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Monday, June 01, 2026

Links - 1st June 2026 (3 - Palestine/Middle East Peace)

Matt Field (@mattfield1) - "On Friday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a City Hall-produced video for Nakba Day featuring Inea Bushnaq, whom he called “a Nakba survivor.” The New York Times covered it as fact.  “Bushnaq” is not a Palestinian family name. It is the Arabized form of “Bošnjak,” meaning Bosnian. The surname was adopted in 1924 by descendants of Bosnian Muslim families who emigrated to Ottoman-controlled Palestine after Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia in 1878. The name they took is a record of where they came from.  Inea Bushnaq was born in Jerusalem in 1948. Her family’s roots in Palestine traced back, at most, 70 years, to settlers from the Balkans who acquired land in Tulkarm and Caesarea and hired Arab laborers to work it.  When the family left in 1948, they did not go to a refugee camp. They went to London. Inea was eventually educated at Cambridge.  A British official in Jerusalem told Time magazine in May 1948: “The whole effendi class has gone. It is remarkable how many of the younger ones are suddenly deciding that this might be a good time to resume their studies at Oxford.” Between 30,000 and 75,000 had already departed before Israel was even declared.  One more detail. The Mamdani video was decorated with a “Visit Palestine” poster presented as Palestinian cultural art. It was created in 1936 by Franz Krausz, an Austrian Jewish refugee from antisemitism who immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. It was commissioned by a Zionist tourism organization.  The “Nakba survivor” is the descendant of Bosnian settlers. The cultural artifact is Zionist. The mayor of New York produced this with city resources, and the Times ran it without a question. That is a press release for a narrative that cannot survive scrutiny."
Ironic. Anti-semites keep claiming that Jews are from Europe. Like with most of their claims, terrorism supporters project

Thomas Lukaszuk says painting the Canadian flag over the Palestinian flag is 'anti-Palestine messaging' - "University of Calgary students were seen painting over the Palestinian flag with the Canadian flag —and Thomas Lukaszuk, former deputy premier, has some thoughts.  On Tuesday — Remembrance Day — the Campus Conservative Association of Calgary gathered, waving Canadian flags and painting a rock — known to be repainted quite often — with the Canadian flag.  Prior to this, the rock had been painted with the Palestinian flag for over a year."
If you don't hate your country, you're a bigot

Cornell backs university prez held hostage in his car by student radicals after Israel-Palestine debate series - "Cornell University’s board of trustees said it’s standing by the Ivy League school’s president Michael Kotlikoff after a group of students followed him to his car and surrounded him following an Israel-Palestine debate series last month.  “The Committee has found that the actions taken by these individuals on April 30th, which included following President Kotlikoff from an evening event into a parking lot and impeding his ability to leave, are inconsistent with university policies governing expressive activity and our standards for respectful conduct, safety, and the prohibition of intimidation,” the board announced following an investigation into the viral incident.   Several of the students who claimed at the time that the president’s car had struck them all declined medical treatment and refused to provide sworn statements to campus police despite repeated attempts to collect them... The same group of rabble-rousers have become notorious on the university’s Ithaca, New York campus for spewing abuse toward Cornell staffers both online and in-person, and swarming Kotlikoff’s vehicle as he attempted to exit the campus is the latest escalation in their tactics.   The students became incensed following a campus debate series hosted by the Cornell Political Union and co-sponsored by Cornell Progressives, Cornellians for Israel and Students for Justice in Palestine...   Although Kotlikoff maintained from the start that the enraged leftists were the aggressors in the caught-on-camera incident, lefty students claimed he injured at least two protesters in the parking lot.  “When we tried to discuss campus speech policies, he hit us with his car,” the Students for a Democratic Cornell wrote on Instagram alongside footage of the incident.  “Kotlikoff’s violent response to student inquiry is just another example of his administration’s repressive crackdown on student speech.”... Kotlikoff’s exoneration by the board was lauded by several Cornell law professors.  “The result of the Board of Trustees’ investigation into the incident between activists and Cornell’s President confirms what the public videos showed — reckless conduct meant to trap and confront the President in a dangerous manner, and highly questionable claims of injury by the activists,” professor William A. Jacobson told The Post. “This incident is just the latest example of a Cornell anti-Israel activist community out of control,” he added.  Law professor Menachem Rosensaft said he was “extremely gratified” the board reached the conclusion it did and the message it sent...   “I think President Kotlikoff is 100% correct in not pursuing any disciplinary measures against the students involved, because that’s what they would have liked. They would have liked to be turned into martyrs, and instead they can now be relegated back to the obscurity that they so richly deserve.”"
It's literally attempted murder if you don't let "pro-Palestine" "protesters" swarm your car and potentially pull you from it and lynch you. The President needs to be jailed forthwith!

Hail Cornell's prez for refusing to let student brats take him prisoner : r/NewsWorthPayingFor - "Let's get this straight. He presided over a debate featuring the original "anti-Zionist loudmouth", Norman Finkelstein, whose presence on campus he not only tolerated but actively promoted. He participated in "dialog" for hours. But it was not enough. It's never enough.  The spirit of 1966 is strong in these activists.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bian_Zhongyun"

'Shocked and deeply troubled': Swastika flag raised at NYU, with school denouncing display - "New York University (NYU) condemned what school officials called an antisemitic act after a flag bearing swastikas was raised above a campus building during this week's graduation festivities... According to campus reports, the flag featured two swastikas, a Star of David, and the letters "NYU"."
Damn suppression of "pro-Palestine" speech!

Our Nakba - "The German ambassador to Egypt works out of a house that used to belong to a Jewish family. So does the Swiss ambassador. So does the American one. The homes were confiscated in 1956, when the Egyptian government declared, in a proclamation read aloud from the minarets of Cairo and Alexandria, that all Jews were Zionists and enemies of the state. The families were given one suitcase. They signed documents “donating” everything else to the government. Then they left. The houses are still there. The families are not.  This is where the argument about Israel begins. Not in Europe. Here. There is a story told about Israel with remarkable confidence in universities, at the United Nations, in the opinion sections of newspapers that should know better. The story goes like this: European Jews, traumatized by European persecution, arrived in a land populated by indigenous Arabs and established, by force, a settler state. European guilt. European migration. European power. Colonialism wearing a Star of David.  The story requires you to ignore the majority of Israelis.  Mizrahi Jews, those whose ancestry traces to Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, and Lebanon, constitute the largest demographic bloc in Israel’s Jewish population, somewhere between 45 and 61 percent depending on how intermarriage and self-identification are counted. No serious demographer disputes the basic fact. They are not European. They are the descendants of communities that lived in the Middle East and North Africa for over two thousand years before the word “Europe” carried any political meaning. Many trace their origins to the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE. Their families were in Baghdad before Rome was a city. They were in Sana’a and Cairo and Tripoli while the ancestors of today’s loudest anti-Zionists were still pagans in northern forests.  By every definition that the language of indigenous rights claims to honor, they are indigenous people of the Middle East.  The colonial thesis does not complicate this fact. It requires its erasure. These communities did not arrive in Iraq and Yemen and Egypt from Europe or from nowhere. They arrived from the Land of Israel, carried there by the conquests and expulsions that defined the ancient world. The Babylonian exile of 586 BCE brought Jews to Mesopotamia when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Temple and deported the population of Judea. Later waves followed the Assyrian conquest, the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and the subsequent dispersions that scattered Jewish communities across the region. The Jews of Baghdad, of Sana’a, of Cairo, of Tripoli were not immigrants to the Middle East from somewhere else. They were the exiled children of the Land of Israel, living in the lands to which conquest had driven them, maintaining their language, their texts, and their memory of home across two thousand years. When they came to Israel in the twentieth century, they were not arriving as colonizers. They were returning.  To understand what was lost, you have to know what existed.  The Jews of Iraq were among the oldest continuous Jewish communities on earth. Their roots in Babylonia stretch to the destruction of the First Temple. They did not merely survive in Iraq. They built there. The Talmud, the central text of Jewish law and life that has governed Jewish practice for fifteen centuries, was composed in Babylon, in the academies of Sura and Pumbedita, on the soil of what is now modern Iraq. By the early twentieth century, Jews made up roughly a third of Baghdad’s population. They were merchants, musicians, government officials, doctors, bankers. They spoke Judeo-Arabic and prayed in Hebrew and had done both, without interruption, for two and a half millennia. The Jews of Yemen maintained a liturgical tradition so ancient and so isolated from the rest of the Jewish world that scholars of Hebrew phonetics study it today to understand how the language was originally pronounced. They had been in the Arabian Peninsula since before the rise of Islam. Their piyyutim, their sacred poetry, carried melodies that the rest of the Jewish world had forgotten.  The Jews of Morocco and Algeria predated the Arab conquest of North Africa. The Persian Jewish community traced its origins to the era of Cyrus the Great, who is named in the book of Isaiah as the instrument of Jewish liberation. The Jews of Egypt were ancient. The Jews of Syria were ancient. These were not transplanted peoples. They were rooted ones, with sacred texts, living languages, and unbroken communal memory reaching back to the earliest chapters of Jewish history.  In 1948, there were 135,000 Jews in Iraq. 265,000 in Morocco. 140,000 in Algeria. 105,000 in Tunisia. 100,000 in Egypt. 60,000 in Yemen. 38,000 in Libya. 30,000 in Syria.  Today, there are fewer than ten Jews in Iraq. Fewer than ten in Yemen. Fewer than ten in Libya. The end of each community had its own texture, but the pattern was the same everywhere.

