DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

Her parents fled Laos in 1976. Her father lied on the immigration forms to “skip a step” so they could get into the U.S. faster. She then automatically got U.S. citizenship when her parents became citizens.

Even after the controversy, Kaohly was elected the mayor of St. Paul in November 2025, because of course.

Fast-forward to July 2026, and the police chief has filed a criminal complaint against Mayor Her, alleging that she sent inappropriate messages to city employees.

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

Newsbusters.

One hand washes the other.

Newsbusters.

Christiane Amanpour, the eponymous host of PBS’s Amanpour & Company, welcomed author and activist Bill McKibben to Tuesday’s show to partake in the latest doom-and-gloom prognostications on the environment. According to McKibben, climate change is mostly former President Ronald Reagan’s fault and any additional blame should be directed at President Trump for engaging in “economic-self sabotage.”

Towards the end of their discussion, Amanpour invited McKibben to “Tell me your story about President Carter back in the ’70s. There was the oil crisis there, and he did all sorts of things, including putting solar panels on the roof of the White House. What did he tell people back then? Tell the American people?”

McKibben mourned, “What he told people was that the sun was, in fact, the future. And in his last budget, he put aside another R&D money that the plan was for America to be producing 20 percent of its power from the sun by the year 2000. Had we done that, we would live in a very different world today, a much cooler one, because this renewable revolution would have been pushed forward several decades.”

Lamenting Reagan’s election, McKibben continued, “Instead, of course, Ronald Reagan was elected over Mr. Carter, and he took down those solar panels from the White House roof. More importantly, he took that money out of the budget and locked us into this cycle of endless drilling for more oil that’s come to define not only America’s economy, but America’s politics.”

Read it.

History was made with the flip of a switch at 12:30 a.m. on June 4, under partly cloudy skies and a waning three-quarter moon in Idaho’s Arco Desert, when a prototype reactor sustained a nuclear chain reaction, becoming the first new design to achieve “criticality,” or viability, in the United States since 1973.

In that midnight milestone’s wake, the future is following fast. Since Antares Nuclear’s Mark-0 design was validated in early June, three other novel reactor designs have met the U.S. Department of Energy’s criticality requirements and, according to Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Up to four more could do so by year’s end.

While technologies, fuels, and applications vary, these prototypes share common traits. All are far smaller than the conventional reactors with massive cement cooling towers, and all are designed to be mass-produced, portable, and scalable. Several can fit in the bed of a pickup truck.

Me want.

Read it.

The American Bar Association president, Michelle Behnke, gave a disastrous performance at a House Oversight Committee Task Force hearing last week.

She doubled down on DEI and couldn’t answer even straightforward questions.

In one emperor-has-no-clothes moment, she refused to answer what her implicit biases might be—even though the ABA proclaims that everyone has them.

In another, she said that she didn’t know if the U.S. has ever had a transgender Supreme Court justice.

And in yet another, she refused to repudiate President Joe Biden’s exclusion of black men—solely on their biological sex—from consideration to be a Supreme Court justice.

The list goes on.

You can’t make this shit up.

Read it.

On July 15th, Mario Roggero, a jeweller from Piedmont charged with fatally shooting two of the three robbers who had just raided his shop in 2021, received a final sentence of fourteen years and nine months in prison. This protracted legal battle has opened up a new political front in Italy and reignited a heated debate: to what extent does a citizen have the right to defend themselves when the state is no longer able to protect them?

With a new election cycle just a few months away, the case has become a powerful symbol for the Italian Right, which sees it as an illustration of a justice system more concerned with the rights of offenders than with those of victims. Conversely, the judiciary and the Left are defending the ruling as essential to upholding the rule of law, refusing to equate self-defence with a right to revenge.

The events date back to 28 April 2021. Three armed men entered Mario Roggero’s jewellery shop in Grinzane Cavour, Piedmont. The shopkeeper, his wife, and his daughter were threatened during the robbery. When the criminals fled, Roggero grabbed his legally owned gun, chased them down the street and fired several shots at their vehicle. Two robbers were killed; the third was seriously injured.

