In the Evie Magazine article that Kira attached to the tweet, a 13-year old discusses why this push to get her vaccinated is, well… creepy. And unnecessary.

Out of the mouth of babes:

The conversation on vaccines has also become very tense. Don’t get me wrong, it’s always been like this (usually with one side being shut down and degraded more quickly), but questioning the new vaccine and its safety has become a fury-switch for many, almost in disbelief that some may have the “audacity” to be concerned. If you go to any government or medical site, they will tell you that the vaccine is “mostly”safe, and even though this is usually just a legal precaution, some people don’t want to take their chances with “mostly” – especially when they’re naturally built to fight it. Should we really be pressuring people to take chances for things they don’t want (and probably don’t even need)?

Oh, but what about sex? Well, there’s an app for that. Another byproduct of modernity is the widespread feminist ideal of “sexual liberation” which, in truth, actually made the sexual value of women decrease by leaps and bounds. If Girl A won’t give it up then Girl B probably will, and technology has made finding her easy.

It’s the perfect recipe for bachelorhood. A man can avoid marriage, keep his money, save himself the stress, have more time to accomplish goals, and avoid involving himself in the crushing weight of emotional slavery.

The solution to the problem is easier said than done. We’ll need a complete societal rework of how women and men are raised as well as portrayed. Men not only need to be taught how to treat a woman but how to be treated and what to expect in order to achieve a solid, stable relationship. Women should, likewise, be taught how to treat a man as well as what to expect.

We also need to leave behind the idea that men and women are the same. We’re not. Everything from our brain function to our bodies is built differently. More accurately, we’re built for different tasks. From the way we process information to the way we interact with the physical world, we are two different entities that belong to the same species.

We should be taught to be mutually beneficial to one another in our own capacities as men and women, not fall prey to these modern ideas. Women shouldn’t be taught that in order to be happy, they must be childless go-getting ball-busters and not waste their life and potential on marriage and children where they become subservient to men. It’s a narrative that sells well in youth but breaks down quickly as women get older, desire children, and wish to leave the workplace to do it.

Men want to feel welcome in their own relationships. Right now, they aren’t. They feel like passengers, or maybe even more accurately, chauffeurs. If women want men to marry them, then women will have to become marriage material and that means leaving behind the mainstream pop-philosophy and looking into the idea that maybe the feminists were wrong. So very, very wrong.

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch sued the top three insulin manufacturers, saying they were increasing the price of the drug, in some cases nearly 1000%. //

Congress has tried several times over recent years to get the price of insulin down, but failure to do so led the Trump administration to a rules change that would have made it easier for patients in rural communities to have access to insulin and other drugs at lower costs. That rule was paused by the Biden administration in January, and earlier this month the White House upheld the decision to scrap it.

All of this comes at the same time as Chuck Grassley and Ron Wyden spearhead an effort to raise before Congress the issue of the surging insulin prices. Grassley and Wyden released a report that “sheds light on factors that led to the surging list price of insulin—a drug that’s been available for almost a century—which has doubled or in some cases tripled in just the past decade, and provides new insight into how the opaque business practices of pharmaceutical manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) impact patients, Medicare Part D, and private health plans.” //

Why the Biden administration would scrap a rule that would make the drug cheaper for Americans is a mystery, but the effect could be catastrophic for patients across the country. The companies in question are now ignoring the ceiling prices that were originally established under rule 340b in what appears to be a violation of the law and would result in several highly inconvenient changes for patients across the country.

When state and local officials decline to help enforce federal firearm rules they view as unconstitutional, The New York Times says, they are adopting “a legally shaky but politically potent strategy” with racist roots.

But when state and local officials decline to help enforce federal immigration rules they view as “unjust, self-defeating and harmful to public safety,” the Times says, they should be “proud” of “choos[ing] not to participate in deportation crackdowns.”

That blatant double standard illustrates how policy preferences and partisan allegiances color people’s views of federalism, which they tend to endorse when it serves their purposes and reject when it doesn’t. But as Missouri Gov. Mike Parson and Attorney General Eric Schmitt recently observed while defending that state’s Second Amendment Preservation Act, “you cannot have it both ways.”

…

Contrary to what the Times reported, that policy is not “legally shaky.” It relies on the well-established anti-commandeering doctrine, which says the federal government cannot compel state and local officials to enforce its criminal laws or regulatory schemes.

