BLUE STATE BLUES: New Jersey’s electric bills tripled this summer — and could cost Dems the state.

“They took generation off before they brought generation on,” one energy expert told me, pointing to the state’s aggressive shutdown of coal-powered plants under Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy and the closure of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in 2018.

The result? A shrinking energy supply, at a time when demand is exploding.

Dan Lockwood, a spokesperson for PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator, explained the problem plainly to the New Jersey Monitor.

“These higher prices are the result of a loss in electricity supply caused primarily by decarbonization policies that have led to an uptick in generator retirements,” Lockwood said.

On top of that came “an unprecedented spike in electricity demand,” he added, due to burgeoning AI data centers and the increasing use of “green” technologies like electric vehicles and appliances.

In short: the state is using more electricity than ever before, after legislators systematically dismantled the infrastructure that used to provide it.

Maybe some sharp New Jersey Democrat should suggest repealing the law of supply and demand.

CHANGE (IT BACK): Border Wall Supplies Sold Off By Biden To Be Returned To Trump Admin.

The Biden administration sold off portions of the border wall in Arizona for pennies on the dollar in December, just one month before Trump reentered office in a move that critics called an attempt to hamstring the new administration. Now, those materials will be handed back over to the federal government.

GovPlanet, the government supply auctioning site that listed the border wall materials, says that it will expedite the return of the materials to the federal government, citing its support for the Trump administration’s border security plans.

“GovPlanet has reached an agreement, working with the Office of the Border Czar, to return border wall materials that were previously deemed surplus and sourced by the federal government to GovPlanet via existing contracts,” the company explained. “We are expediting the transfer of these materials to support the administration’s border protection plans.”

The sale of the border wall materials, Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) told The Daily Wire, was an attempt by the Biden administration to hamstring the Trump administration. “The Biden Administration is well aware they shouldn’t have reversed the construction of the border wall. If it’s true, they’re purposefully hamstringing an incoming president, it wouldn’t be shocking,” Crane charged. “Why would they want to see President Trump succeed with policies they aggressively sabotaged?”

Nice.

On the other hand, it turned out there’s not much need for a wall as originally thought, after word got out that we have a POTUS who actually enforces immigration law.

BEYOND SOLVENCY: Beyond Meat Facing Bankruptcy?

TO BE FAIR, WHAT ELSE HAVE THEY GOT? The Left’s Feeble Attacks on Trump’s Violent Crime Crackdown.

THIS IS CNN: Anas Al-Sharif became the face of the war in Gaza for millions. Then Israel killed him.

This is reality:

“Israel killed an Al Jazeera journalist!!”

Here is that journalist.

Anas Al-Sharif.

Here he is with the founders of Hamas and you see that bottom right picture? That’s what Mr. “Journalist” wrote on his Telegram on October 7th.

Some journalist.

But the media will believe… pic.twitter.com/4TXOGG0QWV

— Hillel Fuld (@HilzFuld) August 11, 2025

UPDATE (From Ed):

The President of the Foreign Press Association "doesn't care" if journalists are members of Hamas.

This explains so much about media coverage of Gaza. pic.twitter.com/QBDHBKpfS8

— Eylon Levy (@EylonALevy) August 12, 2025

Why, it’s as if:

THIS 🎯 pic.twitter.com/ki32lVUBB3

— Nazi Hunters (@HuntersOfNazis) August 11, 2025

DOG BITES MAN: Politico Hacks Insist Gerrymandering Is Different When Democrats Do It.

On Sunday, Politico’s Gregory Svirnovskiy regurgitated talking points by Illinois Democrat governor J.B. Pritzker and former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder to suggest Democrats’ gerrymandering is permissible, while smearing Republicans’ attempt to redistrict in Texas as a Trump-backed “attempt to cheat mid-decade.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called a special legislative session to, in part, consider new maps “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.” This came right after the DOJ expressed “serious concerns” that four Texas districts were unlawfully gerrymandered on racial grounds. Last week, close to 60 Texas House Democrats abandoned the state and headed to Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts to protest a new redistricting proposal that could give Republicans five more congressional seats.

