DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

The Register.

Imagine being paralyzed so badly that not only can’t you move your hands or feet, but you can’t speak either. For years, brain computer interfaces have presented the tantalizing promise of reading brainwaves well enough to allow a person to communicate and access a PC.

Now, a new breakthrough shows how someone can talk and even work a job while afflicted with a motion-robbing disease.

A team of scientists from the University of California, Davis, published a paper Monday detailing a years-long study of a brain computer interface (BCI) system implanted in a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), which destroys motor neurons and causes loss of motor control and eventual paralysis. According to the team, their patient, Casey Harrell, has been living with BCI implants since 2023 that are still working today, giving him the ability not only to control a computer cursor with his thoughts, but also to speak.

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Advances in materials and science are pushing optical cooling out of the lab and closer to actual semiconductors and other electronic systems. “The ability to diffuse energy in a highly targeted way has profound ramifications that extend from performance and costs to sustainability,” Pauzauskie said.

In fact, the appeal of optical cooling extends beyond chips. The technology could also enable more precise scientific instruments: atomic clocks, telescopes, satellites, and more, said Alexander Albrecht, a research assistant professor at the University of New Mexico. “It’s possible to cool exactly where you generate heat—down to microscopic ‘hot spots’—rather than cooling an entire enclosure.”

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Inside every living cell, tens of thousands of different types of proteins are at work: ferrying molecular cargo, relaying signals, repairing DNA, deciding whether a cell should divide or die. Most of these proteins are too small to image with existing microscopes. Those that can be imaged must be pulled out of the cell and studied in isolation — not in the crowded, dynamic environments that drive the processes of life.

That is about to change. In three papers, researchers at Biohub and UC Berkeley report successful results from a technology called a laser phase plate, which uses a laser 100 million times brighter than the Sun to significantly improve the contrast of images produced by cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). The laser phase plate could make otherwise faint, blurry proteins inside intact cells visible, including many proteins most relevant to human disease.

“Rough estimates suggest that scientists can image 10% of the human proteome in purified form using existing cryo-EM — and fewer than 1% of proteins in their native cellular environment,” says Scott Fraser, president of dynamic imaging at Biohub. Scientists believe the laser phase plate could make more than 50% of the proteins that carry out cellular functions visible.

“This is just the first step,” says Bridget Carragher, founding technical director of imaging at Biohub. “It’s like seeing first light through a telescope. The science it enables — that comes next.”

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

Bear in mind that this is CNN, so you’ll want to read the agreement and skip the tendentious commentary.

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A North Carolina school district agreed Monday to pay $95,000 to settle a student’s lawsuit after her school painted over her tribute to Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk shortly after his assassination.

A high school junior at Ardrey Kell High School secured permission to paint “Freedom 1776” and “Live Like Kirk—John 11:25” on the school’s “spirit rock,” a large boulder that often features messages on political topics. Yet, within hours, she learned from social media that officials had ordered the “Live Like Kirk” portion painted over.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education agreed to adopt a new student speech policy, issue a public statement exonerating the student, and pay $95,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees, Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the student, announced Monday.

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Figures released from German police statistics show that Syrian nationals were the largest foreign-national group among suspects identified in violent incidents and certain sexual offences recorded at public bathing sites last year.

The data, obtained by Junge Freiheit from a federal government response to a parliamentary question, showed that authorities recorded 360 violent incidents at public swimming and bathing areas in 2025 involving 426 suspects. Of those, 178 did not hold German citizenship.

Among foreign-national suspects, Syrians accounted for the largest group, with 52 suspects identified in connection with violent offences. Afghan nationals were the second-largest group with 15 suspects, followed by Turkish nationals with 11.

The figures have attracted renewed attention amid ongoing debate in Germany over migration, public security, and the integration of recent arrivals.

The issue has remained in the spotlight following a series of high-profile violent crimes and knife attacks in Germany and neighbouring Austri

The Antiplanner.

