Read it.

The American military is receiving twelve of the new IFPC (Indirect Fire Protection Capability), a new anti-aircraft system starting production in 2024. These twelve systems will be armed with launchers for the ground based version of the air-to-air AIM-9X heat seeking missile, which has a range of 40 kilometers. The first twelve systems are for further testing and refining of the IFPC system.

IFPC is mobile and can detect and destroy cruise missiles, UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), and projectiles fired from rocket, artillery, and mortar systems. The IFPC system consists of a launcher carrying interceptor missiles to protect stationary systems from low-altitude threats. Longer range and higher altitude threats from ballistic missiles are already covered with Patriot and the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system

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Ban gas stoves; Ban gas-powered generators; Ban books; Ban misinformation; Ban fake news; Ban gender affirming care; Ban parents from being notified of gender transitions; Ban abortions; Ban the banning of abortions; Ban gasoline powered cars and trucks; Ban the unvaccinated; Ban the unmasked; Ban DEI; Ban gas boilers; Ban coal; Ban nuclear; Ban high-capacity magazines; Ban guns; Ban incandescent lightbulbs…

Those bans are just to fix all of society’s important problems, but there are presumably less important things that need banning as well. What would really help is banning honors classes to produce equity, banning youth tackle football, and even banning sledding! In Canada!

Reuters.

A generation of children who learned to write on screens is now going old school.
Starting this year, California grade school students are required to learn cursive handwriting, after the skill had fallen out of fashion in the computer age.

Assembly Bill 446, sponsored by former elementary school teacher Sharon Quirk-Silva and signed into law in October, requires handwriting instruction for the 2.6 million Californians in grades one to six, roughly ages 6 to 12, and cursive lessons for the “appropriate” grade levels – generally considered to be third grade and above.

Read it.

It feels like everything these days needs you to create an account and log in to use them. Philips Hue announced you need to plug your home’s light automation to their cloud, even if you just use it locally. They claim it’s for security.

…

If someone breaks into my apartment, them pushing a button on my Hue bridge is the least of my worries. Them being connected to my online account is way higher threat.

The Foundry.

A number of federal statutes govern the National Guard, which is the modern equivalent of state militias and a reserve component of our military. Under 10 U.S.C. § 12301(a), the secretary of defense (and thus the president) is given the authority in “time of war or of national emergency declared by Congress, or when otherwise authorized by law” to order National Guard units to active duty.

But they cannot be called to active duty by the president “without the consent of the governor of the State.” If the governor consents, the unit called into federal service under Title 10 reports to the president as the commander in chief while in federal service.

State governors, however, like Abbott, remain the commanders in chief of their state National Guard units, such as the Texas National Guard, unless they have consented to the president’s call for those units to be in active federal service.

The only exception to the consent requirement is contained in subsection (f) and it only applies if National Guard units are needed for active duty for overseas service—such as when we were in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Read it.

Gee, just like the Good Old Days….

Read it.

The Americans who plan to vote for President Trump are not supporting him because they prefer his dictatorial inclinations to the other guy’s, but because they want someone in charge of the executive branch who does not see the government’s role as controlling every aspect of their lives.

This stands in stark contrast to the Democratic Party’s efforts to regulate entire industries out of existence, or the mad, anti-liberty, anti-human fever dreams of the globalists on display at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.

In 2014, WEF speaker Yuval Harari informed a TEDx event audience that human rights don’t really exist; they are “like heaven or like God—just a fictional story we’ve invented and spread around.” At the 2022 WEF meeting, Alibaba President J. Michael Evans touted a developing “individual carbon footprint tracker” that would monitor where you travel, how you travel, what you eat and what you read on the internet. And the WEF’s 2016 predictions for 2030—including having to pay fines for emitting carbon dioxide (does that include exhaling?), restrictions on meat consumption and the end of private property (“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”)—are infamous.

But, of course, as we all know, ‘race’ does not exist–which is why the Left spends so much time on it.

The Register.

It’s well established that the British are an eccentric people. Among their national obsessions is drinking tea – they consider themselves experts – and one way to trigger the entire United Kingdom is to fuck with the formula.

