Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

These days, most people have a pretty good idea of what tariffs are. They’re an additional tax on goods made in another country, traditionally put into place to protect a homegrown industry. Application of tariffs has been one of the tactics used by the president of the United States in ongoing trade negotiations with China and the European Union.

This story is not about those tariffs. It’s the story of how one company has dealt with tariffs for decades, and the implications that has for stuff you end up buying at the store.

Tariffs are an excellent example of how micromanaging economic activity is the thin edge of the wedge toward a nation in which the government sticks its nose into every orifice of your body.

Tooze and Peter Bragdon, executive vice president and chief administrative officer, are basically the tariff guys at Columbia Sportswear. They told Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal that Columbia has been doing something they call “tariff engineering” for decades — they design apparel and products in accordance with American tariff policy.

For example, certain women’s garments with “pockets below the waist” get lower duty rates than those without. Because of that, a number of the women’s shirts Columbia Sportswear makes are intentionally designed with tiny pockets near the waistline, which lowers the cost of importing them. One of the company’s shorthands for “pockets below the waist” is “nurse’s pocket.”

An example of one of Columbia’s most popular women’s garments with pockets below the waist is a short sleeve shirt called the PFG Tamiami, which retails on the company’s site for $40 for a standard size, $45 if it’s a plus size.

According to Peter Bragdon, this pocket “is a prime example of how the real designers of apparel and footwear in this country live on Capitol Hill.”

Indeed it is.

Read it.

Since 5G began its rollout in 2018 or 2019, fifth-generation wireless networks have spread across the globe to cover hundreds of millions of users. But while it offers lower latency than precursor networks, 5G also requires more base stations. To avoid installing unsightly equipment on more and more shared spaces, Japanese companies are developing transparent glass antennas that allow windows to serve as base stations that can be shared by several carriers.

Because 5G networks include spectrum comprising higher frequencies than 4G, base stations for 5G networks serve a smaller coverage footprint. Which means more base stations are needed compared to 4G. Due to a lack of installation spots and the high cost of rolling out 5G networks, carriers in Japan have been sharing mobile infrastructure.

Last month the Tokyo-based communications company JTower announced the deployment of the new glass antenna, created in part by glassmaker AGC (one of the world’s largest) and the mobile carrier NTT Docomo. The first was installed on a window in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district.

Read it.

Up until the 1960s, the traditional nuclear family—one man, one woman, and at least one child—was seen as the societal ideal.

But in the 1960s, the American family came under withering attack and has never been the same since—resulting in myriad societal problems that seem to spiral increasingly downward with each passing year.

The Great Society “reforms” devastated the African American family, as men no longer had to be responsible for the children they fathered as long as the government was there to subsidize their promiscuity.

Check the history of ‘baby mama’ and ‘baby daddy’ if you don’t believe it.

Coupled with legalized abortion, men could simply walk away from a woman they impregnated because the “problem” of a child could just be disposed of by going to the local Planned Parenthood office.

And women decided that they didn’t need to be picky any more regarding the guys they had sex with. Anything goes!

No-fault divorce laws were proposed, and then passed, under the pretense of making divorce more amicable and less traumatic. Instead, divorce rates skyrocketed, devastating generations of children who saw their worlds torn apart when mom and dad decided they did not want to remain together anymore.

In 70% of cases, it was mom who didn’t want to stay with dad any more. This is why the country is crowded with single mothers who are looking for stepdads and not finding them.

As Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies states, “Prior to the late 1960s, Americans were more likely to look at marriage and family through the prisms of duty, obligation, and sacrifice. … But the [1960s] psychological revolution’s focus on individual fulfillment and personal growth changed all that. Increasingly, marriage was seen as a vehicle for a self-oriented ethic of romance, intimacy, and fulfillment.”

And this is still the case today. Women are raised to be Disney Princesses: Find your Prince and live happily ever after, just the two of you.

ZMan surveys the inner space.

A change that has happened in the culture of the West that has gone largely unnoticed is the concern for psychological states. A generation ago, what mattered in most cases was the material state of things. Governments cared about the economy in terms of measurables like inflation and GDP. Now they care about how “marginalized groups” are feeling about their social status. Large employers now worry about employee wellness, rather than financial benefits.

