Read it.

After years of diligently working to make a college degree represent no more than a high school diploma, college administrators, by promoting “Explorations” type courses, are now working to make a college degree as meaningful as graduating from the 8th grade. This is why books like Academically Adrift can easily show that about half of college graduates have no measurable increase in cognitive skills over what they had in high school; 6 years of college, and all the student gets is a worthless piece of paper and a mountain of debt.

LifeHacker.

Area went for Biden by 10 points.

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“It is in Hamas’ interest, as they have defined it, to actually create a situation of misery and starvation, rather than worrying about its population and making sure that its population stays safe,” according to Awi Federgruen, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business and a global supply chain expert.

The United Nations says there is a “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza, which has led to additional pressure on Israel to allow more aid into the region, but Federgruen says the problem lies more in the aid not reaching the people it is intended to help.

“A quick analysis shows that the amount of food that is coming in from Israel is absolutely plentiful to feed every single individual that lives in Gaza,” the professor says.

Read it.

Oh, ya think?

Read it.

Earlier today, a stunning report was published alleging that the Obama administration “actively interfered” in order to hinder the FBI from arresting individuals suspected of aiding and abetting Iran’s efforts to develop a nuclear bomb. We didn’t hear a peep about this interference on any of the network evening newscasts. Given their proclivities, a reasonable person may wonder whether they’ll report on these developments at all.

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MSNBC’s host Joy Reid pounced on a since-deleted video posted to former President Trump’s Truth Social account. The video – made by a third party – briefly flashed the words “unified Reich” in a series of newspaper clippings. Reid characterized the post as a definitive representation of Trump’s fascist views, and ridiculously suggested that no one in the media was talking about it and that no one was calling him a Nazi.

In addition, she repeatedly referenced several fascist leaders, especially Adolf Hitler, and accused other conservatives of relentlessly promoting fascist thought through their opinions and policies.

After playing the now-deleted campaign ad, Reid ridiculously proclaimed: “As per usual, much of the media is downplaying the fact that the Republican nominee is once again using Nazi language.”

Read it.

How about (more accurately) ‘morality impaired individual’?

Or just use ‘perpetrator’. That works every time.

Read it.

How can they tell it from ordinary modern teen psychosis?

NewsMax.

On Tuesday, Crook County, Oregon, voted in support of a ballot measure to begin negotiations to secede from the state and join Idaho.

The movement known as Greater Idaho seeks to move the border between Oregon and Idaho to include 14 full eastern Oregon counties and 3 partial ones. According to the group’s website, the Crook vote now brings the total to 13 counties that have passed Greater Idaho measures. In 2023, the Idaho House passed a memorial inviting the Oregon Legislation to begin border talks.

Hot Air.

OK, it’s time to put on your tin foil hats because every damn conspiracy theory is proving to be true.

Sure, I still believe men landed on the moon and that the Earth is round, but I am beginning to doubt almost everything else.

Welcome to our world….

Read it.

Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

Nature.

Genetic information usually travels down a one-way street: genes written in DNA serve as the template for making RNA molecules, which are then translated into proteins. That tidy textbook story got a bit complicated in 1970 when scientists discovered that some viruses have enzymes called reverse transcriptases, which scribe RNA into DNA — the reverse of the usual traffic flow.

Now, scientists have discovered an even weirder twist1. A bacterial version of reverse transcriptase reads RNA as a template to make completely new genes written in DNA. These genes are then transcribed back into RNA, which is translated into protective proteins when a bacterium is infected by a virus. By contrast, viral reverse transcriptases don’t make new genes; they merely transfer information from RNA to DNA.

“This is crazy molecular biology,” says Aude Bernheim, a bioinformatician at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who was not involved in the research. “I would have never guessed this type of mechanism existed.”

Interesting Engineering.

The researchers use a phenomenon called thermodiffusion, a temperature gradient to move salt from the warmer to the colder side to bring about desalination. In this process, water remains in the liquid phase, and no energy is spent turning it into vapor and cooling it back.

In a technology demonstrator, the researchers used a narrow channel for the seawater. They sandwiched it between two plates maintained at different temperatures. The top plate was heated to over 140 Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius), while the lower plate was cooled to 68 Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius).
The channel was a little over one and a half feet long, and low-salinity water emerged from the top while high-salinity water emerged from its bottom. After a single pass, cooler and saltier water was removed, and warmer and less salty water was put back into the setup.