But that is exactly what American chemistry professor Michelle Francl has done with her new book, Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea, which was published this week through the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Therein, Francl proposes that a tiny bit of salt – not enough to taste – improves tea because “the sodium ions in salt block the bitter receptors in our mouths.”

OffGuardian.

Here I go with the mask thing again, sorry, but a strange thing is happening with this around the world. It seems that wearing a mask is slowly becoming a sort of natural expectation.

At first, it is showing up arbitrarily, for no particular reason. Maybe people wake up one morning and just say to themselves, “seems like a good day to wear the ol’ face diaper.” Or maybe it is a cold day, and the mask acts like earmuffs for the face. Or maybe, for some people, wearing a decorated mask becomes a fashion statement or a way to show the world who your favourite hockey team is (if their logo is blazoned onto the mask).

The agenda is of course getting on board by mandating masks here and there for special reasons, ironically few having anything to do with public health—directly at least. Health of course will always be the “silent purpose” behind mask-wearing, but I am willing to bet in a few years no one will even know the original reason people started wearing them.

LAME = Look At Me Everyone.

Useful for dealing with people who have tattoos, piercings, unnaturally colored hair, and Tick Tok or Instagram accounts.

Read it.

Reversing the “woke” takeover of America’s education system will require a concerted effort from concerned parents who don’t want their children infected by the woke mind virus.

The latest example of parents becoming infuriated with diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI being injected into the education curriculum, comes from an elite private school in Baltimore County, Maryland.

Project Veritas posted on X this week that St. Paul’s, a private school that charges $38,000 or more per year, issued a questionnaire to 5th-grade boys, asking if they were “Cisgender” or “Transgender” or “Gender Non-Conforming” or “Agender.”

Homeschooling is looking really, really good right now.

The Foundry.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch” used to be American folk wisdom (and inspired a book by economist Milton Friedman). The greatest trick the American Left has played on young people is to convince them that free stuff is actually free. In fact, tax credits, student debt “relief,” COVID-19 stimulus, rent control, and other giveaways simply redistribute existing wealth or borrow money that must be repaid by taxpayers.

Relative to illegal immigration, it doesn’t matter how much you put aside for a rainy day if the rain never stops. Biden’s policies have locked in an unlimited flow of illegal immigration at the border. Many of those coming now have no U.S. relatives or employment waiting for them. They will continue to head for “sanctuary” megacities that offer free housing and benefits. Local authorities there seem to only now begin to understand the scale of demand with which they are dealing. Our open borders have resulted in housing shortages, closed schools, commandeered public spaces, and hospitals catering to patients no one voted to admit into the country while everyday taxpaying Americans wait in line.

It’s not as if all Americans are rich and can absorb the costs of paying for these people who aren’t paying for themselves—particularly in the places where illegal aliens are amassing.

UPDATE: Migrant Encounters Nationwide Hit Record 371K in December

UPDATE: Mexican Cops Halt Train With 1,800 Migrants Headed to Texas

Read it.

The Biden administration on Friday paused U.S. funding to the controversial United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) following allegations that employees of the agency were involved in Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.

“The Department of State has temporarily paused additional funding for UNRWA while we review these allegations and the steps the United Nations is taking to address them,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.

The announcement came after UNRWA on Friday said it opened an investigation into several employees suspected of involvement in the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel and that it had severed ties with those staff members.

Read it.

Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame died at the hands of terrorists in the Islamist attacks in Trèbes and Carcassonne in March 2018 after exchanging himself for a hostage. The freed hostage explained that she had found faith through the sacrifice of Lieutenant-Colonel Beltrame.

The trial opened on Monday, January 22nd, in Paris, and is due to last a month. It involves trying those involved in terrorist attacks that took place on 23 March 2018, in the south of France—in Aude, Carcassonne, and in a supermarket in the town of Trèbes, a few kilometres away.

The terrorist, Radouane Ladkim, was a Moroccan, naturalised French in 2004. His hostage-taking was motivated by the demand for the release of Salah Abdeslam, who was involved in the Bataclan attacks in Paris in 2015. Ladkim entered a supermarket and initially took a young cashier, Julie Grand, hostage before freeing her at the request of Lieutenant-Colonel Beltrame, who took her place—against all the usual procedures.

Yet another reminder that Islam is an existential threat to Western civilization.

The Spectator.

Well that’s that. It now looks certain that Donald J. Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president this year. At the time of writing, Nikki Haley is still hanging on in the primaries, but the contest is essentially over. Even if Haley stayed around and hovered up the votes of every other Republican candidate who has dropped out, she still wouldn’t arrive at the dominant position Trump has occupied since the start of the race.

This will be a cause for either alarm or rejoicing. What nobody should be is surprised. Ever since the race for the 2024 nomination started, it has all been about the man who wasn’t there. Trump chose not to turn up to any of the primary debates, sitting them out like a lion allowing the minions to pick away at a carcass he had already feasted on. What would it have availed him to mix with the single-digit scavengers?

He needn’t have worried anyway. The only candidate who ever actually pointed themselves straight at Trump was Chris Christie, who is a superb debater but never managed to break through. Except for Vivek Ramaswamy, who paid frequent and loud homage to the Don, the rest tried to duck the question of the absentee leader.

Read it.

It’s helpful to think of a COVID experience as a never-ending house of horrors, with room after room of scandal and outrage, so much so that you never quite get through it. There simply are not enough researchers or column inches to cover it all.

In the past, any one of these outrages would be enough to call forth enormous public debate. Introduce them all at once—starting March 2020—and gradually unfold and codify them over a few years and many features slip through the cracks.

Consider, for example, the continued requirement that any legally immigrating person coming to the United States from another country and seeking residency is absolutely required to get the COVID-19 vaccine, a shot widely admitted not to protect against infection or spread and is associated with injury on a scale without pharmaceutical precedent.

Read it.

A twist has been added to California’s homeless crisis after people were found living in eight caves, some furnished, dug into the bank of the Tuolumne River.

Modesto police, a volunteer organization Operation 9-2-99, and the Tuolumne River Trust teamed to remove 7,600 pounds of trash Saturday from the caves, KVOR-TV in Sacramento reported Wednesday.

The caves, some as wide as 10 feet, were located about 20 feet below street level and accessible through makeshift stairs built into the riverbank. It is unknown who dug the caves and how long they had been there.

Read it.

gents raided U.S. Private Vaults, a business that allowed people to rent safe deposit boxes anonymously, based on the belief that criminals were using the service. The search warrant stated that agents could only open the boxes to inventory their contents and identify the owners for the return of their property.

However, agents brought drug-sniffing dogs and planned to set aside cash worth more than $5,000, with the intent to seize the money.

Read it.

that limits the speed of the vehicle.

“This bill would require certain vehicles, commencing with the 2027 model year, to be equipped with an intelligent speed limiter, as specified, that would limit the speed of the vehicle to 10 miles per hour over the speed limit,” reads the text of S.B. 961, which state senator Scott Wiener (D.) introduced Tuesday. “The bill would exempt emergency vehicles from this requirement and would authorize the Commissioner of the California Highway Patrol to authorize the disabling of the system on other vehicles based on specified criteria.”

At a minimum, the device would need to use GPS to determine where the car is driving and communicate with a database of speed limits to ensure that the operator of the vehicle does not exceed the limit by more than 10 miles per hour.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Born deaf, the 1-year-old boy had never responded to sound or speech before. But after receiving an experimental treatment injected into one of his ears, he started turning his head when his parents called his name. Five months later, he spoke his first words.

The boy is one of six children with a type of hereditary deafness who are part of a gene therapy trial in China. Five of the children can now hear, according to results reported today in the scientific journal The Lancet. The news follows an announcement this week that yet another child born with profound deafness can hear after receiving a similar treatment developed by US drugmaker Eli Lilly.

“It’s remarkable,” says Lawrence Lustig, a hearing loss expert at Columbia University who was not involved in the trials. “We’ve never had a therapy that restores even partial hearing for someone who’s totally deaf other than a cochlear implant.”

Read it.

