Read it.

“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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Ka-ching!

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Power Line.

The Tennessee Star has released more excerpts from the diary of mass murderer Audrey Hale, who on March 27, 2023, gunned down nine-year-olds Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, along with Katherine Koonce, 60, Cynthia Peak and Mike Hill, both 61. Hale wrote of her “imaginary penis,” proclaiming “I am such a pervert” wasting “too much time in my fantasies,” and so forth. See here, and here and here, for example, but as John Lott notes, “it turns out that behind the scenes, the FBI had fought hard against the diary’s release.”

According to the FBI’s Behavioral Threat Assessment Center (BTAC), releasing the diary could have “unintended consequences for the segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories, which will undoubtedly abound.” Self-professed “experts,” the FBI fears, will “proffer their perspectives” in the press. As Lott sees it, “the news media and the FBI under the Biden administration are attempting to control the information available to Americans about a mentally troubled woman who identified as a man. The Biden administration is free to argue against linking transgender issues to mental illness or mass murder, but censoring the information is not the right approach.” Americans also have a right to wonder why the FBI was involved in the first place.

As with terrorist mass murders at Fort Hood in 2009 (14 dead), San Bernardino in 2015 (14 dead) and Orlando in 2016 ( 49 dead), the FBI did nothing to prevent Hale’s carefully planned attack. The FBI shows up after the fact to block evidence dealing with the killer’s motive, the central question in any murder case. This should come as no surprise.

Read it.

The Democratic-controlled California Senate and Assembly opposed a loan that would extend the lifespan of the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant, Newsweek reported Friday.

Read it.

The knife action in Germany just never quits. In this case, an Afghan culture-enricher attacked a garden party in the town of Wolmirstedt, in Saxony-Anhalt. Several party guests were wounded, but the only fatality was that of the perpetrator, who was shot dead by police. Apparently, however, he had previously killed a fellow Afghan before joining the festivities.

Power Line.

There is a human tendency to believe that all of the things one doesn’t like are in league or of a piece. That can lead to delusion and misapprehension. On the other hand, it sometimes turns out to be true.

Take the case of the Inflation Reduction Act, which should better be known as the Inflation Promotion Act. This grotesque law is nothing but a grab-bag of payoffs to Democratic Party constituencies. And it turns out that, guided by left-wing ideology, these constituencies do turn out to be in league.

New York Times.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

CNN.

Police are looking for a motive after at least nine people were shot in what appears to be a ‘random’ shooting that sent panicked families fleeing a crowded recreation area in Rochester Hills, Michigan, Saturday afternoon, authorities said.

A gunman pulled up to the Brooklands Plaza Splash Pad, got out of a vehicle and opened fire roughly 20 feet away, reloading multiple times, Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said. The suspect fired “potentially 28 times,” the sheriff said.

Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings suggests that the high number of wounded without fatalities indicate a Shooter Of Color. The need to look for an Aspiring Rapper.

The suspect, a 42-year-old man who has not yet been named by authorities, was found with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at a nearby home after police tracked the weapon from the shooting to an address half a mile from the crime scene, Bouchard said at a news conference Saturday night.

Coulter’s Law of Mass Shootings suggests that the longer it takes to tell us the race of the shooter, the greater the chance that the shooter is a Person of Color. (If he had been white, CNN would have mentioned that first thing, of course.)

Read it.

Pastor Sewell told Fox News on Friday he couldn’t remember the last time a president laid out a plan for the Black community until former President Donald Trump created the “Platinum Plan.”

Former President Trump attended a roundtable discussion at a church in Detroit on Saturday afternoon in an effort to reach out to Black voters.

During the discussion, 180 Church Pastor Lorenzo Sewell told Trump that he was “humbled” by the former president’s visit.

Washington Examiner.

“We recently learned that the Democrat mayor of Denver has been sending illegal immigrants to Utah without proper notification or approval. This is completely unacceptable and follows on the failed catch-and-release policy of the Biden administration,” Cox wrote on X. “Every state has received illegal immigrants and Utah’s resources are completely depleted.”

Where is it written that one state has to have ‘notification or approval’ to send illegal immigrants to another state? Texas obviously thinks that there is no such requirement. Certainly the Federal government feels under no obligation for ‘notification or approval’ before shipping illegal immigrants to a state.

If you don’t like it, ship them back. Or sue.

Read it.

A massive, yearslong study shows the overwhelming majority of young people who identify as transgender will grow out of the diagnosis within five years.

Watch it.

There is a company in Maryland that is working on doing this for structural purposes.

There is a lot of room for exploring natural polymers like lignin, cellulose, and chitin.

(One of the most disturbing aspects of this video is the burdens on firearm possession and use in the People’s Republic of Canada. Go, Second Amendment!)

Read it.

The CTU [Chicago Teachers Union] will push the city to include initiatives like electric school buses, green jobs training programs for students and reducing emissions from buildings with solar panels and other retrofits, among other initiatives,

New York Post.

A patriotic middle schooler who was “humiliated” by his principal when he was barred from giving his school election speech has been kicked out of the school, the student’s mother claims.

Hattie Ruggles shared the news Tuesday that her son Jimmy Heyward and his two sisters would not be returning to Saint Bonaventure Catholic School in Huntington Beach, Calif., over a violation of the school’s code of conduct.

“Finally heard from St. Bonaventure. This morning we received an email terminating Jimmy, Alice, and Livia from the school and will not allow them to return next year,” Ruggles shared on Facebook along with a photo of the termination letter, referencing her three children.

Catholic schools aren’t what they used to be.

Read it.

The 2023 Nashville Covenant School murders understandably received massive news coverage when they occurred. The fight over obtaining the murderer’s diary also received news attention. But when “nearly four dozen pages” of the murderer’s diary were finally released last week, the mainstream media completely ignored it. It turns out that behind the scenes, the FBI had fought hard against the diary’s release. Some Covenant School parents also opposed releasing the diary because it would force families to re-live the nightmare. The Tennessee Star’s parent company, Star News Digital Media, successfully filed two lawsuits to obtain the diary.

Read it.

House Democrats are brainstorming possible events to spoil Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, according to an Axios report released Friday.

Many Democrats already said they would boycott the speech, but they are now developing “counter-programming” events to spoil the speech and demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the leader of the Jewish state and the way he’s waged war against Hamas in Gaza.

Some of the ideas Democrats have proposed reportedly include a press conference, a vigil, and an event with the families of Israeli hostages who believe Netanyahu is not doing enough to secure their release.

Read it.

Pamela Price, the Oakland area’s district attorney once backed by billionaire George Soros, allegedly called “the media and the Asians” her enemy and “fostered and encouraged a racist environment” in her office, according to a lawsuit from her former spokeswoman. She also hid and altered public records she didn’t want released, the suit alleges.

The complaint alleges that Price racially discriminated against Patricia Lee, who is Asian American, and fired her for refusing to withhold public records from journalists. Lee’s lawsuit also claims anti-Asian discrimination factored into her firing, and details how Price tried to suppress and delete documents and emails requested by reporters.

The “reason for Ms. Lee’s termination is because she engaged in a protected activity by refusing to illegally withhold records and by complaining about the Alameda County district attorney’s office’s illegal withholding of records in violation of [California public records law],” the complaint states.

Read it.

A California Bay Area committee appointed to design racism reparations for black residents wants two years and $5 million just to write a plan.

The reparations panel for Alameda County, whose largest city is Oakland, made this demand late last month, San Francisco’s NPR affiliate reported, ahead of its looming July deadline to outline how local taxpayers should make their amends. The committee, created in March 2023 with a $51,000 budget, did not meet until last November.

The committee’s chair is Debra Gore-Mann, the president of a left-wing Oakland-based group called the Greenlining Institute that lobbies the California legislature to subsidize utilities and low-carbon energy, and pushes for “race-aware” and “race-based” tech and banking policies.

Time to leave.

Read it.

It’s been more than three years since Congress directed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate the long-term effects of COVID-19—and there are still no answers for the millions of Americans suffering from long COVID.

Read it.

Another bizarre virtue signal just in time for pride month. Street signs that LA officials said previously targeted LGBT community members were taken down from a Silver Lake neighborhood this week. The signs that read “No Cruising” and prohibited U-turns were installed in 1997 when neighbors allegedly complained about gay men stalking back and forth in vehicles looking for “dates” in certain residential areas.

How does one determine what is a ‘gay neighborhood’, anyway?

(Remember: If you hear the ‘dog whistle’, then you’re the dog.)

Read it.

Friday marked a big win for gun rights advocates when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Trump administration-era ban on bump stocks by the ATF. In their immediate reactions to the 6-3 ruling, CNN Newsroom pontificators were largely unhappy with the court’s affirmation of a piece of plastic not being a machine gun and lauded the “fiery” dissenting opinion authored by liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Of course, the opinion just flaunted their ignorance of firearm mechanics.

