Read it.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock is following in the footsteps of other leftist-liberal politicians who wish to crack down on “disinformation,” i.e., censor free speech on social media in order to “protect democracy.”

On Monday, September 30th, Baerbock called on the European Commission to adopt new rules for dealing with disinformation on social networks. Once again, “disinformation” is being used as the official label for news or views that the European establishment doesn’t want its citizens to see or hear.

The foreign minister cited targeted attacks on democracy as her motive, saying fake news, hatred and agitation were “disintegrating our democratic reality.” As examples of the supposed threat, she cited election influence by Russia and the actions of Islamist groups on the internet. Young people in particular are influenced by fake news, while women are often victims of hate and fake news, she warned.

Totalitarianism pads in on little soft feet.

Read it.

The Nobel Prize in Economics does not exist. UChicago should stop pretending otherwise—hinging our university’s reputation on an outright fraud is not a good look. And UChicago Booth students and staff should be more skeptical of our economics faculty, whose work relies heavily on arbitrary neoliberal assumptions and overly technical methods that cannot be explained in plain English.

When Alfred Nobel died in 1896, he established five Nobel Prizes in his will: physics, chemistry, “physiology and medicine,” literature, and peace. Not economics. The Nobel family’s descendants have protested the economics prize, with one of them calling it a “PR coup by economists to improve their reputation” and a “cuckoo’s egg in the Nobel nest.”

The award most people today call the “Nobel Prize in Economics” is more properly called the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” It was established in 1968 by the economists running Sweden’s central bank, partly to shield the bank from democratic accountability and support their push to make it “independent.” To do this, those economists needed to market their discipline to the world as a “science” with technical, correct answers that only experts could fully understand and that lowly voters did not get to question.

Any prize that Paul Krugman can win is not a real prize.

Economics is not a science because it is not predictive; it is merely suggestive.

Like medicine, it deals with humans, and (as with medicine, which isn’t a science either) humans are too complex to predict. Oh, it has scientific aspects — anything you can measure is, after all, scientific — but to be a science means to be able to make predictions that come true and do so invariably.

Like all pseudosciences, economics depends on statistical correlation rather than actual causation (like a real science, such as physics) for it’s ‘predictions’, which quite often don’t come true; anybody would be a fool to depend on such a ‘science’.

Read it.

Their vote counts as much as any other dead Democrat, silly.

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) is back.

Sometimes Sam Altman, the new young Jupiter of AI, makes it easy to see why—to borrow the title of an essay I wrote ten years ago—he is a blithering idiot.

This is of interest not because Sam Altman is a blithering idiot—in fact, I hear he’s done rather well for himself—but because this miniscule, yet profoundly crippling, logical lesion in so finely-tuned a lipid-based thinking machine is probably not confined to Sam Altman’s brain.

No—whatever the germ (could it be Elon Musk’s “Woke Mind Virus?”) that causes this lesion, it has infected others. In fact, it has infected everyone. It had infected me. (I took my own noötropic tablets, and was cured. Click here to buy.)

Let me explain this simple fallacy using Altman’s own words, posted the other day.

Yarvin makes a point of mentioning evil ideas (according to the Narrative), and doing so in an engaging way.

After all, every time a company refuses to hire someone, it declares them ZMP from the perspective of its own employee pool. A true ZMP adult is unemployable in any firm or by any private individual.

ZMP stands for ‘zero marginal product’, a term apparently coined by economist Tyler Cowen to designate somebody that just plain nobody wants to employ because they just have nothing to offer an employer. In the Good Old Days, such people would (a) starve to death or (b) piss somebody off who would terminate them with extreme prejudice. Nowadays they live off of Government Assistance and use recreational drugs to avoid causing other people problems (although the first two alternatives remain just in case we need them). From an evolutionary standpoint, we are pissing in our own soup. Some people are willing to do that; others think that it’s a Bad Thing.

Not every workplace is Google or OpenAI, but every workplace has a ZMP threshold. Generally that threshold is lower than Google’s. What AI will do—what Sam Altman will do—is to vastly increase the ZMP threshold in almost every workplace.

