Links - 11th April 2025 (2 [including Suburbs])

Meme - "r/cozyplaces
This post is locked. You won't be able to comment.
Suburbia ain't so bad
*People watching TV in a backyard on a projection screen*
Mod: Right, we've had enough. This post has only been up for 4 hours and the comments are the most toxic we've ever seen on this sub. We debated removing the whole post but that's not fair to OP so we're locking the comments instead.
Edit: We're really sorry u/thompsonwoodworks but we are going to have to remove your post. Despite locking the comments we are now getting a flood of comments on here reported. Even this moderator comment has been reported several times."
Time to mock conservative men for being afraid of cities
Left wingers just hate freedom, individuality and responsibility
This is a good case study in reddit censorship too

Meme - Bennett's Phylactery @extradeadjcb: "US suburbs are fortifications built in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing  They are optimized for keeping kids safe & alive when it's illegal to protect them properly" Mark R. Brown, AICP @CompletedStreet: "Most U.S. suburbs are inhospitable to children."
"A Modern child's conundrum"
"Get off the computer and go outside!"
"Stranger danger"
"Mal-Wart no loitering"
"Dead store. Mall no loitering. dying store. upscale grocery. Fake downtown."
Park: "Cars only"
"Gated community. useless decorative pond. Private golf club. Even more useless pond."

Meme - Covfefe Anon @CovfefeAnon: ""Suburbs" are refugee camps for whites who were ethnically cleansed from cities They lack "walkability" because that is a barrier to the same ethnic groups that removed whites from cities to begin with Suburbs lacking "walkability" are a cost, the lack of murders is the feature"
Mark R. Brown, AICP @CompletedStreet: "Suburbs are a relatively recent invention that pretend to be both rural without the farm land and a small town without the charm and walkability"
"affect: civilization likeness (category membership) - Farm, Small town, uncanny valley: Suburb, Mature city"

The Pandemic is Making the Suburbs Even More Appealing - The Atlantic - "Suburbia was never as bad as anyone said it was. Now it’s looking even better."

Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math [ST07] - YouTube
It's not surprising he is demonising suburbs with misinformation again. He only looks at revenues based on property tax alone and expenditure on infrastructure alone to make the claim that poor people are subsidising rich people, ignoring the fact that the categories of revenue and expenditure are much broader than that. For example, in Lafayette (the first city he looks at), property taxes made up only 26% of total government revenue in the year ending October 2023, and public works accounted for only 12% of government expenditure (16.5% if you exclude capital outlay). Plus he assumes that people don't work, shop or otherwise generate money somewhere other than where they live (e.g. many suburban residents work and shop in the city, which means they are financing municpal revenue attributed to the city even though they don't live there).

Contra Strong Towns - Better Cities Project - "Strong Towns is an advocacy organization with substantial impact on urbanism in discourse and policy. Their focus areas are varied and there is a lot to like about the organization, but they have also been affiliated with a particular argument about the unsustainability of suburban sprawl. They are mainly known for an argument that the lifecycle infrastructure costs of suburban areas make them literally Ponzi schemes draining the vitality from urban centers.  You see these claims around all the time around urbanist discourse broadly, but they haven’t attracted as much academic engagement one way or the other.  I think this thesis is broadly misguided and does more harm than good: suburbs are not Ponzi schemes, they are not inherently fiscally unsustainable, and in fact cities are the ones host to a lot of cost bloat issues. It would be better for advocates to tone down the more inflammatory aspects of their rhetoric in favor of their more balanced policy agenda (which does not require the Ponzi language); or else do the data work to actually support these strong claims... The argument is that suburban sprawl literally does not pay for itself when considered on a lifecycle basis: that the deferred maintenance and lifecycle costs of suburban developments are higher than the benefits, such that bankruptcy is inevitable. More development can generate short-term cash, but the long-term trajectory is the whole system collapsing.  The costs that Strong Towns advocates focus on relate to lower economies of scale with respect to suburban developments. Lower densities require sprawling road networks, and high repair costs. Service provision costs for things such as snow removal, police, fire, etc. all snowball, so the argument goes, as the service area expands.  These economies of scale imply, for Strong Towns advocates, that dense urban development is inherently sustainable, while suburban sprawl is inherently unsustainable and can only be propped up in the short-run. The first basic reason this narrative overstates suburban gloom is the simple reality that government budgets — at federal, state, and local levels alike — are primarily about social spending, rather than infrastructure.  judge Glock and Tracy Loh pass along this Urban Institute report, which shows that all road and highway spending accounts for just 5.6% of state and local budgets. Per capita spending growth has been fairly low in this category so the budgetary share is actually down over time, even as the past infrastructure backlog has gotten somewhat addressed. Similarly, sanitation (3%) and sewerage (2%) are small items as well.  What do local governments spend money on instead? The main categories of expense you should be thinking about are social services like schools, police, and healthcare... it’s hard to tell a story about the inevitability of suburban doom when main drivers are just fundamentally pretty small potatoes in the overall budget.  Strong Towns advocates typically do not provide straightforward math here to back their claims — and there are important questions about the validity of the numbers they do provide — but you can multiply highway spending by 2 or 3x without eroding suburban budgets completely... The real crux of the issue however, is that infrastructure costs are typically higher in urban areas than suburban ones... So whatever are the theoretical benefits of amortizing infrastructure spend over a more densely packed population; in general cities have greater diseconomies of scale which lead to both higher infrastructure spending as well as more spending in the main social service categories.  The sources of excess urban expenditures are varied. For things like sewers and water — a lot of the costs seem to stem from things like environmental review, permitting, and so forth — which are really regulatory barriers and not so much about the nuts and bolts of just building the infrastructure. Urban wages are higher, especially union wages which are going to be more binding in urban areas. And then finally you just have greater cost bloat and inefficiencies in urban governments in general, which face fewer competitive pressures relative to their suburban counterparts. Or in Philadelphia; you see that streets and sanitation are just $155m out of a budget of about $5 billion; with the largest item reflecting benefits and pensions.   Here in New York City for instance, we are on track to spend $39k per pupil in K-12 schools. This is not even counting the capital budget. Even though NYC has the best transportation system in the country, which handles 7/8ths of the students in public schools — the busing expenses for the 1/8 of other students takes up over $10k a student traveling on bus, exceeding the total education budget of many states. We also see all the time the costs of dealing with and maintaining legacy infrastructure.  Now, there may well be good reasons for cities to spend more than suburban areas. Perhaps cities take care of different populations or offer more in the way of public services. This point is debatable — there are good reasons to think social mobility and even social integration can be good in many suburban areas.  But if the question is one of pure fiscal sustainability, on average, the answer is pretty clear: cities are more costly to run than suburbs. The pro-urban bias of Strong Towns advocates leads them to obfuscate this basic fact in favor of a doomer narrative of suburbs which lacks a strong foundation... Whether you like it or not, most Americans live in suburbs — they do so because they find it an attractive and low cost of living. Many people would rather live in cities instead, but are dissuaded by low housing inventory, high taxes, high costs of living, and other aspects of poor urban government. The competition between suburbs and cities is one of the main restraining forces keeping cities as functional as they are."

Disparate impact is the abolition of private property - "“Urban planning nerds” love to hate the suburbs.  They’re sterile, isolated, badly constructed, tasteless, expensive, inefficient, car-dependent, etc.  All of this is true — and yet half of Americans choose to live in the suburbs. In particular, something like 85% of American children are growing up in a suburb.  Americans hate commuting intensely — but they spend 4 hours and 40 minutes doing it every week... the sterility and wastefulness of the suburbs is the point.  It’s a distortionary outgrowth of the abolition of community property, which strongly disincentivizes Americans from investing in, protecting, and enjoying common spaces.  We’d rather bowl alone than live in spaces where we have no recourse against violence and social defection.  This is especially true of Americans with families. For a young single person, the economic and social advantages of urban network effects clearly outweigh the dangers of life in the city. You can make more money. The social opportunities are a lot more interesting. The food generally is better.  (This is why liberals in Portland and San Francisco love to ostentatiously pretend not to know what you’re talking about when you describe the problems of living there: it’s a flex.)  But when people have kids, they quickly lose their confidence that they can fly above the social dysfunction indefinitely. All sorts of abstract, macro policy problems suddenly don’t feel so abstract."

Elon Musk asks this question at every interview to spot a liar—science says it works - "He asks each candidate he interviews the same question: “Tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them.”  Because “the people who really solved the problem know exactly how they solved it,” he said. “They know and can describe the little details.”  Musk’s method hinges on the idea that someone making a false claim will lack the ability to back it up convincingly, so he wants to hear them talk about how they worked through a thorny issue, step by step... using the AIM method can increase the likelihood of detecting liars by nearly 70%"

Chinese man has lived in an airport for 14 YEARS so he can get away from his family - "Living with family can be overbearing sometimes, and many may feel annoyed and trapped by constant pestering.  For Wei Jianguo, a Chinese man who is in his 60s, the solution has been to move to Beijing Capital International Airport, where he is understood to have been living for 14 years now, so that he can smoke and drink as much as he likes.  Mirroring Tom Hanks' Viktor Navorsk in the 2004 movie The Terminal - where a tourist is forced to live at JFK airport - Mr Wei  has a set up of his food, belongings, and sleeping bag in a waiting area. He said he won't return home because then, he'll be forced to quit drinking and smoking - a habit he supplies with his monthly government allowance.  In 2018 he told China Daily: 'I can't go back home because I have no freedom there.  'My family told me if I wanted to stay, I had to quit smoking and drinking.  If I couldn't do that, I had to give them all my monthly government allowance of 1,000 yuan (£119.43). But then how would I buy my cigarettes and alcohol?'... The outlet also talked to staff at the airport, who said Mr Wei is harmless, albeit being a loud drunk.  One worker said that Mr Wei had been encouraged to leave a few times, but 'every time we mentioned it he was drunk and lost his temper'.   He added that the airport dweller doesn't bother other passengers and - with the terminals being warm - doesn't 'freeze' in the Shunyi Disctrict's cold winters, in which temperatures can plunge as low as -13C(8.6F).  According to China Daily, Mr Wei is not the airport's only resident, and in 2018 as many as six people were thought to be living like him - with one man 'notorious' for blasting Chinese opera music from his radio.  The world's most famous airport dweller is Iranian Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who lived in the Terminal One of the Paris Charles de Gaulle for a whopping 18 years - from 1988 until 2006 when he became hospitalised. Refugee Mehran Karimi Nasseri, on whom the 2004 film The Terminal is based on, was forced to take up residence in the Parisian airport after being sent here, his last port of departure, by the British authorities due to a failure in seeking entry into Britain.  The French authority also refused his entry, leaving him stuck in the terminal.  While 18 years is a long time, Bayram Tepeli, from Turkey, spent a staggering 27 years at Ataturk Airport, where he moved in 1991 due to problems with his family, before it closed in 2019, according to Daily Sabah."

