America’s defense industrial base is in the throes of major change. For the first time in 40 years, major power war is a real possibility. Conflicts in Ukraine and Israel are providing a harrowing glimpse of what that war might look like. Technology is evolving at a dizzying pace. Instead of peacetime efficiency, governments are prioritizing wartime surge capacity. The “China shock” and COVID-19 have destabilized global supply chains.
Amid these daunting realities, a new generation of defense technology companies has emerged. Anduril Industries — which was founded in 2017 and which I joined in 2020 — is one of them. Of course, defense technology companies aim to make money. But these companies also aim to disrupt and transform American defense by changing culture, attracting new and better talent, harnessing commercial technologies, championing software, bolstering competition, reforming acquisition practices, and more. Only time will tell if they are successful. But perhaps not as much time as one might think. As more defense technology companies scale to compete with traditional defense primes, the contours of a new defense industrial base are emerging.
Changes to this scope, speed, and scale naturally lead to questions, anxieties, and fears. To wit, these pages recently carried a warning about an impending “new era of defense giants.” According to this view, defense technology companies are engaging in corporate acquisitions that mirror the defense industry consolidation carried out by the traditional defense primes after the end of the Cold War. This new consolidation is hurting small businesses and making America’s defense industrial base less diverse, resilient, and innovative.
The Trump administration has charged the surveillance firm Palantir with agglomerating the US population’s personal data across government agencies, raising alarm about a centralized spying tool targeting hundreds of millions without oversight. Wall Street responded to the news by sending Palantir’s stock price to unprecedented heights.
During an end-of-year investor call this February, Palantir co-founder and militant Zionist Alex Karp bragged that his company was making a financial killing by enabling mass murder.
“Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies,” he stated, adding: “And on occasion, kill them.”
CIA seed front company Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp brags about how good business is to shareholders while admitting .. “When it’s necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them .. And we hope you’re in favor of that”
To appreciate the complexities of policing online hate speech that underlie an April summary decision by Meta’s Oversight Board, let’s start with a musical detour through a 2017 US Supreme Court opinion called Matal v. Tam. The Court faced the First Amendment question in Matal of whether the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) could lawfully deny a band’s request to register its name––The Slants––as a trademark. The PTO claimed denial was okay because “slants” disparages Asians.
The wrinkle was that the band’s members are Asian and their frontman, Simon Tam, wanted “to ‘reclaim’ and ‘take ownership’ of stereotypes about people of Asian ethnicity.” As Tam explained:
We grew up and the notion of having slanted eyes was always considered a negative thing. Kids would pull their eyes back in a slant-eyed gesture to make fun of us . . . I wanted to change it to something that was powerful, something that was considered beautiful or a point of pride instead.
Via Shutterstock.
This relates to “reappropriation by self-labeling” or “reclamation.” It involves marginalized groups seeking “to redefine the negative connotations” of a label and reclaiming “social power, as they become in charge of the word’s meaning.”
The Supreme Court sided with Tam, reasoning that the PTO’s denial of registration for The Slants because it disparages Asians “offends a bedrock First Amendment principle: Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend.” Rejecting the stance that speech isn’t constitutionally protected simply because it’s hateful, the Court asserted that:
Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”
In this article I will be proposing an early framework for a mental health intervention called depsychiatrization. Depsychiatrization describes the processes by which a diagnosed individual learns to expel psychiatrically induced self-concepts and substitute them for more empowering and nurturing understandings. These processes are not, in themselves, entirely novel, as they have been a part of many alternative movements throughout time. It is the ambition behind this proposal to formalize a way of helping and supporting people who would benefit from depsychiatrization, as well as supplying a legitimizing platform to stand on for those who wish to encourage growth without pathology.
Much has been written on the many ways in which psychiatry does harm to individuals seeking help for mental health issues: The medical treatments are far too often more harmful than beneficial, especially in the long run. The symptom-focused therapeutic treatments rarely produce sustainable outcomes leading to better lives. For instance, electroshock therapy is a disputed method at best, a harmful, medieval practice at worst.
President Donald Trump returned to Washington in January with a mandate from the American people to end mass migration. That same month, however, the foreign-born population living within America’s borders hit a record high, in an echo of the Roman Empire. Is it too late to save America from mass migration? Even if America is saved, will it be fundamentally changed in the process?
