Links - 2nd June 2026 (3 - General Wokeness [including UK Sikh Stabbing])

Southampton Times on X - "“Can’t breath” - Police body cam footage shown in court revealed the moment officers arrested 18-year-old Henry Nowak shortly before his death. Southampton Crown Court heard officers found Mr Nowak leaning against a house wall in Belmont Road, supported by the defendant’s father. The defendant's father said: “He keeps dropping down, so I am just trying to keep him up.” Mr Nowak can be heard saying “can’t breathe.” Police put handcuffs on Mr Nowak, who was lying on his side, telling officers he had been stabbed and that he could not breathe. The officer told Mr Nowak that he was under arrest for suspicion of assault. Mr Nowak repeated that he had been stabbed. A male voice said: “I don’t think you have, mate.” The video cuts out when CPR starts, and in its place, a transcript was read by Neil King, prosecuting, and the officer in the case. One officer said: "He is not unconscious, mate, he isn't breathing." Mr Nowak was pronounced dead at 12.37am despite the efforts of police, paramedics and a doctor who was flown to the scene by helicopter. The video ended when CPR began, with a transcript read to the court instead. Mr Nowak was later pronounced dead at 12:37am despite efforts from police, paramedics and an airlifted doctor. Vickrum Singh Digwa, 23, of St Denys Road, Southampton denies the charge of murder. Source: Daily Echo"

PIO Sikh man murdered British university student with 21-inch knife, UK court told - "When police arrived, Digwa denied stabbing Nowak, claiming he had been racially abused and attacked by a drunken man."

Polish Connection on X - "New details about Henry Nowak murder. Three female officers responded to scene. "The officer who handcuffed Henry laughed when he said he had been stabbed. He was then dragged across the gravel and held in handcuffs as he bled out. Only after he lost consciousness did officers remove the handcuffs and begin CPR. Henry died at the scene. Police also seized Henry's and his father's phone and searched all messages for racist comments or jokes""

Charlie Bentley-Astor on X - "You're not allowed to take a water bottle into a concert but Sikhs are permitted to wear their ceremonial knives."
Aleph on X - "As a redneck American if I move to Britain I should be able to carry my ancestral Colt python revolver"

Sikh man accused of murdering university student with 8-inch ceremonial knife used racism as his 'trump card' to ensure police arrested his dying victim instead, court hears - "Prosecutors said Vickrum Digwa, 23, was 'skilled' with blades when he came to murder Henry Nowak, 18, having trained with weapons since he was 12. Digwa is on trial accused of stabbing Mr Nowak three times in the front and three times in the back during a street confrontation. In his closing speech to jurors at Southampton Crown Court, Nicholas Lobbenberg KC said Digwa must have known the wounds were fatal, despite denying stabbing Mr Nowak at the scene. He said Digwa used racism as his 'trump card', accusing Mr Nowak of racial abuse when police officers arrived so they would arrest the wrong man - a 'wicked lie about a dying man'. Digwa was said to 'sleep in his bedroom with an arsenal of weapons' and spoke about the Kirpan - a type of ceremonial dagger carried by Sikhs - allegedly used to kill Mr Nowak in 'loving terms'... Digwa filmed his victim as he tried to escape by jumping over a fence, leaving behind a trail of blood in Southampton. Mr Nowak was shouting that he was 'going to die', causing his neighbours to call the police - but when the officers arrived they arrested him over the bogus racist abuse allegation... Prosecutors also allege that Digwa's mother, Kiran Kaur, 53, took the blade from her son at the scene and ran to hide it with 'an arsenal of weapons' at their home address... 'This is a man who chooses to sleep in his bedroom with an arsenal of weapons. 'This is a man who likes weapons. You know he searches for them on his phone. 'He describes the murder weapon in loving terms. 'You might think that rather odd, given what he did with that knife on that night. 'Most importantly, he knows how to use weapons. He told you he has been training with weapons since he was 12.' Mr Lobbenberg said that Digwa had lied about Mr Nowak being drunk that night and he was actually under the legal limit of alcohol to drive. He said: 'The biggest lie, ladies and gentlemen, is why he drew his knife. He told you from that witness box, Henry Nowak said he was going to kill me. He was going to f*** me up. 'We suggest that was never said. You can be sure it was never said because why, if it had been said, would you not tell the 999 operator the most important thing as to why you acted. 'He didn't tell the police at the scene who were asking. He didn't tell his brother when he was saying what happened. 'If this was in the forefront of his mind, seared into his memory, why wouldn't you tell someone. 'Instead, he didn't even put the threat to kill in his defence case statement. 'It came from him for the first time in the witness box.' Mr Lobbenberg said that there was a stream of lies from Digwa starting from the minutes after the incident. He said: 'We say this, "drunk" is a lie, "going to kill me" is a lie and we say "P***" is a lie. The consequence and purpose of these lies is significant. 'Why he tells them is he is seeking to hide what he has done. 'And racism was his trump card to try to make sure what he had done was lawful. 'We say that was a wicked lie about a dying man and it is a wicked lie about a dead man to you now.' Mr Lobbenberg said that Mr Nowak was an 'unarmed young man with a phone'... Mr Lobbenberg said that Digwa's mother did not give evidence to the court because she could not explain why she took the Kirpan back to the house. He said: 'She has no answer to her actions that don't incriminate her son and her. 'That is why she hasn't gone in the witness box."

Sikhs 'demonised' after Southampton murder, says community leader - ""this could happen to any community - an individual could break the law and murder someone but you wouldn't demonise that entire community." After the trial, the UK Sikh Federation wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood calling for anti-Sikh hate crimes to be recorded in a similar way to those against Jews and Muslims."
Kevin Bass on X - "Henry Nowak gets stabbed, chased, stabbed while fleeing. Police arrive. Murderer calls Henry "racist" to get him arrested. Police laugh when Henry says he is wounded, drag him. Henry bleeds to death while handcuffed. BBC makes the story about the dangers of racism. Unbelievable"
White men get demonised all the time

Bristol vigil for Henry Nowak met with counter-protest - "Two small demonstrations were held in Bristol on Thursday evening following the murder of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwain. A vigil organised by “the Patriotic Bristolian” was staged against “two-tier policing where some communities appear to be protected at the expense of others”... Stand Up To Racism held counter-protest to challenge what it describes as attempts to spread “racist myth and bigotry” around the tragedy... anti-racist protesters held placards reading ‘refugees are welcome here’."
Racism was probably a contributory factor to why he died. Left wingers just hate white people

Stand Up To Racism on X - "Antiracists & antifascists outnumbering & out shouting fascist ‘White Vanguard’ in Southampton. We won’t let the far right divide our communities!"
At this point, it's crystal clear what "antiracism" and "antifascism" mean.
Left wingers always project.

Christina Buttons on X - "I recently had the opportunity to put together a talk in New York. I titled it “How Bad Ideas Become Bad Policy,” and invited @SwipeWright , @CarolynGorman_ , @Rafa_Mangual , and @CharlesFLehman to speak with me. I come from a liberal background. My first major break with the left came over trans issues. As my reporting expanded, I began seeing the same thinking errors driving progressive policy on mental illness, crime, child welfare, education, homelessness, drug policy, and more. That is what moved me rightward: realizing the same bad ideas were producing bad policy across very different issues, with results that were not only ineffective, but harmful. It usually begins with a real problem. But progressives misidentify the cause and build policy around an idealistic picture of human nature rather than a realistic account of behavior and incentives. That often means attributing problems to external forces, such as systems, discrimination, poverty, and stigma, while giving too little weight to individual factors and personal responsibility. They favor policies that feel compassionate in the short term, even when they produce worse outcomes over time. They let moral narratives outrun facts. They treat unequal outcomes as proof of injustice. They misplace empathy on wrongdoers instead of those harmed by their actions. They prefer broad, population-wide solutions over targeted interventions for the smaller group driving the problem. They defer to ideologically aligned experts and rely on weak research when it confirms their beliefs. That was the purpose of the talk: to show how the same errors pervade many different policy areas, and to highlight the @ManhattanInst 's work offering better solutions grounded in data and reality."

