🚨EU "Chat Control" could see states scan, monitor and report on the PRIVATE messages of 450 million European citizens. Mass state surveillance is the opposite of democracy. This dangerous bill must be opposed. @Adina_Portaru for @spikedonline ✍️

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For those of you who thought the visit from a Bedford Borough Council official to investigate our daughter Zoe’s (age 12) pretend teddy bear cafe was too ridiculous to be real, here is the arrival of official. This is totally legit. She really did show up at our property to investigate the illegal teddy bears having their coffee🧸🧸☕️☕️

I'm Japanese. Americans who visit my country tend to come home with the same question: how did Japan stay Japan? They watched trains leave on the exact second. They left a phone on a café table, came back an hour later, and found it still sitting there next to the cold coffee. Some of them read that in 2023 people in Tokyo turned in more than 4 billion yen in lost cash to the police, and assumed it was a typo. It wasn't. There are two halves to the answer. Most people who praise Japan online only know the first one. For America, the second one matters more. THE FIRST HALF: HOW WE KEPT OURSELVES It starts in July 1853, when Commodore Perry brought four black ships to the mouth of Edo Bay and pointed his guns at a country that had been closed for over two hundred years. Across the sea, China had just lost the Opium War and was being forced open by foreign powers. Japan's leaders could see exactly what happened to old civilizations that refused to change. So they changed faster than any nation ever had. But they did it under a rule: wakon yōsai. Japanese spirit, Western technique. Take the railways, the steel, the constitution, the navy. Leave the self-contempt at the dock. That rule survived everything that came after. War, defeat, two atomic bombs, nearly seven years of American occupation. We copied your factories and then beat you at cars. I was going to write that no Japanese classroom ever taught us our civilization was a crime. That's not quite true. After 1945 a lot of teachers taught a very guilty version of the war, and Japanese conservatives have been fighting over those textbooks for decades. But the guilt stayed inside the history lesson. It never became a theory of everything, the way it did in your universities. Nobody told us our language was oppressive, or that the family was a structure of domination, or that being good at math was a form of privilege. Foreign residents are still about 3 percent of the population. When outsiders called us closed, most people shrugged and went back to work. For a long time I thought that shrug was a weakness, a kind of stubborn provincialism. I've changed my mind. I think it's most of what a border actually is: a people quietly sure it has something worth keeping. So American conservatives are right about Japan. Confidence in your own culture works. We are the proof. THE SECOND HALF: HOW WE ARE DISAPPEARING In 1949, about 2.7 million babies were born in Japan. In 2024 it was 686,061. The first time I saw that number I assumed I was reading the wrong column. I wasn't. Our fertility rate is 1.15. The population peaked around 2008 and has shrunk every year since. There are mountain villages now where the only new things are the vending machines. And this didn't happen under the left. One conservative party, the LDP, has governed Japan for almost all of the last seventy years. No woke revolution, no open borders, no defund the police. The right won the culture war here before it started. The country is shrinking anyway. What went wrong is economic, and it's very old. On the last trading day of 1989 the Nikkei closed at 38,915. Then the bubble burst. The banks were sitting on mountains of bad loans, and instead of letting failed companies fail, they kept lending them fresh money so nobody had to admit the losses. Economists later called them zombie firms; Caballero, Hoshi and Kashyap documented the whole thing in 2008. The Nikkei didn't get back to its 1989 high until February 2024. Thirty-four years. The zombies were kept alive at someone's expense, and it was the young. To hold the old structure up, the system protected the people already inside: lifetime jobs for the men hired before the crash, pay by seniority, pensions no politician dared touch because old people vote. Whoever arrived after 1990 got what was left. Today close to four in ten workers are non-regular, on short contracts or part-time or sent in by agencies, and men in those jobs marry far less often than men with permanent ones. Nobody plans a family on a contract that ends in March. Real wages are still lower than in 1996. Government debt is well over 200 percent of GDP, the highest in the developed world. When the government finally admitted the birth crisis, it did what governments do and announced a program: about 3.6 trillion yen a year for children. Births kept falling. Have you ever seen a bonsai up close? You take a tree that wants to grow thirty meters tall, and every year you cut back its roots and wire its branches so it keeps exactly the same shape. Some live for centuries. They're beautiful. They never get any bigger. That's what conservatism becomes when it only preserves and never builds. We protected everything, including the things that should have been allowed to die. In 2022 Elon wrote that unless something changes, Japan will eventually cease to exist. A lot of people here called it rude. I was annoyed too, for about a day. Then I looked at the census again. WHAT AMERICA SHOULD TAKE FROM THIS Japan shows you can keep your culture without apologizing for it. Don't let anyone tell you that pride in your country is the problem. Japan also shows that a nation can get culture right and still lose, if it protects its old companies, its old voters and its old arrangements against its own young people. It dies politely, with clean streets and trains on time. You still have what we lost: a system that lets things fail and lets new things be born. Bankruptcy, startups, people who move across the country for a better job. Elon is a product of that system. Every bailout, every subsidy for a company that should have died, every rule that protects the insider against the newcomer moves you a little closer to us. If you know someone who says "America should just be more like Japan," send them this. Both halves. A nation isn't saved by preserving its past. It's saved by having someone to hand it to.

