“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.”

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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.”

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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.

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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….

OffGuardian.

These guys aren’t known for their humor–they prefer to rain on any parade they can find–but this particular instance would grace the Babylon Bee.

My favorite:

16. If a friend recommends a Netflix show that is awful, don’t ever talk to them again. You don’t need friends like that.

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And who could blame them? Democrat cooties!

24/7 Wall Street.

According to a survey by Gallup, a polling agency, 33% of Americans personally own a firearm. The motivations for owning a gun vary by person. Most Americans point to protection or hunting as the main reason behind their decision to purchase a firearm. However, some are required by their jobs to own a gun, and others cite sport shooting or owning a gun collection.

Whatever the reasoning behind owning a gun – firearm sales are booming. In 2023, the industry generated as much as $90.06 billion in total economic activity, as reported by the Firearm Industry Trade Association. (Click here to see the the top-selling gun of all time.)

It’s important to note that the rates of gun ownership vary significantly among diverse demographic groups, regions, income brackets, and other categorizations.

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The Bowie knife holds a significant place in history as one of the iconic blades. It was first created by James Bowie in the 19th century. Today, this knife continues to be a choice for enthusiasts, adventurers, and collectors. However, given the range of options in the market, choosing the perfect Bowie knife can pose a challenge. In this guide for buyers, we will delve into factors to consider when selecting a Bowie knife that aligns with your preferences and requirements.

I prefer an Arkansas Toothpick, actually, but that’s just me.

And, of course, when you’ve said Ka-Bar, you’ve said it all, as many Marines will testify.

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Publication of research results, theoretical propositions and scholarly essays is not a free-for-all. As shown by the dogmatism around climate change and Covid-19, sceptics struggle to get papers in print. The gatekeeper is the peer-review system, which people take for granted as a screening process to ensure rigour in scientific literature.

But it has not always been that way. Until at least the 1950s, the decision to publish was made by the editors of academic journals, who were typically eminent professors in their field. Peer review, by contrast, entails the editor sending an anonymised manuscript to independent reviewers, and although the editor makes a final decision, the reviews indicate whether the submission should be accepted, revised or rejected. This may seem fair and objective, but in reality peer review has become a means of knowledge control – and as we argue here, perhaps that was always the purpose.

‘Peer-reviewed’ is typically better than ‘non-peer-reviewed’, but not my much. The number of such papers that eventually wind up retracted doesn’t fill one with any confidence. The same problem shows up in The News all the time–nothing is more common than the click-bait headline ‘X LINKED TO Y’, the obvious insinuation that there is some causal link which they have to hint at because (wait for it) CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION. (Unfortunately, when causation is unknown, sometimes correlation is all you have to work with.)

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I never imagined that we would ever see a time when it takes $177,798 for a family of four to live comfortably in the United States. Unfortunately, that day has arrived. Our leaders have been pursuing highly inflationary policies for many years, and now we have reached a point where inflation is wildly out of control. In fact, the latest wholesale inflation figure that was released on Tuesday came in much higher than expected. Sadly, this is just the beginning and we are in far more trouble than most people realize.

No indication of whether that amount includes the government’s beak-wetting. (Anyway, where are you going to find a ‘family of four’ any more? You’re lucky to find a family of three.)

The Antiplanner.

A little more than half of America’s incorporated cities collectively lost 2.7 million residents between 2020 and 2023, according to estimates released by the Census Bureau earlier this week. New York City alone lost almost 500,000 residents, or 5.5 percent of its population, while the next 20 biggest losers together lost about half a million people.

The biggest losers, other than New York City, were Chicago (-78,877), Los Angeles (-74,934), San Francisco (-61,530), Philadelphia (-50,142), San Jose (-39,664), and Portland (-22,846). San Francisco’s population slightly recovered between 2022 and 2023, but most major cities that have lost population have seen declines in every year from 2020 to 2023.

Out of 19,484 incorporated cities, population fell in 10,691, while the population of 8,049 cities collectively grew by 3.95 million people. (Some 744 small towns saw no change in population.) Of the cities that grew, the biggest growth was recorded by San Antonio (56,038), Fort Worth (54,866), Port St. Lucie (38,206), Phoenix (37,611), and Charlotte (35,559).

John C. Wright.

The managerial bureaucracy and civil service currently sets the agenda for major politicians, for the UN and the EU and the WEF, and all national and international organizations attempting to install a New World Order.

This New World Order regards men as fungible, interchangeable, merely resources to be used for given purposes. We are livestock to them.

If the population is aging in one nation, and new and younger workers are needed to pay for their pensions, merely importing a goodly number of units of people is regarded as prudent by the New World Order bureaucrats.

The fact that the migrants have different language, religion, worldview, different values, virtues, vices and cultural identity than do the native born is irrelevant to the bureaucrats.

To them, human life is numbers in a ledger.

Such thinking is the inevitable result of Identity Politics. No one is an individual, merely an instance of a class, whatever class is most useful for the person pushing his opinion.

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For President Biden and congressional Democrats, the fierce party division over the campus protests and the war in Gaza is full of warning signs during the 2024 election year. The unrest is unlikely to stop when universities break for the summer; protesters are pledging to disrupt the August Democratic National Convention planned to be held in Chicago.

Most House Democrats have been reticent on the antisemitic protests and encampments roiling college graduations this month, while a handful have vocally defended or even celebrated the student protests as displays of protected free speech.

