Submitted by Gun Owners of America,

State Legislators in West Virginia have just introduced a bill, authored by Gun Owners of America, that would authorize the State to sell machineguns to citizens.

Currently, newly manufactured machineguns are banned for civilian ownership thanks to an amendment slipped into the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act.

Known as the “Hughes Amendment”—named for Representative William J. Hughes, a Democrat from New Jersey—this amendment banned all civilian ownership of machineguns made after May 19, 1986.

While machineguns made and registered prior to the ban date can still be transferred, the law of supply and demand has created a massive disparity, as most ordinary Americans simply cannot afford these much sought after items.

Interestingly, though, the language of the Hughes Amendment specifies that the machinegun ban doesn’t apply to the government, which includes state and local governments.

Specifically, 18 USC Section 922(o) reads:

This subsection does not apply with respect to—

a transfer to or by, or possession by or under the authority of, the United States or any department or agency thereof or a State, or a department, agency, or political subdivision thereof.

Well, we at Gun Owners of America had a thought. What if the States wanted to sell machineguns to their citizens—that is, what if they were to engage in a “transfer … by … a State”?

That certainly would comport with the historical tradition in the United States, where governments have sold military arms to the civilian populace since the Founding.  And, of course, arming civilians with machineguns aligns with the prefatory clause of the Second Amendment, which reads:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.”

What could be a better and more of a “well regulated Militia” than a citizenry armed with machineguns?

According to 922(o), a state government may lawfully “transfer”—that is, sell, give, loan, etc.—machineguns to ordinary citizens. And after the transfer is complete, those citizens may lawfully possess them, so long as the transfer was made by the State government.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. The Department of Justice recently made the very same argument in a court filing. The case is State of New Jersey v. Bondi, which is being litigated in the US District Court for the District of Maryland.

The case involves ATF’s return of Forced Reset Triggers to their original owners after a judge in Texas ruled that these triggers are not machineguns, as ATF had previously claimed. A forced reset trigger, or FRT, is a device that increases the rate of fire for semi-automatic rifles by (like the name entails) forcing the “reset” of a trigger so that a shooter can pull the trigger more quickly and thus fire more rapidly.

These FRTs were at one point classified as machineguns by ATF, and agents were sent out to confiscate them. But, in the aftermath of Cargil v. Garland, and a subsequent settlement with the manufacturer of these devices, they again have been recognized as semi-automatic triggers. And so, ATF was forced to return them to their rightful owners.

Of course, anti-gun jurisdictions didn’t like that. So, they sued to prevent the return of the FRTs to their owners in their respective states.

And in a filing in the case, the Department of Justice defended its return of FRTs.  DOJ argued that, even if FRTs were machineguns, ATF could still give them back to their owners, because federal law doesn’t apply to the transfer of machineguns by the government.

In other words, DOJ has already made the legal argument to support the West Virginia bill that we had introduced. DOJ has already admitted that the transfer of a machinegun by the government does not offend federal law.

And as DOJ’s filing clearly acknowledges, once that “transfer” from the government has occurred, the gun owner’s subsequent possession of the “machinegun” would also be lawful under Section 922(o).

Summed up, the exemption from the ban on machineguns follows the firearm, not who possesses it.

This is why our legislation, now officially introduced by our allies in West Virginia, would create State-Operated Machinegun Stores.

This state-run entity would be tasked with purchasing machineguns and conducting transfers to qualified members of the general public, much like how many states open and operate liquor stores.

Read the bill here…

This is a huge victory for GOA and our members.

*  *  *

We’ve been working to gut the National Firearms Act for decades. Last year, GOA spearheaded efforts in Congress to repeal most of the NFA’s taxes. Then, we filed suit to challenge the registration requirements with our One Big Beautiful Lawsuit. Now, we’re tackling the prohibition on machineguns with West Virginia.

If you hate the National Firearms Act or gun control in general, GOA is your one stop shop. We expect that it will be a fight to get this bill passed and into effect, and we’re going to need your help.

Consider supporting our efforts and becoming a member of Gun Owners of America. We won’t stop fighting until the Second Amendment is fully restored. No Compromises.

After the 2024 presidential election, the Democratic National Committee conducted an autopsy of the party’s defeat and intended to release it.

It pledged an honest accounting of how Donald Trump reclaimed the White House. It assured its own officials, strategists, and donor class that a thorough post-mortem was coming.

However, after the autopsy was complete, the DNC clammed up and kept it under wraps.

There was something in the report they didn’t want the public to see, and Democrats weren’t happy about it.

The official explanation for suppressing the report is that releasing it would distract from the party’s focus on winning back Congress in 2026 and not be distracted by the past.

That explanation doesn’t hold up.

Several Democrats, including advisers to potential 2028 presidential hopefuls, have argued that burying this report conveniently shields Harris from accountability runs again, while also protecting the consultant class whose strategic decisions contributed to the loss.