You will have heard (and read) that we have a population crash problem, that Western woman aren’t having enough babies, that the civilized world aren’t having sufficient youngsters to replace themselves. Yarvin is suggesting that this is a feature, not a bug; anything we can do to avoid having overcrowding by ZMP people (number increasing as automation increases) is probably a Good Thing.

In the end, 20th-century employment as we know it will reduce itself to ten engineers, who write the code that writes the code that writes the code. They will all work for Sam Altman and drive ludicrously amazing flying cars. And what of everyone else?

We (I am anything but an AI engineer—good luck with those matrices, kids) will just have fun, right? Life will just be fun?

No, actually, we will probably all have our throats cut. Here’s why.

Read it.

Though much may separate Thucydides, Xenophon, Ephorus, Plato, and Aristotle from one another, on this fundamental point they and those who subsequently followed their lead were agreed: that to come to understand a polity, one must be willing to entertain two propositions.

First, one must presume that the form of government, the constitution, the rules defining membership in the políteuma or ruling order is the chief determinant of a political community’s character. Second, one must assume that pa?deía, which is to say, education and moral formation in the broadest and most comprehensive sense, is more important than anything else in deciding the character of a particular pol?teía. In one passage of The Politics, Aristotle suggests that it is the provision of a common pa?deía—and nothing else—that turns a multitude into a unit and constitutes it as a pól?s; in another, he indicates that it is the pol?teía which defines the pól?s as such. Though apparently in contradiction, these two statements are in fact equivalent—for, as the peripatetic recognized, man is an imitative animal, the example we set is far more influential than what we say, and it is the “distribution and disposition of offices and honors [táx?s t?ˆn arch?ˆn]” constituting the políteuma of a given polity that is the most effective educator therein.

…what really matters most with regard to political understanding is this: to decide who is to rule or what sorts of human beings are to share in rule and function as a community’s políteuma is to determine which of the various and competing titles to rule is to be authoritative; in turn, this is to decide what qualities are to be admired and honored in the city, what is to be considered advantageous and just, and how happiness and success [euda?monía] are to be understood and pursued; and this decision—more than any other—determines the pa?deía which constitutes “the one way of life of a whole pól?s.”

—Paul Rahe, The Spartan Regime: Its Character, Origins, and Grand Strategy, xii-xiv.

I knew Paul Rahe (now at Hillsdale in Michigan) at Yale, when I was an undergraduate and he was getting his PhD, having done his undergraduate work at Cornell. His magnum opus, the three-volume Republics Ancient and Modern, is first-rate. I heartily recommend anything he writes.

New York Post.

Carter claimed that so many young people “cheat” their way through college, come out with no skills and then experience a “rude awakening” when they land their first job.

Saying it was unreasonable to “expect a great work-life balance and high-paying job” straight after graduating from university, he also encouraged Gen Zers to dress nicely, speak up, and work on communicating effectively.

Entitled slackers. Perfect Democrats.

Read it.

“America doesn’t need this place, doesn’t care about this place… It’s just a place that time forgot.” Tom Altmiller is sitting across from me at a paint-chipped picnic table. It looks like it was bright red once, but the years have faded it to a sort of grayish maroon. He’s in his late 50s, with square glasses, a graying goatee, and a short ponytail, and speaks with a stubborn, matter-of-fact stoicism that’s common among the locals. “My standard joke about this place is that if the world ended tomorrow, we’d get ten more years, because we’re roughly that far behind the curve here,” he says. “In terms of everything.”

…

Beginning around 2021, Charleroi began to be flooded by thousands of immigrants, largely, (though not exclusively) from Haiti. A local CBS report from March reported that “the immigrant population in Charleroi has grown by more than 2,000% in the last two years.” Earlier this month, PolitiFact admitted that the number of non-English speaking students in the Charleroi school district had skyrocketed by an unbelievable 1,800 percent over the past five years.

