To celebrate Mother's Day, Olympic gold medalist Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone shared with her Instagram followers that she...

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Test your Fab Four knowledge with 100 Beatles trivia questions covering songs, albums, movies, lyrics, and band history from Liverpool to Abbey Road.

There’s a new poll out in the governor’s race in California, and the results are not what anyone should want to see. New – Governor poll – California

Nobody should watch HBO’s Euphoria.  It started out as a coming-of-age show about petty high schoolers experimenting with substances and indecent behaviors, and it was inappropriate then. Season 3, which came out in early April (and pulled in some 8.5 million viewers) tells the tale of the protagonists’ “of age” era as they try to make it big in Los Angeles, whether by running drugs, holding down a job, or doing risqué things in front of a camera for the sake of a few extra bucks. As you can imagine, this season has been particularly abominable. One is tempted to wonder whether streaming companies looked over the fence at PornHub, saw that the monetary grass was quite a bit greener, and decided that they too could produce that kind of content. As long as some kind of loose storyline holds everything together, people will be happy to call it a television show. It helps, of course, that the show stars Sydney Sweeney (who somehow became a right-wing heartthrob over a jeans advertisement) and Zendaya. (READ MORE: The Sydney Sweeney Ads Aren’t the Epitome of Conservatism) Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), it’s been incredibly successful.  The moral of this story could easily be that our culture has become so incredibly degraded that this is what passes for entertainment. We could be producing great art and stories designed to inspire us to achieve greater virtue, but instead media companies shove this kind of stuff into our living rooms and, because it appeals to our basest passions, we just kind of accept it. Except, we haven’t. In one of its better moments, the internet seems to have discovered that it is still capable of being shocked by the inappropriate. I won’t go into the details of what exactly incited this reaction, but suffice it to say that Euphoria hasn’t quite gotten plaudits all the way around. And, to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt, it seems quite possible that this is precisely the point. (READ MORE: The Lost Art of Film Advertising — and Film Making) As Suzy Weiss pointed out at the Free Press, “It’s basically designed to shock ‘normal people,’ … with something that they don’t see every day; to confront them with what’s going on around them, all the time.” In other words, the message the show conveys (at least according to Weiss) is that we live in a grossly decadent society. These issues — especially pornography — are incredibly real problems that afflict a larger portion of society than we would like to admit. Back in 2018, a study found that 91.5 percent of men and 60.2 percent of women had consumed pornography in just the month prior. Those kinds of numbers should be mind-boggling.  The best-case scenario might be that HBO’s depiction of Sydney Sweeney as a porn star was meant to shock its audience enough to galvanize some kind of change — although their methods seem somewhat questionable, given that they’re conveniently making money on Sweeney’s behavior. Regardless of the intent, the show will probably be unsuccessful as a means of curing society of pornography by exposing society to just how disgusting and dehumanizing lust can be. In fact, it’s far more likely to move the Overton Window in precisely the wrong direction. It’s rarely the case that exposing a large audience to a shocking vice works as a way of persuading that audience that the vice ought to be expunged from anyone’s personal life. While it’s true that we might be disgusted the first time we see such debauchery, it’s hardly shocking by the third or fourth time. Eventually, it will even seem commonplace. If we’re serious about persuading our society to conquer vice, we need to move the cultural Overton Window in precisely the opposite direction. Wholesome stories and themes should be the norm. The more we excise inappropriate behaviors in our shows, films, and art, the more shocking it will be when we come across even mild depictions of them.  After all, who doesn’t want to live in a society where chastity is the public norm? READ MORE by Aubrey Harris: Medicaid Wasn’t Built For Man. Ohio Fraud Proves It.

Many things changed after the pandemic. The butterfly effect now applies to face masks. Ornithologists fall ill aboard a cruise ship adrift in some place most people couldn’t even point to on a map, like Cape Verde, and suddenly people in Berlin or Paris are wandering through the mountains wearing masks. We live in a kind of permanent love affair with fear and the apocalypse. My generation has lived through two historical moments when everyone thought the world was about to end: December 31, 1999, and later, virtually every day after March 11, 2020. In the case of leftists, there is also a third apocalyptic date to add: January 6, 2021. Only an idiot could believe that some fool dressed as a Viking was going to bring down American democracy, but that is another story. The post-pandemic prophets of doom would do well to take a look at history, or simply read the Bible. The world has never been a safe place. Every civilization understood that until the boomers came along and convinced themselves that science could grant them immortality within a reasonable timeframe, enough time for the magic serum to arrive before it was too late and eternally prolong the lysergic parties of the 1970s. The end of the world has always been a business. When people believe they are going to die, they are easier to deceive and more willing to buy things they would never purchase under normal circumstances. Yes, including windmills and Chinese electric cars. That is why most successful sects throughout history used the excuse of the imminent apocalypse to rob their followers of everything they owned, allowing the chief preacher to enjoy a life of luxury and excess that, under normal conditions, would have been enough to make his flock suspect that something in the apocalyptic equation did not quite add up. Now there is a man who has invented a radar system that tracks billionaires’ private jets and monitors their movements in order to predict the apocalypse. The creator’s theory is that, when a nuclear holocaust or something similar approaches, the elites will know an hour or two before fire starts raining from the sky, and they will try to flee to some remote location aboard their luxurious planes. It is called the Apocalypse Early Warning System, and it offers users a probability scale from 1 to 5, updated every half hour: 1 means “low risk”; 5 essentially means “you’d better start heading down to the bunker.” The last major spike in activity detected by the application occurred on April 30, during the height of tensions between the United States and Iran, when the scale reached 3.1. All of this would sound absurd were it not for the fact that Rising S Company has reported that the luxury bunker market has grown by 400 percent since 2020. People are not building luxury bunkers because they expect a global crisis, or even a major terrorist attack, or even a nuclear conflict. In almost all of those scenarios, owning a luxury villa somewhere remote sounds far more appealing. People buy luxury bunkers because they believe doing so will allow them to survive whatever happens on Earth. Which brings us back to the issue of immortality. The 21st century is producing the most idiotic billionaires in history. They get rich and become far-left anti-capitalists; they get rich and become radical environmentalists; they get rich and try to force you to eat crickets; they get rich and pour vast sums into promoting wokeism; they get rich and insist on traveling to Africa to take photographs with malnourished black children so that people will not think that, simply because they are wealthy, they are bad people. In short: our nouveau riche are a pack of idiots. But secretly they fantasize about surviving an apocalypse, presumably in the company of their cats and their wine cellars, and they remain convinced that immortality can be bought. A true billionaire, at least one who has not been abducted by the rhetoric of the post-Obama Democratic Party, wants three things in life: first, to keep making more and more money; second, to enjoy it to the fullest; third, to devote himself to charity in old age in the hope of softening the heart of God, since Scripture has never seemed especially favorable to millionaires earning a seat at the banquet table in Paradise. I think the best thing postmodern billionaires could do is become journalists. I have never met a journalist who wanted to be immortal. Most are hoping that kidney disease carries them off no later than the age of 50 or 60, and they work hard to make it happen. I myself have never understood people who dream of immortality. I lead a happy life. I even manage, from time to time, to enjoy my work as a journalist, and I always hope to indulge in one final burst of rock and roll before resigning myself to the passing years. And yet, whether because I am a journalist or because I am a Christian, the idea of still being here in my wheelchair when one of Obama’s great-great-grandsons wins the election with the slogan “We Can Too” and the world plunges once again into a spiral of stupidity and misery does not thrill me in the slightest. One of the advantages of being Catholic is that, although you know the Apocalypse may be terrible, it is difficult to imagine that God, who is also our Father, is going to torture us beyond endurance just before ushering us into the great hall where He will host His grand gala banquet. I think that when the Apocalypse finally arrives, instead of running for the bunker, I will step outside and, arms flailing forward in a Milei-like rock and roll frenzy, cheer on the archangels in their final mission. Translated by Joel Dalmau.  READ MORE by Itxu Díaz: Hantavirus Isn’t Especially Dangerous… Except That It’s in the Hands of the Spanish Government Have You Tried Turning Your Brain Off and On Again? The NASA Chief’s Ears Are Endless, and Kimmel Isn’t Funny

Something strange is happening in Washington. A generation of investors and entrepreneurs who built careers championing private capital and intuitively understood the power of market discipline and limited government have joined the Trump administration, taking charge of hundreds of billions of dollars of other people’s money. They assure us that they are deploying it strategically, with accountability and a businessperson’s rigor. From Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (who is apparently convinced he can rearrange the American economy through tariffs and industrial policy as if it were a trading desk) to former Commerce official Michael Grimes (who led the IPOs of Meta, Uber, and Airbnb and reportedly spearheaded a federal “venture arm” last year) to President Donald Trump and his proposed U.S. sovereign wealth fund, the rejection of markets is real. And as with all such schemes, these too will damage the economy. Their presumption is that a government can expertly run the economy if only staffed with expert businesspeople. In a recent episode of his podcast, tech investor and venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale talked with former private equity investor Ben Black, the new CEO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, about the $205 billion budget he oversees “to invest in U.S. strategic interests, build new markets, and deliver real returns for taxpayers.” While I appreciate the optimism, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes private markets work. The government is not some company unluckily plagued by incompetent executives. It is a different institution entirely from those beholden to the market. In the private sector, competitively determined prices, profits, and losses reveal what works and what doesn’t. These signals are ruthless and, thankfully, clear. Good investments get rewarded. Bad ones get punished. The feedback is quick and the accountability personal. A government operates on different — and worse — incentives, constraints, and feedback mechanisms. Injecting it with private-sector knowledge and ambition does little to change the dysfunctional features of political decision-making. It has no prices set by supply-and-demand to guide its political decisions. It has no profit signals for strategic investments and no loss mechanism to punish faulty judgment. When a government agency backs the wrong project, nobody can be expected to lose a job or salary. When a sovereign wealth fund makes a bad bet, the bill is covered by taxpayers who had no say in the matter. Lutnick, Black, and other entrepreneurs now staffing departments like Commerce and DFC built careers in an environment where they could lose their shirts if they made bad decisions. They’re now operating in a system that insulates them from consequences. Whether they realize it or not, the market incentives that made them effective have been switched off. What makes this situation particularly frustrating is that these are not people ignorant of the government’s limitations. The administration’s team of former tech investors and entrepreneurs came to Washington precisely because they understand how government destroys value, misallocates resources, and discourages private innovation. They cheered deregulation. They backed the Department of Government Efficiency because they believed, correctly, that Washington is riddled with programs that serve bureaucracies at the public’s expense. They got all that right and then decided that the solution was not to shrink the government’s role in the private sector but, instead, to treat the government as some investment firm. If a massive federal government cannot efficiently regulate industries, it cannot efficiently invest in them. If its many bureaucrats cannot successfully pick economic winners, neither can presidential appointees. Markets, not people, do that. Somewhere between Wall Street and Washington, this insight got lost. The DOGE experience should have been a clue. Elon Musk, our generation’s most incredible innovator, arrived with genuine urgency and a mandate to cut $2 trillion in waste. He failed because this government isn’t like one of his private companies. He alone couldn’t decide who and what stays and goes. Unlike the head of a company who invests his money and has decision rights, Musk faced a motivated government apparatus ready to resist with armies of lawyers, lobbyists, contractors, and congressional allies whose livelihoods depend on the status quo. This dynamic gets considerably worse when you shift the operation from cutting waste to handing out hundreds of billions in “investments.” As everyone lobbies for a piece, decision makers are not held accountable by market signals. Those doling out the money are driven by lofty and ill-defined goals such as making the U.S. economy more resilient or competing with China. What should we expect when some of these guys are themselves taking cues from Chinese planners? The DFC’s project was created to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. That approach has a name, and it’s not free-market capitalism. It’s state cronyism, and it describes a system that misallocates resources, corrupts institutions, and subordinates economic decisions to political ones. Building an American version replicates the problem rather than solving it. Markets run on competition and objective market signals. Government is steered by politics and ideological fads paid for with other people’s money. This reality remains the same regardless of who runs the government. Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM READ MORE by Veronique de Rugy:  Our Savings Matter, but This Bipartisan Push Misses the Mark Marriage: The Inequality Gap We Should Be Talking About The Same Crisis Wearing Different Clothes

