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 New York school district socially transitioned a girl without her mother’s consent, repeatedly lying to the mother about the child’s mental health and social struggles, according to a new lawsuit.

Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, Jennifer Vitsaxaki of New York filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Skaneateles Central School District and Board of Education, accusing them of violating her constitutional rights through their deception and their social transitioning of her 12-year-old daughter, Jane.

The Daily Signal first obtained the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York. Skaneateles, N.Y., where the school district is located, is about 22 miles southwest of Syracuse.

If you send your kid to a government school, you WILL regret it.

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.”

Newsbusters.

On Sunday, ABC’s Martha Raddatz tried and failed to get Gen. Charles Brown to attack Donald Trump as he tries to pull a Grover Cleveland and return to the presidency. On Wednesday, it was CNN’s Poppy Harlow’s turn to try to get someone to denounce Trump. However not only did Harlow, like Raddatz, fail, but NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg actually had positive things to say about Trump.

Read it.

A father is suing a Garden State school district after his daughter’s gender transition was allegedly kept a secret from him.

The father, who is remaining anonymous to protect his daughter’s identity, found that New Jersey’s Delaware Valley Regional High School had been calling his daughter by a male name and male pronouns for at least two months, after a pro-LGBT student club’s staff adviser—who is not licensed to practice either medicine or psychology, according to the lawsuit—asked teachers and other school staff, faculty, and administration to refer to the girl by a male name and male pronouns and not to tell her father.

“I was devastated,” the father said. “If a kid gets a headache in school, they have to call the parents to give them Tylenol, but they’re going to choose to allow them to identify as something?”

Read it.

I look around and ask myself, “Do I really want these people to reproduce?”

And the answer comes back immediately: “Nah.”

Zman speaks some inconvenient truth.

In the 1980 campaign, Reagan would regularly say that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job. It was a pithy line that got at something that was always missed by the politicians at the time. That is, the economy is not the same for everyone. You can have a good economy but there will be people who are not doing so good. The reverse is also true. Even in the Great Depression, there were people doing fabulously well.

That is the problem facing the political class this year. According to their court wizards, the economy is growing at a blistering pace. The fourth quarter of last year saw growth at over three percent and inflation falling down to two percent for what the wizards call personal items, while overall inflation was under two percent. The definition of “personal items” is one of those things that makes sense to the people doing the counting, but not to anyone who is doing the actual spending

Does it feel like the economy is growing at a blistering pace? Most people do not think the economy is great. In fact, most people think we are in difficult economic times, despite relatively high employment. This was one of the top reasons people voted for Trump in Iowa and New Hampshire. Under Trump, people perceived the economy as strong while under Biden it seems to be weak. The main reason is inflation. Every trip to the store sees prices higher than the last trip.

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.

Michael Cassidy, a Christian veteran who decapitated a Satanic shrine on display in the Iowa State Capitol building, has been charged with a ‘hate crime’.

Iowa. That’s where we’re at these days. (If he were Muslim, of course, to charge him with a hate crime would be Islamophobia.)

UPDATE: Satan Needs a Red Carpet Interview

Read it.

Farmers in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium, Romania, and other countries across Europe are protesting radical leftist governments by obstructing major transport networks with tractors. This widespread populist movement is sweeping Europe at a time when over-regulation, taxes, and the climate change agenda threaten the livelihoods of not just farmers but working-class people and comes several months before the European election cycle kicks off in June.

Some countries hit hardest by protests have been Germany, Italy, Belgium, and France. Protests are expected to spread to Spain and Portugal.

The peasants are revolting–literally.

The American Mind.

n a previous article (Part I) I described the parade of evidence proving that George Floyd died of cardiopulmonary arrest resulting from his rampant drug use, heart disease, enlarged heart, and edematous lungs. I also showed how prosecutors knew that Officer Chauvin’s knee did not restrict the passage of air to Floyd’s lungs. This fact was not in dispute—the medical examiner testified that he informed prosecutors there was no physical evidence of asphyxiation.

Notwithstanding this evidence, the legacy media manufactured the narrative that Officer Chauvin killed Floyd by asphyxiating him: a patently false narrative nicely encapsulated in memetic and opportunistic “I can’t breathe” T-shirts and “8 minutes, 46 seconds” ball caps. This rhetoric implied that responding officers’ use of force was unlawful. As I show below, this view is entirely false, though it made for effective propaganda.

Responding officers (including Officer Chauvin, who arrived several minutes into the ordeal) handled Floyd’s arrest in a professional, dispassionate, and lawful manner. They managed to deescalate a tense and dangerous situation involving an erratic, powerful, and intoxicated suspect amidst an increasingly hostile and dangerous mob. They should be commended for their work. The bodycam footage proves it.

Read it.

Washington glitterati assembled at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in October to celebrate federal employees making a difference in government. Hosted by CNN anchor Kate Bolduan, the black-tie affair featured in-person appearances by top Biden White House officials including Chief of Staff Jeffrey Zients, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack.

Read it.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but the billions of dollars we’re spending to convert the country to “clean” energy in order to reduce carbon emissions is being allocated poorly. We know, government spending that isn’t efficient? We were shocked, too.

The latest example comes from the idea that our tax money should be responsible for instituting electric busses nationwide. As Fox News reported this week, the idea has been nothing short of a total disaster, with busses broken down and unused across the nation.

Fox cites several examples, including authorities in Asheville, North Carolina, who have encountered numerous difficulties with their electric bus fleet, leading to the idling of three out of five buses bought in 2018 for “millions”. These challenges stem from an assortment of software glitches, mechanical failures, and the unavailability of necessary spare parts.

Read it.

A former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer says he believes he has found the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s plane, which disappeared nine decades ago, on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean using sonar data from a deep-sea drone.

Hoping to solve an 87-year-old mystery, explorer Tony Romeo plans to launch a mission later this year or next to find the long-lost plane, which a massive U.S. search failed to do in 1937.

Read it.

Filling a role he carved out for himself since the Nixon days ,,, which is why Doonesbury appears on the Opinion pages rather than with the rest of the comics.

Read it.

In a move that would once again punish those who entered the country legally, the state of New York is mulling a plan to hire around 4,000 ‘migrants and asylum seekers‘ into mostly entry-level jobs that are allegedly ‘hard to recruit for,’ according to a Jan. 12 memo from the Department of Civil Service obtained by Bloomberg.

The jobs in question would largely consist of areas like food service, equipment repairs, facilities management and office assistance, and would apply to those who have obtained a work permit, the memo states.

Washington Times.

A new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Therapeutic Advances in Drug Safety indicates the “COVID-19 vaccination is strongly associated with a serious adverse safety signal of myocarditis, particularly in children and young adults resulting in hospitalization and death.”

Ruh-roh, Scooby.

There’s a study that Big Pharma, Dr. Anthony Fauci and the “take the shot!” bleaters don’t want read.

Read it.

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth….

UPDATE: WATCH: NYPD officers attacked on surveillance video near Times Square by migrants later freed without bail

UPDATE: Cops allegedly beaten by rowdy migrant mob near Times Square — with suspects later freed without bail: horrifying video

Read it.

Several San Francisco residents are suing city officials over an allegedly “illegal” program that provides taxpayer funds to black and Latino biological men who “identify as females.”

In November 2022, Democratic Mayor London Breed, who is listed as a defendant, announced the “Guaranteed Income for Trans People (GIFT) Program,” which provides “low-income transgender San Franciscans with $1,200 each month, up to 18 months to help address financial insecurity within trans communities,” according to a press release.

Read it.

Here is an interesting philosophical conundrum: what is the point of a border if it is specifically built to be breached?

