The American Mind.

In early 2022, Capital Research Center alerted Fox News to the existence of a secret 501(c)(3) “charity” called Governing for Impact. The research organization and its sister (c)(4) “dark money” group, the Governing for Impact Action Fund, exist to research, write, promote, and defend new federal regulations for the Biden Administration to issue. These two groups, sponsored by Arabella’s New Venture Fund and Sixteen Thirty Fund, respectively, received a combined $17.4 million in funding from Soros grant-makers from 2019 to 2021. Most surprisingly, the group intentionally operated far under the radar from its launch in 2019 (long before the 2020 presidential election) because its website was carefully set to be invisible to Google and other search engines. That’s right; it was hidden from the public, who couldn’t find it even by accident. But friends, including in the Biden Administration, could reach it if they were told the site’s URL, GoverningForImpact.org, and typed that into their computers. (After news reports based on our research “outed” the site, it became visible to search engines.)

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Tennessee’s GOP-controlled Statehouse on Thursday approved approval criminalizing adults who help minors receive gender-affirming care without parental consent, clearing the way for the first-in-the-nation proposal to be sent to Gov. Bill Lee’s desk for his signature.

As the AP reports, the bill mirrors almost the same language from a so-called anti-abortion trafficking proposal Tennessee Republican lawmakers approved just a day prior. In that version, supporters are hoping to stop adults from helping young people obtain abortions without permission from their parents or guardians.

Supporters of Lee, a Republican, are certain he will sign them into law. Lee eagerly approved a sweeping abortion ban and a ban on gender-affirming care for children. He has also never issued a veto during his time as governor.

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Half of Americans, including 42% of Democrats, said they would support mass deportations of undocumented migrants, according to a poll released Thursday.

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Imagine that.

“We observed associations between cumulative marijuana use and multiple epigenetic markers across time,” Lifang Hou, a preventative medical doctor and epidemiologist from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine explained in July 2023.

So much for all the stoners who complained that marijuana was harmless.

The addition or removal of methyl groups from DNA is one of the most studied epigenetic modifications. Without changing the genomic sequence, it changes the activity of genes, because it’s harder for cells to read the genome instruction manual with these molecular changes in their way.

Environmental and lifestyle factors can trigger these methylation changes, which can be passed onto future generations, and blood biomarkers can provide information about both recent and historical exposures.

Trofim Lysenko, you’re up.

“Fast money comes with slow problems.” — Adam Sosnik

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Nearly 90% of unborn babies prenatally diagnosed with Down’s syndrome in England and Wales (and Crown Dependencies) were aborted in 2021, according to official data released last month. These statistics were published on the day preceding the UK’s four-day Easter weekend, deliberately, it appears, to bury 973 victims whose deaths were assented to by the state—the PR equivalent of scattering twigs and leaves over a shallow grave.

Every year, thousands of unborn children considered undesirable are made to disappear around Europe. A study published in 2021 estimated that there were 9,300 fewer people born with Down’s syndrome annually in Europe between 2011 and 2015 because of abortion, a reduction rate of over 50%. In total, abortion accounted for approximately 155,000 missing people with Down’s syndrome who’d otherwise be alive in 2015. That figure has surely risen.

The proliferation of abortion and non-invasive prenatal testing has wiped out much of the Down’s syndrome population in recent years. In the age of identity, when so-called ‘victimised’ groups gain special protections from the state and a culture that elevates minorities over the majority, the singling out of unborn children with disabilities is accepted and encouraged.

Out of sight, out of mind. The eugenics gene of progressivism expresses itself whenever it can.

UnHerd.

Here’s a version of a story you might have heard before: first feminists got what they wanted, and then they got what they deserved. At some point in the Noughties, the idea that men and women were fundamentally alike in character and aptitude (if not in body) became the only acceptable thing to believe; and at some point shortly after that, the doctrine of transgenderism swept in and swept away every claim feminism had ever made. It’s a classic of the monkey’s paw genre: be careful what you wish for.

