USAID money dried up, now European MEPs chant “Send Them Back”

USAID money dried up, now European MEPs chant “Send Them Back”. By Hélène de Lauzun at The European Conservative.

The announcement of the European Parliament’s final vote on the Return Directive was met with a burst of jubilation in the chamber, where energetic cries of “Send them back” rang out, reflecting the MEPs’ enthusiasm at having succeeded in passing the first genuine measure to seriously restrict immigration at the European level. On the opposite side of the chamber, MEPs responded to these exclamations with vigorous — though minority — cries of “Shame on you.”

The choice of words is not insignificant; some even see it as a foreshadowing — still a fantasy at this stage — of remigration.

Through a number of key measures, the directive drastically changes the landscape for the management of illegal immigration. Previously, an obligation to leave the territory remained a national decision. From now on, thanks to the Return Regulation, these decisions may be converted into a ‘European Return Order’ — an obligation to leave European territory. …

On the Left as well as in the centre, the prevailing mood was one of exaggeration and dramatisation. Abir Al-Sahlani, a left-wing MEP from the Renew group, said she had never felt “as unsafe in Parliament as she did after the vote.”

Flopping Aces:

Europe just experienced one of the fastest religious conversions in political history.

For years they called basic border enforcement “fascism.” They called deportation “cruel.” They called any suggestion of returning people who had no right to be there “far-right extremism.” NGOs and center-left politicians treated the very idea of stopping the invasion like it was a moral crime. They cashed the checks, ran the programs, and lectured the rest of us about compassion while the flow continued.

Then something changed.

Voters started punishing them. The American money tap (that sweet USAID slush fund) got turned off. And suddenly the same people who spent a decade calling enforcement racist are passing the strictest migration law in EU history … complete with return hubs in third countries, expanded detention powers, and home raids without warrants.

The same ministers who once clutched their pearls are now hugging each other on the parliament floor while chanting “send them back.”

It’s almost like none of it was ever about principle.

It was about cost. When open borders started costing them elections and free American money, the moral clarity arrived overnight. The “compassion” dried up the second it threatened their power and their funding. Everything before that? Just expensive theater paid for by someone else’s taxpayers.

They didn’t have a change of heart. They got hit in the wallet and at the ballot box at the same time. And like every other elite class in history, they immediately discovered that reality is suddenly very interesting when it starts hurting them personally.

Three things made these surprising “historic” reforms possible:

First, “far-right” (moderate conservative) parties have been ascendant in Europe, a trend that accelerated after President Trump’s re-election last year. Conservative and “reform” parties now make up about a third of all elected EU members.

Second, center-left parties — also about a third —  joined the conservatives to pass the new anti-migration policies. Only the far-left parties (Greens and socialists) opposed the new package and shouted “shame!” at their colleagues after the vote passed. …

Third, the center-left’s course correction from pro-migrant virtue-signaling to pro-sanity common sense followed continuous pressure from the U.S. over the last 18 months, which ceaselessly argued that Europe was destroying itself with its open-borders migration policies, and often linked them to America’s pullback from NATO. … A majority of EU voters now want ICE-like migration policies.

You might fairly ask why I linked this political tipping point in Europe to Trump’s re-election. After all, as the experts always remind us, correlation doesn’t prove causation. Maybe Trump’s election and the rise of sanity in Europe were both caused by some other third factor. To answer, I would point to one specific policy decision, the closure of USAID, and to one person, President Trump, over whom the EU leaders fawned at yesterday’s G7 Summit. …

Think-tank analysts estimate that up to $2.3 billion annually in U.S. aid ($23 billion every 10 years) was tied to Europe’s “migration management” work. USAID’s closure effectively zeroed this out, leaving a sudden, large gap in financing for development and protection projects in the countries of origin and transit.

In other words, USAID paid the countries where migrants came from, and it paid the countries through which they traveled on their way to Europe. No longer.

The USAID money spigot is closed. Now the EU is reversing those incentives — by paying origin countries to “host” their own migrants. And, whether it was through tariffs, NATO drawdowns, or energy markets, President Trump has beaten European politics in arm-wrestling.

Follow the money … all the way back to the American taxpayer.

Chaser:

Britain in immigration turmoil

Britain in immigration turmoil.

Wall Street Mav:

Rotherham where white young girls were gang raped by Pakistani men with impunity.

The police (also of Pakistani ethnicity) in Rotherham were complicit and joined in the rapes according to the victims.

 

The British Patriot:

Massive crowds of British patriots have flooded the streets of Birmingham to call for remigration.

Britain’s second-largest city now has over 340,000 Muslims.

 

Who will prevail? Will Islam conquer Britain? Find out in the next 30 years.

The left runs on taxpayer cash

The left runs on taxpayer cash. By Fugitive Caesar.

Leftists are getting angry because around 10-15 million Leftists are paid to do cushy high-paid fake jobs, based on credentials and a claim to unique technical authority.

The education sector over produces people who consider themselves “elite”. Those people then found ways to use government to get them good jobs — as in jobs that pay well, even if they are bullshit jobs. In so doing, these people took over the main party of the left in each western country.

Thus, they are strongly motivated by money and status. Big government is essential for their livelihood, and the livelihood of all their friends, so they need the leftist bureaucracy in power regardless of the cost to the rest of us..

Tldr: Too many chiefs and not enough Indians, and all those chiefs must (?) get paid.

Wall Street Apes:

Democrats are creating fake jobs for themselves and getting massive salaries. … The fake jobs are from companies funded by our tax dollars.

Example:

Texas Democrat Rep James Talarico has a second part time job as a “DEI consultant” and gets paid $83,333 per year … as a consultant for MAYA Consulting, now rebranded as VIDA Collaborative, which is a firm focused on “equitable education” initiatives rooted in DEI. It’s 100% a fake made up job, they do things like promoting “RaceTalks” and addressing “systemic barriers,” “white supremacy culture,” and “cisnormative assumptions.”

It’s all fake, obviously this is a fake made up job that was only invented to do things like launder our money.

But here’s where they criminal part comes in, they get taxpayer funding. MAYA Consulting, now VIDA Collaborative, has received substantial taxpayer money through contracts with the Texas Education Agency and individual Texas public school districts. …

The modus operandi:

Democrats give funding to these obviously fake companies promoting the typical nonsense …

Then these companies turn around and make Democrats “consultants” and pay them $80,000+ dollar per year.

Commenters:

90% of dems in politics don’t have/have never had real jobs. They don’t own businesses, never built, produced, serviced, been in retail. They are poli-sci majors, and prof gov leeches. Professional talkers. A class of useless people.

They hate Trump and Musk (especially DOGE!) with a burning passion because they threaten their money and status. Who wants to become a Sheryl Cowan (graphic at the top of this post)? Hence the rage of a privileged class.

The big government mateship dance: Linfox and Chris Bowen

The big government mateship dance: Linfox and Chris Bowen. By Craig Kelly.

Linfox’s Fox Group, owned by trucking magnate Lindsay Fox, donated $500,000 to the Australian Labor Party during the 2024-25 financial year. This contribution was part of a broader pattern of bipartisan giving by the logistics giant, which also provided an identical $500,000 donation to the Liberal Party in the same period.

This week, Chris Bowen handed $19.63 million of your hard-earned money straight to Linfox, the company owned by billionaire Lindsay Fox (net worth ~$6 billion), so they could buy 26 electric trucks.

That’s $775,000 per truck — taxpayer-funded. Nice.

 

 

If these electric trucks are so great as Bowen claims, why the hell does a billionaire need a $775,000 gift per vehicle from struggling taxpayers?

Why can’t Lindsay Fox reach into his own $6 billion pocket?

It’s rampant:

This is just the latest episode in Bowen‘s and Labor’s taxpayer-funded billionaire mateship program.

He’s already shovelled tens of millions to his other billionaire buddy, Twiggy Forrest.

Same script, different billionaire.

Jobs for the left:

Let’s be honest: Bowen isn’t “investing in the future.” He’s buying future job security.

He’s using public money to build favours and networks so that when Labor gets booted at the next election … he’ll land softly on some cushy board or consultancy gig funded by the very billionaires he’s busy enriching right now.

Hypocrisy:

Meanwhile, Labor has the gall to clutch their pearls and scream about Gina Rinehart supporting One Nation. The hypocrisy is beyond rancid.

  • Billionaires getting taxpayer handouts from Labor? That’s “strategic industry policy.”
  • Billionaires exercising free speech and supporting a conservative party? That’s a “threat to democracy.”

The big government mateship dance:

  1. Linfox donates $500,000 to the Labor Party.
  2. Labor minister uses government funds to subsidize Linfox $19.6m of trucks. (Linfox should have paid for them entirely on its own.)
  3. Linfox or someone will take good care of the Labor minister when he leaves politics.

Losers? Taxpayers, competitors to Linfox, trust and honesty, the free market and efficiency, the Australian economy, …

The decay of trust in the West

The decay of trust in the West. By Dain Little. Outside the MSM a common theme is emerging among the normies, who are the 80 in all these 80/20 issues. In the Anglosphere, the UK is doing it toughest. Trouble is escalating.

Then, normies gave them the benefit of the doubt:

Before the Rape Gang Report, before Charlie Kirk, before Iryna Zarutska, before the multiple assassination attempts on Trump, before COVID, before the Summer of “Love”, ….

Conservatives and Right-wingers thought that Democrats and Leftists were silly, misguided, maybe a bit naive. That Leftists lay on this odd curve that ran from narcissistic self-interest to soft-hearted sympathy for the downtrodden.

We had this idea that despite the fact that we disagreed, if only we could do a better job of reaching across the gap and communicating our ideas in a way that would really come home to the other side, that we would find out that under all the vitriol and despite all the division, we were actually one people.

Most of us had the same idea about foreigners. Africans, Muslim Arabs, Pashtuns, Indians, etc. We thought the division was merely a matter of differing cultures, and that through contact and integration, we would Westernize our guests (and adopt the better parts of their culture in turn), and eventually become one people.

Now, the doubt has mostly evaporated. Again and again over the last decade, what happened is up the worst end of the range of non-fringe possibilities:

The problem is one of trust, and betrayal.

The “benefit of the doubt” is the idea that we extend a certain amount of trust by default. We trust that other people will behave like human beings. We trust that figures of authority will handle their duties and privileges honestly enough. We trust that our political opponents have at heart the best interests of the state and its people.

Our default level of trust was high, because we were a high-trust society. We built our relationships with our neighbors, fellows and even our rivals on this foundation.

Betrayals cut into this foundation. Every betrayal after trust has been granted lowers the general level of trust.

Eventually, the betrayals gouge the foundation apart entirely. Deep faults run across the whole of society, relationships fracture, suspicion and acrimony reign.

Our media have lied to us, knowingly and systematically, for decades. We have a phrase, “you don’t hate journalists enough”, because every time we think we’ve seen the worst from them, they invent a way to surprise us again.

Our ministers of health and disease control betrayed us, pushing a dangerous new vaccine technology on us before its effects were properly understood. And now we find that they funded and encouraged the research that created COVID in the first place. Millions died, everyone’s lives were disrupted all over the globe, freedoms were restricted. We all paid for their incompetence.

Our political class have been caught protecting (and participating in) pedophile rings. The systematic, industrial-scale sexual abuse, enslavement, trafficking, torture, killing and disposal of vulnerable children. Our own law enforcement architecture was used to shield the most heinous possible perpetrators from consequence.

Foreign aliens have been shuttled into our nations by the millions. Crime has skyrocketed, squalor has set in. They have formed encapsulated enclaves, refusing to integrate. While our own people are deprived, these aliens have been given every material advantage our states can afford them.

The words I am writing hardly do justice to the depth of betrayal that we have suffered.

The foundation is broken. Trust is gone. It is GONE.

We are not one people, and we never, NEVER will be.

The recent attack by a Scotsman on some Muslims:

A year or so ago I would have categorically condemned this random street attack.

 

 

An axe-wielding Scot in Edinburgh targeted and attacked five Muslim men across the city. I have no idea whether this was vengeance for some kind of crime they had committed, or just a product of the man’s own unfocused rage.

I don’t really care.

I don’t trust the Muslims enough to extend my sympathies to them. And I don’t particularly care whether the law protects them.

They are foreigners. They belong to a group which has committed shocking, horrifying atrocities across the British isles. The perpetrators have been sheltered by the law and by their own communities.

And so the UK police, also, must be set apart. They, too, are the enemy. They cannot be trusted. And I don’t care what happens to them, either.

That’s what happens.

That is the result of breaking, shattering, EXPLODING the foundation of trust that all of this, all of Western civilization is built upon.

Betrayal upon betrayal upon betrayal must be answered.

Probably, it must be answered with violence.

This axe-attacker is stupid. He has thrown away his life to little avail. There was no real tactic or strategy at play here, only rage.

And yet, I understand him. And I don’t really care to condemn him.

A year ago I would have disavowed him, I would have expressed deep disappointment at his actions, I would have categorically condemned random racial violence.

The reason I won’t do so now is because if the races and roles were reversed, the Muslim community wouldn’t even begin to think of condemning the violence.

You see, they never bought into this whole “trust by default” program. They never intended to integrate. They never extended anyone else the benefit of the doubt.

So. Let’s face it, then. Let’s really, truly ask ourselves: Why should we, for them?

Restoring trust:

If we want our high-trust society back, we’re going to have to remove from it everyone who cannot be trusted.

Not just the foreigners, but the journalists, politicians, state functionaries and other opposition actors as well. Everyone who broke the trust must go.

That will probably be an atrocious, violent process.

So be it.

If our choices are an ugly, uncivilized victory that permits survival, or a very polite managed decline into death, then I’d rather be that axe-wielding Scot.

We can get back to being civilized when we can trust each other again.

The left condemned this attack on a Muslim. And in normal circumstances, this condemnation would be richly deserved. But the left have been silent about the far more numerous attacks by Muslims on white people, and do their utmost to suppress news of the quarter of a million white British girls raped by Muslims in the UK. As they say when it suits them, “silence is violence.” And as the right increasingly needs to say, “you broke it, you fix it.”

The modern left are different and cannot be negotiated or compromised with — because their taxpayer money and status is on the line. For them, it’s (almost) existential.

Iran Wins $300 Billion Cash Prize For Placing Second In War

Iran Wins $300 Billion Cash Prize For Placing Second In War. By The Babyon Bee.

The leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran was reportedly overjoyed to learn they had won a grand total of $300 billion for coming second place in the war against the U.S.

Despite suffering catastrophic damage, the Iranian leaders were seen dancing in the streets, grateful for the opportunity to have participated in another war.

“This is the happiest day of my life! I’m going to buy so many missiles!” said Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei as he moonwalked across the desert sand. “Super stoked to try again next year!” 

Iran War Misconceptions

Iran War Misconceptions. By Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness.

Shorter than recent Democrat wars:

The shooting portion of the Iran “War” lasted about 40 days — far shorter than Barack Obama’s 2011 congressionally unauthorized seven-month bombing campaign against Libya.

Bill Clinton’s unauthorized 78 days of bombing Serbia in 1999 hit bridges, schools, hospitals, monuments, and power plants — far more indiscriminate targeting than anything in the Iran War so far….

Fabrications and distortions:

The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war and is now closed, so the war was a failure.

The Strait was open because an appeased Iran had no reason to close it — given that no nation on earth dared to end its nuclear dreams of dominating the Middle East, funding anti-Western terrorists, and threatening Europe and the U.S.

So the rub was always disarming Iran and then dealing with its inevitable desperate strategy of closing the Strait.

Trump’s agreement will simply be a copy of Obama’s earlier Iran deal.

Obama dealt from a position of abject weakness. Iran assumed correctly that Obama would offer endless concessions and cash, while never considering force. …

Trump is dealing with a bankrupt Iran, a neutered military, a restive Iranian street, a wounded regime, and the specter that the U.S. can do whatever it wishes militarily to a shattered Iran for the foreseeable future.

The U.S. is bereft of allies and strategically isolated in the war.

During the war, the unthinkable occurred when Israel de facto became an ally of the Arab Gulf monarchies.

Other than a few rogue nations and Arab terrorist clients — the weakened Hezbollah, the crushed Hamas, and the wary Houthis — Iran has zero friends.

Neither China nor Russia offered Iran much in the way of aid, other than satellite imagery and some smuggled supplies. Both lost their once-prominent positions among clients in the Middle East who deeply resented their siding with Persian Shiite theocrats over Arab oil suppliers and arms buyers.

Israel has more combat aircraft than the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The Gulf monarchies do so as well. Both Israel and the Gulf states have been flying bombing missions against Iran. There is a far greater chance of Arab-Israeli rapprochement after the war than before it. …

The Iran War was a betrayal of MAGA’s commitment to no “forever wars.”

The second Iran intervention, following up on the initial June 2025 bombing, was certainly an optional and preemptive action. …

Yet there still are no ground troops in Iran. The loss of 13 soldiers, while tragic, is less than the two-week fatal-accident rate of the military.

There is a good chance that less than six weeks of active bombing achieved far more than 20 years in Afghanistan and a decade in Iraq — at a fraction of the human and fiscal costs.

The problems of Iranian nukes and Iran’s rapid production of conventional ballistic missiles (with Chinese help) could not be kicked down the road any longer. It fell on Trump to deal with it. What would Kamala have done?

Why the Worst Get on Top in Academia

Why the Worst Get on Top in Academia. By Scott Scheall.

Most people don’t realize how fundamentally broken the institutions for training tomorrow’s policy-makers are.

The incentive structure of the modern American university encourages relatively unsuccessful scholars, those who fail to establish fruitful research programs early in their careers, to pursue administrative positions, where they wield authority over more successful colleagues, who actually generate educational value. As a result, the American university is disproportionately governed by relative academic failures.

An effective scholar enjoys benefits impossible to find elsewhere in today’s workforce: freedom to follow ideas wherever they might lead and a considerable amount of free time to do it. Those who succeed aren’t inclined to leave the laboratory or library for administration.

Though administrative salaries tend to be higher, the rest of an administrator’s work-life is poorer in every other respect, involving endless committee meetings, paperwork, budgetary knife fights, student and parent grievance adjudication, and the difficult business of cultivating donors. Intellectual freedom and scholarly prestige are nowhere in evidence.

The professoriate, with some justification, views administrators less as leaders to be admired than as annoyances to be tolerated. For a productive academic, a move into administration, high salary and resplendent office notwithstanding, seems less like a promotion than banishment.

The incentives flip for those who do not manage to develop fruitful research programs. Within a few years of entering academia, young professors often find that they are not likely to produce the publications, citations, and grants that tenure requires. By this time, though, they have invested almost a decade of their lives in the study of specialized topics that leave them poorly equipped for comparably remunerative work outside the university. For them, an administrative position seems like salvation. …

Administrators see faculty not as the prime movers of learning, the front line advancing the university’s scholarly mission, but as fussy nuisances to be managed or otherwise ignored.

Deans, provosts, and even presidents are now disproportionately drawn from the large pool of unsuccessful academics. The talented stay where they are; the rest become overseers, having drifted into positions where scholarly talent has no purchase. …

Inevitably:

The consequences of academia’s misincentive structure are harmful. Instead of being deployed in support of rigorous research, limited resources are redirected, by its own administrators, to the university bureaucracy. Hiring and promotion decisions reward the administration’s favorites, the compliant box-checkers, rather than more accomplished, if less accommodating, scholars. Instead of focusing single-mindedly on scholarly excellence, young professors are encouraged to build alliances with administrators. …

The mission of a university is the disinterested pursuit of truth through rigorous scholarship. The internal labor market of a university, however, tends to place those who fail at this mission in positions of authority over those who succeed.

In universities, the incompetent supervise the competent….

Stanford now employs some sixteen thousand administrators and staff persons to support a faculty one-seventh this size. [And only 22% of this year’s incoming class are white.]

Contemporary American academia is just the kind of social system about which Hayek warned, one that promotes individuals with personal traits inconsistent with the system’s alleged objectives. Those who fail at the basic academic mission too easily find snug sinecures from which to tyrannize those who succeed.

Administrators are mostly failed researchers. They have higher salaries and decide policies — like DEI for admissions. But they are mostly superfluous, given that universities did quite well with only a few administrators until the 1980s. Administrative positions are often soft jobs for people with the “right” politics, put in charge of the institutions that train — and obviously indoctrinate — the young people who will be tomorrow’s opinion-makers.

The political types decided a few decades ago that truth didn’t exist and only power matters (aka critical theory). But researchers are truth seekers — they are the reason universities exist and why universities are valuable. Or used to be. Modern universities are mostly run by political types who favor power over truth, on higher pay than the truth seekers, churning out new generations of power mongers.

The Engines of Truth Are Stalling

The Engines of Truth Are Stalling. By Thomas Barlow at Quadrant.

In the 1970s and 1980s, academic staff made up more than 60 per cent of the Australian university workforce. Today, the ratios have flipped, with non-academic staff now making up around 60 per cent of the total workforce. …

The implications should be clear. An administrative class will typically find prestige and revenue more interesting than truth, and bureaucracy always rewards conformity. So, while we may still imagine universities as being full of people beavering away in labs and libraries, trying to discover or invent something new and true and potentially controversial, only a minority are personally pursuing such goals. For the administrative majority there is a different agenda.

You can see this distinction on YouTube. Look up the infamous 2023 congressional hearing on anti-Semitism, at which the then presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT squirmed like clumsy politicians. Then compare their feeble efforts with almost any public talk or interview recorded in the late twentieth century by someone like Richard Feynman or Milton Friedman. You’ll gain an immediate grasp of the contrast between administrative and truth-seeking psychology. …

Mass training centers:

Fifty years ago, hardly anyone went to university. In developed nations, only about one in ten school leavers attended university. Today, university enrolment rates globally are around 40 per cent. … In Australia, in 2024, 57 per cent of those aged twenty-five to thirty-four had a university degree. …

One does not need to be a genius to grasp that teaching students with a broader range of intellectual abilities will likely necessitate a watering down of content and a lowering of standards. …

Easy marking and grade inflation are a gauge for this “consumer is right” mentality, in which regard it seems telling that a Harvard analysis last year … showed that A’s now make up 60 per cent of grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates, up from less than 25 per cent twenty years ago.

Although I am not aware of a similar study in Australia, the incentives and behaviour here are similar. Australian universities now accrue $12 billion a year (or 27 per cent of their total revenues) from fee-paying international students. All that money has proved a persistent inducement for soft marking, low fail rates, and lowering standards in parts of our institutions. …

Funding by bureaucracy:

Partly this trend is a consequence of funding frameworks that systemically encourage quantity of outputs rather than quality of outcomes. One manifestation of this has been an explosion in the number of people pursuing PhDs, often without regard to their actual ability for knowledge discovery. (In Australia, our universities graduate around eight PhDs for every new academic position opening.)

An even graver symptom, though, is the volume of research production. There are now over 6 million supposedly peer-reviewed papers being published each year across all languages and fields. Many of these papers are completely useless and irrelevant. Many are never cited or even read by anyone other than their authors. The modern scientific literature is one of history’s great triumphs of quantity over quality. …

Political bias that reflects that of the funders:

The political bias of the Western academy is often downplayed. The more hubristic on the Left see the one-sidedness as evidence that intelligence correlates with their own views—a position that requires wilful blindness of the considerable variations in academic political attitudes over time, countries, and different disciplines. …

As universities turn into political monocultures, they typically experience a narrowing of scholarship. …

“Fact checkers”:

But there is another, and greater, corruption as well. For, having been accorded special status as arbiters of what is true and false, a growing cohort of politically minded individuals in Western universities have begun also to set themselves up as arbiters of what is right and wrong. This has led to the emergence of ideological gatekeepers in a host of disciplines, who strive to shut down heretics while offering an easy ride for those who conform to their favoured political narrative. …

In 2024, a study of over 6,000 faculty at fifty-five universities and colleges in the United States conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that 27 per cent of faculty say they are unable to speak freely for fear of reprisals from students, administrators or other faculty. An astonishing 35 per cent of faculty said they had toned down their writing for fear of consequences — a four-fold greater rate of self-censorship than was reported for a similar survey in 1958, during the McCarthy era. …

One especially prevalent example of politicisation is identity-based discrimination in hiring, promotions, and admissions. Typically, it is the administrative class, not the scholarly class, that most keenly prioritises identity over truth. Yet it is remarkable how quickly the scholars have fallen into line.

I have watched academic discussions, in which participants have felt compelled to contextualise their contributions with either prideful or self-denigratory observations about their own personal cultural and sexual identities — as if who they are matters more than the truth of what they have to say. There is even a campaign in parts of the scientific community to get authors of scientific publications to cite others not based on their work’s relevance but based on criteria of ethnicity and sex. This is called “citation justice”. …

Are universities worth reforming, or should we just burn them down?

Most universities still have many faculty members who are genuine knowledge seekers in the old-fashioned sense: people who believe in the truth, who love their disciplines, and who want to adhere to rigorous scholarly ideals. This is a fact that must be remembered, no matter how bad things seem. Such people really do still exist — and in significant numbers.

The problem is that they have been sidelined. Yet if there was a way of handing them the institutional reins, and if research-granting schemes could be redesigned to identify these types rather than the blowhards and activists, we would quickly rediscover the treasure that sits within our institutions and the ethos of the academy would change very rapidly.

Over the centuries, universities/monasteries have been through previous cycles of politicization and decay, but eventually recovered. So, they probably will this time too.

Does money buy happiness?

Does money buy happiness? By Ihtesham Ali.

A Princeton Nobel laureate said no above $75,000. A Penn researcher with 1.7 million data points said yes. …

No, above US$75k per year:

In 2010 [Daniel] Kahneman and his Princeton colleague Angus Deaton published a paper that became one of the most quoted findings in the history of social science.

They analyzed 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index and concluded that emotional well-being rose steadily with income up to about $75,000 a year, and then flattened out completely. Above that line, the extra money was not buying any more daily happiness. 

The headline traveled around the world. Every news outlet ran the number. …

Yes:

For 11 years almost nobody seriously challenged it. Kahneman had a Nobel Prize in Economics, the sample size was massive, and the conclusion was emotionally satisfying in a way that made everyone feel a little better about not being wealthy.

Then in 2021 a 33 year old researcher at the University of Pennsylvania published a paper that quietly destroyed the entire finding. His name is Matthew Killingsworth.

He had spent the previous decade building a smartphone app called Track Your Happiness that pinged users at random moments during their day and asked them a simple question.

How do you feel right now, on a scale from very bad to very good. The app was designed to catch happiness in the act, not to ask people to recall it later.

By 2021 he had collected over 1.7 million real-time happiness reports from 33,000 adults. When he plotted income against in-the-moment well-being, there was no plateau anywhere.

The line just kept rising. People earning $200,000 were happier on average than people earning $100,000. People earning $400,000 were happier than people earning $200,000. The curve flattened slightly but never stopped climbing.

The famous $75,000 ceiling that the world had been quoting for 11 years simply did not exist in his data.

The resolution turns out to be more interesting:

Now there were two Nobel-quality findings sitting in direct contradiction with each other. One of them had to be wrong, and neither researcher was willing to walk away. …

Kahneman called Killingsworth and proposed something rare in academic science. He called it an adversarial collaboration. The two of them, joined by Penn psychologist Barbara Mellers as a neutral referee, would sit down together and reanalyze the raw data from both studies, line by line, until they figured out which one of them was wrong.

The paper they co-authored was published in March 2023 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the answer they reached was not what either of them had expected.

Both of them had been right at the same time. They had been measuring two different populations without realizing it.

When the team broke Killingsworth’s 1.7 million data points apart by baseline happiness, the picture clarified completely. For the happiest 70 percent of people, more money kept buying more happiness all the way up to $500,000 a year, with no sign of slowing down.

For people in the middle, the same pattern held. But for the bottom 20 percent of the sample, the ones who were already unhappy before the question of money even came up, the curve flattened almost exactly where Kahneman’s original paper had said it would. Above roughly $100,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, more money did nothing for them. …

Conclusion:

If you are not already unhappy, money keeps buying happiness for a much longer stretch than Kahneman’s original paper suggested. The runway is wider than the world has been telling itself for a decade.

If you are already unhappy, money does almost nothing past a certain point. There is a ceiling, but the ceiling is not about income. It is about the underlying state of the person collecting it.

The deeper insight:

The single biggest predictor of in-the-moment well-being is not money at all. It is whether your mind is on the thing you are doing.

His most cited paper, written with Daniel Gilbert at Harvard, is titled A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. The data from the [Track Your Happiness] app showed that people are mentally absent from what they are doing 47 percent of the time, and that mental absence is one of the strongest predictors of unhappiness in the entire dataset. More predictive than income. More predictive than the activity itself. More predictive than almost any demographic variable you could measure.

Which means the unhappy 20 percent that Kahneman’s plateau actually described were probably not unhappy because they did not have enough money. They were unhappy for reasons that more money could not reach.

The reason the curve flattened for them at $100,000 a year is the same reason it would have flattened at $300,000 or $700,000. The thing they were missing was not buyable.

The most uncomfortable line in the entire 2023 paper is the one that nobody on the internet quotes. The authors note that the relationship between income and happiness, while real, is much weaker than the relationship between attention and happiness.

A person earning $40,000 who is fully present in their own life will, on average, report higher in-the-moment well-being than a person earning $400,000 whose mind is somewhere else.

The fight about money was the wrong fight the entire time.

Takeaway:

You can run the experiment yourself the next time you catch your mind drifting. Stop. Put your phone down. Look at the room you are in, the person across from you, the food in front of you, the work you are actually doing. That is the part the apps cannot sell you and the salary cannot buy you.

The data has been clear for over a decade. The plateau is not in your bank account. It is in your attention.

 

Principles for a Grand Alliance of Centrists

Principles for a Grand Alliance of Centrists. By Edward Ring at American Greatness.

There is a common thread shared by most disillusioned voters. They believe that America’s ruling class has abandoned its fellow citizens. They’re right.

Notwithstanding notable recent defections, America’s elites view ordinary citizens as no longer necessary.

  • Because of globalism, they are replaceable.
  • Because of automation, supercharged by AI, they are superfluous.
  • Because of environmentalism, they are unsustainable.

A plurality (at the least) of America’s elites have decided the nation’s middle class is disposable, and this is the real reason they continue to push woke degeneracy and extreme environmentalism, designed to lower birthrates and reduce standards of living. …

While America’s tradition of assimilation is under attack by an elite-driven obsession with racial segregation and mutual resentment, marketed as multiculturalism, America nonetheless remains the robust product of more than 250 years as a successful melting pot. …

Build a coalition to oppose our hostile ruling class:

We have merely to unite those millions of Americans who want to save their nation from an elite that has declared war on their way of life and their future.

This isn’t as hard as it seems for two reasons. First, most Americans don’t want to live in a divided nation, and they don’t want to live in a culture that has devolved to cater to society’s lowest, most abnormal, deviant, hedonistic, psychotic, sociopathic, dishonest, crooked, lazy, defiant, bizarre, militant cohorts of individuals, regardless of the fact they’ve become politically organized and demand equality of outcome in every imaginable context. Most Americans understand the inherent necessity and benefits of nuclear families, hard work, and immutable standards for achievement and recognition.

 

Antiwhite ‘Anti-racist’ Communists led by Tranny Satanist with Blue hair

 

Second, America’s culture of common sense and unity is threatened by a fractious coalition of fanatics and lunatics who are relatively small in number and who harbor an innate antipathy toward each other that is only held in check by rivers of money flowing to them from globalist billionaires, opportunistic corporations, environmentalist pressure groups, and government unions. Their resources are money and anger. They win elections because all that money, and all that anger, is used to brainwash voters into thinking that tolerating decadence and chaos is compassion, that people who oppose extreme tolerance are bigots, and that recognizing the indispensability of fossil fuel is, somehow, “fascist.” Trump’s victory in 2024 is proof that this brainwashing, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, is wearing thin. …

The old Reagan coalition is no longer functioning:

During the final decade of the Cold War in 1984, President Ronald Reagan was reelected by a landslide. His “big tent” approach brought together fiscal conservatives, neocons, and conservative Christians. Scarcely a generation later, in 2004, George W. Bush also won a decisive victory by unifying these same factions.

But the model that worked then will not work today:

  • Conservatives who claimed to favor smaller government have to answer for their failure to stop a bipartisan public debt binge that started in 1980 and has gotten progressively worse.
  • Neocons have to answer for a foreign policy that has, among other things, destabilized the Middle East, created a surveillance state at home, and delivered endless wars with no exit strategy.
  • As for conservative Christians, the Left has unfairly but successfully defined them as anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-“trans,” and is using them to stereotype all conservatives as dangerous extremists.

Populist leaders like Trump, Farage, and Hanson are — perhaps accidentally — building new centrist coalitions:

Trump recognizes something the leftist leadership of most Big Labor unions deny — the vast majority of their workers love America, believe in traditional values, and want politicians who will first protect them before prioritizing economic refugees that arrive illegally by the millions.

What captured media institutions desperately call “far right” are in fact commonsense reforms that most Americans support. …

What unites the populist Left and populist Right is a recognition that America’s business and political elite share a vision that abandons normal citizens. They correctly recognize that we have been governed by a donor-fed uniparty, dominated by special interests for whom profit and power are acquired because of failing bureaucracies, punitive regulations, scarce and expensive commodities, a massive dependent class of citizens and noncitizen permanent residents, and corporate consolidation of wealth.

Pauline Hanson goes to war with Labor, Islam and trans agenda

Pauline Hanson goes to war with Labor, Islam and trans agenda. By Greg Brown in The Australian.

 

Pauline Hanson … [pledged] massive cuts to government spending while ending the “transgender ­insurgency” and Islamic fundamentalism in Australia. …

Senator Hanson vowed to abandon multiculturalism and ban migration from some Muslim countries, under an immigration policy that would include big cuts to the numbers of visas issued whole restoring “national identity and Australian values”.

“Under the failed policy of multiculturalism, all cultures are allowed equivalence to ours,” ­Senator Hanson said. “Surely ­opposing that is not racist, it’s ­common sense. We cannot be a multicultural society. We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural.” …

Senator Hanson … [vowed] to take a heavy-handed approach to the regulation of artificial intelligence, overhaul the tax and industrial relations systems, abolish the SBS, end free ABC in the cities, audit spending in the childcare sector and dismantle all spending on climate change programs. …

Despite vowing to slash government spending to provide room for tax cuts, Senator Hanson said the government’s proposed NDIS reforms might cut off people who “really do need the help”. …

Arguing that Western civilisation and its values were under siege, she said Islamic hate preachers were a “social cancer”. …

Finally gets a go:

Senator Hanson[‘s] address was her first to the press club in a 30-year political career. …

Senator Hanson said she had not changed her views since first being elected to parliament in 1996 …

All the correct people hate her:

The One Nation leader, who attributed One Nation’s surging popularity to a public that was “sick and tired of being ignored”, drew immediate criticism from Labor, the Greens and regional allies for an incendiary address at the National Press Club. …

Foreign Minister Penny Wong said the speech highlighted the fact Senator Hanson was offering “division and anger” with no ­answers, while Liberal frontbencher James McGrath said it amounted to a “series of grumbles and complaints”. …

Greens leader Larissa Waters labelled the speech as “incoherent hatred” that “offered nothing more than the same tired Islamophobia, transphobia, racism and protection racket for fossil fuels we’ve heard from her for decades”.

Musk Supports Nuremberg-Style Trials After UK Rape-Gang Inquiry Release

Musk Supports Nuremberg-Style Trials After UK Rape-Gang Inquiry Release. By Remix News.

After Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe released the Rape Gang Inquiry Report, … , SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk agreed with calls for Nuremberg-style trials for the perpetrators and those who enabled the heinous attacks. …

“The politicians who turned a blind eye to the Rape of Britain must go to prison.” …

Heinous crimes:

The report makes for difficult reading. It found that the victims were typically between eight to 12 years old.

Children were forced to have sex with dogs and beaten with bats, which were then inserted into them anally and vaginally.

In one case, a little girl’s tongue was nailed to the wall so she could not move while she was being raped by multiple men.

It was also found that police were warning rapists that they were being reported in order to threaten the victims into stopping their reports. In other instances, police participated in the gang rapes themselves.

One girl was raped by between 30 to 80 men, most of whom were never charged by British authorities.

In another case, a little girl was told: “If you don’t come back, I’m going to rape your little sister instead.”

When one mother tried to call for help, a British police officer told her: “You should be happy your daughter is experiencing a different culture.” He then hung up on her.

Another girl was blinded by acid while trying to escape one of the rape gangs. …

 

“This is my mom who was beaten by Pakistani men who want me dead because I spoke out about them raping me from 12 years old.” — Correne – Telford Survivor

 

These grooming gangs primarily consisted of Africans, Indians, Gypsies, Asians, and Muslims … An additional expert commentary included statement from Dr. Taj Hargey, an imam at the Oxford Islamic Congregation. He noted that virtually every individual in these grooming gangs appeared to be Muslim, estimating that 95 percent of those involved are of Muslim faith. …

The grooming gangs are also operating in other countries, including France on a massive scale, but also such cases are arising in Germany. …

Guilty ruling class:

The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan repeatedly insisted there were no grooming gangs operating in the city….

While Sir Keir Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions, it has been reported that 13,000 suspected rape gang members and paedophiles were let off with warning letters. …

The whole ruling class is guilty, which is why the media keeps so very quiet.

Concerned Citizen:

One of the UK Rape Gang Victims publicly spoke about her life shattering ordeal – and then British Police arrested her for it within 30 minutes and sent her to prison. —

Rupert Lowe, inquiry chairman:

“Vulnerable working class white girls were treated like a piece of meat. Raped, abused, tortured, murdered. It was a racial attack, and it was a coordinated attack. All across Britain. They targeted these girls because they were vulnerable, they were young, they were white. Until the political class accepts that fact, nothing will EVER change.”

And Britain’s PM? Look over there: