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Pro-Hamas protesters sought to rip down a reinforced fence outside the White House Saturday night. The assault on the White House constituted the culmination of their march. It looks something like what Democrats call an “insurrection” (video below).

…

For some reason: “No arrests were made.” Perhaps the authorities were busy defending the ramparts. Perhaps President Biden admires the “passion” of the protesters, or the “passion” of the “protesters.”

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Pigs! They’re not just for breakfast any more….

Under the Laws of the Forest, there were four types of venison or ‘beasts of the chase’: The red deer, the roe deer, the fallow deer, and the wild boar. Hunting any of these required a license from the King. These laws are the basis for modern hunting and game laws in the U.S.

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White people are the only people in America who aren’t allowed to prefer living among people who look like them.

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The chairman of Hamas’ decision-making body urged Muslims across the world to “build on” the horrific terrorist attacks on Israel of Oct. 7, which he characterized as a “victory,” and to send money to Hamas in what he called a “financial jihad.”

Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’ political bureau, spoke at the International Union of Muslim Scholars on Tuesday. The union, an international body of Muslim theologians that forms the supreme authority of the Muslim Brotherhood, met in Doha, Qatar, where Haniyeh lives.

“The people of Gaza constitute our frontline trench for defense, as well as for offense,” Haniyeh said, according to a translation from the Middle East Media Research Institute. “They are not there only to defend, but also to attack. What was October 7 if not a frontline trench for an offensive by our nation? We must not let this moment slip away.”

New York Times.

The odds of the NYT writing anything intelligent about either ‘rich Republicans’ or Trump is vanishingly small. Still, it’s good to know what the Uniparty’s propaganda arm is thinking.

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A news article in the Wall Street Journal explains the stakes in the 2024 elections in terms of federal taxes over a decade: The Republicans want to extend $4 trillion in tax cuts, while Democrats want to impose $2 trillion in tax increases.

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In 1996 in the Tazmanian city of Port Arthur a man by the name of Martin Bryant killed 35 people using semi-automatic rifles in what would later be known as the Port Arthur Massacre. This singular event was quickly used as a rationale for the banning of most firearms for Australian civilians, but the new regulations were not a product of Port Arthur. Rather, anti-gun politicians had been pushing for restrictions and confiscation for many years prior; Port Arthur simply gave them enough public panic to get their legislation passed.

This is the modus operandi of the typical anti-gun lobby – Wait for a tragedy and then exploit it to punish all law abiding citizens for the crimes of a handful of deranged people. It doesn’t make much sense unless you realize that gun control laws are not meant to thwart criminals, they are meant to thwart good people who might object to government trespasses.

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You still bump into the stickers from time to time: “Six Feet of Distance.” It’s weird and anachronistic at this point. No one pays any attention anymore. Still it would be nice to know where this came from. Oddly, we don’t really know.

There was very little ‘science’ behind the panicked response to COVID by all levels of government employees.

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Social media users are pressing ahead for continued boycotts of Western brands as the US and its allies pound Yemen with air strikes and missiles to neutralize Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

“Boycott these brands that support the invasion of Yemen,” X user Naila Ayad said in a post viewed more than 1.6 million times.

…

One X user pointed out, “None of these brands have anything to with Yemen and the US didn’t invade Yemen, also why is their idea of a boycott just targeting snacks.”

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Superior Court Judge William Clark nullified the results of a Democrat mayoral primary in November 2023 and ordered a new election. The ruling was based on hours of video evidence showing hundreds of illegally harvested absentee ballots being stuffed into drop boxes in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

“The videos are shocking to the court and should be shocking to all the parties,” Judge Clark wrote in his ruling.

A California judge overturned the result in a 2021 Compton City Council run-off race that was initially decided by one vote.

Block Club Chicago.

The city is considering installing bollards in retail sectors across the city as thieves continue to crash cars into luxury and local businesses before ransacking them, two alderpeople said.

The news comes after a smash-and-grab Monday morning at a Prada store on the Gold Coast, 30 E. Oak St., which resulted in a shootout between two police officers and a 33-year-old man now charged with attempted murder and burglary.