Two weeks ago, my organization America 2100 spent five days on the ground in Charleroi, documenting and reporting on the crisis. Our coverage went viral, and within 48 hours of our first public interview, President Trump mentioned Charleroi at a rally. Then again, one week and a half later, this time at some length, during a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania. That kicked off a media feeding frenzy, replete with a flood of authoritative “fact checks” and reports on Trump’s “debunked claims” about the Pennsylvania town, an NBC News segment, a cacophony of garment-rending legacy media write-ups about “hateful rants”, “dangerous conspiracy theories,” “anti-immigrant lies”, and a statement from Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro slamming Trump’s criticism as “complete and utter bullshit.”

Read it.

In Washington, which has long been a blue state, an average of 56.2% of voters have supported the Democratic candidate across the last four presidential elections. In fact, Washington has gone to the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1984, when Ronald Reagan, the GOP’s candidate, defeated Democrat Walter Mondale. Barring any major, unforeseen shakeup, Washington state is expected to align with historical voting patterns once again in 2024 and go to Harris. (Here is a look at the 15 least popular presidents, according to Millennials.)

Despite its status as a Democratic stronghold, there are several parts of the state that have consistently broken with the prevailing political ideology in recent elections. According to voting records, there are 23 counties in Washington where an average of at least 50% of voters have supported the Republican candidate in the last four presidential elections. In one of these counties, more than 70% of voters cast ballots for the Republican candidate over the same four general elections.

Read it.

carriers like hard drives, optical discs, and flash storage are readily available, the landscape becomes trickier when dealing with older formats such as floppy disks. It is becoming increasingly difficult to source the hardware, such as 5.25”floppy drives. There are many boards that can read flux streams, including the KryoFlux, and the Award-winning Archivist’s Guide to KryoFlux can help to get started. But KryoFlux is somewhat limited in the disk formats it can interpret and might be too expensive for smaller institutions. We came together as practitioners because we encountered disk formats that required additional efforts to read and extract files. We explored hardware such as Greaseweazle and using FluxEngine software to read less common disk formats. Sharing the knowledge we have gained, this tutorial and workshop present an opportunity for participants to delve into these formats, examining them from both hardware and formatting perspectives.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it.

It was all supposed to be so grand. Sweeping libraries of knowledge, fruitful cyber domains and ultimate egalitarian functionality at the touch of a button, or the scuzzy tone of that 9600 baud AOL server hand-shake.

Connect with your friends, they said. Share knowledge, they said. What could go wrong?

But what did we get instead? A seedy panopticon of intrusion and broken bloatware bogging up every last dying pixel of our imported screens. Let’s run down the list of grievances, shall we?

Read it.

The new data on all the criminal noncitizens coming into the U.S. is shocking.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) checks the background of illegal aliens they have in custody. But, the administration’s letter to Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) shows that as of July 21, 2024, ICE let 435,719 convicted criminals and 226,847 people with pending criminal charges in their home countries into the U.S.

Of those cleared by ICE, 13,099 have convictions for homicide, and another 1,845 were facing criminal charges. Some 9,461 have convictions for sex offenses (not including assault or commercialized sex), and 2,659 face pending charges. The convictions include other crimes such as assault (62,231), robbery (10,031), sexual assault (15,811), weapons offenses (13,423), and dangerous drugs (56,533).

About 7.4 million noncitizens are in the “national docket data,” so 662,776 is 9% of the total, and if one extrapolates the numbers to the homicide rate in this country, it strongly indicates that the government is letting migrants into this country who commit murder at a rate 50% higher than the rest of the U.S. population.

The Atlantic.

Nicholas dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

Read it.

Police in India have arrested a man who ordered an iPhone and then killed the courier rather than pay the cash-on-delivery fee.

Who knew that India has Blue States as well?

ZMan jerks the cover off.

What we have now is the Lincoln exception to property rights. If people with power can produce a moral cause to justify to themselves the abrogation of your property rights, then for the good of our democracy they not only can take your property, but they also have a duty to do it. We have gone from the government stealing the property of slave owners to save the Union, to the government granting powerful interests the right to root around in your private affairs and publish the results.

Read it.

