Read it.

Saturday afternoon, a Duane Reade security guard was severely stabbed and a shopper threatened by a knife-wielding thief at one of the chain’s midtown Manhattan stores.

Roughly 12 hours later, a straphanger was shot in the hand as his train pulled into the 86th street and Lexington Avenue platform.

That’s life in Manhattan, where transit crime, assault and shoplifting are raging.

Read it.

Four female prison guards in Baltimore fell pregnant to the same inmate, according to authorities who have busted a major smuggling gang inside the jail system.

Two of the women tattooed the inmate’s name on their bodies and he showered three of them with expensive gifts including cars and jewelry.

Baltimore. Don’t even need to say anything. The poor kids will be lucky if they have double-digit IQs.

Read it.

On the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, human rights supporters continued to speak up about the democratic uprising that was brutally suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on June 4, 1989.

Read it.

Local media outlet Fox 45 News revealed a convicted sex offender and illegal alien was released by Baltimore County officials, blatantly ignoring the federal government’s request to keep the criminal in jail. This stunning act of defiance in the progressive-controlled Baltimore metro area raises serious questions about their commitment to public safety, upholding law and order, and adherence to the federal government.

Fox 45 spoke with the US Department of Homeland Security about 25-year-old Raul Calderon-Interiano, who was convicted of a fourth-degree sex offense and second-degree assault in April by a Baltimore County judge.

BBC.

Gunmen have killed the female mayor of a town in Mexico just hours after the country celebrated the election of Claudia Sheinbaum as the nation’s first woman president.

Yolanda Sánchez was shot in the town of Cotija, which she had governed since September 2021.

She was the first woman to be elected to the post.

Widespread violence against politicians has overshadowed Mexico’s general election, which saw two women run for the presidency.

Read it.

A juror in a huge pandemic fraud trial reports receiving a bag full of $120,000 with a promise of more where that came from if she acquits seven defendants who allegedly stole $40 million from a fund created to feed poor children during the pandemic.

The seven defendants are part of a huge federal criminal complaint alleging that 70 individuals stole more than $250 million of pandemic relief funds.

“This is completely beyond the pale,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said in court on Monday. “This is outrageous behavior. This is stuff that happens in mob movies.”

Ask any member of the mob how he votes and he’ll say ‘Democrat’. Go ahead. Try it.

Ask any prison inmate how he votes and he’ll say ‘Democrat’. Go ahead. Try it.

Read it.

The Mexican government has sued U.S. gun manufacturers, blaming them for crime and cartel violence south of the border. A federal appeals court allowed the case to move forward, so Republican members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives are urging the Supreme Court to defend American sovereignty.

“Mexico is trying to impose its own interpretation of American law on American businesses, and in the process, erode American sovereignty and threaten the Second Amendment,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who led the effort, said in a statement Friday.

“As if facilitating the border crisis was not enough proof on its own, the current government in Mexico has shown a complete disregard for our laws, our Constitution, and our Second Amendment,” Cruz added. “The Supreme Court should defend our Constitution and American sovereignty by taking this appeal and unanimously reversing the First Circuit’s disastrous decision.”

Watch it.

Nobody in the Woke World can think things through and anticipate that people (a) respond to circumstances and (b) won’t always do what those in power want them to do. All of Professor Atwater’s preferences will not change the fact that people will react to events with the minimum effort they need to avoid unpleasantness.

Democrats fumble this all the time: “Oh, well, all we have to do is pass a law and everything will be sunshine and unicorn farts forever.” T’ain’t necessarily so…. Minimum wage laws don’t force employers to raise everybody’s wages, they merely destroy the jobs of people who are not worth that minimum and encourages employers to automate, as Gavin Newsom is finding out in California. Rinse, repeat. Some government agency made a regulation that food manufacturers had to clean their machines thoroughly (and expensively) when switching from foods containing gluten to foods that didn’t contain gluten so that no gluten-sensitive person would be in danger of ingesting gluten. The manufacturers didn’t clean their machines; they merely added trace amounts of gluten to all the foods they made so that Everything Was Made With Gluten and they were off the hook. Presto chango! Problem solved!