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Sweden’s left-wing parties are running Arabic-language advertisements aimed at immigrant voters ahead of this year’s elections, repeating a strategy used during the 2022 campaign.

The advertisements have appeared on Al Kompis, an Arabic-language website aimed at immigrants in Sweden who cannot speak Swedish. Political parties and public authorities have previously used the platform to reach the country’s Arabic-speaking population.

Among those advertising during the current campaign are the Social Democrats and the Centre Party.

An advertisement featuring Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson promises greater investment in healthcare and schools. It links to a dedicated campaign page claiming that the party’s economic policies would leave “ordinary people” with more money.

The party also promises support for workers, families and pensioners struggling with rising electricity, fuel, food and borrowing costs.

The Centre Party’s advertisements focus on fighting racism and discrimination. One features MEP Abir Al-Sahlani, who says she is “equally skilled at cooking Iraqi and Swedish dishes.”

On the party’s campaign page, Al-Sahlani says she wants Sweden to have “a balanced immigration policy that upholds human rights.”

Taking bets on which Nordic country turns full Muslim first.

Read it.

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

I hope Rand Paul can lead him into some post-pardon perjury.

ATQUE: Committee Could Hold Fauci in Contempt of Congress, Paul Warns

Read it.

Viral footage circulating online shows a British man methodically working his way along the streets of his own city with a wheeled bin and litter picker, clearing the rubbish left by others. He is not being paid and not making a political point. He is simply trying to prevent the area from descending into a tip.

Remarkably, as he works, foreign shopkeepers and residents repeatedly emerge from their premises to instruct him to clear the mess outside their own doors, standing by as he does so.

One older local, taking in the state of the streets, observes that if President Trump were to see them he would declare the place a “shithole.”

And he would be correct. Import Turd World people, wind up with Turd World problems (i.e. shithole).

Newsbusters.

Not really knews, but a useful reminder.

Newsbusters.

The Elitist Media Evening News are continuing to do their level best to ignore the explosive details of both the Fauci Files and the Biden Tapes. None of the evening newscasts on ABC, CBS, NBC or PBS devoted any coverage to these two crucial and grossly undercovered stories.

The consensus national story on tonight’s evening news appears to be…the squirrel that disrupted play at Detroit’s Comerica Park between the hometown Tigers and the Baltimore Orioles. Here is that report as aired on ABC World News Tonight on Tuesday, July 28th, 2026:

tReason magazine, a Voice of the Looney Libertarian Left.

When you add it all up, 150 of this year’s congressional races featured no meaningful competition, according to a new report from Unite America, a nonprofit advocating for election reforms.

“These 150 candidates, mostly incumbents, ran unopposed in the dominant party primary for districts that the Cook Political Report rates as uncompetitive in the general election,” the report explains. “In other words, we already know not only which party is all but guaranteed to win these seats in November, but which person will win.”

This is an underappreciated problem plaguing American democracy—and one that contributes to other, more visible problems, like gerontocracy and Congress’ general flaccidity in the face of executive overreach. In those 150 districts where there are no competitive elections this year, over 84 million Americans have been effectively disenfranchised. Those voters can’t make a different choice, no matter how badly they might want one.

They could move. Nobody has nailed their feet to the ground. People who “can’t make a different choice” in California and New York have been moving to Texas and Florida for quite a while now. People in ‘competitive’ districts who lose the election can “make a different choice” all they want to, but their views still aren’t represented by the winning party’s candidate. How does this improve their lives? This is not rocket science.

I am constantly scratching my head about this fetish certain people have for ‘competitive districts’ for Congress. On the part of ‘journalists’ I can understand it, because political sturm und drang pays their bills, but for people who in theory actually follow (and allegedly think about) politics don’t have that excuse. The cure for ’84 million Americans have been effectively dis[en]franchise’ is to increase the percentage of the minority so that when the election is over even more people are ‘dis[en]franchised‘? How does that make any sense?