This is a shift from the objective to the subjective. Inflation is a thing you can measure, even if there are disputes about how the measures are done. Prices are either rising, falling, or remaining the same. The impact of inflation on the psychological state of consumer is another matter. There is no way to objectively describe such a thing, much less produce a metric for it. The only thing to go on are the opinions of people who claim to be experts in these sorts of soft areas.

You see the same shift in the workplace. In the prior century, managers focused on objective measures like productivity and the cost of labor. The manager in charge of benefits focused on driving down the costs of those benefits, while increasing the value to the employee. Now the point of a benefits plan is to increase employee wellness, which cannot be measured, only assessed. More importantly, there is no way to connect employer behavior to the result.

Read it.

A key House committee has begun an investigation into Census Bureau overcounts and undercounts that favor Democrats in awarding congressional apportionment and Electoral College votes.

House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., wrote Census Bureau Director Robert Santos on Wednesday to inquire about its communications about the overcounts and undercounts of state populations with the Biden-Harris administration and its Commerce Department, which includes the bureau.

After the 2020 census, the Census Bureau’s 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey, or PES, released the following year identified significant errors in the counts.

Such miscounts did not occur in the 2010 census, Comer noted in his letter to Santos.

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At last month’s Democratic National Convention, men lined up to have themselves sterilized outside the conference center. You probably heard. So-called “reproductive rights” were one of the key issues of the Convention, which also had a giant inflatable IUD stationed close to the entrance, just in case attendees were in any doubt.

I fully support any movement to encourage Democrat men to get vasectomies and will gladly contribute monetarily to any such program.

Furthermore, I will equally strongly support a similar program to persuade Democrat women to get their tubes tied.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Apparently the Demcorat Party is no longer the party of the working class.

Newsbusters.

If Democrats didn’t believe they’d put former President Donald Trump in an assassin’s crosshairs the first time, they have no excuse for pleading innocent now.

Ryan Routh, the suspect who hid in the bushes at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club waiting for his shot at the former president — AK-47-style rifle at the ready, serial number filed off — wasn’t some 20-year-old without a political paper trail, like the first would-be assassin, Thomas Crooks.

Routh, 58 and now in custody, “frequently posted about politics” on X and other social media, had a Biden-Harris sticker on his truck, “and exclusively donated to Democratic candidates and causes dating back to 2019,” the New York Post reports.

The Foundry.

By a miracle, really a series of miracles, former President Donald Trump has survived two assassination attempts in little more than two months.

The implications of Trump being murdered are almost too disturbing to contemplate. The fact that a man running for president continues to be targeted like this is certainly worth a “national conversation.”

Yet, the media is treating the story of the second assassination attempt—already fading from the back pages of national newspapers days after it happened Sunday—as if it’s no big deal.

When the media can be bothered to mention it at all, they switch to rabidly blaming the victim. In this case, the man they hate so much: Trump.

What we should take away from the treatment of this story is more than just the obvious fact that the news media is biased, although that’s almost cartoonishly the case right now.

It’s clear that the media thinks that another news cycle about a Trump assassination this close to the Nov. 5 election has to be downplayed. It’s double bad that the would-be assassin Sunday has a record of donating to Democrats and copied the Biden-Harris campaign message about Trump being a threat to “democracy.”

Read it.

… which is that for the most part terrorists rely on the creations of Western technology.

9/11 was an excellent example of that. In a jijitsu-like move, the terrorists turned a modern Western invention – jet planes – against one of the societies that had created and maintained that invention. The move was utterly unexpected by the US government – although imaginative writers such as Tom Clancy had come close to envisioning it.

And if Iran gets a nuclear weapon capacity – and it seems well on its way – it won’t be because Iranian scientists came up with the idea and launched a Manhattan Project.

Read it.

In science fiction movies like Frankenstein and Re-Animator, human bodies are revived, existing in a strange state between life and death. While this may seem like pure fantasy, a recent study suggests that a “third state” of existence might actually be present in modern biology.

According to the researchers, this third state occurs when the cells of a dead organism continue to function after its death, sometimes gaining new capabilities they never had while the organism was alive.

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Westinghouse Electric Company has reached a significant milestone in the development of the eVinci nuclear microreactor.

The powerhouse has successfully completed the Front-End Engineering and Experimenting Design (FEEED) phase, according to a press release by the U.S.-based firm.

“Westinghouse is the first reactor developer to reach this milestone in support of siting its test reactor at NRIC’s Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) test bed at Idaho National Laboratory (INL),” read the release published on Monday

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Special fat cells called brown adipocytes help regulate body temperature by converting calorie-rich nutrients into heat. This process helps prevent excess weight gain and metabolic disorders.

An international team of researchers led by Professor Alexander Bartelt from the Institute for Cardiovascular Prevention (IPEK) has deciphered a new mechanism that increases respiration and metabolic activity of brown fat cells. The researchers hope that this discovery will lead to novel approaches utilizing brown fat against metabolic diseases. Their results were recently published in The EMBO Journal.

Read it.

Police in Nassau County, New York are investigating a possible security breach after a reported discovery of explosives near the site of former President Donald Trump’s rally on Long Island, just hours before his scheduled speech Wednesday evening.

Read it.

Do you plan to vote this November? You’re not alone. Experts say somewhere between 1.5 million and 2.7 million illegal immigrants are likely to cast a ballot in the 2024 elections, affecting races from dogcatcher to president of the United States.

The historic flood of illegal immigrants during the Biden-Harris administration has also padded voter rolls, thanks to controversial federal legislation from the Clinton administration. If illegal immigrants and other noncitizens vote in the same proportion as in previous U.S. elections, the number will range anywhere from 1.5 million to nearly 3 million votes.

“A 2014 academic journal found that 6.4% of noncitizens voted in 2008,” Kerri Toloczko, executive director of Election Integrity Network and senior adviser to the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, told The Washington Stand. “There are about 24 million noncitizens in the U.S. right now. If they voted only at the same rate of 6.4% this year as they did in 2008, they would account for 1.5 million votes.”

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This week U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released its latest statistics showing at least 530,000 migrants flew into the U.S. and were paroled into the country as part of the Biden administration’s controversial mass parole program for those migrating from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela (the CHNV program). The program essentially expedites the transfer of migrants from these countries with minimal vetting under refugee laws and allows them to stay in the US for at least two years with a work visa.

The CBP also notes that at least 800,000 more migrants have applied for the program at US ports of entry, meaning they are likely already in the country. The numbers are not counted as illegal border crossings. The CBP has warned that once the two-year work period ends they do not have the manpower to track down those migrants that refuse to leave voluntarily.

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DOE and its minions are running out of stuff to regulate under existing energy efficiency statutes within EPCA. A move to carbon efficiency regulation vastly expands their regulatory empire. The IRA is providing obscene amounts of taxpayer funding to force-feed this anti-consumer agenda.

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To remake America, progressives have centered on a strategy of rewriting history, distorting current events, changing language, and using false allegations of disinformation, malinformation (facts progressives believe are presented out of context), and racism to censor and suppress centrists and conservatives.

By undermining confidence in American values, progressives have considerably advanced their efforts. They have controlled the White House and at least one house of Congress for 12 of the last 16 years, and the Supreme Court for nearly all of the last 70 years. Almost all major media outlets and reporters are in lockstep with progressive goals, lies, and omissions. Most report only about events and views that benefit the progressive agenda, and mischaracterize or suppress news, information, and opinions that may impede it. Progressives also control most federal agencies, many state agencies, leading universities, school boards, professional organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association, most leading think tanks, and many corporate boards.

As the COVID pandemic raged, progressives spoke hopefully of a new world order in which experts would tell us how to live. Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, along with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, often refer to this chaos as the “rules-based international order.” They and other progressives, including Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, see the U.S. as just one among many countries. That is why they oppose immigration controls, support global compacts, subordinate the United States to the United Nations, and believe the U.S. can use economic or military power only when supported by an international coalition.

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I employed an exercise with students in high school to compare the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1787) and the American Declaration of Independence (1776). Side by side, it is easy to see the differences. The American Declaration includes references to a transcendent being as the source of freedoms. The French Declaration repeats the phrase “the will of the people” fifteen times. Even in revolt against tyranny, the origin of authority matters.

The backdrop of “the people’s will” is a fitting entry into Jacob Wolf’s review of The Ideology of Democratism by Emily Finley. Wolf records Finley’s words that democracy is “perhaps the dominant political belief system in modern Western society.” Finley expands the impact of the process of “democracy” into a product, “the ideology of democratism.” Wolf contends, “Democracy has become a secular religion, complete with its own dogmas, practices, clerics, and eschatology.”

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And the hits just keep on coming….

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About two-thirds of Americans believe they pay too much in taxes, and only about 25% believe they get good value in return for their money. Add in the maddening complexity of our tax code and the plethora of (often insane) advice flying around, and it’s easy to see why people put so much effort into avoiding as much tax as they can.

Of course it can be beneficial to reduce the amount of tax that you have to pay every year. If you have the flexibility and a portable income stream that you can take with you, moving to a tax-advantaged area can be an effective way to accomplish that—but it’s not as simple as googling states with no income tax and hopping on Zillow. You need to consider the overall tax burden, and then get creative.

If ten percent is good enough for Jesus, it ought to be enough for Uncle Sam.

Of course, the actual answer to this question is ‘Nowhere in the United States’.

Go Where You’re Treated Best.

Read it.

Best to lean Greek and read it in the original, but hey, whatever works.

[Insert plug for the value of memorizing poetry here.]

The Illiad and the Odyssey were to Greek culture what the Bible is to ours–everybody used (and recognized) a lot of phrases from them and used those phrases in daily life.

How small of all that human hearts endure
The part that laws or kings can cause or cure;
Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,
Our own felicity we make or find.

The Foundry.

Todd McMurtry was a lawyer, but he had never practiced defamation law before legacy media outlets demonized 16-year-old Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann for the crime of “smirking” while wearing a Make America Great Again hat. Now, McMurtry has published a book about defamation law—a book he recommends as a kind of “car insurance” for cancel culture.

“I think that you should treat it like buying car insurance,” McMurtry tells “The Daily Signal Podcast” of his new book, “Dismissed: How Media Agendas and Judicial Bias Conspire to Undermine Justice.” He warns that most Americans with a traditional values approach to life should expect to face attempts to “cancel” them.

He notes that smear campaigns happen to “everybody,” from high school students to college athletes to professionals to housewives. “I’ve dealt with dozens and dozens of these people, and it happens all the time.”

Read it.

Yesterday, we caught CNN’s Kasie Hunt claiming that “we may never know” the motive of the suspect in the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

Today, it was MSNBC’s turn. On Morning Joe, Jonathan Lemire joined the chorus of liberal media members professing ignorance as to Routh’s motives.

The motive is obvious, but not something that the Narrative Media can bring themselves to say.

Yet another instance of the ‘Muslims Murder Jews, Motive Unclear’ syndrome that all Narrative Media embrace.

UPDATE Sen. Paul to Newsmax: Leftist Media Must Stop Inciting Violence on Trump

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Pakistani seeking to kill Jews in New York on the anniversary of last year’s Hamas attack in Israel, everyone is loudly proclaiming: “ISIS is back.”

…

For someone or something to “be back,” it has to have left in the first place. This return can be surprising or expected, but in the end it is of note. With respect to the ISIS terrorist group, it has not “resurged” because it never went away in the first place.

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The reason why people want to move from THERE to HERE is because THERE sucks, and the primary reason that THERE sucks is because of the people who now want to move HERE.

From California to Haiti to the Middle East, this is a universal truth.

Avoid traveling to countries from which people want to move HERE from THERE. You’ll be glad you did.

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After three decades of wrecking Afghanistan, the Taliban finally found someone to blame for the miserable state of their Islamic emirate. In February, a bunch of bearded men gathered at one of the country’s remaining universities for the Taliban’s first International Climate Change Conference (no women or infidels allowed) under Mullah Abdul Kabir to cope with the crisis.

According to the Taliban and its experts, there wasn’t enough water or there was too much flooding, the land is bad, and it’s the fault of someone else. Probably America.

“Just like they invaded our country, they’ve invaded our climate,” Lutfullah Khairkhwa, the Taliban’s deputy higher education minister, who has a degree in the Koran, claimed.

Khairkhwa then demanded that rich countries give the Taliban money in compensation for all the ‘climate change’ they inflicted on them. And that is what everything really comes down to.

Read it.

That the NHS at the time of writing has a waiting list for treatment of over 7 million patients is not a symptom of a failing organisation. It is actually an indicator that the organisation has failed. Any moves to address this public disaster without major change in how British people access health care are not so much as fruitless as re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as it sinks, as it is continuing to do so to barnacle-encrusted furniture years after the doomed ocean liner has settled on the floor of the Atlantic.

Progressives around the world bitch and moan about the costs of U.S. health care, but ‘free’ healthcare that you can’t get isn’t an improvement.