“I suspect the reasons why this isn’t being released are precisely the reasons why it should be released,” Lis Smith, a longtime adviser to Pete Buttigieg, said in a post on X last year.

“The DNC’s actual position is that if the public knew more about what Democrats got wrong in the last election, it would hurt the party’s chances in the next election,” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau wrote.

Favreau was more right than he realized. Because we know now what the DNC didn’t want the public to know.

According to a report from Axios, DNC staff members working on the report held a private meeting with the IMEU Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian advocacy organization, specifically to discuss the electoral impact of U.S. policy toward Israel.

Hamid Bendaas, a representative for the group, said the DNC acknowledged in that meeting that “their own data also indicated that this policy was, in their assessment, a ‘negative’ for the 2024 election.” 

Two additional senior IMEU Policy Project members independently confirmed that the DNC reached the same conclusion.

Axios separately verified that Democratic officials involved in the analysis found the Gaza issue hurt the party’s appeal with certain voter blocs.

Harris spent much of 2024 trying to navigate Israel-Gaza without alienating either side. She expressed firm support for Israel while also calling for a ceasefire and voicing empathy for Palestinian civilians.

It was a strategy that failed to satisfy the pro-Palestinian wing of the party, which is largely made up of younger voters and older progressives who had already grown skeptical of the administration’s backing of Israel, and proved particularly difficult to retain.

The autopsy appears to suggest that the party’s ability to succeed in the future requires it to be unequivocally anti-Israel.

DNC spokesperson Kendall Witmer denied the claim that findings related to Israel are driving the suppression of the report; however, even Kamala Harris seems to have confirmed the autopsy report’s findings.

During an event for her 107 Days book tour, Harris said the administration “should have done more” and “should have spoken publicly” about its criticism of Netanyahu’s handling of the war.

In the memoir, she wrote that Biden’s “perceived blank check” to Israel hurt her 2024 campaign and revealed she had privately urged him to show greater empathy for Gazan civilians even as she refused to break with him publicly. 

Democrats are now staring at an uncomfortable reality: their internal diagnosis is pushing them further down an explicitly anti-Israel path, and now everyone knows it.

Authored by Janice Hisle via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

School officials ordered two eastern Pennsylvania schools into lockdown on Feb. 20, while dozens of students left the schools and became unruly. The move came after officials directed the students to cancel their planned protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.

Quakertown High School and Quakertown Elementary School, about 50 miles north of Philadelphia, were locked down for nearly two hours.

School officials took the action after police notified them that high schoolers, who had left the building without permission, “were engaging in unsafe and disruptive behavior in town,” acting Superintendent Lisa Hoffman wrote on the Quakertown Community School District website.

Her statement provides no further details about the students’ behavior, but CBS News reported that five students were arrested.

Video footage posted on X shows Quakertown police struggling to put a person into the back of a police SUV as a crowd mills around and some people shout. When an ambulance arrives, a man in plain clothes exits an unmarked vehicle, dabbing what appears to be a bloody nose while officers ask whether he is OK.

School officials said they were waiting for more information from the police regarding reports of students’ actions. A Quakertown police sergeant told The Epoch Times that he was not permitted to release a statement from the borough’s police administration.

Earlier in the day, Quakertown school officials had notified families and students that a planned “student-led walkout should no longer occur,” Hoffman wrote. District leaders made that decision after consulting with law enforcement over “a potential safety concern” in connection with the walkout.

However, in defiance of that directive, about 35 Quakertown High School students left the building at about 11:30 a.m. Immediately, administrators worked with police and locked down the high school and the elementary school, stopping anyone from entering or leaving the buildings, Hoffman said.

“Students in both schools maintained their normal school day activities,” Hoffman wrote, and the lockdown was lifted at about 1:15 p.m.

Meanwhile, in Spring Township, near Reading, Pennsylvania, the Wilson School District issued a statement addressing a widely circulated video showing Daniel Weber, principal of Wilson High School, telling student protesters that they would be suspended if they did not return to class.

In response to “numerous” phone calls and emails about the video, Superintendent Chris Trickett posted a statement on Feb. 19, a day after Weber addressed the group amid an unauthorized walkout.

Trickett said the video “captures only a portion of the interaction between school staff and students.”

Further, he wrote, “The situation was particularly challenging because we had been informed that the demonstration would not take place.”

A careful review of the circumstances revealed that no one was disciplined for expressing political views, the superintendent said. Rather, disciplinary action was based on violations of the student handbook, including “leaving class or the building without permission,” he said.

“Longstanding legal guidance, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Tinker v. Des Moines, affirms that students do not ’shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,’” Trickett wrote, referring to that 1969 landmark ruling.

However, Trickett wrote, “the Court made clear that schools may take action when conduct materially disrupts the educational environment or compromises student safety.” Further, schools can and must regulate demonstrations “in alignment with school rules and policies,” he said.

“Our response reflects this balance, between protecting student expression and fulfilling our responsibility to maintain safe and effective school operations,” Trickett said.

Whether you think AI is on the cusp of replacing millions of jobs, or an overblown Google search designed to agree with you, one thing is sure: people whose job it is to analyze complex medical data might want to pay attention…

For years, biomedical research has had a problem: too much data, not enough people who know how to wrangle it – or simply that it took months to do so. Modern health studies generate oceans of molecular information – gene expression, DNA methylation, microbiome profiles. Turning that into useful predictions about disease risk or pregnancy outcomes typically requires teams of data scientists, months of coding, and endless debugging.

Now, according to a new study in Cell Reports Medicine, some AI systems can do much of that work in minutes – and in at least one case, they did it better than humans.

The Test: AI vs. the Crowd

Researchers at UC San Francisco and Wayne State University took eight large language models – the same class of AI that powers systems like ChatGPT – and dropped them into a serious biomedical competition. The team used data from three previous international DREAM Challenges, where more than 100 research teams had built predictive models tackling reproductive health questions such as:

• Can you predict gestational age from blood gene expression?

• Can you estimate the biological age of the placenta from DNA methylation?

• Can you detect risk of preterm birth from vaginal microbiome data?

So this is modern AI creating modeling code in Python vs. human-coded predictive models, not humans manually processing the data (to be clear). 

One dataset included around 360,000 molecular features. Another required parsing genomic data from public repositories. In the original competitions, human teams spent up to three months developing and tuning their models.

The AI systems were given a carefully written prompt describing the dataset and the task. Then they had to generate executable R or Python code from scratch. Researchers ran that code and measured how well the resulting models performed on unseen test data.

No special hints. No iterative coaching. Just one shot.

The Results: Faster, Sometimes Better

Four of the eight AI systems successfully generated working code and usable prediction models.

One of them – OpenAI’s o3-mini-high – completed nearly all the tasks and scored the highest overall.

But here’s the part that surprised even the researchers: on the placental aging task, one AI-generated model outperformed the top human team from the original challenge. The difference was statistically significant.

In other words, the AI built a more accurate predictor of placental gestational age than the best human competitors had.

And it generated the code in seconds to minutes.

By contrast, the human teams had months to refine their approaches. Some built complex multi-stage random forest systems and leveraged additional clinical information. The AI, using a relatively straightforward ridge regression model, still won.

Across the other tasks, AI models generally matched the median performance of human participants – solidly competitive, though not always beating the top experts.

Why This Matters

Preterm birth affects roughly 11 percent of infants worldwide and remains a leading cause of neonatal mortality. Clinicians still lack reliable predictive tools for many pregnancy complications.

Better models could mean; earlier identification of at-risk pregnancies, more precise timing of interventions, and reduced long-term complications for children – among other things. But building those models is slow. – requiring extensive writing, debugging, and standardizing analysis pipelines.

And this is where the LLMs kick ass – given that they’re especially strong at generating structured, reproducible workflows: loading data, splitting training and test sets properly, fitting models, calculating performance metrics, and even producing plots. Notably, none of the successful AI systems accidentally “leaked” test data into training – a surprisingly common human mistake that can inflate results.

That said, AI is still in its infancy and it wasn’t all a slam dunk. In fact, half of the tested models failed outright – often due to basic coding issues like referencing nonexistent packages or mishandling data formats. R code proved more reliable than Python in this setting.

Even the top models were stochastic: run the same prompt multiple times, and you might get slightly different modeling strategies or results.

And there’s a deeper concern. If many researchers rely on similar AI systems, they may converge on similar modeling approaches. That standardization could improve reproducibility – but it might also reduce methodological creativity.

Where is this Going?

Large language models are already showing promise in reading medical records, generating radiology reports, and assisting in pathology analysis. What’s new here is that they’re moving beyond language tasks into hands-on data science, writing actual code. 

The authors emphasize that human oversight remains critical. AI models can hallucinate, misunderstand instructions, or silently make errors. Advanced API-based systems also come with cost and privacy considerations, particularly in clinical contexts.

The question is; will AI in 1, 3, 5 years from now be error free? No hallucinations and generally considered reliable? 

h/t Capital.news

Authored by Kay Rubacek via The Epoch Times,

Most people have never heard of Mrinank Sharma. That is part of the problem.

Earlier this month, Sharma resigned from Anthropic, one of the most influential artificial intelligence companies in the world.

He had led its Safeguards Research Team, the group responsible for ensuring that Anthropic’s AI could not be used to help engineer a biological weapon.

His final project was a study of how AI systems distort the way people perceive reality. It was serious, consequential work for humankind.

His resignation letter was seen more than 14 million times on X.

It opened with the words, “the world is in peril.”

And it ended with a poem and by announcing that he was leaving one of the most consequential jobs in artificial intelligence to pursue a poetry degree. Yes, you read that right: peril and poetry.

The poem he quoted is, “The Way It Is,” by the American poet William Stafford.