Reality is what happens while you’re busy making plans. Unintended consequences will bite Noble Efforts right square in the ass EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Read it.

Time to leave.

Gothamist.

Assistant Chief Scott Henderson of Brooklyn North told reporter that the girls, ages 9 and 11, were playing at the Hilltop playground on Dean Street and Thomas S. Boyland Street in Brownsville, as the older girl’s mother watched from a park bench.

Just after 9 p.m., two people apparently opened fire— shooting six rounds at someone else whom officials are working to identify, Henderson said.

The 9-year-old girl was shot in the right leg, and the 11-year-old was shot in the back. Both were transported to Brookdale Hospital by a family member, “conscious and alert,” Henderson said. Officials said they were later transferred to Maimonides Medical Center, and the younger girl was released early Tuesday morning.

Read it.

New York City hotel prices have never been higher. Illegal immigration is part of the reason why. Mayoral graft is another…

• Uncontrolled immigration
• An alleged right to shelter
• A corrupt mayor purposely removes listings to benefit a favored political group.

The cost to the city is $10 billions. Taxpayers are on the hook for the cost.

Read it.

Research is showing that many of our contemporary problems, such as the rising prevalence of mental health issues, are emerging from rapid technological advancement and modernisation. A theory that can help explain why we respond poorly to modern conditions, despite the choices, safety and other benefits they bring, is evolutionary mismatch.

Mismatch happens when an evolved adaptation, either physical or psychological, becomes misaligned with the environment. Take moths and some species of nocturnal flies, for example. Because they have to navigate in the dark, they evolved to use the moon for direction. But due to the invention of artificial lighting, many moths and flies are drawn to street lamps and indoor lights instead.

Forbes.

Direct File will be a permanent, free tax filing option—that’s the word from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and IRS.

The announcement, which was made jointly by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen and IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, made clear that not only would the program be permanent, but it would be available to all 50 states and the District of Columbia for the 2025 filing season. However, not all taxpayers will benefit immediately. The pilot was limited to those with simple returns. Yellen acknowledged the challenges in rolling the program out to all taxpayers, saying, “over the next few years, we will expand Direct File so that it supports all of the most common tax situations.”

“Meeting your tax obligations and claiming the credits and deductions for which you’re eligible should be easy,” said Yellen, noting that “the IRS has been underfunded for decades, so taxpayers haven’t gotten the support they deserve. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, we’ve been changing this.”

Read it.

A migrant who crossed the southern border illegally in July was arrested after the shootings of two New York City police officers early Monday.

Bernardo Raul Castro Mato, 19, a Venezuelan migrant who entered the U.S. through Eagle Pass, Texas, was arrested, ABC 7 reported. He was taken to New York Presbyterian Hospital in Queens after being shot in the lower leg.

The teen, who has been living at a migrant shelter near LaGuardia Airport, has no criminal history in New York City, but is a suspect in several “snatch and grab” robbery investigations in Queens, police said.

Read it.

Arguing that the EU’s recently adopted flagship migration management policy (the Asylum and Migration Pact) does next to nothing to address the challenge of illegal migration and to protect the bloc’s external borders, the national conservative Sweden Democrats (SD) have unveiled a complimentary package that they dubbed “European Deportation Pact.”

The proposed reform package is intended to create EU-wide instruments to externalize the asylum and deportation procedures to third countries (like the Italian-Albanian agreement); force countries of origin to accept back their citizens or face sanctions; and implement a version of the so-called ‘Australian model,’ denying EU residence permit for anyone who’s been caught attempting to enter illegally.

Gothamist.

The Fiscal Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, released new data showing families with children aged 6 or younger are twice as likely to move out of the city as families without young kids. Households with young children make up 14% of the city’s population but 30% of those fleeing the five boroughs, according to the group’s findings.

The analysis underscores the affordability crisis gripping New Yorkers who are caught between escalating rents, child care costs, rising food prices and inflation.

The new data comes as city officials fight an ongoing battle over proposed cuts to early childhood education programs. Education-focused nonprofits and some members of the City Council are urging Mayor Eric Adams to fully restore proposed reductions to popular programs.

ZMan navigates the shifting sands.

Political science claims to have sorted the various types of political systems that have existed and could exist in the world. As a practical matter this means reducing Aristotle’s list of regimes down to “our democracy” and “fascism.” What is called “our democracy” looks nothing like democracy and it has long ago lost its liberalism. As Paul Gottfried noted many years ago, we now live in post-liberal societies. The trouble is, we lack a label that seems to fit what we are seeing.

The reason we lack a label is our socio-political system is amazingly good at disguising itself by shifting focus away from how it acts onto something else. Every month brings the official celebration of some designated victim group. There are many remembrance days for bad things that may or may not have happened. Of course, there is the perpetual foreign bogeyman who threatens our democracy. Russia is currently the bogeyman, but China is warming in the bullpen.

Read it.

Two state supreme courts are considering whether workers who administered COVID-19 vaccines to minors without parental consent should be shielded by a federal law.

The North Carolina Supreme Court agreed to take up an appeal from Tanner Smith, one of the minors, and his mother, according to an order dated May 23.

Tanner, who was 14 at the time, went to a clinic at a school in his district, Guilford County Schools, in 2021 to receive a COVID-19 test. Instead, his mom and stepfather learned later, he was injected with a COVID-19 vaccine even after he told workers at the clinic he didn’t want it.

Emily Happel, Tanner’s mother, and the boy sued the district and the organization that was running the clinic, alleging battery and violations of constitutional rights.

Read it.

Writing these words on the American holiday, Memorial Day, in an election year, whilst sitting in an Austrian apartment is a poignant experience. It is always sobering to contemplate the legions who have died for the well-being and safety of the United States of America, but never more than in an election year, when everyone in public life is out for themselves, and very few appear to think about the common good for which the honoured dead gave their lives. This year, the very nature of the country is part of the debate. Indeed, I cannot help thinking—as an American in Europe often must—about the identity of my country and its relationship with the Mother Continent. In some ways, we Americans, a race of exiles, can never be truly content. We unconsciously yearn for a completion, a wholeness, that often eludes us, whether we be immigrants just naturalised or Mayflower descendants. The song The Girl I Left Behind Me was brought over the Atlantic in the 17th century; like the Ashokan Farewell, I think it captures that yearning perfectly. We may cross the water as much as we like (and I often do), but it is an ocean of time as well as space that separates us from our origins. Even the America that we more consciously seek to regain is increasingly remote.

It is fair to say that there have been—in time—four Americas, the last three of which occupied roughly the same space. We are currently making the transition to a fifth, and this coming election and its accompanying dramas will play a large role in that transition. After a look at the first four, we can speculate on what the next might be like.

Read it.

Following its abrupt closures in El Dorado Hills and Folsom, 13 additional Rubio’s Coastal Grill locations in San Diego are closing by the end of the day on Friday.

“… The closings were brought about by the rising cost of doing business in California. While painful, the store closures are a necessary step in our strategic long-term plan to position Rubio’s for success for years to come,” a spokesperson with Rubio’s said in an email.

Read it.

Mexico’s election is now the bloodiest in its modern history after a candidate running for local office in central Puebla state was murdered on Friday at a political rally, taking the number of assassinated candidates to 37 ahead of Sunday’s vote.

Jorge Huerta Cabrera, a candidate who was running for a council seat in the town of Izucar de Matamoros, was gunned down in the attack, according to the state prosecutor’s office.

The killing takes the number of assassinated candidates in the 2024 election season to 37, one more than during the 2021 midterm election when 36 candidates were killed, according to data from security consultancy Integralia.

Sure! Open the border! Let ’em all in! What could it hurt?

Read it.

As is traditional in today’s female-centric culture, the divorced mom has succeeded in turning her children against her former husband.

This is one reason why men are refusing to get married–in addition to the easy-divorce-give-me-half-your-stuff, the woman gets custody and almost invariably works to turn the children into dad-haters.

UnHerd.

As a youngish white male historian, stuck in a university system that tends to deem your race and sex as a problem inherited from history, what can you do to make your already slim chances of getting a permanent academic job yet more wraith-like? Based on this week’s case study — a hapless Yale University postdoctoral researcher called David Austin Walsh — the answer seems to be: engage in a frustrated social-media rant about how you’re struggling to find a tenured job, and then in a moment of madness add a reference to preferential hiring practices working against your being white and male.

But why stop there? To create even better conditions for career destruction, make sure that — like Walsh — you have hitherto impressive progressive credentials, having just published a monograph putatively connecting US conservatism to racism and fascism. (Only last week Walsh authored a New York Times op ed to advertise said book, alleging that “a generation of young Republican staff members appears to be developing terminal white nationalist brain”.)

For luck, combine your rant about the difficulty of getting a job as a “white dude” with showboating about personal accomplishments and popularity, and the claim that you are better qualified than many of those to whom you have lost out in the past. In doing all this, you will have gifted envious fellow academics the means and opportunity to ruin you reputationally, while pretending to be striking a blow in the name of anti-racism. Meanwhile, a gleeful conservative commentariat will goad and mock you for being a self-loathing sap, for whom the subservient pose did not work in any case.

Read it.

In November, a poll found 68% of Americans across party lines thought parents should be notified “if their child changes their gender identification or preferred pronouns at school.” And while some are shocked this is a controversial topic to begin with, many are not-so shocked to learn the state of California has proved to be an epicenter of these debates.

When the Chino Valley Unified School District board, led by President Sonja Shaw, met in July to discuss a potential policy that would require parental notification if their children attempted gender transitions at school, they were confronted by California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. Later, in August, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, sued the school district after it established a policy “requiring faculty and staff to notify parents of students’ attempted gender transitions,” The Washington Stand previously reported.

Now, the battle continues. Thurmond has brought a new bill to the table, AB 1955, which California Democrats are eager to codify into law. The bill reflects the views of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, which, in effect, would reverse the parent-friendly policy currently in place.

Read it.

SARS-CoV-2 infection may cause severe pulmonary conditions such as pneumonia, inflammation, and acute respiratory distress syndrome, but until now, researchers have not understood the driving force behind lung damage caused by COVID-19.

In a recently published paper in Nature Communications, researchers at Columbia University discovered that a relatively new form of iron-dependent cell death called ferroptosis is the underlying mechanism causing extreme and potentially fatal pulmonary conditions in COVID-19 patients.

“This finding adds crucial insight to our understanding of how COVID-19 affects the body that will significantly improve our ability to fight life-threatening cases of the disease,” Brent Stockwell, chair of the department of biological sciences at Columbia and co-lead author of the study, said in a news release.

John Derbyshire.

So a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on all thirty-four charges of having falsified business records in 2017 with the intent to cover up another crime. What wasthat other crime? I don’t know. Does anybody?

What came to my mind on hearing the verdict was an old legal story from 19th-century Ireland when, to quote a history of the time, “violence and sectarians tensions abounded” and “the jury system came under considerable strain.” Juries often sympathized with the accused.

In one of these cases a judge is said to have dismissed a prisoner with the words “You have been acquitted by a Limerick jury, and you may now leave the dock without any other stain upon your character!”

Read it.

Vermont on Friday became the first state to enact legislation that requires oil companies to pay for damages resulting from alleged climate change after Republican Gov. Phil Scott allowed the bill to become law without his signature.

Scott, a popular governor who is seeking reelection in November to a fifth two-year term, decided against vetoing the bill because the General Assembly has a veto-proof majority in both chambers. He voiced his concerns about the bill in a letter Thursday to John Bloomer, a Republican who has been secretary of the state Senate since 2011.

“Taking on ‘Big Oil’ should not be taken lightly,” Scott wrote. “And with just $600,000 appropriated by the Legislature to complete an analysis that will need to withstand intense legal scrutiny from a well-funded defense, we are not positioning ourselves for success.”

Read it.

Some residents of the Clinton Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn say they are tired of addicts doing drugs in plain sight on their street.

And they are fed up with a city-backed harm reduction group giving them the drug paraphernalia to do so, reported the New York Post.

Vocal-NY, a statewide grassroots membership organization that offers harm reduction services to people who use drugs in New York City, has been distributing free needles, crack pipes and devices to “cook” heroin every Wednesday at the entrance to the Clinton–Washington Avenue subway station on the C line, according to the Post.

New York  Post.

This whole discussion is about What Women Want and about What Men Need To Do. Nowhere is there any consideration of What Men Want and What Women Need To Do.

That tells you everything you need to know about Why Dating Is Hard These Days.

Read it.

Epstein told the Texas State Senate Committee on State Affairs Wednesday he identified “ten new forms of influence that the internet has made possible and that are controlled exclusively by Big Tech companies.” He labeled them “among the most powerful forms of influence ever discovered” and more “dangerous” as they are nearly “invisible to users.” According to Epstein, “Our great nation unknowingly turned over its elections to Big Tech companies in 2012” and the “2020 presidential election was only one of hundreds of elections that Google has flipped.” This year, Epstein predicted, Google could shift between 6.4 and 25 million votes, and YouTube recommendations alone could alter users’ opinions by 40 percent or more. The demographic most vulnerable to this kind of manipulation are moderate Republicans, according to Epstein.

Read it.

The U.S. Navy is unable to build enough new ships to replace the fleet it currently has. The navy has about 470 ships in active service as well as the reserve fleet. The principal vessels are the combat ships, which include 11 aircraft carriers, nine Amphibious Assault Ships for transporting and landing marine battalions, ten LPD Amphibious Dock Landing Ships to supply amphibious operations, fifty SSNs (Nuclear attack submarines), fourteen SSBNs (Ballistic missile carrying nuclear submarines), four SSGM (SSBNs converted to carry over a hundred cruise missiles), one frigate, 13 cruisers, 75 destroyers and about fifty support ships of various types.

The navy has not spent the money required to maintain its ability to build replacement ships or even maintain the ships it has. The navy has recognized the growing importance of USV (Unmanned Surface Vessels) and UUVs (Unmanned Underwater Vessels) but has been slow to order and deploy these unmanned vessels to aid the navy in defending Taiwan from Chinese attack..

The American Mind.

A striking feature of a debased democratic order is the alacrity by which long esteemed political figures, authors, works of art, and cultural practices can suddenly be subjected to vicious “cancellation” efforts. Fortunately, these attempts do not always succeed, at least completely and irrevocably. But they do serious damage to our capacity to admire excellence (and tried and true wisdom) and to sustain the vigorous debate and disputation that is essential to free political and intellectual life.

The examples are at once numerous and revealing. Icons of American egalitarian democracy such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are treated as non-persons in elite circles today, caricatured beyond recognition. The new racialists confuse Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, with a run-of-the-mill racist, a potential candidate for membership in the Ku Klux Klan. The play Hamilton, which premiered in early 2015, went from being celebrated as the greatest musical of its generation, a moving tribute to multiracial democracy and the promise of the American Founding, to being denounced as racist almost overnight. It was even half-cancelled by the author of its book, music, and lyrics, Lin-Manuel Miranda himself, in a display of cowardice that taints his original achievement.

Read it.

Defense attorney Randy Zelin and former Trump attorney Tim Parlatore said on Friday that Judge Juan Merchan violated the U.S. Constitution with his instructions to the jury in former President Donald Trump’s trial.

Merchan instructed the jury that it is not a requirement for them to be in unanimous agreement about what “other crime” Trump committed, instead receiving a choice of three separate crimes they can select to convict the former president.

Read it.

A Minneapolis police officer responding to a shooting call was ambushed and killed Thursday when he stopped to provide aid to a man who appeared to be a victim. That man instead wound up shooting the officer, authorities said.

The death of officer Jamal Mitchell happened during a chaotic situation involving two crime scenes two blocks apart that left three people dead, two others hospitalized in critical condition and another officer and a firefighter with less serious injuries.

“I’ve seen the video, and he was ambushed,” Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans said at an evening news conference. “I’m using the term for a reason.”

Funny how these ‘ambush-style shootings’ always seem to happen in Blue States.

Read it.

A bill that would allow students who are illegal immigrants to work at California colleges and universities passed the state Assembly on May 22.

Currently, students must obtain a work permit to hold jobs on campus. That would change under Assembly Bill 2586, introduced by Assemblyman David Alvarez of San Diego.

And no doubt they will get preference over U.S. citizens and legal immigrants because they’re from a Fashionable Victim Group.

Time to leave.

Read it.

A group founded by former Trump administration officials accused Tyson Foods on Wednesday of discriminating against U.S. citizens by disproportionately hiring immigrants, including children and people in the country illegally.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Read it.

Perhaps it’s the fact that Big Towns are run by Democrats and are swiftly becoming hellholes of crime and corruption. That’s just a guess.

Read it.

Maybe we can ship them our BLM and AntiFa rioters.

Read it.

Prior to the pandemic, evictions took 6-7 weeks if a tenant needed the boot. Now, an “unlawful detainer” eviction case in Seattle or surrounding areas won’t be heard until 2025.

“There’s a pretty enormous backlog,” said Edmund Witter from the King County Bar’s Pro Bono Services, Fox13 reports. “If you’re a landlord trying to evict someone, it could take months to get a hearing date. That’s the big issue.”

According to King County Councilman Regan Dunn, the last year has been particularly bad – with an estimated 2,200 to 6,500 unresolved cases, and roughly 600 new eviction requests each month.

Read it.

California now leads the nation in imposing dumb wage laws. The state just raised the hourly minimum wage for fast food workers to $20.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said, “We saw the inequities … we had a responsibility to do more.”

Unions pushed for the higher minimum, and in Democrat-run states, unions usually get what they want.

Read it.

You’re about to meet a group of New York University graduates with fresh degrees, likely burdened with a few hundred thousand dollars in debt unless their elite liberal parents footed the bill. Many companies are increasingly viewing woke degrees as liabilities rather than assets.

If these graduates are lucky—and don’t end up as Starbucks baristas—they will have a bright and colorful future at some woke mega-corporation. There, they will be placed in non-productive managerial roles to advance destructive ESG and DEI movements.

It all starts at NYU classrooms indoctrination camps, where the kids are being uploaded the woke mind virus by activist professors. These kids are being brainwashed into not improving society but, in fact, being managers to spread wokesim to dismantle Western society.

Read it.

Ireland was embarrassed recently when the country, via referendum, rejected an amendment to its Constitution that would have revoked a special consideration supporting motherhood. The government was so red-faced by that loss that the prime minister stepped down.

Yet it’s hard to think of a more embarrassing law than one that would lead to arresting people for silently praying on public streets. Such a law rightfully conjures up notions of “thoughtcrime” and dystopias such as in the movie “Minority Report.” Such a law should rightfully be ridiculed.

But that is just what many in the United Kingdom seem to want. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a longtime pro-life leader with March for Life UK, was arrested in December 2022 for silently praying within an abortion clinic “buffer zone.” A widely shared video shows a Birmingham police officer asking Vaughan-Spruce, “Are you praying?” as she stands quietly within the buffer zone, to which she replies: “I might be praying in my head.” Immediately after, the officer informs her that she is under arrest.

