Read it.

The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel (OPC), a state agency that represents its utility consumers, filed a complaint before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) regarding PJM Interconnection, LLC’s plans to charge it $2 billion of the $22 billion it spent to upgrade its grid to accommodate increasing demand from data centers. According to the OPC’s press release, this $2 billion bill will cost the state’s consumers an extra $1.6 billion in the next ten years alone — that means an extra $823 million for residential (approx. $345 per customer), $146 million for commercial (approx. $673 per customer), and $629 million for industrial customers (approx. $15,074 per customer).

“Without FERC action, Maryland customers face paying billions for transmission infrastructure that PJM is advancing to benefit data centers,” said Maryland People’s Counsel David S. Lapp. “PJM’s cost allocation rules are broken. Maryland customers have neither caused the need for these billions in new transmission projects nor will they meaningfully benefit from them.”

PJM Interconnection, LLC is the United States’ largest electricity transmission company, and covers 13 states plus Washington, D.C. This includes Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, covering about 65 million people, or about 20% of the entire U.S. population. Some of these states, including Maryland, host a large number of data centers, so the firm needs to upgrade its infrastructure to meet projected demand from these power-hungry AI systems.

Why not let them provide their own power? Say, small nuclear reactors?

Steve Graham.

Welcome to Dr. Fantasmo’s Dental Fun House

My wife and I went in for dental cleanings, and we learned something that might be very helpful to you. And it’s time-sensitive.

The hippies and trannies have ruined dental floss.

Many people have huge gaps between their teeth, so they can use any kind of floss they want. My teeth are close together, so if I use the wrong floss, it snaps. This is not a rare condition.

In order to fix the problem, our wonderful dental establishment came up with floss made from Teflon. The best-known brand is Glide. It moves in and out of dental gaps much more easily than the old string-and-wax stuff.

I have been buying the Walmart version of this stuff for a long time. I buy it in large quantities so I get the best prices and so I don’t run out fast. I am still working on my last container.

At my cleaning, my hygienist got very angry. She was using some kind of horrible floss that kept snapping, and it felt like she was dragging butcher’s twine between my teeth. She got fed up and started using some kind of little pointy things to get the polishing paste out. I wondered why she was using floss she clearly hated.

I told her I used Teflon floss, and she said it was no longer available.

I was horrified, and when I got home, I did some research. She was right. Since I bought my last shipment of floss, the hippies in a couple of degenerate hippie states banned Teflon floss. Of course, this means it’s banned for everyone else, because companies don’t want to make different floss for different states, and because they don’t want hysterical, hormonal women crying that Oral-B is trying to kill their children.

There are chemicals called PFAS (or something like that) and they are used in the manufacture of Teflon floss. By the time the floss is made, there are only tiny traces of these chemicals in it, and you can probably imagine how much of that will get into your body in a lifetime of flossing. Doesn’t matter. Estrogen is the mind-killer, and you can’t reason with a nose-ringed woman full of SSRI’s.

Incidentally, one of the outfits that got rid of good floss is called Silent Spring, which is named for the 1961 Rachel Carson book that killed millions of little brown people by getting DDT banned because of a greatly exaggerated fear that it might thin bird eggshells. With the use of DDT, the incidence of malaria in Ceylon went from millions per year to 17, and when DDT was withdrawn, numbers shot back up, and there was a tsunami of fatalities as needless deaths resumed.

Malaria is not a joke. You can’t just take a spoonful of quinine and get out of bed, instantly healed, and do jumping jacks. It causes excruciating pain and kills people.

Mosquitoes spread other diseases such as zika and yellow fever. But never mind. Rachel Carson got her chance to virtue-signal.

So what do you do if you want to floss your teeth?

I use a tool called GUM Soft Picks. Using actual dental floss is Too Much Like Work.

The Times (UK).

A magistrate has told a teenage shoplifter that she has never seen offending on such a scale after he avoided a custodial sentence for thefts that totalled £116,000

In other words, no prison time.

The 17-year-old, who cannot be named for legal reasons, participated in dozens of raids in London shops over the past two years, Highbury Corner youth court was told.

He was captured on CCTV either “directly participating” in taking cosmetic products off the shelves or acting as a lookout. The court was told the boy acted alone and as part of a group on a number of occasions and there was an investigation into other perpetrators.

And still, no prison time.

Check it out.

It is quite interesting to compare the writing style of Papal Encyclicals from Popes down to Paul VI with those from John Paul II onward. The former are very florid and have a distinctive structure, whereas John Paul II and his successors have written in more direct and bare-bones style. (Well, I thought it was interesting.)

When I was an undergraduate at Yale I had to depend on the Sterling Library’s copies of Actae Apostolicae Sedis, which is the official ‘gazette’ of the Vatican, for contemporary Latin writings. Now, of course, there is the Finnish site Nuntii Lantini (article here) and, if you look for them, a number of people who write in Latin on the Internet. And, of course, Google Translate does its best.

It’s a great time to be alive….

Read it.

Believe it or not, this happened at around 6 p.m.on a Tuesday in Cheney, Washington. The child was not injured at all, just to let you know. The lady, a 56-year-old named Wendy A. Clemente, has been charged with first-degree attempted assault, DUI, and first-degree criminal trespass.

I’m guessing, but not sure, that the drunk lady was mad that a kid would be riding a dirt bike in the street. So she started chasing him.

The War Zone.

U.S. Central Command said its new plan to protect commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz kicked off Monday with the safe passage of two U.S.-flagged merchant ships. Dubbed Project Freedom, the operation is designed to “restore freedom of navigation for commercial shipping” through this strategically vital body of water, the command stated on X. Iran closed the Strait after being attacked by the U.S. and Israel on Feb. 28. Meanwhile, Iran says this move will threaten the fragile ceasefire and that it will attack any ships transiting the Strait without permission.

“U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyers are currently operating in the Arabian Gulf after transiting the Strait of Hormuz in support of Project Freedom,” CENTCOM stated in a message posted on X Monday morning. “American forces are actively assisting efforts to restore transit for commercial shipping. As a first step, 2 U.S.-flagged merchant vessels have successfully transited through the Strait of Hormuz and are safely headed on their journey.”

Read it.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Read it.

Twenty-three innocent bystanders have been killed and 30 wounded in gang-related shootings in Sweden over the past three years, according to new police data highlighting the country’s ongoing struggle with violent crime.

Authorities say the victims were not the intended targets but were instead caught in the crossfire, struck by stray bullets, mistaken for someone else, or linked to individuals involved in criminal networks.

The Nordic country has spent more than a decade trying to contain shootings tied to rival gangs competing over the drug trade and settling scores.

Sweden was once one of the most law-abiding nations on the planet.

Then they started importing Turd World immigrants.

Read it.

After Korea’s division in 1945 and the adoption of conflicting ideologies, contact between the two sides ceased, causing the language gap to gradually widen. South Korea adopted the Seoul dialect as its “standard language,” while North Korea declared the Pyongyang dialect to be its “cultural language.”

Over the decades, South and North Korean dialects have evolved in different directions, creating considerable discrepancies. The linguistic challenges defectors face go beyond accent differences, including a complex mixture of words that sound the same but have different meanings, words that sound different but mean the same thing, and South Korea’s rapidly changing slang and foreign loanwords.

These linguistic differences create more than just communication difficulties for defectors — they impact their identity and psychological well-being. This analysis examines specific examples of linguistic differences encountered by defectors and the resulting challenges they face during settlement.

The Telegraph (UK).

More than 600,000 households received more in benefits than the average worker’s salary, the first analysis of its kind has revealed.

The figures show that 625,618 households were each given more than £32,200 in welfare payouts last year – the average annual salary of a British worker after tax – despite the introduction of a benefits cap.

The analysis, by the Conservatives, also revealed that 16,000 of those households received more than £60,000 in welfare payments – almost twice the average annual take-home pay.

The Times (UK).

