The American Mind.

Regarding the recent anti-Israel protests on campuses, the common perception, especially in media circles, persists that these are spontaneous student uprisings. In fact considerable evidence exists that they are led and financed by lavishly funded activist foundations like George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation; extremist professional protestors, including a 63-year-old woman named Lisa Fithian who tried to block counter protestors to interfere with the pro-Hamas seizure of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall; and wacky nonstudent activists, including a 40-year-old Marxist-anarchist heir to millions named Cody Carlson and Manuel De Los Santos, the leader of the Chinese-funded People’s Forum and a fervent apologist for the Castro regime. De Los Santos hailed Hamas’ October 7 attack as “heroic,” called for Israel to be “erased from history,” and eagerly welcomed the impending “defeat” of the “U.S. empire.”

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With the dramatic implosion of Michael Cohen on the stand on Thursday with the exposure of another alleged lie told under oath, even hosts and commentators on CNN are now criticizing the prosecution and doubting the basis for any conviction. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper admitted that he would “absolutely” have doubts after Cohen’s testimony.

CNN’s legal analyst Elie Honig declared “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a star cooperating witness get his knees chopped out quite as clearly and dramatically.”

He previously stated that this case would never have been brought outside of a deep blue, anti-Trump district. Other legal experts, including on CNN and MSNBC, admitted that they did not get the legal theory of the prosecution or understand the still mysterious crime that was being concealed by the alleged book-keeping errors. The question is whether the jury itself is realizing that they are being played by the prosecution.

Probably not.

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The DNA of a big cat in the Panthera genus – probably a leopard – has been identified from a swab taken from a dead sheep in the Lake District.

This is the first time that big cat DNA has been found on a carcass in the UK. The analysis was carried out at a laboratory at the University of Warwick run by Prof Robin Allaby.

Allaby told BBC Wildlife that it was very hard to lift DNA from swabs taken from carcasses but there was no doubt in this case. “It makes me a convert [to the existence of non-native big cats in the UK],” Allaby said. “Until now, I have remained open-minded, I think that’s my job as a scientist.”

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The destructive nature of urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build anything at scale ever again.

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Hertz gambled and lost when it placed its big EV bet on Tesla a few years ago. It was a chance for the rental car company to shake up the industry, instead the company bought 30,000 Teslas, got scared away by depreciation and expensive repairs and now wants to get rid of them. While all those used Teslas looked to be great used car deals, it turns out high mileage EVs that were formerly rentals are horrible to own as New York Magazine reported.

Hertz had ambitions to make 20 percent of its rental fleet EVs, and it was going to start with a massive Tesla deal that saw the company purchase over 30,000. Expensive maintenance that the company didn’t account for spooked the company enough to start to sell off it’s fleet. This made for incredible used EV buys, especially when you factor in the used EV tax credit of $4,000. People scrambled to Hertz dealers buying them up. One salesman at a Hertz dealer in Smithtown, New York told New York Magazine that they were selling as many as 30 Teslas a week at one point. A slowdown came when buyers finally started to realize just what they got themselves into.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

And who could blame them? Democrat cooties!

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I never imagined that we would ever see a time when it takes $177,798 for a family of four to live comfortably in the United States. Unfortunately, that day has arrived. Our leaders have been pursuing highly inflationary policies for many years, and now we have reached a point where inflation is wildly out of control. In fact, the latest wholesale inflation figure that was released on Tuesday came in much higher than expected. Sadly, this is just the beginning and we are in far more trouble than most people realize.

No indication of whether that amount includes the government’s beak-wetting. (Anyway, where are you going to find a ‘family of four’ any more? You’re lucky to find a family of three.)

Read it.

For President Biden and congressional Democrats, the fierce party division over the campus protests and the war in Gaza is full of warning signs during the 2024 election year. The unrest is unlikely to stop when universities break for the summer; protesters are pledging to disrupt the August Democratic National Convention planned to be held in Chicago.

