How Math Can Kill You
Posted By: Mercedes44, 3/29/2026 5:00:33 AM
Math ruins some really enchanting ideas. Things like fossil-free energy and open borders, combined with generous social welfare. This week, governments that ignored the basics are seeing serious consequences for fantastical thinking. By the same token, however, properly applied math can dispel doomster thinking. Pollster Mark Penn presents a “math camp” this week. It’s a refreshing response to offset the hysteria about the economic disruption of Iran’s “global terror network.” We use 20 million barrels of oil a day. So if oil prices increased during the war to $110 a barrel that is an extra $1 billion a day in costs.
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The First Holy Week
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From March 29 to April 5 this year, most of the Christian world enters into the holiest days of their calendar year. These are the days that commemorate the final days of the life of Jesus. Investigating what is remembered and celebrated can be both practically impactful and spiritually inspiring.
On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered into Jerusalem riding on a donkey. This was a specific and calculated choice evoking the Old Testament prophecies from Zechariah. The prophet tells Israel that “your king is coming to you, a just savior is he, Humble, and riding on a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9).
Mexico’s government continues to use faulty stats to push a false narrative that the cartel-controlled country is safe. In the most recent attempt to trick the public, Mexico’s government is claiming that one-third of the country’s more than 130,000 persons reported as missing are believed to be alive. During one of Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum’s daily news conferences, her team presented a report on missing persons, trying to downplay a figure of more than 130,000 missing people in recent years.
Bank of America will be dishing out $72.5 million to settle a federal lawsuit that accused the bank of ignoring Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking operation, joining two other big banks that have also settled with multimillion dollar payments. The lawsuit, based in Manhattan, accused Bank of America of providing accounts and processing transactions for Epstein and his associates despite “obvious red flags,” the New York Post reported Friday.
The Bank of America settlement, which still has to be approved by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, joins settlements already paid by JPMorgan Chase for $290 million and Deutsche Bank for $75 million.
No Kings protests in Portland, Los Angeles and Dallas grew violent Saturday — and one near Mar-a-Lago in Florida took a lewd turn — as thousands filled streets around the US in angry demonstrations against the Trump Administration.
No Kings demonstrations in Portland, Oregon got out of hand in the evening with protesters sporting gas masks attacking police officers who were trying to control the crowd, according to video posted on X by FreedomNews.tv. There was no immediate word on arrests.
In Dallas, Police had to separate No Kings demonstrators from “Pro America” counter demonstrators as the two groups engaged in heated clashes.
Vice President JD Vance is the favorite to earn the Republican nomination for president in 2028, according to a new straw poll taken at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday.
Vance earned support from about 53 percent of attendees who participated in the presidential preference poll at the annual gathering in Grapevine, Texas, according to New York Times reporter Kellen Browning. Secretary of State Marco Rubio came in second with 35 percent, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, tied at 2 percent for a distant third place.
As Operation Epic Fury/Roaring Lion continues to degrade and destroy Iranian military capability, the Islamic Republic continues to lash out with what they have left, and that has included attacks on their neighboring Gulf states. In the latest incident, 12 American service members were injured, and two American aerial refueling aircraft were damaged, in an Iranian missile and drone attack on a Saudi Arabian air base. The War Department, as of this writing, has not given any update regarding the 12 service members' identities or the extent of their injuries.
This hasn't been a one-sided exchange. American and Israeli forces are still disassembling Iranian industry with high explosives.
commentator in (mirabile dictu) The Washington Post made an excellent point about how the war in Iran is being understood. “We are living through the first alt-war,” the Tel Aviv University scholar Jen Brick Murtazashvili wrote. On the one hand, we have the war as it is fought online. On the other, we have the war as it is fought in reality, on the ground. The two “have diverged so completely,” Murtazashvili noted, “that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information; it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality—one that confirms what they already believe.”
How Math Can Kill You
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Math ruins some really enchanting ideas. Things like fossil-free energy and open borders, combined with generous social welfare. This week, governments that ignored the basics are seeing serious consequences for fantastical thinking. By the same token, however, properly applied math can dispel doomster thinking.
Pollster Mark Penn presents a “math camp” this week. It’s a refreshing response to offset the hysteria about the economic disruption of Iran’s “global terror network.”
We use 20 million barrels of oil a day. So if oil prices increased during the war to $110 a barrel that is an extra $1 billion a day in costs.
