Victor Davis Hanson.

The five criminal and civil prosecutions of Donald Trump all prompt heated denials from Democrats that President Biden and Democrat operatives had a role in any of them.

But Joe Biden has long let it be known that he was frustrated with his own Department of Justice’s federal prosecutors for their tardiness in indicting Donald Trump.

Biden was upset because any delay might mean that his rival Trump would not be in federal court during the 2024 election cycle. And that would mean he could not be tagged as a “convicted felon” by the November election while being kept off the campaign trail.

The Foundry.

Arizona’s two largest cities allocated tens of millions of dollars to fight homelessness in the past several years, but little has changed, according to a Goldwater Institute investigative report released Thursday.

“We’ve seen Phoenix and Tucson spend, combined, almost half a billion dollars on this issue with very minimal improvements in the area of homelessness,” Austin VanDerHeyden, municipal affairs liaison for the Goldwater Institute, told The Daily Signal.

The Goldwater Institute, a public policy research and litigation organization based in Arizona, launched an investigation into what Phoenix and Tucson officials are spending to address homelessness, who is receiving the funding, and the results of the investment.

Read it.

Shoplifting at TJ Maxx has gotten so bad, security workers at some stores are wearing body cameras like police wear.

TJ Maxx said it made the move last year to stop shoplifting, executives said on an earnings call last month.

“It’s almost like a de-escalation where people are less likely to do something when they’re being videotaped,” John Klinger, chief financial officer of TJ Maxx’s parent company said on the call.

Read it.

Of course they are.

Read it.

Note that these are members of his own party. When did you ever see Democrats criticize a fellow Democrat for wearing a decoration that he (or she) didn’t earn? (That would be Never.)

Read it.

The OnlyFans model who threw a milkshake over Nigel Farage was slammed by her own brother, who said he wanted nothing to do with her.

The Reform UK leader was assaulted after he announced he was running for election during a campaign event in Clacton yesterday.

25-year-old Victoria Thomas-Bowen was subsequently arrested for the assault and said she threw the McDonalds drink over Farage because she “just felt like it.”

Imagine the ignominy of having a sister who does OnlyFans and who attacks people because she ‘just felt like it’.

Read it.

The United States is preparing to announce a new $225 million weapons package for Ukraine this week, coming two weeks after the last package, which was at $275 million and featured badly needed artillery rounds. And a few weeks prior to that, in early May, the US administration rolled out with $400 million in defense aid —  thus it appears the White House is planning to apportion new packages about every two or three weeks, drawing from Biden’s $60 billion in recently approved total funding for Ukraine.

Currently, Ukrainian soldiers are resorting to literally trying to find leftover, unexploded artillery shells scattered in the ground at prior battle sites. The Wall Street Journal recently underscored this severe lack of ammo along Ukraine’s front lines in writing that “Kyiv’s ammunition shortage is so acute that a soldier who hunts for Russian shells—and makes his own bombs—has become an important supplier for some units.” 

The dangerous trend can be summarized as follows: the more desperation there is on the ground as Ukraine loses more and more ground along frontline positions, the greater the bellicose posturing on the part of NATO and the West. Western publications are even openly airing contingency plans for US troop movements in Europe in a WW3 scenario involving war with Russia in the heart of Europe. As another alarming and somewhat absurd example of this trend, look what European Commission chief is positively boasting about…

UnHerd.

Every year, I have to write a version of this article because events like this never seem to stop. Every year, our political leaders promise to do something. And every year, it gets worse. For the past two weeks, it has been the turn of Germany. Next week — who knows?

Last Friday, at about 11:30am, a 25-year-old Afghan went on a knife spree at a rally in Mannheim. He stabbed Michael Stürzenberger, the convener of the rally, along with a policeman and four others, before a second policeman shot him. Two days later, the officer succumbed to his wounds.

We still don’t know everything about the incident. What we do know, though, is that it is a deeply sad — and obvious — metaphor for the way Western countries function. People protest Islamic violence. The press smears them. Islamists attack. The state tries to subdue the protestors. The Islamists continue attacking. Rinse and repeat.

The Spectator.

President Joe Biden announced an executive order this week that he claims will “help us to gain control of our border, restore order to the process” by banning migrants from seeking asylum if they cross the border illegally. At first glance, this seems like a welcome move to reduce a major pull factor for illegal crossings, even if it flies in the face of Biden’s claim in January that he had “done all I can do” on the border.

As always, though, the devil is in the details. First, the limitations on asylum seekers only kick in once illegal crossings exceed 2,500 per day, which is nearly one million per year. As Ammon Blair, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation told me, Biden is going to “meter the invasion.”

As you read further, the executive order contains all kinds of loopholes that render it effectively useless, even during the emergency scenario.

The Foundry.

For anyone who cares to see it, the truth is available in public records in election offices across the nation. But unfortunately, those who expose the truth about voting by aliens—illegal immigrants or not—are subjected to ridicule and an onslaught from the Left to preserve the broken status quo.

Some would prefer that anyone who documents aliens participating in American elections—especially with the current border crisis—simply disappear.

We both testified recently before the House Administration Committee on this serious and real problem. The reactions of some Democrats on the committee were outlandish. They ignored or belittled the hard evidence we presented.

Read it.

For much of the past year we had been pounding the table on two very simple facts: not only has the US labor market been appallingly weak, with most of the jobs “gained” in 2023 and meant to signal how strong the Biden “recovery” has been, about to be revised away (as first the Philly Fed and now Bloomberg both admit), but more shockingly, all the job growth in the past few years has gone to illegal aliens.

Read it.

The Southern Poverty Law Center released its annual list of “hate groups” and “antigovernment extremist groups” Tuesday, and many conservatives say they are disappointed to be left out.

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has squandered its credibility on hate. It gained its reputation by suing the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy, but it took the program it used to monitor the Klan and weaponized it to smear conservative and Christian groups as “hate groups,” placing them on a map with Klan chapters.

The SPLC is currently facing a defamation lawsuit that has made it to the discovery process. A former employee called this a “highly profitable scam,” and some conservatives consider landing on the SPLC’s “hate map” to be a badge of honor.

Read it.

A key element of understanding the smooth-brained antics of the woke left is that they are incapable of doing anything “creative” without sexualizing it and politicizing it. Their collective identity revolves around who they lust after, how to virtue signal to the herd and who is supposedly the most oppressed. Remove these things from their daily lives and there’s not much left to look at. They could disappear tomorrow along with all of their media products and the world wouldn’t miss them in the slightest.

Read it.

The names and photos of the students in a New Jersey high school Jewish club were cut from the 2024 edition of the East Brunswick High School yearbook in what the town’s mayor has called a “blatant antisemitic act.”

Read it.

The Washington Post is melting down and the reason might surprise you.

Actually, no it won’t. Just kidding. The Washington Post is melting down because it leaned hard into the Year Zero cultural revolution that’s completely transformed almost every elite institution in the past several years and the newspaper is now bleeding money.

People are no longer buying what they’re selling.

Read it.

In the transparency case over a recording of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur, a lower court ruling could reach a verdict in August, one involved lawyer says. But he says that “fevered, emergency appeals” are likely to follow, regardless of the outcome.

Biden invoked executive privilege to shield release of the audio recording, although an edited transcript has been released of interviews in which the president showed “diminished capacities,” according to Hur’s report on Biden’s possession of classified documents.

“They altered their released transcript, which is a very big deal in that the arguments they’ve been making for not releasing the audio is that the transcript is already out there and you don’t need the audio,” Mike Howell, executive director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters.

Read it.

There are fresh reports out of Israeli media that the country’s war cabinet is discussing launching a full-scale war against Hezbollah, which would likely involve an army ground invasion of southern Lebanon.

Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said Tuesday a tough “decision” is close amid ratcheting daily attacks on northern Israel. “We are approaching the point where a decision will have to be made, and the IDF is prepared and very ready for this decision,” Halevi said while on a visit to an army base in Kiryat Shmona, a northern region which has witnessed massive fires this week resulting from Hezbollah drone and rocket attacks.

UPDATE: US Warns Netanyahu Against Major Offensive In Southern Lebanon

Read it.

U.S. and allied intelligence services warned current and former military personnel this week that China’s military is covertly recruiting fighter pilots to train flyers for Beijing’s aircraft carriers and air force.

Read it.

It’s been a long time since I brought everyone up to date on what is happening here in the Seattle area. It’s an assortment of tales of homelessness, crime, illegal aliens, burning buildings, and vandalism. For starters, there is a story about a street refugee camp in Kent, south of Seattle. A large group of “asylum-seekers” from Africa, South America, and elsewhere was kicked out of the church whose welcome got old and their permit expired. When expelled, they simply set up their tents in a nearby abandoned motel site and refused to move. They were given a deadline to leave. It went by. The linked story is from the KOMO News Web site, for your reading pleasure.

 

Read it.

The city of Evanston, Illinois, is facing a lawsuit from conservative activists over its plans to offer reparations to Black residents, reports Fox News.

‘Reparations’ is giving money from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves.

Read it.

Anti-Israel demonstrators occupied a building that houses the offices of Stanford University’s president and provost early Wednesday but law enforcement officers quickly removed them and made multiple arrests, the university said.

Read it.

UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) reports a commercial vessel experienced a “significant explosion … a short distance from the port side of the vessel.” The incident occurred 50 nautical miles southwest of Al Shuqaiq, Saudi Arabia, in the southern Red Sea.

“On inspection, no damage was found, vessel and crew are reported safe and is continuing to its next port of call,” UKMTO wrote in an advisory on X.

And the U.S. Navy was … where?

Read it.

It’s not enough to be gay, you have to be the correct (not right, God forbid) kind of gay.

Read it.

Saturday afternoon, a Duane Reade security guard was severely stabbed and a shopper threatened by a knife-wielding thief at one of the chain’s midtown Manhattan stores.

Roughly 12 hours later, a straphanger was shot in the hand as his train pulled into the 86th street and Lexington Avenue platform.

That’s life in Manhattan, where transit crime, assault and shoplifting are raging.

Read it.

Four female prison guards in Baltimore fell pregnant to the same inmate, according to authorities who have busted a major smuggling gang inside the jail system.

Two of the women tattooed the inmate’s name on their bodies and he showered three of them with expensive gifts including cars and jewelry.

Baltimore. Don’t even need to say anything. The poor kids will be lucky if they have double-digit IQs.

Read it.

Fewer fuel particles injected into the atmosphere reduce cloud droplet density and this leads to clouds that reflect less solar radiation back into space.

StrategyPage

What the U.S. Navy has not been able to produce are the cheap, effective UAVs and USVs the Ukrainian used to cripple the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The problem is situational and political. The American situation is peacetime, not wartime. When you are at war things are done quickly, effectively, and inexpensively. Ukraine demonstrated that with its domestic UAV and USV programs. In the United States peacetime defense procurement is a lot more expensive and takes longer than it would in wartime. That means the Ukrainian type UAVs and UUVs will cost the USN far more than the Ukrainian models and take years to reach the U.S. Pacific Fleet. If China goes to war over Taiwan that situation changes in a hurry. Meanwhile, you go to war with what you have when war is declared. Right now the American navy has none of those clever and effective Ukrainian UAVs and USVs. Keep in mind that it took the Ukrainians over a year, after the Russian invasion, to come up with their brilliant and effective UAV and USV tactics that crippled and defeated the mighty Russian Black Sea Fleet.

The United States knows that Ukraine did in the Black Sea but that knowledge does not quickly translate into similar American weapons. The primary problem is so few American naval commanders understand exactly what the Ukrainian did and how to replicate that for the American Pacific Fleet, where such Ukrainian technology is needed.

