Read it.

A ship traveling through the Red Sea came under repeated missile fire Friday in a likely attack launched by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, authorities said, the latest targeting the crucial maritime route.

Five missiles landed near the vessel as it traveled off the coast of the rebel-held port city of Hodeida in Yemen, the British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said.

The missiles landed near the vessel, but caused no damage, the UKTMO added.

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A video shows Welsh police visiting a man’s home because he displayed a Reform UK political sign on the wall, despite this being a completely normal sight during election season.

Voice of Wales posted a clip to X showing an officer at the man’s house talking about how “concerns” had been expressed about the sign and that he needed to take a photo of it.

The officer also took a photo of another Lest We Forget Flag that is sometimes displayed outside homes to honor Britain’s war dead.

The UK is increasingly becoming a totalitarian shithole. Much like Canada….

The Atlantic.

These days, every trip to the grocery store makes me second-guess myself. Lined up next to the bottles of basics such as canola, vegetable, and corn oil are relatively exotic—and expensive—options: grapeseed oil, pumpkin-seed oil, walnut oil. Some are labeled with technical-sounding terms such as “high-oleic,” “cold-pressed,” and “expeller-pressed.” There’s “hexane-free” coconut oil and “naturally refined” avocado oil—if you can make any sense of what these labels mean. Picking an olive oil alone is like trying to plan a European vacation: Greece, Italy, or Spain? Or how about a Mediterranean blend?

Read it.

The Japanese government is planning to connect major cities with automated zero-emissions logistics links that can quietly and efficiently shift millions of tons of cargo, while getting tens of thousands of trucks off the road.

According to The Japan News, the project has been under discussion since February by an expert panel at the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism ministry. A draft outline of an interim report was released Friday, revealing plans to complete an initial link between Tokyo and Osaka by 2034.

The AntiPlanner.

“Rural schools in California already struggle with declining enrollment, staffing shortages and wildfires,” says Carolyn Jones, writing for Calmatters, a left-leaning policy web site. “Now they’re facing the possible loss of money they’ve relied on for more than a century.” What Jones doesn’t say is that the counties have been scamming federal taxpayers for that money for decades and they’d naturally rather continue the scam than have to raise the money locally.

Federal lands aren’t taxable by state or local governments. When Congress began setting aside national forests, it decided to make it up to local governments by giving them 25 percent of any revenues the forests earned. In some places, the counties got 50 percent. Congress specified that national forest payments to counties had to be spent on roads and schools.

When Congress passed this law, it never imagined that national forest revenues would someday be well in excess of a billion dollars a year. By the 1970s, many counties, particularly those in Washington, Oregon, northern California, Idaho, and a few other places were getting far more money in 25-percent funds than they would have gotten if they had been able to collect property taxes.

Peggy Noonan remembers that she was once a Republican.

I suppose this is about being an honorable combatant in the middle of a culture war, which entails seeing the humanity of your perceived foe and, in the seeing of it, preserving your own.

The story, which you’ve already heard, is that a left-wing activist who calls herself an “advocacy journalist” went to the June 3 dinner of the Supreme Court Historical Society, a 50-year-old organization whose declared mission is to unearth and preserve the court’s history. During what appears to have been the drinks portion of the evening the activist, called Lauren Windsor, secretly taped private conversations with Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann. Ms. Windsor dishonestly presented herself as a conservative Christian. She goaded and baited the Alitos, hoping to get them to say extreme and stupid things, which she would later disseminate on social media.

The Foundry.

Not long ago, Snopes, a left-wing “fact-checking” site, finally admitted that former President Donald Trump had never called the neo-Nazis who marched at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 “very fine people.”

For years, Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have repeated this false claim. Indeed, Biden, who’s been running for the presidency since 1987, ludicrously told the press in 2019 that the events in Charlottesville, and Trump’s alleged reaction, inspired him to run in 2020.

