Read it.

In April, police inspectors at the Indianapolis FedEx distribution center seized a box containing nearly $43,000 in cash. Even though no criminal charges have been filed in connection with the package, it’s been in the government’s possession for about four months.

Now, the box’s intended recipient, Henry Minh Inc., is pursuing a class action lawsuit against the state of Indiana. The jewelry wholesale business consists of the husband-and-wife duo Henry and Minh Cheng.

Working with the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit focused on civil liberties, Henry Minh alleges a widespread pattern of unlawful package seizures at Indy’s FedEx processing facility.

Civil forfeiture started out as a way to get at drug dealers and other ‘organized criminals’ that normal law enforcement methods were unable to reach. It has since become a method for governments to confiscate people’s property without the bother of having to prove the commission of a crime.

Read it.

Ahead of the second assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, many influential actors, journalists, and influencers warned that Trump is an “existential threat” to democracy, compared him to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and suggested he or his supporters should face violent attacks. Some continued attacking Trump even after the first assassination attempt July 13.

The New Tolerance Campaign, a nonprofit watchdog aimed at confronting “intolerance double standards” practiced by “establishment institutions, civil rights groups, universities, and socially conscious brands,” compiled a list of extreme rhetoric against Trump that may have contributed to the second assassination attempt.

“New Tolerance Campaign research has shown two kinds of consistent and consistently charged rhetoric surrounding President Trump: insistence that his reelection would lead to the collapse of the country, and calls for the former president’s death,” Gregory T. Angelo, New Tolerance Campaign’s president, told The Daily Signal in a written statement Monday. (New Tolerance Campaign has taken to exposing extremism on the Left, to balance the impact of left-leaning groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

Read it.

In 2002, the FDA approved Suboxone, a new medication to treat opioid use disorder. Suboxone is a compound of two drugs that decreases one’s cravings for opioids while blocking their effects. It is safer and less cumbersome than methadone, which requires daily or weekly visits to a clinic, and more effective than any abstinence-based treatment, which requires people to withstand cravings and suppress physical discomfort. In clinical trials, Suboxone was shown to help opioid users avoid jail time and to decrease their mortality by over 50 percent. “You’d think that anything that can help save a heroin addict’s life would be seen as a good thing,” the writer and academic Michael Clune wrote in 2014, a year that marked an inflection point in an epidemic of fentanyl-related deaths. “So why, then, when I touted Suboxone at an Narcotics Anonymous meeting with a bunch of regulars did they look at me as if I’d gone insane?”

Clune has a history of heroin addiction (he wrote, to my mind, one of the great heroin-addiction memoirs) but successfully wrestled his demons into submission through a stay in rehab, diligent attendance at Narcotics Anonymous, exercise, and an enigmatic, epiphanic experience of grace. He knows how lucky he is to have overcome his addiction through struggle and also knows how rarely his strategy works for others. But when he proposed to friends in the recovery community that Suboxone is a worthy tool, they were upset; they were skeptical of a fix so expedient, so simple, so biological. “That’s like telling someone that smoking crack will get their mind off booze,” one NA longtimer argued. “Your recovery is based on a spiritual awakening,” another explained to Clune angrily. To this friend, Suboxone — a magic pill that changes the brain — would foreclose a person’s chance of personal transformation.

The Spectator.

When Black Lives Matter created the figure of the Karen, it was a sign of that movement’s darker, bullying qualities. What exactly was wrong with a white middle-aged woman who asked to speak to the manager when things were unsatisfactory? The answer seemed to be in the white part and the woman part, and perhaps also in the middle-aged part. In short, the Karen was a racist, sexist, ageist construct, and as a middle-aged white woman myself, who makes her dissatisfaction known from time to time, I felt extra defensive.

But if that original Karen caricatured the wrong person, then there are some modern female types that deserve closer scrutiny. There is the person I like to call the Keffiyeh Karen — the female student with a bare midriff and her head wrapped in the black or red and white patterning of Palestinian liberation, yelling anti-Zionist slogans with manic passion on elite college campus quadrangles and lawns.

