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Democratic Texas gubernatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke disrupted Governor Greg Abbott’s press conference called to update the public on yesterday’s school shooting. O’Rourke is one of the breed of politicians — politicians without a conscience and with no thought other than themselves — that finds the moment of unspeakable tragedy fit to undertake histrionic displays and hysterical lectures promoting their favored causes. I can’t believe this is even good politics, but it is what it is, somewhere south of disgusting.

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If a blind man identifies as someone with 20-20 vision, must we give him a driver’s license?

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The month of the gays is just around the corner and Target is gearing up and binding down on rainbow merchandise.

The LGBTQILMNOP crew has adopted June as their month of gay pride and Target is in full support. In preparation for gay month, Target just announced their partnership with two queer clothing brands in order to “rainbow-wash” the country. Ew.

The new Target collab is with TomboyX and Humankind and is set to be released towards the end of May, according to Bustle. It will feature compression tops, “a comfortable alternative to chest binders,” “packing underwear,” bras and boyshorts as well as swim trunks, tops and what they called “unisuits.” In all honesty, none of these items are even cute. They all look like a rainbow unicorn barfed on them.

I do not buy from Target. Period.  As a wise man once told me, ‘Don’t give money to people who hate you.’

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Yeah, that sure keeps me awake at night. (Not.).

Do an Internet search for “Make Your Own Baby Formula” and see what you find.

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Actress Olivia Wilde, the daughter of failed Democratic House candidate Leslie Cockburn, was served custody papers at a Las Vegas film convention as she was speaking on stage.

“This is for me?” Wilde asked after a woman slid her a manila envelope with the papers, which she glanced at before continuing her speech. The 38-year-old split in November 2020 with her fiancé, Horrible Bosses star Jason Sudeikis, with whom she has two children. She is currently dating a man 10 years her junior who enjoys wearing dresses.

Sounds like a Democrat to me.

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Let’s see: Vaccine causes the disease, so the ansower is – another vaccine!

What’s wrong with this picture….

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A leftist magazine co-founded by former President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor Robert Reich urged the federal government to seize control of the fossil fuel industry. Because … climate change.

The American Prospect, of which Reich is founding editor, ran an April 8 article headlined, “Nationalize the U.S. Fossil Fuel Industry to Save the Planet.” Leftist economist Robert Pollin argued that “Turning the biggest oil companies over to public ownership would serve several goals at once, including climate resilience.”

This is the same Pollin who co-authored a book with radical philosopher Noam Chomsky pushing a “Global Green New Deal.” In his new article, Pollin exploited the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest climate doom-mongering report to argue: “[W]e must begin advancing far more aggressive climate stabilization solutions than anything that has been undertaken thus far.”

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Imagine, therefore, how surprised I have been this past couple of decades to see more and more men fighting on behalf of “women”. Trans-women that is. Let’s call him Nigel — this man is a type you will recognise. White, bearded, and whether gay or straight he somehow manages to shoehorn himself onto the LGBTQQIAP+ community, and is absolutely, without question, more oppressed than females. He gets himself out of bed, dragging himself away from Insta, Twitter and Pornhub (he has donated to some bird making ethical porn, but he prefers the real stuff) and cycles down to where are the feminists are speaking about rape and domestic violence and other bourgeoise rubbish.

His pronouns intact, fluctuating between he/him and they/them, depending entirely on his mood and what he chooses to wear that day, Nigel drops his washing off at his mums, gets his girlfriend (they are a queer couple though) to clean out the hamster cage, slips on his £150 trainers and joins the baying mob shouting “TERFS out” and “bigots”, etc.

Nigel may identify as a citizen journalist, so keen is he to alert the online world to the danger lurking behind any gathering of witches banging on about single sex spaces. Or perhaps he is working for a “progressive” media outlet, and makes it his business to contact feminist event organisers asking probing, intelligent, open-ended questions such as “how many trans women have you killed today” or “when did you become a fascist/bigot?” He writes headlines such as, “Transphobes secretly campaigning to remove the right to free cervical smear tests for trans women.”

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A new startup hopes to bring video games to the forefront of mental health care by developing games that are as therapeutic as they are engaging. They’re also looking at how to make it easier for developers to test the medical benefits of existing games.

