DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

‘It’s Happening Again’: Trump Reacts as Raman Overtakes Pratt in LA Mayoral Race

Lammy says he told JD Vance his Nowak comments were ‘wrong’ (Joshua Nevett/BBC)

‘Checked Out’ RFK Jr. Missing as Agency Spirals (Wiktoria Gucia/The Daily Beast)

House Democrats Plan to Investigate Trump

Maine Dems plot response if Nebraska GOP tweaks Electoral College votes (Holly Otterbein/Axios)

President Denies He Pledged Not to Start New Wars (Katie Rogers/New York Times) Innuendo: Trump is going to start more wars.

Democrats eyeing investigations, and perhaps prosecutions, of Trump officials (Mike Lillis/The Hill)

Trump drags feet on drone deal with Ukraine, mystifying experts (Ellen Mitchell/The Hill)

Congress thought it had a spy-powers deal. Then Trump came in. (Politico)  innuendo: Trump is screwing things up again.

Deep in Rural Virginia, a MAGA Pro-Gun Push Takes an Unnerving Turn (Greg Sargent/New Republic)  MAGA is the New Nigger.

Pam Bondi was the worst AG in history. Until now. (Noah Berlatsky/Public Notice)  Worse than Merrick Garland? Worse than Erich Holder? I don’t think so.

Trump-Hating Pink Frets ‘State of the World,’ ‘Trans Siblings’ Losing ‘Rights’at Tony Awards

How the Drive to Find a Conspiracy Against Trump Rocked the Justice Dept. (Devlin Barrett/New York Times)  Innuendo: There is no conspiracy against Trump. Perish the thought. (There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy when everybody already knows what they need to do.

Former Biden J6 Prosecutor’s ActBlue-Funded Firm Sues To Stop Trump’s UFC White House Event

It’s Johnson’s Gavel But Trump’s House (Reese Gorman/NOTUS)  Innuendo: This is illegitimate in some vaguely sinister way.

Knicks fans warn Trump to expect hostile reception at NBA Finals game (Dan Diamond/Washington Post)

On campaign promises about foreign wars, Trump rewrites recent history (Steve Benen/MS NOW)  Innuendo: Trump is a weasel.

The Trump administration’s multiple investigations of the 2020 election may have more to do with 2026 (Votebeat)  Nothing to see here … move along … move along….

Court blocks Trump’s $100K visa fee (Kyle Cheney/Politico  We want that cheap foreign labor!

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On Monday, the Supreme Court vacated a lower court ruling that upheld Biden Energy Department regulations that would outlaw gas stoves and water heaters in Americans’ homes and require homeowners with these to either renovate their homes or switch to electric appliances.

In American Gas Association, et al. V. Dept. Of Energy, et al, the District of Columbia’s district court upheld the Biden Administration’s regulations banning the use of non-condensing appliances, effectively eliminating gas furnaces and water heaters from the marketplace.

In response, the American Gas Association, American Public Gas Association and National Propane Gas Association asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision. In their petition to the high court for a writ of certiorari, they stressed the consequences of allowing the lower court’s decision to stand.

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he Trump administration has referred more than 100 employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for suspension and debarment after investigators alleged they participated in Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel or were members of Hamas-linked militant groups.

The report issued Friday by the USAID Office of Inspector General, the office overseeing U.S. foreign assistance programs, recommends that 101 individuals be placed on a governmentwide exclusion list barring them from participating in U.S.-funded foreign aid projects for 10 years.

According to the report, those identified included “UNRWA school principals, teachers, security personnel, attendants, psychosocial counselors, and medical professionals” who were found to be members of Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades or other militant organizations.

Among those cited were a “deputy school principal serving as an al-Qassam deputy company commander in the Ain Gallout/5th infantry battalion” and a “math and computer teacher” with “ties to an Al-Qassam intelligence squad.”

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Brent crude futures jumped as much as 5% to $97.83 a barrel, while WTI traded around $95 a barrel, as renewed Iran-Israel fighting threatened to unravel a fragile US-Iran ceasefire and further disrupt energy flows.

On the maritime chokepoint front, Iran-backed Houthis declared a full ban on Israeli vessels in the southern Red Sea, warning that any Israeli ship (or linked ship) will be seen as a military target.

“First: We declare a complete and total ban on maritime navigation for the Israeli enemy in the Red Sea, and we consider all enemy movements to be military targets for our Armed Forces from the moment this statement is issued,” the terror group said Monday in a statement.

The statement continued, “Second: We affirm that we will meet escalation with escalation, and that our military operations will escalate in line with events, the battle, and in conjunction with the axis of Jihad and Resistance.”

“Third: We affirm the right of our people and the peoples of our free nation to confront American-Israeli aggression, and that we will not stand idly by in the face of the unjust siege imposed on our people and the peoples of the axis of Jihad and Resistance in Palestine, Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, and Iraq. All enemy attempts will fail, God willing, and our operations will continue as long as the aggression and siege against us and the axis of Jihad and Resistance continue,” the statement concluded.

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But only among the reality-based community.

“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.” – Stalin

Newsbusters.

When the polls close on Tuesday night in Maine, it’s all but guaranteed that the man who has been accused of “toxic relationships” by three woman, sexting with women outside his marriage, referred to himself as a communist, called police officers “bastards,” said rural White Americans are racist and stupid, and sported a Nazi tattoo, Graham Platner, will be the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate. The liberal media, in an effort to get out in front of this Democratic disaster, have taken to equating Platner with President Trump and Texas GOP Senate nominee, Ken Paxton. That was the case Saturday on CNN Newsroom.

ATQUE: Platner Supporters Unfazed by Allegations of Misconduct (Eliza Collins/Wall Street Journal)

ATQUE: LA voting debacle reflects a democracy in crisis (Joel Pollak/New York Post)

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Six people were injured in a stabbing inside New York’s Penn Station on Sunday evening, authorities said, less than a day before thousands of fans are expected to descend on neighboring Madison Square Garden for Game 3 of the NBA Finals.

A suspect was taken into custody after the attack, which unfolded around 7 p.m. in one of the nation’s busiest transportation hubs.

I predict that it will be a Person of Color, because

Authorities did not immediately release details about what led to the stabbing or whether the victims were targeted.

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A Navy veteran is one of three men recently arrested for allegedly trying to pay more than $2,000 to a person whom they thought was a member of the Islamic State group, or ISIS, to buy rocket-propelled grenades and drones for an attack against U.S. troops overseas, officials said.

Bareen Dzayee, 25, was taken into custody on June 5 along with two other men, a Justice Department news release says. Prosecutors claim Dzayee suggested the drone attack target U.S. Special Forces, according to the Justice Department, according to the Justice Department.

Dzayee enlisted in the Navy in November 2021 and served until July 2024, reaching the rank of seaman, according to his service record, which was provided by the Navy.

After completing the service’s boot camp and Surface Warfare Engineering School in Illinois, Dzayee served on the destroyer USS John S. McCain from March 2022 to July 2024, his record says. KNSD, an NBC television station in San Diego, first reported that Dzayee had served in the Navy.

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On the 82nd anniversary of D-Day, the leader of the Virginia Senate budget conference decided to start firing on her political opponents from her fortified bunkers on the hill she has occupied, while the governor tries to take the political beach from her and her allies with covert operations.

Here’s where the fun begins.

Saturday, rather than spend time sharing stories of locals who were part of the landing operation in France 82 years ago, Senate conference leader Louise Lucas took out her social media flamethrower.

In response to a post by Sen. Scott Surovell decrying the suggestion of a “DC-style continuing resolution,” the Senate president pro tempore wrote, “we had a meeting with ‘Data Center Diva’ [Gov. Abigail Spanberger] and she agrees with ‘Amazon Don’ (House Speaker Don Scott) who doesn’t want to impact the richest corporations in America!”

The Antiplanner.

In recent posts, I’ve noted that the nation’s transit agencies are carrying far fewer riders than in 2019 and yet since that year the size of the transit bureaucracy has grown by more than 50 percent. Two MIT researchers, Vicky Yang and Levi Grenier, have offered a new explanation for such bureaucratic bloat. Instead of looking at transit, they were struck by MIT, whose faculty has grown by 9 percent and the number of students has grown by around 30 percent since 1985, but the number of administrative staff has almost tripled.

The Foundry.

More nonprofits are urging the software company Benevity—which hundreds of companies use to allow employees to donate their time and money to charities—to stop systematically blacklisting conservative nonprofits.

Twelve organizations first sent a letter to Benevity in October following the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. The new letter, sent Monday and exclusively provided first to the Daily Signal, will feature three new signatories: Turning Point USA, PragerU, and Focus on the Family.

“Charitable giving programs should empower generosity, not enforce political conformity,” Douglas Napier, executive chairman and CEO of 1792 Exchange, which helped organize the letter, told the Daily Signal in a statement Friday.?????????????????????????????????????????????????? “Benevity must immediately end its use of Southern Poverty Law Center’s defamatory ‘Hate List’ and ‘Hate Map’ to block mainstream charitable organizations like Turning Point USA and Focus on the Family.”

“1792 Exchange’s research found that hundreds of major corporations rely on Benevity’s platform, making this a critical moment for corporate leadership to reject ideological gatekeeping,” Napier added. “Benevity must completely remove any use of the SPLC filter, adopt a viewpoint-neutral process, and restore full access to the organizations it has unjustly excluded.”