In 2014, a 13-mile extension to Minneapolis’ Blue light-rail line was projected to cost $1.0 billion and open for business in 2020. The latest word is that it is going to cost more than $3.5 billion and won’t begin operating until 2032.

Minneapolis is, of course, run by Democrats.

The line is a northern extension of the region’s first light-rail line, which connected downtown Minneapolis with Bloomington. That line was sold to the public based on claims that it would relieve congestion, but it actually made congestion worse. As reported in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the light-rail line was given priority at traffic lights. Because those lights were coordinated with traffic lights on the para

lel Hiawatha Avenue, the trains interfered with signal coordination on the avenue, a major north-south route in the city.
Engineers tried to fix it but gave up. Moreover, state Representative Phil Krinkie uncovered documents showing that the state knew all along that the light-rail line would make congestion worse, and ignored the problem because “transit had to have an advantage” over driving.

This is why you don’t have rail lines sharing ground level street space. Dallas has the same problem.

Not the Bee.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but laugh at the “Radical Queer Feminist” sign in front of the waving Palestinian flag.

Or maybe that ought to be “Palestinian fag”.

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A British appeals court ruled Monday that the government acted lawfully in banning a prominent pro-Palestinian group as a terrorist organization.

Jewish groups welcomed the decision to maintain the ban on Palestine Action, which has staged multiple destructive attacks on military installations and weapons manufacturers in Britain.

The government banned Palestine Action in July 2025 after some of its members broke into an air force base and damaged two military aircraft as part of a protest against the U.K.’s relationship to Israel during the war in Gaza. The ruling meant that anyone displaying support for the group has been subject to arrest and imprisonment.

The British High Court declared the ban unlawful in February, concluding that the ban interfered with Palestine Action members’ rights to speech and assembly. Now, a five-judge U.K. Court of Appeal panel has ruled that the group’s activities met the legal standards for terrorism and the government’s decision to ban the group was justified and proportionate.

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The difference is coverage. A hijab covers the hair, ears, and neck while leaving the face visible. A niqab covers the face except for the eyes and is usually worn with a headscarf and a loose robe. A burqa covers the whole body and the entire face, with a mesh screen or grille over the eyes so the wearer can see out.

The terms are often confused, but they are not interchangeable. All three are forms of Islamic modest dress worn by some Muslim women, shaped by region, religious interpretation, family tradition, and personal choice. The hijab is by far the most common worldwide. The niqab is worn by a smaller number of women, often in Gulf Arab countries and parts of South Asia. The full burqa is most associated with Afghanistan. The distinction matters because news coverage and political debate often use the words loosely.

Babylon Bee.

I like the gorilla goalie. That would add some spice.

Watch it.

The YouTube channel From Down Under to Down South. I find stuff like this fascinating.

Watch it.

I suspect that the transition from a strong blade with a single edge to a weaker blade with a double edge would be quite confusing.

I would also like to see how he does with a basket-hilted curved cavalry sabre, which ought to be closer to what he’s used to.

Abby Zinman, a Typical Modern Woke Female writer for Buzzfeed (Voice of the Wokerati) illustrates why we have a population deficit and why men aren’t asking women out any more. (“Where are all the good men?” “Back in your twenties where you left them.”)

I’d say read it for entertainment, but it is far from entertaining. It is, however, informative, in a gotta-shake-your-head kind of way.

The self-absorption and entitlement are strong in this one.

And, of course, the men involved are SOLELY to blame. (Girl, if all the men you date have problems, maybe they aren’t the problem.)

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Peptides are amino acids that are used to issue instructions to the body’s various systems. Ozempic, Mounjaro and Retatrutide are all peptides. These GLP-1s have a ridiculous number of things they do in terms of measurable results of reduction: cancer rates, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, obesity, even aging. Some countries are considering making GLP-1s available to all (not just the obese or diabetic) because of these benefits.

There are a host of other things that “biohackers” are injecting. I am posting this here because I think anyone with knee or joint pain would do well to check out BPC-157. I have personal knowledge of people who have cured chronic knee pain with 1-3 injections of the peptide. Old muscle pain? Totally fixable with a trivial injection.

Any search on X will show a host of other peptides in the market, offering or suggesting help for a huge range of maladies. Memory loss? Check. Big drug companies are working on peptides for cancers. Some peptides give you a tan, others are key ingredients in skin rejuvenation (potentially making the Botox world a dead end in human anti-aging treatments). There are peptides in development to cure myopia, and even regrow the optic nerve! Things that we knew could not be done are being done. The peptides can tell the body to do something in old age that it usually would only do at a much earlier (or even foetal) stage of development.

None of the non-GLP-1 peptides (as far as I know) is FDA-approved. Most of them probably never will be, because there is no financial incentive to jump through the hoops for something that cannot be patented and which can be purchased inexpensively.

Government is why we can’t have nice things.

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New findings, published today (10 June) in Nature, help to answer the riddle of how vertebrates evolved the diverse array of brain cells that distinguishes them from other animals. It appears that a dramatic expansion of the genetic toolkit more than 450 million years ago enabled the emergence of different kinds of brain cells. These cellular innovations are shared across vertebrates – from primitive fish to mammals – and form the basis of the sophisticated brains seen today.

By comparing the gene activity of single brain cells across five species, including humans, mice, lizards, lampreys (a primitive, eel-like fish) and amphioxus (one of our closest invertebrate relatives), the team reconstructed how brain cell types evolved over deep time. They found that many of the major cell type families in vertebrate brains arose after a genome duplication event in the common ancestor of vertebrates roughly 520 million years ago. A further genome duplication (around 500 million years ago) then added to this.

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What they found was that if an injury occurs at a particular point in the branched structure of the antler, it makes a small callus and heals; the rack will be shed as normal, and next year, a new rack will grow, with an ectopic tine (branch) at the location where the damage occurred in the previous year. This is one of my favorite examples when I teach developmental biology students, on the topic of “here are some things not in your developmental biology textbook”. Using the tools we normally use in the field – chemical gradients, gene-regulatory networks, molecular pathways – try to come up with a model of how the point of damage is sensed at one location of a complex structure, then the whole thing falls off, and the memory is somehow kept – where – in the growth plate on the scalp? And then months later, a new structure appears, with a pattern dictated not just by the emergent result of genetically-encoded protein production (hard enough to explain) but also by the previous physiological experience of cells that are no longer here, which tells bone growth dynamics to take an extra turn and grow out in a very specific place. The effect disappears after a few years and they go back to normal.

Trofim Denisovich, call your office.

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The job of a tumor suppressor protein is right in the name: stopping us from getting cancer at the cellular level. But when they’re not working properly, the cell is left with limited defenses.

In a new paper published today in the journal Nature titled “Targeting Cancer-Specific Mutations with RNA-Triggered Chromatin Shredding,“ researchers at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) at UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and Gladstone Institutes, along with collaborators at University of Utah and Utah State University, report that a creative new CRISPR-based approach can selectively destroy cells carrying a mutation in a tumor suppressor found in nearly half of all cancers and up to 70–90% of cases of some of the most difficult-to-treat cancers, including ovarian, pancreatic, and non-small cell lung cancer.

“Not only can this approach target the ‘undruggable’ cancers that we know, we can also easily and quickly adapt this to new mutations,” says IGI Founder Jennifer Doudna, a co-author on the paper. “This is an exciting development for cancer therapies, and potentially for other applications as well.”

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In Chapter 10 (“Why the Worst Get on Top”) of The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek argued that centralized political authority tends to elevate the worst people in society. Goons and demagogues do not rise to the top in totalitarian systems by accident. The logic of totalitarianism selects for thuggish leaders.

A less dramatic, but equally perverse, logic governs American academia.

