13th October 2024
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Feds Find Million In Cash While Investigating Staffing Firm Supplying Haitians To Charleroi, PA Food Factory
A mysterious staffing firm operating a complex van transportation network supplying low-cost Haitian labor to a Charleroi, PA-based company that operates multiple food packing plants in the area has been at the center of a federal investigation.
On Friday, local media outlet Action News revealed that federal investigators had been investigating staffing firm Prosperity Services, which supplies cheap migrant labor to Fourth Street Foods in Charleroi.
Hey, we all keep a million or so around, just in case of emergencies.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Feds Find Million in Cash While Investigating Staffing Firm Supplying Haitians to Charleroi, PA Food Factory
13th October 2024
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A team of National Geographic mountaineers has uncovered what is believed to be the partial remains of Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, a British climber who disappeared during a 1924 expedition to summit Mount Everest.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on National Geographic Finds Century-Old Everest Climber’s Foot
13th October 2024
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Culture-enrichers in Hamburg who adhere to the Religion of Peace have proclaimed that Kalifat ist die Lösung, “Caliphate is the solution”. But is it the Endlösung — the Final Solution?
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Call For a Caliphate in Hamburg
13th October 2024
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A “Dutch” criminal, the alleged ringleader of a meth-trafficking network, has been arrested in Paris. Like so many culture-enriching suspects in Europe, the alleged mastermind has a one-letter surname. The mischievous youth allegedly has Moroccan nationality.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Mocro Mafia Boss Busted in Paris
13th October 2024
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An Iranian culture-enricher stormed a cinema in the city of Krefeld in North Rhine-Westphalia carrying a gun and a Molotov cocktail. After he attempted to burn down the cinema, police officers shot and wounded him. Authorities concluded that terrorism was not a factor in the incident, and are perplexed about what the youngster’s motive might have been.
Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Setting the World Alight for Allah
13th October 2024
Babylon Bee.
Satire — read quickly before it comes true.
I doubt that anybody would mistake Tim Walz for a hunter.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Man Pretending to Be Straight Pretends to Hunt
13th October 2024
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Most of what happens among countries concerns something far simpler and more direct: business. International business executives and their attendant lawyers, accountants, and fixers handle the complexities of cross-border trade and investment, but such complex deals still chase a simple goal: making money.
There’s no mystique in that ambition, which may explain why it’s written about far less often than the deals of politicians and diplomats. Yet it is the Donald Kendalls, not the Henry Kissingers, who steer much of international relations. The constant pressure business executives exert as they dig for profit can wear away at even the supposedly rock-solid foundations of national policy. If the quest for profit proves compatible with official objectives, so much the better; if not, then executives will try to manufacture opportunities to pursue their narrow interests.
These pressures manifest in unexpected ways.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Doomed Voyage of Pepsi’s Soviet Navy
13th October 2024
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Wearables operate with photoplethysmography, or PPG, a technology that shines a light into the skin and produces a reflection of the blood moving just below the finger or wrist to record heart rate. In a hospital, an electrocardiography — ECG or EKG — machine measures the heart’s electrical activity through electrodes placed on the body.
“You’re looking at two things, one is blood flow and the other is the electrical signal of the heart,” Tenan said.
Clinicians and medical scientists are interested in heart rate variability because it’s a biomarker for a patient’s general system health. Tenan said even if people don’t pay particular attention to the measure on their wearable, it still plays a part in their overall wellness picture indicated on the device.
“A lot of these devices will give something called a readiness score or a sleep score and one of the primary components of these is the heart rate variability measure,” he explained. “People look at these scores to see how they’re doing overall, whether their fitness has improved, that sort of thing. But, if a composite is full of a measure that’s biased, how accurate is it going to be?”
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on WVU Research Shows Smartwatch And Clinical Testing Measures Differ
13th October 2024
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Six unusual earthquakes shook Mount Adams in September, but it’s too soon to speculate about a potential eruption.
I suspect that this is God telling you to stay away from the Left Coast.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Washington’s ‘Forgotten Giant’ Volcano Stirs: Surge in Quakes Prompts Increased Monitoring
13th October 2024
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Christopher Columbus’ Remains Found After 500 Years as DNA Analysis Ends Mystery
13th October 2024
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The inability to do this so far has been a major factor in the Navy’s unreadiness to participate in a major military conflict, for which they have been heavily criticized by knowledgeable people.