In her ready and confident fury, her rudeness, her iron-fisted appetite for confrontation over infractions of what she deems political and moral gospel, the Keffiyeh Karen is related to a broader epidemic of the Gen Z Mean Girl. These Mean Girls have graduated from running the schoolyard to terrorizing the workplace. If there is one type to be afraid of in modern offices, it isn’t the lech or the shouty, hungover male middle manager. It’s the twenty-three-year-old gluten-free vegan graduate, wet behind the ears. We know what these misanthropic misses are capable of — we’ve seen the Phoebes and Annas of Just Stop Oil chuck soup on Van Gogh.

I am woman, hear me roar.

ZMan has some fun.

The most popular and probably the most effective argument from faith used in favor of open borders is that all men are created in God’s image. Since we are all God’s children, we have the same duty to cat-eating Haitians as we do to the Irish guy who drives the UPS truck and helps coach the local football team. Since immigration is an issue because it is the movement of nonwhites into white areas, it is a racial issue, and the Christian is prohibited from seeing race.

The obvious counter to this is that Jesus was fine with slavery, so he surely would not oppose the deportation of illegal aliens. This never registers with the Bible-quoting immigration enthusiast because much of what makes up modern Christianity in the West is cherry picking verses from Scripture that just so happen to support the secular morality of this age. For the most part, what passes for Christianity in the West is just a loyal servant at the foot of neo-liberalism.

That still leaves the question as to whether Jesus would be on the side of the people important pet-eating Haitians into your town or on the side of the people making AI-generated memes of Trump defending the house cats. The logic of Christianity says that Jesus would be pumping out those cat memes. He would not be making overtly racial claims about Haitians, most likely, but what we understand about Christian faith tells us he would be opposed to mass migration.

The Spectator.

What happens when you continually demonize someone as “Hitler,” insist that he is “a dictator” and “a threat to democracy?”

Why, you get chaps like Thomas Matthew Crooks, who tried to kill Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, two months ago. Yesterday, Crooks was joined by Ryan Wesley Routh, a self-described “revolutionary.” Routh who showed up at the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach with an AK-style rifle and a GoPro video camera. The Secret Service espied him in the underbrush a few hundred yards from President Trump. He fled the scene after the agents opened fire on him but was soon apprehended by the local police.

A couple hours after that “protective incident,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries posted this incitement on X:

Extreme MAGA Republicans are the party of a national abortion ban and Trump’s Project 2025.

We must stop them.

Stop them how, exactly, Hakeem?

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quickly before it becomes true.

Read it.

Researchers at Tokyo Metropolitan University have developed a new type of electrochemical cell that can effectively convert a bicarbonate solution—a product derived from captured carbon—into a formate solution, which is a potent source of green fuel.

It could be considered a major development in carbon capture and utilization technology.

This innovation overcomes significant challenges in reactive carbon capture (RCC) and demonstrates performance levels similar to those of traditional gas-fed methods, which are usually more energy-intensive.

Watch it.

The progressive mindset is based on the unshakable belief that tomorrow will inevitably be better than yesterday. This video is proof that they are wrong.

Read it.

Kamala Harris is running as a prosecutor, but a lot of her old friends are in prison.

Read it.

“ I think I may not have children although I do want them,” she notes. “Just because, with all of the things we see going on in the world, it seems unfair to bring someone into all of this against their will.”

Read it.

“And she said I’m going to have to refer to social services for unintentional emotional abuse for not affirming – just for not using ‘he/him’.”

“The social worker is standing at the foot of our stairs with our daughter next to us and she points her finger at each of us and says, “This. Is. A. Boy!”

These are the words of some of the many parents I interviewed for my new podcast series, Julie in Genderland, which looks primarily at the effect of the imposition on parents who are desperately trying to safeguard their children.

