Links - 28th March 2026 (2 - General Wokeness)

Laura Dodsworth on X - "Hannah Spencer seems to think that the familiar ‘coming together’ rituals after terror attacks are entirely organic. In reality, the bunches of flowers and solidarity graffiti at the terrorist sites, multi-faith vigils and 'don't look back in anger’ messaging is actually pre-planned by disaster planners and PR pros. It is a highly sophisticated exercise in "controlled spontaneity”. Some mutual support after disasters is natural. But when town halls are draped in banners with superficial slogans and love hearts just hours after terror attacks and #LoveWins hashtags are released on Twitter like homing pigeons, it is not natural — it is fair to ask how much is spontaneous and how much is managed. The entirely natural raw grief and anger are suppressed and drowned out, replaced by curated optimism and forgiveness. Why? Staged displays of positive emotion and resilience are intended to facilitate recovery and to prevent civil unrest. But they do so by pulling the wool over your eyes and pulling at your heartstrings — in essence, you are being manipulated. As one psychologist involved in advising the government told me in an interview for ‘A State of Fear’: “You could call psychology ‘mind control’. That’s what we do… clearly we try and go about it in a positive way, but it has been used nefariously in the past. Psychology has been used for wicked ends.”"

TheLawOfAverages on X - ""Who Actually Discriminates in Criminal Sentencing?" Out now! White Democrats & Black Americans punish Whites more harshly. Late 2025 study: “Black Americans and white Democrats punish white perpetrators more than Black ones, whereas white Republicans show no net racial bias.“"
Proof that White Republicans are racist!

Liam Out Loud on X - "Once you understand the psychology of the modern leftists, the last decade makes a lot more sense. The endless outrage, hypersensitivity, and rejection of rational debate was nothing more than a crisis of self-worth masked as a moral crusade. What I mean by leftist:
- Socialists
- Collectivists
- LGBTQ activists
- Climate cultists
What unites all of them isn't just ideology but psychology. Inferiority, low self-esteem, powerlessness, guilt, self-hatred, and depressive tendencies. Many leftists "ally" themselves with groups perceived as weak or inferior, not out of compassion, but because they unconsciously project their own sense of weakness onto these groups. They hate strength, success, and rationality, which is why they direct so much venom at America, Western civilization, white men, and science itself. The same flaws they denounce in the west are excused or ignored in socialist regimes or tribal cultures. The real issue is envy and resentment. If no problems existed, they must invent them, because victimhood is their identity."

glorious-spoon | Words and Cupcakes - "the weirdest thing about a lot of the common criticisms of millennials i see is that they all seem to boil down to:
you are soft. you believe the world should be kind. you expect people to treat you fairly. you think your needs are important, that you deserve to be listened to, that you shouldn’t be hungry and frightened and in pain.
and people are seriously SO OFFENDED by this. like, how dare you. how dare you believe the world might be a good place, how dare you believe you should be treated well just for existing. life is pain, princess, anyone who tells you different is selling something, now wipe that smile off your face, shut your mouth and go suffer like i did. and it’s just like… i have a kid. if she grows up expecting better treatment than i experienced as a young woman, i’m doing my job. i know the world isn’t perfect, but random cruelty isn’t something we should just shrug our shoulders and accept, and it’s so fucking weird how angry people get at youngsters who refuse to do just that."
Left wingers have no idea how the real world works and think belief can manifest reality

Wall Street Apes on X - "Democrat Rep Maxine Dexter says putting “White milk” in schools is “White supremacy” “Ask the science-based regiments, not — whole milk white supremacy dog whistling” She says RFK Jr wanting White Milk in schools is racist This is the Democrat Party"

Thread by @FLEXjss on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "It is estimated that over 4,000 organized crimes groups with ties to over 70 foreign countries and comprised of tens of thousands of criminals are operating in Canada. Yet the left is oddly focused on small groups of white guys working out, because of their political beliefs.
Fun Facts:
"White Nationalists" are not stealing your car from your driveway while you sleep.
"White Nationalists" are not kicking in your front door & terrorizing your family while they rob you.
"White Nationalists" are not trafficking humans, cocaine and fentanyl.
"White Nationalists" are not laundering or extorting money.
"White Nationalists" are not committing fraud or cybercrime.
It's a massive distraction.
You are welcome."

Terrence K Williams | Facebook - "“I am a hell of a lot smarter than most of you.” — Joe Biden — That’s what President Joe Biden said while speaking at Rev. Jesse Jackson’s funeral in Chicago—a church full of Black people honoring a civil rights icon. Now imagine the reaction if Donald Trump had said those exact same words at a memorial service. The media and the left would be screaming from the rooftops, calling him arrogant, racist, you name it. But Democrats get a pass? They’re the real racists—look at Gavin Newsom just a couple weeks ago, telling a Black crowd in Atlanta that he’s “just like them” because he got a low SAT score and “can’t read” due to dyslexia. The hypocrisy is unreal."

Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives on X - "🔥🚨BREAKING: It has been verified that Jesse Jackson’s son asked attendees not to “bring your politics” into the funeral, yet every single Democrat who spoke ignored his wishes and turned his father’s funeral into a political rally."
JezebellePNW on X - "Jesse Jackson’s son literally said ‘No politics—just honor Dad, keep it classy.’ Obama, Biden, Kamala? They heard that and hit the gas—turned the pulpit into a Trump-bashing circus, dragging the funeral through the mud like it was their personal debate stage. Family wishes? Trampled. Grieving son? Slapped silly in front of the world. Now @BarackObama @MichelleObama tone deaf, self-absorbed, bipolar style, posting misty-eyed ‘hope’ clips and Michelle’s serving ‘unity’ realness? Honey, that’s not redemption—that’s straight arrogance. You curb-stomped the legacy mid-eulogy for cheap applause, then strutted back like saints. Disrespect so bold the casket’s still giving side-eye forever."

snuppydogg on X - "A humanities professor recently told me that she considered dog breeds to be "eugenics-adjacent" - not the breeding itself, but the idea that offspring inherit their parents' traits"

Nottingham victim may still be alive ‘had police been more robust’ - "The Nottingham triple killer carried out an earlier violent attack after being released by mental health professionals who had considered the “over-representation” of young black men in custody, a public inquiry has been told. Valdo Calocane was in the grip of psychosis when he tried to batter down a neighbour’s front door, frightening her so much that she jumped out of a first-floor window and badly injured her back. Mental health professionals had been “leaning towards” sectioning Calocane, who had been arrested for criminal damage earlier that day for attacking another neighbour’s door. However, he was released after “the team of professionals considered the research evidence that shows over-representation of young black males in detention”, the inquiry was told. Three years later Calocane fatally stabbed Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber, university students aged 19, and Ian Coates, 65. The paranoid schizophrenic, now 34, had a history of serious violence and was well known to police and mental health services, having been sectioned four times. He was discharged in late 2022 despite refusing to take his medication and not engaging properly with staff... Calocane’s first mental health episode was in May 2020 when he tried to kick down a neighbour’s door. He was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and underwent a mental health assessment in which he said he had heard his mother screaming and believed she was being raped... One doctor had been “leaning towards” sectioning Calocane because it was his first presentation of psychosis and there was a lack of information on his risk. However, the team released him after considering the research about black men in detention and when another professional said it could be dealt with in the community. Langdale detailed how, just 40 minutes after his release, Calocane began trying to kick down another neighbour’s door. “[The victim] was alone in the flat. She was so frightened she jumped out of the first-floor window, causing serious damage to her spine,” Langdale said. Police did not charge Calocane despite the serious nature of his victim’s injuries. The inquiry was told that Nottinghamshire police recorded it as a “crime not detected” after Calocane’s psychiatrist informed them he did not have “capacity” to be considered responsible. Langdale questioned why police simply accepted the doctor’s view as the “final say in the matter”. A different police officer recorded that Calocane was “too ill” to be charged over the first incident involving criminal damage. Calocane was, however, sectioned — the first of four mental health detentions before the fatal stabbings. Community workers at Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust were warned to go to his property in pairs and identify exits because he was so dangerous, and a doctor warned he might kill someone... The killer rang his brother telling him to take his family out of the country, before stabbing Coates who was on his way to work. He then used a van to mow down another three people who suffered serious injuries but survived."
If you don't want people to be murdered, you're racist

Will Tanner on X - "Many will mock the British for this, and rightly so, but it's important to remember that essentially this has been allowed to happen in every American city for decades Why did Memphis and St. Louis go from gems of the South to uninhabitable? Why'd Detroit go from the wealthiest city in America, the Paris of the Midwest, to a deserted hellscape? Why'd Chicago become jokingly called "Chiraq"? Essentially this story on repeat, because stopping crime means accepting that there will be huge disparate impacts, and acting based on that knowledge"

