps is part of a broader shift on the Right, that really starts with @elonmusk’s acquisition of X. Before that, when conservatives complained about bias and censorship on social media, the left/lib response was “well go ahead and build your own social media site.” Which everyone knew was very difficult. And then there would be moves to get whoever hosted the new site to refuse to host it and the response would be “well build your own hosting platform” and so forth.

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X really looks increasingly like an important turning point in the conservative approach, which in the face of this became “well what can you do?” It was a realization “no, actually we can take these institutions and make them ours.”

And what you’re increasingly seeing is a frontal assault on the institutions that buttress the left. So in Trump’s first term, using a (pretty shaky, imo) interpretation of the 1st Amendment, we established you can’t kick a reporter out for his bias. The Right’s response now is “ok, fine, we’ll just flood the press corps with new right-of-center podcasters and bloggers. . . .”

You saw trickles of it with academia with moves on tenure in WI, but it’s a war in FL. “You won’t voluntarily diversify your faculty ideologically? We’ll do it for you, and in a far more severe way in the other direction.” . . . “We can’t fire unfriendly civil servants? Fine, but we’re not going to roll over either. We’re going to make life as miserable for them as possible and give them every possible incentive to leave.” . . .

Advertisement

via www.wsj.com

I hope somebody is taking notes on all of this. It will make a great book. Or course. Or turning point in US history.

Global Elites Ram Digital IDs To Prevent Populist Victories

Imagine a nation where citizens store all their personal documents and financial records on a single app. Vaccination status, tax records, passports, health insurance, and work permits are all conveniently accessed through the app, making it easy for citizens to verify their identities whenever they go to the doctor, open a bank account, apply for a job, or take the bus. The app is efficient, convenient, and helps keep everyone safe, authorities say.

But the app is also linked to your social media accounts, which allows the government to restrict your access to public spaces, services, and financial institutions should you choose to harm others by sharing misinformation or hate speech online.

This is not an episode of Black Mirror. It may soon become a reality.

via www.public.news

Cecílie Jílková.

Well this does not sound good. May I suggest machine gunners? (h/t d.)

Trump’s assault on DEI will bring us closer to a post-racial America - spiked

DEI ideology has been around for years, but it was given a significant boost after the police killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. In response, many government and business leaders chose to embrace DEI as means to placate those calling for a new American regime in which people would be divided and advantaged according to race.

But DEI initiatives have been flailing recently – even before Trump’s election. Indeed, think-tank research from last year showed that over half of company executives were already anticipating pushback against DEI initiatives. Among the firms to have recently stepped back from DEI are Boeing, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Black + Decker, Target and, the biggest of all, Walmart. Over the past two years, corporate DEI departments have been slashed, with one third of DEI professionals losing their jobs in 2022 alone.

Trump’s dismantling of DEI in the federal government no doubt thrills the various factions who support him, from the libertarians to the traditionalist conservatives to the white-nationalist fringe. Yet over time, perhaps the biggest winner from the dethroning DEI may be ethnic minorities themselves.

via www.spiked-online.com

Joel Kotkin.

Goodbye Pacific Palisades, Hello Full Communism – PJ Media

Embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass made her big play this week to rebuild Pacific Palisades in her own image. Needless to say, it won't be pretty.

via pjmedia.com

Stephen Green.

Trump: The Honey Badger Conservative - Rod Dreher's Diary

Trump is doing it. God bless him, he’s doing it. No more of these squish Republicans saying they’re against what the left-liberal state is doing, but barely lifting a finger to stop it, because they were afraid of being called racist. The Big Orange Honey Badger don’t care. And lo, the people like it!

via roddreher.substack.com

I urge you to read the whole thing. I'm glad Rod is so happy.

In first days, Trump deals ‘death blow’ to DEI and affirmative action - The Washington Post

In the first 48 hours of his second term, President Donald Trump moved to eviscerate the surviving remnants of affirmative action, swiftly upending decades of policy — actions observers say are sure to touch every aspect of American life.

via www.washingtonpost.com

!!!