THE PURPOSE OF CONGRESS IS REPRESENTATION. The more ‘uncompetitive’ a district is, the more accurately the resulting winner will represent the existing inhabitants of that district. A district that is 95% Democrat or 95% Republican will represent the viewpoint of the overwhelming majority of the people. If the district becomes ‘competitive’, meaning it drops to, say, 55% of one party and 45% of the other, THAT INCREASES THE PERCENTATE OF PEOPLE IN THE DISTRICT WHO, WHEN THEY LOSE THE ELECTION, ARE ‘DIS[en]FRANCHISED’ (in the sense that their ‘representative’ represents the viewpoint of the other side).

The best representation is when 100% of the people in a district favor one party; the only questions that arise in an election are internal differences within the broad range of what that party stands for. That’s democracy pure and simple.

Read it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) Homeland Security Investigations carried out a nationwide operation between June 22 and July 10 that dismantled “SIM farms” run by transnational criminal organizations.

EuroNews.

A digital tool lets users explore the Roman Empire’s road network and, using historical data, estimate how long journeys between cities took 2,000 years ago.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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A French warship fired 17 live rounds near a boat carrying Britain’s shadow home secretary as he observed French authorities escorting migrants towards the English coast.

Chris Philp, the Conservative Party’s spokesman on immigration and policing, accused the French military of attempting to intimidate him while he monitored illegal Channel crossings on Tuesday.

Philp was being interviewed aboard a fishing boat around two miles off the French coast when the patrol ship Flamant approached within approximately 300 metres and began firing a handgun into the water.

Read it.

The Telegraph (UK).

The US has said it successfully intercepted a “surprise attack” by Iran on American forces in the Middle East.

At this point, what constitutes a ‘surprise’?

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces “launched multiple ballistic missiles in an attempted surprise attack on US forces”, US Central Command said on Tuesday evening.

Perhaps the ‘surprise’ attack interrupted the usual attack.

The Telegraph (UK).

A new tax on income to fund social care is among the plans drawn up by officials for Andy Burnham to consider in his first weeks in office.

Civil servants have developed proposals that would require workers to make mandatory contributions to a new privately managed fund to pay for their care in later life.

The plans, drawn up by officials in the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), could fund a new care system costing £18bn a year.

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My, what a surprise.

It’s all Trump’s fault, of course.

Read it.

Moderate Republicans in the Senate Committee on Health, Education and Pensions have introduced two bills that would prohibit outsourcing certain education programs from the U.S. Department of Education to other federal agencies, blocking a complete shutdown of the federal agency.

Under bill S. 5046, sponsored by Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the Education Department could not transfer offices that oversee special education, postsecondary education, elementary and secondary education, and Native American education programs.

“Moderate GOP Senators” = RINO minions of the Deep State. The fact that it was co-sponsored by former Democrat VP-nominee Tim Kaine tells you all you need to know.

Thank God Mitt Romney is no longer in office, and John McCain is dead.

ATQUE: Keep Dismantling the Department of Education

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Locals lined up outside a Toronto bagel shop on Monday in a show of support after attacks on two outposts of the Jewish-owned chain, adding to a string of incidents facing Jewish businesses in the city.

Two locations of Kiva’s Bagel Bar, a fixture for Toronto Jews since it opened in 1979, were targeted late Saturday and early Sunday. Gunfire hit the windows of one storefront just an hour after another storefront was vandalized and its front glass shattered, according to the Toronto Police Service.

Police said their Hate Crime Unit was investigating, and they believed the same SUV may have been involved at both scenes. The bakeries were closed at the time and no injuries were reported.

Undoubtedly white supremacists.

Babylon Bee.

I had to check to make sure it wasn’t The News.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

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So, not only did Biden spend four years opening the floodgates to allow millions of illegal aliens into the country, but in his final days in office, his administration hatched a plan to hamstring Trump by offering protected status to as many foreigners as possible.

