Hezbollah said it carried out 39 attacks over the past 24 hours against Israeli targets, according to Al Jazeera.
The group targeted Israeli settlements, troop concentrations, military vehicles and close-range clashes at the southern border and in northern Israel, the report said.
https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Hezbollah-says-launched-39-strikes-over-24-hours/66079061
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters Tuesday that Beijing’s panic hoarding of crude and refined products, while refusing to join the rest of the world in releasing supplies to offset the Gulf energy shock, has now demonstrated for the third time in five years that China is an "unreliable global partner."
"China has been an unreliable global partner three times in the past five years; once during COVID, when they hoarded healthcare products, second on rare earth," Bessent said, referring to Beijing's move last year to weaponize rare earth exports against the US in the tit-for-tat trade war that disrupted US supply chains, including temporary factory shutdowns such as production lines briefly shuttered by Ford Motor Company.
Bessent said China continued to purchase tanker loads of crude instead of helping ease the global supply crunch caused by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, despite already holding a massive strategic reserve. He also noted that China restricted exports of crude products early in the conflict.
Reuters noted that China's strategic petroleum reserve "was roughly the same size as that of the entire reserve held by the 32-member International Energy Agency, but it was continuing to purchase oil."
Bessent added, "They continued buying, and they've been hoarding, and they have cut off exports of many products."
On US-China relations, he told reporters he's been in contact with Chinese officials about the hoarding issue.
He declined to comment on whether the dispute and elevated tensions will derail an upcoming Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, which has been pushed to mid-May.
"I think the message for the visit is stability. We've had great stability in the relationship since last summer; that emanates from the top down," he said. "I think that communication is the key."
Bessent added that the US military blockade would ensure that no Chinese tankers or other ships would pass the strait: "So they're not going to be able to get their oil. They can get oil. Not Iranian oil."
Last week, International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol warned that governments must avoid panic hoarding and refrain from imposing fuel export bans as the Gulf energy shock continues to ripple outward to Asia, Africa, Europe, and eventually reaches the US West Coast.
"I urge all countries not to impose bans or restrictions on exports," Fatih Birol emphasized in a Financial Times interview. "It is the worst time when you look at the global oil markets. Their trade partners, their allies and their neighbors will suffer as a result."
The FT noted that Birol was "careful not to name China directly," but made very clear his warning was likely aimed at Beijing.
So Bessent is clearly keeping a running tally of Beijing’s behavior as an "unreliable global partner," and by his count, the number now stands at three.
What comes next is unclear, but the next signal will likely come from the upcoming Trump-Xi meeting.
No one can doubt the sincerity of our blue-state governors in their noble quest to teach migrants a lesson with wealth taxes and exit taxes? I mean, of course, the migrants from blue states to red states, the traitors who, as billionaires and white oppressors, don’t want to pay their fair share.
But there’s a bigger issue, one that our liberal friends are naively ignorant about, as usual.
It is inflation.
A century ago, the dollar was priced at $20.67 per ounce of gold. Today it’s about $4,770 per ounce. If we assume that the gold price is the closest measure we have of inflation, then the dollar is worth less than 1/200th of its value a century ago. Or less than half a cent of the dollar in 1926.
Inflation, as Milton Friedman wrote, “is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” That is economist-speak for “government did it.”
And it seems to me, as a gentle soul writing in the spirit of our beloved blue-state governors, that the people in government that “did it” are saboteurs and wreckers and should pay for their crimes.
I propose, to avoid a McCarthyite witch hunt, that we simply institute an Inflation Tax on the income and emoluments of all politicians, government employees, regulators, and also non-governmental organizations that receive grants from the government.
How much should that Inflation Tax be? In the interest of justice and personal responsibility, it should merely be equal to the inflation recorded on the Gross Domestic Product: Implicit Price Deflator. FRED has the numbers. from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025 the index went from 126.45 to 130.624. That’s an increase of 3.29 percent. There’s your base rate for the Inflation Tax in 2026 that all the grifters -- I mean, devoted public servants -- should willingly pay.
Somehow, to me, that doesn’t seem like it’s enough. Not for elected politicians whose votes for more spending help drive the inflation train. Not for government executives whose failures we the people get to pay for.
Just as with the income tax, the Inflation Tax should be graduated, so that those close to the corridors of power will get to pay their fair share. I am sure that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), given her passion for justice, will agree with me.
