Read it.

Top US virologist Ralph Baric engineered the Covid-19 virus SARS-CoV-2 in his lab at the University of North Carolina as part of his work in connection with the 2018 DEFUSE funding proposal. That’s the story that’s been going round the internet for some months now (and not just in alternative media) and it all looks very damning for Baric and those connected with his research.

Details of the DEFUSE project were first leaked by Major Joseph Murphy, an employee of US military research agency DARPA, in the summer of 2021 and further details of earlier drafts have come to light this month thanks to public record requests from U.S. Right to Know (USRTK).

In DEFUSE, Baric proposed to create a virus that was, to most intents and purposes, SARS-CoV-2. The proposal included inserting a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus spike protein, an order for the restrictive enzyme BsmBI, the search for a binding domain that would infect ACE2 human receptors and a requirement for a viral genome around 25% different to SARS.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus contains a furin cleavage site in its spike protein, its genome includes the restrictive enzyme BsmBI, it has a receptor binding domain finely tuned to infect the ACE2 human receptor and its genome is around 25% different to SARS. A number of virologists have said that such features make SARS-CoV-2 a smoking gun for an engineered virus.

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Democrats and their media allies have been comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler since 2015. It didn’t work. It never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but… it might work now?

Liberal activist Larry David wrote an op-ed for the New York Times last month comparing Trump to Hitler, which a Times editor described as “different.” One day later, Politico published an “exclusive” interview with former vice president Al Gore, who “compared President Donald Trump’s administration to Nazi Germany.” A blogger at MSNBC slammed Trump for governing “in a fashion reminiscent of Nazi Germany.” On Easter, the Atlantic ran an op-ed by a Hitler historian about the Nazi dictator’s fondness for tariffs.

These efforts by liberal journalists and politicians to equate Trump with Hitler can be dismissed as partisan nonsense. What these comparisons fail to take into account are the many ways that Democrats are literally just like Hitler, according to an actual historical analysis based on objective facts. Here are five reasons why Democrats are the same as, if not worse than, Adolf Hitler.

Read it.

Read it.

More than 125,000 New Yorkers relocated to Florida over a recent five-year span, draining the Empire State of nearly $14 billion in income, according to a new report from the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog, reported on by the New York Post.

Roughly a third of those fleeing New York City—some 41,251 residents—resettled in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward counties between 2018 and 2022, resulting in a $10 billion loss in adjusted gross income (AGI) for the city. An additional $3.8 billion in income was lost to other Florida destinations.

“They are getting something more beneficial to them,” said CBC President Andrew Rein. “The key is with any place you need the benefits to outweigh the cost. The question right now for New York is what do we offer?”

The CBC attributes the exodus to a mix of affordability concerns, public safety, quality of life, and lingering pandemic effects. Only 30% of New Yorkers rated city life as “good or excellent” in 2023—down from 50% pre-pandemic.

The Foundry.

While I never met Horowitz, I did have the opportunity to read his autobiography “Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey” for a college final paper. Somewhat ironically, the book had been recommended by a famous left-wing professor at my university whose class on the history of the American Left I was taking.

Reading the memoir would become a highlight of my college career. Horowitz was, at heart, a superb storyteller.

…

Horowitz also became acquainted with the Black Panthers during this period, in particular cultivating a friendship with the group’s founder, Huey P. Newton. As Horowitz would tell it, he even helped facilitate getting a bookkeeping job for a former Ramparts colleague named Betty Van Patter at a school run by the Black Panthers in 1974.

A few months later, Van Patter would disappear, and her severely beaten body would be fished out of the San Francisco Bay. An article published in the East Bay Express in 1989 contended that Newton took credit for ordering the death of Van Patter after she refused to lie on the bookkeeping and threatened to go to the police.

Van Patter’s slaying was a point of no return for Horowitz’s relationship with the American Left.

Babylon Bee.

Following massive power grid failures that plunged multiple countries into blackouts, Europe promised its citizens it would get electricity back up as soon as possible so everyone would be able to hear the Muslim call to prayer over the loudspeakers.

The American Mind.

What is this thing called “merit”? And what role did it play during the recent but hopefully bygone age of elite college dominance, runaway financialization, and the rise of competitive blame-shifting? This is the puzzle proffered by Nicholas Lemann in his 1999 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy: Why should competition for slots at a tiny number of selective colleges play a substantial role in how young people come to fill lucrative private sector jobs?

