Read it.

The Sept. 1, 2021, mandate “clearly violates the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause as interpreted by our precedents,” a majority of a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit said in the May 7 decision.

While the mandate was later updated, the newer version also violates the Constitution, the judges said.

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in 2021 required COVID-19 vaccination of all students and employees. It initially offered religious exemptions to anyone who checked a box, but later said administrators would “only recognize religious exemptions based on religious beliefs whose teachings are opposed to all immunizations.”

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State Department officials told a team of Wall Street Journal reporters about the increasing risks that undersea telecommunications cables could be susceptible to espionage.

The officials became concerned when a state-controlled Chinese firm that repairs undersea cables, SB Submarine Systems, unexplainably and repeatedly concealed the location data of its ship from radio and satellite tracking services. They said the ship’s concealment of its position “defied easy explanation.”

The warnings about potential espionage or even sabotage of undersea cables come nearly three months after underwater telecommunications cables linking Europe and Asia were “damaged” in the Red Sea between Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and Djibouti in East Africa.

Power Line.

On October 7 Hamas brutally maimed and murdered — not necessarily in that order — Israelis attending the Nova Music Festival in Re’im. Hamas kidnapped the living and the dead to Gaza.

Hamas has sought to Gaza exchange the living hostages and the bodies of the murdered Israelis for a multiple of living Hamas murderers incarcerated in Israel. Hamas seeks freedom for its incarcerated murderers so that they can assist in the project of repeating massacres again and again until Israel is annihilated — as Ghazi Hamid explained on Lebanon TV.

Late last week the IDF undertook an overnight operations to recover the bodies of Itzhak Gelerenter, Amit Buskila, Shani Louk, and Ron Binyamin. The Times of Israel reports on this operation here. The New York Post focuses on Louk’s story here.

Watch it.

This expresses an eternal truth that is too seldom appreciated.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

There is plenty of talk about the demographic changes happening in America, but not much thought about where it is headed. Some people mention the fact that the country will be majority-minority in a generation, but no one likes to think about that so that is as far as it ever gets. The people in charge seem to think America will be Brazil but without the favellas and kidnapping industry.

The fact is the social and political structures that have defined America cannot survive the demographic changes that are coming fast. The main reason for that is the majority population, once it becomes just another minority population, cannot continue to think like a majority population. The majority will no longer be able to swap the good of the whole for the good of their group.

Everything about America is the result of the majority population swapping their interest for the interest of the country. This altruism works only when the interests of the country are seen to align with the interest of the dominant majority, which is a thing that comes naturally when the majority is near ninety percent. Once that majority shrinks down to nearly fifty percent this perception collapses.

Newsbusters.

It’s one of those rhetorical devices you often hear on the liberal networks: media condemnations of “today’s Republican Party,” suggesting that if only Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or Mitt Romney were in charge instead of Donald Trump, journalists would be brimming with respect for the Grand Old Party.

“Much of today’s Republican Party has been permeated by extremism,” CNN’s Fareed Zakaria blasted in 2021 as he called for an “exorcism” to purge the evil spirits.

MSNBC’s Mike Brzezinski was more directly partisan: “The Democratic party is the world’s last, best, hope against fascism,” she railed in 2022, “against an extreme, autocratic anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-contraception, anti-freedom collection of fascists, who dominate the Trump wing of today’s Republican Party.”

Washington Poop.

For nearly two decades, Nevada was one of the most promising opportunities for Democrats on the battleground map — an epicenter of labor power with a youthful, highly diverse population that held many of the elements of a winning Democratic coalition.

But at a time of deep frustration about housing costs, inflation and gas prices, recent polls suggest that Nevada could be slipping from President Biden’s grasp — highlighting his broader struggles to win over younger voters, Hispanics and Americans without a college degree.

No Republican presidential candidate has won Nevada since George W. Bush in 2004, but Democratic margins have narrowed in recent presidential elections. In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by fewer than 34,000 votes, or 2.4percentage points. Now, the latest New York Times/Siena College poll shows a dramatically altered political landscape for Biden in the Silver State.

Check it out.

Tired of buying stuff from Communists? They’ve got you covered.

Read it.

According to the latest government statistics, the proportion of migrants among welfare recipients in Germany is now well over 50%. It seems that the “New Germans” are adept at extracting the jizyah social benefits from their hosts.

Read it.

Protesting for Hamas may have seemed like a lark to students at “elite” colleges and law schools, but it turns out that there might actually be consequences. Law firms, in particular, have expressed unwillingness to hire anti-Semites.

Read it.

