Rachel Holt.

I have no words.

Wall Street Journal.

In recent times it has become apparent that young people no longer learn cursive in school. Or anywhere else. They type everything, mostly on their phones. This has become a source of great consternation among traditionalists, who view the demise of cursive as yet another sign that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. As for the stately, elegant penmanship of the kind I was taught in grade school, just forget it. Beautiful handwriting is a thing of the past.

Read it.

States with the highest tax burden also tend to have a higher state sales tax. The states with the highest tax burden have a higher sales tax rate than a 5.10% average state sales tax rate, as of 2024. Whereas, states with the lowest tax burden in the US have a lower sales tax rate than the average rate of 5.10%. South Dakota made a sales tax cut in 2023 which is expected to expire after 2026. New Mexico is another state that lowered its sales tax rate from 5.12% to 5% in July 2022.

Of the top 15, the top 12 are run by Democrats. No surprises here.

Read it.

Specifically, Banks focused on two groups: the Alliance for Global Justice and the Westchester People’s Action Coalition.

Banks referenced a Heritage Foundation Special Report the two of us released last month detailing the vast network that supports America’s protesters—an ecosystem with links to American enemies such as China, Cuba, and Venezuela that we call the Revolutionary Ecosystem.

This ecosystem, which today supports pro-Hamas demonstrators, is virtually the same as the one that supported the Black Lives Matter organizations that emerged in 2014 and 2020.

On the surface, these two causes may seem unrelated. But, as our report details, America’s radical leftist groups are intricately connected through a Marxist network of activists, funders, fiscal sponsors, and media groups.

It’s not a ‘conspiracy theory’ when there’s an actual conspiracy.

Read it.

As Europeans generate greenhouse gas emissions by driving or flying off on their long summer holidays, Denmark is trying to lower those emissions by taxing cow burps and flatulence to combat climate change.

The Danish government believes that taxing methane produced by animals will improve the lives of citizens by lowering global temperatures. Therefore, beginning in 2030, livestock farmers will be taxed $17 per ton of carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2) emitted by their livestock. That tax will increase to $43 by 2035.

The average cow emits the CO2 equivalent of about three tons per year in methane, so each cow will cost farmers $50 in 2030, reaching about $125 by 2035.

Other livestock such as sheep and pigs are also subject to the methane tax, but they emit less methane because of differences in the chemistry of their digestive systems.

But two professors—William A. van Wijngaarden of York University in Canada and William Happer of Princeton University—argue that restrictions on methane emissions are “not justified by facts.”

There is no suggestion that such a tax will reduce the notional harm to the climate. Governments just like having an excuse to create another tax.

Read it.

Don’t EVER send your child to a government school. You WILL regret it.

Read it.

Gee, if only someone had been able to predict such a negative outcome….

Read it.

Sixteen state attorneys general filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of a lawsuit in Wisconsin surrounding a school district’s policy to exclude parents from discussions with children about changing their gender identity while at school.

Read it.

“Talking white” is apparently even worse than “acting white”.

We all gonna be niggas by and by….

Read it.

A flash mob ransacked a mini-mart near the San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport in Oakland, California this week, robbing and destroying the store.

In yet another dystopian scene of what California has become, the group was captured on surveillance video “tearing apart the store”, according to Fox News, who obtained footage of the looting.

The group rummaged through the refrigerated section and shelves, smashing items and stuffing shopping baskets with stolen goods.

The owner of the store told Fox News that they group caused about $100,000 in damage and that, in the process, they threatened two employees.

Read it.

A 2021 strategic plan by the Duke Univ. School of Med. links elements such as expecting people of color to be on time, with white supremacy culture and has a stated goal of increasing the percentage of “Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and People of Color among our faculty, senior staff, and learners.”

Yeah. Being on time is White. Turning in your assignments is White. Showing up for tests is White. Doing well on exams is White. We don’t need such White Things in Duke Medical School.

Read it.

