Links - 13th February 2026 (2)

Meme - "When your female friend sends a titty pic because she knows you're in a coochie drought."
Bran from Game of Thrones: "You are a good woman. Thank you"

Meme - Time Capsule Tales: "The script for Game of Thrones S8 was so disliked that when Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) first got it, she cried, and then went on a walk for 5 hours around London until she had blisters on her feet"

‘Game of Thrones’ Star Reveals Her ‘Full Mental Breakdown’ After Show Ended : r/freefolk - "New article referencing an interview Emilia recently did with the NY Times (that one is paywalled so I didn’t link it but it’s out there if you search).  I don’t know about anyone else, but this to me reads she is more and more dissatisfied with her experience on the show. Prior to the show ending, she always talked about how much she loved playing Dany and how that character is a part of her. So I really think she has become more and more aware how unfair it was how they completely ruined her character. That’s not to say actors are owed to decide their character’s endings, but I think she honestly felt betrayed and it was hard for her at the time to say that because she felt like she owed D&D her career.  In the NY Times article, she also said, “You’re highly unlikely to see me get on a dragon, or even in the same frame as a dragon, ever again.” Which, I don’t blame her. I mean it’s still sad that the whole experience seems almost tainted, but I’m glad she’s happy in her newer projects."

Game of Thrones Star Sophie Turner Says 'No One Else Was Really Happy' With How Their Characters Ended The Show - "Game of Thrones actress Sophie Turner has suggested she was one of the few cast members happy with the fate of their character following the series' divisive final season... "I feel that I was very happy with the way Sansa ended her story in Game of Thrones, and no one else was really happy with their ending," Turner said. "I feel like I got a good one, and so I don't know if I could revisit it.""

‘Game of Thrones’ Star Reveals Her ‘Full Mental Breakdown’ After Show Ended : r/freefolk - "I dint think it was a big secret how upset she was with the ending her character got. Between her sarcastic "best season ever" response during an interview and her face during table reads, the only person more visibly upset was probably Varys' actor."
‘Game of Thrones’ Star Reveals Her ‘Full Mental Breakdown’ After Show Ended : r/freefolk - "The video of Conleth Hill throwing his script after reading his ending always stuck with me."
‘Game of Thrones’ Star Reveals Her ‘Full Mental Breakdown’ After Show Ended : r/freefolk - "They’ll do the same thing that Peter Dinklage did, misrepresent the fans issues with the way the show abandoned logistics and realism, and imply there’s sour grapes because fans didn’t get the story beats they wanted."

Mother Of Sarcasm on X - "Isn’t it weird how KFC is one letter away from Fuck? New slogan idea… KFC: all that’s missing is u."

Latin America turns Right as the Left pays the price of failure - "The rise of conservatism has been fuelled in part by the spectacular failures of Left-wing policies, which in the most extreme cases have tipped countries into economic collapse...  The shift is also the result of voters increasingly prioritising tackling crime and corruption over issues like inequality and social mobility... In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, the Right-wing president, has led an iron-fisted crackdown on organised crime that has incarcerated nearly 2 per cent of the population. Violent crime has plummeted. The formerly gang-ridden country has become one of the region’s safest. By contrast, when a juvenile assassin shot a Colombian senator three times in June, he received a seven-year-sentence owing to lenient laws for juveniles in the country. The case led to calls for reforms to the law, but Gustavo Petro, the Leftist president, has not publicly supported any change. The Right has also been better at portraying their candidates as political outsiders at a time when “there’s a widespread belief that parties and politics are broken, and no longer work for the average person,” according to Mr Young"

Western Lensman on X - "Two Democrats, same night:
Raskin: We can’t have people prosecuting the person who prosecuted them, that would be an endless cycle of prosecutorial vengeance.
Jeffries: When Democrats retake power, we’re going to seek prosecutorial vengeance.
Get your stories straight, guys."

The one Marxist who understood modern Britain - "“If you’re not a Marxist at 14 you’ve got no heart, but if you’re still a Marxist at 40 you’ve got no brain.” This certainly applied to me at 14, but in my defence I’d point out that, in the 90s, Marxism was still about redistributive economics.  Now it has been subsumed by identity politics, so being a Leftist means favouring puberty blockers, open borders, anti-Semitism and police intimidation via non-crime hate incidents. There doesn’t seem to be much “heart” in such things.  Pre-woke Leftism, for all its faults and utopian pipedreams, often had a youthful, creative energy. Surprisingly, this energy has become much more common on the Right during the last decade. Some people call this change a political “vibe shift” – as in all the vibes switching side, from Left to Right... a typical phenomenon of the 2020s: “cultural repetition”. You may have noticed how many Hollywood films are remakes. You may have noticed that pop music sounds the same today as it did twenty years ago. You may even have wondered how it can be that the distance between this year and the year 2005 feels so much shorter than the distance between 1990 and 1970, if you’re old enough to remember a time of significant cultural changes in fashion and music.   Fisher argued that popular culture now stays largely unchanged by time because people have lost a sense of direction, a collective narrative, a feeling that things are moving meaningfully toward the future, a sense of optimism toward our shared life unfolding in time.  Being a Leftist, he blamed the collapse of Leftist hopes for a brighter future, but the same phenomenon can be said to apply to the collapse of the stability once provided by things like family, religion and national culture as well... things get a little odd when today’s programme makers start trying to make new the classics. This happens every year with Eastenders, of course, and this year we’re promised an Only Fools and Horses reunion.  The problem is that shows like this can no longer work. They portray all those things which post-pandemic Britain has lost: a sense of civilisational self-confidence, of material comfort, of an unquestioned faith in national institutions. Those old shows function against the background of shared experiences, shared cultural values, and – particularly at Christmas – shared aspirations and shared hopes. A soap that realistically portrayed today’s East End or Peckham would probably need subtitles. Watching the woefully unrealistic portrayals of British life today thus has a spooky quality. It feels like a ghostly apparition of the future we once assumed would come now returns to haunt us before suddenly disappearing out of sight when you watch the news. Fisher coined a word for this uncanny feeling: “hauntology”, the ethereal appearance of the future that never came, returning to haunt those who ancestors once assured of its reality.  Fisher’s writings thus have that “heart” so often lacking in Left-wing writing today, that creative energy that’s now so rare among grim faced identitarians. This applies even to a concept as melancholic as “hauntology”, which he said not only acknowledges that the hopes of one era have evaporated – it also shows “a refusal to give up” on that desire to create the world we have lost.  It is common for Leftists to dismiss conservatives for political nostalgia, for unrealistic portrayals of some golden era that never was. Fisher is important for showing how nostalgia can function politically, even in relation to the future. Indeed, public fury at the Left-wing radicalism of the BBC is a version of the same impulse – a reminder that a once-treasured national institution was never meant to behave like this."

How the world’s authority on HR descended into an HR nightmare - "The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) describes itself as “the global authority on work, workers and the workplace” and the “voice of all things work”. It is an HR training and education company with, it says, nearly 340,000 members in 180 countries.  As the largest such organisation in the world, it should be a shining example of how to foster healthy, happy, productive employees. Instead, the SHRM’s HR record reads more like a catalogue of blunders and embarrassing missteps... Managers also introduced a “conservative” dress code which promoted “enclothed cognition” – the idea that what an employee wears impacts their performance. The rules banned trainers, hats and denim, as well as any clothing that failed to cover the body between the shoulders and knees. In October Johnny C. Taylor Jr, the company’s chief executive, is said to have called many of its employees “complacent,” “sloppy” and “entitled” at an all-staff meeting at which he announced a round of redundancies. “I am going to reorganise the business of SHRM. There will be a total reorg,” Taylor said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Business Insider, in which he also confirmed he had taken the decision unilaterally. “This is not a decision that I’ve made [in consultation] with anyone, no one.”... the same HR employee tasked with investigating Mohamed’s complaints was simultaneously drafting the paperwork for the termination of her contract, as well as ghostwriting emails for Mohamed’s manager. Just a couple of weeks before she was let go, SHRM had published a guide titled How to Conduct a Workplace Investigation, which stated that investigators “should focus on being impartial.”... SHRM’s allegedly rank hypocrisy raises broader questions about the ballooning HR industry and its increasingly powerful role in the workplace. HR workers now outnumber doctors and lawyers in Britain – there are more than 476,000 people in the industry, an increase of 68 per cent since 2010. Only the Netherlands has a larger HR industry than Britain, and yet a rise in HR professionals has not necessarily made a difference to employee health or productivity... Pamela Dow, a former senior civil servant, posited that our bloated HR sector could be the reason for the UK’s “national sluggishness”... So, what has gone so wrong? Tanya de Grunwald is a former journalist, now an entrepreneur and campaigner who hosts This Isn’t Working, a podcast on the HR industry. She says: “It can look like it’s just a huge mess, but what I see is a battle for the soul of HR. Over the past five years particularly, there’s been huge confusion about what it actually is. A new generation of people have come into the HR industry, a lot of university graduates, and they’ve brought in quite an activist agenda.”... While the primary function of the industry used to be legal compliance, staff welfare and personnel issues – literally the hiring and firing – there is now an overemphasis on employee wellbeing and inclusion, she says, and this creates tension.  According to de Grunwald, the harsh truth is that businesses are ultimately “about making money”. She adds that HR “lost its way with all this wellbeing and DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] stuff, when really all they should have been doing was making sure that we – that our organisation – was as productive as possible.” That’s not to say that employee wellbeing isn’t important. “You should be nurturing your best people, you should be investing in them, training them,” she says. “But you’re not everybody’s mum.”"
I didn't know the US had gotten so informal that moderate dress codes were bad

Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Why do identical twins have such similar personalities?  Is it because they're reared together? Is it because people treat them alike due to their visual similarity?  Nope! Neither theory holds water.  Despite looking as similar as identical twins and being reared apart, look-alikes are not similar like identical twins are. In fact, they're no more similar than unrelated people.  This makes sense: they're only minimally more genetically similar than regular unrelated people. The other thing is that twins reared apart and together have similarly similar personalities.  In fact, there might be a negative environmental effect going on, where twins reared together try to distinguish their personalities more! This data also came with data on dizygotic twins reared together and apart, delivering heritabilities of 0.76, 0.66, or 0.56, depending on which group is used as the comparison.  And as an aside, the traits of same-sex and opposite-sex dizygotic twins are similarly correlated. Twins who are perceived to be fraternal rather than identical and vice-versa also seem to be aligned as predicted genetically, not by perceptions.  That is, people seen as identical (fraternals) but who are not are as similar as fraternals (identicals). If being reared apart or together doesn't matter, and looking alike doesn't matter, misperception of zygosity doesn't matter, and even sex doesn't matter (mostly excepting sex-linked traits), there's just not much room for twin methods to be biased by a lack of equal environments"

Matt Van Swol on X - "I am still waiting for someone to help me understand why DOZENS of donations were made in my name, to Act Blue Democrat candidates in KANSAS... ...when I've never been to Kansas, nor ever knowingly donated to any political candidate in my entire life What is going on???!!!!"
AwakenedOutlaw⚒️ on X - "This practice is referred to as "Smurfing." Act Blue, an illicit Democrat money machine, takes the information of anyone who has donated to Democrat causes and then uses that information in perpetuity as cover to slather their candidates with micro donations (generally from  illegal foreign sources to evade laws that prohibit them) to fly under the radar with illicit micro donations."

Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 on X - "Rereading some of the docs in the Proud Boys case really gets my blood boiling. These guys had no chance given the conspiracy between the court and the DOJ to convict.  Here, Jocelyn Ballantine told Judge Kelly--who quickly agreed--in March 2023 that the accidental disclosure of FBI texts revealing one agent had been instructed to delete evidence represented a "classified" exchange.  FIRE HER."

Eyal Yakoby on X - "Horrifying, an Islamic Scholar at North Carolina State University: “If a loving father wants to marry off his nine-year-old daughter to a righteous man and all parties consent, what is the issue with that?”"

ian bremmer on X - "no serious european leader today believes that the continent is facing “civilizational erasure” warned in the us national security strategy. since world war ii, the us and europe have never been so far from alignment. a crisis for the transatlantic relationship. welcome news for putin."
Coddled Affluent Professional on X - "Europeans have a track record of almost always being right on matters of major political importance. Anyways, here’s a photo of German delegates laughing at Trump in 2018 when he warned they were becoming too dependent on Russian oil."

A scary woman accidentally posts a naked selfie on eBay's air fryer list - "A British woman mistakenly included a naked selfie on eBay's list of air fryer, but before being attacked by a "crude" message asking if "melon" was included. Claimed to remain "quivering in a panic". Sale.  26-year-old Emma Jones is puzzled that she received requests from hundreds of new followers and friends on social media after she listed Ninja Foodi Max at the end of last month... This list has since become viral, but electrical products It explains as follows. There are "previously used" and "signs of wear"."

Meme - Kid prepping for Battle of Helm's Deep: "Please sir, I'm only 9 years old"
"And the orcs you're fighting aren't even a year old. Now shut up and get ready to kill some babies"

Airdrie warns public of brazen coyote after 6-year-old attacked at light festival - "Child is safe but disappointed he didn't turn into a werewolf, mom says... Airdrie mom Elizabeth Dawn wrote on Facebook that the victim of Monday's attack was her six-year-old son. She said his snowsuit protected him from being injured, and her boyfriend took quick action to kick the animal off the child.  "However, he is a bit upset he has not turned into a werewolf yet," she wrote."

Meme - "Sometime in 1906 I was walking in the heat of the day through the Bazaars. As I passed an Arab cafe an idle wit, in no hostility to my straw hat but desiring to shine before his friends, called out in Arabic, "God curse your father, O Englishman." I was young then and quicker-tempered, and foolishly could not refrain from answering in his own language that I would also curse his father if he were in a position to inform me which of his mother's two and ninety admirers his father had been. I heard footsteps behind me and slightly picked up the pace, angry with myself for committing the sin [of] a row with Egyptians. In a few seconds I I felt a hand on each arm. "My brother; said the original humorist, "return, I pray you, and drink with us coffee and smoke. I did not think that Your Worship knew Arabic, still less the correct Arabic abuse, and we would fain benefit further by your important thoughts.""
"White boy shocks Egyptian by telling him to fuck off in perfect Arabic"

Team conflict over lunch habits turned into HR issue. Food place recommendation near Tanjong Pagar. : r/askSingapore - "I manage a small team of 5: 4 Chinese and 1 Malay. The Malay team member came to me saying she feels left out because the Chinese members always go for lunch together without her.  I spoke to the Chinese members, and they said they’re not excluding her intentionally. They just don’t want to eat Malay food.  To stay neutral, I alternate having lunch with different people, and mostly eat alone to avoid any perception of favoritism.  Eventually, the Malay team member escalated this to HR. HR spoke to me, and I told them that lunch is personal time and I can’t force people to eat together. At work and in meetings, I’ve already made English mandatory and there are no communication issues professionally.  I bring them out to eat together occasionally maybe once a quarter.  What would you do? Food recommendation near TP?
EDIT: Thanks for the responses. At least I know I did what I could in this situation.
EDIT2: I understand the malay colleague feels left out. Even the chinese colleagues don't always eat together. Sometimes 2 went to eat different places because they have their own "cravings". I think everyone has to put in a bit of effort if they want to have lunch together or compromise.
EDIT3: Malay colleague prefers Malay style restaurants or sell only Malay food. Nasi padang, Mee rebus, Nasi lemak etc"
"you can’t force adults to eat together, complaining to hr is ridiculous.  Lunch is a private time and if employees want to exclude others that’s their prerogative.  Excluding someone from lunch because they don’t like you is a perfectly acceptable reason.  I think you need to have a conversation with the employee feeling left out and explain it’s not high school, it’s a job. Hr and management can’t regulate people free time."
"One of my friend groups consists of several conflicting dietry restrictions: one Muslim, one Hindu, one can't take chili, one vegetarian, and one extremely picky eater. Every meal together was difficult (to plan), but we take turns compromising (except me, I eat everything) because we are friends and the point is to get together.  But colleagues, dealing with lunch every day? It's such a tiring prospect that I'm really happy that I'm the sort who packs their own lunch and wouldn't mind eating by myself."

Longest urban cable car in Europe lets Paris commuters soar over gridlock - "It is France’s seventh urban cable car, with others in cities including Brest, Saint-Denis de La Réunion and Toulouse."

Meme - "I'll take movies for $500, Alex"
"TIM BURTON DIRECTED THIS DARK TALE STARRING JOHNNY DEPP & HELENA BONHAM CARTER"
"you gotta be kidding me"

Meme - "Lesbians when a new haircut for 9 year old boys drops:
Wooooooo!"

Sean Davis on X - "BREAKING: The corrupt Obama DOJ, including James Comey and Andrew McCabe, explicitly blocked efforts to criminally investigate the Clinton Foundation in 2016 because they did not “want to create any impression we are investigating the Clinton Foundation or the Clintons,” according to new evidence released today by Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa.  Documents show that federal agents were blocked from issuing subpoenas about the Clinton Foundation or conducting interviews with or about the Clintons in order to protect them from scrutiny during the 2016 election. At the same time, the Obama FBI was using the bogus, Clinton-funded dossier as pretext for illegally spying on the Trump campaign."
Weird. I thought "nobody is above the law"

F20 French girl...Let's be honest about what we're looking for here.... : r/Needafriend - "Most people lurking around posts searching for internet friendships are usually insecure, and/or lonely which is often combined with some sort of mental disease (depression, anxiety)."

Was Saudi Arabia’s tourism dream too good to be true? - "You have to hand it to Saudi Arabia. When Mohammed bin Salman announced his intention to turn the desert nation into a $100bn tourism destination within a decade, he was smart enough to realise he’d need something special to make that happen.  For the millennial crown prince, there was one obvious solution to that conundrum: a flurry of breathtaking “mega projects” that would need to be seen to be believed, and which would help lure international tourists who might not otherwise have dreamed of visiting the Islamic kingdom... If it all sounded too good to be true – well, you might have been on to something. Less than 10 years since Mohammed bin Salman dazzled audiences with his transformational vision, Saudi’s tourism dream appears to be slipping away – at least when it comes to the mega-projects... It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that a giant Saudi construction project has been put on ice due to falling oil prices.  Fans of particularly tall buildings may remember when the country announced its breathless plans to build the Kingdom Tower: a one-kilometre-high skyscraper in Jeddah that would dwarf Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and put Saudi Arabia’s second city of Jeddah on the map.  Not long after construction began in 2013, the project ran into trouble, not least when oil prices plunged in 2015."

How Faces of Death traumatised a generation (and made millions) - "Blurring reality, Faces of Death is a mockumentary that queasily combines news clips too graphic to make it to air alongside staged footage... Schwartz, who was widely reported as having died in August 2019, had been working at a family-run nature documentaries firm when Japanese executives visited him with an intriguing proposition: could he make a macabre movie about death for their more extreme market? Initially, Schwartz intended Faces of Death to comprise only real footage, scouring local news stations for unaired material from accidents or murder, but quickly realised he’d need to bulk it out with fabricated recreations. Filmed on a paltry $450,000 budget, Faces of Death ended up grossing a reported $35m (the equivalent of $168m today), and spawned three official sequels – plus a Fact or Fiction video tie-in which sought to debunk some of the myths. Its current cultural currency is high, owing to a reboot (apparently languishing in release-limbo) starring Gen Z scream queen Barbie Ferreira as well as zeitgeist-shaping musician Charli XCX... Apone reckons 60 per cent of the footage is genuine. The brooding Dr Francis B Gröss is, in fact, played by Michael Carr, an actor who reacted to the script by shrieking: “Who wrote this s---?”... “Some of the stuff at the time, I thought, there’s no way people are going to buy this!”, he laughs, singling out a moment where someone is killed by a crocodile. “The alligator trainer was a friend of John’s, and we built a fake alligator, fake arms and different body parts, and we weren’t sure it was going to pass muster, but that was one of the things that people swore was real.”  “Whereas the bear attack – which is real – people still think is fake.”"

‘We’re Not Criminalizing the Unhoused’: How a Homeless Encampment and Drug Dealers Are Destroying a Local Condominium Complex and Turning Its Residents’ Lives Upside Down (Anarcho-Tyranny)

Anarcho-tyranny strikes again. This is what left wing "empathy" looks like in practice. Of course, there is no empathy by those terrorised by groups the left considers victims - the law abiding majority must be ruthlessly policed (until they are homeless too).

‘We’re Not Criminalizing the Unhoused’: How a Homeless Encampment and Drug Dealers Are Destroying a Local Condominium Complex and Turning Its Residents’ Lives Upside Down
Prince George’s County, Md, is going to court to evict legal residents over damage allegedly caused by the camp

The sign outside the Marylander Condominiums, a 200-unit complex in Prince George’s County, Md., describes it as a "private community."

But for members of a homeless encampment in the condo’s backyard, the complex also serves as a crackhouse, a bathroom, and the entrance to an open-air drug market, which has become a magnet for organized crime and caused millions in property damage.

Transients break into buildings and smoke crack in the stairwells. Tenants traversing the property must navigate needles, feces, and sleeping bodies as addicts nap half-naked in the hallways and sprawl themselves like welcome mats outside residents’ doors.

Half of the complex has gone without heat since Thanksgiving after vagrants allegedly vandalized the boiler room, causing pipes to burst in several buildings. Some units have lost electricity, too, due to the overuse of space heaters. Though the county instructed those without heat to "vacate immediately" in December, most have defied the order and tried to weather the cold. They say they have nowhere else to go.

Outside the freezing halls, drug dealers drive high-end vehicles through a dilapidated parking lot—the Washington Free Beacon spotted a Cadillac on one nighttime visit—and park in the complex’s southeast corner. There they approach a hole in the property’s wrought iron fence, which separates the Marylander from what some residents call "the mountains": a homeless encampment that has encroached on its law-abiding neighbors since 2023, and which the county’s law enforcement officials have only recently sought to clear.

Patrolled by masked men who appear to be part of a local gang, the encampment has become a haven for prostitutes—one of whom solicited this reporter just outside the camp—and for the AK-47s police say have been found in wooded areas. While it is not clear who stashed those guns, graffiti on nearby structures includes signs for MS-13. County police declined to comment on gang activity in the area.

The squalor has sparked a smattering of local headlines and belated, but minimal, political action. At a town hall on Jan. 22, officials said they had taken several measures over the past two weeks to address an encampment that had festered for more than two years, evolving from a collection of tents into something that more closely resembles a shantytown, as the camp’s residents have built increasingly elaborate structures with materials that appear to have been stolen from nearby stores. One recently demolished shack included a generator and a makeshift smokestack.

Billed as a "listening session" for condo-owners to air their grievances, the town hall featured a lengthy presentation on how the county was handling its "unhoused" residents.

"We have to be compassionate," the county’s deputy chief administrative officer for public safety and homeland security, Melvin Powell, said of the encampment, addressing the hundreds of residents who could soon be displaced because of it.

"We’re not criminalizing the unhoused," police major Thomas Boone added.

The situation shocked officials at Quasar Real Estate, a local investment firm, when it began managing the Marylander in April 2025. For months, they pleaded with police and county officials to address the open-air drug market that had effectively colonized the condo, which suffered so many break-ins that the company stopped repairing the locks.

But the county—which has the highest Democratic vote-share of any county in the United States, at 86 percent—didn’t clear the camp. Instead, it threatened to sue the condo, which was already tight on cash, for its failure to fix the nearly $5 million in property damage that has been caused by the drug den on its doorstep.

"Residents have made repeated requests for repairs and improved safety measures," a county official, Danielle Coates, told Quasar in an August email. "Failure to address these concerns promptly may result in further escalation, including referrals to the Department of Permitting, Inspections, and Enforcement (DPIE) Housing Enforcement, Landlord-Tenant Affairs, and the County Office of Law for formal action."

What followed was an onslaught of citations that decimated the condo’s finances and put hundreds of families at risk of eviction—all while county social workers were delivering food to the encampment that triggered the crisis.

"The dilapidation of this community was caused directly by the county," said Phil Dawit, Quasar’s managing director. "The reason it’s so bad now is that everyone let it fester."

This report is based on emails from county officials, interviews with residents of the Marylander, invoice records and maintenance logs, and dozens of hours of video footage, much of it from the body cameras that Quasar executives wore when they visited the condo.

It reveals a Kafkaesque battle between law-abiding citizens and the left-wing bureaucrats who abandoned them, as officials in a deep blue county vowed to be "compassionate" and avoid "criminalizing the unhoused."

The costs of that compassion fell predominantly on poor, non-white condo-owners who saw the value of their homes evaporate as vandalism from the encampment pushed the complex into disrepair. That in turn made banks unwilling to finance security upgrades—without which the condo was more susceptible to crime—and caused inspectors to deem many units "unfit for human habitation" after the heating system was vandalized.

The county is now taking the condo to court to enforce an evacuation order against those units. If a judge rules in the county’s favor on Thursday, the residents who for years were terrorized by a homeless encampment will become homeless themselves.

"The people working hard and following laws are on their way to being homeless," Dawit said. "Meanwhile, the homeless encampment gets to do whatever it wants."

At a time when some cities are taking a more permissive approach toward homelessness, the crisis at the Marylander illustrates the perverse incentives those policies can create. The county’s Department of Social Services, for example, delivered food to the camp even as police said that doing so would "incentivize the unhoused population to return," according to a Zoom call between Quasar and police officials. Meanwhile, the homeless camp’s own members say that the refusal to restore law and order enabled their addictions, allowing crack and fentanyl to flow in unabated.

When, after months of political pressure, police finally arrested some of the camp’s suppliers in January, a woman who was living there, "DC," implied that the county’s permissiveness until that point had made it harder for her homeless neighbors to get clean.

"Most of them are not [as] high as they usually [are]," she told Dawit, referring to camp regulars who could no longer rely on their dealers for crack and fentanyl. "Ever since they started getting everybody arrested, they’ve been weaning it off."

Prince George’s County Department of Social Services did not respond to a request for comment. The police department did not respond to a request for comment.

"Shoot me, motherfucker"

When Quasar took over the Marylander in April 2025, there was no fence separating the property from the encampment, and, thanks to $500,000 in alleged embezzlement by the previous management company, almost no money in the condominium’s bank account either, according to financial records reviewed by the Free Beacon.

Quasar used what little remained to build a $27,000 fence around the complex, hoping that it would keep the vagrants at bay.

But members of the camp promptly pried a hole in the fence and continued roaming the property, high on the drugs that were delivered each day by armed men, in sports cars, at around 10:00 p.m.

"The fence has made zero difference," said Scott Barber, who shares a condo at the Marylander with his brother, Chris. "They walk right in."

Once inside, members of the camp will assault residents, start fires, and relieve themselves in hallways, leaving some carpets with permanent urine stains. Work orders for the property’s maintenance staff show numerous requests to clean up human waste, which residents say has been exacerbated by the police’s refusal to arrest trespassers.

One tenant described how police had booted a homeless man from the stairwell only for him to return 90 minutes later, prompting the tenant to call 911 again.

"This time a single officer from before responded and the trespasser was given a SECOND WARNING," the tenant wrote in a note to management.  "I am begging the community to please do something. I do not feel safe."

The unwillingness to make arrests meant that dangerous people kept reappearing. When Quasar CEO Kenneth Brown called police in June to report a homeless woman in the parking lot, the responding officer told him that she would "come right back" as soon as he left, adding that it is "kind of hard for us to … charge everyone with trespassing" given the constant "back and forth" through the fence.

Two months later, the same woman threatened Brown with a metal pole after he asked her to stop harassing maintenance workers. She only backed off when Brown drew his gun.

"Shoot me, motherfucker," the woman shouted. The confrontation, which Brown recorded with a body camera, was defused without injury.

Quasar had turned around seedy buildings before, including one with a prostitution problem, but none of them were being invaded by addicts or deluged with drug dealers.

Violent incidents spooked maintenance workers and delayed renovations as vendors hesitated to work on site. One contractor said in an email that it would not install laundry machines until the buildings were cleared of homeless people, citing the need to "ensure a safe environment for our team."

As conditions worsened, residents grew frustrated with Quasar, which had more than doubled their dues in order to stabilize the condo’s finances. A major sticking point was the company’s decision, in July 2025, to stop fixing the locks because of how frequently they were vandalized, with at least one building suffering multiple break-ins in the span of two weeks, according to invoices reviewed by the Free Beacon. Quasar said it couldn’t afford continued repairs until the root cause of the vandalism was addressed.

The problem, according to residents, is that without locks the complex became even more susceptible to crime. That in turn made vandalism more frequent and its financial toll more acute.

"The encampment has gotten worse because the buildings are unsecure," Barber said. "It’s a crime of opportunity."

"Irreparable Damage"

These sorts of catch-22s popped up again and again as Quasar sought help from county officials.

The company contacted a local councilmember, Wanika Fisher (D.), in June 2025 after outreach to the police went nowhere. It didn’t hear back until August when Fisher’s deputy, Danielle Coates, threatened to sic safety inspectors on the condo if it did not provide a timeline for repairing the locks.

She also demanded a series of measures, including security "patrol[s]," that would later be recommended by a police audit of the condo.

But when Quasar offered to pay off-duty officers to provide private security, it was told that no one would accept the detail due to the threat of gang violence.

"We see a lot of gang graffiti on the dumpsters and trees in the area for ms13," a police sergeant texted Brown, who had inquired about off-duty patrols in May at the request of a contractor. "I would just caution whoever is working there to call 911 if there’s any issues."

Brown said the sergeant told him by phone that officers were afraid for their safety. Another officer told Brown during a recorded conversation in August that "we’ve gotten guns out of these woods, like AK-47s."

Without private security, the condo was locked in a doom loop of crime and capital flight. A bank that had initially agreed to finance $2.5 million in renovations canceled the loan in December after the boiler room was vandalized, saying it would be difficult for the condo to repay given the "irreparable damage" to the heating system and the "Unfit for Habitation" notices.

As a result, the condo now has less than $650,000 in its bank account to pay for $4.7 million in pipe repairs. Residents have been forced to rely on space heaters amid a bitter cold spell, straining the property’s electric grid.

When the complex installed wires above ground to keep the power on, it was hit with yet another citation—fire watch—because the installation lacked the proper permits.

In a phone call with Brown explaining the issue, the county’s assistant fire chief, Aaron White, also noted that homeless people had been lighting fires in the parking lot.

"I mean, they set the dumpster on fire while we were all there," White said, according to audio of the call. "That’s crazy."

White told the Free Beacon that the fires started by encampment members were not a factor in the citation. Other officials have denied that the encampment was responsible for damaging the boiler room.

The condo also lost property insurance in August after a previous carrier canceled its policy, citing, among other things, "ongoing vandalism related to a nearby homeless encampment." More than 20 other carriers have declined to provide coverage—which the condo must purchase under state law—according to a letter from a brokerage firm.

"You literally have to take them into handcuffs"

With the code violations piling up—and with local news outlets, including the Washington Times, picking up the story—Quasar officials held a Zoom call with police on Jan. 17.

There, they were hit with yet another allegation: Residents of the Marylander, police captain Nicholas Collins said, had been spotted bringing food to the camp.

"You need to express to your residents that … they should not be delivering food to the unhoused population," said Collins, who declined to comment. "That's only going to incentivize the unhoused population to return and ask for more."

It was an oddly hard-headed argument for a county that claimed, in a 2024 application for federal housing aid, to "[m]inimize [the] use of law enforcement" against encampments. And it left out some awkward context: At the same time that police were warning about perverse incentives, the county itself was feeding the camp, thanks to a pair of social services programs ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets.

On Jan. 21, after a two-week operation that resulted in 18 arrests for drug and weapons offenses, police finally began clearing the tents under growing political pressure.

When Dawit, Quasar's managing director, asked what could be done to help the evicted campers, an officer told him about two county programs that had been delivering food to them for years. The officer said that a social worker, John Harrison, frequently "brings food" to the camp as part of a "street outreach" program.

"He comes here all the time," the officer said of Harrison, whose name was independently mentioned by camp members interviewed by Dawit.

That program is run by the county’s Department of Social Services, which says its outreach teams "build trust" with the homeless—and eventually get them off the streets—by "meeting them where they are."

But when police launched a similar program in 2023, they saw their no-strings-attached altruism derailed by the realities of addiction.

"We gave them food," the officer said, describing how his department had teamed up with a coterie of nonprofits, including Salvation Army, at a thrift store across the street from the encampment. "We were successful for a bit, but then it kind of stopped because you get the severe drug addicts."

Those addicts, the officer explained, preferred to camp behind the condo, where there was no curfew, plenty of drugs, and none of the rules and regulations of homeless shelters.

To get them off the street, he said, "you literally have to take them into handcuffs."

Handcuffs appear to have been the county’s last resort. Following the Jan. 22 town hall, the Free Beacon returned to the condo and saw several camp regulars—including the woman who threatened Brown—camped around a fire in the area that had been cleared a day earlier.

As the fire department arrived and began to shoo them away, Chris Barber, a Marylander resident, predicted they would come back. Asked how long that would take, Barber laughed.

"I give it about 10 minutes," he said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Links - 13th February 2026 (1 - China's 'Peaceful' Rise)

Dustin Grage on X - "🚨 BREAKING: Tim Walz spoke this morning on who can be the voice in the world that could negotiate some type of deal with moral authority.  “It might be the Chinese.”  Thank God this guy isn’t in the White House. WOW. 😮"

China's Largest Comic Convention Bans Anime & Manga - "China’s largest comic convention, COMICUP, has effectively banned Japanese anime and manga from its upcoming event after organizers announced a sudden shift to a “New Chinese Style–only” format... Posts claim that cosplayers portraying non-Chinese IP characters may be denied entry and that staff will conduct inspections inside the venue to ensure compliance...   The COMICUP decision comes amid a series of recent restrictions on Japanese entertainment in China, particularly in the anime and manga.  In December 2025, the theatrical run of Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle ended abruptly after regulators declined to grant the film a standard release extension. The decision was officially attributed to “unavoidable circumstances,” despite box office performance that would typically support a longer run.  Other Japanese anime films have faced similar uncertainty. Screenings of Detective Conan: The Time-Bombed Skyscraper and the latest Crayon Shin-chan movie have been postponed indefinitely, alongside the live-action adaptation of Cells at Work!, with no revised release schedules announced.  In late November, Japanese singer Maki Otsuki was escorted offstage during a performance in Shanghai, while scheduled Sailor Moon live stage shows in China were also canceled."

Natalie Winters on X - "WATCH: Neil Bush, son of George H.W. Bush and Chair of Bush China Foundation Chair, outlines a plan to make Americans “less fearful” of China. He’s speaking to a Chinese Communist propaganda and spy front that’s paid him millions. Exclusive report below ⬇️"
Melissa Chen on X - "The Chinese have been cultivating influence amongst some of the most prominent American political families for DECADES.  The Bush family's China friendship began in 1974 when George HW Bush served as de facto ambassador to Beijing. As president in 1989, Bush worked hard to smooth relations after Tiananmen, sending a secret delegation to Beijing just a month later.  When Jeb Bush ran against Donald Trump in 2016, he was backed to the tune of $1.3 million by a Chinese couple named Gordon Tang and Haudan Chen who own a property development company in California called SingHaiyi.  They had already appointed Jeb's brother, Neil Bush, as non-executive chairman of their company.  Neil chairs the George HW Bush China-US Relations Foundation which has ties to a known united front body, the Chinese Peoples' Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC). This is an agency that forms an integral part of the CCP's united front work.  In June 2019, Chinese state media People's Daily enthusiastically reported Neil Bush opining that the US was using trade barriers as a "political weapon to bully China." He's on record saying that China is becoming more mature, and that US democracy is flawed and politicians are "brainwashing Americans into seeing China as a problem."  In short, this isn't new. He has been spouting lines as if lifted directly from the CCP's Propaganda Department for years and he is actually DIRECTLY working with the united front, having been personally enriched by these liaisons."

Nguyen Ho on X - "China is trashing the oceans. Each year, 4M tons of juvenile fish are caught before they can breed. That is 1/3 of China’s catch. China has exceeded its legal catch limits every year since 1994."
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "China is destroying much of Earth's ocean life and most environmentalists don't even give a shit"
Melissa Chen on X - "This is so frustrating. It's getting quite hard not to conclude that the environmental movement is primarily an anti-Western vehicle given its silence about arguably the biggest environmental destruction currently being wrought on the planet.   The massive - and potentially irreversible - oceanic destruction by China's huge trawler fleet has been known for about a decade now, but still no one seems to care.  The history of funding and influence links between Russia, China, and some Western environmental groups is well known:  See @UnHerd  article here: https://unherd.com/2025/05/how-china-co-opted-the-green-movement   The longer our most visible environmental activists and orgs stay silent about the behavior of the Chinese trawler fleet, the more we know what their game plan was all along.  Also I seem to recall celebs like Leo DiCaprio caring very much about marine conservation and protection of biodiversity. Sadly, he won’t say shit about this because he would never make another movie again.   He would sooner denigrate Western consumption habits on stage at the Oscars than criticize or use his foundation to do anything about the Chinese destroying swathes of marine ecosystems and overfishing."

BLACK DUMPLING™ on X - "You mean the Leftost movement that crippled American nuclear because "the environment", destroyed American manufacturing to save "the environment" and targeted American AI development for destruction because "the environment" didn't care about the environment?"
Mommar on X - "It's not an accident that the entire western world has been manipulated into killing its fossil fuel industry, limiting its energy usage and output, and thereby destroying its manufacturing base meanwhile China does the complete opposite without an ounce of criticism. This is by design"

Ken Cao-The China Crash Chronicle on X - "Finally, someone in the United States has started asking the obvious question:  what exactly happened to the Qing Dynasty and Republic of China government bonds that the U.S. still holds? If the Chinese Communist Party insists those debts don’t count, then by the same logic, there’s no sacred reason the United States must honor U.S. Treasury bonds held by the CCP either.  And if Beijing’s defense is that “the Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China are not today’s China,” then congratulations—you’ve just invalidated the entire “since ancient times” narrative in terms of Taiwan in one sentence.  You can’t disown history when it comes to debt and then reclaim it when it comes to territory.  I used to think the CCP was playing some kind of grand, long-term chess game. Turns out it wasn’t chess at all. Just a pile of rhetorical boomerangs—thrown confidently, only to come spinning back at full speed."

China Is a Paper Dragon - The Atlantic - "In 2018, the Tufts University professor Michael Beckley published a richly detailed study of Chinese military and economic weaknesses. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower. The book argues that China’s economic, financial, technological, and military strength is hugely exaggerated by crude and inaccurate statistics. Meanwhile, U.S. advantages are persistently underestimated. The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes. Above all, Beckley pleads with readers not to focus on the headline numbers of gross domestic product. China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then—and it will not make China a superpower now, or so Beckley contends. Beckley is a voracious reader of specialist Chinese military journals and economic reports. And, he argues, many of the advances cited as Chinese strengths don’t hold up to close scrutiny. American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.” When Chinese forces do train, Beckley argues, the exercises bear little resemblance to the challenges the People’s Liberation Army would face in a great-power conflict... Worried about Chinese students’ high scores on comparative math tests? You’re looking at the curated outputs of highly selective groups of students... Repression is expensive. Comparing China’s military spending to that of the United States, for example, doesn’t make much sense. The Chinese military’s first and paramount mission is preserving the power of the Chinese Communist Party against China’s own people. The U.S. military can focus entirely on external threats. The lines that plot the comparative GDP of the United States and China distort the real balance of power between the two societies, Beckley argues, because China must devote such a large share of its resources to basic subsistence needs to avert the overthrow of the state... in the 1800s, the Chinese empire had a GDP much larger than that of Great Britain. The Chinese army of 800,000 men also enormously exceeded Britain’s troop numbers. Yet when the two states clashed in the two Opium Wars, from 1839 to 1842 and again in 1858, China was crushingly defeated. Why? A great part of the answer, then as now, was the cost of repression. Nineteenth-century China faced an average of 25 local uprisings a year. Most of its troops had to be deployed to suppress rebellions and control banditry, leaving few available for war-fighting. The next part of the answer is that mass is not power. Although China’s resources were enormous in the aggregate, most were consumed by the basics of subsistence. In the 19th-century, Britain produced only half as much as China, but it did so with one-thirteenth the population—making more wealth available for more purposes. A final piece of the answer is that technological copycats face huge disadvantages against technological innovators. They will always lag behind the more creative rival, not only in the factory, but on the battlefield. “Repeatedly during the Opium Wars … Chinese armies of thousands were routed in minutes by a few hundred, or even a few dozen, British troops,” Beckley notes... the very real limits besetting China: a fast-aging population, massive internal indebtedness, and a regime whose worsening repression suggests its declining popularity... As China’s population ages, it will deplete its savings. Chinese people save a lot to compensate for the state’s meager social-security provision. For three decades, the savings of ordinary people financed the spectacular borrowing of China’s state-owned enterprises. How much was borrowed? Nobody knows, because everybody lies. What happens as the savings are withdrawn to finance hundreds of millions of retirements? Again—who knows? China misallocates capital on a massive scale. More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places. China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital. More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms. The next best alternative: sending their children out."
From 2021

China’s new restrictions on rare earth exports send a stark warning to the West - "Beijing’s new rules announced on Thursday stipulate that licenses will be required for the export of technologies used in rare earth mining and processing, as well as for the manufacturing of magnets, which can be used in military technologies. Crucially, any foreign firm that wants to supply rare earths produced in China or processed with Chinese technologies outside China will also need to get a license, according to China’s Ministry of Commerce... China’s willingness to use its trade heft to advance geopolitical goals should make policymakers in the West wake up to the burgeoning power of China’s manufacturing supply chain and its control over certain so-called ‘chokepoint’ technologies – which it can limit access to at will... Chinese companies compete not only with mid-technology counterparts in the West but also at the apex of the tech pyramid. Research from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) shows that China leads the US in 57 out of 64 critical technology categories."
Time for China to increasing funding for environmental groups blocking rare earth mining

Xi Jinping’s rare earths weapon is backfiring on China - "The dominant narrative at the moment is that Xi has put America in its place with restrictions on rare earths, over which China has a near monopoly. In April, Beijing announced a strict export licensing regime. The measure was turned into a comprehensive set of controls on Oct 9. These actions enhanced restrictions issued in previous years. Reuters reports that Beijing last week agreed not to go ahead with the October rules but left the April measures in place. The White House’s fact sheet has a different slant, stating that general licenses for the export of certain minerals “means the de facto removal of controls China imposed in April 2025 and October 2022”. But the details of the agreement may matter less than the direction of travel. Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, told the Financial Times that China had “made a real mistake” by weaponising rare earths. He also predicted Beijing’s leverage would last no more than 24 months. The Treasury Secretary is right. First, America is moving at “Trump speed” in signing rare earths deals with alternative suppliers, most notably the $8.5bn (£6.5bn) pact inked on Oct 20 when Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited the White House. Moreover, agreements with Thailand and Malaysia signed on Oct 26 and the one with Japan two days later have rare earths provisions. The G7 announced a production alliance on Oct 31. Moreover, the US is working on technologies, such as those being developed at the University of Texas at Austin, that “increase domestic supply and decrease reliance on costly imports”. These new methods could crack Beijing’s firm hold on processing: China currently processes 92pc of the global output of these minerals. While America will make good use of the truce, China will do the opposite. Beijing’s rare earths embargo is accelerating its isolation. “Each embargo justifies a new refinery, alliance, or export control [by China’s opponents],” Tanvi Ratna, an engineer who writes on emerging tech and state power, posted on X. “China’s leverage is real,” she notes, “but it peaks on use”. More fundamentally, Beijing’s rare earths rules take on all other nations, not just the United States. As such, they accelerate the de-globalisation that started with the Covid pandemic. China was clearly the biggest beneficiary of globalisation after the Cold War, and now the country is more trade dependent than at any other time in its history. It, therefore, will almost certainly end up the biggest victim of the de-linking process. Additionally, Xi is now doubling down on policies that make China even more dependent on America. At the Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee, which ended on Oct 23, the Communist Party continued to emphasise industrial production over domestic consumption as the primary driver of the economy, incorporating this priority in the 15th Five-Year Plan, which begins next year. China’s consumers cannot absorb existing factory production, and the economy is already trapped in a deepening deflationary spiral. The Consumer Price Index has been negative six of nine months of this year, and September was the 36th straight month the Producer Price Index, which measures factory-gate prices, was in negative territory. So the country will have to export even more... In response to Trump’s tariffs, Beijing has been selling more to what it calls the “Global South”, but, as Brookings scholar Robin Brooks explains, margins on those sales are lower. China still needs America. American consumers account for about 34pc of global household consumption. With more products to sell, China will need the US more than before. Last year, America accounted for 29.8pc of China’s merchandise trade surplus of $992.2bn (£755bn). Moreover, as each month passes, China’s economy continues to erode. The country’s reported growth figure of 4.8pc for the third quarter of this year is not credible. With even industrial production slowing – the country’s official Purchasing Managers’ Index showed that the contraction in the all-important factory sector deepened last month – President Trump was right to crow that the meeting with Xi was a 12 on a scale of zero to 10. But not for the reasons many commentators might imagine."

Sadly for China, rare Earth elements aren’t actually all that rare - "It all started in July 2023, when the Chinese government announced it would restrict the export of gallium and germanium, two critical minerals that are mostly used in making solar panels and semiconductors. Over the following two years, China’s list of controlled products expanded to include antimony, graphite, and other materials. Earlier this month, the Chinese government escalated things even further, subjecting seven rare earth elements to a more comprehensive export licensing program that covers the whole world and is designed to further choke off American companies... Without them, in many cases, technological infrastructure and consumer gadgets won’t be able to perform at the same level—but they will still maintain their basic functions. “The wind turbines will just go out of service 10 years earlier; electric vehicles will not last as long,” says Wang. Lange agrees that the impact of losing access to heavy rare earth elements would be somewhat manageable for American companies. “One place where that rare earth is in your car is in the motors that pull up and down your window,” says Lange. “There are ways to just deal with some things that are not as fun, like rolling down your windows by hand.” In the past, China’s critical mineral restrictions haven’t worked very well. One reason is that US companies that want to buy rare earth minerals can simply go through an intermediary country first. For example, Belgium has emerged as a possible re-export hub that appears to pass germanium—one of the minerals Beijing first restricted in 2023—from China to the US, according to trade data. Since the European Union has much closer ties with Washington than with Beijing, it’s difficult for the Chinese government to effectively stop this flow of trade. Another sign that China’s export controls haven’t been very effective is that the price of critical minerals has increased only slightly since the policies were first implemented, indicating that supply levels have remained steady. “Whatever they did in 2023 hasn’t really changed the status quo” of the market, says Lange... In the long run, however, companies may be able to find technological solutions to address a potential shortage of rare earth minerals. Tesla, for example, announced in 2023 that it had reduced the use of them in its EV motors by 25 percent, and it planned to get rid of them completely in the future. The carmaker hasn’t clarified what it would use instead, but experts speculate it could be turning to other types of magnets that don’t rely on rare earths... Unlike making advanced semiconductors, which requires using sophisticated machinery worth hundreds of millions of dollars and building extremely complicated factories, critical minerals aren’t that hard to produce. The technologies involved to mine and refine them are mature and both the US and Canada have large natural deposits of some of them. But the mining industry was pushed out of the West because it doesn’t generate much value and is also extremely polluting. In the past, efforts to build up the critical minerals supply chain in the US have either been slowed down or called off. That’s more due to basic economic calculations, says Lange, rather than technological difficulties. “It’s like bending down to pick up a nickel,” he says, meaning the effort isn’t worth the reward. Because companies only need tiny quantities of these minerals, the market for them is very volatile—prices can drop when a single new factory comes online and starts mass producing and refining them. That means if a mining company were to open up shop in the US, it could inadvertently tank the price of the same mineral it’s trying to profit from, says Lange. But if China succeeds in strictly enforcing its export control policies, it might provide just enough incentive for the US government and private companies to finally reshore the mineral refining industry. If that happens, Lange says, it could take about two years for a new critical mineral operation to open in the US."

Lim Tean | Facebook - "The Great Myth Of China Never Having Invaded Other Countries !
Nothing irks me more than to hear the persistent claim, often repeated in public debate, and even by renown scholars such as Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, that China has never invaded other countries and that there is nothing to fear from her unparalleled military build-up over the past 2 decades, and that she is a benign power. This assertion does not withstand serious historical scrutiny and should be rejected plainly and without equivocation.  China’s own imperial history tells a very different story. For more than 2 thousand years, successive Chinese dynasties expanded their territory through military conquest, occupation and coercion, just as other great powers have done throughout history. The Han dynasty pushed Chinese armies deep into Central Asia, conquering the Tarim Basin and waging sustained offensive wars to secure strategic depth and trade routes. The Tang dynasty projected military power across much of Inner Asia, subjugating Turkic states and repeatedly intervening by force in Korea and Vietnam.  The Yuan dynasty launched large-scale invasions across East and Southeast Asia, including Korea, Vietnam and Burma. The Ming dynasty occupied Vietnam for 2 decades, following military conquest while the Qing dynasty- the most territorially expansive of all- used force to absorb Xinjiang, Tibet and Mongolia, effectively doubling the size of the Chinese state. These were not defensive actions. They were wars of expansion, conducted to secure dominance over China’s periphery.  Some argue that these campaigns were softened by so-called tributary system. That, too, is a distortion. Tributary relations were not partnerships of equals ; they were hierarchical arrangements enforced by the credible threat and frequent use of military force. States that resisted were punished. Those that complied did so under pressure. This was order imposed by power, not harmony achieved by consent.  Those who promote the myth of China’s historical exceptionalism ignore one of the most enduring insights of human experience. The great Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian Wars, warned us that human nature does not change, and that fear, interest and power drive the behaviour of states across all eras and cultures. Winston Churchill put it even more starkly when he observed that “the story of the human race is war”. China, like every civilisation before it, is not exempt from these truths.  We must be clear-eyed instead of viewing China through rose-tinted glasses. Power, when unchecked, has always sought expansion. That lesson is as relevant today as it was in antiquity. China’s rise to become a powerful country was never peaceful. It is therefore pointless to pontificate whether her continued rise will be peaceful. It can never be. If we ignore this simple truth and choose to be hypnotised by the smiling Tiger mouthing multi-literalism, we do so at our peril.  In a subsequent post, I shall explain how China has continued with her hard-edged expansionism even in the 20th and 21st centuries."

Roman Baber on X - "The Chinese Communist Party has 2 million muslims in labour camps. The Liberal/Left pretend it's not happening, while Canadian media is fear mongering a US invasion. I lived in USSR for almost 9 years. Canadians are now subjected to Soviet level lies."
Someone claimed this was Russian propaganda. Time to abolish Amnesty International!

Meme - "Is homelessness common in China? I imagine the PRC has social programs to combat this no?"
"No it isn't."
"It's incredibly rare that's why Chinese tourists are always shocked by how many homeless people there are in western cities like Paris or New York"
"For Chinese people, and anyone influence by Confucian thought, homelessness Is heavily looked down upon and is to be prevented as much as possible. It is seen as a sign of a mismanaged or failing society."
"as someone living in china, have seen a lot of homeless people, heck i could probably go outside right now and within a few minutes find 4 or 5
https://ibb.co/rGxbqV5 there you go"

Melissa Chen on X - "YIKES  China just posted a record-breaking $1.2 trillion global trade surplus. The EU's is up 18.1%. Germany's numbers are BONKERS - a staggering 108% surge in surplus, meaning that it now accounts for nearly a third of China's entire EU surplus.   The US has been aggressively correcting its own trade imbalance with China through tariffs and restrictions. The result? China's exports to the US plummeted 20% in 2025, with imports from the US down 14.6%.   Those diverted goods are flooding into Europe, especially Germany. Beijing is redirecting its export machine to softer targets, exploiting the EU's open markets while building dependencies in critical sectors like EVs, batteries, and solar panels. Germany, with its auto giants like Volkswagen and BMW deeply entangled in the Chinese market, is particularly vulnerable.   China's mechanism is through excess production capacity. It identifies a key industry, builds the capacity to produce 90% of global demand, and then flood markets with subsidized exports priced at marginal cost, backed by a 20% undervalued currency.   Domestic markets are decimated. Germany is de-industrialized.   Germany can either admit "Trump was right" or continue getting teabagged by the Chinese."

Pete North on X - "I don't think people truly understand the extent to which China has been plundering and deceiving the West, or the extent to which their own governments let them. The Chinese economy is built on fraud that would make Somalians blush. Virtually everything China sells us is based on stolen IP with fraudulent certification, and made with slave labour, while plundering the world's oceans and polluting the planet like no other.   Then as Europe deindustrialises and offshores its manufacturing to China (along with the knowledge economy that goes with it), it passively allows China to subvert its customs enforcement and tariff regime, and rolls out the red carpet for industrial scale data theft.   Make no mistake. China IS at war with the West. This is an economic war that's been going on for thirty years or more. But Western liberals would rather align with China because Orange man bad. That's the mentality we're dealing with here. For sure, China isn't planning on invading the West, but they don't need to - because we're already handing over everything of value without a fight."

Links - 12th February 2026 (2 - Trans Mania)

Thread by @wesyang on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "There are no "anti-trans extremists."  There is a political party and professional apparatus that put male rapists and murderers in women's prisons, propagandized kindergartners that any of them could change sex, forced taxpayers and insurance customers to fund electrolysis and facial feminization surgeries, put any boy or man who claimed to be female into changing rooms with your daughters, forced you to declare the gender identity of your toddler at the doctor's office, deceived parents about the social transition of their children at school, banned psychological exploration of the mental health comorbidities that manifest as trans-ideation in the midst of an online social contagion generating 5000 percent increases in trans identification among youth, fined all-female nude spas run by immigrants for excluding men with penises who claimed to be women for violating the human rights of those men, imposed men on the athletic playing fields with your daughters, told thousands of parents to submit to the chemical castration of their children to avert imminent suicide risk for which no evidence has ever existed, subjected thousands of children to macabre sex changes procedures while lying about the existence of an evidence base where none ever existed while claiming on the basis of no evidence that the procedures were life-saving, investigated parents who refused to put their children on a pipeline to a lifetime of medicalized self-harm by pretending they had changed sex and sought to seize custody of them, and threatened to unperson you, attack your livelihood and leave you ostracized if you resisted it in any way with the aid of the monopolistic tech platforms that control the circulation of speech and money around the globe in a new surveillance and censorship regime that sought to dismantle biological reality in the name of narcissistic fantasies that it intended to entrench as the only truth while corrupting the truth-seeking apparatus of science itself -- and there is a majority of normal people in both parties who oppose this nonsense and want it stopped. Obviously one can posit the existence of anti-trans extremists who want to put trans people in concentration camps and force them to transition and there may even be individuals who harbor such repressive fantasies. But there is no organized movement anywhere in the world that seeks such outcomes and scarcely any individual with a significant public profile who articulates such a vision. The Trump Administration's EO spells out an agenda with zero overlap with such imaginary anti-trans extremism.  It instead seeks to dismantle institutional investment in and coercive state power over those who wish to opt out of compelled obeisance to falsehoods -- it wishes to undo the institutionalization of the pro-trans extremism that seized control of American institutions under Biden. The transgender movement must observe the same limits on the scope of its ambitions that every movement in a liberal, pluralistic, democratic society must observe. If such limits rule out most of the movement's demands, it reflects the illiberal, undemocratic, and authoritarian nature of its demands which therefore must be refused."

Transgender mum who transitioned from male to female SUES expert for discrimination after being mocked online for breastfeeding her baby - "A transgender mother who underwent medical treatment to breastfeed her newborn son is suing a breastfeeding expert who publicly dismissed her experience as a 'delusional queer theory take'. Former Australian Breastfeeding Association volunteer counsellor Jasmine Sussex will face a Queensland tribunal next year over claims she discriminated against Brisbane transgender woman Jennifer Adrian Buckley. The tribunal will decide if Ms Buckley was discriminated against under the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Act over a series of social media posts by Ms Sussex.  The breastfeeding expert described Ms Buckley as a 'man pretending to be a woman' and referred to transgender male breastfeeding as 'dangerous' and 'experimental'. Buckley is alleging that Ms Sussex's online comments amount to discrimination and vilification, saying that they were 'hurtful'. Ms Sussex told the Daily Mail the case is about protecting the rights of women and preserving the mother-baby relationship. Ms Buckley, who transitioned from male to female, claimed to have successfully induced lactation and breastfed her newborn son in 2019. Her wife, Sandi, had given birth through IVF using sperm Ms Buckley froze before booking sex change surgery.  Ms Buckley said her endocrinologist helped her mimic pregnancy to produce milk and used a range of medications to suppress testosterone, boost oestrogen, and trigger the production of the milk-producing hormone prolactin... others warn further evidence is needed to support the practice, with the potential health outcomes for babies still largely unexplored... Ms Sussex conceded she could have delivered the message more delicately but said her intentions were not to discriminate against Ms Buckley.  'My goal was to alert the ABA that they were dealing with a biological male,' she told the Daily Mail.  Her comment was soon deleted by the ABA, before she was blocked from the organisation's Facebook page.  Within months, the organisation sacked Ms Sussex. The volunteer of 15 years was told it was not related to Ms Buckley's complaint. Behind the scenes, the organisation had been dealing with a dispute over a push to adopt gender-inclusive terminology including 'chestfeeding' and 'pregnant people'. Ms Sussex was among several people who resisted the push, claiming the organisation was made up of 'mothers providing support to other mothers'... Ms Sussex said her defence to the claims of vilification and discrimination would rely on grounds of public interest, human rights and biology.  'Breastfeeding is a sex-specific function,' she said.  'Men can't claim vilification for being told they can't do it.' She plans to call medical experts to challenge the safety of induced lactation in transgender women. 'It's not an issue for me until it affects the wellbeing of babies and mothers… much of my adult life has been about supporting mothers to breastfeed their babies,' she said. 'I just think mothers and babies deserve better than this.'"

Mixed-gender changing rooms becoming a 'magnet' for sexual predators, according to new report - "Police data obtained by the Women’s Rights Network (WRN) showed that 80 sexual assaults, 16 rapes and 65 incidents of voyeurism took place in leisure centres in 2023 – many of them in mixed-gender changing areas.  The report follows earlier WRN research which found that one in three councils no longer offers single-sex changing rooms for swimming pool users, amid what it called “a backdrop of shrinking access” to women-only spaces.  Olympic and Commonwealth swimming champion Sharron Davies MBE described the findings as “shocking” and “horrendous”, warning that mixed-gender facilities were “proving to be a magnet for sexual predators” and “places where females are uniquely vulnerable”.  Although single-sex changing rooms are not mandatory, official guidance states that where they do exist, they must be reserved for biological women.  The WRN has said that mixed-gender “village-style” changing areas are now “the default design” in new leisure centres, and that these layouts “design-in harm” by creating opportunities for avoidable abuse."
Sall Grover on X - "Yeah, that’s why they were created as single sex to begin with. That data has long been confirmed."
Wesley Yang on X - "As with all other progressive lunacies that are instantly translated into policy, we needed to spend a decade accruing enough people harmed by it to have data to prove retrospectively what any sane person knew would necessarily happen from the outset -- and even now, the prospect of any reform to end the policy that has been proven to be harmful is uncertain at best."
There's also the Target changing room study, but TRAs will continue to ignore all the evidence
Keywords: sexual assault, unisex changing rooms, unisex toilets, single sex toilets

Over 5,700 children in 5-year period had gender surgeries, most from 5 liberal states: watchdog - "In a five-year span, thousands of minors had gender reassignment surgeries, puberty blockers or hormone treatments at a number of children's hospitals and medical facilities across the country, a medical watchdog is reporting via their new national database.  Do No Harm, a national advocacy group of medical professionals against "woke" hospital agendas, shared the database, called "Does My Hospital Transition Kids?", with Fox News Digital this week. In total, the group conservatively identified 5,747 minor patients who received sex-change surgery, and 13,994 received some sort of gender reassignment treatment between 2019 and 2023.  The data, de-identified to meet HIPAA compliance rules, shows nearly $120 million total in charges for treatments like sex change surgeries and hormone blockers... "And I think, as you'll hear, we've really been meticulous in trying to make sure that the data are as clear as possible and are as accurate as possible. And because of that, you're going to find that, if anything, we're showing the lower limits of what's going on in this whole arena," he said.  "And to be certain that we're not overstating it one iota, we're probably, and almost certainly, understating the nature of the problem," he added... "Adults can do as they wish, but we feel very strongly that the science behind using these treatments in children is extraordinarily flawed and suggests that children are being harmed in that sense. One of the important issues is to develop some quantitative notion of what's really happening in this arena," Goldfarb said. "And there are lots of myths that are out there, lots of ideas that this is a rare event, lots of ideas that this is localized to just a few places."  Activist and detransitioner Chloe Cole, who underwent a double mastectomy at 15 years old and put on puberty blockers and testosterone at age 13, said the new database "proves the lies from the medical establishment and radical politicians who argue that cases like mine are rare."  "The stats in this database represent thousands of kids who are being treated like Guinea pigs for unproven, and sometimes dangerous, medical experiments. I hope politicians and parents alike use this database to see where these treatments are happening and protect their children from being rushed into irreversible, life-altering treatments," Cole said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital."
"This is not happening, and it's good that it is"

Meme - jess! @jessicobra: "CIS WOMEN STOP SMILING LIKE THAT AT EVERY TRXNNY YOU SEE ON THE STREET
im literally a superior version of you. on my way to get my dick sucked. go home"
MTFs hate women so much

John James on X - "TQ+ have caused so much damage to the gay community. We don’t support castrating kids We don’t support telling boys they’re girls We don’t support telling girls they’re boys We don’t support men in women’s sports We don’t support death threats We don’t support your narcissism"

Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌ on X - "Imagine a scenario in which large numbers of white people start saying that they “feel black,” and that because of this feeling, and their enjoyment of stereotypically “black behavior,” they are now not just black themselves, but the most marginalized and vulnerable type of black person.     Imagine them insisting that they should be the main focus of all activism meant to help PoC. Imagine them having operations to darken their skin and mimic stereotypically black features.   Imagine them walking around in blackface, and saying it’s the exact same thing as actually being black.   Imagine them being honored as black citizens by the White House, being summoned to talk to the President about issues facing the black community, being supported by celebrities, and having laws passed to make white people who identify as black a protected class.     Imagine these people demanding membership in black organizations, insisting that they receive a share of the reparations that CA is about to pay, and demanding they be given awards created specifically to honor black achievement. Then imagine them getting their way.    Now imagine mobs of them showing up to black events that don’t include them, carrying threatening signs and air horns to drown out any speakers with noise. Imagine them coming up with slurs for any black person who doesn’t accept that white people are black if they say they are.     Imagine them calling for the rape, torture, and mass murder of any black person who disagrees with them. Imagine them getting black people doxxed, harassed, assaulted, fired from their jobs, and investigated by the police for saying that you have to be born black to be black.     Now imagine the government supporting their demands.    That’s exactly the position that women are in right now, with a few extras, like being locked in cells with dangerous men, the sexual predation of lesbians via coercion, and the increased risk of sexual assault in what used to be female-only spaces. Our oppressors are now claiming not only the right to oppress us in whole new ways, but the right to erase our identities as women and rewrite the meaning of womanhood in ways that suit - and include - them.    If you wouldn’t support this kind of behavior towards black people, you have no business supporting this kind of behavior towards women."

