Links - 18th July 2026 (2 - UK Politics: Social Media Ban)

Rayner tells Starmer: Ban social media for under-16s

Labour Digital Rights Network on X - "It is incredibly frustrating to hear Angela Rayner treat state-mandated digital exclusion as an "easy fix" and low-hanging political fruit.  The implications of a blanket ban are far from simple. Enforcing these restrictions will fundamentally alter how all of us interact with the digital world, inevitably ending the right to online anonymity.  On top of this, the evidence from Australia is already clear: prohibition is failing. Polling shows that over 60% of teens still have active accounts, with 70% of those users reporting it was "easy" to circumvent the rules using VPNs or entering fake birthdays.  With Keir Starmer currently facing intense political pressure over the future of his leadership, we cannot risk this draconian and unworkable policy being fast-tracked simply to appease backbenchers or secure a quick political "legacy".  We urge all potential Labour leadership candidates to clearly outline their positions on digital rights. We need an evidence-led approach that forces unaccountable Big Tech monopolies to fix their toxic, profit-driven algorithms, not a blind imitation of Australia’s failed experiment."
Michael Reiners on X - "The insistence that this is necessary - a claim that is not founded in any consultation - is even upsetting Labour’s own base, as in the quoted post.  Rayner’s proposal would involve age gating of the entire British population on entry to much of the internet, in order to bar 16 year olds from ‘social media’ (a term not well understood by those pushing for this). Every person in Britain will be compelled to doxx themselves to simply use sites the government has deemed to fall under their definition of social media.   This is a form of digital ID, framed as child safety, with no justification based in reality.   The Englishman has had unfettered internet without calamity in the past - he shall be enabled do so again, and our state will be forced to drop its censorious impulses.  @NoToDigitalID"

Starmer's under-16s social media ban reeks of desperation - "Britain will learn the lessons from the Australian experiment in banning social media for children, vowed Starmer. We will have to: Australian children have become quite adept at using fake IDs and various technical solutions, resulting, according to the Molly Rose Foundation, in 60 per cent of under-16s circumventing the ban.  This is no discouragement for the Prime Minister: “[Children] get around other laws too, but we don’t say, ‘Oh, look, a teenager managed to get a drink somehow, so let’s not bother banning alcohol sales to children’. We don’t do that, do we?”... This ban has two major attractions for Starmer (three if you count its central, stated aim): first, it won’t cost the Government much; and secondly, it confirms Labour’s – and Labour activists’ – defining principle that everything should be either free, banned or compulsory."

Melissa Chen on X - "Bit odd that that investigating child abuse by grooming gangs was resisted for years but then now all of a sudden, child safety is the number one priority for Keir Starmer.  Just watch this government build the machinery to verify every adult online at speed. And once the infrastructure exists, the uses for it will go far beyond social media age checks"
Kiyahri Selwyn on X - "It’s also odd how Starmer and his lot have screamed for years about not giving out information online and now they want your entire history stored on a hackable database."
Melissa Chen on X - "Yeap.   I believe the EU is in the process of rolling out the European Digital ID Wallet. Each of the 27 Member States must offer at least one certified wallet to citizens, residents, and businesses by the end of this year.   Thought the UK would be safe from digital ID because the people voted to leave but... well. Here we are"

Meme - "CHILDREN CAN CHOOSE THEIR OWN GENDER  *Happy Keir Starmer*
SOCIAL MEDIA IS TOO DANGEROUS FOR CHILDREN *Unhappy Keir Starmer*"

Labour’s spyware plan for phones is straight out of North Korea - "The technological reality of Sir Keir Starmer’s demand is extraordinary: that every smartphone in Britain must be child-locked. That means two enormous changes for every one of us: first, our phones will restrict our internet access to child-friendly content only, and second, government-mandated AI software will constantly monitor our messages, video calls and photo albums for verboten activity.  The only way to escape Starmer’s Great British Firewall and get regular internet access is to undergo a digital ID check on the device to register yourself as an adult user.  Convenient, perhaps, for a Prime Minister who has failed to get a digital ID system through the front door. This is a total reshaping of modern civil liberty – a remodelling of internet access, a strangulation of freedom of information, and a death sentence for online anonymity and privacy. That such extreme, illiberal measures could be more appealing to our politicians than the more natural and effective solution of parental responsibility reveals a deeper malaise in British culture.  The uncomfortable truth is that many parents no longer want the burden of supervising their children in the digital playground... Starmer’s national child-lock policy is performative authoritarianism. It is disturbing that it is so popular. In practice, children will be no safer at all and, of course, many will simply use adult-registered phones. Parents overwhelmingly buy their children’s phones and allow them to set them up – only a third of parents use the extensive parental software controls already available to limit children’s phone use. A child need only access a parent or sibling’s ID to set up the phone to get regular internet access. But the price that the rest of the country will pay for the slide towards infantilising control of the internet is significant. In every other democracy, smartphones are portals to the largest library in human history. In Starmer’s Britain, those same devices are being devalued to become, in effect, state-controlled spyware in our pockets.  And why stop at smartphones? What about all the horrible things unsupervised children can see on tablets, games consoles, laptops, and desktop computers? If we accept the principle of passports for internet access now, we should expect ID gateways across millions more devices soon. Moreover, why stop at scanning for nudes? What about the multitudes of other online “harms” one can experience, that the Government has long targeted: from content that can affect mental health to so-called “misinformation”? How long before scanning software begins flagging speech a future government simply doesn’t like? No other country in the world has plunged its population into a child-restricted internet and required ID for regular web access. The Home Office proudly plastered digital ads across the internet this week heralding that Britain will be the “first country in the world” to introduce these so-called child safety measures – an ID gateway to the internet, population-wide spyware and a chokehold on Britons’ internet access. But it’s not a “first” to be proud of. Who exactly are we competing with here? Iran? North Korea? China? The question is not whether children should be protected online, but how. Every generation inherits liberties it did not have to fight for. The test is whether we can pass them on intact. If Starmer’s Great British Firewall becomes a reality, future generations will not remember it as a child safety policy. It will be remembered as the moment Britain introduced digital gatekeepers. If we accept that adults must gain permission to access the open internet, we will only be handing the next generation a new fight for liberty."

Social media ban is Starmer’s desperate scramble for a legacy - "He may even have Kemi Badenoch to thank. The Tory leader, who has been campaigning for a ban since the start of the year, said Sir Keir had been forced into the move because parents had backed her demands for action... It fits into a pattern of bold announcements from departing prime ministers, who often feel more free to follow their instincts once the shackles are off.  Rishi Sunak similarly opted for a ban as his legacy, announcing in October 2023 that he would introduce a bill to eventually outlaw smoking altogether. He described the legislation, which would gradually raise the legal age for smoking until nobody could buy cigarettes, as evidence of “the type of leadership that I bring”.   In the end he could not get the law past a fractured Tory party before the 2024 election, but it was picked up by Labour and will now become a reality. Before him there was Boris Johnson, who decided to sign off in a rather different style. The former prime minister, who was known for his love of a big infrastructure project, made the approval of Sizewell C one of his last acts in office.  In a speech delivered on September 1 2022 – five days before he left No 10 for the final time – he announced £700m of new funding for the power plant, and urged his successor to “go nuclear and go large”.  The need for Sizewell C was made all the more pressing because of the legacy wish of his predecessor, Theresa May, who used her final few weeks in office to pass one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in British political history.  Baroness May was already halfway out the exit door in June 2019 when she enshrined in law the commitment to reach net zero by 2050. The legislation completely redrew the UK’s energy and industrial policies, with ongoing consequences.   Earlier this month she defended her decision, arguing that the move had helped create 1.1 million jobs and generated £105bn in economic value, saying this was “proof that tackling climate change and growing the economy can go hand in hand”.  Her premiership was dominated in real time by the infighting over Brexit that ultimately brought about her demise. But, seven years on, it is net zero that has proved to be the most controversial aspect of her long-term legacy... Gordon Brown... could see the writing on the wall well before the 2010 election. With Labour’s popularity in freefall and election defeat looking almost certain, he used his final full Budget in 2009 to pursue a nakedly socialist agenda.  Top of the list was the introduction of the 50p tax rate, which jettisoned New Labour’s previous aversion to over-taxing wealth creators. Though the 50p rate would last just two years, its impact has been far more long-term... In his last full year in office, Sir Tony rammed through 46 acts including the Climate Change Act, which was the precursor to net zero; the Equality Act, which brought in diversity rules; and the Legislative and Regulatory Act, which handed No 10 sweeping powers to bypass Parliament that have since been widely used by ministers of all stripes.  Those reforms continue to hugely influence Britain to this day, but for the ordinary voter, it was another of Sir Tony’s final acts that had the most obvious effect on their day-to-day lives. That was the introduction, on July 1 2007, of the indoor smoking ban. That he, Mr Sunak and now Sir Keir have all reached for health-related bans to try to cement their legacies is evidence both of how relatively easy they are to introduce and how enduringly popular they remain with the public."
Left wingers still bash the Tories as "far right" despite so many left wing policies

The Government has grown too comfortable with censorship - "The Government’s control over information available to the public is tightening. The rise of censorship and narrative control for our “safety” is one of the most disturbing trends to emerge in modern politics – and unless there is a course correction, it risks becoming a permanent feature of public life... the Government quietly introduced new powers for Ofcom to “crackdown” on social media companies during a crisis. Responding to incidents like disorder outside migrant hotels and the Belfast riots, the powers will force foreign tech companies to police Briton’s speech online even more rigorously than usual.  Companies will also have to open a direct channel to law enforcement, lending weight to concerns that the Government increasingly sees big tech as an extension of the state. Police forces will be invited to direct the companies to censorship action – despite the fact that many recent “crises” in our country arise from the public losing trust in the police, whether in the case of Sarah Everard or Henry Nowak.  Ofcom has admitted that these powers will push platforms to develop a crisis response that “prioritises speech of moderation over accuracy” resulting in “false positives” – that is, lawful speech being wrongly removed. Ofcom accepts that, given the nature of crises, such wrongly censored speech will include “the most highly protected forms of expression” spanning religion, political speech, and journalism and will “adversely impact users’ rights” to free speech – but maintains it is simply better to prioritise safety.  Herein lies the problem. Over the past decade in Britain, censorship has been shedding its stigma. On the altar of safety, it has developed from one of the dark arts people in power could only get away with behind doors, to official policy.  Digital censorship peaked during the Covid pandemic. The failure of the Covid Inquiry to hold the government to account for its sinister mass monitoring of public speech means this was not a mistake to be learnt from. It was an exercise to be repeated. Not only has the inquiry effectively scrubbed the extraordinary overreach of this surveillance operation from the official record, its findings encourage ever-greater counter-misinformation efforts. In response to an official “Rule 9” request for evidence from the inquiry, I submitted a dossier of irrefutable evidence of the daily monitoring and censorship of dissenting parliamentarians, journalists, world-leading scientists, and ordinary Britons. These were critics who were maligned as spreaders of “misinformation” despite expressing lawful, and as it would transpire, entirely accurate concerns spanning preparedness, lockdowns, school closures, vaccine policies, Covid passports and other social restrictions... Really? There was nothing “inappropriate” in turning the British Army inwards to monitor the lawful speech of the domestic population? Nothing inappropriate in logging posts by Sir David Davis MP in government “disinformation” reports intended for foreign hostile threats, to record that he was being “highly critical of the government”? Nothing inappropriate about spending public money recording the activities of Oxford University’s Prof Carl Heneghan, whose Twitter profile was suspended, simply for pointing out certain social restrictions had no scientific basis? The inquiry was told how the government even had to issue a formal apology to journalist Julie Hartley-Brewer after it transpired they had wrongly branded her a “vaccine sceptic” in a secret report sent to 64 officials across the UK as well as US counter-terror officials. How can any of this be remotely “appropriate”? The inquiry not only ignored the evidence of wrongdoing by the counter-misinformation units – it praised them, and then buried the evidence. It made no reference to the evidence I submitted in its report and failed to publish it, despite its duty to publish all the written evidence it received. The inquiry claimed this was an “administrative oversight” and explained it prioritises the publication of documents it referenced in the report. What a curious approach from a supposedly neutral inquiry. Imagine if judges could scrub bundles of evidence to only keep exhibits that support the prosecution and not the defence? The truth is that counter-misinformation powers provide the establishment the perfect premise on which to insulate itself from the forces of dissent. They fit perfectly with the technocratic view that public opinion is a question of information management rather than of democratic freedom. And so, as long as this status quo prevails, no amount of evidence of overreach or abuse will make the Government row back from censorship powers – quite the opposite. Starmer’s raft of online “safety” policies stand to make the UK’s internet one of the most controlled in the democratic world. We will have to win the principled argument that citizens in a democracy have the right to hear, debate and judge for ourselves. We will have to win the battle between liberty and technocracy."

Hey, Starmer, leave those kids alone | Christopher Snowdon | The Critic Magazine - "We will continue to regress as a society until we learn to judge new legislation by its likely consequences rather than by the intentions of its advocates. The looming ban on under-16s having access to platforms “whose purpose is to enable social interaction and  which allow users to post material” has all the hallmarks of another government failure. It has already been tried — and failed — in Australia. It is being framed as an attack on Big Tech rather than its satisfied customers. It has been pushed through by the conflicted old media off the back of a narrow selection of bereaved parents who have been used a human shield against criticism. It seems designed to give Starmer a “legacy”.  These are all red flags. So too is the familiar refrain that the ban will not be a “silver bullet” and that the public should therefore brace themselves for further restrictions. (Many of the problems the ban is supposed to address were meant to have been solved by the Online Safety Act. Remember that?). In his early morning address to the nation, Starmer urged us to not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Teenagers sometimes drink alcohol, he said, but that was no reason not to ban the sale of alcohol to children.   Fair enough, you might say, but leaving aside the fact that children can legally drink alcohol in Britain from the age of five, reducing some teenagers’ access to social media is clearly not perfect, but is it even good? The consequences of Australia’s “world leading” social media ban have been largely ignored by those who seek to emulate it, but any attempt to create evidence-based policy must start there. The Australian government’s eSafety commissioner found that 70 per cent of parents said their children still had active social media accounts three months after the “social media minimum age” was introduced. If, like Wes Streeting, you think that social media is as bad as tobacco, this sounds like a modest but non-trivial improvement, but who are the teenagers being denied this means of communication and what platforms are the rest using? Evidence from Australia is still emerging but the concern is that those who are unable to use websites that the majority of their peers are accessing illicitly will suffer from social isolation. In many cases, these are kids who are marginalised and unpopular in the first place. As for the rest, there are plenty of ways to get around age restrictions. Facial recognition software has proven to be laughably easy to bypass in Australia and there is nothing to stop a parent setting up a phone in their own name and giving it to their child. VPNs are readily available and other interactive spaces that boomers are less familiar with have been growing in popularity in Australia as alternatives to the mainstream networks.   The problem with many of these options is that they lack the guardrails that are currently available to parents. Using standard, pre-installed software on any iPhone, parents can set the number of hours their children can use their phone, control the time of day that it can be used, ensure that the content they see is family friendly and shut the phone down completely. None of these safeguards are available if the child is logged in as an adult or using an unregulated website via VPN. This is why the Molly Rose Foundation has warned that the “the unintended consequences of a social media ban for young people” could be “substantial”. Even UNICEF has warned that it could “backfire”... I, too, miss the days when 14 year olds spent their summer holidays playing video games and spent their time after school drinking cider and setting off fireworks. On more than one occasion I have urged my daughter to come downstairs so we can watch television like a proper family, lecturing her about how we didn’t have all this Snapchat when I was growing up. But the world moves on. What I have learned from my relatively laissez-faire approach is that the kids are alright. Early exposure to social media seems to have given my daughter and her friends a degree of justifiable scepticism about things that are said online that many of their elders could learn from. It has not suppressed her desire to socialise one bit. On the contrary, it has been a complement to it, and a cure for boredom.   Incidentally, she laughed when I told her about the social media ban and asked sardonically if it would work as well as the ban on disposable vapes. This is, of course, only my personal experience and opinion — my “lived experience” — but that seems to be all that matters in policy-making these days."

Meme - Rothmus: "Starmer is rolling out age verification so the state can censor and surveil everyone. "The children" is the oldest pretext in the authoritarian playbook."
Trojan Horse exterior: "PROTECTING CHILDREN"
Trojan Horse interior: "SOCIAL MEDIA CENSORSHIP AND TRACKING"
Person dragging Trojan Horse: "KEIR STARMER"
People welcoming Trojan Horse: "UK"

GB Politics on X - "🚨NEW: Bluesky will not be included in the under-16s social media ban"
☀️AliquisNovus☀️ on X - "Two-Tierism is quickly becoming an automatic reflex of the Yookay. Literally every new policy has some carved-out exceptions for allies of the ruling regime, and there isn’t even an attempt at subtlety with it, either."

End Time Headlines on X - "🚨 The UK Government is plotting a full-scale digital ID lockdown on every smartphone, teaming up with Big Tech giants like Google and Apple to force mandatory age verification and ID checks for unrestricted access.  Leaked proposals reveal ministers are pushing stringent systems under the Online Safety Act—framed as child protection—that could limit messaging, browsing, streaming, and more for non-verified users, effectively requiring passports or biometrics just to use your phone freely.   Critics warn this crosses the Rubicon into widespread surveillance, eroding privacy and anonymity for millions of adults in what could become one of the world's most restrictive internet regimes. https://endtimeheadlines.org/2026/06/uk-gov ernment-plots-digital-id-lockdown-on-every-phone-in-lockstep-with-big-tech/  #DigitalID #SurveillanceState #UKLockdown"

Melissa Chen on X - "Under the pretext of banning under-16s from social media to “protect the children,” Keir Starmer has snuck in some small print that should make Americans really glad that all the tea was dumped into the Boston harbour back in 1773. Adults will still be “allowed” to use the platforms… once they’ve handed over facial recognition, digital ID, passport, or credit card details to prove they’re not a child. So it was never really about the kids. It was about making sure every single person who wants to speak online has to first tell the government exactly who they are.
Step 1: Link your real identity to your speech
Step 2: police have a lovely searchable database of every spicy take, meme, or complaint you’ve ever posted
Step 3: bring in the consequences - arrests, travel ban, debunking, for out-of-bounds speech
The UK is in a free fall."

WasAcop on X - "🚨Labour confirms ID requirement at device level - VPNs useless.🚨 By forcing Apple and Google to verify age at the device level during phone setup… Keir Starmer’s government isn’t protecting kids — it’s building a surveillance infrastructure. The OS itself will restrict platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X, making VPNs largely useless because the block happens before any traffic leaves your phone.   🚨Once every device carries a verified age profile, authorities gain an easy route to identify users through legal requests to tech firms.   This is digital ID by the back door, sold as child safety.   Classic Labour: expand state control first, ask questions later."

WasAcop on X - "🚨 UK plans: Every phone must enforce mandatory age verification at OS level to block nudity/porn for kids.  You’d have to prove you’re 18+ with Face ID-style biometrics, passport/driving licence upload + live face match, or credit card check.   Once done, the OS stores a permanent “adult flag” in the secure chip. No verification = permanent child mode. Filters can’t be turned off.  Is this not just a backdoor Digital ID for everyone?  They start with “protecting children”… but now every adult has to register their identity with Big Tech + government to use their own device unrestricted."

Andre Omietanski on X - "On 22 May 2026, @AztecLabs_  submitted a response to the UK government's consultation on children's online safety.  I'll be direct about where we stand. We are sceptical of mandatory age verification. The evidence that it works is mixed, and the surveillance infrastructure built in the name of child safety rarely stays narrowly scoped. We said so plainly in the submission.  But the consultation is happening, and if the government proceeds, the detail that matters most is how these systems are actually built.  Every method deployed today related to online age verification either gets bypassed easily or forces users to hand a document scan to a third-party server, which creates centralised databases of sensitive personal data. Those databases get breached often and easily, creating personal and national security risks. This is the predictable result of collecting far more than the question requires.  So our submission, among other things, asks the government for three things:
1. make privacy by design a hard requirement rather than an aspiration;
2. recognise device-level proofs within the existing trust framework; and
3. do not restrict VPNs, which serve real privacy and security purposes.
The UK can set the global standard for how this is done, or it can attach a breachable identity database to every platform its citizens use. I think the choice is clear."

LASHFORD on X - "PAY ATTENTION @chrisluxonmp  👇  Signal: Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all."

Basil the Great on X - "🚨BREAKING: UK GOVERNMENT TO TAKE CONTROL OF YOUTUBE ALGORITHM. This is pure authoritarianism. Keir Starmer's/Andy Burnham's Government is set to control the YouTube algorithm by LAW stipulating that they must push "APPROVED CONTENT" to UK Citizens. And independent voices who criticise the government will be pushed to the back of the queue making it harder for people to find. YouTube has acknowledged this is happening. This must be stopped"

PeterSweden on X - "The British government wants to force social media to boost the BBC. Which will effectively downrank independent journalists. This is called tyrrany. This is not something a free country does."
Weird. We used to be told that government influence on the media was fascism

Canadian Patriotism - Just Hating the US

From a thread on grocery prices (of course, lots of people were defending supply management despite its raising food costs, even though US tariffs are bad because they are Unfair):

Christien Savole: "I don't get shot at for going to the grocery store. Yeah elbows up."

Betty Beeton: "Nothing would make this Canadian move to the states"

Stove Johnston: "And if Alberta separates, I'm moving to BC."

Andrea Delaney: "I second that. Never, would I ever move to that country. It may cost me financially to live in Canada but the returns, medically, emotionally, mentally, politically and socially well are worth the financial cost."

Jutta van der Kuijp: "There's no sentence that would make this Canadian move to the USA"

Tyler Johnson: "Same. The US would need to completely take over Canada for me to live in the US. And even then, if I didn't join some kind of resistance, I'd probably move to Europe"

Jeff Simms: "nobody cares. The US is literally the only thing that keeps any canadian pride alive, and its out of spite. Kind of pathetic really."

Links - 18th July 2026 (1 - Left Wing Economics)

Meme - Charles Murray @charlesmurray: "I envy the first sentence of mimetic_sisyphus's post. A straightforward statement of reality that seldom gets said so clearly."
mimetic_sisyphus: "I think something the left has never really been able to accept is that for tens of millions of Americans, nearly all of their federal tax dollars are simply taken from them with no direct and very weak indirect benefits. It's a constant imposition, and there is no thank you."

Richard Hanania on X - "Socialist gets elected mayor of Seattle. She says “I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are super overblown. And the ones that leave? Like, bye.”  The crowd laughs and cheers.  Now, local leaders are worried that they're actually leaving.  Starbucks is opening a corporate hub in Nashville, which actually wants business. The mayor says she wants the company to stay.   How many times do we have to experience this? How is there never any learning?   Socialism isn't just bad economics. It's spiritually rotten to be this hostile to truth and this hateful toward those who contribute most to society."

Fox News Politics on X - "A Seattle Democrat who praised socialist Mayor Katie Wilson's 'change' now admits he's 'gravely concerned' about the business exodus gutting the city — less than five months into her term.  Starbucks just announced it will shift 2,000 corporate jobs to Nashville while cutting Seattle roles. The Columbia Tower Club, an iconic executive hub atop the city's tallest skyscraper, shut down after four decades.  Wilson's response to fleeing millionaires? 'Like, bye.'"

Grifty on X - "MAYOR EATS HUMBLE PIE AFTER WEALTH TAX BACKFIRES
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson admits she was WRONG to call for Starbucks boycott after firm shifts thousands of jobs to Nashville over her millionaire tax.  In a stunning New York Times interview, the 43-year-old Seattle mayor confessed her January 2026 union-rally call “I am not buying Starbucks, and you should not either”  was “wrong” and “not productive” and caused “more harm than good.”  Wilson had strongly backed Washington’s new 9.9% millionaire tax (effective 2028) and previously dismissed wealthy residents fleeing with a blunt “And to the ones that leave? Like, bye.”  Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz directly blamed her policies for the decision to build a major new corporate hub in Tennessee.  The company insists it will keep its Seattle HQ and even sponsor a new homeless shelter  but the damage to local jobs is already done.  More proof that when you do "wealth taxes" people leave..."

Fox News Politics on X - "Seattle's socialist mayor told residents to boycott Starbucks the day she got elected. When the company announced plans to leave, she said 'bye' and giggled. Now she's walking it back. Starbucks just committed $100 million and thousands of jobs — to Tennessee."

Ari Hoffman on X - "Gov Bob Ferguson tried & failed to convince Starbucks not to leave Seattle.   Bob told KOMO he had "multiple personal conversations" with the CEO but the coffee giant still chose to move to Nashville.   Starbucks, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are all cutting jobs in WA, but Bob blamed it on AI, not his onerous regulations and taxes."

Mike Netter on X - "🚨 Seattle Mayor Giggles and Waves Goodbye as $800 Million & 2,000 Aerospace Jobs choosen to be created in Montana! Vs Seattle  A legendary Washington family business — Janicki Industries — that builds parts for Boeing Dreamliners, fighter jets, and NASA spacecraft just took its massive $800 million expansion and 2,000 future jobs out of state. After 33 years of growing in Washington, crushing regulations, skyrocketing taxes, and hostile policies finally made the math impossible. Instead of fighting to keep them, Seattle’s Mayor Katie Wilson literally giggled and said: “If the ones that leave, like bye.” Now those jobs and that investment are heading to Great Falls, Montana — a state that actually welcomes business. How many more companies have to flee before Washington wakes up? This is a warning for every worker and family in the state."

Clown World ™ 🤡 on X - "In 2024 Ilhan Omar’s husband Tim Mynett reported assets worth up to $30 million from his venture capital firm and wine empire. After a congressional investigation was launched into her finances, she filed an amended disclosure claiming it was all an accounting error and the businesses were worth zero. Now her 2025 disclosure shows Mynett earned as little as $200 for the entire year from a wine company called ‘The Devil’s Lie’ that has since gone bankrupt. His venture capital firm Rose Lake Capital still generated up to $1 million in revenue but somehow he personally made $200. The woman who built her career screaming about the wealthy hiding their money just filed the most suspicious financial disclosure in congressional history. The Devil’s Lie indeed."

Meme - thenutritiontea: "I can't believe I'm witnessing people debating whether or not SNAP recipients should be able to purchase rotisserie chickens. Just so we're all clear, this conversation is whether people should have access to food when it should be why are people being exploited by society.
"They need to get jobs and work for it. People just want handouts." Funny that people say this considering many people on SNAP do work and have jobs. But again, they are being exploited because they still are not making enough for food. Even if they don't have jobs, people deserve to eat. Thinking that people don't is a weird take.
We live in such an individualistic society because how on earth do you expect a country to thrive if people are struggling to eat? Food is a necessity for survival and doing everything to take that away is downright disgusting.
Food is a human right. And my personal gripe with SNAP is that it doesn't include hot food when not everyone has access to a kitchen or even a home. Again, food is a human right."
Alli Fitzpatrick: "One time when I was shopping in Costco I paused and really, objectively took a look around at the endless sea of food stacked all the way to the ceiling. Wow! I thought. The abundance is staggering. And this is only one warehouse of how many? It absolutely boggles my mind-it seems absurd-that anyone in this country goes hungry. We have more than enough. Food is indeed a human right."
Left wing logic - if something is a human right the taxpayer must provide it. That's why they declare everything a human right.
Left wingers think that if you have inventory at hand, it means you can afford to give it away for free. This is why they're poor

Let’s stop going into space. There’s nothing to see and no one to talk to | Zoe Williams | The Guardian - "It is absolutely self-evident to me that space exploration is pointless, and the more urgent the crises besetting this planet we live on, the more pointless it becomes."

Thread by @peterrhague on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Zoe Williams is just a deeply, deeply stupid person - whose previous zingers include "democracies don't use nuclear weapons" and "women aren't allowed in mens football because they would win".  Yet when she annoys people with her stupidity, she acts like this is a win somehow? Her basic thing is revealed in the second paragraph - she considers her ignorant brainfarts to be self evident truths about the universe, and everybody else just a bit silly for not agreeing already. She is utterly incurious as to the actual reasons for going to space."

Peter Hague on X - "I promise this is the last time I'll annoy myself by reading the "opinions" of the Guardian, but this one is worth disecting:
* The entirety of NASA costs 0.5% of the US federal budget. It doesn't 'distract' meaningfully from anything. Its a rounding error.
* "ecological limits" is code for "we want to use environmentalism as a pretext for socialism"
- Dismissing colonising new worlds as "fantasy" without a shred of argument for why it is (it actually isn't) because they know that when people can move off Earth it completely kneecaps the above "ecological limit" argument and endangers their project to force socialism on everybody.
These people consistently give the impression that they never bother to expose themselves to counterarguments against their nonsensical but stridently asserted positions."
NeilT on X - "They don't, they just block them out and shut them down. They are supreme in their certainty they are right. No need to go further."
When it comes to rubbish spending they love, left wingers dismiss it as a rounding error and so if you complain about it, you're raising a red herring

Opinion | ‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’ - The New York Times - "When does shoplifting become an act of political protest? The Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman is calling this microlooting, and it describes the phenomenon of people stealing small things from big corporations like Whole Foods. The New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino and the political commentator Hasan Piker join Spiegelman for a lively discussion on what’s behind this trend and where it might lead."
Stores closing and leaving poor areas underserved, and prices rising to cover the cost of shoplifting, are proof that capitalism has failed
Left wingers think internal shrinkage means employees stealing too. They can't fathom that lemons could, say, fall off a truck
Left wing logic: blowing up pipelines is good, free street parking is bad (this was both Tolentino)
Stores closing and leaving poor areas underserved are proof that capitalism has failed

Trying to win? : r/ConservativeMemes - "When the libs say “eat the rich”, they’re comparing the USA to the poorest countries in the world, so everyone in the US is rich except for the people who walk across the Rio Grande with only their shirt on their backs."

Wealth Redistribution Surprisingly Popular Among People With No Wealth • Genesius Times

The triumph of capital - "A handful of left-wing economists have made tortured efforts in recent years to redefine asset value appreciation as a form of income.  That’s because over the past 10 years, Mark Zuckerberg, among other billionaires, has amassed a staggering amount of wealth relative to the taxes he’s paid. But defining income to include this sort of appreciation means that you can say Zuckerberg pays a low tax rate.  The problem, to be slightly boring, is that this is not income.  If you compare the United States to the famously high-tax Nordic countries, the major difference is not in the top statutory income tax rates. The top American combined state and local tax rate is generally a little higher than it is in Norway and a little lower than in Denmark and Sweden. New York and California, where a large share of our billionaires live, have unusually high top income tax rates, so the richest people are paying Nordic-level marginal rates.  The big difference is that the Nordic top rates kick in at between 110 percent (Sweden) and 180 percent (Norway) of average income versus 880 percent of average income in the United States. Obviously if we lowered the threshold for the top income tax bracket down to the Norwegian level, that would generate a ton of extra revenue — including extra revenue from billionaires — and that could pay for all kinds of things.  But nobody in the United States wants to ask the middle class to pay more, so we keep seeing efforts to kind of redefine the billionaire situation to make it seem like they’re paying unusually low tax rates when they actually aren’t... Check out the chart below tracking four major economic indicators over the past 30 years. You’ll see that from 1996 until around 2012, the stock market was much more volatile than median household income or average hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers, but these indicators actually ended up in about the same place. The Case-Shiller house price index diverged from the stock-market trajectory for a few years, but ended up in the same place.  But the years since 2012 have looked very different. To be clear, even my chart is a bit too generous to working for a living. Stocks, in addition to appreciating in price over time, pay dividends. And a house isn’t just a financial asset; if you own one you can live in it rather than paying rent to someone else. Or alternatively, you can rent it out and make money. But still, there’s a world of difference between that 1996–2012 trajectory and what we’ve seen in more recent years where housing prices have risen faster than incomes and stock prices have soared astronomically.  Imagine someone who inherited $1 million in an S&P 500 index fund at the start of 2012 and never sold the shares or reinvested the dividends.  He’d have about $6 million in his portfolio today and would have scored about $40,000 per year in dividend income... it’s good and appropriate for tax policy to encourage this kind of prudence... this is not a historical inevitability. There are long stretches of time when the stock market grew more slowly than the economy. But from 1986–2015 it grew faster. And then for the past 10 years the gap became dramatically larger than at any earlier time in history...this is not a historical inevitability. There are long stretches of time when the stock market grew more slowly than the economy. But from 1986–2015 it grew faster. And then for the past 10 years the gap became dramatically larger than at any earlier time in history."

Hon. Vickie Paladino on X - "The DSA is a terrorist organization pushing for de facto secession from the United States.  And they’re lying about why the city is crumbling.  It’s not because we have a ‘war economy’ draining money from our schools and transit. It’d because leftists like them have been in charge here for decades and have wasted/stolen billions of our dollars.  New York spends an absolutely ungodly amount of money on schools, the MTA, infrastructure, healthcare, housing, and nearly everything else they complain about.  Lack of money is NOT the issue. Failed municipal leadership is the issue. A city council filled with unemployable spoiled children and their enablers is the issue. A 30 year old TikTok mayor who’s never held a job is the issue.  If we zeroed out the Pentagon budget tomorrow and gave every dime of that money to NYC, it wouldn’t improve this city one iota, because the same morons will be in charge of wasting it all.  So please spare us these obvious lies about ‘underfunded’ schools and transit.  You want to kneecap the country militarily for purely ideological reasons and you don’t really care whether anything gets better in New York either way."

Meme - *Disappointed black guy* "The working family tax cut eliminates taxes for families making under $75k
Every single house and senate democrat voted against it"
Left wing logic - if you're against taxing people $10 to give them $1 in benefits, you lack empathy, hate working people and are not a true Christian

Meme - Bennett's Phylactery @extradeadjcb: "An obscure academic wrote a book in 2004 about how dual income households are a scam & the vast majority of women simply aren't economically productive enough to justify outsourcing childcare, even in dystopian government warehouses"
"The Two-Income Trap. Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke. ELIZABETH WARREN and AMELIA WARREN TYAGI"
Elizabeth Warren @SenWarren: "Half of all families live in child care deserts. How did we get here? It's Econ 101: Prices are high because lots of families need care, but there's nowhere near enough child care providers. And there aren’t enough providers, because we’re not paying them enough."

Pubity on X - "The U.S. is investigating Germany for making medication and healthcare a little too affordable for their citizens. They're pressuring Germany to raise prices and invest more in "innovative pharmaceutical research" to keep international drug prices from going down."
nyara on X - "Capitalism be like: “People aren’t going into debt when they’re sick and that makes me mad😡😡”"
Left wing logic - if you ensure no profits from drug development, new drugs will invent themselves out of moral superiority

The Global Burden of Medical Innovation - "U.S. consumers spend roughly three times as much on drugs as their European counterparts, and 90 percent more as a share of income. Calculations using publicly available aggregate data suggest that the United States market accounts for 64 to 78 percent of worldwide pharmaceutical profits. These profits drive drug innovation that ultimately benefits patients around the globe. While American subsidies to innovation provide much-needed philanthropy to poor countries, patients in richer countries outside the United States would benefit longer-term if they financed a greater share of drug discovery. Using a previously published economic-demographic microsimulation, we estimate that if European prices were 20 percent higher, the resulting increased innovation would generate $10 trillion in welfare gains for Americans, and $7.5 trillion for Europeans over the next 50 years. Encouraging other wealthy countries to shoulder more of the burden of drug discovery — including higher prices for innovative treatments — would ultimately benefit patients in the United States and the rest of the world"

Amy Klobuchar on X - "With $300 billion, we could end homelessness, fund cancer research for 40 years, and give every child free pre-K for over 7 years. Instead, Trump is sending it to Iran. This is not America First. Not even close."
Bonchie on X - "How do they not feel embarrassment, constantly claiming they can end all the world's problems with some small fraction of the amount of money they spend every single year?"

Thread by @TristinHopper on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "If my neighbour increases the productivity of their vegetable garden and doubles their tomato crop, this does not subtract from the number of tomatoes I was able to produce in *my* vegetable garden. You are now more economically literate than all of leftist Twitter. "But Tristin, I'm jealous that he has more tomatoes than I do, and I want the tomatoes to be mine."  Ah, true. But the original point continues to hold. "But Tristin, what if the neighbour produces 90 billion tomatoes and also they're poison and I have to eat them? Checkmate, loser.""

Lauren Chen on X - ""Poverty causes crime" Jackson, Mississippi has a murder rate 20 times higher than Rwanda's. St. Louis has a murder rate almost 35 times higher than Ghana's. Stop it. No more excuses."

Yogi on X - "Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that's been in the city since 1921.  They didn't lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they'd rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year.  Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move.  They lost them for two reasons.   The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they're bad at their jobs.  In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack.  Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn't even exist yet.  That fight dragged on for years.  The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn't reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois.  Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting.  So now it's all gone.   The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything.  Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.  Pritzker: they're "an $8.5B valued business" that doesn't need propping up.  But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works.  Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team.  And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.  Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.  Pritzker after they left: "I wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team."  There it is. "Billionaire-owned."   That's how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you're saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line.  Meanwhile they're running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You're living in it.  Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that's $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances "the point of no return."  When you run things this badly, you sell what's left.  They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect.   Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check.   But a fixed property tax rate for a team that's been here 106 years? That's "propping up billionaires."  Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.   Indiana didn't outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren't a disaster.  Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero. Ignore all the bad management but make sure to stick it to those evil, pesky billionaires."

Russ Greene on X - "Total Boomer Luxury Communism is an existential threat to America. And this rhetoric below contributes to it.Democrats want to take ~$25 trillion more in taxes on from younger workers, just because they think retired millionaire households deserve $100k plus a year. Note the language: "your social security." Seniors, your social security doesn't exist anywhere. Your benefits are paid for by younger people's taxes, today. It's not "your social security" - it's "our payroll taxes."Further, Dems want to jack up spending on Medicare and Medicaid, which means tens of trillions more in additional taxes on younger workers. And we haven't talked about interest payments on the $39 trillion in national debt yet."

End Wokeness on X - "Joy Reid's warning about the far-right: "Their plan? 0 income tax, 0 regulation, earn as much as you want, your family inherits it all!""
Kaguya’s Top Gal on X - "A black person’s worst nightmare is white tax dollars not going into their welfare"
Meme - Robert Sepehr @robertsepehr: "In other words, if you don't want to give 80% of your hard earned income to Blacks and African migrants, instead preferring to not have your wealth redistributed because Blacks are either too lazy, incompetent, or Low IQ to work, save and feed themselves, then you're "far-right"."

Meme - Heather MadhatterMarie added a photo to the album: Words that make me feel some...: "Hoarding of wealth is a form of gluttony"
Killer Whale being interviewed: "Attacking the rich is not envy, it is self defence. The hoarding of wealth is the cause of poverty. The rich aren't just indifferent to poverty: they create it and maintain it."
Left wingers actually think rich people being rich makes poor people poor, and claim their violence is "self-defence"
These are the same people who claim people's existence cannot be political, and that denying any bit of the TRA agenda is literally saying that trans people do not exist and trans genocide

Links - 17th July 2026 (2)

Why do cats hate water? An expert explains. - "Cats and water just don’t mix—that’s the prevailing narrative. And yet, some cats seem to love water. Just poke around on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or the more specialized subgenre of the platform, #CatTok, and you’re bound to find some water-loving felines enjoying a shower or swim. So what gives?...   In many ways, cats haven’t changed much in 10,000 years of domestication. Unlike dogs, our feline companions “haven’t really been selectively bred as much. So their predatory motor pattern is basically still intact,” says Vitale. “A lot of their behavior is going to be very [similar to] their wild ancestor.”   That ancestor is the African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica). Clocking in between six and 18 pounds, the African wildcat looks pretty much the same as a large, tabby housecat—and like a tabby housecat, this wildcat isn’t into water either.   “African wildcats are typically going to be hunting on land and hunting terrestrial animals. So they didn’t really develop a lot of behaviors to be in the water or hunting around water,” says Vitale. They are, and always have been, land animals—specifically arid land animals.   African wildcats primarily live in deserts and savannas. When they were first being domesticated some 10,000 years ago, they called the dry plains of the Fertile Crescent, a large swath of the Middle East that stretched from northern Egypt to Iran, home. So it makes sense that their modern descendants aren’t hopping into pools with much gusto.  But evolution is only part of the equation. How cats are raised also plays an important role in why some, if not most, of our feline friends are apprehensive about water.   “If you think about dogs, a lot of pet owners will take their dog to the beach or their dogs are going to be getting baths more often. So from an early age, dogs are learning about water and hopefully that water isn’t something scary,” says Vitale. “But as cat owners, we don’t really do that.”   Most domestic house cats aren’t exposed to water as often as their canine counterparts...   To be clear, it’s usually best not to bathe your cat. Most cats self-clean, using their coarse tongues to groom themselves or one another. “Bathing them might cause issues because you’re potentially masking the cat’s scent,” says Vitale, especially if you use a scented shampoo or soap. “Cats feel safe and secure when they can smell themselves. And if you’re masking their scent, that can cause stress and anxiety,” says Vitale. It’s bad news if your furry friend starts associating water with being stripped of their natural scent. There’s also the potential that getting wet may throw off a cat’s balance. For instance, whiskers play a vital role in how cats interpret the world around them. They provide information about their environment and how to navigate it. “It’s very possible getting wet might hinder [whiskers’] ability to pick up on vibrations and sensations,” says Vitale."

Canicule à l'hôpital: à Bordeaux, il achète sa propre clim pour rafraîchir la chambre de son bébé - "À Bordeaux, pour rafraîchir la chambre d'hôpital surchauffée de son enfant en bas âge, un père de famille a acheté lui-même une climatisation alors que les températures dépassent les 30 degrés... Au CHU de Bordeaux, 44°C ont été relevés sur une passerelle vitrée. Au sein du service de pédiatrie, des températures insoutenables ont été relevées dans certaines chambre.  Au point de pousser certains parents à investir eux-mêmes:
"Il faisait 37°C dans une chambre, le père a dépensé 400 euros pour une clim' car il n'en pouvait plus de voir son enfant hospitalisé dans ces conditions", assure à RMC Agnès Marquet, représente syndicale SUD du CHU de Bordeaux.
Au CHU de Valence dans la Drôme, une aide-soignante a relevé 33°C tout au long de la journée sur son thermomètre: "C'est aberrant, ce ne sont pas de bonnes conditions de travail mais bon, pas le choix. Du coup on se mouille la tête de temps en temps", raconte-t-elle."
Keywords: air conditioning, Europe, buy their own air conditional, hospital, baby

Moongazer on X - "Imagine still being a democrat in 2026 after you wanted Bernie in 2016 and the DNC rigged it so he’d lose to Hillary who lost to Trump and then in 2020 your party had to brazenly rig the election to put in Joe Biden who didn’t deliver on any campaign promises but did allow tens of millions of illegals into America and then he went senile and your party denied it and hid it from you and then when it became too obvious to cover up they did an overnight coup to install Kamala as the presidential nominee instead of democratically selecting one and then she suffered the most resounding defeat of your lifetime and on the eve of Trump’s inauguration Biden’s signature was copy and pasted on preemptive blanket pardons of undefined crimes for every single person involved in anything that ever happened during his administration and within months of the new admin it was uncovered that everything your party touches is engaged and complicit in incalculable fraud using your tax dollars and you still believe your party and the policies they push for are honestly good for you and your country"

3 more nursing assistants arrested in sex investigation at Iowa care facility - "Three more former employees at a northeast Iowa care facility are accused of having sex with patients...  The five are accused of having a sex with patients while working at Prairie View Residential Care Facility in Fayette between 2015 and 2016. The facility cares for patients with chronic mental illness, intellectual disabilities or medical conditions.  Officers arrested Paige Johanningmeier, 23, and Megan Penney, 26, in early March. The investigation, which began in February, revealed that other workers at Prairie View had also had inappropriate contact with patients.  Officers arrested three other former employees who "had been discharged in the past for unhealthy relationships with patients," according to a release from the sheriff's office.  Carolyn Wiedrich, 44, Shelby Sebring, 24 and Jamie Pagel, 32, "had sexual relationships" with patients while working at the facility"

Meme - "About to make a snack"
"Samee what u eating?"
"pizza Not Delivered
how about you?"
"Come over :)"

Myth Busts: The Enduring Legacy of Breast-Shaped Glassware - "It can be a challenge for a person to go through life without seeing Kate Moss's breasts... for those for whom a high-fashion photos and paparazzi snaps don't suffice, for those who literally want to get their mouths on Moss's assets, the London-based Restaurant 34 recently issued a champagne coupe modeled on the left one... it’s Marie Antoinette, teen queen of France from 1774 and 1792, who is the possessor of the pert, perfect breasts most often cited as those from which the wide-mouthed, shallow-bowled champagne coupe takes its inspiration.  It’s a good story. When cocktail banter runs its course and you’re searching the room for something to comment on, it’s useful to be able to look down at the glass in your hand and say, “Did you know that the champagne coupe is modeled after Marie Antoinette’s breast?” But, alas, it’s probably not true. “In the case of Marie Antoinette, ninety percent of what you hear about her is hyperbole or is invented,” Marilyn Yalom explained to me. Yalom is a senior scholar at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the author of A History of the Breast, in which she elucidates both the power and prejudice women throughout time have experienced as a result of their chests. “It’s not out of the question that someone at some point may have made a mold of some famous woman’s breasts and then used it for a glass,” she went on, “but I don’t think there’s anything to indicate that Marie Antoinette herself would have lent her breast for a vessel.”... With no formal political role or legislative power in the French government, the young queen took on extracurricular activities to fill her time, some of which indeed involved breasts, perhaps influenced by her avid reading of the works of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, among other things, wrote about the benefits of breastfeeding children in his 1762 education treatise Émile. At her summer palace of Rambouillet, Marie Antoinette played out a milkmaid fantasy at her mock dairy farm, and the story goes that her husband the king commissioned artist Jean-Jacques Lagreneé of Sévres, a legendary French porcelain producer, to create a ceramic bol sein (literally, a “breast bowl”) for the dairy, in the shape of a single, perfect breast. But no evidence exists to support the notion that the queen’s interests led her to offer her own anatomy as the model for a glass. Nor is there any proof to back up any of the many variations on the Marie Antoinette tale. The champagne coupe was not modeled after the breasts of Helen of Troy; nor those of Joséphine de Beauharnais, wife of Napoleon; nor those of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henri II; nor Madame de Pompadour, chief mistress of Louis XV; nor Madame du Barry, another of Louis XV’s mistresses. It is true that Claudia Schiffer loaned a stylized outline of her left breast to a Karl Lagerfeld-designed ceramic coupe for Dom Perignon in 2008 (which, in its design, harkens back to Marie Antoinette’s own bol sein), and that our hero Kate Moss did the same for a crystal coupe, but those supermodels were inspired by mythology, tittles of historical apocrypha. The women the champagne coupe origin stories are ascribed to are themselves tied together with certain common threads. They all were lovers of powerful men, and primarily defined by those associations. Portraits show their breasts as uniformly small, round, and lily-white; their intricate corsetry and aristocratic toilette likely kept their décolletage supple and firm, looking ornamental and smelling sweet... I found a willing mold-maker and glassblower, and had a wine glass cast from my own left breast.  By no fault of anyone involved—certainly not the deft hands of the expert mold maker, or the glassblower’s meticulous technique—the glass did not come out looking anything like Marie Antoinette’s breast, or my own breast, or even a coupe. The crystalline, ridged, lopsided impression of my breast sitting atop an elegant stem more resembled an ancient, melting glacier than it did the result of a vanity project to immortalize my youthful assets, an outcome which was, in the end, fine by me. It wasn’t supposed to be a glass, it was supposed to be a way to prove a point."

Amateur sleuth Sholto David is demolishing the science establishment’s dangerous groupthink - "  Sholto David is a Newcastle University graduate who has made a name for himself as a “scientific sleuth”. Last year, he brought a case against the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston that resulted in a $15m (£11m) settlement of fraud allegations with the US department of justice.  Now he has found an astonishingly amateurish error in cancer studies across the world. The implications for public trust in science of this and other scandals are increasingly alarming.  In hundreds of studies that David looked at, scientists claimed to have found an effect on a tumour-suppressing gene called p16-INK4a, but had instead ordered the wrong antibody from commercial suppliers. They had bought an antibody that detects the activity of a different and irrelevant gene called p16-ARC, probably because it’s listed alphabetically first in the online catalogue.  As a result, teams of scientists from Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and even Wuhan have published results – often in high-impact journals – that make no sense. Yet the experts involved often claimed to have validated their hypotheses anyway.  As David put it: “What are we to make of cases like this where the wrong antibody was used but the authors still manage to rustle up interpretable results?” He blames “a mixture of outright fabrication, selective reporting, writing errors, and some teams blindly publishing contradictory findings without further questioning or curiosity”. Science is humanity’s greatest triumph, but its reputation is increasingly tarnished after a series of such scandals. In 2023, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the president of Stanford University, resigned after an investigation found “manipulation” of research data in studies he had overseen on Alzheimer’s disease.  Earlier this year, it emerged that studies purporting to show microplastics in human organs were fatally flawed after mistaking natural body substances in fat for plastics. Motivated reasoning – the desire to obtain positive results to support sensational headlines or lucrative rewards – had led scientists to celebrate “false positive” data and make people unduly anxious.  Scarcely less shocking, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has finally laid to rest one extreme model of future carbon dioxide emissions, called RCP8.5. It never represented a realistic possible future, as the authors made clear 20 years ago. But tens of thousands of studies used this model. It generated scary headlines, influenced unrealistic policies and was used to justify financially lucrative insurance premiums.  Britain’s Met Office still uses RCP8.5 to predict what the climate will be like here in the 2070s. The Environment Agency predicts future river flows for flood prevention purposes based on RCP8.5 alone, even though it knows this is bonkers. Examine almost any scary headline about future climate change, and you will find RCP8.5 has been used.  During the Covid pandemic, scientists told us to “trust the science”, with the enthusiastic backing of the BBC and politicians. The implication was that there was only one correct view on matters such as airborne infection, modelling, lockdowns, school closures, masks and vaccine efficacy in preventing transmission.  When that view proved repeatedly to be wrong, trust in science took a hefty battering. Vaccine hesitancy is on the rise with disastrous implications for diseases such as measles. Who gave credence to cranks like Robert Kennedy, I asked scientist friends: you did. Scientists, like all of us, are prone to confirmation bias, where they look for evidence to support their hunches and prejudices rather than to challenge them. What kept them honest in the past was that they relished the chance to challenge each other.  Now, with the insistence on “consensus” – another word for groupthink – and a monopoly of funding channels, dogma has been increasingly allowed to stifle debate. It does not help that science reporters, unlike those who tackle politics, the arts or business, often have a culture of deference rather than critique.  The self-correction mechanisms of scientific debate are no longer working well. Yet instead of tackling the problem with humility and reformation, the scientific establishment is inclined to lecture the public for our irrationality. Perhaps it should take a look in the mirror."
How ignorant. Doesn't he know that science isn't done by amateurs, but by scientists? Unless he publishes peer reviewed research, he is not credible and should be ignore, then deplatformed for spreading dangerous misinformation and spreading mistrust in science

Misconduct sleuth wins $2.63 million from major cancer institute in $15 million settlement - "David identified problematic images and other data issues in 57 cancer biology papers authored by Dana-Farber scientists, including several senior leaders. Some papers appeared in top journals, including Science. His findings, posted on the blog For Better Science, sparked dozens of corrections and retractions. Noting that the suspect work had been used in National Institutes of Health grant applications, he later filed a suit against Dana-Farber under the federal False Claims Act, which applies to potential fraud involving federal funding. If there is a deal or conviction the whistleblower can receive a portion of any returned money."
Bloggers are not scientists. His blog needs to be unpublished as it's not credible

