DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Jeff St. James: “Men want to be married, women want to get married.”

Read it.

A Democrat running for Congress in Arizona says she was attacked and sexually assaulted while repairing campaign signs, alleging that two men were involved, according to Phoenix New Times.

Bawk! Buk buk buk buk…. Watch out for them chickens coming home to roost….

The Other McCain.

Have you seen this guy lately? James Talarico is a Democrat, a previously obscure state legislator who is running for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas against the current state attorney general, Ken Paxton. Or rather, I should say, Talarico was running for the Senate until Sept. 26, which was the last time he was seen at a campaign event. He showed up in New York City for a fundraiser with Robert De Niro on Sept. 28, and made a virtual appearance on a teleconference Sept. 30, but no one in Texas has seen him in public for nearly two weeks, and wild rumors are now circulating as to the reason for Talarico’s mysterious disappearance.

The official explanation from the Talarico campaign is that the candidate came down with the flu, but nobody believes that because (a) everything the Talarico campaign says is a lie and (b) who ever heard of a two-week case of the flu? Yet the truth about Talarico’s whereabouts is unknown, and speculation has given way to wild rumors.

Perhaps he has returned to the Mother Ship for instructions.

Read it.

Workers at former President Barack Obama’s presidential center and foundation are seeking to unionize, citing rising healthcare costs, reduced benefits, heavier workloads, and a lack of input in workplace decisions, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

In an open letter signed by 68 employees, Obama Foundation and Obama Presidential Center workers announced plans to form Obama Workers United, affiliated with the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 31.

The organizing effort could encompass more than 250 employees in Chicago; Washington, D.C.; and remote positions nationwide.

Let’s see:

1. Reagan returned to California after he finished as President and lived there the rest of his life.
2. George H.W. Bush returned to Texas after he finished as President and lived there the rest of his life.
3. The Bill and Hillary abandoned Arkansas and decamped to New York and D.C., respectively.
4. George W. Bush returned to Texas after he finished as President and is living there, probably for the rest of his life.
5. Obama abandoned Illinois for the Other Left Coast and will probably live in Martha’s Vineyard the rest of his life.
6. Trump abandoned New York City prior to becoming President and will probably spend the rest of his life in Florida.
7. Biden—is probably off in his own never-never land.

See a pattern here?

Read it.

El-Sayed, as we all know, is the Great Muslim Hope for the Democrats. He debuted as just about the perfect candidate for the Senate – photogenic, a professional, just radical enough for the youth vote, and with no obvious baggage to excuse.

But his campaign wrongfooted itself at the very outset by attempting to cozy up to Hasan Piker, the would-be Goebbels to any movement that will have him. Piker’s anti-Semitic and anti-American comments soon became intertwined with similar rhetoric from El-Sayed, forcing the candidate to spend weeks of valuable campaign time extricating himself from direct identification with Piker while at the same time not alienating Piker’s “four million” (actually in the low five digits) followers. For a time, it seemed to be working, but recently, the carefully prepared image of a benign, moderate Muslim candidate has been fading faster than the picture of Dorian ibn el-Gray.

New York Post.

“Believe survivors,” the campus activists and leftist politicians admonish us.

But which “survivor” statements are we supposed to believe?

In the weeks following her alleged gang rape at a Cornell University frat house in 2024, “Jane Doe” was unequivocal: She had not been raped.

A day after the incident, she texted one of her sex partners, saying “non (sic) of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly I really liked being with u” — and she suggested another get-together.

OnlyFans, here we come….

Read it.

According to Spanish government estimates, approximately 72,000 “migrants” broke into the enclave of Ceuta on the coast of North Africa at the end of July. Most of the invaders allegedly returned to Morocco a few days later, but it has never been clear how many of them remained in Ceuta. It seemed that the number must be higher than 10,000, given the visible evidence of those who were camped out in shantytowns on the city’s beaches.

…

It’s very difficult to deport illegal migrants from the EU. An application for asylum kicks off an elaborate process that can go on for months, and even if it is denied, the applicant may not be deportable. It’s a common practice for migrants — following the advice of those helpful NGOs that aid “refugees” — to destroy their identity documents before they land on EU territory. In those cases, their country of origin can’t be legally determined, so there is no destination to deport them to.

New York Post.

A Wisconsin congressional candidate has been arrested on hate crime charges after he went on a vulgar caught-on-camera rant against an Israeli dad with his young son in the car — after he was triggered by an anti-Hamas bumper sticker.

Matthew Arndt, 54, allegedly cut off the 41-year-old father on a road in the Milwaukee suburb of Mequon Thursday morning, flipping him the bird and cursing at him before pulling into a gas station, where the dad followed him and began filming the explosive encounter.

“Do you want to tell me something?” the father asked.

“Yeah, you’re a f–king piece of s–t! You’re a f–king traitor!” Arndt erupted, pointing an accusatory finger at the stunned motorist.

