DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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I am the father of two young daughters. They are more precious to me than everything else in the universe combined. I would die for them without a moment’s hesitation, and consider myself honoured to have been given the opportunity. Right now, they are being stolen from me before my eyes, and it is not obvious what I can do about it.

I shall refrain from sharing the details of my unhappy marriage, except to say this: I have done everything in my power to avoid a divorce. Coming from a psychology background, I am only too aware of the deleterious effects that would have on my children, no matter how civil the split. Fatherless children in particular perform poorly on almost every metric, including education, poverty, child pregnancy, drug use, abuse, and prison. This coupled with the excruciating realisation that I would not be there for them when they most needed me, and instead would find themselves at the mercy of whatever third-rate surrogate I am supplanted by. My plan therefore for years has been to hold on until my daughters were adults, and then get the hell out.

That option has been taken off the table now, because my wife has filed for divorce herself. The demands made are interesting: 100% of the family assets (despite my wife having never worked throughout the marriage), a large compensation payment for ‘damages’ (ludicrous, if you knew the circumstances), a healthy alimony cheque and worst of all, sole custody of the children. Seeing as there is zero chance of this being awarded (even in the misandrist hell of the divorce court), manoeuvres were necessary. And they have been deployed exhaustively.

This is why men aren’t getting married any more. Women have no one to blame but themselves.

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German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock is following in the footsteps of other leftist-liberal politicians who wish to crack down on “disinformation,” i.e., censor free speech on social media in order to “protect democracy.”

On Monday, September 30th, Baerbock called on the European Commission to adopt new rules for dealing with disinformation on social networks. Once again, “disinformation” is being used as the official label for news or views that the European establishment doesn’t want its citizens to see or hear.

The foreign minister cited targeted attacks on democracy as her motive, saying fake news, hatred and agitation were “disintegrating our democratic reality.” As examples of the supposed threat, she cited election influence by Russia and the actions of Islamist groups on the internet. Young people in particular are influenced by fake news, while women are often victims of hate and fake news, she warned.

Totalitarianism pads in on little soft feet.

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A new law forcing the British owners of one or more chickens (and pigeons and birds of prey) to register each bird individually has met with resistance.

Not everyone thinks the government should be counting their chickens (even after they’ve hatched). It was reported on X, formerly Twitter, that enough scamps have successfully registered their store-bought roast chickens to crash the government website.

While the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) enjoys some support for its anti-bird flu measures, poultry owners are concerned about the excessive bureaucracy the new system now involves (and no doubt also concerned about the threat of fines and even imprisonment for non-compliance).

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Just a week after the murder of young Philippine in the Bois de Boulogne near Paris, involving a Moroccan migrant facing deportation, another murder has stirred up French public opinion: that of a 17-year-old man, Kilian Binard, who was stabbed to death on Sunday, September 29th in Normandy. This time, the suspect is of Algerian nationality.

According to the initial findings of the investigation, the stabbing occurred in the early hours of Sunday, September 29th, as the young man was leaving a nightclub near Bayeux. The victim, a 17-year-old boxer, became involved in a fight involving around twenty people in the nightclub car park. The suspect allegedly hit Kilian in the back and neck with a knife recovered from his car.

The suspect, an Algerian national, was in possession of a ten-year residence permit that had recently been renewed. The permit was withdrawn after Kilian’s murder. The man initially denied all charges against him, before admitting that he had picked up a knife during the fight, “unfolded the blade and used it to strike the first person in front of him, which he said had no intention of killing,” according to the prosecutor in charge of the investigation.

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Swedes and Danes are progressive, sure, but home-grown Swedes and Danes aren’t doing these attacks.

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The USS Bulkeley and USS Cole fired “approximately a dozen interceptors against the incoming Iranian missiles,” which were captured on video streaking across the night sky above Israel.

The Cole has a history with Muslim terrorists.

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The other day I saw a meme that went something like this:

Isn’t it crappy how basic human activities like singing, dancing, and making art have been turned into skills instead of being recognized as behaviors? The point of doing these things has become to get good at them. But they should be recognized as things humans do innately, like how birds sing or bees make hives.

