Read it.

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

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

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

Oops.

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

Lileks.

Think about it.

Politico.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Time to leave.

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

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

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

Oh, ya think?

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

BBC.

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

There’s no pleasing some people.

Newsweek.

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

…

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

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

UK Independent.

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

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

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

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

Time to leave.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

Read it.

Poor people steal bread because they are hungry.

Rich kids steal snacks and candy because they are bored.

Time to leave.

Gothamist.

The underpass near Cherry Street and Stewart Avenue in Brooklyn where police say 6 men were injured by gunfire.

Time to leave.

ZMan:

Soldiers grumble about the commanding officers all the time. This is normal and probably healthy, but it is a different thing than trashing the reputation of your company to customers or starting a website to air the company’s dirty laundry.
That comes to mind reading this post in the New York Times by the Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine. This guy has taken to the pages of a publication that regularly slanders his party and his colleagues, in order to help them trash the standard bearer of his party in the coming election. The only thing he did not do is endorse Kamala Harris and call Trump a Nazi.
The reason he is doing this is the same reason the bad salesman trashes his company in front of a client, or the bad employee complains about his boss. That bad salesman wants the client to think he is a good guy, not like his company. The whiny employee wants everyone to think the problem is the boss and not her. DeWine. like all Republicans, wants you to know he is not like his party.

UnHerd.

arely 24 hours after an armed man was found within several hundred yards of Donald Trump on his golf course in Florida, my local newspaper ran a piece with the following headline: “Would-be assassin soured on Trump: Who did he want as presidential and VP candidates?”

Great question. What, for that matter, did the wannabe killer, Ryan Routh think of the impending match-up on Monday Night Football? What were his thoughts on electric vehicles, school choice, weight loss drugs and parenting?

More prestigious outlets hardly showed more attachment to what remains of proper American journalism. The New York Times seemed more caught up in proudly displaying the fact that it had interviewed Routh a year earlier about his experiences trying to recruit fighters in Ukraine. By the time darkness had fallen, on the very day Trump was, maybe, almost killed, you had to make your way through the coverage of the Emmy Awards, to find any mention of the assassination attempt.

If someone had tried to shoot Biden or Harris (and who could blame them?) it would have been Jan. 6 all over again, wall-to-wall news coverage 24/7 until we all had long white beards (even the women).

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

In contrast to the United States, Britain has no constitutionally entrenched protections on freedom of speech. The lack of any such guarantees has been more or less of a problem depending on the era in question. Free speech has tended to thrive perfectly well in the absence of legal reinforcement. As a customary right enjoyed by all Englishmen, in good times it has fallen among the indefinite array of things that are permitted precisely because they are not expressly forbidden.

We do not live in good times.

Today, we have citizens in prison for campaigning—not with violence, but with stickers—against replacement migration, for posting unpleasant rage rhetoric on Facebook, even for peacefully chanting “Who the f*** is Allah?” on political demonstrations. While admittedly not the most sophisticated contribution to the debate, why should it be that only theologians can take an interest in divine ontology? Alas, in our hyper-diverse society, the hurt feelings of newly imported tribal interest groups—or ‘communities,’ as we are supposed to call them—naturally take precedence over the right of native Britons to ask provocative questions.

It was violation of the traditional ‘rights of Englishmen’ that prompted the American colnists to rebel.

Tyler Cowen.

The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.

Times of Israel.

Of course he does. No word on the rapes and murders of civilians in the Hamas Oct. 7 attacks, of course.

Read it.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Yeah, I would think so.

I expected it to be United, but it wasn’t. Color me surprised.

Gothamist.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Time to leave.

CNBC.

Almost two-thirds (63%) of wealthy investors said they plan to leave the U.K. within two years or “shortly” if the Labour government moves ahead with plans to ax the colonial-era tax concession, while 67% said they would not have emigrated to Britain in the first place, according to a new study from Oxford Economics, which assesses the implications of the plans.

The U.K.’s non-dom regime is a 200-year-old tax rule, which permits people living in the U.K. but who are domiciled elsewhere to avoid paying tax on income and capital gains earnings overseas for up to 15 years. As of 2023, an estimated 74,000 people enjoyed the status, up from 68,900 the previous year.

Labour last month set out plans to abolish the status, expanding on a pledge set out in its election manifesto and stepping up earlier proposals by the previous Conservative government to phase out the regime over time.

Leave no pocket unplundered.

Read it.

Since Donald Trump amplified baseless rumors about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, last week, the community has been beset with bomb threats and white nationalist activity.

A leading Jewish group called the whole episode a “blood libel” — the antisemitic canard that Jews use non-Jewish blood for ritual purposes, which animated centuries of violence against Jews.

But one Jew says the Haitians are harming Springfield: the city’s only congregational rabbi.

That’s why they’re part of the Turd World, and the U.S. isn’t — yet.

Read it.

Up until the 1960s, the traditional nuclear family—one man, one woman, and at least one child—was seen as the societal ideal.

But in the 1960s, the American family came under withering attack and has never been the same since—resulting in myriad societal problems that seem to spiral increasingly downward with each passing year.

The Great Society “reforms” devastated the African American family, as men no longer had to be responsible for the children they fathered as long as the government was there to subsidize their promiscuity.

Check the history of ‘baby mama’ and ‘baby daddy’ if you don’t believe it.

Coupled with legalized abortion, men could simply walk away from a woman they impregnated because the “problem” of a child could just be disposed of by going to the local Planned Parenthood office.

And women decided that they didn’t need to be picky any more regarding the guys they had sex with. Anything goes!

No-fault divorce laws were proposed, and then passed, under the pretense of making divorce more amicable and less traumatic. Instead, divorce rates skyrocketed, devastating generations of children who saw their worlds torn apart when mom and dad decided they did not want to remain together anymore.

In 70% of cases, it was mom who didn’t want to stay with dad any more. This is why the country is crowded with single mothers who are looking for stepdads and not finding them.

As Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies states, “Prior to the late 1960s, Americans were more likely to look at marriage and family through the prisms of duty, obligation, and sacrifice. … But the [1960s] psychological revolution’s focus on individual fulfillment and personal growth changed all that. Increasingly, marriage was seen as a vehicle for a self-oriented ethic of romance, intimacy, and fulfillment.”

And this is still the case today. Women are raised to be Disney Princesses: Find your Prince and live happily ever after, just the two of you.

Newsbusters.

If Democrats didn’t believe they’d put former President Donald Trump in an assassin’s crosshairs the first time, they have no excuse for pleading innocent now.

Ryan Routh, the suspect who hid in the bushes at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club waiting for his shot at the former president — AK-47-style rifle at the ready, serial number filed off — wasn’t some 20-year-old without a political paper trail, like the first would-be assassin, Thomas Crooks.

Routh, 58 and now in custody, “frequently posted about politics” on X and other social media, had a Biden-Harris sticker on his truck, “and exclusively donated to Democratic candidates and causes dating back to 2019,” the New York Post reports.

Read it.

The reason why people want to move from THERE to HERE is because THERE sucks, and the primary reason that THERE sucks is because of the people who now want to move HERE.

From California to Haiti to the Middle East, this is a universal truth.

Avoid traveling to countries from which people want to move HERE from THERE. You’ll be glad you did.

Read it.

That the NHS at the time of writing has a waiting list for treatment of over 7 million patients is not a symptom of a failing organisation. It is actually an indicator that the organisation has failed. Any moves to address this public disaster without major change in how British people access health care are not so much as fruitless as re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as it sinks, as it is continuing to do so to barnacle-encrusted furniture years after the doomed ocean liner has settled on the floor of the Atlantic.

Progressives around the world bitch and moan about the costs of U.S. health care, but ‘free’ healthcare that you can’t get isn’t an improvement.

Read it.

Spain’s socialist government has unveiled radical plans to regulate the press to combat so-called ‘disinformation.’ Critics have branded the move as “censorship” and an attempt by prime minister Pedro Sánchez to distract attention from an ongoing scandal involving his wife.

The Democratic Action Plan will create a register of media outlets operating in Spain, something Sánchez claimed was necessary because democracy is “being besieged” by “campaigns of disinformation and hoaxes.”

El Debate says the registry will allow the government to dictate who media outlets’ shareholders can be, their sources of financing, and how much government institutions will spend on advertising with them. Any media outlet not on the register will likely be branded “pseudo-media,” a term used by the socialist government and its supporters to discredit any new outlets that deviate from the establishment line.

Read it.

Leaders of the Patriots for Europe (PfE) EU Parliamentary group convened for an ad hoc press conference on the sidelines of the Strasbourg plenary on Tuesday, September 17th, to address the recent developments in Matteo Salvini’s legal case in Italy after Sicilian prosecutors asked for a six-year prison term for the deputy prime minister for preventing an NGO ship from disembarking illegal migrants in 2019.

The group strongly and unilaterally condemned what they regarded as a politically motivated weaponization of the law and the persecution of a democratically elected official for fulfilling his duty toward his nation and all of Europe.

“The world has turned upside down. Those who defend the European borders are harassed and threatened,” MEP Kinga Gál, the First VP of the group said, drawing parallels with Hungary’s ongoing migration row after the country was slapped with an unprecedented fine just for requiring asylum seekers to register their claims before entering the country.

UnHerd.

Yes, Rome itself “fell” to barbarian invaders in the 5th century, but that, as every Orthodox Christian knows even if no-one else does, was not the end of the Roman Empire, which by then already had a new capital in Constantinople. There was a Roman Emperor reigning until that city fell to the Ottomans in 1453, which was when the Empire technically ended. But that’s not really what I’m talking about.

What I mean is that today’s “West” is really just Rome under another name. Not just because the Western Christian Church was and is quartered in the old Imperial city, and behaved like an imperial power itself for much of the Middle Ages. Not just because, for that reason, “the West” was in many ways ruled from Rome until the modern period. It’s something bigger than that, and yet also more nebulous. It’s the fact that, despite the Christian or pseudo-Christian, veneer, Western culture still really has many of the same values as those of Rome.

True, we don’t take slaves anymore, or throw people to lions, or crucify them, and all that is due to the legacy of the most famous man ever to be crucified. But we’re still, in some ways, Roman. We still valorise power and straight lines. We still have Emperors, even if we call them Presidents, and we still have Empires, even if we pretend we don’t. We still build vast amphitheatres for entertainment, even if the entertainment is an AC/DC concert or a Premier League match instead of a lions-vs-slaves face off. We still use Corinthian columns to demonstrate our social status. And we still make endless films and write endless books about the Romans — rather than, say, the Greeks or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or the Ottomans — because, deep down, we think we are their heirs.

Read it.

Sometimes the zeitgeist of a tumultuous era is concentrated in a single place. At the opening of this school year, Columbia University is managing to combine the blights of Chinese Communist influence, anti-Semitism, incompetent leadership, and intellectual disintegration by the first day of class. Columbia combines the worst aspects of higher education at one time and place. This whirlwind of incompetence and foreign influence provides revisionist powers such as Russia, China, and Iran the air to proclaim and act on their anti-American narratives.

In 2021, authorities in India began investigating a media portal company called Newsclick over suspected money laundering and ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). When the company’s offices were searched, India discovered emails between Newsclick and the CCP, and alleged that monies flowed to Newsclick from an American businessman and an alleged Chinese influence agent named Neville Singham. India was concerned that China used the company to build a “media narrative” supportive of Beijing while the two nations fought hand-to-hand battles in the Himalayas around the disputed territory of Ladakh and Tibet.

Last year, the Daily Beast reported that Singham funded “International People’s Media Network” news agencies. The Daily Beast stated that the International People’s Media Network includes news outlets replete with pro-Russian influencers from propaganda outlets like Radio Sputnik, and RT America. The media network was noted as working with the think tank Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, run by Dr. Vijay Prashad, who has defended China’s treatment of the Uighurs. The Daily Beast reported that Prashad and the pro-Russia and pro-China media outlets met at East China Normal University to speak to representatives from Venezuela, Iran, and Russia to underscore a need to “challenge the predominance of U.S., Japanese, and European outlets.” Singham lives in Shanghai and has worked for Huawei.

Newsbusters.

A radical censorship-obsessed group financed by leftist billionaire George Soros is doubling down on efforts to interfere in the 2024 election by turning the screws on Big Tech to censor speech and by manipulating journalists. Free Press, fueled with at least $2 million by Soros between 2017 and 2021, announced that it was launching a new Orwellian scheme called “‘Democracy Is … .’” This so-called “new initiative” will deputize journalists through indoctrination by the Soros machine and engage the public on how to censor speech by supposedly “flagging disinformation” on social media platforms. In addition, Free Press pledged that the initiative would “provide other needed resources to influence media and technology platforms to better serve our communities and strengthen our democracy,” the press release boasted.

Read it.

Ahead of the second assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, many influential actors, journalists, and influencers warned that Trump is an “existential threat” to democracy, compared him to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and suggested he or his supporters should face violent attacks. Some continued attacking Trump even after the first assassination attempt July 13.

The New Tolerance Campaign, a nonprofit watchdog aimed at confronting “intolerance double standards” practiced by “establishment institutions, civil rights groups, universities, and socially conscious brands,” compiled a list of extreme rhetoric against Trump that may have contributed to the second assassination attempt.

“New Tolerance Campaign research has shown two kinds of consistent and consistently charged rhetoric surrounding President Trump: insistence that his reelection would lead to the collapse of the country, and calls for the former president’s death,” Gregory T. Angelo, New Tolerance Campaign’s president, told The Daily Signal in a written statement Monday. (New Tolerance Campaign has taken to exposing extremism on the Left, to balance the impact of left-leaning groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

Watch it.

The progressive mindset is based on the unshakable belief that tomorrow will inevitably be better than yesterday. This video is proof that they are wrong.

Read it.

“And she said I’m going to have to refer to social services for unintentional emotional abuse for not affirming – just for not using ‘he/him’.”

“The social worker is standing at the foot of our stairs with our daughter next to us and she points her finger at each of us and says, “This. Is. A. Boy!”

These are the words of some of the many parents I interviewed for my new podcast series, Julie in Genderland, which looks primarily at the effect of the imposition on parents who are desperately trying to safeguard their children.

Gothamist.

Police shot at a man they say evaded the subway fare at the Sutter Avenue L train station in Brownsville on Sunday afternoon, injuring him along with an officer and two others, according to the NYPD. One bystander, police said. was struck in the head and listed in critical condition.

NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said officers were patrolling the station shortly after 3 p.m. when they observed a 37-year-old man enter the station without paying the fare. The officers followed him up three flights of stairs, leading to a confrontation. The altercation resulted in injuries to the officer, the suspect, and two civilians — a 49-year-old man and a 26-year-old woman, officials said.

Police said the 49-year-old man was struck in the head and in critical condition on Sunday evening, while the officer, suspect and 26-year-old woman were reported to be in stable condition.

Behavioral Sink (Wikipedia).

Time to leave.

UnHerd.

What do Napoleon, America’s Army War College and the liberal media have in common? The centuries-old belief that conscription is the “vitality of the nation”. With the US military hamstrung by a catastrophic personnel problem, the “draft” is being handed a new lease of life. Maybe, murmurs the DC think-tank circuit, conscription could provide America with the proverbial shot in the arm it needs: polarised internally and beset by a multitude of external challenges, the expedient of compelling young Americans to pick up rifles in service to their nation could kill two birds with one stone.

But almost all discussion of conscription today falls into a standard narrative, a just-so story that is both simple to grasp and seductively credible. America could have a draft if it wanted to, the story goes: no doubt it would work and be effective. The problem, however, is that people have grown too self-absorbed for such harsh measures. Previous generations worked hard and sacrificed willingly, while kids these days just want to play videogames.

Such a narrative is increasingly dangerous. The fatal issue with a potential draft is not that people would get very angry about it — though it’s fair to say that they probably would. The entire reason America abandoned the draft in the Seventies was because the Vietnam War was slowly tearing society apart, leading to protests, riots, and an epidemic of enlisted soldiers murdering their own officers. Any attempt to reinstate conscription would likely bring with it a “Vietnam syndrome” far worse than the original one. But in some ways that is beside the point.

Conscription is a cornerstone of socialism and other totalitarian political systems.

New York Post.

Remind me again which party is full of terrorists?

Read it.

Murders across New York City’s subway system have surged by a shocking 60% so far this year, even as overall crime on the rails has dipped, leaving straphangers increasingly terrified for their safety.

According to NYPD data, eight people have been slaughtered on subway cars or in stations as of September 8, up from just five during the same period last year. The surge in killings is closing in on the 25-year high set in 2022, which saw ten murders in the transit system—a grim milestone unseen since 1997. For over two decades, from 1997 to 2020, the city never recorded more than five subway murders in a single year, the NY Post reports.

