NPR.

An Iranian writer and activist has been sentenced to 12 years in prison after replying with a single dot, or period, in response to a post on the social platform X by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Hossein Shanbehzadeh, a longtime critic of Iran’s leadership, was active on social media, supporting political prisoners and the removal of mandatory headscarves for women. He was sent to prison in 2019 for his online comments insulting Khamenei. He later wrote about the experience, including being flogged, according to Voice of America.

In early June, 35-year-old Shanbehadeh was arrested in Ardabil, northwestern Iran. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, he told his family he wasn’t sure why he was arrested, but it came shortly after he posted the response to Khamenei’s tweet, which showed the Iranian leader with the country’s national volleyball team.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology, masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

CNBC.

There’s nothing remarkable about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Mongolia on Tuesday — he’s due to meet the country’s leader, hold talks on developing bilateral ties and attend a gala reception.

What is unusual is that Mongolia, as a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC), should have arrested the Russian president as soon as he landed on Mongolian soil Monday evening.

Putin is the subject of an international arrest warrant issued by the ICC in March 2023. The court alleged that he is responsible for war crimes, with a particular focus on the unlawful deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia.

At the time, the Kremlin described the ICC’s actions as “outrageous and unacceptable” and said they had no effect on Russia, which is not a member of the ICC.

Mongolia has now found itself in hot water as Putin visits the country — his first visit to an ICC member state since the arrest warrant was issued — with apparent impunity.

Under the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the ICC that came into effect in 2002, ICC member states are obliged to detain and surrender to the court any persons who are subject to an ICC arrest warrant, if they set foot on their soil.

The court has no way to enforce the rule, however, and Mongolia defied it by welcoming Putin with a guard of honor as he met President Ukhnaagiin Khurelsukh in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, on Tuesday.

The do-gooders establish these feel-good institutions that parade around at the expense of taxpayers, and do absolutely nothing except provide well-paying and pompous-sounding jobs for favored apparatchiks. Why do they even bother? Nobody takes this shit seriously. But they pretend to, and take money out of your pocket in the process.

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Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have shown that therapeutically restoring ‘youthful’ levels of a specific subunit of the telomerase enzyme can significantly reduce the signs and symptoms of aging in preclinical models. If these findings are validated in clinical trials, they could have important therapeutic implications for age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and cancer.

The study, published in Cell, identified a small molecule compound that restores physiological levels of telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT), which normally is repressed with the onset of aging. Maintenance of TERT levels in aged lab models reduced cellular senescence and tissue inflammation, spurred new neuron formation with improved memory, and enhanced neuromuscular function, which increased strength and coordination.

The researchers show that TERT functions not only to extend telomeres, but also acts as a transcription factor to affect the expression of many genes directing neurogenesis, learning and memory, cellular senescence, and inflammation.

“Epigenetic repression of TERT plays a major role in the cellular decline seen at the onset of aging by regulating genes involved in learning, memory, muscle performance, and inflammation,” said corresponding author Ronald DePinho, M.D., professor of Cancer Biology. “By pharmacologically restoring youthful TERT levels, we reprogrammed expression of those genes, resulting in improved cognition and muscle performance while eliminating hallmarks linked to many age-related diseases.”

Not coming to anywhere near you anytime soon, because reasons, mostly having to do with government regulation.

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Using cannabis may cause changes in the human body’s epigenome, a study of over 1,000 adults suggests. The epigenome functions like a set of switches, activating or deactivating genes to change how our bodies function.

“We observed associations between cumulative marijuana use and multiple epigenetic markers across time,” explained epidemiologist Lifang Hou from Northwestern University when the research was published in 2023.

Cannabis is a commonly used substance in the United States, with 49 percent of people trying it at least once, Hou and a team of US researchers report in their published paper. Some US states and other countries have made it legal, but we still don’t fully understand its effects on our health.

Gee, whoda thunkit?

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The word ‘democracy’ still enjoys considerable cachet. It is invoked with reverence by politicians as various as Nancy Pelosi and Nigel Farage. The difference is that while the populist Right lauds the democratic ideal as something from which we have strayed, Left-liberals yammer on about ‘our democracy’ in defence of an unpopular status quo, dominated by a nexus of like-minded political, media, and cultural elites. The urgency of guarding against ‘authoritarian strongmen’ is cited as the legitimising basis of this regime. Even if the people start clamouring for a stronger, more personally accountable executive, it falls to this mass of faceless mandarins to save them from their own misguided preferences.

In Auron MacIntyre’s new book, The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, the Right is given a lesson which, until recently, only the most callow, sentimental progressives needed to hear: it is a fatal error to worship warm-sounding ideals in abstraction from political reality. The left-wing rebranding of oligarchy as ‘our democracy’ is a cynical lie, but it is politically clever at a time when conservatives still lionise the democratic form of government while failing to take seriously its obvious breakdown in practice.

UK Daily Mail.

Wealthy Americans are packing up and shipping out of blue states in record numbers, a bombshell new report has revealed.

High earners from California and New York are leaving faster than all – topping the list of 10 states seeing an exodus of their richest residents.

The new data by SmartAsset revealed a mass migration of households pulling in at least $200,000 or more annually.

California, the land of Silicon Valley and Hollywood glitz, waved goodbye to a net 24,670 wealthy households.

Coming in close comes New York which saw 12,040 of its highest earners hit the road.

Your tax dollars at work.

Off-Guardian.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has finally admitted what we knew all along: Facebook conspired with the government to censor individuals expressing “disapproved” views about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zuckerberg’s confession comes in the wake of a series of court rulings that turn a blind eye to the government’s technofascism.

In a 2-1 decision in Children’s Health Defense v. Meta, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit brought by Children’s Health Defense against Meta Platforms for restricting CHD’s posts, fundraising, and advertising on Facebook following communications between Meta and federal government officials.

In a unanimous decision in the combined cases of NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice, the U.S. Supreme Court avoided ruling on whether the states could pass laws to prohibit censorship by Big Tech companies on social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.
And in a 6-3 ruling in Murthy v. Missouri , the Supreme Court sidestepped a challenge to the federal government’s efforts to coerce social media companies into censoring users’ First Amendment expression.

Welcome to the age of technocensorship.

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(Insert picture of Paul Krugman here)

Labour’s recent victory in the general election was hardly welcomed by the public. After all, they received fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn’s failed campaign in 2019. Keir Starmer’s victory was only secured because Reform ate into large swathes of the Tory base, a reality that also redounded to the benefit of the Liberal Democrats. Nigel Farage’s rise to Parliament, with the capture of the Clacton constituency, is to be celebrated as a step in the right direction, but at the same time we should not ignore the monumental problems that a Labour government will now face.

It is difficult to know where to begin. No doubt many on the Right will point to mass immigration, and this of course is a major threat to the West. Yet, to understand why this is, we must go deeper into the economic frameworks that bureaucrats have been building in recent decades, because immigration can be blamed as much on shoddy monetary theory as the cult of global universalism.

It is unquestionable that mass immigration is a liberal project, one built on naivety in presuming that everyone who arrives will benefit our society and thus the economy. However, this is only part of the story—and probably the most well known part—because it’s easy to remember, understand, and is repeatedly trumpeted by left-wing activists. That said, the economic pretext for current demographic change has been typically neglected. This is because the idea that flawed monetary and economic policy could be driving the West into a downward spiral strikes us as unlikely, such that we’d rather just pin the blame on social justice warriors and NGOs. This is a mistake.

JD Vance Rants About ‘Miserable’ Professional Women in Unearthed Clip (Lily Mae Lazarus/The Daily Beast)

Winning election wouldn’t save Trump from massive fraud, defamation judgments (Griffin Eckstein/Salon)

Missouri Man Arrested For Allegedly Threatening To Kill Trump, Republicans, Police Officers

Conservative Moms, Charmed by Trump, Would Rather Avoid His Misogyny (Shawn McCreesh/New York Times)

In N.C., some Black voters are uneasy with Harris’s abortion rights focus (Cleve R. Wootson Jr/Washington Post)

Elon Musk Warns Censorship Of X “Is A Certainty” If Kamala Harris Wins

NEW: Gold Star Families Release Devastating Responses to Kamala Harris Politicizing Trump Cemetery Visit (Bonchie/RedState)

Happy Labor Day.

The Other McCain.

Say hello to Corey Cobb-Bey and, while you’re at it, go ahead and say good-bye, because he died Thursday night in the proverbial hail of police gunfire after he murdered a Dallas cop and wounded two others.

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As he filled in on Alex Wagner Tonight on Thursday, MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin allowed his anti-Israel guest to rant so that he took a full minute from his colleague Lawrence O’Donnell’s show — a fact that O’Donnell made sure to point out as he joined.

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Anchor Amna Nawaz hosted on Thursday’s PBS News Hour as her expert Steven Erlanger, chief diplomatic correspondent and former Jerusalem bureau chief and fiercely pro-Palestinian voice for years at the paper. They spoke about Israel killing young Islamic Jihad leader Mohammed Jaber in a West Bank action.

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The Israel Defense Forces announced Saturday that several bodies, likely of those of Israeli hostages seized and held by Hamas, were found underground in Gaza.

UPDATE: Family Confirms Death of Israeli-American Hostage Goldberg-Polin (Bloomberg.com)

UPDATE: Israel recovers the bodies of 6 hostages in Gaza, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin (Josef Federman/Associated Press)

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It looks like the U.S.’s sole export is no longer just dollars and inflation…we’re also exporting the products of our rising crime rate.

A new report last week says that stolen vehicles have become a “world epidemic” and that there is a rising number of stolen vehicles at east coast ports, according to CBS.

The number of cars seized at the Port of Newark is on the rise, according to CBS News New York’s Derick Waller.

Jeffrey Greene, acting director at the Port of New York and Newark, oversees customs officials using x-rays to inspect containers and seize stolen cars. In one case, two junk vehicles concealed a pristine Mercedes, while another container held a stolen Chevy Silverado.

So far this year, they’ve seized 331 vehicles, on pace to surpass last year’s total. Investigators say West African markets, especially Nigeria, offer the highest prices. Social media videos show luxury SUVs being unloaded from containers, sometimes still sporting American license plates.

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As the 2024 election looms, the Biden administration is accelerating efforts to distribute billions in clean-energy loans, fearing the program could stall if former President Donald Trump is re-elected, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The Federalist.

Earlier this year, Cincinnati-area voters Cassandra and Harry Scott were puzzled to receive voter registration updates showing they had changed their address. They hadn’t.

The Hamilton County Board of Elections had received two registration forms for the voters from Black Fork Strategies LLC, an Ohio-based “engagement firm that focuses on all aspects of community and electoral field work.” Elections Board staff made the requested changes in the voter rolls and, per Ohio law, sent notice to the voters at their “new address.” That’s when Cassandra and Harry Scott showed up at the BOE office.

“Both of those voters appeared at our office during normal business hours after receiving those acknowledgement cards. The new address that was submitted on these registration cards was actually the place of business for Ms. Cassandra,” Elections Board Director Sherry Poland told Hamilton BOE members at a meeting last month. “She had not moved and did not complete the registration form.”