Well, there’s a new Charlottesville every week in America nowadays. They aren’t led by a few hundred Nazi cosplayers, but thousands of Islamists and leftist fellow travelers whose goals are supported by numerous administration officials, congressmen, and newsrooms.

Read it.

A group of Republican lawmakers is working to strip all DEI programs out of the government through legislation they call the Dismantle DEI Act.

“This bill goes through the federal government and works to remove the officers, the programs” centered on DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion, Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, says.

Cloud and Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, along with 20 other members of Congress, introduced the Dismantle DEI Act to end the use of taxpayer money to fund programs that Cloud says are discriminatory in nature.

David Frum carries a tanker full of water for the Left.

The debate was a travesty—because its whole premise was to treat a failed coup leader as a legitimate candidate for the presidency again.

You’d never know that this guy (like his fellow sell-out, Conor Friedersdorf) was once an intern at National Review.

Hm. Well, maybe you would….

Read it.

A CDU politician in Germany is under investigation for hate crimes after he reacted to a knife attack by an Afghan migrant by calling for the expulsion of foreign criminals from the country.

Read it.

A new research project, “Milking it: colonialism, heritage and everyday engagement with dairy,” comes out of the University of Oxford’s History of Science Museum.

Leading the project are JC Niala, head researcher of the museum, and Johanna Zetterström Sharp, associate professor of archaeology at the University College London, according to an announcement on the museum’s Facebook page.

Their goal is to “examine the milk-related collections of the History of Science Museum to understand scientific knowledge production and the impact of colonial legacies on contemporary issues,” the announcement states.

The Federalist.

The justice who was nominated to the Supreme Court based on her race and sex refused for the second time in her short high court career to acknowledge women. The stiff to the females she claims to represent came in her concurring opinion in Moyle v. United States, released on Thursday.

Jackson joined Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in deciding to punt a ruling on the Biden administration’s attempt to twist the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) to advance its abortion extremism in pro-life states. She also penned her own concurring opinion claiming that Idaho’s popular lifesaving law specifically posed a threat to women. Yet she refused to write the word “women.”

Throughout her eight-page opinion, Jackson reduced those most impacted by Idaho’s law and the regime’s EMTALA expansion to “pregnant patients” instead of using the biologically accurate label used to describe the unique humans intrinsically designed to conceive and birth children.

The Foundry.

Let the spin begin!

UPDATE: Trump vs. Biden: 4 Highlights From the First Presidential Debate (The Foundry)

UPDATE: Joe Biden Mumbles and Stumbles the Democrats Into Crisis (Daily Beast)

UPDATE: Biden makes stunning omission while claiming no troops died ‘anywhere in the world’ on his watch (Fox News)

UPDATE: WATCH: Biden Malfunctions, Claims He ‘Beat Medicare’ (Washington Free Beacon)

UPDATE: CNN PANIC: Biden was ‘Dismal,’ ‘Not Coherent,’ Dems Want New Candidate (Newsbusters)

UPDATE: Dems freak out over Biden’s debate performance: ‘Biden is toast’  (Politico)

UPDATE: MSNBC’s JOY REID PANICS: Biden ‘Extremely Feeble’, ‘Weak’, Had One Job (Newsbusters)

Read it.

As universities nationwide scale back diversity, equity and inclusion policies, Arizona’s flagship public institution is preparing to implement a new mandate for students — two courses with a DEI emphasis as a graduation requirement.

Through the two courses, students will focus on themes of diversity, power, equity, privilege, oppression and marginalization, learn “how historical and contemporary populations have experienced inequality,” and “theorize how to create a more equitable society,” the university’s website states.

Read it.

The man who opened fire at an apartment complex near Las Vegas, killing five people and injuring a 13-year-old girl, was banned from owning a firearm because of prior felony convictions, court records show.

The suspect, Eric Adams, later shot and killed himself as North Las Vegas police officers confronted him.

I guess all those gun control laws really work, hey?

Gothamist.

Construction crews have been working to install new water pipes and sewers along York Avenue between East 61st and 63rd streets on the Upper East Side for more than eight years.

