Links - 18th April 2026 (2)

Builder rushed to A&E after turning blue ... but reason left him red-faced - "A builder was rushed to hospital after turning blue, only to discover that his skin had been dyed by his bedsheets.  Tommy Lynch, 42, had bought navy blue bedsheets and slept in them for two nights when he woke up looking like “an Avatar”, the blue aliens from the hit movie.  He felt “extremely tired” and a friend, who works as a carer, took one look at him before rushing him to the nearest hospital.  Mr Lynch, from Castle Gresley, Derbyshire, was taken straight to see a doctor and was given a bed within minutes, while concerned staff put him on oxygen.  When the doctor at Queen’s Hospital in Burton rubbed his arm with an alcohol wipe, the swab turned blue, causing Mr Lynch to realise that his skin had been dyed by his new, unwashed sheets... “The doctors said they’d never seen someone that colour before and still been alive. I looked like an Avatar.""

Babak Taghvaee - The Crisis Watch on X - "BREAKING: Disguised as opponents of Iran’s Islamic regime, two collaborators of the regime’s intelligence service assassinated an Iranian dissident in Canada almost 40 days ago.  Canadian authorities in British Columbia have charged two individuals with first-degree murder in connection with the death of Massoud Masjoudi, a former university professor who lived in Burnaby.  According to the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, Mehdi Ahmadzadeh Razavi (48) from Maple Ridge and Arezoo Soltani (45) from North Vancouver were arrested on Friday.  Police said the charges were filed after Masjoudi’s remains were discovered just over a week ago, on March 5, in the city of Mission."
Damn Israel! Damn USA!

Nazanin Afshin-Jam MacKay on X - "Today is a painful day for Iranian-Canadians upon learning about the murder of long-time opponent of the Islamic Republic regime and mathematician, @MasoodMasjoody . The day before his trial was scheduled to begin, where he was expected to expose what he had learned about connections to the IRGC, he suspiciously disappeared. Homicide investigators later discovered his body in Mission, British Columbia, on March 6. Two individuals, Arezou Soltani of North Vancouver and Mehdi Ahmadzadeh Razavi of Maple Ridge have been arrested and charged in connection with his murder. Masjoody had previously reported to police that he believed his life was in danger from these two suspects. Investigators should continue their work to determine who else may be linked and a danger to Canadians. According to newspaper The Province, "In a letter to then prime minister Justin Trudeau in 2021, Masjoody said he had flagged Iranian regime programs that were involved in sensitive engineering and technology fields and warned that technologies developed in Canada could be brought back to Iran for nefarious purposes." He also identified students at SFU who could be connected to the regime's IRGC. https://theprovince.com/news/two-men-c harged-first-degree-murder-masood-masjoody/wcm/ff576c5d-3f23-4b96-bc62-0ce342dc1a29  This case should not close.  Investigators should continue to examine his alleged findings. As an Iranian Canadian activist, I can say that many of us have never felt safe, and this tragedy only deepens those fears. For years, we have been warning Canadian officials to wake up to the export of the regime's Islamist extremist ideology here in Canada, as well as concerns about funding networks, safe haven for regime officials in Canada, billions of dollars in money laundering, and the possibility of sleeper cells. To @MarkJCarney  @csiscanada  @rcmpgrcpolice  @Safety_Canada  @gary_srp  , please take our concerns seriously."

Meme - "Rank Order of Gender Hostility Factor Scores by National Setting (N = 27)
National Setting. Men's Hostility toward Women
Greece .42
India .19
United States .19
Taiwan .16
South Korea .11
Germany .08
New Zealand .06
China .06
Mexico .06
Great Britain .04
Australia .04
Russian Federation .02
Hong Kong -.02
Brazil -. 04
Lithuania -. 05
Portugal -. 06
Canada -. 08
Singapore -. 08
Israel -. 12
Switzerland -. 21
Romania -. 26
Guatemala -. 30
Hungary -. 34
Iran -. 36
Sweden -. 37
Belgium -. 47
Netherlands -. 87
National Setting. Women's Hostility toward Men
South Korea .53
India .51
Taiwan .48
Mexico .37
Lithuania .27
China .18
Russian Federation .18
Hong Kong .17
United States .15
Great Britain .15
Romania .12
Portugal .10
Brazil .10
Iran .08
Guatemala .07
Greece .04
Singapore .00
Germany -. 03
Australia -. 07
New Zealand -. 17
Israel -. 17
Canada -. 19
Switzerland -. 20
Hungary -. 22
Belgium -. 52
Sweden -. 53
Netherlands -. 89"
I can't find out where this is from, but it looks like women hate men more than men hate women, and other studies show similar rank orders for countries

Who will rid us of the password tyranny? - "Why, in the name of all things locomotive, do you need a password to buy a railway ticket? Is there a fear that otherwise the Chinese will secretly buy an Anytime Return to Grantham on your Trainline account?  Heaven knows it is hard enough to travel by train already. Only a doctoral student in stochastics could understand the conditions for buying an Advance Supersaver to Tiverton Parkway. And when you’ve got in your hand a printed-out ticket for a reserved window seat in the quiet carriage, you find that the seat is next to a solid wall with no view even of a restricted kind... It’s not just trains. I’m afraid I lost my patience the other day when I was buying some soap – verbena as it happened – and the nice woman behind the till asked me my postcode. I humoured her until she wanted to “check” my surname. Has it come to this, that you have to give your name and address to buy a bar of soap?... The trouble is that you are now required to buy things online, not in a shop or at a booking office. The secondhand bookshops have closed and the streets are full of youths on bicycles delivering burgers at two in the morning. Even for a free exhibition at the National Gallery you are encouraged to purchase online a ticket for £0.00.  Once the outlets have got you to open an account, it naturally has to be protected by a password. Never mind that in a hack of the Transport for London website in 2024 an estimated 10 million people had their names, email addresses, home phone numbers, mobile phone numbers and physical addresses taken.  Not that we’d have minded a generation ago. We used to have our names, physical addresses and phone numbers published all the time, in a thing called a telephone directory. Very useful it was too.  But now, in order to buy 100 metres of Gütermann black extra strong thick polyester button thread or a ticket for a performance of James MacMillan’s Stabat Mater, you have to remember your password for Amazon or Ticketmaster. You can’t remember them all, of course, which leads you into the temptation of using the same password for everything, exposing you to the immediate attention of Scattered Spider, the teenage hacking franchise that wants to extort a ransom to unfreeze your online activities.  Despite the millions of data breaches, your bank still wants you never to darken its branch again but to do all your banking online. Then the bank can sell the branch. The need for passwords is largely illusory, giving at best an unreal sense of security. The identity cards that the Government keeps trying to force on us are just a way for it to be a Scattered Spider to our private information. The ID will be controlled by a password. For criminals that will be an opportunity for forgery and fraud. For honest citizens the thing won’t bloody work and we’ll all risk becoming non-persons."

easyJet passengers' outrage as elderly woman 'already dead' when wheeled onto flight - "easyJet passengers have alleged that an elderly British woman who was assisted onto a flight by her family was already dead before she got on the plane.  The 89-year-old woman was helped onto the plane at Malaga Airport in Spain by five relatives, with onlookers stating that the family informed easyJet staff she was feeling unwell and had fallen asleep. However, just before take-off, the crew were notified of the woman's death.  Consequently, the plane was halted before it could leave the runway, resulting in a 12-hour delay for the flight to London Gatwick... According to fellow travellers, the group managed to board the plane by assuring a staff member who questioned the woman's apparent ill health that she was 'merely tired'. One passenger even claimed to hear a member of the group reassure the staff member that they were "doctors"... According to easyJet, the elderly woman possessed a fit to fly certificate and was alive when she boarded the aircraft. However, passengers were convinced that something far more serious than fatigue was occurring."

Disabled woman cooped up for 42 days in a Virginia hotel room freed - "A Virginia woman in a wheelchair who had been stuck on the top floor of a four-story hotel for 42 days is finally able to go outside.  Joy Patton, a disabled woman in a wheelchair, had been stuck on the fourth floor of the Woodspring Suites Extended Stay hotel, which had not had a working elevator since April 10, which is the last time she had been outside.  The Pattons said the hotel’s local management told them their room rate would rise from about $600 per week to more than $1,000 per week after they called Nexstar’s WAVY."

Meme - "God when Satan kills someone *upset*
When he tells someone to kill his own child
Trollface: "it's just a prank, bro""

Inside the weird world of Toronto’s transit seat upholstery - "Other transit systems, most recently in Seattle, have shifted away from fabric seats, citing complaints about cleanliness. Toronto transit is in the midst of its own seat debate... "The advantages of the fabric seats are that they offer more comfort, warmth and friction [preventing sliding]," said Metrolinx spokesperson Lyndsay Miller in an email.  "The fabric was chosen because it is extremely durable and easy to clean," she said... "We’ve done a lot of investigation into camouflage as well because it’s used to hide things, hide people, usually," Kerr said. "But this is used to hide dirt," she added, pointing at one of the busy seat patterns.  "If you spill mustard here, it’s not going to show as much." Geneticist Christopher Mason swabs subway surfaces around the world, searching for microbial ecosystems, including on fabric and plastic seats.  He started swabbing more than a decade ago, when his daughter licked a subway pole and he panicked. But his findings have "quantifiably soothed" him. "Almost everything we find are bacteria and viruses related to plants, related to what you would find on human skin," said Mason, a professor of systems and computational biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.  "Most of them are already around you to begin with." While Mason has found more kinds of microbes on fabric than plastic, he doesn't think sitting on one type of seat is worse than the other.  "If an environment is too clean, it’s actually bad. Part of your immune system is you need training," he said. "Plastic often has less diversity. So if anything, I’d probably want more of these diverse surfaces on the subway." Mason says it's still vital the seats get cleaned though."

Siavash Safavi on X - "There is no "Islamic" golden age of science. Ibn Khaldun, Arab sociologist: "Only the Persians engaged in the task of preserving knowledge and writing systematic scholarly works. Thus the truth of the Prophet's statement becomes apparent, 'If knowledge was hanging from the highest stars in heaven, the Persians would attain it'..." Ibn Khaldun, the Arab father of sociology, continues:  "It is a remarkable fact that with few exceptions, most Muslim scholars…in the intellectual sciences have been non-Arabs. Thus even the founders of (Arabic) grammar were Sibawaih and after him... all of them were of Persian… great jurists were Persians… ." Regarding the Islamic Golden Age of Science, Abbasid Caliph Mamun, who had an Iranian mother, defeated his brother Amin with an Iranian army and became the Caliph.  He started the "Translation Movement", and science books from Persia, Greek Egypt, and conquered Roman territories were translated into one language, Arabic,  which naturally caused a scientific boom. Not because of Islam, but because of Mamun, who fought the Abbasid nobility tooth and nail and defeated them.  Go check the list of Islamic "fathers of sciences". Majority of them are Iranians, and a lot of the rest are Spanish.  Kharazmi, Biruni, Avesina (Ibn Sina), Rhazes (Razi), Khayyam, Farabi, Majusi, Tusi, and Farabi, were all Iranians just to name a few. Not Islamic scientists. Most of them were actually labeled as Kafir by Islamists of their time. (If you don't recognize some of these names, add an "al" at the beginning of them and you might.) Also, there is no "Islamic architecture." What you have is Islam appropriating Iranian and Mesopotamian architecture. You see that dome on top of most mosques? That's signature Iranian architecture. And yes, the Taj Mahal is an example of Iranian architecture.  The translation movement was immediately stopped by the Abbasids after al-Mamun and its effects died down in a few centuries. There was never another scientific boom in the Islamic world. I have searched every claim I made here and they seem to be well-established facts. I encourage you to research them and tell me if I'm wrong. This is not a flex about history. That's a stupid thing to do. I love my Arab friends and I hate tribalism. My issue is not even with Islam as a personal religion but with Islamism as a political and public force.  I do believe in national identity, and I don't like lies, and Islamists have been spreading them for as long as I can remember. Islamists have one identity, Islam, no nationality exists under Islamism.  If we are to step forward with open eyes, we have to recognize the false narratives we were fed for generations and know exactly where we come from.
Photo on the left: The Armenian Cathedral in Isfahan, Vank. An example of Iranian, and not Islamic, architecture.
Photo on the right: Inside the Taj Mahal, designed by an Iranian architect."

VKTR on X - "today i learned about the chinese circular gooner economy. delivery drivers work 12 hour shifts on meituan → tip their earnings to egirls livestreaming on douyin → girls are too exhausted from streaming to cook → order takeout on meituan → same drivers deliver it → tip again. 100% efficient monetary velocity. i expect this dystopian meta to hit the west soon"

blighter on X - ""Rufo attacked American programs promoting women's rights in Afghanistan" so fun to see this old chestnut trotted out again! reminder that we spent over *$2 trillion* on afghanistan over 20 years. more than $100 billion *per year* for *20 years*. on a country where the GDP at its max was ~$20B. so we were spending 5x the entire country's GDP. but it was all worth it and should have continued forever bc "programs promoting women's rights in Afghanistan".  absolutely amazing. just incredible."

Morbid Knowledge on X - "A 52-year-old farmer in Lancashire, England, has been arrested after allegedly tying two young men, aged 17 and 20, to his quad bike and driving them four miles to the police station for trespassing on his land.   Leland Hornby, 17, said his friend had been riding an electric bike on the property when they got locked in and decided to return the next morning.   Upon returning, they found the bike missing, and the farmer confronted them and hogtied them to his quad bike.   The farmer, arrested on suspicion of false imprisonment and assault, has been released on bail."

‘Mind the Grab’: London’s Most Famous Shopping Street Has a Controversial New Sidewalk Theft Warning - "On a stretch of one of London’s most famous streets, a new campaign is trying to raise awareness about rampant phone theft through bold purple sidewalk lines and a cheeky message: “Mind the Grab” — a reference to the iconic “Mind the Gap” warning used in the London Underground.  The sidewalk warnings launched this summer amid a surge in thefts where people, often on mopeds or e-bikes, snatch phones from the unsuspecting hands of people in busy pedestrian zones. In 2023, Westminster recorded more than 34,000 phone thefts, roughly 94 per day"
The descent of the UK into a low trust society

LiorLefineder on X - "Modern Soqotra has rates of 35-40% cousin marriage but looking at the rate of inbreeding from ancient DNA in medieval Soqotra, there was no first cousin marriage, "ROH data also provide evidence for an absence of close kin unions, defined here as first cousins or closer"."
Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 on X - "Wow wow! An isolated, island-based Arab Christian population had rather little cousin marriage: until they converted to Islam."

Dystopia has arrived: a reality show where men compete to impregnate a woman - "Despite being pretty in a Getty-stock-image kind of way, and despite being a successful holistic health and beauty expert, Kristy has not yet found her fantasy husband. So she has turned to reality television programming to help her out. That’s the premise of the new show Labor of Love, in which 15 men compete to be the “one” honored with impregnating the show’s heroine. As I watched her journey toward motherhood unfold, I thought, finally. Finally, someone has found a way to make a buck off the fracturing of the American family."

Meme - Brian Krassenstein: "We have left the United States for Montreal. No corruption here."
"MACLEANS. Quebec: The most Corrupt province. Why does Quebec claim so many of the nation's political scandals?"

Meme - kelvin4pres: "I love you NTU thanks for giving me an education and now a job but that's not how acronyms work"
"gAmes for HeaLth InnoVations CentrE (ALIVE)"

Why petrol prices go up like rockets but fall like feathers – in S’pore and globally - "Experts believe the “rockets and feathers” phenomenon is also playing out.  The term was coined by economist and researcher Robert Bacon, who observed that petrol prices in the UK took off like a rocket when crude oil prices increased, and fell slowly like a feather when crude oil prices decreased.  He recorded “faster and more concentrated responses” by petrol prices to increases in the cost of oil, in findings published in the Energy Economics journal in July 1991. Mr Sam Chua, Rystad Energy’s principal for Asia-Pacific advisory, said: "When costs rise, retailers move fast to protect their margins. No business wants to absorb a loss.  “But when costs fall, there is little urgency to be the first to pass on the savings.”  Because fuel demand is barely sensitive to price changes, petrol stations “face less pressure to quickly lower prices when costs come down”, he added.  This pricing scenario largely played out in Singapore when Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb 24, 2022.  Back then, posted prices of 95-octane petrol ranged from $2.75 to $2.85 per litre, according to records from the Consumers Association of Singapore’s price tracker, Price Kaki, before climbing to a peak of $3.42 per litre.  Months passed before oil prices eased, and prices of 95-octane eventually returned to pre-invasion levels... Even if the Middle East conflict subsides, consumers may face a harsh reality, as petrol station operators could hesitate to lower fuel prices ahead of their competitors.  Mr Chua said: “With prices across retailers tending to move in tandem, no single player has a strong incentive to cut first.”"

What Ever Happened to Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’? - WSJ - "In his 1968 book “The Population Bomb,” Paul Ehrlich famously declares that unless countries engage in population control, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” in a “race to oblivion.” He was wrong (“The Paul Ehrlich Apocalypse Is Back,” Review & Outlook, Jan. 4). Sadly though, the Stanford University biologist’s claims helped drive human-rights abuses around the world, from forced sterilizations in India to forced abortions under China’s disastrous one-child policy. Interestingly, Sunita Narain, head of the Centre for Science and Environment, a New Delhi think tank, blamed government planning, not birthrates, for the extreme crowding that first inspired Mr. Ehrlich. “If you want to understand Delhi’s [population] growth,” she argues, “you should study economics and sociology, not ecology and population biology.” Similar lessons apply today. The danger is that global action responding to the risk of people starving to death due to climate change could be heightened by the unintended consequences of government policies. Happily, neither catastrophe needs to occur if market forces are allowed to leverage human ingenuity."
"I was a college student when I read Mr. Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb.” I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid."
Trust the Experts! Even if they are always wrong

Guillaume Cabanac tracks fake science - "Each night, this tool’s Torture detector scrutinises the 120 million publications indexed by the bibliographical database Dimensions, in an effort to ferret out tortured expressions.  This term refers to incongruous assemblies of words, which are symptomatic of misconduct and fraud, and unfortunately get past the filters of certain ineffective or even fraudulent journals, thereby corrupting a small fraction of the scientific literature. To understand why, we must put ourselves in the shoes of fraudsters. For them, simply cutting and pasting paragraphs from legitimate articles – the building block for creating a fake paper – is not possible due to plagiarism detectors.  However, they can paraphrase the text with synonyms thanks to software designed for this very purpose, although this may generate the famous tortured phrases. Paste the result without checking it, and you get “kidney disappointment” instead of kidney failure. “Bosom peril” rather than breast cancer. “Nucleic corrosive” in place of nucleic acid. And “counterfeit consciousness” stands in for artificial intelligence!"
This was pre-AI too

The Oval walkways at Ohio State University were paved based on the students' desire paths. : r/interestingasfuck
User-centred design

The RI Virtual Bookshelf

Meme - "No one caught speeding here today but there was 81 crashes *blonde police officer with shapely butt with radar gun*"

More than 30 Canadian Army soldiers get frostbite in Arctic - "More than 30 soldiers based in Petawawa suffered frostbite injuries during a recent exercise in Alaska, prompting concerns about the quality of equipment military personnel are issued."
Time to send more aid to Ukraine!

👻🐌Jag🐌👻 on X - "In 1845, 79 people died in a bridge collapse over the River Bure because a large crowd had gathered to watch a clown in a bathtub be pulled upriver by four geese."

Unpacking "Nobody is Illegal on Stolen Land"

James Lindsay | Facebook

Let's talk about the opening part of this statement: "nobody is illegal on stolen land." We can break it down, but we should also know what it is. What we are looking at is Chinese-style political sloganeering called "tifa" (提法).

 

Communist communications ever since Mao took over China (and the CCP before that) almost always follow this kind of formulation, called 提法 (tífǎ), which literally translates as "watchwords" or "slogans." Literally, it means to lift up or present or highlight the core message or political principle in play through a charged slogan.

 

The purpose of the sloganeering is actually to do a kind of political engineering through carefully selected and weaponized words that are easily memorable and that hijack the critical thinking faculties of the people who both hear and repeat them so they'll advance the Party line.

 

You can think of tifa quite literally as a form of "discourse engineering" with the intent of doing political engineering or political warfare more or less by hijacking people's brains through mystifying slogans. (Mystification is like a more powerful form of confusion, akin to having been put under a spell.)

 

In his amazing analysis of the CCP in the early 1950s, just after Mao took power (in October 1949), psychologist Robert Jay Lifton referred to what amounts to tifa as "thought-terminating clichés." That is, they're slogans (or clichés) that have the power to turn off your ability to think clearly about what's being said and implied and to just go along with the political messaging rather than to question it.

 

The mechanisms of these political warfare tools are mystification and rhetorical entrapment. Mystification is overriding critical thinking with carefully constructed falsehoods and framing. Rhetorical entrapment occurs when there's no easy way to disagree with the framing (think, "black lives matter" or "Christ is king" (as the Groypers use it), both of which are examples of tifa).

 

The mystification part is a process of using carefully constructed falsehoods presented as truisms that undermine the critical thinking process. That is, the statements can be seen as "obviously" true in a particular way that disguises how they are false in another way. For example, black lives obviously matter, but supporting the organization is something people should not do.

 

The statement "nobody is illegal on stolen land" is very sophisticated as tifa because it contains three mystifications in just six words:

 

1) "Nobody is illegal" confuses the distinction between being a human being of basic human dignity and being a citizen of a country or legal visitor there;

2) "Stolen land" confuses the legitimacy of the country in question;

3) The idea of being able to be legal or illegal if the country itself is not legal because it is "stolen land." This is distinct from the idea of the land itself being stolen because it conceptually bridges the concept of legality and legitimacy of the country.

 

As you can tell, breaking down and explaining the failures of all three parts of this mystification (demystification) is both challenging and exhausting, and it takes so much space that most people will not engage with it due to its length (which will be three orders of magnitude greater (5000-6000 words) than the tifa itself (6 words) to explicate fully and two orders of magnitude greater (600-800 words) just to barely articulate). Raise these by another order of magnitude of effort or two for the argument that will follow the attempt to demystify.

 

The point is that to fully engage a six-word tifa through explanation, discussion, and argument to try to break someone free of it might take 50-100 thousand words worth of effort by the time all is said and done. (Another example: "trans women are women"; look how much effort that one has taken!)

 

This example of tifa also contains two rhetorical traps that derive from the first two mystifications:

 

A) It dares critics to say that people themselves are illegal (illegitimate) because of a political circumstance, thus replacing a legalistic fact with a moral assertion, one that is difficult to litigate without considerable expertise and that might still lose on emotional appeal ("empathy");

B) It lures critics into litigating the legality of the establishment of the nation in question, which undermines the justified presumption of authority in the national concept.

 

These rhetorical traps not only put critics in a bad, weak, and likely losing position from the start, but they also invite adopting a reactionary or chauvinistic stance as the only possible reply (e.g., "we aren't colonizers; we're conquerors" or "illegals are illegitimate"). This feeds the strategic principle of "your target's reaction is your real action" upon which these manipulative movements gain the most ground.

 

In short, tifa like this hijacks the capacity to understand the situation correctly in a succinct, repeatable phrase even Billie Eilish can repeat in about a second and a half (confuses and mystifies) while arranging a sophisticated psychological and public opinion trap that is mostly lose-lose-lose for those who would object.

 

Notice that through the application of tifa as a form of political warfare (public opinion warfare, specifically), any idiot (including the average Billie Eilish fan) can ensnare any good-faith actor in this very sophisticated political warfare device even without understanding in the slightest how it works, dragging them into either confusion or arguments meant to be fought on losing ground for the good-faith critic. You don't need a sophisticated political warfare operator to make this happen.

 

Furthermore, notice that any idiot who falls for the tifa here will actually repeat it, making the slogan campaign viral so that it is mostly being fought out not by experts but by masses of laypeople who know there's a fight but who aren't properly equipped to deal with it. This is why it is an example of "public opinion warfare" as one of the CCP's "three warfares" doctrine styles.

 

As summarized by the RAND Corporation: "Tifa have four identifying characteristics: (1) They are politically laden and stated verbatim, (2) they extend along a clear line of authority, (3) they are distributed to official party organs, and (4) they characterize or resolve a dialectical contradiction between competing ideas in the CCP."

 

Engaging with this kind of slogan, as we must, brings critics into a "dialectical space" that's roughly on the level of the average idiot who can argue emotively or even just repeat the slogan as a kind of verbal cudgel (for those watching) rather than genuinely engaging. We might call this the "Reeeeee! Effect," and we all know it works very well. Tifa creates the "Reeeeee! Effect."

 

Since the late 1960s, almost all "New Leftist" activism in the West runs on a Maoist-Marxist engine, including the heavy use of tifa sloganeering as a form of rhetorical and political warfare. Most of what we engage in today with their B.S. rhetoric is tifa.

 

So these "thought-terminating clichés" (tifa) are very powerful and sophisticated political warfare tools that we all encounter every day. The only way to beat them is to identify them for the manipulations they are and explain them as best we can so that people are more likely to identify them and less likely to fall for them, and also to help people out of the ones they're already caught in and under the spell of.

Links - 18th April 2026 (1 - California [including Homelessness])

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "There won't be an honest mea culpa, just like there won't be a mea culpa once California and its many deep blue local jurisdictions start retreating on their "progressive" crime and education policies. And then 20 years after this inevitable retreat the process of "progress and reform will start once again- an endless cycle of dreamy and destructive utopianism."
AP The Associated Press @AP: "BREAKING: California Gov. Gavin Newsom has issued an executive order for the removal of homeless encampments in the state."

KTLA on X - "The family of a man who was stabbed to death by a homeless man while he was charging his electric car outside the Downey City library has filed a claim against the city seeking $40 million in damages. Details:"
SLC Fatigue on X - "Los Angeles is so bad that you will get stabbed charging your car at the city library by a homeless man, and when an ambulance comes to save you, ANOTHER homeless man steals the ambulance while they’re tending to you at the scene leaving you no way to get to the hospital, and you die. Sounds like South Africa…"

Karen Hanretty on X - "From KTLA: A state audit found that California invested a staggering $24 billion over the past five fiscal years to address homelessness... Yet, as this spending has increased, so has California’s homeless population."
Daniel Friedman on X - "California has 187,000 homeless people, so the state spent $128,000 on each of them in the last five years. This is enough to pay the entire rent for a market rate 1 bedroom apartment over that period for each homeless person, but they’re still living in tents in city parks because most of the money is actually being funneled to wasteful NGOs and government workers who are paid $200k salaries and don’t do anything."
Clearly, if the US "taxed" "billionaires", it could end homelessness

Josh Koehn on X - "Former head of a San Francisco homelessness nonprofit charged with 9 felonies. This comes 3-plus years after Gwendolyn Westbrook admitted to me in an interview that roughly 20 of her friends & family had taken up housing designed to go to SF’s neediest."
constans on X - "SF spends $1 billion/yr on homeless services, and the homeless remain a big problem. It’s not lack of money. It’s both poor policies and the non-profit corruption. The head of this non-profit embezzled money for herself and gave out affordable housing units to friends and family"
Damn Donald Trump!

Official Lies, Bubonic Plague, And California's Homeless Challenge - "According to California Governor (and former San Francisco Mayor) Gavin Newsom, the “vast majority” of San Francisco’s homeless people “also come in from… Texas.”  To him, that’s “just an interesting fact;” to PolitiFact, it’s “Pants on Fire” inaccurate. PolitiFact goes as far as calling it “ridiculous.”   The tiniest factual nugget for Newsom’s fib was contained in data from a city program that hands out bus tickets to the homeless so they can travel to family or friends who have agreed to care for them. Of 12,268 tickets issued over 14 years through last year, 827 were to Texas—that’s 6.7% of the total—though the highest for any destination not in California.   It makes sense that Texas would be the most popular state other than California—as the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual interstate migration report shows that Texas has been the No. 1 state for people moving out of California for more than a decade.  That Newsom, San Francisco’s mayor from 2004 to 2011, would want to blame a state 1,200 miles away for the growing ranks of homeless in the state’s fourth-largest city—and every other urban area in California—is both understandable and troubling.   Understandable, because Newsom, first elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors at the age of 29, has been in public office for 22 consecutive years with direct responsibility for the myriad of policies that bear on the homeless population... in addition to the deplorable plight faced by California’s growing homeless population, estimated by the U.S. Housing and Urban Development to number almost 130,000 last year, the unsanitary conditions they foster are now becoming a public health risk at large.  The trash, used needles, and human waste littering California’s cities have led to increased numbers of rats and—along with them—fleas and deadly diseases. There were 13 reported cases of typhus in California in 2008, spiking to 167 in 2018, while hepatitis A, tuberculosis, and staph has been spreading aggressively in San Francisco and other California cities.  A new public health threat may be on the verge of making a deadly appearance: bubonic plague—known in the Middle Ages as the “Black Death”—it was responsible killing about 60% of the population of Eurasia in the mid-1300s. The mix of conditions that have caused alarm is, so far, unique to California, though progressive environmental philosophy may extend its reach. The reason is the state’s growing discomfort with modern chemistry paired with the California trial bar’s love of industrial chemical dollars, in this case, second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SGARs). For the past five years, L.A.’s Department of Recreation and Parks has forgone the use of SGARs, acting on proposed restrictions from the California Department of Pesticide Regulation. Lawmakers in Sacramento have proposed banning SGARs entirely, making it even more difficult to cull California’s burgeoning disease-borne rodent population.   Returning to the U.S. Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, the federal government estimates that California—with 12% of the nation’s population—accounts for 30% of the nation’s homeless and 49% of all unsheltered individuals. California’s homeless rate is 2-1/2 times the national rate...   It’s not just the unhealthy living conditions among the drug addicted and frequently mentally ill homeless. Law enforcement personnel also spend a significant share of time interacting with the homeless. One Los Angeles area police officer noted that “About 60% of our calls every day are about transients and problems that they cause.” While in jails across the nation, large shares of inmates are homeless or may also be suffering from a mental health crisis."
From 2019. This doesn't stop left wingers blaming red states for sending California homeless people

San Francisco Policy of Hospitalizing Mentally Ill Homeless Is Humane | National Review - "The rapid decline of San Francisco is emblematic of the corrosion now typical in California’s once-glorious cities.  Needles, human waste, and litter are ubiquitous on the city’s streets. San Francisco’s homeless population has exploded; some estimate that as many as 10,000 people live on the street, a census larger than the entire population of almost 85 percent of American townships. City residents have been disturbed by the size and behavior of the homeless population, some of whom, according to the Associated Press, have made a habit of “dashing into traffic or screaming at strangers...   Some municipal leaders are trying to change the culture of disregard that has long characterized California’s urban governance. On Tuesday, San Francisco officials took the bold (and rather brave) step of defying vocal advocacy groups and expanding the city’s involuntary-commitment policies for the state’s most severely mentally ill...   California’s incoherent commitment policies for persons with severe mental illness deserve much of the blame for the state’s homelessness crisis, though it has become increasingly unfashionable to say so. Data from California’s Department of State Hospitals reveals that in fiscal year 2017–18, there were more than 5,700 patients forensically committed to state mental institutions. This number, by way of comparison, was more than 45 times larger than the number of civil commitments (125) that occurred in the same time period; it was likewise the official policy of each of the state’s six public mental hospitals to refuse admissions to any voluntary patients.  It was, in essence, the practice of the state of California to look on helplessly as the gravely ill deteriorated to the point of criminality...  Every non-vulnerable citizen in the state of California is subject to the bureaucratic creep of Governor Newsom’s Brave New World, but the seriously mentally ill sit around in their own filth because the state has discovered Millian objections to involuntarily treating the schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur. It is utterly lunatic...   Heaven forfend that urine-drenched souls talking to themselves on the streets of San Francisco be treated in therapeutic “facilities”!  One would think that, after seeing the outcome — an explosion in homelessness and incarceration among the most seriously mentally ill — of our 50-year experiment of doggedly pursuing and funding “community” solutions, opponents of institutionalization would add at least a little nuance to their moral certainty.  There will always be a tension between a bona fide concern for civil liberties and treating the gravely ill anosognosiac patient. But author and industry critic D. J. Jaffe puts it well when he states that it is folly to “believe that being psychotic, delusional, and hallucinating is a ‘right’ to be protected rather than an illness to be treated.” To force a delusional person who is disconnected from reality to reach a point of no return (“a grave danger to themselves or others”) before granting them the treatment they cannot know they need is to use the vocabulary of civil rights to justify abject cruelty.”
From 2019

T Wolf 🌁 on X - "$322 million spent to house 1,200 people of which 40% left the housing and another 10% died of drug overdose. This is the current "evidence based" homeless strategy in Los Angeles."
Clearly, the problem is they didn't spend enough money

Meme - Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes: "This is a children’s playground in Oakland, California. Kamala Harris’ hometown  It is now completely overrun with a homeless encampment, trash and needles  This is what Gavin Newsom and Democrats have done to California you don’t see reported on the news"
Damn Trump!

San Francisco slammed for $5M a year program to give free alcohol to the homeless: 'This isn't working' - "A program that offers free booze to the homeless alcoholics that roam San Francisco caught flak this week when a tech CEO questioned the logic of feeding the addictions of the city’s street dwellers.  Adam Nathan, founder and CEO of the small business AI marketing tool Blaze and the chair of the Salvation Army San Francisco Metro Advisory Board, posted a thread on X slamming the program after watching a string of unhoused drunks line up for their shots, stating it “just doesn’t feel right.”  “Did you know San Francisco spends $2 million a year on a “Managed Alcohol Program?” It provides free Alcohol to people struggling with chronic alcoholism who are mostly homeless,” Nathan wrote on the social media site. His estimate was actually just 40% of the total cost — the four-year-old “managed alcohol program” actually costs the city $5 million a year, the San Francisco Chronicle reported... The program started with 10 beds and has now grown to 20, the Chronicle reported. Over the four years, it’s served 65 clients total, the report said, with the goal of keeping the participants out of the ER and reducing calls to cops...   Nathan told the outlet that locals are not adequately informed about the program because San Francisco’s health department is worried over how “the program will be perceived by the public, and that to me was validated by the reaction to what I tweeted.”... He said the city’s health department “is not helping people get better, it’s about keeping people sick,” and added, “We are living in the upside down.”"
Mark Fabela on X - "Before asking taxpayers for another dollar, maybe start by defunding the homeless beer-concierge services, trimming the 17 layers of middle management, and shutting down the feel-good programs no one audits."

Giant Pride-colored SF rock mistakenly slammed as anti-homeless measure - "Izakaya Sushi Ran, a Japanese restaurant on Market Street in the Castro, painted the giant rock that sits in its sidewalk alcove rainbow colors in observation of LGBTQ Pride.  The restaurant even dubbed itself “home of the rainbow rock” on its Instagram account, so proud was it of the colorful accoutrement.  But not everyone appreciated the display. Last week, the Coalition On Homelessness circulated a picture of the installation on Twitter along with the sarcastic observation, “When you wanna look inclusive but hate homeless people.”  The tweet, which has since been deleted, gathered ire around the internet. However, this observation turned out to be much ado about nothing, as the Coalition later conceded in a series of tweets that the large stone is, in fact, part of the restaurant’s Zen-inspired aesthetic.  The rock has been sitting on the sidewalk for years, and only started attracting new attention thanks to its multi-hued paint job."
Luckily it wasn't a "white" restaurant, or aesthetic wouldn't be a valid reason to have the rock

Sara Foster on X - "We pay the highest taxes in California. Our fire hydrants were empty. Our vegetation was overgrown, brush not cleared. Our reservoirs were emptied by our governor because tribal leaders wanted to save fish. Our fire department budget was cut by our mayor. But thank god drug addicts are getting their drug kits. @MayorOfLA  @GavinNewsom  RESIGN. Your far left policies have ruined our state. And also our party."
𝗦𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗠𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 on X - "Los Angeles has had a Democrat Mayor for 23 years a Democrat majority in the state assembly for 24 years and a Democrat Governor for 13 years. What’s it going to take for the state to wake up?"

Meme - "The Montreal Star. Thu, Nov 24, 1938. Page 1. California Fires Beyond Control"
Damn climate change!

Meme - Biden spraying foreign aid: "As much as they need!"
LA Mayor (Black Woman) spraying rainbow DEI: "Endless funding!"
LA Fire Department in middle of fire: *short of water*

Meme - "Alright team it's almost fire season. I need some resilience ideas"
"Controlled burns?"
"working hydrants?"
"How about making the firefighters gay?"
*employee of the year&

Meme - Firetruck: "FIRE DOESN'T DISCRIMINATE"
*Pride flag fire hydrant intact while houses in background burn*

Meme - "No water, but look how pretty it is. *Pride flag fire hydrant while houses in background burn*"

Meme - *Dog on fire*
*Firefighter dog with blue hair, Ukraine and ??? badge, with melting cone and burning Pride flag*
"This is fine"

Meme - *Devastated landscape*
Didn't Extinguish It"

Meme - "According to Muslims
Allah at Gaza *weak doge*
Allah at California *strong doge*"

Meme - *Newsom (Elmo with Cocaine and Apple)*
Apple: Forest Mgmt
Cocaine: "Gay shit & illegals"

Meme *Man pouring lighter fluid in burning forest (i.e. arson)
Pointing soyjaks: "Climate change!"

Hayden on X - "Genuine question, for all the anti-abundance folks, why do you think Los Angeles has only issued four housing permits if it’s not red tape and process?"

Wall Street Apes on X - "California Democrats continue to shut down family farms, now expanding to more counties  “Now there's a fight going on in Point Reyes. They just shut down a dozen farms. They really doubled down on those farmers — They put a gag order on them so they couldn't even ask the community to stand up for them”  “They can't even have cows or anything. They've got to move off the property. — Our local RCD even came up with money to upgrade the ranches if needed. And the environmental group said, no. They wanted to take the land over. And so they forced these farmers to sign an agreement that are pushing them all out.”  “So we're going to lose half of our dairies in Marin county and a bunch of the beef ranches that provide local food.”"

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: ""Real antiracism has never been tried.""
"Why is San Francisco the state's worst county for black student achievement?"
Time to blame Republicans again!

Paul D. Thacker on X - "GOLD STAR FOR THIS GENIUS! She said, "Yeah, Democrats are assholes." And I thought, if the cashier in South San Francisco at 10 at night believes that Democrats are assholes because the shampoo is locked up and my stuff got stolen out of the trunk, then we have a problem."

Has California learned anything from Trump's rise? - "Following resounding losses by Democrats in the November election, party leaders such as Gov. Gavin Newsom have sought to align themselves with the burgeoning “abundance” movement, which contends that blue states will only win back voters if they can prove their ability to govern effectively — including by providing access to basic goods, such as high-quality public education and widely available housing.   How’s that effort going in California?  In short — not well.  If you pay attention to California politics, you likely heard about the death this week of SB677, a bill to make it easier to split single-family-home lots for duplexes or fourplexes, and the near killing of SB79, which would allow multifamily housing up to seven stories near major transit stops — both from state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. The bills’ primary assailant was state Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Fremont, chair of the Senate Housing Committee, who has leaned on the tired refrain that efforts to streamline new housing production are “giveaways for developers,” partly because they reduce the ability of local governments to weigh in on projects. Wahab’s insistence on fighting for California’s failed status quo on housing, even as American democracy sinks around us, rightly drew outrage.  But for an even bleaker example of how state leaders are failing to rise to the urgency of the moment, Californians should consider the response to AB1121 from Assembly Member Blanca Rubio, D-Baldwin Park (Los Angeles County).  The seemingly uncontroversial bill would require California teachers in transitional kindergarten through fifth grade to be trained in the “science of reading,” which emphasizes the importance of foundational literacy skills, including phonics — or sounding out words. It would also require schools to adopt an evidence-based reading curriculum in transitional kindergarten through eighth grade. Backed by decades of interdisciplinary research, this approach has proven to be particularly effective in teaching young kids how to read — regardless of their mother language.  California schools and teachers currently have a fair amount of leeway in the curriculum they use, and the state doesn’t track those materials or how effective they are. But a review of more than 300 of the state’s largest school districts conducted by the California Reading Coalition found that fewer than 2% use programs aligned with the science of reading.   The results speak for themselves.  Nearly 60% of our third graders didn’t meet state standards for English language arts and literacy in the 2023-24 school year. Meanwhile, poverty-stricken red states such as Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama have surged ahead of California in childhood literacy after adopting mandatory foundational literacy teaching and training. That California childhood literacy rates have fallen significantly beneath those of the poorest state in the nation should be considered a stain on the progressive values this state claims to stand for. Yet last year, California Democrats silently killed a bipartisan bill to mandate the science of reading, refusing to even discuss the topic publicly. Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, D-Hollister, and Assembly Member Al Muratsuchi, D-Rolling Hills Estates (Los Angeles County), who leads the Assembly Education Committee (and is running for state superintendent of public instruction next year) tabled the bill without a hearing amid fierce opposition from influential interest groups — including the California Teachers Association and Californians Together, which advocates for English language learners.  Yes, you read that correctly — ensuring California kids receive the most effective reading lessons didn’t even merit a discussion among Democrats in the face of union opposition.  Rubio’s bill faced similar hurdles this year.  Most enraging is that the state’s English language arts framework already underscores that foundational reading skills “should be given high priority” among other strategies in early literacy instruction. State law also requires teacher candidates to demonstrate their fluency in evidence-based foundational reading methods to receive their credential.   Meanwhile, literacy rates at some of California’s lowest-performing schools improved significantly after adopting this curriculum."
Left wingers hate the "rich" more than they love the poor, and they don't love children's education - they love more and more money for teachers' unions
Time to continue to mock red states, even if they are pulling ahead of California

Bill Melugin on X - "NEW: California Democrat state senator Lola Smallwood-Cuevas has introduced SB560, a bill that would decriminalize welfare fraud below an amount of $25,000. It would also prohibit prosecutions for attempted welfare fraud and would prohibit someone from being charged w/ perjury if they are subject to prosecution for welfare fraud.   Smallwood-Cuevas represents a large chunk of Los Angeles County, including Mar Vista, West LA, Baldwin Hills, Ladera Heights, Century City, Playa Vista, and part of downtown LA.  SB560 is scheduled for a hearing next Monday on May 5th."
The fraud is the point

Hayden on X - "It took NINETEEN years to plan, approve, and build 1,100 housing units (550 affordable) on a parking lot in San Francisco, and apparently it's a hot take for thinking this should take quicker to happen."

Wall Street Apes on X - "EXPOSED 🚨 Gavin Newsom is NOT ending health care for illegal migrants, he’s EXPANDING IT  California State Rep Carl DeMaio “My office just released actual budget data proving Gavin Newsom is LYING when he says he is CUTTING free health care to illegal immigrants”  Reporter “Republican Assemblyman Carl DeMaio says the headlines you're reading are not telling the full story. He claims Newsom is acting like he's freezing or capping the free health care in an effort to save money. But DeMaio says that's not actually what's happening.   California State Rep Carl DeMaio “Gavin Newsom this year spent $9.5 billion on free health care for illegal immigrants. Now he says he's going to cut that back, but guess what?   His budget INCREASES the cost of free health care for illegal immigrants to $12.1 billion.   The liberal media in California is gaslighting the voters along with Gavin Newsom by not telling them the truth.   So I reached out to Governor Gavin Newsom's office to ask specifically about those numbers. They then pushed me off to the finance office”  “As I'm giving this live report, I just got an email from the finance office essentially confirming those numbers that you just heard now from Carl DeMaio. They said in this Fiscal More than $10 billion was spent on health care for medical they expect next year to be $12.1 billion.”"

Links - 17th April 2026 (2)

NN on X - "I’ve been racking my brain trying to understand what, exactly, the modern Democrat Party offers the American voter. And I’m genuinely asking. I’ve tried to remove my bias, step outside myself, and look at this from a neutral perspective…but I still can’t figure it out.
Mass amnesty does nothing for the average American.
Higher taxes to subsidize millions of illegal migrants do nothing for the average American.
Releasing violent repeat offenders back onto the streets and then gaslighting the public about “restorative justice” does nothing but hurt the average American.
Homeless “initiatives” that burn billions w no accountability help no one except the nonprofits running the grift. Our schools are a nightmare, discipline is gone, standards keep dropping, and parents who speak up are smeared as extremists. Then look at everything else:
• Energy policies that make everyday life more expensive, from gas to groceries
• DEI hiring that values ideology over competence- in medicine, aviation, law, and government…and somehow we’re all supposed to pretend this makes our country stronger.
• Child gender experiments that would have been illegal a decade ago, now framed as “healthcare,” w lifelong consequences we’re not allowed to question.
• Massive taxpayer fraud, whether it’s homeless nonprofits, childcare programs, Medicaid mills, unemployment theft, or “migrant emergency funding” that mysteriously vanishes into thin air.
• Open borders that flood working class communities with costs, crime, and competition for jobs and housing.
And even the two systems that were meant to help struggling Americans, healthcare and welfare, have become catastrophic liabilities.
• Endless welfare expansions w zero accountability. A safety net is good, but Democrats turned it into a political bribe… it is a system of permanent dependence instead of temporary stability.
• Healthcare subsidies that were supposed to make coverage affordable… but ended up raising premiums for everyone not on a government plan. The average family now pays more for healthcare than rent. How is that helping voters?
Every solution creates three new problems, none of which they ever fix.  So what is the upside for the average American voter? What are Democrat voters actually getting in return for their loyalty?  Because from where I’m standing, the only people winning under Democrat policies are:
➤ bureaucrats
➤ illegals
➤ activists
➤ NGOs
➤ government contractors
➤ and politicians who create chaos and then fundraise off the damage.
Everyone else pays the price."

Bin Xie on X - "China has way more college students than the USA — 11 million graduations each year, top the world. So China should be #1 in tech innovation and invention as well as scientific discovery, right?  Wrong!  USA is still #1! What’s the reason? A research paper published in July 2021 on Nature — Human Behavior gives the answer: Critical thinking skills levels in STEM education, that makes big difference.  The researchers compared STEM education in China, India, Russia and USA and found out that STEM undergraduates in the three countries show no significant gains — and sometimes declines—in critical thinking skills over four years of college, trailing behind the U.S..   While Chinese students start with higher critical thinking and academic skills than their Indian and Russian counterparts, all three nations see stagnation or drops in these skills during their final two years.
Initial Levels: At the start of university, Chinese STEM students have a "large head start" in critical thinking and academic skills compared to students in India and Russia. Specifically, they score 1.4 to 1.5 standard deviations higher than Indian peers and 0.3 to 0.5 higher than Russian peers.
Skill Gains (4 Years): Students in all three countries do not experience significant gains in critical thinking over their four-year degree.
Declines: Studies indicate that critical thinking skills in China, India, and Russia often decline during the final two years of college.
Comparison to US: Unlike the three countries, students in the US demonstrate significant gains in critical thinking skills over four years.
Despite high initial skill levels, Chinese students' critical thinking and academic skills (math/physics) show little to no improvement, OFTEN DECLINING IN THE FINAL TWO YEARS (look at the chart below — students in China decline the most). This is attributed to less demanding, classroom-focused, and low-stakes assessment environments where students are almost guaranteed to graduate.  You may think this research must be done by some crazy White supremacists with strong racial bias. Not true. The majority of the researchers in this study are Chinese in America.  This explains why China still wants to send their students to America for education, and wants Chinese scientists and engineers in USA to go back — China’s education system simply cannot produce highly creative talents.  So they have to get talented scientists and engineers from America, and keep copying and stealing from USA."
Sam B. on X - "Lol. China has millions of graduates that now ride uber bikes."

Chilling photo shows tourist's SELFIE with snow leopard seconds before being brutally mauled & left covered in blood - "A SMILING selfie shows the moment before a skier was mauled by a snow leopard and left with blood pouring from her face. The tourist spotted the dangerous predator while skiing off-piste and rushed over to get a cute snap with the wild beast. Seconds later, the big cat pounced and left the woman with serious injuries...  The tourist was on her way back to her hotel in the resort town of Koktokay, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, when she spotted the rare cat in a wooded area nearby...   She was able to get a foreboding selfie with the beast, before it suddenly lunged at her.  The leopard mauled at her face and even bit down on her skull with its sharp jaws, according to witnesses... fortunately the predator was unable to penetrate her thick ski helmet.  A brave ski instructor eventually chased away the cat by frantically waving his poles."

Why I Have to Conduct Raccoon Research in a Bikini #science #animals - YouTube

Meme - "My dear, I'm going to the horse races today, so I'll be back late."
"Don't bother. I called that mare. She won't be racing tonight"

Meme - "Jesus watching me get railed in a sundress by a trans catgirl waifu >UwU<
Oh hell yeah, these are the sins I died for"

Meme - "@darezuka
Translated from Japanese by Grok
Don't RT lewd art -> Your feed gets flooded with pointless arguments, flame wars, and gossip news. Eventually your heart grows barren and you lose your freedom.
Do RT lewd art -> The algorithm starts prioritizing lewd art and shows it to you first. Your heart stays calm with no waves stirred up, and you become free."

Meme - "no idea"
"just got a very nice laser projector and it came with a built in operating system that auto plays ads. already making me insane"
Unofficial BBCNews (UK) Bot @bbcnews...: "Why do Gen Z have a growing appetite for retro tech?"

illuminatibot on X - "The job of the mainstream media today is to make you think that the views of 10 percent of the country are actually the views of 90 percent of the country."

S'pore woman places foodpanda priority order at 7:41pm on New Year's Eve, food arrives at 3:40am on Jan. 1 - "Due to the delay, the food arrived past the safe consumption period, she said, and was allegedly unrefrigerated for hours, resulting in it going bad.  Lim's attempts to contact foodpanda's customer service to request for a refund were also rejected and she was informed that her case would be recorded as feedback."

19F) my dad found my horse dildo and I honestly want to die. : r/copypasta - "I still live at home and this happened last night. My dad knocked on my door because I asked for his help moving my bed. I hid my box of toys in the closet but my horse dildo is obviously huge so I just shoved it under the mattress. My bed has wheels but is very heavy and I wanted to move my dresser and my bed across the room for a different more open layout. We moved the dresser and started moving the bed but one of the wheels was stuck and my dad said, "It'd be easier if we got the mattress off." The sheets were off since I was washing them it was just the mattress. He lifted it RIGHT WHERE I KNEW THE TOY WAS and I said "NO WAIT!" But it was too late. He lifted the mattress and said "What is tha-....fuck!" and put the mattress back down. His face was bright red and he couldn't make eye contact with me and he said, "I'm gonna go go have a beer real quick. Lets try this again in a few minutes okay?" I said "Okay." and after he left I hid my toy in the dresser and he came back after a few minutes and said "Is it ok for us to take the mattress off?" I nodded and he lifted it and propped it against the wall and we moved the solid wood frame and he helped put the mattress back. I said, "Listen, dad about what you saw..." and he put his hand up shook his head and said "I don't know what you're talking about I didn't see anything other than a bed and a mattress." We talked about other things for a sec and he went back downstairs while I tried to forget that my father just saw my giant horse dildo and now knows that I own one. I was honestly so embarrassed I cried after he left."

M'sian man, 38, pretends to be US 'sugar daddy', forces 3 S'pore-based women to have sex with driver, who was also himworld - "An unemployed Malaysian man living in Malaysia with his wife and children posed as multiple characters in a ploy to ensnare three Singapore-based women to engage in sadistic sex with him.  On Jan. 13, 2026, Rajwant Singh Gill Narajan Singh, 38, was sentenced to 12 years' jail and 15 strokes of the cane for crimes involving two of the women...   Gill played two main personas, the first was a wealthy Caucasian "sugar daddy" named "Michael Nolan", "Mike" or "Thomas".  He pretended to be an "American trader living on a yacht in Lumut, Perak, Malaysia".  The second persona was that of "Sam" or "Raj", a driver who utilised a "soft" and good-natured personality to appeal to the victims on compassionate grounds.  Often, "Sam" would offer his help to victims in the extortion process by pretending to settle the debts enforced by "Mike" as a form of goodwill.  He used both personas to coerce the victims into "demeaning and intrusive sexual acts for his pleasure" and to assess whether to threaten or comfort them in the extortion process.  He would scout for victims on Tinder before offering the "paid" arrangements, which established a "dominant-submissive relationship" from the start.     "Absolute obedience, instant submission to unreasonable and perverted demands, and even apologising after being humiliatingly insulted, were status quo if they were to earn their keep."  Gill deceived the victims into believing that he would pay large sums of money, which he never intended to pay.  He would instruct the victims to send nude photographs and explicit videos of themselves to blackmail them and coerce them to have sexual intercourse with "Sam"...   PW2 suffered immense physical abuse; court documents stated that Gill had engaged "a dominatrix to flog her, causing severe pain and numerous open wounds".      "She performed intensely demeaning acts for the accused’s pleasure"... Gill made baseless claims and "claimed trial to the bitter end", forcing victims to relive their trauma.  He ensured that his offences were harder to detect by acting across national borders and by moving conversations from Tinder to WhatsApp, an end-to-end encrypted service.  Gill was arrested in a joint covert operation between the Singapore Police Force (SPF) and Royal Malaysian Police Force (PDRM) and "significant resources were utilised in carrying out this operation"."

PepsiCo to cut prices on popular chips like Doritos and Cheetos
The power of SNAP cuts

James Hickman on X - "PepsiCo spent $2.8 million last year lobbying to keep junk food eligible for food stamps.  Then RFK got 18 states to ban SNAP purchases of soda, candy, and processed snacks. Within a week, PepsiCo cut Doritos, Lay's, and Tostitos prices by up to 15%.  The CEO blamed "affordability." But the timing tells the real story.  SNAP is a $100 billion-a-year program. According to the USDA, 20 cents of every SNAP dollar goes to junk food. Frito-Lay products appeared in 7.2% of all SNAP shopping trips.  The moment the government stopped subsidizing demand, PepsiCo had to compete on price. No regulation. No price caps. No antitrust probe. The subsidy disappeared, and the market corrected overnight.  Now consider that this same pattern — government money in, prices up — plays out in college tuition, healthcare, defense, and every other industry with a guaranteed government buyer.  Pepsi was one company, one product line, one program. Imagine what happens when the subsidies stop across the board."

kevin smith on X - "You ever think the reason food is so expensive Is because like 50 million people are getting it for free"
The okayest poster there is on X - "Kevin, food stamps actually make food cheaper for the rest of us by subsidizing food producers, it's ok to admit you have no idea how agricultural subsidies work in this country"
Left wingers are economically illiterate, as usual

Matt Forney on X - "New Hampshire is living refutation of the blackpiller lie that "there is no political solution" (a nonsensical phrase) or "you can't vote your way out of this." 20 years ago, New Hampshire had been invaded by Massholes and was well on its way to becoming Vermont. It swung hard left in election after election and the Massholes were working overtime to make it just as awful as the state they fled. But the right got organized. They started fighting back, organizing to win elections and entrench right-wing policy. They took over the GOP at the grassroots level and purged all the cucks. The Republicans now hold every statewide elected position and both chambers of the legislature and are cementing the right-wing counterrevolution, driving the Massholes back to their shitty homeland. Next, they'll start purging the Democrats out of federal offices and winning the state for Republicans in presidential elections. If right-wingers had just given up, sat out elections, and did nothing, then New Hampshire would look like Colorado or Virginia right now. Instead, libtards are literally fleeing the state and the government is passing anti-libtard laws literally named after Charlie Kirk, something no Middle American state has done. There is no substitute for engaging with the political system. You don't sit out elections impotently whining or retreat to build some cult compound in the woods. You play the game and you play it to win. Because even if you aren't interested in politics, politics is interested in you."

Thread by @Chowpinglee on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Everyone: “Book your flight on a Tuesday at 3 pm, you’ll get the cheapest tickets!” As an airline veteran, this is a B.S. myth. Timing matters, but not in the way you think. If you've ever felt cheated by sudden price hikes, this is what most airlines don’t want you to know:
The best strategies to score cheap tickets according to conventional wisdom:
• Off-peak tickets
• Flexible destinations
• Flights with stopovers
These help. But to game the system, it helps to understand how airlines price their tickets.
Ever wondered why airline ticket prices fluctuate faster than you can keep up?  It's not you. It's intentionally designed that way.  Think AI-driven madness.  Let's dive in:
Air fares have gone through a full makeover since the 1970s.  In 1974, a NYC to LA round-trip cost $1,442 (in today's dollars).  Then came the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act.  Today, that same flight costs $268.  An 81% drop. But how?  Airlines use a secret code: Booking Classes.  Not just economy or business. There's an alphabet soup of fare levels.  F = full fare first class J = full-fare business Y = full fare economy  But it gets crazy:
American Airlines and British Airways use D, C, R, I for discount business.  United uses J, C, D, Z, P.  United also uses R for premium economy.  Do you follow?  If that's not complicated enough, guess what:
A Boston to San Francisco round-trip has over 25 MILLION different valid fares. Where does all this insanity come from? Two words: AI algorithms.
• Leisure vs. business
• Past booking data
• Competitor prices
• Fuel costs
• Seasonal demand
Here's where it gets creepy:
Airlines profile YOU.  Ever notice that prices are always higher the 2nd time you check?  It’s not a coincidence. It’s because…  They stalk you.
• Track searches
• Analyze behavior
• Fast-changing prices
So how can you beat the system?
Pro tip: The "Tuesday at 3 PM" booking myth is NOT TRUE.  Instead:
• Be flexible with dates
• Use incognito mode to game the algorithm
• Set up price alerts
Remember: Timing matters, but it's not everything.
Another factor that tilts the odds in your favor: The "Southwest Effect".  When low-cost carriers joined the game, big airlines scrambled to match prices.  A 2013 MIT study showed major fare drops when Southwest and the rest started new routes.  The competition between the airlines is good news for us.  But understand this:  Airlines aren't just selling you a seat.  They're selling an experience:
• Baggage fees
• Seat selection
• Priority boarding
• In-flight Wi-Fi
In 2015, these "extras" raked in $59.2 billion — and the figure grows 20% per year.  So what does this mean for us travelers? The all-inclusive ticket is a thing of the past.  What works for the airlines now is to:
• Unbundle service
• Offer dirt-cheap base fares
• With à la carte add-ons
If you want cheap tickets, try to pay only the base fare.
TLDR: Airline pricing is a complex dance of supply, demand, and data.
To score deals:
• Be flexible with dates
• Use incognito mode
• Set up price alerts
• Go without the à la carte add-ons"
Weird. Left wingers tell us that regulation always protects consumers and is good

Susceptibility to Mental Illness May Have Helped Humans Adapt over the Millennia - "Randolph Nesse, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University, attributes high rates of psychiatric disorders to natural selection operating on our genes without paying heed to our emotional well-being...  In his new book, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry, Nesse recruits the framework of evolutionary medicine to make a case for why psychiatric disorders persist despite their debilitating consequences. Some conditions, like depression and anxiety, may have developed from normal, advantageous emotions. Others, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, result from genetic mutations that may have been beneficial in less extreme manifestations of a trait...
there are two very different categories of illness that should be kept separate. One is the emotional disorders, which are potentially normal, useful responses to situations. And in all such responses, variability and sensitivity are influenced by lots of different genes.  There are also mental disorders that are the most severe ones that are just plain old genetic diseases: bipolar disease and autism and schizophrenia. They’re genetic diseases, and whether you get them or not is overwhelmingly dependent on what genes you have. But why would a strong, inheritable trait that cuts fitness by half not be selected against? I think this is one of the deepest mysteries in psychiatry... For bipolar disease, the reduction in the number of offspring is not very great at all, so it might be that there’s not much selection acting there. And what if a tendency to be bipolar resulted in having even more children?... Maybe many of us have tendencies to grand ambitions and mood swings that probably aren’t good for us but might lend to grand successes on occasion, and that might lead to great reproductive success.  Then there’s the “cliff edge” effect, which is the possibility that some traits are pushed very far towards a peak that’s close to a place where fitness collapses for a few percent of the population... I find many of my patients feel like they’re abnormal if they are told, “You have an anxiety disorder, you have a depressive disorder.” Talk with them a little bit about the fact that there are advantages to anxiety and that low moods might have meaning. It might not just be something that’s broken in you, it might be that your emotions are trying to tell you something. I think that makes many people feel less like they’re defective."

Hamtramck City Council votes to allow animal sacrifice for religious purposes - "After months of debate, the city council has voted to allow the practice of animal sacrifice, for religious purposes, in Hamtramck.  The decision ultimately came down to a more than 30-year-old U.S. Supreme Court ruling that says cities cannot infringe on religious freedom under the first amendment.  The act of animal sacrifice is often practiced among Muslims during Eid.  “Our city is dirty enough. We don't want to make it more dirty,” a Hamtramck resident said during a city hall meeting.  “Really ridiculous catastrophic resolution,” another one said. "If it’s not passed then we are ready to take it to courts for religious rights because it is constitution."... Many people, including Muslim residents, were against it citing sanitary concerns if the animals are sacrificed in a home and not in a sterile environment, especially in the tight neighborhoods of Hamtramck.  The ordinance that was passed Tuesday night says religious sacrificing of animals can be done as long as it is done legally and humanely."

Christopher Barnard on X - "Colorado is an experiment in failed progressive governance (D+16 since 2013) Violent crime up 60%+ (vs 3% nat’l average) Median home price $600k (vs nat’l $400k average) Drug ODs up 3x Homelessness up 150% Everyone was moving to CO. Now people are leaving at historic levels"

OC coffee shop secretly operating as strip club - "Inside DD Café in Garden Grove, the women are serving a lot more than coffee. FOX 11's undercover cameras captured female servers providing lap dances, offering private dances for cash, and telling customers they could bring alcohol inside for a fee.  City records show DD Café, located at 10552 McFadden Ave., is licensed only as a coffee shop."

Meme - "True Story. Red Riding Hood"
"So, you were the one who found the wolf at your grandmother's"
"Listen, I have a thing for older broads, ok"
"So when you say you "ate" Grandma..."
"Listen, I know how to please a woman."
"Years of therapy. Turn off the camera!"
"War and Peas"

Lord Sewell: I tried to warn Britain about the curse of identity politics

This just kicks the problem further upstream ignoring, for example, the possibility that more black children are indeed educationally subnormal. 

Lord Sewell: I tried to warn Britain about the curse of identity politics
Racial disparity is not the same as racism. Conflating them is devastating for public policy 

"Valdo Calocane is a black man with a long history of severe mental illness. But during a clinical assessment, some years ago, professionals discussed research showing that young black men are disproportionately detained under mental health legislation in Britain.

And after deliberation, they decided compulsory detention might be inappropriate for Calocane. Community monitoring, they concluded, would be a “safe and reasonable alternative”.

It wasn’t. On June 13, 2023, Calocane fatally stabbed three people in Nottingham: students Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber, both 19, and a 65-year-old school caretaker named Ian Coates.

A psychotic man who should have been detained for his mental illness was released into the world; and three innocent people died. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that ideology – not public safety – played some role in shaping the ultimately fatal decision to release him.

This tragedy could have been avoided. Five years ago this month, and two years before the Nottingham murders, Boris Johnson’s government published the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, which I chaired. The central argument was simple but proved controversial to many: racial disparities are not automatically evidence of racism.

Disparity and discrimination are not the same thing. That black men are more likely to be detained, for example, should not be seen as evidence of racism.

If data shows that one racial group is over-represented in a particular outcome, there may be many explanations – culture, history, geography, class, family structure, health patterns, or institutional practice. The question is not whether disparities exist, but why.

That distinction matters enormously. If disparities are automatically interpreted as racism, then institutions begin to operate under intense pressure to avoid outcomes that might look unequal – even when the unequal outcome might actually be the correct professional judgment. The risk is that evidence is replaced by moral signalling.

Mental health was one of the clearest examples we identified. Activists often point to the disproportionate detention of black men under the Mental Health Act as evidence of systemic racism. But the evidence suggested something more complex: a deep mistrust of mental health services within some communities.

That mistrust has historical roots. In the 1960s, black children were disproportionately labelled “educationally sub-normal” and sent to special schools. The suspicion of institutions did not appear out of thin air. For many families, these experiences created a generational narrative that public services were not neutral providers of care but agents of discrimination.

But today the pattern we see is different: too many young black men engage with mental health services far too late, often when they are already in crisis. Families frequently avoid the system until a situation becomes dangerous.

The result is a tragic cycle. When intervention finally occurs, it often happens in emergency conditions. Police may be involved. Compulsory detention becomes more likely. The statistics then appear to confirm the narrative of discrimination, even though the underlying causes may lie earlier in the chain of events.

That is not the product of a racist conspiracy within psychiatry. It is the result of delayed engagement, untreated illness and a mistrust of institutions.

Yet, in recent years, another force has begun to influence how professionals interpret these disparities: the moral pressure of identity politics.

A new orthodoxy

Across public institutions, a powerful new orthodoxy has taken hold. Racial inequality is assumed to be the product of systemic racism, unless proven otherwise. Any attempt to question this assumption risks accusations of insensitivity or worse.

The incentive structure is clear: it is far safer professionally to err on the side of avoiding any action that might appear discriminatory.

This dynamic is often described as “white guilt” – a pervasive anxiety among institutions, particularly those led by white professionals, that they might be perpetuating racial injustice. That anxiety can lead to overcorrection.

White guilt does not always appear in crude or obvious forms. It often manifests subtly, through cautious decision-making, hesitancy, and a reluctance to exercise authority in situations where race might later be invoked as an explanation. Professionals become acutely aware that any decision affecting a minority individual could be scrutinised through the lens of discrimination.

The result is a kind of institutional paralysis. Instead of asking “what is the safest decision based on clinical evidence?”, decision-makers may also ask, consciously or unconsciously, “how will this decision look through the prism of race?”

When that calculation enters the room, the quality of judgment inevitably changes.

This tragic story in Nottingham makes me angry because our report tried to challenge exactly this kind of thinking. We argued that professionals must not allow ideological assumptions about racism to distort clinical judgment. But the reaction to our work was ferocious.

Activist groups, public sector unions and parts of the corporate world denounced the report. Media outlets – terrified of being labelled racist – amplified the outrage. Several of my fellow commissioners, most of whom were themselves from ethnic minority backgrounds, were vilified online and professionally punished.

The cancellation reached absurd heights in March 2022 when the University of Nottingham, where I earned my PhD, rescinded an honorary doctorate it had awarded me for my work in education. They said the report was too controversial.

The irony is hard to miss. Calocane was also a Nottingham student. It was there that he first experienced hallucinations.

If the progressive gatekeepers around him had read our report with an open mind, they might have found a warning about politically distorted practice in mental health services. Perhaps then he would have been detained and three people would still be alive.

The passage activists hated most was our call for community responsibility:

“The Commission”, we wrote, “does not believe the evidence supports claims of discrimination within psychiatry. The challenge is convincing vulnerable people in ethnic minorities that mental healthcare is neither a threat nor a punishment, but something genuinely helpful.”

For some critics, even raising the possibility of cultural or community factors was unacceptable. The prevailing narrative demanded that institutions bear primary responsibility for disparities.

But ignoring cultural factors helps nobody. If mistrust of services delays treatment, then addressing that mistrust is essential. Pretending the problem lies elsewhere simply prolongs the suffering.

In fact, attitudes are slowly changing. Increasing numbers of patients are recognising their vulnerability and seeking help earlier – sometimes even requesting sectioning themselves.

British schools are not institutionally racist

Our report applied the same forensic analysis we applied to psychiatry across other fields, from education to employment. And again, in many cases, disparities had more to do with other factors – like class, geography and family stability – than race.

Critics said we were too optimistic. They insisted racism seeped into every pore of British society.

But what we exposed was something else: Britain had drunk deeply from the dangerous elixir of identity politics.

Across academia, politics and civil society, moral status became tied to racial victimhood. If you were black, it was implied, the system must be against you. If you were white, you were assumed to benefit from invisible privilege.

This framework reshaped public debate. Complex social problems were compressed into a simple moral narrative of oppressors and oppressed. The concept of white guilt became a powerful cultural force, encouraging institutions to apologise for historical injustices and scrutinise every disparity for evidence of prejudice.

But the danger of this mindset is that it can blind us to other realities. When we examined outcomes across groups, we found something that disrupted the narrative: the white working class is often doing worst of all.

Nowhere is this clearer than in education. According to data published last year, just 34 per cent of white British boys on free school meals reached the expected GCSE standard in English and maths. Among black Caribbean boys on free school meals it was 35 per cent. But among black African boys it was 59 per cent and for Chinese boys it was 82 per cent.

These figures challenge the idea that racial identity alone determines disadvantage. They suggest that class, family stability and local environment may be more powerful predictors of life outcomes.

Family structure, in particular, is one of the strongest predictors of success.

Only two in 10 poor white children live with married parents today, compared with almost six in 10 among poor children in non-white families. Growing up in a stable two-parent household predicts life chances more strongly than many of the characteristics dominating modern equality debates.

For years, pointing this out was treated as politically dangerous. To discuss family breakdown risked accusations of “blaming the victim”. But ignoring such realities helps no one – least of all the children growing up within them.

Five years ago, saying this publicly could get you branded a racist. Today even Labour ministers acknowledge it. The Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has spoken openly about the need for targeted programmes for poor white boys.

That shift is one of the report’s quiet legacies. The goal was never to deny racism where it exists. Racism does occur, and it should be confronted wherever it appears. But reducing every disparity to racism creates a distorted understanding of society – and bad policy decisions.

The purpose of the Commission was to bring evidence back into the centre of the debate. To remind policymakers that social problems rarely have single causes. And to argue that communities themselves must play a role in solving the challenges they face.

The deeper problem we identified was cultural: a political environment in which identity had replaced analysis. When racial identity becomes the primary lens through which all outcomes are judged, evidence struggles to compete with ideology.

Over the last five years we have seen the political consequences of this vacuum. Parties such as Reform UK have gained traction by speaking to voters who feel ignored by elite debates about race and privilege.

The Commission warned this could happen. When mainstream politics refuses to discuss uncomfortable truths, others will step in to fill the silence.

We also argued for a school curriculum that celebrated Britain’s intellectual and cultural achievements rather than treating the nation primarily as a story of oppression. A balanced curriculum should acknowledge historical injustice while also recognising the writers, scientists and inventors who shaped modern Britain.

As a junior minister, Kemi Badenoch deserves credit for fighting to keep the spirit of the report alive, even when some senior figures seemed hesitant. She understood that the Commission was not about denying racism but defending evidence-based policymaking.

That principle matters more than ever today. Because when identity politics replaces evidence, the consequences are not just intellectual. Sometimes they are deadly.