Why anti-racism kills | The Spectator - "When the triple killer Valdo Calocane was allowed to walk free from medical custody in 2020, it appears to have partly been because he was black. One doctor had leaned towards sectioning Calocane, who had just attempted to break into his neighbour’s house during a psychotic episode. Had this sound medical judgement prevailed, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber, both students aged 19, as well as Ian Coates, a 65-year-old caretaker, might still be alive. Unfortunately, Calocane’s insanity was matched by the foolishness of those charged with his care. An inquiry into the killings heard on Monday that he was discharged after a ‘team of professionals considered the research evidence that shows over-representation of young black males in detention.’ On a separate occasion, according to a previous independent report into Calocane’s care, he was similarly spared being forced to take long-lasting anti-psychotic medication because he didn’t like needles and NHS staff ‘felt a pressure to avoid restrictive practice because of his ethnicity.’... This grotesque moral calculus cannot solely be placed at the door of individual doctors. It is an institutional failure. An investigation found that a clinical team attending to Calocane was influenced by the draft Mental Health Bill in 2022, which called for a reduction in forcing medication on patients, highlighting the disproportionate use of such measures ‘for black people’. Little thought seems to have gone into the possibility that pursuing more proportionate statistics can come at an intolerable price. Nor is this sort of thinking isolated to the NHS. The Southport killer Axel Rudakubana’s headteacher was told to remove the word ‘sinister’ from his education plan after mental health workers accused her of racially profiling ‘a black boy with a knife’. Similarly, a chance to apprehend Salman Abedi before he detonated a rucksack bomb in the Manchester Arena, killing 22 people, may have been missed because a security guard declined to approach him for fear of being branded racist. The same fear across countless institutions enabled the grooming gangs to prey on vulnerable English girls for decades with near impunity. This is the human toll of anti-racism, by which I mean the privileging of certain groups over others in the erroneous belief this will reduce uncomfortable disparities. There is nothing in Calocane’s case which suggests racism against him factored into his crimes. Indeed, there’s mounting evidence he was enabled by a series of overcompensations in the other direction, rooted in the bigotry of low expectations; holding minorities to different standards to everyone else. The result of this has been condescending for law-abiding minorities and a health hazard for the public, who have been taking part in a social experiment they did not consent to – an experiment that encourages doctors and the police to act as sociologists. It has made those in vital frontline professions have to consider contested shibboleths around identity and race when it comes to life-and-death decisions that are better made by removing as much noise as possible. Calocane’s doctors should have been focused solely on whether he was a threat to himself or the public. Yet the spectre of racism has muddied the waters. The Macpherson report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence lent this ideology its institutional authority. Among its 70 recommendations to rid society of the scourge of ‘institutional racism’ were two that were particularly insidious. It urged the police to redefine a ‘racist incident’ as ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’, a hopelessly subjective definition that Macpherson suggested should include non-crimes. And the report outlined measures to ensure the judiciary, civil service and NHS, among other bodies, instituted a similar sea change to combat the presence – at once ill-defined and ubiquitous – of institutional racism. Such an all-encompassing brief naturally lends itself to excess. One consequence of this has been the recalibration of what our institutions are trained to fear. Fastidious attention to racism, real and imagined, now takes precedence over genuine threats to the most vulnerable people in society. We are long overdue for a Macpherson-style reset which puts our institutions on notice that there is no excuse, no matter how lofty, for this dereliction of their duty."
Once again, wokeness kills

‘Anti-racist’ dogma is getting people killed - "Then there was the torture and murder of 10-year-old Woking schoolgirl, Sara Sharif, by her father and stepmother in 2023. According to a subsequent safeguarding review, neighbours didn’t report “concerns about what they heard” in the Sharif household because, they too, “feared being branded racist”... Then, of course, we come to surely the most notorious example of all: the child-rape gangs. In 2017, Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham, said: “People are more afraid to be called a racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse.” Little has changed. As Baroness Louise Casey wrote in her report last year: “Instead of examining whether there is disproportionality in ethnicity or cultural factors at play in certain types of offending, we found many examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist.” On and on it goes. Before we judge anyone, though, we need to consider something extremely uncomfortable. Which is that such a fear, however cowardly it may seem, is also perfectly rational. These days, the mere accusation of racism can end a career – particularly in the public sector. Indeed, the repercussions for being thought racist, even when individuals are patently not, can be more severe than the repercussions for proven incompetence. Ultimately, therefore, the real blame lies not with individuals who have failed to act. It lies with the so-called “anti-racist” dogma that’s been drummed into them all their working lives. The dogma that has convinced them that there are no sins greater than “stereotyping”, or “racial profiling”, or “over-representation”. The dogma that has left them so frightened of losing their jobs, they don’t actually do their jobs... Back in 2001 an inquiry was held into the murder of Victoria Climbié, the eight-year-old Ivorian girl who was tortured and murdered in London by her great-aunt and her great-aunt’s partner. In his opening speech, the counsel for the inquiry, Neil Garnham QC (as he was then styled), said: “Fear of being accused of racism can stop people acting when otherwise they would.” Those words were uttered a full quarter of a century ago – and we still haven’t learned a thing."

Meme - Lachlan Phillips exo/acc: "This guy externalising his suicidal nihilism. Grace Tame externalising her abuse. Leftism, particularly the rainbow-islamist alliance is a largely pathological condition, not a political position. We are subjected to living within the psychological projections of the deeply mentally unwell."
Drew Pavlou @DrewPavlou: "The climate activist who defaced the Churchill statue in London has repeatedly requested euthanasia in the Netherlands"
"Climate activist Olax wants to die. 'Everything is useless by definition'. Olax Outis no longer wants to live, but his requests for euthanasia have been rejected repeatedly. His death wish doesn't stop him from a turbulent life as a climate activist."
This is also why left wingers are so pro-euthanasia

Meme - Andrew Follett @AndrewCFollett: "I'm old enough to remember when calling conservatives "evolution deniers" was THE Lib thing. Even when said conservative literally taught evolution...(like myself). I'd like to go back to 2011 me and inform him that evolutionary theory would as conservative and racist."
"Brett: "Let me just say, I am an evolutionary biologist. I'm very interested in how language actually changes..."
Brooklyn: "A eugenicist."
Brett: "Say again?"
Brooklyn: "A eugenicist. That's what you mean as evolution..."
Brett: "No, no, no..."
Brooklyn: "Those are the same thing."
Brett: "No, it's not the same thing."
Brooklyn: "They are the same. They are the same. I've seen the research; they are the same. 'You will not argue that here, you're not about to try to wiggle out of that. Eugenics. That's the common (muffled) for eugenicist.""
I love how according to these black people, evolutionary biology is transphobic and anti-black and if people are claiming it;s transphobic, that's proof of transphobia

Santa Clara University student fired from internship after exposing pornographic essay assignment - "Naomi wrote this op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about how Santa Clara University (founded by Catholic Jesuits in 1851) required therapy students to read bondage porn, watch clothed individuals enact bondage fetishes, and write autobiographies of their "sexual history." She wanted an exemption from the assignments, but she says they were required for graduation... So ... a professor is asking students to talk explicitly about the details of their sex lives, including their "sexual past" as children/teenagers and their "sexual aspirations" for the future... It took a ton of effort for this one student to get a singular exception so she didn't have to complete a pornographic assignment that forces students to detail the most intimate components of their lives. The university's responses so far have been mostly of deflection. Now she's been fired from her internship for daring to express her concerns."

Legal win for son tricked into moving to Africa by parents - "A teenager who was tricked into going to boarding school in Africa has won a significant legal victory against his own parents. The 14-year-old boy, who cannot be identified, was taken from London to Ghana in March 2024 after being told a relative was ill. In fact, his parents wanted to get him out of London as they feared he was being drawn into criminal activity. Unhappy and homesick in Ghana, the boy found lawyers and brought a case against his parents to the High Court in London, which ruled against him in February. On Thursday, he won a Court of Appeal bid, so the case will be reheard."

Meme - whatever: "Woke liberal college girl sent me a DM calling me old and ugly. And she wants me to have a horrible day! Pretty malevolent if you ask me! She studies psychology at UW. A future psychologist/therapist folks! These are the "empathy" people. These are the people that are going to give you therapy! Pillars of goodness, empathy, and virtue! This is what the universities are pumping out. As far as having a horrible day, oblige her!"
blanguita blancagrade: "you're disgusting- just want you to know how ugly you are inside and out from a normal person. you're such a loser!"
"Why don't you come on the show and you can state your actual criticisms and disagreements?"
"aw hell nah. u old and super creepy i just wanted u to have a horrible day! blocking immediately"

Meme - trash jones @jzux: "so it turns out the "woke mind virus" was empathy for human life"
Kangmin Lee @kangminlee: "You said this about Charlie Kirk."
trash jones @jzux: "to put it as bluntly as possibly can, i'm glad he's dead. i think the world is a better place without him. but the way it went down is indicative of a problem that's so much bigger than him, it's tough to wrap my head around"

Keith Woods on X - "The Warrior Gene Explained
The MAOA gene produces an enzyme that breaks down brain chemicals like serotonin and dopamine, which regulate mood and impulse control. If someone has a rare version of the gene called the 2R allele, they have unusually high levels of these chemicals and weaker impulse control. The amygdala, responsible for reacting to threats, becomes overactive, while the prefrontal cortex, more responsible for rational thought, has less input. People like this tend to display explosive, violent behaviour, hence this variant being dubbed "the warrior gene." For an example of how signficant this is: a study found that 50% of African-American men who carry the allele had been involved in a shooting or stabbing, compared to 7% who didn't carry it (still a huge number.) But what's really interesting is the massive racial differences in the spread of the gene. About 5.2% of African-American men carry the "the warrior gene," compared to 0.1% of White men. So African-Americans are 52 times more likely to carry a gene with an extremely strong connection to violent, impulsive behaviour. And given the signficant White admixture in the African-American population, this is likely even higher among other African populations."

