Links - 6th April 2026 (2 - Migrants: US - Islamist Attacks)

Austin mass shooter Ndiaga Diagne became citizen despite string of busts - "The gunman behind Austin’s possible terror-related mass shooting entered the US  and cemented his legal immigration status under Democratic administrations — despite a growing criminal record.  Senegalese national Ndiaga Diagne, 53, arrived in America on March 13, 2000, on a B-2 tourist visa during the Clinton administration... Diagne — who killed two people and wounded 14 more during his rampage outside a Texas bar early Sunday — then became a lawful permanent resident on an IR-6 visa in June 2006 when he married a US citizen, the source said.   He had already racked up at least one arrest before that, for illegal vending in June 2001 in New York City... He then went on to lodge a string of other arrests in the Big Apple between 2008 and 2016 — but that didn’t keep him becoming a naturalized US citizen on April 5, 2013, around the start of former President Barack Obama’s second term...   He was wearing a “Property of Allah” hoodie at the time of the rampage and had a Quran in his car"

Will Cain on X - "This month:
Austin shooter - naturalized citizen
OD shooter - naturalized citizen
NYC teen bombers - children of naturalized citizens
Michigan synagogue attack - naturalized citizen
Who are we giving citizenship to in America? We have a legal immigration problem."
Will Ricciardella on X - "We went from 9/11 vigilance to literally importing terrorists virtually overnight. Intergalactic levels of self-sabotage"

Meme - Kathryn Paisner @KathrynPaisner: "When you compare the @nytimes  profile of the Michigan synagogue attacker to the profile of another deranged bigot who set out to commit mass murder at a place of worship, the contrast is really quite striking."
"Dylann Roof, Suspect in Charleston Shooting, Flew the Flags of White Power. Dylann Storm Roof wearing a jacket with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa, top, and Rhodesia, as modern-day Zimbabwe was called during a period of white rule."
Aviva Klompas @Avivaklompas: "The Michigan synagogue attacker tried to murder 140 Jewish children. So the @nytimes presents him as a "quiet restaurant worker""
The New York Times: "The Michigan Synagogue Attacker Was a Quiet Restaurant Worker"
Terrorism supporter logic - this shows the New York Times is pro Israel

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib on X - "The reports coming out of West Bloomfield are horrifying. I am praying for the safety of everyone at Temple Israel. No one should face violence anywhere, especially in a place of worship."
💜Sarah💜| ✡️🏳️‍⚧️ on X - "You do not get to attend events with Hamas members here in Michigan, or constantly call for globalizing the intifada, and then offer condolences when someone does it. Fuck you."

Conflict Alarm on X - "BREAKING: The brothers (Qasim and Ibrahim Ghazali) of the suspect in the Michigan synagogue attack appear to have been affiliated with Hezbollah's Imam Al-Mahdi Scouts."
The Persian Jewess on X - "CBS News confirms the Michigan synagogue terrorist’s family were “members of Hezbollah’s rocket unit.” The same rocket unit that has been indiscriminately firing rockets at residential homes in Israel for 3 years."
Clearly if you attack Jews and kill civilians on purpose, it's Resistance but when Jews fight back and kill civilians accidentally, it's Genocide

Omri Ceren on X - "Did the CNN expert mention that the two brothers targeted in the Israeli strike were Hezbollah terrorists? We are in the middle of a full-blown legitimacy crisis, in which the institutions that are supposed to produce facts and knowledge are no longer trusted. Yet journalists and news outlets are still parading "experts" who rationalize terrorism in the U.S., in the process of obfuscating terrorism in the Middle East."

The New York Times on X - "The man who rammed his truck into a Michigan synagogue on Thursday had four family members who were killed in an airstrike in Lebanon the week before, a Lebanese official and a Michigan imam said."
Yoni Michanie on X - "Imagine the NYT in 1994: ‘The man who shot up a mosque had family members killed in a Palestinian terror attack the week before.’  They would never print that.   When the victim is a synagogue, suddenly the attacker’s grievances become the lede.   The editorial instinct to contextualize antisemitic violence is automatic and unconscious — and that’s exactly what makes it so insidious.  Jews are always the exception."

Senator Ashley Moody on X - "I know I’m new to Washington, but can someone please explain how the Obama adminstration allowed in and granted citizenship to the brother of a Hezbollah commander?" Rebekah Jones on X - "Israel killed his family. So he drove his car into a synagogue that advertises trips to steal from his people. I may not agree, but I understand."
Rebekah Jones on X - "A "house of worship" that fundraisers for a foreign military engaged in genocide is no longer neutral. A father whose two young children were murdered by that foreign military saught revenge against those complicit in his children's deaths. THEY put people in danger by supporting a foreign terrorist campaign.  We may not like vigilante justice, but don't pretend you don't understand why a father who just lost his children would do what he did."
In 2 hours she went from not agreeing to supporting it

Matt Stoller on X - "The guys family was killed last week by Israel and he was taking revenge. That’s wrong. Murder is wrong. But this isn’t some uptick of antisemitism, it’s blowback. A lot of us have been saying that Israel is bad for the Jews. It is. We have to reject that country."
PoIiMath on X - "Imagine if a man attacked a black church, specifically targeting black children, because a black man killed his daughter. Imagine if someone told you "that's not racism, that's blowback"  idk, that would seem like a weird take to me bc it's saying that the killer is not a someone with agency. Because, wink wink, of course the killer would target black children. That's just the natural inclination of people "like that". You know. *Those* people. You just have to expect this kind of behavior from them."

StopJewHatred 🇨🇦🇮🇱🤟 on X - "@TorontoStar joins the chorus of left wing media making excuses for violent Islamists terror attacks."
Barbara Kay on X - "Context is so important, @TorontoStar. Thanks for the reminder. Although I don't remember you citing the fact that the polytechnic massacres who killed 14 women in Montreal had had his application to the Engineering Faculty rejected. That must have really harsher his mellow. So you see..."

Benjamin Weingarten on X - "By leading his statement with an allusion to the fact would-be jihadist Ayman Ghazali's family members were killed in an Israeli attack in Lebanon -- and of course without noting the targeted were allegedly Hezbollah members, the terrorist organization seeking to annihilate Israel -- Dearborn Heights' Mayor Mo Baydoun makes one thing abundantly clear:   He is justifying the act of Ghazali crashing his truck through a synagogue laced with explosives and armed and ready to massacre 140 kids at the day school, and others present there.   He is justifying the attempted mass murder of Jews in America -- and because Israel is defending itself from those seeking to mass murder Jews in Israel.  He incidentally is showing you that for such genocidal psychopaths, "anti-Zionism" is a thin facade for Jew-hatred.  His concern isn't with the would-be victims of the undescribed "incident." It's with the aggressor.   And then it's with nameless "communities everywhere...confronting rising hate and senseless violence."    The Mayor doesn't even feign condemning the attack and attacker at the outset, only to then try to rationalize and justify the unjustifiable.  That's how confident he is in his position in Dearborn Heights.  Incidentally, Mayor Baydoun includes a Lebanese flag and a watermelon -- a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinian cause -- in his social media bio."
Hans Mahncke on X - "Of the 3,000 people murdered on 9/11, there are roughly 30,000 grieving immediate family members, somewhere like 100,000 grieving extended family members, and about half a million grieving close friends and immediate colleagues. How many of them decided to shoot up a mosque?"

Eitan Fischberger on X - "The terrorist who tried to kill Jews at the Michigan synagogue yesterday lived in Dearborn Heights. After the attack, the mayor of Dearborn Heights issued this psychotic statement explicitly excusing antisemitic terrorism"
Not a Good Jewish Girl✡️ on X - "I think the wider left needs to look at the way that supposedly "integrated" Muslims in America continually monomaniacally focus on Israel when excusing hate crimes against Jews and contemplate what message tolerating this rhetoric, or excusing it, sends to the median voter about liberal priorities.  You can call people Islamophobic and xenophobic bigots all you want, but the truth of the matter is that it is reasonable to wonder how someone like this terrorist became a naturalized US citizen, and how the author of a statement this deranged became the elected mayor of suburban city with a population over 60,000.  You can't "just a bad apple" this. It symbolizes a flaw in US immigration screening, where someone with such Unamerican thoughts and priorities, and family connections to Hezbollah, earns citizenship while Mexican citizens, who have worked harmlessly in this country for decades, have zero path to citizenship.  It also shows that something is deeply, deeply wrong with the citizenry of Dearborn, and that this sort of thinking (and in Hamtrack nearby, which also has a Muslim plurality or majority) is endemic there. That they elect people who make statements like this shows what level of antisemitism is tolerated, or worryingly, approved of.  That we have metropolitan areas in America where a significant portion of the voting population thinks it is understandable or justified to try to blow up dozens of Reform Jewish preschoolers because the attackers family got eliminated by Israel for being Hezbollah operatives is... not great. It doesn't take being a hateful person that reflexively despises all Arabs or Muslims to see that.  The more than the wider left refuses to grapple with the reality of the open acceptance of antisemitism in certain immigrant communities from countries where Jews have been ethnically cleansed, the more the median voter will disapprove of the Democratic party, and flirt with voting for the right. Nothing motivates voters like primal fear, especially those old enough to remember watching fellow Americans die in real time on the news during 9/11, and the more real that fear is, the more it is brushed off as inconsequential even when it is reasonable, the more people will grow to distrust the wider left."

Jesse Arm on X - "My God.  Look at how local press in Dearborn are framing this.  “The suspect died following reports of an active shooter at the synagogue, where police say a truck crashed into the building and shots were fired.”  Yes—because the armed suspect himself rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into the synagogue.  And isn’t it interesting how we’re constantly told that hating Jews and hating the Jewish state are two entirely separate, disconnected things—yet when a Lebanese immigrant from Dearborn attempts a mass-casualty terrorist attack at a Jewish preschool in West Bloomfield, the fact that his family was impacted by a conflict started by a terrorist organization against Israel on the other side of the globe suddenly becomes relevant context.  Depraved, toxic insanity. Terrorism that we imported into our own country. Pure poison for America."