Meme - Tucker Carlson: "Mr. Putin, why did you invade Ukraine?"
Putin: "I am just coming to that. You see on May 28th, 2016, a gorilla was shot at the Cincinnati zoo..."

How Six Sigma's history set the stage for its demise - "as GE began a long, slow decline, so did the popularity of Six Sigma. Once synonymous with management excellence, GE’s reputation in the business world plummeted in concert with its share price... The company’s market cap, which reached a high of nearly $600 billion in mid-2000, sank to around $60 billion late last year.  And as GE’s fortunes diminished, so has interest in Six Sigma... It’s since been surpassed by Agile, a management process that emerged from the world of software development. Was Six Sigma’s decline inevitable?  Eric Abrahamson, a Columbia business professor who studies management trends, distinguishes between fads and fashions. While fads bubble up organically, management fashions are manufactured and promulgated by consultants and business schools who profit from their adoption. Six Sigma was a classic management fashion, Abrahamson says, and GE was its leading model, a high-performing company touted by consultants eager to help other firms implement the system. As a result, it spread widely. “The merchants of Six Sigma wanted to keep expanding the market,” Abrahamson says. “You don’t want to just sell it to manufacturing firms, you want to sell it to service firms, to financial firms, to government agencies, to nonprofits.” And as with all fashions, once Six Sigma was picked up by the masses, fashionable companies lost interest and moved on to the next big thing. “These things have a life cycle: They get popular and then people start looking for something else,” says Art Swersey, a professor emeritus of operations research at the Yale School of Management. “These things run their course, and it has run its course.”  Six Sigma’s decline was also a symptom of a broader change in the corporate world, where innovation became more valued than efficiency, and technical precision was no longer a differentiator. Silicon Valley’s culture of “move fast and break things” meant business leaders were less concerned with reliability and more focused on game-changing discoveries. An obsession with efficiency, researchers have discovered (pdf), can come at the expense of invention... Perhaps nothing represented the decline of Six Sigma as much as a 2009 episode of 30 Rock—a satirical show running on NBC, then owned by GE as it happens—when Jack Donaghy, the head of NBC programming played by Alec Baldwin, travels to a GE corporate retreat. There, he meets the Six Sigmas, six men, each of whom “embodies a pillar of the Six Sigma business philosophy: teamwork, insight, brutality, male enhancement, hand-shakefulness, and play-hard.” Further mockery of business jargon and corporate training exercises ensues.  While GE hummed along for years under Immelt, its earnings were propped up by its financial services business, which under Welch had become the company’s single-largest segment. That over-reliance proved ruinous during the financial crisis of 2008, almost crippling the company... Ultimately, GE’s problems were not due to the problems of quality Six Sigma was intended to solve, but with a failure to innovate in a global economy increasingly dominated by technology companies. Six Sigma could get the company only so far, according to Jim Clifton, CEO of Gallup, the polling and consulting company. “Jack Welch was the king of process innovation,” said Clifton. “But when Jeff Immelt took over, he had a problem—there was nothing left for him to Six Sigma.” While GE’s management was hitting the limits of Six Sigma inside the company, outside it the system was spreading far and wide. It quickly became unmoored from its manufacturing origins, and was sold as an instant fix for companies and careers mired in mediocrity... Six Sigma became “ritualistic and cultish” because its practitioners focused on its nomenclature and methods without understanding the theories undergirding them, according to Steven Spear, a lecturer in organization at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.  “You take the tools that help you manage uncertainty and you get rid of the underlying thinking, and you’re left with just the tools,” he says. “That’s how you get to be ritualistic.”  It didn’t help that Six Sigma has no owner, accreditor, or even a commonly agreed upon body of knowledge... Six Sigma could be pretty much whatever you wanted it to be, Harry, who died in 2017, explained in an interview with Quality Digest magazine. “Six Sigma is not an absolute; it’s a vision,” he said. In its first iteration, at Motorola, Six Sigma was about defect reduction, he said. Its second act, at GE, was about cost reduction. “Six Sigma Generation III” was a system of value creation applicable to anyone... The rise in popularity of Lean, a parallel system of Japanese-inspired process improvement that focuses on reducing waste, has led to a blending of the two, and an even greater proliferation of courses and certifications... Elsewhere, interest in Six Sigma has waned in part because it was successful: American manufacturing has reduced its defects, and quality is no longer a top-level concern... Systems like Six Sigma appeal to managers because they are rooted in the pursuit of predictability, and all managers crave predictability"

Math for Future Scientists: Require Statistics, Not Calculus - "Charles Darwin is a classic example of a genius naturalist who was not a natural at math. As a young man, he sailed around the world aboard the HMS Beagle and explored the giant tortoises and iguanas of the Galapagos, the rainforests of Brazil, and the coral reefs of the South Pacific. From these sorts of direct engagements with nature, he developed his theory of evolution, which revolutionized science. But Darwin wrote in his autobiography that after studying math as a young man, he found that “it was repugnant to me.” When statistics stumped Darwin during his experiments investigating the advantages of crossbreeding plants, he called his cousin, the statistician Francis Galton, to try to make sense of the numbers.  Similarly, Thomas Edison said that as a boy he had a “distaste for mathematics.” But this did not stop him from becoming one of the most famous scientific inventors of all time. “I can always hire a mathematician,” said Edison, “but they can’t hire me.” Edison was so interested in chemistry that at the age of 13, when he got a job as a newsboy and concessionaire on the Grand Trunk Railroad, he brought a chemistry set aboard so he could do experiments during layovers. Math and science are distinctly different fields, and a talent for one does not imply a talent for the other.  According to professor emeritus Andrew Hacker of Queens College of the City University of New York, less than five percent of Americans will ever use any higher math at all in their jobs, including not only calculus but algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. And less than one percent will ever use calculus on the job. Born in 1929 and holding a PhD from Princeton, Hacker taught college political science for decades and has also been a math professor. His book The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions argues that not only college students but high school students should not be required to take algebra, geometry, trigonometry, or calculus at all. Hacker points out that not passing ninth grade algebra is the foremost academic indicator that a student will drop out of high school... Hacker’s larger argument is that both high schools and colleges should switch to teaching more useful types of math that can help students navigate the real world. He says American schools teach basic arithmetic well up to around middle school, but they stop there when they should continue teaching what he calls “adult arithmetic” or “sophisticated arithmetic” rather than veer off into more abstract types of math.  What if, for example, instead of spending months learning about derivatives, quadratic equations, and the interior angles of rhombuses, students learned how to interpret financial and medical reports and climate, demographic, and electoral statistics? They would graduate far better equipped to understand math in the real world and to use math to make important life decisions later on. So, how did calculus become the gatekeeper for majoring in science? In his essay, “Why Defending America’s National Security Requires Calculus and Critical Thinking,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin explains that it was the Cold War Space Race against the Soviet Union that ushered in the rise of calculus in American education...  We are now in the Information Age, and preparing students to build rockets is not as essential for the majority of science majors as learning to interpret and prioritize a sea of information. And far more scientific information circulates in the form of statistics than in any form related to calculus. Rubin goes on to illustrate how, in the 1980s, American educators began to suggest that statistics might be more important for the future than calculus, which led to the first AP Statistics exams in 1997. He says a college educator told him that this introduction of AP Statistics “occurred despite the best efforts of ‘the calculus mafia.’” The calculus mafia is, unfortunately, still alive and well today: In 2021, roughly 375,000 students took the AP Calculus AB or BC exams, while only about 183,000 took the AP Statistics exam... Why should passing calculus be required to major in biology any more than passing biology should be required to major in math?  Hacker says one of the most common arguments colleges make for maintaining calculus requirements is that they put “rigor” into the curriculum. But he argues that there is no evidence that calculus involves any unique rigor. To which I would add that the perceived difficulty of calculus is due largely to the way it is taught, which is highly fragmented, abstract, and divorced from its real-world applications. Students often learn very little about what calculus is actually used for. They are taught to memorize long series of steps in which they manipulate symbols and numbers to produce an answer that has very little meaning to them. Even students who pass calculus with flying colors often leave with little understanding of what the purpose of calculus is—which, ironically, is the most important thing they need to know about calculus... the evidence on the history books is that many of the best scientists have struggled with math, from Darwin to Edison to Alexander Graham Bell, Michael Faraday, and E.O. Wilson"

Austrian criminal Josef Fritzl insists on house with basement if released - "Austrian criminal Josef Fritzl, infamous for his incestuous crimes, is reportedly insisting on a house with a basement if he is granted release.  Now 89, Fritzl asserts that he no longer feels comfortable driving, hence the need for a residence near a train line equipped with a basement... Austria's most notorious inmate, now suffering from dementia, has his prison cell cluttered with folders and boxes filled with documents. He insists he would require a cellar to store these items in anticipation of his potential release, reportedly stating: "You know, I have so many files, documents, and memories."  Fritzl has been confined in psychiatric detention in a high-security unit at Stein prison since receiving a life sentence in 2009. He fathered seven children with his daughter Elisabeth while holding her captive as a sex slave in the basement of their family home in Amstetten.  In a strange turn of events, he claimed to be a good father during a parole hearing in January despite having imprisoned his daughter for 24 years. This perplexing statement was made in a letter to the parole board."

Malaysian police rescue 187 children victimized in Islamic business group’s alleged sex abuse ring - "Malaysian police announced that officers rescued an additional 187 children after conducting raids at various locations across the country associated with an Islamic business organization currently under investigation for alleged child sex abuse crimes.  The children were rescued from welfare homes linked to Global Ikhwan Services and Business (GISB Holdings). At least 572 children under the age of 18 have been rescued since the case began earlier this month, National police chief Razarudin Husain said... Of the 187 children who were recently rescued, 59 of them were under the age of 5, police said. Online videos obtained by authorities showed physical assaults on the children, including a young boy being caned and another child getting stepped on. Police arrested 156 additional suspects during the most recent operation, Husain said.  While living at these GISB properties, according to police, children were reportedly sodomized, instructed to sexually assault one another, denied medical care, and burned with hot metal spoons as a form of punishment. Medical screenings revealed that at least 13 children were sodomized, and 172 children sustained long-term emotional and physical injuries.  According to the police, the victims are primarily children of GISB employees who have been confined to their homes since they were infants. They are believed to have been indoctrinated from a young age to be loyal to the Islamic group.  The GISB is dedicated to promoting an Islamic lifestyle in Malaysia and abroad. The group owns mini-markets, pharmacies, restaurants, bakeries, and other enterprises. Its origins can be traced back to the Al Arqam Islamic sect, which was declared heretical and prohibited by the government in 1994.   Police detained members of GISB's senior management, including CEO Narsirudding Mohamad Ali, two of his wives, and two of his children, last week. Additionally, certain relatives of Ashaari Mohamad, who served as the executive director of Al Arqam prior to his passing in 2010, were apprehended, as per the network.  The police chief stated that an estimated 10,000 employees and officials of GISB were believed to be practicing the Al Arqam teachings, and indicated that Islamic authorities have launched an investigation."

“What makes Baba Nyonya descendants less deserving for Bumi status than Indian Muslims?” - "IN the wake of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim stating that applications from Indian Muslims for Bumiputera status would be assessed individually, a netizen has wondered shouldn’t the Peranakan Chinese, too, be accorded a similar status given the Baba Nyonya heritage represents a true ‘assimilation’ of both Malay and Chinese cultures.  Given that they have a distinct culture which is not Chinese nor Malay, ng(Gua+Pi) (@xgpingx) who claims to be from a Luk Kreung ancestry (Siamese and Chinese) reckoned that “forcibly categorising Baba Nyonya descendants as Chinese is a form of cultural genocide”.  “You may not agree with me but you will never change the fact the Baba Nyonya, Sino-Kadazans, the Peranakan Jawi (Straits Indians) and Hokkien Siamese like me have Bumiputera heritage in our blood,” he penned on his X account.   Referring to a Sinar Daily report, ng(Gua+Pi) further claimed that the Peranakan Chinese were stripped of their Bumiputera status as the “Baba” ethnicity status recognised in their birth certificates during the 1940s but was omitted soon after...   Beyond the Baba Nyonya community, ng(Gua+Pi) also shared that there are other ethnicities in Malaysia who are products of assimilation between Bumiputera and the non-Bumiputera ethnics.  Notable groups include:
Kristang (European + Malay)
Jawi Peranakan (Indian + Malay)
Sino-Native (Sabah Dayaks + Chinese)
Sino-Dayak (Sarawak Dayaks + Chinese)
Luk Kreung (Siamese + Chinese...
 This led to a pro-Pakatan Harapan (PH) current issue observer pointing out that little wonder “why some of the second-generation Indian Muslims, Indonesians, Pakistanis or Middle Eastern origin citizens end up having Bumi status due to religion and marriage”.   “But six generations of non-Muslim Malaysians who had worked hard for the country are still treated as second-class citizens,” lamented Hector of Sector 470 (@BigJoe470)."

Restaurant threatening to sue over bad Google review : r/canadianlaw - "People in the restaurant business have famously large egos and can take things very personally, especially since they often go into severe debt and stretch themselves way too thin to keep their business running."

Inheritance Tax in the UK and Farmers

First they came for the billionaires, claiming they were "hoarding" money...

Thread by @Will_Tanner_1 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

This is what Zimbabweification means for landowners, and really anyone who is normal and has assets

As leftism is built on envy and grievance, like Mugabe's Zimbabwe, the jackals are coming for wealth in the name of equity, as has happened before in England

🧵👇 

Mugabe is far from the only communist to do this, of course. All such regimes, from the Bolsheviks to Mao, confiscated land in the name of leveling society

But Mugabe is particularly apt, as his land confiscation wasn't so much for economic reasons as for spite and envy

To some extent, that was true of all communist regimes. But some of the Soviets at least appeared to think farm collectivization would lead to some prosperity for at least some of the USSR. Similarly, Mao's collectivization and bird killing had a drop of (quite poor) economic reasoning behind it. It was all ridiculous and foolish, of course, but not motivated purely by spite

Mugabe's land expropriation was. No one thought that taking land out of the hands of intelligent farmers and putting it in the hands of various regime cronies and ex-guerrillas would lead to more prosperity. They just hated that the whites owned it, and so they wanted to steal it while citing racial "equity" as their reasoning

This is essentially what's happening in Britain now

Much as they claim that growing crops or raising animals on land is "hoarding" it and taxing families out of existence so that solar farms and migrant shelters can be built on fields that have been farmed for a millennium, that's not actually what they care about, nor what they really think

Only the dumbest could think poisoning the land with solar panels...in a county known for being cloudy, would be anything approaching a prosperity-inducing idea. It has even less sense behind it than Pol Pot killing people with glasses or Mao killing sparrows. Similarly, the migrants who need shelters built for them are an obvious drain on society rather than being anything prosperity-inducing

So, it's near impossible for anyone with a brain to seriously think that stealing, through brutal taxation, land from farmers would lead to prosperity or "new life" 

If it's not about prosperity, then what is it about?

The "prices and rents" line in the above article is telling: they hate that the land of England is tied to its history

They hate that families like the Percys have owned 100k acres for centuries, that farmers who love England have tilled the same soil, whether because they own or rent it, for similar periods of time, that being part of the beautiful countryside is something that ties people to the country's history and traditions

Hence why they claim to want "prices and rents" to fall. It's not really about decreasing costs; if that's what they'd care about, then they'd reduce inflation and the resultant financialization of farmland that has resulted from it. But they're also the easy-money crowd, so it's not that. Rather, the gloating about seeing prices fall is gloating about the massive sales of land they know will happen. They know prices will fall like a rock when huge chunks of farmland hit the market due to families being unable to hold onto the same land their forefathers tilled, and they couldn't be happier

Key to their goal is severing the link between land and tradition

As things currently stand, the landed families and their longtime tenants are much more conservative and care about England herself rather than the cosmopolitan, globalist world of Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer

Breaking that link is key to the liberal "end of history," or having a rainbow flag-festooned boot stomping on the face of normal people, forever. Without people tied to the nation's history, people, and culture, who will stand up to the BLM boot? No one 

But it's also just spite

They hate that certain families own much of the land and have managed to hold onto it despite taxes and regulatory hostility

They hate that people like @JeremyClarkson own land and want to be able to do on it what they please, rather than what a council decides

They hate liberty, they hate freedom, and they hate that such feelings tend to come from country living

And that brings us back to Mugabe. They hate that people like the Duke of Rutland (a UKIP patron) enjoy chasing the fox on horseback or shooting grouse, not so much for any reason other than that they exist. They hate that farmers enjoy the crisp country air, the sight of sheep and cows grazing, the joy that comes from riding a horse into a covert or alongside a hedgerow. And, of course, they hate the feeling of private property and ownership; such is a feeling of independence, of resistance to liberalism and its leveling impulse, and so on

And, like Mugabe, they're justifying their confiscation of private property (though through taxation rather than men with guns) in the name of racial equity.

It's just envy, it's just hate of normal white people. It's just Mugabeism

This isn't the first time that this has happened to England

The envy Starmer represents existed essentially from the Parliament Bill to Thatcher, particularly under Attlee and Wilson

Here's the background on that: 

The Attlee years particularly stand out as a time when envy won out and countryside life and prosperity were destroyed in the name of envy

The best example of this is what happened to the Fitzwilliam family and Wentworth Woodhouse

The Fitzwilliams grew, under the low-tax Victorian and Edwardian years, fantastically wealthy off their coal mines. Unlike other landowners, such as the Marquesses of But, they didn't rent coal land out but instead ran the mines themselves

As mine owners and operators, they contrasted with the plutocratic, new-man mine owners in that they placed a heavy priority on miner safety, and seemed to care a great deal about miner well-being. They always had the best, most effective safety improvements in their mines, provided employment for mine workers during depression years when the mines were slowed or shut down, and generally treated the miners as people rather than industrial cattle

 

Proof that their behavior wasn't just an act is that the local miners liked them and stood by them, even during the nationalization period

That period came under Attlee, the post-WW2 PM. He nationalized railroads, mines, and mills in the name of...envy of the wealthy, explained away as caring about worker wages and safety. Amongst those mines confiscated were those of the Fitzwilliams, showing the lie of Attlee's reasoning: the Fitzwilliam miners were well-paid and safe 

But, nationalize them Attlee did. The spite and envy were put in clear relief by Manny Shinwell, the Labour Party's Minister of Fuel and Power

He ordered strip mining on the Fitzwilliam family's Wentworth Woodhouse estate, despite the low value of the coal on it. The miners protested and threatened striking over his decision, as they were loyal to the Fitzwilliam family, but Shinwell crushed that and the strip mining began. It ravaged the cultivated, Capability Brown garden landscape. It also continued right up to the door of Wentworth, and damaged the foundation of the house severely, making it unliveable

In the name of spite, he destroyed a family's home and gardens despite that family's kind treatment of their employees

 

There was no reason for that other than envy. The miners had been well-treated, the coal was valueless, and the family paid its (unjustly high) taxes

But envy lies at the root of socialist Labour's popularity, just as it lies at the root of communism like Zimbabweification

So, with the Wentworth story playing out across the countryside and sky-high estate taxes destroying landed estates and old families, envy as a political force plagued England and culminated in Harold Wilson's 90% death taxes, currency devaluation, and economic stagnation

Of course, those who were destroyed for no reason other than envy were mocked for it by the media 

That's back

Economic Envy is behind Starmer's decision to start confiscating land through taxation, and this time the country isn't still wealthy from Victoria but rather impoverished and already overtaxed, so the effects will be even worse

 

As always, the policy of envy is justified by saying the policy will just make the rich "pay their fair share"

But are land-rich, cash-poor yeomen farmers "the rich"? Should the actually rich, those relatively few peers who survived the death taxes of Churchill, Attlee and Wilson, be destroyed because of envy? Is that just?

No. But it is what liberalism wants. "Equality," by which they mean state-enforced egalitarianism, requires it

So now the last remnants of the old world are being taxed out of existence, their land to be confiscated by the state in a process little different than what Mugabe did to Rhodesia. It's just envy, as the "meme" below shows 

Links - 11th April 2025 (1 - Mark Carney)

Neil G. Oberman on X - "Last night in Calgary. Heckler: “There’s genocide happening in Palestine right now!” Carney: “I’m aware! That’s why we have an arms embargo!” Meet the new Liberals. Same as the old ones. While #Hamas still holds hostages (including Canadian). Shameful."

Just watched Carneys Scarborough rally : r/CanadianConservative - "He spent the whole time running away from every policy his party has had over the last 10 years and fearmongering about the Americans. NOTHING about the everyday cost of living, crime or immigration, just a whole lot of "elbows up" nonsense. 30 minutes of acting like the 51st state thing is a clear and present danger. He painted his plagiarised policies as "pragmatism" and said Pierre wanted to "divide and be conuered." Also, he said he wants Canada to be an "energy superpower" but he won't repeal C-69 or lift emission caps. All of this is, of course, absurd and absurdly dishonest, but it works. It's good politics right now, and some folks are falling for it, hook, line, and sinker. The elbows-up, "Orange menace wants to invade us" stuff works on boomers and low-information voters, and that's all you need to win."

Just watched Carneys Scarborough rally : r/CanadianConservative - "Liberal supporters amaze me with their capacity for doublethink.
   The Liberal Party under Trudeau ruined Canada. The Liberal Party is the party of "change" and will save us from the Liberal Party.
   Orange man bad. Orange man good because he endorses Carney.
   Elbows up, we love Canada. Canada is a post national state.
   Pollievre will sell us out to the Americans because he is "secretly" tied to American business interests. Carney will save us from the Americans because of his European and American business interests.
   Pollievre's security clearance is an existential threat to Canada, he's probably compromised, foreign interference is a big deal. Liberal foreign interference from China is "not a big deal."
   51st state is our biggest concern and a major existential threat to Canada. Carney is friendly with Trump, this will protect us from American annexation.
   Oil is evil and Carney says we need to have anti-oil policies. Carney is going to turn us into an energy superpower. "

Mark Carney's company, Brookfield, purchases module home company 'Modulaire Group' for $5 billion in June 2021...Mark Carney announces $35 billion of our tax dollars to go to modular homes : r/CanadianConservative

Mark Carney who keeps claiming a united Canada is how we will succeed is seen here disrespecting Danielle Smith. Just imagine what he says behind closed doors. : r/Canada_sub
Unity means left wingers can bash their opponents as much as they want, and if their opponents complain, they are being divisive and threatening national unity

Thread by @SNewmanPodcast on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Mark Carney just pulled off the greatest career con in history.  Elite connections and self-promotion landed him trophy jobs.  But British media warned for YEARS that he doesn't deliver results.  A warning from our commonwealth friends that Canada should listen to:
His resume looks impressive:
• Governor of Bank of Canada
• Governor of Bank of England
• UN Climate Change Envoy
• Chair of Brookfield Asset Management
The perfect CV for running a country. But there's something the British press spotted right away that we missed...
Both left and right-wing British media described Carney the same way:  "The epitome of a remote, globalized, technocratic elite. Very good at self-promotion, at collecting trophy jobs, and negotiating generous salaries for himself."  But they noticed something else too: "He is just not very good at delivering."  That's not from some far-right outlet.  That's from mainstream British newspapers who watched him work for nearly 7 years.  And while Canadian media celebrated his appointment, the Brits saw something entirely different...
The Guardian's economics editor called Carney intellectually confident but lacking substance.  "His answers to questions often went on for several minutes, making them pretty much unquotable."  In a 30-minute interview, he realized Carney "had said nothing that would remotely make a news story." The Daily Telegraph was even more blunt:  "Over eight years at the Bank of England, Carney was at best an indifferent governor, and, at worse, a disappointing failure."  This despite earning over £600,000 a year – far more than any of his predecessors.  Here's where it gets interesting:
The City of London nicknamed him "the unreliable boyfriend" for his constant changes of direction on interest rates.  His policies led to UK inflation hitting 11.1% – much higher than France (5.2%) or Italy (8%).  The blame? The Bank "had printed too much money."  Sound familiar?
But the most damning critique wasn't about his economic decisions.  It was about his character.  British journalists "caught glimpses of his volcanic temper" and bank staff "were wary of getting on the wrong side of him."  "He was respected but not especially liked." We've already seen flashes of this temper in Canada.  When CBC's Rosemary Barton questioned his blind trust arrangements, Carney snapped:  "Look inside yourself. You start from a prior of conflict and ill will."  This from our new PM when faced with basic journalistic questions.
After leaving the Bank of England, Carney's Climate Alliance began falling apart.  Major banks like JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citibank pulled out.  The Financial Times described it as "unravelling."  Yet another impressive title with lackluster results.
Here's what makes Carney's rise so fascinating:  Despite consistently underwhelming performance, his career kept advancing.  He mastered the art of failing upward.  Each prestigious title became a stepping stone to something bigger, regardless of actual achievements. And now he's Prime Minister of Canada.  As we face economic challenges and Trump's tariffs, we've handed the keys to someone the British media described as having "left behind a trail of wreckage in every major job he has ever held."  We should have listened to their warnings.
The British experience with Carney should be a wake-up call for Canadians.  A carefully curated CV and elite connections don't guarantee real-world results.  The question isn't whether Carney looks good on paper.  It's whether he can actually deliver when it matters most. I'd suggest we all pay more attention to what people DO rather than what they SAY.  The British saw behind Carney's polished image. They recognized style over substance.  As a Canadian, I hope we don't learn this lesson the hard way.  But we'll find out on April 28th."
Left wingers keep talking about "qualified" people and "qualifications", but they obsess about positions held, rather than results or achievements
The same people who said Trump had no business being President because he was the first with neither political nor military experience endorse Carney, who has never won a popular election and just fails upwards

Mark Carney claims Pierre Poilievre is the type of politician that “sees opportunity in tragedy.” Mark Carney also said the pandemic offered a “huge economic opportunity” for rich climate grifters such as himself to usher in their sustainable economy. : r/CanadianConservative

Mark Carney hanging with Epsrein Islands Ghislaine Maxwell (thoughts?) : r/Canada_sub
Time to start ranting about Donald Trump again, even though there is no suggestion of wrongdoing, and the lawyer for one of Epstein's victims cleared him, and said he was the only one subpoened who was fully cooperative

Marc Nixon on X - "Watch Mark Carney say climate change is an existential threat. He says: If you’re not the solution to net zero you will be punished. This guy sounds more and more like a dictator. He is Justin Trudeau on steroids."

The baggage Mark Carney is bringing to his prime ministerial bid - "He’s in a photo with Ghislaine Maxwell
He has multiple citizenships
He’s the international face of “net zero”
One of the biggest electoral liabilities for the Liberal Party right now is their climate policy. Although the Trudeau Liberals were always very open about their intention to pursue an aggressive policy of emissions reduction, the carbon tax very quickly came to rank among their most unpopular policies. With Trudeau announcing his intention to resign, party insiders are now openly speaking of ditching the carbon tax altogether. This would be a harder tack for Carney, given that he’s one of the founders of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a consortium of major financiers pledged to “net-zero” emissions by 2050. Carney was also the UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance.  The Net-Zero Banking Alliance is faring about as well as the Liberal Party these days: Just last week, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America all defected from the group.  It also means there’s plenty of video around of Carney saying that businesses who do not sign on with centralized decarbonization efforts should be punished.  “The companies, and those who invest and lend in them, who are part of the solution, will be rewarded. Those that are lagging behind, and are still part of the problem, will be punished,” Carney said in one interview with the United Nations’ Climate Action office.
His tenure as Bank of England governor wasn’t all that great...
Carney was also one of the central figures of what the U.K. tabloid press has dubbed “Project Fear”; an organized effort warning of dire financial consequences if the U.K. followed through with its exit from the European Union. Carney’s successor, Andrew Bailey, has now publicly acknowledged that many of those warnings were overblown. He’s had a Canadian government job at the exact same time his company has been lobbying Ottawa for billions  It was in September when Carney got his first official link to the Liberal government by being named as a senior economic advisor to the prime minister. Unusually, though, it was a position with the Liberal Party of Canada rather than one with the Prime Minister’s Office. As Conservative critics pointed out at the time, this would have allowed Carney to take the job without going through the usual conflict-of-interest disclosures required of a prime ministerial aide.  He also got the job at the exact same time that his company, Brookfield Asset Management, was lobbying Ottawa on a $50 billion pension fund that would be directed towards Canadian assets. Brookfield was asking the federal government to pony up as much as $10 billion for the fund."

