Watch it.

Yes, it’s AI content. That doesn’t make it wrong.

The Foundry.

It has never been easier to feel virtuous without making much of an effort.

Put pronouns in an email signature, repost the slogan of the day, or join the online denunciation of someone who used the wrong word. In many circles, such gestures are expected. A person can take part with little at stake and still come away feeling that he has done something morally worthwhile.

The trouble begins when support for fashionable causes is treated as proof of good character.

The Foundry.

Government schools depend on Federal giveaways, and those depend on how many students schools can sign up for the programs, even if they have to lie about qualifications.

“The total fertility rate in California has dropped from 2.21 children per woman in 2007 to 1.48 in 2023, well below the replacement level of 2.1 necessary to keep a population from declining.”

Migration has also played a role. Nearly 10 million Californians have moved to other states since 2010, and California currently has the nation’s largest net domestic outflow.

The implications extend beyond California schools facing potential downsizing. A shrinking younger population could eventually mean fewer workers supporting a growing older population, potentially straining the state’s economy and contributing to labor shortages.

If California’s population continues to lag behind growth in other states, Lafortune said, the state could eventually lose congressional representation.

And Lafortune does not expect the trend to reverse anytime soon.

Read it.

Tell me you’re a conquered country without telling me you’re a conquered country.

Watch it.

Tim Pool pulls it all together.

Read it.

The King is dead; Long live the King!

Or so the media declare as Britain faces up to its seventh Prime minister in a decade. The seemingly ritualistic axing of our head of government has been accompanied by all the usual rites. The choir of voices declaring “The grownups are back in charge”, the scuttling of MPs as they preach the virtues of their latest leader with the new gospel in their hands and hopes of promotion on their mind; and the insistence by all that this will herald a new age of politics. That this time things will be different!

But in and among these rantings and ravings is the same essential diagnosis. Britain doesn’t work. Its institutions are out of date; its practices out of step and its state model out of time. And aren’t they right? Isn’t it true that in place of efficient execution we’ve had unparalleled chaos at every level of government, with most ministers lucky to last two years at the head of their departments? That instead of a state that builds, we’ve got a state that consults, one that spent fifteen years planning a railway to Manchester before abandoning it, having sunk £2.3bn on a stretch of the railway that got cancelled. A railway which, in the stretch we are still building, will cost more than Britain’s entire nuclear deterrent.

I thank God every day that I don’t live in Britain.

Read it.

A young British man walked out of a Manchester shop with a brand new baseball bat still sealed in its factory plastic packaging. Within moments, multiple police officers were on him, treating the purchase as a weapon and detaining him in full view of the street.

The footage, which spread rapidly on Sunday, captures the absolute state of policing in modern Britain. Officers challenge the lad, physical contact follows, backup including motorbike units arrives, and he ends up in a police van.

The bat’s plastic covering remains clearly visible throughout. No claim has emerged that he brandished it, threatened anyone, or used it for anything other than carrying it home after a legitimate purchase.

Under the Prevention of Crime Act 1953, officers can stop and check items that could be used as offensive weapons in public if there is no clear reasonable excuse. A brand-new bat still in its shop packaging, purchased moments earlier, is the definition of a reasonable excuse for any ordinary person. Yet the response was immediate and multi-officer.

This incident does not stand alone. It fits a documented pattern that has played out repeatedly under the current climate of policing.

I thank God every day that I don’t live in Britain.

Read it.

Jesús Domínguez pushes through thick brush lining a rugged mountainside with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and a grenade fastened to his leather belt.

He marches alongside a pack of camouflage-clad men patrolling the rural stretches of Mexico against one of the country’s most powerful drug cartels.

Armed with military-grade weapons smuggled from the U.S., the 50-man force is one of dozens of “autodefensa,” or “self-defense,” groups that have emerged over the past decade in Mexico to fight increasingly sophisticated cartels in areas far out of the reach of security forces.

“The government doesn’t care about us, and it’s impossible for our arms to compete with (the cartel’s),” said Domínguez, 34, from a watch post overlooking the mountains of Guerrero state. “They come at you with a ton of force, so you need to respond with force…If you don’t, they’ll overwhelm you.”