According to this account, feminist writers had devoted themselves to rooting out the scourge of “neurosexism”, and they had been all too successful. By rejecting the idea of inherent sex difference, writers such as Cordelia Fine (in Delusions of Gender) and Rebecca Jordan-Young (in Brain Storm) had effectively undone the very class they claimed to represent. The most appealing part of this story is, of course, that it takes a particularly virulent attack on women’s rights and pins the blame for it on women.

But it also has a germ of truth to it: there is a strand of feminism that has always seemed deeply uncomfortable with the idea of sex difference. “Born this way” might make strategic sense as a slogan for other civil rights movements, but for the women’s movement, it would have come close to an admission of defeat: born to be underpaid and sexually harassed. No wonder there was an insistent pull towards a form of blank slatism for some feminists.

Navy Matters.

It’s no secret that the military is struggling.  Recruiting is in the tank.  Readiness is near zero.  Maintenance is non-existent.  Gender, diversity, and environmental concerns dominate over warfighting.  The Secretary of Defense has listed climate as one of the top priorities.  The fleet is shrinking despite the Navy stating that a war with China is imminent.  Ships are being retired decades early due to poor planning (LCS, MLP, AFSB, etc.).  Our reserve fleet is nearly non-existent.  Unbelievably, the Army is looking to recall retirees to active duty.

All these problems stem from the quality of the people populating the military. These kinds of problems don’t just happen like the common cold. They’re the result of decisions by people. Bad decisions. Cowardly decisions. Stupid decisions. Traitorous decisions. Criminal decisions.

Naval Gazing.

For those who weren’t paying attention, reports generally seem to agree that Iran (and its proxies in Yemen) launched about 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles and 110-120 ballistic missiles. And to be clear, 300+ missiles (some sources are saying 350, probably with the balance made up by more drones) is a lot. For comparison, during the first Gulf War, the United States launched 288 Tomahawks. Obviously, that was in the context of a much larger air campaign, but this was clearly more than just lobbing a few missiles as harassment.

But the attack was a complete failure, with the net result reported of two Israeli airbases damaged (not clear exactly how much) and a single girl left in critical condition by falling debris. Some of this was because about half of the Iranian ballistic missiles failed during launch and crashed short of the target1 but most of it was a superb performance by Israeli and American ABM systems, and the rapid work of an impromptu coalition of basically everyone who wasn’t Iran in the region to deal with the atmospheric threat.

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Scientists developing China’s next-generation nuclear submarine technology say they have found a way to significantly improve the efficiency of the laser propellers that could one day drive the underwater vessels.

The researchers said the new technology can produce nearly 70,000 newtons of thrust – almost the force of a commercial jet engine – using 2 megawatts of laser power emitted through the submarine’s coating of optical fibres, each thinner than a human hair – an efficiency previously thought impossible to achieve.

The laser pulses not only generate thrust but also vaporise seawater, creating bubbles all over the submarine’s surface in a phenomenon known as “supercavitation” which can significantly reduce water resistance.

We’ve all had that experience.

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We’ve been told for decades that heart disease is caused by saturated fat found in butter, meat, and eggs, but recent research reveals that the studies promoting these messages were heavily compromised.

Any organization is, first of all, an organization, which means it eventually is run by people who would rather run an organization than do what the organization is all about in the first place. The opportunities for corruption are obvious.

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The Monty Python veteran is as feisty as ever at 84, slashing those attempting to crush comedy that breaks any kind of so-called rule.

Cleese opened up to FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff about free speech, “The Life of Brian” and much more in a revealing chat. FIRE stands for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a group that often does what the ACLU once did – stands up for free speech.

Note to self: When the orcs start running, don’t stick around to find out what’s coming.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the unremarked things that has happened over the past ten years is the collapse of the so-called man-o-sphere. There may be people still working that land, but all the big names have moved on or disappeared. The pickup artist have all disappeared from the internet entirely. That whole scene just seems to have folded up and gone the way of the dinosaur without anyone noticing.

One reason is the demographic aged out of the material. A guy like Heartiste, for example, could do the pickup artist stuff when he was early middle-age, but once you hit fifty you become a skeevy weirdo, not a Don Juan. The same holds for the other subcultures in that space. Once you reach middle-age, it all starts to sound a bit weird and pointless, even to the people making money off it.

There is another aspect to it. That whole scene was a reaction to the feminization of the culture starting with second wave feminism. The next generation of males have no frame of reference in which to have a reaction. The typical Zoomer has been raised in the longhouse, to use the cool kid’s term. He has no way of knowing that all of this is both weird and unnatural.

That is the point of the show. The male role is not a slippery concept that changes from one generation to the next. It has been revolutionized and pulverized over the last few decades, but that is what makes this age anomalous. The male role in society is timeless, at least in the Western world. There are certain immutable characteristic to being a man that will reassert themselves in the coming years.

Steve Sailer.

It’s widely assumed, both by Jews and by anti-Semites, that the roots of American progressivism are heavily Jewish.

Yet, Jews had relatively little impact on the crucial first century of the American republic, from the Declaration of Independence through the end of Reconstruction. Yet progressivism that is ideologically ancestral to contemporary “In this house we believe” wokeness was already ascendant during the second quarter of the 19th Century in New England and its cultural satellites upstate New York, and northern Ohio, and triumphed nationally in the 1860s, if only briefly, from say 1862-1868.

For example, one of the first incidents in which I became aware of the Great Awokening was during the winter of 2013 when students at traditionally leftist Oberlin College in northern Ohio had one of their freakouts over the KKK running amok on campus (it turned out, evidently, to be a lady, perhaps homeless, walking around on a cold night with a white blanket draped around her).

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South Dakota state Sen. John Wiik likes to think of himself as a lookout of sorts — keeping an eye on new laws, programs and ideas brewing across the states.

“I don’t bring a ton of legislation,” said Wiik, a Republican. “The main thing I like to do is try and stay ahead of trends and try and prevent bad things from coming into our state.”

I like him already. Would that more elected officials made that their priority.

This session, that meant sponsoring successful legislation banning cities or counties from creating basic income programs, which provide direct, regular cash payments to low-income residents to help alleviate poverty.

While Wiik isn’t aware of any local governments publicly floating the idea in South Dakota, he describes such programs as “bureaucrats trying to hand out checks to make sure that your party registration matches whoever signed the checks for the rest of your life.”

Sounds like he’s been paying attention.

You always get more of what you are willing to pay for. If you pay people who aren’t working, you’ll always get more people not working. To have the income of as many people as possible dependent on the government is the cornerstone of modern progressivism.

ZMan looks under the hood.

For most people this sounds logical. You start every project with the end in mind and you see that is the Yarvin – Rufo debate. In fact, that is the primary appeal of both Chris Rufo and Curtis Yarvin. They hold up this image of a possible future and if you like what you see, you support their program. This has been how political debate has been framed in the West since the French Revolution. You are presented with two images of the future and asked to pick one of them.

The problem with this, the reason that ideology must always fail, is that it never considers if the end is possible or even plausible. This is not because the ideologue is incapable of doubting the ideology. It is because ideology must always rest on the assumption that all societies are intentional societies. What we see is the product of human labor, therefore the goodness or badness of society reflects the goodness or badness of the people who made it.

Good people not only follow a certain code, but they must constitute the telos of the society of which they are a part. No ideology ever concludes that the ideologue must disengage with society, other than if it helps him engage with fellow ideologues in plotting to overthrow the present order. Ideology assumes you must be engage in the project of moving society toward the desired end. Otherwise, you are assumed to be working against those who are doing so.

This is why both libertarianism and modern-day conservatism must inevitably fail.

“A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right.” — ALUX on YouTube

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A national study published by JAMA Health Forum found that there was an abrupt surge in permanent sterilization procedures among young adults ages 18 through 30 after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, which reversed the constitutional right to an abortion.

“If options for avoiding pregnancy and/or avoiding carrying pregnancies to term are severely limited, as has happened in 21 states since Dobbs, many patients will choose permanent ways to avoid this risk, rather than relying on less effective or less permanent methods,” Sarah W. Prager, MD, a professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, told Healthline.

