THE CHUY TRUTH:

FOX News media reporter Joseph Wulfsohn picked up Rep. Jesús “Chuy” Garcia’s vulgar tweet below before it was deleted two hours later. I assume Garcia composed it. I can’t believe a staffer would have the nerve to speak this way under Garcia’s name. Warning: If you click on the tweet you will see the whole thing.

Garcia is (over)sensitive to criticism. The sensitivity also makes me think it is Garcia himself speaking in the tweet. That seems a little unusual for a man whose chosen profession is politics. He really ought to develop a thicker skin.

I wonder if we (I) can learn anything from it. These are my thoughts. Not all of them necessarily apply in this case, but Garcia’s tweet prompts these reflections on my part.

Past performance is no guarantee of future borderline retardation:

FASTER, PLEASE: US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design.

WHY AMERICA CAN’T BUILD. And where we can: “Texas and Arizona are both ‘merit shop’ states, which in practice is synonymous with non-union. They also have a much less stringent regulatory environment. As a result, much of our industrial capacity is being built in these states. And these industrial projects are achieving remarkable productivity gains.”

I GUESS I CAN TAKE DOWN MY UMBRELLA: 25-ton Chinese rocket debris crashes to Earth over Indian Ocean.

OLD AND BUSTED ON THE LEFT: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”*

The New Hotness? Patriotism is the last refuge of a drag queen! AOC’s speech on drag queens and patriotism is the pick-me-up Americans needed today.

* Robert Heinlein had some choice thoughts on that quote, and the man who said it.

THE SPIRIT OF RESISTANCE GROWS: 1 in 4 say harassing health officials over COVID-19 closures is ‘justified.’ And hey, the establishment is fine with harassing Supreme Court justices.

GET WOKE GO…: The Cleveland Indians bowed to the woke mob and renamed themselves the “Guardians” and now nobody wants to go to their games anymore.

As a result of years of pressure from activist groups, several years ago, the Cleveland baseball franchise announced they would soon be changing the team’s name. …

Well, if the numbers are to be believed, it’s possible that fans might not have taken kindly to the rebranding efforts.

Local TV ratings for the newly christened Guardians have dropped dramatically, with one report placing the number at -30%.

That’s the third biggest decline of any team in the league, with only the moribund Oakland Athletics and rapidly fading San Francisco Giants reporting worse numbers.

I doubt the leftist activists whom the Indians’ management caved to are actually huge MLB fans as well; they were simply looking for the next scalp to collect (if that phrase hasn’t been memory holed by the PC cleanup crew). As they say at Small Dead Animals, “Pleasing your enemies does not turn them into friends” — or ticket buyers.

FORTY-SEVEN YEARS OF FECKLESS DIGGING:

Jimmy Hoffa disappeared 47 years ago tomorrow. He was last seen in the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox, a restaurant in the Detroit suburbs, at around 2:45 p.m. on July 30, 1975. And he was last heard from, on a call from a nearby pay phone, around 3:30 p.m. Very soon after that call, Hoffa vanished.

There are lots of good reasons to think the mob murdered Hoffa. But there is not a speck of real evidence about how it did so, or what happened to Hoffa’s body. The unexplained vanishing of the iconic labor leader has over the decades stimulated the imaginations of dozens of people who have confessed to the crime or claimed to know what happened to Hoffa’s body. It has also led to a lot of feckless digging in locations around the country in search of Hoffa’s remains.

* * * * * * * *

But the tips, and confessions, never stopped coming. Some of the more notorious examples:

• Charles Allen, a Hoffa associate, told a Senate committee in 1982 that Provenzano associates “ground up [Hoffa] in little pieces” that were “shipped to Florida and thrown into a swamp.”

• Donald “Tony the Greek” Frankos claimed to have been part of a Hoffa hit team that dismembered the corpse and buried it in cement at Giants Stadium in New Jersey.

• Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran claimed to have murdered Hoffa in Detroit. (The cops found no evidence to support Sheeran’s claim at the home where the murder supposedly occurred. For my debunking of Sheeran’s claim, see here and here.)

The latter’s story’s resulted in one of the longest and most excruciating films Martin Scorsese has ever made: Painting Houses: The Irishman Arrives on Netflix.

JONATHAN TURLEY ON THE CAMPUS EFFORT TO LABEL “PRO-LIFE” SENTIMENT HATE SPEECH.

