Balderdash

Links - 5th June 2026 (2 - Climate Change)

2026-06-05T15:24:00.000+08:00

Melissa Chen on X - "Imagine if the United States had swallowed the Al Gore-style climate gospel back in the day... You don't really have to imagine it. Because there's a natural experiment that took place and that alternative future that the US dodged actually exists. It's called the United Kingdom. I seem to remember there was a sneering attitude from coastal liberal elites hooked on TED talks when Sarah Palin came on the scene and said "drill baby drill." They laughed and dismissed the idea of ramping up domestic fossil fuel production as backward and environmentally reckless. If it was up to them, they would have shut down fracking, choked off new drilling, slapped massive restrictions on oil and gas development, and chased the fantasy of rapid "green" transition at all costs. Instead America did the opposite. The result? UK households today pay 2X more than US households do for energy and their industrial electricity prices are among the highest in Europe. Sure they've lowered emissions (technically they just outsourced it) but at the cost of creating a massive structural economic disadvantage. Energy is the foundational input for everything - steel, chemicals, fertilizers, aluminum, cement, refining. When your electricity and gas bills are 2–6× higher, you just can't even compete. So you end up closing plants, offshoring jobs, and watching your industrial base slowly bleed out. So yeah, the UK's current predicament is exactly where the US would be in if the Green Lobby, Dems and Hollywood suckers had their way: energy-poor, import-dependent, economically hobbled, and geopolitically neutered. The worst part is it's completely ideological. The UK could have had more homegrown energy supply to buffer prices and keep revenue flowing, but Ed Miliband refuses to exploit the UK's own shale or North Sea potential aggressively. Decline really is a choice. Americans should be glad their leaders refused to make it."

Starmer: Miliband decides whether we drill North Sea - "Mr Miliband previously claimed that “new exploration licences in the North Sea, which some people are calling for, will not take a penny off people’s bills”... Kemi Badenoch accused Sir Keir Starmer of making a “reckless promise” not to drill in the North Sea, saying it would now have “catastrophic” consequences. The Conservative leader told the Prime Minister: “Hiding behind the Energy Secretary is pathetic. Under his Labour Government we buy half the gas we use from Norway. Last year, Norway’s Labour government drilled 49 wells in the North Sea. How many did Britain drill? Zero. “For the first time since 1964 under his Government, Britain drilled no wells. Why is energy security the right policy for Labour in Norway but the wrong policy for Labour in Britain?”... “The Jackdaw gas field could be up and running before winter. All that gas would be used here in the UK to heat 1.6m homes. That is enough to power Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex put together. So will the Prime Minister approve the licences or is the Energy Secretary running the Government?”"

CO2 row over climate activist Thunberg's yacht trip to New York - "a spokesman for German round-the-world sailor Boris Herrmann, the yacht's co-skipper, told Berlin newspaper TAZ that several people would fly into New York to help take the yacht back to Europe. Hermann himself will return by plane, according to the spokesman. The paper estimated that in fact Thunberg's boat trip would end up being more polluting than if she and her companions had just taken flights to New York themselves."
From 2019

Meme - "2023 Retail Electricity Price vs Wind + Solar Share (All Countries) *clear positive correlation - the more wind & solar, the pricier electricity is*"
The cope is that wind + solar are expensive despite being intrinsically cheap due to "greed", but it's weird that in the greediest country in the world (the US) electricity is like a third of the cost as in Denmark, which left wingers love to hold up as a model, and Denmark also has slightly more than 3x the wind + solar share of the US
Besides "greed", a new cope I saw was "Rather matches the highest functioning societies. Smart countries tax energy, encourages conservation and efficiency. Smart." Greens actively want to tank quality of life and don't understand that green energy is a luxury good and virtue signalling (rather than the relationship being causal in the other direction)

Meme - "While the US and Europe were dismantling their industrial base, China was building two new coal plants a week, cornering the solar panel market, taking over battery manufacturing, and dominating electric vehicle production. China didn't listen to Greta, China used Greta."

Meme - Unbelievable facts: "Seven countries-Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo- now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy sources."
"Oh look, the most economically productive countries in the world are 100% renewable energy!"
What climate change hystericists envision as the future: either become a shithole with unreliable electricity or be on top of a volcano

MAVERICK X on X - "In April 2025 Katy Perry burned 498 tons of fuel to do space tourism. Today she arrived in Davos to raise awareness about the "environment.""

Meme - Chris Martz @ChrisMartzWX: "China isn't turning into a “green superpower.” Any renewable energy systems they're installing only add to existing energy sources; they are not replacing fossil fuels at all. China is increasing their use of ALL energy."
"China Primary Energy Consumption by Source 1965-2024"

Sean Feucht - "🚨REUTERS finally reports last nights massacre of Christians in Nigeria calling them “gunmen” (not Muslim jihadists) who killed Christians due to “climate change” not their faith. The media is complicit and demonic with their lies! WE ARE ON THE GROUND TO TELL THE TRUTH HERE!"
Gunmen kill at least 30 in Nigeria's Plateau state attack | Reuters
“Muslims massacre Nigerian Christians because of climate change” - Reuters. Trust the Experts! Of course, if Christians massacre Muslims, this will be proof that Christianity is evil and we need to do more to eradicate Islamophobia, like banning all criticism of Islam

Not everything has to be about politics – the time is right for an energy truce in Canada - "For a country blessed with an extraordinary abundance of resources, Canada seems strangely committed to fighting about them. Few topics inflame our politics like energy—oil versus renewables, left versus right, Alberta versus Ottawa. It’s a tug-of-war that’s been dragging on for decades, and every time it looks like we might finally pull in the same direction, we find a fresh reason to let the rope burn our hands again... Energy is the oxygen of modern life. Everything—everything—depends on it. Hospitals. Food supply chains. Manufacturing. Digital infrastructure. Heating. Transportation. Even renewable energy systems themselves rely on hydrocarbons for mining, processing, manufacturing, and transportation. Worldwide demand for all forms of energy is rising rapidly. Billions still lack reliable power. Countries we admire—like Norway, Sweden, Japan, and South Korea—approach energy not as an ideological purity test, but as a strategic national priority. They use what works. They invest where it matters. They innovate. They balance. They don’t spend precious time demonizing one energy source to elevate another. Why can’t we do the same?"

Meme - Fission Phil: "A common attack on #nuclear advocates is that we are trashing #wind and #solar. Wind and solar have so many limitations and drawbacks that simply talking about them is considered trashing them. Explaining why we need nuclear means telling the truth about renewables.
The fact is simply this. Wind and solar make the act of decarbonizing grids to completion harder because they are variable intermittent sources of power we can't call on. This is a physical fact that has been handwaived away since the original push to use those sources. Nuclear now has to be the technology that can integrate wind and solar into the grid. An example is @TerraPower Natrium. They are adding thermal salt storage tanks to deal with the randomness of wind and solar. Decarbonization would be a lot less complicated with just nuclear. People are just conditioned to view wind and solar as a sacred cow that cannot be criticized. I believe the hype around wind and solar is a dangerous lie and actually threatens efforts to decarbonize to the degree needed to save the planet from climate disaster. Now I am not saying we can't do some wind and solar where appropriate. But I am saying we can't continue to believe that wind and solar will do the grid heavy lifting. And saying otherwise is feeding delusion. We need to be clear and adamant in our criticism of wind and solar. If that is considered trashing it then so be it. We can't be coddling feelings over facts. Wind and solar are intermittent, energy diffuse, resource and mining intensive, invasive to ecosystems, needing of ungodly amounts ot transmission infrastructure, needing of replacement every 30 years at a maximum, have no real cheap storage solution, make grids more expensive in total, is unavailable during sever weather, requires lots of natural gas backup, has very low capacity factors and need to be overbuilt, is totally reliant on huge government subsidies, decreases spinning reserve for grid stabilization, cannot black start in an emergency, the list goes ON AND ON. We are not trashing them. We are telling the truth, and the truth is often uncomfortable. Now we can be kind in our truth telling to not turn people off immediately, and exercise a little more humility. But we shouldn't have to just tiptoe around the glaring issues with wind and solar just because the appeal-to- nature folks have more institutional power. /END"
Randy Andy: "What advocates of nuclear don't understand about RE fanatics is that they reject physics and objective reality altogether. They are not interested in proper scientific debate. They have a predetermined ideological outcome in mind (100% RE) and will say anything to further this."

Meme - "Total US Taxpayer Subsidy per Megawatt-hour Of Energy Produced (Subsidy and Production Data by Type of Fuel), 2016 - 2022
Hydro- electric - $0.44
Fossil - $1.03
Nuclear - $1.21
Wind - $16.79
Biomass - $17.79
Geo- thermal - $17.93
Solar - $68.67
DATA: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pdf"
This doesn't stop left wingers screeching about oil and gas subsidies even though "renewables" get more subsidies than fossil fuels

Meme - "Climate activists saving hot water *3 women bathing together*"

UK climate aid cuts 'short-sighted', campaigners say - "Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told parliament that the UK's climate finance commitment would be cut to around £6 billion or three years – roughly £2bn a year, down from £2.3bn annually under the previous five-year arrangement. The overall aid budget has been reduced from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of gross national income by 2027, with the government citing the need to fund increased defence spending. The previous £3bn earmark for nature and forest projects has also been scrapped... Campaigners from the Global South said the cuts represented a historic betrayal by one of the world's largest historical emitters. "For the UK to retreat to a historic low of 0.3 per cent in aid is an act of climate colonialism,” said Harjeet Singh, climate activist and founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation. “We in the Global South are being forced to foot the bill for a catastrophe we did not cause, while the very nation that built its wealth on the carbon of the Industrial Revolution strips away the healthcare, clean water, and education that the world's most vulnerable need to survive it”... "It is clear that climate finance has, to some extent, been protected as a priority within the overseas development assistance budget — it is now a larger proportion of a shrinking overall pot," said Gareth Redmond-King, head of the international programme at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think tank. "However, cutting that budget at a time of such intense global upheaval goes against the warnings from the government's own national security advisers and food experts, who all warn of the growing threats to our security and stability from the climate crisis." "We import two fifths of our food from overseas, and worsening climate change impacts hitting farmers at home and abroad are leading to shortages and higher prices on our supermarket shelves," he said... Andreas Sieber, head of global political strategy at 350.org, told The Independent the cuts were a political choice rather than a fiscal necessity. "Cutting aid to the world's poorest is not belt-tightening, but moral abdication," he said. "The real absurdity: this is a phantom debate. While ministers pick pockets at the bottom, they leave windfall profits from fossil fuel giants untouched, even as those same companies cash in on the price fossil fuel shocks hammering households right now." Earlier this week, former international development minister Gareth Thomas, the Labour MP for Harrow West, also issued a warning to the government that it was leaving the door open for malign foreign powers such as China to fill the space left by the UK... “Our security depends not just on a stronger military but also on building soft power so that our soldiers aren’t needed.”"
When you're upset the grift doesn't keep growing, still pretend to be deluded that burning money stops climate change and are ignorant about the country's fiscal crisis. They know China isn't as stupid as the UK, even though it exceeded the UK's historic emissions quite a while ago and became a bigger economy in 2005
Clearly a Chinese invasion will be repelled by the UK's moral superiority

Barbara Bal MBA on X - "It’s wild how progressives will try to cancel anyone who questions sky-high gas prices, calling us “anti-supply and demand” or even communists for daring to suggest affordable energy. Yet they cheer this kind of cronyism: $206 million in taxpayer-backed loans to Liberal-supported “green” wind projects at sweetheart rates, while small businesses and families pay full price. They don’t actually want true free markets. They just want government control, tax and “global prices” for what they oppose and funding for what they support. Thank you @LeslynLewis for calling this out."
Climate change hysteria is a great way to make money, while climate change hystericists screech about oil company profits

Scott Harradine | Facebook - "There can no longer be any doubt. Our premier Doug Ford works FOR Enbridge Gas, NOT the province of Ontario, NOT the people of Ontario and certainly NOT the environment of Ontario. The #FordGovIsMostCorruptInOntHistory"
Ford’s latest bill collides with cities’ efforts to phase out gas in buildings - "Ontario Premier Doug Ford says the province will have 1.5 million more homes by 2031 to address the housing and affordability crisis in one fell swoop. But some of Ford’s development ambitions concern observers who say his plan is hampering municipalities’ ability to ditch fossil fuels in buildings. Across North America, municipalities have been considering, and in some cases passing, gas bans to force fossil fuels from new buildings. Montreal already has a ban, but legislation is stalled in other jurisdictions. In Vancouver, Mayor Ken Sim tried to kill the city’s existing ban and allow gas back into new buildings, but he was thwarted by popular pushback. New York state’s gas ban is being challenged in court and is on pause. Municipalities in Ontario have taken a different route. Rather than enacting outright gas bans, multiple cities and towns have put green building standards in place. They are broader policies that capture EV-charging requirements, landscaping standards and more, but they also have emissions thresholds that get stricter over time. Toronto’s green standards would have led to very little gas use, the main source of emissions from buildings, citywide by 2030. Those standards have come repeatedly under fire from the province, which says they slow down development. Now, new legislation — Bill 98, or the Building Homes and Improving Transportation Infrastructure Act — is snaking its way through the Legislature, and aims to kill green building standards for good, and in turn, the municipal ability to ditch gas. Bill 98 fits into a trend exhibited by the Ford government, which caters to gas giant Enbridge, said Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner. In 2024, the province overturned a ruling from the Ontario Energy Board (OEB) that would have required developers to front the cost of new gas infrastructure rather than passing the cost on to customers. As with Bill 98, the justification was that the move would slow down housing development. Enbridge supported the province’s intervention, and said the OEB decision would hinder its ability “to bring affordable and sustainable natural gas to all Ontarians.” The OEB’s ruling cited the affordability of heat pumps, and wrote: “The operating cost of a new all-electric house using a cold climate air source heat pump for space heating is lower than a new gas and electricity serviced house.” Schreiner said the province is “putting the profits of oil and gas giants like Enbridge ahead of affordability for everyday people,” even as research shows that fossil fuel use leads to higher energy bills. “Yet the Ford government, over and over again, undermines policies like the green building standards that create the conditions for builders to utilize lower cost solutions like heat pumps”"
Natural Gas or a Heat Pump? Where You Live Matters - "The graph below shows that natural gas is more affordable in 41 out of 50 states when comparing ENERGY STAR natural gas furnaces to ENERGY STAR electric heat pumps. As a rule of thumb, the higher the average annual heating bill, the greater the savings from natural gas."
Left wingers hate choice and want to immiserate people to bring on their revolution

Chris Martz on X - "The New York Times has reported that the east coast beaches may disappear in as little as 25 years from now. Just kidding; this was published in 1995."
Ron DeSantis on X - "Leftism as a religion."

The Kobeissi Letter on X - "Europe is in a full-blown energy crisis. In fact, Europe's energy crisis has gotten so bad that the European Commission is now recommending Europeans to work from home. They are also recommending using public transportation to cut fossil fuel use. Meanwhile, new IEA data shows that Europe has just 6 weeks worth of jet fuel remaining as the Iran War shortage worsens. As a result, many flights are expected to be cancelled on non-essential routes. Between the Russia-Ukraine War and the Strait of Hormuz closure, Europe's vulnerability to energy supply shocks has been exposed. We expect another wave of inflation in Europe."
Weird. Left wingers claim that doubling down on renewables like in Europe is the way to ensure energy security

Chris Mowrey on X - "the republican nominee in Virginia believes solar panels don’t work when it’s dark outside and windmills don’t work when “there’s no wind”. Stunning levels of incompetence and garbage."
Devon Eriksen on X - "Right wing propaganda is increasingly unnecessary. It can be replaced by verbatim reposts of what a democrat just said."

Science Magazine on X - "Climate policy has long fixated on how energy is produced, but a growing body of research suggests the real leverage lies in how it is used. In a new #SciencePolicyArticle, researchers argue that reshaping energy demand, through efficiency, electrification, and curbing excess consumption, could unlock faster, fairer progress toward net-zero goals. https://scim.ag/4cPAlol"
Jannik 🐿️ on X - "Everything that humans do and everything that makes them happy requires energy. No matter if it's food production, traveling, entertainment, industry... everything. "reshaping energy demand" is just an euphemism for artificial poverty and human suffering."
Climate change hysteria's goal is to immiserate humanity

Ontario Adds New Power 73 Per Cent Lower Than Former Government | Ontario Newsroom
Climate change hystericists keep boasting about the average price of electricity from these new projects being 8.8 cents per kwh and citing the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), but from the IESO Long-Term 2 RFP documents (both the initial results table and the Additional background, context and key information presentation, it's clear that this refers to the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) and excludes system costs including storage and grid costs. LCOE is a terrible metric to use to measure the cost of power and experts recommend we stop using it. The true cost of "renewable" energy is much higher as it includes storage to backup unreliable "renewable" energy and grid upgrades to distribute it

Philippe Lemoine on X - "It's pretty remarkable how, within maybe 4-5 years, we went from a quasi-millenarist environment of fear about climate change premised on the idea that we were just a few years away from the end of the world to a situation where almost nobody talks or gives a shit about it anymore. There may be a lesson here about the dangers of hyping a risk, which I think might soon become relevant to discussions about AI, because although the apocalyptic cult that developed about the risk posed by climate change was ridiculous, it's not as if the problem had magically disappeared either."
Clint Warren-Davey on X - "The reason no one talks about climate change anymore is because geopolitics came back. Climate change was a political issue only at the height of the Pax Americana, the Fukuyaman End of History, where there were no real threats to American dominance. Now nations and empires are on the move again. Russia, China and every other country don't give a shit about the environment in any way. They are doing what every state in history tries to do and amass hard power. And the Western world is being forced, kicking and screaming, to care about war and statecraft once again."

BladeoftheSun on X - "The World's largest Wind Turbine 26MW. In its lifetime it will produce the same energy as burning 750,000 tons of coal. That's 44,118 truck loads. And that's just 1 Wind Turbine."
The Rational Animal 🤔 on X - "No one should be surprised but what he left out is that this turbine costs an estimated $50-80 million to build and install. It only produces power 35-45% of the time because wind is intermittent. Its output degrades 12-16% over its 20-25 year lifespan. It requires hundreds of tons of steel, concrete, fiberglass, and rare earth minerals mined largely in China (his favorite country). The other 55-65% of the time you need backup power, which comes from natural gas. And it exists only because of massive government subsidies. A natural gas plant of the same 26MW capacity costs $26-39 million, produces more than double the effective output, runs on demand 24 hours a day regardless of weather, and lasts 30-40 years. Half the price. Double the output. No weather dependency. No subsidies required. But this was never about the environment. If it were, you would care that rare earth mining for wind turbines devastates landscapes across China and Africa, that thousands of birds and bats are killed annually by turbine blades, that the blades themselves are non-recyclable fiberglass rotting in landfills, and that natural gas produces half the emissions of coal with none of these problems. You ignore all of this because environmentalism was never your goal. It is your vehicle. The destination is what it has always been: government control of energy production, which means government control of the economy, which is socialism. Rand identified this decades ago. The green movement is not a scientific movement. It is a political one, and its target is not pollution. It is capitalism."

Dealing with the Chinese

2026-06-05T12:00:00.000+08:00

From 2016:

DO NOT
LEARN
MANDARIN

DO NOT DO IT

YOU WILL FOREVER HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE CHINESE, TRUST ME YOU DON'T WANT TO DO THAT
PLEASE MAN DON'T DO IT, THIS IS COMING FROM SOMEONE WHO SPEAKS MANDARIN AND LIVES IN CHINA YOU DON'T WANT THIS

LEARN JAPANESE OR RUSSIAN INSTEAD, TRUST ME, PLEASE DO NOT LEARN MANDARIN IT WILL FUCK UP YOUR LIFE BECAUSE NO BOSS IS GOING TO BE LIKE 'oh he has a degree in Mandarin and speaks
it really well, let's just have him not involved in any way whatsoever with China'.

The Chinese are absolute shit, they are the worst human beings that I have ever encountered on this planet, and I am EXTREMELY well traveled, including many shithole countries. Don't do it man, please take my advice,
learn Japanese or Russian or some shit instead, do NOT learn Mandarin

You won't realize the truth in what I'm saying until you're already here, but by then it'll be too late. Don't do it man, please, help me help you, learn something else!

Business related:
>constant dickery, backstabbing, underhandedness
>if they can lie, cheat, or steal, they will.
>constantly have to deal with cheats and thieves, the Chinese will rarely outright steal something from you, but they will never give you what you want for the money you spend, unless you spend a large sum of money; the Chinese even have a saying about this, 一分钱，一分货. It's basically expected that if you pay a low price for something you'll get scrap, even if it's supposed to adhere to a strict standard

Example 1:
>I work in the stainless steel industry. Friend is buying 201 grade steel (very common, basic grade) from a factory in Jiangsu. He asks me to inspect. Alright. I go to the factory, they assure me that they can produce within the required specification (tolerance of -0.25mm for thickness, aka 1/4 cm, the steel was 30mm in thickness so it had to be 29.75 or above to be within standard) and normal ASTM/AISI (standard international grade) chemistry, well alright my friend's buying this so I guess they're legit
>nope
>I inspect the goods, thickness if all over the fucking place from ~28.5mm-29.5mm, I confront them about the thickness and their claims that they could produce to standard,
>'oh anon because ASTM is an American grade we were obviously talking about inches, our mill only works in inches so we were talking about 1/4 an inch'
>lying through their fucking teeth, literally everyone else who wasn't part of the company backs me up saying that they were talking about mm, factory denies it
>check chemistry
>nickel content is less than 1/5 of what it's supposed to be on some sheets, chemistry is all over the fucking place, almost nothing is to standard
>oh anon, this is 201 *industry standard* steel, your friend should have specified that he wanted 201 *international standard* steel

cont, this is going to be long, I have several.

>there's only one 201 grade you fucking idiot, if you produce 'industry standard' 201 then you mark it as such like everyone else in the fucking industry you don't just call it '201' grade steel, you're literally committing fraud
>so sue us, the order's only worth ~$30,000, enjoy spending more on legal fees than you'll get from us :^)
>later was arguing with he production staff at their office, showed them the fucking American standard that said 'hey you're wrong on the thickness, you have to refund the money"
>one of the staff got into an argument with me over the meaning of 'up to', i.e. she thought 'up to 30' meant 'starting at 30 and over', rather than everything up to '30'
>no anon, your English is too poor to understand this
>English is my native language you stupid cunt you can barely string two sentences together
He didn't get his money back and didn't sue.

Example 2:
>same 201 steel order, hire a Russian company to do shipping since it's being shipped to Moscow, want everything to be seamless, no chance at fuckups
>our contract with the Russian company specifically states that they will take care of the packaging, because in addition to the steel being off standard it was also produced late, so it has to go on a high speed train to avoid being late; the high speed train has very specific packing requirements for steel, so we thought the Russians could handle it
>day of shipment comes (a Saturday), all documents in place, should be fine
>get a call on Saturday from the Chinese sub-contractor that the Russians hired to do the Chinese leg of the journey
>"hey so the goods didn't leave on Saturday."
>" ... Why."
>"Because the factory didn't package them."
>"WE HIRED YOU TO PACKAGE THE GOODS YOU INCOMPETENT FUCK"
>"Oh. Well, there aren't any forklifts in the area that can handle weights as heavy as this"
>" ... you're literally surrounded by warehouses, many of which stock stainless steel. Please explain how you are unable to find a forklift."
>"Well, we just can't find one. You have to find one."
>I ended up doing their job for them and finding them a forklift. Goods arrived a week late because the train only leaves once per week, friend lost even more money because he had to give additional discounts to his client. LUCKILY, the Chinese 201 grade happened to be the same as Russian local 'industry standard' 201 steel (I guess some shared Soviet thing?), so he didn't lose all of his money, only about 20%+
Sigh

Example 3:
>ordering goods from a large state-owned mill, purchase through a company that came recommended by the sales manager (you have to do this in order to take advantage of the export tax rebate that China has)
>we purchase, everything goes smoothly except for a small crisis at the start, where the company quoted $2600/ton, but when ordering time came around the goods jumped to $3000/ton, meaning we would have lost money on the order, so we had to negotiate with the sales manager and company late into the night to bring things down to $2800/ton, plus increase the price to our end customer (they weren't happy)
>this happens extremely often in China; they quote one thing then jack up the price after your client has signed the contract with you, knowing you can't back out or you'll lose reputation and possibly money
>March comes around, goods are produced on time, sales manager assures us that the goods will be in Tianjin Xingang port on March 9th at the latest, we'll then package the goods and have them ready for shipment on the 16th.
>March 5th rolls around
>'Hey guys, how're the good doing? Still on the train?'
>'No, they haven't left yet.'
>"What.'
>'Don't worry, we can still put them on a fast train to port, it'll take 3-4 days or so, you'll be fine.'
>'Alright, whatever, just make sure we're there in time for the March 16th shipment date.'
>'Yes, yes, of course'
>March 9th comes around
>'Hey guys, where are the goods? Already in Tianjin?'
>'Well, they haven't left yet."
>After I'm done having an aneurysm, I call the mill's transport office and immediately have them cancel the train booking and instead put the goods on trucks and truck them straight to the port
>Goods arrive. Tianjin port is a bit funky, they have a government bureau which packages the goods, you can't package the goods once they're within port, it's like one giant bonded warehouse
>Company assures us that the goods will be packed according to specifications (going on Russian train system, they have special requirements)
>alright, cool
>Confirm with them that the goods are alright about 4 days before the shipping date, they've confirmed that the Russian shipping company has okayed the packaging job, I receive photos of the job, forward them on to the Russian company
>Alright, cool
>Day before shipment, I get a message from the Russian shipping company
>'Hey, we've been trying to get in contact with the Chinese company for a week, we've had no response, the packaging job isn't correct, there's no way the Russian train service will accept the goods'
>Trying to fight back another aneurysm
>immediately get in contact with the Chinese company, ask them who exactly told them that the packaging job was ok
>some fucking Chinese subcontractor who had no authority to do so
>GOD FUCKING DAMNIT
>ask the Chinese why they didn't get in contact with the Russian shipping company, the company had sent them numerous messages over the past week
>'oh well we were talking to you so we thought we didn't have to respond'
>long story short, the packaging job was shit, the coils we were shipping (10,000+lbs each) moved during shipment because of the shit job and damaged the container, we were delayed by one month in Vladivostok port while they fixed the container and redid the packaging, also had to pay all additional fees
>Chinese company refused to compensate us
It was at this point that I completely stopped trusting the Chinese in any way, shape or form.

Example 4:
This happened when the company was still new and just started working in China.
>Had another deal, we were buying common grade steel to be exported
>ok cool, everything's in order, no problems thus far
>We have an inspector in China to check the goods
>He apparently goes to the guy's warehouse in Tianjin and checks up on things, says the seller is legit, he even managed to negotiate a 2% discount, we trust him and go through with the deal
>No problems with import/export, the steel arrives at its destination in Russia, lo and behold the steel is not what we ordered at all, we ordered 304 and 321 steel, what we received was some sort of fucking 201 failed abortion shit, manganese through the roof, low nickel content, low chromium content, completely out of standard
>what in the fuck?
>ask inspector what exactly he did, again, in detail
>he just went to the guy's company office, they chatted for a while, Chinese guy served him some tea, negotiated a 2% discount and then left quite pleased with himself
>never visited the warehouse, never saw the goods in person, never even fucking checked the mill certificate to see if the goods were genuine
>fire him on the spot, never happening again
>I go in person to meet with the fraud, also contact our lawyers in China
>The fraud agrees to a refund only if we send the steel back to his warehouse in China and he has his inspectors look at it and say whether or not it's his
>yeah, okay, sure, great idea 10/10, fucking hell
>I suggest instead that he send a guy to Russia to look at the steel and figure it out
>'No, he's a peasant, he's too afraid to go overseas.'
>I'm going to fucking strangle our recently-fired inspector
>Have our lawyers look into the case
>Fun fun fun: if a Chinese guy commits fraud and sends you the wrong goods, it's not a criminal offense, only a civil offense
>your only recourse is to sue the company
>look into the company's finances
>1m RMB registered capital, almost 100% assured that he's moved it out of the account by now since it does
>decide not to sue him because we'd be spending so much money on legal fees with almost 0 chance of getting any money back
The Chinese legal system is extremely weak. If you order say $100,000 worth of goods from someone and they literally send you trash that SEMI-resembles the goods that's worth maybe $1,000, there are almost
no penalties. They will not got to jail, they will not be penalized in any way, they will simply declare their company bankrupt and start a new one. Companies like this pop up all the time like mushrooms after rain;
you should never, ever, ever, ever, ever buy from Alibaba for this reason. Seriously though, a contract is hardly worth the paper it's printed on, if you do business in China you should ALWAYS have the jurisdiction be under a neutral law, like the UK or Singapore or whatever, also make sure that you never pay much in advance, and only pay the balance AFTER inspection and AFTER any goods you buy are either sealed or put into a bonded warehouse.

Example 5:
This happened long after I realized the Chinese were turbo-Jews on steroids:
>have a Russian client who constantly sends price inquiries over to our company, we constantly give him prices
>'No no no anon, these prices are too high, I can find better prices elsewhere'
>What the fuck are you talking about these prices are very far below market level, literally 10%-20% undercutting the Russian market
>'No anon, you see I can find better prices'
>'Okay. Good luck.'
>Russian friend purchases from some really fucking shady characters
>I strongly, STRONGLY advise him not to do this or at least let me check the mill certificates for him
>He thinks I'm trying to steal his sources or Russian clients
>Hey man, whatever, you do you. Good luck.
>He calls me a month or so later begging me to source his steel for him
>turns out, all these amazing prices he was getting were from ...
> ... surprise, surprise, frauds
>he orders ~$200,000 from these guys, he has inspectors in China who inspect everything, it looks goods
>but, his inspectors left the shipping container in the dealer's warehouse, unlocked, for 2 days before shipping it to port
>when the goods arrived in Russia, the top steel sheet was all according to grade, but everything else was just common carbon steel, and rusty at that
>he ended up losing almost everything, he was able to resell the scrap for maybe $20,000 total
>feel kind of bad for him, but at the same time he refused all help and completely ignored my advice, so w/e
He was very apologetic afterwards though, I'm helping him again to avoid getting fucked by the goddamn Chinese thieves.

Anyway, non-business related examples:

>out at a club with a few friends, we're hanging around outside, as we're talking a guy about 30 feet to the left of us collapses and starts seizing
>Guess someone spiked his drink or something? I don't know.
>never bring my cell phone with my when I go clubbing, fuck
>run over the a small police station about 100 yards away
>'Please call an ambulance, there's a guy having a seizure over there, he needs help!'
>'no.'
>'What the fuck why not?"
>'It's not my job.'
>'...'
Eventually one of the other clubbers called an ambulance for the guy, but still, what the fuck?

>Roommate extremely sick, delirious with fever, can't stand up or walk, have to take him to the hospital
>Call up my landlady, ask her if she can call a cab for us (gated community)
>'No.'
>'Why not?'
>'Point to the part of the contract where it says I have to hire cabs for you.'
>Jesus fucking christ, whatever
>Throw my roommate on my back, carry him out to the street, hire a cab to the nearest hospital
>Arrive in hospital, we wait in line behind this old woman while she's chatting with the doctor about some day-to-day bullshit
>Friend is literally about to vomit all over the floor, can you hurry this up?
>'Nope :^)'
>Christ's sake
>Wait 5 minutes for them to finish their chit-chat (again, I understand/speak Chinese, they were talking about banal bullshit, about the lady's grandson and sports), the old lady takes the pills and walks off
>Doctor attends to my friend
>Has to get him to piss in a cup and everything
>Have to help him piss in a cup and do all the tests and whatever
>All of a sudden, as I'm waiting for a test result in the doctor's office, nurse bursts through the door, asking if I'm someone's 'countryman'
>though she was talking about my roommate, I say 'No he's Canadian, I'm American."
>she grabs my arm and pulls me into the main hall of the clinic
>Some tall white guy is stumbling around, blood caked all over his head, probably just been hit by a car, he's completely out of it
>surrounded by a bunch of Chinese doctors and nurses and keep shouting at him in Chinese to sit down so they can run tests on him
>He obviously has a head injury, why the fuck do you think it's a good idea to surround him and yell at him in a foreign language?
>Whatever. They think that I speak his language cause we're both white
>I go over to him, he keeps getting back up after the Chinese doctors force him to sit down, eventually I just walk with him and we both take a seat near the wall, I talk with him to calm him down, find out he's from Sweden
>the Chinese call an ambulance for the Swedish guy to take him to a larger hospital (Beijing Uni hospital)
>they ask me to be his translator
>yeah sure it's not like my friend is dying in the fucking waiting room.
>I call a Russian friend to come take care of my roommate, after the Russian friend arrives I go in the ambulance with the Swedish guy
>they do all kinds of tests, hospital only accepts cash, by the time the doctor gives us the results I have maybe 80 yuan in my wallet left (spent 800+ on tests)
>To the Swedish guy: "So, our test results show that you are bleeding into your skull as a result of what we assume is you being hit by a car. We would like to keep you in the observation ward overnight,
so if anything happens we can respond immediately. Again, your wound could easily be fatal.'
>me: 'alright, but I only have about 80 yuan, do you guys take cards at all?'
>' ... No. Here, let me patch you up, you guys can go.
>'What? I thought you said that this could be fatal.'
>'Yes, it COULD be fatal, but isn't necessarily fatal, let me clean and bandage up his head so you guys can head out.'
>literally lost all interest whatsoever in caring for the Swedish guy once he learned I was out of cash, refused to do delayed payment or anything like that, I had to pay up front in cash if I wanted to put the guy in the observation ward for the night
>mfw
Jesus fucking christ. In retrospect, I should have called the Swedish embassy the first time I figured out the guy was Swedish so that he could have received proper care, but still. This was by far my most fucked up experience in China, that urgent medical care was refused because I didn't have cash on hand ready to pay. It was completely fucked up. This, of course, is aside from the fact that both my friend and the Swedish guy were made to queue up every time behind people with minor injuries and coughs while one was about to fall over and pass out on the floor while the other was bleeding profusely from his head. It was so completely fucked up.

Anyway, I got a cab back home with the Swedish guy, the Swedish guy promised he'd take me out to dinner and pay me back for the medical expenses, but I never received a call after that night. After I didn't receive any call, I remember checking news articles in the weeks following to see if there were any reports of a Swedish guy dying in Beijing, but I didn't see anything. I hope he's alright.

And one more example of Chinese dickery for tonight, there are a thousand other stories I could tell about this shit both business-wise and everywhere else, but I'll just work myself up if I do that:

>have a few friends who want to go to a nice place for the weekend, to a theme park that's a ways away from the city
>friend contacts a travel agency
>really fucking good prices, 250 yuan for the weekend
>fuck yeah, nice
>we get on the bus, go to the theme park
>long story short, the 250 yuan included: bus tickets. The advertisement and company both confirmed that the 250 yuan was for all expenses for the entire weekend but neglected to mention that those expenses were only those relating to the bus, not even joking
>what the 250 yuan didn't include
>hotels
>food
>actually going into the theme park i.e. paying the entrance ticket
>doing things inside the theme park, all of which costed additional $$$
>transportation to and from the theme park + hotel
>also had to pay additional money for wifi inside the hotel
>by the end of the weekend, the entire thing ended up costing about 2000 yuan per person
>travel company also had mandatory shopping outings at affiliated shops along the route, we all had to stop and hang out in the story for 15 minutes or so
But hey, good luck getting the company to change its advertising. No one gives a shit in China, after all, 一分钱，一分货. You get what you pay for, and even if they lie to your face about every single detail of the trip, the Chinese don't give a fuck because if you don't pay a lot of money then why should you expect them to hold up their end of the bargain? You get what you pay for.

Sigh

I can't wait to leave this place and go to Japan/Singapore. Seriously, I have the absolute utmost respect for Japan/Korea/Taiwan/Singapore now that I've seen how shit China is. They really did a bang-up job.

To sum all this up:

Do not learn Mandarin. Learn something else that will enrich your life and take it in a direction that you want to go. I'm no going to lie, Mandarin HAS made me worth more money. Westerners who can competently speak Mandarin are in rather short supply and they are considered far more reliable than the Chinese for obvious reasons. However, you really want to think about where the language is going to take you, and the answer every single time will be mainland China. Because let's face it, no one else speaks Mandarin except for mainland China and MAYBE Singapore, but they speak English over there as well.

If you learn Mandarin, you will be forced to deal with these people on a daily basis. Please trust me when I say that you really, really don't want to do that. In retrospect, I would much rather have learned Russian or Japanese. If I had a time machine, I would go back to my first year of uni and fucking slap myself and force myself to sign up for Japanese courses instead. It's too late for me now, though. I speak Mandarin, and any company that figures that out will sure as hell be sending me to China so that such a skill doesn't go to waste.

It's not fucking worth it guys, please please PLEASE learn something else, something that will make you happy. Don't just think in terms of salary, think in terms of quality of life and personal satisfaction. China will kill you inside, I absolutely guarantee it. I have yet to meet the man who comes to China, does business here, and comes out a happier and more balanced human being. It just doesn't happen. I know several people who have been working in China for 20 or 30+ years. All of them hate China and have a strong dislike for any work involving the Chinese. There is a reason China has a huge problem with students going overseas to the West and never coming home.

Please don't learn Mandarin.

People generally don't understand how differently China works from Western countries. They'll expect people to honor their agreements as they would in the West. Also, consider the following:

Your average yearly wage in China is just under $10,000. Let's say you're a trading company and with the advent of the internet you can easily market your business and issue quotes. Let's say that you get only two suckers every year, and you fuck them out of $50,000 each (small amount, that's one container of moderately priced steel). Congratulations, you just made 10x the average annual salary with almost zero repercussions. You're now a rich man in China.

You could do deals with these guys, but if you supply them the proper price for the steel, you might make MAYBE $1000-2000/container for stainless steel (and that's a pretty high margin for pricing without organising shipping, normal margins are 1-2% for that kind of job). If that guy is a small buyer and only buys two containers per year, you're going to have to wait decades to get the same amount of profit as you would just straight up fucking the guy. China is a conman's dream, lots of potential customers flooding in from all over the world looking for cheap steel that you can fuck with very little legal repercussions.

Well, the thing is that you can find good quality, it's just that big mills (the reliable ones) only produce in certain order lots, and most of the times those order lots are out of reach for smaller traders. For example, if you're trying to buy Bao stainless steel and you're an ordinary trader without guanxi, you have to buy a minimum of 200 tons at I think 20 tons per dimension, i.e. if you want 2mm*1000*2000 sheets, you have to buy 20 tons, you can't just buy 5 or 6. Problem is, that makes your order lot a minimum of $200,000, more likely in the $350,000 pushing $400,000+ depending on the grade, which is simply out of reach for smaller traders. Thus, most guys have to turn to Chinese traders who stock this stuff, and that's where you start running into the con men.

I'm not a bad businessman otherwise I wouldn't be in business still. Since those early encounters we've more than made up for our losses and turn quite a bit in revenue every quarter.

The examples I gave were growing pains of doing business in China, and this was with having connections in China. Unfortunately, the connections I had were only somewhat connected to the steel business i.e. they were manufacturers who often bought steel, and while I avoided a lot of shit on their advice, the steel industry is just filled with a LOT more cheats than one would expect especially when it comes to sheets and coils, which are easier to produce.

I mean, the Russian guy who got cheated was a veteran in the steel industry, he's one of the largest traders in Russia and has been doing this for going on 25 years, his father was in the business as well after the USSR broke up. Russia also isn't exactly known for being an easy market, but even he still got fucked by the Chinese. In fact, every single one of our clients was defrauded at one point or another, most losing ~$50,000, some losing more than $1m because people don't understand how different China is from Western countries.

Links - 5th June 2026 (1 - Left Wing Economics: Canada [including High Speed Rail])

2026-06-05T09:44:00.000+08:00

Via Rail subsidiary paid Quebec marketing firm $330K as it pivoted to high-speed rail - "A federal Crown corporation paid more than $330,000 to an outside marketing firm to rebrand a planned passenger rail project between Toronto and Quebec City and boost its popularity. Documents obtained by The Canadian Press detail how the corporation, concerned about “widespread disinterest” in a high-frequency rail corridor announced in 2021, decided to change its name and pivot to high-speed rail instead... With the firm’s help, the corporation came up with a new logo and a new name – Alto – more than a year ago. The rebranding was apparently so sensitive that the Crown corporation also chose a code name for Alto. Multiple documents, obtained using access-to-information law, refer to the new name as “Tracks.”... “The concept of ‘high frequency’ faces strong opposition. There’s widespread disinterest and dissatisfaction associated with the term, hindering any meaningful discussions and support. This resistance has become particularly challenging to navigate as the term ‘high frequency’ is directly embedded in the (corporation’s) name,” reads an undated briefing note written in late 2023 or early 2024. It goes on to say that discussions of higher speed “are met with openness,” which would lead to “greater project support and acceptance.” It adds that the VIA HFR name should be changed early in the process, while the public’s awareness of the project is “relatively low.”... Ryan Katz-Rosene, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa who studies high-speed rail, said it’s “concerning” to see the Crown corporation focus on “how to maximize the marketing appeal” of the project instead of “trying to address very specific challenges in the transport sector.” He said a big problem the high-frequency plan sought to fix was the fact that VIA Rail currently has to schedule passenger trains around freight trains sharing the same tracks. Building new, dedicated tracks would have removed a major obstacle to improved service, he said – regardless of speed. But a high-speed rail line could cost double the price of the high-frequency option, Katz-Rosene said, and is therefore less likely to get built... An internal presentation from August 2024 cites public opinion research showing that people preferred a higher-speed rail line, despite the added cost. “We must continue to shift away from the high frequency narrative to keep the public and stakeholders engaged,” it reads. According to the documents, the corporation in September 2023 asked the three groups qualified to bid on building the project to “propose a second option without speed limitations.” Katz-Rosene said it’s not surprising that people would choose high speed over high frequency. But a high-speed rail project will face substantial political challenges, he said, including the fact that Western Canada may balk at the idea of paying billions of dollars to build a rail corridor for Quebec and Ontario. “I don’t think anyone has a really good handle on how much this is actually going to cost,” he said, adding that the “sticker shock” could eventually kill the project. “You just know it’s going to be a hot political issue.”"

Opinion: High-speed rail project just an expensive fairy tale - "The government claims the project will create up to 51,000 jobs during its construction and boost Canadian GDP by up to $35 billion annually. The project will only become profitable after $53 billion in subsidies and 44 years of operation, according to research from McGill University . That $53 billion is close to how much Ottawa takes from taxpayers through the GST in a year. That’s a money pit, not an investment. And those jobs come with a massive price tag. Each of the 51,000 jobs costs about $1.7 million and many of them won’t be around after construction ends. A $35-billion annual increase in GDP amounts to about a two per cent GDP increase in Ontario and Quebec. That’s about those provinces’ projected combined GDP growth this year. That means the government is saying that this train would essentially double the GDP growth of Ontario and Quebec this year if it was completed. From seven stops... Only one out of three people surveyed in the area said they would take the train more than once per year. That’s not enough riders to justify the cost. And then there’s the land issue. High-speed trains need straight tracks. That means the government is going to cut roads in half and take land from people who don’t want to sell. “If people are reluctant, there is of course some recourse with the expropriation process that could happen,” said Martin Imbleau, CEO of Alto, the crown corporation in charge of the project. “A train that runs at 320 km/h cannot have curves. It has to be very, very straight, so of course we’ll need to buy a significant portion of land, and compensation will be a big issue.” And other similar projects are known for coming in severely over budget and behind schedule. The California High Speed Rail project was projected to cost $46 billion in 2008. Now almost two decades later the cost has ballooned to $174 billion and not a single piece of track has been laid. The United Kingdom’s high-speed rail line called HS2 was projected to cost $59 billion in 2011. The latest numbers show the budget is more than $148 billion. And it won’t open for almost another 10 years. The same story has played out here at home. The Ontario government announced it would build a light rail line across Toronto, the Ontario Line, for $10.9 billion. But costs ballooned to $27.2 billion before a single track was laid. Expecting the federal government to buck the trend and build the Alto line within budget is laughable. The federal government has a bad track record when it comes to managing projects. It wasted $60 million on a broken ArriveCan app that was supposed to cost $80,000. Now it wants to manage a $90-billion rail project? It’s a project that taxpayers can’t afford. The federal government is borrowing about $78 billion this year. The federal debt will reach $1.35 trillion by the end of the 2025-2026 fiscal year. Debt interest payments are costing taxpayers $55.6 billion this year. That’s more than the government collects through the GST."

Canada is losing its entrepreneurs—and barely anyone is talking about it - "Self-employment now accounts for just 12.8 percent of total employment, the lowest share in 45 years. The absolute number of self-employed Canadians sits at roughly 2.7 million, essentially unchanged from 17 years ago despite substantial population growth. When measured against the total population, the share of Canadians working for themselves has steadily contracted. These figures mask an even sharper reality. Self-employment includes everyone from ambitious founders building scalable firms to professionals working solo gigs. What matters for economic dynamism is the former: businesses with employees, growth ambitions, and the capacity to challenge incumbents. On this measure, the collapse is striking. The number of self-employed Canadians with paid employees per thousand working-age adults fell 57 percent between 2000 and 2022, dropping from 3.0 to just 1.3. Business entry rates tell the same story. In 2023, new firm creation sat at 12.3 percent of all active businesses, well below the 15.2 percent recorded 16 years earlier and a fraction of the nearly 25 percent Canada achieved in the early 1980s. Exits have also declined, pointing to an economy where creative destruction isn’t happening at robust rates. Venture capital investment, often a leading indicator of entrepreneurial ambition, has also cratered. As a share of GDP, it dropped from nearly 0.5 percent in 2021 to 0.2 percent in 2024—a decline of more than half in just three years. Canadian venture funds are struggling to raise capital, and what little they deploy is pooling into a handful of large bets rather than spreading across a broad base of early-stage companies. A recent report from the National Angel Capital Organization quantifies the cost. Canada’s three largest startup ecosystems—Toronto-Waterloo, Vancouver, and Montreal—collectively lost $66 billion in ecosystem value between 2019 and 2024, translating to an estimated 133,000 fewer high-quality startup jobs. While Canadian ecosystems grew at roughly 2 percent annually during this period, leading global peers posted growth rates between 9 and 17 percent. The report identifies an annual funding gap of at least $141 million at the seed and pre-seed stages, with seed rounds in Canada’s major tech hubs running 40 percent smaller than comparable U.S. ecosystems. The exodus to the U.S. compounds the problem. In 2024, for the first time, more Canadian-educated founders who raised significant capital started their companies in the U.S. than in Canada, according to research from Leaders Fund. Only one-third of startups founded by Canadians that raised more than $1 million last year were actually based in Canada, down from two-thirds between 2015 and 2019. Nearly half now operate from the U.S.—double the share from five years ago. Late last month, Y Combinator—a prestigious startup accelerator—struck a nerve in tech circles when it briefly removed Canada from its list of acceptable incorporation jurisdictions. The reversal came within days, but the message had already landed: even Canada’s most promising entrepreneurs are being pulled south by stronger ecosystems, lighter regulatory burdens, and deeper pools of growth capital. The international comparison is sobering. In 2015, OECD data shows Canada created roughly 191,000 new businesses. By 2024, the figure was essentially unchanged at 190,399, despite significant population growth. Over the same period, the U.S. saw business entries rise 34 percent, the United Kingdom 40 percent, and France 86 percent. On a per-capita basis, Canada now generates fewer new businesses than it did a decade ago and trails most of its peers. Without new employer-firm formation, innovation stalls, productivity stagnates, and established players entrench their positions. Canada has many advantages: world-class universities, strong institutions, and access to talent. But advantages don’t automatically translate into outcomes. Estonia, Ireland, Singapore, and Israel all built dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystems through deliberate policy choices: regulatory reform, competitive tax structures, and environments where risk-taking is rewarded rather than punished. Expediting major resource projects matters. But so does generating competitive new firms that challenge incumbents and drive productivity growth. The causes of Canada’s entrepreneurial decline are varied and the solutions complex, but the first step is to recognize we have a problem."
Time to "tax the 'rich'", increase capital gains taxes and introduce more regulations to push the left wing agenda

Michael A. Arouet on X - "Canada and Germany followed similar left path. Choices have consequences, in this case it’s stagnation and impoverishment compared to everyone else. Why do they keep doing it to themselves? Do they enjoy becoming poor?"
paleoneoliberal on X - "Canada's decline is probably the most striking in the West. Not so long ago, Canada used to be a somewhat smarter and more peaceful version of the US, and its economy didn't lag far behind. However, as the woke left took power, the economy experienced a lost decade, housing prices skyrocketed, non-Western immigration exploded, and personal freedoms collapsed. Canada should be a warning, not a model to emulate."

NO WAY!!! It finally happened. The "Holy Grail" of butter just landed at my local Costco and people are already clearing the shelves. : r/CostcoCanada - "Hopefully the US successfully compels Canada to drop supply management as past of CUSMA reviews. It’s absolutely ridiculous that the Canadian consumer is denied choice to inflate the pockets of a small number of primarily Quebec-based dairy farmers. And before someone chimes in with the “but we can’t allow that swill US milk”, no one is forcing you to buy it. Let Canadians have freedom of choice. Here come the downvotes from LPC shills."
Most people in the thread are raving about foreign butter and complaining about local butter but of course to spite the US we must ban all foreign butter. This comment got down voted a lot. Canadians are so insecure

Majority of Canadians believe economy is on the wrong track: poll
Clearly, this has nothing to do with left wing economic policies, Trump is to blame for over a decade of no GDP per capita growth and In Carney We Trust

Vincent Geloso: How taxes and regulations keep people in poverty - "This isn’t the first time we have been faced with something like this. When Ralph Klein became premier of Alberta in the 1990s, he too was faced with a difficult economic and fiscal situation. The road he took to tackle those issues was one involving deregulation, tax cuts, and a reduction in government spending. The outcomes—including the improvement of economic mobility for all Albertans—present a path forward for a future federal government looking to turn things around at the national level. While Alberta is perceived as a low-tax, low-regulation jurisdiction today, in comparison to other Canadian provinces, that wasn’t always the case. When Klein took office in 1992, economic freedom indices placed the province at the higher end, but very much within the pack of Canadian provinces and average American states. At the time, Alberta was running a $2.6-billion deficit. That’s quite significant given that the province’s expenditures were $16.4 billion back then. The provincial government was essentially borrowing one out of every six dollars it spent. Klein’s vision was quite clear from the beginning. He argued that the provincial government had a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Over the next five years, his government would reduce inflation-adjusted spending per person by 32 percent. Simultaneously, it would lighten the regulatory burden imposed on businesses operating in Alberta, most notably in the energy industry. It would also work to get government “out of the business of business,” as Klein liked to say, by removing a number of government monopolies. Following these changes, economic freedom indicators shot up in Alberta, separating it from the pack of Canadian provinces and the average American state. Through empirical analysis, economists have been able to look at the effect these changes had on the poorest Albertans. Essentially, a dataset was created representing what would have happened if those reforms hadn’t taken place, using a combination of other provinces that did not undergo similar changes. We can then compare this counterfactual, business-as-usual scenario with what actually took place. This isolates the effect of the new policies. What we find is that getting government out of the way and reducing its influence over Albertans’ lives was of significant help to the poorest in the province. By 2005, Albertans who were among the lowest 10 percent of income earners could expect their incomes to grow 73 percentage points faster, over the next five years, than they would have without the reform. Of those, about 12 percent more saw their after-tax income at least double over the same period, compared to the business-as-usual scenario. As their incomes grew faster, their chances of reaching another income bracket, as opposed to remaining in the same situation, also increased significantly. On average, those who were in the lowest 10 percent of income earners could expect to jump 8 percentiles further up the income ladder over five years than they would have without the reforms. Essentially, they were less likely to remain among the lowest-paid 10 percent of Albertans than they would have been without the Klein reforms. Some might find this counter-intuitive—after all, isn’t government intervention regularly presented as a way to help those who have the least? But the reason is quite simple. When the Klein government lowered the province’s regulatory burden and reduced its spending, it also allowed a whole slew of new opportunities to emerge. Where a business idea was once impossible, either because a government monopoly made it illegal or the regulatory burden made it uneconomical, it was allowed to flourish once the legislative barriers were removed. And where government spending once required a higher tax burden, making some investments less profitable, those same investments became more appealing once those taxes were lowered. In both cases, there were more opportunities for Albertans, including those at the very bottom of the income ladder. More opportunities mean more ways for everyone to climb up that ladder. While the rest of the country should certainly take note of how Alberta was able to increase income mobility in the 1990s, so should Albertans today, as the province has unfortunately reverted to being within the pack of Canadian provinces and average U.S. states in terms of economic freedom."
This is why left wingers hate Alberta so much

AACE National Launches National Awareness Week to Advocate for Urgent Childcare Reform - "National Awareness Week comes at a critical time, as childcare operators across the country face dire financial strains under the current system. The CWELCC program, while well-intentioned, has placed undue burdens on Canada’s mixed-market childcare providers, many of whom are now at risk of closure due to inadequate funding, excessive bureaucratic burden, and unreasonable policy directives. AACE National believes that reinstating provincial jurisdiction and empowering provincial governments to design childcare solutions tailored to their populations will lead to more sustainable and effective outcomes. “The federal government is putting ideology and policy before children, excluding and discriminating against the very women-led entrepreneurs who have been relied upon to serve the majority of Canada’s families for the past several decades,” Churcher added. “By forcing an inflexible, one-size-fits-all public centralized system, they are ignoring the voices of parents, educators, and operators—the real stakeholders in childcare."... “The one-size-fits-all funding approach imposed by CWELCC has left rural centres like mine completely out of the equation,” says Anya Kerr, another director of centres in both Alberta and Ontario. “From the current revenue-replacement model to the new cost-based funding model, the unique needs and expenses of centres in remote areas cannot be met. We’ve already had to make cuts to our quality programs, services for families, and nutrition costs, which goes against our founding philosophy. With the proposed changes, we will have to lay off staff who are needed to support inclusion of special needs children and make further cuts to our programs, all of which parents have offered to pay for through donations. This completely defeats the purpose of the CWELCC system, with affordability being canceled out by parents asking to cover these ineligible expenses. If none of the key goals of the system are being met, it is a failure for all Canadian families.” “Finding space in daycare has become increasingly difficult; a sentiment echoed by many of my colleagues,” remarks a parent of a child at Stepping Stone Early Learning Academy in Ontario who attended AACE National’s Canada-wide online meeting of 1,200 parents on October 17. “It appears we’ve shifted from one extreme to another. My concern is that, in attempting to address affordability, the daycares themselves may be facing undue strain. The last thing any of us would want is for the quality of care to be compromised, whether through reduced resources, inadequate equipment, or insufficient compensation for staff. It’s imperative that, in making childcare accessible, we ensure the sustainability of the daycare sector so that the well-being of the children and the livelihoods of the employees are not jeopardized.”"

