"That kind of music has no morals". The post Joe Strummer’s scathing assessment of Van Halen: “That’s not rock ‘n’ roll” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Music beyond our comprehension. The post Why Jeff Beck always knew Jimi Hendrix was better than everyone: “He swept us all aside” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Billie Eilish, who referred to the United States as “stolen land” at the Grammys, lives in a $14 million mansion on land claimed by the Tongva tribe. “As the First People of the greater Los Angeles basin, we do understand that her home is situated in our ancestral land,” the tribe told the Daily Mail. “Eilish has not contacted our tribe directly regarding her property, we do value the instance when Public Figures provide visibility to the true history of this country.” Eilish on Sunday won the Song of the Year Grammy for “Wildflower,” a sonically unremarkable number with trite lyrics that won critical acclaim by switching “him” and “he” to “her” and “she” in the downbeat, love-lost lament. She told those assembled on Sunday, “No one is illegal on stolen land. It’s just really hard to know what to say and what to do right now. I feel really hopeful in this room, and I feel like we just need to keep fighting, and speaking up, and protesting, and our voices really do matter, and the people matter, and f*** ICE is all I want to say.” Image licensed under CC BY 2.0.

“Don Lemon Arrested,” editorial cartoon by Tom Stiglich for The American Spectator on Feb. 4, 2026.

I know that it makes me a terrible person that I don’t care about the plight of the Washington Post’s employees that the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has just put out of their porridge. I know, but I don’t care about that part, either. Oh, you didn’t hear about the professional abattoir being established at the Post? Yes, this is happening: The Washington Post told employees Wednesday that it will begin sweeping layoffs, the latest blow to the storied newspaper under billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, confirming weeks of speculation about drastic newsroom cuts. “We have grappled with financial challenges for some time. They have affected us in multiple rounds of cost cuts and buyouts, along with periodic constraints on other kinds of spending,” The Post’s Executive Editor Matt Murray said in a newsroom note seen by POLITICO, stating that the reductions would impact “nearly all news departments.” The size and scope of the layoffs are not immediately clear. But hundreds of Post employees could lose their jobs, according to Post reporters, with sections including sports, metro, books and international coverage hit particularly hard. The latest round of layoffs cap a tumultuous 18 months for The Post, which Bezos purchased in 2013. The newspaper has undergone significant leadership changes and was roiled by a decision from Bezos and publisher Will Lewis to scrap a planned editorial that would have endorsed then-Vice President Kamala Harris over now-President Donald Trump shortly before the November 2024 election. The decision led to several resignations in the opinions section and a reader revolt. It preceded a makeover of the newspaper’s opinions desk, which Bezos said he reformed to focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” And in early 2025, the paper offered buyouts to much of its staff, which saw several top stars decamp to competing publications. Murray’s note to the newsroom said the paper will “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” naming sections like politics, national security, science, technology and business. Yawn. Yeah, it sucks when your job gets blown up. But the employees at the Washington Post have been, for far longer than Jeff Bezos has owned it, almost universally in favor of an ideology that is injurious to prosperity, entrepreneurship, and behavioral success. Another way to say this is that the destruction of wealth — personal, community, and national — has been the chief philosophical pursuit at the Washington Post for quite some time. Ronald Reagan summed up that philosophy pretty well: Well, Bezos has been subsidizing it since 2013. The Washington Post has been losing money hand over fist for more than a dozen years now, and it’s proof of the veracity of another famous saying, this one by Charles Krauthammer, among others: “That which cannot continue, won’t.” You can’t keep losing money forever. Things don’t exist to diminish. If you don’t produce anything, you will ultimately perish. And the Washington Post has been losing its owners money for two decades now. Yes, but money isn’t everything, right? It’s too bad that sanctimony can’t be monetized. Otherwise this would sustain the Post into the next millennium: “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” said Marty Baron, former executive editor of The Post. “The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.” Lighten up, Marty. Nobody has believed the Washington Post was a great news organization since the previous century. It’s been a disgrace, in the eyes of the majority of the American public, at least since George W. Bush was elected, and its subscribership has been on the wane since. The Washington Post employed Jen Rubin and Taylor Lorenz, for crying out loud. Yes, you say, but that’s to do with the internet. Sure, that’s certainly true, but it doesn’t make the point you think it does. It turns out that the internet is, on balance, a superior news medium than is newsprint (and I say this as someone who used to publish a print publication). The internet provides for dynamic content, audio and video, live streaming, and lots of other things you can’t get from print. And it doesn’t require the use of a printing press to disseminate information. Which means the market isn’t in need of legacy prestige publications like the Washington Post like it once was, and so the trappings of significance that publication has carried far past the reality of its circumstances have made for red ink. And lots of it. The Post loses money because it ran off the conservative side of its subscription base, and then, when it attempted to recover some sort of balance by refusing to endorse the farcical Kamala Harris in 2024, it ran off the leftist subscribers who remained. And it did these things at a time when it was of decreasing necessity to have a bloated, lavish news agency like the Post to cover events from sea to shining sea. So eventually the destruction of wealth by incompetent people — both businessmen and journalists — was going to result in a correction. Bezos doesn’t have a perfect record of brilliance in business — he bought this turkey in the first place, after all — but he did build Amazon from nothing and therefore he does understand the concept of a long-term business vision and how that compares to a lack of one. When you see the inevitable carnage at the Post, it does give you perspective on other things. For example, the ratings came out for the Grammy awards — and they’re not very good. The final Grammy Awards on CBS took a small ratings hit compared to the previous year. Sunday’s telecast of the 68th Grammys averaged 14.41 million viewers, according to big data plus panel same-day ratings from Nielsen. That’s down a little more than 6 percent from the 15.4 million who watched the 2025 show. The Grammys audience shrank some for the second consecutive year since hitting a post-pandemic high of 17.09 million viewers in 2024. CBS has aired three of the four EGOT awards shows in 2025-26, starting with the Emmys in September, and has had mixed ratings results. The Emmys improved year to year (vs. ABC’s telecast in 2024) for their largest audience since 2021, but the Golden Globes in January declined by about the same amount (6.5 percent) as the Grammys. ABC will close out the awards season rush with the Oscars on March 15. It turns out that having to listen to the insufferable dunce Billie Eilish bleat out that “No one is illegal on stolen land” — which shortly introduced to the American public a tribe of indigenous people named the Tongva, on whose ancestral real estate Eilish’s multimillion-dollar mansion sits, and the Tongva have now made a not-so-sarcastic demand for her eviction — isn’t all that conducive to profitable television. (READ MORE: Give It Back, Then) Or music, for that matter. Eilish might be a hot seller here and there, but on the whole, the record industry is basically a corpse — and what keeps it from rotting away these days is the one form of music — that being country — which is dominated by people who would very much like for Billie Eilish to close her pie hole. It’s difficult to see how Eilish, or the bearded, dress-wearing Puerto Rican hip-hopper Bad Bunny, publicly bitching about ICE deportations that the American people are pretty happy about will save the business. Industry by industry, we see that the Left and its votaries are actively destroying wealth. The cities they rule are in ruins, the government treasuries they’ve pillaged are empty, the social programs they’ve touted and run are corrupt and bankrupt, and the institutions they dominate are less relevant and in pronounced decline. Zohran Mamdani has been mayor of New York for less than a month and there is this… Another old saying, this one by Adam Smith, is “There is a lot of ruin in a nation.” A lot, yes, but not an infinite amount. And from the Post to the record business to the burgeoning dysfunction of communist New York, we’re beginning to see that ruin has consequences. Bad ones. Here’s hoping the Post employees can find gainful employment. But along the way, let’s also hope they learn a lesson from the decline of their former employer — which is that serving an ideology, rather than the public good or the needs of the market, ultimately isn’t a sustainable pursuit. As for Billie Eilish, one surmises she’ll be fine — whether the tribesmen of the Tongva repossess her house or not. Thought we do wish the best of luck to her in expanding her audience beyond mentally deranged Gen Z females. She’ll need it. READ MORE from Scott McKay:  The Med-Mal Floodgates Are Open Thanks to the Fox Varian Case, and Thank God for That A Friendly Warning to Giancarlo Esposito Some Obvious Truths From Minnesota

In an interview with the Washington Post published Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom admitted that he sat approvingly by his mother’s bedside as she was euthanized in an act that, at the time, legally amounted to homicide. Assisted suicide was legalized in California in 2015; prior to that time, any deliberate killing of a person — even with that individual’s consent — would be considered a homicide. Newsom has previously admitted involvement in his mother’s death by euthanasia, and it is something that I covered in my book on Newsom’s life, Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power. But his new interview gives additional details that reveal the extent of his complicity in the killing of his mother. As we previously knew, Newsom’s 55-year-old mother, Tessa, informed him in a voicemail that she planned to die by euthanasia and asked him to be present for her death. Newsom agreed. The governor told the New Yorker that he then spent time with his mother in the days leading up to her planned death, including when he made her dinner the night before her killing. This means Newsom knew that Tessa was going to be illegally killed and he did not stop or dissuade her. Newsom told the Washington Post that he, alongside his sister, prepared his mother for her killing by giving Tessa a dose of painkillers 45 minutes before the doctor was to arrive for his deadly deed so as to, in the Post’s words, “keep her comfortable.” Let’s pause there for a moment. Newsom gave his mother painkillers, which have the effect of relaxing a person, leaving her softened and ready to be injected with a lethal dose of drugs. This has the definite appearance of a person who is aiding the commission of illegal euthanasia. It also raises the question of whether Newsom’s mother was cognitively capable of agreeing to her killing when it happened (putting aside the fact that her consent has no impact on the legality of her killing). Those painkillers that Newsom gave Tessa before the doctor arrived could very well have played a part in her death. Newsom claimed to the Washington Post that Tessa was able to lucidly answer the doctor’s questions when he arrived to kill her. Of course, however, we will never know if she was really cognitively unaffected by the painkillers. Sometime after the homicidally minded doctor arrived, the killing became too much for Newsom’s sister, Hilary, who left the room. According to the Washington Post, it was Tessa’s “labored breathing” as well as “the gravity of the moment” that caused her daughter to flee. Newsom, it seems, was the only other person present to witness the homicide. He did nothing to stop it. Stopping the murder would have been as simple as threatening to call the police or turn the doctor in, but he decided to sit by and watch it happen. Evidently, his mother’s death was not peaceful. In his soon-to-be-released memoir, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, which aims to get ahead of the many damaging stories of Newsom’s past (many of which I recount in my own biography of Newsom), Newsom describes the look on his mother’s face as she was killed. The look on her face in her last moments, Newsom said, “will never leave my mind.” He said, “There was no peace that blanketed her.” It was a fatal dose of morphine that stopped Tessa’s heartbeat. But it was her son who had let it all happen by refusing to intervene. “I want to say it was a beautiful experience,” Newsom told the Post. “It was horrible.” In my book, I explain how California had a law on the books in 2002, the time of the killing, that made it a felony to “deliberately aid[], or advise[], or encourage[] another to commit suicide.” The crime was punishable by up to three years in state prison and a fine of $10,000. In 1975, after a California man “stood by while his wife committed suicide,” a spokesman for the district attorney’s office referenced this law and “warned that helping another person commit suicide was still violation of the law,” according to the Columbia Law Review. However, the man was not charged. And given how liberal California is, Newsom is similarly unlikely to be charged under this statute for his role in his mother’s death by euthanasia. As I explain in my book, U.S. courts have generally held that illegally euthanizing someone should be prosecuted under homicide statutes. The 1953 opinion of the Oregon Supreme Court in the case State of Oregon v. Bouse explained this, stating, “[W]here a person actually performs, or actively assists in performing, the overt act resulting in death, such as shooting or stabbing the victim, administering the poison, or holding one under water until death takes place by drowning, his act constitutes murder, and it is wholly immaterial whether this act is committed pursuant to an agreement with the victim, such as a mutual suicide pact.” It would certainly seem as though the doctor’s action of giving Tessa an illegal dose of morphine would constitute murder. Gavin Newsom committed grave evil by sitting approvingly by for his mother’s killing. When he hits the campaign trail, Americans should ask themselves if they really want a man like this in the White House. Ellie Gardey Holmes is the author of Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power. Image licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — There’s nothing intrinsically wrong — and a lot that’s right — about building a high-speed rail system that speedily transports people across vast tracts of land. Some family members recently returned from a trip to Japan, where they traveled the country on the Shinkansen network of bullet trains. Begun in 1964, the system is widely admired for its efficiency, safety, and speed. One can travel the 313 miles between Tokyo and Osaka in two hours and 22 minutes — slower than an airplane, but it’s quicker when one considers all the time wasted at airports. Every transportation system has its pros and cons and its costs and benefits. Taxpayers funded the development of the Japanese network, but the high-speed trains run without direct taxpayer subsidies. Some transportation experts critique the bullet train concept and financials, arguing that airplane travel is the superior technology. As California struggles to build its own high-speed rail system, I’ve often argued that the state already has a similar system, known as Southwest Airlines. It inexpensively connects Sacramento to Los Angeles in about one hour and 30 minutes. Nevertheless, I can’t blame California officials for embracing the concept given the size of the state, the huge population in our metro areas, and the vast, empty spaces between them. But — and it’s a big caveat — there never was any reason to believe that California could expeditiously and cost-effectively build high-speed rail whatever ones views of the bullet train’s merits. Between our overlapping and litigation-inducing environmental rules, bureaucratic and profligate state government, and union-controlled contracting procedures, we really just can’t build anything efficiently. Now fast forward to this week, when Gov. Gavin Newsom touted California’s high-speed rail system during a trip to the Central Valley. His appearance in Bakersfield and the economic-development points he emphasized say a lot about the fundamental problems with the project. “This is about reimagining the future of this region, one of the fastest and most dynamic regions, fastest growing in the state of California. These are real jobs with family-sustaining wages,” he said. The entire premise of the rail line was to quickly connect the Bay Area to Southern California. Yet thanks to politics and cost factors, the alignment started instead in the inland agricultural region, with the current plan to connect the small cities of Merced and Bakersfield. That conforms to former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s cynical explanation of how to get a massive infrastructure project going (“Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”) But it’s not the ideal place to lay track if you’re trying to connect San Francisco with Los Angeles. Furthermore, the goal of this project has never been primarily about economic development. The funding — originally estimated at $33 billion and now around $130 billion — comes from taxpayers. Sure, if you dump public dollars into a giant infrastructure project, you’ll get some jobs, but it’s not creating wealth so much as spending it. The rail authority has touted all sorts of new plans, including a new promise to lure private investors and talk about shifting the northern alignment closer to the coast. But excuse my lack of confidence that these new promises will pan out any better than the last round of them. The feds wisely pulled funding, but the state doubled down and agreed to pay $20 billion more over 20 years. We’ll just keep filling in that hole. In 2008, California voters approved $9.95 billion in initial funding for the rail system with Proposition 1A. The initiative contained a variety of promises: no operating subsidies, two-hour-and-30-minute travel times from the Bay to LA, private investment, specific deadlines, and so forth. The ongoing plan repeatedly strayed from those promises, but the courts let it move forward anyway. The governor touted the completion of rail preparation on the starter segment, so that will just encourage the state to stay the course. To save money, the rail authority in 2014 adopted a blended route that required the system to ultimately share tracks with commuter trains in metro areas. That prompted Sen. Quentin Kopp, a strong initial backer of the project, to say: “I want to kill this iteration of it because it betrays the representations to the voters in November 2008.” The blended routes undermined the promised travel times because the trains would have to move slowly along commuter tracks. It’s been one disappointment after another, all followed up with new, empty promises by the HSR bitter-enders. Fundamentally, the problem is it’s a project designed by government planners rather than the private sector. The largely privately funded Brightline West bullet train that will connect the LA area with Las Vegas in around two hours has had its own shares of delays and cost overruns — but it at least provides a service that many people want. Taking a party train from Rancho Cucamonga to the Strip in half the time of a grueling drive through the desert is far more appealing than parking in Merced, then hopping on a train to a parking lot in Bakersfield. So again, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the technology itself. But there is a lot wrong with the California state government. Until we fix the latter, don’t expect much progress on the former. Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org. READ MORE: Overdose Drops: More Policy and Less Politics California’s Love of Taxes is Backfiring Housing: Trump and Newsom Are Odd Bedfellows