It speaks of a thread that runs through a life—a thread that goes among things that change, but does not change itself. While you hold it, you cannot get lost. Tragedies happen. People suffer and grow old. Time unfolds, and nothing stops it. And the final line: you don’t ever let go of the thread.

Although he didn’t state it explicitly, I argue that that thread is morality. It is the enduring sense that some things are right and some things are wrong—not because a law says so, and not because it is profitable, but because human beings, at their best, have just always known it.

Sharma spent two years watching that thread being let go under pressure, in rooms the public is never shown.

His letter said:

“Throughout my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions.

“I’ve seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society, too.”

He wrote that humanity is approaching a threshold where “our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.”

He wanted to contribute in a way that felt fully in his integrity and to devote himself to what he called “the practice of courageous speech.”

A man who built defenses against bioterrorism concluded that the most important thing he could do next was learn to speak with honesty and courage.

That is a major signal about what is happening behind closed doors in AI research and development.

Many experts have compared the development of AI to the development of the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project was built in total secrecy. The public had no knowledge of it, no voice in how it was used, and no say in what came after. When it was over, some of the scientists who built it spent the rest of their lives in anguish. Several walked away during the project itself.

Sharma was not alone. Numerous safety researchers have walked off AI projects from multiple companies. These departures may be the only signals we, the public, have, because almost everything else about AI development is happening beyond public view. The internal debates, the safety trade-offs, the negotiations over what this technology will and will not be permitted to do—none of it is being shared with the people whose lives it will most profoundly shape. We are not part of this conversation. We are being presented with outcomes and told to adapt.

John Adams wrote that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, and is wholly inadequate for any other. George Washington warned that liberty cannot survive the loss of shared moral principles. The founders studied the collapse of republics throughout history and arrived at the same conclusion: The machinery of freedom requires a moral people to sustain it. Laws and institutions are not enough on their own. They depend on citizens and leaders who hold themselves to something that exists before the law and above it.

That is the thread of human society, and no AI system holds it. If people allow AI to replace the question of right and wrong with the measure of what is legal and permitted, the machine will carry that measure forward at a scale and speed that no previous generation has had to reckon with.

As Sharma ended his resignation letter, “You don’t ever let go of the thread.”

We are at a crossroads not unlike the one the atomic scientists faced.

Sharma’s resignation was a signal.

The wave of departures before and after it are signals.

The reported tensions between AI companies and government over where moral limits should be drawn are also signals.

Together, they are pointing at something the public has not yet been fully invited to consider: that the most important questions about this technology are being worked out without us, and that the thread of morality, which has always required people to hold it by choice, needs to be part of that conversation.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Military generals tend to be much more realistic about the potential negative consequences of going to war, as well as difficulties and challenges, over and against the often more hawkish policy-makers.

Currently, Pentagon generals appear to be belatedly speaking up, as Washington beats the drums of war on Iran. The Walls Street Journal reports Monday, “The Pentagon is raising concerns to President Trump about an extended military campaign against Iran, advising that war plans being considered carry risks including U.S. and allied casualties, depleted air defenses and an overtaxed force.” This is increasingly looking like a military buildup in search of a political and strategic rationale.

Of course, also not too distant in the collective memory of top brass is the disastrous 2003 Iraq invasion, which led to two decade long extremely difficult and bloody occupation and quagmire. 

The Bush administration had essentially said it would be a cake walk, with then-US Vice President Dick Cheney famously telling NBC’s Meet the Press in March 2003: “I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

Some remnant Neocons, who of course never learn their lesson – such as Senator Lindsey Graham – are currently trying to a paint a similar picture with Iran in 2026. Graham and even some within the Trump administration are arguing for full regime change. 

Removing the Ayatollah would more than likely require a ground invasion. But there will be significant hurdles with even just an air war, and it’s no less than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine issuing these dire warnings. According to a paraphrase and outline of what’s being freshly reported by WSJ:

1) Caine warned that the war plans under consideration carry a high risk of significant American and allied casualties.

2) He cautioned that a multi-day campaign would exhaust air-defense munitions and other limited-supply items, which are critical for protecting regional partners like Israel if Iran retaliates.

3) An intensive operation against Iran could deplete stockpiles to a level that would complicate U.S. readiness for a potential future conflict with China.

4) He described the potential campaign as one that could “stretch the military thin” and leave forces “overtaxed”.

5) Caine’s gave “high likelihood of success” reassurances before the January 2026 mission to apprehend Nicolas Maduro, he has been unable to provide similar guarantees regarding a large-scale strike on Iran.

President Trump has not made up his mind, the report says, but also: “Officials say the issues raised by Caine, widely seen as a trusted aide by Trump, and others will be a factor in the president’s decision on whether to attack Iran and how.”

Iran is prepared to make any strikes, however ‘limited’ they might be, into something costly for US forces. Already Tehran has said it would unleash ballistic missiles and drones on US bases in the region. Israel could come under fire too.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry has said Monday that any American military action, even on a small scale, would be seen as an act of war and unwarranted aggression. “And any state would react to an act of aggression as part of its inherent right of self-defense, ferociously. So that’s what we would do,” ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said at a briefing in Tehran.

Within hours after the WSJ report being out, President Trump slammed it as fake news, and has assured that if the decision to strike Iran is given by him as Commander-in-Chief, Caine will be fully supportive and ready…

Might Gen. Caine’s arguments from a place of caution win out? There’s a strong chance that he is speaking some sanity into Trump, who himself had repeatedly vowed on the campaign trail no more dumb regime change wars in the Middle East.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly has been quoted as saying: “General Caine is a talented and highly valued member of President Trump’s national security team. The president listens to a host of opinions on any given issue and decides based on what is best for U.S. national security.” 

* * *

Meanwhile, Hegseth on the hilarious Pentagon/DOD activity ‘pizza tracker’ as an indicator of imminent war chances: “I’ve thought of just ordering lots of pizza on random nights just to throw everybody off.”

PETER DOOCY: “There is an account on X that tries to forecast military action based on how busy the pizza places are around the Pentagon… Have you guys thought about maybe just going to the cafeteria?”

SECRETARY HEGSETH: “I’m aware of that account. I hadn’t thought of just… pic.twitter.com/rLiA5bzMuT

— Vivek Sen (@Vivek4real_) February 22, 2026

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“The SAVE Act can pass today under existing procedure. The obstacle is not the filibuster. It is the habit of surrendering to a myth.”

– Alex Muse on X

Lunacy proceeds from crime. In case you wonder why half the country has gone crazy, seek no further than Susan Rice’s stark warning to the other half of the country that is not crazy.

Ms. Rice was Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor and then “Joe Biden’s” Domestic Policy Advisor. She did a podcast last week with Preet Bharaha, former US Attorney in the SDNY, now a private lawyer with the Beltway law firm WilmerHale. Her message to Trump supporters: We’re coming after you when we’re back in power. “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

WEAPONIZATION: Susan Rice lays out her vision of a post-Trump America where supporters are rounded up and sent to reeducation camps or prisons. pic.twitter.com/IyEPXx4G9T

— @amuse (@amuse) February 20, 2026

It was an important signal and it got a lot of people’s attention. It telegraphed the fear running through the Lefty-left that their crimes against the country are being tallied, carefully catalogued, and presented to a grand jury in Florida.

The crimes are bundled as a multifaceted conspiracy to overthrow the US government.

Pretty serious.

Sedition and Treason.

Susan Rice knows what she (and others) did.

First, in the frantic days between Nov. 3, 2016 and January 20, 2017, Barack Obama’s White House cooked up the Russia collusion hoax with John Brennan’s CIA, James Comey’s FBI, and Loretta Lynch’s DOJ. Ms. Rice, who was in on it, notoriously wrote a CYA memo memorializing the meetings and planted it in her office desk to be easily discovered by the new Trump admin. The memo stated that “every aspect of this issue is handled by the intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book’.” Of course, that was exactly the opposite of what really happened. The mischief emanating from it has run for ten years, crime upon crime upon crime.

Secondly, and surely less-known to the American public, was Ms. Rice’s role as Domestic Policy Advisor under “Joe Biden.” Her actual job from 2021 to 2023 was to serve as a conduit for Barack Obama to run “Joe Biden’s” White House, along with Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken. During those years, the public rarely (if ever) saw Susan Rice. She avoided the news media and did not make public statements or appearances at White House events. The news media were happy to ignore her. They knew exactly what she was up to.

The prime concerns of this cabal were to protect the image (cover up the crimes) of Barack Obama and his associates, to cover up the criminal degeneracy of the Biden family, and to get the Democrat Party back in power by utterly destroying Donald Trump and the populist revolt he headed.

Everything done in “Joe Biden’s” name during those years was to guarantee his party’s return to power, especially the deluge of illegal aliens across the border to pad the census for congressional districts and provide millions of future voters indebted to the party for letting them in (and giving them tons of freebies when they got here. . . phones, housing, food, walking-around money).

Meanwhile, the Democrats erected an immense scaffold of NGOs to funnel taxpayer money into salaries for their corps of political activists — outfits such as Stacey Abrams’ empire of grift in Georgia, the national networks of Antifa and BLM street-fighters, and the matrix of Somali social service fraud in Minnesota and Maine.

This created a huge parasitical patronage class, basically a national racketeering operation.

Eventually all the NGO grift became an end in itself — the Democrats animating principle: grift for grift’s sake, power to just keep it all going and continue to cover up the crime behind it.

The vital component to all this was weapons-grade mind-fuckery to produce a fog of war that would keep the American public utterly bamboozled, unable to comprehend what was happening amid gales of hoaxes, ops, and scams. The Covid-19 caper was the doozy. We still don’t know definitively if the mRNA vaccine program was a deliberate depopulation project, but it kind of looked like it, while plenty of messaging from global institutions — from the Gates Foundation to the WEF to the UN — was pretty explicit about getting rid of useless eaters. On top of all that, throw in the trashing of Western Civ’s industrial economies with “green” trickery, adding another layer of anxiety onto a sore-beset citizenry.

Of course, despite their best efforts — and it was a mighty crusade of bad faith and ill will — the Democrats failed to vanquish Mr. Trump, a strange miracle itself suggesting some sort of divine intervention. The question now is, will Mr. Trump be able to vanquish them? It begins to look like he might, with plenty of help from the Democrats themselves, who have reached a pitch of madness rarely seen in human societies.

Their latest prank: a boycott of the State of the Union speech to Congress.

So far, seven senators and nine congresspersons have promised to bail on the speech, led ostensibly by Senator Adam Schiff of California, a liar so prodigious and fertile that it can be truly said he never uttered an honest word including “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.” This faction will gather on the mall instead and hurl objurgations at the Capitol rotunda.

All that’s needed to finish them off, really, is passage of the SAVE Act so that voters will be required to prove their identity and citizenship, and absentee ballots will be restricted to the old rules about being too sick to get to the poling place, or else out of the country.

Last week, staffers behind the walking mummy, Mitch McConnell, prevented the bill from reaching the Senate floor with some procedural rigmarole.

Mr. Trump must call them out, and call out Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), too, for dragging his feet on whatever’s necessary to pass the SAVE Act.

The country demands honest elections, and one way or another they’ll get them.

Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,

Over the past week or so, many on the political Right have understandably enjoyed a laugh or two at the expense of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, N.Y.). AOC went to the Munich Security Conference to provide “balance” to the Trump administration’s presence and to burnish her own credentials on the global stage. Instead, she mostly just made a fool of herself. Not only did she stutter, stammer, and offer a Kamala Harris-esque non-answer when asked about American interests in and obligations to Taiwan, but she also demonstrated a comically poor grasp of geography and a righteously ignorant understanding of history. In an effort to rebut and embarrass U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, AOC embarrassed only herself, showing that historical facts mean far less to her than identity-inspired fiction.

But while it’s inarguably fun to chuckle at and mock the ignorance of the smug congresswoman and presumed presidential aspirant, it is also important to acknowledge that her historical and political illiteracy extends beyond the superficial and touches on matters of real and critical importance. Notably, this purported champion of the working class does not know the history of working-class politics, does not understand the reasons for the collapse of the working-class-centered ideology, and, as a result, has never contemplated the dangers inherent in attempting to resuscitate that failed doctrine.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez has long emphasized her biography and working-class roots to enhance her political status—and justifiably so. Her childhood may not have been quite the struggle she pretends it was, but she nevertheless endured economic hardships—especially after her father’s death—and was unable to find employment commensurate with her education. She was, famously, a bartender and a cocktail waitress before her election to Congress and, as a result, has long fashioned herself a champion of the working class and its purported priorities.

Indeed, on her trip to Munich, AOC emphasized her affinity with the working class and admonished democratic nations to erect a bulwark against totalitarianism by focusing on workers, workers’ rights, and worker-centered politics. “It is of utmost urgent priority that we get our economic houses in order and deliver material gains for the working class,” the congresswoman said, “or else we will fall to a more isolated world governed by authoritarians that also do not deliver to working people.” She railed against large corporations and especially billionaires, insisting that they had to be stopped from “throwing their weight around” in domestic and international politics. In short, the good congresswoman used her trip to Munich to urge the workers of the world to unite, because, as she sees it, they have nothing to lose but their chains.

There’s only one little problem with AOC’s exhortation: it’s ridiculous. Indeed, it’s been tried . . . and tried . . . and tried. It doesn’t work. And when I say that, I don’t mean that socialism doesn’t work or that communism has been tried countless times before and failed every time. That much is obvious by now. Rather, what I mean is that the workers of the world don’t care about the rest of the workers of the world. They don’t like the idea of being divided into classes, and they don’t have any particular affection for their fellow laborers. They don’t dislike other workers necessarily, but they don’t see themselves as a monolithic federation sharing the same interests, needs, or political predilections. Truth be told—and this is the key to understanding the silliness of the whole “global proletariat” nonsense—even the Marxists long ago gave up on uniting the workers of the world. In fact, in the United States, the most prominent Marxist theorists actually gave up on workers altogether as allies in the fight against capitalism.

One of the most pervasive bits of common knowledge about World War I is the idea that the ruling classes of Europe did not expect it to last very long or to be particularly destructive. Kaiser Wilhelm infamously predicted that Germany’s troops would be home “before the leaves fall.” What is less well known is that this “short-war illusion” was shared and embraced even more unequivocally by the era’s Marxist agitators. They believed, as Engels in particular predicted, in the inevitability of a “new man,” who would evolve from the working classes and would never harm his fellow new men. Just two years before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, the Manifesto of the Second International Socialist Congress in Basel in 1912 declared that war between working men was a virtual impossibility:

It would be insanity for the governments not to realize that the very idea of the monstrosity of a world war would inevitably call forth the indignation and the revolt of the working class. The proletarians consider it a crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists, the ambitions of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties.

Of course, things didn’t exactly go as planned—either for the ruling classes or the Marxists. World War I did many things to Europe, most of them awful and ugly and demoralizing. It did many of the same things to Marxism. Although the war did incite revolution in Russia, that was far less than the Marxists had hoped for. Russia’s revolution was led by the educated classes and animated by peasants. Proletarian “workers” were largely non-existent. In the industrialized parts of Europe, workers flat out rejected appeals to class unity, choosing instead to fight for God and country. German workers saw themselves not as workers but as Germans. French workers saw themselves not as workers but as Frenchmen. And so it went.

In the aftermath of the war, Marxists were forced to confront two massive and related problems: the workers’ refusal to unite and the rise of profound and entrenched nihilism. In order to save their ideology, these Marxists had to revise it and explain its failures. As any schoolboy knows, they did so by concluding that the workers of the world did not understand their own interests or even their own natures. Workers were dissociated from their interests by the institutions of society, especially the institutions of cultural transmission: the Church, the schools, the media, art, entertainment, and so on. Therefore, to enable workers to see their real interests, those institutions had to be taken over, destroyed, and rebuilt along ideological lines. And thus began the Gramsci, Lukács, and Frankfurt School-led “long march through the institutions,” which largely killed economic Marxist theory, creating what we know today as “cultural Marxism.”

In 1964, Herbert Marcuse—a latecomer to the Frankfurt School who became America’s most prominent Marxist theorist—essentially gave up on the workers as the stimulators of revolution. As I have noted before in these pages, “Marcuse conceded that the capitalist system was simply too good at providing goods and services that made the masses comfortable and happy. It therefore deprived them of ever knowing or caring about their true oppressed consciousness. Workers had become one-dimensional consumers, distracted from their fate by their egos and the creature comforts of capitalism.” In turn, Marcuse laid the foundations for “identity politics,” which would, he believed, enable the rise of a new revolutionary class, motivated by new perceptions of oppression.

Long story short (if that’s possible any longer), over the course of the last century, Marxists gave up on workers and even on economics, deciding instead to focus on culture and identity-based grievances.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t appear to know any of this, of course, which means that she also doesn’t know that appeals to working-class unity have tended to end in tragedy, followed by massive, civilization-destroying revisionism. Most notably, because she doesn’t know that revisionism was necessary in Marxism, she also doesn’t know that the other stream of post-World-War-I Marxist revisionism ran through Rome and Berlin and resulted in authoritarianism on a scale previously unimagined.

AOC’s ignorance isn’t just about cowboys, in other words. It’s also about the greatest and most profound tragedies in world history. Her ignorance is dangerous.

After disrupting countless Software/SaaS/finance/real estate/broker sectors, Anthropic’s Claude is now going after targeted companies. 

A little before 2pm ET, Bloomberg sent out a headline that Anthropic’s Claude has found yet another skillset:

• *ANTHROPIC SAYS CLAUDE CODE CAN AUTOMATE COBOL MODERNIZATION

A herd of panicked IBM longs flooded to the Claude blog to read more on what is happening. Here’s what it found (excerpted): 

COBOL is everywhere. It handles an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the US. Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government.

Despite that, the number of people who understand it shrinks every year.

The developers who built these systems retired years ago, and the institutional knowledge they carried left with them. Production code has been modified repeatedly over decades, but the documentation hasn’t kept up. Meanwhile, we aren’t exactly minting replacements—COBOL is taught at only a handful of universities, and finding engineers who can read it gets harder every quarter.

Given these roadblocks, how can organizations modernize their systems without losing the reliability, availability, and data they’ve accumulated over decades? And without breaking anything?

* * * 

How AI changes COBOL modernization

AI excels at streamlining the tasks that once made COBOL modernization cost-prohibitive. With it, your team can focus on strategy, risk assessment, and business logic while AI automates the code analysis and implementation.

* * * 

Start your COBOL modernization

The approach outlined above works for COBOL systems of any size. Tools like Claude Code can automate much of the exploration and analysis work described, giving your team the comprehensive understanding they need to plan and execute migrations confidently.

Start with a single component or workflow that has clear boundaries and moderate complexity. Use AI to analyze and document it thoroughly, plan the modernization with your engineers, implement incrementally with testing at each step, and validate carefully.  This will build organizational confidence and surface adjustments needed for your systems.

