The Beatles – Taxman (Remastered)

“A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right.” — ALUX on YouTube

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A national study published by JAMA Health Forum found that there was an abrupt surge in permanent sterilization procedures among young adults ages 18 through 30 after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, which reversed the constitutional right to an abortion.

“If options for avoiding pregnancy and/or avoiding carrying pregnancies to term are severely limited, as has happened in 21 states since Dobbs, many patients will choose permanent ways to avoid this risk, rather than relying on less effective or less permanent methods,” Sarah W. Prager, MD, a professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, told Healthline.

Following the Dobbs ruling, researchers observed an abrupt increase of 58 sterilization procedures for women, averaging around 5.31 procedures per month per 100,000 individuals. This marks an almost twofold increase from the prior rate of 2.84 procedures per month for women.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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A Florida appeals court has effectively opened a loophole in the state’s long-standing law against recording telephone conversations without the permission of both sides of the call, ruling that law enforcement officers performing their official duties can be secretly recorded because they have no expectation of privacy.

Steve Sailer.

New York City doesn’t have a relatively high crime rate since the Giuliani-Bloomberg-Bratton era, but it needs a really low crime rate because its density and mixture of classes and races (the subway system makes it easy for anybody from public housing projects to hang out in even the richest neighborhoods) makes NYC peculiarly psychologically stressful. Not surprisingly, the BLM era of locking up fewer dangerous men because most of them are black and encouraging racist anti-white hate is taking its toll on New Yorkers, especially when many have trained themselves to try not to notice what is actually going.

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An advocacy group based in Northeastern Mexico that lobbies U.S. lawmakers has distributed and posted flyers encouraging illegal immigrants to vote for President Joe Biden in the 2024 election, according to The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.

Translated from Spanish, the Oversight Project notes, the flyers posted by the organization Resource Center Matamoros say: “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.

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Under the ‘Grocery Protection Act’ introduced by city Board of Supervisors member Dean Preston (Democratic Socialist), stores that want to flee all the crime and other increased liabilities will have to provide the city with six months advanced notice, and make efforts to find a replacement supermarket for the location being vacated, Benzinga reports.

The move comes after While Foods shut down its flagship store in San Francisco after being open for just over a year, citing employee safety concerns.

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Scores of “Free Palestine” protesters across the United States took to the streets Monday to block major airports, highways, and bridges. Those who are arrested will receive bail money and legal support from a left-wing dark money behemoth funded by George Soros, an online fundraising page shows.

The American Mind.

That Ayatollah Khomeini invented “Quds Day” is not surprising. “Al Quds” is Arabic for Jerusalem; the name derives from the Hebrew nickname for “the Holy City,” Ir HaKodesh. Khomeini introduced the holiday in 1979, shortly after the revolution that installed him in power. Celebrated on the last Friday of Ramadan, the festival is generally attended by anti-American and anti-Zionist protests and chants calling for the death of both nations.

Back in 1979, America was glued to TV screens receiving updates on the Teheran hostage crisis, which was national news and contributed to the downfall of then-president Jimmy Carter. In 2012, a similar hostage crisis, in an American diplomatic facility in Libya, hardly gathered attention. Today, few in the U.S. are aware that Palestinians still hold (if they are still alive) five Americans hostage in Gaza and that they killed dozens more in Southern Israel during the massacre in October last year. The Biden Administration does not appear to be preoccupied with their release. By contrast, Vladimir Putin secured the release of Russian-Israeli dual national Roni Krivol, despite him being a male of military age.

That Quds Day is observed in Dearborn, Michigan is not surprising either—but it is disturbing. This year the occasion stirred controversy because it was marked by chants calling Death to Israel and Death to America. It wasn’t the first time such screams were heard in the Heartland, but now they are getting noticed. Even more recently, a group of Chicago leftists planning their protests for the Democratic National Convention this summer were delighted to learn how to chant “Death to America” in Persian.

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In a scene reminiscent of the Chuck Norris film Invasion USA, a speedboat loaded with at least a dozen illegal immigrants ripped through the waters just off the coast of Carlsbad, California, nearly slamming into bathers and surfers as they landed and sprinted across the beach.

Some migrants raced to nearby waiting vehicles which sped away, the rest walked off in broad daylight to mix with the surrounding tourists. Locals who filmed the migrants claimed police were called but didn’t show up.

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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is distributing $300 million to sanctuary cities that provide services like shelter and food to illegal immigrants amid a massive increase in incursions across the southern border.

The $300 million in grants will be provided through the Shelter and Services Program (SSP), according to an April 12 press release. SSP offers funding to non-federal entities like NGOs and local governments that provide support to illegal immigrants released into the United States by the DHS. Out of the $300 million, $275 million will be distributed in the first allocation, with the remaining $25 million to be allocated later this year to meet operational requirements.

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The Biden administration is sending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to an anti-Israel professor to investigate how “viral memes” can “perpetuate gendered, anti-Muslim racism,” federal spending disclosures show.

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded San Diego State University professor Amira Jarmakani $60,000 to research and write a project titled, “Weapons of Mass Dissemination: Apprehending Digital Anti-Muslim Racism,” which will address Islamophobic stereotypes in memes and images on the internet.

Jarmakani in the grant description argues such memes have the ability to perpetuate “gendered anti-Muslim racism” which leads to “domestic surveillance that can also lead to the capture and incarceration of innocent people, framed as terrorists or enemy combatants in the War on Terror.”

Explain to me how ‘Muslim’ is a race.

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U.S. employers’ obligation to accommodate workers’ pregnancies also extends to abortions and the use of contraception, the U.S. agency that enforces workplace discrimination laws said Monday.

New York Post.

Customers packed Cory Gautereaux’s small gun store northeast of San Diego on a recent Friday afternoon.

Many of the people buying pistols at Firearms Unlimited California said they were concerned about the massive number of migrants being released onto the local streets after the area became a hub for the crisis at the border — which is just 25 miles from El Cajon, a Southern California suburb of 105,000 people.

“My wife and I have had home defense guns for many years. Recently, though, with all the stuff that’s happening south of the border and all the people coming over, my concerns have broadened,” said Keith Carnevale, one of the shop’s customers, who’s armed his entire family.

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A former senior employee at TikTok said he was ordered to send American user data to Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, contradicting TikTok’s public claims of operating independently from China, according to a Fortune report published Monday.

Evan Turner, a senior data scientist for TikTok from April to September in 2022, told Fortune that every two weeks TikTok had him email spreadsheets containing millions of American users’ data to ByteDance employees in Beijing, including the users’ names, email addresses, IP addresses, and demographics.

Turner said he “literally worked on a project that gave U.S. data to China” even though TikTok had launched Project Texas in March 2022, promising U.S. officials that it would stop sharing American user data with its Chinese parent company and keep the data in U.S.-based data centers. “There were Americans that were working in upper management that were completely complicit in this,” Turner said.

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Former Wall Street money manager Ed Dowd is still a skillful number cruncher. His recently updated and wildly popular book “Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021, 2022 and 2023” has been correctly documenting the huge numbers of deaths and injuries caused by the CV19 bioweapon vax.

Vox.

‘Mass protest’ is Woke-speak for ‘progressive civil disturbance’ à la BLM and AntiFa.

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will not hear Mckesson v. Doe. The decision not to hear Mckesson leaves in place a lower court decision that effectively eliminated the right to organize a mass protest in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

Under that lower court decision, a protest organizer faces potentially ruinous financial consequences if a single attendee at a mass protest commits an illegal act.

This is, of course, the legal theory under which anyone even remotely associated with the Jan. 6 demonstrations have been tossed in jail. ‘Rules are for thee but not for me.’

Larry Elder.

Consider this proposition: “Suppose that your favorite candidate loses a close election. However, people on the campaign know that they can win by cheating without being caught. Would you rather have your candidate win by cheating or lose by playing fair?” Just 7% of Americans said, “Win by cheating.” This is from a startling new Scott Rasmussen poll.

Rasmussen then put this question to those the pollster calls “the elite 1%.” They make over $150,000 per year, have a postgraduate degree, live in densely populated areas, and give President Joe Biden an 82% approval rating. Why poll this group? Rasmussen said: “A heavy concentration of them went to one of 12 elite schools. … [H]alf the policy positions in government, half the corporate board positions in America, are held by people who went to one of these dozen schools.”

Thirty-five percent of this group said they would rather their candidate win by cheating than lose by playing fair. It gets worse. Rasmussen put the question to a subset of this elite 1%, whom the pollster calls the “politically obsessed,” defined as those who talk about politics every day. Among this group, the number who would rather win by cheating jumps to 69%.

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Pro-Palestinian protesters are blocking Terminal 1 at Chicago O’Hare International Airport on Monday morning, causing chaos for travelers trying to catch flights.

Local media outlet ABC7 reports that “all lanes were blocked on I-190 west between Bessie Coleman Drive and the airport.”

In a rightly-ordered society, these would all be immediately hauled off to jail, where they would be brought to trial and lodged in the pokey for an appreciable amount of time.

