Read it.

Nearly 1 million illegal aliens in the United States have benefited from “quiet amnesty” by the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration court system, according to a report released Thursday.

Over 700,000 illegal migrants have had their cases administratively closed, terminated, or dismissed, allowing them to remain in the country “indefinitely” without being subject to immigration consequences, according to a report released by the House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

The findings, which the committee dubbed as “quiet amnesty,” come amid record levels of illegal immigration into the country under the Biden-Harris administration.

Read it.

Tennessee’s top prosecutor said Wednesday that his office uncovered a scheme by the Biden-Harris administration to release a massive number of illegal aliens into the state, but the plan ultimately was derailed.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, attempted to release illegal aliens into Tennessee, but those plans were scrapped following pushback from the governor and other lawmakers, according to documents obtained by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Federal immigration authorities had attempted to transport potentially thousands of single adult migrants from out-of-state detention facilities and release them into Tennessee in coordination with nonprofit groups, alleged Skrmetti, a Republican.

Read it.

Years ago, I began to notice how household items were not working anymore. The showerheads are federally regulated to restrict flow, as are the toilets and garbage disposals. The mandated designs and blueprints make all the products worse.

The new gas cans are awful, while the old ones sell for a premium. I was mowing the lawn and found that it kept getting clogged because of a lack of airflow. Sure enough, the functioning was hobbled by safety regulations that forced the cage ever lower to the grass surface, to the point that the machine does not do what it is supposed to do.

Indeed, it is hard to think of a single product you use that is not trapped in some kind of forced design emanating from a federal bureaucracy. This pertains to everything in your house but also to every business, all the way down to the fabric of the aprons in every restaurant. These are just federal laws but state and local ones also add to the burden.

Ask any real estate developer and he will tell you the reason for the housing shortage.

It comes down to extreme controls on every single step in hiring and building. The customer ends up paying in two ways: higher prices and less choice.

Gorsuch notes: “If you’re a budding pasta entrepreneur, take note: by federal decree, macaroni must have a diameter between 1.1 and .27 inches, while vermicelli must not be more than .06 inches in diameter. Both may contain egg whites—but those egg whites cannot constitute more than two percent of the weight of the finished product.”

Read it.

“There are two reasons that gas is more expensive in California, and neither of them have to do with price gouging. The first reason, which we’re all very familiar with, is the extra taxes that are added on,” Edward Ring, the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, told the DCNF. “When you take all of the state taxes, fees and programs, you’re going to add another $1.23 to the price of a gallon of gas, and that’s not including the 18 cents a gallon of federal excise tax.”

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

Recent developments in gang activity across the United States are demonstrating an alarming trend of violence, among other things. Major cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Los Angeles are witnessing an increase in gang-related incidents. This has Americans across the board concerned to say the least.

Many of these gangs have evolved past the drug trade and violence that they have been known for in the past. As technology has improved, many have adapted with the times. Now, there’s more incidents of identity theft and fraud.

Of course, if you don’t live in a Democrat-controlled metropolitan area, or rural Mexico, you have little to fear from any gangs.

Rod Dreher.

Did you hear? Hitler’s back! Kamala Harris stood outside her official residence and solemnly warned a national television audience on Wednesday that Donald Trump had reportedly admired Nazi generals, and see, see—he’s a fascist! Later in the evening, she said outright on CNN that Donald Trump is a fascist.

She based this claim on reporting in The Atlantic, a liberal magazine who also quoted a former top Trump White House staffer saying that Trump disparaged a dead U.S. soldier of Hispanic descent, using racist language. Inconveniently, the dead soldier’s sister tweeted that it was a lie, and that earlier in the day, she had cast an early vote for, yes, Donald Trump.

Hitler may be back, but then, he never really went away, not for the Democrats and the liberal media when confronted by a Republican president or presidential candidate. When George W. Bush was president, they called him “Bushitler.” The mild, milquetoast Mitt Romney? Hitler (or at least Hitler-ish). The list of Republican figures the American Left has tarred with the Hitler or Nazi brush is as long as it is absurd. Nobody who isn’t already deeply in the Democratic tank takes it seriously anymore. It has become any irritating ideological tic, like progressives accusing anybody who dissents from their radical identity politics dogma ‘racist,’ or some other type of bigot.

