The United Kingdom's public health service is reportedly refusing to release data on the potential relationship between the COVID vaccine and excess deaths. The reason? It would upset people to know the truth. The question is whether British citizens have become so passive and yielding that they will support their government, keeping them from learning the facts about vaccines and allowing them to reach their own conclusions.

The UK has long embraced speech controls and censorship to protect citizens from unacceptable views or what one criminal defendant was told were "toxic ideologies."

Social media companies assisted governments in censoring opposing scientific views during the pandemic, including those regarding the potential dangers of the vaccines.

According to Lebanese officials, an Israeli strike on a car in south Lebanon killed a school principal identified as Mohammad Shweikh, amid rising cross-border tensions. UNIFIL reported tank fire on its forces as Israel continues to violate a ceasefire agreement that ended months of destructive fighting.

NNA earlier reported Israeli drone activity over villages in the western sector, particularly the Tyre district, as well as over Zahrani and nearby areas.

The agency said Israeli aircraft also dropped flares over the border town of Yaroun, while Israeli forces "threw a smoke bomb toward the Ain Square in the town of Adaisseh" in southern Lebanon.

Isn't it obvious what's at the heart of this Jeffrey Epstein psychodrama? The country is sick unto near-death with official secrecy, cover-ups, black ops, stonewalling, and never-ending games of political hide-the-salami — especially when those salamis are directed up the Republic's own rear end. The worst victim of sexual abuse is America herself. Can't somebody please make it stop?

And so, over the weekend, psychodrama devolved to soap opera as President Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene acted-out their lovers' quarrel on every public channel of news and gossip until, finally, Mr. Trump pulled one of his trademark ju-jitsu moves and yielded to all that implacable forward motion to release the Epstein files.

What the public really wants is to find out which celebrities, politicians and otherwise, were having sex with underage girls so said celebrities can be frog-marched out of public life. It's hard to not sympathize with that wish. It's kind of fundamental that perverts and degenerates are not deserving of public trust. The people in this land who are not perverts and degenerates yearn for the reestablishment of decent behavior, and sexual indecency is only the most garish sort of depravity. Beyond that lies the shadowland of grift, racketeering, sedition, and treason at issue in the ongoing decline-of-empire tragedy that's played out for a decade. And the non-depraved long to get to the bottom of that, too.

In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym "J. Stone," argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire "woke" era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.

The basic facts of the Summers case were familiar to me. On January 14, 2005, at a conference on "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce," Larry Summers gave a talk that was supposed to be off the record. In it, he said that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to "different availability of aptitude at the high end" as well as taste differences between men and women "not attributable to socialization." Some female professors in attendance were offended and sent his remarks to a reporter, in defiance of the off-the-record rule. The ensuing scandal led to a no-confidence vote by the Harvard faculty and, eventually, Summers's resignation.

The essay argued that it wasn't just that women had cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they'd cancelled him in a very feminine way. They made emotional appeals rather than logical arguments. "When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT. Summers made a public statement clarifying his remarks, and then another, and then a third, with the apology more insistent each time. Experts chimed in to declare that everything Summers had said about sex differences was within the scientific mainstream. These rational appeals had no effect on the mob hysteria.

AI hype may soon meet fiscal reality — and, if history is any guide, the American taxpayer will be left raped, holding the bag, while the perpetrators of the bubble will face no real consequences whatsoever.

On the contrary, they'll be rewarded for their recklessness — the classic "moral hazard."

Chaos erupted in front of Mexico's National Palace in Mexico City on Saturday after anti-corruption protests turned violent following the recent cartel murder of Uruapan Mayor Carlos Manzo. Protesters are furious with leftist President Claudia Sheinbaum, while the government blames right-wing business interests for stoking the unrest.

Reuters reports that 120 people and 100 police officers were injured outside the National Palace when a large group of anti-government protesters led by Gen Zers clashed with Sheinbaum's security forces.

The US military has been accused of spraying toxic chemicals into the air for decades as part of a secret program that has backfired in its goal of stopping global warming.

Dane Wigington, an environmental researcher for 30 years, claimed that the conspiracy surrounding 'chemtrails' is not only true but has actually crippled the Earth's ability to naturally overcome the pollution caused by humans.

The 'chemtrail' conspiracy focuses on the idea that the government has been spraying a host of dangerous chemicals from commercial airliners for several reasons, including to control the weather and make people sick.

The company has been accused of secretly enabling Gemini to collect data without user knowledge or consent.

Google has been accused in a lawsuit of using its AI assistant Gemini to illegally intercept and monitor the private communications of users across its Gmail, chat, and video-conferencing services, Bloomberg has reported.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in a California federal court, said the Alphabet Inc. unit had previously made its AI optional for Gmail, Chat and Meet users, but then "secretly" enabled Gemini to access those applications in October, the outlet wrote on Wednesday. The complaint alleged this allowed data collection "without the users' knowledge or consent."

The class-action suit reportedly claims that while Google allows users to disable the AI assistant, doing so requires navigating the company's privacy settings. The complaint states that unless users take this step, Google utilizes Gemini to "access and exploit the entire recorded history of its users' private communications, including every email and attachment sent and received in their Gmail accounts."

Another cockroach crawls out of the woodwork...

In the grand tradition of Wall Street's endless parade of "resilient" investments that evaporate faster than a hedge fund's excuses, BlackRock - that $10 trillion behemoth masquerading as a fiduciary - has just discovered the hard way that private debt isn't quite the "uncorrelated" panacea it's been hawking to pension funds and the terminally optimistic.

Bloomberg reports that a mere month ago, the iShares overlords were marking Renovo Home Partners' IOUs at a pristine 100 cents on the dollar, as if the Dallas-based kitchen-and-bathroom flipper was churning out profits like an OnlyFans 'influencer'.

Fast-forward to last week, and poof: valuation revised to a resounding zero.

Because nothing says "diversification" like watching your balance sheet get torched in a single earnings call.

It is obvious we no longer have the same quality relationship with nature that we used to. In fact, humans have been trying to distance themselves from dirty, savage, ugly nature since man discovered he might actually be different than the beasts he encountered — the beasts could easily dominate and eat.

One primary reason why man opposed Darwin's theories so vehemently is that humans abhorred the idea that we might be related to such disgusting beasts as apes. They saw utterly no correlation with such animals: they were stupid, they defecated in the woods, they didn't wear clothes, they were ugly, and of course, the most important reason, they were not God's chosen animal. (Just for the record, I do not wholeheartedly believe in Darwin's theories myself, but not because I find animals disgusting.)

Before Darwin's theories swept the human world, humans never even considered the idea we descended from anything at all in nature. It seemed we were obviously "connected" in some way — we were physically related to other mammals, we had two eyes, a head, two arms, teeth, etc. but we were so radically different in spirit, intelligence (so we thought) and other obvious things we would be fine, if not better off, to distance ourselves from any of that dirty stuff we call "nature."

Western man's concerted effort to separate himself from nature traces back to the Enlightenment era, when thinkers like René Descartes proclaimed Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), positioning human reason as supreme and distinct from the mechanistic, soulless world of animals and the natural environment. This dualism framed nature as a resource to be conquered through science and industry, culminating in the Industrial Revolution's factories, urban sprawl, and exploitation of resources. Religious influences, particularly Judeo-Christian interpretations of Genesis — where man is granted "dominion" over the earth — further justified subjugation, viewing wilderness as chaotic and in need of taming. By the 19th century, Romanticism briefly pushed back with ideals of sublime nature, but Victorian hygiene movements and urbanization accelerated the divide, associating rural life with backwardness and disease while celebrating sanitized, controlled city environments.