New York Post.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he tried to negotiate with President Trump to release the “criminal illegal alien” and alleged gang member who was shot by ICE Thursday in the Bronx as he called for the abolishment of the federal agency.

“Around 4 p.m. this afternoon, a New Yorker was shot by ICE agents in Marble Hill,” a furious Mamdani told reporters at the late-night press conference near the scene of a rowdy anti-ICE protest in the borough.

“For the past two hours, I’ve been on the phone with President Trump and [DHS] Secretary Mullin negotiating the release of the man ICE agents shot. Those negotiations were unsuccessful,” Hizzoner said.

My, what a surprise.

New York Post.

You can usually tell a controversial idea like the “billionaire tax” is bad when proponents start trotting out teams of Nobel Prize winners to defend it.

If the idea really were that good, you wouldn’t need more than one Nobel laureate to make the case. The “tell” is when they quote half a dozen, as if there were a Nobel Prize for groupthink.

Six Nobel Prize-winning economists recently signed a letter urging Californians to pass Proposition 40, the one-time 5% tax on the wealth of the state’s billionaires.

People always forget that the Nobel Prize is awarded by socialists to socialists. When a talking parrot like Paul Krugman can get a Nobel prize, it’s worth is exactly zero.

The letter is wrong about everything, from the history of wealth taxes to the proceeds California can expect the tax to provide.

The letter calls Prop. 40 “the first-ever tax on billionaire wealth enacted anywhere in the world.” Governments have taxed billionaires’ net wealth for decades.

Twelve European countries imposed annual net wealth taxes in the 1990s. They raised very little revenue, cost a lot to administer, pushed investment out of their countries, and were politically unpopular. All but three of the European wealth taxes have been repealed.

Amazing how that works. Less amazing is the amount of lying—or, to be kind, ignorance—that proglodyte proponents marshal to back their Risky Schemes (to quote AlGore).

The letter claims that California billionaires paid income tax equal to just 1.6% of their wealth gains. This is also misleading. 1.6% is not an income-tax rate. It is income taxes paid divided by an increase in estimated asset values, much of it unrealized.

We don’t tax gains on paper. Not for the rich, and not for the middle class. If we did, homeowners would have to pay a tax every year that their home went up in value, even if they were still living in it.

But would you get a payment if your ‘wealth’ went down in value? Of course not. Payments to the government only go in one direction.

The Nobel laureates assert that “it is unlikely any significant number of billionaires successfully cut ties with the Golden State” before the Jan. 1, 2026, effective date of the tax.

But Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Peter Thiel, Don Hankey, Travis Kalanick, Steven Spielberg, and David Sacks all reportedly left before the cutoff. Stanford University economists Joshua Rauh and Benjamin Jaros found that nearly 30% of the expected taxable wealth left California before the measure even qualified for the ballot.

Gee, who could have predicted that?

Read it.

Scientists accidentally discovered a microscopic organism with a genetic code that breaks a rule researchers thought was nearly universal. While testing a new DNA sequencing technique, they examined a previously unknown protist collected from a freshwater pond at Oxford University. To their surprise, the organism uses two genetic signals that normally mark the end of a gene to encode two entirely different amino acids instead. These signals were previously thought to evolve together, making the discovery particularly remarkable.

A gentle reminder that when life doesn’t act according to your rules, it’s your rule that is wrong, not life.

The Telegraph (UK).

On a windswept beach by the Red Sea, a flag with crossed swords and a shield was raised, adorned with the Arabic text: “The Southern Giants Brigade.”

It marked the return of the most feared militia in Yemen and the most dangerous fault line in the Arab alliance.

Surrounding Houthi fighters were also seen being run down in the sand by armoured vehicles, driven by Yemen’s Saudi-backed forces.

Read it.

Van Zandt County Commissioners unanimously approved a resolution Wednesday denouncing Sharia, making it the first Texas county to pass a resolution specifically addressing use of the Islamic religious code.

Van Zandt County Precinct 2 Commissioner Cliff Williams said he brought the resolution forward because of an 80-acre land purchase in southern Van Zandt County by a family with ties to Muslim youth organizations.

The resolution was inspired by a draft resolution introduced by Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, that denounces Sharia in the United States. Self’s resolution has not been passed by Congress.

While introducing the resolution, Williams explained how Sharia is practiced in various Muslim-majority countries.

Read it.

There’s been an ongoing controversy over Donald Trump for the last decade, both when he appeared on the escalator in 2015, the campaign, the first term, the wilderness years, and the first two years of his second administration.

It works out like this. He has an art of the deal style, where he is bombastic, that he says wild things. He puts his opponents, his partners, whatever the situation is that he’s across the table from, off balance. He demands things that are ludicrous. People are shocked, they criticize him.

And then the negotiations continue, and Donald Trump gets an edge, maybe a 52, 53% edge over the original request. They sign a deal. Donald Trump is very careful not to insult his trading partner or his trading opponent in any deal. And then he says he might have been taken himself, and he walks away with a singular accomplishment.

And then people are troubled. They look at the result of the negotiations, and they’re impressed, especially if you’re Americans. But they also say the methodology clouds the achievement.

Let’s see if that’s a legitimate criticism.

I don’t think it is. I judge him by his results, and he’s gotten better results, from my point of view, than any President in my lifetime.

Wednesday Update: Camp Mar-a-David (Brett Meiselas/Meidas+)

Lawrence O’Donnell Claims Trump Welcomed Iranian Nuclear Attack on LA and San Diego  No, that was me. Trump just discussed the possibility.

Congress’ Watchdog Finds Trump Illegally Withheld More Than $1 Billion in Federal Funds (The Washington Sun)

DNC sues Trump administration, alleging taxpayer-funded ads violate propaganda law (Ali Swenson/Associated Press)

‘King of Injustice’: Golden naked Trump statue installed at European Parliament (Oscar Holland/CNN)  Guess they forgot about Putin.

Colleges seek answers amid Trump push to cancel tax exemptions over diversity programs (Brian Faler/Politico)

Trump Pick’s Campaign Hit With Explosive Staff Revelations (Laura Esposito/The Daily Beast)  Trump cooties!

Flight attendants’ union flags safety concerns over Trump’s Washington arch (Gary Fields/Associated Press)

Disaster relief funding is creeping into Trump’s midterm rhetoric. Critics say it has no place there (Gabriela Aoun Angueira/Associated Press)  Trump critics say a lot of stuff.

Biden’s FBI Spied On Trump Campaign Manager’s Communications And Trump Family Travel

Trump interrupted by protesters as he fights to rally Texas voters behind Paxton in US Senate race (Associated Press)

Trump administration paving way for temporary sale of some unapproved peptides (Rachel Roubein/Washington Post)  ‘Unapproved’ by whom?

Everything Is Bigger in Texas — Including the Number of Protests at Trump’s Rally (The Washington Sun)

Election Deniers Have Trump’s Ear on a Voting Machine Conspiracy (Gavin J. Quinton/The Washington Sun)

Trump Is Still Airing Campaign Ads With Your Money by the Way (Malcolm Ferguson/New Republic)

Trump Pats Himself On The Back For Not Doing ‘Bad Things’ To Obama, Clinton, Biden (Kelby Vera/HuffPost)

Golden Naked Trump Statue Unveiled At European Parliament

Inside Trump’s push to bring Christopher Columbus to the White House (Washington Post)

The White House Has Unleashed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Washington Sun)

Inside Trump’s blow-up at Fox News over El-Sayed coverage (Alex Isenstadt/Axios)

Trump faces his worst bankruptcy yet (Tom Schaller/Public Notice)

‘He’s Not Making Sense’: How Trump Has Alienated Voters for the G.O.P. (New York Times)  Pushing the Narrative for the mid-terms.

Trump Rages, Rages Against the Dying of the Light (Josh Marshall/Talking Points Memo)  A message from Delulu.

Slovak Premier Wants Statue Mocking Trump at EU Parliament to Go (Daniel Hornak/Bloomberg)

NBC Comedians Promote Conspiracy Theories Ahead of Midterms

On the Front Line of the Vaccine Wars (Katherine Eban/Rolling Stone)  There were no ‘vaccine wars’ until the left decided to start one with vaccine-skeptic RFJ Jr.

Our Big Fat Greek Bribery Scandal (Andrew Egger/The Bulwark)  Carrying water for Democrats.

A Month Before the Midterms, PBS Piles 94% Negative Spin on GOP, Trump

Republicans Have an Andrew Tate Eel-Sex Problem (Will Sommer/The Bulwark)  Will Sommer loses his shit.

Liberal Media Counting Dem Chickens: ‘Ass-Whooping, Big Night, Win House and Senate’

Daughter of Trump’s chief of staff works at firm that lobbies for Republika Srpska (Amy Mackinnon/Financial Times)  The old proglodygte Bank-Shot Smear.

Republicans need to bank votes right now. Trump made that harder. (Selena Kuznikov/MS NOW)

Democrat called anti-trans slur by Trump airs ad urging ‘No men in women’s sports’ (Fenit Nirappil/Washington Post)

MS NOW’s Jason Johnson Compares Justice Alito to ‘Burglar’ Who Stole People’s Rights  I guess Diversity Equity and Inclusion includes stupid black people.

ABC and NBC Continue to Push Midterm Doom for Trump and GOP in Texas

Democrats Zero In On Pentagon Contractors to Probe Trump Ties (Bloomberg)  Even if they have to make it up.

CNN’s Stelter: Fox Wants to ‘Turn Off’ Trump  As if Stelter has a clue as to what Fox wants.

The Democrats Who Let Trump’s Oligarchs Buy Hollywood (Harold Meyerson/American Prospect)

Newsbusters.

The media don’t really care about high oil and gas prices in principle, because they had no problem spinning it as a climate virtue voters should appreciate when President Joe Biden was in office.

With all the media kvetching about energy prices now under President Trump — which aren’t even close to what they were under Biden — it’s as if they forgot the internet that exposes the lengths to which they bent common sense into a pretzel to protect their side of the aisle when it was politically expedient still exists.

Writers from the global George Soros-funded outlet Project Syndicate, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, The Atlantic, Bloomberg News and The Colorado Sun all tried their hand at spinning skyrocketing energy prices pounding Americans’ wallets as a befitting development from Mother Earth. One outlet even tried to shoehorn the insane musings of a random “climate economist” to cast high prices as an “unequivocally” good thing. No, we’re not kidding.

Read it.

Pure crack for a history geek like me.

Read it.

Note that all the bluest have their red areas around the fringes, while all of the reddest have a blue pustule in their central core.

Not the Bee.

About as false a flag as you can get.

Read it.

The U.S. government is suspending Microsoft, Adobe and several large IT firms from a program that allows skilled foreign workers to gain permanent residency, senior U.S. officials announced on Thursday, citing alleged fraud, and as part of an effort to push companies to hire more Americans.

“Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” Vice President JD Vance said.

Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling added that some of the largest IT firms in the world would also be suspended from that program, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini.

“We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies,” Sonderling said.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Under the PERM process, employers seek certification from the Department of Labor that there is no qualified, willing or available U.S. worker for a specific job. It’s a step required before filing petitions for most employment-based green cards.

Vance also said nine universities, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford, would be investigated for allegedly bringing in international students to undercut American wages. Labor Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito said subpoenas had already been served.

“We will investigate whether foreign influence, improper financial relationships, or visa abuse are compromising federally funded research,” D’Esposito said. “If an American university is breaking the law to save $1 while exposing American research to a foreign adversary, that is not academic excellence. It’s institutional betrayal.”

The American Mind.

I have spent the last several years learning—the (very) hard way—a lesson that most Americans still have not learned: the courtroom has become the principal battlefield of American politics. And on that battlefield, the Left arrived with an army. The Right brought a checkbook and a prayer. That ends now.

Last week, the Oversight Project announced the launch of a new law firm—a salaried, in-house, battle-ready legal outfit whose mission can be stated in just ten words: defend our friends, and go on offense against our enemies. Backed by a generous philanthropic seed investment from Tom Klingenstein, the chairman of the Claremont Institute, the firm is designed to do what the conservative legal ecosystem has refused to build for 50 years: an institution that treats the legal defense of patriots as a standing obligation rather than a series of one-off charity bake sales.

Read it.

Federal and Louisiana state authorities dismantled a network of Hamas financiers in late September who were accused of committing fraud against the state’s Medicaid program totaling more than $224,000 between 2021 and 2025.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill announced the arrests Wednesday of Abdel Adhami, Iman H. D. Srour, Omar Adhami, Amani Abu Zenah, and Mohammad I. Adhami, residents of St. Tammany Parish. The suspects face state felony charges of government benefits fraud and theft for allegedly underreporting their income between 2021 and 2025 to receive taxpayer-funded benefits.

Which Muslims rationalize as a form of ‘jizyah’, the tax that dhimmis (Christians and Jews) pay to Muslims as ‘protection money’ in Muslim-ruled societies.

The Other McCain.

How many years have I been mocking Amanda Marcotte? Many, many years. Nearly two decades. She got mentioned in the very first National Offend a Feminist Week announcement back in May 2009, by which time I’d been mocking her regularly for more than a year. It’s been a while since I was compelled to pay attention to her, but then Dana Pico reminded me of her existence.

Amanda Marcotte is one of my favorite shit-losers, as I often mention in my TDS posts.

Watch it.

hoe_math points out that once you see ’em you can’t unsee ’em.

More wisdom from hoe_math: Modern Women, Influencers, Propaganda [with Rachel Wilson]

Read it.

First-graders generally do not walk into reading class with a loaded 9mm, shoot the teacher, and then dare the police to come get them. But in this case, that is exactly what happened.

Body-camera footage from a shooting at Richneck Elementary in Newport News, Virginia, was released this week after over three years of being sealed.

The video shows a 6-year-old, identified in court records only as J.T., who had already shot first-grade teacher Abigail Zwerner. Reading specialist Amy Kovac had him in a bear hug when Newport News Officer Brian Torrez walked into the classroom 11. What happened next was even more astounding.

…

The kid is seen telling the officers, “Both y’all want a fucking piece of me, bitch?!” Kovac tells him to stop. He answers, “Fuck you, bitch,” and on and on it goes from there.

As I’m sure you expect, it was a Child of Color from a one-parent family.

The gun belonged to Deja Nicole Taylor’s. Court documents say her son climbed onto her dresser that morning, took it from her purse, and put it in his backpack. Investigators later found about an ounce of marijuana in the home. Taylor pleaded guilty to felony child neglect and to federal charges for lying about drug use on the form she used to buy the pistol.

Horse: gone. Barn door: closed.

Chief U.S. District Judge Mark S. Davis, sentencing her to 21 months on the federal counts, called it “a dereliction of duty and responsibility in parenting” and said the case “cries out for imprisonment.” She has since been released. The boy, now 9 or 10, lives in Newport News with his great-grandfather. He was never charged. Virginia does not prosecute 6-year-olds.

And there you have it.

Stay out of Virginia.

Construction Physics.

In 1960, a team at the University of Illinois released the first version of their PLATO “computerized instruction system,” a network of what would eventually be thousands of computer terminals connected to large mainframe computers. Users of PLATO could use the system to learn about various topics, with courses on subjects such as chemistry, math, music, and foreign languages.

I remember PLATO from my years in graduate school at Indiana University. It raised expectations that have even now not yet been fulfilled.

The first iteration of PLATO used a simple TV screen for a terminal display, but this was at best a stopgap measure. TV screens used cathode ray tubes (CRTs), which used a magnetically deflected beam of electrons to paint an image on a glass screen. This beam redrew the entire screen 30 times a second, which meant that a computer had to feed the CRT screen a constant stream of high-bandwidth video data. This was fine for broadcast TV, since the same signal was being sent to every TV that received it, but on the PLATO system every terminal needed to be sent different data, depending on what the user was doing. Not only would this require high-bandwidth data connections between the mainframes and the PLATO terminals, it would force each terminal to have a large amount of memory storage to hold the video data, which at the time was extremely expensive. CRT-based screens worked well enough for a small system with a few terminals, but it was felt that the technology wouldn’t scale to the thousands or millions of terminals the PLATO designers envisioned. What was needed was a new type of screen, one that had a built-in “memory.” On such a screen, only the things that changed on the screen would need to be redrawn, which would dramatically reduce the bandwidth and data storage such a screen required compared to a CRT.

The change in personal computers from escape-code text to memory-mapped video was a major advance.

Donald Bitzer, one of the architects of the PLATO system, considered possible methods that might be used to make such a display. One potential option was gas plasma — running an electric current through a low-pressure gas, which would cause that gas to glow. Scientists had been making low-pressure gases glow using electric current since the 1600s, and the phenomenon had been used in neon signs since the early 20th century. But no one had yet found a way to turn the phenomenon into a computer display, which would require an array of thousands or even millions of independently controlled tiny gas plasma lamps, one for each pixel on the screen. Bitzer decided it was worth trying.

I lusted in my heart for a Grid Compass when I was younger. Ah, those were the days.

Read it.

A Copenhagen court has handed a one-year sentence to the African-born repeat offender who punched Swedish police officer and father of two Christian Zedig to death at a World Cup fan zone this past Summer.

The killer pleaded guilty and he will not appeal. The sentence is so lenient because under Danish law, killing a man who stepped in to ‘stop a fight’ is classed only as ordinary assault.

Nkumba Ludovic Tshiembe, 31, stood on a bench at Islands Brygge on 30 June, hurled beer cans at Scandinavian supporters, then drove a punch into Zedig’s neck, rupturing an artery. The 32-year-old police officer from Eksjö died in hospital on 3 July, leaving a wife and two daughters. On Wednesday the Copenhagen City Court ruled one year in prison and a one-year nightlife ban was sufficient punishment.

While Europe contains the mindset that can provide so appalling a result, Europe is doomed.

Stay away from Denmark.

Read it.

This is a screw-cutting lathe of the kind Henry Maudslay built in London around 1800. A labourer turns the large wheel to spin the bar in the middle, and a cutting tool moves along beside it on a carriage that slides on straight iron rails. A long screw moves the carriage the same distance on every turn of the bar, cutting a thread into its surface. Lathes like this made shafts and screws for steam engines, looms, locomotives and other lathes.

But the lathe’s own parts have to be accurate first. If a rail is bent, the tool follows the bend. If the turns of the screw are unevenly spaced, the thread it cuts will be uneven too. These errors leave pistons leaking, shafts wobbling in their bearings and nuts jamming on their bolts. In the 1770s, workshops were still struggling to make large cylinders round, long rails straight and screw threads evenly spaced. Even checking their work was difficult: the smallest mark on an ordinary workshop rule was a sixteenth of an inch, about a millimetre and a half.

By the 1850s, Joseph Whitworth had built a machine that could detect a difference of a millionth of an inch. In this article we’ll follow how workshops learned to make flat surfaces, cut accurate screws and measure their parts, using interactive figures to explore each step (try dragging the lathe above, or zooming with ?/Ctrl + scroll). Let’s start with the cylinder of Watt’s steam engine, which we built in the previous article.

Read it.