The Insider has obtained access to hundreds of official documents related to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death in the Polar Wolf penal colony in the Russian Far North on Feb. 16, 2024. Officially, Navalny’s death was attributed to natural causes, and Russia’s Investigative Committee stated in July that the case “does not have a criminal nature.” However, the contents of the documents in The Insider’s possession demonstrate that Russian authorities consistently removed references to symptoms Navalny was documented to have been suffering — symptoms that did not fit with the Russian state’s official cause of death. As medical experts confirm, these symptoms clearly indicate that Navalny was poisoned.

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

Read it.

When lefties switched from class warfare to identity politics, they became hopelessly mired in tribalism. Their old animating principle of an egalitarian society has long since given way to a tribal society in which certain groups will have more power than others because equality can only come about through massive doses of inequality. But even that is considered hopelessly old-fashioned liberalism. The new wave of identity politics doesn’t even justify its demands for special treatment by promising that one day we’ll all be equal. The tribal premise of inherent inequality is the essence of intersectionality.

Read it.

The Balearic Islands are often overlooked in reports about illegal immigration. The Spanish ministry of the interior effectively leaves out statistics related to the Balearic archipelago in its reports, even though it is currently the fastest-growing migration route compared to last year. The situation is becoming critical, and the threat of a migration surge looms larger over the islands each day.

Challenge: How many of the provinces of Spain can you identify?

Read it.

The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) on Sunday announced plans for a widespread strike at all Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports, scheduled to begin at 12:01 am on Tuesday, October 1, 2024.

With just 36 hours remaining before the expiration of the current ILA-USMX contract, negotiations between the ILA and the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) have reached an impasse. The strike would involve 85,000 ILA members and impact ports from Maine to Texas, the ILA said in a Sunday update posted to Facebook.

“United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) refuses to address a half-century of wage subjugation where Ocean Carriers profits skyrocketed from millions to mega-billion dollars, while ILA longshore wages remained flat,” the update said.

The offered 30% raise was apparently insufficient.

“Look for … the Union label….”

Read it.

Tensions are rising in Vienna’s 10th district, Favoriten, as local residents express anger over a project to house refugees in 110 newly built, luxury apartments.

Read it. 

This is Beyoncé, an alleged black woman:

For comparison, this is a real black woman;

Read it.

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Read it.

An entire HR team was terminated after their manager discovered and confirmed that their system automatically rejected all candidates – including his own application.

It’s no secret that the job market has become increasingly competitive and the job search process can be daunting. Many applicants send out numerous applications without receiving a response unless they have connections who can help them secure a job.

Unsurprisingly, receiving rejection emails almost immediately after applying can be frustrating. This often indicates that no one has even reviewed your resume. In one manager’s case, this was due to a ridiculous oversight that led to the termination of many employees.

Read it.

Springfield is the archetypal town of the forgotten man. Trump’s constant refrain has echoed throughout the rusted beams and derelict barns of this place. It has one problem: the wrong people remembered. And those people have come to finish Springfield off, once and for all.

I didn’t come in search of cats and dogs on grills, although I found that too. I came to learn why the political representative of the American people was determined to replace them with others. It turns out that the explanation is simple: they did it for money, for a feeling of moral superiority, and because it could be done.

My investigation discovered a long rotten beam extending from the Mayor down to NGOs, pastors, corporations, and local mediocrities looking to make a fast buck. Everyone is on the take. And Springfield is not an outlier. It is a standard example of local partnerships with federal and corporate resettlement programs working together to profit themselves.

Read it.

Laurence Garnier, a member of the LR party and the new Secretary of State for Consumer Affairs, has had to bear the brunt of this hidden censure. She was anticipated to take up the post of Minister for the Family, but in the end had to make do with a much more modest portfolio. Emmanuel Macron even made it known that he did not want her in the government. This was due to her vote against enshrining abortion in the constitution a few weeks ago, as well as her stance against gay marriage, medically assisted procreation (PMA) for women, and the ban on conversion therapies.

The left-wing newspaper Libération has launched a true witch hunt. On its front page, the paper denounced “the reactionary pact” and went looking into the past of members of the government to award them diplômes d’infréquentabilité—‘certifications of non-reliability.’ Patrick Hetzel, Minister for Higher Education, and Othman Nasrou—though loyal to the very centrist Valérie Pécresse—have been condemned for having, one or more times in their careers, expressed conservative views in favour of the family or a reasoned vision of bioethics.

But what is more serious is the pressure that the Left intends to exert from outside, now that the team is in place, to ensure the government’s ideological rectitude. Left-wing commentators on X are entertaining the fantasy of a resurgence of reactionary policies and worrying that societal ‘rights’—abortion, gay marriage, LGBT rights—might be called into question even though there has never been any question of this and, from our humble point of view, we can even deplore the timidity of the new ministers on these crucial issues. Planned Parenthood says it is “worried.” Former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal sent a very clear message to Michel Barnier: he took the liberty of asking for guarantees that there would be “no backtracking on PMA, abortion, or minority rights.” He said he was “personally offended” by the past positions of certain ministers.

Read it.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

I’d have cut off an ear on each one of them. But that’s me.

Read it.

There’s only one official crossing guard at P.S. 127, the Aerospace Science Magnet School in East Elmhurst, Queens. But every morning, Stephen Cameron, a 78-year-old grandfather of four kids at the school, dons an NYPD hat and neon yellow windbreaker with a police patch and voluntarily guides children through traffic.

“The most important thing is for them to cross here and get security for them,” said Cameron, who is retired from his job as a detective in Trinidad and Tobago. “All the buses come at the same time, everybody getting out at the same time … it makes it a little hectic.”

Not only hectic, but sometimes also tragic: Two students at the school have been killed in traffic in the last two years. They were each walking with a parent near school, navigating a neighborhood full of tricky triangle intersections where parents say it’s hard to figure out who has the right of way as drivers speed through. Just blocks away, kids navigate busy Astoria Boulevard, where they must often dart across multiple lanes of traffic to catch the bus.

UnHerd.

On Friday 26 September 2014, a group of Mexican students boarded buses in the town of Iguala. Members of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, in the southern state of Guerrero, they were hoping to reach Mexico City for an event marking the anniversary of the infamous Tlatelolco massacre. On that day in 1968, hundreds of students were gunned down by the security forces, while others were tortured and falsely imprisoned. Some were simply disappeared, and never seen again. The outrage itself would soon be followed by a monumental cover-up, and ultimately become the defining event of recent Mexican history.

Little did the Ayotzinapa students know that history was about to repeat itself. As night fell, their buses were stopped by police barricades. There, on a lonely stretch of highway, they were set upon by officers and members of the local drug cartel. Many of the students were shot, a number were hospitalised, and one was found dead by the roadside, a part of his face ripped away. It was only the following morning, however, that the full scale of the horror became clear: 43 students couldn’t be accounted for. A decade on from their disappearance, they’re presumed dead. Their bodies have never been recovered.

If the Tlatelolco massacre became the defining moment of Mexico’s authoritarian past, “the 43” have come to symbolise the country’s stumbling democratic transition. There are, after all, over 110,000 desaparecidos (“disappeared ones”) right across Mexico, anonymous men and women who vanished one day and never came home. You’re reminded of them everywhere you go, their faces peering out at you from countless monochrome posters. Each, of course, represents a private tragedy. But just like Tlatelolco, the case of the Ayotzinapa students has gained vigour through the years, and ten years on represents abuse of state power at its most absolute.

A poignant reminder that Mexico is a failed state.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read it quickly before it comes true.

The Other McCain.

One is reminded of the old adage that England’s wars were won on the playing fields of Eton, by which it was meant that the education system of British leadership caste was such as to instill in young men the attitudes necessary to victory. The old “stiff upper lip” disposition of British officers, the quality of calm amid crisis, the dogged persistence in the face of daunting odds and discouraging setbacks — “the playing fields of Eton” taught those qualities, somehow. If there is any cause to be pessimistic about America’s future, certainly the state of our education system is at the top of the list, because there is no effort to create leadership of that character. Indeed, our education system is run by people who lack patriotism and clearly do not wish to make our nation stronger. How could “gender theory” lectures contribute to such a project?

Read it.

The illegal immigration crisis at the southern border has not only created a culture of lawlessness at the southern border, it has also adversely affected the labor and housing markets.