I am not making this up.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Also more proof that if you want improve your chances to be “Woman of the Year,” the best strategy is to be born a biological male, and then switch teams. It appears that men are better at being women than women are. Once upon a time this might have been called chauvinist piggery; now it is called enlightenment. (See: Kaitlyn Jenner, everyone’s “Woman of the Year” four or five years ago now. NB: Jenner has opposed Lia Thomas’s swimming stunt.)

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A man was killed on Sunday night after the Tesla he was driving stopped in the middle of I-70 in Independence, Missouri, causing two vehicles to crash into it, police said. Police still are not certain what caused the vehicle to come to a stop in the center lane.

Hammer tech.

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Western Society has reached a level of absurdity beyond comprehension. A University in Scotland has put a warning label on Ernest Hemingway’s great short novel, The Old Man and the Sea.

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Curious how acceptable veganism has become. George Orwell scathingly described vegetarians as “that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking to the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.” Somehow, via Linda McCartney’s textured soya sausages, veganism has become a mainstream path, not just to health, but to a bright future. As George Monbiot, the high priest of British veganism, exhorted his Guardian readers, “The best way to save the planet? Drop meat and dairy.” It’s the cows. They belch methane.

The UK is a world leader in veganism, the first country to have a Vegan Society. Here, more than a million people will stop eating animal products this month as part of Veganuary, of which Monbiot is an “Ambassador”. After that, who knows? You may want — and the Ambassadors certainly desire — that you embrace the whole vegan testament, and deny yourself not just meat, fish, eggs and dairy, but all animal products. The wool jumper on your back. The leather shoes on your feet.

Of course, the success of veganism is no mystery at all. Vegans are absolutely correct in maintaining that plant-based food can be healthy, and that the welfare conditions of much of the globe’s livestock are pitiful. (On ethical grounds alone, I wouldn’t touch an intensively-reared pig with a bargepole, let alone with a knife and fork. And I’ve farmed for 20 years.) True too: Daisy the cow is implicated in climate-change. No sane or caring human could disagree.

Such is lower case veganism. Sensible, and sensitive. The problem comes with majuscule Veganism, which rages beyond animal ethics, diet and environmental concerns into a fundamentalist crusade untroubled by science, untouched by rationality. When humans killed God, they needed a replacement for religion. Upper-case Veganism is the latest faith for the lost middle classes.

Q: How can you tell a vegan?

A: You don’t tell a vegan. The vegan tells you.

The refutation of vegetarianism is simple: The smell of applewood-smoked bacon. Try it.

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Here, in a 50-acre plot near the Barlow shopping complex, Nguyen grows rare varieties of heirloom wheat like Sonora, the first wheat variety cultivated in North America and the base for Mexico’s original wheat tortillas. Hulking seven feet above the ground are tall stalks of Wit Wolkoring, a Sonora descendant that’s particularly drought-resistant.

These are cultivars that “you won’t find in a seed catalog,” Nguyen said. Each of the dozen-odd grains that Nguyen has grown confer different advantages — the Chiddam Blanc de Mars is perfect for baguettes, the Sonora can be cooked like rice — but what they all share is an adaptation to California’s North Coast. These are hardy, survivor grains, selected to withstand an increasingly hostile climate.

So when Global Warming finally arrives, we’ll have Gourmet Wheat to fall back on. (Well, rich people will–you? Not so much….)

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

I made a disparaging comment here the other day about how I never watch “The View,” because, based on the 10-second clips I’ve seen from time to time by accident, it seems obvious that if you actually attempt to sit through an entire episode you’ll feel your IQ dropping by the minute.

Today “View” stalwart Whoopi Goldberg said “the Holocaust wasn’t about race,” and you can see the other panelists desperately trying to figure out how to go into damage-control mode, before the director, no doubt shouting in the control room “Shut it down! Go to commercial!”, brought up the bumper music quite abruptly and loudly to stop Whoopi’s big whoops!

Her thesis would certainly come as news to Hitler. Maybe even to Joe Biden.

Daily Beast.

This is, obviously, national news.

Read it.

When the Ivy League opened itself up to co-education in the sixties, I don’t think that this is what they had in mind.

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Chicago police have confirmed that a high-end Burberry store on the city’s central Michigan Ave. was robbed no less than two times this week, with the second break-in coming early Thursday morning. The first instance was Tuesday morning, with the burglaries being especially brazen given they took place in daylight hours, or just before dawn. The Tuesday incident involved five men in a White SUV, but apparently with no other leads or identifiers. So naturally they hit the same site again, plus others.

