Links - 23rd October 2024 (1 - General Wokeness [including tests for jobs as discrimnatory])

Thread by @wanyeburkett on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I remember once being at a bar with a good friend, a good, kind person, and telling her that I had to leave because I was conducting some technical interviews at work the next morning and wanted to be sure I was well rested. She was asking a bit about it, and as I described the process, which by tech standards wasn’t all that rigorous, but which did involve more than one technical round, you could see her face kind of scrunch up. The whole thing clearly sounded elitist and snobby distasteful to her; and after all, “you’re just my buddy who hangs at the bar where we’re all equals, who do you even think you are that you can gatekeep a job in this way?”  The feeling was unmistakable, like that feeling you get when you’re on a date and you know you’re not impressing.  This is the emotion on a broader scale that is underlying a lot of liberal thinking about immigration. When you start talking about vetting, about standards, about earning potential, even about criminality, their faces start to crunch up like, “who do you think you are, anyway? Who are you to judge other human beings? To put a measure on their worth?”  They feel this way about job interviews, about college admissions, about immigration policy. This is why you get into these weird debates where they try to beat you on a technicality with the language of legality. None of that is real, or at least it’s not primary. What’s primary is that feeling they get when you start talking like this. They are extremely emotional about it and the policy follows from the emotion. It’s primary, immediate, reflexive. It’s all in the way their face scrunches up when you mention it. The idea that they’ve arrived at that position because they understand the contours of the debate better than you, because they know the law, because they have looked at all the data, because they’re just simply moron, gosh darn it, couldn’t be more absurd. Their face scrunches up when you start talking aboutstandards in admissions. It’s involuntary, reflexive. Every single piece of data they’ve ever learned about immigration is marshaled in defense of that initial lowering of the eyes and raising of the corners of their mouth. I think the most charitable thing you can say about this is that if you felt that feeling, then you would be equally suspicious of anybody who didn’t. It would feel to you internally like an expression of basic kindness and openness to humanity and an absence of it would present as a form of casual sociopathy.  It would take a unique kind of person who was both pretty smart and very good at decoupling their own immediate emotional reactions from policy to feel as they do and not draw that conclusion about the other side. So of course almost none of them are able to avoid it. My view, of course, is that some amount of this feeling is innate. Some of that innateness is genetic, some of it random. You can be more or less predisposed toward this feeling; and then there is the culture, your friends, what is valued by the institutions you inhabit, what you’re taught in school, what is valued by the society. I think this latter portion is fairly large. We know that people don’t always feel this way in every setting and the people within our own country don’t feel this way in equal measure everywhere. Some of that is down to selection effects, sure, but I think culture plays a big part."
Left wingers really think everyone is equally talented, so disparate outcomes must be due to discrimination or oppression

Meme - Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil: "Lots of people are saying this is frivolous because firefighters should have to pass some test, but let's go ahead and look at some test questions so you can see why this test is just way too hard.  This first one's a doozy:"
"A firefighter determines that 350 feet of hose is needed to reach a particular building. If the hoses are 60 feet in length, what is the minimum number of lengths of hose needed?
A. 3
B. 4
C. 5
D. 6"
DOJ Civil Rights Division @CivilRights: "Justice Department Secures Agreement with Durham, North Carolina, to End Discriminatory Hiring Practices in City’s Fire Department"
You're no longer allowed to discriminate against the lazy and the stupid

DOJ Tells Four Police, Fire Departments That It’s Racist To Expect Employees To Know Basic Math - "The Biden-Harris Department of Justice has undertaken a slew of lawsuits against local police and fire departments alleging that it is racist to require hires entrusted with public safety to know basic math. The lawsuits undermine Kamala Harris’s attempts to brand herself as a moderate... employing the theory of “disparate impact,” the radical theory that holds that anytime there are statistical racial disparities, racism must be the cause — even if no one can explain how... Most blacks generally pass the tests, and the lawsuits do not explain how the tests can be racist against only some blacks. Blacks who passed the tests are excluded from the financial payouts... While the DOJ said the tests were not relevant to actually being a good firefighter, an online practice test suggests that it is directly relevant, that people could die if such firefighters were hired. One question asks if a building is 350 feet away, how many 60-foot hoses would be needed... the DOJ forced Maryland State Police to pay $2.75 million to women who were barred from being officers because they couldn’t pass physical fitness exams testing, for example the ability to run quickly, and blacks who couldn’t pass a written test. The test that the DOJ says is racist is designed to ensure that cops are at least as smart as an elementary school student and can serve residents by, for example, adding up the total value of stolen property when items were stolen valued at $400, $40, $1,500, and $100. When police officers who don’t meet basic standards are hired, they sometimes abuse members of the public, sometimes resulting in still more accusations of racism if those members of the public are black. Last year, the media pointed to Memphis police allegedly repeatedly beating people as an example of police brutality — but it turned out that the police were all black and were hired despite not meeting the usual standards required for the position. After D.C. Mayor Marion Barry made firehouses in the nation’s capital a racial spoils program, firefighters repeatedly turned out to be gun-toting, violent criminals. Public outrage over the hiring program culminated in 2014 after a 77-year old man had a heart attack directly in front of a fire station and begged for help, but none of the firefighters ran to his aid. His family sued for $7 million."

TheBlaze on X - "Female, black applicants who failed Maryland State Police tests likely to receive $2.75M in backpay from discrimination suit"

Frank DeScushin on X - "The US government sued Maryland's State Police because the physical test to become a trooper saw women fail at a higher rate than men, and the written test saw Blacks fail at a higher rate than Whites.   If Title VII of the Civil Rights Act requires proportionate pass rates, then nearly all qualification tests are illegal, and Title VII necessarily lowers profession standards. Title VII is based on the idea that all groups are the same and will thus pass tests at the same rate, but the tests themselves consistently show this isn't so. Similar happened several years back when the USDOJ sued New York City’s Fire Department because Black and Hispanic candidates failed the written test at a higher rate than Whites. Those non-white candidates who failed were awarded $98 million dollars between them."

Crémieux on X - "Lots of people attacking  this decision, but do you think YOU could pass the POST? Here's a thread of test questions. Question 1:"

Geoffrey Miller on X - "Pop quiz: Explain how the Supreme Court decision in Griggs v Duke Power Co (1971) explains most of what wrong with American meritocracy, academia, & college tuition costs in the last 50 years."
i/o on X - "If an employer isn't legally permitted to use the most reliable measure of mental ability that exists (IQ tests) when hiring employees for cognitively-demanding positions, it will be limited to less reliable proxy indicators of intelligence like the quality of colleges attended and GPA. This encourages credentialism and boosts the value of a college degree, thereby increasing the demand for undergraduate and graduate-level education, which gives colleges an opportunity to raise tuition costs faster than the overall inflation rate. The extra dollars brought in with increased tuition get increasingly pushed into peripheral administrative activities (like DEI) unrelated to the essential function of a university, and into boutique and heavily-ideological areas of studies."

Crémieux on X - "In 1939, a class of NYPD officers was selected based on Civil Service Exam scores. At that point, it was the department's most Jewish class ever (a third was Jewish!) and it had a lot more women than previous classes too. It produced unusually capable officers."

Jonatan Pallesen on X - "Blacks score about a standard deviation lower in tests on average. This is simply a fact. We can see this on the medical exams, going as far back as we have data:
Recently, we could see on the Fireman test that the difference was about 1 SD on average. It's also true for the SATs, and has been historically. Or any other test that estimates aspects of problem-solving. Singling out one test (such as the police exam) and saying that the difference in test scores on that specific test is due to discrimination, when this difference is present on all tests, makes no sense."
The woke cope is that all tests are discriminatory

Daniel Friedman on X - "The way to break the universities hold is to overturn Griggs v. Duke Power, the case that held that employers may not subject job applicants to tests that have a disparate racial impact. By banning tests, this decision made degrees a proxy for intelligence."

i/o on X - "The cognitive disadvantage of blacks (which is scientifically not in dispute) is turning out to be a gold mine for some of them. This is the fourth case in the last few years that I'm aware of in which blacks have used their lousy performance on a test of mental ability to sue for racial discrimination.   The American Psychological Association says there's a 15-point mean IQ gap between whites and blacks. No reputable intelligence scientist disputes the existence of the gap.  The society we live in is corrupted by sentimental and scientifically unsupported notions of equal group abilities. This is the most recent example of where this is leading us."

Meme - Jeremy Kauffman @jeremykauffman: "3 out of 10 black applicants for police jobs in Maryland were unable to pass a standardized test. Because almost all whites passed, black applicants sued and won a $2.75m settlement. 25 failing blacks will also be hired for police jobs. This is the math section of the test:"
Adventures of the Land North @4guys_dryrubgym: "How is this a serious test?  This has to be a joke. This is literally 2nd grade math"
Ironically, a lot of the people who are against this test also mock the police for not wanting to hire people who are too smart

Meme - "Peter Dinklage after complaining about the Snow White remake using dwarves only for them to become CGI and take 7 jobs away from dwarf actors"
"I miscalculated."

Meme - "this is gross objectification"
"It's for Incels"
"actually its fun"
"let us enjoy it too incel"
"actually this is for the girlies"
*We are here*
"This always belonged to us, you are the invaders"

Meme - "WHAT DO WE WANT?!"
"FREE SPEECH & EQUALITY!!"
"FOR EVERYONE?!"
"NO, JUST FOR US!!"
"THAT'S NOT FREE SPEECH & EQUALITY!!"
"YOU'RE RACIST!!"

