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Eighteen years ago this week, the liberal networks donated their airwaves to the cause of protesters seeking to kill a bill which would have increased the federal government’s ability to enforce immigration laws. The May 1, 2006 protests were part of a wave of activism that spring sponsored by left-wing groups aimed at derailing GOP efforts to curb illegal immigration — even as polls at the time showed four out of five Americans (81%) thought illegal immigration was “out of control.”

 

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Hint: Bags. Money. Monkey boys (and girls).

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Cassidy and colleagues used the ancient man’s molars to reconstruct the first ancient genome for S. mutans. The new data, analyzed in conjunction with modern genomes, allowed them to build a picture of the evolution of the bacteria across millennia for the first time. Previous work with modern oral microbiome genomes suggested that S. mutans populations increased following the adoption of cereal agriculture 12,000 years ago. But the new findings indicate they really skyrocketed around 250 to 750 years ago, when sugar and processed carbs, such as rice and bread, became a big component of human diets. S. mutans particularly loves sucrose, Cassidy says. “It helps it create the sort of sticky film that this bacteria uses to colonize the tooth surface so it can consume all different sugars.”

The Spectator.

Taylor Swift has released another album spilling the beans on her private life. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past two years and wanted to share it all with you,” she says. Her fans are lapping up The Tortured Poets Department, but her critics say dishing the dirt on her ex-boyfriends isn’t fair.

Swift is famous for two things; being so massively successful that a musical visit by her can boost a country’s GDP, and for writing snarky songs about her exes. There is something very appealing about the extremes at play here; the former so grown-up and the second so teenage.

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There was an Afghan riot a week ago in Paris, but the mainstream media did their best not to report on what was happening.

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On Saturday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Weekend, hosts and guests alike bemoaned Biden’s failure to seek to pack the Supreme Court.

Their comments came in response to oral arguments at the Court this past week on the case regarding Trump’s claim of presidential immunity. The panel expressed fears that the Court might expand presidential immunity — if not to the extent of the right to assassinate political rivals, as Trump’s lawyer suggested could be an immune act.

Co-host Alicia Menendez teed up the packing notion, saying that in light of what happened in the Court last week, clearly something “structural”–packing or court “reform” is necessary.

Washington Free Beacon.

Anti-Israel protesters at Harvard University raised Palestinian flags on campus Saturday in a spot typically reserved for the American flag.

Harvard protesters hoisted three Palestinian flags over the Harvard Yard encampment, where students have been sleeping in tents since Wednesday. The flags were raised on poles attached to University Hall–where Harvard usually flies the American flag or flags of the countries of visiting foreign dignitaries.

Approximately one hour after three keffiyeh-clad individuals raised the flags, the Ivy League university’s staff removed them despite jeering from protesters who were chanting “Shame!” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” According to Harvard University spokesman Jonathan L. Swain, raising flags is “a violation of University policy and the individuals involved will be subjected to disciplinary action.”

Reuters.

Dave Duttlinger’s first thought when he saw a dense band of yellowish-brown dust smearing the sky above his Indiana farm was: I warned them this would happen.
About 445 acres of his fields near Wheatfield, Indiana, are covered in solar panels and related machinery – land that in April 2019 Duttlinger leased to Dunns Bridge Solar LLC, for one of the largest solar developments in the Midwest.
On that blustery spring afternoon in 2022, Duttlinger said, his phone rang with questions from frustrated neighbors: Why is dust from your farm inside my truck? Inside my house? Who should I call to clean it up?
According to Duttlinger’s solar lease, reviewed by Reuters, Dunns Bridge said it would use “commercially reasonable efforts to minimize any damage to and disturbance of growing crops and crop land caused by its construction activities” outside the project site and “not remove topsoil” from the property itself. Still, sub-contractors graded Duttlinger’s fields to assist the building of roads and installation of posts and panels, he said, despite his warnings that it could make the land more vulnerable to erosion.
Crews reshaped the landscape, spreading fine sand across large stretches of rich topsoil, Duttlinger said. When Reuters visited his farm last year and this spring, much of the land beneath the panels was covered in yellow-brown sand, where no plants grew.
“I’ll never be able to grow anything on that field again,” the farmer said. About one-third of his approximately 1,200-acre farm – where his family grows corn, soybeans and alfalfa for cattle – has been leased.

