Pro-life organizations and doctors celebrated the end of the Biden-era expansions as a win for women and babies.
In one day, Japan had lost four fleet carriers, a heavy cruiser, and more than 300 front-line naval aircraft. Three of those carriers were lost in the space of a few moments, on the morning of June 4th. The Americans lost the Yorktown, a destroyer, and 150 aircraft. //
I've left a lot of detail out of this account. Explaining everything that happened in the days around this battle would fill a book. But it was the sinking of the Japanese carriers that turned that tide; that was the decisive moment of the war in the Pacific. The war went on for three more years, ships and men were lost, battles were fought and won, and while America suffered some setbacks, after Midway, the outcome was never truly in doubt. The Battle of Midway was the turning point. //
The famous American film director John Ford was on Midway when it was attacked on June 3rd; you can see his account of that battle here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr4YgpKU8ak. //
Eccentric
2 hours ago
The loses for the Japanese were not just the carriers and planes.
They also lost the majority of their experienced naval pilots. The US retained theirs.
As US war production ramped up and older obsolete planes were replaced by newer and better ones, the Japanese were unable to compete.
Atticus62 Eccentric
2 hours ago edited
A massive chunk of the Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor were lost at Midway. The Japanese went no further in their invasion/acquisition strategy after Midway. Everything started to contract for the Japanese after Midway.
Small, little known story that also affected the Pacific War from that campaign. A Japanese pilot landed his Zero on the ground intact and died quickly during the Alaska invasion portion of the the Midway campaign. The US Army recovered that Zero intact in Alaska and kept the discovery top secret.
The technology and plane were analyzed by the US military and the plane flown by many US pilots and they learned how to quickly counter the Zero's strengths. The intelligence value from that Zero was immeasurable. The Zero soon became a sitting duck in dogfights with US aircraft. That was also a result of the Midway campaign that the Japanese never recovered from. It's just not publicized as much because it took place in Alaska. //
Atticus62
2 hours ago edited
Posted this on PJ, but its important to pass along. If people are interested in reading more about the Midway campaign, I highly recommend the award winning 2005 book Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. It is written by Jonathan Parshall & Anthony Tully. It is a 700 page, extremely well written book that gives one a thorough account of the battle and its ramifications.
Welcome to the ZFS Handbook, your definitive guide to mastering the ZFS file system on FreeBSD and Linux. Discover how ZFS can revolutionize your data storage with unmatched reliability, scalability, and advanced features.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. So much has been said about the media, the mainstream media, the legacy media. There’s not really much to add because we all know that it’s not really a disinterested media but it’s kind of a Pravda-like propaganda organ. I’ll give you a few examples.
More recently, when Cyril Ramaphosa came to the White House, the president of South Africa, did you see the word “ambush”? It was in every mainstream paper, every left-wing website, every radio—NPR, PBS, CBS, MSNBC. It’s like the Democratic operatives issue a Pravda-like order and then these mindless people just say, “Okay, today’s talking points are…”
He met President Donald Trump. He wasn’t really surprised that Trump was going to confront him because he bragged that he was gonna confront Trump. There was no secret place. It wasn’t a sudden, unexpected attack from a secret place—the definition of an ambush. Yet, it was ”ambush,” “ambush,” “ambush,” “ambush.”
And when some questions arose about the visit, it was just typical. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, fielded a question from an NBC journalist. She was very angry because Donald Trump mentioned to President Ramaphosa, “See this picture of a thousand graves.” She said, “Well, he was lying. There weren’t graves.” And the press secretary replied back, “They were commemorations.” Each one of those crosses represents a dead South African who was murdered by virtue of his race. And she said, “Yes, but it’s not…”
So what they were arguing about—NBC—was semantics that Trump had improperly—and he had improperly—confused “grave” with “cenotaph,” a cenotaph. That’s “kenos” in Greek, meaning “empty.”
So, these crosses were not on top of a dead person but they represented a dead person. But NBC was so fixated on embarrassing the president that they didn’t even want to discuss the fact that there were a thousand crosses and they did represent individual lives destroyed because of their race. But she just wanted to make the point that you could nullify all of that and excuse it by saying they were not graves but cenotaphs. And there you have it.
