April 14, 2025

UPDATE: What we know about suspect in arson at Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence.

The man charged in connection with an arson at Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home over the weekend allegedly climbed the residence’s fence, used a hammer to break a window and threw Molotov cocktails in to start the blaze, prosecutors revealed.

Cody A. Balmer, 38, was charged with attempted criminal homicide, aggravated arson, burglary, terrorism and other counts in connection with the early Sunday morning attack, the Dauphin County District Attorney’s Office announced Monday.

The arson attack lasted for several minutes. Shapiro and first lady Lori Shapiro, as well as other guests and staff, were inside the Harrisburg residence when the fire erupted around 2 a.m. No one was injured in the fire, and the governor’s family was safely evacuated. However, prosecutors said the residence sustained “substantial damage.”

Balmer, of Harrisburg, turned himself into the Pennsylvania State Police on Sunday and admitted to “harboring hatred towards Governor Shapiro.”

When asked during a police interview what he would have done if Shapiro found him inside the residence, “he advised he would have beaten him with his hammer,” the probable cause affidavit said

The NBC News report played up Balmer’s anti-Biden sentiments but there’s more to the story.

He certainly at least looks more Antifa than MAGA.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green

UNEXPECTEDLY: California has the highest impact fees for homebuilding in the country.

When property owners apply to the government for building permits, they’re often required to pay impact fees: fees meant to cover the strain additional buildings have on public resources like roads, sewers, schools, and parks.

There’s nothing wrong with properly set impact fees. But some local governments set impact fees that are excessively high or that aren’t related to the actual impact of construction projects. In addition to violating property rights, these improperly set exactions increase the cost of construction during today’s housing crisis, as a new Pacific Legal Foundation report reveals.

While this is a problem across the United States, California’s impact fees are much higher than anywhere else. Our report found that the average total impact fees for a typical U.S. home grew from almost $5,000 in 2004 to more than $9,000 in 2019. However, California’s average impact fee in 2019 was more than triple the national average, at almost $30,000. And it was much higher than the next-two-highest states: Maryland and Oregon charged the third- and second-highest exactions on average in 2019—nearly $13,000 and $17,000, respectively.

When breaking this down by locality, the situation paints an even starker picture of how much higher impact fees were in California. The five cities with the largest average total impact fees in 2019 were all in California, and all exceeded $50,000. Ironically, the smallest exactions were found in California’s next-door neighbor, Nevada. Las Vegas and Mesquite had average total impact fees of $165 and $43, respectively.

Somewhat relatedly, Thomas Sowell has written about “The Housing Price of Liberalism.”

In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and “open space” is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.

Anyone who has taken Economics 101 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.

Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.

What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of “open space” — and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.

As Sowell writes, “Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.” San Francisco is a crumbling, endlessly multifaceted example of precisely that.

And as we linked to earlier today, Adam Carolla knows who California’s local governments will invariably roll first:

 

Full episode here.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll 6

KYLE SMITH: Eve of Destruction.

Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World is an exhaustive look at the enduring appeal of works about how civilization might end, from the Book of Revelation to 12 Monkeys, The Matrix, I Am Legend, and whatever extinction-level event Hollywood next brings to screens. (“Extinction-level event,” by the way, is a phrase popularized by the 1998 blockbuster Deep Impact, starring Robert Duvall and Téa Leoni, about what happens as Earth prepares to receive an asteroid the size of Texas.)

A writer and podcaster whose previous books include 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (2011) and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2019), Lynskey seems to have pored over hundreds of books, many of them obscure, and watched nearly as many movies and TV shows to shape this definitive account. “There is always enough misery and mayhem in the world to support a claim that it is the end of days,” he writes. The seismologist Charles Francis Richter noted that when the Gospel records that “there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places” (Luke 21:11), Jesus wasn’t exactly going out on a limb: “Assuredly, no safer forecast was ever made.”

