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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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 The real culprit turned out to be a decades-old flawed cockpit design based on outdated measurements of pilots.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.)

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Multiple recent stories offered more signs of what I consider to be an unfolding civilizational decline. First, a student in Hartford, CT, who had attended local public schools from age six, graduated from high school without knowing how to read or write. At all. She had used speech-to-text software to write her papers. After graduating on the honor roll, she is now enrolled at the University of Connecticut. She is also suing her former school district for educational neglect.

…

I have previously written about how overstuffed with books and bookcases my family’s home is. In the midst of the (il)literacy crisis unfolding around us, I would like to propose an old-fashioned response: Home libraries will save civilization. Why? Because a home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.

Read it.

Before the global Covid-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, mRNA based vaccines had never been administered to the public outside of a single clinical trial that was not completed at the time. However, within the space of 9 months these experimental vaccines were administered to millions through an emergency use authorization (EUA).

…

The early scientific literature was biased, so as not to report SAEs, due to social and political concerns and overwhelming corporate greed. Only in the last year have scientists been able to publish articles that acknowledge a high number of SAEs linked to mRNA based vaccines. This should act as a warning that science should be completely objective when evaluating health risks, but can often be influenced by social and economic considerations.

Wall Street Journal.

One myth exposed by the strike is that unions need more economic and political power because they help the working man. The union behind this strike, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), helps some workers at the expense of countless others.

Start with the astounding fact that there were 50,000 or so ILA strikers but only 25,000 or so port jobs. That’s right, only about half of the union’s members are obliged to show up to work each day. The rest sit at home collecting “container royalties” negotiated in previous ILA contracts intended to protect against job losses that result from innovation.

Read it.

Why are almost all universities the same? The same general curriculum. The same departmental structure. The same political bent. Universities in Wyoming and Idaho are just as left-wing as universities in Colorado and New York. Private universities look just like public universities. Most Christian universities have dropped their distinctive missions and now look like all the other private universities. University administrators adopt the same Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies everywhere. I could go on.

Universities are almost all the same. But why?

Because the universities are machines. To get hired, Ph.D. disciplines produce Ph.D. holders stamped in the same professional mold. Those Ph.D.s then go out into the country and get hired by universities everywhere.

They build departments and design curriculum based on the same standards. University administrators come out of this assembly line—they move from department chair, to associate dean, to dean, to provost, and then to president. The same kind of general education plan gets put in place at nearly every university. And the same distribution requirements do too: take two English, three science, and three social science classes. Now take an ethics of diversity class.

Read it.

And about time, too.

A series of Israeli legislative, diplomatic, and military actions this month have threatened UNRWA’s presence along the country’s borders like never before. A consensus has emerged in Jerusalem that the agency is part of a terrorist menace that can no longer be tolerated following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

“UNRWA encourages terrorism and encourages massacres like Oct. 7,” Dan Illouz, a lawmaker from the ruling Likud party who cosponsored draft legislation meant to kneecap UNRWA, told the Washington Free Beacon, summing up the general sentiment among Zionist lawmakers. “Those things are completely unacceptable, and therefore UNRWA should not exist.”

The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Sunday unanimously approved Illouz’s bill, which would bar Israeli officials from having “any contact” with UNRWA or anyone acting on its behalf. All the committee members also voted to advance a related bill that would revoke UNRWA’s authorization to conduct “any activity, either directly or indirectly,” on Israeli territory.

Read it.

Migration is perhaps the most consequential issue of our time. Our world is far more mobile and interconnected than any point in human history and, as a result, we have seen historic demographic shifts and movement of peoples, especially in the Western world. This socio-political trend has become highly charged with emotional and ethical accusations such that those who stand opposed to the current levels of migration are being systematically labelled ‘hateful,’ ‘far-right,’ or ‘bigoted.’ Meanwhile, we are repeatedly told, in what has become trite rationale for unmitigated mass-migration, that ‘love has no borders,’ or indeed—as the Archbishop of Canterbury argued in an Easter Sunday address—that government policies to deter and remove illegal migrants cannot stand the judgement of God.

The political Left, who defend mass-migration and condemn those who argue for stricter migration controls, have to some degree succeeded in framing this political issue in a moral light which favours their position. They have painted their view as one of ‘love’ and ‘compassion.’ After all, it is inconceivable that anyone could turn away a distressed and needy soul from their home.

