Read it.

Federal immigration authorities confirmed that an MS-13 gang member charged in a shooting spree in Mississippi last week is an illegal migrant who had been previously deported from the U.S.

Fredy Antonio Amaya-Marin is a 39-year-old Salvadoran national living in the U.S. illegally, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday.

The Philadelphia, Miss., Police Department arrested Amaya-Marin on Aug. 24 for allegedly shooting at about 15 vehicles and charged him with attempted murder.

Read it.

Potential gang activity was caught on surveillance camera in a Colorado apartment building after what one former resident calls “no accountability” kept law enforcement from assisting.

The video shows many men armed with handguns, and one with a scoped rifle, bursting through the door of the apartment complex for unknown reasons.

The group appears to be Tren de Aragua, or TdA, a transnational gang based out of Venezuela. The gang, with reportedly 5,000 members, has a motto of “real until death,” or “real hasta la muerte.”

Read it.

Two groups of migrants attempted to board separate elementary school buses filled with children in Southern California, Fox 5 in San Diego reported Wednesday.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Read it.

If a violent transnational gang coming over the border and overrunning a Denver suburb doesn’t get covered in the national news media, did it really happen at all? This appears to be the underlying calculus of the Regime Media’s outright refusal to cover a story that is critically adverse to the electoral prospects of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Read it.

Robin DiAngelo, the pro-DEI author of the bestselling book “White Fragility,” is a fraud.

She’s also been accused of rampantly plagiarizing minority scholars in a scathing new report by The Washington Free Beacon.

“According to a complaint filed last week with the University of Washington, where DiAngelo received her Ph.D. in multicultural education, she plagiarized several scholars—including two minorities—in her doctoral thesis,” the Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reported.

For those who are unaware, DiAngelo is one of the most prominent public faces of the “antiracism” movement. She, alongside fellow guru of antiracism Ibram X. Kendi, exploded in popularity during the 2020 “racial awakening” and Black Lives Matter-provoked protests.

Read it.

Law enforcement in the United States has collapsed. Americans in many parts of the country see that products at CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart stores are behind plexiglass, that you must call a clerk to unlock the glass and then wait while you read and examine the different packages. People know these companies have no choice. Americans know that crime is rising, but the true collapse in law enforcement, particularly in large cities, is without precedent.

A Gallup survey last November showed that 92% of Republicans and even 58% of Democrats believed that crime was rising. In a series of surveys from March 2023 to April 2024, Rasmussen Reports finds a remarkably constant percentage of Americans who believe that violent crime is getting worse – 60% to 61%. Roughly four times as many people think violent crime is rising rather than getting better.

Read it.

Italian authorities have impounded a so-called ‘rescue ship,’ operated by the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), for failing to cooperate with Italian border guards during its mission to pick up migrants from the Mediterranean Sea. Despite successfully cracking down on illegal migration, Giorgia Meloni’s conservative government continues to face foreign-funded NGOs that collude with human smugglers to take as many migrants as possible to Italy.

The ship in question, the Geo Barents is a rescue and salvage ship owned by a Norwegian company, and currently chartered by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). It has carried out ‘sea-rescue operations’ in the Mediterranean since June 2021.

Italian authorities ordered the boat’s sixty-day detention on Monday, August 26th after Geo Barents disembarked 191 rescued migrants at the port of Salerno, near Naples. The captain of the boat has been issued a fine of €3,300. Rome accused Geo Barents of endangering lives and failing to provide prompt information to Italian authorities during a night-time rescue in the central Mediterranean last Friday.

Here’s how the scam works:

• ‘Migrants’ go to sea from a Turd World country in something that barely floats.
• ‘Migrants’ somehow manage to get outside the 3-mile limit.
• Bleeding-heart NGO boats (who have been poised and waiting) swoop in to ‘rescue’ them and take them the rest of the way across the ocean.
• Illegal immigrant privileges ensue.

Read it.

EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is trying to strongarm several smaller member states into changing their commissioner nominations to women so that she can have the gender-balanced cabinet she vowed to set up. But disregarding countries’ sovereign choice for a PR stunt might not only affect her relationship with the capitals but also hurt any women in her administration, whose rightful place in Brussels could be questioned from now on.