The incentive structure of the modern American university encourages relatively unsuccessful scholars, those who fail to establish fruitful research programs early in their careers, to pursue administrative positions, where they wield authority over more successful colleagues, who actually generate educational value. As a result, the American university is disproportionately governed by relative academic failures.

An effective scholar enjoys benefits impossible to find elsewhere in today’s workforce: freedom to follow ideas wherever they might lead and a considerable amount of free time to do it. Those who succeed aren’t inclined to leave the laboratory or library for administration.

Though administrative salaries tend to be higher, the rest of an administrator’s work-life is poorer in every other respect, involving endless committee meetings, paperwork, budgetary knife fights, student and parent grievance adjudication, and the difficult business of cultivating donors. Intellectual freedom and scholarly prestige are nowhere in evidence.

Quanta.

In the first episode of the new season of ‘The Joy of Why,’ Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna discusses how she discovered CRISPR’s genome-editing power, the breakthroughs and hurdles during its explosive growth, and what lies ahead for this groundbreaking technology.

One of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has been CRISPR. Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR is a form of immune system that evolved in bacteria more than a billion years ago to defend against persistent viral threats. Under attack, bacteria can snip a small fragment of a virus’s DNA, store it in the CRISPR region of their genome, and then use it to recognize and destroy the same virus if it returns. The CRISPR-Cas9 system, to give it its longer name, consists of a short strand of guide RNA that identifies where to cut the DNA and a protein that acts as the molecular scissors.

What made this system truly revolutionary was the demonstration in 2012 that it could be reprogrammed with different pieces of guide RNA to edit virtually any genome in any species, and at a level of precision and ease that far surpassed existing gene-editing tools. Since then, the editing capability of CRISPR has been tested on everything from developing disease treatments to engineering drought-resistant crops to resurrecting genes of extinct species. The possibilities have expanded so rapidly that researchers, ethicists, and regulators have found themselves struggling to keep up.

God forbid that ‘ethicists’ (professional tellers of other people what to do) and regulators (professional tellers of other people what not to do) find themselves ‘struggling to keep up’.

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If you’ve ever wondered why some people can wake up before sunrise without an alarm while others struggle to get out of bed on time each morning, the answer lies in biology. Our circadian rhythm, also known as our internal body clock, largely influences our natural sleep-wake preferences, known as chronotypes.

That doesn’t mean your daily habits don’t matter. Light exposure, regular exercise, and consistent sleep schedules can also influence when you feel tired and when you wake up, our experts reveal. But for some people, rising early comes more naturally than it does for others. To better understand why some people are early risers—and whether night owls can shift their schedules—we asked sleep experts to explain the science behind it.

The Telegraph (UK).

Londoners have said they feel increasingly unsafe in the city, in a blow to Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London.

In a London School of Economics survey, 2,022 adults were asked whether living in the capital had become more or less safe generally. Some 54 per cent of respondents, made up of 61 per cent of women and 46 per cent of men, said they felt less safe than previously.

Only 22 per cent of men and 13 per cent of women said they felt London was safer.

We used to laugh at London for having someone named “Sadiq Khan” as Lord Mayer—and then Mamdani became mayor of New York….

The Telegraph (UK).

A biographer of Winston Churchill has accused the National Portrait Gallery of a “barefaced lie” over its claim that the wartime prime minister deliberately starved Indians.

Lord Roberts of Belgravia wrote to the gallery’s board on Monday to demand an explanation after The Telegraph exposed its claims that Churchill “wilfully” inflicted mass starvation on India during the Bengal famine of 1943.

The taxpayer-funded attraction recently installed a 40-minute-long film by Helen Cammock, an artist, whose voice-over narration claims that Churchill used mass starvation as a weapon of war.

The letter, signed by more than 50 peers, including Churchill’s grandson Lord Soames, has described the film as an “ideologically motivated rant”.

Proglodytes lie. It’s what they do.

The Telegraph (UK).

Pro-migrant campaigners boasted about how they had influenced a BBC children’s television show as part of an attempt to change Britain’s attitude towards asylum seekers, The Telegraph can reveal.

My, what a surprise.

The War Zone.

The saga of the Constellation class frigate is emblematic of so many chronic issues with the Navy’s way of procuring warships. The vessel that was supposed to make the wrongs of the Littoral Combat Ship debacle right failed spectacularly and the timing couldn’t have been worse. Now Constellation is dead and the Trump administration is building a different frigate from a different yard. While the Navy has said why it is moving on, we wanted the other side of the story. We recently had a conversation with George Moutafis, CEO of Fincantieri Marine Group, to get exactly that.

Before we get to the questions and answers, however, here is the backstory.

The U.S. Navy needed the Constellation class frigate, badly, and the program to construct it seemed built to deliver. Rather than a clean-sheet design, the service chose the proven Franco-Italian FREMM as its parent design, betting that adapting an existing platform would be far faster and cheaper, and overall less risky than starting from scratch.

It wasn’t. Among the issues plaguing the program, constant change orders pushed the design far from its origins. Two years into construction, the first ship was barely 10% complete while its design was still being finalized. Meanwhile, costs and schedules blew well past original projections.

As a result of these issues, the Navy late last year cancelled the program. That left Fincantieri’s Wisconsin yard sidelined while a contract to replace the Constellation class frigate went to rival Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula.

In the wake of the program’s implosion, the Navy created the Vessel Construction Manager (VCM) system. It uses a hired manager to hold the prime contract and run the show, overseeing shipyard performance, controlling subcontracts, and acting as a buffer between the service and the builder to keep costs and schedules on track.

In a wide-ranging, hour-long exclusive interview, Moutafis – appointed CEO on July 1, 2025 as the wheels were already falling off this project – gave us unique insights into Fincantieri’s version of how Constellation turned into a debacle and what needs to change as a result. He also touched on an array of other topics, which we will address in future installments.

Not the Bee.

I’m going to keep this brief.

Last night, there were two events happening to celebrate America. One was a cage match sponsored by Trump at the White House.

The other was a “Rise Up, Sing Out” event against “fascism” headlined by Jane Fonda, YouTuber Ms. Rachel, Julia Roberts, Robert De Niro, and Bette Midler. It was specifically scheduled to counter-program Trump’s UFC event.

You don’t need to know all the details. You only need the visuals, so here we go.

“They may have won all the battles/But we had all the good songs!” — Tom Lerer

Not the Bee.

Meet Kiana Sears:

The entitled we have always with us.

Associated Press, a Voice of the Crust.

Call up your favorite AI and ask it how many black males died of homicide committed by other black males in 2025.

I guarantee it’s more than 181, and possibly more than 782.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Left.

Savor the irony of a Woke columnist for the Guardian (of all things) complaining about ‘authoritarians’, as if they wouldn’t run (not walk) to put us all under a communist dictatorship.

The ‘authoritarians’ of which he complains, of course are the people who are (gasp) trying to enforce our immigration laws, the people who are (gasp) trying to prevent Democrats from stealing elections, and Everybody in the Trump Administration because, well, Trump (’nuff said).

Not the Jew-hating Muslims attempting to impose sharia law on Americans, not the Jew-hating college students trying to exclude people of which they disapprove from any place in American life, not the BLM/AntiFa rioters who pillage and burn in their ‘mostly peaceful’ activism, not the DEI stormtroopers who are attempting to make sure that no white male anywhere can get any kind of a job (or get promoted if one happens to slip through their clutches), not Democrat apparatchiks who want everybody to send their kids to government schools where they can be properly indoctrinated to Love Big Brother.

Read it for a laugh.

But only if you’re really really good.

The Telegraph (UK).

A National Portrait Gallery display has claimed Winston Churchill deliberately starved Indians to death.

Helen Cammock’s video installation was recently placed among the portraits of significant figures in British history.

Meet Helen Cammock:

The voiceover of the 40-minute film criticises a number of national figures depicted in the taxpayer-funded gallery, and incorrectly claims that Churchill “wilfully” inflicted mass starvation on Indians.

The accusation relates to the Bengal famine of 1943, a lethal food shortage caused by natural disasters and exacerbated by local mismanagement and wartime supply problems.

Some authors and activists have attempted to pin the blame directly on Churchill, who was prime minister. However, he took action to alleviate the famine, and his Cabinet sent supplies to the subcontinent after he declared that “something must be done”.

While India was under British rule at the time, and fighting against the Japanese, the installation at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) suggests that Churchill used mass starvation as a weapon of war.

Needless to say, he did no such thing. But he’s a Dead White Male, and so must be hurled into the void by the Wokerati.

The Telegraph (UK).

A multi-millionaire who bought a £13.5m home on Sandbanks, the exclusive peninsula in Poole Harbour, Dorset, has knocked it down to build an eco-mansion.

Tom Glanfield paid the record price for any property on Sandbanks in 2023. It became known as “the most expensive bungalow in the world” at £4,640 per square foot – a valuation equivalent to luxury homes in central Hong Kong or Monaco.

Seeing the potential of the substantial harbourside plot, he sought planning permission to demolish the run-down Edwardian bungalow, which had been in the same family’s ownership for 117 years.

However, the property sat within a conservation area and had been nominated to be added to the local heritage list.

Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council refused Mr Glanfield’s initial application to demolish it and put a new five-bedroom home in its place.

Government ruins everything it touches. The British local council planning offices are even worse than NIMBY zoning authorities in the U.S., and almost as bad as fascist Home Owner Associations. Run away! Run away!

The Telegraph (UK).

Kenyan who expected security work says he was handed a rifle without training and learned to shoot by watching others

The Telegraph (UK).

Think of it as evolution in action.

The Telegraph (UK).

White jobseekers are being shut out of taxpayer-funded employment schemes.

A range of employment support programmes offered by local authorities to benefit claimants are open only to ethnic minorities, The Telegraph can reveal.

Critics have described the schemes, which are funded by the taxpayer through multi-billion-pound grants to local government, as an example of “two-tier” Britain.

Watch it.

Ordinarily I grant no weight to people who can’t tell which side of their hat is the front, but one doesn’t often find a real no-shit American reviewing common fake food; this is worth it.

(Although I must say this guy has a suspiciously high-end kitchen behind him… He does keep his knives on a magnetic strip rather than leaving them to fester in a knife block, which speaks well of him.)

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department has dismantled organized “birth tourism” networks across West Africa, North Africa and Europe, revoking hundreds of visitor visas tied to schemes that helped pregnant foreign nationals enter the United States to give birth and secure automatic citizenship for their children.

The department detailed more than 600 cases in a June 10 series of posts on X, framing the enforcement push as a defense of the “integrity of U.S. citizenship” against foreigners obtaining visitor visas for the primary purpose of childbirth.

A U.S. Embassy in West Africa uncovered a network of more than 100 foreign nationals using fraudulent documents and visa “fixers”; a U.S. Embassy in North Africa revoked more than 100 additional visas issued to parents who traveled chiefly to deliver in the U.S.

The European caseload runs deeper.

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Gov. Abigail Spanberger and whatever members of the Virginia Democratic Party that aren’t in a war of words with her still speak of fulfilling their affordability agenda, which we have debunked in earlier columns as nothing more than more taxpayer-funded subsidies or draconian controls on providers like landlords.

However, the news that Rideout Arsenal, a firearms designer and manufacturer, will be moving from Fredericksburg to a new, $22 million manufacturing facility in Thomasville, Georgia, brings new questions about their real commitment to affordability.

According to surveys developed by Robert Half, a human resources consulting firm, and conducted by independent research firms, 62 percent of Americans would relocate if their job moved and 75 percent of 18- to 35-year-olds would.

So, let’s say that 50 percent of the 100 jobs Gov. Brian Kemp announced this week in telling the Georgia press about Rideout’s move are ex-pat Virginians. That means 50 people in one of the most expensive places to live in the United States are now unemployed.

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Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) explains why these people are doing deranged things.

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Iran is treating a proposed memorandum of understanding with the United States as a “tactical pause” rather than a permanent settlement to the conflict, according to a report.

The proposed agreement would unfold in two stages. The first phase would focus on ending the current conflict, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and providing Iran with economic benefits, including reconstruction funding, sanctions relief, access to frozen assets, and an end to what Iranian officials have described as a U.S. blockade.

A second phase would address Iran’s nuclear program and one or two other unspecified issues.

According to the report, Iran is attempting to structure the agreement in a way that secures economic concessions before substantive negotiations over its nuclear program begin.

Access to some frozen assets early in the process could provide Tehran with economic relief while reducing U.S. leverage in later talks.

Iranian media outlets have portrayed the emerging agreement as a temporary measure rather than a final resolution.

The technical term is ‘hudna‘.

Newsbusters.

Saturday’s edition of MS NOW’s The Weekend offered up a full-throated class-warfare kvetch over Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire.

Co-host Eugene Daniels grew visibly agitated as economist Justin Wolfers claimed Musk “bought” the 2024 election for Donald Trump with $250 million in campaign spending. Daniels declared the discussion made him “very angry” — not at Wolfers, but at the country for allowing it.

Wolfers argued Musk’s spending was enough to flip the election’s narrow margins in key states and left him with enough wealth to “buy” thousands more. Yet neither Daniels nor Wolfers mentioned that Kamala Harris’s campaign and aligned groups outspent Trump’s by roughly half a billion dollars, with Harris’s side topping nearly $2 billion compared to Trump’s roughly $1.45–1.5 billion.

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Alaska’s election officials may have just saved a U.S. Senate seat from one of the more brazen ballot schemes in recent memory. The state’s Division of Elections issued a preliminary ruling this week that Dan J. Sullivan of Petersburg is ineligible to appear on the 2026 Senate ballot, dealing a significant blow to Democrats – in what Republicans have characterized as a coordinated Democratic effort to siphon votes from incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan through deliberate name confusion.

Dan J. Sullivan is a 69-year-old retired teacher who filed to run as a Republican for the U.S. Senate mere days before the late-May filing deadline. Not only is his name virtually identical to the incumbent senator’s, but he’s also recycled the incumbent’s former campaign slogan, and is using a logo similar to the senator’s own branding. The attempt to deceive voters is obvious, and under Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, where ballot position and name recognition carry outsized weight, the potential for voter confusion was significant and consequential.

According to a report from the Anchorage Daily News, Carol Beecher, director of the Division of Elections, made the state’s position clear in a letter to Dan J. Sullivan on Wednesday. “Based on a review of the evidence presented and in the Division’s possession, the Division has determined that the preponderance of evidence does not support your eligibility for the office of United States Senator,” Beecher wrote.

Newsbusters.

It is, one might say, a completely American media routine.

Out there somewhere in this big country, some far left activist gets attention and the left leaning media loves it.

This has happened so often in American politics that there is no point in denying it.

Way back in the way back – the late 1940’s and early 1950’s – there was a seemingly up-and-coming rising star inside the castle of the American Left. His name was Alger Hiss. Hiss was perfectly credentialed. A Harvard Law grad, followed by jobs in various branches of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the successor Truman administration, holding this or that job in the Justice Department and eventually the State Department.

Eventually, Hiss was, as it were, “ratted out” by a State Department colleague named Whittaker Chambers. Ratted out as a Communist spy. Not good, and a decided attention-getter. All you-know-what broke out, very much in the public and drawing in the Congress. Alger Hiss became a household name, and, yes, was eventually convicted of being a spy and sentenced to several years in the federal pen.

