STEVE SAILER: Broken Window of Opportunity.

This theory of broken windows was Wilson’s second big conceptual contribution to reducing crime. The first—incapacitation—has been forgotten because it’s embarrassing to remember just how inane liberal elites had gotten in their thinking about crime during the 1960s.

Because researchers couldn’t prove that prison reformed or deterred criminals, the conventional wisdom back then became: What was the point of sentencing crooks to prison at all? So, during the 1960s the number of people in prison declined even as crime grew.

But, as Wilson pointed out in the 1970s, somebody can’t be committing more street crimes if he’s in prison rather than out on the streets. At minimum, prison incapacitates criminals.

Granted, Wilson’s first big idea—that if Central Park muggers are in prison, then they can’t mug people in Central Park—doesn’t seem like a genius insight today. But it was, apparently, a blinding revelation in 1975.

It should be even less of a revelation the second time around, which has me convinced that this time going soft on crime is less about criminal justice reform (if it was ever really that in the ’60s and ’70s) and more about lefties working Lenin’s “the worse, the better” dictum.

2024: Ramaswamy First to Officially Qualify for GOP Debate After Signing Pledge to Support Eventual Nominee.

WHO CHECKS THE FACTCHECKERS? For Washington Post’s Feared ‘Pinocchio’ Fact Checker, Forthrightness Dies in ‘Updates’ to Biden-Burisma Story.

For the second time in three years, the Washington Post has quietly “updated” one of the most consequential fact checks in the history of American politics – its October 2020 article undercutting reports that Hunter Biden arranged a dinner meeting between one of his foreign business clients and his father, who was then vice president of the United States.

The original article by the Washington Post’s chief fact checker, Glenn Kessler, was published the same day as the New York Post’s pre-election scoop revealing that Joe Biden had attended a 2015 dinner with a top executive of a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, which was paying his son $83,000 per month. Kessler’s fact-check involved interviews with a host of Biden aides who vehemently disputed the vice president’s attendance at the dinner and advanced the theory that the source of the information – a laptop Hunter had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop – was untrustworthy and possibly a Russian plant.

That conspiracy theory was quickly embraced by 51 former intelligence officials, who signed an open letter dismissing the New York Post’s scoop as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” This letter and the Washington Post fact check were used by the Biden campaign, other media outlets, and social media platforms to discredit the information contained on the laptop in the final days of the campaign. The article, Kessler would later boast, was “one of the most read articles in our 13-year history” of the fact-checking feature.

But Kessler’s fact check has not aged well.

Kessler’s updates aren’t much better, as you’ll see at the link.

IT’S COMPLICATED: The Top Three Issues of 2024 (And Yes, Abortion Is a Big One). “The 800-pound gorilla in the room is the political reality that abortion is unsettled on the national level, and that is costing us elections. Abortion aborted our long-promised red wave in 2022. Last night, it crushed Ohio conservatives’ attempt to shore up the state constitution against a new right to abortion — which will now likely be voted into existence in November.”

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Texas Outlaws Men In Women’s College Sports.

PAULA BOLYARD: This Is Getting So Ridiculous. Check Out What the Big Tech Goons Are up to Now. “The Powers That Be don’t want us writing about climate change or COVID-19 — unless we agree that climate change is an immediate existential threat to the world and that the CDC and Anthony Fauci got everything right in their response to COVID. Telling the truth about transgenderism is another topic that gets us slapped with flags.”

JUST ANOTHER BROKEN EGG: Why Kamala Harris Won’t Be Asked About the Suicide of a Newspaperman She Persecuted.

MATT MARGOLIS: The Latest Trump Indictment Looks Like It’s Backfiring.

SPACE: Looking back toward cosmic dawn − astronomers confirm the faintest galaxy ever seen.

The intense ultraviolet light from the first generations of stars and galaxies is thought to have burned through the hydrogen fog, transforming the universe into what we see today. While previous generations of telescopes lacked the ability to study those early cosmic objects, astronomers are now using the James Webb Space Telescope’s superior technology to study the stars and galaxies that formed in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.

I’m an astronomer who studies the farthest galaxies in the universe using the world’s foremost ground- and space-based telescopes. Using new observations from the Webb telescope and a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, my team confirmed the existence of the faintest galaxy currently known in the early universe. The galaxy, called JD1, is seen as it was when the universe was only 480 million years old, or 4% of its present age.

And scientists are really just getting started with JWST.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP [VIP]: Well Done, Everybody — Anheuser-Busch Is in Real Trouble Now.

Plus:

• Indiana Mike and the Facepalm of Doom.
• It’s vital that California stop the shoplifter-stoppers.
• How not to go to a concert.

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

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Biden Has Handed Taliban Over $2 BILLION In 2 Years.

The SIGAR report found that approximately $1.7 billion “remained available for possible disbursement” at the time writing. The Beacon notes that “it is more than likely that a sizable portion of these funds will end up in the terror group’s coffers.”

The Taliban are viewing international aide as a “revenue stream,” according to the report, which further states that the group is “comfortable accepting foreign support insofar as they can closely monitor the organizations, including restricting and controlling them, and claim some credit for the provision of the benefits.”

The findings come after John Sopko, head of SIGAR, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in April that he “cannot assure this committee or the American taxpayer we are not currently funding the Taliban,” and accused the Biden administration of blocking his efforts to find out.

Is the big guy getting his cut?

AND THEN THERE WERE EIGHT: These Republicans Have Met the Criteria for the First GOP Debate.

JUST ANOTHER DAY IN POST-POST SOVIET RUSSIA: Andrei, You’ve Had Another Industrial Accident? “This morning brings news of another ‘industrial accident’ in Russia. Via OSINTdefender, comes news of a major explosion at the Zagorsk Optical-Mechanical Plant. From video shot on scene, it appears that artillery shells were either being stored there, or were being made/refurbished there. Read the thread for more details, but a couple of things pop out for me.”

PERSEVERANCE: Poll Shows Most New Hampshire Voters Would Vote for Trump Even if He’s Convicted.

UPDATE: That’s GOP primary voters, of course.

CHANGE: WeWork warns of ‘substantial doubt’ it can stay in business after going from $47billion valuation to the brink of bankruptcy.

The New York-based workspace-sharing company, once valued at $47 billion, said its ability to stay in operation is contingent upon improving its liquidity and profitability over the next 12 months.

WeWork was stung by the Coronavirus pandemic as social distancing caused people to work from home and the company has still not reported a profit since restrictions were eased.

WeWork said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that challenges include softer demand and a ‘difficult’ operating environment.

‘Substantial doubt exists about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern,’ the firm said.

Plus: “The company was valued at $47 billion at one point, before investors started to drop off due to [former CEO Adam] Neumann’s erratic behaviour and exorbitant spending.”

FIGHT THE POWER: UC Faculty Members Rebelling Against DEI in Math Classes.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: By 5-4 Vote, Supreme Court Revives Biden’s Regulation of ‘Ghost Guns.’

The Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily revived the Biden administration’s regulation of “ghost guns” — kits that can be bought online and assembled into untraceable homemade firearms.

In defending the rule, a key part of President Biden’s broader effort to address gun violence, administration officials said such weapons had soared in popularity in recent years, particularly among criminals barred from buying ordinary guns.

The court’s brief order gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. The order was provisional, leaving the regulation in place while a challenge moves forward in the courts.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — to form a majority.

Disappointing.

NEVER GONNA HAPPEN: The Latest Disney Rumor Is Mouse-S*** Crazy.

AI, THE NEXT GENERATION: OpenAI to Unleash New Web Crawler to Devour More of the Open Web.

The web crawler will collect publicly available data from websites, while avoiding paywalled, sensitive, and prohibited content, according to OpenAI. Similar to other search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex, however, the system is opt out—by default, GPTBot will assume accessible information is fair game. In order to prevent the OpenAI web crawler from ingesting a website, its owner must add a “disallow” rule to a standard file on the server.

OpenAI also says that GPTBot will preemptively scan scraped data to remove personally identifiable information (PII) and text that violates its policies.

Until the AI grows powerful enough to ignore those restrictions.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: What If They Gave a Republican Primary and Nobody Came? “Are we really doing this Republican primary season? I mean, I know that debates and voting are scheduled, but have you met anyone who’s thinking, ‘I can’t wait to get this all started?’ Presidential election cycles in the United States are longer than the John Galt speech in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ which I’m not sure really ever ended.”

BIDENOMICS, IT’S WORKING! Credit card balances jumped in the second quarter and are above $1 trillion for the first time. “The Fed’s measure of credit card debt 30 or more days late rose to 7.2% in the second quarter, the highest rate since the first quarter of 2012.”

SOURCES: Joe Biden Knows Who Brought Cocaine to White House.

The Secret Service knows, too.

PRISON STORIES: ‘Maddison’ Hall.

For decades, and in multiple countries, imprisoned men have been placed in the women’s prison estate because they have claimed to be women. This has been justified under the guise of compassion for such men, and, we have been told that they are too vulnerable to remain housed with other men.

The following series “Prison Stories” will look at individual cases, the nature of some of these men’s crimes, and at any of the known consequences, to women, of their transfers into female prisons. It will challenge the narrative of particular vulnerability.

Sometimes, I will focus on the cases of men who claim to be women, in prisons, but who have not yet been transferred. As more, and more, countries cede ground to the idea of prioritising gender identity over biological sex, and more organisations adopt Self-ID, this larger pool of men are the potential future cellmates of all female prisoners.

If, and when, they are released, these men will also be granted access to every space designated for women in our society.

The following stories will show that many women prisoners have already been hurt, and essentially thrown to the wolves, because of “gender identity”. Some of the facts presented are, necessarily, distressing.

Much more at the link.

GOODER AND HARDER: Massachusetts Declares a State of Emergency Over Immigration.

LIVE RESULTS: Ohio Issue 1 On Protecting Constitution From Special Interests.