Posts on Saturday, August 23, 2025

If the Cracker Barrel market puke has anything to teach Wall Street, it’s that investors who are deciding where to put their money must add corporate “wokeness” to their menu of risks to ­digest. In fact, making “woke” an investing risk factor — in some cases as important as the direction of interest rates and inflation — seems so obvious that I hesitated to write this column. Recall Bud Light’s ­Dylan Mulvaney fiasco, or Target CEO Brian Cornell’s recent exit following his ill-fated ­obsession with DEI.

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs officials announced Friday that the agency is redirecting nearly $45 million from public union costs to care for veterans. "VA staff will now get to spend more time with Veterans, VA facilities can focus on treating Veterans, and VA can manage its staff according to Veterans' needs and national security requirements, not union demands," VA Secretary Doug Collins said. Earlier this month, Veterans Affairs canceled its contracts with most unions on Wednesday, saying the unions fight against the best interests of veterans. When VA canceled those contacts, it cut the number of VA bargaining unit employees from about 375,000 to about 7,000.

Ah, these are glorious times to be alive. After years of leftists pursuing lawfare, with ever-increasing levels of brazenness and vengeance, against Donald Trump and others, finally, patriots are fighting back. It looks as if at least some of the people who attempted to frame Trump for collusion with Russia are in genuine legal trouble, and more could be coming down the pike for those who cooked up the Jan. 6 “insurrection” and other efforts to make sure that Orange Man Bad would never be able to return to the White House. Leftists are, of course, howling with rage and fear, and claiming that Trump is politicizing

The “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing arrangement has put the United States’ hundred billion dollar+ intelligence budget at the service of the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, vastly benefitting the intelligence agencies of Anglosphere allies. But, to the shock of many, the Trump administration is cutting them out of key areas of interest. (snip) There is no love lost between President Trump and the collective Deep State of the Anglosphere. In concert with Deep State operatives embedded in the US intel community, spooks from half of the other four members collaborated in trying to bring down President Trump’s first campaign and then successfully hobble his first term in office.

The swamp is being drained. And now that the first alligator has been taken out -- in the FBI raid on the home and office of Trump-hating former National Security official John Bolton, reportedly for mishandling state secrets -- the rest of them are sleeping with one eye open. The raid is focusing a lot of minds. They know what they did. They are wondering who will be next? "What if someone is cooperating against me"?

Artificial intelligence is now scheming, sabotaging and blackmailing the humans who built it — and the bad behavior will only get worse, experts warned. Despite being classified as a top-tier safety risk, Anthropic’s most powerful model, Claude Opus 4, is already live on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Anthropic’s own paid plans, with added safety measures, where it’s being marketed as the “world’s best coding model.” Claude Opus 4, released in May, is the only model so far to earn Anthropic’s level 3 risk classification — its most serious safety label. The precautionary label means locked-down safeguards, limited use cases and red-team testing

Mobile phone thefts in London soared to an all-time high last year, with nearly 330 being stolen every day on the streets of the British capital. According to Metropolitan Police figures seen by the Daily Mail, a record 116,656 mobile phone thefts were recorded in 2024, or around 13 per hour. This represented a rise of 1,300 over the previous year and more than a fifty per cent jump since 2017 when the figure stood at around 77,000. The dataset found that theives were more likely to target women, with 61,000 phone theft victims being women in 2024, compared to 48,000 male victims.

FBI agents raided the Maryland home and Washington, DC office of President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton Friday morning in a high-profile probe of allegations that he sent “highly sensitive” classified documents to his family from a private email server while working in the White House.[snip] Justice Department officials who also served during the Biden administration purportedly told Trump officials that they had been “trying to prosecute this case for four years, and the [Biden DOJ] shut it down,”[snip]pause in the probe may have been motivated by the ex-national security adviser’s public political opposition to Trump.

Ever since Trump’s first term, the political and media establishment told us that his trade policies were reckless, destructive, and doomed to wreck the U.S. economy. Every so-called expert on cable TV preached that they would crush American consumers, tank the stock market, and send our economy into a spiral. We’re still waiting for that to happen. Here we are in Aug. 2025, and the Congressional Budget Office just dropped a bombshell that completely shatters the left’s narrative against Trump’s tariff strategy. As of August 19, we estimate that the effective tariff rate for goods imported into the United States has increased

Liberal women are kinda nuts. Have you noticed? Well, a new study out of Quebec, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, might shed some light on the reason why. The researchers found that women who have abortions are more than twice as likely to end up hospitalized for psychiatric problems compared to women who carry their pregnancies to term. This isn’t some fringe finding; it’s based on a massive study tracking over 1.2 million pregnancies for up to 17 years. The numbers don’t lie: for every 10,000 person-years, 104 women who aborted ended up hospitalized for serious mental health issues like psychiatric disorders, substance abuse,

Absentee Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t just MIA in her own district – her mandatory 2024 financial disclosure documents were also missing for months. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was among lawmakers who asked for a 90-day extension when they first came due back in May, but she then missed the second deadline, The Post has learned. The socialist lawmaker finally filed Wednesday, a week late. The socialist lawmaker reported she has somewhere between $17,000 and $81,000 in bank accounts and owes $15,000 to $50,000 in student loans. The federal filings list finances in ranges.

