DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.)

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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.

CNN, believe it or not.

In the early days of rail travel, passengers would either bring their own food or, if scheduled stops permitted, eat at station cafes. In Britain, for instance, meals were served in so-called railway refreshment rooms from the 1840s, though the quality was often questionable. Charles Dickens, a frequent traveler on the UK’s railroads, recounted a visit to one such establishment, where he purchased a pork pie comprising “glutinous lumps of gristle and grease” that he “extort(ed) from an iron-bound quarry, with a fork, as if I were farming an inhospitable soil.”

Check into how food is served on Amtrak. You’ll pick McDonald’s every time.

Nomad Capitalist.

Things are not looking good. Couple economic ignorance with confiscationist demagoguery and the current bloated national debt, the government is sticking its hands in your pockets and ‘our democracy’ is no protection.

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Every day brings another laboured press furore, over the latest bastion of British heritage to fall to the “woke” axe. This time it’s an iconic outlaw: news that the Nottingham Building Society has updated its brand, to remove the Robin Hood imagery it’s used since 1980. The press release boasts that the new abstract design celebrates something called “financial diversity”; Nottingham residents, meanwhile, expressed bewilderment at what, precisely, is so “outdated” about the folklore hero.

Was the Nottingham Building Society right to bin Robin Hood? Actually, yes. The sentimentally patriotic Robin of the Victorian era really is a museum piece today. But once we dig past this layer, to the vigorous, amoral spirit that animated earlier folklore tales of England’s most famous outlaw, what we learn is altogether bleaker. The rise and fall of Robin Hood tracks that of England’s backbone, in our historic “yeomanry”. And today it’s not so much that England has ditched Robin Hood, as that he’s ditched England.

Robin is much older than Victorian nationalist myth-making. His earliest written appearance is in the 14th-century poem Piers Plowman; but the context makes clear that by then he was already a well-known figure in songs and ballads. His folklore emerges in tandem with a new social class, and as a representative of that class: he’s always depicted not as a knight or bondsman, but a “yeoman”.

Popular mythology to the contrary notwithstanding, he did not ‘take from the rich and give to the poor’; he took oppressive taxes and fees back from government officials and gave them to the common people from whom they had been squeezed.

It’s easy to see why a progressive Labor government wants to erase him from public consciousness.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

ZMan explains it all to you.

Iran has been in the news lately and one of the interesting things about the coverage is Western media rarely talks about the president of Iran. In fact, almost all Iran stories skip the president entirely. This is highly unusual as Western media is conditioned to personify countries that are out of favor. The bad country becomes the ruler of that country and that ruler is always some form of Hitler. The closest they get with Iran is using a picture of the supreme leader in the copy.

One reason for this is Iran is a complicated place and Western media struggles with anything more complicated than the good guys versus bad guys narrative. Despite what most think, Iranian politics has factions and parties, with the winners being picked by the voters at fairly normal elections. Those factions and parties argue about all the usual things, including foreign policy. The current president ran on a platform of improving relations with the rest of the world.

The funny thing about Iran is that it has avoided what has happened with all prior revolutionary societies. They did not have rounds of purges or a great terror in which a strongman consolidated power. There is no cult of personality in the way most communist societies evolved. They are not dogmatically attached to a narrow set of economic policies. Instead, Iran has evolved into the world’s first explicitly democratic theocracy based in its form of Islam.

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Many green extremists seem to take the view that anything humans do, including growing their own veg, is causing existential harm to the planet. What they really hate, some may conclude, are humans themselves. Treble bongs all round.

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When all else failed, Kamala had one argument to fall back on. Race. It was the same argument that she deployed in the 2020 primaries against Joe Biden when she falsely claimed to have been saved from a life of racial segregation by being bused out of Berkeley. Not only did she know that her racebating was a lie, but during the vice presidential search committee interview, she was unapologetic about pulling a racial hoax in the hopes of winning an election.

“She laughed and said, ‘that’s politics.’ She had no remorse,” a committee member recalled.

But there was more to Kamala’s racism than just rhetoric.

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Creating unrest in Italy is not enough for the communist pro-Palestinian movement that has called for violent acts against Jews and friends of Israel. In their most recent statement, they share their ultimate goal which is to oust the conservative Meloni government and replace it with one that meets their extremist demands.

As Italian daily Il Giornale reports, the far-left Partito dei CARC (Committees to Support the Resistance for Communism) issued a statement on Monday, October 14th, vowing to strengthen their support for the “Palestinian resistance,” while also claiming that “war must also be fought in our country.”

The declaration was made after the government banned two pro-Palestinian rallies due to public security concerns. They were scheduled to take place on October 5th in Rome.

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A leading UK university has been strongly criticised for putting a trigger warning on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales advising students that the work contains “expressions of Christian faith.”

Critics say the University of Nottingham is “demeaning education” for warning students that the Medieval collection of stories of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury Cathedral may contain Christianity.

The Mail on Sunday obtained details of the “content notice” through a request made under Freedom of Information laws. The warning, which applies to a modular course called “Chaucer and His Contemporaries,” advises students of violence, mental illness, and “expressions of Christian faith” in the works of Chaucer, along with William Langland, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve—all of whom lived in the late 14th and early 15th centuries.

And CrimeThink patters in on little Woke feet….

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A group of ‘performative’ pro-Palestinian protesters swarmed the front of the New York Stock Exchange in Lower Manhattan this morning, demanding an end to Israel’s war in Gaza against terror organization Hamas and denouncing war profiteering by US defense firms like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. These protesters failed to realize that the NYSE is just one giant TV studio, and the real NYSE moved to New Jersey many years ago.

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An Abraham Lincoln statue in Chicago’s Lincoln Park was vandalized with red spray paint in the early morning hours of Monday or late Sunday night.

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You think the bankers are up to no good? No band of scoundrels has brought more chaos and grief to the life of this republic than the claque that gathers darkly under the banner of “Lawfare.” Its public face is Lawfaremedia.org, run by Benjamin Wittes a Brookings senior fellow, but that gang functions only to lend a false-front of decorum to the operations of its Democratic Party activist lawyer-army led by Field Marshal Marc Elias, architect of the ballot fraud that has caused Americans to lose faith in their elections.

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The scale of China’s espionage activities is at an unprecedented scale, sources told The Wall Street Journal.

China has mobilized security agencies, private companies, and Chinese civilians in its espionage activities with the goal of boosting its economy and undermining rival states, the Journal reported.

Last month, the FBI reported a Chinese firm hacked 260,000 internet-connected devices in the U.S., Britain, France, and other countries. Chinese cargo cranes used at U.S. seaports have embedded technology that could allow China to control them, according to a congressional probe.

Ars Technica.

Has your dentist ever told you that it’s recommended to get routine dental X-rays every year? My (former) dentist’s office did this year—in writing, even. And they claimed that the recommendation came from the American Dental Association.

It’s a common refrain from dentists, but it’s false. The American Dental Association does not recommend annual routine X-rays. And this is not new; it’s been that way for well over a decade.

The association’s guidelines from 2012 recommended that adults who don’t have an increased risk of dental caries (myself included) need only bitewing X-rays of the back teeth every two to three years. Even people with a higher risk of caries can go as long as 18 months between bitewings. The guidelines also note that X-rays should not be preemptively used to look for problems: “Radiographic screening for the purpose of detecting disease before clinical examination should not be performed,” the guidelines read. In other words, dentists are supposed to examine your teeth before they take any X-rays.

Which my dentist always does.

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I reported last night on an Iranian culture-enricher named Hassan A.N., who brought a gun to a cinema in the German city of Krefeld and attempted to set fire to the place, but was shot before he could succeed.

More details have emerged about the mischievous youngster: he has an extensive criminal record, has used multiple false identities, and has been arrested and released numerous times, despite his record of violent crimes.

Also: the police are certain that his acts do not constitute “terrorism”, because… wait for it… he is mentally ill.

I never saw that one coming.

As long as Islam exists, ‘jihadis’ will be a problem. It’s been that way for 1400 years, and there is no indication that it will change. Whether our Ruling Class will continue prating how ‘peaceful’ Muslims are while ignoring the mass murder, or whether they will wake up and decide to do something about it, is an exercise left for the reader.

Wall Street Journal.

Startup Kairos Power plans to build small reactors to help supply electricity to the tech company’s data centers, in a first-of-its-kind deal in the U.S.

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When Kathy Alexander started managing a lunch program at a Vermont school with 200 children in the late 1990s, she was shocked by how much the cafeteria felt like a business.

Her staff spent significant amounts of time on paperwork to track students’ incomes and collected money from kids at a cash register. They faced grueling decisions over whether they should raise prices and calculated the debts of families who barely missed out on eligibility for discounted meals yet struggled to pay the full price.

“Within a year I said to myself, ‘This is insane.’ What is happening? Why do I have to run this business in this school?” Alexander says.

Decades later, the model for Alexander, who’s now the director of the food service cooperative in the Mt. Abraham United School District, has changed. Vermont is one of eight states providing universal free meals to public K-12 students rather than charging different price points based on income. In lieu of onerous administrative work, Alexander’s staff spends more time brainstorming how to maximize federal dollars to support the program and trying out new recipes for pulled pork flatbread with pineapple sauce and Vietnamese rice bowls.

She wants universal free lunch to “sweep the country.”

I’m sure she does. She wants the whole country to become dependent on government-provided benefits — overseen by educrats such as herself.

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It’s not just in America that things are going crazy.

Edmund Burke: “The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do; before we risk congratulations.”

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A new image circulating on Chinese social media and subsequently on “X” (formerly Twitter) revealed more details on the new Type 09IIIB nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) produced at Chinese shipyard Bohai in Huludao for the Chinese Navy (PLAN). The image shows the new submarine underway, presumably taken from a boat or coastal location nearby. It is only the second ground-based photo of the new generation SSN, with previous imagery being exclusively satellite-sourced.

The new photo shows a very streamlined design, notably improved from earlier Type 09III-variants. Armament including the much speculated upon VLS remains obscured by inherent nature of perspective, submarine design and low fidelity of the image.

UPDATE: China’s Great Submarine Sinking: What We Know and Why It Matters

UPDATE: Submerged nuclear submarine of China: Testimony of its another failure (IANS Analysis)

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On 15 December 2021 Larry Lowe’s life changed.
He was 54, rarely ill, fit, healthy and running 10km most days – until he got the Pfizer Covid booster.
Within days he developed numbness in the right side of his face and started experiencing pain.
“I had lost all the feeling in my face, teeth, nose, tongue, eye, that whole side of my head,” he said.
These symptoms have spread through his body and intensified over the years, with doctors across the UK saying the vaccine is to blame.
Pfizer said patient safety was paramount and it took reports of adverse reactions very seriously.
It said hundreds of millions of doses had been administered globally “and the benefit-risk profile of the vaccine remains positive for all authorised indications and age groups”.
Mr Lowe said that while he was not opposed to vaccines, his life had been destroyed.

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In 2021, the Orthodox Union declined to put its kosher certification on Impossible Pork, even though similarly vegan “Impossible” foods — its burger, its chicken nuggets — carried the OU seal of approval.

“The Impossible Pork, we didn’t give an ‘OU’ to it, not because it wasn’t kosher per se,” said Rabbi Menachem Genack, the CEO of the Orthodox Union’s kosher division, told JTA at the time. “It may indeed be completely [kosher] in terms of its ingredients: If it’s completely plant-derived, it’s kosher. Just in terms of sensitivities to the consumer … it didn’t get it.”

It’s a delicate phrase, “sensitivities to the consumer,” that hints at a long and fraught history explored in Jordan D. Rosenblum’s new book, “Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig.” The “consumer” of course is the Jew, and those “sensitivities” are the result of a history that turned the pig not just into the ne plus ultra of the taboo, or treyf, in Judaism, but, as the symbol of what Jews do and don’t do, an inadvertent marker of Judaism itself.

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Cutting calorie intake can lead to a leaner body — and a longer life, an effect often chalked up to the weight loss and metabolic changes caused by consuming less food. Now, one of the biggest studies1 of dietary restrictions ever conducted in laboratory animals challenges the conventional wisdom about how dietary restriction boosts longevity.

The study, involving nearly 1,000 mice fed low-calorie diets or subjected to regular bouts of fasting, found that such regimens do indeed cause weight loss and related metabolic changes. But other factors — including immune health, genetics and physiological indicators of resiliency — seem to better explain the link between cutting calories and increased lifespan.

“The metabolic changes are important,” says Gary Churchill, a mouse geneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, who co-led the study. “But they don’t lead to lifespan extension.”

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Multiple recent stories offered more signs of what I consider to be an unfolding civilizational decline. First, a student in Hartford, CT, who had attended local public schools from age six, graduated from high school without knowing how to read or write. At all. She had used speech-to-text software to write her papers. After graduating on the honor roll, she is now enrolled at the University of Connecticut. She is also suing her former school district for educational neglect.

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I have previously written about how overstuffed with books and bookcases my family’s home is. In the midst of the (il)literacy crisis unfolding around us, I would like to propose an old-fashioned response: Home libraries will save civilization. Why? Because a home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.

OffGuardian.

Has anyone else noticed strange things happening? Odd things that seem out of place? Like more incidents of weird dopey driving or seeing more ambulances or fire trucks in the neighborhood? I have. But I don’t know if it is just due to my paranoia.

In preparation for this article, I did a Yandex search for: “Is personality and cognitive function affected by the Covid vaccine?”