One of the largest concerns regarding the U.S. Navy’s ability to persist in a peer conflict in the vast Pacific is the ability to keep its prized major surface combatants — destroyers, cruisers and soon frigates — stocked with weapons. The conflict with the Houthis in and around the Red Sea has only underscored the need to figure out how to reload vertical launch systems (VLS) without coming into port. If an Iranian-backed rebel group can make a big dent in American warships’ weapons stocks, China would be exponentially worse. You can read all about this glaring issue in our previous feature here. But now, the Navy has just demonstrated its fast-tracked possible solution to this pressing issue.
USS Chosin (CG-65), a Ticonderoga class cruiser, came alongside Military Sealift Command’s dry cargo ship USNS Washington Chambers (T-AKE 11) and transferred an empty VLS weapon container to the cruiser while sailing off the southern California coast on October 11th.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Navy Just Reloaded a Vertical Launch System for the First Time While Underway At Sea
12th October 2024
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And Obama before that.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on How the Biden/Harris Admin Helped Iran Get to the Brink of a Nuclear Bomb
12th October 2024
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As it turns out, when you have a far-left mayor in a city that has been under Democratic control since 1931, within a state dominated by radical progressives for decades, criminals become emboldened and live out their lives as if every day was a scene from the ‘Grand Theft Auto’ video game.
Unmentioned, but easily visible in the videos, the fact that the looters were People of Color.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Blue State Blues: Watch: Mob Loots Freight Train of Flat Screen TVs in Lawless Chicago
12th October 2024
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Most developments over the last year have come from one company, Fervo, the enhanced geothermal startup. There have been improvements and derisking in reservoir creation and drilling. The latest project in Utah, Cape Station, could grow to produce hundreds of megawatts of electricity. The company is reducing costs and solving most issues, though questions about fluid loss remain.
Last year, I wrote about closed loop systems and Eavor several times due to the start of their Germany project and signing several sales contracts. The company has been quiet about progress, so no updates there.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on 2024 Geothermal Update
12th October 2024
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In contrast to biological cell membranes, it is still a major challenge for synthetic membranes to efficiently separate ions and small molecules due to their similar sizes in the sub-nanometer range. Inspired by biological ion channels with their unique channel wall chemistry that facilitates ion sieving by ion-channel interactions, the first free-standing, ultrathin (10–17 nm) nanomembranes composed entirely of polydopamine (PDA) are reported here as ion and molecular sieves.
You may not realize it but this is huge. Eventually we want such membranes to be able to filter useful stuff from unuseful stuff, and the better we automate it the better off life will be for all of us.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Ion and Molecular Sieving With Ultrathin Polydopamine Nanomembranes
12th October 2024
BBC.
Vegetarians are congenital hand-wringers. That’s my guess.
The term “ultra-processed” is poorly understood and inconsistently used, even sometimes by scientists. While in some circles it has become a catch-all term for foods with little nutritional benefit, a wide variety of foods fall under this umbrella.
Ultra-processed foods are popular with consumers for their convenience (frozen pizza), taste (wrapped cookies), and durability (sandwich bread). These elements, plus the relatively low cost of ingredients, make them profitable for manufacturers.
But recently another motivation for ultra-processed foods has emerged: to replace meat or dairy among those attempting to eat a more plant-based diet. With this new category has come anxiety about the health effects of these products, leading to headlines such as “The unhealthiest fake meats you can buy (and why it’s better to go to McDonald’s)”. These concerns were exacerbated by recent research, which found that those who consume 10% more ultra-processed foods derived from plants have a 12% higher risk of death related to diet. However, things are not quite as they seem. Are plant-based diets really so rich in ultra-processed foods, and are they any worse for you?
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on What Explains Increasing Anxiety About Ultra-Processed Plant-Based Foods?
12th October 2024
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Bonus Thought for the Day
12th October 2024
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Scientists have uncovered new insights into the diet of the infamous Tsavo man-eating lions after analyzing clumps of hair found in the predators’ teeth.
