Read it.

Energy ignorance, at these levels of government, are getting deadly. I mean, we can all see Germany, right? It’s turning slapstick, what they’re doing to energy policy, and so many western leaders seem intent on following them. Force the closure of baseload power, force the adoption of intermittent power, watch AI buy up all the power from nuclear sources, claim to support new nuclear power which everyone knows won’t get here for a few decades, then trot off to an annual fall climate conference to tell the world what to do next.

Read it.

A blood-drenched, fiery horror scene played out in Haiti on Thursday, as a rampaging gang killed at least 70 people and injured 16 more. Mowed down by automatic weapons or choked to death by house-arson, the dead included three infants and 10 women, according to the UN’s human rights office.

In a troubling indicator of gang violence sprawling beyond the country’s capital, the bloodshed took place in the town of Pont-Sondé, which is located in the agricultural Artibonite department, about 60 miles north of Port-au-Prince. The carnage, which commenced around 3 am local time, prompted more than 6,000 to flee the town for their lives.

“Today, once again, once too often, we are faced with the most absolute cowardice,” said Haitian Prime Minister Gary Conille in a social media post. “This heinous crime, perpetrated against defenseless women, men and children, is not only an attack on these victims, but on the entire Haitian nation.”

Send ’em to Springfield. Plenty of room. FEMA has money for that, at least.

Read it.

Former Gov. David Paterson and his 20 year-old stepson were assaulted on Manhattan’s Upper East Side Friday evening, according to the governor’s spokesperson and police.

The governor and his stepson, Anthony Chester Sliwa, were sent home from the hospital early Saturday morning after being taken to Weill Cornell Medical Center “as a precaution” on Friday evening, according to his spokesperson Sean Darcy.

“The Governor’s only request is that people refrain from attempting to use an unfortunate act of violence for their own personal or political gain,” Darcy said in a statement via text message on Saturday.

I certainly wish Theodore Roosevelt had never done anything. Our country would be a better place, and our lives would be much improved. For one thing, Woodrow Wilson would never have been President.

My dad was born in 1918. If he were still with us, but suffering from dementia, I would spend long hours with him finding out what it was like being a teenager during the Great Depression, learning more about his older brother (and that brother’s kids), and stuff I never thought to talk to him about when I was young and foolish.

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.

CNN.

One state audit found that bonus checks intended for frontline workers during the pandemic were handed out to undeserving recipients. Another criticized a Minnesota state agency for failing to ensure there were no conflicts of interest in taxpayer-funded mental health and addiction programs. A third detailed lax oversight of a program to feed needy kids which federal prosecutors say resulted in the nation’s largest Covid-era fraud scheme.

But when confronted with these and other troubling examples of waste, fraud and abuse, some state agencies working under the administration of Democratic Gov. Tim Walz repeatedly minimized or dismissed the allegations, the state’s nonpartisan auditor, Judy Randall, told CNN.

A CNN review of audits – and the responses they prompted – as well as interviews with statewide politicians and pundits, found that Walz has been a hands-off leader when it comes to seeking accountability for episodes of fraud and mismanagement on his watch. What’s more, some state agencies headed by his appointees have responded defensively in recent months to the audits – a dynamic that Randall, who has worked in the department for 26 years, has found surprising.

Of course, you can’t trust a far-right misinformation source like CNN.

Read it.

God forbid anybody should get help other than from the government.

UPDATE: SpaceX Engineer In North Carolina Has Dire Warning: Biden-Harris’ FEMA “Actively Blocking Shipments” For Relief 

Read it.

This horrific natural disaster is a reminder of the extent to which the regime hates the people who live there.

Yes, yes it does.

The Coastal Crust have always looked with contempt on the Dirt People in flyover country.

Read it.

Of course it was.

Read it.

The European Commission is suing Hungary over its so-called Sovereignty Protection Act, a bill that was passed last December to defend the country against undue political interference from foreign entities.

Brussels had already launched an infringement procedure in February, claiming the law violates several European Union rules and principles, but Hungary has cited foreign interference in the 2022 Hungarian election campaign as the main reason for introducing the law.

In its response to Brussels’ infringement procedure, Hungary argued that the law does not violate EU law and that the concerns raised are unfounded. However, the Commission said in a statement on Thursday, October 3rd that “after carefully assessing the reply of the Hungarian authorities, the Commission maintains that most of the grievances identified have still not been addressed.” A ruling by the European Court of Justice is expected in the coming years.