As The Federalist reported, Illinois is the most gerrymandered state in the country. In fact, as Nathaniel Rakich and Tony Chow wrote in 2022 in FiveThirtyEight, Illinois’ “gerrymandered congressional map seems hell-bent on making Republican congressmen from Illinois an endangered species.” Democrats — who were in charge of redistricting in the state — “drew a map that packed all five Republicans” in Illinois’ U.S. House delegation “into just three.” And despite Democrats not winning even 60 percent of the popular vote in 2024, the party holds 14 out of the state’s 17 congressional seats.

In New York, Democrats at the state level blocked a proposal drawn by the state’s bipartisan Independent Redistricting Committee (IRC) last year and instead approved a map which, as NBC News’ Jane C. Timm wrote, gave “Democrats a slight boost.”Notably, New Yorkers passed a constitutional amendment in 2014 creating the IRC, which is tasked with drawing new maps every 10 years. Democrats had previously been shot down by the courts after they, as Timm described, passed maps “that so significantly boosted their congressional prospects” in 2022.

In Massachusetts, there are a total of zero Republican congressional districts despite the state swinging more than 36 percent for Trump in 2024.

Nonetheless, Svirnovskiy suggested that the real problem isn’t Democrats’ gerrymandering, it’s Republicans’.

To be fair to Svirnovskiy, Democrats’ water isn’t going to carry itself.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: D.C. Man Shot to Death as Lefties Protest Crime Crackdown Nearby.

HAS POWELL EVER MADE A TIMELY DECISION ON INFLATION?

Jerome Powell (in June): We're refusing to cut interest rates because "everyone I know is forecasting a meaningful increase in inflation from tariffs."

July CPI: Came in below expectations once again.pic.twitter.com/FSFHeG3xia

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 12, 2025

From the replies: “Tariffs not showing up in the data for tariff-sensitive items: new vehicles (0%), smartphones (0%), toys (+0.2%), appliances (-0.9%), apparel (+0.1%).”

OOPS: Chinese Warship, Cutter Collide in South China Sea.

A Chinese cutter and guided-missile destroyer collided with each other in the South China Sea on Monday during a botched blockade attempt of Philippine Coast Guard vessels ten nautical miles off Scarborough Shoal in one of the most severe incidents among Chinese forces to date.

Just before the incident, Philippine Coast Guard patrol vessels responded to reports of harassment and “hazardous maneuvers” against Philippine fishing vessels around the contested maritime feature, according to a statement from Philippine Coast Guard spokesperson Commodore Jay Tarriela. BRP Teresa Magbanua (MRRV-9701) and BRP Suluan (MRRV-4406) escorted fishing carrier MV Pamamalakaya and 35 local fishing vessels in support of Manila’s Kadiwa Operation, a Philippine government-led initiative designed to support and empower fishing communities in the country’s western exclusive economic zone.

Chinese forces failed to water cannon Suluan after Philippine sailors maneuvered away, according to the press release. China Coast Guard cutter 3104, one of several former People’s Liberation Army Navy 056-class corvettes transferred to China’s maritime law enforcement agency, proceeded to chase the Philippine vessel alongside the PLAN 052D-class guided-missile destroyer Guilin (164) in what Tarriela described as a “risky” maneuver.

Footage taken of the incident by personnel aboard Suluan depicted the 3104 Jiangdao-class cutter crash into Guilin’s bow as the destroyer attempted to cut off the Philippine patrol vessel.

Video at the link.

POP SOME CORN AND ENJOY THE SHOW: Watch Tapper Grimace as he Beclowns Himself On Air Again.

WHAT YEAR IS THIS? AOL to discontinue dial-up internet service. “The service will shutter on September 30, meaning ‘the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued,’ the web service provider said on its website.”

LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES:

My security camera will show you what life was like for a family living in DC:

Here’s a mass shooting and murder in my front lawn, followed by my house being set on fire with my wife and infant child inside.

These are regular occurrences for DC residents.

I lived just a few… pic.twitter.com/ZPnfUWB0DD

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 11, 2025

More:

I lived just a few blocks from the US Capitol. There were open drug deals and arms deals constantly outside my house. My family was threatened on a near daily basis. Racist epitaphs were hurled at my wife and infant children. Rocks were thrown at us as we walked down the street. We were constantly targeted for being white in a “black neighborhood.” No one gave a sh*t. Judges and cops saw us as the problem. When DC Defunded their police, the city turned into a deadly war zone. Every resident was terrorized.

But DC residents should just sit there and take it because Orange Man Bad.

ICYMI: The Judgment Fund Can Make Whole the Victims of Biden’s Weaponized DOJ.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dems Make Every City ‘Federal Intervention Level’ Dangerous. “It really does take a lot to get me to give a thumbs up to the federal government putting down its overgrown foot in any situation. The Democrats have turned so much of America upside down that it’s getting easier with each new situation. These situations, of course, keep popping up in places where the Dems have been in charge for a long time.”

HEAVY ON THE ARTIFICIAL, LIGHT ON THE INTELLIGENCE: LLMs’ ‘simulated reasoning’ abilities are a ‘brittle mirage,’ researchers find.

In recent months, the AI industry has started moving toward so-called simulated reasoning models that use a “chain of thought” process to work through tricky problems in multiple logical steps. At the same time, recent research has cast doubt on whether those models have even a basic understanding of general logical concepts or an accurate grasp of their own “thought process.” Similar research shows that these “reasoning” models can often produce incoherent, logically unsound answers when questions include irrelevant clauses or deviate even slightly from common templates found in their training data.

In a recent pre-print paper, researchers from the University of Arizona summarize this existing work as “suggest[ing] that LLMs are not principled reasoners but rather sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text.” To pull on that thread, the researchers created a carefully controlled LLM environment in an attempt to measure just how well chain-of-thought reasoning works when presented with “out of domain” logical problems that don’t match the specific logical patterns found in their training data.

The results suggest that the seemingly large performance leaps made by chain-of-thought models are “largely a brittle mirage” that “become[s] fragile and prone to failure even under moderate distribution shifts,” the researchers write. “Rather than demonstrating a true understanding of text, CoT reasoning under task transformations appears to reflect a replication of patterns learned during training.”

Technical details (and lots of them) at the link. I’d just add that LLMs can, in limited circumstances, produce output that closely mimics human thought, but anyone expecting “a true understanding of text” might be smoking something.

ABSENT SOME BIG SHAKEUP IN THE RACE: Yep, Mamdani Will Be NYC’s Next Mayor.

WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T MENTION THE WAR JEWS: Teach the Holocaust — without mentioning Jews — says NEA. “Remember the Holocaust, but forget the Jews, advises the nation’s largest teachers’ union. The National Education Association’s 2025 handbook calls for ‘recognizing more than 12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics’ on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, reports Alana Goodman in the Washington Free-Beacon, The proclamation is remarkably Judenrein, as the Nazis would say.”

A RAYMOND IBRAHIM VIDEO PODCAST: EU’s Fake History Project: Millions Spent to ‘Prove’ That Islam ‘Belongs’ in Europe.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: DC May Be More Receptive to a Trump Takeover Than Many Assume.

Trump’s options are limited, and a full-scale takeover would require an act of Congress. It is also probably dependent on how well it would be received by D.C. residents.

“The city doesn’t particularly like him, and he doesn’t particularly like the city,” George Derek Musgrove, an associate history professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, recently told NPR. Less than 7 percent of the District’s voters pulled the lever for Trump last November. It seems that most would reject a takeover.

But would they?

A big reason they might not is auto theft, which is out of control in the nation’s capital. Thousands of residents have fallen victim in the last few years. In 2023, auto thefts reached a 15-year high of 6,773 in D.C. That declined to 5,126 in 2024 but is still way up over the 2,186 that occurred in 2019. A car theft is an incredibly exasperating and infuriating experience, the type of experience that could make Trump seizing power over D.C. seem very appealing to many residents.

I would know.

Read the whole thing.

SCOTT PINSKER: The Next Great Political Outrage Is Here (and It’s an Old Favorite of Rush Limbaugh)! “Pinsker’s Law of PR #29: Moral outrage has a short shelf life. The hotter the emotion, the shorter your timeline for exploitation.”

UGH: Colorado prison evacuated as wildfire grows into one of largest in state history.

Evacuation orders were already in place for mountain communities as the Lee Fire charred more than 167 square miles (433 square kilometers) across Garfield and Rio Blanco counties, with just 6% containment. No injuries or structural damage has been reported.

All 179 incarcerated people were safely removed from the Rifle Correctional Center on Saturday “out of an abundance of caution,” the Colorado Department of Corrections said in a statement. They were temporarily relocated about 150 miles (240 kilometers) away to the Buena Vista Correctional Complex, the department said.

The Lee Fire, churning through trees and brush about 250 miles (400 kilometers) west of Denver, is now the sixth-largest single fire in the state’s history, according to the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control.

More than a thousand firefighters are battling the blaze, working to keep the flames to the west of Colorado 13 and north of County Road 5, officials said.

The old joke is that Colorado’s four seasons are snow, mud, fire, and construction. And residents will tell you there’s plenty of overlap.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Belmont Club: Our Guardian Angels. “The rise of courtroom media has provided the public with hundreds of glimpses into that supremely tragic moment when a felon, sometimes just a teenager, learns he is sentenced to life imprisonment. Then, despite their efforts at bravado, there is no hiding the shock and disbelief. His life is over. The possibility that he blotted from his consciousness has actually become unbearably real.”

THINK SMALL: Armies Tormented by Drones Innovate Ways to Spot, Jam and Zap on the Cheap.

Project Flytrap began in March with initial research and testing. It has grown in scale and ambition, with 4.0 the first time troops integrated counterdrone systems into battalion-level fighting. The engagement scenario involved several dozen troops attacking roughly 180 defenders in traditional land battles augmented with hundreds of drones, employed in the most realistic ways possible short of lethality, said organizers.

To crank up intensity, they packed into the four-day exercise a relentless series of attacks, engagements and threats modeled on fighting in Ukraine and other conflicts.

“It’s terrifying, watching the drones counter each other,” said Zouzoulas of the scenes on Ukraine’s front lines.

Adapting to that reality is Flytrap’s focus. Troops from the Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment, based in Germany, and the U.K.’s Royal Yorkshire Regiment used new devices—some developed in-house and some from private companies—to track, jam and shoot down drones sent at them by other U.S. forces.

“It’s very much a cat-and-mouse game,” said Army Lt. Col. Jeremy Medaris, a leader of the exercise. Drones keep adapting, “so then you have to have an adaptation as well” to counter them. Instead of seeking a single solution, he said, the emphasis is on developing a flexible and layered approach with a range of tools.

Zouzoulas’s Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team Manpack tackles the first stage in drone-fighting: spotting attackers. A sort of antenna, known as a Beast+, resembles a cactus growing out of a backpack, connected by wire to a screen the size of a smartphone. Designed for foot soldiers on the move, it scans for nearby drones’ radio signals and jams them.

An even smaller wearable system resembles two big walkie-talkies. Dubbed Wingman and Pitbull, they also seek and jam drones’ radio signals.

Much more to come.

(There wasn’t an archived version of this WSJ paywall article ready to go at press time, but it’s in the queue.)

BREAKING: Mass Casualty Event at U.S. Steel Works.

THIS STORY JUST DID A 180: Air Force Airman Arrested for Manslaughter in Connection With Shooting Initially Blamed on SIG SAUER M18 ‘Uncommanded Discharge.’ “The airman’s death was the most high profile incident blamed — wrongly, it appears — on an uncommanded discharge of a SIG P320 platform pistol.”