Immigrant MSP wants Scots to pay reparations to Palestine - "A trans Indian student elected to Holyrood wants Scottish taxpayers to fund reparations to Palestinians because of their “complicity” in the “occupation” of the territory. Q Manivannan was elected as a Green Party MSP on the Edinburgh & Lothians East list for the pro-independence Scottish Greens last week. The election of the self-described “queer Tamil immigrant” provoked an outcry after it emerged Manivannan was on a student visa with no guarantee that it would allow the MSP to stay in the country for the full Holyrood term... Manivannan, along with Iris Duane, another newly elected transgender Green MSP, endorsed a “manifesto” by Art Workers for Palestine Scotland before May’s Holyrood election. One of the demands in the manifesto calls for the future Scottish Government to commit to a “programme of reparative justice from Scotland to the Palestinian people”. The group also demanded that ministers launch a report into the “historical and contemporary complicity of Scotland in the colonisation and occupation of Palestine”. The Scottish Greens do not appear to have backed the pledge as a party, but their 2026 manifesto said they would support “international calls” for reparations for countries impacted by colonialism. It is unclear whether this would include Palestine. Rachael Hamilton, Scottish Tory deputy leader, said: “Ordinary Scots will be appalled that these Green MSPs are not only aligned with an organisation pushing anti-Semitic tropes but are advocating that taxpayers pick up the tab for a misguided virtue-signalling stunt.” “This pair clearly don’t care about the sky-high taxes hard-working Scots are paying or the cuts our public services are experiencing if they think this is appropriate. It also lays bare their contempt for the country they represent. “It seems the new intake of Green MSPs are even more extreme than those who went before them. The thought of John Swinney cutting a deal with these crackpots is truly terrifying.” Historians do not generally consider Scotland to have been any more involved in the British Mandate of Palestine than the UK as a whole. However, some Left-wing Scottish activists point to the fact that Arthur Balfour – who issued the 1917 declaration saying Britain supported a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine – was born in Scotland. Some scholars have also claimed that Scottish Presbyterian thought influenced British Christian Zionism, which, it has been argued, contributed to the country’s support for a Jewish state in Palestine. Anti-Israel activism also has deep roots in Scotland, with Dundee being the first UK city to twin with a Palestinian one, Nablus, in 1980. Manivannan is allowed to serve as an MSP under a quirk of immigration rules which state that holding elected office in a devolved legislature does not count as a form of employment despite the £77,711 salary. The academic is in a race against time to find a graduate visa, which will allow them to work in the UK for three years, before their student visa expires at the end of the year. It is still unclear whether they will be able to obtain the paperwork necessary, a Global Talent Visa, to serve a full five-year term in Holyrood. Malcolm Offord, Reform’s Scottish leader, has said he would block foreign students from becoming MSPs after the SNP allowed temporary visa holders to stand for office last year."

Q Manivannan visa row takes another twist as student chief said she was told to withdraw - "The row surrounding the right of a Green MSP to work in the UK has taken another twist after a party member claims she was told to withdraw her candidacy. Sai Shraddha Suresh Viswanathan alleges that an official called her and asked her to step down over concerns about her visa situation... She said she had been "let down by the internal selection process of the Scottish Greens Party," adding: "Ultimately, there has been a discrepancy in how different candidates have been advised by the party."

Q Manivannan: Green MSP who claimed to have ‘grown up starving’ in India exposed as privately educated with privileged upbringing - "Manivannan came from an upper middle-class family in Chennai, one of India’s wealthiest cities. Despite the Scottish Greens’ opposition to private education, the MSP attended both a private secondary school and private university in India. During the election campaign, Manivannan also suggested they came from a "lower caste" background and had at times been "starved". Shortly before the election, the MSP said they had "saved and worked and lied and begged" in order to study for a PhD at the University of St Andrews. However, The Times have reported that Manivannan’s father, Manivannan Dasarathi, holds degrees in chemical engineering and business administration and has decades of senior management experience across both government and private sectors. The MSP’s paternal grandmother operated a medical clinic, while their maternal grandmother was a pioneering gynaecologist who founded a hospital in Tirupattur. Manivannan’s mother, Rajachitra Manivannan, also had an established academic career. The family’s background allowed the MSP to attend Bhavan's Rajaji Vidyashram, a private school in Chennai described by former pupils as one of the city’s most prestigious institutions. The school is said to have offered an array of international trips, including visits to Nasa in the US, and boasted extensive sporting facilities. Manivannan later studied at OP Jindal Global University in Haryana, one of India’s best-known private liberal arts universities. Fees at the institution reportedly ranged between £7,800 and £9,300 annually - significantly higher than those charged at public universities in India. Following graduation, Manivannan worked at Essai Education, a consultancy helping wealthy Indian families secure places for their children at elite universities including Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge. Former colleagues describe the firm’s clients as extremely wealthy and said the company "paid insanely well"... The MSP recently appealed for financial help with visa costs through a crowdfunding page that raised £1,066 towards a graduate visa application fee... A Scottish Conservative spokesman said: "It appears that Q Manivannan has questions to answer after apparently pulling the wool over the eyes of the Scottish Greens." “This new MSP wouldn’t be the first left-wing politician to embellish their supposedly working-class credentials to curry favour. "But the public expect those they elect to be transparent and honest about their life before politics, rather than peddling false information about what they have done and where they came from.”"
So many woke cosplay being oppressed

Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ ل بن on X - "“Jihad” means “struggle.” “Mein Kampf” also means “my struggle.” Imagine falling for it twice."

Meme - "NOT IN A 1000 YEARS WOULD I IMAGINE PHRASING "DIED FROM FUCKING WITHOUT PROTECTION" AS...
The lack of boomer LGBTQ+ people isn't because it's "more popular now." Many were murdered by their peers, died from government inaction during the AIDS crisis, committed suicide due to lack of social supports, or have had to live in the closet due to their peers' cruelty."

End Wokeness on X - "Things that got canceled for "racism"
1. CCTV cameras (Seattle)
2. Mugshots (San Francisco)
3. Gunshot detectors (15+ cities)
4. Standardized tests (UC system)
5. Gifted & Talented program (NYC)
6. License plate readers (30+ cities)
I wish this was a joke, but it's 100% real"

Dries Van Langenhove on X - "Mohamed Bakkali, the logistical brain behind the Paris and Bataclan attacks that killed 129 and wounded hundreds more, is allowed penitentiary leave by the Brussels court. If Bakkali continues his “calm and good behaviour” according to the court, he could soon be freed indefinitely."
𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ on X - "To remind everyone what really happened that night:
• They cut off testicles and shoved them into the victims's mouths.
• They stabbed pregnant women in the womb and raped them.
• They beheaded people.
• They gouged people's eyes out.
French authorities worked overtime to keep these details away from the public. And apparently, the mastermind behind this atrocity will soon walk, because European leaders are cowards and traitors who will never do the right thing."

Meme - Sargon of Akkad: "This seems like a pretty islamophobic post, Pink News."
"When straights start talking about straight oppression online while it's still illegal to be gay in 70 countries:
*Cat on skateboard* Bye"

Meme - "WHAT THEY SAY
COEXIST
WHAT THEY MEAN
COMPLY"

Meme - Geiger Capital: "The NYT is a meme at this point... "Why doesn't this summit between global superpowers look diverse like the movies?""
"The New York Times. Trump-Xi Summit
Where Are the Women at the Trump-Xi Summit? Nearly all the business leaders and officials accompanying President Trump in China are men. There are few women on the Chinese side, too."