András László, a Member of the European Parliament for the ruling conservative Hungarian Fidesz party reacted by tweeting: “The national law on the Defence of Sovereignty was not adopted for fun. It was a response to the valid outrage of Hungarians when they learned about the illegal foreign funding.”

Read it.

The number of people who are illiterate in Sweden is expected to exceed 800,000 in winter of this year, with researchers expecting the number to soon reach 1 million, in large part due to mass immigration.

The most recent survey by Statistics Sweden shows there are currently around 780,000 people between the ages of 16 and 65 who are illiterate in Sweden, but this number is soaring.

“Each month, eight to ten illiterate students arrive,” said Rita Sommarkrans, SFI teacher in Västerås, to SVT. She added that if someone can’t read or write, it’s hard for them to find a place, pay their bills, or even book a doctor’s appointment.

But I’ll bet they can all recited the Koran from memory.

Read it.

Pure coincidence, I’m quite sure. Could happen to anybody. You know how these things are.

Read it.

Millions of people get arrested every year—about 7.36 million in 2022 alone. For most of us, that seems pretty abstract, because most of us aren’t criminals, and we assume that if we haven’t done anything wrong we have nothing to worry about.

But there are at least two things wrong with that assumption. First, almost everyone does something illegal in their lives that they view as a victimless crime or simply don’t realize is illegal, so your chances of being arrested someday may be higher than you suppose. And second, law enforcement and corporations are increasingly cutting out human beings and relying on technologies like automation, facial recognition, and artificial intelligence (often in combination), and those technologies are flawed—like, really flawed. And interacting with them can lead to false accusations and even arrests, even if you did absolutely nothing wrong. Here are seven ways you could be arrested today without even thinking about a crime.

The Atlantic.

Fifteen years ago, an Apple ad campaign issued a paean to the triumph of the smartphone: There’s an app for that, it said. Today, that message sounds less like a promise than a threat. There’s an app for that? If only there weren’t.

Apps are all around us now. McDonald’s has an app. Dunkin’ has an app. Every chain restaurant has an app. Every food-delivery service too: Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Chowbus. Every supermarket and big-box store. I currently have 139 apps on my phone. These include: Menards, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Joann Fabric, Dierbergs, Target, IKEA, Walmart, Whole Foods. I recently re-downloaded the Michaels app while I was in the Michaels checkout line just so I could apply a $5 coupon that the register failed to read from the app anyway.

Even when you’re lacking in a store-specific app, your apps will let you pay by app. You just need to figure out (or remember, if you ever knew) whether your gardener or your hair salon takes Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, or one of the new bank-provided services such as Zelle and Paze.

Read it.

Not that he knows it.

Republican governors clean up President Joe Biden’s mess in both disaster recovery and the longshoremen’s port strike; the world still doesn’t care what the unelected wife of the president thinks; and scammers are just as annoying as ever.

 

Read it.

Fox News host Jesse Watters warned that an unprecedented favor from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to leftist billionaire George Soros could wreak havoc on the American media landscape.

During the Oct. 2 edition of Jesse Watters Primetime, Watters slammed the FCC decision to waive a mandatory review of Soros’s foreign-backed purchase of Audacy, America’s second-largest radio company. Watters reminded his audience that Soros will soon own hundreds of radio stations that reach countless Americans. “Conservative talk stations” are among those purchased by Soros, Watters affirmed.

After playing a clip of the late radio legend Rush Limbaugh discussing American freedoms, Watters said, “Voices like our good friend Rush, [Sean] Hannity, [Mark] Levin—they’re an oasis of reason in an ocean of liberal bias. But that could change very soon. The company that controls these conservative talk stations, they are falling into the hands of Soros.”

Read it.

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

Tractor maker has only turned over shoddy tools, half-baked info, may be breaking the law, says senator.

And fewer people are more knowledgeable than Elizabeth Warren abouty breaking the law, shoddy tools, and half-baked info.

I wonder how much effort it would take to disassemble a John Deer tractor, reverse-engineer its control systems, and publish CNC milling control files for each of the parts. That would be entertaining.

Read it.

But they’ll try their damnedest nevertheless.

Read it.

In Colorado, now seen as a blue state, an average of 52.3% of voters have supported the Democratic candidate across the last four presidential elections. In fact, Colorado has gone to the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 2004, when the GOP candidate George W. Bush defeated John Kerry, a Democrat. Barring any unforeseen shakeup, Colorado 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 37 counties in Colorado where an average of at least 50% of voters have supported the Republican candidate across the last four presidential elections. In four of these counties, more than 80% of voters cast ballots for the Republican candidate over the same four general elections.

Republicans get outvoted by the major metropolitan areas, which are (as always) dominated by Democrats — Californians moving to Denver, college students in Boulder, and God alone knows what is going on in Colorado Springs.

Read it.

Over the past several years, I’ve watched with sadness as the reputation of medical science has taken it on the chin. The pandemic polluted the public’s opinion of the purity of science and nobility of medicine.

Worst of all, science was taken hostage as much as truth was.

True scientists and honest doctors, asking important questions, were ignored, or worse, canceled. It was replaced by political grandstanding and pharmaceutical profit-taking, and our fellow citizens took note.

Scientific journals of the highest regard were strongarmed into publishing articles generated by lawyers and PR firms, only to then have those papers exposed as lies and retracted. Recent admissions by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg have revealed that government bureaucrats exerted pressure on social media companies to dress up opinions as facts to serve an agenda.

Read it.

The growing female athletes’ revolution against “inclusion” gone mad has escalated, with the Boise State Bronco and Wyoming Cowgirl volleyball teams forfeiting games against conference rival San Jose State, in apparent objection to the Spartans roster including an alleged male-to-female trans player.

The Spartans rolled into the weekend with a sparkling 9-0 record — and controversy over the squad’s senior outside/right side hitter Blaire Fleming, who is one of the team’s top players in terms of kills and points. The buzz was killed, however, when Boise State announced it would take a conference loss rather than play the Spartans. The school did not give a reason for the decision, but the motive seems clear to all observers.

Eventually, athletic competitions allowing ‘trans’ people into women’s sports will drive Real Women out.

Once that happens, Real Women who really want to do sports will form parallel organizations limited to Real Women.

Read it.

In the Netherlands, there is much unrest in the cultural sector over the Dutch government’s intention to increase VAT on culture, books, and sports, raising the rate from 9% to 21% effective 1 January 2026. The VAT increase in question is indeed a problem for the cultural sector, which has experienced significant pressure in the wake of COVID-19. Yet, all in all, it is a relatively minor problem; and, in fact, the fuss being made about it serves to divert attention from a much bigger problem within the Dutch cultural sector. For what is destroying the cultural sector from within is woke ideology, which is ultimately aimed not at the reformation of the sector, but at the complete demise of all heritage institutions.

Are such assessments overblown? I am afraid not. After all, wokeism argues that Western cultural heritage is an expression of colonialism, racism, and abuse of power. In other words, that cultural heritage is a legacy of the privileged white man and his ‘evil’ historical deeds. It is therefore perfectly logical that the adherents of the woke ideology want to bring about a new world, “unburdened by what has been” (to put it in the words of Kamala Harris). But, by definition, the notion of tabula rasa is incompatible with a desire to possess a meaningful and enduring cultural heritage.

Read it.

Colleges and universities are considering new ways to incorporate generative AI into teaching and learning, but not every student is on board with the tech yet. Experts weigh in on the necessity of AI in career preparation and higher education’s role in preparing students for jobs of the future.

Students don’t want jobs in the future. Students want paychecks in the future. Jobs are merely a tedious inconvenience.

Reed it. And watch the video.

Heh. A fool and his money are soon parted.

Read it.

I am the father of two young daughters. They are more precious to me than everything else in the universe combined. I would die for them without a moment’s hesitation, and consider myself honoured to have been given the opportunity. Right now, they are being stolen from me before my eyes, and it is not obvious what I can do about it.

I shall refrain from sharing the details of my unhappy marriage, except to say this: I have done everything in my power to avoid a divorce. Coming from a psychology background, I am only too aware of the deleterious effects that would have on my children, no matter how civil the split. Fatherless children in particular perform poorly on almost every metric, including education, poverty, child pregnancy, drug use, abuse, and prison. This coupled with the excruciating realisation that I would not be there for them when they most needed me, and instead would find themselves at the mercy of whatever third-rate surrogate I am supplanted by. My plan therefore for years has been to hold on until my daughters were adults, and then get the hell out.

That option has been taken off the table now, because my wife has filed for divorce herself. The demands made are interesting: 100% of the family assets (despite my wife having never worked throughout the marriage), a large compensation payment for ‘damages’ (ludicrous, if you knew the circumstances), a healthy alimony cheque and worst of all, sole custody of the children. Seeing as there is zero chance of this being awarded (even in the misandrist hell of the divorce court), manoeuvres were necessary. And they have been deployed exhaustively.

This is why men aren’t getting married any more. Women have no one to blame but themselves.

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.