Where Worship of Anti-Racism Takes You

Long, profoundly sad, well-sourced 2/4/26 Substack article about how the terror of being called prejudiced against Muslims took Britain to a place that makes Epstein into small potatoes. It should be read in full. Just a couple of excerpts to catch the flavor:

 In September 2012, The Times published an extensive overview of the phenomenon.3 The paper reported that for more than a decade, organised groups of men had been able to groom, exploit, and traffic girls across multiple towns and cities in Britain, often operating with minimal interference from authorities....

Yet, event The Times underestimated the scale of this. By early 2015, senior police figures were publicly acknowledging the scale of the crisis. One officer spoke of “tens of thousands” of current victims of grooming gangs. A Member of Parliament, representing a constituency widely associated with the problem, went further, suggesting that the total number of victims nationwide, past and present, could reach as high as one million.4

These figures are almost impossible to comprehend. They refer to school-aged girls systematically identified, isolated, and exploited over many years. And yet, despite the magnitude of the harm, perpetrators were able to operate with remarkable impunity.....

Across policing, social services, local government, and related professions, many officials felt unable to speak frankly about the defining characteristics of the problem. Not because those characteristics were unclear, but because acknowledging them carried perceived risks, to careers, professional standing, and social legitimacy. The boundaries of what could be said narrowed to the point where silence became the safer option.

This produced a self-reinforcing cycle. As fewer people were willing to speak openly, institutional inaction deepened, and the cost of dissent appeared ever higher to colleagues and peers.

In some instances, professionals were directly cautioned against drawing attention to ethnic or cultural patterns. In most, it appears such warnings were unnecessary. The fear of being accused of racism ensured that, for decades, there was little formal recognition of the grooming-gang phenomenon as a distinct and systemic form of abuse.

That the victims were overwhelmingly young white schoolgirls, while the perpetrators largely muslims with darker skin, proved decisive, not in prompting action, but in paralysing it. This dynamic allowed abuse networks to operate with remarkable freedom, even as evidence accumulated.

So again, to ask the central question: how could an abuse network of this scale persist for decades without decisive intervention?

The answer is stark in its simplicity. It was not fear of the crime that silenced authorities, but fear of a word: racist....

To understand the scale and nature of the grooming gang scandal, one must first confront the cultural context from which the perpetrators emerged. The statistical overrepresentation of men from Pakistani and other South Asian heritages in these specific group-based exploitation networks has been documented by multiple inquiries and judicial remarks.6 The abuse is rooted in a specific worldview imported from rural, patriarchal societies where the status of women is determined by rigid codes of honour (sharaf) and where non-Muslim or “out-group” women are viewed through a lens of religious and racial contempt.7

Central to this incompatibility is the existence of a dual morality within the perpetrator networks. While the women within their own communities are often cloistered and protected to maintain family “honour,” Western women, particularly those who are liberated or vulnerable are viewed as “immodest” and therefore “fair game” for sexual predation.8 This perception is reinforced by the use of dehumanising language, such as the term “kuffar” (non-believer) or “khal” (black/outsider), which serves to strip the victims of their humanity and justify their exploitation.9...

Perpetrators in Rochdale were explicitly told by Judge Gerald Clifton that their treatment of victims was influenced by the fact that the girls were “not of your community or religion”.10 This judicial acknowledgment confirms that the selection of victims was not random but was driven by an “us versus them” mentality that prioritised tribal and religious identity over the laws of the host nation. The victims were not only objects of sexual desire but symbols of a “conquered” or “inferior” culture to be dominated.11

The frequent use of racial slurs such as “white trash,” “white slag,” and “white meat” indicates a racialised hierarchy in which the victims were viewed as having no inherent value.12 In Keighley, a victim reported that when she attempted to stop working as a drugs courier for her abuser, she was called a “little white slag” and a “little white bastard” while being raped.13 These terms are ideological markers that define the victim’s place in the perpetrator’s worldview, a place of total subservience and worthlessness.

It is an article of faith in some circles that "outsiders" are only a small part of this problem. The vast numbers in Britain argue otherwise.  Hat tip to Small Dead Animals.

Wow! That Was Fast!

 That $2 million damages must have speeded up review of the "science." 2/5/26 Advocate:

The American Medical Association, which has long supported gender-affirming care for transgender youth, has now endorsed some restrictions.

The AMA recommended Wednesday that any gender-affirming surgeries be delayed until adulthood, The New York Times reports. While genital surgery is almost never performed on minors, some teens undergo top surgery or facial modifications. Gender-affirming care for youth more commonly includes puberty blockers, hormone therapy, social transition, and counseling.

The AMA’s policy shift comes a day after the American Society of Plastic Surgeons recommended that surgeons delay breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.

Gender-affirming care for minors has been under attack from conservative politicians for several years. Twenty-seven states ban all or some such care for minors, and the U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld Tennessee’s law restricting the treatment. A year ago, Donald Trump signed an executive order banning federal funding for any institution that provides the treatment to people under 19. He has also ordered the National Institutes of Health to study transition regret.

How long before the psychological, counselling, and social worker associations realize that they threw away their credibility supporting sexual mutilation to be among the "cool kids."

Gold and Silver

1/30/26 Investing.com:

Investing.com -- Gold’s powerful rally across precious and industrial metals is increasingly showing signs of speculative excess, according to Peter Berezin, chief global strategist and director of research at BCA Research, who warned that prices may have moved “too far, too fast.”

In a new note to investors, Berezin outlined a long-term scenario where gold could theoretically lose almost all of its value.

Any commodity with irrational components to its demand either pretty or overhyped is easily manipulated  

Trump’s Upset About the Fed

2/3/26 TheFP:

Joseph Wang left his job at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he came across an odd new research paper from his former employer. Wang had been a senior trader on the Open Market Trading Desk, carrying out the Fed’s monetary policy. In his five years there, the usual Fed research covered topics like inflation, labor markets, and bank capital. This paper, though, was titled “800,000 Years of Climate Risk.”

“I thought that was very strange,” Wang recalled. “The Fed writing about CO2 concentrations."

The article lists other areas where the Fed seems to have branched from economics to leftist activism. Perhaps a bit more adult supervision is in order. 

I Went Full Clanker on Drilling Pilot and Final Holes

I had to drill pilot holes with a center drill as well as a full hole with a twist drill so I wrote a program for all three holes.

A Nice Surprise: US-Made Thumbscrews

 I needed stainless steel 8-32 x 1" thumbscrews. Amazon had them, and American-made.

#8-32 x 1 Thumb Screw Stainless Steel - Black Knurled Round Plastic Knob - Standard/Coarse Thread Thumbscrew - Length: 1.000" - Proudly Built in USA - Package of (4)

Reading William Shirer's Berlin Diary

This is mostly his daily diary from 1934-1941 as he watched firsthand (sometimes as Hitler walked past him in restaurants) the Gleichschaltung in Germany and then the cowardly turning over of Sudetenland Czechoslovakia to Germany. 

I have read much about this over the years. Watching the Biden Administration was uncomfortably similar, although the resistance of some news organizations to the effort is a counterpoint. To be fair, the National Socialist suppression of alternative points of view was imposed with force, in a way that was unneeded with the fascist leanings of most American news organizations. 

One other very important difference was the courage of Elon Musk spending an incomprehensible amount of money to buy Twitter and open it up to alternative points of view. If there had been any similar courage and alternative media in 1933 Germany, think of the lives not lost, the bright and creative outputs not going up chimneys in German extermination camps. Think of Eastern Europe not suffering under decades of Soviet tyranny. 

While I think it important not to suffer from the mindless optimism of Francis Fuyukama's "The End of History," imagine the resources wasted during World War Ii and the Cold War spent on human development.   

Of course, without those wars, we would never have landed on the Moon, put satellites in orbit, invented Teflon, and arguably the U.S. Civil Rights Movement might have been delayed decades. World War 2 also hastened the end of European imperialism. I confess whatever the justice of the resulting devolution of power, it is not clear that this was a win for the hundreds of millions who suffered and still suffer under corrupt and brutal thugs in the Third World.

Shirer's diary has a depressing immediacy as he describes day-to-day at the front events. If you want to write historical fiction for this time, here is where you go for the daily living that will add versimiltude to your book. Where did correspondents eat dinner, what did they do in their office hours, how did Getapo intimidate citizens of neutral nations?

There are events that even having read Shirer's magisterial Rise and Fall of the Third Reich were new to me.  They seem small in the larger scheme of this disaster.  There was an American Jew who was arrested entering Germany with a suitcase of bombs and guns and was beheaded for it. His German lawyer argued unsuccessfully that he may not have known what he had been asked to take to Germany. I confess I would find that implausible. Just an event that was, to my surprise,unknown to me.