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Report: 60% of Australian Teens Are Evading Social Media Ban

The Molly Rose Foundation (MRF), a British-based group that generally favors online safety measures for children, published research on Monday that found about 60% of Australian teenagers are evading their country’s landmark ban on social media accounts for children under 16.

MRF’s report was entitled “Australia’s Social Media Ban – Is It Working?” The report concluded it wasn’t, not really, although the ban has significantly impacted the online activity of Australian youth.

“There are significant questions about the effectiveness of Australia’s social media ban. Three fifths (61%) of 12–15 year-olds who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts,” the report noted.

MRF found that over half of the 12 to 15-year-olds who used the most perilous of the social media platforms, including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, were still able to access those services. 

Seventy percent of children who responded to the survey, which was conducted in partnership with Australia’s largest online youth panel YouthInsight, said it was “easy” to avoid the social media ban. Fifty-one percent of respondents said the ban made no difference to their online safety, and 14% said they felt less safe after the ban was imposed. 

“This may reflect a range of factors, including their displacement to smaller or more poorly moderated platforms, their experiences on sites not covered by the ban, or a perception that online platforms have pivoted from safety towards prioritizing access restrictions,” the report’s authors ventured.

The ban does seem to have reduced the amount of time children spend online overall, which will likely be taken as a positive development by child safety advocates.

MRF suggested some of the blame for the questionable effectiveness of the ban lies with social media companies, which do not appear to making very aggressive efforts to detect or deactivate accounts created by under-16 users, after headlines were made by a large number of account deactivations in the early months of the ban.

On the other hand, about 5% of the children who evaded the ban were using virtual private networks (VPNs), a tool that has been successfully employed around the world to mask user identities and evade digital censorship. VPNs are a very effective tool for masking user identity, which is why censorious governments are looking for ways to ban them.

MRF noted in passing that one of the earliest government efforts to ban children from online platforms was undertaken by South Korea, which prohibited online gaming for children from midnight to 6:00 a.m., beginning in 2011. The ban “initially resulted in a reduction of time spent online,” but those improvements faded over time, and in fact Internet use by children wound up increasing. The South Korean government eventually discontinued the ban.

MRF felt its report directly contradicted claims by the Australian government that its ban on social media for teens has been “very successful in its early days,” and this could have implications for other countries thinking about bans of their own, including the United Kingdom.

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Our Post-Truth, Post-Trust World

That we inhabit a post-truth world seems to accepted wisdom. But that’s only half of it. We also live in a post-trust world. In a post-truth world, everything is shaped by the implicit goals of the entity claiming to state the “truth,” as the entire point of claiming to state the “truth” is to persuade the target populace to agree to something favorable to the issuer of the claimed “truth.”

In other words, the “truth” as something that has no intentional spin of self-interest no longer exists. What is passed off as “truth” is spin intended / designed to serve the interests of those doing the spinning.

This is the definition of propaganda and marketing, which are pure expressions of self-interest, and they’ve been around since the dawn of civilization, as persuading others to do what serves your private interests is much lower cost / more profitable than having to modify their behaviors with force.

The first step in the con of propaganda and marketing is to win the trust of the mark. This is a fascinating process, as some people are willing believers and others are skeptical, and so the trust campaign must speak to both the skeptics and those primed to embrace the message for reasons that have less to do with the entity issuing the message and more to do with their internal beliefs.

The trick with skeptics is to present persuasive evidence–the “facts.” These can be first-person accounts, scientific studies, or something presented as self-evident. The con artist presents the facts as if they are objective and the mark is invited to “decide for yourself:” the con artist claims he has no intent to persuade.

This is humorously illustrated in Melville’s classic novel The Confidence-Man.

The rise of the collection of data and the scientific method introduced the idea of “objective truth” that was based on facts collected from observations that were repeatable by anyone able to isolate the same variables. In other words, these truths could be verified by anyone using the same tools to collect data that isolated the same variables, so it wasn’t a private truth, it was a public truth everyone had to accept as fact.

