DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The American Spectator is having a bit of fun with another mournful essay by Sally Quinn about the assault on Washington establishment sensibilities by the MAGA hordes in power in DC. She writes:

The worst part about living in Donald Trump’s Washington has been seeing just how much fun he and all the MAGA vandals he brought to power have been having sacking and pillaging the place. This while the rest of us longtime Washingtonians who abided by norms, shared values and even bipartisanship were filled first with shock, then a feeling of helplessness, and hopelessness. It could border on passivity. What could be done?

It is actually a tonal improvement on her abject terror expressed the year before.,

Sally Quinn is a dinosaur. The rise of badly educated brats into positions of power, and especially the poisonous power of social media unmediated by adult editors have created a nasty edge to the Democratic party and solidified the GOP as the resistance to federal expansion (at least in appearance). After Gingrich ousted the genuinely nice guy Bob Michel and after the reign the ugly hardball of George Mitchell and the far worse Harry Reed as both parties shed moderates has meant a very different style.

The delusion that longtime Washingtonians have been trying to sustain a (fictitious) unconditional polite bipartisanship is a hoot.

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The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as early as January 2020 did not believe that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese wet market. He later publicly insisted that a wet market was the likely origin of the virus while dismissing a theory that the virus had a man-made origin.

That was among the many revelations uncovered by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who on Saturday released portions of Fauci’s diary from the pandemic. The diary posts occurred between December 2019 and December 2022.

My, what a surprise.

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Rotterdam has introduced an unprecedented nighttime ban preventing people from entering large parts of the De Esch district unless they live, work, or have another valid reason to be there.

The measure was introduced after residents endured nearly three years of street racing, drug use, intimidation, prostitution, and persistent noise from migrant youth gangs that made normal life impossible.

The measure bars anyone from entering the affected area between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. unless they have a specific reason to be there. Residents, their visitors, people working in the district, and those attending local businesses or events are exempt.

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Homes belonging to supporters of a planned asylum centre have been vandalised in the Dutch villages of Engelen and Bokhoven, marking the latest escalation in a dispute that has already involved demonstrations, a motorway blockade and an explosion.

Police said homes, fences and other properties had been spray-painted with slogans including “AMV nee” and “POA,” as well as crude insults. AMV is the Dutch abbreviation for unaccompanied minor foreign nationals, while POA refers to a reception facility used during the asylum process.

Several complaints have been filed, and officers are working to determine how many properties were damaged. Police are conducting house-to-house inquiries, seeking CCTV footage and increasing patrols in Engelen and Bokhoven.

The vandalism is believed to be connected to plans announced by the municipality of Den Bosch in early April to accommodate 50 unaccompanied asylum seekers aged between 15 and 18.

Quillette.

The assassinations of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and insurance executive Brian Thompson, the murder of a Jewish couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum, the latest (as of this writing) attempt on the life of Donald Trump—these are some recent examples of serious violence in the name of left-wing causes. Others include the spate of bombing and shooting attacks against ICE facilities, and, going further back, the deadly and destructive riots of 2020.

Noah Rothman’s Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America aims to “confront its readers” with “the quickening tempo of left-led attacks and their political motives,” as well as with the ways in which such violence is often forgotten or justified.

Rothman opens the book with recent examples like the Kirk assassination, then goes back in time to consider waves of leftist violence since the early 20th century. It thus proceeds from the anarchists of the 1910s to the Marxian terrorists of the 1970s, on up through violent offshoots of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and pro-Palestinian movements.

Read it.

And guess who will pay for it!

I wonder whether there will be long lines for bread, as is traditoinal for socialist government-owned grocery stores.

LifeHacker.

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

Read it.

These gangs of Muslims and other foreigners are camping with their Ubers and Lyfts outside the airport and monopolizing all of the business for themselves.

They’ve apparently found a way to turn Uber into an ethnic cartel.

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Yes, Britain has found its newest champion of “women’s empowerment”: A devout Muslim woman who showed up to collect her award at the Palace of Westminster fully covered in a niqab.

Khadija Patel, founder of the KRIMMZ Girls Youth Club, was one of 28 recipients of the prestigious British Citizen Award for her tireless work getting hundreds of young girls — many from Muslim backgrounds — into sports like cricket, soccer, cycling, netball, and more. She builds confidence, promotes teamwork, breaks down “cultural barriers,” and all that good stuff.

Truly commendable community service!

She can stab people and rob stores and never be found. Pretty empowering.

Read it.

Allah likes it when you stab people.

ATQUE: “Allah Sent Me To Kill Women”—Triple Stabbing in Paris

ATQIE: ‘It Is Allah Who Commanded Me’: Knife-Wielding Man Attacks Three Women in Paris

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21-year-old Abdul Ballout was named as the suspect who drove a white van through a crowd at an LGBT festival in Berlin, then stabbed more people as he fled the scene.

Ballout is the son of Shia-Muslim migrants from Lebanon. He was born in Berlin.

In 2024, Ballout left Germany to go fight with ISIS. He ended up back in Lebanon.

Instead of classifying him as a terrorist, denaturalizing him (canceling his German passport), and reporting him to the Lebanese authorities, German officials brought Ballout back to Germany for trial.

And the slow suicide of Europe proceeds apace.

ATQUE: Liberal women express sympathy for Muslim who plowed car into LGBT festival, blame white Christian men instead

Babylon Bee.

Across the globe this past weekend, dozens of people had the great fortune to hear someone shouting “God is the greatest!” in Arabic, a sure sign that something really good was happening.

People in Berlin, New York City, and Paris were treated in recent days to the happy Arabic proclamation of God’s greatness, leaving passersby looking around for what wonderful thing was transpiring.

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The International Criminal Court (ICC) has voted to dismiss its chief prosecutor for alleged sexual misconduct.

British lawyer Karim Khan, elected in 2021, was facing serious allegations of sexual misconduct. Members—the 125-state Special Session of the Assembly of States Parties—cast 82 votes in favour of removing him, based on findings in June that he had committed a “serious breach of duty and serious misconduct,” prompting his suspension.

Not the Bee.

Democrats: Party of the Noseless.

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Is “suicidal empathy” the real cause of the western world’s immigration crisis? Or, is the political left completely devoid of empathy? Is the multicultural agenda so important to them that they’re willing to sacrifice their own people to protect it?

The problem of “intersectionality” and engineered mass immigration is that progressive ideals are not shared or respected by most cultures. Leftists envision a sweeping coalition of socialist and minority groups joining forces to destroy the “evil colonial west”, but they seem to be ignoring the fact that foreign elements entering Europe and the US hate liberals as much as they hate conservatives.

This might not be stupidity – it might be a calculated risk on the part of woke leaders who are happy to throw a few of their “comrades” to the third world wolves in the service of the “greater good.” A common tactic of Antifa and related organizations in the face of a terror attack or criminal event that makes them look bad is to counter by diverting the public discourse. The pattern is undeniable and undoubtedly well planned.

Read it.

A newly revealed internal memo from the final days of the Biden administration exposes a calculated scheme to grant de facto amnesty to more than 3 million foreign nationals through Temporary Protected Status expansions, explicitly designed to block President Trump from carrying out the mass deportations the American people voted for.

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A Baltimore-area contractor operating under the names “Squatter King Removal” and/or “Eviction King” has emerged as one of the premier, go-to property recovery services. This reflects a growing enforcement gap in Maryland, a one-party-ruled state controlled by the Democratic Party.

 

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And there you have it: From the horse’s ass’s mouth.

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The WNBA only has two real stars with any meaningful popular following – Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham. Both of them built reputations as underdogs in a sport traditionally dominated by minority players espousing far-left politics. Both of them have been mistreated in the past by a league that tends to play nursemaid to those same players.

The WNBA has long been a cultural joke, not just because its reputation for low standards of athleticism, but because they are constantly whining about “equal pay”, “social justice” and LGBT issues. The league spends so much energy on activism that they’ve forgotten about the game and the fans. No one likes a bunch of crybabies making demands.

The national interest in Caitlin Clark transcends politics; people like her because she takes the game seriously and plays at a level far above most of her peers. Her mere presence on the court now often brings in double or even triple the normal WNBA viewership.

On the other hand, Sophie Cunningham has gained a reputation as an enforcer. While Caitlin Clark is being persistently battered with flagrant fouls disguised as “accidents”, Cunningham has decided to dish out some fouls in return. The Martial Arts trained player has decided to “sweep the leg” on the league and she’s no longer letting the abuse slide.

