PragmaticLibertarian

Cognitive Dissident, thinking at right angles to everyone else. Sometimes my thoughts don’t translate well into English.

[PragmaticLibertarian @parallel235]

The left/right political spectrum doesn’t model reality. What we observe is clusters of ideas; if you hold one idea in the cluster, you’re likely to hold others.

Currently in western countries, there are two major clusters, which I call the Left and the Normal People. You can probably identify the ideas in these two clusters. Note that what you would call Normal are those held by the vast majority of people until the last few decades.

These clusters aren’t stable: ideas become more or less popular and associated to others over time. White supremacy may be an example: widely held to some degree a century ago, it’s now an outlier. The inverse, white racial guilt, is a firm member of the Leftist cluster. This is why, although not all leftists are racist, most racists are leftist.

[David Crumble @DavidCrumbaar]

@guywalters If it was legal it was legal. The rest is just opinion. What about the rape gangs?

[mary poppins @ozgal1965]

Regardless of personal opinions about Russell Brand, on the exact same day he received a prison sentence of ten years and six months, an Afghan national appeared in court for three counts of rape and penetration of a child under 13, but received a two-year suspended sentence.

🤬😡🤬😡🤬😡

[Eric W. @EWess92]

White House Counsel Will Scharf sends a characteristically measured and thoughtful letter to incoming House Oversight Chair Robert Garcia. Garcia has made several outlandish statements that extend beyond the traditional oversight role. And Scharf explains the problem with that

[PragmaticLibertarian @parallel235]

@Thdelli1887 @Pink_Meeces I believe that The Savant was at least inspired by this person, but was utterly wokified.

[The New Westminster Times @NewWestTimes]

BC College of Nurses tipped the scales of justice, argued Amy Hamm’s lawyer Lisa Bildy on day 1 of Supreme Court appeal. Bildy faced constant interruptions, belittling & hectoring from the judge.

[ben rose @benrose1976]

So how did a property adviser end up posting about Andy Burnham and Abu Dhabi?

All we wanted was a planning permission.

It took Manchester City Council over nine years to give us one. In that time Renaker put up about a dozen towers, seven of them around our site.

My client has owned a site on Great Jackson Street in Manchester for 40 years. In October 2017 we started work on planning for 1,037 flats there. We are Manchester born and bred. Friends in London warned us that development in Manchester was "the Wild West". We didn't know how right they were.

We were told we had to provide £28.8m of affordable housing. So we asked what Renaker's Deansgate Square next door had paid. The answer:- Nothing. Zero. Nada. Zip. 1,508 flats and no section 106 agreement at all. Nobody at Manchester City Council could explain why. On four Renaker schemes MCC has "lost" the viability files.

We were told we had to pay just over £1m as an upfront payment. Exactly £1,000 per flat. Across 20 Renaker towers and 8,543 homes, Manchester City Council took just £487,000. That is £57 a home.

So we kept looking. We found £598m of public loans from Andy Burnham's GMCA to Renaker. Add in the other public sources and it is £868m, to companies controlled by one man. None of these loans were ever publicised and the loan terms remain almost entirely hidden.

It took nearly four years just to get to the planning committee. Over nine years on, nothing is built.

We then asked MCC for permission to knock down our own empty warehouses. It refused, giving ten flimsy reasons. So off to court we went. In January 2026 a High Court judge rejected all ten and held that MCC had "acted unreasonably". That case cost MCC over £200,000 of public money. And for what?

My client also owns the main Royal Mail depot on Oldham Road. MCC has since told us that land sits inside its joint venture with Far East Consortium. It has kept over a third of that agreement hidden, including the plan, and won't show it to us. Why?

So we carried on asking questions.

Then they blocked my emails.

We never set out to investigate anyone. We asked one question, got no answer, and kept digging.

We still are.

#ProjectCleanCity
@SianReform @NathanEvansTeam @JoshHalliday @rbrooks45 @DeclanGCarey @jackdulhanty

[PragmaticLibertarian @parallel235]

@CallasLives @sometherapist So you’re saying that you wear a disguise, right?

[Dr Brian of London 🇮🇱 @brianoflondon]

If my friend @TRobinsonNewEra wasn't fighting much more serious battles, and if he really did have infinity money for legal work, and if the British legal system wasn't massively stacked against him every recovering his good name...

I'd have him send this to @guardian

[MNRick 🇺🇸🦅 @MNRick_v3]

NASA handed Boeing $5.1 billion on a fixed-price contract for Starliner development plus six certified crew missions to the ISS.
What did America get?
One disastrous half-mission that couldn’t even complete its job… and a vehicle that still isn’t certified for humans. Boeing just got another $399 million to keep failing. Total: $5.5 billion for **zero** completed human missions.
SpaceX got $2.6 billion for development and six flights. NASA was so impressed they added eleven more missions, taking Crew Dragon through 2028. Total: about $5.6 billion.
One company delivered and then some.
The other burned through billions and still can’t get astronauts home safely.
Now Democrats are promising to cancel every SpaceX government contract the second they get power.
Let that sink in.
They want to punish the only company that actually works… while Boeing’s failure gets more money and a free pass.
Canceling SpaceX contracts doesn’t just “own Elon.” It risks grounding the ISS. Maybe that’s the point.
America’s space program shouldn’t be a political weapon. It should reward results. SpaceX delivered. Boeing didn’t.
h/t: Restore Washington.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Recently I told you there are two kinds of people in this system: cynics and believers.

Ursula von der Leyen, I put her with the believers. And that's exactly why you need to understand how the machine works.

Because cynics are very rare. Soros, I put him in that category: he knows exactly what he's doing, and he has never hidden it.

He read Popper, he has a theory of change, and he understood early on something the right still hasn't figured out: you don't change a society by winning an election. You change it by funding, for thirty years, the people who will write the reports, train the lawyers, and advise whoever wins the elections.

$24 billion spent by Open Society since its creation. More than 50,000 grants. In 2015, he wrote in plain text that the EU must accept at least a million asylum seekers a year, and mobilize NGOs, churches and businesses to take them in.

All of it is public. That's the most impressive part.

Here's how the system got hacked, in three steps.

Step one: selection.

Nobody recruits idiots. No need. The money does the selecting on its own.

A grant never goes to the person who doubts. It goes to the person who already believes. Repeat that over thirty years and tens of thousands of grants, and you get an entire ecosystem where the free thinker was filtered out at the door. He wasn't fired. He just never got funded.

What's left: people who are sincere, credentialed, conformist, and whose paycheck depends on the cause.

Step two: funding manufactures conviction.

Try explaining something to someone whose paycheck depends on not getting it.

The NGO produces a report. The report gets cited by an expert. The expert testifies before the Commission. The Commission turns it into a directive. And the NGO guy ends up in a cabinet, then goes back to a foundation.

Everyone knows each other, cites each other, funds each other. It's an echo chamber with a budget.

Step three: emotion.

You never debate results. You debate intentions.

One photo beats a thousand statistics. Every objection backed by numbers becomes a moral failing. And when reality contradicts the narrative, the dissonance always gets resolved the same way:

"It's a necessary evil."
"It's collateral damage."
"The real problem is elsewhere."
Immigration is never a problem. The problem is your perception.
The result: the system doesn't produce corrupt people. It produces NPCs. People reciting a script while convinced they wrote it themselves.

Ursula doesn't need to be bought. She has spent her entire career in an environment where every expert, every report, every "civil society" group tells her the same thing. She is convinced she's on the side of good. And that's what makes her immune to facts.

And the best part of the story: Soros isn't even the system's biggest funder anymore.

You are.

Between 2021 and 2023, €7.4 billion in EU funds went to more than 12,000 NGOs. The European Court of Auditors itself says it can't get a reliable picture of who gets what.

The hack worked so well that the machine now runs on your taxes.

This is not a conspiracy. A conspiracy hides. Here, the amounts are public, the op-eds are public, the recipients are public.

It's an incentive system. And you don't fight an incentive system by insulting the believers. You fight it by cutting off the tap and demanding total transparency: who funds whom, to say what.

As long as it stays opaque, they'll keep shipping believers at scale.

[Wings Over Scotland @WingsScotland]

These whiny little tossers just had this video pulled off our YouTube, so on no account retweet it so that anyone else might see it.

[Marc 🇫🇷 @marcsplainter1]

URGENCE ABSOLUE : Saghar Gholami, 19 ans, condamnée à la pendaison en Iran.
Arrêtée en janvier 2026 à Gonbad-e Kavus pour avoir manifesté pour sa liberté, elle risque le gibet à tout moment. Le silence tue, brisons l'isolement !
Partagez massivement son nom.
#SagharGholami

[PragmaticLibertarian @parallel235]

🫰🫰🫰🫰🫰

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯 @japan_nobunaga]

For 70 years, every rocket that reached orbit left part of itself behind.

Burned up in the sky. Sunk in the ocean. Gone forever.

This Friday, SpaceX tries to end that.

Flight 15 will attempt to catch BOTH stages of Starship with the tower's giant arms. First the Super Heavy booster. Then the Ship itself, falling back from space after reentry.

The booster has been caught before. The Ship never has.

If both work, it will be the first time every piece of an orbital rocket comes home intact.

Friday, November 13. Pending FAA approval.

Don't miss this one. 🚀

[David Maywald @DavidMaywald]

MEETING THE ENEMY A feminist comes to terms with the Men's Rights movement | Cassie Jaye | TEDxMarin... https://t.co/vCbghcewTY via @YouTube

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

The speaker is a Muslim cleric in Khan Younes who has broken with Hamas and offers a moment of clarity from a tent in Gaza. Thinking Gazans increasingly recognise that two generations of radicalisation destroyed their own territory, and the only way out of their tragic condition is de-radicalisation, coupled with Gaza's demilitarisation.

[PragmaticLibertarian @parallel235]

@DavidP55097307 @KareemRifai Muslims kill Muslims and non Muslims in many places, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Far more than “we” did, actually. They kill in places like Sudan and Nigeria where “we” aren’t involved. So maybe it’s Muslims which are the problem and not “us”?

[Prof. Brian Keating @Briankeating]

I am a professor at the @UofCalifornia. I am appalled by the conduct of one of its Regents, Scott Galloway, appointed in August by Governor Newsom.

@profgalloway is one of only 26 voting Regents entrusted with governing a university system serving hundreds of thousands of students & employing tens of thousands of faculty & staff.

Twice, first on a live Pivot episode featuring Hillary Clinton & on Prof G with Fareed Zakaria, Galloway called Elon Musk a “traitor to the West.”

He invoked Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for espionage, and declared that Musk should be held to the same standards.

He didn’t explicitly demand Musk’s execution. But invoking the deaths of two convicted spies while calling an American citizen a traitor makes the implication hard to miss.

Musk has not been convicted of treason. Indeed, “treason against the West” isn’t even an actual crime.

Now imagine UCLA alumnus @BenShapiro, appointed a UC Regent, saying the same about George Soros.

Would the Governor defend his right to serve? Would Regent leadership shrug and call it provocative commentary? Or would there be demands for resignation?

But there’s something worse here than another of Scott’s trademark podcast rants.

He sits on the Regents’ Academic & Student Affairs Committee.

The committee’s charter says it oversees student conduct, faculty conduct, academic personnel, & campus climate, among other responsibilities.

This is not some honorary title.

The Board sets university policy, controls institutional budgets, & appoints senior university leadership.

You can unsubscribe from a podcast.

A student who finds Scott’s comments morally repugnant can’t unsub from the Regents.

UC bylaws require Regents to serve the public trust with a “high degree of ethics and candor,” including as private citizens.

Professors owe students intellectual integrity. Regents bear an even greater duty: they govern institutions that teach it.

Yet a Regent serving on the committee responsible for student & faculty conduct invokes executions while labeling a fellow citizen a traitor.

What does that say to our students?

That intellectual restraint is expected of the governed but optional for those who govern?

That standards of conduct depend on whether the target of your rhetoric is politically fashionable to despise, as long as the audience applauds?

This isn’t about defending @ElonMusk. He needs no defense from me.

Nor is it about silencing Scott. As if that were possible. He’s free to express his opinions, however reckless they may be.

But freedom of speech is not freedom from accountability, and holding a university office of public trust is not an entitlement.