LOS ANGELES — Lyle Menendez was denied parole Friday, a day after his younger brother Erik received the same recommendation by a California state board. Their separate hearings this week come nearly 30 years after the brothers were convicted of first-degree murder for the 1989 killings of their parents. They were sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1996. But after a Los Angeles judge reduced their sentences to 50 years to life in May, they immediately became eligible for parole under California law because they were under age 26 when they committed their crimes. Who are the Menendez brothers, and what did they do

Chinese officials and state media reacted with sputtering outrage after Ukrainian President Voldoymyr Zelensky said the Russia-allied communist tyranny was not welcome as part of the prospective coalition that will secure Ukraine’s postwar borders. “Why isn’t China one of the security guarantors? We don’t need guarantors that don’t help Ukraine. Beijing assisted Russia by opening access to the drone market,” Zelensky said during a meeting with journalists on Thursday. “We don’t need guarantors who don’t help Ukraine, and didn’t help Ukraine at the moment when we really needed it. We need security guarantees only from those countries that are ready to help us,” Zelensky said.

After firing the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (New: SecDef Fires Defense Intelligence Agency Chief – RedState), Secretary of Defense capped off his Friday by dismissing the Chief of the Navy Reserve, Vice Admiral Nancy Lacore (that organization still has her bio posted indicating either sloth or rebellion) and the Commander of Naval Special Operations Command, Rear Admiral Milton "Jamie" Sands. According to the US Naval Institute, “Effective immediately, Rear Adm. Milton ‘Jamie’ Sands III will no longer serve as commander, Naval Special Warfare Command,” the official told USNI News. “Effective immediately, Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore will no longer serve as the chief of Navy Reserve.”

In roughly three years, Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has established herself as one of the most recognized members of the Supreme Court — and not in a good way. Despite being the most junior justice on the high court, Jackson has regularly gone out of her way to thumb her nose at her colleagues for upholding America’s constitutional framework. Whether it be through public comments or poorly written opinions, the Biden appointee has shown little respect for the longstanding traditions and collegiality that have defined SCOTUS for generations.

A very interesting response from President Trump against the U.S. President stepping back and awaiting Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin to organize their teams and schedule a bilateral discussion. President Trump has said he expects the diplomatic teams of Zelenskyy and Putin to coordinate a face-to-face meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy in the next two weeks. As noted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, sometimes it just takes putting the principals into the same room to break the logjam. However, both regimes have entrenched ideologues who are positioning for maximum leverage.President Trump is asked what he will do if Zelenskyy and Putin cannot or do not or

The MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell believes he’s on to a scandal: The US president who held a snap summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and then, immediately after, hosted a spontaneous meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and major European leaders at the White House, is so debilitated that he can barely function. His evidence is that Donald Trump had a light public schedule a couple of days after this flurry of in-person, high-stakes diplomacy. This would be little like a critic of Charles Lindbergh accusing the landmark aviator of being a layabout

There was important news this week: apparent progress toward peace in Ukraine, a crackdown on crime in D.C., and much else. But those serious topics were pretty much ignored by the nation’s memesters. The story of the week, hands down, was the Cracker Barrel logo reboot. Not having learned, apparently, from the experiences of Bud Light, Target and others, Cracker Barrel debuted a new logo that was seen as an abandonment of its middle American roots. There were other meme-stories too, like the Rhode Island Assistant Attorney General who, apparently the worse for drink, tried to pull rank on a commendably patient police officer. The body cam footage, happily, survives.

In what is being called the largest single-year cut in civilian federal employment since World War II, 2025 will end with 300,000 fewer workers employed by the United States government. New Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor told several news outlets, most recently the New York Times, that the federal workforce will drop from 2.4 million to 2.1 million employees, largely as the result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) efforts. In a lengthy interview this week with Washington, DC, station WTOP, Kupor said that up to 80 percent of the reductions

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shot back at establishment media outlets for using the leftist, politically correct term “undocumented” to describe illegal aliens in the U.S. interior, making it clear that it will not succumb to the left’s “open borders pronouns.” In a post on Wednesday, DHS shared a variety of headlines from establishment media outlets: “Undocumented immigrant caused in fatal drunken crash to remain jailed,” “Eleven undocumented immigrants arrested in Seymour,” and “Who are the undocumented immigrants in Texas?” “‘Undocumented immigrant’ is the immigration equivalent of ‘they/them,'”

A tour bus carrying 50 people crashed in Upstate New York, leaving five dead, including a child, and multiple injured. The tour bus was traveling back from a stop at Niagara Falls when it overturned on Interstate 90 in Pembroke and crashed into a ditch. It is unclear why the bus driver lost control and crashed. Sixteen people were transported to Erie County Medical Center, ABC News reported. ABC News reported: A tour bus traveling back from a trip to Niagara Falls overturned in Upstate New York on Friday, killing multiple people and injuring dozens of others, some of whom became trapped or ejected, police said.

The Department of Education announced on Friday that George Mason University (GMU) allegedly violated civil rights law by “illegally using race and other immutable characteristics in university practices and policies, including hiring and promotion.” The department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened an investigation into GMU in July after receiving complaints from several professors alleging that university leadership adopted DEI policies in 2020 to present, giving preferential treatment to potential and current faculty from “underrepresented groups” to advance “anti-racism,” the department said in a press release.

The legal situation surrounding Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien from El Salvador, continues to rack up twists and turns. But while his Friday release from jail seemed like a big victory, a new development has completely changed the game. Originally deported by the Trump administration to his home country in early 2025, the case immediately drew national attention. (Snip) As it turns out, petitioning the court for release appears to have been a big mistake. According to immigration reporter Bill Melugin, the ICE is already moving to not only detain Abrego Garcia, but to deport him to Uganda.