Christopher Caldwell: The Biggest Policy Change of the Century

So tumultuous was the first week of Donald Trump’s second term that people have barely noticed, a week on, that last Tuesday he repealed affirmative action by executive order. That is astonishing.

For half a century, affirmative action has been the federal government’s principal instrument for carrying out desegregation, the longest and costliest moral crusade in American history. After the 1970s it was adapted to liberation movements, from feminism to gay rights. Supreme Court justices anguished over the way its call for special consideration of minorities might clash with the letter of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred racial discrimination. Over the past decade affirmative action became the hammer of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement, which grew so unpopular that it has now brought affirmative action (and much else) down with it.

Trump’s decision to repeal it is the most significant policy change of this century—more significant than the Affordable Care Act of 2010 or anything done about Covid. How can people be talking about anything else? Yet major news outlets treat Trump’s bold move as a detail of personnel management: “Distress and Fury as Trump Upends Federal Jobs,” headlined The New York Times.

Somewhere along the line, the Trump administration came to understand in a sophisticated way how the enforcement of civil rights actually works.

via www.thefp.com

Let this one sink in, people. And thank G-d, Jesus or your lucky stars accordingly.

Things Suddenly Looking Chilly for Milley – HotAir

But him losing a star - or two - and not being able to sell his expertise (without a security clearance, he's worthless) to boards or networks who hate Trump may help salve some of the wounds. A little bit.

Sure, he'll be a martyr to the Left until they don't need him anymore. But if there's some mechanism to settle a tiny bit of the scores for the ruin he nearly brought our military - and I can think of 13 lives off the top of my head he will forever owe on - for his own disgraceful, dishonorable behavior, and have some answers come out of the investigation about just how deep the malicious rot was under his watch went, then...okay.

via hotair.com

Beege Welborn.

LA Democrats Are So Incompetent that the County is Moving Right – HotAir

The performance of California officials to these recent wildfires has awful, so much so that the careers of several politicians appear to hand in the balance, chief among them LA Mayor Karen Bass. A poll released last weekend shows that people are so angry with Bass's performance they are considering the unthinkable: Voting for a Republican.

via hotair.com

John Sexton.

Trump’s Ukraine Moment - WSJ

An interesting moment has arrived in the Ukraine war. “Putin is not yet desperate” says a headline in Foreign Affairs magazine, over an article by a well-informed former employee of Russia’s central bank. Of course, Vladimir Putin wouldn’t wait until he’s desperate. The time to negotiate is when you think your hand is strong, not weak and getting weaker.

Meanwhile, longtime Ukraine supporters and frequent decriers of Donald Trump are starting to encounter cognitive dissonance of their own. Mr. Trump’s tweets have clearly begun sizing up Mr. Putin for a pressure campaign over a war Mr. Trump says is “destroying Russia.” Trump critics murmur that his claims of “millions and millions” killed are wildly out of line. They do so quietly because Mr. Trump’s megaphone is the biggest and even his critics realize his exaggerations usefully reach the ears of Mr. Putin’s constituents.

From analysts I respect come widely discordant takes. Formerly cynical and self-preserving, Mr. Putin now is driven by sweeping historical and ideological motives. China’s embrace is not grudging or expedient. Beijing will take sizeable risks to advance Mr. Putin’s anti-NATO goals.

via www.wsj.com

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Foreign Lessons in the Perils of DEI and Affirmative Action - WSJ

The details of affirmative-action policies in India, South Africa and Malaysia vary, but all have led to similar outcomes. Each of these countries faces a brain drain as some of its most talented and driven people head for the exits. A large chunk of Malaysia’s well-educated ethnic Chinese have settled in Singapore, Australia, the U.K. and North America. The ethnic Chinese proportion of Malaysia’s population has fallen from 38% in 1957 to 20% today. In the U.S., Silicon Valley is filled with Indian and South African engineers and tech entrepreneurs who see America—not the countries of their birth—as the promised land.