But that was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone….

The New Yorker.

A little more than a decade ago, Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm run by the entrepreneur, investor, and political gadfly Peter Thiel, issued a proclamation called “What Happened to the Future?” As an investment thesis, it was underwhelming—it advanced biotechnology, energy, and the Internet as smart bets—but it was received as something of a spiritual treatise. Thiel was best known for his early investment in Facebook, but he believed that the nation had become sluggish. We might have been attempting to terraform nearby planets or surmount death. Instead, we made apps. His statement belonged to the genre of the writer F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which proposed that Italy’s moribund museum culture be razed in favor of a machine cult of speed and steel: “We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is the very first sunrise on earth!” Thiel, no poet, was punchier: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

ZMan mixes it up.

Today is Tax Day in America, a day when millions of Americans drop tear-soaked checks into the mail, along with their many tax forms. Of course, for most Americans it is now just another day. Their taxes are simple, and their tax is paid by their employer throughout the year. The resulting decline of Tax Day and the tax issue is a good entry point for examining how our politics have changed over the last decade and a good place to start when thinking about the death of conservatism.

…

For the last half century, the white middle-class has been the kid getting bullied at school for his lunch money. Progressives, representing the financial elites, threatened to shove the suburban peasant into a locker. So-called conservatives kept upping the lunch money they had to pay to avoid the wedgie. Now those suburban peasants are too old for school, so those financial elites are looking to prey on their children and grandchildren to keep the plates spinning.

Steve Sailer.

What Austin does have is a lot of smart white people. I got about a 50% higher turnout in fairly small Austin than in huge Los Angeles.

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The Court declined to hear an appeal by DeRay Mckesson, leaving a lower court decision in place which revived a lawsuit brought by the Baton Rouge police officer, John Ford Reuters reports. Ford has accused Mckesson of negligence after being struck by a rock during a protest over the fatal police shooting of Alton Sterling.

In 2023, the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Mckesson’s defense that his rights to free speech and assembly under the First Amendment protect him against the negligence claim. Mckesson is being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The decision could make it easier to sue protest organizers for the illegal conduct of an attendee, according to the report.

And you know we can’t have that.

Note the contrast with the way the Jan. 6 protesters were (and are) being treated.

(If it weren’t for double standards we wouldn’t have any standards at all….)

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California created a boom by offering homeowners a chance to sell energy back to the grid at unsustainable rates.

This year utility companies then slashed what they pay to customers by 75 percent or more.

The payback time for these systems no longer makes any sense. More accurately, if you have to subsidize something, it is not economically feasible in the first place; it just looks like it.

The boom then imploded.

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‘Kaka’ is apparently a European football star.

You can’t make this shit up.

Would that this worked in real life.

The Guardian.

Hungry for niche knowledge to impress your colleagues? Troubled by the size of a hefty new book? Doubt your abilities to understand complex arguments? Well, today an increasingly competitive industry offers to take away these problems with one product: a book summary app.

Since these digital services first promised to boil down a title, usually a nonfiction work, a decade ago, the marketplace has become crowded. So much so that authors and publishers are concerned about the damage to sales, as well as to the habit of concentrated reading.

Some successful writers, including Amy Liptrot, also fear that apps such as Blinkist, Bookey, getAbstract and the latest, Headway, may be undermining the book trade and misrepresenting content.

A cursory review of several books on Amazon that I am interested in seems to suggest that any book worth reading very quickly has a ‘derivative’ work offering the same essential stuff in a quick and allegedly more digestible form. Often it’s difficult to tell which is the original and which the ‘condensed’ version. In the Good Old Days, lines of business such as Reader’s Digest Condensed Books (to which my parents were addicted, to my benefit) paid authors for the rights to ‘condense’ their books for republication; nowadays, of course, Ain’t Nobody Got Time for Dat (much less morals).

BBC.

Squatters have taken over a pub owned by Gordon Ramsay in central London, which is currently up for sale with a guide price of £13m.
The group of at least six people have boarded up windows and put up a “legal warning” defending their occupation of the Grade II-listed York & Albany hotel and gastropub near Regent’s Park.
The BBC understands they want to use the space as a community art cafe.

UnHerd.

In 1967, Lew Louderback published an article titled “More People Should Be Fat”. Fat people were being told they were ugly, immoral and unhealthy; they were discriminated against in the job market and in education. Their persecution had “more than a hint of the Nazis’ kraft durch freude [strength through joy]”, wrote Louderback.

Yet there was no civil rights movement for the overweight. “All that the fat person can do, at great personal sacrifice and daily torture, is attempt to ‘pass’ as a thin person.” Louderback and his wife had opted out. They were what he described as “honestly fat” — predisposed by a combination of inheritance and upbringing to never be skinny — and by finally ending the fight against their own bodies, they had become happier and even healthier.

Again, this is a self-correcting problem, long-term. Being fat is unhealthy. Sooner or later, fat people kill themselves with the kind of indulgences that a modern technological society makes possible and even easy. The famous Internet meme “I want to come to America. I want to see a country where the poor people are fat.” expresses the situation pretty neatly.

The Spectator.

One hundred and twenty minutes. That’s how much time more than 40 percent of American children spent on TikTok every day last year. The app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, worms its way into the minds of young people to an extraordinary degree, dwarfing their use of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X and Snapchat. And when word went out that the House of Representatives was seriously considering forcing a sale to peel the app away from the power of the Chinese Communist Party, TikTok fired back by weaponizing the same children against Congress — driving a deluge of confused phone calls to Capitol Hill, including some where teens threatened to commit suicide if the vote went forward.

The chief virtue of TikTok appears to be encouraging people whose opinions nobody in their right mind cares about to broadcast those opinions to the world.

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Carl Menger is widely recognized as one of the economists leading the so-called marginalist revolution along with William Stanley Jevons and Léon Walras. There are two other contributions by Menger that are relatively underappreciated and are vital for making sense of the socioeconomic order, including why mankind remains so lost in economic ignorance and tribalistic warmongering.

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“I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property,” Maher wrote in a May 2020 social media post. “White silence is complicity. If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community,” she wrote one day later.

I don’t find it hard at all to be mad.

Newsbusters.

CNN’s legal analyst Elie Honig writing in a Cafe Brief newsletter that was reprinted in New York magazine on Friday presented both the pro and anti Trump ways of looking at the Alvin Bragg case that takes place on April 15 in Manhattan. It is obvious which of the two point of view that Honig thinks is most realistic in “Donald Trump’s Trial Is a Rorschach Test.”

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The World Health Organization’s Dr. Hanna Nohynek testified in court that she advised her government that vaccine passports were not needed but was ignored, despite explaining that the COVID vaccines did not stop virus transmission and the passports gave a false sense of security. The stunning revelations came to light in a Helsinki courtroom where Finnish citizen Mika Vauhkala is suing after he was denied entry to a café for not having a vaccine passport.

CBS News.

an Dell is a former chemical engineer who has spent years telling an inconvenient truth about plastics. “So many people, they see the recyclable label, and they put it in the recycle bin,” she said. “But the vast majority of plastics are not recycled.”
About 48 million tons of plastic waste is generated in the U.S. each year; only 5 to 6 percent of it is actually recycled, according to the Department of Energy. The rest ends up in landfills or is burned.
Dell founded a non-profit, The Last Beach Cleanup, to fight plastic pollution. Inside her garage in Southern California is all sorts of plastic with those little arrows on it that make us think they can be recycled. But, she said, “You’re being lied to.”

Imagine my surprise.

“When you’re trying to shoot down $10,000 drones with million dollar missiles, you can see how the math works out.” — ZMan

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The best gun-control measure would be to forbid young black males from buying or carrying guns.

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Twelve news organizations on Sunday urged presumptive presidential nominees Joe Biden and Donald Trump to agree to debates, saying they were a “rich tradition” that have been part of every general election campaign since 1976.

Total bullshit. Nobody is going to be persuaded by listening to two politicians lie to the public for an hour or two. What the Narrative Merdia want is eyeballs, and that is why they want the debates, because their business model is based on getting eyeballs.

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Coming from Russia-allied Belarus, hundreds of “very aggressive” migrants carrying ladders and wielding rocks and tree branches stormed the border of Poland on Wednesday, but were repelled by security forces. Belarus has long been accused of “weaponizing” migrants by encouraging them to travel to Belarus only so they can be pushed into Poland and Lithuania.

According to a statement issued by the Polish Border Guard and reporting by Babel, the onslaught took place around 10 am in a marshy area in the dense Bia?owie?a forest, which is a popular but difficult avenue for attempted crossings by migrants from around the world.

Power Line.

very well-informed person knows that upper-income taxpayers shoulder a disproportionate share of the nation’s fiscal burden. The problem is that most people aren’t well-informed.

“To the best of your knowledge,” asked a new poll, “how much do you think the top 1% of taxpayers by income account for in terms of share of total federal income taxes paid: 1%, 12%, 42%, or 64%?”

