Meme - "Democrats are currently fighting, shouting, and throwing toddler fits because ...
- Violent illegal criminals are being deported.
- Billions of dollars of waste and fraud are being exposed.
- Federal employees actually have to show up for work.
- Trump is trying to broker a peace deal between Ukraine/ Russia.
- Grown men can't compete against women in sports.
Just is case you're wondering why Democrats have a 30% national approval rating and have zero power in our government."
Southport attack survivor calls for kitchen knives to be blunt tipped - "A dance teacher who survived a knife attack in Southport last summer has started a campaign calling for pointed kitchen knives to be replaced by ones with blunt tips. Leanne Lucas, 36, was critically injured in the attack at the Taylor Swift-themed dance class she was leading during last year’s school summer holidays... She said she has not cooked with a pointed kitchen knife since last July’s attack, and that using knives with blunt tips makes her feel safer. “When I’m maybe with friends or family and they’re cooking away and we’re having a conversation, I’ve noticed I’m watching what they’re doing, rather than listening,” she told BBC News, adding that kitchen knives had become a “trigger” for feelings of hypervigilance she has experienced since the attack. “When this idea about the blunt-tip knives came in I just thought: this is a no-brainer, I don’t understand why our kitchen isn’t safer in the first place,” she said. The Let’s Be Blunt campaign hopes to shift public attitudes and change behaviours, with Lucas comparing it to other public health initiatives, such as the indoor smoking ban."
When this won't work, it will be time to ban knives
Amy Hamm: No, Joly, we don’t want America’s far-left academic refugees - "We are tired of being broke, and at (trade) war with the vastly superior economy of the U.S. We want to unleash our oil and gas potential. Does our new Liberal government feel the same? That’s a clear “no” from Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture Steven Guilbeault, who insisted this month that peak oil is imminent and that Canada is hardly using our existing infrastructure — two false claims. (Perhaps to be expected from the ex-Greenpeace activist turned politician .) And then there is Industry Minister Mélanie Joly, who has her own zany idea: to attract the flotsam of America’s crumbling, postmodern academic institutions in an attempt to drive Canadian economic growth. Yes, calling all intersectional-colonialist-gender-justice scholars: Canada’s economy, as per Joly, could really use your help right now. During an interview with CBC’s Rosemary Barton this week , Joly downplayed the importance of our energy sector (or its potential), listing it off alongside other sectors including artificial intelligence and digital technology — and then said that she has other ideas for growth... What Joly is proposing is none other than the net zero version of brain drain. No brain power will be crossing north of the 49 th parallel under Joly’s scheme. The atrocious state of academia in America, including at Ivy League schools such as Harvard, beggars belief. And when Joly talks about Trump’s “attacks” on academia, she makes it clear that any of the “best” or “brightest” she is referring to will be the refugee zealots of the U.S.’s failing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) racket... It suggests that Joly, despite now working for Prime Minister Carney, is still living in Justin Trudeau’s 2015 “ diversity is our strength ” Liberal era — that time before we wised up to Trudeau’s thought-terminating slogans. Another consideration: that Joly does not keep up to date on American Ivy League achievements. If she did, she might have seen the recently-published paper from the heretofore prestigious Yale University, entitled “Transfeminist pregnancy: reproductive speculation, genre, and desire.” Joly certainly — we can hope — missed this scholastic bombshell, in which the scholar, Carlo Sariego, asserts: “I argue that pregnancy is not to be defined by biological phenomena but instead as a genre of political, aesthetic, and affective experience and expectation … involving birth and becoming in a larger sense.” Or maybe Joly didn’t miss it at all. Maybe Joly has instead been praying for some beleaguered Ivy League asylum seeker to beg her for the research funds to uncover polar bear genders in the Canadian arctic. And maybe she is desperate to award those funds. (Here’s a million bucks, one dollar per bear gender tendered!) Who are we to second guess her plans?"
More than half of Canadians say they understand Alberta separatism: poll - "Almost half of respondents in Alberta — 47 per cent — said they support separation."
