I HAD BEEN ASSURED THIS KIND OF THING WAS JUST A QANON DELUSION: Florida sting targeting child sex exploitation finds nearly 40% of arrestees in US illegally. “Officials said that seven out of 19 people arrested in Bay County, Florida, were in the country illegally. Five have no record showing lawful entry into the U.S. One man was admitted on a B-2 visitors visa that expired in 2021, and another was admitted on a J-1 student visa that also expired in 2021.”

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP [VIP]: Maybe AI Isn’t Evil, It’s Just… Wrong.

Plus:

• How to stop the shoplifting crime wave with this one weird beating.
• Ron Perlman performs the Triple Lindy of backflips.
• The Mitch McConnell/Diane Feinstein meme you’ll never unsee.

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

BREAKING: Capitol Police respond to unconfirmed active shooter report around Senate office building.

UPDATE (From Ed): U.S. Capitol Police chief says report of active shooter may have been a ‘bogus call.’

NARRATIVEGUARD: Meet the Company Trying to Control Your Mind.

NEIGHBOR AGAINST NEIGHBOR: Social Networking App Boots Moms for Liberty Amid Leftist Attacks.

WAIT, WHAT? The New Charges Against Trump Carry the Death Penalty.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Thieves target Seattle fire fighting units while fire fighters respond to calls.

HATCHET MAN: Special Counsel Jack Smith Has Done the Job He Was Hired to Do.

HE’S NO USE TO THE CAUSE ANY LONGER: The Media Throw Hunter Biden Under the Bus To Save the ‘Big Guy.’ “After years of ignoring, downplaying, and defending Hunter Biden’s scandals, the mainstream media appear ready to throw in the towel. It looks like the first son may have to take the fall to protect his dad, President Joe Biden.”

Remember that, next time you see a story about how much kindly old Joe dotes on his children.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: You Won’t Believe What We’re Spending ONE TRILLION DOLLARS to Buy.

A trillion dollars might not be what it used to be, what with Presidentish Joe Biden spending that much and more on pet projects designed to accomplish little except enrich his favorite interest groups. But it’s still more money than a single person has ever been worth, and it’s even a few times more than even the largest corporation has ever held in cash or other liquid assets. Apple’s outstanding shares might be worth about three trillion dollars, but the company has “only” $207 billion cash on hand.

Elon Musk is the world’s richest man on most days, but you’d still need nearly six of him to rack up a trillion bucks. But even if someday Starlink and SpaceX IPOs made Musk the world’s first trillionaire — something not outside the realm of possibility — Musk would never in a hundred years ever see anything like a trillion dollars in cash.

Still, if you had a trillion dollars — to paraphrase Barenaked Ladies — what do you think you could buy?

Many more trillions at the link.

DECOUPLING: China Chip Firms Soar on Report of Advance in Fabrication Tech.

Beijing has pushed its firms for years to develop local technologies in sectors it deems of strategic importance, particularly those that Washington is targeting to contain its rival. Chipmaking gear is regarded as among the weakest links in China’s semiconductor supply chain, an area currently dominated by firms including ASML Holding NV and Tokyo Electron Ltd. The country’s top chipmakers, including Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd., all rely on foreign-made equipment.

ASML is the global leader in lithography machines, and gear that can support 28 nm chips is essential to making silicon for a spectrum of products from electric cars to missiles. The Netherlands, home to ASML, has joined a US-led effort to curb Beijing’s chip ambitions by banning the Dutch supplier from selling advanced chipmaking machines to China.

It’s unclear whether the Shanghai firm can deliver such machines in bulk.

The 28nm process that Shanghai Micro is trying to deliver was state of the art, briefly, in 2011.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING: Trump Indictments Conveniently Follow Bad News Days for Joe Biden.

DOUBLETHINK: Joe Biden Wasn’t Involved In Hunter’s Business And It’s Normal That He Was.

The press transitioned from simple bias to Orwellian gaslighting so quickly it was enough to make your head spin.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

https://twitter.com/KevinTober94/status/1686526008210370560

COME SEE THE RACISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: South African Communists Shout ‘Kill the Boer’ During Weekend Rally.

FOLLOW THE ACTUAL SCIENCE: ‘Caught-Red-Handed’: Scientists Call for Full Retraction of Nature’s Proximal Origin Paper, as Fraud Accusations Mount.

The paper, whose authors included immunology and microbiology professor Kristian G. Andersen, declared that evidence clearly showed that SARS-CoV-2 did not originate from a laboratory.

“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote in February.

Yet a trove of recently published documents reveal that Andersen and his co-authors believed that the lab leak scenario was not just possible, but likely.

“[The] main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” Andersen said to his colleagues, according to a report from Public, which published a series of Slack messages between the authors.

Anderson was not the only author who privately expressed doubts that the virus had natural origins. Public cataloged dozens of statements from Andersen and his co-authors—Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry—between the dates January 31 and February 28, 2020 suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered.

