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“He who increaseth knowledge increaseth misery.”

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Some U.S. senators have famously kept a pocket Constitution handy to use as a prop at political rallies; a few may have even read it. But at this point in American history it no longer matters whether they, or anyone else, can read the words of the Constitution because the words no longer mean what they say.

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Iron is one of the most abundant metals on Earth, and the most produced. It has an energy density of about 11.3 kilowatt-hours per liter—better than gasoline. Burning iron powder produces heat that can be used directly or converted into electricity by a steam turbine, leaving behind iron oxide, or rust. This can later be reduced—that is, the oxygen can be stripped away—back into iron powder. “You can think of iron fuel as a clean, recyclable coal,” says Bergthorson.

Iron oxide can also be reduced to iron using hydrogen. Hydrogen is already a carbon-free green fuel if produced by splitting water using renewable electricity. But it is also an ultralight, voluminous gas, so it must be converted using high pressures and extreme cold into liquid, which then has to be stored and transported in special containers. Iron, by contrast, is already moved in dry containers for a lower cost.

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And it will serve you right.

The Foundry.

The Department of Justice is targeting a Texas whistleblower who exposed Texas Children’s Hospital secretly performing attempted gender transition procedures on children.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas announced Monday that it had indicted 34-year-old Eithan Haim for “obtaining protected individual health information for patients that were not under his care and without authorization.”

If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 maximum possible fine.

Texas Children’s had publicly said in March 2022 that it would no longer perform attempted gender transition procedures on kids. In May 2023, Haim provided journalist Christopher Rufo with documents showing that Texas Children’s was “lying to the public about the existence of its transgender-medicine program,” as Haim later revealed in an explosive January 2024 piece.

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Nothing encourages you to spend more on guns than thugs killing and raping your next-door neighbor. Concentrates the mind.

Associated Press.

Translation: “The IRS is going to try to re-write the tax code so that they can steal more of people’s money; since it’s just “rich people”, stealing from them is okay.’

Just as ‘price gouging’ is charging more than the speaker thinks is proper, ‘loophole’ is using the existing tax code to avoid paying the amount of tax that the speaker thinks is your ‘fair share’.

Nature.

For most of the history of life on Earth, genetic information has been carried in a code that specifies just 20 amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which do most of the heavy lifting in the cell; their side-chains govern protein folding, interactions and chemical activities. By limiting the available side chains, nature effectively restricts the kinds of reaction that proteins can perform.

As a doctoral student in the 1980s, Peter Schultz found himself wondering why nature had restricted itself in this way — and set about trying to circumvent this limitation. Several years later, as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Schultz and his team managed to do so by tinkering with the machinery of protein synthesis. Although confined to a test tube, the work marked a key early success in efforts to hack the genetic code.

Since then, many researchers have followed in Schultz’s footsteps, tweaking the cellular apparatus for building proteins both to alter existing macromolecules and to create polymers from entirely new building blocks. The resulting molecules can be used in research and for the development of therapeutics and materials. But it’s been a hard slog, because protein synthesis is a crucial cellular function that cannot easily be changed.

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If you’re unbanked and the fees and onerous terms of check cashing and other non-bank services are killing you, you might be able to get some relief from a surprising place: Your local post office. The Postal Service actually offers some limited banking services, and there are a lot of folks who are pushing to expand those services dramatically.

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A new navigation system that tracks subatomic particles constantly bombarding Earth could help us get around indoors, underground, and underwater — all the places GPS fails.

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Know your enemy.

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New research has shed light on the effects of protein-rich diets on the gut microbiome and overall health. Despite the increasing protein intake in Western diets, especially among athletes and individuals with obesity, the fate of undigested protein and its impact on human health remains largely unknown. A new study, presented at ASM Microbe, explores how excess undigested protein in the colon can be fermented to produce beneficial metabolites, such as short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), or lead to the production of harmful metabolites like ammonia and sulfides, which are linked to gastrointestinal disorders and other health issues.

The research team conducted a series of experiments on mice, discovering that a switch to a protein-rich diet resulted in significant weight loss, reduced body fat and induced immediate changes to the gut microbiome. The study also compared different protein diets to examine the effects of individual amino acids on the gut microbiome’s composition and activity. Notably, the mice consuming aromatic amino-acid-rich proteins experienced the greatest weight and fat mass loss compared to those on standard protein and branched-chain amino-acid-rich protein diets.

UPDATE: 5 Best High-Protein Foods for Gut Health, According to Dietitians

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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The Biden Administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) just issued a proposal to ban medical debt from factoring into your credit score. But for free-money socialists and their Keynesian bedfellows, this doesn’t go nearly far enough: short of canceling medical debt entirely, nothing else is acceptable.

Quillette.

We are witnessing the transition from “college is for everybody” to “college is unnecessary and often useless.” Going to college “to be able to get a better job” is likely to fade away as the primary reason students attend. And the institutions themselves—universities and colleges of various types—will have to accept a much less prominent role in our social and economic systems. They are in danger of becoming cultural relics.

To be sure, a large majority of American parents still believe that their children must attain a college degree for their welfare and happiness. Almost always, those parents are applying both their understanding of how the world works and their recollection of their own time in college. College as they knew it was the on-ramp to prosperous adulthood. But that outcome is steadily becoming less likely.

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A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s new Title IX rule expanding protections for LGBTQ+ students in six additional states, dealing another setback for a policy that has been under legal attack by Republican attorneys general.

This is the rule that includes ‘gender identity’ as a protected class, which is of course not in the statute.

The American Mind.

No one stops you when driving across the border from Nogales, Arizona, into Nogales, Mexico; crossing the other way is a different story. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers often interrogate drivers and search vehicles inside and out, using drug-sniffing dogs, x-ray scanners, handheld chemical analyzers, and trained detectives. One reason is that Nogales, Mexico, is now the world’s epicenter of illegal fentanyl trafficking, and Arizona’s southern border is the primary point of entry for illegal fentanyl entering the U.S.

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Brendan Carr, Republican member of the FCC, has been criticizing Joe Biden, alleging that since the passage of the Infrastructure and Jobs Act of 2021, wherein $42 billion was appropriated to connect rural America with high-speed fiber optic cable internet, not a single internet connection has been achieved. A truly stunning record. Three years, no connections.

Newsbusters.

Over the weekend, three communities across the United States were victims of gun violence as parties and gatherings came to sudden ends when scumbags decided to kill people. NBC’s Today looked to exploit the tragedies on Monday by having correspondent Erin McLaughlin blame the murders on the U.S. Supreme Court, citing their decision to strike down the Trump-era bump stock ban. But none of the shootings involved bump stocks.

“A mass shooting at a splash pad in Michigan, another at a Juneteenth celebration in Texas, and yet another at a gathering in Massachusetts, all just days after Friday’s Supreme Court ruling that rejects a ban on bump stocks,” she announced at the top of the segment.

McLaughlin delivered very glancing explanations of what allegedly happened at each of the shootings but never disclosed what kind of firearms were used.

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Gee, I wonder why?

Financial Times.

Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

Wall Street Journal.

To repeat what everybody ought to know already: CORPORATIONS DO NOT PAY TAXES. CORPORATIONS MERELY COLLECT TAXES. Any tax that they ‘pay’ is, from an accounting standpoint, a business expense and is folded into the price that they charge their customers. IT IS THE CUSTOMERS OF CORPORATIONS WHO PAY THE TAX.

In any population, half of that population are below average in intelligence (by definition), as this persistent fable of ‘taxing corporations’ makes clear.

I would be in favor of making an IQ test mandatory in order to be able to vote.

Read it.

Another day, another Democrat hate crime hoax – this time allegedly by a former Biden White House appointee and current candidate for a county commissioner seat in Texas.

Taral Patel, 30, was arrested for online impersonation last week following an investigation initiated by his opponent, incumbent Andy Meyers, the NY Post reports.

The investigation was launched in October, after a September post Patel made on Facebook in which he suggested that he and his family had been victims of race-based verbal attacks perpetrated by Meyers supporters.

Read it.

As they do.

New York Post.

And yet there are people who will vote for this vegetable. Unbelievable.

Read it.

A math geek reviews a math geek book. Both are worth reading.

The Guardian.

ince the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, genetics has become one of the key frameworks for how we all think about ourselves. From fretting about our health to debating how schools can accommodate non-neurotypical pupils, we reach for the idea that genes deliver answers to intimate questions about people’s outcomes and identities.

Recent research backs this up, showing that complex traits such as temperament, longevity, resilience to mental ill-health and even ideological leanings are all, to some extent, “hardwired”. Environment matters too for these qualities, of course. Our education and life experiences interact with genetic factors to create a fantastically complex matrix of influence.

But what if the question of genetic inheritance were even more nuanced? What if the old polarised debate about the competing influences of nature and nurture was due a 21st-century upgrade?

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The European Union is ready to punish France if Marine Le Pen’s nationalist-sovereigntist National Rally (Rassemblement National) wins the upcoming French parliamentary elections, writes establishment media outlet Politico. According to the article, the European Commission may not let a right-wing government “off the hook” with regards to France’s overspending, unlike their leniency with the current and previous cabinets. This is clearly a sign that the EU institutions use their ‘power of the purse’ to penalise only those member states they politically disagree with.

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During the pandemic it was common for many Americans to discount or even disparage the Chinese vaccines. In fact, the Chinese vaccines such as Coronavac/Sinovac were made quickly and in large quantities and they were effective. The Chinese vaccines saved millions of lives. The vaccine portfolio model that the AHT team produced, as well as common sense, suggested the value of having a diversified portfolio. That’s why we recommended and I advocated for including a deactivated vaccine in the Operation Warp Speed mix or barring that for making an advance deal on vaccine capacity with China. At the time, I assumed that the disparaging of Chinese vaccines was simply an issue of national pride or bravado during a time of fear. But it turns out that in other countries, the Pentagon ran a disinformation campaign against the Chinese vaccines.

Navy Matters.

Here’s a time line of the pier:

• Mar 7 – Biden announces Gaza pier plan
• Mar 9 – U.S. Army support ship General Frank S. Besson leaves to begin construction
• May 17 –  pier opens
• May 28 – pier ops suspended after piece breaks off
• Jun 8 – operations resume after repairs
• Jun 15 – Pentagon announces pier will be torn down

So, what can we learn from the Gaza pier effort?

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How many Americans have been assaulted, raped, maimed or murdered by illegals who have streamed into our country at the invitation of Joe Biden’s open border policies? No one knows, but it is safe to say that Rachel Morin is one among many.

Morin, a 37 year old mother of five, went for a run in Harford County, Maryland. She was waylaid by Victor Martinez Hernandez, who raped, viciously beat, and murdered her. Hernandez is an illegal alien. He reportedly is associated with the MS-13 gang and was wanted for murder in El Salvador, so he fled to the U.S.

A sane country would take every reasonable measure to prevent escaping murderers and gang members from crossing its borders, but we are not a sane country. We elected Joe Biden president. It has been reported that Hernandez entered the country in February 2023, but I am not sure how we know that. Did he use Joe Biden’s app to facilitate his illegal entry? Was he given a free cell phone? I don’t know.

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Nearly eight years after a Muslim terrorist committed the largest massacre of gay people in American history, LGBTQ Islamic terror supporters blocked the Philadelphia gay pride parade.

“Long live the Intifada,” members of Queers4Palestine chanted, referring to the Islamic terrorist campaign against the Jewish State, chanting that the gay pride parade was just like the KKK and the Israeli army. “From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever!”

Protesting a gay pride parade in support of Hamas was a fitting prelude to the anniversary of the Islamic massacre at a gay nightclub which had its own Hamas connection.

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Iran called upon the Group of Seven on Sunday to distance itself from “destructive policies of the past,” the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said, referring to a G7 statement condemning Iran’s recent nuclear program escalation.

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Fans heading to Yankee Stadium hoping to pay in cash at the iconic ballpark for their favorite concessions have been thrown a curveball: go cashless or pay extra.

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Los Angeles City Council has removed No U-turn signs from Silver Lake, claiming that they are homophobic.

How exactly is a road sign homophobic? Well, a long time ago there were some signs alongside the No U-turn ones that said ‘No cruising’.

They were considered to be directed at the gay community, and they were removed more than 20 years ago.

But that’s not enough, because the other road signs remind these people of the ‘No cruising’ ones… or something.

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When I was around eight years old, my baby-sitter let me watch a documentary on nuclear war. Unsurprisingly, it shook me to the core. It’s kind of hard to know what went on in her head, but those images of nuclear detonations never left my head. Looking back at it now, this ‘incident’ starts to make sense, kind of. This is because over the decades I’ve read a lot on nuclear deterrence and on nuclear war simulations. I have had this graving to understand nuclear warfare and deterrence basically throughout my adult-life.

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In many ways, Kyle Daniels is your typical Midwestern American. He grew up in a patriotic household, many of his family members joined the military, and his father was very meticulous about flag etiquette — probably more so than your average American.

“Every morning we put it out at sunrise, we’d go out every night after work, bring it in and fold it the right way. It was very ceremonious,” Daniels recently told Military.com. “It was instilled in me very early that this flag represents the freedoms we enjoy today. It’s not just about the Fourth of July, it’s not just about the special days; it’s about every day. And that was something that I held near and dear to my heart.”

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Created for US insurance firms during a period of devastating fires across the 19th and 20th centuries, the Sanborn maps blaze with detail — shops, homes, churches, brothels, and opium dens were equally noted by the company’s cartographers. Tobiah Black explores the history and afterlife of these maps, which have been reclaimed by historians and genealogists seeking proof of the vanished past.

I love maps. Always have.

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“An Arkansas prosecutor on Friday said a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent was justified when he fatally shot the Little Rock airport director during a raid in March,” CBS News reports. “Pulaski County Prosecutor Will Jones said in a letter to ATF that no charges in the shooting would be filed after reviewing the Arkansas State Police investigation of the shooting of Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport Executive Director Bryan Malinowski.” On the other hand, a group of Arkansas legislators had some questions.

I imagine that they do.

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The Baltimore City Police Department is investigating a “possible chemical agent” released at a Pride event Saturday evening in the downtown area that sparked a “mass exodus.”

Local media outlet Capital Gazette said a “possible chemical agent” and fireworks were released during the Baltimore Pride parade around 830 pm local time.

Baltimore Police has yet to confirm the type of chemical agent that was released. The combination of the chemical agent and fireworks caused the large crowd to panic, scattering in different directions and resulting in several injuries.

Sounds as if the worm is definitely turning.

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My, what a surprise.

The Qatar-based Al Jazeera Middle East media organization is reportedly censoring criticism of Hamas terrorists in Gaza amid Israel’s operations.

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Next step: Claiming that the Japanese, like the ancient Egyptians, were actually black.

Ka-ching!

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The latest attacker to be shot by German police had upgraded from the customary knife to an axe — a Schieferhammer, literally “slate-hammer”, probably more or less like a pickaxe.

The incident occurred around noon today, in the vicinity of a Euro 24 fan parade on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, but police say the attack had nothing to do with football.

The ethnicity of the alleged perp has not been mentioned so far, and the photo is ambiguous, so he might be a culture-enricher, or he might be someone who has lived in Germany for a longer time. Or he could even be a British football hooligan, for all I know.

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Ever since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, curbing climate change has been a fundamental component of his energy policy agenda.

During the spring, for example, the Biden administration issued a power plant rule­­, imposing strict emissions reductions regarding the use of fossil-fuel power plants. There have been many other rules proposed as well, including regulating cars, stoves, dishwashers, water heaters, and even microwaves.

All of these rules are predicated on concerns about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on global temperatures and climate change. If greenhouse gas emissions drive climate change, then curbing the use of sources of energy that emit them (such as coal, oil, and natural gas) should in theory curb these increases in global temperature.

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Place names are fascinating. They tell you about history, local characters, the frustrations of the government saying, “Nope, can’t do that, second choice is taken, and you must be grammatically correct in a foreign language.*”

I’ve always wanted to live in a place called Posthole.

TIME.

oday, in a runoff election for mayor, Chicago voters will choose either former teacher Brandon Johnson or former schools CEO Paul Vallas. What’s raising eyebrows is the funding of Johnson’s campaign: Over 90 percent has come from teachers unions and other public employee unions. Vallas has the endorsement of the police union, but his funding is more diverse, including business leaders and industrial unions. Just looking at the money, the race comes down to this: Public employees vs everyone else plus cops.

What is wrong with this picture? The new mayor is supposed to manage Chicago for all the citizens, not to benefit public employees. Chicago is not in good shape. In 37 of its schools, not one student is proficient in reading or math. Its transit system is stuck with schedules that serve no one at great expense. The crime rate in Chicago is among the highest in the country. But no recent Chicago mayor has been able to fix these and other endemic problems because the public unions have collective bargaining powers that give them a veto on how the city is run. Frustrated by the inability to get teachers back to the classroom during Covid, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot observed that the teachers union wanted “to take over not only Chicago Public Schools, but take over running the city government.”

This is not just a Chicago problem. Los Angeles teachers walked out of class rooms last month supposedly to support striking service personnel, but Los Angeles lacks the resources to help the service employees because of the indebted inefficiencies in the teachers union contract.

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Among the cities on this list, median home values range from about $930,000 to over $2 million – the maximum value tracked by the ACS. In fact, in a dozen of these cities, over one-third of all homes are worth at least $2 million. The vast majority of these places are located in California, though there are also a handful in Northeastern and Southern states.

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Baltimore City and Chicago Public Schools are spending taxpayer monies like there’s no tomorrow, yet math and reading test scores are shockingly low. Radical leftists, who are embedded in these school systems, along with the officials in City Halls in these respective imploding metro areas, have ideals and beliefs not rooted in reality. Their progressive agendas have failed the youth and also unleashed a tidal wave of crime and chaos.

These are not new problems for crime-ridden Baltimore City and Chicago. The school systems in these metro areas have been failing the nation’s future generations for years. Still, it’s only now becoming absolutely insane that woke leftists are continuing to run these education systems into the ground.