“For far too long, major corporations have been relying on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s nefarious ‘Hate List’ to decide what organizations and charities their employees may give to as part of their corporate giving programs,” Paul Batura, vice president of communications at Focus on the Family, told the Daily Signal. “These entities have been relying on a distorted definition of ‘goodness.’”

“In fact, citing and sourcing the SPLC is the equivalent of a company promising clean water drawing their water from a polluted or toxic aquifer,” Batura added. “It’s our privilege to join the 1792 Exchange’s growing coalition in urging companies to stop making decisions and recommendations based on information from the SPLC.”

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Aspects of the 15-minute city are praiseworthy. I yield to no one in my embrace of the pedestrian city. I have long believed that walking as the best of all possible modes.

I also believe that cities should be freed from the business regulations that make it difficult to start small shops and cosy cafes in residential neighbourhoods. An exciting mixed-use neighbourhood can be one of the best gifts of urban entrepreneurship. In the US, we regulate the entrepreneurship of the poor far more than we regular the entrepreneurship of the rich. The rich innovate in cyberspace, which is largely a regulation free zone. The poor innovate on the ground, in real things, and local government rules micromanage the physical.

But the basic concept of a 15-minute city is not really a city at all. It’s an enclave — a ghetto – a subdivision. All cities should be archipelagos of neighbourhoods, but these neighbourhoods must be connected. Cities should be machines for connecting humans – rich and poor, black and white, young and old. Otherwise, they fail in their most basic mission and they fail to be places of opportunity.

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The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone. The U.S. rollout of the iPhone, the first modern smartphone, provides a natural experiment: from June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T’s mobile broadband coverage. Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint’s pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44. National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.

iPhone -> social media -> dating apps -> massive amounts of attention -> women aren’t happy with their locally available prospective sex partners -> waiting for Drake to text … and waiting … and waiting….

Pretty straightforward.

The Register.

Britain’s much-heralded scheme to attract top scientific talent has managed to attract a total of 18 takers, the government has admitted.

The Global Talent visa program was launched last summer following announcements from the EU and France that they intended to tempt scientists unhappy with their lot in Trump’s America and elsewhere.

But while the EU was putting up €500 million ($575 million) in funding for foreign eggheads, the UK could only stump up a dedicated pot of £54 million ($72 million) to lure boffins to Britain.

According to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), UK research organizations have managed to attract ten leading international researchers in the latest wave, who are expected to drive breakthroughs in clean energy, life sciences, and other advanced technologies.

This is on top of eight researchers previously announced by the agency.

The downside is that you have to live in Britain—or France.

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Zul Mohamed is running for mayor of Carrollton, Texas, and he doesn’t think military vets sacrificed anything for his freedom.

Well would you look at that, a foreign Muslim doesn’t support U.S. military.

This is the same guy who pleaded guilty to voter fraud in the State of Texas.

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Jacob Soboroff is an anchor on MSNBC/MSNOW, one of the chosen media outlets for Democrat propaganda.

He says everything is totally fine and there’s nothing to see here. DEMOCRACY IN ACTION!

Meanwhile:

Nithya Raman is the Zohran Mamdani of Los Angeles. She is an extremely wealthy champagne socialist who wants Los Angeles to become even more “progressive” than it has under current Democratic Mayor Karen Bass.

She was a solid 8 points behind Republican reality star Spencer Pratt on Election Day.

As many people anticipated, over the last week, the distant 3rd-place Raman has managed to overcome her deficit despite her dismal polling and debate performance.

You can see how Raman SURGED in the mail-in count.

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

UPDATE: California Reminds Voters There Are Just 30 Days Left To Vote In Last Tuesday’s Election  (Babylon Bee)

Obama-Appointed Judge With Deep Democrat Ties Overturns Trump Immigration Rules Quelle surprise.

Trump’s cognitive impairment endangers us all (Justin Glawe/Public Notice)  Assuming what you’re supposed to prove is a classic Narrative Media trick.

Capehart Says Trump And Republicans Are Why Platner Shouldn’t Drop Out

New GOP Resistance Emerges for Trump in Congress  The RINOs you have always with you.

Watch: Leftists Are Crying Over Trump’s Beautifully Restored Reflecting Pool

Trump cries ‘steal’ over slow California vote count, but anti-fraud system works, say experts (Roque Planas/The Guardian)  Experts say! That proves it!

Obama-Appointed Judge Orders Trump Admin To Restart Processing Asylum Claims

Fact-checking Trump’s interview with NBC News’ ‘Meet the Press’ (Jane C. Timm/NBC News)

The Five’s Tarlov Defends Platner’s ‘Platform’, Says Won’t Be Lectured By Party Of Trump

‘I’ve Had Enough!’ Trump Storms Out of Meet the Press Interview in Wild Fashion — Explodes On NBC’s Kristen Welker After She Hits Him With Fact Checks (Joe DePaolo/Mediaite)

The MAHA moms who helped elect Trump are out of patience (Cheyenne Haslett/Politico)  The mind-readers at Politico are hard at work crafting the Narrative.

Watch Trump walk off the set during Meet the Press  Trump won’t put up with the usual Narrative Media bullshit.

President Trump Walks Out of Combative NBC Interview with Kirsten Welker

President Trump Meet the Press Interview – Full Video and Transcript

‘I’ve Had Enough, Thank You Darling’: Trump Walks Out On NBC Interview

Lawsuit Aims to Stop U.F.C. Fights at White House on Trump’s Birthday (Zach Montague/New York Times)

Trump cuts off interview with Welker: ‘I’ve had enough’ (Max Rego/The Hill)

5 key moments from Trump’s cut-short “Meet the Press” interview (Andrew Pantazi/Axios)  Building the Narrative one moment at a time.

Trump walks out of ‘Meet the Press’ interview when challenged over false claims (Isaac Arnsdorf/Washington Post)  They have to put ‘false’ in the headline so you’ll know what the Narrative is.

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It’s amazing what can happen when attorneys get desperate enough. In the case of Cook County Circuit Judge James R. Brown, they got pretty desperate.

The controversy erupted when Judge Brown wrote a caustic piece, after he had retired from his position, protesting the kinds of misbehaviors he saw in government when he wrote a column for John Kass in Chicago:

Please note that he was a retired judge when he wrote this column. After he had been retired for five years, the Illinois Supreme Court called on him to serve a temporary assignment in Cook County’s traffic courts due to an overload of cases.

Of course, the Democrats were enraged. When the Cook County Bar Association and the Chicago Council of Lawyers demanded that the Illinois Supreme Court rescind Brown’s appointment, they did. They claimed that he had “clearly violated” the code of conduct (even though he had written the column earlier during his retirement).

Judge Brown was not going to take his removal lying down, and filed suit in federal court, seeking a court order to reverse the state high court’s decision to abruptly toss him from the bench:

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The Bank of England has now admitted the quiet part out loud. Historical figures including Winston Churchill were removed from future banknotes after researchers told officials they were “elitist and divisive.”

Nicholas Kristof, a Voice of the Crust.

A quiz question: Which state does best at ensuring the well-being of its citizens, giving them health, education and hope?

The question lays bare Kristof’s life-long career as a Woke proglodyte statist.

How is it the duty of the state to give its inhabitants ‘health’, ‘education’, or ‘hope’? And you’ll notice that he pays no attention to things that most of us might be interested in, such as freedom, law enforcement, and opportunity.

It comes as no surprise that his answer is Minnesota, heartland of Somali fraud, male bathroom tampons,  and BLM riots.

Read it.

A violent Antifa protest erupted outside the Turning Point Women’s Leadership Summit in San Antonio, Texas on Saturday. After protesters attempted, but failed, to storm into the event through a police blockade, the violence escalated.

One man, who had been pepper-sprayed for storming police, was seen washing his eyes with water from a plastic bottle. He immediately threw the bottle at a nearby police officer and ran. The protester was caught. Though he resisted arrest, he was thrown to the ground and taken away.

The Foundry.

State auditors across the country were unable to verify billions of dollars in unemployment spending, Medicaid payments, and pension obligations in federally-funded programs, according to a new report by a government watchdog group.

The findings in the 2026 Financial Transparency Score report, released by the government watchdog Truth in Accounting, found that 13 states failed to earn clean audit opinions. The report comes as the Trump administration is cracking down on how states are spending federal dollars.

The organization used data from annual comprehensive financial reports, or ACFRs, produced by each state as a requirement for getting federal funding.

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California’s punishing cost of living isn’t inevitable—it’s policy-driven. Burdensome regulations have sent housing and energy prices soaring, crushing incomes and deepening poverty. Smarter deregulation could bring back the Golden State’s long-lost affordability and historic role as a “land of opportunity.”

In 2024, California had a poverty rate of 17.7%, meaning about 7 million people were unable to afford basic necessities, well above the national rate of 10.6%. Child poverty nearly tripled from 7.5% in 2021 to 18.6% in 2024. The state also reports the nation’s largest homeless population of 187,084 individuals in 2024.

These outcomes stem from an economy burdened by regulations, particularly those governing housing supply and energy production, which inflate costs and trap Californians in cycles of poverty.

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When the next governor—Democrat Gavin Newsom—was sworn into office in January 2019, it seemed almost a certainty that during his tenure, the state’s population would exceed 40 million. But, according to the Census Bureau’s latest estimates, California’s population has not increased under Newsom, it has decreased.

