Read it.

Nicole Mansfield Wright’s Defending Privilege asks an extremely timely question: how is it that narratives of victimhood at the hands of arbitrary and excessive power are deployed so frequently in defense of those in power already? To answer this question, Wright turns to the eighteenth-century British novel, a genre long understood to be entwined with liberal modernity, the emergence of human-rights discourse, and the elevation of the “ordinary person” to a level of cultural prominence that anticipated the increasing figuration of “the people” as the legitimate seat of political power.

Read it.

The principal current focus of lawlessness is Uptown, formerly the city’s main entertainment district. Uptown is where Winston Boogie Smith opened fire on law enforcement officers who were trying to arrest him, leading to his own death. Expect his canonization any day now. Uptown has not been free from “protests,” which mostly means unchecked crime, in the weeks that have gone by since.

Read it.

A Somali culture-enricher went on a stabbing rampage today in the German city of Wurzburg, killing three people and wounding a number of others. The victims seem to have been chosen at random. The alleged perpetrator was shot in the leg by police and is now in custody.

Awkward moment VP Harris reminds Biden about Florida condo collapse

CBS Cheers Biden for Infrastructure Deal, Ignores Him Possibly Sinking It

Biden’s bizarre behavior at press conference causes ‘Creepy Joe’ to trend on Twitter

More Than 500K Illegal Immigrants Crossed Southern Border Since Kamala Harris Named ‘Border Czar’

Border Arrests Top 1 Million in Fiscal Year 2021

Biden Administration Is Skewing Carbon Numbers to Push Regulations

Compromise: In Lieu Of Eucharist, Priest To Offer Biden Non-Blessed But Delicious Vanilla Wafer Babylon Bee.

Climate change anxiety: Young people ‘feel hopeless’ As with the Pandemic Panic, this feeling of hopelessness facilitates dependence on governmental bodies, which supposedly can perform miracles where individuals are powerless.

We can’t beat the climate crisis without rethinking land use  People need to be packed in like sardines if we’re going to survive.

Green Group Accuses Europe of Climate Change Colonialism  Get yer scorecard! You can’t tell the type of colonialism without a scorecard!

The Real Cost of Wind and Solar

Joy Reid Trashes Conservative Parents Who Oppose Critical Race Theory

Incoming Cal State Dean Defended Farrakhan, Attacked Jewish Critics  I think she’s actually a lizard.

Netflix: What Blacks Really Need in 2021 Is More Encouragement to Shoot People,

Eliminating ‘Racist’ Entrance Exam Led to More White Students, Fewer Asians at Top High School

As Gun Ownership Rises In The United States, Black Imagery Shifts  Forbes admits that media coverage isn’t about rights but about ‘narrative’.

Read it.

Krugman’s latest drivel was headlined, “Economics in a Post-Truth Nation.” Krugman attempted to convince readers that Republicans were daft for not accepting that “we’re clearly in a much better place economically than we were just a few months ago.” Krugman dismissed skyrocketing inflation and hiring problems as “transitory” and “temporary.” In Krugman’s own words, “I still miss the days when truth mattered.” Ironic that Krugman, who claims to care about “truth,” is the same person who peddled a conspiracy theory last year that former President Donald Trump coerced the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to fudge the numbers on explosive job growth that occurred in May 2020.

Glenn Greenwald.

It is, of course, possible that the top brass of the U.S. military has suddenly become supremely enlightened on questions of racial strife and racial identity in the U.S., and thus genuinely embraced theories that, until very recently, were the exclusive province of left-wing scholars at elite academic institutions. Given that all U.S. wars in the post-World War II era have been directed at predominantly non-white countries, which — like all wars — required a sustained demonization campaign of those enemy populations, having top Pentagon officials become leading anti-racism warriors would be quite a remarkable transformation indeed. But stranger things have happened, I suppose.

Read it.

I’ve been writing about Colorado cakemaker Jack Phillips’ fight against cultural authoritarians for a long time. This past March, I noted that Phillips would probably be badgered into the grave. And this week, Denver district judge A. Bruce Jones again found that the state could compel speech, claiming that Phillips had acted unlawfully when refusing to create a cake that celebrated the alleged gender transition of a Colorado activist.

