New York Times.

For young, secular, politically progressive men and women, having children has become something of an afterthought. Liberal conventional wisdom encourages people to spend their 20s on journeys of personal and professional self-discovery and self-fulfillment. Children are treated as a bonus round, something to get to only after completing a long list of achievements: getting a degree, forging a satisfying and well-established career, buying a house, cultivating the ideal romantic partnership.

The standards of readiness for family are at once so high and so vague that it’s hardly a surprise when people fail to reach them. Indeed, the data suggest that people are having children later than they used to and are having fewer than they’d like.

For progressives, waiting to have children has also become a kind of ethical imperative. Gender equality and female empowerment demand that women’s self-advancement not be sacrificed on the altar of motherhood. Securing female autonomy means that under no circumstances should a woman be rushed into a reproductive decision — whether by an eager partner or tone-deaf chatter about ticking biological clocks. Unreserved enthusiasm for having children can come across as essentially reactionary.

“People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.” — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

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Pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is the 2024 election heist all began fitting together Friday as illegal immigrants took over New York City’s Times Square to demand the abolishing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to what was already a toothless and symbolic executive order from President Joe Biden.

Maybe taxpayers ought to demand the abolition of the IRS. Hey, everybody else is doing it.

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I came across an article on the Wall Street Journal with the title His Ex Is Getting His $1 Million Retirement Account. They Broke Up in 1989, and I immediately knew what this was about given it was in my estate planning wheelhouse.

In the 1980s, Jeffrey Rolison and Margaret Sjostedt dated. Now, nearly four decades after their breakup, Sjostedt might inherit his $1 million retirement account. This is because Rolison listed Sjostedt as the sole beneficiary of his workplace retirement account in 1987 and never updated it before his death in 2015.

Rolison’s brothers, who discovered Sjostedt’s claim weeks after his death, are contesting this in federal court against Procter & Gamble (P&G), Rolison’s former employer, to prevent Sjostedt, now Margaret Losinger, from receiving the funds. This case underscores the importance of beneficiary forms for retirement accounts, life insurance policies, and bank accounts, which can override wills even if filled out years ago.

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Columbia University has closed its investigation into the individuals who threw water at a group of Jewish students amid the anti-Israel encampment that plagued campus for weeks without identifying those involved in the incident.

Columbia notified the student who reported the incident on Thursday that the school had been unable to identify the individuals who threw water at Jewish students during a night of anti-Israel demonstrations on April 20 that included violent clashes and explicit calls for terrorism. The email said that while Columbia’s public safety department “conducted a thorough investigation” it was “unable to identify specific individual respondents,” and would thus “be closing this case.”

“Columbia Public Safety conducted a thorough investigation into other reported incidents at the Sundial on the evening of April 20, 2024, specifically the individuals that made remarks, and that allegedly threw water at students, and we were unable to identify specific individual respondents. As a result, we will be closing this case,” Columbia interim hearing officer Jeremy Liss said in the email.

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Competency crises seem to be brewing left and right and are constantly on public display of late. Consider the self-interested testimony of Fani Willis. Jared Bernstein, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, caused an interview to go viral by struggling to explain monetary policy. Several previously 100% effective Covid vaccines have been withdrawn from the market (Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca). Lastly, consider the inspiring image of our own Secretary of Defense triumphantly marching off his plane in the Philippines wearing his Covid mask and face shield. It is not-so-reminiscent of the image of General MacArthur triumphantly marching onshore at Luzon to liberate the Philippines. It is difficult to observe these things and think, These are competent individuals.

In Ayn Rand’s novel, the competent individuals who build businesses, products, and industries all go on strike and suddenly disappear. The resulting world becomes increasingly bleak. Government takes a larger role. Simple things start to break. Less value is provided and at the same time, everything is more expensive. That sounds much like the world we begin to find ourselves in today.

Rand witnessed all of this herself. She was born in the city of St. Petersburg in pre-revolutionary Russia, the daughter of a pharmacist. After the revolution, her father’s pharmacy was nationalized and they fled to Crimea which was under White Army control during the ensuing Russian Civil War. Afterward, they returned to St. Petersburg and were forced to live under desperate conditions. Nearly starving, she was granted a visa to visit Chicago. She managed to stay in the US and chose to leave her family behind. She watched as incompetent men destroyed her father’s business, needlessly broke up her family, and repeated this disaster society-wide.

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Sow the wind, reap the tornado.

Washington Poop.

An arrest affidavit for Junior Geneus Bazile, 29, was filed in March but did not name the woman. However, Paola Garcia told Local 10 News this week that she was the passenger involved in the incident at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. According to the affidavit, the pink suitcase contained an Apple MacBook, an iPad, an Apple Watch, jewelry and high-end women’s clothing, worth more than $5,000 in total.