I was astounded by the pages of related articles, some of the titles include:

“Scientists have confirmed that mRNA vaccinations ‘drastically alter’ the personalities of recipients due to extensive damage they do to the small capillaries in the brain,”

“Do the Covid vaccines affect your ability to think?” “We now have proof the Covid vaccines damage cognition,”

“Personality changes in vaxxed people,” and “Covid injections continue to provoke cognitive decline.”

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PBS is determined to squeeze every bit of anti-Trump animus out of a moderate Republican as they can in the weeks before the election, as demonstrated in Friday’s installment (the show airs on PBS after CNN International).

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The California Coastal Commission on Thursday rejected the Air Force’s plan to give SpaceX permission to launch up to 50 rockets a year from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County.

“Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” Commissioner Gretchen Newsom said at the meeting in San Diego.

The agency’s commissioners, appointed by the governor and legislative leaders, voted 6-4 to reject the Air Force’s plan over concerns that all SpaceX launches would be considered military activity, shielding the company from having to acquire its own permits, even if military payloads aren’t being carried.

Newsom (no relation to the Governor so far as I can tell) is one of those tiresome people who go directly from college into government employment and NGO ‘policy’ positions. Woke is their brand.

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His salary was $70,000 and his rent $2500 a month. That’s 43% of his salary, which is high for housing cost but, hey, it’s California. He want to live in Westwood and commute to school. I recommend he also wish for a pony, while he’s at it.

Considering what is being taught in California schools these days, I’d say he’s probably being paid what he’s worth.

If you can’t afford to live on what you make, it’s time to move. It’s not as if he were a Professor of Grievance Studies who can’t get a real job outside of the Left Coast.

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Before the global Covid-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, mRNA based vaccines had never been administered to the public outside of a single clinical trial that was not completed at the time. However, within the space of 9 months these experimental vaccines were administered to millions through an emergency use authorization (EUA).

…

The early scientific literature was biased, so as not to report SAEs, due to social and political concerns and overwhelming corporate greed. Only in the last year have scientists been able to publish articles that acknowledge a high number of SAEs linked to mRNA based vaccines. This should act as a warning that science should be completely objective when evaluating health risks, but can often be influenced by social and economic considerations.

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Gabagool, provalone, and vinegar peppers.

CNN.

Probably not the grave of Christopher Columbus. But you never know.

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According to Lieu, the gravity needed to hold some galaxies or clusters together might come from “shell-like topological defects.”

Topological defects are unique compact structures in space that have a high density of matter.

Such defects likely first occurred in the early universe during phase transition — an event during which matter throughout the universe goes through a major physical change.

This stuff makes my brain hurt, but I’m glad somebody is doing it.

Wall Street Journal.

One myth exposed by the strike is that unions need more economic and political power because they help the working man. The union behind this strike, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), helps some workers at the expense of countless others.

Start with the astounding fact that there were 50,000 or so ILA strikers but only 25,000 or so port jobs. That’s right, only about half of the union’s members are obliged to show up to work each day. The rest sit at home collecting “container royalties” negotiated in previous ILA contracts intended to protect against job losses that result from innovation.

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was in 2015. The book fetched gushing reviews, admiring interviews in prestigious media, won eminent literary prizes, and almost instantly landed on high school and college required reading lists all over the country.

The book’s rapturous reception, as I can’t be the first to note, rather undermined its central assertion that white Americans are natural-born racists and that the United States is and always has been rooted in white supremacy. A nation so constituted would have ignored Coates’s book, or suppressed it. I wondered at the time if he was made uncomfortable by all the praise or if he secretly hoped America’s cultural arbiters would denounce him and demand that bookstores and libraries remove his book from their shelves.

Evidently I was onto something. In The Message, the 49-year-old’s third memoir, Coates recalls hearing about a high school teacher named Mary Wood in Chapin, S.C., who had been sharply criticized by parents for having her students read Coates’s Between the World and Me. Plainly he had been waiting for such a moment: He recounts traveling to Chapin in order to attend the school board meeting in which Wood’s case would receive a hearing. At a previous meeting of this school board, parents had lined up to demand her firing, some claiming that her assignment violated a state budget proviso forbidding Critical Race Theory.

At the meeting, Coates no doubt hoped to witness a string of fat Southern ignoramuses denouncing his book. In the event, he’s obliged to say, all the speakers expressed support for the embattled teacher and her use of Between the World and Me. “No one, not a single speaker, stood up to support the book’s banning,” he writes. He explains this oddity by noting that “school board meetings, and local politics, are small affairs, easily dominated by an organized faction, and that night the faction was Mary’s.” Uh-huh.

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Being a black lesbian is all the achievement you need.

New York Times.

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