In Britain, the obsessive drive to boost ‘diversity’ across all sectors of society has no shortage of casualties to its name. One of them is merit: talent being both rare and useful, it should be sought wherever it can be found. To make an a priori fetish of women and ethnic minorities will inevitably interfere with what should be a scrupulously evidence-based, talent-seeking process. The most recent casualty, however, is nothing less than Britain’s power to maintain itself in existence as a country.

This power has been pitifully weakened. What is more, it did not have to happen. The British army, tasked with the small matter of defending the realm, has shrunk by 40% since 2010. We now boast a mere 70,000 enlisted soldiers. There is even talk of conscription in the event of war.

While it might be excessive to ascribe this failure to diversity alone, our political class, especially the lamentable Conservative Party, must take a monumental portion of the blame. Far from merely allowing the rot to infect the military’s upper echelons, successive Tory governments have actively commanded our armed forces to adopt the tripartite motto of race communists the world over: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

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There was much media angst over Donald Trump declaring he would be a dictator on “Day One” of a second term in office to promote border security and oil drilling. Scrape off the spicy language, and it sounds more like the standard executive orders every president issues upon taking office, as even a Trump-hostile PBS Amanpour & Co. guest admitted last week.
Will the same press also cringe over former New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil, proudly calling himself a “public health fascist” and recommending even more draconian measures to fight a future pandemic?

Read it.

In 2007, science writer and editor Sally Adee attended a technology conference for DARPA—The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—when she learned about a brain surface electrical stimulation method that allegedly cut in half the time it takes a person to go from novice to expert in sharpshooting. Known as trans cranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), the brain stimulation technique was also presented as a way to potentially speed up language learning and mathematical aptitude.

Adee was struck by the idea of surface brain stimulation and for several years worked on convincing the Department of Defense agency to grant her permission to try it out for herself. In 2011, she flew from London to California to participate in an army training simulation. With a device on her head delivering electrical currents, Adee went from a frustrated shooter to a skilled sniper.

And have you heard anything about this in the intervening sixteen years? I’d guess not….

The Foundry.

We education policy and pedagogy wonks love to spend hours poring over education policies and proposals that shape statewide approaches to everything from tax and financial frameworks to cultural edicts on social-emotional learning, critical race theory, and LGBTQ+ sexualization of children.

We spend far too little time with “boots on the ground” observing what does and doesn’t work in the day-to-day classroom, which often affects students far more than this year’s slate of state education policies.

I’ve spent the past few years visiting hundreds of different schools with dozens of different education styles. From charter schools that are public schools with a corporate coat of paint to Hasidic homeschool cooperatives that teach all subjects at once, and every other kind of school in between.

Current educational methods are modeled on the Henry Ford factory system: You take a set of raw materials and send it through the assembly line in a batch, and do Quality Assurance at various points to weed out the failures. Everything is set up to deal with the ‘average’ student … but the problem is that there is no ‘average student’; each student is an individual, and the system is geared toward forcing that individual into the Procrustean bed of The Method rather than treating each individual as an individual. We can do better. We Have The Technology.

Karen Myers.

If you’ve returned to your childhood home or visited anywhere from your past, you’ve probably learned just how true the adage is, that you can’t go home again.

But my home, and probably yours, is as much or more inside my favorite books. They go back almost as long as I’ve been able to read. Some are warm, some are scary, some are whimsical, and all of them are comforting, in one way or another, suitable companions for a seat by the fire.

Their characters are old friends, and I’m always happy to see them again. I can wallow in their difficulties without anxiety, since I know what will become of them. I can bask in their joys, even if my own life can’t necessarily match them. And they never age — even if they die, they never really leave forever, since I can always open the book again.

Karen is one of the scary-smart people I knew at Yale.

ZMan is delightfully dyspeptic today.

You can go through the music charts and listen to the top-10 in each category each year and find songs that are pleasant and songs that are hilariously terrible. Miley Cyrus should cut back on that five pack a day habit and spend the savings on some people who can write music that make some sense. The fun part about scanning these music lists is there are many comically stupid entries that got pushed into the top-40 by the mega corporations that control the music business.

When it comes to what most people reading this consider rock-and-roll, the landscape has been barren for a long time. Who is the best guitar player in a rock band that is under the age of forty? No one knows. He probably does not exist because rock music does not exist as a genre anymore. If you want to hear that sort of music you are going to be buying or streaming stuff from thirty, forty or fifty years ago. Even young people who want that style reach back to the oldies.

Preach it, brother….

One result of the money drying up for all forms of music that appeals to white people is white people stopped making that music. They stopped learning to play instruments, stopped forming garage bands and stopped cutting their teeth at clubs. Elementary school bands are full of Asian girls playing violin. There has been a steady decline in the sale of musical instruments over the last few decades, even though technology has made it easier to record at home and make it sound good.

Read it.

Or just cold weather breathing, period.

(I wonder, does it work for COVID?)

Read it.

Melanie, the singer-songwriter who rose through the New York folk scene, performed at Woodstock and had a series of 1970s hits including the enduring cultural phenomenon “Brand New Key,” has died.

I loved her song Animal Crackers.

Newsbusters.

While wearing a Trump wig.

As everything looks like a nail to the hammer, so does everything look like racism to the racial demagogue. The racial demagogue in this instance, is of course, MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who performed a segment in which she compared calls to secure the southern border to Southern segregation during the ‘60s.

Read it.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, “urged large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression,” according to a letter from Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, in his capacity as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

FinCEN is a branch of the Treasury Department tasked “to ferret out money laundering, illegal activities,” Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Mo., said in an appearance on Family Research Center’s “Washington Watch.”

“But there’s a way to do that,” the Missouri Republican added. “It’s called a search warrant.”

New York Times.

Fifteen months after city officials were ready to throw a party in the Noe Valley Town Square to celebrate funding for a tiny bathroom with a toilet and sink, nothing but mulch remains in its place.

The toilet project broke down the minute taxpayers realized the city was planning an event to celebrate $1.7 million in state funds that local politicians had secured for the lone 150-square-foot structure. That’s enough to purchase a single-family home in San Francisco — with multiple bathrooms.

Read it.

With over three years having passed since January 6, 2021, it may come as a shock to some that this vexed date is more relevant than ever. The regime has broadly employed the absurd notion of January 6 as a violent assault on the scale of 9/11 as a pretext to weaponize the national security state against its political opponents. The still more absurd notion that Trump personally instigated this insurrection has emerged as the sham legal rationale behind the regime’s recent efforts to remove the presumptive GOP nominee from the ballot entirely. A bungling, senescent Biden clearly signaled in his speech marking the third anniversary of the “day we almost lost America” that January 6 would feature prominently in the Democrat’s 2024 strategy.

The stakes involved help us to understand why the regime so jealously guards its official January 6 narrative, and so aggressively attacks anyone who dares to question it. These troublesome questions involve asking why, of all days, the Capitol seemed to enjoy uniquely poor security, despite numerous warnings and threats. One might also ask how, given the well-established level of penetration federal authorities had into the key militia groups accused of conspiracies to attack the Capitol, the same authorities could possibly claim to have been caught off guard. Most troubling and damning of all, one might ask whether any government agents or affiliates took more active steps in helping to facilitate the events of January 6. This last line of questioning has been the principal focus of my reporting at Revolver.news, and has led me to maintain that the two smoking guns of the “Fedsurrection” is the curious case of Ray Epps, on the one hand, and the case of the so-called January 6 pipe bombs on the other.

Read it.

China’s military is engaged in secret biological weapons development that is a key element of Beijing’s asymmetric warfare strategy, according to a new report by the CCP Biothreats Initiative, a think tank. The report provides new details on biological weapons efforts of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) which researchers say controls all civilian biological research in China.

“Bioweapons are part of the CCP’s standard order of battle; not an unconventional set of capabilities only to be used under extreme circumstances,” the report states.

The report is based on open-source research and Chinese military writings. In 2015, for example, the then-president of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS) He Fuchu stated that biotechnology is a new “strategic commanding heights” of national defense requiring biomaterials and “brain control” weaponry.

The New Neo.

I want to clear some things up about the New Hampshire primary. In New Hampshire, there are 44% who are Democrats or lean Democrat, 35% who are Republicans or lean Republican, and 20% who report no lean. The latter group would represent the true Independents, if there be such a thing. The state has Republican state officials and Democrat federal representatives, which I suppose makes it officially purple. But on the federal level it is blue. Except for the year 2000, New Hampshire has voted for the Democrat in every presidential election since 1992.

But the voter registration rolls are a bit different. Because New Hampshire has long had an important position in the primaries, many people who are not Independents nevertheless register as “undeclared” (there is no other way to register as an Independent in NH). This gives them the freedom to vote in either the Democrat or Republican primaries. All they have to do, as an undeclared voter, is to ask for either ballot when they enter the polling venue. They can’t vote in both, of course. But they can vote in either.

New York Times.

Of all the dozens of suspected thieves questioned by the detectives of the Train Burglary Task Force at the Los Angeles Police Department during the months they spent investigating the rise in theft from the city’s freight trains, one man stood out. What made Victor Llamas memorable wasn’t his criminality so much as his giddy enthusiasm for trespassing. He was a self-taught expert of the supply chain, a connoisseur of shipping containers. Even in custody, as the detectives interrogated him numerous times, after multiple arrests, in a windowless police-station room in the spring of 2022, a kind of nostalgia would sweep over the man. “He said that was the best feeling he’d ever had, jumping on the train while it was moving,” Joe Chavez, who supervised the task force’s detectives, told me. “It was euphoric for him.”

Time to leave.

Read it.

There are no ‘Palestinian civilians’.

OffGuardian.

Apparently, a new study from the University of Michigan has found that “urban gardening” is 5 (or maybe 6, they’re not sure) times worse for the environment than “conventional crops”.

I don’t know how they calculated it, and it doesn’t really matter. If you read the bodies of the articles they even say it only applies to some vegetables in some places and it all depends on how the “infrastructure” is put together.

The details aren’t the point. The point is yet another weapon in the war on food. More regulation, more commercialization, less freedom, all in the name of “fighting climate change”.

“When the ends of one side are the destruction of the other, the only plausible response for the other side is to seek the same.”  — ZMan

Applies to:

• Progressives
• Muslims
• Communists

ZMan

The New Hampshire primary turned out about how most sober minded people expected, with Trump cruising to victory. As expected, regime media and those in the anti-Trump cult have quickly moved onto other things. Even though the narrative on this election has been wrong so far, these people were sure the gods would deliver them from the terrible Orange Man in New Hampshire. Now they will update the script for the South Carolina primary in a few weeks.

Even though the New Hampshire primary was not a surprise to normal people, it does have a few things worth noting. One is the turnout. In 2016 when all of this was new and exciting, about two hundred and sixty thousand people voted on the Republican side, with Trump getting one hundred thousand votes. This time, with the results known in advance, three hundred thousand voted on the Republican side and Trump got one hundred and sixty thousand votes or fifty-four percent.

Read it.

So far in 2024, lawmakers in 10 states have introduced wealth-tax bills or are working on introducing them, according to Amber Wallin, senior policy and outreach director at the State Revenue Alliance. They are California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Washington.

Time to leave.

Newsbusters.

With CNN exit polls suggesting that upwards of 70 percent of former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s support in New Hampshire came from people who were not registered Republicans, on Tuesday night, ABC praised that effort on their streaming service ABC News Live. Network reporter Eva Pilgrim lauded those voters for understanding how important their duty was and was excited about other open primaries like those in South Carolina and 11 Super Tuesday states.

Minutes after the polls closed, Pilgrim lionized those non-Republican voters as people on a mission, who understood the assignment, and could decide the entire Republican race.

Read it.

CPS and union officials want to end selective enrollment at Northside, a diverse, top-performing school where blacks and Hispanics excel at the highest level. At the same time, those officials want to keep open Douglass High School, a nearly-empty, all-black neighborhood school that spends over $68,000 per student…and yet not a single one of its students could read or do math at grade level last year.

That’s the official policy of CPS and the union – to eliminate selective enrollment, magnet and charter schools – ’choice’ schools – and to double down on neighborhood schools where, collectively, just 25 of every 100 kids can read at grade level.

The whole move is CPS’ ultimate expression of “equity.” As Mayor Brandon Johnson put it: “When students succeed at a selective enrollment school, particularly black students, all other black students who don’t meet those same standards get shamed.” The mayor is basically saying that if all minority kids can’t excel, then none of them should.

Power Line.

It is no secret that the New York Times is an arm of the Democratic Party, but this piece–a news story in the paper’s U.S. Politics section, not an op-ed–illustrates how far over the edge the Times has gone.

The theme of the article is that Donald Trump is a racist:

Donald J. Trump first established his connection with the largely white Republican base more than a decade ago by stoking discomfort with the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president — the beginning of the so-called birther movement.

It was Obama who claimed to have been born in Kenya. That is what his official biography said for more than a decade. If he had been born in Kenya, he would not be a “natural born Citizen” and thus ineligible to be president. Trump was wrong because Obama lied; he actually was born in Honolulu. But the controversy over his citizenship had nothing to do with his race.

Quilette.

Teenage depression and suicide rates have been rising in the US for years, but the rates among black teens are rising farther and faster than among those of other ethnicities. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey (2011–2021), the percentage of black teens who seriously considered suicide rose 69 percentage points from 13 percent in 2011 to a frightening 22 percent in 2021. The average increase among all ethnicities was 37.5 percentage points—just over half the rise documented in black teens.

The same trend can be seen across multiple measures of mental health. In 2021, black teens were 63 percent more likely to have made a concrete suicide plan over the course of the past year than they were in 2011 (teens in general were only 38 percent more likely to have done so) and 75 percent more likely to have attempted suicide (the average increase among all teens was 25 percent).

Complex social phenomena can rarely be attributed to a single cause. A range of factors—from increased social media use to less free play—may play a role in teen depression overall and black teen depression in particular. But there is one possible explanation for these disturbing figures that is less often talked about: the virtuous lie that we tell about the prevalence of racism in the United States.

Social evolution operates in the same fashion as physical evolution. When a culture develops a notion that puts those who believe in it at a disadvantage from the viewpoint of natural selection, the automatic processes of evolution (which work even when you don’t want them to) will tend to remove such people from the gene pool. The Abortion War is the poster child for how this process works: Women who claim the right to kill their children will eventually remove their defective genes from the gene pool.

Read it,

For years, the mainstream media consensus was that the Baltimore Sun needed a local buyer to restore the storied newspaper to greatness. The fate of journalism—if not American democracy—was said to be at stake.

Then, earlier this month, a wealthy local media executive bought the Sun from its hedge-fund owner. He pledged to grow the paper by investing more in “community news and investigations,” the Sun reported.

And yet, journalists and news outlets overwhelmingly reacted to the news not with joy, but rather with dismay. MSNBC host Alex Wagner last week characterized the development as “extremely dangerous to our democracy.”

In the Narrative media, ‘our democracy’ means ‘Democrat vote fraud’.

Really, there’s no pleasing some people.

The American Mind.

Americans wondering about the future of a society that centers diversity as a core value should look at Lebanon, the 4,000 square mile eastern Mediterranean nation that just celebrated 80 years of equity as an official policy and the foundation of the state. Since 1943, Lebanon has found neither strength, unity, stability, cooperation, nor prosperity through its diversity and equity. Eighty years of history demonstrate that a continued adherence to the principle of diversity only exacerbates divides, produces political gridlock, paralyzes policy, suspends justice, breeds impunity, erodes and incapacitates state functions, and facilitates violence.

The recognition of 18 diverse religious identities and an attempt to maintain a sense of equity among them has become ingrained in the DNA of Lebanon’s government and society. The Lebanese constitution institutionalized the recognition of multiple identities and proportional representation. The different Muslim and Christian communities must be represented in Parliament with representation proportional to their population. Parliamentary seats are equally divided between Christians and Muslims. Diversity and equity extend to the allocation of top government positions (e.g., the president and the prime minister), the orientation of foreign policy, and bureaucratic appointments. Each religious community dictates the laws governing the marriage and divorce of its adherents.

The institutionalization of multiple identities and equity have produced dangerous and destructive behaviors; the relentless maintenance of diversity and equity underlies much of Lebanon’s travails.

Diversity is not a ‘strength’; diversity is always and everywhere a WEAKNESS, and a serious one.