Smash-and-grabs have been thrown into the spotlight as videos often circulate online of people breaking into stores and leaving with as many items as they can carry. In the past year, this has included using a stolen car to smash through a window to get inside.

Other stores hit in recent months include a West Loop luxury boutique and several streetwear stores.

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The technical term for this approach is passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC), so named because it doesn’t require an injection of energy into the system to disperse heat. The surface emits its own heat into space without being absorbed by the air or atmosphere, thereby becoming several degrees cooler than the surrounding air without needing electrical energy.

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Since we live in democracies, our view of justice is colored and shaped by a democratic bias. The source of right for us is the proposition that all are created equal, and over time we advance and demand ever-greater political and social equality. To see what true justice is, and also what we are, clearly and free of prejudice, we must discover and confront our political (mis)education: we must turn our heads around, see, and cross-examine those hidden puppeteers of our cave. Liberal education is the opposite of political ‘education,’ or propaganda: it is education that liberates.

It is for this reason that David A. Eisenberg’s ambitious book, Nietzsche and Tocqueville on the Democratization of Humanity, is so welcome and needed. In it, he examines the grand democratizing sweep of Western history and its consequences for human life and thought. In the book’s opening chapter, we confront our greatest puppeteers: the philosophers who most advanced democracy and did so with almost prophetic power, given the great inequalities between men then. From Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes, down through Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, Eisenberg argues they “all . . . reduced man to a common denominator in order to ground their philosophic visions. Uniform drives and appetites were rendered paramount.” Even Hegel, at first glance an exception with his master-slave dialectic, eventually resolves that fundamental conflict “so that the outcome of the historical process was one where uniformity supplanted man’s deep-rooted dichotomy and did so, moreover, in favor of the slave.”

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The legendary historian Will Durant famously wrote that civilizations are born stoic and die epicurean. He meant that through a warrior ethos and a propensity to endure and ignore pain, out of chaos a people might create order—the definition of civilization—which eventually grows, first prosperous, then decadent, and, finally, gives itself over fully to pleasure. It forgets the outside world and ceases to strive for higher purposes, indulging in the sensual and material as the only goal in life. Then a new group of stoics comes and conquers them. The most famous example of this phenomenon is, of course, the fall of the Roman Empire. But Indian history, however unknown in the West, actually illustrates this point clearly with its three and a half thousand years of continual invasions by younger warrior cultures: Aryans, Greeks, Kushans, Ghurid Sultans, Mughals, and Brits, who relieve one another of power once their predecessors have grown decadent in the steamy climate of the subcontinent.

Navy Matters.

Reader ‘Robtze’ just thoroughly embarrassed me in a comment with an incredibly astute observation that I completely missed. He observed/asked whether the Houthis were executing the same mission the Marine Corps envisions with their island/coastal missile shooter concept.

To address his comment, yes, this is almost exactly the mission set. Let’s take advantage of this remarkable similarity and examine how the coastal ‘missile sniping’ concept is working out.

Read it.

The back up for intermittent renewables will come from 40 year old plants, which should have been shut down already.

StrategyPage.

South Korea has become the seventh nation to use Sea Launched Ballistic Missiles or SLBMs. The second version of the KSS-III submarines feature a number of firsts. They were non-nuclear, the first non-nuclear submarines that not only use Air Independent Propulsion or AIP but do so using lithium ion instead of lead-acid batteries. With this AIP system the KSS-III submarines can operate submerged for about three weeks. These subs also have ten Vertical Launch Cells or VLS filled by Hyunmoo 4-4 SLBMs with a range of 800 kilometers. North Korea is developing similar technology, but the north can only manage to build crude imitations of what the South Korean created. South Korea is far wealthier and technically advanced than the north. Both Koreas produce weapons that work often enough to do some damage and kill people. The South Korean weapons do this more reliably and effectively. North Korea is content to be able to say, “We have that too.”

Unlike the Europeans, the Asians realize that they can’t depend on the U.S. (especially with a Democrat administration) to defend them from China, North Korea, and other threats, so they have no choice but to step up to the plate.

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It’s widely accepted that “migrants” are a net financial drain on any Western nation that decides to import them en masse. The following article reports on the research conducted by a German economist in an effort to quantify the amount of money lost due to all the cultural enrichment.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

If the election comes down to Trump versus Biden again as is likely, it is a certainty that there will be no debates between them—the first presidential race in 50 years without debates. The Biden White House is already floating the trial balloons for refusing to debate Trump while concealing the real reason—they know Biden is not longer up to it. He can no longer do press conferences or one-on-one interview with friendly reporters.

Dementia Hitler, as Scott Adams calls him, is no longer up to a conversation with Trump, much less a debate.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

During a television appearance last night, I was asked why the Biden administration pursues an open border policy that has had catastrophic consequences and is deeply unpopular with voters. It is a good question. I agreed with the host that liberals think they are importing a lot of future Democrats. I also think some Democrats perceive that mass illegal immigration dramatically increases the demand for social services, most of which are provided by Democrats. Still, I am not sure how persuasive those explanations are.

The New York Times understands its fellow Democrats better than I do, so yesterday’s “The Morning” email likely provides a clue–in a word, Trump made them do it.

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The Portland, Oregon, area is currently experiencing an explosion of shigellosis, a highly infectious, often antibiotic-resistant intestinal disease caused by contact with human feces.

Most of the outbreak—at least 218 cases in 2023, 45 of them reported in December—has taken place in Old Town, a once-lively restaurant and shopping destination near downtown Portland that’s now the site of numerous homeless encampments whose residents often use sidewalks as restrooms.

The Portland City Council, alarmed at a surge in the area’s homeless population, now estimated at about 6,000, in June 2023 passed severe restrictions on camping in public places. Tents and campsites are now technically banned during daytime hours and limited to certain designated areas at night. But no one in famously progressive Portland tried to enforce the legislation until the fall, when this latest infestation of shigella bacteria (there had been a similar outbreak among the homeless in 2021) began to generate headlines.

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Democrat Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker is pleading with Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott not to send busloads of migrants to Chicago while the Midwest is being hit by a powerful winter storm.

Chicago is among the many Democrat-run cities that have declared themselves sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, and Abbott has sent thousands to Chicago and other sanctuary cities by bus and airplane to relieve the strain on his state caused by immigration at the U.S. southern border.

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Last time around, we considered NASA’s recent attempts to build outer space communications systems, and the strange belief of contemporary Left-leaning scientists and academics affiliated with astronomical organisations like SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) that any aliens we did manage one day to contact would inevitably talk in a language every bit as impeccably woke as they themselves do.

A classic illustration of such delusion came in the newly ideologically-captured journal Scientific American in 2022. Under the headline ‘Cultural Bias Distorts the Search for Alien Life’ appeared an interview with Rebecca Charbonneau, a young SETI-linked cultural historian whose paper ‘Imaginative Cosmos: The Impact of Colonial Heritage in Radio Astronomy and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’ had brought her to the attention of the editors.

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As the Middle East is again consumed by wars of terrorist aggression, Africa, too, is experiencing a rise in violence. Despite the region receiving billions in U.S. foreign aid annually, groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have gained ground throughout the continent. As of 2023, the Sahel region—a broad sub-Saharan swathe of land stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans—represents 43% of all global deaths caused by terrorism. This is a 7% increase over last year, with no signs of abating.

All of this chaos has helped American adversaries like China and Russia gain stronger footholds on the African continent—a continent rich in natural resources critical to U.S. commerce and national security, but a sanctuary for terrorists who seek to attack America and our allies. It’s also a place where people deserve better than terrorism, violence, and authoritarian dictators. Yet U.S. influence in the region has declined since the Biden administration took office and rolled out a tremendously weak Africa strategy.

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Brooklyn’s PS 261 school said it took down the colorful map titled, “Arab World,” in which the area that sits between Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria—where the Jewish state, as well as Gaza and the West Bank, lies—is labeled “Palestine,” after the Free Press on Thursday reported its display in a classroom there.

Qatar Foundation International, owned by the Qatari government, in April posted a picture of the map on X, then known as Twitter. The map was displayed in an “Arab Culture Arts” classroom in the school where children from pre-K to fifth grade learn as part of a program that the organization funds, the now-deleted post said.

