Read it.

A rabbi at several British universities who drew hundreds of death threats after flying to Israel to serve as a reserve soldier after Oct. 7 is now in hiding with his wife and two children on the recommendation of police.

Both the University of Leeds and British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis have condemned the threats against Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, his wife Nava, and their two children, which began shortly after Oct. 7 and escalated recently with antisemitic phone calls and an attack on the school’s Hillel House.

“Tell that Jewish son of a bitch we are coming for him,” a message left for Nava Deutsch said, according to the Daily Mail, which listened to some of the messages.

Read it.

The Biden administration does not have a plan in place to prevent Hezbollah from cashing in on its proposed menthol cigarette ban, which lawmakers and experts say will open up a black market that will enrich the Iran-backed terror group and Mexican drug cartels.

As the FDA considers a ban on mentholated cigarettes, a type smoked by around 40 percent of adults, lawmakers have been pressing federal authorities to develop contingency plans meant to stop Hezbollah and its Mexican cartel partners from smuggling black market cigarettes into the United States.

But Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) do not appear to have developed any plans to combat the emerging black market menthol trade, which is likely to generate millions in profit. Hezbollah, Hamas, and other terrorist groups have long trafficked in illegal cigarettes, generating revenue that funds terror operations across the globe. The regulated menthol market in the United States is worth an estimated $30 billion.

G. Gordon Liddy, in his autobiography WILL, noted that cartons of Kool cigarettes, the most popular mentholated brand, were the de facto standard currency among black prisoners in the D.C. jail in the early 1970s.

Read  it.

Major credit card retailers are creating a separate merchant category code (MCC) for firearms and ammunition retailers to comply with a California law that would allow banks to potentially track suspicious gun purchases and report them to law enforcement.

Read it.

Last week, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Jordan Peterson helped expose the failures of Illinois’ public education system on X. Their engagement with a Wirepoints report, “Illinois education 2022: Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 schools. For reading, it’s 30 schools,” revealed the thousands of students trapped in completely failing schools in 2022.

But those results are now old news. Wirepoints has just run the new Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) 2023 Report Card data and the outcomes are worse even though the impacts of covid are another year behind us.

In 2023, there were 67 Illinois schools where not a single student tested proficient in math and 32 where no student tested proficient in reading. What’s worse, officials in those schools graduated nearly 70% of their students.

Read it.

Squatting has always been a problem, especially in certain parts of the nation, but now it is happening on an industrial scale all over America.

Thanks to online listings, it is easier than ever to identify properties that are vacant, and many states have laws that make it exceedingly difficult to get squatters out once they have settled in. In some cases, squatters are able to live rent free in beautiful homes for months or even years. This is becoming an absolutely massive problems, especially in certain areas of the country. For example, it is being reported that squatters have taken over approximately 1,200 homes in the Atlanta area…

Read it.

Shrinkflation is an economic phenomenon where the size or quantity of a product is reduced by manufacturers while the price remains the same, effectively increasing the price per unit without an apparent increase in the sticker price.

And as the fight against inflation in the U.S. continues to be center stage – with consumers getting more and more agitated with higher prices – manufacturers are doing anything they can to try and keep prices steady. This includes offering less product for the same price.

USA Today looked at this in a new report wherein they asked customers which brands they trusted the most to swindle them out of their purchasing power the least. In November 2023, the report “surveyed 1,251 American consumers ages 18 to 58, asking about their experiences buying products from more than 100 high-profile brands.”

Wikipedia.

Reactionary feminism is a form of feminism that rejects the progressivist belief that human history is an ongoing arc of moral advancement and seeks to ground a defence of women’s interests in a contingent, materialist, and sex-realist position. The term originates in an article by the author Mary Harrington and popularized in her book Feminism Against Progress.

Reactionary feminism views men and women as equal in dignity and capacity for excellence but physiologically different in ways that, at scale, are materially and politically significant. Reactionary feminism argues from a materialist analysis of feminist history that the claim that males and females are interchangeabile is itself false, serves as a means of consolidating power by the managerial class, and is actively inimical to the interests of poorer women whose lives of necessity cannot be abstracted from the material.