It is received wisdom in pro-nuclear circles that sinister fossil fuel interests are partly if not largely responsible for nuclear's abject failure to live up to its remarkable promise. To examine this premise, we must divide fossil fuel into coal, oil, and gas. There has never been much overlap between coal and oil and, until recently, surprisingly little overlap between oil and gas. //
Jack Devanney
Dec 8, 2022
US nuclear died in the early, mid-1970's. There were only a handful of orders after 1975 and none after 1978 in the 20th century. Given the promethean promise of nuclear, we need to know what caused this demise. Some say it was Big Oil. But Big Oil was making a big investment in nuclear during this period. Gotta be something else. What happened in the last 15 or so years is irrelevant to to the question on the table.
We have been fed two lies about nuclear electricity by the nuclear power establishment.
The Negligible Probability Lie
The probability of a sizable release of radioactive material from a nuclear power plant is so low that we can just assume it won't happen. //
The Intolerable Harm Lie
Any significant release of radioactive material would be so catastrophic that it cannot be allowed to happen. //
Nuclear power emerged at just about the most difficult time possible economically. In the early-mid 1960's, the real cost of oil was at a all time low. The majors were buying oil in the Middle East at about a penny a liter. Oil was so cheap that it was pushing into electricity generation, the long time preserve of coal. This in turn forced the price of coal down, so it too was at an all time low. This was the cutthroat market that a technology that did not exist 15 years earlier, a technology that was just starting down a steep learning curve, had to enter and compete in. Amazingly it did so. Thanks to nuclear's incredible energy density, these fledgling plants were able to produce electricity at 0.37 cents per kWh in 1965. That's less than 3 cents/kWh in 2020 money.
But the cost of nuclear power escalated rapidly. In the boom of the late 60's and early 70's, nuclear lost control of its costs. This was accompanied by regulatory attempts to ensure we would never have a release. These attempts led to ALARA, the principle that any exposure to radiation is unacceptable if the plant can afford to reduce it further. In other words, there are no limits. //
The Intolerable Harm Lie is false. LNT is not a realistic model of radiation harm. The dose response curve is highly non-linear and critically dependent on dose rate. Cell based laboratory experiments, extensive animal testing, and human study after human study detected no statistically reliable harm unless the dose rates are well above the natural background dose rates in the highest background areas. At very low dose rates, LNT is off by orders of magnitude.
Perhaps the most compelling background radiation study was done in Kerala, India. //
For the US nuclear establishment, abandoning the Intolerable Harm Lie would be suicidal. And as long as you are promulgating the Intolerable Harm Lie, you need the Negligible Probability Lie to stay in business.
The EO starts out on a weak note, while falling into the threshold trap.
The NRC utilizes safety models that posit there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure and that harm is directly proportional to the amount of exposure. Those models lack sound scientific basis.
Here's what Trump should have said.
The NRC's regulatory philosophy is based on a 90 year old radiation harm model called LNT. LNT is biological nonsense. It denies our remarkable ability to repair radiation damage to our DNA. As a result, LNT over-predicts radiation harm to the public in a nuclear power plant release by many orders of magnitude. This ability is indisputable. To conform to undisputed science, LNT must be replaced.
A little later on, we find:
When carrying out its licensing and related regulatory functions, the NRC shall consider the benefits of increased availability of, and innovation in, nuclear power to our economic and national security in addition to safety, health, and environmental considerations.
This call to consider has no teeth. How about:
Any regulatory requirement or action shall be supported by a cost/benefit analysis. These analyses shall explicitly include the reduction in harm from displacing alternate sources of this power. //
It sounds good; but all it really requires is the delivery of some paperwork. The NRC gets to decide what's in these revisions. Once again we are asking the NRC to judge itself. We've done that before, most recently with NEIMA and the Advance Act, with nothing to show for it. There is no reason to believe that this time the results will be different. //
The sad truth is Trump can't change the incentives that will dictate the NRC's behavior. Whatever all the preambles and declaration of purposes, etc say the NRC will continue to be judged on its ability to prevent a release. And as long as we give such a bureaucracy the final say, it will be the bureaucrats' incentives that rule, not society's. But Trump could have outlawed LNT. And he could have forced ALARA underground. //
Business as usual, and the business is extracting money from the taxpayer.
