Read it.

The US, UK and other backers of Ukraine told Kiev to reject the deal reached at the 2022 Istanbul peace talks with Russia, former US under secretary of state Victoria Nuland has said.

In an interview with Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, former editor-in-chief of the opposition news channel Dozhd, which aired on Thursday, Nuland was asked to comment on reports that the peace process between Moscow and Kiev in late March and early April 2022 collapsed after then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Ukraine and told Vladimir Zelensky to keep fighting.

Read it.

The city of Springfield, Ohio – population 60,000, has been overwhelmed by roughly 20,000 Haitian illegal migrants, who flocked to the city – exacerbating a ‘significant housing crisis’ according to city officials, and eating pets and wildlife according to locals.

There’s a reason that Doonesbury is located on the editorial pages.

Remember the days when Nixon was The New Hitler? Ah, the memories….

Read it.

Most of the sins of Big Government arise from a conviction on the part of the Cloud People that the Great Unwashed have to be protected from themselves by means of stringent regulation and requirements for permission to do even the most petty daily activities.

Read it.

Between hysterical outrage and blasé indifference in the face of mass murder is a post-war state religion, organized around the doctrine that Hitler was not a human being, but literally the devil.

According to the precepts of Hitlerian Satanism, never explicitly formalized but everywhere visible through the distortion effects they exerts, World War II was not a political conflict, but a crusade against evil. It could not have been averted, and none of its destructive consequences, including the holocaust, could have been prevented except maybe by earlier action.

Because they were fighting the devil, all of the measures adopted by the US-led forces were justified, including the military alliance with a Soviet terror state which, over the previous decade, had murdered perhaps twenty million of its own citizens in concentration camps and politically engineered mass starvations, which are today widely defended as logistical errors. This criminally sadistic regime, which started the war in alliance with Germany and ended it as the ally of the Western democracies and the master of an Eastern European police empire, following a campaign of mass rape, and indiscriminate murder of European civilians, was our noble Antifascist ally, now and forever: nobody today will face consequences for being a Stalin-apologist.

Most of the time of the ‘thought-leaders’ (if such they can be called) of the modern Crust is devoted the The Hunt For The New Hitler, meaning any non-Woke person who achieves any kind of notoriety. Now it’s Trump; before that it was a broad assemblage of people from Rush Limbaugh to Mitt Romney; and before that it was anyone who had ever been in the same room with Richard Nixon without puking.

Indeed, if there hadn’t be a Hitler, the Left would have been forced to invent him.

By 1953, Leo Strauss, himself a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, had noticed the emerging intellectual maneuver of the reductio ad Hitlerum or the rhetorical move, in which a thought is held to be refuted or illegitimate because it is said to have been held by Hitler: a principle which finally generates the condemnation, not only of his deranged ideology, but also all of the ordinary thoughts that he held as a man of his time.

People need to be reminded constantly that just because Hitler said or believed something is not sufficient to make it wrong.

Read it.

Through a sequence of random events (seeing a note about an Alto emulator, listening to a truly atrocious podcast-retelling of the NeXT computer company) I found myself reading about the PERQ computer this evening.

Reader: the modern Mac is not “a copy of an Alto”. I mean it kinda is. But more recently than that, it’s really a copy of a PERQ.

The PERQ is an early, commercial, and technical-user-focused version of an Alto. Except not quite. It had the same fast CPU, large local memory and bitmapped display with fast microcoded rasterops (a so-called “3M machine” — 1 MIPS CPU, 1 megabyte RAM, 1 megapixel display, “and 1 megapenny of price”, about $10,000). It had the same GUI with overlapping windows. It also had Pascal, Fortran, C and Lisp. It also demoed and started taking orders in 1979 and shipped in 1980, before the competition, including before Xerox. The Xerox Star (Xerox did finally commercialize the Alto) and Apollo/Domain each shipped a year later, in 1981.

Read it.

This particular topic piqued my interest after seeing negative feedback about the quality of tracking on services like AllTrails and Strava. Users often complain about inaccurate routes, inaccurate mapping, “incorrect” elevations, “wrong” distances and more. What I find really interesting about these related complaints is that there are a lot of fundamental misunderstandings about how GPS works, expectations around accuracy, and confusion around how that data interfaces with other applications. So today, I’m going to dive a little bit into how digital mapping systems are built and how GPS works.

Read it.

Gov. Tim Walz has made much of being a former high school teacher in his political campaigns. The DNC brought out former students of his on stage and the media has rolled out adulatory stories claiming that Walz’s time as a teacher will help him shape America’s education policy.

The recent release of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCA) test scores for 2024 by Education Commissioner Willie Jett, a Walz appointee, were described by the Minnesota Star Tribune as “stagnant with only about half of students meeting or beating grade-level standards in math and reading.” The paper struggled to describe an empty glass as half-full.

The actual numbers showed that 49.9% of Minnesota students reached grade-level proficiency standards in reading, only 45.5% did so in math and only 39.6% managed it in science: a more accurate description would be that well less than half of Walz’s school students are proficient.

Read it.

After all the culture-enriching knife carnage in Solingen last month, followed by this month’s antique rifle jihad in Munich, the German Green Party wants to solve the problem of “radicalization” by shutting down Twitter.

There’s no denying that the Internet helps accelerate the transformation of ordinary observant Muslims into raging mujahideen. But the mosques are also well-known as hotbeds of “radicalization” — so why not shut down the mosques? No, of course we can’t do that. It would be racist and Islamophobic. Better to keep everyone off X and Telegram instead.

Read it.

No studies needed. No cooperation from academia or the corporate media. No DHS whistleblowers with stuff we already basically knew anyway. National Republicans and alternative media commentariat just say things like, hey, remember how before 9/11 we didn’t have a Department of Homeland Security? It’s unconstitutional. It’s unnecessary. It’s a waste of money. People hate it. Let’s get rid of it*.

All of the above is true even if you don’t subscribe to the Officially Licensed Conspiracy Theory of the Deep State’s botched JFK-ish assassination attempt. But if you do, if you think they’re out to get Trump, and saving Trump is important because he’s going to save the Union, how do you not spend every day talking about how awful DHS is?

I don’t expect Republicans to seriously (or even haphazardly) advocate for disbanding DHS. Because Republicans don’t actually believe those things. Saint Ronnie didn’t defeat communism; he Americanized it. Republicans love central planning. They love federal government agencies. They love projecting power from DC.

Babylon Bee.

Just maybe.

Wall Street Journal.

Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8.

The more elite the college, the more lenient the standards. At Yale, for example, 80% of grades awarded in 2023 were As or A minuses. But the problem is also prevalent at less selective colleges. Across all four-year colleges in the U.S., the most commonly awarded grade is now an A.

Some professors and departments, especially in STEM disciplines, have managed to uphold more stringent criteria. A few advanced courses attract such a self-selecting cohort of students that virtually all of them deserve recognition for genuinely excellent work. But for the most part, the grading scheme at many institutions has effectively become useless. An A has stopped being a mark of special academic achievement.

The Register.

An international team of scientists has developed a drug delivery system that could one day treat human brain aneurysms in a way without the need for traditional surgery.

The team said it built billions of tiny simple magnetic nanorobots – each 300nm in diameter, or about a twentieth the width of a human red blood cell – that contain clotting medications. After injecting several hundred billion of these into a rabbit’s artery, the scientists used magnets and medical imaging technology to cause the bots to cluster together inside an aneurysm, according to the boffins.

The bots were then heated to their melting point. The process released a naturally occurring blood-clotting protein to prevent or stop the aneurysm bleeding into the brain, the researchers noted.

Read it.

When I first started focusing on Europe almost twenty years ago, gang rape in Germany was very rare. As the years went by, it began to occur more and more often, and the perpetrators — if the news stories gave out any information about them — were always third-world immigrants, usually Muslims. Eventually the incidence of such horrible crimes increased to the point that they didn’t always get reported in the media. They have become the new normal.

Read it.

In the first seven days of September, German police responded to more than 100 crimes occurred in which a knife was used. This is according to a new website called Messerinzidenz (Knife Incidence), which analyses police reports daily to create a live knife crime tracker. The frequency and severity of this now-common crime makes clear that ‘isolated incidents’ add up to a chilling reality.

Numerous knife attacks occur on Germany’s streets every day—but most of them are not even recorded by the media. In order to make the number of daily knife attacks more visible, a developer has now published an interactive map of Germany on which new cases are recorded in real time and displayed geographically and with source references.

OffGuardian.

What will the destruction of humanity look like? First and foremost, it will involve the separation of humans from their soul. Most “sheep types” will not find this to be a threat, as the “soul” is not a real thing to them, it is an abstraction, a made-up religious word that most of them probably do not even believe exists (getting people to this state was one of the first efforts of the agenda). This soul detachment will take place in a variety of ways, and many of these methods are in place right now. You know what they are, I need not take up space here and list all of them.

The transhuman movement is probably one of the most prominent methods of soul detachment. Medical technological advancement is the primary culprit in this currently successful movement. Again, I need not explain how this is happening, but most people do not care, and if they care at all, they typically are all for it as it means to them a longer human life (or I should say, “longer physical existence”—let me leave the word “life” out of it). Maybe even an existence with less physical suffering.

So why does any of this matter?

OffGuardian.

Sometimes it feels like writing for OffG has fallen into a recognizable pattern the last two years, one that could be best summed up “as ignoring the (mostly) fake stuff on the front pages and collating the real stuff on the back”.

Regular reminders that no matter who you vote for, or which side wins what war, the overarching agenda is still out there, eating and growing. Like the Blob or the Thing.

Censorship? We all know that’s on the elite’s shopping list.
Digital currencies? They’re still going.
Digital ID? Absolutely on the cards.

And we’ll be returning to talk about all of them no doubt until they eats any more or we’re finally shut down (whichever happens first)

But today we’re talking about eating the bugs.

Read it.

In a lengthy post on X, one of the best-known fighters in mixed martial arts (MMA) has again strongly suggested he may run for the Irish presidency.

Taking to the social media platform previously called Twitter, McGregor set out his goal, if elected, of using the powers of the Uachtarán na hÉireann to summon and dissolve the Dáil Éireann (the lower chamber of parliament).

Scott Adams brought this situation to my attention. If you consider the chief value of modern politics to be entertainment, as Scott and I do, this would be extremely entertaining.

Read it.

A lawmaker for the German anti-immigration party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has had his bank account closed for unknown reasons. Sascha Schlösser, a recently elected member of the Thuringia state parliament, made the public aware of his plight in a post on X on Thursday, September 5th.

“The DKB [Deutsche Kreditbank Aktiengesellschaft] did not miss the opportunity to congratulate me on my election as a member of the state parliament for the AfD and has terminated all my accounts,” he wrote, attaching a photo of the letter sent to him by his bank. The bank did not give a reason for the closure, but all signs point to yet another ‘debanking’ scandal—where financial institutions get rid of clients for political reasons.

Read it.

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

ZMan: “We live in the narrative age, but it is also part of the democratic age, which means the path to fame and fortune is to get an audience. That means getting an audience within the prevailing narrative of the time. Alternatively, it means creating an alternative narrative for those who oppose those benefitting from the prevailing narrative. Our politics now reduce to crude storytelling and fan service.”

BBC.

Which tells you everything you need to know about Dick Cheney (and, to be honest, Geroge W. Bush).

I wonder whether any Democrats will draw a lesson from this? After all, Dick Cheney had a longer run as The New Hitler than Donald Trump ever did.

Read it.

The University of Vermont solicited applications for a postdoctoral fellowship that was only open to “BIPOC/POC scholars,” according to a job posting obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, raising questions about the school’s compliance with civil rights law as universities face scrutiny over the racial breakdown of their newest classes.

Advertised on the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) online job bank, the posting—which has since been removed—indicated that the Henderson-Harris fellowship, which has existed since the 1990s, “specifically seeks applicants” who “identify as people/persons of color.” The two-year position pays up to $70,000 and fast-tracks winners for a tenured professorship at the university.

“Applicants should be BIPOC/POC scholars,” the posting read. “Preference will be given to candidates whose research focuses on the themes of inequality and/or exclusion.”

Read it.

After the Biden coup, Kamala phoned Rev. Amos Brown to pray for her political campaign. Kamala, an “old timer” and “dues paying” member of Brown’s church had turned to one of the most hateful political figures in her old city to offer spiritual inspiration for her presidential bid.

“America has not changed” since the days of segregation, Kamala’s pastor had argued while revisiting the killing of Emmett Till. “This sin of race is so deep, so pervasive in the body politic of America that if we don’t find a remnant to help turn things around, America is going to go down.”

Rev. Amos Brown, a politically influential minister known to some as the Sharpton of San Francisco, had a long history of race-baiting and of accusing America of racism.

Seems as if every mixed-race Democrat politician has an anti-white racist ‘pastor’. Must be something in the water.

Read it.

The 18-year-old Austrian man who fired shots near the Israeli consulate in Munich on Thursday, September 5th, was suspected of having become “religiously radicalised” and had been investigated over terrorist links, according to Austrian police.

Oh, ya think? (I love that: ‘Austrian man’. Somehow I think not….)

The suspect had been known to authorities since February 2023 after injuring fellow students. The police confiscated his mobile phone and found a video game on it in which gamers can recreate Islamic State-styled terrorist attacks.

I guess it takes a while for police in Austria to do something about a DANGEROUS CRAZY PERSON WHO IS A THREAT TO SOCIETY.

However, he was forbidden from buying and owning a gun for five years—a ban that was useless, as the perpetrator was able to buy a rifle one day before his shooting spree.

Boy, those strict ‘gun control’ laws really work well, don’t they?

Read it.

In the early morning hours of Friday, September 6th, a man with a machete stormed a police station in Linz am Rhein (Rhineland-Palatinate). The 29-year-old Albanian man entered the police station, swinging a machete. Police spokesman Jürgen Fachinger said: “He threatened to kill [everyone] at the police station.”

The police were able to lock the man between the outside door and the secured door that leads to the officers, protecting themselves from the attack.

The officers tried to explain to the man over the intercom that he was trapped—but the man would not calm down. A special task force from Koblenz finally overpowered the machete attacker with a taser. Police spokesman Fachinger said, “After using a taser in the lock, the person was restrained and arrested by special forces. He was slightly injured.”

The man is in custody and his motives have not been reported. The public prosecutor’s office will decide later today whether to apply for an arrest warrant.

In Texas, he would have been stone-cold dead within 30 seconds. (How does a single person, without even a firearm, ‘storm’ a police station?)

This tells you everything you need to know about Europe in general and Germany in particular.

The Economist.

Perhaps we might do something to the drivers? After all, contrary to proglodyte mythology, cars don’t drive themselves (any more than guns shoot themselves).

Read it.

Brampton, Ontario, situated in the sprawling outer suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area, is in many ways your typical Canadian city: rows and rows of middle-class houses with verdant lawns line quiet streets, with strip-mall parking lots and big-box stores in between. That it has been for years a majority non-white city, with South Asians accounting for over half the population, speaks to the success of Canada’s classical immigration regime. For even as Brampton grew more ethnically diverse, its orderly if monotonous suburban social template remained the same, attesting to the motto of late Ontario Tory premier and Brampton legend Bill Davis: bland works.

Lately, however, another set of immigration policy trendlines have begun to alter the town’s pacific character. Demonstrations consisting of more recent arrivals, also from South Asia, can now be seen in Brampton, protesting the prospect of their deportation. Though they came to Canada either with temporary worker or student visas, they believe themselves entitled to permanent residency; some of these students are even protesting their own failing grades! That their presence in the country — amounting to a staggering 2.8 million temporary residents in a population of 40-odd million — continues to exert distortionary effects on wages and housing seems not to bother the rally-goers.

Meanwhile, authorities have registered a 30% rise in hate crimes, a 187% increase in auto theft, and a staggering 350% rise in home invasions in the Peel region of which Brampton is part; this has come on the heels of last year’s interethnic tensions, following the slaying of a Sikh activist. These statistics are not to suggest that all crime stems from immigrants but rather that an environment of material scarcity and institutional breakdown conduces to higher rates of crime, whether committed by immigrants or native-born individuals.

If you don’t know who Enoch Powell is, look him up.

Read it.

The University of South Carolina required students to affirm the value of “diversity and inclusion” as part of a mandatory training this summer, underscoring the tenacity of diversity programs in the face of public blowback and raising concerns about compelled speech at a school that has marketed itself as a bastion of free expression.

In a module on “Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging,” which included 10 multiple choice questions, the training asked students how “diversity and inclusion help create a healthy, positive campus environment.” Students who said these values do not create such an environment—or that they give “unfair advantages” to “people from marginalized identity groups”—were told that their answers were “incorrect,” according to screenshots shared with the Washington Free Beacon by the First Amendment watchdog Speech First.

The right answer was that “diversity and inclusion exposes students to people from different backgrounds, thus enriching the overall campus experience.”

So does invading a random Middle Eastern country, but I doubt that the University of South Carolina would be up for that.

Read it.

Bringing their Filthy Heathen Ways (Beatles: HELP) to a computer near you.

North Korea can’t even feed its own population; where do they get the money for computers?

Read it.

But wait–there’s more:

And it turns out that good decision-making and its fruits is not merely a matter of luck, but strongly tied to white privilege.

People of Color, of course, don’t actually make decisions, but just wait for whatever the great Ju-Ju drops upon them.

Five run by Muslims, five run by Africans. There’s the Democrat base, right there.

Read it.

As recently as 2011, Tim Walz claimed in official biographies for his campaign and congressional office that he was on the verge of completing a doctorate in education, a decade after he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota in the small town of Winona.

The university, however, told the Washington Free Beacon that its last records indicating Walz was an active student are dated to 2004.

“We can confirm that Governor Walz attended Saint Mary’s from 2001-2004 in our doctorate level Ed.D. program,” the school’s communications director, Ashly Bissen, told the Free Beacon. “He did not complete the degree program.”

How sad is it when you can’t even complete a ‘degree’ in education?

The Foundry.

Americans are obligated to lenders and creditors for overspending, the government has made a habit of spending more than it takes in.

You could say that Congress was doing “girl math” long before it was cool.

Popularized on social media, “girl math” refers to an unwritten playbook women sometimes use to justify purchases. A jacket anticipated to cost $150 is on sale for $75, so now you can spend the other $75 on a pair of shoes because you save 50% of the jacket. That’s girl math. Or you forgot you had $20 in your Venmo account; so, paying your friend back for dinner was actually “free.” That, too, is “girl math.”

While “girl math” is usually a funny joke between friends, it can go too far to justify irresponsible spending, and no one is better at justifying lavish and wasteful spending than the federal government.

Read it.

Two and a half years after Bloomberg Opinion published advice for those earning under $300k on how to weather the Biden-Harris inflation storm—suggesting, among other things, swapping beef for “tasty meat substitutes” like lentils—we revisit whether labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci’s tips have truly shielded consumers from the fallout of failed Bidenomics.

The short answer is no.

Read it.

In yet another headline you won’t see from corporate media, 75% of those arrested in Midtown Manhattan in recent months for crimes like assault, robbery, and domestic violence are migrants.

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

In Queens, it’s around 60%, the NY Post reports, citing police sources.

…

According to the report, the sanctuary city laws make it ‘almost impossible’ for authorities to handle the problem.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Harvard University has refused to cooperate with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office’s investigation into the assault of an Israeli business school student that occurred during a protest in October 2023. That decision has delayed the ongoing criminal case against two of the students caught on camera accosting their Jewish classmate, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Assistant District Attorney Ursula Knight, who leads the office’s Civil Rights and High-Risk Victims Unit and is prosecuting two of the students who participated in the assault, during a Wednesday hearing admonished the university.

“Harvard police essentially refused to investigate,” she said, according to an attendee, adding that the school’s behavior “has been a shock to the Commonwealth.”

Read it.

Joe Biden has gone from a vacation at a billionaire’s estate in California to a postponed appearance at the DNC convention in Chicago, and then once more to a vacation in Delaware.

The man who formally serves as president of the country barely has anything resembling a public schedule. And his private one appears to be equally empty. Biden is satisfied with occasionally showing up at a few events a week, mumbling something and then moving on.

Meanwhile his VP is on the campaign trail and appears equally out of reach, only now finally agreeing to a single CNN interview with Gov. Tim Walz, her running mate, there to back her up. If Kamala Harris can’t handle a press conference, can she handle running a country?

And if neither POTUS nor the VP are running the country, who or what actually is in charge?

Alma Boykin.

My car was getting worked on, and another person in the waiting area was listening to a podcast about the End Times and how they were Nigh. They also needed to have their hearing checked, because if I can hear your ear-buds from ten feet away, you need to turn the sound down. Anyway, I mostly tuned the discussion out because 1) I’ve heard most of it before and 2) it wasn’t loud-loud.

Many cultures and belief systems have an idea of an earlier time, when things were much better than they are today. A Golden Age, the time of the Legendary Emperors, the world before the Fall, before the coming of private property when all were Noble Savages, the Dream Time when the gods walked among men and animals spoke, when the living was easy, or easier. When all people were equal (“When Adam delved and Eva span, then there was no noble man”), and a just ruler oversaw a time of peace (Numa Pompillius, Quetzalcoatl, what have you).

Some, not all, also have an end time idea. This may vary, and sometimes shows up in faiths that don’t usually focus on eschatology, like Buddhists or American Indians, or the modern Environmental movement’s more radical offshoots. Judaism has had end times movements, and Christianity is well known for people who think that the End is Nigh and can be predicted. Some people even want to bring about that end time, thus calls of “Don’t immenatize my eschaton.” The government of Iran is the best known at the moment, although I’ve heard that there are Jewish and Christian groups who seek to bring about the Second Coming or just the arrival of the Messiah by— Several things. Extinction Rebellion and some even more radical environmentalists want to trigger the return of wilderness* to the world and restore Nature to its pre-lapsarian state. Which lapse varies from group to group, and which state is often left vague, although “pristine Nature without the corruption of mankind/the free market/the patriarchy/Western Civilization/pick three” seems to be common.

Alma Boykin has many very readable fiction books on Amazon. Highly recommended.

The New Yorker.

There is no such thing as a ‘magazine for mercenaries’, any more than there is a ‘magazine for drug cartels’ or a ‘magazine for car repos’–and if there were, you wouldn’t know about it.

In the early nineteen-eighties, Susan Katz Keating was living in California, working as a freelance journalist with a side gig waiting tables. On a newsstand, she came across Soldier of Fortune, a monthly magazine infamous for its gonzo war reporting and its gun-for-hire classified ads. “I wanted to write about mercenaries,” she recalled recently. So she placed an advertisement in the publication. “You paid by the word, and I was quite young and didn’t have any money. The ad said, ‘Are you a mercenary? Contact S. Katz.’ And then I gave my home address.”

Keating was flooded with letters. A handful of seemingly professional warrior types arrived at her door unannounced. “I also got some government agents showing up, because they thought that I was trying to raise a mercenary army,” Keating said.

In 1986, Keating began contributing to Soldier of Fortune, the rare woman to do so. Two years ago, she achieved a longtime dream by purchasing the magazine from its founder, the retired lieutenant colonel Robert K. Brown, for an undisclosed sum. She now operates as its publisher and editor-in-chief.

Another Narrative Media down-the-alimentary-canal-with-gun-and-camera look at ‘flyover country’; popular zoology for the Coastal Crust. Read it for the entertainment, but don’t take it too seriously.

The Register.

(Sorry, I’m just tired of poor grammer in headlines. Or anywhere, really….)

Tech companies are forever acquiring each other, but future buys will likely face more scrutiny after four US federal regulators decided to share data that they hope will help antitrust investigators assess whether an acquisition impacts labor markets – not just the market for tech.

Let no business be un-over-regulated. (After all, It’s For The Children.)

Read it.

Well, she could always go back to Arkansas.

Read it.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Good luck with that.

Time to leave.