Watch me.

They have convinced our own countrymen that it is a necessary condition of morality to accept millions upon millions of migrants—estranged from our own culture, religion, and heritage—into our homeland. They have bullied those who reject this quasi-moralism by making accusations of racism and hatred, something which has proven an effective strategy for stifling debate and preventing any real political reform.

Read it.

Good politics leads to bad economics, which is why minarchy is the only language these sorts of people understand. Now, obviously, I would say that as some described as a “mad free marketeer” — but as was said about me on the same occasion I can spot those things that are “wrong not just ideologically but in terms of basic facts”.

The subject then was Johann Hari. The subject now is the minimum wage. The base idea of the minimum wage is that the politicians — those who kiss enough babies to have power over us — know the correct value of an hour of labour. That the value of that hour might be what someone is prepared to pay for it escapes them.

Yet the essential truth of this is obvious. As Ha Joon Chang points out, Sven gets much more for driving a bus in Stockholm than Ashraf does in Dhaka, despite the latter’s job being both more difficult and stressful. The reason is that wages in general are higher in Sweden than Bangladesh — therefore higher wages have to be offered to get the bus driven. This does not accord with political reasoning, for no one kisses babies in order to leave the world alone to get on with itself.

Read it.

The graffiti, reading “Serve the nation, kill a Jew,” was inked onto a column of a monument to Simon Bolivar, historically considered “the Liberator” of South America, in Parque Rivadavia in the Argentine capital. A Jewish star stood in for the final word of the slogan.

Argentina’s leading Jewish organization, known as DAIA, filed an official complaint, and the municipality swiftly cleaned up the graffiti in the afternoon, shortly after it was discovered. DAIA condemned the “serious anti-Semitic graffiti” and said it was one of more than 500 antisemitic incidents the organization had recorded this year, amid a spike following Oct. 7, 2023.

Argentina has a Jewish population of nearly 200,000, the largest in Latin America. The vast majority live in the Buenos Aires area.

Read it.

Ten stones that memorialized victims of the Holocaust in a German town were discovered to be missing on Monday, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

Residents in the eastern German town of Zeitz woke up to find that all of the town’s “stumbling stones,” called “Stolpersteine” in German, had been dislodged and stolen. The brass plaques had been lodged between cobblestones in front of the houses where Jews lived before the Nazis deported and killed them.

Stumbling stones like those in Zeitz have been placed across Europe and serve as a memorial to Jews and others persecuted by the Nazis, listing their names, birthdates and what is known of their fates — including their arrests, deportation to concentration camps and death.

In November 2023, weeks after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War, four stumbling stones that marked the residences of Jews in Rome were defaced with black paint or burned.

“… and everybody hates the Jews….” — Tom Lehrer

The American Mind.

In response to an unfavorable Supreme Court ruling in Worcester v. Georgia, President Andrew Jackson is reputed to have said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

This statement finds a contemporary echo in the response of elite universities to the recent Supreme Court decisions that banned affirmative action in college admissions. Almost every one of them has continued to discriminate against white and Asian American applicants.

The implications of the universities’ defiance of the Supreme Court have effects that go far beyond college admissions. Above all, they show that America’s anti-white regime will not just go away because of Court rulings.

The Register.

A US jury has found that employment practices at Cognizant constitute discriminatory conduct toward non-Indian workers in a case that originated in 2013 and claimed the tech giant favored H-1B visa holders from India over local workers.

Last week’s verdict [PDF] says the IT service giant should pay punitive damages. It followed Cognizant’s failed attempt to have a federal judge dismiss a 2017 class action lawsuit alleging bias on the grounds of race and nationality after a previous trial ended without the jury reaching a verdict.

The US-based tech outsourcing and consultancy firm denies the claims. A spokesperson for Cognizant told The Register it was disappointed with the latest verdict and plans to vigorously defend itself on appeal.

“We provide equal employment opportunities for all employees and have built a diverse and inclusive workplace that promotes a culture of belonging in which all employees feel valued, are engaged and have the opportunity to develop and succeed. Cognizant does not tolerate discrimination and takes such claims seriously,” they said.

Read it.

Imagine how peaceful the U.S. would be if there were a wall between it and Mexico.

Read it.

grants that became known as “Zuckerbucks”—recently notified White Pine County, Nevada, of a $20,000 grant.

