UnHerd.

Early in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, a magician performs a trick with a small bird which disappears in a cage flattened on the table. A small boy in the audience starts to cry, distraught that the bird was killed. The magician approaches him and finishes the trick, gently producing a living bird out of his hand — but the boy is not convinced, insisting that this must be another bird, the dead bird’s brother. After the show, we see the magician alone, putting a bird squashed into the trash where many other dead birds lie. The boy was right. The trick could not be performed without violence and death, but it relies for its effectiveness upon concealing the squalid, broken residue of what has been sacrificed, disposing of it where no one who matters will see. Therein resides the basic premise of a dialectical notion of progress: when a new higher stage arrives, there must be a squashed bird somewhere. 

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Ever since the possibility of North Korea assisting Russia in its war effort emerged in the Summer of 2022, quantifying exactly what that would look like and its downstream effects have been challenging. Now, as indications point to North Korean troops wading into the direct fighting, one aspect of this major geopolitical shift beyond how it impacts Ukraine couldn’t be more clear — North Korea getting real-world combat experience on a modern battlefield alongside a well-versed ally is a very unwelcome development for South Korea and the United States.

The experience aspect of North Korea’s involvement in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is one we have stressed repeatedly, but it’s often overlooked, with the focus being more on the immediate impact an influx of troops could have for the Kremlin’s cause. This is understandable as Russia has experienced heavy losses and Ukraine has as well. Any major infusion of able bodies into the fighting from an external source could erode either side’s ability to compete on the battlefield.

The American Mind.

If Donald Trump wins the presidency for a second time, the number of things he could potentially focus on will vastly exceed the amount of time available. During a presidential term that will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—and hence of the United States of America—one obvious priority should be to ensure a spirited celebration of our glorious Founding, not a woke grievance session focused on claims of “systemic racism.” But beyond that, Trump will have to pick and choose among various competing priorities.

Of course, the primary responsibility of any president—and one that has often been neglected of late—is to execute the laws as written. The first line of Article II of the Constitution, after all, vests the president with the executive power. Simply fulfilling this basic constitutional requirement would reap huge dividends for the American citizenry, especially on the issue of immigration. Our current border crisis has been fueled—and deliberately so—by the Biden Administration’s refusal to enforce federal immigration laws (specifically its failure to enforce the legal requirement that those seeking asylum be detained until their claims can be adjudicated).

Beyond faithfully enforcing the law (backed by a competent legal team that believes in that mission), Trump should quickly undo all of the damaging executive orders that President Biden has issued. Executive orders are supposed to be guidance to executive branch personnel about how to enforce the law. Biden’s orders and proclamations, however, have often veered into quasi-lawmaking, such as his kingly mask and vaccine decrees and his edict that student loan debt should be transferred from borrowers to taxpayers as a whole.

Reuters.

A teenager accused of murdering three young girls in a knife attack in northern England in July has been further charged with a terrorism offence and the production of deadly poison ricin, police and prosecutors said on Tuesday.

Axel Rudakubana, 18, is accused of killing the three young girls aged between six and nine at a Taylor Swift dance event in Southport, murders which shocked the nation and provoked days of rioting across the country.

Police said the incident was still not being treated as terrorist related but said after searches of his home, Rudakubana had now been charged with two further offences: production of a deadly biological toxin, ricin, and the possession of an al Qaeda training manual.

Here’s a picture of ‘UK teen’ Axel Rudakubana:

UPDATE: The Al Qaeda Manual and Ricin — Motive Unknown

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Batman is a hero for stopping the criminals threatening the people of Gotham City. Daniel Penny is on trial for stopping a criminal threatening the people of New York City. It doesn’t get much more backward than this.

Spiderman faced this problem all the time.

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A 23-year-old woman has been arrested after she posted on social media about having gotten away with ripping down Greek flags at a New Jersey restaurant that she believed were Israeli.

The incident at Efi’s Gyro in Montclair, New Jersey, occurred March 11, but it wasn’t until Amber Matthews posted the video to TikTok on Oct. 15 that police were able to identify her. She was arrested on Tuesday and charged with bias intimidation and harassment.

In the video, Matthews, who went by the name “Ambamelia” on her now-removed TikTok account, can be heard berating employees about the “genocide” in Gaza. She posted the video with the text “The time I mistakenly thought the flag for Greek was for Israel and took the restaurants flag down OMG.”