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There’s a war being waged for America’s elementary, middle, and high school students. But the leftist agenda-driven campaign that began behind the closed doors of teachers unions and government-run schools is now out in the open and has led to a “parent revolution,” says Corey DeAngelis.

The “teachers unions overplayed their hand and awakened a sleeping giant, which happens to be parents who want more of a say in their kids’ education,” says DeAngelis, author of “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.”

DeAngelis—sometimes referred to as the “school choice evangelist”—dedicated his new book to “Randi Weingarten [president of the American Federation of Teachers] and the teachers unions for inadvertently doing more to advance school choice and homeschooling than anyone could have ever imagined.”

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Electric vehicles (EVs) may be the most subsidized product in America. Federal taxpayers shell out $7,500 every time a new eligible electric vehicle is purchased (usually by wealthy buyers). State and local taxpayers chip in an additional $1,500 for each EV purchase. Then, there’s the tens of billions of dollars “invested” by policymakers into building EV plants. Even these bank-breaking concessions aren’t enough to please the Biden administration. Recently finalized EV tax credit rules expand eligibility for the subsidy while maintaining bizarre trade sourcing rules likely to lead to further tariffs from China. It’s time for President Biden and lawmakers to ditch protectionism and finally end EV subsidies.

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With the threat of a conflict in the Pacific looming, a congressional subcommittee says the Navy is not moving fast enough to figure out how to better push munitions to its ships at sea and wants to know what is being done to fix the problem.

This is hardly a new issue, but it has come into sharp focus in the Red Sea as Arleigh Burke class destroyers had fired more than 100 Standard family surface-to-air missiles alone as of mid-February at Houthi missiles and drones. The need to rapidly replenish warships would be far more pronounced in a large-scale fight with China that would occur over a vast, contested battlespace

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President Joe Biden’s retelling of economic history could win a fiction award.

He recently claimed in an interview that inflation “was 9% when I came into office,” even though it was 1.4% at that time. Not only is Biden lying about the historical record, but it was his policies that fueled the inflation fire.

The facts are clear: Biden was handed an economy that was recovering at an unprecedented pace. Gross domestic product was rising at an annualized rate of $1.5 trillion. Annual inflation as measured by the consumer price index was 1.4%. A monthly average of 1.5 million people were returning to work as lockdowns were lifted.

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Francis Collins, the top public health official during the COVID-19 pandemic, earlier this year said the lab leak hypothesis was not a conspiracy theory, according to a transcript of his testimony released Thursday by House Republicans, reports the Washington Times.

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Doesn’t surprise me. He wants Kennedy to take votes only from Biden, so he needs to bring out the fact that Kennedy is, in the last analysis, Just Another Democrat.

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Already in fiscal year 2024, more Chinese nationals have crossed America’s southern border than the three previous fiscal years combined. Under the Biden administration, “there is no serious vetting” of illegal aliens from China, Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., said during a House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability hearing held Thursday afternoon.

A five-question “limited interview,” as Bishop calls it, “combined with a lack of reliable information from China to verify biographical claims and limited translation services, severely constrain CBP’s ability to conduct rigorous vetting for criminal and national security concerns.”

John Derbyshire alway used to say that there wasn’t anything wrong with New York City that adding about a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix.

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We identify points of conflict and consensus regarding (a) controversial empirical claims and (b) normative preferences for how controversial scholarship—and scholars—should be treated. In 2021, we conducted qualitative interviews (n = 41) to generate a quantitative survey (N = 470) of U.S. psychology professors’ beliefs and values. Professors strongly disagreed on the truth status of 10 candidate taboo conclusions: For each conclusion, some professors reported 100% certainty in its veracity and others 100% certainty in its falsehood. Professors more confident in the truth of the taboo conclusions reported more self-censorship, a pattern that could bias perceived scientific consensus regarding the inaccuracy of controversial conclusions. Almost all professors worried about social sanctions if they were to express their own empirical beliefs. Tenured professors reported as much self-censorship and as much fear of consequences as untenured professors, including fear of getting fired. Most professors opposed suppressing scholarship and punishing peers on the basis of moral concerns about research conclusions and reported contempt for peers who petition to retract papers on moral grounds. Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship. These results do not resolve empirical or normative disagreements among psychology professors, but they may provide an empirical context for their discussion.

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President Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen had his “knees chopped out” by Donald Trump’s defense attorneys in cross-examination during Trump’s ‘hush money’ trial.

Cohen was grilled by Trump attorney Todd Blanche about a pivotal phone call that connected Trump to allegations that he approved reimbursements to pay porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. Blance accused Cohen of calling the former president’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, to complain about harassing phone calls.

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n childhood, Tasliym Morales was always interested in civic affairs, so it was no surprise to those who knew her that as soon she turned 18, she registered to vote. What did take her family and friends aback, however, was the political party affiliation she chose.

“Republican,” she says with a broad smile.

The striking mother of six is sitting at the head table of the Delaware County Republican Party chairman’s dinner, dressed in a rich red jacket topping a paisley dress discussing her reasons for choosing the Grand Old Party when most of her peers and family – Morales is black – were Democrats.

The willingness of the Democrats to run a woke sock-puppet for President is opening a lot of eyes … and brains.

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a full pardon Thursday to a former U.S. Army sergeant convicted of murder for fatally shooting an armed demonstrator in 2020 during nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.