DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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Dr. Eric Cubin, a Wyoming radiologist who was removed from the state Board of Medicine for supporting a bill restricting “gender-affirming care,” condemns the way transgender activists have taken over the medical establishment.

“I think the magnitude of the scandal is unprecedented. It’s unbelievable,” Cubin tells “The Daily Signal Podcast” about the medical industry’s support for experimental interventions euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.”

“What it’s going to do, unfortunately, is serve to undermine people’s faith in the medical establishment,” he warns. “COVID did not help, and this certainly does not help.”

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On Sunday, Donald Trump poked fun at Kamala Harris’ dubious claim that she ‘worked at McDonald’s and made fries,’ by going to a McDonald’s and making fries, plus working the drive-thru.

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The problem with solving problems is that once they are solved, no one needs the solver anymore. The better kinds of problems are recurring problems that ensure customer retention, employing plumbers, locksmiths and police officers, but the best kind are the completely unsolvable problems.

And those are the only kinds of problems that the Left wants to solve.

Given enough human ingenuity and technological development, most problems can concievably be addressed and that is why the Left has to contrive to make them unsolvable by either causing the problem (homelessness), defining it in such a way that it is inherently unsolvable (equity), defining the inappropriate problem while obscuring the actual problem (gun violence) or inventing fake problems (global warming) that can never be solved because they don’t exist in the first place.

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One of the more interesting twists in these last few weeks of the presidential election campaign has been the increasing support of black men for Donald Trump. The trend obviously has the Democrats worried, as evidenced by the blatant pandering of the “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” announced last week by the Kamala Harris campaign. I’m not sure that the target demographic is as stupid as Ms. Harris thinks they are, however — young black men usually have a good sense of when they’re being played.

The movement of black men towards Donald Trump really got going after he was arrested, and the famous mug shot was publicized. That’s when the #Niggas4Trump hashtag started trending, and young black vloggers began enthusing over Mr. Trump using boisterous ghetto argot.

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ENG8, which has been developing a range of catalyst fusion reactors called EnergiCells, reportedly achieved a world-first milestone.

Their system, based on low energy nuclear reactions (LENR) technology, is reported to be capable of operating indefinitely without any external input power.

OffGuardian.

Are humans headed for extinction? When we stop evolving both physically and psychologically, where will we be? It is always assumed that evolution is a good thing. A process that is designed to create the best of the best.

Survival of the fittest and all of that.

Even if we don’t believe in the entirety of Darwin’s theory, most people are apt to believe that individual species have evolved in some way—finches in the wild develop better beaks for eating insects that have changed over millennia, or creatures develop into animals that fit and function better in a changing environment.

What about us? What are we headed for?

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The more time you spend in California, the less sense its politics make. It’s progressive, of course. But the style of progressivism in the West Coast is distinct from that in the East, in roughly the same way that Silicon Valley-style capitalism differs from the Wall Street variety. The West Coast species is the cowboy version: more rebellious, less civilised, and also completely incoherent. On the one hand, it’s the same schoolmarmish, nanny-state liberalism you can find in any blue state: bans on plastic straws, quotas for women on corporate boards, mandated gender neutral toy aisles. On the other, it’s the exact inverse: permissiveness verging on criminal negligence.

In San Francisco, for instance, it’s illegal not to compost your food scraps. But you can smoke meth outside a playground and suffer little more than glares from passersby. In California, college students are required by law to obtain repeated, vocal permission from their partners for a sexual encounter to be deemed not rape. But pimps can openly sex traffic minors on city streets in broad daylight, and the police can do little about it. All of these disparate approaches to perceived social problems are regarded as “progressive”.

What California does, the rest of the country tends to follow. In the past two decades or so, the West Coast’s version of progressivism has become ascendant in Left-wing American politics from coast to coast. New York City, for instance, has embraced not only San Francisco’s compost law, but its laissez-faire approach to public drug use too. How, then, can we explain this weird blend of big-state progressivism and Left-wing American libertarianism?

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Every new yellow taxi in New York City must be wheelchair accessible under rules finalized by the Taxi and Limousine Commission on Friday, marking the latest step by officials to comply with a federal court order stemming from a lawsuit filed by disability advocates more than a decade ago.

The new rules mean the TLC will only approve a new vehicle license to a yellow taxi medallion holder if their car is equipped with a wheelchair ramp and other safety features for disabled riders. And whenever a taxi owner completes a so-called hack-up — or a refitting of their vehicle that’s required every seven years — the accessibility equipment must be added to their taxi.

A 2013 settlement of a federal lawsuit between the TLC and disability advocates mandated 50% of the city’s roughly 13,500 yellow taxis be wheelchair accessible by 2020. That deadline was pushed back to June 2023 during the COVID-19 pandemic — but the city still failed to meet the goal, “reaching only 32% for the Authorized Medallion Requirement and 42% for the Active Medallion Requirement,” according to court records.

When the government controls an industry it typically creates a monopoly is subject to political influence. Politicians like it that way.

Babylon Bee.

Satire – read quickly before it comes true.

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Modern high-speed internet uses light to quickly and reliably transmit large amounts of data through fiber-optic cables, but currently, light signals hit a bottleneck when data processing is necessary. For that, they must convert into electrical signals for processing before further transmission.

A device called an all-optical switch could instead use light to control other light signals without the need for electrical conversion, saving both time and energy in fiber-optic communication.

A University of Michigan-led research team demonstrated an ultrafast all-optical switch by pulsing circularly polarized light, which twists like a helix, through an optical cavity lined with an ultrathin semiconductor. The study was recently published in Nature Communications.

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And who could blame them?

Generation Z (Gen Z) has a reputation for being challenging to work with and difficult to manage.

In August, Intelligent.com surveyed 966 business leaders involved in hiring decisions at their company to explore attitudes toward hiring recent Gen Z college graduates.

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For any foreign country to share its plans with the U.S. is beyond stupid. All it takes is one self-righteous ‘activist’ somewhere in the bureaucracy to make its ‘security’ a joke. (I remember a couple of Tom Clancy novels where this kind of misbehavior was a plot point.) ‘Progressive’ and ‘law-abiding’ is a Venn diagram with no intersections.

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It’s a disturbing trend that has been spreading over the past few years: Gay and Trans couples buying off surrogate mothers to have babies for them, then taking those babies and using them as fashion accessories for social media clout. The trend includes bizarre newborn baby photo ops in which the couples (usually gay or trans men) pose in a hospital bed with the baby as if they just gave birth to it.

No Central Bank Wants To Stop Price Inflation

Many citizens want more government control of the economy to curb rising prices. It is the worst strategy imaginable. Interventionist governments never reduce consumer prices because they benefit from inflation, dissolving their political spending commitments in a constantly depreciated currency. Inflation is the perfect hidden tax. The government makes the currency less valuable by issuing more units of fiat money, partially dissolves its debt in real terms, collects more taxes, and presents itself as the solution to rising prices with subsidies in an increasingly worthless currency.

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Three people were killed and eight others were injured in central Mississippi early Saturday when at least two people opened fire into a group of several hundred people who were celebrating a school’s homecoming football win at an outdoor trail several hours after the game had ended, authorities said.

The gunfire was proceeded by a fight between some of the men at the celebration, but deputies hadn’t yet learned what sparked the fight, said Holmes County Sheriff Willie March.

…

Shootings by young men have been an “off and on” problem recently in the county, which has a population of almost 16,000 residents. The young men who talk to the sheriff tell him that it’s often because they have a “beef,” or disagreement with someone.

“It’s hard to see what they are fighting over. I don’t think they are fighting over turf or drugs,” March said. “These are young men walking around with weapons. I wish I had an answer.”

I’ll be happy to say the quiet part out loud: Holmes County Mississippi is 82% black and 15% white, with negligible amounts of other ethnicities.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if young black males weren’t allowed to possess firearms.

Politico.

Former President Donald Trump is weighing a go-it-alone approach to presidential transition planning, which could dramatically slow his takeover of the federal government if he wins in November.

The Trump transition team has yet to sign two agreements with the federal government to receive transition funding and planning assistance and to share information — a break with modern precedent. Instead, transition co-chairs Linda McMahon, who served as small business administrator in the Trump administration, and investor and GOP mega-donor Howard Lutnick are plowing ahead with their own processes for vetting potential political appointees and preparing policy plans.

The decision not to take federal assistance allows them to raise unlimited funds without disclosing their donors, while avoiding oversight from federal bureaucrats, whom Trump and his advisers deeply distrust. But if Trump wins the election and continues to drag his feet on signing the agreement with the White House, it will limit the information he and his team can access to understand current federal operations and challenges.

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Oct 7 marked the grim anniversary of the worst massacre of Jews since Holocaust. The terrorist perpetrators of it however could celebrate the over $1 billion in foreign aid from the U.S.

