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We have always been obsessed with last words, the final utterances of the human mind right before death. Some have religious significance, such as Jesus saying “It is finished” from the cross. (In the original Greek it is “Tetelestai,” a legal term which translates more accurately into “Paid in full.”)
Start spreading the news: The Empire State is hitting the polls next week, and the election is gonna be something wild. Cook Political’s Erin Covey is our tour de force guide through the many candidates vying to represent the city’s distinct locales, including a “Commie Corridor,” which bumps up against the Wall Street district, which lies just south of the newlywed Upper East/Upper West Side “You’ve Got Mail District.” Let’s just say these neighbors have varied opinions on AI, Israel, the proper minimum wage and paid family leave. Our duo also hops over the Hudson to look into a couple races of interest to NY Republicans before making a quick trip to Maryland 5, where a 24-way race has brewed up to replace retiring Steny Hoyer.
Plus, Henry breaks down this week’s results from Georgia and Alabama, and considers how Trump’s current approval numbers may affect once-safe GOP Senate seats.
I react with contempt to the article “What ‘Created Equal’ Means in America” by William A. Galston in the Wall Street Journal today.
This is an attack on Republicans for objecting to unselective mass immigration in recent years, portraying any objections as a violation of the foundational American principle that “all men are created equal.”
I think my favorite line about the controversy of the San Francisco Giants pitchers who “defaced” their gay rainbow caps with a Bible reference came from the person who wrote (sorry, I forget who), “Major League Baseball is run by a group of HR women from Connecticut.”
If you’re not up on the story, like many MLB teams, the Giants mandated their players wear caps to “honor” Pride Month. J.T. Brubaker, Landon Roupp, and Ryan Walker have moral objections to promoting what they believe is sinful behavior. So, they found a way to wear the rainbow flag in good conscience. They wrote a Bible reference on their caps next to the rainbow, Genesis 9: 12 – 16 :
Teacher unions have long dominated education politics, but their influence is waning. Amber Northern of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute joins Freedom to Learn to discuss a new report ranking teacher union strength across all 50 states. She explains why union membership declined in almost every state, which states remain union strongholds, and how the growing number of school choice advocates, parent groups, and education reform organizations are reshaping the balance of power in state education policy. We dig into the data on collective bargaining, strikes, stakeholder perceptions, and political influence as we explore the evolving role of teacher unions in America.
A Crowded Table: Teacher Union Strength in 2026: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/crowded-table-teacher-union-strength-2026
The unsurprising UK Rape Gang Inquiry Report is out. A quarter of a million young women and girls have been groomed and abused by Muslim men all across the UK. The police knew. The entire strategy of the government has been to suppress what should have been national rage rather than go after perverts and criminals who should be in jail and/or deported. (The report is being as fiercely ignored as possible by the BBC, Guardian, etc)
Keeping womenfolk safe from rape by foreign intruders is kinda Manhood 101, as is avenging such abuse.
I’ve just about had my fill of all the Pride activities going on during the month of June. Has anyone ever thought that these folks, celebrating their main achievement in life as embracing the LGBTQ++ lifestyle, is just a little odd? Forget inventing a cure for cancer or flying spacecraft to the moon. Wearing a Pride flag is their medal of honor.
But I’m letting myself get sidetracked from the real issue here: discrimination against Christians. Three pitchers on the San Francisco Giants baseball club were chastised by the MLB for using a small demonstration of their Christian faith:
The painting of Paul Cezanne’s “The Murder.”
Recently, there has been a lot of reporting about two horrible murders of white men by non-whites. Austin Metcalf in America and Henry Nowak in Britain. The murders were both tragic and evil, as murders usually are. Perhaps it is my pessimistic nature, but individual murders don’t bother me much. A small percentage of people go crazy and murder other people for no sensible reason. It’s a part of life. What has disturbed me more is that a significant contingent of blacks in America and Sikhs in Britain are more tribally oriented than justice oriented.
In this week’s episode of The Learning Curve, co-hosts Prof. Albert Cheng of Ohio State University and Alisha Searcy of the Center for Strong Public Schools speak with Dr. Suzanne Marrs, Professor Emerita of English at Millsaps College and acclaimed biographer of Eudora Welty, about the life, works, and enduring legacy of one of America’s greatest Southern writers. Prof. Marrs explores how Welty’s upbringing in Jackson, Mississippi, her family’s love of literature, and her mother’s devotion to Charles Dickens helped shape her imagination and literary voice. She discusses Welty’s travels throughout the South and her work as a Works Progress Administration photographer during the Great Depression, explaining how these experiences informed both her photography and fiction. She highlights celebrated short stories such as Death of a Traveling Salesman, A Worn Path, and Where Is the Voice Coming From?, as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Optimist’s Daughter, examining their themes of memory, race, family, resilience, and love. Prof. Marrs concludes by reflecting on Welty’s National Historic site home in Jackson, Mississippi, and the timeless significance of her literary legacy in 21st-century America. She closes with a reading from Eudora Welty: A Biography.
There’s a long, shadowy tradition of films about dark motives, hidden conspiracies and fevered psychology. In 1962, now almost two-thirds of a century ago, John Frankenheimer directed The Manchurian Candidate, a robust candidate for any list of politically paranoid thrillers. China, Russia, the North Koreans, even hidden traitors in our own government—everyone, seemingly, is in on the secret truth, everyone but you and me.
Other members in good standing of Paranoid Pictures include Robert Kramer’s harrowing dystopian ICE (1970), the JFK assassins of Executive Action (1974), the genial lunacy of Winter Kills (1976), and, of course, one of the undisputed “thought leaders” of the whole Deep State genre, 1974’s The Parallax View.
Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” was published in 1776, shortly before America’s Declaration of Independence. Smith famously described an “invisible hand” at work behind markets and exchanges, but what did he really mean, and how have so many people misunderstood his many ideas about trade, markets, and free enterprise?
Professor Brianne Wolf discusses Smith in surprising terms: he was first concerned with human morality and behavior, in the connections and community that individuals built with one another. Trade and economics were downstream of those fundamentals. Beyond that, Smith’s explanation of the advantages of markets over central planning or forced commerce are not well-known today – despite their relevance in the face of arguments in favor of government control of economic behavior.
My wife and I went to the diner the other day. Our oven is on the fritz, and we are trying to wait on 4th of July sales before we replace it. Sure, there are endless meals that we could make on the stovetop, but we decided to eat out.
If you are not sure what you want, you can’t go wrong with a Jersey diner. Usually, the menu is eight to ten pages long, so you should be able to find something. A proper diner will have excellent breakfast items that are served always (so you don’t have to go all “Falling Down” if you want breakfast at 11:31 AM). While diners will each have their own specialties, every diner will have great burgers, fries (regular and Disco), club sandwiches, hot open-faced sandwiches (turkey or roast beef), pot roast, meatloaf, and matzo ball soup. If the diner is owned by a Greek family (and it really should be), they will also have very good gyros, moussaka, and spanakopita.
Happy Father’s Day! While Chris is pulled away for journalism stuff, Ben talks about more important things with America’s football family. Jack and John Harbaugh talk about building character, raising families, and living with gratitude. “Who’s got it better than us? Nobody!”
Listeners: Always run out your pop flies, or Jack Harbaugh will make you — and probably your brother — walk home.
Americans get a lot of flak for calling the World Cup game “soccer.” Jabs come for a variety of reasons. A nearly forgotten charge implied arrogance: how dare we abrogate the name “football” for our domestic favorite when there are so many other games—rugby, Australian rules, soccer, Gaelic—under the umbrella. That one never landed. We call ourselves Americans at Mexican and Canadian expense, so we aren’t about to get the vapors over a ball game. Now the world calls soccer “football” so that one’s more or less forgotten.
An odd new front paints “soccer,” our preferred term, as an Americanism; as an abomination spread by Yanks and maintained despite an otherwise global conformation to “football.” The claim that everybody else is down with “football” is specious, but put that aside. This one doesn’t land either. We’re the only ones measuring by an inch, arbitrarily defined as roughly the length of three barley grains, rather than using the scientific metric measurements, which arbitrarily define a meter as one ten millionth of the distance from the pole to the midway point of the planet we happen to be on, which only coincidentally approximates the comfortable yard. But put that aside, too. “Soccer” was the preferred English term until pretty recently.
