Read it.

At least four Texas nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating on the U.S. southern border have come under scrutiny from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for their role in aiding illegal immigrants in recent months.

Read it.

Researchers from Columbia University, Brookhaven National Lab, and the University of Connecticut recently assembled a team to see if they could create a material worthy of Tony Stark. What they developed was a material four times stronger than steel and five times lighter. And they made it using only glass — and DNA.

Read it.

More and more Americans who use “micromobility” transport, such as electric bikes and e-scooters, are motoring their way straight into the ER, new data shows.

The hippy-dippy life can kill you.

Read it.

People are getting sick of being invaded.

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The first official report of the UK’s COVID Inquiry—which has cost the British taxpayer at least £300,000 (€355,000) a day over the last year—contains a number of predictable conclusions. Namely that the UK’s pandemic planning was riddled with “fatal strategic flaws” and, as reported in The Guardian, made all the worse by Brexit and Conservative austerity measures.

But, rather unexpectedly, it is also fairly critical of the policy of locking down the country for months on end—or, indeed, at all.

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Police responded to a call about gunshots shortly after 2 a.m. on the 1200 block of North Alden Street.

A 33-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene and two other men died at local hospitals, according to police.

Late Sunday night, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that police are investigating the shooting and she’ll have more to say on Monday.

She is, of course, a Woman of Color.

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Thank you, Joe Biden.

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It used to be high-status to hold a job and take care of your family. Not so much anymore.

Those who sit at or near the apex of the social ladder (who decide what behaviors are prestigious) have decided that family stability is unimportant.

Ben Thompson at Stratechery.

I’ve long maintained that if the powers-that-be understood what the Internet’s impact would be, they would have never allowed it to be created. It’s hard to accuse said shadowy figures of negligence, however, given how clueless technologists were as well; look no further than an operating system like Windows.

Ben Thompson is one of the most respected voices in tech journalism.

Read it.

Residents of Nantucket, Massachusetts, spoke out on Wednesday at a town hall against a wind power company for a “turbine blade failure incident” that resulted in debris washing up along the beach.

Read it.

An 89-year-old comedian is recovering after being randomly punched and knocked to the ground while waiting to cross a street in New York earlier this month.

She was, how shall I say it, not a Person of Color.

Police on Saturday said the female suspect in the July 10 incident had a medium complexion and cornrow braids and was last seen wearing a tank top and shorts with a Jurassic Park logo.

Gee, I wonder how she ‘identifies’….

Read it.

Hundreds of Kenyan soldiers deployed to Haiti have begun patrolling the streets around key government installations. Gunfire was heard during the operation and an American armored vehicle broke down.

This week, Kenyan soldiers in American MRAP vehicles patrolled the streets of Port au Prince near the National Palace. The troops are in Haiti on a UN Security Council-endorsed mission to take control of the capital city from armed groups.

Read it.

The Olympic Games will be starting shortly in Paris, and it looks like the next few weeks will be a busy time for the Parisian police.

The following report concerns a Senegalese culture-enricher in Paris who was shot dead after attacking a policeman with a knife.

Read it.

The study done by the university’s Center for American Institutions argued that there is a emphasis on training new soldiers about social issues like “unconscious bias” and “intersectionality” in a way the center says runs contrary to typical American ideals. The study examined DEI plan’s in different sector of the military, including DEI office staffing and education at academies like West Point.

The Other McCain.

Having written thousands of words on this subject — there’s a whole chapter in Donkey Cons about the damage that Democrats have inflicted on urban America — perhaps I mistakenly take it for granted that other people understand this problem as well as I do. But then I look at current trends and realize that white liberals continue to vote for Democrats who pursue the same path of destruction that made Coleman Young infamous.

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An International Man lives and does business wherever he finds conditions most advantageous, regardless of arbitrary borders. He’s diversified globally, with passports from multiple countries, assets in several jurisdictions, and his residence in yet another. He doesn’t depend absolutely on any country and regards all of them as competitors for his capital and expertise.

Living as an international man has always been an interesting possibility. But few Americans opted for it, since the U.S. used to reward those who settled in and put down roots. In fact, it rewarded them better than any other country in the world, so there was no pressing reason to become an international man.

Things change, however, and being rooted like a plant – at least if you have a choice – is a suboptimal strategy if you wish to not only survive, but prosper. Throughout history, almost every place has at some point become dangerous for those who were stuck there. It may be America’s turn.

Read it.

In the bad old days, before G-Men took down the mob, were urbanites getting a better deal? Does the betting man receive worse odds from state run lotteries than Vinny gave on the corner running numbers? Did businesses shaken down for “protection” have higher hopes of survival in mob clutches than in municipal ones? Was there more or less anxiety about making rent or the mortgage in 1974 than in 2024? Which is the greater fiscal peril, organized crime or uber-societal-organization? It has become a valid question.

Sometimes the major difference between the government and the mob is the quality of their suits. Certainly the mob offers better protection from random street crime than, say, Gavin Newsom.

Reuters.

While new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer settles into No. 10 Downing St, Haidar is searching for homes in Greece and Monaco, because a proposed inheritance tax revamp will make Britain a ‘no go’ zone for the rich, he says.

Starmer says the overhaul will make Britain’s tax system fairer and raise funds for stretched public services.

Labour never saw a deep pocket that they didn’t want to stick their hand in. Politicians everywhere are firmly convinced that they can spend your money better than you can.

Read it.

Elon Musk is parting from his home state, publicly endorsing Trump minutes after the former president was almost assassinated at his rally in Pennsylvania. Musk also announced he will be donating $45 million to a pro-Trump political action committee and that he will be moving the headquarters of SpaceX and X from California to Austin, Texas.

He is among many other Silicon Valley billionaires who are announcing their support for Trump following the attack, including Bill Ackman, the Pershing Square Capital Management CEO.

Musk cited California governor Gavin Newsom’s new law that bars school districts from requiring staff to notify parents of their child’s gender identification change as the “final straw,” as the law was “attacking both families and companies.”

California state senator Scott Wiener, a former chair of the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus, called Musk “a textbook example of why kids shouldn’t be forced to come out to their parents.” Musk said he made “it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.”

Well, yeah. This is a surprise?

Read it.

Fresh from her re-election campaign, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen outlined plans for a new EU Housing Commissioner at a plenary session in Strasbourg on Thursday.

In a classic example of EU overreach, von der Leyen described how Brussels would develop a “European Affordable Housing Plan, to look at all the drivers of the crisis and to help unlock the private and public investment needed,” and that bureaucrats would create a new Housing Commissioner to administer the task.

While von der Leyen was short on details, pundits believe that the EU will direct additional funding to so-called ‘cohesion funds’ originally meant for underdeveloped member states. This funding will support the housing project, and the European Investment Bank will launch a new tool to attract more public and private funding for building projects.

Read it.

You can steal anything in NYC.

StrategyPage.

It’s been a decade since the last outbreak of piracy in the Gulf of Aden and the adjacent Red Sea waters was suppressed. Now there is a new campaign by Iran-backed Somali Shia rebels, led by a local militia leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi. Houthi’s group decided to declare war in Israel after the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israelis and other foreigners visiting a music festival near the Gaza Israeli border. Hamas killed over a thousand people, most of them civilians. The IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) soon arrived and Hamas has been on the run ever since. For over a decade the Houthi group has been supplied with weapons by Iran. This included missiles to attack targets in Saudi Arabia. The Yemen military was never able to suppress the Houthi violence but that changed when the Houthis began attacking commercial shipping.

The current round of Houthis violence against commercial shipping heading for the Suez Canal or making deliveries to Red Sea countries has led to over a half a dozen NATO nations sending warships to protect cargo ships in the Red Sea by attacking the Houthis rebels and their Iranian missiles in Yemen. American warships and naval aviation have already used hundreds of missiles against Houthi targets in Yemen. This has diminished the Houthi attacks but not entirely eliminated them. That would take a ground war in Yene. For over a decade the Houthis have been leading a rebellion against the Yemen government. For a while Arab nations sent troops to assist in suppressing the Houthis and now the Americans are sending an assault ship with a battalion of marines on board.

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A SOGI czar is their independent expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Graeme Reid, who hails from South Africa, is a professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale, and former director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch.

In Reid’s case, “independent” does not mean “nonpartisan,” as his political and ideological bona fides are decidedly progressive.

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The Polish Border Guard recently lost two legal cases brought by migrants who were injured during their attempts to enter Polish territory illegally from Belarus.

The rulings are controversial considering the extreme violence Polish soldiers and officers routinely face while protecting the border, including the recent stabbing murder of Polish border officer, 21-year-old Sgt Mateusz Sitek.

Read it.

The shorter school week, which first emerged in a few rural areas decades ago, is now expanding into suburbs and smaller cities. At least 2,100 schools in half the states have embraced the three-day weekend mostly as an incentive to hire and keep teachers, prompting cheers of support from instructors, unions, and many families.

Despite the growing popularity of the shorter week, some researchers and lawmakers are pushing back on the strategy. While its impact on teacher shortages appears to be mixed in different districts, its harmful effects on the academic growth of students – arguably the top priority of public education – is clear. Teams of researchers examining the program in a variety of states have come to a similar conclusion: The four-day week stymies learning in math and English when instructional time is reduced, as is often the case.

The most authoritative multi-state study to date found that students have suffered small-to-medium negative effects, learning “significantly less” than they would have in a traditional five-day program, says co-author Emily Morton of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

Read it.

A faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike is responsible for the global outage.

Read it.

The federal government suspended the operations of a wind farm located off the coast of Massachusetts after a massive turbine fell apart, sending debris into the ocean and forcing local officials to temporarily close nearby beaches.

Earlier this week, Vineyard Wind’s developer reported a “blade failure incident” at the facility and said it had dispatched crews to collect debris in the surrounding waters and on beaches in Nantucket, Massachusetts. According to Vineyard Wind, the turbine blade was undergoing testing when it unexpectedly broke about 20 meters from its root.

The incident is the latest black eye to both the offshore wind energy industry, which has faced a number of economic setbacks in recent months, and the Biden administration’s green energy plans. Vineyard Wind was the first large-scale, offshore wind project approved in the U.S. The Department of the Interior signed off on the project in May 2021, less than four months after President Biden took office.

Watch it.

A sesame-street level video pointing out what I have pointed out throughout my adult life: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.

Property is something where, if I have it, you don’t. That is the essence of the concept of property from the beginning of the world until the government decided it could make money off of an artificial monopoly system in the 17th century, and came up with a name (‘intellectual property’) which is as fraudulent as ‘gay marriage’. Copying something does not impair the property right of the owner of the thing being copied. We have this massive system of legalized fraud built and operated by people who make a lot of money off of it, and have managed to convinced Low Information Voters that it is somehow legitimate.

UK Daily Mail

According to the TV personality, who appeared in the TLC reality series in 2020 and previously went viral for discussing her ‘awful’ experience dating an HBO star, she and the unnamed Senator would have ‘virtual dates’ that involved her consuming meals while he watched in exchange for money.

There’s a name for such a relationship, and it isn’t ‘dating’.

Well, let’s hope he’s learned something from this experience.

I must confess that we aren’t electing the sharpest pencils in the box to public office.

Read it.

Nantucket residents are watching their pristine beaches transform into “waste dumps” filled with floating debris and sharp fiberglass shards. This prompted officials to close beaches this week after a massive offshore wind turbine experienced a catastrophic failure.

I’m sure ‘climate change’ is to blame.

As I never tire of pointing out, corporations do not pay taxes, they merely collect taxes. Taxes, to a corporation, are merely another expense, which is rolled into the price of whatever goods or services they provide. The taxes are actually paid by that corporation’s customers (which in some cases, such as national defense, the government); all corporation taxes actually do is (a) raise the price of living (can you say ‘inflation’? I’m sure you can.) and (b) make the corporation less competitive with other corporations (say, from overseas) that don’t have to pay such taxes (or perhaps even receive subsidies from their own governments).

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The extra 2 cents per gallon added July 1 was announced earlier this year by the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration. The department is required to adjust the gas and diesel fuel tax rates on July 1 each year, based on inflation.

For diesel, the state’s tax rose from 44.1 cents a gallon to 45.4 cents.

In all, the state charges about 60 cents a gallon now, which bumps up the already high cost state consumers pay at the pump during summer months, when gas stations are required to sell a special eco-friendly summer blend.

Read it.

A billion-dollar insurance company in Texas threw a “Drag Queen Bingo” event for up to 300 employees during Pride Month, and it featured a drag queen who performs for corporate giants Google and Amazon.

Skyward Specialty Insurance invited employees to attend a virtual bingo game at 11 a.m. on a work day, led by a man dressed in drag and using the name Schwa Works.

The company’s LGBTQ employee resource group, dubbed Soaring Skyward, hosted the event June 13, a company source familiar with the event told The Daily Signal.

