The American Mind.

The stunning events of the last several weeks have highlighted the great weaknesses in the corporate media, an essential part of modern America’s political system. They have, as they constantly remind us, a vital role to play. But they betrayed that role by their open partisanship.

For one brief shining moment, it seemed as if the media would live up to the promise of Adolph Ochs, the founder of the modern New York Times: “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.” In the month after President Biden’s disastrous debate performance, the media raised and vigorously pressed the questions about his fitness for office that had to be addressed for the good of the country.

Yet this spasm of critical curiosity about the fitness of our Democratic president turned out to be just an interlude. Everybody can remember that right before the debate the media (including the New York Times, which later called for Biden to leave the race) were saying that Biden was fine and questions about his decline were based on out-of-context video clips, labeled “cheap fakes” by the White House press office. But now that Biden has left the race, the media have reverted to their usual lack of interest in anything that sheds negative light on the national Democratic Party.

The American Mind.

Most of the excitement and action regarding the “From the River to the Sea” college student encampment movement has petered out as attention has shifted to other matters. The 20-year-old cultural revolutionaries behind it have gone home to their upper middle-class neighborhoods and are enjoying a relaxing summer of poolside reading of the collected works of Edward Said.

For the rest of us, it is time to probe the causes and consequences and to figure out what needs to be done to ensure their ideas have minimal impact on anything important.

Since the middle of the sixties, there has been significant media and scholarly interest in radical student activism. But very typically it has consisted more of cheerleading for it, or despair over its absence, rather than any concentrated effort to objectively understand, profile, and explain it.

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Wright didn’t hurt Obama, so I doubt that this clown will hurt Harris. But it’s a good reminder of where she’s coming from.

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For the past two years, Chicago has received more than 45,000 foreign nationals from the southern U.S. border, where border communities have been inundated with border crossers. The taxpayer costs for Illinois and the city of Chicago continue with the new state budget that started this month setting aside more than $900 million for health care, housing, food and even legal subsidies.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently went on record with his plan to continue busing people to Chicago, where local law enforcement are prohibited from assisting enforcement of federal immigration laws. Earlier this week, a Chicago City Council committee heard from the budget director they have not budgeted for the expected surge.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was asked about the potential of thousands of more non-citizen migrants being transported to the city leading up to the Democratic National Convention next month.

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Nearly every American teen has access to a smartphone or tablet and actively uses multiple social media platforms, including TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. In recent years, the number of social media challenges has skyrocketed and become increasingly dangerous, such as the “Tide pod challenge” and “Benadryl challenge.” Some teens are engaging in risky stunts and even orchestrating events in the real world that pose significant risks to themselves and others—all to get the clicks.

A 17-year-old Nebraska teenager has been slapped with two felony counts of criminal mischief after he was accused of derailing a BNSF Railway freight train while filming the incident for a YouTube video.

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Canada’s standard of living is on track for its worst decline in 40 years, according to a new study by Canada’s Fraser Institute.

The study compared the three worst periods of decline in Canada in the last 40 years – the 1989 recession, the 2008 global financial crisis, and this post-pandemic era.

They found that, unlike the previous recessions, Canada is not recovering this time. Something broke.

In fact, according to the Financial Post, since 2019 Canada’s had the worst growth out of 50 developed economies. Inflation-adjusted Canadian wages have been flat since 2016.

Go Woke, go broke. Reality is what sticks around even after you quit believing in it.

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On Saturday, the organizers of the Paris Olympics scrambled to pressure social media platforms, such as X, to censor users who mocked and criticized Friday night’s shocking Opening Ceremony. The event, which featured drag queens, nudity, and scenes deemed highly disrespectful to Christians, sparked outrage worldwide. When the International Olympic Committee’s social media 1984-style censorship efforts failed (read: here), the committee had no choice but to apologize for the drag queen parody of Jesus’ Last Supper on Sunday morning.

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Time to leave.

Cat Rotator’s Quarterly.

I was outwitted by a Finnish outhouse.

I have never encountered a fully electronic and mechanized, high-efficiency outhouse before. This one, once the door slid shut, was totally dark inside. The door locked and could only be unlocked from inside, using a push-button on a panel. Which was not lit. I ended up digging out my phone, using the light to locate the facility I needed, then had enough light to wash my hands. I managed to find the proper control panel to let myself out. I never did locate the light switch. I guess if you use the fancy facility often enough, you learn where everything was. Intuitive the biffie was not.

Alma Boykin is an excellent writer of Speculative Fiction. Highly recommended.

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The so-called protest in Washington, DC over Netanyahu’s address to Congress was a riot.

