Read it.

The Great Recession led to a carpenter exodus. But cultural and pay issues have stunted the profession’s growth for far longer.

…

Even among the other construction trades, which have long faced retention and recruitment problems and for which there were ~400k unfilled jobs in March, carpentry stands out for its shortages. Builders have more trouble finding carpenters than roofers, electricians, or just about anything else, and by a wide margin.

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. It is always and everywhere a result of too much money, of a more rapid increase of money, than of output. Moreover, in the modern era, the important next step is to recognize that today the governments control the quantity of money so that, as a result, inflation in the United States is made in Washington and nowhere else.“

— Milton Friedman

Check it out.

Not only do we move large items, like dining tables with cars, but we also move small items, like our dinner deliveries with cars. This system isn’t just incredibly inefficient, but it creates emissions, traffic, and unnecessary accidents. But could this problem could be solved with a small, cute robot? To help reduce our reliance on cars, Ali created a fully-autonomous sidewalk bot that is used to deliver small items like our dinner deliveries.

Hmmm. Robots making deliveries.

1. How soon before one gets hacked and hijacked? What’s the black market price of a used delivery robot?
2. How soon before one is just pried open? It’s easier than an ATM, so you wouldn’t need a backhoe. A wrecking bar would probably do.

Uh, let’s think this through a little more.

The guys at MIT are rocking it.

The suitcase-sized device, which requires less power to operate than a cell phone charger, can also be driven by a small, portable solar panel, which can be purchased online for around $50. It automatically generates drinking water that exceeds World Health Organization quality standards. The technology is packaged into a user-friendly device that runs with the push of one button.

UPDATE: Lost at sea? This desalination unit fits in a suitcase

Read it.

Instead of waiting for the police to arrive, a woman with a concealed carry license in West Virginia acted fast to stop a crazed man with an AR-15-style rifle who was about to kill dozens of people at a graduation party.

Read it.

“If the Founding Fathers can be discarded,” Douglas Murray says, “and Abraham Lincoln can be discarded, and everyone else can be discarded from American history, what have you got left?”

Taki turns over a rock.

What used to be extreme radicalism is now the reigning ideology of every major American city. Speech patterns have changed, and the meanings of words are perceived not in the way they were intended. Everything is politicized and crime rates have gone through the you-know-what. Political and racial differences stoked by the internet threaten major US cities, as contempt for the police and American institutions in general becomes the default stance of the ruling elite. I’ve never seen it this bad, even at the height of the Vietnam conflict, when Black Panthers were openly shooting at cops and Hollywood and the left were rooting for them. Now it’s much worse, and only Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and TV network stand between the maintenance of some semblance of the past and total chaos.

Joel Kotkin.

Glenn Ellmers’s analysis of COVID and Trump represents a classic, and effective, account of the situation from the perspective of declining liberty and adherence to traditional values. But though it is important and necessary to hold onto our highest ideals, I would like to emphasize what is actually taking place on the ground and its likely long-term implication.

Statistics show that COVID accelerated economic, demographic, and geographic trends which were already existent, but rarely acknowledged. These trends include large-scale migration to the south, the west, and the suburbs. COVID also, as Ellmers suggests, sharpened the conflict between many Americans and the ruling “expert” class, who, unlike most Americans, actually flourished under COVID.

I am less sure that Trump was a force for good in all this, given his profound personal failings and mixed messaging during the pandemic. Yet he did stir up dissent against the overweening policies of some governors. In this sense the health crisis intensified an already existing political one. Looking forward, post-COVID reality has seen the emergence of powerful populist politics in both parties, and a marked drop in public esteem for the nation’s once-revered institutions.

Read it.

Before we even knew how the killer of 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, had obtained his guns, Sen. Chris Murphy was engaging in his customary performative emotionalism on the Senate floor, literally begging Republicans to “compromise.”

Compromise on what exactly? Murphy has never once offered a single proposal that would have deterred any of these mass shooters. Literally minutes after his routine, Murphy was asked about the obvious mental illness prevalent among most of these shooters. “Spare me the bulls— about mental illness,” the Connecticut senator responded, “ripping” the GOP. “We don’t have any more mental illness than any other country in the world.” That’s how serious he is about compromise.

Whether America is more prone to mental illness or not, these incidents are almost exclusively perpetrated by young men who have exhibited serious antisocial behavior. All of them break a slew of existing laws. All of them have either obtained guns illegally, or legally before having any criminal record. In many, if not most, cases, the shooter is already on the cops’ radar because he has threatened others or written insane, violent manifestos.

Claim: President Biden “Aiming to Destroy a … Climate Lawsuit”

Physicists predict Earth will become a chaotic world, with dire consequences (Livescience)

Earth Will Eventually Become A ‘Chaotic’ World Due To Human Activity: Scientists (IndiaTimes)

People in US and UK face huge financial hit if fossil fuels lose value, study shows (The Guardian)

Big Tech is pouring millions into the wrong climate solution at Davos (The Verge)

Microsoft, Salesforce Add $300 Million to Carbon Removal’s Growing Cash Pile (Financial Post)

UK hits oil and gas companies with $6 billion windfall tax (CNN)

UK Climate Activists Deflate Tyres of ‘Around 100’ SUVs in Edinburgh on Single Night

The World Bank’s Impractical Electric Car Claptrap

Meet Rashida Tlaib’s Favorite Anti-Israel Publisher

WashPost Misses Point of Study Showing Gmail’s Left-Biased Spam Filter

New York Calls Off US History Test, Says Content May Trigger ‘Trauma’ Related to Buffalo Shooting

San Francisco School District Drops ‘Chief’ From Job Titles, Cites Native American Concerns

Beto Interrupts Press Conference To Remind Everyone He’s A Giant Turd  Babylon Bee.

Wisconsin Voters Sue 5 Cities Over Unlawful Unmanned Ballot Drop Boxes in Elections

‘What Is Wrong With’ Us? CBS Pushes Sweeping Bans on All Handguns, Rifles

Biden’s ATF Pick, Senator Clash Over ‘Assault Weapon’ Definition During Judiciary Hearing

NYC Exodus To Florida Accelerates As People Fed Up With Violence And High Taxes 

SHUT IT DOWN: Radical Leftwing Group Draws Up Battle Plans To Blockade Supreme Court

Another Big Story the Press Missed

CBS Anti-NRA, ‘Assault Rifles’ Narrative Upended by Its Own Reporter

More Corporations Removed From ‘GenderCool’ Website Following State Farm Exit

CNBC Buries Elon Musk Quote Voicing Support for Gun Rights

Profile in Courage: Schumer Blocks School Safety Bill as Senate Adjourns for Holiday Weekend

Jewish Community Leads Fight Against NY’s Latest Push for Greater Private School Control

‘No to Gender Politics:’ Virginia Fairfax County Parents Protest Pro-Transgender Elementary School Push

Hundreds of Chinese Depositors Assaulted by Plainclothes for Protesting Their Frozen Accounts

S.F. population fell 6.3%, most in nation, to lowest level since 2010

59-Year-Old Falun Gong Practitioner Dies After 14 Hours in Detention

Career Prosecutor Defeats George Soros-backed Candidate in Arkansas Race

Court Hears Parents’ Challenge to School District’s Secretive Transgender Policy

Teen Vogue Defends Beto Standing On the Graves of Children

San Diego City Council Passes Resolution to Become First ‘Safe Haven’ for Abortion

Anti-Capitalist Coffee Shop Sells ‘People Over Profit’ Shirts for Profit

Virginia AG Sides With High School Teacher Fired for Rejecting Transgender Pronoun Demands

Are You A Racist? Take The Quiz!  (Babylon Bee)

Fact Checking the Fact Checkers: Yes, Stacey Abrams Supported an All-Star Game Boycott

GROSS: WashPost Exploits Buffalo Massacre to Wokescold Stefanik Donors

‘A Very Big and Successful Evening’: Trump Welcomes 100-6 Endorsement Record

What Greg Abbott gets *totally* wrong about the Uvalde shooting (CNN) Says Chris Cillizza, who has never been elected to anything.