The Free Press asked the city’s Department of Education whether the map remained up in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Spokesman Nathaniel Styer responded by asking, “Why would it not be?” and added that it was a “map of countries that speak Arabic.” After the outlet published the story, however, Styer gave an update on the map’s status.

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More than a year since its creation, a U.S.-backed fund to support the Afghan people has not made a single disbursement and lacks safeguards to prevent the $3.5 billion investment from being stolen by the Taliban government, according to a government watchdog.

The Afghan Fund was created more than a year ago by a Biden administration order that allowed more than $3.5 billion in funds previously held by Afghanistan’s central bank to be moved into a charitable account tasked with aiding the war-torn country’s ailing population.

Since that time, “the Fund has made no disbursements for activities intended to benefit the Afghan people” and currently has no “specific controls in place to ensure funds are not diverted to or misused by the Taliban,” according to a report published earlier this week by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which monitors American aid to the country.

Babylon Bee.

At a press conference this week, Sony producers announced the production of a new modern adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984 that will feature the character of Big Brother as the good guy.

And, oddly enough, he looks very much like Joe Biden.

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Because he can?

If he were a Republican, his ass would be rotting in jail even as we speak.

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In a bid to “foster greater inclusivity,” King Arthur Baking Company is hosting a competition that discriminates against white contestants by barring them from entering

I’ll bet you didn’t know that King Arthur was a Person of Color.

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The Texas National Guard this week erected new barriers along part of the state’s border with Mexico blocking access for U.S. Border Patrol agents, the federal government said in a Friday court filing.

The move by Texas comes amid an escalating conflict between the Republican state government and the Democrat administration of President Joe Biden over migration.

Lawyers for the Biden administration told the U.S. Supreme Court in their filing that Texas’ “activities have changed the situation along the relevant stretch of the Rio Grande.” They added that the additional barriers in and around Eagle Pass, Texas “further restricts Border Patrol’s ability to reach the river in particular areas.”

More to the point, it restricts the illegal immigrants’ ability to reach Texas in particular areas, which the Border Patrol seems unwilling to do.

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E pur si muove….

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Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke is running for re-election this year in New York’s 9th District to FINISH THE JOB of utterly destroying New York.

To achieve her goal of ruining a once great city, Clarke is demanding MORE illegal migrants.

Clarke actually admitted that the Democrats need more migrants to overrun their cities and states for “redistricting purposes.”

Of course, if we based our districts on number of citizens rather than number of inhabitants it would not be a problem. But Democrats would fight that to their last breath.

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For their latest magic trick, physicists have done the quantum equivalent of conjuring energy out of thin air. It’s a feat that seems to fly in the face of physical law and common sense.

“You can’t extract energy directly from the vacuum because there’s nothing there to give,” said William Unruh, a theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia, describing the standard way of thinking.

But 15 years ago, Masahiro Hotta, a theoretical physicist at Tohoku University in Japan, proposed that perhaps the vacuum could, in fact, be coaxed into giving something up.

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You will be happier if you spend your money on experiences rather than possessions… or so says the modern truism, supposedly proven by psychological science. Researchers call it the “experience recommendation.”

It sounds good, right? It’s very flattering to a certain class of worldly people who spent their capital on accruing anecdotes. Ah, yes—we who go on retreats in Bali are much happier than the unsophisticated materialistic people who spend money on handbags or whatever.

It also supports the notion, which occasionally floats around, that wealthy people aren’t really made happy by their fancy possessions, which is comforting if you like to believe that wealthy people are idiots.

If you think that money can’t buy happiness you’re shopping in the wrong place.

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When we speak to visitors or students about our medieval manuscripts, we frequently find ourselves spending a significant amount of time talking about how such books were created. We discuss the ways that scribes worked and artists painted, and quite often we will then be asked just how it is that we can know such details. There are, of course, medieval manuals for craftspeople that still exist, but often we can find clues in the manuscripts themselves. Writing was a skill that was hard-won and greatly valued, and many authors and scribes were memorialised by their artisan brethren.