Gizmodo.

The laws surrounding 5th Amendment protections and biometric passwords are still undecided, so just turn it off.

Read it.

Cats love sitting on any square object, as if drawn by some primordial instinct. A new study shows that the square can even be an optical illusion.

Read it.

That little button, the one saying ‘follow’? It’s lying to you.

The follow lie is a classic tale of enshittification that’s occurred on nearly every social media platform. It’s pretty simple:

You join a social media platform and find some people who interest you. You tap follow (or ‘Add friend’, ‘Like page’, ‘Subscribe’), because you want to see their content. For a while, everything works just fine. You see your best friend’s wedding photos, your favourite blogger’s posts.

Soon though, the follow lie kicks in. Something happens. You start seeing a lot less of people you follow, and a lot more of people you don’t follow. But you’re still stuck on the platform, because of all that time you’ve invested in following people there (after all, you still see some of their content) — and a lot of the new stuff you get shown, from people you don’t follow, is addictive. It keeps you scrolling to see what’s up next. The platform benefits by slipping in more and more ads around the content.

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Being a blue pustule in a red state will do that to you.

UPDATE: Texas Attracted California Techies. Now It’s Losing Them

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It is often hard to remember, when so much of the modern Left seems lost to various forms of identitarian madness, that there is a form of leftwing politics that seeks to strengthen the common life of ordinary people, seeing the decency and stability of such a life as a thing of nobility to be sought. Rakib Ehsan’s recently published book, Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong About Ethnic Minorities, is a reminder of a certain idea of English left-wing politics, one that celebrates a covenantal form of life of people lived in rooted communities, joining together in resistance to economic forces that would uproot the bonds of mutual obligation, loyalty, and reciprocity that enable a decent life for those not at the pinnacle of economic fortune.

Strategy Page.

One of the transportation difficulties between Ukraine and the NATO countries is the different gauge railroads used in Europe and Ukraine. Europe uses what is known as Standard Gauge. Gauge means the distance between the two rails. Standard gauge rails are 1,455mm apart. The Russian gauge is wider with the rails 1,524mm apart. In other words, Standard gauge tracks are four feet 8.5 inches wide while Russian Gauge tracks are five feet wide. Since Ukraine was until 1991 part of the Soviet Union, all the Ukrainian railroads are Russian gauge. To deal with this problem, Ukraine is building a transshipment point in the west Ukraine town of Uzhhorod which is on the border with Slovakia and near the Hungarian border. Here there are cranes that will quickly lift standard cargo containers from Russian gauge flatcars and load the containers onto European Standard Gauge flatcars. Passenger trains have a similar arrangement where passengers can disembark and walk a short distance to trains with a different gauge.

This greatly hampered the Germans during WWII.

Power Line.

Commentary in the liberal press is so uniform that you wonder whether reporters and commentators have coordinated their coverage, down to the word and the phrase. Well, they have, of course. You remember JournoList, where, years ago, reporters would gather to coordinate their pro-Democrat, anti-Republican stories. JournoList supposedly disbanded after it came to light, but I assume it more likely just went underground.

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This is not an ‘organic protest’ by students, but rather a carefully crafted movement by activists and agitators in pursuit of a political agenda.

Washington Poop.

D.C. police rejected pleas from George Washington University officials to clear pro-Palestinian demonstrators out of an on-campus encampment early Friday morning, saying they worried about the optics of moving against a small number of peaceful protesters, according to two officials familiar with the talks.

In blue states, police apparently won’t do their  job if it makes them look bad.

The American Mind.

The relentless criminal and civil prosecution of former president Donald Trump is an unprecedented weaponization of our legal system to attack a political opponent. The goal is to re-elect Joe Biden by any means, without regard to the rule of law Democrat prosecutors and officials pretend to be enforcing.

Beyond E. Jean Carroll’s so far successful defamation cases funded by billionaire Reid Hoffman, and failed efforts in 36 states to take Trump off the ballot for purportedly engaging in insurrection, Trump is a defendant in five active criminal or civil actions, and an unindicted co-conspirator in two additional criminal cases, all brought by partisan progressive Democrat prosecutors seeking hundreds of millions of dollars of fines and more than 100 years of prison time. The timing of these cases was coordinated to inflict maximum inconvenience and cost on Trump, and to make it impossible for him to campaign actively. State and federal prosecutors met in the White House to refine their cases and for purposes that have never been disclosed.

