PUNISH THESE INSURRECTIONISTS:

MARK STEYN: Drowning in Lies.

I have said before that we live in “a blizzard of lies”, but the gap between the Diversity Myth and reality widens daily, and the lies are becoming more brazen. In Germany the government has now launched a new campaign to warn patrons of its public baths that groping is verboten:

As you can see, in one poster, a white man is invading the privacy of a brown woman; in the second, a white man is grabbing the bottom of a brown woman; in the third, two white men are assaulting a brown woman; and, in the fourth, a predatory redhead is groping a brown man with a peg leg — presumably a Somali pirate whose storm-tossed galleon was forced to put into port at the Cologne municipal baths.

As Europe’s bestselling newspaper was obliged to point out, this advertising campaign is the precise inversion of German reality:

Elf Tage ist es her, dass acht Mädchen in Gelnhausen bei einem Schwimmbad-Ausflug sexuell belästigt wurden. Die mutmaßlichen Täter waren vier junge Männer. Alle vier sollen derselben syrischen Familie angehören.

Which means, more or less:

Eleven days ago, eight girls were sexually assaulted on a trip to the swimming pool trip at Gelnhausen. The alleged offenders are four young men. All four are said to be from the same Syrian family.

There’s a surprise — not.

Read the whole thing. At Hot Air, Beege Welborn adds: Apparently, Germany Is Facing a Plague of Teutonic Butt Grabbers. “Now, these brilliant behavioral efforts were designed by exactly the sort of person you might conjure up in your head if someone asked you to.”

Exit quote: “White women only distribute swords in ponds anyway. They haven’t molested one-legged boys in years. This will never work.”

JOEL KOTKIN: Homes for Hipsters. “Mamdani’s ‘cost of living’ campaign – offering rent control, free buses, childcare and city-owned supermarkets – seems to some leftist pundits a potential road back to power, under the guise of the burgeoning YIMBY (‘yes in my backyard’) movement that seeks to lower rental prices through massive housing construction. Although Mamdani claims his focus on affordability appeals to working-class voters who shifted to Donald Trump, his core constituency lies elsewhere – with relatively affluent, young, single and childless professionals. For them, rent control is a true blessing, although they may not need free buses or want city-financed grocery stores, unless they resemble Whole Foods.”

POWER, UNLIMITED POWER: Google Bets Big on Nuclear Fusion.

In the U.S., Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) engineers are developing a fusion project consisting of a doughnut-shaped machine known as a tokamak and called SPARC, which they hope will achieve a nuclear fusion reaction. CFS is a company that spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018. The firm has raised over $2 billion in funding to develop the machine, although it is not certain how long it will take and whether it will be able to achieve a net surplus of energy once it is up and running. However, the company’s target is to construct the world’s first fusion-fuelled power plant in Virginia by the early 2030s.

This week, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, came to an agreement with CFS to purchase power from its nuclear fusion project. Google signed the technology’s first direct corporate power purchase agreement, according to the tech company. CFS CEO and co-founder Bob Mumgaard stated, “Without partnership and without being bold and setting a goal and going for it, you won’t ever reach over those challenges.” The financing forms part of a new funding round for CFS, after Google invested $1.8 billion into the firm during its previous 2021 round.

It would be nice if this pans out, but commercial fusion power has been just around the corner since I was a kid — at least.

PRETTY MUCH, YEAH:

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER WORD ABOUT GLENN REYNOLDS’ CARBON FOOTPRINT: Kylie Jenner flew her lavish $73 million private jet to Jeff Bezos’s wedding in Venice and that single trip emitted the same amount of CO2 an average person would if he drove his gasoline car around the world three times.

This meme made the rounds last year at the height of Taylor Swift mania. It’s applicable to everyone who attended the Bezos’ wedding:

Related: Democrats retreat on climate: ‘It’s one of the more disappointing turnabouts.’

Yes, setting Teslas on fire followed by the mass elite’s jet-powered commute to the Bezos wedding signaled the end of the good old days of radical environmentalism.

HOPE IN HEBRON FOR MIDEAST PEACE: Did you know two separate assemblages of Palestinian Sheiks are pushing for “Emirates” status under the Abraham Accords, including official relations with Israel? Richard Pollock reports that these Sheiks represent more than half a million people now under the thumb of the uber-corrupt Palestinian Authority (PA).

Pollock also digs into recent reports that Hamas faces increasingly powerful opposition within the Gaza Strip and that collapse appears imminent for the vicious hate group behind the October 7 Massacre of more than a thousand Jews.

WHOA! RICHARD DAWKINS’ ‘RIGHT-HAND-MAN’ NOW A CHRISTIAN: His name is Josh Timonen. Christian-to-Atheist conversions like that of Josh Harris make the news. This Josh reverses that sequence but odds are you’ve never heard about it in the Mainstream Media. Check out his interview on HillFaith.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: An Elderly Lawmaker’s Staff Keeps Walking Back Things She Tells Reporters. Should They Keep Quoting Her?

A few weeks ago, my POLITICO colleague Nicholas Wu and NBC’s Sahil Kapur ran into D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton in the Capitol. Like good congressional reporters, they jumped at the opportunity to pepper a lawmaker about the news of the day. In this case, one question concerned Norton herself, a civil rights icon who is now the oldest House member: Would she run for another term next year, by which point she would be 89 years old? “Yeah, sure,” Norton said.

Coming on the heels of multiple stories about Norton’s alleged cognitive decline, the statement made news. But a few hours later, Norton’s office began unmaking that news. The Democrat “wants to run again but she’s in conversations with her family, friends, and closest advisors to decide what’s best,” a spokesperson told Wu. There was still no final decision.

It was all awkward and embarrassing — and did little to buttress Norton’s insistence that she’s as sharp as ever. And then, amazingly, it happened again. Last week, Kapur once again approached the delegate and asked about her plans. Once again, she said she’s running: “Yeah, I’m going to run for re-election.” And once again, her spokesperson quickly walked back the comment, telling Axios that “no decision has been made.”

CTL-F “Biden” brings up only one result in the body of this Politico story:

It turns out Norton’s staff had good reason to think they could simply contradict their boss’ comments without it becoming a story: There’s a long history of spokespeople cajoling media outlets into cleaning up the incorrect, impolitic, or downright addled things that lawmakers say when they get buttonholed by Capitol Hill reporters.

Oftentimes, these involve non-craven fixes. “My rule of thumb was that I’m not in the business of playing gotcha,” said Todd Gillman, a former longtime Washington bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News. “People misspeak. They mix up a bill, a vote or a person. There’s a slip of the tongue. I’ve always let people clean up things like that. I’m going for substance.”

Yet the culture of cleaning up makes it harder to say no when you suspect that the slip of the tongue may actually be the substance. “Seems like the tradeoffs don’t change, though the calculus might,” Gillman told me. “Are you willing to incur some wrath for ignoring their lobbying?” Until Joe Biden’s presidency pushed the national conversation about aging officials, the answer wasn’t always self-evident.

Those previous five years in the White House and on the campaign trail? Look into the light, please:

PHOTOSHOP DISASTERS:

Pro Tip: The Content Aware Scaling Tool is extremely useful, but you still have to check your work afterwards.

OOPS, THEY DID IT AGAIN: King, Conqueror, and Cultural Makeover: The BBC Did it Again. “But if someone suggested the BBC cast a few white or Japanese actors for a docudrama about Nigeria’s bid for independence, they’d better bring along enough smelling salts for the whole production team.”

NOW WE KNOW WHY HE PRETENDED TO BE BLACK, AND WHY IT DIDN’T WORK: Zohran Mamdani’s SAT Score Revealed: The elite mayoral candidate played racial shell games in pursuit of prestige.

The wrinkle in the story, however, is that, despite having a father on the faculty and marking black on his application, Columbia rejected Mamdani. There are two plausible theories for why this happened. First, in general, Columbia is a highly competitive university with an admissions rate of less than ten percent, which means that many candidates around the median will not make the cut.

Second, there is a possibility that Mamdani’s box-checking gambit backfired. The full application includes the name and contact information for his father, Mahmood Mamdani, and his mother, Mira Nair, both of whom are public figures and neither of whom is black. The application also included a flag noting that the elder Mamdani appeared to be “affiliated with Columbia” and another line noting the family’s address in an exclusive Manhattan neighborhood. With even cursory research, an admissions officer could have seen that Mr. Mamdani was neither black, nor underprivileged.

Nice that they have some standards.

BUILD ANOTHER ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ FOR THESE INSURRECTIONISTS: