Read it.

The death of Nazir Masih, a Christian in his 70s, was announced Monday, nine days after he was attacked by a mob in Sargodha, a city in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

Read it.

Four more male hostages held in Gaza since Oct. 7 are believed to be dead, according to an announcement Monday by the Israeli army that drew an immediate plea by a group representing the family members of the dozens of remaining hostages to make a deal for their release.

The army on Monday named the hostages as Chaim Peri, Yoram Metzger, Amiram Cooper and Nadav Popplewell and said that Hamas was holding their bodies. The army also announced on Monday that a man who had been thought to be a hostage, Dolev Yehud, had in fact been killed on Oct. 7.

The revelations mean that more than a third of the 120 hostages thought to remain in Gaza are known to be dead.

Read it.

A migrant who crossed the southern border illegally in July was arrested after the shootings of two New York City police officers early Monday.

Bernardo Raul Castro Mato, 19, a Venezuelan migrant who entered the U.S. through Eagle Pass, Texas, was arrested, ABC 7 reported. He was taken to New York Presbyterian Hospital in Queens after being shot in the lower leg.

The teen, who has been living at a migrant shelter near LaGuardia Airport, has no criminal history in New York City, but is a suspect in several “snatch and grab” robbery investigations in Queens, police said.

I pick Fauci too. Empty the magazine.

Read it.

I now make a distinction between education and learning. With education someone else decides what they’re going to teach you, and they push it onto you. With learning you get interested in a questions and pull the answer from books, people, videos, and other resources, and the information sticks.

I don’t think there’s much overlap between education and learning. Rarely a student will be interested in what the teacher is teaching (by coincidence or because the teacher is good at generating interest), and when that happens, the information sticks. But most of the time the two are unrelated and the student remembers little.

We’re all told that education and learning are the same—if education is happening, then learning is happening. And students go through years of education. No wonder they think that learning is something to be avoided! They’ve rarely actually experienced it. We all figure out that education (and, incorrectly, learning) is a game where the teacher tries to get you to remember something and you try to do as little work as possible while getting acceptable grades.

…

If you decide to homeschool, the most common question you’ll get from friends is, “What curriculum are you going to follow?” As soon as you use the word “curriculum”, you’ve already lost. You’re doing education, not learning, because the student isn’t pulling information they’re excited about, they’re having your curriculum pushed on them.

Read it.

Arguing that the EU’s recently adopted flagship migration management policy (the Asylum and Migration Pact) does next to nothing to address the challenge of illegal migration and to protect the bloc’s external borders, the national conservative Sweden Democrats (SD) have unveiled a complimentary package that they dubbed “European Deportation Pact.”

The proposed reform package is intended to create EU-wide instruments to externalize the asylum and deportation procedures to third countries (like the Italian-Albanian agreement); force countries of origin to accept back their citizens or face sanctions; and implement a version of the so-called ‘Australian model,’ denying EU residence permit for anyone who’s been caught attempting to enter illegally.

Gothamist.

The Fiscal Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, released new data showing families with children aged 6 or younger are twice as likely to move out of the city as families without young kids. Households with young children make up 14% of the city’s population but 30% of those fleeing the five boroughs, according to the group’s findings.

The analysis underscores the affordability crisis gripping New Yorkers who are caught between escalating rents, child care costs, rising food prices and inflation.

The new data comes as city officials fight an ongoing battle over proposed cuts to early childhood education programs. Education-focused nonprofits and some members of the City Council are urging Mayor Eric Adams to fully restore proposed reductions to popular programs.

ZMan navigates the shifting sands.

Political science claims to have sorted the various types of political systems that have existed and could exist in the world. As a practical matter this means reducing Aristotle’s list of regimes down to “our democracy” and “fascism.” What is called “our democracy” looks nothing like democracy and it has long ago lost its liberalism. As Paul Gottfried noted many years ago, we now live in post-liberal societies. The trouble is, we lack a label that seems to fit what we are seeing.

The reason we lack a label is our socio-political system is amazingly good at disguising itself by shifting focus away from how it acts onto something else. Every month brings the official celebration of some designated victim group. There are many remembrance days for bad things that may or may not have happened. Of course, there is the perpetual foreign bogeyman who threatens our democracy. Russia is currently the bogeyman, but China is warming in the bullpen.

The Other McCain.

