OffGuardian.

These guys aren’t known for their humor–they prefer to rain on any parade they can find–but this particular instance would grace the Babylon Bee.

My favorite:

16. If a friend recommends a Netflix show that is awful, don’t ever talk to them again. You don’t need friends like that.

24/7 Wall Street.

According to a survey by Gallup, a polling agency, 33% of Americans personally own a firearm. The motivations for owning a gun vary by person. Most Americans point to protection or hunting as the main reason behind their decision to purchase a firearm. However, some are required by their jobs to own a gun, and others cite sport shooting or owning a gun collection.

Whatever the reasoning behind owning a gun – firearm sales are booming. In 2023, the industry generated as much as $90.06 billion in total economic activity, as reported by the Firearm Industry Trade Association. (Click here to see the the top-selling gun of all time.)

It’s important to note that the rates of gun ownership vary significantly among diverse demographic groups, regions, income brackets, and other categorizations.

Read it.

The Bowie knife holds a significant place in history as one of the iconic blades. It was first created by James Bowie in the 19th century. Today, this knife continues to be a choice for enthusiasts, adventurers, and collectors. However, given the range of options in the market, choosing the perfect Bowie knife can pose a challenge. In this guide for buyers, we will delve into factors to consider when selecting a Bowie knife that aligns with your preferences and requirements.

I prefer an Arkansas Toothpick, actually, but that’s just me.

And, of course, when you’ve said Ka-Bar, you’ve said it all, as many Marines will testify.

The Antiplanner.

A little more than half of America’s incorporated cities collectively lost 2.7 million residents between 2020 and 2023, according to estimates released by the Census Bureau earlier this week. New York City alone lost almost 500,000 residents, or 5.5 percent of its population, while the next 20 biggest losers together lost about half a million people.

The biggest losers, other than New York City, were Chicago (-78,877), Los Angeles (-74,934), San Francisco (-61,530), Philadelphia (-50,142), San Jose (-39,664), and Portland (-22,846). San Francisco’s population slightly recovered between 2022 and 2023, but most major cities that have lost population have seen declines in every year from 2020 to 2023.

Out of 19,484 incorporated cities, population fell in 10,691, while the population of 8,049 cities collectively grew by 3.95 million people. (Some 744 small towns saw no change in population.) Of the cities that grew, the biggest growth was recorded by San Antonio (56,038), Fort Worth (54,866), Port St. Lucie (38,206), Phoenix (37,611), and Charlotte (35,559).

Read it.

There’s a war being waged for America’s elementary, middle, and high school students. But the leftist agenda-driven campaign that began behind the closed doors of teachers unions and government-run schools is now out in the open and has led to a “parent revolution,” says Corey DeAngelis.

The “teachers unions overplayed their hand and awakened a sleeping giant, which happens to be parents who want more of a say in their kids’ education,” says DeAngelis, author of “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.”

DeAngelis—sometimes referred to as the “school choice evangelist”—dedicated his new book to “Randi Weingarten [president of the American Federation of Teachers] and the teachers unions for inadvertently doing more to advance school choice and homeschooling than anyone could have ever imagined.”

The New Neo.

How bad must it be for Anderson Cooper to admit that Michael Cohen appears to be a liar?

Of course, the jury might not care, because they hate Trump so much. And Cooper tries to limit the idea of Cohen as a liar to just this little itty bitty bit.

Read it.

Already in fiscal year 2024, more Chinese nationals have crossed America’s southern border than the three previous fiscal years combined. Under the Biden administration, “there is no serious vetting” of illegal aliens from China, Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., said during a House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability hearing held Thursday afternoon.

A five-question “limited interview,” as Bishop calls it, “combined with a lack of reliable information from China to verify biographical claims and limited translation services, severely constrain CBP’s ability to conduct rigorous vetting for criminal and national security concerns.”

John Derbyshire alway used to say that there wasn’t anything wrong with New York City that adding about a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix.

Read it.

n childhood, Tasliym Morales was always interested in civic affairs, so it was no surprise to those who knew her that as soon she turned 18, she registered to vote. What did take her family and friends aback, however, was the political party affiliation she chose.

“Republican,” she says with a broad smile.

