Ars Technica.

Cellulose is the primary component of the cell walls of plants, making it the most common polymer on Earth. It’s responsible for the properties of materials like wood and cotton and is the primary component of dietary fiber, so it’s hard to overstate its importance to humanity.

Given its ubiquity and the fact that it’s composed of a bunch of sugar molecules linked together, its toughness makes it very difficult to use as a food source. The animals that manage to extract significant calories from cellulose typically do so via specialized digestive tracts that provide a home for symbiotic bacteria—think of the extra stomachs of cows and other ruminants.

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For the sons of this world are, for their own generation, more prudent than the sons of light.

— Luke 16:8

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A growing unease is setting in among Brussels’ Eurocrats as a rightist wave is predicted to sweep Europe’s upcoming parliamentary elections in June.

This has however failed to deter some from doubling down on the massively unpopular ‘net zero’ policies that are partly responsible for putting EU elites in their precarious positions in the first place.

In an interview on Tuesday, the EU Commission’s climate chief, Wopke Hoekstra, told Politico that whatever the outcome of these elections, afterward, Brussels must “focus just as much and probably more” on climate action.

His remarks came on the heels of Monday’s first-ever report from the European Environment Agency (EEA), which predicts a climate apocalypse should EU governments slack off in their efforts.

New York Post.

The term “long COVID” should be tossed aside like a stack of expired N95 masks — that’s according to health experts in one country, who found that symptoms of those reportedly suffering a year on weren’t any different than your typical virus, such as the flu.

Government-backed medical researchers in Australia say it’s time to stop using the fear-inducing phrase, which became popular after high volumes of people testing positive for COVID-19 led to a surge in generally non-severe “virus fatigue symptoms” that would normally have gone unnoticed, South West News Service reported.

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Back in 2018, President Donald Trump referred to Haiti as a “s**thole,” and was roundly denounced for being a racist. While watching a clip of a “cannibal gang” member eating a piece of roasted human leg on the streets of Port-au-Prince the other night (it’s revolting; you have been warned), it struck me that Trump’s judgment has held up pretty well.

Turd World is as Turd World does.

And they call it the Green Party … why?

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Celebrities are being targeted across France in an unprecedented wave of “home-jackings,” which are burglaries accompanied by violence and kidnapping. The cases often involve “youths” recruited by experienced ringleaders, such as Kamel Z., who keep their distance from their criminal underlings to insulate themselves from any prosecution.

The country has a history of these violent home invasions, but recent months have seen an explosion of such cases, including well-known French figures, such as Vitaa, Bruno Guillon, Jean-François Piège, Anne-Sophie Lapix, and Nikos Aliagas.

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In a crime-ridden metro area just north of the Washington, DC swap, dominated by radical progressives, it comes as no surprise that the mayor recently appointed a “racial equity” leader who openly supports violence and advocates for a revolution.

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How convenient.

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When criminals are not punished, crime increases. (Not part of ‘Democrat math’.)

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In Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, the former Greek minister of finance, Yannis Varoufakis, argues that wealth accumulation is no longer defined by capitalist relations. The book is at pains to address objections that current conditions represent a post-capitalist system because it assumes a Marxist audience disposed to understand capitalism as a pre-socialist rather than neo-feudal phase of history. Capitalism was supposed to mark the end of human exploitation before something better, not the antechamber to something worse.

Varoufakis’s argument for the global economy being post-capitalist is that it no longer principally relies on the pursuit of profits under conditions of market competition but on rent extraction, the way that feudalism did. He sees this as resulting from a recent de facto privatization of the Internet, like a new enclosure of the commons (despite 18th–century enclosures actually inaugurating capitalism).

Large platforms like Amazon, on which the capitalist has to sell his products to be competitive, or social media, where he has to advertise, would be new fiefdoms, and the capitalist paying rent to use them to make money would be a vassal.

There is nothing new under the sun. The hard part is coming up with new names for the same old shit.

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How do nations become post-Christian? To quote Ernest Hemingway: Gradually, and then suddenly.

