May 15, 2024
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Warren Smith Learns It’s Not Enough to Be Right.
A few months ago, a Massachusetts high school teacher named Warren Smith went viral for the following exchange with a student. In it, he helps the student understand why he’s been thinking about J.K. Rowling all wrong. She’s not a “transphobe” for knowing how chromosomes work.
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I suspect there was no conversation when they fired him, because they knew he would talk them out of it.
So now this excellent teacher is out of a job for making students think instead of riot. I hope he lands on his feet. He seems like a decent guy. He’s certainly handling this a lot better than I would.
If J.K. Rowling really wants to change things, she should start her own school. A real-life Hogwarts. Except instead of teaching magic, it teaches young people how to think. Staff it with people like Warren Smith.
You don’t need magic when you’ve got logic and reason.
It’s Jim Treacher, so read the whole thing.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Drowning deaths rise in U.S. after decades of declines.
JOHN NOLTE: Democrat-Run California About to Get Hit with 50 Cent per Gallon Gas Tax.
In today’s edition of Getting What You Vote For, the dummies in California are about to get hit with a 50 cent per gallon gas tax.
Remember, California voters have handed the Democrat party full power over the former Golden State. Democrats run everything from the governorship on down. Democrats not only hold majorities in the state legislature, they hold veto-proof majorities. In other words…
Republicans are powerless in California. And so…
According to Triple-A, the average cost of a gallon of gas in California today is $5.29. That’s nearly $1.70 more than the national average. In some parts of California, gas costs $6.32 per gallon. The lowest cost for a gallon of gas in that Democrat-run shithole is $5.02.
Now add 50 cents to those prices.
Tee hee.
Throw in “road diets,” banning gas stations, and some of the worst roads in the country, and it all adds up to California drivers continuing to get it gooder and harder.
HERE WE (DON’T) GO AGAIN? ANOTHER Tech Problem? Is Boeing’s Starliner Ever Going to Fly?
GLOBAL BABY BUST UPDATE: What Is Causing This? “Demographic Winter Is Coming” As Fertility Rates Plummet All Over The Globe. “There are about 8 billion people living on our planet today. But it won’t stay that way for long.”
The ruling class wants it this way, but they don’t have our best interests at heart.
Flashback: ‘The Population Bomb’ was wrong: The world now struggling to make more babies.
Plus: The Global Fertility Collapse.
2006 flashback: The Parent Trap.
Related: Montesquieu’s Warning About Our Childlessness.
Also: car seats as contraception: “Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.”
And: How China’s baby bust can help birth a second American Century.
BYRON YORK: Trump faces troubles but Biden campaign is dead in the water.
The story set off a mass freakout in the Democratic Party. A Biden Justice Department-appointed prosecutor had indicted former President Donald Trump twice and Democratic prosecutors in New York and Georgia had indicted Trump two more times — and the former president was still leading President Joe Biden in the most important 2024 states. How could that be? The poll led to an unusually intense round of the usual fretting over Biden’s age, the state of the economy, the border, and the rest of the president’s liabilities.
Fast-forward six months to May 13, 2024 — yesterday. The New York Times published a story headlined, “Trump Leads in 5 Key States, as Young and Nonwhite Voters Express Discontent With Biden.” A new poll showed Biden trailing in the same states by nearly the same margin as the old poll. Compare this sentence with the one from six months ago: “The surveys … found that Mr. Trump was ahead of Mr. Biden in five of six key states: Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden led among registered voters in only one battleground state, Wisconsin.”
Think about it. In the past six months, Biden has traveled the country, touting what he believes are his economic accomplishments. He has spent zillions of dollars on advertising, focusing specifically on the key states. And at the same time, Trump was either preparing to go on trial or, since April 15, actually on trial in New York, facing a maximum of 136 years in prison. And Biden is still unable to catch Trump.
The American people don’t like seeing their justice system twisted for political purposes.
Still… don’t get cocky.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Women on Bumble No Longer Have to Make The First Move. “Bumble received feedback from women who found that making the first move was ‘a lot of work’ or ‘a burden.'”
Do tell!
DON SURBER: How America came to hate FJB — Inflation, immigration, Afghanistan and Trump have done him in.
People forget that before there were chants of FJB, he was pretty popular. He had a plus 23 rating on job approval as his presidency began and six months later he was at plus 9.6, a very respectable score. Trump was never anywhere close to 9.6 — even on his inauguration day.
Biden was the most unknown president since William Howard Taft to the American people. Most people knew two things about Biden: 1) he was Obama’s VP and 2) he wasn’t Donald Trump. Three years ago, Americans saw No. 2 as a good thing. . . .
His haphazard surrender of Afghanistan did him in. The public saw that he left behind billions of dollars worth of military equipment in a manner reminiscent of Vietnam, a war that helped catapult him into the Senate as a peacenik.
The difference in 2021 was Americans didn’t much care about Afghanistan because no one was drafted to fight it, the protests were few, and the feeling was that we had won. Ditching Afghanistan did him in.
College football crowds began chanting Fuck Joe Biden. This shocked me because college students are supposed to be socialist tools who just repeat whatever their pinko professors say. The media tried to ignore the chants but when the chants hit NASCAR, the media had to notice. Instead of telling the truth, they lied.
The lie backfired.
Everyone hates the press now.
MILTON FRIEDMAN ISN’T RUNNING THE SHOW ANY LONGER BUT HIS THEORIES STILL HOLD: Financial Times-Michigan Ross Poll Shows Biden’s Hopes Fall As Prices Rise.
CHANGE:
AstraZeneca withdrawn after admitting blood clots, Pfizer are settling cancer cases out of court and former CNN anchors are taking Ivermectin. "Where's your Conspiracy Theory Now?!"
— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) May 9, 2024
Cuomo did a 180° on ivermectin. So much so that he says he takes it daily now.
Do you believe him when he says he didn’t know?
How come he didn’t know but we did? 🤔
pic.twitter.com/Dhmq6KYnRl— Kat Kanada (@KatKanada_TM) May 11, 2024
I MEAN, I KNOW WHICH WAY TO BET: Is Michael Cohen Still Committing Perjury?
Related, from Jonathan Turley: “No sane prosecutor would rely on Cohen, let alone make him the entirety of their case.”
Plus: Fixer-Turned-Felon Michael Cohen Testifies At Show Trial.
ENRICO FERMI, CALL YOUR OFFICE: A Study Suggests We Found Potential Evidence of Dyson Spheres—and Alien Civilizations.
Finding such a star among the millions observed by star-gazing projects, such as the Gaia satellite, Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explore (WASE), and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), is even worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. But recently, two separate studies accepted the challenge, and came across more than a few compelling candidates.
The first study, led by Ph.D. student Matías Suazo at Uppsala University in Sweden, is actually the second paper relating to Project Hephaistos, which describes its mission as “searching for extraterrestrial intelligence using indirect signatures of astroengineering.” Looking at optical and infrared data from the aforementioned satellites, the team developed a comprehensive method for examining the data and identifying potential Dyson Spheres and their resulting technosignatures. The results were accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“This structure would emit waste heat in the form of mid-infrared radiation that, in addition to the level of completion of the structure, would depend on its effective temperature,” Suazo and his colleagues wrote in the paper. “A specialized pipeline has been developed to identify potential Dyson Sphere candidates focusing on detecting sources that display anomalous infrared excesses that cannot be attributed to any known natural source of such radiation.”
A civilization advanced enough to build a Dyson Sphere (or even “just” a Niven Ring) likely wouldn’t need anything from primitive Terrans — which might prove a saving grace.
RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: New York Mayor Adams Has the Perfect Job for Illegal Aliens (Except It’s So Cringe).
READER FAVORITE: Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet, 8” HD Display. #CommissionEarned
YOU DON’T SAY: Fed’s Powell says confidence that inflation will slow is ‘not as high’ as before.
Speaking during a panel discussion in Amsterdam, Powell said that recent inflation figures – which have come in higher than expected since the start of the year – suggest it will take longer than previously thought to attain the confidence needed to start loosening monetary policy.
“We did not expect this to be a smooth road, but these were higher than I think anybody expected,” he said. “What that has told us is that we will need to be patient and let restrictive policy do its work.”
What do you mean “we,” Kemo Sabe?
Powell can apply the brakes a bit with higher interest rates but he can’t do a damn thing about Washington’s neverending debt orgy.
SCENES FROM A GLOBAL STRUGGLE: Elites still command the strategic heights, but their power and prestige are slipping like water through their hands.
Especially the prestige. Being revealed as incompetent, lying, morons will do that.
THE MUSLIM MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA HAVE BEEN WAGING ETHNIC CLEANSING, VERGING ON GENOCIDE, AGAINST LOCAL CHRISTIANS AND JEWS FOR DECADES: Group Claims 8,200 Nigerian Christians Killed in 13 Months.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: BALEAF Men’s Sun Protection Shirts. #CommissionEarned
MAYBE NOT THE HEROES WE DESERVE BUT THE HEROES WE NEED: Is the Spring of Anti-Israel Riots Transforming Into Based Frat Boy Summer?
Anti-Israel protesters replaced the American flag on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s quad with a Palestinian flag on April 30. Police restored the American flag, and then about 30 members of the fraternity Pi Kappa Phi stood around the flag, defending it from anti-Israel protesters as they attempted to take it down again.
Videos of the brave frat boys spread online, and Americans cheered the patriotic young men.
Leaders from both sides of the aisle celebrated the fraternity brothers.
“Protecting the American flag is admirable,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of the young men’s actions. “It is not right to forcefully take down the American flag to replace it with another flag.”
When even the Biden White House is trying to get out in front of a story, no matter how personally distasteful some of them might find it, you know there’s a groundswell.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: KDJ’s Clown World Edition: As the Right Saves America, the Left Cancels Tinkerbell. “DEI pretends to care about placing minorities into jobs, but if you read my stuff, you know that its true goal is to bring in ‘DEI officers’ into every company and institution in the nation and push communism. And it’s falling apart.”
CORN, POPPED: Cuellar Aides Flip. “Having your bagman flip on you is never a good sign for beating a rap, so I’d say it’s already highly likely Cueller will be going from the House to the big house, especially since a third aide has flipped.”