In Newsom’s first two years, California’s population made miniscule gains. From 2018 to 2019, it grew from 39,437,463 to 39,437,610—an increase of a mere 147. In 2020, it hit 39,527,808—an increase of 90,198. Then in 2021 and 2022, it dropped—first to 39,152,927 and then to 39,125,347. In 2023, it moved up again slightly, but in the two years after that it dropped again, hitting 39,355,309 in 2025.

That was down 82,301 from the 39,437,610 who inhabited the state in 2019, the year Newsom took office.

What has happened under Newsom to reverse California’s long-term trend in population growth?

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On March 25th, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution describing the transatlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Africans as “the gravest crime against humanity.” The text was adopted by 123 votes to 3, with 52 states abstaining, including France, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and most European countries. The United States, Israel, and Argentina voted against.

The symbolic significance of this resolution is considerable. No one would dispute that the transatlantic slave trade constitutes one of the greatest tragedies in human history. For several centuries, millions of Africans were deported to the Americas under appalling conditions, reduced to the status of commodities, and integrated into an economic system based on their dehumanisation. The memory of this crime deserves to be acknowledged and passed on.

But it is precisely because the history of slavery is too grave to be exploited that we must question the ideological assumptions underlying this resolution. For the controversial nature of the text does not lie in its condemnation of the transatlantic slave trade but in what it omits.

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I couldn’t resist a pun for the title of this post. But the content is no joke. We all knew that the vote counting in California is very very slow, and that there’s a history of it turning towards the left as it goes on and if there’s a hint of someone on the right doing relatively well.

Does that mean there’s cheating? Maybe. There’s certainly a strong desire to win coupled with a less-than-convincing devotion to assuring that the will of the voters will be carried out no matter what the outcome. The mail-in ballots that can come in late, the drop-boxes, the rabid leftist partisanship, all combine to create at the very least a lack of trust in the system on the part of anyone on the right.

And so it was almost a foregone conclusion that this would be happening, and that it would seem suspicious whether it is or not.

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We have known for some time that our federal employees have cushy lives compared to the people for whom they work (us). What is particularly infuriating is that so many of them either don’t pay their taxes or are seriously delinquent on what they owe their employer—the federal government.

Recently, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found in a new report showing that 6.9% of federal employees are delinquent on their IRS taxes. That amounts to about 215,000 employees. This is a marked increase in three short years from 4.9%. It is appalling that the rate was previously as high as it was, but it has now hit crisis level, seemingly with little or no consequences. This is in contrast to a 5% delinquency rate among the general population.

The number of delinquents exploded during the Biden administration, which was lax on enforcing anything for favored groups. We can only speculate as to why federal employees felt they had the right to forgo paying their taxes. It might be Biden allowing so many people to go without repaying their student loans that encouraged the government’s employees to skip payments.

The fascinating aspect of this is that these employees are W-2 wage earners who have withholding taken out of their paychecks. The government can easily enforce additional withholding to make sure its employees are in compliance. The feds can easily garnish workers’ wages, as they certainly know where they work. Indeed, the feds do this all the time to ordinary citizens.

I must confess that I am the last person to think ill of people who resist having the Deep State pick their pockets.

Atlas Obscura, an impressively well-named site. (With thanks to VA Viper, a kindred soul.)

ONE DAY THIS PAST APRIL, the residents of Durham, North Carolina, saw the sky turn a peculiar but familiar shade of chartreuse. Enormous clouds of a fine, yellow-green powder engulfed the city. It looked, and felt, like the end of the world. “Your car was suddenly yellow, the sidewalk was yellow, the roof of your house was yellow,” says Kevin Lilley, assistant director of the city’s landscape services. Residents, quite fittingly, called it a “pollenpocalypse.”

Male trees are one of the most significant reasons why allergies have gotten so bad for citydwellers in recent decades. They’re indiscriminate, spewing their gametes in every direction. They can’t help it—it’s what evolution built them for. This is fine in the wild, where female trees trap pollen to fertilize their seeds. But urban forestry is dominated by male trees, so cities are coated in their pollen. Tom Ogren, horticulturalist and author of Allergy-Free Gardening: The Revolutionary Guide to Healthy Landscaping, was the first to link exacerbated allergies with urban planting policy, which he calls “botanical sexism.”

In trees, sex exists beyond the binary of female and male. Some, such as cedar, mulberry, and ash trees, are dioecious, meaning each plant is distinctly female or male. Others, such as oak, pine, and fig trees are monoecious, meaning they have male and female flowers on the same plant. It’s easy to identify female trees or parts—they’re the ones with seeds. And yet more, such as hazelnut and apple trees, produce “perfect” flowers that contain male and female parts within a single blossom. But while both monoecious and male dioecious trees produce pollen, Ogren claims the latter are primarily to blame for our sneezes and watery eyes.

Nothing is too obscure to escape Politial Incorrectness.

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The polls closed in California on Tuesday at 8 p.m. local time. As of Saturday, nobody knows which two candidates will be competing in November for governor or Los Angeles mayor.

Indeed, mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day may stumble in for seven days until June 9—and still be counted. Thus, weeks could pass before these major political contests are settled. Counties have until July 3 to report their official results to the secretary of state.

It was not always this way. By 5 a.m. on March 6, 2013, 100% of precincts had totaled the previous day’s ballots. Nine hours after voting ended, Angelenos knew the final two mayoral rivals. (Gil Garcetti prevailed.) As of Friday, only 71% of ballots had been tabulated in Los Angeles and just 68% statewide.

Escargot can count votes more swiftly than Californians. Pundit Nate Silver calls this “failed state shit.” He observed this week via X: “The fact that California elections often can’t be resolved for weeks is kind of insane and not common in other electoral systems around the world.”

Silver and Eli McKown-Dawson elaborated, “Colombia held a presidential election on Sunday [May 30], and 99.98% of the result was in on Monday morning. Japan also counts most of its votes overnight. And in the UK (not exactly a poster child for state capacity), you can generally expect to have calls for all 650 parliamentary seats the morning after the election.”

G. K. Chesterton:

Puritanism was not a mere code of cruel regulations, though some of its
regulations were more cruel than any that have disgraced Europe. Nor was
Puritanism a mere nightmare, an evil shadow of eastern gloom and
fatalism, though this element did enter it, and was as it were the
symptom and punishment of its essential error. Something much nobler
(even if almost equally mistaken) was the original energy in the Puritan
creed.

I should roughly define the first spirit in Puritanism thus. It was a
refusal to contemplate God or goodness with anything lighter or milder
than the most fierce concentration of the intellect. A Puritan meant
originally a man whose mind had no holidays. To use his own favourite
phrase, he would let no living thing come between him and his God; an
attitude which involved eternal torture for him and a cruel contempt for
all the living things. It was better to worship in a barn than in a
cathedral for the specific and specified reason that the cathedral was
beautiful. Physical beauty was a false and sensual symbol coming in
between the intellect and the object of its intellectual worship. The
human brain ought to be at every instant a consuming fire which burns
through all conventional images until they were as transparent as glass.

This analysis makes clear the applicability of the term New Puritan to the modern proglodyte, as well as explain why New England is its homeland.

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When I was watching the following video, my first reaction was: “This is the future of British policing.”

That is, when civil authority collapses, fit young men who are not averse to violence will assume the job of enforcing community standards, whatever they may be. If the fit young men are Muslims, they will enforce Islamic community standards, i.e. Sharia. If they are native white Britons, they will enforce whatever remains of traditional British community standards. The latter is what you see in the video below.

The window of opportunity for such enforcement is closing rapidly, however. In five years or so there will no longer be a quorum of fit young white men to enforce traditional British community standards. From then on it will be the Pakistanis or the Jamaicans doing the enforcement, but mostly the Pakistanis, because they have the numbers.

In other words, what you see in the video won’t be possible for much longer.

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Nathaniel Wetter Taylor, the protester who allegedly pepper-sprayed two special police officers outside of the Heritage Foundation last year, delivered his own opening statement before a jury Thursday, attacking Heritage as “fascist” and claiming that the officers violated his rights.

Appearing in the D.C. Superior Court, Taylor told the jury that his actions were a “simple case of freedom of speech and protecting yourself.”

Taylor held a solo protest at the Heritage Foundation on June 11, 2025. He walked up to the Heritage Foundation’s front doors holding a sign and a recording smartphone.

When two special police officers, who are licensed to protect and make arrests on Heritage property, attempted to remove Taylor from the property, he pepper-sprayed one of them in the eyes and the other in the mouth, according to security video footage of the incident.

He was later arrested and charged with two misdemeanor counts of assaulting a police officer.

Chris Rock: How Not to Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police.

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To hear the legacy media tell it, the sensible “middle-of-the-road” and “centrist” Xavier Becerra is likely to proceed to the runoff in the California governor race, and while he may have been the establishment pick, he’s far from moderate on abortion or transgender ideology.

In fact, Becerra has an ugly record of weaponizing the law against conservatives.

Becerra spent 24 years in the House of Representatives before California Gov. Jerry Brown, also a Democrat, appointed him attorney general to replace the outgoing Kamala Harris. After four years as attorney general, Becerra led the Department of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden.

Becerra wielded the attorney general’s office against conservatives.

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If a major Senate candidate abused a past girlfriend, isn’t that newsworthy?