Read it.

The recently released Bangladeshi Islamic radical Jashimuddin Rahmani has called on West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to “declare Bengal’s independence from Modi’s rule” in a viral video. Rahmani, the leader of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), a designated terrorist organization, also threatened to “break up” India and “hoist Islamist flags in Delhi”.

Note: The Siliguri Corridor, also known as “the Chicken’s Neck”, is a stretch of land around the city of Siliguri in West Bengal, India. 20-22 kilometres at the narrowest section, this corridor connects the seven states (“Seven Sisters”) of northeastern India to the rest of the India.

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.)

Read it.

When does the fantasy end for them? It doesn’t. They derive life’s meaning from this endeavor. They will try to implement evermore convoluted net zero schemes in the hope that one will work. It won’t. Their bossiness and show of moral superiority will become intolerable and like an earlier generation of socialists and communists they will leave misery in their wake.

Read it.

The Lebanese military militia, Hezbollah, is a formidable opponent of Israel; indeed, it is the key pawn which Iran uses to attack Israel. But that reality can obscure the fact that the Western-recognised terror group also targets the Lebanese population. As the situation in the Middle East is becoming more volatile by the day, the situation in Lebanon is increasingly relevant.

Lebanon was once the ‘Switzerland of the Middle East,’ with a Christian majority living on good terms alongside Muslims, who incidentally have a very secular interpretation of their faith. The influx of Palestinian refugees certainly seems to have played a role in the particularly bloody civil war that tore the country apart in the 1970s and ’80s.

The power wielded by Hezbollah in Lebanon became evident to the whole world with the explosion at the port of Beirut, now 4 years ago. The disaster resulted from the fact that some 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had been stored there, flouting basic safety rules. At least 218 people were killed, and over 6,000 injured, in widespread damage across the city. It is considered the largest non-nuclear explosion of the 21st century.

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.)

Gothamist.

Police shot at a man they say evaded the subway fare at the Sutter Avenue L train station in Brownsville on Sunday afternoon, injuring him along with an officer and two others, according to the NYPD. One bystander, police said. was struck in the head and listed in critical condition.

NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said officers were patrolling the station shortly after 3 p.m. when they observed a 37-year-old man enter the station without paying the fare. The officers followed him up three flights of stairs, leading to a confrontation. The altercation resulted in injuries to the officer, the suspect, and two civilians — a 49-year-old man and a 26-year-old woman, officials said.

Police said the 49-year-old man was struck in the head and in critical condition on Sunday evening, while the officer, suspect and 26-year-old woman were reported to be in stable condition.

Behavioral Sink (Wikipedia).

Time to leave.

UnHerd.

What do Napoleon, America’s Army War College and the liberal media have in common? The centuries-old belief that conscription is the “vitality of the nation”. With the US military hamstrung by a catastrophic personnel problem, the “draft” is being handed a new lease of life. Maybe, murmurs the DC think-tank circuit, conscription could provide America with the proverbial shot in the arm it needs: polarised internally and beset by a multitude of external challenges, the expedient of compelling young Americans to pick up rifles in service to their nation could kill two birds with one stone.

But almost all discussion of conscription today falls into a standard narrative, a just-so story that is both simple to grasp and seductively credible. America could have a draft if it wanted to, the story goes: no doubt it would work and be effective. The problem, however, is that people have grown too self-absorbed for such harsh measures. Previous generations worked hard and sacrificed willingly, while kids these days just want to play videogames.

Such a narrative is increasingly dangerous. The fatal issue with a potential draft is not that people would get very angry about it — though it’s fair to say that they probably would. The entire reason America abandoned the draft in the Seventies was because the Vietnam War was slowly tearing society apart, leading to protests, riots, and an epidemic of enlisted soldiers murdering their own officers. Any attempt to reinstate conscription would likely bring with it a “Vietnam syndrome” far worse than the original one. But in some ways that is beside the point.

Conscription is a cornerstone of socialism and other totalitarian political systems.

UnHerd.

On 14 July 2024, as football fans gathered to watch the Euro 2024 final, a fireball ripped through a café in Mogadishu. Al-Shabaab, an affiliate of al-Qaeda, later claimed responsibility for the blast and the five lives it extinguished. It was a message to the Somali government — and to the West as a whole — that the past decade’s attempts to defeat the terror group had stalled.

But it was also a threat. In 2007, 22,000 African Union (AU) troops were brought into Somalia to support Mogadishu’s fragile government. But at the end of this year, they are scheduled to leave. And there’s every reason to believe that al-Shabaab could take over and destabilise neighbouring nations with a large Somali diaspora. Indeed, there are already reports that al-Shabaab is in contact with the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. Such an alliance would further imperil international shipping routes and have enormous consequences for the world economy.

It could also spark more serious threats closer to home. After all, in the aftermath of 9/11, it was in Somalia — not Iraq or Afghanistan — that a new generation of Western jihadists were spawned.

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.)

UnHerd.

It’s difficult to imagine this quiet bucolic corner of London being the point of origin of the defining dystopia of modern times. Yet, according to literary folklore, it was here in a Canonbury beer garden, in the shadow of a vast horse chestnut, that George Orwell first conceived the idea for 1984. The location would even make it chillingly into the novel: “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me…” Of course, this was a very different London, of ration books and bomb sites, and a recently widowed Orwell was already coughing up blood from the tuberculosis that would kill him. The future was, understandably, to be afraid of. Yet the seeds of 1984 originated decades earlier and over a thousand miles away, blowing in across the seas from what had been St Petersburg.

Yeah, I’m interested in almost anything having to do with Orwell. Feel free to skip it if you aren’t.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quickly before it becomes true.

The Economist.

In many parts of the world, the cool blast of an air-conditioner on a hot day is nowadays seen as a luxury rather than a necessity. Climate change is tipping the balance. Average global temperatures are now roughly 1.2°C higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution: by mid-century they are projected to be about 2°C higher. Air-conditioning (ac) use, correspondingly, is set to soar. By one estimate, the number of room-cooling acs could nearly triple between now and 2050.

These additional units will save lives, make cities liveable and stave off losses in economic productivity. The Lancet, a medical journal, estimates that access to air-conditioning averted nearly 200,000 deaths worldwide among people aged 65 or older in 2019, for instance, cutting the cohort’s heat-related mortality by 37%. But expanding those benefits more widely will come at a cost. The electricity needed for air-conditioning is already responsible for more carbon-dioxide (CO₂) emissions than the entire aviation industry. And as the laws of physics unhelpfully dictate that a single degree of cooling becomes more energy-intensive as the outside temperature rises, additional cooling will require more power per unit, risking a great deal more planetary heating.

If you can’t make yourself read the entire article, just read these two paragraphs. Read them several times, and see whether (not if) you can detect how many Narrative Media boxes they check.

Check it out.

Cognitive Biases and Principles you can use to create products people love.

Or destroy modern civilization. Your choice.

Read it.

Two days ago, tech streamer and host of Code Therapy René Rebe was streaming one of many T2 Linux (his own custom distribution) development sessions from his office in Germany when he abruptly had to remove his microphone and walk off camera due to the arrival of police officers. The officers subsequently cuffed him and took him to the station for an hour of questioning, a span of time during which the stream continued to run until he made it back.

René Rebe and fans of his work can only guess what motivated this incident. Unfortunately, the police seemingly have no idea who did it and acted based on a tip sent with an email. Finding the perpetrators could take a while, and options will be fairly limited if they don’t also live in Germany.

Our world–and welcome to it.

Newsbusters.

GOP vice presidential nominee and Ohio Senator JD Vance went on the Regime Media’s Sunday public affairs shows and utterly dismantled them for their lack of coverage of the stress that the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policies have placed upon such towns as Springfield, Ohio, until a Trump-adverse angle can be exploited.

Read it.

Nine chapters into his book The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies makes a little self-deprecatory joke. He had intended to write a detective mystery about cybernetics, he says, but has spent eight chapters describing the construction of the murder weapon.

The question that Davies starts out with is about how it is that the modern organisation has become structured in structured in such a way that when bad things happen, to customers, or users, or suppliers, no one can be found to be accountable for these poor outcomes.

New York Post.

Remind me again which party is full of terrorists?

Read it.

Taylor Swift’s post-debate endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, appears to have completely backfired. A new post-debate poll from YouGov released Saturday found that while 8% of voters said Swift’s endorsement made them “somewhat” or “much more likely” to support the Democratic ticket, a significant 20% said they are “somewhat” or “much less likely” to vote for former President Donald Trump’s opponent after Swift spoke out.

The majority of respondents, however – 66% – said Swift’s high-profile endorsement made no difference in how they will vote in the upcoming November election, according to the NY Post.

Read it.

Murders across New York City’s subway system have surged by a shocking 60% so far this year, even as overall crime on the rails has dipped, leaving straphangers increasingly terrified for their safety.

According to NYPD data, eight people have been slaughtered on subway cars or in stations as of September 8, up from just five during the same period last year. The surge in killings is closing in on the 25-year high set in 2022, which saw ten murders in the transit system—a grim milestone unseen since 1997. For over two decades, from 1997 to 2020, the city never recorded more than five subway murders in a single year, the NY Post reports.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

ZMan:

It has been fascinating to watch the Haitian cat devouring meme go viral as it was both hilarious and illustrative of the problem facing the managerial regime. Largely due to Musk owning Twitter, now stupidly called X, there was little the regime could do to stop the spread of AI generated images of Trump defending house pets from Kamala and her animalistic Haitians. Regime toadies online were left to snootily do the “but actually” meme in response to it.

It reminded people of 2016 when clever people created MAGA art as well as anti-Clinton meme campaigns that were often far cleverer than what came from Trump. This is why they moved heaven and earth to shut this stuff down for the 2020 election. There is no way we get the Haitian cat devouring story if the cranks were still running Twitter. Of course, this assumes that workarounds had not been found to get around the censorship.

The Register.

With less than a month to go before the Nobel Prizes are handed out for the most worthy scientific discoveries of the preceding year, it would be remiss of The Register not to observe the honors conferred by the gong’s bratty little brother, the Ig Nobel Prize.

The satirical ceremony has been run annually since 1991 by the scientific humor mag Annals of Improbable Research, which serves the laudable goal of highlighting “research that makes people laugh… then think.” In other words, the quirky, trivial, inane, and insane.

It’s just a bit of absurdist fun – winners are awarded tacky trophies, this time a piece of paper saying they’ve won an Ig Nobel Prize, and the traditional 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (a deprecated currency that had a penchant for hyperinflation), but actual Nobel laureates perform the prize-giving, and they looked thrilled to be there.

Next to the Darwin Awards, the best thing going.

Read it.

To curate something is a curious act. Bring two items together, and you’ve made a collection. You’ve just curated. One of the OED definitions for curation is “The selection of items for a collection: The selection of items, such as documents, music, or internet content, for inclusion in a collection or on a website.” This could range from the mundane task of curating clothes for an outfit (a collection) to the sophisticated act of curating cultural artifacts for an exhibition. There are even less obvious, or at least, less intentional acts of curation, like selecting items for an Amazon shopping cart. Yet that would also qualify as curation.

New York Post.

Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, may turn more voters away than it attracts.

A new post-debate poll from YouGov released Saturday found that 8% of voters said the pop superstar’s nod is either “somewhat” or “much more likely” to convince them to cast their ballot for the Democrat. But a whopping 20% said they are “somewhat” or “much less likely” to vote for former President Donald Trump’s opponent now that Swift has spoken.

