Archive for the 'Dystopia Watch' Category
The world is rapidly going downhill. Unfortunately, we can’t get off.
18th June 2021
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18th June 2021
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A Loudoun County, Va., middle schooler whose family asked that he not be exposed to transgender-themed lessons that go against their faith was placed in a small room adjacent to the dean’s office during that class the next day rather than an alternate lesson, according to the parents.
“[The boy’s mother] wasn’t happy about the fact that he was put in this isolation room,” said Brenda Tillett, president of Standup Virginia, a nonprofit that fights for parental rights and education, law enforcement and safe communities and election integrity. “I think that is giving a child a mental message that they’ve done something wrong because they’re placed in isolation.”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Virginia County’s Latest Blow-Up Is Parental Rights After Christian Student Placed in tiny room
17th June 2021
NPR throws its dress over its head.
Missouri has new a law that claims to invalidate all federal gun control laws — and prohibits state and local cooperation with enforcement of those laws.
Gov. Mike Parson signed the bill, known as HB 85 or the Second Amendment Preservation Act, into law Saturday at a gun store and shooting range called Frontier Justice.
The law declares federal laws and regulations “that infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment … must be invalid in this state.”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Missouri Has Declared Federal Gun Laws Invalid. Can It Do That?
17th June 2021
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Following the criminal indictment of a fellow officer, the entire Portland Police Rapid Response Team made the unanimous decision to resign, according to police sources via Portland news outlet KXL.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Entire Portland Police Rapid Response Team Resigns After Officer Indicted For Breaking Up Antifa Riot
17th June 2021
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17th June 2021
ZMan looks at the economy.
The American economy is a middleman economy, designed around the idea of there being a person or group of persons between the parties of a transaction. No matter how trivial the transaction, there is someone trying to get in on the deal. This middleman brings nothing to the transaction. He adds no value and only facilitates the deal because the rules have been set so that he is required. The middleman is the ever-present silent partner that is the point of the economic arrangements.
If you go back a century, selling a house involved three parties. The seller and buyer, of course, and the government. You had to register the transaction with the government so it was known who held the deed for the property. If there was a lien on the property, then the bank would be involved, but only on one side. Today there are dozens of people involved in the transaction. The government is promising to add dozens more in order to flood stable neighborhoods with magic.
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16th June 2021
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16th June 2021
The Other McCain sounds the alarm!
Are you encouraging skepticism toward the Biden administration’s policies? That’s “malicious content,” you extremist! Got a Trump bumper sticker on your car? Your neighbors will rat you out to the Department of Homeland Security, because obviously that’s “threatening behavior.”
Hey, let’s talk about “unindicted co-conspirators” for January 6.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Are You a Terrorist Threat? Do You Spread ‘Malicious Content Online’?
15th June 2021
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Uptown was, until recently, one of Minneapolis’s principal entertainment and shopping areas. Now, in the wake of Winston Boogie Smith’s shooting by law enforcement–he apparently opened fire first–a chunk of Uptown has been closed off to traffic and turned into an “autonomous zone” that is referred to by some as Boogie World. The area encompasses Lake Street, one of the city’s principal roadways, from Hennepin Avenue–another principal roadway–to Fremont Avenue. At this point, Uptown is essentially dead.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Boogie World: Bad News For the Dems
15th June 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
14th June 2021
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14th June 2021
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Does it catch fraud or manipulations of data? No, patently not: peer reviewers are not omniscient, so they cannot divine made-up data, nor can they check all the outputs of a lab to see when they’ve simply copy-and-pasted data between papers. If they were, we wouldn’t have the website PubPeer stuffed to the gills with people flagging potentially serious misdemeanors in published papers, nor Retraction Watch’s endless reporting of papers so dodgy they’re expunged from the literature.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Absurdity of Peer Review
13th June 2021
Petition calls for NJ school board members to resign after holidays removed from calendar: ‘Cancel culture’
ABC Gives Boost to Demings’ Campaign Against Rubio, Before Dem Primary
Forget Going Back to the Office–People Are Just Quitting Instead
“YouTube is shutting down dissenting Biology PhDs and MDs”
Election Assessment In Pennsylvania County Uncovers Five “Issues Of Note”
What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor (New York Times) Pushin’ that Narrative into the ground. I’d like to see What the New York Times Doesn’t Want to Admit About the Rich.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
13th June 2021
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A major pandemic that killed more than 600,000 Americans is finally winding down. Taxes are raised on individuals and corporations. The nation has experienced the most progressive presidency in American history. White supremacy is a major threat, as race riots hit some cities. Systemic racism is everywhere. Soldiers are coming home after a long war. A reportedly debilitated President is largely protected by his spouse. Major movements are afoot to improve the human condition.
An apt description of today? Try 1920, (more specifically, 1913-1921) some 100 years ago.
Woodrow Wilson is arguably the most evil person ever elected President of the United States.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on When Progressives Last Ran America
12th June 2021
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11th June 2021
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10th June 2021
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10th June 2021
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One graph says it all.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Value of One US Dollar in the United States 1635-2020
8th June 2021
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7th June 2021
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Nearly a year later, Umbrella Man has not been arrested. Charges have not been brought against him. Umbrella Man remains at large. Libor did not identify him in his July 28 story because he has not been charged.
Officer Christensen’s account of events was taken at face value in the numerous news accounts that immediately followed the Star Tribune story, but it is ludicrous. Spectator USA’s pseudonymous Cockburn conducted a reality check in “The curious Umbrella Man myth.” Subhead: “Cockburn hasn’t seen this many people excited about an umbrella since Mary Poppins hit theaters in 1964.” Cockburn drily noted in July 2020: “Cockburn would have thought that the carnage of the past month would render one man’s window smashing a historical footnote. But instead, the opposite has happened, for the usual 2020 reason: it is politically useful.”
I thought Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was responsible for the key event that led to the destruction wrought throughout the Twin Cities following the death of George Floyd. The key event was the abandonment of the Third Precinct headquarters on May 28.
Mayor Frey too remains at large. His dereliction was not illegal.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Whatever Happened to Umbrella Man?
7th June 2021
ZMan follows the scent.
Now that the Covid panic is finally winding down, it is a good time to look at how it quickly became a religion for many people. It is fair to assume that most people looked at Covid as a blend of public health and public policy. They do not know much about either topic, so they trusted what they were told. Others, however, embraced Covid and the rules around it like a new religion. The rituals and statistics quickly became the central point around which they organized their lives.
One of the first signs of this happening were the personal testimonials. By the late spring of last year, the Covidian had stories to tell. “I know of four people who have died from Covid this month” was a popular one. Despite the statistical improbability, millions were telling us about their personal war with Covid. The victims became younger as the age realty became apparent. Finally at the end, we are getting stories about the unvaccinated dying despite being healthy.
…
It is not an accident that the same people who tote grimy canvas sacks to the grocery store were the first to embrace the rituals of Covid. All civic religions in the modern age come with these piety symbols, usually with a corporate logo. Public television stations made millions giving members tote bags with the logo on them. Note that American sports teams quickly rushed out branded face masks. In a world of strangers, displaying your corporate overlord is important.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Panic Culture
7th June 2021
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In a story about Dr. Aruna Khilanani, we learn that no matter how many degrees a person has, he or she can become a purveyor of mental illness and hatred. Dr. Khilanani provided a lecture for Yale University, and her sickness was on display for everyone to hear. Bari Weiss received access to the doctor’s talk and you can hear the whole lecture here. Essentially the doctor shared with her audience her unscientific, racist, and hateful attitudes towards white people in general. She felt no need to defend her positions, but instead criticized Bari Weiss, who received access to the taped lecture before the doctor did. Judging from the quality of the recording, it’s possible that it was recorded by someone who attended the event.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Truth or Fantasy?
6th June 2021
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Everybody is talking about some lady psychoanalyst of Pakistani descent who gave a speech at Yale Law School on “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind” that sounds like some 1980s Eddie Murphy routine about “Kill My Landlord” or “Kill the White People.”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Aruna Khilanani: Black Rage and Pakistani Peevishness
5th June 2021
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4th June 2021
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4th June 2021
Severian is delightfully dyspeptic today.
