Jasmine Crockett is the potty-mouthed future the Democrats deserve - "It’s one of the Democrats’ favourite attack lines: that Donald Trump is a crime against good taste and decorum. To be sure, with his often abrasive communication style, the former reality TV star and real estate mogul has seemed to revel in upsetting many of the assumptions underpinning US politics. Plenty of voters have appreciated this as a sign of the president’s willingness to take on the status quo, believing there is no reason to be polite towards a Washington establishment that has so comprehensively failed the American people. But for a time, the Left believed there were political dividends in at least pretending to be polite. Joe Biden ran for the presidency in 2020 on a pledge to “restore honour and decency to the White House”. Kamala Harris said that, in voting for Biden in 2020, the American people had chosen “hope, unity, decency, science, and yes, truth”. This was always a little rich. How, for example, Biden’s self-professed decency in 2020 squared with his decision to seemingly dismiss Trump supporters as “garbage” in 2024, only he can explain. But now even the pretence at politeness and moderation is over. The Democrat contest to choose their nominee in Texas for next year’s US Senate race is turning into a microcosm of the national party’s struggle to define itself. One of the leading contenders, Jasmine Crockett, is widely being talked about as the progressives’ next big star. Not because she’s ever said anything particularly profound, or has an especially persuasive diagnosis of America’s problems and how to fix them. But because she’s made a habit out of speaking from the gutter, and has made vulgarity and callousness her political brand... The Left presumably see Crockett’s language as legitimate anger. There must be profanity and bottom-of-the-barrel insults laced into any candidate’s speeches so that they look like a fighter, a furious leader of the “resistance”. This graceless vitriol extends to almost any member of the opposing side. Crockett called Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas – who was paralysed in an accident decades ago and uses a wheelchair as a result – “hot wheels”, at a Human Rights Campaign event no less (she claims she was referring to Abbott’s busing of migrants)... But in Crockett’s case, it’s beginning to look merely like performance art. In March, she said, “Free speech is not about whatever it is that y’all want somebody to say. And the idea that you want to shut down everybody that is not Fox News is bulls---.” What does that even mean? It would be one thing if Crockett struggled with cursing and coherent sentences because of an underprivileged background or a lack of education. But she comes from a middle class family and went to law school. And with her strong poll numbers in Texas, Democrats have basically affirmed, “the nastier the better.” Crockett’s behaviour seems to have rubbed off on more senior Democrats, who are increasingly worried about a new-guard mutiny and about being perceived as weak against Trump. “Donald Trump and the White House announced they’re going to spend 200 effin’ million dollars to build a large, fancy White House ballroom,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said in a video in August. Does anyone remember Schumer talking that way before? Trump obviously is no debutante when it comes to swearing, but at least he’s consistent and often humorous. I can’t recall seeing Crockett use her cursing for comedic effect. In July, The Atlantic wrote a long profile of Crockett, and it was perhaps more revealing about what really motivates the Democrat than she anticipated. On her then-candidacy for a more senior job in Congress, she suggested her strongest selling point was her large social media following. The writer says Crockett “monitors social-media engagement like a day trader checks her portfolio”. During their interviews, she wore acrylic nails printed with the word: “Resist”. The lock screen on her phone is apparently a headshot of herself."
Tony Lane 🇺🇸 on X - "JUST IN: Rep. Jasmine Crockett caught blowing tens of thousands in campaign cash on luxury hotels, limos, and personal security — while telling Americans to “defund the police.” Fox News dug through her FEC filings and the numbers are INSANE:
$75,000+ in travel & security this year alone
$25,000+ on travel
Limo services: $2,700… $2,300… $1,250…
Luxury hotels coast-to-coast:
• $4,200 at the Ritz-Carlton
• $5,300 at the West Hollywood Edition
• $2,000+ at Vegas resorts
• Two trips to Martha’s Vineyard (around $3,000 each!)
Trips to San Francisco, Vegas, NYC, Chicago, Martha’s Vineyard… on “campaign” funds.
All while families in her district struggle just to buy groceries. And the same congresswoman has preached “defund the police” while dropping $50,000 on private security for herself. As one of her challengers put it: “That’s not representation — that’s recreation on We The People’s dime.” Democrats say one thing in public… and live a VERY different life behind the scenes. What do you think about this? ⬇️ 🇺🇸"
MAZE on X - "Jasmine Crockett says that black women in politics don't get enough money given to them. "Black women do what black women do, which is we always stretch a dollar." Nothing says "stretching a dollar" like taking a limo to The Ritz-Carlton."
Thousands protest crime and corruption in Mexico City as 'Gen Z' protests gain momentum - "Several thousand people took to the streets of Mexico City on Saturday to protest crime, corruption and impunity in a demonstration organized by members of Generation Z, but which ended with strong backing from older supporters of opposition parties... The largest "Gen Z" protests took place in Nepal in September, following a ban on social media, and led to the resignation of that nation's prime minister. In Mexico, many young people say they are frustrated with systemic problems like corruption and impunity for violent crimes."
I remember when Canadians were praising Mexico and promoting a pivot to it because they hated Trump
Canadian Coke drinkers should get used to high-fructose corn syrup - " For decades, Coca-Cola has skillfully used nostalgia as a marketing tool. Its campaigns have featured everything from hippies offering to “buy the world a Coke, and keep it company” to pop stars and even Santa. Some brand experts say that Coke with cane sugar is another way to tap into this ache for the past. According to Eran Mizrahi, CEO and cofounder of Source86, a global food and beverage sourcing and private‑label partner, the move is driven by “two major consumer drivers: nostalgia and health.”... what about RFK Jr.’s argument about the rising obesity and diabetes? Le said those could be linked to the fact that HFCS, because it’s cheaper to make than cane sugar, was suddenly prevalent in a lot more products back then. “It being cheaper allows it to be used more frequently, but it’s hard for me to say, ‘yes, if you just turn everything into cane sugar, all these problems will go away.’ I think it’s just that people are eating more sugar because it has become cheaper to include high-fructose corn syrup in everything.” As for consumers themselves, their physical responses may not matter as much as their emotional ones... efforts to replace HFCS may quickly be met with supply issues. Sugar cane in the U.S. is primarily produced in just three states with warm, subtropical climates: Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. Hawaii was a player, but it stopped production due to labour and shipping costs to the mainland. “There’s a challenge there: Corn literally grows everywhere,” Le says. “That’s what makes high-fructose corn syrup so nice to use — it can be produced in any part of the country.” So for a huge rollout of cane-sugar Coke, Pepsi, or any other heritage-style beverage, Le says, “there’s going to be a lag period before there will be enough cane sugar for everything.” And in the meantime, higher demand will also drive up the price of the limited supply of cane sugar... According to a 2023 report from the Conference Board of Canada, low-calorie non-alcoholic beverages made up nearly 60 per cent of all beverage purchases in Canada in 2021. That’s up from 44 per cent in 2009. By comparison, data shows that diet drinks hold just a third of the U.S. market, according to Persistence Market Research. So many Canadians have something in common with Donald Trump: they prefer diet drinks."
Meme - "Everyone I Don't Agree With Is A Russian Bot. A child's guide to media and government excuse-making for political failings."
Left wingers when they step outside their echo chambers
Basil the Great on X - "While the UK has a national debt there should be no foreign aid budget. Zero. NOTHING. Not a penny. We borrow money at interest to then give away to other countries for free. That's how insane the UK is right now."
VEO on X - "Something I’m embarrassed to have never known until I moved to the Netherlands a few years ago... despite being a total US history nerd... is how much of the Mayflower story my teachers simply left out.. or maybe didn't even know. The people we now call the “Pilgrims” (a label they never actually used themselves) didn’t sail straight from England to Plymouth Rock. They spent an entire missing chapter.. over 10 years.. living in the Dutch Republic, most of them right here in Leiden.. which is where John Quincy Adams would later enroll at Leiden University in 1780 after studying in Paris. Leiden and the Netherlands were known globally as extremely tolerant for that time period... far more than England at the time. The problem, though, was that as the years passed, the Puritan separatist leaders watched their kids grow up speaking Dutch, taking Dutch apprenticeships, and marrying locals. They basically panicked... their community was rapidly assimilating into Dutch society. If they stayed, there would soon be no distinctly English Puritan congregation left. So they cut a deal with the Virginia Company for land in the New World. Their target was for the northern part of the Virginia Colony... basically the mouth of the Hudson River, today’s NYC. But storms and bad navigation (and potential sabotage) led them off course close to Cape Cod in late 1620, way outside their legal grant, and they decided wintering there was safer than trying to sail south again. Only about half of the 102 passengers were actually from the Leiden congregation (called "saints”). The other half were the “strangers”... carpenters, laborers, and totally random adventurers recruited in England by the investors to make the colony economically viable. So they weren’t fleeing religious persecution in 1620. They already had religious freedom in the Netherlands for over a decade. But they left the Netherlands because they were terrified of losing their English identities. But concepts of national identity and culture are far too complicated for little kids to grasp... so we dumb it down... The problem with this is.... nobody ever learns the real story as they get older... so all these childhood myths are all they know!"
Dutch Woman Fined $500 After Traffic Camera Mistakes Ice Pack for Phone - "Driving back from the dentist, a Dutch woman in the city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch was holding an ice pack to her face to reduce the swelling after a wisdom tooth had been removed. But that’s not what an overly zealous traffic camera saw. After returning home on Wednesday, July 2, the woman, Floortje, immediately found out there was a fine of $500. “It was in my boyfriend’s name, but I’d borrowed his car recently. So I immediately thought: let me see if that wasn’t my fault,” she tells Omroep Brabant. “When I opened the fine, I was shocked: 439 euros!” Ironically, Floortje says that while driving with the ice pack, she had spotted a police car and thought to herself: ‘I hope they don’t think I’m on the phone with that ice pack against my cheek.’ But while the officers did not see anything suspicious, the automatic camera did. A letter from the Dutch Central Fine Collection Agency (CJIB) announced she was holding an “electronic mobile device” while operating a vehicle... Floortje requested the photo from the CJIB and began to relax. Not only is the ice pack she is holding much bigger than today’s phones, but upon closer inspection, her phone is sitting in front of her in a holder... back in 2021, a British man named David Knight received a $120 fine after a woman walked through a bus lane with a t-shirt that read “KNITTER”. Knight’s car has the license plate “KN19TER”."
Germany’s Merz admits Europe has been a ‘free-rider’ on US defense - "NATO members agreed to spend five percent of their GDP on defense, including 3.5 percent on "hard defense" like weapons and troops."
YouTube updates new monetisation rules: Inauthentic content ban takes effect July 15 - "originality and genuine human input are now paramount. For years, creators have navigated YouTube's ever-evolving policies, but this latest update marks one of the most aggressive pushes yet to filter out low-quality, repetitive, and potentially AI-generated content that offers little unique value. If your channel relies on easily replicable formats or automated processes, it's time for a serious re-evaluation...
Content borrowed from other sources with minimal alteration: Simply adding background music, changing playback speed, or cropping visuals will no longer cut it. Content must be 'significantly altered' to be considered original.
Repetitive content lacking a clear purpose: Videos that are templated, follow highly repetitive formats (especially in Shorts), or are uploaded solely for the purpose of gaining views without providing entertainment or educational value will be scrutinized.
Clickbait and spam-like uploads: Channels that engage in deceptive practices or offer little meaningful content beyond trying to game the system are in YouTube's crosshairs."
From July
Silsbee, Texas, woman attacked by snake and hawk while mowing the grass - "All Peggy and Wendell Jones wanted was to end their day of yard work in Texas’ triple-digit summer heat by getting cleaned up and going to the casino... Peggy was riding a mower in the back of the property, far from the trees that line it, when “all of a sudden, out of the clear blue sky, a snake fell … and landed on my arm,” the 64-year-old recalled. There was no mistaking it: The reptile was dark-colored and 4 1/2 feet long, she estimated. It had fallen from nowhere and clutched her right arm. And it wouldn’t let go. “I immediately began thrusting my arm, trying to knock the snake off,” she said. “And as I was thrusting my arm, the snake just wrapped around my arm – and he started striking at my face.” The more the grandmother of four tried to rip the snake off her, the tighter it would wrap and squeeze around her arm, she said. She screamed and cried for help as the tractor kept crawling along beneath her. Still, the snake wouldn’t let go... Then, just when she thought the snake might bite her – injecting her with fatal venom and ushering in the end of her life – a brown and white hawk swooped down and tried to clench it. But the serpent would not let go of Peggy’s arm. Its grip was so tight that when the hawk grabbed it, Peggy’s entire arm jerked up in the air with the attempt. The hawk tried again and again, its wings flapping in her face with each try, distorting her view of what was happening right in front of her. All the while, the tractor kept mowing, zig-zagging Peggy – and the tug-of-war of nature unfolding upon her body – across the field in an ordeal she called “utter chaos.” Many times in her life, Peggy had watched this exact same scenario play out in nature: Hawk sets its sights on its prey, swoops in to attack, drops it on a barbed-wire fence, then goes back to claim its prize. But she never imagined she’d play the role of fence. Four times, the hawk dove and bobbed at its prize – and at Peggy – before it finally scooped up the reptile and flew off, she said. Right away, Peggy felt some relief at having been freed. Then, she looked down. Her right arm was covered in blood. Claw marks. Lacerations. Cuts. Punctures."
Bret 🍁 on X - "After witnessing the disastrous effects of Ontario Premier Doug Ford's advertisements in the US causing the collapse of all trade talks, BC Premier David Eby now says that he will still proceed with his own similar ad campaign in America. My God these people are complete morons."
When you hate the US so much you cut off your nose to spite your face
Meme - "The famous couches of our childhoods: *Simpsons* *Spongebob SquarePants* *Blue's Clues* *Casting Couch*"
Teacher claims sexual harassment after student hug - "A Lancaster County, South Carolina teacher has filed a sexual harassment complaint against one of her 10-year-old students after the child hugged her multiple times. In the complaint, the teacher says the child in October had laid “his head on her chest while he hugged her.” In another instance, also in October, the teacher says he “pressed his body into hers and wrapped his arms around her.” The teacher claims that’s when she told him “hugging from behind is very inappropriate and not to do it again.” Earlier this month the teacher claims he “approached her from behind, pressed his body into hers, and put his hands on her hip/side area” attempting to hug her from behind again. The teacher claims it was this incident that lead her to file the case. The boy’s mom, Lyndsay Casey, said she is "hurt and confused" after being unaware aware it had gotten this far or that there was an issue... The child has now been put on a "no-hug policy" while the claims are being investigated, according to Casey. She finds its unfair. “He’s a very loving child. I feel like school should be a safe place and him not feeling that way anymore has him in a whirl of emotions right now,” Casey said."
The media dangerously misuses the word ‘trolling’ - "The word “trolling” has become a media stand-in for online behaviours that are nothing to laugh about. Journalist Ginger Gorman touched on this in her recent “Staring Down The Trolls” series, which explores the experiences of people who are harassed in digital spaces and offers advice on how to protect yourself. There is one semantic problem with the series though – none of the behaviours she describes are actually trolling... Conflating jokes and death threats with “trolling” makes it difficult to legislate or create effective policy around the issue. This is perhaps understandable, given that the word has been applied to behaviours ranging all the way from innocuous rickrolling to deliberately targeting someone with cyberhate and publishing their personal details online – a move known as “doxing”. This makes it harder for victims to be taken seriously and get proper help. To say “I’m being ‘trolled’” is nearly always met with advice to “just block them”, “don’t go on the internet”, or the ubiquitous “don’t feed the trolls”. In fact, by linking “trolling” with abusive behaviours that would be met with swift action in the physical world, we have made it easier for law enforcement to respond dismissively. As UNSW’s Emma Jane points out in the book Cybercrime and its Victims, the use of the term “trolling” creates a false sense that the online world is separate from the “real” one. It is not. Indeed, as Gorman explains in her series, these threatening online behaviours can spill over and invade our homes and workplaces. She told me that some of the victims she spoke with “have been so frightened for their safety and the safety of their children, they’ve moved house”. The very purpose of doxing someone is to facilitate this offline harassment... By letting him (and others like him) say they are only “trolling”, we are “actually [providing] a cop-out … for real dirt-bags who claim they were ‘just trolling’”, as an interviewee says in Whitney Phillips’s book, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. Academics and journalists – and particularly those of us with a foot in both worlds – have a responsibility to call things what they really are. Giving these actions their correct name also matters if we are to hold ourselves accountable for our own online behaviour."
