May 5, 2026

FAIL, BRITANNIA: Britain now down to five operational frigates.

HMS Iron Duke has been withdrawn from active service, leaving the Royal Navy with just five operational Type 23 frigates, NavyLookout has revealed.

The naval analysis website broke the story today in a detailed piece well worth reading in full, reporting that Iron Duke has been stripped of her weapons and sensors and has not been to sea since October 2024, with no formal decommissioning announcement made despite her effective removal from the fleet.

The withdrawal comes less than three years after a £103 million refit that by any measure was extraordinary in its scope. The work took 49 months and more than 1.7 million man-hours, and was described as the most complex ever carried out on a Type 23.

Iron Duke had been laid up in Portsmouth since 2017 and arrived at Devonport in such poor condition that the structural work on her hull was almost twice what had been needed on any previous ship in the class.

Nelson weeps.

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Gee, It’s Almost Like Iran Can’t Be Trusted at All. “The media coverage of Operation Epic Fury/Roaring Lion has been maddeningly irresponsible. Everything President Trump says is parsed out to the nth degree and treated with scorn and outrage. To the hacks in the mainstream media, Trump is always the bad guy. The lunatic fanatics who have been bankrolling terrorism in the Middle East for half a century get the benefit of the doubt though.”

Posted at 9:06 am by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE NATION’S CAPITOL: At least 3 MPD officials under investigation over crime stats may be fired.

At least three Metropolitan Police Department officials who were under investigation for allegedly manipulating crime statistics were issued termination papers by the internal affairs office, law enforcement sources tell News4.

Two of the officials are commanders, sources said; another is a captain.

News4 was first to report in July 2025 that the commander of MPD’s 3rd District was under investigation for allegedly manipulating crime statistics on his district. Cmdr. Michael Pulliam was placed on leave with pay and denied the allegations.

Pulliam was told on Monday that he would be terminated, News4 confirmed.

2nd District Cmdr. Tatjana Savoy also was told she would be terminated, source said.

Multiple other officials were told they would be fired or receive other forms of discipline.

Word of the termination notices spread as a number of high-level officials did not show up to a crime briefing early Monday, sources said.

Interim Chief of Police Jeffery Carroll declined to comment, citing an internal matter. U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro also said she could not comment.

Two federal reports in late 2025 criticized D.C.’s police chief at the time, Pamela Smith, and questioned the accuracy of the District’s crime data.

Accountability, it’s a helluva thing.

Posted at 8:34 am by Stephen Green

FIAT LUX:  If you’re a faculty member, tell FacultyLeaks.com your story.  Or read other people’s stories.  The truth is out there.  Let’s shed some light on it.

Posted at 8:27 am by Gail Heriot

NOW, THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS PROMISED:

I’m not at all confident that it’s true, but I hope it is.

Posted at 8:22 am by Glenn Reynolds

CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN:

Our military looks like a fighting force again — and acts like one, too.

Posted at 8:19 am by Stephen Green

EVERYBODY WHO WAS ANYBODY IN WEST AFRICA WAS COMPLICIT IN THE SLAVE TRADE FOR CENTURIES:

Flashback: My Nigerian Grandfather Sold Slaves. “Nwaubani Ogogo lived in a time when the fittest survived and the bravest excelled. The concept of ‘all men are created equal’ was completely alien to traditional religion and law in his society. It would be unfair to judge a 19th Century man by 21st Century principles. Assessing the people of Africa’s past by today’s standards would compel us to cast the majority of our heroes as villains, denying us the right to fully celebrate anyone who was not influenced by Western ideology.”

There’s a mythology that white slave traders ran around the bush kidnapping Africans, but that’s bunk, of course — they’d pretty much all have died. They bought African slaves from Africans. My brother talked to people in Ghana about that some years ago, and they reflected little guilt: Back then if you lost a war, you either died or were enslaved. That’s just how it worked.

One of the reasons Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon couldn’t get published when she wrote it was that the black literary community didn’t like that it portrayed the extent of African complicity in slavery. But history is history, despite efforts to rewrite it.

Posted at 8:18 am by Glenn Reynolds

HER SOPHOMORIC GRANDSTANDING ISN’T IMPRESSING ANYONE, LEFT OR RIGHT: Justice Alito Just Took Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Cleaners. “Now, with this judgment, there was a harsh rebuke of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent, where Justice Alito, in an academic tone, essentially called her a reckless clown who doesn’t understand the law. We’ve seen a similar attitude on the liberal side as well, with Justices Kagan or Sotomayor disagreeing with the majority but avoiding Jackson’s dissents since they usually don’t make much sense. It led to a barrel of laughs on social media.”

Related:

Posted at 8:13 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE ENEMY WITHIN: New Jersey Dem Congressional Candidate Testified on Behalf of Terror Mastermind ‘Blind Sheikh’: Adam Hamawy, running to represent the state’s 12th district, told prosecutors he had a yearslong relationship with the cleric whose followers carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Is anyone surprised, at this point?

Related:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE MATH IS BRUTAL:

Posted at 7:47 am by Stephen Green

HMM: Inside the Quiet Republican Effort to Flip Fetterman.

If Fetterman does flip, according to officials who were given anonymity to talk about sensitive matters, it will be thanks in large part to his deepening friendship with a pair of senators and their high-profile spouses: Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), and his wife Dina, and Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), and her husband, Wesley.

But the first-term Democrat — who’s infuriated his party with his harder line on immigration and staunch support for Israel, Trump nominees, government funding bills and most recently the president’s ballroom — isn’t yet persuaded.

“I’m not changing,” Fetterman told me in an interview Friday when I asked if he was ruling out both becoming a Republican or turning independent. “I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one. “

Yet, at least in private, he’s not totally rejecting dropping his “D.”

When one senior Republican recently brought up the idea of becoming an independent to Fetterman, he absorbed the suggestion and didn’t embrace or reject the overture, according to a GOP official familiar with the conversation.

In our interview, Fetterman said bluntly: “I’d be a shitty Republican.”

That’s certainly my impression, although to be fair, maybe not all that much worse than a few current GOP senators you could name.

Still, while he seems unlikely to flip, it’s easy to see him dropping the (D) for an (I).

Posted at 7:32 am by Stephen Green

THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE:

Related:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE RAMPANT POLITICIZATION OF THE JUDICIARY IS RAMPING UP:

Posted at 7:27 am by Glenn Reynolds

THIS IS BIG:

Read the whole thing, but this stands out: “As people have realized the United States government will pay them to hang out with their own families, northeast Columbus has seen its economy replaced by businesses that bill Medicaid. And Columbus, a city with the second largest Somali population in the country, has become, on the surface, the most unhealthy city on the planet.”

Posted at 7:17 am by Stephen Green

A BRIEF COMPARISON OF NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM:

Flashback: The Nazi Party Platform.

Related: Hitler’s Handouts — Inside the Nazis’ welfare state.

And then there are the artists and architects of the 1930s: Philip Johnson. Walter Gropius. Mies van der Rohe. Le Corbusier. Ezra Pound. H.G. Wells. Salvador Dali. Why did so many pioneering modernists know all the lyrics to “Springtime for Hitler?”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE:

Posted at 7:07 am by Glenn Reynolds

ADD THIS TO THE LIST OF LEFTIST VIOLENCE:

Posted at 7:04 am by Glenn Reynolds