When Phillips declined to participate in the wedding of David Mullins and Charlie Craig back in the summer of 2012 — this was before Obergefell v. Hodges and before gay marriage was even legalized in Colorado — he made himself the target of harassment by activists and “civil-rights” commissions that set out to destroy his business over a thought crime; by courts that set out to corrode religious liberty and free-speech protections; and by media that either don’t understand or don’t value free expression anymore.

Read it.

The Parent Teacher Association of Virginia sent a letter of intent to abolish the parent group of the nation’s top high school after a slate of candidates opposed to critical race theory won an election earlier this month.

The letter, sent to the Parent Teacher Student Association of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology on Wednesday, claims that the recently elected candidates skirted bylaws and created a “hostile environment” for members. This is the latest fallout between pro- and anti-critical race theory factions at the elite high school, which made headlines last fall after district officials abolished its entrance exam in an attempt to boost black and Hispanic enrollment.

The Virginia Parent Teacher Association would circumvent the results of the referendum on Fairfax County Public Schools if it decided to move forward with eliminating Thomas Jefferson’s parent board. Candidates opposed to Thomas Jefferson’s recent equity measures—such as the updated admissions process—won a majority on the association board.

Read it.

While there’s been no official Israeli confirmation of their involvement, reputable news outlets in the US and elsewhere report that Israeli forces are believed to have carried out the attack.

The New York Times reports that the plant was included in an Israel “Target Bank” presented by Israel to senior members of Donald Trump’s administration in early 2020, part of a target list for possible attacks against Iran’s nuclear program.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett appeared to hint Thursday — the day after the attack — that Israel may have been involved when he spoke to a graduating ceremony for Israeli Air Force pilots: “Our enemies know — not from statements, but from actions — that we are much more determined and much more clever, and that we do not hesitate to act when it is needed.”

You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

Read it.

Hey, all those apparatchiks don’t work for free, you know.

Read  it.

As in most academic fields, the top academic finance departments and journals guide the direction of scholarly research. Preferences, tastes, and sensibilities of the faculty at the top finance departments and the editorial boards at top finance journals can have a considerable effect on the acceptable research questions in those journals. It is well known that a person’s political ideology shapes his outlook on scientific issues.1 Yet little is known about the political ideologies of finance professors at these elite institutions and journals. This analysis of the political party affiliations of faculty at the top twenty finance departments and of the editorial boards at the top three finance journals shows that both institutions lean considerably to the left. Results also suggest that finance departments will become even less politically diverse in the future.

Read it.

Power companies across Texas have refused to disclose which areas of the state were exempt from controlled blackouts after a devastating snowstorm crippled the power grid in February—but one hacker has found that smart meters, the electrical devices on the sides of homes and businesses that monitor energy consumption, are quietly broadcasting data that could be used to determine what infrastructure may have been protected.

My wife and I were without power for almost a week but her parents, just a few miles south in a different city, had no power problems.

Read it.

Pakistan’s tolerance for radicalism has deadly consequences for its neighbors. “India is the second largest Muslim nation in the world and Bangladesh has a large Muslim community where there is a section which can be expected to lead to violent protests and embrace radicalization,” said Ambassador Trigunayat.

India has been victimized by Pakistani terrorists, including Laskhar e-Taiba, which orchestrated the deadly 2009 Mumbai attack that killed 166 people.

Bangladesh suffered attacks from Pakistani-linked terrorist groups, such Harkatul Jihad al-Islami Bangladesh (HuJI-B), and Jamaat ul-Mujahideen (JMB). JMB maintained ties with Laskhar e-Taiba and sent militants for training in Pakistan. Bangladesh expelled a Pakistani diplomat in 2015 for allegedly smuggling fake Indian currency to finance terrorism.

But, of course, as we all know, Islam is THE Religion of Peace.

Read it.

Nothing could be more predictable than media coverage of the catastrophic building collapse in Surfside, Florida. Cable news will feature it because the story is both shocking and eye-catching — and because video is available just by pointing the camera. Their obvious problem is that the cable channels have hours of air-time to fill and precious little real information to fill it with, beyond dreadful pictures and interviews with bereaved friends and family and others who escaped the tragedy.

To save hours of watching this low-information disaster footage, the best thing is to read the story on your favorite website and watch very little TV. That is true of every breaking-news news story where real information is scarce at first. Except for seeing what the building looked like and watching the interviews (if you like that sort of thing), the TV coverage is a waste of time.

Read it.

Under their African-American anchor Lester Holt, NBC Nightly News takes special care to report on incidents of racism and racial insensitivity…typically by white people. On June 22, Holt touted at the beginning of his show “A shocking racist incident on the basketball court. Tortillas hurled at a team from a majority-Latino high school. The growing outrage.”

They’re so oppressed.

Read it.

Graphically design your farm by dragging and dropping plants into the map. The game-like interface is learned in just a few minutes so you’ll have the whole growing season planned in no time.

And it will only cost you ten times the wage of an illegal immigrant. (When it’s actually available, of course, which it isn’t really, yet, but Real Soon Now….)

Read it.

Prime Minister Imran Khan recently (the 20 th ) appeared on an American TV news show and confirmed that Pakistan would not allow an American military base in Pakistan once all U.S. forces are gone from Afghanistan this year. Kahn said he feared retaliatory attacks if he did so. Pakistan has been suffering those retaliatory attacks for over a decade, mainly from Pakistani Islamic terrorists inspired by the Taliban, al Qaeda and ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant).

But, of course, as we all know, Islam is the Religion of Peace.

Read it.

The Register is that uniquely British institution, a tech tabloid.

In addition to being technically savvy, they also do some of the most entertaining writing you’ll find anywhere. If Scott Adams were a tech journalist, he’d write for The Register.

Read it.

Crustian coastal media outlets like Insider love these Through Flyover Country With Gun And Camera pieces, in which a New Yorker (i.e. ‘civilized person’) takes a safari through the American heartland (i.e. ‘Redneck JesusLand’) to write up his (or her – it’s usually a her) experiences in their Quaint Tribal Villages.

Read it.

The Netherlands is not the only one: the Swedish government is preparing to repatriate “Swedish” ISIS jihadettes and their puir wee bairns from Syria. Mama went there to wage jihad for the Caliphate, but now she wants to come home.

Read it.

It is actually rather entertaining to watch the Democratic Party press pretend that we have a functioning president. The entertainment value will be gone, of course, the first time there is a crisis. And no president has ever gotten through a term in office without a crisis.

Read it.

Notice that nobody is attempting to manufacture fake-plant-food out of meat. That ought to tell you something.

Read it.

I find this vaguely disturbing.

How long before they can 3D-print a replacement?

Victor Davis Hanson.

Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them.

Read it.

This article was written by a Turkish woman who has earned the wrath of her community by criticizing Islam. Here she writes about the way the Netherlands is repatriating ISIS women from the Middle East while Yazidi and Kurdish women suffer. Her words are probably causing another stir in the Turkish community

Read it.

Harris long resisted taking the trip down south, but her position became increasingly untenable with each disastrous interview and skyrocketing numbers of illegal border crossers. She referred to a potential border visit as a ‘grand gesture.’ The VP then caused an uproar when she dismissed NBC’s Lester Holt’s reminder that she had not been to the border: ‘And I haven’t been to Europe. I mean, I don’t understand the point you are making.’ She would later snap at a Univision reporter who asked if she had a specific date in mind for a border visit. Around the same time, Customs and Border Patrol announced they encountered more than 180,000 illegal border crossers in May.

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff insisted that his wife’s decision to go to El Paso was not influenced by politics, saying in an interview, ‘Kamala Harris is not driven by any political issues or political pressure.’ It’s hard to believe, however, that the string of negative headlines about Harris’s refusal to visit the border had nothing to do with the seemingly quickly scheduled trip.

Whenever a politician (or the spouse of a politician) tells you something, believe the opposite.

Woke of the Rings

Group Tracks Growing Number of ‘Canceled’ Faculty at American Colleges

US ranks last among 46 countries in trust in media

NBC Asks Second Gentleman: GOP ‘Attacks’ on VP Sexist and Racist?

On MSNBC, Dyson Uncorks Rant Against ‘Mediocre White Men,’ MAGA ‘Maggots’

In Historic First, WNBA Player Comes Out As Straight  Babylon Bee.

ABC Backs Poisoning Students With CRT, Ignored Parents Rising Up

“It’s Gotten So Bad” – Violence In Baltimore City Outpaces 2020 Numbers, Gov. Hogan Reacts

On Her Show, Joy Reid Gets Sunk By Critical Race Theory Critic

A BLM Supporter Tried to Kill a Police Officer: That’s the Terrorist Threat We’re Not Discussing

$100,000 Reward for Suspect Who Shot Daytona Beach Cop in the Head

Homicides Have Skyrocketed in These 6 Democratic Cities. Black People Are Disproportionately the Victims, Data Shows.

Joe Biden Blames Crime Surge on Mythical ‘Rogue’ Gun Dealers

Companies Secure White House Meetings After Hiring Top Biden Aide’s Brother

Initial Jobless Claims Disappoint Again As Pennsylvania Pukes Again

Tabloid ABC BURIES VP Harris Finally Visiting Border, Devotes 12 Minutes to Britney Spears  Frankly, I’d rather read about Britney than Kamala.

Emperor Palpatine Urges Citizens To Give Up Their Blasters Since They’d Need A Death Star To Beat The Empire  Babylon Bee.

Goldman Throws Up Over Biden’s Infra Deal: It’s Too Small, It Probably Won’t Pass And We Have No Idea Who Will Pay For It

Biden Aide Leading Infrastructure Negotiations Helped Push Through Disastrous China Bill

Biden Admin Walks Back U.S. Recognition of Golan Heights as Israeli Territory  Because we can’t let those lousy stinking Jews push our pwecious iddle Muslims around.

Biden Shortchanges Defense Program Aimed at Stopping China

Biden administration removes Rodney Scott as head of U.S. Border Patrol

Escape From Woke Metropolises  Rod Dreher.

Democrat Lawmaker Suggests Catholic Church Should Lose Tax Exemption If Pro-Aborts Denied Communion

“Inclusion” Means Excluding You

How YouTube’s rules are used to silence human rights activists

CNN’s John King Channels Despondent Dems Crying ‘Armageddon’ as Their Voting Bill Fails

California Gov. Newsom to Face Recall Election

Laughable: Joy Reid Claims No Constitutional Basis for Opposing D.C. Statehood  The same people who are adamant that black people are just as smart at white people keep putting stupid black people on TV. (Of course, they put stupid white people on TV too, so maybe they can’t tell the difference.)

Sesame Street Addresses ‘Complex Issues’ by Introducing Gay Couple in ‘Family Day’ Episode  ‘Complesity’ is merely the proglodyte foot-in-the-door to perversion. Once they get people to admit that ‘it’s complicated’, they stick the other foot in under the rubric of ‘nuance’ and eventually succeed in turning everything upside down. Abortion is the master template for this process, and it’s been working well for them the last five decades.

After Repeatedly Promising Not To, Facebook Keeps Recommending Political Groups

Giuliani Suspended From Practicing Law In New York The fact that lawyers, like doctors, require a ‘license’ to practice law (and the fact that you can go to jail for ‘practicing law without a license’, which means whatever the licensed lawyers masquerading as judges want it to mean) makes the practice of law open to flagrant political meddling — and, boy, do they.

Microsoft Exemption From Antitrust Bill Followed Company Donation to Top Democrat  Money talks.

China Kills Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Newspaper

YouTube removed 3.9M dislikes for White House

Music to Soothe the Climate Denial Away?

How a Liberal Think Tank Did China’s Bidding on Climate Change

How to compare today to the past

Climate Models: Worse Than Nothing?

WHO Official Says Mask Mandates & Social Distancing Should Continue Indefinitely

SARS, Gain of Function, COVID, and the Vax: A Timeline

Florida Pranksters Change Highway Sign to Read ‘Arrest Fauci’

US Confirms Removal of Wuhan Virus Sequences From Database

Long COVID in a prospective cohort of home-isolated patients

How the Lancet lost our trust

The Delta and Gamma Covid-19 Variants Are Taking Over the US  And, more importantly, the Covidian fearmongers.

Read it.

Carl Nassib went from hero to zero in record time. Hailed earlier this week by the Left for being the courageous first active homosexual player in the NFL, Nassib is now getting canceled by the Twitter mob because he is a registered Republican who voted for Donald Trump. Oh, the agony of it!

Read it.

A trio of boffins at the Georg August University Göttingen and Münster University have put together a low-cost yet high-resolution microscope for educational users – using smartphone parts and Lego bricks.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Vice President Kamala Harris is not visiting the “epicenter of the crisis” at the U.S.-Mexico border on her first visit trip there since being tabbed to take charge of the immigration surge, according to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

Politico reported Wednesday that Harris will visit El Paso, Texas, on Friday.

“I don’t know why they chose El Paso. It’s not the epicenter of the crisis,” Rubio said Wednesday night on the Fox News.

El Paso is a far distance from the Rio Grande Valley sector where Republicans say the vast majority of border crossings are occurring.

She’s  not about to put herself in any danger just for a photo op.

Read it.

A pair of teenage boys in the German city of Essen was chased down, terrified, robbed, and stabbed by a group of even younger culture-enrichers.

Read it.

Powerline has a post up today about President Biden’s recent remarks, in which he proposed fixing our nation’s recent crime wave with gun control. His statement was not entirely coherent, he wandered about a bit, and concluded with this: “Those who say the blood of Patriots, you know, and all the stuff about how we’re gonna have to move against the government … If you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.” Now, I’m not suggesting that Mr. Biden intends to say whatever he just said. He might have intended that as the direct challenge to dissidents that it sounds like, but was slurring his words and was clearly confused. Hard to say, I suppose. But.

Imagine that President Trump had surrounded the Capitol Building with razor wire and armed soldiers. And then imagine that he said something like that… Imagine how CNN would respond to that. And the morning news shows, and the late-night talk shows, and basically everybody else; just imagine. They would be screaming from the rooftops that he was acting like a tyrant. And they would have a point.

Read it.

We found the most politically engaged partisans held the most exaggerated, and therefore most inaccurate, levels of metadehumanization. Moreover, despite the socially progressive and egalitarian outlook traditionally associated with liberalism, the most liberal Democrats actually expressed the greatest dehumanization of Republicans.

Roger Kimball.

Isn’t normality great? That’s been Joe Biden’s selling point from the beginning, ‘normality’. Back in March 2020, the former conservative Bill Kristol announced that Biden represented the ‘simple’ choice for the ‘normal American’. Biden wasn’t Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders — but especially, just between us, he wasn’t Donald Trump — ergo, etc.

Achilles was the ‘swift-footed’. Ronald Reagan was ‘the Great Communicator’. Joe Biden is — what? People talk about ‘gaffes’, but that is unfair. A ‘gaffe’ is a clumsy social error, a faux pas. Emitting gibberish when you can’t remember the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence is not the same thing as committing a gaffe.

Chilton Williamson.

‘He who is not a republican at twenty compels one to doubt the generosity of his heart; but he who, after thirty, persists, compels one to doubt the soundness of his mind.’ Thus spake M. Anselme Polycarpe Batbie, a 19th-century French academic jurist whose sentiments, variously phrased, have also been attributed to John Adams, François Guizot and Georges Clemenceau. A generous heart and the ability to learn from experience are very good things, certainly. An even better one is common sense: a native attribute that age does not diminish. Mencken claimed that he had never changed his mind on any matter of importance. Donald Trump said in regard to John McCain that he preferred war heroes who didn’t get captured. Myself, I like thinkers who were right from the beginning —and stayed that way.

To believe otherwise, so it seems to me, is to suppose that the error of idealism, among the profoundest of all errors to which the human mind is prey, has any redeeming value whatsoever; which it plainly doesn’t. There is no moral virtue in thinking wrongly on any subject at any age. If to be born good is desirable — something no one has ever denied — then so is to be born wise and without illusions. What value could there possibly be in being wrong for part of your life — idealists, like all liberals, would generally say the best part — when you could be right for all of it?

Read it.

Wisconsin’s Senate this week passed a piece of legislation that supporters say would make the state a “Second Amendment sanctuary” and exempt the state from federal firearms laws, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

I doubt seriously whether this is anything more than virtue-signaling. That the Federal government has the right (it has always had the power) to stomp on any state law it cares to was settled in 1865. But, like a political lawn sign, it is evidence of popular sentiment … which is something, I guess.

Read it.

No one should be denied credit because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Ostensibly to deter such discrimination, a proposal in Congress (HR 1443) would require small-business lenders to furnish data to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau detailing the LGBTQ business-ownership status of credit applicants.

That mirrors current law imposing similar reporting on female or minority business ownership. But regardless of the supposed intent of the bill’s proponents, reporting requirements serve as a next step in bringing quotas to the credit markets.

Ironically, such quotas enshrine discrimination by making success in the marketplace partially contingent on membership in a politically favored category. That conflicts with the American ideal of equality under the law and equal protection of the law.

The fact that this legislation attempts to prevent discrimination against politically fashionable groups in the name of ‘equality under the law’, an obviously corrupt practice, is just a dance around the basic issue that is still unaddressed: What business is it of the government to prevent ‘discrimination’? ‘Equality under the law’ and ‘equal protection of the law’ are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS. They deal with how the government treats individuals with respect to the government — an important thing, no doubt about it, but not the most important thing … which is, how is it the government’s job to decide who I do business with? We used to have something in this country called ‘freedom of association’, which means that it was up to the individual to decide with whom he would associate, either socially or commercially. That freedom has been stomped into the dirt, and people walk over its grave daily without a glance. Even a news organization like The Foundry, which I’m sure describes itself as conservative, has given up the fight about basics and is just squabbling over the details.

Nowadays THE GOVERNMENT decides with whom you are allowed to associate, and in extreme cases CAN FORCE YOU TO ASSOCIATE WITH PEOPLE YOU DISLIKE. That is the essence of tyranny.

The future socialist dictatorship is already here; it’s just not equally distributed.

ZMan keeps pointing out the obvious to the clueless.

The sales pitch for the American political system is that it is a robust debate between two distinct political parties. The Republicans and Democrats are coalitions of interests opposed to one another. The groups that make up each party are held together by a shared ideological outlook. The Republicans are the conservative party, and the Democrats are the liberal party. The political process adjudicates the disputes between the parties over public policy and the result is a compromise.

In reality, America is a one party system. It has been since Gettysburg. The differences between the two parties are miniscule. This is why public policy never changes when the party in charge changes. The mild reforms of the Reagan years were followed by a consensus that remains in place to this day. There is some tinkering around the edges to keep up appearances, but otherwise the results of each election have no impact on public policy or the priorities of government.

Read it.

Liberal outlet Inside Philanthropy sang the praises of an extremist pro-abortion group funded by billionaires George Soros and Warren Buffett looking to revamp its baby slaughter advocacy.

Catholics for Choice (CFC), a leftist organization that twists the tenets of faith to sanction the monstrous act of abortion, is being rebuilt and rebranded at a time when “the politics of reproductive rights are approaching a boiling point,” IP fearmongered.

Read it.

Yes, he attended then-President Donald Trump’s rally in Washington, DC, on Jan. 6, but he never entered the Capitol. He was in a friend’s room at the JW Marriott a 30-minute walk away when the Capitol breach occurred.

Nonetheless, he was raided in February by the FBI anti-terrorism task force, handcuffed, paraded and detained for three hours while his apartment was ransacked and all his devices confiscated. Four months later, he hasn’t been charged and doesn’t have his devices back, but his neighbors are shunning him, and he’s had two strokes from the stress.

Your tax dollars at work.