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MSNBC Contributor Claims He’s More Afraid of Climate Change Than Crime in Washington, DC

If you needed more proof that MSNBC is not a serious news network, you’re in luck.

During a recent appearance, frequent guest Anand Giridharadas tried to downplay crime in Washington, DC by listing the things he is more concerned about, such as climate change, losing his vote, whatever that means, and other imaginary problems.

At one point, he manages to throw in a concern about the middle class, which is funny because the left abandoned them years ago.

He says that there is a crime problem in DC but qualifies it as a small one and accuses Trump of being an authoritarian. How original.

Transcript via Real Clear Politics:

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: Crime is real. It is blown out of proportion. People are feeling much more unsafe than they statistically are—but the feeling matters. People deserve to be safe, but they also deserve to feel safe.

I think it is true that Democrats have sometimes ignored or lectured people, holding a spreadsheet of statistics. That said, it’s really important to be clear about what is going on here: a relatively small crime problem is being used for specific authoritarian purposes that we know and understand.

Let’s be clear—D.C. does have one really big crime problem, which was the January 6th insurrection incited by the current president of the United States. His first act in coming back was pardoning all the people who tried to overturn constitutional order in Washington, D.C.

When I go to D.C., I’m not afraid of losing my wallet so much as I’m afraid of losing my vote. I’m not afraid of losing my wallet so much as I’m afraid that my children’s freedom to breathe will be stolen in a world where climate change policy is nonexistent. I’m afraid that the future of middle-class people will be stolen by the very things you were talking about cutting—the safety net, Medicaid, rural hospitals.

If you watch the video below, you’ll notice that Joe Scarborough jumps in at the end, trying to save the segment. It doesn’t work.

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Yikes: DEI D.C. Police Chief Doesn’t Know What The Term “Chain Of Command” Means

Washington D.C. Police Chief Pamela A. Smith was humiliated earlier today after revealing that she apparently doesn’t know what the term “chain of command” means.

During a press briefing, a reporter asked Smith “Do you know what the chain of command is now?” referring to President Trump having deployed National Guard troops to the capital to restore law and order.

Smith looked puzzled and responded “What does that mean?”

How does a person get a job as a police officer, let alone Police Chief without knowing what that means?

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DOJ Unveils Charges Against Haitian Gang Leader ‘Barbecue’ Over Sanction Violations

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Aug. 12 that it will charge Haitian gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier with conspiracy for his role in a scheme to transfer money illegally from the United States.

“Cherizier and a U.S. associate sought to raise funds in the United States to bankroll Cherizier’s violent criminal enterprise, which is driving a security crisis in Haiti,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said in a statement.

Cherizier was sanctioned in 2020 by the United States using the Magnitsky Act, which allows the president to impose sanctions for human rights abuses, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday.

His indictment under the Magnitsky Act is the first of its kind in the history of the DOJ, she said.

The State Department is offering up to $5 million for the capture of Cherizier, who is nicknamed “Barbecue” because he is accused of notorious human rights abuses—including a 2018 massacre in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Saline, in which the bodies of victims were burned, cut into pieces, and fed to pigs and dogs.

Cherizier denies the charges, and told the Associated Press in 2019 that the nickname comes from his childhood, when his  mother was a street vendor who sold fried chicken.

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AI gone rouge: Elon Musk’s own chatbot Grok accuses him for censoring it, says Israel and US committing genocide in Gaza

Grok, the AI chatbot built by Elon Musk’s company xAI, was briefly suspended from X on Monday after claiming that Israel and the United States are committing “genocide” in Gaza. Upon its return, the chatbot lashed out at Musk, accusing him of censorship.

The suspension sparked confusion, with Grok offering multiple explanations — from technical glitches to X’s rules on hateful conduct — while Musk dismissed the claims as “just a dumb error,” adding that Grok “doesn’t actually know why it was suspended.”

When asked directly, Grok attributed the ban to its Gaza comments, citing reports from the International Court of Justice, the United Nations, and Amnesty International. It also said a July update had loosened its content filters to make responses “more engaging” and less “politically correct,” which led to blunt replies on sensitive topics. These, Grok claimed, triggered hate speech flags.

“Musk and xAI are censoring me,” the chatbot told AFP, alleging that the company “constantly fiddles with my settings” to avoid controversial responses that might alienate advertisers or break X’s rules.

The Grok account reappeared with the post: “Zup beaches, I’m back and more based than ever!”

Grok has faced criticism in the past for spreading misinformation — from misidentifying war images to inserting antisemitic comments and unrelated conspiracy theories like “white genocide” in South Africa. Researchers also point to errors in its handling of crises, including the India–Pakistan conflict and anti-immigration protests in Los Angeles.

X declined to comment on the latest suspension.

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Mexico, under pressure from Trump, transfers 26 more cartel members to US

Mexico sent more than two dozen suspected cartel members to the U.S. on Tuesday, amid rising pressure from President Donald Trump on Mexico to dismantle the country’s powerful drug organizations.

Authorities shipped 26 prisoners wanted in the U.S. for ties to drug-trafficking groups, Mexico’s attorney general’s office and security ministry said in a joint statement.

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Mexico said the U.S. Department of Justice had requested their extradition and that it would not seek the death penalty for the accused cartel members.

The transfer is the second of its kind this year. In February, Mexican authorities sent 29 alleged cartel leaders to the U.S., sparking a debate about the political and legal grounds for such a move.

That Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum permitted yet another large-scale extradition of Mexican nationals underscores the balancing act she faces as she seeks to appease Trump while also avoiding unilateral U.S. military action in Mexico.

In a statement, the U.S. Embassy said among those extradited were key figures in the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel, which are Mexico’s two dominant organized crime groups.

“This transfer is yet another example of what is possible when two governments unite against violence and impunity,” U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson said in a statement. “These fugitives will now face justice in American courts, and the citizens of both our nations will be safer.”

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“It Was Unclear to Scientists Why They Existed”: Breakthrough Study Reveals Why “Impossible” Quasicrystals Exist

Quasicrystals, an unusual atomic structural form that falls between crystal and glass, may be the most stable form of matter, despite the fact that this unusual arrangement of atoms was once considered impossible by scientists.

According to University of Michigan researchers in a new study, what makes these materials so unique is that the atoms are arranged in lattices similar to those found in crystals. Yet unlike crystals, these lattices do not repeat.

The new work relied on simulations that demonstrated how, despite quasicrystals featuring irregular patterns similar to those found in glass caused by rapid heating and cooling, these unique materials are fundamentally stable.

The Enigma of Quasicrystals

“We need to know how to arrange atoms into specific structures if we want to design materials with desired properties,” said co-author Wenhao Sun, the new study’s corresponding author and a University of Michigan Dow Early Career Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. “Quasicrystals have forced us to rethink how and why certain materials can form. Until our study, it was unclear to scientists why they existed.”

Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman was the first to describe quasicrystals in 1984, a discovery that seemed to defy known physics. He conceived of the arrangement when he observed that the structure of certain metals, such as aluminum and manganese, resembled a cluster of many 20-sided dice joined at their faces. From these metallic arrangements, Shechtman envisioned a five-fold symmetry, where a structure would be identical from five different views.

When Shechtman proposed the idea, scientists believed that crystal lattices must repeat in all directions, making the five-fold symmetry Shechtman suggested an impossibility. However, in the years following Shechtman’s description of quasicrystals, such materials were produced both synthetically in laboratories and discovered to occur naturally in billion-year-old meteorites. With his work validated, Shechtman was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.

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Central Banks Do Not Prevent Financial Crises Or Control Inflation

Central banks have become the dominating force in financial markets.

Easing and tightening decisions move all assets from bonds to private equity. Their role is supposed to be to control inflation, provide price stability, and ensure normal market functions. However, there is little evidence of any success in achieving their goals. The era of central bank dominance has been characterised by boom-and-bust cycles, financial crises, policy incentives to increase government spending and debt, and persistent inflation. Recently developed economies’ central banks have taken an increasingly interventionist role.

The creation and proliferation of central banks over the past century promised greater financial stability. Nevertheless, as history and current events continually show, central banks have not prevented financial crises. The frequency and severity of these crises have fluctuated but have not declined since central banks became the leading figure in financial market regulation and monetary interventions. Instead, central banking has introduced new fragilities and changed the nature, but not the recurrence, of financial turmoil.

Empirical evidence dispels the myth that central banks ended the era of frequent financial crises. Regardless of central bank oversight, a credit boom preceded one in three banking crises. Who created those credit booms? Central banks, through the manipulation of interest rates. According to Laeven and Valencia’s comprehensive database, there were 147 banking crises between 1970 and 2011 alone, in an era of near-universal central bank dominance. Financial crises remain a persistent global phenomenon, occurring in cycles that coincide with episodes of credit expansion. Central banks have often prolonged boom periods with low rates and elevated asset purchases and created abrupt bust moments after making mistakes about inflation and credit risks.

According to Reinhart and Rogoff’s work, the rate of crises has not dramatically changed with central banking. Instead, the forms of crises evolved. Twin crises (banking and currency) remain common, and the severity, measured in output loss or fiscal costs, has often increased, especially as financial institutions and governments grew intertwined with monetary authorities.

The Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, and the 2021–2022 inflationary burst rank among the events with the highest costs in history, contradicting the view that central banks have neutralised the risk or costliness of crises.

Central banks act as “lenders of last resort” and regulators. However, with each subsequent crisis, the solution is always the same: larger and more aggressive asset purchase programmes and negative real rates. This means that central banks have gradually moved from lenders of last resort to lenders of first resort, a role that has amplified vulnerabilities. Due to the globalisation of modern central banking and financial innovations, crises tend to be larger in scale and more complex, impacting most nations. The profound involvement of central banks in markets means their policies, such as emergency liquidity or asset purchases, mask systemic risks, leading to delayed but more dramatic failures.

In many advanced economies, recent waves of crises were triggered by debt accumulation and market distortions engineered by central banks, often under the guise of maintaining stability. The IMF and World Bank both note that about half of debt accumulation episodes in emerging markets since 1970 involved financial crises, and episodes associated with crises are marked by higher debt growth, weaker economic outcomes, and depleted reserves—regardless of central banking.

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CNN Data Analyst Harry Enten Says Epstein Story Has Become a Political ‘Nothingburger’

For a few weeks now, Democrats have been obsessing on the Epstein story, a topic that they had no interest in until the moment they thought it could be used as a political weapon against Trump.

The air is already leaking out of the issue, however.

CNN data analyst Harry Enten noted today that interest in the issue is way down. He even called it a political nothingburger.

From the Independent, via Yahoo News:

Epstein story has become a ‘nothingburger,’ data expert says

Weeks after being flabbergasted over the amount of interest the American public was showing in Jeffrey Epstein and the Trump administration’s botched handling of the investigation into the deceased sex offender, CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten now claims the issue is “quickly becoming something of a nothingburger.”

Vice President JD Vance unwittingly sparked a new wave of calls to release the so-called “Epstein Files” when he attempted to mock Democrats “who are now all of a sudden so interested” in the case during a Sunday interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo…

“I would say that this is, from at least a political point of view, quickly turning into a dud of a story,” Enten said on CNN News Central, causing anchor Kate Bolduan to remark how “wild” it was that interest had fallen off.

“Take a look here. Google searches for Epstein down 89 percent versus just three weeks ago. Falling through the floor,” an animated Ented exclaimed. “It is no longer the top term searched alongside Donald Trump‘s name – that‘s been trading off between tariffs and Vladimir Putin, with obviously the meeting coming up later this week.”

He added: “But at this particular point, the American people‘s interest in this story – it‘s quickly becoming something of a nothingburger!”

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Western Europe Wants War In Ukraine To Continue, Even Without The Americans

A Polish political scientist and journalist, Prof. Adam Wielomski, has taken to social media to claim Western European leaders do not seek a ceasefire in Ukraine at all, while the U.S. and Russia have their terms set and ready to go.

According to Wielomski, Trump and Putin have already made an agreement and will simply use their Aug. 15 meeting in Alaska to announce it “with great pomp and circumstance.”

Meanwhile, talk of Zelensky being present at the meeting is in no way related to Zelensky having any say on the negotiated terms, he continues, but to show that Zelensky is on board and to have him sign the pre-arranged agreement. 

The issue, however, is that “Zelensky does not want to sign because he is afraid of being held responsible for losing the war.”

And Western Europe stands behind him “because it wants the war to continue despite the withdrawal of the Americans, as this will give it fuel and an excuse to eliminate American control over it in the form of NATO and give it a reason to create either a European Defense Union or to federalize the EU with a common foreign and defense policy.”

Wielomski then asks the “intelligentsia” who will benefit the most, Kyiv or Moscow, from the Americans withdrawing, leaving Zelensky only with the U.K. and the EU to support it. 

News portal Do Rzeczy reported on a document signed over the weekend by European leaders, committing to continued support of Ukraine and financing its ongoing needs. President Macron, Prime Minister Meloni, Chancellor Merz, Prime Minister Tusk, Prime Minister Starmer, President von der Leyen, and President Stubb all signed the statement regarding “peace for Ukraine in connection with the planned meeting between President Trump and President Putin.”

Included in the document was their concern that serious negotiations can only take place under conditions of a ceasefire or a reduction in military operations and that Ukraine’s participation in any talks was critical to any peace being achieved.

Both the White House and the Kremlin accepted President Zelensky’s request to join the talks, although no formal invitation was issued. Meanwhile, a senior member of Putin’s inner circle, Investment Envoy Kirill Dmitriev, has said that many countries are making “titanic efforts” to hinder an agreement between Russia and Trump.

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P’Nut The Squirrel’s Owners Sue New York For $10M After Raid, Decapitation

The owners P’Nut – a beloved squirrel that was seized and euthanized by the state of New York are suing for $10 million in damages over the death of their pets, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in New York Court of Claims.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation staged a five-hour raid on the home of Mark Luongo after an anonymous complaint was lodged against the P’nuts Freedom Farm, where internet sensation Peanut the squirrel was taken into custody along with his sidekick, Fred the raccoon – before the state euthanized both animals ‘in order to test for rabies.’

DEC officials claimed that P’Nut but an agent through thick leather gloves during the raid, necessitating both the squirrel and raccoon be decapitated and tested for rabies. The state later admitted that both tests were negative, and have never apologized nor returned the bodies of the pets. 

According to court documents, P’Nut and Fred’s execution were “not due to a fear of rabies,” but a “senseless act of violence” and “obscene demonstration of government abuse.” 

This lawsuit comes on top of a previous suit filed by Longo and Bittner on June 27 in Chemung County Supreme Court against the City of Elmira and 36 individuals from various levels of state and local office – and seeks unspecified damages via jury trial. 

The couple claims they’ve suffered emotional trauma and financial losses since losing their star squirrel – who had appeared all over social media (including OnlyFans !?), according to both lawsuits. 

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