Governments derive powers from “the consent of the governed.” Don’t they? In one of the earliest constitutional cases, the Supreme Court seemed to say so. But the Eleventh Amendment threw a wrench in it all, making it exceptionally difficult for us to hold the government accountable in the courts when it violates our rights.
In Episode 3, Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett, NYT columnist and author Jesse Wegman, and Cato Institute Senior Vice President for Legal Studies Clark Neily discuss Chisholm v. Georgia.
Absolutely true story: Mrs. Pessimist’s sister Rita bought a new Tesla. Rita and her husband Jim drove us to a local barbecue restaurant last night. Rita was behind the wheel but was eager to show off the self-driving feature. We had not gone three blocks when a lawn maintenance person jumped from his large enclosed truck into the road very close to us. The Tesla immediately lurched to a stop, which would have put me on the floor if I had not been wearing my seatbelt. I asked if I could sue Elon for the neck sprain I suffered. Jim said, “Probably, but you will have to get in line.”
They asked their car to take us to the restaurant by the quickest route possible without using the Interstate. So of course we wound around quite a bit before we got to the restaurant. On the way back, Jim decided to show off the AI features of the car computer by asking it to tell some jokes. The first one was pretty lame, so Jim told some “Your Mama is so fat” jokes. Their computer is named Daisy. Apparently you have a binary choice of voices to listen to, either male or female. They chose female and call her Daisy any time they talk to her. When Jim asked for some “Your Mama is so fat” jokes, Daisy replied that those jokes were inappropriate and offensive to many people. Jim angrily replied, “You are a liar, Daisy. You told us those jokes before.” At that point Daisy said, “I don’t like your tone of voice and this conversation is over. Goodbye.”
Like many of us, I can find a thread of humor in just about anything, no matter how horrible. For instance, I was in awe of the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode in which Larry David got away with a 9/11 joke, a Holocaust joke, and a glass eye joke, all within the same hour.
But here’s the thing. Although those jokes dealt with very sensitive topics, they were not mean or disrespectful. And the extreme discomfort created by the topic is part of what made them funny. The 9/11 joke involved a surreal cocktail party argument over whether a guy killed in a bicycle accident uptown on 9/11 “counted” as a 9/11 death. The Holocaust joke involved “survivors” invited to a dinner party, except that through a miscommunication, one of them was a concentration camp survivor while the other was a contestant on the TV show “Survivor.” They then get into an insane disagreement over who had it worse. The glass eye joke involved Larry in a car with his Holocaust survivor uncle (who had been at the dinner) and struggling with the reflection from the eye.
Several years ago, not long before my dear Auntie Pat died, she sent a few things (at great expense) through the mail, for me to hold onto, or distribute, among the small contingent of family that’s here in the US. One of those items was a very old copy of Kings and Queens (pictured here) by Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon, early twentieth-century British siblings with a knack for churning out reliably popular children’s stories, poems, and songs. Eleanor is best known outside the UK for the hymn “Morning has Broken,” which put Yusuf Islam (AKA Cat Stevens) on the map in 1972. Oh, well. It’s a pretty song.
Kings and Queens covers every monarch since William the Bastard with a historically accurate and easy-to-memorize little poem. Pat’s copy of the book was given to her by her parents at Christmas in 1936, and covers every monarch from William through George V (Charles III’s maternal great-grandfather). The book was originally published in 1932, and Pat’s copy appears to be a first edition.
I am enjoying the recent widely shared reports of discoveries by visitors to the United States coming for World Cup games. As these visitors explore our country, they have been reminding us life-long residents of the United States that we take much for granted.
There have been for several years YouTube channels by visitors traveling the United States that I have found encouraging by reminding me of the wonders of the United States and its people – wonders I often overlook and assume are universal. One way to find some of these is to look for a foreigner’s reaction to Buc-ee’s (this is a gas station?!) or to Walmart or to a modern American supermarket.