As a California farmer, Victor Davis Hanson faces the reality of this demographic change every day. As a historian and classicist, he knows all too well what happens to regimes and empires that fail to confront mass migration. This week, he joins “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss.
“Everybody,” Hanson told The Daily Signal, “is bewildered why [former President] Joe Biden, or whoever was controlling him, did this.”
Hanson described the pressure to keep migrants streaming into the country as “a consortium of interests” that include corporations (which desire cheap labor), other nations (which benefit from remittances), the cartels, and liberal ideologues.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced it was processing the family of Mohamed Soliman — the radical Islamist who allegedly set Jewish demonstrators ablaze in Boulder on Sunday — for removal from the country. Then came the order from a rogue judge blocking the administration.
Judge Gordon Gallagher’s two-page order halting the removal of Soliman’s wife and five children — all illegal aliens, according to Stephen Miller — isn’t merely a misapplication of justice. It is a direct assault on the executive branch’s constitutional authority. And if President Donald Trump continues to treat these rogue judicial decrees as legitimate, he not only cedes national security to ideological partisans in black robes — he permits a full-blown constitutional crisis to fester unchecked.
On Wednesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “have taken the family of suspected Boulder, Colorado terrorist, and illegal alien, Mohamed Soliman, into ICE custody.”
But within hours, Gallagher issued an order stating the Trump administration “SHALL NOT REMOVE Hayem El Gamal and her five children from the District of Colorado or the United States unless or until this Court or the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit vacates this Order.”
In 2022 three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for proving something astonishing: the universe is not locally real. In other words, particles don’t have fixed properties until they are measured. Although it seems to counter everything we perceive, the discovery was established by some of the most rigorous experiments ever conducted, and it aligns with a prediction Albert Einstein and his colleagues made almost 100 years ago: that particles strangely influence one another, even across vast distances. Today quantum strangeness is no longer confined to theory. Researchers are entangling objects large enough to see, quantum computers are on the cusp of solving problems no classical machine can touch, and speculative ideas such as vacuum decay and alternative realities are serious science. The quantum era has arrived.
Over the weekend, a conservative Polish historian named Karol Nawrocki, backed by the Law and Justice opposition (and President Trump), narrowly won the Polish presidential election. For the European political establishment, Nawrocki’s victory was a catastrophe — a harbinger of right-wing fascism looming over the continent.
Why? Because Nawrocki campaigned against the mass immigration policy of Brussels while promoting conservative Catholic values and Polish nationalism. During his victory speech Sunday night, Nawrocki said, “My Poland is a Poland without illegal migrants. It is a Poland where, instead of integration centers, there are deportation centers for those who want to destroy our safety.”
It turns out, this sentiment is increasingly popular not just in Poland but all across Europe. Last week in Portugal, the right-wing populist Chega party overtook the center-left Socialist Party as the country’s main opposition. Six years ago, Chega had only a single seat in the Assembly of the Republic. It now has 60. In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is one of the most popular political parties in the country, yet Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has officially classified AfD a right-wing extremist group. Why? Because AfD opposes mass immigration and promotes German national identity. In France’s national elections last year, only a desperately cobbled-together coalition of left-wing parties prevented the right-wing National Rally (RN) and its allies from winning.
The current Canadian prime minister is genuinely a walking meme of a Canadian prime minister parody.
During his remarks to Parliament last Thursday, Prime Minister Carney waxed gleefully about the U.S. federal trade court ruling against President Trump’s tariffs, just moments before the federal appeals court stayed the opinion of the lower court. It’s a little funny.
Carney doesn’t seem to recognize the reality of the economic landscape before him. He complains about blocked access to the U.S. consumer base with a level of entitlement that’s genuinely humorous. Meanwhile, the Canadian economy around him is collapsing:
Following the 2024 presidential election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau traveled to Mar-a-Lago and said if President Trump were to make the Canadian government face reciprocal tariffs, open the USMCA trade agreements to force reciprocity, and/or balance economic relations on non-tariff issues, then Canada would collapse upon itself economically and cease to exist. In essence, in addition to the NATO defense shortfall, Canada cannot survive as a free and independent North American nation, without receiving all the one-way benefits from the U.S. economy.