You can watch the video of the incident in which Trooper Londregan shot Ricky Cobb and see that any reasonable person would determine that the shooting was justified, even if they didn’t know that Rick Cobb was a lifelong menace to the community. But this happened in Minneapolis, where St. George of the Blessed Fentanyl is considered a civil rights martyr, and the usual suspects demanded “justice.”

…

In January, Mary Moriarty charged Trooper Londregan with three felonies — second-degree unintentional murder, first-degree assault, and second-degree manslaughter: “Our hearts are with Ricky Cobb’s family today, who are grieving an unimaginable loss. I know that they are devastated and will continue to feel this loss for the rest of their lives.”

“I wouldn’t mind living in a world ruled by software. What I actually live in is a world ruled by crappy software.” — John Derbyshire

Read it.

Background: A Muslim terrorist went on a stabbing spree. Two bystanders wrestled him to the ground. The police arrived and went to work on the bystanders, releasing the terrorist, who promptly stabbed one of the officers in the neck. See above photo.

Read it.

There was a nasty incident of enricher-vs.-enricher violence yesterday in North Rhine-Westphalia: a man shot his pregnant wife in the head, and also several other people. As a matter of interest, the case has a Mohammed Coefficient of 100%.

Read it.

Every few years we get another media piece about the “first climate refugees”. I’ve written about the latest one below.

Here are the first through sixth first climate refugees, and the seventh, ninth, and eleventh-tenth first climate refugees. Where are the eighth first climate refugees? No clue, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Oh, and here are the twelfth first climate refugees.

So where are the 13th first climate refugees? They are some of the Kuna (or Guna) people. They live in Panama, on a tiny island named Gardi Sugdub. And by tiny, I mean minuscule. It is about 1200 feet (366 meters) long and 450 feet (137 meters) wide. The media piece about them is called “Panama prepares to evacuate first island in face of rising sea levels“.

Power Line.

For readers still puzzled about exactly how the Trump trial went down and why Alvin Bragg’s case was so convoluted, Brad Smith, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission whose testimony on this point was disallowed by Judge Merchan, offers this primer in two long threads on Twitter/X.

UK Daily Mail.

Republicans put out the full transcript of their sit down interview with Fauci from January just days before his highly-anticipated public testimony on Monday.

They plan to grill him about COVID restrictions he put in place, that he admitted didn’t do much to ‘slow the spread’ of the virus.

Read it.

One day after Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in his ‘hush money’ trial, a court-appointed officer overseeing the Infowars bankruptcy apparently went rogue on Friday and tried to seize and shut down Alex Jones’ studio without a court order, despite having a reported “path with the [bankruptcy] judge to continue on for years.”

Read it.

Two state supreme courts are considering whether workers who administered COVID-19 vaccines to minors without parental consent should be shielded by a federal law.

The North Carolina Supreme Court agreed to take up an appeal from Tanner Smith, one of the minors, and his mother, according to an order dated May 23.

Tanner, who was 14 at the time, went to a clinic at a school in his district, Guilford County Schools, in 2021 to receive a COVID-19 test. Instead, his mom and stepfather learned later, he was injected with a COVID-19 vaccine even after he told workers at the clinic he didn’t want it.

Emily Happel, Tanner’s mother, and the boy sued the district and the organization that was running the clinic, alleging battery and violations of constitutional rights.

Newsbusters.

This Wednesday (June 5) marks 20 years since the passing of Ronald Reagan, the conservative Republican President whose policies led to record economic prosperity and laid the foundation for the peaceful end to the Cold War. In the years since his death, some in the media have used Reagan’s memory as a weapon to bash today’s Republican Party.

In 2015, for example, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell juxtaposed the Gipper with his would-be successors: “Reagan’s message was infused with sunny optimism, the flip side of today’s angry rhetoric…. Reagan saw America as a shining sit on the hill. A country welcoming people in, not shutting them out.”

But that’s not how Mitchell (NBC’s White House reporter in the 1980s) and her colleagues characterized Reagan when he was implementing his successful conservative program. As NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham documented 20 years ago, the liberal media harshly, and wrongly, portrayed Reagan during his life “as an unintelligent airhead who lived in a fantasy world, a mesmerizing Music Man fooling the public with a phony bill of goods, a man who was cruel or uncaring to poor people, and a puppet for the greedy rich.”

Slate.

Every now and them, Voice of the Crust SLATE puts out something interesting.

Perhaps you hold the currently popular notion that medieval witch hunts targeted wise old women who made herbal remedies for their ungrateful peasant neighbors? Incorrect, according to Stanmore and most historians of the period. In the first place, witch hunts were rare during the Middle Ages. They proliferated in the early modern period, and while Stanmore does not explore theories about what caused this in Cunning Folk, historians increasingly view Europe’s witch hunts as a symptom of social upheaval and competing faiths following the Reformation. Witch hunts occurred within all Christian denominations and served as a kind of advertisement for a particular church’s ability to secure both salvation and protection from evil for its members. They were dramatic demonstrations of purity in a highly competitive ideological marketplace.[emphasis added]

Which tells you everything you need to know about the Trump trials.

Read it.

Google pours millions into development of their email service called Gmail. Its operating costs are insanely high. Yet, the service is offered free of charge to billions of users.

Gmail is not even a Freemium service. It does not have a paid tier with which it compensates the free tier. Even if it did, we have learned through our own experience here at Migadu that free email services do not work without a catch.

We offered free email services between 2015 and 2020 to more than 200.000 email accounts. The free tier was responsible for more than 80% of our costs, both in infrastructure as well in support. This has led to sunsetting the free tier in October 2020.

On the other hand, Gmail offers its free service to billions of users worldwide. Where is the catch?

TANSTAAFL. If you are not paying for a product, then you are the product. (This maxim also applies to the American welfare state. The outcome of getting free stuff from the government is more votes for the Party of Free Stuff, i.e. Democrats–with results as you see them.)

Ars Technica.

The battle formations included the “promachoi”—the foremost fighters who formed the first line—and the “plithos,” men that were staying in the rear. The warriors took turns in the first line and then retreated to the rear to rest. Toward the end of the day, the armies disengaged and returned to their camps. The army operations lasted 11 hours each day.

During those 11 hours, a typical warrior in Homeric tales would go through 31 one-versus-one duels, 10 encounters with the enemy on a chariot, two chariot-versus-chariot engagements, and one chariot-versus-warrior-on-ship encounter (a ranged battle where the warrior defended beached ships from charging chariots). The composition of this ordeal was inferred from statistical analysis of fights in The Iliad. Each of those scenarios included a fair share of spear throws, sword strikes, shooting arrows, and spear strikes, all performed in full body armor. Overall, the whole day was effectively a long, high-intensity interval exercise.

“So, we asked a group of special-armed forces personnel wearing a replica of the Dendra armor to complete this protocol,” says Flouris. The 13 marines who volunteered were trained in historical combat, fitted with sensors that monitored their performance, and fed roughly 4,500 calories worth of goat cheese, roasted meat, olives, bread, water, wine, and other Bronze Age culinary delicacies. And then they had a go at it.

“Sing, goddess, of the sweat of Achilles Peleus’ son….”

Read it.

Evolution is often thought of as a haphazard process acting on an assortment of traits that randomly appear through genetic variation.

So much so that if we were to wind back the clock on evolution and “replay the tape of life,” the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said, he doubts “anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.”

But a new study of stick insects suggests that evolution may sometimes repeat itself in a predictable manner, which could help our understanding of how organisms may change in response to selection pressures.

Why this comes as a surprise puzzles me. Environmental conditions favor certain traits over others; this is the whole basis of the notion of ‘convergent evolution’. Modern epigenetics demonstrates that environmental factors will influence gene expression, and so it takes very little brain to realize that similar environments will promote similar epigenetic changes.

What passes for ‘science’ these days is very weak beer.

NavalNews.

Fincantieri are the folks from whom the U.S. Navy took the design for the new Constellation-class frigates and proceeded to FUBAR it.

There are 50 years’ worth of advances in shipbuilding technology that the U.S. government has resolutely refused to adopt; the poster child for this is the Littoral Combat Ship, which has failed and is failing even as we write, despite Austal being the premier successful builder of high-speed catamaran transports in the world. (The only ships Austal has ever built that have serious problems are the Independence-class LCS, with the Navy pissing in the design process constantly from day 1.)

UPDATE: Shipbuilding 4.0: Using Digital Twins to Enhance Efficiency (MarineLink)

Read it.

Writing these words on the American holiday, Memorial Day, in an election year, whilst sitting in an Austrian apartment is a poignant experience. It is always sobering to contemplate the legions who have died for the well-being and safety of the United States of America, but never more than in an election year, when everyone in public life is out for themselves, and very few appear to think about the common good for which the honoured dead gave their lives. This year, the very nature of the country is part of the debate. Indeed, I cannot help thinking—as an American in Europe often must—about the identity of my country and its relationship with the Mother Continent. In some ways, we Americans, a race of exiles, can never be truly content. We unconsciously yearn for a completion, a wholeness, that often eludes us, whether we be immigrants just naturalised or Mayflower descendants. The song The Girl I Left Behind Me was brought over the Atlantic in the 17th century; like the Ashokan Farewell, I think it captures that yearning perfectly. We may cross the water as much as we like (and I often do), but it is an ocean of time as well as space that separates us from our origins. Even the America that we more consciously seek to regain is increasingly remote.

It is fair to say that there have been—in time—four Americas, the last three of which occupied roughly the same space. We are currently making the transition to a fifth, and this coming election and its accompanying dramas will play a large role in that transition. After a look at the first four, we can speculate on what the next might be like.

Wait until you see whether he can successfully monetize it….

Read it.

Following its abrupt closures in El Dorado Hills and Folsom, 13 additional Rubio’s Coastal Grill locations in San Diego are closing by the end of the day on Friday.

“… The closings were brought about by the rising cost of doing business in California. While painful, the store closures are a necessary step in our strategic long-term plan to position Rubio’s for success for years to come,” a spokesperson with Rubio’s said in an email.

Politico.

Donald Trump’s conviction has raised many political and legal questions, but at least one issue is not in doubt: whether he will appeal.

He might even win.

Watch it.

This disturbing legal trend with firearm training is on the rise in the courtroom. Could your firearm training affect you in a disturbing way? What does this mean for firearm training, police officers, military members, license and permit holders, gun owners, and gun enthusiasts? Armed Attorneys Emily Taylor and Richard Hayes discuss the legal trend they’re seeing more frequently with firearm training.

Read it.

Sweden’s Security Service Säpo confirmed on Thursday that the Iranian regime is recruiting criminals to conduct attacks on Jewish targets in the Scandinavian country. This corroborates earlier intelligence reports from Israel’s spy agency Mossad.

At a joint press conference with the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm, Swedish counter-intelligence chief Daniel Stenling described Iran as wanting to use “criminal networks” as “proxies.” He indicated Iran’s chargé d’affaires would be summoned to a meeting on Friday to answer the claims.

Stenling was short on exact details but confirmed that security measures were being increased on potential Jewish targets. Mossad has already indicated that underworld networks in Europe could be weaponised against the upcoming Summer Olympics in Paris.

Navy Matters.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report on the Constellation class frigate construction program delays and it’s an eye opener even for ComNavOps who predicted exactly these kinds of problems long ago.

To review, the contract delivery date is April 2026. Current estimates by the Navy put delivery sometime in 2029, three years late and seven years after the Aug 2022 start of construction (seven years to build a frigate?!), and you know that date is going to continue to be pushed further out with more delays.

As with all sizable ships, the Constellation is being built in sections, called blocks (although the Navy now calls them ‘Grand Modules’ in their typically PowerPoint-ish, pointless churn style; someone undoubtedly got a promotion for coming up with the phrase, ‘Grand Module’) and, according to a diagram in the report, the Constellation has 31 blocks. Of the 31 blocks, 11 are currently being manufactured despite not having completed design documents

Freeberg nails it.

“Symbol(s) of hate.” I’m not quoting any one particular thing. It’s the concept. Progressives see a S.O.H. and they want it covered, removed, preferably destroyed. You put up text or an image on Facebook expressing a “hateful” idea, their cops will see to it the display is as temporary as possible. Get rid of those symbols.

Read it.

Mexico’s election is now the bloodiest in its modern history after a candidate running for local office in central Puebla state was murdered on Friday at a political rally, taking the number of assassinated candidates to 37 ahead of Sunday’s vote.

Jorge Huerta Cabrera, a candidate who was running for a council seat in the town of Izucar de Matamoros, was gunned down in the attack, according to the state prosecutor’s office.

The killing takes the number of assassinated candidates in the 2024 election season to 37, one more than during the 2021 midterm election when 36 candidates were killed, according to data from security consultancy Integralia.

Sure! Open the border! Let ’em all in! What could it hurt?

Read it.

On Thursday, May 30th, a jury of 12 New Yorkers erased the last distinctive line between Biden’s America and Putin’s Russia. With their verdict against Donald Trump, finding him guilty on 34 counts of forging business records, they verified that the Democrat party—the party of the sitting president—can organize a trial with its party operatives as judge and prosecutor, and get their political opponent found guilty.

The judge in the case, Juan Merchan, is an entrenched Democrat who has been selected to prosecute more Republicans than just Donald Trump. In the America that we all knew before Biden came into office, judges were selected randomly; from now on, ‘random’ means a Democrat when the defendant is a Republican.

The prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, was elected to the position as District Attorney of Manhattan after having campaigned on a promise to prosecute—more appropriately persecute—Donald Trump. In the America that we all knew before Biden came into office, a DA had to first investigate a case before he could judge whether or not to file charges against anyone.

Read it.

As is traditional in today’s female-centric culture, the divorced mom has succeeded in turning her children against her former husband.

This is one reason why men are refusing to get married–in addition to the easy-divorce-give-me-half-your-stuff, the woman gets custody and almost invariably works to turn the children into dad-haters.

UnHerd.

As a youngish white male historian, stuck in a university system that tends to deem your race and sex as a problem inherited from history, what can you do to make your already slim chances of getting a permanent academic job yet more wraith-like? Based on this week’s case study — a hapless Yale University postdoctoral researcher called David Austin Walsh — the answer seems to be: engage in a frustrated social-media rant about how you’re struggling to find a tenured job, and then in a moment of madness add a reference to preferential hiring practices working against your being white and male.

But why stop there? To create even better conditions for career destruction, make sure that — like Walsh — you have hitherto impressive progressive credentials, having just published a monograph putatively connecting US conservatism to racism and fascism. (Only last week Walsh authored a New York Times op ed to advertise said book, alleging that “a generation of young Republican staff members appears to be developing terminal white nationalist brain”.)

For luck, combine your rant about the difficulty of getting a job as a “white dude” with showboating about personal accomplishments and popularity, and the claim that you are better qualified than many of those to whom you have lost out in the past. In doing all this, you will have gifted envious fellow academics the means and opportunity to ruin you reputationally, while pretending to be striking a blow in the name of anti-racism. Meanwhile, a gleeful conservative commentariat will goad and mock you for being a self-loathing sap, for whom the subservient pose did not work in any case.

Read it.

In November, a poll found 68% of Americans across party lines thought parents should be notified “if their child changes their gender identification or preferred pronouns at school.” And while some are shocked this is a controversial topic to begin with, many are not-so shocked to learn the state of California has proved to be an epicenter of these debates.

When the Chino Valley Unified School District board, led by President Sonja Shaw, met in July to discuss a potential policy that would require parental notification if their children attempted gender transitions at school, they were confronted by California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. Later, in August, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, sued the school district after it established a policy “requiring faculty and staff to notify parents of students’ attempted gender transitions,” The Washington Stand previously reported.

Now, the battle continues. Thurmond has brought a new bill to the table, AB 1955, which California Democrats are eager to codify into law. The bill reflects the views of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, which, in effect, would reverse the parent-friendly policy currently in place.

Read it.

SARS-CoV-2 infection may cause severe pulmonary conditions such as pneumonia, inflammation, and acute respiratory distress syndrome, but until now, researchers have not understood the driving force behind lung damage caused by COVID-19.

In a recently published paper in Nature Communications, researchers at Columbia University discovered that a relatively new form of iron-dependent cell death called ferroptosis is the underlying mechanism causing extreme and potentially fatal pulmonary conditions in COVID-19 patients.

“This finding adds crucial insight to our understanding of how COVID-19 affects the body that will significantly improve our ability to fight life-threatening cases of the disease,” Brent Stockwell, chair of the department of biological sciences at Columbia and co-lead author of the study, said in a news release.

Read it.

If the devil is in the details, bureaucracy is hell on earth. Though terrain familiar to the Biden administration, Republicans must prepare to navigate it.

Witness the debacle over liquefied natural gas exports, wherein the White House, by “pausing” most new approvals, has catapulted the energy security of key U.S. allies straight into the buzzsaw of its climate ambitions. (The category of exports that will continue to be authorized is tiny.) The Department of Energy claims that a multifactor impact study due in early 2025 is required to determine whether and how the moratorium will be lifted.

Under a certain conception of executive power, it should be simple enough for a second-term Trump administration to end this national embarrassment by pressing “resume” on the authorization process. But as analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies have suggested, merely setting aside the study could provide a basis, however tenuous, for future litigation. In the modern administrative state, it is easier to open than shut the procedural door to delays.

John Derbyshire.

So a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on all thirty-four charges of having falsified business records in 2017 with the intent to cover up another crime. What wasthat other crime? I don’t know. Does anybody?

