Read it.

Your tax dollars at work. (Wait ’til you see the kevlar ceramic inserts….)

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This is truly silly. The purpose of allowing a deduction for children on taxes is that children require support, which involves extra expenditure and (like the corresponding tax credit) the government gives people a break. Certainly pregnancy involves a bit of extra expense but nothing like what a born child would cost.

On the other hand, I love seeing people able to deduct stuff from their taxable income and thereby reduce the amount the government is allowed to confiscate. And I suppose any economic incentive for women to carry their children to term rather than kill them is a good thing.

Read it.

The man who authorities say planned to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh in a bid to impact the Roe v Wade decision identified as a transgender female called Sophie, according to court documents.

Read it.

A passenger on an overnight rail service from Scotland to London said he was left speechless after waking to find the train had not even left Glasgow, where he boarded.

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What the Ukrainians can expect from the progressives is an airlift of thoughts and prayers.

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The International Quidditch Association (IQA), which governs nearly 600 teams over the world, Avada Kedavra-ed the original name of the highly confusing game in order to distance themselves from Rowling’s “anti-trans positions.”

“This is an important moment in our sport’s history,” said Chris Lau, chair of the IQA board of trustees. “We are confident in this step and we look forward to all the new opportunities quadball will bring.”

Unbelievable.

Read it.

Imagine this: you’re blessed with opposable thumbs and breathtaking mental faculties. You have a notion of object permanence. You can use language, do mathematics, and decipher the world around yourself. There is no question that you are the pinnacle of evolution, a simply amazing, staggeringly rare thing to exist, the very poster child for the best that Mother Earth has to offer. And how do you spend your days? Drinking lattes and eating cheeseburgers.

Day after day, I swipe the Hinge profiles of girls endowed with the greatest gifts known in the universe, only to find that their hobbies are sleeping and eating. The last million years of evolution has been wasted on them; they might as well live with orangutans.

Excuse me … I’ve got a cherry turnover calling my name….

Minnesota University Press.

Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolutionize everything from online commerce to the nation-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right political thought.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that cybercurrency is Right-Wing Extremism.

Read it.

Teen Vogue gets more insane by the day.

On June 13, Teen Vogue released a piece about casting a witches spell to fight for reproductive justice. No, this is not satire.

The teenage geared site gave a rundown on the history of witches fighting back “against the patriarchy.” I assume the “patriarchy” is the Supreme Court who just confirmed what we already knew — there is no constitutional right to abortion.

Luckily, as pointed out by Teen Vogue, witches can cast their spells to save the day. “In the late 1960s, the movement group Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (also known as W.I.T.C.H.) organized protests to push back against the patriarchy and to fight for women’s rights. They had several spin-off covens throughout the country, composed of radical feminists who wanted to expose capitalism as the true enemy of women’s freedom.”

Ah yes, capitalism is the enemy. I must have missed that.

Ben Shapiro.

This week, a professor went viral during congressional testimony regarding the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overruling Roe v. Wade. During her testimony, professor Khiara Bridges of Berkeley Law School refused to acknowledge any value at all in unborn children, instead stating, “I think that the person with the capacity for pregnancy has value and they should have the ability to control what happens.” This prompted Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., to ask, “You’ve referred to people with a capacity for pregnancy. Would that be women?” Bridges immediately responded, “Many cis women have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as nonbinary people who are capable of pregnancy.” Hawley asked incredulously, “Your view, the core of this right is about what?” To which Bridges shot back, “I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic, and it opens up trans people to violence.” She then blamed Hawley for the high suicidal ideation rate of those who identify as transgender, and lectured him, “We have a good time in my class. You should join.”

Read it.

The Florida Democrat who promised to “legalize weed” if elected governor holds thousands of dollars of stake in a marijuana dispensary.

Read it.

Good luck with that.

