Links - 28th July 2025 (1)

Why Do Chinese People Drink Hot Water? - "The Chinese have been drinking hot water since at least the 4th century B.C. At that time, hot beverages were seen to expel humidity from the body, while cold beverages could, naturally, cool the body down. But not everyone had access to the luxury of fuel for a stove. Thus, hot water was reserved for those who needed it the most, namely pregnant women, the elderly, and the sick.  And so, gradually, there grew to be a connection between health and hot water.  It wasn’t until 1862, however, that this connection was cemented as the golden rule of traditional medicine. That year, a cholera epidemic broke out in Shanghai, killing up to 3,000 people a day, many of whom were refugees from the ongoing Taiping Rebellion. From Shanghai, the disease spread northward, reaching the capital of Beijing.  The south, on the other hand, remained untouched by the disease. It was well known at the time that southerners drank more hot water than northerners. And while hindsight has made it clear that the real cause of cholera’s northward travel was mail boats, the myth that hot water had spared the south spread as fast as the disease itself.   By the time of the Communist takeover in 1949, drinking hot water had already become a widespread preference among people of every geographic position and party affiliation. The Nationalists even promoted it in their 1934 guidebook Essentials of the New Life Movement.  In 1952, the new Communist government launched their nationwide Patriotic Health Campaign, with posters hung in schools declaring that “Children should cultivate the habit of drinking boiled water three times a day!”"
So much for blaming Mao

The History Behind China’s Obsession With Hot Water - "Since at least the fourth century B.C., traditional Chinese medicine classified both hot and cold beverages as “functional drinks.” The former was used to expel excess humidity and cold from the body, while the latter was said to cool the body down.  However, in ancient China, poor living standards meant that most ordinary Chinese focused much more on keeping warm and dry than on cooling off... Poor refrigeration also made storing ice exceptionally difficult. Traditionally, only high-ranking officials and the social elite could enjoy iced drinks. During the Zhou Dynasty, the imperial family even had a special team of civil servants tasked with harvesting ice during winter.  As traditional medicine became broadly accepted across society, Chinese people developed an abiding faith in the beneficial health effects of hot water. By the 1830s, people in more prosperous areas near the Yangtze River Delta had come to view it as a necessity, and hot water stores known as laohuzao, or “tiger stoves,” popped up in major cities all over the region. The hot water they sold was not just for drinking, but for washing, too... In its “Essentials of the New Life Movement,” the Kuomintang issued guidelines on proper attire, eating habits, living conditions, and traffic rules. In the section on food, it sought to educate the masses to drink boiled water. The guidelines claimed that the practice could prevent the growth of bacteria and the spread of diseases such as dysentery. Those who could responded enthusiastically, making great efforts to drink boiled water and give up uncooked food. However, the ongoing wars and the inability of the government to assert administrative control meant that, in practice, its efforts to universalize the consumption of boiled water achieved only limited success. Prior to the New Life Movement, however, the Chinese Communist Party had already begun advocating the consumption of hot water in soviets under its control. If soldiers were not provided with boiled water, they could take the matter up with their superiors, while soldiers found drinking unboiled water would be verbally chastised.  During the Yan’an period, the Red Army further promoted the consumption of hot water. Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and other top leaders could often be seen with a cup of hot water, leading to the widespread popularity of enamel mugs."

I’m a trad wife and other parents pay me to teach them lost skills - "Soon, I was being asked to run more cooking classes, making curries, sauces, which went on to become how to host a dinner party, how to plan weekly food menus and budget. I started making little videos and uploading them on to YouTube so people could have a reminder.  I realised that most people my age just weren’t taught these skills for life that I had been – they just aren’t valued. Now, my generation is living without them. I decided to expand my videos to include all sorts of homemaking skills – sewing on a button, cleaning the home, planting spring bulbs – things that used to be common knowledge. Soon, I was inundated by messages from strangers asking for more videos – could I make one showing how to iron and fold fitted sheets? And how exactly should you clean an oven?  Before long, my “Ask Charlie” videos had evolved into a full-blown business, cultivating online and in-person courses covering everything from family organisation to basic sewing – the costs vary from £43 to more than £200, and I have a steady flow of clients."

Shark filmed swimming among children at Hadera beach, Israel, before ‘deadly’ attack - "The incident is only the third recorded shark attack in Israel. One person was killed in the 1940s, but before the country was founded in 1948... Israeli media reported that the victim had gone to swim with the sharks.  An eyewitness told Channel 12: “I saw the diver in the depths of the water, he shouted: ‘I’m bitten, I’m bitten’, and waved his hands in the air. After a few minutes, sharks bit him, and suddenly he disappeared.” Separate footage from the beach shows people tugging at the sharks’ fins, while others throw fish for them to eat."

Dalai Lama Quietly Cancels Scheduled Meeting With JD Vance | Babylon Bee - "After the sad news broke that Pope Francis had passed away just hours after meeting the U.S. Vice President, the Dalai Lama quietly canceled his scheduled meeting with JD Vance."

Ben Shapiro | Facebook - "The Left was very puzzled when Vice President J.D. Vance visited the pope the day before he passed away. They couldn't contain their glee that the pope seemed to give him a bit of a lecture on migration, but they never seemed to have any trouble understanding why Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden would visit the pope. They are extraordinarily pro-abortion, pro-transgenderism, and pro-same sex marriage, and yet claim to be Catholic even though they violate Catholic doctrine at every turn. But the Left had some sort of hang-up when it came to J.D. Vance."

Indian man awakes on funeral pyre - "An Indian man awoke on a funeral pyre moments before it was to be set on fire after a doctor skipped a postmortem, medical officials said Saturday.  Rohitash Kumar, 25, who had speaking and hearing difficulties, had fallen sick and was taken to a hospital in Jhunjhunu in the western state of Rajasthan on Thursday.  Indian media reported he had had an epileptic seizure, and a doctor declared him dead on arrival at the hospital.  But instead of the required postmortem to ascertain the cause of death, doctors sent him to the mortuary, and then to be burned according to Hindu rites...   Kumar was rushed to hospital for a second time, but was confirmed dead on Friday during treatment."

How My Trip to Quit Sugar Quickly Became a Journey Into Hell - The New York Times - "Quirks of genetics and taste-bud architecture impact the might of sugar’s pull on any individual. But there are species-wide patterns: Children, for example, like sugar much more than adults. Beauchamp assessed the sucrose preferences of children ages 11 to 15 across a decade. “There seemed to be a real change, probably around puberty,” Beauchamp says. Their affinity for sweetness had dropped. A popular hypothesis suggests the appetite for sugar wanes as individuals exit their period of rapid growth.

Richard Hanania on X - "Amy Wax on low IQ people going to college and its effect on society.  "What's going on out there is that people who would otherwise get a high school diploma and really technically shouldn't be going to universities in the sense that...[they] aren't smart enough to get a real university education. They're being churned through these institutions and there they are getting an ideological education in lefty ideas. They're being propagandized with the most crude sort of unthought out lefty ideas and then they are going out into the world.""

Traveling in China feels… off? I want to hear your opinion : r/China - "China has thousands of years of history, yet there are very few authentic ancient monuments. I traveled around China for almost a month this year, and most of the “ancient” stuff that I saw was pretty new.  For instance, I went to Xi’an, and the local guide took me to Huaqing Pool, with beautiful Tang Dynasty buildings. He said, “This is where [insert ancient historical event] happened!”… But, then, I took a better look at those old buildings and they were quite new. Aren’t Tang Dynasty buildings supposed to be wooden? Literal concrete was used there lol  Everything there felt like a caricature—not a reflection of what China’s history is truly like, but what people in the modern era think ancient China is like. From pseudo-traditional music being played from the loudspeakers to the choreographed dances and colourful costumes…  Truly ancient historical sites are few and far between. And, even there, reconstruction seems to be preferred to conservation. I’m not even sure some parts of the Great Wall are that ancient, especially the ones near Beijing.  Compare this to traveling in Europe, where you walk in front of a 800-year-old cathedral without thinking twice. I don’t think I have ever encountered this in China. Even 2,000+ year old cities are relatively new.  Even some of the natural landscapes feel artificial. I went to see some cool waterfalls and the whole area surrounding the waterfall was paved lol. And the water was clearly being redirected to create as many awe-inspiring sights in one place as possible.  It’s just… not that fun to travel around China? Many sights are man-made or rebuilt + the amount of people makes it quite difficult to enjoy. Once I went for a hike and, instead, I found myself standing in one place and slowly queuing towards the exit for 2 hours…"

Traveling in China feels… off? I want to hear your opinion : r/China - "Theseus boat was replaced one board at a time, like for like. In China they replace old bricks and mortar with 3rd rate concrete all at once. It's like replacing the whole boat with a steel one and staying it's the same boat because it's a similar shape and color.  As a Zen Buddhist, I visit the historically very important Guangxiao Temple whenever I'm in GuangZhou. They trashed the tower and rebuilt it in concrete. Can you imagine doing that to the Tower of Pisa?"
"I visited the Big Goose pagoda in Xian. The base was made with modern concrete bricks by the chinese communists. They were cracking and some were broken. Meanwhile farther up the orignal Tang Dynasty bricks were in much better condition.  Later that day I went to see the terracotta soldiers of china's first emperor. They had an oldish looking guy sitting at a simple desk autographing books about the place who was supposedly the farmer that first rediscovered the tomb of the first emperor. Now keep in mind the farmer was already an old guy when he discovered the tombs. Now I am no mathetician but add 70 years to that old guys age he would have had to be 130-150 to be the real guy. Very amazing indeed.  This was when I realized that everywhere you go you are getting the Disneyland version of chinese history and of course the requisite crowds and I mean jammed packed in their like sardines crowd which apparently is normal everywhere."
"Indeed. You have witnessed the normal operating procedure. It's cultural revolution 2.0. China's history and culture destroyed by subcontractors instead of the red guard.  I spoke with some contractors at an ancient Taoist temple in Beijing who were throwing 400 year old bricks and tiles into an industrial bin. They said I could have some, but I changed my mind at the last minute. Ironically, the CCP can pay to destroy China's heritage, but if a foreigner was found preserving it by taking it out of China it would be a long jail sentence."
There're people pretending that restoring with as much original material as possible and using original techniques and materials is exactly the same as rebuilding in concrete

Traveling in China feels… off? I want to hear your opinion : r/China - "I've been to Japan, and they built mostly with wood. A lot of their historical sites were destroyed one way or another--earthquakes, fires, the small squabble called World War 2, etc. But they put a lot of care in many of those sites to not only rebuild them, but to rebuild them as close as they could in both materials and methods.  It looks good, at least to a dumb foreigner like me.  I've been to historic sites in China, and they feel more like an amusement park version of ancient places. Like comparing the Disney castle at Disneyland to a real medieval castle."

