Read it.

Principal Marc Balanda sent an email out to students and their families on Jan. 24 and explained that the new dispenser had been torn down and basically destroyed in less than 25 minutes, according to CT Insider. Balanda called the incident “disgusting” and an “egregious instance of vandalism and destruction of property” in the email with a subject line that read “I am feeling ‘dis-’ right now.”

…

The dispenser was put in place in compliance with a law that passed in 2022 and was set to go into effect on Sept. 1 of this year that requires all schools from grades three to 12 to put menstrual dispensers in female restrooms and at least one male restroom, according to the text. Some who supported the bill argued that “menstruating individuals” shouldn’t have to choose between their period and going to school, according to the CT Mirror.

…

“Ask for more information. Use your words to start a dialogue rather than using your hands to destroy something. In this particular instance, if you have questions, please let me know,” Balanda wrote in the email.

Tell that to Antifa and BLM and see how far it gets you.

“Dialogue” these days means getting preached at by proglodyte officials, but doesn’t bring any relief. The boys didn’t have any questions; they knew why a tampon dispenser had been placed in their bathroom, and they were serving notice that it wouldn’t be tolerated.

Read it.

The parents of a former OnlyFans model accused of murdering her boyfriend have now been arrested in Austin.

Courtney Clenney is accused of fatally stabbing her boyfriend, Plano native Christan Obumseli, in Miami in April 2022.

Her parents, Kim and Deborah Clenney, were arrested in Austin on Tuesday on out of state felony warrants.

This looks like another case of Evolution In Action to me.

Read it.

As I write, dozens of tractors, one with an enormous manure spreader hitched to it, are blockading off a street near our Brussels office. They moved in during the night and are now hemmed in by police; most of the farmers look like they slept in their cabs. By 10 a.m., a half-dozen or so men and one young woman had set up an open-air barbeque in the park and opened some beers while reporters took photographs. The farmers are French; more are expected to arrive soon. A blockade is going on in Paris, too. On Friday, I attended a farmers’ protest in front of the EU with several of my colleagues—that one had fewer tractors but featured a large cow painted in EU blue hanging by its neck from a loader, while French politician Marion Maréchal, the blond darling of the French Right, gave supportive interviews.

Read it.

Protesting farmers were met by riot police with fire hoses just metres from the European Parliament on Thursday, as they tried to grab the attention of the European Council by expressing their collective outrage at EU green policies threatening their livelihood.

In an unusually rowdy protest, even by Brussels standards, tyre fires and tractor blockades greeted European leaders as a transnational coalition of farming groups took to the streets. They are angered by EU green policies—including decrees forcing active farmland to go fallow, restricting the use of fertiliser, and limiting permitted amount of livestock—as well as national edicts such as reduced subsidies on diesel fuel—that are direct results of the EU’s Net Zero commitments.

In remarks to The European Conservative, French MEP Thierry Mariani (Rassemblement National-ID) blamed the uproar on the wishes of EU elites to pursue free trade deals while suffocating native European industry with “Soviet-style administration of agriculture,” as well as relentlessly pursuing Ukrainian integration into EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP).

The peasants are still revolting.

Washington Times.

Under pressure from Congress, the Pentagon on Wednesday released an updated and expanded list of nearly 50 Chinese military companies currently operating in the United States. The list includes several key weapons makers such as the Aviation Industry Corp. of China Ltd. and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. Ltd.

Two state-run nuclear companies on the list — the China National Nuclear Corp. and China General Nuclear Power Group — are key players in China‘s rapid nuclear weapons buildup and have been sanctioned by the Treasury Department in the past for suspected diversion of civilian nuclear technology to the Chinese military.

The 46 companies, including 17 subsidiaries is a marked increase since the first list was published in 2021. That list included 34 companies and 13 subsidiary companies. Thirteen companies were added to the list in 2022.

Read it.

There are elections in Hong Kong, but to get on the ballot you have to be nominated by a committee controlled by Beijing government.

Elections for the Harvard Board of Overseers—one of Harvard’s two governing bodies—are almost as well-controlled. A Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) nominating committee curates a slate of candidates, from which alumni make their selections.

But an alternative route to get on the Harvard ballot exists, at least in theory. So-called “petition” candidates have always been rare—but after several climate activists were elected in 2020, the rules were changed to make it even harder. Among other things, the number of petitions to get on the ballot was raised by a factor of fifteen, to more than three thousand.

Newt Gingrich.

Scott Rasmussen has done America an enormous service. He and his team have identified the driving forces behind the destructive radicalism which is pushing us into a cultural civil war.

While doing their two weekly national surveys, Rasmussen and his team noticed an anomaly. Out of every 1,000 or so respondents, there would always be three or four who were far more radical than everyone else. After several months of finding these unusual responses, Rasmussen realized they all shared three characteristics.

The radical responses came from people who had graduate degrees (not just graduate studies), family incomes above $150,000 a year, and lived in large cities (more than 10,000 people per zip code).

Strong Towns.

Across North America, we are dealing with an epidemic of fatalities and injuries on our roadways. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there were 42,795 fatal car crashes in the United States, which is an average fatal crash rate of nearly 16 deaths per 100,000 vehicles.

There are many contributing factors involved in every crash and over the past year, cities and towns across North America have been exploring these factors through the Crash Analysis Studio.

The Crash Analysis Studio has one clear objective: No one should be the second person to die on a dangerous street.

Read it.

A billionaire donor to Harvard University said it and other elite schools create “whiny snowflakes” and vowed not to donate to the institution until that changes.

“Which way are we gonna pick?” Citadel CEO Ken Griffin asked CNBC’s Leslie Picker Tuesday at the MFA Network’s Miami conference. “Are we gonna educate the future members of the House and the Senate and the leaders of IBM, or are we gonna educate a group of young men and women who are just caught up in a rhetoric of oppressor and oppressee and ‘this is not fair’ and, frankly, just, like, whiny snowflakes? Like, where are we going with education in elite schools in America? And that’s a really big issue.”

Picker then asked Griffin if he was still supporting Harvard financially, to which he responded with a terse, “No.”

Read it.

Mike Gill, a married father of three, is in critical condition in the hospital after his family says he was shot during Monday night’s wild crime spree.

Time to leave.

Why any normal person would want to live in D.C. passes all understanding. That’s like knocking on the gate at Auschwitz and asking to come in.

Read it.

The San Francisco store that inspired the movie Toy Story will close next month, with the owner citing crime as one reason for its demise.

An attorney representing the Luhn family, which owns Jeffrey’s Toys—told SFGATE that “the perils and violence of the downtown environment, inflation, the decrease in consumer spending, and the demise of retail across the world” led to the family’s decision to close the store.

Matthew Luhn, the store’s co-owner, told the publication in December that the store has experienced people attempting to shoplift and even had someone try to stab one of his employees. Decreased business due to the COVID-19 pandemic impacted sales, as did the rise of online shopping and general high operating costs. Luhn said the store pays $20,000 per month in rent.

ZMan is not happy.

If you are one of the many schemers in Washington, or you dream of becoming a schemer in Washington, this is a troubling time. By now Trump should be in exile, having had to quit the presidential race due to his many legal troubles and the collapse in his support due to those legal troubles. A more acceptable candidate was supposed to have emerged and pushed Trump out of the race. This was the narrative the schemers in Washington have lived by for over a year.

In what is becoming a regular feature of our politics, the narrative did not turn out as written and the scramble is on for a narrative update. There are still the court cases in Georgia, New York, Florida and Washington. The last two are in Federal court, but the Mark Steyn case tells us that we may all be dead before they get going. The Georgia case may fall apart due to racism. Apparently, racism made the DA turn the case into a chance to give her lover public money.

Of course, the big hole plowed through the narrative was the first two contests of the primary season, where Trump won easily. By the time Iowa came around all but three non-Trump candidates had quit the race. After Iowa it was the neocon offering, but she was trounced in New Hampshire, thus leaving Trump as the presumptive nominee, assuming nothing untoward happens this spring or summer. Few in Washington expected this to be the state of affairs at this point.

Read it.