The Telegraph (UK).

A driver has been denied car insurance because he put “Jesus loves you” stickers on his car.

Simeon Chandra was told his insurer had “declined the modification” and needed photographic evidence that they had been removed.

Photographs show the 35-year-old’s 2009 Nissan Pixo with the words “Jesus loves you” on one side, and “Jesus loves you v much” on the other.

I thank God every day that I don’t live in Britain.

Read it.

Perhaps shooting them in the leg would have got the message through.

Read it.

When the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order in Trump v. Barbara, it settled for now in the courts who becomes a citizen at birth. It did not settle—and could not settle—whether American citizenship may be bought and sold.

It remains well within the power of Congress and the president to shut down the contracts, clinics, agencies, and visas that convert foreign money into American citizenship—without amending the Constitution or defying the Court. Until the Court revisits the issue, the political branches are solely responsible for overseeing the marketplace, and they have no excuse to delay.

If you doubt that such a marketplace exists, meet the Simpson triplets.

The Telegraph (UK).

So that is that, apparently. Crisis over. Nothing to see here.

That was the smug verdict in much of the commentary over the weekend. Tens of thousands of people may have crossed illegally into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta.

But when Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, declared shortly afterwards that “practically all” of them had returned to Morocco, relief quickly gave way to mockery – even though almost nobody had bothered to verify Madrid’s claims.

Giorgia Meloni’s outrage, and her suggestion that Schengen free movement with Spain might have to be temporarily suspended? Wildly overblown, apparently. So too was the criticism coming from other European capitals.

German liberal weekly Die Zeit denounced what it called “fact-free Spain-bashing” and went further still: “The new arrivals were returned quickly and without bureaucracy, so precisely what conservative and Right-wing parties always demand has happened.”

It would be comforting if that were true. It is not.

The Telegraph (UK).

Ministers have been accused of launching a “stealth clawback” of military pensions, leaving veterans who claim benefits thousands of pounds worse off.

Hey, they gotta get the money they spend from somewhere.

Officials at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have informed veterans that their military pension is considered “unearned income” and will therefore result in a pound-for-pound reduction in benefits.

In some cases this has resulted in veterans being ordered to repay tens of thousands of pounds, as well as having their monthly benefit payments reduced.

Read it.

Like medieval monks who preserved civilization after the fall of Rome, traditionalists can live active lives and work to keep the flame of Western culture alive. To do so, we must build loving families, construct independent schools, and erect parallel institutions to challenge those that have betrayed their purpose.

Read it.

What a give-away: If you allow elections, the Court will ‘move to the right’.

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a term-limited Democrat who opposes the measure, said gerrymandering and dark money have put the Legislature out of step with the state and, “to think you can make the judicial branch a part of that dysfunctional system is frightening.”

…

Meanwhile, the national and state affiliates for abortion provider Planned Parenthood contributed another $1.6 million toward the vote-no campaign’s $8 million-plus in spending.

There’s that pesky ol’ democracy that Democrats love to talk about but never like to practice.

Read it.

Yeah. Quit being Woke socialists.

Canada is exporting its highest earners to the United States. This finding, highlighted in a recent Hub analysis on Canada’s GDP per capita crisis, including its causes and manifestations, generated substantial discussion and debate over the past week.

That discussion, coupled with a new article from The Economist entitled “Westerners are fleeing their countries in record numbers,” prompted a revisit of Canada’s brain drain.

Read it.

What had changed, and what generated the host of NITBYs that bore conservationism to victory, was the ascendancy of modernist architecture, a style that most people demonstrably find relatively ugly. Conservationism was a reaction to postwar redevelopment, as its proponents claimed. But it was less a reaction to what the modernists destroyed, than to what they created.

Most debates about the policy significance of ugliness presuppose a certain model of how it affects housebuilding. On this model, local people resent the prospect of having ugliness inflicted upon them, they therefore oppose ugly developments, and politicians implement antidevelopment policies to placate them. This probably does happen sometimes: ugliness obviously does affect local people, and it would be surprising if this had no effect at all on their behavior. But a closer look suggests that ugliness plays only a minor role in motivating NIMBYism.