…

A city that probably has more law enforcement agencies than any other city in the US, and which had plenty of time to plan for Netanyahu’s visit, the response was an epic fail. An epic fail that may involve an effort to try and avoid losing votes from the Hamas wing of the Democrat Party.

They ought to give it back to Maryland, as was done in 1846 with the portion of D.C. south of the Potomac, and let Maryland deal with it. Having a separate political entity for the nation’s capital is a stupid idea, as was moving it from Philadelphia, which was a perfectly adequate location and historically more appropriate.

Associated Press.

“Move fast and break things,” a high-tech mantra popularized 20 years ago by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, was supposed to be a rallying cry for game-changing innovation. It now seems more like an elegy for a society perched on a digital foundation too fragile to withstand a defective software program that was supposed to help protect computers — not crash them.

The worldwide technology meltdown caused by a flawed update installed earlier this month on computers running on Microsoft’s dominant Windows software by cybersecurity specialist CrowdStrike was so serious that some affected businesses such as Delta Air Lines were still recovering from it days later.

It’s a tell-tale moment — one that illustrates the digital pitfalls looming in a culture that takes the magic of technology for granted until it implodes into a horror show that exposes our ignorance and vulnerability.

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Whenever I see an unusually coloured car, I stare. Especially if it is pink. Recently, one particular vehicle did not startle me simply due to its garish paint job, but the slogan plastered across its door: “Unleash my big vagina energy”.

That someone chose to adorn their most public belongings with nonsense I am embarrassed to even type, reveals a lot about how our culture’s boundaries are on life support. Equally does one of its new, likely fleeting heroes: the so-called “Hawk Tuah Girl”. 22-year-old American woman Haliey Welch was dubbed so after uttering the eponymous catchphrase to a YouTube vlogger, it being an onomatopoeia for expectoration on a man during oral sex. The clip later went viral on TikTok.

The people I feel sorry for are her parents.

Washington Free Beacon.

When I entered Cornell University in 1964, I could not have imagined that given the thousands of future doctors, lawyers, scholars, engineers, architects, and executives in my class, the person destined to have possibly the greatest influence on America’s future would not be one of them. Instead, that role may have been achieved by a fellow member of Cornell’s debate association, a tall, loudmouthed Brooklynite who proudly bore the cognomen Rick “The Pr*ck” Mann.

Mann soon achieved a local notoriety when he and his partner/sidekick, chosen to represent Cornell at the prestigious Georgetown University debate tournament, stood up to issue a loud “Boo!” when the dinner speaker, a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, was announced. For their misbehavior, Mann and partner were dismissed from the association, and I never encountered (nor expected to hear of) them again. Imagine my surprise, then, in 2020, when Patrisse Cullors, cofounder of the Black Lives Matter movement, which organized violent riots in many American cities following the George Floyd killing, described herself as a “trained Marxist” thanks to the tutelage of Mr. Mann.

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Many claim the problem with fractional reserve banking is that it loans money into existence. It does, but under normal circumstances the money created by commercial banks disappears when loans are repaid or defaulted on, which therefore doesn’t create a permanent inflation of the money supply.

Government intervention, however, converts temporary money into permanent money through bailouts like the Troubled Asset Relief Program. They purchase loans that would have been defaulted on, preventing the evaporation of credit. When banks hold loans that are at risk of default, they face having to write them off, which would remove this part of the money supply. Bailouts turn such disappearing credit into permanent money, in effect giving banks free money.

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If it’s one thing that Eurocrats can agree on, it’s to leave no fortune nnplundered nor any pocket unpicked.

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Big Lots said in a June filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it plans to open three stores nationwide this year and close 35 to 40.

Prior to the announcement, Big Lots had 1,392 stores throughout the United States.

In its SEC filing, the Columbus, Ohio-headquartered company said the planned closures follow “macroeconomic challenges” within the U.S. economy, such as inflation, that had “adversely impacted” the buying power of its customers.

The retailer also warned in its SEC filing that, based on current cash and liquidity projections, it has “substantial doubts” about its ability to continue. It also cited a “significant likelihood” that Big Lots won’t meet the terms of a 2022 credit agreement.

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Lufkin believes lifestyle is key to preventing chronic disease and writes about his advice in the new book, “Lies I Taught in Medical School: How Conventional Medicine Is Making You Sicker and What You Can Do to Save Your Own Life.”

He doesn’t believe they’re intentional lies since medical knowledge is always evolving and doctors have to constantly re-evaluate things they thought were true. But he’s critical of what he calls the “currently accepted dogma” in medical school, which is often presented without any alternative theories, he notes.

