May 23, 2025

GLEICHSCHALTUNG: House budget bill effectively halts US clean energy boom. “The House budget bill that narrowly passed in an early morning vote on Thursday would effectively put the brakes on a clean energy production boom in the United States spurred by subsidies enacted in 2022.”

Here’s a tip for Reuters: It’s not a boom if it’s financed by tax dollars and summoned into existence by mandates. It’s just another boondoggle.

Posted at 10:42 am by Stephen Green 0

THIS IS CNN: CNN Knows the Real Important Story About the Ongoing Jihad Against Jews in the US: Whatever We Do, We Must Declare That Leftists Calling for “Intifida” Are Absolved from Blame.

The leftwing media has argued for a clampdown on rightist rhetoric claiming that it’s “stochastic terrorism.” The idea is that right is “demonizing” some people and thereby increasing the odds that an unhinged person will take the rhetoric as a “permission slip” to shoot the people right-wing people are criticizing.

Viva Frei talks about the left’s endless discussion of “stochastic terrorism” — until a fellow leftwinger cashes in their “permission slip” to shoot up a Republican softball team, in which case stochastic terrorism doesn’t exist and is all just Russian Disinformation, Bigot.

Drew Holden has a question. Given that a left-wing assassin just gunned down two young, beautiful, completely-innocent people by shouting “Intifada!” and “Free Palestine,” where are the screaming headlines about Stochastic Terrorism today?

* * * * * * * *

Norm Macdonald, call your office!

 

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll 21

THE PRESS CRIBS FROM THE BIDEN PLAYBOOK WHICH WAS CRIBBED FROM THE OBAMA PLAYBOOK WHICH IS ’60S RADICALISM IN A NICE SUIT:

Related:

Posted at 9:51 am by Stephen Green 51

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is ADHD an excuse for punching classmate and a teacher?

“New York City’s public schools routinely flout federal rules designed to prevent schools from removing children from class for long periods due to behavior related to their disabilities, reports a Chalkbeat investigation. If Tristan’s disability had been considered a factor in the fight, the hearing office ruled, he could have been suspended for only one week.

Students with disabilities are far more likely to be suspended than non-disabled peers. In part, that’s because behavioral and emotional issues such as oppositional defiant disorder are disabilities.

The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires schools to educate disabled students with non-disabled students when possible, writes Zimmerman. If a student’s misbehavior is related to a disability, “the student is supposed to return to class immediately, and the school is required to conduct a behavior assessment.” There are exceptions for “extreme violence, drugs, or weapons possession.”

How does that promote the education of the vast majority of kids without behavioral issues?

Posted at 9:40 am by Stephen Green 58

EDUCATION POLICY:

I love the people who think Harvard should suffer no penalty for blatant violations of civil rights laws just because it’s Harvard. You can throw the book at those redneck bible-thumpers at Bob Jones University, but Hahhvahhd is a Title of Nobility and above the rules for the lower orders.

Posted at 9:35 am by Glenn Reynolds 136

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Here’s Hoping Trump Crushes the Intifada and Its Enablers in Academia. “Leftists rally around slogans and talking points, largely because their mobs are comprised of easily-manipulated simpletons who need pithy phrases to achieve peak frenzy. They’re also incurious and easy prey for propagandists. All of this came together and led to the tragedy in Washington, D.C.”

Posted at 9:09 am by Stephen Green 30

“ANTI-WAR” SURE SEEMS TO MEAN “PRO-MURDER”:

Or, “Not anti-war, just on the other side,” to coin an Insta-phrase.

Posted at 8:52 am by Stephen Green 143

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: ATF Issues a Statement Announcing That It Has Ushered In a ‘New Era of Reform.’ “The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is ushering in a new chapter—marked by transparency, accountability, and partnership with the firearms industry. This is not the same ATF of the last four years. We are fundamentally changing course with a renewed focus on rebuilding trust with federal firearms licensees (FFLs), gun owners, and the public by prioritizing public safety and collaboration.”

Much more at the link.

Posted at 8:38 am by Stephen Green 74

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Contact lenses let you see in the dark, even with eyes closed.

In a development worthy of a Bond film, Chinese scientists have invented contact lenses that allow a wearer to see in the dark — even when their eyes are shut.

The lenses have enabled users to detect infrared light, a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum usually invisible to the human eye.

Unlike bulky night-vision goggles, which also pick up infrared, they do not require power from batteries. Instead, tiny nanoparticles are embedded into a type of flexible, transparent polymer material already used for conventional contact lenses.

The particles absorb infrared light and convert it to red, blue and green wavelengths, which the human eye can see.

“Our research opens up the potential for non-invasive wearable devices to give people super-vision,” said Professor Tian Xue of the University of Science and Technology of China.

In a paper published in the journal Cell, he and his colleagues suggest that the contact lenses could, with further refinement, be useful not only for night vision but also in foggy or dusty conditions, because infrared penetrates to a greater degree than visible light.

In trials, the lenses were sensitive to low intensity infrared emitted by LEDs. The light they detect sits just beyond the range of human vision, in what’s known as the near-infrared spectrum. Anything that reflects near-infrared, such as landscapes or people, could potentially be made visible.

For now, however, image sharpness limits their usefulness for night vision. Because the lenses sit so close to the retina, fine detail is blurred. To compensate, the team has also made a pair of glasses that harness the same technique, offering a crisper view.

Making the lenses responsive enough to pick up the low levels of infrared that occur naturally at nighttime is another challenge, though this could possibly be overcome by using a lamp to bathe an area in infrared light.

