THERE’S WAY TOO MUCH SOCIALIST SEWAGE IN THE CAPITALIST WINE:  Capitalism Isn’t the Enemy, We’re Just Not Practicing It Anymore.

AS IT’S MEANT TO BE:  The President Can Finally Be President.

OPEN THREAD: For vibrations and compatibility, I think it’s like a magnet.

PLAYING IT SAFE: NASA considering flying only cargo on next Starliner mission. Probably smart, but not a vote of confidence in Boeing.

ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: This Martian Region Is Hiding Thousands of Kilometers of Ancient Rivers.

STAYING OFF SOCIAL MEDIA? A Simple Daily Habit Could Help Lower Your Blood Pressure.

STAY COOL: FREE SOLDIER Men’s Cargo Hiking Shorts with Belt. #CommissionEarned

I BLAME DONALD TRUMP: Northern Arizona resident dies from plague.

NOT-SO-BEAUTIFUL BIG BILL: Don’t think for a minute that lobbyists working on behalf of all kinds of special interests took a holiday while the Senate and House were wrangling through their competing versions of that Big Beautiful Bill.

In my latest Substack column, you will find details, courtesy of the American Accountability Foundation’s (AAF) Thomas Jones, of what appears to be a worrisome connection, albeit indirect, between a Senate GOP staffer working for Sen. Bill Cassidy on the HELP Committee and a big liberal lobbyist outfit.

IT’S KINDA BIG, CLUMSY, AND UGLY: Why Isn’t The Jeep Wagoneer Selling Better?

FUN GIFT: Magnetic Fidget Pen – Stress Relief Toy & Multifunctional Writing Pen. #CommissionEarned

OOPS: Another Bad Guy Brings A Knife To A Gunfight.

READER FAVORITE: NOCO Boost GB40: 1000A UltraSafe Jump Starter. #CommissionEarned

JONATHAN TURLEY: WaPo Editor to Staff: Get on Board or Get Out.

Bezos wants the Post to be a viable newspaper again and some of us who once wrote for the Post applauded his efforts. However, writers who have contributed to the free fall of the Post were apoplectic.

Amanda Katz, who resigned from the Post’s opinion team at the end of 2024, offered a vivid example of the culture that Bezos is trying to change at the Post. Katz said the change was “an absolute abandonment of the principles of accountability of the powerful, justice, democracy, human rights, and accurate information that previously animated the section in favor of a white male billionaire’s self-interested agenda.”

The most telling condemnation came from Post columnist Philip Bump, who wrote “what the actual f**k.” Not surprisingly, Bump wrote the condemnation on Bluesky, a site that promises a type of safe space for liberals who do not want to be triggered by opposing views.

Bump previously had a meltdown in an interview when confronted about past false claims. After I wrote a column about the litany of such false claims, the Post surprised many of us by issuing a statement that it stood by all of Bump’s reporting, including false columns on the Lafayette Park protests, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and other stories. That was long after other media debunked the claims, but the Post stood by the false reporting.

We have previously discussed the sharp change in culture at the Post, which became an outlet that pushed anti-free speech views and embraced advocacy journalism. The result was that many moderates and conservatives stopped reading the newspaper.

Lewis is still laboring to return the Post to objective journalism. He is even using the language of the left in encouraging them to “reinvent” or “reimagine” the Post. He discussed  the Post’s “reinvention journey” it has taken in recent months, including its “reimagining” of its opinion pages that “champion American values” among other company initiatives.

“The moment demands that we continue to rethink all aspects of our organization and business to maximize our impact. If we want to reconnect with our audience and continue to defend democracy, more changes at The Post will be necessary. And to succeed, we need to be united as a team with a strong belief and passion in where we are heading.

I understand and respect, however, that our chosen path is not for everyone,. That’s exactly why we introduced the voluntary separation program. As we continue in this new direction, I want to ask those who do not feel aligned with the company’s plan to reflect on that. The VSP is designed to support you in making this decision, give you the ability to weigh your options thoughtfully and with less concern about financial consequences. And if you think that it’s time to move on to a new chapter, the VSP helps you take that next step with more security.”

In other words, please leave now.

Especially after the banger the Post ran earlier this week:

HMM: Study suggests semen quality could signal broader health concerns for men.

DISPATCHES FROM ABC NEWS: Sunny Hostin Says CBP, ICE Deserve Violent ‘Reckoning’ Coming for Them.

Disney and ABC News seem to be fine with their hosts promoting violence and attempts to kill federal law enforcement officers. During Friday’s episode of The View, staunchly racist Sunny Hostin responded to the recent attempt to kill Customs and Border Protection agents in McAllen, Texas by suggesting they had it coming because they wear masks. She also proclaimed that a “reckoning” was coming for them.

* * * * * * * *

Upon hearing the story, Hostin immediately launched into seemingly suggesting that the agents deserved it because they wear masks:

If they would do their jobs the way that I think they should be doing their jobs, which is unmasked without disappearing people from the streets, I don’t think that the public would feel as endangered. Because if someone approaches my loved one who is undocumented with a mask, how do I know that they’re actual law enforcement and how do I know they work for ICE? So, that’s one thing I’ll say.

The threat seemed to solidify further when she declared that “in my world, if you mask yourself because you don’t want to be seen…there will be a reckoning for some of the actions that law enforcement, actual law enforcement have done!”

Curiously, the ladies of The View were all for everyone masking up for a surprisingly long time: The View mocked after releasing audience from mask requirement three years into pandemic: ‘Finally.’

—Fox News, March 6th, 2023.

FIGHT THE POWER:

Masculine young men are a threat to society and should be censored, say the media, NGOs, and Left-wing parties. They're not. They're rightly demanding their rights, including to speak. The real threat comes from the Left's totalitarian and misandrist, anti-civilization agenda. pic.twitter.com/LWY9CO4yy8

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) July 11, 2025

ALMOST ONE YEAR LATER, THE QUESTION REMAINS: Why Did Butler Shooter Try to Kill Trump?

MATT TAIBBI: Brennan, MSNBC Can’t Stop Lying About Trump and Russia. “Attention, believers in the Trump-Russia conspiracy: you are being lied to. Side by side, here’s what you’ve been told, next to the reality that’s being hidden from you.”

SUPERVOLCANO! Earthquake swarm detected at Mount Rainier, biggest since 2009. “Hundreds of small earthquakes have rattled Mount Rainier this week in the largest swarm of tremors in more than a decade. But experts say there’s no need to panic — at least not yet.”

SADLY, POPCORN IS NOT LOW CARB: The Trump Administration Is About to Make a HUGE Move Against the Deep State

But don’t count your kernels before they’re popped.

THE NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME CHATBOT: Grok’s Hitler hallucinations expose the stupidity of AI.

One is that large language models (LLMs) are not reliable enough to do much of the work that’s expected of them, because they make stuff up, or ‘hallucinate’. Social-media accounts such as AI Being Dumb collect the examples. One of the more prominent was Google’s recent insistence that former US president John F Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963, had used Facebook. Google’s AI chatbot has also been derided for visualising the Nazi Wehrmacht as black, and refusing to draw a white Pope.

Businesses are also finding out that AI is not all it’s cracked up to be. Indeed, it is hardly revolutionising the private sector to the degree many had hoped or feared. Consulting group Gartner found that AI has been a let-down, largely because ‘current models do not have the maturity and agency to autonomously achieve complex business goals or follow nuanced instructions over time’. In other words, those hoping AI could do the thinking for them, or replace their employees, have been sorely disappointed.

These revelations should hardly be groundbreaking. As the AI engineer and author Andriy Burkov wrote six years ago in his book, The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book, chatbots are not independently intelligent. They are statistical word-completion engines, and have no internal world model against which they can check their output. This is not only a barrier to performing the kind of reasoning we would expect from something that purports to be ‘artificial intelligence’, it also means chatbots are highly suggestible. One of the most popular new classes of exploits in cybersecurity is seducing an AI into ‘believing’ it is in a trusted situation, and persuading it to relinquish any guardrails that may have been put into place. A recent illustration of this ‘narrative engineering’ comes from Cato Networks, whose researchers developed a way to bypass the security controls of DeepSeek, ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot and then convinced the AIs to write malware for Google Chrome.

At the NRO Corner, Phillip Klein adds, “Why the Nazi Grok Fiasco Has Made Me Less Worried About AI.” “If, under Musk’s scenario, we contemplate a future in which AI becomes all-powerful, we don’t have to try very hard to imagine what a MechaHitler might cook up. Yet despite the possibility that either MechaHitler or WokeGemini will get me, the Grok episode struck me as actually a bit more reassuring for humanity. The reason for my optimism is that despite all the brainpower and resources available to Google and Musk, they both faceplanted so spectacularly, and that makes me think that a lot of analysts are getting way ahead of themselves in predicting the scale and speed at which AI will replace human beings.”

In the interim, it’s safe to say who Tucker’s next guest will be:

HMM: Nerve pain medication gabapentin possibly tied to dementia, study says.

DEUTSCHLAND IST GEFALLEN: Vaginal Traps Instead of Migration Policy: Germany’s Latest Absurdity.

Germany is facing an alarming rise in rape cases. In just five years, the number of reported assaults has increased by 49.5%, surpassing 12,000 per year. And yet, the institutional and academic response does not point towards a serious analysis of the causes or reforms that would effectively protect women. Instead of addressing the factors driving this violence—such as massive and uncontrolled immigration—the reaction is a grotesque distraction: proposing “trap condoms” with internal spikes designed to injure the attacker’s penis.

The idea, recycled from an old South African invention called Rape-aXe, consists of a vaginal device that a woman can wear for self-defense. If she becomes a victim of rape, the device activates, inflicting pain and injuries on the attacker and also facilitating later medical identification. Sociologist Julia Wege of the Ravensburg-Weingarten University of Applied Sciences and physician Urs Schneider of the Fraunhofer Institute for Health Technology in Stuttgart have announced a study in which they intend to investigate technical aids against sexual violence, which includes this one.

What is presented as an innovative and empowering measure is a surrender of the state. It is the tacit admission that the streets are unsafe, that the judicial system offers no protection, that the borders are open, and that women must prepare to defend themselves alone—as if they lived in a war zone.

Are we meant to believe that turning the female body into a booby trap is the solution to the surge in rapes in Germany? Is this what Europe has come to: getting used to imported barbarism and finding creative ways to endure it?

Earlier: Why are plus-sized Teutonic frauleins assaulting innocent one-legged Somali pirates?

VDH: The Roots of Leftist Rage.

Across the political left, from orthodox Democrats to Antifa in the streets, the opposition to President Donald Trump has lost its collective mind.

The House minority leader and now self-styled tough guy, New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, poses with a baseball bat to show how dangerous he is in opposing Trump’s budget bill.

Jeffries harangued Congress for eight hours; New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker went on for 25 — both to no effect.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hit the rally trail in private jets to rail about oligarchs, omitting that the ultra-rich are not only mostly leftists but also the funders of the Democratic Party.

Sometimes the Democrats in Congress make bizarre videos, featuring profanity like f**k or s**t. On other occasions, they scream and interrupt Congress.

Some representatives now confess that they’re being pressured by their constituents to take a bullet for the cause.

The racialist Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett — sometimes playing the prep-school prima donna, sometimes modulating her accent to pass as the authentic inner-city activist — gains headlines for monotonously ranting about old white men.

On left-wing social media, the assassin Luigi Mangione remains a heartthrob for murdering a health-care executive, replacing the Tsarnaev brothers as the hot new left-wing killer.

He, too, might soon end up with a cover photo on Rolling Stone.

The left-wing internet mob grotesquely claims that children lost to the recent flash flood in Texas deserved their fate.

They even advance three sick reasons for their ghoulishness. Texas Christians supported the MAGA agenda and thus met a just fate. Or, as red-state Texans, they were deservedly collateral damage to DOGE’s bureaucratic reductions. Or, as climate denialists would say, the flash flood took righteous revenge on children for their supposed ignorance.

Add it all up, and there is a sizable leftist “base” that is completely amoral.

QED:

When the left tells that if they ever return to power they plan to put you in reeducation camps you should believe them and act accordingly https://t.co/yZHOquvbAq

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) July 12, 2025

UPDATE: