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News broke yesterday that a jet carrying European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen had to land using paper charts after its GPS navigation systems were apparently jammed by Russia. Traveling to Plovdiv in Bulgaria, VDL’s jet apparently circled for an hour before the pilot took the decision to do things the old-fashioned way and consult the map.

Such an incident targeting a head of not-quite-a-state is shocking to say the least, but serves as a neat metaphor for relations between Russia and Europe in recent years (decades?): European liberal internationalists assume old norms apply -> Russia disagrees and demonstrates that it views violence as a legitimate tool of national policy -> Europeans left stunned.

Some will remember the images of German diplomats guffawing at the United Nations in 2018 as Donald Trump admonished Germany for placing itself at the mercy of Russia for its energy supplies. Fast-forward to 2022 and suddenly Trump’s speech wasn’t so funny, and anyone who cares to bring up a chart of German industrial production can see the fruits of the lack of imagination of Germany’s leaders. Germany’s factories are now struggling to replace lost production for civilian applications with new production for military applications. But how to do this without cheap energy?

So, yes, violence is back as a tool of national policy. Russia is unapologetic about this. So is Israel. So is the United States if you consider the decisiveness of using B-21 bombers to drop bunker busters on Iranian nuclear facilities. Hamas and the Houthis are certainly unapologetic and China has also been stepping up the frequency and scale of ‘rehearsals’ for the invasion of Taiwan while the Chinese navy and coast guard have had semi-regular clashes with the Philippines over territories that China claims as its own through the ten-dash line. Those Chinese territorial claims are not supported by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, but that is really part of the point.

The Chattering Class in the U.S. is spending its time running around in circles and jumping up and down about the supposed ‘authoritarianism’ of Donald Trump, in the meanwhile ignoring the actual authoritarian regimes in Russian and China. This will not end well.

Note that this includes people who claim to be disabled (for the purpose of claiming taxpayer-funded benefits?), not just people who are actually provably disabled.

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On Monday, September 1, a Gaza-bound flotilla carrying humanitarian aid and pro-Palestinian activists—including environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg—set sail from Barcelona again, hours after strong winds forced it to return to the Spanish port.

Around 20 vessels left the city on Sunday, reports the Global Sumud Flotilla.

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

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Canadian politicians are creating one bonfire after another of freedom and individual rights. COVID crackdowns established persecution precedents that politicians in some provinces refuse to allow to gather dust. Politicians are claiming the right to financially cripple anyone who makes a single misstep in violation of the latest idiotic decrees.

On August 5, Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston decreed a $25,000 fine for anyone walking in the woods or otherwise violating a new prohibition that covered both government and private lands. The prohibition will continue until October. Houston declared, “Most wildfires are caused by human activity, so to reduce the risk, we’re keeping people out of the woods until conditions improve. I’m asking everyone to do the right thing—don’t light that campfire, stay out of the woods and protect our people and communities.” Canadian politicians are exploiting wildfires the same way that former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau exploited COVID to lockdown the entire nation.

Read it.

Say not that the struggle nought availeth.

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Last Tuesday, defense contractor Epirus quietly tested its latest electromagnetic weapon, Leonidas, against a swarm of 49 quadcopters, neutralizing them in seconds at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, according to Axios, the only news outlet invited to the groundbreaking test. Numerous U.S. military services and foreign allies, including Indo-Pacific partners, witnessed the event. In an interview with Axios, Epirus CEO Andy Lowery hailed the “forcefield system” as a “singularity event.”

The great weakness of drones is their command and control systems; disrupt that, and they are useless.

Of course, eventually we will get drones that are fully autonomous, controlled by some sort of on-board AI, and then it will get very interesting. As usual, science fiction stories have been all over this for decades.

The Telegraph (UK).

The late Queen oversaw a change to the law of succession in 2013 that ensured the firstborn child of a monarch would be next in line to the throne regardless of gender.

However, a government source quoted on the subject in a new book has suggested that the monarch was lukewarm about making the change.

