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The Biden administration touted the opening of its first taxpayer-funded electric vehicle charging station as proof that “Bidenomics is delivering for Americans.” Just days after the opening, the station sat empty.

The inaugural station—which opened on Dec. 8, two years after the administration allocated $7.5 billion to build electric vehicle chargers across the country—is located in London, Ohio, a small town situated just southwest of Columbus. The station features an Arby’s, a Cinnabon, and plenty of merchandise for truckers. It also features few to no users.

“At about 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, nobody was using the chargers,” Inside Climate News reported after visiting the station.

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Because she was murdered just two weeks after the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, many at the time were concerned that Woll’s murder was a “hate crime,” even though police immediately emphasized that nothing was known about the motive, and then later ruled out anti-Semitism as a motive. My initial reaction: “However, knowing what we know about Detroit, I’m willing to hazard a tentative guess that the killer was probably not a Trump supporter.” This was a simple deduction. Detroit is a crime-ridden pesthole and, as in most such cities, Biden voters comprise the vast majority of the population. So if police did not immediately suspect Woll’s murder to be motivated by anti-Semitism — if there were no anti-Jewish slurs spray-painted at the scene, etc. — a simple process of elimination would lead one to guess that her killer was an ordinary local criminal.

New York Post.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is not dreaming of a white Christmas — party, that is.
An invite concerning the Boston mayor’s holiday party, specifically for “Electeds of Color,” was mistakenly sent by an aide to all members of the Boston City Council.
Some 15 minutes later, that aide, Denise DosSantos, who serves as the mayor’s director of City Council relations, blasted up a follow-up email flagging the embarrassing error.
“I wanted to apologize for my previous email regarding a Holiday Party for tomorrow,” DosSantos wrote.
The white councilors were not supposed to receive an invite.

UPDATE: Boston Mayor Defends Party for ‘Electeds of Color’ Only‘

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Harvard President Claudine Gay has now been caught plagiarizing five academic papers – nearly half of her entire scholarly output – something which would result in the according to journalist Christopher Rufo.

One of the academics who was plagiarized, former professor Carol Swain, is pissed after Harvard gave Gay a pass on what would have resulted in severe punishment and/or expulsion for anyone else, as Townhall reports.

“I rarely get angry, but I am angry,” she wrote on X. “[R]ight now about the racial double standards that are TEMPORARILY giving #ClaudineGay an opportunity to resign. White progressives created her and white progressives are protecting her. The rest of us have had to work our rear ends off to achieve success. Some get it handed to them.”

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A former Facebook diversity program manager pleaded guilty to scamming the social media giant out of more than $4 million through a scheme in which she faked business deals in exchange for kickbacks, the Justice Department said.

Barbara Furlow-Smiles, who served as lead strategist and global head of employee resource groups and diversity engagement at Facebook, used the stolen funds to live an extravagant lifestyle that spanned from California to Georgia, prosecutors said.

From approximately January 2017 to September 2021, Furlow-Smiles led Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs at Facebook and was responsible for developing and executing DEI initiatives, operations, and engagement programs,” according to the DOJ.

She is, of course, a Woman of Color.

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On Wednesday, December 13th, the Dubai-hosted UN climate summit, COP28, concluded by presenting its final declaration. All 198 participating countries reached a non-binding deal which—in a world first—makes explicit mention of weaning countries off fossil fuel use.

Following two weeks of intense negotiations, the deal aims to reduce or wholly avoid the negative byproducts of climate change and was praised by COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber as “historic.” Amid the celebrations, delegates are avoiding the real implications of phasing out oil, gas, and coal.

At times COP28 presented itself as threatened by some its participants, with the Saudi Arabia-led oil producer group the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) threatening to veto the adoption of a ‘green’ agenda, arguing that the world economy can slash emissions while continuing to use specific hydrocarbon-based fuels. After necessitating an additional day of negotiations, OPEC relented and Al Jaber was able to tell a jubilant plenary session that “we must take the steps necessary to turn this agreement into tangible actions.”

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50 years after the oil embargo crisis of 1973, there remain no American policy for crude oil independence. America continues to INCREASE its dependence on China for “green” minerals and metals, and on OPEC, Russia, and other countries for oil. Today, with LESS independence, America is more vulnerable to another embargo than we were 50 years ago!

Over the same period, California Governors have been continually decreasing California’s in-state oil production. The emissions policies of past and current Governors continue to force California, the 4th largest economy in the world, to be the only state in contiguous America that imports most of its crude oil feedstock to in-state refineries from foreign countries. The States Governor leaders over the decades have been:

Newsbusters.

If ABC News is going to spend precious newscast time on a sex predator that tried to grab and do God-knows-what to three female students on separate occasions, then wouldn’t it be worthwhile to provide viewers with as much information as possible on the suspect so people know what to look for? It appears not.

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Former President Donald Trump issued an urgent call for action to his fellow Republicans over what he called “the biggest story of the year,” namely a survey showing that 20 percent of mail-in voters admitted to committing at least one kind of voter fraud in the 2020 election.

The Heartland/Rasmussen poll, released on Dec. 12, suggests concerning levels of voter fraud in the 2020 election, bolstering President Trump’s longstanding claim that he was cheated out of a victory amid an explosion in mail-in ballots combined with state-level moves by the courts that made it easier to cheat.

 

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After run­ning out of socks one day, I re­flected on how or­di­nary tasks get ne­glected. Anec­do­tally and in 3 on­line sur­veys, peo­ple re­port often not hav­ing enough socks, a prob­lem which cor­re­lates with rar­ity of sock pur­chases and de­mo­graphic vari­ables, con­sis­tent with a ne­glect/pro­cras­ti­na­tion in­ter­pre­ta­tion: be­cause there is no spe­cific time or trig­ger­ing fac­tor to re­plen­ish a shrink­ing sock stock­pile, it is easy to run out.

The American Mind.

The explosion of support for Hamas’s assault on human decency could well turn out to be the high-water mark of the progressive Left. The authoritarian multicultural ideology generated on campuses and transmitted dutifully by the established media has reached its apex and may now begin to descend.

The signs are tentative but some are unmistakable. Corporate and university Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) departments are being slashed, and increasingly seen as both burdensome and discriminatory toward whites, Jews, and Asians. One-third of DEI professionals lost their jobs in 2022. Brands that posted Pride month messages in 2022, such as Lego and Miller Lite, have abandoned such posturing. Even the Navy deleted Pride-related messaging from Instagram and Twitter.

Perhaps more significant may be the rebellion of donors to the leading universities, prime movers of the ideology that drives everything from the DEI establishment. Money is the mother’s milk of politics and universities and foundations alike. The overt hostility toward Israel on campuses, and the resulting feeling of threat among Jewish students, makes Jewish and non-Jewish donors wonder where their money is going.

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President Biden’s “historic” nominee for a federal appellate court served on the board of a Muslim advocacy group that has blamed Israel for provoking Hamas’s terrorist attack and hosted an event with a convicted terrorist fundraiser on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

Adeel Abdullah Mangi, Biden’s nominee for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, served on the advisory board of Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race and Rights from 2019 until earlier this year. During his time on the board, the think tank feted anti-Israel college students and marked the anniversary of the September 11 attacks with an event featuring a terrorist fundraiser. If confirmed, Mangi will be the first Muslim to serve on a federal appellate court, a fact highlighted by Democrats at Mangi’s confirmation hearing on Wednesday. Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), who faces federal bribery and foreign agent charges, called the nomination of a Muslim to the prestigious judicial post a “milestone we should have reached many years ago.”

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The US Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear an appeal from a Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendant which will highlight a law used to charge hundreds of people in connection with that fateful day.

The case will decide whether defendant Joseph Fischer can be charged under a 2002 law which stemmed from the Enron collapse which makes it a crime to obstruct or impede an official proceeding (like pulling a fire alarm to delay a vote?). The law has been invoked against Trump, along with 327 Capitol riot defendants – which an appeals court said the government could continue to invoke.

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The White House on Monday released a “Bidenomics” report that touted the “rapidly growing” electric vehicle market. Just hours later, Ford announced plans to cut the production of its electric truck in half, citing insufficient demand.

The report, which came from White House chief economist Heather Boushey, claimed the “U.S. consumer market for EVs is rapidly growing” and touted President Joe Biden’s efforts to meet that “growing demand by setting ambitious goals for accelerating the EV transition.” Ford threw cold water on those claims hours later, when a leaked memo from the automaker revealed that it plans to produce just 1,600 F-150 Lightnings per week in 2024, a significant reduction from the 3,200 it initially planned to produce. The memo said “changing market demands” motivated the cuts.

“We’ll continue to match production with consumer demand,” a Ford spokeswoman said.

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Harvard President Claudine Gay has been in the news lately because of her evident coddling of radical student antisemites on her campus. This week, more evidence of her lack of fit for the position she holds came in the form of evidence that she plagiarized her academic work.

Though the plagiarism story just broke, there has apparently been an investigation underway at Harvard since October on this matter. So Harvard was able to do what they had surely always planned to do—dismiss the claims as nothing and reaffirm their confidence in Gay as their president.