Reactionary feminist arguments include a critique of modern abortion politics as serving to marginalise key issues raised by maternal feminism such as women’s embodiment and the importance of care, a re-read of the sexual revolution as primarily a technological transition whose externalities are under-counted, and an anti-capitalist framing of transgender politics as driven centrally by the post-1960s industrialization of the body via biotech. Though reactionary feminism is less hostile to religious faiths than liberal feminism, its adherents are by no means all religious. However it has some points of overlap with Catholic social teaching.

Read it.

A prerequisite for unmanned transport and delivery vehicles is a mostly non-criminal population, and you ain’t gonna find that in the ‘hood.

This is why I don’t fear AI.

Wall Street Journal.

For years, the tech industry largely stayed away from San Francisco politics. Not anymore. Silicon Valley investors, executives and CEOs are banding together to host fundraising events for local candidates, pouring money into city ballot initiatives and using their influence to try to sway public opinion.
Tech money backed a campaign to oust San Francisco’s district attorney. It funded the recall of some school board members. And it is seeking residents’ support to elect a spate of moderate Democrats gunning for local elections this year.
Silicon Valley leaders say they want to make the city a safer and more hospitable place to raise families and run businesses. They also want to halt the exodus of some of tech’s most talented workers and reverse the doom loop narrative that has haunted downtown since Covid-19.

Read it.

The term ‘egregore’ belongs to Hermetic philosophy and to Western esotericism more broadly. The notion of ‘egregore’ is not dissimilar to that of ‘tulpa’ in Tibetan Buddhism, the latter being a spiritual agent generated by intense concentration of an elite monastic practitioner. ‘Egregore’ is different, however, because according to the simplest definition, it is a spiritual force that arises out of the collective commitment of a people to a falsehood.

I once thought that I was eccentric in appealing to the notion of ‘egregores’ to explain, at least in part, the chaotic world of ideological squabbles that we now inhabit. But then, a couple of years ago, I attended a dinner at a friend’s farmstead. During the meal, a discussion began concerning the future of the British Conservative Party. Everything indicated that the topic was going to be tiresome, when unexpectedly a youngish man at the other end of the table opined: “There is no hope for the Tories until they are somehow freed from the egregore that’s been controlling them since the time of Robert Peel.” I looked up from my venison cutlet in astonishment, an emotion that intensified as all those around the table nodded in agreement as if the young man had only commented upon the weather.

Many there are, it seems, who in trying to explain our civilisational collapse, are looking to the peripheries of the wider spiritual tradition of the West.

A very handy term.

Read it.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, the Ukrainians, who lack any warships at all, have destroyed twenty Russian Navy ships. These include warships as well as support vessels like landing ships. Ukraine has used long-range missiles and USVs (Unmanned Surface Vessels) to attack Russian ships, forcing the survivors to distant ports in the far northeastern portions of the Black Sea. Even though these ports are a thousand kilometers from Crimea, the Ukrainians can still reach them with USVs, despite the risks of some USVs being lost from equipment failure on the long journey, or attacks by Russian weapons when they reach the distant Russian port.

Read it.

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” is a quote generally attributed to Charles Baudelaire – or possibly Keyser Söze – depending on who you ask on the internet.

Something similar can be said about Big Brother.

When you think about what our emerging surveillance state will look like, you think “1984.” You imagine East Germany powered by Google and Amazon. You recall your favorite dystopian sci-fi film—or maybe horror stories of China’s social credit system. Thoughts of a frustrated middle-aged police chief from a mid-sized Midwestern town attempting to procure security cameras with innovative new features probably don’t come to mind. You definitely don’t think of a guy in a lawn chair jotting down the license plate numbers of passing vehicles in a notebook. And that’s partly how the surveillance state is going to emerge as it creeps its way into one small town at a time.

Read it.

A new study examining the likely impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots had in the 2020 election concludes that the outcome would “almost certainly” have been different without the massive expansion of voting by mail.

The Heartland Institute study tried to gauge the probable impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots cast for both then-candidate Joe Biden and his opponent, President Donald Trump, would have had on the overall 2020 election results.

The study was based on data obtained from a Heartland/Rasmussen survey in December that revealed that roughly one in five mail-in voters admitted to potentially fraudulent actions in the presidential election.

Read it.

For the fourth straight year, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” will be performed at the Super Bowl. The so-called “black national anthem” assumes a separate black nation, a concept with a rather strange origin.