The deadline for nominating members to the second von der Leyen Commission is just days away, and all but five countries have submitted nominations. However, many have chosen to ignore von der Leyen’s request to put forward two names this year—a man and a woman—so that she could come up with a mix of candidates that is at least 50% female.

Out of the 21 nominations so far, 16 are men. There is nothing to be outraged about: there is not a single clause in the treaties that would demand gender parity in the Commission, unlike those that guarantee member states’ right to nominate whoever they see most fit for the job.

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Last December, Liz Magill, then president of my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, resigned. This was the result of a public relations nightmare for the school, brought on by a rise in antisemitism on campus, widespread protests, and, of course, her disastrous performance in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee. While the right celebrated, I wrote a cautionary tale about their excitement. Now, as Ivy League presidents keep dropping like flies, the latest victim being Columbia’s chief administrator, Minouche Shafik, we should all remember that new management doesn’t fix a broken business model.

USA Today.

U.S. Army Private Travis King, who last year ran into North Korea and was taken into custody there, will plead guilty to five charges, including desertion, while taking responsibility for his conduct, his lawyer said in a statement on Monday.

The U.S. Army charged King with crimes ranging from desertion for running into North Korea in July to assault against fellow soldiers and solicitation of child pornography, Reuters reported late last year. He was charged by the Army with 14 offenses under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, after his release from North Korean custody in September.

His release followed weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations that led the Swedish government to retrieve King in North Korea and bring him across the border into China for a handoff to the U.S. ambassador.

“He will plead guilty to five of those (14 offenses), including desertion, three counts of disobeying an officer, and assault on a noncommissioned officer,” his lawyer said. “He will plead not guilty to the remaining offenses, which the Army will withdraw and dismiss.”

Read it.

Los Angeles Realtor to the stars John Woodward says squatters have taken over a multi-million dollar mansion across the street from LeBron James.

Soon after listing the property at 1316 Beverly Grove Place in Beverly Hills, Woodward got a call from the pool boy letting him know that someone had shown up with a U-Haul to move in. Given that he hadn’t sold the house yet, he drove down to see what was going on – and ended up calling the police to report an active crime; these people were breaking into the house.

According to the Daily Caller, when the police showed up, the squatters produced a fake lease, which the cops of course accepted as proof, and told Woodword to pound sand – forcing him to pursue justice through the backlogged and ideologically biased LA court system.

Lara Trump on DNC: ‘They’re attempting to run on hating Donald Trump’ (Sarah Fortinsky/The Hill)  Well, yeah.

Trump Whines About Fox News as Poll Numbers Keep Dropping (Lily Mae Lazarus/The Daily Beast)

Gen. McMaster’s blistering account of the Trump White House (Peter Bergen/CNN)

FLASHBACK: Jorge Ramos ‘Produced’ 2015 Iowa Heckling of Donald Trump

They Served With Trump and Saw the Crazy. They Should Endorse Harris. (Tim Miller/The Bulwark)

Finally, the Democrats Have Found Trump’s Achilles Heel: Ridicule Him (Michael Tomasky/New Republic)

Trump’s personal attacks aren’t just who he is. They’re his strategy (Stephen Collinson/CNN)

“He’s now terrified of debating her”: Trump’s debate flip-flop is a sign Harris has him figured out (Charles R. Davis/Salon)

McMaster: Trump’s Foreign Policy Judgment ‘Clouded’

‘Laugh-out-loud funny’: Experts guffaw as Times op-ed asserts Trump can win ‘on character’ (Kathleen Culliton/Raw Story)

Donald Trump is not exactly Nostradamus (Aaron Blake/Washington Post)

Read it.

Many on the Left suggest that concerns about illegal aliens casting votes in a presidential election are unfounded. After all, illegal aliens can’t legally vote. Yet a new poll suggests that most Americans expect that illegals will be allowed to vote in the Nov. 5 election.

When asked, “How likely is it that a large number of illegal immigrants will be allowed to vote in this year’s elections?” more than half of respondents (56%) said it is “very likely” (27%) or “somewhat likely” (27%). About a third (36%) said it is “somewhat likely” (17%) or “not very likely” (19%), while one in 10 said they weren’t sure.

Off-Guardian.

Now in this third article in the series, I want to link this back to what we started out discussing. How our closed and controlled Social Media services are now processing every post with an LLM.
My point today is not to prove linkages and corruption of the narrative being fed to the masses via Social Media. Such an investigation could be the subject of an entire book in itself.
Rather today, I would like to plant a seed.
Many reading this will already be in agreement with my belief we are entered into and age of Fascism 2.0. But if you are not yet aware, if you haven’t yet recognised the pervasive and consistent propaganda, my hope is you will start to notice.
My hope is that you will start to see our newspapers only carry the stories which support narratives furthering the globalist desire to fix policy-driven markets. Never the stories that contradict them. And Social Media (less so X now) similarly down regulate posts when they are critical of the policies sought. But for good measure, let me give two examples of recent news suppression matching this pattern.

Read it.

If the new punk rock is to be politically correct, then it’s not punk rock. The woke activist invasion of popular media since 2015 continues to ignore the reality that they are not “rebels”, they are villains, and their delusions are becoming more embarrassing for them with each passing year.

Woke tropes have become poison for any brand seeking a wider audience or greater profits, to the point that activist media projects must now be funded by governments and NGOs through DEI initiatives just to pay developer salaries. The goal? To saturate the market with multicultural ideology and LGBT propaganda until the public was forced to accept it and consume it as “normal.” The agenda has failed.

Every new woke product seems to bomb harder than the last these days and that’s a good sign for the future. Video game players, a market which now dwarfs movies and TV streaming, are rejecting woke material en masse. Case in point: Dustborn.

Read it.

My colleague Tony Kinnett captured a rather revealing declaration at the anti-Israel protests in Chicago ahead of the Democratic National Convention this past week. A protester shouted, “Reproductive justice means Palestinian liberation.”

This leftist gobbledygook is nonsensical on its face (abortion isn’t exactly legal under Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and legal protections on abortion in the U.S. will have no impact on civilians in Gaza), but it reveals a nihilism at the root of much leftist protesting. The protests aren’t really about the omni-cause of climate alarmism, LGBTQ+ demands, abortion, Palestine, or whatever the college kids are into these days. Instead, they represent a challenge to authority, an attempt to “stick it to the man,” regardless of the consequences.

These protests echo a culture that has lost faith in itself and is committing suicide.

Gothamist.

Lithium-ion batteries are increasingly exploding inside garbage trucks, endangering New York City’s sanitation workers.

The long, rectangular batteries used in e-bikes have become a fiery threat to New York City homes, and have led to as many as 626 blazes and 26 deaths since 2022, according to the FDNY. These batteries are found in everything from power tools to vapes to laptops, and are now so ubiquitous that sanitation workers say they’re also finding their way into trash streams.

The number of sanitation department collection truck fires that were either caused or likely caused by discarded lithium-ion batteries increased from just 1 in 2017 to 28 in 2023, according to the agency. And so far this year, there have already been 23 such fires through the beginning of August, though no injuries have been reported.

New York City is effectively a Turd World country.

Read it.

The book begins, “In 2021, inflation emerged from a multi-decade hibernation.” Well, inflation had not really been in hibernation, but rather was continuing at a rate which had become considered acceptable. It was worry about inflation that had been hibernating. People found themselves caught up in the runaway inflation of 2021-2023, a wake-up call. As the book explores at length, that explosive inflation had been unexpected by the central banks, including the Federal Reserve, making their forecasts and assurances look particularly bad and proving once again that their knowledge of the future is as poor as everybody else’s.

The dollar has lost two-thirds of its purchasing power since I was in college in the mid-1970s.  When Franklin Roosevelt stole everybody’s gold in 1933, it was worth $20 an ounce. Look at the price today. That tells you everything you need to know about inflation

Read it.

How did American voters get so dumb? Thank a public school.

Newsbusters.

Censorship-obsessed Google seems to be buying off California news outlets with a bombshell deal to fund and influence the state’s journalism enterprise in the middle of an election year.

California was reportedly considering a bill to force Big Tech platforms to pay certain media outlets for the right to share news, and a second bill to tax digital ads. But California Democrats, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, are declaring victory after getting Google to commit to a $250 million bargain with the state.

Some groups are criticizing the deal, which will provide hundreds of millions of dollars from Google, taxpayers and possibly other sources to shape the future of journalism, according to National Review. And if Google’s and California’s sordid records are any indication, that future is undoubtedly marked by another radical lurch leftward.

EcoNews.

Renewable sources are expanding across the country, but there is a ‘silent enemy’ that is eating away at some of this progress, and that is nuclear energy. Experts have believed for years that they can make it clean and safe, which we simply call a pipe dream. Recently, a prestigious media outlet such as The Guardian collected the opinions of several experts under the reflection ‘The dream is dead’. What has happened so that optimism has turned into global pessimism? A discovery about reactors has left everyone in shock.

The sky is falling. The world is about to end. Film at 11.

Read it.

Only days after it was announced that California will be pushing a bill to give illegal aliens access to zero down, no payment home loans, it has been revealed that a taxpayer-funded group out of Oregon called Hacienda CDC is already offering non-citizens a $30,000 home assistance loan for new homebuyers through a program called Camino a Casa.

Screenshots from the Hacienda website posted by X user Oregon Citizen note:

“Only for people who are not American citizens…”

“Clients work closely with financial coaches and HUD-certified housing counselors throughout the entirety of the homebuying process. In addition to mortgage readiness and financial fitness workshops, we provide various opportunities for down-payment assistance…”

Read it.

The invasion continues.

Read it.

Facebook make only about £34 a year from the average customer in the UK – a little under £3 a month (and that’s before costs) so clearly there is no head-room or motivation, for a human level of customer service or attention. The user is not the customer; rather, they are the product whose data is sold to advertisers.

Thus, users do not have a direct customer relationship with the platform. The network is not directly incentivised to “care” about the user before the advertiser. And no matter where you lie on the spectrum between “free speech absolutism” and “private entities have the right to censor any user”, with such low margins it is inevitable machine processing will have to be used to moderate posts and deal with the customer interface.

But it is a fact the customer processing and management capabilities Social Networks are now evolving is being utilised in a variety of ways beyond just moderation. And it is also true this automated processing is being done at scale and is now applied to every post every member makes. 68% of US voters are on Facebook. In the UK it’s 66% and France 73.2%. The figures are similar for every democratic nation in the West. So it is vitally important the applied rules should be politically neutral.

Read it.

The Republic of Panama on Tuesday initiated a new program by which illegal immigrants transiting the country are flown back to their native nations — with the cost borne by US taxpayers.

The repatriation flight program is one of multiple avenues by which new Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino is following through on his campaign pledge to end his country’s role as a major funnel of illegal immigrants bound for the United States. Last year saw a new record, with more than a half-million migrants crossing the infamous Darien Gap jungle wilderness that spans the Panama-Colombia border region.

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Attorneys for a teenager who was ordered into jail clothes and handcuffs during a field trip to a Detroit court filed a lawsuit against a judge Wednesday, accusing him of humiliation, false arrest and unlawful detention.

It is the latest fallout since Judge Kenneth King singled out 15-year-old Eva Goodman for falling asleep and having what he considered to be a bad attitude while she was visiting 36th District Court on Aug. 13.

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A Brooklyn bookstore this week canceled a planned book launch, reportedly over the selection of a pro-Israel rabbi to moderate the event according to The New York Post.

Author Joshua Leifer was set for a live interview with Rabbi Andy Bachman on Tuesday at the Powerhouse Arena in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn to discuss his new book, “Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life.”

However, the store canceled the event just a few hours before the planned start because the venue “would not be willing to host a conversation between me and Andy because they wouldn’t allow a Zionist on the premises,” according to Leifer, who described the decision as “unacceptable and unprofessional.”

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Back in March, when most of Wall Street and economists still believed the lies spewed forth by the Biden Bureau of Labor Statistics, which intentionally uses inaccurate, rushed “data” from the Establishment survey which is meant to pad sentiment and make the economy appear far stronger than it is for propaganda purposes (as one can see by the constant monthly downward revisions), we did an in-depth analysis looking at the actual, “uncooked” numbers published by the Philadelphia Fed preview of the annual Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages employment revision, and warned our readers that actual US payrolls are overstated by at least 800,000.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Read it.

After dozens of staffers at a Seattle museum walked off the job to protest an exhibit on antisemitism they claimed was “Zionist,” area Jewish groups and the museum all pledged that the exhibit would find a new home.

Months later, the Jewish groups are still planning to mount a version of the exhibit, called “Confronting Hate Together.” But they will do so without their original partners, the Black Heritage Society of Washington State and a museum dedicated to Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander heritage. Instead, the Jewish groups say the exhibit will be housed in a Jewish space.

The groups cited “circumstances out of our control” and said that the experience had left local Jews feeling isolated at a time of great need.

Read it.

Anti-Israel agitators clashed with police at an illegal protest organized by pro-terrorist groups outside of the Israeli consulate on day two of the Democratic National Convention. Hundreds of radicals used keffiyehs and masks to cover their faces, and dozens resisted as officers in riot gear arrested them.

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The World Health Organization (WHO) acted as expected this week and declared Mpox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). So, a problem in a small number of African countries that has killed about the same number of people this year as die every four hours from tuberculosis has come to dominate international headlines. This is raising a lot of angst from some circles against the WHO.

Read it.

Regime journalists across America wet themselves last week as year-on-year ticked below 3% for the first time since 2021. As The New York Times put it, “Easing inflation has Democrats tasting victory.”

That’s quite a lot to taste for a 0.1% annual move in inflation—assuming you believe the numbers—especially considering inflation actually went up on the month.

In fact, a more sober reading is that inflation’s been stuck way above the Federal Reserve’s target as that famous transitory inflation logs its 40th month with no end in sight.

More important, falling inflation in a weakening economy is not what the party the communists—er, the journalists—think it is.

Trump’s carny act isn’t working anymore (Davidrlurie/Public Notice)

Conservatives Are Already Working to Enact Their Project 2025 Agenda (Andrew Perez/Rolling Stone)  Gee, I’ll bet nobody else saw that coming.

Trump Falls For AI-Generated Taylor Swift Fans In Kooky Endorsement Claim: ‘I Accept!’ (Ben Blanchet/HuffPost)  Apparently Trump has lost the Middle School Prank demographic.

Democrats Taunt Trump At Trump Tower Chicago Ahead of Convention (Tessa Stuart/Rolling Stone)  Apparently Trump has lost the Elementary School Nyahh-Nyahh demographic.

On Cat Ladies, Mama Bears and ‘Momala’ (Tressie McMillan Cottom/New York Times)

Trump Is Worried About the TV Ratings for Harris’ DNC Speech (Rolling Stone)

Democrats to highlight threat to democracy they say Trump poses, giving speaking roles to January 6 committee lawmakers (CNN)

Trump Proposes Ban on Criticizing Pro-Trump Judges (Jonathan Chait/New York Magazine)  No, he doesn’t.

DNC Projects ‘Weird’ Message on Trump Tower in Chicago

Trump’s unsettling new question: ‘Why are we having an election?’ (Steve Benen/MSNBC)  Yeah, the Democrats are just going to steal it anyway–what’s the point?

Project 2025 is ‘anti-American,’ spokesperson for Harris campaign says (Addy Bink/The Hill)  I like it already.

Evangelicals for Harris Unveil Second Trump Attack Ad  I guess they call themselves ‘evangelicals’ because ‘Christian’ is already taken and they don’t want anybody to be confused.

Trump to campaign in Michigan town with historic links to white extremism (Reuters)

Newsbusters.

Brazil’s Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and Musk had spent months battling over online free speech, with Musk refusing the justice’s aggressive and extensive censorship demands. On Saturday, X’s Global Government Affairs announced its decision to close the Brazil office due to De Moraes’s shocking threats to X staff over alleged “disinformation” on the platform. X is still available to Brazilians, however.

“The decision to close the ? office in Brazil was difficult, but, if we had agreed to @alexandre’s (illegal) secret censorship and private information handover demands, there was no way we could explain our actions without being ashamed,” Musk commented on X.

As shown in several MRC Free Speech America studies, X has suppressed some free speech, but not on the scale and harshness required by De Moraes.

Read it.

We’ve all seen and heard the auto extended warranties. Many of us have been bothered with robocalls and texts. You may have missed this news about Car Shield’s deceptive extended warranty advertising.

Great! Now do one on the Biden administration.

Read it.

Do Columbia University administrators actually want a governable university where students can learn free of disruption and harassment from their own classmates?

Former university president Minouche Shafik threw in the towel last week rather than return to campus. She presided over a period last spring in which Columbia became ground zero for student radicals. Shafik coddled them for weeks, beseeching them to get off her lawn, please, if it wouldn’t inconvenience them too much, until they stormed a university building.

On Monday, we learned how the university has dealt with the criminals in its midst. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce released information obtained from Columbia indicating how the university has meted out discipline in an array of cases. They range from protesters who participated in the unlawful encampment to those who broke into Hamilton Hall to students who disrupted the school’s alumni weekend in late May, plastering cardboard rockets with the photographs of Columbia trustees and other university leaders.

INTERVIEWER: I see that you have a degree from an Ivy League University.

CANDIDATE: Yes, I do.

INTERVIEWER: Well, I’m sorry to hear that. I’m afraid we’re looking for somebody with an education.

MAGA Pastor Hates Democracy Because It Allows Women To Vote (NewsHound Ellen/Crooks and Liars)

JD Vance isn’t helping Trump’s ticket. Removing him would be even worse. (Julia Azari/MSNBC)

Sunday Snapshot: Republicans admit Trump the “provocateur” could lose (Avery Lotz/Axios)

Tammy Duckworth rips Trump over remarks about medal-winning soldiers (David Cohen/Politico)

Secret Service finds protecting Trump is extraordinarily challenging (Washington Post)  When they can be troubled to do it.

Trump’s new absurdity: ‘Kamala price hikes’ cost a typical family $28,000 (Glenn Kessler/Washington Post)

Trump ‘might win, but he’s not a majority candidate’: Brit Hume (Miranda Nazzaro/The Hill)

Pennsylvania conservatives panicked Trump is ‘not even trying’ to win key voting bloc (Tom Boggioni/Raw Story)

Harris implies Trump a ‘coward’ during Pennsylvania campaign appearance (Jeff Mason/Reuters)

Republicans flood TV with misleading ads about immigration, border (Washington Post)

Sunday Meltdown: Trump Floods Truth Social With Photos of Swifties and Communists (AJ McDougall/The Daily Beast)

Read it.

Illegal immigration into Spain’s Canary Islands “remains at extreme levels” and will almost certainly get worse in the second half of August, a Civil Guard report has said.

The number of arrivals is on the verge of breaking the all-time record, and will soon likely pass 30,000 so far this year. The report, seen by Spanish outlet La Gaceta, says this could happen in the coming weeks after 2,200 illegal migrants arrived in July.

That number was the highest total for a July since 2006, when 2,260 arrived.

Read it.

Yet another pride organization founder gets arrested on suspicion of being a child predator, proving once again that when LGBT activists focus on children and gender ideology it’s okay to be suspicious.

Stephen Ireland, the 40-year-old founder and former director of LGBT activist charity ‘Pride in Surrey’, has been arrested on a total of 37 charges involving child sexual abuse. Ireland is an avid proponent of child indoctrination into gender ideology and was a patron of a charity called ‘Educate And Celebrate.’ The charity ran Pride workshops for primary and secondary school pupils, which included “How to break the binary and be gender inclusive”.

In 2022 trans activist Jordan Gray, another patron of Educate And Celebrate, prompted nearly 1,500 complaints when the performer stripped-off during a live Channel 4 show before appearing to play a piano with his penis. The comedian had previously described going into schools to “talk about gender” on behalf of the charity, adding that “toddlers kind of get it straight away”.

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There is nothing abnormal about deviance. This is a lesson I learned growing up during the 1950s and early 1960s in an Italian American neighborhood called Collinwood on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio. While the neighborhood had plenty of conformity, there was also sufficient forbearance for enough deviance to make life interesting and educational.

Years later in the early to mid-1970s, I found myself a Ph.D. student in a seminar on the works of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. I was pleasantly surprised that the lesson I learned growing up was one of Durkheim’s important sociological insights into our common life.