According to Power and the Palace, by Valentine Low, neither Queen Elizabeth nor her aides at Buckingham Palace showed any great eagerness when David Cameron, the then prime minister, set his sights on delivering a package of constitutional reform.

A lot of the damage done to British society has been done by nominally Conservative administrations, whom one would think would resist such changes; all to be Hip and Trendy.

Trump keeps threatening to punish Putin. Here’s what’s holding him back (Holly Ellyatt/CNBC)

It’s Labor Day. And Trump Is the Most Anti-Union President in Decades. (Erik Loomis/New York Times)

The Most Communist President Ever (Jennifer Rubin/The Contrarian)

Donald Trump is a globalist (Joshua Keating/Vox)

The Supreme Court has expanded Trump’s power. He’s seeking much more. (Justin Jouvenal/Washington Post)

MAGA declares war on the property tax  OH NOES! MAGA’S TROOPS ARE MASSING ON THE BORDER!

The Spectator.

Here follows a non-exhaustive list of my genetic flaws. I am short-sighted, more so as I age. I have bunions, dodgy knees and even dodgier shoulders. I have asthma. My skin blisters easily. My hair started going grey when I was in my late teens. I have zero talent for foreign languages, running or music. I am prone to nightmares, as well as to depression and anxiety.

Relatively mild flaws, as they go. But still, these aren’t traits I’m eager to pass on. Our three-year-old already shows a tendency for nightmares that sometimes makes me wince with guilt. Not that it’s my fault, of course. We don’t get to choose which of our genes we pass on. Every conception is a roll of the dice.

But soon that will no longer be true. In fact, it’s already not quite true, at least for those who have the means and determination to load the dice. Emerging technology is about to present parents with a set of ethical questions that make the usual kinds of debates – breast milk or formula? Nanny or daycare? – seem trivial. We have always had the power (more or less) to control our children’s nurture. Before long – perhaps in just a few years – any parent who can afford to will have control over the minutest details of a child’s nature too.

The reason eugenics is trash-talked by the Usual Suspects is that they are an infernal intersection between those who believe that eugenics inevitably means “government mass murder of the alleged inferior” and those who believe that We Are All Equally Good In Every Respect If We Just Wish It So and are congenitally opposed to anything that suggests something different.

As we grow more and more knowledgeable about our genetic code, we will become more and more able to fix the things that we consider to be wrong, ranging from the obvious (like a tendency to come down with a debilitating condition) to the less obvious (want you kids to have blonde hair and blue eye? Not a problem!)

The crucial change set to turn our lives upside-down is called ‘preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders’ (PGT-P), hereafter ‘polygenic screening’. Testing a foetus or embryo for some conditions is now a routine part of the modern pregnancy experience. Prenatal Down’s Syndrome tests, for instance, are so widespread that in some Scandinavian countries almost 100 per cent of women choose to abort a foetus diagnosed with the condition, or – if using IVF – not implant the affected embryo. The result is a visible change to these populations: there are simply no more people with Down’s to be seen on the streets of Iceland and Denmark.

I’m sure somewhere there are hand-wringers who think that’s a bad thing, even among those who do not flinch at aborting a fetus or an embryo.

Read it.

American left-wing heroes are proving to be a creepy bunch.

So what do some of the most renowned “resistance” left-wing heroes have in common other than shared hatred of conservative America?

They are either criminals, pathological liars, or self-described performance-art victims.

New Atlas.

Plant-based microbeads made from everyday ingredients like green tea and seaweed have helped mice shed weight by trapping fats in the gut, reports a new study published in Cell Biomaterials. Researchers see these microbeads as a potential “structured, drug-free therapy” to treat obesity, with fewer side effects than the current medications.

Wake me up when these are available as a commercial product.

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It was the White House ambush that shocked the world. A South African delegation headed by president Cyril Ramaphosa arrived in Washington DC with big grins and smug confidence, ready to milk the American taxpayer for even more foreign aid. What they received instead was thorough embarrassment.

Trump confronted Ramaphosa on the issue of race-based land seizures through the Expropriation Act of 2024, which largely targets white farmers for confiscation (There are 140 race based laws that oppress whites in SA) . The land is then redistributed to black citizens who often run the farms into the ground. The leader has denied that land confiscation is taking place. The South African government and the leftist media has spent the better part of the year trying to spin the issue and deny their motives.

When asked by reporters what he could do to convince Trump there there was no threat of “white genocide” in South Africa, Ramaphosa chuckled and shrugged off the accusation, suggesting that Trump had been misinformed. Trump surprised the leftist political leader with a video montage proving otherwise.

Africans will be Africans.

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I guess Mother Nature didn’t know Who She Was.

Daniel Klein & Zachary Yost.

All libertarians will agree that government exists in the United States. Thus, they will agree that governmental evil is afoot. They will also agree that that evil may be greater or lesser. Since it is fanciful to hope to eradicate governmental evil entirely, the conscience calls libertarians to mitigate governmental evil.

To do one’s part, one must formulate and assess rival evils. America has a two-party system, Democrat and Republican. That contest is not the only one; there are contests between rival evils that cut across the two parties and that divide either or both of the parties. But the choice between Democrats and Republicans remains highly salient. Given these choices, we contend that libertarians should usually favor Republicans over Democrats.

My problem with libertarians is the same as my problem with Marxists:

(1) They think that politics is downstream of economics; if you get the economics right, the politics will follow. This is horseshit. Politics is upstream of economics, as it is downstream of culture. Culture will determine your society’s politics, and politics will determine your society’s economics. Politics is about morality, and your culture’s morality will determine your attitudes toward property, profit, and taxation, not the other way around.

(2) They focus on an artificial person, who is neither a reflection of real people, nor (if it were) accounts for the whole of a population. Libertarianism is built on the assumption that everybody in the society is a rational adult, and can make rational adult choices. This is obviously absurd to anybody who spends any time out among people, much less reads the news. Marxism is built on the assumption that society consists of two mutually exclusive classes, bourgeois capitalists and proletarian workers, and the purported class struggle between them. This takes no account of the progress from manual worker to financially independent investor that millions have traveled since Marx started scribbling.

Both ideologies are a triumph of a-priori reasoning over actual experience. I have no time for either, or their proponents.

Read it.

How strong are the constraints against nuclear use? Experimental studies find that a majority or near majority of citizens in multiple major powers approve of their own governments’ nuclear strikes if they create military advantages or protect co-national soldiers. But what if the nuclear taboo only begins at the water’s edge when individuals evaluate the use of nuclear weapons by a foreign government? Many policymakers believe that the international reaction to nuclear use would be severe, especially among allies. Yet prior studies have not tested this assumption. An identity-based theory of support for nuclear weapons use proposes that this argument is incorrect. The public will display favoritism toward allied and partner countries because it views them as members of the in-group. Four survey experiments in the United States and India provide evidence for this theory. In contrast to many policymakers’ expectations, public approval of nuclear use is not significantly lower for allies or strategic partners than for one’s own government. As expected, however, approval is lower for out-groups, such as non-allied and non-partner countries. Absolute support for nuclear attacks is also high, even when it is foreign countries pushing the button. On balance, these findings are inconsistent with the existence of a nuclear taboo or strong non-use norm.

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As an older millennial, my high school and college summers were defined largely by the jobs I held. Not many of today’s teens can say the same.

Once a rite of passage, teen jobs are now endangered. Just 35% of 16- to 19-year-olds worked last summer, down from 54% in 2000.

It’s a big deal.

My only purpose in working as a teen was to earn as much money as possible. But I now realize the experience and life lessons those jobs provided were far more valuable.

Low-wage, entry-level jobs provide the perfect opportunity for young people to learn the importance of key skills: showing up on time, getting along with co-workers, demonstrating respect and kindness toward customers who may lack both, and staying on task even when it is difficult or boring.

Learning these skills early has long-run benefits. Multiple studies link part-time work during high school to higher future wages and occupational status, and more consistent employment.

My first job as a teenager was six years in the Navy. Nothing compares when it comes to “showing up on time, getting along with co-workers, demonstrating respect and kindness toward customers who may lack both, and staying on task even when it is difficult or boring.”, I can assure you.

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On September 1st, Salzburg ended three family benefits for asylum seekers, marking what Deputy Governor Marlene Svazek (FPÖ) calls the “end of the financial welcome culture.”

The move eliminates multiple birth allowances, support for expectant mothers, and emergency aid, leaving asylum seekers with only statutory basic care. The measure is expected to save around €270,000 annually.

The discontinued benefits included a one-time €700 per child multiple birth allowance, €300–€600 support for expectant mothers in financial need, and up to €3,000 emergency aid for families facing death, serious illness, or eviction.

Previously, these payments were available regardless of residency status.

Svazek emphasized that the state’s family support is meant exclusively for Salzburg families, not as an additional “welcome bonus.” Basic care for asylum seekers will be retained, covering accommodation, meals, health insurance, language courses, clothing allowance, and other essential services.

The policy is part of broader austerity efforts in social and health services, with up to €89 million in savings targeted across the sectors.

The move was sharply criticized by KPÖ Plus, the Communist Party of Austria in the state parliament, with the far-left representatives dismissing the measure as “political distraction.”

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Left-wing climate extremists targeted Barcelona’s Sagrada Família Basilica on Sunday, August 31, dousing parts of the building with red-colored powder in a protest against government inaction on wildfires. The group is venting its anger on the city’s major landmark, hoping to pressure authorities into taking action—but the backlash was immediate.

Radicals “Futuro Vegetal” shared photos and videos of the stunt on social media under the slogan “We act.” They claimed that the action aimed to highlight governmental responsibility for fires that devastated parts of Spain this summer.

This is why we can’t ever have nice stuffl.

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Yet another lie from a crooked female Democrat politician. Not news.

ALSO: Ilhan Omar Said It’s ‘Categorically False’ To Call Her a Millionaire. Her Net Worth Just Reached Up to $30 Million, an Increase of at Least 3,500 Percent in One Year. (Andrew Kerr/The Washington Free Beacon)

MSNBC, a Voice of the Crust.

It is not clear to me how the Center for Disease Control and Prevention is somehow involved with drowning.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Mr. Giuliani was riding in a Ford Bronco when a Honda HR-V hit his vehicle on a northbound section of Interstate 93 in New Hampshire, the state police said in a statement. The two vehicles hit a median and were heavily damaged, the police said.

The driver of the Honda was a 19-year-old from Concord, N.H., according to the police.

he Bronco was being driven by an adviser to Mr. Giuliani, Theodore Goodman.
That much is clear. The moments leading up to the crash are not.

Michael Ragusa, Mr. Guiliani’s head of security, said that the Bronco had been flagged down by a woman who was the victim of domestic violence. The former mayor called 911, waited for help to arrive, and then left, Mr. Ragusa said.

The state police confirmed the domestic violence incident, saying in a statement that it had occurred on a southbound stretch of the highway in Manchester, N.H. Troopers and fire officials who were assisting the woman saw the Honda strike the Bronco and rushed to help, the police said.

No good deed goes unpunished.

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I’m surprised she even bothered. The world indeed has changed.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

On a wisp of land in the Indian Ocean, two hops by plane and one bumpy speedboat ride from the nearest continent, the sublime blue waves lapping at the bone-white sand are just about all that breaks the stillness of a hot, windless afternoon.

The very existence of low-slung tropical islands seems improbable, a glitch. A nearly seamless meeting of land and sea, peeking up like an illusion above the violent oceanic expanse, they are among the most marginal environments humans have ever called home.

And indeed, when the world began paying attention to global warming decades ago, these islands, which form atop coral reefs in clusters called atolls, were quickly identified as some of the first places climate change might ravage in their entirety. As the ice caps melted and the seas crept higher, these accidents of geologic history were bound to be corrected and the tiny islands returned to watery oblivion, probably in this century.

Then, not very long ago, researchers began sifting through aerial images and found something startling. They looked at a couple dozen islands first, then several hundred, and by now close to 1,000. They found that over the past few decades, the islands’ edges had wobbled this way and that, eroding here, building there. By and large, though, their area hadn’t shrunk. In some cases, it was the opposite: They grew. The seas rose, and the islands expanded with them.

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Israel was fairly soft on Greta Thunberg following her first failed Gaza ‘aid mission.’ The Swedish eco-zealot-cum-Gaza activist-cum-“human trafficker” accepted deportation after reportedly refusing to watch a film documenting the atrocities of Hamas’ October 7th terror attack, while the tiny amount of aid she transported—just about enough for “maybe a dozen people,” according to some commentators—was transferred to Gaza through proper humanitarian channels.

But Benjamin Netanyahu’s team appears now to have run out of patience and is preparing a much tougher response to Thunberg’s latest endeavour to deter any future so-called “Palestine rescue missions.” Indeed, the activist has already threatened to “go back” if her expedition is again cut short by Israeli forces.

After Greta and co. left Spain on Sunday on the largest flotilla yet bound for Gaza, Israeli paper Israel Hayom reported that Netanyahu’s ministers are drawing up plans to put the activist in detention “under terrorist conditions” and to convert her ships into a police fleet.

They ought to turn her over to Hamas and see how long she would last.

Read it.

“These incidents do not occur where international officials live and work. They happen in the rotten areas of the city, in Anderlecht, in Molenbeek, in places like that,” Alain Hutchinson, Brussels’ commissioner for Europe and international organizations said in a recent interview, downplaying the wave of violence hitting the Belgian capital. He even claimed that in the European quarter, “we have never had this kind of problem” and that expats “have nothing to worry about.”

However, that discourse, intended to reassure the thousands of EU officials living in Brussels, apart from showing complete disregard for ordinary people, clashes head-on with the official data. Far from being confined to a handful of neighborhoods, violence is spreading across the city and has reached levels more akin to a town at war: since January, there have been 57 shootings, 20 of them in just three summer months.

The offensive classism draws a clear line between the lives of European officials and those of ordinary citizens who must learn to live with the increasingly deteriorating security situation in ‘the capital of Europe.’

Freeberg nails it.

The Director of the CDC is refusing to step down after Trump has fired her.

I’m picking up a pattern here, what with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass pledging not to be intimidated by President Trump…um…attempting to clean up her city?

Defiant liberals who refuse to be intimidated, are all over the place. We could use them as landfill. But I notice you haven’t got long to wait until you see the next one, being defiant, refusing to be intimidated. And I also notice they’re never up to anything good.

In fact, it occurs to me. When a duly elected President fires your ass, and you defiantly refuse to move out of there for whatever reason. That’s a “Deep State,” right? That’s what it is. Unaccountable to The People. Can’t dislodge it. Not going anywhere.

Are they really committed to these bad policies they want to keep going, by refusing to budge? Because if not, and all they really want to do is show how defiant and hard it is to intimidate them, maybe we could come up with some special environment like a deserted island, or an empty lot, over which they can do their ruling and reigning and whatever. Then out here in the real world, we could enact some sensible policies and lower the crime rate, with them out of the way. They could lord over their little bottle-worlds and continue to show anyone paying attention how defiant and not-intimidated they are.

Just an idea.

The Foundry.

The Left is obsessed with the idea that conservatives are the real book banners. California Democrat state Sen. Scott Weiner took to X recently to bash “MAGA” and assumedly Florida, accusing them of banning one of the most famous memoirs about the Holocaust.

“Florida banning the Diary of Anne Frank tells you everything you need to know about the MAGA movement,” Weiner wrote on X.

What? Florida banned the Diary of Anne Frank!? Say it ain’t so. As you probably already guessed, it ain’t so.

Read it.

A nineteen-year-old college student is suing her former high school for negligence because she graduated despite being unable to read or write.

She probably ought to sue her parents as well, since they were responsible for making sure that the school was doing its job.

The student, Aleysha Ortiz, graduated from Hartford Public Schools in the spring of 2024 with honors.

She earned a scholarship to attend the University of Connecticut, where she’s studying public policy. But while she was in high school, she had to use speech-to-text apps to help her read and write essays, and despite years of advocating for support for her literacy struggles, her school never addressed them.

She obviously had the intelligence to do well. The schools just dropped the ball, big-time.

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Outlets including the Associated Press and ProPublica accused Heather Honey of being an “election denier” for the doubts she has cast over the 2020 election outcome.

However, Honey’s supporters pointed to the fact that she has the receipts to back up her skepticism—including evidence that Pennsylvania, a hotbed for vote fraud by many accounts, finished with 121,240 more votes than voters.

“Receipts” is apparently the trendy slang term these days for documentary evidence.

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Financial markets have transformed; today, trading and speculation have merged into performance art. The “Meme Market” culture now permeates mainstream finance. There was once a time when CEOs reigned as icons leading powerful companies, but today, some executives who once managed companies now lead cults.

For example, Palantir, driven by “Palantarians,” rallied more than 100% this year. Its fans call CEO Alex Karp “Daddy?Karp.” Simultaneously, they ignore fundamentals, such as a 520x P/E ratio, a 12.9 PEG ratio, and a 108x price-to-sales. Yes, the company can certainly grow into some of that overvaluation, but most likely not all of it..

Another group remains unyielding to Michael Saylor, who heads up the one flailing company of MicroStrategy, which has been rebranded to just “Strategy,” to signify its new course of converting the company into a leveraged play on bitcoin. He regularly encourages his base with memes to further promote his leverage strategy. His followers congregate on Reddit and X under tags like “Irresponsibly?Long?$MSTR,” which tells you these investors have also disregarded fundamentals, like a 210x price-to-sales ratio, in favor of a “story.”

These are not investment conversations; they are fandom rituals.

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Tax-paying Americans have endured years of negative economic and social impacts from the illegal alien invasion facilitated under the Biden-Harris regime, which ultimately served their progressive billionaire friends, dark-money-funded far-left NGOs, and mega-globalist corporations.

No sane American voted for this invasion, yet Democrats allowed it to happen anyway – and many Americans have all suffered from the fallout, including one consequence still affecting tens of millions of working-class folks today: a housing affordability crisis fueled by the influx of millions of illegal third-worlders.

Adding millions of illegal third-worlders to the country through a manufactured invasion helped drive up the cost of housing and reduced affordability relative to wages in areas of heavy settlement, think of sanctuary states and sanctuary metro areas. Fiscally, illegals are a net drain – they create more in costs than they pay in taxes, such as soaking up government funds for public housing.

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In the US, gun deaths are often the focus of progressive and international criticism, with claims that the nation is a wellspring of violence and murder that could be solved simply by banning firearms. The disdain of the political left for the 2nd Amendment is no secret and their efforts to erase gun rights from the Constitution is a constant point of contention within American society.

Of course, this means that Democrats are required to ignore every other contributing factor to any shooting and deflect when they are confronted with inconvenient truths. Leftists are, once again, attempting to redirect public discourse as yet another trans shooter has hit the news feeds. The Minneapolis killer is one of at least five active shooters since 2018 that were confirmed as transgender.

Multiple other active shooter events have taken place in which the trans status of the killers was suspected but never revealed by authorities (authorities tried to hide Audrey Hale’s trans status and her manifesto, for example).

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Scientists have finally uncovered direct genetic evidence of Yersinia pestis — the bacterium behind the Plague of Justinian — in a mass grave in Jerash, Jordan. This long-sought discovery resolves a centuries-old debate, confirming that the plague that devastated the Byzantine Empire truly was caused by the same pathogen behind later outbreaks like the Black Death.

This is the first recorded pandemic, the Plague of Justinian, which occurred roughtly 550-660 AD. It devastated the Eastern Roman Empire and paved the way for the subsequent Muslim conquests.