John Ivison: Punitive taxes are killing the legal cannabis industry - "The Cannabis Act of 2018 was a cornerstone piece of legislation for the Trudeau government, which pledged to “outflank” organized crime by undercutting the black market for pot. But the new report suggests that illicit producers still control between one quarter and a half of the market, partly because a punitive excise tax regime raises costs for legal producers. The Deloitte report, commissioned by the Cannabis Council of Canada, said that the excise tax paid to governments accounted for 31.5 per cent of gross production revenues last year, at a time when prices are falling... the government’s own expert panel, which conducted a legislative review of the Cannabis Act last year, noted the industry’s “urgent concerns” about viability and said they were “well founded.” Deloitte looked at the financial results of 36 licensed cannabis producers between 2019 and 2024 — nine of which filed for insolvency during the period under review. The share of production revenues diverted to excise taxes doubled in that time, making it the largest single expense... The panel recommended that the consumption of “higher risk” cannabis with elevated levels of THC should be discouraged by higher excise taxes. The Deloitte report called the conclusion “misguided,” saying concerns over public health should focus on minimizing the illicit market. “Placing further restrictions and requirements on legal cannabis products would simply strengthen the illicit market and will only be effective in the absence of a strong illicit market,” the report said... the legal market is highly controlled. Producers are obliged to pay regulatory and security clearance fees for staff — costs the illicit market simply does not have. If it is taxed out of existence, the only winners are the black marketeers. Since one of the government’s current priorities is to tackle crime and drugs crossing the border, it is only logical to support one at the expense of the other."
Systemic Investigation - Survivors of sexual assault
Survivors of Suicide and Homicide Loss - "Losing someone you care about to a suicide or homicide can have a number of short and longer term impacts including social and mental health impacts"
Ontario Supporting Victims and Survivors of Crime - "London Police Service will work with Muslim and Jewish communities in the city to build a dedicated online hate-incident reporting platform."
The Hidden Side of Healing From Emotional Abuse In An Intimate Relationship - "When emotional abuse takes place, it can be very difficult for the survivor to realize they are being abused."
Toward the conceptualization and measurement of transphobia-driven intimate partner violence - "We recruited US-based, English-speaking trans survivors of IPV... Through thematic analysis of the 20 in-depth interviews, we identified four subdomains of transphobia-driven IPV: pressure to perform, disrupting gender affirmation, belittling gender identity, and intentional misgendering"
Victim culture means you don't need to have survived something that can kill you to be a "survivor"
Thread by @GoodwinMJ on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The United Kingdom, or England, more accurately, has the longest and deepest tradition of protecting fundamental rights, going back nearly 1000 years to Magna Carta. We do not need some strange, regional court like the ECHR to protect our freedoms and rights. A huge problem with the ECHR is that it’s simply no longer what we joined in the 1950s. From climate change to immigration, it’s massively expanded the definition of “rights” in ways that are deeply political —not judicial. These debates and decisions should be happening within our representative democracy, making them accountable to the people, not distant courts that are not accountable to anybody and are dominated by distant elites who lean strongly to the cultural left. Those who say “Churchill supported it” are gaslighting you. Neither Churchill nor Thatcher for that matter would have supported the current expansion of the ECHR. It’s a totally different beast from what it was in the immediate postwar era. By belonging to the ECHR we are not simply belonging to a static convention which does not change. We are being forced to remain in something that actually believes it is “a living instrument” that changes over time, hence its expansion and belief it has the right to change what it is over time, irrespective of what citizens think. Like the EU, which morphed into something very different from what the Brits signed in 1973, the ECHR has morphed into something that is totally different from what its creators envisaged and intended To those who say “well only Russia and Belarus have left”, this is just idiocy. Lots of Anglosphere nations and Commonwealth states function just fine without needing to belong to the ECHR. Are they struggling to safeguard the rights and freedoms of their people? Australia? Canada? New Zealand? Nope. Again, they are gaslighting you when they tell you this And Northern Ireland? “We can’t leave because of Good Friday!” Nonsense. The Good Friday Agreement requires us to ensure laws enacted by Stormont can be challenged under UK law if they are not compatible with ECHR. But we can continue to allow this under domestic UK law without needing ECHR. The reason UK elites don’t want to leave is because they are worried it will make them look bad in front of other international elites. They care more about that than keeping their own people safe."
Thread by @ahhmedshh on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The Muslim Brotherhood is not a traditional movement. It is a political deepfake. Just as a deepfake mimics the surface of a person to deceive, the Muslim Brotherhood mimics the behaviors of democracy such as elections, civil society, and free speech while hiding an entirely different agenda underneath. This thread breaks down how and where this deception operates. In Tunisia, the Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliate Ennahda presented itself as a pro-democracy actor after the Arab Spring. It joined transitional governments and defended pluralism. But internally it stalled judicial reform, resisted equal rights legislation, and shielded clerical networks. A 2023 report from the Tunisian Observatory for Democratic Transition found that Ennahda-linked individuals held 40 percent of key public positions despite only winning 27 percent of the vote. In the United Kingdom, Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations such as the Muslim Association of Britain have been cited in UK Parliament reports for hosting extremist speakers while presenting themselves as inclusive community actors. The 2015 UK Government review noted how the Muslim Brotherhood promotes grievance-based narratives while embedding itself in civil institutions using entryist tactics. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief rule from 2012 to 2013 revealed its true intentions. After winning the presidency, it tried to push through a constitution with no national consensus, moved to suppress independent media, and fueled polarization. Khairat al-Shater, the group’s deputy leader, said that democracy was a tool not an end. Once power was secured, the mask fell. On US campuses, Brotherhood-linked student groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine have faced scrutiny for promoting ideological conformity while silencing dissent. A 2024 report from the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy recorded over 200 cases of intimidation and disruption tied to these networks under the banner of academic activism. None of this is accidental. It is part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term strategy. Like a political deepfake, it imitates democratic behavior only enough to gain access and legitimacy. It does not challenge systems head-on. It performs moderation to embed its worldview while gradually hollowing out pluralism from within. The Muslim Brotherhood’s tactics in Tunisia, the United Kingdom, Egypt, and the United States follow one pattern. Mimic democracy. Embed in institutions. Convert influence into control. It is not dangerous because it is radical on the surface. It is dangerous because it sounds just moderate enough to pass as part of the system until it replaces it entirely. And that is the true danger of the Muslim Brotherhood. It does not break the system. It learns to speak its language fluently while quietly rewriting its code from within…"
Sara Sharif homeschooled and made to wear hijab to conceal injuries, court told - "The 10-year-old schoolgirl Sara Sharif was made to wear a hijab to conceal her injuries and was homeschooled in the months before she was beaten to death, a court has heard. Sara “suffered dreadfully” and was burned with an iron, bitten and had a plastic bag taped over head before she was found dead at her family home in Woking, Surrey on 10 August last year... Sara’s father, Urfan Sharif, 42, her stepmother, Beinash Batool, 30, and her paternal uncle Faisal Malik, 29, are accused of carrying out a violent “campaign of abuse” before killing her on 8 August. The court was told the defendants fled to Pakistan the following day. Sharif then called police to say he had beaten Sara “too much” as a punishment for being naughty. The taxi driver also left a note by Sara’s fully clothed body, saying: “I swear to God that my intention was not to kill her. But I lost it.” The prosecutor, William Emlyn Jones KC, told the court on Tuesday that Sara began wearing a hijab in January 2023 “to conceal injuries to her face and head from the outside world”. Neighbours told police it seemed “unusual” because Sara was the only member of her family to wear a hijab."
Chimps like listening to music with a different beat, research finds - "While preferring silence to music from the West, chimpanzees apparently like to listen to the different rhythms of music from Africa and India... When African and Indian music was played near their large outdoor enclosures, the chimps spent significantly more time in areas where they could best hear the music. When Japanese music was played, they were more likely to be found in spots where it was more difficult or impossible to hear the music. The African and Indian music in the experiment had extreme ratios of strong to weak beats, whereas the Japanese music had regular strong beats, which is also typical of Western music."
How come this wasn't cancelled?
Meme - "Libertarians: 'I don't see why regulations matter'
Every part of the world with inadequate regulatory law: *huge mess of tangled wires*"
Douglass Mackey on X - "Biden holdovers in the DOJ are now arguing that 25-year-old women are like children without brains fully developed."