Meme - "Vegan: I dont eat meat because I respect nature. Nature: *eagle swallowing rat*"
Meme - Razib Khan: "if you are my cardio-thoraic surgeon i want you to spend all your free time reading surgery papers and going to surgery trainings. you get paid $1 million a year or whatever; the deal is you don't have other interests and don't see your family much"
Benjamin Ryan: "My dad was a surgeon. We rarely saw him."
Time to have gender quotas to get more women into surgery
Meme - "Marketplace listing. SOLD - Polarwind fan
Tracy: I asked you nicely to hold a $5 fan for just 15 hours. I even explained it was for my daughter's room and promised I'd definitely be there. But I guess that was asking too much. It's not like it was $20, $30, or even $10 - it was literally five dollars. You must've needed that $5 more than I I needed the fan for my daughter's room. Hope it helped you out today. :) Because honestly, only someone who desperately needed that $5 would choose not to risk holding it for someone who clearly said they'd show. And I would have - 100%. But hey, if I hadn't, all you had to do was move on to the next interested person. Simple as that. But it's cool - we all have our priorities. Yours just happen to be $5 and extreme levels of pettiness. I respect the hustle, even if it's one fan blade at a time."
Andrew Follett on X - "Rep. Rashida Tlaib broke the law by using campaign cash to pay for her car maintenance and "other necessities." This is CLEARLY 100% illegal. Worse than what George Santos did. But its (D)ifferent when Democrats do it."
Teenagers more patriotic than their parents - "The biggest poll of 16 to 17-year-olds found considerable pride in being British, strong support for net zero, but little enthusiasm for the royal family"
Damn fascists!
King Charles: a reactionary ruler - spiked - "For much of his 50-odd years as Prince of Wales, Charles was seen as a bit of an oddball. He pushed homeopathy at the expense of modern medicine. He was once forced to deny rumours he’d been ‘dabbling in the occult’. And, of course, he endlessly gave vent to his deep green views. When, in 1970, the then 21-year-old prince warned of the damage humanity was doing to plants, trees and ‘any other animal that is often unfortunate enough to share this Earth with us’, press and public alike were bemused. When Charles revealed, 16 years later, that he spoke to his plants to help them grow, gales of laughter swept across the land. In short, the man who was crowned king this weekend was seen as a few sandwiches short of the full afternoon tea. A bit ‘dotty’, as Charles himself recalled in 2020 – which was one way of describing someone rumoured to travel everywhere with his own toilet seat... But in more recent decades, the treatment of Charles has changed considerably. Among our political, cultural and media elites at least, the mirth that once followed his every public intervention has given way to that most precious of commodities for a monarch – reverence. This one-time plant whisperer has effectively been rehabilitated as a font of environmentalist wisdom. He’s now said to be ‘prescient’, ‘far-sighted’, a ‘green prophet’. ‘He got ahead on climate change, he got ahead on ecological farming, he got ahead on all the questions which now feel bang on the Zeitgeist’, declared the reliably trite Emily Maitlis soon after Charles became king. That is King Charles III as he appears to the right-thinking. He’s now a brave truth-sayer, someone whose ecological thought was too advanced to be appreciated by his future subjects at the time. He’s a visionary, a seer, someone not just on the right side of history, but in its vanguard... If we are to take Charles’s thought seriously today, then he needs to be understood as a reactionary. And not just any sort of reactionary. He is a radical reactionary. Someone utterly opposed to the development of the modern world over the ‘past four centuries’, as he himself frames it. He loathes the modern era’s ‘scientific rationalism’, its ‘mechanistic thinking’ and, above all, its ‘freedom’... It is also hardly a surprise that Charles’s rejection of modernity took an environmentalist form, right from his very first public speech in 1970 onwards. After all, environmentalism may be presented as ‘progressive’ today, but historically it has always been a fundamentally reactionary ideology. Originating in the counter-Enlightenment, and the work of Thomas Malthus in particular, it has consistently appealed to the radically conservative, precisely because it proposes natural limits to material, social and political development. Charles‘s first speech in 1970 may now be praised for being ahead of its time – in this case, for drawing attention to the problem of ‘non-returnable bottles and indestructible plastic containers’ and for its emphasis on the problem of pollution. But what’s really striking about it today is how wrong its predictions proved to be. It even featured that classic Malthusian canard of ‘overpopulation’... This green doomerism was most likely passed down from his father, the Duke of Edinburgh. A sometime president of the World Wildlife Fund, Prince Philip had long been an ardent conservationist, and had frequently complained that there were too many people on the planet. In 2009, he even said that he would like to be reincarnated ‘as a deadly virus’ so as ‘to contribute something to solving overpopulation’. But Charles has never been just a chip off the old block. Unlike other members of the intellectually incurious Windsor family, he has actively cultivated his reactionary instincts. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, studying archaeology and anthropology, he was drawn to non-Western cultures, as alternatives to Western modernity. After graduating, he eagerly embraced EF Schumacher’s anti-growth treatise, Small is Beautiful. By the end of 1973, the year of Small is Beautiful’s publication, Schumacher was visiting Buckingham Palace. There has been an even greater influence on Charles’s reactionary trajectory than even Schumacher or his father’s Malthusianism – namely, Traditionalism, an obscure school of thought born in the early 20th century. It is thanks to his gradual immersion in Traditionalism that he has come to see himself as a man with a spiritual mission to overthrow the modern world... Charles has intimated that as king, he will have to refrain from waging his war on modernity in public. ‘It will no longer be possible for me to give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I care so deeply’, he said last year. The monarchy’s informal commitment to neutrality, in place since Hanoverian times, ought to circumscribe his crusading... The problem is that Charles’s ultra-reactionary worldview no longer provokes the ridicule it might once have done. Quite the opposite. Our political and media classes now seem in love with his reactionary rantings – albeit their more diluted versions... US president Joe Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, says he hopes Charles will continue to press for action on climate, claiming it ‘is a universal issue… not ideology’. ‘King Charles has been an environmentalist for 50 years’, opines the Washington Post. ‘Now is the time for him to make his case to the British people.’ Others have gone even further. ‘We are fortunate that our new king possesses a willingness to intercede in public life’, wrote one particularly excited ‘post-liberal’, just after Charles’s accession to the throne. ‘His instincts are good and just, and his decades-long critiques of globalisation, of our despoliation of our natural and built environments and our pell-mell rush towards the mythical horizon of progress have been tragically borne out by events’, he wrote. This is what is most troubling. Not that Charles likes to think of himself as a 1920s-style conservative revolutionary, engaged in a project of often bizarre avant-gardist reaction. But the fact that these views chime so well with those of our political and cultural elites. His reactionary views, once the source of ridicule, are now theirs, too."
Edward Conard on X - "A sharp and steady decline in the GCT scores of Marine Corps officers occurred btw 1980 and 2014. 96% of this is explained by the widening (and weakening) of the applicant pool due to increased college participation. Affirmative action played no role."
Hunter Ash on X - "In 1970, 10% of people had a bachelor’s degree. Now it’s about 40%. If education actually made you smarter, we would be living in an age of geniuses. Instead, all that happened is the signal value of a degree went down."
