DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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Your Friends in Government, of course, are attempting to ban them by law—and have succeeded with new ones, but a loophole regarding used ones is being (as you might expect) heavily exploited. As you might (als0) expect, the charge on that is being led by the Usual Suspects in the Usual Blue States. As the video points out, “You do not need a conspiracy when you have an incentive.”

I am reminded of a story I heard when I was young; I have no idea whether it’s actually true, but it’s too good not to share.

Supposedly Bill Gates, in the halcyon days when he was newly The Richest Man in the World, bought a brand new high-end Porsche sports car. Unfortunately, he couldn’t drive it in the U.S. because part of the process laid down by Your Friends in Government was that in order to be certified as street-legal a manufacturer actually had to crash a couple of cars to test whether they were sufficiently safe to be on America’s roads. Porsche responded, “Fuck that. We’re not deliberately destroying a couple of $900,000 cars just to slake your appetite for bureaucratic micro-management.” So Bill had to keep it in storage while he attempted to work his way around Our Democracy.

For all I know, it’s still there.

ATQUE: The Real Reason Why You Can’t Own a New Kei Truck or Hilux Champ in the US

As always, government doesn’t provide solutions, it just creates more problems.

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Michael from Offshore Citizen podcast compares the support Canada offered it’s citizens caught in the UAE during the recent Iran incidents to that offered by Montenegro. He points out that the the top marginal tax rate in Canada is around 50% while that in Montenegro is around 15%, and asks a perfectly natural question: What value do their respective citizens get when the diversity hits the fan?

The Telegraph (UK).

From the banks of the river Trent, the ruined stone walls of Newark Castle should be the iconic backdrop to this historic Nottinghamshire market town. But all that’s actually visible on a humid July afternoon is traffic backed up along its famous Great North Road, battling its way to and from the A46. It’s been this way for decades now.

So when National Highways announced “critical investment” to improve the A46 Newark Bypass in February 2022, it wasn’t just the people of Newark breathing a huge sigh of relief. It was seen as a nationally significant trade and export route too. As Heidi Alexander, Secretary of State for Transport, said less than four months ago, upgrading the A46 at Newark “will support sectors such as logistics and manufacturing which are dominant in the local economy and reliant on roads for growth, as well as improving access to Humber ports”.

But then, with one dismissive wave of Keir Starmer’s Defence Investment Plan this week, the £297m project was abruptly shelved. It wasn’t the only roads project immediately mothballed; the A38 Derby Junctions project – also in the East Midlands – was earmarked for “potential cancellation”.

The Telegraph (UK).

Eight men have been arrested in the UK as part of an international investigation into the organised drugging and raping of women by their partners.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) said it was working alongside Europol and the FBI as part of an investigation into an internet forum in which members shared graphic videos of the sexual abuse of unconscious women.

Investigators said they had identified more than 270 people linked to the forum but did not know the true scale of the offending, and that other forums – which were unknown to law enforcement – were operating.

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When the socialist-communist government of Pedro Sánchez first announced he was going to begin the mass legalization of migrants in his country, his government claimed this would amount to 500,000 people. Now, twice as many people are being legalized than first claimed, and importantly for the rdest of Europe, those migrants now have the right to freely move through the Schengen zone.

Due to his mass amnesty, The New York Times has now labeled Spain a “beacon of the global left.”

In April, the socialist-communist government in Madrid first issue the decree, giving illegal migrants three months to submit their application.

According to the New York Times, more than 1 million applications had already been submitted by illegal immigrants.

Vox party leader Santiago Abascal has accused Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of taking the long-term move of naturalizing millions of foreigners to give himself and left-wing parties an electoral advantage in upcoming elections.

“Pedro Sánchez is willing to rob us of the next general elections by manipulating the census and handing out Spanish nationality,” wrote Abascal. “And it is necessary for us to mobilize to prevent him, after everything he has stolen, from also stealing the elections from us.”

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Municipal councils across England are once again clashing with the country’s own national flags. Increasingly, displays of both the Union Flag (“Union Jack”) and England’s Saint George’s Cross are being treated as problematic.

In Cambridge, the leader of Cambridgeshire County Council, Lucy Nethsingha, said people should be able to display flags in support of the England team, but only “in a safe, inclusive way and with permission.”

Local coucils in England are very big on “with permission”.

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The goals of Progressivism are “continually receding ones”, which is, to paraphrase Mussolini, “like a trodden road leading on and on to the land of heart’s desire, which though it grows closer and closer, will never be reached”.

