Former MLB pitcher and two-time World Series champion David Wells took shots at Nike for the company's support of former NFL player Colin Kaepernick when he kneeled during the United States national anthem.

 Late Tuesday evening, a large group of protesters in the New York City borough of Staten Island blocked a bus carrying migrants headed to a former senior living facility. The residents' demonstration ultimately led to an altercation with local law enforcement, and 10 protesters were taken into custody.

House Republicans are taking their next official steps in their impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden by preparing a hearing and subpoenas to members of the Biden family, as well as scheduling the first hearing in the investigation for September 28.

A committee spokesperson told CNN that the hearing will focus on the constitutional and legal questions Republicans are raising about Biden.

While the witnesses are still being finalized, House Oversight Chairman James Comer told CNN he plans to have a financial expert speak to the bank records he has uncovered pertaining to the Biden family’s business dealings and a constitutional expert to discuss why an impeachment inquiry is warranted.

“It’s an informative hearing where we’re going to have some experts in different areas of the law that can answer questions pertaining to specific crimes, as well as to educate and inform exactly what an impeachment inquiry is, and why you do an impeachment inquiry,” Comer, a Republican from Kentucky, told CNN.

The Oversight panel is also poised to issue its first subpoenas to the president’s son and brother, Hunter and James Biden, as early as this week, according to the spokesperson. The subpoenas are the first direct outreach to members of the Biden family and are expected to be for their personal and business records.

Sandy Weyer, age 57 at the time, entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 on the East side of the building, the same side where Brandon Straka stood outside with his bullhorn and the same side where Dr. Simone Gold entered. Weyer went to the protest with her brother and two friends expecting to hear from “her favorite Senator” at the time, Sen. Mastriano, who had planned to speak at the protest rally in a permitted space on the East side. She had been an avid supporter of Mastriano and was once very close to him. According to Weyer, Mastriano never once stuck up for her publicly and, at one point, even denied he knew her.

Weyer had “no intention of harming anyone or obstructing Congress.” She considered her actions to be “acts of civil disobedience.” Like many others, Weyer documented the events of the day, streaming Facebook live as she entered through the Columbus Door, a pair of magnetic doors controlled from the inside. Protesters never breached the doors from the outside. Instead, it later became known that a protester opened the doors from the inside.

Weyer and her friends regrettably followed the crowd through the Columbus Door entrance. By the time she entered the building, she had lost her brother. As a result, she spent most of her time inside looking for him. She and her friends were inside the building for a total of 11 minutes. They left the Capitol grounds when they received an alert that a curfew was being imposed in D.C.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan laid into Attorney General Merrick Garland in a Wednesday hearing, demanding to know why the Justice Department had allowed potential charges against Hunter Biden to lapse.

The Ohio Republican highlighted Biden's business dealings with Burisma, a company in Ukraine, and noted that the DOJ had allowed the statute of limitations to lapse on any potential tax crimes Biden may have committed during that time. Garland refused to answer Jordan's questions directly, instead deflecting to future statements by Special Counsel David Weiss.

Jordan recited the facts leading up to the case, that Biden had taken a lucrative position at Burisma he was not qualified for, and that Burisma executives had told him they were "under pressure." He then asserted that President Biden, then Vice President, moved to get a prosecutor looking into the company fired.

During Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Hill, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) went hard at Attorney General Merrick Garland for being “blissfully ignorant” on the Biden family corruption.

“It’s like you’re looking the other way on purpose because everyone knows this stuff is happening! People don’t take bribes to get nothing in return.”

Watch the heated exchange below.

This is one very evil little man.  No wonder Barack Obama wanted him on the US Supreme Court!

After indicting the leading presidential candidate in America on bogus, manufactured, partisan charges Merrick Garland had the nerve on Wednesday to compare his ancestors fleeing Eastern Europe during the Holocaust to his lawless targeting, indicting and imprisoning of conservative Americans.

Here is an example of lawless Merrick Garland’s record of tyranny:

 A Democratic lawmaker reportedly said that if President Joe Biden were to become the party's presidential nominee but then prove to be unable to remain in that role, that would represent "the nightmare scenario for Democrats."

 Radio talk show host Howard Stern said that he considered being called "woke" a compliment in a rant against Republican President Donald Trump.

 California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, defended Hunter Biden's business deals in an interview during which he said family influence peddling was "hardly unique."

 Former President Donald Trump will reportedly visit Detroit, Michigan, next week on the same day that the second GOP presidential primary debate is slated to take place.

