Read it.

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

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

Read it.

Good luck with that. Muslims have no hesitation killing other Muslims if there is some advantage to be gained.

Read it.

The national anthem at NFL games continues to cause division, including Sunday night’s Super Bowl, where the playing of the unofficial black national anthem wasn’t enough for a Democrat congressman.

Perhaps he ought to go to Wakanda or wherever it is actually a national anthem.

Read it.

Joe Biden’s campaign announced Sunday that he is now on TikTok, despite the fact that Biden signed a bill banning the platform on all devices assigned to federal employees a year ago.

That must have been the Other Biden.

Newsbusters.

The Biden administration and leftist billionaire George Soros are tied at the hip, working in cahoots to undermine Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

The U.S. Department of State entrusted Soros-funded Ökotárs Foundation and media watchdog Mérték Media Monitor to hand over $320,000 in taxpayer dollars to 15 media outlets critical of the pro-freedom Hungarian government, according to NGO and government documents. European Parliament elections take place from June 6 to June 9. Similarly, Hungary will hold local elections on June 9. Hungary-based political analyst András László and Rod Dreher spread the news in Jan. 27 posts on X.

László wrote that “left-wing NGOs announce which Hungarian media outlets will receive direct financing from the US Embassy. More than a DOZEN, a total of 15 media will receive US taxpayer money.” Echoing László, Dreher reacted to the news: “US taxpayers are funding anti government media in Hungary, a NATO ally.”

Think About it … Carefully

Read it.

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

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

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

Read it.

A new law takes effect in New York this weekend requiring businesses to inform customers about credit card surcharges that will cost them more money at the register.

Starting Sunday, businesses must post the total cost of goods or services with a credit card, including surcharges, before customers checkout. Proprietors can either display the total price inclusive of the credit card surcharge, or list a separate prices for paying with a credit card versus cash.

The new law also requires the surcharge passed on to customers using credit cards to the exact amount charged by credit card companies.

…

The new rule does not apply to debit cards.

Which also have a fee attached. One wonders why they were exempted–perhaps because government benefit programs are paid via ‘debit’ cards such as the famous EBT.

Read it.

The 2024 U.S. presidential election will likely pit former President Donald J. Trump against current President Joseph Biden in an epic rematch of the 2020 election. As most Americans know, in 2020, the Democrats and their allies on the far left reached deep into their bag of dirty tricks to put Biden in the White House. They will undoubtedly pull out all of the stops yet again in 2024. This time, however, far more people are watching and are aware of the grifts being run in our elections by the left.

With so many election integrity groups and concerned citizens watching this time around, what will the Democrats do to tilt the results in their favor?

They have quite a few arrows in their quiver, but virtually every trick relies on one thing: dirty voter rolls.

Power Line.

In Italy, illegal immigrants gang-raped a 13 year old girl. Was the crime significant because it shed light on the perils posed by illegal immigrants? Of course not: because it was “pounced on” by the dreaded “far right”.

Read it.

The NFL will continue trying to disunite America by featuring two separate “anthems” to begin the Super Bowl. Our country has only one national anthem, which speaks for all its citizens. To suggest otherwise is anathema.

Read it.

An elementary school teacher who questioned a California school’s spending $250,000 on a teacher training program called “Woke Kindergarten” was placed on leave Thursday by his school district, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Glassbrook Elementary School used $250,000 in federal funds for underperforming schools to pay for training for teachers on how to be “anti-racist” and “disrupt whiteness” in the classroom. Now, the school district, Hayward Unified School District, has put teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley on leave for “allegations of unprofessional conduct” after he questioned the program, according to the Chronicle.

Read it.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s first order of business was taking the Houthis off the list of foreign terrorist organizations. That 2021 decision helped lead to the Red Sea crisis today.

Only four days after being confirmed, the State Department announced that “undertaking an expeditious review”, Blinken had decided that it should be legal to fund the Islamic terror group.