I think that, in the interests of justice, government executives should pay double the base rate of the Inflation Tax and that elected officials should pay triple the base rate of the Inflation Tax.
And then there is a special case: the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the man with his hand on the money spigot. I won’t say his name, because I am opposed to doxxing. But you know who he is. There is no inflation unless the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board wills it with his money creation. I believe that a poll of philosophers, theologians, and secular moralists would reveal a consensus that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board should pay ten times the base Inflation Tax rate. Because justice and morality. In 2025 his Inflation Tax rate would have been 32.6 percent of income and emoluments. That would be justice if I ever saw it.
Think the graduated rate for the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is too high? Then, did you know that the monetary base went from $3.455 trillion in February 2020 to $4.845 trillion in April 2020 to finance the War on COVID? That’s an increase of 40 percent in two months! And for what! To finance all those mostly peaceful protests in the Year of Floyd?
But hey, inflation peaked at only 6.47 percent in 2022. So the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board would only have paid about 65 percent of his remuneration in Inflation Tax. Imagine if he were in charge of Argentina’s central bank, where inflation is down from 200 percent to 33 percent under the chainsaw of President Milei.
Now, according to Google AI, there are about 22-23 million government employees in the United States, and the average earnings of state and local government employees is north of $65 per hour, including benefits. So if we assume that they work 40 hours per week and 40 weeks a year, that would add up to about $74 billion collected by the Inflation Tax last year. Not a lot, not even as much as the notorious Trump Tariffs, that collected nearly $200 billion in 2025.
However, all this is nothing to what is transpiring in Canada where a speaker at the Liberal Party convention proposed to charge young people $500,000 to go work in the USA, in the true spirit of Marx’s 1848 demand for “the confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels.”
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/04/i_demand_an_inflation_tax_on_gubmint_employees.html
On August 22, 2025, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who had fled her country because of the Russian invasion, was stabbed from behind three times while seated on a train. The perpetrator, Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., was arrested and charged with first-degree murder but was later determined to be mentally incapable of standing trial.
Cases like that of Iryna Zarutska bring into sharp focus the gap between abstract theories and concrete consequences. Here is what happens when dangerous individuals intersect with systems more concerned with process than protection. This tragedy is more than a loss of life; it underscores a recurring pattern of sheltering the criminally insane from logical consequences.
The phrase “criminally insane” somehow diminishes the threat they pose and rests on a profound misunderstanding. If anything, such a designation ought to sharpen our awareness of that threat. A person who commits violent acts within the bounds of rational calculation may be deterred by consequences, constrained by incentives, or rehabilitated through changes in circumstance. But a person who commits those same acts without regard to reality itself -- untethered from reason, immune to ordinary incentives -- presents a far more intractable danger.
Yet modern discourse often moves in the opposite direction. Once the label of insanity is applied, the conversation shifts almost immediately from protection to treatment and from accountability to sympathy. This is not because the facts have changed, but because the narrative has. The perpetrator is no longer seen primarily as a threat to others but as a victim of his own condition. The victims of his actions, meanwhile, fade into the background.
Such thinking reflects a broader pattern: the elevation of intentions over outcomes. But good intentions do not alter the underlying reality that some individuals are simply not amenable to rehabilitation. To assume otherwise is to substitute hope for evidence.
Historically, societies have recognized that certain individuals pose a continuing danger regardless of the language used to describe them. Whether labeled “mad,” “deranged,” or “insane,” such individuals were often removed from the general population not out of cruelty, but out of necessity. The goal was not punishment in the moral sense, but protection in the practical sense.
In recent decades, however, the rise of “therapeutic jurisprudence” has shifted the focus. The legal system increasingly treats criminal behavior through the lens of diagnosis rather than deterrence. This approach carries with it an implicit assumption: that with sufficient treatment, even the most disturbed individuals can be rendered safe.
But this assumption is not borne out consistently in practice. The very definition of criminal insanity hinges on the inability to distinguish right from wrong or to conform one’s conduct to the law. If a person lacks that basic capacity, then the mechanisms that normally guide human behavior -- laws, penalties, social expectations -- have limited effect. In such cases, rehabilitation is not simply difficult; it may be fundamentally unattainable.
In addition, the unpredictability associated with severe mental disorders compounds the risk. A rational criminal may weigh costs and benefits, making his behavior at least partially foreseeable. An irrational one does not. The absence of a stable framework for decision-making makes it far more difficult to assess when, or if, such a person can safely reenter society.
