Read it.

The Brookings Institution, an entity substantially funded by Big Tech and leftist billionaire George Soros, is whining for increased censorship in the wake of the 2024 election.

On Nov. 7, Brookings senior fellow Darrell West asserted Republicans won the 2024 election due to insufficient censorship of so-called online disinformation. Disturbingly, Brookings has financial ties to multiple Big Tech platforms that can censor speech online.

Brookings’ new commentary complained about President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans’ 2024 landslide victory, which reclaimed the House and Senate. Brookings highlighted “inflation fears, concerns about border security, worries about cultural issues related to race, gender, and sexuality, and feelings that President Joe Biden and the country as a whole were headed in the wrong direction,” but ultimately blamed alleged “disinformation.”

Read it.

A journalist with the London Telegraph has been visited unannounced at her home by police in the UK who told her they are investigating a “non-crime hate incident” over a tweet she posted a year ago.

Yes, really.

Allison Pearson relates what happened on Sunday in an article, noting that police will not tell her which post is the subject of the investigation, nor will they tell her who her accuser is or what they feel offended about.

Read it.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

Read it.

The UN Climate Change Conference, known this year as COP29, kicked off on Monday and will last through the 22nd of this month. Many of the usual climate grifters have skipped the event as de-growth ‘green’ policies in the US are being prepared to be rolled back to some degree under a Trump presidency. Even Swedish far-left activist Greta Thunberg skipped the event (pre-occupied with pro-Palestine protests?).

On Tuesday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the world leaders who attended the event that last year’s meeting was a “master class in climate destruction,” adding, “The sound you hear is the ticking clock.”

Guterres also said the transition to clean energy “won’t be stopped by no group, no business, and no government.” He was likely referring to Trump’s plan to roll back certain climate policies that are strangling the economy and simultaneously boosting inflation, making US companies unable to compete in international markets. At the same time, China operates free of these de-growth policies.

Read it.

It is no coincidence that both of the Democratic Party’s ‘black’ presidential nominees were not black Americans, but the children of radical third world students who appropriated the rhetoric of the civil rights movement to get ahead, without having any actual history or part in it.

Obama and Kamala are not the legacy of the slave trade, much as they have exploited that history, but the third world immigrants and students ushered in by the JFK administration.

Barack Obama Sr., Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris all arrived in America as foreign students within a few years of each other. They were part of a flood of foreign students brought to America by Cold War legislation meant to educate foreign elites in the United States.

Instead of ‘Americanizing’ the third world, Obama, Gopalan, Harris and thousands of others like them helped radicalize and ‘third worldize’ America. Many of the foreign students, like Kamala’s parents, never had any real intention of going home. Some stayed to radicalize American colleges and their American born children absorbed their politics and hostility to America.

Read it.

A neighborhood patrol organization in Crown Heights, a central neighborhood in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, posted shocking footage on X showing a masked man attempting to snatch a child from his father while they were walking down the street.

“At approximately 3:30 p.m., this deeply concerning incident took place in the heart of Crown Heights. We are working hand in hand with the @NYPD71pct in identifying the perpetrator. Kudos to the father for his quick action,” Crown Heights Shomrim wrote on X.

Rabbi Yaacov Behrman, member of Community Board 9 in Crown Heights, NY, wrote on X, “This video is shocking. A perpetrator grabbed a Chasidic child who was walking with his father today at approximately 3:30 p.m. on Kingston near Lefferts Ave.”

Defense News.

By 2030, the U.S. could have approximately 2.1 million unfilled manufacturing jobs. Not only are these lost opportunities for American workers, but this magnitude of unfilled manufacturing jobs could negatively impact the U.S. economy, costing us more than $1 trillion by the end of the decade.

Part of that cost will be realized in reduced production capacity, limited adoption of new, more efficient technologies and overall slower pace of development and innovation. Beyond the economic implications, our nation’s unfilled defense manufacturing jobs have significant national security implications for our country.

Naval Gazing.