The purpose of an HOV lane is to prevent two (or more) people from driving multiple cars by encouraging the sharing of a vehicle. There is no way an unborn baby could be driving its own car, and therefore it doesn’t come within the ambit of the scheme.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

A while back I did a Taki post on the macaroni men. This was a fad in the 18th century in which men would dress like clowns in public. The only thing is their absurd costumes were not intended to be funny. These were serious people and their ridiculous outfits were proof of their seriousness. The same thing exists now. Instead of silly hats, the Cloud People don silly ideas. They decorate themselves with overwrought opinions about small things made up to be important.

Of course, the absurdity of it all reflects the absurdity of the people behind it and to a great degree the target audience. The mass media is created by flakes and weirdos for people who want to be like them. The days of a newspaper seeking to inform the readers about the events of the day are long gone. Cable chat shows are just the modern freak show and animal act. Out mass media is an essential part of a ridiculous system run by ridiculous people.

Read it.

The Ben & Jerry’s Foundation steered more than $100,000 to a charity run by its own president, in the second case of a sitting board member’s nonprofit group benefiting from the foundation’s grants.

Social Ventures Inc., a charity run by Ben & Jerry’s board member Jeff Furman, raked in around $118,000 from the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation between 2016 and 2020, according to financial disclosure records.

Doing well by doing good.

Read it. 

Our allies across the pond in the UK are having just as much fun with woke propaganda as we are in the states. The Daily Mail caught the National Health Service red-handed removing the words “women” and “woman” from their page on menopause despite ministers promise to tone down woke language, as they reported June 28.

Read it.

Since it debuted in 2016, The Donald Trump Show — the televised meta-commentary from hell we’ve all been living in — has been through many reinventions. Its first season was a tautly plotted election thriller that managed to make the impossible seem possible; its middling stretches were a darkly comic take on The West Wing. It even proved later on that it could continue without its main character, introducing a new president, Joe Biden, who ushered in elements of slapstick humor and cringe comedy.

Now, with last night’s episode, The Donald Trump Show has veered into Kiefer Sutherland territory.

UPDATE: Jan. 6 Committee Says Cassidy Hutchinson Told Them That She Heard Mark Meadows Say That A Secret Service Agent’s Friend’s Cousin’s Husband Once Heard That One Of Trump’s Other Aides Said She Thinks She Heard Him Say He Wanted To ‘Do An Insurrection’  (Babylon Bee)

UPDATE: Clown Car: Funniest Tweets About Hutchinson’s Jan. 6 Testimony

Read it.

It is not news that Democrats are in deep trouble in the upcoming midterm election, and the 2024 election doesn’t look too promising either. With the obvious disabilities of (P)resident Biden, and the obvious unfitness of Kamala Harris to succeed him, and the angst after the Dobbs decision, Democrats are looking around for a plausible Plan B. And there are Democrats who think the answer to their 2024 problems is . . . Hillary Clinton.

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Here’s a summary, courtesy of Dr. Jordan B. Cooper, a pastor in one of the conservative rump denominations that didn’t join the ELCA:

Neurodivergent nonbinary trans pastor is made bishop. This individual then disciplines abusive latinxpastor. But this is unknowingly done on a Hispanic holiday and is thus racist. Woman archbishop rebukes bishop but isn’t harsh enough so is then also racist.

Wait, what?

Current Affairs cries wolf.

Author Elizabeth Sandifer explains the dangerous ideas of the far-right neoreactionaries, who have ties to Silicon Valley and a hostility toward democracy.

Dangerous ideas! Far-right! Neoreactionaries! Ties to Silicon Valley! Hostility toward democracy

OH NO WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!

Or maybe not. Proglodytes have this problem with agency: Just as they behave as if non-white people are too feckless to run their own lives without well-educated rich white leftists to tell them what to do, they behave as if ideas can cause cancer – just being in the wrong place at the wrong time can make you contract Long Trumpism or worse. This attitude is why progressives are often characterized as the New Puritans: You’ve got to be saved from yourselves because by yourselves you’re too weak/stupid/evil to do the Right Thing, so your Betters need to force you into it (For Your Own Good, of course).

Hence there is always a bull market for these sorts of hand-wringing pearl-clutching articles in the Narrative Media. If you’re looking for a side job and can stomach it, write up a few and send them to the New Yorker, you might get lucky.

Read it.

As you may have heard, there’s been slightly more than the usual amount of drama at the Washington Post the past few days. In the midst of the ongoing, junior-high quality drama, a young employee and Stanford graduate named Holden Foreman decided to white knight on behalf of the women generating the drama. He did this by tattling on male Washington Post employees who agreed with a different female employee that everybody should give it a rest, put the drama behind them and get back to work.

So, who is this courageous Generation Tide Pod person, Holden Foreman, standing up for the right of women to create and sustain workplace drama? As I said, he is a graduate of Stanford. While at Stanford, he apparently published an article … I am not making this up … complaining that he had to go hungry at college because eating food from a cafeteria was too traumatizing for him and he lacked the ability to determine for himself how much food to eat. The remedy he demanded … still not making this up… was that the university should cut and portion his food for him individually so he would be spared the trauma of eating at a buffet.

Read it.

A report on alleged systemic racism released Wednesday and greenlit by California Gov. Gavin Newsom is calling for the planting of trees statewide “to create shade equity” and reduce “heat islands in black neighborhoods.”

The 500-page report was released after Newsom, a Democrat, signed legislation in 2020 forming a nine-member task force to “inform Californians about slavery and explore ways the state might provide reparations.” It describes tree demolishing in black neighborhoods for highway construction and says climate change makes these areas hotter.

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Democratic Texas gubernatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke disrupted Governor Greg Abbott’s press conference called to update the public on yesterday’s school shooting. O’Rourke is one of the breed of politicians — politicians without a conscience and with no thought other than themselves — that finds the moment of unspeakable tragedy fit to undertake histrionic displays and hysterical lectures promoting their favored causes. I can’t believe this is even good politics, but it is what it is, somewhere south of disgusting.

Read it.

If a blind man identifies as someone with 20-20 vision, must we give him a driver’s license?

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The month of the gays is just around the corner and Target is gearing up and binding down on rainbow merchandise.

The LGBTQILMNOP crew has adopted June as their month of gay pride and Target is in full support. In preparation for gay month, Target just announced their partnership with two queer clothing brands in order to “rainbow-wash” the country. Ew.

The new Target collab is with TomboyX and Humankind and is set to be released towards the end of May, according to Bustle. It will feature compression tops, “a comfortable alternative to chest binders,” “packing underwear,” bras and boyshorts as well as swim trunks, tops and what they called “unisuits.” In all honesty, none of these items are even cute. They all look like a rainbow unicorn barfed on them.

I do not buy from Target. Period.  As a wise man once told me, ‘Don’t give money to people who hate you.’

Read it.

Yeah, that sure keeps me awake at night. (Not.).

Do an Internet search for “Make Your Own Baby Formula” and see what you find.

Read it.

Actress Olivia Wilde, the daughter of failed Democratic House candidate Leslie Cockburn, was served custody papers at a Las Vegas film convention as she was speaking on stage.

“This is for me?” Wilde asked after a woman slid her a manila envelope with the papers, which she glanced at before continuing her speech. The 38-year-old split in November 2020 with her fiancé, Horrible Bosses star Jason Sudeikis, with whom she has two children. She is currently dating a man 10 years her junior who enjoys wearing dresses.

Sounds like a Democrat to me.

Read it.

Let’s see: Vaccine causes the disease, so the ansower is – another vaccine!

What’s wrong with this picture….

Read it.

A leftist magazine co-founded by former President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor Robert Reich urged the federal government to seize control of the fossil fuel industry. Because … climate change.

The American Prospect, of which Reich is founding editor, ran an April 8 article headlined, “Nationalize the U.S. Fossil Fuel Industry to Save the Planet.” Leftist economist Robert Pollin argued that “Turning the biggest oil companies over to public ownership would serve several goals at once, including climate resilience.”

This is the same Pollin who co-authored a book with radical philosopher Noam Chomsky pushing a “Global Green New Deal.” In his new article, Pollin exploited the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest climate doom-mongering report to argue: “[W]e must begin advancing far more aggressive climate stabilization solutions than anything that has been undertaken thus far.”

Read it.

Imagine, therefore, how surprised I have been this past couple of decades to see more and more men fighting on behalf of “women”. Trans-women that is. Let’s call him Nigel — this man is a type you will recognise. White, bearded, and whether gay or straight he somehow manages to shoehorn himself onto the LGBTQQIAP+ community, and is absolutely, without question, more oppressed than females. He gets himself out of bed, dragging himself away from Insta, Twitter and Pornhub (he has donated to some bird making ethical porn, but he prefers the real stuff) and cycles down to where are the feminists are speaking about rape and domestic violence and other bourgeoise rubbish.

His pronouns intact, fluctuating between he/him and they/them, depending entirely on his mood and what he chooses to wear that day, Nigel drops his washing off at his mums, gets his girlfriend (they are a queer couple though) to clean out the hamster cage, slips on his £150 trainers and joins the baying mob shouting “TERFS out” and “bigots”, etc.

Nigel may identify as a citizen journalist, so keen is he to alert the online world to the danger lurking behind any gathering of witches banging on about single sex spaces. Or perhaps he is working for a “progressive” media outlet, and makes it his business to contact feminist event organisers asking probing, intelligent, open-ended questions such as “how many trans women have you killed today” or “when did you become a fascist/bigot?” He writes headlines such as, “Transphobes secretly campaigning to remove the right to free cervical smear tests for trans women.”

Read it.

A new startup hopes to bring video games to the forefront of mental health care by developing games that are as therapeutic as they are engaging. They’re also looking at how to make it easier for developers to test the medical benefits of existing games.

I am not making this up.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Also more proof that if you want improve your chances to be “Woman of the Year,” the best strategy is to be born a biological male, and then switch teams. It appears that men are better at being women than women are. Once upon a time this might have been called chauvinist piggery; now it is called enlightenment. (See: Kaitlyn Jenner, everyone’s “Woman of the Year” four or five years ago now. NB: Jenner has opposed Lia Thomas’s swimming stunt.)

Read it.

Read it.

A man was killed on Sunday night after the Tesla he was driving stopped in the middle of I-70 in Independence, Missouri, causing two vehicles to crash into it, police said. Police still are not certain what caused the vehicle to come to a stop in the center lane.

Hammer tech.

Read it.

Western Society has reached a level of absurdity beyond comprehension. A University in Scotland has put a warning label on Ernest Hemingway’s great short novel, The Old Man and the Sea.

Read it.

Curious how acceptable veganism has become. George Orwell scathingly described vegetarians as “that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking to the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.” Somehow, via Linda McCartney’s textured soya sausages, veganism has become a mainstream path, not just to health, but to a bright future. As George Monbiot, the high priest of British veganism, exhorted his Guardian readers, “The best way to save the planet? Drop meat and dairy.” It’s the cows. They belch methane.

The UK is a world leader in veganism, the first country to have a Vegan Society. Here, more than a million people will stop eating animal products this month as part of Veganuary, of which Monbiot is an “Ambassador”. After that, who knows? You may want — and the Ambassadors certainly desire — that you embrace the whole vegan testament, and deny yourself not just meat, fish, eggs and dairy, but all animal products. The wool jumper on your back. The leather shoes on your feet.

Of course, the success of veganism is no mystery at all. Vegans are absolutely correct in maintaining that plant-based food can be healthy, and that the welfare conditions of much of the globe’s livestock are pitiful. (On ethical grounds alone, I wouldn’t touch an intensively-reared pig with a bargepole, let alone with a knife and fork. And I’ve farmed for 20 years.) True too: Daisy the cow is implicated in climate-change. No sane or caring human could disagree.

Such is lower case veganism. Sensible, and sensitive. The problem comes with majuscule Veganism, which rages beyond animal ethics, diet and environmental concerns into a fundamentalist crusade untroubled by science, untouched by rationality. When humans killed God, they needed a replacement for religion. Upper-case Veganism is the latest faith for the lost middle classes.