Peptides are amino acids that are used to issue instructions to the body’s various systems. Ozempic, Mounjaro and Retatrutide are all peptides. These GLP-1s have a ridiculous number of things they do in terms of measurable results of reduction: cancer rates, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, obesity, even aging. Some countries are considering making GLP-1s available to all (not just the obese or diabetic) because of these benefits.
There are a host of other things that “biohackers” are injecting. I am posting this here because I think anyone with knee or joint pain would do well to check out BPC-157. I have personal knowledge of people who have cured chronic knee pain with 1-3 injections of the peptide. Old muscle pain? Totally fixable with a trivial injection.
Please permit me to tell you the legend of Howard Beale. Howard was a renowned national news anchor. One night the insanity of the world became too much to endure, and Howard completely lost it on air. He urged all his viewers to go open a window and scream out, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
Well, because Howard was a fictional character in a movie called Network, Howard’s rant went viral years before the internet and the phrase “went viral” was invented.
Beginning on June 14, we celebrate National Flag Week in this country. Our flag has 50 stars to represent our 50 states.
But when the flag was first created, it resembled the British flag, and our Founders wanted the flag to make a statement about our independence and our freedom:
The Renaissance painter, whose Italian name is Raffaello Sanzio, has his first ever comprehensive exhibition in the United States at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, 522 years after his death. The above picture shows the Met on Tuesday of this past week when my wife Caryn and I visited the show. This is only a small view of the enormous museum, whose front steps are more than 150 feet wide, providing leisurely seating for hundreds of New Yorkers who were just hanging out and enjoying the beautiful afternoon.
We almost didn’t make it to the show when our car’s alternator died at 10 PM in the middle of nowhere on Interstate 80 in New Jersey. By the grace of God, the car was able to creep along the berm at low speed, lunging and lurching the whole time, with no working lights except for the hazard, for two miles until we reached a miraculous highway rest stop. Getting weaker all the time, the car literally died right at the entrance to the parking lot. I immediately jumped out and found three illegal aliens who had coincidentally driven their own disabled car into the rest stop for safety only minutes earlier. They generously helped me push our car into the lot since it was blocking the entrance. To make an originally distressful but ultimately successful story short, the tow-truck driver knew exactly what was wrong with the car and who to take it to for a fast repair. He dropped us off at a hotel, the car was fixed by 10:15 the next morning and we were on our way!
In April 1941, a pro-Nazi coup occurred in Iraq. Believing Britain was losing World War II to Germany, Iraqi Pan-Arab nationalists ousted Iraq’s pro-British monarch. The Golden Square, a military junta, replaced the monarchy. It invited in the Germans and Italians, who sent in Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica aircraft.
1941: Thirty Days in May, a novel by JD Wood, tells of the six months preceding the coup and the subsequent thirty-day Anglo-Iraqi War. It follows events through three participants.
Maddie Miller is an American. She is an English tutor in Baghdad, teaching the children of Iraq’s elite. Yet she is also an operative for British intelligence. She has her pulse on the pro-Nazi movement within the Iraqi Army.
Nathan Pinkowski has a great essay in the Claremont Review of Books on what has only become clear with the passage of time, based on the release of old information under FOIA about then-associate director of the FBI, Mark Felt, coming out as “Deep Throat” in 2005.
Though the Ervin Committee praised J. Edgar Hoover’s resistance to the Huston Plan, the committee failed to mention that the plan described activities in which the FBI was already engaged and continued to be engaged. As was finally revealed in 2005, “Deep Throat” was Associate Director of the FBI Mark Felt, who had overseen some of the bureau’s more controversial domestic spying operations. He appeared to be Hoover’s natural heir, but after Hoover died, Nixon twice passed him over in order to appoint an outsider to lead the bureau instead, which enraged Felt. For Yale historian Beverly Gage, “Felt cooperated with Woodward not to preserve the American Constitution or to limit the imperial presidency, as the standard Watergate myths would suggest, but to protect the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover.”