Traveling in China feels… off? I want to hear your opinion : r/China - "Japan was literally firebombed and they still have wooden buildings older than not just the United States, but England itself. Japan tore down most of the amusement park taff, but it was never considered anything other than amusement park taff. They didn't have to pretend it was authentic because they still had the authentic stuff.  The real answer is that the vast vast majority of the authentic ancient structures in China were destroyed deliberately. And guess who did the destroying. As a student of Chinese history and religion, it genuinely breaks my heart again and again and again every time I read about some impressive temple structure or ancient complex of buildings only to read "the original structure of (so and so place) that had stood in (so and so city) since the Tang/Song/Ming dynasty, was torn down in the 1960s during the Cultural Revolution. A new temple was build over the remains of the old in the 2000s but the sight holds little modern religious significance and serves mostly as a tourist destination."
"Destroying cultural heritage is part of the cultural heritage of China. Mao was far from the first emperor to engage in widespread purging and destruction of historical artifacts and architecture."

Meme - "Sweden: I want a bridge
Denmark: I want a tunnel *half tunnel half bridge, Øresund Link*

Meme - "Option #4"
"What's my name on your phone?"
"tloml"
"omg ily"

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "At Yale, 92% of grades in women's studies classes are either A or A-.   Only 55% in mathematics are.  You couldn't ask for a better metaphor for what ails American academia."
"Table 2. Percent A's and A-'s by Subject, 2022-2023
Enrollment greater than 500
Percent
52.39 Economics
55.18 Mathematics
55.82 Psychology (17.32% CR)
62.07 Chemistry
63.49 Molecular Biophysics & Boichemistry
65.43 Philosophy (14.62% CR)
66.17 Molecular, Cellular & Dev Biol
66.96 Physics
67.94 Astronomy
68.27 Statistics and Data Science
70.82 Computer Science
72.27 Biology
72.44 American Studies
73.41 Enviromnental Studies
73.66 Earth and Planetary Sciences
74.02 Political Science
74.40 Engineering #5
74.44 Anthropology
77.11 Global Affairs
79.63 History
79.71 Linguistics
80.04 Directed Studies
80.79 English
81.60 Humanities
82.21 African American Studies
82.71 Regional Studies #8
85.43 Ethnicity, Race, & Migration
85.82 Education Studies
92.37 Hist of Science, Hist of Med
Selected Others, less than 500 Enrollments
57.36 Engineering & Applied Science
61.11 Applied Physics
61.79 Neuroscience
62.25 Cognitive Scignce
73.91 Sociology
81.91 Ethics, Politics, & Economics
92.06 Women's Gender & Sexuality Studies
Denominator includes CR, Sat., W."

Meme - "Distribution of US tech execs' political leanings, inferred from their campaign contributions
2000 *somewhat biased towards conservative right*
*shift left*
2020 *very biased towards progressive left*
2024 *two peaks, with slight advantage for conservative right*"

Meme - "You have been permanently banned from participating in r/RoastMe because your comment violates this community's rules...
This comment may have fully or partially contributed to your ban:
Post Title: Your Comment: God already roasted you"
Imagine being banned from a roasting sub for roasting

Meme - "Tried on but not worn, it was too big. Pet friendly home."
$5 - LINCOLN, NE. XXL[19] Thong"

Meme - Adult dinosaur: "Son, let's play hidden. Go!!!"
Crying adult dinosaur: "Close your eyes and count up to 10"
Kid dinosaur: "Ok, mom"
"1, 2, 3..."
Crying adult dinosaur: "I love you, my baby"
*meteroid about to hit them*

Meme - "How to fix a broken zipper...."

Kemi Badenoch: Kneecap should be prosecuted for ‘kill your MP’ video - "Kemi Badenoch has demanded the rap trio Kneecap be prosecuted for allegedly calling for the death of Tory MPs.  A video emerged of the group at a gig in November 2023 that appeared to show one member saying: “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.”  The Conservative leader said Kneecap’s “anti-British hatred has no place in our society” as she called for the group to face action.  Scotland Yard is looking into the incident, along with another concert from November last year in which a member of the band appeared to shout, “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah” – groups banned as terrorist organisations in the UK... Mrs Badenoch blocked a government grant to Kneecap while she was business secretary. But in November last year, the Belfast group won a discrimination challenge over the decision to refuse £14,250 funding award after the Government conceded it was “unlawful”.  Downing Street described Kneecap’s alleged comments as “completely unacceptable” and suggested they should not be able to receive Government funding."
Damn censorship of pro-Palestinian speech!
If the government doesn't fund left wingers spouting violent rhetoric, that is dangerous censorship and has a chilling effect on freedom of speech and is unacceptable in a democratic society

Meme - Paul Weller @paulwellerHQ: "These artists, including Paul, stand for Freedom of Expression.   If you're an artist and would like your name added, please get in touch with Heavenly Recordings."
Winston Marshall @MrWinMarshall: "None of these artists stand for freedom of expression.  None of them have shown support for Morrissey, JK Rowling, MIA or anyone who has spoken out against progressive orthodoxy  None of them expressed concern for brits being sentenced to lengthy prison sentences for social media posts after the Southport murders  They only care for freedom of expression when it is an expression they themselves agree with. In this case the murder of Tory MPs, and the support of Hamas and Hezbollah."

Meme - "There has never been another nation ever that has existed much beyond 250 years. Not a single one. America's 280th year is 2025. The next 4 years are gonna be pretty interesting considering everything that's already been said."
"My local pub is older than your country"

Rachel Reeves has revealed her art of the deal: total capitulation - "Fresh from gifting the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, handing trades unions powers they wouldn’t have dared put on their Christmas list, and mulling over the idea of slavery reparations, the Government is apparently about to offer major concessions on EU access to our fishing waters. This latest capitulation is self-evidently incoherent: sacrificing our fishing industry in order to have the chance of selling our arms to countries on the continent isn’t a win-win, it’s self-flagellation.  For all the performative fuss over the new, €150 billion EU loans programme – in which more weapons will be bought in the bloc and from allied countries, rather than from the US – several European countries have militaries in an even shabbier state than our own. Italy and Spain lack remotely plausible plans to ramp up defence spending, and probably don’t care: they’re a long way from Kyiv. Our depleted RAF defends Irish airspace. France – which currently spends just 2.1 per cent of GDP on defence against the inadequate 2.3 per cent here in Britain – is desperately attempting to slash its debt burden. Not that you’d detect this from Emmanuel Macron’s latest showboating. The French President has made a pitch for European allies to “buy French” air missile defence systems and fighter jets instead of American weapons. A cynic might question whether the French are exploiting the need to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia, not least given accusations Macron was “blocking” a €30 billion weapons programme for Ukraine earlier this year. The French are never slow to seize an opportunity, but many will wonder why it is that our own politicians consistently fail to act in Britain’s national interest. Sure, it would be nice to sell more munitions to Lithuania, but let’s not promote Remainer delusions over the livelihoods of fishermen in Peterhead and Fraserburgh... has anyone asked what Japan and South Korea gave to gain access to this loan fund? They’re not European, the last time I looked.  “The British are making concessions they need to,” sniffed one EU diplomat this week. “That is positive and shows a maturity that was not there in the Brexit negotiations”. Too many starry-eyed pro-European MPs are likely to ignore this Continental condescension, because they think our interests lie in moving ever-closer to a Brussels elite which disdains us. Fishermen in Grimsby are not on their mental map. Now is really not the time to be snuggling up to Europe. Britain entered the Trump maelstrom earlier this year in a stronger position than most. By leaving the EU, whose trade policies the US President has repeatedly derided, we escaped his initial 20 per cent tariff... In 2023 our exports to America came to £187 billion – nearly a quarter of the total and far more than everything we sold to the entire continent of Asia. The IMF has just downgraded Britain’s growth to a paltry 1.1 per cent this year. We need to exploit our Brexit freedoms, not heedlessly undermine them in the hope of picking up crumbs from the Brussels dining table."

Links - 1st July 2025 (2)

Meme - *Shoppers Drug Mart*
"9.99 9.98. Save 01c"

Meme - "If you're anti-fascist, why do you want the government to control everything?"

Meme - "Islam is solution for humantty"
"Countries where Islam is the major religion
"Sudan Iraq Lebanon Syria Afghanistan Somalia Yemen Libya Gaza"

Meme - alex 🏳️‍⚧️ @cyberdogalex: "a ‘pedophile purge’ of any kind would be both bigoted and a disaster for the left as a whole. anyone advocating for any kind of purge (aside from maybe a Nazi purge) is a terrible person"
"posthuman communist, filmmaker, and art critic ❤️ @thranitten @blueisabug ❤️ // escape velocity //"
This is telling

Meme - "PornHub employee appears on Reddit AMA criticizing their forced incest porn trend to say that it is "antisemitic rhetoric." Thing is, no one brought up the Jews. She quickly edited her comment."

Meme - "GoING To A PARTY
WORST-CASE: "UGH, WHO INVITED THAT GUY?" "HE THOUGHT THAT SHIRT WAS A GOOD IDEA?"
BEST CASE: Girls on guy in mosh pit: "WHO IS THAT GUY?"
WHAT'S MOST LIKELY TO HAPPEN
*People sitting on sofas* "I THINK I MIGHT HEAD HOME SOON" "YEAH, ME TOO"
DRIVING
WORST-CASE: "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?" *Multi vehicle flaming pile up*
BEST-CASE: Man in convertible with scarf in wind: "FREEDOM!"
WHATS MOST LIKELY TO HAPPEN
"UGH, I-65 TRAFFIC ALWAYS SUCKS AT THIS TIME"
Radio: "AND UP AGAIN, THAT POP SONG YOU'RE INDIFFERENT TO!"
GOING ON A FIRST DATE
WORST-CASE: "Well, hello there, Isabella Martinez who lives at 365 Sunset Avenue"
BEST-CASE: "Before tonight, I thought the idea of a soulmate was a myth..." *curled up under blanket before fireplace*
WHATS MOST LIKELY TO HAPPEN: *man and woman at bar* "OH, YOU HAVE TWO SISTERS?" "YEAH, THEY'RE FINE."
GIVING A SPEECH
WORST-CASE: "TECHNICAL ERROR: EVERYTHING IS BAD" "YOU'RE A FRAUD!" "BOO!" *man throwing chair*
BEST-CASE: "WORLD PROBLEMS SOLVED" "Here's a book deal!" "Have my babies!"
WHATS MOST LIKELY TO HAPPEN: "IN CONCLUSION, WE SHOULD CHANGE SOME THINGS, BuT NOT EVERYTHING."
"THAT SOUNDS REASONABLE"
Worst Case vs. Best Case Scenarios by Karina Farek
"This is a great joke, but it's also a wonderful strategy for reducing anxiety that I learned about in therapy. If you're ever nervous about something, just ask yourself: what's the best thing that can happen? What's the worst thing? What will most likely happen? it does wonders for your nerves, really does."
"My counsellor walks me through this all the time and it works??"

Noah Smith 🐇 on X - "One really great education policy is to just remove disruptive kids from class and put them somewhere else (and I say this as a former disruptive kid)"
D on X - "This is the real value of private school, this and social networking. Very few disruptive kids and the ones that are aren’t that disruptive."
Swan on X - "my teacher friends tell me that the opposite is occurring and that in fact they are not allowed to discipline the disruptive for diversity reasons."
Kalle Mikkola on X - "In Finland, we did that. Then we had the best-educated kids in the world. After we stopped doing that, we fell from 1st to 20th or so."

Meme - "Why do I have to be fucked in the ass by an octopus?"
hentai artists: *shocked*
"Tsundere Inran Shoujo Sukumi Episode 1 at 13:26"

Meme - "There is no terrorism in Islam. It is all Western Intelligence. Incidentally, here is a children's religion book from the Middle East. *warriors with swords, beheadings and severed heads*"

Meme - "NOW SHE KNOWS HOW I FEEL... WHEN SHE IS SHOPPING FOR CLOTHES *woman sitting in aisle of DIY/home improvement store*"

Meme - "Gay test. If you see spider-man, I've got bad news for you!"

Meme - "Let's learn the differences between chubby, curvy, fat, and hambeast.
CHUBBY. Chubby girls tend to be rounder all around, but still tend to look more on the average side. Unlike curvy. which has a thin waist. chubby girls lack the same amount of definition that a curvy girl does, but still maintains a semi-curvy figure. Chubby girls may or may not have rolls, most of the time will have larger boobs and butt.
CURVY. Most of the fat stored in a curvy girl is in the breasts and her hips/ass. Curvy girls tend to be thin mostly everywhere else, thing arms, face, waist. These giris tend to be toned and well defined.
FAT. Fat is a level higher than chubby, when excess rolls on the body begin to form. Fat girls tend to have very large boobs and very large butts.
HAMBEAST. Hambeast is exceeding the limit on the definition of "fat". Unlike the other three, hambeasts are generally catergorized for their lack of shape and hygiene. Due to this lack of hygiene and shape, hambeasts are said to be monstrous and horrifying creatures. The only thing that seperates fat and hambeast is apperance and personality."

Meme - "Girls with time machine:
I'm your grandaughter
Omg Really?
Boys with time machine:
*To A&W* Okay so if you want to compete with McDonalds in America you'll want to come out with a 1/5 pound burger because 5 is bigger then 4"

Meme - "Why everyone wanna be your friend as soon as you pull these out in class *Apple EarPods, chewing gum, Takis, pistol*"

Jon and Carie Hallford plead guilty to corpse abuse charges: Reports - "The Colorado funeral home owners that had nearly 200 decomposing bodies at their facility pleaded guilty... A further investigation revealed that about 190 bodies, which were in various states of decomposition, had been stored in the building, according to authorities.    "Some of the remains discovered had dates of death as far back as 2019," the U.S. Attorney's Office said in an October news release. "As part of their fraud scheme, the Hallfords misled customers of the funeral home into believing that the remains of their loved ones would be buried or cremated per their wishes and the terms of the parties’ contracts." The family-owned and operated funeral home advertised that they performed "green" natural burials without embalming chemicals or metal caskets. Prosecutors said the Hallfords defrauded families across the country by "not providing a cremation or burial for the deceased as promised."   According to prosecutors, the Hallfords allegedly gave families dry concrete instead of ashes, collected more than $130,000 from families for cremations and burials they never performed. In addition, the Hallfords allegedly buried the wrong body on at least two occasions."

Tulsi Gabbard Criticizes Harris, Then Suddenly - TSA 'Retaliation' - "“This is a clear act of political retaliation. There is no other way to put it,” that’s how former Democrat presidential candidate and Lieutenant Colonel Tulsi Gabbard describes her placement on a Transportation Security Administration threat list – just a day after she criticized Kamala Harris on a Fox News Program.  Multiple Federal Air Marshal whistleblowers have come forward to claim that Gabbard had been enrolled in TSA’s Quiet Skies program on July 23, a day after she criticized Harris on-air...   Reports claim at least five agents and two explosive detection canine teams were following Gabbard and her husband last month."

Tulsi Gabbard, Rand Paul Placed on List of Russian Propagandists by Ukraine - Newsweek - "Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard have been listed by Ukraine among a number of American politicians, academics and activists Kyiv claims have promoted "Russian propaganda."  The list was compiled by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, founded in 2021 by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to study the impact of Russian disinformation. The center is part of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council.  The list—which also includes retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, military strategist Edward Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer and journalist Glenn Greenwald—does not explain what the consequences are for those who Ukraine clearly considers responsible for promoting the Kremlin's line. But it offers explanations for inclusion on the list... "I am surprised that the blacklist did not include the Pope, Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs, Stephen Walt, Barry Posen, and other prominent figures who have made arguments similar to mine and others already on the list," Mearsheimer told Newsweek.  Luttwak also objected to the label of Russian propagandist. Talking to UnHerd, he said he was not "exactly Putin's most faithful agent," saying he has argued for Western powers to send weapons to Ukraine since "day one of the war."... As well as U.S. citizens, the list of "Russian propagandists" includes political figures, experts and public figures from Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Poland and France.  Other Americans on the list are: political and business advisor Harlan Ullman, author Paul Pillar, economists Jeffrey Sachs and Steve Hanke, political analyst Brian Berletic, academics Patrick Basham and Clifford Kiracofe, former army officer David Payne, ex-diplomat Michael Springmann, retired intelligence officer Scott Ritter, finance specialist Jason Ross, businessman Mike Callicrate, politicians Geoff Young and Diane Sare, journalists Caleb Maupin and Tony Magliano, retired business consultant George Koo, Republican former Senate staffer Jim Jatras, former CIA officer Ray McGovern, former Virginia State Senator Richard Black and political analyst Graham Fuller."
Only Ukrainian propaganda is alright

Meme - Alien 1979: "almost perfect, i just wish there was more than just the one alien in it"
Aliens 1986: "holy hell"

Why has badminton become a code for sex in Hong Kong? - "It may be an innocent enough racquet sport, but Hong Kong's Education Bureau has unintentionally given badminton a whole new meaning.  In teaching materials it released last week, a module titled adolescents and intimate relationships for Secondary Year 3, suggested that teenagers who wanted to have sex with each other could "go out to play badminton together" instead.  The materials also include a form called "My Commitment" aimed at getting "young lovers" to attest that they would exercise "self-discipline, self-control, and resistance to pornography".  The new materials have raised eyebrows and attracted criticism for being "out of touch". But officials have defended the decision.  Meanwhile social media has been flooded with jokes centered around "playing badminton"... To Thomas Tang, who is an amateur badminton player, the jokes and sudden increased interest in the sport have made it slightly embarrassing for players like him.  "In the past this was just a healthy sport, but now if you ask people to play badminton they make a lot of jokes," he said, adding that the irony was that badminton was actually a good way for guys to meet girls.  The Education Bureau documents also told teachers that one of the objectives of the module was to help students master ways of coping with sexual fantasies and impulses, and the module was not created to encourage them to start dating or engaging in sexual behaviour. Some suggested discussion activities in the documents include advising students to "dress appropriately to present a healthy image and to avoid visual stimulation from sexy clothing", and "firmly refuse sex before marriage" if they are unable to cope with the "consequences of premarital sex"."

Meme - "POV: You found out Japan has grocery stores with no cashiers and no security so now all your groceries are free *black guy with covered face*"

The Disgusting Truth About Mao Zedong's Personal Hygiene - "the man was chronically constipated. As Ludwig describes, the chairman's bodyguards were "trained not only to protect him against enemies but also to give him enemas if they failed" at prying the stubborn poop from his butt with their fingers first.   Even Mao's poops were regarded as special occasions. At the end of a nine-day bout of constipation his employees rejoiced, "The chairman's bowels have moved!" Having to unclog a dictators butt by hand must have been horrific enough. But it must have been especially horrendous in Mao's case because he had the personal hygiene of a garbage dump... The doctor revealed that the dictator never brushed his teeth, which turned green. His infected gums gushed pus. When encouraged to brush his not-at-all pearly greens, Mao growled, "Does a tiger brush his teeth?" The chairman preferred to rinse his mouth with tea and chew leaves like peasants did. He seemed to revel in his grossness As detailed in King of the Mountain, Mao once reached into his pants "to pick lice off his body deliberately" while being interviewed by a female reporter. He also considered bathing "a waste of time." And since Mao already spent much of his precious time expelling waste due to constipation, it comes as no surprise that he only occasionally gave people's nostrils a reprieve when he went for a swim and toweled off. Li blamed the chairman's deep-seated opposition to soap and water on a "three-bath philosophy" that Chinese peasants allegedly adopted: "A bath at birth, one before marriage and one at death." However, the Independent mentions one other exception that appears in Li's tell-all. The congenitally filthy dictator claimed to clean his genitals by showering himself with women. Or as the chairman crudely put it, "I wash myself in the bodies of my women." To make matters more revolting, Chairman Lice Crotch reportedly rivaled China's Yellow Emperor, who allegedly "deflower[ed] 1,000 virgins." In exchange for taking them to bed, he gave some of them a "minor venereal disease." Li urged him to take medication so that his partners didn't keep getting the short end of Mao's disease-infested stick. But true to form, the chairman acted like a massive dictator, dismissively insisting, "If it doesn't bother me, it doesn't matter." And since Mao didn't exhibit symptoms, it didn't bother him. One of the giant ironies of Mao's reign is that he waged a major campaign that promoted peasant hygiene, improved sanitation, and reduced STDs. Per the Journal of Global Health, the communicable disease control (CDC) implemented under Mao led to a huge boost in life expectancy and dramatic drops in infant mortality, STDS, and other maladies. NPR reports that he remedied a shortage of competent doctors by organizing a system of so-called "barefoot doctors" who had basic medical training and augmented their knowledge with a rigorous three-to-six-month crash course. These insta-physicians were dispersed to villages."