Each pass saw the water’s salinity decrease by three percent, and using multiple cycles, the salinity decreased from 30,000 parts per million to less than 500 ppm.

Interestingly, the heat needed to carry out the process can come directly from sunlight or even waste heat generated during industrial processes.

Read it.

Illegal immigrants are surging the border now because they believe Donald Trump is going to win the election in November and enforce security, according to a report quoting the illegals themselves.

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

The American Mind.

You have surely heard that your search results on Google (with 92 percent share of the search market) reflect not your curiosities and needs but someone or something else’s views on what you need to know. That’s hardly a secret.

And on Facebook, you are likely inundated by links to official sources to correct any errors you might carry in your head, as well as links to corrections to posts as made by any number of fact-checking organizations.

You have likely also heard of YouTube videos being taken down, apps deleted from stores, and accounts being canceled across a variety of platforms.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

There has been a lot written and said about the decline of intelligence in the Western world, mostly focused on the Idiocracy side of it. Everyday life is getting dumber, compounded by the demographic collapse. Basic processes can easily turn into an ordeal due to stupid people tasked with operating systems that were designed for operators a standard deviation smarter than the current crop. What no one thinks too much about is how this collapse in IQ is impacting the elites.

The dream of the managerial class is to establish themselves as an unassailable aristocracy that rules over a docile population of workers. It is why they favor open borders and mass migration as it provides an unlimited supply of what they imagine to be their ideal helot class. Even if there are pockets of smart challengers out there among the teaming masses, they will be too busy dealing with diversity to organize an opposition to the managerial elite.

This is a good place to start with the decline of elite intelligence. It is not as if we lack data on this sort of arrangement. The end of colonialism in Africa, for example, is a great example of how quantity has a quality of its own. Millions of 80-IQ Africans were able to overthrow thousands of high-IQ Europeans. Today we see something similar as the Mizrahi slowly push aside the Ashkenazim in Israel. They are not as smart as their European tribesman, but they have numbers.

Read it.

Connecticut law enforcement officials released an illegal immigrant convicted of killing two young children in a drunk driving accident, despite a detainer request lodged against him, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said.

ICE agents arrested the man, identified as Israel Alejandro Gonzalez-Arcinega, 40. The Mexican national was convicted 10 years ago of two counts of manslaughter, illegal operation of a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol, and other crimes in Connecticut, the agency announced in a press release Monday.

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Close to three-fourths of the humanitarian aid transported from a new $320 million floating pier built by the U.S. military off the Gaza coast was stolen on Saturday en route to a U.N. warehouse, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

Muslims have a free pass for stealing from non-Muslims, as Mohammed himself did.

Read it.

As Americans struggle to keep up with the rising tide of prices and feel the squeeze of high interest rates on housing, President Joe Biden continues to claim that the economy is good. “Bidenomics” is working, there’s no recession to see here, so shut up and enjoy the drag queen performances at the White House.

That narrative took a hit back in 2022, however, when America experienced two consecutive quarters of decline in gross domestic product—the traditional definition of a recession. In the first quarter of 2022, inflation-adjusted GDP declined in the U.S. by 1.6%, and it declined by an additional 0.6% in the second quarter of that year.

The Biden administration responded by simply redefining the word “recession.” The move made a bizarre kind of sense coming from a bureaucracy that has redefined what it means to be a woman.

But the Narrative Media are all in: Majority of Americans wrongly believe US is in recession – and most blame Biden (The Guardian)  ‘Wrongly’? Somebody’s been drinking the Kool-Aid….

Read it.

The Biden administration’s experiment with a relatively open southern border has been shocking in the sheer number of people who have come across in just over three years, estimated to be about ten million. But the most shocking thing about the border policy may have just been revealed.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), headed by the impeached Alejandro Mayorkas, recently proposed a new rule. In a statement announcing the rule, DHS unwittingly revealed that it has not been doing background checks on these millions of illegal immigrants in order to immediately deport those with criminal records or terrorism ties. Instead, they have been leaving that determination until the asylum hearing, which occurs many years down the road. In the meantime, they remain in the U.S. awaiting the hearing.

Ben Shapiro.