There is an enormous moral chasm between exercising your right to speak recklessly and demonstrating the judgment required of one of the 26 people who govern our great public university.

The UC Board of Regents isnt a podcast sponsors can boycott. It’s a public trust.

One final irony. At @NYUStern, Galloway teaches Brand Strategy, including a session on crisis management.

His own prescription for leadership in a crisis is unequivocal: acknowledge the problem, have leadership take responsibility, and “overcorrect.”

He’s praised the departure of corporate leaders as evidence of effective crisis management.

Now Galloway himself sits on the UC Board of Regents.

Will he hold himself to the standards he teaches, or does accountability apply only to other people’s institutions?

Professor lecture thyself!

I believe Scott Galloway should seriously consider whether his continued service on the Board of Regents is consistent with the ethical standards and responsibilities of that office, or whether he should resign.

I welcome the opportunity to discuss these issues with Galloway directly, including what standards we should expect of those entrusted with governing the world’s best university.

Scott, you have an open invitation to join me on @Into_Impossible for an honest conversation.

[Remix News & Views @RMXnews]

🇩🇪🔴 “They tried to penetrate every opening of our bodies.”

German woman Claudia Vosen and her daughter suffered a mass sexual assault at the hands of Arabs during the Cologne New Year’s Eve attacks of 2015/16.

After the harrowing sexual assaults, Vosen faced a new hell from co-workers who called her racist.

She is speaking out now, a decade later, to EMMA magazine.

She said when migrants finished sexually assaulting them over the course of a half-hour, the women were “spat out.” Vosen filed a complaint that night; she was one of 627 women who did so just in one city, Cologne.

What followed, she said, was almost as damaging as the attack.

“When I arrived at work in January and told everyone what had happened to me, they said: ‘You’re crazy. They really messed me up. What are you saying… that’s not true. Otherwise we would have heard or read something. You have something against foreigners,’” said Vosen. “Everything was swept under the rug. That was the worst part. It was denied, covered up.”

Vosen’s daughter also suffered. On the schoolyard, her daughter heard, “Just be glad you weren’t raped.”

Vosen’s daughter began avoiding groups of young men who appeared Arab.

“Young women don’t defend themselves the way we used to,” says the mother. “They no longer dare to laugh in the face of a group of boys who cause them problems. They answer cautiously. They are afraid.”

“New Year’s Eve opened my eyes,” said Claudia Vosen. “For me, there is a before and an after.”

She also stated that afterwards, the demonstrations were not against the mass sexual assaults and rapes but instead focused on “racism.”

She said these protesters did not act out of solidarity with the victims but with the migrants.

“Instead of simply saying who the perpetrators are, whether right or left. We weren’t allowed to say back then: ‘Those were Arabs.’ All that remained was: people with a foreign appearance,” she said.

Nationwide, 1,200 women filed reports of sexual violence that fateful night. Estimates indicated the number of men involved at more than 2,000.

Cologne Police President Wolfgang Albers initially called the night “largely peaceful.”

Days later, he admitted, as reported by the BBC, that a “very large number of sexual assaults” had been committed by groups of young men “largely of North African or Arab appearance.”

An internal federal police report revealed that women ran a “gauntlet” through masses of heavily intoxicated foreign men “that words cannot describe.” The report labeled the scene as “chaotic and shameful.”

North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Ralf Jäger later told a state parliamentary committee that the perpetrators were “almost exclusively” people with a migration background.

“All signs point to these being North Africans and people from the Arab world,” he said, adding that asylum seekers who had arrived just months earlier were among the suspects.

Of 153 suspects identified in Cologne for offenses that night, about two-thirds were from Morocco or Algeria; roughly 44% were asylum seekers and another 12% were believed to be in Germany illegally.

However, actual convictions were almost non-existent due to the chaos and the lack of footage, which means hundreds of women went without justice.

Follow: @RMXnews

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

Why they NEED it to be a genocide.

From a live event at Valley Beth Shalom Synagogue, Encino, California. With Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz and Reverend Drew Sams, Senior Pastor of Bel Air Church.

[PragmaticLibertarian @parallel235]

@SandyofCthulhu Pick a party member and tie a rope around his waist. Drop him in at various locations. He tugs on rope when it’s time to pull him up.