The project, which stretches over two blocks, is relatively small for a public work in New York City and was originally scheduled to take a year to complete. But it’s now seven years past that deadline, and officials say it won’t be finished until June 2025.

That’s nearly a decade of construction to build about 500 feet of sewer and water lines.

City engineers and architects say the delays point to the inefficient management of municipal infrastructure projects.

The American Mind.

FBI data “makes clear that last year’s historic decline in violent crime is continuing,” he assured America. “This continued historic decline in homicides,” he added, “does not represent abstract statistics. It represents people whose lives were saved—people who are still here to see their children grow up, to work toward fulfilling their dreams, and to contribute to their communities.”

The Attorney General’s misleading statement obscures the troubling reality of increasing, not decreasing, lawlessness. Despite FBI data indicating a 15 percent drop in violent crime and a 26 percent decrease in murders in early 2024, these statistics are marred by significant gaps in reporting, particularly from major cities like Los Angeles and New York City.

This fact was first highlighted by?the Marshall Project, a left-leaning organization that focuses on the country’s criminal justice system. By 2020, the non-profit point out, nearly all law enforcement agencies were included in the FBI’s database. Some agencies provided basic figures, such as total murders or car thefts, using the Summary Reporting System, while others submitted detailed incident reports through the newer National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

Read it.

In the past few days, CNN has demonstrated just how blatant their prejudice has become. From Kasie Hunt’s outrage over the network’s bias being called out to Thursday morning’s display of censorship, President of Students for Life of America Kristan Hawkins being silenced on CNNNewsroom by host Jim Acosta.

Read it.

Legislation, mostly. A lot of it winds up on fashion runways. And don’t get me started on Hollywood….

Forbes.

And he appears to be doing just fine.

What does he know that you don’t?

Read it.

From the way the barbs were wrapped around and woven through the horizontal strands, the ranchers could tell at a glance if the land and animals enclosed within belonged to them — I call them “signature barbs” — sort of like a premodern QR code.

When people started settling the Great Plains, there was nothing out here but millions of buffalo and some scattered Indians. There were no land divisions, no fences, no houses, no roads, no towns…. Moreover, since the land was so inhospitable, most people were intent on going further westward — even to the coast.

The first barbed wire was invented in 1867 by Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio, which is 32 miles from my home in Osnaburg, Ohio. That changed everything. Wooden fences were vastly more expensive (there were very few trees out here then), difficult to install, and hard to maintain — plus they weren’t as effective as barbed wire. So the barbed wire fences started to impose some order on the Great Plains.

Read it.

An illegal immigrant from Ecuador was arrested Tuesday in Syracuse, N.Y., for reportedly killing a 21-year-old woman and burying her body in a shallow grave in an upstate New York park, police said.

Let’s just say that they’re not sending us their best.

Vox.

Good news, for a change, even if Voice of the Crust VOX doesn’t think so.

The dispute in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy turns on whether a hedge fund manager accused of defrauding investors is entitled to a jury trial to determine whether he violated federal securities law, or whether the government acted properly when it tried him before an official known as an “administrative law judge” (ALJ).

Read it.

BLUF:

1. Joe Biden Drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR)
2. Biden Administration Leased the Fewest Acres for American Oil Production Since Truman
3. Joe Biden Colludes with Saudi Arabia for More Oil
4. The Failed “Inflation Reduction Act”
5. Electric Vehicle (EV) Mandates

Read it.

An illegal immigrant from Turkey was arrested and charged last week in Albany, New York, for allegedly raping a 15-year-old girl and authorities didn’t notify the public about the incident, reports the Albany Times Union.

Read it.

The editor-in-chief and publisher of The Tennessee Star was ordered to appear in court last week and threatened with charges of contempt after his newspaper reported on an anonymously leaked collection of documents authored by Nashville mass shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale. Michael Patrick Leahy was joined by his attorneys in court on Monday for a “show-cause hearing,” where the journalist was asked by Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea Myles to demonstrate why his outlet’s reporting does not subject him to contempt proceedings and sanctions.