Seven years. That's how long Republicans in North Carolina waited for a federal court to do the right thing. On Thursday, they finally got their answer — and it came from the last place anyone expected. U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs, an Obama appointee, upheld North Carolina's photo voter ID law in a sweeping 134-page ruling. She found that liberal voting rights groups, including the state NAACP, failed to prove the 2018 law violated the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, or the Voting Rights Act. The ruling keeps the law firmly in place heading into the 2026 midterms — and hands Republicans a significant win on election integrity.
The Trump administration is putting $250 million into a new Pax Silica fund aimed at critical minerals, energy infrastructure, and semiconductor supply chains.
The State Department said the funding will support extraction, processing, and manufacturing tied to secure chip supply chains while helping pull in larger pools of private and allied capital. It also said the fund is intended to “catalyze trusted capital” from sovereign wealth and institutional investors backing supply chain security. Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg said the U.S. would administer the consortium,
The Senate wanted to go home, so it passed a bill late at night that funded most of the Department of Homeland Security, but not Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Border Patrol. The situation is complicated, but the Republicans 'won' this round, as Democrats wanted judicial warrants and masks for ICE agents, but they didn't get either. Still, House Republicans are upset about splitting the funding and annoyed that Senate Republicans procedurally put them in a difficult position. Members of the upper chamber also headed for the weekend, which doesn't look good.
The Department of Justice has confirmed that Iran-linked hackers breached the personal email account of FBI Director Kash Patel and leaked personal photos along with other documents online.
The hacking group known as the “Handala Hack Team” claimed responsibility, posting the materials to its website and Telegram channel.
“Soon you’ll realize the FBI’s security was nothing more than a joke,” the group wrote on Telegram, along with photos from Patel’s account. The group stated that Patel “will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims.”
A DOJ official told Reuters that the materials posted online “appeared to be authentic.”
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The Venezuelan illegal immigrant accused of murdering Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman is missing a part of his brain and has the "development of a child," his lawyer said in court Friday. Jose Medina-Medina was held without bail by Chicago Judge D'Anthony Thedford (snip.) Medina-Medina was shot in the head during a robbery when he was living with his mom in Colombia (snip.) He's being treated at the health facility inside the Cook County Jail, where his lawyer asked he remain so that immigration officials don't arrest and deport him.
500 groups with $3B in revenues are behind
the #NoKings protests and communist call
for 'revolution' 19 replies
the #NoKings protests and communist call
for 'revolution' 19 replies
ST. PAUL, Minn. – A network of about 500 groups with an estimated $3 billion in combined annual revenues is behind the coordinated nationwide "No Kings" protest Saturday, including communist groups who are using the day to call for a "revolution," according to a Fox Digital News investigation.
According to a copy of the permit for the "flagship" march in St. Paul, Minn., Indivisible, a national well-heeled Democratic political advocacy organization funded by billionaire George Soros, is the lead coordinator for the protest.
But Fox News Digital has also identified key participation by a network of radical socialist and communist organizations funded by Neville Roy Singham,
No Bosses
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Bruce Springsteen is the headliner at the flagshiip No Kings rally at the state Capitol in Saint Paul this afternoon. Joan Baez, Jane Fonda, and Bernie Sanders are also primed to appear. Truth in advertising would require the rally to be redesignated Gimme That Old Time Religion or In Search of Lost Time. As the Rolling Stones once trilled, “What a drag it is getting old.”
Tim Walz, Keith Ellison, and Ilhan Omar will also be there. They wouldn’t want to miss the chance to rag on the King. Opposing the King has become the lodestone of their careers. Contrary to the theme of the proceedings, it comes at no cost
What do you call it when a politician tells you to put elections “back on a level playing field” by voting for a redistricting map gerrymandered to give Democrats 10 seats to Republicans’ one?
“Lying” doesn’t quite foot the bill. “Rank deception” is closer, but I think this kind of rhetoric calls for the big guns.
I’ll settle on “shameless Orwellian gaslighting,” because supporting the Virginia redistricting push in the name of “fairness” involves redefining basic words in the same manner as the oppressive government in George Orwell’s “1984,” and this rhetorical strategy seems designed to make people with rational concerns about the ballot initiative question their sanity. This particular shameless Orwellian
Sharks in the Bahamas have tested positive for cocaine, a new study concludes.