Former Royal Marines and veterans of the Parachute Regiment have been hired to protect synagogues and Jewish schools as Britain braces for further antisemitic violence.

The deployment of elite ex-troops for security patrols can be revealed for the first time after the stabbing of two Jewish men in a suspected terrorist attack in Golders Green, northwest London, and a recent spate of fire bombings in the surrounding area.

The wave of incidents influenced the government’s decision on Thursday to raise the terrorism threat level from substantial to severe, meaning that another attack is now “highly likely”. MI5 said on its website that there was an “elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions”.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Two Jewish men were stabbed on the street in a heavily Orthodox neighborhood of London on Wednesday, escalating anxieties amid ongoing incidents targeting local Jews that police say reflect Iranian involvement.

A man was arrested at the scene in Golders Green after being apprehended first by members of the Shomrim, a Jewish security force that operates in parts of London. Hatzola, the Jewish-operated nonprofit emergency service whose ambulances were recently burned in an arson, treated the two victims.

“One male was seen running along Golders Green Road armed with a knife and attempting to stab Jewish members of the public. Shomrim responded immediately and detained the suspect. Police attended and deployed a taser,” Shomrim said in a post to social media.

Both men who were stabbed — one in his 70s and the other in his 30s — are hospitalized in stable condition, according to the Metropolitan Police.

The first duty of government is to keep people safe. Britain has been failing at that for a long time.

ATQUE: Muslim man caught on camera stabbing Jews outside London synagogue

Read it.

I’ve been convinced for quite some time that the political polarization of America has passed the point of no return. At this stage there seems to be no political solution to the problem. To be blunt about it: there is no voting our way out of this.

Where political matters are concerned, the hard Left — which seems to occupy a larger and larger portion of the Democrat Party — has all but cornered the market on violent, incendiary rhetoric. If you disagree with them, you should be beaten up and imprisoned. If you oppose the Narrative, you need to be put up against the wall and shot.

Republican responses to the Democrats’ at-your-throat fighting style are generally weak dishwater. The mainstream Right has always been reluctant to play hardball with their progressive adversaries, but at this point regular hardball will no longer suffice. A harder ball is required, one that would lead to a situation that most of us would rather not contemplate. It’s hard to imagine any Republicans being willing to pick up that ball.

As I said above, there is no voting our way out of this.

Check it out.

A memorial to affordable living.

Read it.

Wild story right here.

Last year, Abdul Saleh — an employee at Sal’s Deli & Grocery in the East Village — went on local news to sound the alarm. He told ABC 7 that violence in bodegas was rampant, that “always something happens and no one really cares,” and that when people get shot, robbed, or worse, the cops show up three or four hours later.

Now we have this.

Read it.

I’m willing to ask the hard question: How badly do modern women stink if men are turning to AI?

At least an AI won’t divorce you after 10 to 20 years of marriage and take your kids and half your stuff.

Read it.

National Post.

Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973) is easily one of the most suppressed books of the 20th century. That’s because it’s a dystopian novel about mass third-world migration, a topic still considered taboo to many. While The Handmaid’s Taleand Nineteen Eighty-Four have become regular headliners of “banned book” campaigns and subjects of novel studies in school curriculums, English translations of Raspail’s magnum opus have been so hard to find that used hard copies sold for prices ranging into the hundreds. Until just last year, that is.

In 2025, the indie heterodox translator-publisher Vauban Books came out with a new, better translation of The Camp of the Saints. Paperbacks were priced at roughly US$25, hardcovers US$40, and, miraculously, they were available on Amazon. All was going well until April 20, when the retailer mysteriously removed physical copies of the book from its American and Canadian storefronts for allegedly violating the company’s “offensive content” policy (though the audiobook remained buyable). Vauban Books raised hell, and a day later, the ability to buy print copies was restored. Amazon attributed the removal to an error.

Yeah, right.

Read it.

Europe is pretty much lost to the Turd World invasion.

Washington Examiner.