The power of “objective fact” was too good to pass up, and so manipulating the metrics of data collection and analysis became the new territory of developing trust and establishing “truth” to serve private interests. Sample sizes were kept small, subjects were selected for their likelihood of yielding the desired data, and analytic tools weeded out outliers that undermined or contradicted the pre-selected “results.”

As McLuhan observed, The medium is both the message and the massage, and so the synthetic media that broadcast the human voice and visual images captured our attention and imagination in ways the written word could not. Now we have AI, which mimics human speech so engagingly that we attribute it with human characteristics: intelligence, emotions, empathy, etc.

With social media and smartphones, these media/ AI technologies have scalable visibility and virulence: they are ubiquitous (everywhere) and extremely contagious / virulent, spreading quickly through vast populations.

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Report: China Supplying Iran with Anti-Aircraft Weapons to Aid in Fight Against US

A new report revealed that American officials believe China is helping Iran in the war with the United States and Israel.

According to The New York Times, U.S. intelligence agencies believe China sent shoulder-fired missiles to Iran. The weapons can be used to down low-flying planes.

The report said the intelligence has some uncertainty, and it is also not clear if Chinese missiles were used in Iran’s recent attacks on U.S. or Israeli targets.

The report said American officials believe China, which heavily controls its private sector, is allowing chemicals, fuel, and parts for weapons to be sent to Iran.

The report noted that sending missiles to America’s foe “would be a significant escalation and an indication that at least some of China’s leaders are working actively to bring about an American military defeat in a war that has engulfed the Middle East.”

A CNN report indicated that China is planning to send the missiles to Iran, and will route them through a third-party nation to cover up the shipment’s origin.

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Regulation by hostility: the real legacy of Biden-era crypto policy

Thorn argues that a recent New York Times op-ed rewrites history through omission, glossing over the collateral damage caused by the previous administration.

Former Biden economic advisers Ryan Cummings and Jared Bernstein would have you believe the decline in bitcoin’s price from its 2025 peak somehow vindicates their administration’s approach to cryptocurrency. A masterclass in selective memory, their February 26 New York Times opinion piece omits the most consequential fact about Biden-era crypto policy: it was not a reasoned regulatory framework.

The authors credit the Biden administration with “increasingly aggressive regulatory efforts to curb scams and fraud.” This framing is extraordinary, given what happened on their watch. FTX grew to enormous scale during the Biden administration. Sam Bankman-Fried was a top Democratic donor and met with senior administration officials (including then-Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler) while running what became one of the largest financial frauds in history.

The administration’s strategy of regulation-by-enforcement, rather than establishing clear rules, had a perverse effect: legitimate, compliance-minded companies were driven offshore or out of business, consumers were harmed, and American innovation was stifled. Meanwhile, bad actors like Bankman-Fried (who knew how to play political games) thrived in the confusion. When you refuse to write clear rules, the only people who benefit are those who never intended to follow them.

The authors conveniently ignore one of the most troubling episodes of the Biden era: “Operation Choke Point 2.0.” Under pressure from federal regulators, banks systematically debanked lawful crypto businesses, cutting them off from the financial system without due process, formal rulemaking, or legislative authority. The debanking campaign swept up ordinary individuals and small businesses who had turned to crypto because the traditional banking system had long underserved them. The Biden administration’s approach cut consumers off from tools they were using to participate in the financial system, without putting a single policy through the democratic process of notice-and-comment rulemaking.

The authors dismiss crypto as a “painfully slow and expensive database” with “almost no practical use.” They acknowledge in passing that crypto is used to wire money

internationally, but wave this away as though enabling fast, low-cost cross-border remittances for millions of people is a trivial achievement.

