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EU (European Union) aid for the West Bank Palestinians is again in danger of being cut because the Palestinian government again tried to deceive EU donors that their $150 million donation was going to general welfare, not to reward and encourage Palestinians to carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis. Since 2020 the Palestinians were, on paper at least, no longer using EU aid for their Ministry of Prisoners and the infamous Martyrs Fund. The EU has a policy of not allowing their aid to be used to support terrorism and would not make an exception for the Palestinians trying to kill Israelis. The Palestinians agreed to the EU demands and eliminated Ministry of Prisoners funding from their budget. They failed to change the budget for West Bank (PLO) Institutions, which now showed an increase equal to what the Ministry of Prisoners was receiving. The Palestinians were also unable to hide the fact that they had not reduced the payments they were making to Palestinians for attacking, and especially killing Israelis. The Palestinian media had not let up on its encouragement for Palestinians, especially children, to eventually attack Israelis if they found an opportunity.

For over a decade Palestinian governments in the West Bank (Fatah) and Gaza (Hamas) have been undergoing increasing pressure from Israel and now aid donors to eliminate Palestinians payments to imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead terrorists. Up to half of the foreign aid received by the West Bank goes to these payments and Fatah has refused to end the system. In 2020 the covid19 virus spread to the West Bank and Gaza and the Palestinians asked for more foreign aid to deal with it. Donors were reluctant because the Palestinian governments have consistently diverted portions of any foreign aid to maintain the “Martyrs Fund” which regularly pays imprisoned, wounded or families of dead terrorists.

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Gee, I wonder why?

Read it.

Good luck getting your insurance to pay for it.

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A convicted culture-enriching rapist can’t be deported from Germany, because… he doesn’t want to leave.

You can’t make this [solid waste] up.

Read it.

They don’t like it when people wander off the plantation.

Canadian Schools Hold Book-Burning Demonstration To Be A More “Inclusive Country”

Missouri conservative group confronts student senator as he takes down and throws away flags from 9/11 display

How Europe’s doors are slamming shut for Americans (CNN) Gee, what a hardship.

Don’t let California become Texas, Newsom says — as residents, businesses flee

More examples of FB marking Mastodon related links as spam

Stelter SLAMMED for Claiming Anchors Were 9/11 Heroes While Leaders Were ‘In Bunkers’

YouTube Suspends Account Of Former Presidential Speechwriter  Bueller? Bueller?

Big Tech Shadow-Banned Rose McGowan: Report

Ex-Acting CIA Director: Taliban Takeover ‘Absolutely Inspired Jihadists’

Serial Inseminator Arrested in Knoxville

Medical Journals Commit Malpractice with Climate Change Misdiagnosis

17Bn life years could be saved if air pollution was reduced to WHO standards  And if we all just went to Mars, imagine how much better life on earth would be.

Surprise!  September Arctic Minimum Sea Ice Extent Trend RISING Over Past 10 Years – Norwegian Data

NYC Teachers Get Exemptions for Vaccinations Rules are for thee but not for me.

Texas AG Paxton Sues Six School Districts for Mandating Masks

The Surprisingly Strong Supreme Court Precedent Supporting Vaccine Mandates (Politico) That’s for vaccines that actually work.

England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

No Vaccine Passports: UK PM to Set Out Winter COVID-19 Plan

Miami International Airport First in US to Test COVID Detector Dogs

Biden to Announce New More COVID-19 Steps Ahead of UN Meeting

NBC Whines COVID Not Unifying as 9/11, Opposition Like Fighting Civil Rights

Paper: NIH Funded Wuhan to Study Mutating SARS-CoV

“Extreme Cover-Up” – Scientists Who Penned Lancet Letter To Bat Down Lab Theory Have Links To China

DeSantis Responds To Biden’s Vaccine Mandate: “In Florida, We Will Fight Back”

Morgan Stanley: Countries Will Transition Toward Acceptance Of COVID As An Endemic Problem They Must Live With  They will certainly try.

