I’M NOT FEELING VERY SUPERIOR WHEN THE ALARM GOES OFF AT FIVE: Social Justice™ Now Claims Waking Up Early Is White Supremacy.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin finally gets coveted moon contract. “NASA has selected Blue Origin to build a human lunar landing system for the Artemis V mission, which is currently targeted for 2029.”

GREEN NUDE EEL: ‘No Correlation’: Steve Milloy Slams Climate Alarmists’ Extreme Weather Claims.

VERY: How bad was the gaslighting?

The political, cultural, academic, and media Elite literally promoted the idea that anybody who was skeptical about the safety and effectiveness of the COVID vaccine was a murderer and deserved to die.

Deserved to die. Not just that they were placing themselves at risk, but that their failure to comply with the diktats of others made them worthy of death.

It is impossible to overstate the level of evil involved. And yes, it was not just wrong, but evil. The primary justifications behind the propaganda effort were manifestly false: unvaccinated people somehow magically endanger people who themselves are totally incapable of either getting or transmitting the virus itself.

This idea is absolutely irrational. If the vaccine worked as advertised, nobody who chose to be unvaccinated presented a moment’s danger to anybody who was vaccinated. After all, if you were vaccinated you were protected, right? That was the point. You could neither get nor spread the virus.

Joe Biden said so.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I Might Pay to Watch ‘English Optional’ Joe Biden Debate Anyone. “Right now, I can think of few things more politically entertaining than seeing Biden, RFK Jr., and Marianne Williamson on a debate stage. Biden can tell a story about riding a manatee to the planet Neptune and frolicking with a jodhpurs-clad Cesar Romero while Williamson casts a spell by slathering an otter in essential oils and yodeling in Gaelic.”

JOANNE JACOBS: SATs are out. Published ‘research’ is in, but it’s pay to play.

Test scores are out. Everyone’s got an A average. The “community service” trip to Mexico and the start-your-own-charity gambit are ho-hum.

Ambitious parents are paying to get a published “research” project on their teenagers’ college applications, report Daniel Golden and Kunal Purohit for ProPublica and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

High-priced college counselors link high schoolers to services that provide online mentors to guide the work and sites to publish it.

“A new industry is extracting fees from well-heeled families to enable their teenage children to conduct and publish research that colleges may regard as a credential,” they write. “At least 20 online research programs for high schoolers have sprung up in the U.S. and abroad in recent years, along with a bevy of journals that publish the work.”

Weird how the SATs were abandoned in the name of fairness, but it’s the rich benefitting.

OH, GROW UP: State Department Beclowns Itself, Offers Therapy for Employees ‘Misgendered’ in Email Glitch.

CAROL ROTH: Joe Biden learned nothing from overseeing the last US debt downgrade.

In the summer of 2011, an ugly economic event that had never happened in the United States’ history came to pass: The sovereign debt of the United States received an official credit downgrade. Standard & Poor’s cut the debt rating from the crème-de-la-crème AAA rating down to AA+, due to concerns over growing debts and deficits.

Who was the vice president when this historic credit downgrade came about? None other than our current president, Joe Biden himself.

You would think that stern and unprecedented warning would have been a learning moment. At the time, the U.S. public debt stood at around 95% of GDP and was less than $15 trillion in the aggregate. If the U.S.’s fiscal standing was a concern then, Biden might realize the dire situation the U.S. is in today with public debt sitting at 125% or so of the GDP and rapidly approaching $32 trillion in total.

The Biden cabal isn’t in Washington to learn or lead or anything like that, but to raid the Treasury for everything they can.

PAULA BOLYARD: The Danger to Canada (and How It Differs from the Danger to the U.S.).

The danger to Canada, writes industrial technologist and army veteran Tex Leugner in The Cochrane Eagle, transcends the state-and-media entente that works to prepare the public for the assumption of elite authority predicated on an ideological agenda. The danger, rather, is delved in the almost insuperable task of “restor[ing] the necessary common sense and good judgment to a lazy, unthinking electorate” prone to electing corrupt, unpatriotic leaders, “a citizenry capable of entrusting an incompetent man with the job of Prime Minister” and refusing to rectify or even acknowledge the blunder: “The danger to Canada is the people in it.”

Election results confirm, Leugner continues, “that more and more Canadians are moving in the direction of socialism with every generation, most of whom no longer have any morality, sense of self reliance, personal responsibility, independent thinking and a willingness to continue the culture of hard-working self-respect that built this magnificent country in the first place.” His conclusion hits hard. “Canada is no longer the country I was once so proud to serve as a soldier. In fact, it is no longer my country.” Many former servicemen, some of whom have become personal friends, agree wholeheartedly. They regret their service, risking life and limb for a country that has neither use nor respect for them, particularly under a Liberal administration.

Read the whole thing.

REAL MONEY: EU regulators fine Meta a record-breaking $1.3B for data privacy violations.

I CERTAINLY HOPE NOT: “Does The US Military’s New Combat Rifle Kinda Suck?”