Many ancient cultures believed that history was circular: Native American cultures often believed that reality itself was circular; Hinduism thinks similarly. The Judeo-Christian West thought differently: that God exists outside of time, but that he guides mankind forward, step by stumbling step, toward an eschatological culmination.

This means that the West has thought, more than any other culture, about progress.

It also means that the West tends to mistake movement in time for progress, and way stations in history as endpoints. Thus, World War I was labeled “the war to end all wars” … until World War II. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama suggested the possibility of an “end of history” … until history reasserted itself along the lines of Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations.

“Soapboxing is a one-way conversation.” — Rian Stone

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The shootdown of Korean Air Lines flight 007 took the lives of 269 people and raised troubling questions on both sides of the Pacific. How could a trained flight crew make such a colossal navigational error, and then fail to notice for five and a half hours? Were they really so unaware? And how could Soviet air defense fail to recognize that the airliner wasn’t a threat? Did they know that they were attacking a plane full of civilians? For ten years, these questions had no concrete answers, becoming fuel for wild speculation and deliberate manipulation by politicians and amateur observers alike, building a cloud of myth and mystery around the events of that September night. But with the end of the Cold War came an end to the embargo on information, and since 1993 a great deal has come to light about what really happened — not only on board flight 007, but also among the Soviet military personnel who shot it down, and within the halls of power in Moscow and Washington, where staunch cold warriors used the shootdown to further their goals at the expense of the truth. Piecing together the evidence reveals that that truth is at once extraordinary and mundane; unbelievable yet inevitable; monstrous, but also terrifyingly human — a story that still lingers darkly in the imagination more than 40 years after it began.

Check it out.

Erik Prince is a former Navy SEAL and founder of the Blackwater military security company that the left has used for a verbal punching bag since forever.

Read it.

Thanks to a 7-2 vote of the Supreme Court, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will continue to be funded by the Federal Reserved instead of congressional appropriations. As the people should know, the court ruling does not confer any merit on the CFPB, a legacy of the Carter-Era Community Reinvestment Act. The CFPB was based on the assumption that even educated and informed consumers are unable to look out for themselves without help from politicians.

Read it.

Normally, coups in Africa are nothing to write about. But starting in 2020, we saw six countries flip into a pro-Russian direction in just three years. Individually, they were a curiosity. Taken together, that rate of turnover outpaced even the most optimistic neoconservative ambitions for pro–United States regime changes in the Middle East. As General Wesley Clark summarized, “We’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

Read it.

The primary appeal of fast-food burgers (even though the food is horrible for your health) is cheap and fast. In recent weeks, McDonald’s indirectly admitted that three years of ‘McFlation’ was crushing burger demand among working-poor consumers, and there was an urgent need within the burger chain to reintroduce the $5 meal deal.

Read it.

Read it.

Too much.

One of the biggest defense topics as of late is the supply of advanced missiles. Russia’s continuous onslaught of aerial attacks on Ukraine, as well as Kyiv’s ability to defend against them, and the defense of Israel from Iran’s large-scale drone and missile barrage, as well as the threat of China in the Pacific, has brought supply and cost concerns regarding these weapons to the forefront. But the Houthi’s constant barrages on shipping in and around the Red Sea, and the defense put up to counter it, has really highlighted just how fast these weapons can be depleted in the naval domain, even against relatively lowly threats.
With this in mind, we followed up on a story of ours from a few years ago on the actual unit costs of the Navy’s diverse array of ship-launched missiles, from SAMs to anti-ship and land-attack types, with the latest figures and put it into a comprehensive video as part of our new YouTube channel.
While nobody would venture to guess that any of these weapons are cheap, some will be very surprised just how expensive they are. Still, it’s always worth remembering that what the missiles are defending or what targets they are attacking are often far more costly or precious, at least in a big-picture sense, than their own value.

Read it.

A West Virginia teen trans athlete defeated nearly 300 girls more than 700 times in middle school track events, according to a court document that’s part of a lawsuit that seeks to prevent the Biden administration’s new Title IX rules from going into effect.

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Former director of the defunct Disinformation Governance Board (DGB), Nina Jankowicz, said President Joe Biden’s disinformation policing government does not even have a consistent definition of disinformation.

Rep. Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee released the transcript of Jankowicz’s sworn testimony to the committee which it gathered in April 2023. In her testimony, Jankowicz pointed out discrepancies in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) definition of disinformation. DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency “has one definition, and one of the things that occurred to me while I was at DHS is that different entities were dealing with different definitions,” she said. But according to Jordan, CISA’s definition is merely “anything that they deem false.”

The leftist disinformation activist said that creating protocols for identifying misinformation, disinformation and misinformation “wasn’t really at the top of the list” of things to do. “And so, to get to identification, you first have to kind of have an agreement about what you’re talking about,” said Jankowicz. “You can’t say that something is a bear if you don’t know what a bear looks like. So that’s where we were.”

Read it.

How does one get to be a ‘totalitarianism expert’? Is there a course? A degree program? A secret decoder ring? In any case, it sounds like a well-paid gig.

The American Mind.

A few years ago, law professor Gail Heriot pointed out a problem that some on the Right have been noticing for quite some time: “Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal.” She argued that at its core, disparate impact liability is an “incoherent” legal doctrine, because “all job qualifications have a disparate impact” on at least one protected class. Established in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), disparate impact liability grants “astonishing discretion” to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to enforce laws against workplace discrimination.

Disparate impact liability is a feature, not a bug, of our present regime. The supposed ubiquity of guilt allows the state total license to pick and choose its criminals. If everyone is guilty, then anyone may be singled out for punishment at any time.

What disparate impact liability is to the field of employment law, left-academia’s indictment of settler colonialism is to the study of history. Just as the EEOC indiscriminately targets employers whose hiring happens to disfavor non-whites, the academy is likewise free to accuse nations of injustice that have displaced—you guessed it—non-whites.

Yale Insights.

As far as most social media users know, the most powerful tool through which platforms steer public opinion is through the outright removal of objectionable content or users. But Zaman argues that there’s a more potent means through which social media platforms can control collective opinions over time, called “shadow banning.” Part of this tool’s power derives from the fact that it’s currently near-impossible to uncover, even by policymakers or software engineering experts.

Read it.

In a story penned Monday and updated Tuesday morning, Reuters’s Michelle Nicholas explained things haven’t exactly gone swimmingly (pun intended) for aid coming from a U.S.-constructed pier into Hamas-controlled Gaza as 11 out of 16 trucks on Saturday never made it to their intended destinations (and thus, being able to reach storage) as they were raided along the way. As such, by Monday afternoon, no delivers came through since Saturday.

Muslims have a free pass to steal from non-Muslims; Mohammed set that standard.

Read it.

Back in March, when reading the mammoth, 1050-page bill that was meant to avert government shutdown, but was yet another pork filled free-for-all bonanza authorizing $1.7 trillion in in discretionary spending, we stumbled upon something that was truly shocking: after Biden singlehandedly drained half of the US strategic petroleum reserve to avoid obliteration for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, Congress has snuck in a provision that would sell off and shutter the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve, a move that while perhaps keeps gas prices lower for a day or two, would also leave the entire continental northeast defenseless to any true environmental catastrophe or shock. We were so dismayed by the inclusion of this particular text, we wondered if it hadn’t been put there solely for the benefit of America’s enemies…

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I guess he’s a Democrat after all.

‘Black farmers’? I’m sure there are some ‘black farmers’ somewhere, but I’ve never seen one, or heard tell of one. There are already government programs for ‘women and minorities‘; what more explicitly racist benefits are needed?

BBC.

Self-labelled neo-Luddites and the tech-stressed are searching for phones with fewer features. Industry experts cite precarious profit margins and a wobbly market around this niche need.

The New Neo.

The Act was introduced by stripping an old bill of its content and replacing it with this content and then fast-tracking it in a stealth way without hearings or publicity. Now it’s the law, and it’s an incredible one that will have enormous repercussions.

The Register.

Chipmaking equipment supplier ASML reportedly has the means to remotely disable its advanced machinery in the hands of TSMC, should China invade Taiwan.

Tensions are high between mainland China and Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a rogue province that it has threatened to reclaim by force.

This is a major concern as a large proportion of the world’s advanced chip manufacturing capacity is found there, and the US in particular is keen to prevent China from having the ability to produce advanced chips for military purposes.

Netherlands-based ASML is said to have reassured the Dutch government that it can remotely disable its most advanced chipmaking machines should such an invasion happen, at least according to Bloomberg, which cites anonymous sources claimed to be familiar with the matter.

Read it.

Federal prosecutors on Friday announced charges against five people in connection with a Chicago-based scheme that staged armed robberies so the purported victims could apply for U.S. immigration visas reserved for legitimate crime victims.

CWBChicago had been working behind the scenes on the story, but withheld publication until charges were announced at the request of our sources. Now, we can tell you the incredible details.

Officials believe hundreds of people, including some who traveled from out of town, posed as customers in dozens of businesses across Chicago and elsewhere, all hoping to win favorable immigration status by becoming “victims” of pre-arranged “armed robberies.”

During a staged hold-up in Bucktown last year, one of the “robbers” accidentally fired their gun, severely injuring a liquor store clerk, according to one source. During that caper alone, five “customers” were “robbed.”

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

Last week brought news that the iconic restaurant chain Red Lobster has filed for bankruptcy protection and has started closing locations. The chain is mostly known for being a cheap night out for people in the suburbs and businessmen stuck near a suburban business park. The people hired to write about business for regime media, people who know nothing about business, have rolled with the usual lines about how casual dining was devastated by the pandemic.

The joke online is that Red Lobster’s all you can eat shrimp deal cost them millions because diversity would sit there for hours eating shrimp. The restaurant admits it was a disaster for them, but the real reason the chain has failed is that it was taken over by gangsters who made it into a bust-out. The gangsters in this case are private equity investors who bought up the chain. This bankruptcy is part of fleecing the dumb money that still remains trapped in the enterprise.

The way these scams work is the private investors swoop in and buy a property that is asset rich but cash poor. That is, they have things of value, but those things are not generating enough revenue to meet expenses. Sometimes the enterprise is profitable but needs cash to expand or maybe reorganize itself to shed poorly performing assets and expand into more profitable areas. Private equity comes in with attractive terms and an army of experts to reshape the enterprise.

In reality, they usually sell the assets in deals that have the buyer lease back the asset to the company in order to raise quick cash. Other times the asset is pledged as collateral in a similar sort of debt arrangement. The result is the enterprise quickly raises cash to pay the investors with a healthy profit but is left stripped of its assets and often holding a lot of debt. This is what happened here. The new investors sold the real estate in lease-back deals that are now expiring.

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CBS’s Stephen Colbert reacted on Monday’s edition of The Late Show to the story that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s wife Martha-Ann flew an upside-down flag at their home in response to neighborly abuse by accusing the couple of being Nazis.

Colbert declared that “when it comes to January 6th cases argued before the Court, Alito has been highly sympathetic to the mob. That’s like when your couples therapist is wearing a shirt that says, “Team David.” There’s no possible justification for a Supreme Court justice displaying a symbol of insurrection at his home.”

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In just the last month, eight heinous crimes occurred that shouldn’t have happened — because they were committed by lawbreakers who wouldn’t even be in the country, if the Biden administration was doing its job of protecting the border.

Arrests of illegal immigrants in crimes ranging from sexual assaults to fatal car crashes have made news in their local communities but have gone COMPLETELY unreported by the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks.

This continues a trend that the MRC reported on back in April.

Read it.

Northwestern appears to have broken a U.S. law called the Clery Act by failing to take and publish police reports from students who say they were assaulted, battered, stolen from, or witnessed crimes committed by anti-Israel protesters on campus. Failure to do so would allow the university to report lower crime numbers and portray a false picture of campus safety.

Northwestern, a private school that receives hundreds of millions of dollars annually in federal subsidies, contracts, and grants, is already in hot water after capitulating to anti-Israel rioters who illegally occupied both its campuses, in Chicago and in Evanston, Illinois.

This week in Washington, a House committee expects to hear from Northwestern’s president on what he did about the protests and why.

New York Post.

President Biden was forced to correct himself after yet another brutal gaffe Monday evening, when he told attendees at a White House Jewish heritage celebration that maimed US citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin was “here with us today” — when in fact he remains a hostage in the Gaza Strip.

“My administration is working around the clock to free the remaining hostages, just as we have freed hostages already. And here with us today is Hersh Goldberg-Polin,” Biden, 81, announced at the Rose Garden party.

A moment later, the president added, “He is not here with us. But he is still being held by Hamas.”