Read it.

School systems complain about the rising costs of handling illegal immigrants. Here’s a spotlight on two cities, one in Massachusetts, the other Colorado.

Both blue ‘sanctuary’ states. Cry me a river….

Read it.

It’s yet another reminder of why blindly ‘trusting the science’ may not always be the best go-to move in the future.

217 year old Wiley science publisher has reportedly “peer reviewed” more than 11,000 papers that were determined to be fake without ever noticing. The papers were referred to as “naked gobbledygook sandwiches”, Australian blogger Jo Nova wrote on her blog last week.

“It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry,” she said. “Who knew, academic journals were a $30 billion dollar industry?”

Read it.

Mass migration is overwhelming American public schools and costing legal Americans public education services, school administrators are warning.

Read it.

Cannabis is a commonly used substance in the United States, with 49 percent of people trying it at least once, Hou and a team of US researchers report in their published paper. Some US states and other countries have made it legal, but we still don’t fully understand its effects on our health.

The researchers studied around 1,000 adults who had participated in a long-term previous study where they had been asked about their cannabis use over a 20-year period. Study participants provided blood samples on two occasions during that time, at the 15- and 20-year points. They were aged between 18 and 30 at baseline, or ‘year 0’.

Using these blood samples from five years apart, Hou and her team looked at the epigenetic changes, specifically DNA methylation levels, of people who had used cannabis recently or for a long time.

Read it.

Nineteen Republican state attorneys general hit five Democrat-controlled states with a legal challenge alleging that the blue states are illegally attempting to impose aggressive climate policies on the rest of the country.

Read it.

In a recent hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski warned of an escalating trend of censorship in countries once considered bastions of free speech. He cited examples such as France, where the government has cracked down on so-called “hate speech,” and Germany, where social media companies face hefty fines for failing to remove “illegal content” within 24 hours. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have also introduced controversial laws that could stifle free expression.

But perhaps the most egregious example of this troubling trend is Brazil. According to Elon Musk, no country where X (formerly Twitter) operates experiences a worse state of censorship than Brazil, a nation until recently regarded as the largest liberal democracy in the Southern Hemisphere. Since 2019, the powerful Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, now infamous, has been conducting his investigation dubbed the “Fake News Probe.” This probe has targeted hundreds of individuals, most recently including Elon Musk himself, for allegedly spreading “disinformation.”

Read it.

So far, eight states have officially adopted the ACCII rules for light-duty vehicles: Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Virginia, plus Washington D.C. Three additional states—Connecticut, Maine, and New Mexico—are also considering adoption of the ACCII standards.

All blue states.

Time to leave.

Read it.

A professional move by one of the European Commission’s top antitrust officials to a New York-based legal firm has precipitated a formal investigation by the EU Ombudsman over potential conflicts of interest.

The European Commission was publicly warned by Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly about a “negative impact on public trust” as well as a potential spike in “Eurosceptic sentiment” after the EU’s antitrust director Henrik Morch opted for a job with the American multinational law firm Paul Weiss after a 33-year career working in EU institutions.

Specialising in mergers and acquisitions, as well as navigating regulatory frameworks for major corporations, legal giant Paul Weiss gloated about Morch’s defection to the company on their webpage, saying that the former Danish Eurocrat would take a role in their Brussels antitrust office.

“This country is planted thick with laws, man’s laws not God’s.”

God’s laws are very simple:

(1) Be nice. (If you have to ask, it’s probably not nice.)

(2) Don’t do stupid shit. (If you have to ask, it’s probably stupid.)

All the rest is commentary (by people who ought instead to be doing something useful).

Read it.

Millions of immigrants keep pouring in. New residential construction has stalled and multi-family construction is in decline. Completions are rising, but is that enough housing?

The American Mind.

The current condition in the United States has been described as a state of “anarcho-tyranny.” This term, originally coined by paleo-conservative writer Sam Francis, was recently defined by Tucker Carlson as “selective punishment while ignoring the rule of law.”

This condition was exemplified by a recent incident in Oakland, California that was so egregious that it would have been unimaginable until recently. Victor Silva is 102 years old and in a wheelchair. He was notified by the city that he is expected to paint over graffiti on a wall that he owns. Failure to do so would result in an $1,100 fine with an additional charge of $1,277 for each time he failed a reinspection. According to news reports he has been doing this for years.

As if all of this was not bad enough, his family owns a nearby commercial building that has been burglarized three times in the past year. He called 911 after each incident, but this never resulted in any investigation, let alone with anyone actually being arrested and charged. While there has not been any mention of just what the City of Oakland has done to punish the vandals and prevent further occurrences, the news media has shown pictures of him painting the fence while seated in his wheelchair. The Sisyphean image of a centenarian in a wheelchair repeatedly being forced to paint over the scribblings of society’s unpunished miscreants is the perfect illustration of just how bad things have become.

ZMan is very dyspeptic today.

A mostly unexamined aspect of the ongoing crisis is the role the media plays in keeping the managerial class misinformed. It is always assumed that the firehose of lies that come from regime media is designed to trick the public, but the truth is no one in charge cares about public opinion outside the extremes. Politicians come and go, and the parties take turns pretending to be in charge but the administrative state and the managerial class that runs it are permanent.

One only has to look at the presidential elections over the last thirty years to see that elections have no impact on policy. Bill Clinton was supposed to be a break with the polices of Reagan and Bush, but things changed very little. Bush was supposed to bring decency back to the White House. Instead, he empowered the neocons, who set about making war on the world. Obama was supposed to put an end to all that war making, but instead doubled down in Afghanistan.

If you could map changes in public policy from election to election since the Cold War you would end up with a line that slowly moves upward. The only change we see is slightly more of the same with each change in administration. The same can be said of the changes in the House and Senate. As we have recently seen with the Republicans in the House, they are just a shadow of the Democrats, who shadow the Republicans as they take turns in the majority.

Read it.

The value of a college education is spiraling lower as youngsters realize it’s a giant scam. Racking up $100k in college debt for worthless gender degrees in liberal indoctrination camps, only to graduate and land a job that didn’t require a degree—such as a realtor or bartender, as many millennials found out, has been a major wake-up call.

Read it.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Read it.

A new study has revealed that roughly 10% to 27% of noncitizens living in the U.S. are illicitly registered to vote, which could result in up to 2.7 million illegal votes being cast in the November elections.

Experts say the significant amount of potential illegal votes could be enough to alter election results.

It ought to come as no surprise that the ‘science’ of psychology is by and for women.

Read it.

After years of diligently working to make a college degree represent no more than a high school diploma, college administrators, by promoting “Explorations” type courses, are now working to make a college degree as meaningful as graduating from the 8th grade. This is why books like Academically Adrift can easily show that about half of college graduates have no measurable increase in cognitive skills over what they had in high school; 6 years of college, and all the student gets is a worthless piece of paper and a mountain of debt.

LifeHacker.

Area went for Biden by 10 points.

Read it.

Oh, ya think?

Read it.

How can they tell it from ordinary modern teen psychosis?

Hot Air.

OK, it’s time to put on your tin foil hats because every damn conspiracy theory is proving to be true.

Sure, I still believe men landed on the moon and that the Earth is round, but I am beginning to doubt almost everything else.

Welcome to our world….

The American Mind.

You have surely heard that your search results on Google (with 92 percent share of the search market) reflect not your curiosities and needs but someone or something else’s views on what you need to know. That’s hardly a secret.

And on Facebook, you are likely inundated by links to official sources to correct any errors you might carry in your head, as well as links to corrections to posts as made by any number of fact-checking organizations.

You have likely also heard of YouTube videos being taken down, apps deleted from stores, and accounts being canceled across a variety of platforms.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

There has been a lot written and said about the decline of intelligence in the Western world, mostly focused on the Idiocracy side of it. Everyday life is getting dumber, compounded by the demographic collapse. Basic processes can easily turn into an ordeal due to stupid people tasked with operating systems that were designed for operators a standard deviation smarter than the current crop. What no one thinks too much about is how this collapse in IQ is impacting the elites.

The dream of the managerial class is to establish themselves as an unassailable aristocracy that rules over a docile population of workers. It is why they favor open borders and mass migration as it provides an unlimited supply of what they imagine to be their ideal helot class. Even if there are pockets of smart challengers out there among the teaming masses, they will be too busy dealing with diversity to organize an opposition to the managerial elite.

This is a good place to start with the decline of elite intelligence. It is not as if we lack data on this sort of arrangement. The end of colonialism in Africa, for example, is a great example of how quantity has a quality of its own. Millions of 80-IQ Africans were able to overthrow thousands of high-IQ Europeans. Today we see something similar as the Mizrahi slowly push aside the Ashkenazim in Israel. They are not as smart as their European tribesman, but they have numbers.

Read it.

The shootdown of Korean Air Lines flight 007 took the lives of 269 people and raised troubling questions on both sides of the Pacific. How could a trained flight crew make such a colossal navigational error, and then fail to notice for five and a half hours? Were they really so unaware? And how could Soviet air defense fail to recognize that the airliner wasn’t a threat? Did they know that they were attacking a plane full of civilians? For ten years, these questions had no concrete answers, becoming fuel for wild speculation and deliberate manipulation by politicians and amateur observers alike, building a cloud of myth and mystery around the events of that September night. But with the end of the Cold War came an end to the embargo on information, and since 1993 a great deal has come to light about what really happened — not only on board flight 007, but also among the Soviet military personnel who shot it down, and within the halls of power in Moscow and Washington, where staunch cold warriors used the shootdown to further their goals at the expense of the truth. Piecing together the evidence reveals that that truth is at once extraordinary and mundane; unbelievable yet inevitable; monstrous, but also terrifyingly human — a story that still lingers darkly in the imagination more than 40 years after it began.

Read it.

Normally, coups in Africa are nothing to write about. But starting in 2020, we saw six countries flip into a pro-Russian direction in just three years. Individually, they were a curiosity. Taken together, that rate of turnover outpaced even the most optimistic neoconservative ambitions for pro–United States regime changes in the Middle East. As General Wesley Clark summarized, “We’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

Read it.

The primary appeal of fast-food burgers (even though the food is horrible for your health) is cheap and fast. In recent weeks, McDonald’s indirectly admitted that three years of ‘McFlation’ was crushing burger demand among working-poor consumers, and there was an urgent need within the burger chain to reintroduce the $5 meal deal.

Read it.

A West Virginia teen trans athlete defeated nearly 300 girls more than 700 times in middle school track events, according to a court document that’s part of a lawsuit that seeks to prevent the Biden administration’s new Title IX rules from going into effect.

The American Mind.

A few years ago, law professor Gail Heriot pointed out a problem that some on the Right have been noticing for quite some time: “Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal.” She argued that at its core, disparate impact liability is an “incoherent” legal doctrine, because “all job qualifications have a disparate impact” on at least one protected class. Established in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), disparate impact liability grants “astonishing discretion” to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to enforce laws against workplace discrimination.

Disparate impact liability is a feature, not a bug, of our present regime. The supposed ubiquity of guilt allows the state total license to pick and choose its criminals. If everyone is guilty, then anyone may be singled out for punishment at any time.

What disparate impact liability is to the field of employment law, left-academia’s indictment of settler colonialism is to the study of history. Just as the EEOC indiscriminately targets employers whose hiring happens to disfavor non-whites, the academy is likewise free to accuse nations of injustice that have displaced—you guessed it—non-whites.

Yale Insights.

As far as most social media users know, the most powerful tool through which platforms steer public opinion is through the outright removal of objectionable content or users. But Zaman argues that there’s a more potent means through which social media platforms can control collective opinions over time, called “shadow banning.” Part of this tool’s power derives from the fact that it’s currently near-impossible to uncover, even by policymakers or software engineering experts.

The Register.

Chipmaking equipment supplier ASML reportedly has the means to remotely disable its advanced machinery in the hands of TSMC, should China invade Taiwan.

Tensions are high between mainland China and Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a rogue province that it has threatened to reclaim by force.

This is a major concern as a large proportion of the world’s advanced chip manufacturing capacity is found there, and the US in particular is keen to prevent China from having the ability to produce advanced chips for military purposes.

Netherlands-based ASML is said to have reassured the Dutch government that it can remotely disable its most advanced chipmaking machines should such an invasion happen, at least according to Bloomberg, which cites anonymous sources claimed to be familiar with the matter.

Read it.

Federal prosecutors on Friday announced charges against five people in connection with a Chicago-based scheme that staged armed robberies so the purported victims could apply for U.S. immigration visas reserved for legitimate crime victims.

CWBChicago had been working behind the scenes on the story, but withheld publication until charges were announced at the request of our sources. Now, we can tell you the incredible details.

Officials believe hundreds of people, including some who traveled from out of town, posed as customers in dozens of businesses across Chicago and elsewhere, all hoping to win favorable immigration status by becoming “victims” of pre-arranged “armed robberies.”

During a staged hold-up in Bucktown last year, one of the “robbers” accidentally fired their gun, severely injuring a liquor store clerk, according to one source. During that caper alone, five “customers” were “robbed.”

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

Last week brought news that the iconic restaurant chain Red Lobster has filed for bankruptcy protection and has started closing locations. The chain is mostly known for being a cheap night out for people in the suburbs and businessmen stuck near a suburban business park. The people hired to write about business for regime media, people who know nothing about business, have rolled with the usual lines about how casual dining was devastated by the pandemic.

The joke online is that Red Lobster’s all you can eat shrimp deal cost them millions because diversity would sit there for hours eating shrimp. The restaurant admits it was a disaster for them, but the real reason the chain has failed is that it was taken over by gangsters who made it into a bust-out. The gangsters in this case are private equity investors who bought up the chain. This bankruptcy is part of fleecing the dumb money that still remains trapped in the enterprise.

The way these scams work is the private investors swoop in and buy a property that is asset rich but cash poor. That is, they have things of value, but those things are not generating enough revenue to meet expenses. Sometimes the enterprise is profitable but needs cash to expand or maybe reorganize itself to shed poorly performing assets and expand into more profitable areas. Private equity comes in with attractive terms and an army of experts to reshape the enterprise.

In reality, they usually sell the assets in deals that have the buyer lease back the asset to the company in order to raise quick cash. Other times the asset is pledged as collateral in a similar sort of debt arrangement. The result is the enterprise quickly raises cash to pay the investors with a healthy profit but is left stripped of its assets and often holding a lot of debt. This is what happened here. The new investors sold the real estate in lease-back deals that are now expiring.

Dennis Prager.

All my adult life, I have warned people about the low moral and intellectual level of colleges and universities. This is the way I have put it: “If you send your child to college, you are playing Russian Roulette with his or her values.”

Except Hillsdale.

I have always made it clear that for STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) and a few other specialized subjects, there may be no choice. You can’t learn those subjects on your own. But parents take serious risks when they send their child to college.

Actually, you can learn those subjects on your own; you just can’t get the credential that will get you a high-paying job. No amount of time spent with Coursera or Kahn Academy will match the pull of a degree from MIT or CalTech.

Read it.

When the president of Slovakia called last week’s attempted assassination of Prime Minister Robert Fico “an attack on democracy,” every other EU leader nodded along. Yet behind the formal expressions of sympathy for Fico, the ambivalent reaction from Europe’s political and media elites to the attack on an elected national leader suggests that the EU establishment is not such a staunch defender of democracy after all.

Of course, nobody in high places expressed support for the would-be assassin or openly said that Slovakia’s populist PM deserved to get shot. But the implicit message was that such a ‘divisive’ and ‘polarising’ figure as Fico might have been asking for it. Summing up the mainstream news coverage, right-wing Italian media commentator Mario Giordano concluded that, “Basically, even if it isn’t specifically written in the newspapers, he was almost right to shoot him and he deserved it a little.”

For the Brussels oligarchy and their allies, Fico represents the ‘wrong’ sort of democracy. His Smer-Social Democracy party won last year’s elections on a platform which opposed mass migration, defended national sovereignty against centralised EU control, criticised NATO’s arming of Ukraine, and vowed to send “Not One Round” to Slovakia’s neighbour in its war against Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Read it.

Navigating the world of benefits programs can feel like trying to decipher a secret decoder ring. If you need a helping hand to make ends meet, you may be surprised to find out that getting help might actually stop you from getting help. (That’s more than a bit confusing!)

Yet, that’s the exact situation many people with disabilities or limited resources found themselves in with Supplement Security Income (SSI). SSI provides a lifeline for many, offering monthly payments for basic needs like rent, food, and medicine. You can read our Social Security guide for more information on how this program works.

For a while, if you lived in the wrong state and received help to pay for your rent, it could actually hurt your chances of getting SSI or even lead to decreased benefits.

Read it.

I waiting for the establishment of a Gluttony Month.

Read it.

French media outlet Atlantico recently discussed the European Union’s Asylum and Migration Pact wtih Rodrigo Ballester, head of the Centre for European Studies at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest and Ministerial Commissioner for Higher Education, and Philippe Moreau Defarges, professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and specialist in geopolitics. They provided an analysis about how the situations in the Netherlands and Poland are a prelude to a larger debate on migration that will take place in the new European Parliament after the elections.

Steve Sailer.

A new California law declares that disparate racial impact in sentencing rates of convicts, regardless of the felon’s individual criminal history, is prima facie proof of systemic racism and justification for a reduced sentence for black criminals.

Taking the notion of ‘disparate impact’ to its logical conclusion.

Time to leave.

Read it.

The percentage of U.S. adults holding an advanced degree increased by over 3% from 2011-2021. This increase in education is assumed to have a crucial role in America’s increasing economic strength over that time period. The expertise gained from such degrees is supposed to be valuable enough to outweigh the time and money put into grad degrees, both from the student’s perspective and the perspective of the schools and institutions that so often fund graduate degrees. In developing countries, college graduation rates are positively correlated with economic success. This same effect is thought to translate to America’s current explosion of higher education. This belief is held so strongly that the federal government spent 311,000,000,000 dollars on higher education in 2021.

However, a high advanced degree rate is much less strongly linked to national and individual success than universities would like you to think.

Unfortunately, when everybody goes to college, going to college doesn’t put you ahead of other applicants for a job.

Not to mention that the degeneration of the educational system means that employers need to specify a college degree in order to find people with the amount of eduction that fifty years ago we could expect high school graduates to have.

Read it.

The city of Oakland, California, known for its extreme leftism, is replacing some traffic lights in the city with a four-way stop sign, according to CBS News

The city isn’t taking this step to improve the flow of traffic or anything like that.

Instead, city officials decided to remove the traffic signal because copper theft has become rampant, and thieves keep tampering with the electrical boxes that control the lights.

Drug-overdose deaths don’t bother me. Think of it as evolution in action. Natural selection is like gravity–it works even when you don’t want it to.

ZMan is not impressed.

Putting aside the nature of the new oligarchs, the nature of the managerial class that actually runs the empire has changed as well. The type of person who slithers his way up into senior positions is different from the old managerial elite. The top officials in government a generation ago, for example, were the product of different selection pressures than those of today. A generation ago, deeds still counted for something in the competition for status within the meritocracy.

Look around at the people running foreign policy now and you cannot help but notice that they are not exceptional at anything. It is one of the things that makes a guy like John Mearsheimer jump off the screen in the geopolitical debate. In addition to having been right about most things over the last twenty years, he is an immensely talented, intelligent, and confident man. By comparison, Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland come off as dull and confused.

OffGuardian.

We are caught in a vicious cycle of too many laws, too many cops, and too little freedom.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or a Nanny State Idiocracy.

Whatever the label, this overbearing despotism is what happens when government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

Power Line.

May 19 marks the birthdays of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, the pair who inspired the May 19th Communist Organization, according to William Rosenau, “the first and only women-created and women-led terrorist group,” and “sort of an offshoot of the Weather Underground.” In 2020 Rosenau authored Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol, which the May 19s pulled off on November 7, 1983, hardly their only terrorist action.

The gals collaborated with the Black Liberation Army, whose member Joanne Chesimard was imprisoned for killing a police officer. May 19 bomber Susan Rosenberg played a role in Chesimard’s escape from prison, and the group’s Judy Clark was Rosenberg’s accomplice in the 1981 Brink’s robbery that took the lives of police officers Peter Paige and Edward O’Grady and security guard Waverly Brown. In 2001, President Clinton pardoned Rosenberg and in 2016 New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo commuted Clark’s sentence and she was granted parole in 2019. Other May 19 vets are still on the run.

The FBI is offering up to $100,000 for information on Elizabeth Ann Duke wanted for “alleged involvement in a series of criminal activities during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.” The fugitive, born in 1940, is “armed and dangerous” and an escape risk. The FBI is offering up to $20,000 for information leading to the arrest of Donna Joan Borup, an “alleged domestic terrorist.” If captured now, Joe Biden would doubtless pardon the pair.

Read it.

Cases of a rare autoimmune disease surged between 2020 and 2022 in Yorkshire, England, peaking in 2021. COVID-19 infection and its vaccines possibly contributed to the rise, a recent study in The Lancet’s eBioMedicine found.

Read it.

State Department officials told a team of Wall Street Journal reporters about the increasing risks that undersea telecommunications cables could be susceptible to espionage.

The officials became concerned when a state-controlled Chinese firm that repairs undersea cables, SB Submarine Systems, unexplainably and repeatedly concealed the location data of its ship from radio and satellite tracking services. They said the ship’s concealment of its position “defied easy explanation.”

The warnings about potential espionage or even sabotage of undersea cables come nearly three months after underwater telecommunications cables linking Europe and Asia were “damaged” in the Red Sea between Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and Djibouti in East Africa.