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Spain’s socialist government has unveiled radical plans to regulate the press to combat so-called ‘disinformation.’ Critics have branded the move as “censorship” and an attempt by prime minister Pedro Sánchez to distract attention from an ongoing scandal involving his wife.

The Democratic Action Plan will create a register of media outlets operating in Spain, something Sánchez claimed was necessary because democracy is “being besieged” by “campaigns of disinformation and hoaxes.”

El Debate says the registry will allow the government to dictate who media outlets’ shareholders can be, their sources of financing, and how much government institutions will spend on advertising with them. Any media outlet not on the register will likely be branded “pseudo-media,” a term used by the socialist government and its supporters to discredit any new outlets that deviate from the establishment line.

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For the second time in a week, a mysterious explosion occurred in the German city of Cologne. The blast happened on Wednesday, September 18th, in the early morning in the city centre, on Ehrenstrasse, a street filled with shops and apartments, police said.

…

The crimes are thought to have been carried out by the so-called “Mocro mafia” whose members are significantly more prone to violence than the crime groups and Arabic clans in Germany. The term “Mocro mafia” was adopted by the media in both the Netherlands and Germany for several organised crime groups that originally arose from the Dutch Moroccan community in the 1990s.

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Leaders of the Patriots for Europe (PfE) EU Parliamentary group convened for an ad hoc press conference on the sidelines of the Strasbourg plenary on Tuesday, September 17th, to address the recent developments in Matteo Salvini’s legal case in Italy after Sicilian prosecutors asked for a six-year prison term for the deputy prime minister for preventing an NGO ship from disembarking illegal migrants in 2019.

The group strongly and unilaterally condemned what they regarded as a politically motivated weaponization of the law and the persecution of a democratically elected official for fulfilling his duty toward his nation and all of Europe.

“The world has turned upside down. Those who defend the European borders are harassed and threatened,” MEP Kinga Gál, the First VP of the group said, drawing parallels with Hungary’s ongoing migration row after the country was slapped with an unprecedented fine just for requiring asylum seekers to register their claims before entering the country.

UnHerd.

Yes, Rome itself “fell” to barbarian invaders in the 5th century, but that, as every Orthodox Christian knows even if no-one else does, was not the end of the Roman Empire, which by then already had a new capital in Constantinople. There was a Roman Emperor reigning until that city fell to the Ottomans in 1453, which was when the Empire technically ended. But that’s not really what I’m talking about.

What I mean is that today’s “West” is really just Rome under another name. Not just because the Western Christian Church was and is quartered in the old Imperial city, and behaved like an imperial power itself for much of the Middle Ages. Not just because, for that reason, “the West” was in many ways ruled from Rome until the modern period. It’s something bigger than that, and yet also more nebulous. It’s the fact that, despite the Christian or pseudo-Christian, veneer, Western culture still really has many of the same values as those of Rome.

True, we don’t take slaves anymore, or throw people to lions, or crucify them, and all that is due to the legacy of the most famous man ever to be crucified. But we’re still, in some ways, Roman. We still valorise power and straight lines. We still have Emperors, even if we call them Presidents, and we still have Empires, even if we pretend we don’t. We still build vast amphitheatres for entertainment, even if the entertainment is an AC/DC concert or a Premier League match instead of a lions-vs-slaves face off. We still use Corinthian columns to demonstrate our social status. And we still make endless films and write endless books about the Romans — rather than, say, the Greeks or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or the Ottomans — because, deep down, we think we are their heirs.

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In an extraordinary development in the Middle East conflict, thousands of Hezbollah members have been injured and at least three people were killed after pagers that the militants used exploded simultaneously today. While exactly how this occurred remains unclear, it could very well be a monumental cyber attack that could have widespread implications far beyond the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Regardless, it should be a wake-up call.

While no one has so far taken responsibility, Hezbollah has blamed Israel for the attack. A source from the group said that they expect the attack may have been launched in response to an alleged assassination attempt by the Lebanese militant group on a former senior Israeli security official. The existence of that plot was only revealed today by Israel’s Shin Bet security agency.

UPDATE: The Hezbollah pager explosions are a textbook Israeli attack

UPDATE: What Experts Make of Israel’s ‘Ingenious’ Hezbollah Pager Attack  Jews a smart. Who doesn’t know this?

Read it.

Sometimes the zeitgeist of a tumultuous era is concentrated in a single place. At the opening of this school year, Columbia University is managing to combine the blights of Chinese Communist influence, anti-Semitism, incompetent leadership, and intellectual disintegration by the first day of class. Columbia combines the worst aspects of higher education at one time and place. This whirlwind of incompetence and foreign influence provides revisionist powers such as Russia, China, and Iran the air to proclaim and act on their anti-American narratives.

In 2021, authorities in India began investigating a media portal company called Newsclick over suspected money laundering and ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). When the company’s offices were searched, India discovered emails between Newsclick and the CCP, and alleged that monies flowed to Newsclick from an American businessman and an alleged Chinese influence agent named Neville Singham. India was concerned that China used the company to build a “media narrative” supportive of Beijing while the two nations fought hand-to-hand battles in the Himalayas around the disputed territory of Ladakh and Tibet.

Last year, the Daily Beast reported that Singham funded “International People’s Media Network” news agencies. The Daily Beast stated that the International People’s Media Network includes news outlets replete with pro-Russian influencers from propaganda outlets like Radio Sputnik, and RT America. The media network was noted as working with the think tank Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, run by Dr. Vijay Prashad, who has defended China’s treatment of the Uighurs. The Daily Beast reported that Prashad and the pro-Russia and pro-China media outlets met at East China Normal University to speak to representatives from Venezuela, Iran, and Russia to underscore a need to “challenge the predominance of U.S., Japanese, and European outlets.” Singham lives in Shanghai and has worked for Huawei.

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As long as Islam exists, ‘jihadis’ will be a problem. It’s been that way for 1400 years, and there is no indication that it will change. Whether our Ruling Class will continue prating how ‘peaceful’ Muslims are while ignoring the mass murder, or whether they will wake up and decide to do something about it, is an exercise left for the reader. (Exercise that doesn’t raise a sweat–my favorite kind.)

Newsbusters.

A radical censorship-obsessed group financed by leftist billionaire George Soros is doubling down on efforts to interfere in the 2024 election by turning the screws on Big Tech to censor speech and by manipulating journalists. Free Press, fueled with at least $2 million by Soros between 2017 and 2021, announced that it was launching a new Orwellian scheme called “‘Democracy Is … .’” This so-called “new initiative” will deputize journalists through indoctrination by the Soros machine and engage the public on how to censor speech by supposedly “flagging disinformation” on social media platforms. In addition, Free Press pledged that the initiative would “provide other needed resources to influence media and technology platforms to better serve our communities and strengthen our democracy,” the press release boasted.

Read it.

You can’t make this shit up.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quickly before it becomes true.

ZMan looks at war tech.

It has been said that a good sniper team can defeat a battalion, which is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to it. Snipers have been a highly effective way to slow down an opposing force. This is especially true for an army facing a much larger opponent, as was the case for the Finns in the Winter War. Finnish snipers harassed the Red Army to the point where they could not advance, despite having an enormous advantage in men and material.

The drone is something like the high-tech sniper. A competent drone team can harass an opponent from a distance, forcing the opponent to find cover. Unlike the sniper, the drone operator can target equipment. An armored unit advancing toward an enemy position can be knocked out by a drone unit, without taking fire. They attack the column to stall it, pass on the geolocation to their artillery units, then move to a new spot in order to repeat the process until the column is destroyed.

Read it.

If you can’t speak freely you are someone else’s puppet. In that brief sentence alone, any genuinely well-educated reader should find delicious food for thought, because words aren’t the innocent little toys the ex-hippies the BBC loves to sell as language experts, insist they are. They are a constant battleground of chemical reactions that link me to other English speakers like you. Tiny, infinitely potent triggers we exchange across time and space, that make us human. English words connect me to Grendel, to Jerusalem and the battlements at Elsinore. They infuse me with a unique identity. They make me the person my colleagues, friends and family recognise.

What they don’t do is merely colour my skin or label me so some witless sociologist can heap more trash thought on a mountain of unwanted and unwarranted research. Without them we are just gurning chimps.

I’ve been writing about how badly words are treated by so many people for the past five years and even did a radio programme on the topic for the BBC, against all the odds it increasingly seems to me, considering their preference for the ex-hippies. But recent events across the West have cast a lurid spotlight on this profoundly important corner stone of democracy. Free speech is under attack in a way no Englishman who feels any pride in his nation, can ignore.

We have a new government in the UK that in a matter of weeks has demonstrated repeatedly, on line and on screen, its absolute dedication to the ex-hippies’ linguistic faith. They have made it clear they neither value, nor wish to support, our free speech. Meanwhile in that other great English speaking nation, someone who thinks a situation in which social media companies “speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation…has to stop” is actually standing for election as President of the world’s largest democracy.

Read it.

Hundreds of members of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah have been left “seriously wounded” following the detonation of the pagers they use to communicate.

One official from the Lebanon-based group, which has been engaged in cross-border warfare with Israel since the October 7th terror attacks, told Reuters that these explosions amount to the “biggest security breach” in the conflict yet.

Graphic footage shared online by American journalist Yashar Ali allegedly shows the moment one of these pagers exploded in a market area.

“If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” — Babylonian Talmud

Read it.

At a time when the case of the American town of Springfield, Ohio—where the aggressive presence of migrants is said to have led to violence against animals—is fuelling the debate in the U.S. presidential election, a remarkably similar incident has been reported in France in the Pas-de-Calais region. Three hunters and a child, with their ducks, were attacked by around sixty migrants.

The incident occurred on the night of September 14-15. Three hunters and a 3-year-old child were stalking in a hut on the Côte d’Opale on the Channel coast when, at around 4 a.m., they were attacked by a gang of around sixty extremely violent migrants.

The migrants, prevented by the police from making the crossing to England, attacked the hunters with machetes and iron bars for raising the alarm. They smashed the windscreens of the hunters’ vehicles and stole their belongings. The hunters were carrying live duck decoys—used to attract wild ducks—which were savagely decapitated by the migrants.

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Germans are baffled at how a Syrian convict was freed to re-offend shortly after inflicting a bloody head wound on an elderly Christian. The unnamed 27-year-old refugee attacked his 79-year-old victim in June for wearing a crucifix, prompting the authorities to classify the assault as an act in the “religious sphere.” Remarkably, the assailant was not taken into custody.

According to the Gera public prosecutor’s office, after briefly arresting the perpetrator, police were unable to detain him “due to a lack of legal requirements.” Two days later, he randomly attacked nine people, including several elderly citizens, causing multiple injuries. One victim suffered a brain haemorrhage, followed by a stroke and hospitalisation. After being arrested for these attacks, the suspect was detained in a psychiatric facility.

June’s one-man violent crime wave has put pressure on the authorities in the city of Gera, in the state of Thuringia, to explain their latest failure in public safety. Most if not all of the assaults were avoidable, given the criminal background of the assailant—if only decisive action had been taken sooner.

OffGuardian.

The column you are about to read is a “hate crime.”

Or, rather, an alleged “hate crime,” as I believe my attorney would like me to put it. We’re still sorting that distinction out in criminal court. Or, rather, we are about to sort it out again, on September 30, in Berlin Superior Court.

We already sorted it out once, in January, in District Court, where I was summarily acquitted, following which, for a few weeks, it wasn’t a “hate crime.” But the Hate-Crime Commissar of New Normal Berlin wasn’t happy about that verdict, so she appealed to have it overturned, whereupon it became a “hate crime” again, or an alleged “hate crime,” or whatever it is, currently.

OK, I’m going to go ahead and re-perpetrate my “hate crime,” or alleged “hate crime,” or whatever its legal status actually is at the moment. I want to get that out of the way now so I don’t go off on a tangent and forget to do it later. If you don’t want be a party to that, this would be the time to click away.

The Register.

According to a Chinese state-sanctioned study, signals from SpaceX Starlink broadband internet satellites could be used to track US stealth fighters, such as the F-22.

They can claim that all they want but the reality is: It’s not that useful militarily, and if it were, Beijing almost certainly wouldn’t let anyone blab about it.

The research details how the academics were able to recognize the rough location of a commercial drone by observing disturbances in electromagnetic signals from Starlink satellites caused by aircraft passing through them. The system could “provide significant advantages in detecting small and stealth targets,” the team claimed.

The academics, led by professor Yi Jianxin from Wuhan University’s School of Electronic Information, launched [paywall] a commercial DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone and sent it over the coast near the Chinese city of Guangdong. The researchers chose the drone as they estimated it has the same radar signature as a modern F-22 fighter.