Suffice to say, the American media of the day ate it up. So too did Republicans in the day, notably in that category a young California Congressman named Richard Nixon.

This piece of ancient history comes to mind as a new figure on the Left is increasingly the focus of today’s media. That would be a here-to-fore unknown Maine Democrat activist named Graham Platner. And with all the certainty of rain on on a cloudy day, today’s media has zeroed in on Platner. Platner being the Democrat candidate for the Maine Senate seat now held by Republican Senator Susan Collins.

Newsbusters.

When Elon Musk’s SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq on Friday, he became the first trillionaire in history. Later that night on HBO’s Real Time, host Bill Maher wondered if you could still be a good capitalist and believe in “some cap on wealth.” Eurasian Group President Ian Bremmer responded not by answering the question but by suggesting that Musk’s history-making day was a result of his donation to President Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Maher wondered, “Is it going to be, like, five people who have all the money in the world, and can you be a good capitalist? Here’s my question: Can you be a good capitalist, because I think I am, or a believer in capitalism and still think there should be some cap on wealth?”

Bremmer began his response by waxing poetic but not answering the question, “Well, you have to—Americans believe that people should be able to make it, they should be successful. It’s one of the things that really makes our country work. We don’t think necessarily that someone who’s worth 100 million, even a billion, maybe even a trillion is necessarily a bad thing where in many other countries they do, but there has to be opportunity for the average American and their kids to get there.”

Turning more negative, Bremmer recalled, “We saw Graham Platner came out immediately today, ‘There should never be another trillionaire.’ You know, you see Elizabeth Warren, you’ll see Rob Reich, ‘Every billionaire is a policy failure.’ That reflects the fact a whole bunch of Americans feel like they don’t trust their leaders. They don’t trust these elites.”

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In George Orwell’s 1984, Great Britain was just a province of Oceania named “Airstrip One” as a none-too-subtle nod to the U.K.’s role as host to the heavy bombers of U.S. Eighth Air Force during World War II.

Four decades past the real 1984, and there’s still no Oceania. But Britain looks more and more like Airstrip One as Parliament considers a bill opening up everyone’s smartphone to government supervision — and jail time for tech execs who don’t submit.

You had to figure this was probably coming, right?

Right.

Read it.

Import Turd World people, get Turd World problems.

Read it.

Virginia is on the verge of its first shutdown in modern history, and it all comes down to data centers and Democratic Party infighting. Democrats control the governor’s mansion, the state Senate, and the House, yet the party can’t get on the same page.

“Virginia has to have a budget by June 30,” Republican Virginia state Sen. Glen Sturtevant told The Daily Signal. After fighting for “several months” on the budget, state leaders are locking horns over data centers and increasing taxes.

“If there’s an actual shutdown and there’s no money appropriated, you know teachers aren’t getting paid, cops aren’t getting paid,” Sturtevant continued.

Sturtevant explained that the Senate, including many Democrats, wants to eliminate the 20-year-old tax break for data centers that currently costs Virginia $2 billion a year that has to be made up for by taxing Virginians. House Democrats and Democrat Gov. Abigail Spanberger want to keep that tax break in place, protecting the data centers.

And their payoffs to Democrat politicians.

New York Post.

A Cornell University student who applied for a summer internship with a Jewish-owned NYC startup rejected the opportunity with a hateful message: ‘Not interested in working for a Jew,” the shocked CEO posted on X.

Austin Franco put his antisemitism on full display when he passed up an interview with VryfID because its co-founders Gabe and Aiden Einhorn are proudly Jewish.

Franco, 19, delivered the message to both brothers via job board site Handshake after applying for a summer role at the company, which pairs renters with landlords and verifies their identities to prevent fraud.

The concept of freedom of association has been so expunged from American life that this will shock a lot of even un-Woke people.