Every life is precious regardless of a diagnosis. 🤍

Teddy Roosevelt Erred on Those “Thick-Skulled Savages,” the Neanderthals scienceandculture.com/2026/1… via @discoverycsc

The City of Toronto used to be the best city in the world. But now there is daily violence, takes an hour to drive anywhere, the TTC is not reliable & pro Hamas thugs take over roads. Today is election day. Polls are open 10am to 8pm. Make your vote count Toronto.

Some people seem baffled by the political earthquake in British Columbia, Canada’s most gender-mad province, which has just voted in a Conservative government for the first time in a century. They might want to read David Thomas’s piece in the National Post from earlier this year. 👇 Parents are really sick of people telling their kids lies and punishing those with dissenting views. As for the BC Human Rights Commission, which fined Barry Neufeld $750,000 for saying that the transitioning of kids is tantamount to child abuse…..

Great news!

Ethiopia: At least 47 Ethiopian Christians were killed, and another 18 hospitalized, in coordinated attacks targeting them in the Oromia region. Surviving witnesses claimed regional authorities collaborated with Islamist militias to carry out the massacre. Church leaders have repeatedly warned local authorities about armed groups entering the area, but received no serious response. This is not an isolated incident, but rather part of a pattern of targeted attacks against Ethiopian Christians, who militants conflate with Amhara ethnicity. This fusion of religious and ethnic violence against innocent Christians and their churches must not be tolerated. We condemn these evil acts and call for the protection of Ethiopia’s Christians.

🚨🚨🚨 A warning to Americans, from a Frenchman. 🚨🚨🚨 You are starting to elect people who promise you more state, more redistribution, more "free" things. New York already has a democratic socialist mayor, perhaps the furthest-left since Fiorello La Guardia. I'm not here to tell you how to vote. I'm here to tell you how this story ends, because we lived it. France ran this experiment for 40 years, and we are now living its final chapter. It starts in May 1981. François Mitterrand wins the presidency with the Communists in government. The program is pure romance. They nationalize the big banks and industrial groups. They lower the retirement age to 60, cut the work week, add a fifth week of paid vacation, create a wealth tax, and hire massively in the public sector. "Changer la vie", change life itself. That was the slogan. Reality took less than two years to answer. Capital fled. The franc was devalued three times. Inflation stayed in double digits while our neighbors were bringing theirs down. In March 1983, Mitterrand made a U-turn and imposed austerity, "le tournant de la rigueur". Remember this, because it is the pattern. Socialism doesn't fail once and disappear. It fails, reinvents itself, and changes its electorate. After 1983 the Socialists had a problem. They had abandoned the economic revolution, so what was left to sell? The answer was identity politics before the term existed. In 1984 SOS Racisme was born, closely tied to the Socialist Party. The moral battle replaced the economic one. Anyone who raised the question of immigration or integration was no longer an opponent. He was a racist. Then came the first real test. In 1989, three girls showed up to a public school in Creil wearing the Islamic veil. The Socialist government refused to decide, sent the question to the courts, and let it rot for fifteen years. The ban only came in 2004. That was the moment the Republic blinked. The message received was simple: if you push, the state will back down. Over the following decades, the left slowly replaced the working class it had lost with a new coalition. In 2011 the Socialist think tank Terra Nova wrote it down in black and white, saying they should stop chasing blue-collar workers and build a coalition of graduates, youth, and minorities. Electoral clientelism became strategy. In certain cities, local politicians traded subsidies, jobs, and silence for votes delivered by community networks, including Islamist ones. The result today is that in the 2022 presidential election, Muslim voters gave 69% of their first-round votes to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the hard-left candidate. A party that once claimed to be secular is now courting religious identity. Let's be precise: this is not about our Muslim fellow citizens, millions of whom are fully French. It is about a political machine that decided a community vote was worth more than the principles of the Republic. Now the economy, because the two collapses are the same collapse. In 2000, the Socialist government of Lionel Jospin, with Martine Aubry as labor minister, imposed the 35-hour work week. The theory was that sharing work creates jobs. What it actually did was make French labor more expensive, destroy the culture of effort, disorganize hospitals that still haven't recovered, and teach an entire generation that work is a burden the state should shrink for you. That is the deep logic of socialism. It doesn't make people richer. It makes them dependent. Every new subsidy creates a voter who fears losing it. Every new public job creates a voter who defends the system. After a while, you no longer have citizens. You have clients. Look where it ends. France hasn't voted a balanced budget since 1974. Public debt was around 20% of GDP when Mitterrand arrived. It is now around 3,550 billion euros, about 118% of GDP. France is once again Europe's biggest spender, with public spending at 57.3% of GDP. And a report commissioned by the government in July 2026 projects that without budget efforts, debt would reach 130% of GDP by 2030. And to be completely honest, the right didn't fix any of this. Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron: they all managed the decline instead of reversing it. The left set the direction, and the right lacked the courage to change it. That's how you get 40 years of slow rot, economic and social at the same time. A country that works less, pays more, gets less security, and no longer dares to say what it is. So today France has two choices, and so will you if you go down this road. The first choice is to stop lying to ourselves. Multiculturalism, meaning many cultures living side by side with no common rules, does not work. It never has, anywhere. When there is no shared culture on top, one culture eventually takes over the others. That's not hate, it's sociology. What worked in France for 150 years was assimilation. You come, you become French, you take on the language, the laws, the history, the way of life. In exchange, the nation takes you in fully, with no asterisk. Assimilation plus controlled immigration. And the deal is already signed with millions of people. Children of Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Algerian, Moroccan, and Vietnamese immigrants who are as French as I am. They are not the problem. They are the proof that the model works when we have the courage to apply it. The second choice is to keep pretending. Let the state get bigger, let debt explode, keep buying social peace with money we don't have, and keep handing territory to those who reject the West. In that scenario, it is not impossible that France first elects a hard-left government, a Mélenchon government. Then, when the system can't pay its promises anymore, something else fills the vacuum. Michel Houellebecq wrote that story as fiction in 2015, in a novel called Submission. A lot of French people stopped laughing at it a long time ago. France is a Western country with Western values. Equality between men and women. Freedom of expression, including the freedom to criticize religion. The law above faith. Work as dignity, not punishment. Some things are simply not acceptable here, and we need to have the courage to say it again. America, you still have what we're losing: a culture of work, a culture of assimilation, the idea that the state is your servant and not your parent. The people selling you "more state" are making the same promise Mitterrand made in 1981. It sounds generous. It ends in debt, dependence, and fragmentation. Don't trade the American Dream for the French Disease. We already paid the price. Learn from it for free.

The party that vowed to remove the ideological claptrap of SOGI from BC’s schools just won a super majority. Sanity and child safeguarding is gradually being restored, bit by bit, even in Canada.

Yep, if you ask me, this is what it means to be a Catholic school: