NIFTY: DARPA’s newest system kills drones with stringy streamers. “The Mobile Force Protection program is designed to defeat drone intrusions over military installations and convoys using small unmanned aircraft. Using an X band radar, MFP automatically detects and identifies potential threats, then selects the appropriate interceptor to respond with. The system has a few different small drones it can send out, including rotary and fixed-wing interceptors. The primary interceptor tool is the one that shoots the streamers to gum up the works of other drones.”

A relatively inexpensive solution like this is exactly the way to deal with the asymmetric price advantage of cheap drones.

WE NEEDED MORE? More Evidence That Fauci Wasn’t Being Straight With the American People.

PRIVACY: McDonald’s Is Being Sued By a Customer Over Its Latest Technology. “ McDonald’s latest tech upgrade which uses artificial intelligence could vastly improve the efficiency of the chain’s drive-thru in the future. But some customers aren’t thrilled by the prospect of placing their orders through an automated system that ends up collecting voice data without their consent.”

THAT’S NOT FUNNY: Kamala Harris Laughs Off Her Border Job and Jen Psaki Turns Into a Human Emoji When She’s Asked Wky.

BREAKING: Judge Orders School District to Reinstate PE Teacher Who Opposed Transgender Policy.

A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: Emails Resurface Showing Teachers’ Union Boss Randi Weingarten Dismissing Racism in New York Schools. “I was exposing what seemed to be one of the most corrupt districts in New York… but instead of fixing the problems they seemed to have encouraged it.”

JUST CALL IT INFRASTRUCTURE: More money flowing to Pitkin County from feds to help with homeless issues. “In April, a grant of $538,073 was approved, to be used by Recovery Resources to assist Pitkin County and other local efforts to help alleviate area homelessness. The money originates from the second major stimulus package for COVID-19 relief, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which was passed by Congress in December. The first such package was the CARES Act, passed in March 2020, which funneled $570,000 to the county for homeless and housing needs.”

HMM: New Capitol Riot Report Blames Law Enforcement Agencies.

BUT THE NARRATIVE! EVs May Offer A ‘Negligible’ CO2 Difference From ICE Vehicles. “If the Jefferies analysis is correct (and we believe it is), then an EV will reach carbon-emission parity with an internal-combustion vehicle just as its battery requires replacement. This will come as a huge disappointment for those believing that EV adoption will have significant impacts on CO2 reduction.”

I’D GET RE-VACCINATED FOR A BOTTLE OF 15-YEAR-OLD BOWMORE: Now Washington State Backs Weed Giveaways for Getting COVID Shots.

BACK TO WORK: Apple Return to Office Plans ‘Forced Some of Our Colleagues to Quit,’ Staff Claim. “Without the inclusivity that flexibility brings, many of us feel we have to choose between either a combination of our families, our well-being, and being empowered to do our best work, or being a part of Apple.”

MEMORY-HOLING PEACE: The Biden Administration’s Orwellian Erasing of the ‘Abraham Accords.’

ANALYSIS: TRUE. It’s Clear Now Anthony Fauci Isn’t A Fool, He’s A Villain.

Besides his lies about the well-supported lab origin theory for COVID, Fauci misled the public about asymptomatic spread being a major driver of the outbreak, as a Feb. 4, 2020 email revealed. He lied about masks working, as “the virus is small enough to pass through the material,” according to a Feb. 5, 2020 email.

He admitted outright he moved the goalposts on herd immunity based on what he thought the public was “ready to hear,” and he continues to lie about herd immunity being a necessity given that vaccine’s purported efficacy, much less a goal that must be achieved through mass administration of an experimental vaccine.

His deceit is just one aspect that conforms to the villain archetype in literature. There’s a poetic injustice in his story arc that would be hard for a novelist to top.

Under his directorship, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded the EcoHealth Alliance, which funneled $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab now under scrutiny for leaking SARS-COV-2, to study coronaviruses in bats.

While Fauci maintains NAIAD never funded the dangerous gain-of-function studies that appear to be potentially involved in COVID’s origin, the U.S. State Department said in January that WIV was indeed conducting gain-of-function research. In 2012, Fauci defended this “risky” type of research, involving increasing the transmissibility or severity of a disease in humans, that he knew might spark a pandemic.

He stated it was a risk worth taking even though it was a “valid concern” that “someone somewhere might attempt to replicate these experiments sloppily.”

It’s a shame he didn’t get Trump’s patented “You’re fired!” over a year ago.

Related (From Ed): Wuhan Lab’s Top Bat Coronavirus Researcher Lists Grants From Fauci’s NIAID On Resume.

IT’S ALMOST LIKE A CRISIS BY DESIGN: Guatemalan President Blames Biden for Border Crisis.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: We Finally Found the Russian Collusion! (It’s in the Oval Office Right Now).

Plus:

• Weiner comes up short
• Missing the Markle with British readers
• Introducing the Libs of TikTok

So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

I LIKE THE CUT OF HIS JIB: DeSantis Takes New Actions Against China As Biden Goes Soft: ‘Enough Is Enough,’ ‘Start Fighting Back.’ “DeSantis signed two bills at a press conference at Monday that aimed to stop the spread of foreign influence in the state and to strengthen penalties against those convicted of espionage. DeSantis also gave a fiery speech, which is featured later on in this report, where he lambasted China and called them an ‘adversary,’ something Biden has refused to do.”

DEMOCRAT VOTERS SEEM TO LIKE EVERYTHING ABOUT PROGRESSIVISM EXCEPT LIVING WITH ITS RESULTS: Is the Progressive Project Over? New York City Mayor’s Race Indicates It Could Be. “If AOC and her radical star can’t make a difference there, she can’t make a difference anywhere. Yet, Democrat leaders in Washington, D.C., still cave to her and her far-left colleagues. New York City is one of the most progressive cities in the country, and even the more moderate candidates use some progressive buzzwords, such as “equity.” But the ambassador for the progressive cause is struggling to influence a critical race there.”

I HAD BEEN ASSURED IT WAS THE CLEANEST ELECTION IN HISTORY: Why a Judge Has Georgia Vote Fraud on His Mind: ‘Pristine’ Biden Ballots That Looked Xeroxed.

When Fulton County, Ga., poll manager Suzi Voyles sorted through a large stack of mail-in ballots last November, she noticed an alarmingly odd pattern of uniformity in the markings for Joseph R. Biden. One after another, the absentee votes contained perfectly filled-in ovals for Biden — except that each of the darkened bubbles featured an identical white void inside them in the shape of a tiny crescent, indicating they’d been marked with toner ink instead of a pen or pencil.

Adding to suspicions, she noticed that all of the ballots were printed on different stock paper than the others she handled as part of a statewide hand recount of the razor-thin Nov. 3 presidential election. And none was folded or creased, as she typically observed in mail-in ballots that had been removed from envelopes.

In short, the Biden votes looked like they’d been duplicated by a copying machine.

“All of them were strangely pristine,” said Voyles, who said she’d never seen anything like it in her 20 years monitoring elections in Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta.

More to come, I’m sure.

ON THE ONE HAND… Biden Backs Ukrainian President In Tensions With Russia, Extends White House Invite Ahead Of Summit With Putin.

ON THE OTHER HAND… Ukraine’s Zelensky says he learned of Biden’s decision to waive Russian pipeline sanctions through the press.

The summit is for appearances. The pipeline is real.

ALL HE DID WAS SAY THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD: CNN’s Brian Stelter Acts Like ‘State Media’ in Psaki Interview.

SAVING GRACE: My Woke Employees Tried to Cancel Me. Here’s How I Fought Back and Saved My Nonprofit.

It is by no means a fair fight. Your opponents will cry foul no matter your speech or behavior. Claims of “harm” will be made simply on account of certain ideas being brought into the conversation or sacrosanct commitments of critical social justice being challenged.

This is why you must be “above reproach.” Let your interlocutors know you will be recording all organizational conversations. Insist that terms be defined clearly from mutually agreed upon authoritative sources or fruitful engagement will be impossible.

On that last point, definition of organizational terms was a key component of our success. The first term I worked to define was “psychological safety.”

This was a necessary first step because even challenging some of our staff’s ideas was seen as “violence.” Being an organization dedicated to addressing trauma, we were shocked that words like “causing harm” and “unsafe” were used liberally by the clinically trained individuals on our program staff to describe conversations about ideas (a sad result of their education in psychology through a critical theory lens).

Grace Daniel has provided a real public service with this piece. Read the whole thing.

YOU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: Order Anything From Pizza Hut and a Side of Toxic Racism Goes to Kids in Public Schools. “Pizza Hut launched the Empowering Educators initiative in August 2020, at the height of the riots that engulfed several U.S. cities in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis, Minn.”

POTENTIAL GAME-CHANGER: New tech cheaply produces lithium and H2, while desalinating seawater.

China’s global leadership on high-volume EV production has put it ahead of the game, and while the majority of ground-based lithium reserves are in the “lithium triangle” of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, China controls more than half’s the world’s supply simply through investments and ownership. It has shown in the past that it’s not afraid to wield commodity supplies as a weapon.

But as with other metals like uranium, land-based lithium reserves pale in comparison to what’s out there in the sea. According to researchers at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), there’s about 5,000 times as much lithium in the oceans as there is in land deposits, and a newly developed technology could start extracting it cheaply enough to make the big time – while producing hydrogen gas, chorine gas and desalinated water as a bonus.

According to the research team, the electricity required to produce a kilogram of lithium in this way (about 76.3 kWh) would cost around US$5 – and every kilogram of lithium would generate a bonus 0.87 kg of hydrogen gas and 31.12 kg of chlorine gas. At 2020 prices, these side products alone could sell for between US$6.90 and $11.70.

Those are encouraging numbers. I hope this pans out.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Biden’s Rabid Trump Reversal Fever Is Bad for America. “It’s no secret that the Democrats were broken by their hatred for Trump. It’s a real sickness though if they need to pretend that peace in a historically war-torn region isn’t a good thing. Objectively, the Abraham Accords are something to be celebrated. Being so consumed by partisan bile that they can’t acknowledge them is not a good look for Biden or the Democrats.”

IF OR WHEN? What Happens If The Coronavirus Wuhan Lab Leak Thesis Is True?

The Biden administration would then be under excruciating pressure to adopt an extremely hardline policy toward Beijing. Despite expectations that President Biden would seek to restore a much more cooperative and conciliatory China policy after the tensions in bilateral relations that characterized the Trump years, his actual approach has been akin to “Trump lite.” On issue after issue, from Taiwan, to the South China Sea, to trade, the Biden administration’s posture toward Beijing has been surprisingly firm. Perceptions that covid began in a Chinese virology lab, though, would compel the White House to adopt even stronger, more confrontational, measures. And that process could intensify bilateral tensions to an extremely dangerous level.

Biden’s allies in Congress and the mainstream media likely would find themselves under ferocious attack as well. The earlier attempt to stifle debate and exonerate the PRC government from any responsibility for the onset or spread of covid would be in danger of backfiring spectacularly. Critics might even question whether that campaign was merely an error born of rabid, unthinking hostility toward any position the Trump administration embraced, or whether more nefarious motives—including financial ties to the Chinese government—played a role. The potential for outright neo-McCarthyism on this issue is considerable.

So if it is proven that Communist China set a pandemic loose on the world, by either accident or design, the real danger is that Republicans might pounce?