 

Read it.

In the glorious age of the Kamala Ascendency, the TSA is no longer restraining its contempt for American travelers. After squeezing millions of butts and boobs and never catching a terrorist, TSA decided to have fun by taunting its victims.

After a traveler asked online, “Why does TSA need social media anyways?” TSA’s Instagram account taunted: “Idk Kyle, why do your friends keep bringing stuff they shouldn’t in their carry-on?”

Almost 40,000 people liked that post (slightly fewer than the total number of TSA employees).

Yet another reason not to fly commercial.

Read it.

The 155-year-old Campbell Soup Company plans to drop “soup” from its corporate name, rebranding as The Campbell’s Company. More consumers are reaching for snacks and ditching ready-to-serve soups, and the company has bought up other food lines to grab them.

In addition to its lineup of soups, Campbell now owns snack brands like Goldfish, Snyder’s of Hanover, Cape Cod, Pepperidge Farm and others. Campbell also recently bought Sovos Brands, maker of popular Italian food brands like Rao’s sauces.

“This subtle yet important change retains the company’s iconic name recognition, reputation and equity built over 155 years while better reflecting the full breadth of the company’s portfolio,” Campbell CEO Mark Clouse said Tuesday in a statement. The name change is subject to shareholder approval at the company’s annual meeting in November.

Read it.

The Center for Gender & Refugee Studies has spent years battling on behalf of illegal alien invaders. Earlier, Freedom Center Investigates exposed how the lawfare group housed at a University of California law school provides full service open borders support.

“During Trump, my CGRS colleagues and I expended a tremendous amount of energy challenging the anti-immigrant policies that were issued on what seemed like an almost daily basis,” Karen Musalo, the CGRS founding director, boasted.

The Center also offers a database of “expert witnesses” willing to testify on behalf of the ‘refugee’ claims of border invaders. It urges licensed medical or mental health personnel to register to “support asylum seekers with forensic mental or physical evaluations.”

Who funds the CRGS open borders lawfare? Many of those who fund it don’t even know it.

CGRS is one of the radical leftist groups that benefits from interest seized from trust accounts controlled by lawyers and redistributed to some of the most extreme groups around.

As a general rule, avoiding California and Californians is a good plan.

Go Where You’re Treated Best.

Read it.

I was away most of the day today, so posting will be light this evening.

I’ve got a good excuse, though: I was one of the Rebels manning a booth for the Sons of Confederate Veterans at the Heart of Virginia Festival in Farmville. All in all it was a successful day, with pleasant weather, good conversations with the attendees at the festival, and plenty of politically incorrect Confederate merchandise sold.

The SCV had reserved two spaces for the occasion, one for the booth, and one next door for a “living history” tableau featuring uniformed Confederates, muskets, a sword, and other odds and ends of Civil War paraphernalia.

Unlike the last time I did the Heart of Virginia gig, none of the visitors wanted to argue with me about the Confederates being “traitors”. The people who stopped to talk were uniformly pleasant and friendly. Most of them were Confederate sympathizers, of course, but some were just interested in history. A few passersby glared at us, but those were all white women. Interestingly enough, black people didn’t seem to have any issue with our being there. Some stopped to talk to us, and even bought some of the merch. So you never can tell.

Read it.

Matteo Salvini, Italy’s right-wing deputy prime minister, is hitting back after Italian prosecutors requested on Saturday a six-year prison sentence against him for blocking migrants from disembarking at one of the country’s ports in 2019.

“Six years in prison for blocking landings and defending Italy and Italians? Madness. Defending Italy is not a crime and I will not give up, not now, not ever,” Salvini wrote on X.

Salvini, a partner in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s coalition, is on trial for alleged “deprivation of liberty and abuse of office” for preventing the Lampedusa landing of the Open Arms ship run by a Spanish NGO and “keeping 147 migrants at sea for weeks.” In a video message on X, the deputy prime minister described in detail the events leading up to his decision to prevent the landing in Italy.