The striking mother of six is sitting at the head table of the Delaware County Republican Party chairman’s dinner, dressed in a rich red jacket topping a paisley dress discussing her reasons for choosing the Grand Old Party when most of her peers and family – Morales is black – were Democrats.

The willingness of the Democrats to run a woke sock-puppet for President is opening a lot of eyes … and brains.

Read it.

Since the Stone Age, hunters have brought down big game with spears, atlatls, and bows and arrows. Now, a new study reveals traditional societies around the globe also relied on another deadly but often-overlooked weapon: our legs.

According to a report published today in Nature Human Behaviour, running down big game such as antelope, moose, and even kangaroos was far more widespread than previously recognized. Researchers documented nearly 400 cases of endurance pursuits—a technique in which prey are chased to exhaustion—by Indigenous peoples around the globe between the 16th and 21st centuries. And in some cases, they suggest, it can be more efficient than stealthy stalking.

The findings bolster the idea that humans evolved to be hunting harriers, says Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. “Nobody else has come up with any other explanation for why humans evolved to run long distances,” says Lieberman, who adds that he’s impressed with the paper’s “depth of scholarship.”

Erik Prince.

It is painfully apparent to anyone of sound mind and judgment that there’s something gravely wrong with America’s current military capacity and our ability to project power in the world. The WWII-era fighting force composed of fourteen million GIs with a muscular industrial base backing them up is almost unimaginable today. In the last three years, five different US embassies have been hastily evacuated: Sudan, Afghanistan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Niger. Americans are held hostage in Gaza; commercial shipping traffic is blockaded and our ground and naval forces are shot at daily with impunity. How did America go from winning the Cold War and becoming the sole global superpower in the 90s to the state of disarray that we find ourselves in now?

ZMan does a deep dive.

A regular feature of the internet age is the emergence of what is called a “new right” that is supposed to supplant the “old right.” This is largely due to the collapse of Buckley-style conservatism over the last twenty years. The assumption is that the failures of mainstream conservatism and its dwindling demographic must lead to its demise and its replacement by a new, more contemporary right. As a result, there have been a lot of hats thrown into the ring from alternative rights.

What may be emerging as the real threat to win the competition is something that has yet to name itself. The recent hit piece on the publisher of Passage Press, the group responsible for rehabilitating Steve Sailer, led to a gathering of online friends and acquaintances in support of the publisher. This is the online character known as Lomez, who has written for Claremont sites and has a big following on Twitter. He is part of a loose network of influencers that could be called the Cosmo Right.

That is the first place to start with understanding this collection of people emerging into a movement of sorts. They are cosmopolitan in the old bourgeois sense of the word, as they often live in or around the trendy cities. Maybe they went to a college that is near a trendy city or they worked at a company in a hipsterville. Maybe they just like to hang out in places like Austin. It is not so much about location when it comes to their cosmopolitanism, but their attitude.

Read it.

When they were still in arts school in Seattle in the early 1990s, Jesper Myrfors and Sandra Everingham would sometimes look for inspiration by exploring Fort Worden, an abandoned 19th-century military base at the entrance of the Puget Sound. To them, it felt like a dwarven ruin.

One day they found a trap door hidden in the woods near the fort, which opened to reveal a rusty ladder leading to a series of underground bunkers filled with broken doors and graffiti. Myrfors snapped a portrait of Everingham as she stood near the base of the ladder, head limned by sunlight, and then forgot about it.

“Later I was looking for some good lighting reference for hair and I remembered the photo, so I took it out and started painting,” said Myrfors. Before he knew it, he had produced an image called The Fallen, one of the thousands of cards that populate the legendary deck-building game, Magic: The Gathering. That card still gives Myrfors the creeps, 30 years later. “It freaked me out a bit, how easily it was created. Almost as if it created itself.”

Welcome to the Heartland.

Read it.

The Florida Keys are a place where deer stand next to children at school-bus stops. They lounge on lawns. They eat snacks right out of people’s hands. So when the deer began acting strangely in the summer of 2016, the people of the Keys noticed. Bucks started swinging their heads erratically, as if trying to shake something loose.

Then wounds opened on their heads—big, gaping wounds that exposed white slabs of bone. Something was eating the deer alive.

That something, lab tests would later confirm, was the New World screwworm, a parasite supposed to have been eradicated from the United States half a century ago. No one in the Keys had ever seen it. If you had asked an old-time Florida rancher though, he might have told you boyhood stories of similarly disfigured and dying cattle. In those days, screwworms found their way into cattle through any opening in the skin: the belly buttons of newborn calves, scratches from barbed wire, even a tick bite. Then they feasted.

Kind of a metaphor for Democrat politicians.

Read it.

Results from a groundbreaking clinical trial of CRISPR gene editing in 14 individuals with a form of inherited blindness show that the treatment is safe and led to measurable improvements in 11 of the participants treated. The phase 1/2 trial called BRILLIANCE, was led by principal investigator Eric Pierce, MD, PhD, of Mass Eye and Ear, a member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, and sponsored by Editas Medicine, Inc. Findings are reported on May 6th in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“This research demonstrates that CRISPR gene therapy for inherited vision loss is worth continued pursuit in research and clinical trials,” said Pierce, director of Ocular Genomics Institute and Berman-Gund Laboratory for the Study of Retinal Degenerations at Mass Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School. “While more research is needed to determine who may benefit most, we consider the early results promising. To hear from several participants how thrilled they were that they could finally see the food on their plates –that is a big deal. These were individuals who could not read any lines on an eye chart and who had no treatment options, which is the unfortunate reality for most people with inherited retinal disorders.”

Alex Tabarrok.

Alec Stapp points out that Canada is the only NATO country that has a free trade agreement with the United States. That’s quite remarkable if you think about it. NATO allies are bound by mutual defense commitments, support for military cooperation, and a dedication to democratic principles. Despite these shared commitments, the U.S. still enforces tariffs and quotas on our NATO allies including France, Germany, the UK, Denmark, Portugal, and Spain. This is like getting married and not having a joint checking account. If they are good enough partners to commit to their defense then surely NATO allies are good enough partners to commit to free trade?

Sarah Hoyt.

If you are talking to a communist, or another religious believer in science or theory, they will want you to prove that you are correct if you say that they are practicing magical thinking. Since magical thinking was evolutionarily favored for reason of making reactions fast, without stopping to reason, evaluate proofs or logic, a magical thinker might be closed to the most obvious proofs that they are indulging in such.

Read it.

Newly released images of China’s new aircraft carrier undertaking sea trials have further highlighted the scale of the country’s naval modernisation efforts as it continues to carve out of sphere of influence into, though, and beyond the western Pacific.

Publishing a series of images on 8 May 2024, China’s Ministry of National Defense stated that the Fujian had completed its maiden voyage as the vessel begins to undertake sea trials required before it can enter service with the People’s Liberation Army Navy, also known as the PLAN.

Beijing is set on spending enormous sums of money on expanding and modernising its armed forces with defence expenditure recorded a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.5% during 2019–23 and was forecast to register a CAGR of 6.6% from 2023 to value $323.7bn by 2028.

China’s Ministry of National Defense is also expected to spend $1.4trn over 2024–28 on the procurement of military hardware and the modernisation of its armed forces, according to GlobalData forecasts.

“You’d  be surprised by what you don’t need.” — Rollo Tomassi.

Read it.

If you had to identify a specific type of real estate that has seen its value increase because of changing consumer eating habits, global demographic shifts, worldwide pandemic preparedness, and US export policy — while its importance to reducing global carbon emissions and adapting to climate change rise in tandem — refrigerated warehouses may not be your first pick.

But there’s a strong case to be made that the expansion and evolution of the cold-storage industry — often called the “cold chain” — will play a significant role in energy, environmental, and economic news in the 21st century. Cold storage facilities aren’t fun places to visit; some are kept so frigid, at minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, that the workers who toil in these windowless spaces rotate in 15-minute shifts, despite their heavy protective gear.

Power Line.

The Babylon Bee—”America’s newspaper of record,” as Glenn Reynolds likes to put it—has established itself as a premier humor and political satire site of our time. They’ve pretty much put The Onion out of business, though one reason for this is The Onion slowly succumbed to wokery, and hence has trouble in the humor department. (Check it out if you want; it’s pretty weak these days.)

Watch it.

Wisdom. Attend.

(Love me that pull-down shelving.)

Read it.

More than most technical procedures in the ancient world, drilling of hard stone such as quartz and granite has evoked awe and puzzlement. Neither wall paintings, nor textual information, nor excavated material has provided complete answers as to how drilling was done. As a conse­quence, there has been scholarly contro­versy. One such disagreement occurred between two eminent Egyptologists, A. Lucas and Sir Flinders Petrie. Their argument revolved around a difficult and important question, namely, how did the ancient Egyptians of the 3rd millennium B.C. drill granite?

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“If you’re not with me, then you are my enemy,” proclaims the young, rebellious Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker during the emotional climax of Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. To this, his disappointed master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, replies, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes. I will do what I must,” as he switches on his lightsabre. Even though the lightsabre duel that follows is universally praised as a piece of cinematic brilliance, the dialogue has left many Star Wars fans annoyed and disillusioned.

The problem is this: To claim that 1) “Only a Sith” 2) “deals in absolutes” is in itself an absolutist statement; we have here an internal contradiction. If this is really the case, then Obi-Wan has just proven himself to be a Sith. It is safe to say that this is not what George Lucas had in mind. So, theoretically, the whole philosophy of the Star Wars franchise falls flat as a result of this claim.

There is a stark parallel between the frustration that Star Wars fans express about this piece of half-baked Jedi philosophy and that of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor about the theory underpinning liberalism.

Read it.

Concerned by the increasing number of attacks on elected leaders, the German government is working on a plan to provide more protection for politicians, while ordinary citizens will be left to their own devices.

Europeans have always been more statist than Americans.

Read it.

New reporting from Forbes published last week outlines a host of college campuses employers are turning to instead of Ivy League institutions — including two in Texas.

The University of Texas at Austin and Rice University joined the rankings of new public and private school elites which are “attracting the smartest students and plaudits from employers.”

Forbes’ researchers said the evaluation came as the traditional Ivy League institutions have “faced a barrage of complaints in recent years” related to admissions policies, grade inflations at several elite schools and university officials’ responses to on-campus protests regarding the Israel-Hamas War.

For Forbes’ methodology, researchers removed the eight classic Ivy League institutions (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth and Cornell) as well as the “Ivy-plus yardstick”: Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University and the University of Chicago.

I’d include UCLA in that latter category. However, the point of the Ivy League is that they are private institutions; UT Austin is a public school, and so wouldn’t qualify, nor is it really of the same quality as the Ivies, although Rice certainly is. If one is looking for value for money, Rice would be hard to beat.

Read it.

Think globally, self-harm locally.

Read it.

Guess wrong, get stuck.

Ride the fashion, get a mashin’.

Read it.

Roxanne Mathai, a lieutenant with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) at the time she traveled to Washington, will receive $395,000 in a settlement reached after she sued her former employer, the parties in the case told The Epoch Times.

“Being a parent is always standing on the bridge, watching the water flow.” — James Lileks

“You have to do what others won’t so that you can eventually do what others can’t.” — Rollo Tomassi.

Zman goes on a journey.

When was the last time you changed your mind? Most likely the answer takes some time as humans tend not to change their opinion on things that much and when they do, it happens over a slow period. Most people on this side of the great divide did not wake up one day and decided to abandon their old worldview. People slowly came to realize that the old way of looking at things was not working and then all of a sudden, they noticed lots of other people noticing the same thing.

That has always been the reality of the red pill experience. It is not so much that the person getting red pilled is going through a sudden transformation but that they are suddenly noticing lots of other people who are on the same road. Almost everyone in the dissident space came here by first running into a writer, YouTuber or social media character that articulated what they were thinking. Then it was another and another until the person was firmly in the dissident camp.

Read it.

The source of biblical theology comes from the biblical languages. So imperative is the study of the Bible’s original languages, that I will make this declaration: as soon as a Christian university or seminary gives up the necessary study of Hebrew and Greek, its theology will move from its foundations. The reason? If there is no original word from which our words come, then biblical theology can easily become a man-made theology.

Amen to that.

