Read it.

Canvassers for a far-left Philadelphia mayoral candidate who has pledged to crackdown on gun violence in the city pulled guns on each other and one of them died, according to the police.

A 22-year-old man, who was canvassing Philadelphia’s East Germantown neighborhood on behalf of the progressive group OnePA, fatally shot a 46-year-old fellow canvasser on Monday, police said. Both men were knocking on doors in support of soft-on-crime Democratic mayoral candidate Helen Gym, among other left-wing candidates.

The victim and the killer “knew each other and began arguing after they ‘happened upon each other'” in the neighborhood, deputy police commissioner Frank Vanore told the Philadelphia Inquirer. Inspector Ernest Ransom said the argument led both men to draw guns on each other, with the younger canvasser shooting and killing the older man.

The shooter “said he was acting in self-defense,” Ransom told the Inquirer.

Reed it.

“You seem to find this whole thing rather amusing,” snapped a short angry man with a Not My King sign, about half an hour into the Republic protest against the coronation of King Charles III. I must admit I did. Kettled into a small enclave just off Trafalgar Square, an angry swell of old school socialists, Twitter anarchists, Lib Dem mums, eccentric vicars, boomer hippies, blue haired students and Covid conspiracists had somehow foundthemselves part of the coronation spectacle. Before the bells of St Martin in the Fields, the full shouty brunt of British republicanism was aimed at a bewildered stream of Chinese tourists and young families out for a day in London.

The survival of the British monarchy is one of the great wonders of modern history. Spending the morning of the coronation with Republic, it began to seem less mysterious. Despite everything in recent years, the Monarchy is still liked more than most of our institutions and probably every one of our elected politicians. No one gathered there could really explain why. The arguments were articulated in between the shouty chanting: things about “modern Democracy” and a “family of Lizards”, none of which quite landed the blow as the day unfolded around us.

Ptolomy I was Greek, one of Alexander the Great’s generals.

In accord with pharoanic tradition, his descendants in the Egyptian royal family depended on brother-sister marriages to ‘keep the bloodline pure’.

Cleopatra was Greek, wholly Greek, and nothing but Greek. Black? No chance.

Apparently black people are comfortable believing six impossible things before breakfast, so long as it’s Good For Blacks.

Steve Sailer.

Thank goodness those heroic gay men saved us so heroically from some obscure disease called Mpox that they didn’t even let become common enough that you or I had ever heard of it.

Oh, wait, Mpox is what they now call Monkeypox because Monkeypox was too memorable and the Authorities were worried that you’d remember it. And if I remember correctly, although who can remember back that far, gay men didn’t save us from monkeypox. Instead, they inflicted it on each other.

The New Republic.

You’ll never guess because the author pulled it out of his ass.

The inflation crisis is over, and you can thank the poorest among us for delivering what (so far at least) is a soft landing. That isn’t the mainstream view yet, but eventually I think it will be.

No, it won’t, because the poor have nothing to do with inflation. Inflation is done by the people with power over the money supply: The government. (Biden and his handlers.)

Timothy Robert Noah (born 1958), an American journalist and author, is a staff writer at The New Republic. Previously he was labor policy editor for Politico, a contributing writer at MSNBC.com, a senior editor of The New Republic assigned to write the biweekly “TRB From Washington” column, and a senior writer at Slate, where for a decade he wrote the “Chatterbox” column. In April 2012, Noah published a book, The Great Divergence, about income inequality in the United States.

No training or expertise in economics, then, but plenty of experience pushing the Narrative.

New York Post.

A growing handful of New York City restaurants are determined not to handle cash despite the Big Apple’s ban on refusing hard currency – and they are turning to a new twist on old technology.

Slutty Vegan, an Atlanta-based vegan comfort food chain with outposts in Harlem and Brooklyn, is among restaurants that are installing “reverse ATM machines” that spit out prepaid cards to get around the “Cash-22” dilemma, Side Dish has learned.

One service provider – called ReverseATM, appropriately enough – rents out ATM-style machines that accept cash bills in exchange for an “open loop” debit card whose balance can be used anywhere that Visa and MasterCard are accepted.

An executive at the ReverseATM – whose clients range from fast-food eateries to large sporting venues like Madison Square Garden – told Side Dish that customers are never charged a fee for the debit cards.