Despite this, there remains a persistent reluctance to draw the logical conclusion. If the primary purpose of the penal system is to protect society, and if certain individuals -- by virtue of their mental condition -- pose a continuing and unpredictable threat, then the appropriate response is not temporary containment, but permanent removal from situations where they can harm others.
This is not a call for retribution, nor is it a denial of the humanity of those afflicted with severe mental illness. It is, rather, an acknowledgment of the limits of what treatment can achieve and the risks a society can reasonably be expected to bear.
To ignore these limits is to impose the costs of failure on innocent people. When a system errs on the side of premature release, it is not policymakers or theorists who bear the consequences, but ordinary citizens who find themselves victims of preventable violence. In this sense, the romanticization of rehabilitation becomes not merely misguided, but dangerous.
There is also an inherent asymmetry in how risks are distributed. The individual deemed criminally insane stands to gain freedom if the system errs in his favor. Society, on the other hand, stands to lose safety. When the stakes are so uneven, prudence dictates that the margin of error should favor protection rather than optimism.
None of this precludes efforts to treat mental illness. Treatment should be pursued wherever possible, both for the sake of the individual and for the broader goal of reducing harm. But treatment and containment are not mutually exclusive. One can recognize the value of medical intervention while also acknowledging that, in certain cases, it does not eliminate the underlying risk.
The difficulty lies in confronting an uncomfortable truth: that some problems do not have tidy solutions. The belief that every individual can be rehabilitated is appealing, but it is not universally true. Clinging to that belief in the face of contrary evidence does not make it more accurate; it merely makes the consequences of error more severe.
Ultimately, the measure of a legal system is not how well it articulates noble ideals, but how effectively it protects the people it serves. When dealing with individuals who have demonstrated both a capacity for violence and an inability to conform their behavior to reality itself, the priority must be clear. Society cannot afford to treat such cases as experiments in optimism.
Preventing another tragedy like that suffered by Iryna Zarutska does not require new slogans or more eloquent theories -- it requires a return to first principles. A legal system that cannot reliably distinguish between those who can be safely returned to society and those who cannot has no business erring on the side of release. The burden should not fall on the public to hope that experts have finally gotten it right this time. It should fall on the system to ensure that it does not get it catastrophically wrong again. Until that priority is restored, assurances about treatment and rehabilitation will ring hollow to those who understand that the next preventable victim is not an abstraction but a certainty waiting for its moment.
Jim Cardoza is the author of The Moral Superiority of Liberty and the founder of LibertyPen.com. Read more of his essays there.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/04/the_insanity_defense_a_public_danger.html
by Monica Showalter
Now that Eric Swalwell has crashed and burned as the Democrats' front-runner for governor of California, greenie billionaire and perennial presidential candidate Tom Steyer has been put forward as the new Favored One, according to the party's Mighty Integral.
Steyer is now the frontrunner to become the next Governor of California...
— Shawn Farash (@Shawn_Farash) April 13, 2026
Looks like the idea is that the bulk of Swalwell's voters go to Steyer, it lifts him past Bianco in the primary, and Steyer beats Hilton in the General.
This is why the Dems took out Swalwell. Every… https://t.co/iW2tNPdzP0
He's been eager enough for it, running millions of dollars of television ads, often featuring young people, who call Steyer 'my man' and other cozy terms. Steyer himself mouths platitudes about 'affordability' and other Democrat shibboleths since the election of Zohran Mamdani, who used the term, and then he sometimes lays out his promise to make electricity prices go 25 percent lower, and build a million houses, which should make ... someone ... rich. But nothing else really comes out of him, other than his craving for power.
Until now. He released his party platform, and it's a doozy:
He calls for a million new units of government housing to be built, in the name of making housing 'affordable' for that lucky million, ending Proposition 13 which protects little-guy homeowners as the prices of their homes go up, lowering electrical bills by breaking up monopolies as he puts it, providing state-education from age three through two years of community college, interfering with ICE agents doing their jobs, which he can't legally do, saddle businesses with oodles of new green regulations guaranteed to make prices go up, not down, and institute Canada-style single-payer health care, bound to create shortages and long waiting times, as well as the already-there high costs.
Here are a couple more key elements:
NEW: CA gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer (D) releases an immigration platform that is radically left of Gov. Newsom. It includes:
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) April 14, 2026
- Abolish ICE
- Put ICE agents in jail & “treat them like the mob”.
- Bring those “kidnapped & detained by ICE back home.”