It is not. Global remittance fees average nearly 6.5%, costing migrant workers and their families billions of dollars each year. Stablecoins running on blockchain networks can execute the same transfers in minutes for a fraction of the cost. This is an immediate, material financial improvement for families in developing countries. The Biden economists sat in “dozens of meetings” and apparently came away unimpressed. One wonders whether they spoke to any of the people these tools serve.

Beyond remittances, blockchain technology underpins a rapidly growing ecosystem of financial applications. Fidelity, JPMorgan, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Morgan Stanley, Visa, Mastercard, Meta, Stripe, Block Inc. and Franklin Templeton are actively building on blockchain infrastructure. The Biden economists’ claim that no “giant tech firms” are using this technology is flatly wrong.

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New Homeland Security Secretary Cracks Down on Sanctuary Cities

What we are now witnessing with sanctuary cities is not simply a political disagreement, it is the breakdown of the rule of law at the structural level. The federal government is now openly questioning whether it should continue providing core services, including customs processing at international airports, to cities that refuse to comply with federal immigration law.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has made that position clear in direct terms, stating, “If they are a sanctuary city, should they really be processing customs into their city?” and further pressing the issue by pointing out the contradiction, “If they’re a sanctuary city and they’re receiving international flights… but once they walk out of the airport, they’re not going to enforce immigration policy?”

Sanctuary cities are, by definition, jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal enforcement, effectively creating a dual system of governance within the same country. Once you reach that point, you are no longer dealing with a unified legal framework, you are dealing with fragmentation.

Mullin has also made it clear that the federal government is being forced into difficult decisions, stating that “we’re going to have to start prioritizing things at some point” as funding battles intensify. That statement is critical because it signals a shift from negotiation to enforcement.

This is precisely the type of breakdown that unfolds during periods of broader systemic stress. The sovereign debt crisis, rising geopolitical tensions, and internal political divisions are all converging at the same time, and governments respond to that pressure by attempting to reassert control.

Sanctuary cities represent a direct challenge to that control, and the response is now escalating accordingly. The implications extend far beyond immigration because once the federal government begins selectively withdrawing services, whether it is funding, enforcement, or infrastructure support, it creates a chain reaction. Major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco are not isolated municipalities, they are economic hubs that handle millions of international travelers and billions in trade. Any disruption to customs operations alone would ripple through tourism, supply chains, and business activity, amplifying economic pressure at a time when the system is already under strain.

This is where the situation becomes dangerous because it introduces a new layer of uncertainty into the economy. Businesses and capital do not respond well to fragmented legal systems or political conflict between levels of government. Capital flows toward stability, and when stability is questioned, it begins to move. That is the core principle that has driven every major financial shift throughout history.

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SHAMELESS: CNN’s Brian Stelter Credits Journalists With Ending Eric Swalwell’s Bid for California Governor 

Like many people in media, Brian Stelter has an inflated sense of the worth of mainstream journalists. We are used to this fact about him, but sometimes, even we are surprised by the lengths he will go to heap praise on his broken industry.

Today on the air, Stelter gave journalists the credit for ending Eric Swlawell’s bid for governor of California.

This is amazing when you consider the fact that people are coming out of the woodwork now, claiming that Swalwell’s behavior has been an open secret among Democrats and the media for years.

And by the way, don’t his victims who have come forward deserve more credit than the media?

The Blaze reported on this:

CNN’s chief media analyst is applauding the mainstream media for exposing sexual misconduct allegations against the top Democratic candidate for California governor, including an alleged rape, and now faces the wrath of online critics.

California Rep. Eric Swalwell had a tenuous lead above the other Democrats, but he has suspended his campaign in the wake of allegations of sexual assault from a former staffer and accusations from others about sexual misconduct. He has denied the claims.

On Monday, Brian Stelter of CNN said the report was a victory for journalism while ignoring that many had looked the other way for a decade about rumors of the allegations.

Stelter said it was a “testament to the power of investigative reporting” and credited CNN and the Chronicle for ending Swalwell’s gubernatorial hopes.

