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Sunday, November 08, 2026

Links - 8th November 2026 (2 - Climate Change)

EVs are more reliable than petrol cars in the long run - "New Automotive stressed that its analysis could only account for roadworthiness, not battery condition.  An MOT examines a car’s brakes, tyres, suspension, steering and lights but does not measure battery health or charging performance, which can affect an EV’s performance.  Separate research by UK broker Howden Group has also previously found that drivers of electric cars were being asked to pay twice as much for insurance as those who own petrol-fuelled models.  The difference was blamed on a higher cost of repairs for electric models when something did go wrong."

Meme - Serafim Batzogiou: "The @washingtonpost has published a graph showing that Earth is close to its coolest temperature of the past 485M years, with most of the time temperature being tens of degrees higher. In fact Earth was much warmer even 1-2M years ago as we are now in an ice age interglacial."
zerohedge @zerohedge: "A funny thing happened as the WaPo tried to map out half a billion years of global temperatures and the "disaster of global warming""
"Scientists have captured Earth's climate over the last 485 million years. Here's the surprising place we stand now. An effort to understand Earth's past climates uncovered a history of wild temperature shifts and offered a warning on the consequences of human -caused warming."

The Left is losing the climate class war - "It is telling that, rather than gathering around such a programme on the Left, “green” industrial workers — such as those in the Danish wind industry — are rejecting environmentalism and voting for the Right. After all, the environmental movement still remains populated by middle-class activists brimming with moral certitude that their political project must include corralling the consumptive behaviour of ordinary people. That we could both save the planet and make life significantly better for the majority simply does not cross their mind. And as long as the Left simply renews the climate politics of the last 30 years, workers will continue to reject a platform that has nothing to offer them."
Punishing rich people and companies, as the author recommends, will still flow down to affect normal people, so. Left wingers see economic growth as evil, so good luck making life better for the majority

The hypocrisy of Australia’s Net Zero policy - "Once completed, the 86 towers will rise 200 metres above the tree line, polluting the view for miles. The federal government can ill-afford to press pause. It has pledged to make the east coast electricity grid 82% carbon-free by 2030. It will be no mean achievement for a grid that relies on coal and gas for more than 65% of its electricity.  The Australian Labor Party is making the task considerably harder by refusing to remove the long-standing moratorium on nuclear power. Of the dozens of jurisdictions with grids running on 80% clean energy or more, none have achieved it with wind, sunshine and water alone. Nevertheless, Chris Bowen, Australia’s pugnacious energy minister, told a business gathering last month his targets are “very, very achievable for Australia”. His timetable is ambitious: installing a 7mw wind turbine and 16,500 solar panels every 18 hours until 2030, supported by some 10,000km of new transmission lines... Their single-minded attention to climate change leads them to regard the destruction of natural biodiversity as a necessary evil. And so they plough on, blind to the realisation that, in Australia as elsewhere, the expansion of wind and solar is constrained by the scarcity of land. We are re-learning the lesson that broke the hearts of Australia’s pioneering farmers in the late 19th century — that even in a country as vast and sparsely populated as this one, you eventually run out of usable terrain. It was only a matter of time before the iron law of energy density checked the headlong rush for wind and solar. A report last month, jointly sponsored by the Universities of Melbourne, Princeton and Griffith, calculated that 120,179 square kilometres of land would be needed to produce enough renewable energy to achieve Australia’s Net Zero target. That is an area equivalent to 90% of the landmass of England, or half the size of the state of Victoria.  Understandably, not everyone supports the colonisation of this land. In April, Apple pulled out of a deal to buy power from a proposed wind development on the edge of the North Queensland rainforests at Upper Burdekin after a devastating environmental impact report. It found that constructing the wind turbine plant would destroy 769 hectares of koala habitat.   Elsewhere, politicians and environmental bureaucrats are quietly making trade-offs. A proposed wind farm on Robbin Island in north-west Tasmania will only proceed if the operators agree to it shut down for five months each year so as not to disturb the migration of the orange-bellied parrot. Construction of a wind farm in Victoria has been curtailed because of the threat to a local wetland bird species, the brolga... Tim Nevard, an adjunct professor at the Cairns Institute at James Cook University, describes the application to build on the site as ludicrous. “Biodiversity can’t be destroyed in order to stop climate change,” he said.  A virtue often ignored is the power of the forest to enrich the human spirit. The natural beauty of the rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef attracts 400,000 tourists a year to the region. But it also has a deeper, sacred significance to the Jirrbal people, whose ancestors were here long before the birth of Christ. Those who retain an attachment to the land through blood lines and tradition are distraught by the proposal... the Jirrbal people, in alliance with local conservationists, are trying to raise funds to fly to Canberra, a distance equivalent to London to Moscow, hoping to put their case to the minister face to face. It is a measure of the unequal battle between a small regional community and the renewable energy companies that they are relying on charity for the fare. For the defenders of Chalumbin, it’s an all-or-nothing fight. If this land isn’t safe from colonisation by big renewables, where is?"

The great Net Zero lie - "while the West is clearly responsible for the overwhelming majority of past emissions, future emissions are going to be driven primarily by newly emerging economies. Regardless of what we do in the West, the billions of people who still live in poverty in countries such as India, not to mention those in Africa, and who legitimately aspire to the comforts of industrialisation, will drive a colossal surge in energy demand in the coming years. Projected worldwide consumption of all types of energy 30 years from now is about 50% higher than today, most of it in poorer countries.  This usually invites two types of response: the Malthusian-pessimist kind, which claims that this is intrinsically unsustainable, and that the world can’t afford the massive increase in fossil fuels that the widespread development of the Global South would inevitably entail; and the naïve-environmentalist kind, which contends that developing countries can rely on solar panels and wind turbines to sustainably grow their way out of poverty. Both of these responses share one thing: they’re wrong.   What’s interesting, however, is how these two approaches overlap when it comes to Net-Zero polices in the West. Climate ideology has become a dangerous mix of end-of-days apocalypticism, with thousands of young Westerners now suffering from “climate anxiety”; of individual scapegoating, where ordinary citizens who bear little responsibility for systemic problems are guilt-tripped into thinking that they bear the burden for potential ecological collapse; and of eco-authoritarian hubris, based on the notion that the West needs to drastically accelerate its process of decarbonisation. A perfect example of the latter is Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte’s recent proposal to drastically cut back nitrogen emissions (70-80%) in the country’s farming sector...  the Netherlands is Europe’s largest exporter of meat and the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, just behind the United States, meaning the government’s plan would cause food exports to collapse at a time when the world is already facing a global food and resource shortage — a disaster caused by the same global elites who are now peddling Net Zero.   This isn’t just happening in the Netherlands. In July, thousands of protesters stormed Sri Lanka’s presidential palace and forced the president and prime minister to resign. As in the Netherlands, the protests were sparked by the government’s decision to ban fertilisers and pesticides in favour of organic, climate-friendly alternatives — a decision that devastated millions of the country’s farmers and caused an artificial food shortage that plunged nearly two million Sri Lankans into poverty, and turned the country from rice exporter to importer. The defenestrated prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, was also, like Rutte, a devoted member and Agenda Contributor of the WEF; in 2018, he published an article on the organisation’s website titled: “This is How I Will Make My Country Rich by 2025”. (Following the protests, the WEF swiftly removed the article from its website.)   In light of all this, it’s easy to see why a growing number of people view Net Zero as either a case study in utter incompetence or, even more troublingly, as the latest example of “crisis capitalism”, whereby crises are exploited (and in some cases engineered) by ruling elites to push through restructurings of the capitalist system — usually by concentrating capital and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people in a manner that would likely face unsurmountable popular opposition in “normal” times. We saw it happen with the financial crisis, with the pandemic, with the war in Ukraine. Now it is being repeated with the climate crisis... there’s one thing that more than any other raises doubts about [elites'] good faith: the fact that while they keep coming up with increasingly fantastical solutions to CO2 emissions, they largely keep ignoring the only existing technology that can help us rapidly phase out fossil fuels once and for all — without disrupting Western societies, and without denying the rest of the world the living standards they legitimately aspire to. I’m talking, of course, about nuclear energy.   The reason nuclear energy is largely absent from the decarbonisation debate is that the latter is based on a lie: that we can generate all the world’s energy needs from renewable sources — primarily wind and solar power. This has become a mantra for much of the climate movement, but it’s a delusion. Aside from the problems arising from covering colossal tracts of land with wind turbines and solar panels (which require hugely polluting rare earth elements, most of which are in China) to meet the world’s growing energy needs, the fact is that both are intermittent and energy storage technologies don’t come close to what would be needed. Even with a high percentage of renewables, a stable, constant source of energy would still be needed — and that’s either going to be fossil fuels or nuclear energy. As James Hansen, the Nasa climate scientist who first warned the world about the dangers of climate change in the Eighties, has pointed out, nuclear is “the only viable path that has been proposed for rapid global decarbonisation”.  This, then, is the great Net Zero lie: it’s primary goal isn’t remedying the climate crisis. After all, a solution to the crisis stands right in front of us — only to be ignored by our political and financial elites. Faced with such deception, it’s hardly surprising that many are starting to question their motives; and in more and more countries, are starting to let it be known that they have had enough."

Meme - Bjorn Lomborg: "Alarmists: "World on fire!" Reality: By Aug 5, global burned area likely never lower than 2026. Disasters in France, Spain & Canada are tragic-but climate is global. Cherry-picking isn't science. Climate policy does near-nothing for fires. We need better fire policy (prescribed burns, let some burn) and better climate info"
"7 months through 2026: Record-low Global Burn. By August 5 2026, the world has burned less than any year, 2012-25"

Despite What You’ve Heard, the World Isn’t on Fire - WSJ - "As smoke from Canadian wildfires poured into American cities last month, the headlines poured out equally fast. Most blamed climate change. Canada’s public broadcaster informed readers the smoky skies had “only one true fix”: Stop burning fossil fuels. But the headlines seem to have missed the most remarkable fact about the wildfires: Canada is having a below-average fire year. In fact, the world is on track to a record low in area burned.  Ottawa’s own tally released July 9 showed 1.4 million hectares burned—less than a third of the 4.6 million hectares burned by the same date last year. Tucked into the “quick facts” of the government’s press release, beneath ministerial quotes about climate change driving ever more severe disasters, was the quiet admission that wildfire activity “remains below the five-year average.” That’s understating it: Satellite data weekly updated by the European Union confirm that Canada’s total burned area in 2026 by Aug. 5 was below the 2012-25 average the EU uses as a baseline.  And the statistical good news keeps coming. The U.S. this year has remained below its 2012-25 average, with its most recent measurement 20% below average as of Aug. 5. North America and South America are at a record-low burn since 2012.  Every continent on the globe is burning less—some much less—than usual. As of Aug. 5, Oceania has burned 14% less than its 2012-25 average and Europe has burned 35% less. Asia has a near-record low of burned area since 2012, clocking in at 41% below average. Africa is at a record low, with current burn at 44% below average.  Globally, we’re on trend for the lowest burn since the collection of that satellite data began in 2001, and likely the lowest since 1900. In the early 1900s, nearly 4% of global land burned annually, nearly double today’s rate. American annual burned area in the 1930s was about five times as large as its modern annual burned area. The deadliest aspect of fires has declined, too: smoke deaths. Air pollution from fires kills roughly 20,000 times as many people as the fires themselves. As fires have declined, the rate of annual deaths from landscape-fire air pollution has fallen substantially since 2000, according to a 2024 Lancet study. Given the current global population, that means fire pollution kills about 1.6 million—400,000 fewer than would have been the case had the 2000 death rate remained.  You wouldn’t know any of this from most media reports. Too much coverage cherry-picks smaller areas that happen to have lots of fire, ignoring everything else. With Canada this summer, scary pictures won out over compelling statistics. In Europe, wildfires in France and Spain repeatedly make headlines; that the Continent’s fires are significantly below average doesn’t. One of the most egregious examples of this narrow reporting was the coverage of the “black summer” fires in Australia in 2019 and 2020. The headlines were apocalyptic. But while the fires did come near heavily populated areas—such as Melbourne and Sydney, where many media outlets are based—the total national burn was “well below average,” according to the government’s annual environmental overview. This sort of media coverage leaves the public with the impression that the planet is ablaze when the evidence shows the opposite.  The positive news in fire statistics should give pause to climate alarmists and those in the media promoting their cause. To be logically consistent, if climate change gets the blame for every fire, it should also get credit for burn declining. The truth is that climate change isn’t the main determiner either way. A warmer planet does lengthen fire seasons and dries out vegetation faster, tilting the odds toward more dangerous fire weather. But weather only sets how easily a landscape can burn. Whether it burns—and how badly—depends mostly on people: how much fuel we let accumulate, how quickly we detect and douse flames, and how much land we farm, fragment and pave. The significant decline in area burned is due to a century of better land management, agriculture and firefighting.  The main culprits of the bad fire seasons Canada suffered in 2023 and 2025 are homegrown. A nation can have less fire overall but still impressive blazes: The same decades of aggressive firefighting that drove total burned area down also let fuel pile up. Canada has all but abandoned prescribed burning—deliberate, controlled fires that clear out the deadwood and undergrowth that turn ordinary fires into monsters. By one measure, the area in Canada treated with prescribed burns annually collapsed from more than 35,000 hectares in 1990 to 182 hectares in 2023, a 99.5% decline. The stock response from climate activists—that the only real fix is decarbonization—fails elementary arithmetic. Even if the entire wealthy world went net-zero by 2050, an astoundingly improbable and expensive policy, temperatures would change less than 0.2 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century, with near-zero effect on fire risks.  Adaptation is what makes the difference. Modeling of Los Angeles’s Palisades fire shows that with no climate action, a similar fire in 2050 would burn about 7.2% more intensely. Yet even if the entire world managed dramatic emission cuts, the fire would still burn 5.5% more intensely in 2050. On the other hand, adaptation—prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, fire-resistant building codes and smarter zoning—could make that fire about 15.4% less severe in 2050 than it was in 2025, at a tiny fraction of the cost massive decarbonization poses.  Canadians and Americans who spent July coughing on smoke deserve better than a false diagnosis. Better forest management—particularly prescribed burns—will do more for next summer’s air than any emissions target."

No To LNG - Squamish | Facebook - "Hey Carney. If you think renewables can’t dramatically power a country, then look at China. The grid is the problem. Not the inability to create renewable energy. Stop putting money into fossil fuels. Put it into renewable energies and the means to get it to our communities: “China turned away enough clean energy to power Mexico for a year in the six months through June as its grids hit their limits, while networks in many other nations ‌such as Australia and Japan also failed to keep pace with a surging renewables buildout. Curtailments, or the pre-emptive rejection of wind or solar power because a grid reaches capacity, are emerging as a growing challenge to renewables globally and underscore continued reliance on fossil fuels.”"
Climate change hystericists are ignorant and don't realise this actually illustrates why renewables are bad because of intermittency meaning you need tons of wasted capacity and the implications for grid stability. Hell, the article already tells you it's a challenge to "renewables"

Meme - "Material per AVERAGE Terrawatt-hour per DOE Quadrennial Review
Metric Tons per AVERAGE TWh
Wind: 11x nuclear. Solar: 18x nuclear
Solar PV - >16,000
Hydro - 14,000
Wind - 10,000
Geothermal - ~5,000
Coal - ~1,000
Nuclear - <1,000
NGCC - 500?
DOE Estimate of Resources per Terrawatt-hour"
"Green" energy sure does require a lot of resources

A landfill of “renewables” = a land full of poison. - "Millions of solar panels are hitting their end-of-life cycle, and the world is completely unprepared for the coming toxic avalanche. By 2050, projections estimate up to 78 million metric tons of solar e-waste globally. This isn’t just a pile of debris — it’s the future of green energy waste hidden in plain sight. While renewables promise a clean transition, their end-of-life realities reveal massive logistical, economic, and environmental challenges. The industry often boasts that solar panels are “95% recyclable” in theory because of their glass, aluminum, and copper components. Yet economics consistently overrides technical feasibility. Proper disassembly and recycling of a single panel can cost $20 to $28 in places like Australia and the United States, while landfilling runs as low as $4. Without strong financial incentives or mandates, up to 90% of decommissioned panels end up in landfills rather than recycling streams. Each solar panel functions as an industrial “sandwich,” with layers tightly bound by heavy polymers and encapsulants. Extracting the microscopic amounts of silver and high-purity silicon requires energy-intensive chemical processes or thermal treatments that often exceed the value of the recovered materials. Newer, cheaper panels use less silver and thinner wafers, further eroding recycling economics and leaving valuable fractions locked away. When panels fracture or are crushed in landfills, heavy metals like lead and cadmium can leach into soil and groundwater. This creates the prospect of multi-generational contamination from dispersed, unmanaged waste sites. The shift from “clean energy” to persistent hazardous legacies becomes real if proper management fails at scale.   The crisis accelerates faster than many models anticipated. Solar cells naturally degrade over 25-30 years, but economic pressures drive even earlier retirements. Newer, higher-efficiency or cheaper panels prompt solar farms and homeowners to replace functional systems a decade or more ahead of schedule. This compressed lifecycle shatters the narrative of durable, long-term green assets and fuels an endless loop of waste generation.   Wind turbines add another dimension to the problem, particularly their massive blades made of fiberglass and epoxy resins. These durable structures resist easy recycling due to cross-linked polymers that cannot be readily melted or reformed. By 2050, significant volumes of blade waste are expected, much of it destined for landfills where the non-biodegradable materials will occupy vast space for centuries. Transporting blades longer than 50-100 meters creates additional logistical nightmares.   Electric vehicle and grid-scale batteries introduce further complexity. Lithium-ion packs contain valuable metals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel, yet global recycling rates remain low despite high potential recovery in advanced facilities. Varying chemistries, glued assemblies, and fire risks during disassembly make processes expensive. Improper disposal risks toxic leaks, even as second-life applications try to extend their usefulness...   Environmental trade-offs extend beyond local landfills. While renewables reduce operational emissions, their full lifecycle — including mining rare materials, manufacturing, and disposal — generates industrial waste streams that challenge sustainability claims. Scaling to meet climate goals without parallel advances in circular design risks trading one pollution problem for another, with cumulative impacts on land use and resources."
"Cheap" "renewable" energy isn't so cheap once you take into account recycling and waste management costs

The Dutch are filling gas wells with cement - "Readers will be familiar with the German nuclear phase-out. The Merkel and Scholz governments prematurely shut down twenty gigawatts of nuclear power. Those plants provided energy for 38 million households for less than twenty percent of the cost of gas. The Scholz government closed one power plant thirteen years before its expected retirement date. But few know that the Dutch government is doing something similar: it is pouring cement down the country’s gas wells. These wells are already inactive; destroying them doesn’t do anything for safety or the environment. The government is demolishing the wells to prevent a future government from reconsidering its decision to stop producing gas. The wells are located in Groningen, a province in the north of the country. Prospectors discovered the gas field in 1959 and soon realized it was the largest in Europe. Over the next 60 years, they extracted 2.2 trillion cubic metres of gas. Groningen earned the treasury lots of money – 363 billion euros – and gave Dutch utilities the ability to generate power without relying on foreign countries. But gas production in Groningen had local downsides. The field is large, shallow, and crossed by small faults, so extraction caused bits of it to shift. In 1986, the region started experiencing small earthquakes. The majority of these quakes registered beneath 1.5 on the Richter scale, too faint for most people to notice. But a small number exceeded 2.0, and a tiny handful 3.0. The earthquakes led vocal Groningers to demand an end to the drilling. Jesse Frederik, a smart Dutch journalist, has argued that locals greatly exaggerated the harmfulness of the earthquakes. But even if they hadn’t, there was a good case to keep drilling. The remaining reserves, some 500 billion cubic metres, are worth around €200 billion at current wholesale prices – enough to pay every single resident of the province €150,000 as compensation and still have 110 billion euros. And while gas alone is not good for the environment, more gas usually results in less coal usage, not less renewable generation. Norway is one of the world’s largest gas exporters despite its sincere concerns about climate change. (The enlightened Norwegians opened seventy more sites for drilling this past May.) But like many modern Western countries, the Dutch are increasingly unable to pursue policies with huge numbers of winners and small numbers of concentrated losers. Rather than buy off the Groningers, the cabinet decided to give in to them. In 2018, the cabinet promised to end gas production by 2030. In 2019, it accelerated that deadline to 2023. The concessions to the losers continued. In 2023, a parliamentary commission released a report announcing that the Dutch government had a ‘debt of honour’ to the people of Groningen, and that economic interests had superseded the interests of Groningers for too long. Hans Vijlbrief, the D66 minister responsible, then decided to fill the wells with 500 metres of cement. The Mining Council opposed the decision: they said that it was possible and preferable to mothball the facilities. The main scientific advisor to the government also opposed the decision: they argued (and continue to argue) that pausing production was no worse for the environment than plugging the wells was, and preserved much greater flexibility for the government in case of geopolitical necessity or economic crisis. The Groningen gas field still holds twice as much gas as the EU has imported from Russia since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. At market value, that gas would be worth enough to increase the Netherlands’ aid to the Ukrainian government thirteenfold. But the politics of the ‘debt of honour’ overcame the national and European interest. A specialised machine is now travelling around the province ripping out kilometres of pipes and filling what is left with thousands of tonnes of cement. It has destroyed 70 of the 300 wells this way so far. This is a story of a few concentrated losers defeating a very diffuse majority of winners. But it is also a story of a government proactively choosing to limit the country’s options. Destroying the wells does not change the likelihood of additional earthquakes. It does not change the world’s emissions pathway either, given that production had stopped. Its only purpose is to ensure that a future government, faced with different circumstances – a collapse in global LNG production – or different preferences – the Groningers decide that they would rather have more money than fewer tremors – has no ability to change course. The situation in Groningen is unique, but the effort to reduce options is not. The German Greens chose to speed through the nuclear phase-out, rejecting a pause proposed by their partner in government, the FDP. In the case of one reactor, Neckarwestheim 2, they issued the dismantling permit before the reactor even shut down. An Austrian Green minister cast the pivotal vote in the European council for the European Nature Restoration Laws against the wishes of their coalition, weeks before an election they lost. Restricting optionality ‘works’. Friedrich Merz opposed Olaf Scholz’s decision to shut down Germany’s remaining nuclear reactors in April 2023, but now says that it is too late to restart them. Future governments do find it difficult to reverse course if the alternative course has become impossible. But it comes at a cost. The impulse to make a decision irreversible signals a lack of confidence in one’s decisions. If a decision is good, it should be capable of surviving the judgement of voters. That the government feels the need to shield it from such judgement suggests that they are not sure it would. It is an act of institutional vandalism, raising the stakes of elections. It is also inefficient. Sometimes circumstances change in unforeseen ways. The demand for data centres has suddenly increased the usefulness of baseload power. Though Japan closed every reactor after Fukushima, it dismantled few; more than a dozen have since restarted. Michigan’s Palisades plant closed in 2022; it is now in the final stage of a restart. (Although it didn’t require much foresight in 2023 to think that gas might be geopolitically useful.) Options are valuable. It would be good for the current Dutch government to prioritize the interests of the Netherlands and Europe over that of Groningen. Failing that, it would be nice for it to allow future governments to reconsider its priorities. For now, the cement-pouring machine is destroying more wells."
Left wingers want to destroy their countries and they are so closed minded and unimaginative they can never imagine changing their mind or the world changing

Meme - "I am 99% sure that climate change is the universe's way of giving us a deadline to end capitalism" earthlyeducation: "extreme heat, drought and consequently wildfires are wreaking havoc all over the world. this video is from Serbia.... See more"
The left wing agenda is all connected. This is why they keep pushing climate change hysteria. It's easier to manipulate scared people too

Tangwa Abilu.🌿🌏🌾🍀🍃.SDG's. on X - "Stop asking what YOU can do for the climate. Start demanding what SHELL, TOTAL and 100 other corporations will do to PAY for the damage."
Climate hystericist logic: China is not responsible for its carbon emissions because supposedly this is because it produces stuff for the rest of the world. Even if only 10% of their carbon emissions are caused by that. But oil companies are responsible for their emissions even though almost all of them are linked to those who consume their products. Left wingers just hate the West

New/Mode | Make your voice impossible to ignore - "Tell the Canada Pension Plan to stop investing in fossil fuel expansion... CPPIB owes all of us a duty to maximize our returns without undue risk of loss. Fossil fuel expansion simply cannot be a responsible investment, with the high risk of assets becoming stranded as the global economy moves away from fossil fuels"
Yet left wingers bitch about how oil companies will profit from pipelines. Their claims are incoherent

Meme - blackleftiss: keeps mixing up coinstar & cointelpro @Boringstein: "youre going to see a lot of people saying this, to the point where it might feel trite from overexposure, but it remains true: the single most impactful action the earth could take to fight climate change would be the disbanding the US military"
The left wing agenda is all connected

Meme - "Africa: Climate Low Priority
Africans from 39 countries worry about unemployment, economy, health, water roads, education, crime, hunger, electricity, poverty, and corruption - but not climate
Percent cite as one one of top top 3 priorities
Unemployment 32.1%
Management of the economy 30.2%
Health 26.3%
Water supply 22.6%
Infrastructure/Roads 22.1%
Education 19.7%
Crime and security 19.3%
Food Shortage/Famine 14.1%
Electricity 12.6%
Poverty/Destitution 12.1%
Corruption 11.6%
Farming/Agriculture 6.5%
Wages, incomes, and salaries 5.5%
Democracy/political rights 3.9%
Services (other) 3.6%
Transportation 3.1%
Housing 2.7%
Political instability/Political... 2.5%
Rates and taxes 2.4%
Agricultural marketing 2.3%
Civil war 2.0%
Discrimination/inequality 1.9%
Loans/Credit 1.7%
Drought 1.5%
Gender issues/Women's rights 1.2%
COVID-19 1.2%
Land 1.1%
Communications 0.8%
Political violence 0.7%
Orphans/Street children 0.7%
Climate change 0.6% 31st of 34th
Sickness/Disease 0.5%
AIDS 0.1%
War (International) 0.1%"
Clearly, Africans are too ignorant to know that climate change will end the world and that they will pay the highest costs for it. They need to be educated on what's good for them.

Europe's Decline and Coasting on the Past

From FT comments (via Nick, 30):

Le Gun:

"The politicians are the symptom, it's the entitled voters that are the disease. They expect a nice life paid for any someone else because they either don't want to work in the available jobs or build a business or don't have the grit and discipline to gain the abilities to do so. Their answer is to hand the whole thing over the politicians to deal with on their behalf which the pols have duly delivered, effectively by liquidating the national equity build up over decades after WW2 to do so. Not much different in the UK.

Nature has a very clear way of dealing with such individuals or indeed entire societies because the laws of thermodynamics don't stop at your borders or even own front door. If you want a nice life every day you have to go out and fight nature to earn it because she gives us nothing for free. Every day you have to work with others to build or do something useful, every day you have to invest at real risk some of the surplus you produce for the future, every day you have to, even late in your career, do the job a bit better, learn a new skill as technology changes. Most importantly you have to determine that you want to create a life for yourself on your terms so you don't have to ask the state to thieve from someone else to pay for what you yourself have not earned. And you have to do it without resorting to becoming thieving smasher because you won't want to live in a society where we all play that game.

Everyone thinks the politicians can fix this. 5 minutes with any senior pol in power will completely disabuse you of such hallucinations. Good societies are build from the ground up actions of millions of peoples working together in a myriad of ways to meet each others needs, but the fundamental building block is a well intentioned individual with some set of values that means they can function with others as a part of the whole.

You can decide whether or not France and many other European countries have that most fundamental quality still in them."

Links - 8th November 2026 (1 - Hamas Attack Oct 2023)

Aizenberg on X - "There's a wave of people today sharing images of Gaza's destruction as prima facie evidence of "genocide," never mind that ~99% of the civilian population was evacuated and survived. Similar images came out of Mosul & Raqqa (see below) where there was also brutal urban combat."
Kristin Reid on X - "This is very simple. Your arguments make no sense. If over 70% of the structures in Gaza are destroyed but 97% of the population is alive, either the IDF can’t hit a target or they’re going above and beyond to avoid civilian casualties."

Seth Frantzman on X - "ISIS was defeated and almost completely disarmed by around 2019 in Iraq and most of Syria. It went from controlling a large area with some 50,000 or more fighters, tens of thousands of them foreign fighters, as well as having taken at least one Iraqi division’s worth of equipment in 2014…it was rolled back and completely defeated; in Mosul, which is a city and area around the size of Gaza with a similar population, ISIS was completely removed by 2017, and completely disarmed because all of its members were killed or removed from the field in that city and its environs. The fact is that Hamas can be disarmed and defeated, using a method as was used with ISIS in Mosul. It’s true that one can’t be rid of all Hamas supporters, but it can be disarmed. The fact is that Hamas is mostly disarmed in the West Bank, a success story of the PA and IDF. There is a way. It’s a question of whether there is the will to do it and to let people in Gaza live free from Hamas. It worked in Mosul and Raqqa; it can work but the local people need rights and freedoms to be free from the extremists like happened in Mosul and Raqqa. Also journalists can travel to Mosul and Raqqa today."
One terrorist supporter cope when the counter-examples of Berlin and Tokyo in 1945 are brought up is that that was a different time and war crimes were committed then too. But ISIS being a victim of "genocide" is a whole new level (then again, a further cope is that Israel was behind ISIS, so)

Meme - Andrew Fox-online: "Was Caen in 1944 a genocide? 5% of the civilian population killed in two months (3% in 3 years Gaza). 75-80% of the city destroyed (50.44% destroyed in Gaza, per UNOSAT). Rubble is not a metric of genocide."
It's "genocide" when the "West" is winning a war and left wingers want to stop them

Meme - Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa: "This is not Hiroshima, this's Gaza. Gaza is nearly 3 times smaller than Hiroshima, and Israel dropped 223,000+ tonnes of explosives, equivalent of ~15 "Little Boy" ATOMIC BOMBS, on Gaza. The world hasn't seen anything like the destruction in Gaza since Second World War."
Yoav Nahmias: "So why have fewer people died in 3 years of war in gaza than on single day at Hiroshima?"
Terrorist supporter logic: destroying buildings is "genocide"

GauleHero on X - "AND Japanese DID NOT accuse the US of a Genocide.... Japanese knew they started the War (much like Hamas did on Oct 7).... But Japanese had the courage to accept the consequences on them (which Palestinians have not be able to) from a war they started... 🤣🤣🤣"
Mr jheri curl on X - "It's a false flag. Hamas blew the buildings up themselves to try and turn the world against Israel"

Saggezza Eterna on X - "The Civilizational Suicide Pact: The Left Launders Terrorism to Destroy the West
The modern left operates as a parasitic organism feeding on the moral decay of Western civilization. Look at the streets of Paris today. It is the third anniversary of the October 7 massacres. While civilized individuals pause to remember the slaughtered, the progressive mob takes to the streets to defend the butchers. This behavior reveals the putrid core of the leftist mind. They possess a sickening obsession with the destruction of successful societies. They despise achievement, order, and strength. They worship victimhood and chaos. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez and Paris police prefect Patrice Faure attempted to ban Wednesday demonstrations organized by the collective Urgence Palestine. The state authorities correctly identified the dark reality of these gatherings. They cited a heightened terror threat, historically high levels of antisemitic acts, and the glaring risk that a march on this exact date serves as a grotesque celebration of the Hamas atrocities. October 7 was officially set aside for solemn commemoration. The radical left views this sacred grief as an invitation to riot. Naturally, the mob defied the law. They believe their self-righteous delusions grant them immunity from civil order. They flooded the streets with their anti-Israel venom. Consider the repulsive scene in Paris. A man violently breached a barrier to rip an Israeli flag from a woman's hands, screaming, "Nazi, you are committing a genocide." We must analyze the utter psychological sickness required to assault a woman displaying a Jewish star on the exact anniversary of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. This is textbook psychological projection. The left harbors deep, violent authoritarian impulses. They project their own genocidal fantasies onto their victims to absolve themselves of their inherent guilt. They brand their violent intimidation as "pro-Palestinian solidarity." French authorities and Israeli outlets properly recognize it as a severe threat to public order and a blatant display of hatred. This ideological virus infects every facet of the left's political apparatus. Look at the supposedly separate street protests from October 6. Hundreds of thousands of students marched across dozens of cities, ostensibly complaining about school conditions. The Interior Ministry counted 266,000 nationwide and 56,000 in Paris. What did this grievance march actually look like? It was completely overrun with Palestinian flags and radical chants. The youthful left seamlessly blended their anti-Macron and anti-National Rally slogans with apologism for Islamic terrorism. They even cheered for the radical agitator Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The left has engineered an intersectional alliance of the perpetually aggrieved and the openly violent. There is absolutely zero distinction between a student complaining about a crowded classroom and an activist demanding the eradication of Israel. They share the exact same fundamentally destructive impulse. Now, the Association France Palestine Solidarité is organizing a massive national mobilization for Saturday, October 10 at Place de la République. They demand sanctions and an end to what they falsely label genocide, colonization, apartheid, and occupation. Read their official literature to see the mechanics of their deception. Their written call acknowledges the three-year mark since October 7, only to immediately justify the Hamas slaughter as a mere reaction to a blockade. They accuse Israel of a genocidal war and accelerated settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. These are entirely fabricated claims designed to provide intellectual cover for barbarism. The left launders terrorist propaganda through the sanitized language of human rights. The media conveniently fails to provide a solid breakdown of how many of these marchers are actual French citizens versus foreign nationals. The distinction is completely irrelevant at this point. Palestinian flags permeate the broader student protests because the ideological infection has already taken hold of the native youth. Whether they are imported radicals or domestic students, they are united in their profound hatred for the foundations of our society. The left aligns itself with the architects of mass murder because they share a common civilizational enemy. They celebrate slaughter while claiming the moral high ground. We must look at them with absolute revulsion. We must recognize them for the civilizational poison they truly are and ensure they never again hold the levers of power."

Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 on X - "NOW: "Globalize the Intifada" and Mamdani chant as Pro-Palestine protesters storm the 'Israelis for Peace, Union Square rally', occupying the vigil seats as speaker of the rally addressed the crowd. Video by @yyeeaahhhboiii2 | Licensing @FreedomNTV Desk@freedomnews.tv"
Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 on X - "NOW: "Long Live Hamas!" chants as protesters stormed and confronted the 'Israelis For Peace' vigil held at USQ, organizers say they hold the vigil regularly for the hostages and for Gaza. Video by @yyeeaahhhboiii2 | Licensing @FreedomNTV Desk@freedomnews.tv"
Guy Benson on X - "Perfect juxtaposition. The worst people in our society & they’re taking over a major political party."
We're still told that no one supports Hamas

Terry Glavin: The antisemitic nightmares are not stopping | National Post - "Within hours of the massacres, throughout the English-speaking world and beyond, there were celebrations. From Vancouver to New York, and from Los Angeles to Istanbul, the killers mobilized by Ḥarakat al-Muqawamah al-ʾIslamiyyah, otherwise known as Hamas, were praised as gallant resistance fighters. Heroes. An upwelling of antisemitic depravity burst its banks from the universities, the “social justice” milieu and all the activist networks that so routinely summon protesters into the public squares. The grisly mutation of Judenrein to Judenstaatrein — the denial of a Jewish right to life to the denial of the right to a Jewish state — was all of a sudden out in the open, jubilant and positively gleeful at the news of what had happened. Across Canada, by the morning of Sunday, Oct. 8, banners were already being hung from freeway overpasses, placards were already being hoisted and slogans were already being chanted at rallies exhorting solidarity with the heroic Palestinian “resistance.” And so it went, week after week, month after month. Campuses became sites of semi-permanent “protest” encampments demonizing Israel. A coordinated bomb threat targeted more than 100 Jewish institutions across the country. Synagogues were firebombed and vandalized. Shots were fired at Jewish schools in Montreal. Jews were besieged in their own neighbourhoods in Toronto. Jewish students were afraid to attend classes. Over the past two years, Statistics Canada has counted 1,731 hate crimes targeting Jews that were reported to the police... Israelis didn’t just wake up on October 7 to find themselves under assault from a ground incursion of the Hamas military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. The murderers of October 7 also came from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — the PFLP, particularly, is deeply embedded in “anti-Zionist” networks in Europe and Canada. And almost immediately after October 7 Israel came under a steady bombardment of thousands of rockets and guided missiles from the Hezbollah-controlled territories in Lebanon. Within the year, nearly a quarter of a million Israelis had been displaced from the “Gaza envelope” along with more than 40 communities near the Lebanese border. The Houthi militants of Yemen, meanwhile, began a reign of terror targeting shipping in the Red Sea. The Khomeinist Islamic Republic of Iran, the key sponsor of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and about a dozen other terrorist proxies in the Greater Middle East, soon began targeting Israel directly. The “12 Day War” between Iran and Israel last year ended up drawing the Trump administration into a catastrophic and erratic operation that has spread through the Gulf states and dramatically disrupted global oil supplies... In Canada, antisemitic hate crimes appear to be on the decline, although Statistic Canada reports that last year, 71 per cent of anti-religious hate crimes targeted Jews, who represent less than one per cent of Canada’s population. According to a report from the “J7” group (representing Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the U.K. and U.S.), more than 23,000 incidents involving Jew-hatred occurred in 2025, including 20 killings. Canada is “one intelligence failure away from a mass casualty event,” the report found. And right on cue: In Belleville, Ontario, the Jew-obsessed 29-year-old Sean Ward who shot up the Sons of Jacob synagogue last month was thwarted in his apparent intent to carry out a mass shooting at Yom Kippur services, only by the bravery of a local police constable, Jeff Smith, who was gravely wounded in the encounter. Ottawa’s unaccountable inattention to the predicament facing Canada’s Jews may be subsiding, at long last. For whatever it might be worth, as of two weeks ago Public Safety Canada has now clearly identified “anti-Zionism” as a form of antisemitism. The finding has triggered “anti-Zionist” complaints, petitions and protests, as you would expect. “Anti-Zionism” remains a disfigurement of much of the NATO capitals’ popular culture and activist set. Israel’s diaspora ministry counts 262 anti-Israel events organized to coincide with the anniversary of the October 7 massacres. Most of them are planned for next weekend, including at least 14 events scheduled across Canada. Worldwide, the diaspora ministry counts 87 of the events as medium or high risk, owing to their proximity to Israeli diplomatic missions."

Toronto poet praises Oct. 7 in government-funded journal | National Post - "An internal review is underway after the latest issue of a journal funded by the Canada Council for the Arts appeared to support terrorism as a form of resistance and featured a poem by a Toronto writer who praises the events of October 7. The poem, called Flood, was written by Bahar Orang and is featured in The Ex-Puritan. In the piece, Orang describes the events of an October morning, a reference to October 7 — the deadliest day for the Jewish community since the Holocaust, when 1,200 Israelis were murdered by Hamas terrorists in 2023. “Praise the paragliders, their gentle ascension, their unbroken morning, and of course their triumphant descension…,” she writes... Orang also writes “praise the fighters,” and acknowledges their courage, cunning and patience. She describes “the tanks on fire, the enemy fleeing.” “Praise the missiles, the recognitions written in blood on each one, the names carved already into your own flesh,” she continues... Orang was a guest editor for the edition and wrote an editorial note explaining why the issue turns “deliberately toward armed resistance.” “Among our obligations as Westerners, one is straightforward: to honour that creation of possibility, even when — or especially when — it takes the systematically disavowed form of armed resistance,” she explains. “Taking resistance seriously in all its forms alters what we, as cultural workers, are able to perceive: the violence already structuring ordinary life, and those who fight it as political agents.” Orang’s biography on the website of Book*hug Press, which published her first book in 2020, describes her as an award-winning author who lives and works as a psychiatrist in Toronto. Her work is expected to be featured in Best Canadian Poetry 2027."
Weird. I thought no one supports Hamas

Meme - "FREE GAZA? GAZA WAS FREE. ISRAEL LEFT GAZA IN 2005 FOR PEACE. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? HAMAS TOOK OVER, RULED FOR 20 YEARS, STOLE $26B IN AID, AND SPENT IT ALL ON TERROR TUNNELS, ROCKETS, AND WEAPONS THEN ATTACKED ISRAEL AND BUTCHERED CIVILIANS"

Meme - echo5savage: "Hamas starts a war calls it Jihad, Hamas loses the war they call it genocide."
timothy.brown.73307634: "When I visited Israel in 2011, I noticed something that wasn't widely known. Muslims are free to roam in the Jewish districts. They own businesses and participate in commerce there. But, non Muslims are forbidden from entering the Palestinian territories. It seemed pretty apparent which side was hostile and who was occupying who."

Meme - Tamer Masudin @TMasudin: "Muhammad: "Gaza has no missiles and no army. Stop calling it a war."
Also Muhammad: "Hamas just launched rockets at the Jews!! Allahu Akbar!!! Glory to the resistance!!!""
Muhammad Mazen @mhmd_s09 (Translated from Arabic): "At 9 o'clock, the sound of the rockets launching from Gaza lifts the head, oh Lord, grant victory to the resistance and guide their aim"
Muhammad Mazen @mhmd_s09: "Gaza has no army, no air force, no navy, no tanks, no artillery, and no missiles. Stop calling this a war. It's a genocide."
Terrorist supporters know at some level that they're lying

Meme - Governor Kathy Hochul @Go...: "On a day of profound pain for so many New Yorkers, disrupting a vigil for the victims of October 7 while waving the flags of terrorist organizations is absolutely despicable. Jewish New Yorkers deserve to mourn in peace, free from hatred and intimidation. There is no excuse for this. None."
Extremely Careless @Shanghaibeast: ""Well. Well. Well. If it isn't the consequences of my own actions."" *Hochul in mosque and with Zohran Mamdani*

Meme - "When Egypt occupied Gaza, Palestinian terrorists attacked Israel. When Israel occupied Gaza, Palestinian terrorists attacked Israel. When Gaza was unoccupied, Palestinian terrorists attacked Israel. It was never about occupation. IT WAS ALWAYS ABOUT JEWS."

Thread by @StarrJpost on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The two youngest Palestinian child soldiers so far to have died in the October 7 War appear to be this 13-year-old and this 14-year-old. They join 29 other deceased Gazan child soldiers that have been confirmed so far. 🧵
Thirteen year old Hossam Muhammad Morsi was announced by Palestinian Islamic Jihad on Friday to be an operative of its Northern Brigade's Central Mobilization Unit. Facial match software and only one similar name in casualty databases indicate the correct identity. Morsi appears to have been killed in a September 9 incident alongside his 18-year-old brother Munir Muhammad Morsi, who was also in the Al-Quds Brigades Northern Brigade, but in the Martyr Husam Abu Habl Battalion. His Facebook page contains photographs of armed men with PIJ insignias. Another man who appears to be a relative, Abdullah Muhammad Morsi, was killed in a later incident. PIJ announced that he was also a member of the Northern Brigade's Central Mobilization Unit. Fourteen-year-old Khalil Mahdi Al-Bahtiti was announced on Friday to be a PIJ operative in the Gaza Brigade's Al-Tuffah and Al-Daraj Battalion. Malik Raafat Marzouq appears to have died at age 16. His name is unique in casualty databases, and while most photos on social media are of poor quality or when he was younger, they do pass muster of facial matching platforms. According to PIJ, Marzouq was an Al-Quds Brigades member, in the Gaza Brigade's Al-Tuffah and Al-Daraj Battalion"
Damn Israel killing defenceless children!

Scholars, legal experts among 6,000 rejecting Gaza genocide charge in letter - "Prominent academics, legal experts, and historians are among more than 6,000 signatories of an open letter released earlier this month rejecting as a “blood libel” the accusation that Israel committed genocide in Gaza... Taking the Gaza Health Ministry’s current death toll, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, alongside INSS’s May estimate of more than 23,000 terrorists killed, the implied civilian-to-combatant ratio would be roughly 2:1. The letter also cites “the absence of mass starvation despite repeated claims of imminent catastrophe” and “the warnings given to civilians before attack,” and asserts that “All these factors were erased in the eagerness to indict Israel for genocide.” Meanwhile, the letter argues that Israel went to war after October 7 to break what it calls an “Iranian-led siege of terror enclaves” on its borders, while noting that anti-Zionists were already leveling accusations of genocide against Israel the following day. “The bitter irony is that Israel, home to half the world’s Jews, is the only country to face a sustained war of attempted genocide – from its inception in 1948 until today,” the letter states. Prominent scholars who signed the letter include Harvard professor and public intellectual Steven Pinker. Other Harvard-affiliated signatories include Harvard Law professor Jesse Fried and visiting scholar Anat Alon-Beck, a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University. Other notable scholars who signed on include historian Niall Ferguson, Israeli historian Benny Morris, Holocaust historian and former US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, Tel Aviv University professor emerita and former Yad Vashem chief historian Dina Porat, historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore, UCLA professor Judea Pearl, and Brandeis University professor emeritus Jonathan Sarna. The signatories also include John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Prominent legal figures include former Canadian justice minister and attorney general Irwin Cotler, Cornell Law professor Robert Hockett, Jeffrey Mausner, a former prosecutor with the US Justice Department’s Nazi War Crimes Unit, and Eugene Kontorovich, a professor of law at George Mason University’s Scalia Law School and director of its Center for the Middle East and International Law. “The genocide libel is a case study in the longstanding – and intensified post-October 7th – historical, moral, legal and normative inversions of fact, law and history,” Cotler said in a statement cited by CCFP. Political signatories include former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, Iraqi-born former UK cabinet minister Nadhim Zahawi, and former US secretary of veterans affairs Robert Wilkie, among others."
Weird. I thought all the experts agreed that Israel was committing genocide. Of course, the anti-Semites were claiming they were all Jews

Nicole Lampert on X - "There are several main thrusts to the genocide libel.
- One is Amnesty calling it a genocide even though they admit they have changed the definition of genocide to accuse Israel of it.
- One is an ‘independent UN report’ by three UN workers with a history of anti Israel activism which hasn’t been adopted by the UN.
- One is the ‘genocide scholars’ even though anyone (you don’t even have to be a scholar) can join the genocide scholars organisation and only 28 per cent of the 500 members voted in what was seen as a political hijacking.
- And finally you have South Africa and others bringing a genocide case at the ICJ. Nations behind this such as Ireland have pushed for the definition of genocide to be changed. The court has said it will allow the case to be heard even though Palestine isn’t a country and it’s being brought by a third party leading to confusion that this is a ‘plausible case’ for genocide rather than the more complicated idea that South Africa can plausibly bring this case. In plain terms: Palestinians have a plausible legal right, under the Convention, to be protected from genocide, and South Africa has a plausible right to bring the case. That is all the word “plausible” referred to. The Court did not find that it was plausible Israel was committing genocide.
In contrast you have facts. If Israel intended to commit genocide of the Palestinian people (and intent is the key word in the genocide definition) it would not have fed them, given them polio vaccinations, moved them to humanitarian zones when it tried to fight Hamas etc and there would be many, many, many more dead. That’s why you have these 6000 experts and genocide scholars saying it not a genocide. The genocide libel against Israel was started in the 1960s by the Soviets to attack America and Israel. It was pushed though the USSR via the UN and now trips off the tongue of antisemites everywhere who don’t understand that genocide is different to war. Antisemites and ignorants who basically want to call a people who were victims of an actual genocide, genociders to appease their guilt, steal Jewish victimhood, dismantle the case for Israel and label Jews the new Nazis."
Ofra Haza Stan Account on X - "Holocaust Inversion actually precedes the Holocaust, when Jewish Nazi appeaser Max Neumann called Zionists worse than Nazis. It was being used during the Holocaust when it was said “Jews are more Hitleran than Hitler.” It was used in the 1950s immediately following the Holocaust. Didn't just appear in the 1960s"

Meme - "A group of psychopaths say "We will butcher you and your children." So you put up a fence. People cry: "You've put these poor things in a cage!" Then they break down the fence and butcher us and our children. And people cry: "What, did you expect?! You put them in a cage!"" - Dr Sheila. Nazarian lranian-American Surgeon & TV Personality

Hamas plan to plant explosives near Gaza displaced persons camps revealed by IDF - "The IDF revealed on Sunday a Hamas document detailing plans to plant explosives in and around camps for displaced civilians in the Gaza Strip, which would then be used as cover in case their leadership needed to evacuate the sites. The document, written in April 2024, detailed a plan that explicitly exploited the civilian population for the benefit of the terror organization's leadership and showed intent to cause direct harm to Palestinian civilians for the sake of minor tactical advantages, like "creating smoke screens, distracting the enemy, and divert[ing] their focus and efforts away from the primary objective." Plans involved detonating improvised explosive devices around civilian camps as IDF troops approached in order to create panic, which terrorists would take advantage of in order to flee."

Leslie Kajomovitz on X = "I think UNRWA is running its own version of "pay-for-slay" The sharia law compliant "aid," which is exclusive for Muslims, is mostly distributed in cash. It prioritizes a unique definition "orphans," which Palestinians re-defined as, "a child without a FATHER" You do the math."
Leslie Kajomovitz on X - "An UNRWA teacher goes public on the indoctrination of children by UNRWA in Gaza. She said she believes the indoctrination has grown worse since October 7th and that if not addressed, another October 7th is inevitable. “If the upcoming generations in Gaza have the capabilities to make another attack, they will make it,” she warned. She says sixth graders are taught to blame Jews for Palestinian suffering, young girls are encouraged to continue Hamas’s war against Jews, and when she objected, a school administrator threatened to cut out her tongue with scissors. She called for an overhaul of Gaza’s schools, including changes to the curriculum and independent oversight of teachers. “It’s more important than disarming Hamas or changing who will govern Gaza,” she said. “Because this can change the future.”"

Jaimee Michell on X - "This is absolutely sickening. Coffeyeh, a coffee shop in Cedar Park, Texas, just outside Austin, is giving free lattes on October 7th to anyone who comes in wearing a keffiyeh and can tell them "what day it is." October 7th is the day Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups stormed southern Israel, killed ~1,200 people, and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Turning the anniversary of a massacre into a coffee promo is sick. The Islamification of Texas continues."

WikiBias on X - "Wikipedia editor JDiala admitted today that since 7 October 2023, sockpuppets and Discord coordination have kept Wikipedia pro-Palestine. What drove the admission was a sense of having nothing to lose. On 4 October, he asked Wikipedia to lift his topic ban and wrote: "I regret my previous conduct." Editors rejected it, cited his Jew-tagging and antisemitic comments, and called for a site ban. Today he dropped the apology: "You can go ahead and site ban me." He said he had already won, that he would return under a different account, and admitted the coordination. The bias against Israel is an orchestrated campaign. Wikimedia is still treating it as a series of isolated editors."

Meme - "SELECTIVE OUTRAGE IS THE TELL
500k Christians killed in Nigeria
500k Christians killed in Syria
500k Christians killed in Sudan
400k killed in Yemen
300k killed in Iraq
250k killed in Afghanistan
Ongoing. Documented. Almost no global marches.
75k killed in Gaza: In a WAR, Of whom 50k were Hamas fighters... "Genocide!""

Dr. Eli David on X - ".@billmaher on Gaza: “It is not a genocide, it is a counterattack in a war… You can't just change the definition of genocide to mean counterattack in a war where people including civilians die, that's every war.”"

Even the Israeli Left can see the West is deluded about a two-state solution - "Ed Miliband may have proudly insisted that his politically convenient sanctions on Israel were to ensure that the two-state solution could not be destroyed by Israeli settlements. But, among the voters I spoke to ahead of the election, even the most optimistic peace-loving Israelis struggled to envisage a Palestinian state happening in this generation. The disconnect between the rhetoric about this conflict that our Parliament has spent so much time blustering over – time on a subject we have absolutely no influence over – and the reality on the ground, where Hamas has been regrouping in Gaza and gaining popularity in the West Bank, is staggering. They could be two completely different conflicts. Hila showed me a photo of a poster Hamas had put up in broken Hebrew on an observation post facing her moshav. “Netiv HaAsara, out of the Sinai and out of Palestine soon. Your destruction is near.” The intention was clear. Before October 7, most of Israel believed the consensus or “conceptzia” idea of containment: to allow Hamas the freedom to rule Gaza, the shared view that however bad their rhetoric about wanting to destroy Israel, however many rockets they periodically sent over, they didn’t really want to start a war. Until they did. And now for most Israelis, whatever their political persuasion, the blinkers have come off. And as much as we see the conflict through a particular lens – through the suffering of the Palestinians – that is just a small part of the picture. Zoom out and you see Hamas growing in power in the West Bank without having disarmed, a radicalised population, and Iran – hurt but not broken – still intent on destroying the country. Many Israelis feel that we in the West have on the same blinkers that blinded them to the enemies who harboured so much hatred. And that by being blind to the threat around us, we are encouraging it against them and ourselves. “As long as I hear voices coming Europe and America saying that Hamas is a legitimate organisation and they are only freedom fighters who want to liberate their people, I know there is no way for both me and the people in Gaza to have a better future,” says Hila. “We will be tangled in that story and all that is happening is Hamas is gaining its money and power.”... Israelis see that Hamas is still a danger which won’t disappear by itself, however many times Western governments pretend a few stern words will do the trick. “We want peace, of course we do,” says Hila. “We don’t want our children and grandchildren to grow up under the shadow of bombs and rockets. But how do you have peace when there is no partner for it?”"

Saturday, November 07, 2026

Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast

Clearly, in-person examinations are outdated and shallow, and coursework, take home exams and term papers allow for holistic evaluation of students, which is superior

Someone (talking about DEI) claimed to pass university you need to put in the effort. So much for that, if you can't fail students

Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast

"Chungin “Roy” Lee stepped onto Columbia University’s campus this past fall and, by his own admission, proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment...

(His personal essay, which turned his winding road to higher education into a parable for his ambition to build companies, was written with help from ChatGPT.) When he started at Columbia as a sophomore this past September, he didn’t worry much about academics or his GPA. “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort. When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”...

What if they built a program that hid AI from browsers during remote job interviews so that interviewees could cheat their way through instead?

In February, Lee and Shanmugam launched a tool that did just that. Interview Coder’s website featured a banner that read F*CK LEETCODE. Lee posted a video of himself on YouTube using it to cheat his way through an internship interview with Amazon...

Although Columbia’s policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities’ — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn’t think this is a bad thing. “I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating,” he said.

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments... “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT...

Teachers have tried AI-proofing assignments, returning to Blue Books or switching to oral exams. Brian Patrick Green, a tech-ethics scholar at Santa Clara University, immediately stopped assigning essays after he tried ChatGPT for the first time. Less than three months later, teaching a course called Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, he figured a low-stakes reading reflection would be safe — surely no one would dare use ChatGPT to write something personal. But one of his students turned in a reflection with robotic language and awkward phrasing that Green knew was AI-generated. A philosophy professor across the country at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt “Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.”

It isn’t as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, “the ceiling has been blown off.” Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences? After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” That future may arrive sooner than expected when you consider what a short window college really is. Already, roughly half of all undergrads have never experienced college without easy access to generative AI. “We’re talking about an entire generation of learning perhaps significantly undermined here,” said Green, the Santa Clara tech ethicist. “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.” 

Before OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, cheating had already reached a sort of zenith. At the time, many college students had finished high school remotely, largely unsupervised, and with access to tools like Chegg and Course Hero. These companies advertised themselves as vast online libraries of textbooks and course materials but, in reality, were cheating multi-tools. For $15.95 a month, Chegg promised answers to homework questions in as little as 30 minutes, 24/7, from the 150,000 experts with advanced degrees it employed, mostly in India. When ChatGPT launched, students were primed for a tool that was faster, more capable...

These days, professors will often state their policy on their syllabi — allowing AI, for example, as long as students cite it as if it were any other source, or permitting it for conceptual help only, or requiring students to provide receipts of their dialogue with a chatbot. Students often interpret those instructions as guidelines rather than hard rules. Sometimes they will cheat on their homework without even knowing — or knowing exactly how much — they are violating university policy when they ask a chatbot to clean up a draft or find a relevant study to cite. Wendy, a freshman finance major at one of the city’s top universities, told me that she is against using AI. Or, she clarified, “I’m against copy-and-pasting. I’m against cheating and plagiarism. All of that. It’s against the student handbook.” Then she described, step-by-step, how on a recent Friday at 8 a.m., she called up an AI platform to help her write a four-to-five-page essay due two hours later...

“I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class — the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”

Most of the writing professors I spoke to told me that it’s abundantly clear when their students use AI. Sometimes there’s a smoothness to the language, a flattened syntax; other times, it’s clumsy and mechanical. The arguments are too evenhanded — counterpoints tend to be presented just as rigorously as the paper’s central thesis. Words like multifaceted and context pop up more than they might normally. On occasion, the evidence is more obvious, as when last year a teacher reported reading a paper that opened with “As an AI, I have been programmed …” Usually, though, the evidence is more subtle, which makes nailing an AI plagiarist harder than identifying the deed. Some professors have resorted to deploying so-called Trojan horses, sticking strange phrases, in small white text, in between the paragraphs of an essay prompt. (The idea is that this would theoretically prompt ChatGPT to insert a non sequitur into the essay.) Students at Santa Clara recently found the word broccoli hidden in a professor’s assignment. Last fall, a professor at the University of Oklahoma sneaked the phrases “mention Finland” and “mention Dua Lipa” in his. A student discovered his trap and warned her classmates about it on TikTok. “It does work sometimes,” said Jollimore, the Cal State Chico professor. “I’ve used ‘How would Aristotle answer this?’ when we hadn’t read Aristotle. But I’ve also used absurd ones and they didn’t notice that there was this crazy thing in their paper, meaning these are people who not only didn’t write the paper but also didn’t read their own paper before submitting it.”

Still, while professors may think they are good at detecting AI-generated writing, studies have found they’re actually not. One, published in June 2024, used fake student profiles to slip 100 percent AI-generated work into professors’ grading piles at a U.K. university. The professors failed to flag 97 percent. It doesn’t help that since ChatGPT’s launch, AI’s capacity to write human-sounding essays has only gotten better...

There are, of course, plenty of simple ways to fool both professors and detectors...

Most professors have come to the conclusion that stopping rampant AI abuse would require more than simply policing individual cases and would likely mean overhauling the education system to consider students more holistically. “Cheating correlates with mental health, well-being, sleep exhaustion, anxiety, depression, belonging,” said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford and one of the world’s leading student-engagement researchers.

Many teachers now seem to be in a state of despair. In the fall, Sam Williams was a teaching assistant for a writing-intensive class on music and social change at the University of Iowa that, officially, didn’t allow students to use AI at all. Williams enjoyed reading and grading the class’s first assignment: a personal essay that asked the students to write about their own music tastes. Then, on the second assignment, an essay on the New Orleans jazz era (1890 to 1920), many of his students’ writing styles changed drastically. Worse were the ridiculous factual errors. Multiple essays contained entire paragraphs on Elvis Presley (born in 1935). “I literally told my class, ‘Hey, don’t use AI. But if you’re going to cheat, you have to cheat in a way that’s intelligent. You can’t just copy exactly what it spits out,’” Williams said.

Williams knew most of the students in this general-education class were not destined to be writers, but he thought the work of getting from a blank page to a few semi-coherent pages was, above all else, a lesson in effort. In that sense, most of his students utterly failed. “They’re using AI because it’s a simple solution and it’s an easy way for them not to put in time writing essays. And I get it, because I hated writing essays when I was in school,” Williams said. “But now, whenever they encounter a little bit of difficulty, instead of fighting their way through that and growing from it, they retreat to something that makes it a lot easier for them.”

By November, Williams estimated that at least half of his students were using AI to write their papers. Attempts at accountability were pointless. Williams had no faith in AI detectors, and the professor teaching the class instructed him not to fail individual papers, even the clearly AI-smoothed ones...

The confusion was enough to sour Williams on education as a whole. By the end of the semester, he was so disillusioned that he decided to drop out of graduate school altogether. “We’re in a new generation, a new time, and I just don’t think that’s what I want to do,” he said.

Jollimore, who has been teaching writing for more than two decades, is now convinced that the humanities, and writing in particular, are quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket-weaving...

He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments. Would it accelerate the widening soft-skills gap in the workplace? If students rely on AI for their education, what skills would they even bring to the workplace? Lakshya Jain, a computer-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been using those questions in an attempt to reason with his students. “If you’re handing in AI work,” he tells them, “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” That’s not theoretical: The COO of a tech research firm recently asked Jain why he needed programmers any longer.

The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT...

It’s not just the students: Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students’ essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.

It’ll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students’ brains. Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants. In February, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University published a study that found a person’s confidence in generative AI correlates with reduced critical-thinking effort. The net effect seems, if not quite Wall-E, at least a dramatic reorganization of a person’s efforts and abilities, away from high-effort inquiry and fact-gathering and toward integration and verification. This is all especially unnerving if you add in the reality that AI is imperfect — it might rely on something that is factually inaccurate or just make something up entirely — with the ruinous effect social media has had on Gen Z’s ability to tell fact from fiction...

“Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought,” wrote Duke professor Orin Starn in a recent column titled “My Losing Battle Against AI Cheating,” citing a quote often attributed to W. H. Auden. But it’s not just writing that develops critical thinking. “Learning math is working on your ability to systematically go through a process to solve a problem. Even if you’re not going to use algebra or trigonometry or calculus in your career, you’re going to use those skills to keep track of what’s up and what’s down when things don’t make sense,” said Michael Johnson, an associate provost at Texas A&M University. Adolescents benefit from structured adversity, whether it’s algebra or chores. They build self-esteem and work ethic. It’s why the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued for the importance of children learning to do hard things, something that technology is making infinitely easier to avoid"

 

Links - 7th November 2026 (History Extra Quoting)

This will probably be the last History Extra Podcast Quoting links post.

Alcatraz: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘Today we kind of use prison and jail interchangeably and throughout history we've used these terms interchangeably but they're actually distinct types of facilities with important differences. So prisons are places where we use to punish people convicted of serious crimes with long periods of confinement whereas jails serve a lot of different purposes but they're generally intended to be short-term holding tanks for a variety of people including people who haven't been convicted of a crime … while islands offer that useful isolation, that's the main attraction that we think of island prisons, that isolation makes it really difficult to run a prison so for example on Alcatraz there's no source of fresh water so that water has to be you know shipped in or brought in somehow which makes it very difficult and then there are added difficulties of just being so close to the ocean. So the sea water and the salt in the air, that's really corrosive. That actually came in handy for a couple of escape attempts because just the materials of the prison were disintegrating so badly and then another factor is even though there's a lot of fresh air and the islands are usually quite picturesque, you have a gorgeous view of San Francisco and the surrounding *something* County on the other side from Alcatraz. Islands tend to be cold and miserable which is attractive if you're thinking about a very punitive style prison but it's also going to be really terrible for the prison staff’...
‘Alcatraz is an outlier… Alcatraz was basically designed to clean up the mess that was the federal prison system at the time and in the United States we have a long history of turning to some prisons or sometimes just part of our existing prisons to fix problems that the main system just can't handle. So throughout history we usually turn to some sort of punishment on the grounds of the prison usually this would be some version of the hole or dark cell, various names for where prisoners would do additional solitary confinement usually on a bread and water diet for a period of days or weeks. Later when states started to build more than one prison for the whole state we developed different security level prisons so we would have a minimum security prison, a medium security prison and a Maximum Security Prison, and the idea there was that you would take the worst prisoners and put them into the maximum security prisons and you would take the kind of lowest level offenders, those who were least likely to recidivate, kind of isolate them from the kind of notorious bad prisoners. But the funny thing is the security levels didn't actually match up to the populations, we would just shuffle people around based on not their dangerousness but just how much of a pain they were for for the wardens. So if warden didn't want to deal with a particularly annoying prisoner they would just transfer them to a different security level, never mind what that security level actually was. So today we've continued that tradition. We have the supermax prison, so supermax which is short for super maximum security prisons so minimum, medium, maximum, super maximum. So these are prisons where prisoners spend about 23 hours a day in solitary confinement and Alcatraz is actually oftentimes called the first supermax which, I don't agree with that label, it's it's not quite right because Alcatraz didn't really use a lot of solitary confinement it definitely didn't use it routinely for most prisoners. So some prisoners would be in solitary but not the majority. But what Alcatraz and the supermax do have in common is both were ostensibly reserved for the worst of the worst prisoner. So today's supermax is often described as being reserved for the Hannibal Lectors of the world. But most people who ended up in Alcatraz or who end up in a supermax tend to be ordinary criminals who were just kind of pains to deal with rather than you know some criminal mastermind... Half of the men who spent time in Alcatraz never returned to the prison after the release um and the number was even higher after the early years so it's known as the Gangster Era so these men who were ostensibly incorrigible recidivists actually weren't'"

Medieval medicine: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘If we were in the medieval period if you and I were there who would we expect to be treated by?’
‘Yeah well the first thing to say is probably not a doctor usually. So doctors’ services were very expensive. And also in many instances I think you'd be pretty sort of certain that they wouldn't be necessarily the right person much as I think today you wouldn't go to your GP with a dental problem, you'd go to your dentist. So there was a range of practitioners with specialisms. So barber-surgeons are a really interesting group because they were were much more omnipresent, their services were less expensive and they were skilled in doing a number of hands-on things. So physicians generally didn't touch the body. They might touch you to take your pulse but usually they were kind of advising you and hearing your case history and so forth. A barber surgeon would do a number of things such as um stitching a wound, cutting your hair, applying a plaster. Many things that were involved close contact with the body, and those those individuals were very important and might you know have their own specialisms. And there might be people with with very niche specialisms such as pulling out teeth for example.’"

An African perspective on the history of Africa | HistoryExtra - "'I was surprised by the richness of the continent's history and especially by the history of the country where I was born, the Sudan, which has a thousand pyramids. Egypt has 100. A thousand in Sudan, although only 300 preserved their superstructure. So I was really quite blown away by the statues of the kings of ancient Sudan and the tombs and some of the artifacts and so on so'"

Highwaymen: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘What's really interesting is that highwaymen began to participate in their own self-promotion. They actually realize that their reputations will be enhanced and their chances of avoiding punishment were enhanced if they could have good stories about them told, so they would work with people who wanted to write their biographies or they would sit in the 18th century. They would sit to have their portraits done so that those positive images of them would be circulating… the ideal Highwayman certainly in the 18th century was a gentleman or had genteel behaviors. He was polite, chivalrous. He robbed without any actual violence. He may have threatened violence but he wouldn't commit it. He would stop a coach, he would hold a pistol to it with one hand but with the other hand offer his hand to let the ladies step out of the coach onto the ground and they could surrender their valuables. He was always apologetic, I'm very sorry I have to do this but it's necessity that requires me to do it. And he left them a bit of money so that they could continue their journey without difficulty… the surprising thing is how many positive representations existed [in literature]... Their whole aim was to present themselves as above the common criminal. They were not an ordinary low and degraded criminal. They were actually genteel. They came from respectable backgrounds, it was just unfortunate they'd fallen on hard times and they needed to support themselves. And as a gentleman you wouldn't work for a living, that's not what gentlemen do. So instead they would rob for a living’"

Graffiti's golden age: radicalism & romance in the 18th century | HistoryExtra - "'For most of human history really up until the early modern period at least in Europe there was a sense of graffiti being instead part of everyday life. It was something that everyone partook in. Everyone would do, in their own homes, in churches, so in the medieval period in Britain we would have everyone from the priest down to the the lowliest poorest member of the parish leaving a mark, things like carved crosses, other Christian symbols, merchants’ marks. Things that were versions or iterations of those people's individual and sort of community beliefs. You know leaving your Merchant’s Mark you might be sealing some kind of business deal for example and often we find these in in the porches of churches and around columns inside and that kind of thing. So it's something that's always been there people have always wanted to leave their mark and there's a real sort of human urge from the very first cave paintings really to do that'"

David Lloyd George: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "'The Germans invade neutral Belgium which gives Lloyd George and indeed many other people if you like who call it a justification or you call it an excuse to support the war because again Belgium, a nation which actually has got its own massive Empire in Africa and is acting in an incredibly oppressive way against the population of the Congo, for example. Nevertheless is presented as one of these small nations on which Liberals are so fond of, they’re sort of supporting their rights and so that when you put it in this frame of the Germans trampling over this plucky little Belgium then that gives Lloyd George and many of his supporters although not all of them this cover if you like to move to supporting what is really a kind of a fairly conventional great power conflict'...
in 1940 where he really doesn't have a party any longer, the only people who were loyal to him are basically MPS who are members of his own family either directly or through marriage and he's not got a party and yet he's actually discussed seriously by some people as a potential prime minister at the point where Neville Chamberlain resigns in May after the Norwegian crisis. And so I don't really think that was ever a runner but it's kind of remarkable what he should still have been discussed by anybody in those terms so long after he'd fallen from office and I think that ultimately is a tribute people's continued belief in his ability on the basis of his record in World War I"

Benjamin Franklin: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "‘Is there any great figure in history who didn't have some deep flaw. And I came up with Joseph Haydn as being somebody who was a complete genius and also incredibly nice. But I'm afraid I think that's a great rarity, and I'm afraid Franklin did have a bit of a flaw and that was the treatment of his wife Deborah’"

The Magus: enlightened magician or Renaissance charlatan? | HistoryExtra - "'Alchemy actually works in a physical sense it's one of the great discoveries of history, historians of Science in the last couple of generations… [Some] have recreated alchemical procedures and it turns out that Alchemy is metallic crystalline chemistry and it works quite well if you can just understand the recipes. And so that is an independent tradition which also goes back to Antiquity but it keeps intersecting with the magical tradition. But the big difference is it works which is one reason why Newton and Boyle and Hooke are still really interested in alchemy by, at a point when they've really given up on astrology and many of the other characteristic pursuits of the Magus. Astrology is the great predictive art of the premodern world. Uh it still of course flourishes, supposedly polls show that more Americans believe in astrology than in any version of Christianity. But I don't think that's a very strong kind of belief’...
‘The other thing I think we have to understand is the very theatrical world and people have a lot of will to, for suspension of disbelief, and that's part of the way the Catholic Church works. You know, there are many many convents you can go to where the rood is a statue which will move, and will move its head and move its arms. And the people going are very sophisticated, you know 15th, 16th century people, but in that place, they're willing to suspend disbelief and see something miraculous happen. And I think that that also works for a skilled Magus and performer with charisma that you know, people suspend disbelief and they'll go along with what you're doing. And I'm afraid we still do this too. I mean to anybody who has lived through the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman Fried, it's impossible not to see that a bit of charisma and a good line of patter can get you a long way even now'"

The Spartans: Everything You Wanted to Know | HistoryExtra - "‘Come back either with it or on it. Meaning come back victorious with your shield which is the key item of defensive armor that a Spartan warrior would use or dead and on top of the shield carried by your comrades. Actually Spartans were buried on the battlefield, they weren't brought back home, so the saying is no doubt made up’...
'[On Leonidas] The 300 he chose, very interestingly not his usual royal bodyguard… he chose 300 specially men who already both were married and had fathered a living son. So there's some point here about the future that these 300 won't necessarily survive Thermopylae, but their children will come up to avenge them and to be their, their successors as it were. And I think Leonidas deserves enormous credit for the psychological warfare as well as the physical bravery that he displayed'"

Inside a Jim Crow asylum | HistoryExtra - "'I was shocked to find that there were patients at Crownsville, one woman brought there for the crime of having cut a white person off in traffic. She ended up at Crownsville for decades. Another patient named Mr Bell that I write about who is discovered by one of the first black employees to get there in the 1950s, it turns out that he's been there for years, he he complains to the new Black employees that he hasn't seen the sun, he hasn't seen the sky, in years… Mr Bell was picked up by her own supervisor, her own boss, in Baltimore with the authorities one night because they had overheard him using a British accent and they didn't believe that there were black people who could have British accents. They just couldn't imagine that world, that way of being. And so they assume he's crazy and bring him to Crownsville. Well it turns out that this man had actually been born in London and had been a jockey, had come to America and fallen on hard times, and had no relatives or friends to really fight for him and get him out of Crownsville'"

Ancient Greek theatre: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘Women were not allowed on the stage… you have a very strange situation where a lot of Greek tragedies give you these very powerful women who are out in the public eye, who are doing sophisticated, powerful things, running the show. And that's very very different from the way we understand life to have been for women in Athens at that time, right. Women in Athens lived a very cloistered domestic life and really didn't have public rights of any kind that that we can see, except maybe for priestesses’"

History Behind the Headlines: student protests down the centuries | HistoryExtra - "'[Reagan] basically thought these students were being subsidized heavily to behave in a deeply antisocial way. Reagan once famously said that a student meaning a California student was a person who talked like Tarzan, looked like Jane and smelled like cheetah, who for those who don't know is the chimpanzee in the Tarzan movies. But that connection between the you know mass growth of higher education in the US and in California in particular was also tied up with the politics of the time, protests against Vietnam, the Hippie movement and of course the contrast between a kind of expansive Democratic party and a Republican party which even then was beginning to move towards a sort of more free market small government vision which Reagan of course became an exemplar of’"

The Tattooist of Auschwitz: is it ok to fictionalise the Holocaust? | HistoryExtra - "'Spielberg making the film has to convert it into moral parable, a moral lesson as it were so in fact all the historical records show that Schindler continues as a corrupt businessman before and after, didn't affect his character at all, he was always having affairs with women. The film prettifies this by showing him reconciling with his wife which he in fact did didn't do at all according to the historical record. And there is this constant temptation to draw moral from from the Holocaust. And there’s some other cheap tricks in Spielberg’s film, you know the women are herded into a shower room which is usually what the gas chambers are disguised at and then to their amazement you know water starts spouting in and it really is a shower room. I think it's a really cheap cheap trick...
Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader for example which is made into a powerful film starring Kate Winslet. This young boy has an affair with an older woman and it's through her asking him to read literary texts to him and he later discovers that she was a prison camp guard in in the Holocaust and she's illiterate and that is a really I think misleading trick because it's not the case that people became camp guards and SS men and so on because they were ignorant or illiterate. On the contrary the higher up you go in the SS hierarchy the more PhD holders there are. So that's very dubious'...
‘How much of a challenge is it to show something like Auschwitz on screen?’
‘Well it's it's very difficult. First of all you've got healthy well fed Hollywood actors and actresses and so on playing people who in reality were starving covered in lice, ill, sick, brutalized. It can't really convey that on film. There are some rare actors like uh Christian Bale I think is one who does sort of if he's playing somebody who's starving he starves himself and there's a kind of method acting in that but I you can't do it you can't so it's one of the problems of Schindler’s List… then films have to have a beginning a middle and an end and for a lot of people this did not, the Holocaust, you know you can't structure it in that way. So in Schindler's List it ends with Schindler with a group of survivors of his own people who survived because he employed them in his factory, saying he wished he could have saved more. But he didn't, it didn't have an effect to him at all. He just went back to his old ways. His businesses failed and in the end some of them got together and tried to support him but he wasn't somebody who became as ideologically committed to ending the, ending the Holocaust anymore than he became committed to making it up with his wife and stopping having affairs. Essentially his behavior was kind of inexplicable, and films don't like that'"
What a weird interpretation of The Reader

Agent Zo: spying against the Nazis | HistoryExtra - "'The Warsaw Uprising is one of most highly documented battles of the Second World War. The Poles deliberately sent out units of five men with cameras and rolls of film, there were cinefilm taking, they were actually to keep their own morale up playing some of the cinefilm in the cinemas in Warsaw while they were under fire, against a backdrop of machine gun fire from you know down the road. and so some of this information is brought out and the commander sends out five different all men in fact to get to Britain so that the world will know the truth of this battle so that it's recorded... They had this Soviet backed Communist Regime installed who rounded up a number of the senior members of the Home Army and basically imprisoned and executed them in the peacetime even though they've been allies because they didn't want potential resistance leaders against the new regime'"

Galileo: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "‘Galileo's work was compared to many scientists really very accessible and readable and it's still it's still pretty accessible and readable today. Nobody reads for example Copernicus for pleasure. Actually nobody reads Kepler for pleasure either but Galileo actually is quite a readable author and I think that is a an important thing because science has to be accessible to the next generation of people who are going to take those ideas forward’...
'He had three children, two daughters and a son who were all born to his mistress and the two daughters he arranged for them to become nuns… At the time he was on his professor's salary and and he would have been expected to provide diaries for his daughters. He was also as the eldest son responsible for his brothers and sisters as well to the extent that they didn't already have their own families. So by putting into nunneries it meant that they weren't to get married and he wouldn't have to pay the dowries that their social status might have demanded but he couldn't afford'"

The Terror: everything you wan - History Extra podcast - Apple Podcasts - "‘He writes in his notebooks a whole series of things that get called Republican institutions but by people who who've dug them up later on. But they they're focused around this very strange static vision of of essentially rural community, is kind of sort of utopianism that's looking backwards to the classical world really and concerned with personal relationships... Men have to declare their friendships on an annual basis and if you don't have any friends you're not part of the community and you get banished. And then these friends are people who support each other through the life course and dig each other's graves and weep at each other's funerals, sort of sort sentimental diffusions that start coming out then’"

Death and mourning in Britain: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The Invisible Dead. This was a major project run by our archaeology department and it would ask this question: we can roughly estimate how many people there have been living in Europe over the last 2,000 years. It's guess work but there's a rough estimate. How many graves have we found? Absolutely minimal number. So where are the invisible dead? What's happened to them?’"

The history of museums: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘They also come up with this again quite quickly this very sort of ingenious system in many ways where they categorize their collection as a b and c and a is basically any kind of object that is unique, irreplaceable, incredibly valuable, incredible provenance attached to it they take that straight away. So that moves immediately. B it's you know second kind of priority but they take as much of that as they can and then c is what they decide to leave on display and remain in the site of the museum and that's something you see with a lot of museums across the world at this point, even though there's world war going on they really don't want to actually shut the doors. They really want to still be able to keep part of the museum open to have the public come in and have that respite, which is actually something that museums came back to during the global pandemic in Covid, because it was actually the first time they actually had to close for a lot of them and one of of the key things with a lot of the national museums and galleries particularly in the UK is that they had never even had to do that during the Second World War’...
'The International Council of Museums a few years ago they changed the official definition of a museum or what a museum is. And there was sort of a lot of debate back and forth. I think it was the first time in over 50 or 60 years they changed the definition… the museum is not for profit, it's permanent, it is in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage, which is open to the public, accessible, inclusive, fosters  diversity and sustainability and that operates and communicates ethically and professionally with the participation of communities. So I find that definition incredibly interesting, very positive actually’
Clearly covid was even more dangerous than the Second World War
If you don't push the left wing agenda, you're not a museum

Tudor ladies-in-waiting: the women who served Henry VIII's queens | HistoryExtra - "'Every lady in waiting had her own female servants, but trying to find them in records, you basically can't, unless you found any kind of anecdotal evidence of a name or something like that but otherwise you just have to assume that they've each got a certain number of women around them and leave it at that'...
'They do definitely write letters but usually they don't put the sensitive information in letters which is incredibly frustrating as a historian. It's very common that somebody will write a letter and say the bearer will tell you the rest. So whoever they've given the letter to and said take this to so and so, the letter bearer carries an oral message as well and that has the sensitive information in it. And it's it's so annoying you see that at the end of the letter and you're like Goddamnit, the juicy stuff was not written down'"

Beastly Victorians: the 19th-century fight for animal rights | HistoryExtra - "‘Different species of animals attracted different levels of attention. I imagine that dogs and cats you would expect would be the ones that people were most worried about cruelty to, or is that just a modern expectation’
‘That's half true. I think dogs, less so cats. Actually cats have a bit of a sort of transformation in terms of their perception in the 19 century. They're not really kept as pets that much until about the 1850s. They are kept but they are largely kept to control vermin. Dogs yes though. People definitely felt affection for them although some of them were working dogs as well. But I guess I'd say within even within that category of dogs you kind of have gradations. So pedigree dogs for example dogs that were a particular breed you know like a St Bernard or a poodle, people cared about them if they were owned. If they were pets definitely you get prosecutions for the mistreatment of pets, usually public mistreatment not kind of in people's homes which was a different issue. On the other hand though stray dogs your mongrels were kind of running around the street, people associate them with things like rabies. They're very worried about them... … mammals tend to more attention particularly kind of large supposedly sort of sentient mammals I mean elephants I'm thinking of here in particular. There's an awful lot of concern for like the elephant jumbo when he’s sold to the circus owner PT Barnum in the states… the RSPCA even actually at one point advocates culling tigers in India because it says you they can't be civilized, they're just killing human beings’"

D-Day: Air | HistoryExtra - "'Of the more than 6,000 jumpers from the 101st only 1,000… land on or near their objectives. Major General Maxwell Taylor who's the 101st Divisional Commander ends up in a topheavy group of 20 men including four colonels and a number of other officers. Never quips one of them have so many been commanded by so few'"

D-Day: Sea | HistoryExtra - "'Nobody thinks they're going to destroy a concrete bunker but what they are attempting to do is so traumatize the German defenders that are inside them that they won't be fit for action at that crucial moment when the landing craft are coming in. So there's a huge amount of work for sailors to do before any landing craft ramp touches the beach'"

D-Day: Land | HistoryExtra - "‘The idea of the German Army I think if we're familiar with the old wartime movies and everything is these sort of goose stepping highly trained you know Waffen SS Panzer divisions etc but the truth on D-Day and on the beaches of Normandy was rather different. That many of the German strongpoints, these gun implacements and the machine gun nests that line in the coastline, they were manned by young conscripts, you know many of them schoolboys 16, 17 years of age who had no experience whatsoever of fighting and frankly were absolutely terrified… they just recalled the absolute terror on the morning you know at dawn on the 6th of June of looking out, peering out of their machine gun nests and seeing this vast armada, this Allied Fleet that was coming towards them and realizing that this was the moment of reckoning. You know they all knew, everyone knew that D Day was going to come at some point but they didn't know when and they didn't know where the Allies were going to land… it really was you know a terrifying moment for them as it was for the Allied troops coming in to land’...
'Sainte-Mère-Église… went badly wrong in the sense that men were just scattered all over the place, they were meant to land in specific landing zones but of course they were scattered wildly over the country, country side. And this was both paradoxically good news and bad news. It was bad news because most of the men had no idea where they were and they'd lost all their other their comrades and and weren't quite sure what to do and where they were and their objectives Etc. But it was good news in the sense that the Germans were utterly confused, they were thinking what on Earth are the Americans trying to do here. What happened is that these men were highly trained, they knew what their objectives were, and they began to gather themselves into small little bands'...
'Some beaches were much bloodier than others so we know that on on Omaha itself there were some 2,400 American casualties so they really, it was a really tough struggle to get onto the beach at Omaha. But others were relatively light in casualties so Utah Beach. there was a mere, I say that with some caution, 197 men who were killed… that's extraordinarily light considering they're capturing this you know huge and heavily defended beach. And if you can contrast that with one of the practice runs for D-Day which was Exercise Tiger in which 749 men were killed in the exercise, and yet on the day itself on Utah Beach, 197 were killed'"

Katherine Parr: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "‘Katherine is the most married Queen of England which is quite a sort of a neat fact when she's married to the most married King. But she's married as a teenager to Edward Burr of Gainsboro...
Katherine She's certainly not someone you would ordinarily consider to be royal wife material. She's also of course a widow, so she's not a young virgin. However he tried to marry a young virgin before with Catherine Howard and that obviously turned out to be a disaster. And I think part of Catherine's attraction to Henry is the fact that she's a widow, he's actually passed a law following Catherine Howard's fall that it's illegal for a non-virgin to marry the king without sort of disclosing the fact that they've got a past’...
'Henry has of course broken with Rome, he's made some changes to the traditional Church, particularly publishing the Bible in English, although he does backtrack actually, during his marriage to Catherine he passes a law that makes it illegal for women to read the Bible in English for example and lower status men'"

Boudica: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "'Prasutagus seems to have died sometime perhaps in the winter of AD 59 or AD 60. He left a will to the emperor Nero… he left a will leaving half of his kingdom and wealth to the emperor Nero in the hope that that would satisfy the Romans and the other half to his daughters… his natural inheritors the Romans weren't having any of this'"

A 17th-century scandal & a writer's secret life | HistoryExtra - "‘Henrietta's lover was her own brother-in-law, he was married to her sister Mary Ford, Lord Gray, aged 27 to her 18 years on the day she ran away from her parents' home and vanished into the underworld of London… we have a very good description of Henrietta's physical appearance because her parents… was so desperate to get their daughter back that they took a really unprecedented step and they advertised for her publicly in the London Gazette, and the London Gazette describes her as a young lady of a fair complexion, fair head, full breasted and indifferent to all. Later editions of the London Gazette removed the reference to Lady Henrietta's bosom’"

The First Crusade | The call to arms | HistoryExtra - "‘Western Europe had been plagued with famine for quite some time and with Jerusalem being depicted as a land of milk and honey rich with wondrous opportunity, it seems likely that this could have been a big draw for potential Crusaders. But this expense Natasha mentioned is an important factor when we consider who actually had the opportunity to go on Crusade, and, what they really wanted.’
‘It used to be thought that a lot of the Crusaders were younger sons who are off freebooting, they're not going to get any land because of the rule that firstborn son gets everything. Looking at the documents just how expensive, it was for the first Crusaders to go, on a journey of roughly 3,500 km, and that's if you make it back. We're looking at about four times the average wage of a knight just to be able to afford to go. So the accounts that we have of what people brought back with them, it tends to be relics, pieces of the True Cross. They're not really telling us in great detail about the huge chunk of wealth they brought back with them. There are a lot of accounts of pillaging and looting. But that is more to keep this campaign going, than it is about bringing back a wealth of riches. We do get some accounts from men like Caffaro of Genoa who tell us, oh we came back rich in peppercorns and we all bought 48 celide [sp?] home with us. It's a long way to go, for 48 celide. So we can probably say that the freebooting younger sons is on its way out, as a theory. But it is one that has persisted for quite some time’"

The First Crusade | On the road | HistoryExtra - "‘It’s easy to focus on the fighting force and perhaps overlook the large number of non-combatants performing auxiliary roles in the background and according to Natasha this has proven to be one of the most enduring misconceptions surrounding the Crusades’
 ‘My kind of take on the legacy of the Crusades is this particular fascination with the hyper masculine concept of the Knight Crusader. This idea that this was the most uber manly man of the medieval period and that that's what a crusader is, when in fact, if you look at the makeup of crusade armies, only, what, six to possibly 10% of them were Knights. The rest were ordinary people. Women, sometimes children, clergy, siege engineers, sailors. All sorts of people are involved in crusading activity. The image of the Knight Crusader is one that's been handed down to us through retellings. First of all in medieval chronicles, then romances, then art in the 19th century. Crusade memes now. There's an instant recognition amongst people at a popular level of what a crusade is but it doesn't bear out what a medieval Crusade necessarily was about’"

The First Crusade | Crossing into the unknown | HistoryExtra - "'If you want to look at the demographic and the political reality of the Levant, it's extremely extremely diverse. On the one hand, the overwhelming population in what is today Eastern Anatolia, Eastern Turkey. Today Syria, Palestine, were Christians. And that's often not considered when you are talking about the Levant. You know, we we say the Crusaders invaded the Islamic world. What do we mean by the Islamic world? Is this because of the people were Muslims or is this because the Muslims were ruling it? Actually it's because the Muslims were ruling it. The majority of the populations were Christians in large cities and in the rural areas. And here Christians you have the Orthodox, you have lots of Arabs who have been Christians for a long time and they remained so. But most of the populations were not of Arab Origins. They have Armenians. You have lots of Syriac speaking people. These were traditionally non-Arabs. They lived there before the coming of the Muslims to occupy this part in the 7th century and these were varieties of Orthodox sects, Orthodox Christian sects. And if you move southward you might come in into contact with people who might follow actually the Greek Orthodo, or the Byzantine Orthodox church. So that's on the Christian front. On the Muslim front, the large number of Muslims in what we call Syria, greater Syria. That is Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and Israel today, the majority of the Muslims were actually Shiites. Three different types of Shiites were living there. The Sunnis had a presence, but their presence was very sporadic and probably only in and around major cities like Damascus. So that, this is the kind of reality and when the Seljuks came, in, starting in 1071 and they controlled this geography, even as Sunnis, they were practicing a form of Sunnism often is we call it Hanafi Sunni Islam that wasn't either present or powerful in that area. And they directly came into problems with the local Sunni populations who practised other forms of Sunni Islam. Especially for instance in the city of Damascus... The division between Sunnis and Shiias or the division between Sunni and Shiias is blown out of historical reality… that it's not true that Sunnis and Shiias were always enemies of each other. For instance the Fatimids at one point during the Crusader period they hired Sunnis to be their Prime Ministers so to speak. And we have equivalent in say in the Abbasid Court. The Abbasids were Sunnis and sometimes they hired Shias as their lead ministers… cities like Bagdad were largely, the Muslims there were either Sunnis or Shiias and they coexisted. Damascus was divided between Sunnis and Shias. Aleppo Etc. So there are large periods of Islamic history where Sunnis and Shiias lived together without necessarily killing each other but there were other moments when there were religious tensions… my opinion this division of Sunnism and Shiiaism when it comes to the Crusader period largely has no relevance in terms of explaining why certain things happens. It can explain other things in terms of context, reception, reaction to the Crusades, the reality of the Muslim world...
There’s the Turkish garrison, they're there for 6 weeks and the Byzantines then say, why don't we talk? And the fact is this is perfectly normal in the Middle Ages. I know Hollywood movies always love you know scenes where cities are taken by storm and people swarming over the walls with ladders and siege engines and all the rest of it. That was quite rare. If a relieving force didn't turn up it was expected the garrison normally did surrender'"

The First Crusade | Besieged | HistoryExtra - "'The other problem the crusaders had with starving cities into submission was that these were big cities and there were never quite enough Crusaders to really, do a tight blockade. It's very rare that a Crusader Army can besiege a city and then stop everybody going in and out. So for instance even in the Siege of Antioch, where the Crusaders um were there for months. At no point were they able to stop supplies going in and out. They were able to hinder them, but people could always move out and around. So once you've realized that you can't starve them into submission, you then have to go to less subtle and more violent, ways. And at its most simple, you can do an assault...
The city of Antioch had only been uh taken over by the Turks in 1086, it was it was only in Turkic hands for 11 years, their population was still Christian. Even when the Turks had taken it over it was only taken by treachery. So treachery is a, is an important ingredient in the toolbox of how you capture cities'"

The First Crusade: the end or the beginning? | HistoryExtra - "'[On the capture of Jerusalem] The Christian chronicles made a big deal of of a massacre. Sieges that end without a surrender, are, very bloodthirsty and that's true in Europe, it's true in the Middle East, and I think that's one thing to bear in mind, is that what happened to Jerusalem was not a, necessarily a rush of fanatical religious hatred or racial hatred. It was of a magnitude which was the same when a European city was captured under siege and without surrender. That was the ghastly rules of war the other thing, that's since become known is that the chroniclers were vastly exaggerating. So the massacres were supposed to be total in fact weren't that at all.'...
'Contrary to what contemporary chroniclers wrote we do know that many members of the Jewish Community were also ransomed after the massacre'...
' They killed everybody and went and asked the Muslims to bury their Muslim coreligionists. Wait a minute where did you bring those Muslims to bury other Muslims? So when you start looking at the details you realize oh wait this doesn't add up. Someone is inventing a story about a massacre that they want to use in order to show off. And by the way Muslim historians from a century after, they became aware of that Christian narrative, Crusader narrative and they adopted it. And, but they adopted it in order to fuel the Islamic resentment. Is very utilitarian, extremely powerful. They are repeating it also for specific agendas'"

Death by nostalgia: the curious history of a dangerous emotion | HistoryExtra - "‘There's an amazing fact in your book which is there was one Swiss milking song that was deemed so nostalgic that singing it among Swiss mercenaries was punishable by death’...
'Absolutely and particularly among soldiers...obviously you need your armies to be fighting fit, you need them to be well, you need them to not be lying around wistfully pining for their home. And so anything that could provoke nostalgia was seen as a real threat not just to the individual well-being of the soldiers but to the kind of whole military effort. And you have similar things in the US during the American Civil War. There was also injunctions against you know there were all these songs like home sweet home that were also cautioned against because they were worried that it would put soldiers off their form, kind of it would make the war effort less effective'...
' In the early 19th century in France where lots of babies were sent away to wet nurses, so not so much the initial sending away because they were so tiny but when they'd come back to their real parents they were effectively leaving the only people they'd ever known to be parents, the wet nurses and there were all these cases of babies being diagnosed with nostalgia or little children that you know were desperately sad and it's it is kind of tragic to think that you know of course they'd be hugely unhappy at the thought of not being able to see their standin mother ever again'
'It can actually be used to improve your well-being so there are all these studies now that are done that kind of try and invoke nostalgia in people trying to make people feel nostalgic as a kind of therapy, as a kind of therapeutic intervention. And they say okay well if we make people feel nostalgic, you know nostalgia is a very social emotion, will make people feel more connected with each other, it will make them feel better about themselves. It'll make them weirdly and kind of you know paradoxically more confident about the future and more positive and optimistic. There are also studies that suggest that nostalgia can make people more creative and that is supposed to improve memory, improve social connectedness, lessen their anxiety, lessen symptoms of depression’"

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