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The suspected drug-smuggling tunnel found last week in Tijuana, in northern Mexico, is so long that authorities haven’t been able to find the exit point without oxygen tanks. Baja California’s Secretary of Public Safety, Leopoldo Tizoc Aguilar Durán, said his team is in the process of getting the tanks to finish the investigation.

Aguilar did confirm that the tunnel is connected to another one found two years ago that does run into U.S. territory. American authorities have been notified of the finding and are looking for an exit point in the country, he said.

Previous tunnels found in the area could provide hints about the nature of this latest discovery. One found two years ago (although unclear if it’s the one Aguilar was referring to) had the length of six football fields and featured rail and ventilation systems, electricity and reinforced walls. Concretely, it was a third of a mile long, four feet in diameter and about six stories deep.

Thank you,  Joe Biden.

Read it.

A neo-Nazi from the country of Georgia was indicted on Monday for planning mass casualty attacks against Jews in New York City.

Michail Chkhikvishvili, also known as “Commander Butcher,” planned to distribute poisoned candy to children at Jewish schools in Brooklyn and other attacks against minorities, prosecutors said

Chkhikvishvili, 20, a leader of a white supremacist extremist group known as the Maniac Murder Cult or MKY, was indicted on four counts at the federal Eastern District Court of New York in Brooklyn. He was arrested in Chi?in?u, Moldova, on July 6 on an Interpol arrest warrant.

Chris Williamson.

“Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence.”

ZMan looks behind the curtain.

Before anyone was sure what happened to Donald Trump on that stage in Pennsylvania, the conspiracy theorists were hard at work. It is reaching the point where conspiracy theories are the primary driver of public discourse. No one can accept the official version of things, so we are left to create our own versions. Throw in the fact that it is easy to manipulate digital images, video and sound and we will soon doubt what our senses tell us about anything in the digital space.

It is fair to say we are living through the conspiratorial age. Fifty years ago, the only people who trafficked in this material were the people who lined their clothes with aluminum foil and vacationed at Dallas. Today, no one believes official narratives, so everyone has their own theory of reality. If not for conspiracy theories, no one would have any idea what is happening in the world, as the official narratives often sound less plausible than the so-called conspiracy theories.

The term conspiracy itself is a conspiracy of sorts. Many people think it was created by the CIA as a way of tarnishing those skeptical of official narratives. In reality the term existed as far back at the 1860’s but was popularized by Karl Popper in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in the 1940’s, which was long before the Central Intelligence Agency existed. Even so, the term is primarily used as a way to discredit people who question the official story.

Read it.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a law barring school districts from passing policies that require schools to notify parents if their child asks to change their gender identification.

Time to leave.

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The founding fathers of the Green revolution are not well-known. Despite their instrumental role in environmental catastrophism and the Net Zero imperative, mention their names on the Clapham Omnibus and you will get a blank look. They have mostly worked off the margins of public attention to instil the structures and systems of a global coup d’état. Their project was never really about science, or nature conservation, but a technocratic power quest profoundly influenced by eugenics. These men (and a few women) were of the liberating twentieth century, but they prepared the ground for a totalitarianism in the twenty-first.

ZMan looks ahead.

By now, everything that can be said about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump over the weekend has been said in every way that can be said. Thanks to cameras being everywhere all the time, most facts were known in real time. It did not take long for the internet to identify the shooter and then for the authorities and their media platforms to confirm the details. An iron rule of life is that it is better to be lucky than good and Trump is the living embodiment of it.

Of course, the same is true to a degree for the shooter. The official story will be that he was a loner, a victim of bullying, who just snapped. Just as the FBI swears every serial killer is a middle-aged white guy, they swear ever assassin is a loner. Regardless of his motivations, many things needed to fall into place for him to get on that roof and get a chance for the glory he was seeking. Ninety-nine percent of the time these guys are caught before they get out of the car.

Putting that aside, what matters right now is the politics of this event. Sensing that this was not good for their side, the regime rolled the dice and sent Biden out to “address the nation” from the Oval Office. Anytime they put him out for public view there is the risk he reminds the world that he is a desiccated husk. Even when he avoids looking like a nursing home patient, it is clear that it is taking all of his remaining energy to get out the words they have on the screen in front of him.

Read it.

The Sacramento City Attorney’s Office allegedly warned Target, located in Land Park, that it could face public nuisance charges if it continues to call the cops when its merchandise is stolen, according to the Sacramento Bee.

An official with the Sacramento Police Department confirmed the location to the publication. But the City Attorney’s Office denied that it was aware of any litigation threats.

However, city officials reportedly met with Target during a meeting following the report to come up with a “safety plan” to mitigate future retail theft. During the meeting, city officials allegedly aired their grievances against Target, which agreed to beef up its own security measures—including “alarms, cameras, and security personnel” along with the implementation of “light fixtures, landscaping, wayfinding and space activation measures,” according to the Bee.

Associated Press.

Secret Service agents fatally shot the suspect, the agency said, after he opened fire from the roof of a building about 150 yards (140 meters) from the stage where Trump was addressing supporters. An AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle used in the shooting was recovered near his body, according to sources.

That’s pretty good shooting for that distance by a kid with no background in shooting. Well, he fucked around and found out.

UPDATE: “Malice Or Massive Incompetence”: Erik Prince Gives Detailed Assessment Of Secret Service Failure

UPDATE: Trump Blesses GoFundMe Page for Shooting Victims

UPDATE: Sniper Victim at Trump Rally Identified, Died Shielding His Family

Read it.

The FBI says the shooting by the 20-year-old gunman was an attempted assassination against the former president and Republican candidate.

No shit?

Steve Sailer.

About a decade ago, the top five Democrats in diverse California were all elderly whites (Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, and party chairman John Burton), as if there was a feeling among Democrats that the Diverse weren’t quite ready for prime time. Since then there’s been a shift among California Democrats, but Kamala Harris has flopped as the affirmative action Veep, and now I sense more enthusiasm among Democrats for Gavin Newsom than Kamala.

Given the world-class incompetence demonstrated on a daily basis for the younger generations, can you blame them?

Read it.

Labor gets immediately to work on continuing their century-long quest to destroy the British people.

Ed Miliband has ordered an immediate ban on new drilling in the North Sea – overruling his own officials and risking triggering a wave of legal action.

Read it.

The tremendous suffering that we are seeing all over the world right now is only just the beginning. As I have documented repeatedly, we are in the midst of the worst global food crisis in modern history, and we haven’t seen this many countries engaged in military conflict since World War II. In other words, this is a time of famine, and it is a time of war. This represents a major problem for those that believe that humans are intrinsically good and that humanity is moving into a new golden era of peace and prosperity. If humans are intrinsically good, why is there so much evil all around us? Of course the truth is that the evil that we see all around is the product of the evil in human hearts. Humanity is the reason why there is so much war, so much famine, so much greed, so much corruption, and so much suffering.

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Thousands of migrants streamed into Panama through the treacherous jungle of the Darién Gap last week, with many fearing that the route will be shut down, thereby dashing their hopes of reaching the United States.

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Open-border advocates love to tell you that “diversity is our strength.” Unfortunately, illegal immigrants flooding into the United States are diversifying the criminal threats Americans face on city streets, exposing them to a tactic widely used across Latin America but rarely seen here — until now.

Latin Americans — and US followers of Phoenix, Arizona-based Active Self Protection’s popular YouTube channel — are quite familiar with attacks carried out by two criminals riding a single moped or dirt bike — a modus operandi that facilitates both surprise and a quick getaway. Sometimes the criminals don’t even dismount. In other instances, one or both may get off the ride. Regardless, they frequently wield deadly weapons to compel their prey to part with valuables.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

I decided to call this show The Borg, after the fictional entity in the Star Trek universe, but I could have gone with Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone. The thing that this show describes is a self-perpetuating system. The purpose of Conservative Inc., and all nodes of the managerial ecosystem, is to maintain itself by defending itself from outside threats through assimilation and subversion.

The trouble with the self-licking ice cream cone idea is that it suggests the self-perpetuating system is benign. The United Nations, for example, is not actively trying to change much of anything. The damage it does is incidental to its existence, in the same way the damage done by the postal service is just the result of it not being particularly good at delivering letters and packages.

The Borg concept, on the other hand, is an aggressive entity. It sustains itself by seeking out and assimilating new life forms. The process by which it sustains itself is a constant danger to everything around it. Cancer, for example, destroys its host by replacing good cells with cancer cells. The death of the host is not incidental to the existence of cancer, but the end point of it.

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The argument that mass migration is needed to support GDP levels and pay for pensions took another blow when it was revealed 47.3% of welfare recipients in Germany are foreign migrants.