Read it.

The Center for Gender & Refugee Studies has spent years battling on behalf of illegal alien invaders. Earlier, Freedom Center Investigates exposed how the lawfare group housed at a University of California law school provides full service open borders support.

“During Trump, my CGRS colleagues and I expended a tremendous amount of energy challenging the anti-immigrant policies that were issued on what seemed like an almost daily basis,” Karen Musalo, the CGRS founding director, boasted.

The Center also offers a database of “expert witnesses” willing to testify on behalf of the ‘refugee’ claims of border invaders. It urges licensed medical or mental health personnel to register to “support asylum seekers with forensic mental or physical evaluations.”

Who funds the CRGS open borders lawfare? Many of those who fund it don’t even know it.

CGRS is one of the radical leftist groups that benefits from interest seized from trust accounts controlled by lawyers and redistributed to some of the most extreme groups around.

As a general rule, avoiding California and Californians is a good plan.

Go Where You’re Treated Best.

Read it.

Hand-wringers: “People can’t afford to get a college degree and improve their lives!”

Do-gooders: “I know! Let’s have the government pay for it!”

Colleges: “The government is paying for it! FREE MONEY! Let’s jack up the price!”

Hand-wringers: “People can’t afford to get a college degree because of the crushing load of debt!”

Rinse. Repeat.

Read it.

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

Gothamist.

Police shot and killed a man inside a Brooklyn apartment on Friday evening whom they said they were seeking in connection with three recent homicides. The incident marks the 12th fatal NYPD shooting this year, according to data tracked by Gothamist.

Police identified the man as 38-year-old Vilmond Jean Baptiste and said officers fatally shot him just before 5:30 p.m. at 485 East 21st St. in Flatbush. Members of the NYPD’s fugitive enforcement unit arrived at the apartment with an open-bench warrant for Baptiste, according to officials. When police entered the apartment, they found Baptiste in a bathtub fully dressed in a hoodie, the NYPD said.

Officers instructed Baptiste to get out of the bathtub when they saw he was holding a knife, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said at a press conference on Friday night. They told him to drop the knife but he did not comply, according to Maddrey.

A sergeant at the scene tried to deploy his Taser to immobilize Baptise, but the effort did not work, Maddrey said. He said Baptiste at that point “jumped out of the tub and advanced on the officers.”

That will get you shot in most places. Stupidity is generally a capital crime. Think of it as evolution in action.

This story is, in itself, worth very little. People gather in cities; among those who gather are crazy people; crazy people often do crazy things; sometimes those crazy things get them shot by police.

I suspect, from the victim’s name and the location of the shooting, that he was Haitian. Of course, in these Woke times, any inquiry into the background of an alleged criminal, much less any revelation of that knowledge to the reading public, is Not Allowed if said alleged criminal is a member (or perceived member) of one of the plethora of Fashionable Victim Groups that hand-wringers just love to wring their hands about.

And, of course, crowds of Activists gather when such things occur, not because they’re just the traditional rubberneckers that customarily gather whenever something unusual occurs among the People Gathered In Cities, but because Activists are always on the hunt for things to be Activist about, such as a member of a Fashionable Victim Group getting inconvenienced (properly or not) by any Minions Of The Man, even when The Man and his (her? its?) minions are also members of a similar Fashionable Victim Group.

I predict that there will be Activists flocking to cameras, TV and Influencer, to decry a member of a Fashionable Victim Group being inconvenienced (properly or not), because that’s what Activists do. It doesn’t matter whether he was guilty or innocent–what matters is to what Political Tribe he can be useful.

Feh.

The Register.

(Reminder: Yoda’s first language is Latin. The Reg is just bad at translating Latin.)

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) and its allies are getting closer to a definition of open source AI. If all goes well, Stefano Maffulli, the OSI’s executive director, expects to announce the OSI open source AI definition at All Things Open in late October. But some open source leaders already want nothing to do with it.

Let’s start with some background. Lots of companies – I’m looking at you, Meta – have been claiming that their AI models are open source. They’re not. They’re not even close.

So the OSI and a host of other companies and groups have been working on creating a comprehensive open source AI definition. After all, the OSI is the same organization that defines open source software with the Open Source Definition.