Read it.

Criminals get caught when they brag. They seemingly cannot help it.

All these “hidden camera” interviews where government workers or politicians let the cat out of the bag to a perfect stranger over a drink (with perhaps some sexual attraction thrown in for good measure) are pretty much the same thing. Look at all the leaks to journalists by people whose job it is to keep a secret, yet are somehow incapable of doing it.

Or even consider Hunter Biden, who blabbed endlessly to prostitutes. Wow. Using beautiful women to get powerful men to talk is a technique as old as time. What is astonishing is that it works.

Why?

My wife is fond of a program that uses bodycam footage of traffic stops to document people talking themselves into jail.

Example.

dickover?n.?:?a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.

Thanks to Daring Fireball for this PSA.

Read it.

Automobiles have been around for well over a century. During that time, we’ve gotten pretty good at designing and building their basic components and controls: seats, doors, pedals, steering wheels, mirrors, etc. But when today’s automakers decide to make an electric vehicle (EV), they seemingly forget much of what they once knew, creating new versions of features that are objectively, obviously worse than the time-tested designs they replace.

When Tesla ushered in the modern EV era in the early 2000s, some of these changes made sense, at least from a marketing perspective. To convince a cautious public to consider an EV, the vehicles had to appear “futuristic.” Flush door handles that automatically extend when you approach the car are definitely cool and fancy! But electronic door mechanisms like these have also proven to be unreliable, and possibly dangerous.

On the interior, Tesla settled on a minimal design dominated by a large touch screen. Touch screens provide a lot of flexibility. This is why our phones no longer have physical keyboards on them. Touch screens are also, perhaps surprisingly, less expensive than the array of physical buttons and switches that they replace in car interiors. This savings is especially important on EVs, where the cost of the vehicle is dominated by the battery (yes, to an even larger degree than an internal-combustion car’s cost is dominated by its engine). But despite their cost savings, the over-use of touch screens in cars has proven unpopular. They’re also not great for safety.

In 2026, we’re well past the time when EVs need to compromise safety and functionality in order to appear futuristic. As for the cost savings, well, that’ll be harder to shake. Once automakers got a taste for cheap touchscreens, they spread to all cars, not just EVs.

To help the industry get back on the right track, I’ve created a checklist for car designers. Make sure your new car—EV or otherwise—checks all these boxes to avoid making the same stupid mistakes that have plagued modern cars for years.

Read it.

Germany’s Left Party is calling for a major expansion of voting rights that would allow long-term foreign residents to participate in elections. The change would apply after five years of legal residence, regardless of nationality.

The proposal, submitted to the Bundestag, also urges cooperation between federal and state authorities to extend similar rights to regional and local elections.

The party argues that Germany faces a ‘democratic deficit,’ as millions of people who live, work, and pay taxes in the country remain excluded from political participation. According to figures cited in the proposal, around 14 million foreign nationals currently live in Germany, including roughly five million European Union citizens. Many have resided in the country for years, with the average length of stay estimated at around 15 years, yet still lack voting rights in most elections.

Easily fixed: Become citizens. If you’ve lived in a country for five years or more and you have made no effort to become a citizen, then you’re not committed enough to that country to be trusted with the vote. It’s just that simple.

Read it.

People set fire to an Ebola treatment center in a town at the heart of the outbreak in eastern Congo on May 21 after being stopped from retrieving the body of a local man, witnesses and police said.

“The police intervened to try to calm the situation, but unfortunately they were unsuccessful,”Alexis Burata, a local student who said he was in the area, told The Associated Press.

“The young people ended up setting fire to the center. That’s the situation.”

An Associated Press journalist saw people break into the center at Rwampara Hospital and set fire to objects inside, and also to what appeared to be the body of at least one suspected Ebola victim that was being stored there. Aid workers fled the treatment center in vehicles.

The crowd set fire to two tents fitted with eight beds run by a medical charity called The Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA), said Deputy Senior Commissioner Jean-Claude Mukendi, head of the public security department in Ituri Province.

Welcome to the Turd World. Be careful not to step in the Diversity.

Read it.

With Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez legalizing what could amount to as many as 1.6 million migrants, other EU member states are getting worried, and not just neighboring France.

While the Socialist prime minister’s announcement originally aimed to naturalize some 500,000 migrants by handing them residency permits and work permits, German authorities estimate that there could be as many as 850,000 applicants in Spain, writes Bild. Leaked internal Spanish police documents have already put this estimated number even higher, at 1.6 million.

Since the announcement in mid-April, hordes of undocumented migrants have been overwhelming local offices across the country, with nearly 130,000 applications in the first week alone. Remix News posted videos of these crowds.

The Register.

The terms “blindingly obvious,” “logical consequence,” and “that is not how it works” appear nowhere in the government handbook of internet legislation. In particular, the discovery that imposing age access controls on websites has pushed users to VPNs has come as a huge surprise to legislators in the UK, the EU, Canada, and Australia. Nobody here knows how old VPN users are, be they kids unwilling to lose access or adults unwilling to disgorge personally identifying data to who knows what.

As they recover from this shocking discovery, these fine people are looking at ways to control VPNs, whether by adding age verification here too or by some magical “digital age of consent” technology that somehow evades the paradox that demanding more personal information in the name of safety itself reduces safety. Yet here, as in so many ways, the rest of the world is lagging behind America – more specifically, the great state of Utah, which has just enacted an anti-VPN law.

This law makes it compulsory for any site that the state says needs age verification – porn, basically – to impose those checks on anyone physically in Utah whether or not they are using any VPN. Those would be the same VPNs whose sole purpose is to prevent the geolocation of their users. Which would seem, and is, another paradox.

ATQUE: Mozilla warns UK: Breaking VPNs will not magically fix Britain’s age-check mess

Read it.

What a great grasp of the obvious.

I’m wondering what’s wrong with the other 40%.

ATQUE: UK Schools Pushing Books On Kids Telling Them “There’s Plenty Of Room” For Small Boat Migrants

Read it.

House pets won’t stab your son or rape your daughter.

ATQUE: Spanish Woman Attacked by Immigrant after She Says She’s a Christian

ATQUE: Ireland Warned: Islamist Terror Now Top Threat  Strange pets you got there, Paddy.

Paul Krugman.

Since it’s an eternal truth that Krugman Is Always Wrong, let’s see how he’s wrong today.

Donald Trump wants to stop the renewable energy revolution. But he can’t — it will continue to advance around the world because the economics and the science are compelling.

An obvious lie to anybody who has been paying attention. Renewable energy fails almost every time it’s tried, and causes unceasing problems for those who stupidly depend upon it. Not to mention all the birds and whales that it kills.

Trump can, however, ensure that the revolution passes us by.

That’s why we elected him.

And the big geopolitical winner from Trump’s hostility to the energy revolution will be China, which dominates the production of renewable-energy infrastructure.

Only so long as people are stupid. It’s no surprise that a Communist regime would dominate a communist enterprise.

Furthermore, the China-led energy future will arrive ahead of schedule thanks to the debacle in Iran.

“China-led energy future”? These are the people who have more coal-fired power plants than any other nation, and whose air pollution in its capital city is notoriously bad.

Also, Trump’s decision to counter Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by blockading the Strait of Hormuz surely adds to the perception that relying on U.S. oil and LNG, which is what countries will have to do if they don’t turn to solar and wind, isn’t safe.

The available evidence seems to indicate pretty clearly the U.S. is actually the only ‘safe’ place to get oil and LNG.

Who can guarantee that an erratic America won’t try to weaponize other countries’ dependence on our energy?

‘Erratic’? Far less ‘erratic’ than Krugman’s brain. I suspect that ‘weaponizing’ other countries’ dependence on our energy is what it’s all about.

While China is strong in many industries, it is utterly dominant in electrotech, the cluster of industries — solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles — at the heart of the renewables revolution. Or as the Wall Street Journal puts it, China’s “green industrial complex” rules. China accounts for more than 80 percent of global production in all these sectors with the exception of wind turbines. In the wind turbine sector, China’s share is “only” 60 percent because Europe retains a significant role.

And of course I’m sure that NOBODY is worried that COMMUNIST CHINA will ‘weaponize’ that reliance on ‘green tech’.

Looks like Krugman came through for us again.

Daily Star (UK).

A 39-year-old man suffered a tragic and premature death, leaving his family desperately searching for him for several days, in a peculiar fatality that was ruled a dreadful accident.

It is thought the man was attempting to recover his mobile phone when he became stuck inside a giant dinosaur sculpture.

Preliminary enquiries by police indicated he was trying to find his phone, but when his remains were initially found, numerous questions remained unanswered.

I’ll bet there were.

Read it.

And there was much rejoicing.

Different people believe in different things. Some believe that we go to paradise after we die. Others that we disappear into cosmic dust. But environmentalist prophet Paul Ehrlich believed mankind would be reduced to cannibalism unless we stopped having children. Right away.

And Ehrlich never gave up hope of seeing cannibalism in his lifetime.

In ‘The Population Bomb’, the 1968 bestseller that became one of the foundational texts of the environmentalist movement and helped inspire the population reduction industry, Ehrlich opened with the statement that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

After going through a dozen printings, later editions postponed the mass deaths and Armageddons to a safely more ambiguous, at least for the era, time “the 1970s and 1980s”.

It got less cheerful from there.

Read it.

It’s something that would have seemed impossible just a few decades ago, but somehow, smoking a cigarette has become thoroughly uncool. Research out this week shows how the smoking rate in America has plummeted to a record low.

Scientists studied nationally representative survey data. Based on this, they estimated that less than 10% of U.S. adults smoked a cigarette in 2024—the first time this rate has ever dropped to single digits. Despite the astounding success, more is needed to further discourage the use of cigarettes and tobacco products in general, the researchers argue.

“Maintaining a centralized federal capacity for tobacco prevention and control is essential to sustaining progress in reducing smoking prevalence,” they wrote in their paper, published Tuesday in NEJM Evidence.

Read it.

The Washington State Senate has voted to approve a new tax on residents who make more than $1 million per year.

Gov. Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, has vowed to sign the bill.

The bill, approved Wednesday by the Democrat-led Senate, will impose a 9.9% tax on state residents who earn over $1 million annually.

Supporters say the tax would affect only a small share of taxpayers — roughly 0.5% of high-income residents — while generating billions annually for programs including education, healthcare, housing, and tax credits for working families, as well as eliminating sales taxes on personal care items such as shampoo.

I predict that when this tax goes into effect, there will be no more ‘millionaires’ in Washington state to be affected.

I predic that they will spend vast sums of money on Woke vote-buying projects in anticipation of revenues that will not arrive.

I predent that eliminating sales taxes in anticipation of the revenues (that will not arrive) will leave the state budget full of holes that, since they can’t conceive of reducing spending, will have to be filled with more taxes on non-‘millionares’.

These people are Just Plain Stupid.

Time to leave. (I’m looking at you, Bill Gates.)

Here it is.

Think of it as evolution in action.

ATQUE: Suspected terrorist defiantly flashes ISIS salute after he’s busted for tossing explosive device near Gracie Mansion (New York Post)  Didn’t know that ISIS had a salute. Well. Learn something new every day….

Watch it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

The Foundry.

When it comes to the Olympics, certain things are no-brainers. Don’t ski jump in high heels. Don’t do mixed doubles curling with an ex-spouse. Don’t do a two-man luge with JB Pritzker on top.

I would add, “Don’t trash the nation you’re there to represent.”

Apparently, several members of Team USA don’t have brains.

Daily Record (UK).

No one should ever be faced with such a decision, but for the rescuers trying to save a cave explorer, it was a matter of life and death.

John Jones suffered what has been described as the most horrific death imaginable when he became trapped upside down in a tiny, confined cave for over 24 hours.

The rescue team was confronted with a difficult decision: attempt to save his life, knowing it would cause him immense pain.

Brandon Kowallis was the last person to see the young man before his tragic end after becoming stuck upside down inside a cave. The details of that night continue to haunt him.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Dealing with terminally stupid people is often occasion for people to demonstrate laudable heroism, but you really have to wonder about some of them.

Watch it.

I have never understood the urge to get tattooed.

It strikes me as a species of narcissism, walking around shouting “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” all the time

The military have a technical term for people who attract attention to themselves.

They are called “targets”.

Read it.

The European Union has issued new guidance affecting asylum decisions in Sweden and across the bloc, particularly concerning applicants with links to terrorist groups such as ISIS.

According to internal directives sent to staff at the Swedish Migration Agency in early January, individuals with affiliations to ISIS in Syria are now considered to potentially have a “well-founded fear of persecution.”

The guidelines, distributed to case officers in early January, mean that individuals with ISIS membership in Syria can potentially be granted asylum. To deny protection, the agency must prove involvement in war crimes, which is considered highly difficult.

The Foundry.