Republicans are trying to dive for cover under the Second Amendment. Don’t let them. (NBC)

What I Saw at Fourth Protest Outside Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Home

REID: GOP Only Wants Book Bans, Forced Births, Harassing LGBTQ People & Guns  Nothing else; only that.

CBS Reporter: Beto Press Conference Interruption Stunt ‘Very Clearly Staged’

No Tragedy Unexploited: Jezebel Uses Uvalde to Slander Conservatives

CNN Runs Misleading Pro-Gun Control Fact Check of Abbott

CDC identifies 9 monkeypox cases in 7 states (CNN) Time to PANIC!

Nine monkeypox cases identified in U.S.: What we know about each of them (NBC)

Understanding Long COVID: Study Finds Biological Difference In People With Prolonged Infection

A WHO pandemic pact would leave the world at China’s mercy  Matt Ridley.

Israel Rejects US Request To Transfer Missiles To Ukraine

UK Slaps Windfall Tax on Energy Firms; Russia Preps to Seize Exiting Western Firms

Terrifying TOS-1A Thermobaric Artillery Strike Recorded In Ukraine

What HIMARS Rocket Artillery Systems Can Actually Do For Ukraine

How China’s Push for AI Weapons Threatens the World

EU Suspends Russia’s Access To Vital Crime Data Sharing Program

LEADERSHIP: China Reconsiders Russian Military Reforms

US Seizes Russia-Flagged Tanker Full Of Iranian Oil Near Greece

Putin Assembles Eurasian Economic Union to Counter Western Sanctions

In Stunning Shift, WaPo Admits Catastrophic-Conditions, Collapsing-Morale Of Ukraine Front-Line Forces

Americans Are Increasingly Wary Of US Efforts To Harm Russia Causing Economic Damage In America  Nobody in the government, of course.

The Russo-Ukrainian War: A New Opportunity for Demagogues to Destroy Freedoms at Home

Iran Seizes 2 Greek Tankers In Gulf As Retaliation For US Taking Oil

Guangdong Province Shifting to ‘Wartime System’ Poses an Imminent Threat to Taiwan

The ‘Gun Lobby,’ ‘Assault Weapons,’ ‘Common Sense Gun Laws’ and Other Things Joe Biden Keeps Lying About

Biden’s energy policy is sending us toward recession

Why the government took home prices out of its main inflation index

Shares of Dollar Tree and Dollar General Rise as Inflation Pushes Shoppers to Find Bargains

Hunter Biden Used Burner Phone and Data Recovery Apps: Former US Secret Service Agent

Biden Plans To Cancel $10,000 In Student Debt Per Borrower Ahead Of Midterms   Pander Bear shops for vote with YOUR money.

Floridians Buying Less Food, Cutting Spending Due to Inflation: Survey

Biden’s approval rating sets a new record…

Small Business Administration Had No Plan To Stop Billions of Dollars in Loan Fraud, Report Finds

FDA Approves First COVID Treatment for Young Children Despite Alarming Risks

Obamacare ‘Double Whammy’ to Hit Right Before Midterms

I remember 1995. I prefer it to today.

Read it.

The weakness of California’s Republican party is reflected in every metric that matters. Its representation in California’s congressional delegation is 10 out of 53, which at 19 percent does not even reflect voter registration totals. Similar underachievement plagues their showing in the state legislature: Republicans number 19 out of 80 seats in the assembly, and 9 out of 40 seats in the state senate. Of the eight higher state offices—governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer, controller, superintendent of public instruction, and insurance commissioner—not one is held by a Republican. Every one of these office holders are Democrats. For those Californians who recall that the state was cherry red through the election of George Bush in 1988, this leftward turn is cause for endless regret.

Read it.

Mmmmmm, could be.

Semi-RINO Peggy Noonan tries some mind-reading.

I’m not sure it’s the party that’s building the coalitions and I’m not sure they’re coalitions exactly, but something new is being built, and it involves the widening of the Republican Party in terms of who wants to join and whom its voters will support. This shift began in 2016 and appears to be accelerating.

Gee, what happened in 2016? Let’s see….

Donald Trump’s endorsements yielded, famously, mixed success. Nebraska gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster, for whom Mr. Trump rallied, lost. Idaho Gov. Brad Little trounced his Trumpian challenger. But J.D. Vance broke through and won in Ohio because of Mr. Trump’s endorsement. If Mr. Trump had picked David McCormick in Pennsylvania, we wouldn’t be in recount territory; he would have won comfortably. Yet Mr. Trump’s backing couldn’t save the strange and hapless Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina.

The figures I saw were 100 successful and 6 unsuccessful. If that’s ‘mixed’, then I don’t know what winning looks like.

Mr. Trump has real influence but it is not determinative.

Well, then, I guess he’s not the New Hitler like everybody thought. Isn’t that amazing?

Read it.

I suspect government regulations, but that’s me.

Read it.

To some, the whole notion of wireless power transmission evokes images of Nikola Tesla with high-voltage coils spewing miniature bolts of lightning. This wouldn’t be such a silly connection to make. Tesla had indeed pursued the idea of somehow using the ground and atmosphere as a conduit for long-distance power transmission, a plan that went nowhere. But his dream of sending electric power over great distances without wires has persisted.

…

Can the same basic physics be harnessed to replace wires today? My colleagues and I at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, in Washington, D.C., think so, and here are some of the reasons why.

Read it.

A Los Angeles Times columnist expected the Texas elementary school shooter to be a “white supremacist” and was disappointed to learn he was a Latino.

“When I heard that a gunman had killed multiple schoolchildren in a predominantly Latino town in Texas, I immediately thought: white supremacist,” Gustavo Arellano wrote in a Wednesday column. “How could I not?”

Arellano said his “stomach dropped” when he learned the mass shooting was in fact carried out by an 18-year-old Latino named Salvador Rolando Ramos. In an attempt to explain why a “Latino-on-Latino mass school shooting” would take place, Arellano blamed the tragedy on Ramos’s assimilation into American culture.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

The category of vile Democrats is a large one and the competition for most vile is stiff. As a Minnesotan, I would nominate Fifth District Rep. Ilhan Omar and Attorney General Keith Ellison for the honor.

I have been writing about them for about as long as they have been running for office — since 2016 in Omar’s case, since 2006 in Ellison’s case (running for Congress, Ellison was a state senator at the time I tuned in). I think I am something of an expert on both of them, but most of all I am an expert on what it feels like to beat your head against the wall for years at a time.

ZMan turns ’em over.

Wars often turn over rocks exposing truths about the age that have either been ignored or hidden from the world. Old tactics, in the case of the Great War, were exposed as obsolete by modern weapons. Sometimes it is in war that the hollowness of a great power is exposed. This was the case of the Soviets in Afghanistan. That war exposed the internal weakness of the regime. The war in Ukraine is similarly exposing problems in the collective West.

The first lesson of this war so far is that Western intelligence has been exposed as useless in understanding modern Russia. At every turn, the information provided to political leaders about what Russia is doing and planning to do has turned out to be more fantasy than reality. The West has been operating on assumptions that may have been true twenty-five years ago but are no longer true today. The result has been a total political failure in response to the invasion.

Read it.

From the world’s largest gathering of hypocrites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, we have learned that a personal carbon footprint tracker is in the works. In the wrong hands, it would be the equivalent of the ankle monitors used to ensure that criminal offenders don’t escape their house arrest.