Durkheim showed that deviance performs at least four important functions in society. It affirms our cultural values and norms; clarifies our moral boundaries; brings us together; and encourages social change by challenging our views. Moreover, our neighborhood was a good example of what’s called the Durkheim Constant: there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior that a community will tolerate since deviant behavior causes conflict.

Read it,

You can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

A few weeks ago, I was just like you, taking a summer vacation to the beach, anxiously waiting for new episodes of “Presumed Innocent.” Then, after reading too many stories about fast furniture, Chipotle’s shrinking burritos, and other examples of corporations diluting the size and quality of their products, I fell down the wrong rabbit hole.

Next thing I knew, I was in touch with a secret source on a black market called eBay. She goes by MrsFreeThinker and frequents estate sales, where she’d found the contraband I needed. Somebody had kept this secret to the grave.

Inside my house, I draw the blinds and rip into a gray plastic bag. It’s everything I hoped for: a factory-sealed four-pack of regular Charmin Ultra toilet paper produced in 1992.

I look at the fine print and gasp…170 sheets per roll!

Read it.

Sow the wind, reap the tornato.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Neighbors in Oakland have had enough with reckless driving and, since their years of complaints are going unnoticed, they’re banding together and doing something about it.

Frustrated by years of reckless driving, Oakland homeowners took action by placing dirt- and rock-filled tires on busy streets.

On Tuesday, city crews faced hecklers while removing the tires from East 21st Street, according to Fox KTVU.

Odelson Souza said his 2 year old son was almost hit by a speeding car on the sidewalk, telling Fox: “Look, please help us. Who else we gonna call? Superman?”

Read it.

California officials are pushing for school districts to convert available property into housing for teachers, school staff, and, in some cases, students.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond hosted a summit on Aug. 14 featuring state leaders to address what his office called the “critical need for affordable housing and workforce housing, and exploring strategies for accelerating access to homeownership for working and middle-class Californians,” according to a news release.

Read it.

Hours after California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a crime bill to stop “smash and grabs,” a bicycling mob ransacked three Hollywood 7-Eleven stores in under 25 minutes.

Read it.

The ‘Great Replacement’ comes to Ireland? Public concerns surrounding government supported open immigration plans in the UK have been consistently treated as “xenophobic” and “overblown” by the media and authorities alike. The typical M.O. of politicians has been to ignore all scrutiny and attack anyone that dares to question the agenda.

Reports that migrant relocation programs were going to flood rural Irish locations with foreign elements raised eyebrows (and raised questions) last month as to the purpose of transplanting the third-world into outlying villages in the UK. These same villages have been demographically unchanged for centuries.

The theory, which holds considerable validity, is that western countries are being destabilized from within by corrupt progressive leaders with the intent to upend traditional western society and replace it with a self-devouring multicultural soup that is easier to convert to globalism. Rural areas of the west are commonly viewed as safe havens away from the corrosive politics of woke socialism, and the targeting of these places seems to verify everyone’s worst fears about open borders.

Read it.

This week, the Wall Street Journal published some good news for proponents of Social Security, the socialist program that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law in 1935. The Journal reported that the Millennial generation — those whose age range is between 27 and 44 — have experienced a “dramatic turnaround” in finances. The Journal states:

The median household net worth of older millennials, born in the 1980s, rose to $130,000 in 2022 from $60,000 in 2019…. Median wealth more than quadrupled to $41,000 for Americans born in the 1990s, which includes the generation’s youngest members, born in 1996. In early 2024, millennials and older members of Gen Z had, on average and adjusting for inflation, about 25% more wealth than Gen Xers and baby boomers did at a similar age, according to a St. Louis Fed analysis.”

Why is that good news for proponents of Social Security? It assures them that there is more wealth that the IRS can confiscate to support and maybe even expand the program.

Read it.

According to police, the 21-year-old perpetrator got into an argument with a visitor and hit him as well as a security guard. The Algerian then fled the scene, but appeared in a courtyard of the asylum center where he punched and stabbed several residents.

The attack was treated by Berlin police as a “mass casualty event,” meaning a large deployment of law enforcement and paramedics, as well as a helicopter to transport the injured.

Two of the victims were admitted to hospital with stab wounds, one reportedly in life threatening condition, while another five were treated on an outpatient basis. Several of the injured are Moldovan.