Most House Democrats have been reticent on the antisemitic protests and encampments roiling college graduations this month, while a handful have vocally defended or even celebrated the student protests as displays of protected free speech.

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Francis Collins, the top public health official during the COVID-19 pandemic, earlier this year said the lab leak hypothesis was not a conspiracy theory, according to a transcript of his testimony released Thursday by House Republicans, reports the Washington Times.

Read it.

We identify points of conflict and consensus regarding (a) controversial empirical claims and (b) normative preferences for how controversial scholarship—and scholars—should be treated. In 2021, we conducted qualitative interviews (n = 41) to generate a quantitative survey (N = 470) of U.S. psychology professors’ beliefs and values. Professors strongly disagreed on the truth status of 10 candidate taboo conclusions: For each conclusion, some professors reported 100% certainty in its veracity and others 100% certainty in its falsehood. Professors more confident in the truth of the taboo conclusions reported more self-censorship, a pattern that could bias perceived scientific consensus regarding the inaccuracy of controversial conclusions. Almost all professors worried about social sanctions if they were to express their own empirical beliefs. Tenured professors reported as much self-censorship and as much fear of consequences as untenured professors, including fear of getting fired. Most professors opposed suppressing scholarship and punishing peers on the basis of moral concerns about research conclusions and reported contempt for peers who petition to retract papers on moral grounds. Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship. These results do not resolve empirical or normative disagreements among psychology professors, but they may provide an empirical context for their discussion.

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President Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen had his “knees chopped out” by Donald Trump’s defense attorneys in cross-examination during Trump’s ‘hush money’ trial.

Cohen was grilled by Trump attorney Todd Blanche about a pivotal phone call that connected Trump to allegations that he approved reimbursements to pay porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. Blance accused Cohen of calling the former president’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, to complain about harassing phone calls.

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Stormy Daniels is joining the long list of celebrities who have threatened to flee America because of Donald Trump. Given that Cher, Barbra Streisand, Snoop Dogg and every other Trump-hating celebrity is still stateside, Cockburn is doubtful Daniels will keep her word.

In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Barrett Blade, Daniels’s porn star husband, revealed that the couple will likely leave the United States if Trump is acquitted in his hush money trial. “I know that we would like to get on with our lives,” Blade said. “I know that she wants to move past this.”

Blade added his wife’s future will be uncertain whether or not she wins the trial. “Either way, I don’t think it gets better for her. I think if it’s not guilty, we got to decide what to do. Good chance we’ll probably vacate this country,” he said.

We can only hope….

Read it.

During my many years of teaching at different universities, nearly all my colleagues insisted that Lee Harvey Oswald alone assassinated President Kennedy, even while the general public questioned such a conclusion. This disparity between gown and town always amused and informed me that something in the “higher education” world was low indeed.

Despite the fact that we agreed on many political matters, my academic colleagues laughed at all my writing and courses that presented overwhelming evidence that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, led by the Central Intelligence Agency. They reveled in their certitude, good humored as it was, but refused to research the matter. They were smug.

Here is an excellent book that, if they would read it with open minds, would, as its subtitle says – inescapably prove that there was a conspiracy – and if Jack Ruby had not killed Oswald and he had been given a fair trial, Oswald would have been acquitted. Written by James DiEugenio, Paul Bleau, Matt Crumpton, Andrew Iler, and Mark Adamczyk, The JFK Assassination Chokeholds lives up to its claim and then some.

Read it.

The Slovak interior minister said Thursday that a “lone wolf” has been charged in the shooting that seriously wounded Prime Minister Robert Fico and prompted soul-searching among leaders in the deeply divided society.

If he had been ‘rightist’, the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching would be never-ending.

Read it.

The Chinese-owned video app TikTok is a major element of what the Chinese military calls “cognitive warfare,” according to a national security expert.