Of course not–they get their piece from the business that accepts the card, as is normal.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

It is fun to take in the Chronicle of Higher Education every day, because it is like reading a trade journal for an industry that knows it is in decline, along the lines of daily newspapers or buggy whip makers. Every day the Chron operates from a cringe mode about the problems of declining enrollment, financial pressures, the poor morale among DEI staff and the rising backlash against it, and above all paranoia about Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Yesterday the Chron had an especially revealing article about labor shortages in higher education. This will certainly come as bizarre news for the armies of un- and under-employed Ph.ds and adjunct instructors everywhere. But it turns out faculty hiring isn’t the main problem. Colleges are having a difficult time hiring—wait for it—administrators.

Babylon Bee.

Long a staple drink of people who hate actual beer, Bud Light felt putting Dylan Mulvaney’s face on a can would also attract people who hate actual women. “As a man acting out the most horrendously offensive stereotypes of women, Mulvaney taps into the soul of people who despise real women,” said Mr. Whitworth. “As a company dedicated to serving those who detest real beer, the partnership made perfect sense. The new beer can just shouts, ‘Come, enjoy this atrocious substitute for the real thing’.”

Read it.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Tech Crunch.

Your romantic love story with Iris (get it, like IRS?) continues similarly throughout the game — while getting to know you, she asks you further questions, like what your address is and whether you have dependents (TH3K only works for single people without dependents, because Iris doesn’t want to get involved in a complicated situation and/or MSCHF did not make the game that complex… also, it doesn’t do state tax.) She even gets nosy enough to ask you for your annual income, tax withholdings and even your social security number, but you’re so enamored by Iris that you’re willing to look past her invasive questions — and the fact that she seems to love talking about taxes. A lot.

I am not making this up.

Washington Post.

To get our politics working again, we need a system that delivers energy (the ability for the government to get things done), republican safety (protection of our basic rights), popular sovereignty (adaptive responsiveness to the will of the people) and inclusion (all voices should be synthesized in the national voice of our House of Representatives). Real proximity of representatives to their constituents is necessary for delivering on all those design principles. For that, we need a bigger, and continuously growing, House of Representatives. We need smaller districts and fairer representation between more- and less-populous places.

But how big should the House be? That is also to ask how small should a district be. And based on what math? And on what principle of growth?

Scholars and advocates have been working on this question for decades. There are seven basic options, all compiled in a report on enlarging the House by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences commission on the state of our democracy, which I co-chaired. Those options would increase the size of Congress from 435 to between 572 to 9,400.

CBS News Pittsburgh.

Every day, we make environmental decisions. Recycling has become almost a reflex.

But did you ever think you are making an environmental or climate decision when you buy toilet paper?

Last week’s World Forest Day went pretty much unnoticed, except for one group which chose the day to release its Issue with Tissue report.

The report takes toilet paper makers to task for wiping out a lot of forest land.

Read it.

Germany and other European NATO members that agreed to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine are running into logistical problems. Germany finally relented and allowed NATO nations that had purchased Leopard 2 tanks from Germany to send them to Ukraine whereupon the real problems started. Most contributors found that their Leopard 2s needed remedial work because they never expected another recurrence of European military tension, let alone another war, and failed to complete, or never started, planned or recommend upgrades.

Delaying these upgrades seemed reasonable because the Americans were still an active NATO member and their M1 tanks were known to be up-to-date. There are still about 2,000 Leopard 2s in service with European nations. Unlike the Americans, the Europeans saw no need to complete needed upgrades to their tanks or even keep most of them operational. So the Ukrainians will have to wait until the Europeans get enough of their Leopard 2s operational or the Americans change their minds on how quickly they will deliver M-1s. There are already over 200 operational M-1s in Europe with American armored brigades. The Ukrainians don’t need American soldiers but they could use their M-1 tanks.

No, they couldn’t. Like the F-16s that everyone is talking about, it would take Ukranians about a year to get enough expertise with the M-1 to survive, much less prosper, in actual combat.

Washington Post.

You don’t have an anxiety toolkit? Well, you’d better get with the program.

Read it.

For eight years, the Scottish National Party (SNP) was synonymous with Nicola Sturgeon’s name. However, her legacy will always be a divisive one, marked by (among other things) a continuous fight for a second independence referendum in the wake of Brexit, as well as controversial progressive policies such as transformative green initiatives or the infamous Gender Bill, which may have contributed to her eventual resignation.

Now, the SNP appears to be moving in an even more leftist direction under the future leadership of Humza Yousaf. The health minister was the first to announce his intention to enter the leadership contest and chances are he will win it comfortably after most other prominent members of the SNP turned down the opportunity. Instead, they have chosen to back Yousaf, believing that the party needs a “fresh perspective.” At the moment, the biggest challenger to Yousaf’s bid is Kate Forbes, the SNP’s young, more socially conservative finance secretary, albeit with considerably weaker prospects.

