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California’s Self-Inflicted Squeeze

Energy Island

Long time readers may recall the many articles we wrote over many years highlighting the madness of California planners and policymakers. We were born and raised in the land of fruits and nuts and lived and worked there for over four decades.

About four years ago, we made our California exodus. At the time, we thought our coverage of the Golden State’s self-destruction would continue. We still have family and friends there who we visit from time to time. But, as we’ve found, without a front row seat to the big show we’re less inclined to gawk at the insanity. Articles on California have diminished to a slow trickle.

Today, however, following a recent conversation with a friend and California resident, we aim our sights at our former home state. Once again, California delivers a rich example of what happens when central planning outweighs economic reality. Here the specific example involves extreme intervention in oil and gas markets.

Policymakers in Sacramento, over many decades, have operated under the assumption that if petroleum production, refining capacity, and fuel consumption were made sufficiently difficult and expensive, the market would rapidly transition to their preferred alternatives. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has been the principal vehicle for implementing this vision through increasingly stringent fuel regulations, emissions mandates, low-carbon fuel standards, permitting requirements, and compliance costs imposed upon refiners operating within the state.

Yet the result has not been the energy transition that was promised. Instead, California has become increasingly dependent on foreign suppliers for products it once produced itself. This trend is particularly problematic because California is effectively an energy island. Unlike much of the United States, California lacks extensive pipeline connections to the major refining centers along the Gulf Coast.

The state also requires unique fuel formulations that relatively few refineries outside California are equipped to produce. Consequently, California’s fuel market functions largely as a self-contained system. When local refining capacity disappears, replacement supplies cannot simply be redirected from Texas or Louisiana with the turn of a valve.

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DOJ Launches New Crackdown on Birth Tourism After Supreme Court Blocks Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announces on Wednesday DOJ will prioritize prosecutions of birth tourism schemes involving visa fraud as foreign nationals continue exploiting U.S. citizenship loopholes despite yesterday’s 5-4 Supreme Court ruling striking down President Trump’s executive order.

On Tuesday, the Trump Department of Justice directed federal prosecutors across the country to prioritize investigations and prosecutions of birth tourism schemes.

The move, announced just hours after the high court struck down President Trump’s executive order protecting the meaning and value of American citizenship, shows the administration is not backing down. Instead, it is weaponizing existing criminal law against the fraudsters who exploit the loophole.

Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald issued a department-wide memo Tuesday directing every U.S. Attorney’s office to work closely with DHS on these cases.

Potential charges include visa fraud, money laundering, identity theft, and wire fraud for foreign nationals who come to the United States under “false pretenses” to give birth and secure automatic citizenship for their child.

“The Department of Justice will zealously protect the sanctity of United States citizenship by investigating and prosecuting those who fraudulently exploit our immigration system,” McDonald wrote.

The memo notes that many of these schemes begin with lies on visa applications about the true purpose and length of stay — conduct that has always been illegal. Past prosecutions focused heavily on visa fraud, but the directive makes clear prosecutors should pursue the full range of criminal statutes when the evidence supports it.

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A Surveillance State On Wheels

Renting a car used to come with an element of fun. For a day or two you could be the pretend owner of a new car. It could be the sports car you have always secretly wanted, maybe in bright red. It could be a mighty utility vehicle you need instead of your 4-door sedan.

In any case, it’s just interesting to experience a new and different car over a limited period, if only to mix things up a bit.

I’ve always enjoyed this, until now.

I innocently rented a new model SUV and hopped in not thinking much more about it. It had a control panel on two big screens with very few physical knobs, which means essentially learning to operate software. Should have pulled over and examined the thing carefully, maybe even read the user manual but traditionally cars explained themselves. Everything was obvious.

Not any more.

The radio was stuck on a guy yammering about sports scores so I thought I would change the station. I’m trying to drive at the same time and looking at the screen with peripheral vision. That’s when the car caught me: it sensed distraction.

Up popped a notification alongside 5 extremely annoying alarm beeps, with a blaring warning: “Consider taking a break” with a coffee cup emoji. That’s strange. I’m not tired. I just started. Why should I take a break?

My car was correcting me. Not only that, it was diagnosing my biology. I was drifting and so clearly did not have enough caffeine in my system and needed more. So said my car.

Thus was my introduction to the new smart car, more monitor than helper, more surveillance than service, more sensate than safe.

