Tuesday marked a favourite date in the calendars of think tankers and political scientists everywhere: the release of Transparency International’s annual “Corruption Perceptions” index. The index throws up interesting results every year, but the ranking for 2022 takes on particular significance amid heated debate over Ukraine’s EU aspirations.
The MS-13 gang member strangled 20-year-old Kayla Hamilton to death months after being released into the United States.
How a cruel, amoral experiment helped birth today’s trans movement.
We are all too familiar today with the basics of trans ideology. That biological sex does not determine one’s ‘gender identity’. That someone born biologically male can become female. And that we need to affirm a person’s ‘gender identity’, even if that person is a small child. What few perhaps realise is that the intellectual origins of so much of trans ideology can be traced back to the work of one man – sexologist and psychologist Dr John Money (1921-2006).
The Boston Globe ran a very good deep-dive yesterday into one aspect of American law enforcement that tragically impacts far too many families and for which there don’t seem to be any obvious solutions. Hanna Krueger examined the phenomenon of missing persons and the scattershot way that police departments across the country investigate and very often fail to solve such cases.
All wars spawn profiteers, and the Ukraine conflict is no exception. Oil companies, arms manufacturers and fertiliser and food producers have all seen their profits rise sharply. Black marketeers and sanctions busters have cleaned up. Whole countries, such as Iran and Turkey, have exploited the war to bolster their standing.
The vast rise in global energy prices has produced record profits for producers sourcing energy from outside Russia. Shell has just posted its highest ever yearly gain, making a profit of almost $40 billion last year. Even after the windfall tax imposed in Britain, those supplying gas and oil are raking in far more money than anything earned before.
The killing of Tyre Nichols is a horrific continuation of American black-on-black crime.
Many commenters on the Left have situated the arrest of Tyre Nichols—the black man who was evidently beaten to death by five Memphis police officers, also black—as a racial issue. White supremacy, they say, does not require the presence of white people to effect its ugliness, because black people—especially those working in a structurally racist institution such as policing—internalize the racist attitudes of whites. There is, according to these pundits, a close parallel between the Nichols case and other abuse cases involving white cops and black victims, because many blacks absorb racist views about blacks and enact them against their own race as enforcers of white supremacy.
Some people have refused blood for themselves, or a child, because of unfounded fears of blood ‘tainted’ by COVID mRNA vaccines
Even as the pandemic abates, some issues are still lingering, with some who need blood transfusions appealing to hospitals and Canada’s blood supplier with the request that they receive blood from unvaccinated donors.
How antisemitic tropes are being used to target the LGBTQ community
Over the past year, a new front for hate has opened up across Canada and the United States, with drag performances and gender-affirming care providers becoming targets of harassment and threats. But the vitriol has an all-too-familiar tone — one that a well-known anti-hate organization says is a cause for concern.
The U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is warning about a “convergence” of antisemitism and anti-LGBTQ hate.
Tablet Magazine has a timely antidote to the CBC & ADL’s toxic lies – The Queering of Antisemitism
How an unlikely alliance between LGBTQ studies and anti-Zionism conquered American universities
Some years ago, I was the target of a series of antisemitic, homophobic, and anti-Zionist hate crimes on the campus of Southern Connecticut State University, where I teach. Aside from the death threats and property defacement, what troubled me most was how authorities and colleagues only acknowledged the homophobic part of the crime. Despite my protestations, the anti-Zionism was erased and the antisemitism, which was not subtle—a swastika drawn on my car with mud—was severely minimalized. On college campuses these days, LGBTQ concerns (as well as racial ones) always count. Anti-Zionism never does, and antisemitism only when it occurs alone—not in relation to other forms of social animus.
This series of hate crimes against me took place—in a way I have never found coincidental—during one of the periodic eruptions of hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Several days later, I again found my office door defaced, and death threats left on my office telephone. One faculty member I knew who had read about the hate crime on the front page of The New Haven Register rushed to empathize, calling me the victim of “the homo-hating patriarchy.” I winced at my colleague commiserating with me in an ideological language that I knew targeted me in other ways.
Is there any deviant behavior the ADL doesn’t endorse nowadays?
This non-binary LGBTQ activist sells underwear packers through Instagram dms to girls who think they’re boys pic.twitter.com/sboMq89bwO
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 2, 2023
Oregon has become America’s first ‘death tourism’ destination, where terminally ill people from Texas and other states that have outlawed assisted suicide have started travelling to get their hands on a deadly cocktail of drugs to end their lives, DailyMail.com can reveal.
In the liberal bastion Portland, at least one clinic has started receiving out-of-staters who have less than six months to live and meet the other strict requirements of the state’s Death with Dignity (DWD) law.
Dr Nicholas Gideonse, the director of End of Life Choices Oregon, recently told a panel that he was advising terminally ill non-residents on travelling to Oregon to end their lives, despite a legal gray area.
NEW ORLEANS — Logistics manager Nicholas Rehak was visiting his parents’ home in Baltimore County, Maryland, several years ago. He was standing on the back deck one night when he noticed a bluish white light.
“It was shaped in a damn near perfect oval and it started to rise,” Rehak told VOA. “I’m talking straight up vertical, no deviation. It sat there for nearly 30 seconds and then suddenly it vanished — like a lamp when someone pulls the plug. Just sudden darkness.”
Perhaps it was a drone. Rehak said that was his first thought.
“I declare herewith once more and most emphatically that the guilt of the German people in this war — into which they were forced by you — consists solely in trying to end the eternal difficulties to their national existence, which you artfully instigated and continued.”
Hermann Göring wrote these words to Winston Churchill just a few days before his death sentence for crimes against humanity was to be executed.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has blasted Elon Musk by declaring that the Twitter boss is not a real philanthropist because he doesn’t use his wealth to push mass vaccinations for the public.
While speaking during a new interview with the BBC, Gates took aim at Musk, who also owns electric automaker Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX.
And…
BREAKING NEWS: Top U.S. Cardiologist states Albert Bourla and other Pfizer Executives are committing Domestic Terrorism. They are criminally lying that there are no safety warning signals from the Covid Vaccines. Pfizer's own data showed 1223 deaths within 90 days of the vaccine. pic.twitter.com/uQwSRi97UT
— Truth Justice ™ (@SpartaJustice) February 5, 2023
h/t XC & Mauser
What does an autocrat do when his support base is shaken by popular protests?
The standard answer is: he tries to reassure supporters by increasing their privileges, thus giving them a bigger stake in the preservation of the status quo.
This is what Islamic Republic’s “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is trying to do with an edict for the largest privatization scheme in Iran’s history.
Unveiled last week, the scheme is the seventh of its kind since the first was launched 23 years ago.
The Russia-affiliated Wagner private military company continues to recruit fighters by more traditional means as the UK Defense Ministry said that its convict recruitment program operated at a reduced scale in late 2022 on Friday.
According to a Monday posting in the Wagner-tied Grey Zone Telegram group, the PMC was offering contracts for 240,000 rubles with “good bonuses for performance.”
Other benefits included health and life insurance and would provide equipment for recruits that needed.