Surely any pot that is intentionally full of holes is not a pot, but a colander. Likewise, though all walls should surely have at least a few doors in them, a wall made up of nothing but doors isn’t really a wall at all, but a turnstile.

Nowadays, it would increasingly seem as if the external defences of Western Europe and the United States are external defences in name only, purely performative barriers designed to allow anyone access who cares to seek it, no matter how unworthy, undesirable, or unassimilable. Catherine the Great’s Russia once had Potemkin Villages. In today’s West, we have Potemkin Borders.

The Spectator.

Now the environmentalists are going after the “Mona Lisa.” Because of course they are. Just when you thought you couldn’t dislike these apocalyptic irritants anymore, now they’ve gone and pelted soup at another priceless artwork, the most famous artwork in the world no less, because they think their fever dreams about climate change are more important than ordinary people getting to marvel at da Vinci’s masterpiece.

Two activists from Riposte Alimentaire — France’s answer to JustStopOil, only with a particular interest in food policy — took their chance at the Louvre yesterday. After emptying a bottle of orange gloop on to the “Mona Lisa,” one of the women was captured on video shouting: “What is more important: art or the right to a healthy and sustainable diet?” They were blocked off by screens before being removed.

Thankfully, the painting wasn’t damaged. The “Mona Lisa” has been behind safety glass since the 1950s, after a vandal hurled acid at it. In 2009, a Russian woman — apparently upset by the rejection of her citizenship application — threw a mug at the painting, smashing only the mug. This isn’t the first time a climate nutter has had a go, either. In 2022, a young man disguised himself as an elderly woman, so he could get close enough to smear cake over the glass, all while shouting “think of the planet.”

The Foundry.

The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database, the only such database in existence, now contains over 1,500 proven cases of election fraud. The sampling of cases vary from lone wolves stealing one vote to conspiracies that stole many votes, defrauding citizens and candidates of honest elections and sometimes changing the outcome of an election. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)

Read it.

A Minnesota farmer is suing the state over an agricultural grant program that discriminates on the basis of race and sex.

…

According to the department, to be eligible, applicants must be women, veterans, disabled, American Indian or Alaskan Native, 35 or younger, urban, “members of a community of color,” individuals who are “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, or asexual (LGBTQIA+),” or “any other emerging farmers as determined by the commissioner.”

I’m sure they exist, but I’ve never seen a black farmer, or even read about one in the news.

Read it.

Yet another corruption scandal has rocked Ukraine’s military, with employees from a Ukrainian arms firm and defence ministry officials accused of embezzling $40 million. The revelations come as Volodymyr Zelensky urges Western nations to provide more weapons and U.S. Republicans want more accountability on how American taxpayers’ money is being spent in Ukraine.

Five people have been charged in Ukraine for mass procurement fraud. High-ranking officials of the defence ministry, as well as managers of arms supplier Lviv Arsenal, were involved in the scheme. They signed a contract in August 2022, six months into the war with Russia, for 100,000 artillery shells worth $39.6 million. However, the goods were never delivered and the money was instead sent to various accounts in Ukraine and the Balkans, investigators said on Saturday, January 27th. If found guilty, the accused face up to 12 years in prison. According to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, the stolen funds have been seized and will be returned to the defence budget.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to clamp down on corruption in a bid to speed up his country’s accession to the European Union and NATO. Both blocs have demanded widespread anti-corruption reforms before Kyiv can join them.

Read it.

You have undoubtedly heard that crime is down in a lot of places. One trick often employed in places like San Francisco is not to report crimes. Shoplifting is no longer pursued, and employees of businesses can be fired for preventing shoplifting. So property theft crimes drop not because theft is no longer happening but because it is no longer treated as a crime.

Atlanta, Georgia, has seen a 21% drop in year-over-year crime. The Mayor of Atlanta, Andre Dickens, faced with a secession effort in the northern wards of his city due to crime and violent protests from the far left over a police training facility, has deployed a novel trick in The City Too Busy to Hate. He actually pushed law enforcement to enforce the law.

Under Dickens and Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum, the city began aggressively cracking down on gun crimes and gang violence. Buckhead, the financial center of the South and Atlanta’s northern ward, began agitating for secession after crime spiked during COVID lockdowns. Random suburbanites were shot while jogging, home break-ins increased, carjackings increased, violence was on the rise after the former Mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, decided to side with rioters against the police.

The Foundry.

A conservative president or Congress that does not defund public broadcasting does not understand what the moment requires—or, in the parlance of the day, they don’t know what time it is.

Across the board, government must stop funding services set up with taxpayer money ostensibly to serve all Americans, but which cater only to one side.

NPR is a prime example of this asymmetry. And because of its visibility, it’s a good candidate for the first symbolic act of resolve by new leadership.

Don’t hold your breath.

Read it.

An odd position for a nominally American citizen to take. But not surprising in her case.

In the Good Old Days this would be sufficient to have her citizenship revoked and her shipped back to Somalia.

UPDATE: Ilhan Omar Needs To Be Expelled From Congress & Investigated As An Undeclared Foreign Agent

Read it.

An interfaith coalition has offered prayers of solidarity to two evangelical Christians facing their third trial for declaring that homosexuality violates the Bible, a position prosecutors call “war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Despite two unanimous acquittals, Finland’s state prosecutor has taken an elderly member of Parliament and a Lutheran bishop before the Supreme Court to answer for their traditional Christian beliefs on sexuality.

Dr. Päivi Räsänen, who has served in Parliament for 29 years, and Bishop Juhana Pohjola of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, are facing “spiritual persecution” for upholding the Scripture, said a letter signed by dozens of Christian and Jewish leaders.

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.

If you want to know why people are going to vote for Trump….

Washington Free Beacon.

The Biden administration hosted a lecture in Egypt on the virtues of “indigenous knowledge,” a pseudoscientific theory that posits Native Americans possess secret wisdom solely by virtue of their ethnicity, according to internal documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The November 2022 lecture took place at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, and featured Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, a Chadian activist. Ibrahim spoke about how alternative methods of knowing are often more accurate than data-driven science. To substantiate her point, Ibrahim claimed that her grandmother could predict when it is going to rain better than a weather app.

“I’m, like, I’m so sorry you went to the school for maybe for 20 years to get your Ph.D.s,” Ibrahim said. “My grandmother was born on those [sic] knowledge, she got it from her own grand-grand-grand-mother. It is hundreds and thousands of years of knowledge.”

Next up: “No kidding, astrology really really works!”

Read it.

A record-breaking number of illegal immigrants crossed the U.S.-Mexico border last month, according to data released Friday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), as the border crisis continues to rage with no end in sight.

Read it.

The new CEO for National Public Radio (NPR) has become instant news over social media postings that she deleted before the recent announcement of her selection. Katherine Maher is the former CEO of Wikipedia and sought to remove controversial postings on subjects ranging from looters to Trump.

God forbid anybody should find out what she really thinks.

Shannon Thaler at the New York Post reassembled Maher’s deleted postings including a 2018 declaration that “Donald Trump is a racist” and a variety of race-based commentary. That included a statement that appeared to excuse looting.

Yet another wokerata getting a cushy job paid for by taxpayers.

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.

Read it.

Although I liked the Harry Potter books as a child, I wasn’t a full-blown Potterhead. I didn’t queue for hours at Waterstones for The Half-Blood Prince or dress up as Hermione for Halloween. It’s in adulthood I’ve come to appreciate the thematic layers, world-building and glorious escapism J.K.Rowling’s imagination gave to my generation.

For many children though, what they felt for the books and, by extension, for J.K.Rowling, was pure love. Love, lest we forget, is an emotion next door to hate. They both require a degree of obsession, surrender, investment. And as a very vocal minority of Rowling’s fandom have demonstrated, ever since she first lent her support to Maya Forstater and sex-based rights in law back in 2019, the switch between can be as fast and ugly.

And relentless. The latest insidious project by self-exiled Potter fans is a “foul-mouthed” show about the author organised by an Edinburgh arts company, due to be performed in New York in early February. The title? Terf C**t.

The thing I find most … telling … about the Harry Potter books is the Ministry of Magic. Rowling is a Modern Briton and therefore assumes that every aspect of British life must have a government agency dedicated to controlling and regulating it. If the books had been written fifty or sixty years ago, there would be no ‘Ministry of Magic’, and indeed the plots might revolve around attempts to keep ‘magic’ un-government-regulated.

Seattle Times.

Three years ago, dozens of big companies formed a coalition and declared an ambitious goal: to lift 1 million Black workers into good-paying jobs over the next 10 years, by hiring or promoting them.
The resulting nonprofit, OneTen, was created amid a crescendo of calls to address racial injustice after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. It asked its members — including AT&T, Bank of America, Cisco, Delta Air Lines, Dow, General Motors, Nike and Walmart — to pledge toward hiring and promoting Black workers based on skills instead of college degrees.
Fast-forward, and the social climate has since changed drastically. Pushing these hiring programs has grown increasingly controversial, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling last year against race-based affirmative action policies at universities.

NBC News.

Starting Feb. 5, Denver will start limiting the number of days migrants can stay in shelters and sending those who exceed their stay out onto the streets

Read it.

The noise you hear is flapping and grunting.

NewsMax.

Billionaire Democrat donor George Soros is reportedly pouring cash into Texas to turn the red state blue.

The Texas Tribune in early January reported the Soros-backed PAC’s attention to “various regions” that would get new attention in the state.

In a new report from Fox News, the breadth of the contribution was revealed — showing Soros has contributed over $3 million to liberal groups over the last year to help Democrats gain some traction in the GOP stronghold.

I’m curious as to why George Soros is still alive.

NewsMax.

A majority of taxpayers feel they pay too much in taxes, with many saying that they receive a poor value in return, according to a new poll from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Two-thirds of U.S. taxpayers say they spend “too much” on federal income taxes, as tax season begins. About 7 in 10 say the same about local property taxes, while roughly 6 in 10 feel that way about state sales tax. Generally speaking, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to view taxes as unfair, to say they are paying too much in taxes, and to see taxes as a poor value.

The poll found that few U.S. adults have a high level of confidence that the institutions that ultimately use their tax dollars — whether the federal government or local school districts — spend those taxes in the best interest of “people like them.” But people tend to trust governing bodies closer to home with their tax dollars slightly more: 16% are extremely or very confident in their local school district, compared to 6% for the federal government.

Well, duh. “The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.”

Read it.

Strong ethnic identities are often portrayed as a holdover from an older, irrational, pre-modern era. This is probably why contemporary international conflicts are framed as civilizational or ideological struggles. On this reading, the conflict between, say, Russia and Ukraine cannot be seen for what it really is: a bloody stand-off between Ukrainian nationalism and Russian imperialism. On the contrary, it becomes just one localized instance among many of a global struggle of democracy against authoritarianism, another example being the conflict between Hamas and Israel.

Such moralizing language is not always ill-founded. However, the undeniable ethnic inflections in these conflicts—also evident in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan—testify to the fact that clashes of zero-sum nationalisms remain the primary cause of interstate wars. Every nation state that has collapsed since the 1990s (Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia) has disintegrated along ethnic lines.

However, the strength of ethnic identities is also indicated by conflicts within states. I will draw on two examples to illustrate how two contemporary civil wars in different parts of the world attest to the continued potency of ethnic identities in the 21st century, despite the fact that the prevailing liberal ethos of our time instructs us to transcend—or, put another way, to ignore—the evident importance of ethnic identity in collective human psychology.

I have heard many instances of a ‘proverb’ — it was presented to me as Arab, but really it applies to any Turd World country — that goes ‘Me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world.’ The amusing thing is that many Cloud People who have intensively internalized Identity Politics (‘You aren’t really an individual who ought to be treated as an individual, you’re merely an instance of whatever category I’ve decided to put you in and by God you’d better act like it!’) will turn right around, without blinking, and criticize Dirt People for the only evolution-certified manner of Identity Politics, i.e. ethnic identity.

The Foundry.

The House Homeland Security Committee on Sunday released two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

“His lawless behavior was exactly what the Framers gave us the impeachment power to remedy,” Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., said of Mayorkas.

The two impeachment articles “lay out a clear, compelling and irrefutable case for Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment,” said Green, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee.

Washington Free Beacon.

Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia was written by Kate Manne, a feminist philosophy expert and author of two other books about misogyny and “male privilege,” respectively. Prospectmagazine named her one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers” in 2019 alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Greta Thunberg. She self-identifies as a “small fat,” as opposed to a “large fat,” “superfat,” or “infinifat,” and other terms from the “fat studies” lexicon you didn’t know existed.

Manne could have written an interesting book challenging the conventional wisdom that being fat is bad for your health. Most scientists seem to agree that it is, but if the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything it’s that so-called scientific experts don’t really know what they’re talking about and are prone to make authoritative pronouncements for purely political reasons. Manne cites other studies that found the relationship between fatness and health to be more “complicated” than we think, and there’s probably some truth to that.

Unshrinking is not that book. It is simply another data point supporting the argument that academic elites have lost their damn minds, starting with the James Baldwin epigraph and trigger warning about “frank descriptions of fatphobia in its intersections with racism, misogyny, ableism, transphobia, etc.” Further reading reveals that fatphobia also intersects with classism, ageism, colorism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. It’s bigotry all the way down.

The reason people are averse to fat is because it is unhealthier than not-fat. Fat is not attractive except to people with a political agenda, many of whom are fat already and see no reason why they should be discriminated against (a common attitude in many fields: You don’t get to judge me according to your standards; you have to judge according to the standards I’m going to lay down for you). It’s basically aesthetic fascism.

Read it.

Ukraine is fighting not one but two hot wars against Russia. The first, a conventional, bloody land war along an 810-mile front line, has descended into stalemate. But the second — drone and missile strikes and sabotage raids deep into enemy territory — may prove to be a game-changing strategy for hitting Russia where it hurts.

Last week, two Ukrainian kamikaze drones scored a spectacular hit on an oil and gas refinery and an oil export terminal in Ust-Luga near St. Petersburg. At a range of 775 miles from Ukraine, the strike has severely dented Russian ability to produce and export naphtha, jet fuel and gasoil, and export liquefied natural gas (LNG). It might take weeks or months before the refinery returns to significant capacity. Effectively, those Ukrainian-made drones have proved more successful at enforcing their own violent brand of sanctions on Russia’s hydrocarbon trade than all the West’s failed efforts to cap prices and embargo Russian exports.

Read it.

Two years of fighting in Ukraine have destroyed the Russian tank force. This was unexpected, as was the Russian inability to replace their tank losses. Ukraine’s success against Russian tanks and armored vehicles revived predictions that tanks were obsolete. Tanks are still relevant, and the Russian losses were the result of poor employment of armored units as well as design features of Russian tanks that make them much more vulnerable than Western tanks like the American M1, German Leopard or Israeli Merkava.

Most Russian armored vehicles were lost while they were on the move, or stationery without adequate infantry support. The first Russian armored units going into Ukraine were told the population would be friendly or neutral. The reality was that the Ukrainians were well armed, hostile, and using tactics the Russians were unaware of and unprepared to deal with. As a result, thousands of Russian vehicles were destroyed in the first month, most of them armored, including some of the most modern Russian tanks plus some ancient models taken from storage facilities for obsolete tanks that might be useful in an emergency. The Ukraine War proved to be that emergency.