Mark Carney’s company accused of ‘massively underreporting’ emissions - "Brookfield’s true carbon emissions are as much as 13 times higher than what it officially discloses, campaign group Investors for Paris Compliance (I4PC) has alleged, claiming that the Canada’s largest private equity investor is excluding key parts of its business.  Former Bank of England governor Mr Carney is the chairman of Brookfield, alongside his role as special UN envoy for climate finance and action."
Climate change is definitely his priority

Mark Carney is not fit to be Canadian PM | The Spectator - "it takes only a cursory glance at his record as Governor of the Bank of England to work out that Carney’s reputation is completely overblown... it is now clear that he was not actually very good. The Bank made a whole series of mistakes under his management. Growth was consistently weak. The Bank printed way too much money, stoking an asset bubble, and ultimately triggering the highest inflation rate in the G7. It badly misjudged the impact of the UK’s departure from the EU, allowing itself to become politicised as part of ‘Project Fear’. It lost control of regulation, as became clear during the ‘liability-driven investment’ crisis during the Truss premiership. And it allowed the City to start losing its position as a leading financial centre, a trend that has accelerated since he left. It is hardly a very inspiring record.   It has gotten even worse since then, with Carney becoming one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Rachel Reeves during the run up to the election, praising her expertise and vision. Whatever your politics, it is surely now clear that Reeves is hopelessly out of her depth, and is turning into one of the worst chancellor’s of the modern era. Again and again, Carney’s judgement has been terrible"

Terry Newman: How fast will Carney flee if he loses election? - "Carney didn’t just win the party’s leadership race, he won the highest seat in our government, without ever being elected by Canadians, not even as a member of Parliament... he told us that his leadership will be one of “fiscal responsibility, social justice, and international leadership.” Except, have you ever seen a government be focused on social justice while at the same time being fiscally responsible? There’s only one way that can happen — on the backs of taxpayers... Carney, who often speaks in religious and moralistic tones, went into full saviour-mode during his acceptance speech, repeating the last line that his campaigners at his recent event in Mississauga, an event where he refused to take questions from media , told me was a sign his speech was almost over: “I feel like everything in my life has helped prepare me for this moment”... Carney claims he’s going to give Canadians “big changes.” He told the audience that “people want change.” Yet, there he was, on stage, accepting the leadership of a party that Canadians wanted change from, a party that he was courted by in 2011 and has been fiscally advising since at least 2020, whose members he didn’t even bother to attack during the leadership debate. Change? Who is he kidding?... The choice to “serve” was taken away from every other elected MP who wasn’t a Liberal in the House of Commons through no fault of their own. They were blocked from serving by Justin Trudeau, who prorogued government in the face of a potential non-confidence vote. So much for representative democracy! Neither the “consciences” of Mark Carney nor Liberal MPs appear to appreciate that... And Carney treated the tariff war with the U.S. with the seriousness of a hockey game... Canada could start by acknowledging the fentanyl crisis exists and that we’ve been apathetic about our border and national security for a long time. You know, humility, the word that Carney uses often, but doesn’t appear to understand the meaning of. These are real issues. Many Canadians just don’t like it being pointed out to us by our neighbours to the south."

Jamie Sarkonak: Mark Carney has forever politicized the Bank of Canada - "The high price of Carney’s bid for power? The politicization of the office of central bank governor, and perhaps other classically non-partisan posts. We’ll be paying that one for a long time, and it’s not likely we’ll be better off for it. Carney is the first of nine Bank of Canada governors to run in politics. His predecessors all went on to become Order of Canada recipients, honourary degree holders, corporate executives, university administrators — even commentators who give scathing reviews of federal budgets. They continued to participate in the life afforded to former public servants of high rank, but wisely stopped short of running for election... The luxury we received in exchange for their self-restraint was a history of governments that could afford to make politically grey appointments to key unelected roles. They didn’t necessarily need political allies; they could select for competency; they perhaps didn’t need to conduct as extensive political vetting of appointees because it wasn’t as necessary. Some jobs within the government were too critical for their holders to ever tarnish their purity by running in an election... Carney probably won’t get the ire he deserves for politicizing the central bank to the degree he did. Indeed, if the world was just, you would have seen it happen already. After all, when Pierre Poilievre, as the Conservative party’s leadership contender in 2022, said he would fire current Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem, he received a mountain of criticism for inappropriately politicizing the office — even though it’s within the right of Parliament to fire the governor by way of legislative change, and even though a precedent for doing so has already been set... From now on, every prime minister will have to consider whether his or her top pick for central bank governor will use the job as a springboard to run for office; every Bank of Canada governor with slight political aspirations will have to consider whether his or her calls to raise or lower interest rates will tarnish his or her public standing. It doesn’t matter that Carney is no longer in the role; the fact that he once held it is enough. The same understanding is what keeps former Supreme Court of Canada justices from running for public office (for now …)."

Carney pitches national unity — just not with Conservatives: Selley - "Politicians of all stripes are likely correct when they say it will require unusual levels of national unity to remake Canada into something other than an unacknowledged American vassal state. “We’re facing the greatest crisis of our lifetimes. We have to do extraordinary things, and together. We have to build things that we’ve never imagined we had to do, at a pace that we never would have believed possible,” Carney told the Liberals assembled in Ottawa on Thursday evening. Poilievre, Carney then opined, would stand resolutely athwart any such ambitions. Carney didn’t show his work on that, because he can’t. At no point will Pierre Poilievre ever have (or desire) a mandate to weaken the Canadian economy in an effort to curry favour with The Donald. He has just as much incentive as the Liberal leader, past or new, to say nasty things about Trump, and all signs are that he’s willing to say those things. Really, it’s a wash: Carney and Poilievre don’t disagree, fundamentally, at all on the question of how to deal with Trump. And most Canadians agree with them that “elbows up” is the best approach. So what Canadians deserve now is an immediate election campaign on how best to respond to this unfortunate new reality into which we have been thrust."

Meet Mark Carney, Canada's next prime minister - "Carney’s problem, potentially, is that his life reads like it was purposefully built to present a ready-made political leader, and perhaps it was, but it is one finally complete at a time this particular image is waning. With populism and skepticism increasingly creating distrust of elites, globalism, higher education and the establishment, could it be that Carney missed his sweet spot?... the Bank of Canada was denying a front-page story in Britain’s Financial Times newspaper saying the Bank of England was courting Carney to be their new governor. When Carney was asked directly about it, he said the article was not accurate. Soon after, he cut his seven-year governorship short to become governor of the Bank of England... Working with the government may have helped him access the party he would soon be asking to vote for him, but it also wrapped the popularity anchor of Trudeau around his waist. Likely understanding Carney’s maneuvres, Conservative House Leader Andrew Scheer called a press conference to coincide with the Liberal retreat to publicly say that Carney and Trudeau are “basically the same people.”... Carney, of course, is an outsider only in the most technical sense of not being a long-time party member, elected MP or in Cabinet. But he has friends in high places, even among those he ran against for leadership. If he was an outsider he was a most thoroughly connected outsider, so connected he was basically inside. The distinction, though, allows him to chastise the Liberals for not showing enough fiscal discipline with a straight face, because he wasn’t at the Cabinet table. It is one thing to win a party’s leadership. It’s another to win a general election. A series of party leaders have found that out the hard way. An obvious comparison is Ignatieff, who also was praised, like Carney, for his intellectual heft and experience abroad. He failed miserably at connecting with the masses... Carney seems to understand the zeitgeist. Such are the times that his online leadership campaign biography doesn’t mention Harvard, or Oxford, or Goldman Sachs, or even private banking. It does mention his hockey goaltending as an adolescent... He wasn’t forthright about the recent move to the United States of the head office of Brookfield Asset Management, a publicly traded company for which he was chairman of the board, and then he didn’t own up to the mistake, or the lie. He was also found not to have yet resigned from some international roles despite saying he had. He spread shockingly wrong information about Canada’s importance in the semiconductor supply chain. In the English leadership debate he spoke in clipped passages, as if reciting PowerPoint slides while struggling to keep it simple."

Brian Lilley on X - "Canada will be a conventional energy superpower Mark Carney has said in English. Listen to this question and answer in French where the PM automatically defers to the provinces and downplays the idea of pipelines for oil and LNG. Why? Quebec."

Brian Lilley on X - "And with that, Donald Trump endorses Mark Carney because Pierre Poilievre isn’t nice enough to him."
Jonathan Kay on X - "Carney may not have a mandate from Canadian voters. But he has one from Donald Trump, King Charles, and Europe’s Central bankers."

Stewart Green 🇨🇦 on X - "Son of a former PM thinks we elect prime ministers. You really can’t make this up. SMH"
Ben Mulroney on X - "I’m beginning to think you and your Gaslight Gang are the ones who don’t understand the difference. When people refer to Carney as unelected, it is not based on the belief that “we elect Prime Ministers.“ it’s that he quite literally, and exclusively doesn’t have a seat in the HOC."

