Meme - Bruce Arthur @bruce _arthur: "Hardcore anti-vaxxers are cancerous to a reasonable society. It's really sad. Vaccine passports now, please"
Bruce Arthur @bruce _arthur: "I am all for empathy and understanding and anti-vaxxers belong in goddamn prison re-education camps"
When left wingers talk about "empathy", "love" and "being a decent human being", this is what they mean. Empathy means sending people who disagree with you and who believe that bodily autonomy is sacrosanct to concentration camps
‘Grim Reaper’ stared at patients from hospital roof - "A man dressed up as the Grim Reaper and climbed onto a hospital roof to stare at patients. Police and firefighters were called after a man wearing a head-to-toe black outfit was seen overlooking the entrance to Glan Clwyd hospital, near Rhyl in North Wales, on June 6. He has since been identified as Leon Gillespie, a 26-year-old from nearby Deganwy, who stood still on the roof during the 50-minute incident. Gillespie was brought before Llandudno magistrates’ court, where he admitted causing a nuisance on NHS premises and was fined £200. No reason was given for his behaviour, and his outfit was also described in court as being like a “crow”."
Covent Garden stabbing: Four men injured and woman arrested after attack
Time to ban scissors
Caleb Wait on X - "I try to keep an open mind about new ideas and opinions, but this take on parents and children is the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Douthat’s response is perfect:"
Brenda Starr on X - "Translation: Socialists want to have a proxy vote "for" your children. In our coming socialist utopia, the State is Mother, the State is Father. The nuclear family may not be allowed to stand in opposition to the all-wise and all-knowing State."
Wesley Taylor on X - "Part of the white shirted guy's goals is to alienate children from their parents. This Marxist tactic can be clearly traced back to Marxists in the early 20th century. Alienate children from their parents and they must depend on the State as must everyone under Marxism."
cheeflo on X - "Hostages of their parents? Good lord ... this guy is certifiable. And how are the interests of the children different than the interests of the family? Family is in the children's best interests."
Lena Elsinger on X - "Overweighting the votes of people whose frontal lobes haven’t fully developed seems like… a bad idea."
Left wingers think children are the property of the state, after all
The brain fully develops at 25 so you can't hold young adults accountable for what they do. But young adults also get to be responsible for the young children they are unrelated to
Age of marriage & giving birth in medieval Europe - ""Yes, nobles/royals did it, but mostly for political or inheritance reasons. And even in those cases they often waited for years to consummate the marriage... Just looking at when these women got married also ignores the fact that husbands often waited to consummate the marriage, that’s why it’s important to also look at how old these women were when they actually had their first baby:
Constance of France (1078 – 1125)
Married at approx. 15–17; first recorded child born at approx. 30.
Cecile of France (1097 – 1145)
Married at approx. 9; first recorded child born at approx. 22.
Empress Matilda (1102 – 1167)
Married at 8; first recorded child born at 31.
Theodora Komnene, Queen of Jerusalem (c. 1145 – 1182)
Married at 13; first recorded child at 23 or 24
Isabella of Hainault (1170 – 1190)
Married at 10; first recorded child born at 17.
Agnes of France (empress) (1171 – 1220/after 1240)
Married at 9-10, no recorded children.
St Elizabeth of Portugal (1271 – 1336)
Married at 11–12; first recorded child born at 19.
Isabella of France (1295 – 1358)
Married at 12; first recorded child born at 17.
Bianca of Savoy (1337 – 1387)
Married at 13; first recorded child born at 14.
Isabella of Valois (1389 – 1409)
Married at 6; first recorded child born at 19 (second marriage).
Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443 – 1509)
Married at 6-7; first recorded child born at 13.
Beatrice d’Este (1475 – 1497)
Married at 15, first recorded child born at 17.
Lucrezia Borgia (1480 – 1519)
Married at 13 (first marriage annulled, not consummated); first recorded child born at 19 (second marriage)...
Also interesting is that there’s quite a bit of evidence of people being concerned about the young age of some of these women, commenting on it and even being critical, like in the case of Lady Margaret Beaufort who got pregnant when she was 12 and gave birth at age 13. People disapproved of it. That she herself considered it something that wasn’t right is proven by her objecting to her own granddaughter being married at 13... And, again, although child marriages did happen among the noble/royal class of Europe, even among this tiny minority of the population it was also not as common as is sometimes suggested. For them too it was more common to marry in your late teens or after. It is even a massive stretch to suggest that child marriage was a widespread practice among the elite."
Japanese Samurai warriors captured in brutal pictures
Couple with more than 400 different personalities between them - "A couple who both suffer from a multiple personality disorder have revealed the struggle of living with hundreds of competing identities. Kai, 27, and Franz, 26, who live in Cardiff, have both been diagnosed with Disassociative Identity Disorder and have more than 400 different personalities, known as 'alters', between them. The 'alters' range from boisterous children to competent adults and each comes with their own memories, behaviours, attitudes and perceived age."
Neetu Arnold on X - "Oh wow 😬 University of Michigan will HIDE first-semester grades on transcripts for students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts It’s to “curb the mental health crisis” AND The policy is mandatory for all students bc “covering an individual’s grades will inadvertently become equated w/them not doing well in a class”"
Hang up on Britain’s blight boxes | Kitty Thompson | The Critic Magazine - "In the age of the iPhone, public calls from phone boxes have collapsed by 99.5% since 2002. Yet there are still around 15,800 phone boxes scattered across the UK, of which only 6,000 are the iconic red phone boxes we have come to love. The reason why, unsurprisingly, traces back to outdated regulations. BT’s status as the designated Universal Service Provider means it must maintain a network of public telephones and it may only remove a phone box without consultation if there are other phone boxes within 400 metres. There are good reasons for that. Around 150,000 emergency calls were made from phone boxes in 2019-20, and they remain valuable in remote areas with poor mobile coverage or during emergencies. Nobody sensible is arguing for the removal of every last box. The real problem is that regulations designed to protect a useful public service are now preserving decrepit infrastructure."
Concern is not judgement | Victoria Smith | The Critic Magazine - "Ariana Grande looks ill. I write this without knowing any of the details of Grande’s personal life and habits. I write it having watched the video for her new song “Petal”, in which she looks painfully thin, even thinner than when she appeared as Glinda in Wicked. It’s the kind of thinness where one can never feel warm, where muscles start to waste, where the wasting eventually gets to the heart. Is it okay for me to say this doesn’t seem right? According to many commentators, no, I shouldn’t say it. I should shut up... Is all concern false, prurient, intrusive? There’s a ready-made narrative that says it is respectful of a famous person’s privacy and bodily autonomy to never, ever comment on extreme thinness, as if the only reason anyone would ever do so is to be cruel. What this ultimately does is normalise self-harm as spectacle. You can tell everyone to say nothing, but they still see what’s right in front of them. "
"Empathy" is only good when it pushes the left wing agenda
Ironically, a lot of people condemning talking about it also claim that anorexia is a huge problem, and are so deluded as to claim that it is a bigger problem than obesity
Driver denied car insurance over ‘Jesus loves you’ stickers - "A driver has been denied car insurance because he put “Jesus loves you” stickers on his car. Simeon Chandra was told his insurer had “declined the modification” and needed photographic evidence that they had been removed. Photographs show the 35-year-old’s 2009 Nissan Pixo with the words “Jesus loves you” on one side, and “Jesus loves you v much” on the other. But after sending his insurer, GoSkippy, pictures of the modifications, he was warned the policy would be voided unless they were removed."
Driver blames speeding on girlfriend ‘cheating on me’ - "A driver caught travelling at 130mph by police blamed his speeding on his girlfriend cheating on him. Video footage posted by the Metropolitan Police shows Mudassir Sandhu, 24, being detained after his vehicle was stopped on the M25."
Eric Lombardi (EricForOLP.ca) 🇨🇦🚀 on X - "It is absolutely bananas how much grade inflation has occurred in Ontario high schools. Just look at how much came after Ford was elected and after the pandemic. We can talk about underfunding until we are blue in the face, but my biggest concern is falling standards. I’ve heard horror stories from teachers and professors alike about how unprepared students are still being passed upward to avoid conflicts with parents and administrators. I am committed to increasing education funding and resources for our classrooms, but there is no doubt that curriculum changes and a reintroduced role for standardized testing are needed. It genuinely seems we’ve lost a major goal of education: to create resilient citizens capable of dealing with challenges and setbacks. By letting standards fall, we have also made it harder for high-potential students to really distinguish themselves. It doesn’t surprise me that more parents are looking to tutoring and private education under these circumstances."
