Links - 27th August 2026 (1 - Left Wing Economics)

Meme - Kelly C. Hitchcock: "After watching the Prager U. video called "The War on Work" I got curious. The total cost to the Union of the Civil War was $6.2 billion. (In 2015 dollars, that's $96.8 billion.) In the Prager video, the speaker said we paid $960 billion in 2012. In short, we spend almost exactly ten times as much to eliminate poverty every year as the ENTIRE Civil War cost the Union real dollars. Ihave been debating a black friend and his friends recently, so I will use black people in the following example. According to blackdemographics.com, 42.6 million Americans identify themselves as "black only'. Divide $960 billion by that, and it comes to $22,535 for every black man, woman and child in America. A one time gift would pay for college for every black kid under 18, and it would pay the rent and groceries for every unemployed black adult for a year, enough time to get off drugs, go back to school or find some kind of job. And that's just how much we spent in one year. Poverty, Inc. is big business, and that is why NO ONE helping the poor ever wants them to go away."
This doesn't address what would happen when, a short while after giving them the money, they are poor again. Of course, it would be entertaining seeing the new cope

Detroit's Belle Isle pitched as tax-free Freedom City for revival - "America’s once-iconic industrial hub is primed for an economic comeback as major metropolitan areas continue to bleed residents to lower-tax states, a prominent Michigan developer told Fox News Digital.  Rodney Lockwood, Board Chairman of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, warned that high-tax cities like New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are facing serious structural trouble.  "I think we have to look at both sides: what is not working, and then what will work," Lockwood said. "Right now, socialists are on the march, and Zohran Mamdani in New York is perhaps the best example of that. They're winning races, and their answer is always the same: more taxes and more free stuff." Lockwood’s comments come as progressive-led cities nationwide—including New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles—struggle with taxpayer flight driven by high state and local taxes, lingering crime concerns, and an astronomical cost of living. A new study by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF), released April 7, 2026, confirmed that taxpayers are fleeing high-tax environments for more fiscally friendly states.   While Texas and Florida remain the top targets, states like North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee are also seeing record gains. Notably, the NTUF "Migration in Minutes" metric found that Texas surpassed Florida in 2022 as the state gaining a new taxpayer most frequently — one every 4 minutes and 40 seconds... Lockwood is championing a proposal to transform Detroit’s Belle Isle into a self-governing "Freedom City" aimed at setting a new blueprint for urban revival nationwide... Under Lockwood’s proposal, private investors would purchase or lease the island from Detroit to build a mixed-use residential, retail, and commercial district. The goal is to generate massive economic activity and private-sector jobs for a city recovering from decades of population loss.  Lockwood pointed to recent polling by Michigan pollster Steve Mitchell indicating strong interest in bold economic solutions, with 68% of likely Detroit voters and 51% of voters statewide approving the concept of special economic freedom zones.  Detroit's economic trajectory highlights the stark reality of post-war urban decline, Lockwood noted. "We're trying to restore it back to being the world-class city it once was," Lockwood said. "Back in 1950, it was the world's richest city. Today, it ranks among the poorest in the United States. We've gone from 1.85 million people down to around 600,000."  Lockwood believes the island represents a vastly underutilized asset ideal for conversion into a tax-friendly special economic zone designed to draw global capital. His vision projects a permanent population of 50,000 residents across 20,000 households—all built without relying on taxpayer dollars."
Weird. Left wingers keep insisting that rich people will never leave

David Burke 🇺🇸 on X - "What was the richest city in the world in 1950? Detroit. Today it has highest poverty rate in the U.S. among cities with a population of 500,000+. Why? Democrat mayors like @NYCMayor taxed the rich to pay for utopian social programs. And guess what? Rich people left Detroit"

Massachusetts Loses Billions in Income After Millionaire Tax - "Residents exiting Massachusetts took a net of $4.2 billion in adjusted gross income with them in 2023, one of the largest totals in the country, after a tax on millionaires took effect.   The amount was an 8% year-over-year increase, according to Internal Revenue Service data, even as the total number of taxpayers leaving the state slowed.   This was the first year that residents were subject to a 4% surtax on incomes over $1 million after voters approved the levy in 2022 to fund schools and transportation.   Several Democrat-led states have since approved or are considering similar taxes on top earners, partly as a way to make up for federal funding cuts enacted under President Donald Trump and also to pay for more ambitious agendas."

Larry Trefz | Facebook - "We've become a society that loves the benefits of progress but increasingly resists the things that make progress possible.   We want AI, but not data centers. We want clean energy, but not transmission lines. We want affordable housing, but not new neighborhoods. We want safer communities, but fight the companies building the technology our first responders use. We want economic growth, but oppose the businesses creating the jobs. It's as if we've convinced ourselves that all of these things just... happen.   Take what's happening with Axon in Scottsdale. Whether you've ever thought about the company or not, you've almost certainly benefited from what it builds. If you've ever watched body camera footage after a critical incident, seen a TASER save a life by preventing the use of deadly force, or expected police to have better tools, evidence, and accountability, you've benefited from the work being done there. It's one of Arizona's biggest technology success stories, founded here, grown here, employing thousands here.   Yet when Axon wanted to expand its headquarters in the city where it was born, the conversation wasn't really about innovation or jobs. It became years of resistance, political fights, lawsuits, referendums, and arguments over why it shouldn't happen.   Now zoom out. The exact same story is playing out across the country with data centers. Everyone wants faster AI. Everyone wants better healthcare powered by AI, smarter education, more productive businesses, better scientific discoveries, and more capable assistants in their pockets.   Almost nobody wants a data center built near them. Communities object because of the power demands. Or the water use. Or the traffic. Or the appearance. Or the noise. Some of those concerns are absolutely legitimate and deserve serious attention. Good planning matters.   But here's the question almost nobody asks. If every community says no... where, exactly, do we expect these things to be built? Because AI doesn't exist in some magical cloud. The cloud is a warehouse full of computers. It's substations. Transformers. Fiber optic cable. Cooling systems. Concrete. Steel. Gigawatts of electricity. It's physical infrastructure, and physical infrastructure has to exist somewhere.   While we're debating whether we should build it, China has largely made a different decision. They've decided that computing infrastructure is strategic. So they build it.   Not because every citizen loves having a data center nearby. Not because there are never tradeoffs. But because they've concluded that if you want to lead in the industries of the future, you can't spend a decade arguing over whether the future should be built at all.   The irony is that America still has enormous advantages. We lead in AI research. We build the world's most advanced chips. We have extraordinary entrepreneurs, engineers, universities, and capital markets.   Our biggest obstacle isn't that we've stopped inventing. It's that we've become remarkably good at stopping ourselves from building.   Every project has opponents. Every development has a petition. Every power line has a lawsuit. Every housing project has a neighborhood coalition. Every data center has organized resistance. Every corporate expansion is portrayed as something to fear before it's evaluated for what it could create.   Individually, each objection can sound reasonable. Collectively, they become paralysis. History isn't kind to civilizations that lose the ability to build.   America became an economic superpower because previous generations built railroads, dams, highways, airports, electrical grids, semiconductor fabs, research campuses, and the internet itself. None of those projects would have survived if the default answer had been, "Not here."   That's the part I think we're missing. This isn't really about Axon. It isn't really about data centers. It isn't even really about AI. It's about whether we've developed a culture of blind resistance where opposing something has become easier than imagining what becomes possible if we actually build it. Innovation doesn't disappear because people stop wanting it. It disappears because someone else is willing to build what we refuse to."

How to Get Filthy Rich with Gary Stevenson, Channel 4 review: an economist who’s out of his depth - "Gary Stevenson is the working-class former City trader who became a millionaire at 25 then quit to campaign against economic inequality. He spreads the gospel with revolutionary zeal via YouTube, where he has 1.62 million subscribers and the slogan: “Other economists make predictions, but my ones are actually right.” Hmm. Did he predict that this documentary, How to Get Filthy Rich With Gary Stevenson (Channel 4), would make him look so embarrassingly out of his depth?... Stevenson became increasingly testy and, instead of countering with an intelligent argument, was reduced to saying: “Poverty has got worse – do you care about that?” Sure, said Neidle, “but the fact I worry about it doesn’t mean I can seize on any initiative with a nice name and refuse to think about the consequences”. Ouch."

Daniel Priestley on X - "Well this is awkward …  @garyseconomics  central claim is that billionaires hoard wealth and plunge people into poverty.   The data does not support this claim.   Between 2010 and 2025 the number of US billionaires rose from 400 to 900. At the same time the rate of people living in poverty declined from 15% to 11%.   In the UK the number of billionaires rose from 74 to a peak of 177 and is now in decline. During that time the percentage of people living in poverty was stable at 21-22%.   It’s as if, a growing economy lifts people out of poverty and a stagnant one doesn’t.   Billionaires clearly do not create poverty. They do however pay a lot in taxes. Driving them out is stupid and based on envy not data.
BONUS FUN FACT: The number of people who describe themselves as “socialists” in the UK is 1 in 5 and in the USA it’s 1 in 12… almost perfectly aligned to the poverty rate in each country."

Richard Hanania on X - "People say government is incompetent but how can that be the case when it’s normal for 99%+ of government employees to get high marks in their reviews?"
Maybe this is why left wingers love government so much and want it to keep expanding. They love mediocrity (e.g. they claim you don't need the best person for the job - just someone good enough) and are mediocre and don't want to be fired

𝖓𝖎𝖓𝖊 🕯 on X - "Young democrats being +22 on “Free market economy” and -31 on “Capitalism” is both funny and bleak"
Time to mock right wingers/conservatives for being ignorant and poorly educated

Mary Julia Koch on X - "America’s democratic socialists are obsessed with the Nordic model. The problem? These countries aren’t socialist."
Democratic Socialists Don’t Understand the Nordic Model - WSJ - "Nordic countries aren’t socialist. Their economies are highly competitive free markets, built on private ownership and global trade. Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden consistently rank among the top 15 countries with the most economic and personal freedom. And Scandinavians aren’t simply sitting around snatching up government benefits. The labor force participation rate is higher in Nordic countries than in the U.S. “Bernie is too much of a socialist for Scandinavia that he probably could not get elected in any of the Scandinavian countries,” Sen. Rand Paul recently said in an interview with John Stossel. The former prime minister of Denmark, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, even had to issue a clarification in 2015 directed at American politicians: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”  Scandinavian countries offer more expansive public services than the U.S. But those benefits are paid for with steep and broad taxation that reaches to relatively low income levels. The U.S. has a much more progressive tax system. While the Nordics see capitalism as an engine of wealth creation, the DSA calls for dismantling capitalism itself. Its vision of a standard 32-hour workweek goes further than Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, where the norm hovers around 37 hours a week... every welfare state has its limits. In recent years, Nordic countries have started contracting out many of their expensive social services like healthcare and schools to private providers as aging populations strain public budgets. Their economic growth can be largely attributed to manufacturing prowess, high rates of employment and a culture of entrepreneurship fueled by access to global markets and deep capital pools (though many startups come to the U.S. Bay Area to scale). And while the U.S. experimented with Scandinavian-style policies in the mid-20th century, the deregulation of the Reagan revolution and the entrepreneurship surge of the 1990s allowed growth to take off. The U.S. economy is now one-third greater than the European Union’s. If today’s socialist sympathizers are searching for honest inspiration, they might instead look to Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea or Soviet Russia. Somehow that pitch never makes it into the stump speech."
John Papola on X - "The nordics are broadly free market, rule of law societies with slightly larger welfare states paid for by VAT taxes and high marginal rates that start close to median income.  The reason these communists claim to obsess about the Nordic model while promoting a set of policies that are the opposite is because they're thieving scumbag liars.  Is that fair? Shouldn't we assume good intentions as an ethic of civil discourse?  No. Not when you're advocating coercion as a political leader. Well-intended Ignorance is not an acceptable answer. You chose to enter public office. You've been making these claims for years (in Bernie's case for decades).  Motivated ignorance is lying. Lying to steal other people's stuff and accumulate power for yourself is thieving scumbag behavior."

Rock Chartrand on X - ""Living wage" is an emotionally loaded term.  It implies that anyone unwilling or unable to pay the demanded amount is condemning people to death.  In reality, it's simply a demand that low-productivity jobs pay more than the market currently values them at, with the costs shifted onto employers, consumers, and the unemployed who get priced out entirely."

jay plemons on X - "Nick Shirley uncovers an adult day care in Flushing, Queens with 7,000 phantom members.
Nick: “This public document says you have 7,899 members.”
Employee: “No, we don’t have 7,000 members.”
Nick: “So you’re overbilling then? You’re getting paid $1,600 per patient — that’s how you got $12.9 million in 2024.”
Employee: “Please leave.”
American taxpayer dollars at work."
Left wingers want unlimited social spending, because that's unlimited funds to leech off

Labor Is The Party of the Bureaucrat, Not The Worker - "For most of this country's political history, the major fault line has been between labour and capital—between workers and the bosses who employ them. That's the fault line that shaped the union movement, and the party that grew out of it. The Australian Labor Party.  But that fault line isn’t as clear anymore. I believe that the major political conflict we have isn’t between workers and bosses. And it isn't between the public versus private sector either. The real fault line is between those whose work lifts productivity and those whose work puts a drag on it. Those who lift productivity include the surgeon, the teacher, the tradie, and the founder: anyone whose work makes someone else more likely to produce. One doesn’t even have to be in paid work to be productive. Stay at home mums are some of the most productive people in our society, raising the future human capital of the nation.  On the other side of the fault line sits work that exists to administer, monitor, or process the people who are actually doing the producing, often with no clear link back to any outcome at all. Every organisation carries some of that second kind of work. But it’s in government that it's growing the fastest, and where it has the least accountability. Because government is the only part of the economy that gets to write its own cheque and send someone else the bill... The Labor Party has gone from being a party of the worker to being the party of the bureaucrat. The same party that purports to defend workers has overseen the highest amount of tax revenue generated from labour in Australia's history. The government collected $349 billion in personal income tax last financial year... Since 2022, the APS has grown by 26 per cent. The cost of running it has blown out by 42 per cent—to $114.6 billion, or roughly $8,200 for every taxpayer in this country, every year. Budget papers show that figure being revised up by a further $19.6 billion over the next four years—on its own, enough to wipe out any savings from cutting the NDIS. Government spending overall now sits at 28 per cent of GDP—the highest it's been in my lifetime.  But here's what I find most telling: of all the things this budget reformed, the government's own spending wasn't one of them. There was no plan to shrink the size of government, no serious attempt to ask why the APS needs to keep growing so fast. Every other part of the economy was asked to adjust. The one part of the economy that gets to write its own cheque was not. A few weeks ago, the Secretary of the Treasury, Jenny Wilkinson, gave the post-Budget address to the Australian Business Economists. It's worth paying attention to what she chose to talk about, because it tells you something about how this budget was actually built. Her speech was thorough, and serious, and almost entirely about one thing: who has more wealth, and who should have less. Page after page of analysis on lifetime income distribution, effective tax rates by income bracket, who benefits from negative gearing and trusts and by how much. All of it very carefully modelled.   But all of the modelling was based on the assumption that wealth just naturally manifests itself.   The Treasury Secretary did not model how these tax changes might affect the decision to start a business at all, to take the risk, to build the very thing that gets redistributed in the first place. When she did address the risk question directly, her answer was that the research didn’t support the idea that capital gains tax impacts risk-taking, beyond compensating for inflation. She mentioned one citation, and moved on. The Treasury, by its own admission elsewhere, hasn't modelled the productivity impact of these reforms at all. You can build a very rigorous case for redistribution. It's a different exercise entirely to build a case for growth, and that is what Treasury has not done.  Australia is already a hard place to take risks, and it's getting harder. The OECD's latest survey found that Australia has gone from being one of the five easiest countries in the OECD to start a business in the late 1990s, to below the OECD average today. The rate of creation of new companies has been falling since the mid-2000s, and its slowing down. And the conversations I've had, particularly with young people online, about the proposed changes have told me something else: there's very little understanding in this country of why entrepreneurship matters, or what risk actually does... What we don't see is the risk not taken. The research not pursued. The film not made. The business not started. The children that are never born. When people don't take risks, we can't know what future we've missed out on. Those losses are invisible—which is exactly why they're so easy for the government to ignore them. You can't put a line item in a Budget for the company that never existed... I've noticed, in the past few weeks, a resurgence of something pernicious that can sometimes characterise this country: tall poppy syndrome.  I've seen ordinary Australians, who own a modest amount of shares, likened to robber barons. I've seen small business owners described as being "subsidised" by the current tax settings.  This is an inversion of the truth. Everyday Australians investing in shares are doing the right thing, and should be rewarded for it, not punished for their thrift. People who take the risk to start a business are not subsidised by our tax settings—they pay income tax, company tax, payroll tax, and GST. When a capital gain finally occurs, it's on money that has already been taxed. This is no subsidy in the equation.  We should also remember something this country seems to have forgotten: in a free market, a business only succeeds when it gives customers something better, or cheaper, than the alternative. The value captured by the business owner is only ever a small fraction of the value created for everyone else. The future is built by the saver who buys shares instead of another holiday. The tradie who decides to start a business and hire apprentices. The founder who pays himself $80,000 a year, the surgeon, the teacher, the parent who took the risk of bringing a child into the world.   Long live every Australian still willing to build something nobody asked them to build. They are not the burden this country needs to manage. They are the only thing that has ever paid for everything else."

Contra AOC, you don't have to be a billionaire to be a leech - "Barack Obama's "you didn't build that" comment during the 2012 election, part of a larger argument that successful entrepreneurs ultimately derived their wealth from public investments, was widely considered a gaffe at the time.  In retrospect, the former president sounds downright capitalist. A decade and a half of leftward drift in the Democratic Party has given us the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), who argues that not only did you not build that, but if you're rich enough, you actually stole it.  The New York congresswoman went viral yesterday for comments she made on comedian Ilana Glazer's podcast describing any billionaire's wealth as inherently unearned... The notion that someone has profited off of others' misery simply by being a billionaire is silly. Philosopher Robert Nozick debunked this idea with his Wilt Chamberlain thought experiment. To summarize, if you redistributed all wealth equally, Chamberlain would quickly end up having way more money than everyone else because a huge number of people would be willing to buy a ticket to see the basketball player live.  Nozick's point was that even from a starting point of complete economic equality, some people's superior skills will enable them to make more money than others and that's fine. The people who voluntarily pay to see Chamberlain are better off for the experience, even if the money they spent on tickets recreates vast wealth inequality.  People have offered the more contemporary example of Taylor Swift as a rebuttal to AOC's comments, but the point is the same: You can indeed become a billionaire by doing something obviously uncontroversial and non-exploitative like selling concert tickets.   Indeed, the source of Swift's wealth is not so different from AOC's interlocutor. Glazer is a successful actor and comedian who's become, even by contemporary American standards, rich and famous by selling performances that people want to see.  The fact that she hasn't obtained the stratospheric levels of wealth that Swift has doesn't obviously make one the oppressor and the other the oppressed. It does reek of envy and petty status competition.  There is of course a case that Taylor Swift's fortune is partially derived from ill-gotten gains. While many consider her to be a talented performer, and she's certainly a skilled businesswoman, her wealth depends in part on copyright protections of her music that many libertarians would consider a form of unjust, state-granted privilege.   The point is that it's not the amount of money Swift has earned, but her means of acquiring it that determines whether her fortune is deserved. The primary question to ask is whether one earned their money conducting voluntary exchanges in a free market, or through some state transfer or grant of privilege.  To be sure, in our modern, mixed economy, there's plenty of state transfers going around. Contra AOC, there are makers and moochers on every rung of the income ladder.  The billionaire who lowers consumer prices by creating an online retail giant and distribution network hasn't inherently exploited anyone. The middle-income tenant living in a rent-stabilized unit in New York is benefiting from an inherently parasitic relationship created by regulation... AOC complains of the "myth" we've created of the productive billionaire to justify wealth inequality. The far more pervasive myth seems to be the one the congresswoman retails in: that government taxation and state-granted privileges can't be coercive exploitation because you didn't earn that money anyway. Sheldon Richman ends his essay on libertarian class theory with a call to "raise the class-consciousness of all honest, productive people. That is, the industrious must be shown that they are daily victims of the ruling political class."  AOC wants to obfuscate the fact that she is a member of the ruling class with her own rags-to-Congress story. Don't buy it. Stand in solidarity with the billionaires she'd like to see the state grind into dust."
Left wingers think all property belongs to the state after all

Swann Marcus on X - "Every left-wing poll be like “Would you vote for socialists if we could give you everything you’ve ever wanted with no cost?” socialism +63 “What if it cost you literally anything?” Death to commies +794"

Links - 26th August 2026 (2)

North Dakota woman gets 25 years in prison for fatally poisoning boyfriend - "A North Dakota woman will serve 25 years in prison for the poisoning death of her boyfriend, who authorities say believed he was about to come into a large inheritance and had planned to break up with her.  Ina Thea Kenoyer was charged with murder in October 2023 for the death of 51-year-old Steven Riley Jr. Riley was hospitalized and died Sept. 5, 2023, after falling ill and losing consciousness, according to court documents.  An autopsy found he died from ethylene glycol poisoning, according to a Minot police officer's affidavit. Ethylene glycol is used in antifreeze... Authorities said Kenoyer claimed Riley had been drinking alcohol all day and suffered heat stroke in the days before his death. Kenoyer knew of the inheritance, which she thought was over $30 million and felt she was due a portion of as Riley's common-law wife, according to the affidavit.  North Dakota does not recognize common-law marriages. Investigators doubted the inheritance existed, according to the newspaper."
Kenoyer gets 25 years for poisoning death - "Kenoyer and Riley believed he was to be the recipient of a $30 million inheritance, and he planned to meet with an attorney at the Minot Airport on Sept. 3, 2023, to complete the transaction. Investigators determined Kenoyer poisoned Riley the day of the airport meeting to collect a share of his inheritance after his death, believing their 10 year relationship qualified her as his common law wife. North Dakota does not recognize common law marriages.  Court documents state several friends of the couple told investigators that Riley planned to end the relationship after he received the money and that Kenoyer was aware of his intentions in the days leading up to the planned meeting with the attorney. Investigators with the Minot Police Department have stated they do not believe the $30 million windfall Riley expected to receive ever existed. The individual who was communicating with Riley about the inheritance has not been identified. Kenoyer told investigators she was aware of the inheritance and planned to split the money with Riley's son. Kenoyer became angry and upset after investigators informed her that she wouldn’t be entitled to any of the money under state law.  Riley fell ill the evening of the airport meeting. When the purported attorney never showed up, and Riley's condition worsened, Kenoyer rebuffed attempts from others to seek medical treatment for him, saying he was only suffering from heat stroke, and brought him home to rest.    Despite Kenoyer telling a concerned friend that Riley had gone to a walk-in clinic the morning of Sept. 5, 2023, the friend was unable to locate him at any clinic or the local emergency room. Riley was transported to the emergency room several hours later in a state of unconsciousness before being flown to a hospital in Bismarck. Riley never regained consciousness and died on Sept. 5, 2023.    After learning of his death, Riley's friends and family reported to Minot Police their concern that Kenoyer had poisoned him with antifreeze. The witnesses stated Kenoyer had made comments in the past about poisoning him with the substance. The witnesses also stated that Kenoyer had

made comments at the hospital that he had been poisoned with antifreeze before they were told of Riley's death...   A search warrant was executed at the couple's home, which found a glass Coors light bottle and plastic mug that both had traces of suspected antifreeze, along with an old Windex bottle containing bright green liquid. Kenoyer admitted to investigators she had been making Riley sweet tea throughout the day of the airport meeting. Ethylene glycol is added to antifreeze to make it sweet to the taste, which the affidavit of probable cause noted can easily be disguised in sweet drinks."

@jq37 on Tumblr - "in conversation about white people who go to Japan and expect their knowledge of anime to culturally carry them, I was once posed with “it’s like if there was a Japanese guy who was obsessed with spongebob and came over here and thought he could get by just communicating in spongebob quotes.” This is a false equivalence because if such a man existed we would crown him king. We’d love him. Americans would fucking love that. sometimes I get sad that this isn’t a real guy I can invite to a party."

Meme - "Besides sensitive snowflake Republicans, it's actually pretty notoriously difficult to insult Americans in any way that actually hurts our feelings. Multiple countries have run into this problem when depicting us on screen. Pretty much every attempt in Japanese anime at creating a stereotype of us ends up hitting the Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzalez threshold."
""This is America-man. He is 7 feet tall, has aggressively blonde hair, and 17 guns on him at all times. The only words he can say are "Murica' and 'freedom' He is clearly a parody."
Americans: "I think I went to high school with him.""
Left wingers say this sort of thing, because when they think of "Americans" they think of right wing Americans. Insulting left wing Americans, on the other hand, is super easy

Meme - "A British streamer I follow (who has been to America but only LA) recently went to Japan, and he tried to explain to his audience that wearing anime tshirts around there would be as ridiculous as wearing tshirts with bald eagles and the flag on them in America. His audience then explained to him that those were perfectly normal tshirts for Americans to wear and they're sold in just about every Walmart that exists. I don't think he believed us???"

Student pilot left to land the plane after flight instructor jumps out | National Post - "In the middle of a flying lesson, a flight instructor in Argentina reportedly jumped to his death, leaving a student pilot to land the plane herself.  “You know what you have to do,” instructor Leandro Andrés Bertazzo, 42, told his 22-year-old student Rosario, according to Argentinian news outlet Todos Noticias (TN). After which Bertazzo reportedly took off his headset and seatbelt, opened the door and jumped out of the plane... Despite being in “complete shock,” the student pilot managed to land the plane."

Finland's pink shopping baskets: It's how singles meet each other - "Some supermarkets in Finland have pink baskets for shoppers. If you carry one, it signals to other shoppers that you are single and open to being approached. This quirky local custom is now going viral thanks to a video by Instagram creator Kashivi...   The initiative has been introduced at select stores run by Finnish grocery chains such as K-Supermarket and S-Market, where pink baskets are used to indicate that a shopper is single and open to meeting other singles. The programme is not a standard feature across all supermarkets, and regular shopping baskets continue to be available.  The idea has also been highlighted by the Instagram page This Is Finland.  “Would you try speed dating or slow friending in Finland? Tatskatytöt (“Tattoo Girls”) are creating welcoming spaces where people can meet, connect and have fun”... While many users found the concept novel, several commenters claiming to live in Finland said they had never encountered it before, suggesting it is limited to participating stores and locations."

Nudist group says swimming-pool ban is ‘discrimination’ - "A nudist group has accused a leisure centre of “discrimination” after their monthly naked swims were cancelled.  Almost 200 members of Northampton Sun Club have been told their swimming sessions at Mounts Baths, which have been held regularly since 1982, can no longer continue."

Arsonists set fire to cats to start Italian wildfires - "Arsonists tied rags to cats’ tails and set them alight, causing wildfires in Italy, investigators have said.  Flames tore through Pollino national park in Calabria, southern Italy, this week, destroying much of the parkland.  Along with the stray cats, investigators found candles and delayed ignition devices near the smouldering remains...   Cats have previously been used to start wildfires in Sicily. In 2016, authorities blamed Mafia-linked groups for using animals to set the Nebrodi regional park in northern Sicily alight.  The next year, the Campania-based Camorra mafia deployed the same tactic to start fires in protected woodlands below Mount Vesuvius, triggering evacuations and the deployment of the Italian army. Lauren Pearson, a researcher, told CNN last year the arson was part of a wider land-grab tactic to buy up torched land at bargain prices.  In the Calabria region, more than 160 fires have been recorded, which the local civil protection chief blamed on arson by “malicious individuals”."
Damn climate change causing so many wildfires!

Airlines use buses instead of connecting flights amid environmental concerns - "Pilot shortages and climate concerns have seen airlines load passengers onto coaches rather than connecting flights... She had used a flight-booking platform and was given a flight number, and her journey was between two airports, but closer inspection of her boarding pass would have revealed the words “Aircraft type: bus”... KLM began operating a bus from Ottawa to Montreal over 15 years ago, meaning customers buying tickets from Ottawa to, say, Amsterdam, have often found themselves connecting via road. In this case the coach departs from Ottawa Train Station rather than the airport, but as the station has even been assigned its own three-letter IATA airport code (XDS), it’s not a stretch to see how this could be misunderstood."

Restaurant owner in South Korea facing jail for serving ant sorbet - "The owner of a Michelin-starred restaurant in South Korea could be jailed for serving sorbet topped with ants.  The restaurant, in the upmarket district of Gangnam in Seoul, imported dried black ants from the US and Thailand to use as a garnish on desserts, prosecutors said.  The insects, which are said to have added a sour taste to the dishes, are banned under South Korea’s Food Sanitation Act. The owner of the two-Michelin-starred restaurant has been fined 20m won (about £10,000) and faces up to a year in prison for violating food safety laws... The ants “contained up to 55 times more heavy metals than typical edible insects”, according to the Chosun Daily, a news site.  Under South Korean law, 10 species of insects, including grasshoppers and mealworms, are approved for human consumption. Other countries, including Australia, Denmark and the UK, permit the use of ants as ingredients. The insects are often eaten in several Asian, African and Latin American cultures. Prosecutors heard that the restaurant’s head chef was accustomed to the practice of using ants to add acidity to dishes while working in the US and Europe, and was unaware of the differences in the South Korean health code."

I was overcharged €100 at an Algarve café – until I discovered Portugal’s ‘complaints book’ - "I was horrified to see I’d been overcharged more than €100 (£85) for a single can of Coke I’d bought the previous day. The drink should have cost €1.50, but the owner of the café where I bought it had in fact charged me €105. I assumed it must have been a simple mistake, a slip of the finger. I kicked myself for just tapping my phone on the card terminal without checking the amount; I was in a hurry. Not a mistake I’ll ever make again.  I rang First Direct immediately to discover the payment couldn’t be stopped. The only form of action, said the call handler, was to return to the café and ask for a refund. She added that these “mistakes” were happening with increasing regularity in bars and restaurants around the world. And that many customers were being caught out by not checking before tapping. When I returned the next morning, the café owner refused to refund me, shaking her head at the very idea that a mistake had been made, even after I showed her the evidence in a screenshot. Her grasp of English seemed to have worsened overnight, and I found myself getting increasingly exasperated.  I suggested we contact the police, but instead my friend Amber picked up a red, A4-sized booklet marked “Livro de Reclamações” from behind the café’s till. This magical item is Portugal’s complaints book – introduced 20 years ago to give consumers strength in just such a dispute. It’s an official and permanent form of redress that, under Portuguese law, must be held visible at every establishment supplying goods and services across the country, from hotels and campsites to restaurants and bars... When Amber picked up the complaints book, the grumpy café owner acted immediately. Before we had so much as opened the first page, she reached for her wallet and swiftly handed over €100 without another word. I was still overcharged for my Coke, but €3.50 was an easy loss... Peru has a similarly named and operated system with a 15-day time frame for business owners, as does Spain, whose version is called the Libro de Hojas de Reclamaciones."

There’s a jar in your spice rack that’s worth its weight in silver - "Chives are delicate and water-heavy, and the chemical compounds that make them such a fine finishing garnish to your omelette or baked spud will, without being overly dramatic, simply vaporise.   Texturally, dried is just as inferior: along with the vibrant green, you’ve lost the crunch that comes when you bite into these little green straws at their freshest.  Happily, chives are incredibly easy to grow. Sow some seeds on your windowsill or even pot-up a supermarket plant and you’ll have a ready supply, there for the snipping. You won’t kill them off if you forget to water them once or twice, and while almost no living flora is slug-proof, the razor-tongued gastropods tend to leave Allium schoenoprasum alone.  Cut them back entirely, and they’ll still sprout anew, which is perhaps why they’re a symbol of immortality in Chinese folklore, and were associated with power and bravery by the Romans, who fed them to their racehorses and legionnaires."

First World War general died after taking officer’s place in Gallipoli battle - "  A general died after taking an officer’s place to lead his troops into battle during the First World War in Gallipoli.  Brig Gen William Scott-Moncrieff took the officer’s place at the Battle of Gully Ravine in June 1915.  As commanding officer of 156th (Scottish Rifle) Brigade, he was meant to stay away from the front line because high-ranking officials were deemed too valuable to lose.  But Brig Gen Scott-Moncrieff, made the split-second decision to lead soldiers into battle himself when the commanding officer of one of his battalions neglected to go forward at the right time.  The 56-year-old, who walked with a stick after being shot and seriously wounded in the leg during the Boer War, was shot and killed almost instantly because his uniform made him an obvious target. As a Brigadier General his uniform would have featured a conspicuous badge featuring a crossed sword and baton on the shoulder or the cuffs. Early on in the First World War, it was frowned upon for officers to wear similar jackets to their men.  But officers’ distinctive outfits made them targets for snipers and as the war went on and casualty rates climbed, many went against the policy and adopted regular troops’ clothing. By 1917, a year after the end of the Gallipoli campaign, this practice was given official sanction."

British Airways fights customer in court over £12 – and loses - "Mr Butler charged the airline interest at a rate of 8pc for 35 days from the date his claim was issued to it being paid in October. BA denied it owed the money, arguing that the law did not allow for interest to be paid on compensation.  “Because they had put me through the trouble of going through complaints and issuing proceedings, I was not going to back down when they had unnecessarily made me go through the legal process,” Mr Butler explained.  “BA seems to have a policy to obstruct any claim and be really difficult in the hope that people give up or claim off their insurance, rather than pay out what is legally due.”  His perseverance paid off, with Uxbridge County Court ruling in his favour in May, ordering BA to pay £11.76 plus a court fee of £181... his victory could open the doors to other consumers adding interest charges to refund claims, experts said.  Martyn James, a consumer expert, explained airlines typically prefer not to have consumer disputes decided by courts for fear of legal precedents being set."

Prince Harry loses £50m phone hacking case against Daily Mail - "The Duke of Sussex has lost his £50m privacy claim against the publisher of the Daily Mail in a humiliating legal defeat...  The Duke’s attack on the judiciary is unlikely to be welcomed by his father, the King, who is the head of courts in Britain. The King refused a last-minute request from the Duke to stay at Buckingham Palace earlier this week after his son’s plans for his UK visit were beset with indecision and delays. There was also a desire to create distance between the Duke’s litigation and the palace... The Duke and his fellow claimants now face potentially crippling legal bills. They were warned by the judge last year that the financial “consequences” could be substantial in defeat... The publisher said the ruling delivered on Tuesday was an “overwhelming victory” for the free press and accused Prince Harry of wasting valuable court time by bringing the “egregious” case.  Mr Dacre, who edited the Daily Mail from 1992 until 2018, said the claim formed part of a “sinister” effort not only to bring down the powerful newspaper group but to resuscitate Leveson Two and impose statutory regulation on the press... The ruling brings a devastating end to the Duke’s seven-year moral crusade against the tabloid press.  He had hoped to continue the success of his previous legal claims against News Group Newspapers and Mirror Group Newspapers, which saw him declare himself a “dragon slayer”... The Duke had proved a valuable figurehead for the campaign for press reform, but this was his last throw of the dice.  His own battle against the tabloid press, which once prompted him to joke that he had become a “professional” litigant, is all but over. The judge was highly critical of how the so-called “Leveson Lies” allegations were pursued."
There goes that potential income stream. Time to slime his family again.
Attacking the press is only fascism when that pushes the left wing agenda

Greek drivers defy warnings to inch across buckling bridge - "Greek drivers are ignoring warnings and crossing a collapsed bridge instead of taking a 11-mile detour.  The Palaiopyrgos Bridge in Larissa, central Greece, was severely damaged in a storm, leaving the central section hanging precariously over the Pineios River. Storm Daniel tore through Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey in September 2023, with 79 bridges in north-central Greece alone damaged in the flooding.  Almost three years on, drivers are still running the gauntlet over the buckled bridge despite repeated warnings that they should take an alternative route."

'Barry Larry Terry' mugshot creates social media sensation - "A police department in rural Alabama became internet famous this week, when an officer posted a humorous mugshot to their Facebook page that unexpectedly went viral. City of Moulton Police Department Officer Russell Graham was posting a round up of real arrest mugshots in the area on June 13, when he came across a mugshot of a long-necked man online. Graham says he doesn't know the origin of the funny mugshot, but decided to throw it into his round-up as a joke. He decided to name the man Barry Larry Terry, and wrote that he had been arrested for 'unlawful possession of a wild raccoon' and 'no headlamp on bicycle'... A day after posting the picture, the department boasted that they now have more likes on Facebook than the entire population of Moulton."

Meme - Old Salty Marine: "When police are killed in the line of duty I always hear the same sentiment "They knew the risk when they took the job." How come we can't apply this logic when criminals are killed during arrests? "They knew the risk when they did the crime.""

Why did Muslim-majority Tajikistan ban the hijab? - "The ban on headscarves in Tajikistan is seen as a reflection of the political line that the government of president-for-life Emomali Rahmon has been pursuing since 1997. Tajikistan's government passed a law banning the hijab, the latest in a string of 35 wide-ranging religion-related acts, in a move described by the government as "protecting national cultural values" and "preventing superstition and extremism"... The law, approved by parliament's upper house Majlisi Milli last Thursday, bans the use of "foreign clothing" — including the hijab, or head covering worn by Muslim women. Instead, Tajikistan citizens are encouraged to wear Tajik national dress... the central Asian country of some 10 million is 96% Muslim, according to the last census in 2020... While there are no legal restrictions on beards in Tajikistan, multiple reports state that law enforcement has forcibly shaved men sporting bushy beards, seen as a potential sign of someone's extremist religious views. The Law on Parental Responsibility, which entered into force in 2011, penalises parents who send their children to religious education abroad, while according to the same law, those under 18 are banned from entering places of worship without permission. A 2017 statement by the Tajikistan Religious Affairs Committee said that 1,938 mosques were closed down in just one year, and places of worship were converted into tea shops and medical centres, for example. The latest set of laws was said to have been spurred by the deadly Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow in April. Four of the attackers captured by Russian law enforcement — said to be part of the Khorasan branch of the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS-K — had Tajikistan passports... Several Muslim-majority countries have banned the burqa and hijab in public schools, universities, or government buildings, including Tunisia (since 1981, partially lifted in 2011), Kosovo (since 2009), Azerbaijan (since 2010), Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan."
From 2024. Islamophobia!

My in-laws are demanding we pay £3,000 more a year for a Sharia mortgage - "When we mentioned we were looking at mortgage rates, his mother was horrified and said we must use an Islamic, Sharia-compliant mortgage. She even said she would not feel comfortable visiting or eating in our home if it was bought with “haram” (forbidden) money. Tariq is now panicked and wants to do whatever they say to keep the peace. I am much more practical. I’ve looked briefly online and it seems like Sharia mortgages are significantly more expensive and harder to get than standard ones. We are already stretching ourselves to afford this house and I don’t think we should pay thousands of pounds more just to appease his parents’ religious views when we don’t share them to the same degree."
Proof that the UK is an Islamophobic country and needs to subsidize Sharia mortgages to ensure equity

Why breakfast really is the most important meal of the day - "A study of 128 adolescents who consistently missed breakfast found that, when given a proper meal soon after waking up, the quality and nutritiousness of their diet improved. Consuming a high-protein breakfast was also found to be the best way to achieve the healthiest overall diet... those eating breakfast took in more fibre, iron, zinc and choline overall. Participants in the high-protein group also consumed more protein, iron and choline compared to those in the normal protein group. The study also showed that both the groups who ate breakfast consumed fewer desserts, sweets and candy compared to participants who skipped breakfast. Additional benefits were observed with the high-protein group, who ate even less added sugar compared to the other groups... Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, has previously said that breakfast should only be eaten after 11am to help people lose weight. He said waiting a few hours before eating anything after waking up was better for staying healthy and shedding excess pounds. That was because most people now eat dinner much later in the evening than previous generations, and only stop eating at around 9pm. Therefore, an 11am breakfast was the best way for a person to achieve 14 hours of fasting overnight, which growing evidence suggested was best for the metabolism."

Call Me Lot's Wife - "Flynn: I know this is random but, dom or sub?
Wyatt: I guess Domino's? I don't really go to Subway all that much. Not sure why you'd put them in the same category though."

Z on X - "Around a month ago, a couple of hedge fund friends pitched me on $SNDK , $MU , $SKHY , and the rest of the memory names as their best ideas. The thesis was compelling, and the guys are very smart. Their main argument was simple: these companies were incredibly cheap. P/E of 10. P/E of 8. Some even lower. The interesting part is that not a lot has changed fundamentally since then, yet many of these stocks are down around 50%. We can extrapolate that, since nothing fundamentally changed and the stocks have been cut in half, sentiment is more important than multiples, and you never want to buy at peak sentiment, no matter how cheap the deal looks. Read more about it in my post below, “The Myth of P/E Ratios.”"

My Medical Association Silenced My Views on Gender Treatment

Trust the experts! Trust the Science! Because they've all been blackmailed into pushing the left wing agenda.

As left wingers proclaim, "How sad it must be believing that doctors, scientists, scholars, historians, economists & journalists are all lying to you, but a criminal conman, business cheat, reality TV game show host with a lifelong history of blatant, unapologetic, nonstop lying, is telling you the truth."

Time to denounce right wingers for undermining trust in medicine by spreading "misinformation"!

My Medical Association Silenced My Views on Gender Treatment
Ordinary people can see quite clearly that this medicine is dangerous. When our greatest authorities insist otherwise, it undermines doctors’ credibility.

I’m a board-certified obstetrician, a lesbian, a mother, a lifelong Democrat, and up until recently, someone who placed immense faith and trust in the institutions that guided my profession.

I served as the chair of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ Iowa section for a year and a half, where I dedicated my time to expanding women’s health access to rural areas in my state.

But in March, one of ACOG’s vice presidents called me into a meeting and told me I had a choice: resign from my position as chair, or stop publicly criticizing ACOG’s endorsement of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s guidelines for transgender medical care.

I had come to realize that our profession was not doing the right thing by encouraging medicalization and surgery for transgender patients, when robust evidence that these treatments provided long-term health benefits did not exist.

The choice was easy.

I told the vice president, Rachel Pittman, that I would resign because I did not intend to silence myself on an issue about which I care so much, and one that impacts so many vulnerable patients deserving of the best, evidence-based medical care.

To understand how I came to this position, I have to take you back to my first day working as a general obstetrician at the UnityPoint LGBTQ+ clinic in Waterloo, Iowa, in 2019.

After enrolling at the University of California, I attended the University of Iowa for my medical residency, where I met my former wife; we had three kids together. I’ve poured myself into my work, at times spending over 120 hours a week in the hospital.

When the opportunity presented itself to work at the LGBTQ+ clinic a few times a month, I jumped at it. I knew how lesbians had historically felt ostracized by their doctors, and I wanted to help rebuild trust.

I was surprised to find that my first patient at the clinic was a biological woman who identified as a man. Even more surprising was that my second patient was too, as was my third, and nearly every patient on my schedule. Those who didn’t identify as transgender identified as nonbinary. The clinic, I learned quickly, didn’t predominantly serve the needs of lesbian or gay patients. It was, by and large, a gender clinic, there to provide medical pathways toward transition for those with gender dysphoria, including hormone replacement therapy and surgery.

I didn’t mind this at the time. In fact, I enjoyed feeling like I was providing much-needed care for an underserved community. I left the clinic after a year due to scheduling conflicts, but it continued to refer patients to me. I performed over a dozen “gender-affirming” hysterectomies—surgery to remove a uterus—on patients who, in some cases, had traveled hundreds of miles to see me. It’s a major medical procedure, which comes with risks as serious as death. By this point, all of the gender-affirming hysterectomies I performed were on biological women who were seeking to transition to men and who had plans to be on lifelong testosterone treatment. I thought the medical basis for these procedures was plausible: lifelong testosterone treatment could cause uterine complications, and in addition, it made sense to me that seeing menstrual blood, or even knowing they had a uterus in their bodies, could cause these patients profound anguish. I presumed that the benefits of a hysterectomy in these cases outweighed the risks.

But in 2023, a patient came to my office seeking a hysterectomy and made me rethink everything. She was in her early 20s and perfectly healthy, but she did not intend to undergo a full medical transition. Instead, she identified as nonbinary, but presented very much like a conventional woman—in the way she looked, but also in the way she acted and dressed. She indicated she did not plan to pursue any other medicalization, such as testosterone. I felt a deep sense of anxiety over performing the procedure. I couldn’t understand how her request was any different than asking for an elective hysterectomy—a surgery that has no medical justification, and against which ACOG strictly recommends. I began to reflect on this patient, and all the other patients who had come through my door asking for me to remove their uteri. Why was it that for a healthy young person it would be nearly impossible to get their uterus removed without an underlying medical issue, but if one were simply to identify as a man with no other plans to transition—or even just say they are nonbinary—the surgery is freely available?

When I reached out to a community of ob-gyns on Facebook and explained my reservations, almost everyone was in favor of the procedure. One group of respondents was highly credentialed doctors at some of the best academic institutions in the country telling me the procedure was “medically necessary,” that ACOG, guided by WPATH’s guidelines, explicitly recommended it. And the second was a group of doctors who called me names like “ignorant” and “transphobe” for even questioning whether to perform the procedure in the first place.

But nobody could provide a strong, evidence-based argument as to why this procedure would help my patient get better, so I declined to perform it. I was nervous to tell the patient. I was scared she would go into the community and tell her friends, and that I’d be labeled a “transphobic doctor” and my practice would be at risk. I had seen that happen to plenty of highly regarded physicians before me.

Shortly after, a detransitioner, a woman who had sought testosterone treatment to transition to male but later stopped taking it and resumed identifying as a woman, came into my office. I had been told for years that detransitioning was so rare, so unlikely, that I was shocked to find someone in my small community going through it.

Around this time, in the fall of 2023, I decided to run to become chair of the Iowa section of ACOG. My focus at the time had been on increasing reproductive healthcare access in rural areas like mine, where we struggled to recruit and retain good doctors. When I assumed the position, I acted as ACOG’s loyal soldier, consistently relying on their standards of care and defending the organization when doctors expressed their frustrations. My superiors in the association told us that by sticking together in our guidance, we could more effectively help our patients and fight for improvements in our field.

But in the background, I began to dig more deeply into the literature on transgender medical science. I assumed there would be a great body of research supporting these invasive measures, even if they didn’t always make sense to me.

But I couldn’t find a single good long-term, longitudinal study on the health outcomes of transgender patients who underwent treatments including hormone replacement therapy and surgery. Then I started reading books like Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think, an investigation into what went wrong at the UK’s Tavistock Gender Service for Children, which shut down in 2022 after independent inspectors found it provided “inadequate” care. In July 2025, I tuned in to a United States Federal Trade Commission hearing that laid out a strong case that leaders within WPATH unethically manipulated their data or put pressure on researchers to produce outcomes that supported their preexisting guidelines.

I was floored to discover the research basis into gender medicine both for adolescents and adults was not just poor; it was fraudulent. I couldn’t understand how my medical association, let alone others in my field, could endorse it.

In December 2025, I authored an essay on my blog titled “Physicians Must Demand Answers from WPATH.” In it, I argued that it was time for members of my profession to hold ourselves to the highest, most rigorous and data-driven standards of care when treating patients with gender dysphoria, even if it means having to admit we had previously been misguided.

I didn’t expect ACOG to completely disregard all of the concerns I had raised. On February 4 of this year, two months after publishing my article, the newly appointed vice president Rachel Pittman sent me an email stating my article “raises concerns” because of my “public expression of dissatisfaction with ACOG’s inclusion of WPATH in its clinical guidance.” She requested I join a meeting with her and the association’s legal staff. On March 10, ahead of our meeting, she followed up to emphasize that I could voice my concerns during the meeting “relating to care for transgender people,” but added that “we aren’t planning on having a full discussion on the issue.” The meeting lasted only 20 minutes, and in the end, I was forced to resign if I wanted to continue expressing my concerns publicly.

What made my dismissal all the more ironic was that the very day I was ousted, ACOG awarded the Iowa section the State Legislative Advocacy Award for my work to recruit and retain ob-gyns in the state. A week earlier, ACOG recognized me with a service award and asked me to give a presentation in Washington, D.C., about my work in Iowa to a national audience of ob-gyns.

Rather than hear my concerns and take them seriously, my national medical association chose to silence me. They chose to be complicit in a campaign to promote ideology in medicine over evidence-backed science.

Whenever WPATH’s proponents are asked to defend their guidelines, they don’t cite the weak scientific evidence. Their strongest argument is always that all major medical associations in the United States have adopted them. That’s hard to argue with. And it was true until this past February, when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major medical association to no longer endorse medicalization of minors dealing with gender dysphoria.

I always thought once the leaders of our medical associations learned the truth, they would seek to change our guidance. But I continue to be disappointed. The reality is that these medical associations have now become overrun by a small, loud group of activists. The leaders who we expect to guide us and hold us to the highest standards have succumbed to them out of cowardice, or even ignorance, to what is best for our patients. They’re now more interested in silencing critics than they are in standing up for what is best for our patients. I know this because it’s exactly what I witnessed at ACOG.

Ordinary people can see quite clearly that this medicine is dangerous. When our greatest medical authorities insist otherwise, it undermines doctors’ credibility and makes people less likely to trust us for their care.

It’s not hateful to tell the truth and to want to keep young people from experiencing these grave harms. In fact, it is our duty as doctors to do so. I hope my medical organization one day finds the courage to admit this.

A week after resigning from ACOG, I signed on as the lead medical adviser of the LGB Courage Coalition, a lesbian, gay, and bisexual advocacy group seeking to restore evidence-based care in gender medicine. My hope is that by reaching out to physicians one by one, I can help them understand how our position isn’t hateful like the mainstream leads them to believe; it’s based on the truth.

Links - 26th August 2026 (1 - Jason Arday)

Frank Lechner on X: "Kathleen Stock and the Arday "delusion"" - "@kathleen_stock1  underestimates the challenge of confrontinting the Arday "delusion." Viewed politically, his supporters do not suffer from a lack of "coherent thought."  She writes, as reported by @ProfAliceS  from behind a paywall (full essay not available to me, alas), "There is, though, another lesson to be drawn here, about the difficulty of delivering truth to a person who is radically self-deceived. Sometimes it is just easier to become half-deluded too. Institutions nominally dedicated to knowledge . . . are full of people captivated by second-hand fantasies, excluding coherent thought. We need to help them face reality." Some Arday supporters inside and outside higher ed may be captivated by "fantasies," but their "thought" tends to be quite coherent, if you don't judge it by fusty academic standards but instead focus on the ideological impetus. Historic oppression and current neoliberalism combine to cause intolerable inequality, not just by class but also by gender and race, to be overcome by affirmative efforts to expand opportunity, restribute positions and resources, and advance the interests of underrepresented minorities. The reality of inequality needs to be replaced by a new reality of equity. You can call it a fantasy, but once the situation is defined as real in these terms, it is real in its consequences. Arday's rise and the response to his end are one such consequence. Another: good progressives must now fall in line to attack the vicious racist campaign against Arday, mere facts be damned--see also the NUJ @NUJoffficial  message on "ethical" journalism. "Delivering truth" to help people "face reality" is going to be a thankless task as long as it is framed in generic terms of delusion and fantasy rather than the reality of ideology and political commitment."

Thread by @IonaItalia on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The people defending Jason Arday's lies have lost their minds. It's madness of a level that I would have thought actually impossible, except among a few clinically insane people, schizophrenics etc. Yet it seems to have become a mass hysteria, a folie à beaucoup. This is no longer about Arday himself or even about Cambridge University. It's about a bizarre new cult that seems to have mesmerised people in the UK. As someone has pointed out, I should have called this a folie à nombreux."

Frank Lechner on X - ""The people defending Jason Arday's lies have lost their minds." Not at all. It's important to see the political rationality at work. Strictly speaking, of course, defending the package of lies (more than just plagiarism) makes no sense, esp. considering the extent (including calling police etc.) But, given their priorities, Arday defenders are also acting rationally (though whether they'll succed is not yet clear!): by the Havel rule, trying to make others assent to lies in some way symbolizes and forces their submission, and by making Arday a martyr and deflecting criticism as racism, his defenders also promote a new round of leftist policy and try to cow media allies."

Alexander Kustov on X - "The whole Arday thing is absolutely breaking me. While many folks lament the loss of trust in higher education or the media, the bigger issue is clearly the loss of our trustworthiness.  Regular people are not supposed to do their own research on things like masks, plagiarism, or racism—they *should* just be able to take what institutions like Harvard, Cambridge, or BBC tell them for granted. But now they can't. And they seek populist alternatives on social media that are even worse.  I mean, I'm not sure I'd trust Cambridge administrators and many other universities myself now. And it's not just the replication crisis or DEI scandals—there are some disciplines like education where the standards are so low it's not even clear whether anything they produce can be replicated or falsified at all by design.  I'm still a professor though, because I believe universities can be valuable and because I see a lot of great people around me doing serious work in the pursuit of truth and the public interest, even within social sciences. But to change course for the better and restore trust, we should start by restoring trustworthiness and calling out bullshit on our own side even when bad people on the other side exist and attack higher ed for the wrong reasons."

Richard Hanania on X - "Amnesty International on Arday  “Jason was a scholar, teacher, colleague, friend and family member. He was also a Black autistic man whose journey expanded our imaginations and understanding of what we believed possible in academia. For racialised, Black, disabled and neurodivergent people, particularly those who have been told that our bodies, minds, origins or differences disqualify us from belonging, his achievements represented hope.”  Fascinating split here between academia and the MSM. The Guardian and The Atlantic published real take downs. Academics and activists still act like the guy was a brave truth teller.  Shows you where truth still matters."
When terrorist supporters proclaim that all the "experts" agree that Israel is committing genocide, they are referring to captured parties like Amnesty International

Mariella Frostrup on X - "Words matter. Headlines hurt. This is a tragedy created by pernicious media.Questions about Arday’s qualifications and early life should never have been front page news and top of every news bulletin. Accountability must follow. My sympathies to his family"
Dr. Dr. P: "I said what I said". on X - "Rubbish @mariellaf1    Jason Arday was a serial liar and a fantasist.  He put a target on the back of every Black person with a qualification higher than a GCSE.   I know this personally.    I've spent 30 years dealing with the questions:   "Are you a real doctor?    Where did you get your qualifications?"    (I literally got asked this just last week!)  It is never-ending.  Arday's actions set us all back a generation.   Cambridge, and the entire academic establishment were complicit.   And when the lies were exposed, he seemingly took his own life, leaving  his children, widow, and parents to pick up the pieces  Suicide is a tragedy that causes  irretrievable damage to those left behind, and any premature death is to be mourned.  But this tragedy wasn't created by a "pernicious media".  It was created by a pernicious liar.   And his enablers."

FreeByTheSea on X - "Did you known that anyone who goes for a job or a promotion at Cambridge University is mandated to sign up to their ‘Behavioural Attitudes Framework’(BAF)? They must;
•Explain their commitment to valuing ‘diversity’.
•Promote an inclusive environment.
•Challenge or report any attitudes that are deemed ‘inappropriate’.
Yes- they are mandated to snitch on their colleagues.
Small wonder Jason Arday’s lies went unchallenged, and he sailed in as their golden boy, when DEI requirements take such priority. As Doctor Norman Fenton writes in his new book,- ‘The Capture of Academia’-  accuracy is sacrificed to ideology. I’ll link @profnfenton‘s book and the full interview with @joshxhowie in the comments. Well worth a watch and a read"

Louise Bagshawe on X - "Jason Arday’s death is a tragedy. There is not enough done in Britain on the NHS for emergency provision when it goes wrong. But Sadiq Khan’s appalling reaction, politicizing his death and attacking journalists and academics as “hounding” him, requires correction. The New York Times got it right, noting that Arday hired one of the most expensive law firms in England to try and suppress publication of the truth about him (and succeeded under the threat of a baseless lawsuit), knowingly falsely tried to jail the two nobly motivated academics that blew the whistle on him at great risk to their careers, and, again knowing he was lying, tried to imprison the selfless and courageous journalist at the Times HE who meticulously collated evidence of Arday’s plaigiarism and fabulism. Arday’s lies hurt his students at multiple universities. Impacted their lives. None of this was “harmless fantasy” and the rewriting of history to portray Arday as gentle, vulnerable and so forth totally ignores, as the New York Times does not, that Arday strove to put innocent men in prison for telling the truth.  Now, you can persecute and defraud others, even try to literally put them in prison, and still be vulnerable yourself. Not just Cambridge, but also Liverpool John Moores university and Durham University all have serious questions to answer over that. It is absolutely awful and heartbreaking, and a horrific waste of a human being with a family and plenty of time to redeem himself that Arday took his own life, but every single one of the articles covering him, and all the mockery, was entirely justified because Arday tried to imprison his critics and end their academic careers to defend his own lies. Those are wicked and predatory acts and the tragedy of his suicide does not change, at all, what Jason Arday did to people for telling the truth about him."
Attacking the media is only fascism when they push the left wing agenda

Max Klinger on X - "This guy is the principal of my old Cambridge college, Homerton. Here he totally falsely calls the death of Arday a ‘lynching’. This is complete, unfettered, dogma, spoken to shut down legitimate scrutiny of the ideological corruption of our elite universities.   Imagine being a student at that college and (rightly) questioning this type of cultish racial grievance narrative. Do you think you’d feel able to do so? I would say almost certainly not.   Ideologues - like this bloke - with a clear and moronic political agenda are warping the education system and are not being held accountable for it."
CriticalReason on X - "Another Cambridge man whose academic record needs investigating - because if he can describe identifying Arday’s lies, theft, and bullying as a ‘lynching’ then I can only assume he has zero integrity, zero academic standards, and zero honesty."

Richard Spencer on X - "There are many “DEI hires” who have been unduly promoted and celebrated, but Arday was something different—a real psychopathic narcissist at the level of the “talented Mr. Ripley.” In a funny way, he made other Diversity hires look bad!    The fundamental issue is not so much Arday’s lies as the SHARED FANTASY participated in by his colleagues and, really, the Western world at large. All psychopaths act this way. In manipulating us, they reveal our unexamined values, fantasies, and blind spots.  In so many ways, Arday has done the world a great service!"

Rare | on X - "Jason Arday's former students on Jason Arday:
‣ he plagiarised course notes
‣ he would turn up late and leave early
‣ he spoke without actually saying anything
‣ he would cry racism when challenged
‣ he liked white girls
If this surprises you, poo in your hands and clap.
Meanwhile, in London, black and brown people ignore all of Jason Arday's lies so they can make it about race.  These people are mentally unwell and have no place in our society.  Deport, with haste."

Can anyone comment on Jason Arday's teaching? : r/UniUK - "  Yes, I was on the one module that he was brought in to teach at Roehampton in the Autumn term of 2018. It wasn't his module, it was written by a previous academic and he made no changes to the moodle or updates. He was a terrible teacher who frequently arrived late and left early, on one occasion only teaching for 1 hour out of a 4 hour lecture. He rarely used the Powerpoint slides, made by the previous lecturer, in his lectures and usually sat on a desk giving his generalised opinion on racism, often drawing on his own experiences without reference to theories or academics relevant to the module (Youth Participation and Identities).    He would sometimes show us film clips from films such as fish tank and kidulthood (links were on the previous moodle) and then ask us to have group or class discussions about it with little guidance as to what we were discussing. He often drifted into talking about celebrities using song lyrics to make his point from artists such as Tinie Tempah and eminem and talking about how black artists, such as Beyonce and Megan thee Stallion were sexualised by white men. Most of what he said was based on his own reflections and opinions.  What really gets me is how he let down the students he was teaching. Roehampton is a very diverse university, both in terms of racial background and neurodiversity and takes inclusion very seriously. Although I was a white, mature student, more than two thirds of the class on the module were either black or from other non white racial backgrounds, mostly women, mostly having come straight from sixth form, initially they were charmed by his relaxed and cheerful attitude and his inspirational stories about himself, they also listened with interest to his accusations of every type of prejudice by white people but this changed as the module progressed and as Jason failed to arrive for class yet again. It gradually dawned on the class that we were learning nothing of academic substance and that much of his talk was actually meaningless and without any form of academic justification for his opinions. When it came to the assessment essay he recommended we answer one of the two essay questions (out of 4) that mentioned ethnicity as this was the only thing he had talked about.  As a mature student I felt protective of the younger students who often looked to me for help and advice.  I remember one young, black, female student coming to me in the library as we began to draft our essays and saying ‘I don’t know what to do, I’ve read my notes and there is nothing there I can use!’. She was not the only one and I directed them to resources and offered advice as best I could. In the end I wrote my essay using the references on the moodle from the previous lecturer and carefully reading her module objectives. I also used notes and resources from relevant teaching in other modules. I complained to the head of the course we were on about his teaching (I played her a recording of part of one lecture - this was something I was allowed to do due to my own dyslexia) and how I felt he was failing the students and she agreed to sit in on one of his lectures, after which she met with me and agreed that his teaching was as I described it however she asked me not to take it further as he would be leaving shortly and she would apparently be taking over the module for the Spring term and she didn't want to cause trouble when he was leaving anyway. She did not explain why he was leaving but I understood it was to take up a post at Warwick.  He gave me 70% on my essay, with no feedback, which sounds good except that my average score for the year was 75% and this was my lowest mark of the term and actually dragged my average down. I asked for a meeting with him to ask him to explain why he had given me the mark and provide feedback. At Roehampton marking is blind so he didn't know whose essay it was when he marked it but in the meeting he implied that I was racist and that the only reason I wasn’t happy with 70% was due to my white privilege. I suddenly saw a very different side to him. But why I really have little sympathy for him is that his arguments about wanting to support black, ethnic minority and female students are not what I experienced. When he had the chance to actually do it he let them down."

Melissa Chen on X - "This is Professor Roland Fryer on @triggerpod  discussing the reaction to his paper, particularly its findings on police use of lethal force.  He received death threats, required police protection (ironic), and was suspended from the Harvard faculty over a handful of jokes that supposedly created a “hostile work environment.” His research lab was shut down for good measure.  The old Twitter before @elonmusk  bought it, flagged and suspended accounts simply for posting the paper, branding it as hate speech.   They had endless tolerance for Arday’s lies.  They went after Fryer for speaking the truth."
No one says Fryer was harassed due to racism. Curious. Clearly it has nothing to do with his not pushing the left wing agenda but actually fighting it

Andy Ngo on X - "London — I’m at the memorial attended by thousands of DEI supporters and leftist radicals for disgraced academic and serial hoaxer Jason Arday. The speakers repeatedly target academic @nathancofnas  for breaking the story about Arday’s plagiarism.  Labour MP Diane Abbott was one of the speakers who smeared Cofnas.   Arday k—lled himself after journalists revealed he had lied about his academic work and purported major life accomplishments. He delayed the truth by siccing police and lawyers on journalists early on."
Nathan Cofnas on X - "There is an anti-Cofnas hate rally in Trafalgar Square with ~15,000 attendees. If I were in London there is a real possibility that I would be murdered. 1000s of academics & journalists knew the truth about Jason Arday for more than a year. Now you know why no one said anything."

WeGotitBack on X - "Diane Abbott: "This was a vicious campaign but it wasn't just a campaign against the professor, it was a campaign against all of us and that's why it is so important to come together and fight for justice for Professor Jason Arday." It wasn’t against me as I didn’t lie to get where I am today"

Sandra Parker on X - "James O'Brien is claiming that the 'root' of why the UK media went after Jason Arday's false claims last week was 'racism' Is that also the same 'root' of why James O'Brien made a very public dumping of his friend Jason Arday, last week? #OBINGO @LBC"

Channel 4 News on X - "Large crowds have turned out in central London at a vigil for the former Cambridge University professor Jason Arday - who was found dead last week.  Almost 100,000 people have now signed a petition drawn up by the Good Law project calling for an immediate public inquiry.  They claimed his death was the direct result of the sustained press harrassment which Mr Arday was subjected to - and said racism lay at the heart of the story."
Royal News Network on X - "If you mean an inquiry into how such an unqualified and prolific liar and plagiarist became a full-blown professor at Cambridge University, why yes, please investigate that. But to investigate "media harassment" for exposing the truth is ridiculous. That Misan Harriman is grifting at this "vigil" isn't a surprise, as he has always been on the Meghan Markle grift -- no surprise he jumped on the Jason Arday grift as well.   This case, as ever, is quite simple. A prolific liar was exposed for his lies and couldn't just say, "I'm sorry," and ended his life because he was too cowardly to face reality. The message it sends is that the delusion he fueled with others' help, and what he gained from it, were clearly more important than his family and his own life (harsh but true). And this didn't have to be the end of his story. I would have loved to see Arday make amends, find redemption, and then later success. This time the right way. But he clung to his lies to the end, which were, again, fueled and supported by others who hold a portion of the blame for his death as well. Many of his supporters also want to do the same because they have all benefited financially, professionally and personally from the same DEI policies that gave rise to Jason Arday in the first place.   They don't want their own grift to end either.  What all these people at the vigil are doing by denying the reality of Arday's lies is just fueling more to head down this path towards destruction, and it's disturbing and disgusting. The reason Jason Arday is dead is that he was elevated far above his skill set and allowed to fabricate stories with impunity because the agenda was more important than education, integrity and, in the end, Arday's own life."

Malcolm Clark on X - "Jolyon Maugham complains about the media monetising pain. Yet he monetised Jason Arday and continued to do so even after his tragic death. Jolyon is what you get if you cross a self-righteous social justice warrior with a dodgy ambulance chasing lawyer."
Gordon Millar on X - "I couldn't agree more. On 29 July the University of Cambridge aggressively dismissed the reports of Arday's plagiarism and resisted the demand for enquiry. And, if plagiarism had been the only issue, this strategy might well have worked. Unfortunately for Cambridge and Arday, two other factors come into play – Arday's own extreme fantasising about his “achievements” and Jolyon Maugham's Good Law Project intervention.  Most people have never head of Arday before 28 July, and the plagiarism issue is legalistic and dry to non-academics. But, after people began to check on-line, it became obvious that there was no independent evidence of any of Arday's remarkable claims about his life story and accomplishments.  And it's at this point that Jolyon Maugham leapt on to the bandwagon and barged in with all the finesse of a bull in a china shop and forced everybody's hand. Framing the allegations against Arday as a politically motivated, racist attack, he produced an open letter that drew mainstream national press attention to what was initially a relatively niche academic dispute. Journalists, defending themselves against charges of racism, looked more closely at the evidence and, in particular, at Arday's biographical claims.  The result was that a series of new stories about Arday's lies and fantasies appeared, but there was no “misinformation”, just a stream of revelations, from publicly available sources, that Arday had claimed non-existent achievements and offices which he didn't hold.  From this point on the course of events was pretty much fixed. But not by the press. And Maugham's virtue-signalling self promotion absolutely didn't help."

Change.org UK on X - "In the 22 days before his death, 249 articles were published about Jason Arday. That's more than 10 a day. Tia Lazaro-James has launched a petition on https://t.co/7nKW12tdpN calling on the government to protect individuals from media harm."
Andy Ngo on X - "Leftists and DEI supporters are urging the British government to pass a law that would ban heavy media coverage of a person. They say this is needed after dozens of stories were published about Jason Arday’s numerous and extensive lies. There were so many stories because there were so many lies."

la scapigliata on X - "They didn't do it for JK Rowling. They didn't do it for Kathleen Stock. Or Anne Widdecombe. Or the Scottish girls defending themselves from groomers. But they want to legislate to limit the number of articles written, for a conman who set police on people who questioned him."
Of course when the press doesn't write enough articles slamming Nigel Farage the left will claim that the press is defending him

Alex Banks on X - "Amnesty International is a shell of its former self, but you'd think that someone in an organization originally dedicated to press freedom would see the irony of asking the UK government to investigate the press for wrong (accurate) thought"
Jeffrey Sachs on X - "Unreal. @AmnestyUK (left) calls and n the UK government to engage in mass press censorship (“Arday’s Law” on right). Putin would dream of this sort of power. Oh, you published four stories in 48 hours? Sorry, you’re only allowed two. Madness."
Muzzling the press is only fascism when it threatens the left wing agenda

Richard Hanania on X - "Almost five thousand signatures for "Arday's Law," which would place limits on how many articles the media can write about a person within a time frame.  This would be quite funny. Like imagine if you're a murderer and the media writes about it but then you get free kills for a while without having to deal with the bad press because they used up their quota. Putin can sue for reduced coverage of the war in Ukraine."

Meme - Jack Blackburn: ""Sorry, I know you have fresh evidence on Epstein but you've hit your quota and we can't mention him ever again""
Change.org: "In the 22 days before his death, 249 articles ..."
"Call to introduce 'Arday's Law'. Petition to cap news coverage of any individual within a set time frame. "It is crucial for our society to foster an environment where public discourse is informed, fair, and respectful—especially when reputations and lives are at stake.""

Good Law Project on X - "“There is no doubt at all that this was a racist attack on a working class black man.” We're taking action – ask the PM to commission an immediate public inquiry:"
Alex Leo on X - "The people at the Good Law Project are more responsible for the circus that engulfed Arday than most. They denied the plagiarism, claiming the truth was merely racist lies. It was this refusal to deal with the obvious issues in Arday’s work that made it an international story."
They want to muzzle the press. Of course if they succeed, the next step will be trying to censor the foreign press and then social media

Links - 25th August 2026 (2 - Canadian Politics)

Blacklock's Reporter on X - "MEMO: @MelanieJoly's dept contemplates "legal action" against users on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook & other social media that it suspects of spreading "misleading information."  https://t.co/r6XNHvEh5Q #cdnpoli @ISED_ca"
Blacklock's Reporter on X - "The department @ISED_CA itself would determine whether social media posts were “factually incorrect, misleading or out of context.” Any punitive measures against individuals would be “proportionate and subject to senior level approval.”"
Matt Alexander on X - "The Canadian government wants to determine if your posts are true, then take legal action against you if they deem them to be untrue. They redacted exactly what they considered as legal action. Interesting. LOST FREEDOM FILES # 5221"

Toronto Star faces heat over alleged spiked Carney critic column - "Supriya Dwivedi, a political commentator and former Liberal staffer, said on X that an editor at the Star told her the paper was pulling her column for the week. In a later post, she said the column had been approved and then “spiked” because of a tweet criticizing what she described as wrong reporting by the newspaper.   In a Real Talk podcast episode description, Dwivedi has reportedly linked the alleged decision to her criticism of a Star report about Prime Minister Mark Carney and Nate Erskine-Smith, even after the paper later issued a correction.  The dispute became politically combustible as Dwivedi’s recent commentary sits close to several live political fault lines for Carney’s government: India, foreign interference, privacy, and contested speech legislation.  National Newswatch’s archive shows Dwivedi has been publishing across Canadian political issues, including columns on Bill C-22, surveillance pricing, Manitoba politics, and earlier Toronto Star work on Carney.  The India file is especially loaded. Carney invited Modi to the June 15-17, 2025 G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alberta, arguing that India’s economic weight made its presence relevant to the summit’s agenda. AP reported that the invitation came despite continued strain over the 2023 killing of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia.  Reuters later reported that a CSIS report identified India as a perpetrator of foreign interference in Canada and said transnational repression was central to India’s activity in the country. India has denied involvement in Nijjar’s killing.  The Dwivedi controversy also landed weeks after Sylvain Charlebois, known as The Food Professor, said La Presse suspended his long-running column. Charlebois said the column had run for 25 years and more than 1,000 unpaid pieces before being suspended following his social-media comments about Canada’s media landscape, government support for media, and possible effects on editorial independence.  Charlebois has now publicly linked his case to Dwivedi’s, calling the situation “deeply concerning.”"
Clearly, it was right and proper that she got fired for spreading misinformation. A responsible press cannot do that. If you don't think the government should subsidise the press and you think that creates a conflict of interest, you're a far right extremist and a fascist

Meme - *Stone rolling down hill*
10 YEARS OF LIBERAL POLICY: "HEALTHCARE. CRIME. DRUG EPIDEMIC. AFFORDABILITY. ENERGY. INFRASTRUCTURE. Immigration"
Running red jacketed Liberal Party members: "VOTE LIBERAL AGAIN!"
"It's Trump's fault!"

Eric Lombardi (EricForOLP.ca) 🇨🇦🚀 on X - "There are some long-time Liberals upset that I’m running for leader, in part, because I am trying to pull my party back towards liberalism. I believe that:
- The law should apply equally to everyone
- People should be judged on merit
- Markets should be competitive
- Opportunity must be real for all
- Government should be secular
- Speech should be free
- Excellence should be celebrated
These values are simple, but they are good, and our politics has wandered too far away from them."

Rachel Gilmore on X - "Speaking of the broligarchy’s project to influence Canadian politics… I just noticed something VERY interesting about an Ontario Liberal leadership candidate that’s confusing everyone with that ambition given his right-wing policies and anti-immigrant language:"
🌐 Rohit 🇮🇳🇺🇸🇨🇦 on X - "I'm an immigrant and I find no part of Eric's platform to be anti-immigrant. I'm very disappointed in @atRachelGilmore 's usage of straw arguments and ad-hominem. What's "right-wing" about Congestion Pricing, Platform Screen Doors, Transit Signal Priority and better compensation for Civil Servants tied to performance?"

Canada Proud on X - "#REPORT: Finnish President Alexander Stubb calls on Canada to join the European Union. He was quoted saying "wouldn’t it be lovely if Canada was the 28th state of the European Union rather than the 51st state of the United States?""
John Tomkinson on X - "28th EU state? Where’s the fake outrage from the left? Is Canada for sale to the EU? As Canada approaches national insolvency with no viable economic plan to reverse course, it appears we might become the target of a bidding war, Alberta excluded."
Left wing Canadians don't love sovereignty. They just hate the US

Meme - "If you're angered by Trump's jokes about the 51st state... But unbothered by these EU leaders seriously calling for Canada to become their 28" state... YOU HAVE FALLEN FOR PROPAGANDA"

Ben Woodfinden on X - "Wagner holds press conferences like this one every year to lecture Canadians that criticizing court decisions amounts to portraying judges “as partisan actors, or described as obstacles to the will of the people.”   But if the judiciary wants to be “sheltered from all politicization,” maybe the Chief Justice shouldn’t be holding press conferences wading into political debates.   You can’t appoint yourself a public commentator and then claim immunity from public criticism. Canadians have every right to object when courts invent rights found nowhere in the constitutional text or effectively legislate from the bench."
David Polansky on X - "Lèse-majesté is the outstanding political principle for much of the Canadian establishment"
Billy Bute on X - "A Bust of himself is sitting in the Grand Entrance Hall of the SCC, in full view for all to see, should tell you exactly what kind of person he is. This is highly unusual for a sitting Chief Justice to have his bust on display. Obviously an arrogant narcissistic Liberal elite."

Steve Saretsky on X - "2018: NDP cancels bridge plans already approved
2018-2021: NDP spends years reviewing alternatives.
2021: NDP announces a new 8-lane tunnel instead.
2024: NDP Selects a contractor to design and build the project.
2026: Still no tunnel construction. NDP Government terminates the contractor.
A masterclass in incompetence. 9 years later, same tunnel."
Damn Conservatives! Meme - Only In Canada: Shrivasha Ramnasibsingh:
Enough Is Enough UCPI - Alberta: "The Maple Magas and especially The Alberta Separatists all have a serious case of CDS. CANADA DERANGEMENT SYNDROME The remedy? GET OUT OF CANADA."
Criticising your country is only patriotic when it pushes the left wing agenda. Telling people who don't like how things are to leave is only ridiculous and like selling a house with minor problems when it's left wingers complaining

Herb Powell on X - "Canada
Your prime minister was installed. It's true.  He then won the election after having little chance.  Then he made deals to steal a majority.  His biggest accomplishment is enriching his own portfolio.   You are the only nation in the g20 having a recession.   They've shut down debate and are just ramming through bills to become law and entrap you in a digital prison.   And the majority defend it, love it, thank it.  Canada is being fleeced, we're being robbed, and most aren't mad at the people doing it, they're mad at the people seeing it."
Time to condemn PP again, because the Conservatives are destroying the country despite not having been in power for 11 years

Canada breaking U.S. trade dependence like fighting ‘gravity,’ new economic study shows - "The framework at the centre of their analysis is the gravity model of trade—among the most consistently validated tools in international economics. Its core insight is that commerce between any two countries tends to expand in proportion to their combined economic weight and contract in proportion to the costs, visible and hidden, of doing business across their shared border.  Applied to Canada and the U.S., the model produces a straightforward verdict: the pull is immense, and the friction is low, and that combination is not easily replicated with any other partner...   More than 100 million Americans live within a day’s drive of the Canadian border, and roughly 70 percent of Canadians are clustered within a maximum of a couple of hours’ drive to our southern neighbour.  Cross-border shipments can move by truck or rail in hours. Meanwhile, reaching customers in Asia or Europe generally means container vessels and weeks at sea—options that carry costs no amount of port investment can bring fully into line with the economics of north-south trade...   Where the paper complicates the government’s case is on the question of what actually drives trade resistance.  Freight costs are the intuitive culprit, but academic research cited by the authors suggests they account for only about 10 percent of the drag that physical distance imposes on trade flows. The larger share comes from what trade economists call “dark costs”—an umbrella term for the trust deficits, informational gaps, unfamiliar legal environments, and absent commercial networks that make doing business with a new partner inherently more expensive and uncertain than continuing with an established one. Canada and the U.S. have spent decades bringing those costs down. With most prospective diversification partners, they remain largely intact... regional trade deals have shown no statistically meaningful positive effect on bilateral flows in energy and mining—sectors that together account for roughly 40 percent of Canada’s merchandise exports.   Canada has held Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) membership since 2018, yet the data show scant evidence that other signatories have meaningfully increased their appetite for Canadian resources as a result.  “Given the outsized role of energy and mining goods in Canada’s overall export portfolio, it does give one pause in thinking about the extent to which current and future trade agreements with non-U.S. countries are likely to affect foreign demand for Canadian goods,” Finlayson wrote. The more binding constraints, according to the economist, are domestic: bottlenecks in how Canada moves and prices its resources, rather than tariffs or market access terms abroad. “The challenges of exporting increased volumes of energy and mining goods from Canada have more to do with infrastructure constraints within Canada and the cost of producing and shipping goods from Canada than they do with foreign trade barriers,” he said... Ambitions from the Carney government to reorient the country’s trade geography should be informed by what that reality actually permits."
Damn Maple MAGA!

Mario Zelaya on X - "Industry Minister Mélanie Joly’s department wants to sue Canadians for what they post on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn.  This not conspiracy.   It’s her department’s own words in an internal strategy memo.   Most of it, conveniently redacted.   She calls it “protecting integrity of public trust in government information.”  Liberals conveniently have taken zero action against:
-Four floor crossing MPs who lied to their voters
-A minister who faked a CBC headline
-A PMO that pre-briefed a pollster on 24 Sussex
-A foreign minister who lied to Parliament and called it “submitted in error”
-Carney’s “New World Order” with China
THE GOVERNMENT WILL SUE YOU FOR YOUR SOCIAL POSTS BUT WILL NOT DISCIPLINE ITS OWN MINISTERS.   Welcome to 1984."

Greg MacEachern on X - "One of the key organizers of the illegal occupation of downtown Ottawa gets an invitation to the US Ambassador’s 4th of July event. So that’s a pretty clear message."
Eva Chipiuk, BSc, LLB, LLM on X - "When, and by whom, was it declared an “illegal occupation”?  That is a very specific and important claim.  What we do know is that four judges have found the Emergencies Act was illegally invoked.  If anyone has been found to have acted illegally, it is the federal government. Yet no one has been held accountable.   Let us set the record straight once and for all.   And perhaps that explains why Justin Trudeau did not receive an invitation."

Meme - Melissa @MelissaLMRogers: "HOLY CRAP. Canada's new reliable partner, CHINA, just imposed a 73.5% tariff on imports of Canadian pea starch. China says Happy Canada Day with a 73.5% TARIFF"
"China imposes 73.5% preliminary tariff on Canadian pea starch"
Damn USA! Damn Trump!

Canada sent no one to make its case against Trump tariffs - "Compare that with the room. Mexico sent its Economy Minister to appear in person and argue that there was no legal basis for the action, and that Mexico should be excluded. Peru’s minister argued that the United States had not carried out the individualized analysis the statute requires. Those governments treated a tariff proceeding against their workers as a fight over law and jurisdiction. Canada treated it as a form to fill out, and left half the form blank. Canadians like to say we go into a fight with our elbows up. Canada sent no person into that room, and no elbows. The people who pay for Canada’s absence were not in the room either. They are the autoworker whose plant went quiet, the steelworker whose shift was cut, the millwright in a town where the mill was the town, and then it wasn’t. Some of them have already lost the jobs this proceeding is about. They dismantled nothing, and they broke no rule. They are simply told, after the fact, what was decided about their livelihoods in a room their own country chose not to enter. They deserved someone there to defend their rights. They had an empty chair.  I made Canada’s argument this week because someone with a Canadian connection had to, and no one from Ottawa would. That is not a role a private lawyer should have to fill. The government of a G7 country, facing tariffs on the work of its own citizens under a law that points the dispute somewhere else, should not have to be reminded to attend, or to argue, or to care."

Data banks on all of us would end up being hacked | Financial Post - " Omar Abdulaziz left Saudi Arabia in 2014, built a new life in Montreal and became one of the most prominent Saudi opposition voices outside the kingdom, as well as a close confidant of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In 2018 his phone was infected with Pegasus spyware, which was traced to a Saudi-linked operator and likely played a role in the chain of events that led to Khashoggi’s murder. Despite Abdulaziz seeking safety in Canada, his persecutors found him anyway.  Parliament is now moving quickly to pass Bill C-22, the so-called Lawful Access Act, which would make Canada more susceptible to exactly that kind of targeted surveillance... The centrepiece of Bill C-22 is a provision allowing the minister of public safety to order companies to build access mechanisms into their encrypted services so they can access Canadians’ metadata — provided doing so doesn’t create a “systemic vulnerability.” But how can companies comply with this idea of avoiding “systemic vulnerability”? Creating a backdoor for Ottawa creates a backdoor for nefarious actors.  In its parliamentary testimony, Apple accused Ottawa of inserting such backdoors into its products. Google went further, warning that the bill could facilitate foreign interference and weaken global user privacy precisely because a backdoor built for Ottawa doesn’t remain exclusive to Ottawa. Rather, it would be a massive green light for hostile foreign intelligence services, criminal hackers and any government willing to coerce, compromise or even legally compel companies to hand over information they want.  No government can mandate “access only for the good guys.” This naive idea was debunked by every major cryptographer and technology company that testified regarding Bill C-22. There is no such thing as a vulnerability only the right people can exploit. On metadata specifically, the bill wants service providers to record and retain that information on all Canadians for six months, which is enough to know almost everything about most of us. The coverage is not just suspects or people under investigation but every person who sends a message or makes a call. Do you know anyone who doesn’t do so on a daily, if not hourly basis?  The Bloc Québécois described the six-month data stores as a “treasure trove” for hackers. But that undersells the specific danger for people like Abdulaziz, or Sheng Xue, a Chinese dissident who fled to Canada and believes Chinese agents have tracked her movements and threatened her life.  For a dissident from an authoritarian state, metadata alone can be a death sentence. Months of retained records reveal who someone contacts, when, how often and from where. It maps attendance at community meetings and protests and exposes any contact with people still living inside the home country. The intelligence services of China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia do not need to hack individual phones to connect the dots, they just need the blueprint that this bill wants built and stored on behalf of everyone in Canada. That blueprint ultimately becomes exploitable by any state actor willing to hack or coerce the same access point.  The market is already registering its verdict on the risks. Signal has said it would rather withdraw from Canada than compromise its privacy commitments. Toronto-based VPN provider Windscribe is already looking at relocating its headquarters because the bill would make it impossible to honour its no-data-collection policy, and NordVPN has said it is considering following suit.  Canada has long presented itself as a sanctuary where people who flee surveillance states can live, speak and organize without fear of being found and watched by the governments they have escaped. Khalid Ramizy, an Afghani activist who fled the Taliban and founded the World Anti-Extremism Network, says: “Canada must remain a place where those fleeing authoritarian regimes can feel secure and protected.” Bill C-22 trades that reputation for surveillance architecture that those same governments will eventually exploit."

Shopify's policy head says Bill C-22 handicaps tech sector | Financial Post - "Ottawa’s lawful access act casts too wide a net and risks creating an expanded surveillance regime that could harm homegrown companies and jeopardize the country’s push to improve productivity and economic growth, says Shopify Inc.’s public policy chief.  Michael Liboiron said if the act, Bill C-22, is made into law, it endangers small and mid-sized Canadian businesses because of its compliance burdens and could hinder the growth of larger ones. “If you’re a small company … and you’re being faced with this type of an order, it can be existential,” he said during a webinar hosted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation on Tuesday. He also said it could also curb the growth of larger Canadian companies such as Shopify that export technology and platforms to customers worldwide.  “Exporting technology that is sourced from this type of a context is not optimal,” he said. “It’s a barrier to growth (and) growing your market share in other places in the world.”"
Clearly, the solution is to get other countries to pass similar laws

Stephen Harper helped save the conservative movement — and the country | National Post - "The first bill introduced by the Harper government was the Federal Accountability Act, which was a direct response to the Liberal sponsorship scandal. It seems almost surreal that some of our government’s biggest scandals involved a $16 bottle of orange juice and a staffer paying $90,000 of his own money to protect the public treasury.  My first role, as minister of foreign affairs, gave me a unique vantage point that marked one of the biggest changes in policy from the previous government. We took morally sound positions on Israel, condemning the terrorist attacks of Hamas and Hezbollah, and their Iranian backers. On China, we took a cautious approach to trade that was mindful of the Chinese government’s long history of intellectual property theft, political interference and human rights abuses...  Harper had tremendous pride in our country, which came in large part from his parents. His insistence on commemorating Canadian history, such as marking the 200th anniversaries of the War of 1812 and the birth of Sir John A. Macdonald and discovering the lost Franklin expedition, stands in stark contrast to the last decade of flag-lowering, destructive post-national tearful rhetoric and woke ideology.  Harper believes passionately in the critical importance of national unity and sovereignty, in particular in the Arctic, where he hosted cabinet meetings alongside Leona Aglukkaq, the first Inuit woman to serve in cabinet. I stood aboard ships and on the tundra as we met with CAF members on the annual Arctic military expeditions known as Operation Nanook. It was apparent to me that Harper’s love of country and the CAF ran deep.  On issues of law and order, we often faced fierce opposition. Our policy of putting the protection of the public at the centre of our justice system through mandatory minimum sentences for violent crimes and the introduction of the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights stand out. Cynically, some of our policies were struck down by the courts and are now being revisited and repackaged by the current government."
If you flag Carney's $70 orange juice as a problem, you are Maple MAGA

CTV News on X - "Canadians view China more favourably than U.S., new survey finds"
captive dreamer on X - "Truly some of the most propagandized people on earth"

Canada dispatch: Montreal activist Yves Engler found guilty over email campaign to police, original harassment charge dropped - "Montreal-based author and activist Yves Engler was found guilty Friday by Quebec Court Judge Karine Giguère on three charges of harassment and obstruction of justice stemming from an e-mail campaign directed at a Montreal police detective... The charges relate to over 1,600 e-mails sent to Detective Francesca Anna Crivello on February 19, 2025, after Engler publicized her plan to arrest him and encouraged supporters to contact police. Notably, the original harassment charge related to media personality Dahlia Kurtz, which triggered the police investigation, was dropped by prosecutors in July 2025.   The case originated in the summer of 2024 when Kurtz contacted Montreal police, alleging harassment over Engler’s social media posts criticizing her positions on the Israel-Gaza conflict. In February 2025, Detective Crivello of the Montreal hate crimes unit contacted Engler to inform him she would arrest him the following day on harassment charges related to Kurtz’s complaint. During that call, Crivello indicated she would impose a release condition prohibiting Engler from discussing the case on social media. The detective testified that this condition was “very rare” but necessary given the social media nature of the alleged harassment... Between 6:39 pm on February 18 and approximately 9:15 am on February 19th, when police installed an email filter, 1,662 emails reached Investigator Crivello’s inbox. In total, investigators identified 1,803 emails bearing the subject line “Drop charges against author Yves Engler.” Engler promoted the campaign across multiple social media platforms, where he has tens of thousands of followers. The judge noted that on X (formerly Twitter) alone, the post generated over 263,000 views within 15 hours... Detective Crivello testified that the volume of incoming emails prevented her from working on her computer because the system indicated she lacked space each time she tried to write an email. She described feeling “intimidated” and “targeted” because her full name and personal work email were used rather than a generic Montreal police address"
Weird. Left wingers are usually very keen to go all out on prosecuting "hate crimes"