You’d think the big cross on the flag would have been a clue, but I guess the ignorance of her generation passes all previous records.

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HEN ELIZABETH FOX moved from Athabasca to the central Alberta hamlet of Elnora in 2013, finding a family doctor close to home was a breeze. “I was pregnant,” she says, “so they’ll all take you.”

But seven or eight years later, Fox’s clinic emailed her to say she was being de-rostered—removed from her doctor’s list of patients—and would have to find a new doctor. The doctor didn’t come in very much, and they needed her for other patients.

“Don’t you just shift your patients around?” Fox recalls asking. They didn’t, and it was up to her to find someone new. With three kids and a declining number of doctors accepting new patients, that proved easier said than done. Her family joined the 650,000 other Albertans who, according to the Alberta Medical Association, lack access to regular primary care.

Unspoken assumption: Canada has mandatory government-paid-for health care. Hence the talk of government mucking about with the fees. In effect, everybody in Canada is on Medicare.

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Following civil unrest after Welsh-born Rwandan, Axel Rudakubana, murdered three girls and injured ten at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper promised Parliament that she would act on long-held concerns that “not enough is being done to counter extremism—including both Islamist extremism and far right extremism.” Condemning all demonstrations as “not about grievance [but] … thuggery, racism and crime,” Cooper announced she had ordered the Home Office to conduct a “rapid review” of the Prevent programme to combat “poisonous ideologies that corrode community cohesion and fray the fabric of our democracy.”

But both the priorities of the new Labour government and the conduct of the Home Office and College of Policing should cause concern. Those who value free speech, and want to ensure that the likes of the Southport massacre never happen again, will be targeted by hate crime and counter-terroism operations, all paid for by our own taxes. Here’s how the UK Home Office polices thought-crime in Britain.

Wall Street Journal.

Another urgent conflict in the Middle East is playing out on the border between Syria and Jordan: a war against captagon, an amphetamine-like drug that’s taken off across the region.

The drug cuts across social class and borders. It’s used by taxi drivers handling late-night shifts, militia fighters looking to induce courage, students studying for exams, and high-powered executives wanting to work, or party, long hours.

It’s all added up to a multibillion-dollar drug trade that is fueling more conflict in the region. Money from drug smuggling has lined the pockets of Iran-backed militias, including Hezbollah, which has spent vast amounts of its proceeds on weapons to fight Israel. The drug props up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has become one of the world’s biggest drug syndicates, helping it offset years of punishing Western economic sanctions.

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The head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Michigan is incensed with The New York Times and with The Heritage Foundation (something that rarely happens simultaneously). The newspaper published an article making it clear that diversity, equity, and inclusion has been a flop at Ann Arbor, and it cited Heritage. That was enough for Tabbye Chavous to throw a fit.

Chavous, University of Michigan’s vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer, excoriated the newspaper and the foundation in a letter posted on her LinkedIn page.

The article by the newspaper’s Nicholas Confessore speaks for itself, and I urge people to read it. However, the gist was hardly novel to DEI critics who have been spotlighting the flaws with this ideology for several years now.

Basically, because it is intrinsically divisive, DEI causes grievances and more division. It’s that simple.

It was important, however, that in this instance, it was The New York Times saying it.

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I gave up reading American literary fiction when its authors gave up writing it. The novel was born with its subject, the bourgeois individual. When it became uncool to be bourgeois and individual, literary novelists abandoned realism (the means of portraying society) and plotting (the ends of the individual’s story). What remained was character (subjective perceptions) and politics (the objective goal of social life). The vestiges of the Puritan personality disorder mean that character must always align with politics.

I exempt detective fiction and spy novels. These genres remain true to form and readership, so they retain a high degree of craft: plausible social detail, competent plotting, and coherent character motivation. Without these constraints, American literary fiction, which was world-class in the century between Mark Twain and Tom Wolfe, has devolved into pious, slackly written slop, a cynical mixture of self-help, affirmative action, and movie pitches.

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Califurnia doesn’t care; all their cars are electric.

‘Regulatory pressure’ is a great tool — rather than trying to outlaw something that it would be unconstitutional for them to outlaw, they just increase the ‘regulatory pressure’ until it’s impossible to comply without going broke, so the business closes down. It’s like a boss, rather than going through the hassle of firing you, makes your life at work miserable until you have to quit.