In a civilized society, authorities are able to maintain at least a basic level of law and order in the streets most of the time. Unfortunately, at this point it is up for debate whether the United States is still a “civilized society” or not. The chaos in our streets never seems to end, and those that are in charge of running things don’t seem to be able to regain control. The theft, violence and mayhem that we are witnessing in our major cities is being fueled by the worst homelessness crisis in our entire history, the worst drug crisis in our entire history, and the worst migration crisis in our entire history. If authorities cannot control our streets now, what is going to happen once our societal collapse reaches a much more advanced stage?

No pressure, but ….

Read it.

An FBI agent and Twitter lawyer who previously worked to censor election-related free speech has now joined a national election task force—just in time for the 2024 presidential election.

Former FBI agent Jim Baker, whose bio appears on the National Task Force for Election Crises, might be engaging in more election interference.

The National Task Force for Election Crises claims to work on securing elections and preventing fraud, including by rapid censorship of supposed disinformation. Baker’s tie to the group is particularly concerning because Baker previously helped coordinate the censorship industrial complex built up between federal government agencies and Big Tech companies like Twitter.

Read it.

An integration report released by the Austrian government on Monday has revealed how much mass migration is changing the face of the country, with 27.2% of residents hailing from a foreign background—first-generation immigrants or born in Austria to foreign parents—up from 19.4% in 2013. However, ministers of the centre-right and Green coalition government are calling for continued immigration.

Germans (232,700), Romanians (153,400), and Turks (124,100) topped the ranks of major migrant populations in the report compiled by Austrian authorities. The same report shows how 112,300 people applied for asylum in 2022 alone, driven by a surge in Afghan and Syrian migrants.

“Austria is only growing due to immigration,” declared Tobias Thomas, Director General of Statistics Austria, upon the release of this week’s report. Centre-right integration minister Susanne Rabb of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) was quick to use the findings as evidence for the need for more immigration, with the Austrian population expected to break 10 million by mid-century despite a declining birth rate of 1.48 children per woman.

Read it.

According to District Attorney Summer Stephan, three men associated with one gang alone have been convicted in what has been more than 100 home burglaries in her jurisdiction.

“Come to America! Get free stuff! Steal what they don’t give you!”

Read it.

If you pay attention to what the globalists who claim to represent our interests tell us, the survival of Our Democracy™ requires us to follow the directives of people and organizations that are collectively identified as “stakeholders”. Stakeholders include a fairly large cabal of organizations, political leaders, and representatives of various corporations, NGOs, and charitable foundations. It goes without saying that ordinary voters are not considered stakeholders.

“Stakeholders” is a buzzword that has emerged in the last couple of decades to describe the dirigistes who plan for the future of Our Democracy™. If we were referring to Russia, they would be called “oligarchs”, or further afield in the Third World, perhaps “warlords”. But since these estimable folks are here in the enlightened West, they are simply “stakeholders”.

And we know, of course, that they have our best interests at heart.

Read it.

We’re not afraid of the tigers in the zoo because we trust they cannot attack. But what if someone opens the cage?

Many viruses are highly lethal in nature but cannot infect humans. Fear arises when these viruses break the species barrier.

This can happen naturally or through risky research practices, particularly gain-of-function (GOF) research.

New York Times.

Through my research on elevators, I got a glimpse into why so little new housing is built in America and why what is built is often of such low quality and at high cost. The problem with elevators is a microcosm of the challenges of the broader construction industry — from labor to building codes to a sheer lack of political will. These challenges are at the root of a mounting housing crisis that has spread to nearly every part of the country and is damaging our economic productivity and our environment.

…

Beyond the elevator itself, you’ll find a byzantine mess of absurdities and contradictions behind the U.S. construction industry’s slowness, inefficiency and expense. For example, Americans cannot use the latest heat pumps — a critical tool for fighting climate change by electrifying heating systems — because of the same sorts of barriers imposed by U.S. regulators. Instead, Americans rely on obsolete heat pumps that don’t have a market abroad. And plumbing codes in America require an entire network of ventilation piping that has been deemed largely unnecessary in much of the world.

