Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says governments will need to spend $3 trillion every year to fight climate change. Bend over and open that wallet wide, here it comes again. Meanwhile, a new peer-reviewed study finds that carbon dioxide emissions now has zero impact on global warming because new CO2 falls out into more plants, because it’s what plants crave. In other words, burning fossil fuels simply converts toxic sludge—petroleum—into beautiful forests. Meaning, we’d spend $3 trillion a year for … fewer trees. Yellen’s $3 trillion hustle came at the Group of 20 finance leaders meeting in Brazil, where she’s currently spending your tax dollars promoting a Soviet-style takeover of the global economy in the name of climate. Hilariously, she frames that tax as the “biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.” If $3 trillion a year to dig holes and fill them with broken wind turbines and solar panels is the economic opportunity of the century, I’m having what Yellen is smoking. For perspective, $3 trillion is roughly 30 times what’s already being spent on crony handouts to green billionaires and activists—40% of which comes from so-called multilateral development banks that are funded by your tax dollars going through a Rube Goldberg machine so you can’t see it. Alas, Yellen is just a cog in a much bigger machine. The U.N. is demanding $150 trillion for the imaginary climate crisis—the most ambitious taxpayer fleecing since the Federal Reserve. That $150 trillion, it’s worth noting, is roughly half the accumulated wealth of the human race going back to Babylonia—whizzed away so we have less trees. So what’s next? Like most government programs, climate change has nothing to do with the alleged crisis. If it did, that CO2 study would be on every front page—after all, it means we’re out of the woods, the planet’s not doomed after all. Worth a headline or two. Instead, of course, crickets. That’s because climate is just the excuse. The actual goal is that $150 trillion Soviet takeover. They’ll do it with climate. They’ll do it with COVID-19. They’ll do it with war, if that’s what it takes. Of course, this is nothing new; the granddaddy of fake crises was World War I, fought allegedly over … Serbia. And even today it’s painted as just one big misunderstanding. In fact, the Deep State engineers of that war on both sides openly saw it as a way to install what they called “wartime socialism.” Murray Rothbard writes about this in “WWI as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals” at Mises.org. Then, as now, the left-wing media was only too happy to play along, ginning up a crisis to scare the plebs into handing over their liberties, their life savings and, of course, their lives measured in the millions. More than 100 years later, the excuses change, but the goal remains the same: the eternal battle between liberty and the monopolies of violence we call governments. Given former President Donald Trump’s skepticism toward global warming, this next election will be a stark choice on climate. But given the profits involved—half of humanity’s wealth—the battle will, alas, be permanent. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post $3 Trillion a Year for Nonexistent ‘Climate Crisis’? Seriously? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

“Official time” is an oxymoron that conveniently misleads federal taxpayers.    When federal employees are on “official time,” they’re not doing the jobs they were hired for. Instead, they’re released from their official duties and working for their union—all while getting their taxpayer-funded federal employee salaries and benefits. Some lawmakers believe this needs to stop. That’s why Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., propose a bill called the No Union Time on the Taxpayer’s Dime Act, which would end the practice of official time. Instead, under the Lee-Bishop bill introduced Tuesday, federal employees who want to work for their union would have to do so on their own time and would have to be paid by their union instead of taxpayers. The problem with so-called official time goes beyond taxpayer money being wasted on federal services that aren’t being delivered. In many cases, federal employees use official time to negotiate for things that directly contradict taxpayers’ interests, such as collective telework entitlements that reduce the quality of government services and legal representation to shield recalcitrant and destructive federal employees from disciplinary actions. Although the Trump-Pence administration tried to rein in official time—limiting it to no more than 25% of employees’ time—the Biden-Harris administration reversed those reforms. Taxpayers presumably once again pay some employees to spend 100% of their time working for their unions. I say presumably because the Biden-Harris administration removed the Office of Personnel Management’s webpage on official time, which had provided transparency for more than a decade on how many federal employees did work for their union instead of for taxpayers, and how much time they spent doing it. Although we no longer know how many federal employees use official time, or how much total time they’re using, the disappearing webpage doesn’t indicate that official time has declined. Data from the last year of the Obama administration in 2016 shows that federal employees spent 3.6 million hours—the equivalent of close to 2,000 full-time federal employees—on taxpayer-funded union time. Based on today’s average federal employee salary of $106,000 and another $56,500 in benefits, if federal employees performed as much official time in 2024 as they did in 2016 they would cost taxpayers over $321 million per year. And beyond the costs, when federal employees don’t perform their jobs it impedes the delivery of federal services. When nurses at the Veterans Administration