The Foundry.

Americans are obligated to lenders and creditors for overspending, the government has made a habit of spending more than it takes in.

You could say that Congress was doing “girl math” long before it was cool.

Popularized on social media, “girl math” refers to an unwritten playbook women sometimes use to justify purchases. A jacket anticipated to cost $150 is on sale for $75, so now you can spend the other $75 on a pair of shoes because you save 50% of the jacket. That’s girl math. Or you forgot you had $20 in your Venmo account; so, paying your friend back for dinner was actually “free.” That, too, is “girl math.”

While “girl math” is usually a funny joke between friends, it can go too far to justify irresponsible spending, and no one is better at justifying lavish and wasteful spending than the federal government.

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Well, she could always go back to Arkansas.

Read it–if you dare.

A few years back, for a laugh, I read every single Dickens novel. All 15 of them. One after another. And then I read his five Christmas Books, followed by the collection of his early short fiction and non-fiction known as Sketches by Boz. I read well over 4 million words of Dickens which, to put it into absurd solipsistic context, is like reading this article 1,700 times, in quantity if not quality. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

Because I’m me, I didn’t just read these books. I also made notes about locations. Specifically, I jotted down every single time a London location was mentioned, across all 21 books. If anyone wants to see it, I have a 714-row spreadsheet listing out every named place, and the books in which each one appears.

Spreadsheets are crap for editorial purposes, though, so a map HAD to be made. I started off plotting all the points on a Google Map. This worked to some extent, but was a bit glitchy, and not particularly easy on the eye. So, that’s where this article comes in. I’ve started from scratch with the data and redrawn Dickens’s geo-literary output — his geobibliome, as I’m pompously calling it — as a proper map.

How does a ‘proper map’ differ from a ‘just plain map’? Got me

UnHerd.

Human beings are conflicted animals. We are capable of great devotion to the people and things we cherish, and will strive tirelessly on their behalf. Yet we long to be done with worry and struggle, to close the open wounds of existence and be relieved, once and for all, of anxiety and toil. At times of cultural exhaustion, this longing can afflict a whole people. We see this today in the United States.

Americans have suffered bruising blows for four years now: the Covid shutdown, urban riots and crime, ballooning inflation and debt, open borders, civil strife, the gloating of our enemies and the collapse of the international order. The electorate is weary and dispirited, and seems ready, like a boxer on his last legs, to take a sweet nap on the canvas.

Kamala Harris’s handlers understand this perfectly well. Having accurately discerned the national mood, they have made her the woman of the hour. She seems to float above all weighty issues. In her campaign poster “Forward”, a knockoff of the iconic Obama “Hope” image, her uplifted gaze radiates joy and “upliftment”. Her invocation of “What can be, unburdened by what has been” is happy and hopeful.

If all that sounds attractive, consider that Harris’s candidacy involves a deep memory-wipe. Politically speaking, she has sprung into being as a fully formed adult with no discernible past or historical recall. Her plan to control food prices repeats a common, famine-inducing error of communist regimes. Her tough-on-crime and border-securing persona rests not just on amnesia, but on media-driven amnesty. And yet, propelled forward by the cheerful drone of the “KHive ” and the good vibrations of “Brat summer”, Harris may surf all the way to the Oval Office.

In the immortal words of the Clinton Campaign Song: Don’t stop thinkin’ about tomorrow/Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone….

Bolts.

The Nebraska Voting Rights Restoration Coalition was ready for July 19. A new state law, Legislative Bill 20, would take effect that day, instantly granting voting rights to some 7,000 people with past felony convictions. Because the law requires state officials to do very little to notify people of their newfound eligibility, let alone to automatically register them, the work of contacting and assisting those affected would largely fall to community groups.

And so the coalition reserved ad space on print, digital, and radio platforms. It organized registration drives in Omaha and Lincoln, each to be held in the first days of the law’s enactment. Those events were to kick off a statewide campaign that would touch many more towns and cities, and go through late October, when Nebraska cuts off new voter registration ahead of the general election.

But the ads never ran. No one was registered at the events in Lincoln and Omaha. More than a month after its planned launch, the campaign has yet to begin.

That’s because two Republican elected officials in Nebraska—Attorney General Mike Hilgers and Secretary of State Bob Evnen—halted implementation of the new law, shutting down new registrations for people with past felonies and throwing into question the voting rights of tens of thousands of other Nebraskans who, until last month, were legally, unambiguously eligible to vote.

Vote Democrat, that is.

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Expecting parents would be allowed to claim “conceived children” as dependents on their state income taxes under a proposed law in Ohio.

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A woman who faced eviction from her New York co-op over her three emotional support parrots has been awarded $165,000 in damages and $585,000 for her apartment.

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In the past 10 years Disney has generated a magnificent reputation for failure. Consider for a moment the overwhelming catalog of marketable properties the company has purchased through its acquisition of companies like 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm – The possibilities for profits are endless. Star Wars itself was long considered to be a bulletproof brand, a beloved franchise that had hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of fans attached to it due to sheer nostalgia alone.

It would take a screw-up of epic proportions to take a loss on Star Wars. Or, maybe a deliberate agenda to deconstruct and destroy the very foundations of the story that made it so popular in the first place.

The Acolyte, directed by Harvey Weinstein’s former assistant Leslye Headland and produced by Steven Spielberg’s former assistant Kathleen Kennedy, is the pinnacle of this agenda. Kathleen Kennedy’s notorious ‘Story Group’ set out to fundamentally change Star Wars from the very beginning with the increasing injection of third-wave feminism, woke ideology and ultimately sexual fetishism.

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Rather that than have them be mutilated into a ‘trans’.

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The new guidelines were issued following an incident where a pregnant woman who presented as a man underwent a CT scan, the Telegraph reports. Radiology procedures such as X-rays and CT scans can be harmful to unborn babies.

The guidelines instruct radiology operators to ask all patients between the ages of 12 and 55 if they are pregnant before proceeding with the scans. They also include admonitions to staff to be sensitive to transgender, non-binary, and intersex patients. Patients are also required to fill out new forms asking about their gender at birth and their preferred pronouns.

However, radiographers have described incidents in which the new protocols made some men so angry they stormed out of appointments without getting their scans done. Women, too, have had strong reactions, with some crying because of the “invasive” fertility questions on the forms that ask them to explain why they could not be pregnant, forcing some to recall miscarriages or other incidents that have left them infertile. Previously, it was enough for women simply to state that they were not pregnant.

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Paging Buford Pusser.

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Economists are easily shocked. They think of their field as a ‘science’, whereas it’s just as much witch-doctory as psychiatry, only with computers.

Paul Krugman is living proof that one can be a Nobel Laureate in Economics while being wrong about pretty much everything.

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I think we’re backing the stupid party in this conflict.

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Most people alive in the West today have grown up with Star Wars films. I was a kid when I saw the original Star Wars (now known as A New Hope) in the cinemas and, like so many other kids, I began to collect everything related to that fantastic universe. Then came The Empire Strikes Back, for me the best of the saga, in which audiences discovered that Luke, the hero, is the son of the villain Vader. Finally, there was Return of the Jedi, where the cruel Vader finds redemption by saving his son, and the whole galaxy, from the evil incarnated in the Emperor.

The Star Wars story is, at its core, a story of good versus evil. That evil is represented by an empire whose methods and uniforms are reminiscent of the Wehrmacht, whose soldiers are ‘stormtroopers,’ and whose leader, Darth Vader, wore a sinister mask with a black helmet very similar to the characteristic model used by Germany in the two world wars. There are many similarities with V, a successful 1980s series. In V, Earth is invaded by a sinister race of lizards who, in human guise and with deceptive smiles, seek to turn the Earth into a larder for their evil empire. Their uniforms, their propaganda posters, and, above all, the symbolism of the visitors, all hearken back with little subtlety to the Second World War. The only thing missing for the lizards is the German language. In both fictional universes, the good guys are the ‘resistance,’ the defenders of freedom who are willing to give their lives to end tyranny.

In 1999, a new trilogy of films began to depict events that happened before the events of the first Star Wars trilogy. Although they were not as original as the first, they were successful, and they revitalised the Star Wars universe in the public consciousness. However, in October 2012, Disney took over the rights to the franchise and announced yet another new trilogy, beginning in 2015, and following the original three films. These films, were as full of special effects as they were empty of meaningful dialogue. Through them, Disney turned a story of fiction and entertainment into a platform for woke ideology.

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

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We can’t have any of this democracy nonsense! We’re Democrats!

Steve Graham.

A while back, I noted that demonic–meaning “caused by demons”–insanity had afflicted many people on Earth, and I said that in order to keep track of the progress of increasing insanity, it could be useful to watch Keith Olbermann, fired ESPN and MSNBC personality and dispenser of absurd theories that conflict with commonly-known facts. Not long ago, he claimed no one should believe Representative Dr. Ronny Jackson, MD, the former White House physician who is now Donald Trump’s primary care provider. Jackson described Trump’s bullet wound, and Olbermann made up two weird claims. He said Jackson was not a medical doctor, and then he said he had no license. Both libels originated either in hell or in Olbermann’s own disrupted psyche.

Olbermann has proven to be a pretty good barometer of lunacy. Recently, some baseball players mimicked Trump’s “Fight! Fight! Fight!” shooting response, and Olbermann said they should be banned from baseball and their stadium should be razed. He also said the franchise should be confiscated.

Nothing crazy there. Nope. And definitely nothing that would inspire arson or murder.

Leftists love confiscation. It’s like a fetish with them. Money. Guns. Land. You name it.

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Drag entertainers have established a new PAC to “educate, invigorate, and motivate the LGBTQ voter base,” emphasizing support for Democratic candidates like Vice President Kamala Harris, Breitbart reported.

ZMan has some fun.

Going back to when the regime selected Joe Biden to “win” the Democratic primary and then “win” the general election, there have been jokes about his health, making references to the movie Weekend At Bernie’s. Just about every way to call someone a corpse has been used to describe Joe Biden. In what could be final proof that we do live in a simulation, Joe Biden is now hiding out, incommunicado, at his beach house in Delaware, supposedly suffering from Covid.

Now, he is not entirely cut off from the world. He supposedly wrote that letter, a scan of which was posted on Twitter, now stupidly called X, in which he bowed out of the presidential race. Someone who sort of sounded like Biden supposedly “called” the Harris campaign to pledge support. Amusingly or alarmingly, depending upon your point of view, Harris flubbed her lines and started to say it was a recording, but then caught herself and played along until the end.

Now, the letter Biden allegedly wrote is a huge problem for a number of reasons, not the least of which is we have no idea who wrote it. The official version is his longtime friend “helped” him write it, but then why was it not on White House letterhead or even the letterhead of the campaign? Why does the signature look like it was written by another person or possibly generated using Microsoft Paint? Resigning by scanned letter posted on social media is also bizarre.

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Saw that comin’.

Keith Richards has outlived Richard Simmons.

Think about it.

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A new research project, “Milking it: colonialism, heritage and everyday engagement with dairy,” comes out of the University of Oxford’s History of Science Museum.

Leading the project are JC Niala, head researcher of the museum, and Johanna Zetterström Sharp, associate professor of archaeology at the University College London, according to an announcement on the museum’s Facebook page.

Their goal is to “examine the milk-related collections of the History of Science Museum to understand scientific knowledge production and the impact of colonial legacies on contemporary issues,” the announcement states.

UK Daily Mail.

A taxpayer-funded project is set to research connections between milk and colonialism, it was revealed yesterday.
Academics at an Oxford museum will research the ‘political nature’ of milk and its ‘colonial legacies’.
One of the experts involved has previously argued that milk is a ‘Northern European obsession’ that has been imposed on other parts of the world.
Dr Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp said the assumption that milk was a key part of the human diet ‘may be understood as a white supremacist one’, as many populations outside Europe and North America have high levels of lactose intolerance in adulthood.
The new project, ‘Milking it: colonialism, heritage & everyday engagement with dairy’, has won funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Milk is white, and so obviously wacist.

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I bet you didn’t know that.

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Slow news day, I guess.

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In another step toward complete and total lawlessness on the West Coast, Los Angeles is reportedly studying the idea of removing police from traffic enforcement altogether as a way to reform policing.

A new report from the LA Times says that this week, the City Council approved a study aimed at determining how to implement additional speed bumps, roundabouts, and other modifications to streets to curb speeding and improve driving safety.

This would come in the place of traffic enforcement by officers after reform advocates argued for “the city to limit how often police pull people over for low-level offenses and to start imagining a future in which unarmed city workers would take over most traffic duties”.

Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson commented: “I think the city of Los Angeles can lead the nation.”

In what, is the real question.

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Los Angeles City Council has removed No U-turn signs from Silver Lake, claiming that they are homophobic.

How exactly is a road sign homophobic? Well, a long time ago there were some signs alongside the No U-turn ones that said ‘No cruising’.

They were considered to be directed at the gay community, and they were removed more than 20 years ago.

But that’s not enough, because the other road signs remind these people of the ‘No cruising’ ones… or something.

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Another bizarre virtue signal just in time for pride month. Street signs that LA officials said previously targeted LGBT community members were taken down from a Silver Lake neighborhood this week. The signs that read “No Cruising” and prohibited U-turns were installed in 1997 when neighbors allegedly complained about gay men stalking back and forth in vehicles looking for “dates” in certain residential areas.

How does one determine what is a ‘gay neighborhood’, anyway?

(Remember: If you hear the ‘dog whistle’, then you’re the dog.)

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

Guaranteed to make you vote Democrat.

(I’m waiting for the Blackened SPAM Burrito.)

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She must be one of those Tiger Mothers we keep hearing about.

Watch it.

Who says YouTube can’t be entertaining?

The New Yorker.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

Next up PC heresy: “Crazy Shaming”. Be the first on your block to join the witch-hunt….

To name something—to separate it from the rest of existence and bestow a label on it—is a foundational act. It is the beginning of understanding and control.

No, it’s the beginning of mistaking the map for the territory. Read Korzybski’s SCIENCE AND SANITY to find out why this is a mistake. Go ahead; I’ll wait.

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How about (more accurately) ‘morality impaired individual’?

Or just use ‘perpetrator’. That works every time.

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Hertz’s foray into renting EVs hasn’t been a runaway success. The rental agency is liquidating its excess Teslas due to limited demand and tanking values, while those who have rented its EVs haven’t always had a good experience. Last week, we reported on a customer who was charged $277 for gasoline his rented Tesla couldn’t have possibly used—and now, we’ve heard from other Hertz customers who say they’ve been charged even more.

Hertz caught attention last week for how it handled a customer whom it had charged a “Skip the Pump” fee, which allows renters to pay a premium for Hertz to refill the tank for them. But of course, this customer’s rented Tesla Model 3 didn’t use gas—it draws power from a battery—and Hertz has a separate, flat fee for EV recharges. Nevertheless, the customer was charged $277.39 despite returning the car with the exact same charge they left with, and Hertz refused to refund it until after our story ran.

It’s no isolated incident either, as other customers have written in to inform us that it happened to them, too.

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Conservatives in Florida and Texas won the right to permit religious chaplains in public schools, and now the Satanic Temple wants in.

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President Biden is willing to debate former President Donald J. Trump at least twice before the election, and as early as June — but his campaign is rejecting the nonpartisan organization that has managed presidential debates since 1988, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times.

The letter by the Biden campaign lays out for the first time the president’s terms for giving Mr. Trump what he has openly clamored for: a televised confrontation with a successor Mr. Trump has portrayed, and hopes to reveal, as too feeble to hold the job. In a Truth Social post on Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump quickly agreed to the two dates proposed by the Biden campaign, although it was unclear whether he would agree to Mr. Biden’s other terms.

Mr. Biden and his top aides want the debates to start much sooner than the dates proposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates, so voters can see the two candidates side by side well before early voting begins in September. They want the debate to occur inside a TV studio, with microphones that automatically cut off when a speaker’s time limit elapses. And they want it to be just the two candidates and the moderator — without the raucous in-person audiences that Mr. Trump feeds on and without the participation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or other independent or third-party candidates.

This would be entertaining. I can’t believe that Biden’s handlers are this stupid.

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Eco-friendly brake cables are being eaten by foxes, after manufacturers switched from petroleum-based insulation to soy, forcing owners to wrap their cars in tarpaulins.

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Gotta laugh!

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Indore: A summer storm on Tuesday damaged a floating solar plant at Madhya Pradesh’s Omkareshwar dam. The floating solar plant, situated in the backwater of the dam, is the biggest of its kind in the world. A joint venture between Madhya Pradesh Govt and National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), the project was nearly completed and ready for its launch. A part of the project became operational last week.

The project near the village of Kelwa Khurd, aimed at generating 100 MW of electricity, with additional capacities of 88MW at Indawadi and 90 MW at Ekhand village. However, on Tuesday, summer storms with the speed of 50kmph hit the project and threw the solar panels all around the place. No employee was fortunately injured.

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In a world that is fracturing into a multipolar state, with risks of world war erupting in either Eastern Europe or the Middle East, continued threats of conflict in the Pacific, and the migrant invasion across Western countries, the company behind the iconic half-century-old fold-up tool, the Swiss Army Knife, will soon debut a blade-less version because of regulations.

Victorinox Chief Executive Officer Carl Eisner told Swiss paper Blick on Monday that its Swiss Army Knife will soon be available without a blade due to mounting regulations in European and Asian countries amid a surge in violence.

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Or maybe it’s LARPing (which term isn’t so easy to fit into a succinct and clever title).

In either case, it’s people with privilege (talking about actual, personal, individual privilege, such as students, whatever their background, who’ve been accepted into some of the most elite educational institutions in the world and who, as a result, have traditionally had their ticket punched for a lifetime of success) identifying with, and pretending that they are–in all equivalent respects to actual victims–actual victims.

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In a major about-turn, British education secretary Gillian Keegan has finally admitted what most ordinary people knew all along. She has said she will no longer use the phrase “trans women are women” after a major review found that treatments for children questioning their gender are based on “remarkably weak evidence.”

Keegan claimed that her understanding of the issue has “evolved” and she has “learnt a huge amount more about this complex and challenging subject.”

The Cass Review, conducted by leading paediatrician Dr Hillary Cass, found that studies are often “exaggerated or misrepresented” to support gender ideology. It also said that children who claim to be questioning their gender may need simply to be treated for mental health issues.

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understood by even the most progressive educators that some rules need to be put in place to keep kids in check. Structure has always been a good thing for small people with developing brains and uncontrollable emotions. Sadly, the educational system has been inexorably hijacked by the most extreme elements of the far left and by extension the principles used to maintain order among often impetuous and impulsive children have been quickly eroded in the name of “deconstruction.”

For those outside of what is now referred to as “Gen Alpha” (the generation born from 2010 onward), most people grew up with restrictions in school, including dress codes. While some institutions might have been more oppressive than others, overall there was a balance between “expressing one’s individualism” and keeping that expression from disrupting one’s education – Schools should focus on academia, not catering to people’s narcissism.

Today, the progressive ideology has devolved into a bizarre form of cultism in which almost all behavior is justified as long as it is minority behavior. This includes the behaviors of the mentally unstable and deranged; such people are swiftly becoming the most popular minority on the victimhood totem pole.

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The latest instance of the migrant invasion and escalating crime wave was a 20-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela who attempted to rob a bank in Sandusky, Ohio.

On April 4, Sandusky Police were called to the West Perkins Avenue bank for a ‘suspicious man loitering’, according to local media outlet Sandusky Register.

“While en route to the bank, officers received additional information that Yeixon Brito-Gonzalez, who only spoke Spanish, was asking tellers to put money in a white trash bag,” the paper said.

Video released of the attempted robbery shows the illegal alien using a translator app on a smartphone to instruct the teller to load a trash bag full of cash.

UnHerd.

By now, you will surely have seen the video of actress Sydney Sweeney at the end of her Saturday Night Live hosting debut last month. She’s enthusiastically waving goodbye, her breasts barely contained by a dress that looks like it was designed to reveal as much of their surface area as possible, while also preventing them from floating away into space — which seems, in this case, a genuine risk. There was no reason why this moment should have been so remarkable, this being neither the first plunging neckline nor first set of boobs to grace the SNL stage, and yet, a consensus swiftly emerged that Sweeney’s physique was more than the sum of its perfectly spherical parts. Conservative writer Richard Hanania summed it up when he tweeted the video with a three-word caption: “Wokeness is dead.”

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In January, FOX 26 reported on what police thought was a robbery turned homicide when a bystander shot the robber, but an investigation now shows that the robbery was fake.

22-year-old Rasshauud Scott was staging a robbery that two victims were in on when Jesus Vargas, a bystander, shot and killed him.

Court records say that Scott was working with William X Winfrey, who instructed Scott to stage the robbery in exchange for money.

The documents say the two victims were in on the robbery, so they could file for U-Visas. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a U-Visa is granted to victims of certain crimes to aid law enforcement in solving cases. It grants the victim temporary immigration status, including work authorization; temporary immigration status for qualifying family members of the victim; and the possibility of lawful permanent resident status.

This probably would have worked in New York or California.

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That cackling sound you hear is the ghost of Orval Faubus and all his Jim Crow buddies.

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In a bizarre news segment, a transgender person who used to refer to himself as the “human Ken doll” attempted to lecture JK Rowling on what a woman really is, declaring that the author should “stick to what she knows.”

OffGuardian.

You know how #SolutionsWatch replaced #PropagandaWatch three years ago? Well, I found a piece of propaganda so crazy, so self-contradictory, so hilariously reaching, so weirdly self-deconstructing that it has to be heard to be believed. Feast your ears on this wet hot dumpster fire of nonsense served up by the very confused propaganda pushers over at NPR.

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There is no path to appeasement – nothing is ever green enough for climate fanatics.