Mario Nawfal on X - "🇨🇳 Zhou Qunfei left school at 15 to polish watch glass in a Shenzhen factory with callused hands and HK$20k to her name. 30 years later she was seated between Elon and Tim Cook at the Trump-Xi state dinner. The journey in between: she founded Lens Technology in 2003, bet everything on precision glass, and became Apple's primary supplier for iPhone screens after 2007. Now she supplies Tesla, Samsung, and nearly every major consumer electronics company on the planet. Born in rural Hunan. Mother died young, father disabled. No safety net, no connections, no elite university. Just a factory floor and an obsession with getting the glass right. One of China's richest self-made women. Built entirely on a component most people never think about. A true story of overcoming adversity."
Weird. Left wingers told us that the fact that there were no women at the summit meant meritocracy was dead

Kangmin Lee | 이강민 on X - "A black man murdered his entire family. 8 children mercilessly slaughtered. This was the deadliest mass shooting in the past 2 years and the left is silent because the perpetrator was black. No national outrage. No protests. No social media campaigns. Silence."
On Shamar Elkins. It's easier to keep quiet than to blame a lack of gun control

Creative Deduction on X - "By the 1930s many Western intellectuals reluctantly realised that classical Marxism had failed and the proletariat wasn’t revolting. But then a group of exiled German Marxists led by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse decided to change the battlefield. Instead of economics, they targeted the “cultural superstructure”: family, religion, tradition, sexual norms and the very idea of objective truth. Their weapon was Critical Theory - a relentless campaign of negative criticism designed to portray every Western institution as inherently oppressive and capitalism as not just economically flawed, but psychologically and morally corrupt. Marcuse gave the strategy its most powerful tactical manual in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”: true liberation, he argued, required “liberating tolerance” - tolerance only for progressive ideas and outright intolerance for conservative or “regressive” ones. Free speech, in other words, was only legitimate when it served the revolution. The intellectual poison of the Frankfurt School was extraordinarily influential and as its graduates and intellectual heirs colonised universities, media, NGOs and corporate HR departments, Critical Theory evolved into today’s identity politics, DEI mandates and cancel culture - a cultural Marxism that attacks the individual in the name of group grievance. What began with a small circle of German émigrés in the 1930s now shapes the moral vocabulary of much of the Western elite. The result has been a softer, more pervasive authoritarianism: the dictatorship of the politically correct."

Black Conservative addresses an Alberta Christian University and a free speech fight breaks out | National Post - "An Alberta Christian university student council has disavowed its own apology, issued after a Black History Month speaker denied the existence of systemic racism in a speech on Biblical definitions of racism. Last Monday, Ambrose University in Calgary said the speech, given in February by Samuel Sey, a conservative activist, blogger and Christian who is Black, “caused severe harm” to some students... Sey said that statements intended to respect and support people of colour and their lived experiences ring hollow. “Clearly they only mean the lived experiences of black people that’s approved by Robin DiAngelo (the author of White Fragility) and themselves,” Sey said. “When they say they are allies of people of colour, they really only mean some people.”"
From 2021

Meme - Storm, Cyclops, Wolverine: "HALT! WE'RE THE X-MEN, AN ALLEGORY FOR ANTI-RACISM!"
Sentinel: "AFFIRMATIVE. DESPITE BEING 1% OF THE POPULATION, MUTANTS COMMIT 99% OF GLOBAL CRISES."
*Shocked X-Men*
Sentinel: *blasts X-men from palm*

Meme - Michael Shermer: "The deeper epistemological problem behind the entire phenomena is confusing Internal Subjective Truths ("I feel like an XX or XY inside") & External Objective Truths ("you can't change sex & there's no such thing as being 'born in the wrong body' because you are your body")"
Michael Shermer @michaelshermer: "Decades from now historians, sociologists & linguists will make a list like this as a case study in how, in the early part of the 21st century, the left took liberal tolerance to absurd lengths to the point of illiberalism. (Didn't they have a word for "vagina-haver"?)"
"Birthing person Cisheteropatnarchy Latinx Chest feeding Justice system-involved
Safe space Two spirit Black Bodies Othering Minontized communities Lived experience
Allyship Front hole Emotional labor Ways of knowing Folx Microaggression Erasure
Queerness/queering Pregnant people Humxn Black fatigue Unhoused Positionality
Setler colonialism Masculinities Cntical consciousness Decolonize Speaking as a
Subverting norms Intersectionality Systems of oppression Invalidation
White woman's tears Becoming Specially-abled LGBTOIA+++
Healthy at every size Vagina-haver Stolen land Gender assigned at birth Problematize
Inseminated person Trans genocide Undocumented worker Microinvalidation
Lived truth Gender-affirming care Racialized Ethnomathematics Epistemic inustice
Holding space Cis/cisgender/cishet White adjacent Person who immigrated
Misogynoir Trigger warning Stay in your lane Womxn/womyn Thinormativity
Genderqueer Voice of color Dog whistle Cultural appropriation Symbolic violence
Herstory Matrix of domination Deadnaming Heteronormative Xenogender White silence
Land acknowledgment A Black woman is speaking"

Meme - "Prison is a perfect place for liberals. Think about it!
1) Everyone is treated equally
2) free food
3) Free healthcare for everyone
4) No one has guns except for the guards
5) No cars and no gas!"

Meme - "Liberal White Woman Quandary"
"Fundamentalist Christians oppressing women like in "Handjobs Tale" *annoyed*
Fundamentalist Muslims oppressing women like in real life *sheepish*"

'We won’t stop': Pride Toronto experiencing funding shortage : r/TorontoTheCity - "Please do look to the primary cause: chickenshit corporate sponsors buckling to Trumps ‘anti-woke’ bulldozer"
"Or, perhaps it’s because this same org had to repay government grants after they “lost track” of funds intended for community initiatives a few years ago... they’re blaming Trump/anti DEI instead of admitting they lost the trust of their sponsors.
Edit: Pride Toronto repaying over $505K after federal grant controversy
“Pride Toronto is repaying just over $505,000 in grant funding after an accounting firm found the organization could not prove that it completed several projects despite receiving $1.85 million from the federal government.”"
"No. Bookkeeping is separate from corporate cowardice. You seem homophobic"
"Organizations that get caught stealing typically struggle to collect donations going forward. Not really a debatable observation"
"Your assumption of guilt is telling"
"What assumption? Did you read the article I linked? They asked for money to do a project, pocketed the money and didn’t do the project, thus were ordered to repay the funds. And they still aren’t being honest, not about the real reason they lost their sponsors at the least. Sponsors prefer donations actually make it to the community. Judging people who accept funding on the behalf of the gay community with no intention to actually pass along that benefit to that community - I fail to see how that makes me homophobic. They “lost” money intended for lgbtq+ benefits, then to make it worse, used donations for the same cause to repay those missing funds. So $1 million intended for the community lost because of them."

Iran: A Longer View

From April:

Iran: A Longer View

The prognosis of the Iran War is now so couched in politics and so warped by the American Left that the public has grown tired and wants it all to go away. But in truth, the situation is so fluid that any accurate prediction is impossible. Yet there is good reason to believe in an eventual outcome quite favorable to the U.S. and one far better than the status quo ante bellum.

The Strait of Hormuz

Prior to President Trump’s most recent announcement that the United States would first blockade and then reopen and control traffic through the Strait, only a few ships were going through, mostly those aligned with Iran, opposed to the United States, or neutral.

Thus, the Strait was disrupted to a far greater degree than during Iran’s earlier efforts at closure during the “Tanker War” phase of the Iran–Iraq War, as well as its chronic harassment of shipping in 2018–19. And now?

If Trump quickly clears and secures control of the Strait, and if allowable traffic reaches, say, 60–70 percent of prewar levels and if the U.S. avoids a full-scale war, instead responding disproportionately to any renewed Iranian attempts to close it—then, within one to two months, oil prices will begin to taper off.

The American challenge with the war is not military but political. This time, the U.S. is not sending Marines to fight house to house in Fallujah or to scour villages on the ground in Helmand Province—losing hundreds in casualties and fighting in circumstances favorable to jihadists and terrorists.

Instead, the administration is restrained in its use of force only by concerns about the war’s effects on the U.S. economy, global oil prices, domestic gas prices, the midterm elections, and the political fortunes of vulnerable Republican members of Congress.

Militarily, the U.S. has choices. The Navy can continue demining the Strait, rotate patrols of U.S. and allied warships through it, allow allied and neutral shipping to pass while blocking Iranian-bound ships, and periodically strike Iran whenever it attempts to disrupt shipping—including clearing its coasts of missiles and drones. In other words, Trump can flip the Iranian strategy of selective entrance to the Strait, with the key difference that he has the wherewithal to carry out such a calibrated blockade, and Iran does not. World opinion will be with him, for economic reasons and, should Iran seek to stop him, for its breaking the ceasefire and thus justifying the rain of retaliatory bombs that will descend upon it.

Or if Iran restarts missile and drone attacks on U.S. military and allies in the region, the administration can warn Iran that it will lose its oil facilities on Kharg Island as well as dual-use generation plants—until it relents.

But in the long term, no one will forget Iran’s third—and most egregious—effort to hijack the Strait, despite its failure to do so completely and for any sustained period.

The Gulf exporters will double down on their Red Sea and Gulf of Oman pipelines, which bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia and others will explore more routes, perhaps even through Jordan to Israel and Haifa on the Mediterranean.

In the end, Iran will be left with an inert asset—if not a liability—since the United States can ensure that no oil flows from Kharg Island through the patrolled Strait, which the West may ultimately render irrelevant anyway. Importers will quietly begin shifting toward increased output from Venezuela, the United States, and perhaps a soon-to-be unsanctioned Russia. Iran’s attacks on 11 Muslim nations in the Middle East will not be lost on the people of the region. Many of the sheikdoms will continue to press Israel and the U.S. to ensure Iran does not rearm. A sane Gulf would not give any more money to Hamas, given its hostile and hated lunatic patron.

Regime Change

Iran lost most of its 47-year-old, multibillion-dollar investment in weapons as well as its military-industrial complex.

To rearm will cost the regime dearly—and that vast expense will be unpopular with a restive populace short of food and fuel.

It will be hard for whoever is running the country to reestablish its military arsenals and multibillion-dollar subsidies to Arab terrorists. Indeed, Iran’s subsidized proxies—Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis—may be left orphaned, despised by the Iranian people, and perhaps even more hated by some of their former Gulf co-sponsors. The odd myth of Iranian military invulnerability is shattered. And that loss of face, too, will have consequences soon at home and abroad. The Iranian people will further grow angry that the one nationalist argument made by the Iranian mullahs—that at least its half-century, half-trillion-dollar military buildup sent shivers throughout the Middle East, terrified the West, and gave global cred to Iran—has now also imploded.

It is one thing for the people to be ruled by globally feared autocrats armed to the teeth, but quite another to be governed by humiliated, now-impotent incompetents and buffoons.

Once the Berlin Wall fell, it took weeks and sometimes months for Eastern Europeans to overthrow their communist oppressors. And it required more than two years after the wall went down for its full effects to ripple out and dissolve the Soviet Union. On that basis, then, no one should expect regime change merely days after the cessation of the war.

The West has little real idea who is currently running Iran or who or even what they represent.

All that is known is that second- or third-tier theocrats, military officers, politicos, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps thugs are vying for power. Each cadre has likely become terrified that it will either be seen as too accommodating and attacked by the hard-liners—or that rivals will defect and cut a deal with the Iranian people to serve as transitional figures, thereby avoiding the noose. The worst of the worst know that if they are not killed by drones or missiles in any renewed hostilities, they may instead be killed by the Iranian people if and when the regime collapses.

Winners and Losers

The eventual beneficiaries and casualties of the war will become clear over the next three or four weeks, hinging on whether the U.S. concludes that those in charge are worthless negotiators who, if Iran persists in attacks, will have to be persuaded by further force.

But on the larger map, the once anti-Western bloc—Russia’s Assad regime in Syria, China’s Iran satellite, and Iran’s own proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis—is either gone, tottering, humiliated, or increasingly isolated.

Russia’s brief advantage from higher oil prices will end soon. It will remain stuck in a Somme-like quagmire in Ukraine, and its weapons corridor to and from Iran will be hard to restore to prewar levels. If Putin were smart, he would cut a deal with Ukraine, seek relief from sanctions on Russian oil, and then pump like crazy.

China has lost its exclusive oil concessions with Venezuela and may have forfeited a similar sweetheart deal with Iran, now or in the near future. If the regime falls, Beijing will likely be hated by any subsequent transitional government. It may instead seek to come to some arrangement with the U.S. to send its tankers through the Strait—if Iran does not provoke the U.S. and lose Kharg Island.

The display of American air power and the evolving nature of 21st-century tactics and munitions will also likely give China pause regarding Taiwan. The specter of a sea of smart mines, surface and submarine drones, and showers of airborne drones and missiles from Taiwan—combined with an allied fleet similarly equipped—cannot be reassuring to the Chinese.

China would likely face a bloodbath transporting hundreds of thousands of soldiers across 110 miles of open and contested sea. At the acme of French power in 1804–5, Napoleon was still wise enough not to press his luck transporting soldiers across the 26-mile English Channel. Hitler sat atop what is now the entire European Union by late summer 1940, but was also savvy enough not to contest the Royal Navy in the channel.

In sum, Beijing watches the once-feared Russian army mired in death and incompetence in Ukraine. In contrast, the U.S. and Israel, in a matter of days, wiped out the Iranian navy, air force, and most of its missiles and drones. The obvious conclusion is that China will be less likely to press its luck invading Taiwan.

Western Europe is a big loser. Almost all of our old Western European allies embarrassed themselves. For weeks, the U.K. lacked a single ship seaworthy enough to reach its base at Akrotiri, Cyprus, which had been targeted by the Iranians.

Had the U.S. once treated Margaret Thatcher’s 1982 unilateral expeditionary flotilla to the Falklands the way Keir Starmer did the U.S. effort to disarm Iran and prevent its acquisition of long-range nuclear-tipped missiles, the Falklands would still be Argentinian. (One wonders today whether Argentina or Britain is the more open society, the more pro-U.S., and the more stable nation. And who knows whether a single British destroyer could even make it all the way to the islands today?)

France talked tough—but has little intention of sending ships to the Strait or aiding postcolonial Lebanon to free itself from even a weakened Hezbollah. Instead, France only seems energized enough to deny the U.S. access to French airspace.

Spain was even worse. It seemed at times pro-Iranian—downgrading its Israeli embassy while reopening its Iranian one. It sent a message to the U.S. that the shared NATO bases in Spain and its airspace were worthless as far as the U.S. operations were concerned. If this is indeed true, then Spain is insignificant as an ally and has now chosen the status of a hostile neutral.

NATO may remain in name, but at least for the near future, the U.S. will likely ostracize the Spanish, be cooler toward Meloni’s Italy, which refused landing rights in Sicily, be curt with Germany, which talked out of both sides of its mouth, and may more or less consider NATO de facto a largely Eastern European bilateral alliance with the U.S.

At any rate, the next time France wishes logistical and intelligence support for its doomed adventures in postcolonial Africa, or a NATO “coalition of the willing” begs the U.S. to lead a “moral” crusade to bomb the ports and communications of Libya or blow up the bridges and power grid of Belgrade, it will be politically impossible in the U.S. to assent. As for the U.K., let us hope it has no need for anything like another Falklands adventure, because next time the U.S. will likely smile and echo Prime Minister Starmer: “This is not our war . . . we’re not going to get dragged into it!”

The Democrat-media nexus, far more so than was true of the Iraq War, was not so much hysterical as nuts. On Monday following Easter, they damned Trump as a warmongering Nazi criminal; by the next night, he was an appeasing naif, a resurrected Neville Chamberlain for 2026.

The Party’s base was openly rooting for Trump and—by poorly disguised association—the U.S. to fail. As for the midterms, they traditionally hinge on the economy. While it is likely the war has impaired it for months, no one knows what its status in November will be. If there is resolution within two or three weeks, ending with an open Strait, lower oil prices, and an Iran neutered for years, then the public may feel that better times are coming at home and abroad.

Most European and Asian democracies for a half-century have had an unspoken, implicit understanding that they would not overtly alienate Iran or condemn it for its Middle East terrorism, in exchange for free passage through the Strait and exemptions from Iranian terrorist proxies. The residual policy remains. So, despite their greater dependency on Middle East oil than is true of the U.S., they until recently felt they could continue their silent understanding and finesse free passage—rather than assemble an armada of warships, help to blast through the straits, and to clean the northern shore of missiles and drones.

The U.S. can open the Strait rather easily, either by direct means, sending tactical aircraft and drones to patrol the coast, providing air cover for the fleet, demining the waters, and escorting ships through, with the proviso that if Iran attacks, it will take out Kharg Island facilities and then resume the air campaign.

Trump is not yet at that point. Given the hysteria of his political enemies, who smell a takeover of Congress in November, impeachment for Trump, trials for his family members, and the end of the Trump counterrevolution, the stakes are high. To avoid all that, he needs a booming economy based on a steady stock market, lower interest rates, and a return to historically low oil prices—but in the next seven months.

The American people also expect a “win” in Iran, defined now by the inability of Iran to close the straits, to launch missiles at U.S. and allied targets, and the surrender of fissionable nuclear material. Iran feels they can delay, harangue, barter, and passively-aggressively stall until the midterms. So the window on the military solution is closing fast.

Trump might point out that the long-term outlook is not good for Iran. Saudi Arabia will expand its pipeline capacities to the Red Sea. The UAE will do the same and expand its existing pipeline to the Gulf of Oman. There is even some talk of Saudi Arabia building a new massive line across Jordan to the Israeli Mediterranean port of Haifa. These Gulf agendas will eventually make the Strait irrelevant to oil exporters like Iran and flip its advantage to the disadvantage of Iran’s vulnerable dependency on the Strait.

In sum, we should ignore the periodic 24-hour schizophrenia of the Left and the media, and instead examine the reality of the war so far, and what will be its likely long-term effects.

 

Links - 2nd June 2026 (2)

Why Women in Ancient Rome Had No Names - "In ancient Roman families, girls did not have separate names, and all daughters could bear the same name... The women of Ancient Rome did not have names as such. Instead, families called their daughters by the name of the family, sometimes also combining the nickname that was assigned to a certain family. Following this tradition, the daughter of Julius Caesar also received the name Julia after the name of the family... The situation in which not one but several daughters were born in the family at once was very common. In this case, all the girls still bore the same name. In a situation where parents had only two daughters, “Elder” or “Younger” was added to the family name of daughters. If more than three daughters were born, then each of them, in addition to the family name, received an ordinal number as part of their name, namely the second, third, and so forth. For example, Clodia Tertia, a Roman matron who was suspected of poisoning her husband Quintus Caecilius, was the third daughter in the Clodian family. When a woman married, she retained her family name but also acquired her husband’s family name or his nickname. Hence, the name of the daughter of Julius Caesar, who married the commander Gnaeus Pompey the Great, became a mix of the names of her father and husband—Julius Pompey—after this marriage. Over time, such traditions have slightly changed"

Meme - *Cars passing each other*
"JEWS BECOMING ZIONISTS IN RESPONSE TO ANTISEMITISM"
"JEWS BECOMING COMMUNISTS IN RESPONSE TO ANTISEMITISM"

Meme - ">After three years of Windows 11 decide to switch back to Windows 10
>Wow! Just wow!
>File explorer launches in an instant
>No lag with the right-click context menu
>Feels way much faster!
>Remember what you've been missing for the past three years"

Meme - "WHAT DO TOY TRAINS AND BOOBS HAVE IN COMMON? THEY'RE BOTH INTENDED FOR CHILDREN, BUT IT'S THE FATHERS THAT END UP PLAYING WITH THEM"

Meme - "Cum in Cheese. Matured Gouda cheese with the traditional Dutch cheese spice: cumin. Pairing Suggestion - Italian Antipasti Meats"

Richard Gott, Marxist Guardian journalist who was exposed in 1994 as a KGB stooge – obituary - "Richard Gott, who has died aged 87, was an academic, journalist, and a chronicler and supporter of Marxist guerrilla movements in Latin America who resigned in 1994 as literary editor of The Guardian when he was exposed as having been in the pay of the KGB... Gott could indeed spout the Moscow line, excusing the misdeeds of the East German leader Erich Honecker and claiming that the Russians had got to the Moon first. But he was just as likely to see good in outright pariahs, writing in 1979: “Have we all got it wrong about Pol Pot?” The bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge leader was, he argued, the author of an “interesting social experiment”."
The Guardian hasn't really changed in so many decades

Toddler dies in alleged DUI crash, 14-year-old driver ID'd as child's mother: reports

Canadian province gave out taxpayer-funded coffee that cost $165 a cup to lure US healthcare workers - "'We sent coffee and tea to health care workers in Seattle so we could share the many benefits of working in our beautiful province,' BC Premier David Eby wrote in a post on X at the time... the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) revealed the province's government spent on $165,000 CAD ($119,134 USD) the promotion. That breaks down to each coffee costing approximately $165 CAD ($119 USD) per cup."

57.5% of Canadians have degrees. We’re the most educated G7 country with the worst mismatch - "As of September 2025, 21.8% of core-aged workers with a postsecondary credential reported being overqualified for their current role, and Canada’s real GDP per capita has fallen below the OECD average for the first time in comparable recorded data, sitting at 99.5% in 2024. The gap between what workers know and what their jobs demand is quietly dragging down wages, productivity, and economic growth. Many immigrants arrive with professional degrees and years of experience, yet provincial licensing bodies move slowly and inconsistently. A physician trained abroad may spend years requalifying or doing unpaid placements before being allowed to practise. According to the 2021 Census, the overqualification rate among non-permanent residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher was 32.4%, compared to 26.2% for recent immigrants and 15.9% for the rest of the population. Data from 2016 showed that about 40% of immigrants with university degrees were employed in jobs below their skill level, and by 2021, the overeducation rate among recent immigrants had declined to just under 27%. Yet progress remains slow... While overqualification dominates one side of the labour market, a critical shortage is quietly building on the other. BuildForce Canada’s 2025 to 2034 national forecast projects that 270,000 experienced construction workers will retire over the next decade, pushing the industry’s total hiring requirement to 380,500 workers by 2034. Even with 272,200 expected new entrants under 30, the industry may still face a shortage of 108,300 workers. Statistics Canada data show that apprenticeship certification counts remained 19.9% below pre-pandemic levels in 2024 despite record new registrations, evidence that decades of treating trades as a backup plan have left Canada degree-heavy in some areas and critically thin in others."
Time to encourage even more people to go to university

Gordon Ramsay’s dwarf porn ‘twin’ dies - "A DWARF porn star who was Gordon Ramsay's double has been found dead in the most bizarre of circumstances, according to UK tabloid The Sunday Sport. Percy Foster's 107 centimetre (3'6") body was discovered in a badger's den in Wales. The report says the 35-year-old was found, "deep in an underground chamber by Ministry of Agriculture experts ahead of a planned badger-gassing program." Investigators have not ruled out the possibility of suicide, according to the report. In a recent interview Foster spoke of his excitement about his growing career as Ramsay's double. "Porn lookalikes get more money than normal actors. Dwarf lookalikes are as rare as hen's teeth and so can command top dollar. "I've already ordered a new BMW and a diamond-encrusted Soda Stream," he said."
From 2011

Stair climbing has been included in guidance. Landlords aren’t happy - "Tom McGee, a 69-year-old market researcher from near Chicago, has found an unusual path to fitness, one that has occasionally put him at odds with hotel security. For two decades, McGee has been climbing stairs as a way to stay off cigarettes, a dedication that has seen him "kicked out of about every hotel in the city" due to his unconventional workout locations. His experience highlights a growing challenge for enthusiasts of this highly effective exercise, as modern office towers increasingly restrict access to stairwells. Despite these hurdles, stair climbing is increasingly recognised in exercise guidance for its significant health benefits. Dr Luis Rodriguez, a 66-year-old semi-retired paediatric pulmonologist and avid stair climber, champions the activity. "You are working your legs. You are working your heart. You are working your lungs," he explains, adding, "You can get a lot more benefit than just walking, because gravity is working against you." This is supported by research indicating that just four minutes of stair climbing offers similar benefits to ten minutes of brisk walking or twenty minutes of slower walking. The efficacy of short, intense bursts of activity was officially acknowledged in 2018, when federal physical activity guidance began promoting such efforts – like opting for the stairs between floors at work"

How sticky-fingered thieves use hot glue to find break-in targets in Vancouver - "Police say the suspects begin by entering the buildings at nighttime and applying hot glue to the top corner of the units' doors, stretching strands of glue between the door and the frame. Investigators say the thieves return later to inspect the doors, checking if the strands are broken, indicating that the door has been opened and the unit is occupied."

Miscellany: Teeth - "Mathias Blau of Chicago persuaded his wife, Helen, to have all her teeth pulled. Then he refused to buy her false teeth because, he said, it was cheaper to feed her on soup than on solids. Mrs. Blau went to court, was awarded two sets of store teeth and at least a beefsteak a week. Judge Jonas told Mr. Blau that he had committed “the meanest trick” he had ever heard of."

The Shocking Lawsuit Of A Wife Tricked By Her Husband Into Pulling Her Teeth To Save Money On Food - "The April 13, 1928 issue of The American Guardian told the story of Chicagoan Mathias Blau. His wife Helen was having some problems with her teeth, so he convinced her the best course of action was to have them all pulled and then replaced with dentures. The suffering woman went to the dentist and had her teeth pulled as planned. During her convalescence, she was able to eat little more than soup. Her husband came to enjoy the savings he noticed… Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Blau was none too happy about the sudden rug pull by her husband. Unable to get him to change her mind, she took the only other reasonable course of action available to her — she took him to court.

Carnival cruise passenger wins $300K lawsuit after being over-served alcohol - "Carnival Cruise Line must pay US$300,000 to a former passenger after a federal jury in South Florida found that the company was negligent in serving a woman at least 14 shots of tequila in an eight and a half hour period before she fell down stairs and suffered a possible traumatic brain injury. The Miami federal jury decided in favour of Diana Sanders, a 45-year-old nurse from Vacaville, Calif, and awarded her $300,000 (about $411,315 CAD) in damages"
Time to sue cruise companies for misogyny when they restrict alcohol served to women

Tucker Carlson Network on X - "The people in charge don't want you to know this, but Muslims love Jesus. Islam reveres Him as a major prophet and messenger of the Lord, believes He performed miracles, and states that He will return to Earth to defeat the Antichrist. That's why Donald Trump's painting depicting himself as the Son of God offended the president of Iran. It was an attack on his religion as well as Christianity. Today's Morning Note newsletter covers Masoud Pezeshkian's condemnation of Trump's “desecration of Jesus,” the Iran War's gutting effects on America's housing market, Colombia's plan to murder Pablo Escobar's hippopotami, and more. Read below."
Eitan Fischberger on X - "Here's how Muslim-majority countries treat their Christian populations:
🇸🇴 SOMALIA No churches exist. Converts from Islam face death. Al-Shabaab is committed to eradicating Christianity entirely.
🇾🇪 YEMEN Christians can be imprisoned, tortured, or killed. Possessing a Bible in Houthi-controlled areas is dangerous. No legal protection for Christians exists.
🇸🇩 SUDAN Over 100 churches have been damaged or destroyed. Christians have been abducted and killed. Islamist extremists operate with impunity.
🇸🇾 SYRIA Now largely controlled by HTS — an Islamic extremist group with roots in Al-Qaeda. Christian population has collapsed from 1.5 million to 300,000.
🇳🇬 NIGERIA More Christians are killed for their faith in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world. Boko Haram, ISWAP, and Fulani militias operate freely. The government has largely failed to prosecute perpetrators.
🇵🇰 PAKISTAN
🔸 Christians are 1.8% of the population but absorb ~25% of blasphemy accusations — which carry a death sentence.
🔸 Mob lynchings of accused Christians are common. Entire Christian neighborhoods have been torched.
🔸 Christian girls are kidnapped, forcibly converted, and married off. Courts often back the perpetrators.
🇱🇾 LIBYA No functioning government to protect Christians. Foreign Christians are kidnapped and killed by Islamist groups. No legal protections exist.
🇮🇷 IRAN
🔸 96 Christians sentenced to 263 years in prison in 2024 alone — a sixfold increase year-over-year.
🔸 House churches are raided. Converts are charged with espionage and "enmity against God."
🔸 Apostasy is punishable by death. Government's stated goal: eradicate the Persian-speaking Church.
🇦🇫 AFGHANISTAN Christians face death if discovered. No public Christian communities exist. The Taliban is actively working to erase any Christian presence.
🇸🇦 SAUDI ARABIA
🔸 No churches allowed. No public Christian worship of any kind.
🔸 Apostasy and proselytizing are capital offenses under Sharia law.
🔸 Bibles are confiscated. Even private worship by expatriates can result in arrest and deportation.
🇲🇱 MALI / 🇧🇫 BURKINA FASO Pastors executed, churches burned, villages massacred. Governments have lost control of large swaths of territory to jihadist groups including Boko Haram and JNIM.
🇮🇶 IRAQ The Christian population has collapsed from 1.2 million in 2011 to just 120,000 in 2024 — driven by ISIS genocide. Christians are described as "close to extinction."
🇩🇿 ALGERIA All 47 Protestant evangelical churches in the country have been shut down. Converting Muslims is a criminal offense.
🇲🇷 MAURITANIA Apostasy is punishable by death. No churches exist for Mauritanian citizens.
🇲🇦 MOROCCO No public Christian worship permitted. Converting from Islam can result in prosecution. Foreign missionaries are expelled.
🇶🇦 QATAR
🔸 Apostasy: death penalty under Sharia law.
🔸 Proselytizing a Muslim: up to 5 years in prison.
🔸 Bringing Christian materials into the country: up to 2 years in prison.
🇹🇷 TURKEY
🔸 200+ Christian workers expelled since 2020, labeled "national security threats."
🔸 No legal training of clergy permitted. The historic Halki Seminary remains closed.
🔸 Christian population has collapsed from 20% to 0.2% over the past century."
Clearly, Israel is to blame

Universities teaching literature students how to cope with long novels - "Some institutions are offering “reading resilience” courses for students facing long texts and reading lists while others are using book jacket design as part of the assessment process. Academics said students in the past five to ten years, who had grown up with phones in their pockets, could be intimidated by reading long, older or more difficult books and the jump in pace from A-level... John Mullan, professor of English at University College London, said: “In the last five to ten years, it’s true that fewer students are used to reading very long books. Most on our course at UCL are still willing to take on demanding texts, but that may not be typical. I do have friends in other universities who feel students are less willing to tackle older books or more difficult books. “Some students are not used to sitting and reading a book for five or six hours. When we’re doing course planning, we’re thinking about that a bit more than we used to do. “We react to unwillingness or difficulty with reading lengthy material by trying to get them to do it and not compromising too much. All first-year students have to do Old English, read the whole of Paradise Lost by their fifth week of term and Wordsworth’s preludes by the tenth week. Some bluff their way, but even to have to bluff with these texts is strenuous.”... The number of pupils taking English A-level has plummeted in the past decade, falling from the most popular subject to outside the top ten... Experts blame GCSE English for deterring teenagers, describing GCSE literature as boring and repetitive and the language qualification as outdated and offputting... English literature or language A-levels were taken by 58,000 entrants this summer, down from nearly 90,000 in 2015. The English Association says full person equivalent numbers taking English degrees, not including creative writing or linguistics, have fallen from around 42,285 in 2019-20 to roughly 33,515 in 2023-24. Mullan said the teaching of English degrees had changed over the past decade. He said: “When I was a student, I don’t think people who taught me gave a damn about students’ opinions and they didn’t need to. It didn’t mean they didn’t care about you but the idea that what students wanted to study should be part of the plan was utterly remote. “Now there is more worry about what you think students want to do. If we want them to do something that’s not at the forefront of their wishes, we have to do a job of explaining or persuading.”... Student feedback now has a bigger role, he said, adding: “Sometimes there’s a danger academics chase student opinion, and can almost worry too much about what students say they want to study. “I don’t think academics do any favours by bending to trends and fashions, whether for individual texts or movements. Those students who shout loudly and make most demands are not necessarily representative — I get others emailing me in confidence saying we just want to study Shakespeare.”"

Dark Knight Shift: Why Batman Could Exist--But Not for Long - "Batman is the most down-to-earth of all the superheroes. He has no special powers from being born on a distant world or bitten by a radioactive spider. All that protects him from the Joker and other Gotham City villains are his wits and a physique shaped by years of training—combined with the vast fortune to reach his maximum potential and augment himself with Batmobiles, Batcables and other Bat-goodies, of course... Batman can't really afford to lose. Losing means death—or at least not being able to be Batman anymore. But another benchmark is having enough skill and experience to defend himself without killing anyone. Because that's part of his credo. It would be much easier to fight somebody if you could incapacitate them with extreme force. Punching somebody in the throat could be a lethal blow. That's pretty easy to do. But if you're thinking about something that doesn't result in lethal force, that's more tricky. It's really hard for people to get their heads around, I think. To be that good, to not actually lethally injure anyone, requires an extremely high level of skill that would take maybe 15 to 18 years to accumulate... There is evidence that experts in something like football or hockey have an improved ability to perceive movement in time. In the book I use the example of Steve Nash throwing the ball, even though he can't see where the receiver of the pass is going to be. Experts are able to extract more information faster than others. It's almost like their nervous systems become more efficient... The difficulty for Batman is he's going to be trying to sleep during the day. He's going to be really tired, actually, unless he can shift himself over to just being up at night. If he were just a nocturnal guy, he would actually be a lot healthier and have a lot better sleep than if he were doing what he does now, which is getting some light here and there. That's going to mess up his sleep patterns and duration of sleep... The biggest unreal part of the way Batman's portrayed is the nature of his injuries. Most of the time, in the comics and in the movies, even when he wins, he usually winds up taking a pretty good beating. There's a real failure to show the cumulative effect of that. The next day he's shown out there doing the same thing again. He'd likely be quite tired and injured... Somewhere around age 50 to 55, he should probably retire. His performance is going down. He's always facing younger adversaries. That is well at the end of when he's going to be able to defend himself and be able to not have to deal that lethal force. This was actually shown in an animated series called Batman Beyond... Keeping in mind that being Batman means never losing: If you look at consecutive events where professional fighters have to defend their titles—Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Ultimate Fighters—the longest period you're going to find is about two to three years. That dovetails nicely with the average career for NFL running backs. It's about three years. (That's the statistic I got from the NFL Players Association Web site.) The point is, it's not very long. It's really hard to become Batman in the first place, and it's hard to maintain it when you get there."

Mâchon: The French breakfast you don't know - "I've always found French petit déjeuner (breakfast) insubstantial, but that wasn't the first thing that came to mind as I scanned the menu on the blackboard. Gone were the tartines and croissants, replaced instead by a list that read like a biology textbook: rognons de veau (calf's kidney), tablier de sapeur (fried, breaded tripe), tête de veau (calf's head). This was mâchon, a long-standing Lyonnais breakfast tradition where no part of the animal goes to waste."

DiscussingFilm on X - "A teaser for ‘THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE HUNT FOR GOLLUM’ was shown at CinemaCon “This is a tale that must never be told.”"
GODZILLA STAN ACCOUNT on X - "this is like the 2025 War of the Worlds tagline being "It's Worse Than You Think""

Cow tools - Wikipedia - ""Cow tools" is a cartoon from The Far Side by American cartoonist Gary Larson, published on October 28, 1982. It depicts a cow standing behind a table of bizarre, misshapen implements with the caption "Cow tools". The cartoon confused many readers, who wrote or phoned in seeking an explanation of the joke. In response, Larson issued a press release clarifying that the thrust of the cartoon was simply that, if a cow were to make tools, they would "lack something in sophistication". It has been described as "arguably the most loathed Far Side strip ever" while also becoming a popular internet meme."
It's absurdism, after all

Most Canadians consider speaking English, French key to national identity, survey shows - The Globe and Mail - "Canadians are more likely than their U.S. counterparts to see language, customs and traditions as central to their national identity, a new survey suggests. Some 84 per cent of respondents to the Pew Research Center poll released Thursday said speaking English or French is very or somewhat important to being Canadian, while only 15 per cent said the opposite. In the U.S., however, only 78 per cent prioritized being able to speak English – the most common tongue in a country without an official language – while 21 per cent said it had little or no bearing on the American identity. “Of the four dimensions of national identity included in the survey, language is by far the most valued,” Pew reported in its brief on the poll. “In all countries where we asked about it, about eight in 10 or more point to language as important for true belonging in the country. And in 13 countries, at least six in 10 consider it a very important factor.” And yet, while a vast majority of respondents in all 21 countries surveyed on language considered it an important facet of their country’s national identity, the percentage who did was lowest in the U.S. A large majority of Canadians surveyed – 81 per cent – also linked customs and traditions to their national identity. But that’s a nine-point decline since the last time the question was asked in Canada in 2016. There again, U.S. participants were less inclined to make the same link: only 71 per cent said customs and traditions were somewhat or very central to being American, while 28 per cent said otherwise. Parse the results by political allegiance, however, and the picture changes. Fully 87 per cent of U.S. respondents who identify as right-leaning said customs and traditions were important, 34 percentage points higher than those on the left. In Canada, 86 per cent of conservative-minded respondents felt the same way, compared with 68 per cent of left-leaning participants. Similar gaps emerged on language... Middle-income countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Kenya and South Africa, were far more likely to put value on being born within their borders, while Sweden and Australia led those who valued birthplace the least. “Nations where immigrants make up a smaller share of the population tend to see birthplace as a more important component of national identity,” the study reported."

One transgender movement?

Read some Piaget please! on X: "One transgender movement?"

The Demographic Fracture: Adult Male Transition and the Child Cohort

Any serious analysis of the gender affirmative movement must reckon with a demographic fact that its proponents rarely address directly. The clinical and political movement that advocates for the affirmation and medical transition of gender distressed children is, at the level of its most prominent adult advocates, predominantly composed of people with a very different profile from the children on whose behalf they speak.

Adult male transition, the cohort that built the foundational institutions, legal frameworks, and cultural visibility of the transgender movement in Western societies over the latter decades of the twentieth century, is a late onset phenomenon. The typical presentation involves a male who has lived for decades as a man, often with a conventional heterosexual history including marriage and fatherhood, and who arrives at gender transition in middle age or beyond. The clinical and autobiographical literature on this cohort, including the work of Ray Blanchard and Anne Lawrence on autogynephilia, describes a pattern of transition rooted in adult male sexuality and psychology, with its own distinct aetiology, trajectory, and set of concerns.

The child cohort presenting to gender clinics in the twenty first century is something categorically different. It consists predominantly, in recent years overwhelmingly, of adolescent females with high rates of co occurring mental health conditions, autism spectrum conditions, trauma histories, and same sex attraction. The sex ratio inversion is one of the most striking and least discussed features of the contemporary clinical picture. At the Tavistock GIDS, referrals shifted from a predominantly male to a seventy four percent female cohort by 2018 to 2019. The children arriving at gender clinics in the contemporary period bear almost no demographic, psychological, or aetiological resemblance to the adult males who built the movement through which they are now being processed.

This demographic fracture matters for several reasons that advocates of the gender affirmative model have been consistently unwilling to examine.

The experiential basis of advocacy is not transferable

Adult male transitioners who report subjective relief following social and medical transition are reporting on an experience that is their own. Whatever the mechanisms underlying that experience, and the literature on outcomes is considerably more ambiguous than popular accounts suggest, it is an experience rooted in adult male psychology, adult sexuality, adult cognitive capacity, and a transition undertaken with the benefit of a fully developed prefrontal cortex. The claim that this experience validates early childhood transition involves an inferential leap that the evidence does not support.

A fifty year old man who transitions and reports improved wellbeing has not provided evidence that a fourteen year old girl with depression, a trauma history, and no prior indication of gender distress before the age of twelve should receive puberty blockers. The two situations share a vocabulary. They do not share an aetiology, a developmental context, or a risk profile. Using the former to justify the latter is not clinical reasoning. It is the substitution of personal testimony for empirical evidence across a demographic chasm.

The political interests of the two cohorts do not align

The adult male transgender movement has historically organised around specific concerns: legal recognition of gender identity, access to sex specific spaces, freedom from discrimination in employment and public life, and the social legitimacy of late onset transition. These are adult concerns. They arise from an adult life situation. They are not trivially wrong as political claims, but they have a specific origin and a specific constituency.

The medicalisation of gender distressed children is a distinct project. It requires a different justification, draws on a different evidence base, and carries a different risk profile. A child receiving puberty blockers at age twelve is not receiving an adult political freedom. They are receiving an irreversible medical intervention at a stage of development when the cognitive prerequisites for evaluating its long term consequences are, as Piaget and Kohlberg establish, not yet present.

The political coalition that advocates for both simultaneously has an interest in presenting them as the same thing. They are not the same thing. The elision serves adult advocacy interests. It does not serve children.

The gatekeeping question exposes the fracture

One of the most revealing sites of tension within the gender affirmative movement concerns the question of gatekeeping, the clinical practice of requiring assessment, differential diagnosis, and a period of psychological evaluation before medical intervention is offered. Adult transitioners have historically objected to gatekeeping on grounds of autonomy. An adult who has considered their decision, lived with it, and is capable of providing informed consent should not, on this argument, be required to obtain clinical permission to proceed with a legal medical intervention affecting their own body.

This argument has force when applied to competent adults making considered decisions about their own lives. It has no application whatsoever to children. Children are not adults. The argument from autonomy does not transfer across the developmental boundary. Gillick competence, the legal and clinical framework governing the capacity of children under sixteen to consent to medical treatment, exists precisely because the law and medicine recognise that adult autonomy cannot simply be projected downward onto developing minds.

The progressive erosion of clinical gatekeeping for children, which occurred in part because of advocacy pressure rooted in the adult autonomy argument, represents the direct transfer of a political position developed in one context to a clinical context where it does not belong. The Cass Review's finding that assessment practices at the Tavistock were inadequate, that comorbidities were insufficiently explored, and that many children were placed on medical pathways without the thorough evaluation their situations required, is in significant part a consequence of this transfer.

The same sex attraction dimension

The relationship between homosexuality and the transgender framework is a further point at which the interests of the two cohorts diverge in ways that have been systematically obscured. A substantial proportion of the children currently presenting to gender clinics are same sex attracted young people whose distress is rooted in the difficulties of developing a gay or lesbian identity in contexts carrying shame, social difficulty, or simple confusion about what their feelings mean.

The historical record is instructive. In a pre affirmation era clinical context, the majority of children presenting with gender distress desisted from that distress without medical intervention, and a substantial proportion of those who desisted went on to identify as gay or lesbian. The affirmation model, applied to these children, does not liberate them from a false identity. It places them on a medical pathway that may foreclose the gay or lesbian identity they would otherwise have developed. The irony is pointed: a movement that emerged in part alongside gay liberation now operates, in its application to children, in ways that risk converting same sex attracted young people into heterosexual transitioners.

Some adult gay and lesbian advocates have noted this with considerable alarm. Their concern is not misplaced. The adult male transgender movement, whose own relationship to homosexuality is complex and contested in the clinical literature, does not have clean hands on this question, and the political pressure to treat any such observation as transphobic has had the effect of suppressing a clinically significant line of inquiry.

The vulnerability asymmetry

Adult male transitioners are, by definition, adults. They have the legal capacity to consent to medical treatment, the cognitive capacity to evaluate risk, the developmental maturity to understand long term consequences, and the life experience to contextualise the decision they are making. Many have indeed considered their decisions over long periods, often decades, before acting.

The children arriving at gender clinics in the contemporary period are, by contrast, among the most psychologically vulnerable young people in the clinical system. They have high rates of mental health conditions, high rates of trauma exposure, and high rates of co occurring developmental conditions including autism spectrum conditions. They are, on Erikson and Marcia's account, in the developmental phase of identity moratorium, the phase in which uncertainty is the expected and appropriate condition and premature foreclosure carries the greatest developmental cost. They are, on Bowlby and Fonagy's account, a population in whom the presentations most likely to be interpreted as evidence of gender incongruence are the characteristic presentations of insecure attachment and mentalisation failure.

Applying a model developed in, and advocated by, an adult population to this vulnerable child population requires a standard of evidential justification that has not been met. The Cass Review, the HHS Systematic Review of 2025, and the Scandinavian clinical reviews that preceded them all reached the same conclusion: the evidence base is weak, the quality of studies is low, comorbidities were inadequately assessed, and long term outcomes are unknown.

A Further Fracture: Transmedicalism and Its Critics

A second schism runs through the adult transgender movement that is equally relevant to the child question. Transmedicalists, sometimes called truscum within online communities, hold that genuine transgender identity requires clinically significant dysphoria, that medical transition is the defining feature of authentic transgender experience, and that identity alone without accompanying distress and the desire for physical intervention does not constitute a transgender identity in any meaningful clinical sense. Anti-transmedicalists reject this entirely, arguing that gender identity is self determined, that dysphoria is neither necessary nor definitive, and that requiring medical criteria for recognition is itself a form of gatekeeping that replicates the oppressive structures the movement exists to dismantle. This internal dispute matters for the child question because the two positions generate radically different clinical implications. A transmedicalist framework, whatever its other limitations, at least preserves a role for clinical assessment and maintains a distinction between identity and diagnosis. The anti-transmedicalist position, extended to children, provides the theoretical basis for social transition without assessment, affirmation without evaluation, and the treatment of any clinical hesitation as political hostility. It is largely the anti-transmedicalist position that has shaped the affirmative model as applied to children, and it is that position which the developmental and evidential literature most directly contradicts.

The institutional capture dynamic

The mechanism by which the adult transgender advocacy movement achieved influence over paediatric clinical practice is not difficult to trace. Advocacy organisations with adult membership and adult concerns became involved in the development of clinical guidelines governing the treatment of children. Professional bodies in which adult transitioners and their advocates had acquired influence endorsed models developed without adequate paediatric evidence. Clinicians who raised concerns about the applicability of adult frameworks to child populations were marginalised. The language developed to describe adult experience was applied wholesale to children, and questioning that application was characterised as a failure of political solidarity rather than a legitimate clinical concern.

The result was a paediatric clinical model shaped in significant part by the interests and experiences of a demographic entirely different from the children it purported to serve.

Conclusion

The gender affirmative model applied to children did not emerge from paediatric developmental research. It emerged from adult advocacy, adult testimony, and adult political organisation, and was then extended downward to a child population that differs from its originators in almost every relevant respect: in sex, in age, in developmental stage, in psychological profile, in aetiology, and in the nature of the risks they face.

The children now being processed through gender affirmative clinical pathways are not young versions of the adult male transitioners who built the institutional infrastructure through which they move. They are a different population, with different needs, different vulnerabilities, and different developmental futures at stake. Treating them as though they were the same population, because the same vocabulary is applied to both, is a category error with serious clinical consequences.

A developmentally grounded, evidentially rigorous paediatric medicine would have recognised this from the beginning. The task now is to ensure that it recognises it going forward.

Suggested Reading

Ray Blanchard's clinical papers on autogynephilia and Anne Lawrence's Men Trapped in Men's Bodies (2013) provide the foundational account of late onset male transition. Michael Bailey's The Man Who Would Be Queen (2003) covers the same ground for a general readership.

The Cass Review (2024), available in full at

cass.independent-review.org

, remains the essential source on the contemporary child cohort and the demographic shift in paediatric presentations. Littman's 2018 paper in PLOS ONE documents the adolescent female cohort specifically.

For desistance and same sex attracted outcomes, Steensma and colleagues (2013) in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Singh (2021) are the key studies.

 

On the limits of the autonomy argument in a paediatric context, the Bell v Tavistock High Court judgment (2020), available through the National Archives, remains essential reading.