The colonialism no one talks about: Arab imperialism - "When the Arab armies surged out of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, they created an empire larger than Rome in barely a century. By 750 C.E., they controlled 13 million square kilometers, ruled more than 50 million people and redrew the map of three continents. Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, North Africa, Persia and as far as Spain were absorbed into a vast imperial system built on conquest and domination.  However, when “colonialism” is invoked today, this empire is rarely mentioned. Only Europe and other Western nations are put in the dock.  This selective memory distorts history. It erases the suffering of entire peoples and presents conquest and subjugation as if they were merely cultural diffusion. The Arab-Muslim expansion was not a benign flowering of civilization, but a deliberate project of empire, motivated by religious and political ambition.  From its inception, Islam carried an imperial vision. Under Muhammad, the warrior-prophet, the early Muslim community saw expansion as a divine mandate. Conquest was central, creating a model of domination that endured for centuries.  The world was divided into Dar al-Islam, the “abode of Islam,” lands ruled by Muslims, and Dar al-Harb, the “abode of war,” lands yet to be subdued. Non-Muslims under Arab rule were tolerated only as dhimmis, second-class subjects compelled to pay the humiliating jizya tax and live under laws marking their inferiority.  The human toll of this imperialism was immense. When Arab armies conquered Egypt around 639 C.E., Coptic Christians formed the majority of the country. Within centuries, heavy taxation, social restrictions and pressures to convert reduced them to roughly 10% of the population. Churches were destroyed, and the administration was Arabized, leaving Copts politically marginalized for centuries.  Sassanid Persia, conquered by Arabs in 651 C.E., was a fully Zoroastrian state. Arab rule brought the destruction of temples, forced conversions and an imposed Islamic administration. By the 10th century, Zoroastrians had become a tiny minority.   The Berbers of Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, indigenous polytheists, were gradually Arabized and Islamized. Their languages, religions, and cultural identities were replaced or suppressed under Arab rule, and many were incorporated into the Arab military as auxiliaries, losing their indigenous traditions.  The Arab slave trade, spanning from the 7th to the late 19th century, lasted more than 1,200 years, far longer than the Atlantic slave trade. Between 10 million and 18 million Africans were captured and transported along multiple routes across the Sahara, through the Red Sea into the Arabian Peninsula, and via the Indian Ocean to Persia, Arabia and India. Male slaves were often castrated, while women were assimilated into Arab households, leaving few Afro-descendant communities able to preserve cultural memory.  Yet Western academics and activists—eager to atone for Europe’s sins—speak of colonialism as if it were an exclusively European phenomenon. Meanwhile, Arab imperialism is celebrated as the “Golden Age of Islam,” highlighting contributions to science, philosophy and culture, while its legacy of conquest, forced conversion and subjugation is ignored.  It is as if history itself began in the seventh century, with Islam’s spread erasing all who came before: Copts, Persians, Assyrians, Berbers, Jews. Nations that thrived for centuries vanished into the shadows of Arab rule.   The legacy of Dar al-Islam is not confined to the past. Arab nationalism and Islamist movements still assume the Middle East “belongs” to Arabs and that minorities must submit. The persecution of Copts in Egypt, the oppression of Kurds in Syria and Iraq, the near-erasure of Assyrian Christians and the Yazidi genocide by ISIS echo the imperial mindset of conquest. Jihadist groups such as Hamas, ISIS and the Taliban invoke the division between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb to justify perpetual war and terrorism.  To criticize Arab imperialism today risks accusations of Islamophobia. Any attempt to highlight early conquest violence or centuries of Arabization is dismissed as reactionary. By contrast, condemning Western colonialism is encouraged as it fits neatly within progressive, anti-racist frameworks dominating Western academia.  This asymmetry produces a distorted historical consciousness. The Levant and North Africa are thought of as “naturally Arab,” as though Arab identity were indigenous. But Egypt was overwhelmingly Coptic, the Maghreb largely Berber, Mesopotamia Assyrian and Aramaic-speaking, the Levant a mosaic of faiths and languages. These were not “Arab lands,” they were made Arab by conquest and cultural suppression.  Modern Arab nationalism, born in the 20th century, compounded the distortion. Figures like Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser or the Ba’ath Party built legitimacy by denouncing Western colonialism while ignoring earlier Arab imperialism that defined the region for centuries. The irony: Arab nationalism, hailed as anti-colonial, was itself built on a colonial legacy.  Absurdly, Israel is routinely accused of “colonialism,” a grotesque inversion of reality. Zionism is not colonial but the most successful anti-colonial movement in history: The return of an indigenous people to their ancestral land after centuries of foreign rule. To call Jewish self-determination “colonialism” while ignoring the Arab conquests that Arabized and Islamized the region is not only intellectually dishonest; it uses historical erasure as a weapon against the one nation in the Middle East that decolonized itself.  The debate on colonialism remains strikingly one-sided. While Europe’s colonial crimes are scrutinized, the Arab conquests transforming North Africa and the Middle East are often celebrated. Such silence is not oversight; it is political. It fosters the illusion that imperialism is uniquely Western, when in truth it has been recurring throughout human civilization.  Acknowledging Arab imperialism does not diminish Europe’s colonial crimes. It restores balance, reminding us that domination is not the monopoly of one continent or culture. It gives voice to forgotten nations such as the Copts, Berbers and Assyrians, whose suffering predates European ships in the Americas.  A real reckoning with empire means holding Arab imperialism to the same standard as Europe. Until then, colonial history is a half-truth, and politics built on it a dangerous fiction. This selective outrage twists history into a weapon instead of a mirror."

Joel Engel on X - "As true now as it was 57 years ago:
Israel's Peculiar Position
By Eric Hoffer
Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1968
The Jews are a peculiar people: things do not happen to them, they happen to other people. Other people have a destiny, the Jews have a rendezvous with God. Yet there is in apparent contradiction a sustainability and unfailingness about the Jews and their impact on history.  Consider their tiny population. They number about 15,000,000, less than 3% of the world's total. One would expect them to be statistically lost and to remain but an obscure footnote in human history. Yet they have been a most conspicuous people and their impact on history has been overwhelming.  Consider again their survival. They have been repeatedly decimated: by the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian Czars, the Nazis. Yet they persist. No other people in history have so miraculously survived.  Consider their contribution to civilization. In the field of religion, they gave the world Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In philosophy, they produced Spinoza and Marx. In science, Einstein and Oppenheimer. In literature, Heine and Kafka. In music, Mendelssohn and Mahler.  Consider finally their role in the contemporary world. They are the only people who have returned to their homeland after 2,000 years of exile. And they have made it bloom.Yet in spite of all this, the Jews are the most hated people in the world.   Why? Is it because they are a success? No. Success breeds envy, but envy does not breed hatred. Hatred is bred by fear.The Arabs fear the Jews. They fear the Jewish success, the Jewish survival, the Jewish return to their homeland. They fear that the Jews will succeed again as they have succeeded before.  The Arabs say that Israel is a cancer in the body of the Arab world. But it is the Arabs who are the cancer. They are the ones who refuse to live in peace with Israel. They are the ones who teach their children to hate the Jews. They are the ones who launch terror attacks against Israel.  The Jews want to live in peace with the Arabs. But the Arabs want to destroy Israel. They say that Israel has no right to exist. They say that the land belongs to them. But the land was desolate when the Jews came back to it. The Jews made it bloom. The Arabs can have their own states, but they want Israel's land too.  Now, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the world is turning against Israel. The United Nations condemns Israel. The Soviet Union arms the Arabs. The Europeans are neutral, but their neutrality favors the Arabs.Even in America, there is a growing anti-Israel sentiment. The intellectuals, the media, the churches—all are turning against Israel.  Why? Because Israel is strong. Because Israel won the war. Because Israel is a success.But success is not a crime. Strength is not a sin. Victory is not a vice.  The Jews are accused of being aggressors. But who struck the first blow? The Arabs. Who refused peace? The Arabs. Who blockaded the Straits of Tiran? The Arabs. Who launched the war? The Arabs.  The Jews are accused of displacing the Arabs. But Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese—and no one says a word about refugees.   But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become the eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single one.  Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis.   Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious, it must sue for peace.   Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover, but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed.   Had Nasser triumphed last June [1967], he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.   We, the Jews, stand alone in the world and always will. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources.  Yet at this moment, Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us.  I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel, so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the Holocaust will be upon us all."

Why did Arab nations choose full-scale war with Israel in 1948 over such a small territory? : r/AskHistorians - "One issue was domestic politics. None of the Arab countries involved had been countries as such for very long themselves. Even after independence from the Ottoman Empire, they weren't truly independent. They were dominated by European powers or elites linked to those powers, particularly the UK and France. Their power was not secure.  The creation of Israel, backed by those Western powers, against popular opinion in the region, risked making regional leaders look so weak and ineffectual that it threatened their hold on power. That was a direct threat. There was also some real feeling in this regard. Arab leaders genuinely did not want to be just European proxies.  They were right to be concerned. It was a hard time for those leaders. For example, Egypt in 1948 was not doing alright. The monarchy had lost legitimacy and the economy was not doing well. The monarchy fell in 1952.  Syria was only two years old, and was still struggling to assemble working institutions. In 1949, that government fell to a military coup, the first of many coups over the next decade.  In Iraq, the political landscape was divided, and the monarchy was losing support. They were undergoing their own internal uprisings, following the failure inJanuary 1948, to achieve real independence from Britain with the Portsmouth Agreement. It was widely denounced as a sham extension of British control. The monarchy fell in 1958.  Lebanon was just five years old, with a political system based on the major competing groups. They made it 27 years before a civil war between those groups broke out.  In contrast, Jordan was doing a bit better. The King felt safe enough from domestic pressures to please another key supporter, the British government, and make a deal with Israel that he would only attack the Arab-controlled areas to stop his rivals from getting them, but not the areas assigned to Israel. That monarchy is still in power.
Not only did they worry about their positions at home, regional leaders worried about their positions vis-a-vis each other. Each set of leadership wanted to be seen as the defender of the Arab cause to help their own power, but also, they didn't want their rivals in the other countries to be seen that way, at their expense. The Palestinian cause was just one in which they competed with each other for leadership.  This extension continued into Palestine itselff. Some Arab leaders wanted a piece - at the expense of others. Some didn't want it themselves, but they feared losing power to.a rival state that did take Palestinian territory. For example, Jordan sought to annex the Arab areas of the UN partition plan to prevent them from falling under Egyptian or Syrian influence.  The land was more than some acreage. It is very symbolic land, both in the larger picture of Arab self-determination, but also in religious and cultural terms. Jerusalem and the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount were important symbols for religion, and of foreign occupations and dominance. The Arabs aren't the only people who felt that way (which is how we got so many crusades).
Palestinians expected help, refusing would look very bad. Already the Muslim Brotherhood - rivals for power - were in Palestine fighting- The Arab League had themselves organised the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) of volunteers. To back down now would look weak and cowardly indeed. That was a political threat, bust also a personal one in a culture that valued strength and bravery.
They thought it would be easy. In the minds of the the Arab leaders at the time, their valiant fighters would obviously beat a few, disorganised Jews without major weaponry. They did not expect a mobilised society, trained soldiers, capable officers and better logistics than their own forces had.   At least some believed their own propaganda about Jews as outsiders, and assumed Israelis would flee "home" when faced with force.  They also expected a lot of assistance, given the popularity of the cause.  For example, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, secretary-general of the Arab League from 1945 to 1952, declared in 1947 that,  "I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars. I believe that the number of volunteers from outside Palestine will be larger than Palestine's Arab population, for I know that volunteers will be arriving to us from [as far as] India, Afghanistan, and China to win the honour of martyrdom for the sake of Palestine ... You might be surprised to learn that hundreds of Englishmen expressed their wish to volunteer in the Arab armies to fight the Jews."  Since victory wouldn't cost much, but inaction could cost them a lot, why not do it?
They felt they had to. The situation was such that to back down would be to surrender without fighting, and that the moral and political pressure was all on action. That same secretary general told representatives of the future state of Israel,  "We shall try to defeat you. I am not sure we'll succeed, but we'll try. We were able to drive out the Crusaders, but on the other hand we lost Spain and Persia. It may be that we shall lose Palestine. But it's too late to talk of peaceful solutions."  Looking at it that way, there was no decision to make. They would attack."
It's only a nakba because they didn't get to genocide the Jews

Meme - "THE OLDEST ULTIMATUM, SAME SCRIPT, NEW DAY
WE'RE NOT ANTI-JEW. WE JUST NEED YOU TO AUDITION FOR YOUR ACCEPTANCE.
THE SCRIPT NEVER CHANGES
Jew thinking: IS HUMILITY ENOUGH? OR DO I NEED TO HATE MYSELF MORE?
THE ROLE: ACCEPTABLE JEW (RECURRING)
DENOUNCE ISRAEL
REJECT JEWISH SOVEREIGNTY
AGREE JEWS DON'T NEED A HOMELAND
BE STATELESS, DEFENSELESS, AND GRATEFUL
AUDITION OR ELSE.
PERPETUAL OUTRAGE PRODUCTIONS
DIRECTOR: HISTORY
SAME ENGINE. DIFFERENT PACKAGING. THREAT UNDERNEATH. MERCY ON TOP.
PREVIOUS SEASONS:
THE INQUISITION "CONVERT OR ELSE."
THE POGROMS "LEAVE OR ELSE."
THE EXPULSIONS “GO OR ELSE."
THE EXTERMINATIONS "DISAPPEAR OR ELSE." *Auschwitz Nazi train car*
TODAY
FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA
GLOBALIZE THE INTIFADA
ZIONISTS NOT WELCOME
"DENOUNCE OR ELSE."
DIFFERENT COSTUMES. SAME ULTIMATUM.
THE ONES WHO READ THE FINE PRINT DON'T FALL FOR REBOOTS.
WE'VE SEEN THIS ULTIMATUM WEARING EVERY COSTUME IMAGINABLE. WE KNOW HOW IT ENDS.
HISTORY
PATTERNS
READING THE FINE PRINT
NEVER AGAIN # OPTIONAL
CAFFEINATED BY SURVIVAL & SARCASM"
Of course, with "minorities" the left loves, Solidarity is unconditional and they get support no matter how awful people they are. But groups the left hates must check off a never-ending list to be worthy of basic human decency

The Patriot Oasis™ on X - "🔥🚨 BREAKING: More Footage of US Marine Corps veteran Brian McGinnis is resurfacing—the man who was thrown out of the Senate hearing yesterday by Sen. Tim Sheehy.  McGinnis, while wearing a muslim Keffiyeh, says that he supports the "Free Palestine Movement."   He said he and his family are Palestinian. While he was assaulting Capitol police yesterday, McGinnis was ranting and screaming about his hatred of Israel.   The Islamic and Palestinian movements are both extremely violent and anti-American movements that have no place in America.  McGinnis has tried for years to leverage his position as a Marine Corps veteran to gain traction for his movements."
Left wingers are pretending he's a victim. The contrast with Jan 6th is telling
Comment (elsewhere): "🤣 you're absolutely clueless as there's multiple things wrong with this let's start with him disrupting the meeting (illegal act), refusing to leave (illegal act called trespassing), resisting the police (illegal), fighting the police (illegal), actively undermining his leadership in uniform(illegal under multiple separate UCMJ articles), attempting to speak on behalf of other people while in uniform (illegal under UCMJ) and i could go on.... Regarding your "he was right" or "speaking the truth" comment now that's just funny and absurd this is a policing action to prevent a homicidal dictator from possessing nuclear wealth which would have severe global repercussions."

Links - 1st June 2026 (2 - Feminism [including Lean In])

Batya Ungar-Sargon on X - "What's so funny about this is the tradwife movement is a women-led rejection of the guilt that very wealthy women like Sandberg inflicted on stay at home moms for not working or failing to rise far enough. For decades, liberal elite Girlboss feminism pushed professional success as essential to self-fulfillment for women, implying that women who worked part time or (Heaven forbid!) chose to be stay at home moms were somehow less than.   Now that those women are pushing back, they must be defeated."
Feminism is not about supporting women in making their own choices, but pushing the left wing agenda

Batya Ungar-Sargon on X - "Sandberg writes, “A woman who applies to medical school or pursues a demanding career is still met with, ‘Are you sure you want to do that—don’t you want kids one day?’”  Really?  The majority of medical school students now are women—for the seventh year straight! Apparently, whatever mythic character is saying this to women is having zero impact."

Batya Ungar-Sargon on X - "Sheryl Sandberg’s GirlBoss feminism is defined by this kind of anachronistic thinking, pretending the women of today face the same kinds of hurdles of yesteryear, so unbelievably wealthy women can cosplay as heroic while continuing to shame women who make different choices:"

Disgraced Propagandist on X - "A tell all book called "Careless People" written by someone fairly high up in Facebook was published last year. I listened to the whole thing. The weirdest detail in it is apparently on Cheryl Sandberg's private plane, Cheryl had a private bedroom. She would ask various employees traveling with her on the plane to come snuggle with her in the bed. The writer of the tell all, an ambitious girl boss from New Zealand, declined the offer, and thereafter Cheryl targeted her for destruction."

Meme - Mike Solana @micsolana: "my sense with all of this is just like, we've been beating the "lean in" drum for a couple decades now and I I think the average american just doesn't want to be sheryl sandberg, which is fine actually"
The Wall Street Journal @wsj: "Exclusive: Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In nonprofit has shed about a quarter of its staff as the founder focuses on pushing back against the "tradwife" and manosphere movements"

Lisa Britton on X - "And now we have a generation of women crying in fertility clinic parking lots, realizing they waited too long to start a family because of “girl boss” messaging from women like Sandberg."

Thread by @wil_da_beast630 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "A point so obvious it's rarely made: easily 90% of the things that are attributed to "the patriarchy" by hard-body feminists - mating for life/marriage, young males as society's warriors, even toy preferences - not only existed in the many matriarchal human societies but also exist among many OTHER mammal predators.  Among homo-saps, it's difficult to think of a single tribe that used fertile females as primary fighters. The blinders-off reason for this is insanely clear - and a compliment to women, at that. When something just clearly and obviously has a necessary purpose - marriage, for example, clarifies the lineage of children and thus incentivizes/forces a father to stick around and raise them - it strikes lil' ol' pragmatic me as a much better idea to trim off rough edges and keep it around than to toss it away and hope Utopia somehow spontaneously emerges from vacuum.  "All these traditions began under BARBARISM! You used to be able to rape your wife and stab your husband!!!"  Ok, cool. Let's change that part of the law. The core idea of mating for life, which foxes also figured out, still seems far preferable to the alternative of "72% illegitimacy.""

Global Goals on X - "The digital divide is a gender divide. 📱🚫👩‍💻  Technology is outpacing regulation, leaving women and girls vulnerable to online abuse. This month, let’s commit to making digital spaces safe, inclusive, and empowering for all.  #ActNow for digital rights: http://un.org/actnow"
James L. Nuzzo, PhD on X - "Again, we see the UN frame online abuse in an asymmetrical fashion. Polls consistently show that men and women are roughly equally likely to be abused or harassed online."

Meme - *Woman seeing 2 men at a race, getting to the start line with Qualifications and Hard Work*
*Woman laying down start line*
*Woman starting ahead of the men due to inclusion policies*

Meme - ""For someone who keeps calling men pigs, she keeps degrading herself to appeal to the male gaze": Sabrina Carpenter's "tone deaf" album cover slammed for "extreme misogyny""

DC Film News on X - "Milly Alcock on the message she hopes audiences take from ‘SUPERGIRL’: “I think young girls should walk away from the film knowing that it’s ok to be a bit bad, and messy.” (via Beyond Noise Magazine, Issue 5)"
Kevin DeAnna on X - "Oh good no media has put out that message before"

Meme - Semi @SUGARTIS...: "how tf is ts more socially acceptable than homosexuality i hate this world"
mindy @mindyisser: "not really a fan of our society"
"PARTICLE. You're 60. She's 30. WE'LL TAKE CARE OF THE GAP. TheParticleMan.com"
Esoteric Tengrianism: "Yup. Utterly sick to pretend that a 30 year old little girl can make decisions for herself. Absolutely agree. But if we are worried about anyone taking advantage of these poor simpletons naivety... arent the lenders, radical ideologues, and etc all much bigger problems than potential romantic partners? If we are serious about this then we need to DRASTICALLY curtail women's independent sovereignty to protect them from themselves, and remove their political franchise for obvious reasons of longterm social stability. I'm not sure what happens with the sex-exclusive privilege to kill unwanted offspring in utero to avoid responsibility for them... but regardless the right to CHOOSE about it would be the decision of some adult who can actually exercise his rational agency and accountability for the decision. Glad we are finally being a little bit more realistic here."
"I'd say America is one of the few countries where homosexuality is actually more acceptable than"

Is there anyway to be a “slut” without benefiting men? : r/Feminism - "Basically the title! Love the word “slut” & using it very positively here.  As a woman, I’ve tried regaining control of my own sexuality. However - i feel now as if there is no way to do this that does not benefit men.  Casual sexual relationships benefit men; dressing more “slutty” appeals to the male gaze.  I’m sure there’s more to this question I’m trying to ask - but is there a way to take control of this myself (as a bi woman) that does not benefit men?"
They hate men so much

James L. Nuzzo, PhD on X - ""But does talk of a male crisis further sideline women and girls?" "It is uncomfortable and sometimes controversial to talk about a male ‘crisis’ in the face of entrenched and often worsening discrimination against girls and women. No country in the world has achieved gender equality — and one in four reported a backlash against women’s rights in 2024." "Some people worry that the ‘boys in crisis’ framing worsens the situation by encouraging young men to view themselves as victims of gender equality — feeding resentment and hostile views.""
Feminists still claim that feminism benefits men

Johannes M. Koenraadt on X - "Highly educated women are marrying uneducated men. They call it 'men marrying up'. But when you look at the financials, it's female academics making 30k a year marrying coal miners who make 120k. That's still women marrying up."

Bryce Dallas Howard's high heels are not sexist. They're the best part of Jurassic World. - "For a movie filled with freakish genetic hybrids and raptors wearing night-vision headsets, the most far-out, fantastical element of Jurassic World might just be Bryce Dallas Howard’s heels. Introduced with a foot-focused shot worthy of Tarantino, Howard plays Claire Dearing, the park’s operations manager, an icy, career-oriented businesswoman who seems like she may well have been cloned in lab using Sigourney Weaver’s DNA from Working Girl.  In a film loaded with retrograde takes on gender, the shoes initially seem to signal all of Claire’s flaws. We’re supposed to know that Claire is unlikable and needs to loosen up because she is uninterested in children, obsessed with her company’s profit margins, and refuses to be nice to Chris Pratt. Her shoes—severe, nude-tone stilettos that seem completely incompatible with tromping around a tropical island filled with prehistoric animals—seem to serve as a shorthand for all of this in the film’s first quarter, where they’re the subject of several loving close-ups and get roughly as much screen time as Vincent D’Onofrio... Howard herself has been taken to task for her own insistence on wearing the shoes; director Colin Trevorrow frustratedly passed the buck to Howard on the issue, telling i09: “I mean, look, I had that conversation with her so many times, and she insisted on wearing those heels.”   For a movie filled with freakish genetic hybrids and raptors wearing night-vision headsets, the most far-out, fantastical element of Jurassic World might just be Bryce Dallas Howard’s heels. Introduced with a foot-focused shot worthy of Tarantino, Howard plays Claire Dearing, the park’s operations manager, an icy, career-oriented businesswoman who seems like she may well have been cloned in lab using Sigourney Weaver’s DNA from Working Girl.  In a film loaded with retrograde takes on gender, the shoes initially seem to signal all of Claire’s flaws. We’re supposed to know that Claire is unlikable and needs to loosen up because she is uninterested in children, obsessed with her company’s profit margins, and refuses to be nice to Chris Pratt. Her shoes—severe, nude-tone stilettos that seem completely incompatible with tromping around a tropical island filled with prehistoric animals—seem to serve as a shorthand for all of this in the film’s first quarter, where they’re the subject of several loving close-ups and get roughly as much screen time as Vincent D’Onofrio.  As the film goes on, the park’s animals go rogue and Claire develops a heart, experiencing a classic cinematic transformation from dispassionate professional to family-loving babe with a gun. But while her pristine white business suit is shucked in the name of mobility, the heels stay on the whole time.  A lot has been made of the improbability of Claire’s heels—the film’s insistence on having her wear them through multiple jungle hikes and dino chases has come to symbolize, among other things, the film’s goofy sexism. Though I doubt that the heels wrote the scene where Claire’s sister chides her for her lack of interest in children, or suggested that Jake Johnson’s Larry exist only so that various characters could cast aspersions on his masculinity. Vulture’s Jada Yuan dismissed them as “foolish;” the Dissolve’s Genevieve Koski pointed to them as a “tiny but maddening detail” that kept the film from working. Howard herself has been taken to task for her own insistence on wearing the shoes; director Colin Trevorrow frustratedly passed the buck to Howard on the issue, telling i09: “I mean, look, I had that conversation with her so many times, and she insisted on wearing those heels.”  But given that films so often require a heroine to drop her high heels in order to be deemed likable (think Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone, or even Jennifer Garner at the end of 13 Going On 30), or use heels as a way to signal that a woman is bait for a predator (think half the horror movies currently streaming on Netflix), I’d argue that the stiletto backlash has been grossly overblown. The way Claire’s heels support her, rather than fail her, throughout her journey is actually one of the most interesting, offbeat decisions in a film largely dedicated to propping up old-school action movie tropes... the fact that she didn’t have to go full Linda Hamilton in order to save her family may have actually been this film’s most progressive bit."

Omoye✨🫶 on X - "The goal of modern feminism isn't to make women better, it's to make them single. Have you noticed how they only call a woman strong and empowered the moment she leaves her home? But when she's building with her husband or submitting to her husband, she's a slave. This movement is from the pit of h£ll."

Fiery Debate After University Professor Claims Women Commit Domestic Violence As Much As Men - "Dr. Fiona Girkin is an associate lecturer in Policing and Emergency Management at the University of Tasmania. Her job is to teach new Tasmania Police recruits about family and domestic violence. Recently, she appeared in a video interview with controversial conservative media figure, Bettina Arndt. In the interview, Girkin talked about how, in listening to the officers she has worked with, there were just as many female offenders in domestic violence cases as there were male... After university officials found out about Girkin’s interview with Arndt, they opened an investigation and ultimately put Girkin under “assessment” until further notice. Regarding Girkin’s role with the Tasmania Police, the department put out a statement saying that “the opinions stated by Dr Girkin are not in line with the principles Tasmania Police supports in dealing with family violence,” and that she would not be teaching police recruits until the investigation with the university was complete... it’s interesting to note that Arndt wasn’t always such a strong advocate for men. Earlier in her career, she was a self-proclaimed feminist... But then, in the 1990s, something changed. She began embracing more socially conservative ideas about relationships and family, criticizing people who have children out of wedlock. In interviews, Arndt has said of her change of heart that she “spent her early career lobbying for women but turned to men when I realised how lousy they are about advocating for issues that affect their private lives.”   Now she is seen as a feminist instigator, authoring a book that she released in the heat of the global #MeToo movement entitled #MenToo. Her critics say the provocations and outrageous statements are just meant to get attention. “To Arndt’s frustration, the male revolution she advocated of political reaction against feminism had failed to emerge,” said a lecturer at Macquarie Law School who has studied Arndt."
Academic freedom is only meant to push the left wing agenda
We're still told that feminism helps men too

Meme - "Male Privilege
In Switzerland, military service (conscription) is compulsory for all Swiss men, but not women. If a man is not fit for military service, he is required to pay 3% extra tax until the age of 30. This is known as "military exemption tax". Naturally, women are also exempt from paying this tax. In 2014 the Swiss voted on whether or not to keep conscription for men. This means women were able to vote on whether or not military service is compulsory for men. Despite not having to participate in conscription themselves, the majority of women voted to keep conscription compulsory for men."

Sabrina Carpenter Killing Men In Music Videos: A Ranking
Proof that we live in a misogynistic society where violence against women is normalised and uncontroversial

Meme - Dear Son: "To all men who survived rock bottom, what's one piece of advice would you give a man who feels like giving up right now?"
Nida Jaffery @nidafjaffery: "Why would women's advice not be useful? Maybe fix your misogyny and that'll get you started. Im sorry I hope things get better for you otherwise"
Of course, if you butt in when a question is only addressed to women, you're a misogynist

Australia’s Victoria state appoints first ever Men’s Behavior Change official - The Washington Post - "The state of Victoria appointed a parliamentary secretary for men’s behavior change — lawmaker Tim Richardson — who said action must start “with us men and boys.”"
Davidson MP Matt Cross: Liberals appoint a shadow minister for men - "NSW Liberal leader Kelli Sloane has declared "masculinity should be celebrated" as she announced a new position in her team targeting men's health. Davidson MP Matt Cross, who survived bowel cancer, has been named the state opposition's parliamentary secretary for men's health."
Feminists see men as a problem, but non-feminists see them as equals who deserve equal protection

Feminist Anxiety about Domestic Violence Against Men – The Feminist Wire - "It’s understandable why there’s resistance to a framework that suggests that “both men and women” are battered, as if there is equivalence there.  It’s also understandable why there may be fear here as well.  At minimum, it could mean a loss of scarce resources for women who do not, overall, have the same earning capacities of men. Domestic violence is intertwined with learned gender roles and histories of abuse, but too often such violence is treated as if it’s inherently male."
30 colectivos feministas alertan de que la Fundación de Hombres Maltratados ahonda en el mensaje negacionista | Noticias de la Comunidad Valenciana | EL PAÍS ("30 feminist groups warn that the Foundation for Abused Men is deepening the denialist message")
Feminists oppose male shelters, and they get very upset when you point that out (Erin Pizzey's experiences being another powerful example). They also like to mock men and say the men should get off their asses and create their own shelters, when female shelters are so dependent on government funding (which male ones get less often) and they screech when the government funding isn't what they deem enough

Meme - "WHAT THEY THINK WILL HAPPEN: *Handmaid's Tale*
WHAT THEY THINK THEIR RESPONSE WILL BE: *Dora Milaje from Black Panther* *Vikings Lagertha shieldmaidens*
THE WORST THEY'LL DO: *Naked screeching women*"

Ask for Angela founder resigns after woman’s image removed to ‘avoid deterring men’ - "The founder of Ask for Angela has resigned claiming that senior figures had ruled the figure of a woman on posters should be removed to avoid deterring men from seeking help."
Clearly, feminists care about men

Daniela on X - "To the idiots that say "she slept her way to the top." What you're actually saying is: "men are rapist and sexual predators that's abuse their power and withhold opportunities to assault women.""
Wilfred Reilly on X - "No. We're not doing this.  What's being said is literally just: "She progressed at a faster than normal rate, because she had consensual sex with clients, sources, colleagues, and management."   The idea "any sex where a woman is influenced to any degree by potential considerations about advantage or the behavior of others is rape" is what feminists actually MEAN - but it sounds appropriately insane to say out loud."
Galtonist on X - "Also, there is a world of difference between "she lost a job that she was good at because she wouldn't sleep with her boss," and "she got a job she didn't deserve by sleeping with her boss.""
Knorbert on X - "Quite. *She* is the one being predatory and transactional. She's the one using sex to manipulate people for personal gain.  There's this constant assumption that women have the accountability of children and are always the victims... If she'd had sex once for advancement, you could argue that the guy might have coerced it. But if it's repeated behaviour, you can be sure that she was the instigator at least some, if not all, of the time..."
LorenzLyaPunov on X - "Agreed it's insane. The standard cannot be "I was abused by being coerced into an action because it benefitted me to do it." That's not what coercion is. Talk about removing all agency from a person."
Sevenders on X - "He thought she was sleeping with him because she liked him. She was sleeping with him for a story/access. This was false pretenses. Ergo she is a rapist. Seems fairly clear"

Woman doused friend in fuel, set him alight for misogynistic comment, court hears - "A woman who angrily doused an "old friend" in petrol and set him alight for making a misogynistic comment was suffering from depression and substance abuse, a court has heard.  Corbie Jean Walpole, 24, earlier pleaded guilty to one charge of burning or maiming by using corrosive fluid.  Her victim, Jake Loader, was 23 when he was found with life-threatening burns at a southern New South Wales home in Howlong on January 7 last year... Most of the group was heavily intoxicated, and Walpole had consumed cocaine...  Her anger then flared when Mr Loader told her she should stay in the kitchen making scones where she belonged, and not to go drinking with boys... Mr Loader sustained burns to 55 per cent of his body, was in an induced coma for eight days, spent 74 days in a burns unit at Melbourne hospital The Alfred, and underwent 10 operations.  Mr Loader can no longer expose his skin to the sun, and struggles with temperature regulation as his sweat glands were burnt off."
Clearly, this was self-defence, and if you disagree, you're a misogynist

JD™ on X - "* Women’s self-reported happiness down 83% since 1970
* Female suicide rate up 50% since 2000
* Antidepressant use among women up 250% since 1990
* Single motherhood up 700% since 1960
* Women on anxiety meds 1 in 4
* Female workforce participation up 75%, but life satisfaction down 200%
* College women report record loneliness and depression
* 40% of women have engaged in self-harm, ranging from cutting to suicide
Your wildest dreams have come true. You can vote and be promiscuous, and you’re unshackled from a man to take care of you and children to adore you. Congratulations, you win. Yay, feminism."

Meme - ella devi @ellad3vi: "why are you picking on women's appearances to engage in ad hominem and attempt to shut down their arguments? it's just flat-out misogyny."
ella devi @ellad3vi: "pete hegeseth's wife wore a dress from temu to the white house correspondents dinner (i'm not joking)"

The costly fantasy of high-speed rail

The costly fantasy of high-speed rail - The Globe and Mail

"A family relies on a rusty sedan to get around. It’s slow and breaks down often. But the family, instead of opting for a practical replacement, puts in an order for a flashy, new model not yet in showrooms.

Sure, the luxury vehicle is significantly more expensive, and it will take years to arrive. But it is sleek and fast, and the family figures the time they will save commuting makes the higher price worth it (despite the loan they will need that will add to their already considerable debts). Besides, many of their neighbours have luxury cars – it’s about time they had one, too.

This in a nutshell is the faulty logic the Liberal government is using to create a high-speed rail line between Quebec City and Toronto.

The idea of a high-speed train that would travel as fast as 300 kilometres an hour, going from Toronto to Montreal in just three hours and seven minutes, has appeal. Its proponents are boasting about the economic and environmental benefits it will bring to this heavily populated part of the country. But the fact that Alto, the Crown corporation in charge of creating the new high-speed rail network, hasn’t released a detailed cost-benefit analysis should set alarm bells ringing.

The project, which is currently in a pre-development and consultation stage and has yet to be approved by the federal government, is estimated to cost $60-billion to $90-billion. Assuming those numbers don’t escalate further (a generous assumption), $90-billion equates to over $5,000 for each Canadian household. The money would likely be borrowed by the federal government, adding to high and mounting debt loads.

Sure, a high-speed train would be nice, but a closer look at the project shows it’s just too expensive for the problem it solves. And in the meantime, Canadians are stuck with slow and unreliable service, much like the family in their rusty sedan. 

High-speed rail is a polarizing topic, but one thing nobody disputes is the dismal state of Canada’s current passenger train service, Via Rail.

A decade ago, the percentage of trains in its main Quebec City-Windsor corridor arriving on time was unimpressive: just 71 per cent hit the on-time benchmark, meaning they arrived within 15 minutes of the scheduled time. (The Ottawa-Montreal threshold is 10 minutes.)

But last year, on-time performance in the corridor sank to an abysmal 34 percent, as this first chart shows. The on-time performance of Via’s long distance and regional trains outside the corridor, at 52 per cent last year, was also poor. (Trains outside the corridor are considered on-time if they arrive within 30 to 60 minutes of the scheduled arrival, depending on the route.) 

Via trains operate primarily on busy freight railroad tracks, mainly those owned by the Canadian National Railway (CN), as well as on tracks owned by increasingly busy commuter rail services around Toronto and Montreal. The track owners give their own trains priority, so Via often has to pull over to wait for them to pass, causing delays.  

In October, 2024, CN imposed speed restrictions on Via’s new fleet of trains operating in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, saying they were not long and heavy enough to reliably activate safety barricades and lights at level crossings. Via says the “arbitrary” speed restrictions aren’t necessary. The issue is currently before the Superior Court of Quebec. A stopgap deal was reached allowing Via trains to travel at constant but slower speeds over longer segments, but it’s still dragging down on-time performance.

The speed restrictions are compounding Via’s ongoing problems. Last fall it said it had to pay $31-million in vouchers for passengers compensation, and ridership has dropped by 2.7 per cent since the disruption started, the first dip since the pandemic shutdowns.

CN is focused on its freight business, and has little motivation to take on liability risks or change its technologies and practices to help Via trains arrive on time. The freight companies have economic heft, given they transport $400-billion of goods a year, and passenger rail makes up just 5 per cent of railway revenues...

Reliability on Via will suffer as long as it doesn’t own its tracks. A new dedicated passenger rail line is needed to improve service – however, a premium high-speed rail link isn’t the only option...

The benefits to travellers and communities are pegged by Alto at around $49-billion over the 60-year appraisal period of the project – less than the $60-billion to $90-billion construction cost projection. But those benefits mostly come from time savings attributed to the faster and more reliable service, as well the value of lower greenhouse gas emissions and reduced automobile operations costs.

Alto also claims the planned seven-stop train route will boost Canada’s gross domestic product by 1.1 per cent, with productivity gains worth up to $35-billion. Not only will construction create employment, but Alto says the high-speed line will boost business efficiency by providing better access to jobs, and will lead to increased investment and housing development. Details on Alto’s site are thin, but it says the train network will boost Canada’s competitiveness and create new business opportunities. 

It all sounds amazing, but it prompts more questions than answers. Time savings are nice, but do they really make us richer? Given most of the stops are in major cities, will Alto really prompt new housing development? Will many people choose to commute between, say, Peterborough, Ont., and Toronto, and will that boost the economy? Will the project foster co-operation with Indigenous peoples by providing jobs, or will land acquisition create new tensions? Will massive tunnels or elevated sections be needed to get into Toronto and Montreal? And most important, will the project provide greater economic benefits than another project with a $90-billion price tag, or by leaving this massive sum of public money unspent?

Alto’s estimates of economic gains seem overly rosy when compared with estimates from the C.D. Howe Institute. The study by Tasnim Fariha and David Jones estimates the economic benefits would be between $15-billion and $27-billion over a 60-year period.

Even the more modest gains estimated in the C.D. Howe study are far from a sure thing. Using methodology typical in transportation projects, much of the benefit is attributed to time savings from increased reliability and satisfaction with punctuality. While these are benefits, putting a dollar figure on them can give the impression that these factors will generate wealth, but it’s not necessarily the case, if the time isn’t used to boost revenue in some way. The study’s figures were calculated assuming Alto’s ticket prices would be the same as Via’s – it warns that if the ticket price is 20 per cent higher, the estimated value of user benefits would fall by around 40 per cent.

The second biggest chunk of economic gains in the study is attributed to “agglomeration effects” – benefits that arise when firms and individuals are located closer to each other. This is believed to improve labour-market matching, and create efficiencies, for example, by having suppliers closer to customers, or researchers closer to innovative industries. While there certainly is value in being connected, these gains are not tangible ones like those the country would see by investing in, say, a new LNG terminal to get energy to market. 

In terms of ridership, Alto’s numbers look relatively optimistic. It says its high-speed service will attract 13 times more passengers annually than the current service, reaching 24 million passengers annually by 2055. As a result, it says the money from ticket sales will cover operations and maintenance costs, and unlike Via, it wouldn’t require any government subsidies once it is fully operating. 

However, a survey from McGill University transportation researchers indicates ridership is likely to be much lower, estimating it would reach 10.48 million passengers after 15 years of service in 2050. The researchers estimate that once operating, the project will require subsidies of around $1.28-billion a year, with the system not becoming self-sustaining until its 44th year.

A subsidy of a public project isn’t necessary a bad thing. The McGill study’s co-author, Prof. Ahmed El-Geneidy, points out that urban transit systems such as the Toronto Transit Commission and Société de transport de Montréal rely on them, and most highways are taxpayer funded – but there needs to be an honest discussion about it. Do we want to spend money luring people away from air travel, where they pay their own way, to take a taxpayer-subsidized rail service?

The projected $60-billion to $90-billion price tag to build the project also requires scrutiny. While it’s admittedly hard to estimate the costs for such a large project at this early stage, the fact that the initial range is so wide is troublesome. It would be no surprise if costs were to escalate beyond $90-billion. An EU audit found that cost overruns and delays were the norm in high-speed rail projects.

A worst-case scenario exists in California, where a high-speed rail line was supposed to be completed in 2020 to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles in fewer than three hours. The cost tripled, and the scaled-back project is now set to connect only two smaller cities by 2033. 

The case for Alto is mired in fantasy, but that doesn’t mean Canadians should continue suffering with substandard passenger rail. The Liberal government had been studying high-frequency rail, the less glamorous cousin of high-speed rail, since 2016, until prime minister Justin Trudeau announced the switch to a high-speed rail plan...

Ryan Katz-Rosene, an associate professor of political science at the University of Ottawa, says that once the government decided to build new passenger rail track, it became a slippery slope: “They wanted to make something truly transformative, but that was probably a mistake.”

High-frequency rail doesn’t have the romantic appeal of high-speed rail, but it would greatly improve service at a more reasonable cost. It would still involve building a new track solely for Via, but as it wouldn’t go as fast as high-speed rail, it could handle more curves, allowing more flexibility about where to build the route. High-speed rail is much more expensive to build, as it can’t stop quickly, necessitating tunnels and overpasses to avoid collisions, rather than at-grade crossings. It is also more disruptive for land owners and communities along the route, as there are limited places where the track can be crossed. 

In a recent submission to Alto’s public consultation, Prof. Jacques Roy at HEC Montréal and his co-authors say a high-frequency train would use tracks reserved for passenger trains, but mainly within the existing railway rights-of-way, offering a faster and more reliable service than the current system. It wouldn’t reach record speeds, but the high-frequency train would serve more stops along the line at around half the cost of a high-speed train. It could also be built much faster, perhaps in five years.

Prof. Roy is skeptical of Alto’s claim that high-speed rail would cost only 20 to 30 per cent more than high-frequency rail. While he agrees the high-speed option would attract more business travellers, he casts doubt about Alto’s ridership claims, which are partly based on assumptions that population in the corridor will rise 30 per cent by 2041. Given that population growth now is almost flat in Quebec, he doesn’t see that happening.

This second chart shows the estimated journey times between the high-frequency rail and high-speed rail options aren’t that far apart. The high-speed trip between Montreal and Toronto saves one hour and two minutes, when compared with a high-frequency train on a dedicated track. On a shorter trip, like between Montreal and Ottawa, the high-speed train route that will cost billions saves just 19 minutes.

There are lessons to be learned from an earlier experiment in high-speed rail half a century ago. In 1968, CN launched its “TurboTrain,” which in theory could hit 225 km/h, and travel between Montreal and Toronto in just four hours and 10 minutes on the existing tracks. The train cars were short and they tilted, so they could navigate the track’s curves. But the trains suffered from numerous technical problems, and they had to reduce speed at level crossings and wait for freight trains to pass, so were slower than anticipated. The last TurboTrain ran in 1982...

Leaving Alto as the only option to improve Canada’s passenger rail could result in paralysis. It’s just a matter of time before economic reality punctures the fantasy, and the mirage of supposed benefits dissipates. The project runs a high risk of getting halted before completion. In the meantime, Via is limping along. The fantasies of high-speed rail are diverting attention from fixes that could reverse the decline of the existing passenger rail system."

Links - 1st June 2026 (1 [including Orban in Jungary])

Thomas van Linge on X - "To say Viktor Orban was a democrat after all because he admitted defeat is quite a stretch considering he manipulated the entire electoral system to his hand and in the end fell victim to the monster of his own creation. Tisza only got 53% of the popular vote."
Ralph Schoellhammer on X - "The Labour Party of Keir Starmer only got 33% of the popular vote in 2025, yet he became PM with a majority of MPs. In 2024, the National Rally (RN) won the largest share of the popular vote in France but finished third in parliamentary seats. Are France and the UK autocracies?"

Climate Warrior🐬 #ClimateJustice🇵🇸🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 on X - "I lived in Hungary for several years under the Orbán dictatorship. The funny thing was, people could and did say whatever came into their heads, protests were held in front of the parliament, there was a gay cruise bar down the road and Orbán held elections. And yet, the country was a dictatorship. Whereas in the UK, people tend to be distinctly guarded and if they do say the wrong thing very publicly, they get locked up. And yet, it's a free country. Once you understand that words can mean whatever we want them to mean, it begins to make sense."

Philippe Lemoine on X - ""Emmanuel Macron armours France against an Orban-style takeover" If Orban packs Hungary's highest courts with ideologically and politically reliable judges, that's "democratic backsliding", but if Macron appoints a notoriously corrupt and incompetent loyalist to head France's constitutional court, where he will be able to systematically undermine the policies of Macron's successor for ideological reasons (even if he campaigned on them, they are overwhelmingly supported by public opinion and there is no serious legal argument for their unconstitutionality), that's a heroic act to protect democracy 😪"

Melissa Chen on X - "On the Hungarian elections: Hungary under Fidesz was a de facto one-party-dominant state in much the same way Singapore has been under the PAP for over 60 years. They are both electoral democracies and not the cartoon “autocracies” that the Western globalist elites describe. Both Fidesz and the PAP are parties that win elections repeatedly, often with supermajorities, because they actually govern for their citizens rather than chasing every globalist fad. One could argue that they've consolidated power through constitutional changes and media influence; voters, however, keep re-electing them because they deliver results and the alternatives look worse (until now). Lee Kuan Yew’s PAP model - strict laws, media self-censorship, meritocracy over Western-style “rights,” emphasis on order and national identity - is the exact template critics say Orbán copied. Yet Singapore gets polite editorials calling it “efficient or enlightened authoritarianism.” Meanwhile, Hungary gets called an autocracy and a threat to Europe. The usual suspects are screaming about "autocracy" because Orbán went against the grain on the European open border consensus - they built a border fence in 2015, slashed migration, boosted family subsidies, and told Brussels to go screw itself on gender ideology and refugee quotas (and paid a steep financial penalty for it). The domestic results are clear - lower illegal migration than peer countries, low crime, a cohesive society, and attempts at demographic recovery. So basically, none of them are really cheering for "democracy." They’re just cheering their team winning. How can they call it an autocracy when there have been fair elections, high turnout, and Orbán conceding when he lost? Now that the opposition won in a landslide with record turnout, it’s suddenly “the people have taken back their country!” It appears that democracy is whatever defeats anti-immigration, nationalist conservatives in Europe. I mean just look at the hypocrisy on display here:
> Hillary Clinton, who once called half of America “deplorables” and cheered color-revolution-style operations abroad, suddenly loves “democracy” (also russigate, anyone?)
> Gavin Newsom runs California like a one-party fiefdom with sky-high homelessness, crime, and out-migration, yet lectures Hungarians about “free press and human rights" lol
> Alex Soros whose family foundation has funded opposition groups across Eastern Europe for years, celebrates “rejection of foreign interference” with an EU flag emoji (hahahah)
> Tim Walz calls it “a big win for freedom.” The same guy who oversaw government overreach in his state during covid and who believes in policing misinformation and hate speech
I personally disagree vehemently with Orban's foreign policy positions but to keep calling Hungary an autocracy is exactly what the woke did with the word racist. They've diluted it to the point of futility. It means nothing anymore. Small countries like Hungary and Singapore prove you don’t need perfect Western liberal checkboxes to succeed. You need competent governance, cultural cohesion, and the willingness to make unpopular decisions and stick to them. Voters in both places have repeatedly validated that approach. They are not "autocracies." If you keep using that word it will come to mean nothing. The Western commentariat only freaks out when the “wrong” party does it - and only when it’s a European country that refuses to dissolve its borders and heritage on command."

Jason Kenney 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 on X - "Lots of weird takes on the Hungarian election result from both left and right here. Peter Magyar is a socially conservative immigration restrictionist who wants to cut taxes and double the defence budget. He criticized Orban for admitting too many guest workers, and wants to increase Hungary's already generous pro-natal incentives. On virtually every issue, his platform is well to the right of centre, by European standards. His foreign policy is to end Orban's alliance with Putin, remove the Hungarian veto on EU loans to Ukraine, normalize relations with the European Union while opposing more Euro integration, and strengthen relations with Eastern Europe's anti-Russian governments, e.g. Poland. His election was not a sudden shift to the left, but a rejection of Orban's corruption, the failure of his interventionist / statist economic policies, and the humiliation of his relationship with Putin."

Mario Zelaya on X - "LOL! 😂 Carney, Macron, Starmer, Obama & Tusk, ALL CONGRATULATED Magyar for defeating Orban. Carney called it a “victory for democracy”. Magyar’s first moves as PM-elect?
✅ Border is not strong enough
✅ 90% of EU demands rejected
✅ Ethnic Hungarian rights prioritized
✅ Told the state funded media, ON AIR, TO THEIR FACE, that their being defunded & called it propaganda
He used to work for Orban until 2024. Then left, became the “opposition” AND WON. He played 4D chess & Liberals took the bait. The EU celebrated thinking they finally got Hungary. They got Hungary alright. Just not the Hungary they wanted. 🤣 How can you not love this guy?"

Joey Mannarino on X - "Viktor Orban didn’t cancel any elections and never arrested people for social media posts. He also stepped down after his election loss and is partaking in a peaceful transfer of power. But, don’t forget, he was a dictator. Keir Starmer attempted to cancel about 1,000 local council elections next month and arrests about 12,000 people a year for social media posts. He also refused to let a rival run for a seat in a by-election because he was worried it would be a threat to his leadership. But, don’t forget, he’s a democratic leader."

Benny Johnson on X - "Muslim banner was draped over a 9/11 memorial in California advertising the Islamic section of the Memory Gardens Cemetery in Concord. Following huge outcry by the public, the insulting banner was recently removed. That it was ever placed there is outrageous."
Islamophobia!

Why the number of Islamic schools in Canada is soaring - "His office bears symbols of a dual identity: boxing gloves emblazoned with the Palestinian flag hang opposite a cabinet of ice-hockey memorabilia. That balance is tricky. “Assimilation,” he says, can be “dangerous if done blindly…you’re going to lose your own personal identity, your own connection with your ancestry.” Many Muslim parents across Canada share his anxiety. They worry that the country’s state-school system—which mostly separates religion from education, allowing religious schools to operate privately—may distance their children from Islamic values or expose them to Islamophobia. Most Muslim pupils attend the state system, but data from the Islamic Schools Association of Canada show rising enrolment for private Islamic schools. There are long waiting-lists for existing schools and new ones are opening fast... State-school systems are responding to the critique. School boards in Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia have adopted anti-Islamophobia policies. Some go further. The Waterloo Region District School Board in Ontario reportedly has promoted an “Islamic Apparel Store”, selling merchandise emblazoned with slogans such as “One Ummah, One Love” (Ummah means “nation” or “community” in Arabic). Canada’s private schools must follow the curriculum set by their province. This is meant to uphold standards in maths, science and social studies. Mr Abougouche says Islamic schools have to get “a little creative” in order to integrate Islamic lessons. At Tarbiyah Elementary School near Toronto study of the water cycle in science lessons is interspersed with discussion about water being a blessing from Allah. Maths lessons at most Islamic schools will highlight the influence of Muslim mathematicians. At Albushra School in Ottawa social-studies classes promise to “highlight the rich tapestry of Islamic civilisation” through “literature, poetry and storytelling”. Mr Abougouche says social-studies classes seek to compare the plight of indigenous Canadians with the experience of modern-day Muslims. Many Islamic schools extend the school day so pupils can learn to recite the Koran. Often, such sessions are not optional. At Ecole Ibn Batouta, also in Ottawa, students must aim to memorise at least one chapter of the Koran per year, and are encouraged to learn more. Ahmed (not his real name), a 17-year-old Ghanaian attending ICE Islamia School in Toronto, proudly sports a white kufi and a flowing Moroccan thobe. “I like to be seen as a Muslim,” he says. Going to Islamia lets him keep a closed circle of friends; he has found that non-Muslim teens are often taken aback by his faith and make him feel left out. His school friends challenge each other to read the whole Koran over Ramadan. Public educators and sociologists worry that accommodation of this preference for Muslim-only friendship groups may harm social cohesion. Not all pupils are like Ahmed, notes Ali Khan, his principal. He deals with kids who are “forced to be” at the school by their parents. “We try to make the best of it,” he says. Some he persuades of the benefits of Islamic education; others drift back to the state system. Parents don’t get everything they want. In Edmonton Mr Abougouche notes that he resisted demand for classes segregated by sex. Some schools allow parents to decide whether their daughters wear hijabs. Others have policies requiring them. One school in Winnipeg demands girls wear hijabs after they turn ten. Education about sex and gender is another point of friction. Some state curriculums now require schools to teach pupils about gay, lesbian and transgender people. Many Muslim schools ignore the directive. Segregation is not absolute. Mr Abougouche says links with non-Muslim schools ensure that pupils mix with children who are different from them. “We create a bubble that is there to protect them,” he says. “But we also recognise if you don’t allow them to step out of that bubble, it’s equally as dangerous.” Lunch is poutine, a classic Canadian dish. Pupils file into the mosque to pray, boys separate from girls."
Clearly, this proves that Muslims are moderate, well-integrated and secular

Ban on child marriage is deemed 'un-Islamic' by Pakistan's religious leaders - "Pakistan's Council of Islamic Ideology - a prominent body that advises the government of the Muslim majority nation 'whether or not a certain law is repugnant to Islam' - has opposed the bill. The council said in a statement published Tuesday: 'Declaring marriage below the age of eighteen as child abuse and prescribing punishments for it, and other controversial provisions, are not in line with Islamic injunctions... The bill was passed after several female politicians who were married off as minors shared their personal support. Pakistan ranks among the top 10 countries with the highest absolute number of women who were married before the age of 18 - more than 20 million. Data compiled by activist group Girls Not Brides and Pakistan's National Institute of Population Studies suggest nearly 1 in 5 women in Pakistan (18%) are married before the age of 18, and 4% before the age of 15."
Time to go on about US states that allow minors to get married, since per capita is only important when it makes white people look bad (not to mention we need to pretend that there are equal amounts of coercion in both places)

