(1) A near-beheading on the streets of Belfast – by a Sudanese “migrant”:

A Sudanese man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a knifeman appeared to try to behead a man in Belfast.

The suspect has been taken into custody after the victim suffered “significant injuries” to his face, neck and back in what police called a brutal attack.

The injured man, a resident of the area in his 40s, is being treated in hospital, where his condition is described as serious.

Footage shared on social media – which is too graphic to publish – appears to show the knifeman, in his 30s, pinning the man to the ground before repeatedly stabbing him in the head.

The video shows three apparently local men intervening, one hitting the attacker with a wooden hurling stick as others kick him to try to force him to release his victim.

Note that the three rescuers didn’t seem to have conventional weapons. Fortunately there were three of them.

(2) Steve Hilton will be on the ballot in California for the governorship. I guess his total was too big to surmount, since that particular primary is statewide (compared to the LA mayor’s primary, which was only in LA). So, to coin a phrase, for the post of governor California will have “a choice, not an echo.”

(3) Todd Blanche is nominated for the post of AG. Until now, he was the acting AG. I think Trump liked the job he was doing.

(4) The cellphone and fertility rates:

Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, and Ezekiel Hooper, her student, used the spotty early rollout of the iPhone as a way to isolate the effects of the phone on fertility. The first iPhone was released in June 2007, they wrote, and was available only on the AT&T network until February 2011. The study compared fertility rates in U.S. counties that had near-universal AT&T coverage with counties that had little or none.

Their paper, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the iPhone caused as much as half of the fertility decline between 2007 and 2011. The most pronounced effects were among young people aged 15 to 24.

What happened in the counties with iPhones? One theory, Professor Myers said, is that young people began to socialize more on their phones and less in person, and consequently were less likely to have sex and become pregnant.

Professor Myers said iPhones may also have made pornography more accessible, which led young people to substitute it for sex, or young people may have used them to obtain better information on avoiding pregnancy, including contraception and abortion.
Researchers not involved in the study said the results were persuasive.

Makes sense. The lockdowns didn’t help, either. And, as Ace writes:

And what messages did they get over their cellphones 24/7? Constant crisis, constant fear, constant messaging that the world was ending and it was all due to human births, constant messaging in favor of hook-up culture and abortion and, for the boys, pornography, and constant messaging against marriage, the family, and humanity itself.

(5) Another horrible murder, this time on a Bronx bus. Jonathan Pettigrew, 41-year-old father of 7 was shot and killed by a teenager – as yet at large – whom Pettigrew had asked not to talk so loudly on a cellphone. There were plenty of witnesses. The news reports don’t mention the races involved, but Google AI said that Pettigrew was black. My guess – and it’s only a guess – is that both victim and perpetrator were black. This fits the pattern of an out-of-control teenager, armed and ready to kill any time he perceives anyone as insulting him or telling him what to do.

RIP Jonathan Pettigrew.