That doctrine is rooted in the basic design of our government, which limits Congress to a short list of specifically enumerated powers and leaves the rest to the states or the people, as the 10th Amendment makes clear. That division of powers gives states wide discretion to experiment with different policies, some of which are bound to offend the Times.

The paper suggests that defending state autonomy is disreputable, because that argument was “deployed in the past in the South to resist antislavery and civil rights laws.” But federalism does not give states a license to violate rights guaranteed by the Constitution or to flout laws authorized by it.

Hirono’s philosophy when it comes to judges is on full display. She attempts to assert that gay marriage would not have been legalized had judges followed “originalism.” Now, I’m not sure of the legal merits of that claim (as far as whether originalism was a deterrent instead of other factors) but it’s a blatant admission that she wants her judges to be partisans who legislate from the bench. In fact, it’s an admission she wants her judges to have no limiting principles whatsoever. Call it the “wise Latina” standard set by Justice Sotomayor, who is very open about the fact that she rules based on the idea of “justice” and impact instead of what the law actually says.

Hirono, in this case, gets very angry when Cruz points out her ridiculous notion, claiming that he was “mansplaining” to her. It’s one of the more cringe moments in the video, akin to your grandmother trying to sing rap lyrics. Cruz then ties her in knots by asking her to note exactly what he mischaracterized about her silly rant.

Gov. Abbott should (a) mobilize the Texas National Guard, who are under his exclusive, lawful authority; (b) authorize the Texas State Police and Texas Rangers to recruit and augment as necessary their forces, including the employment of qualified volunteer auxiliary deputies; (c) encourage all Sheriffs throughout the State to do likewise; (d) secure from the legislature the requisite funding/reimbursement; and (e) establish a nimble command structure to lead, manage, administer, organize, and deploy these forces as may be required to STOP the illegal invasion, drug trafficking, slave trafficking, and other smuggling into and across Texas.

Texans would rally to such a “long roll of the drums” in amazing numbers.

Properly led, they would END this assault on their state that is being aided and abetted by a lawless regime in Washington, DC. //

Furthermore, Arizona could do the same, as could New Mexico and California – though, admittedly, the latter two suffer poor leadership and probably would not engage.

However, the additional State forces deployed in Texas and Arizona would enable the federal US Customs and Border protection forces to shift assets from Texas and Arizona to California and New Mexico.

In addition to all of the above, Texas and Arizona could invite other States to send volunteers … as in 1836 … and as Florida Governor DeSantis is now offering. And invite other individual Americans to come to their aid, e.g., those vetted as law-abiding citizens in good standing, and who are law enforcement and/or military veterans.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)’s official projections assert that “large amounts of annual waste are anticipated by the early 2030s” and could total 78 million tonnes by the year 2050. That’s a staggering amount, undoubtedly. But with so many years to prepare, it describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat. The threat is hidden by the fact that IRENA’s predictions are premised upon customers keeping their panels in place for the entirety of their 30-year lifecycle. They do not account for the possibility of widespread early replacement.

Our research does. Using real U.S. data, we modeled the incentives affecting consumers’ decisions whether to replace under various scenarios. We surmised that three variables were particularly salient in determining replacement decisions: installation price, compensation rate (i.e., the going rate for solar energy sold to the grid), and module efficiency. If the cost of trading up is low enough, and the efficiency and compensation rate are high enough, we posit that rational consumers will make the switch, regardless of whether their existing panels have lived out a full 30 years. //

If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model, they can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than IRENA anticipates. That figure translates to around 315,000 metric tonnes of waste, based on an estimate of 90 tonnes per MW weight-to-power ratio.

Alarming as they are, these stats may not do full justice to the crisis, as our analysis is restricted to residential installations. With commercial and industrial panels added to the picture, the scale of replacements could be much, much larger. //

The industry’s current circular capacity is woefully unprepared for the deluge of waste that is likely to come. The financial incentive to invest in recycling has never been very strong in solar. While panels contain small amounts of valuable materials such as silver, they are mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material. The long lifespan of solar panels also serves to disincentivize innovation in this area.

As a result, solar’s production boom has left its recycling infrastructure in the dust. To give you some indication, First Solar is the sole U.S. panel manufacturer we know of with an up-and-running recycling initiative, which only applies to the company’s own products at a global capacity of two million panels per year. With the current capacity, it costs an estimated $20-30 to recycle one panel. Sending that same panel to a landfill would cost a mere $1-2. //

The same problem is looming for other renewable-energy technologies. For example, barring a major increase in processing capability, experts expect that more than 720,000 tons worth of gargantuan wind turbine blades will end up in U.S. landfills over the next 20 years. //

Compared with all we stand to gain or lose, the four decades or so it will likely take for the economics of solar to stabilize to the point that consumers won’t feel compelled to cut short the lifecycle of their panels seems decidedly small. But that lofty purpose doesn’t make the shift to renewable energy any easier in reality. Of all sectors, sustainable technology can least afford to be short-sighted about the waste it creates. A strategy for entering the circular economy is absolutely essential — and the sooner, the better.

Background checks blocked nearly twice as many gun sales in 2020 as in the year before, FBI numbers provided to The Associated Press show. About 42% of those denials were because the would-be buyers had felony convictions on their records.

The number of people stopped from buying guns through the U.S. background check system hit an all-time high of more than 300,000 last year amid a surge of firearm sales, according to new records obtained by the group Everytown for Gun Safety.

Denial data is released by the FBI, but the information collected by Everytown breaks it down by year and includes data from states such as California and Florida, which conduct their own background checks. //

However, let’s also remember that there were almost 40 million NICS checks conducted in 2020. That was almost a third more than in 2019, which wasn’t a bad year for NICS checks by any stretch of the imagination. Now, many of those weren’t for firearm purchases, but a lot of them were.

What’s So Important About 1 County?

Arizona was key to Biden’s victory in 2020. A Washington Post analysis showed that flipping 43,000 votes across three states—Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—likely would have changed the outcome of the presidential contest.

Without carrying Maricopa County by a significant margin, Biden would not have carried Arizona.

Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county and second-largest voting jurisdiction, was key to Biden’s victory in traditionally Republican-leaning Arizona. The county has 4.4 million residents; the county seat is also the state capital, Phoenix.

In 2016, Maricopa County narrowly went for Trump in 2016 over Democrat Hillary Clinton. In 2020, it went for Biden over Trump by a significant amount.

Trump increased his vote total in Maricopa by almost 250,000 votes compared with four years earlier. However, Biden’s vote tally exceeded Clinton’s performance by about 337,000, according to research by the Foundation for Government Accountability.

New York Post columnist Miranda Devine ran a bombshell of a column late yesterday — an excerpt from her book to be published in September about the contents of Hunter’s laptop computer.

The title of the book is “Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide.”

Reflecting on the Jim Crow era, Cruz noted that “Jim Crow legislation was grotesque and ugly” before lowering the boom on Democrats, reminding them as to the specifics of who passed the legislation, why it was passed, and how the “For the People” act – which Cruz described as the “Corrupt Politicians” act, was a modern-day version of it – also written by Democrats and designed to keep them in power.

Jim Crow laws were the type of “legislation that was drafted without exception by Democratic politicians,” Cruz correctly pointed out. “Jim Crow was written by Democratic politicians, and its purpose, when the Jim Crow laws were written were to prevent the voters from ever voting out of office Democratic politicians.”

“Thankfully,” Cruz observed, “we repudiated Jim Crow.”

That repudiation included the repudiation of its current manifestation, Cruz went on to state.

“The Majority Leader used the phrase ‘Jim Crow 2.0,’ and inadvertently he’s right, but not about what he’s describing. He’s right about the ‘Corrupt Politicians’ act. The ‘Corrupt Politicians’ act follows the exact same pattern that Jim Crow did. It is partisan legislation written by elected Democrats, designed to keep elected Democrats in office and to steal the right to vote from the citizenry to decide on somebody else.”

In what may have been the most laughable of claims made in the piece, she wrote that “The truth is that anti-racism education teaches children to love each other and imagine a better future where racist political agendas won’t win out.”

In actuality, the opposite is true. As DeSantis and other prominent critics of CRT have observed, CRT teaches white students to hate themselves for being born that way, perpetuating the “white guilt complex” liberals have lived by and with for decades. In addition to that, it teaches black students that racism is hidden everywhere, which further fosters feelings of resentment and leads to a victimhood mentality that is very difficult to break until you realize the “racism is everywhere” claim simply isn’t true.