CTV News on X - "#BREAKING: Canada Post reports loss of $1.57 billion in 2025"
Jason YYC on X - "ITS. NOT. A. BUSINESS ITS A SERVICE!!!!!!"
lntuitl0n 🇨🇦 on X - "I fear that Canada post *is* a business - it’s a Crown Corporation that, by law, does not receive regular federal funding and is mandated to be financially self-sustaining. It’s not a mistake to report that it’s operating at a loss"

The Council of Canadians | Facebook - "Canada Post isn't ending door to door delivery to save money. They are cancelling a public service so that a billionaire-backed private company can take over the very lucrative door to door delivery business—which is in higher demand than ever before. To make Canada Post solvent and improve a vital public service, the federal government only has to do one thing: pass legislation to force delivery companies to apply minimal labour standards, environmental regulations, and service standards. But instead, door to door delivery is being handed over to a private company with Liberal ties… that Canada Post helped create! The following helps explain why Mark Carney declared Canada Post "not viable.""
Left wing logic: since Canada Post cannot compete, instead of reforming it so that it can compete, we should cripple competitors instead. Not to mention the usual conspiracy theory about letting "billionaires" profit. But then, these people don't know the difference between door-to-door parcel and door-to-door letter mail delivery, so it's no surprise they don't understand anything else. Unsurprisingly, neither the Facebook post nor the linked article mention the 2025 Kaplan Commission, the 2024 Report of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates or the 2016 Canada Post Review Task Force, which all had similar conclusions about Canada Post's financial sustainability
The comments were hilarious. Apparently seniors will die if they don't get their mail at their house instead of a community mailbox (weird how they don't starve to death since apparently they're unable to leave the house). And Canada Post lost $1.57 billion in 2025 because of "13 lifetime appointed VPs thanks to Harper" (the CEO earns $500-600k a year, so even if all 13 earned as much as him, firing all 13 of them and not replacing them would save at most $8 million a year). And that Canada Post should not be a business because it's a service like the military, so the taxpayer needs to subsidise them indefinitely for an indefinite sum of money because unions are good and people should be paid "liveable wages"

Canadians ignore slow economic growth at their peril - " I recently attended a screening by the Montreal Economic Institute of the film “L’Illusion tranquille” — or “The Quiet Illusion,” word-play on the “Quiet Revolution,” the usual term for the transformation of Quebec’s governance in the 1960s. What’s the illusion? Though Quebec views itself as not just distinct but also a model for others to emulate, the reality is its average income lags that of most other states and provinces. Some model! A particularly striking statistic cited in the documentary is Quebec’s ranking near the bottom of GDP per capita among the 60 states and provinces of North America. This is reflected in UQAM Professor Pierre Fortin’s calculation that GDP per capita in neighbouring New York state — $87,000 in 2018 — was almost twice as high as Quebec’s $48,000. (Both numbers are in U.S. dollars at “purchasing power parity.”) When the film’s audience was asked for its post-screening reaction, one comment was that it seemed overly pessimistic. On the contrary, the documentary arguably does not capture the speed at which the U.S. has been pulling away from Canada over the past couple of years in the race to develop and deploy innovative new technologies, particularly artificial intelligence... Canada’s shrinking stature on the international stage was epitomized by recent comments by Bloomberg Surveillance’s co-hosts Jonathan Ferro and Lisa Abramowitz. Their recent interview with Invesco’s Matt Brill (about 90 minutes into the program) focused on Alphabet’s raising funds on European and Canadian markets after tapping the U.S. market three times earlier this year in its apparently insatiable need to fund its investments. Ferro laughingly derided Alphabet’s raising $8.5 billion in the Canadian market as the corporate equivalent of looking for nickels and dimes “under the couch cushions.” Ridicule of Canada’s trivial role in the financial world must be particularly galling for Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, which specializes in corporate deals. The contrast between the United States and Canada couldn’t be more striking. South of the border, technology firms are spending every dollar they can raise. Here firms remain reluctant to invest even with soaring prices for commodities such as minerals and oil. Given the widening gap in investment trends between the two countries, the difference in per capita incomes will only continue to grow. The resulting incentive for our most talented young people to move to the U.S. threatens our future prosperity and sovereignty. In the words of Evsey Domar, author of a seminal 1946 paper on economic growth, “When an aggressive part of the world is strong and quite successfully committed to rapid growth, the other can disregard this objective only if it is tired of its own existence as a society.”"

Links - 4th June 2026 (3 [including Induced Demand])

2026-06-04T21:31:00.000+08:00

Study: Induced Demand Works for Bikes and Transit, too
Left wing doublethink is that induced demand for roads means you shouldn't build roads because there's no point, but induced demand for bikes and public transit are good and means you should promote them even more. They just hate cars and roads

London congestion charge rises to £11.50 a day - "Sue Terpilowski, the group's London Policy Chairman, said: "Congestion has risen back to pre-2003 levels and it is clear that the scheme is not fit for purpose."
From 2014. Left wing logic: there was no point introducing the congestion charge since traffic returned to pre-congestion charge levels

Toronto traffic doesn’t just seem worse, it is worse – and data shows these major bottlenecks are to blame - The Globe and Mail - "While people living in the Greater Toronto Area have long complained about gridlock, data compiled for The Globe and Mail by traffic analytics firm INRIX shows that the problem is truly getting worse, with traffic surpassing pre-pandemic levels and skyrocketing since the peak of COVID lockdowns, despite traffic volumes remaining relatively flat. Instead, bottlenecks have converged around major construction projects, suggesting that road capacity rather than demand is a bigger part of the problem... A July study commissioned by the Toronto Region Board of Trade showed that 42 per cent of GTA and Hamilton residents said they avoid shopping, going out for entertainment and events because of congestion while 38 per cent refrained from dining out. Giles Gherson, the board’s chief executive officer, said the study also revealed that more than half of residents considered relocating outside the region because of traffic. The same study pegged the price of congestion in Toronto at $11-billion in lost productivity and opportunity cost per year. As Mr. Gherson sees it, traffic is fundamentally undermining Toronto’s business competitiveness."
If the myths left wingers believe about induced demand are right, reducing roads shouldn't worsen congestion (that is also the implied logic when they claim bike lanes, bus rapid transit lanes etc won't worsen traffic). Yet...

Induced Demand Debunked - "Which type of infrastructure should government invest in: transit almost nobody will use, or lanes everybody will use? Induced demand is a false argument. Nobody says “don’t build a new airport terminal or runway – it will just fill up with new flights” or “don’t build a new port terminal – it will just fill up with ships” (🙄 eye roll)"

What does "induced demand" really amount to? - "One of my resolutions for the new year is to encourage people in the pro-housing community to spend less time engaging with the bizarre arguments of Marxist geographers and other hard-left NIMBYs and more time addressing normie concerns about a world of housing abundance. And the biggest, most important thing on that list is traffic... the overall volume of traffic would increase if our neighborhood was upzoned... the downside of more traffic is actually relatively small compared to the benefits of a more economically dynamic city. People don’t like traffic jams, but they don’t like high taxes or high levels of homelessness either. But the traffic issue is worth tackling on its own terms both because it’s a problem in the cities we already have and because fear of traffic is a major impediment to building the cities we should have. The New York Times recently did a big feature grounded in induced demand theory headlined “Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?” which skirted around the kind of obvious answer that we do it because it lets more people drive to more places. In other words, I think the idea of induced demand is just somewhat less paradoxical than people make it out to be. Consider the traffic impact of a mass transit project rather than highway widening... “Ambitious Mass Transit Projects Don’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing Them?” New York City has by far the biggest and most robust mass transit system in the country, but that hasn’t ended road congestion. And yet I think it’s obvious that a high-ridership extension of the Purple Line wouldn’t be a policy failure even if, via the induced demand mechanism, it didn’t end up impacting traffic congestion. The success would be that more people get to go more places. Some of those extra people would be metro riders and some would be drivers, but the point is that region-wide mobility would be improved. By the same token, the existence of serious traffic congestion problems in New York doesn’t show that the New York City Subway, NJ Transit, Metro-North, and the LIRR are all pointless. They’re vital to the existence of the region — without them, the whole metro area would be smaller and poorer."

Opinion: Induced Travel Demand Induces Media Attention - "While the theory of induced demand is sound, leaving the impression that induced demand will fully absorb the capacity of new roadway investments or that new demand is somehow bad is very misleading. Most new demand on expanded roads comes from new population, new employment and economic activity (some or all of which may have been attracted by enhanced transportation infrastructure), traffic rerouted from neighborhood streets or congested roads, or travel that has shifted in time to the benefit of the traveling public now that more capacity is available to undertake activities during desired travel times. Second, today’s induced demand is likely well below historically estimated levels. Measures of induced demand—and there are many with different definitions and data sources—are based on old empirical data from the last century or very early this century, when travel per person was growing at a few percentage points per year as household incomes, labor force participation, auto availability, and economic activity grew. Since approximately 2005, U.S. vehicle travel per person has not grown and the amount of travel on roads with newly increased capacity attributable to additional or longer induced trips is likely modest. The National Household Travel Survey documents declining trip rates as telework, e-commerce, and other communications substitution opportunities further dampen travel demand growth pressures, particularly for urban households. If travel expanded to fill all capacity, we would not have any low-volume highways. More importantly, characterizing induced travel as bad or wasted is a misrepresentation of the value that people derive from engaging in travel. It’s not just wealthy folks making superfluous trips. Residents having access to better jobs or businesses with better selection and lower prices isn’t bad. Businesses having access to a bigger labor pool and potential customer and supplier bases because people can travel farther in a tolerable amount of time isn’t bad. Making supply chains work better isn’t bad. Getting emergency vehicles where they need to go faster isn’t bad. Pulling cut-through traffic out of neighborhoods to travel on a safer highway facility isn’t bad. Having more direct and less congested—and thus environmentally greener—trips isn’t bad. Enabling parents to get home and share a meal with the family isn’t bad. Using transportation infrastructure to shape development or improve economic competitiveness isn’t bad. Being able to engage in social interactions and recreational activities isn’t bad, and contributes positively to physical and mental health... Multiple congressional legislative cycles, successive executive administrations, all states, and hundreds of local and regional transportation agencies have mission statements and goals for their transportation programs that aspire to improve mobility for people and goods. Mobility is widely recognized as critical to economic competitiveness, productivity, upward mobility, and quality of life. Recognizing the importance of mobility, cities are now making extraordinary efforts to ensure mobility for all segments of the population... Congestion is an onerous time tax that does not discriminate. It undermines mobility for rich and poor, able-bodied and impaired, and travelers of all races and ethnicities. It impacts people, businesses, and public services. The impacts of failing to provide needed capacity are not restricted to affluent folks making unnecessary trips; in fact, low-income workers can be severely impacted by congestion delays and travel time unreliability. Overplaying induced demand arguments as a pretext for discouraging roadway expansion or presuming travel demand can be accommodated by investing in alternative modes can be disingenuous and ill-informed. The presumption that directing resources to transit, bike, or pedestrian options can meet the mobility needs of all people and goods seldom works out as a real solution that is financially sustainable, environmentally superior, or offers comparable mobility, accessibility, or other benefits... The premise that new roadway capacity induces traffic, if applied consistently within transportation systems analysis, means that any initiative that attracts travelers to an alternative mode or otherwise reduces roadway travel simultaneously induces replacement travel due to the now available roadway capacity. For example, the analysis of a new transit project would need to debit the energy, emissions, noise, safety, and other benefits attributed to transit by the impacts of the induced roadway traffic. An objective analysis of transportation requires consistent treatment of induced travel across modes and projects. This requires a rich understanding of induced demand, including the impact of context-specific variables and how they may influence induced demand for a specific set of demographic, economic, geographic, and other conditions. Much of the reporting on induced demand gives the impression that the transportation planning community is oblivious to this phenomenon or is comprised of road-building zealots. Newer activity-based transportation models are designed such that activity generation (trip generation) is sensitive to travel times. Consequently, improvements in travel speed will contribute to predictions of increased trip-making and travel distance. Even without the newest models, scenario testing and careful analysis of changes in demographics, mode choices, and flow volumes and patterns can give insight into the nature of demand on new facilities. Planners must also consider that new roadway infrastructure planned or built today is destined to spend most of its useful life supporting the conveyance of electrically propelled and sustainably powered vehicles. Perhaps more importantly, roadway infrastructure built now can be configured and equipped with technologies to support the operation of freight vehicles, priced lanes, public transit services, automated vehicle lanes, or various combinations of vehicles to enable the productive use of the roadway. As planners explore the need for new capacity, they need to value mobility just as they try to understand and mitigate its impacts. Mobility should not come at any cost, but neither should its value be discounted."

Like, not one photo, video or documentary or anything, I had to visit the city just to be jumpscared by it : r/lotrmemes - [On Egypt] "It's a nation of scammers, very off-putting. And I've been in many poorer countries, so it's not that. Examples: Kids pick up rocks off the ground and try to sell them. Nobody buys. Kids proceed to throw the rocks at the tourist bus. Cops force themselves into a photo and then demand money for it. Airport security says the bathroom is closed and basically forces you to one far from others where you're kept hostage until you pay for the "service". No place is safe from the scamming, not even the resorts, they get in through the beach to give you an unsolicited massage or harass women in the water. Been there twice, beautiful history but fuck that place."

MAZE on X - "March, 2016. Hillary laughs at the thought of Trump beating her. Almost a decade later and she’s still can’t even turn on replies on her social media posts"

3 Ways to Find a Partner You Click With If You Have Dating App Fatigue - "Today's dating apps are marketed to help you find a compatible partner. According to a psychology researcher, it's practically useless for actually finding one, no matter how similar your interests, lifestyles, or political views are. "It's mostly a waste of time," Dr. Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, and the author of "Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection," told Business Insider. While it can feel productive to filter out prospective partners, Eastwick said attraction is "going to be more or less a dart throw" when you actually meet the person on the other end. It's because many of us look at compatibility the wrong way, he said, focusing on broad personality traits like "adventurous" or "funny." That thinking often leads us astray because there's no way to know whether the person, with our laundry list of dream qualities, will actually make us feel supported in the way we need. "Compatibility is a construction process rather than an initial attraction process," Eastwick said. Rather than falling into relationships that fit us perfectly, the happiest couples find someone they really like, focus on their similarities, and build a compatible relationship over time. "It's a very complicated thing to do," he added...
If you're on the fence, commit to three dates...
Statistically, the chances that you'll feel an immediate spark on that first date are slim. According to his own research, Eastwick said most people in long-term relationships felt "middling" in their first impressions of their partners... Join groups for slow-burn connections
Count the green flags, not the red"

Do Hinge, Tinder Work? What Dating Apps Get Wrong About Compatibility - Bloomberg - "Dating apps are particularly ill-equipped to account for these intangibles. In today’s love market, the apps are by far the most common way two singles meet. But they prioritize obvious good looks and, often, gender stereotypes. On Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and Grindr, users can screen for attributes and “dealbreakers.” What you think you want is paramount, just as it was in those early survey-driven studies. On the apps this is particularly pronounced for women. While men swipe right on about 50% of their prospects, women cull 95% of their pool from first impressions, making them almost twice as picky online as they would be in real life. None of this is natural. Human mating involves a longer process of evaluation than that of other pair-bonded species, like, say, prairie voles. Humans evolved to find love in person, to feel that ineffable, infuriatingly rare “chemistry” when they connect. This applies to friends as well as lovers, which helps explain why many lasting partnerships grow out of friendships. If you’ve ever wondered why dating in New York is a nightmare, whereas your friends in rural Wyoming always seem to have nice boyfriends, the answer is evolution. Early humans were somewhat restricted transportation-wise, and evolved to find love in much smaller groups than today’s modern cities — with far fewer available options. “Limited sets of choices heighten the stakes — both the risks and the rewards — by taking hypothetical perfection off the table and forcing people to take a second or third look at a person,” Eastwick writes. Dating apps have been positive in many ways. They increase access to singles outside your class and have increased safety for communities where finding love was historically more perilous. But they also create an illusion of infinite, often paralyzing, possibility. When a potentially better mate is always a swipe away, humans experience choice overload... To seek love the way evolution intended, Eastwick romanticizes the pre-smartphone world, where you could get to know a potential match over time in a lower-stakes environment. He reminisces about an era when initial socializing between mates often happened in group settings rather than in “a tiny two-person bubble.” It’s a construct of modern dating that early interactions between two strangers tend to happen in isolation, versus a mutual friend’s dinner party. Most daters would agree. Eastwick’s research comes at an interesting time, when more and more singles are rebelling against the apps, finding them dissatisfying, shallow and fundamentally overwhelming. Although just 1% of heterosexual Americans say dating apps are the best way to find a partner, they overtook mutual friends as the most common way couples meet around 2013. The trouble is that the alternatives are unclear. Eastwick urges a return to mining social networks for potential dates, but the dominance of apps has eroded the role of these connections in the communal labor of making introductions. It’s easier to ask a single friend if they’re “on the apps” than to ask the guy in accounting if you can set him up with your roommate. Long a social activity, the onus of dating is now squarely on the singleton — one reason apps can charge such high rates for their services. It’s also far easier to casually dismiss a stranger on an app than someone in your social orbit."

KTLA on X - "Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has withdrawn from a televised L.A. mayoral candidate forum scheduled for May 13, according to a statement released Friday by the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles and the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs."
Covfefe Anon on X - "Given enough time every member of the "smart, technocratic" party reinvents the strategy of "don't ever speak to anyone outside the bubble" to avoid getting utterly humiliated"
Her refusing to participate is proof of misogynoir!

New York Post on X - "LA mayoral debate in tatters as Nithya Raman joins Karen Bass in suddenly pulling out at last minute"
Seneca Scott on X - "Soggies cannot debate because their arguments collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. They depend on the media to manufacture consent for destructive policies, while using emotional blackmail and mob intimidation to silence dissent. Every disagreement becomes heresy. Every critic becomes immoral. Every failure is repackaged as virtue. And when the illusion finally begins to crack, when people stop applauding and start asking questions, they simply refuse to show up at all."

abby govindan on X - "i dont mind mosquitos sucking my blood (i have plenty to go around) what annoys me is the need to inject the itch juice into my skin....like im already feeding you why are you being such a bitch. imagine if i slapped my mom every time she made me dinner."
Matt on X - "It's not itch juice, it's regular juice! It's just a little anticoagulant, but your body evolved an itchy reaction to it because a few bad apples were spreading malaria and whatever. Anyway if you're itchy take it up with your ancestors. Sincerely, the mosquitos."

Humor Huddle - "The account was from the Edinburgh Evening News of August 18, 1978...
While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clerimston, Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Thirsty were threatened by Mr. Robert Clear. “He demanded that I give him my wife’s purse,” said Mr. Thirsty. ‘Telling him that the purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it. It was not my intention to do any more than frighten him off but, unhappily for us all, he died.”...
Dwarfing all known records for matrimonial homicide, Mr. Peter Scott of Southsea made seven attempts to kill his wife without her once noticing that anything was wrong. In 1980 he took out an insurance policy on his good lady which would bring him £250,000 in the event of her accidental death. Soon afterwards, he placed a lethal dose of mercury in her strawberry flan, but it all rolled out. Not wishin: to waste this deadly substance he next stuffed tier mackerel with the entire contents of the bottle. This time she ate it, but with no side effects whatsoever. Warming to the task, he then took his better half on holiday to Yugoslavia. Recommending the panoramic views, he invited her to sit on the edge of a cliff. She declined to do so, prompted by what she later described as some ‘sixth sense.’ The same occurred only weeks later when he urged her to savour the view from Beachy Head. When his spouse was in bed with chicken-pox he started a fire outside her bedroom door, but some interfering busybody put it out. Undeterred, he started another fire and burnt down the entire flat. The wife of his bosom escaped uninjured. Another time he asked her to stand in the middle of the road so that he could drive towards her and check if his brakes were working. At no time did Mrs. Scott feel that the magic had gone out of their marriage. Since it appeared nothing short of a small nuclear bomb would have alerted this good woman to her husband’s intentions, he eventually gave up and confessed everything to the police. After the case a detective said Mrs. Scott had been “absolutely shattered” when told of her husband’s plot to kill her. “She had not twigged it at all and was dumbstruck.”"

Danish women to face conscription by lottery - "Danish women now face being called up for 11 months of military service when they turn 18, after a change in the law came into effect. Under new rules passed by Denmark's parliament, women are to join teenage males in a lottery system that could require them to undertake a period of conscription. The change was brought in as Nato countries boost defence spending amid heightened security concerns in Europe. Up to now, women were allowed to participate in military service when they turned 18, but on a voluntary basis... The change will also see the period of conscription for teenagers rise from four months to 11 months. About 4,700 Danish men and women undertook a short period of military service in 2024 – about 24% of them being female volunteers. The new rules on conscription are expected to see the overall number doing military service annually rise to 6,500 by 2033. Denmark is following the example of neighbouring Sweden and Norway, which both brought in conscription for women in recent years."

Most People Don’t Have a ‘Type’ - The Atlantic - "Many people think that they have a set type, and that all they need for eternal bliss is to find someone who matches it. When people peruse dating profiles, they’re often looking for someone who has specific interests, qualities, or hobbies. But according to a growing body of relationship research, many people end up marrying someone with few of their must-haves and a lot of “haves” they didn’t think they desired. A person might say that they’re looking for a partner who’s funny and conscientious, but then end up in a happy relationship with someone who is neither of those things. “People don’t know what they want,” Samantha Joel, a psychologist at Western University in Ontario who studies relationships, told me, “and people don’t know what they’re going to like until they meet someone.” Across many studies, people’s stated preferences don’t align well with the traits that incite their fondness for someone in real life. In a 2020 study, the UC Davis psychologist Paul Eastwick and his colleagues asked participants to list some ideal characteristics they wanted in a partner, and then sent them on a blind date. The researchers later asked the participants how closely the person they went out with had reflected both their own ideals and a list of someone else’s. People turned out to be just as romantically interested in a date who met the other person’s must-haves as they were in a date who met all of their own... This is where apps can fall short in terms of quality matchmaking. As Eastwick writes in his new book, Bonded by Evolution, compatibility can’t be determined by a dating profile; it has to be “curated, cultivated, and constructed”—usually as the relationship unfolds. Even some “deal-breakers” may not end up breaking the deal. In one study by Joel, researchers told subjects that a hypothetical romantic partner had a trait that they said they wanted to avoid—poor hygiene, say, or anger issues—and many people said that they would continue to date the prospect anyway. Joel said that this inclination would likely be even stronger “in the context of a real relationship, where there’s feelings involved.” That said, shared values do seem to matter to people: A 2020 report found that only 3 percent of American adults were married to someone from the opposite political party, for instance. Eastwick says that this happens because so many people either immediately screen out or simply never interact with a potential date who has opposing values—a hard-core Democrat might live in a neighborhood populated mostly with other Democrats, for example, or swipe left on all Republicans on Tinder. But if two people get together not knowing that they’re political opposites and the relationship takes off for other reasons, they might compartmentalize their differences or move closer to each other’s ideology. (“He’s probably going to become a libertarian,” Eastwick said, referring to the hypothetical Republican.) Physical attraction matters, too—far more than most people realize, according to the researchers I spoke with... If two people in a relationship are lucky, infatuation will set in: an obsessionlike mental state in which you find yourself thinking about the person a lot, noticing them, and wanting to be physically close to them. Once that initial spark ignites, motivated reasoning—essentially, seeing what you want to see—takes over. Joel theorized that people are prone to a “progression bias” in relationships: They are more inclined to encourage a relationship to continue than they are to dissolve it. Merely spending time together makes people become more invested in making a relationship work. “Once you like someone,” Joel said, “you want to see the best in them.”... This kind of self-delusion is a good thing. Everyone, to some extent, grades their romantic partner on a curve, and relationships in which partners are especially inclined to do this may be particularly strong. In one study that Eastwick cites in his book, the longest-lasting relationships were the ones in which people justified their partner’s faults with “yes, but” statements such as “She is messy, but I wouldn’t ask her to give up her free-spirited ways for anything.” The problem is: The way people actually become attracted to each other can be hard to predict, Joel said. Not even scientists who have dedicated their life to studying chemistry can totally pin down its essence... All of this might help explain why many people who use dating apps struggle to find a long-term partner. With their emphasis on photos and profiles, Eastwick writes, “apps cater to our ideas about what we like much better than they cater to what we actually like.” Chemistry grows, and love is built on shared experiences and memories, but the apps tend to keep people trapped in small talk. Many users find themselves swiping endlessly without ever meeting up with someone. What’s more, Eastwick told me, apps can encourage people to judge their dates too quickly—and perhaps move on prematurely... The better way to find love, Eastwick suggested, is to get to know romantic prospects in person, over time. “Compatibility,” he said, “is about what you’re able to create together.” He recommended building deep friendship networks—both because those friends can introduce you to singles they know and because some of them might become romantic partners. But regardless of how you meet people, the crucial pieces are: Find someone you think is reasonably attractive and then hang out with them at least three times, doing things together that will inspire deep, connection-building interactions (such as playing a conversation card game and maybe answering the “36 Questions That Lead to Love” from that old New York Times essay)."

The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete Here’s what’s next. - The Atlantic - "The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass. The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little “computation” contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way. The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it’s contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you’ve actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves. Perhaps the paper itself is to blame. Scientific methods evolve now at the speed of software; the skill most in demand among physicists, biologists, chemists, geologists, even anthropologists and research psychologists, is facility with programming languages and “data science” packages. And yet the basic means of communicating scientific results hasn’t changed for 400 years. Papers may be posted online, but they’re still text and pictures on a page. What would you get if you designed the scientific paper from scratch today?... After Gutenberg, the printing press was mostly used to mimic the calligraphy in bibles. It took nearly 100 years of technical and conceptual improvements to invent the modern book. “There was this entire period where they had the new technology of printing, but they were just using it to emulate the old media.”... Software is a dynamic medium; paper isn’t. When you think in those terms it does seem strange that research like Strogatz’s, the study of dynamical systems, is so often being shared on paper, without the benefit of his little swirling dots—because it’s the swirling dots that helped him to see what he saw, and that might help the reader see it too. This is, of course, the whole problem of scientific communication in a nutshell: Scientific results today are as often as not found with the help of computers. That’s because the ideas are complex, dynamic, hard to grab ahold of in your mind’s eye. And yet by far the most popular tool we have for communicating these results is the PDF—literally a simulation of a piece of paper. Maybe we can do better."
This reads like an ad for Wolfram Mathematica

How ‘The New York Times’ Laundered a Conspiracy (Israeli Dog Rape)

2026-06-04T18:26:00.000+08:00

Time to ban the Daily Mail and Fox News for spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation

I still see terrorism supporters claim that October 7th was Israel executing the Hannibal Directive, so definitely people still deny it happened

How ‘The New York Times’ Laundered a Conspiracy
Matti Friedman and Dan Senor on how Nicholas Kristof’s ‘New York Times’ column reflects a press corps that increasingly sees activism as its core mission.

On Monday, The New York Times published an opinion column by Nicholas Kristof titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” In it, Kristof recounts allegations of sexual abuse against Palestinians committed by Israeli soldiers, prison guards, and interrogators. The column swiftly provoked a firestorm, as many of its claims were revealed to be misleading, unverified, or demonstrably false. (For more on this, read Eli Lake’s “Nick Kristof’s ‘Dog Torture’ Claim About Israel Doesn’t Pass Muster,” and Haviv Rettig Gur’s “The Paper Trail of Nicholas Kristof’s Smear.”)

But how does a piece like this end up in The New York Times in the first place? That’s the question Free Press columnist Matti Friedman explores in a recent interview with Dan Senor on the Call Me Back podcast. According to Friedman, the column reflects a broader shift in modern journalism: a media culture that, in his view, has traded its credibility to become “a weapon in the fight for justice.” It’s an essential critique—which is why we’re publishing a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity.
—The Editors

Dan Senor: I want to start by going through the main claims that Nicholas Kristof makes in his New York Times piece. What are these claims? Which ones are lies? Which are unfalsifiable? And which may have legs?

Matti Friedman: Kristof gives us a list of terrible abuses that he claims were directed at Palestinian detainees. He says he spoke to 14 people, most of whom are not named, and some of the material is sourced from anti-Israel NGOs. He does not seem to know the identities of some of the people he’s describing. He describes male detainees being raped with objects, a female detainee being raped over the space of two days in an Israeli prison, and sexual assault of another female detainee by Israeli guards. He describes one incident of sexual assault by a settler—not by a uniformed soldier, but an Israeli civilian in the West Bank. That one, as far as I know, is accurate, much to our shame. And the incident receiving the most of the attention is Kristof’s description of a sexual assault perpetrated against a Palestinian prisoner using a dog.

When you read the piece, you have to use your own compass to decide which charges could plausibly be true and which charges come from the world of conspiratorial, anti-Israel fantasy. I think there is a plausible reason for concern about sexual assaults of prisoners. I don’t think we can dismiss every account of sexual assaults against Palestinian detainees.

But the piece kind of goes off the deep end by being credulous about charges that are much, much harder to believe. After all, the facilities are equipped with cameras. There are commanders, there are lawyers. A much more effective piece would have stuck to what is plausibly true, but that would have been less viral.

DS: For those who haven’t read the piece, Kristof charges that Israeli authorities have trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.

MF: The writer is staking his credibility on that anecdote, which really comes from the world of the darkest conspiracies. There are multiple anti-Israel conspiracies that involve animals. This is one subcategory, and it’s been floating around for quite a while.

It’s kind of like drug use, in that you need to constantly up the dosage. So, if you once could say Israel is an apartheid state and that got people agitated, at some point it stops delivering the same effect. So you start saying that Israel’s a genocidal state.

The dog charge has been floating around. It’s been ignored by mainstream press outlets until now, for good reason. But this article shows that the walls between the world of conspiracies and the world of the mainstream press have largely come down. Kristof has dismantled the wall between the insane stuff floating around online and the world of legacy media.

DS: You spent years inside the Associated Press bureau in Jerusalem. You know how sources are used, how the editorial decision-making works, and what the checks are on a reporter. Walk me through how a piece like this gets through.

MF: I was a correspondent for the AP from 2006 to 2011, and one thing that often isn’t clear to readers is the role NGOs play in creating the reporting readers actually see. The press corps is much weaker than it used to be—smaller staff, less experienced reporters, poor pay—and the demands of the 24-hour news cycle are much greater.

Into the vacuum created by that change come political NGOs, who have a lot of money and an interest in swaying coverage in their direction. When I was at the AP, I saw this happen. Big NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as smaller ones operating around this conflict, were mostly funded by European governments and progressive foundations. They became, essentially, the source of information for reporters. Human Rights Watch, for example, would come out with a report, and the AP would write it up as news.

When I read Kristof’s article, I saw this machinery right away. Kristof was handed a package by NGOs. He mentions Euro-Med [Human Rights Monitor], which has proven ties to Hamas and has openly claimed that Israel is using weapons to “vaporize” Palestinians and that Israel is harvesting organs. Relying on Euro-Med is a bit of a stretch even for the world of the mainstream press. Kristof also mentions an anti-Israel activist named Sari Bashi, who is based in Ramallah. So local activists handed him the story, introduced him to his sources, and fed him the inflammatory, unverifiable material.

DS: As you say, Euro-Med—which has been flagged for ties to Hamas—is cited multiple times. How does a group like that become a primary source for the most influential newspaper in the world? How does it slip through the Times’ fact-checking process?

MF: It’s important to understand that the adults who were there 10 or 20 years ago are largely gone. The Times op-ed section once had an excellent journalist running it—James Bennet—who was pushed out in 2020 after a mob uprising over a conservative senator’s op-ed. So the show is now being run by activists. Things that would not have been journalistically viable 10 years ago now sail through, because much of the press has come to consider itself a weapon in the fight for justice.

So when Euro-Med comes to a guy like Kristof, it’s plausible that he sees information that helps him make the point that he wants to make, and decides not to look into it. If the Israeli government came to him with information that seemed equally hard to believe, he would vet it 100 times, and the New York Times’ fact-checkers would go over it with a fine-tooth comb. But because we’re working with a pretty obvious ideological script, this stuff gets in. There is a very large, very well-funded ideological campaign against Israel, and it’s being waged through dozens of NGOs. It’s being waged by arms of the United Nations. It’s being waged by parts of the academy and parts of the press, which have become activist in nature.

DS: Several reporters in the news section of The New York Times told me that this piece—which was published on the opinion page—would never have made it through the news process. Can you explain the difference between something on the opinion page and the news page?

MF: I don’t really buy the distinction between the opinion section and the news section. The news section of The New York Times reported early in the war that Israel had hit a hospital in Gaza and killed more than 500 people. In reality, a misfired rocket from Gaza had exploded outside the hospital, killing a much smaller number of people. That’s just one example of many.

My experience is that much of what is presented as news coverage is kind of passive-aggressive opinion. So instead of saying, “I think,” you have to write, “experts say.” Nicholas Kristof is honest enough to present this piece as opinion, but I don’t see much difference.

DS: In your piece in The Atlantic in 2014, you wrote, “The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it.” Twelve years later, The New York Times runs this piece in which Kristof himself writes, “There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes,” and “It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are.” And yet he still concludes that sexual violence is standard operating procedure in Israel.

MF: I’m not saying I’m happy to be right about this, but the trends that I wrote about in 2014 are not only still relevant—they’ve been supercharged. The Times piece is an extreme example of a problem that I’ve been noticing for a long time. There are too many people inside legacy institutions who have a vision of journalism that does not include trying to understand what’s going on in very complicated corners of the world. It doesn’t include trying to grasp context, and it certainly doesn’t include rigorous confirmation of information before publication. All of these things are now seen as barriers to truth and justice. And by making that leap, these institutions have really committed suicide.

In the world of disinformation and social media, these institutions could have been islands of sanity. Instead, my colleagues decided that they didn’t want to cover the circus—they wanted to be in it.

DS: On the same day that Kristof’s column ran, The New York Times was allegedly sitting on the most comprehensive report ever assembled on Hamas’s sexual crimes on October 7. It is called the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, and it consists of 300 pages, 10,000 photographs, and 400 testimonies. Most of the content comes from actual Hamas videos and photographs. The report ran on CNN and in the Israeli media, but The New York Times published nothing on it until some 24 hours after Kristof’s column was published. How do you explain the timing?

MF: The timing seems unlikely to be coincidental. I don’t know exactly what the Times had and when they had it, but I think it’s safe to assume that Times staff had the report, which was distributed in advance.

I should say, the report doesn’t excuse everything that Israel has done since October 7. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t investigate credible allegations of sexual assault. I remain concerned about the people in charge of detention facilities and law enforcement in Israel. I do not have complete faith that the right people are running this, to be honest, or that we’re pursuing every allegation of misdeeds by our own soldiers.

At the same time, Kristof is very clear about the motivation behind his piece. He repeats several times that these allegations of sexual assault against Israel are meant to even out the allegations of sexual assault and rape against Hamas. Or, in his words, “Think of it this way. The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on October 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day.” So he’s saying: Not only is what I’m writing all true, but it actually balances out the charges of, or the descriptions of, mass sexual assault and rape that we saw on October 7.

I recently had the opportunity to write an essay in The Free Press about new books coming out about the Gaza war, and I described how these books very explicitly do two things: They try to downplay October 7, and they make the case that Israel is so bad that October 7 was justified. These charges don’t make sense once you look at them. But they’re not meant to describe reality, just as Kristof’s essay is not meant to describe reality. It’s meant as an ideological weapon to enable the war against Israel.

DS: What he’s basically saying is Hamas is a sick, depraved society, and now we know Israel is a sick, depraved society. Isn’t it a shame that both societies are so broken and deviant and barbaric? It is the quintessence of moral equivalence.

MF: That’s the way of dealing with October 7. The anti-Israel campaign is vast. Billions of people see it as a priority to rid the world of Israel. October 7 poses a problem for those people, particularly in the West, because it was so obviously heinous and couldn’t be covered up easily. And when people can’t deny that it happened, the only other option is to make an argument that the Israelis deserved it, or that there’s no real difference between Israel and Hamas. I’m not sure how much Kristof understands about the use that’s being made of him. But he’s participating in a political campaign whose goals are obvious.

DS: You’ve explained the cost of this kind of work to journalism. What do you think the cost is to Israel?

MF: Israelis have come to realize that much of the criticism coming at them is not designed to make Israeli society better; it’s designed to make Israeli society go away.

It would be nice to be able to trust The New York Times. If there was an accurate exposé on human rights abuses in Israeli prisons, it would be good for Israelis to see that and say, This is real. This is something we need to take seriously. But we can’t, because the information has become ideological.

Even worse, the Israeli organizations that were created to police human rights in Israel—organizations like B’Tselem, or Breaking the Silence—have been co-opted by the international anti-Israel campaign. Today, despite being staffed by Israelis, they’re funded almost completely from abroad, and have effectively become franchises of the international left.

We need, as Israelis, to be able to have a discussion about the moral quality of our military and our detention facilities and the way we prosecute this war. We need to be able to have this discussion without cooperating with the forces trying to destroy the country. It is very hard to do that. And this reality ends up serving the people in Israeli politics who have no interest in human rights, like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and others in the ruling party.

This has neutralized human rights discourse inside Israel at a moment when we really need it. One of the main challenges for us in this moment is preserving our soul and our morality and our moral compass amid this war. That would be much easier if we had trusted organizations that spoke to us in a language that we could understand and trust. And we don’t have that, in large part, because of the ferocious nature of the anti-Israel campaign.

DS: One of the members of our team recently wrote: “The hard part is that even if the worst claims in the piece are distorted or false, that doesn’t make the real failures”—meaning in the Israeli prison system—“any less painful.” I think that sentiment is shared by many in Israel and in the diaspora. What do you say to those listening who are concerned about problems in the Israeli prison system, but don’t know what or who to believe?

MF: We need to be able to have a discussion about Israel’s very real problems without playing into the hands of people trying to destroy the country. I always try to ask: Is this person trying to make Israel better, or make Israel go away? If the discussion is about how to make Israel go away, I’m not interested in it. If the discussion is about how to make Israel a better country, a more moral country, a more successful country, a better place to live for Jewish citizens, for Muslim citizens, I’m very interested in having the discussion.

In some ways, it’s easier, in this regard, to be Israeli than to be a Jew in the diaspora. Israelis have a pretty loud discussion about the right way forward for Israel, because we know it’s about making the country better. But in the diaspora, Jews need to acknowledge that a lot of criticism is not being made in good faith, and a lot of the actors trying to push it are giving us information that is fictional.

At the same time, we have to be able to look at our prison system and our military and say we want our institutions to observe the highest standard, and we’re clearly failing. Terrible things are happening, as they are in the carceral systems in New York, or in Iraq. I wish Israel could say that we’re better than everyone else. I’m not sure that we can say that. We need to be able to address our own moral issues without participating in this kind of deranged discourse.

DS: Abuse happens in prison systems all over the world—that’s a conversation worth having. But that is not the conversation Kristof is having. When one responds to his framing by conceding ground on a different argument, one legitimizes what I think is blood libel.

MF: I agree. We need to be able to differentiate very clearly between two different discussions: One is how to make Israel better, the other is how to make Israel go away.

There is a very powerful, well-funded ideological campaign—which you might call anti-Zionism—waged across the Islamic world for a century and now increasingly through Western institutions: Columbia, Harvard, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, the Times, the AP. We have to be able to name it as a campaign.

The wrong response to an essay like this is to say, “Well, this is true and this isn’t true.” The right response is to ask: Why does this exist, who’s driving it, and what effect it is having on our society?

Links - 4th June 2026 (2 - Housing)

2026-06-04T15:40:00.000+08:00

Demolishing buildings is a waste. There's another way: deconstruction - "Erick Serpas Ventura, CEO of Vema Deconstruction in Vancouver, acknowledges that traditional demolition using machinery such as excavators is shockingly fast — often, less than a day. Deconstructing a wood frame house, on the other hand, takes a little under a week with four to six people and some machinery. Ventura said, "You have more people doing more labour, but you're also creating more jobs." Moore said deconstructing a brick home, like those found in Toronto, can take longer and cost more — 50 to 100 per cent more than the cost of demolition. Local government incentives and bylaws, as well as sales of valuable recovered materials, could make the cost of deconstruction more competitive."
When prices go up, it's proof that capitalism has failed

'Oracle of Wall Street' who predicted 2008 financial crash says rise in young, sexless men living with their parents will cause house prices to plunge 30% - "Meredith Whitney, who earned the title after predicting the financial crisis of 2007 - 2008, suggested young men increasingly living with their parents and disinterested in starting families will drastically reduce housing demand."
"Luckily" there's always mass migration

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "In terms of wages, income, and wealth, Gen Z and Millennials are doing much better than previous generations. Corporate America is not failing the youth. It's only housing that's really broken."

How British council flats became the blueprint for the best housing system in the world - "When the humble council estate was first devised, it was hoped Britain’s public housing would become the envy of the world. Few today would say this has come to pass. There is a huge shortage of state-subsidised houses nationally, and those who rent or own privately often do so at great expense. One country that’s arguably shown how social housing should be done is Singapore, where sensible government policy has not only solved an acute housing crisis, but also enabled the majority of the population to own their home. You wouldn’t believe it now, but British housebuilding was the blueprint. As Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government oversaw the building of one million homes – an unbeaten record Sir Keir Starmer has promised to surpass – British colonial administrators in Singapore also built a handful of houses to replace the country’s overcrowded slums. “One of our odd characteristics is that the British have been historically pretty good at building infrastructure, housing and so on – but only outside the UK,” says Paul Cheshire, emeritus professor of economic geography at LSE. He cites Britain’s involvement with the Hong Kong and Moscow metro systems, as well as Singapore’s housing... Low-income residents living in kampongs across the island were resettled by the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), a colonial housing taskforce. But the project had a familiarly British problem – it moved at a snail’s pace. “When Singapore attained self-governance, it faced a severe shortage of sanitary housing. Although there was public housing available, it was grossly under-supplied,” says Alan Cheong, head of research in Singapore for estate agent Savills. When the country went to the polls that year, housing was a hot-button issue. The winning candidate, Lee Kuan Yew, ran on a manifesto that accused the British of “failing miserably” to build enough homes, and promised to ramp up construction of new housing. He kept his promise, and winning seven further general elections meant he could see the project through. The Housing Development Board (HDB), a state-owned housebuilding company, was formed in 1960 with the “mission of providing quality and affordable public housing for Singaporeans”, Cheong says. Thousands of new homes were built inside tower blocks but, in a key difference to the British strategy, they were designed for the country’s growing middle class – not just to house the poorest residents... Singapore ranked 11th out of 94 markets for housing affordability in a survey conducted last year by consultancy Demographia. London came 80th... So why hasn’t Britain been able to achieve anything on this level? One huge difference is land ownership. In Singapore, the state owns the majority of land and housing, whereas in Britain, most is private. Beyond that, the finger is pointed at the UK’s planning system. “Our problem is not a lack of affordable housing, but that all housing – at all levels – is not affordable enough. That is primarily because of our planning system, constricting land supply where people want to live around our big cities,” says Cheshire. “[The system] hinders building because of its discretionary decision making, with control almost entirely at the local level. This injects uncertainty into the development process. “Then, via our system of local government finance, we more or less fine local communities that allow development – so no wonder we have constructed a Nimby world. “Singapore, though – really constrained in land supply, not just policy – does things differently and efficiently.” However, despite its historic success, there are questions over what will happen to Singapore’s build-to-own model in the future. So far, none of the public flats’ 99-year leases has expired, but some are starting to run low."
Time for more regulation

NYC Apartment Construction Wage Requirement Leads to 99-Unit Buildings - Bloomberg - "There’s an unmistakable trend across New York City: Real-estate developers are seeking to construct buildings with exactly 99 units. No more, no less. In the past four quarters, 28 such permits were filed, more than double the total from the previous 16 years combined, according to city data analyzed by the Real Estate Board of New York, a lobbying group. To those in the industry, there’s no question what’s behind the pileup at that precise number: A new tax program for real estate developments that requires higher worker wages for buildings with 100 or more apartments... Developer MaryAnne Gilmartin is a case in point for the results of the program. She once envisioned a pair of 400-unit rental towers on a NYC lot, but she’s now considering as many as six smaller buildings — a patchwork of projects that ultimately would deliver fewer apartments. The revised plan would take longer to execute and cost more per unit, but Gilmartin said this is the more financially viable option for her. It’s an unintended consequence of an initiative designed to substantially expand the city’s supply of housing, a crucial need at a time when spiraling rents have made life in New York more unaffordable than ever. The Real Estate Board of New York and many developers argue that 485-x hampers their efforts and will lead to fewer units than might have gotten built under the old program it replaced... Add in high interest rates, rising land costs and the looming impact of tariffs, and the math on larger buildings doesn’t make sense, said Rick Gropper, founding principal at Camber Property Group, a New York-based firm that specializes in developing affordable and mixed-income housing... “You still have to have an elevator and other building requirements, with only 99 units to offset those costs,” he said... REBNY has warned that the city’s housing needs are massive and that while the group supports any program that encourages construction, the wage mandate means 485-x won’t come close to generating enough units to give New Yorkers meaningful rent relief, said Henry Perez-Tlatenchi, a senior policy researcher at REBNY."
Damn greedy corporations keeping housing expensive!

Pubity on X - "One 32 year-old tech millionaire is suing to strip protections from upwards of 1,200 animal species to avoid paying a $140,000 animal conservation fee for his new home. His lawsuit argues animals native to only 1 U.S. State shouldn't be covered by the Endangered Species Act."
Clearly, pricey housing is proof that capitalism has failed

London Renters Union on X - ""No matter how many houses you build, if they are not affordable, then you will not solve the housing crisis." @ZackPolanski at our @TWT_NOW panel on why we need to take on the profiteers and the corporate giants to win homes for people."
Thread by @JeremiahDJohns on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Genuinely the most enraging thing about housing discourse is how people talk about 'affordability' like it's some sort of innate quality, like the building needs to be made out of affordium. Housing. is. affordable. when. housing. is. abundant. Supply and demand are real.
There are expensive cities that don't build. There are cheap cities that do build. And there are no cities that build lots of housing and still see very high housing costs. Data shows this over and over and over and over."
Left wingers are economically illiterate and don't think supply and demand set prices, only "greed"

Alec Stapp on X - "This is madness: In California, environmental review lawsuits seek to block nearly HALF OF ALL PROPOSED HOUSING UNITS"
Damn greedy landlords and investors keeping housing expensive!

Reforming Permitting Requirements to Lower the Cost of Building New Housing and Increase Housing Affordability - "A key detail for permitting issuance is whether the development approval process requires “by-right” or “discretionary” permitting. With by-right permitting, a housing development proposal will be approved so long as it conforms to all zoning laws and building codes, which are known in advance. With discretionary permitting, the proposal is subject to the approval of a public body, such as local planning authority, which may require several re-designs, city council hearings, public outreach meetings, environmental impact studies, impact fees, and other concessions. Relative to by-right permitting, discretionary permitting increases costs, time to approval, and uncertainty. In some cities, discretionary permitting can also create opportunities for corruption and favoritism. Whether developments are subject to by-right or discretionary permitting varies by locality and the proposed type of housing. Among large multi-family projects subject to discretionary permitting, the median time spent in the permitting process in recent years was 7.5 months in Boston, 8 months in Oakland, 13 months in Los Angeles, 16 months in Seattle, 30 months in New York City, and 33 months in San Francisco. These numbers may understate the burden since they exclude projects that never receive approval. In New York City pre-certification and environmental review alone often take nearly two years. In California, environmental review lawsuits sought to block the permitting of 48,000 proposed units — nearly half of all proposed units – in 2020 alone. Even for projects that are ultimately greenlit, construction cannot begin until litigation is completed, typically in four to five years... One study of Washington state estimated that each additional month spent in the permitting process increases the cost of building by about $4,400 (or about 1 percent). In New York City, a two-year delay for mid-rise development increases the per-unit cost by an estimated $50,000. Permitting requirements may also dissuade smaller projects and impose larger burdens on smaller builders who are less well capitalized."

