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.

Read it.

I’d start with Dave Ramsey’s books.

Dave Ramsey is the poster child for the one-size-fits-all financial advice you can get from any ‘Certified Financial Planner’ in the country–for a significant fee, of course. His advice is aimed toward people who are too stupid or too lazy to actually do the work to become financially literate; and they are the very people who won’t take it, because it will pinch them. And if they are of the psychological bent to profit from it, they’re doing it already, because It’s Obvious.

Andrew Mellon:

High taxation, even if levied on an economic basis, affects the prosperity of the country because in its ultimate analysis the burden of all taxes rests only in part upon the individual or property taxed. It is largely borne by the ultimate consumer.”

Businesses, whether corporations or personal, don’t pay taxes. They merely collect taxes. Any tax they collect is passed on to the purchaser in the form of higher prices. So any politician who trumpets the notion of ‘sticking it to the rich corporations’ is both a fool and a liar–who he’s really ‘sticking it’ to is the customer, and ultimately the consumer.

The Times (UK).

In October, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, announced that from April 2026 inherited agricultural assets worth more than £1 million would be liable to inheritance tax at 20 per cent — half the usual rate.

The changes, according to FBUK, could result in the loss of 208,000 jobs. Parts of Cornwall and Aberdeenshire are expected to be the worst affected, alongside Yorkshire, northern and eastern England, the Midlands and Northern Ireland. The industries expected to bear the brunt of the changes are construction, manufacturing, ­accommodation, hospitality and the motor industry, as well as agriculture and horticulture.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. Jacking up taxes when the economy is in the toilet is a key indicator that things are on the downhill slide. Britain is bound and determined to shoot itself in the foot – with a grenade launcher.

Jerusalem Post.

The man who killed two Israeli embassy staff members outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, on Wednesday night has been an active member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a far-left, Marxist, pro-Palestine group.
Chicago native Elias Rodriguez, 30, held a red keffiyeh and shouted, “Free, free Palestine,” as he was being taken into custody after shooting Sarah Lynn Milgrim and her fiancé, Yaron Lischinsky.

…

“He pulls out his keffiyeh and he says, ‘I did it. I did it for Gaza. Free, free Palestine,’” Kalisher told NBC.

Yeah, he’s a nut, but there are a lot of similar nuts out there.

The question that nobody is asking, and certainly the question that Elias Ridriguez never spent a second considering, is how shooting two Israelis in the back in Washington, D.C., is going to ‘help Gaza’? Anybody with two brain cells to rub together ought to realize that this is one of the worst things than anyone could do to ‘help Gaza’. It merely reinforces the notion that the inhabitants of Gaza (who overwhelmingly support Hamas), and their ‘supporters’ around the world, are insane pro-terrorists who deserve, and need, to be eliminated for the preservation of peace and stability in the international body politic. Like people blocking a roadway in a ‘protest’, all such activities actually do is harden people’s hearts s the cause that they are nominally supporting. It is STUPID, plain and simple.

UPDATE: CNN: ‘Can’t Deny’ Jewish Museum Shooter Yelled ‘Free Palestine’—’MAY Be a Hate Crime’

UPDATE: Suspected Israeli Embassy Shooter Worked for Woke Education Group Backed by Ford, MacArthur Foundations

UPDATE: More information on the DC murder

UPDATE: Shadowy Left-Wing Network Funded Elias Rodriguez’s Trip to ‘Resistance’ Convention

Power Line. Deconstructing Tim Walz.

To belabor the Tim Walz U-M law school graduation speech, the descriptions and headlines of his rant don’t do it justice. Here’s what he said to the graduates,

Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets, they are in unmarked vans, wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons, no chance to mount a defense, not even the chance to kiss a loved-one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared. To be clear, there’s no way for us to know whether they were actually criminals or not, because they refuse to give them a trial. We’re just supposed to take their word for it.

To begin, Walz is unable to pronounce the word “Gestapo,” so he is unlikely to have any idea of what the word means.

What Walz is describing is the process by which U.S. ICE deports illegal aliens subject to a Final Order of Removal. They already had a trial, they lost. By the time the “masked men” in those “unmarked vans” roll around, the alien in question is a fugitive.

We do not give fugitives prior warning. The prior warning was the removal order. And yes, we know they are “criminals” because the Final Removal Order declared them so.

They do not get to start from zero with a release and a new trial. That’s not “due process,” that’s endless process.

Read it.

The Arlington County, Virginia, Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on Tuesday to end its police department’s ability to report illegal aliens arrested for felonies and terrorist activity to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Board members couched their decision as a way to protect immigrant communities from the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, which, funny enough, target the types of criminals that Arlington is now protecting.

Prior to this egregious decision to disregard the public’s safety, the Arlington County Police Department’s interaction with ICE was already restricted in the county’s “Trust Policy,” also known as “Arlington’s Commitment to Strengthening Trust with Our Immigrant Communities,” enacted in 2022 and updated last year.

Section 7 of the “Trust Policy” very narrowly carved out a few exceptions for when police were allowed to report arrests of illegal aliens to ICE. These were for instances when police made arrests for felonies, gang activity, terrorism, and human trafficking.

The draft document had identified the presence of these illegal aliens as a “threat to the community.”

And the county was right. Now, Section 7 is crossed out in unambiguous red ink, and terrorists and other dangerous criminals will be effectively shielded from deportation

Read it,

Get Woke, go broke.

Beyond those conservatives and libertarians in the alternative media that were warning about the invasion of woke ideology for many years, the very first group of “normies” to recognize the progressive threat to their subculture was gamers. And, to their credit, they brought attention to the issue in a more effective way than the alternative media ever did.

The conservative sphere has always dismissed video games, movies, and the hobby game world as “stuff for kids” and this was a fatal error. Instead of standing guard and keeping leftists away from the kids, the cultural Marxists were allowed to run rampant throughout the media industry. They effectively blitzed the space and within a five year period they took over almost everything the west sees and hears from movies to games to comics and commercials.

They did have extensive help, though. Through ESG programs, government agencies,NGOs and international conglomerates used vast amounts of cash to manipulate every aspect of media and incentivize the spread of woke ideology. The meaning of ESG (Economic, Social, Governance) is meaningless and doesn’t explain at all what it actually does. At bottom, ESG was about progressive dominance of the cultural conversation.

Their strategy was to saturate media with leftist talking point to create the perception of false consensus. To make the majority of people believe that most people are in support of far-left politics, and that there’s something wrong with you if you’re not also onboard. Even some feminists called out the campaign as malicious.

Read it.

Economics journalists, like any writers, aren’t perfect. Perhaps in a previous age, people thought that everything they read in the news was exactly true; perhaps some still do. But reporting is a human activity, and humans make mistakes. In order to get the true story, you have to read multiple sources, and be skeptical of what you read — and even then, mistakes will slip through.

So the purpose of this post isn’t for me to be a pedantic know-it-all, or to insult the economics journalism profession as a whole, or to call out specific writers. But there’s one simple, elementary mistake that almost all econ reporters make very consistently, over and over. And unlike most mistakes, this one has probably had serious negative consequences for American economic policymaking. Therefore I feel like I have to speak up here, and express my frustration a little.

The mistake econ reporters are making is claiming that imports subtract from GDP. Imports do not subtract from GDP. And yet again and again, economics journalists say that they do.

Mediaite, a Voice of the Crust.

A U.S. Space Force colonel was removed from her position as the commander of Pituffik Space Base in Greenland on Thursday after she disavowed Vice President JD Vance’s remarks about acquiring the Danish territory.

This is public insurbordination, and fully justifies her removal. (Notice that all these officers causing trouble are women.)

You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

Read it.

Large banks can fail within hours, and life savings can vanish overnight.

The US banking system is particularly vulnerable.

So, why do so many people place their confidence—and life savings—into such a fragile system?

It’s because they don’t understand three fundamental truths about modern banking:

#1. The money isn’t yours.

#2. The money isn’t actually there.

#3. The money isn’t really money.

Read it.