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — San Francisco has long been a whipping post for conservatives who like to portray it as the case study for progressive zaniness, an ever-present example of the kind of public policies that other cities ought to avoid. The city has often deserved the rap, as its politicians and voters can fixate on performative progressive politics over the nuts-and-bolts of civic governance. Its bureaucracy is so impenetrable that even state Democrats express frustration. I still remember when the city in 2010 banned Happy Meals for some inexplicable nutrition-related rationale. In 2019, voters elected District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who seemed reluctant to prosecute “quality-of-life crimes.” He blamed poverty and other social ills for the city’s crime and drug problems, of course. The city’s school board spent its time renaming schools, complaining about white supremacy, and undermining merit-based education. But a lot has changed in the last few years, It’s not an exaggeration to conclude the city has self-corrected to a noticeable degree. San Francisco will be San Francisco, so there’s always plenty to criticize and lots of sideshows. I recently wrote about its interminably long and excessively costly process for replacing old trash bins, which I found indicative of the city’s sense of grandiosity and lack of spending controls. To be fair, that is a flaw that can be found in any government — local, state, or federal. But San Francisco always dials it up a notch. My main beef with the city’s conservative critics is they fail to distinguish the various political factions, namely between the mainstream liberals/progressives and the loony lefties. The city’s GOP registration hovers around 8 percent — and modern Republicans aren’t exactly immune to counterproductive, performative nonsense. But it’s crucial to side with those who want positive change even if one disagrees with their overall political perspective. That group is far different than the progressive zanies who like to play out their utopian fantasies. It also irks me that some of these critics seem to delight in the city’s travails, whereas I love the place and wish it the best. But now even some conservatives are recognizing the progress. National Review’s Rich Lowry recently explained that the city, “long associated with exotic ideas, has been experimenting with a radical notion — cracking down on car thieves.” As a result, “car break-ins are down 85 percent from 2023, and are down 50 percent the first three months of 2026.” I’m a frequent visitor to the City by the Bay. Anecdotally, the improvement is evident. The streets seem much cleaner. I notice fewer homeless encampments and far less public disorder. I no longer feel the inclination to leave my car’s trunk open when parked. That was common practice a few years ago as people figured that it beats having the windows smashed if vagrants decided to look for stuff to pilfer from the car. My family recently attended a party in a public park and it was clean, safe, and even the restrooms were tidy. Will wonders never cease? Anyway, San Francisco residents are noticing, too. A recent San Francisco Chronicle poll showed that Mayor Daniel Lurie, the private-sector/philanthropist outsider and reform-oriented Democrat who beat London Breed in 2024, has 74 percent approval ratings — an astounding figure for a mayor in any city. He’s had some foibles, but overall has governed in a practical, centrist manner that has focused on the basics. And it appears to be working practically and politically. Lurie gets overwhelmingly high marks for revitalizing downtown, protecting businesses from crime, and keeping neighborhoods clean. He gets lesser (but still decent) marks for handling the overdose crisis and providing shelter to the homeless, per the poll. He fares poorly when it comes to housing affordability — but that’s an issue that is impossible to turn around in such a short time. Now back to those important distinctions. His strongest support comes from moderates (86 percent), liberals (80 percent), and conservatives (77 percent). His weakest support is from progressives, but at 53 percent he’s convinced enough of them to continue down his current path. The Los Angeles Times last November reported that “he has won over his city,” and the Chronicle polling suggests his numbers have only improved in the following six months. There are national lessons here. What has the mayor done? Per a 100-day analysis last April in the San Francisco Standard, Lurie has moved beyond the counterproductive “Housing First” homeless strategy (just building them apartments) and focused instead on a “Breaking the Cycle” approach that creates wraparound services to deal with addiction and mental health issues. San Francisco’s violent crime rates always have been relatively low, but the mayor has cracked down on visible street, drug, and property crimes. Per the Standard, his downtown business initiative has included expanding “public-drinking ‘entertainment zones,’ slashed red tape on development, and an order to bring city workers back to the office.” He has “leaned on his connections to bring private funds to bear on the downtown problem.” Based on my experience, the downtown financial district looks pretty lively, after having given ghost-town vibes not long ago. Although a bit more nebulous, Lurie has promised to improve the public schools and make the city more family-friendly, the article added. San Francisco is known for being a (relatively) childless city, so that’s a good pursuit. Recently, he’s been willing to endure the wrath of labor unions as he — get this — has proposed budget cuts to tackle the city’s deficit. It’s unclear how to deal with the city’s outrageously high cost structure, but a little fiscal conservatism can’t hurt. The mayor will release his complete budget plan next month, so we’ll see. Lurie isn’t the only good-news story. Voters recalled Boudin in 2022 and replaced him with a more traditional district attorney. That same election, voters overwhelmingly recalled three school board members. In 2024, voters approved three conservative-oriented ballot initiatives relating to crime, homelessness, and drugs. A new state law, Senate Bill 423, puts additional oversight on the city’s notoriously slow permitting department. No one will ever mistake San Francisco’s voters for those in, say, Oklahoma City, but who cares? For those of us interested in positive urban outcomes, it’s the policies — not partisan preferences — that matter. The big question is whether Democrats, whose politicians control most of the biggest U.S. cities, will learn the requisite lessons. Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org. READ MORE by Steven Greenhut: Newsom Backtracks on AI Rules Robotaxis: Lawmakers Make Perfect the Enemy of the Good FDA Vaping Rules: Much Ado About Very Little

Chaos erupted within the Philippine Senate on Wednesday evening as gunfire and explosions resonated through the halls of the Pasay City complex, interrupting a live session at approximately 7:30 p.m.