August 5, 2026

WHEN YOU SEE IT ALL IN ONE LIST, YOU FINALLY UNDERSTAND THE LENGTH AND DEPTH OF JASON ARDAY’S LONG CON:

The scrolling required is not insignificant.

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: The Typhus Rats of Los Angeles.

In 2018, it was clear that L.A. had a serious problem. For much of the early 2000s, the county recorded just a handful of flea-borne typhus cases each year; in 2009, for example, it saw just nine. But in 2018, L.A. battled multiple localized typhus outbreaks, marking a watershed moment for public health officials in the county.

The outbreaks started in the summer. Between July and September, the county identified nine typhus cases linked to downtown. All of them required hospitalization, and six of the nine sufferers had either been homeless or lived in transitional housing. In October, public health officials noted an additional outbreak in the Willowbrook neighborhood, near Compton. By year’s end, L.A. had seen 109 cases of typhus countywide—a record high.

The concern wasn’t just that cases were on the rise, but also where they were being discovered. In the past, the county might have seen occasional, geographically dispersed infections. Now, it was dealing with multiple clusters in dense, urban environments. A document we obtained via public-records requests shows that officials believed “rats and rat fleas” were “contributing to infection” in the county’s cities.

The situation that year was so bad that the city government couldn’t even keep its own employees safe. At the time, Elizabeth Greenwood was a deputy city attorney. One day at work, Greenwood said her shin began to hurt. When she inspected her leg, she noticed some small insect bites but thought nothing of it. Within weeks, Greenwood was reportedly “gravely ill” and suffering from a severe headache, dizziness so bad she couldn’t walk to the restroom unattended, and a 102-degree fever. “It felt like somebody was driving railroad stakes through my eyes and out the back of my neck,” Greenwood said.

Eventually, Greenwood would be diagnosed with typhus. She blamed the city for her contracting the disease, claiming that its failure to clean up garbage and human feces outside City Hall East had “recklessly endanger[ed] the public.” After Greenwood went public with her story, Los Angeles officials admitted that City Hall was infested with vermin. “The rotting trash and the raw sewage is the soup that grows typhus,” Greenwood said.

Documents we obtained via a public-records request show that Greenwood wasn’t the only municipal employee complaining about rats around that time. In 2020, Raul Cabrera, the LAFD captain for Station 6, wrote an email to a city employee complaining that his fire station was being overrun by rats from a homeless encampment.

A homeless encampment, you say?

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

JOANNE JACOBS: From Jonah to Job, the Bible belongs in public schools.

You can’t really get Moby Dick (or Pinocchio) if you’ve never heard of Jonah and the Whale, writes Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic. You won’t understand why Harriet Tubman was called “Moses,” if you’re not familiar with the Exodus story. Bible stories belong in public school classrooms, he argues. Americans who don’t know about David and Goliath, Job, the parting of the Red Sea, the Sermon on the Mount and the Good Samaritan will not be prepared to understand America’s history or literature.

The new required-reading list in Texas has angered many liberals, who see it as “an attack on civil liberties and cultural diversity,” Kirsch writes. The state school board has framed the Bible stories as part of a “common literary canon,” not as religious instruction, but many are unpersuaded. A Dallas Morning News editorial called for including the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita, he writes.

Whether or not you’re a believer, the Bible is a foundational text of Western Civilization. The Quran isn’t, to say the very least.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

AS HEADS IS TAILS: New York deputy police commissioner fired after attempted murder arrest. Mount Vernon official is accused of driving getaway car after son allegedly opened fire outside Bronx court.

A New York state police department fired its deputy commissioner on Tuesday after she allegedly acted as a getaway driver for her son in what is being investigated as an attempted murder.

The city of Mount Vernon said in an Instagram post that it had terminated Jennifer Lackard, deputy police commissioner for safety, for conduct “unrelated to her duties”.

Lackard, 49, and her 20-year-old son Chase were arrested in an early morning raid on Tuesday at their home in New York City’s Bronx borough, according to the New York Daily News, citing “police sources”.

The newspaper said the pair were charged with attempted murder, attempted assault, gun possession, conspiracy and reckless endangerment, in connection with shots that were fired at a group of people outside Bronx criminal court on 29 June.

Chase Lackard was the alleged gunman, according to the Daily News – and jumped into a car that was driven from the scene at speed by his mother.

The new Netflix remake of Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot sounds lit:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS A REAL PROBLEM:

Posted at 1:34 pm by Stephen Green

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The overwhelming migrant blitz on Spain shatters globalist fiction and proves our leaders have abandoned sovereign borders.

The whole world can see there are virtually no women and children in those mobs. The whole world knows Morocco is not ravaged by war or hunger.

From now on, every utterance of “asylum-seeker” should invoke noisy, angry skepticism.

