Anu

Nobody talks about the quiet mechanism that turned a high school diploma into wallpaper and a college degree into a $250k participation trophy. It started with a 1971 Supreme Court decision that made general intelligence testing legally radioactive for most employers. Overnight, the cheapest, most accurate signal of basic competence became a lawsuit waiting to happen. Employers needed a safer proxy. They chose the bachelor’s degree. That worked for a while, until high schools stopped failing anyone who showed up. Social promotion and grade inflation hollowed out the diploma, so the degree became the new minimum filter for literacy and a pulse. Then the colleges expanded. They admitted more people, lowered standards, and printed credentials for anyone who could sign a loan. The signal diluted. Suddenly the four year degree no longer separated the competent from the rest, so the arms race moved to master’s degrees, certificates, and “experience.” Meanwhile the rest of the world noticed. Diploma mills overseas started churning out identical paper credentials at a fraction of the cost. Construction and service jobs that once paid a middle class wage got undercut by workers willing to live four to a room. The people who played by the old rules, show up, work hard, get the credential, found themselves competing against both the global surplus of paper degrees and a domestic labor market that no longer rewards basic competence. Layer on top the student loan machine that socialized the cost of the arms race, the soft bigotry of low expectations that treats objective standards as suspect, and the quiet reality that many institutions now prioritize demographic checkboxes over performance. You get a generation that did everything it was told, still can’t buy a house, and watches the jobs that used to be a fallback get filled by someone else. The system didn’t collapse because people got lazy. It collapsed because we made it illegal to measure ability, illegal to fail students, and profitable to sell the resulting credentials. Then we acted surprised when the credentials stopped meaning anything and the people holding them had nowhere left to go. Restore the right to measure competence, or accept that the middle class will keep vanishing.

This is so unreal. Another crazy one! Missouri Democratic state Rep. Anthony Ealy Jr. was arrested the day after winning reelection on accusations of threatening to kill someone during a disturbance outside a business in Jefferson City. Witnesses said he was yelling while a family made funeral arrangements, claimed to have a gun, lunged at someone trying to calm him down, and repeatedly threatened to kill them. He was charged with misdemeanor assault and disturbing the peace; Democratic leadership had previously stripped him of committee assignments over personal issues and asked him not to run again. Blue no matter who!

This is one way bots are actually doing something good for humanity. An Australian startup called Apate built an army of AI agents whose whole job is to answer the scam calls, reply to the shady texts, and play along as the most useless, time wasting victims imaginable. They keep the fraudsters talking, extract the bank accounts, crypto wallets, and phone numbers, then quietly pass it all to real banks and telcos so the actual victims never get hit. So far, the bots have burned 17 years of scammer time across millions of conversations. The founder’s origin story is pure. He got a scam call at a family picnic, decided to troll the guy for fun, and kept him on the line for 44 minutes. Somewhere in there he realized every minute spent on him was a minute not spent on a real person, and that he was also learning useful stuff. So he automated the trolling. The bots pretend to be different ages, accents, and languages. In one call, a scammer is desperately trying to get the Play Store open while the AI lady who is seventy eight years young keeps hearing pastry, talking about her knitting patterns and scone recipes, and apologizing because back in my day we didn’t have all this technology. The scammer is getting more and more unhinged. The company apparently celebrates every time a scammer starts swearing at the bot. They even track it as a metric. 😂 I think this is AI that everyone can appreciate!

They claim to care about Black people, but talk about them like they’re too stupid to get an ID. They claim to care about women, but let men take their trophies and watch them undress. They claim to care about women’s rights, but defend regimes that beat women for showing their hair. They claim to care about LGBTQ rights, but defend governments where homosexuality is illegal or punishable by death. They claim to care about children, but support abortion until birth. They claim to love America, but kneel for its anthem and put illegal immigrants before citizens. They claim to care about the environment, but burn Teslas. They claim to care about crime victims, but turn Black or undocumented criminal suspects into political causes while ignoring their victims. They claim to oppose racism, but want race to determine who gets hired, admitted to college, or promoted. They claim to support free speech, but silence anyone who disagrees. They claim to support democracy, but try to remove opponents from ballots. They claim to oppose violence, but excuse it when the target is conservative. They claim to support bodily autonomy, but demanded vaccine mandates. They claim to celebrate diversity, but demand everyone think alike. They claim to oppose discrimination, but support racial preferences. They claim to care about education, but graduate kids who can’t read. They claim to care about the poor, but make everything more expensive. They claim to oppose authoritarianism, but want government controlling speech. They claim to support tolerance, but demonize half the country. Make it make sense.

Democrat Shelly Headen won the North Carolina House District 62 race after posting a photo of herself smiling in front of the Dachau crematorium ovens captioned “This is where Trump supporters belong.” The violence and hunger for killing political opponents by the left really freaks me out. The only Republican running in a district not far from me had to drop out and move because they actively tried to kill him and his family in a drive by shooting.

Hmmm…James Talarico won the U.S. Senate race in deep red Texas by a huge margin—about 5.445 million votes to Ken Paxton’s ~4.25 million. That’s roughly 186,000 more votes than Joe Biden got in Texas in his 2020 presidential election (~5.26 million)—a race with the highest national voter turnout in U.S. history—and about 610,000 more than Kamala Harris got in 2024 (~4.84 million). All of this in a midterm for a lower-profile race, not the presidency.

I feel like I’m living in the Twilight Zone. Trump and Republicans delivered on a big chunk of the Agenda 47 promises in that list—border mostly sealed, deportations underway, tax cuts passed, EV mandate killed, men out of women’s sports, and more—while getting blocked at every turn by Democrats and activist judges. And the response on X is that Democrats winning is somehow a “punishment” because the country wasn’t fully repaired in under two years after Democrats spent years wrecking it. So the plan is to hand it right back to the people who broke it in the first place? That’s not logic. That’s just insanity. I’m not a Republican. I think they’re weak. But the Democrats are fucking crazy. Their policies are insane. If former Republican voters are switching to them, and Democrats are still voting for Democrats, we’re in upside-down world. What they did accomplish from the list: 1. Border sealed significantly (crossings down ~95%, no catch-and-release for 17+ months) 2. Large-scale deportations and self-deportations underway (millions left) 3. Energy production expanded 4. Manufacturing push via tariffs and incentives (some reshoring and job gains) 5. Large tax cuts, including no tax on tips/overtime 6. Constitution/free speech/2A defended via EOs and DEI rollbacks 7. Efforts to end government weaponization 8. Migrant crime, cartels, and gang enforcement actions (fentanyl trafficking down) 9. City safety efforts (e.g., DC and Memphis task forces) 10. Dollar remains the world’s reserve currency 11. No direct cuts to Social Security or Medicare (or retirement age) 12. EV mandate canceled 13. Federal funding cut for schools pushing CRT/radical gender ideology 14. Men kept out of women’s sports 15. Some pro-Hamas radicals deported/visa revocations 16. Golden Dome missile defense started (early funding, site, and tests)

Everyone keeps saying Islam is incompatible with the West. It’s not that simple, and the hard part is figuring out what to do about it. Islamic extremism is real, often violent, and rooted in a strict interpretation of the faith. Sharia, where applied, has frequently produced outcomes that are incompatible with Western norms on rights, speech, and equality. The scale of jihadist terrorism over recent decades is also well-documented. At the same time, I’ve traveled in the last two years to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan, and the reality on the ground did not match the stereotypes. Azerbaijan is roughly 97% Muslim by identity, yet I rarely saw anyone who looked or acted the way many in the West associate with conservative Islam. People dressed in ordinary Western clothing. I heard the call to prayer only a couple of times and never saw anyone praying in public. The country is officially secular, and the cities felt safe, orderly, and socially relaxed. While I was there, Azerbaijan enforced a rule restricting headscarves and veils in schools. Some girls were kept out for a day because they would not wear the standard uniform without them. The policy drew condemnation from Muslim groups and governments elsewhere, but Azerbaijan held the line. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have gone further and banned the niqab (full face covering) outright. These places show that large Muslim populations can live in secular societies with broadly Western dress codes, public behavior, and social norms. So I would not say that Islam as a whole is incompatible with the West. Large numbers of individual Muslims clearly are not, especially those from more conservative or theocratic environments. The practical problem is that it is hard to tell the difference in advance when people are moving to Western countries. On immigration, that distinction matters. Places like Somalia and Gaza have high rates of extremism, weak or hostile institutions, and cultural norms that clash sharply with Western ones; restricting inflows from those sources is a reasonable precaution. The same cannot be said for Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, or Kyrgyzstan based on what I saw. This is why the issue is so difficult. Blanket claims that “Islam isn’t compatible with the West” ignore the variation that actually exists. At the same time, the variation makes it hard to keep Western societies safe while still admitting Muslims who are compatible. I don’t have a clean answer for how to do both.

Breaking: Brazil’s stock market is in freefall after Lula’s win. The main Brazilian ETF in New York (EWZ) was down roughly 26–27% in pre-market trading, and the real was collapsing in futures. Polymarket and Kalshi had priced Flávio Bolsonaro at 80–84% to win heading into the runoff. Markets had spent weeks rallying on the expectation of a more market-friendly outcome. That bet is now being violently unwound. This is what happens when the priced-in outcome flips overnight under questionable circumstances.

The polls were closing. Counting had started. Then Justice Cristiano Zanin, Lula’s former criminal defense lawyer, appointed by Lula, ordered voting extended two hours nationwide, signing at five oh one, one minute after close, on Lula’s petition about buses held in Salvador garages. He first said every station till seven, then limited it to electronic voting machines (urban) still open. The TSE’s notice didn’t reach regional courts until five forty-nine. Closed machines couldn’t reopen. In São Paulo, 80% were already sealed. In Curitiba, 87%. Brasília’s court said it was never officially notified. To be fair, Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign also requested extensions filed at 3:27pm over rain in São Paulo, Paraná, and Santa Catarina. Lula won by 4.4 million votes, the first first-round runner-up to win since 1989. For balance: Lula himself was convicted of corruption and money laundering in 2017 and served time before the Supreme Court annulled it on procedural grounds in 2021. Hours later, deputy Duda Salabert posted she’d requested Flávio’s passport seizure and wrote, “We won! Now it’s prison for Flavio Bolsonaro.” In his victory speech, Lula also called for regulating digital platforms, citing “interference coming from outside” — building on his campaign’s fight with Meta over alleged post-throttling. The TSE still hasn’t said how many ballots were cast after five. Maybe the buses were real. Maybe the votes were clean. But when a justice appointed by the winner rewrites closing time mid-count and it lands unevenly, and the loser’s allies immediately call for his arrest — trust dies. A democracy without trust is just theater. This is not democracy.

NYC just handed nonprofits a 90-day head start and a matching right whenever certain private buildings go up for sale. Owners now have to sit tight while city-approved groups get first crack—and can still match any better offer that comes along. That means delayed sales, higher carrying costs, and fewer buildings hitting the open market. Shrink the available supply and prices go up for everyone else. And these aren’t small volunteer groups. Plenty of nonprofits burn most of their money on staff and overhead, yet the city is steering more property their way under the banner of “affordability.” You paid for the building. City Hall now decides who gets the first shot at buying it.

I think I’ve officially discovered Amazon’s newest business strategy: Make returning something so ridiculously difficult that customers eventually give up. 🤦‍♀️ I bought an $86 bean bag chair that arrived vacuum-sealed in a box. Once opened, it expanded to about 10 times its original size. I specifically wanted a beanbag chair with beans in it because my back and neck hurt so badly and I came across one in Mongolia that was so comfortable. Apparently every single beanbag chair in on Amazon now only has memory foam in it, and it does not have the same experience at all, so this wasn’t going to help me. I wrote to the seller about it and asked how to return it and the seller told me to put it back in the original box. Sure. And while I’m at it, I’ll shove a king-size mattress into a shoebox. After a couple of weeks of asking the seller HOW to accomplish this impossible feat, I contacted Amazon. I spent 2 1/2 hours chatting with FIVE different customer service representatives, including a supervisor. Three disconnected mid-conversation. The others kept directing me back to the same automated form that required a tracking number. A TRACKING NUMBER FOR SOMETHING I CAN’T SHIP BECAUSE IT WON’T FIT IN THE BOX! 🤯 I finally managed to submit a detailed explanation, complete with a photograph of the enormous chair and its tiny original box. Amazon’s response? Return the item and provide a tracking number. I explained everything AGAIN. Amazon’s final decision? CLAIM DENIED. Apparently, the only way to return this chair is to invent a shrink ray. Congratulations, Amazon. You’ve managed to turn an $86 bean bag chair into a full-time unpaid customer service position. 👏