The success of ‘lawfare’ depends on a politicized and corrupt legal system, something that is becoming increasingly manifest in blue states.

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Another investigative report by Eugenia Fiore into the plight of women in Muslim ghettoes in Italian cities. One of the cases mentioned is that of Saman Abbas, was murdered by her parents in Novellara (see the bottom of this post for a list of previous articles about Saman Abbas).

Washington Free Beacon.

Stung by the charge of indifference to Palestinian suffering, President Joe Biden attempted to refute the accusations during his State of the Union address. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said about the cost of the war to Gazan civilians, so “tonight, I am directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier.” This “would enable a massive increase” in the humanitarian assistance reaching the beleaguered people of Gaza.

This week, Hamas and its allies sent their reply to Biden: Drop dead. As preliminary construction started, terrorists bombarded the site, damaging several pieces of American equipment. This misadventure illustrates the core problem of Biden’s foreign policy. As much as some Democrats want to abandon Israel and cater to the Palestinians, the rest of the party realizes they cannot do it. Biden is trying to keep his party united by restraining Israel and loudly proclaiming his support for the people of Gaza. But his publicity stunts, like the pier project, are accomplishing very little. The region is still on the brink of war, and the Democrats’ Middle East consensus is faltering.

Hamas is the scorpion to Biden’s frog.

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UCLA medical school is under fire for forcing students to attend ‘health equity’ classes where ‘fat positivity’ is promoted, and reading material claims that the medical term ‘obesity’ is a slur “used to exact violence on fat people.”

UPDATE: UCLA Med School Launches Review Of ‘Health Equity’ Course But Warns That Whistleblowers Could Be Disciplined

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First, the feminists claimed that they “don’t need no man” and promoted a culture of “strong independent women,” the idea being that men were holding women back from their true potential. The “patriarchy” conspiracy was an all prevailing issue for woke activists for years, and their answer was to attack and sabotage men and masculinity with a terroristic fervor. Masculinity, they argued, is the root of all historic evils.

However, as feminists gained the backing of governments and massive corporate financiers the idea of women being “oppressed” in western countries seemed even less probable than it did before. What rights under the law do men have that women don’t have? Ask a feminist this question and she’ll have no idea how to answer. Feminism and woke movements in general rely on the image of being the underdog; a heroic revolutionary effort by people who are fighting to gain a voice. But woke activists aren’t fighting “the man”, they are “the man.” You can’t be a revolutionary when you’re the oppressor.

In response, men started giving feminists exactly what they said they wanted: Equal treatment. The old days of chivalry and the expectations for men to support women financially quickly faded, and suddenly feminists discovered that men were no longer spending their cash as freely as they used to. Everything is half-and-half today, and feminists don’t like that.

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Not only wouldn’t you want to live there, but it’s no longer even a great place to visit.

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The FDIC just seized the troubled Philadelphia bank, Republic First Bancorp and and struck an agreement for the lender’s deposits and the majority of its assets to be bought by Fulton Bank.

The Foundry.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley on Friday said the prosecution’s case against former President Donald Trump is failing as a key witness is benefiting the defense.

Trump is on trial facing 34 felony counts of allegedly falsifying business records in relation to a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. The prosecution’s first witness, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, was helpful to Trump as the prosecution made mistakes that the defense capitalized on during cross-examination, Turley asserted on Fox News’ “Outnumbered.”

The New Republic.

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.

Who are you going to believe regarding the quality of Srinivasan’s thought?

• Some scribbler (Gil Duran is a San Francisco journalist who previously served as editorial page editor of The Sacramento Bee and The San Francisco Examiner) for a demonstrably biased Narrative Media outlet?
• ‘Influential Silicon Valley billionaires’, most of whom have demonstrated their mental acuity over decades?

The New Neo.

I get a bit tired of starting posts by saying something like “It comes as no surprise … “. But indeed, it comes as no surprise that Columbia’s president Nemak “Minouche” Shafik, who recently testified in front of Congress and who has been AWOL in dealing with the vicious anti-Semitic “demonstrations” at the school, is now suspected of having taken false sole credit for a highly-cited academic paper.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Washington Free Beacon.

