IMMIGRATION PROBLEMS: Invasive red fire ant spotted in Europe for first time, researchers say.

WHOEVER IS RUNNING THE DRUDGE REPORT THESE DAYS JUST HAD AN ANEURYSM:

To add to Ben Domenech’s tweet, it’s not like we warned the left repeatedly that they’re not going to enjoy living under the new rules they created:

Flashback: Where’s Matt Drudge? “The Drudge Report reminds me of MTV in the early 2000s, a channel I returned to sheerly out of habit based on its greatness from decades before.”

THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A HOW-TO MANUAL: We Are Re-Paganizing. “A world that embraced infanticide would not necessarily look anything like Nazi Germany. It would probably look like ancient Rome. Or, indeed, twenty-first-century Canada.”

UPDATE: Manhunt in Pa. for Convicted Murderer Takes a Terrifying Turn.

IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME INEXPENSIVE WAY TO KILL MOSQUITOES IN LARGE NUMBERS: Mosquito-borne Jamestown Canyon virus is gaining attention in U.S.

DON’T UNDERESTIMATE JOE’S ABILITY TO F*** THINGS UP: The US moves to advance a prisoner swap deal with Iran and release $6 billion in frozen funds.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed off on the sanctions waivers late last week, a month after U.S. and Iranian officials said an agreement in principle was in place. Congress was not informed of the waiver decision until Monday, according to the notification, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

The outlines of the deal had been previously announced and the waiver was expected. But the notification marked the first time the administration said it was releasing five Iranian prisoners as part of the deal. The prisoners have not been named.

The waiver drew criticism of President Joe Biden from Republicans and others who say the deal will boost the Iranian economy at a time when Iran poses a growing threat to U.S. troops and Mideast allies.

The next crisis by design has been queued up.

WELL, BYE: These Vehicles Are Dead for 2024.

QUELLE SURPRISE:  The Los Angeles Times reports that a poll finds 59% of California voters oppose cash reparations for the African American descendants of slaves.  Only 28% support the idea.

Prediction:  The “nonprofit” organizations that have been arguing for reparations will soon ask that reparations be paid through them instead.

CHANGE: We’re Living in a Different World Now – Let’s Talk About Situational Awareness.

GIVE IT NEARLY SIX SEVENTHS OF EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT: Try Hard, but Not That Hard. 85% Is the Magic Number for Productivity.

So many of us were raised in the gospel of hard work and max effort, taught that what we put in was what we got out. Now, some coaches and corporate leaders have a new message. To be at your best, dial it back a bit.

Trying to run at top speed will actually lead to slower running times, they say, citing fitness research. Lifting heavy weights until you absolutely can’t anymore won’t spark more muscle gain than stopping a little sooner, one exercise physiologist assured me.

The trick—be it in exercise, or anything—is to try for 85%. Aiming for perfection often makes us feel awful, burns us out and backfires. Instead, count the fact that you hit eight out of 10 of your targets this quarter as a win. We don’t need to see our work, health or hobbies as binary objectives, perfected or a total failure.

I’d brag that I was ahead of the curve on this one but that seems like too much work.

I BET YOU COULD TACK ON A ZERO AND STILL NOT GET CLOSE TO THE REAL NUMBER: Where in the World Are the 177,000 Illegal Aliens DHS ‘Lost’?

BIG MONEY: CEO Gets $379 Million For Money-Losing EV Company. “Keep in mind that Lucid lost over $2 billion over the last year. Now, startups can take a while before they turn profitable, but paying the CEO of an unprofitable company hundreds of millions of dollars to boost the stock price of a money-losing company sounds awful pump-and-dumpish to me.”

SKYNET SNIFFS: Scientists are trying to teach AI how to smell.

NOT SO EASY BEING GREEN: Jennifer Granholm Encounters Charging Woes, Angry Families on Electric Vehicle Promotion Tour.

During one leg of the June trip, NPR reported Sunday, Granholm planned to stop at a public charging station outside of Augusta, Georgia, before continuing northwest to Athens. Before Granholm arrived, however, her staff realized the station would not be able to accommodate Granholm’s caravan—one charger was broken and others were in use. Granholm’s team responded by using a gas-powered car to block the public from accessing the station’s only available charger, prompting one family—which had a baby in the car on a hot Georgia day—to call the police.

The revelation reflects the electric vehicle issues that are plaguing the Biden administration’s prized green energy transition. President Joe Biden has worked to spur EV adoption by spending hundreds of billions of dollars on charging infrastructure and other green subsidies, but the effort is yet to deliver a reliable public charging experience for everyday Americans. Public charging stations are often broken and crowded, and when they do work, it can still take hours to fully charge a vehicle.

Still, those issues did not stop Granholm in May from advising road-tripping Americans to purchase an electric vehicle. Beyond the charging woes associated with the vehicles, that purchase is an expensive one—Granholm’s June caravan of EVs included a Ford F-150 Lightning and a Cadillac Lyriq, according to NPR, both of which can cost upwards of $60,000. As a result, less than one-fifth of Americans say they’re very likely to make their next vehicle an electric one, according to an Associated Press poll published in April.