An Icelandic electrician named Guðmundur Felix Grétarsson lived for 23 years without arms after an 11,000-volt shock on a high-voltage line in 1998 set them on fire and forced surgeons to amputate. He later needed a liver transplant and dozens of other operations, then moved to Lyon years in advance and waited on the donor list, refusing to accept a life of prosthetics. In January 2021 a team of roughly fifty surgeons and staff at Lyon’s Edouard Herriot Hospital performed the world’s first bilateral arm-and-shoulder transplant on him—a 15-hour operation that included full reconstruction of one shoulder joint. Nerves regrow at about a millimeter a day, so the real work only began afterward: years of relentless rehab. The results have been remarkable. Within two years he could flex both elbows, move his wrists and fingers, and feel sensation returning. He regained the ability to hug his daughter and grandchildren for the first time in decades. By the five-year mark he was painting, riding a bike, gardening, brushing his teeth, and driving with simple adaptations. Doctors and Felix himself describe a level of independence and body ownership that prosthetics never delivered. It is not perfect—strength, fine control, range of motion, and endurance remain limited, and lifelong immunosuppressants carry risks (he has already faced rejection episodes and other medical setbacks). Proximal transplants simply cannot restore pre-injury function because the nerve distances are so long. Yet the transformation is profound: living limbs with sensation and the simple human capacity to embrace the people he loves. A 23-year wait, a surgical first, and a man who can again wrap his arms around his family. That is one of the coolest medical stories in recent memory.

A father and son allegedly built a $1.6 billion fraud empire by flying vulnerable addicts from across the country into Los Angeles, trapping them in fake detox programs, and dosing them with sedatives so they could never leave. - The Youngs directed “body brokers” to target the homeless, the poor, and people in recovery groups, then paid to fly them into Southern California for sham treatment. - Once there, patients were enrolled in fraudulent insurance policies and recycled through dozens of facilities so the billing never stopped. - Staff were ordered to medicate anyone who tried to leave, including with benzodiazepines, specifically to “knock the client out” and keep the claims flowing. - The operation billed private insurers more than $1.6 billion and collected over $210 million, making it the largest substance-abuse treatment fraud scheme the Department of Justice has ever prosecuted. - The case is part of a broader Los Angeles healthcare fraud takedown totaling roughly $1.8 billion in alleged losses that also includes unnecessary invasive procedures and fake hospice care. This was not treatment. It was the industrial-scale trafficking of human beings for insurance money.

Fun fact: In barely 21 months, the Trump administration has brought home 115 Americans who were held hostage or wrongfully detained overseas. That already exceeds the “over 70” total Biden claimed for his entire term and leaves Obama’s record—highlighted by the release of just five Americans in the 2016 Iran deal—far behind. It is one of the clearest, most concrete wins of the administration, yet major media outlets have largely ignored it.

How does someone get 30 days in jail and $765 in restitution for speeding, running a red light, hitting a 25-year-old man who was out for a run, and then driving away while he died in the street—especially when she was driving without a license and insurance and later admitted she left because she was scared of getting in trouble for that? Lance Sotelo was a former Queens University student-athlete, student body president, and someone just doing what he loved in Charlotte. Q’Laundra Hood pleaded guilty to felony hit-and-run and a related charge. Judge Reggie McKnight handed down that sentence. Thirty days. That’s it. I’ve personally dealt with now many people in Charlotte who stole outrageous amounts of money from me—not paying rent for months then destroying the place, taking payment for something and not providing the service, embezzling massive from my companies, fraud, direct theft, and more. Not once have I seen any justice at all even when I had massive amounts of evidence and went to the police or courts. Thank goodness it’s only been money and not someone’s life. But this is ridiculous. Good people get screwed over. Their families get screwed over. And too many criminals just walk with a slap on the wrist, if that, around here. When a human life is worth less than a month in jail and a few hundred dollars after a hit-and-run, something is broken with the system and the judges who run it. I don’t understand why no one in Charlotte is speaking out against these judges. wbtv.com/2026/09/25/charlott…

Imagine your tax dollars hard at work: “Try to poop before. This is so your drugs are absorbed better. It never hurts to have a boofing buddy!” That’s an actual pamphlet from a Minnesota nonprofit that just received millions from the Walz/Flanagan administration so drug users can more efficiently shove heroin, meth, and ketamine up their rectums. Faster high. Cleaner high. Government-funded high. While Minnesota roads have potholes, schools need money, and veterans wait for services, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and Gov. Tim Walz steered roughly $8 million to Southside Harm Reduction Services. Their specialty? “Booty bumping” kits. Complete with syringes, sterile water, lube, and step-by-step instructions on how to get drugs into your bloodstream faster by going through “the butthole.” Yes. The same government that will lecture you about climate, equity, and “meeting people where they are” is now meeting people in their colon. With a checklist. They even require the organization to hand out voter registration materials with the kits. So you can get high, register to vote, and then presumably thank the people who made your rectal drug experience more convenient. The official justification is “harm reduction.” Translation: we know you’re going to do illegal drugs anyway, so here’s a taxpayer-subsidized instruction manual so you can do them more efficiently and with less risk of tearing something important. The faster absorption is a feature, not a bug—except for the part where faster absorption also means higher overdose risk. Details. This is not treatment. This is not recovery. This is not even neutral. This is the state using your money to lower the friction of continued illegal drug use while calling it compassion. Somewhere a Minnesota taxpayer is working overtime so a junkie can have a “boofing buddy” and a government-approved technique for better absorption. If your state government is handing out instructional materials on how to get high through your rear end, they have officially run out of serious ideas.

The bodycam just dropped, and I need you to watch it all the way through. Not the headlines. In the video, a 6-year-old is standing in a classroom still covered in alphabet posters, held by a teacher, with police around him, and he is cursing them out, daring them to come get a piece of him, talking like a grown man who just got caught. I cannot fathom speaking like that as a child. I cannot fathom a child speaking like that at all. And I certainly can’t fathom a 6 year old purposely shooting someone! That is why I am bringing Richneck up now. Officer Brian Torrez’s footage was unsealed on October 6, almost three years after a first-grader shot his teacher. On January 6, 2023, at Richneck Elementary in Newport News, he pulled a 9mm out of his jacket, pointed it at Abby Zwerner from about 10 feet away, and fired. She was at the reading table with her class. The bullet went through her raised left hand and into her chest, collapsed a lung, broke a rib, and lodged near her spine and aorta. She made it to the office and collapsed. She lived. She could have died on that floor. This was not hair-pulling. This was not a shove on the playground. Police called it intentional. Other children had already been told he had a gun and that he would shoot them if they told. The warrants quote him saying he shot her and that he got his mother’s gun the night before. On the new video he says he stole it from her. He did not invent that at 6. Somebody left a loaded gun where he could take it. Somebody taught him to talk to people, including police, like that. His mother, Deja Taylor, did federal time on the gun case and state time for felony child neglect. The assistant principal’s criminal charges were dismissed. The teacher won a civil verdict. The boy was never charged, because a 6-year-old is not treated as criminally responsible. He was evaluated and placed with his great-grandfather. No conviction. No record. No sentence. So what do you do with a child like this? How do you punish a first-grader for trying to kill his teacher without pretending he is a grown man? How do you not punish him without pretending this was an accident? His prospects do not look good. A 6-year-old who will shoot someone, then talk like that on camera, did not pick it up off the playground, and nothing in the law just now looks strong enough to stop what comes next. Watch it to the end before you tell me this was just a kid acting out. My questions above we’re not rhetorical. I’d actually like to know what everyone thinks on this!