Researchers from the Bahamas, Brazil, and Chile also found traces of caffeine and painkillers in the sharks. This isn't a shift in lifestyle from the animals, but rather something that's being forced upon them, as marine pollution becomes ever more pervasive.
Finding traces of these substances in a tropical place widely seen as idyllic and pristine is concerning – it seems there are vanishingly few spots on Earth where wildlife can escape our influence.
"Pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs are increasingly recognized as contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) in marine environments, particularly in areas undergoing rapid urbanization and tourism-driven development,"
Vice President JD Vance said Friday that Rep. Ilhan Omar defrauded the US by allegedly marrying her brother to help him remain legally in the country. “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America,” Vance told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on the latest episode of his show.
“This is rich coming from someone who literally said they were willing to ‘create stories’ to redirect the media,” said Omar’s chief of staff Connor McNutt. “This is a ridiculous lie and desperate attempt to distract from the pedophile protection party’s unpopular war of choice, increasing gas prices, and rapidly dropping polling numbers.”
The EV Bubble Is About to Burst
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When did getting from point A to point B get so complicated? When the government decided which cars Americans should buy. With the economic and scientific premises behind electric vehicle (EV) mandates collapsing, the EV bubble may burst completely. There is one mandate left to burst: California’s Advanced Clean Cars II (ACC II) regulation, which requires all new vehicles to be 100 percent electric by 2035, or else automakers get penalized.
With the federal repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Endangerment Finding in February, the government’s formal scientific basis for EV mandates is gone. State governments no longer have a rational scientific basis for requiring EV sales.
I remember seeing a comedian on TV years ago who mocked Canadians as “nice people with brown hair.” These days, you wouldn’t use the word “nice” to describe many Canadians.
My colleague Rick Moran wrote a piece on Saturday morning about how antisemitism is rife in Canada. Rick wrote:
The explosion of antisemitic hate directed at Canadian Jews is without precedent in Canada. Rather than address the hate with concrete action, political, cultural, and religious leaders in Canada could only offer sympathetic words and the "This isn't us" bromide.
Except that it is you, Canada. And your tolerance for hate is driving your Jewish friends and neighbors into hiding.
It’s not just Jews who
Progressive Congresswoman and member of The Squad, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), called for “some form of reparation” to be paid to illegal immigrants for the alleged “trauma” inflicted by ICE agents during President Trump’s nationwide deportation campaign.
It remains astonishing that Democrats label funding the Department of Homeland Security and its agencies as a waste of taxpayer dollars, yet have no issue using public funds to provide reparations to individuals who broke the law by entering the country illegally. (X) "We need real accountability, because at the end of the day, the people that have been inflicting this harm need to be prosecuted," Jayapal said. "They need to be brought
Month Two Begins
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~As Month Two begins, the war continues to widen:
Many dissatisfied Steyn Club members have accused me of fighting the last war. (Snip}Yesterday, for example, another dozen US servicemen were wounded and multiple refuelling aircraft were crippled at the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. America's military bases in the Gulf are some of the most expensive on the planet, and yet, as with the killing fields of eastern Ukraine, they're highly vulnerable to drones that cost a few thousand bucks. Result?
"Iran's Attacks Force U.S. Troops to Work Remotely"
Connecticut Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy openly admitted that the people his party cares about “the most” are illegal aliens, in an interview clip from 2024 that resurfaced this week. Democrats have filibustered to prevent funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over their objections to immigration enforcement operations, leading to a partial shutdown of the Cabinet department.
The lawmakers are demanding new restrictions be placed on United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in January during clashes with “rapid response groups” opposed to federal immigration enforcement operations. In the resurfaced clip that went viral
Ilhan Omar married her brother
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Everyone knows this. From the New York Post,
VP Vance claims Rep. Ilhan Omar ‘definitely committed immigration fraud’ by allegedly marrying brother.
In February 2009, the future Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar married a man named Ahmed Nur Said Elmi. It was her first legal marriage. The marriage ceremony was conducted by a Christian ministesr. There is no dispute about these facts, which are recounted by the Post.
All available evidence points to Elmi being Omar’s biological brother. No evidence points away from this fact.
But I have never understood the fixation on motivation. As with my “motive unclear” series, the alleged inability to confirm a motive does not erase the underlying act.
Perhaps immigration fraud