Books about successful people often make success sound rather unappealing. Education should be intense and rigorous, focused on driving up IQ and on the ‘STEM’ quaternity of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours. This last point generates particular excitement, and descriptions of powerful people dwell with eager fascination on how many hours they devote to their labors.

The elites of Victorian Britain operated differently. Their schools and universities were not terribly academic and had very little STEM. As adults, they got up late, drank a lot, and spent a remarkable share of their waking hours partying. They loved feasting, sports, holidays, dancing, and dressing up. Contrary to their stodgy reputation, they were probably a lot of fun.

Despite this, the elites of nineteenth-century Britain were, by their own lights, extremely successful. For much of the century, Britain was the richest country on Earth. Its companies dominated global commerce, industry and finance. Its huge navy reigned over the world’s oceans, and its tiny army won a long sequence of wars while keeping watch over an enormous empire. Britain progressed gradually toward democracy with none of the revolutions and civil wars that wracked continental Europe. There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.

Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well. Huel, STEM, and cold baths have their merits. But the example of the Victorians should make us hesitate before concluding that there is only one way to rule the world.

…

Imagine a San Francisco whose Board of Supervisors featured Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, each feeling this responsibility to be the greatest glory of his career, each hoping that he might one day attain the greater glory that is the House of Representatives. It might not be paradise. Maybe it would be a disaster. But it would certainly be interesting.

Read it.

U.S. authorities on Tuesday arrested a man in Washington State accused of allegedly providing assistance to the teenage perpetrator of the February mass school shooting in Canada.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Western District of Washington announced that James Cody Bryant, a 30-year-old resident of Bellingham, Washington, was arrested on a criminal complaint charging him with conspiracy to murder persons in a foreign country — punishable by up to life in prison.

Bryant identifies as a “transgender woman” and he goes by the name Melody, as reportedly confirmed by the FBI on Tuesday.

“Trans” people are crazy, and crazy people are dangerous.

Read it.

That’s what we’re afraid of.

Read it.

A woman who has been accused of posing as a substitute teacher and causing mayhem in a class full of students did so because she ‘hates kids’, according to authorities in Milwaukee.

Amy Jones, 23, has been charged with one count of impersonating a public employee as well as five counts of exposing a child to harmful descriptions, after an incident at Rufus King International High School on September 24.

When questioned by the authorities she allegedly said she carried out the stunt because she ‘was bored’, adding that she ‘hates kids’ and ‘just wanted to f*** around.’

Jones, a former student at the school, is said to have scouted the premises for a week before carrying out the stunt, getting past security by blending in with other students.

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

Read it.

An invocation beginning an Iowa city council meeting Tuesday began with “Dear dark father” and ended with “Hail, Satan,” prompting a pastor to speak up and call to “reverse” the curse on his city.

“An invocation at the beginning of Tuesday’s Ottumwa City Council meeting overshadowed everything else that took place over the course of 80 minutes,” The Ottumwa Courier reported Wednesday.

Gee, I wonder why.

Read it.

The Treasury Department identified and returned about 13,500 payments totaling $175 million that otherwise would have gone to deceased people during fiscal 2026, part of an effort to catch fraud and improper payments before taxpayer money is disbursed.

And those are just the ones they found.

Imagine how much is going to the ones they haven’t found.

Read it.

Federal authorities have arrested a man accused of plotting a terrorist attack at Mall of America and pledging his allegiance to the Islamic State group.

According to an affidavit unsealed on Wednesday, FBI agents arrested 18-year-old Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud on Tuesday directly after he purchased an AK-47, 200 rounds of ammunition and four 30-round magazines from an informant with the stated intent of carrying out a mass shooting.

The criminal complaint alleges Mohamud had messaged an informant for nearly two years, discussing his hatred of non-Muslims and his desire to align with an Islamic terror group. He floated the idea of joining al Qaeda and al Shabaab before deciding to lend his support to the Islamic State.

Mohamud repeatedly expressed his admiration for Islamic terrorist attacks, including the New Year’s Eve 2024 attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans; the 2017 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida; and the 2025 mass shooting during a Hanukkah gathering at Bondi Beach in Sydney.

Mohamud told the informant he wanted to go to Somalia to join the Islamic State, but when it became apparent he lacked the money to travel abroad, he set his sights on martyrdom and committing mass violence at home instead, court documents state.

The Telegraph (UK).

The BBC pays white staff less on average than their ethnic minority colleagues in every pay band bar one, figures show.

My, what a surprise.

Black, Asian, mixed and other ethnic minority employees received 13.2pc higher median pay than white workers in the corporation’s lowest pay band, and 5.3pc more in the highest pay band.

White employees’ median pay was higher – by 0.6pc – in just one out of seven pay scales. This is despite the BBC’s commitment to “fair, clear and competitive” pay.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion doesn’t include white people.

Watch it.

Josh Pray is perhaps my favorite Person of Color. I would recommend that everyone subscribe to his YouTube channel.