The correct answer, as of 2020, is 42%. But less than a quarter of those surveyed guessed right. Twenty-two percent (including more than a third of Democrats) thought the top 1% of taxpayers paid only 1% of income taxes, which is wildly off the mark. Twenty-five percent suggested it was 12% of revenue. Nineteen percent shrugged and said they weren’t sure.

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The latest instance of the migrant invasion and escalating crime wave was a 20-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela who attempted to rob a bank in Sandusky, Ohio.

On April 4, Sandusky Police were called to the West Perkins Avenue bank for a ‘suspicious man loitering’, according to local media outlet Sandusky Register.

“While en route to the bank, officers received additional information that Yeixon Brito-Gonzalez, who only spoke Spanish, was asking tellers to put money in a white trash bag,” the paper said.

Video released of the attempted robbery shows the illegal alien using a translator app on a smartphone to instruct the teller to load a trash bag full of cash.

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Can Democrats take a hint? The answer is obviously no, but with millions of people flooding out of Democrat controlled places and relocating to more conservative regions one might think they would finally get the message.

Blue cities and states across the US have been experiencing a mass exodus of legal residents since before the pandemic event; many of them business owners taking their money (and job opportunities) with them. The hardest hit states in the country include New York, Illinois and California, with cities like NYC, LA, Chicago and San Francisco seeing some of the most aggressive population shift. In states like California the standard operating procedure has been to lie about the situation, using the surge of illegal immigrants to hide population loss in the census.

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An Afghan man and illegal immigrant who’s on the FBI terror watchlist has been twice apprehended in the United States only to be released by a federal apparatus that continues to make a mockery of the very notion of “border security.”

Mohammad Kharwin, 48, was first arrested in Southern California in March 2023 after he’d illegally entered the United States from Mexico, according to NBC News, which was first to report the story. Border police suspected Kharwin was on the watchlist, because one unspecified attribute matched his entry on the list.

However, for lack of additional corroborating data, he was processed and released, just like hordes of other illegal migrants before and since. He was instructed to periodically call an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, but was free to apply for asylum and permission to work in the United States. He was also free to board domestic flights.

Politico.

The ‘White Rural Rage’ narrative gets the research wrong. I know, because some of it is mine.

The Guardian.

So what happened to the graphene revolution? Why has it not transformed our world? Sir Colin Humphreys, professor of materials science at Queen Mary University of London, has a straightforward answer: “Graphene is still a very promising material. The problem has been scaling up its production. That is why it has not made the impact that was predicted.”

…

Humphreys believes the market could soon be re-energised thanks to breakthroughs in the manufacture of graphene-based devices. A key development in this drive has been made by Humphreys and his colleagues, who realised the technology used to make gallium nitride electronic components could be exploited to make graphene on a large scale.

Astral Codex Ten.

Most studies cited by both sides use “time spent doing homework” as the independent variable, then correlate it with test scores or grades. If students who do more time on homework get better test scores, they conclude homework works; otherwise, that it doesn’t.

One minor complaint about this methodology is that we don’t really know if anyone is reporting time spent on homework accurately. Cooper cites some studies showing that student-reported time-spent-on-homework correlates with test scores at a respectable r = 0.25. But in the same sample, parent-reported time-spent-on-homework correlates at close to zero. Cooper speculates that the students’ estimates are better than the parents’, and I think this makes sense – it’s easier to reduce a correlation by adding noise than to increase it – but in the end we don’t know. According to a Washington Post article, students in two very similar datasets reported very different amounts of time spent on homework – maybe because of the way they asked the question? I don’t know, self-report from schoolchildren seems fraught.

But this is the least of our problems. This methodology assumes that time spent on homework is a safe proxy for amount of homework. It isn’t. Students may spend less time on homework because they’re smart, find it easy, and can finish it very quickly. Or they might spend more time on homework because they love learning and care about the subject matter a lot. Or they might spend more time because they’re second-generation Asian immigrants with taskmaster parents who insist on it being perfect. Or they might spend less time because they’re in some kind of horrible living environment not conducive to sitting at a desk quietly. All of these make “time spent doing homework” a poor proxy for “amount of homework that teacher assigned” in a way that directly confounds a homework-test scores correlation.

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Here is a paradox: a generation whose members get more psychological therapy than any generation before them is more stressed, more anxious, and more depressed than any age group since records began. How can this be? Abigail Shrier, an author and Wall Street Journal columnist, has a suggestion: perhaps there is no paradox. Perhaps it is all this therapy that is the problem.

Nothing will screw up your head like ‘therapy’.