46 Americans had been murdered on Oct 7 and another 12 taken hostage, but ahead of the Oct 7 anniversary, USAID announced that it was sending another $336 million in taxpayer-funded ‘aid’ to the terrorist occupied territories in Israel behind the killings of Americans.

USAID boasted that this “brings the total U.S. humanitarian assistance announced for the Palestinian people to more than $1 billion since October 2023.”

The terrorists had murdered over 1,000 people and gotten over $1 billion.

Naval Matters.

One of the foundational beliefs among US military planners is that our communications will be secure … despite no evidence supporting that belief and a fair amount of evidence to the contrary (see, “Communications Vulnerability”).

So many of our weapon systems depend on guidance signals, telemetry, data flow, and so forth and the security of those communications has been taken as an article of faith despite evidence to the contrary. For example, Iran has had success disrupting and/or capturing our UAV control signals resulting in loss or capture of UAVs.

The US military consistently refuses to test communications under realistic conditions during field exercises and, in a display of unbelievable illogic, has publicly stated that using our full capabilities would be too disruptive during an exercise. Do we not believe that China will have capabilities at least equal to our own? Should we not, then, subject our communications to the maximum disruption possible in exercises to see what works and what doesn’t and to learn how to work in the face of disruptions?

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So the end of life for Windows 10 looms ahead of us, which is a problem because Windows 11 has two fundamental problems, as it currently stands:

First, it just won’t run on the majority of hardware that currently runs Windows 10. This isn’t just, like, ancient hardware; I have a desktop gaming PC that is perfectly fine to play current-gen AAA games on; it’s what I played Cyberpunk 2077 on and that was totally okay. But somehow it doesn’t meet Win11 requirements because of the CPU; it has a Ryzen 5 1600X in it, a CPU from 2017 that is apparently still actively being manufactured.

Moore’s law has been dead for a while, so the long plateauing of, particularly, CPU power has meant that some of this hardware has a looong shelf life. I still haven’t run into a game I want to play on PC that is cpu-bound on my machine and which would make me want to upgrade.

Second, win11 is unsecurable, because they implemented a feature (recall) that is just constantly screen recording everything you do on the computer, creating a sort of one-stop-shop for compromising literally anything. It functionally means that you can’t be sure your computer hasn’t, say, saved a password in plaintext (effectively) just because you had the ‘show password’ switch flipped once.

Those two things make win11 untenable for probably the majority of its users. Hardware compatibility will stop a ton of people on older or lower end personal machines. Individuals, small businesses, the public school in your town that hasn’t had money for new computers in five or ten years. Recall being a major security flaw will, I fucking hope, give pause to a ton of institutional users. Is a computer with Win11 even legal to use in some restrictive settings like government offices, militaries, or hospitals?

I see no reason for Windows 11; Windows 10 was perfectly adequate. (I felt the same way about Windows 7.) Of course, unlike Apple, Microsoft needs to sell Windows (and Windows upgrades) in order to make money.

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In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever.

This is when you take your complaint to the head of the company, which is usually publicly available information. Don’t hesitate to make yourself a royal pain in the ass.

Once you start looking for accountability sinks, you see them all over the place. When your health insurance declines a procedure; when the airline cancels your flight; when a government agency declares that you are ineligible for a benefit; when an investor tells all their companies to shovel so-called AI into their apps. Everywhere, broken links between the people who face the consequences of the decision and the people making the decisions.

Can you spell F-E-D-E-R-A-L G-O-V-E-R-N-E-N-T? I’m sure you can.

New York Times.

The drug, legal in much of the country, is widely seen as nonaddictive and safe. For some users, these assumptions are dangerously wrong.

New York Post.

Much the best thing I’ve ever heard about Lizzo.

What really burns is that she’s right, and all of her critics know it to be true.

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A man from Honduras who has been deported from the United States twice received a 37-year prison sentence for a string of burglaries in Collin County.

Sergio Cardenas-Salinas pleaded guilty recently to leading a criminal burglary operation targeting gold, jewelry, and cash.

He and eight others were arrested last year after being linked to nearly a dozen high-profile burglaries in cities like Plano, Prosper, and McKinney.

Prosecutors said they targeted mostly immigrant families because they believed they kept more of their cash and other valuables in their homes.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Federal government did its job.

Your tax dollars at work–or not, as the case may be.

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Yeah, it’s not as if there aren’t enough people around wanting to kill Netanyahu.

Actually, I’m surprised that this hasn’t been tried before now. I’m sure the Israeli security services were primed for such an attempt, certainly more prepared than the U.S. Secret Service.

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We live in astonishing times. Although ever since we collectively dropped down the COVID rabbit hole in 2020, evil, insanity, and stupidity have seemed to dominate the leadership of most countries, in varying proportions according to the given nation. One hardly knows where to begin. Sir Keir Starmer and his two-tier policing cum attempts at Orwellian thought control? Macron and his all-party Union Desacree against the nefarious Mlle. Le Pen? Kamala Harris’s decidedly undemocratic replacement of Biden as Democratic presidential candidate, while Trump struggles to reinvent himself as a pro-abortion candidate? The Brazilian judiciary’s suppression of Elon Musk’s social medium? On and on it goes, and the hits just keep on coming.

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The Federal Trade Commission is investigating tractor manufacturer John Deere over long standing allegations that Deere makes its farm equipment hard to repair. The investigation has been ongoing since 2021, and we know more about it now thanks to a court filing made public on Thursday.

A data analytics company called Hargrove & Associates Inc (HAI) who works for the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM), of which John Deere is a prominent member, filed a court brief in an attempt to quash the FTC’s investigation. The FTC wants HAI to turn over data submitted from AEM about sales, but HAI is saying that the FTC’s request is too broad and could hurt its business.

Court drama aside, HAI spelled out exactly what the FTC is looking for. “The stated purpose of the FTC’s [investigation] is ‘[t]o determine whether Deere & Company, or any other person, has engaged in or is engaging in unfair, deceptive, anticompetitive, collusive, coercive, predatory, exploitative, or exclusionary acts or practices in or affecting commerce related to the repair of agricultural equipment in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act,’” HAI said in the court records.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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The US Air Force had a serious problem on its hands in the late 1940s. Its planes were dropping from the skies at an alarming rate. Fingers were pointed at pilot error. The real culprit turned out to be a decades-old flawed cockpit design based on outdated measurements of pilots. To address this, the Air Force commissioned a massive study to measure over 4,000 pilots across 140 dimensions. The thinking was that this data would be used to design a standardized cockpit that fit everyone well.  Later, with all the numbers crunched they went back to see how pilots would fall within the averages derived from the study. The Air Force found that not a single pilot out of 4,063 fit the average on all measures. It turns out there was no average pilot. There is an even more profound nugget of truth in here. Designing for the average means designing for no one.

I call this the Aggregation Fallacy. Something that is true of an aggregate (such as average) tells you nothing about an individual element.

It’s one of those buzzy phrases in education—“personalized learning”. In an era where everything from your apron to your apartment is bespoke, it is no surprise we want a perfectly tailored education that fits our unique needs. For decades, alternative educators have argued that standardized, one-size-fits-all education actually fits no one. Neuroscientists have joined that chorus now. The opening anecdote is from The End of Average, a wonderful book that discusses how averages just don’t make sense when dealing with complex systems. And education and learning—and your child—are as complex as systems can be.

The basic problem with the Prussian factory-school model is that it batches up children by year and pushes them through the ‘education factory’ on the assumption that each child has equal ability and equal motivation. This is absurd on its face, but we’ve never had an alternative; if you only have one method available, that’s the method you use, no matter how badly it sucks. Technology, however, is providing us with more options. It is up to us whether we will use them wisely or stick to the old sucky method. (Which method the Teachers Unions will choose is left as an exercise for the reader.)

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Dr Orion Taraban has many wise things to say. This is his best.

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An immigrant restaurant owner who fled Iraq 20 years ago has left Sweden and returned to his home country because of the violent crime he faced in his Stockholm suburb.

I moved to Sweden because it was a safe country. Now I’m moving from Sweden because it’s not safe anymore.

The man, speaking under the alias ‘Amin,’ said in an interview with Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter that he was the object of threats and violent attacks by criminal gangs and was forced to pay them to avoid harassment.

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Far too many people these days think that they are in a movie, of which they are the star.

Virginia Postrel.

Like printed books, perspective drawing, and double-entry bookkeeping, pockets were heralds of the modern era. In most times and places, people have either carried their money, combs, papers, and other small items in bags separate from their garments or tucked them into belts or sleeves. Integrated pockets are a product of European tailoring, which dates back only to the 14th century. They emerged when men’s breeches ballooned in the mid-1500s.

Everything you didn’t know about pockets.

Atlas Obscura.

Let me ask you a question. What pops into your mind, when you envision a can of food? For some of us, it’s a simple can of cream of mushroom soup. For others, the meal of the moment is an expensive tin of fish imported from Portugal.

Perhaps you get a sense of nostalgia seeing tinned pumpkin pureé, jellied cranberry sauce, and green beans neatly lined up on store shelves this time of year. Or your basement could be filled with cans of soup in case disaster strikes.

Grab a can opener, readers. Today, we’ll be cracking open the history of all things tinned.

Of course, canned stuff has to fight it out with freeze dried these days.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

This ‘influencer’ has a PhD from Oxford and an MD from Harvard Medical School, if you’re keeping track.

It’s always best to swap actual knowledge of causation for previous dependency on correlation studies.

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A very good question. My grandmother cooked with lard. My mother cooked with Crisco. I preferred the lard.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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It’s open season on police in cities all across the USA, and now it seems that the same disease has struck Germany. In the German case, the violent perps targeting police officers are mostly culture-enrichers. What a surprise, eh?

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

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“It is a very clear conflict of interest, and no one is going to be providing objective advice, or they’re going to be skewing that advice so it makes them more competitive to receive millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer benefits,” Gunasekara told the DCNF.

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These are some of the allegations leveled in a new report on New York City’s multibillion-dollar shelter system released by city investigators on Thursday.

The review, which began in 2021, found a range of potential improprieties at 51 nonprofits that receive taxpayer funds to provide shelter and services for clients of the city Department of Homeless Services, which manages the biggest municipal shelter system in the United States. On an average night, over 87,000 people stay at the more than 500 New York City shelters funded by the department.

The city’s Department of Investigation found multiple instances of apparent conflicts of interest, potential nepotism and failure to comply with competitive bidding requirements on the part of shelter providers, according to the nearly 100-page report.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

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A new treatment combining ReCET and semaglutide could eliminate the need for insulin in type 2 diabetes, with 86% of participants in a study no longer requiring insulin therapy. The treatment was safe and well-tolerated, and further trials are planned to confirm these results.

Groundbreaking research presented at UEG Week 2024 introduces a promising new treatment approach for type 2 diabetes (T2D) that has the potential to greatly reduce or even eliminate the need for insulin therapy.

This innovative approach, which combines a novel procedure known as ReCET (Re-Cellularization via Electroporation Therapy) with semaglutide, resulted in the elimination of insulin therapy for 86% of patients.

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Petroleum giant Phillips 66 has announced it will shutter its Los Angeles oil refinery next year due to “long-term” uncertainty mere days after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law imposing strict new regulations on the state’s refineries.

All of the unemployed and homeless people in California will no doubt rejoice in their pristine air, water, and feces.

Time to leave.

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Illinois-based John Deere said a deepening farm slump has led to a drop in demand for its agricultural equipment, triggering a new round of layoffs across multiple US-based tractor factories. This also comes as Deere pulled back on disastours diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives following conservative backlash and boycotts.

John Deere has an increasingly negative reputation among farmers for neither making prompt repairs to ailing machinery nor giving their customers the necessary information to fix stuff themselves.

Local media outlet De Moine Register reported a new round of layoffs will total about 287 workers from two Deere factories.

Deere executives were kind enough not to fire the workers before Christmas because doing so would have been a PR nightmare. The layoffs are concentrated at its Harvester Works factory in East Moline, Illinois, and just a handful of layoffs at its Cylinder operations in Moline, Illinois.

…

Demand for tractors and combines has tumbled since crop prices dropped, borrowing costs remained elevated, and inflation continues eroding farmer margins.

So vote for Trump.

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Black men in battleground Georgia, many of whom voted for President Joe Biden in 2020, are now turning to Republican nominee Donald Trump, expressing “buyer’s remorse” over the Biden-Harris administration, Politico reported.

“I’m not necessarily the biggest fan of Trump, but I’ll definitely take Trump over Harris,” said Arthur Beauford, a black 28-year-old whose family is “Democrat, all the way.”

Beauford said that Harris wasn’t qualified to be president as she “just seems to have been given everything” in her career.

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Pretty cool. Let’s see if it has any impact.

UPDATE: Chinese scientists bring record-breaking Stirling generator to life while NASA’s patent stays on paper

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That’s ‘our democracy’ for you.