To locate Joe Biden’s electoral problem, you need only to look on Sunday morning. Polling shows the mass-attending Catholic president trails Donald Trump by 10 points among those who attend religious services a few times a year or more. The score is reversed with voters who report they seldom or never attend church, with Biden leading by 10.

Read it.

Will we see a repeat this summer of the infamous 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention that devolved into chaos and anarchy? This year’s convention is, like 1968, set to take place in Chicago and social unrest is percolating on the Left, to say the least.

In a recent interview on Fox News, Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn.—who challenged President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party presidential primary—said that given our current course of events, history is likely to repeat itself.

“I’m afraid this is looking awfully like 1968 with a lot of anger and angst and disenfranchisement that I think are going to play out on TV this summer, and it’s going to be awfully contentious,” Phillips said on Wednesday.

Trump will likely benefit from Democrat psychosis as Nixon did.

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Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said Thursday that many officials who tried to warn the public about potential problems with COVID-19 vaccines were pressured into silence and that it’s high time to admit that there were “significant” side effects that made people sick.

Don’t hold your breath.

Read it.

After decades of strategic drift and costly acquisition failures, the U.S. Navy is sailing straight into a storm it can’t avoid. Despite the Defense Department’s lip service about China being the “pacing challenge,” decades of deindustrialization and policymakers’ failure to prioritize among services and threats have left the Navy ill-equipped to endure a sustained high-intensity conflict in the Pacific. The United States is unable to keep pace with Chinese shipbuilding and will fall even further behind in the coming years. Where does that leave the U.S. Navy and the most critical U.S. foreign-policy imperative: deterring a war in the Pacific?

As evidenced by the Biden administration’s latest budget request, fiscal constraints are forcing the Navy to cut procurement requests, delay modernization programs, and retire ships early. The Navy’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year calls for decommissioning 19 ships—including three nuclear-powered attack submarines and four guided-missile cruisers—while procuring only six new vessels. The full scope of what military analysts have long warned would be the “Terrible ’20s” is now evident: The expensive upgrading of the U.S. nuclear triad, simultaneous modernization efforts across the services, and the constraint of rising government debt are compelling the Pentagon to make tough choices about what it can and cannot pay for.

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Almost two centuries after California’s gold rush, the United States is on the brink of a lithium rush. As demand for the material skyrockets, government geologists are rushing to figure out where the precious element is hiding.

In September 2023, scientists funded by a mining company reported finding what could be the largest deposit of lithium in an ancient US supervolcano. Now public researchers on the other side of the country have uncovered another untapped reservoir – one that could cover nearly half the nation’s lithium demands.

It’s hiding in wastewater from Pennsylvania’s gas fracking industry.

Read it.

While in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves for 29 years, I thought I had seen some pretty stupid things the military was told by politicians to do. It always begins with politicians deciding the easiest, most sensible solution to a problem would have too much political baggage and cost them votes in the next election. So, they look for a politically expedient solution, one that is invariably very expensive and convoluted.

“My wife doesn’t know how to weld, cut metal, paint, fix chainsaws, cut trees, take a tractor apart, or operate tractor hydraulics. She can’t cut a tree. She has no idea who to call for a burn permit. She doesn’t know what one is. These things are not her problems. On the other hand, I don’t do laundry any more. I don’t wash dishes. I open drawers, and my ironed clothes are there. I open cupboards and see clean dishes.

It’s a pretty good system. God knew what he was doing when he designed it.”

— Stephen Harper

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The number of homeless people in San Francisco jumped compared to two years ago, despite the city spending hundreds of millions of dollars to address the issue, city data shows.

The total number of homeless people in San Francisco rose 7% to 8,328 in a one-night measurement in January 2024 compared to the same in 2022, reversing the 3.5% decline recorded from 2019 to 2022, according to the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Funding for homelessness from the city increased to $676 million in the 2022-23 fiscal year, up from $284 million in 2018-19, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

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After not-so cleverly trying and failing to get Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from important Supreme Court cases related to January 6, the left and the media have moved on to try to not-so cleverly get Justice Samuel Alito to recuse himself based on a photo of an upside-down flag outside his home that was said to show support for the rioters. On Saturday’s Good Morning America, ABC White House correspondent MaryAlice Parks omitted key details from Alito’s side of the story as she also hyped that even the appearance of bias can undermine the Court’s credibility.

It was ABC’s second day in a row of echoing the smear and co-host Whit Johnson showed the picture and introduced Parks by noting, “This morning Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is under fire. The New York Times obtaining this photo of an American flag flying upside down reportedly at Alito’s home in the days just after the January 6th riot. ABC’s White House correspondent, MaryAlice Parks, joins us now from Washington with more. MaryAlice, good morning.”

