REVIEW: In Defense of the Second Amendment: Author Larry Correia provides a helpful guide for refuting anti-gun rhetoric.

The book is here. My interview of Correia is here.

ELI LAKE: American Nomenklatura.

Call it the “content-moderation industrial complex.” In just a few short years, this nomenklatura has come to constitute an implicit ruling class on the Internet, one that collectively determines what information and news sources the rest of us should see on major platforms. Talk about “free speech” and “the First Amendment” may actually be beside the point here. The Twitter that Musk bought was part of a larger machine—one that attempts to shape conversations online by amplifying, muzzling, and occasionally banning participants who run afoul of its dogma.

The existence of this nomenklatura has been known for a few years. But thanks to Musk and his decision to make Twitter’s internal communications and policies available to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and others, more detail is now known on why and how this elite endeavors to protect us from all manner of wrongthink.

The unspooling of Twitter’s secrets—in a series of long Twitter threads—has been revelatory for many reasons. It turns out that despite armies of human content moderators, artificial-intelligence tools to weed out everything from health misinformation to hate speech, and an expanding set of internal rules, a handful of senior executives still made the most consequential decisions on what Twitter’s users were allowed to see.

You’ll never guess which way they all lean.

READER FAVORITE: GOOLOO Portable Car Jump Starter. #CommissionEarned

DUCK! Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies are already merging. “Someday in the far future, Andromeda will shine brightly in our sky, getting bigger and bigger as it approaches us. The eventual merger of our two galaxies has actually already started, despite the fact that they are still 2.5 million light-years apart.”

GOOD: Ransomware victims are refusing to pay, tanking attackers’ profits.

HEH: New Jersey Army Vet Falls In Love with Jihadi. It Was An Explosive Affair.

FASTER, PLEASE: The next generation of US nuclear plants could be tiny but powerful: The newly-approved small modular reactor is just one-third the size of traditional designs.

COLORADO: Legislative Democrats want to give $1,400 tax credit to retired public employees 55 or older.

Meanwhile: How Colorado’s Cage-Free Egg Law Could Impact Prices. “Egg prices may be the perfect way to understand both the causes and the effects of inflation. ‘In the case of eggs, you have rapidly increasing market prices of corn or whatever it is that they eat, and that drives up the cost of feeding the chicken, which drives up the price of eggs, which drives up prices for American consumers,’ Isabella Weber, an economist at UMass Amherst told Vox. When you consider that the price of eggs also affects the prices for all the products that contain eggs, the ripples extend even further.”

Denver is much better at looking after bureaucrats and chickens than voters and their families.

Gooder and harder.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: NASA, DARPA partner for nuclear space rocket test.

TRAINED FROM AN EARLY AGE TO HATE THE COUNTRY THAT ALLOWED THEM SUCH PRIVILEGE: Turns Out the Atlanta Terrorists Are Children of Privilege.

CHANGE: U.S. poised to switch COVID-19 prevention strategy to annual vaccine.

YES: Our Classified System Is A Joke.

In 2022, a woman named Asia Janay Lavarello, a civilian employee of the Defense Department, took materials that included classified documents to both her home and hotel room to help write a thesis project she was working on. She was fired, fined, and sentenced to three months in prison. In 2021, Izaak Vincent Kemp, a contractor with the Air Force, was found to have 112 classified documents among the papers in his home, “[d]espite having training on various occasions on how to safeguard classified material.” He was sentenced to a year in prison. In 2017, a man named Weldon Marshall was sentenced to three years in prison for having classified documents on a disc from his time in the Navy.

There are hundreds of similar examples.

None of these people, as far as I can tell, attempted to sell state secrets to the Russians or the Chinese. Most had merely mishandled documents for personal reasons — perhaps even accidentally. But the Espionage Act (or Presidential Records Act) offers a pardon for cooperating with authorities or for having good intentions or for making mistakes. Those who break laws governing classified documents are subject to strict liability because it’s the mishandling, not the motivations, that matter. Hillary Clinton wasn’t selling top-secret documents when using her illegal private server, but she should have known there was a high probability that foreign governments would be able to hack them. Which is why her disregard for the law was worse than any other official in memory.

Anyway, these laws have long been arbitrarily enforced. If you’re a political official sworn to uphold the nation’s laws, you’re probably going to be fine. If you’re some technocrat at the Pentagon, on the other hand, your life might be destroyed. But, thanks to Merrick Garland, we have some new standards to ponder.

Read the whole thing.

EXCELLENT POINT:

Flashback: Ron DeSantis has emerged as America’s awesome ‘shadow president.’

BUILDING A NEW TYRRELL P34 FROM SCRATCH: Making a F1 car can be easier than buying it (video):

WHO YOU GONNA BELIEVE, FACT-CHECKERS OR YOUR OWN, LYIN’ EYES? Media Fact Checkers Claim Greta Thunberg ‘Arrest’ Wasn’t Staged Despite Video Evidence.

RETENTION: Rapid loss of talent contributing to DOD cyber shortfalls.

The report notes that advanced adversaries such as Russia and China are devoting significant resources to offensive cyber operations directed at the U.S. — and comparable test capabilities are needed to assess DOD’s ability to withstand those feints.

While the report points to a lack of assessment of cyber tools, it notes there must be top level developmental and operational test capabilities. However, there aren’t enough skilled cyber operators to support such requirements.

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The document highlights how the Pentagon is continuing to lose top talent to more lucrative private sector offers. As a result, the department is investing in more automated test capabilities to relieve overtaxed cyber operators and test teams.

Failing to teach American civics (and civic virtue) makes it more difficult to attract volunteers for military service. Having a military more focused on paperwork and wokeness than on the mission makes it more difficult to retain the few who do volunteer.

THE LEFT DEVOURS ITS OWN, ALWAYS: Mark Hamill Feels the Power of the Dark Side. “Hamill, who is well-known for his anti-right stances, recently found himself skewered on his own leftwing lightsaber over a tweet. Of course it was over a tweet.”

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CHINA: ‘Beijing Mini-Me’ Xiongan Is China’s Largest ‘Rotten Tail’ Project. “Due to issues of politics, congestion, or just plain corruption, nations get the bright idea to build brand new capital cities far away from existing urban areas. Sometimes it works out (as with Washington D.C.), and sometimes it doesn’t. China’s Xi Jinping is trying something different with Xiongan, which is being built not so much a replacement to Beijing but as sort of ‘mini-me’ Beijing to relieve overcrowding by offloading functions to the new built-from-scratch city in Hebei* province.”