DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

‘This must be disqualifying’: Harris calls out Trump’s violent Cheney comments (Myah Ward/Politico)  But, amazingly, it’s not.

Trump says ‘war hawk’ Liz Cheney should be fired upon in escalation of violent rhetoric against his opponents (Eric Bradner/CNN)  No, he didn’t. This is a lie.

Ariz. Prosecutor Investigating Trump for Saying Cheney Should Face Gunfire  Which he didn’t.

Johnson leans on Trump in frantic push to save House majority (CNN)

Jeffrey Epstein details close relationship with Trump in newly released tapes (Edward Helmore/The Guardian)

GOPer Confronts CNN for Their ‘Distortion’ of Trump’s Cheney Comments

Here’s Why Mark Cuban’s Attack on the Women Around Trump Is Backfiring

Recap: The Republican War on Women (Andra Watkins/How Project 2025 …)

Nicolle Wallace Calls on Her Former Boss, George W. Bush, to Denounce Trump (Tim Balk/New York Times)

Trump Still Can’t Stop Talking About Women (Jess Bidgood/New York Times)  He wants their votes. How does this come as a surprise?

Wash. State Activates National Guard Ahead of Election

Harris campaign, Drudge Report melt down, accuse Trump of calling for Liz Cheney’s ‘execution’ (Josh Christenson/New York Post)

Kamala Harris Is Not Our Savior. But a Donald Trump Win Would Be Catastrophic. (Versha Sharma/Teen Vogue)

Your Tax $$ at Work: NPR Hails ‘Smart’ Lying ‘Trump Will Ban Porn’ Ads on Porn Sites  Which he won’t.

Trump, Preparing to Challenge the Results, Puts His 2020 Playbook Into Action (New York Times)

Trump’s vows for revenge face few limitations in second term (The Hill)

The Editorial Board – You already know Donald Trump. – He is unfit to lead. Watch him. (New York Times)

Inside the Ruthless, Restless Final Days of Trump’s Campaign (Tim Alberta/The Atlantic)

Trump Says He’ll Fight for Working-Class Americans. His First Presidency Suggests He Won’t. (Eli Hager/ProPublica)

‘Don’t Lie To Me’: Maher Condemns Media For Claiming Trump Wants Liz Cheney Shot

Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? (George Monbiot/The Guardian)  Apparently democracy = socialism.

Bolton suggests Trump will not accept results if Harris wins: ‘We should be ready for it’ (Juliann Ventura/The Hill)

The Unique Danger of a Trumpist Oligarchy (Franklin Foer/The Atlantic)

Maher delivers final message to undecided voters: It may get worse under Trump (Juliann Ventura/The Hill)

Donald Trump Weirdly Simulates Sex Act on Microphone Stand (Mathew Murphy/The Daily Beast)

CBS Falsely Says Trump Mused ‘About Executing Liz Cheney’

“The Guy’s A Retard. He’s Retarded”: The Atlantic Accidentally Makes Trump Look Hilarious Over Biden Nickname

Trump is using election lies to lay the groundwork for challenging 2024 results if he loses (Jill Colvin/Associated Press)

Jeff Bezos Has a Point on Media Trust, and the Liz Cheney Lie Proves It

Latest Trump Hoax Drops: No He Wasn’t Simulating Oral Sex

Close RFK Jr. friend whose account promoted “Jew World Order” conspiracy theory says she’s “working with” Trump’s transition team (Eric Hananoki/Media Matters for America)

Trump Needs Help (Tom Nichols/The Atlantic)

Read it.

EPFL researchers have combined virtual reality, non-invasive brain stimulation and advanced brain imaging techniques to improve spatial navigation in healthy participants. The study is a first step in addressing dementia in an aging population without medication or surgery.

ZMan: “Most of our interactions with the media are to first figure out the angle and then the lie and finally the truth.”