The Foundry.

The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning Americans to prepare for the next pandemic, which he fears will be more catastrophic than COVID-19.

Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist who continues to treat patients suffering from COVID, oversaw the CDC’s initial response to the pandemic and served as a member of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force under former President Donald Trump.

“We are going to have another pandemic,” Redfield told The Daily Signal. “I do believe it’s going to be much more catastrophic than the COVID pandemic.”

What was catastrophic about COVID was government over-reaction, fueled by CDC panic attacks on the part of people like Dr Redfield. And he’s at it again.

Read it.

In what could come close to a record-setting weekend of Chicago violence, 109 people were shot over the extended holidays since July 4th, local media reports.

“One hundred and nine people have been shot, 19 fatally, in gun violence across Chicago since Wednesday during the extended Fourth of July holiday weekend, police said,” ABC7 Chicago writes. The casualty count rose throughout the day as more police and hospital data was tallied, and came across news desks.

Solving the overpopulation problem one weekend at a time….

Read it.

A federal civil rights investigation into reports of antisemitism at Brown University since Oct. 7 concluded Monday by criticizing what investigators said was the Ivy League school’s lack of response to its Jewish students amid a reported surge in campus antisemitism nationwide.

The school also failed to adequately address complaints of anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim harassment, the U.S. Department of Edcuation said.

The Brown investigation was initially triggered in January following a complaint by a Jewish right-wing activist with no connection to the university. But the final report cites a combined 75 incidents of purported antisemitic, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim harassment between October and March. The school didn’t handle these complaints properly and must revise its process for doing so, investigators said.

Read it.

A group of Venezuelan migrants allegedly attacked and robbed a 49-year-old man on a train in Chicago this past February, newly released video from Fox News appears to show.

Video from a Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) train shows two suspects chatting and befriending the victim, who is seen passing around a cellphone with them. One suspect appears to be smoking and hands it to another person inside the subway car.

Then, in a violent knifepoint attack, a migrant put the man in a chokehold, leaving him unconscious, though he later recovered. The suspects were arrested and appeared in court, with three ordered to remain in custody and one released on electronic monitoring.

Read it.

Effectively harnessing nuclear energy does require sophisticated engineering in the form of power plants, but, once online, nothing can beat them in terms of efficiency — a nuclear power plant can generate over 57,000 MWh/acre compared to solar at 200 MWh/acre, or a natural gas plant at 1,000 MWh/acre. For further perspective, a single reactor can power over 1 million homes with over 90% uptime. In fact, our existing, and largely paid off, nuclear fleet also produces the cheapest baseload electrical power at around $30/MWh. And because nuclear energy doesn’t involve hydrocarbon combustion, it generates power without producing carbon dioxide emissions.

However, critics often argue that nuclear power is unsafe or unsustainable, citing fears about potential accidents and the accumulation of nuclear waste. These concerns are largely unfounded and reveal a misunderstanding about advancements in nuclear technology. Nonetheless, they have resulted in a state of affairs where new nuclear reactors are exceedingly rare in the United States and, thanks largely to onerous regulations, typically take many years and cost billions of dollars to complete.

Step 1: Get the government out of it.

ZMan says the quiet part out loud.

If you think back to the end of the Cold War, both parties were set up to prevent an undesirable candidate from winning the nomination. The stakes were too high to risk having a madman with the nuclear codes! Since the Cold War, both parties have tried to select for neo-liberal dullards like Bush and Obama. Look past the superficial and there was not much of a difference between Clinton, Bush, and Obama. Nothing of consequence changed with each “new” president.

That is the main reason the system freaked out over Trump. It was not just that he comes from outside the managerial class, but that he wanted to use the power of the presidency to do things. The people who actually run things were scandalized by the suggestion that an outsider could take the job and make the machine do things they did not want it to do. In other words, the managerial state has been running itself for a long time now and it is what is viewed as normal.

