The late Joe Sobran famously said, “In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the Ku Klux Klan.” Less famous writers have often pointed out that the American Left talks like MLK but lives like the KKK. Without exception, the white people staking out fashionable positions on race do so from as far away from black people as possible. Antifascists love Portland Oregon because it is one of the least diverse cities in the county.
This was always true. Sobran made his observation about the American Left forty years ago when the country was still 85% white. Thirty million South American tourists later and the Left may be even more sensitive this reality. On the one hand, they have become violent in their racial politics, but also extremely sensitive to the reality of race in the daily lives. Forty years ago, white race hustlers actually went to the ghetto once in a while, but now they stay as far away as possible.
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But despite this, Philadelphia seems to be trying to restrict one important form of defending life and liberty (and protecting property): bulletproof barriers that help shield employees from robbers or other attackers.
The just-enacted Bill 170963 would have originally banned them outright in eating and drinking establishments that seat at least 30 customers. (These restaurants are also the ones that, under Pennsylvania law, can get licenses to serve beer, though not all such large restaurants do sell beer; the law seems aimed at “beer & delis,” but apparently some local KFCs and Popeyes also have bulletproof barriers.) The bill was ultimately amended to call on the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections to “promulgate regulations to provide for the use or removal” of such barriers — but that Department seems to support broadly restricting them them; it thus seems likely that the regulations will provide for more removal than use.
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On Saturday around 10:10 p.m. in the area of the Karlsruhe Palace Park, a rainbow flag was snatched away and burned by a group of people. This apparently developed into a brawl in which there were several minor injuries. Several had their hair pulled and were forced to the ground, where they continued to be beaten and kicked. A 27-year-old was taken to hospital by ambulance as a precaution; others were examined on-site by rescue teams.
Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization – St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers – dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they’re more stylish.
This is the setup for my all-time favorite conspiracy theory, Tartaria. Its true believers say we are those savages. We live in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, Art Deco skyscrapers, etc. But our buildings look like this:
The headquarters of Google, one of the richest corporations in the world. A third-rate 1500s merchant would be ashamed to live anywhere as bare.
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Imagine you are an advisor to a politician facing a difficult re-election campaign in the fall and you are tasked with planning a campaign strategy. If you are a rational person, you would first start with the polling. What are the big issues on the minds of the voters and how do they rank your guy on those items. The best way to get back in good standing with the voters is to show them you care about their issues and most important, you agree with them on those issues.
Now, this is easier said than done. If the top issue with voters is energy prices and your guy has spent his career talking about the need to ratchet up energy costs in order to please Gaia, then you have a problem. The voters are stupid, but there are limits and your guy is a true believer. In fact, you worship Gaia as well, so the idea of speaking against the climate cult is a bridge too far. Still, you have to figure out a way to convince people that Gaia cares about gas prices too.
This is the problem with impractical politics. When public policy is about putting two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot, politicians are free to acknowledge error and change gears to chase the voters. In happier times, politicians were the guys chasing the parade, hoping to get to the front so they could pretend to be the parade leaders come election time. That can only work when the only thing you believe in is being on the good side of the voters.
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Washington Post reporter claims the Second Amendment was ‘reinterpreted’ to include individual gun rights Where is the provision that was ‘reinterpreted’ to allow abortion? To allow ‘gay marriage’? I don’t see it anywhere.
You probably missed the New York Times column last week exploring the upside of inflation. Understanding what Democrats and their supporters need to hear right now, the Times delivered Annaliese Griffin’s op-ed column “You Want to Buy Meat? In This Economy?”
Like a bad cold contracted by a cigarette smoker, inflation presents a good opportunity to lose a bad habit. Griffin observes: “Meat, poultry, fish and eggs now cost 14.3 percent more than they did a year ago.”
What has gone wrong? Griffin does not want to know how we got here. Rather, Griffin presents the opportunity food inflation presents for you, the reader, to reform your diet in the interest of Gaia.