‘Strong’ Women in Trump Orbit Clap Back at Mark Cuban

Vance suggests upper- and middle-class kids ‘become trans’ for college admissions, says Trump may earn ‘normal gay guy vote’ (Kit Maher/CNN)

Trump’s ‘grab them’ comment was history. Now TikTok is showing it to young voters. (Tatum Hunter/Washington Post)

Trump lagging in early vote with seniors in Pennsylvania, a red flag for GOP (Politico)

“It is so disastrous”: MAGA men are freaking out that wives may be secretly voting for Kamala Harris (Charles R. Davis/Salon)

After Godwin’s Law, Dems May Try One Last ‘Get Trump’ Gambit On Election Day

ABC, CBS Newscasts OMIT Mark Cuban Insult of Trump-Supporting Women

Leopards Are Telling You That They Will Eat YOUR Face (Paul Krugman/New York Times)  It’s about Trump. Trust me.

THIS IS CNN: Tavis Smiley Mocks JD Vance, Says He Has ‘Mommy Issues’

Listen to Jeffrey Epstein Spill Intel on Donald Trump’s White House (Harry Lambert/The Daily Beast)

Crazy Talk About the Media Favoring Trump Over Harris

CNN’s Preston Argues Biden Should Double Down on ‘Garbage’ Smear

New Report Suggests “Whale Psychiatrist” Trump May be Right About Wind Farms and Whales

Harris keeps bringing in new money as Trump struggles to grow his donor base (Jessica Piper/Politico)

Trump actually treats Puerto Rico like garbage (Noah Berlatsky/Public Notice)

Liz Cheney Fires Back at Trump, Accuses Him of Threatening Her ‘With Death’ in Blistering Counter (Colby Hall/Mediaite)

Europe’s Greens ask Jill Stein to pull out of US election to prevent Trump victory (Politico)

Donald Trump’s campaign of relentless lying (Daniel Dale/CNN)

Trump Attacks Liz Cheney Using Violent War Imagery (Michael Gold/New York Times)

Secret Service Interfered in IG Assassination Probe

Meet the Democrats using porn ads to convince Trump voters to stay home (Susan Davis/NPR)

Elon Musk’s Machine for Fascism: A One-Stop Shop for Disinformation and Violence (emptywheel)

“The Garbage Can of the World” – At Donald’s hate rally at Madison Square Garden … (Mary L. Trump/The Good in Us)

Trump’s botched COVID response has been largely forgotten, but it’s crucial we remember (Elizabeth Hlavinka/Salon)

The Strongman Fantasy (text and audio) (Timothy Snyder/Thinking about)

When You Thought He Couldn’t Sink Lower (William Kristol/The Bulwark)

Trump Fantasizes About Guns Pointed at Liz Cheney’s Face (Nikki McCann Ramirez/Rolling Stone)  Uh, actually, no….

Execute Her? Fake News Invents New Outrage When Trump Suggests Liz Cheney Serve In Wars She Promotes

What Happens When Trump Exploits Your Daughter’s Murder (Asawin Suebsaeng/Rolling Stone)

Some Maga men seem to think women don’t have rights – starting with their wives (Rebecca Solnit/The Guardian)

Donald Trump Is Done With Checks and Balances (Jamelle Bouie/New York Times)

YouTube CENSORS Rogan-Trump Interview: Jordan Fires Back at Google CEO

Trump embraces violent rhetoric, suggests Liz Cheney should have guns ‘trained on her face’ (Washington Post)

Trump Suggests Training Guns on Liz Cheney’s Face (David A. Graham/The Atlantic)

If Trump gets elected, get your tech buying done asap

Garbage In/Garbage Out

CNN’s Stelter Disses Trump’s Lawsuit Against CBS with Lefty ‘First Amendment Experts’

Desperate Leftist Media Wildly Distort Trump’s Liz Cheney Comments 

Obama FBI Ran Off-The-Books ‘Honeypot’ Operation On Trump Campaign In 2015: Whistleblower

Arizona’s top prosecutor investigating Trump’s comments about Cheney as possible death threat (Brahm Resnik/KPNX)

Trump and Vance make anti-transgender attacks central to their campaign’s closing argument (Bill Barrow/Associated Press)

10 Things You Should Do One Last Time Before Trump Institutes A Totalitarian State (Babylon Bee)

Read it.

There were two snipers posted inside the second floor of the AGR building used by alleged gunman Thomas Crooks to shoot at Donald Trump. Both failed to spot Crooks before his assassination attempt.

Ever since then, excuses have been made for the failure of the local snipers, Greg Nicol and Mike Murcko. Local officials have insisted that the snipers didn’t have a vantage of Crooks, and would have had to lean out of their windows to see him on the rooftop. Meanwhile, some media members have reported rumors that Nicol locked himself out of the building while searching for Crooks—and that the shooting happened right when Murcko went downstairs to let him back inside.

However, a time-stamped transcript of encrypted radio communications from July 13 tells a different story—showing that both Murcko and Nicol received warnings about an armed man on the rooftop at least seven seconds before he opened fire, and that Murcko radioed that Crooks was down after the shooting. The transcript further reveals other new details about the July 13 Butler rally, raising still more questions in the process.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

If swing-state Nevada goes for Donald Trump in 2024, a decisive role may be played by a critical but widely under-examined constituency: ex-Californians who fled spiraling West Coast leftism and are now nudging Nevada rightward, Politico reports.

Early voting data from Nevada has already sent Republican hopes of securing the state’s six electoral votes soaring. Through Thursday — the penultimate day of early voting — the number of registered Republicans who’ve cast a ballot exceeds the Democrats’ tally by 47,300, or 5.1 percent. That’s a complete turning of the tables, as it’s usually Democrats who’ve banked a majority of the votes before Election Day. The GOP has built that lead not through the mail, but by a level of Republican in-person turnout that veteran Nevada political reporter and full-on leftist Jon Ralston has called “startling.”

Nate Silver: “The people who respond to polls are weird.”

Read it.

There is no surer sign that Trump has this in the bag. Stores and restaurants boarding up and moving on ahead of the obvious massive layoffs about to hit the most corrupt and inefficient jurisdiction in American history. Families will have to move out of their potholes because not enough drivers will fall in to financially maintain them. There will be no one left to maintain the walls and fences that make our brutally corrupt Congress tenable. Who will feed the troops guarding them from righteous citizens’ rage? Now that DC is no longer significant, who will come visit the monuments and museums?

This is actually good news. Anyone who has ever lived in the DC area knows that the city was built in a wetland. A literal swamp. Being ecology minded, I have lobbied for years to remove the buildings and restore the glorious, pristine Okefenokee ambiance spoiled by all of those imperialist invaders. No more Cheneys or Pelosis or Schiffs or Wrays or Comeys or, well, it’s a long, pugnacious list.

Save DC. Save the planet. Vote Trump.

Read it.

At least a dozen women’s and girls’ sports teams have forfeited games against teams with biological male players without consequences, but one team has been kicked out of its league for almost a year for refusing to play a team with a transgender-identifying player.

Mid Vermont Christian School in Burlington, Vermont, forfeited a girls’ high school basketball game in November 2023 against a team that had a male athlete playing for it. The Vermont Principals’ Association resultantly kicked Mid Vermont Christian out of the association and denied it public funding through the state’s tuition program.

But other teams across the country have faced no penalties for declining to play teams with biological male players.

Reuters.

The news reporting on the news reporting on the news.

The American Mind.

It’s easy to forget the litany of ways that the institutional Left and our “representatives” in government have repeatedly betrayed the American people over the last eight years. There’s no need to single out individuals. “They” are legion: the Democrats, the compromised courts that ignore or invent the law, the Intelligence Community that interferes in our elections, the leftist foot soldiers burning and looting our cities, the unelected “experts” who try to rule Americans by fiat, the “non-government organizations,” Big Tech, the useful idiots, and corporate media that lie to us about all of it.

As the election approaches, citizens should once again take inventory of the long train of abuses we have endured by that dishonorable group.

CNN.

The Crust takes care of its own.

Read it.