Following the Dobbs ruling, researchers observed an abrupt increase of 58 sterilization procedures for women, averaging around 5.31 procedures per month per 100,000 individuals. This marks an almost twofold increase from the prior rate of 2.84 procedures per month for women.

Think of it as evolution in action.

The New Yorker.

A little more than a decade ago, Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm run by the entrepreneur, investor, and political gadfly Peter Thiel, issued a proclamation called “What Happened to the Future?” As an investment thesis, it was underwhelming—it advanced biotechnology, energy, and the Internet as smart bets—but it was received as something of a spiritual treatise. Thiel was best known for his early investment in Facebook, but he believed that the nation had become sluggish. We might have been attempting to terraform nearby planets or surmount death. Instead, we made apps. His statement belonged to the genre of the writer F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which proposed that Italy’s moribund museum culture be razed in favor of a machine cult of speed and steel: “We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is the very first sunrise on earth!” Thiel, no poet, was punchier: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

Read it.

California created a boom by offering homeowners a chance to sell energy back to the grid at unsustainable rates.

This year utility companies then slashed what they pay to customers by 75 percent or more.

The payback time for these systems no longer makes any sense. More accurately, if you have to subsidize something, it is not economically feasible in the first place; it just looks like it.

The boom then imploded.

Would that this worked in real life.

The Guardian.

Hungry for niche knowledge to impress your colleagues? Troubled by the size of a hefty new book? Doubt your abilities to understand complex arguments? Well, today an increasingly competitive industry offers to take away these problems with one product: a book summary app.

Since these digital services first promised to boil down a title, usually a nonfiction work, a decade ago, the marketplace has become crowded. So much so that authors and publishers are concerned about the damage to sales, as well as to the habit of concentrated reading.

Some successful writers, including Amy Liptrot, also fear that apps such as Blinkist, Bookey, getAbstract and the latest, Headway, may be undermining the book trade and misrepresenting content.

A cursory review of several books on Amazon that I am interested in seems to suggest that any book worth reading very quickly has a ‘derivative’ work offering the same essential stuff in a quick and allegedly more digestible form. Often it’s difficult to tell which is the original and which the ‘condensed’ version. In the Good Old Days, lines of business such as Reader’s Digest Condensed Books (to which my parents were addicted, to my benefit) paid authors for the rights to ‘condense’ their books for republication; nowadays, of course, Ain’t Nobody Got Time for Dat (much less morals).

“When you’re trying to shoot down $10,000 drones with million dollar missiles, you can see how the math works out.” — ZMan

Definition: Propaganda organs of the ruling establishment masquerading as ‘jourlanists’ and ‘news’ organizations.

Source: Chris Rufo on the plagiarism accusations against black female professors

An apparent variant of ‘media’ based on the French word ‘merde’.

OffGuardian.

We want to know why something is the way it is. It is in our nature. It is why, now presumably understanding the movement of celestial things, we can rest watching an eclipse with the quietened birds and the colours drifting to dark, saturated. Watching as it gradually returns to normal and not be afraid.

As if normal existed now.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

On the Sunday show I said I was swearing off any Trump news until the summer, as there is only so much screeching and squealing, I can take. I needed to take a break in order to train for the coming election. I plan to stick to that for the most part but looking at the clips of Trump stopping into a Chick-fil-A and the reaction to it, I thought it may be a good time to talk about the meaning of Trump.

Read it.

Following a path blazed by the once and future Republic of Texas, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Wednesday signed into law a measure making it a state crime to enter the Hawkeye State after being deported or denied entry into the country. As an “aggravated misdemeanor,” it would subject illegal immigrants to imprisonment for up to two years.

Reynolds raced to sign the bill just one day after it cleared the state legislature. In a statement issued after the signing, she said President Biden’s neglect of border security made it imperative for Iowa to step up and fill the void.

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If an investor bets big on Apple, that investor will have a good reason to carefully monitor Apple’s performance, carefully consider how to vote in shareholder elections, and serve as a watchdog on management because of their investments. With index funds, every investor can end up so diversified the performance of each company matters little to investors. It also means that a few investment companies can end up controlling a large or sometimes majority share of every major company. In 2019, the Harvard Business Review pointed out that “either Blackrock, Vanguard, or State Street is the largest shareholder in 88% of S&P 500 companies.”

