Read it.

The deadline for EU member states to put forward their picks for the next European Commission passed on Sunday with all 27 capitals successfully naming their candidates. The ball is now in President-elect Ursula von der Leyen’s court to divide the portfolios between them as she sees fit before the incoming commissioners stand before the European Parliament for the approval of MEPs.

But von der Leyen has a problem: only nine candidates are women (excluding herself) and 17 are men, something she sees as unacceptable in the current age. In order to reach gender parity, she even asked countries to put forth two names this year—a man’s and a woman’s—for her to mix and match for the best results. However, as commissioner nominations are an exclusive member state competence, all but one country (Bulgaria) ignored this ridiculous (and frankly, undemocratic) request.

When your priority is quotas rather than competence, you’re going to lose.

Read it.

An Idaho Army National Guard officer is under fire for expressing his religious beliefs on social media, leading to his removal from command and a heated debate over First Amendment rights within the military.

Read it.

Nearly one-third of K-12 students across the country are behind their grade level as of the end of the 2023-24 school year, according to a new survey released by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

Gee, those government schools work great, don’t they? Must be the teachers’ unions, yeah,  that’s the ticket.

Read it.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has sparked debate by awarding billions of dollars in extra paid leave to DHS employees, leading to questions about the impact on the department’s budget and mission, a new report says.

As Jerry Pournelle was fond of saying, the purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers.

The New Neo.

The first of a multi-part elucidation of the recent activities by the Religion of Peace.

Read it. And watch the video.

Eric Weinstein told Chris Williamson on the “Modern Wisdom” podcast that Donald Trump’s presidency has disrupted the old “rules-based international order,” which many view as an attempt to control global stability and wondered if the Republican nominee will “be allowed” to reenter the White House if elected in 2024. Weinstein argued that Trump’s unorthodox approach challenged the status quo, exposing flaws in the system and revealing that the impact of populist leaders on democracy and international agreements is more complex and significant than previously understood.

Chris Williamson’s MODERN WISDOM podcast on YouScrewed is well worth watching.

Read it.

An illegal immigrant from Mexico, who has been deported four times from the U.S., including after a murder conviction in Alabama, was arrested last week in Houston.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Read it.

The authors at UCSF have found that the C19 spike protein, while its primary purpose is to penetrate cell walls, has a secondary effect in binding to a protein called fibrinogen, which is an essential precursor to… blood clots. There’s an affinity between parts of the spike protein and sites along the amino acid chain in fibrinogen – an accidental bonding that’s apparently triggering the clot formation cascade just as bodily damage will do normally. The authors provide evidence for this, as well as secondary effects on inflammation and lung and brain damage. They also perform an experiment in mice using a monoclonal antibody that ameliorates these effects. This seems to be a substantial advance by a credible team, and is likely to trigger plenty of attempts to verify and advance the work.

A natural question arises: Can COVID-19 vaccines trigger the same cascade? The paper has this to say…

…we do not believe that this mechanism is related to the rare clotting complications observed with adenovirus based COVID vaccines because the production of anti-PF4 autoantibodies and ensuing drop in platelet counts are triggered by the vector rather than spike36. In general, COVID-19 RNA vaccines lead to small amounts of spike protein accumulating locally and within draining lymph nodes where the immune response is initiated and the protein is eliminated37. Consistent with the safety of the spike mRNA vaccines, mRNA vaccines prevent post-COVID-19 thromboembolic complications38 and a cohort study in 99?million COVID-vaccinated individuals showed no safety signals for haematological conditions…

The distinction being made is between dead-virus vaccines (the first case) and those using mRNA as a means to get the body to synthesize virus spike protein without any actual virus present. The latter seems reasonable, as the binding to fibrinogen will have the effect of consuming spike protein. An active C19 infection will keep producing more, but as the mRNA is consumed during the formation of spike, there’s a limited amount that can be generated. Again, I expect follow-up studies to confirm this, assuming the observed mechanism is verified by others.

And that’s why I refused to take any of the mRNA vaccines: THE SPIKE PROTEIN ITSELF IS PATHOGENIC and will damage your body. So injecting spike-protein-creating stuff into your body is like shooting yourself in the foot to avoid getting mugged. It reminds me of the scene in Blazing Saddles when Our Hero, surrounded by Hostile White People, pulls out his gun, holds it to his own head, and mutters “Nobody move or the nigger gets it!” The people of Rock Ridge were the audience for the COVID hysteria, successfully so.

UPDATE: The eternal lockdown of the soul

UPDATE: How Many People Have Been Harmed by mRNA-Based So-Called Vaccines?

Tom Kratman.

In the first place, there are two things we mean by “the election was stolen.” They’re mutually reinforcing, yes, but they’re not the same. The first of these is via the influence of media and social media. It was not illegal for them to have been Biden’s campaign, but they _were_ Biden’s campaign. What that means, in practice, is that they used their privileges under the first amendment to violate the intent of the first amendment. I say “privileges,” by the way, rather than “rights” because by their conduct they have undermined the first amendment to the point we can calmly consider killing it, as regards the media, as so many lefties want it to be killed for the common citizenry. It no longer serves its purpose.

The second factor is our belief that actual spurious ballots were introduced into the system by both mailing in and other means. And the numbers were not even that large; Trump “lost” by about twelve thousand in Georgia, eighty thousand in Pennsylvania, and under twenty-one thousand in Wisconsin. Let’s not pretend that those were particularly difficult numbers to have illegally come up with.

…

In short, election fraud is so completely a part of the Democratic Party and the left, more generally, and has been for so long, that it would only be remarkable if there were a close election where there wasn’t any. We expect it. If we can’t easily see it, we expect it to be only because it’s a little better hidden than usual.

The Democratic Party is and always has been a party of corruption, heavy on power, short of or bereft of principle. The only difference between it and any given sub-Saharan African kleptocracy is in the shade of skin.

Does anybody seriously think that Biden got more votes than Obama did in 2004 and 2008?

Read it–if you dare.

A few years back, for a laugh, I read every single Dickens novel. All 15 of them. One after another. And then I read his five Christmas Books, followed by the collection of his early short fiction and non-fiction known as Sketches by Boz. I read well over 4 million words of Dickens which, to put it into absurd solipsistic context, is like reading this article 1,700 times, in quantity if not quality. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

Because I’m me, I didn’t just read these books. I also made notes about locations. Specifically, I jotted down every single time a London location was mentioned, across all 21 books. If anyone wants to see it, I have a 714-row spreadsheet listing out every named place, and the books in which each one appears.

Spreadsheets are crap for editorial purposes, though, so a map HAD to be made. I started off plotting all the points on a Google Map. This worked to some extent, but was a bit glitchy, and not particularly easy on the eye. So, that’s where this article comes in. I’ve started from scratch with the data and redrawn Dickens’s geo-literary output — his geobibliome, as I’m pompously calling it — as a proper map.

How does a ‘proper map’ differ from a ‘just plain map’? Got me

Read it.

The European Commission has threatened to take away European Union funds from Hungary if it does not pay the €200 million fine imposed by the European Court of Justice over the country’s asylum system.

“There is no wiggle room here. We have to follow the applicable procedures,” a Commission spokesman said on Monday, September 2nd.

The issue revolves around the Hungarian conservative government’s tough stance on migration. Hungary has made it difficult for illegal migrants to enter the country, which is also the external border of the European Union—a border Hungary is obliged to protect.

Since 2016, Hungary has been enabling its police to deport foreigners lacking valid documentation directly to Serbia. Illegal migrants travelling through the Western Balkan route can only submit requests for asylum outside Hungary’s borders.

The European Commission, which has been pursuing an open-border, pro-migration policy, has deemed these practices a breach of EU law, saying asylum seekers should be allowed into a member state to seek protection and to stay there until their claim is handled.

“We won’t give you this money until you pay this other money.” To which the appropriate response would appear to be “Stick them both up your ass.” But that’s just me. Why Hungary remains a part of the European Union escapes me.

Tyler Cowen.

I don’t agree with this theory as stated, but it can be worth spelling such things out, if only to see their weaknesses, or perhaps some strengths at some of the more unusual or less likely margins. Here goes:

People, especially “thinkers,” like to believe they serve all sorts of noble purposes in the intellectual infrastructure. But in reality their main effects are either to raise or lower the status of the elites in their society.

Noam Chomsky, for instance, has lowered the status of American elites. That is his net long-run effect, not that he drummed up sympathy for the Khmer Rouge. A lot more people, for better or worse, are more skeptical of a bunch of things because of Chomsky.

The New York Times, in contrast, works hard to raise the status of elites. It tries especially hard to raise the status of Democratic elites, but still it is raising the status of elites for the most part.

Most ‘thinkers’ are in love with thinking, and spend little time thinking about whether what they’re thinking has any connection to reality. Usually they think of ‘connection to reality’ as a bug, not a feature

It is hard to lower the status of elites without lowering your own status as well.  It is not just that the elites will not like you, or may treat you and your PR harshly.  You also have to come across as quite negative, and furthermore some of the negativity you create for your targets will rub off on you, at least in the eyes of much of your audience.  Plus being too relentlessly critical, rather than constructive, tends to make people stupider.

I can live with it. Most people will grow stupider over time all by themselves; I am happy to help that process along pro bono publico. Think of it as evolution in action.

UnHerd.

Human beings are conflicted animals. We are capable of great devotion to the people and things we cherish, and will strive tirelessly on their behalf. Yet we long to be done with worry and struggle, to close the open wounds of existence and be relieved, once and for all, of anxiety and toil. At times of cultural exhaustion, this longing can afflict a whole people. We see this today in the United States.

Americans have suffered bruising blows for four years now: the Covid shutdown, urban riots and crime, ballooning inflation and debt, open borders, civil strife, the gloating of our enemies and the collapse of the international order. The electorate is weary and dispirited, and seems ready, like a boxer on his last legs, to take a sweet nap on the canvas.

Kamala Harris’s handlers understand this perfectly well. Having accurately discerned the national mood, they have made her the woman of the hour. She seems to float above all weighty issues. In her campaign poster “Forward”, a knockoff of the iconic Obama “Hope” image, her uplifted gaze radiates joy and “upliftment”. Her invocation of “What can be, unburdened by what has been” is happy and hopeful.

If all that sounds attractive, consider that Harris’s candidacy involves a deep memory-wipe. Politically speaking, she has sprung into being as a fully formed adult with no discernible past or historical recall. Her plan to control food prices repeats a common, famine-inducing error of communist regimes. Her tough-on-crime and border-securing persona rests not just on amnesia, but on media-driven amnesty. And yet, propelled forward by the cheerful drone of the “KHive ” and the good vibrations of “Brat summer”, Harris may surf all the way to the Oval Office.

In the immortal words of the Clinton Campaign Song: Don’t stop thinkin’ about tomorrow/Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone….

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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?

Read it.

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.

Read it.

(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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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)

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.”

The New Neo.

That won’t necessarily stop her from being elected, of course. But I really wonder why she decided to become a politician. Among other things, although she lies and lies and lies, she – unlike most politicians – seems somewhat uncomfortable doing so. That discomfort gets transmitted in awkward body language and stress in her voice, as well as a lack of emotional match to the content of what she’s saying. That’s why the awkward forced laugh comes out sometimes; I think it’s nervous laughter.

And that is why Walz was part of her interview with CNN and why people joke that he’s her emotional support animal. And I don’t think Walz has any discomfort whatsoever with lying.

But this uneasiness of Harris’ is not her only difficulty when she’s playing the role of a politician (and on her it really does seem to be a role). Most politicians are verbally fluent. They may be lying through their teeth, but the listener has no trouble understanding what they’re actually saying. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, generates a lot of near-meaningless words in the process of trying to find her way to an answer that doesn’t implicate her. She is, to be blunt, BS-ing and stalling, and in the process leaves the listener scratching his or her head. Again, this is something most or all politicians do, but they ordinarily accomplish it with smoothness and finesse.

For some reason, Harris has trouble doing that.