Read it.

Things have gotten so utopian in the state of California, delivery drivers are being accompanied by armed guards due to “crime concerns” while out making deliveries.

One company, Core Mart, has started hiring the guards to escort its drivers. Which means that somewhere, in a board room, it likely made more financial sense to pay for all new security staff than it did to continue to allow drivers to get robbed (and inventory lost) as was happening prior.

Public safety has always been Job One of any government. It ought not to surprise anyone that Democrats suck at it.

Read it.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., picked a pending victory over Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., which remains in a recount, but the revenge tour is vowing to keep pressing forward against all of those who stripped him of the gavel this past January.

You’d think he was a Clinton.

To be fair, I can’t say that I wouldn’t do the same, had it happened to me.

The only thing that keeps me from being a SuperVillain is my native indolence.

Read it.

Speaking at the WEF’s ‘Annual Meeting of the New Champions’, often dubbed the “Summer Davos,” in China, Schwab stated that in order to drive the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” forward, elites must aggressively drive their agenda home.

“To drive future economic growth we must embrace innovation and force the collaboration across sectors, regions, nations, and cultures to create a more peaceful, inclusive, sustainable, and resilient future,” Schwab proclaimed.

He added, “At this critical juncture the active participation of all stakeholders is essential to ensure a sustainable development path.”

I wonder how much it would cost to put out a contract on Klaus Schwab. Maybe we could do a Kickstarter or a GoFundMe project.

Read it.

The answer is in—our hospitals are overwhelmed. And it has now reached a crisis point. It is killing people.

Emergency medicine doctors across the country have been sounding the alarm. Americans are noticing it too. In a recent poll, nearly half of Americans said they avoid the ER—avoid critical care they need—given the wait times.

Here’s what is happening on the front line and how to fix it.

Hand surgery and ennui. Back in a week, maybe.

Read it.

Blacker than Lagos? I think not.

Chicago celebrated ‘Juneteenth’ with 40 shootings. The Windy City kept up a Father’s Day weekend in which 71 people were shot by fatherless young men in a city where 8 out of 10 black children are born to single mothers. And in which it’s all the fault of “systemic racism”.

Over in Daley Plaza, Mayor Brandon Johnson (pictured above) raised the ‘Juneteenth flag’ created by an activist who wanted the black parts of Boston to secede and form a new city named ‘Mandela’.

But who needs Mandela, when you’ve got Chicago?

“God bless the blackest city in the world,” Johnson, a radical who has presided over massive crime and enjoys an approval rating of 28%, declared.

Read it.

UPDATE: Nearly 90,000 People Fled J.B. Pritzker’s Illinois Between 2021 and 2022, Taking Billions in Income With Them

Read it.

A low-carbon cement developed by two MIT grads has officially exceeded industry standards for strength, durability, and more, clearing a major hurdle to commercialization.

Sublime Systems, a startup founded by two MIT grads, has developed a process that slashes the emissions generated during cement production.

Instead of using heat to extract lime from limestone, it uses a series of electro-chemical reactions — powered by electricity from renewables — at ambient temperatures to pull the cement ingredient from the rock.

Because the CO2 that remains is pure — that is, not diluted by other exhaust gasses — it’s easier to capture and store than the emissions from the traditional process.

Watch it. And creak along … if you can.

Like the narrator, I suck at vocal fry. (Is that a Good Thing?)

Read it.

Who could have guessed that after multiple Ivy League university presidents publicly humiliated themselves during congressional testimony – and then it broke that Harvard’s president, among others were likely involved in plagiarising key parts of their “academic” work – that confidence in U.S. universities has plunged to a new low?

The data is according to two new national polls commissioned by FIRE and conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Americans were asked “How much confidence, if any, do you have in U.S. colleges and universities?”

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Unsurprisingly, few atheists have been persuaded by these arguments. “I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible,” argued Matt Dillahunty in a discussion with Douglas Murray. Like Lewis, Dillahunty is interested in whether Christianity is factually true, not whether it is useful. These arguments are also unsatisfactory to many Christians, who dislike the idea that their deeply held faith could be donned like a cloak. Criticising Peterson in an article for Australia’s Gospel Coalition in 2022, Dani Trewek writes that the Gospels are “not ultimately concerned with the earthly ‘optimisation’ of created man, but the eternal glorification of the Son of Man.”

But the truth or falsity of Christianity is a separate question from its historical and social impact. The advocates of political Christianity argue that Western civilisation has Christian foundations, and returning to those Christian roots can help protect Western values today. “As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms—of the market, of conscience, and of the press—find their roots in Christianity,” writes Ali. So, how well do these claims stack up?

Read it.

Shareholders who recoil at the specter of self-described human rights activists partnering with corporations to promote “gender transition” surgeries had the opportunity to make their voices heard Thursday at Dell Technologies Inc.’s annual shareholder meeting. But their efforts against the radical LGBTQ agenda fell short.

A shareholder proposal asking Dell’s board of directors to list “any recipient of material donations from the company”—not including employee matching gifts—was voted down, according to the company’s official tally.

Washington Poop.

No one expects an Ikea bookcase or West Elm sofa to last for generations, or maybe even to survive another move. But walk into a vintage furniture store and you’ll find all types of old pieces that were inexpensive and mass-produced in their day, yet have still managed to achieve heirloom status.

Furniture isn’t what it used to be. Fifty or 60 years ago, people thought of it as something they’d have for life — a dresser that a grown kid could take to college, a dining table where future grandchildren would have Thanksgiving. Today? Not so much.

Power Line.

A few weeks back Harvard announced that it would henceforth practice “institutional neutrality” on hot button political and social issues, and no longer issue official university statements. This is an obvious case of closing the barn door after the animals have all escaped, and is clearly a dodge to avoid offending competing alumni and faculty interests with any kind of position on the Hamas War against Israel. For once taking the leftist line could cost Harvard—in fact its tolerance for anti-Semitism already has.

There was a carve-out, of course. Harvard will entertain arguments from anti-Israel protestors to divest Harvard’s endowment from any Israeli-linked assets. Harvard will likely not do this in the end, but it had to make this concession to the campus Hamasniks in order to appease them for the moment.

Now Harvard has come out with two reports, one from the “Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism,” and the second from the “Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab Bias.” Because of course the bias problem is perfectly symmetrical, and Harvard needs to address “both sides” of the problem. It’s a shabby attempt at moral equivalence in an effort to placate the left, and the Wall Street Journal dutifully reported it thus: “Harvard Finds Jewish and Muslim Students Were Harassed, Bullied and Discriminated Against.”

Read it.

That’s an increase from $127 a month in 2022 to $161 a month by the end of 2023.

The increase in insurance premiums far outpaces the overall average inflation rate of 12% over the same time period.

These price hikes strain the budgets of all American motorists, especially those who depend on their cars for work, grocery shopping, or picking up their kids from school.

Four main factors are driving up auto insurance rates: increasing vehicle thefts, soft-on-crime district attorneys, burdensome regulatory policies, and the broader impact of inflation on the car industry.

Read it.

A new Bloomberg report reveals that retailer Target is finally cracking down on thieves by lowering the staff intervention threshold from $100 to $50. Target management has complained on earnings calls about ‘shrink’ in recent quarters and surging thefts that have squeezed margins.

People familiar with the new policy say employees will soon be able to intervene and halt criminals from leaving the store with as little as $50 in stolen goods. The previous threshold was $100. They say the new policy will be enforced this summer.

Then $50 is what they will steal.

Read it.

A video shows Welsh police visiting a man’s home because he displayed a Reform UK political sign on the wall, despite this being a completely normal sight during election season.