Northwestern University professors are encouraging students to skip classes to attend anti-Israel demonstrations on campus, and some are even moving their lessons to the site of the protest encampment, according to emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The faculty messages are in defiance of campus administrators and police, who warned they would arrest trespassers who set up an anti-Israel tent city on Northwestern’s Deering Meadow lawn on Thursday. Campus police have yet to remove over 100 protesters who gathered there as of Friday afternoon, as professors encouraged their students to join in.

“In light of artist tradition, studies, activism, and movements, tomorrow discussion will be held in Deering Meadow,” wrote Isaac Vazquez, a Northwestern art history lecturer, in an email to students on Thursday. “If you’re already there, I’ll see you.”

Read it.

A pro-Palestinian student at Columbia University justified deadly violence against Zionists in a video taken in January.

Number of pro-Israel students anywhere who say that Arabs or Muslims ‘don’t deserve to live’: Zero.

The Foundry.

Given the Marxist fixation with seizing power, it’s strange that woke university administrators can’t seem to use it better.

After all, they, not the students, are the legitimate authority on campus. For campus administrators who need remedial training on how to do their jobs, Texas provided a tutorial Wednesday when University of Texas at Austin students tried to establish a Gaza solidarity encampment there within sight of the state capitol building.

Here’s a six-step handbook to shutting down illegal campus takeovers, the Texas way.

The New Neo.

Whoever could have guessed such as thing? Everyone:

In response to recent minimum wage increases in California, fast food restaurants across the state are shifting to automation to get rid of wage-earning humans.

The move to making customers place orders at digital kiosks alleviates what owners say is the financial strain of rising labor costs after the minimum wage for the state’s fast food workers increased on April 1 from $16 to $20 per hour.

Harsh Ghai, a Burger King franchise owner who manages 140 outlets along the West Coast, is leading the transition to automation. He plans to introduce digital kiosks across all his restaurants within months — a drastic acceleration from his original timeline of five to 10 years.

Note that it was going to be happening anyway, just on a slower schedule.

It’s ironic that progressives, with their ham-handed attempts to speed a future utopia, are actually speeding the arrival of a future dystopia. (Be careful what you wish for….)

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Apparently not risking losing the black vote is more important than virtue-signaling about protecting people’s health.

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The roots of cancer run deep. Indeed, they’re usually assumed to run all the way to the blighted bits of DNA we call oncogenic mutations. But what if they don’t have to run quite that deep? What if they needn’t emerge from the genome, but from the epigenome? After all, genomically identical cells that differ epigenomically can mature toward different cell fates. Perhaps some of these fates are cancerous. The possibility seems all the more likely if we consider that many aspects of cancer susceptibility and tumorigenesis have been associated with substantial epigenomic alterations.

This possibility was explored by scientists based at the Institute of Human Genetics, CNRS, University of Montpellier. Using the familiar Drosophila model, the scientists uncovered evidence that tumors can emerge through epigenetic dysregulation leading to inheritance of altered cell fates.

It used to be the Conventional Wisdom that natural selection depended upon random mutations, and since such mutations were few and far between, therefore evolution needed long periods in which to be come apparent. Now, however, we know that environmental factors can cause epigenetic changes, and epigenetic changes can be inherited, so evolution happens faster than most people think–and humans are evolving at a quicker pace than a lot of folks are comfortable with.

Just wait until you see him with a soy latté.

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Havelar, Porto has completed the first 3D printed house in Portugal, utilizing COBOD’s 3D construction printing technology, 3D printing a modern 80 m2 2 bedrooms house in just 18 hours.
The fast execution of the 3D printed walls enables Havelar to offer new houses completely made in less than 2 months, more than twice as fast as common in the market.
Due to the use of 3D construction printing Havelar is capable of offering new contemporary design mid-market houses for just 1.500 euro per m2, well below current market prices.
Havelar’s ambitions also include reaching carbon neutrality by utilizing new materials.

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If the Federal government refuses to do its job, then the states have to step up.

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No, that headline is not satire. Ex-NBC disinformation reporter Ben Collins announced on his Twitter account on Thursday that he is the new CEO of The Onion. It’s a fitting end for both parties as they tailspin into the depths of bitter politics.

Before he was suspended by NBC for having an unprofessional obsession with Elon Musk, he was on the network’s disinformation and extremism beat, which was exclusively focused on the right side of the political spectrum. Collins’s shtick was to find the most outrageous things coming from the internet and pretend that they represented all conservatives. For example, he declared that Kanye West’s anti-Semitism was within the Republican Party’s Overton Window.

Does anybody even read The Onion any more?

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

George Soros and his far-left movement is paying student agitators to co-opt and amplify anti-Israel protests at colleges across the country, the NY Post reports.

The protests, which began at Columbia University, have expanded nationwide – with copycat tent cities erected at colleges including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley in California, the Ohio State University and Emory in Georgia, with organized branches of the Soros-funded Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) having organized them.

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“DOE believes at this time that circadian-friendly integrated LED lamps do not possess unique attributes compared to other (GSLs).” (i.e. light bulbs, which they refer to as general service lamps). (p. 28877)

This is nonsense. Circadian-friendly light bulbs have distinct spectral power distributions—i.e., the relative amounts of light at each color wavelength. Circadian-friendly lights are rich in 480 nm blue during the day and emit minimal 480 nm blue in the evenings and at night. This can easily be measured with a handheld spectrophotometer.

Evidence establishes that circadian-friendly lights should be less than 2 percent 440-495 nm blue in the evening and at night, and more than 20 percent 440-495 nm blue during the daytime.

Ars Technica.

If you’ve been wondering when you’ll be able to order the flame-throwing robot that Ohio-based Throwflame first announced last summer, that day has finally arrived. The Thermonator, what Throwflame bills as “the first-ever flamethrower-wielding robot dog” is now available for purchase. The price? $9,420.

Thermonator is a quadruped robot with an ARC flamethrower mounted to its back, fueled by gasoline or napalm. It features a one-hour battery, a 30-foot flame-throwing range, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity for remote control through a smartphone.

Me want.

“I like owning stuff.” — Steve Graham

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Couldn’t happen to a more appropriate guy.

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Three times in the past 40 years have Republican presidents signed tax reforms into law. Contrary to what the Left likes to tell us, these reforms have reduced the tax burden on all Americans, which is the reason why no Democrat president has dared to fully reverse the Republican tax cuts.

That may end if Joe Biden is re-elected. In his recently released budget for the 2025 fiscal year, the president calls for substantial tax increases on both corporations and individuals. The Tax Foundation, a relatively neutral think tank in Washington, DC, has compiled the tax hikes and analyzed their macroeconomic effects.

LifeHacker.

It’s been a few years since Lifehacker looked at the slang of Generation Z—long enough that Generation Alpha has had time to develop and spread some of its own special buzzwords and jargon. Below is an alphabetized collection of slang taken from both Gen Z and Gen A, in case someone younger than you says something you don’t understand. As with all slang, if you need an online list to know what a word means, you are too old to say it aloud.

One notable omission is ‘Tyrone’, which refers to a Chad of the Negro persuasion.

Another notable omission is ‘304’ (a.k.a. ‘common garden tool’), derived from entering that number into a handheld calculator and turning it upside down to read the result. (Try it.)

The American Mind.

In early 2022, Capital Research Center alerted Fox News to the existence of a secret 501(c)(3) “charity” called Governing for Impact. The research organization and its sister (c)(4) “dark money” group, the Governing for Impact Action Fund, exist to research, write, promote, and defend new federal regulations for the Biden Administration to issue. These two groups, sponsored by Arabella’s New Venture Fund and Sixteen Thirty Fund, respectively, received a combined $17.4 million in funding from Soros grant-makers from 2019 to 2021. Most surprisingly, the group intentionally operated far under the radar from its launch in 2019 (long before the 2020 presidential election) because its website was carefully set to be invisible to Google and other search engines. That’s right; it was hidden from the public, who couldn’t find it even by accident. But friends, including in the Biden Administration, could reach it if they were told the site’s URL, GoverningForImpact.org, and typed that into their computers. (After news reports based on our research “outed” the site, it became visible to search engines.)