As y’all undoubtedly know, mental illness is something of a badge of honor in the ivory tower. Screw HIPAA; most people in academia are willing, indeed eager, to tell you all about their mental problems. The students mostly do it to get out of classwork, of course — the minute you get the letter from Student Services, you can go ahead and start filing the “incomplete” paperwork with the registrar — but grad students and professors collect DSM diagnoses and SSRI prescriptions like the Japanese collect Pokemon and used panties.
Given that, and given how lunatic professors’ actual beliefs are, there’s pretty much nothing you can’t get away with saying in the ivory tower if you play your cards right. In much the same way Jon Stewart rode his “clown nose on / clown nose off” act to adulation from the smart set, you can say whatever you want if you keep it ambiguously crazy. (You know how it goes — if you agree with Stewart, he’s doing straight political commentary; but if you disagree with him to the point where he might lose sponsors, c’mon man, he’s just a tv comedian).
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Thoughts About Academia
4th June 2021
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San Francisco is coming undone. In recent years, the city has manifested a series of visible and persistent inequalities, with a spoils-to-the-victor world for its technological elite and a chaotic, brutalized world for its dispossessed.
In the city’s Tenderloin district, men openly hawk drugs on the street corners, desperate addicts are crumpled across the sidewalks, and first responders dart through the chaos to revive overdose victims.
The city has become a web of contradictions. There are thousands of new millionaires and, by the latest estimates, 18,000 people in and out of homelessness.
The headquarters of Uber, Twitter, and Square are blocks away from the open-air drug markets of the Tenderloin, Mid-Market, and SoMa. Wealthy families attending an art opening at the Civic Center have to cross through the tent encampments that line the sidewalks.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on San Francisco Shows Leftist Policies Can’t Solve Homelessness
3rd June 2021
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3rd June 2021
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Buckhead is a well-to-do district in Atlanta with around 86,000 residents. It has not been exempt from Atlanta’s crime wave (homicides in Atlanta are up 59 percent from this time last year, when the city ended up with its highest total in two decades). One new Buckhead resident was victimized by break-ins to her vehicles twice within a period of a few weeks. Then, there was a shootout on her street.
In response to this crime surge, some residents and business leaders are pushing for Buckhead to become its own municipality. This would enable residents to use their tax dollars to take effective crime prevention measures, something the city is failing to do.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Crime Wave Sparks Secession Movement in Atlanta
3rd June 2021
Severian is delightfully dyspeptic today.
The Z Man’s essay today is on electric cars, which prompted me to comment with a story from my professing days. You’ve heard me say quite often that the nicest car in the faculty lot always belongs to the wildest-eyed Marxist. Given what we know about the stiffness of the “most insane Marxist” competition among eggheads, it seems to follow that the faculty lot must look like a rap video — Bugattis and Bentleys and Maybachs everywhere. But that’s not the case, comrades.*
Not because academics are worried about anything so prole as hypocrisy — as we know, cognitive dissonance only affects the Dirt People — but because eggheads operate on a different scale of values. Bentleys etc. are what those people drive — we all know it, but we can’t say it — so professors have to kick it bobo style.** Thus the faculty lot is filled with Priuses (Prii?), Teslas, and so forth. Back when The Simpsons was funny, it had a throwaway joke about Ed Begley Jr. driving a car so eco-friendly, it was powered entirely by his own sense of self-regard. If they actually marketed those, every professor in America would have one… but since they don’t, the “eco-pimp my ride” competition continues unabated.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Luxury Beliefs
3rd June 2021
Victor Davis Hanson.
During America’s first-ever national lockdown, thousands of unelected bureaucrats, as well as federal and state governments, assumed enormous powers not usually accorded them.
They picked and chose which businesses could stay open without much rationale. They sent the infected into rest homes occupied by the weak and vulnerable.
Their rules of prosecuting those who violated social distancing, sheltering in place, mask-wearing, or violent protesting hinged on political grounds. Their spending bills on “infrastructure” and “health care” were excuses to lard up redistributive entitlements.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Never Let a Plague Go To Waste
3rd June 2021
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The Big Tech social media giants are having to rethink their policy of censoring anybody who suggests that COVID originated from a lab near Wuhan, rather than through some local chowing down on sweet and sour pangolin testicles. This is because it now seems quite possible, if not probable, that the virus was kindly bestowed upon us by Chinese scientists. I don’t know either way, but I would suggest that a suspicion that the virus was man-made, given the proximity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, scarcely qualifies as a lunatic conspiracy theory to be banned from public utterance. But that’s what the Big Tech companies decided — almost certainly for political reasons. They did not like Donald Trump making such aspersions, nor his tendency to refer to COVID as ‘Chinese flu’ (because it came from China) and still less ‘Kung flu’.