I have to confess that I’ve participated in most of these Redneck Habits.

Those of us raised by parents who were teenagers during the Great Depression were programmed to save EVERYTHING. ‘You never know when it might come in handy.’ ‘Waste not, want not.’ My wife and I still struggle to throw away a plastic food container that Might Be Useful Some Day if you just wash it and put it in a Safe Place. (This is why every Boomer car is parked in the driveway or on the street. The ‘garage’ is the Designated Storage Area for Things That Might Be Useful Some Day.)

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani arrived at a New York City park on Wednesday night that was supposed to hold a vigil for Oct. 7 but turned into a gathering of hundreds of Pro-Palestinian protesters.

Israelis for Peace, a left-wing peace group, was scheduled to host the vigil in Union Square Park before it was overrun by protesters.

“We don’t want peace with Israelis, bro!” one protester yelled to an Israelis For Peace organizers. “We sent your people to hell on October 7.”

Just imagine what the reaction would be if a memorial of Kristallnacht were overrun by neo-Nazis with swastika flags and armbands.

Babylon Bee.

Local man Chris Pinson made a bold guess today that the name of the Mall of America terror plot suspect would turn out to rhyme with “Bohammed.”

Great guess. Sign that guy up on a prediction market.

Read it.

Legislation to deny the Democratic Socialists of America party status has gained momentum in the House of Representatives.

If enacted, the effort from Reps. Rich McCormick and Clay Fuller of Georgia would mirror the Communist Control Act of 1954, signed into law by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, by denying the DSA legal rights and privileges.

“The DSA has made clear that it wants to abolish and fundamentally change the 250-year American experiment of self-government,” Fuller told the Daily Signal. “The organization’s co-chair has confirmed support for abolishing institutions like the Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, abolishing ICE and our borders, defunding the Pentagon, and mass amnesty for illegal immigrants.”

Posting on X, Fuller wrote, “Proud to co-sponsor the Communist Control Act of 2026. The Communist Control Act of 1954 denied the Communist Party the rights of a normal political party. This bill applies those same rules to the DSA.”

“Communism has no place in the United States,” he added.

Read it.

Last month, public school leaders from Fairfax County, Prince William County, and Richmond traveled to Aspen, Colorado. As members of the Aspen Institute and College Board’s Social Mobility Leadership Network, their districts are participating in a three-year program on expanding low-income students’ access to advanced coursework.

As I previously wrote in the Daily Signal, membership requires each district to sign a data-sharing agreement with the Aspen Institute and the College Board. The agreement covers advanced coursework participation data “disaggregated by race, ethnicity, income status, and other locally relevant student groups.”

Aspen is beautiful, and helping more students succeed in advanced coursework is a worthy goal. But these districts face a more basic problem: Many of their students are not performing at grade level.

Richmond Public Schools is a case in point. According to the Virginia Department of Education, nearly half of its students failed their Standards of Learning (SOL) tests in reading, math, and science in 2025-26.

Golden naked Trump statue unveiled at European Parliament (The Telegraph)

Trump Derangement: No, he didn’t ask Iran to attack LA or San Diego (New York Post)

Fury in California After Trump Suggests Iran ‘Take Out’ L.A. or San Diego (Laura Chung/New York Times)

California officials condemn Trump for saying Iran could ‘take out’ Los Angeles or San Diego (Megan Brand/NBC News)

Morning Joe Insists Trump Wants Iran to Bomb LA, Claims Media Is Biased in Trump’s Direction  Unintentional comedy.

California Leaders Erupt After Trump Suggests Letting Iran ‘Take Out’ Cities (Ryan Bort/Rolling Stone)

October LIES: Networks Falsely Claim Trump Wants Iran to Blow Up LA, San Diego

Former NBC Journos on MS NOW Lie and Say Trump Wants Iran to Bomb California Cities

Kimmel Peddles Fake News That Trump Wants Iran To Wipe Out LA, San Diego

Despite its Own Fact-Check, CNN Insists on Pushing ‘Los Angeles-San Diego Hoax’

Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal voting rests on a shaky foundation (Kyle Cheney/Politico)

Trump administration unveils plan to tie high birth and marriage rates to transit funding (Sam Ogozalek/Politico)

Grandpa Trump Is Getting Desperate (William Kristol/The Bulwark)  Crazy Uncle Bill Kristol has been desperate ever since Trump got elected the first time.

Veteran conservative lawyer quits Trump’s interior department and warns of ‘assault on the rule of law’ (Jimmy Tobias/The Guardian)  Of course, for The Guardian ‘conservative’ means ‘not as Left as we are’.

US Senator Murphy says Pentagon denied him access to US base in Qatar (Timour Azhari/Reuters)  As it does with all enemies of America.

Trump says journalists should be ‘arrested’ for reporting on empty seats at rally (Jasmine Fernández/The Independent)  Sure, I believe that.

