IF ANY SINGLE COLUMNIST FULLY REPRESENTS THE DRAB CONFORMITY OF INSIDE-THE-BELTWAY THINKING, IT’S DAVID IGNATIUS: President Biden should not run again in 2024.

TO BE FAIR, REPORTERS AREN’T GENERALLY VERY WELL INFORMED: Reporter Gets Destroyed After Claiming ‘No Evidence’ for Biden Impeachment.

STOP BEING POOR SICK: ObamaCare Turns Out to Be Affordable Only for the Healthy.

According to President Biden, health insurance in America is free or almost free (“as little as $10 a month or less” after subsidies) for about 80% of people who acquire it in an ObamaCare exchange. Most preventive care—the only kind of care healthy people require—is also free.

If you are sick, things are different. Consider a hypothetical middle-aged couple in Dallas earning $70,000 a year. Suppose they have two children, both of whom have serious birth defects. Although this family will pay no premium for a Blue Cross bronze plan in the ObamaCare exchange, they will face a $9,100 deductible for each child. Their total out-of-pocket exposure is $18,200 a year.

It gets worse. Patients with serious diseases often require the care of highly trained specialists who usually work at centers of excellence. But that family in Dallas will discover that their Blue Cross plan isn’t accepted at leading cancer providers nearby, including Baylor University Medical Center and the University of Texas Health Science Center, or MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The problem isn’t unique to Texas. ObamaCare plans have very skinny networks in every state. They tend to pay providers Medicaid rates or close to them. As a result, ObamaCare looks like Medicaid with a high deductible. A great many providers, including prestigious medical institutions, won’t accept Medicaid managed care—the version of Medicaid most recipients receive—or ObamaCare.

When a patient with ObamaCare coverage goes out of network, the plan usually pays nothing and the patient’s payment doesn’t apply to his deductible or out-of-pocket maximum.

High prices for restricted service… yep, that’s a government program.

Plus: “If you wonder why ObamaCare was designed this way, consider that it wasn’t designed by Mr. Obama or by Democratic lawmakers. It was designed by special interests. ObamaCare has been pouring about $60 billion a year in new money into the healthcare system. All that spending is lining the pockets of insurance companies, hospitals and some doctors—although it doesn’t appear that there has been any overall increase in the amount of healthcare being delivered.”

CORN, POPPED: RFK Jr. Telegraphs Threat to Vacate Democrat Party Plantation.

FIRST, THEY MADE IT DIFFICULT TO BUY THE GOOD STUFF WITH PSEUDOEPHEDRINE THAT ACTUALLY DOES WORK…: A Popular OTC Decongestant Might Soon Be Pulled From Shelves for Being Useless. “Food and Drug Administration scientists say that oral phenylephrine doesn’t work for nasal decongestion, though the agency’s final decision has yet to be made.”

COURTESY OF GREG ABBOTT AND RON DESANTIS: The Bluster and Demise of Sanctuary Cities.

WHO YOU GONNA BELIEVE, AOC OR YOUR OWN LYIN’ EYES? ‘Is AOC Crazy?’: Ocasio-Cortez’s Constituents Blast Her For Sharing Video Calling Inflation ‘Propaganda.’

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Gov. Lujan Grisham Is All Alone on a Commie Gun-Grabber Island. “There is so much wrong with her edict banning open and concealed carry for 30 days in Albuquerque that Lujan Grisham has achieved something almost impossible in this political climate: she has Republicans and Democrats agreeing on something.”

HUXLEY MEETS ORWELL: California Bills Headed to Newsom’s Desk Will Launch a Transgender Inquisition Targeting Parents.

AB-5, called the Safe and Supportive Schools Act, passed the California State Assembly in May by a vote of 64-4 and on Thursday passed the California State Senate, 32-3. The bill would mandate an “online delivery platform and an online training curriculum to support LGBTQ cultural competency training for teachers and other certified employees.”