Voice of Wales posted a clip to X showing an officer at the man’s house talking about how “concerns” had been expressed about the sign and that he needed to take a photo of it.

The officer also took a photo of another Lest We Forget Flag that is sometimes displayed outside homes to honor Britain’s war dead.

The UK is increasingly becoming a totalitarian shithole. Much like Canada….

Read it.

The Japanese government is planning to connect major cities with automated zero-emissions logistics links that can quietly and efficiently shift millions of tons of cargo, while getting tens of thousands of trucks off the road.

According to The Japan News, the project has been under discussion since February by an expert panel at the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism ministry. A draft outline of an interim report was released Friday, revealing plans to complete an initial link between Tokyo and Osaka by 2034.

The Foundry.

Not long ago, Snopes, a left-wing “fact-checking” site, finally admitted that former President Donald Trump had never called the neo-Nazis who marched at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 “very fine people.”

For years, Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have repeated this false claim. Indeed, Biden, who’s been running for the presidency since 1987, ludicrously told the press in 2019 that the events in Charlottesville, and Trump’s alleged reaction, inspired him to run in 2020.

Well, there’s a new Charlottesville every week in America nowadays. They aren’t led by a few hundred Nazi cosplayers, but thousands of Islamists and leftist fellow travelers whose goals are supported by numerous administration officials, congressmen, and newsrooms.

Read it.

The man who opened fire at an apartment complex near Las Vegas, killing five people and injuring a 13-year-old girl, was banned from owning a firearm because of prior felony convictions, court records show.

The suspect, Eric Adams, later shot and killed himself as North Las Vegas police officers confronted him.

I guess all those gun control laws really work, hey?

Read it.

But by God they’ll respect your pronouns!

Read it.

It’s not just Britons who think Labour will have a lax attitude towards the nation’s borders—perhaps even more so than the Conservatives. Migrants in France also expect that the likely incoming government under Sir Keir Starmer will make it even easier for Channel crossers to make the illegal (and hideously dangerous) journey to the UK—and, more importantly, to stay there.

WIRED.

So many people are nearsighted on the island nation that they have already glimpsed what could be coming for the rest of us.

My own family is a case in point. My older brother, born during WWII, has good natural eyesight; I and my younger brother, born and raised in the 1950s, were strongly nearsighted. My earliest memory is of being in a classroom and not being able to read what was on the blackboard not ten feet from where I sat.

Quillette.

A recognition that genetic influences on social outcomes are important will potentially influence the kind of help that society offers poorer individuals. But it does not in any way compel an absence of help, or a casual indifference.

And only people who fail to grasp the distinction between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’ would make that mistake.

Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.

Far too many people think that the scientific determination of ‘what we are’ is somehow normative of ‘what we ought to be’. Diet fads are based on this: We evolved to eat meat, so we all ought to eat meat and nothing else. Well, no. The first part of that statement is true, but the second part is not–non sequitur, as we old-fashioned people would say.

ZMan muses.

To great fanfare Julian Assange struck a deal with the American government whereby he would be allowed to leave a British jail and return home to Australia. Reportedly, the deal he accepted was to plead guilty to some charges in exchange for a sentence of time served in the British jail. The full details of the deal have not been released, but most likely he gave the government information they wanted or sufficiently demonstrated that he was not in possession of it.

This was always the primary issue. Secret documents and information leak out of the government all the time, but the government knows who leaked it. Most of the time the leaks are official leaks. Someone with authorized access to something hands it over to someone in regime media to publish. Once in a while the people at the top of the regime get mad about this habit and demand to know the source, and the regime reporter puts on a show of resisting but gives in at the end.

Generally speaking, what the regime cares most about in the case of these leaks is the source of the leak and the method they used. If regime information is getting into the public through unknown channels or by unknown figures, it can not only lead to things in the public the regime does not want made public, but it threatens the legitimacy of the regime for the people inside the regime. Blackmail, for example, only works when the victim is sure the blackmailer has control of the information.