Meme - Wesley Yang @wesyang: "If you deceive enough people about what the law says, you have effectively changed the law for the vast majority of situations that never reach a court"
Razib 🥥 Khan 🧬 📘✍️📱 @razibkhan: "most ppl are retarded, not just tim walz"
""The United States Constitution has laws against hate speech" % saying "True" by Sex and Generation"
Gen Z are better informed than MIllennials and Gen X, but Boomers are the best informed. And men are more informed than women. Ironic, given the relentless mocking of men and "boomers"

Thread by @L0m3z on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Researching some stuff on the Great Awokening and decided to revisit the Charlie Hebdo murders and various responses to it. This open letter to PEN written by Teju Cole and co-signed by hundreds of other mainstream writers like Joyce Carol Oates is as striking now as it was when I read it 10 years ago.  This was an early indication for me that something was very very wrong in the world of American intellectual life and that we were headed down a dark path.  The context here is hat PEN awarded Charlie Hebdo with a "Courage" award in the aftermath of the murders. Hardly a provocation from a Free Speech organization. But the signatories of this letter didn't like that. Sure, the Hebdo cartoonists were brutally slaughtered for drawing a picture, but, well they were ... racists!  This really is a perfect encapsulation of the who/whom logic that would become the engine of the Great Awokening.  Other thing about Charlie Hebdo, it was the first time I saw the NPC update happen in real time...  Right thinking people were initially appalled and supported CH unconditionally. But over the days and weeks that followed, they changed their views to align with the letter above I observed this with personal acquaintances. Smart libs inside of academia. Their instincts were right. This wasn't complicated or nuanced at all. But very quickly they lost the courage to say so directly. Suddenly this was a moral gray area.  It really was shocking to see."
Left wing/woke preference falsification and virtue signalling in action

Meme - Pirat_Nation @Pirat_Nation: "A modder "whitewashed" Angrboda from God of War Ragnarok, but the files did not last even an hour on NexusMods and were removed by moderators Source: https://reddit.com/r/Games_Piracy"
The modder "whitewashed" the dark-skinned Angrboda from God of War Ragnarok, but the files did not last even an hour on NexusMods : r/Games_Piracy - "On September 19, the long-awaited release of the PC version of the game God of War Ragnarok took place and many fans of the Kratos universe were waiting in anticipation for the correction of some inaccuracies of the developers that could not be corrected on console platforms, to which already in 2022 there were complaints from players during the release of the project on PlayStation .  Just a few days later, an enthusiast named Comic Fan shared concepts and unfinished files for the dark-skinned heroine of God of War Ragnarok with white skin, to bring her closer to the description from Norse mythology. But just an hour later, the alternative version of Angbroda was deleted by NexusMods moderators without explanation.  The author himself did not despair and decided to post his vision of the heroine on another resource called Gamebanana, but in the end his work suffered the same fate, and the moderators of the portal called the work of the 3D modeler “discrimination” and “trolling.”"
You're only allowed to raceswap in one direction. This is what preventing "harm" amounts to
Only fascists believe in faithfulness to the source material

Meme - ""I can't believe I have monkeypox. How did this happen?"
The entire month of June: South Park: *huge clusterfuck*"

Meme - Buck Sexton @BuckSexton: "Really all the Soviets needed to do was convince Americans that criticizing communism was "hate speech" and they could have won the Cold War"

I hate hate speech laws | The Spectator - "For far more than any race, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference or nationality against which I might harbour some irrational prejudice, what I hate is hate speech laws.  Hatred is an emotion. It is not the business of the state to legislate how we feel or to make us into nice people by fiat. True freedom of expression entails the right to say things that others find disagreeable. I may believe fervently in the existence of Israel, but I believe just as fervently in the right of anyone else to say that they don’t believe in it or even that the country is racist. Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are preposterous – hyperbolic, rhetorically impoverished and historically illiterate. But we should never stop the trite, the poorly educated and the feeble-minded from embarrassing themselves. By advertising their deficiencies, they do the rest of us a service. Deeming a statement hateful is a supremely subjective exercise. Britain characterises as a hate crime anything the ostensible victim claims is a hate crime, which is legally absurd, relying as it does on no objective, statutorily specific standard. This eye-of-the-beholder definition is a formula for the pursuit of frivolous litigation and petty personal vendetta.   Hate speech laws are naturally expansive and grow only more prohibitive. Scotland has criminalised speech in your own home. Pending legislation in Canada would criminalise what you might say. In flagrant defiance of the bedrock democratic principle of equality under the law, the UK’s list of ‘protected characteristics’ grows ever longer. The population sheltered under the Equality Act’s clumsy umbrella could soon extend to all Britons who aren’t straight white men. Even the holding of certain opinions, such as belief in the reality of biological sex, is now ‘protected’. The answer isn’t to protect still more opinions, but to protect all opinions, including nasty or wrongheaded ones, and scrap the Act.   These laws easily slippery-slope to criminalising ideas. If you criticise the Islamic faith as predatory and intolerant, isn’t that anti-Muslim? It’s a commonplace for the media to conflate being anti-immigration with being anti-immigrant. By now, we’re all exhausted by the never-ending debate over whether being anti-Zionism or anti-Israel is unavoidably anti-Semitic. We can keep arguing, but it shouldn’t be up to the state to settle that dispute.   In outlawing crude statements of bigotry such as ‘I hate black people’ (curiously, you might get away with ‘I hate white people’), hate speech laws also imperil assertions with more nuance. How about, ‘The animosity and hypersensitivity of the BLM era has made me racist’ – which I’ve heard from more than one party. Should saying that be illegal?   In Britain, the prosecution of utterances, posters and tweets has distracted the police from pursuing actual criminals. But the blank page is the ultimate safe space. Words aren’t violence, any more than silence is. The US does sensibly disallow incitement to violence, which would apply to multiple anti-Israel protestors who’ve called for killing Jews. Short of that, expressions of bilious or vitriolic ideas can act as a safety valve. Better ugly speech than ugly acts.   I can’t think of a country that’s ever plunged into tyranny because it gave its citizens excessive latitude to say what they think, including the right to say mean things. Demagoguery and totalitarianism thrive on restriction and suppression of dissent. The most horrible places to live are those where you keep your mouth shut, you watch your back even in private and you live in terror of letting slip some stray remark that will destroy your livelihood and your reputation, perhaps even landing you in jail. Which sounds like just the sort of place that pending legislation in Ireland and Canada aims to manifest. It sounds like Scotland right now."

Meme - "SECRET INGREDIENT/ FOXFORD COMICS 2024"
*Soyjak gets 3 tacos made by a white person and is upset*
*Soyjak gets 3 identical tacos in an identical setting, but made by a brown person, and is excited*

Wilfred Reilly on X - "Robin D'Angelo, Saira Rao and all of these similar people were obvious grifting morons all along.  D'Angelo, specifically, just deleted her socials after her $15,000/hr fee was exposed. I would genuinely love to see her - indeed, her whole field's - reaction to an IQ test score.   There is no/almost no "American systemic racism" in 2024. The most successful Yanks are Asian, Indian, Nigerian, and Jewish. What we have been doing is paying very stupid people to scare us with outlines of old ghosts."
On "Am I Racist?"

Meme - Parkrose Community United Church of Christ: "Project 2025 should be called Project 666"
Left wingers usually get very upset when churches get involved in politics. Turn out that's only when they're not pushing the left wing agenda

Labour MP Dawn Butler shares video with ‘celebratory collage’ of murderers and rapists - "In spoken verse, she refers to an unnamed foe as being “the wrong one, the violent one, the weird one,” before saying that she is “the Chosen One, Because I am of the First Ones.”  In the Spectator magazine, Melanie McDonagh said: “What I think she is saying is that because human civilisation originated in Africa and her own ethnic origins are African … she is a cut above the rest of us.” The footage attracted widespread criticism on X, with critics describing it as racist and offensive.  GB News can now reveal that the post also included stills of controversial black American activists and criminals.  The video includes portraits of cop-killing fugitive Assata Shakur and controversial Nation of Islam figure Khalid Abdul Muhammad.  Shakur is one of the FBI’s so-called "Most Wanted Terrorists" after she escaped custody in 1979 following a conviction for murdering a police officer. Muhammad gave a speech in 1993 in which he referred to Jews as the “bloodsuckers” of blacks and called the Pope a “no-good cracker”.  He also called for all white South Africans to be murdered after a 24-hour warning period.  The clip also includes a still of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who murdered Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981.  Several leaders of the Black Panther movement also feature in the footage, named below, while “my skin is my protection” is shown across the screen as Butler continues her spoken verse.  The footage also appears to glorify Eldridge Cleaver, a convicted serial rapist, who considered raping white women an “insurrectionary act”. In his 1968 book Soul on Ice, a collection of essays written while imprisoned, he said: “It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women - and this point, I believe was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman.”  He continued: “I felt I was getting revenge. From the site of the act of rape, consternation spreads outwardly in concentric circles. I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race.”...  Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert, director of anti-racist campaign group Don’t Divide Us, said the footage was “offensive rubbish” and questioned the Government’s silence on the matter.  “Her ‘celebratory collage’ includes American activists who have been convicted of murder, rape, and openly espoused antisemitism.  “This is an elected British MP uncritically and publicly endorsing criminals and racial thinking. The American civil rights movement deserved better, and so do we.”  She added: “Butler is saying black people are superior to white people.  “It is good that she has exposed her racism for us to see. The Government’s silence on this speaks volumes about its cynical use of racism/anti-racism to police the words of many while giving free reign to the likes of Butler.  “If Black History Month gives a green light to this offensive rubbish, it's high time for it to go.”"  Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert, director of anti-racist campaign group Don’t Divide Us, said the footage was “offensive rubbish” and questioned the Government’s silence on the matter.  “Her ‘celebratory collage’ includes American activists who have been convicted of murder, rape, and openly espoused antisemitism.  “This is an elected British MP uncritically and publicly endorsing criminals and racial thinking. The American civil rights movement deserved better, and so do we.”  She added: “Butler is saying black people are superior to white people.  “It is good that she has exposed her racism for us to see. The Government’s silence on this speaks volumes about its cynical use of racism/anti-racism to police the words of many while giving free reign to the likes of Butler.  “If Black History Month gives a green light to this offensive rubbish, it's high time for it to go.”

Harrison Pitt on X - "One minute: “I’m just as British as you, racists!”
The next: “You ghastly Brits will pay for what you’ve done to my beautiful, mahogany-skinned people. How dare you blaspheme against the sanctity of God’s chosen global majority!”"
GB News on X - "'There's no apology whatsoever and there is silence from the Labour Party.' @CDP1882 calls out the Labour Party for their 'silence' over Dawn Butler MP posting a black history month video featuring murderers and rapists, which has now been deleted."

Meme - Jack Hadfield 🇬🇧 @JackHadders: "It’s incredibly radicalising to see a sitting MP for the governing party posting retarded hotep-tier nonsense on her social media.  Who’s put this together for her? Do they have access to Parliament? A sensible country would have them monitored for extremism"
"YOU SEE THIS SKIN I'M IN? I AM THE CHOSEN ONE"

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani: How can Iran still legally stone women to death? - "I watched this sickening film yesterday morning. Posted on the internet by a human rights group, it shows the execution in Tehran of two Iranians convicted of adultery."
If you condemn this, you're racist, ethnocentric, xenophobic and Islamophobic

Meme - Harry Robinson @HarryLotusEater: "Ahh yes, because Emily Brontë, who lived and died in a Yorkshire valley, clearly meant Sub-Saharan when she wrote that Heathcliff was ‘dark’."
"Wuthering Heights adaptation stirs controversy after white actor is chosen to play Heathcliff. Emily Brontë fans criticise casting of Jacob Elordi to play ‘dark-skinned’ character in film starring Margot Robbie"

Thread by @lara_e_brown on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The claim Heathcliff was "one of the most famous people of colour in literature" is a fundamentally absurd misreading of Wuthering Heights.  It emerges from a misunderstanding of the Victorian use of the descriptor "dark"  🧵thread on what Brontë (and other writers) meant.
To start with - it's pretty clear that Linton Heathcliff is probably not a "person of colour".  He is described in Ch. 19 as a "pale, delicate, effeminate boy". Earlier, in ch. 3 Brontë claims his face is "as white as the wall behind him". So why does this claim keep popping up?  Heathcliffe is described as a "dark-skinned gipsy in aspect"  (aspect here almost certainly referencing his appearance - not a known fact about his origins, which are a mystery over the course of the novel). Mr Linton also hypothesises Heathcliff might be "a little Lascar, or American or Spanish castaway".  This is a derision of his character - based on Heathcliff's apparent back story as a foundling adopted from the streets of Liverpool. Describing a character as "dark skinned" is a clear Victorian shorthand for the Byronic Hero.  Heathcliff is a typical Byronic Hero (as first exemplified in 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage').  He is at arms length from polite society, wild, and unsettling. Descriptions of Heathcliff as a "gipsy" also centre around status - another way to denigrate a character as an outcast.  George Elliot's Maggie Tulliver is described repeatedly as "like a gipsy". This is not a comment on her race - but her wild instincts and lower status. It is feasible that Heathcliff's mother may have been a gipsy (we don't know who she is!) - but here it's worth noting that Victorian traveller communities were usually English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish (or possibly descended from Romanies in Europe).
It's also worth noting that if Heathcliff was discernibly Irish - then Emily Brontë may not have regarded his as "white". Victorian attitudes on this question are worlds apart from modern conceptions.  Heathcliff probably simply had recognisably Mediterranean features. Probably most importantly - claims that Heathcliff was a "person of colour" forget how stratified Victorian society was.  Heathcliff marries Isabella Linton -a woman from a wealth and respectable society -18th c. Yorkshire was not a place that would have allowed such a union. This isn't to say that Heathcliff being mixed race isn't something one couldn't read into the text, or that films shouldn't cast ethnic minority actors to play him.  But it's fundamentally untrue to say he's definitely canonically "not white" without evidence in the text."

Links - 22nd October 2024 (2 - Palestine/Middle East Peace: Lebanon and Hezbollah)

Kosher🎗🧡 on X - "What f*ck is going on? Seriously.  Look at both of these images.  The BBC have just live streamed Ayatollah Khamenei’s propaganda speech for 40 minutes and put on their banner his quotes:  “October 7th was logical and legal”  “Missile Attack on Israel ‘legal and legitimate”  This, in my opinion, is distributing terrorist propaganda to the UK public, via a channel that is paid for by the UK public.  How are the BBC getting away with this?"

Meme - Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby: "Breaking: Students at the University of Michigan are rallying for Hezbollah right now. Notice the Hamas triangles on their banner.  This movement went from pro-Hamas, to pro-Iran, and now pro-Hezbollah."

Meme - Khamenei: "Are ya the victor son?"
Crying man on floor with blood and pager: "No, the Jews blew off my testicles with a pager"
Khamenei.ir @khamenei _ir: "Hezbollah is the victor."
Readers added context: "The entire Hezbollah leadership, including Nasrallah, has been eliminated."

Meme - The Mossad: Satirical and Awesome @TheMossadIL: "Let's congratulate Hassan Khalil Yassin on his new role as... never mind."
"HASSAN KHALIL YASSIN IS NOW THE NEW LEADER OF HEZBOLLAH. AND HE'S DEAD"

Blake Flayton on X - "The frantic panic exhibited by antisemites in the past 48 hours is truly something to behold. Hezbollah cannot be characterized as a “Palestinian resistance front.” Israel does not occupy Lebanon and has no territorial claims on Lebanon. The attacks have been so specifically zeroed in on military targets that the surrounding Arab countries and even the Shiite militias have said and done nothing. They’re realizing that the playbook of “genocide,” “colonialism,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” is not a believable explanation for this campaign, and that most people even on the left realize that if you leave the Jews the fuck alone, you won’t get bombed. And they’re not happy."

Tom Cotton on X - "Hezbollah, unprovoked, started launching thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians after October 7. No other country would accept this. Every casualty in Lebanon is a direct fault of Hezbollah terrorists--not of Israel."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Look for a lot of hysterics, but this is literally, factually accurate. The take of a "surprising" number of leftists seems to be that, if small corrupt Muslim countries really suck at war - no one thinks that Turkey or Saudi or Indonesia does - that Israelis or Americans should not be able to kill their fighters.  That's not how any of this works."

Meme - Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇨🇾🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @DrewPavlou: "Hamas and Hezbollah started this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else, and nobody was going to bomb them."
Mia K. @miakhalifa: "Can someone please tell the freedom fighters in Palestine to flip their phones and film horizontal"
Mia K. @miakhalifa: "My heart is breaking for Lebanon and for humanity"
Jews are not allowed to defend themselves, and if they do, it's an outrage and a human rights violation

Brianna Wu on X - "Real talk: I am a Democrat. But recent events have convinced me that the Republican Secretary of State @mikepompeo was right. When Democrats are running foreign policy, we need to stop trying to appease Iran. It just leads to this."
Presumably some people will still claim that Hezbollah isn't backed by Iran

Meme - Swann Marcus @SwannMarcus89: "The sheer delusion of "decolonization" twitter is insane  Israel steamrolls Gaza, reorients to Hezbollah, blows up their comms, kills Nasrallah, kills his replacement the day after he's chosen, and then shoots down Iran's missile barrage and they think it's crumbling"
@BLAK MENACE: "Other colonies watching Israel get torn to shreds for being a violent settler colony:"

Meme - Graham Linehan 🎗️ @Glinner: "Same. Imagine weeping for Hezbollah."
Frances Weetman @francesweetman: "My entire feed is Middle Eastern people and commentators celebrating and rich westerners with humanities degrees crying"

‘They called us crazy!’: Hezbollah tunnel to Israel ignites outrage among border communities - "The tunnel, dug by the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group, had the potential to allow armed militants to infiltrate Israel. In recent years, Hezbollah has constructed numerous tunnels and amassed weapons near the Lebanese border as part of its strategy to launch attacks on Israeli communities. The IDF discovered the tunnel and neutralized it before it could be used, but the discovery has left residents deeply unsettled... The couple also expressed relief that the tunnel was found before Hezbollah could carry out an attack, particularly in light of the coordinated assault from Gaza by Hamas on October 7. “It’s a miracle they didn’t invade from the north on the same day. Had they done so, the outcome could have been catastrophic.”"
This is violating the Lebanese people's rights of self-defence against Zionist aggression!

Top Hamas commander killed in Lebanon was UNRWA employee placed on administrative leave - "The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said a top Hamas commander killed in Lebanon Monday was one of its employees but had been suspended since allegations of his ties to the militant group emerged in March. Fatah Sharif’s connection to Hamas appeared set to ratchet up pressure on UNRWA, already facing a $80 million funding shortfall this year. Critics have repeatedly blasted the agency, saying it wasn’t doing enough to root out Hamas militants from its ranks... A Hamas statement praised Sharif for his “educational and jihadist work”"
Damn Zionists! By killing a UN employee they show how bloodthirsty and vicious they are! How can aid workers feel safe when they know Israel is targeting them?!

Meme - delian @zebulgar: "IDF: Highly precise attack using pagers, barely any civilian casualties
Woke leftists: How dare they
Iran: Firing missiles indiscriminately into civilian areas, endangering 10m+ lives
Woke leftists:"
Israel Defense Forces @IDF: "Approx. 10 million civilians are the targets of Iranian projectiles." *Whole of Israel covered with red target marks*

This wasn’t a war crime – it was an audacious assault on antisemites - "Experts suspect Mossad intercepted a massive stash of pagers destined for Hezbollah militants and planted explosive material in the batteries. Then they sent a signal, from hundreds of miles away, that caused the batteries to overheat and eventually to blow up. The planning required for such a spectacular op blows the mind — no pun intended. I know Israelophobia is the default position of the influential classes, but surely even they will admit this was an ingenious way for the Jewish State to take out the adherents to a self-styled “army of god” that has sworn itself to excising the “cancerous growth” of Zionism from the Middle East. (They mean Jews.)... some observers seem unshakeably certain about one thing: it was terrorism. It was a war crime. It was yet more proof of what a uniquely nasty nation Israel is. Invective is flying and tears are flowing across social media. The demonic state strikes again, radicals wail. Even a presenter on Sky News looked shook, describing the operation as “scary.” I suppose it is scary, if you’re a member of an antisemitic army with a pager in your pocket. The double standards are shameless at this point. Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets into Israel since the Hamas pogrom of October 7. These missiles have destroyed homes, scorched earth, caused 60,000 inhabitants of northern Israel to flee, and butchered 12 Druze kids. It is a strange “anti-fascist” who weeps more for the testicles of a racist terrorist than he does for the lives of innocent Israeli children. Yet beneath the double standards, which are painfully predictable, there is something else, too. Something even worse. It’s the flagrantly bigoted belief that everything Israel does is a war crime. This nation can’t do right for doing wrong. If it fights its Islamist foe from the air, as it is doing in Gaza, it is committing a crime. Yet if it plants deadly weapons directly in the pockets of the Islamists who want to destroy it, that is also a crime. If it bombs neighbourhoods in Gaza where Hamas lurks, that is “indiscriminate slaughter. Yet if it behaves in a highly discriminating fashion and puts mini-bombs in the trousers of terrorists, that is “barbarism.” The list of things that become “crimes” when Israel does them grows longer every day. Following the butchery of October 7, when Hamas’s pogromists raped, kidnapped and murdered Jews in southern Israel, Western leftists described Israel’s bombing of Hamas positions in Gaza as criminal. Yet when Israel went to extraordinary lengths to warn Gazans to leave the places it planned to bomb, dropping tens of thousands of Arabic-language leaflets from the sky, that was called criminal, too — it was the crime of “forced displacement,” apparently. Kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal; try not to kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal. Likewise, when Israel bombed Aleppo in Syria earlier this year to take out the Hezbollah militants based there, it was noisily damned as the vilest of military aggressors. Yet now its meticulous planting of mini-bombs in Hezbollah pagers is branded wicked aggression, too. That many in the West view Israel’s every action as criminal is depressing, but not surprising. Fundamentally, they think it is a crime for Israel to defend itself. They think it is a crime for Israel to take any action that might limit the threat posed by the apocalyptic antisemitism of Hezbollah and Hamas. And they think this because they think Israel’s very existence is a crime. They view the Jewish State as a criminal enterprise, a vile, law-defying blot not only on the Middle East but also on the reputation of humankind itself. When you harbour such intense, irrational hatred for one nation, it is a short step to telling that nation to down its weapons, lower its defences and let itself be attacked. Make no mistake, this is what the radical accusers of Israel are saying when they tell it to stop bombing Hamas, stop attacking Hezbollah militants, stop arming itself, stop everything. They are saying leave your enemy be, and let your people be murdered. They can call this “anti-Zionism” as much as they like, but to many of us their bizarre and cruel singling out of the world’s only Jewish nation as the only nation that is forbidden from fighting its enemies smacks of antisemitism. If you are stony-faced when Jews are murdered, but furious when their murderers have 20 grams of explosives put in the batteries of their pagers, then please remove the word “anti-fascist” from your social-media bio, please refrain from calling yourself “anti-racist,” and please cease all future use of the word ‘progressive’."

AG on X - "When Hezbollah was starving entire Syrian towns and murdering civilians for Assad, the world was silent.   When Hezbollah was regularly persecuting and attacking Christians in Lebanon, the word was silent.  When Hezbollah stockpiled a hundred thousands rockets from Tehran and put them in residential buildings and towns preparing for a war they wanted, the world was silent.   When Hezbollah started launching daily rocket attacks and displaced hundreds of thousands of Israelis after 10/7, the world was silent.   But when Israel started taking out or blowing the nuts off the group that has been terrorizing the region for decades, suddenly the world is very concerned.   Just once it would be nice if the concern started when the terrorizing was happened instead of when the victims of it started fighting back."

Canada announces $10 million for humanitarian assistance in Lebanon : r/canadian - "So, where does the line exist for you? How long does a state need to be attacked before it's allowed to respond in kind? What is an appropriate response to decades of shelling, to you? What do you suggest when a two state solution isn't being accepted, and one side has agreed to never settle or negotiate? I want your honest opinion to what's acceptable.  Imagine if the Mexican cartels invaded San Diego, kidnapped, murdered and raped civilians, while Canada was firing rockets all over the northern border. How many missiles would the US allow before responding? What would be the scale of response? Is any response acceptable to you?  Like, one side has clearly stated they want to exterminate the other, and has mobilized pieces worldwide to attack non affiliated people simply because of their religion. Your a Canuck, how many times have non affiliated Jewish areas been targeted in Canada?  Hezbollah and Hamas have both called for attacks on Jews worldwide, and they've happened. So is it a Palestinian/Israeli issue, or more about hating Jews because they're Jews?  So, how long before you are allowed to respond, and why does any state need to wait that long to respond?"

Hezbollah confirms its leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike - The Washington Post - "Immediately after the confirmation from Hezbollah, people starting firing in the air in Beirut and across Lebanon to mourn Nasrallah’s death.  “Wish it was our kids, not you, Sayyid!” said one woman, using an honorific title for Nasrallah, as she clutched her baby in the western city of Baabda."
"Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." - Golda Meir

Aviva Klompas on X - "WaPo: Democracy Dies in Darkness
Also WaPo: Allow us to paint a sympathetic portrait of a ruthless terror leader"

Jared Kushner on X - "September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough.  I have spent countless hours studying Hezbollah and there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade them was possible.  This is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel. Iran spent the last forty years building this capability as its deterrent.  President Trump would often say, “Iran has never won a war but never lost a negotiation.” The Islamic Republic’s regime is much tougher when risking Hamas, Hezbollah, Syrian and Houthi lives than when risking their own. Their foolish efforts to assassinate President Trump and hack his campaign reek of desperation and are hardening a large coalition against them.   Iranian leadership is stuck in the old Middle East, while their neighbors in the GCC are sprinting toward the future by investing in their populations and infrastructure. They are becoming dynamic magnets for talent and investment while Iran falls further behind. As the Iranian proxies and threats dissipate, regional security and prosperity will rise for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike.  Israel now finds itself with the threat from Gaza mostly neutralized and the opportunity to neutralize Hezbollah in the north. It’s unfortunate how we got here but maybe there can be a silver lining in the end.  Anyone who has been calling for a ceasefire in the North is wrong. There is no going back for Israel. They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance. After the brilliant, rapid-fire tactical successes of the pagers, radios, and targeting of leadership, Hezbollah’s massive weapon cache is unguarded and unmanned. Most of Hezbollah fighters are hiding in their tunnels. Anyone still around was not important enough to carry a pager or be invited to a leadership meeting. Iran is reeling, as well, insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated. Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible.  I have been hearing some amazing stories about how Israel has been collecting intelligence over the past 10 months with some brilliant technology and crowdsourcing initiatives.  But today, with the confirmed killing of Nasrallah and at least 16 top commanders eliminated in just nine days, was the first day I started thinking about a Middle East without Iran’s fully loaded arsenal aimed at Israel. So many more positive outcomes are possible. This is a moment to stand behind the peace-seeking nation of Israel and the large portion of the Lebanese who have been plagued by Hezbollah and who want to return to the times when their country was thriving, and Beirut a cosmopolitan city. The main issue between Lebanon and Israel is Iran; otherwise there is a lot of benefit for the people of both countries from working together.  The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job. It’s long overdue. And it’s not only Israel’s fight.  More than 40 years ago, Hezbollah killed 241 US military personnel, including 220 Marines. That remains the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima. Later that same day, Hezbollah killed 58 French paratroopers.  And now, over the past six weeks or so, Israel has eliminated as many terrorists on the US list of wanted terrorists as the US has done in the last 20 years. Including Ibrahim Aqil, the leader of Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization who masterminded the 1983 killing of those Marines."

Jonathan Kay on X - "Our family spoke to a Christian Arab friend from Lebanon, and asked after her family in Beirut. She said that reports of Israel bombing “Beirut” in general are somewhat misleading, because Hezbollah and its supporters are clustered in a specific notorious neighbourhood which (by her account) most people do their best to avoid. She grew up despising hezbollah for the usual sectarian reasons, and of course because it’s a despicable terrorist group. No one likes to have their country bombed, and I’m guessing there are many mixed feelings at play among hezbollah’s enemies, but the idea that the region’s sunnis and Christians are going to rise up in defence of this terrorist group seem completely misplaced"

Meme - Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇨🇾🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @DrewPavlou: "The video shows massive secondary explosions as a direct result of Hezbollah ammunition depots blowing up.   Why does Hezbollah get to claim total immunity for ammunition depots in a war they started? Why aren’t they morally responsible for endangering civilians?"
Fathel @fath0039: "We are watching the normalisation of terror bombing as an acceptable doctrine."
"Minorities" have no agency

Saul Sadka on X - "Based on the number of major ammo cookoffs that people are posting, the IDF claim to have destoryed 50% of Hezbollah's stocks doesn't look implausible. The IDF are unlikely to let up now that even the minority of civilians who remained have fled the battlefield."

David Collier on X - "According to media reporting, the population of Gaza and Lebanon breaks down as follows:  40% of the population are journalists. 36% Doctors, nurses or teachers. 22% aid workers. 95% women 82% pregnant women 75% children under 7. 99% want peace  The media reporting is atrocious."

António Guterres on X - "The situation in Gaza is a non-stop nightmare that threatens to take the entire region with it.  Lebanon is at the brink.  The people of Lebanon, the people of Israel and the people of the world cannot afford Lebanon to become another Gaza."
Haviv Rettig Gur on X - "You have many thousands of UN soldiers in south Lebanon whose job, according to UNSC resolutions, is to stop Hezbollah. But they refuse to stop Hezbollah.  You have two UNSC resolutions that demand Hezbollah disarm and leave the border, but you won’t even name them in any of your statements.  You have systematically avoided any action that might have prevented this war. You refuse to protect the Israelis, you refuse to protect the Lebanese, you don’t even pretend to try to implement your own solemn decisions. And now, in your moralizing, you effectively run defense for Hezbollah.  If you can’t protect us, if you can’t do a damn thing to push back the influence of malign and evil actors, at least shut up."

Morgoth on X - "Pretty wild to consider that Iran fired 200 missiles into Israel and achieved fewer casualties than a single day of the Notting Hill Carnival diversity stab-fest."

Andrew Fox on X - "I’m astonished that Iran’s big retaliation has been “hand Bibi what he wants, on a plate”. As an aside, the US needs to step up now. Iranian oil and nuclear facilities, IRGC sites and regime HQs are all in targeting scope."

Hen Mazzig on X - "Remember when the UN called for a ceasefire for Ramadan? Tomorrow night begins Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and the High Holidays. The holiest part of the Jewish year. Where are the calls for ceasefire now, as the Islamic Republic in Iran prepares to attack Israel?"

Sky News has lost its way | The Spectator - "Occasionally I am told that I go too hard on the BBC. It is an understandable gripe which I sometimes hear from disgruntled journos from Broadcasting House. So let me start by saying that, as an equal-opportunities insulter, I would like to put on the record how completely rancid Sky News in the UK has become.  To give an idea of where Sky UK has gone wrong since being sold, allow me to highlight one story as the channel reported it this week. After the targeted strikes on Hezbollah operatives via their pagers and walkie-talkies, Sky ran a story headlined: ‘Hezbollah has been provoked like never before by Israel and may be tempted to unleash its firepower.’  That is truly fascinating framing. For it suggests that the terrorists of Hezbollah should be allowed to fire thousands of rockets into Israel with impunity, and that if Israel responds to this – even in the most targeted and personal way possible – it is being ‘provocative’. Poor Hezbollah. It’s just too beastly – can’t it be allowed to fire missiles at Israeli civilians in peace? Much of the broadcast media in Britain has been similarly skewy. The BBC news website last week led with ‘Lebanon reels from two days of device attacks’. ITV News lamented not just the pager and walkie-talkie explosions but Israel’s strikes on Hezbollah arms dumps. Presenting these as though they were strikes on civilian targets, ITV – in its own footage – showed the secondary explosions in the buildings Israel had hit. Which gives the game away, surely? I have seen all this before. I was on the Israel-Lebanon border 18 years ago during the last Israel-Hezbollah war. Back in 2006 much of the media played the same game. Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets into Israel, Israel responded and before you knew it the world was running headlines about Israel striking Lebanon. I remember being in a hospital on the Israeli side of the border that had been hit by Hezbollah. There was no mention of this in the next day’s media outside of Israel but there were plenty of reports about Israeli ‘aggression’ against Hezbollah.  That conflict ended with a UN resolution (1701) which was meant to ensure that Hezbollah would not be allowed to rebuild its stockpile of rockets in southern Lebanon. Over the succeeding years Hezbollah more than replenished these supplies. By last year the group that has done so much to destroy Lebanon – and to decimate its Christian population, among others – was estimated to have around 160,000 missiles in position to launch at Israel. Labour and Conservative governments never had very much to say about this – and certainly did nothing about it. Under successive governments, people who generally enjoy talking about UN resolutions were silent about 1701. Hezbollah more than rebuilt its armoury, and then, from 8 October last year, it started firing its missiles into Israel again, keen as it was not to miss out on the genocidal opportunities opened up by its Hamas colleagues the previous day. Over the past year I have witnessed plenty of this activity for myself. On a normal day a few dozen missiles might be fired by Hezbollah into Israel. On some days – like this past week – hundreds are fired over. This almost never makes the British news. But many thousands of Iranian-gifted rockets have been fired by Hezbollah into Israel in the past year. And all this has happened under the watchful eye of UN ‘peacekeepers’ whose effectiveness approximates to that of a eunuch in a harem.  Meantime the court eunuchs in the western media rarely mention that Hezbollah fires the occasional rocket. When they do they tend to suggest it is simply trying – utterly reasonably, of course – to target Israeli military sites. As to why Hezbollah fired rockets into a playground in a northern Israeli town, killing a dozen Israeli Druze children playing football, nobody will say. It’s just one of life’s little mysteries. If there is anyone left in Britain who still watches Sky News then they will be almost uniquely misinformed about what is actually happening in the world. In the past week its crack squad of misinformants, led by someone called Dominic Waghorn and Alex Crawford, did manage to utter the word ‘terror’. But they used it while referring to the ‘two days of terror’ recently suffered by the ‘fighting group’ Hezbollah.  I am sure Hezbollah terrorists were terrorised when they found their balls blown off by exploding pager devices. But that is probably one of the job hazards that comes if you make the mistake of joining a terrorist group and then try to wipe out your neighbours on the orders of the Revolutionary Islamic government in Iran. Decisions have consequences, and joining what Ms Crawford calls a ‘fighting group’ should be seen for what it is: a distinctly bad career choice. Worse even than entering broadcast journalism. People sometimes wonder why the media in a country like Britain has gone so partisan on a story which should not be that complicated to report. A number of reasons present themselves. The one I am most prone to is simply that failing television networks attract less and less talent and that Sky, ITV and even the BBC just don’t get the best or brightest any more. The idea that they have been ‘bought’ or compromised in some way seems to me a little too conspiratorial.  Then I notice that just about the only regular sponsor of Sky News UK is the terrorist-supporting slave state of Qatar, through its national airline. The Qataris are, of course, not just funders of Hamas but also hosts to the Taliban. But I am sure this is a coincidence and their efforts to provoke their remaining viewers into reaching for the ‘off’ button comes from ignorance rather than anything worse."

Saul Sadka on X - "So here are TWO questions with ONE answer:
1. Why is it so easy for Israel to recruit spies among their enemies?
2. What have been the effects of the efforts by Israel's enemies to wipe it off the map for 80 years on their culture and economy?
The ongoing conflict has reduced the economies of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and others to ruins, turned much of their populations into beggars, and caused tens of millions of their best and brightest to flee to the West. The destruction of a large part of Beirut by carelessly stored Hezbollah explosive precursors—an event that devastated the already failing Lebanese economy—is a perfect encapsulation of 80 years wasted on Jew-hate in the Middle East.  The problem with turning a nation into a theocratic terror base is that you inevitably impoverish it. As @Khaledhzakariah  points out, it's much easier to bribe desperate, hungry people. (It's also easier to recruit spies in theocracies where, for example, homosexuality might be a capital crime, for obvious reasons.)  Ironic, isn't it? Israel is able to use the core values of its enemies—theocracy and terrorism—to undermine them, just as groups in the West attempt to destroy it by taking advantage of its core values—liberty and freedom."

Canada can no longer afford to ignore its ‘soft corruption’ problem

Clearly, the answer is even more taxes so even more money can be spent, as well as more regulation.

Eric Lombardi: Canada can no longer afford to ignore its ‘soft corruption’ problem

"It’s a corruption that dons the mask of procedure, cloaked in legality, yet it siphons resources away from the people and into the pockets of self-selected, well-connected insiders.

Consider Toronto’s recent announcement of the West Toronto Railpath extension—a modest 2.1-kilometer bike and pedestrian trail along a Metrolinx-owned rail corridor. The projected cost? A jaw-dropping $149 million. That’s $71 million per kilometre, or $71,000 per metre.

To put this absurdity into perspective: you could hire a skilled construction worker for every single metre of the path, pay each one an above-average salary for a full year, and you’d still not burn through it.

You could literally line the stretch hood-to-trunk with newly purchased Range Rovers and still not spend it. Unless we’re talking about installing gold-plated pavement and diamond-studded railings, it’s hard to fathom how a simple bike path could rack up such a bill. When costs are this wildly out of sync with reality, it’s not just eyebrow-raising—it screams for scrutiny.

When questioned about this astronomical figure, Toronto’s Mayor Olivia Chow suggested that federal funding implied due diligence had been done, despite the city covering over 80 percent of the bill; a bill, astonishingly, quoted by the provincial government.

Every level of government, and the entire mainstream political spectrum, Conservative, Liberal, and New Democrat, is complicit in this outrageous outcome.

It should come as no surprise then, that populist movements are on the rise while broader political participation continues to slide as the mainstream fails to deliver.

Then there’s Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown LRT, a 19-kilometre light rail line initially budgeted at $5.3 billion and slated to open in 2020. As of now, it remains unfinished—years overdue and billions over budget, with estimates suggesting costs could exceed $12.5 billion. What was once hailed as a groundbreaking public-private partnership has become a masterclass in pointing the finger and lighting taxpayer dollars on fire. Accountability has been so diluted that no one seems responsible for the delays and overruns. It’s like a group project where everyone gets an F, but nobody knows who didn’t pull their weight.

Meanwhile, the proposed Ontario Line—a 15.6-kilometre subway route—was initially estimated at $10.9 billion but could cost over $20 billion, nearly doubling the original budget and reaching over $1 billion per kilometre—one of the highest price tags globally. Astonishingly, nearly half of this line will run above ground along existing rights-of-way, which should reduce costs. Contrast this with Paris’s Line 14 extension, a largely underground metro line of longer length built for the 2024 Olympics which cost €3.5 billion–about $5.3 billion in Canadian dollars, equating to less than a quarter of the cost per kilometre compared with the Ontario Line.

This problem isn’t unique to Toronto. From coast to coast, Canada’s infrastructure projects are trapped in a vicious cycle where costs skyrocket and scopes shrink—a phenomenon turning grand visions into expensive mirages. Calgary’s Green Line LRT, initially a bold 46-kilometrer venture estimated at $4.5 billion, has been whittled down to just 20 kilometres while the budget could swell to over $5.5 billion. That’s paying more for less, quite literally.

In Montreal, the contrast between the original REM project and the canceled REM de l’Est highlights the cost spiral. The original elevated REM, a 67-kilometre network opened in 2023, was built at approximately $6.9 billion—about $100 million per kilometre. In stark contrast, the REM de l’Est, planned at 32 kilometres, was estimated at over $10 billion—more than $312 million per kilometre. Ultimately, it was canceled when costs ballooned to over $36 billion, leaving sunk costs and dashed hopes.

Vancouver’s Surrey-Langley SkyTrain extension saw its price tag leap from $4 billion to $6 billion—a 50 percent increase—and its opening date was delayed by a year without significant scope expansion.

This relentless spiral of escalating costs and diminishing returns isn’t just an unfortunate series of local mishaps; it’s a national crisis buffeted by a culture of “soft corruption” that has become endemic. If left unchecked, it threatens to cripple Canada’s long-term ability to build the essential public infrastructure that underpins economic growth and public well-being, turning us into a country that can’t afford to build its own future.

How did we get here? The rise of “process parasites”—consultants, lawyers, planners, and other paid stakeholders—has embedded unnecessary complexity into every stage of building just about anything. They’ve turned nice-to-have activities into legal necessities, often influencing regulations to mandate their involvement. Cozy relationships with procurement departments lead to unscrutinized deals at unreasonable costs. While overt corruption may be rare, the system is engineered to justify waste as the “cost of doing business,” enriching connected insiders.

Few sectors are more burdened by this “cottage industry tax” than in housing. An Altus Group report reveals that in the Greater Toronto Area, every city takes over a year to approve new housing projects, with the fastest averaging 13 months. Developers face dozens of report requirements that vary by municipality. In Caledon, getting approval to build multi-family housing demands over two years and nearly 100 different reports—from heritage impact assessments to frivolous sun and shadow studies. These obligations keep consultants employed but add little value, escalating costs amid a housing crisis.

In Toronto, approvals take an average of 25 months, adding six figures to the cost of each housing unit due. Add on the fact that cities in the Greater Toronto Area now charge over $100,000 dollars per unit in direct development charges and it becomes clear that wasteful government and process parasites have undoubtedly inflated housing costs, cashing in on the next generation’s stolen dreams.

Consider that obtaining a construction permit in Canada takes an average of 249 days, compared to just 64 days in Denmark. Far from being a hallmark of sophistication, our drawn-out procedures are a symptom of systemic malaise, reinforcing our national decline in economic development.

Ironically, the labyrinth of red tape has become a breeding ground for soft corruption rather than a safeguard against it. Decisions are made behind closed doors, inefficiencies flourish, and regulations touted as “accountability measures” create a maze where oversight is nearly impossible. This convoluted system doesn’t just hide unethical practices, it normalizes them, allowing inflated costs from opaque processes and relationship-based procurement to be dismissed as normal.

Nowhere in Canada do political connections appear to yield more tangible benefits than in Ontario under Premier Doug Ford’s leadership... The involvement of consulting firms with government ties raises further questions about whether they’re profiting more from connections than actual expertise...

Soft corruption isn’t confined to infrastructure and housing. Governments at all levels have indulged in questionable industrial policy, dishing out subsidies and sole-source contracts with a lack of transparency that would make even the most seasoned lobbyist blush.

Take the federal and Quebec provincial government’s recent $2.54 billion loan to Telesat, a Quebec-based satellite internet provider aiming to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink. Despite a market valuation of around $900 million and declining revenues of around $550 million, Telesat received generous loan conditions to build a new satellite constellation. The provincial government boasted about creating 1,000 new jobs, which, when you do the math, amounts to over $2.5 million per job. That’s quite the deal if we’re minting millionaires, but private investors were notably absent, raising questions about the project’s financial risks and the government’s due diligence—or lack thereof.

Similarly, over $50 billion has been promised to Canada’s electric vehicle sector in the next decade. While aiming to be a future economic player is commendable, there’s skepticism about whether these investments will actually pay off or become another costly lesson in state-led industrial policy.

Lavishing the world’s largest corporations with taxpayer money in hopes of securing their loyalty is like trying to keep a cat from roaming by offering it cream—it’ll enjoy the treat, but eventually wander off anyway. This isn’t savvy economic planning, it’s soft corruption. Disloyal companies orchestrate scenarios where countries are pitted against each other in a corporate welfare race. It’s a fool’s errand—a bridge we shouldn’t jump off just because our allies are leaping.

All these misallocated funds add up. Every Canadian dollar spent inefficiently on politically favoured companies and industries is a dollar not available for actual public goods—infrastructure, clean energy, education, health care, defence, and so on. The excessive overhead and inflated project costs mean we get less bang for our buck, leaving us with a quality of life that lags behind other countries with similar wealth.

So, how do we break free from this quagmire of soft corruption? The solution isn’t simply cutting red tape or slashing budgets. It requires a fundamental reevaluation of how public and private projects are planned, approved, executed, and audited.

It’s high time Canada launched a public inquiry into government procurement practices at all levels. Let’s shine a spotlight on where taxpayer dollars are vanishing, expose inefficiencies, and—crucially—propose actionable changes to fix these systems. To really turn the tide, we must rebuild state capacity by investing in public sector expertise to reduce reliance on costly third parties for recurring activities. Cultivating in-house talent cuts unnecessary expenses and ensures long-term access to expertise. Transparency is essential; public projects should undergo rigorous, independent audits accessible to all, deterring cost inflations and inefficiencies.

Investing in high-quality public goods—state-of-the-art infrastructure, clean energy, and a talented workforce—is the industrial policy we ought to prioritize. This prevents rent-seeking behaviour and stops private entities from exploiting government connections. Focusing on broadly beneficial public goods and clear processes reduces risks to all investments, leading to a more competitive private sector empowered to pursue genuine innovation."

Links - 22nd October 2024 (1 [including Hurricane Helene])

Meme - Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok: "Meet Betsy Packard, an instructor at @UKarts_sciences . She appears to celebrate Hurricane Helene destroying cities because some of those towns are Republican.  Does @UKarts_sciences  also believe this? Do they condone these messages?"

Meme - "Welcome to Ohio"
Signs: "Help" "Need Water"
*Zombie Biden*
*Ohioans cover "Welcome to Ohio" sign with Ukrainian flag*
*Biden runs over with a bag of cash to "Ukraine"*

Peachy Keenan on X - "In order for FEMA to help you, you will need electricity, cell service, and a computer. Then we will email you in 2 weeks with our decision. If those things got washed away along with your home, please go to Mexico and enter the United States illegally and you will be helped"

Meme - "GOVERNMENT HELP. FOXFORD COMICS 2024
*Family on roof of house in floodwaters cheer as they see US helicopter*
*Helicopter unloads brown and black migrants and family is bemused*

Unearthed woke FEMA webinar touts shift toward 'disaster equity' in emergency management priorities - "In FEMA’s alphabet, DEI comes first.  A startling 2023 FEMA webinar features federal health and disaster personnel trumpeting the urgent need to move away from policies that benefit the greatest number of people and instead turn focus toward “disaster equity” where aid is distributed based on innate characteristics like sexual orientation and gender identity.  The roundtable discussion, recorded in March last year, was titled “Helping LGBTQIA+ Survivors Before Disasters,” included panelists like Maggie Jarry of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and was moderated by Tyler Atkins, an emergency management specialist at FEMA who uses he/they pronouns...   Atkins, visibly moved by her oratory, capped off her words with a DEI word salad.  “The topic of preparedness and preparedness resources and the intersectionalities within equities and discrimination and hate — it’s a real thing that needs to be discussed, needs to be vocalized, and we need to start looking at how we can find solutions to this.”   The initiatives raised at the panel discussion echo many of those on FEMA’s website, which proudly proclaims instilling “equity as a foundation of emergency management” as goal 1... FEMA has come under fire after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted to reporters that the agency “does not have the funds” to safeguard Americans through the remainder of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, its coffers depleted in part by the more than $1.4 billion it has spent addressing the migrant crisis since fall 2022."
Damn Republicans hobbling FEMA!

Thread by @feelsdesperate on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App- "Hard not to view events through the lens that empire has turned inward with the federal government playing the role of increasingly paranoid colonial administrators alienated from and hostile to the local population.  Helene cuts a swath through a regressive imperial backwater, and the main concern seems to be that this is an inconvenience that has to somehow be worked into the stage sets of the presidential campaign.  Don’t these people understand there are more important extra territorial matters (Ukraine, the Middle East) that are of priority?  Are they not being impertinent by complaining too loudly? Don’t they know their place? Don’t they know democracy is on the ballot? Don’t they know we’re defending the freedom of Europe? That ‘no human is illegal’ and that the federal disaster response agencies have been repurposed to do NGO humanitarian aid work for non citizens? Don’t they understand all that is at stake? Because if they did and were decent people they would be less noisy and stop complaining on social media, and stop publicizing inconvenient facts, and stop insulting and embarrassing important bureaucrats, and anyway they pay less taxes than what they receive and so they should be grateful for what they already get and these are the same people who gave us Trump, so now they’re asking for our help?? And we’re going to help them…of course (we are Good People) but it would be a basic decency on their part to appraise themselves of the bigger picture and know their place."

Report: Government Sends Electric Chainsaws To Appalachian Town Without Power - "The original poster said his community in Little Switzerland, North Carolina, received these chainsaws from a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter ... and that it has been the only government assistance their community has received."

Potential ActBlue criminal charges once again reveal the Dems' fraud campaign - "ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform that has collected millions of dollars for Kamala Harris, is facing potential criminal charges in five states over allegations that it fraudulently exploited unwitting donors to get around campaign finance laws."

wanye on X - "The special relationship between parents and their children is fundamentally at odds with the ethos of leftism. The whole point of the relationship is to be unfair. I want my kids to have more than your kids, if there’s any question of whether one of the two must fall short. I want my kids to outcompete your children. If necessary I want my kids to rule your children. If I can find an advantage for my kids, I will take it. If I run a company and I can give my children a job they didn’t earn, I will do it. I will give my children all of the money I have collected when I die. And I love my children unconditionally for who they are, literally because of the DNA in their body and for no other reason — not for anything they’ve done, not because they are good people or because they’re funny or because they tell good stories or because they’ve accomplished anything or because they’re talented in any particular way. No, I will love them purely as a matter of nepotistic preference, of ancestral contingency. My love for them is not a meritocracy, it’s not a democracy, nobody else gets a say in it, and it is definitely, categorically, entirely unfair. The entire relationship is like some kind of rigid class hierarchy from the middle ages. They are born into this special privilege and it is theirs forever no matter what anybody says or does, no matter what they say or do, no matter what they accomplish or don’t accomplish."
Why left wingers hate the family

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry on X - "For those who are wondering: yes, it is true, and denied by no historian of the period, that in June 1940 Hitler made a sincere offer of peace and rapprochement to Great-Britain.   Even apart from the fact that after Munich and everything else it was quite rational to doubt Hitler's sincerity, there is a simpler and much more fundamental reason why neither Winston Churchill, nor any other prime minister of the United Kingdom, could have taken this offer: ever since it emerged as a coherent state, the overriding security imperative of the British government has been to prevent, at all costs, the appearance of a hegemonic power on the European continent.   Take it from a Frenchman.   Us and our cousins fought centuries of war--literally, centuries of war--because of this.   They fought us in the Hundred Years' War. They fought us in the Thirty Years' War. They fought us in the Nine Years' War. They fought us in the War of Spanish Succession, during which Lord Marlborough--of whom Churchill was a direct descendant and biographer--and French armies tore up half of Germany chasing each other. They fought us in the War of the Austrian Succession. We fought them in the War of American Independence. And, of course, they fought us in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars--25 years of almost uninterrupted war.   Americans, even history nerds, don't understand history, because they are too young. History is the unfolding, over centuries and millennia, of the inner logic of nations and geography. History was in Churchill's blood, quite literally. In his bones. He understood perfectly well what every British statesman understood in June 1940, which was that the Fall of France had turned Germany into an existential enemy of the British Empire.   For a small island nation that imports most of its food, division on the European continent is a matter of survival, in the way that anti-nomad walls are a matter of survival for any Chinese empire.  Churchill would never have done it. Chamberlain would never have done it. No plausible occupant of Churchill's seat would have done it, and if he had, he would have immediately been overthrown by Parliament and replaced by, well, Churchill.   The alt history that Buchanan and others fantasized about was never, ever, ever going to happen... another take which is very important to read here, which I'm afraid hasn't been translated into English (yet) is Gérard Araud's outstanding history of French diplomacy 1919-1939. What Araud conclusively shows is that up until Munich, the British, dedicated to their "divide and rule" strategy in Europe, saw *France*, the main victor of WW1, as the primary threat of European hegemony and did everything to strengthen Germany at the expense of France. Only at Munich did the Brits realize that the Germans were the real threat. Versailles made another pan-European war inevitable but if you want some sort of way to prevent WW2 the obvious answer is to invade Germany after the remilitarization of the Rhineland and break it up... The giant black hole at the heart of all WW2 takes, and the fact that people forget it is itself so tragically revealing, is French weakness and self-sabotage."

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry on X - "The obvious parallel is Napoleon. Napoleon spent 15 years making peace offers to the British and being rebuffed. "Here for the first time was a scenario where Britain would remain unchallenged on the high seas, as long as Germany had Europe", but Napoleon wanted this scenario, desperately.   The obvious parallel here is what happened after the Treaty of Amiens. After the War of the Second Coalition, Napoleon signed a pan-European peace which he hoped would last for decades. And the concept of the peace was the same: Britain would have the high seas, France would have the continent.   Contrary to British popular history/propaganda, it was the British who broke the peace of Amiens... The key issue with Amiens was Malta. During the Revolutionary War, England had occupied the island of Malta, stealing it from the Order of Malta completely illegally. Malta is extremely strategically located, and it's only a slight stretch to say that whoever controls Malta controls the Mediterranean.   One provision of the Treaty of Amiens was that the English would vacate Malta. Using increasingly flimsy logistical excuses, the English pointedly did not leave Malta while proclaiming that they would very shortly.   This was a major and inexcusable breach of treaty, over an extremely strategic piece of land and a direct threat to French national interests.   And Napoleon...caved."

EzDubs (@ezdubs_bot) / X - "Dub videos in minutes, in the voice of the original speaker! To dub, tag our bot in a reply with the source and target language."

Eric Weinstein on X - "I asked ChatGPT the following.   Imagine a modern poltical party.   Imagine that all you know about it is the following:     It champions rights for state sponsored schools over the rights of the parents on behalf of their own children.    It promotes equality of outcome over a level playing field.  It is concerned that unfeterred speech is a threat to the safety of the population.  It supports candidates chosen by party leaders rather than the people via primary elections.  It celebrates choices for irreversable self-sterilization via reproductive surgical mutilation within the K-12 curriculum.  It does not want people to have to show ID to vote.
Q: To which political parties is this unspecified party most similar worldwide and throughout history?"

Makelegs on X - "Here's how Venice (@ErikVoorhees) answered:
This political party sounds strikingly similar to the modern-day Progressive Left, particularly in Western democracies like the United States and Europe. However, historically, this ideology can be traced back to various socialist and authoritarian movements that emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  The emphasis on state-sponsored schools over parental rights aligns with the progressive belief in collectivism and the role of the government in education. Progressives often advocate for a centralized educational system to promote social equality, sometimes at the expense of individual parental choice.  Promoting equality of outcome rather than equal opportunity is a key tenet of socialism and social democracy. These ideologies argue that unequal outcomes are a result of structural inequality and must be addressed by an active government policy.  The concern about unfettered speech being a threat to safety reflects the broader left-wing view that free speech can sometimes lead to harm, particularly when it comes to hate speech or misinformation. Some progressives advocate for regulation of speech in the interest of public safety and social harmony.  Supporting candidates chosen by party leaders rather than primaries is common in parties with strong centralized leadership structures, such as those found in many socialist and authoritarian regimes throughout history. It contrasts with the democratic progressive ideal but can be a pragmatic approach to maintaining ideological purity within a political party.  Celebrating irreversible self-sterilization (reproductive surgical mutilation) within the K-12 curriculum is antithetical to the values of most modern progressive parties, which prioritize individual rights and often advocate for expanded reproductive choices. However, historical socialist movements, particularly those in East Asia during the 20th century, sometimes had controversial views on family planning.  The opposition to ID requirements for voting aligns with the progressive belief in universal suffrage and access to voting. This stance also reflects a concern about disenfranchisement of certain groups who might be less likely to have accepted forms of identification.  In summary, this hypothetical political party exhibits characteristics similar to various progressive movements worldwide, particularly those focused on social justice, equality, and state intervention. However, specific historical analogues may vary due to the unique contexts and ideologies present in different times and places."

Jash Dholani on X - "> humans suffer from a recurring problem
> eureka! solution found
> solution becomes a "tradition"
> future generations dont have the problem
> as they cant see the problem, they think the tradition is useless
> tradition thrown away "muh efficiency" "muh progress"
> problem back"

Swiss politician resigns after firing shots at Jesus picture - "Swiss politician Sanija Ameti has resigned from leadership of the Liberal Green Party in Zurich after an uproar over pictures of her firing shots at a Christian motif. On Sunday evening, she deleted photos that had already been published on social media and made an apology.  The youth arm of the right-wing Swiss People’s Party filed a criminal complaint against Ameti for violation of freedom of religion and worship, the party announced on Monday morning. Nicolas Rimoldi, founder of Mass-Voll, a movement formed to protest pandemic measures, also announced that he would press charges.  After Swiss daily Blick reported on the pictures published by Ameti on Instagram on Sunday, it did not take long for the 32-year-old politician to respond to the criticism...   Ameti said that she had happened to have an art catalogue with her and had not paid attention to the religious content of the picture. Amid criticism, she resigned from leadership of the Liberal Greens in Zurich. The party is also considering expulsion proceedings... Ameti had published pictures showing her with a sports pistol during shooting practice, as well as a picture of Mary and Jesus riddled with gunshots."

Green Liberal party members criticise handling of Ameti affair - "Some members feel that the leadership reacted too quickly and too strongly."
Of course, if it had been Islam she had attacked...

Cenk Uygur on X - "Agree with an online right-winger 2%, their reaction: Welcome to the party! MAGA welcomes you.
Agree with an online leftist only 98%, their reaction: Nazi!"

Santiago on X - "My European friends (software engineers) make a fraction of what my American friends make.  The disparity in salary is huge (as high as 2x, 3x, and even 4x.)  And if you think that “hEalTh inSuRanCe aNd pAid lEaVe” makes up for this, you are just coping."

Sex, status, and reproductive success in the contemporary United States - "This paper reexamines the relationship between status and reproductive success (at the ultimate and proximate levels) using data on sex frequency and number of biological children from representative samples of the U.S. population. An ordered probit analysis of data from the 1989–2000 General Social Survey (GSS) shows that high-income men report greater frequency of sex than all others do. An OLS regression of data from the 1994 GSS shows that high-income men have more biological children than do low-income men and high-income women. Furthermore, more educated men have more biological children than do more educated women. Results also show that intelligence decreases the number of offspring and frequency of sex for both men and women."

Meme - Harry Robinson @HarryLotusEater: "From GRRM’s latest blog post:  ‘I still haven’t written Winds of Winter… uhhh… because of fascism.’"
"The world, the country, and yes, certainly me This has not been a good year for anyone, with war everwhere and fascism on the rise and on more personal level, I have had a pretty wretched year as well, one full of stress: anger, conflict, and defeat."
Al Pine @AlPine4700: "Meanwhile, Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and all their back stories while 2 world wars were going on ... 🤔"

Meme - memetic_sisyphus @memeticsisyphus: "It doesn’t matter if we’re talking tax code, charity or neighborhood defense, community is what can be done for them, not how they can help."
"The far left has a very odd sense of community, where they focus nearly entirely on the community's duties and obligations to the individual, while ignoring what that individual must do to be part of the community."
🇵🇸MackMacTalksBack 🇵🇸 @MackMacTlksBack: "Kids doing the job of the federal government in the middle of a hurricane evacuation is not a feel good segment."
To the left, government is and should be the solution to everything

Left–right political orientations are not systematically related to conspiracism - "Researchers have long sought to make generalizable conclusions about the relationship between conspiracism and political identities. However, this literature remains deeply conflicted. The “extremity hypothesis” argues that, due to the psychology of extremism, individuals who identify as extremely left or right wing should display higher levels of conspiracism than centrists. But the “asymmetry hypothesis” argues that, due to the psychology of conservatism, individuals who self-identify as right wing should display higher levels of conspiracism than those identifying as centrists or left wing. Here, we attempt to reconcile these competing hypotheses and the empirical findings supporting them. First, we demonstrate that the inconsistent findings stem from research designs that cannot support generalizable conclusions about the relationship between conspiracism and political identities. Second, we reexamine the most prominent studies supporting the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses. We find that they suffer from inappropriate measurement and modeling strategies, rendering their conclusions suspect. We then test the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses by reexamining 18 U.S. surveys (2012–21; n = 32,056) and examining new surveys from 18 countries (2022; n = 18,033). In total, our 77 samples spanning a decade and 27 countries (n = 161,492) provide only weak support for either hypothesis. The wide variability in our findings suggests that differences in the relationship between conspiracism and political identities across political and temporal contexts do not stem from sampling variability, but rather from systematic forces that impact ideology, conspiracism, or both. We conclude that there is no single functional form that universally characterizes the relationship between conspiracism and political orientations across countries, or even over time within countries."
Weird. We keep being told that conspiracy theories are what right wingers love, and that the left wing is rational and reality has a liberal bias

Palmer Luckey on X - "The 1992 Democratic Party Platform is based. "Governments don't raise children, people do. People who bring children into this world have a responsibility to care for them and give them values, motivation and discipline. Children should not have children. We need a national crackdown on deadbeat parents, an effective system of child support enforcement nationwide, and a systematic effort to establish paternity for every child."
Jonathan Blow on X - "And they won that election. What a shock that this was not implemented."
Damn far right extremists!

Meme - "You know your life sucks.. When not a single person in the room is interested in looking at your big tits!"
Uncensored photo at: Today's Photo Gallery Is Called "Party Sluts"

Bret Weinstein on X - "Anyone else notice Nina Jankowicz (disgraced would be Minister of Truth) pop up in the Tenet Media / Lauren Chen story? Curiouser and curiouser…"

Meme - AtomicAstrid @AtomicAstrid: "If Three Mile Island reopens it would just be such a poetically beautiful end to the era of boomer environmentalism"
"Pa. activists try to head off nuclear restart at Three Mile Island"
"WE ARE NOT GOING BACK KEEP T.M.I. SHUT"
"WHEN PROFITS R INVOLVED, TMI"
"Eric Epstein of Three Mile Island Alert speaks at an event to oppose reopening Three Mile Island at the state capitol on Sept. 3, 2024."
Profits are only good if they're on "renewables" due to subsidies and regulation hobbling alternatives

isabelle 🪐 on X - "Hawk Tuah recently went viral for her rant about nuclear waste.  “It’s astonishing that people are concerned about the only energy waste that’s fully regulated, contained and that has never hurt anyone or the environment.”  She added that “dry cask storage has proven to be an extremely safe and easy solution for this overblown problem.”"

 Meme - PeterSweden @PeterSweden7: "Incredible.  Nobody turned out to watch Socialist President Lula's parade.  Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Brazilians were protesting for freedom.  People are rejecting tyranny 👇"

Most Important Things Ever — sylphoftime: i think it’s funny how christianity... - "i think it’s funny how christianity made a big deal about mary being impregnanted by god and everyone was like “oh my god the son of god! we must worship him listen to his great wisdom.”   meanwhile, if you said god knocked you up in ancient greece they’d just be like “yeah, me too.”"

Japanese restaurants say they’re not charging tourists more – they’re just charging locals less - "“People say it’s discrimination, but it is really hard for us to serve foreigners, and it is beyond our capacity,” said Shogo Yonemitsu, who runs Tamatebako, an all-you-can-eat seafood grill in Shibuya, Tokyo’s bustling shopping district.  He maintains that he doesn’t charge tourists extra. Instead, he offers a 1,000 yen ($6.50) discount to locals.  “We need (this pricing system) for cost reasons,” Yonemitsu said...  Visitor arrivals to Japan hit a record 17.78 million in the first half of 2024, according to government data - and are on track to break the country’s 2019 record of 31.88 million tourists.  In response, places around the country have begun implementing tourist taxes, imposing visitor caps and even banning alcohol sales in an attempt to curb the effects of too much tourism.  Earlier this year, a resort town in the foothills of Mount Fuji erected a giant net to block views of the iconic peak after tourists flocked to a photo-viewing spot, causing litter and traffic problems.  Meanwhile, tourism authorities in Hokkaido, the country’s northernmost prefecture known for its scenic views and ski resorts, this month urged businesses to set lower prices for locals.   And a mayor in western Japan said he was considering charging foreign tourists more than six times the local entry fee to the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Himeji Castle...  Yonemitsu, the restaurateur, said the influx of tourists isn’t simply an issue of adding extra tables.  He said his seafood grill had to hire additional English-speaking staff to take orders, handle bookings and explain to tourists everything from how to tell the difference between sashimi and grilled food items to where to put their luggage. Failing to do so results in “mayhem,” he said.  “Some people say, ‘We don’t do this in our country.’ But think about how bad Japanese people’s English skills are. We aren’t at that level where we can call ourselves a tourism powerhouse yet. We just can’t speak English, and yet we can’t say the wrong things. It’s really stressful,” he said.  While it’s a new phenomenon in Japan, differential pricing is quite common in other parts of the world. As the less-expensive resident prices are often written in the local language, foreign tourists may not even know they paid more... some Japanese business owners are trying to be creative. Shuji Miyake, who runs an izakaya, or informal pub, in Tokyo’s Tsukiji district, offers ramen topped with lobster for 5,500 yen ($35) - four times the price of the shrimp noodles his regulars often order. The premium dish is marketed to tourists, who he said have a higher budget to try new things."

Auto theft in Canada drops 19% as CBSA intercepts nearly 2K stolen vehicles