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Nancy Pelosi Denies That Democrats Had Any Advanced Knowledge of Eric Swalwell’s Behavior

Today on CSPAN, former house speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked if she or other Democrats had any advanced knowledge of Eric Swalwell’s behavior or the things he has been accused of.

The host framed it as an accusation that Republicans are making, rather than pointing out that people all over the country are now admitting that Swalwell’s issues were an open secret for years.

Pelosi denied the whole thing, saying it is “absolutely not true.”

Pelosi’s comments are in direct conflict with a new report from ABC 7 in California (emphasis is ours):

U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell has suspended his campaign for California governor following sexual assault allegations, announcing the decision Sunday as scrutiny intensified around the Democratic primary race.

In a statement, Swalwell said he would step aside to address the claims.

“To my family, staff, friends, and supporters, I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past. I will fight the serious, false allegations that have been made – but that’s my fight, not a campaign’s.”

The suspension immediately reshaped a closely watched contest in which Swalwell had held a narrow lead among Democrats.

Criticism of Swalwell has circulated in Washington for years, according to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who spoke on ABC’s “This Week.”

“Every member in Congress knows not to let any young staffer around Swalwell or Matt Gaetz, it’s not a secret there,” McCarthy said.

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said the allegations were not unexpected, citing longstanding talk among Democratic leaders.

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Political pressure from Somali community hampered Minnesota fraud probes, whistleblower says

A key whistle-blower, and one of the first to draw attention to what he believed was widespread fraud in the Minnesota welfare system, says that state officials hampered probes into the allegations over concerns about pressure from the state’s Somali immigrant community. 

That community has been at the center of recent welfare fraud accusations, including the Feeding Our Future fraud case, in which prosecutors say more than 70 defendants — most of them part of Minneapolis’ Somali community — were charged in connection to a $250 million pandemic-era fraud on a state-funded meals program for children. 

Last year, new charges in the Feeding Our Future case sparked renewed interest in the state’s federally-funded daycare program. Independent journalists flocked to Minneapolis and recorded videos of empty daycare centers that had received millions in state grants. 

“It was obvious that they were committing fraud”: DHS investigator

But, concerns about Minneapolis daycare centers go back at least a decade, according to the whistle-blower, Scott Dexter, who worked as an investigator at the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) from 2013 to 2019. He told Just the News that his team uncovered evidence of fraud in the state’s taxpayer-funded daycare system almost immediately after he started his work. 

“The very first [daycare] that we investigated […] had received about $3.75 million in one year, and so it was obvious that they were committing fraud,” Dexter told the Just the News, No Noise TV show on Tuesday.  

“And the number of these childcare centers would be owned by the same owners, or there’d be, you know, intertwined people involved in it. So one daycare center was involved with another daycare center, so it was obvious that it was a coordinated fraud scheme,” said Dexter. 

In his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee earlier this year, Dexter said that he was hired after a 28-year law enforcement career to be part of a new investigative unit in the Office of the Inspector General at the Minnesota DHS tasked with identifying fraud in the state’s Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP). 

Dexter testified that what his team uncovered was “deeply concerning” regarding daycare centers operating out of commercial spaces “with windows covered, no visible play areas, and very few children ever present.” After reviewing records and surveilling locations, they found “documented patterns of overbilling, nonexistent attendance, and in some cases, children being signed in for hours they were never actually at the center.” 

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Can’t bomb your way out of a logistical bottleneck

When officials from the United States and Iran walked away from negotiations in Pakistan this weekend with no deal on the Strait of Hormuz, markets didn’t wait for clarity. They reacted. The subsequent announcement by United States Central Command of a naval blockade targeting Iranian ports was meant to reassure. Instead, it raised more questions than answers.

Markets, as they often do, may be reading this correctly.