An Arkansas state trooper used a PIT maneuver on the wrong car during a high-speed chase earlier this month, WREG-TV reported.

 The Minneapolis Police Department is experiencing historically low staffing shortages, with ranks down approximately 35% since the death of George Floyd in 2020.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), mRNA from COVID-19 vaccines is “broken down within a few days after vaccination and doesn’t last long in the body”—a position it has adhered to since the pandemic's beginning, despite research suggesting otherwise (pdf). The CDC refers to mRNA as “messenger RNA,” whereas regulatory documents and Pfizer refer to the mRNA in COVID-19 vaccines as “modified RNA.”

Yet a new study published on Aug. 31 in Proteomics Clinical Applications found spike protein in the biological fluids of people who received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine six months after vaccination, suggesting mRNA may be integrated or retranscribed in some cells.

The study group included 20 subjects who received two doses of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, 20 who were unvaccinated and tested negative for COVID-19 or antibodies indicating they had previously been infected, and a control group of 20 unvaccinated participants who tested positive for COVID-19.

Researchers then tested to differentiate synthetic spike proteins originating from mRNA vaccines from natural spike proteins in biological fluids, such as blood, urine, saliva, and bronchoalveolar lavage fluids of study participants and monitored vaccine-induced spike protein following vaccination.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will travel to China on September 21 to participate in a Syrian-Chinese summit at the official invitation of his counterpart Xi Jinping. According to Syrian state media, Assad will lead a high-level political and economic delegation for official meetings in the cities of Beijing and Guangzhou.

Syria's official delegation will include Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad and Finance Minister Samer al-Khalil. This will mark Assad's first official visit to Beijing since 2004.

Analysts expect several bilateral agreements to be signed during Assad's visit as part of China's larger strategy to cement its position as a power broker in West Asia.

Beijing has already proved instrumental once this year in helping Syria come in from the cold after Chinese officials brokered the historic Iran-Saudi rapprochement that also saw a normalization of ties between Gulf states and Damascus.

In the weeks that followed the Saudi-Iran deal, Syria was also welcomed back into the Arab League, a development which China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called evidence that "when the shadow of the US shrinks, the light of peace spreads."

In March, Chinese officials urged the US to end its illegal military occupation of Syria and stop looting its resources, stressing that its continued presence has worsened Syria's humanitarian crisis.

YouTube has demonetized Russell Brand's channel following allegations that the British comedian raped one woman and sexually assaulted three others between 2006 and 2013 - allegations which remained un-alleged for a decade, until Brand appeared on Tucker Carlson's show six weeks ago.

In a video released before the Sunday Times published the allegations, Brand, 48, denied "serious criminal allegations" and said that while he has a history of promiscuity, all of his relationships "were absolutely, always consensual."

According to YouTube, it stopped monetizing Brand's channel because he violated their "creator responsibility policy."

The parents of alleged crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried were involved in Democrat dark money and 2020 election tactics deemed 'illegal' by a right-leaning political research firm.

Allan Joseph Bankman and his wife, Barbara Fried (who are currently being sued to claw back some a portion of $26 million to "fraudulently transferred and misappropriated funds" as part of FTX's bankruptcy), have found themselves in the middle of fresh controversy.

In a Monday lawsuit seeking the clawback, the pair were accused of siphoning off millions in firm funds to benefit their "pet causes," with Bankman - who says he helped FTX "navigate tax issues," allegedly "considered having funds made available by Sam through Arabella," one of the largest dark-wing money advisory groups in the USA, whose board Bankman sat on according to court documents.

"This meant that Bankman had unfettered access to the FTX Group’s financials and corporate structure — two things that would have alerted him that money was moving between and among the FTX Exchanges, FTX Insiders, and other legal entities," reads the filing.

Bankman's advisory role was revealed in a footnote on P. 19 of the lawsuit.

Webmaster addition: The US sent billions to Ukraine. Ukraine "invested" some of that money in FTX, who in turn made generous donations to Democrats!

The following is a condensed version of "Transcending Technopessimism" by Rachel Lomasky, published at Law & Liberty.

Technopessimism is reaching a fever pitch, fueled by headlines like, "Meta’s AI internet chatbot starts spewing fake news," "Self-driving Uber Car Kills Pedestrian in Arizona," "Artificial Intelligence Has a Racial and Gender Bias Problem." Artificial Intelligence can be sexist, racist, or just profoundly stupid. The knee-jerk reaction to these sensational headlines is to call for limits and constraints on AI. But we need to pause and realize that to err is both human and AI. Substitute a human for the AI in those headlines, and they become completely mundane. AI misconduct garners great attention, but that’s because human transgressions are taken for granted, not because technology is necessarily worse. In many cases, even the most egregious of AI errors can be audited and corrected. In extreme cases, AIs can be shut down. Society generally frowns on “shutting down” humans whose behavior is stupid or insulting.