I grabbed a tissue while searching for the off switch to the radio and up popped the same warning again. This was only a few minutes later. I wondered how long this would go on. I had two and a half hours to drive. This could be miserable.

It was in fact. My car monitored, hectored, and lectured me for my entire trip. It more closely tracked my venial sins than a Puritan preacher in 17th-century Plymouth Colony. At least in that world, privacy was possible. It is not possible in this new car. You are under the gun, tasked with impossible feats of digital management at which you are destined to fail.

The ever-pious, self satisfied, and immaculately conceived robo-scold seems gleeful to call out every infraction, even when a gust of wind causes a two-inch draft. FAIL!

This car is rooting against its driver, like a horse not entirely broken in and trying to buck you off. But it’s more threatening than that. It’s watching you constantly but you don’t know where its eyes are or why precisely it is making the judgments it is making.

While still fussing with the radio, a big message appeared on the screen, which I tried to read while driving. Another sin. As best I could make out, it said not to attempt this while driving because it is unsafe. And if I have read this message and understand the risk, and accept the terms of the software app, I should click approve, which I did, while driving.

Like clockwork, up appeared the demand that I stop and drink another cup of coffee. If I had complied with the doctor/car physician’s demands, I would have had a gallon of coffee and been taken to the hospital for a caffeine overdose.

The roadside signs all say not to text and drive or otherwise look at your smartphone. But this entire car is far more distracting than my phone would otherwise be. I’m only mentioning a few of these notifications so far.

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Illegal Alien Monster Repeatedly Raped 10-Year-Old Child in Minnesota – Tim Walz Issued Pardon to Shield Him from Deportation

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) pardoned an illegal alien pedophile to shield him from deportation.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, Laotian illegal alien pedophile Tou Lue Vang repeatedly raped a 10-year-old girl in Minnesota in 2004 and was issued a deportation order.

Vang even blamed the child and said it’s a “cultural thing to marry and have sex with girls as young as 12.”

However, Tim Walz pardoned Vang which shielded him from deportation and gave him a clear record.

Vang served ZERO prison time.

“Governor Tim Walz’s decision to pardon an illegal alien convicted child rapist so he can remain in our country is disgusting,” said Acting DHS Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis. “These are the criminal illegal aliens he and his Minnesota sanctuary politicians are protecting. Tou Lue Vang lost his legal status following his conviction for repeatedly sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl. Following the conviction, he was placed in removal proceedings and issued a final order of removal by a judge. This pardon will take away this child rapist’s qualifying convictions that made him removable from the United States.”

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Marco Rubio Helps Israel Pursue Goal of Civil War in Lebanon

After President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance committed the United States to a deconfliction cell with Iran in Switzerland – a mechanism enforcing a ceasefire in Lebanon as well as Iran – Israel and its powerful lobby moved instantly to sabotage it. And in a preview of the sorts of foreign policy fissures that will likely define the 2028 GOP primary, the lobby has deployed Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the man to pursue Israel’s interests and pave the way for Israel’s further occupation of Lebanon.

The first article of the 60-day interim agreement signed by the U.S. and Iran conditions an end to the conflict on the “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon” and on “ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon.” That second clause, more than any other, appears to be the one Israel is most reluctant to accept.

Despite Israeli withdrawal now required to end a war that now threatens to destabilize the entire global economy, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said that Israel would occupy southern Lebanon indefinitely, stating that “we dominate southern Lebanon, from the summit of the Beaufort, and we will remain as long as required,” adding that “we do not intend to withdraw from it.” Defense Minister Israel Katz meanwhile said there was “no American demand for Israel to withdraw from Lebanon,” and that Israel would not withdraw even if there were one, later telling reporters that southern Lebanon was Israel’s “playground.”

That Iran has set out to secure the complete “territorial integrity” of Lebanon is unacceptable to Israel, which seeks to ethnically cleanse southern Lebanon and possibly further north, with the goal of seizing the land for the Greater Israel Project.

In order to sabotage a deconfliction track outlined in Switzerland and continue their endless project to secure more lebensraum, the Israelis have turned to the U.S. State Department and the Israel Lobby’s man in charge, Marco Rubio, whose spearheaded deconfliction framework was signed by the governments of Israel and Lebanon in Washington on Friday.

Intended to supplant the one announced by Vance – which the Times of Israel reported “infuriated Israel” – Rubio’s agreement strips out the guarantee of Lebanese territorial integrity that Iran insists is necessary to end the war and replaces it with an Israeli wishlist that includes permissions for continued Israeli occupation of a “security zone” and a plan to deputize Lebanese forces to accomplish the likely-impossible objective of “disarming” Hezbollah.

Such an agreement is unacceptable to Hezbollah, which has vowed to keep fighting until Israeli forces leave Lebanon. That is why Israel and Marco Rubio deliberately excluded the group from the deal, producing a “peace deal” between two warring parties to which only one of them agreed.

Indeed, although the deal was pitched by Marco Rubio as “a framework for lasting peace and security,” statements made by Israelis and Hezbollah in recent days reveal that narrative to be nothing more than propaganda designed exclusively for Western audiences. On Israel’s Channel 13 after the signing of the Rubio deal, an Israeli analyst remarked how “it seems we’re leading the state of Lebanon into civil war,” adding “maybe it’s not so bad for us, let the Lebanese government fight Hezbollah.” That was “the goal from the start,” replied his co-host. Lebanese lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah, who is close to Hezbollah, agreed with the Israeli assessment, telling Al-Mayadeen on Friday that Lebanese ​authorities would not be able to enforce the agreement signed ‌in ‌Washington ​on ‌Friday ⁠unless, with ​U.S. backing, “they go ⁠to civil war.”

As John Mearsheimer foresaw in April, “what I think Netanyahu wants to do is to foment civil war in Lebanon, a war with the government on one side and Hezbollah on the other,” describing the strategy as a way of weakening them both. “The Israelis can’t disarm Hezbollah, so they want the Lebanese government to do it.”

In response to questions about the apparent divergence between the Lebanon frameworks pursued by JD Vance and Marco Rubio, the White House has denied that any divisions exist at all. Israel Katz has essentially said the same, admitting that even after Trump linked the Iran and Lebanon tracks and demanded that Israel stop “bringing down buildings in Beirut,” the IDF expanded ground operations north of the Litani River and enlarged its occupation of southern Lebanon, all of it, Katz said, “carried out with U.S. approval.”

Whether the intra-administration split is real or kayfabe, the status quo in Lebanon and its spoiling effect for a peace deal remain the same.

Harrison Berger is a correspondent at The American Conservative. He has contributed to Drop Site News, The Nation, and Responsible Statecraft. Previously, he was a researcher and producer for System Update with Glenn Greenwald. His work focuses on civil liberties and U.S. foreign policy. He studied Political Science and Russian Studies at Union College (NY).

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BBC refuses to report on The Rape Gang Inquiry because it has to make “complex choices”

Today, the story broke about a Muslim rape gang ringleader, who was convicted of 30 child rapes, who “cannot be deported” despite being stripped of his British citizenship – thanks to a rule in the Immigration Act 1971.  Instead, this child rapist will be let loose into the British community.

It’s not only legislation which is protecting the perpetrators and putting the community at risk. 

Today, Rupert Lowe, a Member of Parliament (“MP”) for Restore Britain, revealed evidence of the protection the BBC affords Muslim rape gangs.

The BBC has not reported on the findings of the independent Rape Gang Inquiry because, the BBC says, “complex choices” have to be made for editorial and practical reasons.

You can read the BBC’s excuses HERE.

The following is a tweet posted by Mr. Lowe, commenting on the BBC’s explanation.

The BBC has issued an official explanation on why it has failed to cover our rape gang inquiry.

“Complex choices” are made for editorial and practical reasons. These choices “should not be taken as indicative of bias.” Their words.

But the BBC were very quick to cover malicious complaints against our inquiry, in an attempt to smear our efforts. They were then forced to later apologise for how they covered the story.

So, either the inquiry is worth reporting on, or it’s not. They can’t pick and choose.

We’re told “complex choices” are made, meaning that efforts to uncover the industrial rape of young girls is not near the top of list.

Let’s take a look at a few stories on the main BBC news page, right now…

  • ‘Osaka pays ‘love and respect to Japan’ in Wimbledon kimono’
  • ‘Why £15 durians are being sold at half price – or given away for free’
  • ‘We had packed lunches every day for 10 years and retired at 40’

Are these stories more important than the rape gang inquiry? I think not.

You cannot hate the BBC enough. I expect no fair coverage from them; I’ve stopped expecting it. But the BBC is funded by the British people. Their continued suppression of our inquiry is a disgrace.

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The House Just Voted for KOSA, a Privacy and Free Speech Disaster

The House voted Monday night to build the machinery of online identity checks into federal law, packaging the mandate inside a bundle of kids online safety bills that cleared the chamber 267-117, with 47 members not voting.

It marks the first time any version of the Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA, has escaped the lower chamber, and the version that survived carries a structure that pushes platforms to figure out who you are before you can use them.

The legislation, called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, or KIDS Act (H.R. 7757), stitches together more than a dozen separate bills, including KOSA, the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTs Act, COPPA 2.0, and the SPY Kids Act, plus data broker rules and research initiatives.

House leaders rushed it to the floor under suspension of the rules, a fast-track path requiring a two-thirds majority. Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone, who announced their agreement a week earlier, said the bill would “hold Big Tech accountable” and described months of cross-aisle work toward what Guthrie called a “workable compromise.”

If you’ve been following our updates, you’ll know the accountability positioning hides the actual design. The bill defines “know” or “knows” to mean “to know or should have known,” and that phrase runs through sections covering platforms, AI chatbots, and gaming services.

A company that fails to spot a minor faces legal exposure, which gives every platform a reason to gather more information about everyone who shows up. The text tries to defuse this, stating that nothing in it may be construed “to require the provider of a covered platform to implement an age gating or age verification functionality on the covered platform.”

The reassurance collapses on contact. A platform forbidden from ignoring a user’s age, yet liable the moment it “should have known” someone was a minor, has one move left. It starts checking ages, deploying age-estimation tools, demanding ID, or watching behavior closely enough to guess. The law does not order surveillance outright, it engineers the incentive and lets companies build the rest.

That is the First Amendment problem dressed as a child-safety provision. Verifying age means verifying identity, and identity checks sit between a person and ordinary protected activity, whether that is reading, watching, posting, or speaking. Adult websites would face explicit age-verification requirements under the package, which functionally means every visitor proves who they are before viewing lawful content. Anonymous and pseudonymous speech, the kind the Supreme Court has shielded for decades, gets harder to find the more platforms lean on identity to limit their liability.

The bill tightens how data brokers handle children’s information and updates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to widen its reach.

But, to do that, it would require platforms that know a user is a minor to offer controls that limit communications, restrict geolocation sharing, cut compulsive-use features, and let users opt out of personalized recommendation systems, with default settings for minors set to what the bill calls “the most protective level of control with respect to privacy and safety.”

These are strong protections on paper and would be good if they applied evenly to all users, but they all depend on the platform identifying minors first, which loops straight back to the same question of how much data gets pulled from users, adult or not, to sort out who the children are.

The encryption language carries the same gap. The bill says platform requirements may not override encrypted communications and that companies must comply in ways that “do not compromise the integrity of strong encryption.” That could read as a shield until you notice that regulatory pressure to monitor behavior or flag certain users can hollow out encryption without ever formally banning it. Compliance routes around the protection the text claims to offer.

Getting the package across the floor cost the duty of care provision, the piece many child-safety groups and KOSA’s Senate authors consider the heart of the bill. The text now states that nothing in it may be construed to “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a KOSA co-author, wrote that “KOSA without a duty of care isn’t KOSA,” and said last week that the House version is “dead in the Senate.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the other co-author, agrees the provision was central. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, told reporters he stays open to negotiating with the House.

That stalemate is the most encouraging thing about this whole fight.

The Senate’s standalone KOSA (S.1748) keeps the duty of care, which would legally require platforms to “exercise reasonable care” to prevent broad categories of harm to minors. On the free speech axis, that is the more dangerous of the two bills, not the safer one. A duty of care over vaguely defined harms compels companies to police or re-engineer recommendation algorithms for lawful, constitutionally protected content, under threat of liability so open-ended that the rational corporate response is to over-remove anything that might draw a lawsuit.

So neither chamber holds the civil-liberties high ground. The Senate bill compels platforms to suppress protected speech, while the House bill conscripts them into identity verification, and a conference committee tasked with reconciling the two could just as easily graft the worst of each onto a single law as split the difference.

The good news for anyone who values either anonymity or free expression is that the two chambers, each representing a different type of civil liberties disaster, do not appear close to agreement.

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Elon Musk Shares that AOC is an Actress – How Many Other Politicians Are Actors As Well?