For decades, the United States has been a bastion of religiosity, bucking the trend of secularization, but in recent years, the needle has begun to move. According to a 2019 poll, between 20% and 25% of American adults now identify as ‘nones’ (meaning that they do not identify with any religion), a percentage that is higher among younger adults than older adults and likely indicative of a long-term trend. According to a 2020 Politico/Morning Consult poll, 49% of voting-age Gen Z (those born after 1996) respondents identified as either agnostic or atheist—a sea change in religious identification.

To unpack those numbers a bit further, consider that a 2017 survey found that only 11% of Americans claimed to have read the entire Bible—meaning that a whopping 89% have not. Thus, it is no surprise that even Americans who still identify as Christian are abandoning any semblance of orthodoxy, with 40% of American Christians claiming that the Bible is ‘ambiguous’ on abortion, 34% rejecting the biblical definition of marriage, and another 34% claiming that abortion is morally acceptable.

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The Biden administration is preparing to run the 2024 election on abortion. With a miserable economy and failure on every side, that is the one thing still left for the Democrats to run on.

But no generation has ever had less use for abortion than this one.

After the end of Roe v. Wade, Democrats warned of a decline in abortions, what they failed to mention was that abortions had been declining long before the Supreme Court decision.

After Roe v. Wade first came on the scene, abortions shot up all through the 80s and hit a peak in 1990 with 1.6 million. Then, just as the Democrats decided to go all-in on abortion, purging their pro-life wing, abortion rates crashed, and now struggle to pass the million mark.

The American Mind.

The American legal system was a thing of beauty. Refined across centuries and emerging from the precedence of millions of common law cases, by the end of the last millennium it had become the envy of the world. Serving both a dispute resolution and truth-seeking function, it channeled the violent passions of human nature into a controlled medium. It then subjected those passions to standardized procedures (the rules of evidence and civil or criminal procedure) to yield judgments that commanded the respect of the parties and the public.

The American rule of law sustained our capacity for self-governance. The legal system midwifed the most sophisticated property rights regime in the world, improved our collective reasoning faculties, balanced the imperative of change with the demands of tradition, and settled disputes of trivial insignificance as well as controversies of monumental importance. The system functioned so well that most Americans never even thought about it. And it commanded such astonishing respect that virtually everyone obeyed its commands in even the most partisan contests.

But today, sophisticated regime mandarins in Big Law, government, and non-profit activist organizations seek to pervert our legal system by hacking it. They warp its dispute resolution and truth-seeking function to one that advances and sustains their grip on power, delegitimizing that grip in the process. This is known as lawfare. Its variants include access denial, weaponized defamation law, weaponized criminal law, misuse of federal and state agencies, subversive professional licensing requirements, and “adversarial inversion.”

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Can’t say that I blame them.

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Systemic racism, but not the way they want you to believe.

Imagine how much the crime rate in the U.S. would plummet if all of the Africans left.

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The Southern Poverty Law Center has repeatedly opposed Georgia bills that would require local law enforcement to report illegal aliens to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement if they are charged with or convicted of other crimes. This activism has drawn renewed scrutiny in the wake of Laken Riley’s killing, allegedly at the hands of an illegal alien who appears to have slipped through the justice system, and amid a defamation lawsuit against the SPLC.

D.A. King, a Georgia immigration activist who founded a pro-immigration enforcement organization called the Dustin Inman Society, noted that the SPLC opposed two laws that would have improved communication between local law enforcement and ICE.

King is currently suing the Southern Poverty Law Center for defamation after the group branded his organization an “anti-immigrant hate group” in 2018, around the same time the SPLC registered a lobbyist to oppose an immigration enforcement bill King supported.

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Germany’s gross domestic product has been falling since the third quarter of 2022, causing fears of the first two-year-long recession since the early 2000s. German farmers are openly protesting new climate regulations that would raise the price of diesel fuel, vital for tractors and farm machinery. This discontent is mirrored by the general public, which is opposed to higher energy costs that drag down the economy. Recent polls show a significant shift in public opinion that’s increasingly opposed to the coalition government.

Unlike the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate, where invariably one party secures a ruling majority, multiple German parties must form a coalition to reach the required 50%+1 majority threshold. Currently, the Green Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Free Democratic Party comprise this coalition. The latest polls show all these parties polling far below their 2021 election results while the more right-leaning parties, such as the Christian Democratic Union and the Alternative for Germany, are surging in popularity.

The recent economic slowdown has resulted in widespread political discontent, and the core of the slowdown has been disastrous energy policy.

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disturbing services without parental knowledge or consent, an investigation by a leading parental rights group has found.

Progressive education activists claim that so-called school-based health centers and other “wrap-around services” improve academic performance and behavior by giving students daily access to mental and health services on campus.

This sounds good in theory—especially with a proposed staff of nurses, doctors, and psychologists ready to aid students in need—a lack of guardrails and associations with politically motivated organizations severely compromise the sales pitch for school-based health centers, or SBHCs.

The Foundry

According to a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, ICE asked police in Montgomery County, Maryland, 119 times this year to detain and hand over criminal aliens they had arrested. The criminals’ records included “convictions for assault, robbery, illegal firearms, sex abuse of a minor, rape, and MS-13 gang membership,” former official John Feere said. Montgomery County didn’t honor a single request.

ICE “detainers” are a request from federal law enforcement to their state and local colleagues to let them know when a foreign national (“alien” in immigration law) is going to be released from custody after having been arrested or after having served time for a criminal conviction. This is so ICE can take them into federal custody pending removal, or during any legal process needed to deport them.

Illegal aliens are deportable under immigration law simply for being here illegally, but they can apply for relief such as asylum. Some have legitimate asylum cases, fearing for their lives if they are returned to their home countries, but the majority clog the system with bogus claims so they can stay in the United States for years—oftentimes, indefinitely. But being convicted of a crime makes illegal aliens doubly deportable under other sections of the law.

When detainers are honored, ICE can lock potentially violent alien suspects or convicts safely away from the public. Unfortunately, many local and even state governments in the U.S. have “sanctuary” policies, one of which is to refuse to inform ICE when they arrest or release an alien.

I have some bad news….

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A report released on Monday by the U.S.-based think tank Environmental Progress, alleges that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has supported “unethical” medical procedures in its advocacy for transgender health care.

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Count how many are Persons of Color.

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Get spotted making your way across the Channel to Britain and the English authorities will wilfully help you on your way, completing the job for which traffickers were paid a grand sum. But get caught trying to leave Britain, to make your way back to France, and you’ll be stopped in your tracks.

This is what a number of illegal migrants have found after successfully arriving in Britain but then, believing it to be a disappointment, being stopped by the police while trying to escape.

Ann Coulter.

With the Biden administration hauling in millions of “newcomers” (the latest euphemism for illegal aliens) from booming economies like Venezuela, Senegal and Haiti, we seem to be getting a Kate Steinle every day.

Among the recent atrocities committed by Our Greatest Strength is the savage murder of 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley by Jose Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan illegal alien released into our country by the Biden administration. The “newcomer” beat Riley so badly that he disfigured her skull.

MEDIA ALERT: Time to roll out the fake studies on low immigrant crime!

Financial Times.

The Biden administration will target billionaires and corporate America with sweeping tax rises as part of a plan to cut the US’s record national debt and boost the president’s standing with voters ahead of November’s election.

So it’s not because of any concern over the national debt, merely an election-year hunt for the usual proglodyte punching-bags.

The proposals, expected to be unveiled in Thursday’s State of the Union address and over the following week, include an increase in the minimum corporate tax from 15 per cent to 21 per cent, as well as a 25 per cent minimum tax for billionaires.

Corporations don’t pay tax; they merely collect tax, which is paid by their customers, which is usually normal middle and working class Americans.

The proposals, which are unlikely to pass Congress but are intended to distinguish Biden’s progressive agenda from that of his Republican rival Donald Trump, come as most voters remain unconvinced by the president’s performance on the economy.

So it’s not a serious proposal, just virtue-signalling by Biden’s puppet-masters. Sheesh.

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Bethel said the students are in the range of 15 to 17 years old. One of the students was shot multiple times and placed in critical condition.

Authorities are searching for three masked shooters who were inside a blue Hyundai sedan with paper tags, police sources said.

Sailer’s Law says that the high ratio of wounded to fatalities indicate that the shooters were non-white.