This common ownership discourages competition.

…

It also means that ideological crusades can be driven by a few investment companies. It’s hard to imagine small firms going all in on DEI or ESG investments. What small family company wants to abandon hiring the best job candidates in the name of diversity or adopt unproven “green” practices in the name of sustainability?

But if a few investment managers become passionate about such trendy left-wing ideas they can rapidly disseminate through the market.

The Guardian.

It was billed as a glass-walled city of the future, an ambitious centrepiece of the economic plan backed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to transition Saudi Arabia away from oil dependency.

Now, however, plans for the mirror-clad desert metropolis called the Line have been scaled down and the project, which was envisaged to stretch 105 miles (170km) is expected to reach just a mile and a half by 2030.

Dreamed up as a linear city that would eventually be home to about 9 million people on a footprint of just 13 sq miles, the Line is part of a wider Neom project. Now at least one contractor has begun dismissing workers.

CNBC.

Wealthy U.S. families are increasingly applying for second citizenships and national residences as a way to hedge their financial risk, according to a leading law firm.

The wealthy are building these “passport portfolios” — collections of second, and even third or fourth, citizenships — in case they need to flee their home country. Henley & Partners, a law firm that specializes in high-net-worth citizenships, said Americans now outnumber every other nationality when it comes to securing alternative residences or added citizenships.

“The U.S. is still a great country, it’s still an amazing passport,” said Dominic Volek, group head of private clients at Henley & Partners. “But if I’m wealthy, I would like to hedge against levels of volatility and uncertainty. The idea of diversification is well understood by wealthy individuals around what they invest. It makes no sense to have one country of citizenship and residence when I have the ability to actually diversify that aspect of my life as well.”

Recent high-profile examples of second citizenships include billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, who added a citizenship in New Zealand, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who applied for citizenship in Cyprus.

ZMan turns the cynicism up to 11.

For fifty years abortion was a part of the national political debate due to the fight to overturn Roe v. Wade. Those who opposed abortion sought to overturn this court decision, thus returning the issue to the people. The pro-life side assumed they could win the argument and get laws passed to end most abortions. The pro-abortion people obviously fought to prevent this, even though they always claimed the vast majority of the people saw abortion as a holy sacrament.

Abortion was always a good money maker for Conservative Inc. because on the one hand, they only had to pay lip service to the moral issue. It was not as if they could pass legislation or change a regulation to meet the demands of their voters. The courts would just strike down those changes. On the other hand, the only path to victory was getting a majority of pro-life people in office, especially the White house, so the courts could be stocked with pro-life judges. That meant voting Republican.

The way the two party grift has worked since the middle of the last century was that the Democrats conjure novel ideas and find creative ways to normalize them with the progressive segment of the population. Once these ideas gain circulation, the Republicans pretend to oppose these new ideas. Both sides squabble over it, thus narrowing the options to their preferred positions. Then they aggressively fundraise off it as the novel ideas are slowly implemented.

The genius of this arrangement is the elites get what they want, while both parties protect themselves from outside threats by sucking all the oxygen out of the room in their endless media debates. With the oxygen comes the money, which keeps both camps in the lifestyle they think they deserve. Just as important, none of that money goes to anyone who has a third opinion. The political rackets rest on every issue being reduce to a binary choice.

Binary is bad.

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An amount of land equivalent to the Isle of Wight has been added to the shorelines of 13,000 islands around the world in just the last 20 years. This fascinating fact of a 369.67 square kilometre increase has recently been discovered by a group of Chinese scientists analysing both surface and satellite records. Overall, land was lost during the 1990s, but the scientists found that in the study period of three decades to 2020 there was a net increase of 157.21 km2. The study observed considerable natural variation in both erosion and accretion. Of course, the findings blow holes in the poster scare run by alarmists suggesting that rising sea levels caused by humans using hydrocarbons will condemn many islands to disappear shortly beneath rising sea levels. By means of such flimsy scare tactics, as we have seen in many other cases, desperate attempts are made to terrify global populations to accept the insanity of the Net Zero collectivisation.