Gay men discriminate against feminine gay men, new study finds - "Psychology study finds both gay men and heterosexual men prefer masculine over feminine gay men for a high-status role, suggesting feminine gay men may face implicit discrimination in the workplace."

The Kansas Budget Experience from 2012 to 2017. - "In 2012, Kansas was the first state to eliminate pass-through business income taxes for LLCs, partnerships, and S-corporations. It also lowered the personal income tax rate in its 2012 and 2013 legislative sessions. Proponents of the tax cuts argued that they would stimulate the economy by creating jobs at a higher than historical rate and would thus have a minimal effect on the budget. This research documents when legislators began discussing the tax cut proposals through the repeal of the tax cuts. The consequences of the tax cuts was a significant decline in income tax that led to a structural deficit in the Kansas budget. The defi cit necessitated an extended series of diffi cult choices for legislators on how to balance the budget. The tax cuts also led to credit downgrades, increasing debt, and a series of lawsuits over court funding of K-12 schools, among other problems. Studying the Kansas experience is important because several states and the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 followed this model of tax cuts."

The Short-term Effects of the Kansas Income Tax Cuts on Employment Growth - "The state of Kansas made dramatic changes to the structure of its personal income tax by eliminating taxation of business income and lowering marginal tax rates on other personal income sources. Proponents of the legislation maintain that the tax reductions will stimulate employment growth. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we estimate the impact of the tax changes on private-sector employment in the state of Kansas, relative to its border states, using data on the number of establishment employees and proprietors. We apply multistate county fixed effect model and county-border matching approaches to identify tax effects. Our findings indicate that two years post enactment, the tax law changes have not yielded a net increase in private-sector employment."

Nestflix - "The platform for your favorite nested films and shows.  Fictional movies within movies? Got ‘em. Fake shows within shows? You bet. Browse our selection of over 800 stories within stories."

Meme - "I went to Haiti and was served stewed cat. I can confirm the meat is really delicious. (NSF cat lovers)"
"While I was in Haiti, it was really awesome to always see kittens running around the villages I visited. After about a week though, I got curious and asked someone who had been there for over a year, "so, where are all the like... adult cats?" "Oh, they get eaten." Nice."

Meme - Hide the Pain Harold: "I am a meme not an influencer"

How to Live for Free in Beijing: An Artist’s Guide - "Like many art students, Zou Yaqi often worried she’d be unable to afford to live in Beijing after graduation. So, earlier this year, she decided to set herself a daunting challenge: Survive in the city for three weeks without spending a single yuan.  It turned out to be a piece of cake.   The 23-year-old spent most of May living the high life: gorging on buffets in VIP lounges, sipping wine at exclusive events, and sleeping on plush sofas in the lobbies of five-star hotels. She ended up sticking to her zero-yuan budget with ease. The secrets to her success? A fake Hermès handbag, bright red lipstick, and a velour designer tracksuit — all of which helped Zou pose as a member of China’s wealthy social elite. She found that when she was disguised as a mingyuan —  or “socialite” — businesses would let her exploit their hospitality without question... authorities vowed to “adjust” excessively high incomes and force the rich to “give back to society.”... While Zou said her stunt was intended as a criticism of capitalism and consumerism, many critics have accused her of being unaware of her own privilege. Her experiences as a student at one of China’s elite arts colleges, the theory goes, allowed her to pass as a socialite with ease.   “What enables her to accomplish her performance art is precisely her class,” wrote one user on Weibo. “Everything — her makeup, choice of props, successful repartee in each place, and the individual image she presented — come from the invisible accumulation (of cultural capital) prior to the experiment.”... After she began studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, this feeling grew. Zou says she became increasingly fascinated by the excess on display at the campus. During exhibition openings, hungry students like herself would “madly” eat the caviar-topped canapes on offer, while other well-heeled visitors ignored them.  “Those elegant people barely ate them, and they’d go to waste,” Zou says. “We were stuffing ourselves till we were full, like we were at a free buffet.”  Zou coined a term to describe this phenomenon: “excessive goods.” An “excessive good” could be anything that is given to the wealthy for free, but is inaccessible to the non-wealthy. A complimentary snack at a swanky bar. A free gift at a luxury store. A bottle of wine at an invitation-only dinner. To Zou, these “excessive goods” were a potent symbol of the wealth gap. They were seemingly everywhere, yet the capital’s high-rollers barely noticed them. Often, they ended up being thrown away... “I’m more cautious and casual in daily life, but I had to present an elegant, haughty, and self-confident image,” says Zou... Zou was caught off-guard when the story began to focus on her own background, and social media commenters started to describe her as a mingyuan in a different — and much less pleasant — sense.    The word mingyuan has become ubiquitous in Chinese media in recent months, and the meaning of the word has begun to morph. No longer simply a term to describe true socialites, it has acquired classist and sexist connotations. Increasingly, it’s used as a derogatory term to describe women who flaunt fake wealth in order to get attention."

Opinion: TD Bank’s ‘LOL’ culture reverses two generations of southward expansion - The Globe and Mail - "The most striking thing about U.S. Attorney-General Merrick Garland’s takedown of Toronto-Dominion Bank TD-T on Thursday wasn’t the criminal conviction, the massive US$3.09-billion in penalties or the freeze on future growth in the U.S. market.  The shocking element of Mr. Garland’s press-conference critique was the TD employee e-mails he read aloud... Time after time, year after year, TD branch staff, managers and compliance officials joked about laundering money for drug dealers. In three separate e-mails that Mr. Garland read aloud at the press conference, TD employees’ reaction to suspicious activity, such as customers dropping off $1-million in cash and withdrawing the same day in cheques, was to send a note ending with LOL – laugh out loud – to colleagues.  “In one instance a compliance employee asked a manager what ‘the bad guys’ thought about the bank. The manager replied: ‘Lol. Easy target,’ ” Mr. Garland said.  When bankers consistently tack “LOL” to e-mails and texts about working with criminals, there is a serious problem... Going forward, 97,000 TD employees will understand dropping LOL into an internal e-mail is a career-ending move."

Meme - *Venn diagram*
China and Japan: hate South Korea
China and South Korea: hate Japan
Japan and South Korea: hate China
All three: addicted to anime"

Commentary: Don’t dismiss the fury over Fukushima’s water - "Japan of all countries should be empathetic in dealing with the sometimes irrational opposition that nuclear energy can generate.  For decades, US nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers visiting local ports had to give authorities 24 hours’ notice so that geiger checks could be carried out - despite more than 1,000 dockings passing without incident.   A 20-minute unapproved arrival in 2001 prompted the country’s foreign minister to temporarily call off such visits. In the 1960s, even agreed visits often prompted thousands of demonstrators to turn out.  That unique political environment is inseparable from the fact that Japan is the only nation that has had atomic weapons used against it. You would have expected the nation that razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be a little accommodating of local sentiments on this issue.   Even so, the US’ observance of the radiological theatre around ship visits was a potent example that, in diplomacy, listening and pragmatism are usually more important than being right...   As recently as 2015, then-prime minister Shinzo Abe told a delegation of island leaders meeting some 40km from the Fukushima plant “to support Japan's effort without being misled by rumours”.  That sort of scolding response was thankfully absent in his successor Fumio Kishida’s summit on the sidelines of the Group of Seven meeting earlier this month with Prime Minister Mark Brown of the Cook Islands. Pacific leaders, in turn, appear to have been mollified by the greater transparency and dialogue.   There’s a lesson here for nuclear advocates, too. It’s common now for supporters of an enhanced role for nuclear energy to dismiss the safety regulation around atomic plants as an unnecessary and costly imposition that must be swept away, sparking a renaissance of atomic power.   That’s an unrealistic and ultimately counterproductive ambition. Every form of major infrastructure has to deal with public opinion, and in a democracy you don’t get to rule whether your opponents’ arguments are valid enough.   That’s a problem for renewables as much as nuclear. Europe closed nine factories for wind turbine parts between 2018 and 2022, according to Bloomberg, as demand slumped in a region that has effectively outlawed onshore wind farms from swathes of its territory."
There is an interesting parallel here with "misinformation" and other things the left hates

Meme - "Got a new quilt cover with sequins on, me and the Mrs leave each other romantic messages #love #romantic"
"fancy a shag" "no fuck off"

Fury as council worker removes chocolate eggs left for park Easter hunt - "A council worker confiscated chocolate eggs hidden for children to find.  A “kind-hearted” resident hid 30 eggs in parks around Melksham, Wilts, for children on Easter Sunday.  But the hunt was ruined when a “jobsworth” from the town council seized the chocolate eggs – some of which also had £20 notes inside – because of health and safety fears... “I had two eggs and he told me I couldn’t keep them because they weren’t safe. I replied that it was really about the money inside them. He claimed he didn’t know any had money in them so I just handed them over, called him a jobsworth and walked away.”  The council has now apologised and said it had returned the eggs to where they had been taken... “I understand that over 30 eggs were removed from various park locations around Melksham this morning. This action was taken on health and safety grounds as our operatives were concerned the eggs might not be safe to eat."
Damn right wing media trying to remove worker protections!

The Terrorist Propaganda to Reddit Pipeline

With Reddit being used for LLM (artificial intelligence) training, this also explains why AI models have a left wing bias. And Reddit's selective moderation (primarily banning non-left wing users/subreddits for imaginary offences while letting left wing ones do much worse, with an example below of promoting a terrorist supporter to top mod over much older ones) is how it ensures overall bias on the site:

The Terrorist Propaganda to Reddit Pipeline

"It’s by now a truism that digital propaganda will play a central role in wars of the 21st century. What’s less understood is the extent to which this is already happening. Amid the din about TikTok’s ties to Beijing, little attention is paid to terror groups funded by Iran and Qatar that are linked to extraordinarily effective propaganda networks that span every major social media and information platform.

Since October 7, an online network has emerged that directs content sourced from US-designated Islamist terror organizations — including Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthi movement — across Reddit, Discord, X, TikTok, Instagram, Quora and Wikipedia. The network works with an awareness that its manipulation eventually flows downstream and gets baked into universal platforms like Google search and ChatGPT.

The central locus of the network is a 270,000-member subreddit called r/Palestine. A Discord server with the same name functions as command-and-control for the r/Palestine network, and is promoted prominently on the subreddit. On the Discord — whose new members must undergo an ideological purity test consisting of questions about their views on Israel, Zionism and October 7 — a “Reddit task force” channel coordinates posting to Reddit, identifying “comments sections that need more pro Palestinian commentary,” mass upvoting of anti-Israel posts, and downvoting of pro-Israel posts (a practice known as “vote brigading”). The Discord has separate task forces for Quora, TikTok, Instagram, X, and Wikipedia.

On Reddit, the network consists of no fewer than 110 subreddits controlled by around 30 core moderators who are part of the network. Its central subreddits — including r/Palestine, r/IsraelCrimes, and r/ApartheidIsrael — are topically relevant and built around overlapping ideologies that include anti-Zionism, anti-capitalism, radical Marxism, Islamism, and anti-Western and pro-Iranian-regime sentiment. Other core subreddits in the network include r/Panarab, r/fight_disinformation, r/Global_News_Hub and r/suppressed_news.

But it’s with a cluster of million-member-strong subreddits infiltrated and now controlled by the network that have nothing to do with the Mideast — or even politics generally — that the r/Palestine network is particularly effective, and which illustrates an extraordinary degree of unambiguous astroturfing meant to convince unsuspecting users that there’s a widespread anti-Israel, anti-Western, Marxist movement online. These include, but aren’t limited to: r/Documentaries (20 million members), r/therewasanattempt (7.2 million), r/PublicFreakout (4.7 million), r/Fauxmoi (4.3 million), and r/iamatotalpieceofshit (2.1 million).

The network leverages command-and-control mechanisms, radicalizing messaging and decentralized tactics by exploiting the openness and freedom afforded by these platforms, as well as vulnerabilities in the platforms’ trust and safety operation, which have largely been outsourced to the user-base itself (rather than trained moderators).

But they also use Reddit and Wikipedia’s unique status in relation to search engines and LLMs to spread the propaganda orders of magnitude further.

Last year, Reddit and Google signed a $60 million content licensing deal giving Google access to Reddit’s API for LLM training and search purposes...

A similar phenomenon is at work on search engines, namely Google, which frequently ranks Reddit posts as the first results on topic searches — something the r/Palestine network has reverse engineered to its benefit. For example, if you Google “hostages collage” (in reference to a grid of photos of Israeli hostages held by Hamas), a top result — when we viewed them, it was placed above a page from the Hostages and Missing Families forum where users can download the collage — is a r/Palestine post: “Has anyone noticed the duplicate images in the hostages collage shown by Israel at the ICJ?” Google prominently features misinformation from other platforms, too. Information from Wikipedia can be found at the top of billions of searches per year, despite its articles being heavily poisoned by bad actors. And YouTube frequently uses Wikipedia as the ground truth for “topical context” it provides for “videos related to topics prone to misinformation,” despite the ability for those articles to be manipulated and affect users in real time.

This on its own is highly problematic, though could be reasonably dismissed as an unintended consequence of legitimate free expression and the benign mechanics of LLM training and search algorithms. What changes the equation, however, is that, at its core, the network is dedicated to covertly spreading propaganda distributed by US-designated terror groups. And this is exactly what the r/Palestine network often does: it sources the content it puts on Reddit (and then vote brigades) from propaganda aggregators like Resistance News Network (RNN).

Screenshots I obtained seem to indicate that RNN pulls content from a color-coded list of Telegram channels run by US-designated foreign terror organizations headquartered across the Middle East. Many of these channels aren’t available in the US due to restrictions on terror-related content, so RNN’s translation and re-posting of the content represents an effective — if illegal — workaround of US terror law.

While not the sole distributor of content produced by foreign terror groups, RNN is the main one. It aggregates and distributes content from US-designated groups in Israel-Palestine, including Hamas, the group that launched the October 7 attacks, during which its militants deliberately killed children, and for which Human Rights Watch accused it of war crimes; Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which participated in the October 7 attacks alongside Hamas and is known for its indiscriminate rocket fire targeting civilian areas in Israel; Martyr Abu Mustafa Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which also participated in the October 7 attacks; and many more. In Iraq, RNN pulls from around a dozen channels, including Kataeb Hezbollah, which has engaged in a sustained campaign of rocket and drone attacks against US bases and assets in the region, and Scream of Al-Quds Brigades, which is part of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq. In Yemen, RNN aggregates at least six channels of major terror groups, including the Houthis...

RNN has a particularly tight relationship with Samidoun, which the US government classifies as a terror entity, with the Treasury Department calling it a “sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the PFLP” (Khaled Barakat, a PFLP senior leader, co-founded Samidoun in 2011). After RNN’s Telegram was banned in the EU last August, Samidoun was instrumental in helping them reconstitute, publishing statements on behalf of RNN and directing users to the group’s mirror channel. Samidoun’s efforts to revive RNN after the ban reveal the extent to which it is connected to — and perhaps reliant on — RNN.

On Reddit, terror group propaganda aggregated by RNN is able to tunnel under the walled gardens of Telegram and into the groundwater of public debate. In one case, a user in r/israelexposed (68,000 members), a subreddit controlled by the r/Palestine network, posted a quote about the alleged detention of a Palestinian boy under the title “Israeli soldiers abduct and beat children.” The post was a direct quote from RNN, which was cited as the source. The same text and video were also posted in r/IsraelCrimes (54,000 members), also controlled by the network. While the content of the clip can be interpreted in different ways, the post is one of many examples of how the r/Palestine network funnels content from RNN onto Reddit.

In the r/TrueAnon subreddit (60,000 members), also controlled by the group, a user posted a screen grab of a message from the head of the Houthis posted in the group’s Telegram channel: “I call on America to send more MQ9 drones, as Yemeni air defenses enjoy grilling them.” The same account previously posted a “Guide to Palestine Resistance groups posted by RNN,” which featured a screen grab of an explainer on Hamas’ Al-Qassam brigades, which led the October 7 atrocities, broken down into sections: “Who are they?”, “Notable figures,” “Where are they most active” and their “Arsenal.” The last line of the post, taken directly from RNN, reads, “Together, we are united until liberation.”

The activity coordinated by the network is not restricted to posting content online. In fact, the network frequently promotes demonstrations and rallies organized by US-designated terror groups on Reddit. In December, after Samidoun was designated a terror entity, an account tied to the network posted an image from a rally organized by Samidoun in Brazil with the title “Free Palestine!” and the caption “Today in São Paulo BR.” A post like this would normally be an unambiguous example of free expression if it weren’t for the fact that Samidoun is a front organization for the PFLP designed to fundraise from a Western audience. In another example, one of the network’s highly influential moderators, u/Sabbah, directly sources Samidoun content about a demonstration it organized in New York City in a r/Palestine post.

The promotion of content from foreign terror organizations on Reddit, including by top moderators, raises serious legal concerns. U.S. “material support” laws prohibit aiding terror entities, including spreading propaganda, training guides, or recruitment tools — forms of speech not protected by the First Amendment. (Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act also does not shield platforms from criminal liability in such cases.)

This poses a major risk for Reddit. Despite this, sources with direct knowledge told me Reddit’s trust and safety executives have repeatedly failed to address the issue adequately, even though they’re aware of it. These sources told me that dozens of attempts to alert the company about the pipeline were systematically ignored and sidelined. On one occasion, I was told, Reddit senior trust and safety team members — including the VP of Data Science and Safety — openly laughed at issues they raised.

The backbone of the r/Palestine network is a group of moderators who control dozens of overlapping subreddits, with r/Palestine as the central hub. These users co-moderate the core group of ideological subreddits, like r/IsraelCrimes, r/palestinenews, and r/ApartheidIsrael, where the content is dedicated to intensive and sustained anti-Israel messaging.

The moderator network is key, since Reddit mods hold sweeping authority over their communities, with the ability to remove posts, ban users, dictate discussion rules, and control visibility through pinned posts and automated filters. They can shape narratives by approving or suppressing content, restricting participation with account age and karma requirements, and even preemptively censoring topics using Automoderator.

Much of the network’s influence lies in popular subreddits that, nominally, have nothing to do with Israel. For example, u/Sabbah, the highly influential member of the network mentioned previously, moderates topically relevant subreddits like r/Palestine, r/IsraelCrimes, r/Palestinians, r/palestinenews, r/ApartheidIsrael, and r/Panarab. However, Sabbah also moderates r/Documentaries, r/therewasanattempt, r/PublicFreakout, r/IRLEasterEggs, r/ToiletPaperUSA, r/Thatsactuallyverycool and r/boringdystopia — a cluster of unrelated, large subreddits that have been captured by the network.

The network includes moderators like BlueberryBubblyBuzz (who also operates another account in the network called Kumquat_conniption), ohhyouknow, PlenitudeOpulence, Falafel1998, _makoccino_, and dozens of others, many of whom also moderate the r/Palestine Discord server. Clustering together as mods gives the group effective control over some of the biggest subreddits on the site. As of the time of this writing:

• On r/therewasanattempt (7.2 million members), Sabbah, Kumpquat_conniption, ohhyouknow, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, PlenitudeOpulence, and usernameoverloaded are some of the most active human (i.e. non-bot) moderators.

• r/PublicFreakout (4.7 million members) is moderated by Sabbah, --intifada--, PlenitudeOpulence, ohhyouknow, Kumquat_conniption, and BlueberryBubblyBuzz. The former two have what amounts to admin privileges (their permission level is “everything”).

• On r/MorbidReality (1.1 million members), Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, PlenitudeOpulence, and ohhyouknow make up the majority of the subreddit’s human moderators.

• r/ToiletPaperUSA (440,000 members) is moderated by Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, and BlueberryBubblyBuzz, all of whom have ‘admin’-level moderation privileges.

• r/Thatsactuallyverycool (277,000 members) is moderated by Sabbah, Kumpquat_conniption, BlueBerryBubblyBuzz, Falafel1998, and PlenitudeOpulence, all of whom have ‘admin’-level moderation privileges

• On r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM (184,000 members), Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, PlenitudeOpulence, and Falafel1998, are moderators, all of whose permission level is “everything.”

• r/boringdystopia (94,000 members) is moderated by Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, _makoccino_, Falafel1988, ohhyouknow, all of whom have ‘admin’-level moderation privileges.

r/therewasanattempt, a subreddit originally meant for funny ‘fail’ content, and which has over 7 million members, features as its main banner an archery target in the colors of the Palestinian flag with the words “Free Palestine” ringed around it and Israel in the bull’s eye. (The subreddit’s icon is this same target with the Israel bull’s eye.) The main banner previously featured the phrase “From the River to the sea, Palestine will be Free.” The subreddit’s sidebar recommends network-controlled r/Palestine, r/PublicFreakout, r/boringdystopia, and several more.

The sheer volume of posts in r/therewasanattempt obscures a steady tempo of anti-Israel content. For example, a recent post’s caption was “[there was an attempt] to support Palestine” featuring a video of the protestor who rushed the field with a Palestinian flag during the last Super Bowl halftime show captioned, “Fearless Protester Charges Field Waving Palestinian Flag During Super Bowl Half-Time Show.” Two days before, there was a post featuring the caption, “[there was an attempt] To appear as the world’s most powerfull [sic] country” showing an image of Trump pulling out a chair for Netanyahu. One day prior came a post with the caption “[there was an attempt] To argue that opposing ethnic cleansing makes you antisemitic.”

The extent to which other network-controlled subreddits are so obviously astroturfed would be hilarious if moderators weren’t using them to distribute propaganda made by terrorists. A mod announcement titled “We’re a pro-Palestine, leftist subreddit!” is pinned to the top of r/ToiletPaperUSA; every other post on r/PublicFreakout is protest footage; the pinned post on r/boringdystopia is a list of ways to donate to Palestine (which includes a link to r/Palestine’s fundraising page), and its recommended subreddits include r/Palestine, r/IsraelCrimes, and other network-controlled subreddits.

One of the biggest non-relevant subreddits controlled by the network — and one that, at 20 million members, is among the most popular subreddits on the site — is r/Documentaries. Co-moderated by Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, Falafel1998, ohhyouknow, PlenitudeOpulence and another member of the network, PalRep, the subreddit is dominated by the r/Palestine network, its members constituting eight out of the subreddit’s 14 non-bot moderators.

A glance at r/Documentaries content shows what you’d suppose: links to documentaries, mainly on YouTube. Woven into these videos, however, is a steady through-line of anti-Israel or pro-Palestine propaganda on a cycle that separates them by mere days — in some cases, no more than a single day. No other topic or theme on r/Documentaries receives this persistent and intensive focus...

Given the prominence of Israel/Gaza in the news, you might think the content on r/Documentaries is organic. But this is not the case. Sabbah — one of the primary moderators of r/Palestine subreddit, Discord server and multiple nodes in the network — brigades upvotes for posts featuring anti-Israel videos to ensure these posts end up positioned prominently.

And that the six subreddits recommended by r/Documentaries are exclusively controlled by the network also suggests blatant astroturfing, and effectively makes r/Documentaries the top of a multi-step funnel that sends users into ever more topical network subreddits, each of which contains successively more terrorist-sourced propaganda.

r/Documentaries recommends the slightly smaller r/therewasanattempt →

r/therewasanattempt recommends r/BoringDystopia (and r/Palestine) →

r/BoringDystopia recommends both r/Palestine and r/palestinenews, and so on

Generally, the pattern plays out across all the network’s subreddits: subreddits with massive membership funnel users to — and supercharge the growth of — a stepladder of ever more extreme subreddits, always leading back to one of the group’s core subreddits like r/Palestine, r/IsraelCrimes, and others.

Sabbah — and other key moderators who belong to the r/Palestine propaganda network — was the first member of the network to join r/Documentaries, in the weeks after October 7 in his case. Ohhyouknow, Kumquat_conniption, and PlenitudeOpulence joined four days later. The other r/Palestine network members joined in the subsequent weeks and months. The only moderators of r/Documentaries who are not members of the r/Palestine network joined between 2015 and 2016.

Despite having nearly a decade less seniority in r/Documentaries than the previously existing moderators, Sabbah was made the subreddit’s top mod (the first listed in the moderator side panel). This gives him a raft of powers, including the ability to remove every other moderator from the subreddit.

This network extends far beyond Reddit. Key members serve as ligatures connecting the network’s activities on Reddit, X, Discord and Quora...

The r/Palestine network is not only succeeding but growing rapidly. The pipeline it operates carrying propaganda from terror organizations into the open sea of the Internet suggests that very little about the network is organic. That, rather, is part of the illusion of a groundswell of popular sentiment that just happens to think and speak about this issue in a given way.

Good propaganda has varying objectives and standards. In some cases, it’s to sow just enough doubt to create a wedge. In other cases, the aim is to cajole or convince, or intimidate opposition into silence. What’s unique to r/Palestine is that it’s likely the first major propaganda effort that brings to bear the full range of digital platforms and capabilities, from messaging apps like Telegram to the forum modality of Reddit, the group discussion of Discord, and amplification of ancillary networks like X and Quora.

The truth is that the network is doing what propaganda is designed to do — influence masses of people without them knowing. Its success in camouflaging the network is evidenced by the fact that Reddit continues to deny this is an issue. But that only makes it more effective, giving it a freedom to maneuver that propagandists of yesteryear could have only dreamt of. 

While there may be some top-down control somewhere much further up the food chain, the network successfully merges deliberate control with an ability to commandeer existing networks. It’s a symbiotic approach that hijacks the democratic dynamics embedded in spaces where speech and expression are open and free — all performed in service of radical ideologies that seek nothing more than totalitarian control of how we think and what we think about."

 

Addendum: 

These are the same people who accuse everyone who says you can't go around killing Jews of being "hasbara" 

Links - 1st July 2025 (1 - Trans Mania)

Meme - Leanne: "Having access to healthcare for trans people is also very important, which China and Thailand do a much better job at than the West"
Readers added context: "Transgender health care in China is severely lacking in resources and social acceptance:"

Meme - MaryCate Delvey @marycatedelvey: "Jail for all men who involve INFANTS in their disgusting womanface f3tishes"
"THE QUEER ISSUE
My First Time Breastfeeding My Daughter
Breastfeeding is freaky. Not the sucking bit. You're reading The Stranger, so odds are you've had a titty sucked at some point in your life. No, it's because when my baby attached to my breast, there was an incredible chemical cascade that ran through my entire body like lightning. Imagine the most electric thing a partner has ever done to you, then multiply it by 10. I could feel my brain rewiring, creating pathways that would permanently connect me to my child (And yeah, I kind of got off on it. Don't judge.)"
Venice allan @roseveniceallan: "Never mind the dolls, PROTECT THE BABIES" *MTF breastfeeding*

Kimberly Klacik on X - "Why aren’t kids in the hood transitioning to the opposite sex? I know the answer, just wanted to see if you knew. Comment below…"
Sara Higdon on X - "Well because the typical demographic is upper middle class white kids of progressive parents. for two reasons. They have time and money to worry about such things, and have been conditioned to believe through Critical Theory that they are an oppressor and there is no way they can ever escape that status, so they see this as a way to join an oppressed class for which they are celebrated for instead of condemned. It’s the relationship between CRT and Queer theory."

Transgenders in the Military? Please stop the Hyperbole - It's Not About Equality. - "In the past, the US military had one purpose: To defend our nation. The individual voluntarily succumbed to the greater national good. If the individual benefitted, it was secondary to the cause of the nation. Now, certain individuals have eclipsed the purpose for serving, and the military has assumed a secondary role of some cultural touchstone whereby serving is an individual right.  Why should someone be allowed to enlist, knowing that the enlistment will entail medical costs due to mental health management, hormone treatments, and other procedures up to and including gender reassignment surgery – not to mention the lost work productivity for all of the above? Why is that fair to the millions of others who wish to serve who also have a medical condition? Or even a non-medical condition, such as being a single parent or having a wrong tattoo? Why is it fair to allow a transgender to enlist – knowing the medical costs on the other side from the time of enlistment – when someone with high blood pressure cannot? That’s treatable. If he or she is otherwise fit to serve, why not enlist him or her, and begin treatment?  In an extreme example, why not let someone in with cancer? Why couldn’t John McCain, in an earlier life, have shown up to Annapolis with a brain tumor? After all, in hindsight, we know what he’s capable of. Why not treat it, and let him serve? Going further, as the military is looking for the best and the brightest, what if Lance Armstrong had enlisted right after winning the Tour de France? He takes his entrance physical and finds he has testicular cancer. Why should that be disqualifying? We know on the face that he’s capable of serving. Let him in, treat the cancer, and let him serve. That’s hyperbole, of course, but it makes my point. There is no overwhelming reason to incur the costs of medical care for any individual, and because of it, the military has a cut-line of medical restrictions for enlistment. In the words of Spock – the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Unless, of course, you have a vocal lobby in congress. Then the military mission becomes secondary to an individual’s “right” to serve.  I hear a lot of talking heads saying “we need whoever can best serve. We’re cutting our recruitment base when we discriminate”, but that misses a banal truth: The military is built on medical discrimination, and that discrimination is based on its mission. There is a reason you don’t see any soldiers taking the oath of enlistment from a wheel chair, and it’s not because the military hates handicapped persons. It’s because the military is not a social construct. It is a war machine, and it is designed to close with and kill the enemy, period. There are hundreds of different medical conditions that prevent one from serving, and saying we’re losing out on recruits by banning transgender personnel is a red herring. Why not say the same about flat feet, like they did in 1941?...  emotion has taken sway over common sense. It is not the military’s job to create a position for the individual to self-actualize – especially if that self-actualization entails medical treatment at taxpayer expense. I feel for the transgender community, but no more than I do for the person with a hyperthyroid disorder or asthma. Neither can enter the military, but one has a political lobby that treats this as a civil rights issue. It is not.   Yes, there are transgender personnel who have served honorably while hiding their condition, just as there are thousands of soldiers who hide other medical conditions to serve, but that is not an argument to alter the enlistment standards. I know of a soldier who wanted to be a pilot, but found out he was color blind, which was a disqualifying condition for pilot training. He joined the Army instead of the Air Force, and then, after joining Special Forces, he learned that color blindness was also disqualifying for becoming a free-fall parachutist. He decided to hide it, ripping out any reference to colorblindness from his medical records and going to extraordinary lengths to pass the color vision tests over and over again. He succeeded for over a twenty-five year military career, but he would be the first to tell you that we shouldn’t drop color vision as a discriminator for HALO status. It’s there for a reason, as he discovered on a harrowing night jump.   The fact remains that gender dysphoria is a medical condition, and that diagnosis requires medical treatment the same as a host of other disqualifying medical ailments. A recent RAND study is routinely held up as showing that the medical costs incurred by transgender enlistments is negligible – a veritable drop in the bucket to the overall defense budget – and that may be true, but it’s also irrelevant. The same could be said of the majority of ailments currently proscribing one from serving. (Which also begs the question, if it’s so negligible, it’s proof that so few transgender are serving that the recruitment argument is meaningless. Why are we pole-vaulting over mouse turds for such a small minority?) Should we now simply drop all medical discriminators? Or is it just the LGBT community that gets the benefit? Why can’t someone with high cholesterol get in? Sure, they’re at risk for heart disease, but it’s treatable – and the cost would be negligible when compared to the overall defense budget. What about vision tests? A person disqualified from serving due to poor eyesight that could be fixed simply by a Lasik procedure? Why don’t we let all of them in, and give them the procedure – something that’s a hell of a lot cheaper than gender reassignment surgery? That, too, would be a drop in the bucket when compared to the overall defense budget, but do we really want the military to be in the business of fixing every problematic medical condition so that every single person who wishes to serve gets the ability to do so? Sooner or later, it’s no longer a drop in the bucket, and it’s a Pandora’s box that doesn’t need to be opened for the simple fact that it is unnecessary. A single day lost or a single dollar spent due to gender dysphoria is one too many, and it’s patently unfair to others who wish to serve but are denied that ability due to a medical condition outside of their control.  At the end of the day, we need to remember the mission of the military. The LGBT community has turned this into a crusade, but it doesn’t alter the facts. The military is not built to serve the individual, but the other way around. The individual serves the military – and by extension, the nation... The transgender community is estimated at 0.6 percent of the US population. The rate of disqualifying high blood pressure in the typical age for enlistment, per the American Heart Association, is 9 percent. Where is the outrage over the nine percent with hypertension? A completely treatable condition? Why does the fraction of a percentage of the transgender community have a cudgel to pound, as if that population somehow holds greater sway than the millions of others with treatable medical conditions?"

James Esses on X - "A concerned trainee therapist has leaked an advertisement for a student placement at the NHS Sussex Gender Service. Successful candidates must “understand gender diversity” and must be “affirming” and “anti-oppressive”. Dangerous ideology continues to infect the NHS."

James Esses on X - "A Green Party that doesn’t understand the basic and irrefutable science of biological reality cannot be trusted on the complex science of climate change."

Independent Women's Forum on X - "“Is there a biological difference between men & women?” -@RepLisaMcClain
“The answer is NO.”
WHAT⁉️"

Meme - Gay Not Queer @Gaynotqueer1: "Some dads would much prefer to pretend that they have a straight daughter than a gay son."
LIEV SCHREIBER: ""Kai was always who Kai is" ...But I suppose the most profound moment was her asking us to change her pronouns. To be honest with you, it didn't feel like that big of a deal to me only because Kai had been so feminine for os long"

Meme - Sall Grover @salltweets: "“Men assault people in bathrooms” isn’t the argument to make when you want women to accept men in their bathrooms.  Why is this so hard to understand?"
Machine Pun Kelly @KellySc...: "Trans women don't want to invade women's bathrooms. They're just women who want to be able to pee. Over 50% of trans women are assaulted in the men's room EVERY YEAR. ACTUAL trans women assaulting women in the women's room doesn't even happen. Why is this so hard to understand?"
This never happens, of course.

Meme - pagliacci the hated 🌝 @Slatzism: "Copeland killed himself after he was outed as a secret crossdresser who had sick fantasies of "feminizing" little boys for sex and murdering women in his town.  Esquire does not mention this at all in their article and blames his suicide on “right wing media.”  won a Pulitzer."
Esquire @esquire: "It's an incredible honor to take home the @PulitzerPrizes  award in Feature Writing for Mark Warren's portrait of Bubba Copeland in our April/May 2024 issue.   Revisit the vital story:"
"Right-Wing Media and the Death of an Alabama Pastor: An American Tragedy"
Readers added context: "The article that was awarded a Pulitzer prize trivializes the fact that former mayor "Bubba" Copeland used photos of women and children to create transgender fetish content, and even wrote a sexual fantasy about murdering a woman in order to steal her identity."

Meme - slsyckes:  "Yesterday a 69 year old man known as Robert his entire life walked out on a balcony and self identified as Leo. The entire world now calls him Leo without question. See how easy it is to accept and respect what an individual identifies as. Oh, and he was wearing a dress."
nycgingerguy: "No one's ever had a problem calling someone by a chosen name. A name is not an identity, however. "Hi. What's your name?" "I identify as Jim." You're trying to say the tradition of a man taking a name as Pope (which British Royalty do, also) is the same as choosing your own pronouns, something he's not doing. He also doesn't identify as The Pope. He actually is the Pope. Same difference as identifying as woman and actually being a woman. Lastly, a vestment is not a dress anymore than a wedding dress train is a rug."
I identify as The Pope. If you disagree, you're a bad person
When you think the left has hit peak stupidity, they outdo themselves

Meme - Michigan UNCENSORED Residents Group: Amelia Loupe: "If you're sooo deadset on stopping me, a trans woman, from using the women's restroom I hope you're also deadset on tasting the first round in my chamber Seconds, thirds, and even fourths are available if you really enjoy the first serving too! Bon appetit!"
Brianna Emirie: "Thank you for proving our point, women aren't safe with males in our spaces"

Meme - James Esses @JamesEsses: "Dear @carla_denyer ,  Could you kindly explain why you have compared the majority of the population, who believe in biological reality, to racists, anti-Semites, and male supremacists?"
Carla Denyer @carla_denyer: ""Overlaps can commonly be found between anti-gender [anti-trans] movements and: a) racist, anti-migrant, anti-Semitic, white nationalist, &/or pro-imperialism groups b) male supremacist, misogynistic, &/or men's rights groups" From @GATEOrg's report:"

Trans Community Feeling Unsafe Knowing There’s A Hockey Player Somewhere Out There Not Wearing A Pride Jersey | Babylon Bee - ""In order for us to feel safe, it's essential that every person on earth agree with our opinions and openly celebrate them in public at all times," said Trans Community Safety Liaison Bertha Glamqueen. "The knowledge that even one hockey player somewhere in the world is maybe not fully endorsing our beliefs is literal genocide." The distressing news comes after player Ivan Provorov refused to wear a shirt with rainbows on it and the NHL's Blackhawks announced they will not wear pride jerseys on pride night. Experts are warning this may cause trans people to die from being unsafe.  "What kind of fascist would let someone feel unsafe?" said Glamqueen as a 5-year-old stuffed a $20 in his G-string. "This groundswell of anti-LGBTQ hatred is absolutely terrifying."  At publishing time, the entire trans community had been led to feel even more unsafe after hearing that a guy named Steve from Peoria attends a non-queer-affirming church."

Being a man was too much hard work, so I became a woman: Inside the transmaxxing trend where men swap gender to get 'female' benefits like cheaper car insurance, free meals and sex - "if you were to believe everything you read on internet forums, modern-day womanhood can simply be defined by its perks.  They include cheaper car insurance, free meals and an all-round 'easier' life once you've bagged a 'high-value' man - i.e. someone who is wealthy and attractive, thereby making them 'deeply desirable'.  So it's perhaps unsurprising that men who fear they don't meet this criterion are growing increasingly envious of women's position in the dating sphere - and going to extreme lengths to achieve it.  Welcome to the world of transmaxxing: where 'low-value' males, who are struggling with their gender identity or former incels, are transitioning to females to cash in on on the benefits of womanhood.   The 'Transmaxxing Manifesto', which was written by the movement's anonymous Swedish leader Vintologi, outlines how one of the biggest advantages of becoming a woman is the 'superiority of female aesthetics' and how this can be used to 'extract resources from males'. On top of this, the document, which is readily available on transmaxxing forums, also highlights how the transition gives them 'access to female spaces' that are 'cleaner and generally more pleasant' - arguing that 'males are disgusting'...  'transmaxxer' Sammy appeared in the Channel 4 documentary Transmaxxer Life Uncovered - where she defined a man as 'dominant, successful, outgoing, confident and resilient'.  She then added that none of these stereotypical attributes could be used to describe her before her transition - as she went on to characterise her old life as 'slightly incel-esque' and 'isolated'... Since being on hormone replacement therapy, Sammy revealed she had been offered 'a lot' of free meals and drinks from men - and now has a steady boyfriend.   She added: 'I don’t want to spend 70 hours a week working or get a personal trainer to become a “true man”.'... transmaxxing has also become intertwined with the incel movement - as transitioning to a woman is deemed preferable to being a 'low value' man... Following their break-up, Tina was inspired to research how much success women have in dating versus men - adding: 'What we can observe across the board is that women, by literally every metric, are somewhat more successful in terms of dating an sexual things than men.'...  'The incel communities, I realised, have fundamentally misidentified the problem.   'Most incels that I came across think that their problem is women and the lack of attraction women feel towards them.  '[But I told them] the problem isn't that women aren't attracted to you, the problem is you're attracted to women'.  Following this, Tina tried a series of medications to try and suppress their desire - and discovered transmaxxing after fellow incel began scrutinising the movement... 'I had very strong evidence that a woman's life would be socially advantageous as well as sexually and possibly even attracting a girlfriend [...]...  a fellow 'transmaxxer' posted on the Reddit forum - where they revealed they had similarly been 'rejected by girls and bullied by the alphas for being a virgin loser'.  Sharing before-and-after photos of their transition, they claimed: 'Now the very same alpha males that bullied me bend on their knees just to have a chance of kissing my feet, my [direct messages] are full of thirsty men begging for my attention, and I'm having more sex than any alpha male ever.'... Vintologi, from southern Sweden, began working on the first Transmaxxing Manifesto in 2016 - having graduated from university with a degree in mathematics.   The 28-year-old, who has never revealed his full name, said the purpose was to 'reduce the surplus of males' who were growing increasingly angry over not being able to find a partner."
How foolish. Don't they know about Male Privilege?

Jennifer Sey on X - "This pitcher -- who goes by "Marissa" -- is a boy named Charlie. He is 6' tall and his Batting Against Average is .128. When boys compete in girls' high school sports, they win."

Thread by @_CryMiaRiver on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "There are now stacks of systematic reviews conducted independently all over the world showing there is precisely zero evidence to support youth gender medicine and the evidence of harm is undeniable.  Nova Scotia’s response?  Let’s open more paediatric gender clinics!...  Earlier this year, I wrote about the appalling failure of Canadian media covering the scandal of paediatric gender medicine. CBC, unsurprisingly, completely ignored my plea for balanced coverage"

Meme - Mia Hughes @_CryMiaRiver: "This is atrocious journalism. There is no excuse for spreading this dangerous misinformation at this point in the medical scandal. Shame on you, CBC."
"Puberty blockers are a reversible treatment that temporarily stop the progression of puberty, providing a child with more time to explore their identity - for example through clothing - without the distress that can come with going through developmental changes."

Jonathan Kay on X - "Yet another Andrew Lam CBC “news report” celebrating the sterilization of depressed children in Atlantic Canada"

How gender activists stole the media, distorted medicine, and hurt Canadian kids - "There is a major medical scandal unfolding in Canada, and our media is fuelling it. In gender clinics across the country, doctors put healthy adolescents on invasive medical procedures that can impair fertility, sexual function, and bone density, damage bodily systems, and result in the removal of healthy organs. Teenage girls are being put into menopause, and young men are being chemically and surgically castrated. This is all done without a clear diagnosis or solid scientific evidence that these treatments are safe or beneficial.  Yet Canada’s mainstream media portrays these interventions, euphemistically called “gender-affirming care,” as evidence-based, medically necessary, and lifesaving. Top outlets such as CBC, CTV, and Global present paediatric gender medicine as uncontroversial.   The scandal of paediatric gender medicine contains all the elements of a sensational news story – conspiracy, intrigue, deception, and blackmail. It involves powerful institutions suppressing dissent, whistleblowers risking their careers to speak out, and innocent young people being harmed in the crossfire. There are medical professionals ignoring basic ethical principles, activists influencing policy under the guise of science, and victims being vilified and silenced. All this should prove irresistible to the inquisitive journalistic mind. Which makes it all the more puzzling that, aside from the National Post, Canada’s mainstream media has opted to ignore the story and instead act as a mouthpiece for extremist trans activists, uncritically echoing their talking points... before Dutch researchers introduced puberty suppression for trans-identified adolescents, studies showed that 63 per cent to 98 per cent of youth eventually outgrew their gender distress. However, once puberty blockers were implemented, nearly all adolescents progressed to irreversible cross-sex hormones, with persistence rates of 98 per cent to 100 per cent. The explanation for this striking reversal of persistence rates is that the cognitive and sexual development that occurs during puberty naturally resolves gender dysphoria in most cases. Blocking puberty, therefore, means blocking the natural cure for gender-related distress.  Yet our mainstream media continues to call puberty blockers reversible because Canada’s “experts” in “gender-affirming care” continue to cling to this belief, despite the mounds of scientific evidence to the contrary. It is the same for the claim that affirming a young person’s transgender identity and providing access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries amounts to “life-saving care.” The most pernicious of all trans activist misinformation, the transition-or-suicide narrative is ubiquitous in Canada’s mainstream coverage of this controversial medical treatment... a young trans-identified person is quoted as saying, “If I wasn’t able to start this therapy, honestly, I probably wouldn’t be here anymore.” This content directly contradicts suicide prevention guidelines, which emphasize that the media must never oversimplify or attribute suicide to a single cause because suicide is known to be socially contagious.   The truth is the transition-or-suicide claim rests on exceptionally flimsy scientific evidence. Surveys of trans-identified youth do show increased risk of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts, but completed suicide in this population is rare. The elevated risk is likely due to co-existing mental health issues that are extremely common in youth who identify as transgender. All systematic reviews to date have found no good quality evidence to support the transition-or-suicide narrative, and the Cass Report and a recent robust study out of Finland reached the same conclusion. The final most common falsehood repeated by our top news outlets is that very few people regret undergoing these hormonal and surgical procedures... (the review cited by CBC is among the most poorly conducted study in a field already known for exceptionally low standards, leading one exasperated critic of the paper to ask, “where exactly is the line between incompetence and fraud?”)   These falsehoods remain ever-present in Canada’s reporting on paediatric gender medicine because our journalists have misplaced trust in medical associations, most notably the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). WPATH, an activist group masquerading as a medical association, has been thoroughly discredited in recent years, but these revelations have failed to penetrate the Canadian media landscape.  Even more remarkably, it is not only the media who were duped by WPATH. Almost every major medical association in North America, including the Canadian Paediatric Society, follows the lead of this fraudulent activist group that sets standards of care based on flimsy science, buries evidence that does not align with its political goals, and believes “eunuch” is a valid gender identity even children can possess.   The WPATH Files, released in March 2024, revealed professionals within WPATH, including a prominent Canadian endocrinologist, are aware that children and adolescents are not capable of understanding the lifelong implications of puberty suppression, that there is significant regret among this cohort, and that gender-affirming clinicians are conducting an unregulated experiment on people who identify as transgender... what journalism is meant to do: present the full picture. But in a media landscape dominated by trans activists, news outlets abandoned balanced reporting. In May 1941, the Saturday Evening Post published an article with the headline “Turning the Mind Inside Out.” In it, Waldemar Kaempffert, an editor of the New York Times, described a miraculous new brain surgery called a lobotomy that cut “worries, persecution complexes, suicidal intentions, obsessions, indecisiveness and nervous tensions” out of the mind... Kaempffert’s article was just one of many glowing media endorsements of what would become one of medicine’s greatest atrocities...   The misleading coverage of “gender-affirming care” has a similarly dangerous impact...   In February 2024, Radio-Canada’s Enquête team produced a stunning piece of investigative journalism in which an actress posing as a trans-identified 14-year-old obtained a prescription for testosterone after just a nine-minute appointment at a private gender clinic in Quebec. In response, local trans activists smashed the windows of the Radio-Canada headquarters in Montreal...   One of the greatest challenges in exposing the scandal of paediatric gender medicine is that the truth is so shocking it defies belief... It sounds like a wild conspiracy theory. Yet every word is true. Which means now more than ever, journalists must do their job"
This is why left wingers hate the National Post so much - it accurately reports the truth
With lobotomies, the state didn't lobotomise kids against parents' will, so trans mania is even worse

Gays Against Groomers on X - "Here she is—a smug 'Transhausen' mom, casually sipping coffee & gleefully singing after abducting her own child from his father. She trafficked him to Colorado, all so she could strip the father of his rights and rush to sterilize & mutilate her son—with a smile & song. DEPRAVED"

Boy 'quizzed by counter-extremist officers' for saying 'there are only two genders' - "A 12-year-old boy has allegedly been referred to counter-terrorism authorities after posting an online video saying "there's no such thing as non-binary".  The child, who remains unnamed, reportedly created the video to counter bullies who had mistakenly assumed he supported transgender rights. In the footage, he reportedly declares: "[I'm] gay not queer."  According to the boy's mother, school officials informed her that the video had prompted them to report her son to Prevent, the Home Office programme aimed at thwarting potential terrorists.  It is understood that authorities may have linked the boy's expressed views to right-wing ideology, leading to the controversial referral. The incident has raised questions about the interpretation and application of anti-radicalisation measures in schools, particularly concerning young children expressing opinions on complex social issues. Concerns were also reportedly raised that the boy, who is Jewish, said he wanted Hamas to be “wiped out” and told bullies he would “exterminate” them... 'We think that he was targeted as the children believe gay people agree with trans ideology.  “He made a video which I uploaded to YouTube where he said 'there are only two genders' and 'I'm gay not queer'.  “The school phoned up and were incensed by it. They said that they would refer him to Prevent for that video.  “They said that he was at risk of radicalisation - not that he had been, but was a risk when he gets to 13 and is entitled to his own social media accounts.  “There was a risk he would fall in with far right groups.”  She did not identify the far right groups that he is considered to be at risk of joining and the boy’s secondary school has not been made known.   The authorities were also said to be curious about a toy crossbow that had been bought from an English Heritage.  The mother added that bullies had attacked the boy’s Jewish heritage by making Nazi salutes and it was said that they forced him to drink another child’s urine.  “We sat down with the Prevent officers and there was an interrogation - they had an attitude of 'we'll ask the questions'.  “We were asked if we monitored his social media and what songs he listens to.  “They said there was a whole series of things he had been accused of.”"
Time to detain the "Far Right" to keep Jews safe
CLearly PREVENT is Islamophobic and oppresses minorities