In South Africa, infrastructure is crumbling and the unemployment rate for blacks was nearly 40% last year. Malaysia, despite its natural resources, trails neighboring (and brutally meritocratic) Singapore in per capita income. In a 2021 essay, University of Tasmania Professor James Chin wrote that Malaysia’s New Economic Policy has “poisoned ethnic and personal relations in a way that now defines the country’s polity and economy.”

Mr. Trump may help the U.S. avoid a similar fate, and his actions are in keeping with the American spirit. In a phone interview, Richard Hanania, author of “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” points out that affirmative action was always unpopular in the U.S. “I think there’s something about American exceptionalism here,” he says. “The arc of American law and American history goes against race-based governance.”

via www.wsj.com

Sadanand Dhume.

I agree. Getting off the DEI track might have been the most consequential decision Trump will ever make. Of course, we'll never know for sure.

I’ve Never Been Tied to a Chair: Oil Workers Mystified by New TV Show - WSJ

In the first episode of “Landman,” protagonist Tommy Norris makes his first appearance tied up to a chair, a burlap sack over his head as he negotiates an oil deal with members of a drug cartel. 

That’s when Chris Yonker’s mother-in-law, who was watching the show with him in Houston, chimed in. “Is this something that ever happens to you?” she asked Yonker, a 47-year-old landman based in San Antonio.

Since “Landman” started streaming on Paramount+, landmen—who help oil and gas producers secure drilling rights—have been inundated with calls and texts from friends and family suddenly eager to learn all about their job. 

In the show, the chain-smoking Norris, played by Billy Bob Thornton, clocks oil patch thugs, puts out literal fires, and spars with lawyers, police officers and his glamorous ex-wife. Early on the foul-mouthed Norris races to the site of a well explosion that killed three men. “This is the patch,” he tells his boss at one point. “An airplane full of drugs being run over by an oil tanker ain’t news, it’s just another Monday.“

via www.wsj.com

Seems like a pretty good show, though, if you watch TV.

Why Does the NYT Continue To Print Front Page Lies About RFK Jr.? | RealClearPolitics

Any NYT reader looking at the buzzy front page headline below would immediately think that Robert F Kennedy Jr. is a madman. Can he really be an advocate for repealing the polio vaccine, a disease that has killed and crippled tens of millions of kids?

“Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine”

To the ordinary reader, the headline says pretty clearly that Kennedy asked his lawyer to revoke the polio vaccine. The headline makes the shocking accusation that Kennedy is in favor of banning the polio vaccine. There is no other way of interpreting it.

But it is flagrantly false and a gross distortion of the truth. There is not one polio vaccine; there are six different polio vaccines that are used worldwide. Moreover, Aaron Siri, the lawyer in question, does not represent Kennedy in his petition.

via www.realclearpolitics.com

Blake Fleetwood

DeepSeek Scrambles U.S.-China Tech War - WSJ

SINGAPORE—The unexpected success of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has revealed cracks in U.S. efforts to contain China’s technology ambitions, challenging both Washington and Silicon Valley to rethink how best to preserve American supremacy.

via www.wsj.com

Gender Medicine Is on the Ropes

The left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse,” Donald Trump declared in a 2024 campaign video. “On Day One,” Trump vowed, he would sign an “executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” He would also ask Congress to ban child sex-change procedures, prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars “to promote or pay for these procedures” in adults, “support the creation of a private right of action for victims to sue doctors who have unforgivably performed these procedures on minor children.” He pledged to unleash the Department of Justice to “investigate Big Pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long-term side effects of sex transitions in order to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients.”

Demonstrating how even gender ideology’s critics have been conditioned to use its language, Trump said that he would ask Congress to pass a bill declaring that there are only “two genders,” which are “assigned at birth.” Presumably, he meant two sexes, which are determined at conception and recognized at or before birth.

