DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

His hand only has race cards, so he’s kinda stuck.

UPDATE: Memo to Obama: Race Remains Last Refuge of Scoundrels

Read it.

As if Nevada parents didn’t already have their hands full, including helping their children navigate the waters of adolescent sexuality. Now gender activists increasingly are using the public schools to lead students down a path their parents may know nothing about.

Nevada is hardly alone. Nearly 20,000 public schools across the country, attended by 11.5 million students, now have policies that cater to kids’ current sense of “gender identity” but that deliberately keep parents in the dark about that same thing.

The Elko County School District’s gender policy, like many others, defines “gender identity” as “a student’s inner sense of being male or female.” That sense might be nothing more than a fleeting feeling, prompted by a suggestion on social media, or a clinically significant diagnosis of gender dysphoria requiring medical intervention.

Moral: Don’t send your kid to a government school.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Gothamist.

For the first time in four years, New York City did not break a new record for drug overdose deaths in 2023, according to new city data released Thursday.

But while overdose deaths are down among some groups of New Yorkers, the figures show there’s been little progress in the hardest-hit communities. Black New Yorkers are still recording high rates of overdose deaths and rates increased in some low-income communities, according to city data, which advocates say is a stark reminder that these communities need more resources.

The city recorded 3,046 overdose deaths in 2023, down 1% from the previous year’s 3,070, according to the data. About 100 fewer white New Yorkers died of accidental drug overdoses in 2023 than in 2022, and the overdose death rate dropped 9% in the wealthiest city neighborhoods.

To be clear, these ‘overdose deaths’ are happening to PEOPLE WHO VOLUNTARILY TAKE ILLEGAL DRUGS. A drug overdose is not like rain, which droppeth on the just and the unjust alike; IT IS THE CONSEQUENCE OF A CHOICE. If a ‘community’ is ‘hardest-hit’, IT IS BECAUSE THAT COMMUNITY IS CHOCK FULL O’ DRUG USERS. This is like saying that a guy who puts a gun to his head is ‘hardest-hit’. This is not a ‘stark reminder that these communities need more resources’; it is a reminder that these ‘communities’ need FEWER DRUG USERS. Additional ‘resources’ will merely GO TO BUY MORE DRUGS, unless the root cause of the problem is addressed, which is ILLEGAL DRUG USE.

Unbelievable.

Fortune.

Wealthy U.S. citizens are more likely to support Vice President Kamala Harris over former President Donald Trump in this year’s presidential election. But regardless of who wins in November, more and more millionaires are looking for a backup plan to escape the political environment in the U.S. through golden passport and citizenship by investment programs.

Gee, I wonder why?

The survey finds that while Harris commands a “strong lead” over Trump amongst these wealthy citizens—52% support the VP compared to 42% for Trump—many still report that they are looking for more economic opportunities abroad.

Any problems are the result of Biden/Harris policies. What’s not to like?

Americans Are Fleeing With Their Wealth (Nomad Capitalist)

ZMan looks behind the curtain, with popcorn.

Yesterday, internet activist Christopher Rufo posted on Twitter a long post denouncing, disavowing and anathematizing someone named Chris Brunet. Apparently, Brunet used to work for Rufo or maybe they were friends, but Rufo now finds that old association inconvenient to his current relationships and career choices, so he decided to do the predictable thing and denounce Brunet. It is a weird form of public piety that the conservatives inherited from communism.

For those of a certain age, this is familiar stuff. While the format is different from the old days of conservatism, the act is the same. That post reads like a Twitter version of Bill Buckley’s denunciation of Pat Buchanan thirty years ago. Interestingly, that famous essay is nowhere to be found online, but the book version is still available. Imagine someone writing a forty-thousand-word essay denouncing someone then being so proud of it that he turned it into a book.

That is the first notable thing about this bit of drama. Those familiar with the history of conservatism recognize this performance. The person putting on the show is doing it for an audience that is never named, but always assumed. The stated audience is either credulous, incredulous or confused by the performance. Everything about this age is a reboot, especially the stuff that emanates from the political class, so the “new right” is just a low-budget reboot of the old right.

Read it.