spend 100% of their time working for their union and don’t treat a single patient, that hurts veterans. According to a Government Accountability Office report in 2017 that examined official time at the Department of Veterans Affairs, “a manager … interviewed said it can be especially challenging to find other staff to fill in for employees who are responsible for serving patients yet spend most of their work time on official time.” It’s time for the federal government to stop paying federal employees to do anything other than their jobs. The post How This Bill Would Stop Feds’ Union Time on Taxpayer’s Dime appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A new nonprofit organization has released a map revealing leftist groups spewing hate and inspiring violence, countering the narrative that all animus and political violence comes from the Right. The map aims to balance the notorious far-left bias of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy and creating a map to monitor Klan groups and others it claimed were fellow travelers. The SPLC’s “hate map” has since grown to include many mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits that have nothing to do with hate, much less white supremacy, yet the SPLC continues to claim the map shows the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy.” The New Tolerance Campaign, a nonprofit dedicated to applying equal standards of tolerance to balance the Left’s cancel culture, launched its own hate map to counter that narrative. “I can forgive the general public for thinking that hate and violence are exclusively the domain of the far Right—that’s the message they’ve been receiving for years from much of the mass media and the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Gregory Angelo, founder and president of the New Tolerance Campaign, told The Daily Signal. “The NTC Hate Map is designed to counter that narrative by showing the volume of hate promoted and perpetuated on the American Left. If we’re truly going to address all hate in the United States, we need to be honest about it.” The NTC Hate Map includes 184 organizations, as of Friday. “All of the organizations and individuals listed have promoted, inspired, or directly engaged in physical violence against those with whom they disagree,” the campaign’s webpage states. “This list was compiled through an extensive review of extremist group publications and materials, and reports by the public, law enforcement, field sources and the news media.” By giving the veneer of objectivity but focusing only on one side of the equation, the @splcenter allows hate on the left to go unmonitored and unchecked.That ends now.Today, the New Tolerance Campaign is launching https://t.co/4MzlkQxjfF. pic.twitter.com/TPWE9yIher— New Tolerance Campaign (@New_Tolerance) July 31, 2024 Angelo said he intends to build up the list, but the New Tolerance Campaign also maintains far more stringent rules than the SPLC. The SPLC’s 2023 “hate map” includes 1,430 organizations branded “hate groups” or “antigovernment groups.” The SPLC has faced criticism for employing a sticky definition of hate: The Southern Poverty Law Center defines a hate group as an organization or collection of individuals that —based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities—has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. An organization does not need to have engaged in criminal conduct or have followed their speech with actual unlawful action to be labeled a hate group. We do not list individuals as hate groups, only organizations. As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC applies this definition overly broadly against conservatives and far too narrowly for any group on the Left. Among other things, the SPLC has cited as “hate” a Roman Catholic leader’s decision to cite the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This suggests the SPLC should brand the entire Catholic Church a “hate group” if it were to be consistent. The SPLC branded an openly gay group an “anti-LGBTQ hate group” earlier this year because the gay group opposes the sexualization of children. Although the SPLC does include the antisemitic Nation of Islam on its “hate map,” the rioters with Antifa and Black Lives Matter or pro-abortion agitators with Jane’s Revenge don’t make an appearance. Students for Justice in Palestine, a notorious anti-Israel group that often engages in harassment of Jewish students on college campuses, is also conspicuously absent from the SPLC map. The NTC Hate Map may include less than a fifth of the number of groups as the SPLC’s map, but it manages to correct SPLC’s most egregious oversights. The map includes Black Lives Matter and Jane’s Revenge, along with 12 chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and 12 Antifa groups (including Portland’s infamous “Rose City Antifa”). Students for Justice in Palestine has over 250 chapters, so NTC chose which chapters to include by examining evidence of direct antisemitic attacks and violence. The campaign’s map also includes Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the organizations behind the anti-Israel riots on college campuses earlier this year, and the John Brown Gun Club, a leftist pro-gun group that frequently associates with Antifa, the anti-police movement, and other leftist causes. Perhaps most notably, the NTC Hate Map includes the Southern Poverty Law Center itself. A terrorist used the SPLC’s “hate map” to target a conservative Christian nonprofit for an attempted mass shooting in 2012. The man, convicted on terrorism charges, confessed to using SPLC’s map to target the Family Research Council. Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, a former SPLC employee said the organization’s “hate” accusations were a “highly profitable scam” to bilk donors. The SPLC has faced many defamation lawsuits over its accusations, and one of those lawsuits—brought by the Dustin Inman Society—has made it to the discovery process, heading toward trial. The NTC Hate Map may be new, but it already shows signs of beating the SPLC at its own game. The post New Hate Map Counters SPLC Narrative That Violence Is ‘Exclusively the Domain of the Far Right’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Media Burying Trump Assassination Attempt

Caught On Camera: Current Kamala Claptrap Is Still Craptastic

The smooth-hound shark (Mustelus mustelus) just proved that it can reproduce without sperm, producing multiple offspring with identical genes. It’s the first time recurrent parthenogenesis has been reported for the species, and broadens our knowledge of all the ways that exist in nature to cook up a baby solo.Parthenogenesis is sometimes referred to as “virgin birth” because it involves producing offspring from an egg without needing any sperm. There was a suspected case of parthenogenesis in a tank of female smooth-hound sharks at an aquarium in Italy (video below), and now a new paper has found genetic evidence that they can reproduce without sperm.  It’s thought to be what’s known as facultative parthenogenesis, describing an animal that can reproduce sexually as well as asexually. The drivers for going solo can vary, but a dip in the male population is thought to be one, which is why cases of parthenogenesis often arise (and are most noticeable in) captive environments.This new research took samples from captive sharks to examine their genetic markers, revealing that the juvenile M. mustelus tested were born through parthenogenesis. This was clear from the homozygosity seen at each genetic marker, which is consistent with an embryo developing from an egg – no male required.It’s a version of parthenogenesis called automixis where the egg can merge with cells called polar bodies, which are leftovers from the egg production process. This generates offspring that are similar to the mother but not exact clones, and they’re generally all female. Alternatively, parthenogenesis in plants can occur by apomixis, which involves reproductive cells duplicating their chromosomes via mitosis. In this case, offspring are genetically identical to their parent.  The study also revealed that parthenogenesis can occur annually in smooth-hound sharks, making it the first report of recurrent parthenogenesis. It also excluded the possibility that long-term sperm storage could explain where these babies were coming from, showing just how talented these female sharks are. “This study represents the first genetically verified instances of parthenogenesis in Mustelus mustelus from 2020 onwards,” concluded the study authors. “These occurrences appear to recur annually, alternating between two adult female sharks, a phenomenon reported previously in the oviparous species Stegostoma tigrinum as a facultative response in the absence of a mate.”Smooth-hound sharks now join a host of other critters who have shown that when the sperm count gets low, females can keep the population going all on their ones. To date, we’ve also seen parthenogenesis among California condors, Brazilian boas, zebra sharks, anacondas, and crocodiles – a finding that’s particularly eyebrow-raising and begs the question: could dinosaurs reproduce asexually? Bring on the archosaur clones.The study is published in Scientific Reports.

The animal world is full of what appear to be miracles: a Brazilian boa giving birth without being near another snake; fish that rain down from the sky; and who could forget the ferret that somehow survived a 100-minute cycle in a washing machine? There’s one group of birds, however, that likes to go for an old classic when it comes to miraculous behavior.Those birds are the jacanas. Their miracle? Walking on water, or at least seeming to do so, which has unsurprisingly earned them the nickname “Jesus birds”.Found in tropical regions of Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas, the various species of jacana make their homes in water anywhere from swamps and marshes to lakes and lagoons, appearing to effortlessly glide across them as they go about their birdy business.But sadly, there are no water walking-based miracles going on here – unless you consider physics and walking on vegetation to be a miracle, that is.They’re actually walking along lily pads (which has given them their other nickname: lily trotters) and other water vegetation floating on the water’s surface. These plants may well have a bit of a water on them, so at a glance, it looks as though a jacana really is walking on water.Still, if we attempted to walk over a lake by hopping between lily pads, it’d end in a quick trip underwater. How, then, are jacanas able to do it?Those toes would be 100,000 times more creepy if they weren't attached to a chick.Image credit: JMx Images/Shutterstock.comThe answer lies in their freakishly long toes, which allow them to spread their weight across the vegetation they’re walking on, stopping them from sinking. Readying them for a life on the water, jacanas have these big ol’ tootsies from birth, providing us with delightfully gangly, if a little Freddy Krueger-esque, fluffy chicks to look at.However, life is not all lily pads and larking about for baby jacanas – the waters below contain plenty of other animals that see them as tasty little snacks. Luckily, as the clip from PBS’s Nature shows below, dad is quickly there to the rescue. Male birds are able to scoop up their young beneath their wings and carry them a short distance away to safety. Though they don’t fly whilst doing so – jacanas aren’t the greatest of fliers, only spending short bouts of time up in the air – it’s still quite the spectacle.That’s because the chicks aren’t fully hidden; their lanky legs stick out below, which, if you didn’t know what was going on, actually looks reasonably terrifying.

In the British Museum sits an ancient marble relief that depicts two gladiators battling with swords and shields. It’s a familiar scene from ancient Rome bar one intriguing detail: both of the gladiators are female.The inscription about the marble relief, which was found in Halicarnassus, Turkey, reads that both gladiators fought to an honorable draw. So was this work of art a one-off, or were female gladiators in ancient Rome commonplace?Female gladiators in ancient Rome: The evidenceTrying to understand cultures from which we are so far removed always sees scientists stumble upon a myriad of familiar obstacles. We’re burdened with the expectations of modern life, and so struggle to interpret evidence through anything other than the lens of today’s status quo. However, when it comes to female gladiators, there is some intriguing evidence to work from.The marble relief mentioned above is perhaps one of the clearest depictions of female gladiators in ancient Rome. A ~2,000-year-old bronze statue is also believed to depict a female gladiator, but that wasn’t the original interpretation of the artifact.Now housed at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, the small statue was traditionally considered to represent a female athlete holding a strigil – an instrument with a curved blade used to clean the skin by scraping off dirt and sweat. However, in a 2011 paper, Alfonso Manas of the University of Granada suggests this statue actually depicts a female gladiator, “more specifically a thraex, a gladiatorial type that fought with a short-curved dagger, a weapon that to the untrained eye can be confused with a strigil.”According to Manas, 10 literary fragments and one epigraphic inscription are all we have in the way of written evidence that speaks of female gladiators, so you can see why it’s a tricky picture to piece together.A marble relief at the British Museum depicting two female gladiators without helmets.Image credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0The role of female gladiatorsWhile we celebrate the Gladiators on TV today, the social standing of gladiators in ancient Rome was quite different. To fight or perform in an arena for the entertainment of the masses was considered a lowly position, so you can imagine the shame thrust upon any woman who wanted to enter the ring. As put best by the Roman satirist Juvenal:"What sense of shame can be found in a woman wearing a helmet, who shuns femininity and loves brute force....If an auction is held of your wife's effects, how proud you will be of her belt and arm-pads and plumes, and her half-length left-leg shin-guard! Or, if instead, she prefers a different form of combat [as a Thraex, both of whose legs were protected], how pleased you'll be when the girl of your heart sells off her greaves!....Hear her grunt while she practises thrusts as shown by the trainer, wilting under the weight of the helmet."While female gladiators were rare compared to their male counterparts, they did exist and were cut from all kinds of cloth, from the lowly to the high-born. As for why they felt compelled to battle when such an activity was received with criticism, it seems – as Lady Gaga put it – they may have lived for the applause.“Women who chose a life in the arena – and it does seem this was a choice – may have been motivated by a desire for independence, a chance at fame, and financial rewards including remission of debt,” explained Content Director of World History Encyclopedia Joshua Mark. “Although it seems a woman gave up any claim to respectability as soon as she entered the arena, there is some evidence to suggest that female gladiators were honored as highly as their male counterparts.”The mission continues to piece together the no-doubt rich history of ancient Rome's female warriors from the scant evidence we have available to us, and while we wait to find some more, we’ll always have that Pepsi advert.

A titanium heart sounds like something made for the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz – but for the first time, on the July 9, it was implanted in a patient.The implantation of a total artificial heart (TAH) is a proposed solution to help people with heart failure who need a heart transplant. Heart failure affected 6.7 million people in the US alone between 2017 and 2020, but in 2021 only 3,817 heart transplantations were performed. Currently, TAH implantation is seen as a bridge to heart transplant in severe cases of heart failure.BiVACOR’s titanium heart is a new type of TAH. Australian by design, it was approved to be tested in five human patients in an Early Feasibility Study in the USA. The first of those patients was implanted on July 9 and lived with the device for 8 days, until it was replaced with a donor heart.“This is an amazing advancement as the BiVACOR TAH may offer hope for countless patients who suffer from end-stage heart failure. This device may serve as a life-saving bridge to a heart transplant; future studies may prove its potential as a long-term pump that can effectively serve as a total replacement for a patient’s heart,” Dr Alexis Shafii, Surgical Director of Heart Transplantation at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center and Associate Professor of Surgery, Cardiothoracic Transplant & Circulatory Support at Baylor College of Medicine, explained in a statement. The titanium heart, like yours, has two ventricles. One sends blood to the lungs (pulmonary circulation) and the other sends it to the rest of your body (systemic circulation). But unlike yours, this heart doesn’t beat. It spins.The blood flows through the titanium heart, pushed by a rotating impeller that uses MAGLEV: magnetic levitation. That’s the same technology that made a train fly by at 603 kilometers per hour (374.69 miles per hour) in Japan in 2015. Maglev reduces the risk of mechanical wear and minimizes blood trauma. The TAH comes with a controller and battery that the patient would carry with them. BiVACOR says that the TAH is up to handling adult male patients engaging in physical exercise. Settings can also be adjusted to provide pulsatile, instead of continuous flow, to mimic the flow from a beating heart.While this first BiVACOR patient wore it for only 8 days, the device has been implanted for longer periods of time in animals - including for a month in a cohort of calves. The device has also been running error free for four years and counting on a benchtop.It is not the first total artificial heart, though. SynCardia was approved by the FDA in 2004 and has been implanted in more than 1,400 patients, even allowing them to go home while they wait for a donor heart.However, 12 percent of patients with SynCardia were reported to have strokes, and 14 percent experienced thrombotic events. The Maglev in BiVACOR hopes to reduce these risks. SynCardia is also quite large compared to BiVACOR, which resembles a human heart, and the materials it is made of are less durable. BiVACOR is made of titanium, which is already commonly used for orthopedic implants. Titanium readily oxidizes, creating a biologically inert film that coats the device protecting it from any biological reactions from the body.“The BiVACOR TAH represents a paradigm shift in artificial heart design” according to the BiVACOR website.

On Thursday’s The Faulkner Focus, Fox News host Harris Faulkner offered her first public reactions to the wild National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Convention panel she participated in that was hijacked by far-left reporters Rachel Scott of ABC and Kadia Goba of Semafor sparring with former President Trump.     Faulkner didn’t mention them by name, but she didn’t have to in voicing her displeasure with how it went: [T]he former President sat for what was supposed to be a really wide ranging interview with three journalists. I was one of them at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention. It was an interesting tip-off. It started acrimoniously and it — it was very emotional. Things got pretty fiery as we went on. As you know me, I leaned in with the questions that, I think, matter to journalists, so we’ll — we’ll talk about that. After a break, Faulkner said the forum “took a hostile turn before [she] could even ask one question” as “the journalist to his right” (i.e. Scott) “leaned in with this”, giving way to portions of Scott’s first two questions and Trump answers (which can be seen in full below): Here's the full exchange on the insane first question at the #NABJ convention by ABC's Rachel Scott.... Scott: "I want to start by addressing elephant in the room, sir. A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today. You have pushed false claims about… pic.twitter.com/qU5b5K8EBH — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 31, 2024   ABC’s Rachel Scott: “If we can move on now to the state of the race, sir, I want to get back to the campaign. Senator J.D. Vance is your running mate. He's had a lot of controversy lately, and I want to read you a few things that he has said in the past. He said the Democrats… pic.twitter.com/VpYwvgdNoD — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 31, 2024 Faulkner acknowledged “race is a tough issue” and “it doesn’t matter when it comes up and when there’s emotion mixed in,” things become “even tougher.” “I was really glad I was there to witness it because right from the get, it was not what it should have been,” she added. After noting the evasiveness from Vice President Harris’s team and soundbites of both Harris and Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre denouncing Trump’s comments at the panel about Harris’s racial identity. Moments after Faulkner uttered a “wow”, she brought in Trump 2024 campaign official Caroline Sunshine, who thanked her for “actually doing your job as a journalist rather than deciding to play commentator like the other woman on that stage, who should have honored her profession but instead took the opportunity to play commentator, which was a disservice to that audience.” Sunshine went onto say Trump sparring with Scott “was a master class...in how you fight, fight, fight and tell the truth and yet another textbook case study in how the mainstream media’s liberal bias plays out.” Before moving onto a question she didn’t receive a straight answer from at the forum, Faulkner added further tea on what was going on behind the scenes: The President walked into a situation where people had already expressed they wished the NABJ had canceled him. Then, some of those same people showed up for the forum and didn’t move out of the seats. So, he did what you said. He showed up. And he was trying to be an honest broker in that position. There were a lot of technical — I’ll call them shenanigans cause we don’t really know what was going on. I could hear very little of what he said. He could hear very little of what I said. I want to put that out there. To see the relevant FNC transcript from August 1, click here.