America’s lower judiciary is out of control — and Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is putting it on notice.

In a Thursday order, the nation’s highest court granted (in part) a request by the Trump administration to temporarily pause a lower court blockade on the National Institutes of Health’s bid to terminate DEI-related grants totaling nearly $800 million. The ruling was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s Democrat appointees saying they would have denied the administration’s application in full. //

In addition to signing onto the majority’s Thursday decision, Gorsuch penned a concurring opinion in the case in which he ripped into the lower judiciary’s out-of-control behavior. While noting that “[l]ower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions … they are never free to defy them.”

Citing a related case recently before the Supreme Court (Department of Ed. v. California), the Trump appointee highlighted how the high court “granted a stay [in that case] because it found the government likely to prevail in showing that the district court lacked jurisdiction to order the government to pay grant obligations.” He wrote, “California explained that ‘suits based on “any express or implied contract with the United States”’ do not belong in district court under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), but in the Court of Federal Claims under the Tucker Act.”

“Rather than follow that direction, the district court in this case permitted a suit involving materially identical grants to proceed to final judgment under the APA,” Gorsuch wrote. “As support for its course, the district court invoked the ‘persuasive authority’ of ‘the dissent[s] in California‘ and an earlier court of appeals decision California repudiated … That was error.”

Gorsuch went on to underscore that “the promise of our legal system that like cases are treated alike means that a lower court ought not invoke the ‘persuasive authority’ of a dissent or a repudiated court of appeals decision to reach a different conclusion on an equivalent record.” More to the point, however, he noted that the district court’s apparent rebuke of the precedent very recently established by SCOTUS in the California case is not an isolated incident among the lower courts.

“If the district court’s failure to abide by California were a one-off, perhaps it would not be worth writing to address it. But two months ago another district court tried to ‘compel compliance’ with a different ‘order that this Court ha[d] stayed,'” Gorsuch wrote. “Still another district court recently diverged from one of this Court’s decisions even though the case at hand did not differ ‘in any pertinent respect’ from the one this Court had decided … So this is now the third time in a matter of weeks this Court has had to intercede in a case ‘squarely controlled’ by one of its precedents.” //

“All these interventions should have been unnecessary, but together they underscore a basic tenet of our judicial system: Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect ‘the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress,'” Gorsuch wrote.

Making original films for young men isn’t that hard, but you have to quit pushing gay race communism and appeal to masculine virtue. //

If you understand that this is what appeals to young men, then the movie scripts pretty much write themselves. Make movies with masculine heroes — not necessarily muscle-bound meatheads or ridiculous superheroes, but real men who are heroes because they’re willing to suffer and deny themselves for a greater good, detach from their own desires to pursue justice, and lay down their lives to protect those under their charge.

Smart filmmakers understand this intuitively. Christopher Nolan is reportedly working on an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, due out next summer. It’s probably going to be a blockbuster. Mel Gibson is now finally filming “The Resurrection of the Christ,” a two-part follow-up to his 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ,” which grossed nearly $610 million worldwide. Gibson is also working on a limited TV series about the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, when a small contingent of knights and Maltese citizens repelled a vastly superior Ottoman force.

These are the kinds of films and TV shows young men want to see. If Disney, or any other production company, wants to appeal to young men and not just lecture at them, then make films that are unapologetically American and Christian.

Make films about crusaders in which the crusaders are the heroes (unlike Ridley Scott’s botched effort in 2005’s Kingdom of Heaven). Make films about the American Revolution (there are precious few good ones). Make sympathetic films and TV series about the great European explorers and conquistadors, the pioneers who settled the American continent, and the soldiers who fought in the Civil War — on both sides. Revive the great tradition of the American western that gave us the catalogues of Sam Peckinpah and John Ford. Make a TV series based on the Hardy Boys — one that actually resembles the original books. Make sci-fi action films about America competing against China to colonize the moon or Mars — in which China is the villain, just like in real life.

And don’t worry about the Chinese market at all, or any international markets. Just make films for American audiences that are pro-American. One of the reason’s Tom Cruise’s 2022 film Maverick was so successful is that it wasn’t preaching woke nonsense. It was just a fun, patriotic action film with awesome stunts, a great cast, and a compelling storyline. Just do that.

If Disney wanted to — and it doesn’t, not really — it could make countless films and TV shows that deeply appeal to young men. It would be the easiest thing in the world to do. But to do that, Disney would have to repudiate its woke ideology and quit trying to lecture young men about how masculinity is toxic, America is bad, Christianity is oppressive, and everything should be gay. And let’s be honest: Disney is incapable of doing that.

The fiery furnaces are there by God’s direct permission. It is misleading to imagine that we are developed in spite of our circumstances; we are developed because of them. It is mastery in circumstances that is needed, not mastery over them.
The Love of God—The Message of Invincible Consolation, 674 R

You wouldn’t believe this if you saw it in a movie

If you were watching a movie and saw a 737 swerve to avoid a truck on the runway and have it narrowly pass between the nose and main landing gear, you'd think the script writers had gone too far. But that’s exactly what happened this February in Brazil. On this week’s AvTalk we walk through the incredible sequence of events. https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/avtalk-podcast/avtalk-332/

Putin en route to Anchorage

Russian president Vladimir Putin is en route to Anchorage, Alaska to meet with US president Donald Trump at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. https://www.flightradar24.com/RSD539/3bbf7fe8

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Let the Music Play...Again!

And so, after a long wander looking for an “ism” to explain what’s wrong with her love life, in the final paragraph, she turns to the words of a friend: “’The old way of mating is dead,’ said my friend at our colloquy of female complaint over dinner, ‘and the new one has yet to be born.'”

Garnett and her friend believe this may give some comfort in their relational wasteland, but in truth, the old ways are alive. Plenty of people still get married and remain happily and faithfully married. But she is right that the old ways are not alive for everyone — not for as many people as they should be. And that’s the big picture explanation that Garnett struggled to identify.

Garnett’s present unhappiness is a result of the ideology and behaviors she has promoted. The immediate cause of her unhappiness is that she’s a middle-aged woman hooking up with noncommittal men. The more comprehensive cause is the culture she has marinated in and furthered. She obviously yearns for the “old-fashioned man-woman stuff” she wants to dismiss. And she should — she was made for it. But our culture encourages people to give their bodies quickly and their hearts slowly, if at all. This divides the person and precludes genuine love, which requires the gift of the whole self. This is why Christian sexual morality — and the marital sexual exclusivity it requires — is not a killjoy. Rather, it is a protector and promoter of human well-being. It directs us toward our good and the good of others.

Let the Music Play...Again!

If your home router links to the right IP address...

To enroll your PC in the ESU program, you'll need to meet Microsoft's list of requirements and anti-requirements, which we'll summarize here for convenience:

• A PC running Windows 10 Home, Pro, Pro Education, or Workstation with all available update installed.
• An administrator account.
• A Microsoft account. Even if you usually sign in with a local account, you need a Microsoft account to acquire the ESU license.
• The PC can't be in kiosk mode, joined to an Active Directory domain, joined to Microsoft Entra, or enrolled in any kind of mobile device management (MDM), which will cover a lot of workplace PCs. Microsoft has separate ESU programs for businesses, schools, and other large organizations.

If your PC meets those conditions, you'll enroll in the ESU program by opening the Settings app and clicking Windows Update. You should see a status message telling you that Windows 10 updates end in October of 2025, with an "enroll now" link you can click to enroll in the Extended Security Updates program.

Cracker Barrel wasn’t just a company or a restaurant. It represented a slice of Americana that millions would desperately like to return to. A time where people worked with their hands, and prayed before meals, and didn’t bother locking their doors at night. The old soda signs reminded us that our money wasn’t always worthless and our country wasn’t always run by greedy bankers. We used to be a country that built things and conquered the frontier.

That’s the feeling that Cracker Barrel used to evoke, and it’s what made its customers so loyal. It’s why people would stop there for lunch during a long road trip instead of just grabbing fast food and getting back on the highway. It’s why people were happy to wait 30 minutes for a table after Sunday School and happily mill about the store until their table was ready.

And it’s that feeling and that America that the woke parasites in charge of Cracker Barrel deliberately sought to maliciously destroy. They refused to fix the actual problems and instead decided the real problem was their own customers, whom they set out to reeducate.

I hope they had their fun, because Cracker Barrel is done. They killed it, wrapped the corpse in a rainbow flag, and then made it do a little puppet show in New York City for the entertainment of all their woke little friends.

I can’t believe I caught THIS on camera… a bee having a wee! 🐝👇

Yep, it turns out that bees do wee, well kind of – but not like we do. Apparently they’ve got a clever little system that gets rid of wee and poop in one go, usually mid-flight, so they don’t mess up the hive (that’s very well trained!)

It’s normally such a blink-and-you-miss-it thing… but while I was filming the echinops in full bloom at @fieldgateflowers this week, one bee just went for it right in front of me.

On 12 September,1983, the Rev. William Still, Gilcomston South Church, Aberdeen, universally recognized as the senior parish minister, both in years and influence, among evangelicals in the Church of Scotland, gave the following address to some fifty ministers at an In-Service course of his denomination, convened at St Andrews. The address was published in The Banner of Truth magazine in 1984, and was drawn to the attention of the men at the 2010 US Ministers’ Conference in Grantham, PA, by Craig Troxel, one of the speakers, who comments:

When I first read this article it helped to forge in my mind an all-important distinction. When it comes to the stewardship of the Gospel, there are two basic choices before the Church of Christ. Either the Church will be content to apply itself to God’s ordinary means and trust him for their extraordinary ends; or, the Church will pursue extraordinary means and content itself with ordinary ends. In his reflection of four decades of ministry William Still describes the extraordinary fruit that God brought about through one congregation’s simple devotion to God’s appointed means of grace: Word, sacrament and prayer. In a day when there are so many voices calling for the church to do ‘something more,’ here is a plea for the church to pursue ‘its own native activity’ in the power of the Spirit. One need not claim membership in the Stillite clan to feel a deep kinship with our brother and his (still) timely word. //

He says that he found, that apart from the Early Fathers and the Reformers, any such systematic teaching and preaching of the Scriptures was short-lived, and even the Puritans, who certainly covered the Scriptures in depth, used textual rather than systematic expository preaching. One is not saying that our practice has not been done by preachers throughout history and even today, but I think you will agree that it is far from the accepted form.

However, the abundant fruit of this form of ministry, which I have documented in a book called The Work of the Pastor, is such that only a lunatic would have abandoned it despite all that was said against it. //

Now, I wonder if any are saying, ‘How incredibly narrow this is as an example of congregational life! Such intense spirituality!’ Perhaps you think you could not stand it, let alone your congregation! Well, all I can say is that from that fount of praise, prayer and Bible Study every conceivable kind of outreach goes on into the wider church and the community. //

I take the opposite view, having seen the dissipation and dilution of effort by such all-inclusive activities on the part of the different denominations I have been in. I felt that my time as Pastor could best be employed by concentrating almost wholly on feeding the sheep and tending the lambs in their spiritual growth through a corporate life of prayer and the ministry of the Word. Then let the congregation go out – and encourage them to do so – with an absolutely free commission to be leaven throughout the community and to live their life out there amongst the people as the good Lord guided. //

You see, you could get crowds to come to pie suppers You see, you could get crowds to come to pie suppers and dances in the hall, but precious few to church on Sunday, until things were so bad that old J. T. Cox – the compiler of our Church Law Book, who was Presbytery Clerk back then – twice tried to close our congregation down because it could not pay its way. Serve it right, too!

I hope you see what I am saying: let the church be the church, and let it not incorporate into its fundamental constitution anything but its own native activity, and let all the rest be as much in the nature of an unofficial activity and outreach as possible. //

I was saying that in our experience the whole future of young folk attending church – to put it no higher than mere attendance, although I can put it higher – right up to early adulthood, has hung on getting them to attend regularly, preferably in the family pew, during childhood. To say that we cannot do this in our modern age is surely the most pathetic admission of failure in our elementary responsibility as Christian parents. //

But instead of arguing with people that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God and presenting a wealth of apologetics, as many conservatives have spent their time doing, one has felt that the way to press people into the kingdom, especially thinking young people, is to preach the Word and teach it, and let it do its own work by the Holy Spirit in their consciences, ‘precept upon precept, line upon line’ (although I know that these phrases were perhaps first used by Isaiah for a different purpose). I mean preaching in a dogmatic way, not in the aggressive sense of the word but in the positive sense of it. And it is axiomatic and essential that we must present the truth with that backing of prayer and that dependence upon the Holy Spirit (in both the study of the Word and in the declaration of it) which releases the latent power of the Word to reach not only the minds, but the consciences, hearts and wills of the hearers. Our purpose must be nothing less than life transformation and, consequently, the calling of many into the Lord’s service. //

William Still (1911-1997) was the Minister of Gilcomston South Church of Scotland, Aberdeen, from 1945 until his death. This article was previously published in The Banner of Truth magazine, No. 244 (January 1984),

When I switched to a locally compounded all-natural testosterone cream, the issue was solved. And the FDA has made it clear that it is interested in taking compounded creams for testosterone and estradiol off the market, as well. The FDA would prefer I inject myself with improved synthetics than allow me to opt for an organic alternative. //

Big Pharma loathes the idea of local providers and compounding pharmacies, because there is no money in such things. Something similar to this issue may one day affect you or someone you love. After all, there is more money to be made and more power to be had in treating sick people than in actually seeing them get better. There is more money to be made and more power to be had in forcing people to take synthetic medications than in allowing them to choose a natural alternative.

My son, Max, once worked for social media companies. Now he makes his living speaking to students about how phones hook them. He compares smartphones to casino slot machines.

"All the things we love about social media, those are the reward in the slot machine ... we get that 'hit' once in a while ... That's there to keep us scrolling for hours."

Haidt agrees, calling smartphones a "gambling machine."

They say some apps are worse than others.

"Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok. Those really shatter attention spans. In terms of exposure to things that are really dangerous, Snap is the worst," says Haidt. "In terms of destroying your ability to pay attention, TikTok is the worst. In terms of destroying a teenage girl's sense of confidence, self-esteem, body image, Instagram is the worst."

He says social media affects boys and girls differently.

"Check in on the kids at age 14, girls are doing worse. They're more depressed and anxious, more messed up."

But a few years later, he says, "Girls are more likely to have gone to college, gotten a job and moved out of their parents' home. Boys are more likely to still be in their parents' basement playing video games. They never grew up. Real life is incredibly boring compared to a video game or porn."

Teachers say phone addiction makes it harder to teach.

That led to a quick trip to an 'Urgent Care' - the frontline medical center for most Americans. At the check-in counter, the check-in nurse asked to see some ID, so I handed over my Australian driver's license. The nurse looked at the license and typed some of the info on it into a computer, then they looked up at me and asked: "Are you the same Mark Pesce who lived at...?" and then proceeded to recite an address that I resided at more than half a century ago.

Dumbstruck, I said, "Yes...? And how did you know that? I haven't lived there in nearly 50 years. I've never been in here before - I've barely ever been in this town before. Where did that come from?"

"Oh," they replied. "We share our patient data records with Massachusetts General Hospital. It's probably from them?"

I remembered having a bit of minor surgery as an 11 year old, conducted at that facility. 51 years ago. That's the only time I'd ever been a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Somehow that had never been forgotten.

We seem perfectly willing to accept that everything we do today leaves a permanent record. It appears that long before Eric Schmidt declared, "Privacy is dead," any of our pretensions to privacy had already joined the Choir Invisible. //

I don’t much care how my records made it into 2025. I am interested in why nobody ever decided to delete them.

I realize we all want our medical records instantly available to inform treatment in moments of great need. But half a century of somewhat senseless recordkeeping strains credulity. Most likely my record remained in that database simply because it's never been cleaned out - an operation that would take time and budget that would never be approved because, why would you ever delete patient data?

This has the feel of a situation we had no idea we were making for ourselves - countless sensible decisions culminating in a ridiculous outcome. Go forward another fifty years, when it's quite likely I, too, will have joined the Choir Invisible. Will my patient record still be in that database? What purpose would that serve? If my records as a child are in there, half a century later, it's easy to imagine this database holds records of many other people who have passed on and therefore shouldn't be in there at all. Privacy lost to laziness. //

Alex 72
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Medical records should be kept but access should be controlled
I agree yes you want medical records kept, patient history is always useful and provided they are only shared with the patient or a doctor or other professional they have consented to be cared for by, and who is not engaged in malpractice, it's not harmful. The hard part is drawing the line on how much anonymised data can be used for research, ensuring that data remains anonymous and managing consent for sharing data when patients are treated elsewhere or researchers want to use data from multiple sources.

and if you keep them for someone's entire lifespan then you should provided they did not object in their lifetime and next of kin explicitly consent or at least don't object probably archive it for future research in the near/medium term and historical value in the long term. Again managing consent, allowing reasonable anonymised research in the public interest, preventing de-anonymisation and deciding the limits of how long parts of it stay private vs when genealogists and historians can have unrestricted access.. is the challenge.

To do any of this effective durable storage, access control, authentication and authorisation are just some of the challenges. I have seen data analytics firms who's job is just this struggle to get everything correct so a group of organisation just trying to provide healthcare, research, treatments, disease, prevention.... Having to do this as an add on with a limited budget I am honestly impressed its only now with ransomware we are starting to see issues and paper records were not being stolen and abused on a massive scale in the past...

I don't know the answer but I don't think its the delete key

Gene CashSilver badge
Why would you ever delete patient data?
Yes, seriously.

I can understand other records, but not medical ones.

I was able to get proper medical care, including surgery, for a broken coccyx after proving I had fallen off a hay bale in 1973 and seriously injured myself, and thus it was a chronic thing and not just the minor recent incident my doctor insisted it was. I would have otherwise not been considered eligible for the surgery.

And after you're dead, it's no longer a privacy issue and becomes historical records. It's no different than census records.

Should this data be held indefinitely? Yes.

This is the same sort of data that let me piece together that my great^9 grandfather was Edward Reavis, born 1680 in Paddington, England, and left to come to Virginia, after being held in Newgate prison for his religious beliefs. He moved to Henrico county, Virginia in 1721 and died in Northampton county, North Carolina in 1751. I've also found 454 other relatives down to me, through a ton of things including bible notes, estate papers, census records, marriage records, medical records, military records, family papers, private letters, obituaries, social security records, tombstones, and even old wedding invitations.

Through 2023, the firm focused on training staff on how to use chatbots and write effective prompts.

In 2024, it started building agents, including the TaxBot mentioned above.

Munnelly said building that bot started with locating tax advice written by partners, which he said was "stored all over the place" – often on tax partners' laptops. KPMG found as much of that advice as it could and placed it in a RAG model along with Australia's tax code to produce an Agent that creates tax advice.

"It is very efficient," Munnelly told the Forrester conference. "It does what our team used to do in about two weeks, in a day. It will strip through our documents and the legislation and produce a 25-page document for a client as a first draft.

"That speed is important," he added. "If we have a client who is about to do a merger, and they want to understand the tax implications, getting that knowledge in a day is much more important than getting it in two weeks' time."

"That is really changing our business and how we work."

Munnelly said KPMG built the agent by writing a 100-page prompt it fed into Workbench. The Register asked for details of the prompt and Munnelly said a substantial team worked on it for months, and the resulting agent asks for four or five inputs before it starts working on tax advice, then asks a human for direction before generating a document.

Only tax agents can use the tool, because its output is not suitable for people without deep tax expertise. //

The chief digital officer said KPMG has deployed agents that do frustrating and time-consuming work people would rather avoid, and that staff surveys suggest employee satisfaction has risen as AI frees them to spend more time working on challenging tasks, leading them to rate the firm as more innovative.

"They just don't want to do the boring stuff," Munnelly said. "They want to get out there and help clients with chewy problems." //

An_Old_DogSilver badge
Sprawling, Unmaintainable, Spreadsheet Macros: The New Generation

1. Does this new, faster method produce complete and accurate results? No.

2. Is this 100-page LLM prompt effectively-maintainable software? Probably not.

3. Does this smack of corporate-image-spinmeistering over rationality and logic? Yes.

This would encourage more traditional, less politicized instruction in military-run public schools and boost recruitment from the most pro-America demographics. //

The current Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) moving through Congress would require DODEA schools to offer 11th-grade students the college admissions test of their parents’ choice. This would allow students to take the Classic Learning Test, a Great Books competitor to the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. NDAA is a must-pass annual military spending bill. Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., successfully added that amendment during markup in July. //

The CLT arose 10 years ago as a market response to the increased politicization of the College Board. //

Classical education is an elite form of education for the common man. Classical schools teach the Western great books by using age-appropriate primary source documents instead of textbooks as much as possible.

Classically educated children devote core instruction time to grammar, logic, and writing, as well as traditional math and science. They memorize great poetry, hymns, folk songs, and language rules. Classical schools deliberately cultivate the virtues and habits necessary for republican self-government, such as faith in the Triune God, honesty, respect for God’s creation, hard work, attentiveness, charity towards others, and perseverance.

Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wyoming have passed laws making CLT’s college entrance and annual K-12 tests an option in their states, from school choice programs to entrance and scholarships at state higher education institutions. //

Banks has also introduced a standalone bill, the Promoting Classical Learning Act, that would require the military academies to accept CLT. That bill would also require all federally administered K-12 schools to offer CLT to all 11th-graders. The federal government directly runs both DODEA schools and Bureau of Indian Education schools.

“If I can save 7,000 people a week from being killed, I think that’s a pretty [good thing].”

“I want to try to get to Heaven if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well, I am really at the bottom of the totem pole,” he joked. “But if I can get to Heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”

It was classic Trump, using self-deprecating humor to highlight something that was actually a great accomplishment. And in Trump fashion, his comment was almost certainly more of an off-the-cuff quip than a serious declaration of theology. Many have made the mistake of taking Trump literally instead of seriously, and that awareness is worth having here.

But out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, and it’s not every day the president gives you a perfect news hook to talk about the Gospel. So it bears repeating: None of your own works, not even an act as virtuous as saving lives, can earn you a spot in paradise.

But beneath the onslaught of celebrity cameos — including the Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce, pop singer Bad Bunny (Gilmore’s caddy!), and many PGA golfers — a plot line that asks audiences to expel rather than merely suspend their disbelief, and the gratuitously silly scenes that populate the film from start to finish, the movie is shockingly profound and profoundly conservative.

The movie’s core messages are the importance of family, the meaninglessness of hedonism, marriage’s eternal nature, the defense of tradition, the reality of gender roles, and the integrity of the human body. These are provocative and courageous messages to bring audiences (and leftist movie critics) in 2025.

Arkansas could have leased this land to a mining company. Instead, the state maintains it as the only diamond-producing site in the world where the public can search for diamonds in their original volcanic matrix and keep what they find.

Since Arkansas turned this geological oddity into a state park in 1972, visitors have found more than 35,000 diamonds. The park operates on a simple principle that sounds almost too good to exist in modern America: Everything you find belongs to you, no questions asked, no revenue sharing, no fine print. However, finding diamonds is not as easy as it sounds. //

Park staff told Mays that visitors find one or two diamonds daily, so "keep your expectations in check," she writes. Most diamonds discovered are about the size of a paper match head, while a one-carat diamond is roughly the size of a green pea. But even tiny diamonds carry the thrill of discovery. Park staff provide free identification services, examining finds under loupes and confirming whether that glassy pebble is quartz or something more valuable.

The ingenious American engineering behind early sequential signals in Ford Mustangs and Mercury Cougars

By rotating a cam assembly, three lobes completed circuits for individual bulbs: inner, middle, and outer.
The electric Ford Mustang Mach E SUV is the latest FoMoCo product to feature sequential turn signals, blinking taillights that show, by flashing individual LED bulbs, the direction you’re turning. But what if I told you this is old technology, nothing new, and first saw use in the mid-1960s?

First introduced on the 1965 Ford Thunderbird and popularized on the more powerful Ford Mustang and Mercury Cougar, sequential turn signals were a novel way to differentiate Ford products from the rest of the muscle cars.