The affidavit from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office says Garcia’s flight was canceled and passengers were advised to retrieve their luggage from a carousel at the airport. She told the local news station she stood waiting for the bag, which contained a laptop she needed for her university studies, at a carousel for at least two hours. But it never arrived. Garcia told Local 10 News that she normally carries the bag on board with her, but on this occasion, Spirit Airlines employees forced her to check it.

Yet another reason not to fly commercial. There are services that will hook you up, Uber-like, with idle corporate and personal jets.

NewsBusters.

The circus came to California a long time ago, and there are no signs it’s packing up any time soon. Some recent examples:

California lawmakers set up a reparations panel for “black descendants of slaves” even though California was never a slave state. California has a budget deficit of close to $50 billion, and some put the price tag of the panel’s reparations recommendations at $800 billion.

A former soap opera actor recently was shot and killed in downtown Los Angeles. He interrupted thieves attempting to steal the catalytic converter from his car. In response, a Democrat Los Angeles City Council member — there are no Republicans — blamed the automaker for failing to make the catalytic converters harder to steal. Councilwoman Nithya Raman said: “In this case, I think one of the things that infuriates me, is that we have a company — whatever, Toyota — who makes the Prius, that essentially has a device on their cars which is super easy to remove. It’s the value of a MacBook, right?”

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Retail stores are being shut down at a staggering rate all over the country. If we stay on the pace that we are on, the total number of stores closed in 2024 will be nearly 40 percent higher than the total number of stores closed in 2023. That is what you call a crisis! Meanwhile, banks are shuttering hundreds of branches from coast to coast, and a “restaurant apocalypse” is sweeping across the nation. Everywhere around us, “space available” signs are going up on buildings that were once considered to be prime commercial real estate. If someone tries to convince you that the U.S. economy is in good shape, just show them this article and ask them why so many once prosperous businesses are closing. Needless to say, they will not be able to win the argument after that.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Read it.

The United Nations world food price index rose for a third consecutive month in May, as higher cereals and dairy product prices outweighed drops in prices for sugar and vegetable oils.

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Just when you think the Democrats’ socialist utopia state of California can’t possibly sink any higher (sic), it does just that: first it was catalytic converters, now it’s fire hydrants.

According to CBS News, a California state water company has responded to a growing frenzy of fire hydrant thefts in Los Angeles by installing locked shields to cover the bolts on hydrants to stop thieves.

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Shoplifting at TJ Maxx has gotten so bad, security workers at some stores are wearing body cameras like police wear.

TJ Maxx said it made the move last year to stop shoplifting, executives said on an earnings call last month.

“It’s almost like a de-escalation where people are less likely to do something when they’re being videotaped,” John Klinger, chief financial officer of TJ Maxx’s parent company said on the call.

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The OnlyFans model who threw a milkshake over Nigel Farage was slammed by her own brother, who said he wanted nothing to do with her.

The Reform UK leader was assaulted after he announced he was running for election during a campaign event in Clacton yesterday.

25-year-old Victoria Thomas-Bowen was subsequently arrested for the assault and said she threw the McDonalds drink over Farage because she “just felt like it.”

Imagine the ignominy of having a sister who does OnlyFans and who attacks people because she ‘just felt like it’.

The Foundry.

For anyone who cares to see it, the truth is available in public records in election offices across the nation. But unfortunately, those who expose the truth about voting by aliens—illegal immigrants or not—are subjected to ridicule and an onslaught from the Left to preserve the broken status quo.

Some would prefer that anyone who documents aliens participating in American elections—especially with the current border crisis—simply disappear.

We both testified recently before the House Administration Committee on this serious and real problem. The reactions of some Democrats on the committee were outlandish. They ignored or belittled the hard evidence we presented.

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For much of the past year we had been pounding the table on two very simple facts: not only has the US labor market been appallingly weak, with most of the jobs “gained” in 2023 and meant to signal how strong the Biden “recovery” has been, about to be revised away (as first the Philly Fed and now Bloomberg both admit), but more shockingly, all the job growth in the past few years has gone to illegal aliens.

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A key element of understanding the smooth-brained antics of the woke left is that they are incapable of doing anything “creative” without sexualizing it and politicizing it. Their collective identity revolves around who they lust after, how to virtue signal to the herd and who is supposedly the most oppressed. Remove these things from their daily lives and there’s not much left to look at. They could disappear tomorrow along with all of their media products and the world wouldn’t miss them in the slightest.

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It’s been a long time since I brought everyone up to date on what is happening here in the Seattle area. It’s an assortment of tales of homelessness, crime, illegal aliens, burning buildings, and vandalism. For starters, there is a story about a street refugee camp in Kent, south of Seattle. A large group of “asylum-seekers” from Africa, South America, and elsewhere was kicked out of the church whose welcome got old and their permit expired. When expelled, they simply set up their tents in a nearby abandoned motel site and refused to move. They were given a deadline to leave. It went by. The linked story is from the KOMO News Web site, for your reading pleasure.

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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!”

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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.”

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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.

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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..