But as CWB Chicago details of the second break-in, it appears the criminals are positively boasting about the ease of mass theft in a seemingly “lawless” windy city: “A group of armed burglars broke into two Lakeview convenience stores, dumped their stolen cash registers in front of Gov. JB Pritzker’s home, and then burglarized the Burberry store on Michigan Avenue early Thursday.”

Check it out.

I am not making this up.

New York Times.

New York’s attorney general is investigating the death of a 29-year-old man who was badly burned when he was shot with a stun gun after dousing himself with hand sanitizer during an altercation with police officers, officials said on Thursday.

I rejoice that the Attorney General of New York State has nothing more important to do than investigate the death of a crazy person in a small town upstate.

(Think of it as evolution in action.)

Refusal to wear a mask says more about you than your face ever could (The Guardian) Indeed it does.

Marjorie Taylor Greene wonders why we never closed schools or businesses because of cancer (Daily Kos)

Fauci calls Ron Johnson’s AIDS comment ‘preposterous’: ‘I don’t have any clue of what he’s talking about’ (The Hill) Almost certainly true.

Fauci dumbfounded by GOP senator’s false accusation (CNN)  False!

Face masks and omicron: Should you upgrade from cloth to N95s? Double mask? (SFChronicle) In any event, you need to PANIC!

Omicron: More Transmissible, Less Severe Due To ‘Common Cold’ Mutation?

Questioning School Madness and Vaccine Mandates

Fauci Downplays Severity Of Omicron Strain

Krazy Krugman: GOP ‘Apparatchiks’ Trying ‘To Keep Pandemic Going’

Huge New Study Shows Zero COVID Deaths Among Healthy German Kids

New York Will Require Full Vaccination To Access Restaurants, Gyms And Entertainment; 5-Year-Olds Need At Least One Shot  Time to leave.

Moderna President Warns Vaccines May Struggle To Protect Against Omicron

Doctor Banned For Questioning Efficacy Of Masks Wins High Court Case

Biden Surgeon General: Even Tripled Vaxxed Still Have To Wear Masks Indoors  Don’t forget to PANIC!

De Blasio Announces NYC Will Mandate Vaccines for Private Sector Workers  Time to leave.

Oregon Moves To Make Indoor Mask Mandate Permanent  Time to leave.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

ZMan attempts to read the witch-hunt tea leaves.

Lost in the rush into the holiday season is the Charlottesville monkey trial concluded last week with a verdict for the plaintiffs. The jury had no verdict on some of the claims but agreed there was some sort of conspiracy by the defendants. They also decided that the plaintiffs suffered no harm as a result of it, but the defendants were doo-doo heads who deserved some sort of punishment. As a result, they awarded the plaintiffs eleventy billion bars of gold-pressed latinum in punitive damages.

The jury did not fall into Star Trek jargon, but they may as well have, given the structure of their decision. According to lawyers who followed the case, the punitive damages are symbolic due to rules governing the relationship between punitive and compensatory damages in civil cases. Typically, courts limit the ratio to a single digit. That is, punitive damage awards are capped at something less than ten times the compensatory damages, which in this case were one dollar.

This reality is of no consequence as the trial was always political activism on behalf of the ruling class. In a sane society this never would have been in a courtroom and the lawyers who brought it would be deported. Ours is a society in crisis, so ridiculous things like this are common now. The lawyers got their win and regime media was happy to promote it as a great blow against free speech. For a day, the blue-checks on Twitter were celebrating the win.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that there even was an Australian Rhino Project.

It’s good to know that they don’t have anything better to do with their time and money.

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Heaps of unworn clothes are being discarded in the Chilean desert, adding to a swiftly swelling graveyard of fast-fashion lines past.

According to a report from Agence France-Presse, the massive mound of clothes consists of garments made in China and Bangladesh that make their way to stores in the US, Europe, and Asia. When the garments are not purchased, they are brought to Chile’s Iquique port to be resold to other Latin American countries.

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McDonald’s McPlant, a burger with a plant-based meat patty, is now available at select locations in the U.S. for a limited time.

Notice how nobody ever tries to make a meat-based plant substitute.

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It’s in the blood of any decent charlatan to solve problems that don’t exist, rather than face the full horror of their in-tray. Sadiq Khan (no stranger to blood) wants to outlaw misogyny – wolf-whistling you understand, not FGM, Sharia courts or segregation. Health secretary Sajid Javid, wants blood donations to be more inclusive (because worrying about HIV is just silly). Keir Starmer meanwhile, is prepared to ‘Sweat blood to win voters’ respect’ just as soon as he’s finished playing hunt the cervix.