I thought about that for a minute, then decided: making websites should be the same!

The original vision for the web, according to Tim Berners-Lee, was to make it a collaborate medium where everyone could read and write.

Social media sort of achieved this, but the incentives are off. And it’s not just about ownership of the content you produce and who can monetize it, but the context in which you produce it.

Everyone ought to have a personal website. That way they can make public anything that they think ought to be made public, and other people have the ability to consume it or not, as they choose. As an added bonus, the type of people who require attention/validation to feel good about themselves increase their chances of becoming so despondent and lonely that they self-delete, thus improving the gene pool for the rest of us.

I’m all about improving the gene pool for the rest of us. Just sayin’.

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The Nobel Prize in Economics does not exist. UChicago should stop pretending otherwise—hinging our university’s reputation on an outright fraud is not a good look. And UChicago Booth students and staff should be more skeptical of our economics faculty, whose work relies heavily on arbitrary neoliberal assumptions and overly technical methods that cannot be explained in plain English.

When Alfred Nobel died in 1896, he established five Nobel Prizes in his will: physics, chemistry, “physiology and medicine,” literature, and peace. Not economics. The Nobel family’s descendants have protested the economics prize, with one of them calling it a “PR coup by economists to improve their reputation” and a “cuckoo’s egg in the Nobel nest.”

The award most people today call the “Nobel Prize in Economics” is more properly called the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” It was established in 1968 by the economists running Sweden’s central bank, partly to shield the bank from democratic accountability and support their push to make it “independent.” To do this, those economists needed to market their discipline to the world as a “science” with technical, correct answers that only experts could fully understand and that lowly voters did not get to question.

Any prize that Paul Krugman can win is not a real prize.

Economics is not a science because it is not predictive; it is merely suggestive.

Like medicine, it deals with humans, and (as with medicine, which isn’t a science either) humans are too complex to predict. Oh, it has scientific aspects — anything you can measure is, after all, scientific — but to be a science means to be able to make predictions that come true and do so invariably.

Like all pseudosciences, economics depends on statistical correlation rather than actual causation (like a real science, such as physics) for it’s ‘predictions’, which quite often don’t come true; anybody would be a fool to depend on such a ‘science’.

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Their vote counts as much as any other dead Democrat, silly.

Curtis Yarvin:

Leftism is always and everywhere an aristocratic force. Perhaps this is most clearly seen in the Labor Party UK, which from its roots in the Ruskinites and Fabians has always been the political vehicle of the university Left. Across the last century, this vehicle has switched its fuel from the disappearing British worker to the burgeoning British immigrant—without any substantive change in the nature of its leadership! This is an absolutely wild way to use the word “democracy.”

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) is back.

Sometimes Sam Altman, the new young Jupiter of AI, makes it easy to see why—to borrow the title of an essay I wrote ten years ago—he is a blithering idiot.

This is of interest not because Sam Altman is a blithering idiot—in fact, I hear he’s done rather well for himself—but because this miniscule, yet profoundly crippling, logical lesion in so finely-tuned a lipid-based thinking machine is probably not confined to Sam Altman’s brain.

No—whatever the germ (could it be Elon Musk’s “Woke Mind Virus?”) that causes this lesion, it has infected others. In fact, it has infected everyone. It had infected me. (I took my own noötropic tablets, and was cured. Click here to buy.)

Let me explain this simple fallacy using Altman’s own words, posted the other day.

Yarvin makes a point of mentioning evil ideas (according to the Narrative), and doing so in an engaging way.

After all, every time a company refuses to hire someone, it declares them ZMP from the perspective of its own employee pool. A true ZMP adult is unemployable in any firm or by any private individual.

ZMP stands for ‘zero marginal product’, a term apparently coined by economist Tyler Cowen to designate somebody that just plain nobody wants to employ because they just have nothing to offer an employer. In the Good Old Days, such people would (a) starve to death or (b) piss somebody off who would terminate them with extreme prejudice. Nowadays they live off of Government Assistance and use recreational drugs to avoid causing other people problems (although the first two alternatives remain just in case we need them). From an evolutionary standpoint, we are pissing in our own soup. Some people are willing to do that; others think that it’s a Bad Thing.

Not every workplace is Google or OpenAI, but every workplace has a ZMP threshold. Generally that threshold is lower than Google’s. What AI will do—what Sam Altman will do—is to vastly increase the ZMP threshold in almost every workplace.

You will have heard (and read) that we have a population crash problem, that Western woman aren’t having enough babies, that the civilized world aren’t having sufficient youngsters to replace themselves. Yarvin is suggesting that this is a feature, not a bug; anything we can do to avoid having overcrowding by ZMP people (number increasing as automation increases) is probably a Good Thing.

In the end, 20th-century employment as we know it will reduce itself to ten engineers, who write the code that writes the code that writes the code. They will all work for Sam Altman and drive ludicrously amazing flying cars. And what of everyone else?

We (I am anything but an AI engineer—good luck with those matrices, kids) will just have fun, right? Life will just be fun?

No, actually, we will probably all have our throats cut. Here’s why.

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Though much may separate Thucydides, Xenophon, Ephorus, Plato, and Aristotle from one another, on this fundamental point they and those who subsequently followed their lead were agreed: that to come to understand a polity, one must be willing to entertain two propositions.

First, one must presume that the form of government, the constitution, the rules defining membership in the políteuma or ruling order is the chief determinant of a political community’s character. Second, one must assume that pa?deía, which is to say, education and moral formation in the broadest and most comprehensive sense, is more important than anything else in deciding the character of a particular pol?teía. In one passage of The Politics, Aristotle suggests that it is the provision of a common pa?deía—and nothing else—that turns a multitude into a unit and constitutes it as a pól?s; in another, he indicates that it is the pol?teía which defines the pól?s as such. Though apparently in contradiction, these two statements are in fact equivalent—for, as the peripatetic recognized, man is an imitative animal, the example we set is far more influential than what we say, and it is the “distribution and disposition of offices and honors [táx?s t?ˆn arch?ˆn]” constituting the políteuma of a given polity that is the most effective educator therein.

…what really matters most with regard to political understanding is this: to decide who is to rule or what sorts of human beings are to share in rule and function as a community’s políteuma is to determine which of the various and competing titles to rule is to be authoritative; in turn, this is to decide what qualities are to be admired and honored in the city, what is to be considered advantageous and just, and how happiness and success [euda?monía] are to be understood and pursued; and this decision—more than any other—determines the pa?deía which constitutes “the one way of life of a whole pól?s.”

—Paul Rahe, The Spartan Regime: Its Character, Origins, and Grand Strategy, xii-xiv.

I knew Paul Rahe (now at Hillsdale in Michigan) at Yale, when I was an undergraduate and he was getting his PhD, having done his undergraduate work at Cornell. His magnum opus, the three-volume Republics Ancient and Modern, is first-rate. I heartily recommend anything he writes.

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Shocking video showing the killing of a Kentucky judge in his chambers was played during a court hearing for the ex-sheriff who is charged in the murder.

The short video clip was presented by prosecutors during the preliminary hearing for Letcher County Sheriff Shawn “Mickey” Stines showed the shocking moments that he allegedly opened fire on 54-year-old District Judge Kevin Mullins on Sept. 19.

The video, with no audio, showed a man identified by police as Stines pulling out a gun and shooting the judge as he sat at his desk. The man walked around the desk, pointed the gun at the judge — who had fallen to the floor — and fired again.

Coming soon to a tabloid near you. The only question left is whether this is a First Degree or a Second Degree murder. It may be a while before the full story comes out, but a story there certainly will be.

Watch it. (Practical Engineering)

More than you ever wanted to know about the Foundation of Civilization.

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

UPDATE: Ridiculous ‘fact check’ of a true statement during CBS debate (New York Post)

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Business leaders are loath to criticize a sitting mayor who can cause trouble for their enterprises. And they have been loyal backers of this particular mayor both because he is such a contrast to his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, who routinely bashed them, and because his priorities — fighting crime, spurring economic development and tackling the housing crisis — are their priorities.

Maybe most importantly, according to extensive background interviews THE CITY has conducted over the past several weeks, the candidates who have announced for mayor so far are unpalatable to business leaders because of their progressive views.

New York Post.

Carter claimed that so many young people “cheat” their way through college, come out with no skills and then experience a “rude awakening” when they land their first job.

Saying it was unreasonable to “expect a great work-life balance and high-paying job” straight after graduating from university, he also encouraged Gen Zers to dress nicely, speak up, and work on communicating effectively.

Entitled slackers. Perfect Democrats.

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The ravages of Hurricane Helene had left parts of Asheville, North Carolina underwater, but it wasn’t just the homes and roads that were underwater, but FEMA’s botched response..

Criswell, who had been appointed to head FEMA by the Biden-Harris administration as a reward for coordinating New York City’s horrendously botched response to the pandemic, posed in a starched FEMA blouse and gold necklace on a morning show even as private volunteers were once again having to step in because the Federal Emergency Management Agency had failed.

FEMA was unprepared for the flooding because under Criswell, a DEI hire whose resume included being “the first woman commissioner of New York City Emergency Management”, the agency had shifted from disaster management to DEI disasters.

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“America doesn’t need this place, doesn’t care about this place… It’s just a place that time forgot.” Tom Altmiller is sitting across from me at a paint-chipped picnic table. It looks like it was bright red once, but the years have faded it to a sort of grayish maroon. He’s in his late 50s, with square glasses, a graying goatee, and a short ponytail, and speaks with a stubborn, matter-of-fact stoicism that’s common among the locals. “My standard joke about this place is that if the world ended tomorrow, we’d get ten more years, because we’re roughly that far behind the curve here,” he says. “In terms of everything.”

…

Beginning around 2021, Charleroi began to be flooded by thousands of immigrants, largely, (though not exclusively) from Haiti. A local CBS report from March reported that “the immigrant population in Charleroi has grown by more than 2,000% in the last two years.” Earlier this month, PolitiFact admitted that the number of non-English speaking students in the Charleroi school district had skyrocketed by an unbelievable 1,800 percent over the past five years.

Two weeks ago, my organization America 2100 spent five days on the ground in Charleroi, documenting and reporting on the crisis. Our coverage went viral, and within 48 hours of our first public interview, President Trump mentioned Charleroi at a rally. Then again, one week and a half later, this time at some length, during a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania. That kicked off a media feeding frenzy, replete with a flood of authoritative “fact checks” and reports on Trump’s “debunked claims” about the Pennsylvania town, an NBC News segment, a cacophony of garment-rending legacy media write-ups about “hateful rants”, “dangerous conspiracy theories,” “anti-immigrant lies”, and a statement from Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro slamming Trump’s criticism as “complete and utter bullshit.”

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The national conservative Patriots for Europe (PfE) group, the third largest party family in Brussels with 84 MEPs, has officially launched a lawsuit against the European Parliament at the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU). PfE aims to overturn the mainstream parties’ cordon sanitaire, which strips the group of all its earmarked leading positions in the Parliament’s governing bodies—even at the expense of violating the institutions’ own internal rules.

The right-wing group is home to parties such as the French National Rally, the Hungarian Fidesz, the Italian Lega, the Austrian FPÖ, the Czech ANO, and the Portuguese Chega. Many of these won the European elections in their respective countries and remain the most popular parties to this day (the FPÖ won the general elections in Austria just two days ago). Yet, the mainstream still believes it’s justified to exclude the PfE from power on account of it being “far-right.”

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In Washington, which has long been a blue state, an average of 56.2% of voters have supported the Democratic candidate across the last four presidential elections. In fact, Washington has gone to the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1984, when Ronald Reagan, the GOP’s candidate, defeated Democrat Walter Mondale. Barring any major, unforeseen shakeup, Washington state is expected to align with historical voting patterns once again in 2024 and go to Harris. (Here is a look at the 15 least popular presidents, according to Millennials.)

Despite its status as a Democratic stronghold, there are several parts of the state that have consistently broken with the prevailing political ideology in recent elections. According to voting records, there are 23 counties in Washington where an average of at least 50% of voters have supported the Republican candidate in the last four presidential elections. In one of these counties, more than 70% of voters cast ballots for the Republican candidate over the same four general elections.

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With still no resolution in the months-long diplomatic row between Brussels and Budapest over the latter’s alleged violation of European Union asylum rules, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán doubled down on his government’s previous rhetoric, saying he would begin bussing illegal migrants straight to the EU capital if the Commission insists on collecting hundreds of millions of euros in accumulated fines—despite Budapest’s willingness to implement the reforms being demanded.

And, indeed, it would serve them right.

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And all of the little eco-Nazis go WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH….

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One hopes that Israel will respond in kind.

Such an attack is recognized in international law as a causus belli, an act of war.

Israel is now fully justified in bombing the living shit out of Iran.

I hope they do so.

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carriers like hard drives, optical discs, and flash storage are readily available, the landscape becomes trickier when dealing with older formats such as floppy disks. It is becoming increasingly difficult to source the hardware, such as 5.25”floppy drives. There are many boards that can read flux streams, including the KryoFlux, and the Award-winning Archivist’s Guide to KryoFlux can help to get started. But KryoFlux is somewhat limited in the disk formats it can interpret and might be too expensive for smaller institutions. We came together as practitioners because we encountered disk formats that required additional efforts to read and extract files. We explored hardware such as Greaseweazle and using FluxEngine software to read less common disk formats. Sharing the knowledge we have gained, this tutorial and workshop present an opportunity for participants to delve into these formats, examining them from both hardware and formatting perspectives.

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

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It was all supposed to be so grand. Sweeping libraries of knowledge, fruitful cyber domains and ultimate egalitarian functionality at the touch of a button, or the scuzzy tone of that 9600 baud AOL server hand-shake.

Connect with your friends, they said. Share knowledge, they said. What could go wrong?

But what did we get instead? A seedy panopticon of intrusion and broken bloatware bogging up every last dying pixel of our imported screens. Let’s run down the list of grievances, shall we?

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The new data on all the criminal noncitizens coming into the U.S. is shocking.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) checks the background of illegal aliens they have in custody. But, the administration’s letter to Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) shows that as of July 21, 2024, ICE let 435,719 convicted criminals and 226,847 people with pending criminal charges in their home countries into the U.S.

Of those cleared by ICE, 13,099 have convictions for homicide, and another 1,845 were facing criminal charges. Some 9,461 have convictions for sex offenses (not including assault or commercialized sex), and 2,659 face pending charges. The convictions include other crimes such as assault (62,231), robbery (10,031), sexual assault (15,811), weapons offenses (13,423), and dangerous drugs (56,533).

About 7.4 million noncitizens are in the “national docket data,” so 662,776 is 9% of the total, and if one extrapolates the numbers to the homicide rate in this country, it strongly indicates that the government is letting migrants into this country who commit murder at a rate 50% higher than the rest of the U.S. population.

The Atlantic.

Nicholas dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

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ABC failed miserably when it comes to doing basic journalistic research for this story. The fact that no fact check was even attempted is so egregious, one must wonder if it is purposeful, rather than just an indication of incompetence. A paragraph at the very bottom their story suggests it may be purposeful.

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Police in India have arrested a man who ordered an iPhone and then killed the courier rather than pay the cash-on-delivery fee.

Who knew that India has Blue States as well?

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

I’ll pass.

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Tidal action on the underside of the Thwaites Glacier in the Antarctic will “inexorably” accelerate melting this century, according to new research by British and American scientists. The researchers warn the faster melting could destabilize the entire West Antarctic Ice sheet, leading to its eventual collapse.

Which scientists? Who cares! Just, you know, scientists!

The massive glacier—which is roughly the size of Florida—is of particular interest to scientists because of the rapid speed at which it is changing and the impact its loss would have on sea levels (the reason for its “Doomsday” moniker). It also acts as an anchor holding back the West Antarctic ice sheet.

More than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) thick in places, Thwaites has been likened to a cork in a bottle. Were it to collapse, sea levels would rise by 65 centimeters (26 inches). That’s already a significant amount, given oceans are currently rising 4.6 millimeters a year. But if it led to the eventual loss of the entire ice sheet, sea levels would rise 3.3 meters.

Yah, sure. Call me when real estate prices in Malibu, Martha’s Vineyard, and Miami Beach start going down.

UPDATE: US Government interagency sea level rise website is live  All hail the Narrative!

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For decades, one of the most fundamental and vexing questions in neuroscience has been: what is the physical basis of consciousness in the brain? Most researchers favor classical models, based on classical physics, while a minority have argued that consciousness must be quantum in nature, and that its brain basis is a collective quantum vibration of “microtubule” proteins inside neurons.

New research by Wellesley College professor Mike Wiest and a group of Wellesley College undergraduate students has yielded important experimental results relevant to this debate, by examining how anesthesia affects the brain. Wiest and his research team found that when they gave rats a drug that binds to microtubules, it took the rats significantly longer to fall unconscious under an anesthetic gas. The research team’s microtubule-binding drug interfered with the anesthetic action, thus supporting the idea that the anesthetic acts on microtubules to cause unconsciousness.

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My Grann’s edition of The Grady County Extension Homemaker Council’s cookbook Down Home Cookin’ is missing its front and back cover. Once made of thin, flimsy pieces of plastic decorated with an old barn and windmill, the cover has long since fallen off and some of the pages are loose. The book is held together by three red rubber bands. My Grann explains that the plastic binder got brittle and began to fall apart—the rubber bands are her solution. The pages of the cookbook are yellowed from years of use. At least three generations of women in my family, including myself, have flipped through these pages, leaving them stained with the oils from their fingers and the drippings of in-progress recipes. Most importantly to me, they scribbled in the margins. My family’s edition of Down Home Cookin’ has reached a critical mass of notes in the marginalia such that it no longer counts as a simple copy of a cookbook: it is my Grann’s cookbook, our family cookbook. Holding it in my hands in my apartment in California (my Grann kindly agreed to mail it to me) feels off. It feels so delicate here, out of the context of her home, her kitchen, in the little cupboard where she has kept all of her cookbooks since I was a child. Now, it is more like a museum piece, something precious and precarious, meant to be handled with care, preserved, analyzed.

My mother had an old composition book in which she kept all of the recipes she had accumulated throughout her life, starting off with taking Home Ec from the nuns in high school and extending through over six decades of being a homemaker. I wish I had thought to make a copy of it before she passed on and everything got lost. I especially miss the Connie’s Fudge recipe.

ZMan jerks the cover off.

What we have now is the Lincoln exception to property rights. If people with power can produce a moral cause to justify to themselves the abrogation of your property rights, then for the good of our democracy they not only can take your property, but they also have a duty to do it. We have gone from the government stealing the property of slave owners to save the Union, to the government granting powerful interests the right to root around in your private affairs and publish the results.

Navy Matters.

The supposed savings is estimated at $1B. In the aggregate, that sounds impressive. A billion dollars! Wow! However, across four ships that’s just $250M savings per ship. That’s not nothing but it’s not a miraculous savings, by any means. More importantly, you know those savings will never materialize. With 100% certainty, the ships will come in over budget and behind schedule with a litany of excuses like supply chain disruptions, parts shortages, design modifications, and all the other usual suspects. There won’t be any savings. The absolute best case is that the ‘savings’ (let’s be optimistic and assume there will be actual savings) will slightly reduce the magnitude of the inevitable cost overruns. Again, better than nothing but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking we’re actually going to save money.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read it quickly before it comes true.

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As a general rule, you can make a generic headline “[black person’s name]’s new book compares [thing Woke people don’t like] to the Jim Crow South.”

Saves a lot of time and effort on everybody’s part.

Headline you won’t ever see: “Ta-Nehisi Coates’ New Book Compares Palestinian Treatment of Israelis to Muslim Massacre at Hebron“.