‘We’re Not Done Yet’: Biden To Announce More Pandemic Measures  Of course he will.

Two Years Ago Today: Wuhan Bat Lab Mysteriously Scrubbed Database With 22,000 Specimens

How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science

California Medical Ethics Prof With Natural Immunity Sues University Over Vaxx Mandate

MSNBC Historian: Honor 9/11 Heroes By Fighting Back Against GOP

Hack of Texas GOP website on 9/11 ‘made my day,’ ex-Biden-Obama adviser says

Kinzinger Praises George W. Bush For Calling Out Domestic Terrorists  I hope Bush winds up in the same Hell as Nixon.

Read it.

New work shows that histones, long treated as boring spools for DNA, sit at the center of the origin story of eukaryotes and continue to play important roles in evolution and disease.

I have always been fascinated by the mechanics of biochemistry.

Read it.

Come to sunny Rimini for the surf and sand and Somalis running around stabbing people!

Last night a Somali “refugee” at a beach resort in Italy stabbed five people, including a child. Somehow the authorities have already ruled out terrorism as a motive for the incident. So what do you call running around stabbing strangers, if not terrorism? Was he just engaged in a culture-enriching hobby that just happens to involve knives and exsanguination?

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Good. Stay out! Your kind ruined California – we don’t want that here.

Remote workers, on the other hand – who don’t inflict their filthy heathen ways on our politics – are very welcome. The more the merrier.

Read it.

The gods and goddesses of Ancient Egypt were an integral part of the people’s everyday lives. It is not surprising then that there were over 2,000 deities in the Egyptian pantheon. Some of these deities’ names are well known: Isis, Osiris, Horus, Amun, Ra, Hathor, Bastet, Thoth, Anubis, and Ptah while many others less so.

This comprehensive list of the Egyptian pantheon reminds me of nothing so much as a list of current Federal and State government agencies.

The more famous gods became state deities while others were associated with a specific region or, in some cases, a ritual or role.

Pretty keen resemblance.

The goddess Qebhet, for example, is a little known deity who offered cool water to the souls of the dead as they awaited judgment in the afterlife, and Seshat was the goddess of written words and specific measurements overshadowed by Thoth, the better known god of writing and patron of scribes.

That would be the SSA (Social Security Administration), National Bureau of Standards, and the Department of Education.

These gods all had names, individual personalities and characteristics, wore different kinds of clothing, held different objects as sacred, presided over their own domains of influence, and reacted in highly individualistic ways to events. Each deity had their own area of expertise but were often associated with several spheres of human life.

See? Nailed it.

Read it.

Whenever a virus infects you, there’s a chance it will leave behind a piece of itself within your DNA, and if this happens in an egg or sperm cell, it will then be passed on through the generations. These are known as endogenous viral elements (EVEs).

In humans, fragments of viral DNA make up around 8 percent of our genome. They can provide a record of viral infections through our evolutionary history, like genetic memory.

“These viral fragments have been retained for a reason,” said paleovirologist Emma Harding. “Over millions of years of evolution, we would expect all DNA to change, however, these fossils are preserved and kept intact.”

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Genetic “dark matter” may drive the emergence of new species, new research finds.

These long, repeating stretches of the genome, called satellite DNA, may ultimately prevent incompatible animals from mating by scrambling the chromosomes in their hybrid babies, according to the study. And if animals from different populations can’t mate, they will diverge over time, leading to speciation.

‘Dark Regions of the Genome’ would be a great title for a move.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line.

Based on what I’ve read and seen, the prevailing narrative on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is that the war on terror went pear-shaped. 9/11 presented a test, and we failed it.

On September 12, 2001, America was unified as it hadn’t been for decades. Our allies were fully behind us. But we blew it, or rather the Bush administration did by plunging us into war in Iraq. So I keep reading and hearing.

I disagree. My view is that we won the first 20 years of the long war on terror. Sure, we made many mistakes, as always happens in difficult wars. But there hasn’t been an attack on our homeland of anything remotely like 9/11’s scale in 20 years.