Read it.

In January, I had the fortune of being a keynote speaker at LCA2013. One of the tchotchkes I received from the conference organizers was a little USB memory stick.

I thought it was a neat coincidence that I was in a factory that manufactured exactly such memory sticks about a week before the conference. In fact, I managed to score a rare treat: the factory owner gave me a sheet of raw chip-on-flex, prior to bonding and encapsulation, to take home.

…

The lady is using some sort of tool made out of hand-cut bamboo. I still haven’t figured out exactly how they work, but every time I’ve seen this process they are using what looks like a modified chopstick to place the chips on the board. My best guess is that the bamboo sticks have just the right surface energy to adhere to the silicon die, such that silicon will stick to the tip of the bamboo rod. A dot of glue is pre-applied to the bare boards, so when the operator touches the die down onto the glue, the surface tension of the glue pulls the die off of the bamboo stick.

It’s trippy to think that the chips inside my USB stick were handled using modified chopsticks.

Read it.

Even colleges can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

It’s barely education and the ‘higher’ refers to the debt you accumulate.

Read it.

Dr. Anthony Fauci may have believed his Fifth Amendment marathon at the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday would shield him from prosecution, but he miscalculated.

Before he refused to answer questions from the committee, Fauci did deliver an opening statement, during which he attacked Committee Chairman Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and explained his decision not to answer any questions.

“Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and, recently, his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something – anything – that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,'” Fauci said. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

And so he did, an estimated 111 times, but it won’t protect him completely.

On Jan. 20, 2025, his last day in office, Biden granted Fauci a full and unconditional pardon covering any offenses he may have “committed or taken part in” tied to his government roles between Jan. 1, 2014, and Jan. 19, 2025. The broad preemptive pardon Joe Biden handed him on the way out the door covers federal charges alone, and it leaves him exposed to the state charges that may arrive sooner than his lawyers expected.

Florida wasted no time proving the point. State Attorney General James Uthmeier announced an investigation into the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) after Fauci declined to answer lawmakers’ questions on Wednesday.

Read it.

A Spanish Supreme Court ruling restricting the immediate return of migrants arriving by sea has been blamed for an influx that has overwhelmed the reception system in Spain’s North African territory of Ceuta.

Between 1,500 and 2,000 migrants, mainly from Morocco, reached Ceuta by sea over a period of nine or ten days, according to the city’s Mayor-President, Juan Jesús Vivas.

“In the last few days, more than 1,500 migrants, including adults and minors, have reached Ceuta by sea,” Vivas told journalists.

“The reception centers have collapsed and are over-saturated,” he said. Ceuta’s temporary migrant reception centre, which has 512 official places, was housing nearly 600 people, while more than 400 others waited outside.

“We are in a very serious situation. We are in a very difficult situation,” Vivas added, warning of conditions like those in May 2021, when around 8,000 illegal migrants stormed and entered Ceuta in just two days, equal to around 10% of the local population.

Footage circulating on the internet shows how easy it is to enter the exclave by sea, as migrants only need to swim around a short pier to bypass the fence that marks the Spanish-Moroccan border.

And this will continue to happen as long as Spain doesn’t get rid of them as soon as possible.

Watch it.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you move.”

Read it.

The American Bar Association president, Michelle Behnke, gave a disastrous performance at a House Oversight Committee Task Force hearing last week.

She doubled down on DEI and couldn’t answer even straightforward questions.

In one emperor-has-no-clothes moment, she refused to answer what her implicit biases might be—even though the ABA proclaims that everyone has them.

In another, she said that she didn’t know if the U.S. has ever had a transgender Supreme Court justice.

And in yet another, she refused to repudiate President Joe Biden’s exclusion of black men—solely on their biological sex—from consideration to be a Supreme Court justice.

The list goes on.

You can’t make this shit up.

Read it.

On July 15th, Mario Roggero, a jeweller from Piedmont charged with fatally shooting two of the three robbers who had just raided his shop in 2021, received a final sentence of fourteen years and nine months in prison. This protracted legal battle has opened up a new political front in Italy and reignited a heated debate: to what extent does a citizen have the right to defend themselves when the state is no longer able to protect them?

With a new election cycle just a few months away, the case has become a powerful symbol for the Italian Right, which sees it as an illustration of a justice system more concerned with the rights of offenders than with those of victims. Conversely, the judiciary and the Left are defending the ruling as essential to upholding the rule of law, refusing to equate self-defence with a right to revenge.

The events date back to 28 April 2021. Three armed men entered Mario Roggero’s jewellery shop in Grinzane Cavour, Piedmont. The shopkeeper, his wife, and his daughter were threatened during the robbery. When the criminals fled, Roggero grabbed his legally owned gun, chased them down the street and fired several shots at their vehicle. Two robbers were killed; the third was seriously injured.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

I hope Rand Paul can lead him into some post-pardon perjury.

ATQUE: Committee Could Hold Fauci in Contempt of Congress, Paul Warns

Read it.

Viral footage circulating online shows a British man methodically working his way along the streets of his own city with a wheeled bin and litter picker, clearing the rubbish left by others. He is not being paid and not making a political point. He is simply trying to prevent the area from descending into a tip.

Remarkably, as he works, foreign shopkeepers and residents repeatedly emerge from their premises to instruct him to clear the mess outside their own doors, standing by as he does so.

One older local, taking in the state of the streets, observes that if President Trump were to see them he would declare the place a “shithole.”

And he would be correct. Import Turd World people, wind up with Turd World problems (i.e. shithole).

Read it.

A French warship fired 17 live rounds near a boat carrying Britain’s shadow home secretary as he observed French authorities escorting migrants towards the English coast.

Chris Philp, the Conservative Party’s spokesman on immigration and policing, accused the French military of attempting to intimidate him while he monitored illegal Channel crossings on Tuesday.

Philp was being interviewed aboard a fishing boat around two miles off the French coast when the patrol ship Flamant approached within approximately 300 metres and began firing a handgun into the water.

Quillette.

A curious paradox sits at the heart of many advanced economies. Employers complain constantly about labour shortages. Governments respond by importing record numbers of migrants to fill vacancies. Yet at the same time, a growing number of men have quietly withdrawn from work altogether.

These men are not showing up in unemployment queues or appearing in dramatic economic statistics. In many cases, they are not even looking for jobs. Instead, they exist in a liminal space between participation and withdrawal, cycling through gig work, periods of welfare dependence, disability payments, online entertainment and increasingly isolated lives.

The phenomenon is most pronounced in the United States, where male labour-force participation has been declining for decades, particularly among men without university degrees.

Feminist complaints about ‘patriarchy’ appear to be illusionary.

Read it.

The filibuster is unconstitutional.

Our Founding Fathers spoke against requiring a supermajority threshold to pass regular measures in Congress, yet the erroneous practice continues today via the filibuster. Current Senate practice reaches beyond our Founders’ original plan that a supermajority vote was only to be used for the five instances listed in the Constitution and two instances listed within the Amendments, according to CRS. Those who advocate for the filibuster are invoking the symbolism of protecting “history” when all they are actually protecting is an unconstitutional tradition.

The Constitution specifies a very limited number of times when a supermajority vote is necessary: amending the Constitution, overriding vetoes, convicting impeached officials, ratifying treaties, and expelling Members of Congress. The 14th and 25th Amendments also allow for a supermajority vote to remove individuals deemed unfit to serve from office.

The filibuster is nowhere listed in the Constitution, and the supermajority vote to overcome it was an accidental creation. That’s right, the biggest impediment to delivering on the mandate handed to the House, Senate, and White House by the American people is an accident that we have turned into tradition.

The New Neo.

However – and it’s a big “however” – the diaries certainly reveal other extremely disturbing things about Fauci. But maybe the word “reveal” isn’t quite right, either, because they are mostly things we already knew. So perhaps the correct word would be “underline.”

Some of us suspected all along what a dirtbag he was. It’s nice to see it confirmed out of his own pen.

We already knew, long ago, that most of our “betters” were defying the restrictive rules they were setting down for us peons. We already knew that they were allowing the 2020 demonstrations in the streets when all other gatherings were forbidden. We already knew they made up most of the rules with almost no scientific backing, and we already knew they strongly suspected a lab leak was the cause of the pandemic long before they admitted it.