The Spectator.

It’s a Wednesday evening, and I’m getting psyched up to go catch a pedophile with the boys. Playlist on, rocking down the A12 and chatting to my new mate, Nick, in his van. There’s a man not far from here who thinks he’s going to meet an underage girl tonight. He doesn’t know that we’ll be pulling up instead and that his sick fantasy — and his life as he knows it — will be over.

Nick is a guy I met on Facebook who runs a team of pedophile hunters called London Overwatch. He says that he’s caught 300 pedophiles, and that tonight’s is one of the worst. This man believes he has been talking to a 14-year-old girl and has apparently been sending her obscene videos while he’s on holiday with his family. The “girl” is really a woman on Nick’s team.

T-minus one hour before the meeting, and we park at a local health club just around the corner. The team assembles: Ben, George, Tony, Michael and Abdul. All friendly Essex boys. We discuss whether you can spot a pedophile in the street judging only by the clothes somebody wears. Yes, it’s agreed, they wear Slazenger or Lonsdale. We talk about fishing and about how Ben recently visited the no. 2 ranked sushi restaurant in the world.

The Spectator.

Last week, on a Swedish train somewhere between Linkoping and Mjolby, as I struggled to open a bag of cheesy snacks that was to serve as my lunch, my travel companions began unwrapping their own picnics. Some, like me, had made hasty and unappetizing purchases at the station. Others had carefully curated lunches, assembled earlier in the day from our hotel’s lavish breakfast buffet. Well-filled rolls, pieces of fruit, pastries. In they tucked.

I was suddenly aware of a frisson of stance-taking rippling through our group. There were those who regarded buffet plundering as theft and those who defended it as plain common sense. Women were more likely to have taken food, but then women are generally more likely to make advance preparations for lunch. I noticed schisms even within families and between close friends. And then there was me, who had never before given the matter any thought, nor realized it was a thing people did.

It is, apparently, a very British habit. The Germans may be on the march at dawn, annexing sun loungers, and Italians may not have the faintest idea about queuing, but it’s the Brits who secrete breakfast goods about their person and spirit them away in order to economize on lunch.

Read it.

After an absent-minded guest left a bag of Cheetos deep within Carlsbad Caverns, the National Park Service (NPS) responded with a stern warning. Unsightly trash and plastic pollution aren’t the only issues, they cautioned; the garbage could have had a significant impact on the wider ecosystem of the ancient cave system.

The bag of food was dropped in Carlsbad Caverns’ so-called Big Room, the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America, which takes around an hour of walking underground to reach.

Left to fester in the pits of the humid cave, the full bag of cheesy snacks sent a tiny shockwave through the local ecosystem.

“The processed corn, softened by the humidity of the cave, formed the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi. Cave crickets, mites, spiders, and flies soon organize into a temporary food web, dispersing the nutrients to the surrounding cave and formations. Molds spread higher up the nearby surfaces, fruit, die and stink. And the cycle continues,” the NPS said in a Facebook post.

“At the scale of human perspective, a spilled snack bag may seem trivial, but to the life of the cave it can be world-changing,” they explained.

“Just because they really are out to get you doesn’t mean you aren’t paranoid. If they’ve been after you long enough, paranoia can become a reflex.”

— Steven Brust, Issola

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quick, before it comes true.

Read it.

Hand-wringers: “People can’t afford to get a college degree and improve their lives!”

Do-gooders: “I know! Let’s have the government pay for it!”

Colleges: “The government is paying for it! FREE MONEY! Let’s jack up the price!”

Hand-wringers: “People can’t afford to get a college degree because of the crushing load of debt!”

Rinse. Repeat.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

“Why won’t you become Orthodox, my friend?”

“Because your priests look like foreigners and your bishops look like hoboes.”

“Hmmm. Can’t say you’re wrong.”