To advance towards the mirage, progress must convince. Indeed, one needs to emancipate oneself from the past and its many thorns. Complexity, you see, slows down progress. Data, when it is used, must tell an irrefutable story. Whatever our current situation, we are, it is said, materially better off now than we were then. We are admonished to look straight ahead, not to see what we have lost. To reminisce is, in a way, to conspire.

Proglodytes want progress, and progress is never final. Therefore, progressives need change, because without change, progress won’t happen. That is why they are never satisfied. That is why they are always changing things just for the sake of change, because without change there is no progress, and without progress progressives are failures.

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Scientists from the University of Minnesota say they have created the first-ever synthetic cell built entirely from scratch, and seen it go through an entire ‘life’ cycle – including reproduction.

“This is the most fascinating and important thing I’ve ever done in my work, and the realization that it’s actually happening was rather slow to sink in,” synthetic biologist Kate Adamala, a co-lead on the project told ScienceAlert.

“We’ve replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell. It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark,” she says.

*sigh* Biology IS chemistry, and that’s ALL it is. There is no Magic Secret Sauce to ‘biology’.

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In addition to making you look like a goober.

Humans have been tattooing themselves for thousands of years, for spiritual, cultural, or personal reasons.

Long before we were covering ourselves in ironic stick’n’pokes, butterfly tramp stamps, or full blackout tattoos, humans were marking their bodies with permanent ink.

But while history can tell us much about the culture of tattooing, we still don’t know much about how the practice affects our health.

Introducing tattoo pigment into the skin triggers an immune response, and that ink obviously sticks around – though it doesn’t always stay put.

Research shows that particles of tattoo ink can enter the lymphatic system and build up in the lymph nodes.

Lymph nodes are key hubs of our bodies’ immune activity. Full of white blood cells, lymph fluid is filtered through them to clean out any debris it’s collected on the way around your body. That includes misbehaving cells (i.e. cancer), bacteria, viruses, and foreign substances such as tattoo ink.

Rapper MGK recently found this out the hard way by rushing a massive blackwork piece that covers much of his torso, including the area of the lymph nodes around his armpits and shoulders. He says the process turned his surrounding skin yellow and made him “really sick.”

The Telegraph (UK).

There is a nervousness in Lebanon’s corridors of power. But the whispers are not about the US or Israel. They are about Unit 121 – a threat from within.

Known as “Hezbollah’s death machine” and the most secretive and brutal arm of the terror group, the unit has been linked to some of the country’s most notorious political assassinations, including that of Rafik al-Hariri, the former prime minister, in 2005.

Now, angry at a peace deal between Lebanon and Israel that neuters Hezbollah’s operations against the Jewish state, they are regrouping.

“This is one of the most secretive and lethal units in the world, second only to a similar Russian unit, the GRU,” Ronen Solomon, the author of an upcoming trilogy on Hezbollah and its global operations, told The Telegraph.

The Telegraph (UK).

A migrant who attacked a group of small children and caused riots in Dublin has been found guilty of attempted murder.

Riad Bouchaker was convicted on Wednesday for the knife attack in Parnell Square in 2023.

Bouchaker was found guilty of the attempted murder of a five-year-old girl, who was stabbed in the heart during the attack and is now non-verbal, uses a wheelchair and cannot swallow safely.

The Telegraph (UK).

Iranian hardliners abruptly cut off a television interview with the country’s chief peace negotiator as he was defending the deal with the United States.

The pre-recorded interview with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf stopped midway through its broadcast on the IRINN state TV channel on Tuesday night, prompting a rare public protest from parliament.

Mr Ghalibaf was in the middle of a sentence which started: “The $12bn – yes, they can do it and it is ongoing” when the screen went black and then switched to an old speech by Ali Khamenei, the former supreme leader.

The Telegraph (UK).

White British students are a minority in almost one in five universities, analysis by The Telegraph has found.

In the 2024-25 academic year, white UK-domiciled students comprised less than 50 per cent of the student population at more than two dozen universities across the UK.

Yet almost a dozen of these institutions continue to exclude white students from diversity scholarships that target students from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds.

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Our friend from Maxinomics explains it all to you.

The number one thing that people want money for is so that they can say “No”. I don’t want to spend my time like that.

Which means that this saying is wrong: “Time is money.” Benjamin Franklin got it backwards—putting time first to emphasize that you should trade time to get money. That’s what the whole paragraph you can find the saying in is about. When really, we know that humans work to obtain time. “Money is time.” You want money to buy a house so that you don’t have to build it; to buy food so you don’t have to grow it; to buy a car so you don’t have to walk. That gap, between the input you’re given and the output you want to get, is largely time spent doing things that no one likes doing.

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Mice get all of the good stuff.

In an incredible breakthrough, scientists created a mouse using ancient genetic tools older than animal life. By taking a gene from single-celled lifeforms and introducing it into mouse cells, researchers generated stem cells, which, when injected into a developing embryo, helped give rise to a living, breathing mouse.

The Guardian, Voice of Socialism in Britain.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, called for a national “billionaires tax” on Friday as he fights a ballot measure targeting the ultra-wealthy in his home state.

Rules are for thee but not for me.

Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028, published his proposal the day after California officials certified a ballot measure to levy a one-time 5% tax on residents worth more than $1bn. The initiative, called the California Billionaire Tax Act, was brought by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) and would fund the state’s healthcare, education and food assistance programs.

Proglodyte never run out of ideas for spending YOUR money.

The initiative received more than 1.6m signatures – one of the highest in California history and something organizers point to as testament to the ballot measure’s popularity. But it also spurred intense pushback from some of the state’s richest Silicon Valley residents as well as several other prominent labor unions.

“The dangerous wealth tax directly threatens vital funding for education and schools, healthcare and clinics, public safety, and infrastructure projects by making California’s revenue even more volatile,” a coalition of unions including the California Medical Association, California Primary Care Association and the California School Boards Association said in a joint statement on Thursday.

ScienceDaily.

Researchers have uncovered an unexpected antiviral defense system in sea anemones that works very differently from the one humans use. The discovery suggests evolution developed multiple ways to combat viruses, challenging long-held ideas about how animal immune systems evolved.

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No one who’s kept up with U.S. politics even minimally over the last four decades should be surprised that the Democratic Party has been the launching pad for a wave of socialism. The party has long been rooted in socialist principles. It was inevitable that what the Democrats have long covered up is now out in the open and its zealots adherents are threatening our republic.

Granted, the wave is not overwhelming and our country has survived previous flirtations with socialism. But the boldness from the outright socialists, who are hiding behind the label of “democratic socialists,” cannot be waved away, and the Democratic Party will be responsible for the damage that the Democratic Socialists of America will wreak if voters don’t turn away the slate of the most radical candidates we’ve seen in some time.

There is a reason that Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders first caucused with, then ran for president as a member of, the Democratic Party. Contempt for limited government and economic freedom (which naturally begets capitalism) has long been a main chapter in the Democrats’ handbook.

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There has clearly been trillions of fraud over the last several decades, and politicians in both parties have shown very little interest in rooting out the fraud until Trump. Somehow, most of the media and other Democrats aren’t too concerned with saving taxpayer dollars—they spend their time attacking Trump.

The media and other Democrats were outraged when Trump spent $16 million dollars fixing the reflecting pool problems, and there was endless reporting, but there is virtually no outrage and minimal reporting on the endless fraud, no matter how many billions have been legitimately stolen from the taxpayers.

The following is a small sample of what crooks have gotten away with, which is only the tip of the iceberg.

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Jessica Gorman, bereaved mother of Sheridan Gorman, shot back at Democrat members of Congress who complained about having to hear her testimony about illegal immigrants during a Tuesday congressional hearing on sanctuary cities.

“No family should ever have to bury a child because public officials fail to put American lives first,” Gorman said in her opening statement before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement. Venezuelan national Jose Medina has pleaded not guilty to murder charges involving the death of Gorman’s 18-year-old daughter.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who serves as the subcommittee’s ranking member, began her opening statement with condolences to Gorman and Joe Abraham, whose daughter died when an illegal alien drunk driver collided with her car.

“Let me start by offering my deepest condolences to you, Mrs. Gorman, and to you, Mr. Abraham, for the loss of your children,” Jayapal said.

But then her tune changed.

“Unfortunately, this hearing is the fourth time in this committee that we’ve had a hearing on sanctuary cities. The fourth time,” Jayapal told Gorman and Abraham. “And there’s many other things we could be doing other than this.”

Not the Bee.

This might be one of the best videos on the internet right now.

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After Morocco knocked the Dutch national football team out of the World Cup, rioting broke out this morning in The Hague, with dramatic footage showing Dutch motorcycle police fleeing from Moroccan supporters. Police also deployed water cannons to control the crowd and at least a dozen people were reportedly arrested.

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I’ll believe it when I see it.

Denmark’s government, led by the center-left Social Democrats, has once again announced plans to pursue a nationwide ban on the public broadcast of the Islamic call to prayer via loudspeakers. This now amounts to the third time the center-left government is trying to ban the call to prayer.

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Almost ten years ago, a Catholic priest was set upon by Islamists who had sworn an oath of allegiance to the Islamic State group. Now, as part of a relatively rapid administrative process, Fr. Jacques Hamel looks set to be beatified by the Church he served for many years.

Hamel was murdered on July 26th, 2016, in the Church of Saint-Étienne in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen. His two young killers entered the church during Mass and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, before killing Hamel at the altar. (Another churchgoer was seriously injured.)

In the years since, this still notorious case has prompted pilgrimage to the crime scene, where a once blood-soaked wooden altar, still showing knife-marks, stands beside a desecrated cross.

Whereas there is a standard waiting period for a beatification process, normally at least five years, the Pope has waived this. Instead, the Diocese of Rouen was allowed to commence work on Jacques Hamel’s case significantly earlier, completing this phase in 2019 with an 11,000-page dossier, now under review in Rome.

Vatican News describes the document as comprising more than 100 kilograms of paper, around 10,000 hours of work, 600 transcribed sermons, and interviews with 60 witnesses. Officially already a martyr, this process puts Hamel on the path to beatification.

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Unbelievable.

asylum seeker accused of causing the death of a 14-year-old girl in a fatal traffic collision before leaving the scene without offering help.

The tragic incident took place six years ago near the village of Marken in the western Netherlands.

The defendant, Jamal T., who lives in Germany but was born in Iraq, was allegedly distracted while looking for directions on one of his co-passengers’ mobile phone.

The prosecutor’s office is seeking two weeks’ imprisonment for careless driving, arguing that the defendant was not paying sufficient attention to the road and could have avoided the collision, and is requesting a further six weeks in prison for failing to stop and provide assistance after the impact.

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And rightly so.

Two police officers are facing gross misconduct investigations following the death of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, who was handcuffed and arrested while suffering a fatal stab wound, according to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).

The IOPC said evidence suggests the officers who first arrived at the scene may have failed to recognise that Nowak required urgent medical assistance. Therefore the investigation will examine the decision to arrest and handcuff him rather than provide immediate first aid, as well as the actions of control room staff handling emergency calls.

The watchdog also said one officer may have breached professional standards relating to authority, respect, and courtesy after allegedly dismissing Nowak’s claim that he had been stabbed. This is a euphemistic way of describing what happened: the officer in question when told by Nowak he had been stabbed replied “I don’t think you have, mate.”

The investigation follows formal complaints from Nowak’s family, who questioned differences between how Henry was treated by officers and how Digwa was treated after his arrest.

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An African migrant was arrested on suspicion of stabbing and killing a 19-year-old man in the French city of Fréjus during the weekend of June 27–28th.

The suspect, from Guinea in West Africa, was scheduled to face a deportation ruling on the day of his alleged offence, in which a young man was killed with a knife blow to the neck. Rescue workers struggled in vain to help the deceased.

Three other young men were hospitalized during the knife attack, which occurred shortly after the Guinean alleged perpetrator filed an appeal against his French deportation order (or OQTF), which the local administrative court was scheduled to examine.

Not for the first time, a violent crime was committed—allegedly—by someone already subject to a French deportation order. Indeed, France appears to struggle with deporting migrants who have been ordered to leave the country.

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Dutch farmers’ organisations have warned of a summer of protests if the government presses ahead with proposed nitrogen restrictions that they say could put many farms out of business.

The warning came as parliament debated Agriculture Minister Jaimi Van Essen’s plans on Wednesday. Farmer representatives met for crisis talks in Nijkerk while farmers gathered outside with tractors to protest the proposals.

The organisations—including Agractie, the Dutch Dairy Farmers Union (NMV), the Dutch Poultry Farmers Union (NVP), Farmers Defence Force (FDF), and LTO Nederland—oppose plans to introduce wider buffer zones around Natura 2000 protected areas and tougher livestock emissions limits, arguing they would make farming in some regions virtually impossible.

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Good luck with that.

The family of Louis, the 17-year-old boy beaten to death at a construction site in Narbonne, France, have spoken publicly about the impact of the attack, with his aunt describing the footage of the incident as “unspeakable.”

Marie-Julie Marteau, Louis’ aunt, told BFMTV on Monday, June 29, that she had watched videos of the assault and said the family had been left deeply traumatized. She said Louis’ mother had been “in a state of total shock” since the teenager’s death.