That doesn’t mean it’s not still infuriating and destructive. But it’s no surprise at all.

Indeed it is not.

Read it.

There is a rot at the heart of our political system. It casts its shadow over Parliament, through the chamber, at the dispatch box and along the (largely empty) green Commons benches. It pervades our political culture, often recognised yet rarely analysed. And no, it’s not the product of an establishment stitch up, thuggish populism or a hidden gestapo, policing the behaviour of our political classes. It is the decline, in nature and in practice, of political oratory.

As Tom Tugendhat so brilliantly pointed out, in one of the few parliamentary speeches worth listening to these days, members have put less attention, care or thought into their speeches; or even, it seems, into attending parliament unless they’re whipped into it. The very phrase, I rise to speak, innocuous though it may seem, barely troubled the record a decade ago and yet now recurs constantly; emblematic of the Americanisms that have beaten their way into our political discourse. These, and the increasing use of ChatGPT and other assorted AI, have only served to cast a light on a decay that had been festering for years.

Of course, it would be idle to assume Parliament could return to the days of Chatham, where the thunder of one man could collapse governments and the fate of a nation hung on the words of a speech in the Commons. But for good oratory we need only go so far back as the 1960s, to the era of Macleod’s ‘Brotherhood of man’ or even Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’. In place of eloquence, we have been left with vague aphorisms and meandering ‘mission statements’. Instead of Prime Ministers who could proudly declaim “Never had so much been owed by so many to so few” or had the eloquence to expound of “the winds of change is blowing through this continent”; we are left with yet another prime minister who, lectern and notes discarded, could reach no higher than a promise ‘to make politics work, to make it work better’.

The Guardian, the Mouth of Sauron in Britain.

One day, as a 16-year-old in the late 2000s, I received an AOL instant message from my friend Kenyon. He wanted to know whether I had heard of Esperanto, the universal language. Kenyon was several years older than me, and something of a mentor. Like me, he was a musician – he engineered my teenage band’s first record – but unlike me, he had a head full of trivia that made him the confidently nerdy star of any Saturday-night gathering of outcasts. His pitch: Esperanto was invented in the late 19th century by a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist named LL Zamenhof, who aimed to create a language so irresistibly easy to learn that it would be adopted as a shared second tongue by people the world over. From a position of mutual understanding, world peace would surely follow. Yes, the language had been around for well over 100 years and, yes, universal fellowship had yet to be achieved. But the internet had inaugurated a new era of global connectivity, and users could learn through an abundance of online classes. Perhaps we were on the verge of an Esperanto renaissance. Kenyon had been practising for a few years and was practically flua.

New York Post.

Hampered by the fact that the Mayor had all of the security cameras turned off to thwart ICE. What goes areound comes around.

A 15-year-old was arrested in connection to Sunday night’s senseless shooting at a popular Seattle food festival that left three dead and injured four, including a toddler, officials said.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson shared the update on the investigation on Monday while cops said another suspect died and the whereabouts of a third is still “unknown.”

“We believe this teenager opened fire in the crowd, but details are still under investigation,” Wilson said at a press conference.

The mayor said the unnamed teen is being investigated for firearms violations and first degree assault.

The lack of detail suggests that this was a Child of Color.

Worse on Purpose.

A listing of brands and whether to use or avoid them—and why.

I knew about the enshitification of Pyrex, but CorningWare surprised (and disappointed) me.

Approval of Le Creuset was a welcome surprise. And I’m happy about my Cutco knives, which I bought a decade ago and have never had to sharpen. Recently upgraded to a Made In griddle, and happy to see them among the elect.

You can subscribe to their alerts and updates for free. Highly recommended.

Read it.

I guess nobody reads the Fifth Amendment any more, much less the Fourth.

A federal case in Atlanta is raising questions about a privacy-focused mobile operating system, with prosecutors arguing that its features were used to erase evidence. The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute Atlanta resident Sam Tunick under a federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized.