The free speech implications of the OneTaste lawsuit - "the prosecution rested its very underwhelming case—a case that has invoked witchcraft, bad brain science, and a disturbing infantilization of women. Typically, a forced labor case involves someone employing violence, threats of violence, or other means of "serious harm" in order to compel someone to work for them. But again and again, government witnesses—former OneTaste volunteers, employees, and community members—testified that they were entirely free to quit their positions, move out of OneTaste communes, or otherwise cease formal associations with the group without threat of physical harm or some sort of serious retaliation. They just didn't want to go because they feared being excommunicated from the OneTaste community, which they had become dependent on for their social, sexual, and spiritual identities. The idea that this constitutes a "serious harm" that can sustain a forced labor charge "gets us into some very worrisome First Amendment issues, because the First Amendment protects people's right to assemble as they see fit," Bonjean told U.S. District Judge Diane Gujarati on Monday... The prosecution's theory of the case is that OneTaste's teachings about things like sexual openness, openness to new experiences, personal responsibility, and the value of orgasmic meditation (O.M.)—a 15-minute, partnered clitoral stroking practice—left people powerless to reject living, working, or sexual situations they did not want. Yet with government witness after government witness, the defense has produced evidence suggesting that discomfort or displeasure came only with hindsight. In the moment, these witnesses were effusive—on social media, in emails to OneTaste higher-ups, and so on—about the benefits of O.M. and OneTaste teachings more generally... they seem to be looking for someone other than themselves to blame for these choices, even if they were mentally capable 20- and 30-something-year-old adults at the time... Neria even brought up witchcraft, telling the court that "pretty much all of the staff, all of the female staff" were considered witches. Another government witness, Dana Gill, took a less mystical and more pseudo-scientific approach to explaining her time at OneTaste: "My brain wasn't fully developed." Gill was 25 years old and a college graduate when she started to associate with OneTaste. "I was so young, you know," she told the court on May 14. "My prefrontal cortex wasn't done developing." The suggestion here is that a 25-year-old woman is too young to legally make decisions for herself—an implication that could have serious consequences far beyond this prosecution. But believing that 25-year-olds aren't culpable for their actions isn't Gill's only unusual idea; she also seems to think that it's coercive to talk about or do things in front of her. While at OneTaste, Gill entered into a sham marriage with someone who needed a green card, getting paid $10,000 for it. She told the court that she only did this because a few other people she knew in OneTaste (neither of the defendants) had green card marriages and this "normalized" the idea for her. Likewise, Gill—who is now a Methodist pastor—became a sugar baby and then started doing sex work because her friend in OneTaste, Aubrey, was doing it... She went on to suggest that hearing Aubrey—a friend who is not either of the defendants, mind you, or even in OneTaste leadership—describing her own positive experiences with sex work amounted to "coercion over a period of time.""
Pop psychology has very real costs
Reneé Rapp Says Her Home is a “Lesbian Frat House” Full of Queer Friends - "she said that queer friendships have made her “fulfilled” and “so happy.” “Nothing matters to me more in the world than being with that group of friends,” she says. “It’s changed my life.” She added, “Straight people don’t exist to me. I see one and I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’”"
Heterophobia is a myth
Exercise spurs neuron growth and rewires the brain, helping mice forget traumatic and addictive memories
Nicholas Fabiano, MD on X - "The gym bros were right"
Meme - Lomez @LOm3z: "I didn't think my faith in institutional competence could get any lower. Truly stunning to watch fellow internet retards get everything right, almost by accident, as the experts get everything, compoundingly, wrong
"Oh you think you're so smart and know more than the experts?!" No, I think I'm a fucking idiot and know more than the experts. That's the problem."
Africa has too many businesses, too little business - "African policymakers love to champion their continent’s entrepreneurs. For Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, small and medium enterprises are the “backbone of Africa’s economy”. “We must support the youth to go beyond looking for jobs,” says Akinwumi Adesina, the head of the African Development Bank (afdb). Such bigwigs like to point to data that seem to show how unusually entrepreneurial Africa is. The African Youth Survey, a regular poll, suggests that 71% of young Africans plan to start a business. Male leaders also like to congratulate themselves on how more than a quarter of adult women have started, or are starting, a business—the highest share of any continent, according to data cited by the afdb. Yet much of this praise amounts to misplaced virtue-signalling. Though there are African entrepreneurs founding innovative startups in everything from fintech to commercial agriculture, running a business is often the result of desperation, not choice. To close the gap with the rest of the world, Africa does not need more small businesses. It needs more large ones. Large firms are productivity powerhouses. They bring people, ideas, technology and equipment together in ways that make workers more efficient, which makes people richer... the total revenue pool of African firms (excluding South Africa) is “about a third of what it could be”. Africa is the only inhabited continent without any of the world’s 500 biggest firms, as compiled by Fortune, a magazine. Other research suggests that African firms employ fewer people than businesses do elsewhere. A paper by Leonardo Iacovone, Vijaya Ramachandran and Martin Schmidt, three economists, albeit from a decade ago, estimated that African firms employ between a fifth and a quarter less people than firms of the same age in other countries, even after controlling for the size of the market where they operate. Karthik Tadepalli of the University of California, Berkeley, says that, in America, firms “either grow or die”. Those that are still around ten years after their founding typically employ three times as many people as when they started. Unfortunately, in many developing countries, including African ones, firms grow very slowly, often barely adding workers over time. Instead of many large firms with salaried staff, Africa has lots of micro-enterprises and informal workers. More than 80% of employment in Africa is informal, according to the International Labour Organisation. Roughly half of informal workers in cities are self-employed, doing everything from crafting Instagram advertising to fixing roofs. Many Africans mix formal work with informal hustles, which are often poorly paid. Most would love a steady job. Mr Tadepalli suggests that many of the “self-employed” may just be the unemployed “in disguise”. Informal work is common in all poor countries. Data from the 2010s suggest that African cities had similar shares of informality to Indian cities. But Africa seems different in two ways: it has a relatively high share of informal self-employment, and the likelihood of a young person entering informal work does not seem to be diminishing. In 2022 Oriana Bandiera of the LSE and co-authors compared the sorts of work done by 18- to 24-year-olds in various parts of the world. Young Africans, they found, are more likely to do unpaid work and not to have an employer than their peers in other developing countries. They also found that young Africans are not any more likely to hold a salaried job than older Africans. “The jobs of many young people in Africa do not differ from [those] of their parents’ generation.” Part of the problem is poor education. Mass literacy has been a precursor to take-off growth in many parts of the world. Reading helps people follow instructions in a factory or a call centre. Yet while primary-school enrolment has risen in sub-Saharan Africa in the past 25 years, some 60% of 15- to 17-year-olds are not in school. Literacy rates for 15- to 24-year-olds are around 75% across the region. The average for other developing regions is 90%. But the problem is bigger than that: there are simply not enough jobs for young people... The World Bank surveys firms from around the world about what they see as their biggest obstacle. The results point to something akin to the business version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In sub-Saharan Africa the two most commonly cited obstacles are the basics every growing firm needs: capital and electricity. Access to finance is the main constraint cited by firms... Small wonder when it costs so much to borrow. The average lending interest rate (the rate banks charge firms to meet short- and medium-term needs) for the 19 African countries for which the imf had data in 2023 was 25%. In India and Vietnam, it was around 9%... Rates would also be lower if there were more savings to go around. But the domestic savings rate in sub-Saharan Africa from 2010 to 2021 was just 19%, against 37% in East Asia. This is partly a demographic story: when fertility rates are high there are more mouths to feed and less money to save. But some analysts caution that in parts of Africa, savings rates have remained low even as fertility rates have dipped, suggesting that other factors matter, too... Yet boosting the size, number and productivity of African firms is not simply a case of overcoming market failures. Business in Africa can be highly political, in ways that undermine the continent’s growth."
Luckily, South Africa is chasing away all the white people so it can end up like the rest of the continent
Since we know that high interest rates are due to greed - why are Africans so much greedier than people elsewhere?