In kneejerk reaction, IBM stock, already down sharply on the day, and tumbling 20% from its all time highs just earlier this month, plunged $15 to the lowest level since Liberation Day, briefly dipping below $230…

… as the market realized that it is the latest target of the Claude disruption train. You see, Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL)  is a high-level, English-like compiled programming language developed specifically for business data processing, via IBM. As such, anything that disrupts this lucrative ecosystem created by IBM (code COBOL, then sell consultancy contracts to adjust the code which virtually nobody knows how to use), would immediately smash IBM stock… and that’s precisely what happened. 

Which begs the question: after various Claude updates caused hundreds of billions in market cap damage in the past 3 weeks, is the company’s strategy to keep rolling incremental disruption updates becoming Antrhopic’s self-funding strategy. After all, if Dario Amodei had bought puts on IBM, and the dozens of companies that have plunge dmore than double digits in recent weeks, he would have made billions, certainly enough to fund his company for months if not years. 

And if not Anthropic, when will OpenAI – which needs capital much more badly than its enterprise-focused peer – do the same? 

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to hear two cases on Feb. 23 about U.S. business assets that Cuba’s communist government seized decades ago.

Both cases focus on the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act that was created to pressure Cuba by penalizing foreign companies “trafficking” in property that the Cuban regime seized from U.S. interests.

Also known as the Helms-Burton Act, the law allows U.S. citizens and companies to sue any person who traffics in or uses confiscated property. Trafficking in the statute includes using or profiting from the confiscated property.

The law defines “person” to include “any agency or instrumentality of a foreign state,” and contemplates civil judgments being obtained against “an agency or instrumentality of the Cuban Government.”

Cuba’s late dictator Fidel Castro overthrew the then-government in 1959 and turned Cuba into a one-party state in which socialist policies were implemented, including the nationalization of the assets of foreign businesses operating in Cuba at the time.

In Exxon Mobil v. Corporacion Cimex, Exxon Mobil seeks compensation from three Cuban government-owned companies for energy assets seized in 1960 after the communists took power. The company was previously known an Standard Oil Co.

Until recently, parties like Exxon were unable to pursue claims against Cuban government-owned enterprises under the Helms-Burton Act because President Bill Clinton suspended Title III—the part of the law allowing compensation lawsuits to be filed.

In his first term, President Donald Trump revoked the suspension on May 2, 2019, and Exxon Mobil filed its lawsuit the same day.

The legal issue in the case is whether the Helms-Burton Act “abrogates foreign sovereign immunity” in cases against Cuban entities, the company said in its petition.

Foreign sovereign immunity is a legal doctrine that prevents governments from being sued unless they agree to be sued. Abrogation is the act of formally annulling a law or legal provision.

In 2024, a divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that a separate federal statute poses an additional hurdle for lawsuits against Cuban entities. That court held that Title III claims may only proceed against Cuban entities if the lawsuit falls under an exception in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which generally forbids lawsuits against foreign governments but allows suits involving commercial activities or property seized in violation of international law.

The appeals court ruled that when the district court considered the case, it failed to properly analyze whether the commercial activities exception applied, and sent the case back to that court for further consideration.

Exxon Mobil argues the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act shouldn’t be interpreted to deprive the company of the judicial remedies promised by Helms-Burton.

Exxon is seeking compensation upwards of $1 billion for assets seized by the Cuban government in 1960. At the time of the confiscation of the assets, then belonging to subsidiaries owned by Standard Oil, they were worth $70 million. 

However, Exxon wants $1 billion in the current claim because interest has accrued and there is potential of enhanced damages. 

Cuban government-owned company Corporacion Cimex argued in a brief that if Exxon’s legal argument prevails, it could open U.S. courts to a flood of lawsuits against foreign entities like itself, despite the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act protections.

The other case, Havana Docks Corp. v. Royal Caribbean Cruises, involves U.S.-based company Havana Docks Corp., which, in its petition, described the case as “the most important case involving U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba to reach this Court in the past sixty years.”

Havana Docks Corp. built the port of Havana’s docks at its own expense in exchange for a concession to run those docks for 99 years. The Cuban government unilaterally ended the concession without compensation in 1960, which had 44 years left to run, along with the company’s property interest in the docks, according to the petition.

In October 2024, a divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit overturned a more than $100 million judgment against various cruise lines for trafficking in confiscated property by using expropriated docks in Cuba.

The appeals court held that the cruise lines could not be held liable for using the port facilities because Havana Docks’s property interest “expired in 2004,” according to the provisions of the 99-year concession the company was originally granted.

The appeals court “effectively nullified” the right to sue under Title III, the company said in the petition.

The petition said the cruise lines used the confiscated docks even after the U.S. Department of Justice’s Foreign Claims Settlement Commission certified Havana Docks’s claim against Cuba for taking its property interest in the docks.

The cruise lines disembarked almost one million tourists on the docks from 2015 to 2019, paying Cuba at least $130 million and earning more than $1 billion from their Cuban cruises, the petition said.

The cruise lines argue that Havana Docks Corp. has no legal claim against them because even though that company once had permission to use the docks, it never actually owned the docks, which always remained the property of the Cuban government.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the two cases by the end of June.