Assuming that these are not empty promises, Trump’s victory in November poses a serious threat to the gender medicine industry. That industry, however, was already on the defensive on the eve of the presidential election. Since 2021, 24 states have passed laws banning the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for youth who feel discomfort with their sex. An additional two—Arizona and New Hampshire—have prohibited the use of surgeries, but not hormones. A challenge to one of these laws, from Tennessee, is on the Supreme Court’s 2025 docket. The case, U.S. v. Skrmetti, will determine how states can regulate gender medicine—and, with its 6–3 conservative majority, the Court likely will rule in Tennessee’s favor.

Nearly two dozen de-transitioners—young men and (more often) women who were given drugs and surgeries, only to realize later that what they really needed was counseling and time to mature—are now suing their doctors and clinics for medical mistreatment. Though these lawsuits are tough to win, even a single multimillion-dollar verdict or out-of-court settlement could send malpractice insurance premiums soaring and create a chilling effect in states where “gender-affirming care” remains legal.

The gender medicine industry’s most powerful argument—that kids will commit suicide without access to “gender-affirming care”—suffered another serious blow in February, when a Finnish study found that gender-dysphoric minors and young adults’ suicide risk, while higher than the general population’s, was still thankfully low. Crucially, the study was the first of its kind to control for psychiatric comorbidities. The researchers found that gender-dysphoric young people were not statistically significantly more likely to commit suicide relative to non-dysphoric individuals with similar levels of psychiatric problems. In other words, comorbid mental-health challenges, extremely common in gender-dysphoric youth, explain that population’s elevated suicide risk—not gender issues per se. At the oral arguments in U.S. v. Skrmetti, Chase Strangio, the ACLU’s star transgender litigator, admitted that suicide among trans-identified youths is “thankfully and admittedly rare.” Admittedly?

via www.city-journal.org

Leor Sapir.

DeepSeek is a big deal. Wes Roth explains.

LA fires extinguish Gavin Newsom's presidential dream - UnHerd

Two years ago Gavin Newsom was widely seen as a rising Democratic star and likely future presidential candidate. Meanwhile Donald Trump, facing massive legal troubles and the results of his own intemperance, seemed to many, like those at CNN, a fading figure.

How quickly things change. Over the weekend, Trump met with the California Governor as they toured parts of California devastated by the wildfires. As Newsom was forced to greet the President with his cap in hand, Trump wasted no time in attacking the state’s progressive policies. On his arrival, Trump called on Newsom to change the state’s water policies, blaming the spread of the fires on deficient supplies. This is partially accurate: although water policy has been poorly implemented, the immediate issue lay in the city’s failure to maintain fire spending and key infrastructure like water pressure for hydrants and keeping the local water reservoir filled and operable.

Trump’s demands have drawn attention to the state’s self-inflicted wounds, and its pattern of astounding incompetence. In 1971, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith described the state government as run by “a proud, competent civil service,” and enjoying among “the best school systems in the country”. This year Wallet Hub ranked the state last in terms of return on investment for taxpayers.

There are signs that the state’s residents are taking note and growing tired of the progressive regime. Only 40% of California voters approve of the legislature and almost two-thirds have told pollsters the state is heading in the wrong direction. Today

via unherd.com

Joel Kotkin.

It's an ill wind that blows no good.

That Colombian President the Left Sides With Against Trump? He Was a Marxist Terrorist – HotAir

It was Petro or Trump, and you know who should win that fight. And he did. Donald Trump was as likely to defer to a Colombian Marxist as he is to give up Diet Coke. The only surprise is that Trump ended his round of gold 3 under par at 78. That's impressive, considering that he was simultaneously kicking a Latin American President's butt diplomatically at the same time. 

Trump is magic. 

via hotair.com

Holy smokes. Trump shot a 3 under par 78? If that's his legit score and the Doral (?) is a legit course, then I'm truly impressed. Trump might be the best golfer ever to sit behind the Resolute desk.

Stock Market Today: Nvidia Stock Sinks on China DeepSeek AI Threat — Live Updates

DeepSeek has sparked a deep freakout.

The Chinese artificial-intelligence upstart has trained high-performing artificial intelligence models cheaply—and without the most advanced gear provided by Nvidia and others. That has pulled the rug from under global companies riding the AI wave, including chip makers, infrastructure suppliers and power stocks, as investors question the outlook for AI spending.

Nvidia tumbled 15%, wiping out more than $400 billion in market value and tarnishing one of the stock market’s brightest stars of recent months. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite sank 3.1%. Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet were both down more than 3%. Bonds climbed as investors sought safety.

The rethink comes as a busy week for earnings gets under way—with some of the biggest spenders on AI, such as Microsoft and Meta, among the companies due to update investors.

via www.wsj.com

A Prayer for Nvidia and Its Stewards

O Thou, who dost ordain the rise and fall of nations,
Who dost appoint the tides of fortune’s sea,
Look down with mercy on this humble plea,
And hear the voices of Thy supplicants.

To Thee, whose hand doth guide the stars above,
Whose wisdom spans the bounds of time and space,
We lift our hearts, and seek Thy boundless grace,
For Nvidia, and those who trust in its love.

O Lord, who dost the sparrow’s flight behold,
And number every hair upon our heads,
Restore, we pray, the paths where hope once led,
That Nvidia’s worth may shine as purest gold.

Yet not for greed, nor pride, do we implore,
But for the stewards who in faith invest,
Who labor long, and seek but what is best,
That they may prosper, and despair no more.

If it be Thy will, O Sovereign King,
Return this vessel to its former height,
That it may serve as beacon in the night,
And through its rise, let countless blessings spring.

But if Thy wisdom bids another course,
Teach us to trust, and yield to Thy design,
For Thou art just, and all Thy ways divine,
And in Thy mercy lies our truest source.

So hear our prayer, O Father of all light,
And in Thy mercy, grant us peace and rest,
That we may praise Thee, knowing Thou dost bless,
And in Thy providence, all wrongs are right.

Amen.

---

This lovely prayer was composed by DeepSeek, which just goes to show ya.

The Left Gave Us Trump 2.0 - by Glenn Harlan Reynolds

A second consecutive Trump term would have delayed the advance of the left/Democrat agenda, and pushed it back in some minor ways, but would probably have ultimately been no more than a bump in the road for that agenda. This Trump term will likely burn it down.

It helps, of course, that most of that agenda was always heavily unpopular. Open borders poll badly with almost every constituency except elites. Likewise affirmative action. Likewise the entire Trans agenda, etc., etc. These things were kept in place basically through bullying: Calling anyone who opposed them a racist and using the power of the media, and leftist institutions, to punish them.

But they squandered that power going after Trump, blowing the media’s credibility and wrecking the moral and intellectual authority of institutions like universities and corporations. (Covid policy, which was a part of the anti-Trump campaign, made that much worse). It wasn’t enough to keep him out this time, and it’s nowhere near enough to effectively oppose him now. And they also gave him a motive to be ruthless in going after both their agenda and their institutions.

Oft evil will shall evil mar. It’s funny how that works.

via instapundit.substack.com

The monster of Southport – and his enablers - spiked

Even now, in the wake of the most horrific murders England has witnessed in the 21st century, the establishment cannot look its problems in the face. It would rather launch a crusade against social media, or rail against Amazon for selling Rudakubana his knife, than reckon with its own catastrophic failures and the nihilism that is too often being nurtured in our midst.

Axel Rudakubana, the monster of Southport, is now firmly behind bars. But his enablers remain legion.

via www.spiked-online.com

ICYMI.

Trump wants neighbours to take in Palestinians to clean out Gaza

US President Donald Trump has said he wants Egypt and Jordan to take in Palestinians from Gaza.

Trump said he had made the request to Jordan's King Abdullah and planned to ask Egypt's president on Sunday, too.

Describing Gaza as a "demolition site", Trump said: "You're talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing". He added that the move "could be temporary" or "could be long-term".

Hamas has vowed to oppose any such action, and the comments will likely outrage Palestinians in Gaza, for whom it is their home. Jordan's foreign minister said the kingdom was "firm and unwavering" in its rejection of displacing Palestinians.

A ceasefire is being observed in Gaza after a deal between Israel and Hamas to halt the war which began when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken back to Gaza as hostages.

More than 47,200 Palestinians, the majority civilians, have been killed in Israel's offensive, Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry says.

Most of Gaza's two million residents have been displaced in the past 15 months of the war, which has flattened much of Gaza's infrastructure.

The United Nations has previously estimated that 60% of structures across Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, and it could take decades to rebuild.

via www.bbc.com

Well you can understand why King Abdullah rejected the idea.

'Blood, feces and terror' — judges are raging over Trump pardons

The court system plays a key role in either tamping down or fueling rage in society. The book details how “rage rhetoric” often became state rage during periods of crackdowns on free speech. Over the last two centuries, some judges used their courtrooms to lash out at political opponents, anarchists, unionists or communists. 

I was particularly concerned in these cases with sentences that seemed visceral, even gratuitous, in denying free speech rights. In Washington, judges imposed limits on what political views defendants could read or share.

For example, Judge Reggie B. Walton, a Bush appointee who had previously called Trump a “charlatan,” had before him a typical Jan. 6 case — that of Daniel Goodwyn, 35, of Corinth, Texas. Goodwyn pleaded guilty on Jan. 31, 2023, to one misdemeanor count of entering and remaining in a restricted building. It is a minor offense that generated little jail time.

However, Walton faulted Goodwyn for appearing on Fox News and spreading “disinformation,” and so he ordered the government to monitor what he was viewing and discussing. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rebuked Walton for that surveillance order, but he doubled down. On remand, the Biden Justice Department insisted that Goodwyn was unrepentant and still viewing “extremist media.”

Walton, therefore, determined that the risk was too great in Goodwyn spreading “false narratives” when we are “on the heels of another election.”

Now, his colleague is similarly ordering that those freed under Trump’s commutations will disclose and seek approval to go to the Capitol to speak with members or other citizens.

via thehill.com

Jonathan Turley.

Read the whole brief thing.

Eithan Haim: ‘We Took On the Federal Leviathan and We Won’

Until Friday afternoon, Dr. Eithan Haim, 34, was facing a potential decade in federal prison for revealing publicly that Texas Children’s Hospital was continuing to perform gender transitions on children even after declaring a moratorium on the controversial practice. For this, Haim, a Texas surgeon, became the target of the Biden Department of Justice, which indicted him for allegedly violating patient privacy laws.

There was no violation of patient privacy. What Haim blew the whistle on were mostly surgeries to insert hormonal devices that prevent children from going through puberty. The records he revealed about these interventions carefully redacted identifying information about the patients. What’s more: He had caught the hospital in a bald-faced lie about the very existence of the program. Most dangerous for Haim was that he had run afoul of the Biden administration’s unquestioning support of medical transition of young people distressed about their gender.

“Eithan Haim was the only person with the courage to stand up for what was right,” Haim’s wife, Andrea, wrote on X about her husband taking on the powerful children’s hospital, the country’s largest. “For him, it wasn’t even a decision. Kids were being harmed, and he had to stop it.”

It came with a high price. The couple lost close friendships, all their savings, and their peace of mind. But they never budged.

On Friday came vindication.

via www.thefp.com

Dr. Haim's was to me the most undisguised and appalling example of both lawfare and suppression of conscience in the whole saga of wokeness, at least in the US. In the world, I have to go with ongoing and beyond appalling rape gang scandal in the UK, which is still ongoing. I hope something will be done to somehow compensate Haim and his young family for the retaliation that the local Texas medical bureaucrats and DOJ thugs visited upon them.

Whistleblower Gary Shapley Should Be Appointed Acting Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service

I suggest that President Trump appoint Shapley (or Ziegler) as Acting Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. Shapley would only be in the position for a month or so, until the permanent Commissioner is confirmed by the Senate, but this would be a well-deserved honor for Mr. Shapley and a well-deserved slap in the face for civil service top leadership of the IRS, all of whom would love to have this on their resumes.

President Trump has nominate Billy Long to be the new IRS Commissioner. He needs to be confirmed by the Senate, first. Biden’s Commissioner has resigned, so there has to be an Acting Commissioner for the short period of time till the new Commissioner is confirmed. Deputy IRS Commissioner Doug O’Donnell is now Acting Commissioner. That is routine: the law says that if the Commissioner steps down or dies, the Deputy Commissioner replaces him. This is necessary because if the vacancy is by sudden death, or is a temporary vacancy because of illness, someone has to fill the position immediately.

But Doug O’Donnell is an evil man.

via ericrasmusen.substack.com

Eric Rasmusen.

Good idea.

Coleman Hughes: The End of DEI - by Coleman Hughes

I did not foresee that less than a year later Donald Trump would become president again, and that upon taking office, he would end decades of race-based presidential directives and with the stroke of his Sharpie adopt my call for racial color blindness. As Trump put it in his inauguration address: “We will forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based.”

Trump’s Executive Order 14171 is titled Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity. It describes how vast swaths of society, including the “Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI).”

In response, Trump has ordered the executive branch and its agencies “to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements.”

That is a lot of preferences and mandates. Trump’s executive order accurately describes the enormousness of the DEI bureaucracy that has arisen in government and private industry to infuse race in hiring, promotion, and training. Take, for example, the virtue-signaling announcements made by big corporations in recent years—such as CBS’s promise that the writers of its television shows would meet a quota of being 40 percent non-white.

And so, we will now see what federal enforcement of a color-blind society looks like. We’ll certainly see how many federal employees were assigned to monitor and enforce DEI—Trump has just demanded they all be laid off.

via www.thefp.com

Talk about weeks in which decades happen.

Remembering My Lost Los Angeles

After the fire, I slipped past the police lines. I took pictures of other homes that we admired and looked at the photographs online to remind myself what these piles of ash had once been. When I reached my favorite house, only the chimney remained. That and a small USC flag near the garden gate.

I imagine that my old neighbors in the Pacific Palisades will be making the same walks in the days to come. They’ll recall white stucco walls adorned with neon bougainvillea or ficus hedges shielding some fading star’s privacy.

But the rest of the country must understand: this world of The Beach Boys, The Parent Trap, avant-garde architects, physicists, novelists, of soft Southern California light was once here. Now it’s gone, and it will never come back. The imagination that made Old California come to life was snuffed out long ago. It won’t be remade by tech bros, influencers, or anyone else. Here, in this pretty world, Old California took its last bow.

via www.city-journal.org

Aaron Gigliotti.

A lot of areas in SoCal are like this, or have their own histories. And it can all go up in smoke.

Biden’s Lawless Gambit to Establish a 28th Amendment

Last Friday, in one of his parting shots, then-President Joe Biden abruptly proclaimed that the Constitution now has 28 amendments, thanks to the supposed ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures of the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment. For several procedural and substantive reasons, Biden’s attempt to conjure a 28th Amendment will prove futile.

via www.city-journal.org

I get this but what I want to know is what his staff was thinking. Presumably they wanted some sort of precedent set.

What the Left Did to Me and My Family

This is a historic moment. For the past five years, I have been fighting to defeat critical race theory, gender cultism, and DEI. Now, President Trump has taken decisive action and instructed his administration to rip out these malicious ideologies root and branch, not just from the federal government but from all institutions that receive federal funding—universities, schools, corporations. All of it.