A US federal court has blocked President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, in a major blow to a key component of his economic policies.
The Court of International Trade ruled that an emergency law invoked by the White House did not give the president unilateral authority to impose tariffs on nearly every country.
The Manhattan-based court said the US Constitution gave Congress exclusive powers to regulate commerce with other nations and this was not superseded by the president’s remit to safeguard the economy.
The Trump administration lodged an appeal within minutes of the ruling.
Democrats desperately want to control the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections. However, their plan to wield power will likely doom their political future, but could give Republicans a golden opportunity.
An expert political strategist has issued a stark warning to the Democrats about their midterm prospects. If their plan succeeds, it would mean short-term gain but long-term pain for the embattled party.
Most Americans assume the United States is the world’s unrivaled nuclear superpower. The truth is, America’s nuclear stockpile has shrunk significantly. Meanwhile, China is building nuclear weapons at a rapid pace, and arms experts believe the world’s security is now at serious risk due to the communist regime’s expansionist schemes.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has dramatically reduced the number of nuclear weapons it has deployed or in storage. That arsenal today is roughly 85 percent smaller than at the height of the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and the number of operational nukes is tiny compared to 40 years ago.
America’s nuclear stockpile has fallen to levels not seen since the 1960s, while China has embarked on an unprecedented nuclear buildup.
Last week, a plane landed: 59 Afrikaners, mostly farmers, mostly white. Trump called it a genocide. MSNBC called it racism.
Turning away the persecuted because they’re the wrong color is not justice; it’s betrayal.
Just like that, we were off. Cue the outrage cycle, fearmongering chyrons, left-wing think pieces, and Twitter threads from soft-palmed theologians who wouldn’t recognize a plow if it hit them in the face. “This isn’t what Christianity looks like,” they screamed.
But that’s precisely the problem. Trump’s version of Christianity doesn’t look the way they want it to. It doesn’t speak in nonprofit euphemisms, hold committee meetings on climate equity, sing hymns to intersectionality, or check in with the Episcopal diocese before making moral decisions.
It does something far more offensive: It acts on behalf of people the professional Christian class has decided no longer count. In other words, white, rural, conservative Christians who don’t fit the preapproved narrative.
Trump Tariffs Are Authorized By Emergency Powers Act– thefederalist.com Source Link Excerpt:
You can buy a set of three pads of legal paper, “proudly made in the U.S.A.” by TOPS, for $16.64 (that is, $5.55 per pad). Or go to Simplified and get an imported two-pad set, currently marked down to $22 ($11 a pad).
Simplified is not confident customers are willing to pay much more for its products, so when President Donald Trump put tariffs on China, it went to court to object.
The case was filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Florida, Pensacola Division, on April 3 by Emily Ley Paper, Inc., an upscale stationery website doing business under the name Simplified.
The Trump administration asked to move the case to the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT). The outcome of that request could make this case an easy win for Trump once the CIT reviews the transfer order.
A bill to add “an understanding of communist regimes and ideologies” to the Texas social studies curriculum passed in the state’s legislature Wednesday. It now heads to Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R-TX) desk to be signed into law.
It passed in the House 112-20 on Wednesday, after passing in the Senate in March. If the bill is signed into law, the Texas State Board of Education will revise its Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills curriculum for grades 4-12 beginning in the 2026-2027 school year.
Texas Senate Bill 24 was authored by Texas state Sen. Donna Campbell, and highly regarded by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who said the prioritization of the curriculum amendment was necessary “so history does not repeat itself.”
While Patrick’s statement when the bill was passed in the Texas Senate in March labeled it as bipartisan, several democratic lawmakers, such as state Reps. Vikki Goodwin and Jon Rosenthal, tried to get the bill amended to include the dangers of fascism, specifically Nazism, as well.
A new study has shown that community trust in Australian and New Zealand scientists is the highest in the developed world, and the authors say – surprisingly – it might be because local politics doesn’t get in the way.
Not everyone agrees.
The survey results were posted yesterday. The study of 70,000 respondents compares public trust in climate scientists and scientists in general across 68 countries.
