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.

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

Times of controversy and conflict make or break leaders. During his moment of testing, University of Nevada, Las Vegas President Keith Whitfield, like many college presidents, is crumbling.

Whitfield recently met with the UNLV chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. That alone was a major error. Earlier this month, this group helped sponsor a “Walkout for Palestine” at UNLV. At that event, protesters chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Long life the intifada.” The first is a call to wipe out Israel, which would result in the murder of millions of Jews. The second is praise for terror campaigns, including bombings, directed at Israelis.

Most people choose friends poorly.

Dennis Prager.

All my adult life, I have warned people about the low moral and intellectual level of colleges and universities. This is the way I have put it: “If you send your child to college, you are playing Russian Roulette with his or her values.”

Except Hillsdale.

I have always made it clear that for STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) and a few other specialized subjects, there may be no choice. You can’t learn those subjects on your own. But parents take serious risks when they send their child to college.

Actually, you can learn those subjects on your own; you just can’t get the credential that will get you a high-paying job. No amount of time spent with Coursera or Kahn Academy will match the pull of a degree from MIT or CalTech.

Financial Times.

The Financial Times is the Wall Street Journal of the UK … if the Wall Street Journal were put out by the staff of Mother Jones.

The ‘super-rich’ are of course already being taxed; they’re just not being taxed into poverty, which is what proglodytes are really after.

Read it.

When the president of Slovakia called last week’s attempted assassination of Prime Minister Robert Fico “an attack on democracy,” every other EU leader nodded along. Yet behind the formal expressions of sympathy for Fico, the ambivalent reaction from Europe’s political and media elites to the attack on an elected national leader suggests that the EU establishment is not such a staunch defender of democracy after all.

Of course, nobody in high places expressed support for the would-be assassin or openly said that Slovakia’s populist PM deserved to get shot. But the implicit message was that such a ‘divisive’ and ‘polarising’ figure as Fico might have been asking for it. Summing up the mainstream news coverage, right-wing Italian media commentator Mario Giordano concluded that, “Basically, even if it isn’t specifically written in the newspapers, he was almost right to shoot him and he deserved it a little.”

For the Brussels oligarchy and their allies, Fico represents the ‘wrong’ sort of democracy. His Smer-Social Democracy party won last year’s elections on a platform which opposed mass migration, defended national sovereignty against centralised EU control, criticised NATO’s arming of Ukraine, and vowed to send “Not One Round” to Slovakia’s neighbour in its war against Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Read it.

Many families with children research an area’s school district before considering buying a home. Furthermore, homes in good-quality school districts tend to have higher value than those in less desirable school districts. Although all children in America have access to public education, in reality, the quality of that education can vary widely based on location.

Teachers are critical in providing students with a quality education, however, many teacher positions are left unfilled. Unfortunately, 79% of public schools with open positions reported hiring difficulties in August of 2023 (per the Department of Education.) Most recently, test scores have fallen in students. For example, the share of eighth graders who are proficient in core subjects has fallen is only 26% in math and 31% in reading, according to government data.

In response to this, Americans have less confidence in the education system than ever before in history. A 2023 Gallup poll revealed less than a quarter of Americans (23%) expressed a high level of confidence in public schools. In 1975, confidence was at a record high of 62%, and just a few years ago in 2020, it was at 41%.

Read it.

Considering the paltry amount that Social Security pays (about the same as unemployment), it’s disgusting that any state taxes such benefits.

And you will note that the Federal government will tax your benefits as well.

Read it.

Navigating the world of benefits programs can feel like trying to decipher a secret decoder ring. If you need a helping hand to make ends meet, you may be surprised to find out that getting help might actually stop you from getting help. (That’s more than a bit confusing!)

Yet, that’s the exact situation many people with disabilities or limited resources found themselves in with Supplement Security Income (SSI). SSI provides a lifeline for many, offering monthly payments for basic needs like rent, food, and medicine. You can read our Social Security guide for more information on how this program works.

For a while, if you lived in the wrong state and received help to pay for your rent, it could actually hurt your chances of getting SSI or even lead to decreased benefits.

Read it.

I waiting for the establishment of a Gluttony Month.

Read it.

Many Americans carry a firearm for personal protection, but the laws for doing so vary drastically by state. Although the same federal laws apply to each citizen of the United States, states have additional restrictions within their borders. In fact, between federal, state, and local municipalities, there are over 20,000 gun laws on record, and in some parts of the country, gun owners are subject to far more restrictions. One of the most noticeable differences, however, is how states and localities regulate guns (especially concealed firearms) in public areas.

Read it.

French media outlet Atlantico recently discussed the European Union’s Asylum and Migration Pact wtih Rodrigo Ballester, head of the Centre for European Studies at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest and Ministerial Commissioner for Higher Education, and Philippe Moreau Defarges, professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and specialist in geopolitics. They provided an analysis about how the situations in the Netherlands and Poland are a prelude to a larger debate on migration that will take place in the new European Parliament after the elections.

Steve Sailer.

A new California law declares that disparate racial impact in sentencing rates of convicts, regardless of the felon’s individual criminal history, is prima facie proof of systemic racism and justification for a reduced sentence for black criminals.

Taking the notion of ‘disparate impact’ to its logical conclusion.

Time to leave.

Read it.

There are so many Muslim culture-enrichers in Germany now that a leading pedagogue wants to institute formal Islamic education in the public schools.

The big question is who will do the teaching. Will it be native German pedagogues who have undergone training in the intricacies of sharia? Or will it be imams “with a migration background”? If the latter — which I assume will most likely be the case — the problem will be finding any that are not under the control of Ditib (Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs [Turkish: Diyanet ??leri Ba?kanl???; German: Türkisch-Islamische Union der Anstalt für Religion]) or Iran (I don’t know the name of the Iranian religious authority in Germany, but I’m sure there must be one).

Chances are, when the new curriculum has been put together and the teachers assigned, everything will be under Turkish control, but everyone involved will pretend that’s not the case.

Power Line.

Minnesota’s Department of Education allowed taxpayers to be defrauded of somewhere between $250 million and $500 million in programs that ostensibly were intended to feed poor children during covid.

Of course, if you did the math, there aren’t that many poor children in Minnesota, and the facilities whose operators got the money couldn’t possibly have fed the many thousands of kids for whom they claimed reimbursement. The fraud was open and obvious.

The real moral of the story is that Democrats are not actually opposed to the government being defrauded. They think that the purpose of government is to take money from some and give it to others–i.e., the ones who vote for them. If hundreds of millions are obtained by fraud, so what? The dollars went to their friends and supporters. In the Democrats’ eyes, there is little difference between legitimate social welfare payments to qualified claimants and outright theft. Which, now that I think of it, should tell you something.

Read it.

But you knew that.

Read it.

The percentage of U.S. adults holding an advanced degree increased by over 3% from 2011-2021. This increase in education is assumed to have a crucial role in America’s increasing economic strength over that time period. The expertise gained from such degrees is supposed to be valuable enough to outweigh the time and money put into grad degrees, both from the student’s perspective and the perspective of the schools and institutions that so often fund graduate degrees. In developing countries, college graduation rates are positively correlated with economic success. This same effect is thought to translate to America’s current explosion of higher education. This belief is held so strongly that the federal government spent 311,000,000,000 dollars on higher education in 2021.

However, a high advanced degree rate is much less strongly linked to national and individual success than universities would like you to think.

Unfortunately, when everybody goes to college, going to college doesn’t put you ahead of other applicants for a job.

Not to mention that the degeneration of the educational system means that employers need to specify a college degree in order to find people with the amount of eduction that fifty years ago we could expect high school graduates to have.

Read it.

The latest blotter entry comes to us from the US Government Accounting Office (GAO), via a new report pointedly titled “F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: Program Continues to Encounter Production Issues and Modernization Delays.”According to GAO, Lockheed Martin is running out of parking space for all the completed F-35s that the Pentagon refuses to accept.

These aren’t one-by-one rejects. Last summer, the DOD put a complete freeze on accepting the stealth fighters until Lockheed fixed huge hardware and software problems associated with “Technology Refresh-3” (TR-3), a $1.8 billion package intended to expand the planes’ capabilities.

Read it.

In the first – but certainly not last – major shake up at a key US financial regulator under the Biden admin, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Martin Gruenberg bowed to pressure to resign from the bank regulator after an external investigation found widespread sexual harassment at the agency and lawmakers of both parties berated his leadership, capping a nearly two-decade career at the agency.

But he’ll undoubtedly still receive a lush pension.

In a press release, Gruenberg said he would resign once a successor had been confirmed, avoiding an outcome that would leave FDIC Vice Chairman Travis Hill, a Republican, as the agency’s acting chairman. Hill is a former staffer at the agency who has served on the five-member board for about a year.

God forbid that a Republican should ever be in charge of anything at any time, however much qualified.

Read it.

The city of Oakland, California, known for its extreme leftism, is replacing some traffic lights in the city with a four-way stop sign, according to CBS News

The city isn’t taking this step to improve the flow of traffic or anything like that.

Instead, city officials decided to remove the traffic signal because copper theft has become rampant, and thieves keep tampering with the electrical boxes that control the lights.

Read it.

The World Economic Forum’s catchphrase you’ll own nothing and be happy was widely mocked as an eyebrow-raising vision of a “sharing economy” future without the implicit agency granted by full ownership. Renting stuff that one needed only for one-time use has long been a market, and car-sharing makes sense for urban dwellers who only need a vehicle on occasion.

But to own nothing still implies powerlessness and poverty, not happiness, which continues to be associated with owning income streams and nice things, i.e. wealth.

Given our dependence on software / digital rights and the phantom wealth of credit-asset bubbles,”how much do we actually own?” is a fair question. Consider the recent New York Times article Why Tech Companies Are Not Your Friends: Lessons From Roku, which was reprinted in other publications with the more accurate title Our Gadgets Are Not Ours.

Read it.

ByteDance may be suing the Department of Justice (DOJ), but the two have now joined forces in an effort to fast-track the company’s legal challenge to a potentially imminent TikTok ban.

‘Opposing parties’? Say rather ‘the two wings of the Establishment UniParty’.

Drug-overdose deaths don’t bother me. Think of it as evolution in action. Natural selection is like gravity–it works even when you don’t want it to.

Read it.

More than half of U.S. voters support deporting all illegal immigrants in the country according to a new poll from Reuters and Ipsos released on Monday.

Will the government act? Of course not.

CNN.

Ocean water is pushing miles beneath Antarctica’s “Doomsday Glacier,” making it more vulnerable to melting than previously thought, according to new research which used radar data from space to perform an X-ray of the crucial glacier.

As the salty, relatively warm ocean water meets the ice, it’s causing “vigorous melting” underneath the glacier and could mean global sea level rise projections are being underestimated, according to the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Call me when the sea level actually rises.

Falling in:

Washington Poop: This ‘doomsday’ glacier is more vulnerable than scientists once thought

The Hill: Researchers studying ‘doomsday glacier’ make worrying discovery

UCI News: UC Irvine-led team uncovers ‘vigorous melting’ at Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier

SciTechDaily.

A new study led by researchers from UCL and the University of Vigo suggests that the ability to regulate body temperature, a characteristic shared by all mammals and birds, may have first evolved in some dinosaurs during the early Jurassic period, around 180 million years ago.

In the early 20th century, dinosaurs were considered slow-moving, “cold-blooded” animals like modern-day reptiles, relying on heat from the sun to regulate their temperature. Newer discoveries indicate some dinosaur types were likely capable of generating their own body heat but when this adaptation occurred is unknown.

National Library of Medicine.

Results: Of the 51 patients completing the study, 26 (51%) were treated with duct tape, and 25 (49%) were treated with cryotherapy. Twenty-two patients (85%) in the duct tape arm vs 15 patients (60%) enrolled in the cryotherapy arm had complete resolution of their warts (P =.05 by chi(2) analysis). The majority of warts that responded to either therapy did so within the first month of treatment.

No indication as to whether WD-40 was involved.

The Atlantic.

For more than two decades, through two wars and domestic upheaval, the idea that al-Qaeda acted alone on 9/11 has been the basis of U.S. policy. A blue-ribbon commission concluded that Osama bin Laden had pioneered a new kind of terrorist group—combining superior technological know-how, extensive resources, and a worldwide network so well coordinated that it could carry out operations of unprecedented magnitude. This vanguard of jihad, it seemed, was the first nonstate actor that rivaled nation-states in the damage it could wreak.
That assessment now appears wrong. And if our understanding of what transpired on 9/11 turns out to have been flawed, then the costly policies that the United States has pursued for the past quarter century have been rooted in a false premise.

Read it.

You can’t make this shit up.

ZMan is not impressed.

Putting aside the nature of the new oligarchs, the nature of the managerial class that actually runs the empire has changed as well. The type of person who slithers his way up into senior positions is different from the old managerial elite. The top officials in government a generation ago, for example, were the product of different selection pressures than those of today. A generation ago, deeds still counted for something in the competition for status within the meritocracy.

Look around at the people running foreign policy now and you cannot help but notice that they are not exceptional at anything. It is one of the things that makes a guy like John Mearsheimer jump off the screen in the geopolitical debate. In addition to having been right about most things over the last twenty years, he is an immensely talented, intelligent, and confident man. By comparison, Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland come off as dull and confused.

Read it.

Why is it so hard for entrepreneurs to get mortgages? Why did the address I send my payment to change? Why don’t most banks own mortgages anymore? Why is there a thriving economy of small specialist lenders locally who only do mortgages? Why is a 30-year fixed rate mortgage available at all?

Welcome to the wild and wooly world for mortgages in the United States: the world’s most important manufactured product that virtually no users understand. For starters, virtually no one outside of the value chain considers a mortgage a manufactured product at all. Most people who own homes think they were the primary customer of the mortgage, but that’s not true.