Q: How can you tell a vegan?

A: You don’t tell a vegan. The vegan tells you.

The refutation of vegetarianism is simple: The smell of applewood-smoked bacon. Try it.

Read it.

Here, in a 50-acre plot near the Barlow shopping complex, Nguyen grows rare varieties of heirloom wheat like Sonora, the first wheat variety cultivated in North America and the base for Mexico’s original wheat tortillas. Hulking seven feet above the ground are tall stalks of Wit Wolkoring, a Sonora descendant that’s particularly drought-resistant.

These are cultivars that “you won’t find in a seed catalog,” Nguyen said. Each of the dozen-odd grains that Nguyen has grown confer different advantages — the Chiddam Blanc de Mars is perfect for baguettes, the Sonora can be cooked like rice — but what they all share is an adaptation to California’s North Coast. These are hardy, survivor grains, selected to withstand an increasingly hostile climate.

So when Global Warming finally arrives, we’ll have Gourmet Wheat to fall back on. (Well, rich people will–you? Not so much….)

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

I made a disparaging comment here the other day about how I never watch “The View,” because, based on the 10-second clips I’ve seen from time to time by accident, it seems obvious that if you actually attempt to sit through an entire episode you’ll feel your IQ dropping by the minute.

Today “View” stalwart Whoopi Goldberg said “the Holocaust wasn’t about race,” and you can see the other panelists desperately trying to figure out how to go into damage-control mode, before the director, no doubt shouting in the control room “Shut it down! Go to commercial!”, brought up the bumper music quite abruptly and loudly to stop Whoopi’s big whoops!

Her thesis would certainly come as news to Hitler. Maybe even to Joe Biden.

Read it.

We begin today by heading north, past Vermont, over Winterfell, above the Arctic Circle, beyond the part of the map labeled “monsters be here,” and into Canada. There do we find a writer named John Ibbitson, who recently published a piece for the Toronto Globe and Mail warning that American democracy may not be long for this world. “If the next presidential election reveals the U.S. hurtling toward possible violence and autocracy,” Ibbitson asks, “should Canada try to intervene?”

Before an entire nation of 330 million bursts out laughing, consider that Ibbitson isn’t suggesting Canada militarily intervene on American soil. Still…for us Yanks, that is the image that springs to mind, isn’t it? An invasion of moose cavalry stopping to say saw-rry and ask for directions to the nearest riot is not a contingency this country is prepared to deal with. (Or for the inevitable American response: “And you are?”)

Daily Beast.

This is, obviously, national news.

Read it.

When the Ivy League opened itself up to co-education in the sixties, I don’t think that this is what they had in mind.

Read it.

Chicago police have confirmed that a high-end Burberry store on the city’s central Michigan Ave. was robbed no less than two times this week, with the second break-in coming early Thursday morning. The first instance was Tuesday morning, with the burglaries being especially brazen given they took place in daylight hours, or just before dawn. The Tuesday incident involved five men in a White SUV, but apparently with no other leads or identifiers. So naturally they hit the same site again, plus others.

But as CWB Chicago details of the second break-in, it appears the criminals are positively boasting about the ease of mass theft in a seemingly “lawless” windy city: “A group of armed burglars broke into two Lakeview convenience stores, dumped their stolen cash registers in front of Gov. JB Pritzker’s home, and then burglarized the Burberry store on Michigan Avenue early Thursday.”

Check it out.

I am not making this up.

New York Times.

New York’s attorney general is investigating the death of a 29-year-old man who was badly burned when he was shot with a stun gun after dousing himself with hand sanitizer during an altercation with police officers, officials said on Thursday.

I rejoice that the Attorney General of New York State has nothing more important to do than investigate the death of a crazy person in a small town upstate.

(Think of it as evolution in action.)

ZMan does a review.

Politics in a liberal democracy is first and foremost performative. Getting attention is the first goal for political types and they do that by comporting to familiar roles. How well they play those roles, as in any type of theater, establishes their status in the hierarchy of the political theater. Some actors, of course, take a short cut and play one of the various fools or jesters in the political drama. If done well this is a fast-track to attention, but the role itself is always on the periphery of the main show.

If most people were operating from self-interest and had a reasonable sense of their self-interest, political theater would not exist. For example, why would people line up to vote when they know their votes will be ignored? Most people know this to some degree and the science bears it out, but people still vote. In fact, voter participation has gone up as the effectiveness of voting has declined. The theater of democratic politics blinds people to the futility of it for some reason.

Refusal to wear a mask says more about you than your face ever could (The Guardian) Indeed it does.

Marjorie Taylor Greene wonders why we never closed schools or businesses because of cancer (Daily Kos)

Fauci calls Ron Johnson’s AIDS comment ‘preposterous’: ‘I don’t have any clue of what he’s talking about’ (The Hill) Almost certainly true.

Fauci dumbfounded by GOP senator’s false accusation (CNN)  False!

Face masks and omicron: Should you upgrade from cloth to N95s? Double mask? (SFChronicle) In any event, you need to PANIC!

Omicron: More Transmissible, Less Severe Due To ‘Common Cold’ Mutation?

Questioning School Madness and Vaccine Mandates

Fauci Downplays Severity Of Omicron Strain

Krazy Krugman: GOP ‘Apparatchiks’ Trying ‘To Keep Pandemic Going’

Huge New Study Shows Zero COVID Deaths Among Healthy German Kids

New York Will Require Full Vaccination To Access Restaurants, Gyms And Entertainment; 5-Year-Olds Need At Least One Shot  Time to leave.

Moderna President Warns Vaccines May Struggle To Protect Against Omicron

Doctor Banned For Questioning Efficacy Of Masks Wins High Court Case

Biden Surgeon General: Even Tripled Vaxxed Still Have To Wear Masks Indoors  Don’t forget to PANIC!

De Blasio Announces NYC Will Mandate Vaccines for Private Sector Workers  Time to leave.

Oregon Moves To Make Indoor Mask Mandate Permanent  Time to leave.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

ZMan attempts to read the witch-hunt tea leaves.

Lost in the rush into the holiday season is the Charlottesville monkey trial concluded last week with a verdict for the plaintiffs. The jury had no verdict on some of the claims but agreed there was some sort of conspiracy by the defendants. They also decided that the plaintiffs suffered no harm as a result of it, but the defendants were doo-doo heads who deserved some sort of punishment. As a result, they awarded the plaintiffs eleventy billion bars of gold-pressed latinum in punitive damages.

The jury did not fall into Star Trek jargon, but they may as well have, given the structure of their decision. According to lawyers who followed the case, the punitive damages are symbolic due to rules governing the relationship between punitive and compensatory damages in civil cases. Typically, courts limit the ratio to a single digit. That is, punitive damage awards are capped at something less than ten times the compensatory damages, which in this case were one dollar.

This reality is of no consequence as the trial was always political activism on behalf of the ruling class. In a sane society this never would have been in a courtroom and the lawyers who brought it would be deported. Ours is a society in crisis, so ridiculous things like this are common now. The lawyers got their win and regime media was happy to promote it as a great blow against free speech. For a day, the blue-checks on Twitter were celebrating the win.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there even was an Australian Rhino Project.

It’s good to know that they don’t have anything better to do with their time and money.

Read it.

Heaps of unworn clothes are being discarded in the Chilean desert, adding to a swiftly swelling graveyard of fast-fashion lines past.

According to a report from Agence France-Presse, the massive mound of clothes consists of garments made in China and Bangladesh that make their way to stores in the US, Europe, and Asia. When the garments are not purchased, they are brought to Chile’s Iquique port to be resold to other Latin American countries.

Read it.

McDonald’s McPlant, a burger with a plant-based meat patty, is now available at select locations in the U.S. for a limited time.

Notice how nobody ever tries to make a meat-based plant substitute.