I’m pretty sure that Veep and Parks and Recreation weren’t meant to be how to guides for politicians.

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: Hold Your Horses: Texas Mandates a Gun at Every Public School.

FRESH AIR, SUNSHINE, AND EXERCISE: ONCE AGAIN, YOUR GRANDMOTHER WAS RIGHT. Healthy lifestyle can help prevent depression – and new research may explain why.

NIFTY: Earth’s atmosphere can clean itself, breakthrough study finds.

The discovery is outlined in a new paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which suggests that the traditional thinking around the formation of OH in the atmosphere is incomplete. Until now, it was thought that sunlight was the primary driver of OH formation, but this new research shows that OH can be created spontaneously by the special conditions on the surface of water droplets.

“You need OH to oxidize hydrocarbons, otherwise they would build up in the atmosphere indefinitely,” said Sergey Nizkorodov, a University of California, Irvine professor of chemistry, who was part of the research team.

“OH is a key player in the story of atmospheric chemistry. It initiates the reactions that break down airborne pollutants and helps to remove noxious chemicals such as sulfur dioxide and nitric oxide, which are poisonous gases, from the atmosphere.”

The implications of this discovery are significant. It could change the way we model air pollution, as the assumption has always been that OH comes from the air and is not produced in the droplet directly. This means that existing models may need to be revised to take into account this new source of OH.

It’s almost as though the science had never been settled.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: New California Law Dictates If Your Kid Says He’s Optimus Prime You Must Install Tires On Him And Let Him Run Down The 405 Freeway.

SPACE: Telestat, SpaceX announce agreement to launch satellites.

I DID NOT EXPECT THIS DEGREE OF GRILLING: CNN Anchor Grills NM Gov. Lujan Grisham About “Public Health” Gun Ban Order: How Are You Not Violating The Constitution?

BEN BARTEE: Fifth Circuit Partially Upholds Temporary Ban on Biden Censorship Regime, Pares Down Order.

WELL, IT’S ABOUT TIME FOR ME TO DONATE AGAIN ANYWAY: Red Cross calls for blood donations amid nationwide shortage.

FROM SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Sweeping and Forcing the President into Section 3: A Response to William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen.

Does the full “sweep and force” of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment disqualify Donald Trump from the presidency? In a new article, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen argue that the answer is yes because “essentially all the evidence concerning the original textual meaning of Section Three . . . points in the same direction . . . .” This sweeping conclusion is not accurate. Establishing the original public meaning of Section 3 is difficult because there is originalist and textualist evidence pointing in different directions. Our research is built on more than a decade of scholarship in areas that are, regrettably, neglected in modern courts and scholarship, but would have been well understood in the 1860s.

If you want to move America closer to a Civil War, make Trump supporters feel that the 2024 election is illegitimate. Especially if it is. It’s that simple.

CHANGE: Ceramic Nano Memory promises to disrupt the $500 billion storage business.

Ceramic Nano Memory is designed to address the “density, performance and access paradigms” as well as cost and sustainability demands of datacenters, Pflaum said. The new technology will bring storage in the “Yottabyte Era,” where a yottabyte is equal to 1,000 billion terabytes, by using ceramic nano layers that are 50-100 atoms thick. Ceramics are inorganic materials that can resist heat and corrosion, and they have been used by humans for at least 26,000 years.

Cerabyte now wants to exploit ceramics’ outstanding qualities to store information that can be protected against “most data storage media threats.” Data is written and read with laser or “particle beams,” the company states, with bits structured in QR code-like matrices. Cerabyte already has its own roadmap for the technology, which is projected to scale from 100 nm to 3 nm bit sizes or to an areal density of GB/cm2 to TB/cm2 class.

Ceramic Nano Memory promises a 75% reduction of total cost of ownership (TCO) in data centers, as the technology needs no media replacement, “no energy” and no data migration.

No energy? Surely reads and writes require some juice, even if it’s a lot less than a spinning hard drive requires.

MARTIN GURRI: The World Before the Thaw: Welcome to the era of pseudo-ideology.

The grand ideologies of the last century arose after World War I and the Great Depression had discredited the liberal order. They grew into mass movements that aimed to overthrow that order and impose utopia by brute strength. In their doctrines and their consequences, they were moral monstrosities, every one of them, but they represented organic attempts to grapple with the big questions of a particular moment in history.

A pseudo-ideology is designed by the people in power to keep them in power. It is blatantly self-serving and artificial. Far from grappling with big questions, pseudo-ideology rests on a foundation of avoidance. Far from seeking to overthrow the establishment, it demands its perpetuation unto eternity. A world justified by pseudo-ideologies must lapse into the political equivalent of suspended animation. That is our world. All around us, decrepit regimes cling to power by default. Dead ideologies are digitally exhumed and cannibalized. Absent the ferment of new ideas, the flow of history has frozen solid.

This describes the democracies as well as authoritarian nations. Everywhere, a mutinous public struggles in vain against a glacier of mendacity. In the twisted echo chambers of the web, the public can only rage impotently against the ice age while waiting for a thaw.

“A glacier of mendacity.” Can we get some climate change here?