Yeah, I can’t think of a more obvious Scottish Nationalist than ‘Hamza Yousaf’.

Check it out.

A silicon-based Guide for the Perplexed.

Read it.

It’s this kind of shit that gives lawyers a bad name.

Read it.

Tech companies with names from the world of Lord of the Rings.

Zeldin dumps campaign treasurer he shared with Santos (Politico)

Journalist finds something unusual in George Santos’ campaign expenses (CNN)

Meet the Auschwitz survivor saluted by George Santos in Congress (The Forward)

Susan Quinn: Get Rid of George Santos

Santos’ unusual $199.99 campaign expenses are putting scrutiny on his longtime treasurer (CNN)

Santos expected to face House ethics committee probe (CNN) But no probe of Maxine Waters for funneling funds to her daughter’s business.

McCarthy: House Ethics Committee Investigating GOP Rep. George Santos

Santos is accused of harassing prospective staffer in his D.C. office (Washington Post)

About Those 2,500 Dogs That George Santos Claims He Saved (N.Y. Times)

George Santos, who claimed mom survived 9/11, invites ground zero volunteer to SOTU (ABC)

Ex-staffer claims George Santos sexually harassed him, violated pay rules (N.Y. Post)  Joining the witch-hunt for fun and profit.

George Santos Is Accused of Sexual Harassment in His Capitol Office (N.Y. Times)

The most important secret George Santos is keeping (CNN)

The One Lie That Could Get George Santos in the End (Daily Beast)

George Santos may owe thousands for traffic violations in two states (CBS)

George Santos: ‘I’ve kept 100 percent of my campaign promises’

Read it.

Welcome to the Whitest City in America.

Just 22 cups will be available from Proud Mary Coffee Roasters, which has locations in Portland and Austin, Texas.

Of course.

Read it.

A man suspected of breaking into a Seattle home has refused to come clean about his intentions, even though police found him fully clothed in a bathtub filled with water.

A woman returned to her home Friday night to find a window smashed and an unknown man inside the house, according to the Seattle Police Department.

She remained outside the home and called police. Upon their arrival, officers instructed anyone inside to come out. When they got no reply, they went in to search the home — and found a suspect in a bathroom.

“The man was clothed but very wet, and the bathtub was full of water,” police said in a statement.

Full of hopes and full of fears
Full of laughter full of tears
Full of dreams to last the years in Seattle

Read it.

A UK man was crushed to death by a hydraulic ‘telescopic’ Urinal designed to pop out of the ground for use.

The man, who has not been named, was performing maintenance on the pop-up urinal at Cambridge Circus outside the Palace Theatre, when the hydraulic unit trapped him below street level.

Think of it as evolution in action.

These types of pop-up urinals appeared in London around 20 years ago to discourage urination in the street.

Uh-huh. San Francisco, take note.

Read it.

A Florida woman was pulled from a storm drain for the third time in two years last week.

The Delray Beach Police Department said officers and firefighters responded to a report of a woman possibly in distress while swimming in a canal near the 500 block of Lindell Boulevard around noon on Wednesday. The department said officers located the woman, identified as Lyndsey Jane Kennedy, and asked if she needed help.

Read it.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees….

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

When it comes to gender follies, Minnesota Democrats are keeping up with their insane colleagues on the coasts. DFL state representative Sandra Feist has been pushing a bill “that would require school districts and charter schools to provide students in grades four through 12 with access to free menstrual products in student restrooms.” Feist’s bill was approved in committee last year by a 12-4 vote. See Feist’s news clip. The news clip also maps out new frontiers in poverty: “Elif Ozturk, a sophomore at Hopkins High School, said ‘period poverty’ is an issue she’s encountered among classmates.”

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

We wrote here about a task force of the State of California that is developing a proposal to pay reparations to the state’s black residents, to the tune of perhaps $800,000 apiece. But that is chump change compared with what is being demanded in San Francisco.

The City of San Francisco appointed an African American Reparations Advisory Committee which delivered its draft Plan in December. The Plan is embedded below, so you can peruse it at your leisure. It acknowledges, as it must, that neither the State of California nor the City of San Francisco ever countenanced slavery, but nevertheless claims that San Francisco has systemically discriminated against blacks from the beginning. And, of course, the “legacy” of such discrimination is still felt today, reflected in every “disparity” that is to the disadvantage of blacks.

On the whole, the document comes across as whinier than Prince Harry’s memoir. But for now, let’s focus on the proposed remedy. News accounts have reported that the Plan provides that San Francisco blacks should get $5 million apiece. Currently, San Francisco’s population is 895,000, of whom around 5% are classified as African-American. Assuming those numbers, around 44,750 people would get $5 million apiece, for a total of $223,750,000,000. Each San Franciscan who is not a recipient of reparations would be on the hook for approximately $263,000, or a little over $1 million for a family of four. (I know, there aren’t many families of four in San Francisco, but you get the idea.)

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Leftists, perhaps thinking their war on reliable energy is well in hand, are now making war on scientific agriculture. The war has two main elements: opposition to fertilizers, without which billions of people could not be fed, and hostility toward animal husbandry. Leftists don’t want you to eat meat.

When you tell people that liberals’ end game is for them to eat bugs, they sometimes think you can’t be serious. Those are the people who aren’t paying attention. This article in an ostensible scientific site, is typical: “Making the case for using insects as food for both humans and livestock.”

Steve Sailer.

My impression has long been that the White House during Democratic administrations, bureaucrats, NGOs, academics, and the media routinely conspire together to promote The Latest Thing.

…

Occasionally, though, The Establishment screws up and gets the pieces in the wrong order, so the conspiracy is more evident. We can see this with the Gas Stove Fiasco of 2023.

Steve Sailer.

Dear ChatGPT: Write me a Washington Post book review of a novel by a whiny Asian-American guy obsessed with an Asian-American player in a black-dominated sport who once got a hot hand for seven games in a row. Blame everything on white people.

TIME magazine wanders out into Left field.

How did U.S. exercise trends go from reinforcing white supremacy to celebrating Richard Simmons? That evolution is explored in a new book by a historian of exercise, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of the book Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, out Jan. 2023.

Because, you know, black people just can’t do shit when it comes to exercise.

Read it.

Perhaps you’ve seen the story on the Wall Street Journal editorial page today (or in some other outlet where it is booming this morning) about Stanford University’s “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative,” which reads like a parody of our idiotic woke university culture today. But no—Stanford employed a task force that worked for months to advocate that no one on campus use the word “American” because “This term often refers to people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the US is the most important country in the Americas. . .”

Read it.

For much of its running time, Avatar: The Way of Water resembles nothing so much as one of those screensavers from the early 2000s that turned your computer monitor into a simulated aquarium. Remember? Fish floated by, there were some bubbles, it was very colorful and completely unrealistic. Soothing, though.

For a solid hour of The Way of Water—it’s the movie’s second in a complete running time of 3 hours and 10 minutes—we are treated to tall blue and green cartoon characters swimming and diving and riding on the backs of alien seahorses and having sign-language conversations with whale-like creatures. It’s like a nature documentary, only there’s no actual nature, just the world’s most unimaginably expensive computer-generated imagery blended with live-action performances the computer then draws over. (Kate Winslet is in this movie. You’d never know. It could have been me.)

Check it out.

Move over David Deeble, J.P. Sears, and Ammo Grrrll: we have a new comic to induct into the Official Power Line Comedy Club: Tyler Fischer.

Here he neatly skewers NPR and practically every other major woke news media sensibility in just sixty seconds.

Read it.

I’m sure we are all tired of hearing about David French.  But this is ridiculous.  This isn’t a legal issue (as French knows full well).  It isn’t just about Twitter either; Facebook also suppressed the story.  Nor was the government totally uninvolved; Congressional Democrats applied pressure behind the scenes.  But this idea that there is something wrong about making a political issue out of an entire sector of industry conspiring to secretly manipulate an election.  That is obscene.  French should be ashamed of himself.

But he’s not. Which is the problem with David French.

Read it.

But it was the very serious journalists at the Bezos Post who delivered the death blow, gravely noting that Musk’s affinity for Diet Coke puts him in league with the beverage’s other “unsavory acolytes, including former president Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein.”

I’m sure Hitler would have drunk Diet Coke if it had been available to him. After all he was a vegetarian, and you know what fascist assholes vegetarians all are.

Victor Davis Hanson.

For various loose definitions of the term ‘morality’.

Sam Bankman-Fried is the ultimate dangerous and ridiculous expression of the most toxic and creepy culture in America. If he did not exist, he would have to be invented.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Meghan Markle (the Duchess of Sussex) has a podcast on which, earlier today, she hosted Paris Hilton as a guest. The topic of their discussion was “bimbos.” (They said it, I didn’t.)

All actors/actresses are narcissists. Narcissists are crazy. Crazy people are dangerous. Avoid if at all possible.

Read it.

Alex Taylor, the animal rights activist who stormed the field on Monday Night Football’s game between the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers, is suing Rams linebacker Bobby Wagner for tackling him to the ground at Levi’s Stadium. Santa Clara Police Department Lt. Cuong Phan confirmed that Taylor filed a police report on Tuesday afternoon.