The Ceuta crisis also confirms that the moral cowardice of the modern state is like a red rag to hostile actors.

It is undeniable that Pedro Sánchez’s lunatic granting of asylum to illegal immigrants this year emboldened these Moroccan men to pour into soft-touch Spain.

In January, Sánchez bypassed parliament and issued a royal decree to regularize virtually all “undocumented migrants” on Spanish territory.

Almost 1.2 million illegal arrivals applied for this status, granting them the right to reside in Spain, to work there and to enjoy unfettered access to healthcare and education.

Sánchez’s monarchical creation of close to a million neo-“Spaniards” was an act of lethal folly.

In throwing open residency rights and access to public services, he stripped Spanishness itself of meaning.

Anyone, from anywhere, can have what you have — that, at root, was the imperious diktat.

And he shone a massive green light to outsiders to try their luck with his spineless regime.

Hence, Ceuta — 50,000 North Africans accepting his witless, brainless invitation to come and take the piss out of Spain.

In the past, invading forces did a much better job of planning out their logistics:

But in 2026, why bother, when the locals will provide that for you?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

YES: It’s High Time We Restore Martha Stewart’s Gun Rights. “It makes little sense to deny Martha Stewart, who has the financial means to employ armed private security for her safety, the right to personally possess a firearm,” the Grassroots NC brief says. “Even more questionable is why Donald Trump cannot possess a gun when he currently commands the most powerful military in the world.”

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green

THIS:

“There’s always a choice!” the wise man once said. “This one is a choice between ‘bad’ and ‘worse’ — which is a difference much more poignant than that between ‘good’ and ‘better.'”

Posted at 12:28 pm by Stephen Green

HAS ABDUL EL-SAYED JUST SAVED TRUMP?

Just a few hours before Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan last night, he told me that he was going to “beat the shit” out of his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, in the November general election. His tactic, he explained in a Detroit farmers’ market yesterday, would be to “staple his [Rogers’s] sins to his forehead.” What those sins were, El-Sayed wouldn’t say. He has in the past criticized Rogers as a “corporate shill” who prioritized pharmaceutical and corporate interests over Michiganders while in Congress.

In truth, although he did scrape to victory last night, it was El-Sayed who almost had the shit beaten out of him by Haley Stevens, a mainstream Democrat. Going into the contest, polls gave El-Sayed a 20-point lead. NBC have declared him the winner, but the vote is close. Ballots are still being counted and, at the time of writing, Associated Press has him on 48.6 percent versus Stevens’s 47.3. Stevens, it seems, couldn’t quite “stick it to ’em” as she vowed to do in a viral video.

El-Sayed inspired such little enthusiasm for his progressive agenda that it seems unlikely he can beat Rogers in November. Confidence is also falling in the much-predicted midterm “blue wave.” With so many Democratic candidates standing on a Democratic Socialists of America platform, the fear is that voters will view the party as too radical and it will miss the golden opportunity of slumping Republican poll numbers.

Don’t get cocky.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE RED-BLUE PLANET: ‘Significant areas of Mars may have once been covered by water’: Scientists find hidden clue in Spirit rover data.

Researchers reanalyzed measurements collected by Spirit between 2004 and 2010, revealing widespread traces of crystalline hematite and altered magnetite in ordinary Martian soil — iron-bearing minerals that point to ancient chemical changes consistent with interactions between water and rock. The findings suggest liquid water may have been more widespread across Mars than scientists previously thought, according to a statement from Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia.

The team combined hundreds of individual measurements from 32 undisturbed soil sites inside Gusev Crater, where Spirit landed in January 2004, creating the most detailed iron-mineral profile yet assembled for typical Martian soil, according to the statement.

“One of the most important discoveries was finding crystalline hematite in ordinary Martian soil,” Paulo de Souza, lead author of the study and an ECU professor, said in the statement. “This mineral’s widespread presence suggests not only that water was present, but that significant areas of Mars may have once been covered by water.”

How much of it remains as ice is the big question.

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green

THEN THEY’LL PACK THE COURT TO GET IT:

Among other things.

Posted at 11:26 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER: Of Commies, Purple States, and the Elusive Undecided Voter. “All of the above means that the Democrats should be looking at bright skies and clear sailing to victory in November, especially in the House. That’s what those wacky historical trends tell us, anyway. Oddly, the hive mind party has chosen this year to have a full-on family feud. The fight is between the young commies who proudly let their hammer and sickle freak flags fly, and the Dem elders who agree with all of the commie stuff, but would prefer to be more coy about it so that they can dupe undecided voters.”

Posted at 11:11 am by Stephen Green

YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO GO EASY ON COMMIES…:

…because they’ll never go easy on you.

Posted at 10:55 am by Stephen Green