By and large the major liberal institutions concurred: the utterly hopeless World Health Organization refused to entertain the suggestion that the virus had leaked from the WIV and the major liberal broadcasters in the US scarcely covered the suggestion at all. A couple of leftish American journos were invited into the WIV and marveled at how clean everything was, what nice space suits everyone wore and how people definitely weren’t throwing chunks of COVID out of the windows every few minutes, and thus gave it a clean bill of health. The idea thus got pushed into the conspiracy theory dungeon, a realm of racists and reactionaries. The banning of this idea, that the virus was man-made and leaked from a Chinese lab, was not because it was wrong, necessarily, but because it came from the political right and challenged the liberal view. How kind it is of them, then, to think again.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Big Tech Is Turning Into Big Brother
2nd June 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
2nd June 2021
Kay C. James.
As a black conservative for more than 40 years, I’m an expert on being canceled. I was canceled by the political left long before cancel culture was all the rage. If there’s one thing liberals and leftists dislike more than a conservative, it’s a black conservative.
Liberal America doesn’t want to hear from African American conservatives because we go counter to their narrative that black people needed liberal saviors, especially ones who come bearing gifts of more government.
But we weren’t just canceled by liberals. For decades, liberals worked to put a wedge between black conservatives and our own communities. As a result, many African American leaders wouldn’t invite us to the table and wouldn’t allow us to offer our ideas to help solve problems in our own communities. We weren’t considered “authentically black”—whatever that is.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on 7 Ways to Survive Cancel Culture
2nd June 2021
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Last year, Davon Brown, a former fashion model turned homeless activist, conned his way into an LA Ritz-Carlton luxury suite alongside Jed Parriot, the son of a producer on Grey’s Anatomy.
t was May Day, Brown was wearing a blazer and sunglasses. The former fashion model and son of a wealthy producer were there to ‘occupy’ a luxury suite for the homeless. And demand that the city take over hotel rooms and hand them out to the population of junkie vagrants.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti held a press conference and assured Brown that he would get him a room. When the son of the Grey’s Anatomy producer was asked how to spell his name, he sneered, ““Parriott, like Marriott—which has 900 empty rooms.”
Jed, a Democratic Socialists of America activist, appears to live in a $1.3 million home in Silver Lake owned by a trust controlled by his parents: a prolific TV producer and a TV actress.
Just good clean fun, right? Kids being kids?
Brianna Moore, a talented 18-year-old concert violinist with offers from MIT, decided to get involved in the summer of protests. After a series of Black Lives Matter marches, she joined the homeless cause, and died in an Echo Park tent after taking cocaine laced with fentanyl.
Think of it as evolution in action. Natural Selection doesn’t care about your good intentions, only about what you do.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Richest Homeless in the World
1st June 2021
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31st May 2021
China Allows Families To Have Up To 3 Children Amid Dramatic Drop In Birth Rates That’s very white of them.
‘Blue Lives Murder’ Merchandise For Sale On Amazon
New York Times Opinion Editor Denies They’re Progressives or Partisans And if you believe that one they’ll tell you another one.
Woman Catches State Police Attaching Tracker to Her Car, Now They Want It Back So give it back. Use a hammer on it first, though.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
31st May 2021
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In order to carry out the business of increasing property values, the HOA enacts and enforces a series of rules designed to ensure that neighborhood standards of conformity are met. You?ve probably noticed that HOA neighborhoods tend to have dozens or hundreds of substantially identical homes. This is by design. Conformity is easier to enforce in similar homes. Customization of any kind becomes easier to spot.
The HOA will limit what color you can paint your house, how many people can live in it, how many – and what type of – vehicles you can park in the driveway, how often you need to paint the exterior, where you place your garbage dumpsters, and the condition of your landscaping. They can also prevent you from adding on to the house, or maintaining out-buildings, like tool sheds or a tree house for your kids. And that?s just the general stuff.