Read it.

Newly released testimony from former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins confirms that Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx did not base the pandemic-era six-foot social distancing rule on science, and instead were making things up as they went along.

But you knew that.

Read it.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office condemned Sean “Diddy” Combs’ shocking surveillance video, in which the music mogul is seen assaulting ex Cassie Ventura — but is unable to file charges.

The office of district attorney George Gascón explained in a lengthy statement released via Instagram Friday why their hands are tied due to the statute of limitations.

Some minorities are more equal than others.

Read it.

In this case, I suspect that ‘disinformation’ actually means ‘reporting the facts’.

Read it.

I’m enjoying the conversation about Project Hephaistos engendered by the article on Dyson spheres. In particular, Al Jackson and Alex Tolley have been kicking around the notion of Dyson sphere alternatives, ways of preserving a civilization that are, in Alex’s words, less ‘grabby’ and more accepting of their resource limitations.

…

As pointed out in the article, a number of Dyson sphere searches have been mounted, but we are only now coming around to serious candidates, and at that only seven out of a vast search field. Two of these are shown in the figure below. We’re a long way from knowing what these infrared signatures actually represent, but let’s dig into the Project Hephaistos work from its latest paper in 2024 and also ponder what astronomers can do as they try to learn more.

The Other McCain.

In general, then, it is worthwhile for Schmitz to compare what a typical “midlife crisis” meant for Baby Boomers, as compared to what it means for younger Americans. As he points out, before you get divorced, you first have to get married, and the under-40 cohort has historically low marriage rates. In particular, Millennials have tended to delay marriage and, especially among college-educated women, to delay childbearing to such an age that becoming a mother may require medical intervention, if it is even still biologically possible. Whereas, by comparison, when I was living the bachelor life back in the 1980s, I was being countercultural — because in the Bible Belt, most folks still got married in their late teens or early 20s — nowadays, it would be countercultural to marry young.

…

Think about the phrase “the black community,” which is used to imply a monolithic commonality of interest among the 46 million black people in America. “The black community” is viewed as generally poor and oppressed, simply because of statistics, i.e., comparing group averages. Certainly it is true that, on average, black people have lower incomes than white people, but to turn this statistical comparison into a definitive description of “the black community” is unfair to those black individuals who strive to be more than average.

Commonly referred to by me as The Aggregation Fallacy.

Read it.

Intersectionality has been a buzzword used by the hard Left to slyly erase inconvenient differences in their chaotic movement. It was the ameliorator of unresolvable dilemmas. Now it has become an unspoken doctrine of the self-appointed right-leaning Twitterati and the supercilious, tolerant (read ‘Lib-Dem in disguise’) Tory elite. If you are one of these—lower your eyebrows, stop liking that annoyingly funny meme posted by Elon Musk, cease fawning over Liz Truss’s latest piece of soon-to-be-reduced-in-Waterstones literature—and read on. Simply put, self-proclaimed conservatives will now accept bedfellows of the strangest kinds, based on their mutual attachment to basic beliefs.

Here I am not referring to the diplomacy of accepting new converts to the political conversation. I am talking about the blind desperation for alliance in a world of untrue truths and transient ideologies—a world where companionship follows the hoof-marks of a rare and ill-defined beast that frequently rears its delinquent head in political circles: the often misappropriated ‘Overton Window.’

Power Line.

An Australian man calling himself Sasha Jane Lowerson must be allowed to compete in a California surfing competition, which “cannot discriminate on the basis of gender.” As Sir Bedevere (Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways of biological science and athletics? Why, it’s the California Coastal Commission (CCC), an unelected body that overrides the elected governments of cities and counties on the California coast. As Steve once noted, the commission combines Stalinist regulation with mafia-style corruption, a reference to coastal commissioner Mark Nathanson, packed off to prison for extorting bribes from Hollywood celebrities.

The CCC’s prime mover was Peter Douglas, a regulatory zealot of considerable ferocity. Douglas authored Proposition 20, the 1972 ballot initiative that created a temporary 15-member commission aimed at preventing disasters like the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. Douglas also wrote the California Coastal Act of 1976, signed by governor Jerry Brown, which made the Commission permanent. The next year, Douglas became deputy director and in 1985 executive director, a post he held until 2011.