The Hong Kong anti-extradition movement is experiencing dark times. Exiles endure public beatings in Western countries; would-be exiles endure torture in Chinese jail cells. Million-dollar bounties are pronounced, public confessions are extorted, and lifelong manhunts are threatened. Three years after the final erasure of Hong Kong’s freedoms, citizens are still fleeing the territory for safer shores. We have come a long way from the glorious peak of 2019, when a single march would attract two million participants—the strongest possible demonstration of the will of the people to a watching world.

The betrayal of Hong Kong by the British was a significant milestone on the road to the fall of Western civilization.

Reuters.

A generation of children who learned to write on screens is now going old school.
Starting this year, California grade school students are required to learn cursive handwriting, after the skill had fallen out of fashion in the computer age.

Assembly Bill 446, sponsored by former elementary school teacher Sharon Quirk-Silva and signed into law in October, requires handwriting instruction for the 2.6 million Californians in grades one to six, roughly ages 6 to 12, and cursive lessons for the “appropriate” grade levels – generally considered to be third grade and above.

Read it.

It feels like everything these days needs you to create an account and log in to use them. Philips Hue announced you need to plug your home’s light automation to their cloud, even if you just use it locally. They claim it’s for security.

…

If someone breaks into my apartment, them pushing a button on my Hue bridge is the least of my worries. Them being connected to my online account is way higher threat.

Read it.

The Americans who plan to vote for President Trump are not supporting him because they prefer his dictatorial inclinations to the other guy’s, but because they want someone in charge of the executive branch who does not see the government’s role as controlling every aspect of their lives.

This stands in stark contrast to the Democratic Party’s efforts to regulate entire industries out of existence, or the mad, anti-liberty, anti-human fever dreams of the globalists on display at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.

In 2014, WEF speaker Yuval Harari informed a TEDx event audience that human rights don’t really exist; they are “like heaven or like God—just a fictional story we’ve invented and spread around.” At the 2022 WEF meeting, Alibaba President J. Michael Evans touted a developing “individual carbon footprint tracker” that would monitor where you travel, how you travel, what you eat and what you read on the internet. And the WEF’s 2016 predictions for 2030—including having to pay fines for emitting carbon dioxide (does that include exhaling?), restrictions on meat consumption and the end of private property (“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”)—are infamous.

OffGuardian.

Here I go with the mask thing again, sorry, but a strange thing is happening with this around the world. It seems that wearing a mask is slowly becoming a sort of natural expectation.

At first, it is showing up arbitrarily, for no particular reason. Maybe people wake up one morning and just say to themselves, “seems like a good day to wear the ol’ face diaper.” Or maybe it is a cold day, and the mask acts like earmuffs for the face. Or maybe, for some people, wearing a decorated mask becomes a fashion statement or a way to show the world who your favourite hockey team is (if their logo is blazoned onto the mask).

The agenda is of course getting on board by mandating masks here and there for special reasons, ironically few having anything to do with public health—directly at least. Health of course will always be the “silent purpose” behind mask-wearing, but I am willing to bet in a few years no one will even know the original reason people started wearing them.

The Foundry.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch” used to be American folk wisdom (and inspired a book by economist Milton Friedman). The greatest trick the American Left has played on young people is to convince them that free stuff is actually free. In fact, tax credits, student debt “relief,” COVID-19 stimulus, rent control, and other giveaways simply redistribute existing wealth or borrow money that must be repaid by taxpayers.

Relative to illegal immigration, it doesn’t matter how much you put aside for a rainy day if the rain never stops. Biden’s policies have locked in an unlimited flow of illegal immigration at the border. Many of those coming now have no U.S. relatives or employment waiting for them. They will continue to head for “sanctuary” megacities that offer free housing and benefits. Local authorities there seem to only now begin to understand the scale of demand with which they are dealing. Our open borders have resulted in housing shortages, closed schools, commandeered public spaces, and hospitals catering to patients no one voted to admit into the country while everyday taxpaying Americans wait in line.

It’s not as if all Americans are rich and can absorb the costs of paying for these people who aren’t paying for themselves—particularly in the places where illegal aliens are amassing.