Save the planet! Eat bugs! Live in caves! Huddle in the dark!
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For the past decade, America’s urban centres have been increasingly run by ‘progressive’ activists. Yet today, as US cities reel from collapsed economies, rising crime and pervasive corruption, there’s something of a revolt brewing, the success of which may well determine the role and trajectory of our great urban centres.
This emerging conflict is coming to a head next week in Los Angeles, the US’s second-largest city, in the Democratic primaries for LA mayor. Next week’s vote is likely to lead to a head-to-head between moderate billionaire developer Rick Caruso and progressive congressperson Karen Bass, once considered a potential vice-president for Joe Biden. On the same day, ultra-liberal San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin faces a potential recall amid rising crime rates.
The possible shift towards the centre reflects a move back to more traditional urban policies, particularly on crime and homelessness. It’s not Republicans leading the charge against ultra-progressive policies, either. It is African American, Democratic mayors like Houston’s Sylvester Turner and New York’s Eric Adams.
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The Chinese Communist Party is exporting its tyranny all over the world after the United States let it get away with murder 33 years ago during the Tiananmen Square Massacre, three Chinese activists say. It was a bloody night for pro-democracy student protestors on June 3, 1989. Tanks rolled in towards Tiananmen Square, the heart of China’s capital, crushing people and objects in their way. Tear gas and live ammunition inundated the square.
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What started as a Chinese-style “social credit” financial system focused on protesting truckers four months ago has now expanded to guns, mainstream and social media, and religion.
Following the tragic massacre in Uvalde, Texas last week, Canada’s government, some 2,000 miles away, decided they needed to do something. There is no right to gun ownership in Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, backed by masked and clapping seals from his Liberal Party caucus, announced that legislation would be forthcoming to ban (sorry, a “national freeze”) the sale and transfer of all handguns.
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In this week’s massive defamation award to actor Johnny Depp, his ex-wife Amber Heard was left holding a bill for $15,000,000. Even after a reduction for her own award and a statutory reduction of the punitive damage portion, Heard is still looking at $8,350,000 in damages. Many view that amount (which is $1.35 million more than her divorce settlement) to be justified in light of the damage caused to Depp’s reputation and career.
However, the stain of this verdict should be shared with others, even if they avoided the sting of actual damages. That includes many in the media (including the Washington Post staff) who rushed to paint Heard as a victim and Depp as an abuser. Yet, the greatest condemnation should be reserved for the organization that not only pushed that narrative but actually helped draft the defamatory column: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
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A creative writing course at a British university has withdrawn graduation requirement that students should attempt a sonnet, not on the reasonable grounds that it is futile to try to turn people with cloth ears for language into sonneteers, but because the sonnet is a literary form that is white and Western.
I was writing sonnets in high school. Anybody who can’t write a sonnet doesn’t deserve a college diploma.
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One of the general characteristics of Western feminism is its preoccupation with rape. Accusations of rape, the insistence that men are predisposed towards rape, etc. Yet when culture-enrichers are the ones doing the raping, feminists look away. When it’s not a white European man doing the raping, they don’t want to know about it.
The following report documents the rape and violence against women perpetrated by culture-enrichers in Sweden. For many Swedish feminists, the issue of racism seems to trump any concern about rapes committed by third-world immigrants. Any frank discussion of migrant rapes risks accusations of hets mot folkgrupp — incitement against a group of people.
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After Washington state passed a law to constrain police officers, state drivers are refusing to pull over when asked by cops.
Northwest News Network recorded nearly 1,000 failure-to-yield incidents in 2022. Patrol officers have described a sharp rise in motorists fleeing traffic stops, speeding away sometimes in stolen cars, according to one county police chief. Washington House Bill 1054, which Governor Jay Inslee (D.) signed into law last year, has banned police from pursuing traffic violators in their cruisers, unless the officer is granted permission by a supervisor or the perpetrator is suspected of being under the influence or having committed a violent offense, is causing imminent danger, or must be identified.
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A Democrat running for Congress in California says student loan debt is “one of the biggest crises faced by our country” as tuition costs “skyrocket.” He would know—as president of a local college’s board, he voted to hike tuition three times.
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Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings says that many wounded and few dead suggests black perps. The fact that no descriptions of the shooters, although it is said that police saw people shooting, further suggests black perps. We shall see.
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Politicians converging on the scenes to do ritual hand-wringing? Nope.
Biden trip? Nope. Harris trip? Nope. Harris call for greater gun control in Chicago? Nope (Actually, it would be hard to imagine what ‘greater gun control in Chicago’ would comprise.)
Fringe Lefty candidates accosting the governor in front of TV cameras? Nope. (Maybe because the governor himself is a fringe Lefty candidate; he’d be hard to outflank.)
BLM marching in the streets (since most of the victims are presumably black)? Nope.
Well, there you have it.
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Not only do we move large items, like dining tables with cars, but we also move small items, like our dinner deliveries with cars. This system isn’t just incredibly inefficient, but it creates emissions, traffic, and unnecessary accidents. But could this problem could be solved with a small, cute robot? To help reduce our reliance on cars, Ali created a fully-autonomous sidewalk bot that is used to deliver small items like our dinner deliveries.
Hmmm. Robots making deliveries.
How soon before one gets hacked and hijacked? What’s the black market price of a used delivery robot?
How soon before one is just pried open? It’s easier than an ATM, so you wouldn’t need a backhoe. A wrecking bar would probably do.
Uh, let’s think this through a little more.
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“If the Founding Fathers can be discarded,” Douglas Murray says, “and Abraham Lincoln can be discarded, and everyone else can be discarded from American history, what have you got left?”
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The weakness of California’s Republican party is reflected in every metric that matters. Its representation in California’s congressional delegation is 10 out of 53, which at 19 percent does not even reflect voter registration totals. Similar underachievement plagues their showing in the state legislature: Republicans number 19 out of 80 seats in the assembly, and 9 out of 40 seats in the state senate. Of the eight higher state offices—governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer, controller, superintendent of public instruction, and insurance commissioner—not one is held by a Republican. Every one of these office holders are Democrats. For those Californians who recall that the state was cherry red through the election of George Bush in 1988, this leftward turn is cause for endless regret.
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From the world’s largest gathering of hypocrites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, we have learned that a personal carbon footprint tracker is in the works. In the wrong hands, it would be the equivalent of the ankle monitors used to ensure that criminal offenders don’t escape their house arrest.
“We’re developing, through technology, an ability for consumers to measure their whole carbon footprint,” J. Michael Evans, president of Alibaba Group USA, said Tuesday while on a panel discussion on responsible consumption. “What does that mean? Where they are traveling. How they are traveling. What are they eating. What they are consuming on the platform.”
This will excite the virtue signalers who will be happy to post their carbon footprint scores on social media. But for the rest of us, those still wishing to live freely, who don’t want elites establishing the limits of “responsible consumption,” it’s deeply troubling.
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There is nothing a strong government likes more than a weak people; and therefore, whether consciously or not, everything is done to render the people ever feebler. Not physically, of course, we are raising up giants of a size and strength never before seen, as can be seen on any sports field, but psychologically—which is why psychology is the handmaiden of soft authoritarianism, it teaches people their vulnerability.
The more vulnerable people can be induced to believe themselves to be, the more they need assistance to keep themselves going. Such assistance (which is self-justifying, though never sufficient, or indeed even partially effective) requires a vast legal and other infrastructure, put in place and regulated by the government. The government is the pastor, the people are the sheep.
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A rash of thefts of semiconductor-loaded powertrain control modules from parked Freightliner and Western Star trucks is turning the tractors into oversize paperweights. Daimler Truck North America is going after the bad guys but has few leads.
The rip-offs of common powertrain control module 4 units relate to the ongoing shortage of microchips. Harvesting and reprogramming the modules allow them to work in other trucks, Daimler said.
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Klaus Schwab is the head of the World Economic Forum; he founded the organization in 1971. Each year, the WEF hosts a massive conference in Davos, Switzerland, with thousands of world leaders, diplomats and experts on various topics gathering to trade ideas about how best to cooperatively run the world. Lest this characterization be seen as overstating the case, Schwab himself said as much this year in opening the conference: “The future is not just happening. The future is built by us, by a powerful community as you here in this room. We have the means to improve the state of the world. But two conditions are necessary. The first one is that we act all as stakeholders of larger communities, that we serve not only self-interest but we serve the community. That’s what we call stakeholder responsibility. And second, that we collaborate.”
This is the call to action for elitists the world over. They appoint themselves the representatives of global interests — without elections, without accountability — and then create mechanisms of national and international order to control citizens over whom they claim to preside. Schwab himself has decoded his favorite term, “stakeholder capitalism.” He wrote in Time magazine in October 2020, “Free markets, trade and competition create so much wealth that in theory they could make everyone better off if there was the will to do so.” To do so, however, would require taking hints from Greta Thunberg, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter; it would require “building … a virtuous economic system” in which companies abandon their core mission of serving customers and shareholders and instead embrace answering questions like “What is the gender pay gap in company X? How many people of diverse backgrounds were hired and promoted? What progress has the company made toward reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions?”
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As reporters ascertain what happened during the tragic school shooting in Uvalde, we have more to process. The Associated Press has reconstructed events outside the school during the shooting before and after the heroic Border Patrol agent entered the building. The AP story is “Onlookers urged police to charge into Texas school.”
Five years ago in 2017, when the US labor shortage was in its nascent stages and when the US was years away from a wage-price spiral, the Fed’s Beige Book surveys of economic activity across the country in April, May and July all noted the inability of employers to find workers able to pass drug screenings: “It’s not just a matter of labor participation; there is also a lot of collateral economic damage,” said Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist who wrote a widely discussed paper on the subject last year. In other words, too many people were high 24/7 to be gainfully employed.
Soma! A gramme is better than a damn!
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News accounts shows drug deaths have spiked everywhere. The year we lost my sister more than 65,000 people overdosed and died. That’s skyrocketed to more than 100,000 people during the 12-month period ending April 2021. That’s nearly 300 people each day.
We live in an age of data visualization, so the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers an?interactive dashboard?with provisional counts of drug overdose deaths. As jarring and important as the statistics are, it’s imperative we don’t forget that each one of these is a life lost, forever. Nearly 100,000 unique individuals—with inherent value, talents, dreams, desires—vanquished by a nearly invisible foe.
It takes only 2 milligrams to be lethal. That’s not even enough to cover the year on the front of the penny in your pocket.
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The California economy may seem healthy on the surface, with home prices soaring, Silicon Valley booming and the state government posting big multi-year state budget surpluses thanks to a massive surge in capital gains tax revenues and income tax revenues from tech stocks.
But that good news masks a dangerous period ahead.
In fact, California’s heavy dependency on tax payments from the rich and on the continued strength of the tech economy makes the state highly vulnerable in the event of a significant slowdown — or, worse yet, a full-bore global recession. According to Jim Doti of the A. Gary Anderson Center for Economic Forecasting at Chapman University, the probability of a recession starting late this year or next is very high.
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An informal metric for measuring the stability of a society is the distance between reality and the official truth of the ruling regime. The more lies the regime tells, the less stable it and the society over which it rules. Official lies are a good proxy for the degree of authoritarianism within the regime. The degree of authoritarianism is a good proxy for the level of official insecurity. The more thuggish the regime the less support it enjoys, thus the more it needs to lie to the people.
At the extreme end of this metric is a place like North Korea. The regime is deeply paranoid about everything. The Kim family does not trust anyone in the ruling class and no one in the ruling class trusts anyone, especially Kim. The one thing everyone agrees upon is they cannot trust the people. This is why they get images of the tubby Kim in heroic poses or stories of him making ten holes in one playing golf. The regime feels it needs to present him as a god to intimidate the people.
On the other end of the spectrum, you get a place like Switzerland that barely has a government relative to the rest of Europe. Many Swiss residents do not know who is currently holding the position of president. It is a rotating position currently held by someone calling herself Simonetta Sommaruga. The Swiss government has no need to turn her into a rock star or make while claims about her. The official truth of Switzerland is easy for everyone to see, so they have no need to lie.
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I’m agnostic on the subject of how much the vast media publicity for certain crimes (such as Buffalo) encourages copycat mass killing shootings, but this case sure looks like one. Of course, while this one will get lots of coverage, it’s Mexican on Mexican, so it won’t be as enthralling to the media as white-on-black in Buffalo.
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Have you ever dreamed of belonging to the woke nomenklatura, of being free to harass and bully the deplorables to your heart’s content? It sounds like a wonderful life, and many of your contemporaries have chosen it. But before you join them, listen to this true tale. (Caveat: You may or may not be able to worm your way into the web site. If you can’t, the following summary furnishes all the pertinent facts.)
…
Within a few minutes after she posted her heresy, Krista was expelled from Law Mamas. Another member then complained, “Hey, I don’t love that we all just kicked out this girl from our group for making the statement.” She was expelled, too.
Freedom of speech is not a Progressive value.
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Some years ago, when the idea of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) was first floated, the new all-electronic money was touted as an innovation that would make commercial transactions easier, more convenient, and more secure for the consumer. Then, when the “pandemic” hit, digital money was also promoted as a touch-free way to avoid contagion with the dreaded coronavirus.
There was always much more to the CBDCs, of course. The full potential of the new currencies is now being openly discussed at Davos as I write this. Once cash is abolished and all your income and payments are put through via CBDC, every transaction you make will be fully tracked by the government and financial institutions (between which there will no longer be any meaningful distinction). What you spend your money on will be known in detail. Your spending habits will be analyzed by AI systems, which will monitor your carbon credits and your use of non-sustainable resources. Since the currency will be tied to your individual digital identity, your ability to purchase certain goods and services may be limited when the State deems it appropriate.
Throw in your cell phone and the ubiquitous 5G surveillance, which includes facial recognition, and you will have no privacy whatsoever, just as the WEF promised. You’ll own nothing except for the limited personal items that you are allowed to possess. And you’ll be happy! All while you eat those delicious crickets, which can be prepared in a mouth-watering variety of culinary ways.
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“Before the pull of technology, we would never dream of wasting time on our phones instead of jumping straight into the pool and soaking up every minute of our vacation,” Lisa Checchio, Chief Marketing Officer for Wyndham, said at the time. “But today, adults and kids are so glued to their devices that we’ve had to add more pool chairs to accommodate all the poolside swiping.”
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Durbin’s Catholic faith is a ‘conflict of interest’ for holding Supreme Court accountable: pro-choice group It’s not as if he’s ever acted like a Catholic.
“F’s” and “v’s” belong to a group of sounds known as labiodentals. They happen when you raise your bottom lip to touch your top teeth and are used in more than half of today’s human language. But science suggests we didn’t always have this linguistic ability.
As hunter gatherers, our ancestors ate a diet that was minimally processed and required more effort to chew. As a result, by adolescence their teeth would develop what’s called an edge-to-edge bite, where the jaw is elongated so that both the bottom and top teeth are completely flush with one another.
Cue the Neolithic period, where widespread agriculture meant more soft foods like stew and bread and less laborious chewing. Over time, the slight overbite that most people are born with stayed preserved, because chewing was less of an arduous process.
Except, of course, that you can do the same thing by touching your top lip to your bottom teeth, the human lower jaw being quite versatile. Yeah, you’ll feel like Mongo The Cave Man, but you can do it.
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