The Strait of Hormuz is not just another geopolitical hotspot. It is one of the most critical arteries of the global economy. Roughly 20% of the world’s oil and close to 30% of globally traded fertilizers pass through that narrow corridor. When flows are threatened, the consequences extend far beyond energy markets. They move quickly into agriculture, food production, and ultimately, the prices Canadians pay at the grocery store.

Oil prices are now back above $100 USD per barrel, but the real story began months ago. Markets started pricing in Middle East risks early in the year. In the food economy, there is typically a six- to nine-month lag between energy shocks and retail food prices. That means the inflationary pressure we are beginning to feel today was already set in motion weeks ago.

For Canadian consumers, it is already too late to avoid it.

The first signs are now emerging across the food system. Transport companies, facing extraordinary volatility, are reintroducing fuel surcharges and adjusting contracts upward. Suppliers are hedging aggressively. These costs do not stay within the supply chain—they get passed along.

Fresh produce will be among the first categories to reflect this shift. Fruits and vegetables rely heavily on long-distance, temperature-controlled transport, making them highly sensitive to fuel costs. Canadians should expect price increases in the range of 5% to 15% over the coming months, particularly for imported items. Meat and seafood will follow. These products are energy-intensive at every stage—from feed production to processing and refrigeration—and are likely to rise by 5% to 10%, with beef leading the way.

Dairy products will also move higher, though more gradually, as rising energy costs affect processing and distribution. Increases of 4% to 8% are likely over the next few quarters. Even staples like bread and cereals will not be spared. Fertilizer markets, closely tied to energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz, will push grain production costs higher, resulting in price increases of 3% to 6%. Processed foods, exposed to energy at multiple stages, will also climb steadily.

These are not isolated adjustments. They reflect a broader reality. Historically, a sustained rise in oil prices adds between one and three percentage points to food inflation in Canada. Under current conditions, grocery inflation could easily climb back toward 6% to 8%. For households, that translates into real money. Every sustained 25% increase in oil prices typically adds $150 to $200 annually to the average grocery bill. With oil already surging, the total impact could be several hundred dollars per family.

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Embattled Rep Tony Gonzales announces plans to resign amid sexual misconduct allegations

Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, abruptly announced his decision to resign from Congress Monday evening amid calls for him to step aside after admitting to sexual misconduct with a staffer earlier this year.

The embattled lawmaker is facing an anticipated expulsion vote that could occur as early as this week. 

“There is a season for everything and God has a plan for us all. When Congress returns tomorrow, I will file my retirement from office,” Gonzales wrote on social media. “It has been my privilege to serve the great people of Texas.”

It is currently unclear when Gonzales will formally resign. A spokesperson for Gonzales did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Gonzales has come under bipartisan pressure to immediately step aside or face expulsion following his acknowledgment of an affair with his former staffer, Regina Santos-Aviles, who later died by setting herself on fire.

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, D-N.M., has vowed to move forward with her expulsion resolution if Gonzales does not quickly resign.

“He has until 2PM tomorrow—when we will file his expulsion. He better write that resignation “effective immediately,” Leger Fernandez wrote on social media.

He first admitted to an affair with Santos-Aviles during a radio interview in March after repeatedly denying the existence of a sexual relationship.

“I made a mistake, and I had a lapse in judgment, and there was a lack of faith, and I take full responsibility for those actions,” Gonzales told conservative radio host Joe Pags during the interview. “Since then, I’ve reconciled with my wife, Angel. I’ve asked God to forgive me, which he has, and my faith is as strong as ever.” 

Gonzales, who is married and has six children, has not acknowledged a second accusation of sexual misconduct with a former aide reported by The San Antonio-Express News.

Lawmakers are prohibited from engaging in sexual relationships with staffers, per House rules. 

His announcement came just an hour after Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., said he planned to resign from the lower chamber amid serious allegations of sexual misconduct and rape. The California Democrat has not specified the particular day he plans to leave office.

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