When it comes to non-issues however, my personal preference remains the LGBTQwerty attack, aka ‘the world is not gay enough’ (and if that’s not the title of the next James Bond film, there’s no justice in the world). Indeed the ostensive lack of gayness is a conundrum worth pondering as you mince across London’s permanent gay crossings, sip your Starbuck’s gay coffee, or get run over by the Old Bill, too focused on painting their nails in their gay ‘hate crime cars’.

Read it. And watch the video.

Democrats correctly see Ron DeSantis as a potential presidential nominee in 2024, and are doing all they can to discredit him. This video is by an anonymous left-wing group (“Remove Ron”) and closes with the slogan “Remove Ron” and the hashtag #Florever Purge.

The makers of the video are banking on the idea that for most people, freedom is terrifying. Many have found the video funny and some have interpreted it as a parody, but it is for real.

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When the staff at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in ??northern Denmark opened boxes last week from artist Jens Haaning, they expected to see pieces featuring the half-million kroner they lent him for the works of art, the director told a Danish radio show host.

The new name for the artwork: “Take the Money and Run.”

Sounds as if they got what they paid for.

CNN.

All it needs is the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

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“I’m just born to be in it,” failed Senate candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke told Vanity Fair before he announced his failed campaign for president in 2019. He dropped out a few months later, after a series of Democratic primary polls showed him getting blown out by alternative options such as “None” and “Not Sure.”

Steve Sailer.

Because the ASHG values genetic diversity, it insists that all groups are genetically identical.

Or something.

Okay, let’s try that again: All races are diverse, but some races are more diverse than others.

Check it out.

I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer.

Fighting climate change via green energy is the most important thing in the world, except, of course, for hiring more black women to climb up hundreds of feet in the air to repair windmill turbines in the name of equity.

C’mon, people, priorities!

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In the two hectares of land he bought, he has already built his first house, where he lives with his family, in hobbit clothes, and his doors are also open to visitors. Here, the pastry chef, who has a degree in geology, plans to build the caravan of the dwarves, the green dragon inn and a large version of Bilbo Baggins’ house. His goal is to transform this piece of Abruzzo into a hobbit village, with an adjoining farmhouse, where visitors will be able to live in a magical world, which, according to Gentile, is not too far from the way people live in Bucchianico.

Yeah, I’m sure that all of us, when we hear ‘hobbit’, think ‘Italian’.

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I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

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A New Zealand terrorist attack that left six people injured has prompted a supermarket chain to remove all its knives and scissors from its shelves.

One general manager of the supermarket chain Countdown said the store was also considering not selling knives in the future.

One would think that a more … focused solution would be to remove “a Sri Lankan national who was said to be aligned with the ISIS ideology” rather than inconveniencing EVERYBODY ELSE by removing knives and scissors from the store would be the way to go. But I guess not.

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There’s a pleasure in the downfall of sages, gurus, and moralists that is, unfortunately, part of the makeup of Man. Those whom we delight to place on a pedestal we delight equally to pull down. When a stern reader of lessons to humanity is found egregiously to have broken the very lessons that he has read the rest of us, we feel a sense of relief. He is just like us after all; we therefore need to feel a little less ashamed of our own conduct.

I doubt, then, that anyone who read of the current scandal concerning the research into human dishonesty by Dan Ariely of Duke University will not have taken some slightly shamefaced pleasure in it. Some of his research into dishonesty has proved to be dishonest: what, in fact, one might call meta-dishonest.

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I know there’s a live argument over the Oxford comma, and whether to use one or two spaces after a period. But these are so 20-teens: did you know that capitalization is—somehow—oppressive?

That’s what we’re told by Dr. Linda Manyguns, I mean, dr. linda manyguns, who is “associate vice president of indigenization and decolonization” at Mount Royal University in Alberta.

Apparently capitalization (except of ‘Indigenous’) is raaaaaaysis. Who knew?

I know what you’re thinking, and I checked: this is not a Monty Python skit.

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Shouldn’t be too difficult to come up with a ‘vaccine’ that doesn’t prevent someone from getting the disease and doesn’t prevent someone from spreading the disease. After COVID, how hard could it be?

Severian speaks for all right-thinking people.