The American meritocracy was created in the mid-20th century by academic administrators such as war gas chemist and sometime Harvard President James Conant not to staff Wall Street but to find the best and the brightest to fill vital government and scientific positions.

We can think about how merit selection can and should work for these few and demanding positions by riffing on the 1943 Warner Brothers propaganda short The Rear Gunner. The small and folksy Burgess Meredith was the star, while the tall, slim, and handsome Ronald Reagan was in a supporting role.

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

Poor people can always be depended on to vote for The Party of Free Stuff.

Babylon Bee.

Women across the country have been shocked to learn that mifepristone and misoprostol, pills designed to murder babies in the womb, might not be all that safe.

Humor with a razor’s edge….

The New Neo.

Here’s an interesting interview with Frank Luntz. Why interesting? Why Luntz? Because he’s emblematic of so many people who sort of get the Trump phenomenon but also fail to get it.

The Free Press.

Just out of the goodness of their hearts, of course.

ZMan really doesn’t like Conservatism Inc.

One of the tricks played upon the American people since the middle of the last century has been to take unreasonable ideas and cloak them in reasonableness so that reasonable people will embrace them. The main tool for doing this has been the people we call conservatives. One of their main tasks is to take the radical ideas of the people they claim to oppose, make these ideas sound reasonable and then offer up a plan to implement these ideas in a reasonable way.

A great example of this is civil rights. Conservatives eventually came to defend and promote the cause on the grounds that it was always a conservative value, as equality before the law is a first principle of conservatism. You see, civil rights were about applying the existing law to all people. Specifically, it was about granting equality before the law to black people in the South, where those bad whites have been willfully excluding black people from the constitutional order.

Of course, the civil right agenda was vastly more radical and utopian. That is made clear in the Brown decision, which declares all discrimination is assumed to be immoral and unconstitutional by default. Therefore, anyone seeking to exercise their freedom of association must first get permission from the court. Further, it says that diversity is the highest goal, so all public policy must bend towards it. Three generations of social destruction have been the result of this new moral order.

Read it.

Set aside that MacGregor is actually a Scottish name … Hey, if Sean Connery can be a Scot, anybody can be a Scot.

A massive anti-immigration protest unfolded in the city streets of the Dublin City Centre on Saturday as public concerns surrounding mass migration backfired.

The Irish Alliance is one of the groups behind the demonstration and shared footage of UFC legend Conor McGregor at the Parnell Square site ahead of the protest.

…

Local media outlets said several thousand people turned out for the anti-immigration protest, while X videos show anti-immigration protesters were significantly higher…

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

New data out of Yale’s Youth Poll broke the internet last week when it revealed a partisan split within Gen Z. Given a generic Democrat vs. Republican ballot for 2026, respondents ages 18-21 supported Republicans by nearly 12 points, while those ages 22-29 backed Democrats by about 6 points.

It was a stunning gap that undermined the longstanding notion of younger voters always trending more liberal. On the contrary, today’s youngest eligible voters are more conservative than their older counterparts: According to the poll, they are less likely to support transgender athletes participating in sports, less likely to support sending aid to Ukraine and more likely to approve of President Donald Trump. Fifty-one percent of younger Gen Zers view him favorably, compared to 46 percent of older Gen Z.

That split might seem surprising, but it’s only the latest example of an emerging dynamic I’ve noticed developing over the last few years: It’s increasingly clear that there are actually two different Gen Z’s, each with a particular political worldview.

Don’t settle for anything less.

The Register (UK).

Called Zyrex, the robot is being designed by RIC Robotics of Torrance, California. The company expects to have a working prototype in early 2026, and said it will mark “a significant leap forward in the evolution of robotic construction.”

The 20-foot high general-purpose construction robot is, we’re told, designed to have cognitive capabilities – which will be novel for that industry – and ultimately be fully autonomous in carrying out complex and delicate tasks across commercial and industrial job sites.

It is unlikely to be able to wolf whistle at passers by and does not require copious amount of tea… like Brit builders.

It will be equipped with LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) plus visual sensors powered by VLA (Vision-Language-Action) AI models, to allow it to be deployed in dynamic job site environments, with human monitoring.

Power Line.