UnHerd.

You’d think that Suffs, a play about women’s suffrage, would be considered to be pretty progressive. It’s currently playing on Broadway, and has enjoyed broadly positive reviews from all the usual outlets. Yet earlier in the year, this most liberal of liberal shows was nonetheless assailed. In July, activists stormed the Music Box Theatre mid-performance, and began chanting demands for the musical’s cancellation. Just to make their point clear, they also unfurled a banner, emblazoned with the words “Suffs Is a White Wash”.

As that last phrase implies, and a quick glance at the protest the Cancel Suffs website confirms, the protesters are ultimately unhappy about Suffs for one fundamental reason: the whiteness of its feminism. A self-declared group of “radical, anti-racist, queer” feminists, the group rejects the idea that “white women are always aligned with progressive causes” — even as they attack Suffs for underplaying the supposed racism of those early electoral reformers. Taken together, in fact, Suffs is nothing less than “a betrayal” of the next generation of feminists.

The chaos in July is far from unique. At least according to a certain kind of intersectional feminist — the sort of person who believes trans women are women and sex work is work — “white feminists” are now to blame for everything. Consider, to give one example, the wild popularity of the “Karen” slur, an implicit (or sometimes not-so-implicit) attack on white women standing up for themselves. Then there’s the explosion of books. The titles speak for themselves: White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color; The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women; Against White Feminism; The Problem With White Feminism.

Revolutions always eat their children — often, unfortunately, not soon enough.

Read it.

Sideshows, the stunt-driving parties that rankle Bay Area residents and throttle early-morning commutes on the Bay Bridge, could become harder to pull off due to a new policing tool from tech company Flock Safety.

Officially launching Thursday, and with beta testing already complete, the technology listens for the sound of tire screeches and engine revs and then automatically sends a five-second audio clip to nearby police. The surveillance product is akin to Alexa- or Siri-enabled devices, digesting all nearby audio and waiting for trigger sounds.

Tom Pethtel, an engineering vice president at Flock, told SFGATE that his company has heard a dramatic uptick in complaints about sideshows from law enforcement customers over the past two years. The tech tool is meant to complement Flock’s license plate reader cameras and Raven gunshot microphones, part of the company’s mission to “eliminate crime.”

Read it.

A new study has revealed that the iconic bronze-winged lion in St. Mark’s Square, Venice, may have originated in 8th-century China.

The discovery comes from a multidisciplinary team of experts in geology, chemistry, archaeology, and art history from the University of Padua, the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and the International Association for Mediterranean and Oriental Studies (Ismeo). Through advanced metallurgical analysis, the team discovered that a significant portion of the bronze used in the lion came from the lower Yangtze River basin in southeastern China, and it was likely cast during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE).

…

Lead isotope analysis of the bronze alloy provided indisputable evidence of the Chinese origin of the materials used in the statue. The results were announced on September 11, 2024, during an international conference on Marco Polo, part of Venice’s celebrations marking the 700th anniversary of the famous merchant’s death. Scholars have long debated the lion’s origins, with previous theories suggesting it could have been made in Anatolia during the Hellenistic era. However, the new evidence points directly to China.

Read it.

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the world that my two daughters — both under the age of three— will inhabit when they’re adults. Last night, I was surprised to find that my older daughter Yara was able to recognize a 1980s-style tape deck in a picture book we were reading (“this… a… music box,” she said, after studying it intently). And she certainly knows what the mail is — in fact, one of her favorite books is called The Jolly Postman.

But will the adult Yara personally write out and mail letters? Perhaps about as frequently as she will play cassette tapes. Which is to say: not never, but almost never.

Wired, a Voice of the Crust.

That’s “don’t need it” in the opinion of the ‘experts’. Your opinion, of course, doesn’t matter.

UPDATE: Ozempic linked to lower Alzheimer’s risk in people with Type 2 diabetes

Read it.

Look for … the Union label….

Read it.

Science and Nature, two leading science journals, have revealed a growing problem: an alarming rise in fraudulent research papers produced by shady paper mill companies. This wave of fake studies is creating a major headache for the academic world, putting the integrity of global academic research at risk.

Paper mill companies offer authorship services to researchers, academics, and students who want their names listed as an author of a scientific article published in reputable scientific journals.