“We’re developing, through technology, an ability for consumers to measure their whole carbon footprint,” J. Michael Evans, president of Alibaba Group USA, said Tuesday while on a panel discussion on responsible consumption. “What does that mean? Where they are traveling. How they are traveling. What are they eating. What they are consuming on the platform.”

This will excite the virtue signalers who will be happy to post their carbon footprint scores on social media. But for the rest of us, those still wishing to live freely, who don’t want elites establishing the limits of “responsible consumption,” it’s deeply troubling.

George Will.

The Department of Homeland Security’s announced “pause” of its Disinformation Governance Board, 21 days after creating it as a “national security” measure, probably is itself disinformation. DHS realizes that its 10-thumbed debut of this boneheaded idea almost doomed it, so the “pause” feigns deliberation while the department plots the DGB’s resurrection.

Government pratfalls such as the DGB are doubly useful, as reminders of government’s embrace of even preposterous ideas if they will expand its power, and as occasions for progressives to demonstrate that there is no government expansion they will not embrace. Progressives noted approvingly that DHS was putting a disinformation “expert” — a “scholar” — in charge, so science would be applied, including the “science” of sorting disinformation from real information.

Read it.

There is nothing a strong government likes more than a weak people; and therefore, whether consciously or not, everything is done to render the people ever feebler. Not physically, of course, we are raising up giants of a size and strength never before seen, as can be seen on any sports field, but psychologically—which is why psychology is the handmaiden of soft authoritarianism, it teaches people their vulnerability.

The more vulnerable people can be induced to believe themselves to be, the more they need assistance to keep themselves going. Such assistance (which is self-justifying, though never sufficient, or indeed even partially effective) requires a vast legal and other infrastructure, put in place and regulated by the government. The government is the pastor, the people are the sheep.

Read it.

Two sisters from a Pakistani family in Catalonia were lured to Pakistan, where they were murdered by their male relatives in the presence of their mother for wanting to divorce the husbands they had been forced to marry.

The Religion of Peace is still out there and doing what it does. Don’t be distracted.

Read it.

A rash of thefts of semiconductor-loaded powertrain control modules from parked Freightliner and Western Star trucks is turning the tractors into oversize paperweights. Daimler Truck North America is going after the bad guys but has few leads.

The rip-offs of common powertrain control module 4 units relate to the ongoing shortage of microchips. Harvesting and reprogramming the modules allow them to work in other trucks, Daimler said.

Pfizer warns of ‘constant waves’ of Covid as complacency grows (Financial Times)

‘Everybody and their grandmother has COVID’ in the SF Bay Area (S.F. Gate)

With California hit by new coronavirus wave, time to start wearing masks? Limit gatherings? (L.A. Times)

The NHS Just Edited Their Monkeypox Page… To Make It Scarier

Sweden Recommends 5th Dose of COVID-19 Vaccine to Pregnant Women and Over-65s

Monkyepox-Mania

Is This the Worst Excuse for Vaccine Failure Yet?

California Poised to Adopt ‘Medical Misinformation Bill’ Targeting Alternative COVID-19 Protocols

Quebec to Start Monkeypox Vaccination of Contacts as Officials Confirm 25 Cases

The Rise and Fall of Serial Killers

Obama Is Sore That Latest School Shooting Is Distracting from 2nd Anniversary of the Death of George Floyd

Unhinged Joy Reid: GOP & NRA’s Tolerance for Slaughter Is Bottomless

NBA Star Jonathan Isaac Shares How Christ Inspired Him to Stand Tall Amid BLM Protests

How Biden’s Menthol Ban Endangers Black Bodies

They’re Replacing You, Black America

Raiders Reap Praise For Providing Workout Opportunity For Kaepernick  “What do I have to do?” “Just smile for the camera, son.”

