Leonardo da Vinci, the painter of the "Mona Lisa" and a symbol of the Renaissance, was only half-Italian, his mother a slave from the Caucasus, new research revealed on Tuesday.

Da Vinci's mother had long been thought a Tuscan peasant, but University of Naples professor Carlo Vecce, a specialist in the Old Master, believes the truth is more complicated.

"Leonardo's mother was a Circassian slave... taken from her home in the Caucasus Mountains, sold and resold several times in Constantinople, then Venice, before arriving in Florence," he told AFP at the launch of a new book.

In the Italian city, she met a young notary, Piero (Peter) da Vinci, "and their son was called Leonardo".

The findings of Vecce, who has spent decades studying da Vinci and curating his works, are based on Florence city archives.

San Francisco residents lined up at a city board meeting last night to share their full-throated support of a wide-eyed reparations plan that would award every black resident $5million, wipe their personal debt, guarantee $97,000 incomes for 250 years and $1 homes. 

But no one at the emotional meeting - where residents burst into song and begged to be made 'whole' - asked  how the struggling, debt-addled city might pay for it. 

Reparations are being considered in various Democratic cities around America as a means of providing compensation to the descendants of enslaved African-Americans. 

Webmaster addition: We are all, black or white, slaves to that 1040 form. When do we get our reparations?

Occasionally, big media institutions still do valuable reporting.

As you’ll recall, the prestige press humiliated themselves back in January when the story first broke about how five black Memphis policemen beat a black motorist to death. The media’s initial response was heavy on explaining over and over that white people were still to blame…for reasons.

But now the Washington Post has paid for former sports reporter Robert Klemko, who looks like he is about one-fourth black, to talk to nine old-time cops who served at the Memphis police academy about what has gone wrong with the new generation.

Are they wholly trustworthy? Perhaps not (office politics are endlessly complex), but what they say makes a lot of sense.

As with most patterns in human society, their explanation involves both nature (Memphis has been scraping the bottom of the barrel harder when hiring cops) and nurture (its police academy has been made easier in order to not flunk out its new recruits, who are more fragile: mentally, emotionally, and ethically):

Payments of $5 million to every eligible Black adult, the elimination of personal debt and tax burdens, guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years and homes in San Francisco for just $1 a family.

These were some of the more than 100 recommendations made by a city-appointed reparations committee tasked with the thorny question of how to atone for centuries of slavery and systemic racism. And the San Francisco Board of Supervisors hearing the report for the first time Tuesday voiced enthusiastic support for the ideas listed, with some saying money should not stop the city from doing the right thing.

Silicon Valley Bank might have been able to make good on $74 million promised to customers had it not pledged the money to leftist causes.

According to a new database by the conservative Claremont Institute, the collapsed bank donated or pledged to donate nearly $74 million to groups related to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research, told The Federalist that SVB’s failure on the heels of its left-wing activism “is yet another indication that SVB was focused on woke virtue signaling instead of protecting their customers’ deposits.”

Tobias Langdon makes a case that Jews have worked to undermine gentile countries. https://www.unz.com/article/the-trouble-with-trans-westernism-how-men-cant-be-women-and-jews-cant-be-american/

As I see it, if so, they have had a lot of help from gentiles themselves. The skepticism in Enlightenment thought in the end unravels civilization by subjecting everything to doubt. This is a long process of erosion, the story of which waits to be told. Jacques Barzun attempted the task in his book, From Dawn to Decadence dedicated “to all whom it may concern” and whose opening lines are: “It takes only a look at the numbers to see that the twentieth century is coming to an end. A wider and deeper scrutiny is needed to see that in the West the culture of the last 500 years is ending at the same time.”

It seems that Barzun is correct as it is difficult to find any remains of Western culture in the 21st century where the normalization of perversity and the institutionalization of tyranny and demonization of white ethnicities are the rage, but I have not seen any influence of Bazun’s effort or any attempt to recover the civilization that has been destroyed.

Joe Biden’s Treasury Department has been stymying the effort to get suspicious activity reporters related to the Biden family business deals for years. It’s been a scandal that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. When Rep. James Comer (R-KY) tried to get the records before the Republicans took over the House, the Biden administration changed the rules that prevented members of Congress from getting the records unless it was from the Committees (which Democrats controlled). Then, even when the Republicans took over the House, the Treasury Department wasn’t complying initially.

Violent Antifa protesters are being arrested on the University of California, Davis campus after smashing doors and windows as they attempted to storm a speech by Charlie Kirk sponsored by the school’s Turning Point USA chapter.

Antifa activists have been attacking Kirk in the press and on campus in the lead-up to the event, and one of the largest newspapers in the state, the Sacramento Bee, ran a piece Tuesday falsely claiming that Kirk has “called for the lynching of trans people” and calling for the cancellation of his speaking engagement.

Dove is facing backlash after slamming Oscar-winning film 'The Whale' for using a 'fat suit' on actor Brendan Fraser. 

The film received some criticism in the lead up to Sunday's Academy Awards as viewers took issue with an actor playing an obese man when they were not obese themselves.

In the latest swipe, Dove took a moral stance in response to a tweet in which one user said, 'our identity is not your costume.'

Florida Democrat Representative Anna Eskamani did her part in kicking off the Pride at the Capitol activities by stepping up to the mic and announcing that the legislation the group is protesting is “erasing trans babies”.

Yes, you read that correctly: Erasing. Trans. Babies.

Take a listen to the jaw-dropping statement at the 0:18 mark:

Russia, China and Iran and a number of other countries will hold joint naval exercises "Maritime Security Belt-2023" in the Gulf of Oman on March 15-19. This is reported by RIA Novosti with reference to the Ministry of Defense of the People's Republic of China.

So far, no other details regarding the exercises have been provided.

On February 17-27, the second joint naval exercises of Russia, China and South Africa were also held in the southern part of the Indian Ocean. On the Russian side, a detachment of ships of the Northern Fleet participated as part of the medium tanker "Kama" and the frigate "Admiral Gorshkov".

The chief commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has lauded the Iranian nation for standing up to the enemies, saying the more pressure they exert on the country, the more decisive the nation’s response will be.

Major General Hossein Salami made the remark at an event in the northwestern Iranian city of Orumiyeh in West Azarbaijan Province on Sunday.

Praising the “exemplary strength” of the Iranian nation, Salami said, “The year that passed was the year of the Iranian people standing up against the enemies, and the presence of the people [in various arenas] disappointed the enemy.”

The IRGC chief commander pointed to the unprecedented pressure and wide-ranging hostilities against the Iranian nation over the years, saying, “This amount of hostility and pressure is without precedent in human history.”

Young children can be “mixed berry gender fluid muffins,” a government document has instructed teachers in Wales.

A 170-page “Agenda” document detailing how sex education should be taught in Wales reportedly instructs teachers that children as young as seven can be “mixed berry gender fluid muffins”.

It is the latest evidence of militant transgenderism being taught in British schools, with government officials in both the UK and neighbouring Ireland becoming increasingly keen to see gender ideology taught as fact to young children.

According to a report by The Telegraph, the sex ed pamphlet produced by Cardiff University academics in partnership with the Welsh government tells the country’s teachers that there are many different genders.

The document furthermore encourages teachers to play the “mixed-muffin gender berry challenge” with children, a game which involves teaching children that “you can’t assume someone’s gender by how they look”.

Webmaster addition: This transgenderism agenda is designed to make children unsure of who they are, in order to weaken their sense of self and make them easier to control.

Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly has admitted that the Canadian government’s goal is not just to see Russia leave Ukraine but to topple the government of Russian president Vladimir Putin itself.

Foreign Minister Joly, a senior member of the cabinet of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, made her remarks as Canada has enacted new sanctions against the import of Russian aluminium and steel, outright mentioning the proposal of regime change.

“We’re able to see how much we’re isolating the Russian regime right now — because we need to do so economically, politically and diplomatically — and what are the impacts also on society, and how much we’re seeing potential regime change in Russia,” Joly stated, the National Post newspaper reports.

The City of Light is losing its luster with tons of garbage piling up on Paris sidewalks as sanitation workers strike for a ninth day Tuesday. The creeping squalor is the most visible sign of widespread anger over a bill to raise the French retirement age by two years.

The malodorous perfume of rotting food has begun escaping from some rubbish bags and overflowing bins. Neither the Left Bank palace housing the Senate nor, across town, a street steps from the Elysee Palace, where waste from the presidential residence is apparently being stocked, was spared by the strike.

More than 5,600 tons of garbage had piled up by Monday, drawing complaints from some district mayors. Some piles disappeared early Tuesday with help from a private company, the TV station BFMTV reported.

Webmaster addition: Good for the French people!

Declared and prospective Republican 2024 presidential contenders laid out their views on the Ukraine War, including some for the first time, in response to a questionnaire from Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Carlson posed six questions about Ukraine to declared 2024 candidates former President Donald Trump, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, as well as prospective candidates former Vice President Mike Pence, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

In general, Trump, Ramaswamy, DeSantis, Noem, and Abbott fell into a camp leaning towards non-intervention in the conflict or limiting support to Ukraine; while Haley, Pence, Scott, and Christie fell into the more hawkish camp — with Pence being the most hardline.

Pakistan’s Ex-Prime Minister Imran Khan has held a fresh election rally in Pakistan's eastern city of Lahore. Thousands of supporters, guarding his bulletproof vehicle, welcomed the former PM by chanting slogans and singing party anthems.

This was Khan's first rally in more than four months, as he has been organizing his party’s affairs via a video link after being injured in a failed assassination attempt last year in Punjab.

Khan was shot in the legs on November 3 as he waved to crowds from a truck-mounted container while leading a protest march to Islamabad to pressure the government into announcing an early election — but the march was cut short in Rawalpindi.

Khan said he’s determined not to appear before courts due to ‘security threats’, and that he has no trust in the incumbent government. He asked the country’s top Court to ensure his security, claiming that his life is in serious danger.

One in five students at UK top universities are considering dropping out due to the worsening cost-of-living crisis across the country, and a quarter are regularly going without food and other essentials, a new survey has revealed.

A new research by the Russell Group Students’ Unions, which represents 24 of the UK’s most elite higher education institutions, suggests that more than 20 percent of the students at high-ranking universities such as UCL and Edinburgh are under the intense pressure of soaring prices, being forced to quit their studies.

More than half of those surveyed said that they are experiencing concentration problems caused by poor nourishment and financial stress, as their academic performance is negatively influenced by the deepening crisis.

ChatGPT was apparently made to hate the GOP.

A damning new report has detailed that the highly advanced language model AI was programmed not only with liberal biases — like censoring The Post’s Hunter Biden coverage — but also to be more tolerant of hate-style speech towards the right wing by its creator OpenAI.

“OpenAI’s content moderation system is more permissive of hateful comments made about conservatives than the exact same comments made about liberals,” according to data from the Manhattan Institute, a conservative NYC-based policy and economic-driven think tank.

“Relatedly, negative comments about Democrats were also more likely to be labeled as hateful than the same derogatory comments made about Republicans.”

Several Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) board of directors have donated thousands of dollars or have direct ties to prominent Democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Federal investigators are now looking into the role the board may have played in the bank’s abrupt collapse, as the board members failed to prevent its failure.

Although there are 12 board members, several are under scrutiny for their donations and connections to Democrat politicians.

For example, director Kate Mitchell is a Clinton mega-donor who prayed at a shrine after Clinton’s 2016 loss to former President Donald Trump.

In a rapidly-changing world of finance – increasingly led by artificial intelligence, algorithms and big data, Israeli startup ARX aims to advise publicly traded companies or mid to late-stage companies on IPO strategy and robust aftermarket support. 

Founded by former IDF Unit 8200 members Yehuda Leibler and Rotem Gantz, as well as Nimrod Okon, who served in an elite forces unit in the IDF, ARX uses big data insights to advise companies that are in the process of offering their IPO to public markets or are looking to protect their existing position in capital markets. 

ARX uses AI to track patterns in the market that could be an opportunity – or threat – to a public company, such as short sellers or disinformation campaigns, which ARX says are on the rise.

Webmaster addition:

The US banking industry is reeling from a string of bank failures, which kicked off last week and continue to rattle both domestic and global markets. Economists spell doom and gloom, despite efforts to stem the fallout. Here's what you need to know.

1. What happened?
   California-based, crypto-focused bank Silvergate was the first to announce impending liquidation last Wednesday. Then came tech and start-up favorite Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the implosion of which on Friday was the largest US bank collapse since the financial crisis of 2008. New York-based Signature Bank was the latest to be shut down over the weekend, as regulators feared for its liquidity.

The Russian Defense Ministry on Tuesday denied claims by the US military that a Russian interceptor came into contact with the American MQ-9 drone over the Black Sea, causing it to crash. 

The UAV was flying towards the Russian border without an active transponder, in clear violation of the restricted area established for the conduct of the special military operation, the ministry said. Two interceptors were dispatched to investigate. 

“As a result of sharp maneuvers around 9:30am Moscow time, the MQ-9 unmanned aerial vehicle went into uncontrolled flight, lost altitude, and collided with the water surface. The Russian fighters did not use weapons, did not come into contact with the UAV, and returned safely to their home base,” the defense ministry said in a statement.

Webmaster addition: As I mentioned in yesterday's radio show, the story that seems to be emerging from the American and Russian narratives is that one of the Russian fighters flew ahead of the MG-9, trying to disrupt the airflow into the turboprop engine, and the pilot of the drone, not wishing to lose engine power, made a sharp turn away and inadvertently stalled the drone, sending it into the water where it could be recovered and studied by the Russians.

When politicians right across the political spectrum, in support of NATO’s role in supplying military support for Ukraine, when major media support this position with extremely one-sided, context-free coverage, and when recent demonstrations in support of peace pale in comparison with the “Stand With Ukraine” rallies, people with a dissenting opinion can feel extremely lonely.

Early in the Vietnam War, people could totally relate. When the war was in its first year, one tenth of Americans said they felt the need to organize a protest and of those individuals one in ten said they would protest the Vietnam War. One in six by contrast said they were more inclined to protest the antiwar demonstrators! [1]

But it was actual journalism doing incisive work that arguably helped turn the tide and contributed to the Vietnam War finally coming to an end. One of many critical pieces of work in this regard was the reporting of a cover-up of the My Lai massacre, in which as many as 500 civilians in South Vietnam were murdered by several members of the 11th Infantry Brigade. The deaths included women and children and infants.[2]

This story helped massively shift attitudes about the promise of a military effort bravely “freeing the people from communism.” Despite bipartisan support, the U.S. was defeated in large part by massive domestic popular opposition.

US drones are collecting reconnaissance data to be used by the Kiev forces for their future strikes on the Russian territory and troops, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov has said.

"The unacceptable actions of the United States military in the close proximity to our borders are cause for concern. We are well aware of the missions such reconnaissance and strike drones are used for," the ambassador was quoted as saying in a communique, issued in connection with Tuesday’s US MQ-9 Reaper drone’s crash in the Black Sea.

The Russian diplomat quoted US National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby as saying that US UAVs make these kinds of overflights on a daily basis.

"What do they do thousands of miles away from the United States? The answer is obvious - they gather intelligence which is later used by the Kiev regime to attack our armed forces and territory," Antonov said.

Webmaster addition: There is no denying the US is now directly involved in a war against Russia.

Webmaster addition:

Since end of January, eight Royal Netherlands Air Force F-35 fighter jets have been deployed to Malbork Air Base in Poland. With their presence, they contribute to NATO’s Deter and Defence mission along the eastern flank flying Air Policing sorties and training with Allies in the region.

“Our jets have been closely integrated into NATO’s Deter and Defend posture here at Malbork with our twofold mission,” said Lieutenant Colonel Guido Schols, commander of the 160-strong F-35 detachment. “Under the control of the Polish Air Operations Centre in Warsaw and NATO’s Combined Air Operations Centre at Uedem we have monitored the skies and conducted regular training activities with Allies showcasing our F-35s’ capability across the spectrum of combined and joint Air Power missions,” he added.

During their stay at Malbork Air Base, the Royal Netherland Air Force F-35s conducted combined flying e.g. with French Rafale fighters.

International partners will help Ukraine develop its naval fleet.

Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said this at a joint briefing with Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren at the Ukraine-Odesa Media Center on March 14….

“Today, the Minister of Defense of the Netherlands, Mrs. Ollongren, announced that minehunters will be handed over to us. According to her, Belgium will participate in this project too. The United Kingdom has already provided us with two mine hunters and they are already flying the Ukrainian flag. Accordingly, there are already three countries that are part of this naval coalition,” the minister said.

Reznikov added that it is a well-known fact that Ukraine is also building a fleet in Turkey.