ROBERT SPENCER: Working-class Houston Suburb Tries a Beautiful Way to Fight Crime, but With an Ugly Edge. “Alief, a working-class suburb of Houston that is 71% Hispanic and black, is planting 1,200 new trees, but the objective is not just to beautify the neighborhood. Rather, the idea is that trees will fight crime.”

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: She Said, ‘You’ll Be a Dentist!’ “This week we have the strange case of the itinerant dentist, something even better than a bitchin’ Camaro, and Michigan Man’s excellent forklift adventure.”

CATCH AND RELEASE IS FABULOUS: Illegal aliens who are LGBTQ ‘may not be detained’ under Democrats’ new bill. “The Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, from Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., is aimed at setting minimum standards for detention facilities where thousands of illegal aliens are kept as they await processing. Among other things, it would bar the use of private detention facilities and make sure government-run facilities meet minimum standards as defined by the American Bar Association.”

REVEALED: Biden Campaign and Tony Blinken Orchestrated Letter From Intel Officials Disputing Hunter Biden Laptop.

SCIENCE! King’s College London rejects research on trans athletes for calling men ‘males.’

Armstrong told The College Fix via email he was told to “contact the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion team to seek input on the wording used in the survey and surrounding presentation of the research.”

Armstrong, a lecturer and mathematician at the university, said “the specific text they objected to was in the presentation of the research.”

“The language is not sensitive and the misgendering of athletes is not appropriate,” the research review team told Armstrong. This is because he wanted to ask individuals their thoughts about “when males should be allowed to compete in the female category in athletics.”

“This is different to the language used by World Athletics,” the research team told him.

Professor Armstrong said that athletes who are critical of transgender participation in elite competition have lost a chance to be heard, due to the obstacles imposed on research into the topic.

That means the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion team is functioning as designed.

WATCH: Justin Trudeau Weeps as Twitter Slaps ‘State Media’ Label on CBC.

THEY WENT WOKE: Army, Navy and Air Force predict recruiting shortfalls this year. “The Army is projecting the largest shortfall of all, as it did last year, proving to be the bellwether for recruiting crunches across the armed services, at a time when the Defense Department is trying to grow its overall ranks by about 12,000.”

FAUCI’S LEGACY: Judicial Watch Obtains Docs Showing U.S. Funded Wuhan Lab Research From 2013-2020.

HMM: China’s 19.6% youth unemployment rate is nearing a record-high and may pose ‘a threat to social stability.’

Unemployment among those aged 16 to 24 rose to 19.6% in March, up from 18.1% in both January and February, and inching toward the 19.9% of last July, the highest level since records began in 2018. Youth unemployment was 16% in March 2022.

Joblessness among the young remains “stubbornly high,” says Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief Asia Pacific economist at investment bank Natixis.

China’s worsening youth unemployment situation was an outlier in a report that otherwise showed an improving economy.

And those are the official numbers.

It’s also very strange that China, where the working-age population is already shrinking, can’t generate youth jobs in a growing economy.

Well, in an economy that’s officially growing, anyway.

CHANGE: Twitter Quietly Drops Its Rule Against Calling a Man a Man If He’s Mentally Ill and Deluded.

SCIENCE IS NEVER SETTLED: Oops. That climate science isn’t quite as settled…

New research shows that methane is still a powerful greenhouse gas, but nothing like what is claimed regularly.

This is the sort of thing that happens all the time in climate research, where variables are viewed and modeled in isolation based upon a limited set of data, and then the “scientists” extrapolate the heck out of the limited data and come up with models that are, frankly, ridiculous.

Then they pick the most extreme outcomes from models with the worst outcomes, and call it “settled science.” It is exactly the sort of thing you see in nutrition research, for example. Creating simplistic models from limited data interpreting complex and highly interdependent systems as if they mirror the falling of a bowling ball and a feather in a vacuum.

And the results, as you can see in the real world, are quite different. Bowling balls and feathers fall at the same rate in a vacuum, but once you introduce the atmosphere a feather can “fall upwards” on a breeze while the bowling ball crashes down as predicted.

The research in question here reveals the complexity of reality: methane may trap heat, but it also prevents energy from reaching the earth. To some extent, the two effects cancel each other out.

Much more at the link.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Biden Border Disaster Rolls Out Red Carpet to the ChiComs. “Great, a rogue commie goon squad is roaming free in the Land of the Free. Perhaps the new kids on the commie block are here to train Democrats.”

THAT MEANS BIDENOMICS IS WORKING: How Americans have taken a pay cut every month since Biden took office. “For the typical family with two parents working, their combined weekly paychecks are up about $200, but that money has lost so much purchasing power from inflation that it’s as if their weekly pay has shrunk by more than $100.”

PRIORITIES: Biden Administration Moved a Lot Faster Against Proud Boys Than Chinese Communists in New York.

THIS SEEMS PREMATURE: The West Is Preparing for Russia’s Disintegration.

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, an independent U.S. government agency with members from the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate, and departments of defense, state, and commerce, has declared that decolonizing Russia should be a “moral and strategic objective.” The Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, comprising exiled politicians and journalists from Russia, held a meeting at the European Parliament in Brussels earlier this year and is advertising three events in different American cities this month. It has even released a map of a dismembered Russia, split into 41 different countries, in a post-Putin world, assuming he loses in Ukraine and is ousted.

Western analysts are increasingly pushing the theory that Russian disintegration is coming and that the West must not only prepare to manage any possible spillover of any ensuing civil wars but also to benefit from the fracture by luring resource-rich successor nations into its ambit. They argue that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the West was blindsided and failed to fully capitalize on the momentous opportunity. It must now strategize to end the Russian threat once and for all, instead of providing an off-ramp to Putin.

But many others see a rump Russia as a more severe threat to global peace and security and warn against emasculating an enemy that, even when weaker than the West militarily and economically, still possesses almost 6,000 nuclear warheads, armed militias, and vast resources trapped in a sparsely populated landscape bordering China.

Handling the dissolution of the Soviet Union was dicey enough but at least the 15 constituent SSRs had relatively strong central governments. Pushing nuclear-armed Russia into collapse — or even just publicly considering it — seems foolhardy in the extreme.

MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS BY DESIGN: Climate Change Terror Wrecks Gen Z’s Already-Fragile Psychology.

BREAKING: Charges Dropped Against Alec Baldwin for Fatal Shooting.

VIDEO: Elon Musk Warns Tucker Carlson: The Feds Are in Your Twitter DMs. “According to Elon Musk, who took over the social media platform last year, government bureaucrats were routinely taking a close look at users’ content.”

INDEED:

The next test flight is supposed to take place “in a few months,” according to Musk, and by then they should know what went wrong at separation (with those failed engines, too) — and have it fixed.

Fail, learn, iterate, succeed.

SAD: Portlandia No More.

Stare wrongly at the wrong homeless person, cut off the wrong car in certain neighborhoods, or just be a bystander when the gangs start shooting, and you could end up dead. Was it always so? Not like this. Crime has skyrocketed since Brownstein’s character asked after the previous life and times of the chicken she was ordering for dinner.

Once a commenter on a story I’d written at a conservative website, after seeing that my bio included Portland, wrote: “Portland? You must feel surrounded.”

It’s true that Portland is blue. It gets a lot of conservative bad press. Urinals were omitted from blueprints for the new mega-million dollar city hall—something about gender neutrality? When Antifa besieged downtown in 2020, resulting in months of rioting and millions in property damage, President Trump offered to send in the National Guard. City hall refused the help, and vilified Trump instead. A Trump fan wearing an insignia was murdered by a rabble rouser who laid in wait at a parking garage. The killer was later gunned-down by federal agents in a Washington State apartment complex parking lot.

Downtown hasn’t recovered. Businesses are still fleeing. Slabs of plywood cover many street-level windows. Intractable homelessness besotting block after block and open-air shooting galleries have turned Portland into a no-go zone for thousands of locals and decimated the tourist and convention trade. The pandemic played a part in creating the current malaise, but that’s over, and there’s been little discernible bounce-back.

Decline is a choice, and one Portland voters make again and again.

ASKING THE UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTIONS: Where Did All the Biden Illegal Immigrants Go?

In New York City, if the newcomers aren’t put up at the luxury cruise terminal that served the QE2, they could get $700-a-night midtown hotel accommodations with iconic Manhattan views. In Chicago, they found themselves whisked to suburban lodgings. In Denver, officials refer to them discreetly as “guests” and you needn’t bother inquiring about their inns or addresses.

The people enjoying these free digs aren’t privacy-conscious jet-setters, but the secrecy surrounding them might be comparable: They’re some of the millions of migrants who have illegally crossed into the U.S. since the Biden administration relaxed most border controls. 

No one knows exactly how many people have poured across the southwestern U.S. border since President Biden took office, or where they’ve gone since.

Read the whole thing.

OH, CANADA: Canadian Experts Blame Climate Change on Capitalism and Whiteness.

LAUGHING WOLF: Congratulations SpaceX. “The question is already being asked on social media: Was today’s launch a success? The short answer is YES! The longer answer is the subject of today’s post.”

PART II OF CHRIS QUEEN’S DEEP DIVE INTO DESANTIS VS DISNEY: The New Central Florida Tourism Oversight District Board Has a Bold Vision Beyond Merely Serving Disney’s Interests.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Politico Pretends Culture War Doesn’t Win School Board Races, But Dozens Of Pro-Parent Candidates Just Prevailed.

The public school activists were specifically thrilled that the publication’s education reporter, Juan Perez Jr., pointed to Democrat wins in recent school board elections as evidence that the right’s culture war issues were a brief and unsustainable phenomenon.

“General election voters are less interested in crusades against critical race theory and transgender students than they are in funding schools and ensuring they are safe,” Perez Jr. asserted.

He evidenced this claim by noting that Democrats and teachers’ unions in both Wisconsin and Illinois celebrated the wins of many of their preferred candidates in the more than 100 races they endorsed. Many of those wins came in districts in or near Democrat stronghold cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee, but that didn’t stop the author from concluding that Republicans “lost big.”

Perez Jr. included data from political action committees that clearly showed candidates on the right claimed several victories but discounted those results by claiming that at least “two conservative national education groups did not dispute that their candidates posted a losing record.”

Just seven paragraphs into the article, Perez Jr. included a half-sentence quote from 1776 Project PAC founder Ryan Girdusky — “We lost more than we won” — that seemingly backed up his belief that these results “offer lessons to both parties as they eye even more board elections this year.”

“We had an hour-long conversation. [Perez Jr.] left it to one edited half sentence,” Girdusky told The Federalist.

Those narratives don’t establish themselves, you know.