John Brennan on X - "CBC’s Rosemary Barton was unprofessional when she implied to PM Carney that he was lying about his blind trust. This was a personal attack against him. CBC needs to impose a disciplinary measure and issue a formal apology to PM Carney."
Jonathan Kay on X - "turns out the only thing we needed to do to get progressives on board with clearing the rot at the CBC was for Dear Leader to be criticized"
It's only fascist to attack the media when it hurts the left wing agenda. Left wing leaders are above scrutiny

Tasha Kheiriddin: No, Carney, you're the one who must 'look inside yourself' - "At a news conference in London , Globe and Mail reporter Stephanie Levitz and CBC News anchor Rosemary Barton grilled Prime Minister Mark Carney on his personal finances. “For a guy who has spent most of his life in the private sector, there’s no possible conflict of interest in your assets,” Barton insisted . “That’s very difficult to believe.” An exasperated Carney told Barton to “look inside yourself, Rosemary” and accused her of coming from a “prior (assumption) of conflict and ill will.” He went on to add, “I have served in the private sector. I have stood up for Canada. I have left my roles in the private sector at a time of crisis for our country. I’m complying with all the rules.” This rather cringey exchange taught us two things. First, Carney needs more media training: news conferences aren’t therapy sessions, and scolding journalists is what the media slams Conservatives (and U.S. President Donald Trump) for doing... if the new PM isn’t careful, he will blow one of his main advantages, which is that voters consider him more “likeable” than his Conservative rival, and less arrogant than his predecessor, Justin Trudeau... Trudeau’s ethical lapses were legion... Carney is facing scrutiny for his work as Brookfield Asset Management’s head of transition investing, in which he oversaw the financing of billions of dollars in net-zero projects around the world... there are legitimate questions as to whether he would personally benefit from net-zero policies going forward"
Conflicts of interest are only problems if they hurt the left wing agenda

Carney needs better response to financial questions: Experts - "“Every time he’s asked about his connections to Brookfield Asset Management or his conflicts, he becomes defensive. He deflects and then he attacks,” Barrett said.   “Apparently, he thinks answering questions on this subject is beneath him.”  Until he ran for the Liberal leadership, Carney was also on the boards of business media empire Bloomberg and the payment processor Stripe... Sarbjit Kaur, founder of the public relations firm KPW Communications, said “intensive media training is absolutely necessary” so he can handle tough questions without appearing confrontational. The tendency to get “defensive, evasive, or dismissive” shows Carney’s lack of experience in the hot seat of political leadership... he’s the first Canadian prime minister never to have been elected at any level of government... Amanda Galbraith, a partner at the crisis communications and strategic management firm Oyster Group, said Carney’s response shows how he is grappling with the differences between being a central banker — a public-facing bureaucrat, essentially — and a politician.   “There’s just less respect, candidly, for you as an individual when you’re in that role, and I think we saw him get prickly and testy and somewhat condescending in tone,” said Galbraith, who has also worked as a Conservative staffer.   “That is a real weakness and soft spot for him that he has to guard against.”"

Mark Carney's cabinet is more of the same, only weirder: Selley - "Windy pronouncements are a constancy, certainly. On his way to Rideau Hall Friday morning, Carney told reporters, “We are a very focused government, focused on action and we are going to get straight to work.” “Today, we’re building a government that meets the moment,” Carney wrote on X. “Canadians expect action — and that’s what this team will deliver. A smaller, experienced cabinet that moves faster, secures our economy, and protects Canada’s future.” Look at those sentences and sentence fragments. Bask in their Trudeauvian emptiness. Savour... Baffling decisions seem to be a constancy: Marco Mendicino is Carney’s chief of staff. Yes that Marco Mendicino: The hapless ex-cabinet minister whose greatest hits include claiming no one at Correctional Service Canada (CSC) told his public safety ministry that Paul Bernardo was being transferred to a medium-security prison; then admitting that CSC did tell his ministry, but claiming his ministry didn’t tell him; and then allowing CSC’s untenable decision to stand anyway. (A prison break would sure spice up the election campaign, wouldn’t it?) Inscrutable change: The carbon tax is being cancelled, as a first order of business, which is a stinging rebuke to Trudeau — or it would be, if Trudeau were capable of feeling rebuked. But then, more constancy: Carney clearly believes carbon taxes are a good way to reduce emissions. While running for the Liberal leadership he said, “the consumer carbon tax isn’t working (because) it’s become too divisive” — note, not because he thought it was bad policy. Constancy: Whatever “system of incentives” a Carney government designed “to reward Canadians for making greener choices, such as purchasing an energy efficient appliance, electric vehicle or improved home insulation” and taxing emitters — as were his leadership-campaign promises — will cost taxpayers one way or the other. (One of the funnier media narratives to take hold in the early days of the Carney era is that by ditching Trudeau’s carbon tax, the new PM has neutralized the issue such that the Conservatives can’t use it against him. By that logic, the Liberals can’t use abortion rights against Poilievre because he has forsworn introducing or supporting any legislation on the matter.)"

Links - 9th April 2025 (2)

California police find spider monkey in front seat during DUI traffic stop - "California police were treated to a surprise Monday night when they pulled over a Rolls-Royce in a suspected DUI case and discovered a dealer’s amount of weed and a spider monkey in the front seat.  Ali Mused Adel Mohamed, 27, was busted in his 2022 Rolls-Royce Ghost for speeding on SR-99 as he was driving the 1-month-old primate, which was wearing a pink onesie... The exotic pet was taken from Mohamed due to California’s rule against owning primates as pets."

Man from China passes Japanese language proficiency test after watching more than 4,500 Japanese AVs - "Most people will engage a tutor or attend classes to learn a new language. However, this is not the case for Mr Jakku Song, a man from China who learned Japanese entirely by watching Japanese adult videos (AV)... by watching 4,545 Japanese AVs, he learned the language on his own.  Through this unconventional way of learning, he passed the N2 level of the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), qualifying for entry into Japanese universities or vocational schools. Mr Song has never received any formal Japanese language training, making his feat all the more amazing.  Rather, his deep interest in Japanese AV culture motivated him to learn by immersing himself in extensive viewing and imitation.  A quick browse on his YouTube channel shows that he publishes controversial topics in Japanese. He also calls himself on his Instagram page the “Prince of dirty jokes”, “Asia’s last gentleman” and “China’s most gentle hentai”.  In his latest video, he can be seen lying among a sea of “used” tissues where he shows off his N2 certificate and thanks Japanese AV actresses such as Sola Aoi and Tsukasa Aoi."

Meme - *Publicité de Burger King*
*Jeune fille avec une marqueur de hauteur*
"1ERS PAS"
"1ER AMOUREUX"
"1ER BURGER KING"
"1ERES CLOPES"
"1ERE PIPE"

Meme - Lisa Simpson: "sparkling water tastes like when your leg falls asleep"

Two men on trial over sham marriage to Georgian woman, defence calls it 'true love' - "Goh had told a defence witness that he enjoyed Maia's European cuisine and that "sex was good", said the lawyer.  He said Goh was homeless, hydrophobic or had a phobia of water, and did not shower as a result. He was also unemployed.  "Maia provided intimate care and affection to Goh more than that of a friend," said Mr Sandhu. "Maia provided care and affection that (is) only shared by those in covenant of matrimony."  He gave examples, claiming that Maia helped Goh overcome his hydrophobia and bathed him, cooked for him, shaved Goh's armpit and private parts and bathed together with him.  They also slept with each other and it was only when Goh's bad habit of using his phone late into the night started interrupting Maia's sleep that they slept separately.   The defence witnesses confirmed that the pair behaved like a married couple, holding hands and being affectionate, Mr Sandhu said.  He said these factors, even Goh's bravado tale that sex was good with Maia, were not the elements of a typical sham marriage.  "Maia testified that she tried to make the marriage work but it was too difficult, (so) she decided to divorce him," said Mr Sandhu. The pair are currently divorced."
Two Singaporean men jailed over marriage of convenience to Georgian woman - "  Maia previously pleaded guilty to entering into the marriage of convenience and was sentenced to six months' jail. She then became a prosecution witness against both Singaporean men before being deported.  She had testified about how she repeatedly tried to find a job in Singapore without success. In late 2015, she resorted to plying the nightlife trade and met a Vietnamese woman at a pub... The woman told Maia she could apply for a student pass to remain in Singapore and told her to contact Kok for details. Kok arranged for Maia to enrol in an international college, but her student pass application was not approved...   When Maia met the two men at a Vietnamese restaurant in Marina Square mall, she said she was taken aback by Goh's unkempt appearance...   In his mitigation plea, Kok said he did not benefit from the sham marriage and "sincerely longed for them to have a blissful marriage". He has also not been able to get a long-term pass for his wife of 20 years due to his case.  He added that he had depleted his money to contest his charges, after his previous defence counsel Charles Yeo fled the country in the middle of the trial...   Kok told the court that he wanted Goh – whom he referred to as Alex – to leave his restaurant.  “During that time, my restaurant had a rat infestation and business was very bad. Later, I found out Alex didn’t shower, and he had a very big body odour and was driving customers and patrons away from my restaurant,” Kok said.  “At that time, I desperately needed to get rid of Alex from my restaurant and I was trying to help him become a better man … I am, in fact, exploited by Goh.”"

Smoke Gets in Their Eyes: How the Liberals’ Anti-Tobacco Crusade Worsens Smokers’ Health - "Under the Justin Trudeau government, federal smoking policy has been driven by two main urges. The first is a conceptualization of smokers as a group of misguided consumers who simply need to be educated about the consequences of their bad habit. It is an approach that seems dramatically at odds with how other social failings are treated in 2023. Consider that hard drug users as well as people who are obese, homeless or unemployed are generally considered to be victims of circumstances beyond their control and in need of direct government aid and support, as well as ample amounts of public sympathy. Yet Ottawa’s latest cigarette warning label gambit is one more iteration of a long-stale plan to stigmatize smokers as weak individuals of low moral character who can be hectored into quitting if simply presented with a sufficiently stern negative message. A lengthy train of scientific and historical evidence suggests it won’t work. Bennett’s replacement as federal addictions minister, Ya’ara Saks, would benefit herself and Canadians by taking the time to understand the true nature of smokers and to confront the nicotine environment of the present day. Most smokers are not willfully self-destructive or stupid. They crave nicotine to satisfy a powerful addiction while hating the health consequences that smoking inflicts upon them. It is also important to understand that smoking is particularly prevalent within certain sub-populations. These include low-income individuals, Indigenous people, the LGBT+ community, schizophrenics, people suffering generalized anxiety disorder or ADHD, and prisoners. Smoking rates are about one-third for LGBT+ people and 70 percent for schizophrenics. For them nicotine is not only a compulsive habit but a cognitive aid and a balm for anxiety. There is also a significant cohort of middle-aged and elderly smokers who have been addicted to nicotine their entire adult lives. The pool of remaining smokers is thus a heterodox group, and helping them reduce the health effects of their nicotine addiction requires a nuanced and sensitive approach. Of central importance is recognizing that the weaponry to win the battle against smoking-caused cancer, stroke and cardiovascular disease has evolved in significant ways. Evidence from other countries points the way. Sweden has far and away the lowest lung cancer rate in Europe. Yet Swedish nicotine usage per capita is similar to the European average. The reason is that cigarette smoking is quite rare in that country. Swedes instead tend to consume nicotine through oral smokeless tobacco: either snus (a powdered form of tobacco) or little sachets called “modern oral tobacco.”... Japan offers another example. Cigarette sales have plummeted in that country since the recent arrival of heated tobacco products (HTPs). These battery-driven devices warm a plug of tobacco about half the size of a cigarette, releasing nicotine without burning the tobacco. Research into Japan’s hospital admissions has revealed a “significant reduction in the number of hospitalizations for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease” since HTPs began to supplant cigarettes over the period 2010 to 2019... burning tobacco is what is responsible for most of the toxins and carcinogens associated with the grave health outcomes of smoking. If nicotine consumption can be separated from tobacco combustion, the overall harm of smoking can be substantially reduced...  While nicotine has been implicated in neuro-developmental birth defects, it is not linked to cancer, cardiovascular disease or chronic pulmonary obstruction – the main harms caused by tobacco smoking. “When nicotine is decoupled from the deadly toxins in inhaled smoke, it is substantially less harmful,” states a 2018 academic study in the Annual Review of Public Health. Its conclusion: “Alternative Nicotine Delivery Systems may provide a means to compete with, and even replace, combusted cigarette use, saving more lives more rapidly than previously possible.” British research published by both Public Health England and the Royal College of Physicians over many years has highlighted the significant differences in toxicity. This evidence shows e-cigarettes have a risk factor of 5 percent relative to combustible cigarettes, as estimated by the toxin content of smoke versus vapour. This is a mammoth difference – 20 to 1... encouraging such a shift in consumer behaviour requires a sea-change in smoking culture and regulation in Canada. Opponents of vaping habitually cite high rates of e-cigarette use among youth and warn that this will ultimately lead to traditional smoking. Both claims are false... Smokers themselves, unfortunately, are largely unaware of the relative risks of consuming nicotine in different forms... This lack of understanding is not restricted to smokers. Research in academic journals has shown that doctors frequently confuse the effects of nicotine with those of smoking and combustion. A poll of over 1,000 U.S. doctors published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2020 found a stunning 80 percent of physicians thought that nicotine directly causes cancer. It does not. An earlier survey found that 60 percent of nurses were similarly mistaken. This lack of awareness, combined with the instinct of doctors to “do no harm”, means that the North American medical profession has not adopted a coherent “low-risk” approach to tobacco use or nicotine addiction. In similar fashion, numerous medical and health-advocacy groups in Canada have vociferously argued against alternative nicotine devices... This campaign of disinformation impedes efforts to improve the health of smokers. The same goes for provincial regulations, municipal bylaws and corporate policies that conflate smoking with vaping, as witnessed by the proliferation of “No Smoking, No Vaping” signs in public spaces, stores and elsewhere. Beyond misrepresenting the nature of tobacco use and nicotine addiction, the second main urge behind the federal Liberals’ anti-smoking policy is a near-religious determination to destroy the legal cigarette industry in this country, or what is commonly referred to as Big Tobacco... the public health sector and federal bureaucracy have refused to move away from their historic modus operandi of attacking manufacturers. In this context, the planned cigarette stick messages are not just needless overreach, they represent a government that has lost its focus. A clear example of this dogmatic paralysis can be seen in current efforts that prevent an exchange of knowledge between public health organizations and the manufacturers of alternative products, such as e-cigarettes. The Canadian Public Health Association, for example, forbids representatives from the nicotine industry or individuals who have had any professional role or financial relationship with that industry – including doctors – from registering at their conferences or even listening to what its members promote. Health Canada’s financial support to these conferences thereby actively limits scientific exchange and learning and should be considered counter-productive in 2023. This is especially relevant given how the medical community habitually misunderstands the comparative risks of smoking and vaping... public health officials take the stance that anything Big Tobacco wants must be evil by definition. This explains why regulators have repeatedly blocked efforts to promote vaping over smoking through regulations and restrictions on alternative products... keep in mind Big Tobacco controls only about one-third of the vaping industry, which is dominated by smaller, newer firms... eliminating the legal tobacco industry will not put an end to smoking or nicotine addiction in Canada. It will simply force smokers into the hands of the black market, where there is no regard for anyone’s health. It is estimated that one-third of all cigarettes sold in Canada are produced illegally, typically on Indigenous reserves... the UK, which recently held a major public inquiry on tobacco use headed by prominent public health promoter Javed Khan. The Khan Report, formally titled Making Smoking Obsolete, made four main recommendations to eliminate smoking in Britain. “Promote Vaping” was number three...  the British government is giving away vaping devices."

Why Do We Call Chicken ‘Chicken’ But Cow Meat ‘Beef’? (aka "Who’s Afraid of a Spatchcocked Chicken?") - "It was in 2010, in a shared kitchen at Cambridge University, that I first came to harbor a secret disdain for the semantic squeamishness of English-speaking meat-eaters. I was preparing raw chicken for dinner when a hallmate walked in. He, a sturdy, English-born student of Economics, stopped at the sight of me, and I had the distinct impression of having, once again, done something wrong.  I was, that year, an American student studying abroad at one of the most decorated institutions in the world, and made aware of it...   That “chicken” remains “chicken” has its basis in constructed hierarchies, too. Chickens were peasant food in 11th-century England. Nowadays, to say something “tastes like chicken” is to promise no gaminess or oddness, no funk or distinction, no whiff of barnyard animal. “Chicken” has transcended food to achieve a kind of inert neutrality. Most of my Cambridge hallmates cooked chicken in our shared kitchen. They preferred breasts and tenderloins, often shortened to “tenders.” Neat digits of meat, tenders arrived precut and slid bloodlessly from plastic trays, the violence of their severing from the “loin” — an uncomfortably human body part — having been done offstage.  In Mandarin, a pig is a pig is a pig, whether oinking or braised; and chickens, ideally, come with feet and head intact. In some cases, a second character may be appended to the name of the animal, so that 猪 (zhū) is referred to as 猪肉 (zhū roù). 肉 (roù) means “meat” or “flesh.” Rather than hide the animal, 肉 draws attention to the fact that food is carved from a living creature — or added to one"

Why the dwarves in the Hobbit LOOKED RIGHT! - YouTube

Google is testing the ‘impact’ of removing EU news from search results - "Google says it’s running the “time-limited” test because EU regulators and publishers “have asked for additional data about the effect of news content in Search.” The company says it will continue to show results from websites and news publishers located outside the EU, and it will resume showing results from EU news publishers once the test ends.  This may be just a small experiment, but it almost feels like a warning. By the end of the test, EU news publishers will see exactly how much traffic they’d be missing out on without Google. The experiment might also give Google some insight into how much its users actually care about news. That’s something Facebook has explored as well — which ultimately led it to remove the “News” tab and stop paying publishers entirely."
Hopefully the EU will learn from Canada's folly

Meta is ‘reckless’ in ‘need-to-know situations’, Canada warns Australia as it braces for early bushfire season
Naturally, left wing governments can never be reckless

Meta’s news ban in Canada has led to a media disaster. What does that mean for US efforts to wrangle big tech platforms? - "The Liberal government isn’t backing down in the face of this new data, though. Ottawa is now saying Meta may still indeed be regulated by way of the Online News Act since some news is still sneaking through the block, which looks like a technicality but speaks to the government’s intention to double down on the law."