Ian Oxnevad, senior fellow in national security at the National Association of Scholars, stated in a recent report that TikTok serves as “one of [China’s] foremost cognitive weapons.”

The military defines cognitive warfare as activities to alter the attitudes and behaviors of people and populations for political purposes by degrading rationality and changing perceptions of reality.

OffGuardian.

Between 2008 and 2022, land prices nearly doubled throughout the world and tripled in Central-Eastern Europe. In the UK, an influx of investment from pension funds and private wealth contributed to a doubling of farmland prices from 2010-2015. Land prices in the US agricultural heartlands of Iowa quadrupled between 2002 and 2020.

Agricultural investment funds rose ten-fold between 2005 and 2018 and now regularly include farmland as a stand-alone asset class, with US investors having doubled their stakes in farmland since 2020.

Meanwhile, agricultural commodity traders are speculating on farmland through their own private equity subsidiaries, while new financial derivatives are allowing speculators to accrue land parcels and lease them back to struggling farmers, driving steep and sustained land price inflation.

New York Post.

An Australian doctor who was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor last year is cancer-free thanks to a first-of-its-kind treatment that he helped to develop.

Richard Scolyer, a professor at the University of Sydney, revealed Monday that the incurable stage 4 glioblastoma discovered in his head has not recurred after receiving the heartbreaking diagnosis last June.

“I had brain #MRI scan last Thursday looking for recurrent #glioblastoma (&/or treatment complications). I found out yesterday that there is still no sign of recurrence. I couldn’t be happier!!!!!” the professor shared on X.

Power Line.

Things are not going well here in America. That is obvious to pretty much everyone who lives here. And yet, our democratic, free market heritage is not yet entirely squandered. That is perhaps most easily seen through the eyes of others, like Britain’s Telegraph, which documents how much better off we Americans are compared with UK residents.

Read it.

Woke activists today often like to hearken back to nostalgic media from the 1960s; what they consider the golden era or genesis moment of far-left movements in British and US history. These were the days when being a progressive was considered “counter-culture” and cool, with every major rock star and celebrity tapping into youth angst and hippie philosophy. The progressive shift led to considerable social instability in the 1970s.

It is common these days to hear leftists in popular media argue that TV shows like Star Trek or Doctor Who were “always woke” and that they are simply carrying on the tradition. This is simply not true. While many productions in the US and in Europe displayed liberal sensibilities, woke activists are not liberal and do not hold liberal values. They are, rather, a hybrid ideology combining elements of Marxism/communism/fascism, collectivism, moral relativism and narcissism.

One could argue that the woke cult is the natural end state, the unavoidable final evolution of liberal thinking. That may be true, but that’s a debate for another day. The point is, the woke activism of today has very little in common with the political movements of the 1960s. In fact, if you were to go back in time only 15 years ago and tried to explain to a typical Democrat in the US or Labour member in the UK what leftists are trying to get away with in 2024, they would laugh in your face and call you crazy.

Washington Post.

Gotta be careful when a season looms.

Read it.

Largest city being run into the ground by crooked racist Democrats? Check.

Chief executive a morbidly obese billionaire? Check.

People leaving for Red States? Check.

Steve Sailer.

From the New York Times news section, an exercise in pounding home the Democrats’ talking point that the late May 2020 explosion in gun murders was due to the pandemic. The pandemic was the cause. The cause was the pandemic. Pandemic, pandemic, pandemic.

Number of times mentioned by NYT:

Pandemic: 26
George Floyd: 1
Protest: 1
Black Lives Matter: 0
Riot: 0
Defund: 0
Depolice: 0
Racial reckoning: 0

Read it.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, is the leading authority in the field of gender medicine. Its guidance is routinely used by top medical associations in the U.S. and abroad, while its standards of care inform insurance companies’ approach to coverage policies.

But behind closed doors, top WPATH doctors discussed, and at times seemed to challenge, the organization’s own published guidelines for sex-change procedures and acknowledged pushing experimental medical interventions that can have devastating and irreversible complications, according to exclusive footage obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

LifeHacker.

Shoot them with an air gun or a bow, drag them inside, dress them out, bury the entrails in the garden (good compost), section the carcass, throw the parts in the freezer, don’t tell anyone.

Eventually the deer will learn to avoid your yard. Problem solved. Good eating along the way.

The Spectator.

Washington makes a fundamental error when it sees the present border crisis as an immigration problem, rather than the national security problem it has become under President Biden. For border states such as Texas, which bear the brunt of the situation, it’s also becoming a constitutional problem. In January, the US Supreme Court vacated an injunction prohibiting the feds from cutting razor wire that Texas had placed across a 2.5-mile stretch of border near the town of Eagle Pass. Governor Greg Abbott responded by asserting his state’s fundamental right to self-defense in the face of federal inaction, citing constitutional authority. The Texas governor was entirely correct — authority to defend and preserve the polity exists prior to process arguments about who will enforce federal immigration law.

Abbott’s dramatic move invoked a set of 2023 state laws that allow state and local authorities to arrest suspected illegal immigrants; he deployed the National Guard, state troopers and Texas Rangers to take control of Eagle Pass. The action captured the news cycle and snapped the border crisis into sharp relief, making illegal immigration the number one issue of the 2024 presidential election, seemingly overnight.

But there is one topic regarding border protection that even the most stalwart of governors cannot breach, a power reserved only for the federal government — and the only solution that will end the industrialized human trafficking operations that have enriched some Mexican criminal groups even more than the drug trade: we must go to war with the cartels, which profit handsomely from misery on both sides of the border.

The Register.

Doomed internet cesspits Omegle and Chatroulette should have been warning enough of what happens when a webcam is placed between random strangers, yet the Portal art project linking New York City to Dublin didn’t last a week before being shut down.

Among the examples of “inappropriate behaviour,” as described by Dublin City Council, flaunted before the Portal were derrières, members, raunchy dancing, thrown eggs, drug use, and middle fingers. Nastier still were images of swastikas and the twin towers on 9/11. Thankfully, the giant webcam does not transmit audio.

Most of the unruliness was coming from the Irish side, leading the New York Post to dub it the “portal to hell,” though one US adult content creator thought “the people of Dublin deserved to see my New York homegrown potatoes” as “revenge” for the World Trade Center taunt.

She reportedly went on to make around $10,000 in new OnlyFans subs. The Register cannot confirm whether the potatoes are organic.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Betcha he ‘identifies’ as ‘black’….

Read it.

Car manufacturers are slowing their transition to producing electric vehicles (EVs), because of low customer demand and production problems.

Imagine that.

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Some of this stuff seems a bit dated now, sure, and the video thing sounds a little creepy. But mostly it looks reasonable—couldn’t hurt, right?

Except it did hurt. Students who did the Emotion program ended up smoking more cigarettes and more weed and drinking more alcohol than students who received no program at all. Which is to say: researchers came into schools in Los Angeles and ran a drug prevention program that caused a bunch of seventh-graders to do more drugs

(Best of all, the name of this program was Project SMART.)

What about the kids in the Social program? Basically bupkis. The effects were way stronger in the Emotion program, and in the wrong direction.

Beware of sociologists bearing clipboards.

Read it.

In recent weeks, a number of US college campuses have been turned into protest encampments in the name of the Palestinian cause. Activists have occupied buildings and pitched legions of identical tents in campus quads. Protestors at UCLA have built palisades out of plywood and umbrellas in expectation of violent clashes with police and/or counter-protestors; at Columbia, participants have held press conferences, performed interpretive dances, and demanded “humanitarian aid” in the form of DoorDash.

With all of this the protestors have made themselves look ridiculous, and their cause unattractive. When met with police action, they’ve been dragged to squad cars screaming like toddlers. Still, for all their absurdity, it would be an error not to take these events seriously.

No matter how comical and counterproductive their tactics may seem, every Leftist protest or rally is an act of political violence. This brand of political violence presents both an expression of power and an implicit threat to everyone who sees it. Antifa-type demonstrators are visible, angry, and loud, and therefore effective. They tell the average American that they’re in charge – that they are the street-level authority on what political expressions are acceptable, and that one defies them at one’s peril.

Newsbusters.

A massive effort spearheaded by a censorship-obsessed group financed by leftist billionaire George Soros is looking to incorporate global pressure to push Big Tech platforms to juice their censorship operations before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Read it.

In just over two months, the Paris Olympic Games will kick off. The French capital, which is hosting the Games for the first time in a hundred years, will be living to the intense rhythm of the sporting competition. It’s an eagerly awaited event, but one that many French people, Parisians in particular, dread. The cause: the fierce determination of the French organisers to turn the Games into the most desolate showcase for a civilisation corrupted by veganism and transgender propaganda.

“Quand l’homme essaye d’imaginer le Paradis sur terre, ça fait tout de suite un Enfer très convenable” (“When man tries to imagine Paradise on earth, it immediately makes for a very fitting Hell”), summarised the poet Paul Claudel in a pithy phrase that the French authorities in charge of organising the 2024 Olympics could easily adopt as their motto. For the past few months, the French—and with them, the entire public interested in the Olympic Games—have been discovering in bits and pieces everything that has been devised to make this global summer event, which is being held on French soil for the first time since 1924, an ‘exceptional’ moment. In terms of ‘exception’, what we have here is a dismaying and awfully commonplace catalogue of all the hackneyed clichés of a modern world lacking in creativity and rehashing its old obsessions.

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The problem with Britain is that it doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t control its borders, it doesn’t enforce its laws, it doesn’t build anything. It’s not only a British problem or even Britain’s only problem, but there is something essentially British about it. On the Left and the Right, government apparatchiks, political parties, and lawmakers are all conservative—in the worst sense of the word. Given a free hand, the Leftist gender radicals and the right-wing Tories would have us living in the same sprawling favelas, bulging obscenely with ever-growing human capital and dominated by a small number of American corporations. But in recent times an unlikely figure, the president of El Salvador, has remade the rules on getting things done—and he should be looked to for inspiration.

Nayib Bukele, the 42-year-old President of El Salvador, came to power in June 2019—just six months after Boris Johnson won a landslide victory in the UK promising to reduce immigration, freeze taxes, and boost the NHS. Bukele’s problems were of a different sort. He inherited the responsibility for one of the most dangerous countries in the world, ravaged by gang violence, plagued by poverty, and riddled with corruption. But his approach to taking issues head-on, and winning, should be instructive.

Within days of his inauguration, Bukele initiated his ‘Territorial Control Plan.’ It began almost immediately with the deployment of thousands of soldiers and police officers to problem areas. An organised crime think tank called InSight Crime said at the time that Bukele’s policies would result in “few successes” and “gangs becoming stronger.” Think tanks shouldn’t be listened to. Bukele’s forces would eventually surround and extract the gang members from their strongholds, in a series of mass arrests which have seen more than 76,000 people thrown in jail.

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Why is Greta Thunberg wearing a keffiyeh? The Swedish activist is the poster-girl for climate change. The keffiyeh, though, symbolises a wholly different cause: solidarity with Palestinians in the current conflict with Israel. What does that have to do with global warming?

It’s not just Greta who sees a link. When the current conflict in Gaza began, the climate activist group, Just Stop Oil, known for polarising, clickbait-friendly protests, such as blockading the M25 or throwing soup at Van Gogh paintings, promptly organised a sit-in at London’s Waterloo Station.

This sort of campaign creep is far wider than just climate and Palestine: all contemporary radical causes seem somehow to have been absorbed into one. A protean animating energy seems to ingest every progressive issue it encounters, to create a kind of ever-spreading, all-encompassing omnicause.

I don’t think the term ‘attention whore’ is out of place. Per Wikipedia:

Histrionic personality disorder (HPD) is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as a personality disorder characterized by a pattern of excessive attention-seeking behaviors, usually beginning in early adulthood, including inappropriate seduction and an excessive desire for approval. People diagnosed with the disorder are said to be lively, dramatic, vivacious, enthusiastic, extraverted and flirtatious.

HPD lies in the dramatic cluster of personality disorders, also known as the Cluster B. People with HPD have a high desire for attention, make loud and inappropriate appearances, exaggerate their behaviors and emotions, and crave stimulation.^[1] They very often exhibit pervasive and persistent sexually provocative behavior, express strong emotions with an impressionistic style, and can be easily influenced by others. Associated features include egocentrism, self-indulgence, continuous longing for appreciation, and persistent manipulativebehavior to achieve their own wants.

The Spectator.

It is 10 p.m. at the University of Texas at Austin’s South Mall. The night is quiet, a stark contrast to just the day before when UT Austin became the latest battleground of the culture war on American college campuses. All over the country this spring, anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protesters set up squalid camps on well-manicured quads, blocking and storming buildings. Revolutionaries clad in Covid masks and the keffiyeh favored by terrorists the world over spent the semester hounding Jewish students in libraries, dorms and whatever other structures they could seize. They demanded that institutions cut ties with Israel, topped off with requiring criminal pardons and straight “A”s for themselves, lest their noble impulses hinder their career prospects.

UT Austin president Jay Hartzell, having witnessed such protest theater play out nationwide following the 10/7 Hamas attacks, was prepared when his pupils attempted to build their own encampment on April 23. With Hartzell’s blessing, campus police and Texas state troopers, clad in riot gear, cleared out protesters from the South Mall. This led to clashes as the students fought back and resisted arrest. It did not take long for people on social media to temporarily take their attention off the protest epicenter at Columbia and notice the chaos unfolding in Texas.

The next day, students and faculty staged a walkout to denounce what they claimed had been unfair treatment by the college and law enforcement. A small group of pro-Israel demonstrators stood off to one side, chanting, “Bring them home!” in reference to Hamas’s kidnapping victims, and “Am Yisrael Chai!” While the tension between the two groups was high, no major fighting broke out. Campus police watched the protest from the steps of the UT Tower.

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All the mainstream parties in the German Federal Republic agree: the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany) must be suppressed. They acknowledge that it can no longer be stopped at the ballot box, because it has become too popular, so the only solution is that the party must be officially banned. All in the name of “democracy”.

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An American woman who suffered an injury from AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine sued the company on May 13, alleging the company breached a contract by not paying for the medical care she requires to deal with the injury.

“They left us no choice,” Brianne Dressen, a preschool teacher in Utah, told The Epoch Times in an email.

Ms. Dressen has paid tens of thousands of dollars to drugs to treat the nervous system disorder and other issues she’s experiencing, according to the complaint, filed in federal court in her home state.

Read it.

From 2017 to 2019, the U.S. had an average of 16,641 homicides a year. In 2021 and 2022, however, the country saw considerably more bloodshed, with an average of more than 22,000 annual homicides. Even if the 2023 number drops slightly, it will still represent a large increase over the recent past, before the pandemic and racial upheaval set in motion in 2020.

Many criminologists say this illlustrates one of the problems with the official numbers that are at the center of public debate: They give a distorted impression of true levels of crime. They note that crime stats have become notoriously incomplete in recent years. In some years many big cities did not report their numbers to the FBI, and there are such wide discrepancies in these tallies that the picture they provide has more blur than clarity.

Declining arrest rates and slowing police response times to 911 calls also help explain why polls show Americans believe crime is rising. The experts say the numbers only give some sense of lawbreaking, while most Americans – the vast majority of whom are not crime victims in a given year – are influenced by their largely media-driven perception of whether society feels orderly.

BBC.

Dating app Bumble has apologised for adverts that critics said shamed women who were not sexually active.

The marketing campaign included messages such as “A vow of celibacy is not the answer” and “Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun”.

Bumble said the ads were supposed to bring humour to “a community frustrated by modern dating”.

Reminds me of the famous Eddie Murphy skit from Saturday Night Live: “Be a Ho”.

Read it.

“It’s free! Just swipe your EBT!”

UPDATE: DC Holds Training Sessions for Noncitizens to Vote

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While the border crisis rages on and frequent, preventable crimes as well as stories of illegal aliens displacing Americans in receiving services continue to come out of cities like New York, Chicago, and Denver, even rural America will not be spared. This is all thanks to the Biden administration and several allied nongovernmental organizations.

NGOs facilitate President Joe Biden’s border crisis by transporting, sheltering, feeding, and providing social and legal services for the millions migrating to and throughout the U.S. NGOs receive billions of dollars in federal funding to resettle aliens in our communities regardless of their legal status and without proper vetting or coordination efforts with localities.

In 2024, for example, World Relief, a global Christian organization, has received U.S. taxpayer funding to transport 75 Somalis to rural Wisconsin. Seventy-five may seem insignificant compared to the millions of illegal aliens who have already crossed our southern border, but this is just the beginning for Eau Claire and Chippewa Counties as well as the surrounding area. The plan is to resettle at least 3,000 Somalis in western Wisconsin over the next three years, where nearly 1,900 already reside.

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In the early 1950s, a notorious bank robber, one of the first fugitives on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, was asked after his capture: Why did you rob banks?

William Sutton’s response: “Because that’s where the money is.”

Fast-forward to today. Thieves are targeting electric vehicle charging stations because the charging cords at each stall contain a ‘gold mine’ of copper that can easily be scrapped.

Read it.

Progressive International is an organization created in December 2018 by the Sanders Institute (belonging to the U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders) and by the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DIEM25). According to its own website, which is published in 27 different languages, “Our mission is to build a planetary front of progressive forces. We define progressive as the aspiration to a world that is: democratic, decolonised, just, egalitarian, liberated, feminist, ecological, peaceful, post-capitalist, prosperous, plural, and bound by radical love.”

In its declaration of principles, Progressive International affirms that the most harmful ‘virus’ afflicting humanity is none other than capitalism, an incredible assertion coming from an organization founded by a U.S. senator: “We aspire to eradicate capitalism everywhere. We believe that exploitation, dispossession, and environmental destruction are written into the genetic code of capitalism.”

In addition, the PI openly proposes the dismantling of North Atlantic Treaty Organization, arguing—together with DIEM25—that NATO is “a killing machine largely responsible for the devastation in Gaza and many other places, and must be stopped!” It is not necessary to read all the documents posted on its website to understand its ideological commitments, because its X (formerly Twitter) timeline praises Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Karl Marx, Lenin, the Black Panthers, and even Black Lives Matter (BLM).

Read it.

The In-N-Out Burger chain was begun in California in 1948 in the Baldwin Park area of Los Angeles and has expanded to more than 400 eateries in eight states and 287 cities. Until March 24, the company had never closed a restaurant.

However, on that day, the location in East Oakland shuttered because of “ongoing issues with crime,” according to Denny Warnick, the chief operating officer of In-N-Out.

Employees at the now-closed burger joint had to deal with “car break-ins, property damage, and armed robberies.”

ZMan is fed up.

An aspect of modern politics that does not get discussed is that it is less about the practical things politics is supposed to address and mostly about esoteric and abstract ideas that have meaning only because we pretend so. Look at the current crop of campaign ads and the candidates may as well be running against the bogeyman or in favor of the good juju. Without the party labels, it would be impossible to know anything about the candidates.

This was not always the case. The old joke about politics was that every candidate ran around promising two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot. The point was they all had plans about how to increase material prosperity. Even though no politician speaks to anything specific these days, the economy remains the top issue with voters because the prevailing assumption inherited from the past is that politics is supposed to be about practical things like fixing potholes.

One reason for the shift in political rhetoric is that the public square has become the domain of clever midwits playing word games with one another. Public discourse is now controlled by credentialed experts who have no idea how anything works, other than the complex game of relationships that defines the managerial class. That means they are good at constructing complicated intellectual structures that are useful in rhetorical jousting but have no connection to reality.

Concur.

Watch it.

Pearl Davis points out the inconvenient truth.

Read it.

In March, Joe Biden declared Easter Sunday to be “Transgender Day of Visibility” in a move which outraged many and was received as an assault on the holiest day of the year. In one sense, this was of course deeply shocking. Yet it is not as shocking as one might initially presume and is actually somewhat consistent with the fact that transgenderism, as a political and ideological movement, is profoundly religious in its orientation, particularly in its contrast with Christianity. Amidst the noise about the death of God and the decline of faith, the political climate of the West has become charged with religious ideas and impulses masquerading under the supposed secularism of the social movements gripping our culture which, properly explored and unearthed, will aid us in better addressing this descent into heresy.

Transgenderism is a false view of anthropology, based upon a series of premises contrary to reason and reliant upon distinctly religious ideas that happen to be false and should not be accepted as true, good, or beautiful. Its power as an ideological force—observable in its dramatic capture of the political debate in recent years—can, to some degree, be attributed to the religious nature of its presuppositions, which also demonstrates the importance of decisively rejecting its religious conclusions and proscriptions. But first, let us recap just a few of the quite astonishing consequences of this movement and the effects it has had on our society—all of which a mere decade ago would have been considered unthinkably absurd.

StrategyPage.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has decided to seize or try to seize Taiwan before the end of the decade. Xi realizes Taiwan has a say in this matter and wants to mobilize sufficient forces and create the right psychological conditions in China and Taiwan. This includes having Chinese naval and air forces operating near Taiwan on a regular basis so the Taiwanese military is not alarmed every time Chinese forces operate near the island.

Some of these forces that regularly appear off the Taiwanese cast are those that would be used if China were seeking to blockade Taiwan. Chinese military forces will eventually blockade Taiwan and prevent any ships from getting in or out.

UnHerd.

Cokes, pilsners and passion-fruit-flavoured vapes. Many smoke rollies, some do ket and cocaine. Eyes rarely widen at the mention of such things; bring up the Pill, however, and you elicit a flurry of disdain and lively debate.

Once seen as a tool of sexual liberation, the Pill is now often spoken of as a pharmaceutical menace, wreaking havoc with female moods and increasing the risk of cancer. It was first rolled out on the NHS in 1961 — for married women, of course. And though still the most popular method of birth-control, its use is plummeting — data published in June last year showed that community pharmacies dispensed 7.2 million items of progestogen and combined contraceptives in 2022-3. In 2014/15, the number was 8.5 million.

A world away from the groans associated with the Pill, there is an enticing optimism to the chatter around the contraception app of the moment, Natural Cycles. To look at testimonies online is to find yourself in the lexical world of the farmers market — words like “harmony” and “rhythms” crop up just as a wrinkling of the nose, an eye roll, follow any mention of the Pill. How good might it be, I think between big rips of a vape, to be free of chemicals?

Read it.

Chinese students pursuing an education at western universities are faced with intimidation by Chinese authorities and their proxies—fellow Chinese students.

This is the conclusion of an Amnesty International report that draws on dozens of testimonials from students in Europe as well as the U.S.

While students feel quietly intimidated by their more ‘patriotic’ peers, such tactics can be also applied to their family members.