Not only were only 12k jobs created, all of the jobs were in the public sector (government). Private payrolls dropped 28k.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Every four years the media tells us that this is the most important election in our lifetimes, maybe in the history of the world. It is always nonsense, of course, but even if it does turn out to be important, few people realize it. Hardly anyone realized that the 1992 election, for example, would be an inflection point. The Cold War was over, and it felt like politics was not all the important.

This time may be different. Trump is a unique figure and has come to define the first quarter of the 21st century. To understand him and his time on the stage, you must start with the election of the execrable George Bush and then follow the chain of events that flowed from that moment. Trump was the delayed response to the hollowing out of conservatism and the Republican Party by the neoconservatives.

What the Trump era has come to be about is who is going to run the country, Americans or a collection of alien weirdos? For their part, the alien weirdos have made it clear since Trump came down that escalator that they would rather blow up the world than allow normal Americans to rule themselves again. The election next Tuesday is the last battle in the fight between Trump and the alien weirdos.

Read it.

Down the Memory Hole!

Matthew Continetti.

The images are indelible: Donald Trump’s mugshot. His visit to a New York City bodega. His bloody ear and face and raised fist after being shot. Standing before his name in lights at the RNC. Joining forces with RFK Jr. beneath sparkling fireworks. Praying at the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Serving French fries at McDonald’s. Selling out Madison Square Garden. And then, this week, donning a safety vest and riding in a garbage truck.

If Donald Trump is elected president for a second time on Tuesday, such moments will have been signposts on the road to an extraordinary comeback. Trump’s willingness to take risks, his boldness in appearing in places and situations where the old Republican Party feared to tread, his knack for the memorable photo and cutting riposte have defined his political career and the 2024 campaign.

This campaign is notable, moreover, for Trump’s confidence in his team, and his team’s confidence in their candidate and strategy. McDonald’s, MSG, and the garbage truck are examples of a former president flexing his power to command attention, thrill supporters, and expose opponents as aloof and condescending. Such confidence has both strengths and weaknesses. It imbues a campaign with the élan of victory and the determination to succeed. But it may also blind a candidate to realities that limit his appeal.

Read it.

Americans are. American politicians aren’t.

Read it.

My visit to Iraq in 2016, right before the U.S. election which produced a Trump victory, was an enlightening experience. ISIS had driven out the Christian population of the region of the Nineveh Plain, where Jonah had preached, into Iraqi Kurdistan in 2014. The refugees were still in camps when I visited, as ISIS had not been defeated. The Christians in Nineveh—mainly Catholic and Orthodox Chaldeans and Syriacs—had lived there for 2,000 years, since disciples of Christ first brought the Christian faith to that land. These people were eager to return to their ancient home, even though it was later discovered that the radical Islamists had destroyed much of their specific culture, especially their churches and Christian imagery. Because of these catastrophes, the U.S. election was on everyone’s mind, even as they struggled to survive.

For the Christians in Iraq and Syria, there was one man they hoped would win: Donald Trump. I still remember a priest from Mosul in one of the camps. ISIS had used his Church as a torture centre: he repeated three times to me, “I love Drump.” They felt abandoned by the Obama administration, and believed that Trump would help them. Every time we asked who they prayed would be the next president, the answer was the same, and it was never Obama.

Read it.

An Egyptian (19) in handcuffs, already known to law enforcement for previous minor arrests of drug dealing and theft. Now the other members of the pack are being sought.

There is an arrest for the rape of a 27-year-old Peruvian woman, raped on the premises of a former nightclub, closed to the public for some time, in Valentino Park in Turin on October 15. The victim recognized his face, together with that of another man still being sought, after identifying them among the mug shots of an album of profiles of “previously convicted or dangerous subjects” in custody of the authorities.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace did not exist.

Major News Media Fall For Fake GOP Outrage Yet Again (David Kurtz/Talking Points Memo)

The Economist Endorses Harris, Warns Trump Carries ‘Unacceptable Risks’ (Nina Golgowski/HuffPost)  Ask yourself why The Economist, a British magazine, is endorsing a candidate for the U.S. Presidency.