One of the most persistent mistakes in modern politics is the insistence on flattening all ideologies—pretending that all human beings think the same way, want the same things, and are motivated by the same forces. Every time policymakers fall into this trap, the result is not compassion or clarity but some of the worst public policy imaginable.

The assumption usually begins with a comforting but false premise: that all people harbor the same yearning for freedom in precisely the same way. That belief animated much of the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy, when the president famously declared that America’s mission was to end tyranny on planet Earth. Noble as the sentiment sounded, it was never sustainable. It presumed that every society shares America’s priorities, values, and political instincts. History has shown otherwise.

The same flattening impulse appears whenever violence is discussed. Instead of examining the specific causes behind specific acts—who committed them, why they were committed, and which ideas justified them—many commentators abstract everything into a vague moral generality. Violence is bad, they say. All people should know that violence is bad. And with that, the inquiry ends.

But ending the inquiry there ensures that real solutions never begin.

John Stossel.

Google settled a racial bias lawsuit for $50 million.

Merrill Lynch paid $20 million.

Maryland taxpayers will have to pay $3 million to make a racial discrimination suit go away.

“This is ridiculous! Taxpayers should not be on the hook for this!” complains Heather Mac Donald, author of “When Race Trumps Merit.”

In our new video, she argues that companies and governments feel forced to pay because of a legal doctrine called “disparate impact.”

“Most people don’t even know what it is!” I say.

“It is their greatest weapon against excellence,” she replies, “and it is an abuse of the spirit of our civil rights laws.”

Disparate impact rules say any policy or test in which some races or sexes do better than others is illegal discrimination, even if the policy has nothing to do with race or sex.

“The Maryland State Police wanted to make sure state troopers could read at a very basic level,” says Mac Donald.

But because black applicants got lower scores, the test was ruled racist.

Because women got lower scores on the physical fitness test, the state was also found guilty of sexism.

State politicians promised to change their standards and create new tests. Maryland taxpayers still have to pay millions.

Daily Record (UK).

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Stupidity can at first be a derogatory term, it can also seem judgemental when cast from others and indeed it can be somewhat subjective. In Artificial Intelligence and behavioural economics we are very interested in stupidity. As Amos Tversky quipped:“My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence; me, I study natural stupidity.”

My curiosity into the subject of ‘stupidity’ was triggered based on a specific type of stupidity, which is a different concept to irrationality. Danny Kahneman used to differentiate stupidity and irrationality by saying he was more interested in peoples “susceptibility to erroneous intuitions.” Likewise, stupidity is not ignorance, which I define as lack of knowledge and understanding.

Here we are in the 21st century, we can launch and catch rockets descending from the sky, we have instant communication systems, we can buy and sell goods globally with a click on our incredibly powered personal computers, our money is transferred in nanoseconds, our medical advancements are helping to cure diseases, we have self-driving taxis that have covered millions of miles. Yet, we still have a myriad of shortcomings and imperfections, especially around choices and decision making, systematically across governments, institutions, business and personal. The crux lies in the quality of these decisions: are they optimal and aligned with human aspirations, the laws of nature, and societal norms? If they are, we can deem them wise; if not, they fall into the category of “stupidity”.

As Ron White used to say, “You cain’t fix stupid.”

Read it.

The German federal government is firing its big debt cannon at the ongoing recession. So far, with zero effect. Berlin is about to learn the hard way that you cannot create prosperity with a money printer.

Read it.

Is there a Ponzi scheme? Can we get in on it?

Read it.

On Saturday, the last cooling towers of a German nuclear power plant were demolished in Gundremmingen, Bavaria. Germany thus continues, symbolically and materially, its isolated energy policy path. Even the increasingly dramatic economic situation seems unable to shake the German spirit.

It was a gloomy, rainy day, that Saturday, October 25, 2025, when at precisely 12 o’clock noon the last two cooling towers of a German nuclear power plant collapsed into dust.

Read it.

An immigrant has returned to the United Kingdom by small boat after being sent to France under the government’s ‘one-in, one-out’ pilot scheme, highlighting the collapse of the UK’s border policy.

The man, who said he sought asylum in Britain because France was unsafe for him, alleged that he had been a victim of modern slavery in northern France. “If I had felt that France was safe for me I would never have returned to the UK,” he said. After being sent back, “we were taken to a shelter in Paris,” but he “didn’t dare to go out because I was afraid for my life.” He described smugglers as “very dangerous,” saying they “always carry weapons and knives.”

Home Office sources confirmed that one person deported under the UK-France treaty has returned to Britain. His case comes amid a record surge in small boat arrivals, undermining claims that the pilot scheme is working as a deterrent.

Reports confirmed that more migrants have crossed the English Channel in small boats so far in 2025 than in the whole of 2024, hitting last year’s number more than two months early into the year. The ‘one-in, one-out’ agreement with France has seen just 42 illegal migrants removed, while the UK has accepted 16 asylum seekers in return.

Read it.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who last month declared his country’s support for a Palestinian state, said he would honor an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit Canada.

Carney was asked Friday on Bloomberg’s “The Mishal Husain Show” whether he would enforce the ICC warrant issued in November 2024 for alleged war crimes tied to Israel’s military response to the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Netanyahu has denounced the court’s decision.

“Yes,” Carney said, echoing the stance taken by his predecessor, Justin Trudeau.

Times News (UK).

Sir Keir Starmer said now is “not the time for a fight about the role which any individual played” in progressing a Gaza peace deal. Addressing the row over the role Britain played in securing the peace deal, the prime minister said: “I am proud of what Steve Witkoff [the US envoy] said about our national security adviser. He was negotiating this, he knows absolutely the role we played and this House should be proud that we played that role.

Read it.

A major UK political party leader just went on TV and seriously argued that women can have penises. How on Earth did we get here?

During a recent episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored, the host engaged in a bizarre debate with Zack Polanski, the newly elected leader of the Green Party of England and Wales. What started as a discussion on topics like the Israel-Hamas conflict and pro-Palestine protests quickly devolved into a surreal exchange on gender identity.

Polanski, representing one of the UK’s long standing political parties, boldly affirmed that a woman can have a penis, dismissed biological sex as “not necessarily” binary, and even claimed superior knowledge over the UK Supreme Court on the matter.

The interview’s pivotal clash came when Morgan posed a straightforward question: “Can a woman have a penis?” Without hesitation, Polanski responded, “Yes.” He elaborated that gender is a “spectrum” and that biological sex is “complicated,” insisting that people are not always born strictly male or female.

“A woman is a gender,” Polanski decreed, framing the issue as one of “nuance.” Morgan, visibly incredulous, laughed and called the response “absolutely ridiculous,” accusing Polanski of not understanding what a woman is—a fundamental problem for someone aspiring to lead a national party.

Read  it.

An anarchist threat, posted online, targeting federal aircraft with lasers reportedly forced emergency medical helicopters to divert from Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in Portland on Saturday night, putting lives at risk.

“Every night for weeks we are forced to listen to the threatening rhythm of helicopter blades as the federal regime spies on us,” the Rose City Counter-Info website flyer read. “The only limit power knows is our refusal to submit.

“This Saturday, October 11th, you are invited to fight back. All you need is a laser. Leave home – they can see where the laser is coming from.

The Telegraph (UK).

Rachel Reeves has signalled the better off will be forced to “contribute more” as she prepares to raise taxes at the Budget.

Treasury sources have said that the Chancellor will not cut spending on public services or significantly increase borrowing, as she looks to plug a £20-30bn black hole in the public finances.

It will leave her with no option but to increase taxes substantially.

Ms Reeves will argue that growth boosting reforms, such as a further loosening of planning rules, can avoid the need for tax rises on “working families”. She will instead target those with higher incomes or more wealth, The Telegraph understands.

Sources close to the Chancellor said: “She will be fair when asking those to contribute more to rebuild our public services.”

What is she going to do when the ‘rich’ all leave and she’s still got a hole in her budget? Politicians aren’t going to spend less in the future.

Daily Record (UK).

It’s been 20 years since Keith Gough and his wife Louise won a staggering £9million on the lottery — a win he later said ‘ruined’ his life before his death just five years later.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Daily Record (UK).

Climbing influencer Balin Miller, 23, fell to his death as he was scaling El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, an enormous sheer granite rock face of approximately 3,000 feet.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

A new survey released on Sept. 21 reveals that a significant number of college students view socialism more favorably than capitalism, with some even praising countries like Cuba over the United States.

The poll, conducted for Yale University’s William F. Buckley Institute, asked undergraduates whether they agreed with the statement, “While socialist countries like Cuba and the Soviet Union have not been perfect, they offer a better economic model than capitalist countries like the United States.” 