Meme - "The Only Chart You Need To Understand European Politics In 2026
Venn diagram: Jihadis, Commies, Fashies
Commie and Jihadi: WEST BAD
Jihadi and Fashie: FEMINISM AND QUEER RIGHTS BAD
Commie and Fashie: LIBERALISM BAD
Commie, Jihadi and Fashie: JEW BAD"

Flying a Union Jack flag is branded a 'tool of hate' in Government's leaked 'social cohesion' strategy - "Flying English, Scottish and Union Jack flags has been branded 'tools of hate' in a leaked draft of the Government's new social cohesion strategy. A leaked draft of the proposals suggests national symbols were sometimes used last summer to 'exclude or intimidate'. It warned that the 'extreme right has tried to turn symbols of pride into tools of hate'... ministers will unveil the finalised plans, titled Protecting What Matters, in a cross-Government drive... At the time, the Prime Minister backed the public's right to fly St George's flags but the leaked Government documents appear to link it to rising tensions over immigration and protests by the far-Right... The proposals also suggest a 'special representative' role will be introduced to 'champion efforts across the UK to tackle hostility and hatred directed at Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim'."

Meme - Emma Trimble @Emma_A_Webb: "But this was fine. *people waving Palestine and Islamic State flags*"
Daily Mail @dailymail: "Flying a Union Jack flag is branded 'tool of hate in Government's leaked 'social cohesion' strategy"
We're still told that left wingers don't hate their countries

Thread by @jonkay on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This is hilarious. The faculty association at @usask (@USaskFaculty) subjected its members to a mandatory eye-glazing struggle session about their settler-colonial original sin; and this prof was able to (mercifully) get out of the last 90 minutes by live tweeting the idiocy he witnessed This is my favourite part about this garbage: You’re expected to have so many mind blowing epiphanies about your internalized racismness or whatever that you need a notebook so you can write them all down"
On Michael Plaxton

Meme - The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole: "Most Hispanic, Black, and Asian women think "white people invented slavery." Most Liberal Millennials think the same."
""White people invented slavery." Percent that chose "True" by Race and Sex
Percent that chose "True" by Political Orientation
Skeptic Research Center Team"

Meme - Skeptic Research Center Team @SkepResCenter: "Those with the highest levels of formal education hold blatantly false beliefs about race issues in America. Nearly a third of Americans with graduate degrees believe white people invented slavery, 3 in 4 believe white people are the richest group in America, and over half are unaware that qualified Asian applicants are regularly rejected from colleges and universities."
"False Beliefs About Race Among Those with Graduate Degrees
"White Americans have the highest household income of any racial group in the US." - 75%
"White people invented slavery." - 31%
"American colleges and universities regularty reject qualified Asian applicants." - 54%"
Weird. We're told that reality has a liberal bias, and left wingers claim that what educated people believe is objectively correct and society needs to follow that path. Of course, here graduate education is a proxy for left wing indoctrination, which explains why they believe all the left wing misinformation

Thomas Pierre 🇨🇭 on X - "If the world had an islamophobia problem, we would be protecting mosques… not synagogues and Christmas markets."

Peter Lloyd on X - "“British Muslims are scared,” says Sadiq Khan - after FOUR Jewish communities had their voluntary ambulance services torched 🇬🇧"
Gad Saad on X - "Indeed. Whenever Jews are attacked (typically by Muslims), it is important to redouble our efforts to fight against Islamophobia."

Harman Singh Kapoor on X - "I am a Sikh, and my faith matters to me. Being pressured to sell halal meat and remove non-halal signs is not just a business issue for me, it is about my religious beliefs and my right to practice them freely. No one should be forced to compromise their faith to satisfy intimidation or pressure. I respect everyone’s right to follow their religion, and I expect the same respect in return as I don’t go and intimidate places who are selling Halal I will not bow down when it comes to my beliefs. Freedom of religion must apply to everyone. If they want to have a holy war for this then let it be 🙏🏻"
Some minorities are more equal than others. I wouldn't hold my breath for a hate crime investigation
Time to arrest Harman Singh Kapoor for calling for holy war! This is clearly not just Islamophobia but anti-Muslim hatred

Harman Singh Kapoor on X - "Fucking inbreds pelted my restaurant with eggs because I'm not selling fucking halal. Hate crime at its peak in London."

Wall Street Apes on X - "‘Sikh restaurant owner persists with sign despite daily harassment from locals’ The store owner proudly declares his Indian restaurant does not serve Halal to stand against the Islamic invasion"

Tracking Hate against Sikhs on X - "I have my differences with this man @kingkapoor72, but he has every right to refuse to sell halal. If you want halal, go to any other establishment that serves it. Halal is bajjar kurehat in Sikhi."
Harman Singh Kapoor on X - "Inbreds attacking me again because I refuse to sell Halal"

Melanie Bennet on X - "While the U.S. is busy addressing Islamic terrorism, Canada is busy covering it up. The Trump administration has that is is "sanctioning four illicit charities that directly fund Hamas militants." Meanwhile, the Canada Revenue Agency is busy meeting with academics and lobby groups upset that Muslim charities that were found to be funding terror groups like Hamas are having their status revoked. Of course, they're claiming this is because of systemic Islamophobia within the CRAs anti-terror financing department."

Gothamist on X - "'We are enough': After Islamophobic attacks, Mamdani comforts NYC's Muslim community"
Corey Walker 🇺🇸 on X - "So after 3 high-profile terrorist attacks in the US, we are lectured about Islamophobia? This insanity happens all the time in Europe after terrorist attacks, and now it's happening here."

Dei Civitas on X - "Violent, invading Moslems march on the streets of Canadian cities, screaming slogans of death to Jews, Iranians, and Americans, and shouting "Alahu Akbar". What does the Canadian secret service do? It publishes a woke ad which warns Canadians against "Islamophobia". Notice that they specifically call it "hatred". That's because the Canadian regime has just passed a law which can put you behind bars for life if you utter speech and think thoughts which don't align with the government's ideology. Instead of protecting Canada from Chinese election interference, Chinese police stations on Canadian soil, Indian and Khalistani assassins operating at will in Canadian territory, 11 treasonous MPs sitting with impunity in Parliament, and Chinese fentanyl labs proliferating in Canada, the CSIS decides to collect data on who is "hateful' and "Islamophobic". I guess they're making the lists for who gets put into the cattle cars and shipped to the gulags."

Azat on X - ""My brother was killed with 17 stab wounds, and then his head was cut off. Nothing can ever make that right again" French teacher Samuel Paty was murdered by an Islamist. Some people continue to defame his reputation. His sister is fighting back"
Daniel Bordman on X - "I remember going to the Islamic protest against France in Toronto right after this happened. The average opinion of the 1000 or so Muslims that day:
- it is Islamophobia to link Islam to the murder of Samuel Paty
- it’s a lie that he was killed by Muslims
- it’s a good thing that he was killed because anyone who insults Islam should be beheaded."

Mike Bales 🫡🇺🇸 on X - "Can anyone remember the last time a Jew or a Christian stabbed, beheaded, shot, bombed, burned, blew himself up, or ran people down in a car or truck while yelling “Christ is King” or “God is great”?"
Naturally, lots of idiots started ranting about The Crusades

They Lied To Us About Having It All, And It's Costing Us Our Children

They Lied To Us About Having It All, And It's Costing Us Our Children
The women who followed every rule, hit every milestone, and built every résumé are now the ones crying in fertility clinic parking lots, and it's time someone said why. 

I was in elementary school the first time I heard it. "Girls can do anything." The poster in my school hallway showed a little girl, fists on hips, staring down the world like it owed her something. "Girl power!" "The future is female." The messaging was everywhere—in my classroom, on merchandise, in the TV shows that told us we were destined for boardrooms, not bassinets.

Love and family? Those were for women who gave up. Who settled. Who betrayed the sisterhood.

I believed it. We all did.

I grew up in the nineties, came of age in the aughts, and hit my twenties during the golden age of the girl boss. Sheryl Sandberg told us to "lean in." Beyoncé sang about running the world. Every magazine cover, every TV show, every commencement speech hammered the same point: your career is your identity. Your womb can wait. Marriage is a trap. Babies are a detour.

So we did what we were told.

We climbed. We hustled. We put off dating "seriously" because who has time for that when there are careers to chase? We dated the wrong men because the right ones wanted families, and families, we were assured, could come later. After the corner office. After the book deal. After we'd become someone.

As I shared in my article last week for Evie, I was twenty-six when I fell in love with a divorced father of three. He was kind, steady, and clear: no more kids. I told myself it was fine. I didn't need to be a mother. I could be the cool stepmom. The career woman who chose differently. I could still be significant. I was very influenced by the modern feminist messaging.

Years passed. Perspectives changed. We realized we were in different life chapters and my fiancé was worried I'd resent him in the future for not giving me children of my own. The relationship ended. Now I'm in my thirties, single, and suddenly, terrifyingly aware that the future I'd dreamed of as a girl might not show up.

Last week the internet lost its mind over Brad Wilcox's piece in Compact. The sociologist laid out the data with the cold precision of a coroner: women who reach thirty without starting a family have roughly a fifty-two percent chance of ever having children. Not great odds. Not the odds we were sold.

The outrage was immediate. "How dare he?" "Misogyny!" "Stop telling women when to have babies!"

But here's the thing no one wants to say out loud: the people sounding the alarm aren't the villains. The villains are the ones who spent decades lying to us.

They lied when they said fertility is a light switch you can flip at thirty-five. They lied when they told us egg freezing was a reasonable Plan B instead of an expensive, low-success Hail Mary. They lied when they painted motherhood as the thing that would limit us instead of the thing that would give us purpose deeper than any title or expensive handbag.

France just did something radical. They're sending letters to every twenty-nine-year-old in the country, men and women, reminding them that biology doesn't negotiate. That the window is real. That "later" has a terrifying habit of becoming "never."

The French are being called fascists for it. I call it mercy, because I've seen what happens when we don't get the memo.

I have a friend who turned forty and decided to freeze her eggs "just in case." At the clinic, the nurse looked at her with something between pity and exhaustion. "Hunny, you should've done this years ago." My friend cried in the parking lot. She'd believed the magazines. The Instagram influencers. The celebrities who announced their first pregnancy at forty-two like it was no big deal. She thought she had time.

Another friend was one of the best editors in Hollywood. By thirty-five she'd won awards, had the big office, the assistant, the recognition. She also had the creeping realization that the life she actually wanted—a husband, kids, Sunday dinners—was slipping away. She started dating men she didn't even like, just to try to make it happen. At thirty-nine, her two-year relationship imploded. She called me in tears. "I put my career first because that's what we were supposed to do. Now yeah, I'm at the top of my game, but I've lost the only thing I actually wanted."

A third friend is in her thirties, married, and has been trying to get pregnant for two years. Every failed round, every negative test, every well-meaning "have you tried relaxing?" from people who don't understand. She said to me, voice cracking, "They lied to us. They told us it would be easy. Why did they lie?"

I hear versions of this story constantly. In DMs. In coffee shops. In the group chats where millennial women gather to compare notes on the lives we were promised versus the ones we're living. The successful ones who cry in their luxury apartments. The now-older ones who froze their eggs and have a slimmer shot at a live birth. The ones who say, "I don't regret my career, but I regret believing it was the only thing that mattered."

And here's the part that makes me uncomfortable to say: I'm in that camp too.

I may still get to be a mother one day. But I'm also a realist. The choices I made—the years I spent telling myself I didn't want children of my own, I'll just be the best stepmom, chasing the wrong kind of significance—might mean that prayer goes unanswered. And that grief is real. It's not theoretical. It's the empty nursery I walk past in my mind every single day.

For years I've spoken out against the female victimhood mentality. I still do. Believing you're doomed because you're a woman is the fastest way to become exactly what you say you are. But if we're going to talk about victims, let's be honest: a generation of women were victims of the most successful propaganda campaign in modern history. We are victims of "girl boss" feminism.

We were told that traditional womanhood was oppression. That wanting a husband and babies was basic. That prioritizing love over status was weak. That our bodies were inconveniences to be managed, not miracles to be celebrated.

And now we're shocked that so many of us are alone, childless, and devastated.

This isn't about shaming women who chose differently. Some women genuinely don't want children, and that's their business. Women having choice was the supposed goal of women's liberation after all. This is about the millions who did want them—who still do—and were never told the truth about what it would cost to wait.

The data is brutal. Fertility declines sharply after thirty. Miscarriage rates climb. The chance of abnormalities skyrockets. Yes, there are miracles. Yes, science can do incredible things. But miracles aren't a business model. And "you can have it all" was never a promise. It was a sales pitch.

I'm tired of watching my friends mourn the children they'll never hold. I'm tired of the gaslighting that says pointing this out is "anti-woman." Telling women the biological reality of their own bodies isn't misogyny. It's the opposite. It's love. It's the kind of love our mothers and grandmothers used to give before we decided feelings mattered more than facts and self, status, money, and power mattered more than nurturing others.

We owe the next generation better. We owe them the truth that career is wonderful but it will never love you back. That status is fleeting but loving your children is eternal. That the most significant thing most of us will ever do isn't closing a deal or becoming famous—it's raising human beings who know they are loved.

We owe them the warning we never got: the window is real. The clock is ticking. And no amount of girl-boss mantras can stop it.

If France can send letters, we can at least start telling the truth in our culture. In our schools. In our families. In the conversations with our younger sisters and nieces and the girls scrolling TikTok and Instagram thinking they have forever.

Because they don't. And neither did we.

It's not too late to change the story. But it is late. Later than we were ever told. And the women waking up in their thirties and forties with empty arms and full résumés deserve to hear, finally, what no one had the courage to say when it still could have made a difference: We were manipulated and lied to.

And the cost could be our children.

Links - 28th March 2026 (1 - Hamas Attack Oct 2023 [including Francesca Albanese])

Meme - Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig: "Remember UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, the one who implied that Israelis eat human flesh and that Israel is humanity's common enemy. She just retweeted Dyab Abou Jahjah, a former Hezbollah member who became a politician in Belgium, saying that "the Lebanese resistance is fighting to defend the country". A UN employee is openly siding with a Hezbollah member and defending the terrorist group. The fact that Albanese's contract has been renewed tells us everything we need to know about the UN's bias."
Francesca Albanese, UN Spe... @FranceskAlbs: "The New World isn't West vs the vast, North vs South. It's UP vs DOWN: filthy rich vs everyone else, with a cohort of cowards, racists & opportunists in between, sustaining an imperial war-driven system bombing ppl into submission. Time for an ethical course correction"
Dyab Abou Jahjah @Aboujahjah: "The Lebanese resistance is fighting to defend the country. Resistance against occupation is a right recognized under international law. Israel has chosen to destroy Lebanese villages an..."
Since the Lebanese government has condemn Hezbollah, it's proof that they are controlled by "Zionists" and must be ignored!

Francesca Albanese in Her Own Words - "Holocaust Distortion, Trivialization and Comparisons to Nazis
Conspiracies about Jewish power
Demonization and Delegitimization of Israel
Denying or Diminishing the Oct. 7th Massacre
Justification of Violence
Albanese’s Antisemitism Prior to Her UN appointment...
In 2014, Albanese expressed excitement on Facebook that Hamas was removed from the list of terror organizations by the EU General Court: “Two good news one after another from the radio while I was taking a nap. Normalization in the relations usa cuba [sic] and removal of hamas [sic] from the list of terror organizations. Was i [sic] dreaming???” The EU’s decision to declassify Hamas as a terrorist organization was overturned by the European Court of Justice (EJC) in 2017.
In 2014, Albanese stated: “America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust.” When uncovered in 2022, Albanese’s comments were condemned by US Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt as “blatantly antisemitic.” Albanese has since said that she regrets this remark."
Clearly, she meant the "Zionist" lobby and isn't anti-Semitic at all

France to call for Albanese's resignation at UN session - "Albanese’s antisemitic remarks at Saturday’s Al Jazeera Forum, where she spoke alongside a “representative of Hamas and a representative of the Iranian government while the repression continues.”... The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Austria, Beate Meinl-Reisinger, claimed that Albanese branded Israel an "enemy of humanity," chastising her for using language that "undermines the impartiality and highest standards that the role of a UN representative requires."... Her comments, Barrot said, “target not the Israeli government, whose policies can be criticized, but Israel as a people and as a nation, which is absolutely unacceptable.” Barrot noted that Albanese’s words "add to a long list of scandalous positions, justifying October 7, the worst antisemitic massacre in our history since the Holocaust, mentioning the ‘Jewish Lobby’ and comparing Israel to the Third Reich.” “She presents herself as a UN independent expert, yet she is neither an expert nor independent — she is a political activist who stirs up hate speech and undermines the cause of the Palestinian people that she claims to defend.”"

Adelaide University cancels literary festival event with UN Gaza investigator Francesca Albanese : r/aussie - "Wtf you doing, Adelaide?"
"Supporting a genocide apparently."
"No, that would be if they invited her."
"Didn't Israel fund and support Hamas? Yep."
"Didn't Hamas get Netanyahu elected in the first place? Yep."

Adelaide University cancels literary festival event with UN Gaza investigator Francesca Albanese : r/aussie - "Banning a antisemetic consipracy theorist who supports Hamas, denies rapes and atrocities, calls Israel an "enemy of humanity' and claims Jews control the media. Imagine saying a single one of those things about any other minority and being invited to a festival."

Adelaide University cancels literary festival event with UN Gaza investigator Francesca Albanese : r/aussie - "So free speech means you have a right to support Hamas' atrocities and deny that they were antisemitic? By that standard, do you believe that hate speech isn't a valid reason to cancel someone's participation in an event?"
"please link to when and where francesca albanese supported hamas and claimed they weren’t antisemitic"
""So it is critical that you understand, that when you think of Hamas, you should not necessarily think of cut-throats, people armed to the teeth, or fighters. It's not like that."
"The narrative that has been spread including by European leaders is that 7th of October, the crimes that were committed on October 7 were because of antisemitism. This is so false. I do not exclude that there could be antisemitic sentiments among some Palestinians. Who am I to say that? But the motives were not antisemitic — because the attack was against Israel and Israelis,..."
"Look there are different views of what happened on October 7, but the thing is, the violence of that day which was brutal for the Israelis but that brutality there were also fabrications attacked to it, like the mass rape and other horror stories.”
"In the West, the mainstream media has replicated and amplified lies. We have heard, and sometimes I look at politicians and journalists who have repeated lies. But what’s the need to talk about mass rapes? There is no evidence of rape.
"The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism but in response to Israel’s oppression."
"There might have been people carrying out the attack who might have been motivated by hatred. But the attack itself, and this is the thing, there is something like intent at the level of the attack, and all the statements that were collected at the level of command have not pointed to aggression against the Jews""
"you’re upset because she’s right, aren’t you?"
""She didn't say it but if she did say it, she was right""
Adelaide University cancels literary festival event with UN Gaza investigator Francesca Albanese : r/aussie - "Is she also right when she said "America and Europe have been subjugated by the Jewish lobby"?"
"Criticising Israel makes you unelectable in the US and almost certainly so in Europe. You tell me."
"Are you conflating Israel and Jews? I was told that was antisemitic... Sure, sure, just ask Zohran Mamdani. So you think she's right?"

Eyal Yakoby on X - "BREAKING: U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres under fire after reports that 12 Palestinian aid workers were killed by Hamas and their bodies left in the courtyard of Nasser Hospital. When asked to condemn Hamas over the killings, he declined."

The Lawfare Project on X - "UC Santa Barbara has a legal duty to protect its minority students, but when it comes to Jewish students, it is failing to uphold that duty. Tessa Veksler, a Jewish student leader, is suing the university for ignoring sustained antisemitic harassment and discrimination. She was called a “Zionist dog.” She was accused of supporting genocide. She was subjected to antisemitic tropes. She was targeted inside the Multicultural Center where her office was located. According to the complaint, the University failed to act; the abuse intensified with the full knowledge, consent, and even active participation of one of the University’s representatives. When universities fail to uphold the law, they must be held accountable."

Meme - Oren Barsky @orenbarsky: "The calls for genocide began in the first hours of Hamas’s attack inside Israel’s borders, as they slaughtered, raped, and burned Jewish families. Everything was planned in advance — including the influence campaign on social media and other platforms. Those responsible for this campaign and these posts are no less guilty than the Hamas terrorists who murdered Jews with their own hands. They should be held to the same standard of justice."
Refaat in Gaza @itranslate123: "Horror horrors. There are explosions almost everywhere second in Gaza. The whole house shakes and the little kids everywhere weep and shriek in fear. This is genocide and ethnic cleansing. 07 Oct 23"

Meme - Virag Gulyas @theviraggulyas: "It's tragically fascinating how countries are afraid to join Trump's peace committee, yet insist the UN should be responsible instead. Sure, fine. But how about acknowledging that the UN has failed at its job for decades? How about the fact that UNRWA has kept Palestinian Arabs in a perpetual refugee status, actively reinforcing the status quo? How about the UN's ongoing failure to clearly designate Hamas as a terrorist organization? So maybe, just maybe, it's worth giving a chance to this "crazy" committee idea, initiated by the very person responsible for the Abraham Accords. Otherwise, it's fair to assume that the countries refusing to join aren't really interested in peace."
"Vatican declines to join Trump's Gaza 'Board of Peace, calls for UN leadership. Cardinal Pietro Parolin cites 'critical points' and says UN should manage crisis situations instead"

Thread by @v_j_freeman on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Mothin Ali led an antisemitic campaign against a Rabbi working at Leeds University who had briefly served as a border guard in the IDF after 7/10 which led to his young family having to go into police protection as a result of credible death threats. This is simply fact. If you think this man was a legitimate target for Mothin Ali’s demonising campaign where he characterised the Rabbi as an “animal” who was an immediate threat to students, you’re part of the escalating violent threat to British Jews. It’s all part of ‘anti Zionist’ antisemitism. These risks also extend beyond Jews. Lee Rigby was murdered as a result of exactly the same sentiments expressed by Mothin Ali. All those who have served are put at risk if we accept Mothin Ali’s ‘logic’."

Seth Mandel on X - "The cautionary tale of Momodou Taal: he was vocally pro-Hamas, suspended twice for non-speech offenses, given special treatment *because* he was on a visa, sued *after* his visa was revoked, and fooled a lot of ppl into defending him by lying about his deportation:"
Naturally, left wingers are pretending he's being persecuted for his speech, not violence

John Spencer on X: "I’m a War Scholar. There Is No Genocide in Gaza" / X - "In his New York Times op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” Omer Bartov accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. As a professor of genocide studies, he should know better. Genocide is not defined by a few comments taken out of context, by estimates of casualties or destruction, or by how war looks in headlines or on social media. It is defined by specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part. That is a high legal bar. Bartov did not meet it. He did not even try... Bartov claims that five statements by Israeli leaders prove genocidal intent. He begins with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comment on October 7 that Hamas would “pay a huge price.” That is not a call for genocide. It is what any leader would say after the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history. He also cites Netanyahu’s statements that Hamas would be destroyed and that civilians should evacuate combat zones. That is not evidence of a desire to destroy a people. It is what professional militaries do when fighting an enemy that hides among civilians. Bartov presents Netanyahu’s reference to “remember Amalek” as a smoking gun. But this is a phrase from Jewish history and tradition. It is engraved at Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, and also appears on the Holocaust memorial in The Hague. In both places, it serves as a warning to remain vigilant against threats, not as a call for mass killing. He also highlights Defense Minister Gallant’s use of the term “human animals” to describe Hamas fighters. That is not a war crime. After the slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of civilians on October 7, many would understand or even share that reaction. Unable to find intent among those actually directing the war, Bartov turns to far-right politicians like Bezalel Smotrich and Nissim Vaturi. These individuals do not command troops, issue orders, or shape battlefield decisions. I have studied the actual orders. They focus on destroying Hamas, rescuing hostages, and protecting civilians whenever possible. Their rhetoric is irrelevant to the legal case. Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets, and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level. I have seen missions delayed or canceled because children were nearby. I have seen Israeli troops come under fire and still be ordered not to shoot back because civilians might be harmed. Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime. More than 94,000 trucks carrying over 1.8 million tons of aid have entered the territory. Israel has supported hospitals, repaired water pipelines, increased access to clean water, and enabled over 36,000 patients to leave Gaza for treatment abroad. The IDF has coordinated millions of vaccine doses, supplied fuel for hospitals and infrastructure, and facilitated the flow of food and medicine through the UN, aid groups, and private partners. The U.S.–Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation alone has delivered more than 82 million meals—one to two million a day—while weakening Hamas’s control over aid. This is not genocide. It is responsible and historic mid-war humanitarian policy. Bartov cites death tolls from Hamas health authorities without question. He says 58,000 have been killed, including 17,000 children. But these numbers come from a terrorist organization. They mix civilians and fighters and count anyone under 18 as a child, even though Hamas uses teenagers and younger children as combatants. The figures are not independently verified and have been shown to contain false details, including names, ages, and sex. Civilian deaths are tragic, but in Gaza, they are also part of Hamas’s strategy. No military operation is judged solely by body counts or destruction figures. If we used Bartov’s logic, every major war would be called genocide. Two million civilians died in the Korean War, an average of 54,000 per month. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars killed hundreds of thousands. The fight against ISIS leveled multiple cities and killed tens of thousands. None of those wars were considered genocidal. Gaza is not either. War is evaluated based on the actions of commanders, the goals set by leaders, and how well the military follows the laws of war, not by statistics taken out of context. War is hell. It is inhumane, destructive, and ugly. But it is not automatically a crime. Nations must not target civilians. They must follow the rules of distinction, proportionality, and take all possible care to avoid civilian harm. Israel is doing that. I have seen it. In Rafah this summer, Israel spent weeks preparing evacuations. It opened new safe areas and waited until civilians had moved before striking Hamas targets. That operation killed Hamas’s top commander, recovered hostages, and kept civilian deaths very low. It was a clear example of Israel’s extraordinary intent and actions to protect civilians while targeting only Hamas, a part of the story ignored by those who reduce war to headlines and numbers... This is not a campaign of extermination. It is a war against Hamas, a terrorist army embedded in civilian areas by design. The law matters. So does precision. And above all, truth matters."

Arsen Ostrovsky on X - "There is no depths to the depravity of some pro-Palestinian activists. Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat and Righteous Among the Nations, who risked his life to save over 6,000 Jews during the Holocaust, while he was stationed in Lithuania. Yesterday, his statue in Los Angeles was vandalized with red paint. Defacing the memory of a man who saved thousands of Jews isn’t activism, it’s moral bankruptcy and Holocaust distortion."

Shadi Hamid on X - "What Israel has done in Gaza clearly and easily meets the legal definition of genocide as described in the UN Genocide Convention. I lay out the case in detail here in @washingtonpost:"
David Bernstein on X - "I'm a law professor, and if this "case" was made by a student in a class, he'd fail. Let's start with the fact that you haven't made a case for genocidal intent, that many months after you claimed that starvation was imminent for many Gazans it never happened, that you rely on entirely unconfirmed statistics that Hamas itself doesn't claim to exaggerate the death toll, that you don't separate out combatants in the death toll, that you don't explain what precisely Israel did that was illicit--just people being killed doesn't make for a genocide--and instead try to define "genocide" so broadly (and clearly contrary to the intent of the language you cite) that almost any urban warfare could be deemed genocide."
🏳️‍🌈🇳🇫🇱🇰🇸🇨Jin🇻🇦🏳️‍⚧️🏴‍☠️🇺🇳 on X - "God I remember how I first started to drift away from the pro-palestine position It was when I started to get hit with the "Gaza was beautiful" posts and I remembered how they said it was an open air prison like a ghetto Oh also during the "48 hours before 10000 kids die""
old crank on X - "If its so clear, why wouldnt the IDF let journalists in to observe? Or dont law professors use evidence these days."
David Bernstein on X - "Allowing journalists to embed with armed forces, which Israel did, is common practice. Allowing journalists to wander around on their own in territory controlled by terrorists is not, and especially not when any time a journalist, pseudo-journalist, or terrorist moonlighting as a journalist sometimes, is killed, the usual suspects put all the blame on said armed forces. Anyway, there was no shortage of cell phone cameras in Gaza, and people routinely claim that Israel targeted and murderer children. when you ask them for video evidence, they give you pictures of blown up buildings, or pictures of bodies with no context. Where are the videos of soldiers doing all the things they are accused of."

Meme - Colin Wight @colwight: "It's worth remembering that in the Revised Disengagement Plan Main Principles," on Gaza, approved by the Israeli government on June 6, 2004. It states: "Israel hopes that the Palestinians will have the sense to take advantage of the disengagement move in order to exit the cycle of violence and rejoin the process of dialogue. The disengagement move has the potential to improve the fabric of Palestinian life and the Palestinian economy." Instead of taking those opportunities Gaza, under the leadership of Hamas, built a structure designed for war. If what's in this video has been destroyed, it's on Hamas. And no one should be surprised if, after the disengagement, and Israel can't see a way forward towards peace."