Trump’s plan to radically remake government with RFK Jr. and Elon Musk is coming into view (Zachary B. Wolf/CNN)  I’d vote for that.

Election officials are outmatched by Elon Musk’s misinformation machine (CNN)

MSM Melts Down Over Trump Garbage Truck Stunt

Majority of swing-state voters say they fear violence if Trump loses (Washington Post)

Billionaire Trump Awkwardly Dresses Up as a Garbage Truck Driver (Charisma Madarang/Rolling Stone)

Harris says she will be ‘sadly ready’ if Trump prematurely claims victory Tuesday (Alex Gangitano/The Hill)

New York Times Revels in Harris Tactic of Labeling Trump a Fascist

The Spinal Tap Election: Everything Is Turned Up To 11

The Politics Of Fear: Laying The Groundwork For Fascism, American-Style

UNBURDENED: CBS’s O’Donnell MAD About Trump’s Garbage Truck ‘Stunt’

Trump Insists He Has Big Lead Over Harris, Setting Stage for 2024 Doubts (Josh Wingrove/Bloomberg)

Bush v Gore 2: Despotic Boogaloo (Liz Dye/Public Notice)

Trump: My Own Staff Beg Me to Stop ‘Inappropriate’ Talk About Women (Sean Craig/The Daily Beast)

Donald Trump Is a Foreign Influence

Trump Dresses Up as a Fascist for Halloween and It Sure Is Scary

Is The Left Preparing For War If Trump Wins?

“I’m gonna do it whether the women like it or not”: Trump’s closing argument is toxic masculinity (Amanda Marcotte/Salon)  Amanda Marcotte is toxic stupidity.

Swing State Newspaper Slams Trump: ‘Crippled Cognitively’ With ‘Clear Signs Of Mental Illness’ (Lee Moran/HuffPost)

A second Trump term comes with unacceptable risks (The Economist)

YouTube let right-wing figures undermine the 2024 election results even before any votes were cast (Media Matters for America)  This is the same YouTube that made Joe Rogin’s interview with Trump infindable through their search engine.

‘Like it or not’: In one quote, Trump distills the 2024 gender gap (Philip Bump/Washington Post)

Why the Right Thinks Trump Is Running Away With the Race (New York Times)

PBS Gets Out Harris Vote in PA: ‘Racist, Sexist’ MSG Rally Has ‘Broken Through’

Trump Would Be Worse for Palestinians (Nicholas Kristof/New York Times)  And rightly so.

CNN’s Kasie: Don’t Let Election Denier Trump Distract You With Garbage Truck/McD’s Stunts!

Make Diseases Great Again: Trump team says they’re coming for vaccines (Emily Singer/Daily Kos)

Networks MAD Trump Wants to ‘Capitalize on’ Biden ‘Appearing to’ Call Voters ‘Garbage’

Report: WashPost Pays to Promote Anti-Trump Stories

Republicans are serious about cutting people’s health care (Dylan Scott/Vox)

ABC Blames Trump for Biden’s ‘Garbage’ Smear, Rips Blue-Collar Workers

2024 election violence is already happening (Nicole Narea/Vox)

Read it.

Los Angeles County has sued beverage makers PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, accusing them of polluting the most populous U.S. county with plastic bottles and misleading the public about the environmental impact and recyclability of their containers.

Watch it.

Something you won’t find through the search engine on YouTube.

That’s all they can do, since Rogan is already ‘demonetized’ for not being Woke enough.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

Just another New Yawk minute.

Off-Guardian.

Are you an aspiring oligarch, dictator or autocrat? Do you want to wield power whilst maintaining a façade of popular support and democratic mandate? Do you want to make your proles believe they have a choice?

Well then, welcome to the first of our “How to…” series. A selection of articles dedicated to teaching aspiring authoritarians how to hide tyranny behind a reassuring mask of freedom.

Here we’ll go into the finer points of how it’s possible to have “elections” that mean almost nothing.

Read it.

Elections have become not merely choices of policy change but referenda on the full-scale, top-to-bottom destruction of America’s form of government and way of life.

Democratic Party candidates in the 2024 election have proposed policies that would radically, and irrevocably, alter America’s constitutional order. Liberal candidates have endorsed plans that would fundamentally transform all three branches of government, assure permanent left-wing power, and effect the domination of American politics by a polarized ideological minority.

Watch it.

Inquiring minds want to know. Maybe.

Sounds like a plan.

Freeberg says the quiet part out loud.

Kamala Harris could still emerge victorious in this thing, but she’s not doing quite as well as she’d like, I think. There’s no one single misstep to point to for the bulk of the blame. I perceive that the American public is belatedly catching on to what’s long been obvious to just some of us: Liberalism is not about solving problems, or even about making anything better. It is rainbow-chasing and complaining. It is just like a rainbow in fact. Most coherent, definable and relatable when distant, losing any semblance of structure upon the observer’s approach.

Every single issue follows the same pattern. The liberal agitator states the case for reform, and it isn’t tiny-step reform, it requires societal overhaul: Oppressors are oppressing victims. The victim’s situation is this, and that, and this and that, and such and such and so and so. “And we think that’s wrong!!!” Stating this case, they capture all they want to capture. Hearts, minds, votes, emotions. And then there’s some kind of incursion, involving some combination of force and guile. The movement becomes an actual movement, with the good guys making good-guy movement into bad-guy territory. Like the Trojan horse into the city’s gates. Activists, and their sympathizers, go to where the problem is, where the slope-foreheads occupy, those undesirables who have yet to be enlightened.

And then…?

Confront the problem-people. And…?

Convert them? Isolate them? Banish them? Obliterate them? What are we doing now?

Power Line.

The Democrats are pushing all the chips into the middle of the table. With Kamala Harris calling us Nazis and fascists, and Joe Biden calling us garbage, they aren’t planning any sort of unity-fest if they win. While Donald Trump is laying out a positive vision for his second term, one that will benefit all Americans who aren’t financially tied to the status quo, the Democrats are preparing to go scorched earth.

After all, if you are in power and your country is infected with Nazis, fascists and garbage people, what should they expect? We will see a crackdown the likes of which our country has never experienced, with near-total control over the means of communication and lawfare that, this time, won’t only be directed at figures like Trump and Steve Bannon, who was just released from a federal prison. I think the Democrats plan on casting a much wider net to punish “Nazis” and “fascists,” with no one to protest except us garbage people, whom they intend to silence, one way or another. If the Democrats can get to 51%, they will try to cement themselves in power for a long time to come.

So which vision is going to come true? The positive, or the dystopian? Many Trump supporters are feeling exultant, as the tide has been running, if only weakly, in his direction. The RealClearPolitics average betting odds now stand at 64%/35% in Trump’s favor. But if the polls are a guide, Trump’s momentum has slowed somewhat. The most recent surveys have him tied in Michigan, either tied, down one or up three in North Carolina, tied or up one in Wisconsin, tied (twice) or up three in Pennsylvania, and so on. The polls are telling us the election is too close to call, and I don’t think there is any reason to believe they are–all!–somehow undercounting Republican voters. That certainly isn’t what happened in 2022.

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She dropped out of all her studies without a degree. Moreover, she’s an anti-car activist who travels by bicycle. She has neither industrial management experience, financial expertise nor an inkling of automotive engineering. That folks, is one of the top executives at VW. No joke!

Read it.

The twin pillars of Woke ‘journalism’ appear to be Envy and Prurience.

‘Secret’? Can’t be much of a secret if three Jimmy Olsens found out about it.

Read it.

Trump spends his days in a target-rich environment.

Read it.

On Tuesday, the sitting president called half the country “garbage.” While it’s hard to grasp historical significance as it unfolds, this moment will likely be analyzed and debated for decades. The comment reflects more than just a slip of the tongue—it reveals the deep contempt the Democratic Party holds for ordinary Americans, evident in their rhetoric, policies, and methods.