Nearly half of respondents, 46 percent, supported the statement placing socialistic model of government above our capitalistic one, according exclusive early information about the poll in an exclusive by The New York Post. 39 percent disagreed, while 15 percent said they were unsure.

The problem is that there is no such thing as capitalism, which is a term invented by socialists in the mid-19th century to have a smear-term for the people they don’t like, and which has been swallowed hook, line, and sinker by people who ought to know better. All of the things that people find objectionable about ‘capitalism’ are problems with industrialism, which exist under socialism just as much as under non-socialism.

Bear in mind that, by definition, half of the population is below average in intelligence. The stupid, like the poor, we have always with us.

Read it.

A duo of Tesla shareholder-influencers tried to complete Elon Musk’s coast-to-coast self-driving ride that he claimed Tesla would be able to do in 2017 and they crashed before making it about 60 miles.

In 2016, Elon Musk infamously said that Tesla would complete a fully self-driving coast-to-coast drive between Los Angeles and New York by the end of 2017.

The idea was to livestream or film a full unedited drive coast-to-coast with the vehicle driving itself at all times.
We are in 2025 and Tesla never made that drive.

Despite the many missed autonomous driving goals, many Tesla shareholders believe that the company is on the verge of delivering unsupervised self-driving following the rollout of its ‘Robotaxi’ fleet in Austin, which requires supervision from Tesla employees inside the vehicles, and improvements to its “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) systems inside consumer vehicles, which is still only a level 2 driver assist system that requires driver attention at all times as per Tesla.

Two of these Tesla shareholders and online influencers attempted to undertake a coast-to-coast drive between San Diego, CA, and Jacksonville, FL, in a Tesla Model Y equipped with the latest FSD software update.

They didn’t make it out of California without crashing into easily avoidable road debris that badly damaged the Tesla Model Y.

Pardon me while I snicker. Anyone who drives a Tesla is a fool.

Newsbusters.

It’s not the job of law enforcement to prevent crimes from being committed, Texas Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett declared Wednesday in an interview.

Denouncing President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to deter crime in areas of the country that are being ravaged by lawlessness, Rep. Crockett contended that the role of law enforcement is merely to solve crimes – after they’ve already been committed.

Read it.

California’s community colleges are grappling with a surge in fraudulent enrollments, with 1.2 million fake applicants last year accounting for nearly 30 percent of new students, blocking real students from classes and costing millions in stolet financial aid, according to college officials.

The two essential functions of government are the keep people safe and keep people honest. Democrats seem congenitally inept at both.

The problem, exacerbated by the shift to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, affects at least 90 of the state’s 116 campuses, said Marvin Martinez, chancellor of the Rancho Santiago Community College District, and Jeannie Kim, president of Santiago Canyon College.

Before the pandemic, most classes were in-person, making fraud more difficult, Martinez said. But with 80 percent of courses moving online, bots and fake students can enroll from anywhere, including other states or countries.

How is this possible? In Indiana, the only place where I ever went to a ‘public school’, you had to submit a class schedule that was checked against the master computer list of students who were enrolled and had paid their fees. If you weren’t on the list, your proposed schedule went into the trash. California public employees must be truly incompetent.

Read it.

The Young Turks co-host Ana Kasparian made a complete fool of herself when she let one of her anti-Israel brain drain episodes affect her so much she tried to convince the world America spends more on Israel than Social Security. Kasparian went on a tear against Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro during the September 2 edition of CNN NewsNight for correctly suggesting that America’s massively inefficient approach to Social Security would bankrupt the country.

Kasparian, clearly triggered, was livid that Shapiro didn’t focus on what she considered to be the real culprit behind America’s debt bomb. “I totally reject what you just said about how we’re going bankrupt because of Social Security? Really? You don’t think the trillions of dollars that we spent on wars in the Middle East might have something to do with that?” She proceeded down the logical toilet, crying over how “we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Israel — on Ukraine.”

Seriously, a simple Google search would have cleared this right up.

Watch it.

Nick Norwitz discusses a problem with modern scientific discussions that has implications for modern political discussions.

Most scientific studies these days deal with correlation, and the studies themselves acknowledge this by using terms such as ‘linked to’ rather than ’causes’, which would be an overreach. Dimwit journalists, many of whom ought to know better, jump right in and claim “X causes Y” and then head off into the stratosphere in laying down “things we must do to prevent Y”.