Lebanon town grapples with family ties to Michigan attack : NPR - "As you arrive in this town in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, one of the first things you notice is a poster of Iran's late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, plastered across a concrete wall.  Usually about 25,000 people live here, and many support the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah."
Norm McDonald is laughing in his grave
When even NPR admits they are Hezbollah supporters

Magills on X - "For everyone saying Muslims can’t assimilate to American culture let me point out that they’ve attempted two school shootings today"

Brianna Wu on X - "I want to be very clear about what is happening. Media and the freak left have decided that Jewish children in America are valid military targets if it helps the cause of eliminating Israel."

Hen Mazzig on X - "If your country has freedom of religion, but members of one religion need to pay millions on security just to safely gather, then your country does not have freedom of religion."

Threads - "If a mosque was targeted for violence, exactly zero of my “progressive” friends would blame the government of a Muslim country. They would blame Islamaphobia, full stop. It is no different than societies of the past blaming us for our own oppression. The justifications and excuses I’m seeing are only ever reserved for one minority group. And we are sick of your shit."

Meme - thatkoreanjew: "Do you know how many Americans have family members murdered by Hamas and other IR terror groups? A lot. Do you know how many of them have retaliated by attacking an American mosque? Zero."

Meme - Ike Ijeh: "Up to a quarter of a million people were tragically killed in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the 81 years since, I cannot recall a single incident of retaliatory Japanese terrorism against Christianity or the United States."
Robert McCartney @McCartneyWP: "CNN expert says it appears Michigan synagogue attacker lost family members to Israeli air strike in Lebanon in past week."

Michigan synagogue shooter who drove car into Jewish temple is PRAISED by neighbors in Muslim enclave where he lived - "A shooter who drove a truck loaded with explosives into a synagogue was praised by locals in his Michigan neighborhood, which is America's most Muslim.   Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, 41, a naturalized US citizen born in Lebanon, was killed by security on Thursday after ramming his pickup truck into the Temple Israel synagogue in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield.  Ghazali lived in a $315,600 home in nearby Dearborn Heights... The gunman lost four family members - two brothers, a niece, and a nephew - in an Israeli airstrike in his native Lebanon last week, authorities confirmed. His longtime neighbor Kandie Zaidieh, who described Ghazali as 'my rock,' was shocked to learn of his involvement in the attack and suspects the tragedy in Lebanon may have played a role in his decision-making.  'Because his brother died, right?' Zaidieh, 60, questioned when approached by the Detroit Free Press. She added: 'He was the best. The best neighbor. Always quiet, a hard worker. He was always pleasant. Everybody liked him.'"

HonestReporting on X - "Seriously, you don’t hate the @nytimes enough. A synagogue with a preschool is targeted. The NYT reminds readers it was “dedicated to the formation of a Jewish state.” The journalistic equivalent of: “well… what was she wearing?”"

Orli Peter on X - "You can hear the echo if you listen across media outlets. A line dropped here, a shrug there, each one shifting the Overton window another inch. Until the moral ground moves beneath our feet and the unthinkable becomes speakable: that shooting up Jewish children in a synagogue nursery is somehow justified because …something something …Israel."

Peter Kazanjy on X - "So just two days after Haroon tried to cancel me for documenting the clear, public math associated with Islamic terrorism in the US in response to the failed islamic terrorism bombing in New York, there's been not one, but TWO new Islamic terrorism attacks in the US - both at schools.  It's a problem. It's ok to talk about it.   Don't let people silence you."

Meme - Mike Pesca @pescami: "When a truck crashes into the front doors of your synagogue and the driver starts shooting, the proper response is "but our net favorability is 2 points higher than Catholics""
Matt Stoller @matthewstoller: "Jews are disproportionately better off on virtually every social indicator and position of power than the median American, and Judaism polls as the religion with the highest approval rating. Antisemitism may make you feel alive but it's not a real problem for you."
Joe Roberts @Joe_Roberts01: ""There is no antisemitism on the left" is the kind of lie people tell when ideology matters more to 'them than truth. Everyone knows it exists. Everyone..."

Jews Fight Back 🇺🇸🇮🇱 on X - "🚨 MEET MOHAMED BAILOR JALLOH, 36 The jihadist who opened fire inside an ROTC classroom today at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.  Born in Sierra Leone.  Later became a naturalized U.S. citizen.  In 2016, the FBI arrested him for supporting ISIS.  He cheered the slaughter of Americans.  He told an informant he “thought about conducting an attack all the time.”  He talked about carrying out a Fort Hood-style massacre.  He said doing it during Ramadan would be “100 percent the right thing.”  He pled guilty.  In 2017, he was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison.  He got out early.  Today he walked into a classroom and asked:  “Is this an ROTC class?”  He heard yes. Then opened fire.  He murdered the retired military officer teaching the class.  He critically wounded two ROTC cadets.  A hero ROTC cadet charged him with nothing but a knife and ended him right there.  BUT HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN?  He wasn’t born here.  He swore allegiance to a jihadist death cult.  He was caught red-handed plotting our murder.  Then he was released back into society.  Why wasn’t he denaturalized?  If swearing allegiance to ISIS isn’t enough, what is?"

Ken Dilanian on X - "The convicted ISIS sympathizer who carried out today’s shooting at Old Dominion U. was released from prison in December 2024. Why wasn’t the FBI monitoring him? Why wasn’t he, as a native of Sierra Leone, denaturalized and deported by the Trump Admin?"
Legal Phil on X - "Just unbelievable to ask why the Trump Admin didn't deport him, after the left has been using every legal means (including abusing power) to stop deportations."
champagneayatollah on X - "He's a citizen though. And so far, the Trump administration has made only small scale efforts to denaturalize anyone, usually based on fraud. Can you imagine the hue and cry if Trump was more aggressive in this space? It would make the current wailing over enforcement seem mild."
Legal Phil on X - "Of course. They would lose their minds. The pretending is ridiculous."
On Mohamed Bailor Jalloh

End Wokeness on X - "0 AP stories on Stephanie Minter 0 PBS stories on Stephanie Minter 0 NYT stories on Stephanie Minter 0 NPR stories on Stephanie Minter 0 WSJ stories on Stephanie Minter 0 BBC stories on Stephanie Minter 0 CNN stories on Stephanie Minter 0 WAPO stories on Stephanie Minter 0 Reuters stories on Stephanie Minter 0 MSNBC stories on Stephanie Minter"

Republican Patriots | Facebook - "Stephanie Minter, a 41-year-old woman just waiting for her bus, was brutally stabbed to death in a random attack at a Fairfax County bus stop. The suspect, Abdul Jalloh—a man with over 30 prior arrests, including multiple violent felonies—was allowed to roam free time and again. Charges dropped, bail granted, repeat offenses ignored. Now an innocent life is gone forever. The national media—CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, Washington Post, and the rest—have given this horrific story zero coverage. Not one story, not one mention. If the demographics were flipped, it would dominate headlines for weeks with wall-to-wall outrage and endless panels on "systemic" issues. This selective silence speaks volumes. It shows whose lives truly matter to the legacy press and the progressive policies that keep dangerous criminals on our streets. Say her name: Stephanie Minter. Demand real justice, tougher enforcement, and accountability before more families are destroyed."

Before Christopher Columbus: 1491

Before Christopher Columbus: 1491 - The Atlantic

"When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness. My son picked up the same ideas at his schools. One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balée would be to say that in their opinion this picture of Indian life is wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind...

“I have seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in the Beni,” says Betty J. Meggers, of the Smithsonian Institution. “Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking.” Similar criticisms apply to many of the new scholarly claims about Indians, according to Dean R. Snow, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University. The problem is that “you can make the meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record tell you anything you want,” he says. “It’s really easy to kid yourself.”

More important are the implications of the new theories for today’s ecological battles. Much of the environmental movement is animated, consciously or not, by what William Denevan, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin, calls, polemically, “the pristine myth”—the belief that the Americas in 1491 were an almost unmarked, even Edenic land, “untrammeled by man,” in the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, one of the nation’s first and most important environmental laws. As the University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon has written, restoring this long-ago, putatively natural state is, in the view of environmentalists, a task that society is morally bound to undertake. Yet if the new view is correct and the work of humankind was pervasive, where does that leave efforts to restore nature?...

Should we let people keep burning the Beni? Or should we let the trees invade and create a verdant tropical forest in the grasslands, even if one had not existed here for millennia?...

By the time my ancestor set sail on the Mayflower, Europeans had been visiting New England for more than a hundred years. English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese mariners regularly plied the coastline, trading what they could, occasionally kidnapping the inhabitants for slaves. New England, the Europeans saw, was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges—British despite his name—tried to establish an English community in southern Maine. It had more founders than Plymouth and seems to have been better organized. Confronted by numerous well-armed local Indians, the settlers abandoned the project within months. The Indians at Plymouth would surely have been an equal obstacle to my ancestor and his ramshackle expedition had disease not intervened.

Faced with such stories, historians have long wondered how many people lived in the Americas at the time of contact. “Debated since Columbus attempted a partial census on Hispaniola in 1496,” William Denevan has written, this “remains one of the great inquiries of history.” (In 1976 Denevan assembled and edited an entire book on the subject, The Native Population of the Americas in 1492.) The first scholarly estimate of the indigenous population was made in 1910 by James Mooney, a distinguished ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution. Combing through old documents, he concluded that in 1491 North America had 1.15 million inhabitants. Mooney’s glittering reputation ensured that most subsequent researchers accepted his figure uncritically...

That changed in 1966, when Henry F. Dobyns published “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques With a New Hemispheric Estimate,” in the journal Current Anthropology. Despite the carefully neutral title, his argument was thunderous, its impact long-lasting...

Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

His argument was simple but horrific. It is well known that Native Americans had no experience with many European diseases and were therefore immunologically unprepared—“virgin soil,” in the metaphor of epidemiologists. What Dobyns realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated. Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so.

Peru was one example, the Pacific Northwest another. In 1792 the British navigator George Vancouver led the first European expedition to survey Puget Sound. He found a vast charnel house: human remains “promiscuously scattered about the beach, in great numbers.” Smallpox, Vancouver’s crew discovered, had preceded them. Its few survivors, second lieutenant Peter Puget noted, were “most terribly pitted … indeed many have lost their Eyes.” In Pox Americana (2001), Elizabeth Fenn, a historian at George Washington University, contends that the disaster on the northwest coast was but a small part of a continental pandemic that erupted near Boston in 1774 and cut down Indians from Mexico to Alaska.

Because smallpox was not endemic in the Americas, colonials, too, had not acquired any immunity. The virus, an equal-opportunity killer, swept through the Continental Army and stopped the drive into Quebec. The American Revolution would be lost, Washington and other rebel leaders feared, if the contagion did to the colonists what it had done to the Indians. “The small Pox! The small Pox!” John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. “What shall We do with it?” In retrospect, Fenn says, “One of George Washington’s most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of ’78.” Without inoculation smallpox could easily have given the United States back to the British.

So many epidemics occurred in the Americas, Dobyns argued, that the old data used by Mooney and his successors represented population nadirs. From the few cases in which before-and-after totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died—the worst demographic calamity in recorded history.

Dobyns’s ideas were quickly attacked as politically motivated, a push from the hate-America crowd to inflate the toll of imperialism. The attacks continue to this day. “No question about it, some people want those higher numbers,” says Shepard Krech III, a Brown University anthropologist who is the author of The Ecological Indian (1999). These people, he says, were thrilled when Dobyns revisited the subject in a book, Their Numbers Become Thinned (1983)—and revised his own estimates upward. Perhaps Dobyns’s most vehement critic is David Henige, a bibliographer of Africana at the University of Wisconsin, whose Numbers From Nowhere (1998) is a landmark in the literature of demographic fulmination. “Suspect in 1966, it is no less suspect nowadays,” Henige wrote of Dobyns’s work. “If anything, it is worse.”

When Henige wrote Numbers From Nowhere, the fight about pre-Columbian populations had already consumed forests’ worth of trees; his bibliography is ninety pages long. And the dispute shows no sign of abating. More and more people have jumped in. This is partly because the subject is inherently fascinating. But more likely the increased interest in the debate is due to the growing realization of the high political and ecological stakes...

When human beings and domesticated animals live close together, they trade microbes with abandon. Over time mutation spawns new diseases: avian influenza becomes human influenza, bovine rinderpest becomes measles. Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in close quarters with animals—they domesticated only the dog, the llama, the alpaca, the guinea pig, and, here and there, the turkey and the Muscovy duck. In some ways this is not surprising: the New World had fewer animal candidates for taming than the Old. Moreover, few Indians carry the gene that permits adults to digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in milk. Non-milk-drinkers, one imagines, would be less likely to work at domesticating milk-giving animals. But this is guesswork. The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. Swine alone can disseminate anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, taeniasis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can transmit diseases to deer and turkeys. Only a few of Soto’s pigs would have had to wander off to infect the forest.

Indeed, the calamity wrought by Soto apparently extended across the whole Southeast. The Coosa city-states, in western Georgia, and the Caddoan-speaking civilization, centered on the Texas-Arkansas border, disintegrated soon after Soto appeared. The Caddo had had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After Soto’s army left, notes Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddo stopped building community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between Soto’s and La Salle’s visits, Perttula believes, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today in the population of New York City would reduce it to 56,000—not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. “That’s one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” says Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out.”

Could a few pigs truly wreak this much destruction? Such apocalyptic scenarios invite skepticism. As a rule, viruses, microbes, and parasites are rarely lethal on so wide a scale—a pest that wipes out its host species does not have a bright evolutionary future. In its worst outbreak, from 1347 to 1351, the European Black Death claimed only a third of its victims. (The rest survived, though they were often disfigured or crippled by its effects.) The Indians in Soto’s path, if Dobyns, Ramenofsky, and Perttula are correct, endured losses that were incomprehensibly greater.

One reason is that Indians were fresh territory for many plagues, not just one. Smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough—all rained down on the Americas in the century after Columbus. (Cholera, malaria, and scarlet fever came later.) Having little experience with epidemic diseases, Indians had no knowledge of how to combat them. In contrast, Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine. They boarded up houses in which plague appeared and fled to the countryside. In Indian New England, Neal Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, wrote in Manitou and Providence (1982), family and friends gathered with the shaman at the sufferer’s bedside to wait out the illness—a practice that “could only have served to spread the disease more rapidly.”

Indigenous biochemistry may also have played a role. The immune system constantly scans the body for molecules that it can recognize as foreign—molecules belonging to an invading virus, for instance. No one’s immune system can identify all foreign presences. Roughly speaking, an individual’s set of defensive tools is known as his MHC type. Because many bacteria and viruses mutate easily, they usually attack in the form of several slightly different strains. Pathogens win when MHC types miss some of the strains and the immune system is not stimulated to act. Most human groups contain many MHC types; a strain that slips by one person’s defenses will be nailed by the defenses of the next. But, according to Francis L. Black, an epidemiologist at Yale University, Indians are characterized by unusually homogenous MHC types. One out of three South American Indians have similar MHC types; among Africans the corresponding figure is one in 200. The cause is a matter for Darwinian speculation, the effects less so.

In 1966 Dobyns’s insistence on the role of disease was a shock to his colleagues. Today the impact of European pathogens on the New World is almost undisputed. Nonetheless, the fight over Indian numbers continues with undiminished fervor. Estimates of the population of North America in 1491 disagree by an order of magnitude—from 18 million, Dobyns’s revised figure, to 1.8 million, calculated by Douglas H. Ubelaker, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian...

“Most of the arguments for the very large numbers have been theoretical,” Ubelaker says in defense of low counters. “When you try to marry the theoretical arguments to the data that are available on individual groups in different regions, it’s hard to find support for those numbers.” Archaeologists, he says, keep searching for the settlements in which those millions of people supposedly lived, with little success. “As more and more excavation is done, one would expect to see more evidence for dense populations than has thus far emerged.” Dean Snow, the Pennsylvania State anthropologist, examined Colonial-era Mohawk Iroquois sites and found “no support for the notion that ubiquitous pandemics swept the region.” In his view, asserting that the continent was filled with people who left no trace is like looking at an empty bank account and claiming that it must once have held millions of dollars.

The low counters are also troubled by the Dobynsian procedure for recovering original population numbers: applying an assumed death rate, usually 95 percent, to the observed population nadir. Ubelaker believes that the lowest point for Indians in North America was around 1900, when their numbers fell to about half a million. Assuming a 95 percent death rate, the pre-contact population would have been 10 million. Go up one percent, to a 96 percent death rate, and the figure jumps to 12.5 million—arithmetically creating more than two million people from a tiny increase in mortality rates. At 98 percent the number bounds to 25 million. Minute changes in baseline assumptions produce wildly different results.

“It’s an absolutely unanswerable question on which tens of thousands of words have been spent to no purpose,” Henige says. In 1976 he sat in on a seminar by William Denevan, the Wisconsin geographer. An “epiphanic moment” occurred when he read shortly afterward that scholars had “uncovered” the existence of eight million people in Hispaniola. Can you just invent millions of people? he wondered. “We can make of the historical record that there was depopulation and movement of people from internecine warfare and diseases,” he says. “But as for how much, who knows? When we start putting numbers to something like that—applying large figures like ninety-five percent—we’re saying things we shouldn’t say. The number implies a level of knowledge that’s impossible.”...

The Americas were filled with a stunningly diverse assortment of peoples who had knocked about the continents for millennia. “You have to wonder,” Fenn says. “What were all those people up to in all that time?”...

Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed in the Americas...

The Earth Shall Weep, James Wilson’s history of Indian America, puts the comparison bluntly: “the western hemisphere was larger, richer, and more populous than Europe.” Much of it was freer, too...

The Indians... often viewed Europeans with disdain. The Hurons, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed “little intelligence in comparison to themselves.” Europeans, Indians said, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain dirty. (Spaniards, who seldom if ever bathed, were amazed by the Aztec desire for personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the “Savages” were disgusted by handkerchiefs: “They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground.” The Micmac scoffed at the notion of French superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants leaving? 

Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp...

When scholars first began increasing their estimates of the ecological impact of Indian civilization, they met with considerable resistance from anthropologists and archaeologists. Over time the consensus in the human sciences changed. Under Denevan’s direction, Oxford University Press has just issued the third volume of a huge catalogue of the “cultivated landscapes” of the Americas. This sort of phrase still provokes vehement objection—but the main dissenters are now ecologists and environmentalists. The disagreement is encapsulated by Amazonia, which has become the emblem of vanishing wilderness—an admonitory image of untouched Nature. Yet recently a growing number of researchers have come to believe that Indian societies had an enormous environmental impact on the jungle. Indeed, some anthropologists have called the Amazon forest itself a cultural artifact—that is, an artificial object...

The dispute grew bitter and personal; inevitable in a contemporary academic context, it has featured vituperative references to colonialism, elitism, and employment by the CIA...

Unlike Europeans, who planted mainly annual crops, the Indians, he says, centered their agriculture on the Amazon’s unbelievably diverse assortment of trees: fruits, nuts, and palms. “It’s tremendously difficult to clear fields with stone tools,” Clement says. “If you can plant trees, you get twenty years of productivity out of your work instead of two or three.”

Planting their orchards, the first Amazonians transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In a widely cited article from 1989, William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously estimated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthropogenic origin—directly or indirectly created by human beings. In some circles this is now seen as a conservative position. “I basically think it’s all human-created,” Clement told me in Brazil. He argues that Indians changed the assortment and density of species throughout the region. So does Clark Erickson, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist, who told me in Bolivia that the lowland tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the planet. “Some of my colleagues would say that’s pretty radical,” he said, smiling mischievously. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, “lots” of botanists believe that “what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia.” The phrase “built environment,” Erickson says, “applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes.”

“Landscape” in this case is meant exactly—Amazonian Indians literally created the ground beneath their feet. According to William I. Woods, a soil geographer at Southern Illinois University, ecologists’ claims about terrible Amazonian land were based on very little data. In the late 1990s Woods and others began careful measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of inhospitable terrain. But they also discovered swaths of terra preta—rich, fertile “black earth” that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings...

In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time...

“Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying this,” Woods told me. “Deep down her fear is that this data will be misused.” Indeed, Meggers’s recent Latin American Antiquity article charged that archaeologists who say the Amazon can support agriculture are effectively telling “developers [that they] are entitled to operate without restraint.” Resuscitating the myth of El Dorado, in her view, “makes us accomplices in the accelerating pace of environmental degradation.” Doubtless there is something to this—although, as some of her critics responded in the same issue of the journal, it is difficult to imagine greedy plutocrats “perusing the pages of Latin American Antiquity before deciding to rev up the chain saws.” But the new picture doesn’t automatically legitimize paving the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time big chunks of Amazonia were used nondestructively by clever people who knew tricks we have yet to learn...

Fewer people may be living there now than in 1491...

Hernando de Soto’s expedition stomped through the Southeast for four years and apparently never saw bison. More than a century later, when French explorers came down the Mississippi, they saw “a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man,” the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman wrote. Instead the French encountered bison, “grazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river.”

To Charles Kay, the reason for the buffalo’s sudden emergence is obvious. Kay is a wildlife ecologist in the political-science department at Utah State University. In ecological terms, he says, the Indians were the “keystone species” of American ecosystems. A keystone species, according to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, is a species “that affects the survival and abundance of many other species.” Keystone species have a disproportionate impact on their ecosystems. Removing them, Wilson adds, “results in a relatively significant shift in the composition of the [ecological] community.”

When disease swept Indians from the land, Kay says, what happened was exactly that. The ecological ancien régime collapsed, and strange new phenomena emerged. In a way this is unsurprising; for better or worse, humankind is a keystone species everywhere. Among these phenomena was a population explosion in the species that the Indians had kept down by hunting. After disease killed off the Indians, Kay believes, buffalo vastly extended their range. Their numbers more than sextupled. The same occurred with elk and mule deer. “If the elk were here in great numbers all this time, the archaeological sites should be chock-full of elk bones,” Kay says. “But the archaeologists will tell you the elk weren’t there.” On the evidence of middens the number of elk jumped about 500 years ago.

Passenger pigeons may be another example. The epitome of natural American abundance, they flew in such great masses that the first colonists were stupefied by the sight. As a boy, the explorer Henry Brackenridge saw flocks “ten miles in width, by one hundred and twenty in length.” For hours the birds darkened the sky from horizon to horizon. According to Thomas Neumann, a consulting archaeologist in Lilburn, Georgia, passenger pigeons “were incredibly dumb and always roosted in vast hordes, so they were very easy to harvest.” Because they were readily caught and good to eat, Neumann says, archaeological digs should find many pigeon bones in the pre-Columbian strata of Indian middens. But they aren’t there. The mobs of birds in the history books, he says, were “outbreak populations—always a symptom of an extraordinarily disrupted ecological system.”

Throughout eastern North America the open landscape seen by the first Europeans quickly filled in with forest... Far from destroying pristine wilderness, European settlers bloodily created it. By 1800 the hemisphere was chockablock with new wilderness. If “forest primeval” means a woodland unsullied by the human presence, William Denevan has written, there was much more of it in the late eighteenth century than in the early sixteenth.

Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983) belongs on the same shelf as works by Crosby and Dobyns. But it was not until one of his articles was excerpted in The New York Times in 1995 that people outside the social sciences began to understand the implications of this view of Indian history. Environmentalists and ecologists vigorously attacked the anti-wilderness scenario, which they described as infected by postmodern philosophy. A small academic brouhaha ensued, complete with hundreds of footnotes. It precipitated Reinventing Nature? (1995), one of the few academic critiques of postmodernist philosophy written largely by biologists. The Great New Wilderness Debate (1998), another lengthy book on the subject, was edited by two philosophers who earnestly identified themselves as “Euro-American men [whose] cultural legacy is patriarchal Western civilization in its current postcolonial, globally hegemonic form.”...

Guided by the pristine myth, mainstream environmentalists want to preserve as much of the world’s land as possible in a putatively intact state. But “intact,” if the new research is correct, means “run by human beings for human purposes.” Environmentalists dislike this, because it seems to mean that anything goes. In a sense they are correct. Native Americans managed the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its 1491 state, they will have to find it within themselves to create the world’s largest garden." 

 

If the population numbers were so high, the relative lack of civilisation is even more notable. Ditto for losing to Europeans despite being "larger, richer, and more populous"

Of course, European racism towards native Americans is condemned, but the reverse is good (and if they were inferior, it's ironic that they won)

We're told nowadays that European streets being full of filth and Europeans rarely bathing are myths, so 

This pretends that there was no landscape reshaping in Europe, but the Neanderthals would like a word 

If there were few buffalo when there were more native Americans, that suggests that the claim that settlers killed buffalo to hurt them is wrong

This has interesting implications for the contemporary sanctification of native Americans for being stewards of the land 

 

Links - 6th April 2026 (1 - General Wokeness)

Pop Tingz on X - "Tests confirmed that Lil Nas X was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol during last week's episode. The singer reportedly suffered a psychotic episode."
matt on X - "black queer pop star experiencing a mental health crisis in public, being filmed by some asshole who wanted a few hundred dollars from TMZ, then being charged with four felonies is both cartoonishly evil and very predictable. drop all charges now"
If you're black and queer, that means you can break the law. So much for "nobody is above the law"

End Wokeness on X - "Gov. Newsom to a black crowd in GA: "I am like you. I'm a 960 SAT guy. I can't read.""
Congressman Randy Fine on X - "Gavin Newsom just said he is like a black person because he got a bad SAT score and can’t read. I wish I could come up with something witty, but it’s so disgusting, I can’t. I look forward to all my Democrat colleagues in Congress demanding his resignation tomorrow."

hasanabi on X - "the newsom “racism” saga should be a teaching moment on the rights cynical weaponization of idpol & false accusations of racism. this doesn’t mean there aren’t racial blindspots, but centrist liberals love deploying the same cynical strategy to their left flank. no more!"
Coddled Affluent Professional on X - "Lol libs are crying about the ‘cynical weaponization of idpol & false accusations of racism’ which was the predicate of their politics for an entire decade. Total demoralization."
🌘revenant⚡ on X - "People are still acting like "woke" was something new that started in 2015 just because that was the first time they heard of it. Nobody flipped a switch, they built up to what you see now with slowburning rot. They have been doing this for over a century."
Cirsova: Winning Secrets on Kickstarter Now! on X - "In 1949, progs were writing into Planet Stories magazine demanding fewer white and American protagonists in science fiction, and demanding more weird sex "because the Kinsey Report means my weird sex hangups are hard science now.""

Meme - Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort: "Liberals genuinely cannot model other people’s beliefs. Even when I have a lib-coded opinion on an issue, I can at least understand people who take the other side. “You think everyone else, all the Jews and Muslims and Hindus, should convert to Christianity? How dare you!” I’m not Christian, but to be a Christian is to believe Christianity is true and other religions are false, and that this is the most important fact in the universe. “You don’t like an abortion? Don’t get one!” I’m largely pro-choice, but pro-lifers think abortion is murder so obviously this won’t be convincing to them. “Your personal beliefs don’t dictate other peoples lives” except when liberals want them to. The belief in vaccine efficacy (which I share) *is a belief*, and it is one that liberals frequently want to legislate based on. Same with the *belief* in systemic discrimination as an explanation for group differences (which I don’t share), which motivates a bunch of policies that absolutely impact my life and the lives of many others They cannot comprehend that beliefs they disagree with are as sincere and heartfelt as their own beliefs. They speak as if they are mere aesthetic preferences, favorite flavors of ice cream. They do not understand that it really is all up for grabs, that other people genuinely disagree with them on a fundamental level and that their positions and actions are motivated by these beliefs."
Amelia Adams @neuroticjewgay: "The reaction to this is insane. If you don't like surrogacy, don't be a surrogate. If you don't like abortion, don't get one. If you don't like gay marriage, don't marry somebody of the same sex. Your personal beliefs do not dictate how other people live their lives."
As usual, the "empathy" crowd have no idea how people with different beliefs from them think. Of course, if you tell them if you disagree with conversion therapy, don't go for conversion therapy, if you want to feed the poor, do it yourself and if you hate the n word, don't use it etc, they get upset because they want the government to force through the left wing agenda

Jon Levine on X - "MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan has compared non-Muslims to "animals" and homosexuals to "pedophiles" and "sexual deviants" Hard to imagine MSNBC allowing someone on television who said similar things about a different religion — let alone giving them a show!"
TIme to condemn white Christian straight cis men for their bigotry and homophobia. We all know they are just secretly closeted since they are the most homophobic people in the world

Meme - Baba Banaras @RealBababanaras: "Mehdi Hasan has deleted this post because it exposes him. This reflects the thinking that no matter what profession they are in, their main work is to spread Jihad. Can we make him famous by sharing his thoughts so that the world can be saved from another terrorist attack ?"
Mehdi Hasan: "Make American Planes Crash Again. *911 plane crashing into World Trade Center*"

African nations’ latest push for slavery reparations will backfire disastrously - "No legal system worthy of the name holds people responsible for the crimes of their distant ancestors. On what grounds (other than spurious ones) can anyone today, individual or taxpayer, be judged for acts committed three centuries ago? And yet this is precisely what a group of African nations is trying to achieve. The African Union is concocting a legal case to be heard by the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial institution of the United Nations, in support of slavery reparations. Invoking the language of international law, and inspired by Mauritius’s claim against British ownership of the Chagos Islands, these nations appear to be motivated by righteousness. Britain will be in the dock, joined by other European imperial nations whose governments and subjects traded and enslaved Africans between the 15th and 19th centuries. Surprisingly, though, there is no mention of the Arab slave trade that took even more Africans – 17 million as opposed to the 12 million transported across the Atlantic – to lands in North Africa and the Middle East. And the omission tells us all we need to know about this affair: this is a crude assault on the West, not a disinterested application of justice. As a legal case, it will have other problems to overcome. There were no laws banning the slave trade and slavery until the British and the newly independent Americans began to pass them from the late 18th century... Though monarchs and state-backed companies across Western Europe were responsible for some of the slave trade, many were traded, and the vast majority were owned, by individuals. Should Western European taxpayers be on the hook for the crimes, defined as such retrospectively, of these people? Or should the bill be paid by their direct descendants only? And what of the Africans who captured other Africans? The first stage of enslavement always involved Africans enslaving other blacks, usually after tribal conflicts, and marching them to the West African ports to be sold. Should not African nations be suing themselves for reparations? This isn’t about history, or even about law, but about politics. This claim, and others like it, are driven by resentment. Instead of focusing on building stable and prosperous societies in Africa, the nations of the African Union prefer to blame the West for their problems and use the courts to get what they can. They should instead remember who gave the world a model for international law and mediation. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) traces its history to two events: first, the Jay Treaty of 1794 between the new United States and Britain, which established an ongoing procedure for arbitrating outstanding issues left unresolved by American independence; and second, after the American Civil War, to the agreement in 1872 between Britain and the United States to settle outstanding maritime claims. The West taught the world how to resolve international disputes. The US withdrew from the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ in 1986. It did so because it was concerned it would be used against America and its citizens in political actions just like the one now being planned against Britain. Weak African nations might think they will make a quick buck and simultaneously shame the West. But what they are actually doing is undermining respect for the international institutions and laws which were designed to protect states like theirs."
Once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane

Do the British really need to ‘integrate better’ with immigrants? - "After years spent frozen out of the music industry, Morrissey has cruised into this week’s official album chart at number three. As a fan, I’m delighted by his triumphant comeback. But not everyone will share my joy. In particular: the extraordinary number of pearl-clutching middle-aged liberals who keep droning on about how they used to love Morrissey’s music, especially from his time in The Smiths, but can no longer bear to listen to it because of his “political views”. To be specific: they think he’s grown horrifyingly Right-wing, because he once suggested that Nigel Farage might “make a good prime minister”, and argued that some semblance of border control is actually quite useful. I find these people’s attitude utterly baffling. Can they really only enjoy a piece of art if it’s been created by someone who happens to share their own opinions about politics? Before they buy a record, or watch a TV show, or go to see a film, do they assiduously research the political views of everyone involved in making it, to check that none of them has ever said anything they disagree with? Poor things. It must be so terribly time-consuming. “No, I never did get to see the last Bond film. By the time I’d finished scouring social media to establish what every single member of the 1,000-strong crew thinks about net zero, Brexit and the Labour Party manifesto of 2017, it was no longer in cinemas.”"

Lords pile pressure on Starmer with vote to scrap non-crime hate incidents - "The House of Lords has backed plans to scrap non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) in a vote that puts pressure on Sir Keir Starmer to end their use. Peers voted by a 227 to 221 majority to bar police forces from recording, retaining or otherwise processing any personal data relating to NCHIs. The amendment to the Government’s policing bill would only allow incidents to be recorded where it was required to prevent or detect a crime. The proposal was put forward by Lord Young, director of the Free Speech Union, and Lord Hogan-Howe, the former Met Police commissioner, who is chairing the Government’s independent review into cutting the number of police forces. It coincides with plans by the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) to recommend scrapping NCHIs, following warnings that recording them undermines freedom of speech and diverts officers from fighting crime. Police chiefs want to replace them with a new “common sense” system, where only a small fraction of such incidents would be recorded under the most serious category of anti-social behaviour."

Mahmood abolishes non-crime hate incidents - "Shabana Mahmood has abolished non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) after criticism that they were diverting officers into “policing tweets rather than the streets”... Ministers have accepted police chiefs’ conclusions, in a review led by the College of Policing, that the current system is “not fit for purpose” and has undermined freedom of speech and diverted officers from fighting crime."

Police Federation drops legal challenge in free speech row - "In October 2024, Rick Prior, who was head of the Metropolitan Police Federation branch, was suspended after saying that his members were increasingly nervous about challenging people from some ethnic minorities for fear of being labelled racist. He was then sacked for complaining about his treatment in comments he made to The Telegraph. Richard Cooke was suspended as chairman of the West Midlands Police Federation after posting a comment online disputing suggestions that his force was “institutionally racist”. The men, with the support of the Free Speech Union (FSU), brought a judicial review of their treatment. In January, the High Court found both suspensions were unlawful and a breach of their right to freedom of expression. The FSU argued that the PFEW’s conduct was an attack on two democratically elected representatives who were expressing the views of their members."

UN Watch on X - "U.N. SAYS SOMALIA LEADS ON HUMAN RIGHTS: Ben Saul, the U.N. Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, says the U.S. is “raining death”—but Somalia is a model “responsible state” that “is committed to strengthening human rights.” FYI: China donated $150,000 to Ben Saul."
Clearly, this is why the whole world wants to live in Somalia and flee the United States

The sinister tactics of Hope Not Hate | The Spectator - "Of all the blights on our politics, there are few more tedious than the left-wing campaign group that masquerades behind some poorly constructed frontispiece. The Resolution Foundation – run by the gloriously named Torsten Bell – is a fine example. Torsten allows his publishers to call his Foundation ‘an enormously respected and influential economic research charity’. You may have heard of it, or you may be one of those who focuses your enormous respect elsewhere, but you will probably have seen the BBC and others regurgitate its press releases in lieu of doing actual journalism. The Resolution Foundation routinely discovers things like many people in Britain are poor or ill or suffer from mental health problems. The cause is always Tory cuts. The solution is always more money. Because if only we gave even more money away in taxes one day nobody in Britain will feel sad... These people are not even good at disguising their politics. Just this week Torsten was on Twitter writing that Suella Braverman’s warning that we are ‘sleepwalking into a ghettoised society’ was the former home secretary ‘talking garbage’. But don’t expect to hear Torsten questioned about his language next time the BBC gives a fawning interview to him. Most of these groups give themselves more obvious names; indeed they name themselves in a way which is meant to make them unopposable. Love Music Hate Racism is one such construction – as though there’s anyone who says: ‘I actually hate music, but I’m very much into the old racism stuff.’ Worst among these campaign groups is Hope Not Hate (HNH). It is supported by a range of left-wing MPs and occasionally gets a reach-around from some Conservative or other. HNH calls itself an ‘anti-fascist’ organisation and that is what the media slavishly call the group when they report on its work. A few years ago, a classic piece of HNH reporting claimed that evil people are using video games to spread messages of hate. This crack journalism was picked up by the BBC, which quoted one of the group’s activists saying: ‘Once you’re in that world, then the radicalisation starts to happen.’ The man in question was referred to by the BBC as coming from the ‘anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate’. If anyone had any doubt that HNH is not, in fact, an anti-fascist organisation they might note several things. First – there aren’t many fascists around. We don’t like them in Britain. Perhaps thanks to a dearth of targets or perhaps because it’s full of far-left ideologues, HNH some while ago decided that its targets should be Ukip, Nigel Farage, Brexiteers and the Tory party. Naturally the group has had little to say about the hate marches in London each week. But they did swoop into action when a small group of people opposed one of the protests. This group – predictably enough – was portrayed by HNH as the far-right on the march. As we all know, calls for ‘intifada’ and ‘jihad’ are expressions of peace and love whereas saying ‘Eng-er-land’ is a notorious far-right dog-whistle. Anyhow, this week HNH was back at it, heralding another incredibly unimpressive ‘investigation’ online: ‘This is BIG. We’ve uncovered the private Twitter account belonging to Sir Paul Marshall, co-owner of GB News. And it’s littered with likes and retweets of racist and Islamophobic content.’ It was amusing in its way. HNH, of course, had not ‘investigated’ or ‘uncovered’ anything. Marshall’s Twitter account was public and all that the geniuses at HNH had to do was sit at home eating crisps and screen-shotting tweets. Nor was the material ‘racist and Islamophobic’. Most of it was just retweeting things which the rest of us notice as ‘events’ and ‘facts’, such as disturbing footage of Islamists running riot. HNH cherry-picked a few ‘likes’ from Marshall’s account and then presented it as representative not just of the man but of a wider, sinister movement. The usual dolts jumped on board. Alastair Campbell insisted Ofcom step in (because when it comes to reliable dossiers, Campbell is your man), as did Alan Rusbridger, formerly of the Guardian. Just as predictably, a group of ex-BBC journalists who call themselves ‘The News Agents’ joined in. These former Newsnight employees – who have given up any pretence of impartiality– thought this was major stuff. Indeed one bubble-dwelling creature called Lewis Goodall tried to claim it as their ‘exclusive’. All these people whipped themselves up about Marshall’s ‘likes’ in the same week that parliamentarians in Westminster were fearing for their safety because of pro-Palestinian mobs turning up outside parliament and, in some cases, outside their homes. Again, HNH and co. have little to say about any of this. Well I have something to say about them. Some years ago HNH published a list of ‘Islamophobes’. One – a scholar I know – subsequently had an Islamist come to his front door and try to shoot him in the head. I wrote about this at the time. A while later, HNH wrote a similar report and threatened to put me in it. When I lawyered up, HNH explained that if I removed the piece criticising it, it might consider removing my name from its latest hit-list. In other words, the group is not just silly but sinister. It wishes to change the political weather in our country, and it operates like a gangster. As with so many self-proclaimed ‘anti-fascists’, their name is wrong. They really should drop the ‘anti’ bit and rename themselves Hate Not Hope."

Emil Kirkegaard on X - "This was the same group that infiltrated our group of science nerds then tried to smear us as eg building an ethnostate Nazi style. Fact: we're an international, multiethnic team and not involved in any politics. It's a disgrace such people apparently have the support of the British state, but not surprising unfortunately."
"Hate" is anything that hurts the left wing agenda, after all
We're still told that left wingers don't hate their countries

Gad Saad on X - "Me: Here is a tsunami of evidence showing how people from societies X are destroying our civilization.
Wood Cricket Westerner (WCW): Yes but empathy.
Me: Here is more evidence.
WCW: Yes but sympathy.
Me: Here is more evidence.
WCW: Yes but compassion.
Me: Here is more evidence.
WCW: Yes but kindness.
Me: Here is more evidence.
WCW: Yes but tolerance.
Me: Here is more evidence.
WCW: Yes but acceptance.
Me: Our civilization is being eaten alive. It is going to be a very very very ugly future for your children and mine.
WCW: I'd rather die and having my children killed knowing that I'm empathetic, sympathetic, compassionate, kind, tolerance, and accepting of those who rape and murder us. I'm a good person."
More realistically, the "empathy", "sympathy", "compassion", "kindness", "tolerance" and "acceptance" squad seek to mercilessly crush and destroy those who seek to prevent them from destroying civilisation, since all these "virtues" are only meant to push the left wing agenda

Meme - D&D BEYOND: "We don't allow any game that declares itself 'non-woke' as 'woke' nowadays seems to apply to anything from grammatical pronouns, setting boundaries, having LGBTQ+ content or other minority groups. As such, that would fall short of Rule 1: Respect."

Meme - hoe_math = PsychoMath: "If you marry a liberal woman, she will hold your arms behind your back to make it easier for a black to stab you in the heart"
Jeff Younger @JeffYoungerShow: "He's fighting a guy with a knife. His wife GRABS HIS ARMS FROM BEHIND. Unfathomably stupid. He should get rid of her. She'll get him killed."

Czech Republic’s first Black MP guilty of two rapes, one attempted rape - "Dominik Feri was billed as the “first Black man” ever elected to the Czech Republic’s Chamber of Deputies. The European media heaped wild praise on him. Politico named him #8 on a list of 28 up-and-coming European politicians in 2018. From 2017 until early 2021, he was the subject of non-stop media adoration. His Instagram account, “choco-afro,” had over 700k followers at one time."

Jonathan Kay on X - "the president of Canada‘s leading LGBT advocacy group, Egale, has resigned. She says fellow activists, including Egale’s own board of directors apparently, condone antisemitic terror groups such as Hamas “that would clearly put them [i.e. LGBT] to death if given the opportunity”"
When you hate the West more than you love your own interests. Of course, they will continue to mock right wingers for supposedly voting against their own interests. Leopards eating people's faces is only when it pushes the left wing agenda

Meme "AMERICA STINKS! THE HOLOCAUST GIVES ME A CALMING FEELING" - Rashida Tlaib
"AMERICA STINKS! JEWISH MONEY CONTROLS CONGRESS" - Ilhan Omar
"AMERICA STINKS! US HAS CONCENTRATION CAMPS" - AOC
"AMERICA STINKS! WE DON'T NEED BLACK FACES THAT DON'T WANT TO BE A BLACK VOICE" - Ayanna Pressley
"IF YOU HATE AMERICA, LEAVE" - Trump
"THAT'S UNAMERICAN, YOU RACIST!" - All 4 Squad members

Daniel on X - "The degree to which Charlie Kirk's assassination affected people and their decisions about life will never be fully comprehended or conveyed but it seems to be surprisingly large"
kache on X - "It was the celebration of his murder from leftists everywhere, not the murder itself. People that you knew were openly just saying "I am glad that fucker died". Like, sheepish women that you knew irl would say this shit. Bloodthirsty Changed my perspective on a lot of things"

MALCOLM: Celebrate Canada’s history — don’t appease the woke mob | Toronto Sun - "Canada is a great country, it’s a country worth celebrating. Article content A statement like that used to be banal and universal. Not too long ago, there was a general consensus not just among the political parties, but prevalent throughout Canadian society, that we lived in a pretty special place. “The world needs more Canada” was once the slogan of Canadian book giant Indigo/Chapters, and the phrase was repeated by global celebrities like Barack Obama and U2 frontman Bono. But that was a simpler time. All the way back in 2017, the world hadn’t yet been steamrolled by the woke mob pushing cancel culture and strict intellectual conformity... Article content The ultimate goal of the woke mob is to tear down what they call hierarchies of power, essentially dismantling every institution in our society."

Links - 5th April 2026 (2)

‘Frightening’ Paddington Bear puppet must be destroyed, his owners demand - "A “frightening” Paddington Bear puppet used on the Spitting Image must be returned to the character’s owners or be destroyed, court documents claim. StudioCanal, which makes the Paddington films, and Paddington and Company are bringing legal action against Avalon, producer of the puppet-based satirical series, at the High Court in London... The court was told that a puppet with bulging, bloodshot eyes or dishevelled fur is called Paddington, who is said to be from Peru, and references marmalade. “The Avalon puppet depicts the Paddington character with a frightening demeanour,” barrister Tom St Quintin continued in the document. Mr St Quintin claimed that the episodes show Paddington as a cocaine user, with one of the episodes also depicting the bear as a cocaine smuggler, an alcoholic and a user of heroin, while another shows Paddington “as a promoter of gun sales and sex robots”. Three episodes depict Paddington as a user of “coarse language”, the barrister added, with each episode said to use an accent for the puppet that mocks Peruvian people... Spitting Image co-writer Al Murray previously told the Radio Times that he and fellow writer Matt Forde were “baffled” by the legal action. He said: “It’s a very Spitting Image thing to do – to take someone and say: ‘Hey, maybe they’re the opposite.’”"

Cooking is dying out. This is why it matters - "Sainsbury’s, it should be said, was ahead of the curve on this. In 2018, it changed to “touch-free” packaging to allow millennials (37 per cent of whom were apparently “scared of handling raw meat”) to slide the chicken from package to pan. “These bags allow people, especially those who are time-poor, to just ‘rip and tip’ the meat straight into the frying pan without touching it,” the supermarket announced at the time. You will feel the effects of this hands-free approach at the till. Chopped onions are £1.35 for 400g, whereas on the opposite shelf, loose onions cost £1.05 per kilogram. A pre-seasoned bird in a bag is £5.30/kg, a regular chicken £3.98/kg. And if you want to eat something homemade but bypass some of the cooking bit, you can. Anything you once needed to cook – high, low, complex or commonplace – can now be purchased either partly or entirely ready made. They have boiled the eggs for you, mashed the potatoes, chopped the broccoli into florets, grated the cheese, and done the first 10 hours of cooking on the pork shoulder – you will just need to slide the tray into the oven and finish it off for 20 minutes. In short, you just need to find the right shortcut. There is an unavoidable conundrum buried in there, though. Rachel Sugar, writing in The Atlantic about the tyranny of what she called “the dinner treadmill”, said it best: “The thing about dinner is that you have to deal with it every single night.”... you wonder if we haven’t lost some important life skills. Along the way, between the air fryers and the meal kits and the dinner “hacks” we are constantly being sold, have we become a nation that is simultaneously obsessed with food and doesn’t know how to cook it?... “almost 30 per cent of Britons admit to trying to pass off supermarket meals as their own cooking”. These days, we seemingly can’t get enough of cookbooks, and yet, in an increasingly saturated market, they often struggle to sell. In 2022, Sunday Times research found that while more than 5,000 cookbooks were released in the UK in 2020, only 556 sold more than 100 copies. The books that now get the most buzz tend to be miles from Delia Smith’s fabled Complete Cookery Course, with its brisk, reliable instructions on how to boil an egg... The appetite for food shows is still there, but the people who watch them are surfing YouTube, not turning on BBC Two at 7pm. Meanwhile, Waitrose’s most recent annual food and drink report heralded “the death of the recipe”, and noted both a rise in “scratch cooking with shortcuts” and “restaurant-quality dining at home”. Ready-made sauces and marinades were popular again, with restaurants from Wagamama to Michelin-starred Gymkhana, and chefs such as Yotam Ottolenghi launching ranges of sauces. “Pre-prepared proteins” such as marinated tofu and “easy to cook” joints of meat were proving popular, as were “flavoured butters, premium jarred beans and instant noodles”. Customers want to cook – 55 per cent said they would opt for a home-cooked meal over a takeaway. They just need some of the work to have been done for them... On TikTok, videos of people explaining how to make “cloud coffee”, pancake cereal and nutritionally boosted lunch bowls are popular. They might teach you how to “fibremaxx” some pasta but not how to season it properly. If image or eccentricity are prized over flavour and usefulness, how many skills are being acquired? “We’ve skipped over the basics and gone from your parents’ kitchen table to complicated TikTok trends, and in between, no one taught me how to sweat an onion,” says Poppy, 25, who admits that when she has guests over: “It doesn’t matter how it tastes, it’s more about how it looks.”"