As a first-term legislator under Tim Walz in Minnesota, I’ve witnessed firsthand how a narrow Democratic majority has forced through the most radical agenda imaginable. This includes some of the most extreme abortion provisions globally, an energy mandate that bans 80% of current production without a viable replacement, and business policies driving companies out of the state. Worse, billions of taxpayer dollars are wasted on initiatives meant to create favorable election soundbites—such as offering free school lunches to wealthy families just to say, “We’re feeding kids.”

New York Post.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Axios.

Half of Gen Z voters — and 1 in 4 U.S. voters overall — have lied to people close to them about who they’re voting for, according to the latest Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll.

Ever wonder why polls seem wrong more often than not? This could be it.

(Savor the irony of depending on a polling organization to find out why most polls suck.)

Quillette.

In March, Sarah Carr—a professor of journalism and contributor to the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and Slate—published an essay in the Hechinger Report titled, “How Flawed IQ Tests Prevent Kids from Getting Help in School.” Reliance on IQ tests in many US schools, she wrote, “is now slowly starting to ebb after decades of research showing their potential for racial and class bias, among other issues. IQ scores can also change significantly over time and have proven particularly unreliable for young children.”

In August, the Atlantic published an essay by staff writer Ali Breland titled, “The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed with Race and IQ,” which fretted that “right-wing gatekeepers are shrouding [their] bigotry in a cloak of objectivity and pseudoscientific justification.” That essay was approvingly linked by a contributor to the Free Press the following month in an essay titled, “Pseudo-Scholars and the Rise of the Barbarian Right.” Three days after the Atlantic essay appeared, Lithub ran an essay titled, “On the Dark History and Ongoing Ableist Legacy of the IQ Test.”

These are just a few recent examples of the tendentious journalism about IQ that routinely appears in mainstream news outlets otherwise dedicated to scientific rigour and accuracy. Reporting and commentary like this would lead any reasonable citizen to conclude that intelligence tests are biased and that the study of IQ is pseudoscientific. Conversely, there is very little reporting on the field’s strong research base or its efforts to improve the health of people with low IQs, accelerate treatment for children with learning disabilities, and understand the link between the brain and behaviour. Consequently, there is a mismatch between the work and findings of intelligence researchers and the portrayal of their field in the popular media.

Most ‘journalists’ are progressives, including those purported to be ‘scientists’. They hate the notion that one person can even possibly be inherently ‘better’ in any area than another; which is rooted in the Woke delusion that everybody is just as good as everybody else, everybody is just as capable as everybody else, and if differences arise they arise because somebody is being oppressed or somehow being deliberately cheated.

Read it.

Three billion years ago, life on Earth was simple. Single-celled organisms ruled, and there wasn’t much to them. They were what we now call prokaryotic cells, which include modern-day bacteria and archaea, essentially sacks of loose molecular parts. They swirled together in shallow, primordial brews or near deep-sea ocean vents, where they extracted energy from the environment and reproduced by dividing one cell into two daughter cells. Then, one day, that wilderness of simple cells cooked up something more complex: the ancestor of all plants, animals and fungi alive today, a cell type known to us as the eukaryote.

The eukaryote’s debut transformed the planet. Today, all complex multicellular life — indeed, all life that any of us regularly see — is made of eukaryotic cells. No one knows for sure how that first eukaryote arose, but biologists believe that it took at least a billion years of interactions between bacterial and archaeal cells for it to finally come into being.

“Eukaryotes are this bananas chimera of bacteria and archaea,” said Leigh Anne Riedman (opens a new tab), a paleontologist who studies early life at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We are still trying to sort out exactly how it happened and who was involved.”

And God said, ‘Hey, I’m standing right here.”

The eukaryotes invented organization, if we use the literal definition of “organize”: to be furnished with organs. Inside a eukaryotic cell are self-contained, membrane-bound bundles that perform special functions, called organelles. All eukaryotic cells — animal, plant, fungus or protist — have a nucleus that encloses and protects DNA. Nearly all of them have mitochondria, which produce energy to fuel biochemical reactions. (Any eukaryotic lineages that lack mitochondria used to have them and then lost them sometime in evolutionary history.) And across the evolutionary tree, different eukaryotes have evolved or procured additional organelles that assemble proteins, store water, turn sunlight into energy, digest biomolecules, get rid of waste, and more. If prokaryotes are a loose pile of papers on the floor, eukaryotes are a sophisticated filing system that binds pages into packets and labels them.