If a major Senate candidate knowingly sported a Nazi tattoo, isn’t that newsworthy?

If a major Senate candidate, already under fire for his past remarks about rape, talked about raping intruders, isn’t that newsworthy?

You’d think so.

Yet in an extensive new article about Maine Democrat Graham Platner, The New York Times reporters penned over 1,000 words before revealing the detailed allegation of physical abuse. (There is a very brief mention of Platner being “physically threatening” in paragraph six.)

There are over 500 words before reporting that an ex-girlfriend says Platner knew his tattoo was a Nazi symbol.

And there are about 1,300 words before the revelation that Platner “said … a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them” and “He was like, I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant,” according to that same ex.

As anyone with experience in journalism knows, most readers generally won’t read a full article—or even most of an article, depending on how long it is. Most people are busy. That’s why journalists are taught to put the most important facts in the first few paragraphs of an article.

So it’s telling that The New York Times, a major outlet with employees most definitely familiar with journalism norms, decided that the opening paragraphs of its article should include sentences like “several women … [described] Mr. Platner as a fun and caring partner, and saying they felt safe with him,” but not the most explosive allegations of his former girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield.

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In Argentina, equine cloning in polo is no longer a rarity. It’s now a mature industry — although ethical dilemmas surrounding it persist.

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Kirtner, 75, has seen a lot in his time as a broadcast owner in the tri-state area of Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio along the Ohio River.

One of his AM station’s copper radials once fell victim to a copper thief cutting its wires.

But an FM transmission line being snapped and cleared in broad daylight? He couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

The alleged perpetrator — Paul Crisp of Catlettsburg, according to WSAZ(TV)’s reporting — had severed the main transmission line leading up to the broadcast tower of 93.7 WDGG(FM), a 100,000-watt country-formatted FM station licensed to Ashland, Ky., which goes by the moniker “The Dawg.”

Kirtner isn’t sure how the suspect is still alive.

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Chemists have observed a boron buckminsterfullerene for the first time, providing experimental evidence for an 80-atom cage whose existence has been debated since 2007 (Chem. Sci. 2026, DOI: 10.1039/d6sc02674e).

Buckminsterfullerenes, or buckyballs, are hollow, soccer ball–shaped molecular cages first discovered in carbon. Their discovery launched a new branch of nanoscience. Boron, carbon’s electron-deficient neighbor in the periodic table, has long been considered a candidate for its own fullerene.

“Boron is known as the rule breaker in chemistry,” says Lai-Sheng Wang of Brown University, who led the experimental work. “For 80 atoms to exhibit this structure—I still find it incredible.”

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A fresh college degree used to come with a quiet edge in the job market. New grads had better odds of landing work than the average worker, and that edge held for as long as anyone tracked it. Not anymore. They now face higher unemployment than the workforce as a whole, and the gap is the widest on record.

What makes this strange is the timing. The reversal did not start with ChatGPT, and it did not start with the pandemic. It started in early 2019, before either one was on the radar.

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Remote work skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research since has prioritized studying the impact of working remotely on productivity and job satisfaction but neglected other consequences such as loneliness and mental health. Emanuel et al. examined pre- and postpandemic population-level changes in well-being among workers in remote-capable jobs versus jobs necessitating on-site presence (see the Perspective by Zang and O’Brien). After the pandemic, workers in remote-capable jobs spent more time working alone and avoided social activities with their friends, remaining more isolated both during and after work. This pattern was most pronounced among remote workers living alone: They spent entire days without human contact and their mental distress, use of mental healthcare, and antidepressants increased acutely. —Ekeoma Uzogara

Except for introverts, of course, who were in hog heaven.

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If you’ve ever tried chatting with a public figure, you probably know what I mean by “hitting the cache”. They produce slick soundbites that sound smart-ish, and could plausibly be connected to the question you asked, or what you said. But the responses aren’t bespoke. It’s like they have a lookup table, and compare the vague topic and sentiment of what you said to their roster of prepared responses, and return the best match.

This is not unique to public figures. I do it. I think almost everyone does it to some degree. And the degree tends to correlate with how often they get asked the question. (The same way a webserver serves cached versions of the most frequently-requested, slow-to-load pages.) Since public figures get asked the same questions a lot, it makes sense that they serve most traffic from the cache.

The cache can have good stuff in it, but it’s never as interesting as interacting directly with the origin. The cache is stale. The cache is optimized. The cache is safe.

How do we bust the cache?

Wrong question. Take a step back. Why is it so important to ‘bust the cache’? Why does What You Wnat trump What They Want?

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The race for America’s worst governor rages on.

“Attacks on immigrants” here refers to enforcing the bare minimum of our nation’s immigration laws, by the way.

And this is an additional $12 MILLION on top of a previous $8 MILLION allocated for paying the legal fees of illegal aliens.

The Telegraph (UK).

Scotland Yard has been captured by the “woke mind virus” and no longer treats citizens equally under the law, a veteran police officer has claimed.

Rick Prior, the former chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said the force had prioritised equalising outcomes among different ethnic groups over ensuring equality of opportunity for more than a decade.

He said this had led to a loss of skills in the force and had affected the policing of London’s streets.

He also claimed the force had rejected his suggestions that officers should be banned from wearing political symbols, such as rainbow lanyards representing the LGBT community, after he was invited to draw up new guidelines on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) last summer.

Albanians fight Trump resort with blow-up flamingos (The Telegraph)

This liberal woman hates that she likes Trump’s restored Reflecting Pool

The White House’s Latest Provocation Is ‘Grotesque and Terrifying and Juvenile’ (M. Gessen/New York Times)  Because it’s Trump. No need for a reason.

How Bari Weiss’s Free Press laundered MAGA talking points about refugees (Radley Balko/The Watch)  I give up—how does one ‘launder’ talking points? I suspect that Radley Balko has been hitting ChatGPT too hard.

White House Explodes Over Viral Video of Sleepy Trump, 79 (Olivia Ralph/The Daily Beast)  At his worst, he’s not as bad as Biden.

As Trump prepares to make his pitch to farmers, he’s haunted by his record (Steve Benen/MS NOW)  Haunted! The mind-readers at MSTHEN are hard a work crafting the Narrative.

First on CNN: DOJ sends prosecutor to observe LA ballot counting amid Trump’s baseless ‘cheating’ claims (CNN)  They have to put ‘baseless’ in the headline to make sure you kinow what the Narrative is.

Democrats ramp up plans to investigate Trump through corporate America (Nicholas Wu/Semafor)  The same ‘corporate America’ they keep trash-talking?

Trump auctions off rights to drill in Alaska wildlife refuge, but gets few bidders (Rachel Frazin/The Hill)  Nobody is going to risk their money on something that the Democrats will just cancel if they ever get a chance.

Trump Fumes as Republican Senator Delivers Todd Blanche an Ultimatum (Malcolm Ferguson/New Republic)  Fumes! The mind-r4eaders at the New Republci are hard a work crafting the Narrative.

Todd Blanche Reveals He’s Making It Harder for Dems to Prosecute Trump (Malcolm Ferguson/New Republic  As Merrick Garland made it harder for Republicans to prosecute Bidens.

Trump says he asked Pulte to gut intelligence agency (Aaron Pellish/Politico)  No, he didn’t. This is just proglodyte propaganda.

Leon Panetta Calls Iran War ‘Trump’s Vietnam’ While CNN’s Keiler Calls It A ‘Quagmire’  I guess the Democrats are still living fifty years in the past.

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Minnesotans are familiar with the perils of “snow blindness,” a temporary blindness caused by overexposure to ultraviolet rays from the reflection from snow and ice. It appears that Minnesota politicians and prosecutors have a type of mob blindness, where they cannot see crimes committed in front of them by the far left. That condition appears to be tragically evident in St. Paul, where City Attorney Irene Kao made an absurd denial of any criminal activity at the demonstration in the City Church on Jan. 18th. While claiming that there were no observable crimes, Kao’s decision just happened to be enormously popular with the mob-driven politics and polling in her state.

Time to leave.

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After 106 years of Chicago Bears football in Chicago, the franchise announced it will relocate to pursue a new stadium development about 25 miles away in Hammond, Indiana.

“Yesterday, the Chicago Bears Board of Directors met and voted to advance our stadium development project in Hammond, Indiana, with the exact site yet to be selected,” Chicago Bears Chairman George H. McCaskey and President & CEO Kevin Warren wrote in a statement.

The statement continued, “We believe a world-class stadium project in Hammond will transform the region, connecting Northwest Indiana to the South Side of Chicago through the Loop and across neighborhoods and suburbs stretching north of the city. It will bring Chicagoland together and deliver new opportunities to its residents and businesses.”

Time to leave.

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The Global Positioning System (GPS) relies on its primary L1 frequency to broadcast precise timing and orbital data, allowing receivers on Earth to calculate their exact location. Because the L1 C/A signal transmits at just fifty bits per second, every bit of this navigation data must earn its place. Yet, within this highly constrained signal, the standard sets aside Subframe 4, Page 17 – a 176-bit field broadcast every 12.5 minutes – for “special messages with the specific contents at the discretion of the Operating Command”. While the official specification suggests it carries readable text, the reality is entirely different. For nearly twenty years, this channel has acted as a global numbers station, broadcasting military ciphertext on a public signal to billions of receivers in plain sight.