This week is the anniversary of one of the most resonant speeches made since the end of World War II. It still echoes down the decades, ringingly relevant to Western civilization, perhaps more today than ever.

At a meeting of Conservatives in Birmingham, England, on April 20, 1968, Enoch Powell warned of the peril of allowing mass immigration from alien and incompatible cultures. A scholar of classics, he wound up his peroration saying, “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

For this “Rivers of Blood” speech, as news media dubbed it, Conservative leader Edward Heath sacked Powell from his shadow Cabinet. The Times of London echoed Heath in excoriating Powell’s words as “evil,” “disgraceful,” and “racialist.” The Thunderer, as it used to be known, accused him of a “calculated” effort to “inflame hatred between the races.”

Edward Heath was the beginning of the rot that has destroyed the Conservative Party in Britain. Not even Thatcher could save it.

Read it.

Britain is now officially pert of the Turd World.

In an emergency, almost anything can serve as a weapon. Table cutlery, napkin holders, condiment containers, chairs, tables, etc.

The Telegraph (UK).

A Morrisons store manager claims he was sacked after tackling a prolific shoplifter.

Sean Egan, 46, said he intervened when a shoplifter became abusive and aggressive while being escorted from his store in Aldridge, near Walsall, in the West Midlands.

At his disciplinary hearing, Mr Egan, who had worked in the store for 29 years, said he had been told he would be dismissed on the grounds of not following the company’s deter-and-not-detain policy.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Read it.

Restore Britain is out here doing the Lord’s work, attempting to salvage Western Civilization in the United Kingdom.

Over the weekend, a British “newcomer” went viral after he was recorded tearing down someone’s centuries-old wall just so he could make a path for himself.

Apparently it was too much effort to climb over a four foot high wall.

Read it.

Import Turd World people, get Turd World problems.

The Telegraph (UK).

Of course they are.

Record numbers of foreign students are securing student loans amid fears the taxpayer is being defrauded of millions of pounds by fake claims.

The number of foreign students receiving loans of up to £13,000 a year has increased by 60 per cent in the past five years with seven European countries accounting for two-thirds of the 262,000 overseas claimants, official figures show.

That contrasts with a 6 per cent fall in the number of British students receiving loans over the same period from 1.2 million to 1.13 million, a decline of 73,000.

The Telegraph (UK).

On the Belgian coast during two world wars, thousands of British soldiers lost their lives. In Coxyde Military Cemetery, more than 1,500 valiant souls are laid to rest.

Men like Gunner A W Loney, of the Royal Field Artillery, who was 20 when he died at Passchendaele. Next to his grave lies that of a 19-year-old soldier killed in the relentless shelling and sniping around Ypres. These men made the ultimate sacrifice to protect our borders.

Today, standing amid the rows of white gravestones as the spring sunshine lights up the names engraved on them, it is hard not to wonder what they would have made of the invasion that is under way today.

Across the road from the cemetery is an accommodation centre for illegal immigrants. Sooner or later, some will be heading to the UK. Belgium is the new front in Britain’s losing battle against migrants. In recent weeks, more than 20 small boats have left the beaches of West Flanders for the UK.

It is astonishing how utterly spineless the British government is in the face of this French assistance in what is an actual invasion of Britain. In times past this would be seen as causus belli, and Steps Would Be Taken.

Utterly spineless.

Read it.

The currently closed Strait of Hormuz, situated between Oman and Iran, connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, and has emerged as a major flashpoint in the US-Iran war. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, off Yemen’s coast, has also remained a focal point among critical maritime chokepoints, given ongoing threats from Iran-linked Houthi rebels.

While both critical chokepoints have been in sharp focus in the news cycle and among US officials, institutional research desks, intelligence analysts, observers, the OSINT community on X, and even everyday viewers watching Fox News or CNN, there is also another set of regional and transregional straits that warrant additional monitoring given their importance to global energy flows and commercial shipping.

Shifting from the Hormuz chokepoint, the latest data from Bloomberg, citing AIS ship-tracking data, shows that tankers bound for China transiting from the Gulf area through the Strait of Malacca is yet another maritime chokepoint, especially for energy and trade flows into Asia.

The Strait of Malacca, at its narrowest point, is only 1.7 miles wide, creating a natural bottleneck. Most of the tankers transiting the tiny but very critical strait are hauling crude and LNG bound not just for China, but also for Japan, South Korea, and other countries in the region. This strait is a key link between Hormuz and China’s coastal refineries.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

A prison work programme has backfired, after two inmates in the US state of Ohio built computers from PCs they were supposed to be dismantling for recycling.

The unsupervised inmates later hid the PCs in the ceiling of a training room.

Investigators found software, pornography and articles about making drugs and explosives on the machines.

Oh, ya think?

Read it.

No trial needed this time, thank goodness.

Naomi Guzman abducted a child from Walmart and carried out her threat to stab him in front of police officers. She was shot and killed by Omaha PD for her troubles.

Guzman … Guzman … undoubtedly of Old Yankee stock.

Read it.

I guess they’ll just have to encourage native Germans to rape more, since nobody is going to touch ‘migrants’.

Read it.

Which tells you everything you need to know abut the ‘immigration crisis’.

Cheap labor. That’s what it’s all about. Your country not producing enough babies? Import them from the Turd World?

Read it.

For many years the US government maintained a strategic helium reserve, but this was sold off in 2024.

In June, before the election, by the Biden Administration.

The Times (UK).

Hundreds of NHS staff spend the majority of their time at work on trade union-related activities, data reveals.

Taxpayers have footed a £100 million bill for so-called facility time across the NHS since 2020 to allow union officials paid time off work for union activities.

Some 305 NHS employees had permission to spend more than half of their working hours on union-related activity, including 172 people who are full-time trade union organisers paid by a hospital or ambulance service.

Overall, 2,978 NHS staff received permission to spend at least some of their working hours on so-called facility time in the year ending March 2025, according to the latest available data published by the Cabinet Office.

U.S. government unions work the same scam.

Read it.

We’ve all become numb to the way the LGBT acronym has slowly expanded over the years until it’s hard to remember what all the letters mean, but an activist in Canada decided to prove once and for all that no one will ever rival our northern neighbor in the woke Olympics.

Get ready for “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.” It’s the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious of identity politics, one long string of oppression that uses 10 of the 26 letters of the alphabet (including several it uses twice).

Fortunately, I don’t have to use AI to try to parse this because a Canadian editor for Quillette jumped in to explain.

Read it.

A growing number of young Germans say they are actively planning to leave their homeland. According to a recent study entitled Youth in Germany, approximately 21% of surveyed youth reported they aim to move abroad in search of a better life. Furthermore, as many as 41% stated they could imagine moving abroad in the longer term.

And who could blame them?

UPDATE: Almost Half of German Benefits Go to Non-Germans

Read it.

In a chilling retaliation against an act of civic duty, a 39-year-old man was left with severe facial fractures—after he intervened to protect two young women on a Berlin commuter train.

The April 2nd incident was a display of violence which aboard an S46 train near the Wildau station in the Dahme-Spreewald district.

According to Federal Police, the victim noticed a group of approximately 12 individuals harassing two female passengers. When he attempted to de-escalate the situation and shield the women, the group turned their aggression toward him, delivering a brutal beating during the journey.

Despite sustaining significant injuries, the victim remained on the train until reaching the Treptower Park station, eventually calling for help only after he had returned to his home.

He was subsequently rushed to a hospital to undergo surgery for multiple facial breaks. While investigators have secured CCTV footage from the carriage, the identities of the assailants remain unknown.

Authorities are now issuing an urgent public appeal for witnesses, specifically calling on the two young women who were being harassed to come forward to provide crucial testimony.

Which they won’t do, of course, for fear of being tracked down by the people who are harassing them once their identities are know publicly. They know the police won’t lift a finger to protect them, especially if (as I suspect) their assailants are ‘migrants’.

Read it.

It takes some people longer to wake up than others.

Watch it.

To be fair, the Orthdox service is Russian and the Roman Catholic service is Hispanic of some sort, so these may not be typical.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

The Antiplanner.

In the two decades I spent critiquing the Forest Service on behalf of environmental groups, I learned several things. I learned that the people who run the national forests were good people who truly loved the land and wanted to do the right thing for the American people. I learned that the managers of each of those national forests believed that their forests were particularly special and unique. And I learned that these good people managing unique resources somehow all decided to do exactly the same thing: clearcut as much of the timber as they could get away with each year.

The American Mind.

When Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins began writing The Golden Thread, their two-volume History of the Western Tradition, they were both Ivy League professors. By the time it was published, neither of them was. Hankins, whose first volume on The Ancient World and Christendom sweeps from Greco-Roman and Jewish antiquity to the European Renaissance, gave his last lecture as a history professor at Harvard late last year. Guelzo, whose second volume on The Modern and Contemporary West begins with the Protestant Reformation and ends hauntingly with images of the World Trade Center shortly before its destruction, left Princeton last fall. Both authors are now faculty members at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, established in 2022. The Golden Thread is a momentous achievement. It’s also a landmark event in the history of American letters. Its appearance signals that the country’s most prestigious universities have all but given up on maintaining the intellectual foundations of the West. For the time being, perhaps, the stewards of civilization will have to do their work outside the gates of the old academy. They will have to build something new.

The Register.

Datacenter protests have taken an ugly turn in the US, with gunshots fired at the home of an Indianapolis councilor who recently lent his support to plans for a server farm in the area.

Ron Gibson, a city-county representative for Indianapolis’s 8th District, was woken in the early hours of Monday by gunfire. He found that 13 shots were fired at his front door, and a note left on the doorstep reading “No data centers.”

In a statement posted on social media site X, Gibson said the bullets struck just steps away from where his eight-year-old son had been playing with Lego the previous day, and described the event as “deeply unsettling.”

The Telegraph (UK).

Ben Roberts-Smith, 47, is expected to be charged with five counts of murder which he allegedly committed while on deployment in Afghanistan.

The former Australian Defence Force member was arrested at Sydney airport on Tuesday morning.

The charges brought against Mr Roberts-Smith are in connection to the deaths of five people in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012, the Australian Federal Police said.

…

Mr Roberts-Smith was heralded as a national hero after being awarded several top military honours – including the prestigious Victoria Cross – for his actions during six tours of Afghanistan from 2006 to 2012.

The Telegraph (UK).

Adult chaperones are to take children to and from school to protect them from violence in knife-crime hotspots.

Up to 250 schools in the areas worst affected by knife crime will be identified by the Home Office using new mapping technology, which can pinpoint the most dangerous streets and when pupils are most at risk.

Adult volunteers from charities and teachers will be recruited to act as chaperones, replicating a scheme in Chicago, which cut crime on targeted routes by 14 per cent and helped students cross gang boundaries.

The Telegraph (UK).

No good deed goes unpunished.

Read it.

In a story that could only come out of West Virginia, a woman living in a chicken coop with her dad had to defend her home against a burglar.

I’ve been in chicken coops that had more room than my first apartment after college.

Apparently, a girl named Anna Groves was there to kick somebody’s butt over money, but that didn’t really work out for her.

But the daughter pulled a knife and stabbed Groves instead, and the invaders fled.

Officers found Groves at CAMC General Hospital being treated for stab wounds.

Watch it.

This is the year that the chickens of Progressivism came home to roost and all pooped on America at once.

Then Teddy Roosevelt’s ego gave the Presidency to the Democrats.

Then Woodrow Wilson got us into a war that was none of our business, using it as an excuse to head America down the long road to the semi-fascism we ‘enjoy’ today.

Then: The 18th Amendment (Prohibition)—and we know how that turned out.

After that: The 19th Amendment (Votes for Women)—and we’re still suffering from that one.

Daily Record (UK).

The first woman to die using a Sarco suicide pod in Switzerland was discovered with unexplained strangulation marks on her neck, with an alarm sounding during the procedure.

Read it.

The United States was born of a desire to leave behind monarchial government and instead live under a republic. Although the structure of the United States was explicitly crafted to have both democratic and anti-democratic elements, the perils of democracy have been part of the American discussion from the beginning (“When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest, both the public good and the rights of other citizens”). The allure of democracy is simple: by allowing people to collectively express their collective will, a representative government should be entitled to rely on their support in carrying out its political agenda. This social contract between the governed and those who govern should, in most cases, be a recipe for broad acceptance of the program of government.

Nevertheless, in the 20th Century, as the memory of monarchies faded and the threats of fascism and communism blossomed, Americans have gradually come to believe that democracy embodied the American project. Despite America’s traditional suspicion of pure democracy (and James Madison’s plea for a government run by enlightened delegates), “democracy” came to stand for all that is good and holy in a world threatened by godless collectivism and/or authoritarianism. Beginning with President Wilson’s exhortation to “make the world safe for democracy” our Founders’ strong philosophical misgivings about mob rule appear to have been discarded as part of America’s search for common ground with allies against authoritarian alternatives. Unlike the Founders, 20th Century Americans weren’t trying to rise above the shortcomings of western European governments in such as those in France or Britain, but rather trying to find common cause with them.

Indeed, in the present moment we now call anything we favor “democratic” and anything we oppose “un-democratic.” We do this even when the problem we are concerned with is itself an inherently democratic one, only reluctantly acknowledging the very significant role played by the pervasive (and anti-democratic) “checks and balances” built into our own federal constitution. The fault lines inherent in democracies—so well known to the Founders—can be showcased by (mostly) contemporary examples. All have lessons for armies—as the premier land force at the disposal of national governments. As military professionals, it is incumbent on soldiers to consider at least a few of the pitfalls which may beset a democracy and ponder the involvement of armies therein.

Quillette.

It is not normal to hear objections raised when universities award honorary doctoral degrees. The distinction, often conferred at happy graduation ceremonies, brings attention to exemplary achievement by the recipient. The aim is to nominate recipients who, in the tradition of the university, elevate all of us. This is true with academic recipients who represent the best of scholarly inquiry, but also with popular figures who represent universalist aspirations.

Francesca Albanese has been the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur for occupied Palestinian territories since 2022. In every medium, she leads the accusation that Israel has been committing genocide in the Gaza Strip since Hamas’s 7 October 2023 massacre. And on 2 April, in Antwerp’s Queen Elisabeth Concert Hall, Albanese will receive an honorary doctorate from not one, but three Flemish institutions in Belgium: the University of Antwerp, the University of Ghent, and the Free University of Brussels. The universities say they wish to honour Albanese’s “outstanding commitment to human rights and international justice.”

It is the first time that universities have jointly conferred such an honour, and this curious event will overshadow simultaneous awards by the University of Antwerp to a pulmonologist, a toxicologist, and a scientist of learning. But the illusion of unanimous acclaim has been punctured already. The Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium’s highest ranked university, rejected an invitation to join the others. “The stance of KU Leuven at this moment is sickening,” wrote a professor emeritus at the university’s faculty of law and criminology in response. “It is a direct mockery of the calls from the International Court of Justice to do everything possible to end the genocide in Gaza. It makes KU Leuven complicit in this mass murder.” Not only did Leuven not wish to honour Albanese; it had also awarded research grants to Israeli scholars engaged in academic work.

Read it.

Europe is literally paying Indians hundreds of euros a month to “study” while its own students can’t afford rent and are drowning in debt.

In a now-viral video, an Indian student in Europe boasts about the arrangement. He explains how the EU provides him with 1400 euros every single month that covers rent, travel, and meals, with zero student debt, while he still saves 600 euros every single month.

He walks through what he calls “elite scholarship secrets,” noting that a simple bachelor’s degree, a valid passport, and basic English proficiency suffice — adding that “IELTS is not always mandatory” and a certificate from some random school abroad will do.