* * * * * * * * *

The most celebrated of this supposedly brilliant crew was the spectacularly erroneous neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich (“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” he promised in 1970), who boldly accepted a bet in 1980 by the techno-optimist economist Julian Simon about the future price of any five precious metals chosen by Ehrlich, which under his catastrophic-scarcity theory would necessarily become more expensive. Prices instead fell across the board. Lynskey sniffs, “Simon was lucky because commodity prices were unusually high in 1980 and Ehrlich had a weak grasp of economics.”

The most sophisticated of the sophisticated see climate change and overpopulation working in tandem to hasten our mass demise. For Lynskey, the 1973 Charlton Heston flick Soylent Green, which pictured a 2022 New York City (population 40,000,000) as a “smoggy, sweltering, desperate shanty town” is “a remarkably far-sighted movie about climate change.” Yet any long-time resident of New York City will tell you that the place is considerably cleaner and more pleasant than it was in 1973.

To Lynskey, no climate-change prophecy is ever wrong, merely premature; he occasionally sounds like a Millerite re-calculating the future arrival date of Armageddon. Why, after mocking so many doomsayers, does he include only two glancing mentions of the leading alarmist of our age, Al Gore, whose film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) won an Oscar for its sci-fi speculation, warning that the planet would be doomed in ten years unless a “drastic” reversal of course were taken? Lynskey seems entirely to have forgotten that Gore, a Nobel Prize winner, was taken far more seriously than nearly all of the dozens of (other) nuts and cranks whose wrong predictions get detailed, multi-page summaries. Reaching the end, one feels a bit worn out by the endless zombie-march of unearthed factoids. A greater effort to make sense of it all would have been welcome. But then again, it’s always a good time to panic.

It really is: On climate change scare tactics.

1971: New ice age coming by 2020 or 2023!

1972: New ice age by 2070! Oil depleted in 20 years!

1974: Space satellites show new ice age coming fast! And another ice age just around the bend! Ozone depletion a ‘great peril’ to life!

1976: Scientific consensus planet cooling; famines imminent!

1977: Department of Energy says oil will peak in ’90s!

1978: No end in sight to 30-year cooling trend!

1980: Acid rain kills life in lakes! Peak oil in 2000!

1988: Regional droughts (that never happened) in 1990s! Temperatures in DC will hit record highs! Maldive islands will be underwater by 2018!

1989: Rising sea levels will obliterate nations if nothing done by 2000! New York City’s west side highway will be underwater by 2019!

1996: Peak oil in 2020!

2000: Children won’t know what snow is!

All this doomsday talk gives me a serious case of nostalgia. The apocalypses haven’t been nearly as much fun ever since Orson Welles wasn’t available to pick up a quick paycheck narrating them:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll 20

MOSCOW NEEDS A FIRST-CLASS ARMY MORE THAN THEY NEED A FEW MORE SUBS: Russia To Launch Massive $100 Billion Naval Expansion. “Based on available reports and recordings of the meeting shared by state media and social media channels, Putin did not provide specifics on how the funds would be distributed or which projects would be prioritized.”

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green 60

IT’S COME TO THIS: As Concert Ticket Prices Soar, More Than Half of Coachella GA Attendees Are Buying Tickets Through Payment Plans.

Tens of thousands of music fans will descend on the California desert this weekend for the first of two iterations of the Coachella Music and Arts festival outside of Palm Springs, Calif.

Approximately 80,000 to 100,000 fans each weekend will have coughed up the $599 ticket price to see headliners Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, Green Day and Post Malone. But ticket price is often just the cost of entry — many of those fans will spend more than a $1,000 per weekend on lodging and cough up hundreds of dollars more for food, drinks and merchandise. It’s a substantial spend for any of the 20-somethings in Coachella’s target demographic. But festival organizers have increasingly helped finance their purchase through payment plan programs.

Approximately 60 percent of general admission ticket buyers at this year’s festival opted to use Coachella’s payment plan system, which requires as little as $49.99 up front for tickets to the annual concert. The desert festival isn’t alone — Lollapalooza, Electric Daisy Carnival and Rolling Loud all sell the majority of their tickets using some kind of payment plan system.

Representatives at Goldenvoice, which puts on Coachella, declined to comment for this story. One source, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media, told Billboard that payment plans have fundamentally changed how festivals are marketed to the public.

“Festivals are now marketing a cheap down payment as their main call to action,” the source says. “The messaging is $20 down gets you in the door, or $50 down gets you started. It’s no longer about the artists, or the festival lifestyle — the message is, ‘You can afford this if you act today.’”

Yes, but it’s not just Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, Green Day and Post Malone. There was also this brilliant veteran rap star spitting bars, and dropping some dope verses, straight fire: Bernie Sanders urges Coachella crowd to stand up against ‘US oligarchy.’

Senator Bernie Sanders held celebrity-backed rallies across the US as he emerges as one of the most vocal opponents to Donald Trump’s presidency.

Appearing for his war on extreme wealth tour – called Fighting Oligarchy – at the exclusive Coachella festival this weekend, he said: “This country faces some very difficult challenges and the future of what happens to America depends on your generation.”

Taking to the stage after a performance by the British pop singer Charli XCX he told the 36,000-strong crowd: “We need you to stand up.”

“You can turn away and ignore what goes on but you do it at your own peril. We need you to stand up to fight for justice.”

“Fighting Oligarchy” is definitely Bernie’s greatest hits package, crafted from years of extensive jamming on the road, and presumably went down well with the young potentially violent socialists in the crowd:

Related: Festival guests report stolen belongings from hotel rooms during Coachella.

Multiple Coachella festivalgoers contacted News Channel 3, saying their belongings were stolen from their hotel rooms while they were away at the festival.

Ellie Brownridge said she’s attended Coachella for years with her best friend, Zoe Grober.

Grober said they’ve stayed at La Quinta Resort & Club before.

“We always love this property,” Grober said. “It’s just so disappointing that something like this happened and it’s totally tainted the experience.”

Brownridge and Grober, staying with their husbands, said they returned Saturday morning after the first day of Coachella to find personal items missing — including vintage bags, jewelry, family heirlooms and sunglasses.

They told News Channel 3 they called hotel management and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department — and quickly learned they weren’t alone.

“We met two other groups. In total, I think it’s like 15 people that we know of that this has happened to,” Brownridge said. “I think we’re looking at over $100,000 worth of stuff that’s gone.”

I was told in 2020 by Bernie’s supporters — including the New York Times and NPR — that this sort of five-fingered wealth distribution was perfectly acceptable. I’m glad to see that’s apparently no longer the case.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 91

POLICE: Arson Suspect Admitted ‘Harboring Hatred’ Toward Gov. Shapiro.

[Cody] Balmer faces numerous charges including:

  • Criminal Attempt – Criminal Homicide
  • Aggravated Arson – Person Present Inside Property
  • Terrorism – Affect the Conduct of a Government

6ABC reported that the police “have not ruled out Shapiro’s Jewish faith” as a possible motive.”

Duane Patterson adds:

What little is known about Balmer, the suspected Jew-hating arsonist, paints the picture that he isn’t a resident of either side of the political aisle. He seems to be A) a nut, and B) an anarchist, which if you look up the definition of an anarchist, it’ll say see A). He once proclaimed on social media that he was a socialist, but there’s not much other evidence out there to back up that claim. What is there is that he hated everybody on both sides.

I hope that Kash Patel at FBI gets to the bottom quickly of what made this person snap, and I hope that Attorney General Pam Bondi, if he did it out of religious bigotry, throws the book at him, despite whatever political affiliation, if any, he currently espouses.

I am grateful that Governor Shapiro and his family are safe. As for the Governor’s ‘both sidesism’, we all have eyes and ears, and functioning brainstems. It’s not hard to see where the bulk of the outbreaks of anti-Semitism are falling on the ideological spectrum recently. It’s not on the right. It’s on the left. Using moral equivalence to downplay the explosion of hate against Jews on the Democratic side isn’t going to make the problem go away. Putting political expediency over morality reduces the spotlight on the true offenders of evil instead of shining the light brightly on these cockroaches wherever they surface.

I want to help dig a giant pit and assist the rest of the country in dropping every anti-Semite into it, regardless of whom they voted for in the last few cycles. If this latest fire outbreak of hate is happening mostly on the left, however, perhaps that’s the direction where we should be applying the most water.

