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.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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.

Read it.

The Department of Justice report on the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Tx was released today. It is about a 600-page report. I’m just starting to read the report, but I will say that the law enforcement response was an epic failure.

Words matter in training and in my opinion the words ‘Hunter Cells’ should be used to reinforce the concept that in an active shooter situation the first officer(s) that arrive at the scene are not perimeter builders and should not wait for a supervisor or incident commander to start hunting for the shooter. The only reactive part of searching for an active shooter is the dispatch call. The proactive action is searching for and neutralizing the shooter.

I will try to write a series of posts involving the DOJ report.

Read it.

Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the liberal ladies of ABC’s The View celebrated by making a mockery of Dr. King’s legacy. In addition to spreading the usual lies about Republicans trying to erase black people from history, white co-host Sara Haines proclaimed that it was “important” for white kids like her own to be made to “feel bad” in history class, particularly about slavery. She demanded this while no one living today was involved in the slavery of the past.

Setting the stage for Haines’s insane demand, staunchly racist and anti-Semitic co-host Sunny Hostin spewed her usual anti-American falsehood about how the country was founded on slavery. “What happens is when you’ve had privilege for so long, equality feels a lot like oppression,” she chided her critics.

Hostin herself had a very warped perspective on what oppression actually was. Despite being a multimillionaire who brags about not needing to shop for groceries in years, Hostin insists she’s “oppressed” and demands her reparations.

Read it.

Desperate for members and knowing the importance of getting in on the ground floor, the Association of Flight Attendants-Communication Workers of America (AFA-CWA) saw an opportunity with startup airline Avelo.

The AFA-CWA recruited flight attendants to its cause almost before the airline got off the ground.

The union filed an application for an election when the company was in its infancy and there were only 14 eligible voters. At the time of the election, there were nearly 100 flight attendants, but through a loophole in the law, only the original 14 were allowed to vote, and of them, eight voted for the union.

Since then, the company has continued to grow. Now, Avelo Airlines’ 200-plus flight attendants are saddled up with a union voted in by eight people. Think of that: More than 200 people have been forced into an affiliation with an entity that only eight of them embraced.

And there’s still no contract. The AFA-CWA may claim to be adept at contract negotiations, but nearly two years have already passed with no end in sight to negotiations.

Look for … the Union label….

Read it.

My local Home Depot now locks up a great many things. I don’t have time to ring a bell and cool my heels – so I walk out and purchase online instead.

The net result is that prices will soar at these stores (just to pay for the staff, and reduced demand from impatient shoppers). And Amazon (and equivalents) will soon be the only ways to purchase the stuff people steal from stores.

A good start to the day consists of taking a nap. After breakfast, of course.

I remember, when I was in the Navy, getting together with my colleagues to discuss what we were going to do for the day. We called it “Quarters for Muster”.

BBC.

It’s a common sight at many retail stores: a queue of people, waiting to use a self-checkout kiosk, doing their best to remain patient as a lone store worker attends to multiple malfunctioning machines. The frustration mounts while a dozen darkened, roped-off and cashier-less tills sit in the background.

For shoppers, self-checkout was supposed to provide convenience and speed. Retailers hoped it would usher in a new age of cost savings. Their thinking: why pay six employees when you could pay one to oversee customers at self-service registers, as they do their own labour of scanning and bagging for free?

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn’t living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it’s worth.

That’s in addition to people such as myself who object to them on principle.

Read it.

In 1996 in the Tazmanian city of Port Arthur a man by the name of Martin Bryant killed 35 people using semi-automatic rifles in what would later be known as the Port Arthur Massacre. This singular event was quickly used as a rationale for the banning of most firearms for Australian civilians, but the new regulations were not a product of Port Arthur. Rather, anti-gun politicians had been pushing for restrictions and confiscation for many years prior; Port Arthur simply gave them enough public panic to get their legislation passed.

This is the modus operandi of the typical anti-gun lobby – Wait for a tragedy and then exploit it to punish all law abiding citizens for the crimes of a handful of deranged people. It doesn’t make much sense unless you realize that gun control laws are not meant to thwart criminals, they are meant to thwart good people who might object to government trespasses.

Read it.

Superior Court Judge William Clark nullified the results of a Democrat mayoral primary in November 2023 and ordered a new election. The ruling was based on hours of video evidence showing hundreds of illegally harvested absentee ballots being stuffed into drop boxes in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

“The videos are shocking to the court and should be shocking to all the parties,” Judge Clark wrote in his ruling.

A California judge overturned the result in a 2021 Compton City Council run-off race that was initially decided by one vote.

Block Club Chicago.

The city is considering installing bollards in retail sectors across the city as thieves continue to crash cars into luxury and local businesses before ransacking them, two alderpeople said.