And all of this just sort of happened, you know?

Read it.

FOR A MACHINE THAT’S designed to replicate a star, the world’s newest stellarator is a surprisingly humble-looking apparatus. The kitchen-table-size contraption sits atop stacks of bricks in a cinder-block room at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in Princeton, N.J., its parts hand-labeled in marker.

The PPPL team invented this nuclear-fusion reactor, completed last year, using mainly off-the-shelf components. Its core is a glass vacuum chamber surrounded by a 3D-printed nylon shell that anchors 9,920 meticulously placed permanent rare-earth magnets. Sixteen copper-coil electromagnets resembling giant slices of pineapple wrap around the shell crosswise.

The arrangement of magnets forms the defining feature of a stellarator: an entirely external magnetic field that directs charged particles along a spiral path to confine a superheated plasma. Within this enigmatic fourth state of matter, atoms that have been stripped of their electrons collide, their nuclei fusing and releasing energy in the same process that powers the sun and other stars. Researchers hope to capture this energy and use it to produce clean, zero-carbon electricity.

Orion Taraban:

The finish line you can see is not the real finish line. In the vast majority of cases, you will need to continue past this point for some time before bringing a project to completion. The reason for this is simple: most plans do not survive their own execution. Before starting out, you likely did not know to plan for certain circumstances that arose in the implementation of your vision. Unknown unknowns are an unavoidable feature of any endeavor.

UnHerd.

Early in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, a magician performs a trick with a small bird which disappears in a cage flattened on the table. A small boy in the audience starts to cry, distraught that the bird was killed. The magician approaches him and finishes the trick, gently producing a living bird out of his hand — but the boy is not convinced, insisting that this must be another bird, the dead bird’s brother. After the show, we see the magician alone, putting a bird squashed into the trash where many other dead birds lie. The boy was right. The trick could not be performed without violence and death, but it relies for its effectiveness upon concealing the squalid, broken residue of what has been sacrificed, disposing of it where no one who matters will see. Therein resides the basic premise of a dialectical notion of progress: when a new higher stage arrives, there must be a squashed bird somewhere. 

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The following list of culture-enriching incidents was drawn from items in this month’s news feed. I searched the database using various keywords, and found these links to attacks with knives, machetes, bombs, hand grenades, and possibly even shovels and rakes and other implements of destruction. And also culture-enriching rapes.

There are still a couple of days left in October, so a complete list would probably be a little longer than this.

I only used news stories that either specified the ethnicities of the perpetrators or included names that gave the game away. But there were two exceptions: Marseille and machetes.

I made the reasonable assumption that when someone in Marseille stabs somebody else fifty times and then burns him to death, the perpetrator without a doubt “has a migration background.”

And as far as machetes go, the number of people who are not culture-enrichers and who attack others in the street with machetes (most of those probably really kebab knives) is vanishingly small, possibly zero, and may safely be disregarded.

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

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After cheering the “brave” resignations of LA Times employees, it was expected that faux Republican Jen Rubin would follow suit when the Washington Post also failed to endorse Kamala Harris.

Guess not.

My theory is that precisely because she is so principled, she is merely delaying her resignation to achieve maximum effect. And then it’s Take that Jeff Bezos!

A reported 200,000 readers have cancelled their WaPo subscriptions in protest even though there has not been even a hint of an editorial shift in favor of balanced, more objective coverage or something equally terrifying and fascistic. Does anyone believe that there is any employee, editor, reporter or opinion writer at the WaPo who is openly to the right of Trotsky or Whoopi Goldberg?

Those cancellations could be a loss of maybe $30 million per year on top of the $77 million annual deficit Bezos is currently paying out of pocket to fund these ingrates. And some have even vowed to stop using Amazon.com!

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ZMan discusses current politics in the “Coffee and a Mike” podcast.