Links - 22nd September 2026 (2 - Migrants: Europe [including Ceuta Invasion])

Inevitable West on X - "🚨BREAKING: Ceuta locals are now tracking down and BLOCKING vehicles belonging to the Red Cross NGO, in order to halt their operations across the enclave This is unprecedented. They are warning the Red Cross to leave immediately. An uprising has begun in Ceuta. 🇪🇸"

Inevitable West on X - "🚨BREAKING: Ceuta police have desperately warned that illegal migrants are kidnapping young girls, taking them to the mountains, and then gang-raping them This is mass rape by invading barbarians, and Pedro Sánchez is facilitating it. 🇪🇸"
Gemini claimed the claims were unverified when there's literally a media article on it

Mario Nawfal on X - "🇪🇸🇲🇦 Two Spanish volunteers helping the invaders who stormed Ceuta… while wearing Palestine T-shirts. Do they not know Morocco is allied with Israel and the U.S.? 0 political knowledge. These people have NO idea what they’re supporting. Writer: Samuel"

Inevitable West on X - "🚨WATCH: A mother in Ceuta has broken down in tears on Live TV: "My 16-year-old daughter has to go everywhere with her father or with me because the migrants devour her. I can't take it anymore. I want them all gone." The left-wing feminists are silent."

TaraBull on X - "Ceuta, Spain has turned into a third-world hellhole in a just a couple of weeks"

Visegrád 24 on X - "🇪🇸 The President-Mayor of Spain's enclave of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas, has officially given Pedro Sánchez’s government a 30-day ultimatum to resolve the migration crisis overwhelming the autonomous city, or else he will initiate legal action."

euronews on X - "Spain ignores EU and prepares urgent transfer of 500 migrant girls from Ceuta to mainland"
Connor Allen on X - "'Not a single person' from Ceuta entered Schengen, they told you. European leaders were right to mull Spain's suspension from Schengen because they knew that, given enough time, they would start bringing hundreds over. Schengen cannot function with Trojan Member States."

Mario Nawfal on X - "🇪🇸🇲🇦 Illegal migrants in Ceuta are protesting for the right to stay despite entering the city in the most offensive way 2 weeks ago. Their sense of entitlement is insane. Spain is cooked. Source: RT News / Writer: Mhedi"

Meme - AJ Edelman @realajedelman: "Correct me if I'm wrong, but Spain traditionally calls this an "apartheid wall.""
"Spain installing containment fence between Morocco and Ceuta after massive frontier rush killed 67"

How Britain can stop small boats, from the man who halted Sweden’s migrant wave - "Britain can stop small boats crossing the Channel without leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), says the man who slashed Sweden’s migrant wave.  Sweden is expected to receive only 4,200 asylum seekers this year, its lowest number since 1984.  Since the Right-wing coalition government took power in 2022, deportations have increased by 60 per cent and asylum claims have dropped by 75 per cent.  Johan Forssell, the minister for migration, said cutting migrant benefits, deporting criminals and forcing asylum seekers to live in reception centres had helped cut arrivals to record lows. “If you come to Sweden, you need to learn Swedish, you need to find a job, you cannot commit crimes. That is not an extreme view, is it?” he told The Telegraph. He said the people-smugglers’ boats and the tens of thousands of migrants storming the Spanish exclave of Ceuta last week were a warning.  “There are so many Leftists nowadays saying the migrant crisis is over. The situation in the UK has taught everyone that migration is still a very explosive topic, and the crisis is not over. And that is the same lesson that Europe learned last weekend with Spain [...] we need to secure our borders.”   During the 2015 European migrant crisis, Sweden received more than 162,000 asylum applications in a single year – the highest per capita rate in the European Union.  In 2024, the government reported net emigration, more people leaving than arriving, for the first time in over 50 years. Mr Forssell said that it was possible to cut illegal immigration and boost deportations without leaving the ECHR but warned that the treaty needed reform.  He said: “We are fully committed to doing things by the book. But we have seen some cases, especially regarding criminals, where these conventions have protected them, the criminals, rather than the victims of crime, and that will not stand.” Mr Forssell said Tory and Reform UK threats to quit the Council of Europe and its Strasbourg court were a “consequence of a system that has been working in favour of criminals rather than in favour of their victims”.  “A criminal saying, ‘I don’t want to go back home’ is not a reason for still being in the country,” he said, adding that the ECHR was “absolutely outdated”. Sweden is involved in the push to reform the ECHR, which Sir Keir Starmer’s government also supported. It also backs EU moves to set up Rwanda-style offshore detention camps for failed asylum seekers... The coalition is led by Ulf Kristersson, prime minister and leader of the centre-Right Moderates. It is propped up by the hard-Right, anti-migrant Sweden Democrats, which remained formally outside of government despite coming second in 2022.  Its fingerprints were all over the government’s crackdown on illegal immigration, which came after an election dominated by a crime epidemic blamed on gangs with immigrant backgrounds  It included laws ensuring all asylum seekers lived at government-run reception centres and not in private housing. If claims are denied, they are moved to tougher detention centres.  The law was changed to allow the authorities to check migrants’ smartphones at airports for digital evidence of destroyed papers.  The government introduced laws to make claiming citizenship more difficult and deporting criminals easier, as well as tougher family reunification rules.  Accepted refugees are also no longer granted permanent residence as a matter of course. Instead, their claim is reviewed every three years."
Too bad the UK vigorously protects "human rights", so this won't work

Dries Van Langenhove on X - "A very sad announcement.  I have just been convicted a second time for 'hate speech' and it is only due to a technicality that I could not immediately be sent to jail —to the judge's frustration.  In an ironic turn of events it's actually thanks to my previous prison sentence (for memes in a private group chat) that I am now still free —in a physical sense, at least.  Call me naive but I didn't think they would take it this far, given that this precedent criminalises many of the arguments used by even the most moderate politicians critical of mass migration.  In February 2024 I gave a lecture at Catholic University Leuven wherein I linked mass migration to crime and a deterioration of our quality of life. Every single point I made was 100% the truth and based on scientific evidence.  Cynically, even the judge that convicted me admits as much by writing in his verdict: “Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law.”   That's a lot of words just to say he wants to send me to prison for speaking the truth.  Even the regime media write: "It did not matter to the court that Van Langenhove was quoting scientific sources. The judge argued that Van Langenhove's main message was that a big part of the societal problems like insecurity, housing shortages and lowering educational standards are due to mass migration."  You may think the regime media are being sympathetic to me in the first sentence, but in reality they are warning people: even if you speak the truth, if you go against our narrative, we will crush you in every way possible.   Both the public prosecutor and the judge did not present a single real argument as to how or against whom I would have incited hatred. So even if I would accept their crazy, dystopic law, I still did not break it.   The only argument they present is that I created a "hostile atmosphere of us versus them” in regards to migrants. But even this silly argument (which is not even a punishable offence) is not true. To me, the deadly disease is self-hatred and one of its worst symptoms is replacement migration. My enemy is thus NOT the migrants themselves but those orchestrating the mass migration.  Sadly, in Belgium, evidence is not needed and ‘vibes’ are enough to put someone in jail.  Given the fact that I have another court case coming up in September and that I have a dozen active criminal investigations for hate speech, time is running out for me. I have already paid more than €420,000 in legal fees and there is no ending in sight. I have been in an intense battle of attrition for eight years and must now regroup to make sure I can still win.  If you want to help me, you can do so via the links below. If you can help in other ways, please contact me via DM.  If you live in a country that still has free speech, never let them touch it, however noble they make the motives sound, because this is where it leads to."
Truth is illegal in Europe. Clearly this protects "Democracy"

Lars Andersen on X - (Translated from Danish): "Recipe for Tyranny in Denmark:
1. Let hundreds of thousands of Muslims immigrate.
2. Let the population see that crime, radicalization, and insecurity are rising.
3. Refuse to mention the actual cause and let the state-owned and -funded media downplay it. Talk about "youth" as the problem.
4. Introduce draconian measures that dismantle all Danes' privacy. For example, constant surveillance of car traffic, abolition of the right to encryption, and grotesquely expanded powers for PET, including constant monitoring of social media, health records, and the right to impose ankle monitors on those not convicted.
5. Tell your unthinking and obedient voters that it's all about being freer (because without security, there is no freedom) and spice up your excuse by saying it's for the children's sake if you get tired of mentioning the terror threat.
6. Watch millions of water-cooler and hamster-wheel people beg for more and attack everyone who opposes the madness.
And voilà, you have a society that in a short time has dropped almost all liberal rule-of-law principles without solving the underlying cause of the problem—and thus you can continue indefinitely."
This is without even going into how divide and conquer was used to rule native populations under colonialism

Arab refugees in sights of Berlin's crime 'clans' - "Berlin crime gangs of Arab origin have long earned infamy with violence and brazen robberies but now, police warn, they have targeted a new generation of refugees for recruitment.  Known in the media as Berlin's "clans", whose founders themselves fled war in Lebanon in the 1980s, they have long controlled much of the city's illegal drugs trade, street prostitution and protection rackets... The dozen or so Arabic and Kurdish-origin extended families, with their patriarchal structures and codes of honour, have also been mythologised by rap artists and portrayed in the TV series "4 Blocks"... The clans "are trying to get others to do the dirty work" such as selling drugs or committing small burglaries, said Benjamin Jendro of the GDP police union.  Many refugees, he said, are "men who have arrived alone in Germany" and who "have not yet had to do with the justice system," making it less likely they will go to prison if caught... The migrant wave that peaked three years ago sparked a xenophobic backlash in Germany, and stoked heated debate about integration efforts and crimes committed by foreigners.  This has thrown a new focus on the clans and raised questions about how Berlin's police could let them openly flout the law for so long in a generally fairly low-crime country.  Germany's best-known rapper, Bushido, long boasted about his close ties to one Berlin clan -- until they had a falling out this year and he sought the protection of a rival group.  Bushido's wife, Anna-Maria Ferchichi, told news weekly Stern that the couple now feared for their lives from gangsters who had formed "parallel societies right here in Germany". The clans' latest show of force was the September 13 funeral of an infamous underworld figure, when 2,000 mourners congregated in the Islamic section of a Berlin cemetery, watched over by some 150 police. In scenes Stern described as "worthy of a mafia movie", they paid their last respects to Nidal Rabih, a 36-year-old violent repeat offender who had been shot dead in front of his family days earlier.  Rabih, a Palestinian born in Lebanon, had achieved cult status in the Berlin criminal underworld.  Boasting more than 100 offences from robbery to attempted manslaughter, he had spent more than a decade behind bars but avoided a 2004 deportation attempt when Lebanon refused to issue him a passport. Days after his death, Berlin municipal workers guarded by police whitewashed over a wall mural at the murder scene that depicted Rabih in the style of a martyred Islamic fighter. Sociologists say the story of Berlin's clans is a cautionary tale about failed integration.  Their patriarchs mostly arrived in the 1980s as refugees from then war-torn Lebanon, among them Palestinians and members of Turkey's Arabic and Kurdish minorities.  Many had only temporary protection status and "did not have access here to education or work", said Islamologist Mathias Rohe, arguing that this sped up the descent into delinquency.  The extended families, aside from now running large chunks of Berlin's illegal economy, have also committed some of the city's most headline-grabbing criminal stunts... Berlin's police is now under fire for having long neglected the problem -- something researcher Ralph Ghadban blames partially on a "fear of stigmatising and discriminating against certain minorities"."
From 2018

Instagram - "Muslim refugee in Germany:  "I've been here for three years and I hate everyone. This is a country of infidels.  I don't care that they accepted me as refugee. A Muslim who doesn't accept me is a million times better than a non-Muslim who accepts me."  That is their mentality."

An Update on Sweden’s Experiments in Remigration - "Considering that 75% of all “child migrants” the Swedish state tested were lying about their age and the fact that migrants in the country are 30 times more likely than native Swedes to commit fraud against the Swedish state it stands to reason that huge percentages of migrants committed fraud against the Swedish nation in the lead up to acquiring their citizenship not to mention their refugee status or residence permit. It is also worth mentioning that this 75% fraud rate among would-be asylum seekers is similar to the 80% fraud rate amongst “family members” of refugees to the United States or the estimated 70% fraud rate among immigrants who applied for amnesty under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), commonly referred to as the Reagan Amnesty... Sweden’s government recently announced that it was looking into sending foreign criminals to serve their sentences abroad. The country wants to lease jail cells in other countries and send criminals abroad (alongside Swedish jailers) for the duration of their sentence. If the criminals are foreign nationals, they may not be allowed to return to Sweden. This is a fantastic policy, but it is not without issues. The primary issue is that the Swedish state wants to lease prison spaces only in other European countries when the reality is that most foreign and non-Swedish criminals are not other Europeans but are instead non-Europeans from the third world."

Alex Armstrong on X - "Guess what? The EU is going to exclude “fighting age Ukrainian men” from being able to claim refugee status. They’ll have fighting age men from South East Asia and Africa, some of them from countries that aren’t even at war, like Pakistan, but not from their own continent."

Irish killer who dismembered landlord escapes during supervised outing in Barcelona - "An Irishman who admitted last year to killing his landlord and dumping his mutilated body in a waste container in Barcelona has reportedly escaped from prison.  William Morrow Anderson was serving a jail sentence of just over ten years for homicide and desecrating his victim’s body.  A manhunt was launched yesterday for the 54-year-old after he vanished during a supervised “scheduled outing” with a social worker in the Catalan capital.  Local press are reporting he had been enjoying a stroll and a coffee in the trendy Born area of Barcelona with his therapist and also his partner as part of a reintegration programme and fled a car they then got into when it stopped at a red traffic light.   He was last seen on Tuesday in an emblematic avenue in Barcelona called Calle de la Marina...     He ended up being caged for 10 years after pleading guilty to a charge of homicide and another three months for desecrating his victim’s body. A mental disorder he is said to be suffering was taken into account as a mitigating circumstance.  Prosecutors had accused the self-confessed killer of fatally attacking his German victim Alireza Rahideh two days after he had sub-let him a room in a seventh-floor flat in a central Barcelona street called calle Casanova...   The killer claimed after his arrest he got into a fight with his victim and didn’t intend to end his life when he hit him although further details did not emerge at his trial because of his plea bargain deal...   The Irishman said to be on the run was an inmate at Quatre Camins Prison in the province of Barcelona.  Although he is not due to be released until October 2033, he is already said to have been enjoying temporary prison outings."

PeterSweden on X - "The Socialists are campaigning in Arabic for the upcoming elections in Sweden. They are currently leading in the polls and are likely to form the next Swedish government."
Future Reality on X - "Campaigns and political information has always bothered me when it is not in the native language. Because in most countries there is a requirement to know the language to be a citizen and thereby be eligible to vote. So there should be no need for information in other languages."

Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 on X - ""Palestinian" Muslim scholar:  “Europeans are lowlifes and a civilization of prostitutes, promiscuity, and homosexuality.  We will conquer Paris and Rome and rule Europe through Islam.”  And Europe has plebs waving their flags and chanting for it.🤡"
Time to jail this Islamophobe!

Rotterdam imposes unprecedented nighttime exclusion zone after years of disorder by anti-social migrant youth gangs - "Rotterdam has introduced an unprecedented nighttime exclusion zone across large parts of the De Esch neighborhood following nearly three years of street racing, drug use, intimidation, prostitution, and persistent noise from migrant youth gangs.  The order, which took effect on Thursday evening, makes it a criminal offense to enter the designated area between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. without a valid reason. Police can fine anyone unable to explain why they are there.  Residents, workers, visitors to local homes, and people attending events, restaurants, or bars are exempt."
Damn climate change!
Damn gentrifiers! Can't they understand that only rich white people like silence?!

Rotterdam residents say 'shady' new arrivals have made streets unsafe after latest shootings - "Residents of IJsselmonde say the area has changed sharply in recent years... Police later found a machete in nearby bushes. “They found that. I was quite shocked,” Richard said. “Bombs have already been dropped here twice at number 32. It used to be a really nice neighborhood, but since that apartment complex was built, it’s not fun anymore. It’s commonplace.”  He said he is now considering moving. “I will look into moving. Maybe to Zeeland or Brabant. Just because of this. It used to be quiet here. Not anymore.”   Other residents say the atmosphere has worsened since the construction of a nearby apartment complex. “It’s gotten worse in the last year and a half or so,” said one man who wished to remain anonymous. “This used to be a nice neighborhood. Now it’s just become a disaster.”"

Whyvert on X - "In France, only about 50-60% of third world immigrants are in employment. Low-skill immigration is not going to pay for all those pensions."

Joey Mannarino on X - "A 23-year-old woman in Milan had her face permanently slashed and disfigured by an Algerian Muslim migrant.  Their eyes met for a second and he screamed “What are you looking at? I’m a man and I’m Muslim!” before punching her and carving her face open with a blade.  This same piece of garbage had been arrested the night before for theft and smashing up parked cars. A judge let him walk free immediately.  Europe keeps importing these savages, then acts shocked when their women end up scarred for life in the streets.  The judges releasing these monsters are just as responsible as the politicians who opened the borders in the first place.  Italy needs to stop pretending this is normal."

PeterSweden on X - "Unbelievable story from Sweden.  A 98 year old woman with dementia was placed in a nursing home.   About a week after admission she was diagnosed with hip fracture, four broken ribs and more.  The nursing staff spoke Arabic among themselves, leading to communication difficulties.  Staff tried to teach the woman Arabic as well.  Despite her injuries, she was not sent to hospital.  She eventually got transferred to another nursing home and then hospital weeks later where she died.  WHAT'S GOING ON WITH ELDERLY CARE IN SWEDEN???"

Dutch minister forced to cancel surprise visit to asylum center - "A planned visit by the Dutch asylum minister Bart Van den Brink to the Ter Apel asylum application centre has been cancelled at short notice due to security risks, highlighting ongoing tensions at one of the Netherlands’ most pressured reception facilities...   It has faced repeated criticism from local authorities, residents, and politicians over safety incidents, drug-related issues, and the impact on the surrounding community.  Previous visits by ministers and officials have sometimes been met with protests or required heightened security.  Next to a series of violent incidents and stabbings in the centre, there also have been problems in the wider neigbourhood, with a spike in shoplifting, intimidation and other criminality that people connect with the asylum seekers.   Just before the cancelled visit, it was reported that in the first four months of this year, far more cases of shoplifting were recorded in Ter Apel than in previous years. Almost every theft, 141 out ot 144, was linked to the reception centre.  Fifty-three people have been arrested in connection with the thefts, 50 of them in Ter Apel.  All the reports of crime have led to the deployment of the maximum number of police and security personnel...   Critics have noted the contrast with claims often made by left-leaning politicians and advocacy groups that asylum centres cause few problems for surrounding communities and that security concerns are overstated or motivated by political prejudice."
Left wing logic: this proves they need more money and/or not all the shoplifting cases were due to asylum seekers, so you can't blame them. They can't even fall back on the cope that the majority of shoplifting cases were not by asylum seekers so you need to ignore per capita. Of course, if you steadily increase populations which have a high per capita incidence of problems, eventually they will account for the majority of the problems

Amy Mek on X - "Breaking: The AfD’s Remigration Anthem Ignites Germany!
“We’re Deporting ALL of Them!”  That’s the message blasting through Germany right now, as the AfD’s youth wing drops the most controversial remix yet. The song “Wir schieben sie alle ab!” [We’re Deporting Them All!] is echoing nationwide, angering the political establishment. The left is losing their minds, but the people? They’re cheering it on!   The AfD is done with open borders, done with the unchecked wave of migrants that’s brought crime, chaos, and cultural collapse. This isn’t just a party song – it’s a battle cry. A call to defend Germany from the failed policies that have left neighborhoods unrecognizable and citizens fearful in their own country.   While the left-wingers and their media buddies try to censor it, calling for investigations, lawsuits, and even criminal charges, the AfD stands firm. They’re not backing down. Tino Chrupalla, the AfD chairman, says it best: This is a celebration of victory, of reclaiming what’s been lost.  Germany’s night has come. The AfD is leading the way with no apologies. They’re pushing back against the flood of migrants and the weak and corrupt leaders who allowed this mess. It’s time for REAL change. Time to put Germany first.  Support the AfD – They’re the only party fighting to defend Germany from the chaos of mass immigration. Share this post if you believe in standing up for your country, and let the world know:  We’re Deporting Them ALL!"
From 2024

Meme - Smirkley @Smirkley: "Liberals and leftists label a shower and a hurricane rain and call it a day. Nobody boards up the windows for a shower."
"Muslims in Europe are more anti-gay than natives
% holding each view, Muslims vs native comparison groups
"Homosexuality should be illegal" British Muslims 52% General public 11%
"Reject homosexuals as friends" Muslims 60% Christian natives 13%"

PeterSweden on X - "You probably never heard about this from the mainstream media. Italy is now INVESTIGATING the captain of a NGO ship who claimed to do rescue missions. The captain is suspected of WORKING with people smuggler networks to bring people into Europe illegally"
Clearly, if the UK doesn't grant asylum to people from Bangladesh who have come through Italy, they are violating their human rights

ⴰⵀⴰⵣ 🇩🇿 on X - "Denmark is so funny bc they’re so leftist on pretty much everything but immigration"
ObtainerOfRareAntiquities on X - "It’s funny when Europeans try to say “the rise of the far right has nothing to do with immigration” and the only Western European country without a growing far right movement is the one with the strongest immigration controls"
The left wing cope is that by being strict on immigration they automatically qualify as far right anyway so nothing else matters

Freyja. Missing Children Advocate🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 on X - "An 82-year-old woman with dementia was allegedly raped in her own home by the caregiver entrusted with looking after her.  Her son witnessed the attack through surveillance cameras he had installed because he was worried about his mother. The 26-year-old Afghan caregiver was arrested that day and reportedly confessed while in custody.  According to the family, what happened next was almost as revealing.  They say the care organization offered them no meaningful support and instead told the son that continued care would require disabling the cameras and warned that the caregiver could potentially complain about being filmed without permission.  The victim’s lawyer says the assault caused devastating psychological harm and that she subsequently spoke repeatedly about wanting to die.  A vulnerable elderly woman was supposed to be the person everyone in this system protected.  When the bureaucracy’s instinct after something this horrific is to start discussing the rights of the man caught on camera, something has gone profoundly wrong with its moral priorities. Credit Basic optimism"

Costs of public transit projects are out of control, experts say

Time to blame "capitalism" and for more regulation! European countries are autocracies, which is why they can build public transport for cheaper.

Costs of public transit projects are out of control, experts say

"On the surface, high-tech methods employed to build the latest extension of Montreal’s métro system seem revolutionary.

A tunnel-boring machine that stands three storeys, or 12 metres high, rotates at a rate of five turns per minute to dig roughly 15 metres of métro tunnels per day, while pouring concrete behind it to seal it all up. Such technology makes it relatively easy to put together major subway expansion projects, as the tunnel machine will dig four kilometres of tunnel in roughly 18 months.

But when you dig deep to examine the length and cost of modern projects, they appear to fall far short of the era of the métro’s inception in the 1960s, which was planned and executed in a span of less than six years and even came in under its original budget.

When it opened in 1966, Montreal’s métro was considered an engineering marvel, because of its design achievements, but also due to its low price tag and the speed with which the original network was built. It cost $213 million to build 26 kilometres and 26 stations. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $2.1 billion in today’s dollars or $80 million per kilometre. 

Consider that the current 5.5-kilometre expansion of the Blue Line is expected to cost at least $7.6 billion for five stations. That amounts to an eye-popping $1.4 billion per kilometre — among the most expensive in the world. It’s also expected to take six years to complete the project.

So does it really cost 18 times more to build a métro today than it did back in the 1960s?...

It wasn’t so long ago that métro extensions were affordable. In 2007, the project to extend the Orange Line three stations to Laval was a relative bargain at $745 million for 5.2 kilometres. Adjusted for inflation, it amounts to $1.1 billion for the project in today’s dollars, or $211 million per kilometre — one sixth of the cost of the Blue Line extension.

Matti Siemiatycki, a University of Toronto professor and the director of infrastructure at the School of Cities, said Canada has the distinction of being the country with among the most expensive infrastructure projects, and it spells trouble for the future, as costs continue to balloon, while the causes of this increase are not clear.

“The costs are through the roof for transit projects,” Siemiatycki said. “It’s out of control, and worse, it’s out of line with what our peers are doing. And this is troubling for all sorts of reasons.”

Montreal isn’t alone, he said. The cost of Toronto’s 15.6 kilometre Ontario Line is expected to reach close to $27 billion, which is just over $1.7 billion per kilometre.

Siemiatycki speculates that some of the regulations attached to project construction are to blame. Another issue is the amount of subcontracting that is done in major projects, as there are more companies involved and each takes a profit margin on the work.

“We also lose control of the project, the more companies that are involved,” he said.

Métro historian Benoît Clairoux said people have to remember that the construction standards are far different today than they were in the 1960s. Among the major changes is the attention now paid to worker safety...

Entire neighbourhoods were also demolished for major projects back in that era, and there was little care taken for relocating those who became homeless as a result.

Ahmed El-Geneidy, the director of the school of Transportation Research At McGill, said that is the price of living in a democracy today, as opposed to an autocracy...

Siemiatycki agreed that it was easier to build projects of all sorts back in the 1960s — because there were far fewer rules about how construction companies could conduct their business.

“This was the era when you could just ram projects through, partly because of the safety issues, but also because you could just brush away the opposition to the projects,” Siemiatycki said.

Speaking for the current Blue Line extension project, David Chartier explained that there are also more environmental norms to respect, more studies that need to be done before a project, and more public consultation that has to be done.

“We have proven that the costs of the project are in line with the (worldwide average),” Chartier said. “I think we’re even a little more competitive.” 

Murtaza Haider, a professor and the Executive Director of the Cities Institute of the University of Alberta, doesn’t buy that argument. He called on politicians in provincial and federal circles to figure out why infrastructure seems to be more expensive to build in Canada compared to most other countries.

“The current situation is that we have lost control of how we build public infrastructure,” Haider said. “Cost discipline has gone out the window; it’s scandalous.

“It is a crisis.”

He added that the public seems less concerned when transit projects go over budget, because most agree that public transit serves the greater good and leads to economic benefits. He called on authorities to pay more attention to financial discipline.

“The mindset is that we need more transit, and at any cost, it’s good,” he said. “So if I’m a builder, I can increase my proft margins, because there is no one trying to get money for dollars. This shouldn’t be acceptable.”

El-Geneidy added that there also fewer companies around these days that can build such projects, so the ones that exist have greater power to dictate the price.

Siemiatycki agrees there is something fundamentally wrong with the way projects are planned, conceived and built that drives up their cost unreasonably.

He called on authorities to go back to Square 1 and examine all the steps involved in planing and building projects."

Links - 22nd September 2026 (1)

Meme - Bruce Arthur @bruce _arthur: "Hardcore anti-vaxxers are cancerous to a reasonable society. It's really sad. Vaccine passports now, please"
Bruce Arthur @bruce _arthur: "I am all for empathy and understanding and anti-vaxxers belong in goddamn prison re-education camps"
When left wingers talk about "empathy", "love" and "being a decent human being", this is what they mean. Empathy means sending people who disagree with you and who believe that bodily autonomy is sacrosanct to concentration camps

For years, the Irish Police (the Garda Siochana) considered Prawo Jazdy as one of the most prolific offenders in the country with more than 50+ traffic related offenses. The case was later dropped when it was established that Prawo Jazdy meant Driver's License in Polish. : r/interestingasfuck

‘Grim Reaper’ stared at patients from hospital roof - "A man dressed up as the Grim Reaper and climbed onto a hospital roof to stare at patients. Police and firefighters were called after a man wearing a head-to-toe black outfit was seen overlooking the entrance to Glan Clwyd hospital, near Rhyl in North Wales, on June 6. He has since been identified as Leon Gillespie, a 26-year-old from nearby Deganwy, who stood still on the roof during the 50-minute incident. Gillespie was brought before Llandudno magistrates’ court, where he admitted causing a nuisance on NHS premises and was fined £200. No reason was given for his behaviour, and his outfit was also described in court as being like a “crow”."

Covent Garden stabbing: Four men injured and woman arrested after attack
Time to ban scissors

Caleb Wait on X - "I try to keep an open mind about new ideas and opinions, but this take on parents and children is the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Douthat’s response is perfect:"
Brenda Starr on X - "Translation: Socialists want to have a proxy vote "for" your children. In our coming socialist utopia, the State is Mother, the State is Father. The nuclear family may not be allowed to stand in opposition to the all-wise and all-knowing State."
Wesley Taylor on X - "Part of the white shirted guy's goals is to alienate children from their parents. This Marxist tactic can be clearly traced back to Marxists in the early 20th century. Alienate children from their parents and they must depend on the State as must everyone under Marxism."
cheeflo on X - "Hostages of their parents? Good lord ... this guy is certifiable. And how are the interests of the children different than the interests of the family? Family is in the children's best interests."
Lena Elsinger on X - "Overweighting the votes of people whose frontal lobes haven’t fully developed seems like… a bad idea."
Left wingers think children are the property of the state, after all
The brain fully develops at 25 so you can't hold young adults accountable for what they do. But young adults also get to be responsible for the young children they are unrelated to

Age of marriage & giving birth in medieval Europe - ""Yes, nobles/royals did it, but mostly for political or inheritance reasons. And even in those cases they often waited for years to consummate the marriage... Just looking at when these women got married also ignores the fact that husbands often waited to consummate the marriage, that’s why it’s important to also look at how old these women were when they actually had their first baby:
Constance of France (1078 – 1125)
Married at approx. 15–17; first recorded child born at approx. 30.
Cecile of France (1097 – 1145)
Married at approx. 9; first recorded child born at approx. 22.
Empress Matilda (1102 – 1167)
Married at 8; first recorded child born at 31.
Theodora Komnene, Queen of Jerusalem (c. 1145 – 1182)
Married at 13; first recorded child at 23 or 24
Isabella of Hainault (1170 – 1190)
Married at 10; first recorded child born at 17.
Agnes of France (empress) (1171 – 1220/after 1240)
Married at 9-10, no recorded children.
St Elizabeth of Portugal (1271 – 1336)
Married at 11–12; first recorded child born at 19.
Isabella of France (1295 – 1358)
Married at 12; first recorded child born at 17.
Bianca of Savoy (1337 – 1387)
Married at 13; first recorded child born at 14.
Isabella of Valois (1389 – 1409)
Married at 6; first recorded child born at 19 (second marriage).
Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443 – 1509)
Married at 6-7; first recorded child born at 13.
Beatrice d’Este (1475 – 1497)
Married at 15, first recorded child born at 17.
Lucrezia Borgia (1480 – 1519)
Married at 13 (first marriage annulled, not consummated); first recorded child born at 19 (second marriage)...
Also interesting is that there’s quite a bit of evidence of people being concerned about the young age of some of these women, commenting on it and even being critical, like in the case of Lady Margaret Beaufort who got pregnant when she was 12 and gave birth at age 13. People disapproved of it. That she herself considered it something that wasn’t right is proven by her objecting to her own granddaughter being married at 13... And, again, although child marriages did happen among the noble/royal class of Europe, even among this tiny minority of the population it was also not as common as is sometimes suggested. For them too it was more common to marry in your late teens or after. It is even a massive stretch to suggest that child marriage was a widespread practice among the elite."

Japanese Samurai warriors captured in brutal pictures

Couple with more than 400 different personalities between them - "A couple who both suffer from a multiple personality disorder have revealed the struggle of living with hundreds of competing identities. Kai, 27, and Franz, 26, who live in Cardiff, have both been diagnosed with Disassociative Identity Disorder and have more than 400 different personalities, known as 'alters', between them. The 'alters' range from boisterous children to competent adults and each comes with their own memories, behaviours, attitudes and perceived age."

Neetu Arnold on X - "Oh wow 😬 University of Michigan will HIDE first-semester grades on transcripts for students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts It’s to “curb the mental health crisis” AND The policy is mandatory for all students bc “covering an individual’s grades will inadvertently become equated w/them not doing well in a class”"

Hang up on Britain’s blight boxes | Kitty Thompson | The Critic Magazine - "In the age of the iPhone, public calls from phone boxes have collapsed by 99.5% since 2002. Yet there are still around 15,800 phone boxes scattered across the UK, of which only 6,000 are the iconic red phone boxes we have come to love. The reason why, unsurprisingly, traces back to outdated regulations. BT’s status as the designated Universal Service Provider means it must maintain a network of public telephones and it may only remove a phone box without consultation if there are other phone boxes within 400 metres. There are good reasons for that. Around 150,000 emergency calls were made from phone boxes in 2019-20, and they remain valuable in remote areas with poor mobile coverage or during emergencies. Nobody sensible is arguing for the removal of every last box. The real problem is that regulations designed to protect a useful public service are now preserving decrepit infrastructure."

Concern is not judgement | Victoria Smith | The Critic Magazine - "Ariana Grande looks ill. I write this without knowing any of the details of Grande’s personal life and habits. I write it having watched the video for her new song “Petal”, in which she looks painfully thin, even thinner than when she appeared as Glinda in Wicked. It’s the kind of thinness where one can never feel warm, where muscles start to waste, where the wasting eventually gets to the heart. Is it okay for me to say this doesn’t seem right? According to many commentators, no, I shouldn’t say it. I should shut up... Is all concern false, prurient, intrusive? There’s a ready-made narrative that says it is respectful of a famous person’s privacy and bodily autonomy to never, ever comment on extreme thinness, as if the only reason anyone would ever do so is to be cruel. What this ultimately does is normalise self-harm as spectacle. You can tell everyone to say nothing, but they still see what’s right in front of them. "
"Empathy" is only good when it pushes the left wing agenda
Ironically, a lot of people condemning talking about it also claim that anorexia is a huge problem, and are so deluded as to claim that it is a bigger problem than obesity

Driver denied car insurance over ‘Jesus loves you’ stickers - "A driver has been denied car insurance because he put “Jesus loves you” stickers on his car. Simeon Chandra was told his insurer had “declined the modification” and needed photographic evidence that they had been removed. Photographs show the 35-year-old’s 2009 Nissan Pixo with the words “Jesus loves you” on one side, and “Jesus loves you v much” on the other. But after sending his insurer, GoSkippy, pictures of the modifications, he was warned the policy would be voided unless they were removed."

Driver blames speeding on girlfriend ‘cheating on me’ - "A driver caught travelling at 130mph by police blamed his speeding on his girlfriend cheating on him. Video footage posted by the Metropolitan Police shows Mudassir Sandhu, 24, being detained after his vehicle was stopped on the M25."

Eric Lombardi (EricForOLP.ca) 🇨🇦🚀 on X - "It is absolutely bananas how much grade inflation has occurred in Ontario high schools. Just look at how much came after Ford was elected and after the pandemic. We can talk about underfunding until we are blue in the face, but my biggest concern is falling standards. I’ve heard horror stories from teachers and professors alike about how unprepared students are still being passed upward to avoid conflicts with parents and administrators. I am committed to increasing education funding and resources for our classrooms, but there is no doubt that curriculum changes and a reintroduced role for standardized testing are needed. It genuinely seems we’ve lost a major goal of education: to create resilient citizens capable of dealing with challenges and setbacks. By letting standards fall, we have also made it harder for high-potential students to really distinguish themselves. It doesn’t surprise me that more parents are looking to tutoring and private education under these circumstances."

The state capacity crisis - "It is an extraordinary fact about the 2024 election that the areas that turned most aggressively toward President Trump were cities and states that have long been Democratic bastions... Whatever explains the election results, we think the electorate in fact has plenty of reasons to be unhappy with the quality of American governance. Housing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, urban violence, the opioid crisis, climate change — feckless government is implicated in all of them. For the past decade, an ideologically disparate group of scholars have warned that America faces a crisis of “state capacity”— the ability of government officials to translate policy goals into action and produce good outcomes. This concept, borrowed from development economics, has traditionally been used to explain why some nations succeed while others fail. A state with strong capacity can enforce contracts, prevent private violence, supply public goods, mobilize capital, and deliver basic services. A state with weak capacity struggles with these tasks. The United States is very far from a failed state, but many of its most urgent political and policy problems can be traced to the perception that government is unable or unwilling to meet people’s basic needs. By linking the American government’s weakness to concerns about state capacity, scholars suggest that our day-to-day political dysfunction is not just a garden-variety problem. Instead, it may foreshadow political collapse or, at least, declining economic growth and international standing. Yet scholars diagnosing America’s state capacity crisis have mostly focused on the federal government, blaming the problems primarily on issues like the filibuster or the National Environmental Policy Act. As flawed as those institutions are—and they are plenty flawed!— it is a mistake to put the primary responsibility for weakness in American state capacity on the federal government. The old joke is that the federal government is really just an insurance company with an army. It doles out checks for old people through Social Security and Medicare, and regulates all manner of conduct, but does not much involve itself directly in service provision. In contrast, state and local governments provide almost all government services that people depend on—schools, police, fire protection, and more—either independently or in partnership with the federal government. They build and operate almost all public infrastructure. And they employ many times more people than the federal government does, by any measure. So if we have a crisis of state capacity, its roots are in state and local governments. That simple point—one familiar to scholars of American political development—is mostly absent from the new state capacity literature... In our view, three main factors explain the weaknesses of state and local government in the United States: First, voters know almost nothing about their state and local representatives and instead base their votes entirely on the national political climate... The collapse of local media has made matters worse... Second, state administrative law is as strict, and often stricter, than federal administrative law, both with respect to the procedures it imposes and the intensity of judicial review. State and especially local governments have extremely powerful rules requiring lots of public participation in administration. Because small groups with members that care intensely about state and local decisions are much easier to form than groups representing a diffuse public interest, unrepresentative private interests—whether that’s the Chamber of Commerce or public employee unions or neighborhood NIMBYs—can and do overwhelm the administrative process at the expense of majoritarian preferences. State and local governments fail at providing basic services well because their processes slow things down and give veto rights to intense “policy demanders.” Third, states face severe fiscal constraints that the federal government doesn’t. Every state is legally required, one way or another, to balance its budget. Further, no state can print money to inflate away its deficits, and all states face both legal and market limits on their capacity to borrow... The results of weak state and local government capacity are visible everywhere. Across America, our private sector outperforms the rest of the world, while public services wither. In San Francisco, a tech titan at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence can leave her office and hail a self-driving taxi—a miracle!—only to be driven down a road covered in potholes and lined with tent encampments. In New York, a mogul in the global financial industry might ride to work on a subway system that has barely expanded in the last 100 years and that has repeatedly broken records for history’s least cost-efficient capital programs. This dysfunction isn’t because Americans inherently distrust government or prefer weak public institutions. In our most laissez-faire era at the turn of the last century, public infrastructure in American cities was far better than what was on offer in Britain or Germany. Our bridges and waterworks, our libraries and public street lighting, were the envy of the world. And today, many liberal democracies that are much poorer than we are and have less dynamic private sectors than we do have better public services. The problem is institutional, not cultural."

Squatting nanny makes couple’s lavish $1.5 million upstate New York farmhouse a living hell: report - "A wealthy couple who thought they had found their dream nanny to help with their newborn daughter soon found themselves in a living nightmare when the caregiver allegedly refused to leave their lavish upstate New York home after things turned sour. Barbara Molnar checked all the boxes that Jamie Carano Nordenström and her husband, Philip Nordenström, were looking for when she answered their ad on Nanny Lane in the summer of 2024... While the Nordenströms’ Nanny Lane ad said a “guest house is provided,” the couple was hoping to find a full-time caregiver for their little girl. But when Molnar asked if she could move in in December, they allowed her to, rent-free, as Jamie wanted to avoid giving her legal status as a tenant, the Cut reported. It didn’t take long for things to implode, with Molnar soon defying every rule the Nordenströms had... Though she was told the guesthouse was pet-free, Molnar brought her yellow Labrador, Hudson, and asked if her youngest son could visit over Christmas while on break from boarding school — but was still there come mid-January, Jamie added. Molnar also allegedly refused to clean up after herself in the shared spaces of the property — or if Hudson pooped in the garden or inside the home, Jamie alleged to the Cut... However, when the Nordenströms returned from Philip’s native Sweden in June, they found teenagers hanging out in and around their pool — and no room in either of their fridges for their groceries and a vacuum clogged with dog hair, per the outlet. After shutting the party down, Jamie went to sleep, only to be awakened by Molnar making a racket in the kitchen, she told the Cut. She confronted the nanny, who was angry that her boss had embarrassed her son in front of his buddies... Jamie fired Molnar after the party — but begrudgingly offered to help her find a new place to live and pay her through the end of the month. However, Molnar immediately cited tenants’ rights, telling Jamie, “You don’t know the law. This is my home, my furnished apartment. This is my designated parking space”... While Molnar had no criminal record, she did have a similar landlord-tenant dispute in 2021. Records from that case obtained by The Post show that Molnar wound up owing the couple $27,617 plus interest. A lawyer confirmed that Molnar was a licensee — with permission to live rent-free from a homeowner without a rental agreement — under state law. So their attorney demanded the nanny leave via a 10-day notice — which passed with no sign of Molnar vacating. There were run-ins with cops, both sides began filming each other, and the couple even called animal control about Hudson... The Nordenströms eventually filed a lawsuit against Molnar, where they claimed she was “a professional con-artist, with a well-documented history of ingratiating herself with well-off individuals, unlawfully occupying their property in bad faith, and then refusing to leave and abusing the protections afforded by eviction laws”... A judge ordered Molnar to vacate the premises on Sept. 10 and additionally slammed her with a temporary order of protection from the Nordenströms. When she finally left, Jamie found that the guest house was soaked in urine — and placed so precisely she assumed it couldn’t have all come from the dog... She said that the mattress and comforter were drenched, and the rugs were bogged down to such a degree that the liquid seeped through the floorboards. “Maybe it was a bear,” Molnar told the Cut while claiming she’s the real victim, who’s “going to be completely discredited and slandered.” The ousted New Jersey-born nanny — now working as a private chef in Hillsdale — said she was scouted as a high-end model and worked for French designer Guy Laroche before marrying Pasquale Fabio Granato. They had three kids and opened celeb Big Apple hotspot Serafina Fabulous Pizza. After their divorce, he sent their kids to European boarding schools, where she would visit them, she told The Cut. She later had her youngest son with a French wine heir and is suing him for $5 million in child support, the outlet reported. Molnar also filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Jamie in August, which her former boss called “baseless and frivolous AI-generated,” while calling her mentally unstable in a counter-filing. Eventually, a judge placed restraining orders on both women."

Wilfred Reilly on X - "Many <40 Americans, per fairly serious polling from a dozen-plus people including me, genuinely feel they are unique beings who should not be expected to do everyday things unless they are wildly excited about them. This is the subtext of many major twitter discourses...from women seeming almost offended that their partners expect sex and affection in "sexual and romantic relationships" to currently broke grad school bros raging about being expected to make their dinners at home. In both contexts, as with "the difficulty of parenting" - another debate favorite every week or two - it is just objectively untrue that everything was better in 1970. The primary difference, other than maybe improved hygiene in the 1st case, is that EXPECTATIONS have sky-rocketed."

Meme - "r/Swingers
We got invited to church the morning after... has anyone else?
So my husband and I have this couple we've been playing with for the past several months. We've already hosted eachother a few times, very nice people and good at playing. We're 33F and 30M, they're both in their late 50s, by a good margin the oldest couple we've done anything with. Apparently we've never gone over their house on a saturday night. All went well, we shared the bed and it was great. As we got up to leave, they asked if we wanted to go to church with them. They offered to treat us to breakfast if we did, and while we're not very religious we know how to sit through mass, so we agreed. It was odd to say the least, but not bad at all. Actuay it was pretty calming to do after a fun night, a good way to get your head back into reality. My husband and I even actually prayed together for the first time in a while, which was sweet. Anyway we had breakfast and went home, that was interesting, and I'm wondering if anyone else has ever had this happen to them?"
"This is the best conversion tactic I've ever heard."

Meme - "Even in our politicized era, most people are apolitical, including women. Appearing too into politics is a turnoff because it shows it's probably filling a void and you're not socially well adjusted. Women might find a passionately progressive guy more tolerable because she'll agree on more things, but she'll also probably see that guy as a version of her gay friend. Being passionately conservative probably appears more masculine, but she'll also more likely see you as bitter, resentful and downwardly mobile. The sweet spot is probably being smart enough to be politically aware but not dogmatic and able to joke about it (including at expense of your own beliefs). One exception to this might be abortion, which predates our current era. Even Seinfeld depicted this in an episode 30 years ago where Elaine dumped a guy she liked because he was pro life."

Meme - Supergirl: "PLEASE, PLEASE, SUPERMAN DON'T BANISH ME! GIVE ME ANOTHER CHANCE !"
Superman: "I'm SORRY TO END YOUR CAREER, BUT YOU'RE A FAILURE AS SUPERGIRL! I MUST EXILE YOU TO. ANOTHER WORLD!"

Links - 21st September 2026 (2 - US Schools)

Thread by @wokal_distance on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This teacher admits she doesn't know when America was founded. She also says she doesn't teach her students the curriculum, but instead teaches about protesting anti-racism, activism, and Black Lives Matter.  So....Let's talk about the Department of Education.  A Thread🧵
The entire education system, including the Department of Education, is full of activists, professors, teachers, and other people who thing teaching is a political act, and that Social Justice (AKA: woke ideology) should be the foundation of all learning and education. In his book "The Critical Turn in Education" Isaac gottesman, explains how leftist brought marxism, feminism, and Critical Race Theory into universities and used them to radicalize the field of education in the 70's and 80's. All of this begins with the work Paulo Freire.  Freire was a Brazilian Marxist and education theorist who said the main goal of education is to create political and social change. That is, the goal of education is to teach students how to be activists who transform society
According to Freire teaching has two aims:
1. To teach students they are oppressed
2. To teach students how to engage in "praxis" (AKA, activism) on behalf of leftist social change
Things like literacy and math take a backseat to the real goal of teaching leftist politics. The field of education has been taken over by Marxist ideology.  Isaac Gottesman shows this in "The Critical Turn in Education" and you can see it in the fact Freire's work has 568873 academic citations. That's more academic citations than *EINSTEIN* (who has 199740)
Let's connect this to the Department of Education.  In the 1990's a professor named Gloria Ladsen-Billings wrote a paper explaining how she brought CRT into education, and how the founders of CRT saw moving CRT into education as the logical extension of Critical Race Theory. Now, Ladson-Billings brought CRT into education, but that's not all she did.  She invented "Culturally Relevant Pedagogy" a method to, in part, help students develop "Critical Consciousness," an idea that comes from Paulo Freire (the Marxist educator we discussed earlier). In "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed" Freire says Critical Consciousness is understanding the world through the Marxist framework of Oppressor vs. Oppressed.  So when Billings talks about Critical Consciousness, she's referring to understanding the world through a *Marxist* lens.
What does this have to do with the Department of Education?  Well, the United States Department of Education as a research arm called the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The IES is supposed to be research based, neutral, fair, and non-partisan.  However.... The IES is encouraging educators to use the Gloria Ladsen-Billings Marxist infused "Cultural Responsive Pedagogy."  Remember, Billings wants students to adopt the marxists opppressor/oppressed framework and gain the "Critical Consciousness" of how oppressed they are. Further, the REL (Regional Educational Libraries) that are run by the IES (which is run by the Department of education) are similarly telling educators to make use of these Marxist Theories of education. Worse yet, the REL and IES admits there is no evidence that "Culturally Responsive Pedagogy" is an effective way of educating children.  But they're implementing it anyway though, because their goal is not education: their goal is turning children into leftist activists. If that weren't bad enough, the Regional Library Program, run by the IES ran a series of blogs asking teachers to use Culturally Responsive Education as a tool to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by looking at "Social Justice issues" As Henry Giroux explains here, Paulo Freire's work is the thing that kicked of the movement of education scholarship toward neo-marxism, and critical theory.  This entire field of neo-marxist scholarship is called "Critical Pedagogy."
There is an agency called "The White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics" within the Department of Education which produced a paper calling for the use of Critical Pedagogy to with the goal of making Hispanic Student believe they are oppressed in Schools.
What I want you to see here is that with the Department of Education there is a strong strand of workers, activists, employees, teachers, writes, and so fourth who are making it their goal to use education as a vehicle for advancing various forms of radical leftist politics. The Department of Education is, in my view, beyond repair.  It needs to be audited (both financialy, and to find out what the department actually did), shut down, and replaced by something like rigorous accreditation boards, state level agencies, or private sector agencies. I prefer to see an orderly shut down and audit of the finances and activities of the DOE as a transition to a much smaller, less active agency occurs.  But let their be no doubt, the Department of Education needs to be shut down."
Left wingers will pretend that the long march through the institutitons is a conspiracy theory while at the same time cheering indoctrination. "This is not happening, and it's good that it is"

LeBron’s School Has Everything We’re Told Students Need. It’s Still Failing Them - "The I Promise school he launched with much fanfare in 2018 made headlines last week for all the wrong reasons.  Data presented to the Akron, Ohio, school board revealed not a single student from the school’s inaugural third-grade class — now entering eighth grade — has ever passed the state’s math test.  “It is discouraging,” said Keith Liechty-Clifford, the district’s director of school improvement, in a model of understatement.  State test scores in English and science are nearly as bad, and Black students at I Promise test in the bottom 5% of all Black students in Ohio. Expectations for the school were much greater in 2018. Liberals loved the idea because it wasn’t a charter school, it featured smaller class sizes, it included a host of wraparound services, it incorporated many “community school” concepts and its staff was unionized. Conservatives loved it for its STEM curriculum, its extended school day and year, and its emphasis on students taking responsibility for homework, paying attention to teachers and being respectful...   The school receives the same taxpayer funding as other district schools, but the LeBron James Family Foundation put up funding for building renovation, free school uniforms, free bicycles and helmets, free breakfast, lunch and snacks, a food pantry, GED and job placement services for parents, and guaranteed admittance to the University of Akron. The foundation raised funds from philanthropists to ensure free tuition as well.  With this entire wish list of public school advocates in place, why aren’t the results better?  Unfortunately, the school may be unique, but the explanations were unimaginative.  “We believe our students are more than a test score,” said Victoria McGee, the foundation’s senior director...   “The type of growth that is important to us is not made overnight. It takes time,” said Stephanie Davis, the new principal at I Promise.  Members of the school board were not so sanguine.  “For me as a board member, I just think about all the resources that we’re providing,” said President Derek Hall. “I’m just disappointed that … it doesn’t appear like we’re seeing the kind of change that we would expect to see.”  Even the union is having doubts... 15 of the school’s 50 teachers have resigned in the past two years... the resources and programs committed to I Promise were supposed to be the solutions to those types of difficulties."
Clearly, they need even more money

Among the Wildflowers on X - "Intern: My name is … and I am from … and I am a nonbinary queer.
Kid: *raises her hand* Why is it necessary for us high school students to know your sexual preference?
Intern: 😳
Teacher: 😳
Kid: 🧐
Guess whose kid it was. 🥰"

One Bad Dude on X - "Kids surround a woman and chant “racist” while hurling projectiles at her.  This is what your kids are waking out of school to do.    This is what they’re being taught is okay.  It seems like there are a whole lot of irresponsible parents out there who either don’t know what’s happening in their kids lives or just don’t care 🤷‍♂️"
Xi Van Fleet on X - "Another reminder that we are getting dangerously close to the mass violence of China’s Cultural Revolution. Once again, girls are being pushed to the front."

Survey Promoted By Michigan Teacher Says ICE Targeting People By Race and 'Language They're Speaking' - "Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Leonard posted an image of a student-written survey distributed by a teacher that said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were “targeting people based on the language they’re speaking, their race, and where they work.”... The two questions from the survey posted on Leonard’s X account stated:  “How do you feel about law enforcement targeting U.S. citizens such as Renee Good, Keith Porter Jr. and Alex Pretti as well as protesters that have been harmed?” and “How do you feel about I.C.E. targeting people based on the language they’re speaking, their race, and where they work?”...   “These aren’t questions—they’re political propaganda, telling students what to think instead of how to think,” Leonard said on X. “This isn’t education—it’s indoctrination. Parents should be outraged.” Leonard added, “According to the parent, the survey was written by a student or students but emailed out by a teacher as part of a class project. I’ve also been told by another person that other surveys were part of the project, but I have not personally seen those. My concern is that this survey was distributed by a teacher. I believe it’s appropriate to debate whether slanted surveys like this belong in our classrooms. I do not believe they do.”"

Michael Strong on X - "Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to Newark public schools. It was one of the largest philanthropic gifts to a school district in history. Of that $100 million, roughly $31 million, about 31%, had to go to the teachers union as essentially a payment to allow measures that would track teacher performance.  Thirty-one percent of a gift meant for children went to the union as the price of being allowed to measure whether teachers were effective. That's not a bug in the system. That's the system working exactly as it's designed to work. Protecting itself from accountability is the primary function."

Libs Of Chicago on X - "Only 6% of students at Roosevelt High School can read at or above grade level so it was extremely important that students were lead out of school to chant ridiculous slogans fed to them. Using children as pawns."

New York Leads in School Spending—But Not Student Achievement - "Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed executive budget for fiscal year 2027, released January 20th, earmarks nearly $40 billion in state funds for K–12 education. Her proposal appears with New York leading the nation in per-pupil spending for the nineteenth consecutive year.  Albany cites these nation-leading expenditures as evidence of the state’s “longstanding commitment” to giving students “the opportunity to excel.” But big spending has not meaningfully improved the metric that matters: student achievement...   If record investment translated into academic mastery, New York students’ proficiency rates would be increasing. Instead, they remain stubbornly low. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 31 percent of New York eighth-graders were proficient in reading; only 26 percent were proficient in math.  Student performance has lagged for years. New York’s NAEP reading- and math-proficiency rates for eighth-grade students have remained below 35 percent for over a decade, even as per-pupil spending continues to rise.  For a state that claims to prioritize education, these outcomes are hard to defend. While demographic differences help explain New York’s performance relative to other states, they don’t explain why the state’s investments aren’t improving student performance...   Research shows that education spending doesn’t necessarily improve academic performance. A recent Brookings Institution analysis compared state education spending with student outcomes and showed that, after accounting for income and demographics, spending levels alone don’t explain differences in student achievement...   Improving outcomes will require greater clarity about what education spending is supposed to produce. When funding decisions are not linked to academic results, systems have limited incentive to examine whether resources are improving instruction or student learning.  New York needs to focus on student outcomes. The question shouldn’t be how much the state spends but whether students are reaching grade-level proficiency in reading and math. The state will fulfill its promise to families only when it evaluates its education system by what students have learned—not by how much it spends."
Clearly, the problem is they don't spend enough money

Connor Boyack 📚 on X - "Teachers' unions say they care about children. Then why do they fight every reform that empowers parents? Because their loyalty isn't to kids. It's to the system that pays them."

Clown World ™ 🤡 on X - "The interview California doesn't want you to see just dropped.  @C__Herridge  asked LA schools how many employees have sexually abused students. Their response? "File a public records request."  Here's what they're hiding:  An estimated 8 million students, 17%, have been abused by teachers, coaches, and staff.  In California alone, lawyers have identified over 350 predators. They don't get fired. They get transferred. Unions block reporting laws. Parents never know.  This is an epidemic funded by your tax dollars.  Watch. Share. Demand answers."
Time to shut down the Catholic Church!

Meme - "Federal K-12 Spending Per Pupil and achievement results *Fed Spending surging 375% as Reading, Math and Science scores are flat*
Source: OMB Hist. Tables 2011"
Clearly, the problem is insufficient spending

Wall Street Mav on X - "Catherine Herridge has released a staggering interview that reveals 17% of children nationwide are the victim of sexuaI abuse in our public schools by school employees. This would be 8 million students.  California public schools are trying to hide the data, claiming "the data is only available the the Public record Act".  Teachers unions are fighting reporting laws to hide the issue. Teachers are not held accountable, they are allowed to transfer schools and are protected by the unions.  This should be receiving national media attention, but the fake "news" media ignores it because of ideology."
Time to abolish the Catholic Church to protect children!

Matt | The Mini-Retirement Maximalist on X - "When my friend started teaching she made $54k. Today she makes $117k. In her final year she'll make $150k+. When she retires she'll have:
• A full pension
• ~$1M invested
• Health coverage for life
All from a public school teaching career. With summers off."
The FIRE Satoshis on X - "The "teachers don't make money" narrative needs to die. Pension + healthcare for life is a comp package most startup employees would cry over."
Beverly A. Pekala on X - "One of my fav stories is a lawyer I know, who, after working like a dog as a lawyer for a few yrs said nope, I'm making it easy on myself. Took a job as a school teacher. Making $100k+ for 170 classroom days. Summers+ many days off during the yr. Will retire with fat pension."

Jeremy Horpedahl 🥚📉 on X - "On PISA tests, US average score is similar to Denmark and Sweden. Broken down by race/ethnicity: Asian Americans score similar to best Asian countries. US Whites are ahead of all European countries. US Hispanics are well ahead of all Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas"miss

Who Misbehaves? - "Race advocates and the media are greeting a new Government Accountability Office report on racial disparities in school discipline as a vindication of Obama administration policies. The GAO found that black students get suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students nationally, a finding consistent with previous analyses. The Obama Education and Justice Departments viewed that disproportion as proof of teacher and principal bias. Administration officials used litigation and the threatened loss of federal funding to force schools to reduce suspensions and expulsions radically in order to eliminate racial disparities in discipline. The GAO report, which implicitly rubberstamps the Obama approach, comes just as Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos is evaluating whether to rescind Obama’s school discipline directives. DeVos should go forward with that rescission: the administration’s policies were fatally flawed, as is the GAO report that attempts to justify them.  The GAO report ignores the critical question regarding disciplinary disparities: do black students in fact misbehave more than white students? The report simply assumes, without argument, that black students and white students act identically in class and proceeds to document their different rates of discipline. This assumption of equivalent school behavior is patently unjustified. According to federal data, black male teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at nearly 10 times the rate of white male teenagers of the same age (the category “white” in this homicide data includes most Hispanics; if Hispanics were removed from the white category, the homicide disparity between blacks and whites would be much higher). That higher black homicide rate indicates a failure of socialization; teen murderers of any race lack impulse control and anger-management skills. Lesser types of juvenile crime also show large racial disparities. It is fanciful to think that the lack of socialization that produces such elevated rates of criminal violence would not also affect classroom behavior. While the number of black teens committing murder is relatively small compared with their numbers at large, a very high percentage of black children—71 percent—come from the stressed-out, single-parent homes that result in elevated rates of crime.   The GAO report makes no effort to control for family structure in looking at different discipline rates. The report did control for the percentage of poor students in any given school, which is defined by the proportion of students receiving free lunches. It found that black students in schools with lower rates of student poverty are still disciplined more than white students. But we don’t know whether those black students themselves were more likely to come from single-parent homes, and we most certainly do not know how those suspended black students actually behaved in class compared with their white counterparts—the most relevant question of all.   Observational studies of classroom behavior are in short supply, the result of the taboo against researching racial behavioral disparities. But the GAO did not even avail itself of what data do exist on student behavior. The Justice and Education Departments recently released their annual report, “Indicators of School Crime and Safety.” Black students self-reported being in a physical fight at school at over twice the rate of white students in 2015—a data point certainly relevant to the question of racial rates of school discipline.  Schools that were 50 percent minority or more reported weekly gang activity at nearly ten times the rate of schools where minorities constituted 5 percent to 20 percent of the population. Reports of gang violence in schools with less than 5 percent minority populations were too low to be usable statistically. Widespread weekly disorder in classrooms was reported in schools with at least 50 percent minority populations at more than five times the rate as in schools with 5 percent to 20 percent minorities. More than four times as many high-minority schools reported weekly verbal abuse of teachers compared with schools with a less than 20 percent minority student body...   The GAO, like the civil rights offices of the Obama Education and Justice Departments, ignored these data. Instead, the GAO adopted a favorite tactic of academic bias researchers: it claimed that black students are disciplined more frequently for offenses that are allegedly subjective or “largely based on school officials’ interpretations of behavior.” For the GAO and the activists, it therefore follows, without further proof, that that supposed subjectivity results in an outpouring of teacher and principal bias...   “Objective” metrics regarding attendance show the identical racial disparities. As U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Gail Heriot shows in a forthcoming report, the rate of chronic truancy (defined as 18 or more unexcused absences) was five times higher for black elementary school students in California than for white students. That “objective” behavioral disparity tracks the “subjective” behavioral disparities and grows out of the same home and socialization challenges that produce classroom disobedience.   The GAO report superficially reviewed a handful of bias cases brought by the Obama Education and Justice Departments against school districts. Since the GAO uses the same behavior-free analysis, it’s no surprise that it parrots the conclusions of those suits. The report provides only two concrete examples of allegedly biased discipline... The report notes that boys are disciplined at higher rates than girls but mysteriously fails to level charges of sex discrimination against school teachers and administrators. It does not explicitly note, though it is true, that whites are disciplined at higher rates than Asians. According to GAO logic, school officials must be biased against whites... adult criminal predilections track the rate of impulse control in children. The New York Times gloats that the report undercuts conservative claims that the Obama administration policy has resulted in a decline in school safety. But the GAO did not look at school safety rates at all. Numerous reports have documented just such an effect, however. The Manhattan Institute’s Max Eden found that students in New York City schools reported much higher levels of violence and disrespect after Mayor Bill de Blasio limited school suspensions... And the education of students, especially black students, is suffering as well. Wisconsin schools that adopted the non-punitive disciplinary measures advocated by the Obama administration (and now, the GAO) had lower reading and math achievement than schools that stuck with traditional discipline.  Teachers are among the most liberal professionals in the country. Education school is one long marinade in white-privilege theory. Yet we’re supposed to believe that once these social-justice warriors enter the classroom, they are unable to evaluate their black students fairly"
From 2018

Meme - Andrew Gustafson: "The internet is forever, Rachel. PS your overlord says "no book burning"."
Randi Weingarten: "Corey- no one should be burning books."
Corey A. DeAngelis, school choi... @DeAngelisCorey: "Correct, but you should really direct this comment to the teachers union executive board member who called to burn my new book. Would you like to endorse the book, by the way?"
Rachel Schlueter @kinderrach: "Good day for a book burning party!"
Andrew Gustafson: "Do it Rachel! We are all behind you! Go to Barnes & Noble TODAY, buy 5, no, buy 10"
Left wingers pretend that "book bans" are terrible, but endorse burning books they disapprove of (JK Rowling is another example)

Karol Markowicz on X - "A teen cousin showed me this in her AP American Government book. Trump is similar ideologically to Hitler and Bernie Sanders is a touch off the center to the left."
Bonchie on X - "The level of imbecilic hysteric you’d need to be to actually believe Donald Trump is more authoritarian than *Stalin* is simply unfathomable."

Daughter of Wolves on X - "People don’t understand just how EVIL the “no child left behind” policy is.  And yes, I know this isn’t exactly the same, but let me explain…  In the 1930’s the Kellogg’s conducted a “study” where they raised a chimpanzee alongside their toddler.   Their theory was that the chimp would take on higher qualities and a type of evolution would occur.  The exact opposite happened.  The Kellogg’s child began behaving like a chimpanzee. The child DEVOLVED.   And while there was mild accelerated learning observed in the chimp, it was nothing that couldn’t have been achieved apart from the child.   This same experiment is being run every single day in our public schools across the nation where the lowest common denominator is catered to and our best and brightest are left to struggle on their own.   “Inclusion” is simply a euphemism used to describe the slow strangulation of intelligent, and now even normal, boys and girls. It needs to end."

wanye on X - "Just to state this plainly: I do not think that rich people will move into undesirable, poor neighborhoods on the hope that their mediocre kids will be in the top 10% of those school districts and will therefore get into college on that basis 🤷🏻‍♂️"
memetic_sisyphus on X - "Sometime I hear progressives talk about humans and I question if they’ve ever met one before."
Crémieux on X - "This did happen. But the scale of moves wasn't that much, because well-off people generally don't want their kids going to school with the types of kids who make it a bad school."
Thread by @SlumRNA_Dog on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Being a smart rich libtard and sending my kids to “I hate whitey” high school so they have a shot at valedictorian but at the seriously increased risk of getting punched in the back of the head and getting a tbi. And then being confused that he didn’t get valedictorian anyway, and remembering that I sent him to “I hate whitey” High school and the administrators hate him too"

Reseda girl dead after bully threw water bottle at her head - "A 12-year-old girl tragically died after a suspected bully at her Los Angeles high school threw a metal water bottle at her head — leading police to open a homicide investigation.  The young victim, Khimberly Zavaleta, was hit in the hallway of Reseda High School"
Liz4SF on X - "Restorative justice for kids in CA schools encourages bullying. Former principal at Argonne even idiotically told kids they cant defend themselves against serial bullies bc that was escalating fights. At same time, teachers are told they cant break up fights due to the very liabilities that restorative justice creates. So parents have to sue the schools when their kids are assaulted & bullied to death."

TheUnquirer on X - "Westbrook Maine School's 'Shariah Compliant Food' Halal does not just mean pork is banned. Halal is the 'Shariah Compliant' practice where Muslim prayer, facing towards Mecca, and slaughtering the animals must be done in a specific way. Expect more of this in Maine. Fun fact - almost all Somalians are Muslims. Democrats flooded our state and nation with foreigners from either Marxist countries(like Angola) or Islamic countries(like Somalia). -There is a reason for this.
Westbrook School also recognizes that America "is stolen land". This is all connected."
Steve Robinson on X - "More importantly, Shariah compliant food means that all of the taxpayer-funded cafeteria contracts must flow to Muslim-owned companies and Muslim-owned farms (which also have to be subsidized separately by taxpayers bc reasons)."

Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” on X - "Oh this is hilarious. Sad but hilarious. This study finds (and others confirm) that a teacher earning a graduate degree has a NEGATIVE effect on student achievement. Attending a graduate school of education literally makes teachers WORSE at their job"
Clearly, Finland has good education results because they require teachers to have Master's degrees

The Reality of the "Nakba"

Captain Allen on X

This real-time 1948 article from The Economist completely destroys the modern “Nakba” narrative that was invented decades later as political propaganda. Straight from British eyewitnesses in Haifa, October 2, 1948: “Jewish authorities urged all Arabs to remain in Haifa and guaranteed them protection and security ... However, of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa, not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. The most potent factor was the announcements made over the air by the Arab Higher Executive, urging the Arabs to quit ... those who remained and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.” They didn’t flee because of “Zionist ethnic cleansing.” They fled because Arab leaders ordered them to get out of the way so their armies could “drive the Jews into the sea.” Then they lost the war they started — and spent the next 77 years rewriting history to blame the Jews. The “Nakba” you were taught? Pure revisionist fiction. 

 

Article (which I finished transcribing from the original source):

"The events of the first exodus are described as follows by a British eye witness :-

On April 21st British Military and Police evacuated certain buildings, mainly in the commercial quarters of the town, which they had previously occupied, and withdrew to the British residential zone and to the Port, holding a narrow connecting link between these two districts. Upon the British withdrawal, the
Haganah and certain Irgun Zvai Leumi units made a determined attack upon the Arab-held quarters of Haifa) and within twelve hours had completely overcome all Arab resistance. A considerable number of Iraqi and Syrian irregulars was killed and the Arab residents of Haifa fled, in a state of utter panic, to the (British-held) port area ; to the Roman Catholic Monastery of Stella Maris on Mount Carmel, and to St. Luke's Anglican Church compound in the German Colony. During the subsequent days, the Jewish authorities who were now in complete control of Haifa (save for the limited districts still held by the British troops) urged all Arabs to remain in Haifa) and guaranteed them protection and security. So far as I know, most of the British civilian residents whose advice was asked by Arab friends told the latter that they would be wise to stay.

However, of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. The remainder fled, many by sea to Acre or Beirut-paying exorbitant fees for their passages-others in convoys of three-ton lorries, provided by the British Army and protected by British Military escorts. The latter went either to Acre or to Nazareth (both of which towns subsequently fell into the hands of the Israeli forces). So far as I am aware, no effort, apart from urging the Arabs to stay, was made by the Jews to interfere with this exodus. In the majority of cases the refugees took all the movable property that they could take on the lorries-I believe a limit was imposed in some cases-and if they had time they either bricked up or secured as strongly as possible the entrances and windows of their houses and shops.

Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that far the most potent of these factors was the announcements made over the air by the Arab Higher Executive, urging all Arabs in Haifa to quit. The reason given was that upon the final withdrawal of the British, the combined armies of the Arab States would invade Palestine and "drive the Jews into the sea," and it was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades. At that time, the Palestinian Arabs still had some confidence in the ability of the Arab League to implement the promises of its spokesmen. The news of what happened at Deir Yassin had been widely circulated among the Arabs all over Palestine. It is possible that the Arabs feared a repetition of this incident, as an act of retribution for the massacre of the Jewish technicians at the CRL installation in Haifa Bay in December.

Not until a couple of months later-by which time it was quite obvious that the refugees were not coming back-did the Jewish authorities take steps to enter those houses which had been evacuated by the refugees, or to break down the bricked-up doors of their shops. And, in any case, these entrances were effected legally, by orders of the (Jewish) Custodian of Enemy Property (appointed by the Israeli Provisional Government) and records have been kept of the goods (some of them foodstuffs urgently needed
by the remaining population, both Jewish and Arab), which were confiscated."