Meme - David Bernstein @ProfDBernstein: "I wonder if all the Western rubes who before 10/7 described Gaza as an open air prison, worse than the Warsaw Ghetto, even when saner voices pointed out that this was contrary to what one could easily observe on Gazans' social media are at all embarrassed by this, and have learned any lessons."
Suppressed Voices @supressedvoic: "Gaza was beautiful before Israel destroyed it completely. Don't look away"

Meme - Simone Rodan-Benzaquen @srodan: "This is what so-called "pro-Palestinians" did last night to the man who saved the free world.
*Winston Churchill statue*
"Zionist war criminal. Stop the genocide. Globalise the Intifada! *upside down red triangle*"

Hamas is reasserting control in Gaza despite its heavy losses fighting Israel - ""The taxes imposed by Hamas depend on the type and quantity of goods, but prices start at 20,000 shekels and above," he said. "If a trader refuses to pay, force is used and in some cases he is kidnapped or threatened. No one can avoid paying taxes on goods." He told us that traders used a code-word for Hamas when discussing tax payments, so that Israel wouldn't learn that money was being siphoned off to the group. "Hamas now has a database of all the traders who import goods into the Gaza Strip," said the activist Mohammed Diab. "The trader pays in cash, not through bank transfers, so that the flow of funds cannot be traced. It is gradually restoring the system that was in place in the past, but away from the spotlight so it can't be monitored.""
Hamza on X - "Today, after one month the BBC confirms what I reported here on Hamas's exploitation of Gaza merchants. Hope to hear something from the UN/Amnesty...etc."

Doctors Without Borders Says Gunmen Are Using a Gaza Hospital, Posing Risk to Patients and Staff - WSJ - "Doctors Without Borders suspended all noncritical services at one of Gaza’s largest hospitals, the group said, alleging that the facility was being used by armed men, some masked, to intimidate and arrest patients and potentially move weapons. The aid group, known by its French initials MSF, said it made the decision to pull services from the Nasser Hospital Complex in Khan Younis after its staff witnessed an uptick in what it called unacceptable acts that it said posed a threat to its team and patients... The Wall Street Journal spoke to two men who said they were detained and interrogated by Hamas at Nasser hospital in recent weeks... Hospitals were a flashpoint during two years of fighting between Israel and Hamas. Nasser hospital and others were sites of extended battles during the war and caused widespread damage to Gaza’s healthcare system. Many international organizations condemned Israel for attacking hospitals, citing their protected status in international law. Israel said Hamas used hospitals to hide senior militants, plan and launch attacks, a charge Hamas denies... A 45-year-old Palestinian man told The Wall Street Journal he was detained by a Hamas street patrol and brought to the orthopaedics department in Nasser hospital for an interrogation. Another Palestinian man said he was detained by Hamas at Nasser hospital for 12 hours. Medical facilities can lose their protective rights if used for hostile acts against enemy combatants, said Emanuela-Chiara Gillard, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics Law and Armed conflict. She said while isolated incidents involving armed individuals might not constitute militarization of a facility, it was the pattern of incidents that threatened the facility’s status. “The accumulation of them is what’s problematic and clearly what’s led MSF to say when you look at them as a whole, we are having here a militarization of parts of this hospital,” she said."
Clearly, they have been infiltrated by "Zionists" and can no longer be trusted!

COGAT on X - "After too long, MSF has finally admitted what Israel has been saying all along: Hamas abuses Nasser Hospital as a terror base. The obvious question is: where was MSF until now? If MSF now acknowledges Hamas’ deep presence in a hospital they work in, why has it repeatedly refused basic transparency—such as submitting staff lists—to ensure its organization has not been infiltrated by Hamas operatives? This is not accountability; it is a late admission after years of choosing to stay in the dark, during which Hamas systematically exploited humanitarian infrastructure."

How the Israeli President’s Visit to Australia Created a ‘Tinder Box’ - The New York Times
Arsen Ostrovsky on X - "President Herzog didn’t create any “tinderbox” by coming to support a grieving Jewish community after Bondi. That tinderbox was built over 2+ years by mobs harassing Jews, chanting “Globalise the Intifada,” and all the activists, politicians and media who enabled it."

Links - 27th March 2026 (2 - Left Wing Economics [including Poverty and Crime])

Meme - John Rain: "Poverty does not cause crime. You will find a correlation between neighborhood deprivation and violent crimes as a whole, but it disappears once you "adjust for genes', ie by comparing siblings for example."
"The Impact of Neighborhood Deprivation on Violent Crime: It Declines With Added Controls"

Childhood family income, adolescent violent criminality and substance misuse: quasi-experimental total population study - "There were no associations between childhood family income and subsequent violent criminality and substance misuse once we had adjusted for unobserved familial risk factors."
More proof that poverty causes crime

Does Poverty Cause Crime? - "the relationship between poverty and crime is inconsistent. If poverty causes crime, why don’t all similarly impoverished groups—by race, religion, ethnicity, age, gender, and so on—commit violent crimes at the same rate? The fact that they don’t suggests that other factors are at play. Consider some striking facts that illustrate the inconsistency between poverty and violent crime. Some cities and countries with high poverty rates have low murder rates, and vice versa. Calcutta, for example, one of the poorest cities in India—and, indeed, the world—recorded a murder rate of just 0.3 per 100,000 people in 2008. The rate in Delhi, by contrast, was 2.9 per 100,000. That same year, the rate in far wealthier New York City was 7 per 100,000—more than 23 times higher than Calcutta’s.  Zimbabwe, among the poorest African countries, had a remarkably low murder rate of 0.5 per 100,000 in 2023. By contrast, Jamaica, with a relatively modest 16.7 percent of the population in poverty, had the world’s highest murder rate: 49.3 per 100,000. What explains the relative nonviolence of impoverished Zimbabweans? And why are Jamaicans so homicidal, despite their relative affluence? Clearly, poverty can’t be the answer to both questions.  Turning to macro trends in the United States, we find similar anomalies. In the late 1930s, as the Great Depression worsened, homicide rates declined, as I note in my book The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America. Likewise, during the so-called Great Recession of 2007–09, murder rates, which had begun to sink in the early 1990s, kept falling. And in the late 1960s, when the American economy was booming, the great crime wave (more like a crime tsunami) was beginning its deadly multi-decadal surge—a pattern that I discuss in The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America. Criminological research has revealed similar surprises, with no consensus on the explanation. Over 40 years ago, criminologist Steven F. Messner, studying more than 200 metropolitan areas, was astonished to find that, after controlling for various demographic variables, poverty was inversely related to homicide. In other words, the more poor people there were in a metro area, the lower the murder rate was. As a follow-up, the same researcher studied Manhattan neighborhoods, this time finding that, while poverty was associated with homicide, economic inequality—the concentration of wealth in fewer hands—bore no connection to killing.  In a 1996 study of extremely disadvantaged neighborhoods in Columbus, Ohio, which included poverty as part of its definition of disadvantage, Lauren J. Krivo and Ruth D. Peterson found that, even at comparable levels of hardship, black communities had higher rates of violent crime than white ones. In 2009, Krivo and Peterson and a third coauthor identified significant differences in violent crime levels between black and Latino neighborhoods, despite similar levels of disadvantage and segregation... I wrote for City Journal about a new study on Asian poverty in New York City. Columbia University researchers found that more Asians than African Americans were living below the poverty line, a surprising result. Curious about how this affected crime, I examined violent crime arrests. The data showed far more arrests of blacks than Asians... while more Asians live in poverty than blacks, African Americans are 16 times more likely to be arrested for murder.  The disparities extend to other violent crimes. The black arrest rate is 4.5 times higher than the Asian rate for felony assault, 3.3 times higher for rape, and 11.4 times higher for robbery. Latino arrest rates are also higher than Asian rates, though generally lower than black rates.   Clearly, poverty alone does not explain these disparities. But what does? Given that black violent crime rates have been elevated relative to other social groups since the late nineteenth century, it appears that something in the culture of poor blacks, especially young males, predisposes them to violence.  The phenomenon is often described as a “subculture of violence,” marked by a heightened sensitivity to perceived slights and threats, along with a readiness to use violence in response. Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson, who spent four years immersed in Philadelphia’s inner cities, identified a “code of the street”—a set of unofficial rules for poor black neighborhoods. The essence of this code is to display violence, or a predisposition to violence, to ward off the all-too-common attacks and assaults in these communities... Lifting the poor into the middle class does reduce violent crime, as we saw with Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century and Italian immigrants in the early twentieth. But there is little agreement on how best to achieve this through government policy."
The cope is that blacks are wrongly arrested and convicted, inflating the arrest and conviction numbers
If the Scottish influence theory is right, Scots should be as prone to violence as African-Americans. But...

Poverty and Violent Crime Don’t Go Hand in Hand - "in New York City, Asians’ relatively high poverty rate is accompanied by exceptionally low crime rates. This undercuts the common belief that poverty and crime go hand in hand.  Asians had consistently low arrest rates for violent crime—usually lower than their proportion of the population, lower than those of blacks and Hispanics, and in one category (assault), even lower than that of whites, who, as a group, are far less often impoverished... At 1.2 per 100,000, Asian murder arrest rates were nearly one-ninth of black rates. If poverty were the principal cause of crime, we would expect Asian rates to be as high, if not higher, than those of blacks. That the Asian rates are relatively low illustrates what I call the “crime/adversity mismatch,” a recurring phenomenon. As I observe in my history of crime: “Throughout American history, different social groups have engaged in different amounts of violent crime, and no consistent relationship between the extent of a group’s socioeconomic disadvantage and its level of violence is evident.”   When it comes to violent crime—murder, assault, robbery, and the like—history tells a complicated story. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, impoverished Jewish, Polish, and German immigrants had relatively low crime rates, while disadvantaged Italian, Mexican, and Irish entrants committed violent crime at high rates. This crime/adversity mismatch also seems to be a global phenomenon. In Great Britain, for instance, a criminologist observed that “all of the minority groups with elevated rates of crime or incarceration are socially and economically disadvantaged, but some disadvantaged ethnic minority groups do not have elevated rates of offending.” There, too, it was the case that Asians were more disadvantaged than blacks, but the latter had much higher offending rates.   Why is it that poverty is not consistently related to crime? A major reason is that crimes of violence are usually motivated by quarrels, personal grudges, perceived insults, and similar interpersonal conflicts, not by economic necessity. Consequently, a decline in one’s financial condition is not likely to cause violent criminal behavior. This explains why an economic recession or depression does not invariably produce a crime spike. In the second half of the 1930s, for instance, violent crime declined, even though the country experienced some of the worst years of the Great Depression. Likewise, during the Great Recession of 2007–2009, when the economy tanked, crime fell."
Clearly, white people are victims of racial profiling, which is why they are arrested more than Asians

Revisiting the Income Inequality-Crime Puzzle - "The economics literature generally supports a positive theoretical link between income inequality and crime. However, despite this consensus, empirical evidence has struggled to yield definitive conclusions. To address this puzzle, I conducted a meta-analysis based on 1,341 estimates drawn from 43 studies in economics journals. The findings indicate a statistically significant but economically insignificant true effect of inequality on crime, ranging between 0.007 and 0.123 using UWLS FAT-PET and advanced methods. In essence, if there is an impact of inequality on crime, it is, at best, minimal. Additionally, there is some limited evidence suggesting positive publication bias. Results from Bayesian model averaging reveal that inequality does not affect exclusively property crime, as predicted by the rational choice models. Moreover, this analysis shows that inequality measures which are sensitive to changes in income at the middle and top of the distribution are associated with higher coefficients. The study also underscores the biases arising from the exclusion of relevant variables. The implications of this research suggest that inequality may not be the primary motivator for criminal behaviour, with other factors potentially playing more significant roles. Lastly, if inequality does affect crime, it might do so in different ways than those discussed by the majority of the existing empirical studies."

Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 2014, David Graeber wrote an article for the Guardian in which he argued "Working-class people... care more about their friends, families, and communities. In aggregate... they're just fundamentally nicer."  The Economist put up a similar article at the time.  Were they right?
To make his case, Graeber wove a nice little narrative together about how the rich don't need to care, so they don't, and thus they're bad at empathy and they do things like hiring out the sons and daughters of the poor to do the job when empathy is needed.  The meat of Graeber's case was a set of two social psychological papers.  The first was a set of three studies in which the poor appeared to outclass the rich at tasks like the Mind in the Eyes, or figuring out the emotions of people they're talking to.  The main effects from these studies had p-values of 0.02, 0.02, 0.04, 0.01, 0.04, 0.03, and 0.04.  This first article was severely p-hacked. To make matters worse, one of the studies featured priming and two of them used "subjective" measures of social class. The second article was a series of seven studies that were, at times, just bizarre.  In the first two studies, students watched cars at a four-way intersection and tallied up how often the "upper-class" and "lower-class" cars cut off other vehicles and pedestrians.  What's an upper-class car? Beats me. It was based on student judgment.  p's = 0.046 and 0.040. In the rest of the studies, things were similarly dodgy: almost all of the p-values were barely less than 0.05, the hypotheses were unbelievable, priming was featured, low power was abused, and liberties were taken in sampling and in defining key variables
So what happens next?  Some researchers looked at these studies and the media coverage saying that the rich were bad at being empathetic, were selfish, etc. and thought  Wait, why does every field but social psychology say the opposite? Social psychology, alongside nutrition, is a paragon of the replication crisis. Not in a good way, mind you, in the sense that remarkably many of its studies failed to replicate  Studies from outside social psychology got less coverage, but indicated the rich were more prosocial. The researchers decided to use large, population-representative samples with objective measures of social class to figure out if the rich were more prosocial or antisocial than the poor  To start, in these two studies from Germany (SOEP) and the U.S. (CEX) they donated more often   This is key. The reason is, some studies had indicated that the poor donate relatively larger portions of their incomes.  But, those studies all looked at donations among those who donated. In other words, they didn't account for differences in the likelihood of donating at all. Account for that difference, and a proposed curvilinear relationship between relative amounts of donations and poverty disappears. Now, the rich just donate more absolutely and relatively! In the GSS, measures of both objective and subjective social class were available, so they could be discriminated and... it appears subjective social class might be weaker than objective social class as a predictor of at least this prosocial behavior:
You could argue donations aren't a great metric.  Fine.  So look at volunteering, which the rich in the SOEP were more likely to do (and do more frequently—not shown here). In the GSS, the same result emerged: the objectively and subjectively rich volunteered more usually (and frequently—again, not shown here).  This happens despite the poor having more free time and the rich spending more time each week gainfully employed on average. If you look in the ISSP—a large international survey covering more than 30 countries—the rich are more likely to volunteer at all in aggregate, and they volunteer more frequently, although there is some heterogeneity across countries in the frequency of volunteering relationship:
You could argue that the poor are more selfish because they're poor. And, OK! But even in the setting of the well-known trust game, the rich were more trusting and more trustworthy:
Since the poor commit more crime, are more likely to act indecent and loud, show less trusting and trustworthy behavior, and so on, we really have no reason to believe Graeber's article and so many others like it.  They were, at best, a relic of the replication crisis. At worst—and this is likely what they really were—they were political wishcasting.  So let's not denigrate the rich, because it's not true that they deserve it."

Kevin Bass on X - "At least 20% of healthcare spending is waste and fraud. That's $1,000,000,000,000 on waste and fraud in healthcare alone. Maybe as much as $2,500,000,000,000. The federal deficit is $2,000,000,000,000. America is being bankrupted by waste and fraud."
Anthony DiGiorgio, DO, MHA on X - "I believe this.  Some of it is the obvious cartoon villain stuff. The outright fraud like the Minnesota autism scam.  But a lot of it is softer fraud.  When a hospital charges $18k for an MRI that can be done for $400, that is not technically fraud. It is still an extraction racket.  When state Medicaid programs award massive contracts to politically connected nonprofits or vendors, they will insist it is not fraud.  All of these revenue streams started with good intentions. Of course we want to support disabled children. Of course we want low income patients to have access to imaging and specialty care.  Then people figured out how to enrich themselves inside those programs.  What we now have is a massive wealth extraction industry hiding behind moral language and complexity.  Audit everything."

The Minnesota fraud scandal is just the tip of the iceberg - "Minnesota is not the exception but rather the example Americans finally noticed. Medicaid fraud has been endemic at the state and federal levels for decades. Politicians haven't done much, even with scholars and journalists raising the alarm.  Medicaid reports $543 billion in "improper payments" over the past decade, though that figure omits one of the largest sources of error: whether states correctly determined the eligibility of the individuals they enrolled and paid providers on behalf of. According to Paragon Institute calculations, this brings improper payments to $1.1 trillion over those 10 years.  Improper payments are not identical to fraud; many involve missing documentation or administrative errors. But that distinction offers little comfort considering how little money is recovered. They are also an open invitation for more abuse.  Actual fraud, meanwhile, is widespread and persistent. In 2024 alone, state Medicaid Fraud Control Units reported more than 1,151 convictions and more than $1.4 billion in civil and criminal recoveries. Federal enforcement recovers a tiny share of what is stolen. Fraud that goes undetected never appears in the data.   That's only the tip of the iceberg. Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and many other welfare programs also suffer from massive fraud. The Affordable Care Act's (ACA) exchange subsidies provide another cautionary example.  A recent Government Accountability Office report shows that the fraud risks in the ACA's advanced premium tax credit remain severe a decade after they were first identified. The ability to gain subsidized coverage for fictitious applicants without providing required documentation, tens of thousands of Social Security numbers used for overlapping coverage, and more than $21 billion in subsidies never reconciled with tax filings are among the findings. Nonetheless, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has not updated its fraud risk assessment since 2018 and still lacks a comprehensive anti-fraud strategy.   It's tempting to treat the Minnesota scandal as a morality play about managerial incompetence. And yes, Gov. Tim Walz deserves some blame. When red flags persist for years across multiple programs, failure of leadership is part of the story. But focusing on a single official or state misses the deeper lesson.  The problem is not administrative capacity; it's incentives. Spending other people's money with little personal consequence for failure leads to a collapse of accountability, regardless of who's in charge. In addition, voters have limited incentives to monitor complex programs. Interest groups, by contrast, have strong incentives to organize around government spending.   None of this requires bad intentions—it's predictable human behavior flowing from predictable incentives—but it creates an environment for waste and fraud to take root."
If you don't want to relentlessly expand government programmes, you're a terrible person who has no "empathy" and if you're a Christian you're a hypocrite. If you want a pause while programmes are audited, you just want people to die