Lufkin says these are three of the “lies” he taught in medical school. TODAY.com also reached out to medical specialists in each field for their take on his views. The interviews were edited and condensed for clarity:

Yeah, I’ll rush right out to buy a book by somebody who admits to teaching lies in medical school.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

I was unsure what to do for a show this week. The nonstop firehose of craziness from the political class has fried my brain a bit. That and the events of the last week have broken the gauge on my clown meter. The absurdity of the Kamala Harris campaign on the heels of Nursing Home Joe getting bumped off in a midnight coup highlights the utter fakeness of our politics.

Instead of trying to make any sense of it, I just turned the mic on and started talking for an hour in a drug fueled stream of consciousness. Okay, there were no drugs involved, even though drugs would make it easier to follow the election. Instead, I meandered around from one topic to another, all revolving around the fact that our politics have been fake and gay for a long time.

In fact, I was going to call the show “Fake & Gay” but that ran into problems with the platforms I post this to, so I went with something less salty. That is, however, the prevailing sentiment of the show. It is not just that things are fake now, but they have been fake for a long time. What we are seeing now is the approach to peak fakeness, which most likely comes just before collapse.

Reuters.

At the tap of a buyer’s smartphone, Chinese chemical sellers will air-ship fentanyl ingredients door-to-door to North America. Reuters purchased enough to make 3 million pills. Such deals are astonishingly easy – and reveal how drug traffickers are eluding efforts to halt the deadly trade behind the fentanyl crisis.

UPDATE: Markets in Everything: Fentanyl Precursors (Tyler Cowen)

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Princeton University is on the verge of promoting a professor who participated in the occupation of a campus building that disrupted university operations and led to more than a dozen arrests, according to an email reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The university has recommended that the classics scholar Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who along with 13 anti-Israel student protesters stormed Princeton’s historic Clio Hall in April, be promoted from associate to full professor, pending the approval of the university’s board of trustees. Peralta already has tenure, but the promotion would make him eligible for university leadership roles, including deanships.

“I’m sure you will want to join me in congratulating Dan-el on his promotion to a full professorship,” the chair of the classics department, Barbara Graziosi, wrote to her colleagues on July 18. “This is still ‘unofficial’ news, because the Board of Trustees will have to rubber stamp the recommendation made by the committee that oversees promotions, but I was told I am allowed to share the news internally and do so with glee.”

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One of the most damaging impacts of Illinois’ people loss to other states is the destruction of Illinois’ tax base. When people leave in a given year, they take their incomes (adjusted gross incomes, or AGI) with them, and that means the state’s tax base suffers.

A smaller tax base, everything else equal, means less tax revenues for safety, education, road repair and every other core government service – or, as is typically the case in Illinois, more debts and more tax hikes.

Unfortunately, Illinois’ out-migration problem is much bigger than just a one year loss: the state has lost people and AGI every single year since at least 2000, the first year of Wirepoints’ out-migration analysis. The AGI losses pile up on top of each other year after year, slashing Illinois’ tax revenue growth and destroying Illinois’ overall prosperity.

Time to leave.

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A North Korean military intelligence operative has been indicted in a conspiracy to hack into American health care providers, NASA, U.S. military bases and international entities, stealing sensitive information and installing ransomware to fund more attacks, federal prosecutors announced Thursday.

The indictment of Rim Jong Hyok by a grand jury in Kansas City, Kansas, accuses him of laundering the money through a Chinese bank and then using it to buy computer servers and fund more cyberattacks on defense, technology and government entities around the world.

The hacks on American hospitals and other health care providers disrupted the treatment of patients, officials said. He’s accused of targeting of 17 entities across 11 U.S. states, including NASA and U.S. military bases, as well as defense and energy companies in China, Taiwan and South Korea.

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Alameda County, home to Oakland, ranked No. 1 in homicides in the state per capita in 2023, according to a report released earlier this month, by the California Attorney General’s office.

Meanwhile, Merced County – in the central region of the state – which topped the list in 2022, showed a sharp decrease in homicides and fell out of the state’s top five.

Los Angeles County, despite accounting for more than one-third of homicides in the state, also was not on the top five list.

Statewide, 1,892 homicide cases were reported in 2023 – a nearly 16 percent decrease compared to 2022. This is the first time the number of homicides has dropped below 2,000 since 2020.

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Francis Fukuyama saw liberal democracy as the optimal political system because it allowed all to satisfy their “desire for recognition” but, he warned, absent an external threat, such a society could become moribund, the levelling of recognition dissuading any from pursuing it through the achievement of great deeds. “It would have little art or literature, music or intellectual life. It would be incompetently governed, for few people of quality would choose a life of public service. It would not have much in the way of economic dynamism; its crafts and industries would be pedestrian and unchanging; its technology second rate.” Look around and say it is not so.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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’….

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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