Coulter’s law says that the longer it takes for the Narrative media to mention the race of the suspects, the greater the chance of their being non-white.

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced plans Wednesday to send the National Guard to the New York City subway system to help police search passengers’ bags for weapons, following a series of high-profile crimes on city trains.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

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“It’s gonna get a little hot in this city in the next few months” over contract negotiations with teachers. That’s from Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates’ address to the City Club of Chicago yesterday.

That sure sounds right based on the rest of her speech. Gates told us what the CTU is. “We are a whole bunch of people who have been told no. Don’t, Forget about it. Don’t even think about it. No. Poo.” And this time, they won’t accept those answers, which was the primary point of the speech. It’s all part of the CTU’s broader “movement,” a term she used throughout the speech.

Teaching has gone from a socially useful profession to being a jobs program for the fashionable victim categories.

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Biden’s first campaign ad attacked conservatives for keeping ‘Lawn Boy’, a book featuring a 10-year-old performing sex acts, out of schools. The Department of Education launched a civil rights investigation of a Georgia school district for pulling books containing graphic sexual content from middle school shelves. At a Pride Month event at the White House, it was announced that a special coordinator would be waging lawfare against schools that try to shield children.

The Biden administration sued Tennessee over the ‘Protecting Children from Gender Mutilation Act’. Democrat judges have illegally blocked similar measures in Florida, Arkansas and Alabama. In Washington and California, Democrat majorities legalized the abduction of children by the state for transgender procedures. Similar legislation is pending in other states.

“This game of defense can get tiring. We want offense,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra demanded at a Health and Human Services ‘Pride Summit’. “Let’s play on the offensive.”

Beyond the usual motives of groomers looking for fresh victims, what is behind the unprecedented obsession with sexualizing children by an entire political party?

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A new killer has emerged in the illegal drug market, leaving a trail of bodies in its wake. Synthetic opioids called nitazenes—up to 20 times more potent than fentanyl—have infiltrated street drugs from heroin to benzodiazepines, catching unsuspecting users in a web of addiction and overdose (OD) death.

These opioids have evaded authorities and fueled a silent epidemic, presenting novel dangers law enforcement is only beginning to grasp.

Breaking Defense.

Early last month, the US Army sent four Stryker-mounted 50-kilowatt laser prototypes to the Middle East for real-world testing that includes facing down dust particles, the service’s new vice chief, Gen. James Mingus, revealed to Breaking Defense.

“It’s a prototype, but we want to experiment in a live environment,” Mingus said Wednesday in his first interview since being sworn in as the vice-chief in January. “Is it 100 percent ready? Is it going to work perfectly? Probably not, but we’re going to learn from it.”

New York Post.

Electric vehicles release more toxic particles into the atmosphere and are worse for the environment than their gas-powered counterparts, according to a resurfaced study.

The study, published by emissions data firm Emission Analytics, was released in 2022 but has attracted a wave of attention this week after being cited in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Sunday.

It found that brakes and tires on EVs release 1,850 times more particle pollution compared to modern tailpipes, which have “efficient” exhaust filters, bringing gas-powered vehicles’ emissions to new lows.

Today, most vehicle-related pollution comes from tire wear.

The Foundry.

What has happened to the downtown of one of the most beautiful cities in America?

Well, the pandemic happened—and according to reports, foot traffic in the area has never really recovered. But more glaringly, crime happened. No, Union Square has never been, at least in my memory, a place you could mistake for Disneyland. But it was only in the 2020s that you heard regular stories of shoplifting, of an employee facing a machete-wielding man, of a mob bursting into luxury shop Louis Vuitton and grabbing goods, and of a car purposefully driving into Dior and thieves snatching items valued at $275,000.

Unsurprisingly, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, no disinterested party, pushed back on the idea that crime contributed to the decision by Macy’s, telling the San Francisco ABC affiliate that there had been a “significant decline in crime” between Nov. 20 and the end of the year. (Macy’s executives haven’t attributed the decision, which comes amid the closings of 150 Macy’s locations, to crime.) San Francisco put a heavy police presence in Union Square at the end of 2023 during holiday shopping.

But crime seems to be increasingly on San Franciscans’ minds. That’s not surprising, as residents have had to endure not one, but two pro-criminal George Soros prosecutors as district attorney: George Gascon from 2011 to 2019 and Chesa Boudin from 2020 to 2022. Crime got so bad in 2022 that the progressives in the city recalled Boudin from office.

USA Today.

Feb. 16 started like any typical Friday night. My husband and I decided to stay home, grill chicken and make a salad for dinner. At about 6:45 p.m., we heard some loud rumbling overhead.

We walked onto the back patio, and two police helicopters were overhead – shining lights all over our property, and a recording echoed, “Police. You are under arrest. Stay right there and I won’t shoot you.”

As I looked across the fence, a swarm of armed members of the Phoenix SWAT Team with a few dogs were circling our property. One of the guys said, “Yeah, there’s a jammer right here.” He picked it up. I leaned over the patio and asked, “What’s going on?”

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Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.

Just as an accurate census is a prerequisite to funding American communities equitably, policymakers depend on economic indicators to shape economic policy. LISEP developed the True Rate of Unemployment to provide analysts and decision-makers with a more accurate measure of Americans’ financial well-being.

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Take comfort from the fact that, no matter how bad it is in the U.S., Britain and Canada are far worse.

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A 15-year-old boy was critically injured in a shooting near Six Flags Over Georgia, a popular amusement park in suburban Atlanta, after police exchanged gunfire with a group of people, authorities said Sunday.

Cobb County Police Department officers were assisting with crowd control near the amusement park’s entrance on Saturday “after several fights had taken place” among people who were leaving the park, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a press release.

“At some point, multiple people began shooting, hitting an unoccupied CCPD marked patrol car,” the statement said. “As officers identified where the shots were coming from, they ran after people who had run into the woods. During the incident, one CCPD officer fired his weapon, hitting one minor.”

Authorities said the 15-year-old was taken to Grady Hospital and determined to be in critical condition.

Sailer’s Law says that a high ratio of wounded to fatalities indicates that the shooter was not white.

Coulter’s Law says that if they don’t mention the race of the shooter then the shooter was not white.

So there you have it.

UPDATE: Chaos At Georgia Six Flags As Violent Mob Invades – Ends In Shootout With Police

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A San Francisco restaurant chain recently closed its last two remaining locations after 40 years of operation, with the owner citing the city’s economic challenges and homelessness.

“COVID has been a disease for us, let’s put it that way, so it’s been difficult, and we tried opening six or eight stores in the beginning in 2021, and it was ugly,” Lee’s Diner founder and owner Lee Quan told the local ABC 7 in a report published Wednesday. “There was just nobody around—we can’t do business.”

Quan, whose family-owned chain had 16 locations at its height, said after the pandemic, people were generally back to work only for three days out of the week. He also blamed inflation, minimum wage hikes in San Francisco, and a lack of support from government leaders from the city and state for his business’s closure.

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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has named Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., his choice to lead the Republicans in the Senate in the wake of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announcing his resignation Wednesday.

Concur.

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The attorney general of Missouri is suing Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States, for “trafficking minors out of state to obtain abortions without parental consent.”

“This is the beginning of the end for Planned Parenthood in the State of Missouri,” Attorney General Andrew Bailey said in a statement posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “This lawsuit is the culmination of a multiyear campaign to drive Planned Parenthood from the State of Missouri because of its flagrant and intentional refusal to comply with state law.”

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The chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer of Columbia University’s medical school, Alade McKen, plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting entire pages of material, without attribution, from sources that include Wikipedia, according to a complaint submitted to the university on Wednesday.

The allegations implicate approximately a fifth of McKen’s 163-page dissertation, “‘UBUNTU’ I am because we are: A case study examining the experiences of an African-centered Rites of Passage program within a community-based organization,” submitted to Iowa State University’s School of Education in 2021. More than two of those pages are a near-verbatim facsimile of Wikipedia’s entry on “Afrocentric education,” which is not cited anywhere in the dissertation.

