DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Neal Stephenson.

Because I am known to write using a fountain pen on paper, a number of people have pointed me to this post and its underlying research. I won’t rehash what is said in those sources, but the gist of it is that when you write things down by hand you’re recruiting more of your brain, which is a good thing.

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

I’m not an expert on how the brain works, but I can say that, when writing by hand, one is continually solving a series of small problems having to do with the spacing of words, how letters are connected, the crossing of the letter t (sometimes more than one in the same word) and the dotting of the letters i and j, and how to accomplish all of those things through coordinated movements not just of the fingers but of the whole arm. All of that has to be integrated in real time with whatever is happening on a more abstract level in the brain’s processing of ideas and imagery.

Concurrently I have been following discourse on Reddit and other sources about how widespread use of AI has forced educators to return to the long-abandoned practice of having their students take exams in person by writing things out longhand in blue books. This has created new challenges for students who never really learned how to write by hand, and for teachers who can’t make sense of their students’ terrible handwriting.

When I was in school, bad handwriting could cost you when it came grading time. That focused the mind excellently.

Check it out.

Corporate autopsies on the brands you trust. Who bought them, who gutted them, and what’s still worth buying.

We pessimists stand ready to say “We told you so…”

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Socialism doesn’t grow strong leaders. That’s why nominally socialist movements eventually adopt fascism, as Italy and Germany did in the early 20th century, in order to make any progress.

For years I’ve been puzzled by the left’s odd combination of arrogance and self-loathing. They think there is no God higher than themselves, so they can do whatever they want without being held accountable for their actions – they can do whatever they want. But they also view humans as a blight on the planet and you shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever you want – you can’t drive an SUV, for example. But abortion is ok. It takes a lot of bourbon to figure out things like that.

I’ve also been confused by another dichotomy, which may be similar: Leftists believe in the use of government to improve people’s lives. They hope to use strong centralized control structures to make society more just and fair. As those who lived under Mao, Hitler, Castro, Mussolini, Stalin, etc will tell you, that type of system generally involves a strong leader using force to control the citizenry. Ok, makes sense. You need a strong leader to control a large, powerful government.

Ok. So who do modern leftists elect to leadership positions? Joe Biden. Kamala Harris. Gavin Newsome. Kier Starmer. Justin Trudeau. Elizabeth Warren. Leftists envision an all-powerful government designed to control the entire world. And then they elect incompetent empty suits to direct the entire enterprise. That seems odd. But I think I may have some idea why they do that, now. See if you agree with me.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

My, what a surprise.

ATQIE: New Yorker Being Stabbed On Street Corner Glad To Know Mamdani Focused On Bringing Netanyahu To Justice (Babylon Bee)

The American Mind.

Johann Kurtz’s essay on why younger generations feel left behind economically, even while official statistics from GDP to stock markets send signals that our economy is thriving, touched a nerve.

Kurtz’s central argument is that young people only appear to be doing fine in official statistics because those measures fail to capture the collapse of “social capital”—the free inheritance of trusted neighbors, functional public schools, safe streets, and marriageable norms that previous generations received at no cost. Because that commons has been liquidated and privatized, young people must now repurchase its components individually at market prices. Expensive homes in good districts, private schooling, daycare, credentials, and more—all of it requires substantial financial resources, even as incomes have risen only modestly. Meanwhile, the cost of these essentials has increased many times over.

The result is a measurement failure: cheap electronics and rising nominal incomes make the young look prosperous, but the actual building blocks of a middle-class life have moved beyond the reach of average Americans, which explains why younger generations are delaying or forgoing them entirely.

Read it.

A 26-year-old railway security guard remains in a medically induced coma after a violent altercation with an alleged fare dodger ended with him falling from a moving regional train. Meanwhile, public outrage is growing as the suspect has been set free by a regional court, despite prosecutors asking for his arrest.

Airedin M. was working aboard a German regional train between Offenburg and Karlsruhe on July 17th when he checked the ticket of a male passenger, who claimed he could not show his digital ticket because his phone battery was dead. Witnesses also described the man as heavily intoxicated.

Federal police were contacted, and the situation briefly calmed. However, the dispute soon reignited when the passenger allegedly stood up and attacked the security guard. During the struggle, both men fell to the floor near one of the train’s doors. According to witnesses, the suspect punched and kicked Airedin M. next to a train door, which opened during the assault, causing the guard to fall from the train while it was traveling at approximately 120 km/h.