Once you?ve been prohibited from doing something with your property, or made to do something you don?t want to, you begin to get a clearer picture of what?s really going on.
To add insult to injury, should you be found to be in violation the HOA has the legal right to impose legally enforceable fines on you, that are automatically attached to your property.
They give you a very good look at America under Communism, with Karens in charge. You don’t want that.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 2 Comments »
31st May 2021
Sarah Hoyt says what we all know to be true.
Prove to me that we’re not being run by a cabal of our enemies. Prove it.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on A Cabal of Our Enemies
31st May 2021
Watch it.
In this special edition of The American Mind Podcast, Michael Anton, former Trump official and senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is joined by Curtis Yarvin, formerly “Mencius Moldbug” of the successful blog “Unqualified Reservations.” The two debate what to do if and when the current regime crumbles under the weight of its own incompetence. Yarvin makes his case for a Big Tech CEO-turned-monarch.
Yarvin is one of the most outrageous people you will ever encounter. Unqualified Reservations, although now no longer current, is easily found archived on the Internet; it’s lots of fun.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Stakes: The American Monarchy?
31st May 2021
Victor Davis Hanson.
Once upon a time long ago, we agreed there were certain immutable laws of human nature. These laws were based on facts, reality, and data.
In other words, we accepted common sense about the way the world worked according to logical and even “scientific” principles. That assumption defined us as “enlightened” rather than Dark Age reductionists and ideological- or myth-driven zealots.
Not now. “Progressives,” especially the media, are most often regressive, anti-Enlightenment, and intolerant people, who start with a deductive premise and then make the evidence conform to it—or else.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The New Regressive Dark Ages
31st May 2021
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30th May 2021
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30th May 2021
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A Stockton, California high school principal was escorted off of school property by law enforcement officers after his controversial graduation speech, telling the crowd, “Successful people stomp on each other,” on Thursday.
Stagg High School Principal Ben Nakamura gave the graduating class of 2021 a lot to think about in his commencement speech Thursday morning. While the school board said they got many complaints saying Nakamura inappropriately used the graduation as an opportunity to complain about personal issues, some community members have said it was unfair that he was removed from the graduation.
In an email to Newsweek, Melinda Meza, a spokesperson for Stockton Unified School District, said they “received several complaints from parents that the principal at Stagg High School used the graduation as a platform for his personal grievances.”
California.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Principal Escorted Off School Grounds After Graduation Speech: ‘Successful People Stomp On Each Other’
29th May 2021
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29th May 2021
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YOU COULD fill a small library with books on right-wing populism. Some authors argue that these movements emerged in reaction to relatively recent events, such as the financial crisis of 2007-09 or the advent of social media. Others look to longer-lasting regional trends, like European integration or racial politics in America.
Thomas Piketty, an economist, became famous for a book that analysed 200 years of data on wealth inequality in a wide range of countries. This month he published a paper, co-written by Amory Gethin and Clara Martínez-Toledano, which applies a similar approach to the relationship between demography and ideology. Its findings imply that the electoral victories of Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign in 2016 were not an abrupt departure from precedent, but rather the consequence of a 60-year-old international trend.
…
The paper finds that income and education began diverging as predictors of ideology long ago. In 1955 both the richest and the most educated voters tended to support conservative parties. Conversely, both poorer and less-educated people mostly chose labour or social-democratic ones.
Today, wealthy people still lean to the right. In contrast, the relationship between education and ideology began to reverse as early as the 1960s. Every year, the 10% of voters with the most years of schooling gravitated towards left-wing parties, while the remaining 90% slid the other way. By 2000, this had gone on for so long that, as a group, the most educated voters became more left-wing than their less-educated peers. The gap has only grown since then.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Educated Voters’ Leftward Shift Is Surprisingly Old And International
29th May 2021
The Other McCain gives you the details.
Say hello to Joshua Nazario, 22.
Daley was waiting for a train on the southbound N/Q/R/W platform around 10 p.m. Wednesday when suspect Joshua Nazario, 22, crept up from behind and started hacking away at her neck and shoulders, cops said.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous
28th May 2021
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28th May 2021
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Antagonism to Big Health is making unlikely allies of crunchy moms and right-wing trads.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Health Alliance
27th May 2021
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