Government Rests Its Case Against All-Black Militia Leader

Judge Tosses Racial Justice Activists’ Bid to End NYC Gifted & Talented Program

Mike Rowe Says Feds “Revoked” Film Permit Because Official “Didn’t Like His Personal Politics” 

CNN’s John Harwood Angered Biden Didn’t Blame Republicans During Speech

CNN Smears GOP Senator as Uncaring, Blind to Racism of Maternal Mortality?

Brad Raffensperger defeats Trump bid to oust him as Georgia’s top election official (The Guardian)

Donald Trump had a rough night in Georgia (CNN)

Lightfoot erupts at Chicago alderman during City Council meeting: ‘You are a liar!’

What Mitt Romney says about gun laws in wake of Texas school shooting (Deseret News) The Pander Bear speaks.

Why Republicans feel little political pressure for stricter gun control (CNN)

Kellyanne Conway’s Trip to ‘The View’ Was a Train Wreck (Daily Beast)

Princeton fires professor who opposed ‘anti-racist’ agenda  Stripping him of tenure first.

Jan. 6 Commission Subpoena Is ‘Political Vendetta’ Disregarding House Rules: Rep. Jim Jordan

Judge Strikes Email, Testimony Suggesting Trump-Russia Claims May Have Been Fabricated  The Crust looks after its own.

Israeli Forces Murdered Star Al Jazeera Journalist: CNN

Late Nights Hosts Defend Beto, Blame GOP, SCOTUS For Shootings

PBS: Racism is Why ‘Firearms Industry’ Gives Kids ‘A Middle Finger’  I’ve never heard of anybody refusing to sell a gun to somebody because of race. I suspect the murder rate would go down if it were illegal for black males to own guns.

California parents could soon sue for social media addiction (Associated Press)

They’re Worried About The Spread Of Information, Not Disinformation

Did the News Media’s Orgy of Coverage of the 18-Year-Old Buffalo Shooter Influence the 18-Year-Old Uvalde Shooter?

SEC weighs crackdown on phony environmental and social justice funds (Tech Crunch)

Sussman Trial Day 8: Ex-Clinton Lawyer Told Different Stories To Congress And FBI, Jury Hears

Scarborough Calls Baby Before Birth ‘The Being’ That Is Not ‘Actually Alive’

Obamacare ‘Time Bomb’ To Hit Right Before Midterms

America’s ‘techwokery’ is infecting its allies

California Republican Goes Full Ilhan Omar in Anti-Semitic Rant

Watchdog to Investigate 8 UK Universities Over Course Quality

State privacy laws are being written by tech companies to minimize protections

English and Welsh Police Apologise for Racism and Issue Mandatory Anti-Racist Training

Most Election Fraud Involves Absentee Ballots and Drop Boxes: Expert

Top Medical Group Scrubs Discredited Information Used To Push Late-Term Abortion

This Ain’t It, Chief: San Francisco Schools Ban Commonplace Word From Job Titles

NBC ‘Today’ Celebrates Trans Barbie

12 Groups Behind Protest of Musk’s Twitter Takeover Have Ties With Gates Foundation, Soros

What’s Behind California’s ‘Business Exodus’  Aside from high taxes and crime?

Whitmer Orders Michigan to Thwart Abortion Investigations

New Tools Being Provided to Security Agencies to Counter ‘Extremist Ideology’ and ‘Misinformation,’ Says Trudeau

Top Democrat Blocks Legislation Aimed at Preventing School Shootings

An Example to Young Girls

Report Shows FBI Spied On 3.3 Million Americans Without A Warrant

Is Biden’s Terror Exemption for Blind Sheikh’s Terror Group Prepping a Second Arab Spring?