Big Labor's child care racket - "in the last 12 years, the number of child care workers has increased by about 33%, while the number of children ages 5 and under fell by 8.8%. The explosion of the child care industry has persisted even while the number of stay-at-home mothers has risen in recent years.   The story here is not just a matter of Somali fraudsters. It’s a much bigger story about special-interest politics boosted by ideology and masquerading as family policy.  For the past two decades, Democrats have been pumping billions of dollars into the child care industry at the behest of labor unions, who then use the state funding as a lever by which to unionize all child-care workers, including the unwilling.  These same unions, in turn, funnel this taxpayer money back to the Democratic politicians.  When you hear a Democratic politician say they want “universal child care,” or campaign on expanding “affordable, high-quality child care,” you should suspect that they are playing patronage politics with the labor union allies.   Minnesota’s raft of child care subsidies is just one example, but it’s a telling example.  Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) was reelected in 2022, and his party took control of both legislative chambers — its first “trifecta” in a decade.  The margins were thin, but the party’s ambitions were great. It accomplished almost everything it set out to do. Liberals celebrated this as “the Minnesota Miracle.” The biggest thing they did was expand all sorts of subsidies for child care.  Politicians such as Walz painted this as a win for parents, but it wasn’t parents who crafted these policies and pushed them across the finish line.   Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Jamie Long explained the progressive approach: “You need good ideas. … You need elected politicians who are going to be supporting those ideas, and then you need outside organizing for elections and to support those votes.”  The Washington Post’s EJ Dionne elaborated: “All three are key to getting things done. In Minnesota, key players included unions, environmental groups and faith-based organizers in the appropriately named Isaiah organization. In the run-up to the session, the outside groups were brought into the task of crafting an agenda.”  That is, Democrats let the outside groups, including the unions, craft their child care policies.  It was telling that Democrats did this with a razor-thin majority. Their aggressive actions in 2023 should be understood in part as a strategic effort to build political strength: funnel more money to their political allies, which will help them win in two, four, and eight years.  Building their political power is explicitly the goal of these outside groups. Isaiah, one of the groups Dionne cited, has “Build Power” in its motto. Isaiah’s biggest project is a program called “Kids Count on Us,” which is a lobby effort to boost state subsidies for child care.   This is explicitly a supply-side project more than a demand-side one. As Kids Count on Us describes itself, “Providers, teachers, and parents organizing together.”  This is an industry lobby looking for more federal funds. The organization brags, “We won over $1 Billion in childcare funding in Minnesota.”  One item the industry won: increasing the amount the Child Care Assistance Program will pay to child care providers. Under the new law, the taxpayer would pay these subsidized child care providers well above the average going rate — specifically, equal to the 75th percentile.  In that 2023 session, the groups also lobbied successfully to extend special COVID-19-era direct payments to child care providers. Called the “Great Start Compensation Support Payment Program,” it is “designed to support the child care and early learning industry and workforce,” according to the legislature. It’s a $100-million-a-year subsidy directly to the industry. This money never goes to parents. It just goes to the businesses, and thus to the unions.  In that 2022 cycle, government unions, such as AFSCME and SEIU, spent more than $13 million on Minnesota politics, with almost all of the money going to Democrats.   A similar story has played out in other states.  Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) in 2019 signed AB 387, which effectively transformed tens of thousands of child care workers into state employees for the purposes of union organizing...   This bill was crafted and pushed by a child care lobby called Child Care Providers United, a coalition formed by SEIU and AFSCME.  So, taxpayer subsidies were the mechanism by which day care workers became members of SEIU and AFSCME. These unions, which are very liberal and 100% aligned with Democrats, then tapped into these 40,000 workers as an organizing army and a source of funds — both of which were put to work for the Left.  As an added bonus, the unions often pocket money from unwilling child care workers.   “In several states, governments are automatically deducting a portion of Medicaid or other government aid from home healthcare and family childcare (day care) providers’ assistance checks and giving that money to government unions,” the State Policy Network reported. “Many providers are unaware this money is even being taken; others are aware but struggle to stop their state and union from skimming money from their checks; and some caregivers allege the unions and governments are fraudulently skimming the money.”  In Washington state, this little racket started much earlier. Since 2004, SEIU has been the bargaining representative for any licensed childcare provider that receives state money through the “Working Connections Child Care” subsidy. Of course, SEIU is “bargaining” with liberal state politicians who are spending other people’s money, and so it gets a lot of what it wants.
 In short, Democratic politicians create subsidies for day care for poor parents, the subsidies effectively turn day care providers into members of Democrat-aligned unions, those unions then lobby to expand these subsidies to pay above market rate, and to cover more families.  Meanwhile, most parents do not want formal child care. The Bipartisan Policy Center published a paper in 2022 asking “What Keeps Employed Parents Out of the Childcare System?” The answer: parents don’t want to be in the “childcare system.”  “More than half of parents would still prefer informal child care, even if formal care was free and convenient,” BPC found.   This is the consistent finding of polls and studies in the United States. Most parents would like to simply work less and thus take care of their children, and to the extent they need or want outside help, they would prefer informal, often unpaid child care, such as neighborhood babysitting co-ops or help from grandma.   But stay-at-home mothers and informal networks do not pump money into the system that allows the unions to grow and kick money back to politicians.  So if you wonder why Democrats’ only answer, when asked about family policy, is day care subsidies, just follow the money."

Strawberries and Balsamic - "Sorry, I could never be a capitalist, I suffer from “wanting humans to have their basic needs met” disorder, where I care about people who aren’t me."
"Someone once asked me if, assuming we got universal healthcare, I would be okay with the rise in “healthcare tourism” where people who are sick come to our country to get their medical bills taken care of and life-saving medical treatment cheaper than in their home countries. I was just like, yeah thats fine, I’d actually prefer it if 0 people died from preventable causes kept behind a paywall for no reason."
"“even the addicts?” yeah dude did i fucking stutter"
Of course, all this is paid for by "taxing the 'rich'"
And then left wingers keep claiming healthcare is "underfunded", when they want to treat the whole world for free

It’s Not Just Minnesota—Fraud Is Everywhere - "If you tried to steal a billion dollars from a bank, you would probably fail. You might even get shot for your trouble. But if you tried to steal the same amount from Medicaid, Medicare, or other federal safety-net programs, your odds of success are much better. Just submit phony bills, and the government will pay you.  That’s what Somali fraudsters did in Minnesota. They netted more than $9 billion, according to a top prosecutor. It’s an old trick that has worked thousands of times... frauds against government health-care programs are both common and costly. Fraudsters routinely scam CMS for billions of dollars. States themselves run schemes of their own. Covid-related frauds, for example, exceeded $280 billion, with another $123 billion wasted or misspent. Obamacare enrollment fraud is pervasive, likely costing taxpayers $27 billion in 2025 and $21 billion in 2024.  Fraudsters in Russia and other East European nations scammed Medicare for $1 billion over three years by submitting phony bills for durable medical equipment. Companies operating out of Connecticut, Florida, Kentucky, New York, and Texas pilfered about $2 billion by submitting phony bills for products like wigs for cancer patients and urinary catheters. Fraudsters who submitted bogus bills for orthotic braces, pain creams, and other items took federal health programs for more than $1 billion. CMS’s own estimate—“comfortingly low,” in the words of one professor—is that it made $87 billion in “improper payments” to fraudsters and people who provided insufficient documentation in 2024. The real number is likely double the official estimate; over the past decade, it totals more than $1 trillion in Medicaid losses.  State officials also engage in behavior that, while not technically fraudulent, is at least sketchy. Every year, 49 states (all but Alaska) use “provider taxes” to tap CMS for about $160 billion. Federal law says states should be raising this money themselves, but states use the “provider tax” loophole to evade this restriction. That’s one-sixth of total Medicaid spending. States can even divert some of the money to non-Medicaid purposes. Either way, each state that participates is effectively (if legally) stealing from taxpayers in other states. Further, when the federal government has repeatedly tried to constrain the provider-tax provision, states have created new workarounds and loopholes to keep the money flowing from the U.S. Treasury...   It’s politically risky to confront fraud, given how dependent states are on the dollars. Financial controls would also imperil payments to doctors, hospitals, and other health-care businesses, all of which together make a powerful lobby.  Public officials have had six decades to impose needed financial controls on Medicaid and Medicare. It seems unlikely they ever will. If we can’t fix them, we should remake these programs on the model of Social Security, a program harder for fraudsters to raid because it makes direct payments to beneficiaries. Giving money directly to consumers could also make health care better and more affordable by allowing market forces to work."

World Food Programme on X - "Enough food is produced to feed everyone on the planet. Yet millions of people struggle to feed themselves and their families. Learn why it's time to transform our #FoodSystems - for people, for the planet, and for our future."
ⓘ Dogs don't have thumbs on X - ""Is produced", passive voice The food just falls from the sky, and all we need is some super smart people at an NGO to tell us what to do with it"

Incidence, allocation, and efficiency costs of tenancy rent control - "Tenancy rent control limits rent increases for sitting tenants while allowing market resets at vacancy. When demand grows or household composition differs across segments, spillovers raise rents in the unregulated market. We study its general equilibrium effects in Switzerland, where a nationwide regime meets large spatial variation. Linking administrative records on all households from 2010-2022 to detailed unit data and market rents, we estimate a structural sorting model with heterogeneous preferences, correcting for selection and price endogeneity. Counterfactual simulations show unregulated rents would be 8-21 percent lower, with the largest drops in supply-inelastic cities. Older, lower-income, and less educated households gain most, while newcomers face higher entry rents. The policy reduces mobility and induces space overconsumption, generating efficiency losses."
I was told that rent control works in Switzerland

Rent Control - Clark Center Forum
Only 2% of economists agreed that rent control "had a positive impact over the past three decades on the amount and quality of broadly affordable rental housing in cities that have used them" (and none strongly agreed). When weighted by confidence, only 1% agreed. In contrast, we are told that 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agreeing that "humans are causing global warming and climate change" is a scientific consensus and that if you disagree, you are a "climate change denier".