The county, in a major battleground state going into the Nov. 5 presidential election, has a population of about 9,000 and is part of what the Left-aligned center calls its Rural and Nonmetro Election Infrastructure Grant Program.

The notification to White Pine County came with a message from Tiana Epps-Johnson, CTCL’s executive director, and an agreement on how the $20,000 grant could be used.

Read it.

Given the news about the conflict in the Middle East, “freebiegate”, and the potential vote on assisted dying, you could be forgiven for missing the news this week that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) raised the cap on payments that could be made by fertility clinics to young women for their eggs.

The news had been trailed in August, to the dismay of women’s rights campaigners, and on 1 October the change was made, with payments to women for their eggs rising from £750 to £985 per cycle. Supporters of the policy change say this has come about as payments hadn’t risen since 2011, and that an uplift was necessary to account for inflation. That being the case, we may ask why men are being paid a mere £45 for their sperm, which increased from £35 on 1 October.

It may come as a shock to many readers that you can be paid for your gametes at all, raising as it does the concern that such high payments (for eggs at least) may incentivise young women on low incomes or those who are students to sell their eggs for the money. Indeed, reports have been seen in the media of women undergoing egg donation to pay towards holidays, or to go travelling. For a long time now, eggs and sperm have been tradable commodities.

All part of the feminist program to destroy our civilization by breaking the genetic link between parents and their children. Eventually children will be a fashion accessory, as they are now for celebrities.

Read it.

In the year 1623, Christian IV, king of Denmark and Norway, built a long series of moats and ramparts just across from central Copenhagen, on the eastern edge of the city’s harbor, to protect the city from Swedish invasion. In the early 19th century, the Danish government added artillery barracks. And in the 20th century, they filled in the surrounding swamps to make room for a modern military base, even as the rest of Copenhagen grew around it. That is until 1971, explains Far From Home reporter Scott Gurian, when the Danish defense ministry closed the base for good, and Copenhagen’s countercultural youth wasted no time breaking into the now vacant fortress and squatting in various buildings.

Progressives have been assholes every age.

Read it.

Will America’s downtowns recover after the downturn from the global pandemic? Digital technology and working from home have reduced the need for many of America’s workers to make the commute into a busy downtown every day. When employees aren’t heading downtown for jobs, it affects restaurants, retail, and other downtown businesses. Though some American downtowns are rebounding, many have experienced severe population declines in the past 10 years. One American city in particular has reduced its population by nearly 40% in a ten year time span. The population of Albany, Georgia’s downtown has declined by 39.3%.

Albany is 75% black and (of course) run by Democrats, and has what you would expect for crime rate.

Anybody who wonders why their downtown has declined by almost 40% in the last ten years needs to get out more.

Read it.

No, housing is not a global problem. Government is a global problem — housing is one of the results of that problem. Don’t mistake the symptom for the disease.

Read it.

The dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, Jerlando Jackson, plagiarized extensively over the course of his career, according to a complaint filed with the university on Thursday, lifting text without attribution and raising questions about his fitness to lead one of the top teacher training programs in the country.

The complaint includes nearly 40 examples of plagiarism that span nine of Jackson’s papers, including his Ph.D. thesis, and range from single sentences to full pages. It adds to the allegations of research misconduct already facing the embattled dean, who was a coauthor on several papers implicated in complaints against diversity officials earlier this year, including Harvard University’s chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston.

“Jackson has failed all ordinary standards of academic honesty,” said Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars and a former provost at Boston University, where he helped lead plagiarism investigations of faculty and alumni. “As long as he remains as a dean, the university has no legitimate basis to hold students and faculty to basic standards of intellectual integrity.”

“Top-Ranked Ed School” is like “fiercest Chihuahua”, something of a low bar.

Insider, a Voice of the Crust.

Ron Sherman has always had what he considers a typical baby-boomer attitude toward work: You’re loyal to your employer, you give 100%, and you never call out sick unless you really have to — and even then, you might try to push through anyway.

Work, however, has not always had that same attitude toward him. Sherman has been laid off three times in his career: once after his company was bought out, once after his job was shipped overseas (he trained his replacement), and, most recently, after his team at a major cable company was downsized. “Three strikes, you’re out,” he somewhat painfully jokes. The company says age has nothing to do with it and that it was about title, but Sherman, who is 67, notes that everyone who was cut from his team was over 60. As he contemplates whether it’s time to retire, the callousness with which his past employers treated him is making him rethink his give-it-all-on-the-job attitude.