US Economy Contracted Even More Than Expected In Q1, Raising Odds Of Recession

Biden’s Border Crisis Is Back on the Nets: More Coverage in April Than Past 5 Months Combined

Foreclosure-Wave Sweeping US Crests In Chicago

FBI Agent Under Investigation for Withholding Exculpatory Information in Trump-Russia Probe

Kyle Bass: Fed Will Start Cutting In 2023 After US Enters Recession Later This Year

Assassins and Terrorists ‘Seek to Exploit’ Southern Border: FBI Director

A Cabinency of Dunces

Buffalo vs. Waukesha: To Biden, Some Mass Killings Are Worse Than Others

Biden shooting blanks (again)

Biden Repeats False Claim About The Second Amendment

Climate Change Reveals Unique Artefacts in Melting Ice Patches

Seven White House climate staffers to watch (Washington Post)

‘Go after the money’: Goldman environmental prize winner honoured for urging banks to divest from coal (The Guardian) Parrot the Narrative! Win valuable prizes!

Here’s where Big Oil stands on climate plans – and it’s not good (Electrek)

Big Oil, flush with cash, is failing on climate pledges (CNN)

Consumers Face Summer Of Hell As Power Bill Costs Set To Jump 

The Green Agenda’s Role in Global Inflation

Eat the Bugs Peasant

UK Imposes Windfall Tax on Energy Firms to Fund £15 Billion Relief Package for Households

Read it.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have now demonstrated a low-cost gel film that can pull many liters of water per day out of even very dry air.

The gel is made up of two main ingredients that are cheap and common – cellulose, which comes from the cell walls of plants, and konjac gum, a widely used food additive. Those two components work together to make a gel film that can absorb water from the air and then release it on demand, without requiring much energy.

Freeberg discusses the elephants in the room.

Let is dispose, I say, of the following bits of sticky persistent nonsense. I can see here there’s work for me to do, because I’m seeing lots of people crying out for “new solutions that will work,” and then answering their own plaintive pleas with a lot of garbage that everyone’s heard lots of times before. Into the breach I bravely step.

Ben Shapiro.

Klaus Schwab is the head of the World Economic Forum; he founded the organization in 1971. Each year, the WEF hosts a massive conference in Davos, Switzerland, with thousands of world leaders, diplomats and experts on various topics gathering to trade ideas about how best to cooperatively run the world. Lest this characterization be seen as overstating the case, Schwab himself said as much this year in opening the conference: “The future is not just happening. The future is built by us, by a powerful community as you here in this room. We have the means to improve the state of the world. But two conditions are necessary. The first one is that we act all as stakeholders of larger communities, that we serve not only self-interest but we serve the community. That’s what we call stakeholder responsibility. And second, that we collaborate.”

This is the call to action for elitists the world over. They appoint themselves the representatives of global interests — without elections, without accountability — and then create mechanisms of national and international order to control citizens over whom they claim to preside. Schwab himself has decoded his favorite term, “stakeholder capitalism.” He wrote in Time magazine in October 2020, “Free markets, trade and competition create so much wealth that in theory they could make everyone better off if there was the will to do so.” To do so, however, would require taking hints from Greta Thunberg, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter; it would require “building … a virtuous economic system” in which companies abandon their core mission of serving customers and shareholders and instead embrace answering questions like “What is the gender pay gap in company X? How many people of diverse backgrounds were hired and promoted? What progress has the company made toward reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions?”

Read it.

The concept and governance of name, image, and likeness has always been highly politicized. But the deals themselves have largely stayed out of politics — until now.

Dresser Winn, a quarterback at the University of Tennessee at Martin, has signed a partnership to support the candidacy of Colin Johnson, who is running for District Attorney General for Tennessee’s 27th Judicial District.

The deal is considered to be the first to support a political candidate. It’s also an example of how athletes who may not have major followings or a Power 5 platform can ink partnerships in their community, as one of Winn’s agents, Dale Hutcherson, pointed out on Twitter.

They have always said that politics is show business for ugly people. It was inevitable that some sort of hustler would connect the dots and count up the zeroes.

ZMan turns over a rock.

Outside of the progressive hive, there has been a long running debate, going back to the 1980’s, about the awareness of the people in the hive. Left-wing people say things that are clearly not true, but they seem to believe what they are saying. They have some of the facts and seem to grasp certain concepts, but they come to conclusions that are obviously false. The question is whether the people in the hive really believe what they say or do they know the truth?

The default assumption, popular with mainstream conservatives, is that progressives are well-intentioned, but wrong on the facts. These are reasonable people who can come to the right answer if you slowly explain it to them. Conservatives have built their entire movement around the assumption that there is some way to explain things to the Left that will trigger a revelation. They will see their error, throw down their weapons and embrace the conservatives as brothers.

Along with conservatism, this view is fading from the scene. It is a generational thing as conservatism and most conservatives were formed in the post-war period. Most people have now concluded that the Left knows they are lying, but they are consumed with partisanship, so they are fine with lying. Far-left cranks will claim men can get pregnant because it advances their interests. The blank slate is central to their program, so they defend nutty ideas like the trans business.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

As reporters ascertain what happened during the tragic school shooting in Uvalde, we have more to process. The Associated Press has reconstructed events outside the school during the shooting before and after the heroic Border Patrol agent entered the building. The AP story is “Onlookers urged police to charge into Texas school.”

UPDATE: Police Waited to Enter Texas School as Shooter Opened Fire: Witnesses

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Salvador Ramos’s evil rampage in Uvalde, Texas has had the inevitable consequence: it was politicized within minutes by Democrats calling for more gun control. Michael Moore, at least, was honest. He said the Second Amendment should be repealed. That, one suspects, is what many Democrats want, but most aren’t bold enough to say it. Instead, they beat around the bush, like Joe Biden who blamed the Uvalde murders on the “gun lobby” and fumed: “When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?” What, exactly, is that, Joe? He didn’t say.

The fundamental point to be made about mass school shootings is that they are extraordinarily rare.

…

The “solutions” proposed by Democrats are laughable, obviously intended for political gain rather than practical benefit. Banning “assault rifles,” while likely unconstitutional, would do zero good. In close quarters, handguns are better than rifles, even short-barreled rifles like AR-15s. In the worst school shooting rampage so far, at Virginia Tech, the murderer used handguns. And when the ill-fated ban on “assault weapons” expired in 2004, the homicide rate went down, not up.

Read it.

Five years ago in 2017, when the US labor shortage was in its nascent stages and when the US was years away from a wage-price spiral, the Fed’s Beige Book surveys of economic activity across the country in April, May and July all noted the inability of employers to find workers able to pass drug screenings: “It’s not just a matter of labor participation; there is also a lot of collateral economic damage,” said Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist who wrote a widely discussed paper on the subject last year. In other words, too many people were high 24/7 to be gainfully employed.

Soma! A gramme is better than a damn!

Read it.

News accounts shows drug deaths have spiked everywhere. The year we lost my sister more than 65,000 people overdosed and died. That’s skyrocketed to more than 100,000 people during the 12-month period ending April 2021. That’s nearly 300 people each day.

We live in an age of data visualization, so the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers an?interactive dashboard?with provisional counts of drug overdose deaths. As jarring and important as the statistics are, it’s imperative we don’t forget that each one of these is a life lost, forever. Nearly 100,000 unique individuals—with inherent value, talents, dreams, desires—vanquished by a nearly invisible foe.

It takes only 2 milligrams to be lethal. That’s not even enough to cover the year on the front of the penny in your pocket.

Read it.

Democratic Texas gubernatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke disrupted Governor Greg Abbott’s press conference called to update the public on yesterday’s school shooting. O’Rourke is one of the breed of politicians — politicians without a conscience and with no thought other than themselves — that finds the moment of unspeakable tragedy fit to undertake histrionic displays and hysterical lectures promoting their favored causes. I can’t believe this is even good politics, but it is what it is, somewhere south of disgusting.