Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Megan McArdle.

So this isn’t just an essay about pie. It is a polemic. I want to convince you that American pie is special, because it is. American pie is great, in part, because of its rich, unlikely history. But American pie is also in dire straits, because American cooks have mostly forgotten how to make the most important part.

Which means that we are at risk of losing not just a dessert, but a little piece of who we are as a country.

She’s right. Nobody makes good pie any more.

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You may or may not have heard about the Chabad rabbi and father of 12 who was stabbed eight times in broad daylight outside a Jewish day school in Boston. I’m going to go out on a limb and take a guess that this was a bona fide hate crime. I also guess that it would be a big deal if the victim were black, Muslim, gay, trans, or some combination thereof, so long as the (alleged) perpetrator fit the requisite profile.

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The English Democrats, launched in 2002, are the only campaigning English Nationalist Party. We campaigned for a referendum for independence for England; for St George’s Day to be England’s National holiday; for Jerusalem to be England’s National Anthem; to leave the EU properly and fully; for an end to mass immigration; for the Cross of St George to be flown on all public buildings in England; and we supported a YES vote for Scottish Independence.

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America’s teachers’ unions are the country’s single most malign influence. They do more to promote leftist extremism, and do it more effectively, than anyone else. The teachers’ unions dominate the schools of education, from which most teachers come, and they control school board elections in most districts. In effect, they run the public schools, which is the main reason why the public schools are so bad.

Scott Adams blames the teachers’ unions for whatever systemic racism exists in the U.S.

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Democrats are determined to keep the memory of the mostly-peaceful demonstration in Washington last January 6 alive. It isn’t just a matter of investigatory commissions, either. The obsession has spilled over into family holiday celebrations.

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It is not only the first time in 2,000 years that the area — described as the “heart” of the building — has been open; since the underground levels, or “hypogea,” were where gladiators and animals waited before going into combat, this is the first time in the monument’s history that the public has ever been allowed in.
Now, tourists will be able to walk through the passageways on a wooden platform and admire the corridors and archways which interconnected the hypogea between the rooms where gladiators and animals waited, before entering the elevators which would catapult them onto the arena.

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Culture-enrichers in Sweden have been targeting cops for many years, but on Wednesday they finally managed to kill one. Which goes to show, I suppose, that they’re not very good shots.

Since the material shown below was translated, a young “Swede” named Sakariye Ali Ahmed has been arrested and charged with the murder of a policeman named Carl Andreas Danman in the Gothenburg neighborhood of Biskopsgården.

Republican Governors Excluded From White House Wildfire Meeting

AOC Switches To Republican Party After Jen Psaki Says They’re The Ones Who Want To Defund The Police

Poll: Almost Half of Americans Disapprove of How Biden Handles Crime  If, of course, you can actually say that he’s handling it.

Man Spending $5 A Gallon On Gas Excited To Learn He Will Save $0.16 On Cheese This Year  Babylon Bee.

Biden Looking to Encourage as Many as 9M Immigrants to Become US Citizens  And, presumably, reliable voters for candidates of the Party of Free Stuff.

Report: Dems Concerned Harris Wouldn’t Beat GOP Nominee in 2024  Oh, ya think?

Ohio Judge Makes COVID Vaccination Condition Of Probation  That seems illegitimate to me.

New Study Links “Acute Chest Pain” In Male Soldiers To mRNA Vaccines  If I actually were to get vaccinated, it wouldn’t be an mRNA vaccine.

85 teens, staffers get coronavirus at summer camp that didn’t require masks or check vaccine status (Washington Post)

J&J Says Its COVID Vaccine Neutralizes Delta Variant

Coronafascism is Here

Delta Variant Threatens To Spoil Europe’s Summer Tourism Season  How tragic.

Scientists quit journal board, protesting ‘grossly irresponsible’ Covid study

The Delta Variant’s Rise, New Vaccine Tactics, and More News

Barents Sea polar bears thriving despite huge summer ice loss: spring research results are in

The scientists hired by big oil who predicted the climate crisis long ago

Time for Environmentalists to Take Their Lithium

BBC Censors their Own Climate Change Page

Eric Trump: CFO Charges Are ‘Political Vendetta’  Well, duh.