What came to my mind on hearing the verdict was an old legal story from 19th-century Ireland when, to quote a history of the time, “violence and sectarians tensions abounded” and “the jury system came under considerable strain.” Juries often sympathized with the accused.

In one of these cases a judge is said to have dismissed a prisoner with the words “You have been acquitted by a Limerick jury, and you may now leave the dock without any other stain upon your character!”

Read it.

Where the old European governments had looked to pacify Muslims abroad, their EU descendants struggled to pacify them at home. And America soon followed. After 9/11, America had been primarily worried about Muslim terrorism coming from abroad. Now it mostly worries about Islamic terrorism coming from Muslim converts and immigrants within the United States.

A history of Islamic colonialism is repeating itself with the complicity of ignorant ideologues who describe the process by which the cruel imperialism that crippled most of the world made a comeback, subjugating women, cultural and racial minorities and all non-Muslims, as liberation.

The long march of Islam across the Middle East, and then Africa and Asia, had climaxed in a struggle in Europe between the invading Muslim armies and the indigenous population. The Gates of Vienna marked a turning point in which the Islamic empires dominated much of what we came to call the Third World, but were prevented from conquering and colonizing Europe.

Read it.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office provided free consultations and legal assistance to illegal aliens charged with violent felonies in 2023, documents reveal.

The taxpayer-funded consultations were provided to migrants charged with various heinous crimes—including rape, robbery, strangulation, aggravated assault, and homicide by vehicle—in an ostensible effort to help them avoid convictions that would lead to their deportation, documents obtained by the Immigration Reform Law Institute reveal.

Daily Signal.

If you’re one of the millions of Americans struggling to save for retirement today, get ready for more struggle, at least if President Joe Biden gets his way. He’s proposing a tax hike on savings that would mean a negative rate of return for many people after adjusting for inflation.

As part of his trillions of dollars in tax hikes, Biden has proposed a 45% tax on capital gains, painting it as a tax on the boogeyman of “greedy” billionaires. In reality, 12.5 million Americans—mostly middle class—pay this tax on their retirement savings.

That’s why every American should be horrified that Biden wants to raise this tax to the highest rate in 111 years. Such a move would severely hamper people’s ability to save for retirement, and it would cripple economic growth.

Read it.

Despite ubiquitous reports that there is an overwhelming consensus among scientists in support of this narrative, many scientists, like John Clauser, a 2022 Nobel Prize recipient in physics, see it differently.

Mr. Clauser stated in 2023 that “the popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.

“Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience,” Mr. Clauser stated. “In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis.”

Read it.

The Republican attorneys general of Mississippi and Tennessee announced Friday that they are part of a multistate lawsuit challenging a new Biden administration rule that redefines Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition against discrimination based on “sex” to include “gender identity.”

“Gender identity” is, of course, mentioned nowhere in the applicable statute. This regulation goes beyond the powers granted in HHS. But they plan to do it anyway because it fits the Democrat fascist political agenda.

The rule change by the Department of Health and Human Services “is the latest effort by the Biden Administration to enshrine sweeping gender-identity mandates without congressional consent,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday at U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Mississippi.

The rule would require medical providers to perform surgeries and administer hormone drugs to children and adults for the purpose of gender transition, without regard for a doctor’s medical judgment as to whether that treatment was appropriate, according to a news release from the office of Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch.

Read it.

Vermont on Friday became the first state to enact legislation that requires oil companies to pay for damages resulting from alleged climate change after Republican Gov. Phil Scott allowed the bill to become law without his signature.

Scott, a popular governor who is seeking reelection in November to a fifth two-year term, decided against vetoing the bill because the General Assembly has a veto-proof majority in both chambers. He voiced his concerns about the bill in a letter Thursday to John Bloomer, a Republican who has been secretary of the state Senate since 2011.

“Taking on ‘Big Oil’ should not be taken lightly,” Scott wrote. “And with just $600,000 appropriated by the Legislature to complete an analysis that will need to withstand intense legal scrutiny from a well-funded defense, we are not positioning ourselves for success.”

Read it.

Some residents of the Clinton Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn say they are tired of addicts doing drugs in plain sight on their street.

And they are fed up with a city-backed harm reduction group giving them the drug paraphernalia to do so, reported the New York Post.

Vocal-NY, a statewide grassroots membership organization that offers harm reduction services to people who use drugs in New York City, has been distributing free needles, crack pipes and devices to “cook” heroin every Wednesday at the entrance to the Clinton–Washington Avenue subway station on the C line, according to the Post.