Two little girls in the Charleston suburbs starved to death under their mother’s “care.” Emory was 2. Harlow was 1. Deputies found them on September 29, 2026, already past the point where anyone could save them. Their mother, Justine Marie May, is charged with two counts of homicide by child abuse. The affidavit says she told detectives she’d been in a “blur” for two weeks and couldn’t remember the last time she gave her daughters food or water. She told them she believed they died because they hadn’t eaten, and she was their only caregiver. She wasn’t some stranger who slipped through the cracks. She was a preschool teacher, Teacher of the Month in 2019, with a room full of other people’s toddlers. The same women we hand our kids to all day, teachers and nurses and caregivers, keep showing up in these stories. It’s a strange pattern, and nobody wants to say it out loud. Family says she was normal for more than 30 years. Then something broke this summer. She left the girls’ father, Zachary Deacon, in late July. By mid-August she’d cut off her mother. August 14 was the last day her mother saw Emory and Harlow. August 23 was the last day their father saw them. After that she shut him out completely. He kept trying to see his daughters. He never got to. While that was happening, she was texting about Lindsay Clancy and following that case. Her own family was already telling police she was spiraling. While the girls were staying at their grandmother’s, she said they woke up and stayed in a closed bedroom in soaked diapers until noon. Harlow developed what she called a horrific diaper rash. By September, the power was shut off, a bank notice was on the door, and the trash was overflowing. The coroner still hasn’t released what those babies weighed. What is already on the record is that they were left without food or water, and weeks earlier they were already sitting in wet diapers for hours. People were screaming for help. On September 4, the grandmother emailed that there was a countdown written on the wall in crayon, and that she was afraid this could lead to May harming the girls or herself. She begged to take the children. May’s answer was, “Don’t question my motherhood again.” On September 11 police came out again. May texted her mom, “Good try with the police,” and blocked her. That same day, the father was arrested. Second-degree harassment. He was trying desperately to see his kids, and the system put him in handcuffs. May asked for a no-contact order, and a judge gave her one. The man fighting to get to his daughters got arrested. The woman who hadn’t fed them got a court order protecting her from him. On September 13, the paternal grandmother posted that she was begging May to get help before she harmed her babies. May’s own brother wrote that they needed to get her help. On September 14 there was another welfare check, and police told the father the kids were okay. Fifteen days later they were dead. Family says DSS had an open case for about a month, and that relatives were warned they could be arrested for harassment if they kept requesting welfare checks. A mother is supposed to be the protector. Courts act like the word itself is proof. Mothers get the kids. Mothers get the benefit of the doubt. Mothers get believed when they say the people banging on the door are the problem. Emory and Harlow had a grandmother, a father, and an uncle begging anyone who would listen to take those girls out of that house. The father who was trying to see them was the one who got arrested. The people advocating for the children were the ones threatened with harassment charges. The woman who hadn’t fed them, and who was already talking about Lindsay Clancy, got a court order protecting her. We give too much credence to the title of mother, and two toddlers paid for it with their lives.

A flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv almost became a mass-casualty event this morning — and the attacker was sitting in the cockpit. Flight FZ1073. Boeing 737 MAX. About 180 people on board, most of them Israeli. Two hours after takeoff the plane fell more than 17,000 feet in under two minutes. Speed jumped toward 600 knots. Then the emergency squawk. Then the hijack code. Israel scrambled fighters. Passengers and Israeli officials say the co-pilot, an Omani national who had been at flydubai about nine months, stabbed the captain and tried to take the aircraft down. Blood in the cockpit. Screaming in the cabin. People smashed in, pulled him off the controls, and tied him up with headphone cords. Two off-duty pilots who were riding in the back ran forward and landed the jet in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Both working pilots went to the hospital. Every passenger walked off. The stabbed captain was too severely injured to stabilize and land the plane safely. The two other Israeli pilots on board landed the plane and saved 180 people. Saudi authorities have the suspect. Israel has grounded flydubai’s Israel routes while they ask how a first officer from a country with no diplomatic ties to Israel was on that flight deck at all. The plane did not hit the ground. That is not luck. That is a stabbed captain, two deadheading pilots, and a cabin full of people who refused to sit there and die. How terrifying! cnbc.com/2026/09/30/israel-f… reuters.com/world/middle-eas… washingtonpost.com/world/202…