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The killing on Friday of Hezbollah’s leader by Israeli forces prompted celebrations across the globe, confirming that Israel is not alone in seeing the terror group as an existential threat.

After news broke of the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah—who Benjamin Netanyahu said was “not a terrorist, he was the terrorist”—and much of the team around him, jubilant civilians gathered in the northern Syrian city of Idlib, honking horns and handing out sweets. Iranians also came together outside the Israeli embassy in London to thank Israel for its action.

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A 41-year-old Syrian man set fire to two buildings, rammed his vehicle into a grocery store, and threatened passers-by with a machete in the western German city of Essen. While authorities and mainstream politicians are treating the case as an act of revenge by a mentally deranged man against his ex-wife’s new boyfriend, the attack bears the hallmarks of Islamist violence.

According to German media reports, the perpetrator set fire to two residential buildings on Saturday afternoon, injuring 31 people, including eight children who remain in critical condition. Photos circulating on social media show people clambering down ladders to try to escape one of the torched buildings.

The fire department said people stood at windows and on balconies for air because they could no longer escape through the smoke-filled stairwell.

New York Times.

In blue states, everybody is forced to do it the Government Way.

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When 19-year-old Aleysha Ortiz told Hartford City Council members in May that the public school system stole her education, she had to memorize her speech.

Ortiz, who was a senior at Hartford Public High School at the time, wrote the speech using the talk-to-text function on her phone. She listened to it repeatedly to memorize it.

That’s because she was never taught to read or write — despite attending schools in Hartford since she was 6.

Ortiz, who came to Hartford from Puerto Rico with her family when she was young, struggled with language and other challenges along the way. But a confluence of circumstances, apparent apathy and institutional inertia pushed her haphazardly through the school system, according to Ortiz, her attorney and district officials.

Those officials, in statements that her attorney says display “shocking” educational neglect, have acknowledged that Ortiz never received instruction in reading.

Government schools. Union teachers. Results as you see them.

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The Insider has obtained access to hundreds of official documents related to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death in the Polar Wolf penal colony in the Russian Far North on Feb. 16, 2024. Officially, Navalny’s death was attributed to natural causes, and Russia’s Investigative Committee stated in July that the case “does not have a criminal nature.” However, the contents of the documents in The Insider’s possession demonstrate that Russian authorities consistently removed references to symptoms Navalny was documented to have been suffering — symptoms that did not fit with the Russian state’s official cause of death. As medical experts confirm, these symptoms clearly indicate that Navalny was poisoned.

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

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The NBC-Telemundo poll showing Vice President Kamala Harris with a historically low level of support among Hispanics has begun to trigger some of the usual reactions at MSNBC, including the tired “adjacent to whiteness” trope.

WashPost Associate Editor and MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart opened his The Sunday Show segment on the poll by barely being able to put together the words necessary to describe Harris’s 14-point lead among Hispanics in relation to past Democrat nominees.

So, appaarently, do many ‘black’ women, such as Beyoncé.

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Author and cultural critic Fran Lebowitz added voice to the unhinged calls on the left for trashing the Supreme Court. As I discussed recently in the Wall Street Journal (and in my book), there is a growing counter-constitutional movement in the United States led by law professors, pundits, and celebrities. Lebowitz amplified those calls in a radical demand to simply get rid of the Court.

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When lefties switched from class warfare to identity politics, they became hopelessly mired in tribalism. Their old animating principle of an egalitarian society has long since given way to a tribal society in which certain groups will have more power than others because equality can only come about through massive doses of inequality. But even that is considered hopelessly old-fashioned liberalism. The new wave of identity politics doesn’t even justify its demands for special treatment by promising that one day we’ll all be equal. The tribal premise of inherent inequality is the essence of intersectionality.

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Machetes were very, very active yesterday in the city of Essen in North Rhine-Westphalia. And so were matches: they just suddenly started lighting buildings on fire. And a truck kept running into buildings! What makes those inanimate objects so malicious?

The fact that a Syrian happened to be wielding all three types of weapon is not something that needs to be discussed. Only racists would do that.

The following news video gives a brief account of what happened in Essen, but without mentioning cultural enrichment.