Meme - Robert Reich @RBReich: "Rent is skyrocketing and home buying is out of reach for millions. One big reason why? Wall Street. Let me explain."
Jeremy 'adjusted for inflation' Horpedahl 📈 @jmhorp: "One big reason? NIMBYs."
"In 2020, Reich wrote letters to the City of Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission objecting to the construction of ten housing units (including one low-income unit) on a lot near Reich's home"

Meme - Jordan Grimes🚰 @cafedujord: "Rent is skyrocketing and home buying is out of reach for millions. One big reason why? Rich homeowners like Robert Reich keep blocking new multifamily housing in their affluent neighborhoods. Let me explain. 👇"
"Dear Landmark Preservation Commissioners,
My wife and I moved into our house at 1230 Bonita Avenue, two doors down from the Payson House, fourteen years ago. One reason we moved into the area was the abundance of older homes dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, offering the charm of an older era of Berkeley, along with the lovely Codornices Creek that runs through the neighborhood. The character of the neighborhood is anchored by the Payson House, built in 1889 and the oldest in the area, and by the old live oaks surrounding it. We walk past it every day. We were frankly appalled to learn that the new owner of the Payson House was planning to tear it down, and already had illegally cut down two of the oak trees in order to squeeze ten units onto the lot. It is no small irony that the original owner of the house, William Payson, was a political reformer who fought against the illegal practices and corrupt politics of the late nineteenth century. We urge the Landmark Preservation Commission to designate the Payson House at 1915 Berryman Street, a City of Berkeley Landmark. If historic preservation means anything, it means maintaining enough of the character of an older neighborhood to remind people of its history and provide continuity with the present. Development for the sake of development makes no sense when it imposes social costs like this
Sincerely,
Robert B. Reich
Perian Flaherty"

Why Your House Was So Expensive - The Atlantic - "Name just about any problem the U.S. has suffered from in the past decade. Inequality? Obesity? A vague, pervasive sense of doom? You could tell a housing story about all of them. In the essay “The Housing Theory of Everything,” the writers Sam Bowman, John Myers, and Ben Southwood argue that the housing shortage in the Western world—“too few homes being built where people want to live”—prices out middle-class workers from high-productivity zones, forces people to spend more time sitting in their cars to commute long distances, and reduces the availability of homes and overall growth rates. There you have housing’s contribution to more inequality, obesity, and gloom. And this generalized Western trend is especially bad in the U.S. Although homeownership is strongly encouraged by federal tax law, America has fewer dwellings per thousand inhabitants than the European Union or Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average... In America’s most expensive housing markets, reformers often focus on the need to “upzone” neighborhoods to build taller. But other rules might be even more onerous. As the urbanist Brian Goggin wrote in 2018, some cities have permitting processes with dozens of stages, which can take hundreds of thousands of dollars to get through. When UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation interviewed developers and construction workers about the costs of building in San Francisco, everybody agreed on only one point: “The most significant and pointless factor driving up construction costs was the length of time it takes for a project to get through the city permitting and development.” The average San Francisco project takes nearly four years to be permitted... These rules might not sound utterly diabolical. Who’s against money for schools? Who’s against safe low-income housing? No one, perhaps. But when you add them up, defensible rules can become indefensible barriers to new construction. This is especially true for affordable-housing projects, which depend on many different financing sources and government agencies. The Terner Center estimates that these projects in California cost $48 more per square foot than market-rate projects. That’s an extra $48,000 to build each typical apartment of 1,000 square feet, or nearly $4 million extra for an eight-apartment building. What happens when affordable housing isn’t affordable to build? You get less of it. Let’s say you’re a developer. You find an empty lot in a major city. You propose to build a big apartment building on the cracked concrete, with dozens of units set aside for people experiencing homelessness. When you ask around the community, people tell you they love the idea. More housing, less homelessness. Who could possibly say no? The answer is: one angry, litigious neighbor. By filing an environmental lawsuit, this single person can delay construction for years by demanding that the planners conduct expensive and time-consuming research on the ecological impact of new development. This isn’t a hypothetical. As the author and city planner M. Nolan Gray wrote in The Atlantic, it’s the story of a housing dream deferred, at the corner of First and Lorena Streets in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. In the past few decades, Gray said, California’s environmental rules—particularly the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA—have allowed citizens to veto new projects by dragging developers to court and saddling them with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and environmental research. “CEQA lawsuits have imperiled infill housing in Sacramento, solar farms in San Diego, and transit in San Francisco,” he wrote. Researchers sometimes call this phenomenon “citizen voice.” Because I’m fond of both citizens and voices, I don’t like this term. I prefer vetocracy—rule by veto—which is Francis Fukuyama’s phrase for systems that empower minority objectors to stop anything from happening. Local vetocracy sounds appropriately vomitous to describe this situation... Interstate-construction costs tripled from the 1960s to the 1980s, even after adjusting for inflation, according to research by the George Washington University professor Leah Brooks and the Yale Law professor Zachary Liscow. Basic costs, such as labor and materials, didn’t explain the increase. But the researchers found suggestive evidence that CEQA and other environmental laws passed in the 1970s empowered citizens to veto new construction projects, which “caused increased expenditure per mile,” Brooks and Liscow concluded... Around the world, construction appears to be one of the only commodity-producing industries that isn’t getting more productive. The Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon has estimated that the construction industry recorded negative productivity growth around the turn of the century in both the U.S. and Europe due to a decline in “multifactor productivity,” which is a complicated proxy for innovation... French building agencies conduct environmental studies in-house and don’t open the door to citizen lawsuits that can stymie new development... Housing costs are complex because nearly half the cost comes from local rules and preferences rather than just materials and labor. That’s appropriate, in a way. A house is not just a pile of wood and stone and work. It is a depository of our values. America’s housing system could prioritize abundance—more houses, permitted faster and built cheaper. Instead, by putting rules over outcomes and litigation over public benefit, we are getting fewer houses, interminable permits, and expensive projects. As in health care, energy, and scientific research, the failures of U.S. housing policy aren’t mysterious error codes. They’re design flaws. This is what happens when a bad blueprint is built to plan."
I like how he advocates more immigration, but in the whole article he doesn't talk about demand side factors at all

George on X - "WATCH: Senator Elizabeth Warren, aka Pocahontas, tried to trap President Trump's HUD nominee Scott Turner with a gotcha, and it totally backfired. He calmly & smoothly silenced her with facts.
"Do you support additional federal investment in programs so that we can lower the cost of building affordable housing?"
Turner: "What I do support is maximizing the budget that we do have... My point is there's record funding for HUD. HUD's budget is nearly $70 billion at this point..."
Scott Turner is saying he can solve the problem with the same budget, and her reaction is that it can only be solved with more tax funds. The Democrat solution to any problem is to just print more money."
A good insight into left wing economics - if things don't work, it's always because too little money is spent

Moses Kagan on X - "Something I wish every legislator, regulator & housing court in the country would internalize: The harder you make evicting a tenant who dishonors his lease:
1. The harder it is for owners to justify renting to marginal applicants, &
2. The less appealing it is for developers to build new housing in your jurisdiction"
Greedy landlords need to suck it up and let everyone stay for free and wreck their places, or they're bad people

Irish Independent on X - "Retirees now driving up house prices in scenic areas along Ireland’s coastline"
The Laymans Take on X - "So elderly Irish people buying a nice house for a pleasant retirement is driving up prices and that's a problem But immigrants coming by the hundreds of thousands has no impact, and you're racist for suggesting it"

Meme - Mason @webdevMason: "Spoiler: she recently found an apartment, was coached by "housing activists" to lie about her recent rental history and ongoing debt obligations, and got her church to cover the security deposit By her own account she can't afford the $2,360 rent and that's apparently fine"
Amazon Piss Jugs - Free Palestine @JeremyWard33: "Horrific capitalist dystopia: She makes $72K/yr but lives in a Ford Fusion. She can't afford rent in Seattle"
"More Americans turn to living in their cars. Dozens of parking lots have opened across the country for working people who can afford a car but not rent."
Clearly, housing needs to be free

Move fast and build things? Minneapolis holds lessons for the Labour Government’s planning reform - "Minneapolis wanted to address its housing crisis by building more in the existing urban area, rather than new suburbs. The city started by lowering mandatory parking requirements for new developments in 2009 and 2015. Developers needed to build fewer parking spaces for every home they built, reducing their costs significantly and making more developments viable. In 2019, the city enacted a more comprehensive reform through the Minneapolis 2040 Plan... By changing the rules to allow more development in a system that guaranteed planning permission to developers who followed those rules, the hope was that developers would respond and build more housing. The zoning reforms allowed more dense development. Figure 1 shows significant jumps in planning permissions for multi-family developments, mostly blocks of flats, after the reforms in 2009, 2015 and 2020. Trends in development types decoupled, so developers started preferring denser housing due to the new rules. Higher construction meant housing supply began to meet demand. As shown in Figure 2, housing numbers per resident – a measure of housing availability – were falling in Minneapolis and across the US for most of the 2010s. Since 2019, housing availability has started to improve across the US, but it increased much more quickly in Minneapolis after the implementation of the 2040 Plan. The increase in supply made housing more affordable. As Figure 3 shows, real housing costs dropped for buyers and renters in Minneapolis between 2020 and 2024. During the same period, housing in other cities in the same region became more expensive... Minneapolis price drops are significant and exceptional only five years after the biggest reform. This is partly because, in a rules-based system, changing the rules is enough to increase supply."
Clearly, developers just became less greedy

New study shows why Chicagoans were right to reject ‘Bring Chicago Home’ - "Chicago became the first major city in the country to reject a “mansion tax” referendum at the ballot box. “It was cowardly,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said after the loss. “And I will be punching back.” But did voters make the right choice? A new study out of Los Angeles suggests yes, they did... In 2022, LA voters passed Measure ULA, which slapped a 4% transfer tax on properties selling for more than $5 million and a 5.5% transfer tax on properties selling for more than $10 million. ULA has generated $288 million a year in new revenue so far. But it’s also imposed significant hidden costs, which are now coming to light. According to a new study from nonprofit research organization RAND and UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, ULA:
Cut commercial, industrial and multifamily property transactions by 30-50%
Cut new housing production by about 1,910 units per year, an 18% drop compared with the pre-election level of new development
Led to a $25 million loss in property tax revenue, which compounds year after year
“We found that it is having a pretty strong negative effect on both market rate housing and affordable housing,” said Shane Phillips, a housing policy researcher at UCLA... Austin’s experience echoes that of Minneapolis, where pro-growth housing reforms have led to more construction and falling rents. The same story is playing out in New Zealand, where Auckland made it easier to build housing while Wellington did not. The results are clear... Rent relative to income is now falling in Auckland while rising in the rest of the country."

Opinion: Chicago should follow the lead of Austin, Texas, on affordable housing - "the Chicago City Council’s Committee on Housing and Real Estate dawdled with a resolution asking Illinois lawmakers for permission to implement rent control, a failed policy that’s wrecked housing markets nationwide. Aldermen should have been cutting the city’s burdensome housing regulations that are choking development and driving up costs in the city. Chicago’s leaders must abandon their self-strangling, restrictive approach to affordable housing. Regulation coupled with market manipulation is not working. Just this year, average one-bedroom rents have grown to more than $1,900 per month in Chicago. They should look toward another blue city, Austin, Texas. Austin has shown you can only build your way to affordable housing. You can’t regulate it. This year, rents in Austin dropped again to $1,436 per month. How?
In 2019, the city eased zoning restrictions and provided incentives for higher density in affordable and mixed-income developments.
In May of last year, the city boosted its commitment to housing affordability by passing local ordinances to allow single-family homes to be built on smaller lots.
Last month, the City Council voted to expand single-stair housing developments to provide more affordable options for families. Buildings no longer are required to have two staircases per floor when taller than three stories, which eliminates the need for a central hallway and allows compact designs.
Austin leaders spent time dismantling red tape instead of pursuing headlines. The result? Austin has been building well above the national average for new units, while Chicagoland ranks last of the top 10 urban areas for issuing new housing permits per 100,000 residents, according to an Illinois Policy Institute analysis."

Indians Abroad

2026-06-04T12:32:00.000+08:00

Harsh Goenka on X

"A Swiss hotel once displayed a list of special rules exclusively for Indian guests which I personally saw and was appalled.

Today, videos of garba in restaurants, loud conversations in airports, and turning aircraft cabins into picnic spots keep doing the rounds. Even in Davos, an Indian businessman blasted Punjabi music in a club so the whole town could hear it, calling it “soft power” but to everyone’s annoyance.

Japan earned global admiration through their courtesy and civic sense. If India wants to be a true global superpower, the world should remember Indians for its excellence, consideration and respect for others.

Our civic sense seriously needs to be upgraded."

"arc-en-ciel
HOTEL . GSTAAD

Dear guests from India

Welcome to the Hotel Arc-en-ciel in Gstaad. In order for you to enjoy your holiday, we kindly ask you to observe the following rules:

. The breakfast buffet is open from 7.30 to 10.30 am. Everything you will find on the buffet is freshly prepared and comes from local producers. Please do not take anything with you, the food is for breakfast only. If you would like a lunch bag, you can order it from the service staff and pay for it.
. Please note that other guests also want an appetizing buffet. Only use the cutlery provided.
· Our restaurant is open for lunch and dinner. We offer various dishes and also vegetarian dishes. If you want to share a dish for 2 or more persons, we have to charge CHF 5 .- per aditional person for the service and plate and CHF 1 .- for a drink.
. In addition to you, there are other guests from all over the world in the hotel. They also appreciate the peace and quiet and therefore we ask you to be quiet in the corridor and not speak to loud on the balcony. Thank you very much!
. The reception is open from 7.00 am to 10.30 pm. During the night only emergency calls can be accepted. Room service is only available vom 7.30 am to 10.00 pm.
. The entrance door can be opened with the room key (sensor).
. Do you need information for excursions in the region? Please contact the reception, we will be happy to advise you.

Thank you very much and enjoy your stay in Gstaad.

Christiane Matti, Manager"

Sadly, this notice was from 2019 and got removed after claims of racism.

Harsh Goenka shares Swiss hotel's special rules for Indian guests, says 'our civic sense seriously needs to be upgraded' amid viral garba videos - The Economic Times

"Goenka argued that the issue extends far beyond a single hotel notice. He pointed to viral videos showing people performing garba inside restaurants, engaging in loud conversations at airports, or treating aircraft cabins like picnic spots. He also cited an incident in Davos where an Indian businessman allegedly blasted Punjabi music in a club loud enough for the entire town to hear, describing it as "soft power" while, according to Goenka, it only annoyed others...

Goenka's post came amid two viral videos of Indians doing garba abroad. In one video, a group can be seen performing garba on the tarmac of a Vietnam airport. In another, a group was seen dancing inside a restaurant. Both incidents sparked a heated debate online, with some arguing that such actions tarnish India's image abroad, while others defended them as harmless expressions of culture...

One user narrated how a fellow Indian used his phone on speaker mode in a café, much to the annoyance of others. "Was at a café in a 5-star property in Goa yesterday. One gentleman spent the next 30 minutes conducting speakerphone calls at full volume, creating a nuisance for everyone around. What surprised me more was that neither he nor the staff seemed to find anything unusual about it," the user wrote.

Another commented, "Agreed. But our reputation is getting downgraded. Even the younger lot is contributing to the problem by dancing to Chaiyya Chaiyya on the iconic Vietnamese train street for reels and likes, ensuring that these discriminatory rules remain forever."

A third user wrote, "The 'jugaad' mentality has to go. We cannot become a developed nation while carrying a developing nation mindset. Charity begins at home — every citizen must be part of this change, either by choice or through necessary enforcement.""

Clearly, The Economic Times of India is racist against Indians, perpetuating harmful stereotypes and needs to do better.

Links - 4th June 2026 (1 - Trans Mania)

2026-06-04T09:56:00.000+08:00

A man's a man for a'that - "Sophie Weddell is a man who says he is a woman and goes by the name of ‘Sophie Sparkles’ or ‘Sophie Molly’. He’s quite active on social media and how he manifests his womanhood includes posting pictures of himself with clothes pegs on his nipples, a ball gag in his mouth, his head tilted back in apparent sexual pleasure. I find this portrayal of womanhood offensive and repulsive. But guess what? I have to put on my big girl pants and deal with it. Sophie is allowed to be offensive and repulsive. I don’t think this should be a crime. I can always look away. He isn’t emailing me the pictures directly or standing outside my house at 4am screaming at me to come and look. Sophie finds some behaviour of mine offensive, in particular the manifestation of my protected belief that sex is real, it matters and it is immutable. But he adopts a rather less pragmatic approach and makes direct complaints to my regulator about me. The offensive manifestation of my protected belief were the following words on the social media platform X in 2024 when I commented on Sophie’s topless photo ‘this man is not a woman. I am allowed to say this’ Sophie described this as ‘unprovoked transphobic hate’ which was ‘abhorrent’ directed at a ‘vulnerable transgender woman’ and had bought him to tears. I must face disciplinary action for my abuse of power. My regulator the Bar Standards Board responded to him in June 2024 - perfectly sensibly, lawfully and properly - to tell Sophie that I had a right to express views about sex and gender. I did not use profane or abusive language or threaten him. I simply said, as I will repeat in this piece and beyond, that Sophie is a man. He is male. When his mum’s egg meet his dad’s sperm at the moment of his conception, his sex was determined and can never change. I appreciate he seems unhappy about this and wishes to present as a woman. Whatever floats his boat. But he cannot coerce me or anyone else into believing or saying that he is a woman. Provided I am not refusing him employment, goods or services because of my position, or following him about in real life shrieking ‘you are a MAN!’ - which would be unlawful harassment - my belief and the manifestation of that belief, that you cannot change sex, is political speech which is given the highest form of protection of all, pursuant to article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Not only did Sophie complain but he requested his complaint be kept secret from me, fearing undefined repercussions. Happily, I did find out because Sophie complained in public when his complaint was rejected... I will leave to the Bar Standards Board the issue of whether my calling Sophie a man is in fact a breach of my Code of Conduct and in fact brings the profession into disrepute. I think all of this will raise many interesting questions for a disciplinary tribunal - not least, the issue of whether it is ‘disreputable’ for having views which are shared by more and more people as time passes. At a recent meeting of the Westminster Legal Forum where we discussed equality, diversity and inclusion [EDI] in the law, the Director General of the BSB denied that ‘EDI’ carried any ‘ideological freight’ and asserted there was not only a legal but a moral duty to make sure that barristers were subject to a duty to promote it. The frozen response of the BSB to Sophie’s complaint underscores my fear that the Director General is dangerously wrong. There is clearly significant ideological freight attached to a policy of equality, diversity and inclusion which acts to protect and include only one kind of belief - Sophie’s ideological position that he is a woman must be included, while my protected characteristic, the belief in the immutability of sex, is excluded. He is allowed to sing from the roof tops about what a womanly woman is he. I am to be silenced with threats to my reputation and my livelihood."

Wesley Yang on X - "There is no distinction between "being transgender" and being a cross-dresser because the whole point of manufacturing the empty construct "transgender" in the late 1990's was to encompass and confer rights upon cross-dressers:"

Wesley Yang on X - "The Transgender Inquisition is global and unitary. It seeks the same goals and imposes the same agenda everywhere it acquires the power to do so: it seeks to compel people to believe a falsehood and to punish people who state a truth. What it has done in Canada, where a human rights tribunal imposed a $750,000 fine on a school trustee for resisting the imposition of gender propaganda in the schools, or in Australia, where Smith was found guilty of "vilification" by publicly identifying the sex of men participating in women's sports, it will do everywhere it obtains the power to do so. It is at its core a movement to stop the circulation of truths so that falsehoods may be enshrined as the only truth -- all of its actions conform to this pattern and seek the attainment of this goal."

Liberal Tear Creator™ on X - "How is it possible for an entire middle school class to be “trans?”"
Xuan Vu on X - "Social contagion. Children are the most susceptible and we should not tolerate this. It's child abuse. Sue the school."
Clearly, no one can be influenced into being trans, so they must all be trans and must all be affirmed

Jonathan Kay on X - "The world according to Mother Jones. Forcing people to get vaccinated? A-okay. Cheek swabs to keep dudes out of women’s sports ? A violation of human rights (I’m not anti-vaccine, but I just love the selective bioethical outrage)"
Bodily autonomy is only sacrosanct when it pushes the left wing agenda (i.e. for abortion at any time, for any reason)

Billboard Chris 🌎 on X - "Trans-identified female lawyer berates judge, pulls trans card, gets found in contempt, resists arrest, screams “I can’t breathe,” and yells for people to call 911 as she’s fighting police. Absolutely glorious performance. Women should not take testosterone."
The Dragon's Treasure on X - "There's 2 particular events in this video that are the sheer embodiment of arguing with these kinds of trans people and the left as a whole. The first being when, on camera, she throws her phone on the ground like a petulant child, right there on camera, in front of the judge. When called out, she says she didn't throw it, it fell from the counter, and doubled down on it. A clear and obvious lie everyone can see, and nothing will be done about it. They lie as easily as they breathe. The second is when the cops were trying to arrest her. While things were still calm, she tried to say that they cops were throwing her over the bench or something. It was a lie so big and brazen that even she had to stop herself and back up a bit. But the point being she made herself into a victim before anything violent even happened and screamed oppression... Then took action to CAUSE said violence in the first place. Man, I'm tired.:
Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌ on X - "I’ve been a cop for almost 20 years. This has less to do with her being trans than it does with her being a liberal white woman whose testosterone injections do fvckall to suppress her Inner Karen. This is absolutely typical behavior for a liberal white woman who’s dealing with authority figures who won’t let her have her way. Add on the sacred transness, and you get someone who thinks they should be able to do whatever they want: they expect even their obvious lies to be believed. (I will say that it’s the height of irony for the judge to call her out for lying while at the same time addressing her as “sir,” but that’s the world we live in)."

American loses UK appeal to become legally non-binary - "An American who wanted to be formally recognised as non-binary in the UK has been told by the Court of Appeal their gender identity does not legally exist in this country. Ryan Castellucci previously lost a High Court challenge to have their gender recorded as non-binary on a gender recognition certificate - a document which changes someone's legal sex - after moving to the UK in 2019. They had obtained legal recognition as non-binary in California in 2021, and were issued an American passport in 2022 listing their sex as 'X'... Lord Justice Singh, sitting with Dame Victoria Sharp and Sir Andrew McFarlane, said that only 11 countries worldwide, as well as some US states including California, recognise non-binary gender in law... "Ryan's only registered gender is non-binary. Despite Parliament legislating for the UK to recognise foreign-acquired genders, the courts have so far ruled that non-binary foreign genders do not count. "Ryan considers that there cannot be true gender equality without recognition of the fact that not all genders are binary.""

NBC News on X - "Trump administration terminates agreements to protect transgender students in several schools."
Wesley Yang on X - "Trump Administration acts to ensure compliance with Title IX by scrapping prior agreements that force mandates that have been found by multiple federal court judges to violate Title IX and the US Constitution on every school in America"
When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression

Trans researcher j wallace skelton roasted for absurd pronouns - "A woke Canadian academic whose research includes working with young children to create “queer- and trans-centered spaces” is drawing mockery online for his choice of pronouns — his full name, all lowercase. The PhD — who is transgender and presents as a man with a goatee — asked on Facebook to be referred to by his full name, j wallace skelton, in place of traditional third-person pronouns like him, her or they — including the lowercase letters. “lower case letters please,” the header on his Facebook profile reads for reasons unknown. Skelton, an assistant professor of queer studies in education at the University of Regina, says on his website that he is the father of a “non-binary ten year old,” whom he says is a frequent research partner. One of the duo’s projects — as detailed on Skelton’s personal website — centers around “how do 2SLGBTQ children and children from 2SLGBTQ families envision educational spaces that meet their needs,” he wrote, using Canada’s preferred term for LGBTQ."

Adam Paul Laxalt on X - "Some people are offended by the opening words my former Solicitor General uses, but as he points out, you should be more offended by the underlying law here that forces men into a female only small business spa and the liberal Judges who didn’t protect the female owner."
"This is a case about swinging dicks. The Christian owners of Olympus Spa- a traditional Korean, women-only, nude spa-understandably don't want them in their spa. Their female employees and female clients don't want them in their spa either. But Washington State insists on them. And now so does the Ninth Circuit. You may think that swinging dicks shouldn't appear in a judicial opinion. You're not wrong. But as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa- some as young as thirteen-to be visually assaulted by the real thing. Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds. Woke regulators and complicit judges seem entirely willing, even eager, to ignore the consequences that their Frankenstein social experiments impose on real women and young girls. Yet if harmful and unfortunate consequences were all this case was about, we'd have to shrug and say: "That's what comes with living in a democracy." Unless the Constitution is implicated, we get what we voted for "good and hard.""
Shipwreckedcrew on X - "Judge Van Dyke is addressing a ridiculous social engineering experiment on behalf of a segment of the population suffering from a form of mental illness that is dressed up as a legal argument through the use of sophistry and invented language. If the Ninth Circuit wants to play in the "Theater of the Absurd" he's happy to go along. When you suspend the rules of language that were developed over thousands of years, all for the purpose of accommodating the delusions of a nearly infinitesimal number of sufferers, then all bets are off about what words appear on the page."

One of the first people known to change their gender was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh : The Picture Show : NPR - "For Women's History Month, I wanted to highlight Hatshepsut,"
From March 2026. The media won't stop pushing this bullshit and erasing women
I like how this is for "Women's History Month" but she supposedly wasn't a woman

The rampant misogyny of transing Elizabeth I - spiked - "It’s a sign that trans thought is so woefully conventional, so gender straitjacketed, that it just doesn’t seem able to grasp, in this case, why a woman would refuse to hand over her hard-won power to a man by marrying a stranger who didn’t even speak her language. Or that she said on the eve of the Spanish Armada invasion: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king’? It’s called wordplay, I believe, and was extremely common until people with Tin Ear Syndrome – a disease affecting the ‘trans community’ and their inordinate number of ‘allies’ – became so prevalent among those in the arts and media. This, of course, is our old mate ‘Queering the Past’ (or ‘lying’ as those not educated beyond all common sense and honesty know it) beloved of universities, museums and other beclowned institutions. There have been some truly rib-tickling examples of it, such as the claim that ‘trans Vikings’ existed, which sounds like a Monty Python sketch; sometimes the whole circus gets too much even for the most proudly gay public figure. In 2023, the museum dedicated to conserving the Mary Rose hosted a blog, promising to understand the collection of everyday objects found on the 16th-century ship ‘through a queer lens’. This prompted the great Philip Hensher to post on X: ‘I am as keen as anyone on gay sex, but I have to say to these curators – you’re fucking mental.’ We can easily mock the kind of mind that can tie itself into the most labyrinthine of sailor’s knots in order to posit the notion of invading ‘trans’ hordes raping their way across countries, presumably using papier-mâché penises, without the poor women of those nations noticing. Who cares about Vikings’ rights anyway? But it’s beyond a joke when real women who lived in (relatively) recent memory – who we know had to fight against monstrous insults and / or oppression – have their remains picked over by academic half-wits, apparently for no greater cause than making inadequate men (befrocked or not) feel better about themselves; Joan of Arc, Rosa Bonheur, Louisa May Alcott, Storme DeLarverie. Some women pretended to be men so they could be doctors, soldiers, pirates – not because they really considered themselves he / hims. The class privilege of those intent on ‘queering’ every female ‘presenting’ as female in history quite understandably prevents them from understanding how earning a living was the reason many women pretended to be men – including, of course, the Brontë sisters, or Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, as they were known. Or even JK Rowling, whose publishers advised her that boys would not buy books written by someone called Joanne. Famous women are rare in history. They are generally there because they dared to do what was not expected of them – sometimes on pain of death. Yet somehow, it’s now ‘progressive’ to cancel them out by posthumously changing their sex. It’s especially idiotic in the case of Elizabeth I, who if she had really been born male (and let’s remember that royal births have been witnessed by the courtiers and politicians of the day, a practice which only ended in 1948, prior to the birth of Prince Charles) would not have seen her mother executed, when Elizabeth was still a child. Her father married and murdered multiple times because he couldn’t get a male heir. It’s telling that those who scream most loudly about having their feelings hurt when they’re called Martha instead of Arthur don’t mind trampling all over the graves of women killed by the savage misogyny of the age. Their lack of respect for the dead reminds one of the way rape and murder victims once had their reputations trashed by authorities defending violent males. A less important but still significant side effect of ‘queering’ or ‘transing’ the past is that this will mean fewer roles for actresses, already at a disadvantage in a profession that throws them on the scrapheap far earlier than men. Shakespeare’s heroines were originally played by teenage boys, as it was considered improper for women to display themselves in such a way. The call for ‘actors who identify as transgender women’, as the casting call for Majesty puts it, means that women can be edged out once more. Over the past few years, the woman-face actors Karla Sofia Gascon, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez and Laverne Cox have been nominated for Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Emmys and BAFTAS in the female categories. Tellingly, there’s been no traffic the other way, with women pretending to be men being put up for male prizes."

Le_Sorelle_Arduino KPSS on X - "The fellas at @TheOnion have done a spoof about JKR being sectioned These are the same men that would have committed opinionated women to asylums in Victorian times - there is nothing progressive or funny about this"
Kyle Mann on X - "The joke is JK Rowling is insane because she believes men are men and women are women"
Josh Howie on X - "There’s actually something quite funny here, if read as a satire on how trans activists view JK Rowling. But the Onion has instead written it for trans activists, and as such it’s utterly deranged, nasty, and terribly unfunny. The Onion is a cautionary tale of the saddest fate in comedy; to be laughed at, when you used to be laughed with."

Gender-Affirming Care Needs a Lobotomy - WSJ - "Different societies have different ways of responding to the anguish of a young woman. In the medieval period, her difficulties would be understood in spiritual terms and she would be directed toward a priest or even an exorcist. In the late-19th century, she might be diagnosed with hysteria and offered hypnosis therapy. In the 1930s, she might be diagnosed with agitated depression and subjected to a lobotomy. In the 2000s, she might be diagnosed with gender dysphoria... It’s easy to look back at the uncritical acceptance of medical wrongdoing in the past and see what C.S. Lewis described as “chronological snobbery.” It seems obvious now that bloodletting and trepanning were acts of idiocy. But the widespread acceptance of “gender-affirming” medicine in our own time ought to cure us of this hubris. Perhaps the closest historical analog to the emerging scandal around gender medicine is the practice of lobotomy, a type of brain surgery that doctors performed approximately 50,000 times in the U.S., most between 1949 and 1952, with the same goal: to relieve the symptoms of mental illness. The most important figure in the rise of lobotomy in the U.S. was Walter Freeman, a talented surgeon who came from an esteemed medical family and could trace his lineage back to the Mayflower. This was an era when that kind of prestige conferred enormous power on doctors, and Freeman pursued his experiments with very little restriction, although plenty of his colleagues voiced concerns. As his biographer Jack El-Hai wrote, “Freeman made it plain that he found such ethical complaints a waste of time.” He refused to be deterred from his humanitarian mission. We must resist our chronological snobbery here. Freeman and his allies really did think they were doing good, and often the surgeries appeared to work. Some lobotomy patients, in fact, expressed immense gratitude. In an era when psychiatric drugs were still primitive, severe mental illness could see a person confined to an asylum for the rest of his life. Doctors like Freeman were desperate to find some treatment for patients who were experiencing acute suffering, and the scientific principles behind lobotomy seemed sound enough. But some of the outcomes were terrible... If our forebears were transfixed by Freeman’s status as an eminent WASP, we have been bewitched by the social-justice messaging around gender-affirming care. We have heard, like Fox Varian’s mother, that if patients aren’t given access to these treatments, they will surely kill themselves. We have heard, too, that a failure to endorse this area of medicine betrays a lack of empathy for suffering patients. Some who raised concerns have been socially ostracized or forced out of their jobs. A growing movement of detransitioners is now demanding redress, and it seems likely that medical-malpractice lawsuits will become more common. But while the victims of reckless doctors may secure financial compensation, the physical harm done to them can’t be reversed. I’d like to think we will learn lessons on the arrogance of medical authorities, the power of groupthink and the importance of listening to whistleblowers. But history shows that it’s remarkably easy for doctors to double down on a misguided protocol, even—or especially—when they have lost sight of the foundational principle of their profession: Do no harm."
Sevultura on X - "Up until eighties (and nineties) newborn babies were operated on without anaesthetic (including heart surgery) because the medical consensus was that babies couldn’t feel pain. Mothers who saw their babies in distress were dismissed as hysterical ignoramuses"
If you don't Trust the Science, you are an ignorant science denier who spreads misinformation and you need to be silenced

Thread by @epkaufm on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "NEW: trans identification is in free fall among the young
Non-conforming sexual identity (queer, questioning, etc) is also in sharp decline. Gay and lesbian are stable while heterosexuality has rebounded by around 10 points since 2023. Not only this, but freshmen in 2024-25 were less trans and queer than seniors whereas it was the reverse when BTQ+ identity was surging in 2022-23. This suggests that gender/sexual non-conformity will continue to fall.
What explains the sudden reversal of trans and queer? It’s not because the kids became less woke, more religious or more conservative. Those beliefs remained stable throughout the 2020s. Is it improved mental health? Yes, in part. Less anxious and, especially, depressed, students is linked with a smaller share identifying as trans, queer or bisexual. But not entirely. Mental illness fell after the pandemic but the sexuality and gender shifts happened at least a year later. All groups, including LGBT, got less mentally ill after the pandemic. The decline in anxiety and depression occurred within trans, bisexual and queer groups as much as among others. So it wasn’t the case that most of those who solved their emotional problems became heterosexual.
The fall of trans and queer seems most similar to the fading of a fashion or trend. It happened largely independently of shifts in political beliefs and social media use, though improved mental health played a role."
The cope is that they're just scared to come out now, and that the right is going to go after other minorities next. Yet gay and lesbian identification are stable

Wesley Yang on X - "The most obvious social contagion in world history is starting to peter out, but not before memeing into existence a subpopulation of 750K minors aged 13-17 who have been brainwashed into yearning to be chemically castrated and dismembered in pursuit of a delusion that can never be true. A crucial part of breaking this fever was simply people telling the truth about it just as the decisive aspect of stoking it was silencing those who told the truth about it."

WomenAreReal on X - "Another remarkable clip from Wiener’s SB 934 hearing. Hearing Wiener imagine being a parent is bizarre, but I want to focus on the committee’s inability to understand the bill they are voting on. Few realize California lawmakers have been inserting “gender” nonsense into state law for decades. It starts in 1998, when “gender” is added to the hate crime code. Then it appears in the Education Code, opening the door to boys in girls’ bathrooms. By 2003, “gender identity” enters the Government Code. In 2005, female-only public accommodations are gone. In 2007, the biological definition of sex is stripped from the Education Code. By 2013, girls’ sports are no longer protected as female-only. In 2017, self-ID comes to driver’s licenses. By 2021, it reaches women’s prisons. I’ve watched many of the hearings & the pattern is always the same. Every bill is “minor.” Just “codifying.” Just “clarifying.” Just “aligning statutes.” Opponents are dismissed as confused or hysterical. “This won’t let boys into girls’ bathrooms. You’re overreacting.” Then the bill passes and that is exactly what it does. Nothing is different with SB 934. All the committee members (even the R’s) seem sold on the idea the SB 934 merely changes the statute of limitations, nothing more. But anyone with a working brain can read the text of SB 934 (it’s not long) and compare it to the existing CA law on conversion therapy. Under existing law, SB 1172, enforcement of conversion therapy is limited to licensing boards and deals only with “sexual orientation.” However, SB 934 explicitly allows a plaintiff to bring a civil action (lawsuit) for “gender identity change efforts” and recover damages. That is a massive expansion of liability. And even if this were “just” a statute of limitations bill, that should raise a different question: why are we continuing to expand a legal regime in a highly controversial and contested space? But never mind all that. The committee is convinced this is a simple, small bill that increases the statute of limitations. We’ve seen this play out for 25 years. And each time, lawmakers say: this changes nothing or very little. And each time, the law expands far beyond what was promised. SB 934 follows the same script."

Clinical guidelines for children and adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria or incongruence: a systematic review of guideline quality (part 1) - "Most clinical guidance for managing children/adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence lacks an independent and evidence-based approach and information about how recommendations were developed. This should be considered when using these to inform service development and clinical practice."
This is what "settled" "science" looks like

Links - 3rd June 2026 (3 [including Vegans])

2026-06-03T21:32:00.000+08:00

Vegan diet made Essex woman delusional, says coroner - "A university student took her own life while suffering delusional beliefs caused by her strict vegan diet, an inquest has concluded. Georgina Owen had developed a vitamin B12 deficiency due to the diet she began in 2016 "stemming from her environmental concerns", the coroner said... an expert report concluded Owen was also showing vague signs of cognitive impairment, anxiety, fatigue and difficulty with simple decision making."

Harvard doctor says animal products are essential for mental health - in blow to veganism: 'The brain needs meat' - "Meat is essential for warding off depression and anxiety, a top nutrition expert has revealed, sending a blow to veganism. Dr Georgia Ede, a Harvard-trained nutritional and metabolic psychiatrist and author of Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind, studies the relationship between what we eat and our mental and physical health. And despite the health halo that vegan diets have been given over the last few years, she claims that giving up meat could be detrimental for mental health... Dr Ede said that while getting enough protein has long been a concern surrounding vegan diets, eating meat is about more than protein. 'It's actually less about protein and more about all of the other nutrients that are inside meat,' she said. 'You can get your protein needs met through a vegan and vegetarian diet if you plan it carefully.'... While animal products like eggs, meat, cheese, and Greek yogurt are high in protein, it can also be found in vegan options like lentils and broccoli. 'But many of the other essential nutrients are much more difficult if not in some cases impossible to obtain from plants,' Dr Ede said. She noted that meat is 'the only food that contains every nutrient we need in its proper form and is also the safest food for our blood sugar and insulin levels.' These nutrients include vitamin B12, omega-3 fatty acids, zinc, choline, iron, and iodine. Vitamin B12, for example, helps with the formation of oxygen-rich red blood cells and DNA. However, it has also been linked to regulating mood-boosting serotonin, and low levels of serotonin have been linked to increased risks of depression and anxiety. Additionally, a review in the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology found that lower levels of zinc were associated with depression, as zinc can reduce inflammation in the brain. Several studies have suggested that meat eaters have better mental health. A 2021 systematic review of 18 studies compared those who do and don't eat meat. The research included 160,257 participants ages 11 to 96 (53 percent of whom were female), including 149,559 meat eaters and 8,584 meat avoiders. Of those, 11 studies found that meat-free diets were linked to worse mental health outcomes. One of those studies found that vegetarians had a 35.2 percent chance of developing major depression, compared to 19.1 percent for meat eaters. Additionally, vegetarians had a 31.5 percent chance of developing an anxiety disorder, compared to 18.4 percent for meat eaters. One study published in 2022 surveyed 14,000 Brazilians between 35 and 74 years old and found those who followed a vegan diet were twice as likely to be depressed — even if they had similar nutrient intakes to carnivores. And a meta-analysis published in 2020 and including 160,000 meat-eaters and 8,500 meat-abstainers also found those who cut meat from their diet were significantly more likely to be depressed. Despite gaining a health halo over the years, emerging research suggests that vegan diets could have other lasting health consequences. A 2023 report from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), for example, looked at more than 500 studies and concluded that animal sources of food offer 'crucial sources of much-needed nutrients.' The agency noted that these macro and micro nutrients are hard to find 'in the required quality and quantity' if following a vegan diet. Additionally, meat, eggs, and milk are 'particularly vital' for children, young people, and the elderly, as well as pregnant and breastfeeding women. A 2019 paper also noted that a deficiency of vitamin B12, which is more common in vegans, could raise the risk of stroke. This was because its absence inhibits the clearance of proteins from the blood stream, leading to inflammation — which in turn raised the probability of blood vessels being damaged. This is a key risk factor for stroke."

New data shows plant-based mince is now 33% cheaper than beef - "Plant-based food prices have widely been considered high, leading to the concept of the ‘vegan tax’, by which vegan products often appear subject to ‘price hikes’ compared to their non-vegan counterparts. But now, that seems set to change as recent data has shown that plant-based meat prices have dropped below animal meat prices, and the gap is widening. Recent fluctuations in global supply chains have put immense pressure on traditional livestock farming, leading to a noticeable spike in the cost of beef, lamb, and pork. Amidst this volatility, new research from the Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe has found that plant-based mince and meatballs at Tesco are now, on average, 33 per cent less expensive than their conventional counterparts... While mince and meatballs are leading the charge for affordability, the GFI report noted that the trend hasn’t reached every corner of the supermarket just yet. Beef burgers, for instance, remain 9 per cent cheaper than plant-based patties. However, with chicken prices expected to climb further due to the rising costs of fertiliser and energy for heating sheds the overall outlook for meat-free affordability remains strong."

Red meat is not a health risk. New study slams shoddy research - "In a new, unprecedented effort, scientists at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) scrutinized decades of research on red meat consumption and its links to various health outcomes, formulating a new rating system to communicate health risks in the process. Their findings mostly dispel any concerns about eating red meat. “We found weak evidence of association between unprocessed red meat consumption and colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes and ischemic heart disease. Moreover, we found no evidence of an association between unprocessed red meat and ischemic stroke or hemorrhagic stroke,” they summarized. The IHME scientists had been observing the shoddy nature of health science for decades. Each year, hundreds of frankly lazy studies are published that simply attempt to find an observational link between some action — eating a food for example — and a health outcome, like death or disease. In the end, owing to sloppy methods, varying subject populations, and inconsistent statistical measures, everything, especially different foods, seems to be both associated and not associated with cancer. How is the lay public supposed to interpret this mess?... “The evidence for a direct vascular or heath risk from eating meat regularly is very low, to the point that there is probably no risk,” commented Dr. Steven Novella, a Yale neurologist and president of the New England Skeptical Society. “There is, however, more evidence for a health risk from eating too few vegetables. That is really the risk of a high-meat diet, those meat calories are displacing vegetable calories.”"

How do Britons feel about nuclear energy?
Tom Chivers on X - "This seems really bad and I don't know what to do about it: not so much the differences in political attitudes, that's fine, but there's a strong gender divide in belief on straightforward factual questions like "is nuclear energy low-carbon?""

Swedish government plans to take majority stake in nuclear power development firm Videberg Kraft - "The Swedish government said on Friday it plans to take a 60% stake in nuclear development company Videberg Kraft as it looks to kick start the construction of a new generation of reactors ‌to replace its aging atomic power plants. The government has said nuclear power is vital to meet an expected surge in demand for electricity as industry and the transport sector shift away from fossil fuels... "Sweden is a nuclear nation. We are now taking the next step to clarify the state's role and responsibility ⁠in the further development of nuclear power," Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch said in a statement... The government has said it wants Sweden to build the equivalent of ‌around 10 ⁠new, full-size reactors by 2045 to complement the six currently in operation."
This climate change hystericist claimed that Sweden was shutting down its nuclear plants and switching to renewables

Meme - Project Liberal: Crying Soyjak Germany: "Stop using nuclear it's dangerous and bad for the environment 349g CO2/kWh"
Normal person France: "No. 52g CO2/kWh"
Mew @GermanAgnos: "I don't take opinions from surrender countries"
Mr_Liberal @MrLiberalCa: "Didn't you guys surrender twice?"

‘Fish disco’ not enough to protect nature at nuclear plant, says green quango - "The Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is facing fresh delays as a green quango demands extra nature protections on top of a controversial “fish disco”. Natural England has told developer EDF that existing plans to stop aquatic life in the Severn Estuary from being sucked into the Somerset plant’s cooling pipes will not be enough to satisfy environmental rules. The company had proposed using £700m of special equipment to ward off fish, including a bespoke underwater loudspeaker system which campaigners have called the “fish disco”. EDF provided new research data to regulators in February following promising trials of the technology, formally known as the acoustic fish deterrent, by university scientists. But in recent weeks, Natural England is understood to have claimed that further protections are necessary, such as the creation of new salt marshes to boost fish populations in the area. The quango is refusing to sign off the plant until new plans are set out and approved. It has prompted concern that Hinkley’s targeted 2030 opening date is now effectively impossible to deliver, owing to the time it will take to win approval for and build the new salt marshes. Sam Richards, the chief executive of Britain Remade, a Right-leaning think tank, said: “Hinkley Point C is already the most expensive nuclear power station ever built. “It also has more fish protection measures than any reactor built anywhere in the world. “For Natural England to now demand even more mitigation – regardless of the wider impact on the project and for minimal added benefit to nature – shows just how out of touch with reality they really are. “This out of control quango has become a direct threat to Britain’s energy security.” From the start of consultation to the end of construction, other artificially created salt marshes in the UK have taken as much as eight years to complete. If the same timescales were replicated at Hinkley, the plant would not open until 2034 at the earliest – almost a decade later than originally planned. There is also strong opposition among locals to the salt marshes proposal, including from farmers whose land would have to be compulsorily purchased, meaning any new scheme is likely to become ensnared by fresh legal challenges. Natural England’s ultimatum will be seen as a direct challenge to reforms confirmed by ministers just weeks ago, aimed at speeding up the construction of nuclear power stations."
Proof that nuclear power is too expensive and that's why we should stop using it!

Post by @did:plc:62gdkmpwa7xme36getyqnem3 — Bluesky - "When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it. Anyway: fund basic research."

Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb: A Disastrous Legacy | National Review - "“I was a college student when I read Mr. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb,” wrote Wall Street Journal reader Kenneth Emde of “population scientist” Paul Ehrlich’s most famous work in a 2023 letter. “I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later, the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid.” It’s cold comfort, but Emde was hardly alone in deferring to Ehrlich’s supposed expertise. The longtime professor of biology at Stanford University and advocate of an apocalyptic theory of human overpopulation, who passed away on Friday at the age of 93, was said by the New York Times to have been merely “premature” in his predictions. Maybe someday, Ehrlich’s catastrophism will seem prescient. Today, however, it would be more accurate to say that Ehrlich was just wrong. Central to Ehrlich’s thesis in The Population Bomb was his contention that the Earth had a finite “carrying capacity,” and its limits were already being tested by the mid-20th century. Humanity would soon have to ration its resources and consign those for whom it could no longer care to triage. Ehrlich’s modern Malthusianism fired the imaginations of the international environmental left, but he seemed compelled to forever up the ante on his dire predictions. He subsequently anticipated that, by 1980, the average American lifespan would decline to just 42. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” Ehrlich wrote in 1969. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years,” he declared the following year. By 1971, Ehrlich was willing to “take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Roughly 100 to 200 million people, he assumed, would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989 in what he deemed “the Great Die-Off.” Sure, he got some of the “details and timing” of the events he predicted wrong, his allies will concede. But, to them, the eschatological gist of his work still rang true. “Population growth, along with over-consumption per capita, is driving civilization over the edge,” Ehrlich told The Guardian as recently as 2018, “billions of people are now hungry or micronutrient malnourished, and climate disruption is killing people.” With the confidence of a Marxian economist, Ehrlich never questioned his faith in where humanity’s addiction to prosperity was taking it. “As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell,’” he said. Ehrlich’s work left much misery in its wake. As even Ehrlich’s supporters will admit, his theories “lent support to racist attitudes to population control.” Population bombers encouraged the promotion of abortion in places like Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Overpopulation as a theory justified some of the worst eugenicist abuses of the human species since World War II — abuses in which the United States was very much a participant. “The large number of sterilizations began in earnest in 1966, when Medicaid came into existence and funded the operation for low-income people,” the author Angela Franks wrote. Indeed, by 1977, “up to one-quarter” of Native American women had undergone sterilization, she wrote. A program of “voluntary” sterilization of Puerto Rican women in the 1960s unfolded similarly. By 1965, about one-third of Puerto Rican women surveyed admitted to undergoing a sterilization procedure amid the efforts of the U.S. government and the International Planned Parenthood Federation to promote the practice. Ehrlich’s primary contention — that the human race is, more or less, doomed — continues to inform the work of today’s Malthusians. The various United Nations appendages that routinely warn us of our species’ imminent collapse a decade or so on from whenever the last report was published lean on Ehrlich’s theories. The professor’s legacy inspired a 2018 initiative by a collection of bioethicists to rehabilitate The Population Bomb in the pages of the Washington Post. As recently as 2023, CBS’s 60 Minutes lent its platform to Ehrlich to promote groundless apocalypticism. “The next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to,” he told a credulous Scott Pelley. Ehrlich never questioned his conclusions and refused to repent for the suffering they produced. “For a species that named itself homo sapiens, the wise man, we’re being incredibly stupid,” Ehrlich told CNN at the end of the last decade. That seems to have been Ehrlich’s primary conceit — one that fatally undermined his work. Ehrlich and those who bought into the theory of overpopulation regularly underestimated mankind’s ability to engineer itself out of a challenge. Those who subscribed to that flawed outlook did what they could in their own ways to meet what they were told was the measure of a responsible citizen of the world: In CNN reporter Clint Watts’s summary, “consuming less, polluting less,” and “having fewer children.” Kenneth Emde took Ehrlich’s advocacy to heart, and he regrets it. Emde was asked to make what he thought was a noble sacrifice to future generations, but he only deprived himself of one of life’s foremost joys. Millions more similarly immiserated themselves for what they were told was the greater good. They deserved, if not an apology, at least the truth. But Paul Ehrlich couldn’t bring himself to provide them with either."
As Richard Dawkins observed, the retreat of Christianity has been replaced by worse things
Ehrlich is probably the best example of the core misanthropy of environmentalism

Queen guitarist Brian May blocked from planting daffodils - "Legendary rocker Brian May became a local hero in the quiet English village where he lives when he donated thousands of daffodil bulbs to brighten up the green outside the church last year. But plans to extend his floral donations for next year have bitten the dust after local authorities intervened and blocked the move."

The sad death of the sub machine gun - "The sub-machine gun was never meant to be universal. It was a solution, an elegant, ruthless solution to a specific problem. And for a time, in the hands of tank crews, resistance fighters, gangsters and elite soldiers alike, it performed that role with remarkable fidelity."

Another progressive myth about children’s education has been punctured - "For decades we have been told that streaming or setting (the grouping of children of similar ability in one class) was ineffective, damaging or even, in words that have peppered academic commentary, “symbolic violence” against less-able children. We were told that teaching in mixed-ability classes was fairer and enabled children of all abilities to shine. At long last, authoritative evidence has shown what many of us instinctively knew: streaming works... a report has been published which firmly disproves any notion that setting by ability negatively impacts children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The report – produced by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), which evaluated groundbreaking research by the Institute of Education, the well-respected teacher training arm of University College London – was based on observations and data from 28 secondary schools that teach maths in mixed-ability classes and 69 similar secondary schools that teach maths in classes set by the prior attainment of their pupils. The research found no negative impact on the attainment of children eligible for free school meals in being taught in a class of children of similar ability compared to being taught in a mixed-ability class. Most significantly, the research found that high-attaining pupils in mixed-ability classes showed two months less progress than those in classes set by ability. And, of course, amongst those high-attaining pupils will be children from disadvantaged backgrounds... The latest EEF research found that lessons in mixed-ability classes teach at a similar level to the bottom sets in schools that group children by ability. Inevitably, therefore, high-ability children in those mixed-ability classes learn less than if they had been in a class of similarly able pupils. This is a tragic waste of talent at a time when our economy needs the brightest maths graduates to drive innovation in science and computing... children who are taught in mixed-ability classes suffer higher negative effects on their self-confidence in maths compared to those in classes set by ability. This work, which follows very strict criteria about research methods – in this case using a “naturalistic” randomised controlled trial, is exactly what the EEF was established to do. Its work has significantly improved the quality of educational research in this country. It has exposed many orthodoxies that lacked an evidence base, such as the notion of “learning styles”, a widely held belief that has no research to support it. The success of the EEF is one of Michael Gove’s greatest legacies and its research this week, if implemented in schools, will transform the life-chances of future generations."
Left wingers hate success, so they want to penalise high-attaining pupils

Margot Cleveland on X - "The fact that you who are reading this care as much as you do about prospective SCOTUS vacancies is an indictment of how far afield our Constitutional system has strayed. There was a time when the Republic did not wait with bated breath every summer to learn whether a justice would retire, or ghoulishly check the actuarial tables against the justices’ ages. That was when the Court restricted itself to the proper (if somewhat dull) task of applying the law made by others. But somewhere along the way justices (Thomas and Alito are notable exceptions) discovered that it is far more exciting to make up your own laws. You can even remake society in your own image! So the next time you check SCOTUS retirement rumors, take a moment to remember WHY you are checking — whereas finding out the identity of the next justice as contemplated by the Founders might be interesting, finding out your next tyrant-in-robes is life-changing."

reason on X - ""Our nation is not founded on a religion. It's not based on a common culture, even, or heritage. ... We're a creedal nation," Justice Neil Gorsuch tells @nickgillespie on The Reason Interview podcast."
Boris Ryvkin on X - "This is simply wrong. It’s the common religion, culture, and heritage that yielded this supposed creed and the constitutional, rule of law, free republic that followed. Specifically, the Anglo-Dutch religious, political, cultural, and economic model is the foundation on which the U.S. was built. The Founding Fathers weren’t a bunch of randos thrown together from disparate cultures who signed on to a collection of ideals. They came from basically the same place ancestrally and culturally - and influenced by overlapping intellectual currents or forces when forming the new country. That’s why what worked in America has not worked in so many other parts of the world."
The Liberian constitution is based on the American one, so clearly the country is a failure because the American creed sucks. Also see Douglass North on Hispanic countries copying US institutions

Meme - "1) "You cannot challenge what we said today" - the Science
2) "You cannot hold us accountable for what we said yesterday because the science changed" - the Science
*Back to 1)*"
The cope is that Science is done by Scientists, so laymen have no right to talk about it. But of course, this pretends that scientists who go against the establishment don't get censored and deplatformed too (a further cope is that Science can only be done in peer reviewed journals)

David Juurlink on X - "The official journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society has just acknowledged that more than 100 of its case reports are fabricated. Incredible reporting from @RetractionWatch:"
Jonathan Shedler on X - "“The ultimate lesson is that science isn’t special—at least not anymore. Maybe back when Einstein talked to Niels Bohr, and there were only a few dozen important workers in every field. But there are now three million researchers in America. It’s no longer a calling, it’s a career. Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. Its practitioners aren’t saints, they’re human beings, and they do what human beings do—lie, cheat, steal from one another, sue, hide data, fake data, overstate their own importance, and denigrate opposing views unfairly. That’s human nature. It isn’t going to change.” —Michael Crichton, in “Next”"
If you don't Trust the Science, you're a Science Denier

Peter Boghossian on X - "Prediction: The replication crisis will unfold like #MeToo. Everyone in science knows how bad it is, but nobody wants to speak first. Then it all comes crashing down."
John Carter on X - "The thin end of the wedge was the culture of polite lies surrounding race, sex, religion, and sexuality that began to permeate academia in the postwar era. This led directly to massively increased female participation, which then reinforced the trend due to women prioritizing social harmony over verity, thereby establishing a positive feedback loop that eroded the epistemic integrity of academic culture. As academics became accustomed to averting their gaze from polite fictions, it became much easier for them to accept other deceptions. The old collegial culture of courteous but vigorous disputation was replaced with the new collegial culture of vicious enforcement of orthodoxy. This rendered academics much more ideologically pliable, which perfectly suited the goals of government bureaucrats and corporate marketing departments, who did not want truth but plausible-looking justifications for predetermined social engineering goals."

Simon Maechling on X - "The collapse of trust in science is going to go down in history as one of the most sad, bizarre, and destructive social contagions of modern times. We fed billions, cured diseases and powered nations - yet people ran toward conspiracies instead."
Roman Helmet Guy on X - "People haven’t lost trust in “science,” they’ve lost trust in a self-selected self-perpetuating academic priest class who rely on constant alarmism or revisionism to secure funding and who look upon dissent as heretical to an extent that would make the medieval church blush."
Yuri Bezmenov's Ghost on X - "Science is good The Science™ not so much"
Possum Reviews on X - "The replication crisis is not a conspiracy theory."

Joscha Bach on X - "Yes, it's mindblowing how the sciences squandered trust and status by needlessly giving up their neutrality, objectivity and truth seeking, while recklessly embracing capture by partisan ideologies. No authoritarian government forced them to do this."
nic carter on X - "shouldn't have tried to convince us that men can be women, children can change gender if you sterilize them, the vaccine is safe and effective, and covid was zoonotic in origin. 0/10 do better next time"
Armed Liberal on X - "When science explained there were 16 genders, and that assembling for grandma’s funeral was going to kill us all but thousands gathering in the streets for George Floyd was healthy…science may have had something to do with that."
ralphellis on X - "@simonmaechling What do you expect? If you lie about the climate. If you lie about the environment. If you lie about CO2. If you lie about the origins of covid. If you lie about masks. If you lie about lockdowns. If you lie about myocarditis. If you lie about ivermectin. If you lie about excess deaths. If you lie about Unreliables for electricity. If you lie about their cost. If you lie about stored backup. NOBODY WILL BELIEVE YOU ANYMORE. Ralph"

3 sentenced after bear costume used in $142K luxury car insurance scam - "Three people in California have been sentenced for insurance fraud in a bizarre scam that involved someone dressed in a bear costume damaging luxury cars. The California Insurance Department said the three used a person in a bear suit to stage fake attacks inside a Rolls-Royce and two Mercedes in 2024, then submitted fraudulent claims seeking nearly $142,000 in payouts from insurance companies. The department called it “Operation Bear Claw.”"

Employees: Too Ugly to Hire, or a Must Fire? - "Maybe ugliness is considered intentional by way of excessive tattoos, facial piercings and those big corks people put in their ears. Perhaps ugliness is unintentional. In any event, if a prospective employer does not hire you and states that it’s because you are ugly, is that a form of discrimination? The short answer is “no.” In Canada and British Columbia, there is no legislative prohibition against not hiring a person based on appearance alone. Moreover, potential legal action on behalf of the unattractive could be very complicated. One complication is that ugly people usually do not identify as such. There are no, or perhaps very few, ugly people groups, associations or clubs. Unlike other groups of people such as men, women or Catholics, ugly people have a problem identifying as ugly. Another complication is that people, being diverse and unique individuals, perceive beauty and ugliness differently. Our society places an undeniable emphasis on the value of physical beauty. We commonly associate physical traits with perceived correlating qualities or characteristics. Attractiveness is perceived to correspond with attributes such as virtue, integrity, intelligence, sensitivity, kindness, and honesty, whereas ugliness or obesity corresponds with perceptions of laziness, lack of discipline, incompetence, lack of productivity, and slovenliness. This attribution process is legally and socially acceptable. Employers use appearance traits as indicators of employee worth or qualification. In fact, from an economic perspective, some argue appearance is a valid indicator of productivity, to the extent that productivity is measured by personal, customer, or co-worker satisfaction. Employers generally retain discretion to consider whatever factors they deem important in their employment decisions. Employers routinely acknowledge the importance of an attractive appearance in employee selection. Given the immediate visibility of physical attributes, grooming, and attire, one’s appearance often constitutes an employer’s first impression of an applicant’s employability. Further, an employer can regulate and/or prohibit, as a term of the employment, dress codes, grooming standards, hair length, hairstyle, uniforms, jewellery, and visibility of body piercings and tattoos, and an employer can regulate other appearance-based requirements, unless such regulation is in contravention of the BC Human Rights Code and is based on one of the prohibited discriminatory grounds. In sum, unless you can connect your looks with your race, colour, ancestry, place of origin, political belief, religion, marital status, family status, physical or mental disability, sex, sexual orientation, age, or a criminal conviction that is unrelated to the employment as a basis of the discrimination, then you may be discriminated against based on your looks. Often, people who are overweight will commence a claim regarding a breach of the Human Rights Code based on “disability.” Perhaps one could even argue that ugliness is a physical disability; however, you would then have to admit you’re ugly, which no one wants to do."

Meme - "The people employed to get rid of a problem will always try to preserve that problem"
This explains homelessness non-profits and the rest of the homeless-industrial complex etc

Why Higher Ed Won’t Look Itself in the Mirror

2026-06-03T18:24:00.000+08:00

When left wingers use the term "Critical", they mean "Critical Theory", not "Critical Thinking":

Opinion | Why Higher Ed Won’t Look Itself in the Mirror

"I traveled to Washington for a meeting of American education scholars. The opening panel focused — appropriately enough — on Trump’s threats to university funding, free speech on campus, and more. Then it was time for questions, and I raised my hand. I said that I agreed with all the critiques of Trump, but I also wondered what those of us who work in higher education might have done — or not done — to bring about this awful moment. Could we use it to look in the mirror, I asked, and not just to circle the wagons?

Dead silence. Then another member of the audience spoke up. “I just wanted to say that I was deeply offended by Professor Zimmerman’s use of the term ‘circle the wagons,’ which connotes a hateful history of Native American displacement and genocide,” she said, as I remember it. More awkward silence. Finally, the moderator of the panel interjected with something along the lines of: “Thank you for reminding us that we need to be careful in the language that we use to describe others.” So the panel began with a diatribe about Donald Trump’s assault on free speech and it concluded with a warning to watch our words.

For the past 75 years, academics have been telling a story about how we enhance democratic dialogue and understanding. Yet we don’t really believe it. If we did, the moderator would have asked the objecting scholar to say more about why she bridled at my phraseology. Then the moderator would have asked me to reply, and eventually we might have gotten around to the substance of my question, which concerned the delicate matter of what degree of introspection, what sort of critical self-examination, might be required of professors and teachers amid the current crisis. None of that happened, of course. The moderator drew the panel to a moralistic and satisfyingly evasive close, and we all went out to lunch.

“Out to lunch” is where much of higher education is — oblivious about how we got here and how we might change course. Yes, Trump represents a dagger at our heart; and yes, we must join hands to resist him. But long before he came to power, growing numbers of Americans — and not just Republicans — were starting to see higher education as something of a scam. We charge ever-higher sticker prices for degrees of increasingly dubious worth, even as we proclaim our commitment to the public good. To make good on that ideal, we cannot simply circle the wagons. We need to look in the mirror...

Truman received a pair of high-profile reports that defined the contours of American higher education for the next half a century. The first, Science: The Endless Frontier, called on the federal government to subsidize university research that would improve Americans’ health, national security, and standard of living. The second, Higher Education for American Democracy, urged the government to help people attend college. That would create a more equal society, as well as a more virtuous one: Bringing greater numbers of students into higher education, it would also foster the skills and the understanding that good citizenship demanded.

Universities would receive considerable autonomy in deciding how to use federal dollars and in exchange they would provide the technical know-how and the democratic spirit to sustain the nation. Education scholars call this the “academic social contract.”...

When did the contract start to unravel? One common story links it to the student demonstrations and social upheavals of the 1960s, which soured taxpayers — especially those on the right — against higher education. Ronald Reagan won the governorship of California in 1966 by pledging to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” which had exploded in protest two years earlier. (He also railed against campus “hippies,” whom Reagan famously described as “someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.”) Yet tuition remained free for in-state students until 1970, when California instituted a nominal $150 fee. The big nationwide tuition increases did not kick in until the 1980s, as state legislatures started to slash their higher-education budgets. After Reagan ascended to the White House, the federal government reduced student aid by 25 percent over five years.

Yet the universities were backtracking on their side of the bargain, too. Despite the Truman-era promise to educate young people for democracy, universities eliminated core courses designed to introduce students to the liberal traditions of Western thought; in some quarters the West itself was imagined as a source of oppression rather than liberation. Colleges also cut back on distribution requirements, which had forced students to take classes in a wide range of disciplines in what used to be described as “Gen Ed.” Now each student would choose their curricular adventure: They were paying their own way, so they also got to select their own courses.

At the same time, higher education created systems that rewarded faculty research and downgraded undergraduate instruction. Any professorial effort in the classroom meant less time in the laboratory or the library, where careers were won or lost. That was already apparent in 1947, when the Higher Education for American Democracy report called on professors across the disciplines to teach and model the habits of democracy...

The report also demanded that every professor receive rigorous training in how to teach... most professors still receive almost no formal preparation for these tasks. To get a Ph.D., you must spend six to eight years mastering a field and making an original contribution to it. But at the University of Pennsylvania, where I work, teaching assistants receive three days of training before they are thrown to the undergraduate wolves.

Professors cannot fulfill their obligations to their students — and to our democracy — if they are not deeply committed to educating them. That means exposing them to a wide range of ideas, which was once the heart of the liberal ideal. But no longer. In a recent study, the political scientist Jon A. Shields and two colleagues surveyed course syllabi to see if professors who assigned Edward Said’s Orientalism also asked students to read Ian Buruma’s and Avishai Margalit’s Occidentalism or other critiques of Said. They also looked to see whether teachers teaching The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s now-canonical account of racism in criminal justice, also assigned scholars who took issue with Alexander, such as the Yale Law School professor James Forman Jr. or the Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey. Shields’ conclusion was sad and altogether predictable: These kinds of pairings, these efforts at fairness and complication, are extremely rare.

Despite our rhetorical commitment to “critical thinking,” we typically present one side of an issue — the left-wing side, almost always — and call it a day. Such a practice is not simply a reflection of political bias, although it is surely that. It is also a mark of bad teaching.

Professors generally refuse to admit any of this, which compounds the problem. We are like little children who close their eyes in the hopes that nobody can see them. That was apparent during the fateful testimony by three college presidents in December 2023 before a congressional committee investigating antisemitism on campuses following the Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. Asked whether calls for genocide would be protected speech, the presidents answered — correctly — that it depends on the context.

But here is what they did not say: Universities have not defended this principle consistently. At Harvard, for example, the eminent evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven was effectively pushed out for saying that there are a multiplicity of genders but only two sexes: male and female. “In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Harvard president Claudine Gay was asked. She replied that Harvard supports “constructive dialogue, even on the most complex and divisive issues.” The Hooven episode proved the opposite, of course.

When Gay was asked whether Harvard prepared its professors to engage students in that dialogue, she dissembled still further. “We devote significant resources to training our faculty in that pedagogical skill and prioritizing that in our recruiting and hiring,” she said. Really? I have been a professor for three decades, and I have never seen a hiring decision or a tenure decision that hinged on teaching ability or accomplishments. Nor have I witnessed any required pedagogical training for faculty.

We all have Centers on Teaching and Learning, which began in the 1960s in response to student protests about poor instruction. But the centers cannot force anyone to participate in their programming, and they certainly cannot reward good teachers or penalize bad ones. If we truly valued teaching, we wouldn’t need a separate unit of the university that was devoted to it. Designed to elevate instruction, the centers demonstrate our low estimation of it. Ditto for teaching awards, another legacy of the 1960s: Everyone knows you can make more money by finishing your book — and getting promoted to the next salary rung — than you can via a one-off prize...

I am also mortified that our own institutions have done such a poor job in upholding the values that Trump is undermining. The big question is whether we can rediscover them, and how.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Most of my colleagues aren’t there yet. The trauma of Trump is too fresh, too raw, too painful. When a group is under attack, its initial impulse will be to defend itself. Thus, everything our team says is right and everything the other team says is wrong. Mocking the idea that universities are biased against conservatives, the American Association of University Professors — our most august academic organization — recently posted that “fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review.” In other words: The reason we have so few Republican professors is because they are brownshirts in disguise. We do not have to engage or debate them; indeed, we must not engage or debate them.

As an analysis of the views of people with whom liberals disagree, this is shameful. Our interlocutors may be wrong, but that does not make them evil. And this kind of condescending dismissal is also a terrific way to avoid the hard questions about our own complicity in the degradation of the university...

We know that growing numbers of Americans have lost faith in us. And so we tell ourselves that they are racist, or anti-intellectual, or so blinded by the Trump cult that they cannot see how good we really are. And we imagine that anyone who doubts us must be on his side. This is what conservatives mean when they talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome: It prevents us from thinking straight. It is a cognitive impairment nearly as obscene as Trump himself. But surely we can circle the wagons against him while continuing to look at ourselves in the mirror. Or maybe not so surely — but we must try...

The big problem in higher education is not our scientific-research apparatus, which was the envy of the world before Trump took a sledgehammer to it. It is our abandonment of the ideal that propelled us to build up universities in the first place: the cultivation of citizens. Students come to college for all kinds of reasons: to have fun, to get a job, to find a mate. But they generally do not come here to become better citizens in a democracy, as the report to Truman envisioned they would.

What would it mean to reconstitute our universities around that goal? Several universities — including my own — are developing new core courses for first-year students that explore the history and the challenges of democratic government, alongside other fundamental themes in the humanities. Other institutions have established programs around civic engagement and “dialogue across difference,” which has become something of a cliché at the Trump-era university. And over 100 academic leaders — calling themselves College Presidents for Civic Preparedness — have partnered with the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation) to create new classes and other campus initiatives to “prepare the next generation of well-informed, productively engaged, and committed citizens.” This is all fine and good — indeed, it is great — but it also feels a bit like our Centers for Teaching and Learning: If we embraced our civic purpose fully and honestly, we would not need to create special courses and initiatives to enhance it.

Nor would we need separate schools of civic thought...

There is no organization called College Presidents for Teaching Preparedness, because we do not prepare people to teach in our colleges. That needs to change if we want to make good on our democratic charge. Every department that produces new faculty members should have a set of required courses devoted to the instruction of that discipline. And every professor’s teaching — like their research — should be judged by their peers. Student evaluations are important, but they are not enough. I have taught at Penn for nine years, and nobody has observed me in the classroom. I could be doing anything — or nothing.

We also need a set of institutional rankings around teaching, so that students and their families can make informed choices about where to go to college. When we survey Americans and ask them what makes for a good university, they’ll often point to teaching quality. But there is no way for them to know which institutions promote teaching excellence in their classrooms. It is wonderful that many colleges are reviving their curricula to address citizenship and democracy, but without skilled and informed teachers, curricula alone are unlikely to make much of a difference.

Effective teaching resembles a workable democracy in that it is premised on free and open exchange. And if you think we have protected and nourished that value at our colleges and universities, you haven’t been paying attention. The current academic culture of fear, timidity, and conformity is inimical to both education and democracy. Trump has ramped up that fear, but he certainly did not create it. We created it. It is up to us, therefore, to undo it."

Links - 3rd June 2026 (2 - 2024 & 2026 Olympics)

2026-06-03T15:54:00.000+08:00

Meme - Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens: "Truly incredible things are happening on Reddit. Generational crashout. The plucky rebels were supposed to defeat the evil empire, and now they don’t know what to do."
Melissa C... @MsMel...: "Feel like bringing up Epstein is the only way for them to feel better about themselves"
"USA winning the sports ball competition is just the thing to make the drones forget about that whole zero arrests being made regarding the Epstein clients."
Rick Fox @rickhfox: "Losing game makes me want to drink blood from a skull.""
hoser1: "Well, at least our prime minister isn't a pedophile"
Neuraxis: "~~small~~ massive victories"
Full_Hunt_3087: "A win for a unifying democratic country Canada would have been like finding an extra chicken nugget as a kid, a nice but deserved extra surprise. A win for the United States, a country run by pedophiles, is more like giving a participation medal to a kid who will brag about it to all of his friends and pretend he's the best in the world. Giving them way more satisfaction proportionately than it should, because they need that superficial satisfaction."
PauseJazzlike6819: *laughs* *showing the finger* *medals* *Eagle* *US flags* (-11 karma)
Full_Hunt_3087: "Good for you, champ. Have a cookie!"
Meme - usernamedmannequin: "I cannot fathom how bad of a mood I'm in right now and I can't even process my emotions right now. I feel ready to die in fight to the death for my country like never before and I don't understand how a fucking hockey game did this to me."
Lampadaire345: "That's because that game was symbolic of our National Unity and struggle to be seperate from those fascists down South. Winning would have been a show that we stand together and that we are not backing down or getting pushed aside by their bloodthirsty empire, and that we strike back against bullies. Although symbolic, it was much more important to us than most people in the USA who are ignorant enough to actually support their war seeking president."
usernamedmannequin: "The men's and women's both lost to the USA and I swear if Trump says a fucking word about it (which he will) nothing will satisfy me besides drinking the blood of my enemies from the skull of my fallen enemies. (I'm a tad bit fired up bud)"
Left wingers have awful sportsmanship

🖤 Christine on X - "To be clear, I don’t hate Eileen Gu. She was born and raised in America. Her Chinese mom embraced capitalism when her daughter was 15 and set her up for a comfortable life. This is actually a version of the American dream too. Even if people feel a certain way about it. As an adult with full agency, Eileen continues to choose China because it remains financially lucrative. That’s fine. But choices have consequences. She's smart. She has a script. But that script isn't working anymore. The willful ignorance and “weight of two countries” “build my own pond” act worked better when she was a naive teenager. As an international relations major at Stanford, come on. This coming from a former international relations major from BU. The reality is, she has taken money from the Chinese government and the brand sponsorship benefits that come with it. That comes with strings attached. One of them is not being able to openly criticize China. She can criticize her own country (she’s likely still a U.S. citizen). But she can’t criticize China for the same reason anyone with family or financial ties to China can’t. If you do your access to China gets cut off and the risk and retaliation is real. Eileen can’t comment on human rights issues in China. She can’t comment on her Chinese citizenship status even though China doesn’t allow dual citizenship. She can’t comment on transnational repression of Chinese dissidents overseas. She has to pretend that doesn’t exist. Don’t ask her about why her mom was able to cheer her on at the Beijing Olympics in 2022 while Alysa Liu’s dad wasn’t able to because he’s a Chinese dissident. She has to pretend she knows nothing about any of that. Don’t ask her what she thinks of a fellow Bay Area gold medalist being targeted by the same government that made her a multimillionaire. Don’t expect the China experts to weigh in on any of this either. There are conditions to keeping their visa valid and their access to China open. Being openly critical of the U.S. is encouraged and so is gaslighting everyone who is critical of China. It is what it is."

Eileen Gu and Chinese nationality law - "Let’s establish two factual premises first.
(1) Eileen Gu has not renounced her US citizenship and remains one. Does anyone seriously believe that Eileen Gu has renounced her US citizenship? Not only is it virtually inconceivable even in the abstract, but are we supposed to think she’s at Stanford on a student visa? That would severely limit her ability to earn money in the US; she would only be allowed to take on-campus jobs. Nor has her name shown up on the State Department’s periodic lists of people who have renounced their citizenship. (See immigration lawyer Gary Chodorow’s blog post on this.)
(2) Eileen Gu has been given Chinese citizenship by the Chinese government, and possesses a Chinese passport. The International Olympic Committee said that Gu acquired Chinese nationality in 2019 and confirmed that they had seen her Chinese passport both to Emily Feng of NPR and to Lizzi Lee...
the Chinese authorities have clearly decided that they are not bound by the rules of the Nationality Law, and can therefore issue a passport to whomever they please if they deem it expedient to do so. And they have the actual, unchallengeable power to do so. It is important to remember this important feature of China’s legal system when evaluating claims about what the Chinese government can and cannot do under its own law.

Meme - "What people think Nietzsche's idea of Ubermensch is: *Gigachad*
What it actually is: *Alysa Liu happily skating*"

Often unseen, flower kids help keep the Olympic figure skating flowing - The Globe and Mail - "Their official title is ‘flower kid’ and their moment starts as soon as the music ends. In figure skating, it is customary for fans to throw gifts on the ice for skaters after a performance, but this show of appreciation can slow down the whole event and cause tripping hazards if anything is missed. That’s where the flower kids come in and you’ll see them in the background each night here in Milan. At the end of a skate, as stuffed animals and the occasional wrapped bouquet rain down from the stands, half-a-dozen little kids in matching blue-and-pink zip-ups bolt onto the ice, grab the goods, and get off again before the marks are announced and the next performance is set to start. When a new teddy bear hits the surface, another one sprint-skates into the rotation... Capasso is from Turin. She is one of 30 young figure skaters – aged 8 through 12 – from across Italy who were selected to be the flower kids during the Milan Cortina Olympic figure-skating events. For any skating competition, they’re an integral part of the event as they keep the program going and the skaters safe from debris on the ice. And for the dozens of kids chosen, it’s the chance of a lifetime to have front-row seats to the best skating in the world... And this isn’t the flower kids’ only job. They can also be spotted during the ice resurfacing, performing seated choreography to the intermission music."

How Israel’s strategy made seven Olympic medals normal - "Israel understood that to improve its Olympic achievements it needed to consider its size and relative strength. To that end, five sports were chosen to receive excess funding: athletics, gymnastics, swimming, sailing, and, of course, judo. The Olympic Committee of Israel understood that the state budget alone couldn’t provide for the professional development needed to compete with leading teams, so partnerships were developed with 11 businesses, including Bank Hapoalim, Arkia, and Shufersal. A scientific-medical support system – employing 110 people – was developed to provide athletes full support in nutrition, medicine, therapy, and data analysis. It was also decided to offer significant financial rewards to winning athletes: NIS500,000 for a bronze medal, NIS750,000 for a silver, and NIS 1 million for a gold – all tax-free. This has positioned Israel as a world leader in rewarding its athletes. However, pouring money into the Olympic effort isn’t the only solution. Singapore, for example, tops the list of rewarding countries with a grant of NIS 2.7 million for gold medalists but had to settle for a single bronze medal in Paris. The real difference lies in a combination of professional leadership, long-term planning ability, early investment in talents, significant development budgets, and a population large enough to supply the best athletes... if we zoom out, it’s evident that Israel’s achievement in Paris was statistically normal and reflected a result that matches its population, size, and resources. When Israel won a silver and a bronze medal in 1992, it had only half its current population (5.1 million), and its GDP per capita was significantly lower. Those medals were a huge achievement. Seven medals for Israel 2024 were what is now expected. However, looking at other countries with similar population sizes, it’s clear there’s still room for improvement"

Meme *Sad guy Happy guy bus*
"ASS-MEN DURING OLYMPICS
TITS-MEN DURING OLYMPICS"

Noah Lyles was selfish to run Olympic 200m with COVID. But he's not alone - "they all look for an edge, the proprietary one or two per cent they believe makes the difference between contender and also-ran. In Lyles’ case, it meant staying mum for two days about a positive test for COVID, lest he let his competitors in Thursday’s 200-metre final know about the condition his condition was in... Tebogo, incidentally, was asked if he was ready to be the face of track and field. “I can’t be the face of athletics because I’m not an arrogant or a loud person like Noah Lyles, so I believe Noah is the face of athletics.”"

TracingWoodgrains on X - "It's incredibly dumb that I've wound up so fixated on this example, but this story has driven me mad from the first moment I saw it and the madness compels me to write. I call it "The story of Imane Khelif and the lying liars who lie." Let's start with a bare-bones rendition of the facts:
1. At the 2024 olympics, Imane Khelif won gold in women's boxing.
2. She was raised as a woman.
3. After challenges, she took several tests, one of which led to her disqualification from the 2023 women's world boxing championships
4. The IBA maintains she has XY chromosomes; her trainer said she had a problem with her hormones and chromosomes; independent journalists report seeing multiple independent tests that indicate XY chromosomes.
5. The IOC president, when addressing calls for her disqualification, explicitly walked back remarks that it "was not a DSD issue" to clarify that he meant it "was not a trans issue."
6. One journalist has leaked alleged lab results indicating an intersex condition.
All of these point in one extremely clear Occam's Razor direction: she has an intersex condition involving XY chromosomes and elevated levels of testosterone as a result. She is genotypically male, phenotypically androgenous/female, and was raised as a woman. All of that should be reasonably straightforward. But because it's a culture war issue, a thousand lying liars who lie have descended and stripped any semblance of sanity from the conversation around her. Here's the problem: there are a lot of nasty, aggressive arguments around trans issues with a lot of people who bitterly hate each other. This is tangentially related to trans issues. So if one side says something, for the other side, they have to be wrong. And lying liars who lie will find any possible way to make it so. Snopes is the best example, because it is at least facially honest. You can get the full story from it, which is more than you can say for other sources. But watch what it does: while none of the facts are in dispute, it fixates on specific wording choices to create a sense that Something Is Wrong. Watch as it confirms the core details of the story, then immediately pivots into "not necessarily":
"According to the alleged medical files produced by Ait Aoudia, Khelif had testosterone levels that well exceeded that of a typical female and, upon examination, lacked ovaries and had internal gonads. Such a person might be considered chromosomally male, but that does not necessarily mean they are accurately or conclusively described as biologically male."
Snopes highlights wording from the reporting it wants to dispute:
"Results? The pelvic MRI shows "an absence of a uterus," the presence of "gonads in the inguinal canals" (testicles in her abdomen, editor's note), "a blind vagina" and a micro-penis in the form of "clitoral hypertrophy"."
How does Snopes dispute this wording? Again, "not necessarily:"
"Describing undeveloped internal gonads as testes is a scientific conclusion inserted by Ait Aoudia. DSDs can sometimes cause ambiguous gonads with both ovarian and testicular tissues. Clitoral hypertrophy — an enlarged clitoris — is not necessarily the same thing as having a micropenis."
It's not arguing the facts. It's not disputing anything concrete. It's playing definition games, quibbling over the edges. The whole dispute is like this. Some people falsely said Khelif is trans, so rather than focusing on the intersex claim, lying liars who lie clamor to Debunk the trans claim. The journalists who reported the details and noted having seen the report were from relatively small organizations, so lying liars who lie clamor to emphasize Unverified without substantive counters. The athletic association who disqualified Khelif had a falling out with the IOC, so lying liars who lie emphasize that it has ties to Russia and claim (falsely) that the disqualification came after Khelif defeated a previously undefeated Russian boxer. Khelif was raised as a woman, so when people who use chromosomes as their definition for "man" call her a man, lying liars who lie act like those people are fundamentally confused instead of operating from a different definition. Everybody who has paid attention knows the facts I outline at the head of this. There is no serious dispute around them. But lying liars who lie insist, on Wikipedia, around Twitter, and anywhere this conversation is brought up, on litigating every minor detail they can find, anything not conclusively and unambiguously admitted by parties they have no choice but to trust. They don't have serious counterpoints. They don't have serious counterevidence. They don't have, really, any reason at all to think she is anything other than the intersex athlete all signs point towards her being, but lying liars who lie are paying attention and arguing only to the extent they can use arguments as a weapon to ensure The Other Side doesn't score points, and as far as they are concerned they will go to their graves lying about it.
Anyway. I was reminded of all of this because @jimmy_wales wanted examples of Wikipedia pages that have been protected for bad reasons, and this page was protected because lying liars who lie are dead-set on ensuring that everyone who reads Khelif's Wikipedia page comes away thinking she's very likely not intersex and all attention on her was baseless. It's stupid that I know about this story. It's stupid that I think about it. It is stupid that thousands of lying liars who lie have become so invested in promoting a stupid lie at all costs that they will only acknowledge the facts of the case under extreme duress, and will instead spend countless hours quibbling over absolute nonsense. I have nothing against Khelif, and on a personal level I have sympathy for what it's like to be at the middle of a firestorm of attention. I don't think people should attack her or make anything personal, and I absolutely understand impulses to defend against anti-trans sentiment or to stand up for someone in the middle of a firestorm. But I am beyond sick of lying liars who lie creating fake, pedantic, quibbling arguments with purely instrumental standards that adapt on the fly to whatever points they think they might be able to turn into contested territory, just because they would rather kick and scream and lie than admit that their opponents were ever right about any factual claim, ever, at all, ever. ...ok, I think that's it. Blech."

Honest Sabe on X - "The gait really says it all."
Billy Bragg on X - "Trying very hard not to judge Imane Khelif on looks, walk, or the fact that he's the only "woman" not wearing hijab....trying very, very hard...."

'Khelif is a man': Former sparring partner's shocking claims on Olympic champion boxer, says ‘has some kind of…' - "Joana Nwamerue, who fought against Imane Khelif during a sparring match in Bulgaria, has made shocking claims about the Olympic champion boxer who faced intense scrutiny over her biological sex and gender identity. Nwamerue, Bulgarian-Nigerian woman boxer, has claimed that (Khelif) has some kind of internal issues, but he is a man. “I will stay [by] my words until he/she does a test to prove to the world that he/she is a woman. But we all know that won’t happen,” reported Reduxx quoting Nwamerue. Stating that she played 3-4 sparring sessions, Nwamerue said, "(I) can confirm that this (Khelif) is a man to her. ‘Male power. Men’s techniques, everything’.” The Bulgarian-Nigerian boxer also claimed that [Khelif’s] teammates came to her and told her “Imane is not a man. She is a woman and just lives high in the mountains with her relatives and parents and so there may be a change in her testosterone or chromosomes and the like.”"

Huge row after Imane Khelif, Paris Olympics gold medalist, confirmed as man in leaked medical report - "In a surprising turn of events, the gender identification of Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who just won gold in women's boxing at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, has come under scrutiny due to a leaked medical report. According to the document, which French journalist Djaffar Ait Aoudia was able to secure, Khelif has internal testicles and XY chromosomes, hinting at a disorder called 5-alpha reductase insufficiency. Experts from the Kremlin-Bicêtre Hospital in Paris and the Mohamed Lamine Debaghine Hospital in Algiers drafted the report in June 2023. The report describes Khelif's biological traits, such as the existence of internal testicles and the lack of a uterus. Additionally, an MRI revealed the presence of a micropenis... A chromosomal test reportedly confirmed that Khelif has an XY karyotype and a hormone test revealed Khelif's level to be that typical of males. Khelif's reported sexual development deficiency causes babies to be incorrectly assigned female due to the presence of deformed genitalia, according to Reduxx. The disorder typically becomes apparent by puberty. The report of an XY karyotype aligns with not only the IBA's findings before disqualifying Khelif from the 2023 Women's World Boxing Championships, but also that of Alan Abrahamson, an associate professor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism who said that he had viewed the results from tests administered by the IBA."
Weird. We kept being told that it had been proven that she was a woman and claims to the contrary were "Russia disinformation", even though even her coach admitted she had been found to be a man
Time for the left wing gaslighting to start again
One of the strangest original copes was that she couldn't be a man because it was illegal to be trans in Algeria. By that logic, crime doesn't exist anywhere in the world because crime is illegal everywhere

Blinded by ideology: Inside boxing row that tarnished Olympics - "It was a telephone call to Dr Emma Hilton, the developmental biologist whose work illuminates why sex matters in sport, that gave a first inkling as to the freight train hurtling down the tracks. Given her research had illustrated the average man could punch 162 per cent harder than a woman, I had wanted to establish what, to put it bluntly, the International Olympic Committee was playing at by allowing two biologically male boxers into the female category. “They are trying to balance fairness, inclusion and safety,” she said. “But safety isn’t about balance. Safety is a cut-off. If it’s not safe, nobody cares if it’s fair or inclusive. You can’t do it.”... Dr Hilton’s warning of the danger came on Monday, July 29. But far from heeding it, the IOC did nothing. Almost two weeks on, its inertia and flat denial of science has enabled both Khelif and Lin to sweep to Olympic titles, each achieved with four lopsided victories. Mired in politics and blinded by ideology, it has presided over the perfect storm of a scandal. “They are women”: this, all along, was president Thomas Bach’s incantation about Khelif and Lin, which is what they consider themselves to be. And yet he still cannot even present a persuasive definition of what a woman is. To Bach and his IOC acolytes, in hock to a belief that your sex is whatever you say it is, womanhood can be determined by passport status. Except athletes do not compete at the Olympics using legal documents or self-declared gender identities. They compete using their bodies, with their capabilities governed by the immutable laws of human biology... The major sports are all controlled here by federations that have seen sense, prioritising fairness by ring-fencing the female category for biological women. Athletics acted in response to seeing three athletes with differences in sexual development on the women’s 800 metres podium at Rio 2016. Swimming understood it had a problem when Lia Thomas went from being the 554th-ranked male in the United States to winning a national collegiate title as a female. Cycling was forced to draw a line when Austin Killips, a post-puberty male, won a UCI stage race for women. But boxing, the most perilous sport at the Olympics, has been left at the mercy of the IOC, the most ideologically captured body of all. It saw no issue in sending Angela Carini into the ring to face Khelif, only for the Italian to be dismantled inside 46 seconds by punches so hard she said she feared for her life. It was not just because it disputed the IBA’s findings, but because it believed the Algerian should never have been tested at all. Its much-vaunted eligibility “framework” is rights-led rather than scientific. This means, in essence, that it is prepared to ignore anything to do with Khelif’s chromosomes. All that matters is being perceived not to discriminate... It is worth studying the precise details of the IBA letter describing the tests carried out on the boxers. Summarising the results as “abnormal”, it declares: “Chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype.” It also includes imaging, for each athlete, of an X and a Y chromosome, highlighting that the tests were conducted at a Delhi laboratory certified by the Swiss-based International Organisation for Standardisation. But still the IOC maintains that the results are “arbitary”, not worth the paper they are written on. The only possible conclusion is that the IOC simply does not want to listen, that it is more interested in burnishing its credentials as “inclusive” than in upholding what is fair. It is no wonder that Bach wanted to be nowhere near the boxers’ gold-medal presentations, instead delegating Khelif’s victory ceremony to Mustapha Berraf of Algeria, one of his arch-loyalists. He has, frankly, made himself foolish on this issue. He had been warned for six years that a story such as this could explode if the IOC did not draw clearer boundaries, but still he refused to react. Despite the IBA claiming that the fighters have been tested twice and that they are male, Bach insists there is no scientific means of discovering who is female. Now, not before time, he has agreed to step aside next year, his credibility severely damaged by his handling of the controversy. It marks the dramatic culmination of a quite extraordinary episode. In the space of a single Games, the IOC has done nothing less than distort biological truth in a sport fraught with physical risk. In the eyes of many women, there could scarcely be a greater dereliction."

The IOC's shameful worship at the altar of trans virtue-signaling will get women killed - "any confusion about Khelif’s biology was clarified by this report, a full year before the Paris Olympics. And the IOC knew it. So why did it still permit Khelif to compete against, and beat — in every sense — women? The answer is cowardice. It was terrified of offending the woke mob, who viciously mobilize against anyone who dares to stand up to this transgender athlete nonsense. Indeed, such was its fear that the IOC hasn’t submitted athletes to chromosomal testing since 1999 and its only requirement for participation at the Paris Olympics in women’s boxing was to have a female sex marker on legal documents. In other words, you just say you’re a woman on a form and bingo, you’re fighting against women — even if, like Khelif, you’re a man... The one thing that never happens in this debate is accountability, despite the mounting evidence that it’s rapidly destroying the integrity of women’s sports. The United Nations recently revealed that a staggering 900 medals have been robbed from women by trans athletes around the world, in 29 different sports. This is a disgusting, systematic global abuse of women’s rights... In boxing, separating the sexes is even more important because lives may be at stake. Kamala Harris has no problem with any of this, which makes a mockery of her claim to be the only presidential candidate who stands up for women’s rights. In fact, it’s Donald Trump who got it right when he said all trans women athletes should be banned from competing in women’s sports."

i/o on X - "I've noticed that certain events at the Olympics tend to contain a distribution of physical attractiveness among participants that's more favorable than what you'd expect to see in the general population. (The men's decathlon and women' high jump come to mind). Does anyone know if this sort of phenomenon has ever been studied? (I vaguely recall that the attractiveness of NFL quarterbacks may have once been the subject of a scientific paper.)"

A CNN reporter, a BBC reporter, and an Israeli commando

2026-06-03T12:57:00.000+08:00

Hank Campbell on X

A CNN reporter, a BBC reporter, and an Israeli commando are captured by Hamas in Gaza. The leader of the terrorists said he'd grant them each one last request before they were beheaded. The CNN Reporter said, "I’d like one last hamburger with fries.” The leader nodded and said it would be done. The BBC Reporter said, "I want to describe the scene here and what’s about to happen so my government knows I did the job until the end.” The leader nodded and said it would be done. Then he turned to the Israeli commando and said, “And what is your final wish?” “Kick me in the butt,” said the soldier. “Do not mock me, Jew.” “I’m not kidding. I want you to kick me in the butt.” So the terrorist leader shoved him into the open and kicked him in the behind. The soldier went sprawling but rolled to his knees, pulled a pistol they hadn't found, and shot the leader dead. Then he grabbed a rifle from another terrorist and suddenly they were all dead or fleeing. "You could've done that all along?" asked the Brit. "Yeah, why did you want to be kicked in the butt?" asked the American. “If I hadn't," replied the Israeli, “You two would have reported that I was the aggressor."

Related (in comments):

A man in France sees a dog attacking a child so he runs to help and kills the dog to save the child. People surround him to shake his hand and the media goes to interview him.

Reporter: I can see the headline now, French man saves child from vicious dog.

Man: That's nice but I'm not French.

Reporter: ok so European man saves child from vicious dog.

Man: I'm not European either.

Reporter: So where are you from?

Man: Israel

Next days headline: Vicious Jew kills family pet.

Links - 3rd June 2026 (1 - Palestine/Middle East Peace)

2026-06-03T09:52:00.000+08:00

Palestinian prisoners emerge wealthy men thanks to Palestinian Authority payments | The Australian - "A five-star Cairo hotel has removed 150 Palestinian guests after it was revealed they had been released from Israeli jails in exchange for Hamas hostages, and included members of the militant organisation... BA crew were shocked to learn of their fellow guests’ identities, with some considering barricading their doors for safety. The militants were removed to a remote, secure facility an hour from the city with strict limitations on excursions into the city. The furore came as it was also revealed more than half the Palestinian prisoners freed in exchange for Israeli hostages have become instant millionaires, thanks to years of payments from the Palestinian Authority. Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Hirsch, a former military prosecutor and a researcher at the Jerusalem Centre for Security and Foreign Affairs think tank, told Israeli media 160 of the 250 terrorists released in the deal – including Hamas militants – are rich men thanks to monthly payments of roughly 8,000 shekels (AUD$3450) over many years. “The Palestinian Authority rewards our child murderers with hundreds of millions of shekels annually, exactly as a prize for their participation in terror,” Lieutenant Colonel Hirsch told the Israel Hayom newspaper. “The payments accumulate to millions and they leave prison for a life of prosperity – not remorse.” Israel’s Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa’ar, accused the Palestinian Authority of continuing to pay salaries to prisoners, despite claiming to have ended the controversial “pay to slay” program that critics said incentivised terror attacks against Israel... Mr Sa’ar said the Palestinian Authority had not stopped paying Palestinian prisoners and Hamas operatives but had only changed its payment methods so the operatives did not receive the money directly. Speaking in Hungary, Mr Sa’ar told reporters: “Contrary to the Palestinian Authority’s promises in English, the PA continues its policy of paying salaries to terrorists. “The PA pays salaries to terrorists and their family members for murdering Jews and Israelis according to their law from 2004 until this very day. The PA rewards Palestinian terrorists, including Hamas operatives, who have Jewish blood on their hands – both those sitting in prison and those released in the latest deal. “The PA never stopped paying salaries to terrorists – the PA only changed its method. Terrorists now receive the money from Palestinian postal branches. The PA even makes additional payments to terrorists released under the agreement.” Mr Sa’ar accused the European Union of encouraging terrorism by ignoring the payments... Lieutenant Colonel Hirsch, who is also an adviser to Israel’s Ministry of Defence, said Israel was partly responsible for the large payments due to agreements under the Oslo Accords. “Out of every 100 shekels the PA pays terrorists, 65 come from us – from the VAT and income taxes we transfer to the PA under the Oslo Accords. We are literally funding the murder of our children,” he said. “A terrorist murderer knows he won’t die in prison, but will exit to a good life with an inflated bank account. The time has come to cut off this money pipeline once and for all.” A former Israeli intelligence officer told the Mail some of the men staying in Egypt would be free to move on to Qatar, Turkey and Tunisia. “There are no restrictions on their movements in these countries,” he said. “The first thing these terrorists will do when they reach Turkey or Qatar is contact their associates in Gaza and the West Bank to send money and re-establish their networks. They will quickly regroup and form new terror cells.”"

Meme - Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby: "Dave Smith is reaping what he has sowed for over 2 years."
Dan Bilzerian @DanBilzerian: "No I said you're ducking a good faith convo, because you told multiple people that you were scared to talk to me, which is odd because we agree on many things, anyway..."
Dave Smith @ComicDaveSmith: "You're actually a fucking liar. I've never told a single human being that I'm scared of you. I've told several that I think you're dumb."
Dan Bitzerian @DanBilzerian: "You are a subversive lying jew. @jakeshieldsaijj said you were scared. Everything I I said was a fact, you ducked the convo and then lied about doing so."
The cope is that solidarity is not contingent, and that decent human beings stand up for what is right regardless of whether they are personally hurt by it. Of course, leopards eating people's faces is only for people who defy the left wing agenda

Meme - The Misfit Patriot @misfitpatriot_: "Dave Smith might finally understand the meaning behind the famous poem “first they came for the socialists”. Being a useful idiot for Jew hating scum only protects you while you’re useful. Once that use runs out, they know you’re an easy target. They know the people you helped them attack won’t come to your defense, and all that bullshit about how “you can’t be antisemitic because you’re a Jew” is all they need to treat you like one. “Don’t shoot, I’m on your side” are the famous last words of the useful idiot, and it’s a hard lesson to learn."
Dave Smith @ComicDaveSm...: "Weren't you profusely apologizing to me last time you saw Rob? Weren't you an open communist into your 50s? Shut the fuck up about opposition. I regret supporting you substantially more than I regret supporting Trump. Go take another gummy, clown."
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D.: "That's the Chomsky view--the U.S. empire is in charge. LOL. Classic liberal zionist hasbara. Dave Smith is controlled opposition-if he's even opposition at all."
Left wingers like to claim that not all Trump supporters/Republicans are bigots, but all bigots are Trump supporters/Republicans. So since all anti-Semites are "anti-Zionists"...

Meme - Uri Kurlianchik @VerminusM: "The far left and the far right have an excellent division of labor: the far right wants to drive all the world's Jews into Israel and the far left wants to destroy all the Jews in Israel."
Man painting graffiti slogan: "JEWS OUT"
"He's A RIGHT WING ANTISEMITE !"
Man painting graffiti slogan: "JEWS OUT OF PALESTINE."
"OH! SORRY COMRADE!"

Julie Kahan on X - "The left is also doing a great job driving Jews toward Israel, by encouraging the immigration into western countries of Muslims who hate Jews."

Meme - *Daily Struggle*
"Free Palestine" "Kill Nazis"
*Hitler2 shop*
Hijaz Abu Shanab. Gaza City Resident: The name of the shop is 'Hitler' and I like him because he was the the most anti Jewish person
Description: Gaza: Hitler 2 clothing store puts Palestinian knife-wielding mannequins on display
We asked Hitler why he left some of you alive.
إسلامي: لقد أثبت انتصار القيادى الشيخ خهر عدنان مجددا أن إرادة الحق أقوى من جبزوت البادها
He did so in order to show us how wicked you are.
ميادي الشيخ خضر عدنان مجددا أن إرادة الحق أقوى من جبروت الباطل وأن عزيمته الصلبة نموذج
Description: Inside the Gaza Summer Camps Training Children to be the Next Generation of Terrorists"

Meme - Bouken Kabuto: "Can someone explain how a country that's only 71% jewish is considered an ethnostate but none of 17 other countries that are 99% arab are not ethnostates? Explain how that works"

Palestinian shunned for selling land to Jews to be buried in Jewish cemetery - "A chief rabbi of Jerusalem allowed a Palestinian man to be buried in a Jewish cemetery following his body’s exclusion by imams over his sale of real estate to Jews. Aryeh Stern, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel’s capital, this week ruled that Alah Kirsh may be buried at a Jewish cemetery as an exception because he was a “righteous gentile,” the Ynet new site reported Friday. Kirsh was killed along with five other people in a traffic accident on November 4. His family sought to bury his body at a Muslim cemetery in East Jerusalem but the imams there turned them away because he had been accused of selling real estate in that part of the capital to Jews several years ago. Family members were not allowed to bring Kirsh’s body to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and were forbidden to pitch a mourner’s tent and receive guests there, as is the Muslim custom. Ekrima Sa’id Sabri, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, cited a 1935 fatwa, or religious Muslim edict, issued by his predecessor, Amin al-Husseini. A publicly anti-Semitic leader of Arab Israelis and ally of Nazi Germany, al-Husseini wrote that year that “anyone who sells a home or land to Jews will not receive a Muslim burial.” Basing a new fatwa on the old one, Sabri wrote: “Whoever sells to the Jews in Jerusalem is not a member of the Muslim nation. We will not accept his repentance and he will not be buried in the Muslim cemetery.”"
Damn Zionists! Clearly, as Israel is the source of all problems in the Middle East (not to mention the world), its founding in 1948 is why Amin al-Husseini ruled in 1935 that Muslims cannot sell land to Jews

Hajj Amin al-Husayni: Arab Nationalist and Muslim Leader - "Al-Husayni cultivated the perception that the demand of the Jews for free access to the wall (the holiest place for Jews) had threatened the very existence of the al-Aqsa and Dome of the Rock shrines (one of the holiest sites in Islam). He thus had exacerbated religious tension, infused the secular issues of Jewish immigration and land purchases with religious fervor, internationalized the political dispute by equating the Jewish presence in Palestine with an existential threat to the Muslim faith, and enhanced his own political position among the Palestinian Arab leaders. That al-Husayni explicitly encouraged or incited the violence is not documented; yet he did not do much to prevent it. After the riots, he presented himself as a preeminent defender of Islam and of Muslim rights in Palestine... The British authorities sent the Peel Commission to Palestine to investigate and propose a political settlement. Al-Husayni's testimony before the commission implied that the safety of the Jews residing in an independent Palestine could not be guaranteed... When the commission report recommended partition on July 7, 1937, radicals escalated a new wave of violence... After insurgents murdered the District Commissioner for the Galilee on September 26, the British dissolved the Arab Higher Committee and arrested its members... n mid-October 1937, al-Husayni, now fully committed to violent rebellion, fled to Lebanon. The British crushed the Arab Revolt in the autumn of 1938. The violence left 206 Jewish civilians, 454 Arab civilians, and 175 Mandate authority employees dead. In addition, British troops killed 1,138 armed Arab insurgents. The British never unequivocally linked al-Husayni with the insurgency in 1936-1937. There can be little doubt, however, that the Mufti maintained contacts with the radicals, whom he clandestinely encouraged when he thought it opportune... Before the arrival of British troops, Iraqi civilians mounted a pogrom, known as the Farhud, against the Jewish population of Baghdad on June 1-2, 1941, that claimed the lives of 128 Jews and the destruction of almost 1,500 businesses and homes"
Damn Zionist terrorists!

Mark Gist's answer to Why is it so hard for Israelis to share land with Palestinians, who have been living on that same land for many centuries? - Quora - "That word “share” is the problem and it’s because of this guy. That’s Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He was an antisemite, and anti-zionist, and a Nazi collaborator. He ruled that it was unacceptable for Jews to rule any land, no matter how small, that had once been ruled by Muslims. Because of him and his protege, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinians will not sign any agreement that allows the existence of Israel. Because of him, Israel has been under constant attack since it first declared its independence from Jordan. Israel has tried to trade land for peace multiple times. It appeared that a peace agreement was possible in 2000 in an agreement negotiated by Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright. But Arafat ended up walking out on it. You can’t share land with people who want it all."

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on X - "Anyone who's familiar with Arab politics knows that anti-Zionism is a cognitive trap that collapses all political analysis into a single explanatory theory. Why no democracy? America protects Israel. Why poverty? The regime serves American-Israeli interests. Why corruption? The rulers are traitors working for Israel. Every domestic failure gets routed through this singularity, which means the actual causes of the failure become literally unthinkable, genuinely unavailable as categories of analysis because the entire space of political reasoning has been totally consumed. The political decisions that flow from this captured consciousness are then what actually produce the conditions of poverty and unfreedom that the theory pretends to explain. This is, without doubt, what the rise of anti-Zionism threatens will do in Western societies and you can already see it. The American opposition that forces everything through Palestine/Israel isn't just wrong about chains of causality; it's actively generating the dysfunction it attributes to the Zionist-American conspiracy or empire or whatever. The singular theory is not merely a misdiagnosis but the very pathogen that produces the disease it claims to name. Every population whose political cognition has been captured by the Palestine/Israel symbol ultimately and inevitably becomes an open field of exploitation because they become incapable of seeing the causes of their own immiseration, and thereby unwittingly but actively reproducing the conditions of their immiseration, often through the very act of trying to resist it."
It's not just Arab politics. Other Muslims also blame "Zionists" for everything wrong in the world Conspiracy theories are comforting but prevent you from actually solving problems

Meme - "'Palestinian identity only an anti-Zionist tactic'
LONDON (JCNS) - Golda Meir's assertion that the Palestinians are not really a separate people, has received the surprising endorsement from the most unexpected quarter, reports the JCNS diplomatic correspondent. It came from Zuher Mohsin, leader of Saiqa, the Syrian-sponsored Palestinian units, and head of the military depart- ment of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In an interview for the Dutch newspaper "Trouw," he said: "There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all one people. It is for political reasons only that we carefully emphasize our Palestinian identity. For it is in the national interest of the Arabs to en- courage the existence of Palestinians against Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity is there only for tactical reasons.""

Melissa Steinberg Brodsky | Facebook - "In 1977, the head of the PLO's military department gave an interview to a Dutch newspaper and said something that should have changed everything. He said Palestinian identity is emphasized for political reasons only. That a separate Palestinian identity exists for tactical reasons. That there are no real differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. His name was Zuher Mohsin. He wasn't a dissident. He wasn't breaking ranks. He was one of the architects of the movement and he said the quiet part out loud. Eight years earlier, Golda Meir had said the same thing and been destroyed for it. But that's not even the beginning of the story. The PLO was founded in 1964. Three years before Israel controlled the West Bank or Gaza. Whatever it was built to liberate, it wasn't land Israel acquired in 1967. Before Arafat, there was no Palestinian national identity. Not because the people weren't real. Because the identity hadn't been built yet. And Arafat built it the same way you build a city — founding story first, then institutions, symbols, a flag, a claim of ancient dispossession, and enough foreign funding to make it stick."

Textbook row triggers vote to suspend EU funds to Palestinians - "MEPs will vote on Wednesday on a resolution to freeze EU funding to the Palestinian Authority amid allegations that its school textbooks promote violence, including by encouraging students to take up arms to ‘liberate’ Palestine from Israel. Investigations by advocacy groups and independent researchers, such as the Germany-based Georg Eckert Institute, have repeatedly found in recent years that PA textbooks promote violence and antisemitism. Although the PA has promised changes, the revisions have fallen short, according to a new study. While the European Commission claimed that “tangible progress has been observed” and the PA textbooks were being aligned with UNESCO standards, researchers from Impact-se, a UK-Israel-based institute that examines school materials from around the world, found that changes in textbooks used in the 2025-2026 school year were “very limited, partial, and cosmetic”. Hours before the vote on funding in Brussels, the US State Department released a report to Congress, citing Impact-se’s findings that textbooks used by the PA Ministry of Education “continue to glorify jihad and incitement to violence.”... Since 2008, the EU has funnelled about €3.8 billion to the PA through its PEGASE fund, which finances the salaries of civil servants, teachers, and education systems, responsible for drafting, approving, and delivering the curriculum.
Grade 12 Arabic Language textbook printed for 2025–26 includes a poem that urges students to “return” to Israeli cities “with a weapon in your hand”
In fact, most of the content remained unchanged, a review by Euractiv found, often reproducing earlier editions verbatim. Revisions frequently removed neutral material, while leaving problematic content intact. Researchers also found a revised textbook stating that “jihad is a contemporary religious duty to ‘liberate’ Palestine from the Zionist Occupation,” effectively encouraging students to pursue armed struggle. Another allegedly revised Grade 12 Arabic textbook urges students to “return” to Israeli cities “with a weapon in your hand,” using what Impact-se called “vivid, emotional verse to romanticise armed invasion “in a way disturbingly reminiscent of the violence witnessed on 7 October 2023.” An Islamic Education textbook also marked as revised portrays “the Jews” as liars and associates them with Satan. Even some cosmetic revisions may not have been implemented. In an internal document issued by the PA ministry of education and seen by Euractiv, school principals were instructed to reinstate previously removed Grade 12 lessons “omitted in error”, including a lesson on jihad."
Time to condemn Israel for "genocide" by defending itself from Palestinian terrorists and to excoriate Japan for having one or two textbooks that are not mandated nationwide which gloss over what happened during World War II. Celebrating war and genocide and spreading racism is okay when "minorities" do it
Clearly the textbooks meant "Zionists", not Jews

Troubling News for Jews from the Michigan Democratic Party - "There have been troubling developments in both parties regarding antisemitism in the last few years, but I found this one especially perverse and disturbing. And of course, it shouldn't be just Jews who are worried about it, not only because everyone should oppose antisemitism, but because antisemitism on both left and right is based within the growing illiberal constituencies in both parties. In short, you don't have to be worried about antisemitism to wonder what the heck's going on when the Democrats nominate a supporter of a radical Islamist, Iran-allied anti-American terrorist group that has murdered hundreds of Americans, weeks after an immigrant tied to that group tried to murder dozens of American schoolchildren."
Jewish Insider April 20th, 2026 - "Michigan Democratic delegates, at their statewide convention Sunday, nominated a Hezbollah supporter, Amir Makled, to the University of Michigan Board of Regents, choosing to oust a Jewish member, Jordan Acker, whose home and car were repeatedly vandalized with antisemitic graffiti and his family threatened. Acker’s offenses? He backed efforts to hold anti-Israel campus protesters at the University of Michigan accountable for assaulting police and engaging in intimidation of Jewish students, among other instances of student misconduct. He declined to support efforts to divest university funds from Israel, along with other members of the Board of Regents, as a radical faction of students had demanded. Acker’s non-Jewish Democratic ticketmate, Paul Brown, who also supported discipline against anti-Israel students, wasn’t targeted and was renominated for election. But the Democratic delegates ousted Acker in exchange for Makled, who has posted on social media with comments praising Hezbollah’s leaders and retweeted antisemitic messages from the conspiracy-theorizing influencer Candace Owens. The results mark a new low for Michigan Democrats. Also over the weekend, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed told CNN that he believes the Israeli government is just as evil as Hamas"
Time to jail the "far right" to keep Jews safe

Rep. Mike Levin on X - "This should be on the front page of every newspaper in America. A Syrian billionaire needed U.S. sanctions lifted so he could cash in on $12 billion in reconstruction contracts. In an attempt to influence American foreign policy, he proposed a Trump-branded golf course, cut Jared Kushner & Ivanka Trump into a multibillion-dollar real estate deal for a resort in Albania, and had someone physically deliver a stone engraved with the Trump family crest to a Republican Member of Congress with instructions to take it to the White House to get the President's attention. Trump threw his weight behind repealing the sanctions. They were lifted. The contracts are moving, the Trump family’s deals are expanding, and not a single Washington Republican is willing to say a word about any of it. This is a corruption of everything the office of the presidency is supposed to stand for, and the American people deserve to know about it."
Daniel Friedman on X - "This is a wildly misleading framing. The US imposed sanctions on Syria in the 1970s for being a state sponsor of terrorism and added new ones in the 2010s as the regime of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, with the backing of Iran and Hezbollah, devastated his country and slaughtered nearly a million of his own people during a decade-long civil war. After Israel destroyed Hezbollah and weakened Iran, Assad was left defenseless and was overthrown by the rebels. Al-Sharaa, the rebel leader who deposed Assad and replaced him has a terrorist past but has signaled openness to engaging and allying with the West. After Assad was overthrown, Syrian businessmen came to lobby the US to lift sanctions that had been imposed on the country under the Assad regime. Lifting sanctions is something that is likely to happen when a sanctioned regime has been overthrown by its friendlier enemies. Assad was sanctioned because he used chemical weapons on his own people and was aligned with Hezbollah and Iran. Al-Sharaa fought Assad and is an enemy of Hezbollah and Iran. Lifting sanctions is a totally reasonable olive branch to show him the kind of opportunities that are available to Syria if Al-Sharaa decides to be a peaceful member of the international community. I think any administration likely would have lifted sanctions on Syria after the sanctioned regime was overthrown by its opposition."

Cambridge college’s response ‘wholly inadequate’ after students accused of making death threats over Israel visit - "A Cambridge college has been accused of failing to suspend students who made death threats against an undergraduate who visited Israel. Bradley Smart, a 21-year-old third-year student, told The Telegraph he was targeted with threats after returning to Homerton College. Smart took part in a trip to Israel organised by the Pinsker Centre think tank, which invited students from Oxford and Cambridge to meet both Israelis and Palestinians and to better understand the conflict. Smart, who is not Jewish, alleged that upon his return, fellow students posted messages in a college group chat, including “I’m going to kill him”, “kill him”, and “he needs to die”."
More disgusting censorship of pro-Palestine speech!

Iranian propagandists ‘given platform by British charities’ - "The charities watchdog is investigating claims that British charities could be providing a platform for supporters of the Iranian regime, The Telegraph has learnt. Two London-based charities have been accused of backing supporters of the Islamic Republic and the banned terror group Hamas. One of the charities, the Dar Alhekma Trust (DAT), stands accused of promoting a backer of the hardline regime in Tehran who appeared in videos praising Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, who was killed in an Israeli air strike at the start of the current conflict with the US. Another charity, the Abrar Islamic Foundation (AIF), is accused of platforming an alleged supporter of the Iranian-founded Al Quds Day and the Oct 7 attacks on Israel."

Links - 2nd June 2026 (3 - General Wokeness [including UK Sikh Stabbing])

2026-06-02T21:48:00.000+08:00

Southampton Times on X - "“Can’t breath” - Police body cam footage shown in court revealed the moment officers arrested 18-year-old Henry Nowak shortly before his death. Southampton Crown Court heard officers found Mr Nowak leaning against a house wall in Belmont Road, supported by the defendant’s father. The defendant's father said: “He keeps dropping down, so I am just trying to keep him up.” Mr Nowak can be heard saying “can’t breathe.” Police put handcuffs on Mr Nowak, who was lying on his side, telling officers he had been stabbed and that he could not breathe. The officer told Mr Nowak that he was under arrest for suspicion of assault. Mr Nowak repeated that he had been stabbed. A male voice said: “I don’t think you have, mate.” The video cuts out when CPR starts, and in its place, a transcript was read by Neil King, prosecuting, and the officer in the case. One officer said: "He is not unconscious, mate, he isn't breathing." Mr Nowak was pronounced dead at 12.37am despite the efforts of police, paramedics and a doctor who was flown to the scene by helicopter. The video ended when CPR began, with a transcript read to the court instead. Mr Nowak was later pronounced dead at 12:37am despite efforts from police, paramedics and an airlifted doctor. Vickrum Singh Digwa, 23, of St Denys Road, Southampton denies the charge of murder. Source: Daily Echo"
PIO Sikh man murdered British university student with 21-inch knife, UK court told - "When police arrived, Digwa denied stabbing Nowak, claiming he had been racially abused and attacked by a drunken man."
Polish Connection on X - "New details about Henry Nowak murder. Three female officers responded to scene. "The officer who handcuffed Henry laughed when he said he had been stabbed. He was then dragged across the gravel and held in handcuffs as he bled out. Only after he lost consciousness did officers remove the handcuffs and begin CPR. Henry died at the scene. Police also seized Henry's and his father's phone and searched all messages for racist comments or jokes""
Charlie Bentley-Astor on X - "You're not allowed to take a water bottle into a concert but Sikhs are permitted to wear their ceremonial knives."
Aleph on X - "As a redneck American if I move to Britain I should be able to carry my ancestral Colt python revolver"
Sikh man accused of murdering university student with 8-inch ceremonial knife used racism as his 'trump card' to ensure police arrested his dying victim instead, court hears - "Prosecutors said Vickrum Digwa, 23, was 'skilled' with blades when he came to murder Henry Nowak, 18, having trained with weapons since he was 12. Digwa is on trial accused of stabbing Mr Nowak three times in the front and three times in the back during a street confrontation. In his closing speech to jurors at Southampton Crown Court, Nicholas Lobbenberg KC said Digwa must have known the wounds were fatal, despite denying stabbing Mr Nowak at the scene. He said Digwa used racism as his 'trump card', accusing Mr Nowak of racial abuse when police officers arrived so they would arrest the wrong man - a 'wicked lie about a dying man'. Digwa was said to 'sleep in his bedroom with an arsenal of weapons' and spoke about the Kirpan - a type of ceremonial dagger carried by Sikhs - allegedly used to kill Mr Nowak in 'loving terms'... Digwa filmed his victim as he tried to escape by jumping over a fence, leaving behind a trail of blood in Southampton. Mr Nowak was shouting that he was 'going to die', causing his neighbours to call the police - but when the officers arrived they arrested him over the bogus racist abuse allegation... Prosecutors also allege that Digwa's mother, Kiran Kaur, 53, took the blade from her son at the scene and ran to hide it with 'an arsenal of weapons' at their home address... 'This is a man who chooses to sleep in his bedroom with an arsenal of weapons. 'This is a man who likes weapons. You know he searches for them on his phone. 'He describes the murder weapon in loving terms. 'You might think that rather odd, given what he did with that knife on that night. 'Most importantly, he knows how to use weapons. He told you he has been training with weapons since he was 12.' Mr Lobbenberg said that Digwa had lied about Mr Nowak being drunk that night and he was actually under the legal limit of alcohol to drive. He said: 'The biggest lie, ladies and gentlemen, is why he drew his knife. He told you from that witness box, Henry Nowak said he was going to kill me. He was going to f*** me up. 'We suggest that was never said. You can be sure it was never said because why, if it had been said, would you not tell the 999 operator the most important thing as to why you acted. 'He didn't tell the police at the scene who were asking. He didn't tell his brother when he was saying what happened. 'If this was in the forefront of his mind, seared into his memory, why wouldn't you tell someone. 'Instead, he didn't even put the threat to kill in his defence case statement. 'It came from him for the first time in the witness box.' Mr Lobbenberg said that there was a stream of lies from Digwa starting from the minutes after the incident. He said: 'We say this, "drunk" is a lie, "going to kill me" is a lie and we say "P***" is a lie. The consequence and purpose of these lies is significant. 'Why he tells them is he is seeking to hide what he has done. 'And racism was his trump card to try to make sure what he had done was lawful. 'We say that was a wicked lie about a dying man and it is a wicked lie about a dead man to you now.' Mr Lobbenberg said that Mr Nowak was an 'unarmed young man with a phone'... Mr Lobbenberg said that Digwa's mother did not give evidence to the court because she could not explain why she took the Kirpan back to the house. He said: 'She has no answer to her actions that don't incriminate her son and her. 'That is why she hasn't gone in the witness box."
Sikhs 'demonised' after Southampton murder, says community leader - ""this could happen to any community - an individual could break the law and murder someone but you wouldn't demonise that entire community." After the trial, the UK Sikh Federation wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood calling for anti-Sikh hate crimes to be recorded in a similar way to those against Jews and Muslims."
Kevin Bass on X - "Henry Nowak gets stabbed, chased, stabbed while fleeing. Police arrive. Murderer calls Henry "racist" to get him arrested. Police laugh when Henry says he is wounded, drag him. Henry bleeds to death while handcuffed. BBC makes the story about the dangers of racism. Unbelievable"
White men get demonised all the time
Bristol vigil for Henry Nowak met with counter-protest - "Two small demonstrations were held in Bristol on Thursday evening following the murder of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwain. A vigil organised by “the Patriotic Bristolian” was staged against “two-tier policing where some communities appear to be protected at the expense of others”... Stand Up To Racism held counter-protest to challenge what it describes as attempts to spread “racist myth and bigotry” around the tragedy... anti-racist protesters held placards reading ‘refugees are welcome here’."
Racism was probably a contributory factor to why he died. Left wingers just hate white people
Stand Up To Racism on X - "Antiracists & antifascists outnumbering & out shouting fascist ‘White Vanguard’ in Southampton. We won’t let the far right divide our communities!"
At this point, it's crystal clear what "antiracism" and "antifascism" mean.
Left wingers always project.
Christina Buttons on X - "I recently had the opportunity to put together a talk in New York. I titled it “How Bad Ideas Become Bad Policy,” and invited @SwipeWright , @CarolynGorman_ , @Rafa_Mangual , and @CharlesFLehman to speak with me. I come from a liberal background. My first major break with the left came over trans issues. As my reporting expanded, I began seeing the same thinking errors driving progressive policy on mental illness, crime, child welfare, education, homelessness, drug policy, and more. That is what moved me rightward: realizing the same bad ideas were producing bad policy across very different issues, with results that were not only ineffective, but harmful. It usually begins with a real problem. But progressives misidentify the cause and build policy around an idealistic picture of human nature rather than a realistic account of behavior and incentives. That often means attributing problems to external forces, such as systems, discrimination, poverty, and stigma, while giving too little weight to individual factors and personal responsibility. They favor policies that feel compassionate in the short term, even when they produce worse outcomes over time. They let moral narratives outrun facts. They treat unequal outcomes as proof of injustice. They misplace empathy on wrongdoers instead of those harmed by their actions. They prefer broad, population-wide solutions over targeted interventions for the smaller group driving the problem. They defer to ideologically aligned experts and rely on weak research when it confirms their beliefs. That was the purpose of the talk: to show how the same errors pervade many different policy areas, and to highlight the @ManhattanInst 's work offering better solutions grounded in data and reality."
Immigrant MSP wants Scots to pay reparations to Palestine - "A trans Indian student elected to Holyrood wants Scottish taxpayers to fund reparations to Palestinians because of their “complicity” in the “occupation” of the territory. Q Manivannan was elected as a Green Party MSP on the Edinburgh & Lothians East list for the pro-independence Scottish Greens last week. The election of the self-described “queer Tamil immigrant” provoked an outcry after it emerged Manivannan was on a student visa with no guarantee that it would allow the MSP to stay in the country for the full Holyrood term... Manivannan, along with Iris Duane, another newly elected transgender Green MSP, endorsed a “manifesto” by Art Workers for Palestine Scotland before May’s Holyrood election. One of the demands in the manifesto calls for the future Scottish Government to commit to a “programme of reparative justice from Scotland to the Palestinian people”. The group also demanded that ministers launch a report into the “historical and contemporary complicity of Scotland in the colonisation and occupation of Palestine”. The Scottish Greens do not appear to have backed the pledge as a party, but their 2026 manifesto said they would support “international calls” for reparations for countries impacted by colonialism. It is unclear whether this would include Palestine. Rachael Hamilton, Scottish Tory deputy leader, said: “Ordinary Scots will be appalled that these Green MSPs are not only aligned with an organisation pushing anti-Semitic tropes but are advocating that taxpayers pick up the tab for a misguided virtue-signalling stunt.” “This pair clearly don’t care about the sky-high taxes hard-working Scots are paying or the cuts our public services are experiencing if they think this is appropriate. It also lays bare their contempt for the country they represent. “It seems the new intake of Green MSPs are even more extreme than those who went before them. The thought of John Swinney cutting a deal with these crackpots is truly terrifying.” Historians do not generally consider Scotland to have been any more involved in the British Mandate of Palestine than the UK as a whole. However, some Left-wing Scottish activists point to the fact that Arthur Balfour – who issued the 1917 declaration saying Britain supported a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine – was born in Scotland. Some scholars have also claimed that Scottish Presbyterian thought influenced British Christian Zionism, which, it has been argued, contributed to the country’s support for a Jewish state in Palestine. Anti-Israel activism also has deep roots in Scotland, with Dundee being the first UK city to twin with a Palestinian one, Nablus, in 1980. Manivannan is allowed to serve as an MSP under a quirk of immigration rules which state that holding elected office in a devolved legislature does not count as a form of employment despite the £77,711 salary. The academic is in a race against time to find a graduate visa, which will allow them to work in the UK for three years, before their student visa expires at the end of the year. It is still unclear whether they will be able to obtain the paperwork necessary, a Global Talent Visa, to serve a full five-year term in Holyrood. Malcolm Offord, Reform’s Scottish leader, has said he would block foreign students from becoming MSPs after the SNP allowed temporary visa holders to stand for office last year."
Q Manivannan visa row takes another twist as student chief said she was told to withdraw - "The row surrounding the right of a Green MSP to work in the UK has taken another twist after a party member claims she was told to withdraw her candidacy. Sai Shraddha Suresh Viswanathan alleges that an official called her and asked her to step down over concerns about her visa situation... She said she had been "let down by the internal selection process of the Scottish Greens Party," adding: "Ultimately, there has been a discrepancy in how different candidates have been advised by the party."
Q Manivannan: Green MSP who claimed to have ‘grown up starving’ in India exposed as privately educated with privileged upbringing - "Manivannan came from an upper middle-class family in Chennai, one of India’s wealthiest cities. Despite the Scottish Greens’ opposition to private education, the MSP attended both a private secondary school and private university in India. During the election campaign, Manivannan also suggested they came from a "lower caste" background and had at times been "starved". Shortly before the election, the MSP said they had "saved and worked and lied and begged" in order to study for a PhD at the University of St Andrews. However, The Times have reported that Manivannan’s father, Manivannan Dasarathi, holds degrees in chemical engineering and business administration and has decades of senior management experience across both government and private sectors. The MSP’s paternal grandmother operated a medical clinic, while their maternal grandmother was a pioneering gynaecologist who founded a hospital in Tirupattur. Manivannan’s mother, Rajachitra Manivannan, also had an established academic career. The family’s background allowed the MSP to attend Bhavan's Rajaji Vidyashram, a private school in Chennai described by former pupils as one of the city’s most prestigious institutions. The school is said to have offered an array of international trips, including visits to Nasa in the US, and boasted extensive sporting facilities. Manivannan later studied at OP Jindal Global University in Haryana, one of India’s best-known private liberal arts universities. Fees at the institution reportedly ranged between £7,800 and £9,300 annually - significantly higher than those charged at public universities in India. Following graduation, Manivannan worked at Essai Education, a consultancy helping wealthy Indian families secure places for their children at elite universities including Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge. Former colleagues describe the firm’s clients as extremely wealthy and said the company "paid insanely well"... The MSP recently appealed for financial help with visa costs through a crowdfunding page that raised £1,066 towards a graduate visa application fee... A Scottish Conservative spokesman said: "It appears that Q Manivannan has questions to answer after apparently pulling the wool over the eyes of the Scottish Greens." “This new MSP wouldn’t be the first left-wing politician to embellish their supposedly working-class credentials to curry favour. "But the public expect those they elect to be transparent and honest about their life before politics, rather than peddling false information about what they have done and where they came from.”"
So many woke cosplay being oppressed
Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ ل بن on X - "“Jihad” means “struggle.” “Mein Kampf” also means “my struggle.” Imagine falling for it twice."
Meme - "NOT IN A 1000 YEARS WOULD I IMAGINE PHRASING "DIED FROM FUCKING WITHOUT PROTECTION" AS...
The lack of boomer LGBTQ+ people isn't because it's "more popular now." Many were murdered by their peers, died from government inaction during the AIDS crisis, committed suicide due to lack of social supports, or have had to live in the closet due to their peers' cruelty."
End Wokeness on X - "Things that got canceled for "racism"
1. CCTV cameras (Seattle)
2. Mugshots (San Francisco)
3. Gunshot detectors (15+ cities)
4. Standardized tests (UC system)
5. Gifted & Talented program (NYC)
6. License plate readers (30+ cities)
I wish this was a joke, but it's 100% real"
Dries Van Langenhove on X - "Mohamed Bakkali, the logistical brain behind the Paris and Bataclan attacks that killed 129 and wounded hundreds more, is allowed penitentiary leave by the Brussels court. If Bakkali continues his “calm and good behaviour” according to the court, he could soon be freed indefinitely."
𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ on X - "To remind everyone what really happened that night:
• They cut off testicles and shoved them into the victims's mouths.
• They stabbed pregnant women in the womb and raped them.
• They beheaded people.
• They gouged people's eyes out.
French authorities worked overtime to keep these details away from the public. And apparently, the mastermind behind this atrocity will soon walk, because European leaders are cowards and traitors who will never do the right thing."
Meme - Sargon of Akkad: "This seems like a pretty islamophobic post, Pink News."
"When straights start talking about straight oppression online while it's still illegal to be gay in 70 countries:
*Cat on skateboard* Bye"
Meme - "WHAT THEY SAY
COEXIST
WHAT THEY MEAN
COMPLY"
Meme - Geiger Capital: "The NYT is a meme at this point... "Why doesn't this summit between global superpowers look diverse like the movies?""
"The New York Times. Trump-Xi Summit
Where Are the Women at the Trump-Xi Summit? Nearly all the business leaders and officials accompanying President Trump in China are men. There are few women on the Chinese side, too."
Mario Nawfal on X - "🇨🇳 Zhou Qunfei left school at 15 to polish watch glass in a Shenzhen factory with callused hands and HK$20k to her name. 30 years later she was seated between Elon and Tim Cook at the Trump-Xi state dinner. The journey in between: she founded Lens Technology in 2003, bet everything on precision glass, and became Apple's primary supplier for iPhone screens after 2007. Now she supplies Tesla, Samsung, and nearly every major consumer electronics company on the planet. Born in rural Hunan. Mother died young, father disabled. No safety net, no connections, no elite university. Just a factory floor and an obsession with getting the glass right. One of China's richest self-made women. Built entirely on a component most people never think about. A true story of overcoming adversity."
Weird. Left wingers told us that the fact that there were no women at the summit meant meritocracy was dead
Kangmin Lee | 이강민 on X - "A black man murdered his entire family. 8 children mercilessly slaughtered. This was the deadliest mass shooting in the past 2 years and the left is silent because the perpetrator was black. No national outrage. No protests. No social media campaigns. Silence."
On Shamar Elkins. It's easier to keep quiet than to blame a lack of gun control
Creative Deduction on X - "By the 1930s many Western intellectuals reluctantly realised that classical Marxism had failed and the proletariat wasn’t revolting. But then a group of exiled German Marxists led by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse decided to change the battlefield. Instead of economics, they targeted the “cultural superstructure”: family, religion, tradition, sexual norms and the very idea of objective truth. Their weapon was Critical Theory - a relentless campaign of negative criticism designed to portray every Western institution as inherently oppressive and capitalism as not just economically flawed, but psychologically and morally corrupt. Marcuse gave the strategy its most powerful tactical manual in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”: true liberation, he argued, required “liberating tolerance” - tolerance only for progressive ideas and outright intolerance for conservative or “regressive” ones. Free speech, in other words, was only legitimate when it served the revolution. The intellectual poison of the Frankfurt School was extraordinarily influential and as its graduates and intellectual heirs colonised universities, media, NGOs and corporate HR departments, Critical Theory evolved into today’s identity politics, DEI mandates and cancel culture - a cultural Marxism that attacks the individual in the name of group grievance. What began with a small circle of German émigrés in the 1930s now shapes the moral vocabulary of much of the Western elite. The result has been a softer, more pervasive authoritarianism: the dictatorship of the politically correct."
Black Conservative addresses an Alberta Christian University and a free speech fight breaks out | National Post - "An Alberta Christian university student council has disavowed its own apology, issued after a Black History Month speaker denied the existence of systemic racism in a speech on Biblical definitions of racism. Last Monday, Ambrose University in Calgary said the speech, given in February by Samuel Sey, a conservative activist, blogger and Christian who is Black, “caused severe harm” to some students... Sey said that statements intended to respect and support people of colour and their lived experiences ring hollow. “Clearly they only mean the lived experiences of black people that’s approved by Robin DiAngelo (the author of White Fragility) and themselves,” Sey said. “When they say they are allies of people of colour, they really only mean some people.”"
From 2021
Meme - Storm, Cyclops, Wolverine: "HALT! WE'RE THE X-MEN, AN ALLEGORY FOR ANTI-RACISM!"
Sentinel: "AFFIRMATIVE. DESPITE BEING 1% OF THE POPULATION, MUTANTS COMMIT 99% OF GLOBAL CRISES."
*Shocked X-Men*
Sentinel: *blasts X-men from palm*
Meme - Michael Shermer: "The deeper epistemological problem behind the entire phenomena is confusing Internal Subjective Truths ("I feel like an XX or XY inside") & External Objective Truths ("you can't change sex & there's no such thing as being 'born in the wrong body' because you are your body")"
Michael Shermer @michaelshermer: "Decades from now historians, sociologists & linguists will make a list like this as a case study in how, in the early part of the 21st century, the left took liberal tolerance to absurd lengths to the point of illiberalism. (Didn't they have a word for "vagina-haver"?)"
"Birthing person Cisheteropatnarchy Latinx Chest feeding Justice system-involved
Safe space Two spirit Black Bodies Othering Minontized communities Lived experience
Allyship Front hole Emotional labor Ways of knowing Folx Microaggression Erasure
Queerness/queering Pregnant people Humxn Black fatigue Unhoused Positionality
Setler colonialism Masculinities Cntical consciousness Decolonize Speaking as a
Subverting norms Intersectionality Systems of oppression Invalidation
White woman's tears Becoming Specially-abled LGBTOIA+++
Healthy at every size Vagina-haver Stolen land Gender assigned at birth Problematize
Inseminated person Trans genocide Undocumented worker Microinvalidation
Lived truth Gender-affirming care Racialized Ethnomathematics Epistemic inustice
Holding space Cis/cisgender/cishet White adjacent Person who immigrated
Misogynoir Trigger warning Stay in your lane Womxn/womyn Thinormativity
Genderqueer Voice of color Dog whistle Cultural appropriation Symbolic violence
Herstory Matrix of domination Deadnaming Heteronormative Xenogender White silence
Land acknowledgment A Black woman is speaking"
Meme - "Prison is a perfect place for liberals. Think about it!
1) Everyone is treated equally
2) free food
3) Free healthcare for everyone
4) No one has guns except for the guards
5) No cars and no gas!"
Meme - "Liberal White Woman Quandary"
"Fundamentalist Christians oppressing women like in "Handjobs Tale" *annoyed*
Fundamentalist Muslims oppressing women like in real life *sheepish*"
'We won’t stop': Pride Toronto experiencing funding shortage : r/TorontoTheCity - "Please do look to the primary cause: chickenshit corporate sponsors buckling to Trumps ‘anti-woke’ bulldozer"
"Or, perhaps it’s because this same org had to repay government grants after they “lost track” of funds intended for community initiatives a few years ago... they’re blaming Trump/anti DEI instead of admitting they lost the trust of their sponsors.
Edit: Pride Toronto repaying over $505K after federal grant controversy
“Pride Toronto is repaying just over $505,000 in grant funding after an accounting firm found the organization could not prove that it completed several projects despite receiving $1.85 million from the federal government.”"
"No. Bookkeeping is separate from corporate cowardice. You seem homophobic"
"Organizations that get caught stealing typically struggle to collect donations going forward. Not really a debatable observation"
"Your assumption of guilt is telling"
"What assumption? Did you read the article I linked? They asked for money to do a project, pocketed the money and didn’t do the project, thus were ordered to repay the funds. And they still aren’t being honest, not about the real reason they lost their sponsors at the least. Sponsors prefer donations actually make it to the community. Judging people who accept funding on the behalf of the gay community with no intention to actually pass along that benefit to that community - I fail to see how that makes me homophobic. They “lost” money intended for lgbtq+ benefits, then to make it worse, used donations for the same cause to repay those missing funds. So $1 million intended for the community lost because of them."

Iran: A Longer View

2026-06-02T18:54:00.000+08:00

From April:
Iran: A Longer View
The prognosis of the Iran War is now so couched in politics and so warped by the American Left that the public has grown tired and wants it all to go away. But in truth, the situation is so fluid that any accurate prediction is impossible. Yet there is good reason to believe in an eventual outcome quite favorable to the U.S. and one far better than the status quo ante bellum.

The Strait of Hormuz

Prior to President Trump’s most recent announcement that the United States would first blockade and then reopen and control traffic through the Strait, only a few ships were going through, mostly those aligned with Iran, opposed to the United States, or neutral.

Thus, the Strait was disrupted to a far greater degree than during Iran’s earlier efforts at closure during the “Tanker War” phase of the Iran–Iraq War, as well as its chronic harassment of shipping in 2018–19. And now?

If Trump quickly clears and secures control of the Strait, and if allowable traffic reaches, say, 60–70 percent of prewar levels and if the U.S. avoids a full-scale war, instead responding disproportionately to any renewed Iranian attempts to close it—then, within one to two months, oil prices will begin to taper off.

The American challenge with the war is not military but political. This time, the U.S. is not sending Marines to fight house to house in Fallujah or to scour villages on the ground in Helmand Province—losing hundreds in casualties and fighting in circumstances favorable to jihadists and terrorists.

Instead, the administration is restrained in its use of force only by concerns about the war’s effects on the U.S. economy, global oil prices, domestic gas prices, the midterm elections, and the political fortunes of vulnerable Republican members of Congress.

Militarily, the U.S. has choices. The Navy can continue demining the Strait, rotate patrols of U.S. and allied warships through it, allow allied and neutral shipping to pass while blocking Iranian-bound ships, and periodically strike Iran whenever it attempts to disrupt shipping—including clearing its coasts of missiles and drones. In other words, Trump can flip the Iranian strategy of selective entrance to the Strait, with the key difference that he has the wherewithal to carry out such a calibrated blockade, and Iran does not. World opinion will be with him, for economic reasons and, should Iran seek to stop him, for its breaking the ceasefire and thus justifying the rain of retaliatory bombs that will descend upon it.

Or if Iran restarts missile and drone attacks on U.S. military and allies in the region, the administration can warn Iran that it will lose its oil facilities on Kharg Island as well as dual-use generation plants—until it relents.

But in the long term, no one will forget Iran’s third—and most egregious—effort to hijack the Strait, despite its failure to do so completely and for any sustained period.

The Gulf exporters will double down on their Red Sea and Gulf of Oman pipelines, which bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia and others will explore more routes, perhaps even through Jordan to Israel and Haifa on the Mediterranean.

In the end, Iran will be left with an inert asset—if not a liability—since the United States can ensure that no oil flows from Kharg Island through the patrolled Strait, which the West may ultimately render irrelevant anyway. Importers will quietly begin shifting toward increased output from Venezuela, the United States, and perhaps a soon-to-be unsanctioned Russia. Iran’s attacks on 11 Muslim nations in the Middle East will not be lost on the people of the region. Many of the sheikdoms will continue to press Israel and the U.S. to ensure Iran does not rearm. A sane Gulf would not give any more money to Hamas, given its hostile and hated lunatic patron.

Regime Change

Iran lost most of its 47-year-old, multibillion-dollar investment in weapons as well as its military-industrial complex.

To rearm will cost the regime dearly—and that vast expense will be unpopular with a restive populace short of food and fuel.

It will be hard for whoever is running the country to reestablish its military arsenals and multibillion-dollar subsidies to Arab terrorists. Indeed, Iran’s subsidized proxies—Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis—may be left orphaned, despised by the Iranian people, and perhaps even more hated by some of their former Gulf co-sponsors. The odd myth of Iranian military invulnerability is shattered. And that loss of face, too, will have consequences soon at home and abroad. The Iranian people will further grow angry that the one nationalist argument made by the Iranian mullahs—that at least its half-century, half-trillion-dollar military buildup sent shivers throughout the Middle East, terrified the West, and gave global cred to Iran—has now also imploded.

It is one thing for the people to be ruled by globally feared autocrats armed to the teeth, but quite another to be governed by humiliated, now-impotent incompetents and buffoons.

Once the Berlin Wall fell, it took weeks and sometimes months for Eastern Europeans to overthrow their communist oppressors. And it required more than two years after the wall went down for its full effects to ripple out and dissolve the Soviet Union. On that basis, then, no one should expect regime change merely days after the cessation of the war.

The West has little real idea who is currently running Iran or who or even what they represent.

All that is known is that second- or third-tier theocrats, military officers, politicos, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps thugs are vying for power. Each cadre has likely become terrified that it will either be seen as too accommodating and attacked by the hard-liners—or that rivals will defect and cut a deal with the Iranian people to serve as transitional figures, thereby avoiding the noose. The worst of the worst know that if they are not killed by drones or missiles in any renewed hostilities, they may instead be killed by the Iranian people if and when the regime collapses.

Winners and Losers

The eventual beneficiaries and casualties of the war will become clear over the next three or four weeks, hinging on whether the U.S. concludes that those in charge are worthless negotiators who, if Iran persists in attacks, will have to be persuaded by further force.

But on the larger map, the once anti-Western bloc—Russia’s Assad regime in Syria, China’s Iran satellite, and Iran’s own proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis—is either gone, tottering, humiliated, or increasingly isolated.

Russia’s brief advantage from higher oil prices will end soon. It will remain stuck in a Somme-like quagmire in Ukraine, and its weapons corridor to and from Iran will be hard to restore to prewar levels. If Putin were smart, he would cut a deal with Ukraine, seek relief from sanctions on Russian oil, and then pump like crazy.

China has lost its exclusive oil concessions with Venezuela and may have forfeited a similar sweetheart deal with Iran, now or in the near future. If the regime falls, Beijing will likely be hated by any subsequent transitional government. It may instead seek to come to some arrangement with the U.S. to send its tankers through the Strait—if Iran does not provoke the U.S. and lose Kharg Island.

The display of American air power and the evolving nature of 21st-century tactics and munitions will also likely give China pause regarding Taiwan. The specter of a sea of smart mines, surface and submarine drones, and showers of airborne drones and missiles from Taiwan—combined with an allied fleet similarly equipped—cannot be reassuring to the Chinese.

China would likely face a bloodbath transporting hundreds of thousands of soldiers across 110 miles of open and contested sea. At the acme of French power in 1804–5, Napoleon was still wise enough not to press his luck transporting soldiers across the 26-mile English Channel. Hitler sat atop what is now the entire European Union by late summer 1940, but was also savvy enough not to contest the Royal Navy in the channel.

In sum, Beijing watches the once-feared Russian army mired in death and incompetence in Ukraine. In contrast, the U.S. and Israel, in a matter of days, wiped out the Iranian navy, air force, and most of its missiles and drones. The obvious conclusion is that China will be less likely to press its luck invading Taiwan.

Western Europe is a big loser. Almost all of our old Western European allies embarrassed themselves. For weeks, the U.K. lacked a single ship seaworthy enough to reach its base at Akrotiri, Cyprus, which had been targeted by the Iranians.

Had the U.S. once treated Margaret Thatcher’s 1982 unilateral expeditionary flotilla to the Falklands the way Keir Starmer did the U.S. effort to disarm Iran and prevent its acquisition of long-range nuclear-tipped missiles, the Falklands would still be Argentinian. (One wonders today whether Argentina or Britain is the more open society, the more pro-U.S., and the more stable nation. And who knows whether a single British destroyer could even make it all the way to the islands today?)

France talked tough—but has little intention of sending ships to the Strait or aiding postcolonial Lebanon to free itself from even a weakened Hezbollah. Instead, France only seems energized enough to deny the U.S. access to French airspace.

Spain was even worse. It seemed at times pro-Iranian—downgrading its Israeli embassy while reopening its Iranian one. It sent a message to the U.S. that the shared NATO bases in Spain and its airspace were worthless as far as the U.S. operations were concerned. If this is indeed true, then Spain is insignificant as an ally and has now chosen the status of a hostile neutral.

NATO may remain in name, but at least for the near future, the U.S. will likely ostracize the Spanish, be cooler toward Meloni’s Italy, which refused landing rights in Sicily, be curt with Germany, which talked out of both sides of its mouth, and may more or less consider NATO de facto a largely Eastern European bilateral alliance with the U.S.

At any rate, the next time France wishes logistical and intelligence support for its doomed adventures in postcolonial Africa, or a NATO “coalition of the willing” begs the U.S. to lead a “moral” crusade to bomb the ports and communications of Libya or blow up the bridges and power grid of Belgrade, it will be politically impossible in the U.S. to assent. As for the U.K., let us hope it has no need for anything like another Falklands adventure, because next time the U.S. will likely smile and echo Prime Minister Starmer: “This is not our war . . . we’re not going to get dragged into it!”

The Democrat-media nexus, far more so than was true of the Iraq War, was not so much hysterical as nuts. On Monday following Easter, they damned Trump as a warmongering Nazi criminal; by the next night, he was an appeasing naif, a resurrected Neville Chamberlain for 2026.

The Party’s base was openly rooting for Trump and—by poorly disguised association—the U.S. to fail. As for the midterms, they traditionally hinge on the economy. While it is likely the war has impaired it for months, no one knows what its status in November will be. If there is resolution within two or three weeks, ending with an open Strait, lower oil prices, and an Iran neutered for years, then the public may feel that better times are coming at home and abroad.

Most European and Asian democracies for a half-century have had an unspoken, implicit understanding that they would not overtly alienate Iran or condemn it for its Middle East terrorism, in exchange for free passage through the Strait and exemptions from Iranian terrorist proxies. The residual policy remains. So, despite their greater dependency on Middle East oil than is true of the U.S., they until recently felt they could continue their silent understanding and finesse free passage—rather than assemble an armada of warships, help to blast through the straits, and to clean the northern shore of missiles and drones.

The U.S. can open the Strait rather easily, either by direct means, sending tactical aircraft and drones to patrol the coast, providing air cover for the fleet, demining the waters, and escorting ships through, with the proviso that if Iran attacks, it will take out Kharg Island facilities and then resume the air campaign.

Trump is not yet at that point. Given the hysteria of his political enemies, who smell a takeover of Congress in November, impeachment for Trump, trials for his family members, and the end of the Trump counterrevolution, the stakes are high. To avoid all that, he needs a booming economy based on a steady stock market, lower interest rates, and a return to historically low oil prices—but in the next seven months.

The American people also expect a “win” in Iran, defined now by the inability of Iran to close the straits, to launch missiles at U.S. and allied targets, and the surrender of fissionable nuclear material. Iran feels they can delay, harangue, barter, and passively-aggressively stall until the midterms. So the window on the military solution is closing fast.

Trump might point out that the long-term outlook is not good for Iran. Saudi Arabia will expand its pipeline capacities to the Red Sea. The UAE will do the same and expand its existing pipeline to the Gulf of Oman. There is even some talk of Saudi Arabia building a new massive line across Jordan to the Israeli Mediterranean port of Haifa. These Gulf agendas will eventually make the Strait irrelevant to oil exporters like Iran and flip its advantage to the disadvantage of Iran’s vulnerable dependency on the Strait.

In sum, we should ignore the periodic 24-hour schizophrenia of the Left and the media, and instead examine the reality of the war so far, and what will be its likely long-term effects.

Links - 2nd June 2026 (2)

2026-06-02T15:48:00.000+08:00

Why Women in Ancient Rome Had No Names - "In ancient Roman families, girls did not have separate names, and all daughters could bear the same name... The women of Ancient Rome did not have names as such. Instead, families called their daughters by the name of the family, sometimes also combining the nickname that was assigned to a certain family. Following this tradition, the daughter of Julius Caesar also received the name Julia after the name of the family... The situation in which not one but several daughters were born in the family at once was very common. In this case, all the girls still bore the same name. In a situation where parents had only two daughters, “Elder” or “Younger” was added to the family name of daughters. If more than three daughters were born, then each of them, in addition to the family name, received an ordinal number as part of their name, namely the second, third, and so forth. For example, Clodia Tertia, a Roman matron who was suspected of poisoning her husband Quintus Caecilius, was the third daughter in the Clodian family. When a woman married, she retained her family name but also acquired her husband’s family name or his nickname. Hence, the name of the daughter of Julius Caesar, who married the commander Gnaeus Pompey the Great, became a mix of the names of her father and husband—Julius Pompey—after this marriage. Over time, such traditions have slightly changed"
Meme - *Cars passing each other*
"JEWS BECOMING ZIONISTS IN RESPONSE TO ANTISEMITISM"
"JEWS BECOMING COMMUNISTS IN RESPONSE TO ANTISEMITISM"
Meme - ">After three years of Windows 11 decide to switch back to Windows 10
>Wow! Just wow!
>File explorer launches in an instant
>No lag with the right-click context menu
>Feels way much faster!
>Remember what you've been missing for the past three years"
Meme - "WHAT DO TOY TRAINS AND BOOBS HAVE IN COMMON? THEY'RE BOTH INTENDED FOR CHILDREN, BUT IT'S THE FATHERS THAT END UP PLAYING WITH THEM"
Meme - "Cum in Cheese. Matured Gouda cheese with the traditional Dutch cheese spice: cumin. Pairing Suggestion - Italian Antipasti Meats"
Richard Gott, Marxist Guardian journalist who was exposed in 1994 as a KGB stooge – obituary - "Richard Gott, who has died aged 87, was an academic, journalist, and a chronicler and supporter of Marxist guerrilla movements in Latin America who resigned in 1994 as literary editor of The Guardian when he was exposed as having been in the pay of the KGB... Gott could indeed spout the Moscow line, excusing the misdeeds of the East German leader Erich Honecker and claiming that the Russians had got to the Moon first. But he was just as likely to see good in outright pariahs, writing in 1979: “Have we all got it wrong about Pol Pot?” The bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge leader was, he argued, the author of an “interesting social experiment”."
The Guardian hasn't really changed in so many decades
Toddler dies in alleged DUI crash, 14-year-old driver ID'd as child's mother: reports
Canadian province gave out taxpayer-funded coffee that cost $165 a cup to lure US healthcare workers - "'We sent coffee and tea to health care workers in Seattle so we could share the many benefits of working in our beautiful province,' BC Premier David Eby wrote in a post on X at the time... the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) revealed the province's government spent on $165,000 CAD ($119,134 USD) the promotion. That breaks down to each coffee costing approximately $165 CAD ($119 USD) per cup."
57.5% of Canadians have degrees. We’re the most educated G7 country with the worst mismatch - "As of September 2025, 21.8% of core-aged workers with a postsecondary credential reported being overqualified for their current role, and Canada’s real GDP per capita has fallen below the OECD average for the first time in comparable recorded data, sitting at 99.5% in 2024. The gap between what workers know and what their jobs demand is quietly dragging down wages, productivity, and economic growth. Many immigrants arrive with professional degrees and years of experience, yet provincial licensing bodies move slowly and inconsistently. A physician trained abroad may spend years requalifying or doing unpaid placements before being allowed to practise. According to the 2021 Census, the overqualification rate among non-permanent residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher was 32.4%, compared to 26.2% for recent immigrants and 15.9% for the rest of the population. Data from 2016 showed that about 40% of immigrants with university degrees were employed in jobs below their skill level, and by 2021, the overeducation rate among recent immigrants had declined to just under 27%. Yet progress remains slow... While overqualification dominates one side of the labour market, a critical shortage is quietly building on the other. BuildForce Canada’s 2025 to 2034 national forecast projects that 270,000 experienced construction workers will retire over the next decade, pushing the industry’s total hiring requirement to 380,500 workers by 2034. Even with 272,200 expected new entrants under 30, the industry may still face a shortage of 108,300 workers. Statistics Canada data show that apprenticeship certification counts remained 19.9% below pre-pandemic levels in 2024 despite record new registrations, evidence that decades of treating trades as a backup plan have left Canada degree-heavy in some areas and critically thin in others."
Time to encourage even more people to go to university
Gordon Ramsay’s dwarf porn ‘twin’ dies - "A DWARF porn star who was Gordon Ramsay's double has been found dead in the most bizarre of circumstances, according to UK tabloid The Sunday Sport. Percy Foster's 107 centimetre (3'6") body was discovered in a badger's den in Wales. The report says the 35-year-old was found, "deep in an underground chamber by Ministry of Agriculture experts ahead of a planned badger-gassing program." Investigators have not ruled out the possibility of suicide, according to the report. In a recent interview Foster spoke of his excitement about his growing career as Ramsay's double. "Porn lookalikes get more money than normal actors. Dwarf lookalikes are as rare as hen's teeth and so can command top dollar. "I've already ordered a new BMW and a diamond-encrusted Soda Stream," he said."
From 2011
Stair climbing has been included in guidance. Landlords aren’t happy - "Tom McGee, a 69-year-old market researcher from near Chicago, has found an unusual path to fitness, one that has occasionally put him at odds with hotel security. For two decades, McGee has been climbing stairs as a way to stay off cigarettes, a dedication that has seen him "kicked out of about every hotel in the city" due to his unconventional workout locations. His experience highlights a growing challenge for enthusiasts of this highly effective exercise, as modern office towers increasingly restrict access to stairwells. Despite these hurdles, stair climbing is increasingly recognised in exercise guidance for its significant health benefits. Dr Luis Rodriguez, a 66-year-old semi-retired paediatric pulmonologist and avid stair climber, champions the activity. "You are working your legs. You are working your heart. You are working your lungs," he explains, adding, "You can get a lot more benefit than just walking, because gravity is working against you." This is supported by research indicating that just four minutes of stair climbing offers similar benefits to ten minutes of brisk walking or twenty minutes of slower walking. The efficacy of short, intense bursts of activity was officially acknowledged in 2018, when federal physical activity guidance began promoting such efforts – like opting for the stairs between floors at work"
How sticky-fingered thieves use hot glue to find break-in targets in Vancouver - "Police say the suspects begin by entering the buildings at nighttime and applying hot glue to the top corner of the units' doors, stretching strands of glue between the door and the frame. Investigators say the thieves return later to inspect the doors, checking if the strands are broken, indicating that the door has been opened and the unit is occupied."
Miscellany: Teeth - "Mathias Blau of Chicago persuaded his wife, Helen, to have all her teeth pulled. Then he refused to buy her false teeth because, he said, it was cheaper to feed her on soup than on solids. Mrs. Blau went to court, was awarded two sets of store teeth and at least a beefsteak a week. Judge Jonas told Mr. Blau that he had committed “the meanest trick” he had ever heard of."
The Shocking Lawsuit Of A Wife Tricked By Her Husband Into Pulling Her Teeth To Save Money On Food - "The April 13, 1928 issue of The American Guardian told the story of Chicagoan Mathias Blau. His wife Helen was having some problems with her teeth, so he convinced her the best course of action was to have them all pulled and then replaced with dentures. The suffering woman went to the dentist and had her teeth pulled as planned. During her convalescence, she was able to eat little more than soup. Her husband came to enjoy the savings he noticed… Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Blau was none too happy about the sudden rug pull by her husband. Unable to get him to change her mind, she took the only other reasonable course of action available to her — she took him to court.
Carnival cruise passenger wins $300K lawsuit after being over-served alcohol - "Carnival Cruise Line must pay US$300,000 to a former passenger after a federal jury in South Florida found that the company was negligent in serving a woman at least 14 shots of tequila in an eight and a half hour period before she fell down stairs and suffered a possible traumatic brain injury. The Miami federal jury decided in favour of Diana Sanders, a 45-year-old nurse from Vacaville, Calif, and awarded her $300,000 (about $411,315 CAD) in damages"
Time to sue cruise companies for misogyny when they restrict alcohol served to women
Tucker Carlson Network on X - "The people in charge don't want you to know this, but Muslims love Jesus. Islam reveres Him as a major prophet and messenger of the Lord, believes He performed miracles, and states that He will return to Earth to defeat the Antichrist. That's why Donald Trump's painting depicting himself as the Son of God offended the president of Iran. It was an attack on his religion as well as Christianity. Today's Morning Note newsletter covers Masoud Pezeshkian's condemnation of Trump's “desecration of Jesus,” the Iran War's gutting effects on America's housing market, Colombia's plan to murder Pablo Escobar's hippopotami, and more. Read below."
Eitan Fischberger on X - "Here's how Muslim-majority countries treat their Christian populations:
🇸🇴 SOMALIA No churches exist. Converts from Islam face death. Al-Shabaab is committed to eradicating Christianity entirely.
🇾🇪 YEMEN Christians can be imprisoned, tortured, or killed. Possessing a Bible in Houthi-controlled areas is dangerous. No legal protection for Christians exists.
🇸🇩 SUDAN Over 100 churches have been damaged or destroyed. Christians have been abducted and killed. Islamist extremists operate with impunity.
🇸🇾 SYRIA Now largely controlled by HTS — an Islamic extremist group with roots in Al-Qaeda. Christian population has collapsed from 1.5 million to 300,000.
🇳🇬 NIGERIA More Christians are killed for their faith in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world. Boko Haram, ISWAP, and Fulani militias operate freely. The government has largely failed to prosecute perpetrators.
🇵🇰 PAKISTAN
🔸 Christians are 1.8% of the population but absorb ~25% of blasphemy accusations — which carry a death sentence.
🔸 Mob lynchings of accused Christians are common. Entire Christian neighborhoods have been torched.
🔸 Christian girls are kidnapped, forcibly converted, and married off. Courts often back the perpetrators.
🇱🇾 LIBYA No functioning government to protect Christians. Foreign Christians are kidnapped and killed by Islamist groups. No legal protections exist.
🇮🇷 IRAN
🔸 96 Christians sentenced to 263 years in prison in 2024 alone — a sixfold increase year-over-year.
🔸 House churches are raided. Converts are charged with espionage and "enmity against God."
🔸 Apostasy is punishable by death. Government's stated goal: eradicate the Persian-speaking Church.
🇦🇫 AFGHANISTAN Christians face death if discovered. No public Christian communities exist. The Taliban is actively working to erase any Christian presence.
🇸🇦 SAUDI ARABIA
🔸 No churches allowed. No public Christian worship of any kind.
🔸 Apostasy and proselytizing are capital offenses under Sharia law.
🔸 Bibles are confiscated. Even private worship by expatriates can result in arrest and deportation.
🇲🇱 MALI / 🇧🇫 BURKINA FASO Pastors executed, churches burned, villages massacred. Governments have lost control of large swaths of territory to jihadist groups including Boko Haram and JNIM.
🇮🇶 IRAQ The Christian population has collapsed from 1.2 million in 2011 to just 120,000 in 2024 — driven by ISIS genocide. Christians are described as "close to extinction."
🇩🇿 ALGERIA All 47 Protestant evangelical churches in the country have been shut down. Converting Muslims is a criminal offense.
🇲🇷 MAURITANIA Apostasy is punishable by death. No churches exist for Mauritanian citizens.
🇲🇦 MOROCCO No public Christian worship permitted. Converting from Islam can result in prosecution. Foreign missionaries are expelled.
🇶🇦 QATAR
🔸 Apostasy: death penalty under Sharia law.
🔸 Proselytizing a Muslim: up to 5 years in prison.
🔸 Bringing Christian materials into the country: up to 2 years in prison.
🇹🇷 TURKEY
🔸 200+ Christian workers expelled since 2020, labeled "national security threats."
🔸 No legal training of clergy permitted. The historic Halki Seminary remains closed.
🔸 Christian population has collapsed from 20% to 0.2% over the past century."
Clearly, Israel is to blame
Universities teaching literature students how to cope with long novels - "Some institutions are offering “reading resilience” courses for students facing long texts and reading lists while others are using book jacket design as part of the assessment process. Academics said students in the past five to ten years, who had grown up with phones in their pockets, could be intimidated by reading long, older or more difficult books and the jump in pace from A-level... John Mullan, professor of English at University College London, said: “In the last five to ten years, it’s true that fewer students are used to reading very long books. Most on our course at UCL are still willing to take on demanding texts, but that may not be typical. I do have friends in other universities who feel students are less willing to tackle older books or more difficult books. “Some students are not used to sitting and reading a book for five or six hours. When we’re doing course planning, we’re thinking about that a bit more than we used to do. “We react to unwillingness or difficulty with reading lengthy material by trying to get them to do it and not compromising too much. All first-year students have to do Old English, read the whole of Paradise Lost by their fifth week of term and Wordsworth’s preludes by the tenth week. Some bluff their way, but even to have to bluff with these texts is strenuous.”... The number of pupils taking English A-level has plummeted in the past decade, falling from the most popular subject to outside the top ten... Experts blame GCSE English for deterring teenagers, describing GCSE literature as boring and repetitive and the language qualification as outdated and offputting... English literature or language A-levels were taken by 58,000 entrants this summer, down from nearly 90,000 in 2015. The English Association says full person equivalent numbers taking English degrees, not including creative writing or linguistics, have fallen from around 42,285 in 2019-20 to roughly 33,515 in 2023-24. Mullan said the teaching of English degrees had changed over the past decade. He said: “When I was a student, I don’t think people who taught me gave a damn about students’ opinions and they didn’t need to. It didn’t mean they didn’t care about you but the idea that what students wanted to study should be part of the plan was utterly remote. “Now there is more worry about what you think students want to do. If we want them to do something that’s not at the forefront of their wishes, we have to do a job of explaining or persuading.”... Student feedback now has a bigger role, he said, adding: “Sometimes there’s a danger academics chase student opinion, and can almost worry too much about what students say they want to study. “I don’t think academics do any favours by bending to trends and fashions, whether for individual texts or movements. Those students who shout loudly and make most demands are not necessarily representative — I get others emailing me in confidence saying we just want to study Shakespeare.”"
Dark Knight Shift: Why Batman Could Exist--But Not for Long - "Batman is the most down-to-earth of all the superheroes. He has no special powers from being born on a distant world or bitten by a radioactive spider. All that protects him from the Joker and other Gotham City villains are his wits and a physique shaped by years of training—combined with the vast fortune to reach his maximum potential and augment himself with Batmobiles, Batcables and other Bat-goodies, of course... Batman can't really afford to lose. Losing means death—or at least not being able to be Batman anymore. But another benchmark is having enough skill and experience to defend himself without killing anyone. Because that's part of his credo. It would be much easier to fight somebody if you could incapacitate them with extreme force. Punching somebody in the throat could be a lethal blow. That's pretty easy to do. But if you're thinking about something that doesn't result in lethal force, that's more tricky. It's really hard for people to get their heads around, I think. To be that good, to not actually lethally injure anyone, requires an extremely high level of skill that would take maybe 15 to 18 years to accumulate... There is evidence that experts in something like football or hockey have an improved ability to perceive movement in time. In the book I use the example of Steve Nash throwing the ball, even though he can't see where the receiver of the pass is going to be. Experts are able to extract more information faster than others. It's almost like their nervous systems become more efficient... The difficulty for Batman is he's going to be trying to sleep during the day. He's going to be really tired, actually, unless he can shift himself over to just being up at night. If he were just a nocturnal guy, he would actually be a lot healthier and have a lot better sleep than if he were doing what he does now, which is getting some light here and there. That's going to mess up his sleep patterns and duration of sleep... The biggest unreal part of the way Batman's portrayed is the nature of his injuries. Most of the time, in the comics and in the movies, even when he wins, he usually winds up taking a pretty good beating. There's a real failure to show the cumulative effect of that. The next day he's shown out there doing the same thing again. He'd likely be quite tired and injured... Somewhere around age 50 to 55, he should probably retire. His performance is going down. He's always facing younger adversaries. That is well at the end of when he's going to be able to defend himself and be able to not have to deal that lethal force. This was actually shown in an animated series called Batman Beyond... Keeping in mind that being Batman means never losing: If you look at consecutive events where professional fighters have to defend their titles—Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Ultimate Fighters—the longest period you're going to find is about two to three years. That dovetails nicely with the average career for NFL running backs. It's about three years. (That's the statistic I got from the NFL Players Association Web site.) The point is, it's not very long. It's really hard to become Batman in the first place, and it's hard to maintain it when you get there."
Mâchon: The French breakfast you don't know - "I've always found French petit déjeuner (breakfast) insubstantial, but that wasn't the first thing that came to mind as I scanned the menu on the blackboard. Gone were the tartines and croissants, replaced instead by a list that read like a biology textbook: rognons de veau (calf's kidney), tablier de sapeur (fried, breaded tripe), tête de veau (calf's head). This was mâchon, a long-standing Lyonnais breakfast tradition where no part of the animal goes to waste."
DiscussingFilm on X - "A teaser for ‘THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE HUNT FOR GOLLUM’ was shown at CinemaCon “This is a tale that must never be told.”"
GODZILLA STAN ACCOUNT on X - "this is like the 2025 War of the Worlds tagline being "It's Worse Than You Think""
Cow tools - Wikipedia - ""Cow tools" is a cartoon from The Far Side by American cartoonist Gary Larson, published on October 28, 1982. It depicts a cow standing behind a table of bizarre, misshapen implements with the caption "Cow tools". The cartoon confused many readers, who wrote or phoned in seeking an explanation of the joke. In response, Larson issued a press release clarifying that the thrust of the cartoon was simply that, if a cow were to make tools, they would "lack something in sophistication". It has been described as "arguably the most loathed Far Side strip ever" while also becoming a popular internet meme."
It's absurdism, after all
Most Canadians consider speaking English, French key to national identity, survey shows - The Globe and Mail - "Canadians are more likely than their U.S. counterparts to see language, customs and traditions as central to their national identity, a new survey suggests. Some 84 per cent of respondents to the Pew Research Center poll released Thursday said speaking English or French is very or somewhat important to being Canadian, while only 15 per cent said the opposite. In the U.S., however, only 78 per cent prioritized being able to speak English – the most common tongue in a country without an official language – while 21 per cent said it had little or no bearing on the American identity. “Of the four dimensions of national identity included in the survey, language is by far the most valued,” Pew reported in its brief on the poll. “In all countries where we asked about it, about eight in 10 or more point to language as important for true belonging in the country. And in 13 countries, at least six in 10 consider it a very important factor.” And yet, while a vast majority of respondents in all 21 countries surveyed on language considered it an important facet of their country’s national identity, the percentage who did was lowest in the U.S. A large majority of Canadians surveyed – 81 per cent – also linked customs and traditions to their national identity. But that’s a nine-point decline since the last time the question was asked in Canada in 2016. There again, U.S. participants were less inclined to make the same link: only 71 per cent said customs and traditions were somewhat or very central to being American, while 28 per cent said otherwise. Parse the results by political allegiance, however, and the picture changes. Fully 87 per cent of U.S. respondents who identify as right-leaning said customs and traditions were important, 34 percentage points higher than those on the left. In Canada, 86 per cent of conservative-minded respondents felt the same way, compared with 68 per cent of left-leaning participants. Similar gaps emerged on language... Middle-income countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Kenya and South Africa, were far more likely to put value on being born within their borders, while Sweden and Australia led those who valued birthplace the least. “Nations where immigrants make up a smaller share of the population tend to see birthplace as a more important component of national identity,” the study reported."

One transgender movement?

2026-06-02T12:36:00.000+08:00

Read some Piaget please! on X: "One transgender movement?"
The Demographic Fracture: Adult Male Transition and the Child Cohort
Any serious analysis of the gender affirmative movement must reckon with a demographic fact that its proponents rarely address directly. The clinical and political movement that advocates for the affirmation and medical transition of gender distressed children is, at the level of its most prominent adult advocates, predominantly composed of people with a very different profile from the children on whose behalf they speak.
Adult male transition, the cohort that built the foundational institutions, legal frameworks, and cultural visibility of the transgender movement in Western societies over the latter decades of the twentieth century, is a late onset phenomenon. The typical presentation involves a male who has lived for decades as a man, often with a conventional heterosexual history including marriage and fatherhood, and who arrives at gender transition in middle age or beyond. The clinical and autobiographical literature on this cohort, including the work of Ray Blanchard and Anne Lawrence on autogynephilia, describes a pattern of transition rooted in adult male sexuality and psychology, with its own distinct aetiology, trajectory, and set of concerns.
The child cohort presenting to gender clinics in the twenty first century is something categorically different. It consists predominantly, in recent years overwhelmingly, of adolescent females with high rates of co occurring mental health conditions, autism spectrum conditions, trauma histories, and same sex attraction. The sex ratio inversion is one of the most striking and least discussed features of the contemporary clinical picture. At the Tavistock GIDS, referrals shifted from a predominantly male to a seventy four percent female cohort by 2018 to 2019. The children arriving at gender clinics in the contemporary period bear almost no demographic, psychological, or aetiological resemblance to the adult males who built the movement through which they are now being processed.
This demographic fracture matters for several reasons that advocates of the gender affirmative model have been consistently unwilling to examine.
The experiential basis of advocacy is not transferable
Adult male transitioners who report subjective relief following social and medical transition are reporting on an experience that is their own. Whatever the mechanisms underlying that experience, and the literature on outcomes is considerably more ambiguous than popular accounts suggest, it is an experience rooted in adult male psychology, adult sexuality, adult cognitive capacity, and a transition undertaken with the benefit of a fully developed prefrontal cortex. The claim that this experience validates early childhood transition involves an inferential leap that the evidence does not support.
A fifty year old man who transitions and reports improved wellbeing has not provided evidence that a fourteen year old girl with depression, a trauma history, and no prior indication of gender distress before the age of twelve should receive puberty blockers. The two situations share a vocabulary. They do not share an aetiology, a developmental context, or a risk profile. Using the former to justify the latter is not clinical reasoning. It is the substitution of personal testimony for empirical evidence across a demographic chasm.
The political interests of the two cohorts do not align
The adult male transgender movement has historically organised around specific concerns: legal recognition of gender identity, access to sex specific spaces, freedom from discrimination in employment and public life, and the social legitimacy of late onset transition. These are adult concerns. They arise from an adult life situation. They are not trivially wrong as political claims, but they have a specific origin and a specific constituency.
The medicalisation of gender distressed children is a distinct project. It requires a different justification, draws on a different evidence base, and carries a different risk profile. A child receiving puberty blockers at age twelve is not receiving an adult political freedom. They are receiving an irreversible medical intervention at a stage of development when the cognitive prerequisites for evaluating its long term consequences are, as Piaget and Kohlberg establish, not yet present.
The political coalition that advocates for both simultaneously has an interest in presenting them as the same thing. They are not the same thing. The elision serves adult advocacy interests. It does not serve children.
The gatekeeping question exposes the fracture
One of the most revealing sites of tension within the gender affirmative movement concerns the question of gatekeeping, the clinical practice of requiring assessment, differential diagnosis, and a period of psychological evaluation before medical intervention is offered. Adult transitioners have historically objected to gatekeeping on grounds of autonomy. An adult who has considered their decision, lived with it, and is capable of providing informed consent should not, on this argument, be required to obtain clinical permission to proceed with a legal medical intervention affecting their own body.
This argument has force when applied to competent adults making considered decisions about their own lives. It has no application whatsoever to children. Children are not adults. The argument from autonomy does not transfer across the developmental boundary. Gillick competence, the legal and clinical framework governing the capacity of children under sixteen to consent to medical treatment, exists precisely because the law and medicine recognise that adult autonomy cannot simply be projected downward onto developing minds.
The progressive erosion of clinical gatekeeping for children, which occurred in part because of advocacy pressure rooted in the adult autonomy argument, represents the direct transfer of a political position developed in one context to a clinical context where it does not belong. The Cass Review's finding that assessment practices at the Tavistock were inadequate, that comorbidities were insufficiently explored, and that many children were placed on medical pathways without the thorough evaluation their situations required, is in significant part a consequence of this transfer.
The same sex attraction dimension
The relationship between homosexuality and the transgender framework is a further point at which the interests of the two cohorts diverge in ways that have been systematically obscured. A substantial proportion of the children currently presenting to gender clinics are same sex attracted young people whose distress is rooted in the difficulties of developing a gay or lesbian identity in contexts carrying shame, social difficulty, or simple confusion about what their feelings mean.
The historical record is instructive. In a pre affirmation era clinical context, the majority of children presenting with gender distress desisted from that distress without medical intervention, and a substantial proportion of those who desisted went on to identify as gay or lesbian. The affirmation model, applied to these children, does not liberate them from a false identity. It places them on a medical pathway that may foreclose the gay or lesbian identity they would otherwise have developed. The irony is pointed: a movement that emerged in part alongside gay liberation now operates, in its application to children, in ways that risk converting same sex attracted young people into heterosexual transitioners.
Some adult gay and lesbian advocates have noted this with considerable alarm. Their concern is not misplaced. The adult male transgender movement, whose own relationship to homosexuality is complex and contested in the clinical literature, does not have clean hands on this question, and the political pressure to treat any such observation as transphobic has had the effect of suppressing a clinically significant line of inquiry.
The vulnerability asymmetry
Adult male transitioners are, by definition, adults. They have the legal capacity to consent to medical treatment, the cognitive capacity to evaluate risk, the developmental maturity to understand long term consequences, and the life experience to contextualise the decision they are making. Many have indeed considered their decisions over long periods, often decades, before acting.
The children arriving at gender clinics in the contemporary period are, by contrast, among the most psychologically vulnerable young people in the clinical system. They have high rates of mental health conditions, high rates of trauma exposure, and high rates of co occurring developmental conditions including autism spectrum conditions. They are, on Erikson and Marcia's account, in the developmental phase of identity moratorium, the phase in which uncertainty is the expected and appropriate condition and premature foreclosure carries the greatest developmental cost. They are, on Bowlby and Fonagy's account, a population in whom the presentations most likely to be interpreted as evidence of gender incongruence are the characteristic presentations of insecure attachment and mentalisation failure.
Applying a model developed in, and advocated by, an adult population to this vulnerable child population requires a standard of evidential justification that has not been met. The Cass Review, the HHS Systematic Review of 2025, and the Scandinavian clinical reviews that preceded them all reached the same conclusion: the evidence base is weak, the quality of studies is low, comorbidities were inadequately assessed, and long term outcomes are unknown.
A Further Fracture: Transmedicalism and Its Critics
A second schism runs through the adult transgender movement that is equally relevant to the child question. Transmedicalists, sometimes called truscum within online communities, hold that genuine transgender identity requires clinically significant dysphoria, that medical transition is the defining feature of authentic transgender experience, and that identity alone without accompanying distress and the desire for physical intervention does not constitute a transgender identity in any meaningful clinical sense. Anti-transmedicalists reject this entirely, arguing that gender identity is self determined, that dysphoria is neither necessary nor definitive, and that requiring medical criteria for recognition is itself a form of gatekeeping that replicates the oppressive structures the movement exists to dismantle. This internal dispute matters for the child question because the two positions generate radically different clinical implications. A transmedicalist framework, whatever its other limitations, at least preserves a role for clinical assessment and maintains a distinction between identity and diagnosis. The anti-transmedicalist position, extended to children, provides the theoretical basis for social transition without assessment, affirmation without evaluation, and the treatment of any clinical hesitation as political hostility. It is largely the anti-transmedicalist position that has shaped the affirmative model as applied to children, and it is that position which the developmental and evidential literature most directly contradicts.
The institutional capture dynamic
The mechanism by which the adult transgender advocacy movement achieved influence over paediatric clinical practice is not difficult to trace. Advocacy organisations with adult membership and adult concerns became involved in the development of clinical guidelines governing the treatment of children. Professional bodies in which adult transitioners and their advocates had acquired influence endorsed models developed without adequate paediatric evidence. Clinicians who raised concerns about the applicability of adult frameworks to child populations were marginalised. The language developed to describe adult experience was applied wholesale to children, and questioning that application was characterised as a failure of political solidarity rather than a legitimate clinical concern.
The result was a paediatric clinical model shaped in significant part by the interests and experiences of a demographic entirely different from the children it purported to serve.
Conclusion
The gender affirmative model applied to children did not emerge from paediatric developmental research. It emerged from adult advocacy, adult testimony, and adult political organisation, and was then extended downward to a child population that differs from its originators in almost every relevant respect: in sex, in age, in developmental stage, in psychological profile, in aetiology, and in the nature of the risks they face.
The children now being processed through gender affirmative clinical pathways are not young versions of the adult male transitioners who built the institutional infrastructure through which they move. They are a different population, with different needs, different vulnerabilities, and different developmental futures at stake. Treating them as though they were the same population, because the same vocabulary is applied to both, is a category error with serious clinical consequences.
A developmentally grounded, evidentially rigorous paediatric medicine would have recognised this from the beginning. The task now is to ensure that it recognises it going forward.
Suggested Reading
Ray Blanchard's clinical papers on autogynephilia and Anne Lawrence's Men Trapped in Men's Bodies (2013) provide the foundational account of late onset male transition. Michael Bailey's The Man Who Would Be Queen (2003) covers the same ground for a general readership.
The Cass Review (2024), available in full at
cass.independent-review.org
, remains the essential source on the contemporary child cohort and the demographic shift in paediatric presentations. Littman's 2018 paper in PLOS ONE documents the adolescent female cohort specifically.
For desistance and same sex attracted outcomes, Steensma and colleagues (2013) in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Singh (2021) are the key studies.

On the limits of the autonomy argument in a paediatric context, the Bell v Tavistock High Court judgment (2020), available through the National Archives, remains essential reading.

Links - 2nd June 2026 (1 - UK Politics)

2026-06-02T09:38:00.000+08:00

Sadiq Khan on X - "Disinformation about London has become a global industry. The new “outrage economy” is growing - and it’s eating away at the bonds that hold our society together. That's why I'm calling for urgent action from social media companies and government."
Laila Cunningham on X - "“Misinformation” is now just code for censorship. Khan spent a decade making London dangerous. Now he wants to make it illegal to say so. He’s not trying to make London safer he’s trying to make it look safer. He’s asking government to censor what people can post about crime in London. He wants to silence the truth. That is textbook authoritarianism. Free speech is not a problem to be managed. It’s a right to be defended. Any politician who thinks censorship matters more than fixing the reality has no business running this city."
Zipcar leaves the UK, abandoning 650,000 members: Sadiq Khan condemned for ignoring London warnings - "Richard Dilks, of CoMoUK, says London needs to ensure those firms are given full backing to operate in order to prevent the streets being overstuffed with more cars. 'Our research shows that every car club vehicle replaces 31 private cars in London, freeing up space and making the capital's streets less clogged and more pleasant for everyone,' he added... it is thought that City Hall had anxieties that Zipcars and other car club vehicles would actually contribute more unnecessary traffic to London's roads - antithetical to Sadiq Khan's flagship transport strategy. Zipcar's decision, however, could actually fly in the face of his plan to cut car ownership in favour of walking, cycling and taking public transport. A CoMoUK survey commissioned after Zipcar began consulting on its closure found some 80 per cent of those who had been using it are either buying, or considering buying, a car of their own."
Sadiq Khan has maxed out his credibility with Londoners - "Could someone please confiscate Sadiq Khan’s phone? I’m starting to think a nasty case of social media addiction is at least part of the reason why his time as Mayor of London has been so hapless, not to mention miserable, for most Londoners other than him. His bio on X says he has been “Londonmaxxing since 2016” – the year our pint-sized mayor was first elected. We’ve been subjected to his heady mix of cringe and ineptitude ever since... Shoplifting is at a record high. There were nearly 95,000 shoplifting offences recorded by the Metropolitan Police in the year ending June 2025, a rise of 38 per cent on the previous year. Meanwhile, “theft from the person”, such as pickpocketing, has almost tripled since 2016. Khan might call himself a “proud feminist”, but sexual offences have skyrocketed under his watch, too – with more than 27,000 cases recorded, up 11.2 per cent on the previous year, and up 63.2 per cent from June 2016. Then there’s knife crime, which continues to inflict needless tragedy, fear and bloodshed on many of London’s most deprived communities. In the year to June 2025, there were 15,639 instances recorded – an increase of nearly 72 per cent from the 2015-16 data... Khan’s constant gaslighting and obfuscation reveal a brittle leader who refuses to take any responsibility, and refuses to accept that much at all is going wrong... Khan’s deflections have been particularly shameful on the subject of grooming gangs. He once infamously said there was “no indication” of these monsters preying on London’s girls, but that was contradicted by revelations uncovered this year by the BBC of familiar stories of the rape and exploitation of the most vulnerable among us. It seems to me Khan is blinded by two things. The first is ideology. He appears to have absorbed many of the most bizarre delusions of the woke Left, such as better education or “awareness-raising” can tackle serious crime. Remember City Hall’s “Maaate” campaign, encouraging young men to chide their friends for their “sexist jokes and banter”, lest they slide down the slippery slope to sexual violence? Give it time and those rape gangs will soon be a thing of the past. The second factor is Khan’s towering self-regard and victim complex. His opponents couldn’t possibly have a point when they levelled criticism at him. During the last mayoral race, he dubbed Susan Hall, the Tory hopeful, as the “most dangerous candidate I have ever faced”. And when Londoners protested against his ultra-low emission zone expansion, he described them as “part of the far-Right”. Seeing fascists everywhere, thinking in hashtags, talking in Gen Z slang ... Khan, like much of today’s Left, appears to have memed himself into believing ridiculous things, all while ignoring the evidence before his own eyes."
Sadly, there may be enough migrants and left wingers in London to keep re-electing him, even as the city continues to go to shit
Rupert Lowe MP on X - "Britain is a Christian country, and under a Restore Britain Government - it will remain a Christian country."
Join Us - Restore Britain - "If you believe in low tax, small government, secure borders, national pride, traditional Christian principles, free speech, and direct democracy - you’re in the right place."
Talk on X - "“I think viewers at home will understand what I'm getting at.” Campaign Director for Restore Britain Charlie Downes slams Reform UK for “not having a clear idea of who the British people are.” @ThatAlexWoman @cfdownes_"
Charlie Downes on X - "Reform UK believe that anyone from anywhere can become British. Restore Britain believe that Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith."
Reform UK believe that anyone from anywhere can become British. Restore Britain believe that Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith. : r/ukpolitics - "Is this some sort of psyop to make Reform look more palatable to normal people?"
Besides the religious nationalism, if the talk of "somebody whose family has been here for a thousand years" doesn't suffice as ethnonationalism, Restore Britain's campaigns director talking about "indigenous British ancestry" is pretty clear
Andrew J. Willshire on X - "This is Olympic-standard corruption of Parliament. Say you want to abolish the House of Lords but instead appoint more new peers than your four immediate predecessors combined (62) and also kick out a large group (90) of opposition peers. Starmer has tipped the scales in the Lords in favour of Labour by 152 in just two years. It's outrageous."
Has Keir Starmer forgotten that he’s the Prime Minister? - "Future crucial decisions about energy policy were nothing to do with him, Starmer rightly pointed out. Only someone with the authority of Ed Miliband, the Net Zero Secretary, could do so, and he wasn’t around so what did you want me to do about it... Miliband, it turns out, has a “quasi-judicial” role in deciding whether to exploit new oil and gas fields in the North Sea, a role that Starmer dare not even ask about. This is hardly surprising. It is known that at last autumn’s reshuffle, Starmer had tried to move Miliband from his current brief, and Miliband had said “No”. And that was that. Starmer, though nominally Prime Minister, didn’t feel he had the personal authority to be able to have exactly who he wanted running departments. Just as he doesn’t have enough personal authority to decide energy policy. At the despatch box, Starmer held his head in his hands, a visual cue to let us know that he had given up on trying to explain the intricacies of government to Badenoch. Why didn’t she understand that Prime Ministers don’t have any power, responsibility or authority? Surely she doesn’t think that his job is to lead the Government, rather than to wait to be told by his Cabinet colleagues what they’re going to do? Starmer then resorted to the single policy he has alighted on in the last 18 months that has gained favour among his own supporters: his opposition to the war against Iran. “We’re discussing this because of the war. We need to de-escalate – that is why I stuck to my principles not to join the war.” Which resulted in the unfamiliar yet inevitable cheer from some Labour back benchers. “We need to take control of our energy prices and the only way to do that is through renewables,” Starmer said. “The party opposite used to make that argument.” This is true. The party opposite made exactly this argument, right up until the point where they lost two-thirds of their MPs. Then they stopped making that argument. Make of that what you will. Perhaps his background as a lawyer means that Starmer believes what he says about Miliband being allowed to lead and decide government policy without interference from the Prime Minister or the rest of the Government. Perhaps that’s really what Starmer thinks “quasi-judicial” means when it comes to government decisions. That would be a pity because that is not what it means at all. Ministerial decisions are still political, whatever context they’re made in. They are still made in consultation with colleagues, with the aim of achieving government aims, aims that are set by the Prime Minister and agreed by all ministers. Miliband cannot possibly be allowed to act in isolation. If the government as a whole decided we needed to exploit the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil fields, then Miliband would be instructed to deliver that aim and, being a clever and competent type, would doubtless do so. And if he refused, then he could be replaced by someone who would. And let’s face it: if Starmer really were that committed to running a government according to the rule of law, he wouldn’t still be allowing the entire country, including his own government, to flout the Equality Act and its protections for single-sex services. But some laws are more important than others."
Meme - Kemi Bedenoch: "TFW Ed Miliband is running the government. *Keir Starmer with face in hands*"
Starmer under fire for claiming petrol ‘price gouging’ without evidence - "Sir Keir Starmer has been accused of an “irresponsible” attack on petrol stations after claiming they were profiteering from the oil crisis. The Prime Minister said regulators needed to crack down on “price gouging” as the cost of fuel was climbing rapidly. He made the claim to MPs on Monday without presenting evidence to support it. The Conservatives called it “irresponsible” and suggested Sir Keir was simply trying to shift the focus away from a planned increase in fuel duty... It came as the Treasury said regulators will introduce a new “anti-profiteering framework”... In a report into the road fuel industry published in 2023, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said “a large majority of the fluctuation in petrol and diesel pump prices has been due to movements in the crude oil price”, though it did find competition in the market had become weaker."
Elliot Keck on X - "I'm old enough to remember being told that a Starmer government would be dull and non-ideological. Less than two years and we now have a justice secretary using an official channel of the justice department not just to defend the partial abolition of jury trials, but also to discard the principle of innocent until proven guilty"
Cleopatra on X - "When someone says a man can grow a cervix you can't believe anything he says thereafter."
Kiera Diss on X - "PARKING INSANITY IN BIRMINGHAM Days after a Labour MP posted a video highlighting the utter lawlessness of Birmingham drivers with them double parking and parking on paths, a fire engine was filmed attempting to get through a road in the same area. They should be prosecuted."
Paul Joseph Watson on X - "A low trust society which creates petty lawlessness literally doesn't function."
Coach Dale | Fat Loss For Men on X - "And then the people who rightly oppose this collapse in social cohesion and duty get labelled 'divisive'."
Met Police chief thanks Britons for standing up for Golders Green officers amid 'nonsense' Zack Polanski row : r/gbnews - "Some people say Trump is Putin’s friend and a Russian asset. There are arguments that can be made about that but is rather a myth than obvious. Greens on the other hand, is hard to make an argument against it. Get rid of nukes, check. Get out of NATO, check. Have no control over who is coming, check. I swear even Putin himself wouldn’t come with such bold claims in the manifesto."
Zack Polanski falsely claimed to have worked for Ministry of Justice - "The London Assembly member said he worked inside the MoJ doing "actor roleplay work", having said during his successful leadership campaign he was "currently working at the Ministry of Justice on their training & diversity programmes". However, the MoJ said they had no record of Mr Polanski ever working for the department... he conceded that, rather than working for the MoJ directly, he had been hired through an agency that supplied actors for role-play scenarios to a quango responsible for interviewing would-be judges."
Polanski falsely claimed to be Red Cross spokesman - "Zack Polanski falsely claimed to be a spokesman for the British Red Cross while raising funds to stand as deputy leader of the Green Party... The newspaper also claimed Mr Polanski, 43, who worked as a hypnotherapist before moving into politics, was not a full member of the National Council of Hypnotherapy, despite him having apparently made such claims to potential clients... Mr Polanski was criticised when it emerged he had appeared in an article in The Sun in which he claimed his hypnotherapy could help with breast enlargement. He has repeatedly claimed he was misrepresented by the newspaper, but The Telegraph revealed that his archived blogs from 2019 showed he had stood by the breast enlargement claims and “was not misreported” at all."
The Green Party has become a monster - spiked - "Two years ago, the Green Party of England and Wales became the first political party in British history to lose a claim for unlawful discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. My ordeal escalated in 2021, when I was reappointed as a frontbench spokesperson for policing and justice. My gender-critical views precipitated the passive-aggressive resignation of Siân Berry as co-leader of the party and the escalation of an unrelenting, concerted campaign by gender-identity ideologues to have me removed as spokesperson... I took the party to court for unlawful gender-critical discrimination and won in 2024. Going to court was extraordinarily stressful and required my absolute resolve in the justice of the cause and the support of countless concerned campaigners and donors. I was horrified at the idea that a political association could remove a spokesperson from post for expressing not just a legally protected belief but also a sex-realist one at that... In any sane organisation, which had just lost a landmark court case, the next step would not be to do the same thing again. Following my victory, the rational thing to have done would have been to reinstate my spokesperson role. Instead, the party sought to find renewed pretexts for removing me entirely... I also regard it as my duty to expose the monster that the party has become. The almost daily revelations about the anti-Semitic bile, whether historic or recent, perpetrated by a slew of its local-election candidates are testament to how far the Greens have fallen. The hypocrisy of the leadership in seeking to stop a ‘Zionism is racism’ motion from being voted on at conference, when they have fed and facilitated hardline Islamic entryism, is evidence of its further hard-left totalitarian rot. The Green Party has always talked about doing politics differently. That once was the case, in a good way – but now it has become so in a bad way. A political party that acts as an authoritarian law unto itself, and that is seeking to govern the UK, is a menace to society."
Green Party deputy leader blasts 'inherently racist’ claims he was supporting Iran's Supreme Leader at London rally : r/unitedkingdom - "And not just him either, every MSM report I've seen notes that Muslims voted Green and automatically assumed that they were "Conservative Muslims", hinting they were supporters of the worst kinds of sectarian theocracy nonsense who'd somehow been tricked into voting for a diverse progressive party."
"They voted for the Greens because the Greens made Gaza, Modi and Labour’s immigration rhetoric a focus of their campaign. It was speaking to the specific interests of Pakistani Muslims. I’m not sure what you’re implying instead - that they voted Green due to dreams of an LGBT drug fuelled utopia?"
Thread by @ArchRose90 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The Telegraph has obtained WhatsApp messages of Green Party activists have described Jewish people as “an abomination to this planet”. A decade ago I would have assumed this was a far-right chat group. Now the far-left have embraced antisemitism. Sickening but unsurprising.
Don’t you dare call Reform “racist” again @ZackPolanski whilst your party is infested with vehement antisemites. When you overlook antisemitism from certain communities for votes, this is what happens."
Clearly, we know they meant "Zionists"
Scratch an "anti-Zionist", find an anti-Semite
Time to blame The Telegraph
YouGov backs down in row with Nigel Farage - "YouGov defended its methods last week, saying that its polls were more accurate than others because it asked people how they would vote in their constituency in a general election, rather than just which party they favoured. YouGov claimed this produced a more accurate result, as it took into account likely tactical voting. However, Mr Farage took issue with the fact that YouGov did not also publish the underlying data on which party people favoured at a national level. He said it broke rules set out by the British Polling Council (BPC), which state that if people are asked a second question – in this case how they would vote in their constituency – which produced a markedly different answer from a prior question – which party they favoured – then the results of both questions must be published... In recent polls of voting intention YouGov has given Reform an average of 24.8 per cent. Over the same period Opinium had Reform on 30.9 per cent, More in Common 29.5 per cent and Find Out Now 29.3 per cent. Mr Farage accused YouGov of breaking a second BPC rule, which states that pollsters must publish tables showing the exact questions asked in the order in which they were asked."
Police chiefs warn Labour against cancelling mayoral elections - "Labour’s decision to cancel mayoral elections next year will put public safety at risk and result in a surge in knife crime, said policing chiefs. The Government has delayed mayoral elections in Hampshire, Sussex, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk until 2028 after ditching plans to hold them this May."
An evening with Nish Kumar and The Guardian - "Retired primary school teachers, people who worked for the council and childless, sullen couples in their early forties whose life had become a silent downward spiral of Time Out “Things to Do in London”. The topics of conversation this evening would be vegetables, Tim Dowling’s Wife and The Traitors. For the last decade, the idea of “metropolitan liberal elite” has loomed large in the national conversation. This has always been a confusing label, attached to everyone from the Davos Set to Gary Lineker. When everyone from Lee Anderson to Peter Turchin conjures up the overeducated, downwardly mobile, haywire plight of the urban liberal middle classes, they are actually, for the most part, talking about the sort of people who work in marketing, live in Walthamstow and get their thrills from Richard Osman and BBC6 music. Our popular conception of the liberal metropolis is skewed. Britain, unlike the US, even France, doesn’t have anything remotely approaching an intellectual, discerning liberal bourgeoisie. Liberal Americans have the New York Times — a publication that has survived the decline of prestige media to become a global institution read reliably even by the people who despise it. Britain has the BBC, The Guardian and The Rest is Politics. Yet I suspect they’ve been happy, Kumar included, to lean into the “liberal elite” slur over the past decade because it very much flatters to deceive... It’s easy to laugh at Kumar’s fall, much harder to forgive his rise. Over the summer of George Floyd, Nish Kumar and his “anti-racism” went from a tedious and unfunny career bit to the ruling ideology of the British state. As the Kate Clanchy episode has confirmed, this was never an intellectual crusade about “progressivism”, but a jealous, cruel and vindictive romp played out by middle class people who hated each other... For the last confused and uncertain decade, “fighting populism” had been a tedious matter of labouring through the translated fiction of the Guardian’s review pages, pretending to read the latest Thomas Piketty and demanding the local constabulary be abolished in the name of black rights. Now it was possible to believe that Nigel Farage could be prevented from becoming Prime Minister by a deference to the kindness of people like Stephen Fry and Alan Carr. It was all too easy. The room was howling with laughter as Kumar began to lampoon the Daily Mail as the cause of all of our ills. On stage, a faithful Guardian reading couple had appeared to discuss their disagreement over whether it was necessary to iron their tea towels. Never, perhaps since the eve of the First World War, has such a naive, dull, provincial, gentle and misguided view of Britain on the eve of such profound upheaval enchanted so many people. It was time to leave. Outside, across the Kings Cross skyline a new London was being built. The station was fronted by a mixture of lost asylum seekers, seedy tramps and self-confessed demonic mendicants well beyond the wit of Nish Kumar. I had, with some relief, escaped back to reality."
Censored by Britain - by Ed West - Wrong Side of History - "The Online Safety Act is a badly-drafted law with numerous unintended – and perhaps intended – consequences... the law, originally marketed as protecting children from pornography, was hijacked by various groups to counter ‘hate’, by which they mean people with opinions they don’t like... It could be bad news for me, since most people don’t want to hand over their details to the government, who will probably end up leaking it to the Taliban by accident... The British state’s response to unarguable social problems is to stop people noticing them, but people overseas are certainly noticing... of the four big cultural British exports I mentioned, three of them - Harry Potter, James Bond, Tolkien - feel ‘classy’ to Americans, and there is also Downton, which reflects the common American idea that they have money, but the British have class. Indeed, the plot line in which Lady Grantham is the daughter of a Cincinnati-based industrialist, is based on a real-life dynamic - a third of the House of Lords in the late 19th century married American heiresses... Britain’s declining reputation is in large part due to the declining sense of Britain being ‘classy’."
Æthelstan on X - "One thing strikes me as the political class scrambles to capitalise on various crises - particularly with respect to increasing the power of the state. You could make Keir the Lord Emperor of the Economic Zone formerly known as Britain, you could bestow upon him and his friends all the power in the world. You could toss out Magna Carta and every other bulwark the British have against the technocrat class... And yet they STILL could not solve any of the problems facing Britain. The issues Britain faces do not stem from a lack of laws, or persecutory mechanisms for bending the populace to the will of politicians. It's not a lack of School Breakfast Clubs. It's not a lack of funding for the NHS. It's not a lack of "hate speech" laws. It's not even a lack of experience or competency - even if many of their ideas are stupid and doomed to failure. The issue is a disloyal, Londoncentric political class that holds no authentic affection for Britain or its peoples at all. The EU was the canary in the coalmine there. The political class spent decades outsourcing their jobs and their democratic legitimacy to Belgium. When they weren't doing that, they were handing over policymaking to an assortment of shady NGOs and and private corporations who they can blame when everything goes wrong. They have been privatising the benefits of power - money, prestige, property portfolios - while dodging responsibility for how things got this bad. Meanwhile, in election after election, people demand secure borders and a safe society with a reasonable standard of living. Instead they receive inflation, hate speech laws, endless chatter about foreign engagements of no concern to them, and a de haut en bas smugness that openly states they'd trade us away for a decent curry (thank you Piers). Gun laws. Hate speech laws. Sugar taxes. Flim flam. You can have literally anything you want except border controls. The progressive blob will cheerfully self-destruct its electoral chances forever rather than compromise on open borders for 1 nanosecond. So it's not a competency crisis, it's a loyalty crisis. Rupert Lowe stands out not only because he is an exceptional orator and politician, but because he is loyal - and loyalty is what matters."

Links - 1st June 2026 (3 - Palestine/Middle East Peace)

2026-06-01T21:41:00.000+08:00

Matt Field (@mattfield1) - "On Friday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a City Hall-produced video for Nakba Day featuring Inea Bushnaq, whom he called “a Nakba survivor.” The New York Times covered it as fact. “Bushnaq” is not a Palestinian family name. It is the Arabized form of “Bošnjak,” meaning Bosnian. The surname was adopted in 1924 by descendants of Bosnian Muslim families who emigrated to Ottoman-controlled Palestine after Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia in 1878. The name they took is a record of where they came from. Inea Bushnaq was born in Jerusalem in 1948. Her family’s roots in Palestine traced back, at most, 70 years, to settlers from the Balkans who acquired land in Tulkarm and Caesarea and hired Arab laborers to work it. When the family left in 1948, they did not go to a refugee camp. They went to London. Inea was eventually educated at Cambridge. A British official in Jerusalem told Time magazine in May 1948: “The whole effendi class has gone. It is remarkable how many of the younger ones are suddenly deciding that this might be a good time to resume their studies at Oxford.” Between 30,000 and 75,000 had already departed before Israel was even declared. One more detail. The Mamdani video was decorated with a “Visit Palestine” poster presented as Palestinian cultural art. It was created in 1936 by Franz Krausz, an Austrian Jewish refugee from antisemitism who immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. It was commissioned by a Zionist tourism organization. The “Nakba survivor” is the descendant of Bosnian settlers. The cultural artifact is Zionist. The mayor of New York produced this with city resources, and the Times ran it without a question. That is a press release for a narrative that cannot survive scrutiny."
Ironic. Anti-semites keep claiming that Jews are from Europe. Like with most of their claims, terrorism supporters project
Thomas Lukaszuk says painting the Canadian flag over the Palestinian flag is 'anti-Palestine messaging' - "University of Calgary students were seen painting over the Palestinian flag with the Canadian flag —and Thomas Lukaszuk, former deputy premier, has some thoughts. On Tuesday — Remembrance Day — the Campus Conservative Association of Calgary gathered, waving Canadian flags and painting a rock — known to be repainted quite often — with the Canadian flag. Prior to this, the rock had been painted with the Palestinian flag for over a year."
If you don't hate your country, you're a bigot
Cornell backs university prez held hostage in his car by student radicals after Israel-Palestine debate series - "Cornell University’s board of trustees said it’s standing by the Ivy League school’s president Michael Kotlikoff after a group of students followed him to his car and surrounded him following an Israel-Palestine debate series last month. “The Committee has found that the actions taken by these individuals on April 30th, which included following President Kotlikoff from an evening event into a parking lot and impeding his ability to leave, are inconsistent with university policies governing expressive activity and our standards for respectful conduct, safety, and the prohibition of intimidation,” the board announced following an investigation into the viral incident. Several of the students who claimed at the time that the president’s car had struck them all declined medical treatment and refused to provide sworn statements to campus police despite repeated attempts to collect them... The same group of rabble-rousers have become notorious on the university’s Ithaca, New York campus for spewing abuse toward Cornell staffers both online and in-person, and swarming Kotlikoff’s vehicle as he attempted to exit the campus is the latest escalation in their tactics. The students became incensed following a campus debate series hosted by the Cornell Political Union and co-sponsored by Cornell Progressives, Cornellians for Israel and Students for Justice in Palestine... Although Kotlikoff maintained from the start that the enraged leftists were the aggressors in the caught-on-camera incident, lefty students claimed he injured at least two protesters in the parking lot. “When we tried to discuss campus speech policies, he hit us with his car,” the Students for a Democratic Cornell wrote on Instagram alongside footage of the incident. “Kotlikoff’s violent response to student inquiry is just another example of his administration’s repressive crackdown on student speech.”... Kotlikoff’s exoneration by the board was lauded by several Cornell law professors. “The result of the Board of Trustees’ investigation into the incident between activists and Cornell’s President confirms what the public videos showed — reckless conduct meant to trap and confront the President in a dangerous manner, and highly questionable claims of injury by the activists,” professor William A. Jacobson told The Post. “This incident is just the latest example of a Cornell anti-Israel activist community out of control,” he added. Law professor Menachem Rosensaft said he was “extremely gratified” the board reached the conclusion it did and the message it sent... “I think President Kotlikoff is 100% correct in not pursuing any disciplinary measures against the students involved, because that’s what they would have liked. They would have liked to be turned into martyrs, and instead they can now be relegated back to the obscurity that they so richly deserve.”"
It's literally attempted murder if you don't let "pro-Palestine" "protesters" swarm your car and potentially pull you from it and lynch you. The President needs to be jailed forthwith!
Hail Cornell's prez for refusing to let student brats take him prisoner : r/NewsWorthPayingFor - "Let's get this straight. He presided over a debate featuring the original "anti-Zionist loudmouth", Norman Finkelstein, whose presence on campus he not only tolerated but actively promoted. He participated in "dialog" for hours. But it was not enough. It's never enough. The spirit of 1966 is strong in these activists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bian_Zhongyun"
'Shocked and deeply troubled': Swastika flag raised at NYU, with school denouncing display - "New York University (NYU) condemned what school officials called an antisemitic act after a flag bearing swastikas was raised above a campus building during this week's graduation festivities... According to campus reports, the flag featured two swastikas, a Star of David, and the letters "NYU"."
Damn suppression of "pro-Palestine" speech!
Our Nakba - "The German ambassador to Egypt works out of a house that used to belong to a Jewish family. So does the Swiss ambassador. So does the American one. The homes were confiscated in 1956, when the Egyptian government declared, in a proclamation read aloud from the minarets of Cairo and Alexandria, that all Jews were Zionists and enemies of the state. The families were given one suitcase. They signed documents “donating” everything else to the government. Then they left. The houses are still there. The families are not. This is where the argument about Israel begins. Not in Europe. Here. There is a story told about Israel with remarkable confidence in universities, at the United Nations, in the opinion sections of newspapers that should know better. The story goes like this: European Jews, traumatized by European persecution, arrived in a land populated by indigenous Arabs and established, by force, a settler state. European guilt. European migration. European power. Colonialism wearing a Star of David. The story requires you to ignore the majority of Israelis. Mizrahi Jews, those whose ancestry traces to Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, and Lebanon, constitute the largest demographic bloc in Israel’s Jewish population, somewhere between 45 and 61 percent depending on how intermarriage and self-identification are counted. No serious demographer disputes the basic fact. They are not European. They are the descendants of communities that lived in the Middle East and North Africa for over two thousand years before the word “Europe” carried any political meaning. Many trace their origins to the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE. Their families were in Baghdad before Rome was a city. They were in Sana’a and Cairo and Tripoli while the ancestors of today’s loudest anti-Zionists were still pagans in northern forests. By every definition that the language of indigenous rights claims to honor, they are indigenous people of the Middle East. The colonial thesis does not complicate this fact. It requires its erasure. These communities did not arrive in Iraq and Yemen and Egypt from Europe or from nowhere. They arrived from the Land of Israel, carried there by the conquests and expulsions that defined the ancient world. The Babylonian exile of 586 BCE brought Jews to Mesopotamia when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Temple and deported the population of Judea. Later waves followed the Assyrian conquest, the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and the subsequent dispersions that scattered Jewish communities across the region. The Jews of Baghdad, of Sana’a, of Cairo, of Tripoli were not immigrants to the Middle East from somewhere else. They were the exiled children of the Land of Israel, living in the lands to which conquest had driven them, maintaining their language, their texts, and their memory of home across two thousand years. When they came to Israel in the twentieth century, they were not arriving as colonizers. They were returning. To understand what was lost, you have to know what existed. The Jews of Iraq were among the oldest continuous Jewish communities on earth. Their roots in Babylonia stretch to the destruction of the First Temple. They did not merely survive in Iraq. They built there. The Talmud, the central text of Jewish law and life that has governed Jewish practice for fifteen centuries, was composed in Babylon, in the academies of Sura and Pumbedita, on the soil of what is now modern Iraq. By the early twentieth century, Jews made up roughly a third of Baghdad’s population. They were merchants, musicians, government officials, doctors, bankers. They spoke Judeo-Arabic and prayed in Hebrew and had done both, without interruption, for two and a half millennia. The Jews of Yemen maintained a liturgical tradition so ancient and so isolated from the rest of the Jewish world that scholars of Hebrew phonetics study it today to understand how the language was originally pronounced. They had been in the Arabian Peninsula since before the rise of Islam. Their piyyutim, their sacred poetry, carried melodies that the rest of the Jewish world had forgotten. The Jews of Morocco and Algeria predated the Arab conquest of North Africa. The Persian Jewish community traced its origins to the era of Cyrus the Great, who is named in the book of Isaiah as the instrument of Jewish liberation. The Jews of Egypt were ancient. The Jews of Syria were ancient. These were not transplanted peoples. They were rooted ones, with sacred texts, living languages, and unbroken communal memory reaching back to the earliest chapters of Jewish history. In 1948, there were 135,000 Jews in Iraq. 265,000 in Morocco. 140,000 in Algeria. 105,000 in Tunisia. 100,000 in Egypt. 60,000 in Yemen. 38,000 in Libya. 30,000 in Syria. Today, there are fewer than ten Jews in Iraq. Fewer than ten in Yemen. Fewer than ten in Libya. The end of each community had its own texture, but the pattern was the same everywhere.
The colonialism no one talks about: Arab imperialism - "When the Arab armies surged out of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, they created an empire larger than Rome in barely a century. By 750 C.E., they controlled 13 million square kilometers, ruled more than 50 million people and redrew the map of three continents. Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, North Africa, Persia and as far as Spain were absorbed into a vast imperial system built on conquest and domination. However, when “colonialism” is invoked today, this empire is rarely mentioned. Only Europe and other Western nations are put in the dock. This selective memory distorts history. It erases the suffering of entire peoples and presents conquest and subjugation as if they were merely cultural diffusion. The Arab-Muslim expansion was not a benign flowering of civilization, but a deliberate project of empire, motivated by religious and political ambition. From its inception, Islam carried an imperial vision. Under Muhammad, the warrior-prophet, the early Muslim community saw expansion as a divine mandate. Conquest was central, creating a model of domination that endured for centuries. The world was divided into Dar al-Islam, the “abode of Islam,” lands ruled by Muslims, and Dar al-Harb, the “abode of war,” lands yet to be subdued. Non-Muslims under Arab rule were tolerated only as dhimmis, second-class subjects compelled to pay the humiliating jizya tax and live under laws marking their inferiority. The human toll of this imperialism was immense. When Arab armies conquered Egypt around 639 C.E., Coptic Christians formed the majority of the country. Within centuries, heavy taxation, social restrictions and pressures to convert reduced them to roughly 10% of the population. Churches were destroyed, and the administration was Arabized, leaving Copts politically marginalized for centuries. Sassanid Persia, conquered by Arabs in 651 C.E., was a fully Zoroastrian state. Arab rule brought the destruction of temples, forced conversions and an imposed Islamic administration. By the 10th century, Zoroastrians had become a tiny minority. The Berbers of Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, indigenous polytheists, were gradually Arabized and Islamized. Their languages, religions, and cultural identities were replaced or suppressed under Arab rule, and many were incorporated into the Arab military as auxiliaries, losing their indigenous traditions. The Arab slave trade, spanning from the 7th to the late 19th century, lasted more than 1,200 years, far longer than the Atlantic slave trade. Between 10 million and 18 million Africans were captured and transported along multiple routes across the Sahara, through the Red Sea into the Arabian Peninsula, and via the Indian Ocean to Persia, Arabia and India. Male slaves were often castrated, while women were assimilated into Arab households, leaving few Afro-descendant communities able to preserve cultural memory. Yet Western academics and activists—eager to atone for Europe’s sins—speak of colonialism as if it were an exclusively European phenomenon. Meanwhile, Arab imperialism is celebrated as the “Golden Age of Islam,” highlighting contributions to science, philosophy and culture, while its legacy of conquest, forced conversion and subjugation is ignored. It is as if history itself began in the seventh century, with Islam’s spread erasing all who came before: Copts, Persians, Assyrians, Berbers, Jews. Nations that thrived for centuries vanished into the shadows of Arab rule. The legacy of Dar al-Islam is not confined to the past. Arab nationalism and Islamist movements still assume the Middle East “belongs” to Arabs and that minorities must submit. The persecution of Copts in Egypt, the oppression of Kurds in Syria and Iraq, the near-erasure of Assyrian Christians and the Yazidi genocide by ISIS echo the imperial mindset of conquest. Jihadist groups such as Hamas, ISIS and the Taliban invoke the division between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb to justify perpetual war and terrorism. To criticize Arab imperialism today risks accusations of Islamophobia. Any attempt to highlight early conquest violence or centuries of Arabization is dismissed as reactionary. By contrast, condemning Western colonialism is encouraged as it fits neatly within progressive, anti-racist frameworks dominating Western academia. This asymmetry produces a distorted historical consciousness. The Levant and North Africa are thought of as “naturally Arab,” as though Arab identity were indigenous. But Egypt was overwhelmingly Coptic, the Maghreb largely Berber, Mesopotamia Assyrian and Aramaic-speaking, the Levant a mosaic of faiths and languages. These were not “Arab lands,” they were made Arab by conquest and cultural suppression. Modern Arab nationalism, born in the 20th century, compounded the distortion. Figures like Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser or the Ba’ath Party built legitimacy by denouncing Western colonialism while ignoring earlier Arab imperialism that defined the region for centuries. The irony: Arab nationalism, hailed as anti-colonial, was itself built on a colonial legacy. Absurdly, Israel is routinely accused of “colonialism,” a grotesque inversion of reality. Zionism is not colonial but the most successful anti-colonial movement in history: The return of an indigenous people to their ancestral land after centuries of foreign rule. To call Jewish self-determination “colonialism” while ignoring the Arab conquests that Arabized and Islamized the region is not only intellectually dishonest; it uses historical erasure as a weapon against the one nation in the Middle East that decolonized itself. The debate on colonialism remains strikingly one-sided. While Europe’s colonial crimes are scrutinized, the Arab conquests transforming North Africa and the Middle East are often celebrated. Such silence is not oversight; it is political. It fosters the illusion that imperialism is uniquely Western, when in truth it has been recurring throughout human civilization. Acknowledging Arab imperialism does not diminish Europe’s colonial crimes. It restores balance, reminding us that domination is not the monopoly of one continent or culture. It gives voice to forgotten nations such as the Copts, Berbers and Assyrians, whose suffering predates European ships in the Americas. A real reckoning with empire means holding Arab imperialism to the same standard as Europe. Until then, colonial history is a half-truth, and politics built on it a dangerous fiction. This selective outrage twists history into a weapon instead of a mirror."
Joel Engel on X - "As true now as it was 57 years ago:
Israel's Peculiar Position
By Eric Hoffer
Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1968
The Jews are a peculiar people: things do not happen to them, they happen to other people. Other people have a destiny, the Jews have a rendezvous with God. Yet there is in apparent contradiction a sustainability and unfailingness about the Jews and their impact on history. Consider their tiny population. They number about 15,000,000, less than 3% of the world's total. One would expect them to be statistically lost and to remain but an obscure footnote in human history. Yet they have been a most conspicuous people and their impact on history has been overwhelming. Consider again their survival. They have been repeatedly decimated: by the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian Czars, the Nazis. Yet they persist. No other people in history have so miraculously survived. Consider their contribution to civilization. In the field of religion, they gave the world Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In philosophy, they produced Spinoza and Marx. In science, Einstein and Oppenheimer. In literature, Heine and Kafka. In music, Mendelssohn and Mahler. Consider finally their role in the contemporary world. They are the only people who have returned to their homeland after 2,000 years of exile. And they have made it bloom.Yet in spite of all this, the Jews are the most hated people in the world. Why? Is it because they are a success? No. Success breeds envy, but envy does not breed hatred. Hatred is bred by fear.The Arabs fear the Jews. They fear the Jewish success, the Jewish survival, the Jewish return to their homeland. They fear that the Jews will succeed again as they have succeeded before. The Arabs say that Israel is a cancer in the body of the Arab world. But it is the Arabs who are the cancer. They are the ones who refuse to live in peace with Israel. They are the ones who teach their children to hate the Jews. They are the ones who launch terror attacks against Israel. The Jews want to live in peace with the Arabs. But the Arabs want to destroy Israel. They say that Israel has no right to exist. They say that the land belongs to them. But the land was desolate when the Jews came back to it. The Jews made it bloom. The Arabs can have their own states, but they want Israel's land too. Now, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the world is turning against Israel. The United Nations condemns Israel. The Soviet Union arms the Arabs. The Europeans are neutral, but their neutrality favors the Arabs.Even in America, there is a growing anti-Israel sentiment. The intellectuals, the media, the churches—all are turning against Israel. Why? Because Israel is strong. Because Israel won the war. Because Israel is a success.But success is not a crime. Strength is not a sin. Victory is not a vice. The Jews are accused of being aggressors. But who struck the first blow? The Arabs. Who refused peace? The Arabs. Who blockaded the Straits of Tiran? The Arabs. Who launched the war? The Arabs. The Jews are accused of displacing the Arabs. But Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese—and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become the eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single one. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious, it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover, but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June [1967], he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews. We, the Jews, stand alone in the world and always will. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources. Yet at this moment, Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel, so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the Holocaust will be upon us all."
Why did Arab nations choose full-scale war with Israel in 1948 over such a small territory? : r/AskHistorians - "One issue was domestic politics. None of the Arab countries involved had been countries as such for very long themselves. Even after independence from the Ottoman Empire, they weren't truly independent. They were dominated by European powers or elites linked to those powers, particularly the UK and France. Their power was not secure. The creation of Israel, backed by those Western powers, against popular opinion in the region, risked making regional leaders look so weak and ineffectual that it threatened their hold on power. That was a direct threat. There was also some real feeling in this regard. Arab leaders genuinely did not want to be just European proxies. They were right to be concerned. It was a hard time for those leaders. For example, Egypt in 1948 was not doing alright. The monarchy had lost legitimacy and the economy was not doing well. The monarchy fell in 1952. Syria was only two years old, and was still struggling to assemble working institutions. In 1949, that government fell to a military coup, the first of many coups over the next decade. In Iraq, the political landscape was divided, and the monarchy was losing support. They were undergoing their own internal uprisings, following the failure inJanuary 1948, to achieve real independence from Britain with the Portsmouth Agreement. It was widely denounced as a sham extension of British control. The monarchy fell in 1958. Lebanon was just five years old, with a political system based on the major competing groups. They made it 27 years before a civil war between those groups broke out. In contrast, Jordan was doing a bit better. The King felt safe enough from domestic pressures to please another key supporter, the British government, and make a deal with Israel that he would only attack the Arab-controlled areas to stop his rivals from getting them, but not the areas assigned to Israel. That monarchy is still in power.
Not only did they worry about their positions at home, regional leaders worried about their positions vis-a-vis each other. Each set of leadership wanted to be seen as the defender of the Arab cause to help their own power, but also, they didn't want their rivals in the other countries to be seen that way, at their expense. The Palestinian cause was just one in which they competed with each other for leadership. This extension continued into Palestine itselff. Some Arab leaders wanted a piece - at the expense of others. Some didn't want it themselves, but they feared losing power to.a rival state that did take Palestinian territory. For example, Jordan sought to annex the Arab areas of the UN partition plan to prevent them from falling under Egyptian or Syrian influence. The land was more than some acreage. It is very symbolic land, both in the larger picture of Arab self-determination, but also in religious and cultural terms. Jerusalem and the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount were important symbols for religion, and of foreign occupations and dominance. The Arabs aren't the only people who felt that way (which is how we got so many crusades).
Palestinians expected help, refusing would look very bad. Already the Muslim Brotherhood - rivals for power - were in Palestine fighting- The Arab League had themselves organised the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) of volunteers. To back down now would look weak and cowardly indeed. That was a political threat, bust also a personal one in a culture that valued strength and bravery.
They thought it would be easy. In the minds of the the Arab leaders at the time, their valiant fighters would obviously beat a few, disorganised Jews without major weaponry. They did not expect a mobilised society, trained soldiers, capable officers and better logistics than their own forces had. At least some believed their own propaganda about Jews as outsiders, and assumed Israelis would flee "home" when faced with force. They also expected a lot of assistance, given the popularity of the cause. For example, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, secretary-general of the Arab League from 1945 to 1952, declared in 1947 that, "I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars. I believe that the number of volunteers from outside Palestine will be larger than Palestine's Arab population, for I know that volunteers will be arriving to us from [as far as] India, Afghanistan, and China to win the honour of martyrdom for the sake of Palestine ... You might be surprised to learn that hundreds of Englishmen expressed their wish to volunteer in the Arab armies to fight the Jews." Since victory wouldn't cost much, but inaction could cost them a lot, why not do it?
They felt they had to. The situation was such that to back down would be to surrender without fighting, and that the moral and political pressure was all on action. That same secretary general told representatives of the future state of Israel, "We shall try to defeat you. I am not sure we'll succeed, but we'll try. We were able to drive out the Crusaders, but on the other hand we lost Spain and Persia. It may be that we shall lose Palestine. But it's too late to talk of peaceful solutions." Looking at it that way, there was no decision to make. They would attack."
It's only a nakba because they didn't get to genocide the Jews
Meme - "THE OLDEST ULTIMATUM, SAME SCRIPT, NEW DAY
WE'RE NOT ANTI-JEW. WE JUST NEED YOU TO AUDITION FOR YOUR ACCEPTANCE.
THE SCRIPT NEVER CHANGES
Jew thinking: IS HUMILITY ENOUGH? OR DO I NEED TO HATE MYSELF MORE?
THE ROLE: ACCEPTABLE JEW (RECURRING)
DENOUNCE ISRAEL
REJECT JEWISH SOVEREIGNTY
AGREE JEWS DON'T NEED A HOMELAND
BE STATELESS, DEFENSELESS, AND GRATEFUL
AUDITION OR ELSE.
PERPETUAL OUTRAGE PRODUCTIONS
DIRECTOR: HISTORY
SAME ENGINE. DIFFERENT PACKAGING. THREAT UNDERNEATH. MERCY ON TOP.
PREVIOUS SEASONS:
THE INQUISITION "CONVERT OR ELSE."
THE POGROMS "LEAVE OR ELSE."
THE EXPULSIONS “GO OR ELSE."
THE EXTERMINATIONS "DISAPPEAR OR ELSE." *Auschwitz Nazi train car*
TODAY
FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA
GLOBALIZE THE INTIFADA
ZIONISTS NOT WELCOME
"DENOUNCE OR ELSE."
DIFFERENT COSTUMES. SAME ULTIMATUM.
THE ONES WHO READ THE FINE PRINT DON'T FALL FOR REBOOTS.
WE'VE SEEN THIS ULTIMATUM WEARING EVERY COSTUME IMAGINABLE. WE KNOW HOW IT ENDS.
HISTORY
PATTERNS
READING THE FINE PRINT
NEVER AGAIN # OPTIONAL
CAFFEINATED BY SURVIVAL & SARCASM"
Of course, with "minorities" the left loves, Solidarity is unconditional and they get support no matter how awful people they are. But groups the left hates must check off a never-ending list to be worthy of basic human decency
The Patriot Oasis™ on X - "🔥🚨 BREAKING: More Footage of US Marine Corps veteran Brian McGinnis is resurfacing—the man who was thrown out of the Senate hearing yesterday by Sen. Tim Sheehy. McGinnis, while wearing a muslim Keffiyeh, says that he supports the "Free Palestine Movement." He said he and his family are Palestinian. While he was assaulting Capitol police yesterday, McGinnis was ranting and screaming about his hatred of Israel. The Islamic and Palestinian movements are both extremely violent and anti-American movements that have no place in America. McGinnis has tried for years to leverage his position as a Marine Corps veteran to gain traction for his movements."
Left wingers are pretending he's a victim. The contrast with Jan 6th is telling
Comment (elsewhere): "🤣 you're absolutely clueless as there's multiple things wrong with this let's start with him disrupting the meeting (illegal act), refusing to leave (illegal act called trespassing), resisting the police (illegal), fighting the police (illegal), actively undermining his leadership in uniform(illegal under multiple separate UCMJ articles), attempting to speak on behalf of other people while in uniform (illegal under UCMJ) and i could go on.... Regarding your "he was right" or "speaking the truth" comment now that's just funny and absurd this is a policing action to prevent a homicidal dictator from possessing nuclear wealth which would have severe global repercussions."