And then there’s the weird schizophrenia of it all. I mean, as Nikolai put it the other day, half the time you want “your” countrypersyns to lose, to deny them the opportunity to wipe xzheyr asses with the flag on the podium… and half the time you want them to win, precisely because you know they’d wipe their asses with the flag on the podium, thus giving the CivNats in the audience (who are probably the only ones watching) a good, long, hard look at what civic nationalism hath wrought. The idea that I’d cheer for any of them for the old fashioned reason of “one American supporting another” is a sick joke — this is Clown World; xzhey are citizens of Clownlandia; xzhey are NOT AMERICANS, whatever it might say on their official government paperwork.

A good point. Why would I, an American, want to watch a competition between people representing countries that aren’t America and people who allegedly represent American but actually don’t? It’s insane.

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We document appearance effects in the economics profession. Using unique data on PhD graduates from ten of the top economics departments in the United States we test whether more attractive individuals are more likely to succeed. We find robust evidence that appearance has predictive power for job outcomes and research productivity. Attractive individuals are more likely to study at higher ranked PhD institutions and are more likely to be placed at higher-ranking academic institutions not only for their first job, but also for jobs as many as 15 years after their graduation, even when we control for the ranking of PhD institution and first job. Appearance also predicts the success of research output: while it does not predict the number of papers an individual writes, it predicts the number of citations for a given number of papers, again even when we control for the ranking of the PhD institution and first job. All these effects are robust, statistically significant, and substantial in magnitude.

Name a field where looks don’t matter (but don’t hold your breath waiting to find one).

I guess this is another case of Tenure Doesn’t Grow On Trees You Know.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Longtime readers will remember Barrett Brown, the former “Anonymous” spokesman who went to federal prison after a September 2012 incident in which he threatened an FBI agent’s family in a bizarre 13-minute video rant on YouTube. That episode went down while I was trying to cover the 2012 presidential election, but Barrett had been threatening me (and also Patterico) in connection with some of the weirdness swirling around Neal Rauhauser, which is a very long story.

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Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the FDA, published a letter Friday asking the federal government’s top inspector to investigate if FDA staff worked inappropriately with biotech company Biogen to approve the new drug.

“To the extent these concerns could undermine the public’s confidence in FDA’s decision, I believe that it is critical that the events at issue be reviewed by an independent body such as the Office of the Inspector General, in order to determine whether any interactions that occurred between Biogen and FDA review staff were inconsistent with FDA policies and procedures,” she wrote in the open letter.

The drug in question, Aduhelm, was approved by the agency last month and has caused an uproar in the scientific community. Three of the agency’s scientific advisors resigned following the decision.

Deep state, anyone?

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Former news anchor Kari Lake announced her candidacy in June, positioning herself as the “only conservative, America First Trump Republican in the race.” But instead of spending the opening weeks of the campaign touting her conservative bona fides, Lake has sparred with local media over her donations to liberal politicians.

Gee, I guess she lied. How unexpected….

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The leftist bull is finally spilling over into the real world and normal Americans are not okay with it. One woman in a viral Twitter video, found herself fighting for her basic rights while at a spa trying to relax. The unnamed woman was at Wi Spa in Los Angeles, California, when a naked biological male entered the women’s section. She then recorded her reaction and conversation with the employees on her phone.

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Classified Ministry of Defence documents containing details about HMS Defender and the British military have been found at a bus stop in Kent.

One set of documents discusses the likely Russian reaction to the ship’s passage through Ukrainian waters off the Crimea coast on Wednesday.

Another details plans for a possible UK military presence in Afghanistan after the US-led Nato operation there ends.

The government said an investigation had been launched.

Well, that’s all right, then.

The documents, almost 50 pages in all, were found in a soggy heap behind a bus stop in Kent early on Tuesday morning.

A member of the public, who wishes to remain anonymous, contacted the BBC when he realised the sensitive nature of the contents.

Note: The BBC. Not the Ministry of Defence. (If you had found classified documents behind a bus station, would you have notified the Washington Post rather than the DOJ?)

This is why we can’t ever have nice things.

Read it.

Notice how nobody is developing meat-based vegetarian food. Guess why that might be.

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The latest news out of radical racial justice land would be terrifying if it weren’t so damn funny. BET studios actually dropped a trailer for a new movie titled “Karen,” a flick about a terrifying “entitled white woman” who terrorizes her new African American neighbors.