It would be easy to miss today’s good news, which comes via the Trump Department of Justice. The headline of the Jewish Chronicle spells it out: “US scraps UNRWA’S legal immunity in major reversal of Biden-era policy.” Subhead: “The decision could see the UN agency, which has been accused of employing Hamas operatives, hit with significant claims from the relatives of terror victims.”

And about time.

ZMan has some fun.

One of the things that comes with writing for a public audience in the digital age is the editor without portfolio. This is the person who roams the internet looking for spelling errors, punctuation mistakes, and grammar issues. There are many of these people, as the comment section of every internet post has at least one comment about a typo or alleged improper word choice. They are like the samurai without a master in feudal Japan, except they wield the blue pencil instead of a sword.

Soon, of course, they will be replaced by AI. It will not be long before the browsers simply rewrite your text in the period between when you hit submit and the text commits to the website. The robots will patrol the internet like the grammar ronin of this age but do so with a speed that the grammar ronin cannot match. Imagine a terminator sent back to seventeenth-century Japan to battle Miyamoto Musashi. By the looks of it, the days of the grammar ronin are numbered.

At least it seems that way if you assume there is only one way to construct a sentence or that the rules of grammar are iron laws of grammar. That is often how the grammar ronin look at language and writing. The rules of grammar are not merely guides to facilitate clarity but laws that must be ruthlessly enforced. Even if the grammar rule no longer works for a modern audience, the grammar ronin insist that it must be followed lest chaos be unleashed on humanity.

Read it.

Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) says the Trump administration should drop nuclear negotiations with Iran and finish off the country’s nuclear facilities with a military strike.

“Waste that s—t,” the Pennsylvania Democrat told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview on Wednesday. “You’re never going to be able to negotiate with that kind of regime that has been destabilizing the region for decades already, and now we have an incredible window, I believe, to do that, to strike and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Sense from a Democrat is like charity from a banker: unexpected but delightful when it happens.

Fetterman dismissed the foreign policy experts who warn that striking Iran would lead to the outbreak of a regional war. “And remember, all of these so-called experts were all wrong,” he said. “You know, they’ve been saying for years and years Hezbollah was the ultimate badass that kept Israel in check, and we can’t move on anything beyond that.”

As it turned out, Fetterman said, the Iranian proxy group “couldn’t fight for s—t. And Hamas, literally, are just a bunch of tunnel rats with junkie rockets in the back of a Toyota truck. And now the Houthis have been effectively neutered as well. So what’s left? You have Iran, and they have a nuclear facility, and it’s clearly only for weapons.”

What he said….

Read it.

Or not, as it pleases you.

The Enneagram is a powerful tool that helps us understand our motivations, core beliefs, and unconscious patterns that drive our behavior. We have all 9 Types in us, although one of the Enneagram Types is dominant for each of us. A good place to start with the Enneagram is in learning about all 9 Types and identifying our own dominant Enneagram Type.

How this differs from astrology eludes me.

Read it.

Integral theory as developed by Ken Wilber is a synthetic metatheory aiming to unify a broad spectrum of Western theories and models and Eastern meditative traditions within a singular conceptual framework. The original basis, which dates to the 1970s, is the concept of a “spectrum of consciousness”[1] that ranges from archaic consciousness to the highest form of spiritual consciousness, depicting it as an evolutionary developmental model.[2] This model incorporates stages of development as described in structural developmental stage theories, as well as eastern meditative traditions and models of spiritual growth, and a variety of psychic and supernatural experiences.

Read it.

Kohlberg’s theory of moral development outlines how individuals progress through six stages of moral reasoning, grouped into three levels: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional.

At each level, people make moral decisions based on different factors, such as avoiding punishment, following laws, or following universal ethical principles.

This theory shows how moral understanding evolves with age and experience.

Read it.

Another major e-commerce player is departing from Delaware as corporations pack up and find a new domicile for their businesses.

Affirm Holdings Inc., a publicly held American technology firm with a market cap of about $14 billion, is preparing a move to either Nevada or Texas, reports GuruFocus.

Affirm, founded in 2012 by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, handles financial services for merchants and shoppers. The company is headquartered in San Francisco but seeking shareholder approval to move its corporate domicile from Delaware.

Read it.

As Colorado lawmakers consider a bill that would take custody rights away from parents who diverge from transgender orthodoxy, the Trump administration’s Education Department says that children aren’t the property of the government.

“Children do not belong to the government. They belong to parents,” Education Department spokeswoman Julie Hartman told The Daily Signal.

The Colorado House of Representatives passed a bill April 6 that would remove kids from parents’ custody for behaviors such as “misgendering” and “deadnaming” a transgender-identifying child. The bill has yet to progress in the Colorado Senate.

Babylon Bee.

It would be a refreshing change….

Antigone.

Name that Order!

Why take a chance? That’s all I’m sayin’….

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision to block the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan migrants under a wartime law was premature.

Read the whole thing. It will be worth the effort.

The New Neo.

North Dakota’s governor recently signed a bill prohibiting ranked-choice voting in the state. That started a conversation and disagreement in this open thread on the subject of ranked-choice voting. In red or blue states, ranked-choice voting often pits people from the same party against each other in the final round, and because people from the opposing party have no candidate, they can vote for the candidate the members of the dominant party don’t want. It also causes confusion and delay in getting final results.

I can see where people invested in the current two-party system might object to it. I don’t see that it is incompatible with democracy. It ensures that whoever is elected is the choice of at least 50% of the voting population, which can’t be said of the current first-past-the-post elections. (Look up the last time the winner of the American Presidency got more than 50% of the vote. Go ahead–I’ll wait.) It doesn’t do anything that runoff elections don’t do, and it means less delay that runoff elections. I really don’t see what the problem is.

Watch it.

ShoeOnHead is why I watch YouTube.

The King–Crane Commission was an American fact-finding mission commissioned in 1919 by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to investigate the wishes of the peoples of the former Ottoman Empire territories after World War I, aiming to guide post-war decisions aligned with Wilson’s principle of self-determination.

Read it.

In living organisms, every protein—a type of biological polymer consisting of hundreds of amino acids—carries out specific functions, such as catalysis, molecule transport, or DNA repair. To perform these functions, they must fold up into specific shapes. It’s a complex process that’s critical to life, and despite advances in the field, there remain many open questions about the process.

Proteins are the toolbox of cellular life. The whole purpose of DNA and RNA is to create the proper proteins.

The researchers, led by Corey O’Hern, developed computational models for all globular proteins in the Protein Data Bank, an online database, and measured their interior core regions to determine how densely packed they were. Every protein had a core packing fraction of 55%. That is, 55% of the space was occupied by atoms. That led the research team to two questions.

“Why did they all have the same value? And, specifically, why is the value 55%?” said O’Hern, professor of mechanical engineering, materials science, physics, and applied physics. “The answer seems to be that the packing fraction stops increasing when the protein cores jam or rigidify.”

That is, the individual amino acids that make up the protein core couldn’t compress any further when the protein folded. The packing fraction at which objects jam together depends largely on their shape. Spherical objects, for instance, jam at a packing fraction of 64%.

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One of the primary platforms of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign was the strict control of foreign elements entering into the United States. American voters overwhelmingly supported closed borders as well as the deportation of illegal migrants and disruptive migrant elements including those that received visas and green cards under the Biden Administration. The political left, not surprisingly, has refused to accept that this is the majority view of the population as they continue to interfere with the migrant clean-up using whatever methods are at their disposal.

The question of constitutional legality has come up often. The very same people who, only a few years ago, were trying to silence any and all dissent on the Covid mandates and vaccines are suddenly concerned with the free speech rights of people who are not American citizens or those that obtained green card status through convenient circumstances (marriage as a fast track for citizenship).

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Men who claim to be “transgender” should not be legally defined as women, the UK’s Supreme Court has ruled.

In a landmark ruling on whether sex-based protections should only apply to natural-born women, top judge Lord Hodge said that the terms “woman” and “sex” in existing equality legislation refer to biological sex, not self-defined gender identity.

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In the name of “equity,” many competitive colleges had stopped using entrance exams in their application process.

Now, the pendulum has swung: Realizing that standardized tests actually do help school officials evaluate applications, administrators at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Brown, MIT, and more have reinstated use of the SAT and ACT.

This is a good course correction and a welcome return to a time when student merit and effort mattered.

I’d love to have admissions just depend on scores, as with A-levels in Britain. That would eliminate all subjective Wokery.