BBC.

The test firing of a Trident missile from a Royal Navy submarine has failed, for the second time in a row.
The latest test of the UK’s nuclear deterrent was from HMS Vanguard and was witnessed by the defence secretary.
The missile’s booster rockets failed and it landed in the sea close to the launch site, according to the Sun, which first reported the malfunction.
When on patrol missiles would usually carry nuclear warheads but they are not fitted for test fires.
The Ministry of Defence said the “nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective”.

You can tell when government employees are lying because their lips are moving.

Read it.

The coach of a high school girls basketball team in Massachusetts forfeited a game at halftime earlier this month after a biological male playing for the other team had injured three of his players during the physical game.

Read it.

After around two decades of being told that mass immigration is good for the economy—essential, in fact, to keep it afloat—Britons have been informed that jobless legal migrants have cost them almost £24 billion (€28 billion) in just four years.

This amount has been paid by taxpayers since 2020 to cover the costs of services and accommodation for “economically inactive” individuals who have moved to Britain and are neither in work nor looking for work, and so are not contributing to the economy.

That is according to the Centre for Migration Control (CfMC) think tank, whose findings are based on data from the Office for National Statistics. It said that 2023 saw a record number (711,500) of “economically inactive adult migrants, regardless of the visa on which they arrived.”

“Hello! I want to live in your country! Give me money!”

Read it.

A full 60% of Texas voters say “there will be political violence in the United States in response to the 2024 election results,” according to a new poll from The Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas.

Roughly 24% of respondents said political violence is “very likely,” while 36% found it “somewhat likely.” Comparatively, 21% said violence was “not too likely,” and only 5% said it was “not at all likely.” About 14% were unsure.

“Dark attitudes from the 2020 election and violent reactions to its outcome among Trump supporters continue to lurk in Texas public opinion,” wrote Jim Henson and Joshua Blank in their summary.

OffGuardian.

In 2021, after a year-long protest, India’s farmers brought about the repeal of three farm laws that were intended to ‘liberalise’ the agriculture sector.

Now, in 2024, farmers are again protesting. The underlying issues and the facilitation of the neoliberal corporatisation of farming that sparked the previous protest remain and have not been resolved.

The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, global agribusiness and financial capital are working to corporatise India’s agriculture sector. This plan goes back to the early 1990s and India’s foreign exchange crisis, which was used (and manipulated) to set this plan in motion. This ‘structural adjustment’ policy and process involves displacing the current food production system with contract farming and an industrial model of agriculture and food retail that serves the above interests.

Read it.

The most recent results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) highlight a concerning trend for U.S. students in the field of math.

In comparison to their counterparts in other industrialized nations, American students are falling behind. The rather sobering results revealed a 13-point decline for U.S. students when compared to the 2018 exam.

One of the podcasts on YouTube that I watch occasionally is fond of showing a crew stopping people on the street, showing them a map of the world with country outlines on it, and asking whether they can name a country. It’s surprising how many people think that “Africa” or “South America” are countries.

Read it.

n case you’re wondering whether or not libraries still have use in the age of the internet, they do. And we have Gavin Newsom’s state to thank in helping the nation get reacquainted with their new purpose.

That use appears to now be a designated place for drug use, robberies and public sex. At least, that was the case at the Contra Costa County Library’s Antioch Branch in California, according to a new NY Post article.

The city of Antioch is about 45 miles northeast of Oakland and is home to about 115,000 people.

Read it.

One thing Chicagoans can’t help but notice when scrolling through news feeds: the number of violent crimes committed by defendants while they were out either on parole, probation or awaiting trial.

That’s not surprising given the long-term decarceration trend in Cook County that’s left the county’s jail population at the lowest level in 40 years. Cook County Chief Judge Tim Evans started a no bail/low cash bail policy in 2017, resulting in a growing number of pretrial defendants out on bond who are then charged with new crimes, as we reported here. The state’s new SAFE-T Act has taken that policy even further. In September 2023, Illinois became the first state in the country to eliminate cash bail altogether, while the law also reduced the types of crimes for which defendants could be detained before their trial.

The big question in 2024 is how will the SAFE-T Act impact crime, everything else equal. It’s still far too early to determine whether there are more violent defendants out on the streets awaiting trial and, unfortunately, the government is far behind on releasing the relevant data on that, according to a recent BGA report.

Read it.

On Saturday, 10 February 2024, Giorgia Meloni paid tribute to the victims of the Foibe massacres, perpetrated by Yugoslavian communists during and just after WWII, in a solemn ceremony at the Foiba in Basovizza. This fact alone is newsworthy, because it is the first time that an Italian prime minister has attended a ceremony in memory of the thousands of Italians killed and the hundreds of thousands who had to go into exile. “I came here as a child,” Meloni recalled, “when few did, because it meant being singled out, accused, isolated.” The victims were forgotten and the exiles were repudiated in their own country for decades. The official remembrance came only twenty years ago. With her presence, Meloni wanted to settle a historical debt: “The homeland is the family of the heart; so you, who have defended and loved this homeland and thus contributed to building it, are our family.”

Istria, Fiume, and Dalmatia—where there was a majority Italian population—were incorporated into Italy after the end of World War I. But after the defeat of fascism, they were integrated into Yugoslavia in February of 1947 as a result of the Paris Peace Treaties. Consequently, the Italian population was forced to leave their lands and homes. In what became known as the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus, some 300,000-350,000 Italians left the region. For example, the town of Pola (now Pula, in Croatia) had 33,000 inhabitants in February 1947; but, after the exodus, only 3,000 people remained.

The Italians were well aware of what awaited them under communist rule, because they had suffered persecution at the hands of Tito’s partisans since late 1943. In the early post-war years, the partisans murdered thousands of Italian civilians in a campaign of ethnic cleansing—men, women and children, under the pretext that they were “supporters” of fascism. Figures vary from 5,000 to 10,000 killed, although some historians put the number as high as 15,000. The victims were shot or thrown alive into natural sinkholes called “foibe,” which are abundant in the region: there are more than 1,700 in the Istria area alone, and some are up to 200 metres deep.

NBC News.

Gee, those gun control laws really work, don’t they?

New York Post.

Unsettling Post footage and interviews with US residents along the Canadian border offer a rare glimpse into the thriving migrant smuggling operation that has taken hold up north in addition to the debacle to the south.
Residents of bucolic Swanton, Vt. — a town of about 6,500 people located just across Lake Champlain from New York and about a 10-minute drive from the Canadian border — have been getting a troubling firsthand look at the US’s northern illegal-migrant crisis for months.
The town’s plentiful woods make the leafy hamlet an ideal spot for hunters — and also provide ample camouflage for smugglers, who have become so rampant that some locals are packing pistols to protect themselves and turning into amateur sleuths to help thwart them.
“Now I’ve got the Border Patrol guys on speed dial,” local Chris Feeley, 52, recently grimly acknowledged.

UPDATE: Vermont Town Gets First-Hand Look at Border Invasion

NewsMax.

New York businesses may leave the state following New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron’s historic $364 million verdict against Donald Trump, top financial services executives tell the New York Post.

They already considered the New York State Attorney General’s Office a major obstruction to doing business, starting with New York AG Elliot Spitzer, aka the sheriff of Wall Street. Despite forcing financial firms to fork over billions, Spitzer’s cases primarily focused on minor offenses.

The office has liberally used state laws, such as the Martin act, for political advancement, according to the Post.

In the cases against Trump and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York AG Letitia James has taken Spitzer’s strategies to a new level, Wall Street executives say.

Time to leave.

Read it.

A leading member of a Canadian centre-Left party supporting Justin Trudeau’s minority Government has tabled a bill seeking to jail people who speak out in favour of hydrocarbon fuels. Charlie Angus is a leading member of the NDP party which has 25 seats in the Canadian Parliament, and his bill seeks to ban the commercial promotion of hydrocarbons by any means “that is likely to influence and shape attitudes, beliefs and behaviours about the product or service”. Angus’s bill (C-372) is given the Orwellian title of ‘An Act respecting fossil fuel advertising’, and under this proposed anti-free speech measure, a gas station retailer could be fined C$50,000 for offering a complementary coffee and doughnut with every full tank.

Canada is really turning into a totalitarian hellhole.

BBC.

Even in the dead of Canada’s winter, the embers of last year’s record-setting wildfire season remain. So-called zombie fires are burning under thick layers of snow at an unprecedented rate, raising fears about what the coming summer may bring.