The state capacity crisis - "It is an extraordinary fact about the 2024 election that the areas that turned most aggressively toward President Trump were cities and states that have long been Democratic bastions... Whatever explains the election results, we think the electorate in fact has plenty of reasons to be unhappy with the quality of American governance. Housing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, urban violence, the opioid crisis, climate change — feckless government is implicated in all of them. For the past decade, an ideologically disparate group of scholars have warned that America faces a crisis of “state capacity”— the ability of government officials to translate policy goals into action and produce good outcomes. This concept, borrowed from development economics, has traditionally been used to explain why some nations succeed while others fail. A state with strong capacity can enforce contracts, prevent private violence, supply public goods, mobilize capital, and deliver basic services. A state with weak capacity struggles with these tasks. The United States is very far from a failed state, but many of its most urgent political and policy problems can be traced to the perception that government is unable or unwilling to meet people’s basic needs. By linking the American government’s weakness to concerns about state capacity, scholars suggest that our day-to-day political dysfunction is not just a garden-variety problem. Instead, it may foreshadow political collapse or, at least, declining economic growth and international standing. Yet scholars diagnosing America’s state capacity crisis have mostly focused on the federal government, blaming the problems primarily on issues like the filibuster or the National Environmental Policy Act. As flawed as those institutions are—and they are plenty flawed!— it is a mistake to put the primary responsibility for weakness in American state capacity on the federal government. The old joke is that the federal government is really just an insurance company with an army. It doles out checks for old people through Social Security and Medicare, and regulates all manner of conduct, but does not much involve itself directly in service provision. In contrast, state and local governments provide almost all government services that people depend on—schools, police, fire protection, and more—either independently or in partnership with the federal government. They build and operate almost all public infrastructure. And they employ many times more people than the federal government does, by any measure. So if we have a crisis of state capacity, its roots are in state and local governments. That simple point—one familiar to scholars of American political development—is mostly absent from the new state capacity literature... In our view, three main factors explain the weaknesses of state and local government in the United States: First, voters know almost nothing about their state and local representatives and instead base their votes entirely on the national political climate... The collapse of local media has made matters worse... Second, state administrative law is as strict, and often stricter, than federal administrative law, both with respect to the procedures it imposes and the intensity of judicial review. State and especially local governments have extremely powerful rules requiring lots of public participation in administration. Because small groups with members that care intensely about state and local decisions are much easier to form than groups representing a diffuse public interest, unrepresentative private interests—whether that’s the Chamber of Commerce or public employee unions or neighborhood NIMBYs—can and do overwhelm the administrative process at the expense of majoritarian preferences. State and local governments fail at providing basic services well because their processes slow things down and give veto rights to intense “policy demanders.” Third, states face severe fiscal constraints that the federal government doesn’t. Every state is legally required, one way or another, to balance its budget. Further, no state can print money to inflate away its deficits, and all states face both legal and market limits on their capacity to borrow... The results of weak state and local government capacity are visible everywhere. Across America, our private sector outperforms the rest of the world, while public services wither. In San Francisco, a tech titan at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence can leave her office and hail a self-driving taxi—a miracle!—only to be driven down a road covered in potholes and lined with tent encampments. In New York, a mogul in the global financial industry might ride to work on a subway system that has barely expanded in the last 100 years and that has repeatedly broken records for history’s least cost-efficient capital programs. This dysfunction isn’t because Americans inherently distrust government or prefer weak public institutions. In our most laissez-faire era at the turn of the last century, public infrastructure in American cities was far better than what was on offer in Britain or Germany. Our bridges and waterworks, our libraries and public street lighting, were the envy of the world. And today, many liberal democracies that are much poorer than we are and have less dynamic private sectors than we do have better public services. The problem is institutional, not cultural."
Squatting nanny makes couple’s lavish $1.5 million upstate New York farmhouse a living hell: report - "A wealthy couple who thought they had found their dream nanny to help with their newborn daughter soon found themselves in a living nightmare when the caregiver allegedly refused to leave their lavish upstate New York home after things turned sour. Barbara Molnar checked all the boxes that Jamie Carano Nordenström and her husband, Philip Nordenström, were looking for when she answered their ad on Nanny Lane in the summer of 2024... While the Nordenströms’ Nanny Lane ad said a “guest house is provided,” the couple was hoping to find a full-time caregiver for their little girl. But when Molnar asked if she could move in in December, they allowed her to, rent-free, as Jamie wanted to avoid giving her legal status as a tenant, the Cut reported. It didn’t take long for things to implode, with Molnar soon defying every rule the Nordenströms had... Though she was told the guesthouse