The young father suffered life-threatening injuries, including a severe traumatic brain injury and multiple fractures to his left leg. He remains in intensive care at a Karlsruhe hospital, where doctors placed him in a medically induced coma because of the severity of his condition. Police arrested the suspect following the incident.

Relatives are hoping the victim will one day recover enough to return to his wife and one-year-old son.

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New surveillance footage appears to show a German migrant rescue group receiving around 90 migrants directly from masked smugglers off the Libyan coast.

The footage was recorded on May 11 by a surveillance plane operated by the EU border agency Frontex. It shows five masked men transferring around 90 migrants from a speedboat to two inflatable boats sent out by Sea-Watch 5, a ship run by the German NGO Sea-Watch.

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On July 1st, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, European Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration Magnus Brunner, and Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos travelled to Turkey. The purpose was to meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan.

“Türkiye is a key partner on security, migration, and energy, as well as an EU candidate country,” Kallas posted on X after meeting Erdo?an, adding that the country “is making a significant contribution to protecting NATO’s eastern flank.”

Europeanconservative.com spoke with Emmanouil Koulas, Head of Office to Greek MEP Afroditi Latinopoulou and Board Member of the Patriots for Europe Foundation, about Brussels’ stance on Turkey, Erdo?an’s expansionist foreign policy, and how mass migration affects Europe.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not invent the idea that man is naturally good, but he was the thinker who gave it the intellectual form that would eventually transform much of modern political culture. Since then, the belief that human beings are born naturally good and are corrupted only by society has become part of the cultural mainstream. Consequently, if evil does not reside within man himself, then it must be found in institutions, traditions, the family, religion, inherited culture, or any form of authority.

Formulated in the eighteenth century, this thesis has survived revolutions, world wars, and the collapse of the great ideological systems. Today it reappears in the language of woke culture. The terminology has changed, but the underlying intellectual structure remains the same. The problem is no longer sin, human frailty, or personal responsibility, but a system of oppression said to have distorted an originally innocent human nature.

For Rousseau, natural man lives in harmony with himself. He is not virtuous because he has acquired virtue, but because he has not yet been contaminated by civilization. Property, social prestige, and institutions become the true sources of selfishness. History is thus understood as a process of degeneration.

Rousseau did greater damage to human civilization than Marx ever could.

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All it took was roughly one month of relentless international outcry for British authorities to admit that they made a mistake.

It might be the first time the UK has dropped a charge against a white guy in years!

Read it.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but an illegal alien … from India … with a California commercial driver’s license … just made the news.

Not the Bee.

On Wednesday, President Trump went to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to salute four fallen soldiers who were killed in recent days by Iranian missile attacks on U.S. bases in the Middle East.

After this, Trump flew to Georgia, where he was scheduled to speak at a high school in Marietta. The president spoke about his “Trump Accounts” for kids and promoted GOP candidates ahead of the midterms.

At one point, he honored Stephen and Shari, the parents of 25-year-old 1st Lt. Tyler Feehan, and revealed he had flown them back home to Georgia on Air Force One.

A President worth having.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

It’s complicated.

Not the Bee.

I’d pay to see that.

Michigan or Minnesota, take your pick.

Washington Free Beacon.

Democrats are in the midst of a fun and terrifying transformation. Hating Trump is no longer sufficient to win elections in blue states. Democratic primary voters—specifically the party’s core constituency of college-educated white professionals—are demanding candidates who also hate Israel and capitalism. The 2028 presidential race is going to be an absolute clown show.

The least surprising aspect of the Democratic Party’s lurch toward left-wing radicalism is the pampered, privileged backgrounds of the politicians, donors, and operatives leading the charge.

Watch it.

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

Don’t open that attachment … it might contain a virus.

Quillette.

I’ve often used the term “social panic” to describe the unmarked-graves claims that swept through Canada in 2021. For reasons described below, the term feels inadequate. But I can’t think of any word or phrase that better captures the spasm of manic self-denigration that unfolded following the purported discovery of 215 dead children (some “believed to be as young as three years old,” gullible reporters told us) on the grounds of a former Indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.

Those claims, originally announced by Kamloops First Nation Chief Rosanne Casimir, set off a frenzied rhetorical bidding war among pundits and politicians, each trying to outdo one another in heaping shame upon their country. It would take months, or even years in many cases, before mainstream media outlets began admitting—tacitly or otherwise—that they’d been duped by Casimir’s fake news (as the Globe & Mail newspaper finally did last month).

Despite the passage of five years since the original announcement, many public figures, including former prime minister Justin Trudeau, have never come clean on the issue. And a few even say they still believe the graves are real—including former Globe & Mail Ottawa bureau chief Robert Fife, who recently told a podcast host that journalists must align their reporting with the “lived experience” of Indigenous people.

Read it.

A kerfuffle arose on a flight from Turkey to Dusseldorf when a Turkish passenger became violent because he didn’t want to be contaminated by sitting next to a haram female.

Read it.

If you want to know where a good deal of the modern rise of socialism is coming from, look no further than 90 miles off the coast of Florida, to Cuba.

That’s certainly where American leftists have been looking for a long time.

The State Department released a thorough and perhaps, to many, startling report on Monday highlighting how the authoritarian Cuban regime founded by Fidel Castro has been a prime mover of leftist activism and violence for more than half a century and poses a significant threat to the United States.

The 100-page report, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” explained how the seemingly small Marxist gadfly has effectively made leftist ideology its chief export, which sets it apart from other, more militarily and economically powerful regimes hostile to the United States.

The report argued that Cuba has leaned into a unique brand of Marxism, what it calls “Third Worldism,” to deconstruct Western civilization and bring about a global communist revolution.

From this ideology sprang forth a variety of causes often associated with the American college campus New Left.

The Foundry.

Van Jones, the proudly progressive CNN pundit, has a message for the Democratic Socialists of America candidates who have crashed his party:

“Stop pooping in the punch bowl and telling us the turds are ice cubes,” he declared on X.

Leftists are never happy unless they are peeing in someone else’s soup.

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Youth violence is becoming an increasingly serious concern across Vienna, with district leaders warning that gangs of young offenders are committing brutal attacks, robberies, vandalism, and assaults throughout the Austrian capital. Following a series of high-profile violent incidents, districts across the city are calling for stronger police presence and immediate action to restore public safety.

District representatives report repeated incidents involving fights, robberies, property damage, and attacks. They also warn that children under the age of 14 are becoming involved in criminal activity more frequently. Because these offenders are below the age of criminal responsibility, they often face no legal consequences after being apprehended by police.

One particularly striking example comes from Brigittenau, where district officials say a single suspect under the age of 14 is linked to 270 offenses, highlighting the difficulties authorities face when dealing with unpunishable repeat juvenile offenders.

District politicians also warn that the perpetrators are becoming not only younger but increasingly aggressive. Many see this as both a public security issue and a broader societal warning sign. They further argue that many known offenders operate across multiple districts, making it difficult for local authorities to respond effectively within their own jurisdictions.

The more you import people from the Turd World, the more like the Turd World you become.

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A veteran Swedish police officer has warned that Islamisation will soon overtake migrant gang violence as the greatest threat facing the country.

Maria Rosander, who has served in the police for 17 years and leads the national-conservative Sweden Democrats in Uppsala County, said tougher criminal laws were beginning to reduce the shootings and bombings that have plagued Sweden for the past decade.

However, she argued that such measures cannot address religious segregation, Islamic radicalisation and the refusal of some migrant communities to assimilate.

In a recent interview, Rosander recounted the dramatic conditions that Swedish police officers have to face while in the line of duty since migrant crime skyrocketed in the past decade. Just last year, there were 189 bombings (as well as nearly three hundred foiled plans) in the country, along with 158 shootings, a number relatively low compared to the 2022 peak of 391.

Quillette.

In the early 1930s, the Australian government lost a war against emus, and its present war, this time on tobacco, is heading the same way. Excessive taxation in the name of public health has backfired in extraordinary fashion, helping create a massive black market in tobacco products. This has led to an effective transfer to criminal gangs of billions of dollars of revenue previously earned by the legal tobacco industry, and a corresponding significant drop in excise tax revenue collected by the government, unprecedented violence between those gangs as they scrap over money and territory, and, to top it all off, an increase in the consumption of tobacco and nicotine..

Exhibit A. Politicians are both stupid and ignorant.

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Democratic Party, adding that his party’s leadership is only making room for the extreme wing of Democrats.

“I just found it to be not the same caucus I joined in 2007,” Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., told CNN regarding the House Progressive Caucus. “It had become more the socialist caucus, and most of the leadership was socialist Democrats,” Cohen said. “I didn’t feel comfortable in it.”

Cohen’s remarks come after the Democratic Party has begun to drift apart over its members’ stances on Israel, where some members have recently taken the side of America’s Islamic enemies, such as Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

A 2026 Pew Research Center survey found that 44% of American Muslims support Hamas, Iran’s funded terror proxy responsible for the mass rape, kidnapping, and slaughter of Israeli civilians.

Pew Research noted that around 66% of American Muslims vote Democrat.

Read it.

Of course he does. That’s what socialism is all about.

Not the Bee.

And if you believe that one, she’ll tell you another one.

ATQUE: New Jersey Blames ‘Slight Software Glitch’ For Enrolling Entire Country Of Bolivia As Voters (Babylon Bee)

Watch it.

That hand in your pocket does not belong to a Republican.

Thank you, toxic feminism.

The Telegraph (UK).

Jameela Jamil has claimed British people are “the most evil in history”.

The former BBC presenter, who was born in London and is of Pakistani and Indian descent, went on to say that Britain owed “43 trillion” to India.

Hey, you could always move back….

Curtis Yarvin (‘Mencius Moldbug’):

Progressive Idealism is a nontheistic branch of Christianity, specifically its Unitarian (American) and Nonconformist (British) sects, both of course dating back to the Puritans, who were the first to construct the integrated political, educational and religious system who much-improved descendant now hold Planet Three in its icy, inexorable grip.

. . .

The only reason we don’t think of the Progressives’ descendants, the Psuedo-Democrats, as a Christain party, is that the Psuedo-Democrats don’t want us to. In fact, their theocratic ideology, progressive idealism, is the leading modern descendant of the most powerful American Christian tradition, the “mainline” Protestants, who infested New England in the early 1600s and for some damned reason have never left.

These bastards are the Roundheads, the Puritans, whatever you want to call them, and after their defeat of the last Cavaliers (to be clear, the Slave Power was no picnic either), they have reigned unchallenged in North America. And no less outside it – indeed, more. The beliefs held at Harvard, not those at West Point and certainly not at VMI, are the complacent belches of today’s global transnational governing class.

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Andrew Henderson of Nomad Capitalist lays out how bad it is in Britain, and why it’s certain to get worst.

Time to leave.

Watch it.

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

ATQUE: The Economics of Owning a Medieval Tavern

Just in case the castle is beyond your price point.

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Long before the African-American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates began vilifying Israel—which started right after Hamas massacred 1200 Israelis—and long before he began vilifying Charlie Kirk—which started right after Kirk was murdered—some commentators were expressing serious concerns about the celebrated status Coates had attained in elite American culture. Before 2020, for example, left-leaning black academic John McWhorter and right-leaning white columnist David French both said Coates’ ornate prose really just concealed an utter hatred of white people, which was unworthy of acclaim.

Finding hatred in Coates, who mused that the 343 firefighters and 72 police officers killed in the 2001 World Trade Center attack were “menaces of nature” and “not human to me,” was easy. It didn’t matter, though. Coatesmania reigned, and his books became best-sellers, the literary awards piled up, and his presence dominated high school syllabi.

David French is ‘right-leaning’? News to me—and, I suspect, the other ‘right-leaning’ people in America.

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A knife inexplicably became active last week near the University of Trier in Germany, causing the death of a university student. The knife in question just happened to be held in the hand of an Afghan culture-enricher, who fled the scene but was apprehended later.

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Three rambunctious Moroccan “youths” attempted to make whoopee with a young lady in Playa de Palma on the Spanish island of Mallorca. When their advances were rejected, the young miscreants used violence in a bid to have their way with the reluctant victim. Fortunately, the young woman made a spirited defense, and came out of the incident with her virtue intact, despite having injuries from being beaten.

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The importance of codifying into law the guarantee of affordable, reliable energy for all Americans is driven home by the current turmoil surrounding Honda, which “reported its first annual loss since becoming a publicly traded company in Japan seven decades ago,” as reported by the New York Times back in May.

Why did a company considered one of the most stable in the world suddenly suffer such a catastrophic about-face? In large part because it relied on Biden administration policies designed to funnel industries into a future where fossil fuels would be completely phased out.

It’s all about the clicks.

Sarah Hoyt.

Societies don’t cope well with technological innovation that changes the way people live every day. Because once you change the way people live every day, you’re changing the way people interact, which means the structures of society are going to start not working the way they were intended to.

Right now we’re in a time of catastrophic innovation. What does that mean? It means that we’ve reached a point where innovation is building on innovation — which is to be fair what innovation does. First someone figures out how to dig in the ground and plant some seeds and next thing you know someone is planting kale, and then you have to kill them and… ahem… — and the new one is dropping before we’ve even started to process the effects of the last one.