OffGuardian.

And here comes the killer. You trust. You trust that the people in the world who have the power to take care of the things you care about also care about the same things.

They don’t.

Yeah, sure, they care about their own children (maybe, but I have my doubts) they care about the water they drink, the food they eat, and the safety of the bed they sleep in under the roof of the house they live in. But they don’t care about you. Not one single iota do they care about you. In fact, they would just as soon throw you and your babies in an incinerator if it helped them achieve their own goals in the world. They don’t care.

Read it.

In a world inundated with information, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect provides a critical lens to view our interaction with media. Coined by author Michael Crichton and named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, this concept describes a curious paradox: the tendency of individuals to doubt news stories about subjects within their field of expertise yet readily accept the veracity of articles on topics outside their expertise. This phenomenon highlights the inconsistencies in our approach to media and poses significant questions about our perception of knowledge and credibility.

Read it.

While most people’s attention is focused on the dual crisis of America’s southern border and President Biden’s apparent brain freeze, they shouldn’t forget that over the last few months, the USA’s slide into a quasi-Marxist dystopia may be shifting into high gear. I’m basing this unpleasant conclusion on the following data points.

One is California governor Gavin Newsom’s proud introduction in California of his state’s Cradle-to-Grave Data Collection System (C2C), this clone of Communist China’s notorious Social Credit Score system began operation last October. California’s Office of the Governor’s homepage proudly boasts that since its launch, the C2C system has already scooped up more than 1 billion data points on all aspects of Californians’ lives and “will provide the public, researchers, and lawmakers unprecedented insight that could improve the education and quality of life for millions of Californians.”

And, according to Governor Newsom, C2C’s pervasive system of surveillance can, “By leveraging billions of data points, California’s Cradle-to-Career data system will be a game-changer for improving the quality of life for millions of Californians and highlighting ways to improve opportunity in the classroom and access to the workforce. Through insights and innovation only made possible by this system, the Golden State is leading the nation in equitably connecting our education system to the workforce to ensure every Californian has the freedom to succeed.”

I wonder if the good governor and Xi Jinping compared notes during Newsom’s October 2023 trip to China?

OffGuardian.

In the digital age, the incessant calls to action reverberate across the virtual landscape, summoning legions of fervent warriors to wage battles against perceived evils.

This rallying cry, echoing the urgency of a multitude of crusades, permeates our online existence. Be it the casual dehumanization of entire swaths of people to the slow deterioration of language through constant decries of ‘racist’ and ‘pedo’—everything is a conflict now. A conquest. A campaign against the devil himself. We do not ‘treat’ cancer; we FIGHT IT. We do not discuss climate change; we FIGHT IT! It is not enough to ‘Not be racist’; you have FIGHT against racism! The fight against homelessness, the fight against heart disease, the fight against hate—that’s a novel one.

The internet has become a constant battlefield where zeal and fury and bold, untenable posturing are prized virtues. Amidst this cacophony, a troubling pattern emerges—the call to arms is always fueled by fear, anger, outrage and the demonization of specific, or sometimes not-so-specific, groups of human beings. It is a grand mobilization, an ever-present summons to fight against perceived devils, urging countless brave soldiers to embark on a crusade. Yet, as we heed these calls, it is essential to question the consequences of blind action and reflect on the historical echoes that warn of the perils of unchecked zeal.

Read it.

On January 24, Stanford University held a forum on combating anti-Semitism. The event, which featured Stanford president Richard Saller and provost Jenny Martinez, was meant to reassure Jewish students that the university had their back amid the wave of anti-Semitism sweeping college campuses.

“We really do want to make sure that all of the communities on campus get the respect that they deserve,” Saller told the forum. “We’re committed to equal treatment and equal protection.”

The events that transpired that night undercut that message. By the end of the evening, protesters had physically threatened Jewish students, harassed a rabbi, and told employees of the elite university that they would “find out where you live.”

The Guardian.

Chicago will not renew its ShotSpotter contract and plans to stop using the controversial gunshot detection system later this year, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office announced on Tuesday.

The system, which relies on an artificial intelligence algorithm and network of microphones to identify gunshots, has been criticized for inaccuracy, racial bias and law enforcement misuse. An Associated Press investigation of the technology detailed how police and prosecutors used ShotSpotter data as evidence in charging a Chicago grandfather with murder before a judge dismissed the case due to insufficient evidence.

Chicago’s contract with SoundThinking, a public safety technology company that says its ShotSpotter tool is used in roughly 150 cities, expires on Friday. The city plans to wind down use of ShotSpotter technology by late September, according to city officials. Since 2018, the city has spent $49m on ShotSpotter.

“Chicago will deploy its resources on the most effective strategies and tactics proven to accelerate the current downward trend in violent crime,” the city said in a statement.

“Doing this work, in consultation with community, violence prevention organizations and law enforcement, provides a pathway to a better, stronger, safer Chicago for all.”

Young male black gang-bangers will vote for Johnson for a hundred years, per Lyndon Johnson.

Read it.

As inflation remains stubbornly high, farmers throughout the Western world are warning that cost increases from the net zero movement will drive food prices still higher, while simultaneously putting many smaller farmers out of business.

“Let them eat bugs!”

Read it.

Denver is buckling under a financial crisis caused by illegal immigration. But the fault lies not in the stars, but with the city itself.

“Denver will cut hours at recreation centers, end in-person vehicle-registration renewals and eliminate spring flower beds to save $5 million this year, a response to the migrant crisis that is expected to cost the city $180 million,” the Colorado Sun reported.

But the city isn’t just cutting corners on niche city services.

Get Woke, go broke.

Read it.

Another day, another city, another collapse in the commercial real estate market.

This week the property in question is a 20 story building located at 1515 Market St. in Philadelphia, which Philadelphia Business Journal notes has “joined a growing list” of distressed office properties in the city.

Almost $60 million in debt backed by the building was moved to special servicing in December, the report says. Owner Accesso Partners, based in Florida, has a $59.4 million balance on the building, which it acquired in 2014 for $85 million.

Power Line.

“We do have three persons detained and under investigation for today’s incident,” Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves told reporters Wednesday. According to Graves, “bad actors” had caused the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs’ rally, and unidentified “officials” said they did not believe the motive was terrorism. (Word starting to dribble out today that the shooting may have been “a personal matter,” which is a euphemism for “gang-related.”)

Fox News identified no suspects or possible motive, and provided no information on the firearms used in the attack.

According to Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings, the high number of wounded and low number of dead suggests that the perps were non-white. The fact that no news outlet has mentioned the perps’ race or provided pictures reinforces this suspicion.

Read it.

Rachel Dolezal was president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP when she posed for this 2015 photo. Dolezal resigned June 15, 2015, amid a furor over racial identity that erupted when her parents came forward to say she has been posing as Black for years when she is actually white. She has changed her name to Nkechi Diallo and now lives in Tucson, where she was working as a part-time instructor for Catalina Foothills Unified School District. District officials said she is no longer employed there after they learned Tuesday of her OnlyFans social media content.

Read it.

A migrant charged with assaulting two cops in Times Square last month and subsequently freed without bail was arrested again Tuesday night while allegedly trying to rob a Macy’s store in Queens.

NYPD officials confirmed 19-year-old Darwin Andres Gomez-Izquiel as one of four individuals accused of “acting in concert” to steal over $600 worth of clothing in the Queens Center Mall at around 5:30 p.m Tuesday. A security guard tried to confront the suspects but was punched in the face by one of them and suffered minor injuries.

While Gomez-Izquiel was arrested after getting away initially, the other three suspects—two men and a woman—remain on the run as of Wednesday morning. “[Gomez-Izquiel] acted as a lookout with a group of three unapprehend[ed] others, who concealed merchandise from inside the store and passed all points of sale without paying,” the NYPD said in a statement.

The American Mind.

If you had asked me ten years ago about the possibility of a future civil war in America, I—an “Intelligence Community” veteran who analyzes civil conflict in Asia—would have laughed. I’m not laughing anymore, and neither are a lot of other people. Recent tensions between the federal government and Texas over the former’s refusal to secure the border and enforce immigration law are bringing to life scenarios that once seemed theoretical, if not fantastic. In mid-January, “Texas soldiers” took control of a section of the border near Eagle Pass and then denied access to federal agents, setting the stage for a standoff some alarmists are calling “today’s Fort Sumter.” Even as Texas pushes beyond legal and normative boundaries, creating a potential constitutional crisis in the process, more dangerous challenges lie ahead. In today’s America, a combination of democratic backsliding, ethnic factionalism, and elite splintering have set the stage for a series of intractable political and legal challenges that could plausibly lead to violence in 2024. The only real questions now relate to the scale of the violence and whether the American union will ultimately survive it.