Few predicted this on 9/12, and the fact that the grim predictions of that time didn’t come true isn’t down to luck. It’s due largely to the war on terror.

This alone represents victory to me.

‘Evil Can Never Be Dead Enough’

Found: The Ward Churchill for 9/11@20

Universal Vaccines? Nope

Fauci-Funded Wuhan Lab Viruses 10,000 Times Stronger Than Usual, Documents Show

Ed Dept Opening Civil Rights Inquiry Into Florida Governor’s Ban on Mask Mandates

Here’s who loves Biden’s vaccine mandate: The companies that have to enforce it (CNN)

The hyperbolic GOP reaction to Biden’s vaccine mandate shows why it’s necessary (Washington Post)

Joe Biden’s incoherent, fear-mongering COVID vaccine speech (New York Post)

Axios panics about GOP ‘uprising’ over Biden’s vaccine mandate not seen in ‘decades’, ignores 2020 BLM riots

What is ivermectin, and how did people get the idea it can treat covid? (Washington Post) Perhaps from doctors who have successfully used it to treat COVID patients, and those patients who have been helped by it?

Biden declares war on DeSantis and Abbott: ‘Get them out of the way’

Court rules for Florida governor, reinstates ban on mask mandates in FL schools

Study Finds Teenage Boys Six Times More Likely To Suffer Heart Problems From Vaccine Than Be Hospitalized by COVID  Think of it as evolution in action.

Experts Fear Crowded Sport Stadiums, Virus Combustible Mix  Gee, if we had a vaccine that actually worked, it might solve the problem.

NYC Using $5.9 Billion In Federal Relief Funds To Pay Artists $5,000, Give Cash To Cab Drivers And Encourage Outdoor Dining

How to Make Sense of Contradictory Science Papers

NY Hospital Forced To Stop Delivering Babies After Maternity Workers Resign Over Vaccine

“A Decision They’ll Regret” – Australia Regulator Bans Ivermectin Use As COVID-19 Treatment

Fauci Fumbles Natural Immunity

NY Times’ Classless Krugman Marks 9-11: Real Threat to USA? The Right Wing  Paul Krugman is a proglodyte polemicist who teaches economics in his spare time.

PBS on 9/11 at 20: MAGA Is Much More Threatening to US Than ISIS

IPCC’s “No One Is Safe” Slogan Is Deeply Misleading

“Green”: A Slow-Motion Train Wreck

Bloomberg: “What Smart People Get Wrong About Climate Change Extremes”

Stalled: September Arctic Sea Remains Surprisingly Stable Over Past Decade, “Long Way From Predicted “Ice Free”

Global warming: is weight loss a solution?

Are China’s climate promises just a load of hot air? (Yes!)

The Post-Afghanistan ‘Pivot,’ as Predicted

Members of Congress and Their Staff Are Exempt From Biden’s Vaccine Mandate

Brother of Afghan VP Executed by Taliban, Family Says

Panetta Predicts Taliban, Al Qaeda Will Attack US

Celeb and Harris-Backed Fund Freed ‘Career Criminal’; Now, a Man Is Dead

More And More Australians Are Seeking To Leave The Country

REMINDER: Twitter Censored Dave Rubin For Predicting What Biden Did

Yeah, 9/11 Was Bad; But It Wasn’t ‘QAnoners Wandering Around The Capitol For A Few Hours’-Bad

Facebook Censored Me for Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

Progressives Cheer As Man Pummels Woman  Babylon Bee.

Read it.

After conducting an extensive review of the literature and evidence of long-term human evolution, scientists Tim Waring and Zach Wood concluded that humans are experiencing a “special evolutionary transition” in which the importance of culture, such as learned knowledge, practices and skills, is surpassing the value of genes as the primary driver of human evolution.

Culture is an under-appreciated factor in human evolution, Waring says. Like genes, culture helps people adjust to their environment and meet the challenges of survival and reproduction. Culture, however, does so more effectively than genes because the transfer of knowledge is faster and more flexible than the inheritance of genes, according to Waring and Wood.

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of your average citizen more than those it’s likely to be Extinction Rebellion. Utter these words to your average working-class Londoner and don’t be surprised if they start grinding their teeth or begin to show signs of a florid complexion.

Since the group re-emerged after a long hiatus in the wilderness — probably busy making hair shirts or shouting at petrol — they have tried every means at their disposal to raise awareness that we are living in a supposed climate emergency. Their hapless Dad’s Army approach to environmental activism managed to enrage and frustrate just about every sector of British society. From a blockade that obstructed newspaper printing presses to disrupting the travel plans of millions of fed up commuters, the group managed to alienate just about anyone who may have been receptive to their cause. Hyperbolic statements didn’t help either. Founding member Roger Hallam claimed “billions” will die if we fail to take immediate action. Rather than bring people with them, these ridiculous stunts and statements have had the opposite effect.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

An epistemological point I try to make is that there really isn’t all that much Fake News in terms of outright hoaxes in the press. Instead, there is an intractably vast abundance of news, countless facts which people can’t be expected to remember unless it fits into a well-worn narrative, usually about who or what is Good and who or what is bad.

For example, if racial profiling pushed by George W. Bush had contributed to 9/11, you’d never ever hear the end of it. After all, we all know, racial profiling is bad and 9/11 was bad, so of course racial profiling caused 9/11. Who could ever forget that?

In contrary, the high likelihood that George W. Bush’s anti-racial profiling campaign contributed to 9/11 … well, DOES NOT COMPUTE. Being against racial profiling is good but Bush was bad, so how can you fit the fact that Bush was against racial profiling into your narrative. Further, being against racial profiling is good while 9/11 was bad, so how can bad things flow from good things?

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Redlining a neighborhood is the act of the government and lenders turning off the spigot of loans in a neighborhood by drawing a line around a neighborhood and denying loans to be made in that neighborhood. Munger Place in Dallas is a good example of a neighborhood that was ripe for redlining and suffered the consequences of this policy.

Bluelining a neighborhood is the act of the government and lenders turning on a firehose of free government money and benefits to developers in a designated neighborhood to build low-income apartments. This free government money to developers might include a 99-year property tax exemption for school, City, County and Community College tax. Free government money might also include Community Development Funds, Housing Finance Corporation grants, and the City of Dallas bestowing benefits like added zoning density allowances not desired by the development’s neighbors. Dallas City Council District 3 is a good example of a neighborhood that has suffered the consequences of being blueline.

Biden’s Bold COVID Plan Is the Prescription America Needs (Daily Beast)

Ron Johnson said last fall that undermining the Covid vaccine “will cause people’s deaths.” Now he spreads anti-vaccine misinformation (CNN) I.e. Not the Narrative.

‘Pay the Consequences’: Nets Praise Biden Pulling ‘Hammer’ on Unvaxxed

Former FDA Commissioner: Fauci Funded Gain Of Function On Even Deadlier MERS-like Coronaviruses

Biden Orders TSA to Double Fines for Maskless Passengers

Gavin Newsom Opposed Vaccine Mandates Just Two Years Ago; Biden And Fauci Also Said ‘No’  Well, the Party Line changed, and they had to change with it.

Fauci: The Face of Big Government and Tyranny

Biden Admin Losing Unwinnable War On COVID, Scapegoats ‘Unvaccinated’ Americans  Best Narrative Yet: That unvaccinated Americans can give COVID to ‘vaccinated’ Americans. (Hey, if vaccinated people are in danger from unvaccinated people, your ‘vaccine’ isn’t worth shit.)

Kentucky Lawmakers Override Governor, Expel School Mask Mandate

Jen Psaki Blocks Question on Fauci and US Funding of Deadly Coronavirus Research in China

Court Rules for Florida Gov. DeSantis, Reinstates Ban on School Mask Mandates

College Textbook Says People Who Oppose Lockdowns Caused COVID Deaths

FDA Official Hopeful Younger Kids Can Get Shots This Year  So does Big Pharma. KA-CHING!

Bucs-Cowboys opener begins with Black national anthem

Actress and ‘View’ Agree: TX Law Restricting Abortions Is Racist  The ghost of Margaret Sanger says, ‘They’re not killing enough black babies!’

Yet more evidence Donald Trump is running a shadow presidency (CNN) When the ‘real’ President is a vacancy, that’s not hard to do. (What would CNN have to talk about if they didn’t talk about Trump?)

Trump praise for Robert E. Lee’s statue in Virginia shows how far this ‘hero’ has fallen (NBC News) Praise from Trump? Say no more!

Lunatic Wallace: Have Mueller Investigate GOP, Supreme Court ‘Collusion’ on Abortion!

Biden: Vaccine Mandates ‘Not About Freedom or Personal Choice’  I’m sure he would like us to believe that.

Biden plan for forced vaccinations doesn’t include illegal immigrants  Which demonstrates that it’s not about protection, it’s about freedom and personal choice.

Biden Exempts Over 600,000 USPS Workers From Federal Mandatory Vaccination Order   Which demonstrates that it’s not about protection, but about government privilege.

Postal Service Unions Spent Big on Biden. Now They’re Exempted From the Federal Vaccine Mandate  One hand washes the other.

Biden Administration Appealing Federal DACA Ruling

Doocy Bomb: Why Do Americans Have to Get Covid Shots But Not Illegal Immigrants?

Jen Psaki Provides Electricity To All Of DC By Backpedaling On Exercise Bike  Babylon Bee.

Seth Meyers Rips Trump Military Board Appointees for Trying to Stick Around (Daily Beast) Yeah, we all look to Seth Meyers for public policy advice.

The Texas county that explains why Republicans are terrified (The Guardian) As if a Left Coast writer for the Guardian knows anything about Texas.

Los Angeles diners robbed at gunpoint on sidewalk café in broad daylight Maybe they need an open carry law for victims — the criminals appear to have one already.

California May Require Menstrual Products in Public Schools

Nets Skip WH Pulling ATF Nominee After Accusations of Racism Surface

20 Years Of Government-Sponsored Tyranny: The Rise Of The Security-Industrial Complex From 9/11 To COVID-19

Judges question constitutionality of felony charge against Jan. 6 defendants

BBC Admits Syria Chemical Attack Documentary Had “Serious Flaws”

Netflix ‘Gay James Bond’ Cartoon Embraces Demonic Eroticism, Calls Jesus ‘Her’

Trump: Downside of a 2024 Run Is That I’d Be Saving CNN

What Afghan Blunder? CBS’s King Helps Clinton Tout Voter Suppression as Real Threat

Rutgers and San Francisco State 9/11 Panel To Feature Terrorist Sympathizers n Of course they do.

$3.5T Reconciliation Bill Would Lavish Hundreds of Billions on Nanny State Education

Former Sen. Boxer Nudges Feinstein Toward Retirement  If I had a safe seat like Feinstein, they’d have to carry me out in a box.

On Morning Joe, Wash Post Book Critic Laments American ‘Blood Lust’ After 9/11

Wealthy School District Diverts $79M in COVID-19 Relief to ‘Equity’ Programs

Contest Challenges Inventors to Harness Wave Power to Desalinate Seawater (‘Scientific’ American)

Earth’s tipping points could be closer than we think. Our current plans won’t work (The Guardian)

Climate Crisis Shape Shifting vs Natural Diversity

A recent reversal in the response of western Greenland’s ice caps to climate change

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And if you believe that one they’ll tell you another one.

Here’s an alternative: companies should offer a four or five-hour workday. It doesn’t have to be for everyone. For those interested, the tradeoff is that they will have to get in on time, work diligently without any internet shopping searches and remain dedicatedly focused. If you are able to produce what is expected or exceed expectations, you’re out by around 2:00 p.m.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

Recently an acquaintance who works for a major U.S. utility sent me brochures describing several schemes, and asked what I thought of them. Two store energy in mechanical ways, and one is a thermal storage system resembling the one profiled on WUWT a few weeks ago. As the time scale to switch to 100% renewables is constantly being advanced on us, even as we only begin to recognize the unsuitability of renewables alone, my acquaintance said, “We are going to waste a lot of money in the next ten years.”

A lot of it provided by taxpayers, whether they like it or not.

Paul Mirengoff, an Actual Lawyer, at Power Line.

Whatever one’s views of the Texas law, the DOJ’s suit is baseless. Its filing demonstrates that under Joe Biden and Merrick Garland, the DOJ has become a hyper-partisan, unprincipled, and lawless tool of the left.

The Department of Justice lacks authority to file any lawsuit unless a statute grants litigation authority to the Attorney General. The DOJ’s complaint cites no statute granting such authority.

None exists. Otherwise the DOJ would have cited it.

Merrick Garland may consider the Texas statute unconstitutional. He may be right. But he lacks the free-standing authority to challenge statutes he deems unconstitutional, no matter how much the Democrats’ leftist base clamors for him to do so.

And the court will throw it out on standing grounds. So this is just Virtue Signaling on the part of the Biden mal-administration. What it does demonstrate, however, is what a terrible pick Garland would have made for the Supreme Court, and how right Republicans in the Senate were to ignore his nomination.

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Journolist is no more. In 2010, the online forum where leftist journalists congregated to decide on the liberal talking points of the day was shut down by its founder Ezra Klein when the group was exposed.

And yet, leftists still manage to spout remarkably similar lines. When it comes to the Texas abortion law, the liberal trope of the times is the poor, besieged, “Uber driver.” The notion is that Uber drivers who transport women to abortion clinics will be sued by private citizens under the law, seeking an award of up to $10,000.

On Friday’s Morning Joe, MSNBC liberal analyst Jonathan Lemire, who also poses as a “reporter” for the Associated Press, mouthed the “Uber driver” line. We’ve put together a mash-up of multiple liberal worthies, starting with Lemire, all trotting out the “Uber driver” trope. leftists prefer to focus on supposedly beleaguered Uber drivers even though very few are likely to be sued because they want to deflect attention from what the true target of the law would be: the abortionists themselves.

Nobody who objects to abortion is going to waste time on some poor Uber driver. They’re going to go after the abortionists, which are the chief target of the law.

On the other hand, I can see the sue-and-settle scam artists who currently prey on businesses that don’t have the appropriate Americans With Disabilities Act accommodation provided rubbing their hands with glee. I suggest that the legislation was poorly drafted if it will allow this result (presuming that the Wokerati are interpreting it correctly, which is never a reliable assumption).

UPDATE: A Tight-Knit Circle of Internet Troublemakers Convinced Professional Journalists

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Despite more than 18 months of hardship, the stock markets have miraculously continued to move upward, indicating a renewed confidence in our economic recovery by investors, both domestic and abroad.

In other words, people not only want to see America win, but they also believe that America can win. In fact, the markets have hit record highs, surging 100% from where they were at the start of the pandemic. Although there has been some recent lag due to the COVID-19 delta variant, the markets have, for the most part, remained consistently strong.

Despite these trends from the markets that signal economic recovery, strength, and renewed interest from investors, the most significant concern that hasn’t been discussed enough by mainstream media outlets is the number of Americans who are refusing to go back to work.

But the Cloud People don’t want job markets to work,  which is why they keep trying to raise the minimum wage. They want as many people as possible unemployed so that they will be dependent on government benefits (and more willing to vote for the Party of Free Stuff).

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the patent-pending ‘SE200? concept features a lightweight tri-wing layout to enhance lift over drag, a ’tilting’ seat, and a new ‘once-through’ air feed ventilation system. the innovative aircraft is imagined as a monocoque, made up from a single solid-molded component that can float on water. fuel is stored on top of the fuselage in self-sealing bladders, and not in the wings. ‘the construction is all-composite, molded in one tough, safer piece. we also incorporated super-thin, long wings and complete streamlining from the nose to the tail. we did it all.’ SE aeronautics chief engineer lloyd weaver mentions.

I’ll believe it when I see it walking down the aisle.

Read it.

Top Democrats and environmental groups connected to left-wing activist and former Bernie Sanders adviser Tara Houska are keeping silent following revelations that a bail fund she founded has not accounted for millions in contributions.

The Freshet Collective, which provided legal support for Dakota Access Pipeline protesters, had just over $2 million in net assets at the end of the 2017 fiscal year. Four years on, however, it’s not clear what became of those funds, a Washington Free Beacon review found. A nonprofit charity watchdog told the Free Beacon that Freshet has a duty to be forthcoming about its finances and identified other operational deficiencies.

This is how the scams are run:

1. Collect a lot of money from delusional Wokies (and taxpayers!) for a ‘good cause’.
2. Use most of the money on yourself and your friends, including conveniently-placed politicians.
3. Keep vewy vewy quiet and hope nobody notices.

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There’s an outfit called Next Energy Solar Fund, who are after your money to invest in solar projects.

…

Next Energy don’t directly own the solar farms, it is merely the holding company for a number of shell companies who do own them. This is advantageous to them, as they can simply let any one of the shell companies go bankrupt if it runs into trouble, without the holding company taking much of a hit.

And because most of the money invested belongs to investors in the fund, Next Energy have little to lose anyway. Instead they merely rake off the profits and service charges.

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This year marks a century since the world premiere of Karel ?apek’s drama R.U.R. in the town of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic. By that very fact, it marks a century of the word “robot” which has spread into all world languages from the very title of ?apek’s drama, since the latter is an initialism standing for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti in the Czech original (meaning Rossum’s Universal Robots). It is the name of the megacorporation responsible for introduction of robots as a cheap and versatile workforce, and – no big spoiler there, considering how famous and even canonical the drama has become – ultimately responsible for the extinction of the human species.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The news of late has been dominated by a few big items, all of which are driven by the ruling class commitment to their narratives. As a result, the show this week is about how the Cloud People are living in a simulation. Their reality is not only not our reality, but rather an approximation of it. If you imagine the Cloud People playing a live action role plating game of real life, their rantings make more sense.

They just had Mumbly Joe slur through a speech on Covid that sounded like it was given by an alien in another universe. This great emergency he thinks is happening outside the bubble is not happening at all. For most of the country, life is back to normal, except for the annoying interference of these idiots. Team Dementia, however, is sure the peasants are living through a version of the Black Death.

Matthew Continetti.

Reading the twentieth-anniversary commemorations of 9/11 that have filled our prestige newspapers and magazines in recent days, it might seem as if Krauthammer was describing not only another time but another country. Those pieces tell an altogether different story: not of pride and resilience but of guilt, pathos, regret, and exhaustion. The reckless, slapdash, and deadly American withdrawal from Afghanistan has only thickened the funereal atmosphere. That “bedrock America” of courage and grit? It is obscured behind a fog of self-loathing.

For example: “After 9/11, the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong,” says one headline in the Atlantic. “9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed,” reads the title of an essay in the Washington Post. “Winning Ugly” is the name of an article in Foreign Affairs. A headline in the Spectator (U.K.) asks, “Is America still worth fighting for?” (The implied answer is no.) New York magazine, of all places, is chockablock with hot takes arguing that the war on terrorism wasn’t worth it: “America’s greatest existential threat wasn’t terrorism”; “The case for Iraqi reparations”; “Bin Laden Won.” The headline of an opinion column in the Washington Post: “We best remember 9/11 by moving beyond it.”

Read it.

Geert Wilders, the leader of the Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid, PVV) in the Netherlands, makes some pointed remarks about Afghans who vacation in Afghanistan after claiming refugee status because they are in danger in their homeland.

In danger of being bored, perhaps.