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It was announced today that the UK will transfer sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius. Assuming this happens before March, this means when the sun sets on the Pitcairn Islands (18:50 Local time: UTC-8, 02:50 London time: UTC), the sun will have set on all British territory for the first time in over 200 years.

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In a surprising yet overdue move, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has released its Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for the New York Bight. This document, despite its extensive layers of technical jargon and cautious language, marks a pivotal shift. It appears to be a rare admission from BOEM that offshore wind farms are indeed capable of causing harm—biologically, socioeconomically, physically, and culturally.

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Police in the 2024 battleground state of Pennsylvania are investigating some 2,500 voter registration forms that were submitted in two massive batches — and investigators say that 60% of the forms they’ve checked so far are fraudulent. All of the ballots were submitted in Lancaster County, but two other counties are scrutinizing similarly suspect batches. While officials say it’s the work of a “large-scale canvassing operation,” they’re not yet saying who’s behind it.

The roughly 2,500 applications landed at or near Pennsylvania’s Oct 21 registration deadline; some observers are speculating that the timing may have been tactical, with the intent of exploiting time-pressure administrators would be under ahead of the Nov. 5 Election Day. However, as they examined the massive heap of forms, application processors were immediately alarmed by what they saw:

• Multiple applications with the same handwriting and signatures

• Many forms filled out on the same day

• Applications for previously-registered voters whose signatures on the forms did not match the ones on file

LifeHacker.

Idealist nerds have a long history of giving terribly confusing names to potentially revolutionary technology. So it goes with Fediverse, a portmanteau of “Federation” and “Universe,” and the potential future of the social internet. But what does that mean?

Put simply, the Fediverse is the collective name for a bunch of different social networks and platforms that are connected to one another. Users on any of these services can follow users on any other one and respond to, like, and share posts.

There are a lot of articles and websites that explain this concept in detail, but most of them get bogged down in technical language pretty quickly. I’d like to avoid that, so here’s my good faith attempt to explain what the Fediverse is in plain English.

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Italy will strengthen its digital services tax as part of plans to raise more revenues in the 2025 budget, Deputy Economy Minister Maurizio Leo said on Wednesday, in a move that could trigger retaliation from the United States.

Washington has threatened tariffs over unilateral digital taxes in Europe such as the Italian levy, which applies to Meta Platforms Inc (META.O), opens new tab, Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab and Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab and has so far raised 400 million euros ($436 million).

A senior Italian official, who declined to be named, said the government had authorised the tax increase without receiving any tacit approval from Washington.

“Our politicians have decided to take a risk,” the official said.

Italy in 2019 introduced a 3% levy on revenue from internet transactions for digital companies with sales of at least 750 million euros ($817.13 million), at least 5.5 million of which are made in Italy.
The government will remove these minimum conditions necessary for the tax to be applied, Leo said, confirming an earlier Reuters report.

They see the U.S. government sticking their hands in to Mark Zuckerberg et al.’s pockets and want to get a piece of the action.

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Tennessee’s top prosecutor said Wednesday that his office uncovered a scheme by the Biden-Harris administration to release a massive number of illegal aliens into the state, but the plan ultimately was derailed.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, attempted to release illegal aliens into Tennessee, but those plans were scrapped following pushback from the governor and other lawmakers, according to documents obtained by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Federal immigration authorities had attempted to transport potentially thousands of single adult migrants from out-of-state detention facilities and release them into Tennessee in coordination with nonprofit groups, alleged Skrmetti, a Republican.

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Recent developments in gang activity across the United States are demonstrating an alarming trend of violence, among other things. Major cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Los Angeles are witnessing an increase in gang-related incidents. This has Americans across the board concerned to say the least.

Many of these gangs have evolved past the drug trade and violence that they have been known for in the past. As technology has improved, many have adapted with the times. Now, there’s more incidents of identity theft and fraud.

Of course, if you don’t live in a Democrat-controlled metropolitan area, or rural Mexico, you have little to fear from any gangs.

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Look for … the Union label….

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Science and Nature, two leading science journals, have revealed a growing problem: an alarming rise in fraudulent research papers produced by shady paper mill companies. This wave of fake studies is creating a major headache for the academic world, putting the integrity of global academic research at risk.

Paper mill companies offer authorship services to researchers, academics, and students who want their names listed as an author of a scientific article published in reputable scientific journals.

By paying around €180 to €5000 (approximately US$197 – $5472), a person can have their name listed as the author of research paper, without having to painstakingly do research and write the results. No doubt, some experts refer to these paper mills as illegal and criminal organizations.

ZMan cuts to the chase.

The fact is, these antiwhite pogroms, whatever you want to call them, are the logical outcome of generations of jurisprudence. The “Brown Test”, named for the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, implemented a set of racial and cultural standards that effectively eliminated free association and made openness the standard against which everything is measured. In effect, it made anything that results in racial inequality both illegal and immoral.

That means it is impossible to have a color-blind society under the Brown doctrine because it would lead to racial inequality. The underlying assumption of Brown and the entire moral edifice that sprang from it is that any racial inequality, not matter how trivial, must be the result of discrimination by whites. Therefore, a colorblind society that has racial inequality will mean that color blindness is the cause. It is why people like Ibram X. Kendi can reasonably say color blindness is racism.

This is what makes race a binary issue. You either understand the moral reasoning that lies behind the novelty of the word “racism” or you do not and simply accept it as part of your ethics. You either understand and accept the reality of race as a biological matter or you reject it and embrace the blank slate ideology. There is no middle position and no way to pick a few things from one column and a few from the other to create yourself a bespoke racial awareness.

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Hungary has formally asked the European Parliament to lift the immunity of Italian Green MEP Ilaria Salis, who was imprisoned in Hungary for brutally beating up innocent civilians on the streets of Budapest.

…

Ilaria Salis, a 40-year-old former teacher, was arrested and imprisoned in Hungary last year for participating in a series of attacks organised by the Hammerbande (Hammer Gang), a German left-wing militant group linked to Antifa. The members of the group surrounded and bludgeoned nine innocent people—who the attackers decided “looked like” neo-Nazis based on their choice of clothing—with telescopic batons and hammers on the streets of Budapest.

Salis was arrested and charged with three counts of attempted assault and accused of being part of an extreme left-wing organisation. Her case was widely reported in European media, especially in Italy, with left-wing journalists focusing on her alleged “inhumane” treatment in prison, and not on the shocking crimes she committed.

In May this year, she was released from prison and transferred to house arrest in Budapest, and after her election as an MEP, she gained legal immunity and was released.

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In a record-breaking incident, a boat carrying 231 migrants arrived at the Canary Islands, the largest single migrant vessel to reach the archipelago.

The boat, which departed from The Gambia, carried 58 minors and 13 women among the passengers, all of African origin, including individuals from Senegal, Mali, and Guinea. The dangerous journey across the Atlantic left three of the migrants in need of hospital treatment for minor injuries.

This arrival comes on the heels of a tragic shipwreck in September, the worst in the Canary Islands in 30 years, which left 50 people missing. The number of migrants reaching the Canary Islands has surged this year, with 32,878 individuals arriving between January and mid-October, a 39.7% increase compared to last year. Of this figure, 2,875 migrants arrived in October alone, 467 of them unaccompanied minors.

Why do they do it? (a) They know they’re not going to be sent back where they came from. (b) They know they aren’t going to be left to starve. (c) They know that their injuries will be treated with better medical care than they would get back ‘home’.

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It’s not an easy task these days to commemorate, as the world around us has accelerated. Everything and everyone rushes. For many, the only thing that matters is to seize and experience something instantly: a bite and a sip, a selfie and a post, a tweet and a share. Before you know it, before you could actually enjoy it, it’s already there, and the next one is right on the production line: the newer, the better; the faster, the trendier.

But recalling the memories and values of 1956 offers an opportunity to pause for a moment and reflect: there are things that are stronger than the passage of time and that resist being buried beneath it. These are, for instance, the heroes, their great deeds, or memory itself. Be it a 150, 100, or even 68 years, truly great heroes and feats must be commemorated. Because where heroes are remembered, there will always be new ones! For us Hungarians, 23 October 1956 is one such day in our memory, the cornerstone of our nation.

In the battle of ’56, the people became a nation. The country united. Young and old, man and woman, worker and intellectual, peasant and soldier shared the very same wish: freedom for Hungary, because Hungarians cannot live without freedom. No matter how many times we were deprived of it, sooner or later we regained it. If needed, we fought for it; if forced, we died for it. In October 1956, the freedom we reclaimed brought an end to the fear. If we take a look at the photographs and film footage taken in those late October days, and gaze at one of the faces for a longer time, we might picture what his life must have been like, what his aspirations were, what he hoped for. We shall recognize him as a fellow compatriot longing for freedom, one who has taken the hand of the person standing next to him, clinging to a stranger. He trusted the others, because he knew that they too wanted to be free.

The events of 1956, not only the suppression of the Eastern Europe revolts but Eisenhower’s humiliation of the British and the French over Suez, brought home to the slaves of Communism that No One Is Coming To Save You and that they couldn’t count on any useful help from the U.S. in trying to get free.

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It is well known that California has been among the worst-performing states in the country in terms of job growth. But the latest statistics show that nearly all jobs that are being created in California are government jobs. Between January 2022 and June 2024, total California jobs grew by about 156,000, with government jobs accounting for 96.5 percent of that growth.

California’s job creation record has been even more dismal over the last 18 months. Since January 2023, private-sector employment in the state declined by over 46,000 workers. California’s private-sector job collapse is unprecedented, and with the state representing nearly 12 percent of the country’s population, it is a drag on the nation’s economy.

Part of California’s job weakness reflects the number of people and businesses leaving the state. California’s population declined by about 75,000 between 2022 and 2023 (the latest data available), and a number of business headquarters have departed.

Not to mention that California government, state and city, are hostile to business in the extreme. Between punitive minimum wage laws, police incompetence to do anything about mobs looting stores, shoplifters hauling out carts of loot that no one dare impede, and oppressive taxes, I’m surprised that there are any businesses left in California.

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Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. has removed several accounts across Threads and Instagram that were used to track celebrities’ private jets, including the jet owned by its Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, citing a risk of “physical harm.”

The accounts, which rely on publicly available information to track a jet’s location and CO2 emissions, among other details, were banned without warning this week after Meta updated its privacy policy. The newly banned accounts include those tracking planes for celebrities, including Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, and business leaders, including Zuckerberg, former Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos, and Tesla Inc. CEO and X owner Elon Musk.

As I was once told by a wise old gunnery sergeant, “If they can’t find you, they can’t hurt you.”

Many of the accounts impacted were operated by Jack Sweeney, a Florida college student who has gained notoriety by tracking celebrity jets. In a letter posted to his Threads account, Sweeney said he “received no communication from Meta” about the bans before they were initiated. “These platforms operate without transparency, and it feels like they make arbitrary decisions,” he wrote.

There is no legitimate reason to ‘track celebrity jets’, and the obvious abuse to which such information is liable ought to be obvious to any person with a room-temperature IQ. Anybody who would have been surprised by Meta’s action probably has a hard time walking and chewing gum at the same time.

It’s not Sweeney’s first run-in with a tech company or billionaire that wanted his accounts removed. Musk has long taken issue with Sweeney’s account that tracked his private plane, once calling the information his “assassination coordinates.” Shortly after buying X in late 2022, he banned Sweeney’s account and made a new rule that forbid sharing someone else’s location in real-time. Sweeney still tracks Musk’s jet on X, but posts the jet’s location on a 24-hour delay.

If I had Elon Musk’s money, I’d have a couple of goons visit him and explain the error of his ways. That’s the only sure method to keep him from just starting fresh accounts and continuing being a brat.

Insider.

It feels like a distant memory, but once upon a time America’s carmakers produced vehicles in a veritable rainbow of colors. As recently as 2005, more than half of all automobiles on the road were painted a color other than black, white, silver, or gray. Some of the tints even sported names straight out of a Hot Wheels collection: Tangerine Scream, Go Green, Plum Crazy.

But over the past quarter century, the range of hues has narrowed dramatically. Today, less than 20% of vehicles listed in our database of 1.7 million cars are a color other than black, white, silver, or gray. In an age of infinite digital luminosity, America’s roads have become as dull and washed out as a Civil War daguerreotype.

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The Regime Media takes delight in exhibiting recently conquered conservatives as role models for others to emulate. Such was the case during Adam Kinzinger’s tearful heyday, but the Regime now has a bigger prize: former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.

As part of her endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, Cheney is touring the country in hopes of wrangling disaffected conservatives over to Harris at events festooned with imagery meant to evoke Reaganite nostalgia. But such conversions require an abandonment of prior deeply-held beliefs. Such is the case with Cheney and abortion, which the networks gleefully featured.

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This test is not impossible (except perhaps in the minds of progressive who think that black people are hopelessly stupid, such as — obviously — the publishers of this web site).

Actually, I wouldn’t want anybody who would fail this test to be able to vote, black or white.

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A deceptive New York ballot initiative would empower the blue state’s lawmakers to pass such progressive laws as allowing illegal migrants to vote and mandating the most radical reading of transgender rights, according to the New York Post editorial board.

Named the “Equal Rights Amendment,” Proposition 1 was placed on the ballot under the guise that it’s just about abortion. Proponents say enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution would make it harder to restrict if the political situation were to change.

However, New York’s state Republican Party says the state already has anti-discrimination laws — Article 1 Section 11 of the New York state Constitution prohibits discrimination based on race, color, creed, and religion — and the amendment goes well beyond creating a constitutional right to abortion.

Wall Street Journal.

No doubt it was inevitable. As Election Day nears, and the progressive panic over Donald Trump escalates, Democrats are closing their campaign with a favorite theme: Mr. Trump is a threat to the Constitution, to democracy itself, and is even a “fascist.” But is this true, and could he really impose authoritarian rule in the U.S.?

The fascist meme is all over the place, an upgrade from President Biden’s description of the MAGA movement in 2022 as “semi-fascist.” MSNBC interviews earnest academics who draw a straight historical line between mid-20th-century Europe and the 21st-century GOP. A writer for The Atlantic takes the hyperbole prize with a headline that says Mr. Trump is talking like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. Why leave out Chairman Mao?

Kamala Harris is also hitting the theme. Mr. Trump “is seeking unchecked power,” she told a crowd this week in Pennsylvania. “Listen to General [Mark] Milley, Donald Trump’s top general. He has called Trump, and I quote, ‘fascist to the core,’ and said, quote, ‘No one has ever been as dangerous to this country.’ ”

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The more time you spend in California, the less sense its politics make. It’s progressive, of course. But the style of progressivism in the West Coast is distinct from that in the East, in roughly the same way that Silicon Valley-style capitalism differs from the Wall Street variety. The West Coast species is the cowboy version: more rebellious, less civilised, and also completely incoherent. On the one hand, it’s the same schoolmarmish, nanny-state liberalism you can find in any blue state: bans on plastic straws, quotas for women on corporate boards, mandated gender neutral toy aisles. On the other, it’s the exact inverse: permissiveness verging on criminal negligence.

In San Francisco, for instance, it’s illegal not to compost your food scraps. But you can smoke meth outside a playground and suffer little more than glares from passersby. In California, college students are required by law to obtain repeated, vocal permission from their partners for a sexual encounter to be deemed not rape. But pimps can openly sex traffic minors on city streets in broad daylight, and the police can do little about it. All of these disparate approaches to perceived social problems are regarded as “progressive”.

What California does, the rest of the country tends to follow. In the past two decades or so, the West Coast’s version of progressivism has become ascendant in Left-wing American politics from coast to coast. New York City, for instance, has embraced not only San Francisco’s compost law, but its laissez-faire approach to public drug use too. How, then, can we explain this weird blend of big-state progressivism and Left-wing American libertarianism?

No Central Bank Wants To Stop Price Inflation

Many citizens want more government control of the economy to curb rising prices. It is the worst strategy imaginable. Interventionist governments never reduce consumer prices because they benefit from inflation, dissolving their political spending commitments in a constantly depreciated currency. Inflation is the perfect hidden tax. The government makes the currency less valuable by issuing more units of fiat money, partially dissolves its debt in real terms, collects more taxes, and presents itself as the solution to rising prices with subsidies in an increasingly worthless currency.

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So the end of life for Windows 10 looms ahead of us, which is a problem because Windows 11 has two fundamental problems, as it currently stands:

First, it just won’t run on the majority of hardware that currently runs Windows 10. This isn’t just, like, ancient hardware; I have a desktop gaming PC that is perfectly fine to play current-gen AAA games on; it’s what I played Cyberpunk 2077 on and that was totally okay. But somehow it doesn’t meet Win11 requirements because of the CPU; it has a Ryzen 5 1600X in it, a CPU from 2017 that is apparently still actively being manufactured.

Moore’s law has been dead for a while, so the long plateauing of, particularly, CPU power has meant that some of this hardware has a looong shelf life. I still haven’t run into a game I want to play on PC that is cpu-bound on my machine and which would make me want to upgrade.

Second, win11 is unsecurable, because they implemented a feature (recall) that is just constantly screen recording everything you do on the computer, creating a sort of one-stop-shop for compromising literally anything. It functionally means that you can’t be sure your computer hasn’t, say, saved a password in plaintext (effectively) just because you had the ‘show password’ switch flipped once.

Those two things make win11 untenable for probably the majority of its users. Hardware compatibility will stop a ton of people on older or lower end personal machines. Individuals, small businesses, the public school in your town that hasn’t had money for new computers in five or ten years. Recall being a major security flaw will, I fucking hope, give pause to a ton of institutional users. Is a computer with Win11 even legal to use in some restrictive settings like government offices, militaries, or hospitals?

I see no reason for Windows 11; Windows 10 was perfectly adequate. (I felt the same way about Windows 7.) Of course, unlike Apple, Microsoft needs to sell Windows (and Windows upgrades) in order to make money.

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In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever.

This is when you take your complaint to the head of the company, which is usually publicly available information. Don’t hesitate to make yourself a royal pain in the ass.

Once you start looking for accountability sinks, you see them all over the place. When your health insurance declines a procedure; when the airline cancels your flight; when a government agency declares that you are ineligible for a benefit; when an investor tells all their companies to shovel so-called AI into their apps. Everywhere, broken links between the people who face the consequences of the decision and the people making the decisions.

Can you spell F-E-D-E-R-A-L G-O-V-E-R-N-E-N-T? I’m sure you can.

New York Times.

The drug, legal in much of the country, is widely seen as nonaddictive and safe. For some users, these assumptions are dangerously wrong.

New York Post.

Much the best thing I’ve ever heard about Lizzo.

What really burns is that she’s right, and all of her critics know it to be true.

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We live in astonishing times. Although ever since we collectively dropped down the COVID rabbit hole in 2020, evil, insanity, and stupidity have seemed to dominate the leadership of most countries, in varying proportions according to the given nation. One hardly knows where to begin. Sir Keir Starmer and his two-tier policing cum attempts at Orwellian thought control? Macron and his all-party Union Desacree against the nefarious Mlle. Le Pen? Kamala Harris’s decidedly undemocratic replacement of Biden as Democratic presidential candidate, while Trump struggles to reinvent himself as a pro-abortion candidate? The Brazilian judiciary’s suppression of Elon Musk’s social medium? On and on it goes, and the hits just keep on coming.

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The US Air Force had a serious problem on its hands in the late 1940s. Its planes were dropping from the skies at an alarming rate. Fingers were pointed at pilot error. The real culprit turned out to be a decades-old flawed cockpit design based on outdated measurements of pilots. To address this, the Air Force commissioned a massive study to measure over 4,000 pilots across 140 dimensions. The thinking was that this data would be used to design a standardized cockpit that fit everyone well.  Later, with all the numbers crunched they went back to see how pilots would fall within the averages derived from the study. The Air Force found that not a single pilot out of 4,063 fit the average on all measures. It turns out there was no average pilot. There is an even more profound nugget of truth in here. Designing for the average means designing for no one.

I call this the Aggregation Fallacy. Something that is true of an aggregate (such as average) tells you nothing about an individual element.

It’s one of those buzzy phrases in education—“personalized learning”. In an era where everything from your apron to your apartment is bespoke, it is no surprise we want a perfectly tailored education that fits our unique needs. For decades, alternative educators have argued that standardized, one-size-fits-all education actually fits no one. Neuroscientists have joined that chorus now. The opening anecdote is from The End of Average, a wonderful book that discusses how averages just don’t make sense when dealing with complex systems. And education and learning—and your child—are as complex as systems can be.

The basic problem with the Prussian factory-school model is that it batches up children by year and pushes them through the ‘education factory’ on the assumption that each child has equal ability and equal motivation. This is absurd on its face, but we’ve never had an alternative; if you only have one method available, that’s the method you use, no matter how badly it sucks. Technology, however, is providing us with more options. It is up to us whether we will use them wisely or stick to the old sucky method. (Which method the Teachers Unions will choose is left as an exercise for the reader.)

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Far too many people these days think that they are in a movie, of which they are the star.

Atlas Obscura.

Let me ask you a question. What pops into your mind, when you envision a can of food? For some of us, it’s a simple can of cream of mushroom soup. For others, the meal of the moment is an expensive tin of fish imported from Portugal.

Perhaps you get a sense of nostalgia seeing tinned pumpkin pureé, jellied cranberry sauce, and green beans neatly lined up on store shelves this time of year. Or your basement could be filled with cans of soup in case disaster strikes.

Grab a can opener, readers. Today, we’ll be cracking open the history of all things tinned.

Of course, canned stuff has to fight it out with freeze dried these days.

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Petroleum giant Phillips 66 has announced it will shutter its Los Angeles oil refinery next year due to “long-term” uncertainty mere days after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law imposing strict new regulations on the state’s refineries.

All of the unemployed and homeless people in California will no doubt rejoice in their pristine air, water, and feces.

Time to leave.

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Illinois-based John Deere said a deepening farm slump has led to a drop in demand for its agricultural equipment, triggering a new round of layoffs across multiple US-based tractor factories. This also comes as Deere pulled back on disastours diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives following conservative backlash and boycotts.

John Deere has an increasingly negative reputation among farmers for neither making prompt repairs to ailing machinery nor giving their customers the necessary information to fix stuff themselves.

Local media outlet De Moine Register reported a new round of layoffs will total about 287 workers from two Deere factories.

Deere executives were kind enough not to fire the workers before Christmas because doing so would have been a PR nightmare. The layoffs are concentrated at its Harvester Works factory in East Moline, Illinois, and just a handful of layoffs at its Cylinder operations in Moline, Illinois.

…

Demand for tractors and combines has tumbled since crop prices dropped, borrowing costs remained elevated, and inflation continues eroding farmer margins.

So vote for Trump.

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V?ra Jourová, the EU’s outgoing Commission Vice President for Values and Transparency decided to show what true EU ‘values’ were with a ranting parting shot. True to form, she went on a moralizing rant against free speech—and a certain billionaire who holds it dear.

In an interview with Politico, published on Wednesday, October 16th, Jourová went as far as to brand Elon Musk, the owner of X, a “promoter of evil” just because he turned the platform formerly known as Twitter into one of the internet’s last remaining hubs of freedom of expression following years of insidious censorship tactics employed primarily against conservatives by the previous management.

Unlike other Silicon Valley tech bosses, Musk “is not able to recognize the difference between good and evil,” the Commissioner asserted. A more appropriate question would be whether she herself is able to differentiate between free speech and hate speech.

And here I thought that the old Soviet Union was dead. Foolish me. “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can ever imagine.”

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100 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the high desert of California’s Antelope Valley lies the blueprint of a city. But the blueprint isn’t drawn on paper — it’s etched into the sand.

Miles and miles of unpaved roads are carved into the eastern half of California City, intersecting and folding into themselves only to bottom out into empty cul de sacs. Even though there are no houses in sight, the roads are marked with street signs — with names like Lincoln Boulevard, Rutgers Road and Aristotle Drive — that stand among the prickly creosote bushes.

Aside from the dusty roads and the telephone poles, the only interruptions to the landscape are old signs advertising land for sale. Some have fallen off of their wooden posts and lie flat on the sand.

Another famous victory for central planning.

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It seems oddly mediaeval to convict a man for his prayers.

But the British courts have defied all reasonable expectations of modern democracy by convicting a man for doing just that on the streets of Bournemouth.

Adam Smith-Connor is a military veteran who served his country in the reserves in Afghanistan. As part of his medical training, he participated in 30 abortions in 2003—actions he now deeply regrets. Adam converted to Christianity in later life, and is now deeply committed to prayer on the issue. In November 2022, he stopped to pray for a few minutes, in silence, near an abortion facility, remembering a time he had paid for an ex-girlfriend to abort his own child.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it becomes true.

(Of course, the ‘if’ in the headline ought to be ‘whether’, but I’ve given up expecting people who write for publication to use the language properly.)

Gothamist.

New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams is opening a new front in the battle between an increasingly diminished mayor and an emboldened city legislature — setting up the potential to change the balance of power in City Hall.

The speaker plans to introduce a bill that would allow the City Council to initiate its own commission tasked with proposing changes to the City Charter, which is essentially the city’s constitution, according to three Council officials who requested anonymity to discuss closed-door talks during the Democratic conference.

While it’s still unclear what the commission would prioritize beyond seeking to improve transparency and good governance, the Council has been pushing for a larger say over mayoral appointments, similar to U.S. Senate confirmations of high-level federal officials and existing practices in large cities like Chicago.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.