That will go nowhere. He was a trespasser. He’s lucky that the NFL isn’t suing him.

ZMan scratches his head.

Food plays an important role in every culture. Since culture evolves in a place and that place has certain foods not known in other places, food helps ground the culture in a time and place, which helps ground the people in a time and place. A big part of the answer to the only question that matters – who are we – is the place where the answer was created by our ancestors. It is why our holidays have special foods. They help remind the people of the answer to the big question.

In the West, fear of food is also a big cultural item. For some reason, Western people remain convinced that their food is out to get them. From time to time certain foods have been banned. In pre-modern times the reasons ranged from the superstitious to the ritual, while in modern times “science” is the blame. In this age, we are told every day that something in our diet is trying to kill us. These days, people are often defined by the foods they think are plotting against them.

Fear of food seems to track with belief. The more ideological the person, the more likely they are to be paranoid about food. Vegans and vegetarians are almost always in one of the subcultures on what we call the Left. The exception will be someone who got it into his head that something is bad for his training regimen. Otherwise, when someone tells you they are a vegan, and they almost always tell you that as soon as you meet them, they are telling you their politics.

Read it.

The 2022 Socialism Conference in Chicago earlier this month felt more like an academic conference than, as the promotional materials pronounced, “a place where activists can share lessons from their struggles.” Attendees paid $150 for full-price passes granting access to four days of panels, talks, and social events for professional schmoozing at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place hotel and convention center in Chicago’s swank South Loop neighborhood. Panels hosted academics and writers plugging and signing books that could be purchased at the conference book fair. Keynote speakers gave the kind of rousing and impassioned prewritten talks to restrained applause that one would expect of a literary reading. The only real perceivable difference between the Socialism Conference and, say, the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference was that of genre, which was social justice instead of more traditional literary poetry or prose.

Socialism is the astrology of the modern intellectual class.

Read it.

We’re a queer, feminist-led tech and media company on a mission to make astrology and its wisdom accessible to everyone as a tool for self-discovery, mindfulness, and healing.

Every believer in astrology and witchcraft I ever met was a Democrat.

They sure are ‘the party of science’.

UPDATE: Astrology Is Back (Steve Sailer)

Read it.

CNN’s Don Lemon played the fool — okay, he did his thing as usual — in conversation with Strelmark president and “Royal Watcher” Hilary Fordwich. Lemon packs slavery, reparations, the empire, and the monarchy into his boffo question. Fordwich dispatches it in a baloney meets the grinder moment. Lemon was unprepared to engage beyond the shibboleths. That must be why this highly satisfying video has gone viral.

Halfricans are smarter than Africans, but not as smart as their white ancestors.

Read it.

While water is an essential element to life that can be found for free most everywhere you look, that does not stop business from turning it into a profitable commodity. There is a whole aisle at the store dedicated to bottled water in a variety of forms. While some of us are too cheap to splurge on fancy water, it still manages to be a $283 billion global industry. With that in mind, it was only a matter of time before we circled fully around and went full Spaceballs by selling air in a can.

Steve Sailer.

Holding your bow sideways isn’t as accurate.

Seriously, Tolkien’s masterpiece The Lord of the Rings is obviously inspired by Wagner’s hyper-masterpiece The Ring. Tolkien’s work is about northern Europeans, just like The Iliad is about southern Europeans, and Journey to the West is about Asians. Like Wagner’s, Tolkien’s work is awesome, but not diverse.

If you are a giant global corporation like Amazon, it’s a difficult conundrum that the world loves northern European artistry, but also is instructed to resent northern Europeans.

Steve Sailer sniffs out the truth.

Golf is connected to imperial “exploitation”, according to display information, because balls were once made using rubber harvested from colonial territories.

The game itself was also “imposed” across the Empire, the St Andrews exhibition claims, as British enthusiasts established clubs from South Africa to Hong Kong.

Read it. And watch the video–if you dare!

The cast of empowered women includes Kim Kardashian, Megan Thee Stallion, Wanda Sykes and Amy Schumer. It looks like Amy was sick of being the most hated woman on the planet and wanted to surround herself with more like-minded souls that do… not very much. In response to the trailer, one person asked Chelsea, “Did hanging out with women who have actual jobs make you feel inadequate?”

All America wants to know!

UPDATE: See Hillary Clinton Lose a Legal Knowledge Quiz to Kim Kardashian: ‘It Was Heartbreaking’ (People) Kim is studying to be a paralegal. Hillary hasn’t practiced as a lawyer in 30 years.