“In the future, by working together with materials scientists and optical experts we hope to make a contact lens with more precise spatial resolution and higher sensitivity,” Xue said.

Geordi La Forge smiles. I wore contact lenses for most of the 1980s, but I think I’m going to hold off a bit though before I put nanoparticles developed by CCP scientists directly in front of my eyeballs.

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll 41

THIS SEEMS RIGHT:

Posted at 8:34 am by Glenn Reynolds 42

PUBLIC SAFETY, YOU’RE REALLY DOING IT WRONG: Former Los Angeles deputy mayor pleads guilty to threatening to bomb City Hall.

The former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor of Public Safety, Brian Williams, pleaded guilty on Thursday to threatening to bomb City Hall.

The Department of Justice announced that Williams, 61, of Pasadena, has been charged with a felony count that carries a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison.

Williams made the threat on Oct. 3, 2024, while he was in office. According to the DOJ’s release, Williams crafted the threat to appear as if it came from an unknown man who was “tired of the city support of Israel, and has decided to place a bomb in City Hall.”

It started while Williams was in an online meeting that day with “multiple people in connection with his official duties,” the release detailed.

During the meeting, Williams picked up an incoming call on his city-issued phone, excused himself and called the L.A. Police Department’s Chief of Staff.

In the conversation with the LAPD chief, Williams said he had just received a call from an unknown man who was threatening to bomb L.A. City Hall.

However, detectives uncovered that what had really happened was that while he was in his online meeting, Williams used the Google Voice application on his personal phone to place a call to his work phone, meaning Williams crafted the actual threat.

Of course, in the event of an actual explosion…:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll 36

NOAH ROTHMAN: A Clockwork Blue: How the Left Has Come to Excuse Away and Embrace Political Violence.

In our day, the notion of the clarifying and cleansing power of violence has become a key element of activist thinking on college campuses, as embodied not by ignorant young students but by advanced-degreed teachers. George Washington University lecturer Jessica Krug made a name for herself by justifying child murder in the name of anti-colonialism (before being drummed out of the public square for claiming falsely to be African-American). The 2018 slaughter of 15-year-old Lesandro “Junior” Guzman-Feliz by a machete-wielding Dominican gang in New York City might have been ugly, Krug conceded. But it was also reminiscent of revolutionary reversals like the South African practice of “necklacing,” in which collaborators with the apartheid government had their necks fitted with a rubber tire filled with gasoline that was then set alight. “That kind of violence toward people who are collaborating, or who are working against their communities,” Krug said, “we have to consider a radical moment in 2018 in which people are using machetes to hack apart a 15-year-old boy who’s working with the police.”

Down in South Carolina, Clemson University professor Bart Knijnenburg declared, “I admire anyone who stands up against white supremacy, violent or non-violent” during the “Punch Nazis” craze. Over in Ohio, Oberlin assistant professor Jenny Garcia observed that “protests, even when there is violence, right, can make it a more salient issue and provide greater pressure on elected officials and candidates.” She went on: “When we see the destruction of buildings, when we see violence—either by police or by protesters themselves—we actually see greater response by elected officials.” Former Texas A&M associate professor of philosophy Tommy Curry dispensed with all the high-flown euphemisms and got right down to business. “In order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die,” he mused.

This intellectual environment is profoundly redolent of the one in which the violent radicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s were steeped. Terrorist groups like Weather Underground, the FALN, and the Black and Symbionese Liberation Armies—organizations that engaged in targeted assassinations and thousands of domestic bombings from the late 1960s through the late 1970s—immersed their members in revolutionary literature to help their followers think of actual people as abstractions, the better to disengage their emotions from the maiming and killing they were pursuing.

In his chronicle of the Students for a Democratic Society and its devolution into a variety of factions, Kirkpatrick Sale identified the psychological predisposition that had radicalized so many of the SDS members. “There was a primary sense, begun by no more than a reading of the morning papers and developed through the new perspectives and new analyses available to the Movement now, that the evils in America were the evils of America, inextricably a part of the total system,” he wrote. “Clearly, something drastic would be necessary to eradicate those evils and alter that system.”

This explanation is as true of today’s left as it was of the left when it was written in 1973. Just as 1960s and 1970s liberals came to echo revolutionary rhetoric that contributed to the foul atmosphere in the country rather than looking to stem the passions and cool the national temperature, so too do today’s liberals make common cause with those who believe the American system is delegitimizing itself.

Read the whole thing.

Flashback: Jon Gabriel last year: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.'”

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll 61

COMPANY TIME: Microsoft bars employees from using words ‘Palestine,’ ‘Gaza’ and ‘genocide’ in internal emails.

Microsoft has barred its employees from using the words “Palestine,” “Gaza” or “genocide” in its internal email system as the tech giant looks to crack down on unrest within its ranks following protests of the company’s ties to Israel.

The company has quietly implemented a filter on its internal Exchange email system that blocks messages containing the politically charged words without notifying the sender or recipient, according to a report by Dropsite News.

“Sending unsolicited email to large numbers of employees at work is not appropriate,” a Microsoft spokesperson told The Post.

And criticizing your employer to large numbers of employees isn’t very smart.

Posted at 7:36 am by Stephen Green 28

GOVERNOR DEATH: Don’t Forget What Cuomo Did To Your Grandparents. “Well, while families were forced to celebrate birthdays and holidays from the parking lot or on the other side of the windows, state governments, like New York under Cuomo’s reign, were placing Covid-positive patients from the hospital into local nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and other adult care homes. Cuomo sent a March 25, 2020, mandate forcing elderly care facilities to accept Covid-positive patients.”

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds 19