Pro-Life Police Officer Reinstated After 4-Month Suspension For Praying Outside Abortion Clinic

Trump meets his match in Manhattan DA. Tax fraud charges show accountability is coming. (USA Today)

Manhattan’s Trump Org. indictments suggest Weisselberg isn’t ready to flip (yet) (NBC ‘News’)

House Democrats call on McCarthy to ‘take immediate action’ to address Greene’s behavior (CNN)

Woman who authorities say falsely accused Black teen of stealing cell phone in NYC hotel charged with a felony hate crime

California high school stripped of basketball title after tortillas were thrown at opposing Latino players

Juror Hit With ‘Extreme’ Fine After Googling Suspected White Supremacist Badge on ICE Officer’s Uniform (Gizmodo) Gizmodo is supposedly a tech news site.

‘There are no lone wolves’ when it comes to white supremacist violence, expert says in wake of Winthrop shooting (Boston Globe) One could say the same of Muslim terrorists, but they don’t dare.

NY Times Targets Target, Capitalism: Breaking ‘Pledge to Black Communities’

Predicts GOP Will Spark Mass Violence

Someone Need a Hug? MSNBC Panel Loses It Over ‘Racist,’ ‘Violent’ SCOTUS Ruling

Hayes Claims SCOTUS Election Ruling Part of a GOP Conspiracy

Facebook now warning users about exposure to “harmful extremist content”

Twitter Lefties Lose Their Marbles Over SCOTUS Decision On Donor Disclosure  The reason for this is that proglodytes want to know who is donating to ‘right-wing’ causes so that they can call upon their Rent-a-Mobs to cancel them, or at least hound them into silence. This is fairly obvious. THE ONLY REASON to force disclosure of a donor to a cause is to punish them in some way.

Nothing More Than A ‘Trophy Kill’: Trump CFO Does Perp Walk Over Corporate Perks

Daredevil Accused Of Being A Racist Since He Can’t See Skin Color  Babylon Bee.

Once Broke Stacey Abrams Now Owns 2 Homes Worth Total of $1.4M  Race hustling pays pretty well. Just ask Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

Chicago Council Wants Meeting on Crime After Exchange Between Mayor, Newsmax  BRAAAAAAAINS!

Chicago Mayor Lightfoot says 99% of critics motivated by racism, sexism Surely, surely she can squeeze homophobia in there somewhere? BRAAAAAAAINS!

A harvest for the world: A Black family farm is fighting racism in agriculture and climate change (Washington Post)

New Evidence Indicates Critical Race Theory Escaped From A Lab In A College Humanities Department  Babylon Bee.

Read it.

Seems perfectly clear to me.

Read it.

A medical reversal is when an existing treatment is found to actually be useless or harmful. Psychology has in recent years been racking up reversals: in fact only 40-65% of its classic social results were replicated, in the weakest sense of finding ‘significant’ results in the same direction. (Even in those that replicated, the average effect found was half the originally reported effect.) Such errors are far less costly to society than medical errors, but it’s still pollution, so here’s the cleanup.

Psychology is not alone: medicine, cancer biology, and economics all have many irreplicable results. It’d be wrong to write off psychology: we know about most of the problems here because of psychologists, and its subfields differ a lot by replication rate and effect-size shrinkage.

Psychology is no more a science than is astrology or palmistry.

Read it.

For the past three years, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science have been developing a type of material they’ve dubbed “metallic wood.” Their material gets its useful properties and name from a key structural feature of its natural counterpart: porosity. As a lattice of nanoscale nickel struts, metallic wood is full of regularly spaced cell-sized pores that radically decrease its density without sacrificing the material’s strength.

The precise spacing of these gaps not only gives metallic wood the strength of titanium at a fraction of the weight, but unique optical properties. Because the spaces between gaps are the same size as the wavelengths of visible light, the light reflecting off of metallic wood interferes to enhance specific colors. The enhanced color changes are based on the angle that light reflects off of the surface, giving it a dazzling appearance and the potential to be used as a sensor.

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If you wanted to find the group getting the rawest deal in 2021 America, you might start with small-business owners. Many are finding themselves working 60- or 80-hour weeks just to scrape by. During the height of COVID-19, these companies were especially beaten down. Between Jan. 1, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2020, about 30% of U.S. small businesses closed, while total small-business revenue decreased by 31%, according to Economic Tracker. During the same period, the stock market boomed, and multinational corporations continued to thrive. The effects of this economic destruction are apparent in communities all over the country. Boxed-up storefronts on main streets across America are the norm.

Given this dynamic, it’s almost incomprehensible that Senate Republicans are about to help pass an infrastructure package that unleashes the IRS to collect more revenue through aggressive policing of small businesses.

Read it.

After the Supreme Court upheld an Arizona law on Thursday that threw out votes cast in the wrong precinct and prohibitions on ballot harvesting, the disgust and rage were palpable on CNN as disgraced chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said this was the latest part of Chief Justice John Roberts’ legacy of destroying “the most important civil rights law in American history.”