Not only does this training enforce transgender ideology among educators, but it also trains educators to profile those despicable “anti-LGBTQ” parents.

Sure, the so-called Safe and Supportive Schools Act doesn’t explicitly state that “the material will include five tips on profiling parents who dissent from gender ideology so we can rip their kids from their arms.” It’s far subtler than that.

The bill states that “at a minimum,” training will include information on ” identifying LGBTQ+ youth who are subject to, or may be at risk of, bullying and lack of acceptance at home or in their communities.”

Yet how would teachers identify these allegedly vulnerable “LGBTQ+ youth” if not by examining the parents who supposedly pose such a threat to the boys and girls they brought into the world?

Make no mistake: This bill does involve training teachers to profile parents based on the likelihood that they may secretly harbor heresy against the transgender state religion.

Let’s call this what it is: The sex-groomer Stasi.

HEH: Did Sodom and Gomorrah Have a Stripper’s Union? Portland’s Asking…

WELL, GOOD: St Louis Children’s Hospital will no longer perform sex changes on minors.

The Washington University Transgender Center at Saint Louis Children’s Hospital will no longer prescribe puberty blockers or sex hormones to minors for purposes of gender transition, as a result of a new law in Missouri.

In a letter to staff obtained by The Post Millennial, Dr. David H Perlmutter, the executive vice chancellor for medical affairs of Washington University’s School of Medicine told staff at the center that following a review, “We have now reached a point where we can no longer continue to operate the center in the same way.”

He specifically cited “Missouri’s newly enacted law regarding transgender care” that has “created a new legal claim for patients who receive these medications as minors. This legal claim creates unsustainable liability for healthcare professionals and makes it untenable for us to continue to provide comprehensive transgender care for minor patients without subjecting the university and our providers to an unacceptable level of liability.”

Providers are moving very quickly from denying they ever did these kinds of things to sounding resentful that they’re no longer allowed to.

DANGER: Conservative Media Is Starting to Self-Censor.

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

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.

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.”

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

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.

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

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.

SILVER ALERT: Have You Seen This Man? “Someone in Washington law enforcement needs to issue a silver alert for the man who used to be Joe Biden, who is currently play-acting as President of the United States and last seen wandering aimlessly around various events in India, Vietnam, and Alaska. And while they’re at it, maybe round up the Cabal that actually runs the “Biden” White House for elder abuse — and for criminal conspiracy to completely ruin a once-great nation.”

SPACE: Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18 b. “A new investigation with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into K2-18 b, an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth, has revealed the presence of carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide. Webb’s discovery adds to recent studies suggesting that K2-18 b could be a Hycean exoplanet, one which has the potential to possess a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a water ocean-covered surface.”

BREAKING: Impeachment Inquiry Into Joe Biden May Be Imminent.

WE SHOULD HAVE DONE THIS YEARS AGO: We must end the experiment of science cooperation with China.

The Biden administration’s decision to request a six-month extension of the expiring U.S.-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement (STA) follows a noisy campaign by U.S. scientists urging renewal of the landmark 1979 accord.

To hear the scientists tell it, the STA has contributed to nearly every significant scientific breakthrough over the last 40 years.

In reality, the agreement codifies the disadvantageous terms of the immediate post-recognition U.S.-China relationship, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how China uses global science cooperation and sends a contradictory message about the seriousness with which the administration is approaching U.S.-China economic security issues.

Signed by the Carter administration as the first major bilateral agreement following U.S. diplomatic recognition of China, the STA reflects the geopolitical reality of the late 1970s. As scholars like Dr. Michael Pillsbury, writing in “The Hundred Year Marathon,” have noted, the U.S. provided extraordinary technological transfer, both civilian and military, to China in the years immediately following diplomatic recognition, with the goal of accelerating Chinese development as a counterweight to the Soviet Union.

Needless to say, the geopolitical dynamics of U.S.-China relations have dramatically altered in the decades since.

Indeed.