UPDATE: Migrant Encounters Nationwide Hit Record 371K in December

UPDATE: Mexican Cops Halt Train With 1,800 Migrants Headed to Texas

Read it.

A twist has been added to California’s homeless crisis after people were found living in eight caves, some furnished, dug into the bank of the Tuolumne River.

Modesto police, a volunteer organization Operation 9-2-99, and the Tuolumne River Trust teamed to remove 7,600 pounds of trash Saturday from the caves, KVOR-TV in Sacramento reported Wednesday.

The caves, some as wide as 10 feet, were located about 20 feet below street level and accessible through makeshift stairs built into the riverbank. It is unknown who dug the caves and how long they had been there.

Read it.

In Britain, the obsessive drive to boost ‘diversity’ across all sectors of society has no shortage of casualties to its name. One of them is merit: talent being both rare and useful, it should be sought wherever it can be found. To make an a priori fetish of women and ethnic minorities will inevitably interfere with what should be a scrupulously evidence-based, talent-seeking process. The most recent casualty, however, is nothing less than Britain’s power to maintain itself in existence as a country.

This power has been pitifully weakened. What is more, it did not have to happen. The British army, tasked with the small matter of defending the realm, has shrunk by 40% since 2010. We now boast a mere 70,000 enlisted soldiers. There is even talk of conscription in the event of war.

While it might be excessive to ascribe this failure to diversity alone, our political class, especially the lamentable Conservative Party, must take a monumental portion of the blame. Far from merely allowing the rot to infect the military’s upper echelons, successive Tory governments have actively commanded our armed forces to adopt the tripartite motto of race communists the world over: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

The Foundry.

We education policy and pedagogy wonks love to spend hours poring over education policies and proposals that shape statewide approaches to everything from tax and financial frameworks to cultural edicts on social-emotional learning, critical race theory, and LGBTQ+ sexualization of children.

We spend far too little time with “boots on the ground” observing what does and doesn’t work in the day-to-day classroom, which often affects students far more than this year’s slate of state education policies.

I’ve spent the past few years visiting hundreds of different schools with dozens of different education styles. From charter schools that are public schools with a corporate coat of paint to Hasidic homeschool cooperatives that teach all subjects at once, and every other kind of school in between.

Current educational methods are modeled on the Henry Ford factory system: You take a set of raw materials and send it through the assembly line in a batch, and do Quality Assurance at various points to weed out the failures. Everything is set up to deal with the ‘average’ student … but the problem is that there is no ‘average student’; each student is an individual, and the system is geared toward forcing that individual into the Procrustean bed of The Method rather than treating each individual as an individual. We can do better. We Have The Technology.

ZMan is delightfully dyspeptic today.

You can go through the music charts and listen to the top-10 in each category each year and find songs that are pleasant and songs that are hilariously terrible. Miley Cyrus should cut back on that five pack a day habit and spend the savings on some people who can write music that make some sense. The fun part about scanning these music lists is there are many comically stupid entries that got pushed into the top-40 by the mega corporations that control the music business.

When it comes to what most people reading this consider rock-and-roll, the landscape has been barren for a long time. Who is the best guitar player in a rock band that is under the age of forty? No one knows. He probably does not exist because rock music does not exist as a genre anymore. If you want to hear that sort of music you are going to be buying or streaming stuff from thirty, forty or fifty years ago. Even young people who want that style reach back to the oldies.

Preach it, brother….

One result of the money drying up for all forms of music that appeals to white people is white people stopped making that music. They stopped learning to play instruments, stopped forming garage bands and stopped cutting their teeth at clubs. Elementary school bands are full of Asian girls playing violin. There has been a steady decline in the sale of musical instruments over the last few decades, even though technology has made it easier to record at home and make it sound good.

Read it.

Melanie, the singer-songwriter who rose through the New York folk scene, performed at Woodstock and had a series of 1970s hits including the enduring cultural phenomenon “Brand New Key,” has died.

I loved her song Animal Crackers.

Newsbusters.

While wearing a Trump wig.

As everything looks like a nail to the hammer, so does everything look like racism to the racial demagogue. The racial demagogue in this instance, is of course, MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who performed a segment in which she compared calls to secure the southern border to Southern segregation during the ‘60s.

Read it.

China’s military is engaged in secret biological weapons development that is a key element of Beijing’s asymmetric warfare strategy, according to a new report by the CCP Biothreats Initiative, a think tank. The report provides new details on biological weapons efforts of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) which researchers say controls all civilian biological research in China.

“Bioweapons are part of the CCP’s standard order of battle; not an unconventional set of capabilities only to be used under extreme circumstances,” the report states.

The report is based on open-source research and Chinese military writings. In 2015, for example, the then-president of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS) He Fuchu stated that biotechnology is a new “strategic commanding heights” of national defense requiring biomaterials and “brain control” weaponry.

New York Times.

Of all the dozens of suspected thieves questioned by the detectives of the Train Burglary Task Force at the Los Angeles Police Department during the months they spent investigating the rise in theft from the city’s freight trains, one man stood out. What made Victor Llamas memorable wasn’t his criminality so much as his giddy enthusiasm for trespassing. He was a self-taught expert of the supply chain, a connoisseur of shipping containers. Even in custody, as the detectives interrogated him numerous times, after multiple arrests, in a windowless police-station room in the spring of 2022, a kind of nostalgia would sweep over the man. “He said that was the best feeling he’d ever had, jumping on the train while it was moving,” Joe Chavez, who supervised the task force’s detectives, told me. “It was euphoric for him.”

Time to leave.

ZMan

The New Hampshire primary turned out about how most sober minded people expected, with Trump cruising to victory. As expected, regime media and those in the anti-Trump cult have quickly moved onto other things. Even though the narrative on this election has been wrong so far, these people were sure the gods would deliver them from the terrible Orange Man in New Hampshire. Now they will update the script for the South Carolina primary in a few weeks.

Even though the New Hampshire primary was not a surprise to normal people, it does have a few things worth noting. One is the turnout. In 2016 when all of this was new and exciting, about two hundred and sixty thousand people voted on the Republican side, with Trump getting one hundred thousand votes. This time, with the results known in advance, three hundred thousand voted on the Republican side and Trump got one hundred and sixty thousand votes or fifty-four percent.

Read it.

So far in 2024, lawmakers in 10 states have introduced wealth-tax bills or are working on introducing them, according to Amber Wallin, senior policy and outreach director at the State Revenue Alliance. They are California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Washington.

Time to leave.

Quilette.

Teenage depression and suicide rates have been rising in the US for years, but the rates among black teens are rising farther and faster than among those of other ethnicities. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey (2011–2021), the percentage of black teens who seriously considered suicide rose 69 percentage points from 13 percent in 2011 to a frightening 22 percent in 2021. The average increase among all ethnicities was 37.5 percentage points—just over half the rise documented in black teens.

The same trend can be seen across multiple measures of mental health. In 2021, black teens were 63 percent more likely to have made a concrete suicide plan over the course of the past year than they were in 2011 (teens in general were only 38 percent more likely to have done so) and 75 percent more likely to have attempted suicide (the average increase among all teens was 25 percent).

Complex social phenomena can rarely be attributed to a single cause. A range of factors—from increased social media use to less free play—may play a role in teen depression overall and black teen depression in particular. But there is one possible explanation for these disturbing figures that is less often talked about: the virtuous lie that we tell about the prevalence of racism in the United States.

Social evolution operates in the same fashion as physical evolution. When a culture develops a notion that puts those who believe in it at a disadvantage from the viewpoint of natural selection, the automatic processes of evolution (which work even when you don’t want them to) will tend to remove such people from the gene pool. The Abortion War is the poster child for how this process works: Women who claim the right to kill their children will eventually remove their defective genes from the gene pool.

The American Mind.

Americans wondering about the future of a society that centers diversity as a core value should look at Lebanon, the 4,000 square mile eastern Mediterranean nation that just celebrated 80 years of equity as an official policy and the foundation of the state. Since 1943, Lebanon has found neither strength, unity, stability, cooperation, nor prosperity through its diversity and equity. Eighty years of history demonstrate that a continued adherence to the principle of diversity only exacerbates divides, produces political gridlock, paralyzes policy, suspends justice, breeds impunity, erodes and incapacitates state functions, and facilitates violence.