The case centers on Tunick’s use of GrapheneOS, an open-source operating system that works on Google Pixel phones and lets users enter a passcode to wipe a device clean.

Experts said the legal approach is unusual and may be the first time the law has been aimed at an operating system. “It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,” said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a similar case.

…

Tunick was taken to a secondary screening room, where multiple agents questioned him. A motion filed by his defense argues the interrogation focused on child sexual abuse material as a pretext for investigating his connections to the protest movement. The motion also states that Tunick asked four times to speak with a lawyer and was denied each time. According to the same filing, agents did not present a warrant or read him his rights.

The Telegraph (UK).

Dozens of armed police officers and emergency services rushed to the Seattle Center complex at around 6pm local time on Sunday after rapid gunfire broke out during the event, named the Bite of Seattle.

The annual three-day festival is one of the city’s busiest events, having drawn more than 280,000 visitors last year.

Authorities have not yet confirmed the exact number of casualties.

However, Harborview Medical Centre was forced into a sudden lockdown to manage the influx of victims and a heightened police presence, according to an internal staff email seen by The Seattle Times.

Read it.

Institutions built to prevent atrocities eventually face the question of what they actually protect. For the United Nations, voting patterns, internal investigations and its own decisions this year no longer support the fiction of neutrality. An UNRWA school in Gaza sat above a Hamas tunnel shaft and three anti-tank positions, and its own principal was on the payroll of both institutions at once – a fact that American investigators, not the UN, brought to light.

The pattern is old: during the oil-for-food scandal, a mid-level program director faced US prosecution while the officials who managed the program from above kept their positions. When UN failures surface, line staff absorb the exposure. The people who set the policy rarely do.

The arithmetic alone dismantles the pretense of balance. In 2025 the UN General Assembly (UNGA) adopted 15 resolutions targeting Israel, and only 11 addressing the rest of the planet combined – a tally covering North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, Russia and the United States together. From 2015 through 2024, the total reached 173 resolutions against Israel, compared to 80 for all other member states combined. The UN Human Rights Council has run comparable numbers since 2006, adopting 112 resolutions against Israel compared to 45 against Syria, despite a civil war there that killed hundreds of thousands.

New York Post.

The ex-GOP aide accused of staging a politically motivated hate-crime hoax in New Jersey by slashing her body with scars is now dating a career criminal with an ankle monitor and a rap sheet spanning three states, sources told The Post.

Natalie Greene, who faces federal charges for allegedly orchestrating a fake 2025 attack in which “Trump whore” was carved onto her body while working for Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew, recently shared a smiling Fourth of July selfie with the heavily tattooed man.

People familiar with the relationship identified him as her boyfriend, 34-year-old Dylan Wayne Goetz, whom she allegedly met on the dating app Hinge.

You can’t make this shit up.

The Telegraph (UK).

Iran has been caught sending suspected covert operatives across the English Channel into the UK, The Telegraph can reveal.

Yeah, but what are they going to do about it? Under Labor, fuck all.

Individuals with links to Tehran’s intelligence agencies are understood to have been intercepted by UK authorities while attempting to enter Britain on small boats.

People smugglers working on the Continent told The Telegraph that the Iranian regime facilitated the passage to Britain of migrants living at Calais in exchange for a “favour” for Iran after they settled in England.

BuzzFeed, a Voice of the Crust.

Have you ever been on a first date so bad you seriously thought about walking out mid-meal? Same. The reasons can be all over the place. For one person, the reason could just be a date who chews with their mouth open. For another, it could be something more universal…like them showing up completely hammered with their shirt on inside out. And I know one person’s yuck is another person’s yum. But I think we could probably agree that most of these are pretty egregious.

Quite frankly, I’m astonished that such a feminine-negative treatment would get published in so gynocentric a publication. But people will surprise you. If you’re wondering about the ‘dating crisis’, look no further.

Says something about the sort of people who hang out at BuzzFeed, I suspect.

Neal Stephenson.

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

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

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

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

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

Check it out.

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

Michigan or Minnesota, take your pick.

Quillette.

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

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

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

Curtis Yarvin (‘Mencius Moldbug’):

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

. . .

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

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

Watch it.

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

Time to leave.