Using cannabis may cause changes in the human body’s epigenome, a study of over 1,000 adults suggests. The epigenome functions like a set of switches, activating or deactivating genes to change how our bodies function.

“We observed associations between cumulative marijuana use and multiple epigenetic markers across time,” explained epidemiologist Lifang Hou from Northwestern University when the research was published in 2023.

Cannabis is a commonly used substance in the United States, with 49 percent of people trying it at least once, Hou and a team of US researchers report in their published paper.

Some US states and other countries have made cannabis legal, but we still don’t fully understand its effects on our health.

Even if we did, history demonstrates that the self-indulgent chemically-inclined would ignore it. How many people still smoke tobacco? But evolution has a way of taking care of such things.

Read it.

Viewers of MSNBC and CNN have recently noticed more frequent appearances by Reps. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York). With the Democratic Party lacking clear leadership in a rudderless motion—still confused about how many genders—its strategists are testing the waters to determine which unhinged and crazed progressive lawmaker will be the party’s new face.

“I have heard from Democratic operatives is that Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez are trying to fill the vacuum created by Harris’s loss, the absence of a clear 2028 frontrunner and a coherent agenda,” Douglas MacKinnon, a former White House and Pentagon official, recently penned in an op-ed featured in The Hill.

Crockett’s latest appearance on far-left conspiracy network MSNBC resulted in a Community Note on X after she claimed: “It is not a criminal violation to enter the country illegally… it’s not a crime.”

I’ll bet it did….

Associated Press, a Voice of the Crust.

New Zealand’s most senior envoy to the United Kingdom has lost his job over remarks he made about U.S. President Donald Trump at an event in London this week, New Zealand ‘s foreign minister said Thursday.

Phil Goff, who is New Zealand’s High Commissioner to the U.K., made the comments at an event held by the international affairs think tank Chatham House in London on Tuesday.

Actions have consequences. You’d think that a career diplomat would know enough to be more, how shall I say it, diplomatic.

Read it.

China may be a serious threat. North Korea is not. They are always long on threats and short on action.

The Wall Street Journal, unfortunately these days a Voice of the Crust.

The U.S. imported $1.2 trillion more in goods in 2024 than it exported, a record annual deficit and a major economic irritant for President Trump. On Feb. 13, the president announced that his administration would evaluate tariffs and other trade barriers imposed on U.S. exports by other nations and match them with “reciprocal” tariffs. The president said last week that 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico would go into effect Tuesday.

This is utter horseshit, and a good indicator of how far reporting in the WSJ has degenerated.

There is no such thing as a ‘trade deficit’, any more than there is a ‘car deficit’ if you buy three cars and only trade in two.

All trade is balanced. Nobody ships good to the U.S. gratis. If the U.S. imports X amount of goods and only exports X-Y goods in return, the difference is in the form of actual money … i.e. pieces of paper (or electronic bits) that are worth no more than what the government says they are. If we are receiving goods and sending bits of paper in return, who is on the short end of that stick?

The Antiplanner.

The residents of Maumee are so thrilled with the street’s reconstruction that they have submitted more than 10,000 signatures to the election board seeking to recall the mayor and six members of the city council. Their real goal is to fire the city administrator, who they believe has run roughshod (with the support of the city council) over citizen interests. Among other things, they are upset that the administrator “was the mastermind that created the stricture reducing Conant Street traffic flow to unbearable levels during peak driving times.”

“Our main uptown area has become a headache to navigate,” reports a resident on Strong Towns’ Facebook page. “The Strong Towns experiment has resulted in traffic cutting through neighborhoods where children play because drivers grow tired of waiting for traffic lights and traffic backs up. In an attempt to promote walking, the city placed a concrete island in the middle of the road. That island has been hit by cars at least four times if not more in the last year resulting in thousands of dollars in damages. The transition to the Strong Towns initiative has also resulted in the closing of some businesses in our uptown region. Our current leaders may think they did a great thing by sending a bunch of our tax dollars to Strong Towns, but talk to most citizens and they will tell you the truth of the negative impact this ponzi scheme has had on a once enjoyable town to live in.”

Read it.

After nasty clashes involving character assassinations and a mass resignation, a showdown is drawing closer in Chicago between the most powerful local teachers’ union in the country and the most financially distressed school district.

The growing possibility of a teachers’ strike in a city with a long history of labor upheavals highlights the troubles rocking public schools nationwide. First came drops in academic performance and enrollment from lower birth rates and the pull of charter and home schools promising a better education and sometimes delivering it. Enrollment has plunged 20% in Chicago since 2012, a bigger decline than in many large cities.

After the pandemic hit, a windfall of $190 billion in federal emergency funding helped districts like Chicago paper over years of deficit spending and significantly expand the ranks of teachers, social workers, and counselors. Now that the federal aid has ended, students have only partly recovered from their devastating learning loss while budget deficits have ballooned, prompting widespread education cuts in Houston and upcoming reductions in San Francisco, to name just a few districts facing fiscal woes.

Read it.

Hey, they don’t call it Brown University for nothing.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Today in “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” news…

Two Oregon men searching for the mythical Sasquatch tragically died after going missing in the wilderness on Christmas Eve, according to the NY Post.

The Skamania County Sheriff’s Office reported that the bodies of the men, aged 37 and 59, were discovered in a remote, forested area of Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Authorities believe the pair succumbed to exposure due to severe weather conditions and inadequate preparation for the harsh environment.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

For the better part of a century, Cuba has been under the control of communists and their ideologies, and the previously inconceivable has finally happened – they’ve run out of sugar.

How is this even possible? Do you really even have to do anything to get a tropical crop to grow on an island nation with a literal year-round growing season?

According to a new report from CiberCuba, the communists are now importing sugar at about $25 a pound, and have stopped exporting entirely, after a number of “failures” over the years.

NEWS FLASH: Communism never works, and it is always a failure.

Read it.

*sigh* Buy ’em books, send ’em to school, and they still can’t pour piss out of a boot with instructions printed on the heel.

Read it.

David French has offered a deeply pathetic NeverTrump manifesto just in time for the election. It rehashes French’s ongoing themes of (a) his morality superiority (b) the irrelevance or nonexistence of perfidy on the left and (c) the betrayal of all Republicans and evangelicals who do not think exactly as he does. Nothing you did not already know about the Gospel of St. David. I read it so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.

 

Read it.

Emergency services had to move a boulder to get her out

If you’re out and about in nature and drop your phone down a three-meter crevice between some boulders, maybe don’t try to retrieve it.

Read it.

Many have discovered an argument hack. They don’t need to argue that something is false. They just need to show that it’s associated with low status. The converse is also true: You don’t need to argue that something is true. You just need to show that it’s associated with high status. And when low status people express the truth, it sometimes becomes high status to lie.

In the 1980s, the psychologists Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo developed the “Elaboration Likelihood Model” to describe how persuasion works. “Elaboration” here means the extent to which a person carefully thinks about the information. When people’s motivation and ability to engage in careful thinking is present, the “elaboration likelihood” is high. This means people are likely to pay attention to the relevant information and draw conclusions based on the merits of the arguments or the message. When elaboration likelihood is high, a person is willing to expend their cognitive resources to update their views.

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New for Playstation and the PC.

ZMan is not impressed with Joe Biden … or his handlers.

Since the Thursday night debate at which Joe Biden looked like a hospice patient, there have been competing theories about whether it was a setup in order to push Biden out of the way or whether it was just another screwup. Basically, we have two competing theories of the crime. One says it is the work of those mysterious people in the hollowed-out volcano who control the world and the other theory says it is the work of people who are too stupid to run the machine they inherited.

The hollowed-out volcano theory side had the momentum on Thursday night as regime media started bellowing for Biden to step aside. It had the feel of that first weekend of the Ukraine war when every talking hairdo on television had a Ukraine flag lapel pin and was spasmodically saying “keev” at one another. The same people who were telling one another that Joe Biden was as sharp as a tack were suddenly competing with one another to condemn his family for rolling him out on stage.