While running roughshod over property rights, the CCC prevents Californians from tapping their greatest asset, the vast Pacific Ocean. In 2022 the Commission voted unanimously to reject the Poseidon Water desalination plant in Orange County. As the California Globe noted, the plant was “decades in the works during a time when California needs more freshwater to combat a drought in the state.” The plant would have provided 50 million gallons of freshwater a day but the Commission wasn’t having it.

Read it.

StrategyPage.

The high cost of the war in Ukraine plus a decade of economic sanctions has hurt the Russian economy. To make matters worse Russia has no major allies in Europe or overseas. That leaves Russia dependent on China, which has the second largest economy in the world. The Chinese expect to be paid for the substantial economic aid they have been providing Russia. None of this aid is military, but a lot of it is dual use. That is, which means Russia needs only add a few key components to turn dual use materials into a weapon. This would include guided missiles, military communications and ground-based radars. Without these large quantities of Chinese dual use items, Russia could not maintain its production of many key weapons.

One problem remains, how does Russia pay for all this? China suggested, and Russia accepted, that long-standing Chinese claims on a quarter of the Russian Far East and most of its prime coastal areas be considered as a form of payment. China never canceled these claims, even in the 1940s and 50s when China was very dependent on Russia. These claims amount to about nine percent of Russian territory. The Russian Far East contains part of Siberia as well as the large Pacific Ocean coastline and the port of Vladivostok. The relatively small coastal areas are the most densely populated of the Russian Far East. The entire Russian Far East is huge, at 6.9 million square kilometers. That is nearly the size of the eight million square kilometer continental United States. While these 48 states have 310 million people, the Russian Far East only has a population of 8.3 million. The Far East region contains 40 percent of Russian territory and less than six percent of Russia’s population. The region contains many naval and ballistic missile bases as well as ports that provide the cheapest way to get goods from the rest of Russia to the Far East. The Trans-Siberian Railroad alone cannot support the population and economy of the Far East region.

Read it.

An Algerian culture-enricher tried to burn down a synagogue in the French city of Rouen, but was shot dead by police before he could consummate his heart’s desire.

I haven’t yet seen a name for the alleged would-be perpetrator, so I can’t assign a Mohammed Coefficient to the incident.

Power Line.

The New York Times believes that by right, it should have the Supreme Court in its pocket–as, to be fair, it did for quite a few years. So it is doing all it can to discredit the Court’s new conservative majority. It has directed its attacks mostly toward Justice Clarence Thomas, against whom the Times has levied baseless charges of ethics violations.

Yesterday the Times went after Justice Samuel Alito, probably the Court’s most conservative member. For what? “At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.”

John Hinderaker.

The Biden Administration insists that Israel must have a plan for the “day after” it completes its victory over Hamas. A reasonable question is: why? Gaza started this war on October 7, and Israel responded as it had to, as any nation would, by fighting and, now, winning the war. Why should it be Israel’s burden to try to make something constructive out of the sickest culture in the world?

They fucked around and found out. Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

“Today we began delivery of aid from the temporary pier on to the beach of Gaza for further distribution to the people by our partners,” US Central Command announced Friday. “This unique logistics capability facilitates the delivery of lifesaving humanitarian aid enabling a shared service for the international community to use to serve the people of Gaza.” Below are some of the first overhead images since its completion.

Remind me again why this is any of our business.

Remind me again why Muslim countries aren’t paying for this. The could certainly afford it.

Read it.

A federal appeals court ruled that the largest school district in Maryland does not have to afford parents the opportunity to opt-out their elementary school-age children from LGBTQ lessons.

Time to leave.

Eventually public schools will contain only the children of the poor and proglodyte. This will not end well.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Republicans on two House committees voted to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress on Thursday night despite President Joe Biden’s intervention to block them from obtaining his recorded interviews with special counsel Robert Hur.

After a spirited debate, members of the House Judiciary Committee voted 18–15 on May 16 to approve a resolution to hold Mr. Garland in contempt for refusing to provide impeachment investigators with the recordings in defiance of congressional subpoenas.

The House Oversight Committee followed suit hours later, voting 24-20 to approve their own resolution.

As Eric Holder demonstrated, being held in contempt of Congress don’t mean shit.

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A data privacy amendment buried within the Federal Aviation Administration re-authorization bill will allow private aircraft owners to fully block aircraft registration information. Concealing this information will make establishing who owns private aircraft much more difficult, and render aircraft harder to track.

President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) re-authorization bill into law yesterday. Last week, it passed a vote in the Senate 88-4, before going on to pass a vote in the House of Representatives by 387 to 26 on Wednesday. The bill was introduced into the House in June of last year.

The FAA re-authorization bill renews the agency’s authority for the next five years, and authorizes more than $105 billion in funding for it from fiscal years 2024 through 2028. The legislation aims to improve aviation safety, as well as tighten protections for both airline workers and passengers.

Some people on the Internet make it a hobby to track the flights of billionaires and other famous people and publish this information to their followers. The people thus tracked, of course, consider this a security threat. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates are popular targets.

Read it.

Earlier this week, the New York Times asked an intriguing and surprisingly overlooked question: why aren’t black students on historically black college campuses protesting against Israel and marching for Palestine? It’s an important query — made all the more urgent by President Biden’s commencement address this coming weekend at Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the nation’s preeminent historically black colleges and universities.

Considering the seemingly endless ways African Americans have pledged their allegiances to the suffering in Gaza — and Palestinians in general — America’s 107 HBCUs should be exploding with anti-Israel rancor. But they’re not — in fact, notes the Times, there have been no Columbia-like encampments and few students marching while draped in Palestinian flags. Why not?

As the Times sees it — much as they see everything — black students are simply too poor and historically marginalized to risk violently protesting in public. Black students — who comprise the vast majority of HBCU scholars — enter higher education “lower on the economic ladder and are more intently focused on their education and their job prospects after graduation,” wrote the paper.

The American Mind.

Regarding the recent anti-Israel protests on campuses, the common perception, especially in media circles, persists that these are spontaneous student uprisings. In fact considerable evidence exists that they are led and financed by lavishly funded activist foundations like George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation; extremist professional protestors, including a 63-year-old woman named Lisa Fithian who tried to block counter protestors to interfere with the pro-Hamas seizure of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall; and wacky nonstudent activists, including a 40-year-old Marxist-anarchist heir to millions named Cody Carlson and Manuel De Los Santos, the leader of the Chinese-funded People’s Forum and a fervent apologist for the Castro regime. De Los Santos hailed Hamas’ October 7 attack as “heroic,” called for Israel to be “erased from history,” and eagerly welcomed the impending “defeat” of the “U.S. empire.”

Read it.

Conservatives in Florida and Texas won the right to permit religious chaplains in public schools, and now the Satanic Temple wants in.

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With the dramatic implosion of Michael Cohen on the stand on Thursday with the exposure of another alleged lie told under oath, even hosts and commentators on CNN are now criticizing the prosecution and doubting the basis for any conviction. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper admitted that he would “absolutely” have doubts after Cohen’s testimony.

CNN’s legal analyst Elie Honig declared “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a star cooperating witness get his knees chopped out quite as clearly and dramatically.”

He previously stated that this case would never have been brought outside of a deep blue, anti-Trump district. Other legal experts, including on CNN and MSNBC, admitted that they did not get the legal theory of the prosecution or understand the still mysterious crime that was being concealed by the alleged book-keeping errors. The question is whether the jury itself is realizing that they are being played by the prosecution.

Probably not.

Read it.

The DNA of a big cat in the Panthera genus – probably a leopard – has been identified from a swab taken from a dead sheep in the Lake District.

This is the first time that big cat DNA has been found on a carcass in the UK. The analysis was carried out at a laboratory at the University of Warwick run by Prof Robin Allaby.

Allaby told BBC Wildlife that it was very hard to lift DNA from swabs taken from carcasses but there was no doubt in this case. “It makes me a convert [to the existence of non-native big cats in the UK],” Allaby said. “Until now, I have remained open-minded, I think that’s my job as a scientist.”

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The destructive nature of urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build anything at scale ever again.

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Hertz gambled and lost when it placed its big EV bet on Tesla a few years ago. It was a chance for the rental car company to shake up the industry, instead the company bought 30,000 Teslas, got scared away by depreciation and expensive repairs and now wants to get rid of them. While all those used Teslas looked to be great used car deals, it turns out high mileage EVs that were formerly rentals are horrible to own as New York Magazine reported.

Hertz had ambitions to make 20 percent of its rental fleet EVs, and it was going to start with a massive Tesla deal that saw the company purchase over 30,000. Expensive maintenance that the company didn’t account for spooked the company enough to start to sell off it’s fleet. This made for incredible used EV buys, especially when you factor in the used EV tax credit of $4,000. People scrambled to Hertz dealers buying them up. One salesman at a Hertz dealer in Smithtown, New York told New York Magazine that they were selling as many as 30 Teslas a week at one point. A slowdown came when buyers finally started to realize just what they got themselves into.

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

Politico.

They say that like it was a bad thing….