How Meta's news ban reshaped Canadian media - "A recent study by the Media Ecosystem Observatory underscores the profound effects of these changes on Canadian media. The report, which examined the effect of Meta’s ban on Canadian news, revealed that news outlets lost 85% of their engagement on Facebook and Instagram, leading to a total engagement decline of 43%... approximately 30% of local news outlets in Canada are now inactive on social platforms. “Their digital presence has basically collapsed and they’re no longer connecting to the social web,” he said... The decline in traffic appears to have been part of a longer-term trend in Canada, according to David Beers, editor in chief of The Tyee, a B.C.-based independent, online news magazine. Even before the official block, he watched The Tyee’s Facebook engagement dropping over the previous year—evidence that Facebook was already adjusting its algorithms to deprioritize news.   “We saw it. It was unmistakable. We compared notes with other publications. They saw the same”... Meta’s interpretation of what qualifies as news posed a particularly ironic challenge for digital outlet Narcity–one that demonstrates the subjectivity of the company’s decisions around what to block. “The government doesn’t hold an official list of news organizations that Meta would have to comply with,” said Lapointe. “So Meta… relies on their interpretation of which companies would be captured. And right now, you are automatically part of the law if you are a QCJO company.”   For years, Narcity tried to receive a Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization (QCJO) designation, which must be determined by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to qualify for journalism labor tax credits. Narcity was denied the qualification in 2021. It resubmitted in 2022, and was denied again...   After the denial of the QCJO, Lapointe used the rejection letter–which says that the government does not recognize it as a news organization that is engaged in the production of original news–to Meta for reconsideration. “The government does not believe that Narcity is a news organization, so why would Meta?” Two days later it regained control of its Facebook and Instagram pages... only 22% of Canadians are aware that the ban exists"

CRA alleges Muslim Association of Canada has radical links - "The Canada Revenue Agency is demanding corrective action from the Muslim Association of Canada's (MAC), in relation to alleged links to terrorist groups and other issues, or it will lose its charitable status... The MAC unsuccessfully fought in court to prevent the documents, the results of a years-long audit, from being made public by the newspaper. The organization also sought in court months ago to keep court evidence, including the audit, sealed, saying their release would threaten the dignity and safety of MAC members and all Canadian Muslims. The Ontario Court of Appeal ruled against the MAC. The MAC is in charge of four schools in Quebec and five mosques and community centres in Montreal, including a community centre in the borough of St. Laurent, which is also the location of the Al-Rawdah mosque.  The documents specifically say the CRA is concerned about the MAC's links with the Muslim Brotherhood, and that the association's resources are being used by terrorist groups. The agency was not satisfied with the MAC's claim it had no links with the Muslim Brotherhood.  The documents also revealed that the MAC allowed two organizations that support the Muslim Brotherhood to use its facilities for free and without monitoring what the groups were doing. The CRA is also alleging contact was made with the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria... The CRA also expressed concern in its audit that an individual named Mohammed al-Khatib, who allegedly had  a link to an unidentified organization involved in financing terrorism, used MAC's list of contacts to ask for money for some groups in Jordan.  The CRA documents also focuses on Azzam Abu-Rayash, who allegedly supports the terrorist group Hamas and favours violence. Abu-Rayash is alleged to have conducted a prayer service and took part in a MAC leadership workshop. Ahmed Khalil, another speaker at a MAC facility, is alleged to have called for violent jihad.  As previously reported in 2023, the CRA alleged in in March 2021 that some directors and employees of the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC) have been involved in "an apparent Hamas support network." IRFAN-Canada has been designated a terrorist entity by the Canadian government because of its support for the terrorist group Hamas, which perpetrated the attack against Israel on Oct. 7 in which 1,200 people were slaughtered.  At that time, the MAC countered that the CRA is biased against Muslim charities. The CRA also expressed concern in its audit that an individual named Mohammed al-Khatib, who allegedly had  a link to an unidentified organization involved in financing terrorism, used MAC's list of contacts to ask for money for some groups in Jordan.  The CRA documents also focuses on Azzam Abu-Rayash, who allegedly supports the terrorist group Hamas and favours violence. Abu-Rayash is alleged to have conducted a prayer service and took part in a MAC leadership workshop. Ahmed Khalil, another speaker at a MAC facility, is alleged to have called for violent jihad.  As previously reported in 2023, the CRA alleged in in March 2021 that some directors and employees of the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC) have been involved in "an apparent Hamas support network." IRFAN-Canada has been designated a terrorist entity by the Canadian government because of its support for the terrorist group Hamas, which perpetrated the attack against Israel on Oct. 7 in which 1,200 people were slaughtered.  At that time, the MAC countered that the CRA is biased against Muslim charities. The CRA has also fined the MAC $1.1 million for giving gifts, rent benefits and salaries to ineligible individuals and organizations, including a Montreal-based imam, a Quebec-based security company and the Canadian Muslim Forum.  The CRA documents also claim that the MAC held non-religious activities during religious holidays.  Yaser Haddara, a former MAC official, has said the organization is challenging the CRA audit, saying the organization is being accused of guilt by assoxiation.  “Unfortunately, the issues of Islamophobia and bias that existed [in 2021] continue to exist in the final audit,” Haddara said."

Meme - *Slinkies*
"$1.95 each. We honestly don't really know what these are. They make a funny noise and are good for killing 5 minutes, but other than that we're at a loss, We didn't even order them. We receive a package of them every other month with no return address. We contacted the postal service and they have no record of these packages even being shipped. Please buy them. We want them gone. We have thousands of them. Help."

Meme *Jeep bumper stickers*
"Don't follow me. I do stupid shit..."
"My driving scares me too"
"It's dirty because play with it"
"Attempting to give a fuck. *Progress bar with low progress* Please wait..."
Licence plate: "B KND"

Opinion | There’s Already a Better Search Engine Than Google. It’s YouTube. - The New York Times - "One of these places is Reddit, a site whose outsize role in my life I plan to write about in a future column.  The other is YouTube. The gargantuan video site is a lot of things to a lot of people — in different ways, YouTube is a little bit like TikTok, a little like Twitch and a little like Netflix — but I think we underappreciate how often YouTube is a better Google. That is, often it is the best place online to find reliable and substantive knowledge and information on a huge variety of subjects...  I am routinely stunned by some of the things my kids have learned from YouTube that I never could have when I was their age. We were watching “Saving Private Ryan” the other day when my 12-year-old began pointing out historical inaccuracies in the film’s depiction of D-Day. I don’t think I’d even heard of D-Day at his age. Thanks to his copious consumption of YouTube war documentaries, he can’t stop talking about the North African campaign."

Woman shares husband with her mum - and sometimes lets her sister get involved - "Madi Brooks lives with her husband in the US, but if she’s ever not in the mood for loving, she’s more than happy for her mum to sleep with him instead.  Speaking in a video on TikTok, she says: “Me and my mom are both swingers and it’s great, you know why? Because when I’m not in the mood I can just let my husband have her... Brooks, her husband and her mother are all swingers so they’re all in open relationships.  In another video she revealed that even her younger sister apparently gets involved every now and again.   She says: “You wanna know how I keep my man happy? I let him play with my little sister.”"

Jack Harlow Talks About Second Time He Lost His Virginity - "“I lost my virginity when I was 16,” Harlow recounted to a stadium full of people. “I always tell people I lost it twice because when I was 18 and I graduated high school, somehow, some way, I landed this dime piece who was five or six years older than me. She was like 23, 24 — it blew my mind because, Nashville, you have to understand, at that point, I’d only fuck with girls I’ve seen in the halls.”"
???

John Boyega says he 'only dates Black' as he details his rules for dating
It's only racist if white people do it

People think about breaking up more when they look outside their relationship for psychological fulfillment - "it wasn’t simply that these participants were making up for a lack of fulfillment from within the relationship, the findings held even when the researchers took into account the extent of support provided by participants’ partners."

N. J. bars caught passing off dirty water, rubbing alcohol as liquor - "A drink ordered as “dirty” typically means the bartender should add a splash of olive juice, not actually contaminate the glass.  The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office announced Thursday that one of the 29 bars targeted in an investigation called “Operation Swill’ allegedly passed dirty water as top-shelf liquor.  Another mixed a concoction of rubbing alcohol and caramel food coloring to create a fine scotch, according to a spokesman from the attorney general’s office... The raided establishments also included 13 locations of the nation restaurant chain TGI Fridays, a trend Ricky Richardson, president of Fridays USA, called “very disturbing.”"

They look white but say they're black: a tiny town in Ohio wrestles with race - "“Negro”, it reads, next to each of her parents’ names. She looks up triumphantly, victory in her periwinkle eyes. “It’s a legal document,” she says... “I’m 53 years old, and that’s all I’ve ever been raised as: black,” Shreck says. “So if you’re taught that from when I’m old enough to understand, up to when you’re a grown woman, then [it’s] born and bred in you and you’re automatically black.”  As first reported in State of the Re:Union, most of Shreck’s generation and the generations before her here in East Jackson, on the edge of Appalachian Ohio, were raised to believe they are black. Never mind that they might register to most as white by appearance, or that there is hardly a trace of black ancestry left in their blood. This inherited identity most East Jackson residents still cling to and fiercely protect is based on where they were born and who they were told they are... Officials in Waverly created East Jackson by corralling any newcomer they deemed to be black because of their appearance, or by second-class status because they were laborers or housekeepers, into the smaller town. Some forced to stay in East Jackson were not black, but because they all lived in East Jackson, grew up together and were treated as black by law, a community that identified as black took root. They married across racial lines, and had multiracial children. Over generations, as fewer black people sought this area out, black heritage thinned out. But black identity did not. The town functions as a microcosm of what African Americans have had to deal with in America, says Dr Barbara Ellen Smith, a professor emerita who has spent much of her career focused on inequality in Appalachia. Alongside the rise of anti-slavery laws was a parallel rise of what historians and scholars call “black laws” including the one-drop rule – that one drop of “black blood” disqualified an individual from having the legal status of whites – which became a widely accepted social attitude in Ohio beginning in the 1860s... In recent years, some East Jackson residents have shifted their identity. Oiler’s sister, Sarah Harris, 74, has come to identify as Native American in the latter stages of her life. Until a few years ago, she lived as a black woman.  Harris’s birth certificate notes her parents as “dark”, and that has been part of her reasoning for identifying as Catawba Indian. She has even obtained an identification card that proclaims her new status, even though she has never taken a genetic test to confirm it."