It has been a long road. The Left will try to memory-hole the recent past, but we must not forget a simple historical truth: the Left put America through a reign of terror after 2020. I have long hesitated to tell my personal story—I did not want to give my enemies the satisfaction—but now it’s time to lay out the facts. This is some of what the Left’s activists did to me and my family as they sought to intimidate me and shut me up.

via christopherrufo.com

Christopher Rufo is a real hero and a legit BAMF. The death threats, attacks on his family and reputation, and the rest of it would have been enough to scare off most of us, and for good reason. Thank God we still have a few men like Rufo left.

Randy ‘Crawdaddy’ Miod, a Malibu Surfing Legend, Dies in LA Fire at 55 - WSJ

Since he was a kid, Randy Miod wanted to be at the beach. Once he got there, he never left.

Growing up in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, Miod skipped school as a teenager to take the bus to Malibu’s famous Surfrider Beach. He was missing so many classes in high school that his mother was worried he wasn’t going to graduate, so she hid his board.

She had reason to be worried: Instead of a high-school diploma, he got his GED, and instead of a 9-to-5, he worked restaurant jobs that afforded him maximum time at the beach. In his 20s, he started renting an apartment in a faded red house in Malibu that was built in 1924. It sat right on the Pacific Coast Highway, across from the beach and a short drive to Surfrider and its famous Malibu Wall. He never moved. Over the next 30 years, he became a fixture in the Malibu community, described by friends and locals as both a character and an icon.

“Malibu has a pier and it’s got many, many, many different pilings in it that hold the pier up,” said Jean Pierre “Peli” Pereat, a Malibu-based therapist who uses surfing to help patients. “And Randy was one of those pilings.”

via www.wsj.com

Fauci is pardoned

The truth is that Fauci is a narcissist. His home office is full of photos of himself, and he has relished the limelight for decades. His brand of science communication always involved oversimplification and simple , direct messages. Pre pandemic, this was largely fine because the issues he spoke about had little US relevance. But during the pandemic, there was major unanswered questions. He stifled debate and made up recommendations. He oversimplified to the point of being wrong.

He is politically saavy and aligned himself with Democrats, who have shielded him from accountability. He did so even though it meant advocating school closure, a catastrophic policy that helped Biden’s 2020 campaign but destroyed children.

A true narcissist would fund GOF research, despite an Obama era ban because he believed it was valuable. In 2011, he called such resarch a flu virus risk worth taking in an oft forgotten Washington post editorial.

Then, when COVID began, Fauci worked to cover up the origins. He used a personal gmail server to evade FOIA. He ran emails through Moran to hide his involvement. He lied to Congress.

Fauci then famously got most things wrong in the pandemic. Cloth masking, closing kids schools, lockdown, giving 2 doses of vax to fewer people rather than 1 dose to more people, failing to consider natural immunity, and vaccine mandates. How did he make so many errors?

No one errs more than someone who feels responsible. The person who spills wine on your carpet is often the worst person to clean it up. They frantically rub it in deeper, rather than blot it gently, and that is what Fauci did. He favored an extreme, heavy handed response.

His pardon— back to 2014— can be considered strong evidence that the Biden administration knows he is responsible for the COVID19 pandemic. As time advances, and Rand Paul’s investigation continues— hopefully retrieving the Gmail messages— the true picture will be known.

via www.drvinayprasad.com

Vinay Prasad.

Read the whole brief thing.

‘Countercultural groundswell’: Yale freshmen want stronger free speech protections | The College Fix

The Yale Undergraduate Student Survey by the Buckley Institute found a “significant turn in favor of free speech, driven largely” by freshmen.

“It is very encouraging that the newest class at Yale is dramatically more supportive of free speech and open discussion than its predecessors,” Lauren Noble, founder and executive director of the Buckley Institute, said in an email to The College Fix.

“The freshman class came to campus in the middle of serious debate, on campus and nationally, about free speech and resoundingly decided that free speech was the right way forward.”

Noble said she believes the results echo “a broader cultural vibe shift [that] will have an impact on Yale long into the future.”

“While it is too soon to eulogize censorship and DEI on campus, this indicates that the momentum is on the side of open expression,” she said.

via www.thecollegefix.com

Seems like winning.