Brief example: Consider Ephesians 5:22, translated by the Authorized Version as “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as to the Lord.” Except that it doesn’t actually say that–Greek has a perfectly good word for ‘submit’, hupoballein, which is not used in this passage.

Greek doesn’t have separate specific words for ‘husband’ or ‘wife’; the term for ‘spouse’ is suzugos, and one adds ‘male’ or ‘female’ to specify which one. But suzugos isn’t used in this passage either. The actual words used are anEr (‘man’) and gunE (‘woman’), so it would apply to boyfriend/girlfriend (or ‘partner’) as readily as to a married couple.

The verb almost always translated as something like ‘submit’ is actually hupotassein, which is a technical military term used (for example) in indicating that soldiers are lining up in formation for battle behind their commander. So a better translation would be ‘Women, fall in behind your own men.’ Makes a bit of a difference, does it not?

But if you’re just reading a translation by people with a theological axe to grind, you lose any significant chance of truly understanding what is going on. Nuance matters. And if you don’t make an effort to understand the original language, you’ll miss it.

Translators lie as readily as politicians, and from the same motivation, an attitude of patronizing moral superiority. Resist them, steadfast in the faith.

Read it.

Germany, like other Western European countries, is averse to deporting migrants, whether legal or illegal. Unless, of course, they’re Ukrainian men of military age: then they must be sent back so that they can serve as cannon fodder and be fed into the Russian meat grinder. All for the sake of Ukrainian democracy.

Read it.

The Hebrew word “hostages” can be translated into English as “children of surety,” and in many languages the word for “hostage” means both “security, pledge” and “people captured (held) in pledge.” The Greek for “hostage” (hóm?ros) will come as a surprise to many. Is this, we wonder, the meaning of Homer’s name? Why was the most famous Greek in history called this? Since nothing is known about Homer, we will avoid guesswork. In any case, the word does not go back to the poet’s name: the opposite is true. Moreover, this noun occurs in neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey. Though its etymology is far from clear, hóm?ros does not seem to have emerged from any root meaning “pledge” or “security.” May the poet sleep in peace, while those whose only connection with Homer is by way of Homer Simpson enjoy their hero’s deeds. Needless to say, Homer is a fully acceptable name in today’s English-speaking world.

“Conservative is just the long spelling of Retarded.” — ZMan

ZMan is not objecting to conservatism but rather the current incarnation of Conservatism, Inc.

ZMan looks ahead.

There is an old expression in politics that roughly says the most successful politicians are blessed with the right enemies. William Weld, a long time Massachusetts politician, was enormously gifted, until alcoholism got the better of him. He could have reshaped state politics and become a national figure, but he ran into the far wilier Billy Bulger at the local level and the more powerful duo of John Kerry and Ted Kennedy at the national level, so he never lived up to his promise.

We seem to be seeing the opposite with Donald Trump, who has better political instincts than most seasoned professionals, even though his only political experience was at the very top of the game eight years ago. Imagine a fighter stepping into the ring for the first time and the opponent is the reigning world champion. Then imagine that guy winning, and you see the enormity of 2016. Since then, the system has thrown everything at the man, and he is still going.

The main reason Trump continues to move toward the Republican nomination and a general election rematch is he is blessed with the best enemies. The two Federal court cases are now stalled indefinitely. In both cases, the reason for the delay is the chief inquisitor appointed by the Biden administration is proving to be an incompetent fanatic who cannot stop lying to the court. In the most recent example, he was forced to admit the FBI tampered with evidence and lied about it.

Wall Street Journal.

Surprise fees are widely hated, but they are still sneaking onto the bottom of bills for everything from concert tickets to dinners out.
More companies are unbundling the cost of their goods and services, retail analysts say, tacking on 3% for swiping a credit card or adding a little extra for gas. With Live Nation Entertainment facing scrutiny over its ticketing process, singer Maggie Rogers recently urged her fans to buy tickets to her next show at the box office “like it’s 1965” to avoid fees, even showing up at one herself. The Cure’s Robert Smith, meanwhile, convinced Live Nation Entertainment subsidiary Ticketmaster to offer some fee refunds.
The upshot is that prices we see, whether on a restaurant menu or flight-booking site, are rarely the ones we end up paying.