Marteau described the video as extremely distressing and said the family struggled to understand the level of violence shown in the footage.

She added that those responsible appeared to show no remorse during the assault. “They are laughing, they beat him, they leave him no way out,” she said, describing the footage as showing the attack being recorded alongside “snickering and selfies.”

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White working-class students are effectively locked out of almost every race-based diversity scholarship at Oxford and Cambridge despite being among the most educationally disadvantaged groups in England, according to a new analysis.

The investigation, published in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, found that more than a dozen scholarships, bursaries and outreach schemes at the two elite universities prioritise applicants from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, while offering little or no equivalent support to poor white British students. The findings have reignited criticism that Britain’s diversity agenda rewards race over genuine disadvantage.

According to the analysis, Oxford and Cambridge together offer at least 15 scholarships or financial aid schemes aimed specifically at BAME students, alongside at least 15 outreach programmes including residential visits, taster days, and webinars. White working-class men appear eligible for just one of those diversity schemes, while white working-class women qualify for only two.

Quillette.

For neo-decolonial activists, Western civilisation reflects all of the things they regard as oppression: capitalism, Zionism, borders, prisons, police, property, universities, legal systems, national sovereignty, and the ordinary habits of middle class life.

To call for our civilisation’s “total eradication” is to demand a revolutionary unmaking of the world that Western people inhabit. It is a politics of purification. It’s hard to view this as anything other than naked destructivism. They are talking about dismantling our whole society.

Western civilisation is a lot of things beyond simplistic labels like “capitalist”. Western civilisation is the assumption that government is limited by law; that a person can speak, worship, publish, own property, marry, dissent, sue, vote, and be judged as an individual. Western civilisation means the various habits of argument, self-criticism, contracts, due process, scientific inquiry, and voluntary association that make modern life possible. It is the system that has lifted billions of people out of poverty worldwide.

During the George Floyd protests, when another user asked whether there was a better slogan than “defund the police,” Chevalier reportedly replied: “Fuck you. We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movements.” When someone suggested that abolition meant ending policing “as we know it,” she corrected them: “No. It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever.”

Freeberg nails it.

The straight white male privilege is: If people want to play this tribe game, your tribe is the first one they’re going to excoriate. It’s pretty consistent. So it’s not at all hard to pick out these people. They hate you already.

Winnowing down this friends list is as easy as falling off a log, for us straight white males. We just say “You don’t want to have anything to do with me? Fine. Your terms are acceptable.” And that’s it. No muss no fuss.

Gays…transgenders…blacks…”native Americans” and women…who have figured out the above three truisms and are struggling to get them implemented in their own lives…I dunno. I dunno how they even get started on it. It must be awful. A bunch of damn fair-weather friends and you have to figure out which ones are lying. Who’s only pretending to be your friend, so they can be someone else’s.

It would drive me bonkers. In a heartbeat.

Glad I’m a straight white male. A loathed, native-born, third-generation, Scandihoovian, meat eating carbon spewing always-wrong SWM.

Read it.

Mice get all the good stuff.

Not the Bee.

The Left tells us that if we just submit to government medicine and allowed the entire medical industry to become socialist, everything will be okay.

Meanwhile, as The Guardian reports, the reality is somewhat different.

It’s absolutely horrible.

Read it.

Reckless driving and aggressive driving can describe similar behavior, but they are not the same legal idea. Reckless driving is usually the more serious label because it turns on willful or wanton disregard for safety. Aggressive driving usually describes a pattern of hostile or impatient traffic behavior, and some states do not use that label as a separate charge.

There is no single national rule. A speed, lane change, or tailgating incident can be treated differently depending on the state, the road conditions, the risk created, and whether the driver threatened or endangered someone else.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Not the Bee.

It’s Somali Independence Day in Little Mogadishu, and this Minnesota man got stuck in the crowd.

Memo to self: Avoid Minnesota.

Not the Bee.

Arab Muslim migrant Loay Alnaji, a former community college professor, walked up to 69-year-old Paul Kessler at a protest in Thousand Oaks, California, two months after the horrific October 7th terror attack carried out by Hamas jihadis.

Alnaji, a jihad-lover, was angry that Kessler was counter-protesting the mostly peaceful pro-jihad rally. The two traded verbal spars, then witnesses say Alnaji walked over to Kessler and smacked him on the head with his megaphone.

Kessler fell backward on the concrete, busted his head open, and died due to the resulting brain bleed.

Judge Derek Malan offered Alnaji a sweetheart deal after he pled guilty in May to felony involuntary manslaughter and felony battery causing serious bodily injury. On Tuesday, he was sentenced to one year in county jail and two years of probation.

Memo to self: Avoid California.

Not the Bee.

This is your average pro-LGBT Democrat right here. Nothing going on upstairs. Just repeat the line.

Read it.

According to the UN Environment Programme, the world can expect to generate 408 million tons of waste by 2040. If nations around the world successfully adapted their systems, including getting better at reusing plastics and improving their processes for sorting recycling, then this total could be brought down to 216 million tons.

While multiple surveys show that there is overwhelming global support for a ban of some single-use plastics and consumers have also repeatedly claimed that the topic is important to them, Statista data shows that this is not necessarily trickling down all the way into shopping behaviors. According to a survey carried out by Statista Consumer Insights between April 2025 and March 2026, only between a third and a tenth of shoppers in most surveyed countries say that they avoid plastic packaging when buying food. This rate was especially low in Japan, known for its high use of single-use food packaging, at 7 percent. It stood at just 17 percent in the United States. India was one of the outliers of the survey. There, almost half of urban respondents said they had an eye on the matter. A comparably high level of respondents said the same in Vietnam, potentially showing that in countries where supermarkets still play a smaller role in daily shopping, plastic waste can be considered more by consumers.

The survey also reveals something about the nature in which respondents answer questionnaires. When asked if they actively try to reduce harmful packaging, many people tend to respond that they do. This is called social desirability bias, meaning that respondents might exaggerate their positive deeds in order to feel better about themselves. The answers displayed in the chart are from a multi-pick question in which respondents could pick all options that apply to them from a list of food consumption statements. Despite being free to check all boxes, many respondents focused on a few central statements, disregarding some of the desirable, but potentially less true behaviors.

They’re asking the wrong questions. Most shoppers don’t get to choose the packaging in which their products come. If they did, they might choose something other than plastic. But they want the product, and, however much they might prefer that it not come in plastic, they don’t get to chose—they have to take what the maker of the product offers. Nobody is going to choose one product over another merely based on the packaging unless it’s a total commodity, and even then price is far more dispositive.

Navy Matters.

More and more, the Western naval ship acquisition world is reverting to ‘existing designs with only minor modifications’ instead of new ship designs. This is due to fear rather than combat requirements: fear of runaway costs, fear of schedule delays, fear of bad publicity and criticism, fear of innovation, etc. Fear. The Western naval world is acquiring ships as a reaction to fear of their own ineptitude

Instead of honestly and objectively assessing the reasons for acquisition failures and fixing the problems, Western navies have opted for the perceived path of safety over that of combat effectiveness.

That’s an Aggie for you.

The Telegraph (UK).

The Treasury has removed a numeracy test from its graduate scheme to boost diversity.

What kind of ‘graduates’ find numeracy a barrier?

The government department quietly scrapped the numerical reasoning test from its application process in 2020 owing “to evidence of the test having an adverse impact on candidate diversity”.

I guess diversity is more desired than, say, core competency.

The measure, uncovered by the Spectator magazine, has been described as “insane” and “through the looking glass” by critics.

Well, duh.

The Telegraph (UK).

Of course they do. They’re Muslims.

The Telegraph (UK).

One 20-year-old student says barriers he faces in education and employment because of his race have left him wanting to leave the UK.

And who could blame him?

The Telegraph (UK).

White working-class students are excluded from almost all Oxbridge diversity scholarships, an analysis by The Telegraph has found.

More than a dozen scholarships, bursaries and financial aid schemes are available to Oxford and Cambridge university students based on their ethnicity and not their socioeconomic backgrounds.

While all of the schemes can be used by students from black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, they almost entirely exclude white working-class students, who are one of the most under-represented groups in higher education.

Read it.

An Ashura procession in Berlin has sparked widespread condemnation after participants chanted support for deceased Islamist terror leaders and flagged controversial symbols, Junge Freiheit reports.

During the march, observing a holy day that holds major historical and religious significance for Shiite and Sunni Muslims, attendees openly chanted the name of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in a 2024 Israeli airstrike, and paid tribute to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The event drew severe criticism online and from civic groups, particularly due to the treatment of young children during the processions. Social media footage showed children dressed in ceremonial robes and bound with ropes, being led through the streets in 40-degree heat. The Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Antisemitism (JFDA) condemned the scene on its X account, calling it a “disturbing instrumentalization of children” who were put on display for an “Islamist spectacle” under dangerous weather conditions.