The news comes after a smash-and-grab Monday morning at a Prada store on the Gold Coast, 30 E. Oak St., which resulted in a shootout between two police officers and a 33-year-old man now charged with attempted murder and burglary.

Smash-and-grabs have been thrown into the spotlight as videos often circulate online of people breaking into stores and leaving with as many items as they can carry. In the past year, this has included using a stolen car to smash through a window to get inside.

Other stores hit in recent months include a West Loop luxury boutique and several streetwear stores.

Read it.

Imagine being trapped in London rush hour traffic next to a huge 4500F / 2500C fireball, or even worse, being a passenger trapped on the upper deck of a burning EV.

Read it.

A former civil servant, Anna Stanley reports on a counter-terrorism course she attended which she found a deeply, existentially depressing experience. She argues that ‘prestigious’ educational institutions are delivering politically biased, anti-government training, amounting to indoctrination and that extremism and terrorism are misunderstood by civil servants to the point of being a national security risk.

I recently attended a Kings College course called ‘Issues in Countering Terrorism’. Organised by the Centre for Defence Studies, it was designed for civil servants and professionals in Counter Terrorism. Staff from the Foreign Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defence and Home Office attended. Facilitating this relatively new 3 day course were senior lecturers from the Security Studies Department.

The civil servants were given presentations by Kings College lecturers while Visiting Senior Research Fellows and Professors also spoke. These included those formerly holding positions such as Permanent Secretary of the Home Office and Director of GCHQ, Defence Minister and Foreign Office Director.

PJ Media.

These Fani Willis allegations are getting crazier by the day. By now, I’m sure you’ve read Athena Thorne’s intrepid report on the accusations that Willis hired an attorney with whom she is supposedly carrying on an extramarital affair as a special prosecutor in the Trump RICO case, despite his lack of qualifications with that type of litigation. The special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, also allegedly met with White House representatives about the case.

I penned a follow-up piece about another Willis hire, Pallavi Bailey, who serves as the DA’s spokeswoman. She is married to Charlie Bailey, who ran for lieutenant governor and lost in 2022. Willis hired Pallavi Bailey and actively campaigned for Charlie Bailey while using the Trump grand jury to target Burt Jones, his rival in the lieutenant governor’s race. Targeting Jones led a judge to bar Willis from investigating him due to the conflict of interest.

But now the plot thickens for the beleaguered prosecutor, who probably just wants to be left alone so she can take Trump down and profit off that achievement. The estranged wife of Willis’ alleged sneaky link wants her to testify in their divorce proceedings.

The Other McCain.

In Seattle, one of the richest cities in the world, entire blocks of downtown streets have become open-air drug markets, but — BUT! — you can’t get a plastic straw in a restaurant there.

Read it.

The University of Michigan continues to exponentially grow the number of staffers dedicated to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, with at least 241 paid employees now focused on DEI and payroll costs exceeding $30 million annually, according to an analysis conducted for The College Fix.

The payroll costs are $23.24 million for salaries and $7.44 million for benefits, or $30.68 million, an amount that would cover in-state tuition and fees for 1,781 undergraduate students.

Thirteen DEI staff members earn more than $200,000 and 66 earn more than $100,000 when factoring in benefits.

Read it.

Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) published its official figures for 2023 on Monday, January 8th, revealing that asylum requests have increased significantly compared to 2022.

The data shows that there were nearly 352,000 asylum applications submitted in Germany last year, an increase of 51.1% compared to the 218,000 applications in the year before. The figure includes 23,000 ‘subsequent’ applications from migrants who have already been rejected at least once.

The statistics also make it clear that Ukrainian refugees are not included, as they are provided with a separate scheme to apply for asylum in the country. Germany hosts the largest population of Ukrainian refugees in Europe at nearly 1.2 million, or close to 29% of all people who fled Ukraine for the European Union.

The Foundry.

Our nation’s capital is a model of dysfunctional, clueless blue city governance. Nothing highlights that better than the explosion of crime—and especially carjackings—since 2020.

The official 2023 year-end tally of carjackings in Washington, D.C., ended up being a staggering 959, twice the number of the previous year. There were 152 carjackings in 2019. That number more than doubled in 2020, and it has been soaring ever since.

What’s particularly hard to believe is that 65% of the carjackings last year were committed by perpetrators under the age of 18.

Perhaps I need a new Category: Blue State Blues.

The American Mind.

The seeds of this movement were planted long ago, but its blooming flower bears only a superficial resemblance to the seed. Progressivism was once the seed. The term is still in use on the Left; but the flower of progressivism today is identity politics. It needs to be identified as such. Affirmative action, too, was once the seed. The term is still in use on the Left; but the flower of affirmative action is more appropriately named spiritual eugenics, as I have written elsewhere. In this twenty-first century version of eugenics, the impure identity groups—whites, Asians, Jews—must be purged; and the innocent victims must be elevated, whatever their scholarly record, perhaps even to the rank of university president. It is long past time for the spiritual eugenics that is now at the heart of higher education to be identified and repudiated. If left unchecked, it will someday yield real purges, involving bloodshed.

Let us be clear-headed about what our colleges and universities have always been. Almost every institution of higher education in America founded prior to the twentieth century was religious from the outset. Their seed was Christianity. Harvard, Yale, Princeton—all of them were self-consciously Christian. And from that seed grew the flowers, from which other seeds sprang: the social gospel movement of the late nineteenth century; Progressivism in the early twentieth century, which as I indicated above provided the germ from which identity politics grew. All of these movements would have been inconceivable had our colleges and universities not provided the soil for their growth. Not by accident has Harvard been ground zero for the growth of all the quasi-religious “social movements” that have transformed America. From the seed of its Calvinism has come the flower of identity politics. And it is not good.

OffGuardian.

Will 2024 be the year the Deep State’s exercise in controlled chaos finally gives way to an apocalyptic dismantling of our constitutional republic, or what’s left of it?

All the signs seem to point in this direction.

Read it.

As a child of the ’80s, I recall with great fondness the Christmases of my youth: full of stinging cold winters and reassuring fireside warmings up; snowball fights and tobogganing; turkey dinners and endless festivities. They provided the perfect segue into the new year, with its accompaniment of bonfires, piping hot jacket potatoes, and mesmerising firework displays. I don’t think it’s naïve to say I cannot recall a single violent episode, save for a very British exhibition of tutting one year, over the lack of queuing etiquette witnessed at the hotdog stand.

I must be mistaken, however, because the festive season no longer looks anything like that. Christmas markets are increasingly facing cancellation, on the pretext of ‘public safety.’ Those that remain are becoming ‘winter’ markets. Choirs and Santas have been replaced with armed guards; presents with metal detectors and concrete bollards, because you never know when those self-driving cars are going to get uppity again, do you?

Meanwhile, New Year’s Eve has become less celebration, more conflagration. Last year’s Europe-wide festivities were particularly un-Christian in this regard. In Germany alone, there was widespread rioting across Berlin, Hamburg, and North Rhine-Westphalia, where several hundred people were arrested. With 41 emergency service personnel injured, clearly it was essential to identify where the aggression was coming from. “Apparently predominantly young men in groups, often with a migration background,” was the furthest the authorities were willing to go.

San Francisco Standard.

A group representing drug users in San Francisco has posted signs promoting drug use and criticizing law enforcement across the Tenderloin neighborhood, the center of the city’s open-air drug scene.

Created by an entity called the Drug User Liberation Collective, the signs, measuring approximately 8 inches by 11 inches, aim to counter a recent initiative under Mayor London Breed to arrest people who use drugs in public, according to Nova Schultz, the creator of the campaign.

The signs blame Breed’s recent drug-enforcement measures for last year’s record-breaking number of overdose deaths. They argue the negative stigma of drug use is responsible for problems in the Tenderloin—rather than drug use itself.

OffGuardian.

So, what’s with all the fake crying?

Rachel Maddow pretended to cry about “kids in cages”. Matt Hancock pretended to cry about Covid vaccines. Sarah Sidner pretended to cry over covid. Anderson Cooper pretended to cry about Israel, so did John Kirby. Van Jones pretended to cry after Biden “won” the 2020 “election”. Adam Schiff and Adam Kinzinger both pretended to cry about January 6th.

Don Lemon pretends to cry about pretty much everything.

They all do it, and they’re all so bad at it.

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The Turd World invasion of Europe continues unabated.

N. Y. Post.

A mob of over 100 looters purposefully crashed a Kia into a small bakery in Compton, Calif., before they flooded in and ransacked the store during a night of rampage on the streets earlier this week.

The thieves had gathered in the area for an illegal street takeover around 3 a.m. Tuesday before making the mile-long trek to Ruben’s Bakery & Mexican Food.

When they got to the locked store, a white Kia backed into the front doors, clearing an entryway for the crowd of pillagers to get to their loot.

Straight outa Compton … time to leave.

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Despite promises to reduce illegal migration and attempts at negotiating deals with countries outside of the European Union to curb migration flows, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s first full year as the head of the Italian government has been marked by failure.

The Italian interior ministry announced that in 2023 a total of 155,754 illegal migrants had arrived in Italy, up from 103,846 in 2022, an increase of nearly 50%, according to a report from the European Union-funded website InfoMigrants.

For Meloni, the numbers are representative of the biggest failure of her government so far. She had campaigned hard on reducing illegal immigration prior to the 2022 election that saw her party, the national-conservative Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), shock the world and place first, ensuring her premiership in a right-wing coalition government.