Wanker.

Read it.

This is just so entertaining that I had to mention it.

Schnorring is a Yiddish word for very aggressive begging. Both parties do it. But, at least for now, I am registered as a member of the Republican Party, so that is what I will be discussing. During election “season,” I get probably 100 daily texts, calls, and emails from the Party. Even during the merciful two or three weeks before the start of the NEXT campaign, I get somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 emails and 10 texts A DAY.

Some obscenely overpaid consultant has obviously conducted a seminar hitting every major psy-ops persuasion technique known to man in the eternal quest to separate me from my hard-earned money. And believe me, I am very small potatoes, barely a Tater Tot. I can only imagine the pleas and bribes for the major donors. “I think I can get you an ambassadorship to Uganda. I know you wanted to be the US Ambassador to the United Nations, because the restaurants in New York are so much better than the one in Uganda, but I’m afraid the Democrats have promised that to legendary billionaire Conservative Biden supporter, Cindy McCain.”

There are so many opportunities in life to be importuned by people wanting to spend your money that sometimes it seems a shame that they don’t have monasteries around any more. This is why my wife and I have a NO SOLICITING sign on the door, and why we regularly have to report two or three people a year for blowing past it. (They invariably start their spiel with ‘I’m not soliciting, but….’)

Since I regularly vote in the Democrat primaries (in my part of Texas the Republican primaries are pretty self-managing) in order to cause as much trouble as I can, the stuff I get is pretty much SJW bullcrap. Yeah, it gives me a chance to insult people who richly deserve it, but some days it gets wearing – I went to college with these people, I don’t want to be reminded that they actually exist in real life.

Read it.

The rigorous format in which the speedrunning community asks players to provide video proof of their runs is itself significant. For many games, you need to show not just a recording of your screen, but also a video of your hands on the controller or keyboard, so moderators can ensure that it really was a human—and not a script or a bot—that clinched the all-important record.

Science has been much slower to adapt, even after countless scandals. Researchers provide images for their papers entirely at their own discretion, and with no official oversight; when they aren’t faked, they might still contain cherry-picked snapshots of experiments that don’t represent the full range of their results. The same applies to numerical data, which are often—consciously or unconsciously—chosen or reported to make the best case for a scientist’s hypothesis, rather than to show the full and messy details. Only a few journals require scientists to do the equivalent of posting the screen-and-hands recording: sharing all their data, and the code they used to analyze it, online for anyone to access.

The most interesting thing is that video gaming won’t win you a lifetime cushy job at a university through tenure. So the rigor ought to align exactly the opposite of the way it actually does.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

It is ironic how many on the Right now hold the same view of patriotism that the Left used to hold a generation ago. Just a few decades ago it was the Left that said patriotism was a con to keep people from noticing what was happening. In the Bush years, they said dissent was the highest form of patriotism. Today, they put dissenters in prison on trumped up charges. They orchestrate elaborate plots to frame people for schemes that were cooked up by state actors.

I talked about that Revolver story in the show. It reminds me of the old gag about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. “People would stop believing these conspiracy theories about Clinton if they stopped being true.” It is increasingly looking like the so-called insurrection was another hoax. Protestors did clash with cops, and they did barge into the capitol, but it was at the direction of state actors. That does not absolve them of what they did, if any of it was criminal, but it stinks, nonetheless.

Read it.

Hammer tech.

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After a year of violence and unrest, large American cities serve as a cautionary tale for the progressives in Washington who want to move the country further to the left. The Democrats’ airtight lock on the urban vote has allowed political leaders to pursue ideological agendas without fear of reprisal, which has revealed just how much the elite left – comprised mostly of affluent, liberal whites who dominate media narratives – is out of step with the concerns of rank-and-file urban residents.

(Hint: No.)

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was such a thing as a ‘fire scientist’.

I’m glad the ‘U.S. West’ is a single entity that can take action. I’m sure there’s a Federal agency for that.

Read it.

President Joe Biden has a problem, and her name is Kamala Harris. The vice president has become a comic figure in today’s Washington—a politician given to missteps and unforced errors who inspires neither loyalty nor trust within her inner circle. She might have been Biden’s safest pick for running mate. But now she’s a liability for both the president and the Democratic Party.

It’s not just that Harris is unpopular. Her unique combination of falsity and incompetence generates negative press and endangers her dreams of succeeding Biden. For Harris, the month of June has been an extended replay of highlights from Veep, the HBO comedy starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a clueless and floundering politician on the make. Only Harris isn’t laughing.

Read it.

EVs are cool. They are not new. The history of EVs is a century of failure tailgating failure. In 1911, the New York Times said that the electric car “has long been recognized as the ideal solution.” In 1990, the California Air Resources Board mandated 10% of car sales be zero-emission vehicles by 2003. Today, 31 years later, only about 6% of the cars in California have an electric plug.

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According to witness statements, the perpetrator shouted “Allahu Akhbar”, among other things. He fled after the attack. The police still managed to catch him and temporarily arrest him. A breath test for alcohol on the 25-year-old showed a value of around 1.4 per mille. The man is from Eritrea, officials said.

Read it.

Brutal attack on Sky cameraman in Rome: “Dirty white man, I’ll stab you”

Read it.

There is a lot of judicial news today. This one is hot off the press: a judge of the Hennepin County District Court has granted a motion for a writ of mandamus against the City of Minneapolis, ordering the city to “immediately take any and all necessary action” to increase the size of the Minneapolis Police Department. The case was brought by residents of crime-ridden North Minneapolis, represented by the Upper Midwest Law Center, on whose board I serve.

The petition for a writ of mandamus was predicated on a provision of the Minneapolis City Charter that requires the city to maintain a police force of at least 0.0017 employees per resident. The petitioners argued that the City’s force has fallen below that requirement and is projected to continue falling farther behind over the next year.

Half Of Australia’s Population Locked Down As Delta Hysteria Worsens

Fauci: “There Are Now Two Americas, The Vaccinated & The Unvaccinated”  He could have just cut to the chase and said ‘Slave and Free’.

Biden to Send Response Teams to Fight Spreading Delta Variant

Rainfall Driving Bumper Crops and Crop Failures Is Neither Random Nor Due to Global Warming

171 Scientists: CO2 Budget Of Electric Mobility “Twice As Big As Assumed” By European Leaders

Media Scrambles to Deny Climate Revolutionaries Staged an Insurrection

Claim: NASA Satellites See Upper Atmosphere Cooling and Contracting Due to Climate Change

CNN Exploits Building Collapse to Push Climate Agenda  But you knew that.

EVs Must Drive Tens Of Thousands Of Miles Before Doing Less Environmental Harm Than Gas-Powered Vehicles

NYT: President Biden Just “Walked Back” his Pledge on Climate Action

PANIC! NYT Columnist Cries Dems ‘Have a Year to Save the Planet’

The Virtue Signaling Bill Arrives: Producers Charge More For “Green” Nat Gas

I’ve Been a Critical Race Theorist for 30 Years. Our Opponents Are Just Proving Our Point For Us. (Politico)

Wisconsin GOP official is branded racist over Facebook meme hailing ‘signs’ of white supremacy (Daily Mail)

Biden’s race training for federal workers is designed to humiliate whites (New York Post)

California university offers faculty $1,200 stipends for course on CRT, eradicating ‘whiteness’: report

Old Gwen Berry photo of her holding American flag goes viral amid anthem uproar

Confederate soybeans and the legacy of racism in American agriculture (Boston Globe) I’ll bet you didn’t know there was such a thing as ‘Confederate’ soybeans. Racism! Racism everywhere!

Two Polls: What Do Opinion-Mongers Secretly Believe About Race Gaps?

Majority Of Voters Reject Teaching Children That America Is “Structurally Racist”: Harvard Poll

D.L. Hughley: A Black Superhero Should ‘Make White People Believe Him’

Largest Teachers Union Plans $56,500 Anti-Critical Race Theory Opposition Research

COLLEGE CRINGE: Race-Obsessed 1619 Project Author Gets Tenure at UNC

UNC Caves, Grants Tenure To ‘1619 Project’ Founder Nikole Hanna-Jones

Trump Organization and its CFO indicted by Manhattan grand jury

Why a gag order against Trump would be a good idea (CNN) Because, you know, Trump.

Jorge Ramos Ditches Surfside Ruins for One Last Shot at Trump

Nets Give Seconds to Botched NYC Ballot Count, 13x to Trump Org. Charges

How Fringe Stem Cell Treatments Won Allies on the Far Right  (Wired ‘Science’)

Supreme Court Rules Arizona Law Against Ballot Harvesting ‘Not Racist’

CNN’s Jim Acosta Booed While Heckling Trump During Texas Border Visit

Read it.

Vance, whose book was seen in 2016 as helping explain Donald Trump’s appeal to struggling white, working-class voters, plans a “special announcement” and rally at the steel fabricator Middletown Tube Works in his Ohio hometown on Thursday. ABC News reported.

Vance, a venture capitalist who became a popular TV political commentator, was dubbed “the Trump whisperer” for his ability to explain the Republican’s rise to the presidency. His book became a Ron Howard-directed movie

Read it.

A prominent conservative has finally launched a payment processor so Americans won’t have to worry about PayPal or other woke corporations blacklisting them.

The pro-free speech payment processor solves a critical problem for the conservative movement online. “Dan Bongino and I have formed an entity, Liberatio Protocol LLC. Liberatio means liberation, and our launch of AlignPay represents our first investment in our Align For Freedom ecosystem,” strategic investor Jeffrey Wernick declared on Bongino.com. AlignPay described itself on its website as a “new payment processing solution that’s built for freedom and driven by the time-tested American conviction that everyone – no matter their race, religion, gender, or ideology – has the right to pursue happiness and live the American dream.”

Read it.

Put a 20mm Bushmaster turret on top with a head-up display and I’m in.

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A confrontation Tuesday between a police sergeant and member of the public didn’t start out unusually. James Burch, policy director of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), was standing outside the Alameda Courthouse in Oakland, California when an officer approached him and asked him to move a banner. As the two argued, the sergeant noticed he was being filmed. Then, he pulled out his phone and started playing “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift — in an apparent play to exploit copyright takedowns and keep the video off social media.

“You can record all you want,” he said, according to a video obtained by The Verge. “I just know it can’t be posted to YouTube.”

Pretty clever.

Read it.

In 1890 the British Library acquired a set of papyri dating from the first century that had been found by archaeologists digging in a rubbish heap near the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus. Amid the trove of tax assessments and official records was a papyrus with a text, known from ancient references and fragments but long believed lost, of what has come to be called the Constitution of Athens, generally attributed to Aristotle. Though the papyrus is hardly complete and has many contested passages, it offers an extensive history of Athenian political development and details Athens’ political structure during the fourth century bc. Suddenly, the institutional configuration of the first democracy became available.

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There is a moment in nearly all post-9/11 thrillers that anyone of a certain generation will be familiar with. It’s the point in the third act of a TV series like 24 or Homeland, or the last mission of video game franchises like Call of Duty,where the whole conspiracy has finally unraveled and the true villain is revealed. And he (it is always a he) turns out to be not an Arab jihadist, or a Russian ultranationalist, but a self-styled American patriot.

These reveals, intended to be shocking, always came off a bit contrived. For a population which experienced an unprecedented terrorist attack within recent memory, it was like living through a real-life version of The Exorcist, only to have the televisual tastemakers divulge that Linda Blair’s character was actually Old Man Withers all along.

One cannot help but get the same sense from the Biden Administration’s recently revealed National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. We have seen this one before and the whole thing comes off…a little formulaic.

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The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday in a Houston case that Facebook is not a “lawless no-man’s-land” and can be held liable for the conduct of pimps who use its technology to recruit and prey on children.

The ruling came in a trio of Houston civil actions involving teenage trafficking victims who met their abusive pimps through Facebook’s messaging functions. They sued the California-based social media juggernaut for negligence and product liability, saying that Facebook failed to warn about or attempt to prevent sex trafficking from taking place on its internet platforms. The suits also alleged that Facebook benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking victims.

The justices said trafficking victims can move forward with lawsuits on the grounds that Facebook violated a provision of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code passed in 2009.

Victor Davis Hanson.

The military is not yet a revolutionary people’s army overseen by commissars. But it is getting there.

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If Kamala Harris didn’t exist, the media would have to invent her. The mainstream media is determined to treat Joe Biden with kid gloves. Gossip about the White House seems largely off-limits and apparently not easy to come by without great effort.

But journalists love gossip and drama, so they seek them one level down from the Oval Office. And what’s more dramatic than a woman on track to becoming the first female president, but facing an uncertain path and sniping from sources who favor potential rivals?

Read it.

Nothing enhances confidence in government like an admission that it can’t count.

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Last Saturday a 13-year-old girl was murdered in Vienna, allegedly by two Afghan migrants. The suspected killers are considerably older than their victim, 16 and 18. And, like thousands of other “child” asylum seekers in Europe, they may well be much older than their ostensible ages.

Steve Sailer.

So in London, as many as 74% of the worst of the worst criminal teens, the ones too dangerous to let out of jail while awaiting trial, are black?

That’s bad.

By the way, this report by a woke NGO is cherry-picking the single worst month for black misbehavior for their headline: the usual percent black in London is in the 60s not 70s. But, still, London is only 13% black, and many are decently-educated Africans brained-drained from Africa to work in the National Health Service and the like.