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

Read it.

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

Read it.

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).

Read it.

Principal Marc Balanda sent an email out to students and their families on Jan. 24 and explained that the new dispenser had been torn down and basically destroyed in less than 25 minutes, according to CT Insider. Balanda called the incident “disgusting” and an “egregious instance of vandalism and destruction of property” in the email with a subject line that read “I am feeling ‘dis-’ right now.”

…

The dispenser was put in place in compliance with a law that passed in 2022 and was set to go into effect on Sept. 1 of this year that requires all schools from grades three to 12 to put menstrual dispensers in female restrooms and at least one male restroom, according to the text. Some who supported the bill argued that “menstruating individuals” shouldn’t have to choose between their period and going to school, according to the CT Mirror.

…

“Ask for more information. Use your words to start a dialogue rather than using your hands to destroy something. In this particular instance, if you have questions, please let me know,” Balanda wrote in the email.

Tell that to Antifa and BLM and see how far it gets you.

“Dialogue” these days means getting preached at by proglodyte officials, but doesn’t bring any relief. The boys didn’t have any questions; they knew why a tampon dispenser had been placed in their bathroom, and they were serving notice that it wouldn’t be tolerated.

Read it.

The parents of a former OnlyFans model accused of murdering her boyfriend have now been arrested in Austin.

Courtney Clenney is accused of fatally stabbing her boyfriend, Plano native Christan Obumseli, in Miami in April 2022.

Her parents, Kim and Deborah Clenney, were arrested in Austin on Tuesday on out of state felony warrants.

This looks like another case of Evolution In Action to me.

Read it.

As I write, dozens of tractors, one with an enormous manure spreader hitched to it, are blockading off a street near our Brussels office. They moved in during the night and are now hemmed in by police; most of the farmers look like they slept in their cabs. By 10 a.m., a half-dozen or so men and one young woman had set up an open-air barbeque in the park and opened some beers while reporters took photographs. The farmers are French; more are expected to arrive soon. A blockade is going on in Paris, too. On Friday, I attended a farmers’ protest in front of the EU with several of my colleagues—that one had fewer tractors but featured a large cow painted in EU blue hanging by its neck from a loader, while French politician Marion Maréchal, the blond darling of the French Right, gave supportive interviews.

Read it.

Protesting farmers were met by riot police with fire hoses just metres from the European Parliament on Thursday, as they tried to grab the attention of the European Council by expressing their collective outrage at EU green policies threatening their livelihood.

In an unusually rowdy protest, even by Brussels standards, tyre fires and tractor blockades greeted European leaders as a transnational coalition of farming groups took to the streets. They are angered by EU green policies—including decrees forcing active farmland to go fallow, restricting the use of fertiliser, and limiting permitted amount of livestock—as well as national edicts such as reduced subsidies on diesel fuel—that are direct results of the EU’s Net Zero commitments.

In remarks to The European Conservative, French MEP Thierry Mariani (Rassemblement National-ID) blamed the uproar on the wishes of EU elites to pursue free trade deals while suffocating native European industry with “Soviet-style administration of agriculture,” as well as relentlessly pursuing Ukrainian integration into EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP).

The peasants are still revolting.

Washington Times.

Under pressure from Congress, the Pentagon on Wednesday released an updated and expanded list of nearly 50 Chinese military companies currently operating in the United States. The list includes several key weapons makers such as the Aviation Industry Corp. of China Ltd. and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. Ltd.

Two state-run nuclear companies on the list — the China National Nuclear Corp. and China General Nuclear Power Group — are key players in China‘s rapid nuclear weapons buildup and have been sanctioned by the Treasury Department in the past for suspected diversion of civilian nuclear technology to the Chinese military.

The 46 companies, including 17 subsidiaries is a marked increase since the first list was published in 2021. That list included 34 companies and 13 subsidiary companies. Thirteen companies were added to the list in 2022.

Read it.

There are elections in Hong Kong, but to get on the ballot you have to be nominated by a committee controlled by Beijing government.

Elections for the Harvard Board of Overseers—one of Harvard’s two governing bodies—are almost as well-controlled. A Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) nominating committee curates a slate of candidates, from which alumni make their selections.

But an alternative route to get on the Harvard ballot exists, at least in theory. So-called “petition” candidates have always been rare—but after several climate activists were elected in 2020, the rules were changed to make it even harder. Among other things, the number of petitions to get on the ballot was raised by a factor of fifteen, to more than three thousand.

Newt Gingrich.

Scott Rasmussen has done America an enormous service. He and his team have identified the driving forces behind the destructive radicalism which is pushing us into a cultural civil war.

While doing their two weekly national surveys, Rasmussen and his team noticed an anomaly. Out of every 1,000 or so respondents, there would always be three or four who were far more radical than everyone else. After several months of finding these unusual responses, Rasmussen realized they all shared three characteristics.

The radical responses came from people who had graduate degrees (not just graduate studies), family incomes above $150,000 a year, and lived in large cities (more than 10,000 people per zip code).

Strong Towns.

Across North America, we are dealing with an epidemic of fatalities and injuries on our roadways. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there were 42,795 fatal car crashes in the United States, which is an average fatal crash rate of nearly 16 deaths per 100,000 vehicles.

There are many contributing factors involved in every crash and over the past year, cities and towns across North America have been exploring these factors through the Crash Analysis Studio.

The Crash Analysis Studio has one clear objective: No one should be the second person to die on a dangerous street.

Read it.

A billionaire donor to Harvard University said it and other elite schools create “whiny snowflakes” and vowed not to donate to the institution until that changes.

“Which way are we gonna pick?” Citadel CEO Ken Griffin asked CNBC’s Leslie Picker Tuesday at the MFA Network’s Miami conference. “Are we gonna educate the future members of the House and the Senate and the leaders of IBM, or are we gonna educate a group of young men and women who are just caught up in a rhetoric of oppressor and oppressee and ‘this is not fair’ and, frankly, just, like, whiny snowflakes? Like, where are we going with education in elite schools in America? And that’s a really big issue.”

Picker then asked Griffin if he was still supporting Harvard financially, to which he responded with a terse, “No.”

Read it.

Mike Gill, a married father of three, is in critical condition in the hospital after his family says he was shot during Monday night’s wild crime spree.

Time to leave.

Why any normal person would want to live in D.C. passes all understanding. That’s like knocking on the gate at Auschwitz and asking to come in.

Read it.

The San Francisco store that inspired the movie Toy Story will close next month, with the owner citing crime as one reason for its demise.

An attorney representing the Luhn family, which owns Jeffrey’s Toys—told SFGATE that “the perils and violence of the downtown environment, inflation, the decrease in consumer spending, and the demise of retail across the world” led to the family’s decision to close the store.

Matthew Luhn, the store’s co-owner, told the publication in December that the store has experienced people attempting to shoplift and even had someone try to stab one of his employees. Decreased business due to the COVID-19 pandemic impacted sales, as did the rise of online shopping and general high operating costs. Luhn said the store pays $20,000 per month in rent.

Read it.

The Hong Kong anti-extradition movement is experiencing dark times. Exiles endure public beatings in Western countries; would-be exiles endure torture in Chinese jail cells. Million-dollar bounties are pronounced, public confessions are extorted, and lifelong manhunts are threatened. Three years after the final erasure of Hong Kong’s freedoms, citizens are still fleeing the territory for safer shores. We have come a long way from the glorious peak of 2019, when a single march would attract two million participants—the strongest possible demonstration of the will of the people to a watching world.

The betrayal of Hong Kong by the British was a significant milestone on the road to the fall of Western civilization.

Reuters.

A generation of children who learned to write on screens is now going old school.
Starting this year, California grade school students are required to learn cursive handwriting, after the skill had fallen out of fashion in the computer age.

Assembly Bill 446, sponsored by former elementary school teacher Sharon Quirk-Silva and signed into law in October, requires handwriting instruction for the 2.6 million Californians in grades one to six, roughly ages 6 to 12, and cursive lessons for the “appropriate” grade levels – generally considered to be third grade and above.

Read it.

It feels like everything these days needs you to create an account and log in to use them. Philips Hue announced you need to plug your home’s light automation to their cloud, even if you just use it locally. They claim it’s for security.

…

If someone breaks into my apartment, them pushing a button on my Hue bridge is the least of my worries. Them being connected to my online account is way higher threat.

Read it.

The Americans who plan to vote for President Trump are not supporting him because they prefer his dictatorial inclinations to the other guy’s, but because they want someone in charge of the executive branch who does not see the government’s role as controlling every aspect of their lives.

This stands in stark contrast to the Democratic Party’s efforts to regulate entire industries out of existence, or the mad, anti-liberty, anti-human fever dreams of the globalists on display at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.

In 2014, WEF speaker Yuval Harari informed a TEDx event audience that human rights don’t really exist; they are “like heaven or like God—just a fictional story we’ve invented and spread around.” At the 2022 WEF meeting, Alibaba President J. Michael Evans touted a developing “individual carbon footprint tracker” that would monitor where you travel, how you travel, what you eat and what you read on the internet. And the WEF’s 2016 predictions for 2030—including having to pay fines for emitting carbon dioxide (does that include exhaling?), restrictions on meat consumption and the end of private property (“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”)—are infamous.

OffGuardian.

Here I go with the mask thing again, sorry, but a strange thing is happening with this around the world. It seems that wearing a mask is slowly becoming a sort of natural expectation.

At first, it is showing up arbitrarily, for no particular reason. Maybe people wake up one morning and just say to themselves, “seems like a good day to wear the ol’ face diaper.” Or maybe it is a cold day, and the mask acts like earmuffs for the face. Or maybe, for some people, wearing a decorated mask becomes a fashion statement or a way to show the world who your favourite hockey team is (if their logo is blazoned onto the mask).

The agenda is of course getting on board by mandating masks here and there for special reasons, ironically few having anything to do with public health—directly at least. Health of course will always be the “silent purpose” behind mask-wearing, but I am willing to bet in a few years no one will even know the original reason people started wearing them.

The Foundry.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch” used to be American folk wisdom (and inspired a book by economist Milton Friedman). The greatest trick the American Left has played on young people is to convince them that free stuff is actually free. In fact, tax credits, student debt “relief,” COVID-19 stimulus, rent control, and other giveaways simply redistribute existing wealth or borrow money that must be repaid by taxpayers.

Relative to illegal immigration, it doesn’t matter how much you put aside for a rainy day if the rain never stops. Biden’s policies have locked in an unlimited flow of illegal immigration at the border. Many of those coming now have no U.S. relatives or employment waiting for them. They will continue to head for “sanctuary” megacities that offer free housing and benefits. Local authorities there seem to only now begin to understand the scale of demand with which they are dealing. Our open borders have resulted in housing shortages, closed schools, commandeered public spaces, and hospitals catering to patients no one voted to admit into the country while everyday taxpaying Americans wait in line.

It’s not as if all Americans are rich and can absorb the costs of paying for these people who aren’t paying for themselves—particularly in the places where illegal aliens are amassing.

UPDATE: Migrant Encounters Nationwide Hit Record 371K in December

UPDATE: Mexican Cops Halt Train With 1,800 Migrants Headed to Texas

Read it.

A twist has been added to California’s homeless crisis after people were found living in eight caves, some furnished, dug into the bank of the Tuolumne River.

Modesto police, a volunteer organization Operation 9-2-99, and the Tuolumne River Trust teamed to remove 7,600 pounds of trash Saturday from the caves, KVOR-TV in Sacramento reported Wednesday.

The caves, some as wide as 10 feet, were located about 20 feet below street level and accessible through makeshift stairs built into the riverbank. It is unknown who dug the caves and how long they had been there.

Read it.

In Britain, the obsessive drive to boost ‘diversity’ across all sectors of society has no shortage of casualties to its name. One of them is merit: talent being both rare and useful, it should be sought wherever it can be found. To make an a priori fetish of women and ethnic minorities will inevitably interfere with what should be a scrupulously evidence-based, talent-seeking process. The most recent casualty, however, is nothing less than Britain’s power to maintain itself in existence as a country.

This power has been pitifully weakened. What is more, it did not have to happen. The British army, tasked with the small matter of defending the realm, has shrunk by 40% since 2010. We now boast a mere 70,000 enlisted soldiers. There is even talk of conscription in the event of war.

While it might be excessive to ascribe this failure to diversity alone, our political class, especially the lamentable Conservative Party, must take a monumental portion of the blame. Far from merely allowing the rot to infect the military’s upper echelons, successive Tory governments have actively commanded our armed forces to adopt the tripartite motto of race communists the world over: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

The Foundry.

We education policy and pedagogy wonks love to spend hours poring over education policies and proposals that shape statewide approaches to everything from tax and financial frameworks to cultural edicts on social-emotional learning, critical race theory, and LGBTQ+ sexualization of children.

We spend far too little time with “boots on the ground” observing what does and doesn’t work in the day-to-day classroom, which often affects students far more than this year’s slate of state education policies.

I’ve spent the past few years visiting hundreds of different schools with dozens of different education styles. From charter schools that are public schools with a corporate coat of paint to Hasidic homeschool cooperatives that teach all subjects at once, and every other kind of school in between.

Current educational methods are modeled on the Henry Ford factory system: You take a set of raw materials and send it through the assembly line in a batch, and do Quality Assurance at various points to weed out the failures. Everything is set up to deal with the ‘average’ student … but the problem is that there is no ‘average student’; each student is an individual, and the system is geared toward forcing that individual into the Procrustean bed of The Method rather than treating each individual as an individual. We can do better. We Have The Technology.

Read it.

Melanie, the singer-songwriter who rose through the New York folk scene, performed at Woodstock and had a series of 1970s hits including the enduring cultural phenomenon “Brand New Key,” has died.

I loved her song Animal Crackers.

Newsbusters.

While wearing a Trump wig.

As everything looks like a nail to the hammer, so does everything look like racism to the racial demagogue. The racial demagogue in this instance, is of course, MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who performed a segment in which she compared calls to secure the southern border to Southern segregation during the ‘60s.