The favorite Democrat term ‘assault weapon’ exemplifies this ignorance, both of firearm mechanics and of history.

The Foundry.

The Environmental Protection Agency plays judge, jury, and executioner—and its newest-issued rule is a death sentence to American energy and energy-producing states.

Meanwhile, states like Pennsylvania, which will be disproportionately harmed by the rule because of our abundant natural gas production, hold the key to America’s increasing energy needs, generating immense economic development and reducing the very emissions targeted by this heavy-handed agency.

The EPA unilaterally issued a final rule establishing draconian emission standards that target existing coal and new natural gas power plants nationwide. It requires 90% carbon capture for power-generating facilities by 2032.

Aside from its questionable legality, the new rule is unfeasible. The EPA proposed impossible standards. Current carbon-capture technology—a water- and energy-intensive process that filters and sequesters emissions—neither meets this standard nor projects to do so in the next decade.

Forbes.

“Where are all the genetic cures?” asks Denis Noble, a frustrated biophysicist, Royal Society fellow and pioneer of the field of systems biology. “They don’t exist. Where will they be? They won’t exist.” Since mapping the human genome in 2003, research priorities and funding shifted significantly towards genetics. The investment improved disease detection and management but failed to deliver on its promise of cures for our most common deadly diseases like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s and most cancers. Compounding the issue, a large-scale, 2023 study concluded that genetic risk scores perform poorly at predicting who’s going to develop common diseases. For Noble, the billions invested annually in genetic research represents less of a strategy and more of a scientific confusion—that we are our genes.

Reuters.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided on Thursday with Starbucks (SBUX.O), opens new tab in the coffee chain’s challenge to a judicial order to rehire seven Memphis employees fired as they sought to unionize in a ruling that could make it harder for courts to quickly halt labor practices contested as unfair under federal law.

The justices unanimously threw out a lower court’s approval of an injunction sought by the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ordering Starbucks to reinstate the workers while the agency’s in-house administrative case against the Seattle-based company proceeds.

The justices ruled that lower courts had used an improper legal standard – one that Starbucks argued was too lenient – to issue a preliminary injunction requested by the agency under a federal law called the National Labor Relations Act.

New York Post.

Summertime in presidential campaign season tends to resemble midyear network TV schedules of yesteryear: unpopular, full of re-runs and marred by the occasional high-concept experiment gone horribly wrong.

Such is the Democrats’ latest attempt to jump-start their stubbornly nonplussed electorate with a jolt of old-timey hate.

Presented with endless potential lines of attack against the GOP’s court-convicted-nominee and his bottomless well of sycophants, lefties are instead sounding the ooga-booga alarm against a menace that does not meaningfully exist: Christian nationalism.

“Trump allies prepare to infuse ‘Christian nationalism’ in second administration,” warned a Politico headline, over an article about . . . a single such ally, who heads up a three-year-old think tank no one’s ever heard of, and speaks with the former president “at least once a month” (according to an anonymous source, natch).

Read it.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court has found that the federal government cannot use a decades-old ban on machine guns to ban bump stocks.

“Semiautomatic firearms, which require shooters to reengage the trigger for every shot, are not machineguns. This case asks whether a bump stock—an accessory for a semiautomatic rifle that allows the shooter to rapidly reengage the trigger (and therefore achieve a high rate of fire)—converts the rifle into a ‘machinegun.’ We hold that it does not,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas.

Thomas was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch in deciding the ban was illegal.

Read it.

And, then again, you might not.

Noted left-wing organizations such as Arabella Advisors and the Soros network are bankrolling the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel protests across the United States, according to a new website documenting the organizations and their funders.

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project has launched a new website, ColorRevolutions.us, that details the nonprofit organizations, academic and financial institutions, and foreign governments that have put financial resources behind the anti-Israel protests after the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel last Oct. 7.

“The stakes not only for the American way of life, but for Western civilization itself, could not be higher,” Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Oversight Project, told The Daily Signal.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

I still tend to think in 24-hour terms.

Read it.

Human beings will always form membership groups, and always show an inbuilt bias in favour of other people who share that group.

Given this instinct, much of modern political life becomes confusingly unnatural, which might explain a great deal of the alienation many of us feel from the political process itself.

So, if we are predisposed to form groups and prioritise those groups, isn’t it odd that we have so many people today who have been conditioned, who can be conditioned, to detest a group to which they themselves belong?

Zman’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the many frustrations of people in outsider politics is that the people inside conventional politics, especially in the conservative wing, never respond to what is going on outside of Washington. After every election, regardless of the result, they continue doing what they were doing before the election. We saw this most clearly after 2016 where Conservative Inc rallied against Trump.

The reason for that is conservatism is not just an institution or even a collection of institutions, but rather an ecosystem that provides total care for the people who are allowed to take up a place in it. If you manage to slither inside one of the institutions, you no longer live outside of your political existence. To the contrary, your entire life is now defined by your place in the political ecosystem.

The reason for that is the enormity of institutional conservatism. What it lacks in popular support it more than makes up for in financial support. That money is used to build a network of institutions that are linked together to provide a lifestyle to the people inside them that they could never achieve in the dreaded private sector. As a result, everyone inside is deeply loyal to the system.

Read it.

Muslims just LOVE killing Jews.

Read it.

After a March tweet by Elon Musk decrying the New York Times bestseller list as “pure propaganda” after the outlet was forced to admit in court that it’s not a ranked list, The Economist decided to see if there was any merit to longstanding claims of bias against conservative authors.

They found, of course, that there is.

The Economist compiled Bookscan data over a 12-year period and built a statistical model to predict the likelihood of books appearing in the NYT’s weekly “hardcover non-fiction” and “advice, how-to, and miscellaneous” rankings. The model considered books from publishers that identify as politically right of center.

New York Times.

James-Todd, an associate professor of environmental reproductive epidemiology, is a pioneer who has conducted or been a co-author of nearly 70 scientific investigations over the past 20 years to establish the connection between the chemicals in hair products that generations of Black women have used to straighten their hair and the reproductive-health racial disparities that scientists have struggled to explain for decades. And on that day last October, she was receiving calls because the Food and Drug Administration had announced a proposal for a ban on the use of formaldehyde as an ingredient in hair relaxers, citing its link to cancer and other long-term adverse health effects.

Read it.

We don’t see a lot of pride flags flying through most of the US, not even during the unilaterally declared “pride month” that has been foisted on the populace every June. The only pride flags we do see are in corporate marketing campaigns and certain government buildings, not to mention certain city crosswalks.

If you have come to the conclusion that the pride movement is nothing more than astroturf sponsored by corporate interests and far-left politicians then you would be right on target. Without these institutions pushing LGBT propaganda on a regular basis the pride movement simply would not exist beyond a minority of useful idiots.

But what is the point? Why fabricate an activist ideology and why force it on the masses as if it is legitimate? There are a lot of reasons, but the primary goal is to create a vehicle for controlling speech and a shield for collectivist ideologues so that they can pursue political power while hiding behind proclamations of “equal rights.” If you are engaging in a coup from a position of weakness it sure helps if your enemies can’t criticize you for fear of being labeled “monsters and insurrectionists.”

Read it.

A 16-year-old Minnesota girl forced to share private spaces with males under a public school transgender policy says that girls deserve privacy in their restrooms and locker rooms.

“It’s really uncomfortable, because I was in gym class, and I was just about to change, but then I heard this voice, and I was, like, ‘That does not sound right.’ So, I look, and it’s a male,” said the rising junior at Stewartville High School, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely on the controversial issue.

In 2017, the Minnesota Department of Education issued a toolkit telling school districts to provide transgender students facilities, including bathrooms, locker rooms, and hotel rooms on overnight trips, that are “consistent with their gender identity.”

Read it.

The Associated Press reported that unnamed U.S. intelligence officials are recycling a familiar narrative ahead of the 2024 election, claiming without evidence that the upcoming presidential election is a target for foreign disinformation campaigns.

An unnamed official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has been briefing political candidates and government groups an unspecified number of times, alleging that the risks in 2024 are higher because “presidential elections draw more attention from our adversaries,” according to The Associated Press (AP).

They made similar claims in 2020 when 51 intelligence officials falsely asserted that Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” This letter and the leftist media’s refusal to cover the story ultimately led Big Tech to censor anyone who dared to share the New York Post’s bombshell on the laptop.

Read it.

A few months back reports started to emerge of Illegal immigrants taking shelter in Boston’s Logan Airport. Now there are HUNDREDS of them living there, including whole families.

The New York Post reports that there are “throngs of families lining a baggage claim surrounded by suitcases and using sparse blankets for makeshift mattresses.”

“We continue to see migrants at the airport. They come to Logan a number of ways. They also arrive at Logan at all hours,” a representative from MassPort commented.

The rep. also noted that as quickly as the migrants are moved out of the airport to shelters, more arrive.