Read it.

A rabbi at several British universities who drew hundreds of death threats after flying to Israel to serve as a reserve soldier after Oct. 7 is now in hiding with his wife and two children on the recommendation of police.

Both the University of Leeds and British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis have condemned the threats against Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, his wife Nava, and their two children, which began shortly after Oct. 7 and escalated recently with antisemitic phone calls and an attack on the school’s Hillel House.

“Tell that Jewish son of a bitch we are coming for him,” a message left for Nava Deutsch said, according to the Daily Mail, which listened to some of the messages.

Read it.

The Biden administration does not have a plan in place to prevent Hezbollah from cashing in on its proposed menthol cigarette ban, which lawmakers and experts say will open up a black market that will enrich the Iran-backed terror group and Mexican drug cartels.

As the FDA considers a ban on mentholated cigarettes, a type smoked by around 40 percent of adults, lawmakers have been pressing federal authorities to develop contingency plans meant to stop Hezbollah and its Mexican cartel partners from smuggling black market cigarettes into the United States.

But Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) do not appear to have developed any plans to combat the emerging black market menthol trade, which is likely to generate millions in profit. Hezbollah, Hamas, and other terrorist groups have long trafficked in illegal cigarettes, generating revenue that funds terror operations across the globe. The regulated menthol market in the United States is worth an estimated $30 billion.

G. Gordon Liddy, in his autobiography WILL, noted that cartons of Kool cigarettes, the most popular mentholated brand, were the de facto standard currency among black prisoners in the D.C. jail in the early 1970s.

Read  it.

Major credit card retailers are creating a separate merchant category code (MCC) for firearms and ammunition retailers to comply with a California law that would allow banks to potentially track suspicious gun purchases and report them to law enforcement.

Read it.

Last week, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Jordan Peterson helped expose the failures of Illinois’ public education system on X. Their engagement with a Wirepoints report, “Illinois education 2022: Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 schools. For reading, it’s 30 schools,” revealed the thousands of students trapped in completely failing schools in 2022.

But those results are now old news. Wirepoints has just run the new Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) 2023 Report Card data and the outcomes are worse even though the impacts of covid are another year behind us.

In 2023, there were 67 Illinois schools where not a single student tested proficient in math and 32 where no student tested proficient in reading. What’s worse, officials in those schools graduated nearly 70% of their students.

Read it.

Squatting has always been a problem, especially in certain parts of the nation, but now it is happening on an industrial scale all over America.

Thanks to online listings, it is easier than ever to identify properties that are vacant, and many states have laws that make it exceedingly difficult to get squatters out once they have settled in. In some cases, squatters are able to live rent free in beautiful homes for months or even years. This is becoming an absolutely massive problems, especially in certain areas of the country. For example, it is being reported that squatters have taken over approximately 1,200 homes in the Atlanta area…

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Shrinkflation is an economic phenomenon where the size or quantity of a product is reduced by manufacturers while the price remains the same, effectively increasing the price per unit without an apparent increase in the sticker price.

And as the fight against inflation in the U.S. continues to be center stage – with consumers getting more and more agitated with higher prices – manufacturers are doing anything they can to try and keep prices steady. This includes offering less product for the same price.

USA Today looked at this in a new report wherein they asked customers which brands they trusted the most to swindle them out of their purchasing power the least. In November 2023, the report “surveyed 1,251 American consumers ages 18 to 58, asking about their experiences buying products from more than 100 high-profile brands.”

Wikipedia.

Reactionary feminism is a form of feminism that rejects the progressivist belief that human history is an ongoing arc of moral advancement and seeks to ground a defence of women’s interests in a contingent, materialist, and sex-realist position. The term originates in an article by the author Mary Harrington and popularized in her book Feminism Against Progress.