The Communist Party USA, an overwhelmingly white party controlled by an all-white Soviet dictatorship, held that blacks were not real Americans. In 1928, the Communist International, (Comintern), founded by the USSR to control national Communist parties, declared that blacks in the United States were a separate nation and called for self-determination in the “black belt,” a swath of territory in the south.

In 1930, as Paul Kengor explained in “Communism’s African-American Soviet Republic,” the Comintern called for a Soviet-controlled “Negro Republic” among America’s southern states. The current Revolutionary Communist Party calls for black Americans to unite into a separate, autonomous republic in “the southern part of the former imperialist United States of America.” The decision would be made by “a special vote in which only African-Americans would be eligible to participate.”

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The socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, recently organised a ‘citizens’ vote’ (votation citoyenne) to ask Parisians about the appropriateness of a particularly punishing parking fee for SUVs, which she considers too bulky and too polluting. The vote in favour of a specific tax won the day, but in a highly questionable ballot and with an ideology emblematic of the disastrous way in which Hidalgo is managing France’s capital city.

SUVs, or sport utility vehicles, are large motor vehicles with four-wheel drive and off-road capability. Initially designed as leisure vehicles, they have become increasingly popular in recent years, including in cities where the road infrastructure (narrow streets, car parks) is not necessarily suited to their size. They get bad press because they are considered too bulky and too polluting—some towns are even considering banning them. In Paris, Mayor Anne Hidalgo has come up with the plan to subject them to a punitive parking fee—significantly higher than that for ordinary vehicles. But before introducing these regulations, she wanted to put the measure to the people of Paris for their approval.

An enthusiast of ‘participatory democracy,’ Anne Hidalgo has been holding an increasing number of impromptu votes on specific issues relating to the organisation of urban life since she took office as mayor of Paris. The stated aim is to give Parisians a say, but the methods used are highly questionable. While the proliferation of ‘participatory’ opportunities has not aroused the enthusiasm of Parisians, who have become accustomed to shunning these untimely elections, it has triggered hilarity in the Swiss, who know a thing or two about direct democracy.

Read it.

Few would have contended, just some years ago, that it would come to this. Armed with Rawlsian gibberish, the liberal establishment has finally decided to do away with the masquerade. Liberalism’s own altarpieces of political liberty, freedom of the press, and the rule of law have finally been cast aside with liberating frankness.

The examples are, by now, too many and too egregious to describe in detail. It likely began in France, that nation of liberty so adept in the ugly art of persecution. Many were surprised when, in 2017, France’s leader of the opposition, Marine Le Pen, had her European parliamentary immunity rescinded on the shamelessly bogus charge of ‘publicizing ISIS.’ She had, instead, tweeted gruesome images of the Salafist group’s crimes precisely in order to denounce it. Having enjoyed this first taste of judicial abuse, the international establishment took note and readied itself for more. It was not long until what had once been taboo became the new norm. In the U.S., President Trump had to undergo the ignominy of having his Mar-a-Lago home searched by the FBI. Democrats have, more recently, been playing judicial games to bar him from the 2024 Republican ticket.

Power Line.

By some counts, the Biden Junta has allowed more than eight million foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally. Donald Trump and others contend that Democrats are “signing them up” to vote. As legal immigrants and legitimate citizens should know, illegals have been voting for a long time in California, the model Democrats now seek for the entire country.

In 1996, illegals cast 784 votes against Republican Robert Dornan in a congressional race Democrat Loretta Sanchez won by only 984 votes. Spearheading the voter fraud was the Stalinist Bert Corona, founder of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional. He failed to comply with a subpoena and the Justice Department declined to take any action. For the vote fraudsters it was more steps forward with no steps back.

In 2013 the state passed Assembly Bill 60 the “Safe and Responsible Drivers Act,” which enabled false-documented foreign nationals to get driver’s licenses. In 2015 California passed Assembly Bill 1461, the “California New Motor Voter Act” which automatically registered the illegals to vote. “At the latest, for the 2018 election cycle,” Secretary of State Alex Padilla told the Los Angeles Times, “I expect millions of new voters on the rolls in the state of California.”

Newsbusters.

The Student Development and Center for Civic Engagement at the Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, put on a week-long event called “SexCon.” The week, “dedicated to creating space for exploring sexuality, learning about sexual and relationship health, and reflecting on social and legislative landscapes around sexual and reproductive freedom,” featured 13 unique events for students to attend.The event was held from January 29 to February 1 and was highly promoted on the school’s Office of Student Activities Instagram account.

