"It's chaos here"

The US State Department is warning all American citizens to exercises extreme caution when traveling abroad amid the ongoing US-Israeli military operation against Iran, which has included two days of heavy bombing aimed at regime change - and which has already resulted in the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and some 40 top military leaders.

"Following the launch of U.S. combat operations in Iran, Americans worldwide and especially in the Middle East should follow the guidance in the latest security alerts issued by the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate," a fresh weekend US notification says. "They may experience travel disruptions due to periodic airspace closures. The Department of State advises Americans worldwide to exercise increased caution."

Not only is Israel's airspace closed, as Iranian retaliatory ballistic missiles rain down, but much of the Gulf nations have restrictions and airspace closures in place. This after at least two regional airports have been struck.

Thirty-five years ago, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama made a name for himself by advancing the proposition that the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union promised the ascendency and universalization of so-called Western liberal democracy. As a Marxist-Hegelian who saw the progression of history as an evolutionary process with a natural and predetermined conclusion, Fukuyama envisioned Western-styled liberalism as both "the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution" and "the final form of human government." Expecting all human struggles to barrel toward a state of imminent equilibrium and future peace, Fukuyama stated out loud what many other late-twentieth century thinkers also believed: Humanity had reached the end of history.

After the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks in the United States, two decades of the "Global War on Terrorism," communist China's expansive "Belt and Road Initiative," immigration-fueled social strife, the collapse of public trust in government institutions, the prevalence of pre-civil war conditions across Europe, the rise of Indian economic power, the emergence of Donald Trump's nationalism as a counterbalance to the World Economic Forum's vaunted globalism, the return of the Russian Federation as a major source of European angst, the growth of "multiculturalism" and its attendant fracturing of national unity, the "great powers" competition for hydrocarbon energies and other natural resources, the new geopolitical race to project strength in the Arctic, and the ever-present discussion of an impending World War III — just to name a few of the numerous global conflicts of the first quarter of the present century — Fukuyama's "end of history" argument has probably reached the end of its usefulness.

An audit by the European Commission had uncovered contaminated beef in January, and yet that same day German Chancellor Merz urged for the deal to move forward.

Opponents of Brussels' deal with Latin American countries to import agricultural products are being proven right, unfortunately. Meat containing a banned growth hormone has shown up in the EU, a Dutch authority has reported, leading Polish authorities to order urgent inspections by the relevant inspectorates.

EU farmers and multiple groups warned that the lack of safety regulations in use across the Mercosur countries would lead to such outcomes.

The Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority announced that it had detected Brazilian beef contaminated with estradiol, a growth hormone used to stimulate estrus in cattle that is banned in the European Union, writes Do Rzezcy.

Mental health professionals decided not to detain the Nottingham triple killer Valdo Calocane despite a violent incident in 2020, after they considered research that addressed the over-representation of young black men in custody, a public inquiry has been told.

Calocane, who has paranoid schizophrenia, fatally stabbed 19-year-old students Barnaby Webber and Grace O'Malley-Kumar, and 65-year-old Ian Coates, and severely injured three others on 13 June 2023.

He was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order in January 2024 after admitting three counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and three counts of attempted murder.

A public inquiry began on Monday to assess the "events, acts and omissions" that allowed Calocane to be free to kill and what can be done to prevent something similar happening again.

Just yesterday afternoon we published a piece headlined "Epstein and the coming "age of accountability" psy-op", which argued that the Epstein files are being used to tell a story of faux-accountability for the ruling class.

That's the narrative in a nutshell. The system is fair and treats everyone the same. Old Guard bad, corruption being rooted out, accountability for the old boys club. Like #MeToo on crack.
[...]
[T]he safe prediction is that this age of pretended accountability has some way to go yet, and some flagging member of the American upper class is probably going to have to fall on their sword to push the narrative forward

Well, since then the MSM - as they so often do - have hurried to publish evidence to prove OffG's point.

There's this bizarre strategic blunder from banker Baroness Ariane de Rothschild, who features in a front-page story in the Telegraph:

Plastering "Please ignore my big sinister secrets!" across the banner of a major newspaper is such a suicidally bad PR move it's almost comical, especially from a member of a family who have perfected never appearing in the newspapers.

A Maryland school district that lost a recent U.S. Supreme Court case will pay $1.5 million to parents who weren't allowed to opt their children out of LGBT story time, the families' attorneys said.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented the plaintiffs in the landmark Mahmoud v. Taylor case, announced the settlement on Feb. 20. The defendant, the Montgomery County Board of Education — which oversees Montgomery County Public Schools, the largest school district in the state — was also ordered to comply with court orders mandating advance notice and opt-out provisions.

"Public schools nationwide are on notice: running roughshod over parents' rights and religious freedom isn't just illegal — it's costly," Eric Baxter, Becket senior counsel and the lead attorney in the case, said in a Feb. 20 statement.

"This settlement enforces the Supreme Court's ruling and ensures parents, not government bureaucrats, have the final say in how their children are raised."

A California community college professor cannot be required to embed diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility practices in his classroom, a federal judge has ruled.

The decision is the latest development in a nearly three-year-old lawsuit filed by Daymon Johnson, a history professor at Bakersfield College, part of the Kern Community College District. Johnson is also faculty lead of the Renegade Institute for Liberty.

Two California Code of Regulations provisions would require Johnson to employ teaching, learning, and professional practices reflecting diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, or DEIA, as well as mandate the professor establish proficiency in DEI to teach or lead within California's community colleges, the decision states.

But a faculty institute that Johnson leads does not conform to DEI concepts, as it is "dedicated to the pursuit of free speech, open inquiry, critical thinking to advance American ideals within the broader Western tradition of meritocracy, individual agency, civic virtue, liberty of conscience and free markets," its website states.

I recently attended an event at the Prosperity Institute in the United Kingdom, and, as a foreigner listening to the discussion unfold, I found it both unsettling and clarifying. The panel addressed the grooming gang scandal, a subject that remains profoundly uncomfortable for Britain's political and cultural establishment. What distinguished this event was its refusal to soften the reality of what occurred or to retreat into evasive language. The discussion did not merely revisit past failures; it exposed a deeper pattern in how British institutions exercise power.

At the center of the panel was Fiona Goddard — a victim of grooming who spoke with calm precision. She described how the police betrayed her trust after she came forward with her story, only to discover that information she had shared in confidence had been passed back to members of the grooming gang. That institutional betrayal placed her at renewed risk and compounded the original abuse. She also recounted something even more disturbing. The men who groomed her told her explicitly that they targeted her because she was white and that their aim was to destroy white girls. The starkness of her testimony stripped away any remaining illusions about the ideological framing that has often surrounded these crimes.

I thought it was the rape

The Epstein Scandal, reignited after the Department of Justice published over 3.5 million partially redacted pages, has dominated the headlines for weeks. While others may wish to pore over the documents and attempt to piece together a coherent narrative, we can learn an essential feature of the progressive elite through examining mainstream coverage of the scandal.

New York Magazine recently published an article initially titled "Pizza Gate Was Not Real. Right?", where Dan Brooks ostensibly discusses the recent tranche of files. However, while the piece is concerned with the details of the theory and viral supporting evidence, the author himself is primarily focused on defending the liberal order against the "well-documented conspiracy of morons."

In both this article and others concerning similarly inconvenient sex scandals, we see progressive authors act more upset that the ruling class has been discredited — and the so-called 'far-right' proven correct — than they are with the scandal itself. This trend reveals a flaw in progressive self-conception and undermines the moral legitimacy of the regime.

The state is lecturing its citizens about the supposed danger of their diets, again.

Here comes the 1st battalion of desk jockeys to lecture you about your dinner's carbon footprint.

Daily life in France used to be simple, until the government decided to appoint itself Mother Nature's personal bodyguard, and the average citizen was declared her number one threat. Their latest salvo is to make the climate more resilient, even if it means that you end up less so.

The newly published "national strategy for food, nutrition, and climate: 2025-2030" points out that "32% of the adult population consumes too much meat other than poultry," "63% too much cold cuts," and not enough fruits and vegetables. You can probably guess what comes next:

"Yep, here come the lectures about cow farts and deuces again!"
Correct!