Reactionary feminism views men and women as equal in dignity and capacity for excellence but physiologically different in ways that, at scale, are materially and politically significant. Reactionary feminism argues from a materialist analysis of feminist history that the claim that males and females are interchangeabile is itself false, serves as a means of consolidating power by the managerial class, and is actively inimical to the interests of poorer women whose lives of necessity cannot be abstracted from the material.

Reactionary feminist arguments include a critique of modern abortion politics as serving to marginalise key issues raised by maternal feminism such as women’s embodiment and the importance of care, a re-read of the sexual revolution as primarily a technological transition whose externalities are under-counted, and an anti-capitalist framing of transgender politics as driven centrally by the post-1960s industrialization of the body via biotech. Though reactionary feminism is less hostile to religious faiths than liberal feminism, its adherents are by no means all religious. However it has some points of overlap with Catholic social teaching.

Read it.

A prerequisite for unmanned transport and delivery vehicles is a mostly non-criminal population, and you ain’t gonna find that in the ‘hood.

This is why I don’t fear AI.

Wall Street Journal.

For years, the tech industry largely stayed away from San Francisco politics. Not anymore. Silicon Valley investors, executives and CEOs are banding together to host fundraising events for local candidates, pouring money into city ballot initiatives and using their influence to try to sway public opinion.
Tech money backed a campaign to oust San Francisco’s district attorney. It funded the recall of some school board members. And it is seeking residents’ support to elect a spate of moderate Democrats gunning for local elections this year.
Silicon Valley leaders say they want to make the city a safer and more hospitable place to raise families and run businesses. They also want to halt the exodus of some of tech’s most talented workers and reverse the doom loop narrative that has haunted downtown since Covid-19.

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The term ‘egregore’ belongs to Hermetic philosophy and to Western esotericism more broadly. The notion of ‘egregore’ is not dissimilar to that of ‘tulpa’ in Tibetan Buddhism, the latter being a spiritual agent generated by intense concentration of an elite monastic practitioner. ‘Egregore’ is different, however, because according to the simplest definition, it is a spiritual force that arises out of the collective commitment of a people to a falsehood.

I once thought that I was eccentric in appealing to the notion of ‘egregores’ to explain, at least in part, the chaotic world of ideological squabbles that we now inhabit. But then, a couple of years ago, I attended a dinner at a friend’s farmstead. During the meal, a discussion began concerning the future of the British Conservative Party. Everything indicated that the topic was going to be tiresome, when unexpectedly a youngish man at the other end of the table opined: “There is no hope for the Tories until they are somehow freed from the egregore that’s been controlling them since the time of Robert Peel.” I looked up from my venison cutlet in astonishment, an emotion that intensified as all those around the table nodded in agreement as if the young man had only commented upon the weather.

Many there are, it seems, who in trying to explain our civilisational collapse, are looking to the peripheries of the wider spiritual tradition of the West.

A very handy term.

Read it.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, the Ukrainians, who lack any warships at all, have destroyed twenty Russian Navy ships. These include warships as well as support vessels like landing ships. Ukraine has used long-range missiles and USVs (Unmanned Surface Vessels) to attack Russian ships, forcing the survivors to distant ports in the far northeastern portions of the Black Sea. Even though these ports are a thousand kilometers from Crimea, the Ukrainians can still reach them with USVs, despite the risks of some USVs being lost from equipment failure on the long journey, or attacks by Russian weapons when they reach the distant Russian port.

Read it.

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” is a quote generally attributed to Charles Baudelaire – or possibly Keyser Söze – depending on who you ask on the internet.

Something similar can be said about Big Brother.

When you think about what our emerging surveillance state will look like, you think “1984.” You imagine East Germany powered by Google and Amazon. You recall your favorite dystopian sci-fi film—or maybe horror stories of China’s social credit system. Thoughts of a frustrated middle-aged police chief from a mid-sized Midwestern town attempting to procure security cameras with innovative new features probably don’t come to mind. You definitely don’t think of a guy in a lawn chair jotting down the license plate numbers of passing vehicles in a notebook. And that’s partly how the surveillance state is going to emerge as it creeps its way into one small town at a time.

Read it.

A new study examining the likely impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots had in the 2020 election concludes that the outcome would “almost certainly” have been different without the massive expansion of voting by mail.

The Heartland Institute study tried to gauge the probable impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots cast for both then-candidate Joe Biden and his opponent, President Donald Trump, would have had on the overall 2020 election results.

The study was based on data obtained from a Heartland/Rasmussen survey in December that revealed that roughly one in five mail-in voters admitted to potentially fraudulent actions in the presidential election.

Read it.

For the fourth straight year, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” will be performed at the Super Bowl. The so-called “black national anthem” assumes a separate black nation, a concept with a rather strange origin.

The Communist Party USA, an overwhelmingly white party controlled by an all-white Soviet dictatorship, held that blacks were not real Americans. In 1928, the Communist International, (Comintern), founded by the USSR to control national Communist parties, declared that blacks in the United States were a separate nation and called for self-determination in the “black belt,” a swath of territory in the south.

In 1930, as Paul Kengor explained in “Communism’s African-American Soviet Republic,” the Comintern called for a Soviet-controlled “Negro Republic” among America’s southern states. The current Revolutionary Communist Party calls for black Americans to unite into a separate, autonomous republic in “the southern part of the former imperialist United States of America.” The decision would be made by “a special vote in which only African-Americans would be eligible to participate.”

Read it.

The socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, recently organised a ‘citizens’ vote’ (votation citoyenne) to ask Parisians about the appropriateness of a particularly punishing parking fee for SUVs, which she considers too bulky and too polluting. The vote in favour of a specific tax won the day, but in a highly questionable ballot and with an ideology emblematic of the disastrous way in which Hidalgo is managing France’s capital city.

SUVs, or sport utility vehicles, are large motor vehicles with four-wheel drive and off-road capability. Initially designed as leisure vehicles, they have become increasingly popular in recent years, including in cities where the road infrastructure (narrow streets, car parks) is not necessarily suited to their size. They get bad press because they are considered too bulky and too polluting—some towns are even considering banning them. In Paris, Mayor Anne Hidalgo has come up with the plan to subject them to a punitive parking fee—significantly higher than that for ordinary vehicles. But before introducing these regulations, she wanted to put the measure to the people of Paris for their approval.

An enthusiast of ‘participatory democracy,’ Anne Hidalgo has been holding an increasing number of impromptu votes on specific issues relating to the organisation of urban life since she took office as mayor of Paris. The stated aim is to give Parisians a say, but the methods used are highly questionable. While the proliferation of ‘participatory’ opportunities has not aroused the enthusiasm of Parisians, who have become accustomed to shunning these untimely elections, it has triggered hilarity in the Swiss, who know a thing or two about direct democracy.

Read it.

Few would have contended, just some years ago, that it would come to this. Armed with Rawlsian gibberish, the liberal establishment has finally decided to do away with the masquerade. Liberalism’s own altarpieces of political liberty, freedom of the press, and the rule of law have finally been cast aside with liberating frankness.

The examples are, by now, too many and too egregious to describe in detail. It likely began in France, that nation of liberty so adept in the ugly art of persecution. Many were surprised when, in 2017, France’s leader of the opposition, Marine Le Pen, had her European parliamentary immunity rescinded on the shamelessly bogus charge of ‘publicizing ISIS.’ She had, instead, tweeted gruesome images of the Salafist group’s crimes precisely in order to denounce it. Having enjoyed this first taste of judicial abuse, the international establishment took note and readied itself for more. It was not long until what had once been taboo became the new norm. In the U.S., President Trump had to undergo the ignominy of having his Mar-a-Lago home searched by the FBI. Democrats have, more recently, been playing judicial games to bar him from the 2024 Republican ticket.

Power Line.

By some counts, the Biden Junta has allowed more than eight million foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally. Donald Trump and others contend that Democrats are “signing them up” to vote. As legal immigrants and legitimate citizens should know, illegals have been voting for a long time in California, the model Democrats now seek for the entire country.

In 1996, illegals cast 784 votes against Republican Robert Dornan in a congressional race Democrat Loretta Sanchez won by only 984 votes. Spearheading the voter fraud was the Stalinist Bert Corona, founder of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional. He failed to comply with a subpoena and the Justice Department declined to take any action. For the vote fraudsters it was more steps forward with no steps back.

In 2013 the state passed Assembly Bill 60 the “Safe and Responsible Drivers Act,” which enabled false-documented foreign nationals to get driver’s licenses. In 2015 California passed Assembly Bill 1461, the “California New Motor Voter Act” which automatically registered the illegals to vote. “At the latest, for the 2018 election cycle,” Secretary of State Alex Padilla told the Los Angeles Times, “I expect millions of new voters on the rolls in the state of California.”

Newsbusters.

The Student Development and Center for Civic Engagement at the Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, put on a week-long event called “SexCon.” The week, “dedicated to creating space for exploring sexuality, learning about sexual and relationship health, and reflecting on social and legislative landscapes around sexual and reproductive freedom,” featured 13 unique events for students to attend.The event was held from January 29 to February 1 and was highly promoted on the school’s Office of Student Activities Instagram account.

Quillette.

Something I’m increasingly sceptical of in modern mental health culture is this constant insistence to open up. Share your story! says every celebrity. Speak out! says every company. Men aren’t opening up enough, says pretty much every mainstream publication. In fact last week in the UK it was #TimeToTalk Day, urging us to “be more open about mental health and share how we really feel”.

My main concern with this is that Gen Z are very lonely and screen-addicted and so often take this advice and start opening up online. All over the internet, my generation are sharing their autism traits, ADHD habits and Tourette’s tics. Plus deeply personal moments: traumatic events, anxiety attacks and mental breakdowns. On TikTok #mentalhealth has over 127 billion views; #trauma alone has almost 30 billion.

The chief problem with ‘social media’ is that it encourages everybody to be LAME (“Look At Me, Everybody”), and NOBODY CARES.

Read it.

From the end of the Second World War until early 2022, the geopolitics of our world followed a very similar pattern. The pattern was that borders were sacred, they could not change, and this narrative was enforced by the United Nations and America’s military might. This meant rival ethnicities and religious sects were often forced together into nations they despised—as in the example of Iraq—where different groups have fought continuously since independence in 1932. Any attempt by the Sunnis, Shias, or Kurds to break off has been met by Western condemnation, yet military intervention by the latter exacerbated the chaos.

The problem is that the West’s foreign policy is informed by liberalism, the central pillar being that people should get along. This is why Washington disapproved of Serbia annexing areas of Kosovo populated by Serbs, and why it despised the idea of reshaping the Middle East’s boundaries so that Kurds, Shias and Sunnis could have their own states. Even though such moves make sense from an ethnic and religious perspective—and would certainly make peace more likely—the option is always repudiated. This is because redrawing the maps would entail admitting an obvious truth: that some cultures are incompatible with each other.

Iraq is three nations crammed into one country; Libya is three; Afghanistan is closer to five.

John C. Wright.

A Yammerhead on Twitter remarks:

Slavery is white history. How we survived it is black history.

Matt Walsh answers:

Slavery is world history. White people did not invent it, and were not the first to practice it, but were the first to abolish it. The last place in the world to still have legal slavery was Africa. It wasn’t fully legally abolished on the continent until 1981.

The most ironic aspect of ‘black history’ is the affection among African Americans for Islam and Muslim names, since Arabs were one of the major participants in the black slave trade; black slavery existed in Saudi Arabia until at least 1964.

Quillette.

The use of the word “coach” as a synonym for tutor emerged from Oxford University during the 1830s to convey the idea of someone carrying a student through their exams. Initially associated with sports and organisational efficiency, today the realm of the coach has expanded to include everything falling under the banner of life.

A form of personal development ostensibly intended to help individuals achieve personal and professional success, the rapid growth of the life-coaching industry has accelerated exponentially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when the global shutdown prompted many people to question values around work and relationships, the life coach—aided by Instagram, TikTok, and Zoom—has emerged as a fashionably new response to the age-old question of how to live the good life. But the popularity of this trend raises questions about the ethics of a nascent industry and the potential damage it may inflict on vulnerable people.

I’d use the term ‘grift’ rather than ‘sophistry’, but, yeah, pretty much. Any0ne who thinks that he or she needs a ‘life coach’ needs a lot more help than just a ‘life coach’.

SFGate.

A cyclist was injured in a collision with a Waymo driverless vehicle in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood on Tuesday afternoon, police said. This news comes after Cruise, another autonomous car company, recalled its entire fleet nationwide, including from SF’s streets, in November; a cruise robotaxi drove over a pedestrian who had been hit by another car in October.