By paying around €180 to €5000 (approximately US$197 – $5472), a person can have their name listed as the author of research paper, without having to painstakingly do research and write the results. No doubt, some experts refer to these paper mills as illegal and criminal organizations.

Read it.

The sister of slain soldier Vanessa Guillén slammed The Atlantic after it used anonymous sources to allege that President Donald Trump disparaged her after discovering the funeral expenses.

Babylon Bee.

Satire —  read quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an Anglo-U.S. non-governmental organisation, set out its main “annual priorities” from March to October 2024 in bullet-pointed lists. It aims to “Kill Musk’s Twitter,” a goal backed by an “advertising focus”—i.e., a campaign to deter advertisers from using the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Screenshots from a CCDH monthly planner, obtained by Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi, outline this censorious phrase. More detailed suggestions include reminders to lobby for U.S. and European Union regulation to be tightened, or at least deployed, against ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate’—suitably loosely defined to mean things that the campaigners disagree with. “Social media companies erode basic human rights and civil liberties by enabling the spread of online hate and disinformation,” asserts the CCDH website.

“This is war,” replied Elon Musk, following the publication of the leaked documents. He later added, “This violates U.S. criminal statutes against foreign interference in elections. We are going after CCDH and their donors. AND their donors.”

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

ZMan cuts to the chase.

The fact is, these antiwhite pogroms, whatever you want to call them, are the logical outcome of generations of jurisprudence. The “Brown Test”, named for the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, implemented a set of racial and cultural standards that effectively eliminated free association and made openness the standard against which everything is measured. In effect, it made anything that results in racial inequality both illegal and immoral.

That means it is impossible to have a color-blind society under the Brown doctrine because it would lead to racial inequality. The underlying assumption of Brown and the entire moral edifice that sprang from it is that any racial inequality, not matter how trivial, must be the result of discrimination by whites. Therefore, a colorblind society that has racial inequality will mean that color blindness is the cause. It is why people like Ibram X. Kendi can reasonably say color blindness is racism.

This is what makes race a binary issue. You either understand the moral reasoning that lies behind the novelty of the word “racism” or you do not and simply accept it as part of your ethics. You either understand and accept the reality of race as a biological matter or you reject it and embrace the blank slate ideology. There is no middle position and no way to pick a few things from one column and a few from the other to create yourself a bespoke racial awareness.

Read it.

Hungary has formally asked the European Parliament to lift the immunity of Italian Green MEP Ilaria Salis, who was imprisoned in Hungary for brutally beating up innocent civilians on the streets of Budapest.

…

Ilaria Salis, a 40-year-old former teacher, was arrested and imprisoned in Hungary last year for participating in a series of attacks organised by the Hammerbande (Hammer Gang), a German left-wing militant group linked to Antifa. The members of the group surrounded and bludgeoned nine innocent people—who the attackers decided “looked like” neo-Nazis based on their choice of clothing—with telescopic batons and hammers on the streets of Budapest.

Salis was arrested and charged with three counts of attempted assault and accused of being part of an extreme left-wing organisation. Her case was widely reported in European media, especially in Italy, with left-wing journalists focusing on her alleged “inhumane” treatment in prison, and not on the shocking crimes she committed.

In May this year, she was released from prison and transferred to house arrest in Budapest, and after her election as an MEP, she gained legal immunity and was released.

Read it.

The existence of a secret Israeli drone, referred to as RA-01 and used for covert missions, has emerged from an unauthorized disclosure of U.S. intelligence documents which have now been posted all over social media. Israel’s possession of at least a pocket fleet of long-range stealth drones capable of gathering intelligence and possibly conducting strikes is extremely logical to the point of it being a bit odd if they never pursued such a capability. Israel is home to an extensive and often pioneering uncrewed aviation industry and drones of this kind would be very well suited to supporting the country’s ongoing stand-off with Iran. During a major Israeli operation to strike targets in that country, they would likely play an indispensable role, as well.

Read it.

This technology aims to revolutionize the way satellites are sent into space, using a giant rotating arm to fling satellites into low Earth orbit. Remarkably, this process eliminates the need for rocket fuel, relying solely on electricity.

SpinLaunch has already conducted multiple successful tests with this technology. “This is not a rocket, and clearly our ability to perform in just 11 months this many tests and have them all function as planned, really is a testament to the nature of our technology,” said Jonathan Yaney, founder and CEO of SpinLaunch, in a 2022 Space.com report after their 10th successful launch. The company plans to launch constellations of satellites into orbits below 600 miles by 2026.

I wonder if that would work for ICBMs?

Read it.

In a record-breaking incident, a boat carrying 231 migrants arrived at the Canary Islands, the largest single migrant vessel to reach the archipelago.

The boat, which departed from The Gambia, carried 58 minors and 13 women among the passengers, all of African origin, including individuals from Senegal, Mali, and Guinea. The dangerous journey across the Atlantic left three of the migrants in need of hospital treatment for minor injuries.

This arrival comes on the heels of a tragic shipwreck in September, the worst in the Canary Islands in 30 years, which left 50 people missing. The number of migrants reaching the Canary Islands has surged this year, with 32,878 individuals arriving between January and mid-October, a 39.7% increase compared to last year. Of this figure, 2,875 migrants arrived in October alone, 467 of them unaccompanied minors.

Why do they do it? (a) They know they’re not going to be sent back where they came from. (b) They know they aren’t going to be left to starve. (c) They know that their injuries will be treated with better medical care than they would get back ‘home’.

Read it.

It’s not an easy task these days to commemorate, as the world around us has accelerated. Everything and everyone rushes. For many, the only thing that matters is to seize and experience something instantly: a bite and a sip, a selfie and a post, a tweet and a share. Before you know it, before you could actually enjoy it, it’s already there, and the next one is right on the production line: the newer, the better; the faster, the trendier.

But recalling the memories and values of 1956 offers an opportunity to pause for a moment and reflect: there are things that are stronger than the passage of time and that resist being buried beneath it. These are, for instance, the heroes, their great deeds, or memory itself. Be it a 150, 100, or even 68 years, truly great heroes and feats must be commemorated. Because where heroes are remembered, there will always be new ones! For us Hungarians, 23 October 1956 is one such day in our memory, the cornerstone of our nation.

In the battle of ’56, the people became a nation. The country united. Young and old, man and woman, worker and intellectual, peasant and soldier shared the very same wish: freedom for Hungary, because Hungarians cannot live without freedom. No matter how many times we were deprived of it, sooner or later we regained it. If needed, we fought for it; if forced, we died for it. In October 1956, the freedom we reclaimed brought an end to the fear. If we take a look at the photographs and film footage taken in those late October days, and gaze at one of the faces for a longer time, we might picture what his life must have been like, what his aspirations were, what he hoped for. We shall recognize him as a fellow compatriot longing for freedom, one who has taken the hand of the person standing next to him, clinging to a stranger. He trusted the others, because he knew that they too wanted to be free.

The events of 1956, not only the suppression of the Eastern Europe revolts but Eisenhower’s humiliation of the British and the French over Suez, brought home to the slaves of Communism that No One Is Coming To Save You and that they couldn’t count on any useful help from the U.S. in trying to get free.

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A team of pathophysiologists at the University of Milan has found that climbing stairs or walking for short bursts allows people to consume 20% to 60% more energy than if they do the same activity nonstop for the same distance. In their study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group asked volunteers to walk on a treadmill or climb stairs while also monitoring their oxygen intake.

The research team noted that available reported energy expenditures tend to reflect activities that are done at a metabolically steady state, which only becomes established after performing such an activity for a while. They wondered if there might be differences in expenditures if people engaged in start-and-stop-type exercise multiple times. To find out, they recruited 10 volunteers.

The volunteers walked on a treadmill or climbed a short flight of stairs for different lengths of time, ranging from 10 seconds to four minutes. As they did so, they wore a mask to measure their oxygen intake, a means of measuring energy consumption.

I always wanted to be a pathophysiologist. It sounds as if it pays well and doesn’t involve any heavy lifting.

Read it.

In Ancient Greek philosophy, ataraxia (Greek: ????????, from ?- indicating negation or absence and ?????- tarach- ‘to disturb, trouble’ with the abstract noun suffix -??), generally translated as ‘unperturbedness’, ‘imperturbability’, ‘equanimity’, or ‘tranquility’, is a lucid state of robust equanimity characterized by ongoing freedom from distress and worry.

Sounds like a disease, doesn’t it? “Well, ma’am, you got a really bad case of ataraxia. I recommend watching MSNBC until you get over it.”

“Hey, John, come on over and watch the election/Superbowl/Rings of Power with us.”
“Nope. I’ve got ataraxia, and I need to isolate for a couple of weeks.”

The Register.

Good luck with that.

Sales of “dumb” phones are on the rise in the UK, according to telco Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), with parents choosing them instead of smartphones to try and spare their kids from the perils of social media and instant messaging.

One of the largest mobile operators in Britain, VMO2 says it has seen sales of non-smartphones double year-on-year, with a significant spike this September, as the new school year started.

Many Reg readers will recall feature phones, which supported basic voice calling and text messages, but often lacked a touchscreen or the ability to download and run apps, and even internet access more generally. If VMO2 can be believed, these are enjoying something of a comeback as parents try to make informed choices regarding their children’s online safety.

Make the kid wear an AirTag and you’re good. They can always borrow a friend’s phone if they need to make a call.

Popular Mechanics.

Think back to elementary school science class, and you’ll likely remember studying the water cycle—staring at an illustration filled with arrows forming an overall circular motion and annotated with words like evaporation, transpiration, condensation, and precipitation. This system forms the bedrock of life on Earth as it moves moisture across the planet, but now scientists think that, for the first time in human history, that system is malfunctioning.

Ah, ‘scientists’. There are a lot of ‘scientists’ in the world. Which ‘scientists’ might these be? After all, ‘scientists’ famously often disagree.

That’s the conclusion of a new report published this week by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water—a group of leading scientists and economists formed in 2022 whose mission is to assess the state of Earth’s hydrological systems and how those systems are being managed. The results are not encouraging. The report finds that demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by more than 40 percent by the end of the decade, mostly due to stresses caused by climate change.

Humm. The Global Commission on the Economics of Water. Sounds pretty impressive. In fact, it sounds like a creature of the U.N., and we know how objective and conscientious such agencies are.

But no; their address is:

OECD Environment Directorate
Climate, Biodiversity and Water Division
2, rue André Pascal
75775 Paris Cedex 16
France

So they are a creature of the Globalist Crust. And we know how objective and conscientious the Global Crust are.

I don’t think I’ll worry about the ‘water cycle’ just yet.

The Atlantic.

The backlash against the world’s most hated font may finally be ending.

On the morning of July 4, 2012, two big headlines came from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. The first was that the Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti had made a significant discovery in quantum field theory. The second was that her PowerPoint presentation about it had been delivered in Comic Sans. Hilarity competed with outrage: Critics argued that Comic Sans was a font for children’s-party invitations, with a promise of fun and games. It was not meant for important developments in particle mass. Lisa Randall, the first tenured female theoretical-physics professor at Harvard, emailed Gianotti with congratulations and the question on everybody’s mind: Why Comic Sans? “Because I like it,” Gianotti replied.

Take that, stuck-up Ivy League bitch.

Read it.

Emergency services had to move a boulder to get her out

If you’re out and about in nature and drop your phone down a three-meter crevice between some boulders, maybe don’t try to retrieve it.

Read it.

Vicki Umipeg was prematurely born at 22 weeks, weighing 3 pounds. Her optic nerve was damaged due to high oxygen in the incubator, resulting in complete blindness. She had no visual experiences, no awareness of light whatsoever.

her neck, back, and leg. While being rescued in the hospital, she found herself floating to the ceiling.

She had panoramic vision and saw a woman’s body lying on a metal operating table, with a male and a female medical staff working to save her. When she noticed the distinct wedding ring on the woman’s hand, she realized it was her ring, and the woman lying there was her.

As she had been blind all her life, she had never seen that ring or her body. Only in that near-death experience (NDE) did she see her ring.

…

“She had a 360-degree vision, where she could simultaneously be aware of and process vision during her near-death experience, in front of her, behind her, right, left, up, down.”

“In fact, I told Vicki that the rest of us in our earthly lives have these pie-shaped visual fields because of the location of our eyes, in our eye sockets. She literally laughed at me because her entire life experience with vision [during her NDE] was at 360 or spherical vision.”

Furthermore, initially unfamiliar with math and science, Vicki intuitively grasped calculus and understood how planets are formed after her NDE. She gained answers to questions about science, math, life, planets, and God, experiencing a flood of knowledge and understanding languages she didn’t know before.

Read it.

Democrats cheat. It’s what they do. It’s a centuries-old tradition, practically the only thing that they actually stand for.

Read it.

It is well known that California has been among the worst-performing states in the country in terms of job growth. But the latest statistics show that nearly all jobs that are being created in California are government jobs. Between January 2022 and June 2024, total California jobs grew by about 156,000, with government jobs accounting for 96.5 percent of that growth.

California’s job creation record has been even more dismal over the last 18 months. Since January 2023, private-sector employment in the state declined by over 46,000 workers. California’s private-sector job collapse is unprecedented, and with the state representing nearly 12 percent of the country’s population, it is a drag on the nation’s economy.

Part of California’s job weakness reflects the number of people and businesses leaving the state. California’s population declined by about 75,000 between 2022 and 2023 (the latest data available), and a number of business headquarters have departed.

Not to mention that California government, state and city, are hostile to business in the extreme. Between punitive minimum wage laws, police incompetence to do anything about mobs looting stores, shoplifters hauling out carts of loot that no one dare impede, and oppressive taxes, I’m surprised that there are any businesses left in California.

Read it.

And they’ll suffer no consequences, so they’ll do it again.

UPDATE: ‘Blatantly Supporting Terrorism’: Anti-Israel University of Minnesota Students Storm Campus Building, Trapping Employees Inside

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Last month the mayor of Portland, Maine, shocked Jewish communities in his backyard and beyond when he expressed full-throated support for his city council’s successful resolution to divest from companies linked to Israel.

Now, Mayor Mark Dion is taking it all back.

“Upon personal reflection and following many private conversations I have had with our Jewish neighbors, I have come to the conclusion that my vote on the divestment was wrong,” Dion said during prepared remarks at Monday’s city council meeting.

Read it.

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. has removed several accounts across Threads and Instagram that were used to track celebrities’ private jets, including the jet owned by its Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, citing a risk of “physical harm.”

The accounts, which rely on publicly available information to track a jet’s location and CO2 emissions, among other details, were banned without warning this week after Meta updated its privacy policy. The newly banned accounts include those tracking planes for celebrities, including Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, and business leaders, including Zuckerberg, former Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos, and Tesla Inc. CEO and X owner Elon Musk.

As I was once told by a wise old gunnery sergeant, “If they can’t find you, they can’t hurt you.”

Many of the accounts impacted were operated by Jack Sweeney, a Florida college student who has gained notoriety by tracking celebrity jets. In a letter posted to his Threads account, Sweeney said he “received no communication from Meta” about the bans before they were initiated. “These platforms operate without transparency, and it feels like they make arbitrary decisions,” he wrote.

There is no legitimate reason to ‘track celebrity jets’, and the obvious abuse to which such information is liable ought to be obvious to any person with a room-temperature IQ. Anybody who would have been surprised by Meta’s action probably has a hard time walking and chewing gum at the same time.

It’s not Sweeney’s first run-in with a tech company or billionaire that wanted his accounts removed. Musk has long taken issue with Sweeney’s account that tracked his private plane, once calling the information his “assassination coordinates.” Shortly after buying X in late 2022, he banned Sweeney’s account and made a new rule that forbid sharing someone else’s location in real-time. Sweeney still tracks Musk’s jet on X, but posts the jet’s location on a 24-hour delay.

If I had Elon Musk’s money, I’d have a couple of goons visit him and explain the error of his ways. That’s the only sure method to keep him from just starting fresh accounts and continuing being a brat.

The Register.

Fake review writers are officially on watch – the US is now enforcing a new rule to ban the practice and is promising a crackdown.

“As of today, @FTC’s final rule banning fake online reviews and testimonials has come into effect,” the head of the agency Lina Khan wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “If you encounter any of these prohibited practices, you can report them to @FTC at: https://reportfraud.ftc.gov.”

And then what? How are they going to identify the perpetrators? How are they going to identify the perpetrators with the surety that legal rules of evidence require? Or are they just going to do the Deep State dance and hit people with penalties on the basis of rumor and suspicion?

Naval Matters.

Pivoting our thinking away from the ship-sinking role for the PT-ish boat (we’ll use the term ‘PT boat’ in a generic sense for the rest of the article) and keeping in mind that the most effective use was as barge-busting gunboats and ISR, we could easily imagine a very useful PT boat component in the Navy, today. For example, we could flood the Persian Gulf with PT boats to monitor and eliminate Iran’s maritime harassment, ship seizures, and ship mining. Of course, that would require us to have the will to use force, as necessary, otherwise there would be no point.

Read it.

Muslim terrorists have no hesitation in using innocent civilians–and hospital patients–as human shields.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

Insider.

It feels like a distant memory, but once upon a time America’s carmakers produced vehicles in a veritable rainbow of colors. As recently as 2005, more than half of all automobiles on the road were painted a color other than black, white, silver, or gray. Some of the tints even sported names straight out of a Hot Wheels collection: Tangerine Scream, Go Green, Plum Crazy.

But over the past quarter century, the range of hues has narrowed dramatically. Today, less than 20% of vehicles listed in our database of 1.7 million cars are a color other than black, white, silver, or gray. In an age of infinite digital luminosity, America’s roads have become as dull and washed out as a Civil War daguerreotype.

Read it.

The Regime Media takes delight in exhibiting recently conquered conservatives as role models for others to emulate. Such was the case during Adam Kinzinger’s tearful heyday, but the Regime now has a bigger prize: former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.

As part of her endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, Cheney is touring the country in hopes of wrangling disaffected conservatives over to Harris at events festooned with imagery meant to evoke Reaganite nostalgia. But such conversions require an abandonment of prior deeply-held beliefs. Such is the case with Cheney and abortion, which the networks gleefully featured.

Power Line.

Frontpage has proclaimed Tanya S. Chutkan number one in their series on the ten worst judges in America. An Obama pick for the DC District Court, Chutkan goes easy on Islamic terrorists and violent criminals but cracks down hard on the January 6 defendants. Her handling of the Imran Awan case failed to get the attention it deserved.

Of all the IT people in all the IT firms in all the world, House Democrats thought Awan was best man for the job. Sometimes working from his native Pakistan, Awan and his family team accessed the computers of some 40 Democrats, including those on the intelligence and foreign affairs committees. Without their consent, Awan and his team stashed the Democrats’ data on a server controlled by Xavier Becerra, chair of the House Democratic Caucus. Capitol Police sought a copy of the server but were handed a fake.

In February, 2017, Awan and his team got booted off the House computer network, but Becerra had already fled to California where Gov. Jerry Brown made him state attorney general. In July of 2017, Awan attempted to flee the country but the authorities busted him for bank fraud. For Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman, “this appears to be a real conspiracy, aimed at undermining American national security.” Some in Congress agreed but the IT man had his defenders.

Gates of Vienna.

The municipal authorities put in a bike path that ended up being in violation of the fire regulations, so the solution was to compel residents to move out of adjacent apartment buildings.

Makes sense, right?

Right?

Well, I guess it does if you’re German.

New York Times.

Sales of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles have soared over the last few years — helping to slow global warming and take dangerous pollutants out of the atmosphere.

“Why are you spreading sawdust around?”
“Keeps the elephants away.”
“But there aren’t any elephants in Brooklyn.”
“See how effective it is?”

But one technology critical to fighting climate change is lagging, thanks to a combination of high interest rates, rising costs, misinformation and the cycle of home construction. Adoption of heat pumps, one of the primary ways to cut emissions from buildings, has slowed in the United States and stalled in Europe, endangering the switch to clean energy.

Oh noes!

Homeowners may also run into trouble when trying to find contractors to install heat pumps. Barton James, the president and CEO of the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, says many contractors don’t have training on how to properly install heat pumps; if they install them incorrectly, the ensuing problems can sour consumers on the technology.

Oh, ya think?

In the United States, low gas prices also make the economics of heat pumps more challenging. Gas is around three times cheaper than electricity — while heat pumps make up most of that ground with efficiency, they aren’t the most cost-effective option for every household.

Being ‘climate-friendly’ is easy … if you’re rich.