Eugyppius argues that the many thousands of Matt Hancock's finger-flicking conversational exchanges leaked to the Telegraph do not provide evidence of a conspiracy.

His argument has much that is sound in it and I admire its tone. But in the great argumentative battle between cock-up and conspiracy as explanations of pandemic protocols, he comes down on the side of cock-up. The protocols were "driven by autonomous political and institutional forces rather than nebulous globalist conspirators". In short, he claims:

• Advisers and bureaucrats originally pushed for lockdown.
• Once lockdown protocols were initiated, the Government and the media terrorised citizens to ensure they would comply.
• Politicians used public panic as an opportunity for politicking.
• Everything was really about politics, not science.
• There was a feedback loop, whereby restrictions were introduced, strictly enforced, generating a fear in citizens which justified further restrictions and enforcement.
• The politicians knew that there was no medical justification for the protocols, but allowed political imperatives to keep them in place.

After these arguments he concludes that the people responsible are not only "callous and evil" but also "really dumb". Then he sets aside the first claim ("callous and evil") to emphasise the second ("really dumb"). He says, and I paraphrase, that nothing meant anything, that no one had any idea of what they were doing, that all the policies were illogical, and that the politicians themselves were shallow abusive narcissists.

For years, the Department of Homeland Security has run a virtually unknown program gathering domestic intelligence, one of many revelations in a wide-ranging tranche of internal documents reviewed by POLITICO.

Those documents also reveal that a significant number of employees in DHS's intelligence office have raised concerns that the work they are doing could be illegal.

Under the domestic-intelligence program, officials are allowed to seek interviews with just about anyone in the United States. That includes people held in immigrant detention centers, local jails, and federal prison. DHS's intelligence professionals have to say they're conducting intelligence interviews, and they have to tell the people they seek to interview that their participation is voluntary. But the fact that they're allowed to go directly to incarcerated people — circumventing their lawyers — raises important civil liberties concerns, according to legal experts.

That specific element of the program, which has been in place for years, was paused last year because of internal concerns. DHS's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which runs the program, uses it to gather information about threats to the U.S., including transnational drug trafficking and organized crime. But the fact that this low-profile office is collecting intelligence by questioning people in the U.S. is virtually unknown.

At least 17 people have been killed and 140 injured in an explosion inside an office building in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, police and fire service officials have said.

The explosion shook the fourth and fifth floors of a five-storey building in Gulistan, a major hub for wholesale goods in the capital, shortly before 5pm local time (11:00 GMT) on Tuesday.

Authorities could not immediately provide the reason behind the huge explosion in the bustling commercial area.

More than 1.2 million protesters marched in France on Tuesday as rail workers and refinery staff began rolling strikes and trade unions stepped up their campaign to try to stop Emmanuel Macron's plan to raise the pension age to 64.

For the sixth time since the start of the year, trade unions called a nationwide day of strikes and demonstrations. Many protest rallies attracted bigger crowds than previous ones organised since mid-January, including in Marseille, one of France's biggest cities, authorities and local media said.

"The idea is to bring France to a standstill," said Fabrice Michaud of the railway workers' branch of the CGT trade union.

Rail unions called for rolling, open-ended strikes, which could affect all national trains as well as international routes including the Eurostar. Bin collectors and truck drivers joined the action.

Nicole Solas slammed those responsible as 'psychopaths'...

Rhode Island mom Nicole Solas slammed an area teachers' union she claimed harassed her and made her the topic of a "secret meeting" after she made a records request regarding the district's curriculum.

Solas told Fox News' Rachel Campos Duffy Sunday on Fox & Friends Weekend:

"They painted me like a wanted enemy of the state simply because I submitted public records requests.

"There were 250 teachers that attended where they were alerted to me being an attack on public education."

Solas, who was sued by her daughter's school district last year, said presentation slides condemning her at the secret meeting were leaked to her by a teacher.