Dimwit journalists even cut out the middleman and go from “X is linked to Y” to “Therefore in order to prevent Bad Thing Y we must ban X, which is insane.

Look at the news and you can find all of the evidence of this that you might desire.

Matthew Yglesias.

No, it’s not. Proportional representation would be unconstitutional in the U.S., because it requires people to vote for a ‘party list’, and the party in question then determines who gets seats and who does not. This is historically seen as corruption in the U.S., and the reason why we now have a series of primary elections to choose party candidates. The constitution knows nothing of parties, and requires individual candidates running for office. (Indeed, read the Federalist papers and what they have to say about political parties, which the Founders termed ‘faction’–and that was not meant as a compliment.)

Proportional representation is what has ensured a multitude of splinter parties in most European countries, as a result of which most European countries have fragile ruling coalitions that break if you breathe on them hard, which in turn puts power firmly in the hands of their equivalent of the Deep State. (Proportional representation is what allowed the Nazis to form a government in Germany in 1933, with results as we saw them.) The problem of a multitude of splinter parties has debilitated even Britain, which has the same ‘first past the post’ system that the U.S. uses (although the individual states often have rules about run-off elections to ensure that the winning candidate has some sort of majority of the votrs cast, if not the total votes available).

Democrats, being ‘democrats’, would love a proportional system, even though it would destroy them.

Read it.

The legalization and commercialization of marijuana edibles in the U.S. reportedly has coincided with an escalation in cannabis-related poisonings.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Think of it as evolution in action.

WIRED, a Voice of the Crust.

In Yanis Varoufakis’ latest book, the former Greek finance minister argues that companies like Apple and Meta have treated their users like modern-day serfs.

*sigh* Where to start … Feudalism was a way of farming out agricultural land in order to finance armies to defend the state. Serfs were part of a system called “manorialism”, which coincided in time with feudalism but had no organic connection to it as a system. I am really sick and tired of ignorant Leftists thinking with their spleens when they discuss stuff that they mostly know nothing about. This Turd World apparatchik knows nothing about serfs, nothing about feudalism, and (from what I’ve seen) nothing about economics. He’s just another Eurotrash Deep State bureaucrat trying to pee in other people’s soup.

Go ahead and read the article. Be prepared for the loss of IQ points that doing so will involve.

Read it.

Apparently Keynes’ problem was that he wasn’t enough of a Marxist. Who knew?

Trigger warning; The author is a proglodyte who mistakes Industrialism for Capitalism and spends a lot of his time beating the Usual Straw Men.

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

“Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.” So starts Alfred Marshall’s “Principles of Economics”, a 19th-century textbook that helped create the common language economists still use today. Marshall’s contention that economics studies the “ordinary” was not a dig, but a statement of intent. The discipline was to take seriously some of the most urgent questions in human life. How do I pay my bills? What do I do for a living? What happens if I get sick? Will I ever be able to retire?

The fundamental error of the so-called ‘science’ of economics is precisely this. In fact, economics is not about ‘the ordinary business of life’ except insofar as that involves trade, which almost every aspect of modern life does. Economics is about trade, nothing else. It is about production only insofar as that produces goods to be used in trade, which almost every aspect of modern life does. How do I pay my bills? Typically, from the money you receive in trade for your labor. What do I do for a living? Trade my labor for resources. What happens if I get sick? You can’t trade your money for resources, so you’re screwed––unless you get passive income from investments or rents, in which case you’re golden. Will I ever be able to retire? Sure, if you put enough away to generate passive income … or someone else is obliged to pay you some sort of pension. Every ‘economist’ in history has made this mistake, which is why economists stick their noses into every other aspect of ordinary life without any justification.

Like the judicial sophistry that enables conscription in violation of the 13th Amendment and the judicial sophistry that allows birthright citizenship in violation of the 14th Amendment, the Federal government is perfmitted to stick its nose into ‘the ordinary business of life’ in violation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution by the judicial sophistry that, well, if you weren’t doing your ‘economic’ activity within the border of a single state, you would be ‘engaging in interstate commerce’ and so you get the Federal boot on your neck.

Daily Record (UK)

Darwin Award candidate. The stupid we have always with us … until they die.

Daily Record (UK).

Who goes to lunch with an ‘estranged spouse’? Darwin Award material. Think of it as evolution in action.