Over the years, the critics of the United Nations have multiplied in number. Its inability to be effective, to act with integrity, its anti-Semitic actions and its refusal to intervene in some of the world’s worst tragedies are well-known. Some people would say that it does accomplish some things, such as data collection and sharing, but its most prominent councils and agencies are fraught with political agendas and ineptitude.

The U.N.: As ineffective as the League of Nations but far more expensive. Not bad for a body that had Alger Hiss as its organizer.

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V?ra Jourová, the EU’s outgoing Commission Vice President for Values and Transparency decided to show what true EU ‘values’ were with a ranting parting shot. True to form, she went on a moralizing rant against free speech—and a certain billionaire who holds it dear.

In an interview with Politico, published on Wednesday, October 16th, Jourová went as far as to brand Elon Musk, the owner of X, a “promoter of evil” just because he turned the platform formerly known as Twitter into one of the internet’s last remaining hubs of freedom of expression following years of insidious censorship tactics employed primarily against conservatives by the previous management.

Unlike other Silicon Valley tech bosses, Musk “is not able to recognize the difference between good and evil,” the Commissioner asserted. A more appropriate question would be whether she herself is able to differentiate between free speech and hate speech.

And here I thought that the old Soviet Union was dead. Foolish me. “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can ever imagine.”

Read it.

Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the deadliest attack on Israel in its history, was killed in a shootout with Israeli forces, Israeli officials reportedly have said.

Kan, Israel’s government-run radio network, quoted senior official sources as saying that DNA testing confirmed that the Hamas chief was one of three terrorists killed in a shootout Thursday with Israeli forces in Rafah, the city on the Gaza-Egypt border.

Israeli officials would not confirm the report to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The army had earlier said that it was seeking to confirm whether a slain man resembling Sinwar was indeed the terrorist leader.

The wage of sin is death.

Read it.

Almost a month after the murder of 19-year-old Philippine in the Bois de Boulogne near Paris, the main suspect, a Moroccan living illegally in France, is still in Switzerland, where he has just refused extradition to France. The proceedings could drag on for many more months.

Well, duh.

A few days after the death of the young woman, the suspect, Taha O., a 22-year-old Moroccan already convicted of rape and facing deportation at the time of the killing, was arrested in Switzerland at Geneva station, where he was on the run. He was to be extradited to stand trial in France.

France filed a simplified extradition request on October 9th, i.e., 15 days after the events; the maximum deadline being 18 days—a delay considered shocking by many, since it risked the early release of the suspect by the Swiss authorities.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

Read it.

French essayists Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern, who denounced the evils of transgender ideology in their book Transmania, have been forced to cancel a conference scheduled for October 22nd in Brussels after being subjected to violent threats from the extreme Left. This is not the first time they have been intimidated into silence. On this occasion, they felt that the risk to their safety was too great.

The two women made headlines with the publication of their essay in April 2024, denouncing the assault on Western society by the transgender lobbies. Since then, they have held a series of conferences to alert the public to the risks posed by these activists to children and teenagers, as well as to freedom of expression and women’s rights. On several occasions, the venues where the events were to be held have suffered serious damage. On a personal level, they have received death threats and are now travelling under police protection.

One of their scheduled conferences in Versailles recently had to be cancelled at the request of the intended venue. Stern and Moutot had planned to hold another conference in Brussels on October 22nd, at the initiative of the Café Laïque—founded by renowned academic Florence Bergeaud-Blacker, herself a regular victim of censorship. This time, they decided to cancel it themselves in the face of mounting threats.

Read it.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has reportedly fired about 24 staff at its Los Angeles offices for using their $25 (£19) meal credits to buy items such as toothpaste, laundry detergent and wine glasses.

The tech firm, which is worth £1.2tn and also owns the messaging platform WhatsApp, is said to have dismissed workers last week after an investigation discovered staff had been abusing the system, including sending food home when they were not in the office.

That included one unnamed worker on a $400,000 salary, who said they had used their meal credits to buy household goods and groceries such as toothpaste and tea.

And this is exactly what will happen to recipients of Universal Basic Income if they spend it on not-government-approved stuff. He who pays the piper calls the tune. (Markets work even when you don’t want them to.)

Read it.

What’s a medical drug? Ask someone on the street and they’re likely to tell you it’s the kind of thing you take when you’re unwell.

This understanding is wrong, as we will see. But after a thorough investigation, my colleagues and I found no other potential definitions are any better.

Despite their centrality to medicine, we have no idea what medical drugs are. We can’t even tell the difference between drugs and food, let alone drugs and so-called “natural” alternatives.

A drug is a substance that is taken (or put) into the body in anticipation of its having a chemical effect (typically beneficial) on that body.

Ask me a hard one.

The New Yorker.

The ascent of the cassette caused a major freak-out among record-company executives. Nearly anyone who has ever bought vinyl will be familiar with the cassette-and-crossbones image that was for many years printed on record sleeves, accompanied by the dire warning: “Home taping is killing music.” On both sides of the Atlantic, the recording industry sought, futilely, to make the duplication of music on cassette tapes illegal. Other proposals included a compensatory tax on blank tapes. A member of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers even went so far as to equate cassettes with recreational drug use: “Very soon it becomes a hobby. And after it becomes a hobby, it becomes a habit.” None of those strategies blunted the popularity of the cassette tape. As Masters observes, the “perception that home taping was illegal or at least immoral . . . succeeded in making tapes seem even cooler and more rebellious.”

The cassette rubbed everybody’s nose in the fact that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, merely a government-enforced artificial monopoly that is increasingly more impossible to enforce.

Read it.

I’ve been working from home since long before the pandemic. It’s been almost 10 years of partial ‘wfh’ and 6 years of full time ‘wfh’ for me, and frankly I don’t see it ever changing on my end, without threats of physical violence or bags of money.

Some folks really missed the office social club when the shutdown happened, and I get that. But being a ‘tech person’ who needs to focus on things in a deep way, and having to share some open plan office space with a hundred other people every day… The two things just don’t mix well. In addition, being in the DevOps/SRE space means that I often need space to bang my head against the wall (figuratively of course) or yell out about the injustice of yet another bug in a Terraform provider that I don’t have the time to upgrade from.

There’s just no way the tradeoff of going back to an office would work for me. Lets look at the two sides here from my perspective and see how it might compare to yours:

Read it.

Many have discovered an argument hack. They don’t need to argue that something is false. They just need to show that it’s associated with low status. The converse is also true: You don’t need to argue that something is true. You just need to show that it’s associated with high status. And when low status people express the truth, it sometimes becomes high status to lie.

In the 1980s, the psychologists Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo developed the “Elaboration Likelihood Model” to describe how persuasion works. “Elaboration” here means the extent to which a person carefully thinks about the information. When people’s motivation and ability to engage in careful thinking is present, the “elaboration likelihood” is high. This means people are likely to pay attention to the relevant information and draw conclusions based on the merits of the arguments or the message. When elaboration likelihood is high, a person is willing to expend their cognitive resources to update their views.

Read it.

While one could interpret “Science” as referring to the epistemological concept of methodologies employed to discern truths, this seems incongruous in our particular context. Instead, “Science” seems to serve as a shorthand for a collective body of research: observations, experiments, and models related to climate change. This body of research presumably “tells us that the sooner we respond to climate change, the lower the risks and the costs will be in the future.”

Additionally, “Science” as used here goes beyond the descriptive by implying an ethical obligation to act in a certain way. This violates Hume’s is/ought distinction providing “Science” with a religious character. Blurring the distinction between science and religion (between descriptive and normative claims) leads to the “Believe The Science” disaster observed over the last few years.

Linguistically, “Science” is presented as the acting entity in the sentence. Rewriting the beginning of the sentence, “Science tells us” as “We have been told by Science” highlights how strange and ridiculous it is to have “Science” as the main actor (although, note, that it makes sense if you replace “Science” with “God”).

Read it.

Faced with a housing shortage, Los Angeles once had a solution. From the San Fernando Valley to Culver City to La Cienega Heights, developers in the 1950s and ’60s tore down thousands of older buildings and filled in virtually every square foot with aggressively economical two- or three-story apartment complexes — known locally as dingbats.

Subdivided into as many units as the lots could accommodate — usually between 6 and 12 — most of these stucco boxes left little room outdoors, except for an exposed carport slung beneath the second floor. This new format for affordable multifamily living became nearly as ubiquitous as the single-family tract housing that iconified the much-mythologized Southern California suburban lifestyle.

American Sociological Review.

How do elites signal their superior social position via the consumption of culture? We address this question by drawing on 120 years of “recreations” data (N = 71,393) contained within Who’s Who, a unique catalogue of the British elite. Our results reveal three historical phases of elite cultural distinction: first, a mode of aristocratic practice forged around the leisure possibilities afforded by landed estates, which waned significantly in the late-nineteenth century; second, a highbrow mode dominated by the fine arts, which increased sharply in the early-twentieth century before gently receding in the most recent birth cohorts; and, third, a contemporary mode characterized by the blending of highbrow pursuits with everyday forms of cultural participation, such as spending time with family, friends, and pets. These shifts reveal changes not only in the contents of elite culture but also in the nature of elite distinction, in particular, (1) how the applicability of emulation and (mis)recognition theories has changed over time, and (2) the emergence of a contemporary mode that publicly emphasizes everyday cultural practice (to accentuate ordinariness, authenticity, and cultural connection) while retaining many tastes that continue to be (mis)recognized as legitimate.

Read it.

100 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the high desert of California’s Antelope Valley lies the blueprint of a city. But the blueprint isn’t drawn on paper — it’s etched into the sand.

Miles and miles of unpaved roads are carved into the eastern half of California City, intersecting and folding into themselves only to bottom out into empty cul de sacs. Even though there are no houses in sight, the roads are marked with street signs — with names like Lincoln Boulevard, Rutgers Road and Aristotle Drive — that stand among the prickly creosote bushes.

Aside from the dusty roads and the telephone poles, the only interruptions to the landscape are old signs advertising land for sale. Some have fallen off of their wooden posts and lie flat on the sand.

Another famous victory for central planning.

Read it.

According to research, walking backwards can have surprising benefits for both your physical health and your brain, as Michael Mosley recently explored in a recent episode of the BBC podcast and Radio 4 show Just One Thing.

Retro-walking, as walking backwards is known in academic circles, has a rich history. There are reports dating back to the early 19th Century of people walking hundreds, and sometimes thousands of miles, in reverse. Many were the result of impulsive bets and others were simply attempts to claim the bragging rights to a bizarre new record.

But due to the difference in biomechanics, backwards walking can actually bring some physical benefits. It is often used in physiotherapy to relieve back pain, knee problems and arthritis. Some studies even suggest that backwards walking can positively affect cognitive abilities such as memory, reaction time and problem-solving skills.

Financial Times.

Americans have been wagering on presidential elections since George Washington and doing so in organised markets since at least Abraham Lincoln. More than a century ago, in the hotels and billiard halls of old New York and on the streets outside its stock exchanges, citizens swarmed to place bets on their next political leaders. Glorified bookies offered prices shifting with demand and kept healthy cuts for themselves.

In an era before scientific polling, these markets served a unique purpose — forecasting. Major newspapers would report their prices daily during the campaigns, as a barometer of the electorate. Modern scholarship finds that these early markets were remarkably accurate, with more predictive power than any other readily available source.

Prediction markets show that markets work. As Hayek loved to show, markets encapsulate everything that there is to be known about a comparative relationship, expressed as a price. This is a fundamental building block of economics, one of the first thing that students of economics are taught (however much their socialist professors later walk it back with handwaving about ‘market failures’).

But economics is always downstream from politics. No society has ever dared to allow fully free markets to operate, because the result would always put some politician’s panties in a wad (along with those of his constituency). So they have to Make Shit Up about how markets can be manipulated, how markets are inherently evil, etc. etc., which is bullshit–markets are neither good nor evil, any more than gravity is good or evil. Markets exist because they are the result of humans trading, which humans will find a way to do no matter what devices their ruling class use to eradicate them. (The term ‘black market’ is just a recognition of this fact, a smear that the ruling class uses to cast shade on a normal human activity.)

Read it.

“Former President Barack Obama sternly chided Black men over ‘excuses’ to not vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” ABC News reports. This recalls Joe Biden’s charge that blacks “ain’t black” if they failed to support the Delaware Democrat. On the left being “black” is a matter of politics, and that recalls one of the many attacks on author Thomas Sowell.

Back in the 1990s Clinton civil rights pick Lani Guinier charged that Sowell was not authentically black because he failed to support affirmative action. Sowell, author of The Economics and Politics of Race and many other books, shot back,  “I don’t need some half-white woman from Martha’s Vineyard telling me about being black.”  In 2024, nobody needs a half-white former president from Martha’s Vineyard telling them anything.

As David Garrow confirmed, his Dreams from My Father was a novel, not an autobiography or memoir. For Tablet’s David Samuels, “there was something about this “fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now.” The composite character played a divide-and-con game. No scandals in his administration and under Obamacare you could keep your doctor and your health plan. As his recent orders to black men confirm, the prodigious liar hasn’t lost his touch.

Read it. And watch the video.

For some years, it has been a basic political reality that Democrats have a hard time getting men to vote for them. This is the “gender gap.” This year, the gap seems to be wider than ever, and there has been hand-wringing among Democrats about the fact that the Harris-Walz ticket has little appeal for men, in particular minority men, who are gravitating toward Trump.

This ad is the result. It is comical in so many ways that I won’t try to list them. The men in the ad are laughable stereotypes, and the creators of the ad seem to view men as an alien species.

…

We can only hope that as many men as possible see it.

Read it.

A commemoration in Amsterdam of the October 7 massacre by Hamas brought the Jew-haters out of the woodwork — a coalition of culture-enriching Islamics and leftists/greens/commies, similar to what is happening on college campuses in the USA.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

Read it.

It seems oddly mediaeval to convict a man for his prayers.

But the British courts have defied all reasonable expectations of modern democracy by convicting a man for doing just that on the streets of Bournemouth.

Adam Smith-Connor is a military veteran who served his country in the reserves in Afghanistan. As part of his medical training, he participated in 30 abortions in 2003—actions he now deeply regrets. Adam converted to Christianity in later life, and is now deeply committed to prayer on the issue. In November 2022, he stopped to pray for a few minutes, in silence, near an abortion facility, remembering a time he had paid for an ex-girlfriend to abort his own child.

Read it.

Over the last year, Israel has decimated Hamas’s regime in the Gaza Strip. The terrorist organisation showed no remorse after its invasion of Israel last October. Of course, the victorious proclamations that followed the massacres in Israeli settlements soon turned to pathetic protestations of victimhood when Benjamin Netanyahu’s government struck back. Over the last year, the IDF has systematically dismantled and routed Hamas’s military capabilities, yet the concern now is what comes next, as Egypt has deployed its military along the Gaza border to prevent any refugees from leaving. This could have left the Israelis in a familiar situation, able to defeat the enemy, yet having to wait for the problem to reemerge once again. The idea of Palestinians being moved to other Islamic countries is considered a faux pas in polite company, so this has never been discussed seriously as an option. Thankfully, Netanyahu’s government—unlike previous conflicts against Hamas—have finally implemented lasting change. They have split the Gaza strip into several zones, which will prevent Islamists from re-arming, whilst allowing food and other commodities through checkpoints.

This policy is shaped by the realisation that Israel’s calculations have now changed. The delusion that they could live next to territory controlled by Hamas has been shattered, and no prime minister who presides over a similar invasion will be forgiven. With this in mind, Netanyahu’s government voted in late August to keep troops in the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow strip of land 100 yards wide and nine miles long, which runs parallel to the Egyptian border. This will allow a robust control of the border areas and make tunnelling very difficult for any remaining militants.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it becomes true.

(Of course, the ‘if’ in the headline ought to be ‘whether’, but I’ve given up expecting people who write for publication to use the language properly.)

Gothamist.

New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams is opening a new front in the battle between an increasingly diminished mayor and an emboldened city legislature — setting up the potential to change the balance of power in City Hall.

The speaker plans to introduce a bill that would allow the City Council to initiate its own commission tasked with proposing changes to the City Charter, which is essentially the city’s constitution, according to three Council officials who requested anonymity to discuss closed-door talks during the Democratic conference.

While it’s still unclear what the commission would prioritize beyond seeking to improve transparency and good governance, the Council has been pushing for a larger say over mayoral appointments, similar to U.S. Senate confirmations of high-level federal officials and existing practices in large cities like Chicago.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

Surgeons at the University of California, San Diego have been testing the Apple Vision Pro for surgeries, and have performed more than 20 minimally invasive operations while wearing the headsets. Surgeon and director of the Center for Future Surgery at UCSD, Santiago Horgan, recently spoke with Time to provide some commentary on the Vision Pro’s performance.

The Register.

On Wednesday, Amazon announced plans to support the development of three new nuclear energy projects, which it says will see the construction of several new small modular reactors (SMRs).

Just as their name suggests, SMRs are miniaturized nuclear power plants designed to be mass produced in a modular fashion. Amazon touts “faster build times” and the ability to deploy them “closer to the grid” as major benefits.

While there are several startups developing SMRs, including NuScale and Sam Altman-backed Oklo, Amazon is betting big on X-energy’s SMR tech for the Washington development. The e-tailer is one of the major investors in a $500 million Series-C funding intended to accelerate the development of X-energy’s tech and will reportedly support its goal of bringing more than 5 gigawatts of SMRs online in the US by 2039.

Naval News.

The Ultra Heavy-Lift Amphibious Connector (UHAC) was a revolutionary half-scale amphibious tractor test prototype that used foam flotation pad blocks on its tracks to tread over water and land. In 2014, it was a revolutionary new way of moving Marine Corps vehicles from ship to shore, as a cargo deck was between the two gigantic tracks. But what happened to the UHAC, and why hasn’t it been tested since 2014 or entered active U.S. Marine Corps service?

Read it.

Imagine a realm where the effects of cannabis extend beyond the mind, reaching deep into your DNA.

As potent strains of weed become increasingly popular, new research reveals that these powerful substances may not only elevate your mood but also influence genetic expression.

This intriguing intersection of cannabis and genetics invites us to explore how the highs of today can spark transformations at a molecular level, promising a future where smoking weed could truly change the essence of who we are.

Read it.

A series of recently published opinions and letters in JAMA Internal Medicine present varying perspectives on the current state of US dental care all emphasize the need for evidence-based practices and changes in economic models.

The conversation kicked off in the July issue when Paulo Nadanovsky, DDS, Ph.D. and colleagues presented “Too Much Dentistry,” arguing that dental diseases and procedures are highly prevalent, costly, and often exceed spending on other major health conditions such as diabetes and hypertension.

They suggest that dental care in the U.S. is driven more by economic pressures and patient trust than clinical evidence, leading to excessive diagnoses and interventions.

Read it.

The Pentagon is stating that B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, along with other U.S. forces, conducted a strike on Houthi underground weapon storage sites in Yemen. This it the first operational strike mission for the Spirit in years and the first into Yemen. It sends a very specific and powerful message that only the B-2 can to the Houthis’ benefactor, Iran. It also occurred on what appears to be the precipice of an unprecedented Israeli retaliation strike. As to why the B-2 was used against the Houthis, who have only rudimentary air defenses, we will address that in a moment, but it was by design a very ominous and potentially historic act that might have featured the first use of an incredibly rare weapon. Even if it did not, the message was the same.

Read it.

Four years ago today a French schoolteacher named Samuel Paty was beheaded by a confused youngster of the Islamic persuasion. In this case, I’m not just being facetious when I refer to Abdoullakh Anzorov as a “youngster”, since the Chechen migrant was just eighteen years old when he lopped a head for Allah while yelling “Allahu Akhbar” (which is Arabic for “I feel marginalized by a racist society”).

In the following video, Samuel Paty’s sister Mickaëlle Paty talks about the traumatic moment when she learned of her brother’s death, and her subsequent visit to the morgue to view his body.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if only the Religion of Peace did not exist.

Read it.

In 1964 a Labour Party minister for education whose name is largely forgotten and truly deserves to be, so he’ll remain nameless here, instructed local education authorities to reorganise secondary schooling along comprehensive lines. Like dutiful sheep, they mostly did.

Our current minister for education, Bridget Phillipson, is now up to her neck in an equally catastrophic rearrangement of the nation’s educational deckchairs.

By the time she is finished, if she is allowed to continue, and that is far from certain given the astounding level of ignorance about the schools landscape she has exhibited so far; her predilection for lavish birthday parties and misuse of laughably politicised research; UK State schools will be reduced to walk-in therapy centres and cafes, delivered by technology instead of skilled teachers.

Every so often British voters upchuck a Labor government, just to remind everybody that, however bad the Conservatives might be, things can always get worse.

Read it.

An army veteran has today been convicted for praying silently near an abortion clinic.

Adam Smith-Connor, who served in Afghanistan, was prosecuted for breaching a ban on protests within a buffer zone around a clinic in Bournemouth, Dorset, in November 2022. His head was bowed and hands were clasped as he prayed for his unborn son Jacob, whom he now regrets aborting more than two decades ago.

Reporting on the case, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) legal advocacy group said the conviction was “the first known conviction of a ‘thoughtcrime’ in modern British history.”

It added that Smith-Connor must now pay £9,000 (€10,770) in legal costs to the prosecution, just for praying in his head for three minutes.

Read it.

A new contract has revealed the British Labour government doesn’t believe its own rhetoric on illegal migration, and that Channel crossings will go unstopped for at least another ten years.

Prime minister Keir Starmer has described stopping the small boats—by “smashing the gangs” rather than deterring the migrants themselves—as a priority. Yet the Home Office is now seeking commercial partners to run two large facilities that will receive and process illegal migrants from January 2026, potentially until 2036.

Read it.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled against Germany following a routine deportation to Greece. Germany was instructed to make an €8,000 compensation payment to the plaintiff, in what the NiUS news site called a “crazy” decision.

Back in 2018, German authorities made an arrest on their border with Austria. A Syrian asylum seeker was arrested and deported on the same day. Strasbourg subsequently condemned Germany for this action, with judges deciding that the German authorities failed to ensure that the refugee received a suitable asylum procedure on arrival in Greece.

Likewise, according to the ruling, Germany did not do enough to prevent the plaintiff’s potential mistreatment in Greece.

Read it.

Across the Western world, the Culture of Death is expanding its borders, casting its grim shadow across an ever-growing population of weak, vulnerable, and disabled peoples. Norway is proposing to expand abortion to include babies up until 18 weeks gestation; Denmark has just done the same. After Poland’s legislators voted down a plan to legalize abortion, the nation’s rogue coalition government simply changed the rules by fiat to facilitate feticide anyway. France made abortion a “constitutional right” earlier this year. The UK government is fast-tracking a vote on assisted suicide, which was rejected by Parliament nine years ago. The list goes on.

It was predictable that as the West advanced into the post-Christian era, prohibitions on killing human beings rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic would fall away. Westerners no longer have a basis for believing in the ‘sanctity of human life’ because they no longer have a basis for the sanctity of anything. Academics and medical professionals now make the case for the pre-Christian practice of infanticide openly, and explicitly cite residual Christian values as the only reason we have not yet embraced it. As Louise Perry, who is reluctantly “pro-choice,” observed in her First Things essay “We Are Repaganizing”.

“Hey, there’s a demographic crisis; we’re not having enough kids to replace our population, which is shrinking as a result.”

“Okay, how about we kill unborn babies and maybe small children,  plus old and sick people.”

Sure, that ought to solve the problem.

Federal Trade Commission.

The Federal Trade Commission today announced a final “click-to-cancel” rule that will require sellers to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up. Most of the final rule’s provisions will go into effect 180 days after it is published in the Federal Register.

“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” said Commission Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

Good luck with that.

Read it.

Apple Vision Pro is being praised by surgeons for its high resolution images and its ergonomics, which may even save them injuries that now lead to early retirement.

Since its launch in February 2024, the Apple Vision Pro has already been used by surgeons in the US, and across the globe. Now the first surgeon to ever perform a robotically assisted gastric-bypass operation, is now a proponent of the Apple Vision Pro both for patients and surgeons.

Santiago Horgan heads the Center for the Future of Surgery at UC San Diego, and told Time magazine that the Apple Vision Pro is more significant than the robot tool he used in 2000. “This is the same level of revolution, but will impact more lives because of the access to it,” he says.

Read it.

Tesla’s bulky and sharp-cornered Cybertruck is a disaster waiting to happen, the safety organizations claim.

Why are the safety orgs so worried about Tesla’s truck? I guess it’s because it seems so obviously dangerous. “The Cybertruck fails to meet a range of basic European road safety norms that apply to passenger cars (M1),” the letter notes. “As outlined below, these range from the Cybertruck’s inadequate, or non-existent, crumple zones for crash absorption to its sharp edges.”

One of the relevant concerns regarding the Cybertruck are its sharp, angular corners, which look like they were built to shiv cyclists. Wired writes that the same driver who imported the Tesla truck to the Czech Republic has attempted to get around local regulations regarding angular car design by affixing slim rubber bumpers to the vehicle’s four corners, thus allowing them to technically skate through regulatory vetting. The groups warn that this particular rubber modification could lead to the “mass import of Cybertrucks into Europe” and that the Czech Republic “risks becoming a back-door channel to trans-ship such dangerous vehicles to other Member States.”

Read it.

Razor wire fences, galvanized spikes and electrified perimeters: the barriers that entomb the ultra-rich in their walled settlements isolate them from perpetual violence and societal collapse.

He says that like it was a bad thing.

It’s not rich people who are stirring up ‘perpetual violence’.

It’s not rich people who are fostering ‘societal collapse’.

They’re the ones being expected to pay for everything while apologizing for being able to. They are the sheep being perpetually fleeced. I think that fences, galvanized spikes, and electrified perimeters are a very rational response.

Huffington Post. (Of course.)

This kind of ‘female-entitlement’ attitude is at the root of a lot of today’s problems.

I became a single mother seven years ago. I ended my marriage because I simply wasn’t happy, wasn’t in love and believed I deserved to feel fulfilled. I didn’t want to merely exist in life or in my most important relationship. I wanted to be my authentic self. I wanted more.

This is why over 50% of marriages end in divorce, and over 80% of divorces are initiated by women. (Lesbian ‘marriages’ have the same problems.) The modern woman is a thoroughgoing Disney Princess: It’s all about her, she’s the prize, she deserves the Handsome Prince who will sweep her off her feet and deliver her to that great castle in the sky where she will be waited on hand and foot and be beautiful and adored forever after. When reality breaks into this fantasy, they continue on their hypergamous quest; whatever they had, even though that’s what they chose, isn’t good enough. As the author bluntly says, she wants more. She believes that she ‘deserves to feel fulfilled’.

She might want to wish for a pony while she’s at it.

My estranged husband and I divided our things and worked out a custody arrangement. I worried about the criticism I’d receive for making what still so often feels like an unpopular choice. I wondered if I’d be able to support myself and my kids. But I didn’t worry about dating, or whether it would be hard or scary. I didn’t worry about never finding someone or being alone for the rest of my life — not once.

After all, she’s a Disney Princess. Hot rich guys are just lined up to submit their applications. All she has to do is hang out the OPEN sign.

I had flings and some relationships, none which lasted very long. But each time I dusted myself off and returned to the apps — the place where most romantic connections begin these days — I started to feel a greater and greater sense of dread. It wasn’t exactly that I had grown tired of meeting people. It was that I started to feel as if I was no longer what a growing number of men were looking for.

Men aren’t looking for a Disney Princess. They’re looking for a wife, someone who will be a homemaker and a mother and a member of their team. They’re not looking for a diva. This is the harsh reality that they can never wrap their heads around. They’re also looking for someone quite a bit younger and more fertile with a lot less mileage. Don’t blame me–blame evolution.

Whether they were 28 or 58, they all claimed to want someone who “doesn’t take herself too seriously.” I saw the line again and again, on profile after profile. Bumble, Hinge, Tinder or The Stir (the dating app for single parents), it was all the same: This unserious woman request was everywhere. I couldn’t swipe through five profiles without seeing it. Each time I’d furrow my brow and spit out, “Nope!” Still, after the past few years spent mostly alone, I started to ask myself, am I just too serious?

No, that was code for ‘I don’t want a self-centered shrew’, which this woman obviously is. (The also don’t want a ‘single mother’, because they have no interest in raising somebody else’s child. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

As long as she keeps her focus on what she wants rather than on what the men she’s trying to attract want, she’s going to wind up alone.

Financial Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The rapid rise in billionaires has disrupted what it means to be part of the moneyed elite.

The monetary definition has shifted significantly, reflecting not just the growth in wealth globally, but also the changing expectations of what it takes to be considered part of this elite group.

Not mentioned: The rapid rise of inflation has eroded the actual value of ‘money’ by 90% just within my lifetime. (In 1933, when FDR stole all of the gold, an ounce of gold was worth $20. Today, an ounce of gold — let me check — is worth $2682.10. So a dollar today buys what a penny would buy in 1933.)

Read it.

Cutting calories and habitually holding off on meals just might be a winning strategy for stretching out your years, though terms and conditions may apply.