In 1982 and 1983, recycled rebar, containing Cobalt-60, was “accidentally” used in the construction of 180 apartment buildings in Taipei. Most of the buildings were completed in 1983. The problem was discovered in the mid-1990's, and full scale investigations started in 1996 after a kindergartener whose classroom was in one of the contaminated buildings died of leukemia.
The Chen 2004 Study
The first study was led by W. L. Chen of the National Yang-Ming University. //
In 2006, Hwang et al published a competing study of the Taipei apartment exposure. //
The Taipei apartment data emphatically contradicts LNT. Hwang's methodology in attempting to refute this conclusion suggests that we are dealing with defense lawyers, not scientists.
The Hwang paper was designed to shoot down the Chen paper and reestablish LNT. //
The Hwang numbers may not demolish LNT as dramatically as the Chen figures; but they clearly meet Feynman's criterion for "one ugly fact", although in this case, the fact that a providential Nature has endowed us with a radiation damage repair system which has no problem with dose rate profiles such as Figure 2 is far from ugly. It's humanity's salvation.
Here's a truly ugly fact. The promoters of LNT can't show us one situation, not one, where people have received a very large dose spread more or less evenly over a protracted period where LNT does not screw up completely. It's quite remarkable that a 100 year old theory that is based on an assumption --- radiation damage is unrepairable --- that we now know is flat wrong, and is always orders of magnitude in error on the kind of dose rate profiles that will be incurred in a nuclear power plant release has survived.
EDF is building a nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point in England. EDF proudly requires that each of its plants have a tombstone like Figure 1 at the main entrance, a point it emphasizes in its advertising. EDF is not alone, you will find the phrase "safety is our overriding priority" in various forms repeated over and over again by the NRC, INPO, and the rest of the nuclear establishment. For example, INPO has a monomanical focus on safety culture which it defines as “an organization’s values and behaviors that serve to make nuclear safety the overriding priority.”
Hinkley Point C(HPC) will cost at least $18,000/kW and take over 12 years to construct. //
Table 1 shows the overnight cost in 2024 USD and build times of the six lowest overnight cost plants built in the USA. When I lived in the Florida Keys, I enjoyed some of the cheapest electricity in the country, thanks to Turkey Point 3 and 4.
If you repeat the Figure 2 calculation for Turkey Point 3 at $795 per kW, the LCOE is just under 3 cents/kWh, about 4 times less than Hinkley Point 3. //
Over the 3 year, 2022-2024 period, the EIA finds that Turkey Point 3 had a capacity factor of 95.2%, about 5% above the USA average, and ranking it 15th among 92 reactors, In 53 years of operation, Turkey Point 3 and all its elderly brethren have harmed exactly zero members of the public. Most of these plants will still be operating in 2050. Turkey Point 3 and the other five plants in Table 1 were designed and built before the current regulatory apparat became organized. There was no independent regulator. //
We made a disastrous, tragic, colossal, brobdingnagian blunder. We set up an omnipotent bureaucracy whose overriding priority, as it so clearly states, is nuclear safety. While Congress declared "public health and safety" to be just one one of its goals, it created an apparat for which nuclear health and safety was effectively the only goal. The NRC would be judged on its ability to prevent a release. Period.
Bureaucrats are not saints. They reacted according to the incentives they have been given, just as we would. And since we have given the last word to these souls we have misguided, it is their priorities that rule, not society's. The regulatory structure that the AEA/ERA setup is inherently inconsistent with the stated goals.
The result has been an auto-genocidal increase in the cost of nuclear power for no apparent benefit. There is nothing in the actual harm data that suggests the oldest plants are less safe than the newest. When Three Mile Island 2 melted down in 1979 and produced the biggest release in the US so far, it was the youngest plant in the US fleet, and subject to the most stringent regulation. //
vboring
May 13
Grok estimates that the choice to implement "safety" regulations for nuclear energy in such expensive ways has killed about 840,000 people in the US so far.
Safety first! is a strict lie.