” …the fact that we are discussing this shows how plausible it is,” Garry said of the lab-leak hypothesis.

“We unfortunately can’t refute the lab leak hypothesis,” Andersen said on Feb. 20, several days after the authors published their pre-print.

They put politics over science while accusing dissenters of being science deniers.

Why? Follow the money: “To complicate matters further, new reporting from The Intercept reveals that Anderson had an $8.9 million grant with NIH pending final approval from Dr. Anthony Fauci when the Proximal Origin paper was submitted.”

WELL, THEY’RE RELIABLE: California Relying on Fossil Fuels Amid Heat Wave.

WE’VE GOTTA PROTECT OUR PHONY BALONEY JOBS: Santa Barbara School Board Protects Lefty Activists’ Grift As Student Scores Keep Sliding. “Freed, the founder of a Santa Barbara nonprofit named ‘AHA!’ (Attitudes, Harmony, and Achievement), was an important conduit for the Santa Barbara school board’s mission of injecting critical race theory and queer theory into the veins of public schools. Under the guise of ‘social-emotional learning,’ Freed would recruit teenagers for her workshops, talk about sex openly with children, invite grown men to talk about sex with children, and flaunt her organization’s life-changing effects to her donors.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Unhinged Dems’ Trumped-Up Trump Witch Hunt Sleazily Rolls Along. “Once more, with feeling: what is happening here is straight-up election interference. The Democrats are getting out in front of it earlier than in any previous election.”

CAROL ROTH: Americans Should Not Have to Rent the American Dream.

In recent years, the balance sheets of young and old alike have been wrecked by inflation, debt and college loans. Home prices have also been driven up by undersupply, government regulation, and even corporate competition.

With that, more Americans are finding their dream isn’t attainable—it is only for rent.

Corporations have been given a huge advantage through government and central bank policy. With this unlevel playing field, these institutional investors drove up the prices in traditional asset classes. When they couldn’t find enough of a return on their investment from the usual sources, Wall Street-backed corporate investors decided to come into the single-family home market.

The New York Times Magazine reported that “from 2007 to 2011, 4.7 million households lost homes to foreclosure, and a million more to short sale. Private-equity firms developed new ways to secure credit, enabling them to leverage their equity and acquire an astonishing number of homes.”

It was an epic transfer of wealth.

Moreover, it consolidated power with big institutions and has impaired the ability of many Americans to gain wealth via home ownership.

While there was no meaningful institutional corporate investment in the housing market prior to 2010, at the end of 2022, more than one in every five homes was purchased from a corporate investor, according to CoreLogic.

Imagine for a moment an America without broad individual home ownership.

Read the whole thing.

THEY’LL KEEP TRYING: Columbia Law Schools Tried to End-Run the Affirmative Action Ruling.

CHANGE: DeSantis-appointed district abolishes Disney board’s DEI and race-based programs: ‘illegal’ and ‘unAmerican.’ “The old district for the better part of 50 years kept Disney insulated from that state government and was described as having had a nearly indistinguishable relationship to that of being a Disney employee.”

GOOD LORD: Illegals Committed 430K+ Criminal Offenses in Texas Since 2011.

BREAKING: Trump Indicted by Biden DOJ for His ‘Role’ in Capitol Riot.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: YouTube Punishes Dr. Drew (Again). “Dr. Pinsky has always been more cautious, less willing to inflame the public or start arguments out of thin air. The current tenor of the times, where reasonable debates are silenced on major Big Tech platforms, changed Dr. Pinsky’s thinking.”

THIS IS WORLD-CHANGING… OR JUST ANOTHER BUST LIKE COLD FUSION: Room-Temperature Superconductor Claim Goes Viral, But Be Skeptical.

The South Korean researchers say LK-99 can be made in a baking process that combines the minerals lanarkite (Pb₂SO₅) and copper phosphide (Cu₃P). They say the resulting material shows two key signs of superconductivity at normal air pressure and at temperatures up to 127 ℃: zero resistance and magnetic levitation.

They propose a plausible theory of how LK-99 might display room-temperature superconductivity, but have not provided definite experimental evidence. The data presented in the papers appear inconclusive.

One of the signatures of a superconductor is the Meissner effect, which causes it to levitate when placed above a magnet.

In a video demonstration, the researchers position a piece of LK-99 over a magnet. One edge of the flat disk of LK-99 rises, but the other edge appears to maintain contact with the magnet.

We would expect a superconductor to display full levitation and also “quantum locking” which keeps it in a fixed position relative to the magnet. In a charitable interpretation, the behaviour we see in the video may be due to imperfections in the sample, meaning only part of the sample becomes superconductive.

So it is too early to say we have been presented with compelling evidence for room-temperature superconductivity.

I’d love to be wrong, but I get the feeling that room-temperature superconductors are the material of the future and always will be.