Trump Again Offers Govt Help to Address Chicago Crime  Sorry, they’d rather their citizens get robbed and killed than accept Trump cooties.

Trump Rages at ‘Loser’ Female Fox Host in New Tirade (Cameron Adams/The Daily Beast)  Of course, without Trump they wouldn’t have any readers.

As Trump Dithers, Ukraine War Is Approaching a ‘Fatal Point of No Return’ (Mac William Bishop/Rolling Stone)  And of course we take military and foreign affairs advice from Rolling Stone.

CNN’s Hunt Repeatedly Pushes Raskin On Blocking Trump SCOTUS Nominees for Years

‘He Tricked Us’: SNL’s Rubio Campaigns Against GOP In Midterms  Saturday Night Live is just another propaganda organ for the Wokerati.

FBI whistleblower says White House pushed unconstitutional probe of protesters (Ryan J. Reilly/NBC News)

Inside Trump’s Plan to Fence Off a Historic Protest Site (New York Times)

ABC Blames Trump for Cornell Incident, Hostin Brags Not Pushing Facts

MS NOW explores the relationship between election denier Tina Peters and the Trump administration and her calls to “get rid of voting machines” (Media Matters for America)

Election deniers Cleta Mitchell and Tina Peters want Trump’s commerce secretary to seize voting machines (Matt Cohen/Democracy Docket)

Trump keeps demanding criminal punishment for reporting he dislikes ??? including about his crowd sizes (Matt Gertz/Media Matters for America)  Sure, I believe that….

Trump sons’ investments have won billions in Pentagon contracts since his election (Nathan Lee/ABC News)  Two words: Hunter Biden.

Donald Trump Is Buying Votes at $500 a Pop (Jonathan Cohn/The Bulwark)

Democrats push back on Trump administration’s ‘brazen’ attempt to roll back education standards (Arthur Jones II/ABC News)

Kimmel Wants De Niro To Be President After He Calls Trump a ‘F****** Piece Of S***’

ABC, NBC Cheer Democrats Scolding Republicans in Debates as Trump Stooges

From Iran to the U.K., Trump Is Being Forced Into Retreat (New York Times)  I doubt that he notices.

Dale Debunks Idea Trump Wants Iran to Bomb L.A., But CNN Doesn’t Have Him on Air

Naked statue of Trump named ‘Orange Plague’ unveiled at European Parliament (Suha Kidwai/The Independent)

October 6, 2026 ??? Judging from his social media posts, Trump is panicking. (Heather Cox Richardson/Letters …)  Mind-readers in the Narrative Media are coming out of the woodwork.

Ana Navarro Predicts Everyone Dying from Russian Plague Because of Trump

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

A year ago, after a screening at Baruch College of my documentary “TORN: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets,” four different students asked me the same question: What about the whiteness of the posters?

“TORN” follows the fight that broke out on New York’s streets over the “Kidnapped” posters of those taken hostage by Hamas-led terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023. Many pro-Palestinian activists tore down the posters of those abducted from Israel as soon as they were put up.

The students’ question stunned me and has stayed with me ever since. Look at who was actually on the posters. Among the 251 hostages taken on Oct. 7 were more than two dozen Thai farmworkers, a Nepalese agricultural student, a Filipino caregiver, a Tanzanian agricultural student, Bedouin Arab citizens of Israel, and many dozens of Ashkenazi, Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews whose families came from places as far apart as Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Argentina,Mexico, Morocco, Iraq, Yemen and Iran.

And yet these students only understood the poster project as a plea for sympathy for “white” people. Afterward, their professor told me that many of them had never heard of Mizrahi or Sephardi Jews.

“TORN” shows what that lens does on the street. In the film, Alana and Liam Zeitchik, whose family is Yemenite, describe confronting people who were tearing down the posters of six of their relatives, all kidnapped to Gaza. A passerby called their cousin’s 3-year-old daughter a “white colonizer.” In another scene, in Williamsburg, a white, middle-aged man in a keffiyeh calls a pro-Israel gathering a “white supremacist” rally. An Israeli woman in the crowd asks him: “Did you see the color of my skin?” Her skin is darker than his.

MIT News.

A broken motor in an automated machine can bring production on a busy factory floor to a halt. If engineers can’t find a replacement part, they may have to order one from a distributor hundreds of miles away, leading to costly production delays.

It would be easier, faster, and cheaper to make a new motor onsite, but fabricating electric machines typically requires specialized equipment and complicated processes, which restricts production to a few manufacturing centers.

In an effort to democratize the manufacturing of complex devices, MIT researchers have developed a multimaterial 3D-printing platform that could be used to fully print electric machines in a single step.

Read it.Canadian health researchers are urging the country to choose permanent standard time over permanent daylight saving time if it ends the twice-yearly clock change, warning that darker winter mornings could harm sleep and mental health.

Not the Bee.

This is a preview of what happens when you mass import the Third World, then change the election laws to make sure your party stays in power forever: