I lay on a lilo 'til I'm lobster red, I still read the tabbies here at home in bed ...
What about a ban on beheading ? https://t.co/p98pCXEBgB
— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) June 12, 2026
Ed: The community note on this post shows a complete lack of humor, not to mention a sense of what Cleese is arguing here. The UK does not need new laws of new programs to deal with the terrorism that their unrestricted immigration has allowed to flourish. It just needs to impose harsh consequences for lawbreakers, and a recognition that the mass migration has changed the character of the United Kingdom for the worse.
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Axios: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday that an agreement with the U.S. to extend the ceasefire, reopen the Strait of Hormuz and launch negotiations on Iran's nuclear program "has never been closer."
Why it matters: Araghchi's comments on X were the most positive yet from Tehran about the prospects for a deal in the coming days, and appeared designed to prevent the deal from collapsing amid a battle to shape the narrative around it.
Ed: Duane and I had considerable skepticism about this deal, but the signals improved later in the day … sort of. The IRGC’s propaganda mouthpieces kept making ridiculous claims, but Araghchi and others in the civilian side pushed back and claimed those reports were false. This may force some kind of showdown over control of the regime … or this may all be for show. The latter seems still to be the likeliest explanation, but I’m willing to change my mind if the signals keep improving. On the other hand ...
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Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi:
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) June 12, 2026
Fees will be charged for services in the Strait of Hormuz, and these services will no longer be free.
This important matter has been confirmed: payment of fees is required.
Ed: If this is what Iran thinks it got from the MOU, then it should be no deal and get back to the only language that terrorists understand. It’s still possible that this was meant for internal consumption to avoid admitting that the regime lost.
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Fox News: Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said he has a "hard time understanding" claims that the guilty verdict in Karmelo Anthony's murder trial was unfair or racially motivated, distancing himself from some Democrats and activists who have criticized the outcome of the case.
"I have a hard time understanding why they would say that," Kaine said when asked about claims from some Democrats that Anthony's guilty verdict was unfair or racially charged. ...
Kaine's comments stand in contrast with remarks from Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, who has publicly described Anthony as a "scared Black boy" and argued he was not shown enough "mercy" following the verdict.
Ed: Kudos to Kaine for not enabling this mindless racism that Crockett’s peddling. It would have been easy to take a pass on comment, or to offer some vague solidarity with the sentiment. Crockett’s so bat-guano nuts that it’s impossible to stay on the sidelines. Anthony provoked the conflict, escalated it with a verbal threat, and then used lethal force in a circumstance where no reasonable person could fear for their life or that great bodily harm would result, the legal threshold for lethal force. Having participated in the conflict, Anthony would have had to retreat before justifying lethal force, too. That’s the law, and the jury applied it properly.
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Many are saying Graham Platner has “changed.” Are there any records of therapy? Anger management classes? AA? Anything to prove that he might have gotten help?
— Ally Sammarco (@Ally_Sammarco) June 12, 2026
Ed: Good questions. Platner was still on the predatory Kik platform with his half-naked profile pic as recently as ten days ago, a middle-aged married man on a social media platform known for its dangers to adolescents. I guess all we’d need to see to answer Sammarco’s questions would be Platner’s campaign schedule.
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NRO: “As somebody who is the son of a veteran and the grandson of a veteran as well, both of whom were objectively working class, this line I keep hearing from people that ‘this is just what you get if you want to be represented by working class people or veterans’ is incredibly offensive and wrong,” says Charlie.
Platner, says Charlie, “is not what you are intrinsically like if you’re working class. It’s not what you’re intrinsically like if you are a veteran or if you saw action in combat. That is a bigoted slander of millions of people who are not like this at all, who don’t cheat on their spouse, who don’t join underage sites, who don’t get Nazi tattoos, who actually don’t sign up for the military because they want to kill people.”
Ed: Der Oysterführer is an insult to many types of people. The DSA-driven attempt to remake Platner insults veterans, men in general, veterans, women who have been victims of abuse, teenagers on social media, and so on. Mainly, though, Democrats keep insulting our intelligence by claiming that Republicans are Nazis for wanting immigration law enforced, but that we should give “grace” to Herr Totenkopf for wearing Nazi death-camp insignia for almost twenty years. The letters F and U come to mind.
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Not only has Elon built many successful businesses of substantial value, he also manages to live rent-free in your head!
— Carol Roth (@caroljsroth) June 12, 2026
Generational entrepreneurial talent.
Ed: Musk didn’t just build companies of value to Musk, but companies of tremendous value to mankind as well. Musk demonstrates what a motivated entrepreneur can accomplish in a capitalist system designed to reward it. He’s not building hedge funds; he’s giving us access to space, a mission NASA has failed to meet for the last couple of decades. He’s actually making broadband access universal without handing Joe Biden $40 billion in pork-barrel funds. The wealth he built today will almost certainly get channeled back into innovation, unless progressive thieves get their hands on power.
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WSJ: SpaceX's shares rose about 25% over their opening price as the largest-ever IPO had Wall Street and investors around the world glued to their screens.
The stock opened trading at $150, 11% above the IPO price of $135. The initial climb gave it a market cap above $2.2 trillion, making it the sixth most valuable U.S.-listed company.
Elon Musk officially became the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX—trading under the ticker SPCX— went public. His stake in the rocket maker was valued at around $690 billion at the IPO price, while his Tesla stake makes up around $279 billion of his net worth.
Ed: It’s important to understand that Musk’s wealth is not liquid; it’s tied to the performance of Musk’s companies. If they succeed, so does he. If not, Musk won’t stay a trillionaire for long. Some people don’t understand that, which may be understandable…. in some cases ...
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He is more Tony Stark and the Financial Times is more business illiterate each passing day.
— Al's Café Americain™ (@therealADWarren) June 12, 2026
Ed: You gotta be kidding me. Financial Times should rename itself to something more appropriate, such as the Marx Crier.
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Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO: I find this viewpoint revolting. Repulsive. Grotesque. Un-American. I hate it. As far as I’m concerned, Newsom, Markey, Warren, Platner, and those who agree with them are members of an impotent envy cult. Elon Musk has been responsible for PayPal, Starlink, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and more. If your primary reaction to his stewardship of these endeavors is to wonder how quickly you can confiscate the money he has tied up in them, you are a loser and you do not deserve the blessings that this country has bestowed upon you. That sort of thinking is at home in Belgium or Canada or Russia. It is not at home in the United States of America. There are many, many reasons that I wanted to move to this country, and one of them is that it is the sort of place where people such as Elon Musk are able to do great things. England has become sclerotic and its politics have become narrow and covetous. But America? America is a different beast. Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire? Hell yeah he is. ...
I suspect, at one level, Musk’s enemies believe the things he has achieved would magically have happened without him — that, somehow, they were foreordained to occur, and that he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. This is stupid and it is wrong. There are such things in history as great men, and Musk is one of them. Gavin Newsom, Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren, and Graham Platner, by contrast, are not.
Ed: Read it all, but this is the pith of the gist. It’s a great essay.
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The deliberate inability of people to understand — on the day of SpaceX’s IPO no less — that Musk doesn’t actually have $1 trillion in cash to be grabbed by the revenuers and redistributors is kind of amazing.
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) June 12, 2026
Ed: Jonah’s right, of course, but “socialists flunk real-world economics” isn’t a surprising outcome.
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Joe Lancaster at Reason: SpaceX has pioneered innovations in space travel that very recently seemed like science fiction. "SpaceX's ability to lower launch costs by roughly 90 percent—through reusable first-stage boosters, but also a vertically integrated manufacturing process and a high-cadence flight rate—is mega innovation equal to any of the past quarter century," writes James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute. "That massive cost decline, with another 90 percent or more potentially on the way through full reusability, has fundamentally altered the economics of space and finally made possible the dreams of the original Space Age: orbital cities, deep-space habitats, space-based solar, asteroid mining."
Besides, economics is not zero-sum. Musk's balance sheet growing to a trillion dollars does not mean other people lose money; it means the economy as a whole is growing.
And growing economies are good for everybody, not just the uberwealthy: Between 1990 and 2025, the global share of people living in "extreme poverty" declined by nearly two-thirds, from 2.31 billion to 808 million, even as the global population increased by nearly 3 billion—an accomplishment J.D. Tuccille called "nothing short of miraculous." It's not a coincidence that over that same period of time, global gross domestic product (GDP) roughly quadrupled, boosting countless thousandaires into millionaires and millionaires into billionaires in the process.
Ed: For all of the shrieking of the progressives, no one has yet to show how Musk’s success has made others less wealthy, except possibly for investors who bet against him. Musk’s wealth comes from innovation and achievement, which expands wealth rather than redistributes it. Now let’s ask the companion question: Name one socialist country where the populace became wealthier and less impoverished through redistribution in a similar timeframe as Musk’s. The only people who become wealthier in the systems demanded by Sanders, AOC, and Warren are those who run those systems, and they do so at the direct expense of their subjects.
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The most envious, Marxist, redistributive person in the world isn't the guy busting his hump to frame a house, or the guy grinding out DoorDash...it's the smug guy worth 7 or 8 figures staring at a trillionaire he considers socially beneath him. https://t.co/4NA4w0XCbS
— Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) (@antoniogm) June 12, 2026
Ed: Is there ever a time when Kimmel tries comedy rather than seething hatred and envy? As I’ve said before, he’s Lonesome Rhodes without the brains or the heart.
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Free Beacon: Recently axed 60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega was cooperating with the virulently anti-Israel United Nations official Francesca Albanese—who's been accused by the United States of "malignant anti-Semitism"—on a profile for the flagship news program, and was preparing to fly to Tunis to interview her on camera, when Vega was suddenly fired, according to a new report from Zeteo, which spoke to Albanese.
60 Minutes producers had already been filming on location with Albanese, who is under formal sanctions imposed by the U.S. government. Albanese is accused of using multiple antisemitic tropes, minimizing the violence of Oct. 7, and comparing Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto and Israel to the Third Reich, an antisemitic device known as Holocaust inversion. Last July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Albanese "spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism and open contempt for the United States, Israel and the West."
Vega—who helmed an incendiary January 2025 60 Minutes piece that featured ex-Biden administration officials denouncing American support for Israel's war against Hamas—had already met twice with Albanese, Zeteo reported, to lay the groundwork for a profile showcasing her work as the U.N. special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, a position that has enabled Albanese to travel the globe accusing Israel of genocide.
Ed: I’d understand this if 60 Minutes planned this as an exposé on Albanese. I suspect it was planned as a hit job on Trump, Rubio, and Netanyahu. This may be why six fired 60 Minutes figures went running to Variety to complain about Bari Weiss. And ...
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I’m unclear why anyone, from Bari Weiss to me, should care at all what former 60 Minutes staffers are sick of. https://t.co/hPjptWhCcr
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) June 12, 2026
Ed: This is precisely the situation for which the word “disgruntled” was coined.
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A Bueller, Bueller AnniversaryForty years ago today “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was released — changing Ben Stein’s life forever. Here Ben recalls how it came about. https://t.co/4YmORJegsJ pic.twitter.com/az2fXWQxEs
— Lisa De Pasquale (@LisaDeP) June 12, 2026
Ed: It’s been 40 years? Good Lord, I’m old. Maybe we should expect a sequel, “Ferris Bueller’s Retirement Day.” I can still remember seeing this in the theater more than once and knowing it would become an absolute classic. Ben Stein is fabulous in that small role.
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Last night's lyric: "The Rain, the Park, and Other Things" by The Cowsills. This is a great live performance from the Billy Cowsill Benefit Concert in 2004.
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