Quillette.

Something I’m increasingly sceptical of in modern mental health culture is this constant insistence to open up. Share your story! says every celebrity. Speak out! says every company. Men aren’t opening up enough, says pretty much every mainstream publication. In fact last week in the UK it was #TimeToTalk Day, urging us to “be more open about mental health and share how we really feel”.

My main concern with this is that Gen Z are very lonely and screen-addicted and so often take this advice and start opening up online. All over the internet, my generation are sharing their autism traits, ADHD habits and Tourette’s tics. Plus deeply personal moments: traumatic events, anxiety attacks and mental breakdowns. On TikTok #mentalhealth has over 127 billion views; #trauma alone has almost 30 billion.

The chief problem with ‘social media’ is that it encourages everybody to be LAME (“Look At Me, Everybody”), and NOBODY CARES.

Read it.

From the end of the Second World War until early 2022, the geopolitics of our world followed a very similar pattern. The pattern was that borders were sacred, they could not change, and this narrative was enforced by the United Nations and America’s military might. This meant rival ethnicities and religious sects were often forced together into nations they despised—as in the example of Iraq—where different groups have fought continuously since independence in 1932. Any attempt by the Sunnis, Shias, or Kurds to break off has been met by Western condemnation, yet military intervention by the latter exacerbated the chaos.

The problem is that the West’s foreign policy is informed by liberalism, the central pillar being that people should get along. This is why Washington disapproved of Serbia annexing areas of Kosovo populated by Serbs, and why it despised the idea of reshaping the Middle East’s boundaries so that Kurds, Shias and Sunnis could have their own states. Even though such moves make sense from an ethnic and religious perspective—and would certainly make peace more likely—the option is always repudiated. This is because redrawing the maps would entail admitting an obvious truth: that some cultures are incompatible with each other.

Iraq is three nations crammed into one country; Libya is three; Afghanistan is closer to five.

John C. Wright.

A Yammerhead on Twitter remarks:

Slavery is white history. How we survived it is black history.

Matt Walsh answers:

Slavery is world history. White people did not invent it, and were not the first to practice it, but were the first to abolish it. The last place in the world to still have legal slavery was Africa. It wasn’t fully legally abolished on the continent until 1981.

The most ironic aspect of ‘black history’ is the affection among African Americans for Islam and Muslim names, since Arabs were one of the major participants in the black slave trade; black slavery existed in Saudi Arabia until at least 1964.

Quillette.

The use of the word “coach” as a synonym for tutor emerged from Oxford University during the 1830s to convey the idea of someone carrying a student through their exams. Initially associated with sports and organisational efficiency, today the realm of the coach has expanded to include everything falling under the banner of life.

A form of personal development ostensibly intended to help individuals achieve personal and professional success, the rapid growth of the life-coaching industry has accelerated exponentially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when the global shutdown prompted many people to question values around work and relationships, the life coach—aided by Instagram, TikTok, and Zoom—has emerged as a fashionably new response to the age-old question of how to live the good life. But the popularity of this trend raises questions about the ethics of a nascent industry and the potential damage it may inflict on vulnerable people.

I’d use the term ‘grift’ rather than ‘sophistry’, but, yeah, pretty much. Any0ne who thinks that he or she needs a ‘life coach’ needs a lot more help than just a ‘life coach’.

SFGate.

A cyclist was injured in a collision with a Waymo driverless vehicle in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood on Tuesday afternoon, police said. This news comes after Cruise, another autonomous car company, recalled its entire fleet nationwide, including from SF’s streets, in November; a cruise robotaxi drove over a pedestrian who had been hit by another car in October.

Read it.

The European Commission has launched a rule of law infringement procedure against Hungary—again. This time, it is challenging the country’s recently adopted ‘Defense of Sovereignty’ law that is meant to curb foreign election interference—similarly to an EU bill that’s currently in the works.

Read it.

With considerably lower efficacy rates, mRNA COVID-19 vaccines cause more deaths than save lives, according to a new study whose researchers called for a “global moratorium” on the shots and “immediate removal” from childhood immunization schedule.

Newsbusters.