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME:

● Shot: “The warning that I received, you may take with however many grains of salt you wish, that the brown acid that is circulating around us, is specifically not too good. It’s suggested that you do stay away from that; of course, it’s your own trip, so, be my guest. But, please be advised that there is a warning on that one.”

—Lighting director Chip Monck’s announcement at Woodstock, August, 1969.

● Chaser: Chicago Tells Lollapalooza Attendees to ‘Test Your Drugs’ for Fentanyl.

—Mary Chastain, Legal Insurrection, yesterday.

KAMALA SMILES: Breaking: Joe Biden has COVID again. He’s returning to quarantine.

UPDATE: Cartoonist Roman Genn perfectly captures Kamala’s mood right now.

(Updated and bumped.)

DISPATCHES FROM THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH: Facebook, Instagram Posts Flagged as False for Rejecting Biden’s Recession Wordplay.

Last week, the White House published an online article disputing the standard definition of an economic recession: i.e., two consecutive fiscal quarters in which GDP growth was negative.

“Both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data—including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes,” wrote the White House. “Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.”

This post has been widely shared—and in some cases, mocked—on social media. Graham Allen, an Instagram personality, posted a video reacting to the post in which he asked Siri to define the term recession. Siri’s definition: two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.

But Allen’s video is currently obscured on Instagram; users can still watch it, but they first have to click past a disclaimer that it contains “false information reviewed by independent fact-checkers.” A similar label has appeared on some Facebook posts that also take issue with the Biden administration’s wordplay.

The fact-checker is Politifact, a fact-checking website run by the Poynter Institute. Politifact is an official third-party fact-checking apparatus for Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram. This means that PolitiFact is not like any ordinary website that offers a critique of a political narrative: PolitiFact’s critiques are enforced by social media platforms.

As of Saturday afternoon, Siri still gives the “two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth” answer — but I assume it’s only a matter of time before she’s reprogrammed with a different definition.

BOMB CANADA: THE CASE FOR WAR. Canadian Children’s Activity Book Indoctrinates Kids into Euthanasia.

Children are being indoctrinated into everything that subverts traditional values these days, and in Canada that includes bringing children along when a loved one is being euthanized — which goes by the euphemism MAID for medical assistance in dying.

Children are introduced into the medical killing fields by Canadian Virtual Hospice with its Medical Assistance in Dying Activity Book, described as being for children ages 6–12. In it, the child is taught how a person is killed during euthanasia:

The three medicines work like this: The first medicine makes the person feel very relaxed and fall asleep. They may yawn or snore or mumble.

The second medicine causes a “coma.” A coma looks like sleep but is much deeper than regular sleep. The person will not wake up or be bothered by noise or touch.

The third medicine makes the person’s lungs stop breathing and then their heart stops beating. Because of the coma, the person does not notice this happening and it does not hurt. When their heart and lungs stop working, their body dies. It will not start working again. This often happens in just a few minutes, but sometimes (rarely) it can take hours.

One fellow on Twitter asks, “I wonder if even Germany in the 1920s and ’30s sank so low as to educate its youth about the goodness of euthanasia of the sick and disabled. Welcome comment from those who know the literature.”

Certainly, the post-Weimar Germany of the 1930s did. It was referred to as “Lebensunwertes Leben.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

DUMB IDEAS AND TAMMY DUCKWORTH GO TOGETHER: Dumb Gun Control Idea of the Day: Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s Federal Gun Owner License Card.

TWITTER UNCENSORS EPOCH: Not clear why, but it seems there was quite a public uproar of protests that got Twitter’s attention.

JOHN STOSSEL: Covid taught 1 million parents there are alternatives to failing public schools.

INCONVENIENT FACTS: Race, Crime and Data. Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute discusses his new book, Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts the Most.

I wrote this book largely because I was tired of reading stories about heinous crimes carried out by offenders who had no business being out on the street—stories the data make clear are not outliers—and I wanted to do something about it.

That desire only grew as I watched 2020 unfold. In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the unrest and political grandstanding that followed, politicians and activists pushed policies aimed at systematically lowering the transaction costs of crime (by making prosecutions and substantial punishments less likely) and raising the transaction costs of law enforcement (by placing new restrictions on police discretion and limiting the resources at their disposal). . . .

I was unsurprised when, in 2020, homicides spiked 30 percent across the U.S. (the largest one-year increase in generations). And I remained unsurprised by the fact that between 2020 and 2021, more than a dozen cities set all-time records for homicides, and more than a dozen more flirted with their 1990s peaks.

Read the whole book.

HMM: Oral herpes is about 5,000 years old, according to researchers.

HE WAS AN ENTERTAINING ONE: Is Penn Jillette Still a Libertarian? The louder half of Penn & Teller talks with Nick Gillespie.

THIS IS ABOUT TO GET REALLY INTERESTING: The litigation, that is, between Rumble and Google, as Glenn Greenwald notes a judge’s decision Friday opens the door to discovery. Usually, such suits against one of the tech giants fails to get beyond dismissal, long before anybody gets to prepare discovery motions.

JUST TWO [PARTNERS] TO SLOW THE SPREAD?  WHO advises men who have sex with men to ‘limit partners’ amid monkeypox. 

…. Sarah looks at the example of just two weeks to slow the spread.  Okay, so for all you guys in the demographic, I think that means — translates from liberal — you should definitely limit it to 106 partners (more for the more liberal areas of the country) to slow the spread.

Scratches head. That’s going to work about as well as the lockdowns for “just two weeks.”

(Bumped.)

NEW ENGLAND: An Energy Crisis Waiting to Happen? “She goes on to describe that while burning oil had averted disaster, it had only barely done so. The grid was hours away from rolling blackouts before the weather thankfully turned warmer. The book then covers the broken interplay between policy, markets, and fuel security, how renewables impact the grid, and her thoughts on a more rational path forward. It is well worth a full read. You would think that the near collapse of their energy grid would have motivated the good people of New England to get serious about shoring up their energy needs ahead of future cold snaps. You would be wrong. Instead, they have set about the task of systematically dismantling existing critical infrastructure and blocking the development of proven technologies. In 2019, the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station was shuttered, leaving New England with only two nuclear power facilities. There are no plans to build more. More urgently, virtually every attempt to expand the region’s natural gas pipeline infrastructure has been delayed, blocked, or abandoned.”

Advice: “Pick up a wool blanket or two. In the war between platitudes and physics, physics is undefeated.”

WHAT IF THEY GAVE A WAR AND EVERYBODY WAS WOKE? The military’s embrace of faddish politics may make activists happy, but it’s driving away recruits:

Is the U.S. prepared for battle? By one measure, military recruitment, the answer appears to be no. Nearly every branch has struggled to meet its recruitment goals for 2022, with some falling as short as 40%. Worse yet, only about a quarter of America’s youth meet current eligibility standards—and recent surveys show only 9% are even interested.

Military leadership primarily blames this slump on two causes: teen obesity rates and the tight labor market. But data for both claims can’t paint the full picture. Teen obesity did increase during the pandemic, to 22% from 19%. But that jump likely can’t account for the sudden and widespread collapse in recruitment. Neither can the labor market. The unemployment rate today sits at 3.6%—roughly the same as in 2019. Yet in 2019 the Army exceeded its recruiting goals. It’s falling perilously short today and will be understrength by 28,000 troops by the end of 2023. The military’s benefits—including child care, housing allowances, medical coverage and large bonuses, up to $50,000—should also help insulate it from the pitfalls of hiring young recruits in a tight labor market.

What, then, explains the shift? Perhaps one answer lies in the Pentagon’s wholesale embrace of woke politics.

On his first day in office, President Biden rescinded a Trump-era executive order banning critical-race-theory training in the military. The changes made by senior commanders were nearly immediate. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin mandated that every military unit conduct a “stand-down” to confront “extremism in the ranks.” The chief of naval operations, Adm. Mike Gilday, added Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” to his professional reading list for sailors—never mind the book’s endorsement of racial discrimination and its charges that the institutions troops swear to protect are systemically racist.

In addition to the hyper-wokeness, as Glenn noted on Wednesday, there’s also “the Afghanistan debacle. When you casually create the greatest military defeat and humiliation in U.S. history and then pronounce it a success, people aren’t excited about dying for you.”

Update: Priorities: U.S. Military Base Is Hosting a Drag Show. “It seems as if every day lately there is another reason to break out the champagne in Moscow and Beijing, and Saturday was no exception: it was the day of Joint Base Langley-Eustis (JBLE)’s first ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Summer Festival,’ featuring (what else), a drag show. What does all this woke nonsense have to do with winning wars? Oh, never mind that; that’s the old, white supremacist military! The new diverse military has other priorities altogether.”

(Updated and bumped.)

CANADA BECAME A MAFIA STATE SO GRADUALLY I BARELY NOTICED: Hope Springs Infernal: Pawlowski, Lich, and Canadian ‘Justice.’

THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Twitter is censoring every article from the Epoch Times and is refusing to tell the news organization why.