The State Department claimed that it was lifting the terror ban on the Houthis, despite “their reprehensible conduct, including attacks against civilians and the kidnapping of American citizens” because of “the humanitarian consequences” that would take place in Yemen.

Read it.

Watch it.

Chris Williamson does a podcast called Modern Wisdom in which he interviews the most interesting people he can find about modern social relations, focusing on how men and women deal with each other. I’ve liked every one of them I’ve seen.

This particular episode includes Mary Harrington, about whom I knew nothing and whose work I intend to investigate.

Highly recommended.

Wikipedia.

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

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

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

Newsbusters.

It was exactly 25 years ago tomorrow, February 12, 1999, the U.S. Senate voted to acquit President Bill Clinton at his impeachment trial. Two months earlier, the House had approved two articles of impeachment: one charging that Clinton had “willfully provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony” to a federal grand jury; the other said he had “willfully corrupted and manipulated the judicial process of the United States for his personal gain and exoneration, impeding the administration of justice.”

In spite of his acquittal, Clinton eventually admitted that he had made false statements under oath, as part of a plea arrangement to avoid criminal indictment. So at least that element of the case against him is beyond dispute.

But unlike the two subsequent Trump impeachments, which the media had championed since before the Republican President had even taken office, journalists sneered that the trial of William Jefferson Clinton was a pointless waste of the Senate’s valuable time.

The Other McCain.

Even though most of the media continue trying to defend Biden, the past three days of coverage — even on CNN (I watch, so you don’t have to) — has been more negative toward Biden than at any time in the past three years. Many of these “Democratic operatives with bylines” have now realized that Biden’s cognitive decline likely makes his reelection impossible. No matter what else happens, no matter what Trump does, Biden can’t win because his brain’s gone soft and everybody can see it now. Sure, he’ll get the 40% or so of voters who would vote for a turnip if the turnip had a (D) beside it on the ballot, but there’s no way he gets to a majority on that basis. Democrats can’t even steal enough votes to overcome the problem of trying to reelect President Dimished Faculties.

If one thinks of a society as occupying a three-dimensional bell curve (which looks like an actual bell, not the two-dimensional slice to which the term ‘bell curve’ is ordinarily applied), one can divide it into two parts: That which exists within One Standard Deviation from the center axis (approximately 68% of its volume) and everything else, the other (approximately) 32%. I call these apportionments Core and Fringe, and apply  them to the people who occupy those parts of society that are either central to its existence or peripheral to that existence.

The distinction between Core and Fringe may be discerned by asking a simple question: If all of the people that share a certain characteristic were to disappear overnight, would society grind to a halt? or would it keep chugging on, perhaps after a bobble or two or at a reduced level? If that removal means society would halt, then such people are Core; if not, then they are Fringe.

Truck drivers are Core; homeless people are Fringe. Engineers are Core; artists and other ‘creatives’ are Fringe. Doctors, lawyers, and accountants are Core; bikers, convicts, and yoga instructors are Fringe. Carpenters, electricians, and plumbers are Core; sculptors, musicians, and poets are Fringe. Tech writers are Core; literary novelists are Fringe.

You get the picture.

This is a useful frame for viewing the modern world. About half of government employees are Core; the rest, including politicians, are Fringe. The higher one climbs in the academic prestige rankings, the more an institution trains Fringe and the less it trains Core–in fact, we have academic institutions who focus solely on training Core, like MIT and CalTech.

Try it yourself.

The Atlantic, medium of the Crust.

It can seem, these days, like we are meant to be constantly acquiring things while also constantly getting rid of them. Mass consumption is everywhere—endless online shopping; always a new iPhone or device—as is the reactionary minimalist ethos that demands that we declutter our lives. But the relationships we have with our things tend to be more complicated than either of those extremes allow. Objects are more than just the sum of their parts. I would never give up my copies of my grandmother’s cookbooks. I’m also not going to quit my search for the perfect pair of jeans. I remember a great outfit, and what I did in it, for a long time.

