July 2, 2026

CRIME: Cops Bust Would Be Casino Mass Shooter With An Actual Cache (This Time) of Weapons. “How many times have you seen a blaring headline that reads something like this? MAD KILLER WITH HUGE CACHE OF WEAPONS AND AMMO ARRESTED BY POLICE. You give in and click on the link, only to find that the HUGE CACHE consisted of a beat-up Charter Arms snubby, a Yeet Cannon with a missing front sight, and a sawed-off 870 along with five 50-round boxes of Monarch 9mm ammo and eight loose rounds birdshot.”

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

THANK YOU, SCOTLAND: The independence we declared 250 years ago on July 4 was very much a product of the influence of Scots, especially those who were hard-core Presbyterian ministers, and Scots professors who tutored people like Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and James Wilson.

Posted at 1:34 pm by Mark Tapscott

SAD: Why So Many Women Are Rethinking Motherhood in 2026—and It’s Not Just About Money. “Of course, there’s nothing wrong with deciding not to have kids, says Merle Bombardieri, MSW, LICSW, a parenthood decision-making coach who has specialized in this topic for 40 years. But some women are held prisoner by their anxiety and information overload, opting out of motherhood not because they don’t want kids but because they’re too afraid and overwhelmed.”

There are whole industries devoted to encouraging that anxiety and information overload.

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

2026: A WEIMAR ODYSSEY. Sir, Why Do You Want Babies To Suck Your Nipples? “‘ The conflict originated in 2019 when Buckley… posted on Facebook about inducing lactation in order to breastfeed his infant son. At the time, while Buckley’s wife was still pregnant, he publicly shared that he was taking hormones to grow breasts…’ This is where we are, people. Everyone remember where we parked.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

BATTLESWARM: RAM Cartel? I Seriously Doubt It. “Manufacturers switching production from a less profitable product to a more profitable product isn’t some nefarious conspiracy, it’s how the market works. If they’re getting premium pricing for HBM memory that sells out instantly for the AI bubble, that’s what they’re going to produce. A whole lot of tech companies depended on the spot market for RAM because it gave them more flexibility and costs savings, but now it’s biting them in the ass. Their lack of foresight does not indicate a conspiracy or market failure.”

Posted at 12:45 pm by Stephen Green

ROGER KIMBALL: Why socialism will fail.

For those impervious to the siren call of socialism, its activities in the world seem like the truth according to Hegel, “a bacchanalian whirl in which no member is not drunk.” The sitting New York Democrats that Mamdani’s new squad just defeated are pretty far left. But they are the soul of moderation compared to the newcomers.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, who will be the Democratic candidate for New York’s 13th district, wants to abolish prisons, abolish ICE, abolish borders and defund the police. She thinks “all deportations are wrong” and has called the United States an “effing disgrace.” “I forgot to get napkins,” she wrote online, “so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.”

Claire Valdez (NY-7) and Brad Lander (NY-10) are cut from the same cloth. Grant citizenship and voting rights to illegal aliens? Yep. Seize the property of “bad landlords”? You betcha. Eliminate private health insurance and make taxpayers pony up for all transgender procedures? But of course. Abolish ICE, forgive the $2 trillion of student-loan debt, pack the Supreme Court? Can you doubt it?

A standard option in all current models of socialism is a ferocious anti-Israel sentiment fed, although you are not supposed to notice this, through a noxious current of apparent anti-Semitism. “Israel doesn’t exist,” Chevalier tells her followers, while all three support Hamas and think that Israel’s actions to defend itself in Gaza count as “genocide.”

What will be the upshot or outcome of these political perturbations? The disclaimer found on many financial statements offers a useful reminder: past results are no guarantee of future performance. A persistent gremlin affecting our prognostications is the temptation to extrapolate simply from current trends to future realities. It is easy to discount the presence of countervailing forces.

True socialism has never been tried:  Mamdani Is Ignoring 40 Centuries of Economic Lessons.

Jonah’s tweet concludes, “There’s not a single major idea proposed by the DSA crowd that wasn’t an old idea before I was born. From price controls and rent-freezes, to wealth taxes, or shunning Jews. It’s all old, old hat. You can agree with it. Or admire it’s newfound energy or something. But the ideas are old, tried, and failed.”

Related:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

NAILED IT, INDEED:

And from the replies: “The Bible also says that if a man doesn’t work, he doesn’t eat. So, there is that.”

Posted at 11:58 am by Stephen Green

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Elon Musk is in the rabid left’s crosshairs — but he’s not the true target. “What’s happening to Musk is straight from the pages of Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ playbook, specifically Rule No. 13: ‘Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.'”

Plus:

Posted at 11:43 am by Stephen Green

THE 1.9% SOLUTION:

Lefties get mad when you take the other people’s money away.

Posted at 11:27 am by Stephen Green

CHANGE (IT BACK): Idaho Brings the Firing Squad Back to Center Stage. “The state has now made the firing squad its primary method of execution. Lethal injection remains available as a backup, but Idaho has moved the rifle ahead of the needle because the old system has become slow, fragile, and legally tangled.”

Posted at 11:12 am by Stephen Green

NICK KRISTOF, DOG-RAPE ENTHUSIAST:

Posted at 10:46 am by Stephen Green

SPACE: ‘PROMISE’ me the moon? NASA wants to send spare nuclear-powered Mars rover to the lunar surface.

Isaacman also announced the potential repurposing of an engineering development model built to mirror the agency’s Perseverance and Curiosity rovers on Mars. “There is another,” Isaacman said, quoting Yoda’s line from “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.”

That test rover is called PROMISE, short for “Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration” (though it was formerly known as Optimism). PROMISE was developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, where it has been used as a test platform for fixes or commands that engineers want to try on the ground before permanently sending them to Perseverance and Curiosity. Now, NASA wants to send PROMISE on a mission of its own.

Though sending PROMISE to the moon would leave Perseverance and Curiosity — both of which remain active on Mars — without an Earth-based testbed, Isaacman thinks it would be worth it.

“We’ve had years now of experience operating the two rovers on the surface of Mars, and we’ve got this hardware that the taxpayers have invested a lot in,” he said. “So the question was posed: ‘What if we send it to the moon?'”

Beats the hell out of staying in California.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green

THE MICROCOSM WITH A MICRO AUDIENCE:

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll

THE CHAIN OF COMMAND, HOW DOES IT WORK?

Of course, we know how the Left works:

Change the incentives, change behavior.

Posted at 10:25 am by Stephen Green