Honestly, the Heinlein time line (not that one. I was told I can no longer mention that particular story here, not without doing the whole Black Adder dance for when someone mentions the Scottish Play) would have been easier on our institutions as they were when he wrote the juveniles. Going to space would just be a continuation of the westward expansion, and at least on earth there was no big innovation on communication and putting the power of communication in the hands of individual to counter the centralized big media. (Or the power of manufacturing, to counter centralized big industry. Okay, we’re on the early stages of that, but it could easily be the next big break through.) In fact, he had Earth become more and more the worst aspects of FDR, to be honest.

But no. We weren’t allowed to go to space (no, you can’t possibly convince me it wasn’t deliberate. The way the left hates any attempt at space exploration and becomes insane with their FEFer (Fix Earth First) bullshit, you know they did what they could to prevent us leaving this rock.) And so some geeks in garages created the internet revolution. Yes, yes, I now. Government, but be real. If it hadn’t escaped into private lands and cat memes, it would still be unimportant to all but defense geeks.

And that… well, that escaped containment again, at least in the US right after 9/11, when a lot of us trying to figure out what was happening and what should happen hit the internet and a lot of the big blogs now originated. And then there was social media, and then–

Well. Here we are.

Babylon Bee.

Sure, I believe that.

Not the Bee.

‘Assault weapon’ is, of course, not a thing, except in the fever dreams of the Wokerati.

To the extent that it means anything, it means ‘guns the Left find scary and want to stigmatize’, but of course they can’t say that, so they have to come up with a smear-term (like ‘price gouging’ and ‘black market’) to scare the people on the left side of the IQ curve.

They are attempting to conflate ‘assault weapons’ with ‘assault rifles’, a term invented by Adolf Hitler for what is now the standard configuration for a military longarm—which term they can’t use without looking like retards because ‘assault rifle’ refers to a fully automatic weapon, which is not what they are trying to ban.

David Appleton:

I don’t want artificial intelligence to write books and make art; I want artificial intelligence to do the dishes and and the laundry so I can write books and make art.

Full disclosure: Dave is a friend of mine and doesn’t claim this to be original with him. Nevertheless, I think that spreading good thoughts ought to be encouraged.

New York Post.

A prominent black Big Apple politician compared Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s comrades in the Democratic Socialists of America to white supremacists as a bitter rift between Democrats spilled onto social media.

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards breathed new life into a longstanding complaint among minority lawmakers that the largely lily-white DSA ignores race in its crusade to grow its ranks and dismantle capitalism.

“White supremacy comes in all forms,” Richards posted on social media late Sunday.

Guess he wasn’t getting what he considered to be his fair share of the l0ot.

New York Post.

And there you have the modern world.

ATQUE: Watch this Cubs fan smack a young whippersnapper for not standing during the national anthem (Not the Bee)

The Telegraph (UK).

Scotland Yard is assessing claims that Labour banned fox hunting in return for a £1m donation from an animal rights group.

The Metropolitan Police is looking into new allegations that Lord Mandelson and another senior Labour figure suggested that the party introduced the ban in 2004 in return for the £1m donation from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

Brian Basham, a former Labour fundraiser, said he had “known for many years” that Labour’s Hunting Act 2004 was “bought and paid for by a political donation” from IFAW in 1996.

Watch it.

I get all my news from Tim Pool.

Government: Butty Fucky

Read it.

For centuries, we’ve been covering thinning locks with wigs, and more recently started grabbing at regrowth with hair plugs, topical ointments, and oral treatments. But it turns out the simplest, or rather the most natural, solution might be key to keeping your mop—and it’s been hiding beneath our feet the whole time.

In a December 2025 scientific review, a team of researchers from across China found that an ancient Chinese medicinal root could be the titan that stops balding in its tracks—not only by slowing hair loss, but also by encouraging regrowth. Perhaps even more shocking, the findings are also reshaping history, as they imply that scientific understanding was more advanced than previously believed. The paper was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Holistic Integrative Pharmacy.

The team focused on a root known as the Polygonum multiflorum. Also known as the Chinese climbing knotweed or Fo Ti, practitioners have historically used the root for hair loss and hair graying, tuberculosis, erectile dysfunction, as well as for a myriad of other conditions. Fo Ti is native to China, though people have cultivated it elsewhere, including in the United States. Traditionally, Fo Ti is prepared before use, often in teas, tonics, ointments, or pills.