- Give CA AG power to… https://t.co/XqM8eK7Hhf
This, too. Proposition 13 is the third rail of California politics.
Tom Steyer Campaigning on Blowing up Prop 13.
— California Globe (@CaliforniaGlobe) April 14, 2026
Proposition 13 is one of the very few protections that California taxpayers have.@CaliforniaGlobehttps://t.co/tmon0wXMDO https://t.co/VvRPrmlhek
LAUSD teachers got a deal. Good. Now let's fix the reason they had to strike in the first place.
— Tom Steyer (@TomSteyer) April 13, 2026
We need to fund our schools, and I'll do that by changing Prop 13 so that corporations pay real estate taxes based on their property's true value, not its value from the 1970s. https://t.co/7le6nwblZm
Even Gavin Newsom thinks it's skeevy, and that is saying a lot:
Here’s what Gavin Newsom thinks of the leading Democratic candidates for California Governor.https://t.co/dK5ygYFhdB pic.twitter.com/TAsE1R0qa6
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) April 15, 2026
When you've lost Gavin Newsom ...
But he has a lot of big-money sponsorship:
🚨 The Green‑Industrial Complex: How Tom Steyer Converted California into a Private Equity Colony ☠️
— Tony Seruga (@TonySeruga) April 14, 2026
Tom Steyer is not a candidate for Governor; he is the architect of a new bureaucratic empire that has successfully merged California's regulatory power with the predatory… https://t.co/6JNo9myYhL
His buddies include Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and other lefty moneybags with dreams of making California their first globalist colony:
🚨 Beware of Tom Steyer ☠️
— Tony Seruga (@TonySeruga) February 24, 2026
We have been doing this investigation for over a decade, and we must unpack our exposé on Tom Steyer carefully—because very few people in American politics represent the seamless blending of Wall Street machinery, “green capitalism,” and establishment… pic.twitter.com/HVH3q7IWSQ
This is billionaires plotting behind the scenes for a hostile takeover, which is clearly part of Democrat machine politics.
Steyer may have been the one who got the Democrats to put their machine in motion to knock out Swalwell (did he pay them off?), but it's interesting that he's not following the Democrat establishment playbook these days, which is to run as Abigail Spanberger did, making moderate statements during the campaign and then governing as a radical.
Steyer seems to be following the Mamdani playbook, which is to be as open and extremist as possible. Perhaps the Democrat machine is that radical, or considers California voters that radical, that Steyer can lay out a whole round of crazy.
But it's awful stuff, and Heaven help California if this freak gets elected. He's currently the Democrat favorite who is deemed most likely to unite the fragmented Democrat vote, besting true frontrunner Steve Hilton of the Republicans.
But that hasn't happened yet. It's up to Hilton and other Republicans to drive all the ugly details about Steyer's platform into the open, where voters anxious for change can rightly reject these frequently rejected policies. California deserves a lot better than the sorry candidate on offer from the Democrats.
Thanks to a 6.11% stake in SpaceX (SPACE) Google LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet (GOOG), could make at least $100B from its investment once the space exploration company goes public.
According to a regulatory filing in Alaska, Google’s initial investment has been diluted to ~5% due to the dilution impact of the SpaceX/xAI merger, but it is still worth billions of dollars should the valuation reach a record-setting $2T valuation.
While the SpaceX IPO stands to make billionaires out of early investors, including SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, Fidelity Investment’s Contrafund, Founders Fund, and even some original SpaceX employees, CEO Elon Musk could become history’s first trillionaire with his 40%+ holding in the company.
With so many individuals at the company poised to see their financial futures change dramatically, Bloomberg raises the possibility of a brain drain in the wake of the IPO.
“One of the biggest questions I have for this is what happens to middle management, even though SpaceX is a very lean company, and some of the upper management that after the IPO will not need to do anything to support themselves,” PitchBook’s Franco Granda said to Bloomberg.
“The investors who got in at 2021 will have life-changing returns, if not career-defining,” Granda added.
SpaceX submitted a confidential filing to go public, aiming for a June offering. The IPO is expected to raise at least $75B, making it the largest initial public offering on record.
The company is reportedly weighing several alternative IPO structures, including a dual-class share structure that would give insiders—including Musk—extra voting power, a tiered lock-up period that would release shares every 20 to 30 days to avert mass selling of shares after the traditional 180-day lock-up period, and a higher-than-usual retail allocation of shares of 30%.