The writer Katy Kelleher is seemingly no different. In her debut book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, she seeks to understand both her collector’s impulse and her longing “for more, always more, even when I know I already have enough.” A magpie’s nest of research and anecdotes about the objects that attract her, the book examines the tension she feels between wanting the things she wants—clothes, cosmetics, home goods—and acknowledging the murkier story of how some of those items were made and marketed. “I’ve never found an object,” she writes, “that was untouched by the depravity of human greed or unblemished by the chemical undoings of time.”

Cloud People worry about the hidden depths of ordinary daily activities. Dirt People just get on with it.

OffGuardian.

And now, from a deep underground military base on the other side of the flat Earth, it’s time for the 7th Annual Fake News Awards!

How did the disinformation specialists of the mockingbird media lie to the public this year? What rich, creamery nothingburgers did they use to whip the public into hysteria over matters of no consequence whatsoever? And what real scandals of earthshaking importance did they ignore? And who will walk away with the most coveted Dino of them all: the Fake News Story of the Year?

Find out in this face-meltingly, apocalyptically horrifying extravaganza of media mendacity known as the Fake News Awards!

Read it.

A young woman I know broke it off with a young man after three dates but declared that it was a pretty successful relationship anyway. “He showed me a couple of great Amazon Prime series,” she told me. “And he turned me on to Derry Girls.”

Derry Girls, for the record, is a British comedy set in Northern Ireland in the 1990s and it’s hilarious. But there are more than 600 scripted television series currently on the constellation of streaming services competing for your credit card number, so if you don’t go on a dedicated search for that specific title, you’ll probably miss it. And that’s one reason there’s a new category of first-date small talk: What are you watching? is the new What’s your sign?

Watching TV has never been so baffling. You don’t just walk in the house and flop down in front of the TV and start flipping around anymore. Watching television in 2024 requires what psychologists and self-help gurus call intentionality. You have to know what you’re looking for and exactly where to find it, which means the entire process usually starts with a Google search. We’re all familiar with today’s Television Catechism. It goes: What was that show we wanted to see, again? Followed by: Which one of the thingy’s is it on? And ends in an exasperated: Do we even get that one?

Read it.

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

This is why I don’t fear AI.

New York Times.

Young people tend to lean more liberal on a range of issues pertaining to relationship norms. But when it comes to dating, the idea that men should pay still prevails in heterosexual courtship.

I didn’t realize that ‘dating’ was even a thing any more.

Wall Street Journal.

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

Read it.

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

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

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

A very handy term.

Read it.

Reporters at The Guardian never tire of demonizing fossil fuels. In its latest salvo, the newspaper –  funded in part by the green-billionaire Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – published a January 25 hit piece on the Propane Education and Research Council. PERC, funded by the U.S. propane industry, is a nonprofit that provides propane safety and training programs and invests in research and development of new propane-powered technologies. PERC, its critics charge, is “greenwashing” by downplaying “the full climate impacts of propane” and marketing it as “clean” energy. The Guardian article claims that PERC “has invested millions in a multiyear strategy to rebrand propane from what it’s called a ‘dirty fossil fuel’ to a so-called clean energy source.”

Read it.

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

Read it.

When a Maghrebi “youth” arrives on the platform at the Barcelona Metro, what’s his preferred action? Why, to clock a young girl, of course! Hit her as hard as he can, and then run like hell…

It goes without saying that the unfortunate culture-enriching perp is thought to be mentally ill.

John Derbyshire.

A sensible U.S. foreign policy would have been to leave NATO the week after the Warsaw Pact was dissolved in February 1991. The Europeans, who far exceeded Russia in population and wealth, and included two—count ’em, two—nuclear powers could then have handled the Eastern Question as they saw fit.

We, meanwhile, could have developed friendly, helpful relations with Russia as they got back on their feet after the Soviet fiasco.

They would be just another big, distant nation we could have commercial relations with, like India or Brazil.

Why didn’t we take that path? Because the architects of our foreign policy are, as David Goldman tells us, terminally stupid.

Exactly right.

Read it.

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

Something similar can be said about Big Brother.

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

Power Line.

The Associated Press refers to GOP fears of “unauthorized migrants” voting in American elections. As readers should understand, “unauthorized” is code for “illegal,” and the latest replacement for “undocumented,” which needs some explanation. At some point, all illegals must use fake or stolen documents, so “false-documented” illegals is the more accurate designation.

“Migrants” are people who come and go, working for a time then returning to place of origin. The millions now being transported into the United States are settlers, with a difference. The Biden Junta is bringing them in with no criminal background checks, vaccination records, English language ability or job skills. In other words, with none of the measures required of legal immigrants.

The Indepeendent (UK).

For 18 months, a teenager allegedly operated a “swatting” service out of his father’s California home where criminals could call in a hoax bomb threat or mass shooting almost as easily as ordering a burger on UberEats.

Alan Winston Filion, 17, is suspected of targeting hundreds of high schools, mosques, historically black churches, US Senators and even the Supreme Court with swatting attacks that placed thousands of people in the crosshairs of heavily-armed police response teams.

Prosecutors say the 6ft 3in teenager advertised his services under the pseudonym Torswats on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, charging as little as $40 to get someone’s gas shut off, $50 for a “major police response” and $75 for a “bomb threat/mass shooting threat”.

Mr Filion would then post chilling audio of the 911 calls on Telegram as a proof of purchase, according to court documents.

Among the hundreds of “swats” that Torswats allegedly claimed credit for were multiple hoax callouts at the home of Patrick S. Tomlinson, a Milwaukee-based science fiction author who says he has been swatted dozens of times in the past four years as part of a targeted harassmentcampaign by a group of “sociopathic” stalkers.

“You can’t fathom the amount of clinical obsession that grips these people,” Mr Tomlinson told The Independent this week. “Trying to destroy my world is their full time lives.”

Norm MacDonald was apparently a Canadian comedian.

Read it.

Nazism is a political meme which has been securely packaged up and filed under ‘Far Right: Conservative’, and is wheeled out whenever the left wants to shut down debate or dialogue or sling the ‘racist’ epithet against their opponents.

But whilst conservatives may want to preserve cultural integrity and Judeo-Christianity in particular, they have not generally indulged in mass murder and slavery as have the Left.

This ‘right-wing’ filing is wrong, but has caused mayhem for the last 70 years. It is a superlative opportunity for projection and, as conservatives nearly always fall for it, too, it has become a major suppressor of conservative cultural policy.

Axios.

Day 2 of the White House’s damage-control plan defending President Biden’s fitness for office called for a coordinated attack on special counsel Robert Hur.

Why it matters: Biden’s team scrambled to counter Hur’s report that called the president an “elderly man with a poor memory” — and aides rushed to defend Biden’s performance at a late-night press conference that left even some Democrats thinking Hur had a point.

Read it.

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

Read it.

And there you have it….California passed a law that threatens the professional license of any medical professional who shares their professional opinion or any information that contradicts a “contemporary scientific consensus”. It is considered “false” because it contradicts the current consensus. And in this case about a topic that has a lot of controversy and a broad range of opinion.

Read it.

Swiss police killed a 32-year-old Iranian asylum seeker who boarded a train armed with an axe and a knife and held 15 hostages for four hours while traveling between Baulmes and Yverdon-les-Bains in the western region of the country.

Read it.

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

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

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

Steve Sailer.

The first time the New York Times ever mentioned the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in its history going back to 1851 was August 21, 2014, twelve days after Michael Brown’s death at Ferguson, MO. Since then, it has run 5,915 more articles with the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”

As you can see, there were two eras in which Black Lives Matter was ascendant: 2015-2016 (the Ferguson Effect), after which Soros and other smart money funders let it slowly fizzle, followed by the utter insanity of 2020-21 (the Floyd Effect), after which, I’m guessing, the Biden White House got the word through to the NYT than it was no longer in the Democratic Party’s electoral best interests to continue harping on BLM.

…

For reasons utterly baffling to the New York Times, this barrage of concern for black lives led to a big boost in black deaths in BLM Era I and then a huge boost in black deaths in BLM Era II. It’s almost as if the cops got the message that the Establishment didn’t want them to hassle as many black drivers for driving badly, so they didn’t. In turn, blacks drove worse, died more in car crashes, and carried more illegal handguns when they went out, which led to more blacks shooting more blacks.

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

The ascent of AI has naturally lent itself to the rise of AI adult content, which people have used to get their jollies off by employing the hot new technology to craft women in various states of undress. Obviously, this has come with some serious ethical issues, but it isn’t all that surprising, as new technology tends to cut its teeth in NSFW content before becoming mainstream.

This has made a recent trend where people appear to be doing the opposite and use AI to make real women more clothed peculiar, and this new #DignifAI trend has sparked intense debate on social media.

Apparently putting virtual clothes on half-naked women is mysoginist. Who knew?

Marginal Revolution.

Why does schooling in much of the developing world not result in much in the way of increased skills? Maybe because education bureaucrats in these counties want obedient citizens more than literate, numerate, informed citizens.

Read it,

Akron, Ohio’s first Pakistani Muslim mayor is convinced that America is racist.

Despite winning a challenging mayoral election by 97% in which he was the only candidate on the ballot after the Republican candidate was disqualified, Shammas Malik has never stopped talking about how racism is everywhere in the country and the city that elected him.

“He’s going to be the face of equity and diversity,” a Malik ally claimed.

Since when is ‘Muslim’ a race?

Since when is ‘Pakistani’ a race?

Time to leave.

Read it.

In a Congressional hearing last spring, Gil Cisneros, then-Under Secretary for Military Readiness, announced that the Pentagon was closing its newly formed Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion within its K-12 school system and reassigning its controversial DEI chief after a ten-month internal investigation.

The Pentagon’s climb-down was a big win for OpenTheBooks.com. We had worked alongside whistleblowers, journalists, other investigative non-profits, and ranking members of Congress to expose alleged conflicts of interest, violations of military ethics policies, and radical ideologies being forced on the kids of servicemen and servicewomen.

Today, we are announcing Cisneros was actually faking. The radical curriculum was not dismantled. Instead, it was stealthily embedded into the lesson plans and classrooms throughout the entire school system.

Read it.

When I visit foreign countries, I often go into bookstores. They provide a window into how cultures think. Thumbing through high-school history books in Japan, I noticed that many were divided into two sections: one dedicated to Japanese history, and the other resembling a Western history textbook, including material on ancient Greece, the medieval feudal system, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so on. They covered the same core Western Civilization topics that are the focus in classical schools in the US.

It seems strange that citizens of many non-Western countries recognize a value in Western civilization that many in the West themselves cannot or will not see. An OECD survey of over 20 of the most advanced countries in the world found that Japan scored highest of all in “proficiency in literacy and numeracy among adults.” But the current proliferation of classical schools across America indicates that there are many other Westerners who do recognize the value of Western culture and want to ensure that it is passed on to future generations.

It is also odd that the classical education movement is sometimes described as elitist. In point of fact, it is driven by millions of everyday working parents, homeschool mothers, and local community leaders. Critical theory is the opposite: a product of ideologues who shelter in elite universities but claim to represent the oppressed masses. Classical schools have been expanding rapidly due to demand from millions of families; critical theory is pushed on millions of families despite resistance, as illustrated at countless contentious school-board meetings publicized on YouTube. Critical theory requires the uncritical consumption of ideological dogma; classical education asks us to accept the value of a dialogue of ideas that has transpired in the West over millennia, a value recognized in foreign countries like Japan.