Why Canada could be the last holdout for trans pseudoscience - spiked - "While the US, UK, Sweden, Italy and others are banning puberty blockers and other dangerous procedures, the Great White North remains committed to this increasingly discredited medical fraud.  There is only one place in Canada that's resisting the trans othodoxy: Alberta. The province, which is governed by the United Conservative Party, recently took steps to prevent the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on minors, as well as surgeries like mastectomies. 'Alberta introduces Canada's harshest anti-trans policies yet', read the headline in Xtra, a Canadian 'LGBTQ2S+' online magazine. If 'harshest anti-trans policies' means protecting women and children, then that is precisely what Alberta's Conservatives are trying to do. In October, premier Danielle Smith introduced three changes to advance this objective. They include the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act, which bans males from competing against females, and an amendment to the Education Act to ensure that parents are notified if their child uses a different name or pronouns at school. Then there is the Health Statutes Amendment Act, which prohibits sex-reassignment surgery for minors, as well as the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to anyone under the age of 16. This need for each of these laws should be obvious. They follow major, systematic reviews of 'gender-affirming care' in Sweden, Finland, the US, the UK and even Canada - all of which reduced the arguments of trans activists to rubble. Of these investigations, undoubtedly the most significant was last year's Cass Review, commissioned by NHS England... Clearly, the bulk of Canadian doctors either haven't read, or refuse to accept, these reports. This became apparent last month, when the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) announced that it intends to file a constitutional challenge to Alberta's Health Statutes Amendment Act on the basis it undermines 'the freedom of conscience of physicians'. 'This legislation has put me and many of my colleagues in a state of moral crisis', wailed Jake Donaldson, a Calgary-based physician. The CMA's intervention warrants closer scrutiny, not least because of its blatant hypocrisy. In 2020, Canada's then attorney general, David Lametti, tried to make it illegal for doctors to question a child's 'gender identity', doing so under the banner of banning 'conversion therapy'. In the CMA's, this did not apparently violate the 'freedom of conscience' of Canadian doctors. Yet preventing doctors from offering drugs that arrest the natural physical development of minors, render them sterile and permanently disfigure their bodies supposedly does. Go figure. Donaldson was at least right about one thing. 'These patients are a vulnerable group that already face significant and disproportionate discrimination, violence and mental- health challenges', he said. These patients are indeed vulnerable. They are minors who don't understand the very serious repercussions of the path they are being led down by trusted authorities, and are in no position to consent to such drastic, dangerous and permanent measures. Instead of using arguments based on evidence, doctors like Donaldson instead prefer a form of emotional blackmail. Last month, in response to the Alberta bills, he cited a study claiming that US states with restrictive gender laws experienced 'significant increases' in suicide attempts in transgender groups. This is bogus, to put it mildly... In recent years, we have seen this type of argument used repeatedly in the form of accusations that those of us challenging trans ideology have 'blood on our hands'. But it is doctors who offer these treatments to minors who really do have blood on their hands. It is a complete abandonment of medical ethics, and as unscientific as it is unethical. Yet in Canada, doctors are fighting for the right to destroy the bodies and lives of countless youth. Canada's bizzarro world reigns."

Trans row: 'Women-only' block of London flats now accepts men who 'identify as women' - "A "women-only" affordable housing scheme in London has said it will accept male-born transgender women on its waiting list.  The 102-flat Brooke House in Ealing will welcome applicants who were born male but now identify as women.  However, transgender men, those born female who now identify as male, cannot apply for the development.  The Women's Pioneer Housing Association now appears to describe the project as "women-led" rather than women-only. Residents' male family members will be permitted to live at the site... The Supreme Court ruled in July that the terms "sex", "man" and "woman" in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex."
The law is only to be respected when it pushes the left wing agenda

London child protection body scraps ‘gender ideology’ training after legal challenge - "London’s child-protection body has abandoned its gender training programme, which advised frontline professionals to learn neopronouns such as “zirself” and “eirself,” as well as family and relationship titles including “dommy,” “zaza,” “nibling,” “datefriend,” and “loveperson,” following a legal threat.  The city-wide child protection partnership — the Safeguarding Children Partnership (LSCP) — which sets training standards for safeguarding professionals across the capital, had included these terms in an online course offered to staff in key safeguarding positions, including teachers, social workers, and NHS staff... A Bayswater spokesperson said: “It’s unacceptable that a publicly funded body failed to check the assertions made by Ms Martinez, especially in this vital area of safeguarding children.  "Underlying a trans identity in a child are complex pre-existing factors such as childhood trauma, sexual abuse, bullying, autism, ADHD, and social isolation. In this so-called safeguarding training, Ms Martinez wrongly and dangerously suggested that once a child questions their gender identity, it’s an open-and-shut case: they must be affirmed in their ‘new identity.’  “However, there are significant risks to any social transition or affirmation of identity — not just parental alienation, but also physical harms from binding (of breasts), tucking (of male genitalia), and DIY hormones.” They added: “Indoctrinating safeguarding professionals to act in this way is like instructing the bank manager to rob a bank. We hope this case will highlight the ideological capture of safeguarding training for trans-identifying children and bring some very overdue scrutiny into this area.”  Bayswater Support Group is represented by solicitor Paul Conrathe, who said the training conflicted with statutory guidance and the independent Cass Review into gender services. He said: “This training not only completely misrepresented the law but advocated for activism""

Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌ on X - "It takes a lot to really shock me. I get pissed off about horrible things, but they don’t really shock me. This does. This paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics draws a comparison between female genital mutilation and “gender affirming” surgeries — and uses the latter as justification for the former.   To be clear: after pushing an entire generation of gay and autistic children to volunteer for genital mutilation, these people are using that as an excuse to cut up little girls‘ vulvas with neither consent nor the presence of a medical professional, let alone any kind of pain management.  And just like that, gender ideology has become justification for the most barbaric custom on planet Earth."
Trans mania has so many downsides

Stephanie Winn, LMFT | ROGD Repair on X - "After analyzing 2,700 detransitioner stories, @pjamessteven noticed a striking pattern: women transition to escape being sexualized. Men transition to sexualize themselves. Two opposing forces driving the same phenomenon. He has more insights on his platform @DetransAI.

Skate Canada won't host Alberta events due to gender law
deccmate on X - "What you should be wondering is “what is Skate Canada going to do when the Olympics announces the new rules around female participation in female sport in January?” In typical Canadian fashion, trans activists have no idea that the rest of the world has left 2018 behind."

Sam Morgan on X - "“Trans” activism is the idea that the more unstable, mentally ill, perverted or dishonest a man is, the more important it is to give him access to vulnerable women and children."

‘I dared to question gender theory at Cambridge. Students carved Terf into my door’ - "  University of Cambridge students allegedly carved the word “Terf” into a fellow undergraduate’s door after she showed interest in gender-critical books.  Thea Sewell, 20, says she was ostracised by friends at Christ’s College and condemned as a “bigot” for possessing literature which disputed gender theory – the notion that gender is changeable.  The second-year philosophy undergraduate, who is a survivor of childhood sexual assault, says she continues to be shouted at in the street for allegedly holding “reprehensible” beliefs on gender.  Ms Sewell has now co-founded the Cambridge University Society of Women (CUSW) with other gender-critical students to fight for the right to express their views. Cambridge has recently come under fire after Newnham, its oldest women-only college, said it would welcome trans women as students despite April’s Supreme Court ruling that the definition of a woman under the Equality Act means someone who was born female.  The wider university, however, has banned transgender women from women’s college boat races following the court’s clarification on the legal definition.  Ms Sewell said she had bought books by Kathleen Stock, the former University of Sussex professor, Alex Byrne, the philosopher, and Helen Joyce, the gender-critical author, at a talk by the latter in Oxford in April... she was confronted by a different friend in a communal kitchen in the college who asked her, “Are you a Terf?”, an acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”.  “I actually first said, ‘No, I’m not a Terf’,” she recalled. “And I still actually would stand by that, because I think that that term doesn’t necessarily allow for the nuance that my opinion has.  “I asked her why she thought that, and she said she knew that I owned some gender-critical books, and she knew I’d gone to the Helen Joyce talk. I said to her, ‘Okay, what’s the problem with that? I’m a philosophy student. I’m going to own philosophy books. I could also own Mein Kampf. It wouldn’t make me a Nazi.’  “Her response was that buying books from bigots is the same as being a bigot,” she said.  Ms Sewell then confronted the friend to whom she originally showed her books.  “Her tone was completely different to anything that it had ever been to my face,” she said. “She told me that I was a bigot and that everyone deserved to know my hateful views on trans people.” The friend then ended the call and Ms Sewell had a panic attack. Over the next fortnight, she struggled to sleep and said she was “completely cut off by pretty much all of my friends, bar maybe one or two”. Others told her they “loved” her but could not be seen with her in public because of “social optics”, while her “college wife” – a fellow student with whom she was due to help settle in some of next year’s undergraduates – “divorced” her... the college condemned her treatment and the graffiti as bullying, and the matter was investigated. But Ms Sewell said she was unaware of any disciplinary action being taken... “I think what needs to happen is that academics need to start coming out loudly for free speech. We need a real culture change because people are really, really scared to speak their minds, academics and students alike.”  Ms Sewell found her treatment particularly shocking because her fellow students knew she had been abducted and subject to a serious sexual assault in 2019, when she was 14... “My feeling is one of outrage,” she said. “Every single person in my college knew about that, and if I was them, even if I was captivated by gender ideology, I would think, ‘Wait a minute, I’m going to have a chat with Thea, because I’m sure that her views on this matter will be influenced by her experience as a teenager.’  “And it absolutely has informed my beliefs because I know just how important single-sex spaces are for women.”   Ms Sewell is continuing her studies at Cambridge but now attends fewer lectures and tutorials in person because she fears how fellow undergraduates will treat her.  Her former friends continue to ignore her, while other students stare, surreptitiously take her photograph and shout abuse, she says.  But she and other gender-critical students are hopeful that CUSW will change the atmosphere at the university. “Students don’t know that being gender-critical is a protected belief,” she said. “That’s something that I think people are gradually waking up to, because our society has not been shut down. I think they were under the impression that university authorities or even the police would come and shut us down, but obviously that’s not going to happen. Our success will change things.”"
The crowd who are against "banned books" want to ban books that oppose the left wing agenda

‘Transphobic’ Christmas card pulled from Sainsbury’s - "A Christmas card has been removed from Sainsbury’s shelves after being branded transphobic.  The card was deemed offensive for featuring a cartoon of Dr Seuss’s Grinch character alongside the caption: “This Christmas, I’m identifying as a Grinch.”"