Elon Musk Shares that AOC is an Actress – How Many Other Politicians Are Actors As Well?

Elon Musk shared a post this morning that tells how AOC won a contest for Congress, and her brother put her name in.

Elon Musk just posted “AOC is an actor”

He’s 100% correct, and here’s the proof. AOC was chosen to be in Congress by a Democrat casting call. She’s a political actor that was picked out of 10,000 applicants

AOC’s brother submitted her application and she was chosen by the Executive Director of Justice Democrats Out Of 10,000 Candidates

It’s all on camera. There is even footage of AOC and Alexandra Rojas both confirming this on camera

“Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is not really the congresswoman of New York’s 14th congressional district. She is essentially an actress. She’s merely playing the part of a New York congresswoman. I know this sounds crazy, but bear with me. In 2017, a group called the Justice Democrats held auditions for potential congressional candidates that they would run on their platform for various congressional seats throughout the country. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s brother Gabriel submitted her for the role”

– In 2017 Justice Democrats, a progressive PAC founded by former Bernie Sanders staffers and allies put out a public call for congressional candidates
– They received over 10,000 nominations
– AOC’s younger brother, Gabriel Ocasio-Cortez, submitted her name. AOC was working as a bartender

Justice Democrats vetted nominees and chose AOC. They then trained her and installed her as their candidate

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Study Finds Sunscreen Use Linked to Higher Risk of Multiple Skin Cancers

A UK Biobank study involving over 470,000 people found that individuals who reported using sunscreen more frequently had substantially higher risk of multiple skin cancers — even after researchers accounted for major confounding factors like age, sex, skin type, tanning ability, sunburn history, sunlamp use, and time spent outdoors.

The findings are worrisome:

• MELANOMA: +292% higher risk (RR = 3.92)

• BASAL CELL CARCINOMA: +140% higher risk (RR = 2.40)

• SQUAMOUS CELL CARCINOMA: +126% higher risk (RR = 2.26)

The researchers categorized sun protection habits from “never/rarely” to “always” and found the strongest associations among the most frequent sunscreen users.

In other words: the more sunscreen use reported, the higher the observed skin cancer risk.

This was an observational study, meaning it cannot prove sunscreen directly caused cancer. However, the study was also not a simplistic comparison of random sunscreen users versus non-users. Researchers statistically accounted for many of the biggest known skin cancer risk factors — including skin color, hair color, tanning ability, childhood sunburns, tanning bed exposure, outdoor time, age, and sex.

Even after all of that, the association remained.

Many chemical sunscreens contain hormone disruptors that are rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream, including compounds like oxybenzone, octocrylene, and homosalate.

Some formulations have also been found contaminated with benzene, a known human carcinogen.

And then there is the vitamin D issue. Sunlight is how the human body produces vitamin D, a hormone precursor involved in immune regulation, cellular repair, inflammation control, and cancer defense. People who never receive sunlight exposure without sunscreen are likely to become vitamin D deficient.

That does not mean people should recklessly burn in the sun. Sunburns are clearly harmful. Aim for sensible sunlight exposure — spending enough time in the sun reap the benefits without reaching the point of burning. If you’ll be out in the sun for hours on end during mid summer, consider opting for zinc-based (mineral) sunscreens rather than heavily absorbed chemical formulations.

The takeaway is not to fear sunlight, but to respect it.

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Justice Sotomayor Discloses $4,333 in Concert Tickets from Bad Bunny’s Record Label in Latest Supreme Court Financial Report

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor disclosed receiving $4,333 worth of concert tickets from Rimas Entertainment, the Puerto Rican record label that represents superstar Bad Bunny, as part of the latest round of Supreme Court financial disclosure reports.

The tickets were for Sotomayor and an unspecified number of guests during a private trip she took to Puerto Rico in August.

Sotomayor, the first justice of Puerto Rican descent, noted in her filing that the gift came from the label while she was traveling privately, though she did not specify which concert she attended.

At the time, Bad Bunny was in the middle of a major residency that included more than 30 sold-out shows in San Juan.

These 2025 financial disclosures, which cover outside income, gifts, and other interests for eight of the nine justices, are required annually under federal ethics rules.

Justice Samuel Alito was granted a 90-day extension and has not yet filed.

While Sotomayor’s concert tickets stand out as the most eye-catching gift in the current reports, the filings also show substantial outside earnings for several other justices, primarily from book deals and teaching positions.

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