“I was sort of raised that you do a hard day’s work and you’re honest, and things will work out for you — it’s a two-way street between you and your employer,” he says. “But I found out that’s truly not the case.”

Read it.

It was revealed this weekend that Chinese hackers managed to access systems run by three of the largest internet service providers (ISPs) in the US.

What’s notable about the attack is that it compromised security backdoors deliberately created to allow for wiretaps by US law enforcement.

One of the most universal truths is that any government enterprise is more incompetent than the average non-government enterprise.

Read it.

Leading members of the European Parliament’s national conservative Patriots for Europe (PfE) group gathered for the first time since the party’s foundation in July for the Italian Lega’s annual rally in Pontida on Sunday, October 6th. As prosecutors are seeking a six-year prison term for Lega leader and deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini for trying to protect his country’s borders, this year’s rally focused heavily on illegal migration and solidarity with the Patriots’ persecuted ally.

Huffington Post.   (Yeah, I know, but I’m trying to make a point here.)

Is a five-year age gap in a relationship a little untoward? What about a three-year gap?

On social media, Gen Zers–at least those who are chronically online–are constantly debating the ethics of age gaps. Even if some relationships are perfectly legal, that doesn’t necessarily make them ethical, many say.

“Untoward” and “Ethical” are the new “I don’t like it so you have to quit doing it”.

It’s little wonder then that age-disparate relationships are cause for so much conversation: Having grown up alongside the #MeToo movement, Generation Z is well versed in unbalanced power dynamics and the language of consent. And lately, there’s been plenty of celebrity pairings to interrogate.

“Power dynamics.” “Language of consent.” “Interrogate”. Let’s see how much Woke pseudo-intellectual jargon we can cram into one sentence, shall we?

There’s the obviously icky examples, like the recent, short-lived romance between Aoki Lee Simmons — Russell and Kimora Lee Simmons’ 21-year-old daughter — and restaurateur Vittorio Assaf, 65. Earlier this month, viral photos showed the pair flouncing around on vacation in St. Barts.

“Icky” is the new “unethical”. Whatever it actually is cannot withstand how somebody feels about it. It’s all about the feels. A 21-year-old obviously has no agency; she has to be protected from herself by Older And Wiser Heads (excepting Vittorio; he’s TOO old). (Of course, it doesn’t count how “icky” a transgender weirdo might be; your feels must Get With The Woke Agenda.)

Yes, they’re both consenting adults, but it was still unseemly, critics said.

“Unseemly.” It’s all about how critics feel; your choices must bend to their prescriptions. (Of course, these are the first people to celebrate Cardi B and Miley Cyrus being “unseemly” in public; You Go Girl trumps everything.)

So the discomfort around these types of relationships isn’t anything new. What is new, according to Lehmiller, is how comfortable Gen Z feels about publicly and vocally disapproving of these relationships ? even on people’s personal Instagram pages. (Aaron and Sam Taylor-Johnson recently spoke out against the “bizarre” online judgment they’ve received. Eilish and Rutherford brushed off the criticism from overly concerned fans by dressing up as a baby and an old man one Halloween.)

“To some in Gen Z, age-gap relationships read as being inherently exploitative because they perceive age discrepancies as necessarily creating a power imbalance that favors the older partner,” Lehmiller told HuffPost.

Here is the actual reason: Sexual Market Value.

Men reach their peak Sexual Market Value in their mid 30s; women in their early 20s. Women are evolutionarily wired to prefer older men, who have more experience with life, more confidence, more charm (“rizz”), and more financial resources. Evolutionary psychologists like David Buss have been documenting this FACT for years.

Most of the hate thrown on age-gap relationships comes from women who are past their peak SMV and discover that the men they want, who are their own age or greater, are passing them by in favor of younger women who are still around their peak SMV.

Here’s the sad truth:

More here.

Read it.

This week, the US Supreme court announced that it will consider throwing out the Mexican government’s suit in the case of Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos. The Mexican government alleges that Smith & Wesson and wholesaler Witmer Public Safety Group Inc. are intentionally conspiring with middle-men to supply Mexican cartels with guns.

Let’s close the border — totally. Nobody gets across either way. No thing gets across either way. Violators will be shot on sight, like the old Iron Curtain. Mine fields are not out of the question.