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As tensions mount over mass migration and a spate of brutal crimes by immigrants, Ireland is beginning to burn. Nationalist sentiments last seen in the twilight years of British colonial rule are reawakening, as a disenfranchised native population resorts to desperate measures to make their opposition to reckless migration policies heard.

Irish state broadcaster RTE recently reported that, since 2018, 23 buildings linked to planned migrant centres have been badly or completely damaged by fire. Ten of these fires have occurred since November of 2023. After Ross Lake House Hotel in County Galway, which was due to house 70 asylum seekers, burned on 16 December 2023, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar stated, “There is no justification for violence, arson, or vandalism in our Republic. Ever.” Green Party member and Minister for Integration Roderick O’Gorman called the fire “deeply sinister” and “designed to intimidate people seeking international protection here in Ireland.”

Despite the condemnations, the burnings continue. If we accept the government’s position that these are deliberate acts of arson, then we are witnessing a grassroots movement by locals across the nation in resistance to migrant centres being opened in their tight-knit communities. The last example of such a movement was during the Irish War of Independence and the ensuing Civil War which ended British rule and established the Irish Free State. In the period from 1920-1923, 275 Anglo-Irish landlord houses were burned to the ground. The parallels are impossible to ignore. Now, like then, the native population is turning to methods reserved for a disenfranchised people against a hated ruling class. How did this happen?

Steve Sailer.

Note that, increasingly, exponents of polyamorism describe it not as their preference but as their identity, just as men who like to dress up in women’s clothes used to have a transvestite fetish, which made them figures of fun, but now have a transgender identity, which makes them sacred and entitled to abuse anybody lower on the pyramid of identity-politics privilege.

The Strategy Page.

China continues trying to make the best of a bad situation they cannot seem to control; a shrinking population, a workforce that is shrinking even faster and markets for its exports leveling off. These three factors mean China’s Ponzi scheme economy has reached its limits with substantial declines now in progress. Other East Asian nations have similar problems, some not involving on-going Ponzi scheme financial systems, after having experienced a sustained economic boom that has moved much of the population into the middle-class. China too has prospered and given several hundred million Chinese prosperous middle class lives. This is unprecedented in Chinese history. One of the downsides of this prosperity is that couples have fewer children. When poor, families have more children because that is how people can create some support for their old age. Children do that and in the absence of savings, children have traditionally supported their elderly parents. Because of all the prosperity, that ancient form of old age care is eroding.

Bloomberg.

Some ‘scientists’ appear to be as easily puzzled as those Narrative media ‘journalists’ who can’t discern the motive for a mass murderer who shouts ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he’s firing away.

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Tattoos are a trendy way to decorate your body, but a new study reveals that the inks used in the process often contain unlisted substances that could cause health problems.

An analysis of tattoo inks from nine manufacturers in the United States found the contents rarely matched the label of the product.

Of 54 inks analyzed, nine out of 10 (90%) had major discrepancies with the labeled contents, such as different pigments or unlisted additives, researchers report.

The nice thing about tattoos is that they immediately identify the people it’s best to avoid. “Here’s your sign.”

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And, of course, ‘hate’ is whatever the gummint says it is.

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Wendy’s is about to test a surge pricing model similar to Uber, in which the cost of menu items will fluctuate throughout the day on ‘high-tech menu boards’ that can update prices in real-time, meaning a burger and fries will cost people more during the lunch or dinner rush than slower times of day, the NY Post reports.

Beef up at Arby’s.

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Republicans in the Tennessee House voted Monday to advance a bill that would prevent local governments from reappointing state lawmakers who were expelled due to behavior.
The proposal is one of several restrictions being considered after the GOP’s high-profile expulsion proceedings last April against Democratic state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. It would bar what happened after: Jones and Pearson were reappointed and quickly went back to work.

One the one hand, people in an electoral district ought to be able to choose whomever they want to represent them. This is of the essence of democracy.

On the other hand, no legislature can be effective if it contains ‘members’ who won’t obey the rules and allow the body to do what it’s there for, which is a problem as old as the activities of Irish nationalists in the British Parliament. Black elected officials are quite fond of being disruptive when they don’t get their own way, which is the situation in Tennessee–the whole civil-rights-movement-civil-disobedience shtick.

This is the puzzle of modern politics.