Links - 4th May 2024 (2)

This is what partying in your 30s is like. #otk #otknetwork #otk&co - YouTube - *Vacuum sucking up mess on floor*

Meme - Muslim man with rifle: "Come on, take off your burqa and fulfill your marital duties."
Grim Reaper: "I think there is a misunderstanding here"

Meme - "King Abdullah II is direct descendants of prophet Muhammad and this is his family. Whatever happened to wearing hijab and burqa? *uncovered women*"

Meme - Boy: "Mum why do you wear the hijab?"
Woman: "Because it's my choice sweetie!"
Boy: "What happens if you don't want to wear it anymore?"
Woman: "First, your daddy will kick me in the gut. My family will disown me and friends will talk shit about me. After I die Allah will burn me in hell"

Katharine Birbalsingh says she was forced to stop Muslim prayers after racial harassment of teachers - "Ms Birbalsingh said the school’s governing body decided to stop prayer rituals when some pupils started them “against a backdrop of events including violence, intimidation and appalling racial harassment of our teachers”... a High Court heard that the school had taken action on prayers because of concerns about a “culture shift” over “segregation between religious groups and intimidation within the group of Muslim pupils”... The school’s actions were based on teachers’ conversations with pupils over certain incidents, such as hearing about a Muslim girl who had dropped out of the school choir because she was told it was “haram”, or forbidden, he added.  “A number of children had been told that they were “bad Muslims” for not praying and had begun to pray,” Mr Coppel said in his written arguments.  He told the court that the school is “exceptionally successful” academically, “highly oversubscribed”, “aggressively” promotes integration, is run with “military precision” and uses an “ultra-strict enforcement of prescribed behavioural rules”. Ms Birbalsingh said the decision to ban prayer rituals “restored calm and order to the school”. She said: “We have always been clear to parents and pupils that when they apply to Michaela that because of our restrictive building combined with our strict ethos that does not allow children to wander around the school unsupervised, we cannot have a prayer room.”  She added: “We believe it is wrong to separate children according to religion or race, and that it is our duty to protect all of our children and provide them with an environment which is free from bullying, intimidation or harassment.  “Multiculturalism can only succeed when we understand that every group must make sacrifices for the sake of the whole.” Michaela school was ranked top in the country last year for “Progress 8”, a measure of how much a secondary school has helped pupils improve since primary school.  Ms Birbalsingh said that to achieve its results, the school “must be a place where children buy into something they all share and that is bigger than themselves: our country”. About 30 pupils began praying in the school’s “wet” and “dirty” yard in March last year, using blazers to kneel as they were not permitted to bring in prayer mats, the hearing at the High Court was told.  The court heard the school was targeted on social media with “threats of violence”, abuse, “false” allegations of Islamophobia, and a “bomb hoax”, but that the situation had since “calmed”."
Clearly, the problem is the school discriminating against Muslims. Muslim students religiously bullying other Muslims and enforcing religious segregation is no problem at all, because that's religious freedom, and condemning that is Islamophobia

The Michaela Community School ‘prayer ban’: facing the awkward realities of a multicultural society - "Having opened in 2014, the school achieves consistently high grades and defies expectations and statistical averages attached to children the from lower income and deprived backgrounds that the school typically takes. Around 80 per cent of its sixth form students go on to the country’s best universities, and it has been lauded with praise by Ofsted and the government. Accordingly, its pupils have achieved better progress in their learning than any other school in the country.   Noted for its unorthodox methods by contemporary standards – which in fact follow a more traditional approach – Michaela prioritises discipline, silence and authority. Birbalsingh has been dubbed “Britain’s strictest headmistress” because her students walk mutely in single file around the school and students’ eyes have to be fixated on the teacher during lesson time. Random socialising is strongly discouraged – there is no group work; groups who gather at break-time are capped at a maximum of four people. It’s quite something. And its results are hard to disagree with... The Church has consistently supported (and built upon) the liberal arts approach historically. That Michaela’s students are mandated to read Shakespeare and learn poetry by heart is one heartening aspect of the school’s methods... Students all eat vegetarian meals at lunch – to avoid conflict. And Jehovah’s Witness children are forced to read literary materials with the class which contain magic: something they’re typically not permitted to do... “the school observed a child starting to wear a headscarf who had not previously done so... The school decided to ban “prayer rituals” and what followed by way of protest against that decision included a bomb threat, a brick thrown through a teacher’s window, and a number of personally aimed threats which left some teachers “fearing for their lives”."
Clearly, the school must be forced to change even though students choose to go there. And when the results go down, this will be the school's fault for discrimination and stigma

Michaela School made being Muslim seem toxic, former pupil says - "Sarah said she too received insensitive comments from staff when she chose to start wearing a hijab during her time at the school.  "I do remember a teacher asking me if I was forced to wear it and it just shocked me so much," she said.  She explained it made her feel staff believe that "Muslim kids wearing a hijab or practising their faith cannot come out of pure will; they're doing it because they're oppressed or pressured"."
Obviously, there're no countries in the world where Muslim women are forced to wear the hijab, and in other countries, no Muslim women are forced to do so either

Father says killed daughter in hijab case - "A teenager who was said to have clashed with her father about whether she should wear a traditional Muslim head scarf died of injuries late on Monday, and her father told police he had killed her. Aqsa Parvez, 16, was found without a pulse in her home in Mississauga earlier on Monday. She was resuscitated by paramedics, treated at two hospitals, and later succumbed to her injuries, police said on Tuesday. Her father, 57-year-old Muhammad Parvez, has been charged with murder... The victim's brother, Waqas Parvez, 26, was arrested and charged with obstructing police... Others were quoted as saying the girl wore traditional Muslim dress when leaving the house in the morning, but would change into other clothes in school washrooms."
From 2007. Damn Islamophobia! Clearly the father was lying, because we know no Muslim women, especially not in developed countries, are forced to wear the hijab

Meme - "Dating Companies HATE Him. See how this young man with NO game met 72 virgins-Using one simple life hack *teen suicide bomber*"

Accurate machine learning prediction of sexual orientation based on brain morphology and intrinsic functional connectivity - " We found an average accuracy of 62% (±6.72) for predicting sexual orientation based on GMV and an average predictive accuracy of 92% (±9.89) using RSFC. Regions in the precentral gyrus, precuneus and the prefrontal cortex were significantly informative for distinguishing heterosexual from homosexual participants in both the GMV and RSFC settings."
MRI prediction of sexual orientation

Canadian MPs the world's second-best paid politicians after raise - "On the same day Canadians will see an increase in the federal carbon tax, MPs will also see a little extra on their pay stubs. And with that April Fool’s Day pay increase, Canadian parliamentarians will become the second-best paid elected officials in the world after Americans... Eighty per cent of Canadians oppose the automatic April 1 MP pay increase... Under legislation, parliamentarians’ raises are based on average wage increases granted by large public sector companies. Salaries for MPs are overseen by the House’s Board of Internal Economy — a shadowy committee chaired by the Speaker and consisting of privy council members and senior opposition party members... The United States pays elected members of Congress an average of US$174,000 annually ($236,433). That’s now followed by Canada’s new MP salary of $203,100, followed by Israeli Knesset members ($200,700), Australian MPs ($200,175), and Singapore’s parliamentarians ($192,500)."

A single act of courage is needed to fix Canada's tax system, but this government won't do it - "You know there’s a problem when seasoned tax specialists consistently struggle with new legislation. Combine this with the fact that anyone can call themselves a “tax specialist” (when they’re not and so the public is left to fend for themselves), and the consequences of being wrong are not good... Legislation that treats otherwise honest Canadians in a fashion that is extremely punitive does not encourage them to comply and can actually do the opposite. For example, the new legislation on short-term rentals (which will deny otherwise legitimate expense deductions against rental income in areas that prohibit such activity) is a great example. This kind of legislation is so obviously designed to be a short-term political “win” for the government and make them look good to their voter base, but it ignores good public policy. This is dangerous for Canada. Those who followed the Underused Housing Tax and bare trust-reporting debacles will know that legislation was introduced that ignored the concerns and feedback of many in the tax community, only to then have the government backtrack on some of the sharper edges of both pieces of legislation. In both cases, the backtracking occurred very late in the process and after a massive amount of effort was wasted by taxpayers and their advisers... This country’s personal tax rates are much too high , extremely punitive and discourage many from taking much-needed entrepreneurial risks. High rates discourage the best and the brightest from coming to Canada and have caused a flurry of successful Canadians to leave the country . These high rates are a real drag on our country’s serious productivity challenges and they need to change... The tax system massively redistributes wealth by introducing credits and cash rebates (such as the Canada Child Benefit, GST credits, carbon tax rebates, pharmacare, dental care, etc.) that all require the filing of a tax return in order to be eligible for them. Such credits, while lauded by some, are simple Robin Hood wealth redistribution schemes that ultimately redistribute tax revenues generated from the so-called rich to lower-income residents. Without automatic tax filing , many lower-income people who would likely be eligible for such credits do not receive such amounts since many are intimidated by the tax system... It won’t happen under this current federal government, disappointingly, but the single act of courage required to fix our tax system is tax reform and review "