Read it.

After the knife jihad attack in Mannheim, the governing “traffic light” coalition in Germany wants to solve the country’s problems by importing more Muslim migrants.

Of course! What an elegant solution! Why didn’t I think of that?

Read it.

On the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, human rights supporters continued to speak up about the democratic uprising that was brutally suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on June 4, 1989.

New York Times.

Four years have gone by since George Floyd was murdered on the pavement near Cup Foods in Minneapolis, sparking the racial “reckoning” that made Kendi a household name. Many people, Kendi among them, believe that reckoning is long over. State legislatures have pushed through harsh antiprotest measures. Conservative-led campaigns against teaching Black history and against diversity, equity and inclusion programs are underway. Last June, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. And Donald Trump is once again the Republican nominee for president, promising to root out “the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

Kendi has become a prime target of this backlash. Books of his have been banned from schools in some districts, and his name is a kind of profanity among conservatives who believe racism is mostly a problem of the past. Though legions of readers continue to celebrate Kendi as a courageous and groundbreaking thinker, for many others he has become a symbol of everything that’s wrong in racial discourse today. Even many allies in the fight for racial justice dismiss his brand of antiracism as unworkable, wrongheaded or counterproductive. “The vast majority of my critics,” Kendi told me last year, “either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.”

Kind of like the way he treats white people.

UPDATE: Like I Said, Ibram X. Kendi Is Not Very Bright (Steve Sailer)

Read it.

Local media outlet Fox 45 News revealed a convicted sex offender and illegal alien was released by Baltimore County officials, blatantly ignoring the federal government’s request to keep the criminal in jail. This stunning act of defiance in the progressive-controlled Baltimore metro area raises serious questions about their commitment to public safety, upholding law and order, and adherence to the federal government.

Fox 45 spoke with the US Department of Homeland Security about 25-year-old Raul Calderon-Interiano, who was convicted of a fourth-degree sex offense and second-degree assault in April by a Baltimore County judge.

Read it.

Washington Poop publisher and CEO William Lewis is being denounced this week after the end of the short-lived tenure of Executive Editor Sally Buzbee and delivering a truth bomb to the staff. Lewis told them that they have lost their audience and “people are not reading your stuff.” It was a shot of reality in the echo chambered news outlet and the response was predictable. However, Lewis just might save this venerable newspaper if he follows his frank talk with meaningful reforms to bring balance back to the Poop.

Read it.

It’s hard to adequately describe what happened to Donald Trump in Venezuela-on-the-Hudson. Outrageous? A travesty of justice? A devasting blow to the sanctity of our justice system and its reputation for fairness and nonpartisanship? An American repetition of the Soviet show trials of the 1930s?

It’s all of those things. And you don’t have to be a Trump supporter to understand that.

A former president was convicted of 34 misdemeanors for paperwork errors (whose statute of limitations had run out) that were changed to felonies because he had supposedly violated another state law—nowhere mentioned in the indictment—that makes it a crime to use “unlawful” means to promote or oppose the election of a candidate.

BBC.

Gunmen have killed the female mayor of a town in Mexico just hours after the country celebrated the election of Claudia Sheinbaum as the nation’s first woman president.

Yolanda Sánchez was shot in the town of Cotija, which she had governed since September 2021.

She was the first woman to be elected to the post.

Widespread violence against politicians has overshadowed Mexico’s general election, which saw two women run for the presidency.

Read it.

When 75-year-old Paulette Harlow was sentenced to 24 months in prison on Friday for attempting to dissuade women from getting abortions, she felt thankful—despite her chronic health conditions.

“I went to the sentencing, and I felt very confident, and I felt very joyful, and I felt like it was a tremendous privilege to stand in the court on behalf of the unborn, who have no voice,” she told The Daily Signal.

The jury found Harlow guilty in November under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act and of a civil rights conspiracy. The FACE Act prohibits “violent, threatening, damaging, and obstructive conduct intended to injure, intimidate, or interfere with the right to seek, obtain, or provide reproductive health services.”

Let’s see: How many BLM rioters are in prison? That would be: None. How many AntiFa rioters are in prison. That would be: None.

Read it.

A juror in a huge pandemic fraud trial reports receiving a bag full of $120,000 with a promise of more where that came from if she acquits seven defendants who allegedly stole $40 million from a fund created to feed poor children during the pandemic.

The seven defendants are part of a huge federal criminal complaint alleging that 70 individuals stole more than $250 million of pandemic relief funds.

“This is completely beyond the pale,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said in court on Monday. “This is outrageous behavior. This is stuff that happens in mob movies.”

Ask any member of the mob how he votes and he’ll say ‘Democrat’. Go ahead. Try it.

Ask any prison inmate how he votes and he’ll say ‘Democrat’. Go ahead. Try it.

Read it.

The Mexican government has sued U.S. gun manufacturers, blaming them for crime and cartel violence south of the border. A federal appeals court allowed the case to move forward, so Republican members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives are urging the Supreme Court to defend American sovereignty.

“Mexico is trying to impose its own interpretation of American law on American businesses, and in the process, erode American sovereignty and threaten the Second Amendment,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who led the effort, said in a statement Friday.

“As if facilitating the border crisis was not enough proof on its own, the current government in Mexico has shown a complete disregard for our laws, our Constitution, and our Second Amendment,” Cruz added. “The Supreme Court should defend our Constitution and American sovereignty by taking this appeal and unanimously reversing the First Circuit’s disastrous decision.”

The Guardian.

Study participants born unable to hear could locate sound sources, recognise speech and dance to music after treatment

Watch it.

Nobody in the Woke World can think things through and anticipate that people (a) respond to circumstances and (b) won’t always do what those in power want them to do. All of Professor Atwater’s preferences will not change the fact that people will react to events with the minimum effort they need to avoid unpleasantness.

Democrats fumble this all the time: “Oh, well, all we have to do is pass a law and everything will be sunshine and unicorn farts forever.” T’ain’t necessarily so…. Minimum wage laws don’t force employers to raise everybody’s wages, they merely destroy the jobs of people who are not worth that minimum and encourages employers to automate, as Gavin Newsom is finding out in California. Rinse, repeat. Some government agency made a regulation that food manufacturers had to clean their machines thoroughly (and expensively) when switching from foods containing gluten to foods that didn’t contain gluten so that no gluten-sensitive person would be in danger of ingesting gluten. The manufacturers didn’t clean their machines; they merely added trace amounts of gluten to all the foods they made so that Everything Was Made With Gluten and they were off the hook. Presto chango! Problem solved!

Reality is what happens while you’re busy making plans. Unintended consequences will bite Noble Efforts right square in the ass EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Read it.

Apparently that’s what Democrats mean by ‘closing the border’.

Read it.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Google continues to bury former President Donald Trump’s campaign website after a Manhattan, New York jury came down with a guilty verdict in the dubious case filed by George Soros-backed prosecutor Alvin Bragg.

MRC Free Speech America analyzed Google search results for the eight presidential candidates still in the race Friday. Despite his donation website crashing due to the overwhelming number of visitors following the verdict Thursday, former President Trump was the only candidate whose campaign website did not appear on the first page of search results a day later. All seven other candidates’ websites, including those of President Joe Biden and even Robert F. Kennedy Jr, appeared in the first 10 results when researchers searched for each candidate’s name and the phrase “presidential race 2024.”

“There you go again,” said MRC Free Speech America & MRC Business Director Michael Morris. “Google is up to its old censorship antics in an all-important election season. Just like it did in 2022, burying Republican campaign websites in key Senate races, burying its biggest critics and burying the GOP candidate in the Georgia runoff races, Google is burying the leading GOP challenger in the 2024 presidential race from the first page of results.”

Read it.

Your tax dollars at work.

CNN.

“Cozy” is Voice-of-the-Crust for ‘small’. The home in question is 600 sq. ft., which is about 25×25. That’s a good size for a one-bed apartment, but not what I’d call a ‘home’.

The new printer can produce objects as large as 96 feet long by 32 feet wide by 18 feet?high and can print up to 500 pounds per hour. Dagher says that the goal is to be able to print 1,000 pounds of material in an hour. At that rate, it could reproduce the BioHome3D in 48 hours, he says.

96′ x 32′ is 3,072 sq.ft. Yet what they ‘bolted together’ is only 600 sq.ft. Hmmmm….

Notice that the walls are 3D-printer horizontal wavicles, which will attract dust like nobody’s business. The first thing people are going to do is plaster that wall flat, or sheet-rock it. So much for the warm-fuzzy-wood vibe.

There are some obstacles to overcome first. “It takes years for codes to change,” says Dagher, referring to building codes that construction companies must meet.

Your tax dollars at work. Good luck getting that past the bureaucrat-and-union-pillared Democrat regime in most urban areas. The reason housing costs are so high in the People’s Republic of Maine is because government employees are restricting the supply of housing through strict zoning and environmental regulations, and union labor are filling their pockets and won’t look kindly on somebody trying to bring in a 3D house printer to ‘take union jobs’.

Will CNN report on it when it all comes a cropper? I think not. (‘Oh, look, MAGA squirrels!”)

Watch: Why 3D Printing Buildings Leads to Problems

Read it.

There’s actually a very obvious answer, which is that our protagonists aren’t typical Hobbits. Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin are all very clearly members of the landed gentry, the landowning class that controls most means of economic production and maintains social dominance over the Shire. This isn’t really extrapolation or interpretation, it’s more-or-less text, and I suspect the only reason it’s not spelled out is because Tolkien assumed any reader would understand that intuitively. Bilbo and Frodo are both gentlemen of leisure because the Baggins family is independently wealthy, and that wealth almost has to come from land ownership, because there isn’t enough industry or trade to sustain it. They can afford to go on adventures and study Elven poetry because they draw their income from tenant farmers renting their land. Merry and Pippin are from an even higher social tier; both are the heirs to powerful families that hold quasi-feudal offices (the Master of Buckland, for the Brandybucks, and the Thain, for the Tooks).

The strict definition of ‘farmer’ is someone who works another’s land. We use ‘farmer’ these days for anybody involved in agriculture because the Anglo-Saxon term ‘husbandman’ has fallen out of use.

Read it.

The upper 10 kilometers of the Earth’s crust contains vast geothermal reserves, essentially awaiting human energy consumption to begin to tap into its unstinting power output—which itself yields no greenhouse gasses. And yet, geothermal sources currently produce only three-tenths of one percent of the world’s electricity. This promising energy source has long been limited by the extraordinary challenges of drilling holes that are deep enough to access the intense heat below the Earth’s surface.

Now, an MIT spin-off says it has found a solution in an innovative technology that could dramatically reduce the costs and timelines of drilling to fantastic depths. Quaise Energy, based in Cambridge, Mass., plans to deploy what are called gyrotron drills to vaporize rock using powerful microwaves.

Read it.

Imagine you could go back in time to the ancient world to jump-start the Industrial Revolution. You carry with you plans for a steam engine, and you present them to the emperor, explaining how the machine could be used to drain water out of mines, pump bellows for blast furnaces, turn grindstones and lumber saws, etc.

But to your dismay, the emperor responds: “Your mechanism is no gift to us. It is tremendously complicated; it would take my best master craftsmen years to assemble. It is made of iron, which could be better used for weapons and armor. And even if we built these engines, they would consume enormous amounts of fuel, which we need for smelting, cooking, and heating. All for what? Merely to save labor. Our empire has plenty of labor; I personally own many slaves. Why waste precious iron and fuel in order to lighten the load of a slave? You are a fool!”