Ludwig Wittgenstein by Anthony Gottlieb: 5-star review (aka "Why Wittgenstein disagreed with everyone (including himself)") - "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus... is essentially a treatise on the limits of language, which, Wittgenstein argues, is useful only for the stating of facts. It follows that a great deal of what we say is literally meaningless. When we talk – as we so often do – about moral issues, matters of religion or questions of aesthetics, we’re using language on stuff it’s simply not equipped to deal with. We are, according to Wittgenstein, talking nonsense. And that “we” includes philosophers – for they deal not in empirical statements (as scientists do), nor in tautologies (as mathematicians do), but merely in pseudo-problems engendered by the ineluctably slippery confusions of language. It should be said that Wittgenstein was none too happy with this. Unlike the logical positivists, a bunch of naive scientistic luvvies who believed that the Tractatus was the final word on everything, Wittgenstein didn’t think that the only things that matter are what we can talk about, rather what we can’t. For all its minatory sound, the Tractatus’s closing line – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – isn’t a cry of triumph but a howl of anguish: philosophy ending not with a bang but a whimper... One of history’s most tormented homosexuals, Wittgenstein was a tormentor in his turn. Like Kenneth Williams, he was in the habit of proposing to women while being adamant that their marriage would be chaste. Nor were things easier for the invariably young men he loved, not least because he never told them he loved them. Wittgenstein said that David Pinsent, the dedicatee of the Tractatus, “took half my life away” when he died in a flying experiment a few months before the end of the Great War. Yet “there is no sign”, says Gottlieb, “that Pinsent was aware of such feelings… or that he felt them himself”... for a man who argued that ethics can’t be meaningfully discussed, he spent an awful lot of time haranguing people moralistically. Norman Malcolm complained of “his tendency to be censorious”. Georg von Wright, one of Wittgenstein’s literary executors, said that talking with him “was terrible… like living through the day of judgment”. To be sure, the person Wittgenstein was always hardest on was himself. Thoughts of suicide were rarely far from his mind. More than one of his friends was made to listen while he read out a list of his lies and sins. And years after beating his pupils at a primary school in Austria, he returned to apologise to them individually. On his deathbed, he exclaimed: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” Maybe so, yet you close this wonderful biography thinking that the linguistic philosopher JL Austin summed him up best: “Poor old Witters.”"

Uber, Lyft spent millions pushing for NYC congestion pricing —and stand to make killing - "Uber and Lyft poured millions of dollars into efforts to legalize congestion tolling — and they stand to be among the biggest winners. Uber spent $2 million alone from 2015 to 2019 to promote congestion pricing, roughly $1 million of which went to some of the city’s top lobbyists... both and Uber and Lyft have continued to hire top lobbyists to help persuade key state and city officials to approve the controversial levy, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, records show. It’s unclear how much the companies spent lobbying for congestion pricing because the lobbyists hired worked on multiple issues, and officials records don’t break it down. The ride-share companies declined to provide The Post a breakdown — or even an estimate — of its lobbying expenses. Lyft — which also own the CitiBike program — has also directly contributed to pols who have been pushing the polarizing scheme. Lyft poured over $125,000 into state campaigns since 2020 – including $18,500 the past four years to Hochul, who pushed it forward after a brief pause near the election, records show. It also donated $10,000 in 2020 to then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who backed congestion pricing when he was in office but now wants to hit the brakes on it. It’s been money well spent. The growing industry — which got a huge boost last year when the city lifted a cap on how many for-hire vehicles can be on the road — stands to make a killing because the new surcharge is both cheaper than the $9 fee private vehicles will pay to enter parts of Manhattan, and the $2.90 straphangers pay to take subways and buses, critics say. The ride-hailing services will be slapped with an additional $1.50 surcharge for Manhattan trips below 60th Street. But the additional costs will be passed on to customers — just like a similar $2.75 “congestion fee” on all trips below 96th Street authorized in 2019. “This is corporate greed at its worst,” said Councilman Robert Holden (D-Queens), who opposes congestion tolling. “These companies will stop at nothing to rewrite the rules in their favor while leaving chaos in their wake.” The new tolls fit “right into” Uber and Lyft’s “business model to charge a premium for access to the scarcest street — those in core Manhattan” – and its customers will benefit from faster service with less cars on the street, said Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute... Susan Lee, one of the plaintiffs in a slew of lawsuits seeking to stop the congestion tolling, blamed the for-hire industry for “pushing” congestion tolling and flooding city streets with its roughly 100,000 vehicles — causing much of NYC’s gridlock. “If the motivation is to incentivize people to take mass transit, then the new fee for for-hire vehicles should be equivalent to” the $2.90 cost for a bus or subway ride,” Lee said.

Letters: Why does 'Buy Canadian' exclude 'Buy Alberta (oil)'? - "Industry Minister Mélanie Joly’s efforts would be better served if she were to dedicate her energies to persuading Prime Minster Mark Carney to unshackle Canadian businesses rather than trying to persuade pension fund managers to invest in shackled Canadian businesses. Someone should explain to Minister Joly that her time would be better spent increasing the appeal of (and returns from) investing in Canada rather than attempting to steer pension fund managers on how and where to invest. Professional managers of these critical funds welcome investing advice from politicians like Trey Yesavage would welcome pitching advice from Margaret Atwood."
"The debate about speed cameras would be enriched by more knowledge. Everyone agrees with the objective of a speed-enforcement policy: safety for all concerned. How speed limits are determined is the issue. Transportation engineers should tell us how they determine reasonable and appropriate speed limits; in many locations, it feels like they could safely be higher than now. And, perhaps, the cameras could be calibrated for different limits at different times based on a risk assessment for accidents — for example 3 p.m. versus 3 a.m. Such an approach would result in fewer people believing that speed cameras are used as a cash grab. Evidence would indeed show that they grab the dangerous drivers only."
"Most Ontarians are not against speed cameras, they are upset at “cash cow” implementations. The avowed purpose of speed cameras is to force drivers to slow down to reduce accidents — not fill the municipality’s coffers. Instead of banning the cameras, Ontario should make the cameras more visible: put a flashing “here’s your speed” sign with a very visible “speed camera ahead” image some distance before the camera, and give drivers a 10 per cent margin of error. Anyone who failed to slow down and who exceeded the posted limit by 10 per cent would deserve to get a ticket."
Left wingers hate cars, so they love speed cameras

United flight attendant arrested for tapping someone on the shoulder - "The Cayman Airways worker was reportedly speaking loudly on her phone in French while waiting for the bus to arrive... Fleischmann told her to “close your mouth” before the bus arrived, which she perceived as rude and possibly racially insensitive. “He said it’s my last week here. Trump is gonna deport me,” the woman told police. “I was like, ‘Are you racist? Why are you bothering me?’” The situation escalated once both were aboard the shuttle, with Fleischmann admitting in the body‑cam footage that he tapped the woman on the shoulder while asking her to stop speaking loudly. He also allegedly threatened to ensure she was fired from her job. “She calls me a racist over and over and over,” Fleischmann told officers just before he was due to board a United flight. “She flips me off with her fingers, she tells me to go f*** myself, and I said, ‘All we need is quiet in the shelter.’” “I did turn around and put my hand on her shoulder, and I said, ‘Can you please stop?’ And that was the only time I touched her,” he continued. One of the officers then explained to Fleischmann that under Florida law, any intentional, unwanted physical contact can legally constitute battery. “That’s technically a battery, just so you know,” the officer said about the alleged incident. The officers proceeded to arrest Fleischmann on a misdemeanor battery charge and removed him from his flight... prosecutors in the State of Florida ultimately dropped the case on May 16, formally abandoning the charges."
It's racist to tell people off for speaking loudly. Time to force more people to use public transit as anyone who doesn't is a selfish asshole

Can Bollywood Survive Modi? - The Atlantic - "Its films have always celebrated a pluralistic India, making the industry—and its Muslim elite—a prime target for Narendra Modi."
From 2021