Shi Pei Pu, The Chinese Opera Singer Turned Spy - "In 1964, Bernard Boursicot, an employee of the French embassy in Beijing, met a beautiful opera singer named Shi Pei Pu at a Christmas party. The two immediately hit it off, and soon embarked on a secret 18-year-long love affair. But under Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, Chinese people were forbidden to mix with foreigners, and eventually, Boursicot agreed to trade embassy secrets to the Chinese government in order to continue seeing Shi. In 1983, the French government arrested the pair for espionage. It was only then that the truth finally emerged: Shi was not a woman, as Shi had told Boursicot for the duration of the affair. During their trial, Shi identified himself as a man. For nearly 20 years, he explained, he had convinced Boursicot that he was a woman by hiding his genitals and insisting on having sex only in the dark. He even secretly adopted a child to present as their biological son... Shi learned French while growing up in the city of Kunming, which has a strong French influence. He attended Yunnan University, majoring in literature. By the age of 17, he had gained local recognition as an opera singer, often playing female roles. Bernard Boursicot was born in France in 1944. Throughout his youth, he attended boarding schools, where he had same-sex relationships with several fellow students. But by the time he arrived in Beijing at the age of 20, he was seeking a relationship with a woman, believing his relations with men were just a “schoolboy’s game.”... At first, Boursicot and Shi’s relationship was strictly platonic, as Boursicot was still determined to find a female partner. Then, Shi told him a tale called “The Story of the Butterfly” about a schoolgirl in ancient China named Zhu who dresses as a boy so she can attend school... Shi explained that his paternal grandmother had given his mother a decree: If she did not give the family a son, Shi’s father would have to take a second wife. When Shi was born, they realized the baby was a girl. Not wanting to lose her place in the household, Shi’s mother and the midwife made a pact to raise the baby as a boy and keep the real identity secret from Shi’s grandmother. Shi had been living as a man ever since. Realizing that Shi was a woman, Boursicot suddenly saw her in a whole new light — and realized they could now pursue a romantic and sexual relationship. At first, their romance was strained and cold. Whenever they had sex, it was always hurried, under cover of darkness. Meanwhile, Shi continued to dress and live as a man publicly. It was only ever with Boursicot that she lived as a woman... Boursicot would not meet his son for years. During that time, at great risk to his own safety, he continued to visit Shi under the guise that she was teaching him about the Cultural Revolution. One day, Shi told Boursicot that a Beijing city government representative would be taking over as Boursicot’s teacher. A man named Kang soon showed up at Shi’s house while Boursicot was visiting. Sensing that Kang was a police officer, Boursicot offered the Chinese government something in exchange for continuing his relationship with Shi. “How can I help the people?” Boursicot asked Kang. “If, for example, we had news at the embassy…” Thus began Boursicot’s work as a spy for the Chinese government... Shi later claimed to not have any knowledge of Boursicot’s espionage... In prison, medical examinations showed Shi had intact male genitalia. Shi demonstrated to doctors how he was able to hide his genitals during sex to convince Boursicot he was a woman. Later, Shi testified in court that he was a man... Distraught over the lies he had been told for nearly 20 years, Boursicot attempted suicide in his prison cell while awaiting trial. Thankfully, he survived. But he never quite forgave Shi Pei Pu. Both Shi Pei Pu and Bernard Boursicot were convicted of espionage and sentenced to six years in prison. But less than one year later, Shi received a presidential pardon. Reportedly, the French government did not want to endanger relations with China over a “very silly” case. Boursicot received a pardon a few months later."

Germans Save More, Yet Retire Poorer: A Financial Enigma - "German savers have little choice when it comes to the actual investment of capital. For example, pension funds are not allowed to invest more than 35 percent of their capital in stocks. Ebert says that “the nominal guarantee of contributions prescribed by politics systematically destroys the return.”... These are not the only stumbling blocks in the German company pension. The situation with taxes is similarly unfavorable"

The best Lord of the Rings Easter eggs are quotes hidden in dialogue - "Tom Bombadil, who appears early in the novel version of The Fellowship of the Ring and baffles lore experts, and one of the distinctive ents of The Two Towers, the (relatively) sprightly Quickbeam, are two characters who wound up cut from the movies. But Boyens, et al. honored them by slipping their dialogue into the mouth Treebeard - another guardian of nature. In addition to singing Quickbeam’s song (“O rowan mine!”), Treebeard also speaks aloud some narration from Tom Bombadil’s chapter, with his line about the “destroyers and usurpers!” who go about biting, breaking, and burning the pristine wilderness. Tricks like that highlight just how much restructuring of the story Jackson had to do as a director to keep the story in the shape of a film trilogy rather than a novel trilogy... In some cases, Boyens, Jackson, and Walsh chose quiet moments where Tolkien’s prose could breathe, and better evoke the books’ bittersweet tone. Frodo’s lament to Gandalf about wishing he were not the one to live to see such times has become a memetic touchstone, especially during this past year of constant doom and gloom. Jackson plucked it out of an exposition-heavy chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring and found a quiet moment for it, as Gandalf and Frodo rest in Moria, a lull before a major swell of action. It’s not unlike another lull during the movies’ climactic siege of Minas Tirith, when Gandalf and Pippin take a breather and Gandalf soothes his fears about death. He actually sneaks in a line of narration from the very end of The Return of the King, describing the last thing Frodo sees aboard the ship as it bears him to the shores of Valinor: “white shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.” Jackson and his co-writers also made a valiant effort to preserve the many songs and poems that pepper Tolkien’s work but that would have absolutely torpedoed the pacing of the movies. On his way into the Shire in The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf sings the song that is so often reprised throughout the series, “The Road goes ever on and on…,” for instance. Particularly dramatic, too, is a poem of Rohan that begins “Where now are the horse and the rider?”, originally recited by Aragorn in The Two Towers as he, Legolas and Gimli arrive in the land of the horse lords. In the movies, Theoden delivers a portion of it in solemn voiceover over a montage of characters gearing up for the siege of Helm’s Deep. It’s a change that shows a deep understanding of the text, tying Theoden’s character to his culture, and in a way perfectly in line with its fatalistic theme... The extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring includes one short scene that sets up a major callback to the novels for Aragorn’s character. In an early scene in Rivendell, he visits his mother’s grave. Readers would know that Aragorn’s mother lived a hard life, hiding from a dark lord bent on killing her son. And so, when Elrond visits Aragorn at the end of The Return of the King to deliver the sword Anduril (a scene that does not happen in the books in the same way or at the same time), it means even more than some viewers may know when he says “I give hope to Men” and Aragorn answers, “I keep none for myself.” Those two lines are a paraphrasing of the poem Aragorn’s mother spoke to him the last time he saw her alive. Put in context with the extended edition scene by the grave, Elrond’s visit isn’t just handing off a plot device: He’s admonishing Aragorn to remember his duty. It’s a triumph of the film adaptations that scenes like this sometimes feel like improvements on the original work."

Police detain firebrand Umno Youth chief who led boycott calls on 'Allah' socks controversy - "Police have detained Umno Youth chief Dr Muhamad Akmal Saleh, who has been leading boycott calls against local convenience store chain KK Mart, over the sale of several socks with “Allah” wording printed on them... Three weeks ago, at the start of the socks issue, Dr Akmal had also posted a photo on Instagram of him bearing a Japanese sword. His caption said he would not change his stance for anything and he “preferred to die standing than living on his knees”."

Agong angry about ‘Allah’ socks issue - "The Yang di-Pertuan Agong Sultan Ibrahim has expressed his displeasure at the controversy surrounding the sale of socks bearing the word “Allah” at convenience stores. In a Facebook post, the king called for stern action to be taken against those responsible... Police have received 36 reports about the socks and are investigating the matter for causing disharmony and misusing network facilities. Earlier today, the vendor firm that supplied the socks to KK Mart said it was considering legal action for negligence against its supplier in China. Xin Jian Chang Sdn Bhd, a local company based in Johor, said its supplier had admitted that the socks were included “by mistake”."

Harvard and its peers should be embarrassed about how few students they educate - The Washington Post - "Ivy League colleges grew by 14 percent over the last 30 years, lagging far behind the 44 percent rise in the number of high school graduates. Many well-known public universities have expanded the number of students they serve without sacrificing quality. For example, the University of Michigan’s enrollment has increased by 35 percent since 1990, but that has not caused it to lose its place among the top 25 schools in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of national universities"
When you don't understand the value of signalling

CoderPad and CodinGame State of Tech Hiring 2024 - "36% of developers say they’re not interested in taking on managerial responsibilities."

A Harvard career adviser explains how managers can bridge the Gen-Z generation gap at work - "When I survey students on what they want from their careers, they overwhelmingly tell me they want financial stability and work/life balance. Only about 2% of any student audience I survey wants to climb the corporate ladder."
This seems to contradict what he claims about Gen Z not being different

Millennials and Gen Z Like to Splurge on Groceries Over Anything Else - "Gen Z, meanwhile, says the money they choose to spend on high-quality snacks and beverages makes for expensive grocery bills. One 23-year-old Gen Zer told Business Insider by text that he spends about $130 for a week and a half on groceries. "Fancy sodas and drinks" and "random snacks at Trader Joe's" account for the bulk of the bill. He also said he spent about $35 on protein bars. The success of the canned water brand Liquid Death also shows how young people are willing to spend on flashy food and beverages. The brand recently shot up to a valuation of $1.4 billion thanks to a recent round of funding, according to Forbes. Peter Pham, an investor in Liquid Death, previously told Business Insider that part of the brand's success comes from its appeal to younger generations."

Meme - "The vet suggested a shirt instead of a cone for my cat. Fun Fact: Most Cats wear baby sizes 0-3 months."

Meme - Girl: "I didn't say "Let's play doctor." I said, "Let's play Civil War doctor." *ready to saw off boy's leg*"

Why lesbians flock to Lesbos - "Joanna Savva, a local travel agent, estimates that 3,000-4,000 gay women now visit Eresos every summer, up from under 1,000 a couple of decades ago. The village has only 1,500 full-time residents, but three lesbian bars. Hundreds of tourists attend a women’s festival every September, where activities range from political discussions to beach parties... Although locals on Lesbos are now friendly towards lesbian visitors, this was not always the case. Homophobia used to be widespread. Ten years ago, three islanders even tried to reclaim the word “lesbian”: they unsuccessfully demanded that Greek courts ban its use to describe gay women. But attitudes have since softened considerably, as lesbian tourists have filled hotels, bars and restaurants in Eresos. As Ms Savva puts it, “People here have learnt the value of the pink dollar.”... Lesbos is not the only Greek island to attract gay tourists. Nearby Mykonos has developed a reputation as a frenetic party hotspot for gay men. But with acceptance of homosexuality growing across the rich world, some wonder if places like these will appeal to future generations of gay travellers. Lillian Jensen, the Norwegian owner of a lesbian bar in Eresos, says many younger lesbians “want to go to more mainstream places”. But for now, she remains optimistic about Eresos’s prospects. “There’s nowhere else in Europe quite like it,” she says."
From 2018

Russian Mentality / Working Under Pressure / Slave Leia

Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇦🇹🇼 @DrewPavlou: "Russian police proudly film themselves cutting off a suspect’s ear and forcing him to eat it. I hate terrorists but this is just savagery. Medieval barbarism. Our civilisations are very distinct."

𝔻𝕒𝕧𝕚𝕕 𝕄𝕔𝕁𝕠𝕪𝕟𝕥💪🏾 @DavidGabaocoe_: "In case you think you're working under pressure *Kim Jong Un watching stressed guy working on computer*"

Slave Leia: "Alright guys! Give me my clothes... You rescued me THREE DAYS AGO!!"

Links - 4th May 2024 (1 - Hamas Attack Oct 2023: College Campuses)

Iranian professor makes chilling prediction about American college students after pro-Palestine rioting: 'These are our people' - "An Iranian academic claims pro-Palestine protesters that have taken over American universities would support Iran in a war with the US. Tehran University Professor Foad Izadi who was educated in America, declared 'these are our people' in an interview with Iranian state TV station IRIB Ofogh on April 26. He said Iran's brutal Islamic dictatorship, which he he claimed to be part of, was cheering on the protests from coast to coast in the US... Izadi also claimed in the interview, translated and posted online by the Middle East Research Institute, that Iran had Hezbollah-like militant cells hiding in the US... Izadi claimed Iran it could do more damage to the US with an armed militant group than it did in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has caused chaos for decades. 'Personally, I think that the potential to repeat in the US what Iran did in Lebanon is much higher,' he said. 'Our Hezbollah-style groups in America are much larger than what we have in Lebanon. 'American is the Great Satan and our main enemy, but we have hope in these areas.'"

NYPD ripped down Palestinian flag at City College and hoisted Old Glory - as cops arrest pro-Palestinian protesters who smashed their way into Columbia University building - "New York City cops ripped down a Palestine flag that had been hoisted above City College and replaced it with the American flag, after officers arrested nearly 300 people in a night of chaos on campuses throughout the city... 173 people were arrested from City College, in Harlem, while 119 were arrested at Columbia on charges of trespassing, criminal mischief and burglary. Hundreds of officers stormed Columbia, with officers going through an upstairs window of Hamilton Hall, after students barricaded themselves inside. Protestors, many of whom covered their faces with masks or keffiyehs, were then marched out unmasked and loaded onto three awaiting NYPD buses. Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday morning, Mayor Eric Adams berated the schools for allowing the flying of the flag... Adams said that one person identified by authorities was 'married to someone that was arrested for terrorism' but would not elaborate further when questioned. During a press conference, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban showed off one of the chains used to secure Hamilton Hall, saying it explained why it was necessary for police to storm the building. In a statement released on Wednesday afternoon directed at the University community, President Shafik praised the NYPD. Shafik said: 'Early Tuesday morning, tensions on our campus rose to new heights when a small group of protestors broke into Hamilton Hall, barricaded themselves inside, and occupied it throughout the day... As the buses left the scene crowds that had gathered to watch cheered as the protestors were finally led away from the university. The NYPD said that those who occupied Hamilton Hall would be charged with third-degree burglary, criminal mischief and trespassing. Those who had been camped out on the lawn at the university meanwhile would face trespassing and disorderly conduct charges... Pictures and video taken of the aftermath show the hall's trashed interior strewn with activists' belongings. Pictures show how chairs and desks had been turned upside down to become makeshift barriers inside Hamilton Hall. The cost of damage to the building is likely to total thousands of dollars. The occupation followed weeks of unrest at Columbia, which began with the establishment of the encampment on April 17."
We are still told that left wingers don't hate their countries
Given how radical many of the students are, blaming this all on "outside agitators" is just a way to save face
More "censorship" of "pro-Palestinian" "speech"!

Who's really behind the campus protests? Expensive tents, giant banners and adult agitators who have nothing to do with the schools where they're causing anarchy make expert think the uproar in America is a 'professional job' - "Organized encampments have appeared across the country's most respected universities after first showing up at Columbia in New York City. Violent clashes between protesters and police have followed at various schools including UCLA and the University of Texas at Austin. Many have pointed fingers at a company called Crowds on Demand, which provides paid protesters as a service, accusing it of hiring left-wing agitators to manufacture the movement... CEO Adam Swart denied that his company has any involvement with the protests, and has actually denied requests from both sides... While his company is not taking the jobs, Swart believes someone is, because as an expert on this type of operation, he recognizes the telltale signs pointing to big money behind a cause, like similar tents and expensive banners seen at Columbia University over the last week. 'I do, to be clear, think there is money behind the pro-Palestine protests - 100 percent. I'm just saying we're staying out of it,' he said. Swart said it's possible for tax-exempt advocacy organizations to not disclose their donors, and thus anyone could be funding their causes, opening the door to enemy foreign powers like China or Russia to sow discord in the US... The People's Forum, a tax-exempt advocacy group who often hosts propaganda events for the regimes of countries like Venezuela and Cuba, has been accused of being behind the Columbia protests. The Washington Free Beacon reports the group, which has received $12million from Goldman Sachs, may have provided materials for the so-called occupation of Hamilton Hall. Over 100 masked activists met at the group's Manhattan headquarters, a base for all kinds of leftist activism, to plan their moves on Monday, participating in breakout sessions that taught 'resistance' methods. There, People’s Forum executive director Manolo De Los Santos told the group to 'give Joe Biden a hot summer' and 'make it untenable for the politics of usual to take place in this country.' He then claimed 'Zionist' Columbia administrators 'want to be more like their masters in Israel.' Daniel DiMartino, a PhD student at Columbia and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told DailyMail.com The People's Forum is a group that aims to lobby for enemies of the US. 'The People's Forum is one of several foreign-funded organizations whose goal is to create havoc in America and defend tyrannical regimes like China's, Russia's, Cuba's and Venezuela's,' the Venezuela native said. 'I saw it firsthand when they hosted employees and officials from the Venezuelan socialist regime in 2022 in New York City. They don't care about human rights, not of Palestinians or Jews and certainly not of Venezuelans.' The New York Times reported last year that the Chinese Community Party was indirectly funding the People's Forum. Meanwhile New York mayor Eric Adams has warned that outside agitators have been instructing students as they took over Hamilton hall in Columbia... A video shown by the mayor shows Lisa Fithian, an infamous agitator at US protests for over half a century, showing protesters how to occupy a building. Adams called Fithian 'the nation's best-known protest consultant', noting she gets paid as much as $300 a day to run demonstrations and teach how to take over streets during protests. CNN has reported that at least half of demonstrators at Columbia are not affiliated with the university... ‘They were throwing water on the police, hurling insults, throwing water bottles, they were definitely provoking the cops to a confrontation,' he said... Most of the protests across the US campuses have been partly organized by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a campus group with more than 250 chapters across the country. SJP was founded by UC Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian, who has repeatedly justified terror attacks against Israel and Intifada (uprising) in the US. Just days after the October 7 attacks, Bazian shared a video titled: 'Here's why Hamas says its attack on Israel wasn't unprovoked.' The Detroit Free Press once quoted him as saying: 'The Day of Judgment will not happen until the trees and stones will say, "Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him."' Bazian also once apologized after sharing a cartoon of a stereotypical Orthodox Jewish man celebrating the murder and rape of Palestinians and another of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un wearing a kippah and demanding money from the U.S. The group has received millions from several charities with alleged links to Hamas, per a report by the think tank Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). The ISGAP report asserts that SJP has become an effective and well-funded network for organizing protests around the country, but that its failure to register as a charity or formal organization left its funding sources and operations murky and unregulated. Hints of financial backing could be seen at the Columbia 'Gaza Solidarity Encampment', including students erecting several identical high-end tents costing hundreds of dollars each, and handing out free Dunkin' Donuts coffee, $12.50 sandwiches from Pret-a-Manger and $10 rotisserie chickens to participants. The nonprofits funding SJP include the Westchester People's Action Coalition (WESPAC), Tides, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), its parent organization Americans for Justice in Palestine (AJP), and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). The ISGAP report said SJP had the closest financial links with WESPAC, which acts as a 'financial sponsor' for the organization, routing tax-free donations through its accounts to SJP chapters. The report said SJP also gets extensive organizational aid from American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a nonprofit under investigation by the Virginia attorney general and accused of being a reincarnation of a charity found liable for funding Hamas."
Money supporting protests is only bad when it hurts the left wing agenda
Time for the left wingers to complain about police agents provocateurs and false flags, even though they openly celebrate violence and revolution

Student protesters at McGill encampment determined to stay after judge rejects injunction - "McGill and the students requesting the injunction raised concerns about behaviour they described as antisemitic. On Tuesday, the university shared a video with CBC News that shows protesters chanting "all the Zionists are racist, all the Zionists are the terrorists," as well as "go back to Europe.""
Weird. I thought it was racist to tell immigrants to go back home. Much less people who were born in a place, or indigenous people. But this is left wing logic, after all

William Watson: So much for universities' 'quiet and still air of delightful studies' - "Chiselled into the entryway to McLennan Library at McGill University, not far from where pro-Palestinian demonstrators have literally set up camp — 75 tents worth by Tuesday — is an inscription from Milton: In the quiet and still air of delightful studies. (“Milton who?” the 21st-century student asks. John Milton, DWEM, that is: dead white European male. Check him out in the Wikipedia entry on freedom of speech, which he kind of invented.) With bullhorns and chants blaring, the air isn’t as still or quiet as it used to be. The full quote is: “Beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.” Truth, usually written “truth,” is a maligned concept in the universities these days. Truth is no longer bright but murky and relative. We all supposedly have our own truth, though in giving voice to it we often forget this multiplicity and insist our opponents accept our version — and be secularly damned if they don’t. Above another McGill doorway, the law faculty’s, the inscription is: “Audi alteram partem,” Latin for “Hear the other side,” which is what courts do and which is a key part of working toward truth. Of course, McGill’s law professors have now unionized so presumably they will be replacing that with “Workers of the world unite!” or “Free the academic wage slaves!” or some such. In any case, taking care to hear the other side is not something many of us do these days... For many years now universities have abandoned pure reflection and Milton’s delightful studies to presume to tell society how it should be behaving — outside advice many segments of society quite reasonably resent. Universities’ record at self-government is nowhere near as sterling as all the brainpower involved should have produced. “University disciplinary procedures” is almost an oxymoron. In my years teaching, profs who reported students for plagiarism or other forms of cheating were never told how cases were resolved — privacy concerns, you understand — though faculties produced summary reports every year end. Punishment always seemed insubstantial to me. The one exception was where alleged sexual offences were concerned and hearings typically devolved not to “He said, she said” but to “She said, he presumably lied in response.” The term “sexual assault” is used, unhelpfully, to cover a wide range of offences. Those that aren’t merely “micro-aggressions” and innocuous should be and are crimes. Universities should not be prosecuting crimes. That’s what the police and courts are for. They have strict rules they actually follow about hearing the other side... Protesters/campers who say they won’t leave until the university does this or that — in this case divest from “complicity” in “genocide” — are engaged in extortion, not expression... Henry David Thoreau actually spent a night in jail before writing Civil Disobedience. Martin Luther King wrote one of his most famous messages from inside a real Birmingham jail. People who practice their civil disobedience only if assured there will be no sanctions against them aren’t really to be taken seriously."

Biden finally condemns pro-Palestinian agitators 'destroying' college campuses but won't send in the National Guard: 'There's the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos' - "Officers ripped apart an umbrella one activist tried to use as a shield while the crowd chanted 'peaceful protest.' 'Leave the campus, this is a f*****g school. This is a f*****g school, what are you doing, this is a school, we f*****g learn. I got to learn about public health,' one protester shouted... A top Jewish group on Columbia's campus reported that Jewish students were being told to 'go back to Poland' and 'stop killing children' by pro-Palestinian demonstrators."
Apparently "learning" involves illegally occupation and anti-Semitism
"Anti-Zionism" means all Jews are collectively responsible for what Israel supposedly does. But if you hold Muslims collectively responsible for Islamist terrorism, that is Islamophobia, of course

Australian National University protesters declare ‘unconditional support’ for Hamas - "Student organisers of an anti-Israel protest camp at the Australian National University have declared that Hamas “deserve our unconditional support” while saying they “do not condemn” the October 7 terror attacks... Two of the organisers, Beatrice Tucker and Luke Harrison, spoke to ABC Radio Canberra on Tuesday when Drive host Ross Solly repeatedly pressed them to condemn Hamas, which is formally listed as a terrorist organisation by the Australian government... “I will not condemn what Hamas did,” Ms Tucker said. “We must be unconditional but we must be critical also.”... Solly asked whether the organisers had any concerns about “how you might be making Jewish students feel on campus”.  Mr Harrison replied that he was a Jewish student and “the organisation of this encampment has been so focused on making it a safe space for everyone, including Jewish students”... In a statement on Wednesday, Mr Harrison said “in the moment” he “did not give sufficient thought to the question the journalist had raised”.  “On further reflection I withdraw my statement and wish to say the following,” he said.  “I think it’s important I clarify my comments of yesterday. The issues are complex and difficult and I want to make clear that I condemn what happened on October 7 and endorse the SRC statement from March 2024.”"
We'll still be told that no one supports Hamas, and that no one supports terrorism
As usual, "critical" means "critical theory"
Another anti-Israel Jew

Anti-Semitic tensions at ANU: Jewish Students allege abuse - "One pro-Israel protester told The Canberra Times that she heard people saying "f--k the Jews"...  "To make matters worse, this encampment exists directly in front of a student residence, Fenner Hall, making it impossible for students living there to escape the protests - it is not only where they study, but their home."  Members of the Jewish students' society said they felt betrayed by the ANU students' union "who endorse the encampment, despite the anti-Semitic messages being sent from many of the protesters"... the Jewish students said that at least one pro-Palestine protester confronted them and made out-and-out virulently anti-Semitic remarks."
ANU investigating reports of Nazi salute, death threats against Jewish students on campus as pro-Palestine encampment continues
Weird. I thought this never happens

Sabiha Khan on X - "Moments ago Zionists through a backpack full of mice into the #UCLA encampment. Mice appear to have been injected with something. School admin is not protecting students. @SanaSaeed @PplsCityCouncil @AJEnglish @CAIRNational @abierkhatib @SuppressedNws @BTnewsroom @ACatWithNews"
mirax on X - "Stupid mfing hamasniks were all for rats being released into fastfood restaurants as "protests" a hot second ago. Now squealing about biological warfare."
UK Man Arrested For Releasing Live Rats In McDonald's In Pro-Palestine Protest - "A man has been arrested in the United Kingdom for allegedly releasing live mice into a number of McDonald's restaurants in Birmingham. According to The Guardian, the 32-year-old was detained over the incidents in what appear to be protests related to the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Police said that they are still investigating the three separate incidents in the region where live rats were thrown into the fast food venues, and were also looking for a second man, 30-year-old Billal Hussain.   A video going viral on social media showed a man with what appears to be a Palestinian flag draped around his head. In the clip, he is seen carrying the rodents from the boot of his car into the McDonald's and tipping them on the floor, in front of customers."

FIRE president Greg Lukianoff on how to determine when protest goes too far - "at Yale University, police officers arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters who set up an encampment on school grounds, one of a growing number of organized demonstrations on college campuses across America. While the protests are ostensibly aimed at supporting Palestinian civilians amidst the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, there have been numerous reported instances of protesters engaging in the intimidation and harassment of Jewish students and faculty...
Since October 7th we’ve definitely seen a combination of clearly protected speech by pro-Palestinian students—speech that we’ve proudly defended because we are a nonpartisan organization; we will always defend people regardless of the content of their speech—but we’ve also seen an awful lot of assault, we’ve seen a lot of shout-downs, we’ve seen a lot of vandalism, and we’ve seen a lot of unprotected speech. It’s been accelerating for several months now.  Probably one of the worst places for this phenomenon has been Columbia University in New York City. What happened over the weekend, with the crackdown on the encampments that they had there, was interesting from a free speech standpoint, partially because you don’t have a First Amendment or free speech right to camp out on campus grounds. You have a protest right. But generally, every school in the country has rules that basically say, “No, you can’t camp here. You can’t turn this into your own encampment.” They just haven’t been enforcing them. So Columbia, to a degree, is paying the price for not actually fairly enforcing their rules, going far back.   Now, do I think that in the course of this, there are students engaged in protected speech who are getting in trouble? I have very little doubt that there are. And we want to know about those cases. But we’ve also seen, particularly at Columbia, examples of assault. Certainly examples of students being blocked and surrounded. Also, students engaging in things that, by pretty much any definition, would count as discriminatory harassment, which is a severe, persistent, and pervasive patterns of behaviour that a reasonable person would understand is discriminatory. And that’s something that we’ve seen, unfortunately, all over the country.  Now at Yale, we even know the student who was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag, and she had to go to the hospital for it. That obviously isn’t protected. I think that there was a chance for a lot of these schools to prevent a lot of this from escalating by simply, fairly, and evenly enforcing their rules from the very beginning. But in a lot of cases, they simply didn’t. One thing that readers really need to understand is that if you care about free speech on campus, you need to know that last year was the biggest year for deplatforming in recorded history, that we know of, on American college campuses. Deplatforming includes getting speakers disinvited and shout-downs. Yet this year, 2024, is going to blow 2023 out of the water, even just from shout-downs. And that has overwhelmingly come from pro-Palestinian students. Some of them have engaged in violence, including at Berkeley where they chased off an IDF speaker, for example, several weeks ago.   I sometimes see people arguing as if violence is just an extreme form of free speech. I always have to correct them like, “No, violence is the antithesis of what freedom of speech is for.”...  Students engaging in violence against their fellow students should be expelled. They deserve due process, but they should also be prosecuted because this is this has been getting out of hand for months now... I don’t think you have to really draw a line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. What you have to ask yourself is, is it discriminatory harassment? Is it a threat? Regardless of what line that falls under. So if you’re surrounding students and threatening them, for example, then it doesn’t matter if you’re calling out Israel or calling out Jews, it’s not protected. And nor should it be.  I think that’s one of the things that American law really gets right. It’s something that we call “the bedrock principle” in the United States, which is you can’t ban speech simply because it’s offensive. But you can ban patterns of behaviour that are discriminatory, for example, or you can ban speech that actually would place a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death. So we try to get out of evaluating the offensiveness of the expression and into a reasonable understanding of the behaviour. This is a way to not have to make judgments on whether or not we think one kind of speech is more offensive than the other, which of course, is always a culturally laden evaluation to make. That is difficult in a genuinely multicultural society... In terms of what state schools can do, actually, the government is required to be involved to protect freedom of speech on campus because the First Amendment applies to students’ free speech as well as professors’ free speech. I think they’ve been kind of falling down on the job on this. I think that universities that had speech codes that were unconstitutional, that’s something that the government never should have tolerated in the first place. I think when there are violent shout-downs, that’s something that the government should not be tolerating. I think that the government has really dropped the ball, in a lot of cases, on defending free speech on campus for decades now, and actually, in many cases, have passed regulations that made the issue worse... the very first thing we recommend in the section on higher education is to have a lot fewer jobs in the United States that require a bachelor’s degree. We’ve created an incredibly expensive system. I mean, I know someone who is just realizing that it is probably going to cost their kid $95,000 a year to go to one of these schools. This has been putting Americans in huge debt. We need to really rethink how we do a lot of these things"
Of course, the left wing "answer" to college costs is for the taxpayer to pay, because education supposedly benefits society (having lots of radical terrorism supporters around apparently helps society)

The Unreality of Columbia’s ‘Liberated Zone’ - The Atlantic - "word goes out, tent to tent, student protester to student protester—a viral warning: Intruders have entered the “liberated zone,” that swath of manicured grass where hundreds of students and their supporters at what they fancy as the People’s University for Palestine sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and fighting settler colonialism and genocide. In this liberated zone, normally known as South Lawn West on the Columbia University quad, unsympathetic outsiders are treated as a danger.  “Attention, everyone! We have Zionists who have entered the camp!” a protest leader calls out. His head is wrapped in a white-and-black keffiyeh. “We are going to create a human chain where I’m standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy.” Privacy struck me as a peculiar goal for an outdoor protest at a prominent university. But it’s been a strange seven-month journey from Hamas’s horrific slaughter of Israelis—the original breach of a cease-fire—to the liberated zone on the Columbia campus and similar standing protests at other elite universities. What I witnessed seemed less likely to persuade than to give collective voice to righteous anger. A genuine sympathy for the suffering of Gazans mixed with a fervor and a politics that could border on the oppressive. Dozens stand and echo the leader’s commands in unison, word for word. “So that we can push them out of the camp, one step forward! Another step forward!” The protesters lock arms and step toward the interlopers, who as it happens are three fellow Columbia students, who are Jewish and pro-Israel.  Jessica Schwalb, a Columbia junior, is one of those labeled an intruder. In truth, she does not much fear violence—“They’re Columbia students, too nerdy and too worried about their futures to hurt us,” she tells me—as she is taken aback by the sight of fellow students chanting like automatons... As the war has raged on and the death toll has grown, protest rallies on American campuses have morphed into a campaign of ever grander and more elaborate ambitions: From “Cease-fire now” to the categorical claim that Israel is guilty of genocide and war crimes to demands that Columbia divest from Israeli companies and any American company selling arms to the Jewish state. Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.” Of late, at least one rabbi has suggested that Jewish students depart the campus for their own safety. Columbia President Minouche Shafik acknowledged in a statement earlier today that at her university there “have been too many examples of intimidating and harassing behavior.” To avoid trouble, she advised classes to go virtual today, and said, “Our preference is that students who do not live on campus will not come to campus.” Tensions have in fact kept ratcheting up. Last week, Shafik called in the New York City police force to clear an earlier iteration of the tent city and to arrest students for trespassing. The university suspended more than 100 of these protesters, accusing them, according to the Columbia Spectator, of “disruptive behavior, violation of law, violation of University policy, failure to comply, vandalism or damage to property, and unauthorized access or egress.” Even some Jewish students and faculty unsympathetic to the protesters say the president’s move was an accelerant to the crisis, producing misdemeanor martyrs to the pro-Palestinian cause. A large group of faculty members walked out this afternoon to express their opposition to the arrests and suspensions. As for the encampment itself, it has an intifada-meets-Woodstock quality at times. Dance clubs offer interpretive performances; there are drummers and other musicians, and obscure poets reading obscure poems. Some tents break out by identity groups: “Lesbians Against Genocide,” “Hindus for Intifada.” Banners demand the release of all Palestinian prisoners. Small Palestinian flags, embroidered with the names of Palestinian leaders killed in Gaza, are planted in the grass. During my nine-hour visit, talking with student protesters proved tricky. Upon entering the zone, I was instructed to listen as a gatekeeper read community guidelines that included not talking with people not authorized to be inside—a category that seemed to include anyone of differing opinions... As I toured the liberated zone, I found most protesters distinctly nonliberated when it came to talking with a reporter... “We are not anti-Jewish, not at all,” Saliba said... an email went out from a lesbian organization, LionLez, stating that Zionists were not allowed at a group event. A subsequent email from the club’s president noted: “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.”... after she said in class that “Jewish lives matter,” others complained that her Zionist beliefs were hostile. She ended up dropping the course. This said, the students I interviewed told me that physical violence has been rare on campus. There have been reports of shoves, but not much more. The atmosphere on the streets around the campus, on Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, is more forbidding. There the protesters are not students but sectarians of various sorts, and the cacophonous chants are calls for revolution and promises to burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Late Sunday night, I saw two cars circling on Amsterdam as the men inside rolled down their windows and shouted “Yahud, Yahud”—Arabic for “Jew, Jew”—“fuck you!”... When he describes the encampment, it sounds like Shangri-la. “It’s 100 percent love for human beings and very beautiful; I came here for my mental health,” he said.  He claims no hatred for Israel, although he suggested that the “genocidal goliath” will of course have to disappear or merge into an Arab-majority state. He said he does not endorse violence, even as he likened the October 7 attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II... He was labeled an anti-Semite and remains deeply pained by that. He advised me to look up what he said and judge for myself. So I did, right on the spot.  Shortly after October 7, he posted this on X: “Zionists are straight Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.”  A bit harsh, maybe? I asked him. He shook his head."
Good luck if you say that suspending white supremacist students is a mistake, or worse, protest it
Naturally, the terrorism supporters protest the killing of terrorists
Of course, if you call Islamist terrorists "swine", the left will be on you for "Islamophobia"

Meme - Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze: "Trump - "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides."
NY Times yesterday -"
"At Columbia, the Protests Continued, With Dancing and Pizza. Will more stringent tactics subdue protests? Or fuel them?"

Meme - Joe Gabriel Simonson @SaysSimonson: "The dynamic the left enjoys is "we will break the law, make you miserable, and laugh about it because we know that Democrats won't ever arrest us. But if you dare touch us, we're going to scream bloody murder.""
Aaron Sibarium @aaronsibarium: "Their strategy is to gather in such large numbers and with such coordination that dispersing them requires force-then to claim the mantel of victimhood when force is inevitably used."
Jessica Schwalb on X - "Update: Columbia’s pro-Palestine protestors will break up into platoons to defend the encampment in the event of arrests. “WILL YOU BE READY TO TURN UP FOR YOUR COMRADES?”"

Thread by @feelsdesperate on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "University leadership is disgraceful and cowardly.  For years they cheered on the derangements because they saw an opportunity to protect and legitimize themselves ideologically.  In doing so, they abrogated commitments to core institutional missions and values. Now it’s blowing up in their faces because they’ve staked their credibility on being Good People yet have no ‘answer’ for Gaza.  If they had more character and were better people they would have never agreed to the demand that disciplinary knowledge production and pedagogy be subservient to activist manias and ideological policing in the first place.  But it’s too late. They’ve degraded their institutions and the time they thought they bought themselves with their cynical dealmaking has run out."

Meme - Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze: "Hey, they built a wall."
Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.today @JordanSchachtel: "It really is one massive LARP. Filthy communists."
"Welcome to the Liberated Zone! Make sure to talk to one of us before entering :)"

Meme - Daniel Di Martino 🇺🇸🇻🇪 @DanielDiMartino: "What's the immigration process at the liberated zone? Are there ideological tests? Or does it have open borders?"
Peter Hague PhD @peterrhague: "Left anarchism reinvents borders and police almost instantly. Right anarchism tends to likewise discover taxation from first principles."

REVEALED: George Soros is PAYING left-wing activists to head up camp outs at colleges across America - as huge wads of cash they're getting are shared - "Multiple leaders of the anti-Israel protests at college campuses across the nation have been revealed to be paid fellows of George Soros-connected groups.  Three of the major figures in the pro-Palestine encampments in universities are fellows at the Soros-funded US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, the New York Post reports.  USCPR 'community-based' fellows are paid up to $7,800 for their labor, while 'campus-based' fellows are given between $2,880 and $3,660 for spending eight hours a week organizing 'campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.' The organization instructs its fellows to 'rise up' and spark 'revolution,' while specifically telling them to reject 'reform.'... Tensions continue to escalate at the Columbia, where hundreds of pro-Palestine protesters are demanding that the institution divest from companies with ties to Israel.  So far, more than 100 demonstrators have been arrested at the 'Gaza Solidarity Encampment', which is comprised of a coalition of 116 groups under the umbrella organization Columbia University Apartheid Divest.  Several of the groups in the coalition have received backing from left wing donors, including one group currently under investigation for allegedly fundraising for terrorist organizations.  One of the key players in the coalition is Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which the Gazette reports came out in support of the October 7 attack which killed 1,200 Israelis. SJP receives funding from American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), according to the Anti Defamation League, which describes AMP as holding 'extreme anti-Israel views'.  Last year, Virginia's Attorney General Jason Miyares announced his office was investigating AMP over allegations they may have been fundraising for terrorist organizations.  SJP is also an offshoot of the Westchester People's Action Coalition which supports Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, the Green New Deal, and other left-wing initiatives... Another central player in the encampment is Jewish Voice for Peace, which has received millions from various donors including George Soros's Open Society Network.  Since  2016 the group has netted at least $650,000 from Soros-backed organizations.  Other donors have included the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, whose director, Nicholas Burns, resigned in 2017 over its support for JVP... Columbia canceled in-person classes, dozens of protesters were arrested at New York University and Yale, and the gates to Harvard Yard were closed to the public Monday as some of the most prestigious U.S. universities sought to defuse campus tensions over Israel's war with Hamas... The coalition began the sit in following Columbia president Minouche Shafik's testimony before Congress about anti-Semitism on campus.   The stunt entered its seventh day today and has already seen billionaire donors including Robert Kraft pull their funding and earned condemnation from the White House."
Damn Jews! All working in unison to advance Israel's interests!
Of course, the right wing anti-Semites simultaneously hate on Soros for pushing the left wing agenda
News of paid protesters is only a problem when it hurts the left wing agenda

Meme - The Daily Beast @thedailybeast: "When Isra Hirsi, the daughter of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, joined several of her classmates in a pro-Palestinian campus protest known as the Gaza encampment, she had no idea she would end up suspended, homeless, and left without food within a matter of days."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Important context: Isra Hisri may not have expected repercussions when initially joining the protest, but was given advance warning of pending suspension, arrest, and eviction from campus housing. She had with plenty of time to avoid these consequences and chose to accept them."

MIA on X - "If you ignored the anti-White narrative on college campuses for years or actively wrote it into the curriculum, why should I care what you have to say about antisemitism on college campuses now?  If you let BLM rioters burn working class Americans’ businesses to the ground, why should I care about the anti-Israel protesters marching through those same streets tonight?  Our ruling class didn’t expect these college kids to turn against them like this, they thought their anger would be limited to local cops and White people. Now that it’s reached the top, they want sympathy from the very White people that they’ve been vilifying for years.  Nope, you get none from me. I could care less that these protesters oppose Israel’s actions. Maybe I don’t agree with their tactics, but I also don’t agree with my tax dollars funding Israel’s wars. I’m over it."

Kathryn Paisner on X - "I wonder how campus officials & media would respond to pro-life students engaging in a 6-month activism campaign, using the same tactics that pro-Palestinian students have used, that started with a celebration of a terrorist attack on a Planned Parenthood."

Links - 3rd May 2024 (2 - California)

San Francisco Stores Remove Self-Checkout to Fight Surge in Shoplifting

San Francisco Walgreens Now Using Chains on Freezers to Prevent Shoplifting - "Employees told CBS reporter Betty Yu the freezers are sometimes emptied overnight by shoplifters. The store also reportedly deals with at least 20 shoplifters a day.  Walgreens has already announced its plans to shutter hundreds of stores across the country, all to save the company money in the wake of declining sales and a rise in shoplifting... The chains threaten to alienate loyal customers who may grow weary of summoning staffers every time they need to pull an item off the shelf.  One Walgreens store in San Francisco — while still open — has been completely boarded up. The location was the scene of a fatal confrontation in April between a homeless trans woman and a security guard."

Starbucks to Close Seven San Francisco Stores - "This move comes as San Francisco is seeing retailers exit the city. A Whole Foods in the city’s downtown closed citing safety concerns and Nordstrom shuttered its flagship San Francisco store. "

Chino Yang Apologizes for Video Criticizing San Francisco Mayor - "A rapper and restaurateur has released an apology on social media barely a week after releasing a diss track that sparked controversy for its criticism of San Francisco’s mayor.  Chino Yang, 35, a Chinese American rapper who grew up in San Francisco and is the owner of Kung Food near the city’s Alamo Square, slammed Mayor London Breed in his song “San Francisco Our Home.” He blamed Breed and the rest of the city’s leadership for a spate of anti-Asian crimes and a crisis of public safety after his businesses were burglarized multiple times... Breed’s supporters, including former Mayor Willie Brown and Rev. Amos Brown, president of the NAACP’s San Francisco chapter, are organizing a rally on Thursday to urge him to take down the video... Yang also said that he had received threats from a powerful—unnamed—figure in local and national politics who is close to Breed... Brown also noted to Yang that he used an art form that was birthed in the Black community."
Holding a black politician accountable is anti-blackness. But black rappers going on about robbing Asian houses is freedom of speech

MAZE on X - "California becomes the first state to provide illegal immigrants with health insurance. This is just the beginning. Nobody will be deported and no benefits will ever be taken away. It only moves in one direction."

Amy Alkon on X - "California (further!) incentivizes illegal immigration by providing free healthcare through Medi-Cal (Medicaid in other states) to illegal immigrants. Effective Jan 1, 2024.  Absolutely insane.   @Susan_Shelley  op-ed in the LA Daily News: https://dailynews.com/2024/01/06/can-california-afford-health-care-for-undocumented-immigrants/  Assemblymember Bill Essayli just introduced legislation, Assembly Bill  1783, to “remove all taxpayer funding for healthcare for illegal  immigrants in the California state budget.”"

Laura Powell on X - "As of January 1, California law requires pharmacists to receive training focusing specifically on LGBTQ+ and BIPOC people. Maybe that doesn’t sound so bad on paper (which might be why there was no opposition when the bill passed), but the provision requiring training that addresses "how sexual identity is directly impacted through intersectionality" shows this is part of a larger movement to make indoctrination in Wokeism a prerequisite for employment in every field."

San Francisco is in 'far worse shape than New York,' JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says - "Dimon said: "Any city who doesn't do a good job, it will lose its population."... Features that make a city attractive include parks, art, safety, jobs, and affordable housing, Dimon said. San Francisco needs more affordable housing so that companies can attract workers and create jobs, he said. There's been an exodus of both workers and high-profile businesses from San Francisco in recent years as it battles with a reputation crisis amid a swirl of media reporting on the city's supposed demise. San Francisco's population was around 873,000 as of the 2020 Census. But estimates from the Census Bureau suggest that it fell to about 811,000 in 2021 and 808,000 in 2022, a drop of around 7.5%. People flocked from the city for a plethora of reasons, such as to avoid crime, find cheaper rent, and escape the hustle and bustle, ultimately enabled by the surge in remote work during the pandemic. Some business owners, residents, and visitors have expressed concern about violent crime, drugs, and homelessness in the city, though the rate of homelessness in San Francisco fell during the pandemic and is actually lower than in Oakland and Los Angeles, according to city data. Both rent and property prices in San Francisco are much higher than the US average. Households also spend considerably more on food, insurance, and pension contributions, data shows."

Opinion | Why In-N-Out Burger Is Out of Oakland - "California’s famous In-N-Out Burger chain announced Sunday that it is closing its restaurant in Oakland, blaming rising crime. You might also say it is the victim of a progressive backlash to law enforcement and soaring government-worker pension costs that have squeezed spending on public safety... “Despite taking repeated steps to create safer conditions, our Customers and Associates are regularly victimized by car break-ins, property damage, theft, and armed robberies.”... Oakland’s progressive City Council in 2021 bowed to antipolice activists by limiting the number of police academies for training new officers and freezing 911 surge units, all while boosting funding for putative violence prevention “alternatives.” Meantime, as federal pandemic largesse shrank, spending on government-worker benefits ballooned. Between 2019 and 2023, Oakland’s spending on public-worker retirement benefits rose 42% ($73 million) and 34% ($49 million) for fringe benefits. Last year Oakland spent more on government worker benefits than it collected in property and sales tax. To close a $360 million budget deficit, the city cut back on law enforcement even more. The unsurprising result: Surging crime... Businesses in California pay exorbitant taxes, which are supposed to provide for public safety and other essential government services. But increasingly businesses are finding they are on their own as cities slash law enforcement. Is it any wonder In-N-Out is now intent on growing outside of California in states such as Texas and Tennessee?"

'LA vs Hate' Snitch Line Is Funded By Taxes And Big Business - "Authorities in Los Angeles County are operating an ideologically charged tip line that encourages citizens to report one another to the government for non-criminal “hate incidents.” The project, called “LA vs Hate,” was founded in 2020 and is backed by a handful of corporate sponsors... Despite being central to its mission, the term “hate” is not clearly defined anywhere on the group’s website. Nevertheless, its materials are scattered with ideological indicators. A series produced by LA vs Hate and 211 LA, called “Exploring Justice,” includes videos to “challenge our own prejudices by educating ourselves on social justice topics and issues that many are still experiencing today,” with topics like “Privilege and Oppression,” “Intersectionality,” and “Racial Justice.” They also tout merchandise and graphics with pro-trans and BLM messaging...   LA vs Hate did not provide a public definition of “hate” or respond to The Federalist with a definition when asked. Taxpayers, Christians, and Angelenos outside the far left should be troubled by this ambiguity, given recent efforts to use overly broad definitions of hate to smear and punish political opponents...   Inez Stepman, Independent Women’s Forum senior policy analyst, said LA vs Hate is the hallmark of a leftist overhauling of institutions. Stepman said, “The greatest conceit of conservatives for the last 30 years has been that they can allow the left to take over every educational and culture-producing institution and that ‘life’ would teach indoctrinated generations better in ‘the real world.’ Well, here’s your real world, we all live on campus now.”"

This Bay Area school district spent $250,000 on Woke Kindergarten - "A Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is spending $250,000 in federal money for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning. The Woke Kindergarten sessions train teachers on concepts and curriculum that’s available to use in classrooms with any of Glassbrook Elementary’s 474 students. The sessions are funded through a federal program meant to help the country’s lowest-performing schools boost student achievement.   But two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, student achievement at Glassbrook has fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well spent given the needs of the students, who are predominantly low-income. Two-thirds of the students are English learners and more than 80% are Hispanic/Latino. English and math scores hit new lows last spring, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and just under 12% at grade level in English — a decline of about 4 percentage points in each category. Efforts to reach the organization were not successful, with an automated response saying the founder, who also provides the training, was recovering from surgery.  District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level. The decision to bring in Woke Kindergarten, rather than a more traditional literacy or math improvement program, aligns with the belief by some parents and educators that the current education system isn’t working for many disadvantaged children. The solution, these advocates say, is for educators to confront legacies of racism and bias in schools, and to talk about historic white supremacy, so that students feel safe and supported. As such anti-racism programs have spread, several more conservative state legislatures have moved to restrict or ban them. At the same time, some education experts say struggling schools need research-based literacy and math interventions that ensure all students have the basic skills to succeed... Woke Kindergarten, aimed at elementary-age students, is founded on the relatively new concept of abolitionist education, which advocates for abolition, or “a kind of starting over,” said Zeus Leonardo, UC Berkeley education professor. The idea is that certain things can’t be reformed, tweaked or shifted, because they are inherently problematic or oppressive. It’s not about indoctrinating or imposing politics, “but making politics part of the framework of teaching,” Leonardo said.   But some Glassbrook teachers have questioned the decision to bring in the program, saying Woke Kindergarten is wrongly rooted in progressive politics and activism with anti-police, anti-capitalism and anti-Israel messages mixed in with the goal of making schools safe, joyful and supportive for all children... The Woke Kindergarten curriculum shared with schools includes “wonderings,” which pose questions for students, including, “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?”  In addition, the “woke word of the day,” including “strike,” “ceasefire” and “protest,” offers students a “language of the resistance … to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.” Teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said he supports discussing racism in the classroom, but found the Woke Kindergarten training confusing and rigid. He said he was told a primary objective was to “disrupt whiteness” in the school — and that the sessions were “not a place to express white guilt.” He said he questioned a trainer who used the phrasing “so-called United States,” as well as lessons available on the organization’s web site offering “Lil’ Comrade Convos,” or positing a world without police, money or landlords. Craven-Neeley, who is white and a self-described “gay moderate,” said he wasn’t trying to be difficult when he asked for clarification about disrupting whiteness. “What does that mean?” he said, adding that such questions got him at least temporarily banned from future training sessions. “I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?” Another Glassbrook teacher said Woke Kindergarten offered one perspective on issues and that there was no tolerance for questions. “It slowly became very apparent if you were a dissenting voice, that it’s not what they wanted to hear,” said the teacher, who requested anonymity for fear of pushback at the school...   Reimann said the district didn’t hire Woke Kindergarten for its politics, but rather its work in restorative practices, helping eliminate suspensions and removals from classrooms while luring more students back into seats.  “We are in favor 100% of abolishing systems of oppression where they hold our students back,” he said. “What I do believe is we should pick providers based on their work and how effective they are.” The superintendent said Woke Kindergarten wasn’t hired to improve literacy and math scores, but that “helping students feel safe and whole is part and parcel of academic achievement.”"
Clearly the problem was they didn't spend enough
Weird. The left claim that "woke" is a term only ignorant right wingers use because they don't know what empathy is

Drew Pavlou 柏乐志 🇦🇺🇺🇦🇹🇼🇨🇾 on X - "The founder of the “Woke Kindergarten” consultancy recently awarded a $250,000 grant: “I believe Israel has no right to exist. I believe the United States has no right to exist. I believe every settler colony who has committed genocide against native peoples has no right to exist”"
Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 on X - "Of note – this video was posted on the company account, not on the personal account of this individual. The founder is professing these antisemitic messages as part of the company messaging. This is what California taxpayers are paying for."
We're still told that it's a myth that liberals hate their countries

Inside tech billionaires’ push to reshape San Francisco politics: ‘a hostile takeover’ - "“This is a $20bn hostile takeover of San Francisco by people with vested real estate and tech interests, and who don’t want anyone else deciding how the city is run,” he said, referring to the combined wealth of the most prolific new donors. In its storied history, San Francisco has always seen tycoons seek influence over city business. In the 2010s, the tech investor Ron Conway played a crucial role in the election of the mayor Ed Lee and was a major factor in the ascent of the current mayor, London Breed, after Lee died in office in 2017 . But the entry of a libertarian billionaire class into local politics is new, said political operatives and people who have been targeted by them"
Of course, when it's left wing money like from Soros, it's "supporting democracy"

Meme - Confirmed Miscer @ManDaveJobGood: "If I wanted to see a black guy punch an Asian woman in the face I'd visit San Francisco"
Film Updates: "'MR. & MRS. SMITH' starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine debuts on Prime Video on February 2.
marriage is their most dangerous mission"

Libs of TikTok on X - "UNREAL. This store in San Francisco now has a barrier when you walk in and shoppers need to be accompanied by staff as they shop through the store because crime has got so bad. Welcome to @GavinNewsom’s California"

What if San Francisco never pulls out of its ‘doom loop’? - "Senna Matkovic passed out and turned blue. The 10-month-old had been playing with his twin brother in the grass... a paramedic undid the tiny buttons on Senna’s shirt and wired his chest to a heart monitor and put a mask over his mouth to keep him breathing. But the toddler wasn’t coming to. Senna’s pupils were constricted and, when his eyes rolled back, the paramedic decided to administer naloxone, a nasal spray that reverses opioid overdoses. Senna woke up instantly... Senna accidentally ingested fentanyl, an opioid that is cheaper and deadlier than heroin. The narrow rescue hinged entirely on the familiarity of San Francisco’s emergency services with a raging epidemic that has meant fentanyl overdoses are now so common that the city has expanded distribution of reversal kits to libraries, entertainment venues, churches and schools... Their son’s accidental overdose became a new low in San Francisco’s metastasising crisis. In recent years, drug cartels have flooded US cities with fentanyl to meet demand for opioids created by rampant overprescription. On the streets of San Francisco, a dose costs $8 and its effects last barely 30 minutes, trapping addicts in a cycle of quick highs followed by hours of painful withdrawals as they hunt for another hit. The synthetic drug’s strength means that as little as 2mg can kill users. San Francisco has the second-highest rate of drug deaths of any city in the country after Philadelphia; almost twice as many people here — about 2,000 — have died from overdoses than from Covid-19 since 2020. But San Francisco’s problems go far beyond drugs. The Bay Area is home to four of the 10 most valuable companies in the world — Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia and Meta — titanic producers of wealth, but a staggering one per cent of the city’s population is homeless, compared with less than 0.2 per cent across the US. The gulf between rich and poor — and white and black — is among the largest in America. House prices and rents soared to among the highest in the US during the last tech boom. Since the pandemic, tech companies have embraced remote working, laid off staff and slashed office space, leaving almost a third of the city’s commercial real estate vacant. In other words, houses are more expensive and scarcer, and offices are cheap and empty. Teachers and nurses can’t afford to live in San Francisco, and tech workers see fewer reasons to.  There is a growing sense, too, that the city’s progressive political class has failed its citizens. Violent attacks in wealthy neighbourhoods, including the fatal stabbing of Cash App founder Bob Lee and a burglary at the home of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi which left her husband in hospital with a fractured skull, were interpreted as symbols of pervasive lawlessness. (The truth of both cases turned out to be more complicated than it at first appeared.) Then there was the bizarre case of Don Carmignani, the former fire commissioner, who was hospitalised last month after a homeless man assaulted him with a metal pipe; Carmignani’s attacker was released from jail when CCTV footage emerged that appeared to show the ex-official attacking numerous homeless people with bear mace, unprovoked... “The city always had a bit of an underlying unsafe element, but it was isolated. If you stayed away from it, you were pretty much OK.” As he spoke, he watched out his window as a homeless person clutching a glass pipe rifled through his trash cans. “It has spread out,” Matkovic continued. “It feels like the probability of something going sideways here is higher.”... Urban Alchemy has reversed 1,300 opioid overdoses in the two years he has worked there. He once had to give naloxone to a dog that had licked fentanyl off the sidewalk.   The Tenderloin, a neighbourhood just south-west of touristy Union Square, is home to some 35,000 people in fewer than 50 cramped blocks. Drugs and destitution are out in the open. Sticks of burning incense have been jammed into the shutters of closed businesses to mask the smell of human excrement. Glass from shattered car windows glitters in the gutter. A few people are hunched over in wheelchairs, clutching the paraphernalia of hard drug use. Urban Alchemy has around 45 people on the ground here at any given time... a small number of its employees have been shot at or injured on the job. But it is having a noticeable effect on streets where tent encampments have been cleared out. It has been mostly welcomed as trust in traditional institutions like the police has hit an all-time low and residents say the city hasn’t felt this unsafe in decades... more than 40 per cent of the homeless are black or mixed race, while the broader population has become overwhelmingly white. (Over the past 30 years, the percentage of the population that is African-American has halved, to 5.7 per cent.) The median income for white households is three times larger than for black households, the largest gulf in the country... Black people are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than white people in the city, compared with around three times nationally... “Five years ago, it wasn’t like this,” he says about the people openly using drugs around us on Market Street, just outside the Urban Alchemy headquarters, where he sells souvenir photographs of local liquor stores. “Five years ago, a black guy with a pipe got arrested; now the police walk past a white guy with a needle in his arm,” he says... In 2014, the state downgraded many theft and drug possession crimes from felonies to misdemeanours. San Francisco is particularly alluring because of its historical embrace of counterculture and progressive politics, funding free food and shelters. Adisa calls it a “sanctuary city”... San Francisco’s city budget this year is $14bn — almost twice the budget for the entire state of New Hampshire — for about 810,000 residents... It has been the slowest city in the US to recover from the pandemic; mobile phone activity in the downtown area is still only a third of 2019 levels, a sign of tourism’s decline and tech companies’ retreat... Boudin was kicked out of office last summer by voters who said he had made the city less safe. Petty crime like burglary had risen on Boudin’s watch. He pledged to approach crime differently than his predecessors, in part by no longer prosecuting lower-level offences such as recreational drug use... Many Silicon Valley luminaries won’t be around to find out what happens. They have long since lost confidence in San Francisco. Libertarian billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel relocated to Los Angeles in 2018, indignant at what he saw as a left-leaning political class that had become intolerant of big business. Two years later, Charles Schwab, founder of the brokerage giant and once one of San Francisco’s most generous philanthropists, relocated headquarters to Texas in protest at high tax rates and regulations"

Opinion | San Francisco’s Decline Frustrates Even Democrats Like Me - The New York Times - "Like it or not, San Francisco has become a prize example of how we Democrats have become our own worst enemy. Causes that we have long espoused — respect for human rights, plenty of housing that’s within reach for most people, care for the mentally ill, fair pay, high-quality public education, a dignified retirement — have all been crippled by a small coterie who knows how to bend government to its will. This astonishing city that I have been lucky enough to call home for more than 40 years has become subject to the tyranny of the minority.  For several years, I have tried hard to figure out the reasons for our civic confusion. San Francisco’s problems didn’t occur overnight. And they don’t bode well for other cities, long considered Democratic fortresses, where the consequences of the fentanyl epidemic, homeless encampments, housing that is unaffordable for most, deteriorating school systems and high tax rates are also evident. Here, janitors, nurses, teachers and bus drivers are forced to endure 90-minute commutes; two-income couples cannot afford to start families; young children have become increasingly rare sights; and the Police Department cannot fill its ranks. Charles Schwab, founder of the brokerage giant and one of the city’s most patient and generous philanthropists, moved to Florida, and his company relocated its headquarters to Texas. Even major figures who hail from San Francisco and who in many parts of the country are viewed as irredeemable leftists, such as Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, seem at times embarrassed by the condition of their hometown... The core of the issue, in San Francisco and other cities, is that government is more malleable at the city level than at higher levels of government. While there have been just 16 amendments to the U.S. Constitution since 1800, there have been 106 changes to San Francisco’s City Charter since 1996. If the U.S. Constitution requires decades and a chisel and hammer to change, San Francisco’s City Charter is like a live Google doc controlled by manipulative copy editors... mayors have been stripped of much authority while remaining convenient heat shields for the board... Many of these changes have been triggered by referendums that are a staple of the city’s elections and which have often been controlled by the board. Since 2000, 321 initiatives have appeared on the city’s ballots. This process spawned eight different business taxes in the last decade that have doomed many small businesses, as well as driven away large companies whose headquarters are now located in less hostile settings. This has resulted in a sharp drop in projected tax revenue which, as usual, will result in cutbacks in city services for those most in need. Then there is the matter of San Francisco being a one-party town."

Police post photos of suspects with Lego heads to comply with new law - "Getting arrested is no child’s play — except for these California cops.  The Murrieta Police Department has been posting hilarious arrest and lineup photos with suspects’ faces replaced by Lego heads to comply with a woke state law protecting offenders’ rights...   The Photoshop-savvy law enforcement agency explained Monday that it is shielding detainees’ faces to comply with a new state law prohibiting the release of mugshots and booking photos of those accused of nonviolent crimes...   But the practice is nothing new for the Murrieta police: the agency has been obscuring suspects’ faces for a couple of years now, also using emojis, Barbie dolls and even “Shrek” characters...   Many commenters, however, argued that shielding suspects’ identities under the new state law essentially amounted to protecting criminals. At least on one occasion, the agency used a Barbie head in a booking photo"