It reveals that on average, participants reported moderately high levels of trust in climate scientists, with trust levels being slightly lower than in scientists in general.
“Overall, this trust gap was larger among participants who identified as politically conservative or right-leaning, but there was considerable variation across countries,” the report concludes.
President Donald Trump, who seeks to prevent the Islamic Republic of Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, wants to secure a new nuclear agreement with that country. Trump’s motive is honorable. Difficult diplomacy is preferable to military strikes on Iran. But numerous complications stand in the president’s way, and perhaps none of these complications is more significant than the growing threat of Iranian terrorist attacks.
Yes, formalizing a viable Iran nuclear agreement represents a big challenge in and of itself. For one, Iran has engaged in more than two decades of deceptive conduct via its covert research of nuclear warheads. Any deal would thus need to ensure prompt inspection access to any sites suspected of being used to conduct illicit nuclear weapons research. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action had woefully inadequate safeguards in this regard.
Another difficulty arises in the Trump administration’s new insistence that Iran suspend all nuclear enrichment, even at very low purity levels, in return for any deal. This demand conflicts with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s belief that his Islamic Republic should be allowed to engage in some enrichment as a matter of honor. Khamenei might well regard the risks of U.S. military action as less concerning than the loss of prestige and regime confidence that would go with suspending all enrichment activities. Allowing Iran to maintain its nuclear facilities, albeit in a nonoperational status, might allow the regime to save face. But probably not.
Russian forces in Ukraine are suffering casualties at more than 400,000 per year — enough to pack the house at the world’s four largest stadiums. Losses like these have been fuel for simultaneous talk of inevitable Russian defeat or victory in the public conversation.
What should we make of this talk? Can Russian forces sustain similar losses in its ongoing war in Ukraine and rebuild to fight another day? The likely answer is “yes,” and it speaks to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approach toward negotiations to end the war. In refusing to agree to an unconditional ceasefire and skipping the latest peace talks in Turkey, Putin is playing for time — because time appears to be on his side.
While Russia could run out of quality recruits, force replenishment through 2024 was far more successful than many predicted. In April of that year, NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe Gen. Christopher Cavoli observed that “Russia is reconstituting that force far faster than our initial estimates suggested. The army is actually now larger — by 15 percent — than it was when it invaded Ukraine.” Whether Russia can maintain its ability to reconstitute and even grow its forces as its war in Ukraine progresses remains uncertain. More certain is its advantage over Ukraine in terms of total population, with nearly four times as many people and roughly 18.9 million males aged 20–39 relative to Ukraine’s fewer than five million males of that age. Russia can lose three times as many troops as Ukraine and still suffer less in relative terms.
Until Democrats start naming names and apologizing for their reckless, craven conduct as it relates to Joe Biden, I don’t want to hear another word about Pete Hegseth’s Signal chats.
It was fine timing to get news over the weekend that the former president, a well established dotard, has an advanced and aggressive form of prostate cancer that has reached his bones. There’s a strong likelihood that Biden was diagnosed with some stage of the disease before he was even elected president, and he almost certainly had it while in office. Yet the public knew nothing until Sunday.
Prayers up for Biden, but this is an appalling scandal. And it comes just as the dying news media are finally acknowledging that, yeah, Biden’s brain was rapidly browning over as he sat in the Oval Office, where he was losing track of space and time as the commander of the United States military, the point person for nuclear war.
Recall that now-Republican Rep. Ronnie Jackson, when he was serving as Donald Trump’s first-term White House physician in 2018, rendered a medical summary on the president that more or less described Trump as in good health, if a little overweight and in need of some exercise. The dying media questioned him for an hour at a press conference. They were sure that Jackson was deceiving the public by not divulging some mental affliction that would have affirmed their feverish desire to see Trump removed from office by way of the 25th Amendment.
Toddlers may swiftly master the meaning of the word “no”, but many artificial intelligence models struggle to do so. They show a high fail rate when it comes to understanding commands that contain negation words such as “no” and “not”.
That could mean medical AI models failing to realise that there is a big difference between an X-ray image labelled as showing “signs of pneumonia” and one labelled as showing “no signs of pneumonia” – with potentially catastrophic consequences if physicians rely on AI…