The American Mind.

When presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told CNN last week that he sees President Joe Biden as a greater threat to democracy than Donald Trump, mainstream media, academics, and elected Democrats exploded in vitriol.

Speaking on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront, Kennedy said, “I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is…the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.” Kennedy added: “The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns but a President of the United States who will use the power of his office to force the social media companies…to open a portal and give access to that portal to the FBI, CIA, the IRS, the NIH, to censor his political critics.”

Biden is not actually the first president to use federal agencies to censor political speech. Presidents John Adams and Woodrow Wilson used the Sedition Acts of 1798 and 1918 to do so, and President Roosevelt censored opponents during World War II. Nonetheless, Biden has undoubtedly overseen the most massive censorship enterprise in U.S. history, and the first to be enjoined by federal courts. That progressives embrace Biden’s affront to a right central to our democracy underscores how far the Left has travelled from its once-avowed principles. While the attack line that Trump is a fascist is so well-worn that most of us ignore it, too little attention is given to authoritarians on the Left. Fascism is a vicious ideology that was responsible for millions of deaths in the twentieth century, but communist and other socialist systems are guilty for at least ten times more murders in the name of class warfare.

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If you take a look at a map of the world’s Blue Zones — the areas with the highest concentration of centenarians — every one of them is situated along a coastline. Little wonder: settling down by the sea, in a so-called “blue space,” has been linked to a 17% reduction in mortality rate. One study suggested that living within 250 meters of a seaside environment helps reduce stress levels, with the smell and sounds offering a “wonderful tonic.”

…

That’s according to Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, a marine biologist who coined the term “blue mind theory.” (Ted Talk here, book here.) After years spent researching and protecting sea turtles, Nichols started studying the impact that water has on the human body and brain. “When you see water, when you hear water, it triggers a response in your brain that you’re in the right place,” he said in an interview.

ZMan cuts to the chase.

One of the enduring truths about war is that the side that wins is usually the side that starts with a clear objective. That understanding of the goal allows for a strategy to accomplish the goal, which then becomes the framework for the tactics required to implement the strategy and win the war. Starting with the end in mind also allows for changes in strategy and tactics to account for the unknown unknowns that are always a part of a military conflict. No plan survives contact with the enemy.

We may be about to see this in the Ukraine war. From the start the Russians have had a very clear understanding of their interests in Ukraine. This predates the war by about a thousand years. Russia is a land power without natural barriers between itself and its neighbors, so the goal of Russian foreign policy since forever has been to maintain space between Russia and its neighbors. The Ukraine has always been part of that space controlled by the Russians.

This is why the Russians had clear demands at the start of the war. They wanted the Russian speaking areas liberated from Ukrainian control, they wanted Ukraine demilitarized and they wanted NATO out of Ukraine. When the war started, these goals did not have to change as they were the reason for the war. The Russians would simply have to do what was necessary to impose these ends. In other words, once the war started, the question was how not why.

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Two Bay Area railway workers gave new meaning to “transit oriented development” – when they allegedly built two illegal apartments inside train stations for a combined $50,000.
San Mateo prosecutors allege that two former Caltrain officials built two secret office-to-apartment conversions in two Peninsula stations south of San Francisco, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
Former Caltrain Deputy Director Joseph Navarro and contractor Seth Andrew Worden face felony charges for misusing public funds to build the mini apartments in the historic Burlingame and Millbrae stations. Neither facility is being used by the public.

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A Nebraska state legislator is transitioning from blue to red after his own party censured him for having a pro-life stance. Nebraska state Sen. Mike McDonnell officially left the Democratic Party last week after 40 years and became a Republican.

In a written statement explaining his decision, McDonnell wrote: “I have asked the Democratic Party to respect my religious based pro-life position. Instead over the last year they have decided to punish me for being pro-life.”

Last month, the Nebraska Democratic Party voted to censure McDonnell, a Catholic, over his pro-life record, contending that his stance “adversely affected the reproductive rights of Nebraskans and the rights of transgender individuals in the state.”