was pet-free, Molnar brought her yellow Labrador, Hudson, and asked if her youngest son could visit over Christmas while on break from boarding school — but was still there come mid-January, Jamie added. Molnar also allegedly refused to clean up after herself in the shared spaces of the property — or if Hudson pooped in the garden or inside the home, Jamie alleged to the Cut... However, when the Nordenströms returned from Philip’s native Sweden in June, they found teenagers hanging out in and around their pool — and no room in either of their fridges for their groceries and a vacuum clogged with dog hair, per the outlet. After shutting the party down, Jamie went to sleep, only to be awakened by Molnar making a racket in the kitchen, she told the Cut. She confronted the nanny, who was angry that her boss had embarrassed her son in front of his buddies... Jamie fired Molnar after the party — but begrudgingly offered to help her find a new place to live and pay her through the end of the month. However, Molnar immediately cited tenants’ rights, telling Jamie, “You don’t know the law. This is my home, my furnished apartment. This is my designated parking space”... While Molnar had no criminal record, she did have a similar landlord-tenant dispute in 2021. Records from that case obtained by The Post show that Molnar wound up owing the couple $27,617 plus interest. A lawyer confirmed that Molnar was a licensee — with permission to live rent-free from a homeowner without a rental agreement — under state law. So their attorney demanded the nanny leave via a 10-day notice — which passed with no sign of Molnar vacating. There were run-ins with cops, both sides began filming each other, and the couple even called animal control about Hudson... The Nordenströms eventually filed a lawsuit against Molnar, where they claimed she was “a professional con-artist, with a well-documented history of ingratiating herself with well-off individuals, unlawfully occupying their property in bad faith, and then refusing to leave and abusing the protections afforded by eviction laws”... A judge ordered Molnar to vacate the premises on Sept. 10 and additionally slammed her with a temporary order of protection from the Nordenströms. When she finally left, Jamie found that the guest house was soaked in urine — and placed so precisely she assumed it couldn’t have all come from the dog... She said that the mattress and comforter were drenched, and the rugs were bogged down to such a degree that the liquid seeped through the floorboards. “Maybe it was a bear,” Molnar told the Cut while claiming she’s the real victim, who’s “going to be completely discredited and slandered.” The ousted New Jersey-born nanny — now working as a private chef in Hillsdale — said she was scouted as a high-end model and worked for French designer Guy Laroche before marrying Pasquale Fabio Granato. They had three kids and opened celeb Big Apple hotspot Serafina Fabulous Pizza. After their divorce, he sent their kids to European boarding schools, where she would visit them, she told The Cut. She later had her youngest son with a French wine heir and is suing him for $5 million in child support, the outlet reported. Molnar also filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Jamie in August, which her former boss called “baseless and frivolous AI-generated,” while calling her mentally unstable in a counter-filing. Eventually, a judge placed restraining orders on both women."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Many <40 Americans, per fairly serious polling from a dozen-plus people including me, genuinely feel they are unique beings who should not be expected to do everyday things unless they are wildly excited about them. This is the subtext of many major twitter discourses...from women seeming almost offended that their partners expect sex and affection in "sexual and romantic relationships" to currently broke grad school bros raging about being expected to make their dinners at home. In both contexts, as with "the difficulty of parenting" - another debate favorite every week or two - it is just objectively untrue that everything was better in 1970. The primary difference, other than maybe improved hygiene in the 1st case, is that EXPECTATIONS have sky-rocketed."
Meme - "r/Swingers
We got invited to church the morning after... has anyone else?
So my husband and I have this couple we've been playing with for the past several months. We've already hosted eachother a few times, very nice people and good at playing. We're 33F and 30M, they're both in their late 50s, by a good margin the oldest couple we've done anything with. Apparently we've never gone over their house on a saturday night. All went well, we shared the bed and it was great. As we got up to leave, they asked if we wanted to go to church with them. They offered to treat us to breakfast if we did, and while we're not very religious we know how to sit through mass, so we agreed. It was odd to say the least, but not bad at all. Actuay it was pretty calming to do after a fun night, a good way to get your head back into reality. My husband and I even actually prayed together for the first time in a while, which was sweet. Anyway we had breakfast and went home, that was interesting, and I'm wondering if anyone else has ever had this happen to them?"
"This is the best conversion tactic I've ever heard."
Meme - "Even in our politicized era, most people are apolitical, including women. Appearing too into politics is a turnoff because it shows it's probably filling a void and you're not socially well adjusted. Women might find a passionately progressive guy more tolerable because she'll agree on more things, but she'll also probably see that guy as a version of her gay friend. Being passionately conservative probably appears more masculine, but she'll also more likely see you as bitter, resentful and downwardly mobile. The sweet spot is probably being smart enough to be politically aware but not dogmatic and able to joke about it (including at expense of your own beliefs). One exception to this might be abortion, which predates our current era. Even Seinfeld depicted this in an episode 30 years ago where Elaine dumped a guy she liked because he was pro life."
Meme - Supergirl: "PLEASE, PLEASE, SUPERMAN DON'T BANISH ME! GIVE ME ANOTHER CHANCE !"
Superman: "I'm SORRY TO END YOUR CAREER, BUT YOU'RE A FAILURE AS SUPERGIRL! I MUST EXILE YOU TO. ANOTHER WORLD!"