ATQUE: USA TODAY Sports Activists Faceplant with Fake News on Caitlin Clark

Newsbusters.

Sunday’s edition of MS NOW’s The Weekend staged a kvetchathon over President Trump ordering the installation of signs outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History warning visitors that the museum does not accurately reflect American history.

The panel repeatedly asked: Who gets to tell America’s history?

They never answered that question, other than to make clear they don’t want Trump doing it.

Read it.

On the heels of liberal artist Bruce Springsteen’s TDS-laden political rants during his “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour earlier this year, two Rock and Roll Hall of Fame legends have spoken out against pushing political propaganda during shows. Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger said fans should be entertained, not lectured, while Journey’s iconic pianist/keyboardist and songwriter Jonathan Cain was more blunt, insisting “The Boss” needs to “shut up” and sing.

In a New York Times podcast interview, Jagger was asked what his audience means to him. The question was disingenuous as the interviewer qualified it with an inaccurate description, claiming Springsteen “engages in in a meaningful back-and-forth with his audience.”

We all know there’s no “back-and-forth” with the Born to Run singer when he’s ranting about politics. It’s strictly a one-sided, self-righteous lecture. Still, Jagger answered politely:

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Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, a Democrat, was indicted by an Oahu grand jury on Friday on charges of criminal conspiracy to commit bribery, bribery, and falsifying candidate committee reports. The charges stem from an alleged 2022 scheme, dating to her time as a powerful state lawmaker, to steer state money toward COVID-19 testing contracts during the pandemic. Hawaii News Now reported that legal experts are calling it the biggest bribery scandal in state history.

Luke was one of five people named in the 12-count indictment. The others: Ryan Yamane, a former state representative and ex-director of the Department of Human Services; Tobi Solidum, a businessman and lobbyist; Ford Fuchigami, a Transportation Department official; and Leo Asuncion, a former chair of the state Public Utilities Commission. Luke turned herself in Friday afternoon; her bail was set at $80,000.

Gov. Josh Green did not wait for the case to develop. “The Lieutenant Governor needs to consider formally resigning to address this matter and so that the state of Hawai?i can move forward,” Green said in a statement Friday.

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Genociding commuinism is a genocide I can get behind with a clear conscience.

(What’s next in the proglodyte term-twisting contest? Culinary genocide? Arboreal genocide? Hello Kitty genocide?)

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Many people begin to notice the arrival of spring with the large, beautiful blooms of the magnolia flower. Magnolia trees can be found in many parts of the world, and their beautiful forms have symbolic, medicinal, and visual meaning across cultures—and have for centuries. If you’re ever near a magnolia tree, though, look closely: you’ll notice that beetles, instead of bees, will be moving amongst the flowers.

So, why beetles over bees? The answer is simpler than you might think. Magnolias are so ancient that they were around long before bees came into existence. They’ve been around for over 100 million years, in fact, and beetles have existed for even longer , approximately 300 million years.

Named after the French botanist Pierre Magnol, magnolias belong to one of the oldest lineages of flowers on Earth. (Dinosaurs still walked the Earth at this time, to put it into perspective!) Given this ancient setting, the pollinators we’re most familiar with, butterflies and bees, had not yet evolved. Beetles were the primary insect pollinators for the time, and so they became the de facto agents for the magnolia’s survival.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Watch it.

Objectivism is Red Pill? Who knew?

Read it.

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

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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I guess nobody reads the Fifth Amendment any more, much less the Fourth.

A federal case in Atlanta is raising questions about a privacy-focused mobile operating system, with prosecutors arguing that its features were used to erase evidence. The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute Atlanta resident Sam Tunick under a federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized.

The case centers on Tunick’s use of GrapheneOS, an open-source operating system that works on Google Pixel phones and lets users enter a passcode to wipe a device clean.

Experts said the legal approach is unusual and may be the first time the law has been aimed at an operating system. “It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,” said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a similar case.

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Tunick was taken to a secondary screening room, where multiple agents questioned him. A motion filed by his defense argues the interrogation focused on child sexual abuse material as a pretext for investigating his connections to the protest movement. The motion also states that Tunick asked four times to speak with a lawyer and was denied each time. According to the same filing, agents did not present a warrant or read him his rights.