On March 27, 2023, Hale (born Audrey Elizabeth Hale) entered the Covenant School armed with three semiautomatic guns and murdered six people, including three 9-year-old children. Hale, who was eventually shot and killed by police in the school, was a transgender man and former student at Covenant who harbored extremist sentiments on race, gender, and politics. The massacre remains the deadliest mass shooting in Tennessee history.

Adam Goldstein, a senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told RealClear last week that there is no legal basis whatsoever on which Myles can pursue contempt proceedings against Leahy. “It has not been alleged by anyone to date that the Star or Leahy did anything unlawful to obtain this information,” Goldstein said, speaking of the leaked documents, “or that the information was not basically accurate as published.” Reporting on leaked documents, however they were obtained by a source, is an essential journalistic practice protected by U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

Can you say “Pentagon Papers”? I’m sure you can.

Read it.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on Thursday released the full transcripts of several high profile former intelligence officers who signed their names to the now discredited “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails” letter.

Read it.

16 Nobel Prize-winning economists, who’ve heretofore been silent as a group over the brazen bull of inflation cooking Americans alive under President Biden, have teamed up for a pre-election collab to let us know that former President Trump ‘could stoke inflation if he wins.’

“Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast [oh?]. There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets,” reads the letter, signed by the 51 former intelligence plucky pocket protector vanguard of Biden’s reelection campaign, CBS News reports.

Of course, they ignore the fact that Biden has kept the Trump tariffs from 2018 and added specific tariffs on “strategic” imports from China.

Read it.

But by God they’ll respect your pronouns!

Read it.

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, better known as Project 2025, is the effort of a broad coalition of more than 100 conservative organizations working together to ensure a successful new presidential administration begins Jan. 20.

Project 2025, spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation, seeks to restore democracy, to loosen it from the grip of the political elites in Washington, D.C.

But the fiercest attackers of Project 2025 are lining up to protect the deep state. In recent months, the project has faced outlandish, hyperbolic attacks.

UPDATE: TRUMP ALLIES’ 920 PAGE PLAN TO GIVE TRUMP MORE POWER OVER YOUR DAILY LIFE, GUT DEMOCRATIC CHECKS AND BALANCES, AND CONSOLIDATE POWER IN THE OVAL OFFICE.

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It’s not just Britons who think Labour will have a lax attitude towards the nation’s borders—perhaps even more so than the Conservatives. Migrants in France also expect that the likely incoming government under Sir Keir Starmer will make it even easier for Channel crossers to make the illegal (and hideously dangerous) journey to the UK—and, more importantly, to stay there.

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Boeing is being sanctioned by U.S. investigators for sharing information about a federal investigation of a door plug blowout that left a gaping hole in a Boeing 737 Max 9.

The National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday that Boeing “blatantly violated” the agency’s investigative regulations as well as a signed agreement by providing non-public investigative information to the media and speculating about possible causes of the Jan. 5 door plug blowout on a Boeing passenger jet in Portland, Oregon.

Unelected bureaucrats react to transparency the way vampires are said to react to garlic and holy water. Your tax dollars at work….

Read it.

Study comparing the genetic activity of mitochondria, the cell’s power plants, in males and females finds extreme differences, suggesting certain disease therapies must be tailored to each sex.

Oops–this will get you cancelled by the Wokerati for the ThoughtCrime of Noticing.

Read it.

“Once you really know how to diagram a sentence really know it, you know practically all you have to know about English grammar”, Gertrude Stein once claimed. “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. . . . I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves.” While one student’s lexical excitement is surely another’s slow death by gerund, Stein cuts to the heart of the grammatical pull. Is grammar prescriptive and conventional, something one learns to impose on language through trial and error? Or do sentences, in a sense, diagram themselves, revealing an innate logic and latent structure in language and the mind? More than a century before Noam Chomsky popularized the idea of a universal grammar, linguists in the United States began diagramming sentences in an attempt to visualize the complex structure — of seemingly divine origins — at their mother tongue’s core.

I remember diagramming sentences in elementary school – I could probably still do it if I had to (although I would need to stifle the impulse to put it in Backus-Naur format).

WIRED.

So many people are nearsighted on the island nation that they have already glimpsed what could be coming for the rest of us.

My own family is a case in point. My older brother, born during WWII, has good natural eyesight; I and my younger brother, born and raised in the 1950s, were strongly nearsighted. My earliest memory is of being in a classroom and not being able to read what was on the blackboard not ten feet from where I sat.

Commonweal.

Maybe parking really does explain the world.

Quillette.

A recognition that genetic influences on social outcomes are important will potentially influence the kind of help that society offers poorer individuals. But it does not in any way compel an absence of help, or a casual indifference.

And only people who fail to grasp the distinction between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’ would make that mistake.

Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.

Far too many people think that the scientific determination of ‘what we are’ is somehow normative of ‘what we ought to be’. Diet fads are based on this: We evolved to eat meat, so we all ought to eat meat and nothing else. Well, no. The first part of that statement is true, but the second part is not–non sequitur, as we old-fashioned people would say.

Read it.

Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. The speakers of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, for example, use the same word hunden, meaning “the dog,” to communicate that the dog is in the house or that someone found the dog or gave food to the dog. In Icelandic, on the other hand, three different word forms would be used in these situations, corresponding to the nominative, accusative, and dative case respectively: hundurinn, hundinn, and hundinum.

Icelandic is essentially Old Norse–Icelanders can read sagas from around 1000 AD with no difficulty–thus illustrating the surprising fact that languages on the fringes of a linguistic area tend to retain archaic features. The French spoken in Quebec is closer to the French of the 17th century than modern French, as the English spoken in Appalachia is closer to the English of the 17th century than modern British English.

“You see, once you call yourself a journalist, you get to ignore the rules of decency, the laws governing private property and declare yourself a moral authority. You get to betray confidences and deceive people about your intentions. You also get to steal the property of others and use it for personal gain. All the while, you get to wrinkle up your nose as if you caught wind of a bad odor and lecture the rest of us about your moral goodness and our moral failings.” — ZMan

ZMan muses.

To great fanfare Julian Assange struck a deal with the American government whereby he would be allowed to leave a British jail and return home to Australia. Reportedly, the deal he accepted was to plead guilty to some charges in exchange for a sentence of time served in the British jail. The full details of the deal have not been released, but most likely he gave the government information they wanted or sufficiently demonstrated that he was not in possession of it.

This was always the primary issue. Secret documents and information leak out of the government all the time, but the government knows who leaked it. Most of the time the leaks are official leaks. Someone with authorized access to something hands it over to someone in regime media to publish. Once in a while the people at the top of the regime get mad about this habit and demand to know the source, and the regime reporter puts on a show of resisting but gives in at the end.

Generally speaking, what the regime cares most about in the case of these leaks is the source of the leak and the method they used. If regime information is getting into the public through unknown channels or by unknown figures, it can not only lead to things in the public the regime does not want made public, but it threatens the legitimacy of the regime for the people inside the regime. Blackmail, for example, only works when the victim is sure the blackmailer has control of the information.

Read it.

The 2000s shift from capitalism to ‘Cloudism,’ described in Yannis Varoufakis’s Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism as a shift from terrestrial capital to so-called ‘Cloud capital,’ was already augured by manual labour’s representing less of the economy than digital labour and by the prominence of the virtual implying less of the actual. Of course, in a sense, ideas have always represented the bulk of value, so this is nothing new, nor is it problematic as such. The problem lies elsewhere.

Read it.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

Police in New York have arrested a man who allegedly demanded that “Zionists” identify themselves on a crowded subway car around the time of a controversial protest earlier this month at a Manhattan exhibit commemorating the Nova music festival massacre.

Anas Saleh, 24, was arrested on Wednesday morning, the NYPD told the New York Jewish Week.

The Staten Island resident was charged with attempted coercion in the third degree. Under New York law, coercion involves a person forcing another to do something against their will, usually under threat.

Steve Graham.

Why was I too blind to see this? Apparently, the Global Jewish Conspiracy is stealing elections from liberals now.

Isn’t this the same Global Jewish Conspiracy that makes about 90% of American Jews vote for liberals? It sounds like someone forgot the mission statement.

Sarah Hoyt is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Lately I’ve become an awful old woman. My reaction, during the con, to the little card hotels leave in your bathroom, in the hopes that you’ll save them laundry money — you know the one that says that if you want to help save the Earth or the Environment (I don’t remember which, precisely, these pagan divinities all run together in my head) you’ll hang up your towel and use it another day — was to sigh and say: Deary, the Earth has been here for billions of years before I was born. It will be here for billions of years before my very atoms have been dispersed in its general Earthness. I can’t save it. There isn’t a tupperware large enough. And besides where would I put it? Who would dust it?

In the event, the only audience for my musings was my husband who consented to chuckle at it, as he went on. And we didn’t hang up the towels. We might have, had they made a sensible business appeal “if you save us money, we’ll be able to keep our prices lower” but we’re not at home to religious pandering to religions not our own. As far as I’m concerned they might as well ask me not to use electricity so as to spare the feelings of Zeus, god of thunderbolt.

So, yes, you see, I have become an awful woman. Or if you prefer, I’ve become a fool or a sadist in Heinlein’s definition of such: Someone who tells the truth in social situations.

Read it.

In the middle of a war, Israel’s government is wobbling. Not because of the policy failures that led to the country’s worst disaster ever when Hamas invaded on October 7, 2023; not because of the slow progress of the war, its high human cost or its failure to recover the hostages; not even because of the looming threat of a major escalation in northern Israel and Lebanon. No, the threat to the stability of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition comes from within, after the Supreme Court ruled that the government must start drafting Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) men into the Israeli Defense Forces.

In 1948, as the newly-formed state of Israel fought for its independence against the invading armies of its Arab neighbors, David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, made a fateful decision: the 400 Haredi men studying in religious seminaries would be exempt from military service. Seen by many as a dying relic of an old world, these few dozen students would be permitted to duck the draft and devote themselves to the full-time study of the Talmud.

Today, there are 63,000 young Haredi men who, were it not for Ben-Gurion’s decision, would be eligible to be drafted. Many of these men are effectively stuck studying, unable to join the workforce because leaving the seminary before the military exemption age of twenty-five would mean they’re obliged to join the IDF. Others, possibly thousands, are fraudulently claiming to be studying while they work “off the books” and avoid service.

OffGuardian.

Shocking evidence is emerging from Australia and New Zealand of how the climate scam is being used to impose a techno-totalitarian smart-city future.

The criminocratic global imperialists often use their Commonwealth colonies to try out the most insidious escalations of their tyranny – think of Canada, New Zealand and Australia during Covid.

We can therefore assume that this is going to be the blueprint for the roll-out of their Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda across the world.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

A German woman reacting to the vicious gang rape of a 15-year-old by ten predominately migrant men is set to spend a weekend behind bars for alleged “hate postings” made over WhatsApp to one of the attackers.

The gang rape was perpetrated in September 2020 in a prominent public park in Hamburg, with the ten men, ranging from 16 to 20 years old, taking advantage of the teen’s inebriated state and the lack of witnesses due to ongoing lockdown measures.

The nature of the gang rape, as well as the fact it was organized over a group chat, attracted particular horror in the courtroom and the popular press.

German press reports that five of the ten men were non-German nationals, including from Afghanistan and Syria, with all of the attackers of non-German extraction. Only one of the men found guilty at the trial was given a prison sentence—of two years and nine months. The rest of the attackers were given mild community service and suspended sentences.