In 1898, a pair of male lions (Panthera leo) killed and devoured dozens of workers constructing a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya — killing at least 35 people. They stalked and terrorized the workers for nine months before being shot later that year. Since then, their bodies have been kept at the Field museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on New DNA Findings Shed Light on Tsavo’s Infamous Man-Eating Lions
12th October 2024
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In the last part we looked at how the Dutch took the dirty, solar-evaporated salt of France, Portugal and Spain, known as “bay salt” or black salt, and refined it to a white salt fit for butter, cheese, and preserving herring, which they made by burning their plentiful supplies of peat — the economic underpinning for the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age. Soon, however, Dutch peat was to face a new competitor: British coal.
Now, you might think you’re about to hear a very straightforward story. A given cart- or boat-load of even a nice, dry peat yields only about a sixth the heat of the same volume of coal,1 and only about half the heat by weight.2 With that kind of difference in energy density, coal seems like the obvious eventual winner as a source of heat for any industry, not just for refining salt.
But the story turns out to be lot more interesting than that, though we’ll first need to take a very long detour to fully appreciate why. Before we follow the history of salt-making even a single step further, we first need to delve — deeply — into the history of both wood and coal.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Age of Invention: The Coal Conquest
12th October 2024
Antigone.
“Does anyone still believe in the Roman gods?” asked my classmate in our school Latin lesson. It was an odd thing to ask. He was probably just bored of pluperfect verbs and thought that it was worth trying for a digression. Our teacher clearly didn’t know the answer, and ducked the question by asking one of his own: “Did the Romans believe in their gods?” (Answer: Probably, in most cases, although belief wasn’t as big a deal for them as it is for Christians.)
I didn’t know it at the time, but the right answer to the question that my classmate asked in that suburban British classroom 30 years ago was “Yes”. There are large numbers of people today in formerly Christian countries who practise paganism, defined broadly as beliefs and practices that seek to revive the deities, rituals, symbols and religious philosophies of ancient pre-Christian Europe. In England, for example, around 90,000 pagans showed up in the 2021 census, which is generally regarded as an undercount. The total number of modern pagans across the Western world must be in the hundreds of thousands, if not over a million. Most people would regard this as somewhat surprising. How we got to this point is a puzzle which scholars in the small but fascinating field of Pagan Studies have spent the past 20-30 years trying to solve.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on The Old Gods Return: The Strange Story of Pagan Revivals
12th October 2024
Ars Technica.
A few years ago, Egyptian archaeologists discovered what they thought were the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple dating back to the sixth century BCE. Subsequent finds at the site indicate that the structure was actually an astronomical observatory, deemed the first and largest such structure yet found, according to Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
The L-shaped structure was found within a larger complex called the Temple of Buto (a later Greek name), known to the ancient Egyptians as Per-Wadjet and located east of Alexandria in the Nile Delta. It’s now called Tell El Fara’in (“Hill of the Pharaohs”). Buto was once a sacred site dedicated to the goddess Wadjet, believed to be the matron and protector of lower Egypt, who took on a cobra form. Buto was well-known for its temple and the oracle of Wadjet, with an annual festival held there in her honor.
There were archaeological excavations of the site in the 1960s and 1980s, revealing a palace dating back to the Second Dynasty, as well as six Greek bathhouses. An Egyptian team began fresh excavations a few years ago. In 2022, they uncovered a hall at the southwestern end of the temple, with the remains of three papyrus-shaped columns aligned on a north-south axis. They also found engraved stone fragments and a limestone painting of a bird’s head wearing a white crown within two feathers.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Archaeologists Found an Ancient Egyptian Observatory
12th October 2024
New York Post.
Can’t let good sushi go to waste. Who cares about a bunch of rubes in flyover country, anyway?
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on DHS Chief Mayorkas Spends Under Six Hours in Helene-Hit NC Before Bolting to Grab Sushi at DC Nobu: ‘Complete failure’
12th October 2024
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Saudi Arabia has executed 213 people so far in 2024, more than it has in any other calendar year on record, as the kingdom competes for a seat at the UN Human Rights Council (HRC).
According to the London-based rights group Reprieve, which documents the death penalty worldwide, the largest recorded figure prior to this year was 196 in 2022, followed by 184 in 2019. “As the world’s attention fixates on horror elsewhere in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is clearing death row with a bloodbath,” Reprieve’s deputy director, Harriet McCulloch, told MEE.
