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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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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.

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Imagine a realm where the effects of cannabis extend beyond the mind, reaching deep into your DNA.

As potent strains of weed become increasingly popular, new research reveals that these powerful substances may not only elevate your mood but also influence genetic expression.

This intriguing intersection of cannabis and genetics invites us to explore how the highs of today can spark transformations at a molecular level, promising a future where smoking weed could truly change the essence of who we are.

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In 1964 a Labour Party minister for education whose name is largely forgotten and truly deserves to be, so he’ll remain nameless here, instructed local education authorities to reorganise secondary schooling along comprehensive lines. Like dutiful sheep, they mostly did.

Our current minister for education, Bridget Phillipson, is now up to her neck in an equally catastrophic rearrangement of the nation’s educational deckchairs.

By the time she is finished, if she is allowed to continue, and that is far from certain given the astounding level of ignorance about the schools landscape she has exhibited so far; her predilection for lavish birthday parties and misuse of laughably politicised research; UK State schools will be reduced to walk-in therapy centres and cafes, delivered by technology instead of skilled teachers.

Every so often British voters upchuck a Labor government, just to remind everybody that, however bad the Conservatives might be, things can always get worse.

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An army veteran has today been convicted for praying silently near an abortion clinic.

Adam Smith-Connor, who served in Afghanistan, was prosecuted for breaching a ban on protests within a buffer zone around a clinic in Bournemouth, Dorset, in November 2022. His head was bowed and hands were clasped as he prayed for his unborn son Jacob, whom he now regrets aborting more than two decades ago.

Reporting on the case, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) legal advocacy group said the conviction was “the first known conviction of a ‘thoughtcrime’ in modern British history.”

It added that Smith-Connor must now pay £9,000 (€10,770) in legal costs to the prosecution, just for praying in his head for three minutes.

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A new contract has revealed the British Labour government doesn’t believe its own rhetoric on illegal migration, and that Channel crossings will go unstopped for at least another ten years.

Prime minister Keir Starmer has described stopping the small boats—by “smashing the gangs” rather than deterring the migrants themselves—as a priority. Yet the Home Office is now seeking commercial partners to run two large facilities that will receive and process illegal migrants from January 2026, potentially until 2036.

Read it.

Across the Western world, the Culture of Death is expanding its borders, casting its grim shadow across an ever-growing population of weak, vulnerable, and disabled peoples. Norway is proposing to expand abortion to include babies up until 18 weeks gestation; Denmark has just done the same. After Poland’s legislators voted down a plan to legalize abortion, the nation’s rogue coalition government simply changed the rules by fiat to facilitate feticide anyway. France made abortion a “constitutional right” earlier this year. The UK government is fast-tracking a vote on assisted suicide, which was rejected by Parliament nine years ago. The list goes on.

It was predictable that as the West advanced into the post-Christian era, prohibitions on killing human beings rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic would fall away. Westerners no longer have a basis for believing in the ‘sanctity of human life’ because they no longer have a basis for the sanctity of anything. Academics and medical professionals now make the case for the pre-Christian practice of infanticide openly, and explicitly cite residual Christian values as the only reason we have not yet embraced it. As Louise Perry, who is reluctantly “pro-choice,” observed in her First Things essay “We Are Repaganizing”.

“Hey, there’s a demographic crisis; we’re not having enough kids to replace our population, which is shrinking as a result.”

“Okay, how about we kill unborn babies and maybe small children,  plus old and sick people.”

Sure, that ought to solve the problem.

Read it.

Razor wire fences, galvanized spikes and electrified perimeters: the barriers that entomb the ultra-rich in their walled settlements isolate them from perpetual violence and societal collapse.

He says that like it was a bad thing.

It’s not rich people who are stirring up ‘perpetual violence’.

It’s not rich people who are fostering ‘societal collapse’.

They’re the ones being expected to pay for everything while apologizing for being able to. They are the sheep being perpetually fleeced. I think that fences, galvanized spikes, and electrified perimeters are a very rational response.

Financial Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The rapid rise in billionaires has disrupted what it means to be part of the moneyed elite.

The monetary definition has shifted significantly, reflecting not just the growth in wealth globally, but also the changing expectations of what it takes to be considered part of this elite group.

Not mentioned: The rapid rise of inflation has eroded the actual value of ‘money’ by 90% just within my lifetime. (In 1933, when FDR stole all of the gold, an ounce of gold was worth $20. Today, an ounce of gold — let me check — is worth $2682.10. So a dollar today buys what a penny would buy in 1933.)

CNN, believe it or not.

In the early days of rail travel, passengers would either bring their own food or, if scheduled stops permitted, eat at station cafes. In Britain, for instance, meals were served in so-called railway refreshment rooms from the 1840s, though the quality was often questionable. Charles Dickens, a frequent traveler on the UK’s railroads, recounted a visit to one such establishment, where he purchased a pork pie comprising “glutinous lumps of gristle and grease” that he “extort(ed) from an iron-bound quarry, with a fork, as if I were farming an inhospitable soil.”

Check into how food is served on Amtrak. You’ll pick McDonald’s every time.

Nomad Capitalist.

Things are not looking good. Couple economic ignorance with confiscationist demagoguery and the current bloated national debt, the government is sticking its hands in your pockets and ‘our democracy’ is no protection.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

An Abraham Lincoln statue in Chicago’s Lincoln Park was vandalized with red spray paint in the early morning hours of Monday or late Sunday night.

Read it.

The scale of China’s espionage activities is at an unprecedented scale, sources told The Wall Street Journal.

China has mobilized security agencies, private companies, and Chinese civilians in its espionage activities with the goal of boosting its economy and undermining rival states, the Journal reported.

Last month, the FBI reported a Chinese firm hacked 260,000 internet-connected devices in the U.S., Britain, France, and other countries. Chinese cargo cranes used at U.S. seaports have embedded technology that could allow China to control them, according to a congressional probe.

Watch it.

It’s not just in America that things are going crazy.