IT CERTAINLY LOOKS THAT WAY [VIP]: Was Russia Just Invaded by Russian Troops? “When I read reports that a Russian volunteer force that fights alongside the Ukraine army had invaded Russia’s Belgorod region this morning, my first instinct was to dismiss it as a mostly meaningless stunt. I didn’t even bother mentioning it in this morning’s big update on Russia’s victory in the Battle of Bakhmut — maybe that was a mistake.”

HMM: Russian minister, 46, ‘who privately condemned Putin’s “fascist” invasion of Ukraine’ becomes latest figure to mysteriously die: Official married to Eurovision singer fell ill during flight from Cuba to Moscow.

BUT THAT’S AFTER THE BIG GUY GOT HIS TEN PERCENT: Hunter Biden Cries Poverty During Child-Support Hearing.

DEFUND THE FBI: FBI improperly used warrantless search powers more than 278,000 times in 2021, FISA court filing reveals. “U.S. citizens covered in that improper effort included people involved in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021; George Floyd protesters during the summer of 2020; and donors to a failed congressional candidate, the filing said.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): This wouldn’t happen if there were consequences. But there aren’t. By design.

VANDALS: Fountain of Lies: Climate Crazies Dye Trevi Fountain Black.

ALSO KNOWN AS “JUST ANOTHER WEEK IN EL PASO”: Denver hits 10,000 immigrants milestone during 5-month stretch.

UKRAINE WAR: Russia Finally Takes Bakhmut… Now What? “It was the bloodiest battle in Europe’s bloodiest war since WWII and, whatever Bakhmut’s actual value, Russia’s first win since last year’s humiliating triple defeats around Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson.”

THE BIG MISTAKE WAS MADE BACK IN 2015: How Bud Light Blew It. “Anheuser-Busch works with 385 independent distributors, or wholesalers, across the country. Many of them are family-owned businesses that have carried Anheuser-Busch products for generations. The move of the company’s sales and marketing hub from St. Louis to New York in 2015, several years after Anheuser-Busch was acquired by global giant InBev, has been a point of contention. Some wholesalers have pushed the brewer to move those marketers back to St. Louis, arguing that executives in New York are out of touch with the drinkers of the company’s flagship brands. Anheuser-Busch also has marketers based in St. Louis, Austin, Miami and Los Angeles.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Sort of like how Boeing started downhill when it moved its executive offices from Seattle to Chicago.

TALES FROM THE SWAMPLAND: Deep State Quietly Starting to Fear the Worst: the Return of the Trump Wrecking Ball.

LOCK-IN: Neeva, the would-be Google competitor, is shutting down its search engine. “I’ve talked with Neeva’s co-founders several times over the last couple of years, and their list of grievances here is long and well-founded. They’ve had to contend with the billion-dollar deals Google signs to make itself the default search engine on devices everywhere; the huge ‘are you sure you want to change?’ popups that show up whenever you try to set a new default browser or search engine; the difficulty of finding those settings in the first place; the mess that is the Chrome Web Store; on and on and on. Anyone trying to build a new search engine is fighting a massively uphill battle.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: As DeSantis Decision Nears, Media Ramps Up the Smears. “The Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media are afraid of both Trump and DeSantis and — because they’re not very crafty anymore — they don’t do anything to hide it.”

SAY ANYTHING: Biden Accuses Republicans Of Sabotaging Debt Limit To Get Him Out Of Office. “If the economy does default, Biden argued he would be ‘blameless,’ and called for Republicans to move their positions.”

The GOP-controlled House already has voted to raise the debt limit. This is all on the White House.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Three Years of COVID Democrat Tyranny That We Should Never Forget.

LOAN SHARK: ‘In a lot of the world, the clock has hit midnight’: China is calling in loans to dozens of countries from Pakistan to Kenya.

Behind the scenes is China’s reluctance to forgive debt and its extreme secrecy about how much money it has loaned and on what terms, which has kept other major lenders from stepping in to help. On top of that is the recent discovery that borrowers have been required to put cash in hidden escrow accounts that push China to the front of the line of creditors to be paid.

Countries in AP’s analysis had as much as 50% of their foreign loans from China and most were devoting more than a third of government revenue to paying off foreign debt. Two of them, Zambia and Sri Lanka, have already gone into default, unable to make even interest payments on loans financing the construction of ports, mines and power plants.

In Pakistan, millions of textile workers have been laid off because the country has too much foreign debt and can’t afford to keep the electricity on and machines running.

In Kenya, the government has held back paychecks to thousands of civil service workers to save cash to pay foreign loans. The president’s chief economic adviser tweeted last month, “Salaries or default? Take your pick.”

Since Sri Lanka defaulted a year ago, a half-million industrial jobs have vanished, inflation has pierced 50% and more than half the population in many parts of the country has fallen into poverty.

Experts predict that unless China begins to soften its stance on its loans to poor countries, there could be a wave of more defaults and political upheavals.

Never get in bed with mobsters.