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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.”

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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.

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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Americans are. American politicians aren’t.

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Just another New Yawk minute.

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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. 

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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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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.

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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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.