He just ran out of time to do it all.

As Bombs Fall in Iran, Trump Bombs in Washington (John F. Harris/Politico)

Trump Gutted the Kennedy Center. A Tour Guide Wants You to See It Anyway. (Elizabeth Williamson/New York Times)  Gutted! Kennedy Center guts strewn all over D.C.! Carnage unimaginable!

The predictable disgrace of the White House Correspondents Dinner (Margaret Sullivan/American Crisis)

The Saudi nuclear farce and governance by whim and meme (Noah Berlatsky/Public Notice)  Funny, I was under the impression that ‘governance by whim and meme’ was a Democrat habit.

A Tale of Two Speeches — The press’s responsible handling of Trump’s incoherent speech … (Jem Bartholomew/Columbia Journalism …)

Republicans worry about rising gas prices — but won’t blame Trump (Kevin Frey/MS NOW)  No, we blame Biden.

Why Trump’s team is letting some Republicans distance themselves from him (Vaughn Hillyard/MS NOW)  As if they had a choice. Democrats are totalitarians and so think the Republicans must be totalitarians too.

In Memphis, an ‘anti-crime’ task force quietly turned into an ICE crackdown (Kat Lonsdorf/NPR)  Note the assumption that rounding up and deporting illegal immigrants is somehow different from ‘anti-crime’.

Capitol agenda: Thune tries to focus as Trump fumes (Politico)

Appeals Court Blocks Trump Mail-In Voting Order In 23 Democrat-Led States, Setting Up SCOTUS Fight

Congress Budgeted Billions for Big Transit Projects. Trump Isn’t Spending It. (New York Times)  The swine! How dare he not spend all of this Democrat money?

What’s the Worst Thing Trump Can Do in the Midterms? (Jeffrey Toobin/New York Times)  Fail to kill himself?

Fauci expressed disillusionment with ‘rambling, crazy’ Trump in journal (Martin Pengelly/The Guardian)

The Ellisons Discover the Hard Way That Trump Is the Anti-Midas (Mark Gongloff/Bloomberg)

Trump aid cuts put HIV response at risk, reports show (Nathaniel Weixel/The Hill)  Because, as we all know, fixing a disease that is a problem only because homosexuals (3% of the population0 can’t be bothered take precautions is TOTALLY the responsibility of the Federal government—and the Federal taxpayer.

Trump tries to sell an economy voters aren’t buying (Josephine Walker/Axios).

July 26, 2026 — From the time he took office in January 2025, Trump and his cronies … (Heather Cox Richardson/Letters …)  Because, as we all know, only Trump has ‘cronies’.

After Trump meltdown, Cracker Barrel bends the knee and replaces CEO (Quispe López/Advocate)

Newsbusters.

New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker tweeted on X on Saturday that it is time for the White House Correspondents’ Association to “rethink” its annual dinner with the president, after the event with President Donald Trump did not “advance” the cause of reporting “without fear or favor.” As if that motto isn’t ridiculous at this point?

“Have been a member of the WHCA almost continuously since the 1990s. Our mission is to defend the First Amendment rights of White House correspondents to report on the president without fear or favor. Unfortunately last night did advance that cause,” Baker posted. “Time to rethink the dinner.”

He elaborated on that argument on MS NOW with Alex Witt over the weekend, noting the president is suing journalists and issuing subpoenas for their work. That’s funny, because his hero President Obama ordered more leak investigations into reporters than all previous presidents combined. But they were celebrating him at White House reporter dinners just the same. Friends and political allies make for warm dinners.

It gave The New Hitler a platform to mock the people who hate him. We can’t have that.

Read it.

Time,” said Anthony Saldivar, his eyeglasses slipping down his broad nose, “is always the biggest enemy.” Sporting a black tie and thick suspenders, his shirtsleeves cuffed at the elbows, Saldivar was one of eight contestants stationed across four folding tables inside a cavernous glass-and-steel convention center in Chicago, all of whom were attending to the same ticking-clock task. They had three hours, split over two afternoons, to rehabilitate a decomposing human head. The heads, of course, weren’t real. They were props furnished by funerary-cosmetics supplier Post Mortem Restorative Cosmetics, a company founded by the Hollywood special-effects technician Dean Jones, who parlayed techniques honed on the sets of Blue Velvet and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine into a career in the mortuary sciences.

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It hardly seems possible nowadays, but if you give a search engine a phrase, it may well search for it. I sense this is facilitated if the phrase you provide is in a foreign language. The machinery, otherwise bent on giving you what it thinks you want rather than what you just said you want, is baffled and just obeys rather than mess with your mind. Or maybe, since what I just said I want is to get married in a mosque, it rightly decided this request was unsubstitutable. None of this Did-you-mean-in-a-bus-station tentativeness. The first hit I got was for what I asked.

I should say that I personally don’t want this, and that I was asking in Turkish, for reasons I will describe below the fold. That hit was on a website calling itself, in Turkish, Girls Are Asking. Oh, I’m also not a girl, so the search engine really was indulging me. I am guessing that in Turkey, girls are likewise indulged.

The reason I was looking up this stuff at all was, on Steve Sailer’s Substack was a revisitation of a very good idea he’d had a few years ago. Wondering if there was any way to determine what sort of architecture people really like, he came up with what I’d call an objective measure of subjectivity: note where young ladies want to get married. His point was that brides strongly and publicly prefer venues that look good. California, where Steve lives, has every example there is of building fashions, and the ones that were in force before about 1945 are definitely favored. The Substack article contains long quotes from the Washington Post about how a lot of gals are uninterested in church weddings and opting for civil ceremonies, but not the ultra-simple, in-the-JP’s-office-right-now ones. Many cities are offering more elaborate packages, ones where the couple invites a modest number of friends and family to witness the knot-tying, inside City Hall or some similarly venerable municipal or county edifice. Sounds pretty nice!

Quillette.

A curious paradox sits at the heart of many advanced economies. Employers complain constantly about labour shortages. Governments respond by importing record numbers of migrants to fill vacancies. Yet at the same time, a growing number of men have quietly withdrawn from work altogether.

These men are not showing up in unemployment queues or appearing in dramatic economic statistics. In many cases, they are not even looking for jobs. Instead, they exist in a liminal space between participation and withdrawal, cycling through gig work, periods of welfare dependence, disability payments, online entertainment and increasingly isolated lives.

The phenomenon is most pronounced in the United States, where male labour-force participation has been declining for decades, particularly among men without university degrees.

Feminist complaints about ‘patriarchy’ appear to be illusionary.

Read it.

Nigel Farage has reported the leader of Britain’s Green Party to the police after he shared an image appearing to threaten the Reform UK leader with execution.

Zack Polanski shared a photograph of a man wearing a T-shirt featuring a guillotine alongside the words “We’re only making plans for Nigel”—a reference to the 1979 song by the British band XTC.

The Telegraph reports that the image appeared in a collection of photographs from a Green Party rally in Bristol and was shared with Polanski’s 700,000 Instagram followers. It was originally uploaded by another account, which invited the Green leader to become a co-author of the post.

The Antiplanner.

I thought that spending $4.7 billion on a passenger train from Fort Collins to Pueblo was a crazy idea. Yet that sounds positively cheap compared to a new proposal for a train from Denver’s airport to Eagle, Vail and other Colorado ski areas, which is estimated to cost $33 billion. As usual, this humongous amount of money is justified based on the claim that it will relieve traffic congestion.

The Denver West Express was first unveiled in an article in the Colorado Gazette by Bob Loevy. Loevy is a retired professor at Colorado College, so you know he has the expertise to offer such a proposal.

Of course, he was a professor of political science, not engineering, transportation, or economics. But that’s okay because, he claims, the project “is supported by a group of professionals with engineering, architectural and business training.” The only one Loevy names is Jay Branch, who is presumably the Jay Branch who has a masters degree in management and runs a management consulting firm — still a long way from engineering or economics.

DWE would not be a high-speed rail line. The trains would go as fast as 90 miles per hour “in places,” says Loevy, but no train is going to climb the Rockies at 90 mph. The proposal calls for a two long tunnels in the mountains, one 5.0 miles and the other 6.5, but otherwise the route will go around lots of curves that will slow down trains even if they are on the level. Moreover, the route from DIA to Eagle would be 17 miles (more than 10 percent) longer than I-70, making it even harder for the train to compete with driving.

Read it.

In an effort to gain the financial support of a public sector union before an election, Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education in 1979. Its first year in operation was 1980, when it had a budget of $14 billion (a little over $50 billion in today’s dollars). That $14 billion in taxpayer dollars was enough to get him significant campaign contributions from teachers’ unions. So it was a successful policy, politically. Although he still lost the election. Oh well. Still, $14 billion is a lot of money. Today the Dept of Education’s budget is around $260 billion. That is absolutely remarkable growth. The Dept of Education is doing better than nearly any company in the private sector.

The one major accomplishment of Joe Biden was to bump Jimmy Carter into being only the second worst President ever.

If you look at the list of Fortune 500 companies from 1979, 40% of them no longer exist. Only around 14% of those companies are still on the Fortune 500 list today. The Dept of Education has grown exponentially over this time, but only 3% of 1979’s Fortune 500 companies have moved up that list since that year.

Which means one of two things:
1) Perhaps our government is much, MUCH better at managing things than private companies.
2) Perhaps we have a very serious problem.

Tough call. What do you think? Hard to say.

But I think we may have a very serious problem…

I’m told that Ronald Reagan used to say that the closest we’ll ever come to eternal life on this earth is a government program.

Read it.

The filibuster is unconstitutional.

Our Founding Fathers spoke against requiring a supermajority threshold to pass regular measures in Congress, yet the erroneous practice continues today via the filibuster. Current Senate practice reaches beyond our Founders’ original plan that a supermajority vote was only to be used for the five instances listed in the Constitution and two instances listed within the Amendments, according to CRS. Those who advocate for the filibuster are invoking the symbolism of protecting “history” when all they are actually protecting is an unconstitutional tradition.

The Constitution specifies a very limited number of times when a supermajority vote is necessary: amending the Constitution, overriding vetoes, convicting impeached officials, ratifying treaties, and expelling Members of Congress. The 14th and 25th Amendments also allow for a supermajority vote to remove individuals deemed unfit to serve from office.

The filibuster is nowhere listed in the Constitution, and the supermajority vote to overcome it was an accidental creation. That’s right, the biggest impediment to delivering on the mandate handed to the House, Senate, and White House by the American people is an accident that we have turned into tradition.

The New Neo.

However – and it’s a big “however” – the diaries certainly reveal other extremely disturbing things about Fauci. But maybe the word “reveal” isn’t quite right, either, because they are mostly things we already knew. So perhaps the correct word would be “underline.”

Some of us suspected all along what a dirtbag he was. It’s nice to see it confirmed out of his own pen.

We already knew, long ago, that most of our “betters” were defying the restrictive rules they were setting down for us peons. We already knew that they were allowing the 2020 demonstrations in the streets when all other gatherings were forbidden. We already knew they made up most of the rules with almost no scientific backing, and we already knew they strongly suspected a lab leak was the cause of the pandemic long before they admitted it.

That doesn’t mean it’s not still infuriating and destructive. But it’s no surprise at all.

Indeed it is not.

Read it.

Two knives suddenly became active in Paris this morning. They were held in the hands of a culture-enriching man, and managed to wound three women before the hands that held them were subdued. The attacker — who has yet to be named — told police that Allah had instructed him to act out with the knives, but authorities have disregarded that statement because they are convinced that he is “psychologically unbalanced”.

There are none so blind as they who will not see.

Read it.

There is a rot at the heart of our political system. It casts its shadow over Parliament, through the chamber, at the dispatch box and along the (largely empty) green Commons benches. It pervades our political culture, often recognised yet rarely analysed. And no, it’s not the product of an establishment stitch up, thuggish populism or a hidden gestapo, policing the behaviour of our political classes. It is the decline, in nature and in practice, of political oratory.

As Tom Tugendhat so brilliantly pointed out, in one of the few parliamentary speeches worth listening to these days, members have put less attention, care or thought into their speeches; or even, it seems, into attending parliament unless they’re whipped into it. The very phrase, I rise to speak, innocuous though it may seem, barely troubled the record a decade ago and yet now recurs constantly; emblematic of the Americanisms that have beaten their way into our political discourse. These, and the increasing use of ChatGPT and other assorted AI, have only served to cast a light on a decay that had been festering for years.

Of course, it would be idle to assume Parliament could return to the days of Chatham, where the thunder of one man could collapse governments and the fate of a nation hung on the words of a speech in the Commons. But for good oratory we need only go so far back as the 1960s, to the era of Macleod’s ‘Brotherhood of man’ or even Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’. In place of eloquence, we have been left with vague aphorisms and meandering ‘mission statements’. Instead of Prime Ministers who could proudly declaim “Never had so much been owed by so many to so few” or had the eloquence to expound of “the winds of change is blowing through this continent”; we are left with yet another prime minister who, lectern and notes discarded, could reach no higher than a promise ‘to make politics work, to make it work better’.

Ars Technica.

A couple of decades after the discovery of systems that could selectively target DNA, we’re starting to see the first therapies based on gene editing. One challenge these developments have faced is safety. While we can make them pretty specific to the gene we want edited, the human genome is very large, and even rare DNA sequences can appear a couple of times by chance.

As a result, all the original gene-editing systems had known rates of what are called off-target effects, in which they simply edit the wrong sequence. This may be a low-probability event, but edit enough cells—and therapies generally have to edit many—and errors become inevitable.

A lot of effort has gone into finding ways to minimize or eliminate off-target edits. In a recent issue of Nature, researchers described modifying the AI protein-folding software AlphaFold to help identify key areas of gene-editing proteins responsible for off-target effects. Those areas were then modified to reduce the problems.

The Guardian, the Mouth of Sauron in Britain.

One day, as a 16-year-old in the late 2000s, I received an AOL instant message from my friend Kenyon. He wanted to know whether I had heard of Esperanto, the universal language. Kenyon was several years older than me, and something of a mentor. Like me, he was a musician – he engineered my teenage band’s first record – but unlike me, he had a head full of trivia that made him the confidently nerdy star of any Saturday-night gathering of outcasts. His pitch: Esperanto was invented in the late 19th century by a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist named LL Zamenhof, who aimed to create a language so irresistibly easy to learn that it would be adopted as a shared second tongue by people the world over. From a position of mutual understanding, world peace would surely follow. Yes, the language had been around for well over 100 years and, yes, universal fellowship had yet to be achieved. But the internet had inaugurated a new era of global connectivity, and users could learn through an abundance of online classes. Perhaps we were on the verge of an Esperanto renaissance. Kenyon had been practising for a few years and was practically flua.

New York Post.

Evan Barker believed she was a lifelong Democrat. Born into a Kansas City union family, she campaigned for Barack Obama while still in high school and was a community organizer for Hillary Clinton in 2015. Working for the consultancy Left Rising, she writes, “I built my name as a ruthless fundraiser … I was a live player who helped progressive insurgents” — including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush and Jasmine Crockett — “infiltrate from within.” But her new book, “Nothing Left” (Threshold Editions), out today, gives a look at how Barker lost faith in her party — and, in 2024, voted for Donald Trump. In this exclusive excerpt, she reveals one of the moments that showed her how Democrats shamelessly left heartland voters in the dust.

New York Post.

Hampered by the fact that the Mayor had all of the security cameras turned off to thwart ICE. What goes areound comes around.

A 15-year-old was arrested in connection to Sunday night’s senseless shooting at a popular Seattle food festival that left three dead and injured four, including a toddler, officials said.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson shared the update on the investigation on Monday while cops said another suspect died and the whereabouts of a third is still “unknown.”

“We believe this teenager opened fire in the crowd, but details are still under investigation,” Wilson said at a press conference.

The mayor said the unnamed teen is being investigated for firearms violations and first degree assault.

The lack of detail suggests that this was a Child of Color.

The Telegraph (UK).

Andy Burnham will argue that Sir Tony Blair’s drive to get half of school leavers to attend university has “let down” a generation of young people.

Unveiling his plan to tackle youth unemployment on Tuesday, the Prime Minister will say that under his leadership Britain will “value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap”.

Mr Burnham’s intervention, a rejection of three decades of policy, comes amid a surge in spending on youth sickness benefits and concerns that students are being saddled with thousands of pounds of debt after studying poor-quality courses.

The Telegraph (UK).

Zack Polanski has been referred to the Metropolitan Police by Nigel Farage for sharing a post that appeared to threaten the Reform leader.

The Green Party leader posted an image of a man wearing a T-shirt with a guillotine graphic alongside the caption: “We’re only making plans for Nigel.”

Mr Polanski shared the photograph with his 700,000 Instagram followers as part of a series of images from a Green Party rally in Bristol on July 26.

The Telegraph (UK).

Labour MPs have threatened to rebel if Andy Burnham makes “punitive” cuts to welfare.

The Prime Minister is planning to strip young people of their benefits unless they agree to do training or voluntary work under proposals to reduce the £333bn welfare bill.

However, backbenchers on the party’s Left have warned Mr Burnham against repeating the “failed politics of welfare cuts” and signalled that they would oppose such a move.

And that’s why the UK is doomed to die.

How Trump could undermine the midterms (George Chidi/The Guardian)  Where ‘undermine’ refers to Democrat efforts to steal the mid-terms.

Trump’s foreign policy enters its decadent, desperate end stage (Andrew O’Hehir/Salon)

Trump revives old tropes as he pushes warnings of ‘communist menace’ (Robert Tait/The Guardian)  Old but still true.

I’ve visited the Smithsonian hundreds of times. Warnings aren’t needed. (Philip Kennicott/Washington Post)  Because, as we all know, what proglodytes believe is absolutely the truth.

Why Trump Has ‘No F*cking Way Out’ of His Failed Iran War (Asawin Suebsaeng/Zeteo)

INEVITABLE: Brian Stelter Whines Over Trump’s Nerd Prom Speech

Trump Triggers Massive Leftist Hypocrisy On ‘Transgenderism’

The media’s anti-Trump bias was on full display at redo of White House Correspondents’ Dinner (Michael Goodwin/New York Post)

Why even some Trump supporters are souring on his handling of the economy (Washington Post)

Elizabeth Warren Claims Crypto Clarity Act Would Help Trump… And ‘Criminals & Cartels’

Trump’s Iran Fallacy

Worse on Purpose.

A listing of brands and whether to use or avoid them—and why.

I knew about the enshitification of Pyrex, but CorningWare surprised (and disappointed) me.

Approval of Le Creuset was a welcome surprise. And I’m happy about my Cutco knives, which I bought a decade ago and have never had to sharpen. Recently upgraded to a Made In griddle, and happy to see them among the elect.

You can subscribe to their alerts and updates for free. Highly recommended.

Read it.

The Democratic Socialists of America are not hiding their plan to reshape America. On Sunday, their co-chair joined Fox News and openly confirmed that their long-term goals ahead of the midterm elections include abolishing parts of the U.S. government.

Megan Romer appeared on Shannon Bream’s “Fox News Sunday,” saying the organization’s goals include abolishing the presidency, U.S. Senate, and Supreme Court, as well as prisons, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the nation’s borders. The Democratic Socialists of America also envision defunding the Pentagon and granting amnesty for illegal aliens.