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments in the Colorado ballot removal appeal, ABC News has taken this opportunity to further efforts to get Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from this and other potential matters related to the ongoing prosecutions of former President Donald Trump. Hence, tonight’s cheap hit job.

The piece aims at pressuring Thomas by using his wife, longtime conservative activist Ginni Thomas, as leverage. It is a most unsavory tactic. Unfortunately, recent history has shown that there has been no lack of imagination for unsavory tactics when it comes to dislodging originalists and conservatives from the Court or hectoring them into ruling as the left wishes them to rule.

Read it.

In the 1930s, the world had three powers that aspired to dominate the world: the communists of the Soviet Union under Stalin, who sought a worldwide proletariat revolution that redistributed wealth to the masses; the Nazis of Germany under Hitler, who sought to establish a global top-down fascist regime; and the United States under FDR, who sought to spread free-market capitalism throughout the world.

Although these three powers competed for global dominance with each other, they nonetheless sought alliances of convenience when it served their interests. Stalin tried to form an alliance with the West to counter Hitler’s rise, and when rebuffed he entered into a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Later, the capitalist West and communist Russia allied against fascist Germany.

Today, the world has five globalist elites with worldwide aspirations—communist China and Islamists have joined refashioned successors of the three of the 1930s. As in the 1930s, the elites form alliances and cooperate in numerous areas, often to crush opposition from their own subjects.

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

“A major challenge now is how to efficiently de-risk potential toxicities associated with mRNA technology,” the scientists wrote in the paper, which was published by Nature Reviews Drug Discovery on Jan. 23.

The Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 shots use modified messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology. The mRNA is delivered by lipid nanoparticles (LNP).

The toxicity risks include “lipid nanoparticle structural components, production methods, route of administration and proteins produced from complexed mRNAs,” the authors of the paper said.

Neoscope.

Everything good is bad for you.

I hope this lasts longer then most ‘government guidelines’, like the ‘food pyramid’.

Read it.

You knew it had to happen.

In a world of fake tits, fake butts, fake cheeks, and fake lips, could fake IDs be far behind?

Read it.

As he does.

If anyone is watching, there’s been plenty to see as armed Hamas fighters have hijacked aid convoys in videos taken both by the IDF and civilians in Gaza. In video after video, Hamas terrorists seize aid, assault civilians who, in some cases, respond by hurling abuse and stones.

On Halloween, John Kirby, Biden’s national security spokesman, denied anything was going on.

Read it.

Student achievement at a San Francsico-area elementary school fell dramatically following the establishment of a woke teaching policy through a $250,000 federal grant.

Read it.

Amazon yielded to pressure from President Joe Biden’s White House to suppress books that opposed COVID-19 vaccines, according to documents reviewed by The Daily Signal.

The House Judiciary Committee obtained the emails, which demonstrate the White House’s pressure on Amazon to suppress “anti-vax books” and the company’s decision to take action against the books.

Amazon employees strategized for a meeting with the White House on March 9, 2021, openly asking whether the administration wanted the retailer to remove books from its catalog.

My, what a surprise.

Read it.

Repeat break-ins have forced an Atlanta small business owner to close her store.

Thieves broke into According to Fashion in Sweet Auburn at least seven times in 2023.

Police dusted for prints, and by December, officers had arrested three people.

Apparently that wasn’t good enough.

Per Wikipedia:

The mayor of Atlanta is Andre Dickens, a Democrat elected on a nonpartisan ballot whose first term in office began on January 3, 2022.Every mayor elected since 1973 has been Black

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leopard, Camembert and Roquefort are on the brink of extinction. The cause: a narrow selection of the strains of fungi used to culture the cheeses has been reproduced through an asexual, standardised process —to the point of exhaustion. Could cheese be a metaphor for our humanity adrift?

To understand how this tragedy came about, it’s important to understand the production process that allows these two jewels of French cheese-making expertise to come into the world. To produce Camembert, made from cow’s milk, or Roquefort, made from sheep’s milk, the milk has to be inoculated with very specific fungi: Penicillium camemberti for Camembert, and, logically, Penicillium roqueforti for Roquefort. The presence of these fungi in the milk will transform it and allow it—under the watchful eye of man who monitors the natural process—to develop the fine flavours that will then, after a long evolution, charm the fine palates of gourmets.

The problem is that these little creatures called Penicillia camemberti and roqueforti are rare and fragile.

Read it.

The Firm of Schumer & McConnell (as Senator Lee calls it) released the text of the “bipartisan border bill” last night. The text (I think) is posted here. It’s part of an “emergency” supplemental appropriations bill that runs to 370 pages.

The proponents of the bill have also released a 19-page summary. Fox News reporter Bill Melugin has posted his take on the bill’s highlights on X beginning here.

Senator Schumer wants to call the bill up for an initial procedural vote on Wednesday. Speed is of the essence. One might hazard the guess that is because the closer we look the worse it gets. Listening to Senator Lankford promote the bill, I think that any good the bill allegedly does is illusory.

Read it.

Thereby guaranteeing that only rich people can use them.

Government officials, of course, will not have to pay–or, of they do, the cost will be passed on to the taxpayers.

Bloomberg.

A growing number of young adults can’t see a way to manage both careers and the demands of parenting.

Freeberg nails it.

So I was reading this epistle posted on this Internet woke-kiosk called The Mary Sue, which was sounding the familiar clarion call of the woke, “Oh how much I hate this thing, come gather around and help me hate it.” In this case, for today, “it” would be J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter adventures.

The author piqued my curiosity by willfully using the word “problematic.” This isn’t a good word. It doesn’t say anything. Take an object, let’s say it’s a beehive, or a pair of salt & pepper shakers. A milk bucket. You tell me it’s “problematic” and what does that say about the thing? Nothing. You’re telling me about yourself, and your objectives. You’re trying to start a new cultural more in which the thing is generally disliked, for some reason. You’re instigating a bargain. You’ll grant me approval if I help you dislike the thing. Or, you’ll withhold the approval unless I help you. And…that’s it. That’s all you’re saying.

The word “problematic,” itself…has problems. But our newer generation of feminists just can’t stop using it.

It’s a term used to imply that there’s something wrong without doing the work of being specific because that would open up the opiner to refutation; as long as it’s kept inchoate, there’s nothing you can nail down but the impression of deficiency is left in people’s brains.. ‘Troubling’ is another such term.

It isn’t because my biases are the opposite of theirs, and I don’t trust their judgment. Although those apply. No. I would expect a reasonable progressive, if you can find one, to concede the point that never being happy is an indispensable part of their ideology. This is easily defined and easily tested. Just give them whatever they want, which is something we’ve done many times. They’ll find a new way to be unhappy, to say “Still not good enough.” Progress, remember?

Preach it, brother.

Read it.

Recently I found myself trying to describe the appeal of the Harry Potterbooks to a friend who’d never read them, and I came to realise that, at over a quarter of a century since The Philosopher’s Stone was published, the series can now be used to illuminate the dreams, obsessions and resentments of the class of people who took over the reins of first culture and then politics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in Britain and the Western world more widely. The fact of the rise of this class to prominence is a commonplace and there are many terms in circulation for them that capture various overlapping elements: liberal elite, new elite, graduate class, meritocrats, champagne socialists, or even for the specific British generation that J. K. Rowling belongs to, Britpoppers.

This class rose with the postwar economic expansion and the meritocracy that accompanied it, and combined 1960s counter-cultural values with conventional worldly success. They saw themselves as defined against the fallen old world and being oppositional and anti establishment was core to their self image. For a descriptive term therefore I like American journalist David Brooks’s coinage of Bobo (bourgeois bohemian) from his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. As Scott Alexander said in his partial review of Bobos, the neologism “was cute but never caught on”, but nonetheless I will use it going forward. Harry Potter is often associated with the millennial generation who were its first and largest target market, but while the millennials grew up in the world the bobos created and largely imbibed their philosophy (which is one reason why they liked Harry Potterso much), they were not, of course, its originators.

One of the disadvantages of living in a technological society is that people can prolong adolescence for decades without much in the way of repercusssions.

Read it.

A Feb. 9 Federal TRIO Programs Subcommittee meeting could push the Biden administration one step closer to extending $1.2 billion in college-preparatory programs to illegal immigrants.

A draft proposal released Jan. 12 by the Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education argued in favor of extending Federal TRIO programs to illegal immigrants. TRIO programs are a set of eight “outreach and student services” initiatives meant to prepare “low-income individuals, first-generation college students, and individuals with disabilities” for college, as seen on the program page.

At the upcoming meeting, subcommittee members will discuss “participant eligibility” and then present their recommendations to an overhead committee, as stated by the Office of Postsecondary Education. Subcommittee members could continue to push the proposal to include illegal immigrants in TRIO programs.

L.A. Times.

From a parking lot on the corner of 12th and Figueroa streets, Michael Lopez carefully commandeered his drone through the skyline around LA Live.
A video screen showed the drone’s slow ascent. Up and up it went, until it framed a shot almost straight out of Ansel Adams. The cloud-covered San Gabriel Mountains. Green foothills glimmering from recent rains. And an abandoned, half-finished skyscraper plastered in bright, bubbly graffiti.
Two other towers were similarly hit, the floor of each 20-plus-story building featuring graffiti on the corners.

Read it.

A former Trump administration official who was shot during a Washington, D.C., carjacking spree on Monday died Saturday, his wife said in a statement.Mike Gill, who worked at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission under former President Donald Trump, was shot Monday.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Last November, the American Ornithological Society, or AOS, announced that it would change the common names of all American birds named after people. There are 152 such “eponymic” names (that is, birds that are named after a specific person, like Bicknell’s Thrush) on the AOS’ official checklist, and the group is planning to start with between 70 and 80 species predominantly found in the U.S. and Canada. In the coming years, birds like Cooper’s Hawk, Wilson’s Snipe, and Lincoln’s Sparrow will be stripped of their eponyms and given new common English names.

The eponymic naming issue has been heating up in the bird world for a few years now. Birds got their English names when they were “discovered” by Western scientists, or otherwise identified as a new species. This meant ornithologists had the honor of coming up with whatever moniker they wanted, and frequently named birds in honor of a benefactor, a friend, or the person who shot the first known specimen.

Red State.

CNN anchor Erica Hill was stunned into silence on Friday morning after a panelist explained to her why illegal immigrants don’t stay in Florida.

The exchange came after four illegal immigrants were released from jail with no bail after assaulting two police officers in New York City. As they walked out of the police station, they flipped off the cameras and then, according to the NYPD, got on a bus to flee to California.

During the CNN segment, Jon Miller, who is a law enforcement analyst for CNN, explained how organized these criminal illegal aliens are, noting their rap sheets. He then brings up what NYPD detectives are telling him about why illegal immigrants are coming back to New York. The answer? They’d end up in jail if they stayed in Florida.

That’s followed by a period of awkward silence before one of the anchors abruptly ends the segment.

The Other McCain.

Just a few years ago, Portland, Oregon, was seen as a sort of progressive utopia, and it’s not really a secret why this was so: Portland is the whitest major city in America. Progressive like to talk about “diversity,” but they prefer to admire it from a comfortable distance, you understand.

…

Portland proves this principle in reverse — a predominately white city populated by the kind of left-wing kooks who like Bernie Sanders, but think he’s perhaps too “mainstream” for their taste. It’s no surprise that Portland is a hotbed of “Antifa” radicalism, just like it’s no surprise that Portland has a significant homelessness problem.

Reuters.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg was on Friday cleared of a public order offence over a protest outside an oil and gas conference last year, after a judge in a London court ruled she had no case to answer.

Thunberg, who became a prominent campaigner worldwide after staging weekly protests in front of the Swedish parliament in 2018, was acquitted at Westminster Magistrates’ Court of a single charge under the Public Order Act.

Thunberg was one of dozens of people arrested in October outside a London hotel where the Energy Intelligence Forum was hosting oil and gas industry leaders.

She and four others, aged between 19 and 59, were accused of failing to comply with an order by police to move their protest to a designated area near the conference.

If there are no consequences for breaking the law, people are going to continue to break the law.

Read it.

Federal authorities in Minnesota are investigating a suspected arson fire that heavily damaged the offices of three conservative groups, which are calling the blaze an act of political terrorism.

If there are no consequences for breaking the law, people are going to break the law. And AntiFa and BLM has conclusively demonstrated that proglodytes won’t shrink from political terrorism if they think they can get away with it.

UPDATE: An arson footnote

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Meanwhile, 150 Democrats also voted against legislation that would quickly deport illegal aliens who drive drunk.

“I am appalled to see a majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives voting to prevent illegal aliens who endanger the lives of American citizens by drunk driving from being deported. Americans deserve leaders who put their safety and prosperity first,” said Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX).