Data Centers

 From The Enterprise:

I spent the late 1990s and early 2000s building data centers in the middle of America's largest cities. We built them in Dallas, Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and St. Louis. Thousands of people walked past our buildings every day. They did not protest them. Most did not even know what was inside. That silence was not a cover for some environmental menace. Our data centers were good neighbors. They occupied underused buildings, produced almost no traffic, and bought enormous amounts of electricity from the grid while our cooling systems consumed no water. Servers and telecommunications gear hummed behind anonymous walls while the fiber inside connected businesses and consumers to a rapidly expanding Internet.

 We were hardly alone. After the Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened local telephone networks to competition, venture-backed companies raced to build carrier hotels and colocation facilities across the country. Section 251 of that law required incumbent carriers to interconnect with competitors, which created demand for neutral buildings where rival networks could meet. Equinix, Colo[.]com, Exodus, Switch & Data, LayerOne and scores of others poured billions of dollars into the physical plant of the dot-com economy. The Federal Reserve later described "a massive boom in the sector, beginning in 1997." Then the bubble burst, investors lost fortunes, and the data centers remained. They became the backbone of the cloud, mobile communications, streaming, e-commerce, and now AI. (Read more.)

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The Banality of an Evil Pro-Abortion Art Exhibit

 From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Still, the effect of seeing Andrea Bowers’ art was mostly enervation. This kind of angry political art is by now very old hat. Take the first room one enters at the exhibit. In Wall of Letters: Necessary Reminders from the Past for a Future of Choice, Bowers has simply reproduced dozens of letters of women seeking abortions, as well as guides on how to perform abortions, blown them up to poster size, and wallpapered a huge white room with them. This performative exercise might have shocked people a few decades ago, but by now the public has already absorbed and passed its judgment on the nonsense of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. We have moved on. A hectoring and didactic display meant to incite insurrection in defense of abortion is old news. I mean, I was around to see Karen Finley smear herself with chocolate!

Bowers does better in the other rooms at Glenstone, which feature her pieces The Body is Not a Thing, It’s a Situation and Women and the Earth Have to Tolerate a Lot. Bowers has reproduced book illustrations, both from 1896, on square panels of cardboard. The illustrations themselves are quite beautiful, lovely representations of women in flowing Victorian dresses bodies intertwined. The original drawings were meant to illuminate women as deeply powerful and fertile beings with a seamless and metaphysical connection to nature. Then there are the works Ecofeminist Sycamore Branches: Women Have Always Thought Like Mountains, which feature tree branches illuminated with neon. The irony, of course, is that Bowers is using imagery evocative of the sensual and generative power of women to argue for killing babies. (Read more.)

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Seven Years of History: the Seditious Six

From DataRepublican:

 The Seditious Six video did not came out of nowhere in November 2025. It developed from an institutional lineage over a period of about eight years among academics, NGOs, and activists, with the final goal to rewrite the relationship between the military and the executive branch.

On January 30, 2017 — ten days into the first Trump presidency — Rosa Brooks published a piece in Foreign Policy laying out four ways to remove a sitting president before his term ended: impeachment, the 25th Amendment, resignation under pressure, and a military coup. Of the last, she imagined the moment senior officers would look at a lawful commander-in-chief and refuse:

“The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.”

Brooks had been Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, a political appointee inside the Pentagon from 2009 to 2011, reporting to Michèle Flournoy. Before the Pentagon, she was special counsel to the President at George Soros’s Open Society Institute. After it, she went to Georgetown Law, where she still holds a professorship and participates in the university’s national-security programming.

One year after that article ran, a new organization was quietly incorporated. National Security Action - co-chaired by Obama deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes and future Biden national security advisor Jake Sullivan — was funded largely, in Puck’s words, by Alex Soros since its inception. Rosa Brooks joined its advisory council.

That is the beginning of the timeline the Pentagon press corps skipped. (Read more.)

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Make All of America Muslim?

 From Tierney's Real News:

Most people are not aware that Hillary Clinton brought Huma Abedin and the Muslim Brotherhood into the White House in the 1990s and then shortly thereafter 9/11 happened.

THIS IS HOW THEY SCHEMED TO MAKE ALL OF AMERICA MUSLIM.

I posted an article on my old blog website and on social media in March 2018. It was about Hillary Clinton, her “new” aide Huma Abedin and a threat made by one of their associates, Sharifa Alkhateeb, the then head of the North American Council for Muslim Women, in 1989, to “MAKE ALL OF AMERICA MUSLIM.” (Read more.)

The DSA wants to transform America. From The Enterprise:

 On July 16, 2026, the World Bank approved a $1.5 billion loan to modernize South Africa's electricity, freight rail, water, and sanitation systems. It is the fourth rescue of this kind since 2022, which means the first three left the wreck standing. The conditions attached to the money are a list of the ordinary rules Pretoria spent a generation discarding. The government is to build a competitive wholesale electricity market, open transmission to private investment, allow private rail operators to compete for freight, grant the first private concession at a port terminal, and let private firms provide water. Those conditions are the sound of a creditor describing a machine that no longer runs.

Maintenance, competition, professional management, and independent oversight keep a grid from becoming a patronage office. Conservatives who treat institutions as machines have been saying so while Democrats in American cities treat the same institutions as prizes for the faithful. The African National Congress is the party that removed those disciplines. It is also the party now borrowing to put them back. The wrecking crew is sending the invoice abroad.

The claim is not that apartheid was just. In 1994 the ANC inherited an industrial economy that was unjustly distributed and technically sophisticated. The duty that came with that inheritance was to universalize access without destroying the competence that kept the lights on and the ore moving to the sea. The party did the opposite. It converted technical administration into political allocation. In thirty years it consumed capital that had taken generations to assemble. Democrats who now talk the same way about American agencies, as if competence were a colonial residue, are watching a finished experiment and applauding the method. (Read more.)

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Free Derek Chauvin!

 From Tierney's Real News:

Derek Chauvin’s attorney, Gregory Joseph, has filed a new motion seeking the dismissal of Chauvin’s state convictions, alleging that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office engaged in “illegal” and “fraudulent” conduct.

Joseph argues that a grand jury was never convened to review or indict Chauvin on the enhanced murder charges. Under Minnesota law, severe charges like first-degree murder typically require a grand jury indictment, though lower-level murder charges (like the second-degree unintentional murder Chauvin was convicted of) are frequently initiated via a prosecutor’s criminal complaint.

Joseph contends that the initial, lesser charges brought by Hennepin County were bypassed due to immense political and public pressure. He claims Governor Walz overstepped by transferring the case to AG Keith Ellison, who subsequently e-filed a second, “unfounded” complaint that included the elevated murder counts to satisfy public demand rather than following appropriate statutory boundaries.

“Because Hennepin County’s unlawful charges against Mr. Chauvin were not severe enough for the mob, Walz referred the case to Keith Ellison, who signed and e-filed a second unfounded complaint against Derek Chauvin that included the murder charge.”

Chauvin is currently serving a 22.5-year state sentence concurrently with a 21-year federal sentence for allegedly violating Floyd’s civil rights, with a projected release date in 2037. State prosecutors have not yet filed a formal response to these specific grand jury allegations. (Read more.)

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Manipulated Polls

 From The Enterprise:

A $20 bill that a bank teller miscounts is still a $20 bill. A $20 bill printed in a basement is something else. Median Strategies appears to have done the second thing to two elections in one week, inventing the voters, the interviews, the methodology, and the results, then posting the product under a corporate-sounding name the day before Wisconsin Democrats chose a nominee for governor. Calling the stunt a "social experiment" after it was exposed does not convert attempted election fraud into political science.

On August 10, one day before Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary, an anonymous shop calling itself Median Strategies published a supposed survey putting Francesca Hong at 46.3% and David Crowley at 22.6%. The release came with a sample, field dates, a methodology statement, and a name that sounded like one you might already have heard of. Someone reading it on a phone the night before the primary would have seen the ordinary furniture of a real poll and had no reason, from the face of the document, to treat it as fiction. The poll did not exist.

Crowley won the August 11 primary 39.8% to Hong's 39.3%, a margin of 3,796 votes. Median had overstated Hong's advantage by more than 24 points. That gap is not a polling miss, because no voters were interviewed and no sample was ever in the field.

Median did not confess when the returns came in. On August 12, it behaved like a legitimate firm that had simply gotten Wisconsin wrong "by quite a margin," the kind of rueful note a real shop posts after a blowup, the kind of note that keeps the brand intact for whatever it planned to publish next. The next release arrived the following day. (Read more.)

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Democrats’ Southern Strategy

 From Daniel McCarthy from Chronicles:

Don’t believe the Democratic National Committee’s official storyline—the DNC’s decision to make South Carolina the first Democratic presidential primary in 2028 isn’t about introducing more racial diversity into the early contests. It’s actually about keeping power in the hands of the party establishment, the people who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, and who are likely to wind up supporting Kamala Harris in 2028.

The fix is in.

South Carolina was the establishment’s firewall against Bernie Sanders’ left-wing insurgency twice over. In 2016, Sanders nearly beat Hillary Clinton in the first caucus, in Iowa, and went on to defeat her in the New Hampshire primary. Four years later, there was a brief moment when Sanders looked like the frontrunner—until he got clobbered by Joe Biden in South Carolina.

It’s true that the black voters who make South Carolina’s primaries more racially diverse than the contests in Iowa or New Hampshire are also less politically radical, so it’s easy for the DNC to say it’s not trying to choke off support for the socialist wing of the party, it’s just giving black voters more of a say.

The Democratic Socialists of America, the left fringe of the party, is disproportionately white—even its New York City chapter is 60 percent white, according to DSA’s own membership polling.

That’s astonishing considering NYC itself is only 34 percent white.

This racial split between the Democrats’ most ideologically intense faction and the party’s elite, which only holds onto power thanks to black voters’ loyalty, is a fault line with the potential to reshape American politics. (Read more.)

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Homebuyers Deserve the Facts About Crime and Schools

 From Chronicles:

Nothing is more natural when buying a house than looking into how safe the neighborhood is, and, if you have or plan to have children, whether the schools are any good.

Yet the last Democratic presidential administration tried to prevent real estate agents from answering those kinds of questions because it prioritized “diversity” over safety and education. The Trump administration revoked the de facto gag rule this year, but the damage the Biden administration inflicted is still being felt.

What’s worse, state regulations in New York and elsewhere still prevent real estate agents from speaking freely to homebuyers about crime and schools.

Interfering with homebuyers was a first-week priority for the Biden administration: Six days after he was sworn into office, Joe Biden issued his directive establishing enforcement priorities for the Department of Housing and Urban Development that would scare real estate agents into remaining silent on two of the subjects most important to their clients.

“Diverse and inclusive communities strengthen our democracy,” the executive memorandum began. What mom or dad wants their community to be “inclusive” of failing schools? Who wants diversity to mean mixing criminals with innocent people?

Black families don’t want to live in dangerous or educationally dead-end neighborhoods any more than people of any other color do. (Read more.)

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Maryland’s Energy Crisis Is a Choice

 From Brian Chisholm:

Maryland’s soaring electricity bills are not a mystery, an accident, or an unavoidable act of nature. They are the predictable result of deliberate policy choices and Maryland families are being forced to pay the bill.

A new fifty-state analysis from Energy Bad Boys exposes a widening divide in American electricity prices. In 2011, average prices in Democratic-led states were reportedly 44% higher than in Republican-led states. By 2025, that gap had widened to 61%. Since 2018, prices in blue states rose 43%, compared with 22% in red states.

That does not prove that party control alone determines a state’s electric bill. Geography, fuel mix, weather, infrastructure, taxes, and market structure all matter. But the pattern is too large and too consistent to ignore: states that prematurely close dependable power plants, restrict natural-gas infrastructure, and impose increasingly aggressive mandates tend to make electricity scarcer and more expensive.

Maryland is a case study in what happens when political ambition outruns engineering and economics. (Read more.)

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The Absence of Young Male Novelists

 From Chronicles:

Acclaimed novelist Joyce Carol Oates had no issue tweeting that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.” And, without a hint of irony, followed up that statement with “this is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own ‘privilege.’” Although she is willing to recognize that young white men may be talented and barred from literary opportunities, she cannot help but equalize the statement with ludicrous notions of “privilege” where there is anything but.

None of this is especially controversial within the industry itself. By 2021, there was not a single white male millennial on the Times’s “Notable Fiction” list; the same was true in 2022, and only one appeared in each of the next two years. Demographic transformation of American publishing is measured, publicized, and, in many quarters, celebrated. The question is not whether the literary establishment has changed, but whether its new priorities have altered the kind of literature it is capable of producing. If the aspiring Roth or McCarthy today finds fewer editors willing to take his manuscript seriously (not because of its prose but because of the demographic profile of its author), that represents more than an injustice to individual writers. It represents a narrowing of the imaginative possibilities of American literature itself.

Beyond the disparities in race among novelists and literary agents lies the much more pervasive racial disparity in short-form magazines where fiction writers can build a portfolio. These magazines brazenly cater to just about every favored identity group imaginable. They offer fee-free submissions for minority groups; they have exclusive windows to segregate who may submit; and they champion these groups as combating historical overrepresentation from white men. This, of course, can only go on so long before these identity groups, themselves, become the overrepresented ones.

The most commonly offered explanation for this obvious discrimination against white men is that publishing is simply “correcting historical imbalances.” An industry that once professed indifference to the identity of the author increasingly treats identity as a meaningful criterion in and of itself. Literary merit is now expected to coexist with representational goals, institutional diversity targets, and a moral vocabulary inherited from Marxist cultural theory. The result is a publishing culture that increasingly evaluates fiction not as art but rather as an instrument of social justice.

What does this mean for us? What does this mean for the West? (Read more.)

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A Flawed Covid Study and the Amish

 From Sharyl's Substack:

A study was published entitled: “Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” It appeared in the Journal of Religion and Health on June 11, 2021.

But I noticed serious flaws with the study and decided to challenge it. Among the problems I saw:

• For their study population, the researchers grouped together a sample of Mennonite and Amish— even though Mennonites typically followed CDC guidelines while the Amish did not.

• They excluded the largest Amish population in the US in Lancaster, the one that was actually the subject of the news reports.

• And their study headline was at odds with what their own data showed: even with their skewed sample, the Amish fared no worse than the rest of the US for not having shut down.

After examining the study, I tried to get further information to determine if corrections were warranted. Among other things, I wanted to know:

• Who were the peer reviewers who had signed off on a deeply flawed study?

• What did the actually study notes and data show about why the most obvious study sample population was excluded?

• What were some of the internal communications before and after publication?

With scientific studies, all the data is supposed to be available for public review and replication for obvious reasons. Studies aren’t considered scientifically valid without this kind of transparency. And. in many cases, we actually own the data because our tax money paid for the study—or some of it— or pays the salaries of some of the people involved.

But in this case, as with other with other times I’ve pursued study information, the scientific establishment found a way to exempt itself from the common sense oversight guidelines. (Read more.)

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Welfare Fraud Racket

 From Tierney's Real News:

The 64-page report titled Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of Gender Medicine reveals that more than 225 hospitals and health systems made more than $50 MILLION in profit by building pediatric gender programs nationwide and exploiting insurance billing codes. They used diagnoses like “endocrine disorder, unspecified” and “precocious puberty” to get coverage to perform these disgusting procedures in minors. In other words, they mutilated children for profit.

JD VANCE: “It turns out that convincing vulnerable children to reject their gender can create patients for life, earning hospitals tens of thousands of dollars in additional revenue per child. For years now, some hospitals and healthcare providers have been subjecting children to horrific, experimental treatments in service of radical gender ideologies.

Today, thanks to the Wolves in White Coats report released by the HHS, we know why: profit. It turns out that convincing vulnerable children to reject their gender can create patients for life, earning hospitals tens of thousands of dollars in additional revenue per child.

The report contains deeply disturbing allegations, and I encourage every American and every parent, to read it. More than just pushing these procedures on kids, hospitals and providers may have been defrauding Medicaid and private insurers by using misleading or fraudulent billing codes to get insurance to cover the costs.

People were getting wealthy by DOING these procedures on kids, LYING about medical implications, and collecting REWARDS!”

More than 225 hospitals and health systems built pediatric gender programs. Then they HID what they were doing to kids behind FALSE billing codes.

• $50 MILLION in puberty blockers were billed under E34.9 — “Endocrine Disorder, Unspecified”

• More than $11 MILLION found billed as “precocious puberty” for kids aged 13-17.

That’s not a paperwork error. That’s how you hide the abuse you inflicted on children.

These providers created lifelong patients (hormones, surgeries, follow-up care) - with average costs for such treatments far exceeding routine pediatric care (tens of thousands to over $100,000 per patient in some estimates cited). (Read more.)

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Why Minnesota Is the Warning

 From Tierney's Real News:

There are roughly 1.3 million Democrat voters in Minnesota. Therefore turnout for Democrats was roughly 54%. There are roughly 1.4 million Republican voters in Minnesota. Therefore turnout for Republicans was roughly 29%. Would you pat the Minnesota Republican RINO party on the back for this result? I would not. THE MATH DOESN’T LIE.

In 2016, Trump got 1,322,951 votes in Minnesota while Hillary got 1,367,716. If you add in the Libertarian votes, the total conservative vote in Minnesota exceeded 1.5 MILLION. So, yes, there ARE that many Republican voters in Minnesota! I contend that the Minnesota Republican party is a bunch of RINOS and Koch Libertarians who confuse and fracture conservatives voters to reduce turnout and instill complacency and apathy - to help Democrats win!

The Minnesota GOP endorsed Kendall Qualls (in 3rd place) to split the conservative vote. Then, like clockwork, the Minnesota GOP RINOS came out with a bogus campaign accusing Mike of being for amnesty - just a few days before the election. In addition, DeMuth is the one who is actually for amnesty - she said so herself! Then she framed Mike for HER stance! RIGGED. (Read more.)

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The Hessians and the American Revolution

 I remember visiting the Hessian Barracks in Frederick, MD as a child. From Smithsonian:

On August 15, 1776, a flotilla of British ships arrived on Staten Island, New York, just south of Manhattan. On board the vessels were more than 8,600 foreign soldiers, the first major contingent of German troops to reach the American Colonies. (Another group had set up camp in Quebec several months earlier to reinforce British forces in Canada.) 

There was no mistaking the new arrivals. Unlike their British allies, who were famously known as the redcoats, the Hessians usually wore blue or green coats, sometimes accompanied by tall, pointy brass headgear called miter caps.

For more than a year, the British Army had been battling rebellious colonists intent on establishing an independent nation. In October 1775, a fed-up George III announced his intention to “put a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions.” The British king added that he had “received the most friendly offers of foreign assistance.” Despite vigorous objections from some lawmakers, Parliament backed George in taking up those offers, expecting that the added manpower would soon crush the rebellion once and for all.

The Germans apparently shared that optimism. “None of the soldiers that went to America in 1776 anticipated that the war would last more than a year or two,” writes Friederike Baer, a historian at Penn State Abington College, in her 2022 book, Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War. (Read more.)

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Ferguson at Twelve: The Lie That Divided a Nation

 From Man of Steele:

Ferguson is often thought of as an isolated event, something that happened way back when. I recently had to explain what happened in Ferguson to several eighteen year olds who had never heard of the shooting, because they were six years old when it happened. But Ferguson is not an isolated event. In many ways, it is the beginning, or the key escalation, in the long running culture war that is now sixty years old, and its repercussions are felt to this day. Would the stunning response sanitizing the Hamas of October 7 as freedom fighters have been possible without how Ferguson changed the landscape? Likely not. Or it wouldn’t have been as successful. Ferguson was the launch of Black Lives Matter, the elevation of liberation ideology and the red-green axis that rolls stronger today than ever. And it all began on Canfield Drive with the dead body of Michael Brown lying on that scorching pavement that August afternoon and this weekend is the twelfth anniversary.

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was eighteen years old when he was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson. Within hours of the shooting, Dorian Johnson, who had been with Brown prior to the shooting, told the world that Brown had his hands up in the air and said, don’t shoot. The “Hands up, don’t shoot” slogan spread across the world like wildfire as the Twitter hashtag maps documented. Al Sharpton yelled the slogan and that a surrendering black teenager had been shot by a white cop. Black shot by white. Black white. And it traveled from Canfield Drive to the Congress to the NFL to corporations and to campuses across America. It became, to use my father’s phrase, a poetic truth, the kind of lie that a nation believes not because the evidence supports it but because it confirms what many Americans suspected of their nation. (Read more.)

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When Everything Is Fascism, Nothing Is

 From Unlicensed Punditry:

If I hear that America is sliding into fascism one more time, I’m going to puke.

Maybe I’m just hopelessly old-fashioned, but I still believe words are supposed to mean things. Fascism is a real thing. It has a history, an ideology, identifiable characteristics and some exceptionally ugly examples from the twentieth century. It does not simply mean that the president said something obnoxious, enforced a law you dislike, criticized a newspaper, deported someone, imposed a tariff, fired a bureaucrat or exercised an executive power differently than the last guy did.

Yet here we are.

“Fascism” has become less a political classification than a particularly nasty synonym for “authoritarian,” and authoritarian increasingly means “someone on the other political team using government power in a way I don’t like.”

When everything is fascism, nothing is.

That is not an argument that fascism is meaningless. Quite the opposite. It is an argument that a useful word has been abused to the point that its use in contemporary American politics often tells us more about the person saying it than the person being described. (Read more.)

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No More Free Money: The Conservative Case for Taxpayer Capitalism

 From The Enterprise:

It is worth being precise about what socialism actually is, because the word is doing an enormous amount of unearned work in this debate. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy identifies capitalism by three features. The bulk of productive property is privately owned, workers own their own labor, and markets allocate inputs, outputs, consumption, and investment. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the contrast plainly: an economy becomes socialist when it rejects private ownership of the means of production in favor of public or social ownership. Notice what these definitions do not say. Neither says that an economy becomes socialist when the government holds a financial asset. Socialism is a claim about who owns and directs production, not a claim about whether a public entity appears anywhere on a cap table.

Ludwig von Mises, who was hardly soft on the subject, drew the line with characteristic bluntness. Publicly owned enterprises operating inside a larger structure of private firms, market prices, and economic calculation remain subject to the laws of the market. “The system remains a market society,” he wrote. Real socialism arrives when the state decides what factories produce, whom they hire, what wages they pay, where they buy their inputs, and where they sell their output. Apply that test to the transactions actually in front of us and the accusation collapses. Not one of these agreements transfers a single one of those decisions to a government office. (Read more.)

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'Hemingway in Toronto'

 From Old Hollywood and Beyond:

“Paris in the Dark Ages,” wrote Belloc, gave way to an ‘awakening Europe’ in which “the Normans show first how true a kingdom, with peace and order and unity, may be established” and how “Rome did not die; it was transformed” and how “the philosophy of the Empire had been touched with mysticism” and “the shrine, the miracle, the unseen had replaced the clear and positive attitude, the speculative and cold intelligence, which had distinguished the philosophy of Rome.”

In its place was “medieval religion, its legends, its marvels . . . the one good counterbalance that ultimately saved the world from barbarism.”

Hemingway absorbed it all and gave it back to us, brilliantly, in The Sun Also Rises. While many think this, his debut novel, is just about drinking and debauchery, underlying that decadence is an iceberg of spiritual healing.

Its protagonist, “Jake” Barnes, is inspired by St. James—whom Mary, i.e., Our Lady of Pilar, appeared to shortly after her Assumption into Heaven. On the eve of his trip to Pamplona, Jake refers to the Paris street named for St. James as “the rigid north and south of the rue saint-Jacques.” A curious description, Stoneback thought, since there’s nothing rigid about it, unless the underlying spirituality along this medieval main street is, in fact, the whole point of the literary device.

Le long de la rue, there’s the famous Church of the Val-de-Grâce, meaning “vale of grace”—an architectural splendor King Louis XIII’s wife, Queen Anne of Austria, built to celebrate the birth of their son Louis XIV (“The Sun King”); and the adjoining monastery, later converted into a hospital for wounded soldiers, imaging Jake’s war wounds—Hemingway’s, too. Then there’s that plaque dedicated to Pamplona, a town along the Chemins Pèlerinage—the Way of St. James. (Read more.)

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Our Sea Ports

 From ColonelRETJohn:

Not since World War II did we seriously show concern over the security of our ports from enemy threats.

Now with drones being used regularly to attack ships in the Black Sea, Mediterranean ports of Egypt, and the U.S. conducting its first drone attack against the Iranian Bandar Abbas Naval Base, the realization is that our own ports may be vulnerable to attack.

What’s to keep a drone from coming into Puget Sound in Washington State, New York Harbor, or the Chesapeake in Virginia and striking one of our many naval installations or container terminals?

Right now, not much.

The U.S. Coast Guard is in overdrive to figure out ways to ensure our ports are protected.

“Faced with a growing threat from uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs), the USCG is seeking technology not just to detect these weapons, but to defeat them. Ports and other maritime facilities are vulnerable to this kind of attack vector, and our adversaries surely know it. The effort is being led by the Coast Guard Futures Development and Integration (FD&I) Directorate, which oversees research, modeling and simulation, technology forecasting, and field experimentation. It is part of the service’s role to protect U.S. maritime assets and comes as adversary militaries and non-state actors alike, are developing a wide array of UUVs for surveillance, strike and sabotage.”

Threat actors like Iran and China watch everything we do and try to play it back at us, so it is important that the Coast Guard comes up with solutions fast to protect our ports. (Read more.)

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The Future of the Anti-Communist Film Festival

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

  Movies change lives. Film gets into the soul and the subconscious, altering perceptions of the world and creating understanding. It’s why Roger Ebert called movies “an empathy machine.” the Left has owned Hollywood for a century. It’s time to change that. We also intend for the festival to be an annual event. As Al Pacino once put it, I’m just getting warmed up!

    I had the idea for the Anti-Communist Film Festival over a year ago, and the response has been great enthusiasm and some solid media hits. Before taking a short break for the August recess and then letting the Victims of Communism Foundation host news about the festival, including the schedule, I wanted to briefly lay out what I envision as the future of the festival.

    I see the Anti-Communist Film Festival as an annual event, a success from the first year but also expanding in size and stature into the future. I’d like it to become a place where young and upcoming filmmakers can creatively express their love of freedom and expose the lies told by Marxists. I want dramas and comedies and cartoons and shorts. I want this to expand into a national or even international event, with digital simulcasts going to anywhere people want to participate. (Read more.)

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