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Imagine being trapped in London rush hour traffic next to a huge 4500F / 2500C fireball, or even worse, being a passenger trapped on the upper deck of a burning EV.

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American ‘journalism’: More interested in Elon Musk’s use of drugs than Hunter Biden’s.

No wonder the country’s in bad shape.

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How dare he act like an American President!

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It’s tough out there for a hungry grasshopper on the Kansas prairie. Oh, there’s plenty of grass to eat, but this century’s grass isn’t what it used to be. It’s less nutritious, deficient in minerals like iron, potassium and calcium.

Partly due to that nutrient-deficient diet, there’s been a huge decline in grasshopper numbers of late, by about one-third over two decades, according to a 2020 study. The prairie’s not hoppin’ like it used to — and a major culprit is carbon dioxide, says study author Michael Kaspari, an ecologist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

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In its latest assertion of sovereignty and responsibility for securing its border with Mexico, the once and future Republic of Texas has seized control of a 47-acre park in the city of Eagle Pass, which has been a major avenue of illegal immigration. What’s more, the Texans are barring US Border Patrol agents and watercraft from the property, which they’ve used as a staging area for processing migrants.

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Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

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The young “French” woman in the following video avers that she was born in France, but doesn’t like the country. She would prefer to live in a Muslim country, but she foresees an Islamic future for France, and clearly regards it as her distasteful duty to remain in her despicable infidel milieu in order to further the process of Islamization.

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People reacted to the news that the U.S. Army is struggling to recruit white soldiers by asking why they would want to serve a regime that hates them.

Good point. In fact, any white male who works for a corporation with an HR department might just as well quit now, because there is no chance that you will ever get promoted.

“A total of 44,042 new Army recruits were categorized by the service as white in 2018, but that number has fallen consistently each year to a low of 25,070 in 2023, with a 6% dip from 2022 to 2023 being the most significant drop. No other demographic group has seen such a precipitous decline, though there have been ups and downs from year to year,” reports the website.

In 2023, the Army missed its recruiting goal of 65,000 soldiers by a shortfall of 10,000, with just 44% of new recruits categorized as white in 2023 compared to 56.4% in 2018.

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A former civil servant, Anna Stanley reports on a counter-terrorism course she attended which she found a deeply, existentially depressing experience. She argues that ‘prestigious’ educational institutions are delivering politically biased, anti-government training, amounting to indoctrination and that extremism and terrorism are misunderstood by civil servants to the point of being a national security risk.

I recently attended a Kings College course called ‘Issues in Countering Terrorism’. Organised by the Centre for Defence Studies, it was designed for civil servants and professionals in Counter Terrorism. Staff from the Foreign Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defence and Home Office attended. Facilitating this relatively new 3 day course were senior lecturers from the Security Studies Department.

The civil servants were given presentations by Kings College lecturers while Visiting Senior Research Fellows and Professors also spoke. These included those formerly holding positions such as Permanent Secretary of the Home Office and Director of GCHQ, Defence Minister and Foreign Office Director.

PJ Media.

These Fani Willis allegations are getting crazier by the day. By now, I’m sure you’ve read Athena Thorne’s intrepid report on the accusations that Willis hired an attorney with whom she is supposedly carrying on an extramarital affair as a special prosecutor in the Trump RICO case, despite his lack of qualifications with that type of litigation. The special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, also allegedly met with White House representatives about the case.

I penned a follow-up piece about another Willis hire, Pallavi Bailey, who serves as the DA’s spokeswoman. She is married to Charlie Bailey, who ran for lieutenant governor and lost in 2022. Willis hired Pallavi Bailey and actively campaigned for Charlie Bailey while using the Trump grand jury to target Burt Jones, his rival in the lieutenant governor’s race. Targeting Jones led a judge to bar Willis from investigating him due to the conflict of interest.

But now the plot thickens for the beleaguered prosecutor, who probably just wants to be left alone so she can take Trump down and profit off that achievement. The estranged wife of Willis’ alleged sneaky link wants her to testify in their divorce proceedings.

The Other McCain.

In Seattle, one of the richest cities in the world, entire blocks of downtown streets have become open-air drug markets, but — BUT! — you can’t get a plastic straw in a restaurant there.