That’s according to the testimony of Center for Immigration Studies director of research Steven Camarota at a hearing of the House Oversight subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs on Wednesday, “The Border Crisis: The Cost of Chaos.”

Camarota said at the hearing that the amount of illegal immigration in recent years has been “unprecedented” in scale. He said that a recent report by the House Judiciary Committee found that at least “5.6 million illegal immigrants have been released into the country since January of 2021.”

Newsweek.

Modern dating is a minefield—but instead of just opting out, a cohort of single women are trying to roll with the punches and adopting the “Burned Haystack” method.

Aimed at cutting through dating app noise and fatigue, the Burned Haystack Dating Method (BHDM), developed by Jennie Young, is especially resonating with women over 40.

Riffing off the popular “needle in a haystack” saying, BHDM encourages women to filter out potential matches through a rigorous vetting process. In other words, in order to find the needle, you have to burn down the haystack.

Exactly wrong. These poor women are going to find that there are no needles in their haystack. And it’s entirely their own fault.

The right-hand caption is wrong: It ought to read “Invisible Men”. The problem is not ‘standards not strict enough’; the problem is ‘standards are too strict’. Social media has globalized the dating market and women are competing for the same upper cohort of men and ignoring all the rest.

Michael Sartain likes to say that there are actually three sexes: The top 20% of men that all women want; all women; and the bottom 80% of men who are effectively invisible. He also likes to cite a study in which a large number of men and women are asked whether they would marry somebody who was 80% of what they were looking for–the men invariably responded, “80%? Hell, yes; that’s a win!” and the women invariably responded, “No, that would be ‘settling’.”

Read it.

They’d been friends for years and once worked side-by-side in the county courthouse. They were two high-profile elected officials in a town where it seems like everybody knows each other, our media partners at the Cincinnati Enquirer report.

So why, as he’s accused in court, did Letcher County Sheriff Shawn “Mickey” Stines walk into a private room inside the courthouse, pull out a gun and kill District Judge Kevin Mullins?

It’s an unprecedented crime in a town that can go years without a homicide. And the Thursday afternoon shooting left a gaping hole in the judicial system — Mullins was the county’s only judge, and its sheriff is behind bars in Leslie County, facing a first-degree murder charge after he surrendered on the scene.

I’ll bet there’s an interesting story behind this.

Unfortunately, one won’t find it by reading the news coverage, which is basically 5,o00 words of ‘journalists’ scratching their heads.

Read it.

1,092 crimes were recorded at Frankfurt Central Station in just the first six months of 2024. That’s equivalent to about six crimes per day.

The figures, quoted by German news media company Apollo, were released by the federal government in response to a request from the AfD parliamentary group. They show that a very high proportion of the criminal suspects are foreign nationals.

A report produced this month by the Bundestag reveals that, for example, non-Germans were involved in 123 cases of violent crime at the station in the first half of this year. By comparison, German citizens were involved in 84 cases. In five cases, the nationality of the suspect was “unclear.” It was “unknown” in 57 others.

Read it.

The 33-year-old ship was built by Avondale Shipyard and entered service in 1992. Military Sealift Command operates 14 Kaiser-class vessels including the Big Horn, at least six of which are slated for removal from service in the next five years, to be replaced by the John Lewis class — 746-foot ships that can carry nearly 50,000 tons of fuel and supplies.

The Big Horn is the only Navy oiler operating in the Middle East. According to MarineTraffic, an app that provides real time and approximate locations for maritime vessels worldwide, seven ships in the class currently are operating in U.S. waters, five are in the Pacific area of operations, and one is near Italy.

The USNS John Lewis was last reported in Portland, Oregon, while the Harvey Milk, also a Lewis-class tanker, is in Norfolk, Virginia.

Oops.

UPDATE: US Navy Oiler Runs Aground Off Oman Coast, Forcing Carrier Strike Group To Scramble For Fuel

Lileks.

Think about it.

Politico.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Time to leave.

UPDATE: Chicago Teachers Instructed to Pass Migrant Students Despite ‘Severe Academic Deficiencies’

Read it.

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

Read it.

Women’s Fencing is the latest sport to be corrupted by gender-deluded men snatching the win. A 39-year-old male named “Annika Rose” Suchoski has only been fencing for nine months, but still placed second in Ontario’s Fortune Fencing Regional Championships. He came out of left field, beating biological women who had been competing for years, according to the Daily Mail. This was Suchoski’s first tournament since taking up the sport. He reportedly began “transitioning” to a female in 2018, and underwent sex change surgery only two years ago. Fans online expressed outrage, describing how Suchoski’s height and features as a (still) biological male give him the advantages of longer reach and more upper body strength.

I’m curious how long women are going to put up with this.

ZMan chronicles the fall.

In the early days of the internet, people started to notice that there was another side to the mass accumulation of information online. The information piling up in databases and data centers was not just public information, but also what had always been assumed to be private information. Pictures of your home and maybe even you outside cutting your grass could now turn up in the public square, without you knowing it. Lots of things about your life were now public information.

Suddenly, a degenerate with free time could figure out things about you that he could not know in the past. Of course, this became a temptation for people to nose around in the lives of coworkers and neighbors. The more information that piled up online, the less privacy everyone could expect. Quickly we were moving into glass houses and subjected to the unwanted gaze. The only place where you can be free of the gaze is in your own mind, and even there the synopticon is hunting for data.

Of course, in typical American fashion, the same people gathering up your private information and making it public now sell services to keep your private information as private as possible in this age. On the other hand, people told by the state to gather your private information for things like banking are reckless with their security, so it is regularly stolen and published by gangsters. Again, in typical American fashion, the reckless people never pay a price for it.

Read it.

The Canary Islands have experienced their highest number of recorded migrant arrivals in a single seven-day period. With more than 40 boats detected and almost 3,000 individuals landing illegally, previous weekly records were shattered. Police sources predict that this new figure “will soon be pulverised” if current trends continue to afflict the archipelago.

Critics of Spain’s ruling socialist (PSOE) and Christian-democratic Pa?tio Popula? (PP) parties say that failure to deal with migrants robustly is exercising a ‘pull factor’ bringing more to the Islands. Specifically, the official approach to unaccompanied minors is actually incentivising more young men to take the risky journey.

Oh, ya think?

New figures from the State Security Forces and Corps compiled by La Gaceta show 2,823 illegal entries from the 16th to 22nd September. This exceeds the 2,759 immigrants detected during the recognised ‘worst week’ at the end of January 2024. It follows a Civil Guard report warning that the problem “remains at extreme levels,” while correctly predicting that it would almost certainly get worse in the second half of August. (The authorities began consolidating migration statistics in 2019.)

If they just left such people on the islands to starve, the flow would soon stop. But nobody would do that these days … which is why the ‘immigrants’ do it; they know that they will be taken care of.

Read it.

Locked display cases, the theft-prevention measure that makes shopping less grab-and-go and more wait-and-see, aim to prevent shoplifting, but a new survey suggests that particular solution might be worse than the problem.

Worse for whom? If people won’t buy stuff in locked cases, how are the retail stores worse off than if they steal stuff?

Upon discovering that an item they want to buy is in a locked case, less than one in three shoppers (32%) get a store employee to unlock the case, according to a reader survey from Consumer World, a consumer advocacy website. For 55% of respondents, it’s a lost sale, because when a product is locked up, they try to buy it elsewhere. The remaining 13% try to find an alternative product in the same store that is not locked up.

Good luck trying to buy it elsewhere in high-crime areas, from places who are probably also putting stuff in locked cases. Look, ‘locked cases’ are used for high-value easily grabbed-and-gone stuff, and changing the store doesn’t change the nature of the product. ‘Finding an alternative product’ means a product not as amenable to snatch-and-run, and the store still makes a sale.

BBC.

The union representing thousands of striking Boeing workers has hit out at what the aircraft manufacturing giant called its “best and final” pay offer, which proposed a 30% rise over four years.
The new offer also included the reinstatement of a performance bonus and improved retirement benefits.
However, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) said the offer was not negotiated with the union and that “it was thrown at us without any discussion” – a claim Boeing denies.

There’s no pleasing some people.

Newsweek.

And who could blame them? A Grievance Studies major hardly prepares one for the real world.

The survey revealed that one in six businesses said they were hesitant to hire recent college graduates over concerns about how prepared they are for the work as well as their communication skills and professionalism.

And a whopping six in 10 employers had already fired college graduates who were hired in 2024. One in seven said they might refrain from hiring new college grads next year as well.

Newsweek, of course, has no good advice to offer on fixing the problem, other than the usual hand-wringing about how hiring companies need to cut the kids some slack and do more training.

Read it.

‘Culture’ is an unavoidably imprecise and slippery word, sometimes used to mean creative work of some kind – art, film, music – and sometimes something (even) broader. Here I’m using it mostly in the sense of the habits of behaviour and thought that we unconsciously acquire from our society or community. Culture is everything you don’t have to think about (until you do).

…

Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another – say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. Local cultures, in the sense of finely patterned, shared sensibilities, automatically absorbed and deeply felt, are no match for these bulldozing, ‘deculturating’ forces.

We still need shared norms of behaviour in order to function as societies, however. So in place of implicit culture, he says, we have introduced explicit “norms”: rules of behaviour and speech which aren’t felt or intuited but articulated, coded for, and argued over endlessly. Without instinctive standards for behaviour we have to thrash everything out, from the correct use of pronouns to how to behave on public transport or dress for work. “Culture war” implies some kind of profound division between people, but in truth, suggests Roy, our differences are shallow and petty and all the more bad-tempered for it. Scrape away culture and what you’re left with is negotiation. Everything is politics.

UK Independent.

Luke Ings was handed a controversial imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence for robbery and a fight in McDonalds aged just 17.

The jail terms were scrapped in 2012 amid human rights concerns, but not retrospectively – leaving almost 3,000 people languishing in prison with no release date.

His devastated mother Samantha, 57, said Luke, now 36, is trapped with “monsters” inside maximum security HMP Wakefield, which is home to some of Britain’s most serious criminals, having spent his entire adult life inside.

Britain, of course, doesn’t have the Constitutional protections available in the U.S.

Time to leave.

Read it.

The university’s president, Darryll J. Pines, who studies aerospace engineering, was accused of copying significant portions of a paper in 2002.

Read it.

As Rabobank’s Michael Every adds, “US businesses could miss the key Black Friday/Cyber Monday peak sales period. Port trade is around $2.12trn, and 72% would grind to a halt, a one-day strike reportedly taking six days to recover from, a one-week strike in October creating bottlenecks until mid-November, not factoring in Red Sea disruptions caused by the not-terrorist Houthis.”

If goods are then forced to shift to the US West Coast ports, Rabobank speculates that Asia-US freight rates could leap to $20,000, far above the peak seen in the last supply-chain crisis. That would mean firms with low margins might opt not to import at all, creating empty shelves.

A strike called by–wait for it–labor unions, the Democrat base.

Democrats don’t care how many people get hurt, so long as it profits them.

“There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” — Calvin Coolidge

Read it.

Already, just 2 years in operation, 270 panels (5%) of the Muttsee project need to be replaced, and that at an exorbitant cost. Just check out the Axpo promotion video and take a look at the equipment needed to build the project. The helicopters, cranes, rigging and this caliber of personnel aren’t cheap.

The meaning of ‘renewable energy’ is that the equipment needs to be renewed year after year after year after….

Read it.

The degradation of liberal education in America is anything but a niche public-policy concern.

Like all rights-protecting democracies – and especially as a 21st-century great power with globe-spanning interests – the United States requires a host of highly-trained individuals to keep its government functioning, military operating, economy churning, and civil society thriving. Essential men and women perform manual labor, offer basic services, and run small businesses. In addition, the nation needs physicists, chemists, and biologists; lawyers, doctors, and business executives; teachers, software engineers, and architects; journalists and civil servants; military officers, politicians, diplomats, judges, and religious leaders; and many more.

To acquire the professional skills necessary to fill key roles in America’s advanced industrial society, individuals must typically obtain a four-year college degree. Prestigious undergraduate programs, which incubate America’s highly credentialed elites, purport to offer the requisite professional training – or requisite introduction to professional training – within the framework of liberal education.