Links - 1st June 2026 (2 - Feminism [including Lean In])

2026-06-01T15:37:00.000+08:00

Batya Ungar-Sargon on X - "What's so funny about this is the tradwife movement is a women-led rejection of the guilt that very wealthy women like Sandberg inflicted on stay at home moms for not working or failing to rise far enough. For decades, liberal elite Girlboss feminism pushed professional success as essential to self-fulfillment for women, implying that women who worked part time or (Heaven forbid!) chose to be stay at home moms were somehow less than. Now that those women are pushing back, they must be defeated."
Feminism is not about supporting women in making their own choices, but pushing the left wing agenda
Batya Ungar-Sargon on X - "Sandberg writes, “A woman who applies to medical school or pursues a demanding career is still met with, ‘Are you sure you want to do that—don’t you want kids one day?’” Really? The majority of medical school students now are women—for the seventh year straight! Apparently, whatever mythic character is saying this to women is having zero impact."
Batya Ungar-Sargon on X - "Sheryl Sandberg’s GirlBoss feminism is defined by this kind of anachronistic thinking, pretending the women of today face the same kinds of hurdles of yesteryear, so unbelievably wealthy women can cosplay as heroic while continuing to shame women who make different choices:"
Disgraced Propagandist on X - "A tell all book called "Careless People" written by someone fairly high up in Facebook was published last year. I listened to the whole thing. The weirdest detail in it is apparently on Cheryl Sandberg's private plane, Cheryl had a private bedroom. She would ask various employees traveling with her on the plane to come snuggle with her in the bed. The writer of the tell all, an ambitious girl boss from New Zealand, declined the offer, and thereafter Cheryl targeted her for destruction."
Meme - Mike Solana @micsolana: "my sense with all of this is just like, we've been beating the "lean in" drum for a couple decades now and I I think the average american just doesn't want to be sheryl sandberg, which is fine actually"
The Wall Street Journal @wsj: "Exclusive: Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In nonprofit has shed about a quarter of its staff as the founder focuses on pushing back against the "tradwife" and manosphere movements"
Lisa Britton on X - "And now we have a generation of women crying in fertility clinic parking lots, realizing they waited too long to start a family because of “girl boss” messaging from women like Sandberg."
Thread by @wil_da_beast630 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "A point so obvious it's rarely made: easily 90% of the things that are attributed to "the patriarchy" by hard-body feminists - mating for life/marriage, young males as society's warriors, even toy preferences - not only existed in the many matriarchal human societies but also exist among many OTHER mammal predators. Among homo-saps, it's difficult to think of a single tribe that used fertile females as primary fighters. The blinders-off reason for this is insanely clear - and a compliment to women, at that. When something just clearly and obviously has a necessary purpose - marriage, for example, clarifies the lineage of children and thus incentivizes/forces a father to stick around and raise them - it strikes lil' ol' pragmatic me as a much better idea to trim off rough edges and keep it around than to toss it away and hope Utopia somehow spontaneously emerges from vacuum. "All these traditions began under BARBARISM! You used to be able to rape your wife and stab your husband!!!" Ok, cool. Let's change that part of the law. The core idea of mating for life, which foxes also figured out, still seems far preferable to the alternative of "72% illegitimacy.""
Global Goals on X - "The digital divide is a gender divide. 📱🚫👩‍💻 Technology is outpacing regulation, leaving women and girls vulnerable to online abuse. This month, let’s commit to making digital spaces safe, inclusive, and empowering for all. #ActNow for digital rights: http://un.org/actnow"
James L. Nuzzo, PhD on X - "Again, we see the UN frame online abuse in an asymmetrical fashion. Polls consistently show that men and women are roughly equally likely to be abused or harassed online."
Meme - *Woman seeing 2 men at a race, getting to the start line with Qualifications and Hard Work*
*Woman laying down start line*
*Woman starting ahead of the men due to inclusion policies*
Meme - ""For someone who keeps calling men pigs, she keeps degrading herself to appeal to the male gaze": Sabrina Carpenter's "tone deaf" album cover slammed for "extreme misogyny""
DC Film News on X - "Milly Alcock on the message she hopes audiences take from ‘SUPERGIRL’: “I think young girls should walk away from the film knowing that it’s ok to be a bit bad, and messy.” (via Beyond Noise Magazine, Issue 5)"
Kevin DeAnna on X - "Oh good no media has put out that message before"
Meme - Semi @SUGARTIS...: "how tf is ts more socially acceptable than homosexuality i hate this world"
mindy @mindyisser: "not really a fan of our society"
"PARTICLE. You're 60. She's 30. WE'LL TAKE CARE OF THE GAP. TheParticleMan.com"
Esoteric Tengrianism: "Yup. Utterly sick to pretend that a 30 year old little girl can make decisions for herself. Absolutely agree. But if we are worried about anyone taking advantage of these poor simpletons naivety... arent the lenders, radical ideologues, and etc all much bigger problems than potential romantic partners? If we are serious about this then we need to DRASTICALLY curtail women's independent sovereignty to protect them from themselves, and remove their political franchise for obvious reasons of longterm social stability. I'm not sure what happens with the sex-exclusive privilege to kill unwanted offspring in utero to avoid responsibility for them... but regardless the right to CHOOSE about it would be the decision of some adult who can actually exercise his rational agency and accountability for the decision. Glad we are finally being a little bit more realistic here."
"I'd say America is one of the few countries where homosexuality is actually more acceptable than"
Is there anyway to be a “slut” without benefiting men? : r/Feminism - "Basically the title! Love the word “slut” & using it very positively here. As a woman, I’ve tried regaining control of my own sexuality. However - i feel now as if there is no way to do this that does not benefit men. Casual sexual relationships benefit men; dressing more “slutty” appeals to the male gaze. I’m sure there’s more to this question I’m trying to ask - but is there a way to take control of this myself (as a bi woman) that does not benefit men?"
They hate men so much
James L. Nuzzo, PhD on X - ""But does talk of a male crisis further sideline women and girls?" "It is uncomfortable and sometimes controversial to talk about a male ‘crisis’ in the face of entrenched and often worsening discrimination against girls and women. No country in the world has achieved gender equality — and one in four reported a backlash against women’s rights in 2024." "Some people worry that the ‘boys in crisis’ framing worsens the situation by encouraging young men to view themselves as victims of gender equality — feeding resentment and hostile views.""
Feminists still claim that feminism benefits men
Johannes M. Koenraadt on X - "Highly educated women are marrying uneducated men. They call it 'men marrying up'. But when you look at the financials, it's female academics making 30k a year marrying coal miners who make 120k. That's still women marrying up."
Bryce Dallas Howard's high heels are not sexist. They're the best part of Jurassic World. - "For a movie filled with freakish genetic hybrids and raptors wearing night-vision headsets, the most far-out, fantastical element of Jurassic World might just be Bryce Dallas Howard’s heels. Introduced with a foot-focused shot worthy of Tarantino, Howard plays Claire Dearing, the park’s operations manager, an icy, career-oriented businesswoman who seems like she may well have been cloned in lab using Sigourney Weaver’s DNA from Working Girl. In a film loaded with retrograde takes on gender, the shoes initially seem to signal all of Claire’s flaws. We’re supposed to know that Claire is unlikable and needs to loosen up because she is uninterested in children, obsessed with her company’s profit margins, and refuses to be nice to Chris Pratt. Her shoes—severe, nude-tone stilettos that seem completely incompatible with tromping around a tropical island filled with prehistoric animals—seem to serve as a shorthand for all of this in the film’s first quarter, where they’re the subject of several loving close-ups and get roughly as much screen time as Vincent D’Onofrio... Howard herself has been taken to task for her own insistence on wearing the shoes; director Colin Trevorrow frustratedly passed the buck to Howard on the issue, telling i09: “I mean, look, I had that conversation with her so many times, and she insisted on wearing those heels.” For a movie filled with freakish genetic hybrids and raptors wearing night-vision headsets, the most far-out, fantastical element of Jurassic World might just be Bryce Dallas Howard’s heels. Introduced with a foot-focused shot worthy of Tarantino, Howard plays Claire Dearing, the park’s operations manager, an icy, career-oriented businesswoman who seems like she may well have been cloned in lab using Sigourney Weaver’s DNA from Working Girl. In a film loaded with retrograde takes on gender, the shoes initially seem to signal all of Claire’s flaws. We’re supposed to know that Claire is unlikable and needs to loosen up because she is uninterested in children, obsessed with her company’s profit margins, and refuses to be nice to Chris Pratt. Her shoes—severe, nude-tone stilettos that seem completely incompatible with tromping around a tropical island filled with prehistoric animals—seem to serve as a shorthand for all of this in the film’s first quarter, where they’re the subject of several loving close-ups and get roughly as much screen time as Vincent D’Onofrio. As the film goes on, the park’s animals go rogue and Claire develops a heart, experiencing a classic cinematic transformation from dispassionate professional to family-loving babe with a gun. But while her pristine white business suit is shucked in the name of mobility, the heels stay on the whole time. A lot has been made of the improbability of Claire’s heels—the film’s insistence on having her wear them through multiple jungle hikes and dino chases has come to symbolize, among other things, the film’s goofy sexism. Though I doubt that the heels wrote the scene where Claire’s sister chides her for her lack of interest in children, or suggested that Jake Johnson’s Larry exist only so that various characters could cast aspersions on his masculinity. Vulture’s Jada Yuan dismissed them as “foolish;” the Dissolve’s Genevieve Koski pointed to them as a “tiny but maddening detail” that kept the film from working. Howard herself has been taken to task for her own insistence on wearing the shoes; director Colin Trevorrow frustratedly passed the buck to Howard on the issue, telling i09: “I mean, look, I had that conversation with her so many times, and she insisted on wearing those heels.” But given that films so often require a heroine to drop her high heels in order to be deemed likable (think Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone, or even Jennifer Garner at the end of 13 Going On 30), or use heels as a way to signal that a woman is bait for a predator (think half the horror movies currently streaming on Netflix), I’d argue that the stiletto backlash has been grossly overblown. The way Claire’s heels support her, rather than fail her, throughout her journey is actually one of the most interesting, offbeat decisions in a film largely dedicated to propping up old-school action movie tropes... the fact that she didn’t have to go full Linda Hamilton in order to save her family may have actually been this film’s most progressive bit."
Omoye✨🫶 on X - "The goal of modern feminism isn't to make women better, it's to make them single. Have you noticed how they only call a woman strong and empowered the moment she leaves her home? But when she's building with her husband or submitting to her husband, she's a slave. This movement is from the pit of h£ll."
Fiery Debate After University Professor Claims Women Commit Domestic Violence As Much As Men - "Dr. Fiona Girkin is an associate lecturer in Policing and Emergency Management at the University of Tasmania. Her job is to teach new Tasmania Police recruits about family and domestic violence. Recently, she appeared in a video interview with controversial conservative media figure, Bettina Arndt. In the interview, Girkin talked about how, in listening to the officers she has worked with, there were just as many female offenders in domestic violence cases as there were male... After university officials found out about Girkin’s interview with Arndt, they opened an investigation and ultimately put Girkin under “assessment” until further notice. Regarding Girkin’s role with the Tasmania Police, the department put out a statement saying that “the opinions stated by Dr Girkin are not in line with the principles Tasmania Police supports in dealing with family violence,” and that she would not be teaching police recruits until the investigation with the university was complete... it’s interesting to note that Arndt wasn’t always such a strong advocate for men. Earlier in her career, she was a self-proclaimed feminist... But then, in the 1990s, something changed. She began embracing more socially conservative ideas about relationships and family, criticizing people who have children out of wedlock. In interviews, Arndt has said of her change of heart that she “spent her early career lobbying for women but turned to men when I realised how lousy they are about advocating for issues that affect their private lives.” Now she is seen as a feminist instigator, authoring a book that she released in the heat of the global #MeToo movement entitled #MenToo. Her critics say the provocations and outrageous statements are just meant to get attention. “To Arndt’s frustration, the male revolution she advocated of political reaction against feminism had failed to emerge,” said a lecturer at Macquarie Law School who has studied Arndt."
Academic freedom is only meant to push the left wing agenda
We're still told that feminism helps men too
Meme - "Male Privilege
In Switzerland, military service (conscription) is compulsory for all Swiss men, but not women. If a man is not fit for military service, he is required to pay 3% extra tax until the age of 30. This is known as "military exemption tax". Naturally, women are also exempt from paying this tax. In 2014 the Swiss voted on whether or not to keep conscription for men. This means women were able to vote on whether or not military service is compulsory for men. Despite not having to participate in conscription themselves, the majority of women voted to keep conscription compulsory for men."
Sabrina Carpenter Killing Men In Music Videos: A Ranking
Proof that we live in a misogynistic society where violence against women is normalised and uncontroversial
Meme - Dear Son: "To all men who survived rock bottom, what's one piece of advice would you give a man who feels like giving up right now?"
Nida Jaffery @nidafjaffery: "Why would women's advice not be useful? Maybe fix your misogyny and that'll get you started. Im sorry I hope things get better for you otherwise"
Of course, if you butt in when a question is only addressed to women, you're a misogynist
Australia’s Victoria state appoints first ever Men’s Behavior Change official - The Washington Post - "The state of Victoria appointed a parliamentary secretary for men’s behavior change — lawmaker Tim Richardson — who said action must start “with us men and boys.”"
Davidson MP Matt Cross: Liberals appoint a shadow minister for men - "NSW Liberal leader Kelli Sloane has declared "masculinity should be celebrated" as she announced a new position in her team targeting men's health. Davidson MP Matt Cross, who survived bowel cancer, has been named the state opposition's parliamentary secretary for men's health."
Feminists see men as a problem, but non-feminists see them as equals who deserve equal protection
Feminist Anxiety about Domestic Violence Against Men – The Feminist Wire - "It’s understandable why there’s resistance to a framework that suggests that “both men and women” are battered, as if there is equivalence there. It’s also understandable why there may be fear here as well. At minimum, it could mean a loss of scarce resources for women who do not, overall, have the same earning capacities of men. Domestic violence is intertwined with learned gender roles and histories of abuse, but too often such violence is treated as if it’s inherently male."
30 colectivos feministas alertan de que la Fundación de Hombres Maltratados ahonda en el mensaje negacionista | Noticias de la Comunidad Valenciana | EL PAÍS ("30 feminist groups warn that the Foundation for Abused Men is deepening the denialist message")
Feminists oppose male shelters, and they get very upset when you point that out (Erin Pizzey's experiences being another powerful example). They also like to mock men and say the men should get off their asses and create their own shelters, when female shelters are so dependent on government funding (which male ones get less often) and they screech when the government funding isn't what they deem enough
Meme - "WHAT THEY THINK WILL HAPPEN: *Handmaid's Tale*
WHAT THEY THINK THEIR RESPONSE WILL BE: *Dora Milaje from Black Panther* *Vikings Lagertha shieldmaidens*
THE WORST THEY'LL DO: *Naked screeching women*"
Ask for Angela founder resigns after woman’s image removed to ‘avoid deterring men’ - "The founder of Ask for Angela has resigned claiming that senior figures had ruled the figure of a woman on posters should be removed to avoid deterring men from seeking help."
Clearly, feminists care about men
Daniela on X - "To the idiots that say "she slept her way to the top." What you're actually saying is: "men are rapist and sexual predators that's abuse their power and withhold opportunities to assault women.""
Wilfred Reilly on X - "No. We're not doing this. What's being said is literally just: "She progressed at a faster than normal rate, because she had consensual sex with clients, sources, colleagues, and management." The idea "any sex where a woman is influenced to any degree by potential considerations about advantage or the behavior of others is rape" is what feminists actually MEAN - but it sounds appropriately insane to say out loud."
Galtonist on X - "Also, there is a world of difference between "she lost a job that she was good at because she wouldn't sleep with her boss," and "she got a job she didn't deserve by sleeping with her boss.""
Knorbert on X - "Quite. *She* is the one being predatory and transactional. She's the one using sex to manipulate people for personal gain. There's this constant assumption that women have the accountability of children and are always the victims... If she'd had sex once for advancement, you could argue that the guy might have coerced it. But if it's repeated behaviour, you can be sure that she was the instigator at least some, if not all, of the time..."
LorenzLyaPunov on X - "Agreed it's insane. The standard cannot be "I was abused by being coerced into an action because it benefitted me to do it." That's not what coercion is. Talk about removing all agency from a person."
Sevenders on X - "He thought she was sleeping with him because she liked him. She was sleeping with him for a story/access. This was false pretenses. Ergo she is a rapist. Seems fairly clear"
Woman doused friend in fuel, set him alight for misogynistic comment, court hears - "A woman who angrily doused an "old friend" in petrol and set him alight for making a misogynistic comment was suffering from depression and substance abuse, a court has heard. Corbie Jean Walpole, 24, earlier pleaded guilty to one charge of burning or maiming by using corrosive fluid. Her victim, Jake Loader, was 23 when he was found with life-threatening burns at a southern New South Wales home in Howlong on January 7 last year... Most of the group was heavily intoxicated, and Walpole had consumed cocaine... Her anger then flared when Mr Loader told her she should stay in the kitchen making scones where she belonged, and not to go drinking with boys... Mr Loader sustained burns to 55 per cent of his body, was in an induced coma for eight days, spent 74 days in a burns unit at Melbourne hospital The Alfred, and underwent 10 operations. Mr Loader can no longer expose his skin to the sun, and struggles with temperature regulation as his sweat glands were burnt off."
Clearly, this was self-defence, and if you disagree, you're a misogynist
JD™ on X - "* Women’s self-reported happiness down 83% since 1970
* Female suicide rate up 50% since 2000
* Antidepressant use among women up 250% since 1990
* Single motherhood up 700% since 1960
* Women on anxiety meds 1 in 4
* Female workforce participation up 75%, but life satisfaction down 200%
* College women report record loneliness and depression
* 40% of women have engaged in self-harm, ranging from cutting to suicide
Your wildest dreams have come true. You can vote and be promiscuous, and you’re unshackled from a man to take care of you and children to adore you. Congratulations, you win. Yay, feminism."
Meme - ella devi @ellad3vi: "why are you picking on women's appearances to engage in ad hominem and attempt to shut down their arguments? it's just flat-out misogyny."
ella devi @ellad3vi: "pete hegeseth's wife wore a dress from temu to the white house correspondents dinner (i'm not joking)"

The costly fantasy of high-speed rail

2026-06-01T12:54:00.000+08:00

The costly fantasy of high-speed rail - The Globe and Mail
"A family relies on a rusty sedan to get around. It’s slow and breaks down often. But the family, instead of opting for a practical replacement, puts in an order for a flashy, new model not yet in showrooms.
Sure, the luxury vehicle is significantly more expensive, and it will take years to arrive. But it is sleek and fast, and the family figures the time they will save commuting makes the higher price worth it (despite the loan they will need that will add to their already considerable debts). Besides, many of their neighbours have luxury cars – it’s about time they had one, too.
This in a nutshell is the faulty logic the Liberal government is using to create a high-speed rail line between Quebec City and Toronto.
The idea of a high-speed train that would travel as fast as 300 kilometres an hour, going from Toronto to Montreal in just three hours and seven minutes, has appeal. Its proponents are boasting about the economic and environmental benefits it will bring to this heavily populated part of the country. But the fact that Alto, the Crown corporation in charge of creating the new high-speed rail network, hasn’t released a detailed cost-benefit analysis should set alarm bells ringing.
The project, which is currently in a pre-development and consultation stage and has yet to be approved by the federal government, is estimated to cost $60-billion to $90-billion. Assuming those numbers don’t escalate further (a generous assumption), $90-billion equates to over $5,000 for each Canadian household. The money would likely be borrowed by the federal government, adding to high and mounting debt loads.
Sure, a high-speed train would be nice, but a closer look at the project shows it’s just too expensive for the problem it solves. And in the meantime, Canadians are stuck with slow and unreliable service, much like the family in their rusty sedan.
High-speed rail is a polarizing topic, but one thing nobody disputes is the dismal state of Canada’s current passenger train service, Via Rail.
A decade ago, the percentage of trains in its main Quebec City-Windsor corridor arriving on time was unimpressive: just 71 per cent hit the on-time benchmark, meaning they arrived within 15 minutes of the scheduled time. (The Ottawa-Montreal threshold is 10 minutes.)
But last year, on-time performance in the corridor sank to an abysmal 34 percent, as this first chart shows. The on-time performance of Via’s long distance and regional trains outside the corridor, at 52 per cent last year, was also poor. (Trains outside the corridor are considered on-time if they arrive within 30 to 60 minutes of the scheduled arrival, depending on the route.)
Via trains operate primarily on busy freight railroad tracks, mainly those owned by the Canadian National Railway (CN), as well as on tracks owned by increasingly busy commuter rail services around Toronto and Montreal. The track owners give their own trains priority, so Via often has to pull over to wait for them to pass, causing delays.
In October, 2024, CN imposed speed restrictions on Via’s new fleet of trains operating in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, saying they were not long and heavy enough to reliably activate safety barricades and lights at level crossings. Via says the “arbitrary” speed restrictions aren’t necessary. The issue is currently before the Superior Court of Quebec. A stopgap deal was reached allowing Via trains to travel at constant but slower speeds over longer segments, but it’s still dragging down on-time performance.
The speed restrictions are compounding Via’s ongoing problems. Last fall it said it had to pay $31-million in vouchers for passengers compensation, and ridership has dropped by 2.7 per cent since the disruption started, the first dip since the pandemic shutdowns.
CN is focused on its freight business, and has little motivation to take on liability risks or change its technologies and practices to help Via trains arrive on time. The freight companies have economic heft, given they transport $400-billion of goods a year, and passenger rail makes up just 5 per cent of railway revenues...
Reliability on Via will suffer as long as it doesn’t own its tracks. A new dedicated passenger rail line is needed to improve service – however, a premium high-speed rail link isn’t the only option...
The benefits to travellers and communities are pegged by Alto at around $49-billion over the 60-year appraisal period of the project – less than the $60-billion to $90-billion construction cost projection. But those benefits mostly come from time savings attributed to the faster and more reliable service, as well the value of lower greenhouse gas emissions and reduced automobile operations costs.
Alto also claims the planned seven-stop train route will boost Canada’s gross domestic product by 1.1 per cent, with productivity gains worth up to $35-billion. Not only will construction create employment, but Alto says the high-speed line will boost business efficiency by providing better access to jobs, and will lead to increased investment and housing development. Details on Alto’s site are thin, but it says the train network will boost Canada’s competitiveness and create new business opportunities.
It all sounds amazing, but it prompts more questions than answers. Time savings are nice, but do they really make us richer? Given most of the stops are in major cities, will Alto really prompt new housing development? Will many people choose to commute between, say, Peterborough, Ont., and Toronto, and will that boost the economy? Will the project foster co-operation with Indigenous peoples by providing jobs, or will land acquisition create new tensions? Will massive tunnels or elevated sections be needed to get into Toronto and Montreal? And most important, will the project provide greater economic benefits than another project with a $90-billion price tag, or by leaving this massive sum of public money unspent?
Alto’s estimates of economic gains seem overly rosy when compared with estimates from the C.D. Howe Institute. The study by Tasnim Fariha and David Jones estimates the economic benefits would be between $15-billion and $27-billion over a 60-year period.
Even the more modest gains estimated in the C.D. Howe study are far from a sure thing. Using methodology typical in transportation projects, much of the benefit is attributed to time savings from increased reliability and satisfaction with punctuality. While these are benefits, putting a dollar figure on them can give the impression that these factors will generate wealth, but it’s not necessarily the case, if the time isn’t used to boost revenue in some way. The study’s figures were calculated assuming Alto’s ticket prices would be the same as Via’s – it warns that if the ticket price is 20 per cent higher, the estimated value of user benefits would fall by around 40 per cent.
The second biggest chunk of economic gains in the study is attributed to “agglomeration effects” – benefits that arise when firms and individuals are located closer to each other. This is believed to improve labour-market matching, and create efficiencies, for example, by having suppliers closer to customers, or researchers closer to innovative industries. While there certainly is value in being connected, these gains are not tangible ones like those the country would see by investing in, say, a new LNG terminal to get energy to market.
In terms of ridership, Alto’s numbers look relatively optimistic. It says its high-speed service will attract 13 times more passengers annually than the current service, reaching 24 million passengers annually by 2055. As a result, it says the money from ticket sales will cover operations and maintenance costs, and unlike Via, it wouldn’t require any government subsidies once it is fully operating.
However, a survey from McGill University transportation researchers indicates ridership is likely to be much lower, estimating it would reach 10.48 million passengers after 15 years of service in 2050. The researchers estimate that once operating, the project will require subsidies of around $1.28-billion a year, with the system not becoming self-sustaining until its 44th year.
A subsidy of a public project isn’t necessary a bad thing. The McGill study’s co-author, Prof. Ahmed El-Geneidy, points out that urban transit systems such as the Toronto Transit Commission and Société de transport de Montréal rely on them, and most highways are taxpayer funded – but there needs to be an honest discussion about it. Do we want to spend money luring people away from air travel, where they pay their own way, to take a taxpayer-subsidized rail service?
The projected $60-billion to $90-billion price tag to build the project also requires scrutiny. While it’s admittedly hard to estimate the costs for such a large project at this early stage, the fact that the initial range is so wide is troublesome. It would be no surprise if costs were to escalate beyond $90-billion. An EU audit found that cost overruns and delays were the norm in high-speed rail projects.
A worst-case scenario exists in California, where a high-speed rail line was supposed to be completed in 2020 to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles in fewer than three hours. The cost tripled, and the scaled-back project is now set to connect only two smaller cities by 2033.
The case for Alto is mired in fantasy, but that doesn’t mean Canadians should continue suffering with substandard passenger rail. The Liberal government had been studying high-frequency rail, the less glamorous cousin of high-speed rail, since 2016, until prime minister Justin Trudeau announced the switch to a high-speed rail plan...
Ryan Katz-Rosene, an associate professor of political science at the University of Ottawa, says that once the government decided to build new passenger rail track, it became a slippery slope: “They wanted to make something truly transformative, but that was probably a mistake.”
High-frequency rail doesn’t have the romantic appeal of high-speed rail, but it would greatly improve service at a more reasonable cost. It would still involve building a new track solely for Via, but as it wouldn’t go as fast as high-speed rail, it could handle more curves, allowing more flexibility about where to build the route. High-speed rail is much more expensive to build, as it can’t stop quickly, necessitating tunnels and overpasses to avoid collisions, rather than at-grade crossings. It is also more disruptive for land owners and communities along the route, as there are limited places where the track can be crossed.
In a recent submission to Alto’s public consultation, Prof. Jacques Roy at HEC Montréal and his co-authors say a high-frequency train would use tracks reserved for passenger trains, but mainly within the existing railway rights-of-way, offering a faster and more reliable service than the current system. It wouldn’t reach record speeds, but the high-frequency train would serve more stops along the line at around half the cost of a high-speed train. It could also be built much faster, perhaps in five years.
Prof. Roy is skeptical of Alto’s claim that high-speed rail would cost only 20 to 30 per cent more than high-frequency rail. While he agrees the high-speed option would attract more business travellers, he casts doubt about Alto’s ridership claims, which are partly based on assumptions that population in the corridor will rise 30 per cent by 2041. Given that population growth now is almost flat in Quebec, he doesn’t see that happening.
This second chart shows the estimated journey times between the high-frequency rail and high-speed rail options aren’t that far apart. The high-speed trip between Montreal and Toronto saves one hour and two minutes, when compared with a high-frequency train on a dedicated track. On a shorter trip, like between Montreal and Ottawa, the high-speed train route that will cost billions saves just 19 minutes.
There are lessons to be learned from an earlier experiment in high-speed rail half a century ago. In 1968, CN launched its “TurboTrain,” which in theory could hit 225 km/h, and travel between Montreal and Toronto in just four hours and 10 minutes on the existing tracks. The train cars were short and they tilted, so they could navigate the track’s curves. But the trains suffered from numerous technical problems, and they had to reduce speed at level crossings and wait for freight trains to pass, so were slower than anticipated. The last TurboTrain ran in 1982...
Leaving Alto as the only option to improve Canada’s passenger rail could result in paralysis. It’s just a matter of time before economic reality punctures the fantasy, and the mirage of supposed benefits dissipates. The project runs a high risk of getting halted before completion. In the meantime, Via is limping along. The fantasies of high-speed rail are diverting attention from fixes that could reverse the decline of the existing passenger rail system."

Links - 1st June 2026 (1 [including Orban in Jungary])

2026-06-01T09:12:00.000+08:00

Thomas van Linge on X - "To say Viktor Orban was a democrat after all because he admitted defeat is quite a stretch considering he manipulated the entire electoral system to his hand and in the end fell victim to the monster of his own creation. Tisza only got 53% of the popular vote."
Ralph Schoellhammer on X - "The Labour Party of Keir Starmer only got 33% of the popular vote in 2025, yet he became PM with a majority of MPs. In 2024, the National Rally (RN) won the largest share of the popular vote in France but finished third in parliamentary seats. Are France and the UK autocracies?"
Climate Warrior🐬 #ClimateJustice🇵🇸🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 on X - "I lived in Hungary for several years under the Orbán dictatorship. The funny thing was, people could and did say whatever came into their heads, protests were held in front of the parliament, there was a gay cruise bar down the road and Orbán held elections. And yet, the country was a dictatorship. Whereas in the UK, people tend to be distinctly guarded and if they do say the wrong thing very publicly, they get locked up. And yet, it's a free country. Once you understand that words can mean whatever we want them to mean, it begins to make sense."
Philippe Lemoine on X - ""Emmanuel Macron armours France against an Orban-style takeover" If Orban packs Hungary's highest courts with ideologically and politically reliable judges, that's "democratic backsliding", but if Macron appoints a notoriously corrupt and incompetent loyalist to head France's constitutional court, where he will be able to systematically undermine the policies of Macron's successor for ideological reasons (even if he campaigned on them, they are overwhelmingly supported by public opinion and there is no serious legal argument for their unconstitutionality), that's a heroic act to protect democracy 😪"
Melissa Chen on X - "On the Hungarian elections: Hungary under Fidesz was a de facto one-party-dominant state in much the same way Singapore has been under the PAP for over 60 years. They are both electoral democracies and not the cartoon “autocracies” that the Western globalist elites describe. Both Fidesz and the PAP are parties that win elections repeatedly, often with supermajorities, because they actually govern for their citizens rather than chasing every globalist fad. One could argue that they've consolidated power through constitutional changes and media influence; voters, however, keep re-electing them because they deliver results and the alternatives look worse (until now). Lee Kuan Yew’s PAP model - strict laws, media self-censorship, meritocracy over Western-style “rights,” emphasis on order and national identity - is the exact template critics say Orbán copied. Yet Singapore gets polite editorials calling it “efficient or enlightened authoritarianism.” Meanwhile, Hungary gets called an autocracy and a threat to Europe. The usual suspects are screaming about "autocracy" because Orbán went against the grain on the European open border consensus - they built a border fence in 2015, slashed migration, boosted family subsidies, and told Brussels to go screw itself on gender ideology and refugee quotas (and paid a steep financial penalty for it). The domestic results are clear - lower illegal migration than peer countries, low crime, a cohesive society, and attempts at demographic recovery. So basically, none of them are really cheering for "democracy." They’re just cheering their team winning. How can they call it an autocracy when there have been fair elections, high turnout, and Orbán conceding when he lost? Now that the opposition won in a landslide with record turnout, it’s suddenly “the people have taken back their country!” It appears that democracy is whatever defeats anti-immigration, nationalist conservatives in Europe. I mean just look at the hypocrisy on display here:
> Hillary Clinton, who once called half of America “deplorables” and cheered color-revolution-style operations abroad, suddenly loves “democracy” (also russigate, anyone?)
> Gavin Newsom runs California like a one-party fiefdom with sky-high homelessness, crime, and out-migration, yet lectures Hungarians about “free press and human rights" lol
> Alex Soros whose family foundation has funded opposition groups across Eastern Europe for years, celebrates “rejection of foreign interference” with an EU flag emoji (hahahah)
> Tim Walz calls it “a big win for freedom.” The same guy who oversaw government overreach in his state during covid and who believes in policing misinformation and hate speech
I personally disagree vehemently with Orban's foreign policy positions but to keep calling Hungary an autocracy is exactly what the woke did with the word racist. They've diluted it to the point of futility. It means nothing anymore. Small countries like Hungary and Singapore prove you don’t need perfect Western liberal checkboxes to succeed. You need competent governance, cultural cohesion, and the willingness to make unpopular decisions and stick to them. Voters in both places have repeatedly validated that approach. They are not "autocracies." If you keep using that word it will come to mean nothing. The Western commentariat only freaks out when the “wrong” party does it - and only when it’s a European country that refuses to dissolve its borders and heritage on command."
Jason Kenney 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 on X - "Lots of weird takes on the Hungarian election result from both left and right here. Peter Magyar is a socially conservative immigration restrictionist who wants to cut taxes and double the defence budget. He criticized Orban for admitting too many guest workers, and wants to increase Hungary's already generous pro-natal incentives. On virtually every issue, his platform is well to the right of centre, by European standards. His foreign policy is to end Orban's alliance with Putin, remove the Hungarian veto on EU loans to Ukraine, normalize relations with the European Union while opposing more Euro integration, and strengthen relations with Eastern Europe's anti-Russian governments, e.g. Poland. His election was not a sudden shift to the left, but a rejection of Orban's corruption, the failure of his interventionist / statist economic policies, and the humiliation of his relationship with Putin."
Mario Zelaya on X - "LOL! 😂 Carney, Macron, Starmer, Obama & Tusk, ALL CONGRATULATED Magyar for defeating Orban. Carney called it a “victory for democracy”. Magyar’s first moves as PM-elect?
✅ Border is not strong enough
✅ 90% of EU demands rejected
✅ Ethnic Hungarian rights prioritized
✅ Told the state funded media, ON AIR, TO THEIR FACE, that their being defunded & called it propaganda
He used to work for Orban until 2024. Then left, became the “opposition” AND WON. He played 4D chess & Liberals took the bait. The EU celebrated thinking they finally got Hungary. They got Hungary alright. Just not the Hungary they wanted. 🤣 How can you not love this guy?"
Joey Mannarino on X - "Viktor Orban didn’t cancel any elections and never arrested people for social media posts. He also stepped down after his election loss and is partaking in a peaceful transfer of power. But, don’t forget, he was a dictator. Keir Starmer attempted to cancel about 1,000 local council elections next month and arrests about 12,000 people a year for social media posts. He also refused to let a rival run for a seat in a by-election because he was worried it would be a threat to his leadership. But, don’t forget, he’s a democratic leader."
Benny Johnson on X - "Muslim banner was draped over a 9/11 memorial in California advertising the Islamic section of the Memory Gardens Cemetery in Concord. Following huge outcry by the public, the insulting banner was recently removed. That it was ever placed there is outrageous."
Islamophobia!
Why the number of Islamic schools in Canada is soaring - "His office bears symbols of a dual identity: boxing gloves emblazoned with the Palestinian flag hang opposite a cabinet of ice-hockey memorabilia. That balance is tricky. “Assimilation,” he says, can be “dangerous if done blindly…you’re going to lose your own personal identity, your own connection with your ancestry.” Many Muslim parents across Canada share his anxiety. They worry that the country’s state-school system—which mostly separates religion from education, allowing religious schools to operate privately—may distance their children from Islamic values or expose them to Islamophobia. Most Muslim pupils attend the state system, but data from the Islamic Schools Association of Canada show rising enrolment for private Islamic schools. There are long waiting-lists for existing schools and new ones are opening fast... State-school systems are responding to the critique. School boards in Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia have adopted anti-Islamophobia policies. Some go further. The Waterloo Region District School Board in Ontario reportedly has promoted an “Islamic Apparel Store”, selling merchandise emblazoned with slogans such as “One Ummah, One Love” (Ummah means “nation” or “community” in Arabic). Canada’s private schools must follow the curriculum set by their province. This is meant to uphold standards in maths, science and social studies. Mr Abougouche says Islamic schools have to get “a little creative” in order to integrate Islamic lessons. At Tarbiyah Elementary School near Toronto study of the water cycle in science lessons is interspersed with discussion about water being a blessing from Allah. Maths lessons at most Islamic schools will highlight the influence of Muslim mathematicians. At Albushra School in Ottawa social-studies classes promise to “highlight the rich tapestry of Islamic civilisation” through “literature, poetry and storytelling”. Mr Abougouche says social-studies classes seek to compare the plight of indigenous Canadians with the experience of modern-day Muslims. Many Islamic schools extend the school day so pupils can learn to recite the Koran. Often, such sessions are not optional. At Ecole Ibn Batouta, also in Ottawa, students must aim to memorise at least one chapter of the Koran per year, and are encouraged to learn more. Ahmed (not his real name), a 17-year-old Ghanaian attending ICE Islamia School in Toronto, proudly sports a white kufi and a flowing Moroccan thobe. “I like to be seen as a Muslim,” he says. Going to Islamia lets him keep a closed circle of friends; he has found that non-Muslim teens are often taken aback by his faith and make him feel left out. His school friends challenge each other to read the whole Koran over Ramadan. Public educators and sociologists worry that accommodation of this preference for Muslim-only friendship groups may harm social cohesion. Not all pupils are like Ahmed, notes Ali Khan, his principal. He deals with kids who are “forced to be” at the school by their parents. “We try to make the best of it,” he says. Some he persuades of the benefits of Islamic education; others drift back to the state system. Parents don’t get everything they want. In Edmonton Mr Abougouche notes that he resisted demand for classes segregated by sex. Some schools allow parents to decide whether their daughters wear hijabs. Others have policies requiring them. One school in Winnipeg demands girls wear hijabs after they turn ten. Education about sex and gender is another point of friction. Some state curriculums now require schools to teach pupils about gay, lesbian and transgender people. Many Muslim schools ignore the directive. Segregation is not absolute. Mr Abougouche says links with non-Muslim schools ensure that pupils mix with children who are different from them. “We create a bubble that is there to protect them,” he says. “But we also recognise if you don’t allow them to step out of that bubble, it’s equally as dangerous.” Lunch is poutine, a classic Canadian dish. Pupils file into the mosque to pray, boys separate from girls."
Clearly, this proves that Muslims are moderate, well-integrated and secular
Ban on child marriage is deemed 'un-Islamic' by Pakistan's religious leaders - "Pakistan's Council of Islamic Ideology - a prominent body that advises the government of the Muslim majority nation 'whether or not a certain law is repugnant to Islam' - has opposed the bill. The council said in a statement published Tuesday: 'Declaring marriage below the age of eighteen as child abuse and prescribing punishments for it, and other controversial provisions, are not in line with Islamic injunctions... The bill was passed after several female politicians who were married off as minors shared their personal support. Pakistan ranks among the top 10 countries with the highest absolute number of women who were married before the age of 18 - more than 20 million. Data compiled by activist group Girls Not Brides and Pakistan's National Institute of Population Studies suggest nearly 1 in 5 women in Pakistan (18%) are married before the age of 18, and 4% before the age of 15."
Time to go on about US states that allow minors to get married, since per capita is only important when it makes white people look bad (not to mention we need to pretend that there are equal amounts of coercion in both places)
So the only way to fly from Canada to Cuba is through Miami now? : r/TravelCuba - "I need to go get some paperwork in Havana to process my daughter's application for canadian citizenship. She is a toddler and while I love Cuban people, that country has no future and children shouldn't be raised in such a precarious economy if they have the opportunity to grow and thrive elsewhere. Her mom thinks the same. The only flights to Havana I'm seeing departing from Montreal have a stopover in Miami (American Airlines). I rather not go through the US, for obvious reasons. There are flights from Montreal with a stopover in Panama (Copa Airlines), but those stopovers are 10-15 hour long which is not practical. Only decent options are with a dominican airline (roundrip from Canada to DR, then within that roundrip I'd book ANOTHER roundrip between DR to Cuba with Air Century). Can anyone think of other flight options? Thanks"
When you hate the US / have bought into the hysteria so much, you go to great lengths to inconvenience yourself
Pediatrician who traded sex for prescriptions blames Holocaust; judge rejects excuse - "For years, pediatrician Craig Spiegel worked out of a medical building near DePaul Hospital in Bridgeton, where patients reported the doctor offered prescriptions for sex or sexual pictures... Spiegel apologized in court but partly blamed his behavior on losing family in the Holocaust. The judge said that was an offensive excuse and sentenced Spiegel to 20 years in prison."
French election: Far right takes 55 new municipalities as left bickers - "Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella and their allies took control of 310 cities across the country. The Socialist Party, meanwhile, finds itself at a crossroads after many of its ad-hoc alliances with the hard-left France Unbowed fell flat."
Time to condemn the whole country as Far Right, and to stage a coup to Save Democracy
Threads - "ACAB includes snitches that call the cops when someone gets shot when they try to steal or destroy someone else's property"
Threads - "ACAB includes anyone who sides with the oppressive systems over people."
Commies' list of people to execute after the Revolution steadily gets longer
TIL a Harvard study found that hiring one highly productive ‘toxic worker’ does more damage to a company’s bottom line than employing several less productive, but more cooperative, workers. : r/todayilearned
Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High
This has interesting implications for people who keep complaining about their "idiot" colleagues
It's often claimed that masturbation saps the body of testosterone, but in a study of young well-trained male athletes, masturbation prior to a strength test was associated with higher testosterone levels compared to abstinence. : r/psychologyofsex - "Also, when exercising post-masturbation, the athletes had better cycling endurance and showed a small increase in grip strength when compared with abstinence. Researchers attributed the improved performance to the athletes' higher sympathetic nervous system activity – due to their more aroused state – which offered small, short-lived increases."
Fake violinist high tech winners. : r/richmondhill - "The violin plays itself when he bent to pickup someones money."
"we need to collectively stop giving money to people in york region to people at plazas, grocery stores, the plaza exits or those people who beg while waiting at left turns. its an organized ring"
"But then how am I supposed to delude myself into thinking I'm not just a vapid, empty, morally-bankrupt cockroach if I don't virtue signal, engage in performative empathy and spend the rest of the afternoon patting myself on the back repeating the mantra, "you're a good person. You did a good thing. You deserve a klondike bar"?"
Meme - "why do you care so much about this man, it's irrelevant, it's not real, it doesn't affect anything at all. you're so weird for getting worked up about this thing lol that's only for you though. I still really really really really really really really want to get my way with this thing no matter what"
e.g. left wingers claiming other people shouldn't care about trans issues
Meme - "DONUT OR CERVIX"
What Makes Europe Better than America? - "The U.S. and Europe really do have two different understandings of what it means to be human, and this manifests in our rules, regulations, and social preferences. While both the U.S. and Europe share a commitment to classical liberalism and democracy, we have very different definitions of the public good, and therefore very different views of what we want from life. In broad terms, the U.S. emphasizes material wealth, opportunity, and indivifdual liberty, while Europe places more value on community health, shared resources, and a sense of place. From the European perspective, the U.S. is built on the cult of the individual, which is why it has too many guns, obscenely large cars, inadequate public transportation systems, and dysfunctional public spaces. From the U.S perspective, Europeans are held back by a vision of the common good that means stealing from the successful to prop up the losers, which is why they are unmotivated, unproductive slackers who would rather sip coffee all day than work. This difference isn’t just about policy on taxes, healthcare, or labor rights—it’s about how we understand the “good life” and how our physical environments reflect that. If individual liberty is the priority, as it is in the U.S., then the public sphere can largely be ignored. It is a place you have to pass through on your way from your workplace to your home, which is big enough to serve as a social space. The result is public spaces in the U.S. are given short shrift, with little appreciation for their aesthetics. Thus today, despite our immense natural and material beauty, large parts of the U.S. are ugly, soulless, and dehumanizing—a landscape of bland housing developments, strip malls, and franchise stores that look as though they were dropped from the sky into bulldozed land, with no regard for the surrounding environment. This isn’t to say Europe doesn’t also have its own suburban sprawl or dehumanizing architecture. It does—especially in the Netherlands—but even in these places, there’s a lingering respect for beauty and the need to publicly socialize. If the state doesn’t provide social spaces, family-run businesses do, because the citizens demand it. Nor is it to say all of America is ugly. There are pockets of beauty—neighborhoods, cafés, and restaurants with a European level of aesthetic appreciation—but these are exceptions, often built for wealthy and educated elites. By contrast, if you find yourself stuck—as I have been—in a random town in France, Germany, Italy, or the Netherlands, you will almost always find a café, restaurant, or park that offers something uplifting. You can sit, have a decent meal, and relax without being immersed in banality. That simply isn’t the case in the U.S. Beyond being depressing, this homogeneity means much of America feels indistinguishable from place to place. When I was in that hotel in Atlanta, I could have been in any city in the country. In Europe, however, there’s still a genius loci—a spirit of place—that persists, even in areas not known for their historical significance. You don’t need to be in a famous part of Paris or a picturesque Lombardy village to detect an area’s unique identity—though that certainly helps. Belonging depends on being part of something larger than yourself, and in Europe, this is tied to a cultural heritage that stretches back millennia. The U.S, with its relative youth and diversity, lacks this connection—and instead, its obsession with wealth has made us a nation of fragmented communities.
SightBringer on X - "⚡️Europe is going to stop being a serious civilization within this generation and almost nobody is willing to say it in those terms. Europe is actually ending as the thing it has been for the last five hundred years. The continent that produced the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, global empire, liberal democracy, and most of the intellectual and cultural inheritance the modern world runs on is genuinely going away. What replaces it will share some of the same geography and some of the same languages but it will not be the same civilization. The six weeks of jet fuel is not the story. The story is that this is the visible consequence of a civilization that has lost the will to sustain itself. Europe stopped having children. Europe stopped producing its own energy. Europe stopped defending itself militarily. Europe stopped building industrial capacity. Europe stopped growing its economies in real terms. Europe stopped believing in its own cultural inheritance enough to transmit it to the next generation. Each of those is individually a crisis. Together they are civilizational suicide in slow motion. The demographic collapse is the terminal condition. 1.3 to 1.5 fertility for a generation means the native population will halve within two generations. Replacement migration from culturally distinct populations is not continuity of the civilization. It’s substitution. The continent will still exist. The population will be different. The culture will be different. The political systems built around the old population will be under stress they weren’t designed to handle. This is happening now and it’s not reversible because the children who would have been the Europeans of 2060 simply were not born. The energy crisis is the near term manifestation of a deeper rot. Europe built its prosperity on cheap Russian gas and cheap Middle Eastern oil while taking moral stances against both. It shut down its own nuclear capacity. It limited domestic extraction. It bet that the transition to renewables would happen faster than the old supply chains would fail. It lost that bet. Now it’s rationing energy in its wealthiest cities and telling citizens to stay home in pajamas to save fuel. A continent that was producing most of the world’s advanced manufacturing in 1990 is now debating whether to run the air conditioning. That’s not a crisis. That’s a collapse. The military situation is the silent emergency that will determine everything else. Europe has functionally disarmed over the last thirty years. NATO defense spending is a fiction in most European countries. Ammunition stockpiles are months, not years. Industrial capacity to produce military equipment at scale doesn’t exist. The continent cannot defend itself from Russia without American support and American support is not reliable. If the US decides Europe’s security is Europe’s problem, which Trump has been explicit about, Europe has no independent capability to protect itself. A continent that can’t defend itself is not a civilization. It’s a protectorate."
Fossils in Greece Suggest Human Ancestors Evolved in Europe, Not Africa - "A recent analysis of fossils recovered in the 1990s in the village of Nikiti in northern Greece supports the controversial theory that apes, the ancestors of humans, evolved in Southeastern Europe instead of Africa. The 8 or 9-million-year-old fossils had first been linked to the extinct ape called Ouranopithecus."
Wrath Of Gnon on X - "Sustainable forestry: lumber without cutting down trees. Daisugi is a Japanese forestry technique where specially planted cedar trees are pruned heavily (think of it as giant bonsai) to produce "shoots" that become perfectly uniform, straight and completely knot free lumber."

Links - 31st May 2026 (3 - Canadian Politics)

2026-05-31T21:44:00.000+08:00

401_da_sarpanch on X - "#REPORT: Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) Appointed By Carney Estimates The Liberal GST Handout Will Cost Taxpayers $12.4 Billion Over The Next 6 Years — $3.1 Billion In The First Year Alone.🚨 The PBO Was Not Offered A Full-Time Position Because PM Carney Wants Someone With "Tact" And "Discretion," Must Communicate In A "Neutral Way." In Other Words He Exposes To Much.🇨🇦"
401_da_sarpanch on X - "#REPORT: Liberals Vote 164-153 To Block Interim Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) Jason Jacques As Permanent Watchdog, Despite Being Ranked The World’s Best. 🇨🇦 Handing PM Mark Carney’s Oxford Classmate Annette Ryan The PBO Position. This Comes After Jacques Raised Alarms On Soaring Deficits And Shady Financial Reporting Changes.🚨- @mindingottawa"
TrendingPolitics.ca on X - "NEW: Sources confirm Liberal government expected to nominate FinTRAC deputy director Annette Ryan as next Parliamentary Budget Officer, rejecting calls to keep interim PBO Jason Jacques, who earned OECD praise as world's best — The Globe and Mail READ MORE:"
Watcher on X - "Notice to reader: Canada has a huge money laundering problem. https://t.co/K4pcdC1Tie Appointing someone from FinTRAC - the agency responsible for tracking money laundering - does not bode well for the integrity of the PBO."
The Free People Of Canada | Facebook - "Canada is not a conservative country. That’s not just about voting preferences — it’s cultural. Where American conservatism celebrates individualism and personal responsibility, Canada worships collectivism, politeness, and the idea of being seen as good. You see it everywhere: the pride in “free” healthcare, the religious devotion to climate change, the refusal to assign blame to individuals. Conservatism doesn’t just lose in Canada because of policy — it loses because it fundamentally clashes with the national identity. Modern conservatism believes people are responsible for their own actions. Canadian liberalism says society is to blame. Crime? It’s not a choice — it’s the fault of poverty or socio-economic environment, especially if the criminal is a racial minority. The disaster on First Nations reserves? That’s not about corrupt or incompetent leadership — it’s all the fault of colonialism. There’s always an excuse. This is why the Liberal Party fits so perfectly. Their values — compassionate, welcoming, polite, environmentally friendly, cosmopolitan — are exactly how Canadians see themselves. The Liberals don’t have to persuade people of anything. They just mirror back the story Canadians already believe about who they are. Even when their policies are useless or damaging, they still feel like the good guys — and in this country, that’s what matters. But this didn’t start with Trudeau. "Toronto the Good" was around long before the Charter. The real roots of Canadian liberalism go back to the Protestant foundations of the country — the Puritans, Quakers, Methodists, Presbyterians. The moralizing, rule-enforcing, purity-obsessed spirit of mainline Protestantism never went away. It just evolved. Curtis Yarvin talks about this — how progressivism is just the next version of that same religion, minus God. Once you take God out of it, all you have left is a moral structure enforced by social pressure and state power. And that’s exactly what Canada is now. Not Christian, but not secular either. It’s religious about being “good.” But this kind of goodness isn’t biblical — it’s legalistic. Orthodox Christianity says nobody is good apart from grace. Canadian goodness is earned through compliance. Follow the rules. Say the right things. Pay your taxes. Be nice. Don’t judge. Don’t speak too strongly. Just obey, smile, and recycle. Look at the evidence. Canadians talk like they have moral superiority over Americans because of our “free” healthcare system — even though it’s falling apart. They pay carbon taxes, separate their recycling, drive electric cars— even though it changes nothing. But it’s not about results. It’s about looking virtuous. They believe in the climate cult, in multiculturalism, in every progressive cause that makes them feel morally superior to Americans. It’s not logic — it’s ritual. This is Canada. A country built on unearned moral superiority. A culture that confuses politeness with virtue. A people that care more about being seen as good than actually doing good. Until conservatives understand they aren’t just up against liberal policy — they’re up against an entire worldview, a national religion — they’ll keep losing."
I hate how the liberals have successfully boiled down Canadian culture to just being “not American” to their voters : r/CanadianConservative - "Their voters used to say Canada had no culture. Then it became useful for them to say it had a culture, and it’s defined by adherence to left wing politics. It’s all just a game, they rarely believe anything they say they believe. Next election cycle if Trump’s gone they’ll go back to saying Canada has no culture so they can take the stance that conservatives are racists for believing otherwise, to try to win votes from immigrant groups."
"The American and Canadian left has done more to Americanise us then the American right, I'd like to see Mark Carney and Kamala Harris admit to this instead of pinning this shit on Trump"
I hate how the liberals have successfully boiled down Canadian culture to just being “not American” to their voters : r/CanadianConservative - "The Conservatives should just surrender? Because it's the Liberals who brought the culture wars here by importing all the anti-Canadian, anti-Western, anti-Capitalist beliefs and practices of the American progressive Left. I'm tired of people acting like us paying attention and fighting back is about wasting our time on minutia. It was the culture wars that had people tearing down statues of Canada's founders. It's the culture wars that have every left-wing institution mouthing those idiotic land acknowledgements before every meeting, which are designed to reinforce in everyone's minds that we're here illegally, that this isn't a legitimate country, that we're interlopers even after centuries of living here. It's the culture wars that are behind the mass of immigration, and people accusing you of racism or white supremacy if you want to protect Canada's heritage and culture. It's the culture wars behind crime in the streets, as the Left decides anyone without white skin is a helpless victim of oppression and racism, no matter how violent they are, and who keep sending them back out onto the streets to commit more crimes. The culture wars are not just about trans and gender, they're about destroying the foundations of our society, from the family to the legitimacy of the country itself. You can't build up pride in a nation that is on 'stolen' land, illegitimate, genocidal, populated by 'settlers' and 'colonists' who have no right to be here in a country whose every institution, according to our previous prime minister, are systemically racist. You surrender to the Left on the culture wars you can damned well forget about establishing any pride in this country at all."
The only country that left wing Canadians hate more than Canada is the US
Instructor at federally funded Islamic org promotes Islamic caliphate to youth on U.S. podcast - "Taxpayer dollars are funding an Islamic institute in Mississauga where an instructor is openly encouraging young Muslims to dream of a global caliphate and work toward establishing a theoretical Islamic state. Canadian Islamic scholar Ustadh Abu Ibrahim appeared on a U.S. podcast to promote political Islam. In an episode of the Islamic Oasis podcast, Abu Ibrahim stated that Gen X Muslims don’t shy away from shari’a [Islamic law] and that their eyes “light up” when he lectures them about establishing an Islamic caliphate."
FIRST READING: 'Hate speech' to critique child gender transitioning, says Nova Scotia minister - "When floor-crossers began filtering into the Liberal ranks late last year, Prime Minister Mark Carney initially explained the phenomenon as being an organic exodus from the opposition. But this week, Conservative MP Kelly DeRidder outlined what she called a coordinated “pressure” campaign to sway opposition MPs to the Liberals. “These are not rumours … these are conversations taking place behind the scenes, away from public view, away from accountability,” she said. De Ridder added that her own experience was a Liberal Party staffer allegedly threatening to steamroll her in the next election with a star candidate, before hinting there would be fiscal benefits to her riding for defecting. “You know that Kitchener Centre is a technology hub, it would be good for your riding if you were with the government,” was how De Ridder described the pitch."
KLEIN: Government announcements fail to convince Canadians - "The latest Probe Research poll from April should put an end to the illusion that governments across this country are building anything of consequence. The numbers do not show confidence, they show uncertainty. They do not reflect momentum, they reveal hesitation. Most importantly, they confirm what many Canadians already suspect: these so-called “major projects” exist far more in announcements than in reality. Six flagship initiatives are being promoted as evidence of economic leadership. High-speed rail, LNG development, carbon capture, small modular nuclear reactors, offshore wind, and the expansion of the Port of Churchill. On paper, it reads like a serious national strategy. In practice, it is a collection of ideas still waiting for proof that they will ever be delivered. The polling data strips away the messaging. While small majorities express support for some projects, that support is shallow and fragmented. Large portions of Canadians admit they have never even heard of most of these initiatives. In some cases, nearly forty per cent of respondents cannot form an opinion at all. That is not an endorsement. That is a public being asked to react to something it does not understand because it has not yet seen it. This is the central problem. Governments continue to treat announcements as achievements. A press conference is framed as progress. A funding promise is presented as an action. A partnership agreement is marketed for execution. None of those things builds a rail line, produces energy, or moves goods through a port. Until construction begins and measurable progress is visible, these projects remain concepts, not contributions to the economy. The regional breakdown in the poll reinforces this point. Support aligns with geography rather than a coherent national vision... The most telling detail in the poll is the admission that opinions remain volatile. That is not a minor footnote. It is a warning. It means support is conditional and can disappear quickly once projects move beyond the abstract stage and into real-world consequences. When costs become clear, when delays emerge, and when taxpayers are asked to fund overruns, public patience tends to evaporate. Canadians have seen this pattern too often. Projects are announced with confidence and optimism, only to stall under regulatory delays, shifting political priorities, or rising costs. Timelines stretch, budgets grow, and accountability fades. Eventually, attention shifts to the next announcement while the previous one remains unfinished. This cycle has created a credibility problem that no amount of messaging can fix. The private sector operates under a different standard. Businesses cannot rely on announcements to generate returns. They must execute, deliver, and produce results within defined timelines and budgets. If they fail, they lose investor confidence and market share. Governments should be held to a similar standard when they commit public dollars to major infrastructure and energy projects. There is a straightforward path forward, but it requires discipline and a willingness to change how success is measured. Governments must begin by setting clear, public timelines for each project and reporting progress against those benchmarks. Delays should be explained, not buried. Cost estimates should be realistic from the outset, not adjusted repeatedly after the fact. Equally important is the need to streamline the regulatory environment. Lengthy approval processes create uncertainty that discourages investment and slows progress. Businesses can manage risk, but they cannot plan around indefinite timelines. If Canada is serious about competing globally, it must be able to move projects from approval to construction without years of delay. Capital commitment is another critical factor. Early tangible investment signals that a project is moving forward. Feasibility studies and consultations have their place, but they cannot become substitutes for action. At some point, decisions must be made, and work must begin. Finally, governments must prioritize"
Too bad left wingers think announcements are the same as achievements
The upside-down world of Liberal budgets - The Globe and Mail - "In the upside-down land of the Liberals, a spending spree is a spending cut, blowing a windfall of billions of dollars is prudent and failing to prepare for a fiscal storm is, well, just good management... the government’s much ballyhooed expenditure review does not cut spending, despite much hand-wringing to the contrary. The last fiscal document from the Trudeau government, the December, 2024 fall fiscal update, forecast spending for the current fiscal year at $568.1-billion. In the fall budget, the Carney government upped that total to $588.5-billion. And on Tuesday, it boosted spending even more, to $594.9-billion. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, a spending increase of $26.8-billion is not a spending cut. Ah, but the Liberals have promised, as Mr. Champagne points out, to increase spending on productive investment while throttling back on more consumption-focused expenditures. Surely that must explain the rise in spending? Quite the contrary. The government’s “capital investments,” an admittedly fluid category, are now projected to be $1.8-billion lower this year, even as overall spending jumps. Some of that drop is owing to unexpectedly slow uptake on clean-economy tax credits and some is due to recategorizing some expenditures. Still according to its own logic, the government is spending more, but investing less, again the opposite of what the finance minister claims. Mr. Champagne portrays a picture of a government as a “prudent fiscal manager” that is whittling down the federal deficit. And that is his biggest misstatement. It is true that the deficit for the 2026 fiscal year that ended on March 31 is $11.5-billion lower than was forecast in November. But that is largely because the government’s revenues surged by $7-billion. After that, the projected deficits from fiscal 2027 through to fiscal 2030s are only marginally lower than in the November fiscal framework, despite a $42.6-billion surge in revenue over that time. Of that, just $1.1-billion goes to deficit reduction. Or look at it this way: For every $100 in new revenue, the Liberals spend $97.40 and save just $2.60. Even Justin Trudeau would have difficulties in matching that performance. Despite Mr. Champagne’s rhetoric and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s promises, it’s clear that the Liberals have no intention of changing their high-spending ways. Any faint hope that the Liberals would use their newly acquired majority to do so vanished on Tuesday. Instead, it’s more of what Canadians have become resigned to from the past decade of Liberal budgets. Every new dollar of revenue is just another opportunity to spend. Today’s lack of fiscal discipline is enough of a worry on its own. But compounding that concern is the failure to take action to head off the future fiscal crunch. The budget projects a slowdown in labour productivity growth by the end of the decade, a decline from an annual increase of 1.3 per cent to 0.9 per cent. (That latter number might prove to be optimistic since the average increase in labour productivity from 2015 to 2025 is much lower, at 0.2 per cent.) Economists have sounded the alarm that, absent aggressive measures to boost productivity, the federal and provincial governments face a future where debt loads relative to the economy inexorably creep higher, eventually to a crisis point. (The fiscal update has a much cheerier view, showing a steady decline in the ratio of long-term debt to gross domestic product.) Such aggressive action is nowhere to be found in Tuesday’s update; no commitment to deep deregulation, no effort at broad tax reform, no dismantling of the protectionist barriers that coddle Canadian industry. Instead, there is a pablum-esque statement on a “Whole-of Government Competition Plan.” Mr. Champagne, in his speech, urged Canadians to be ambitious. He should take his own advice to heart, and come up with a reality-based plan to stabilize federal finances."
Clearly, Donald Trump is to blame!
National Post on X - "Applications to Canada's armed forces surged 12.9% in the past eight months, says national defence minister"
Lee Humphrey on X - "When I joined in 82 it was also amongst a surge that grew even larger when the Liberal gov gave us a 12% pay raise & created a youth employment program called YTEP. The economy at the time was in the dumpster, unemployment was at or near double digits & no one joining cared if we had crap equipment & had to yell bullets because the Army couldn’t afford to buy blank ammunition for training. We had jobs that paid $208 twice a month after we paid for rations & accommodating. Millions of CDN’s were drowning, we weren’t. Sound familiar? The Libs just followed the PET model but put it on steroids. They handed out 20% raises for privates, lowered medical standards, lowered dress standards, lowered fitness standards & eliminated the need for a background check before showing up for basic training so yeah, there’s a recruiting surge but retention among high tech trades is still staggering & now you have months long remedial fitness training (while we’re paying these folks) just so they can meet the pitiful standards expected at the beginning of basic training & we’re taking on medical liabilities that will limit deployability & wasting months of salary & training on an unknown number of people that may well not be capable of passing a basic background check! Is this making the CAF more lethal or capable? The hard answer is no!!"
Holly Doan on X - "“News subsidies are paid without restrictions on use of aid. The insolvent @SaltWireNews of Halifax used $5,174,847 in aid to pay delinquent taxes while laying off employees. @thediscourse of Sun Peaks, B.C. used its subsidy to hire foreign workers and was fined $10,000 for breaching federal labour laws. @WinnipegNews on receiving aid closed its Parliament Hill Bureau after 149 years.”"
David Clement 🌐 on X: "No, Canada Is Not Doing Great" / X - "There is a generational divide in Canada. On one end of the spectrum you have younger Canadians who feel irritated at the current state of affairs. On the other, however, are older Canadians who, like clockwork, think that Canada is doing just fine. Or, even that Canada is “doing great”. The dichotomy between these two groups reared its ugly head again with the recent jobs figures, where Canada posted its worst numbers in 4 years. Unemployment rose to 6.7%, with youth unemployment more than double that at 14%. 84,000 jobs vanished in February, and to make matters worse most of those losses were in the private sector. So when older Canadians say Canada is doing great, my response is that it's not. Canada is not doing great. And I'm tired, actually exhausted, of watching people nod along with this comforting lie. What about our cherished universal healthcare? Fine. We have universal healthcare — where the median wait time to see a specialist and receive treatment is 30 weeks . Thirty weeks. We have physicians retiring in record numbers and we're importing doctors because we decided, thirty years ago, that training too many doctors would cost too much. Now more than 6.5 million Canadians don't have a family doctor , more than the entire population of British Columbia. What about housing? Please. A detached house in Toronto has a benchmark price well over a million dollars. A nurse, a teacher, a cop (people we spent two years calling heroes) can't afford to live within an hour of where they work. We did that. We chose that. We kept strict zoning, we stalled permitting, we coddled NIMBYs at every level of government for forty years, and now we act baffled that young people are either leaving or quietly giving up on the idea of ever owning anything. You want to talk about productivity? Canada's labour productivity was the worst in the G7 in 2023 . The value we produce per hour worked was 17 per cent below the G7 average . We dig things out of the ground and we ship them somewhere else to be made into things. That's it. That's the economy. We have coasted on commodities and the American economy, and now we are scrambling because we never built the east-west infrastructure, never built the refining capacity, never built the trade corridors because it was always easier to just send it south. And if you don't believe me, ask the OECD. They have projected, not warned or suggested, that Canada will be the worst-performing advanced economy in the world for the next 40 years . Dead last. Not just this decade, but the three decades after that. Young Canadians entering the workforce today are looking at a lifetime of stagnating real incomes. That's not a prediction anymore. That's a trajectory. And we have done almost nothing to change it. We rank near the bottom of G7 in business investment, and Canada and France are the only G7 countries where R&D spending as a share of GDP hasn't increased in twenty years . Our most talented people leave. We celebrate them when they win a Nobel Prize at an American university and then we wonder why they didn't come back. You want to say we're nice? That we're decent? Sure. We're polite. We're good at apologizing. We apologize so well, so reflexively, that we've started confusing the apology with actually fixing anything. I love this country. I genuinely, deeply love it. The land, the idea of it, what it was supposed to be. A place that figured out how to be fair. But we have spent twenty years mistaking the reputation for reality. We kept cashing that reputation cheque, and nobody noticed the account was running low. The first step to fixing something is stopping telling yourself it isn't broken."
Left wingers want to destroy the economy to spite Donald Trump and the US, while believing everything the media, Mark Carney and the Liberal party tell them, so. Patriotism is not always good for the country
Wayne Mathison | Facebook - "Canada has developed a dangerous political habit: explaining everything away.
Radical rhetoric? “Just frustration.”
Censorship? “Safety.”
Ideological hiring? “Equity.”
Falling standards? “Inclusion.”
Economic stagnation? “Transition.”
It’s the national version of hearing grinding noises in the engine and turning the radio up louder. Isaiah Berlin warned about this while writing about pre-revolutionary Russia. Moderates convinced themselves the rising extremism, anti-intellectualism, and political intimidation were only temporary excesses. So they rationalized it. Excused it. Softened the language around it. Until it became the culture.
Canada now risks combining two bad instincts at once:
• activist moral absolutism,
• and technocratic social engineering.
One side governs through emotional pressure. The other through managerial pressure. Ordinary Canadians get squeezed in the middle while being told this is all “progress.” A country does not usually lose itself in one dramatic collapse. It drifts there slowly through fear, excuses, and intelligent people refusing to say what they can plainly see.
The first step back is simple: Stop explaining everything away.""
‘Canadians love Americans,’ says Doug Ford after receiving honorary degree from Michigan university : r/notthebeaverton
Of course, left wingers were very upset. Left wing Canadians like to claim they just hate Trump, but clearly they hate the US too
‘Pearson is a disaster’: Poilievre backs Toronto island airport expansion : r/Toronto_Ontario - "An MP from rural Alberta shouldn't have an opinion on Toronto"
"Should Marit Styles STFU about anything outside her Davenport riding? Because that's basically what you're saying here."
‘Pearson is a disaster’: Poilievre backs Toronto island airport expansion : r/Toronto_Ontario - "He’s the leader of the opposition."
"It's true lol. Redditors will say this about Poilievre (who's doing his job as leader of Opposition) But then post about about the Wab Kinew MP from Manitoba publicly commenting on the Iran war that Canada isn't even involved in and it gets 10k upvotes"
"Exactly. Wouldn't you want the leader of the opposition to have an opinion about this? As in, so you know where I stand if I were to form a government and take action on this matter."
"Truly. Official leader of federal opposition comments that Canada's largest and busiest airport is busy. Hard to disagree with. Encourages push for alternative, which would benefit Toronto but also the rest of Canada Toronto Redditors: sTaY iN yOuR LAnE CONservative LOSER!!!1!!!! Sometimes I wonder if our smugness might limit our progress."
You're only allowed to have an opinion if it pushes the left wing agenda

BlackRock’s tyrannical ESG agenda

2026-05-31T18:42:00.000+08:00

From 2023:
BlackRock’s tyrannical ESG agenda
As February turns to March, the finance world is waiting with bated breath for one of its most dubious annual traditions: The Larry Fink Annual Letter to CEOs. Since 2012, when the BlackRock chief executive wrote his first letter, the occasion has come to symbolise the growing threat both to shareholder capitalism and American democracy posed by investment houses’ crusade to force the principles of ESG, or “environmental, social, and governance” investing, down the throats of companies, investors, and the public.
ESG first entered the investment and banking mainstream as a survival strategy. In 2009, BlackRock had acquired Barclay’s Global Investors Ltd, making it the largest investment firm in the world with almost $3 trillion in assets under management (AUM), a sum larger than the total revenue of the US federal treasury. Politically speaking, BlackRock’s emergence as an investment superpower could hardly have come at a worse time. Amid the wreckage of the 2008 Financial Crisis and then the ululations of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, public suspicion of big banks and corporations was at an all-time high. Finance, in particular, became a morality play: financial institutions were the greedy villains, while policymakers played the heroic civic advocates reining them in. For BlackRock, the chances of continuing to grow freely in such a hostile policy climate seemed remote.

But BlackRock’s leaders had an epiphany — one that would repeat itself in the C-suites of several of its competitors in the early 2010s. What if big investment houses could rebrand themselves as so unimpeachably virtuous and civic-minded that their virtue outshone even their regulators themselves? Such a strategy would be game-changing. Not only would it afford investment houses a mile-wide road to limitless growth; it could even, if played judiciously, accord the companies themselves quasi-governmental power.
The ESG principles underpinning that strategy had already been written. The 2004 United Nations report “Who Cares Wins,” which introduced the principles of ESG to a worldwide audience, suggested that investors would make higher long-term profits if they put more emphasis on environmental and social progress. The small print was that the task of defining these impossibly broad categories (“environmental” or “social”) would be left to international institutions. Per those institutions’ priorities, “environmental” would mostly focus on implementing CO2-reduction goals, while “social” would mean anything related to the UN’s stated social goals on issues such as gender parity, racial justice, and poverty reduction. In other words, from the very beginning, the goal of ESG was to harmonise the priorities of political elites with those of business leaders. This approach was nothing new in Europe, where Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum (WEF) had long blurred the lines between business and government. But in the US, where the WEF ethos had failed to take root and the shareholder remained king, it was a radical departure.

When the UN invited global financial institutions to sign onto the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) in 2007, the total global assets managed by ESG-minded investing vehicles was around $10 trillion. By 2020, a mere 13 years later, that has grown to more than $30 trillion worldwide and more than $17 trillion in the US. New private equity firms and investment outfits devoted purely to ESG — such as Al Gore’s Generation Investment — were springing up every year, and most large US investment firms began offering ESG-mandated mutual funds, leading Bloomberg in 2021 to project $53 trillion invested in ESG by 2025.

As the ESG agenda took hold, the individual investor increasingly found himself shunted aside. Admittedly, the roots of this shift lay in the early Eighties, when federal proxy voting rules were changed to allow fund managers such as BlackRock to vote on behalf of their clients. The idea was a good one at the time, in that it recognised that few individual investors have the time to attend shareholder meetings or the wherewithal to make their views known to company leadership. But it handed vast power to investment companies — admittedly under the understanding that they would vote on behalf of their clients for one purpose only: the maximisation of profits and shareholder returns. It was, however, only a matter of time before this power was exploited.
That time came in the 2010s, as investment companies began instead to vote in line with the ESG agenda. Company leaders who opposed this were either quickly made to see its inherent wisdom, overruled, or out of a job.

In 2020, BlackRock voted at 16,200 shareholder meetings on 153,000 company proposals. Frequently, these votes were against company management. According to the company’s own Investment Stewardship Annual Report: “In 2020, we identified 244 companies that were making insufficient progress integrating climate risk into their business models or disclosures. Of these companies, we took voting action against 53, or 22%. We have put the remaining 191 companies ‘on watch’. Those that do not make significant progress risk voting action against management in 2021.”

In the same report, BlackRock boasted of having voted against management more than 1,500 times for “insufficient diversity” in company management. This interventionist approach was hardly limited to BlackRock. At State Street Global Advisors, in 2017 alone, proxies voted against the re-election of board members at 400 companies that it felt had made insufficient effort to appoint female board members.
But for huge investors such as BlackRock, attending shareholder meetings remained a rather inefficient method of coercing company managers into accepting the Good News of ESG. By 2012, Larry Fink had already discovered a far better method: the royal proclamation.

Fink’s first few letters contained tell-tale signs of the revolution to come, particularly in 2015, when he chastised managers for returning too much money to their investors in dividends and buybacks. Then, in his 2018 letter, he went a step further, advocating that CEOs step away from traditional shareholder capitalism and toward ESG by embracing the idea of “stakeholders”. In his words: “Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.” “Every company,” he wrote, “must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.” Allow me to translate: On behalf of millions of shareholders I’ve never met, I declare that they no longer truly own the companies they have invested in. Society does.

As Vivek Ramaswamy convincingly argues in his book Woke, Inc., this feint of widening the pool of “stakeholders” beyond shareholders marginalises the shareholder and elevates the manager. By making companies answerable to everyone, proponents of stakeholder capitalism make them answerable to no one.
In his 2020 letter, modestly subtitled “A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance”, Fink decreed that all American companies must redesign their businesses to align with the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, with the implied threat of shareholder activism or even divestment if they failed to do so. To that end, he declared that all portfolio companies would thenceforward need to define climate risk as investment risk in their financial analyses — a measure designed to disadvantage companies engaged in heavy industry or fossil fuel production or use, and likely shunt them into cleaner businesses. Furthermore, since the nearest-term climate risks for many businesses are government climate regulations rather than the actual effects of climate change, this is a thinly-disguised method for coercing companies into complying with international climate agreements.

Second, Fink stipulated that companies must disclose their climate risk to investors using accounting methods created by two organisations which are constituted primarily of representatives from investment companies including BlackRock and international organisations such as the UN, World Bank, and IFC. Fink ordered that these disclosures specifically draw a path to the two-degree global temperature increase stipulated by the Paris Agreement.

A reader sympathetic to Fink’s goals might reasonably ask why such use of the bully pulpit is a problem. After all, if companies don’t do the right thing on their own, why shouldn’t Larry Fink incentivise them to do so? But in making his demands, Fink is speaking with the authority of an elected representative who has polled his investors and found that his proposals have their universal support, when he has not.
Considering that BlackRock is headquartered in the United States, which within the last decade elected a president who withdrew America from the Paris Agreement, there are probably many BlackRock investors who would either reject ESG principles out of hand or else disagree with Fink’s methods of applying them. For example, while many Americans would agree with Fink that climate change is cause for concern, some would dispute the idea that reaching Net Zero emissions by 2050 is a workable strategy, or even that businesses should focus on climate change at the expense of prioritising other problems such as hunger, poverty or terrorism. Similarly, some individual investors might disagree with State Street’s insistence on gender and diversity quotas for company boards.

Living as we do in a free-market capitalist democracy, there is supposed to be room for disagreement on questions such as these. When companies disagree with one another, the result is that they choose different strategies, allowing the market to choose the best strategy in the long term. But when the CEOs of every company in America answer to Larry Fink first and their actual investors second, that diversity — and therefore, the probability that we ever discover the best strategies — plummets.

There is a further irony in this. Over the past decade, as investment houses such as BlackRock have exerted ever-greater influence over decision-making at their portfolio companies, investors have in fact been signalling for them to take a step back. We can see this in the growing popularity of passive strategies (in which investment companies take a backseat role) compared with active strategies (in which they more frequently buy and sell stocks and actively intervene in the affairs of portfolio companies to improve performance). In 2011, 21% of US AUM were managed passively, compared with 79% managed actively; by 2018, the split had narrowed to 36% to 64%. Parity is projected for 2025. BlackRock’s own active-to-passive balance has followed a similar trajectory. Their portfolio had been primarily actively managed until 2009. But by 2018, $3.9 trillion of their $6 trillion assets were invested passively. Just as BlackRock’s customers were voting with their dollars for the firm to intervene less in company policy, BlackRock’s leaders were declaring it their sacred duty to intervene more.
Over the years, ESG advocates have parried charges of overreach by responding that investing with ESG criteria is just as lucrative as traditional investing. This has always been a dubious argument: after all, if favouring ESG-friendly companies were a prudent financial strategy, an investor would not need to publicly commit to ESG in order to do it; it would simply be the best financial decision.

The evidence of ESG’s performance has until recently been ambiguous enough to offer ammunition to both sides. But that has begun to change. In 2022, eight of the top ten actively managed US ESG funds (including one of BlackRock’s) performed worse than the S&P 500. This demonstrates two things. First, that ESG funds are not some financial miracle. And second, that the performance of ESG funds is tightly bound to the tech industry, which had a terrible year in 2022. (Unsurprisingly, tech stocks are overrepresented in ESG funds, since it is easier for tech companies to claim low environmental impact than companies that actually make things.)
Not only is ESG failing to make money, but it is not even achieving its non-financial goals. One sizeable Columbia University and London School of Economics study published in 2021 found that US companies in 147 ESG portfolios had worse compliance records for both labour and environmental rules than US companies in 2,428 non-ESG portfolios. They also found that companies added to ESG portfolios did not subsequently improve compliance with labour or environmental regulations. This study added to a growing body of evidence that ESG investing is not only anti-democratic but ineffective.

Over the past few months, investment companies have begun to take notice. Of particular note was investing giant Vanguard’s December 2022 decision to pull out of a Net Zero 2050 pledge. Last week, Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley told the Financial Times: “We don’t believe that we should dictate company strategy […] It would be hubris to presume that we know the right strategy for the thousands of companies that Vanguard invests with.” The just-announced presidential campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the most articulate spokesmen on ESG’s excesses, will doubtless only amplify demands for corporate independence.

Larry Fink has not yet posted a 2023 letter. Perhaps he is delaying as he contemplates how to respond to the growing anti-ESG tide, a tide he bitterly decried at the January WEF in Davos. I might be unusual among ESG detractors in my belief that Fink should write another CEO letter this year. But it should be a very short one, the writing of which is unlikely to take too much time away from his busy schedule of saving the planet through regular flights to Aspen and Davos. The letter should read, simply:

Dear CEO,

I’m sorry.

Links - 31st May 2026 (2 - Diversity)

2026-05-31T15:07:00.000+08:00

Basil the Great on X - "The UK Government made an anti-harassment campaign advert. All the perverts were white. The saviours were ethnic minorities. This anti-white racism is there for everyone to see But we all know the truth"
Hunter Ash on X - "The media does a subtle kind of statistical lying where every PSA, every ad, every TV show, and every movie is full of situations that are demographically unlikely. Are there black scientists, woman fighters, gay people, and white sexual harassers? Of course. But when 80% of movie scientists are black, half the warriors are women, 1/3 of characters are some kind of gay, and all the sexual harassers are white guys, that constitutes a collective lie by the media. And it’s obviously intentional."
Paul Embery on X - "This is insane. In nearly every public information film about sexual harassment, the perpetrator is white. Transport for London happened to produce a film showing a black harasser. The film has been banned for "perpetuating a racist negative stereotype"."
Jared Taylor on X - "This ad was banned after ONE SINGLE COMPLAINT from a viewer. JUST ONE. We must never see blacks shown in a bad light."
Sam Ashworth-Hayes on X - "I had vaguely wondered why the overwhelming majority of ads targeting misbehaviour on the tube seemed to cast white men/women as criminals and assumed it was purely "good manners". The answer appears to be that you're not allowed to show minorities committing offences."
Millennial Woes on X - "Imagine a stereotype so obviously true, so obviously primed to confirm public suspicions, that a single example of it has to be banned. LOL"
Transport for London advert banned for harmful racial stereotype : r/unitedkingdom - "So the versions with a white male harassing a black female are not racist, but when it’s a black male as the criminal, suddenly that’s racist?"
Tom Jones on X - "In Britain it is now functionally illegal to show anyone but a white man committing harassment."
Advert banned: Ministry of Justice photo 'likely to cause serious offence on the grounds of race' - "A Ministry of Justice advert has been criticised by the advertising watchdog, which said it was "likely to cause serious offence" on the grounds of race. The ad on Facebook was for the MoJ's Prison Jobs scheme and featured an image of a white prison officer talking to a black inmate, with text saying: "Become a prison officer. One career, many roles."... A reader complained that the ad, seen on 25 June, perpetuated negative ethnic stereotypes and was likely to cause serious offence. The Advertising Standards Authority said: "We considered the ad did not suggest that all black men were criminals or were more likely to be so than any other ethnic group. "However, it showed an imbalanced power dynamic, with a smiling white prison officer, described as a 'life changer', and a black, institutionalised prisoner. "We considered the ad's focus on the positive qualities of the white prison officer and negative casting of the black prisoner was likely to be seen as perpetuating a negative racial stereotype. "We concluded that the ad was likely to cause serious offence on the grounds of race by reinforcing negative stereotypes about black men." It ruled that the advert must not appear again. The MoJ said it would appeal the ruling, adding that the photos in the campaign featured real officers and prisoners, so it was not an inaccurate or unfair representation of the engagement that might be seen between officers and prisoners. None of the other images used in the campaign showed white officers alongside ethnic minority prisoners, it added."
The media only have a responsibility to portray reality when that makes "minorities" look good
Reality needs to be banned, because it perpetuates negative stereotypes
Jimmy Failla on X - "The more you hear Ketanji Brown Jackson talk, the more you realize why Democrats think women are too dumb to get voter id."
Visegrád 24 on X - "Covering tonight’s launch, Sky News decided it was necessary to whine about the fact that all astronauts who went to the moon 1969-1972 were white men"
Dr Philip Kiszely on X - "It’s a mental illness. Without white men there would no space travel. There would be no rockets, aeroplanes, trains, cars, or bicycles. White men drove the Industrial Revolution. They urbanised. They civilised."
Meme - Pagliacci the hated @Slatzism: "Ottawa is 4% Indian. Why are they 60% of the city's new bus drivers?"
OC Transpo @OC_Transpo: "Drum roll please! We are happy to introduce our newest group of Bus Operator graduates. They are fully trained and looking forward to driving our city forward. Congratulations!"
Luckily 60% of the new bus drivers aren't white, because though 65% of the city is white, if 60% of new bus drivers are white that means there's racism against non-white people and they need to do better in attracting non-white talent
i/o on X - "Data about black law students from 2004 study:
— Half graduate in the bottom 10th of their class
— They flunk-out at more than twice the white rate
— Are 6 times as likely as whites to take the bar multiple times but never pass
— Have LSATs/GPAs 2 SDs below whites
There is little evidence that these disparities (other than the LSAT disparity) have changed much since the publication of the study."
Clearly we need more DEI to correct historic and current racism
John Rain on X - "Manufacturing white criminals: Depictions of criminality and violence on Law & Order "Results suggest whites are disproportionately portrayed as criminals five to eight times more often on police dramas compared to actual crime statistics for the city of New York, and exposure to police dramas leads to elevated perceptions of white criminality among non-whites.""
Wesley Yang on X - "The conundrum here is that the overwhelmingly black population subject to the criminal justice system is what lends (superficial) credence to the (false) “New Jim Crow” narrative at the foundation of the decarceration movement — but a realistic portrayal of it would be shocking even to the liberals whose votes support decarceral agendas. It would either have to be New Jim Crow agitprop that would fail dramatically and be non-credible or an actual depiction of what decarceration is actually doing (unleashing criminals with dozens of prior arrests until they finally kill). Thus the manufacture of white criminals."
The media only have a responsibility to depict reality when that pushes the left wing agenda
Cynical Publius on X - "Anybody remember Richard Sander? He was a law professor who proposed the “mismatch” theory of racial preferences in school admissions. The theory basically claimed that racial preferences in admissions to elite schools actually HARMED those minority students who were admitted with objectively lesser qualifications. His theory held that because those students did not have high enough test scores and grades as others admitted to those elite universities, they would therefore lag behind in their school work, receive lesser grades and lesser job opportunities post-graduation, and possibly not graduate at all. His theory further held that those minority students would be far more successful in life going to schools where their credentials were good enough for admission without racial preferences. He suggested that going to a state school, for example, would lead to higher grades, higher rates of graduation and better life opportunities. For this theory he had his life ruined. He was metaphorically crucified in the public square as a “racist." Now look at the headline below from the NY Times. (I’ll link to the full article one post below.) America owes Richard Sander a huge apology."
Colleges See Major Racial Shifts in Student Enrollment - The New York Times - "An analysis finds that flagship state universities, as well as less selective colleges, had major increases in Black and Hispanic students following a ban on race-conscious admissions."
llillillulu on X - ""who cares if a billionaire partners with a corporation to screw tax payers out of millions with a DEI loophole? hes black so somehow its actually A Good Thing" btw 100% chance that she is a "death to all billionaires" tiktok liberal when it comes to white billionaires lmao"
Thread by @bobbyfijan on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "It’s even “funnier” that this applies to housing projects too. I have plenty of friends who have essentially started companies that sell basic construction items … like doors, cabinets, drywall … where they do ~nothing other than charge a markup to projects that need to be a certain % of projects costs to be from minority owned businesses It adds a meaningful percentage to the cost of construction, while providing literally ZERO benefit of service other than to the owner of the license. It doesn’t change what is manufactured, or where or by who."
On Magic Johnson school catering
Left wing logic: if it's paid for by the taxpayer, "who cares"? That's why they want unlimited government and unlimited social spending - so the state can pay for all the fat and graft
The Argument on X - "Want to hear two friends argue about affirmative action? Subscribe today wherever you get your podcasts! New episode drops this Thursday, April 9. Don't miss it!"
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "The editor of "The Argument" really struggles to understand the argument. No, affirmative action is not an "edge case"—it's been the ruling formula of political life since the 60s. And you can't shrug off systematic state-backed discrimination with a casual "who cares.""
Jesse Arm on X - "“Who cares?” Racial favoritism in government contracting is the most costly, egregious form of DEI that exists. When the government wastes tens of billions of taxpayer dollars by illegally requiring firms to discriminate on the basis of race in contracting decisions, it undermines merit not just in school lunch programs, but in infrastructure, national defense, disaster relief, and more—all while doing nothing to help the truly disadvantaged. This does far more damage than imbecilic mandatory DEI trainings—or even affirmative action in college admissions, which affects only an elite subset of Americans. I care about that! Many other Americans do as well."
Colin Wright on X - "Progressives dismiss and downplay racist affirmative action policies that, if the races were reversed, would cause them to take the streets in protest of "Jim Crow 2.0" and an epidemic of systemic white supremacy. When you present a case of racial discrimination to a progressive, always start with the races reversed and see how they respond. When they respond with predictable outrage, reveal the true dynamic. This is how you expose a real racist."
Shakespeare was a black woman, new book claims - "William Shakespeare was a “black Jewish woman”, according to a new book. It claims that the truth of Shakespearean authorship has been hidden by centuries of “Western-centric and Eurocentric ideology”. The author contends that the real Bard was a cosmopolitan woman with a “multicultural identity”. This woman is identified in the new work, titled The Real Shakespeare, as the historical figure Emilia Bassano – a poet with connections to the Tudor court. Bassano, it is claimed, used the pen-name “Shakespeare” and wrote the Shakespearean canon of plays, only for her work to be stolen by an uneducated interloper from Stratford-upon-Avon. This interloper, whom we now know as William Shakespeare, was then revered by posterity because the idea of a “white” genius was preferred to a black female playwright, the book argues. The book’s author, Irene Coslet, a feminist historian, told The Telegraph: “If Shakespeare was a female of colour, this would draw attention to issues of peace and justice in society.”"
Feminists making shit up again, as usual
A Framework, Not Folkways - "When critics say America has “no culture,” what they often mean is that America does not enforce a single narrative of identity. It does not require conformity to ancient custom and does not demand ethnic continuity. It asks only that you operate within a framework of law, liberty, and responsibility. Because it is not culturally dependent, anyone can practice it, and because anyone can practice it, it can absorb the world without losing itself—so long as the underlying values remain intact. The real danger to American civilization is not cultural diversity. It is the erosion of the principles that make diversity workable in the first place. America is not a tribe— it is a process, and processes, when they work, do not need a single face to endure. By trying to remake the nation into tribes, classes and races, the left is working to destroy the trust that binds America together. Diversity is not our strength, unity in value and principle are—and that is how we make it through these trying times. The question is whether we can achieve the unity necessary."
Meme - United Nations @UN: "Every 3 seconds, a girl is married somewhere in the world. Child marriage is a human rights violation that denies girls the chance to reach their full potential. This #ValentinesDay, join @UNEPA in speaking out against this form of gender-based violence:"
"A child should never be in a marriage. #EndChildMarriage @UNFPA"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "The image in this post is deliberately misleading. Even their own site shows that the vast majority of child marriages happen in countries that are predominantly dark skinned. The use of a white woman with blond hair is a dishonest representation of the problem."
Josh Barro on X - "How does prohibiting racial discrimination in college admissions constitute a ruling against civil rights? Who edited this article?"
Left wing logic: if you're against racial discrimination, you're racist
Andy Ngo on X - "The board of @UniversitiesWI has fired its president as revenge for him making concessions to Republican lawmakers by pausing DEI hiring. The board members are appointed by @GovEvers, a Democrat. People who said “woke is dead” seriously need to rethink their position."
Ameer Kotecha on X - "It’s important to dissect the tactics that the (so called) progressives employ. The public never asked to get rid of Churchill. They never would. In 2002 they voted him the greatest Briton of all time in that BBC poll. This “consultation” instead involved asking about categories and found 'nature' was the top choice ahead of 'architecture and landmarks' and 'notable historical figures'. Hardly surprising when framed in those terms. Hard to hate badgers. That provided the cover to enact this change. As so often, fear of causing offence - no matter how unreasonable or small in number the potentially offended - trumps pride in a national hero."
Graeme Archer @graemearcher - "I don't think it's possible to be sufficiently contemptuous of Labour MPs. The BoE guidance, which many others have shared, made clear that "diversity" was a clear criterion - no image could be selected that might cause "offence." So no Churchill, no Darwin, no Nightingale, no Newton, no Turing, no Berners-Lee, no Logie Baird, no Montgomery, no Shakespeare, Marlowe or Johnson, no Holst and certainly no Elgar. Just fucking badgers. That Labour has reduced me to swearing in public just depresses me even more. There is literally nothing great about this country that Labour doesn't hate. There is literally no move Labour won't countenance to erase British symbolism from everything British. (That's why they've styled themselves "UK Govt" as opposed to the truth - His Majesty's Government. The Crown is the people's guarantor of protection against executive diktat, a reminder that the government serves us; shouldn't rule over us. So Labour abolished the symbol. In two generations the idea that the government doesn't just have the right to do whatever it wants to you will be lost.) Meanwhile, of course, in case we've forgotten, Starmer made Mandelson US ambassador because whatever, God knows why - maybe a podcast bro said it would be like fine, man, have you *seen* this dossier? - and then decided to abolish jury trials. When Geoffrey Cox made the greatest Parliamentary response of our generation to this abominable idea, the Lammy Thing lolled about, fat face sniggering like some village idiot. I have never before been governed by a movement that doesn't hide the fact that it hates the country. It's alarming and depressing in equal measure."
Analysis: Charlie Kirk’s Black Pilot Comments in Context - "KOLVET: We’ve all been in the back of a plane when the turbulence hits or when you’re flying through a storm and you’re like, “I’m so glad I saw the guy with the right stuff and the square jaw get into the cockpit before we took off. And I feel better now, thinking about that.”
KIRK: You wanna go thought crime? I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, “Boy, I hope he’s qualified.”
KOLVET: But you wouldn’t have done that before!
KIRK: That’s not an immediate … that’s not who I am. That’s not what I believe."
With the Artemis mission, left wingers are busy posting that meme quote mining Charlie Kirk. But of course, they're lying, as usual
RedWave Press on X - "NASA pilot Victor Glover CLAPS back after being asked what it means to be the first black man to visit the moon: “It’s the story of humanity, not black history, not women’s history, but that it becomes human history.” “I also HOPE we are pushing the other direction that one day we don’t have to talk about these first. That one day, this is just—and listen to this—that this is the human history.”"
Ironically, he rejected DEI. So much for mocking Charlie Kirk
Left wingers are still trying to pretend the right hates him because he's a DEI hire, because they always project
DEI Practices Reduce Productivity, Cost $94 Billion Annually: White House Economic Report - "Researchers calculated that DEI policies reduced output and lowered the country’s gross domestic product by about $94 billion each year, amounting to approximately $1,160 per year for families with two working adults. “These estimates imply that DEI promotion has led to inefficient management, raising the cost of doing business,” the report reads. “These costs lead the companies practicing DEI to hire fewer people and pay their workers less.”... DEI policies “actively encouraged” employment discrimination, according to the report, which cited fourfold growth in the percentage of minorities holding management positions between 2016 and 2023. During the same period, industries that adopted DEI protocols were 2.7 percent less productive than industries that avoided the cultural shift. "
Oxford and Cambridge drop out of top three in university rankings because of 'misguided attempts at equality': Experts blame social engineering as elite institutions lose prestige - "The historic universities of Oxford and Cambridge have failed to get into the top three in a prestigious annual university ranking for the first time. The Times and The Sunday Times Good University Guide 2026 placed the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) first for the second year in a row, followed by the University of St Andrews in Scotland second and Durham University in third. Oxford and Cambridge were joint fourth - the first time neither have held a place in the top three in the 32 years the Times has produced its guide. Last year Oxford was ranked third, while Cambridge was already sitting at fourth."
Meme - "She openly admits that it's impossible to be a young white male writer but she doesn't care"
Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates: "(a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. this is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own "privilege.")"
Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates: "There's More Than One Way to Ban a Book"
Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates: "before DEI, only white men were even interviewed. DEI was instituted to at least make interviews possible for non-white men; & to everyone's surprise, or no one's, once the playing field was leveled women & persons of color began to be hired. naturally, white men were miffed."
Left wingers are still lying that DEI is to ensure everyone enjoys an even playing field and that everyone who isn't a straight white man can get hired
Meme - "JUST IN: McDonald's to eliminate self-serve soda stations nationwide by 2032, citing "changing consumer habits""
"Changing consumer habits stole my bike"
Liam Out Loud on X - "A study found that exposure to DEI material increases paranoia, hostility, and support for violent retribution. Participants were more likely to seek punishment even when discrimination hadn’t occurred "They even endorsed explicitly hostile statements against entire groups they deemed to be privileged." In other words: Progressive ideology manufactures moral grievances and then trains people to retaliate against imagined transgressors. I'd estimate 20–30% of society now appears psychologically primed to interpret ordinary events as oppression and respond with moral hostility."
Left wing ideology is all about division, after all
Also see the Dartmouth Scar Experiment - people see what they're looking for, and grievance-mongering means people feel more oppressed (even when they're not). It's literally in their heads
End Wokeness on X - "Justice KBJ: "If I steal a wallet in Japan, I am subject to Japanese laws….. in a sense, it's allegiance." Her case for birthright citizenship:"
Will Ricciardella on X - "That’s territorial jurisdiction, not political allegiance. If being subject to laws meant allegiance, every tourist would be a citizen."
Left wingers will continue to insist that she is "qualified" and that if you question has competence, you're racist and sexist