Consider, for example, new NYC legislation that requires AI to be audited for bias before making hiring decisions. Proponents argue AI can be biased against certain classes of applicants. If these biases exist in the training set, it is because human agents have previously been biased. When an algorithm is a jerk, we can fix it, e.g. by changing the training data, and we can confirm that it is fixed before deploying into the wild. It’s very difficult to determine whether human biases have been remediated, especially given how deeply rooted they can be.

Similarly, people worry about a lack of transparency behind AI’s recommendations. Indeed, the best performing algorithms often offer little clarity in decision-making. But even black-box algorithms are extremely clear when compared to the mushy black boxes inside humans. Introspection illusion, a field of psychology, explains why humans are so bad at explaining their decision-making logic. On the other hand, suites of tools explain AI results, even for nontransparent algorithms. Given a resume, the AI response is deterministic. The same is rarely true of a human, who may not even respond consistently over a single day.

I woke up earlier this week to two depressing articles that on the surface seem unrelated but are actually connected.

They both speak to the existence of a war on marriage in our culture that will destroy the fabric of our country if not dealt with. This is a war that surfaced ideologically in the early years of the Soviet Union in a way oddly similar to a primitive version of our “woke,” but was soon withdrawn as impractical even there.

Not here.

This war is now being fought in the USA on a deeper cultural level that could actually be more pernicious and ultimately succeed with monumental societal implications.

The first of these articles—“The Dating Pool Dropouts” by Olivia Reingold at The Free Press—details the declining number of men even attempting to find a life partner. Marriage itself has been declining for years.

Ms. Reingold describes a number of reasons for this, adding that “part of it also boils down to this: it’s hard for men to find partners at a moment when women are outpacing them both at school and work. Young women now hold 1.6 million more college degrees than men, and in a growing number of cities, including Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and New York, they make as much as—or more than—their male counterparts. And even if they become mothers, odds are four in ten will become the breadwinners of their households.”

And yet we have feminists still yammering on about “equal pay.” Go figure.

You would also think these now-successful women might enjoy having a working-class man in the house who knows how to fix the plumbing or the electrical, but such is not the behavior of human society, ours anyway. If a man does not have a college degree, the fancier the better, he is filtered out on the dating apps.

What has evolved from this, according to the article, is pervasive loneliness among the younger generation.

Ms. Reingold also points out that, statistically, married people are happier. But most of us have known that from simple observation.

Meanwhile, with the male sex in decline, we have a war on gender—or more accurately, massive, and likely deliberately instigated, gender confusion, making matters worse and putting marriage in further jeopardy.

Earlier this month, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey declared a state of emergency in response to the surging number of migrants in state-managed shelters. Then, last week, the governor mobilized the National Guard to assist with the migrant crisis. Now, residents are outraged with the governor's decision to house the migrants as Biden's southern border crisis spreads nationwide. 

Local newspaper The Bourne Enterprise reports anger spreads across the Cape Cod peninsula as "residents turned out in force to express opposition to the state's opting to provide temporary housing for migrant families who have been relocated to Massachusetts." 

"Protesters outside the building that evening held signs reading "Americans First"; inside, residents at the lectern cited potential board of health regulations, as well as concerns with whether the public school system can accommodate children from the immigrant families," the paper said. 

Over the past several years, a trend has emerged to label anything that deals with men, exercise, and masculinity as toxic.

In July of 2023, MSNBC reshared a year-old-tweet by extremism expert Cynthia Miller-Idriss that she penned in March of 2022, sounding the alarm that young men were being radicalized and recruited through encrypted chat groups, they’re ‘lured with health tips and strategies for positive physical changes.’ Researchers reported this as “fascist fitness.”

(https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/06/fascist-fitness-how-the-far-right-is-recruiting-with-online-gym-groups)

(https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/pandemic-fitness-trends-have-gone-extreme-literally-n1292463)

The author goes on to mention that physical fitness has always been central to the far right, referencing Mein Kampf and Hitler’s fixation with boxing and jujitsu. The author goes on to claim that far-right groups are setting up mixed martial arts and boxing gyms in Ukraine, Canada, and France.

Mrs. Cynthia Miller-Idriss speaks of extremism and fitness as it connects to an obsession with the male body, training, masculinity, testosterone, strength, and competition. She talks of how combat sports are appealing to the far right because fighters are trained to accept physical pain, become warriors, and embrace solidarity, heroism, and brotherhood. I’m guessing she thinks that when a person, male or female, joins a CrossFit gym, a powerlifting gym, boxing, Muay Thai gym, or jujitsu school, a community from all walks of life, the bonds and confidence they build there is supposed to be a form of extremism.

Webmaster addition: We are on the verge of a global war, and not only is our military woke, but physical strength and ability is being discouraged in potential troops?!?

 YouTube announced Tuesday that it has demonetized Russell Brand and blocked him from earning money on the social media platform.

 In October 2021, I gave a voluntary interview to two FBI agents about my coverage of the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. At one point, Special Agent Craig Noyes slid a photo across the table and asked me if I knew the young man pictured. The picture had been taken inside the U.S. Capitol Building. I didn’t know him, though I recognized him from videos I’d captured on my own camera that day.

 Advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are convening Tuesday and Wednesday for closed-door meetings to discuss the prospect of approving artificial wombs for use in human trials. The FDA's Pediatric Advisory Committee will chiefly address what kind of data scientists will have to produce in the trials and what sort of regulations may be needed.

 Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) delivered a nasty insult to House Republicans during a Monday interview, leaving MSNBC host Chris Hayes apparently shocked and struggling to redirect the conversation.

 Former President Donald Trump plans to skip the second Republican primary debate in California to deliver a speech to striking autoworkers in Detroit that same night.

 Attorneys for an Indiana man charged with murdering two teenage girls in Delphi, Indiana, claim that the girls were actually killed by a white nationalist group.

In a raft of glowing reviews, Hunter Biden’s 2019 memoir “Beautiful Things” was celebrated as an “unflinchingly honest” (Entertainment Weekly), “confession and an act of contrition” (Guardian), that was “candid” and “doesn’t hold back details” (New York Times) of his substance abuse and broken relationships.  

While describing the book as an “unvarnished confessional,” the Washington Post exalted it as a “harrowing, relentless and a determined exercise in trying to seize his own narrative from the clutches of the Republicans and the press. 

In the years since, testimony from a former business partner, Devon Archer, and newly disclosed emails indicate that the president’s son’s memoir was an exercise in spin rather than truth-telling, especially concerning his father’s role in his foreign business dealings, which are now the subject of a House impeachment inquiry. That evidence shows how the Bidens used the memoir to create a politically charged narrative – one largely embraced by the mainstream media – that distorted the truth to protect the family.  

California Governor Gavin Newsom, who will undoubtedly be decanted if and when Joe Biden can't manage to mount a 2024 campaign, says that Hunter Biden's alleged influence peddling scheme - in which prominent foreign businessmen, including the "fucking spy chief of China," paid the Biden family millions to affect US policy while Joe was VP - is no big deal.

"One of the things that Republicans are relentless on, of course, is Hunter Biden," CNN host Dana Bash asked Newsom, adding. "There is no evidence that Joe Biden benefited from anything that Hunter was doing, but Republicans have shown that Hunter Biden – he tried to leverage his father's name, and that the president allegedly before he was president joined phone calls that Hunter Biden's business associates were on. Do you see anything inappropriate there?"

To which Newsom, whose career was undoubtedly helped by his family's connections with the Pelosis, replied: "I don't know enough about the details of that. I mean I've seen a little of that," adding "If that's the new criteria, there are a lot of folks in a lot of industries – not just in politics – where people have family members and relationships and they're trying to parlay and get a little influence and benefit in that respect. That's hardly unique."

Several major retailers have already raised concerns about a downturn in consumer spending that may persist through the crucial holiday shopping season. Many mid to low-tier consumers are stretched thin in the era of 'Bidenomics,' grappling with rising credit card debt, diminished savings, and steep interest rates. Additionally, tens of millions of consumers are resuming their student loan payments this month. These factors are headwinds that may spark a growth scare narrative. 

Online review platform Trustpilot published a new survey of 2,000 consumers, finding that many have less disposable income than in previous years. However, some respondents are finding ways to leverage up to fund purchases: 

• Today's economic crisis is undoubtedly contributing to consumer stress levels this year with 1 in 3 considering going into credit card debt to purchase holiday gifts this year. 

• This is followed by 41 percent considering Buy Now Pay Later services, while another 2 in 5 would cut down on essential expenses such as food and gas to afford their gift purchases. 

• 34 percent would look at dipping into their savings, and 1 in 3 would consider starting a side hustle to offset the costs.