The day after Balmer’s arson attack on the PA governor, CNN was in a festive mood regarding political violence in general: CNN blasted for segment calling Luigi Mangione a ‘morally good man. “’CNN is a bad joke of a new org and Lorenz is a nut job. She said Mangione is a ‘morally good man’ which is absurd, as he killed a man in cold blood,’ another said. ‘The more I think about the Donie O’Sullivan interview with Taylor Lorenz the more astonished I am that they were laughing when talking about a guy who shot a man in the back in cold blood,’ a third person fumed.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 97

HMM: Iran Has a Reason to Strike a Nuclear Deal: Its Economy Is in Trouble.

Iran’s currency is among the weakest in the world. Inflation remains well above 30%. Young people are struggling to find work, and a frustrated middle class can no longer afford to buy imported goods.

Those troubles look set to intensify under a second Trump administration, which resumed its campaign of “maximum pressure” to force Iran to rein in its nuclear program and prevent it from developing a bomb. Already severely strained by sanctions and endemic corruption, political observers and analysts say a further deterioration of Iran’s economy could push its people to the brink.

“This is a country that’s creaking under the pressure of economic sanctions, sustained mismanagement and corruption,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a think tank in London. “Ultimately, what they seek is durable sanctions relief, and they believe that Donald Trump could perhaps deliver that in a way that the Biden administration couldn’t.”

Officials from the U.S. and Iran convened in the Omani capital on Saturday for their highest-level talks in years, pledging to keep a conversation going. Washington wants a new deal to curb Tehran’s uranium enrichment in exchange for lifting sanctions, after abandoning an earlier one during President Trump’s first term.

Lifting the sanctions is a bad idea.

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green 104

CHINA CENTURY THAT NEVER WAS: Over on Substack today, Rod Martin’s guest author is Yi Fuxian. Remember that name because this guy knows China like few others in the world. In “The End of the Chinese Dream,” Fuxian explains why two decades ago he described China as “A Big Country With an Empty Nest.” It’s even more relevant today.

Posted at 10:49 am by Mark Tapscott 38

CHANGE (IT BACK): US Military Academies End Racial Preferences in Admissions.

The policy changes that prompted the request for a pause, the academies said, stem from directives issued by President Donald Trump, whose administration is committed to dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across all branches of the U.S. military as part of a broader effort to refocus the military.

To implement the president’s vision for the military, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered his department to eliminate DEI initiatives and offices, including ceasing the practice of considering race or sex when admitting cadets to military academies.

The U.S. Air Force Academy, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, stated in its letter that it has already ended race-based admissions practices following a series of White House and Pentagon directives. These include, most recently, a Feb. 6 memorandum issued by acting Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Gwendolyn DeFilippi, who ordered the elimination of “quotas, objectives, and goals based on sex, race, or ethnicity for organizational composition, academic admission, career fields, or class composition.”

Well, good — assuming they don’t just take quotas underground.

Posted at 10:38 am by Stephen Green 74

GOODER AND HARDER, LA: Why LA Knows That Karen Bass Can’t Get it Done. “This week we found out that the Los Angeles mayor’s office has only managed to get four building permits pushed through her city’s sausage making machine. Seventy-two are in the queue. The multimillionaire named to be the sherpa by which all things are rebuilt, has been allowed to fade into the sunset.”

Posted at 10:07 am by Stephen Green 93

CHANGE: Hong Kong’s biggest pro-democracy party moves to disband as freedoms dwindle.

Pro-democracy protests that paralyzed Hong Kong in 2019 led to a crackdown that has all but silenced dissent through restricted elections, media censorship and a China-imposed national security law that saw some of Yeung’s party members jailed. Dozens of civil society groups closed down.

Former chairperson Yeung said in an interview with The Associated Press that Chinese officials told him the party needed to disband. He urged his members to support the motion to give the leadership mandate to handle the process.

“I’m not very happy about it,” said Yeung. “But I can see if we refuse the call to disband, we may pay a very huge price for it.”

Others received similar messages.

“One country, two systems” lasted longer than I thought it might, honestly.

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green 103