Read it.

A huge development Thursday regarding enforcement of Iran sanctions and the West’s economic war on both Damascus and Tehran: British Royal Marines seized an oil tanker in Gibraltar off Spain’s southern coast while it was en route to Syria in what’s being called an unprecedented and aggressive move to enforce EU sanctions.

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Good riddance. Would that other RINOs had the character to do the same.

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Strikes me as disqualifying himself as a Presidential candidate.

Not to much to ask that a candidate for President NOT BREAK THE LAW.

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MAD Magazine will cease publication later this year, according to reports. Blogger Jedidiah Leland reportedly discovered the news after a MAD editor confessed to the magazine’s doom in a Facebook group, and shortly thereafter, cartoonist Ruben Bolling seemed to confirm the report on Twitter. Of course, Bolling is not a MAD cartoonist (although he did have work published in it in 2005), so he may have been simply responding to the growing volume of responses to the Leland report.

Read it.

How about that GREAT government -provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

Bernie does.

British eco researcher drowns off coast of South Africa after yacht hit by storm  ‘Eco-researcher’ gets a yacht? I’ m in the wrong business.

If Thwaites Glacier collapses, it would change global coastlines forever  “if”. “could”. If an asteroid hit the earth, we’d all die.

Hidden Costs of Energy Mandates

Solar Power Triumph: Los Angeles Announces The End of Fossil Fuel

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: Trump ‘Hijacked’ the Fourth of July  Yeah, how dare the President make a big deal about the 4th?

Nets Insist Trump Is ‘Hijacking’ 4th of July to Make It ‘More About Him’

WHAT!? Matthews, Friends Bash Trump’s Fourth Plans as ‘Un-American’ Mirroring the USSR

No, The Trump Administration Is Not Torturing Migrants

The Anti-Trump Circus

MSNBC Won’t Air Trump’s 4th Of July Celebration

Joy Reid: Trump’s Positioning of Tanks in the Capital is an Overt Threat to Use Military Force Against “The Resistance”

Trump Rape Accuser: Send Men To ‘Retraining Camps,’ Let Women Rule  So she’s just a looney.

Ilhan Omar Defends Obama For Implementing The Same Immigration Policies As Trump

MSNBC: ‘Strong Man’ Trump’s July 4th Like Soviet May Day Parade

Read it.

Democrats: Party of Fear–Party of Hate–Party of Death.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Some good news for a change.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Usually in any showdown with a Muslim state of the Middle East, especially a large, theocratic country like Iran, the United States would be subject to the usual Islamic boilerplate slurs of Islamophobia, racism, imperialism, and colonialism, and we’d see popular anti-American unrest. But in the Muslim world, Iran is probably more unpopular than even the Trump administration. Renegade allies such as Hezbollah, Bashar al-Assad’s rump remains of Syria, and Hamas are reminders that Iran has no friends. Hatred for Tehran in the Middle East transcends the ancient Persian–Arab and Shiite–Sunni fault lines, and it’s fueled by 40 years of Iran-backed terrorism, bullying, and backing of insurgent movements throughout the Middle East.

Read it.

Intersectionality is a game that everyone can play.

Read it.

What is it with Democrats and their kinder gentler conscription schemes?

Did they learn nothing from the Peace Corps and its variants?

ZMan looks at the Brave New World.

Every day, we are told the artificial intelligence is not a science fiction fantasy, but a reality of modern life. Crimes are solved using AI and the military is supposedly using it to fight the forever wars. Microsoft regularly runs ads explaining that thanks to AI, the modern world will run just fine without white people. IBM goes further, claiming their artificial intelligence robots are already running large swaths of the world. The robot revolution is here and humans are being replaced with machines.

The target audience for these ads is a question, as the people watching television are not the people deciding whether to use IBM or Microsoft for the artificial intelligence requirements. It’s an example of how the custodial state has evolved. These ads are not about moving product or even improving the image of the firms. It is about conditioning people to the idea that they are wards of the state. Not only will they have no role in how their world is managed, they should not even bother thinking about it.

The Netflix series PERSON OF INTEREST is of relevance.

Read it.

Bias? What bias?

Read it.

Environmentalists ought to be pleased.

I bet it would survive Global Warming just as well.

Steve Sailer.

Reminds me of how in the Soviet military, top officers had political commissars following them around to make sure they didn’t get up to anything.

Read it.

Gee, how could that have happened?

I am consistently amazed and the number of defective people wandering about in our world.

Depressing, really.

The Hill Slaps Obama-Era Photo Of Kids In Cages On Story About Trump Detention Centers

‘Morning Joe’ Whacks Ivanka as ‘Not Professional,’ ‘In Completely Over Her Head’  How do they put it? Oh, yeah: With No Evidence.

Futuristic HBO Drama Lambasts Trump, Pence, ‘Old Men In Power Forever’  Old men like Bernie and Biden?

Netflix Uses New Comedy Series ‘Mr. Iglesias’ to Bash Conservatives and Trump

Nadler: Border Agency Chiefs Should Be Prosecuted For Child Abuse

Megan Rapinoe’s Girlfriend Sue Bird Compares Trump Criticism To ‘Out Of Body Experience’

MSNBC Touts Ilhan Omar Labeling Trump ‘Dictator in the Making’  Pretty fe0esty for a foreigner.

Daily Beast Wheezily Warns of ‘Team Trump’s Plan to Destroy Mueller’

MSNBC Panel Mocks Trump-Kim Meeting as ‘Diplomatic Booty Call’  Guess they’re not interested in peace. Good to know.

Bette Midler And Other Celebs Hit Social Media To Slam Trump’s July 4th ‘Salute To Himself’

The “Magic Wand of Fudging” Produces Global Warming

Debunking 3 doomster stories about energy & climate

Deserts ‘greening’ from rising CO2

Resolution and Hockey Sticks, Part Deux: Carbon Dioxide

Climate models are fudged, says climatologist – Video  But you knew that.

Snyder: The Earth Strikes Back – 10 Signs That Nature Has Turned Against Humanity  Women and minorities hardest hit etc.

Read it.

Not sure what the point of that is — if they had money, they wouldn’t be here illegally — but you gotta admit that Trump’s team is full of surprises.

Read it.

Below is Mark Steyn’s take on the Antifa-generated street violence in Portland last weekend. He includes a useful portmanteau word to describe the self-appointed arbiters of public ideology: “Klantifa”. I looked the neologism up, and it was evidently coined sometime last summer, but I’d never heard it before.

The Antifa groups (which were all but non-existent in the USA before the election of Donald Trump) are the enforcers of the Democrat party line in major American cities. The cities are run by the Democrat political establishment, which approves of Antifa’s choice of targets. The police stand down because the mayors order them to stand down and let their pet street thugs bash the fash. The Antifa bully boys are ostensibly independent of any party or government or political organization, which provides the plausible deniability that the pols require. The city fathers can then wring their hands and deplore the “violence”, as if it were a natural disaster, like a flood or a tornado.

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Gee, I wonder why.

Read it.

Duh: Communist Dictatorship.

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A church holding membership in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest Lutheran denomination in the country, worships God almost exclusively as a woman. The church, Ebenezer Lutheran in San Francisco, also participates in rituals to honor ancient goddesses.

Calling their Sunday service “The Liturgy of the Divine Feminine,” the church uses crystals, animal masks, Reiki healing, Kundali Yoga, and goddess idol-making in their liturgies and events. The church uses names like “Womb,” “Kundalini,” “Sophia,” and “Midwife” to worship God, according to their website.

Well, San Francisco. Something in the water out there, I expect.

Read it.

Maybe they need a wall.

Read it.

Mainstream bioethics is often really just leftwing politics, masking as a field of objective expertise that seeks to influence society far beyond medical ethics and health care public policy. As an example, the other day I pointed out that leaders of the movement recently presumed to make the global-warming controversy a bioethics issue — which it isn’t.

‘Bioethicist’ is an occupation  like ‘grief counselor’ that requires only a compulsion to tell other people what they ought to do.

Read it.

Migrants in Tijuana shelters said they are alarmed after reports of single mothers being approached by groups of men who have offered to buy children to improve their chances of safely crossing into the United States.

A decades-old legal document, known as the Flores agreement, says migrant children should only be held briefly in U.S. border custody, which often means they are released, along with the parent or guardian with whom they crossed while they wait for their asylum cases to make their way through clogged immigration courts.

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Both men were victims of SIM-swap attacks, where someone uses pieces of personal information to convince your cell service provider to transfer (port) your number and associated phone account to a device in the attacker’s possession. With control of your phone number and account, they proceed to break into all connected accounts, usually beginning with email. The attacker changes info in your accounts so you can’t get them back, sets up email forwarding in case you regain control of your email, and goes through all your cloud-stored documents looking for things of value.

Read it.

The quest for Pokemon Victim Points keeps producing hoaxes.

Read it.

I’m okay with that.

Severian looks at knowledge.

We Normals think of “science” as a process.  I’m not going to go full Vox Day here and start making up words, but when we say “science,” we mean it almost like a verb.  “Science,” for us, means something like “functioning as a scientist, doing science, science-ing” — that is, testing a theory against the bedrock of Reality.

The PoMos, by contrast, use “science” like a noun — “science” is whatever the community of scientists say it is.  It’s not a process, it’s a thing, a body of “knowledge” handed down like Scripture.  That’s why they love the idea of “falsifiability.”  It’s why the phrase “the science is settled!” makes sense to them.  Actually doing science — behaving as a “scientist,” science-ing — is, to them, a process that we Normals would call “hermeneutics.”  Hermeneutics is the interpretation of scared texts.  The Bible doesn’t contradict itself all over the place.  Nor was Karl Marx wrong in every prediction he ever made.  Rather, the apparent contractions are all perfectly consistent in the light of the Higher Truth.

ZMan pulls on a thread or two.

Not so long ago, both political parties in the West had a strong hold on their members and controlled access to their ballots. If you wanted to be a Democrat, a Tory or a Christian Democrat, it required you to be a member of those parties. You had to be in good standing with party leaders. There was plenty of internal party politics, as that’s the point of party politics, but the parties themselves had firm borders. If you wanted to be in the party, it meant adhering to party rules and supporting the party.

Look around today and that’s no longer true. In the United States, both parties are devolving into loose affiliations of power centers. The Republicans have no control over the message, as members regularly contradict one another in public and they can barely perform the basics as a party. The Democrats are close to flying apart as the various tribes within the party put loyalty to the tribe ahead of the party. They may nominate for president someone who is technically not in the party.

Read it.

Actions have consequences.

Read it.

Factory OS is in the business of designing and building homes using pre-fabricated, modular components. Its first customer was Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which in 2017 ordered 300 apartment units from the company, according to Wall Street Journal reporting from the time. The reported value of that deal was between $25 million and $30 million. Unnamed experts cited by the Wall Street Journal said that modular, pre-fabricated construction can reduce construction costs by 25 to 50 percent in the Bay Area.

In 2018, the company opened a sprawling manufacturing facility in Vallejo which can produce 2,000 to 3,000 units per year, according to local Fox affiliate KTVU. Describing the facility, the KTVU article states that, “[h]ouses will be moved along the assembly line by cranes and industrial air cushions. At two dozen assembly stations, 150 to 250 union employees will build the modules from the inside out. The modules, some as large as 16 feet by 70 feet, will likely contain two or more living units, studio sized to multi bedrooms.”

The housing units are then loaded onto trucks and shipped whole to building sites. Factory OS is currently working on developments in West Oakland and El Cirrito.

Read it.

Electroactive bacteria were unknown to science until a couple of decades ago. But now that scientists know what to look for, they’re finding this natural electricity across much of the world, even on the ocean floor. It alters entire ecosystems, and may help control the chemistry of the Earth.

Read it.

A stowaway fell out of the bottom of a jet as it was approaching Heathrow airport to land on Sunday, according to NBC. The incident took place after a nine hour flight from Nairobi and the body wound up landing in a garden.

Metropolitan police said that the body was found in a garden in South London on Sunday and that it was believed to have fallen from a plane. The body has not been identified, nor has an official cause of death been determined.

We are not coroners, but we’re going to go out on a limb and say that if the authorities’ hypothesis is correct, the cause of death is likely going to be – wait for it – falling out of an airplane.

The poor guy was probably dead a corpse. Commercial flights typically travel at 30,000 feet, and there isn’t enough oxygen at that height to sustain life; Mt Everest climbers refer to altitudes above about 29,000 feet as ‘the death zone‘. Spend nine hours up there and you’re pretty much dead.

Read it.

I wrote here about an attack by Antifa criminals on journalist Andy Ngo in Portland on Saturday. Ngo was hospitalized and had several thousand dollars worth of camera equipment destroyed. It turns out that at about the same time, in a different area of the Antifa rampage, Brownshirt thugs attacked and seriously injured two other men.

Read it.

That didn’t take long.

Beto Meets With Migrants In Mexico ‘Impacted By Donald Trump’s Cruel And Inhumane Policies’

2020 Democrats Slam Trump’s North Korea Visit  Apparently they’re not all that interested in peace.

WaPo, NYT Giving Dangerous Platform To Left-Wing Apologists Stoking Civil Discord

Brian Stelter Preaches: Trump Presidency’s ‘One Long Class About the Patriarchy’

Anti-Trump fever takes threatening turn

MSNBC ‘Republican’ Elise Jordan: Trump-Kim Meeting ‘Makes Me Want to Puke’

Trump Cartoon Depicting The President Playing Golf Over Dead Migrant Family Goes Viral, Canadian Cartoonist Responsible Loses Job  He will get another soon enough..

NBC Turns to Obama Flack to Label Trump North Korea Visit ‘Dangerous’

#Resistance Restaurant Owner Defends Spitting on Trump Son in WashPost

CNN Special Slimes: Trump ‘Feeds,’ ‘Jumps on’ KKK, Bigoted Bandwagon

Bernie Sanders Campaign Shares Doctored Video Of Trump

CNN Panel Bashes Fox News; Stelter Wants Trump Hit Harder

MSNBC’s ‘The Last Word’: Trump ‘Begging’ Putin to Interfere in Elections  There are times when ‘delusional’ is just too weak a word.

Climate Advocate Ship of Fools University Bans Teaching Potentially Offensive Facts

Russia Launches “Floating Chernobyl” Bound For The Arctic

Climate change is taking its toll on Greek monuments, say scientists  Although not as much as tourists.

Typical barbecue is as bad for the planet as a 90 mile car journey, scientists warn   I can’t drive a Mercedes but I can have the ribs. Mmmmmm!

Doug Watt: Chastising the Climate Wreckers

Devastating Crop Losses Are Literally Happening All Over The Globe  Government policies have that effect.

German Green Leader Apologises for Blaming Merkel’s Trembling on Global Warming  I believed her.

‘Don’t F**k It Up!’: Miley Cyrus Berates Audience Over Climate Change  I wonder whether she eats with that same mouth.

We’ve already built too many power plants and cars to prevent 1.5 ?C of warming  Women and minorities hardest hit, etc.

Read it.

Go science.

Read it.

The state of Illinois holds a B+ rating from the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (the highest rating given is an A). Gun control advocates would have you believe this means it should be a relatively safe place.

Yet Illinois’ largest city, Chicago, has long been an embarrassment to this notion. The city if anything has had an even lengthier list of gun controls than the state itself, but it has also seen years of terribly high rates of violent crime.

Read it.

According to the United Nations, everyone has the right to air conditioned comfort powered by magic.

And who could object to that?

Read it.

How about that GREAT government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

When health care workers become government employees, patients get government employee levels of service.

Read it.

“Those who save human life cannot be criminals,” Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president said. “Italy is a founding state of the European Union. We expect a country like Italy to handle such a case differently.”

“We ask the German president to take care of what is happening in Germany and perhaps to invite his fellow citizens to avoid breaking Italian laws,” Matteo Salvini, the Italian interior minister, countered on Twitter.

Troublt in paradise?

Read it.

And yet presumably they still expect to be paid.

I’m waiting to see how they work that.