“The Kingdom smashed its own grim record for most people executed in a year in the first nine months of 2024,” she added. “With 213 executions and counting, death row prisoners are at greater risk than ever before, their families desperately awaiting news of their fate in the news.”
Apparently nothing that anyone does justifies capital punishment. I rather think that the October 7 massacres justify capital punishment. But that’s me.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Saudi Arabia Smashes Own Record for Most Executions in a Year
12th October 2024
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According to a new study, weather station data has been shown to non-climatically and erroneously record warmer-than-actual temperatures due to the steady and perpetual aging process almost universally observed in temperature gauges.
When a weather station temperature gauge’s white paint or white plastic ages and darkens, this allows more solar radiation to be absorbed by the gauge than when the gauge is bright white and new. Within a span of just 2 to 5 years, a gauge has been observed to record maximum temperatures 0.46°C to 0.49°C warmer than in gauges that have not undergone an aging process. This artificial warming is not corrected in modern data sets, and it builds up over time – even when the gauges are cleaned or resurfaced every few years.
If these systematic artificial warming errors were to be corrected rather than ignored, the 140-year (1880-’90 to 2010-’20) GISTEMP global warming trend plummets from the current estimate of +1.43°C down to +0.83°C, a 42% differential. The temperature reduction can be even more pronounced – from +1.43°C down to +0.41°C – if a set of conservative assumptions (described in detail in the paper) are removed.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on New Study: Systematic Error in 1880-2020 Global Temperature Measurements Inflates Warming by 42%
12th October 2024
Cedar Sanderson: “On vacation, there is no diet.”
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Quotation for the Day
12th October 2024
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Democrat politicians appear very resistant to actual democracy.
Posted in Democrats: Party of Fear--Party of Hate--Party of Death | Comments Off on Blue State Blues: 12 More New Jersey Towns Join Lawsuit to Overturn State’s Affordable Housing Law
12th October 2024
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
11th October 2024
No, I don’t know where she finds these. I wish I did.
Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | 1 Comment »
11th October 2024
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California State Motto: “When in doubt, regulate.”
Posted in Democrats: Party of Fear--Party of Hate--Party of Death | Comments Off on Here Is What’s Illegal Under California’s 18 (And Counting) New AI Laws
11th October 2024
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Hey, it’s hard out there for a pimp….
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on Pizza Hut Will Deliver Your Resume Printed on a Pizza Box to Potential Employers
11th October 2024
Watch it.
Maybe it’s true, maybe it ain’t. But it’s entertaining.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on How Family Structure Drives Ideology
11th October 2024
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Why are almost all universities the same? The same general curriculum. The same departmental structure. The same political bent. Universities in Wyoming and Idaho are just as left-wing as universities in Colorado and New York. Private universities look just like public universities. Most Christian universities have dropped their distinctive missions and now look like all the other private universities. University administrators adopt the same Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies everywhere. I could go on.
Universities are almost all the same. But why?
Because the universities are machines. To get hired, Ph.D. disciplines produce Ph.D. holders stamped in the same professional mold. Those Ph.D.s then go out into the country and get hired by universities everywhere.
They build departments and design curriculum based on the same standards. University administrators come out of this assembly line—they move from department chair, to associate dean, to dean, to provost, and then to president. The same kind of general education plan gets put in place at nearly every university. And the same distribution requirements do too: take two English, three science, and three social science classes. Now take an ethics of diversity class.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Destroying the Higher Education Machine
11th October 2024
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Obesity medication has something of a troubled past. Fen-phen, a weight-loss drug combination popular in the 1990s, was pulled after it was found to cause heart valve problems. Sibutramine, sold under the brand name Meridia, was prescribed until it was discovered to lead to adverse cardiovascular events including strokes in 2010.
But the market for an effective weight-loss drug is too big and the potential profits too high for pharmaceutical companies to give up. More than one in eight people around the world live with obesity. In the United States, it’s more than two in five. Though many clinical trials of weight-loss drugs over the past decade ended in failure, it was only a matter of time until a successful drug emerged.
GLP-1 medications 1 like Ozempic appear to be that drug. Estimates suggest GLP-1s can reduce body weight by at least 15% when taken regularly?—?and perhaps even more as newer drugs come to market. And though evidence is still being gathered, they may have benefits beyond weight loss: potentially curbing drinking, treating sleep apnea, and reducing risk of stroke. They’ve been called, in many places, a miracle drug, and as such, the category is poised for massive growth. Gallup estimated that 15.5 million Americans have tried them, and half as many are currently using them.
Obesity is the premier First World medical problem of our age. Doctors profit thereby, and the incentives are all for them to restrict access (FDA approval process, requiring a prescription) to any safe and effective weight-loss drug.
Will Big Pharma win over Big Medicine? Stand by.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on How Long Til We’re All on Ozempic?
11th October 2024
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A Palestinian-owned cafe in Oakland, California, has introduced a menu to celebrate its first anniversary that includes an item celebrating the leader of Hamas.
Near the bottom of its menu, the Jerusalem Coffee House advertises the “Sweet Sinwar” orange, ginger, and carrot juice. The $10 drink shares a name with Yahya Sinwar, the terror group’s leader and architect of its Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel.
The cafe released the menu on Monday, the first anniversary of the attack and a day that featured competing pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian rallies across the United States, as well as expressions of communal mourning in Jewish communities.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Palestinian-Owned Oakland Cafe Features Drink Named for Hamas Leader Yahya Sinwar
11th October 2024
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A 13-year-old boy has been apprehended by Swedish police after a shooting by Israeli company Elbit Systems’ building in Gothenburg. While nobody was injured in the shooting, the suspected shooter is facing charges of attempted murder and aggravated weapons offenses. Police said the boy was not from the area but appeared to have traveled there for the purpose of committing a crime.
Elbit Systems, a defense technology contractor, has been the target of protests and attempted sabotage before. In December, the company was targeted by protesters spray painting slogans on the building and in June, a live explosive device was found outside the company’s office. The company has also been the focus of protests in Gothenburg city center, and its UK headquarters was targeted by violent anti-Israel protesters in August.
While it’s unknown whether the actual perpetrators of the latest attacks on Israeli targets in Sweden and Denmark have ideological motives, Swedish security services Säpo have reason to believe the people at the top do.
Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Shooting at Israeli Company by 13-Year-Old May Have Been Ordered by Iran
11th October 2024
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
11th October 2024
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A leading UK journalist has expressed outrage after a Wikipedia page dedicated to the grooming gangs scandal in which approximately 1,400 girls were abused over decades was changed.
As Gript previously reported, thousands of girls in the UK were drugged, raped, trafficked, and beaten by groups which were “almost exclusively” comprised of Muslim men, mostly of Pakistani origin according to former Greater Manchester Police detective turned whistle-blower, Maggie Oliver.
Speaking to Gript, journalist Charlie Peters – who has reportedly extensively on the grooming gangs scandal and worked closely with numerous victims – said, “The state-endorsed narrative is that the grooming gangs scandal is a right-wing myth propagated by extremists, with a 2020 Home Office report released under Priti Patel’s leadership facilitating much of that agenda.”
“Far-right” is Woke-speak for normal people.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on “Muslim grooming gangs in the UK” Wiki Page Altered to Say Scandal Is “Moral Panic” of “Far-Right”
11th October 2024
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The French school hierarchy’s inability to combat militant Islamism was once again made obvious when a teacher was slapped by a Muslim student after asking her to remove her veil, worn in violation of French law.
The incident took place on Monday, October 7th. A student in her final year of secondary school, aged 18, put on her headscarf as she was preparing to leave the school at 4:30 p.m. The wearing of religious insignia is normally prohibited on the premises of a state secondary school. According to the initial investigation, a teacher approached the girl and asked her to remove her headscarf. The student responded to the request with insults, while continuing towards the exit. The teacher then caught up with her and asked for her identity, while preventing her from leaving the building. The student then slapped the teacher, who hit her back. The girl eventually fled, before being caught at her home and taken into custody. The teacher immediately lodged a complaint.
The student was previously unknown to the police, but her father is already known for offences against secularism. He maintains that it was the teacher who struck the first blow. The girl was due to be tried on Wednesday, October 9th, but was granted an extension until December. She attended Wednesday’s hearing unveiled. She will be tried for “violence resulting in less than eight days’ absence from work” and” threatening to kill a public official.” The young woman admitted that she had slapped the teacher but denied having made any death threats. Former Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, MP for the Tourcoing constituency where the incident took place, said that the incident had been confirmed by the school’s CCTV.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on French Teacher Assaulted by Muslim Student
11th October 2024
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If Apple can make a watch that reliably monitors blood pressure, I may have to get one.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Can Apple Watch Measure Blood Pressure? Not Yet—But Here’s How the Science Would Work.
11th October 2024
BBC.
Relatively few people are lefties, and it’s a puzzle why. Still, the science of handedness is revealing fascinating insights about you – from how it could change the way you think, to the fact that you might be ‘left-eared’.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Mystery of Why Left-Handers Are So Much Rarer
11th October 2024
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And about time, too.
A series of Israeli legislative, diplomatic, and military actions this month have threatened UNRWA’s presence along the country’s borders like never before. A consensus has emerged in Jerusalem that the agency is part of a terrorist menace that can no longer be tolerated following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
“UNRWA encourages terrorism and encourages massacres like Oct. 7,” Dan Illouz, a lawmaker from the ruling Likud party who cosponsored draft legislation meant to kneecap UNRWA, told the Washington Free Beacon, summing up the general sentiment among Zionist lawmakers. “Those things are completely unacceptable, and therefore UNRWA should not exist.”
The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Sunday unanimously approved Illouz’s bill, which would bar Israeli officials from having “any contact” with UNRWA or anyone acting on its behalf. All the committee members also voted to advance a related bill that would revoke UNRWA’s authorization to conduct “any activity, either directly or indirectly,” on Israeli territory.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Israel Moves Toward All-Out War—With UNRWA
11th October 2024
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Sen. Jacky Rosen (D., Nev.) pulls no punches when speaking publicly about the 2017 Trump tax cuts, calling the package a “monstrosity” that is “just a giveaway” to the wealthy while urging Congress to focus its efforts on making the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes.
But behind the scenes, Rosen, who is running for reelection against Republican challenger Army veteran Sam Brown, appears to have structured her own vast financial holdings to take advantage of certain provisions in the Trump tax cuts to reduce her family’s tax liability. Rosen is worth up to $18.2 million, according to her latest financial disclosures, with upwards of $7.3 million housed in her family’s limited partnership, the Rosen Family Limited Partnership. Limited partnerships are a common vehicle utilized by wealthy Americans to give tax-free gifts to their children and shield their offspring from estate taxes.
But the Trump tax cuts appear to have rendered moot the need for the Rosen family limited partnership. The law doubled the estate tax exemption from $11 million in 2017 for a married couple to more than $22 million in 2018. Put simply, the estate tax provision enabled Rosen to transfer her entire net worth to her child tax-free without the use of any sophisticated tax strategies.
I happen to agree with former Senator Phil Gramm, who once said about a particular government program that he didn’t think it was legitimate and intended to speak against it — and vote against it — every chance he got, but so long as the program existed, he was going to take advantage of it for himself and his constituents because it would be stupid not to. This is why I take advantage of any government giveaway I can, regarding it as a partial refund of the onerous taxes that I am perennially forced to pay.
Posted in Democrats: Party of Fear--Party of Hate--Party of Death, Think about it. | Comments Off on Jacky Rosen Called the Trump Tax Cuts a Monstrous ‘Giveaway’ to the Rich. Then She Took Advantage of Them.
11th October 2024
Quillette.
“Anti-Palestinian Racism” (APR) is a term that does not seem to have been widely in use before 2022. It began to be popularised when Dania Majid, co-founder and president of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA), issued a report on the existence of this new form of bigotry. Of course, everyone should oppose racism against Palestinians—as they should stand against all forms of race-based hate. The definition of APR, however, is far broader than the term implies. It can include everything from denying that Palestinians have a “right of return” to Israel to condemning acts of Palestinian violence or terrorism. In fact, the term has been carefully crafted to fit into the social justice lexicon, which goes some way to explaining its ready adoption by various individuals, activist groups, and institutions, including the Toronto District School Board, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, sundry American teachers’ unions, colleges, universities, and even Queen Rania of Jordan.
The problem with all of this, of course, is that ‘Palestinians’ are not a race. Nothing is more common among the Wokerati than to pick out some Fashionable Victim Group, cram it into the box called ‘race’, and then hand-wring about ‘racism’, even when it is patently absurd. (‘Muslim’ is not a race.)
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on A New Kind of Racism
11th October 2024
Tyler Cowen.
The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation minority staff (Committee), which oversees federal science agencies including NSF, analyzed 32,198 Prime Award grants NSF awarded to 2,443 different entities with project start dates between January 2021 and April 2024.
Committee analysis found 3,483 grants, more than ten percent of all NSF grants and totaling over $2.05 billion in federal dollars, went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle. The Committee grouped these grants into five categories: Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, and Environmental Justice. For the purposes for this report, “DEI funding,” a “DEI grant,” or “DEI research” refers to taxpayer dollars NSF provided to a research or engagement program that fell into one of these five groups.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on U.S.A. Facts of the Day
11th October 2024
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Migration is perhaps the most consequential issue of our time. Our world is far more mobile and interconnected than any point in human history and, as a result, we have seen historic demographic shifts and movement of peoples, especially in the Western world. This socio-political trend has become highly charged with emotional and ethical accusations such that those who stand opposed to the current levels of migration are being systematically labelled ‘hateful,’ ‘far-right,’ or ‘bigoted.’ Meanwhile, we are repeatedly told, in what has become trite rationale for unmitigated mass-migration, that ‘love has no borders,’ or indeed—as the Archbishop of Canterbury argued in an Easter Sunday address—that government policies to deter and remove illegal migrants cannot stand the judgement of God.
The political Left, who defend mass-migration and condemn those who argue for stricter migration controls, have to some degree succeeded in framing this political issue in a moral light which favours their position. They have painted their view as one of ‘love’ and ‘compassion.’ After all, it is inconceivable that anyone could turn away a distressed and needy soul from their home.
Watch me.
They have convinced our own countrymen that it is a necessary condition of morality to accept millions upon millions of migrants—estranged from our own culture, religion, and heritage—into our homeland. They have bullied those who reject this quasi-moralism by making accusations of racism and hatred, something which has proven an effective strategy for stifling debate and preventing any real political reform.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on A Moral Argument against Migration
11th October 2024
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Authorities in Florida encountered a boat full of illegal immigrants arriving in the Sunshine State on Wednesday night, just as the state was preparing for Hurricane Milton to make landfall.
Border Patrol announced that agents and law enforcement partners responded to a migrant landing in Boynton Beach on Wednesday night.
The boat was carrying 11 migrants. Six from Haiti, two from Guyana, one from the Dominican Republic and two from the Bahamas.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on As Hurricane Milton Hits Florida, So Do More Illegal Immigrants
10th October 2024
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An Afghan man accused of plotting a terror attack on Election Day previously worked as a security guard in Afghanistan for the CIA, NBC News reported Wednesday.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Afghan Accused of Election Day Terror Plot Worked for CIA
10th October 2024
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Which teaches you all you really need to know about the anti-Trump crowd.
Funny how the ‘anti-hate’ people appear to be the most accomplished haters around.
Posted in Democrats: Party of Fear--Party of Hate--Party of Death | Comments Off on ‘Anti-Hate’ Art Exhibit in LA Featured Participants Kicking Around Donald Trump’s Head
10th October 2024
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A 33-year-old man punched a female MTA worker in the face without provocation in a Manhattan subway station last month, according to an indictment announced on Thursday.
Prosecutors said Robert Ray followed a female MTA employee inside the Lexington Avenue-53rd Street station at 6:05 a.m. on Sept. 16 as she made her way to the bathroom and checked that the escalators were working on her way. He ran up behind her and punched her in the face, causing her to fall to the ground, prosecutors said.
Ray fled the scene and was arrested later that day, prosecutors said. The attack left the worker’s face lacerated, swollen and in substantial pain, they said.
By Coulter’s Law, the fact that they didn’t mention the ethnicity of the perpetrator suggests that he was black, and the fact that they didn’t mention the ethnicity of the victim suggests that she was white. But modern ‘journalists’ are trained not to mention facts that might be inconsistent with the Woke Narrative.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Man Punched MTA Worker in Unprovoked Attack at Manhattan Subway Station, Indictment Says
10th October 2024
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It can also type, so the robo-doctor can heal you and write legibly
Robot hands are commonplace, but their sense of touch is crude compared to that of a human. A design proposed by a group of scientists in the Middle Kingdom may change that.
Attention, PornHub….
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Chinese Boffins Build Soft Robot Finger That Can Take Your Pulse