I had the chance to look at some of the evidence that was presented to Harvard. It shows that Gay did violate Harvard’s own rules for its students on plagiarism, multiple times, in multiple publications over the course of her career.

…

The materials I saw detailed 30 different examples of plagiarism in Gay’s work, ranging from relatively small chunks of text to sentences and significant parts of paragraphs.

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Controllers like to control. Many things need to be controlled (and some things don’t), but once there is an obligation to secure some level of planning permission, the applicant is a hostage to the decision-maker. And, as controllers are often frustrated by the limitations of their powers, they are naturally tempted to push for their extension.

Rules and regulations are always done with the best of intent. But once some apparent improvement is put in place, however ill-conceived or impractical it transpires to be, it establishes a benchmark from which any relaxation is seen as a drop in standards.

This article is from the U.K., which is worse in most respects than the U.S., but you can find equally insane conditions in this country, especially in Blue states.

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Rasmussen Reports has polled voters on, among other things, their use of mail-in ballots in the 2020 election, in conjunction with the Heartland Institute. The results, if even remotely representative, are stunning. Cheating may be far more widespread than is generally assumed.

Newsbusters.

The media elite always had a choice: They could portray the various legal cases against former President and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump as partisan — i.e., Democratic prosecutors attempting to bring down a powerful Republican — or as nonpartisan law enforcement just doing its job. Since even before the first indictment of Trump in April, the media made their choice clear: They’re simply not going to tell their viewers that these prosecutions are all Democratic projects.

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Vice News’s Arabic website published an article defending Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and arguing that it was “within international law.”

Badar Salem, the former managing editor of Vice MENA, condoned the attacks in an Arabic-language article for the publication. She also appeared to celebrate the massacre on social media.

Vice has faced criticism for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, with media watchdog group Honest Reporting calling it “skewed and dangerous.” A Vice spokesman said the article was an opinion column, and noted that Salem left as managing editor last January, although she still contributes regularly to the publication.

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role in the early history of the English Church, was black, despite the fact that there is no record of him being black at all.

The Telegraph reports “The Dark Age abbot St Hadrian of Canterbury has been referred to as a ‘black scholar’ in primary school teaching material, despite the holy man being of north African origin and not black.”

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Over the weekend, border-policy negotiations between Senate Democrats and Republicans fell apart. The talks were meant to firm up Republican support for the president’s massive $105 billion military support proposal ahead of Wednesday’s vote by including additional funds for border security in the spending package. Now, with no imminent approval of further aid to Ukraine, hawks in government and the media are trying to stoke panic about what will happen if Kyiv is cut off from US support.

The American Mind.

The border crisis is a disaster for the rule of law. Approximately five million inadmissible migrants have already entered during Joe Biden’s presidency, and the numbers continue to climb. Far from attempting to block the flow, the Biden Administration is actually facilitating it, inviting migrants without visas to come to the U.S. to receive “parole” or other temporary status. The legal situation has deteriorated to the point where the administration effectively claims the right to wave through any migrants it wants, from whatever countries it wants, at any time it wants.

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Georgia’s top election official is pointing to the Biden administration’s failure to secure the southern border as a reason the state Legislature must act to prevent voting by foreign nationals in state elections.

“With open borders, citizenship verification for voter registration is more important than ever,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said Monday in a public statement.

Raffensperger called on the Georgia General Assembly to amend the state Constitution to clarify that only U.S. citizens may vote in elections. He warned that liberal organizations are trying to use the courts to overturn citizenship verification ahead of the 2024 election.

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The Atlantic magazine’s unintentionally hilarious IF TRUMP WINS series warns its readers of the scary apocalyptic future should Donald Trump emerge victorious in 2024, but Helen Lewis brought a mildly moderating tone to the flock, urging the Trump-loathing readers not to “go bonkers” again as they did after Trump won in 2016. Should the unthinkable happen again, Lewis urged her readers not to go full mental jacket as explained in the title, “THE LEFT CAN’T AFFORD TO GO MAD.”

9to5Mac.

Primarily, Rocket Homes lets you browse homes for sale on CarPlay based on location. You can see nearby listings with address, price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and even photo previews.

New Atlas.

In a move that echoes a sci-fi series, researchers have developed a super-small material that was able to not only stimulate nerves in rodents, but reconnect them as well. The finding could lead to injectable particles that take the place of larger implants.

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From a certain perspective, the Aegis combat system was one of the worst developments in the history of the Navy. It directly led to the [literal] sinking of an entire class of the best ASW destroyer ever built and has resulted in expensive ships with permanently degraded radar systems. Worse, there was an alternative to Aegis which was the New Threat Upgrade (NTU) program which would have modernized the existing conventional radars and combat systems, providing much the same capabilities.

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“When you ban a product mostly sold in black communities – as 80% of black smokers prefer menthol cigarettes… you must consider the fairness of such an approach as well as the reality of what will happen to that very same overrepresented community in the criminal justice system,” the family members argued.

The critical race theory logic of disproportionate impact was being used to argue that banning Kool cigarettes was racist.

G. Gordon Liddy mentions, in his autobiography, WILL, that when he was in the D.C. jail after being arrested for the Watergate burglary, the basic unit of currency for black-,market transactions in the jail (which was apparently overwhelmingly Felons of Color) was a ‘box’, a carton of Kool cigarettes.

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Free speech video hosting platform Rumble was hit with an “unprecedented” cyber attack shortly after new security camera footage from January 6 was posted on the platform.

When you’re taking flack, you know you’re over the target.

The Hill.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) dubbed some of her Republican colleagues “idiots” and “assholes” alongside criticism of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s attempts to launch a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden.

…

“The Oversight Committee is where all the drama is. This is where the impeachment inquiry is,” Crockett, who is a member of the committee, told “The Breakfast Club” host Charlamagne tha God on Monday. “And, you know, it’s insulting that we have idiots like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Jim Jordan. I mean, you just name all of the nonsense Republicans.”

The ‘Affordable Care Act’ made health care substantially less affordable.

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If conservatives wish to live lives that have meaning and purpose, bound to family life and a local community, and situated within a religious and ethical apprehension of the world, to whom should they turn? Where can one turn for a humane conservatism? To these questions, it seems obvious to me that Russell Kirk and Sir Roger Scruton are two giants from whom we can seek answers.

Zman does a deep dive.

Belief is probably why democracy ends in disaster. The point of democracy is to have policies that reflect the general will of the people. In theory this means figuring out what most people will accept. You cannot make everyone happy, even in a small group ordering in lunch, but you can make most people happy and those outliers happy enough so they do not revolt. In theory, democracy is ordering pizza for lunch because no one hates it and most people like it.

In reality, democracy quickly turns into a game of convincing the majority to go along with whatever benefits the few. If you and your conspirators can get fifty percent plus one to agree to your scheme, it will be very good for you. Of course, others have their schemes so that democracy quickly moves from understanding the will of the people to persuading the majority. In reality, democracy is ordering Chinese after having convinced the majority that it is the right choice.

That phrase “right choice” is critical. It is never about facts and reason, but about the morally correct choice. Democracy rests on the assertion that the morally correct choice is that which satisfies the needs and demands of most people. Therefore, the way to persuade someone is to convince them that the majority already believes whatever it is you are pitching. In practice, democracy is telling each person that everyone really wants Chinese, except those troublemakers in the pizza party.

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An anti-ship cruise missile fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebels struck a Norwegian-flagged tanker in the Red Sea near a key maritime chokepoint known as the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, where nearly 10% of all crude traded at sea passes through.

Reuters quoted Houthi military spokesperson Yehia Sarea, who said the tanker – named “Strinda” – was targeted because it was headed to an Israeli terminal, and the crew ignored all warnings.

However, Strinda’s owner, Norway’s Mowinckel Chemical Tankers, said the vessel was bound for the Suez Canal and then on to Italy with a cargo containing vegetable oil and biofuels.

Washington Free Beacon.

Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.) and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), the top Republicans on the Senate and House energy committees, have asked the Department of Energy to turn over records regarding the loan to Sunnova Energy by Dec. 21.

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Part of the ongoing invasion of the woke movement involves regular attempts to undermine Christian holidays as “problematic” and archaic. Leftists argue that increasing diversity (mostly through open border policies or illegal immigration) requires increasing inclusion at the national level. Meaning, it is not for immigrants to adapt to the west, the west must adapt to them. National celebrations like Christmas are therefore a representation of “discrimination” because they are being given preference over minority holidays.

This was the message given by the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) in a paper published under the radar in October. The treatise on “Religious Intolerance” was then condemned in a motion unanimously adopted on Nov. 30 by the House of Commons, the lower chamber of the Canadian Parliament. The paper cited Christianity’s two biggest holy days (Christmas and Easter) as examples of “present-day systemic religious discrimination” linked to colonialism because they are statutory holidays in Canada.

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We asked 1,234 authors for their 3 favorite reads in 2023

I can recommend The Golden Enclaves (and its two predecessors) by Naomi Novik.

Scientific American.

Mechanical engineers Shervin Foroughi and Mohsen Habibi were painstakingly maneuvering a tiny ultrasound wand over a pool of liquid when they first saw an icicle shape emerge and solidify. The pair shrieked so loudly that their colleagues down the hall at Montreal’s Concordia University could hear them. “Well, they would have heard us, if they hadn’t been at home because of COVID,” Foroughi says. Still, a quick video call let the researchers share their excitement: after months of effort, they had 3-D printed a solid object by exposing a liquid to a focused field of sound waves—transmitted through a solid wall.

The Concordia team’s new “direct-sound printing” technology is the first to create a solid structure using sound waves from behind a barrier. And although it has a long way to go to reach commercial viability, the researchers believe their remote-control 3-D printing opens the door to numerous possibilities. It could, they say, potentially enable minimally invasive tissue engineering and bioimplant repair within the human body. It could also support industrial repairs in other difficult-to-access places such as inside an airplane’s fuselage.

Niall Ferguson.

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs—“The Treason of the Intellectuals”—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics.

Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.

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Raytheon has successfully tested its “Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle,” designed to defend the US by intercepting and neutralizing long-range ballistic missiles in low-Earth orbit.

The kinetic-force weapon successfully destroyed an intermediate-range ballistic missile during a test in the Pacific region by the US Missile Defense Agency and the US Northern Command on Monday.

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Some years ago, I was in Boston on business, and invited a European friend to lunch. The man was finishing a year-long fellowship at Harvard University, and was about to head back to Europe. Over a spread of delicious New England raw oysters, I asked my friend what the most important lesson he learned from his year at America’s most prestigious university.

He thought for a moment, then said, “How fragile the American elites are.”

The European explained how shocked he and his fellow Europeans on the program were to see so many American students unable to confront ideas that gave them anxiety—and how eager professors were to accommodate their intellectual and emotional fragility. This expressed itself as an ideological phenomenon—the students were all on the left, and coughed up the usual woke hairballs (e.g., “Transphobia is triggering”) told me that when he read in the Harvard student newspaper that more than three-quarters of the university’s student population was taking anti-depressants, he understood that their intellectual fragility was tied to their mental fragility.

Watts Up With That.

Check out AlGore’s carbon footprint sometime.

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But no one dare call it an ‘insurrection’.

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Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian has issued some surprising remarks claiming that Lebanon-based Hezbollah and Gaza-based Hamas can procure more weapons anytime they want utilizing the thriving arms black market in Ukraine. He suggested this is already happening while addressing a conference in Doha Monday.

He went so far as to say these groups, which the US has listed as terror organizations, can “easily” and “without much effort” get whatever they need in Ukraine.

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A group of Oakland, California teachers gave pro-Palestine lessons to their students Dec. 6 as part of an unauthorized “teach-in” amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.

The teach-in was organized by several members of the local teachers’ union, the Oakland Education Association, who remained anonymous.

Organizers told ABC News they felt the resources that had been provided by the district to discuss the conflict with students were incomplete and did not include the Palestinian side.

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Research firm TechInsights reports Huawei Technologies Co.’s Mate 60 Pro smartphone continues to “bypass technological embargos” by Washington. Further examination of the smartphone has shown considerable progress in Chinese design and engineering of radio-frequency chips.

The new analysis of the Mate 60 Pro shows China is quickly progressing in developing high-tech chips despite technological embargos by the Biden administration.

“This progress isn’t just in the application processor system-on-chip (SoC) but also in the 5G BaseBand processor and mobile RF technologies,” the report stated.

ZMan peers under the bend.

There is an old meme where a guy is up late at night and his wife asks him why he is not in bed. He says, “There is a guy on the internet saying things I don’t like.” Most people are not like this, but the weirdness of this new thing depends on that reality at the start. You are not supposed to care about the words of anonymous weirdos.

That is the place to start with yet another example of the regime losing its mind over people holding the wrong opinion about the 2020 election. Here is a breakdown of the charges the Biden administration is bringing against Trump over the peaceful protests on January 6. The first thing to note is the prosecutor is using the crackpot idea of stochastic violence, which was cooked up by mentally unstable people on Twitter who thought mean tweets would cause them physical harm.

Note also that the core of the case against Trump here and in all of the January 6th persecutions is that the offenders are election denier. In many of these cases, the judge, as a part of the punishment, makes the accused say in open court that he now believes Biden won fair and square. You can be sure that the main goal of these charges against Trump is to get him to do the same. The regime and its volunteer army of toadies is obsessed with this idea.

The morality of the schoolyard bully: It’s not enough to beat your victim down, you don’t really win until you get him to cry Uncle.