Or why I hate costly nuclear. //
Poverty has a Lost Life Expectacy(LLE) of the order of tens of billions of years per year. And we reject should-cost nuclear for fear of an occasional release that worst case, Chernobyl, properly handled, will have a public LLE of less than a 1000 years? This makes sense only if we assume a malthusian level of selfishness. But that is precisely where the nuclear establishment is. //
Jack Devanney
May 19
Edited
I rarely compliment the choir, but I do want to give a shout out to the choristers for whom nuclear's main attraction is its low CO2. For them, this was a very tough sermon. It was a call to change focus, metanoeite if you will, from what nuclear can do for the climate to what nuclear can do for the poor, and for all humanity. That's not an easy switch. For one thing, it implies that costly nuclear is not good enough. It's immoral. We must have should-cost nuclear, and that will require a complete rethink about how we regulate nuclear.
I expected something like a 5% subscriber cancellation rate. Instead we lost 7 of 2900. I thought that was impressive.
Here's your reward. If and only if we push nuclear down to its should-cost, not only will nuclear push fossil fuel out of power generation except for a bit of peaking and backup fo r unplanned outages and do so automatically, not only will EV's now be very attractive economically, but now we can talk seriously about synfuels starting with synthetic methane.
If LNT is biological nonsense, how did it ever get accepted? The Hamlet in that tragedy is Ed Lewis.
The Rockefeller Foundation and the Genetic Scare. //
Hundreds of scientists could have pointed out the glaring inconsistency. But as far as I know none did. Moreover, fractionation, dividing a therapeutic dose into fractions, delivered a day or so apart to allow healthy cells to recover, was universal medical practice. If LNT is valid, fractionation makes no sense. Even Lauriston Taylor, a towering figure, who called LNT "a deeply immoral use of our scientific heritage" did not speak out until 1980. He was about 25 years too late. Were all these people grasping creeps?
Of course not. They were petrified of the bomb. If LNT could end bomb testing, then I will have to abandon scientific integrity, just this once. Look at Taylor's strange wording. You don't normally call a model, a "use". He knew LNT had been accepted not because it was correct, but because it was a tool, a tool for controlling the bomb.
On Tuesday federal authorities announced that Yunqing Jian, 33, and Zunyong Liu, 34, had been charged with conspiracy, smuggling goods into the United States, false statements, and visa fraud.
The FBI arrested Jian in connection with allegations related to Jian’s and Liu’s smuggling into America a fungus called Fusarium graminearum, which scientific literature classifies as a potential agroterrorism weapon. This noxious fungus causes “head blight,” a disease of wheat, barley, maize, and rice, and is responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year. Fusarium graminearum’s toxins cause vomiting, liver damage, and reproductive defects in humans and livestock. //
According to the complaint, Jian received Chinese government funding for her work on this pathogen in China, and a January 2024 work assessment form found on her phone, which she signed, contained a pledge of loyalty to China and to "support the leadership of the Communist Party of China, resolutely implement the party’s educational guidelines and policies, love education, care for students, unite colleagues, love the motherland and care about international affairs."
When customs agents at Detroit Metropolitan Airport found baggies containing various strains of the fungus in his luggage Liu at first denied they were his, according to the complaint. Eventually he admitted they were his and told agents what they were, and that he planned to clone them and make more samples if his experiments failed.
June 1 marks the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark parental rights decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters.
That historic opinion recognized “the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” It also famously declared that “the child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
Sadly, despite that—and even now—many federal programs continue to encroach on parental rights. //
....
These federal programs violate parents’ fundamental right to direct their children’s upbringing, education, and health care. The government should help—not hinder—loving parents in fulfilling their “high duty.” Including parents helps. Keeping secrets hinders. //
Fortunately, Congress has the authority—and the opportunity—to protect parental rights from federal government overreach by passing the Families’ Rights and Responsibilities Act.
This act recognizes that parents’ fundamental rights are entitled to the highest level of constitutional protection. It requires courts to apply the proper standard of judicial review—“strict scrutiny”—to federal violations of parental rights.
This is the same standard the Supreme Court has applied to safeguard other fundamental rights—like free speech and free exercise of religion. Congress is well within its constitutional authority to ensure that federal programs properly respect parental authority. ///
Therefore... School choice!?
Sinatra Jordan was accused of firing at police officers and leading them on a chase through the streets of Jackson. Then the officers were arrested.
Did FBI headquarters bury Hunter Biden laptop in “Prohibited Access” black hole? //
The United States attorney screening evidence related to Ukrainian corruption in the lead-up to the 2020 election did not know the FBI’s Sentinel case management system had a stealth feature to render files invisible during search queries. Nor did anyone from FBI headquarters reference the existence of such “Prohibited Access” files during discussions over access to relevant material related to Burisma and Hunter Biden. These new facts add to the growing scandal surrounding last week’s revelation that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team placed documents related to the Russia collusion hoax in “Prohibited Access” subfiles, preventing other FBI agents from discovering their existence. //
Given that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team secreted evidence in Sentinel by using the “Prohibited Access” coding, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that FBI headquarters followed a similar tack to protect the Biden family. In fact, given the lengths FBI headquarters went to interfering in the investigation of Hunter Biden, as detailed by the IRS whistleblowers, if anything, it would be shocking if FBI headquarters’ didn’t bury evidence about Ukrainian corruption in “Prohibited Access” files.
Unfortunately, it will likely be some time before the country knows how widespread the FBI’s use of “Prohibited Access” was, and how many investigations it potentially impacted.
The phone, which from the outside appears no different from a normal device, issued warnings about using South Korean slang words to users, and auto-corrected “South Korea” to read “puppet state,” an investigation from the BBC found.
It would also covertly take a screenshot every five minutes, storing the images in a secret folder which the user couldn’t access, but which presumably were accessible to North Korean authorities. //
When the user tried to type in the word “oppa,” which means older brother in Korean, but has come to be used to refer to a boyfriend in South Korean slang, the phone would auto-correct the word to the more Communist-friendly alternative “comrade.”
A warning would then flash, informing the phone’s user that the term “oppa” could only be used for older siblings, the BBC investigation found.
Weiss tried to claim that "there is not a threat to gender women" when a biological male competes against them.
"Why do you want to be a cheat?" Morgan hit back. "I mean, seriously, why do you want to be a cheat? That's what you're doing. You're cheating."
When Morgan got pushback that he was being disrespectful to Weiss, he said no, "It cuts to the heart of the debate."
"It is cheating," the host said. "It is knowingly using a superior biology from birth to beat women who are born with female bodies, it is cheating, and it's time to call it out for what it is."
On Monday, Alex Marquardt, CNN Senior Intelligence Correspondent and frequent fill-in anchor at the network, announced that he was leaving his position. Speculation was immediately emerging that this was in connection to the defamation lawsuit brought against CNN, where a jury found the news network liable for defamation and ruled they had to pay tens of millions of dollars in damages. Now, indications are that Marquardt was in fact let go as a result of the suit.
CNN was sued by Navy veteran Zachary Young over a report on Young’s work as an extraction expert who facilitated the safe release of people from Afghanistan. CNN chose to frame Young’s work as illegal black market activities where he was extorting people to have them safely escape the nation as it fell into Taliban rule. The jury ruled CNN acted errantly and with malice in its false presentation, awarding Young with significant compensatory damages, with the network then negotiating undisclosed punitive compensation.
Marquardt was the reporter on those disputed reports, which ran on programs hosted by Jake Tapper, as well as others at the network.
These new charges appear to confirm that the ballot was cast. It is no longer an "unauthorized attempt." It is a very tangible case of illegal voting. //
Whether or not it sends a message to Gao himself remains to be seen.
The case against him has a significant problem - Gao was granted a $5,000 personal bond with conditions by a Michigan state court, which included surrendering his passport. Unfortunately, it appears the man who was charged with perjury wound up - shocker! - allegedly forging another passport in his name but with a different serial number.
As a result, the accused citizen and national of the People’s Republic of China managed to flee the country the day before President Trump took the oath of office. He hitched a flight to Shanghai.
Secretary Marco Rubio @SecRubio
·
In light of yesterday’s horrific attack, all terrorists, their family members, and terrorist sympathizers here on a visa should know that under the Trump Administration we will find you, revoke your visa, and deport you.
3:56 PM · Jun 2, 2025. //
Per Fox News' Bill Melugin, Soliman "allegedly told investigators that he waited to carry out the attack until his daughter graduated high school." //
It sounds as though her post-graduation plans will not include remaining in the United States.