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'The truth is important'

'White washes J.D. Vance'

Someone at the Olympics gets off on domestic violence

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.