el gato malo on X - "you're villifying the wrong people and arguing by false equivalence, simon.  people still trust science, they just do not trust "science imposed upon them by experts at the point of a gun."  no one is saying "airplanes don't fly" or "computers don't compute."  they are saying "you lied about climate change, epidemiology, trade offs with products like roundup, GRAS designations, nutrition, race, gender, and 500 other topics>'  and many of these criticisms have validity.  and in response, the experts blame the questioner and demand deference.  and those who refuse to engage on facts rarely have the facts on their side.  trust was lost because "the experts" proved not only untrustworthy, but outright dictatorial.  they faked evidence and data, made up wild pseudoscientific theories, and vilified sound science, and pushed utter fakery in its place.  they censored opposition and claimed "the science was settled" to prevent investigation into their frauds.  and they forced the whole world at the expense of lives and trillions of dollars of lost welfare to play along.  it was high handed, dishonest, tyranny.  have you stopped to consider that they earned this loss of faith?  because they did.  MIT wrote a literal article about "anti mask twitter" which it vilified by claiming  “most fundamentally, the groups we studied believe that science is a process, not an institution.”  as though it proved we had somehow turned our backs on science.  but we did not.  science is and must be a process.  it is never an institution.  that's dogma, not the methods of bacon.  we did not stop trusting science, the experts stopped performing it and were dancing around in the flensed skinsuit of scientific method that they had stripped from the bones that made it valid:  dispute, dissent, replication, validation - open and honest discourse.  if you want to win back trust, you need to restore open debate and engagement, share methods, means, and data.  wailing about "they won't trust us!" and blaming the folks who called out the deviation from sound science is just another arrogant presumption for institutions to dictate doctrine.  you want to respect for sceince?  start respecting to process of science again."
John Carter on X - "I was trying to warn my colleagues about this like a decade ago.  Most people do not have the time or expertise to evaluate every single peer-reviewed study that enters the scientific literature. Therefore they apply simple heuristics. Until recently the rule of thumb was "the guys in lab coats know what they're doing, you should probably trust them."  Then the guys in lab coats started abusing that trust in the name of global warming, fighting racism, making money from pharma, and dozens of other social engineering projects and outright scams.   It was very obvious to me that this would destroy trust, thus leading to a new heuristic: "the guys in lab coats are probably full of shit, you should be suspicious of everything they say."  Which then leads at the extreme end to Moon landing hoax theories, flat Earth, young Earth creationism, and other nonsense. It also leads to less public support for science funding, because why would anyone want to pay for an ideological priesthood that can't produce anything but a replication crisis?"

The death of work perks - "In a high-profile case last year, the American technology company Dell was criticised for on the one hand demanding staff return to the office, while simultaneously ditching what many saw as one of the last vestiges of what makes office life bearable – free hot drinks... “Because many perks – like health insurance – are contractual, they’re harder to remove, and so it’s the ‘smaller’ perks that are easier to cut,” says Charles Cotton, of the CIPD.  “But ironically, when these benefits go, people notice them the most,” he adds.  “Perks send an important message about a company’s culture. Removing them might save a bit of money, but what’s often not factored-in is the impact on happiness and productivity.” Antoinette Weibel, a human resources professor at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, adds: “Motivation theory suggests people experience loss twice as much as they do gain. Perks shouldn’t be seen as a cost, but as an investment.”... When pay rises are restricted, benefits are historically boosted, to take up the slack.  But not only are benefits also being squeezed, worse still are accusations that employers are trying to relabel what little they do offer as “perks”, when actually they are basic legal minimums. Benefits platform Rippl recently analysed nearly 125,000 job adverts and found 46pc of vacancies described a statutory right (such as 20 days’ holiday leave or sick pay), as a benefit.  Three employers were proud of their “bean bag chairs”. One even boasted of its “free water”... A forgiving view is that employers are reacting to a common bugbear: low take-up rates of the benefits they do offer, which are routinely under 10pc, and they are clawing back wasted spend.  Last year, research from financial firm Isio and YouGov found UK employers spent £15bn a year on employee benefits that do not resonate with workers or get used."

Meme - "From Bolehland community on Reddit"
"In Malaysia,the indian who cannot speak tamil "we call them coconut". The chinese who cannot speak Chinese "we call them banana. Then how about the Malay who cannot speak Malay? What we call them?"
"Singaporean."

Meme - Rock Solid: "The Chinese government's true intention behind creating the Great Firewall is actually to protect the rest of the world from Chinese internet users"
"Translated from Chinese by Google
When your mother was pregnant with you, did she work as a prostitute on the street every day? Did she have semen from hundreds of men pouring into your brain through your nostrils? Now you are living with a brain infection and cerebellum atrophy. You typed these words to me with your deformed fingers. I suggest you stop surfing the Internet in the future. You are so pitiful."

Meme - Ash beneath grate with water pouring in: "It looks like Team Rocket has finally outsmarted us"
Ash: "Help me Pikachu. I don't want to drown"
*Pikachu struggling with grate*
Ash with head pressed to grate: "No, listen Pikachu. I don't want to drown"
*dark house*
*lit up house*
*dark house*

Wylfċen on X - "If I’m killed, please use my death to push for mass deportations and colonialism, even if it’s completely unrelated."

Meme - Derek @sipofkoko: "For those unaware, nations like Botswana allowed rich Westerners to come shoot aging rhinos and elephants for like, $150k a pop and used that money to pay park rangers and build other infrastructure to prevent poaching and conflicts with farmers. It worked.
SPAR (thee/thou) @SPQRx2: "Hunting is conservation. Even trophy hunting."
"BOTSWANA HAS LEGAL, REGULATED ELEPHANT HUNTING
1977: 33,000
2025: 150,000
KENYA BANNED ELEPHANT HUNTING IN 1977
1977: 275,000
2025: 36,000"
Derek @sipofkoko: "A big part of it was also distributing some of these funds to local communities whose crops are often trampled by these animals. These villages started voluntarily protecting large mammals because it now meant more (not less) money for them.
The intuitive policy approach doesn't always work. What feels good doesn't always lead to good outcomes."
Environmentalists care more about moral purity than outcomes

Poll: 55 Percent of Democrats Would Rather Live Outside the U.S. - "A poll in 2025 found a majority of Democrat voters aligned with socialism over capitalism and supported far-left candidates"
We are still told that left wingers don't hate their countries

Happy Cows Make More Nutritious Milk - "Happy CowsDaily infusions with a chemical commonly associated with feelings of happiness were shown to increase calcium levels in the blood of Holstein cows and the milk of Jersey cows that had just given birth. The results, published in the Journal of Endocrinology, could lead to a better understanding of how to improve the health of dairy cows, and keep the milk flowing."

Online porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
From 2024

Here’s Why Our Walking Gets Slower as We Age - "Analyzing movement data from 107 adults aged 26 to 86, aging experts from Australia’s Flinders University discovered some interesting differences in how our ankles work as we age. When taking a step, older people tend to activate ankle muscles in opposition to one another at the same time. Known as “co-contraction,” this stiffens the joint, improving balance, but it comes at the cost of reduced push-off power, shorter strides, and slower walking speeds. Instead of a confident stride, it’s more of a hesitant shuffle."

Trump and the Academic Cocoon

From 2024. Clearly, if you oppose the left wing agenda, that is proof that you don't understand history or science or art matter in your daily life.

Trump and the Academic Cocoon

"Yale historian David Blight has written an op-ed for the New York Times calling for a “reckoning” on the part of universities. Academia must grapple with its blind spots, he argues, in order to understand why blue-collar workers voted for an “authoritarian in a red tie” in the recent US presidential election. But despite these good intentions, Blight unwittingly illustrates why universities will not self-correct without external intervention.

Blight is a scholar of American race relations and the Civil War; he directs Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. His massive 2018 biography of Frederick Douglass won a Pulitzer Prize. He holds one of the most prestigious chairs at Yale, he’s a prominent voice on campus, and he has left a significant public footprint in non-academic historical associations. But his worldview remains stunningly parochial...

Either Blight does not see the ideological monoculture of which he is a part or he fears criticising it. Either way, he confirms the very charge he refuses to adjudicate. And his assertion that the media regularly publish negative stories about academic leftism suggests a low tolerance for criticism since such criticism rarely appears in papers like the Times. Only the conservative press regularly reports on the latest campus uprisings against apostasy, and it is unlikely that Blight subjects himself to Fox News.

What does Blight leave out of his accounting? For starters, the extent of de facto campus censorship. Had he actually wanted to assess the “ideological monolith” charge, he might have started by looking more closely at his own discipline. On 17 August 2022, James Sweet, the president of the American Historical Association, published a column in the AHA’s newsletter criticising the “presentism” of much contemporary history writing. Today’s historians, wrote Sweet (a specialist in Africa and the slave trade at the University of Wisconsin), view history “through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism,” while minimising “the values and mores of people in their own times.” Moreover, he added, today’s historians are blind to violations of social justice committed outside the West.

A storm duly erupted on social media...

Sweet capitulated within two days. On 19 August, he appended a craven author’s note to the front of his essay in which he took “full responsibility that [my column] did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused.” The note concluded: “Once again, I apologize for the damage I have caused to my fellow historians, the discipline, and the AHA. I hope to redeem myself in future conversations with you all. I’m listening and learning.”

This grovelling repudiation of plain-speaking has become the norm in academia, including in the STEM fields. “Ideological purity” is not something that an ignorant or malicious press merely “alleges,” as Blight puts it. It is a daily reality. Students and faculty who hold a contrarian position on systemic racism or gender fluidity know it is better to remain silent lest they suffer condemnation and ostracism. Good luck getting hired if you want to study behavioural and cultural contributions to racial inequalities. Blight overlooks the loyalty oaths that many would-be professors must sign if they want to be considered for a job. Those oaths test a professor’s enthusiasm for incorporating diversity tenets into the syllabi and teaching, no matter how incongruously; they require assent to the view that racial disparities are by definition the product of racism.

Other academic associations are just as compromised as the American Historical Association. Physics, mathematics, and chemistry organisations have issued apologies for the racism of their fields and called for greater diversity hiring and admissions (which means selecting less qualified minority and female applicants over more qualified white and Asian male applicants). The attack on academic excellence can be found in virtually every faculty hiring search and in the publishing decisions of virtually every academic journal.

Sweet’s critique of presentism could apply to Blight himself. Earlier this year, Blight published a 350-page report on Yale and slavery that rebuked the university for its past sins against present-day certainties... some sins still needed to be called out, such as the university’s 1915 Civil War memorial. 

Blight described that memorial as a work of “racism” and a product typical of “elite White men.” Why? Because it commemorated students who died fighting on both sides of the war and did not mention slavery or the Union victory. Blight dismisses the instinct of reconciliation that motivated the monument as simply a cover for “white supremacy.” Such white supremacy would presumably include the comity between Union general Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate general Robert E. Lee at Appomattox in 1865 and Lee’s subsequent invitation to the Grant White House. It would include the Massachusetts congressional delegation’s choice in 1874 of a Mississippi secessionist to eulogise the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner. It would include President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 praise of Robert E. Lee as “one of our greatest American gentlemen.”

Blight’s 2024 report unleashed a geyser of reparations-like spending from Yale: funding for public schools, economic development grants to New Haven, and scholarships to non-Yale institutions. Such matters were once outside what was considered a university’s core competence. Yale has so many excess funds sloshing around from taxpayer support and tuition, however, that it can set itself up as a mini-government dispensing largesse as well as ideological correction. A follow-up report is in the works. Volume II will focus on another evil in Yale’s soul: naming many of the college’s undergraduate dormitories after “slaveholders.” It is a 21st-century breakthrough to posit slave-owning as the primary attribute of 18th-century statesmen.

For further local insight into “why ‘they’ hate us,” Blight could usefully ponder the mistreatment of Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis in 2015. Christakis’s wife had suggested that Yale’s students could choose their own Halloween costumes, free from oversight by Yale’s diversity bureaucrats. For defending his wife from the deluge of outrage that followed, Christakis was denounced as a racist by a crowd of Yale students. He was jeopardising the safety of Yale’s minority members, they screamed. In response, the university’s then-president Peter Salovey conferred a racial-justice prize on two leaders of the nearly three-hour abuse session and increased Yale’s already princely expenditures on racially coded academic programs.

Blight might ask how Yale’s students became so convinced of their own fragility and so confident in their right to be swaddled in conforming views. Yale’s law students, like law students everywhere, periodically erupt in tantrums if the local Federalist Society chapter invites a speaker who has ever taken a position that contravenes progressive dogma. Blight is fulsome about academia’s commitment to justice and the rule of law, but campus diversity bureaucrats have stripped due-process protections from male students accused of sexual assault. During Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Supreme Court nomination hearings in the Senate, Yale’s students pledged “Solidarity with Survivors,” a mantra that implicitly contravenes the presumption of innocence.

In 2019, Yale dug out a small stone carving from the back of its main library. The sculpture showed a Puritan with a musket and an Indian with a bow and shield, one of hundreds of such fancies that decorate Yale’s neogothic architecture. Ordinarily, historical preservation principles would demand the protection of this little bagatelle. But after fierce study of its meaning, Yale concluded that the carving “depicts a scene of warfare and colonial violence toward local Native American inhabitants.”

The threat that this sculpture posed to Yale’s students was judged to be so great that Yale promptly covered up the musket as an interim measure, like a Victorian draping a piano leg. Eventually, the university removed the work entirely and it has not been seen since. No Yale student in the modern era had ever complained about the sculpture, but Yale’s solicitude for the safety of its allegedly “marginalised” students guarantees that were one of them to notice the work, he, too, would leverage the rhetoric of trauma that the academic world so readily provides.

Blight’s understanding of broader politics will seem lucid to his fellow academics. In his Times article, he calls Kamala Harris a “brilliant Black woman [who] ran an honorable campaign about unity in a fractured political culture riddled with fierce tribalism.” Many outside Yale, however, will find this assessment unhinged. During her 2024 campaign for president, Harris was unable to answer straightforward questions about her own political positions. Without a script, her speech dissolved into meandering repetition, cul-de-sacs, and baffling circumlocutions. The Biden-Harris executive orders on racial equity insisted on the permanence of whites’ supremacist views. Those orders, implemented in ninety government agencies, doled out government benefits on the basis of race, following the lead of university racial preferences.

Blight’s hothouse politics would ordinarily not matter, since a professor’s extracurricular beliefs should be irrelevant to his work as a teacher. But with the ideological skew on campuses as great as it is—according to the Buckley Institute, 88 percent of the Yale faculty in the social sciences and the humanities are Democrats while just one percent are Republicans—the faculty monoculture has long since seeped into teaching as well as scholarship.

According to Blight, it is the Trumpist Right that fuels “culture wars,” not the Left with its biologically nonsensical theories about sex, say, or its policies shutting parents out of their child’s “gender transition.” Blight draws a puzzling moral from the election: “Election outcomes, if nothing else can, should make us aware that substantial parts of our society may like to know why history or science or art themselves even matter in their daily lives.” Among the many meanings that observers have read into the recent result, doubts about the relevance of the liberal arts or science are surely the most self-involved. Blight does not confine this reading to the 2024 election; all “election outcomes,” apparently, remind us about the need to justify academic activity to society.

Weirder still is Blight’s explanation of why Trump voters fail to understand the value of universities: “‘they’ are scared by the price of milk, and tuition, and by hurricanes.” Scared by hurricanes? It is the Left that keeps up a steady alarm about the existential threat of allegedly climate-change-induced storms. Red-state residents simply band together to help with recovery efforts. And being “scared” is a condescending characterisation of the response of non-Harris voters to the price of milk or college tuition. “Fed up” is more like it.

Blight’s view of Trump supporters is as strange as his view of Harris’s brilliance. In a July 2024 article for the New Republic, Blight wrote that MAGA enthusiasts are the “equivalent of the 1850s Slave Power” who seek to spread a “deadly poison” of authoritarianism throughout the body politic. It is time to “call the enemies by their names,” he declared, explaining that the US faces the same threat from “MAGA-fascism” as it did before the Civil War from separatist slave-holders. The election would decide whether the “Union can endure half-MAGA neofascist and half-Democratic pluralistic under rule of law.” The Supreme Court’s recent decisions striking down a constitutional right to abortion and overturning the doctrine of judicial deference to administrative agencies are as inimical to the American experiment as was the Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision (which held that the federal government could not stop the spread of slavery into the territories because doing so would interfere with slaveowners’ property rights in their slaves).

Blight had drawn the parallel between Republicans and the Slave Power before. In 2020, he tweeted: “Republicans have become the new Confederacy in our system. The difference is that they will tear us apart and take down our institutions in order to own them. We need to say some things out loud about who and what they are.”

With all due respect to epistemological relativism, it is delusional to call Trump’s voters “neofascists.” They do not seek the end of democracy, they just want their voice back. They are starting to rebel against the elite hatred directed at them for beliefs shared throughout human history until 20 years ago. They support the rule of law, but they hold a different view of what threatens it most: government campaigns against “misinformation” and politically motivated prosecutions, say, rather than promises to strictly enforce immigration laws and cut back on 20th-century accretions to the federal government. Blight nevertheless views half of his fellow Americans as enemies of the Constitution and rubes too stupid to understand that the Democrats’ lax immigration policies and hostility to law enforcement “work for them.”

The Right’s rhetoric about Biden and Harris undoubtedly seemed as lunatic to those politicians’ supporters as Blight’s hysteria about Trump and his followers will seem to most Republicans. The latter’s fiercely partisan views now animate almost all university functions and have spilled over into virtually every mainstream institution. Blight’s New York Times op-ed warns against allowing “Trumpists to own and tell our national story” during the commemoration of American independence in 2026. If Blight and his fellow academics had their way, we could expect that 250th-year-anniversary to echo Blight’s 2024 Yale and slavery report, with its belief in the ongoing “realities of white supremacy.”

Sloppily written and badly punctuated to boot, Blight’s op-ed epitomises the cocooned state of contemporary academia. Universities should face a choice: Forgo the billions of taxpayer dollars that underwrite their bloated tuitions, politicised bureaucracies, and one-sided intellectual orthodoxies or accept strict conditions of colourblindness, admissions transparency, and political neutrality in every aspect of their operations. The Yale faculty and its counterparts throughout the country will undoubtedly feel under siege from unsophisticated “culture warriors,” but it is those who believe in preserving Western culture who now need to stand up and take the universities back."