So the only way to fly from Canada to Cuba is through Miami now? : r/TravelCuba - "I need to go get some paperwork in Havana to process my daughter's application for canadian citizenship. She is a toddler and while I love Cuban people, that country has no future and children shouldn't be raised in such a precarious economy if they have the opportunity to grow and thrive elsewhere. Her mom thinks the same. The only flights to Havana I'm seeing departing from Montreal have a stopover in Miami (American Airlines). I rather not go through the US, for obvious reasons. There are flights from Montreal with a stopover in Panama (Copa Airlines), but those stopovers are 10-15 hour long which is not practical. Only decent options are with a dominican airline (roundrip from Canada to DR, then within that roundrip I'd book ANOTHER roundrip between DR to Cuba with Air Century). Can anyone think of other flight options? Thanks"
When you hate the US / have bought into the hysteria so much, you go to great lengths to inconvenience yourself

Pediatrician who traded sex for prescriptions blames Holocaust; judge rejects excuse - "For years, pediatrician Craig Spiegel worked out of a medical building near DePaul Hospital in Bridgeton, where patients reported the doctor offered prescriptions for sex or sexual pictures... Spiegel apologized in court but partly blamed his behavior on losing family in the Holocaust. The judge said that was an offensive excuse and sentenced Spiegel to 20 years in prison."

French election: Far right takes 55 new municipalities as left bickers - "Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella and their allies took control of 310 cities across the country. The Socialist Party, meanwhile, finds itself at a crossroads after many of its ad-hoc alliances with the hard-left France Unbowed fell flat."
Time to condemn the whole country as Far Right, and to stage a coup to Save Democracy

Threads - "ACAB includes snitches that call the cops when someone gets shot when they try to steal or destroy someone else's property"
Threads - "ACAB includes anyone who sides with the oppressive systems over people."
Commies' list of people to execute after the Revolution steadily gets longer

TIL a Harvard study found that hiring one highly productive ‘toxic worker’ does more damage to a company’s bottom line than employing several less productive, but more cooperative, workers. : r/todayilearned
Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High
This has interesting implications for people who keep complaining about their "idiot" colleagues

It's often claimed that masturbation saps the body of testosterone, but in a study of young well-trained male athletes, masturbation prior to a strength test was associated with higher testosterone levels compared to abstinence. : r/psychologyofsex - "Also, when exercising post-masturbation, the athletes had better cycling endurance and showed a small increase in grip strength when compared with abstinence. Researchers attributed the improved performance to the athletes' higher sympathetic nervous system activity – due to their more aroused state – which offered small, short-lived increases."

Fake violinist high tech winners. : r/richmondhill - "The violin plays itself when he bent to pickup someones money."
"we need to collectively stop giving money to people in york region to people at plazas, grocery stores, the plaza exits or those people who beg while waiting at left turns. its an organized ring"
"But then how am I supposed to delude myself into thinking I'm not just a vapid, empty, morally-bankrupt cockroach if I don't virtue signal, engage in performative empathy and spend the rest of the afternoon patting myself on the back repeating the mantra, "you're a good person. You did a good thing. You deserve a klondike bar"?"

Meme - "why do you care so much about this man, it's irrelevant, it's not real, it doesn't affect anything at all. you're so weird for getting worked up about this thing lol that's only for you though. I still really really really really really really really want to get my way with this thing no matter what"
e.g. left wingers claiming other people shouldn't care about trans issues

Meme - "DONUT OR CERVIX"

What Makes Europe Better than America? - "The U.S. and Europe really do have two different understandings of what it means to be human, and this manifests in our rules, regulations, and social preferences. While both the U.S. and Europe share a commitment to classical liberalism and democracy, we have very different definitions of the public good, and therefore very different views of what we want from life. In broad terms, the U.S. emphasizes material wealth, opportunity, and indivifdual liberty, while Europe places more value on community health, shared resources, and a sense of place. From the European perspective, the U.S. is built on the cult of the individual, which is why it has too many guns, obscenely large cars, inadequate public transportation systems, and dysfunctional public spaces. From the U.S perspective, Europeans are held back by a vision of the common good that means stealing from the successful to prop up the losers, which is why they are unmotivated, unproductive slackers who would rather sip coffee all day than work. This difference isn’t just about policy on taxes, healthcare, or labor rights—it’s about how we understand the “good life” and how our physical environments reflect that. If individual liberty is the priority, as it is in the U.S., then the public sphere can largely be ignored. It is a place you have to pass through on your way from your workplace to your home, which is big enough to serve as a social space. The result is public spaces in the U.S. are given short shrift, with little appreciation for their aesthetics. Thus today, despite our immense natural and material beauty, large parts of the U.S. are ugly, soulless, and dehumanizing—a landscape of bland housing developments, strip malls, and franchise stores that look as though they were dropped from the sky into bulldozed land, with no regard for the surrounding environment. This isn’t to say Europe doesn’t also have its own suburban sprawl or dehumanizing architecture. It does—especially in the Netherlands—but even in these places, there’s a lingering respect for beauty and the need to publicly socialize. If the state doesn’t provide social spaces, family-run businesses do, because the citizens demand it. Nor is it to say all of America is ugly. There are pockets of beauty—neighborhoods, cafés, and restaurants with a European level of aesthetic appreciation—but these are exceptions, often built for wealthy and educated elites. By contrast, if you find yourself stuck—as I have been—in a random town in France, Germany, Italy, or the Netherlands, you will almost always find a café, restaurant, or park that offers something uplifting. You can sit, have a decent meal, and relax without being immersed in banality. That simply isn’t the case in the U.S. Beyond being depressing, this homogeneity means much of America feels indistinguishable from place to place. When I was in that hotel in Atlanta, I could have been in any city in the country. In Europe, however, there’s still a genius loci—a spirit of place—that persists, even in areas not known for their historical significance. You don’t need to be in a famous part of Paris or a picturesque Lombardy village to detect an area’s unique identity—though that certainly helps. Belonging depends on being part of something larger than yourself, and in Europe, this is tied to a cultural heritage that stretches back millennia. The U.S, with its relative youth and diversity, lacks this connection—and instead, its obsession with wealth has made us a nation of fragmented communities.

SightBringer on X - "⚡️Europe is going to stop being a serious civilization within this generation and almost nobody is willing to say it in those terms. Europe is actually ending as the thing it has been for the last five hundred years. The continent that produced the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, global empire, liberal democracy, and most of the intellectual and cultural inheritance the modern world runs on is genuinely going away. What replaces it will share some of the same geography and some of the same languages but it will not be the same civilization. The six weeks of jet fuel is not the story. The story is that this is the visible consequence of a civilization that has lost the will to sustain itself. Europe stopped having children. Europe stopped producing its own energy. Europe stopped defending itself militarily. Europe stopped building industrial capacity. Europe stopped growing its economies in real terms. Europe stopped believing in its own cultural inheritance enough to transmit it to the next generation. Each of those is individually a crisis. Together they are civilizational suicide in slow motion. The demographic collapse is the terminal condition. 1.3 to 1.5 fertility for a generation means the native population will halve within two generations. Replacement migration from culturally distinct populations is not continuity of the civilization. It’s substitution. The continent will still exist. The population will be different. The culture will be different. The political systems built around the old population will be under stress they weren’t designed to handle. This is happening now and it’s not reversible because the children who would have been the Europeans of 2060 simply were not born. The energy crisis is the near term manifestation of a deeper rot. Europe built its prosperity on cheap Russian gas and cheap Middle Eastern oil while taking moral stances against both. It shut down its own nuclear capacity. It limited domestic extraction. It bet that the transition to renewables would happen faster than the old supply chains would fail. It lost that bet. Now it’s rationing energy in its wealthiest cities and telling citizens to stay home in pajamas to save fuel. A continent that was producing most of the world’s advanced manufacturing in 1990 is now debating whether to run the air conditioning. That’s not a crisis. That’s a collapse. The military situation is the silent emergency that will determine everything else. Europe has functionally disarmed over the last thirty years. NATO defense spending is a fiction in most European countries. Ammunition stockpiles are months, not years. Industrial capacity to produce military equipment at scale doesn’t exist. The continent cannot defend itself from Russia without American support and American support is not reliable. If the US decides Europe’s security is Europe’s problem, which Trump has been explicit about, Europe has no independent capability to protect itself. A continent that can’t defend itself is not a civilization. It’s a protectorate."

Fossils in Greece Suggest Human Ancestors Evolved in Europe, Not Africa - "A recent analysis of fossils recovered in the 1990s in the village of Nikiti in northern Greece supports the controversial theory that apes, the ancestors of humans, evolved in Southeastern Europe instead of Africa. The 8 or 9-million-year-old fossils had first been linked to the extinct ape called Ouranopithecus."

Wrath Of Gnon on X - "Sustainable forestry: lumber without cutting down trees. Daisugi is a Japanese forestry technique where specially planted cedar trees are pruned heavily (think of it as giant bonsai) to produce "shoots" that become perfectly uniform, straight and completely knot free lumber."

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