The recognition of 18 diverse religious identities and an attempt to maintain a sense of equity among them has become ingrained in the DNA of Lebanon’s government and society. The Lebanese constitution institutionalized the recognition of multiple identities and proportional representation. The different Muslim and Christian communities must be represented in Parliament with representation proportional to their population. Parliamentary seats are equally divided between Christians and Muslims. Diversity and equity extend to the allocation of top government positions (e.g., the president and the prime minister), the orientation of foreign policy, and bureaucratic appointments. Each religious community dictates the laws governing the marriage and divorce of its adherents.

The institutionalization of multiple identities and equity have produced dangerous and destructive behaviors; the relentless maintenance of diversity and equity underlies much of Lebanon’s travails.

Diversity is not a ‘strength’; diversity is always and everywhere a WEAKNESS, and a serious one.

Read it.

An extreme trans lobbyist group is pressuring schools in the UK to stop calling pupils ‘boys and girls’ and use the pronoun ‘they’ instead of ‘he’/’she’, in an effort to “remove any unnecessarily gendered language” from the classroom.

In a properly ordered society (The Good Old Days) a mob of angry peasants with pitchforks and torches would take care of this problem.

Read it.

Urban elites are far more likely than other Americans to oppose gasoline powered cars, SUVs of all types, and gas stoves, according to a survey released last week by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. The survey defined “elites” as people who have post-graduate degrees, live in households that earn more than $150,000 a year, and live in zip codes with densities of more than 10,000 people per square mile, which is about four times the average urban density in the U.S.

Read it.

Nigeria is the largest country in sub-Sahara Desert in terms of area and population, with 225 million people. Population was only 120 million in 2000. The economy has grown even faster, with per-person GDP reaching $4,000 by 2024.While that is high for Africa, nearly half the population lives in poverty, barely getting by. One reason for this is the low literacy rate of 62 percent. That explains the high unemployment rate of over 30 percent. Endemic corruption means the national police is not only ineffective but part of the problem. Criminal activity is widespread and often intense. Currently there has been a sharp increase in kidnapping for ransom. If you are wealthy, you can hire expensive, but effective, mercenaries to recover a kidnapping victim alive. Paying the ransom encourages the kidnappers to come after more members of your family. Hiring the mercenaries encourages the kidnappers to go after more vulnerable victims.

There’s a reason it’s called the Turd World.

Read it.

In the 2022 off-year election, nearly everyone expected Republicans to make big gains in Washington. But they didn’t: Democrats held the Senate and Republicans eked out a bare House majority. Meanwhile, gains in state elections were muted. In Minnesota, where I live, GOP hopes were dashed as the Democrats held the House, took the Senate, and won all the constitutional offices from the governor on down.

Why these disappointments? The defining issue in 2022, on account of the Dobbs decision, was abortion. Even in states where there was no serious chance that the election would lead to any restrictions on abortion–like Minnesota–Democrats campaigned on nothing else. And it worked. Swing voters, including millions of suburban housewives, turned out to insure that the precious right to abort babies would not be undermined.

Conservatives have hoped that this year, voters would move on to more urgent issues. But the Democrats have other plans

Politics is downstream from culture. As long as our general morality finds nothing objectionable in mothers killing their unborn children, abortion will be a problem.

Read it.

Weeks after Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned amid a plagiarism scandal, the university’s teaching hospital is set to retract or correct dozens of papers authored by four of their top researchers, following claims of data falsification.

The ‘peer-review’ process appears to be defective.

UPDATE: Dana-Farberications at Harvard University

Read it.

The Biden administration’s bid to ban menthol cigarettes will open a lucrative black-market trade, bringing in millions of dollars for terrorist organizations, including Iran-backed groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, according to a Republican senator.

Since May 2022, the Biden administration has been championing a proposal that will eliminate menthol-flavored cigarettes from American stores. Around 40 percent of adult smokers prefer mentholated cigarettes, and they are particularly popular with black Americans, according to the American Lung Association.

With the menthol market still booming, the Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to enact an outright ban will likely create a massive black market for Mexican cartels and a host of terror groups known to work alongside them, such as al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, according to Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), who sent a letter on Monday to multiple federal agencies seeking information on how they plan to combat the potential for terrorism financing.

It’s always astonished me the number of people who think that merely passing a law against some practice will be effective in stopping the practice. I should have thought that the train-wreck of Prohibition would have cured anybody with an IQ above room temperature of that notion.

Read it.

There is debate among scholars as to the extent of the quiet quitting phenomenon, but there is increasing evidence that white Americans are increasingly quiet quitting America’s leading institutions. And the possible implications of that for American society are profound.

This phenomenon is a consequence of the trends I write about in my forthcoming book, The Unprotected Class, about the rise of anti-white racism in American culture and how both formal and informal anti-white discrimination have become a factor in almost every area of American public life.

CBS News.

Southern California-based fast-food chain In-N-Out said in a statement Sunday that it will shutter its Oakland restaurant in the spring “due to ongoing issues with crime.”

The restaurant, located at 8300 Oakport Street off Interstate 880 near Oakland International Airport, will close Sunday, March 24, according to a statement from In-N-Out chief operating officer Denny Warnick.

According to Warnick, the location has been a profitable one for the company, which is headquartered in Irvine.

“…This location remains a busy and profitable one for the company, but our top priority must be the safety and wellbeing of our Customers and Associates – we cannot ask them to visit or work in an unsafe environment,” Warnick said in the statement.

UPDATE: In-N-Out’s First Ever Store Closing

Read it.

The ongoing battles between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Mexican army have ostensibly made Mexico’s border towns war zones, as Newsmax’s border correspondent Jaeson Jones has reported for months.

The criminal organizations that are well-funded to help get migrants to the U.S. border in crossings like Lukeville, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas, are funding the criminal organizations that battle any law-and-order efforts on behalf of the Mexican army, according to reports.

The cartels are using AK-47s and AR-15s to fight border authorities, causing gunfights that even forced the international bridge to shut down for days.

Read it.

Although the world is becoming increasingly distracted with this year’s elections, there are several events that should not slip under the radar. This month marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of a man who left an indelible imprint upon the modern world and, in fact, all of human history. January 21st, is the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known to the world as Comrade Lenin.

Despite a century having passed since he died, his legacy is still very much up for debate. But those discussions are not closed to the former Soviet Union alone. Lenin impressed his name and ideas so deep into our modern political consciousness that it is only fair to acknowledge that the world would be entirely different had he not existed. It seems likely that history would have been far better without him; but, as is often the case in human history, it could also have been much worse.

To give the devil his due, Lenin was and remains a hero to many, portrayed as the great revolutionary who, with little but his indefatigable will, inspired his fellow countrymen to overthrow the Czarist order, one of the most oppressive and arbitrary rules in modern history. And, indeed, Lenin was a remarkable individual, possessing a ferocious intellect and political cunning. Like the other great men of the early 20th century who maximised the capacity of the new means of communication, Lenin was all-consuming in his oratory: captivating, eloquent, and forceful. Better still for his age, he possessed the much rarer gift of collecting esoteric ideas and condensing them into comprehensible doctrines capable of being understood and adopted by the working man.

Lenin was Hitler without the insanity.

Read it.

Of course they do. It’s all they know.

The New York Times Magazine carries an interview with Andreas Malm, the author of the 2021 book “How To Blow Up a Pipeline.”

And the FBI is spending all it’s time on ‘right-wing terrorists’?

Read it.

In total, e-bikes caused 267 fires, causing 18 deaths and 150 injuries in the city, the New York Fire Department (FDNY) told Fox News, which notes that the figures represent the highest levels of each statistic – with deaths jumping 200% and fires increasing 21% over last year.

“As we rely more and more on micromobility vehicles to earn a living in our daily lives, we increase the risk of fires caused by lithium-ion batteries. And as mentioned, we had over 100 deaths in this city alone on these batteries,” said Mayor Eric Adams (D) during an e-bike safety event last year.