The reason that people in ‘finance’ make eye-watering amounts of money is that they enjoy working in mathematically-complicated areas of the economy that make most people’s brains hurt.

OffGuardian.

We are caught in a vicious cycle of too many laws, too many cops, and too little freedom.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or a Nanny State Idiocracy.

Whatever the label, this overbearing despotism is what happens when government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

Power Line.

May 19 marks the birthdays of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, the pair who inspired the May 19th Communist Organization, according to William Rosenau, “the first and only women-created and women-led terrorist group,” and “sort of an offshoot of the Weather Underground.” In 2020 Rosenau authored Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol, which the May 19s pulled off on November 7, 1983, hardly their only terrorist action.

The gals collaborated with the Black Liberation Army, whose member Joanne Chesimard was imprisoned for killing a police officer. May 19 bomber Susan Rosenberg played a role in Chesimard’s escape from prison, and the group’s Judy Clark was Rosenberg’s accomplice in the 1981 Brink’s robbery that took the lives of police officers Peter Paige and Edward O’Grady and security guard Waverly Brown. In 2001, President Clinton pardoned Rosenberg and in 2016 New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo commuted Clark’s sentence and she was granted parole in 2019. Other May 19 vets are still on the run.

The FBI is offering up to $100,000 for information on Elizabeth Ann Duke wanted for “alleged involvement in a series of criminal activities during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.” The fugitive, born in 1940, is “armed and dangerous” and an escape risk. The FBI is offering up to $20,000 for information leading to the arrest of Donna Joan Borup, an “alleged domestic terrorist.” If captured now, Joe Biden would doubtless pardon the pair.

The Spectator.

It’s fighting season in Afghanistan again. When the Americans were in charge, after the poppy fields had been harvested in late spring, and the madrassas in Pakistan that supplied the Taliban with fanatical soldiers had finished for the term, the Islamists kicked off the fighting. Between 2001 and 2021, around 200,000 people died. Now an insurgent group called the National Resistance Front are starting the annual springtime assaults, this time against the Taliban government.

Read it.

The Regime Media, which at one time falsely foisted “Don’t Say Gay” upon the American public in protest of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, now suddenly find themselves in a similar pickle thanks to President Joe Biden’s commencement address at Morehouse College.

Read it.

Hertz’s foray into renting EVs hasn’t been a runaway success. The rental agency is liquidating its excess Teslas due to limited demand and tanking values, while those who have rented its EVs haven’t always had a good experience. Last week, we reported on a customer who was charged $277 for gasoline his rented Tesla couldn’t have possibly used—and now, we’ve heard from other Hertz customers who say they’ve been charged even more.

Hertz caught attention last week for how it handled a customer whom it had charged a “Skip the Pump” fee, which allows renters to pay a premium for Hertz to refill the tank for them. But of course, this customer’s rented Tesla Model 3 didn’t use gas—it draws power from a battery—and Hertz has a separate, flat fee for EV recharges. Nevertheless, the customer was charged $277.39 despite returning the car with the exact same charge they left with, and Hertz refused to refund it until after our story ran.

It’s no isolated incident either, as other customers have written in to inform us that it happened to them, too.

SciTechDaily.

A long-term study at the University of Bonn has shown that plants can genetically adapt to the specific conditions of organic farming. In the study, researchers cultivated barley on two adjacent fields, employing conventional farming techniques on one and organic practices on the other.

Over the course of more than 20 years, the organic barley was enriched with specific genetic material that differed from the comparative culture. Among other things, the results demonstrate how important it is to cultivate varieties, especially for organic farming. The results have now been published in the journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development.

Leaves the anti-GMO crazies in a cleft stick.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

The Atlantic.

Allow me to explain my toilet theory of the internet. The premise, while unprovable, is quite simple: At any given moment, a great deal of the teeming, frenetic activity we experience online—clicks, views, posts, comments, likes, and shares—is coming from people who are scrolling on their phones in the bathroom.

Toilet theory isn’t necessarily literal, of course. Mindless scrolling isn’t limited to the bathroom, and plenty of idle or bored swiping happens during other down moments—while waiting in line, or sitting in gridlocked traffic. Right now, somebody somewhere is probably reading an article or liking an Instagram post with a phone in one hand and an irritable infant in the other.

I have a huge stack of Dilbert and Sherman’s Lagoon books in everyone of my bathrooms, so I never take the phone into the bathroom.

Read it.

Cases of a rare autoimmune disease surged between 2020 and 2022 in Yorkshire, England, peaking in 2021. COVID-19 infection and its vaccines possibly contributed to the rise, a recent study in The Lancet’s eBioMedicine found.