The Great (Fake) Child-Sex-Trafficking Epidemic - The Atlantic - "In some ways, this is just the most recent expression of a fear that has been part of the American landscape since the early 20th century—roughly the moment, as the sociologist Viviana Zelizer has argued, when children came to be viewed as “economically useless but emotionally priceless.” As in previous moral panics, messages about the threat of child sex trafficking are spread by means of friendly chitchat, flyers in the windows of diners, and coverage on local TV news. But the present panic is different in one important respect: It is sustained by the social web... The phenomenon suggests the possibility of a new law of social-media physics: A panic in motion can stay in motion... Her volunteer chapter claimed that “upwards of 300,000” children are victims of sex trafficking in the United States every year. All over the country, well-meaning Americans are convinced that human trafficking—and specifically child sex trafficking—is happening right in their backyard, or at any rate no farther away than the nearest mall parking lot. A 2020 survey by the political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Adam Enders found that 35 percent of Americans think the number of children who are victims of trafficking each year is about 300,000 or higher; 24 percent think it is “much higher.”... When today’s activists talk about the problem of trafficking, knowing exactly what they’re referring to can be difficult. They cite statistics that actually offer global estimates of all forms of labor trafficking. Or they mention outdated and hard-to-parse figures about the number of children who go “missing” in the United States every year—most of whom are never in any immediate danger—and then start talking about children who are abducted by strangers and sold into sex slavery. While stereotypical kidnappings—what you picture when you hear the word—do occur, the annual number hovers around 100... There is a widely circulated number, and it’s even bigger than the one Laura Pamatian and her volunteer chapter publicized: 800,000 children go missing in the U.S. every year. The figure shows up on T-shirts and handmade posters, and in the captions of Instagram posts. But the number doesn’t mean what the people sharing it think it means. It comes from a study conducted in 1999 by the Justice Department, and it’s an estimate of the number of children who were reported missing over the period of a year for any reason and for any length of time. The majority were runaways, children caught up in custody disputes, or children who were temporarily not where their guardians expected them to be. The estimate for “nonfamily abductions” reported to authorities was 12,100, which includes stereotypical kidnappings, but came with the caveat that it was extrapolated from “an extremely small sample of cases” and, as a result, “its precision and confidence interval are unreliable.” Later in the report, the authors noted that “only a fraction of 1 percent of the children who were reported missing had not been recovered” by the time they were counted for the study. The authors also clarified that a survey sent to law-enforcement agencies found that “an estimated 115 of the nonfamily abducted children were victims of stereotypical kidnapping.” The Justice Department repeated the study in 2013 and found that reports of missing children had “significantly decreased.”... even fleeting moral panics can have lasting consequences. The white-slavery panic of the early 1900s led to the passage of the Mann Act—a law that criminalized transporting across state lines “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery.” It was wielded against Black men who traveled with white women, and later against sex workers who were accused of trafficking themselves. The 1980s hysteria about child sex abuse preceded the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act, which made sharing child-sex-abuse material over a computer illegal, but also broadened the list of crimes for which the government could obtain wiretaps. Today, the difficult problem of child-sex-abuse material on the internet is being offered as a rationale for law enforcement to obtain backdoor access to encrypted communication, or for Congress to obligate social-media companies to constantly surveil their users’ posts and private messages... this panic may not soon recede. There are too many issues on which Americans can’t agree, such as how (or whether) to manage a deadly pandemic and how (or whether) to confront racism. But one type of justice isn’t complicated, and one definition of freedom is clear. If children are disappearing from all over the country, how could we possibly think about anything else?"
Plus a common definition of trafficking doesn't need to involve kidnapping but can be consensual

New Zealand volcano owners' conviction over deadly eruption quashed - "The owners of a New Zealand volcano that erupted in 2019, killing 22 people, have had their conviction over the disaster thrown out by the country's High Court. Whakaari Management Limited (WML) was found guilty in 2023 of failing to keep visitors safe and fined just over NZ$1m ($560,000; £445,000). They were also ordered to pay NZ$4.8m in reparation to the victims. However, following an appeal, the High Court ruled on Friday that the company only owned the land and were not responsible for people's safety... High Court Justice Simon Moore said on Friday that while WML licensed tours of the volcano, there was nothing in these agreements that gave the company control of what was happening on the island day to day."

Akon City: Wakanda-style $6bn project abandoned by Senegal - "Plans for a futuristic city in Senegal dreamt up by the singer Akon have been scrapped and instead he will work on something more realistic, officials say. "The Akon City project no longer exists," Serigne Mamadou Mboup, the head of Senegal's tourism development body, Sapco, told the BBC. "Fortunately, an agreement has been reached between Sapco and the entrepreneur Alioune Badara Thiam [aka Akon]. What he's preparing with us is a realistic project, which Sapco will fully support." Known for his string of noughties chart hits, Akon - who was born in the US but partly raised in Senegal - announced two ambitious projects in 2018 that were supposed to represent the future of African society. The first was Akon City - reportedly costed at $6bn (£5bn). It was to run on the second initiative - a brand new cryptocurrency called Akoin. Initial designs for Akon City, with its boldly curvaceous skyscrapers, were compared by commentators to the awe-inspiring fictional city of Wakanda in Marvel's Black Panther films and comic books. But after five years of setbacks, the 800-hectare site in Mbodiène - about 100km (60 miles) south of the capital, Dakar - remains mostly empty. The only structure is an incomplete reception building. There are no roads, no housing, no power grid. "We were promised jobs and development," one local resident told the BBC. "Instead, nothing has changed." Meanwhile the star's Akoin cryptocurrency has struggled to repay its investors over the years, with Akon himself conceding: "It wasn't being managed properly - I take full responsibility for that." There had also been questions over whether it would even be legal for Akoin to operate as the primary payment method for would-be residents of Akon City. Senegal uses the CFA franc, which is regulated and issued by the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO), and like many central banks has expressed opposition to cryptocurrency. The plans for Akon City had been sweeping. Phase one alone was to include a hospital, a shopping mall, a school, a police station, a waste centre, and a solar plant - all by the end of 2023. Sitting on Senegal's Atlantic Coast, Akon's high-tech, eco-friendly city was supposed to run entirely on renewable energy. But despite Akon's insistence in a 2022 BBC interview that the project was "100,000% moving", no significant construction followed the initial launch ceremony."
Damn colonialism!

JD Vance’s silence is allowing the oldest hatred to take root - "The Groypers are not yet a popular movement in Britain, but given the way cultural trends spread from America, they may be spread here soon. It was not so long ago, after all, that we stared in horror at films of fentanyl addicts, rigid and bent double by the drug down-town in American cities. Now we see them in British streets. Taking their name from a fat internet meme which is a variant of Pepe the Frog, the Groypers are young, overwhelmingly male, ultra-Right keyboard warriors who promote white nationalism, sometimes in the name of Christianity. They are 100 per cent devoted to destroying, not building. Anti-Semitism is at their core. They are fantastically unattractive, but that market is nowadays not as niche as it should be. At any one time in a free country, there are always such pitiful groupuscles around, but it is part of the unforeseen consequences of the online age that they can sometimes hit the big time. This seems to have happened among young Maga Republicans. The conservative cultural commentator, Rod Dreher, recently wrote that 30 to 40 per cent of Washington conservative “Zoomers” are Groypers. So they start to have political salience... All this reminds me of what happened on the Left in Britain not so long ago. As leader of the Labour Party from 2015-20, Jeremy Corbyn gave free rein to anti-Semites. No one ever established that he was personally anti-Semitic, but his extreme ideology put blinkers on his capacity to see what was surrounding him. In the old phrase, there were, for him, “no enemies on the Left” (and there were Muslim votes for the asking). Since Israel was and is, in the eyes of the Left, the tool of capitalist America and white imperialism, Corbyn thought they must be good socialists. So they simply couldn’t be Jew-haters, could they? At the time, it may be recalled, Sir Keir Starmer kept pretty quiet about all of this from inside Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, only assailing the anti-Semites when he had won the leadership. Possibly J.D.Vance admires his tactics... Possibly, too, the Right is jealous of the success of the implicitly anti-Semitic Zohran Mamdani in winning the New York mayoralty. The militant American Right often seems to imitate the militant American Left"
Ironically, the Jews are hated for similar reasons as white people. So right wing anti-Semites aren't doing themselves any favours

She bought a colorful vase at Goodwill for $3.99. The rare piece sold at auction for $107,000 - "This image provided by Wright Auction House shows a vase by Italian architect and designer Carlo Scarpa which was part of his Pennelatte series in the 1940s. Jessica Vincent purchased it at a Goodwill store outside Richmond, Va., in June for $3.99. It was sold through the Wright Auction House in Chicago on Wednesday Dec. 13, 2023, to a private European collector for $107,100."

How Will France Deal With an Outdoor Smoking Ban? - The Atlantic (aka "When a Nasty Habit Is Part of Your National Identity") - "Russians have their vodka. Americans have their McDonald’s and AR-15s. Japanese have a concept called karoshi, which apparently means “working so hard that you die.” Every self-respecting nation has a fatal habit that helps define it—a guilty pleasure its citizens indulge in despite the scoffing of foreigners, and because doing so almost proves that their identity is worth dying for. The French—Sartre and Bardot and Gainsbourg and Houellebecq—have their smoking... What was most alluring about cigarettes, besides the notion—okay, the fact—that I looked cooler holding one casually between two fingers, was the quality of time that opened up in the space of a smoke. It’s been a while—maybe 20 years—since I’ve touched a cigarette, but what I still remember, more than the nicotine, is the sensation of pressing “Pause.” For the few minutes it took a cigarette to become ash, I had nothing to do but enjoy the silence or the chat I was having outside a bar. These moments of idle nothingness—or acute presence—are a source of nostalgia for me in part because they belong to the aimlessness of youth, and because our phones have since become a constant portal to somewhere else. But they also make me wistful because this sense of time out of time feels so very French. Think of the languidness of a French meal, with its aperitif, entrée, plat, fromage, dessert, café. Or the nation’s incredible shrinking workweek—now 35 hours, by law—in favor of more leisure time for love affairs and philosophical debates. Or the month of August, when no one is around. Or strikes, when everything stops. Or the years it takes to make good cheese and wine. Or that glorious description of the concept underlying the country’s internet-privacy laws: “the right to be forgotten.” This whole cultural preference seemed to have been hand-rolled into every cigarette... For the French, I always sensed that smoking, even when its dangers were well known, was almost an illustration of existentialism. The act seemed in some way to distill the central idea of that most French of philosophies: True freedom is terrifying because it means taking responsibility for every single choice we make. But not taking responsibility is worse—it is to live in bad faith. Smoking, that controlled flirtation with death, is the perfect test of this proposition. You know it’s bad for you; you do it anyway, fully aware that you are taking your fate in your own hands. Maybe this is also why the cigarette has always signified rebellion—especially for women living in cultures bent on circumscribing their choices. Even as our cultural mores and our health standards evolve, the cigarette retains this symbolic power. A blueberry-flavored vape (currently exempt from the new law) could never carry all this meaning... A little less than a quarter of the country’s population takes a drag every day. And young French people, thankfully, are not buying my romanticism"