American naval captains, like their British forebears, command a great deal of authority. In the US Navy, a captain is wholly and entirely responsible for maintaining the safety of their vessel, its crew, and accomplishing the missions that they are assigned. They have sole command of all aspects of their ship’s operation, from watch rotations to weapons employment. This tradition of sole command is so inculcated into Anglo-American naval traditions that it is difficult for us to imagine any other way of running a navy ship. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), however, offers an alternative system. Instead of being commanded by individuals, as US and UK naval vessels are, PLAN vessels have a dual command system, where a captain and a political officer assume joint responsibility for major decisions. In their report, Party on the Bridge: Political Commissars in the Chinese Navy, Jeff Benson and Zi Yang look at this very different system of commanding a naval vessel, examine its strengths and weaknesses and highlight how it may lead to misunderstandings when US and Chinese naval units encounter each other at sea.

All Communist countries do this. The Soviet Union was famous for stationing commisars behind their tropps with machine guns to ensure nobody tried to retreat.

For a hint of how well this works, read the Honor Harrington series by David Weber, available from Baen Books,  Amazon, and wherever fine literature is sold. (Or watch the behavior of sampolit Putin in The Hunt for Red October).

The Foundry.

Billionaires favored Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s election over President-elect Donald Trump, according to Forbes’ analysis of campaign finance disclosures.

Eighty-three billionaires threw verbal or financial support behind Harris, while 53 backed Trump, according to Forbes. Trump’s victory on election night came despite a massive financial disadvantage, with his campaign raising $388 million as of Oct. 16, compared to the nearly $1 billion the Harris campaign had collected.

A coalition of Harris’ wealthy backers wrote a letter in September explaining their support for her.

A pointed reminder that Democrats remain the Party of the Rich.

Read it.

An essential mission for many educators throughout the country is the indoctrination of their students. The newest arrival on the propaganda front is Israel. In August, one of the topics of a United Teachers of Los Angeles meeting was “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired.”

Read it.

This is like demonstrations against democracy in Pyongyang.

Watch it.

Compounded by the fact that nobody in the modern world uses the term ‘capitalism’ correctly, even worse than ‘fascism’. (Yeah, this guy is a Marxist, but listen to him. It will tell you a lot about the Kamala Bros.) (No, I have no idea what ‘cuck theory’ means.) (I love the concept of Eat The Rich movies….)

Read it.

FEMA is supposedly constituted to provide help to Americans in the event of disaster, natural or man-made. They are funded and their personnel are paid by taxpayer dollars, which one would think that fact alone should ensure that said help would be provided without condition or qualification.

Unless, of course, a disaster victim has a Trump sign on their house. It seems that a FEMA supervisor in charge of the recovery workers in Lake Placid, Florida, ordered them as a “best practice” to skip houses with Trump signs, per a Daily Wire exclusive.

UPDATE: FEMA Official Removed After ‘Avoid Trump Houses’ Message Leaks, DeSantis Orders Investigation

The American Mind.

In his 1941 classic of political science, The Managerial Revolution, James Burnham claimed that the need for managerial skill and technological competence had made the inherited forms of capitalism and democracy utterly unsuited to the challenges of his time. Ruling would belong not to capitalist entrepreneurs or elected politicians but to skilled managers. For only the managers had the sufficient training—that is, the training necessary to produce, mobilize, and deploy human and nonhuman resources to achieve victory in war and prosperity in peace.

Events and ideas since Burnham have made much of his book appear dated. The owner-entrepreneur has returned: just as Henry Ford took the automobile to mass production, Elon Musk has done the same for space rockets, while at the same time revolutionizing the electric car and social media. Moreover, thanks to the work of Friedrich Hayek and our experience of Communism, nobody today has the faith that managers have the ability to plan the nation’s or the world’s economy, or even conduct a business efficiently, without being subject to prices that float more or less freely according to supply and demand.

Nonetheless, the managers are still with us, and returning to Burnham can help us understand their aspirations and limitations. Returning to Burnham will also help us understand the present form of political conflict that is occurring in almost every democracy, between one faction that represents the credentialed professional-managerial class and the other that seeks to constrain, chasten, or, even in its more delusional moments, dissolve that class.

Read it.

Just before Tuesday’s presidential election, the Biden-Harris administration quietly waived mandatory terrorism sanctions on the embattled Palestinian government—even as it determined that the government’s leaders are paying imprisoned terrorists and fomenting violence in breach of U.S. law.

The State Department, in a non-public notice to Congress, determined that the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) are not complying with agreements to curb terrorism against Israel and end the “pay-to-slay” program, which rewards imprisoned terrorists for committing acts of violence.

Those violations should trigger American sanctions, barring members of the Palestinian government from obtaining U.S. visas. The Biden-Harris administration nonetheless used its executive power to waive the sanctions.

Quilette.

On election day, I caught the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Sitting across from me, an elderly woman wore a T-shirt with the image of Trump pumping his fist in the air with the words “fight, fight.” A small “I Voted” sticker was pressed onto her lapel.

She sat with an easy confidence. There were no disapproving glances from other passengers. There was no tension. No conflict. It struck me that in 2024 it was now perfectly acceptable to express support for Trump in a deep blue (Democratically held) city. As I travelled to my destination I wondered: If one could support Trump this openly in New York City, what might support look like in the rest of the country?

Read it.

China’s air force announced it is about to unveil its newest stealth jet fighter, the J-35, which U.S. officials say was built with the help of stolen American military technology.

…

Documents disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden a decade ago revealed that the J-20 was built with stolen American technology used in the F-35.

The documents revealed that Chinese military hackers stole more than 50 terabytes of data from U.S. government and defense contractor networks, data that included details of the F-35 stealth radar and engine secrets, as well as details of the F-35’s AN/AAS-37 electro-optical distributed aperture system.

Engine schematics included details on the methods used by the turbine to cool gases, along with leading- and trailing-edge engine treatments and engine heat reduction data, all key elements of stealth design.

The technology was incorporated into the J-20.

Newsbusters.

It was not official that Donald Trump would win the presidential election during The Daily Show’s live taping on Tuesday night on Comedy Central, but the writing was on the wall as the assembled cast struggled to deal the news as the guy with the bleep button got a workout.

First there was Troy Iwata, who was playing the role of a reporter at Trump’s headquarters and who was also dressed in a garbage bag, “The mood here is also very tense, Jon. People are really sick of all the positive signs and just want to find out the results so they can start the insurrection.”

Host Jon Stewart acted confused, “Wait, Trump seems to be doing well.”

Read it.

Google searches for “Move to Canada” surged overnight, almost in parallel with Trump’s rising election odds, as the historic election swung key battleground states in his favor. Internet searches related to leaving the country continued climbing in the early morning hours, predominantly from liberal-leaning states.

Most of the “Move to Canada” searches on Google came from states like Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Oregon.

The Register.

Japan’s wooden satellite has been launched into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with a mission to prove that wood can be a viable material for use in space.

Trust the Japanese to make a satellite out of wood.

LignoSat is a 10 cm cubesat made mainly of wood and solar panels and a smattering of electronics to record how the satellite holds up during its six months in orbit. Data collected will include temperature, the expansion and contraction of the wood as the spacecraft orbits, geomagnetism, and hardware performance onboard. One hope is that the use of wood will reduce the impact of space radiation on electronics.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Gothamist.

The American publish eduction system continues to degenerate, especially in Blue States.

Don’t send your kid to a government school. It can only end badly.

Read it.

Of all the trends on Tuesday night that stand out, one of the most remarkable ones is the shift in the black vote to the right. The shift was especially pronounced with black men.

Trump appears to have made significant inroads with black Americans, at least according to some of the preliminary exit-polling data. Several state exit polls show the former president picking up a much larger percentage of the black vote than he did in either 2020 or 2016.

Early exit polls released by CNN and Fox News showed Trump winning about 20% of black men in North Carolina and Georgia, and getting double digits among black voters in general. According to Politico, that’s a significant shift from 2020, “when Trump won 11% of black voters in Georgia and just 7% in North Carolina.”

Read it.

The potential return of former President Trump to the White House appears to have sparked rage among far-left activists on Tuesday night. With Trump currently leading the electoral count at 214 votes to Harris’s 179, reports are surfacing from Seattle that show Antifa activists have mobilized.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Presumably as opposed to the home-grown People of Color gangs that already exist….

ZMan: “Courtrooms are now lotteries due to ideology, which is the definition of corruption.”

ZMan is delightfully dyspeptic today.

If you were to ask an American to name a corrupt country, he would most likely pick one from what we used to call the third world. To a great degree, this is how we now define the term “third world”. It simply means corrupt. First world countries have transparency and the rule of law, while third world countries are opaque, and the rules are not always clear to the citizens of those countries. These days it is not unusual to hear Russia or China called third world, for example.

This is one of those legacy ideas from the 20th century that evolved with the times rather than following the Cold War into the history books. As a result, our rulers tend not to think much about the corruption in American society. It is just assumed, as it was in the Cold War, that Western countries are largely free of corruption, mostly due to the honesty of Americans, while the rest of the world is riddled with corruption. It is a form of the old good guy – bad guy view of the world.

The thing is you can quite easily make the case that America is one of the most corrupt countries in the world now. Today is election day and most Americans assume the vote counts will be corrupted with fake votes generated by the people who support things like mail in voting, drop boxes and ballot harvesting. In popular government, voting is the key to its integrity, but in the world’s greatest democracy, most people assume the vote is as corrupt as anything that happens in the third world.

The countries that holds elections, even the ones we still call third world, require voters to cast their vote in person and show that they are a citizen. The burden of proof is on the voter to show they are entitled to vote. In America, this basic safeguard has been corrupted through many schemes like mail-in voting, drop boxes and bans on voters showing their government identification. Anyone who questions the integrity of the vote must prove their case all the way to the Supreme Court.

 

Read it.

At the Paris Olympic Games, an Algerian boxer made headlines after violently beating one competitor, Italian Angela Carini, and going on to win the women’s welterweight gold medal, amid strong suspicions about ‘her’ real sex. Evidence now released from a medical file proves us, and others right: Imane Khelif is indeed a biological male.

The investigation was conducted by journalist Djaffer Ait Aoudia for Le Correspondant. It indicates that Khelif was allowed to compete for ideological reasons, despite medical evidence and notions of sporting fairness.

The investigative journalist was able to obtain a copy of Imane Khelif’s medical records from two hospitals: the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital in Paris and the Mohamed Lamine Debaghine hospital in Algiers, where the athlete is monitored by renowned endocrinology specialists.

Read it.

The far-right political influencer James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, has reportedly assembled a group of election personnel and monitors in the US to secretly film voting and ballot counting procedures on election day.

To The Guardian, there is no right but the far-right.

According to documents given by a whistleblower to the New York Times, the people involved would use hidden cameras “to record and then publicise video to support their claims of fraud and irregularities” at polling locations.

Such transparency is of course anathema to the Left.

Read it.

Henley & Partners, a firm that advises the wealthy on international migration, says that the total number of inquiries by affluent Americans to move abroad surged 500% in the first ten months of 2024 compared with the same period of 2020. Most inquiries are by folks who fear political and social unrest regardless of who wins next Tuesday.

“The primary driver for US citizens looking outside the country is political uncertainty,” Basil Mohr-Elzeki, managing director at Henley & Partners, told Bloomberg.

Basil said clients are spending up to 10% of their net worth on residency and citizenship programs, some of which can cost millions of dollars. More than 40 countries, including the US, have these residency-by-investment programs, also called “golden visas.”

Artur Saraiva, Henley & Partners’ co-founder, explained that “a lot of Americans at the moment” are speaking with us about second passports or long-term residencies abroad as the US presidential election cycle ends in just days.

He noted that surging demand for dual citizenship comes from clients across the political spectrum, including registered Democrats and Republicans, with many fearing socio-economic turmoil regardless of who wins.

Go Where You’re Treated Best.

Read it.

Win or lose, fans of the Philly Eagles go out into the street and smash things. Whoever wins on Election Day, leftists will smash things. The election only determines whether they smash up the country from the inside or the outside. Forget all the theory and all the empty policy promises.

It’s not about equity, democracy, free college, funding terrorists, defunding the police, breaking the glass ceiling, or any of the other suits the naked emperors and empresses wear. When the champagne corks and pills have been popped, the desire underneath is to destroy it all.

Mediocre elites created leftism by sublimating their narcissistic drive to destroy everything superior to them into the revolutionary politics of a purported underclass. But the elites are the oppressed underclass they’ve been waiting for. They fight for their own right to seize power.

And they don’t stop fighting once they get it.

Read it.

common criticism of modern progressive activism – the movement that has come to be called woke – is that it is religious. What is meant by this is that progressives have an all-encompassing worldview which purports to have explanatory power, and direct application, across all domains of life, from politics to art to personal relationships. At the risk of over-simplification, the keystone of this belief system is that social and political relations should be understood primarily in terms of power dynamics, and that there is a powerful class of oppressive and controlling persons, the proverbial straight white Christian men, who must be resisted by the rest, a ragtag rebel coalition of oppressed minorities and their allies.

Not everyone accepts the characterisation of wokeism as akin to religious belief, for various reasons. It seems to me a useful if not perfect way of understanding how left-wing politics has developed in the last decade or so. But regardless of how persuasive we find that framing, there is one important respect in which wokeism, for want of a better word, is quite unlike religion, or at least quite unlike Christianity, which remains the background religious noise in the countries where identity politics is most strongly embedded.

The vital difference is that progressive morality has no consistently defined content, and no clear pathway to reconciliation and restoration. US vice-presidential candidate JD Vance noted this in his recent interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan. He put it this way: “What most world religions have, but the woke stuff doesn’t have, is forgiveness….it has the excommunication part, but it doesn’t have the redemption part.”

Read it.

Americans are. American politicians aren’t.

Read it.

Just another New Yawk minute.

Read it.

Elections have become not merely choices of policy change but referenda on the full-scale, top-to-bottom destruction of America’s form of government and way of life.

Democratic Party candidates in the 2024 election have proposed policies that would radically, and irrevocably, alter America’s constitutional order. Liberal candidates have endorsed plans that would fundamentally transform all three branches of government, assure permanent left-wing power, and effect the domination of American politics by a polarized ideological minority.

Power Line.

The Democrats are pushing all the chips into the middle of the table. With Kamala Harris calling us Nazis and fascists, and Joe Biden calling us garbage, they aren’t planning any sort of unity-fest if they win. While Donald Trump is laying out a positive vision for his second term, one that will benefit all Americans who aren’t financially tied to the status quo, the Democrats are preparing to go scorched earth.

After all, if you are in power and your country is infected with Nazis, fascists and garbage people, what should they expect? We will see a crackdown the likes of which our country has never experienced, with near-total control over the means of communication and lawfare that, this time, won’t only be directed at figures like Trump and Steve Bannon, who was just released from a federal prison. I think the Democrats plan on casting a much wider net to punish “Nazis” and “fascists,” with no one to protest except us garbage people, whom they intend to silence, one way or another. If the Democrats can get to 51%, they will try to cement themselves in power for a long time to come.

So which vision is going to come true? The positive, or the dystopian? Many Trump supporters are feeling exultant, as the tide has been running, if only weakly, in his direction. The RealClearPolitics average betting odds now stand at 64%/35% in Trump’s favor. But if the polls are a guide, Trump’s momentum has slowed somewhat. The most recent surveys have him tied in Michigan, either tied, down one or up three in North Carolina, tied or up one in Wisconsin, tied (twice) or up three in Pennsylvania, and so on. The polls are telling us the election is too close to call, and I don’t think there is any reason to believe they are–all!–somehow undercounting Republican voters. That certainly isn’t what happened in 2022.

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. 

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.