Read it.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen conducted two separate surveys, each covering 1,000 “Members of the Elites.” The results are remarkable, not to say shocking. But the starting point is, who was defined as “elite” for purposes of these surveys?

The Elites are defined as those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile. Approximately 1% of the total U.S. population meets these criteria.

Ten thousand people per square mile represents a high-density urban environment. But in that context, $150,000 a year is no princely salary. Nationwide, it takes far more–around $650,000 annually–to be in the top 1% in income. A person who lives in a big city and earns $150,000 is not, in any financial sense, elite.

So the key element in Rasmussen’s formula is having a postgraduate degree. Basically, what we are surveying here is people with graduate degrees who live in cities, the large majority of whom don’t make a great deal of money. Many in that group are probably women, although Rasmussen says the survey results were “lightly weighted” by gender, age and race. Rasmussen also defined a subcategory of “Ivy League elites,” consisting of graduates of one of the eight Ivy League schools, plus Northwestern, Duke, Stanford and the University of Chicago.

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The European Union is at a crossroads. The EU, in its current form under the Lisbon Treaty (2009), is a union of states, even if it periodically tries to overstep its own mandate. EU members that understand the importance of sovereignty, such as Denmark and Poland, can and do behave as sovereigns. This usually provokes a struggle, but it is possible. That, however, may change.

The European Parliament recently approved an amendment to the EU treaties that would be the next step in abolishing the member states’ veto in the EU Council and increase the powers of supranational institutions. Such a reform is a decades-old federalist dream. It is no coincidence that Guy Verhofstadt, one of the fiercest federalists, is pushing for it. The idea has a long history. At the beginning of the century, the EU proposed a constitution that was rejected by referenda in the original member states—France and the Netherlands. Later, in 2010, Herman van Rompuy openly said that “nation states are dead” and that borders were obsolete. Everyone heard him. Throughout the last decade, the sentiment of centralisation has been fading in European societies, while it has been expanding among the Brussels elite.

The current proposals are the most concrete manifestation yet of this anti-democratic trend. They are far from accepted. A vote in the Council is looming. However, there is considerable support. Even greater than the support is the threat this reform poses to freedom and democracy in Europe.

New York Magazine.

After almost 70 years, Sports Illustrated — the storied magazine that has published some of the best sports journalism of the past two centuries — appears to be over, at least as anyone knew it.

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The jilted wife of DA Fani Willis’ alleged lover and outside counsel Nathan Wade dropped receipts in a Friday court filing, revealing that Wade purchased plane tickets in Willis’ name, with alleged travel to places such as Napa Valley, California, Florida and the Caribbean, according to the Daily Caller.

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A hospital system in Denver said the migrant crisis the city faces could drive it into financial collapse as it struggles to make ends meet, with over $100 million in unpaid-for care.

“While I have tremendous compassion for what’s going on, it’s heartbreaking, it’s going to break Denver Health,” the safety net hospital’s CEO, Donna Lynne, told a committee of the city council last week, according to the Denver Post. In the past year, 8,000 illegal immigrants have come to the hospital for 20,000 visits, the cost of which goes into the millions and has not been reimbursed by the state and federal governments.

The strain from treating the migrants has contributed to $136 million in care the hospital provided last year for which it has not received compensation.

David Brooks.

Sometimes in this job I have a kernel of a column idea that doesn’t pan out. But other times I begin looking into a topic and find a problem so massive that I can’t believe I’ve ever written about anything else. This latter experience happened as I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.
Once you start poking around, the statistics are staggering. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” All of us who have been entangled in the medical system know why administrators are there: to wrangle over coverage for the treatments doctors think patients need.
The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”

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When five-and-six-year-old schoolchildren were stabbed on a Dublin street on 23 November 2023—allegedly by an Algerian immigrant—the resulting riots made headlines around the world. Those riots, however, were the result of tensions over immigration that had been building under the surface for years. In a recent survey, 75 percent of Irish people stated that they believe that the country has let in too many immigrants.