The American Mind.

Race, more than anything else, has come to define American politics. Sixty years after the Civil Rights Act, it permeates virtually all political and cultural discourse. The decades-long campaign to position race at the center of American life has succeeded, and to avoid the subject is to embrace irrelevance.

Most accounts of this transformation are celebratory, as scholars and cultural tastemakers are intimately aware of the advantages of affirming the present. But in recent years a small cohort of intellectual rebels have gone against the grain, most notably Christopher Caldwell, whose book The Age of Entitlement provides an alternate account of the 1960s.

Caldwell argues that the 1964 Civil Rights Act effectively replaced the U.S. Constitution as the nation’s primary legal and moral authority, abridging the social contract and fundamentally altering the relationship between Americans and their government. Since its publication, Age of Entitlement has served as the definitive counterargument to the whitewashed, self-congratulatory retelling of racial progress. Caldwell’s book is a must-read, and its powerful thesis will continue to influence political dissent for years to come.

ZMan draws an analogy.

Mary was a five-ton Asian elephant that performed at a circus, until she went berserk and killed one of her handlers. For some reason, the otherwise gentle beast attacked the handler on his second day of work. She picked him up with her trunk, hurled him against a wall and then stepped on his head. The circus owner decided that the right thing to do was to hold a public execution of the elephant for the crime of having murdered the elephant handler. The elephant was then hanged.

This strange story happened in 1916 in rural Tennessee, and it is a good way to think about what is about to happen in a New York City courtroom. This week the jury will get the Trump case with instructions by the judge to convict. This trial and the behavior of the people running it is like the execution of a circus elephant. It is about vengeance, rather than justice. The circus owner hanged Mary the elephant to satisfy the lust for vengeance and the conviction of Trump is for the same purpose.

The trial of Trump has nothing to do with the law. He paid a lawyer to make a problem go away, which happens all the time in America. The claim here is that it was booked incorrectly by his accounting department. The trial was never about the alleged accounting error. It was an excuse to humiliate a man that the judge, the prosecutors, the media and most likely the jury think deserves to be punished just as the locals thought Mary the elephant needed to be punished.

Read it.

The felony arrest of an illegal immigrant in Chicago on May 15 has marked his 10th police apprehension in the past 10 months.

Read it.

Amazon has forbid employees from hanging signs showing the number of days one of their co-workers has been held hostage by Hamas, according to a Hebrew-language newspaper.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Proving that unpaid anonymous review is worth every cent, the 217 year old Wiley science publisher “peer reviewed” 11,300 papers that were fake, and didn’t even notice. It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry. Naked “gobbledygook sandwiches” got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink.

Big Government and Big Money has captured science and strangled it. The more money they pour in, the worse it gets. John Wiley and Sons is a US $2 billion dollar machine, but they got used by criminal gangs to launder fake “science” as something real.

Things are so bad, fake scientists pay professional cheating services who use AI to create papers and torture the words so they look “original”. Thus a paper on ‘breast cancer’ becomes a discovery about “bosom peril” and a ‘naïve Bayes’ classifier became a ‘gullible Bayes’. An ant colony was labeled an ‘underground creepy crawly state’.

Read it.

Specifically, almost one in three (29.2%) in ‘junk’ Class 5 had ‘uncertainties’ up to 5°C as defined by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Nearly half (48.7%) were sited at ‘near junk’ Class 4 sites with ‘uncertainties’ of 2°C. Shockingly, only 52 stations, or just 13.7% of the total, came without any ‘uncertainty’ rating. Class 5 station are prone to pick up all manner of human and natural caused heat corruptions, while class 1 sites simply measure the surrounding air temperature.

Read it.

Wactor was killed early Saturday morning after he allegedly caught three suspects trying to steal a catalytic converter from his car.

Time to leave.