In June 2020, the Southern Poverty Law Center posted an article entitled, "Designating Antifa as domestic terrorist organization is dangerous, threatens civil liberties."

The organization that supposedly tracks extremism in America dismissed the idea that Antifa was a threat to anyone.

The "anti-fascists" are "broad, community-based" and "represent a large spectrum of the political left." "Individuals loosely affiliated with Antifa are typically involved in skirmishes and property crimes at demonstrations across the country," the article hand waves.

"But the threat of lethal violence pales in comparison to that posed by far-right extremists."

Will the SPLC change its tune now that 23 members of Antifa were arrested as domestic terrorists for violently attacking a police facility outside Atlanta?

Sometimes a single incident efficiently summarizes a larger trend. So it is with New York University's selection of its new president, Linda Mills, a licensed clinical social worker and an NYU social work professor. She researches trauma and bias, as well as race and gender in the legal academy. She is a documentary filmmaker and teaches advocacy filmmaking. She serves as an NYU vice chancellor and as a senior vice provost for Global Programs and University Life. In all these roles, Mills is the very embodiment of the contemporary academy. The most significant part of her identity, however, and the one that ties the rest of her curriculum vitae together, is that she is female, and thus overdetermined as NYU's next president.

Mills is part of the Great Feminization of the American university, an epochal change whose consequences have yet to be recognized. Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that "only" 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and "only" 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.

These female leaders emerge from an ever more female campus bureaucracy, whose size is reaching parity with the faculty. Females made up 66 percent of college administrators in 2021; those administrators constitute an essential force in campus diversity ideology, whether they have "diversity" in their job titles or not. Among the official diversity bureaucrats installed in their posts since July 2022, females predominate: the vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at the University of California, San Diego; the vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at UCLA; the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Maryville University in Missouri; the chief diversity officer and vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the School of Education at the College of Charleston in South Carolina; the vice president for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at Kansas State University; the associate dean of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at the University of Kansas School of Law; the vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of California, Santa Cruz; the vice president for inclusion and community impact at Herzing University in Wisconsin; the associate provost for faculty and diversity initiatives at Muhlenberg College (this associate provost also became Muhlenberg's first chief diversity officer); the first chief officer of culture, belonging, and community building at Delta College in Michigan; the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh; the vice provost for faculty diversity, equity, and inclusivity at the University of Texas, Austin (a lateral move from the position of managing director of diversity in UT's office of the executive vice president and provost); the vice president for equity, culture, and talent at Prince George's Community College — all are female.

Conspiracy and coordination were important at the beginning, but national governments and their institutions rapidly assumed the initiative in all areas of pandemic policy.

We are witnessing an unprecedented, comprehensive failure of policy, medicine and science. The world will never be the same.

Arguing the conspiracy-or-emergence question with respect to pandemic policy is a little like weeding the garden. You are never quite done with it, and every few months you find you have something more to say.

In this instance, I must thank friend-of-the-blog Igor Chudov for providing the opportunity. He disagrees with my view that Covid policies owe less to creepy conspiratorial globalists, than they do to the unbounded stupidity of our leaders, boring institutional dynamics, and feedback effects. He's explained why in an extensive post that everyone should read.

A 31-year-old woman who admitted to having sex with a 13-year-old boy and getting pregnant with his child will serve no jail time, according to reports.

"I feel like if she was a man, and he was a little girl, it would definitely be different," the victim's mother said. "They would be seeking more. I feel like because he is not a woman, they are not. They are having compassion for her."

The Fountain Police Department in Colorado arrested Andrea Serrano in June 2022 on felony charges of sexual assault on a child by one in a position of trust and sexual assault on a child.

'Tucker Carlson Tonight' was the first to look at over 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from the Capitol Building on Jan 6.

Tucker Carlson released never-before-seen footage from the Jan. 6, 2021 riots at Capitol Hill that appear to dispel several narratives pushed by the Democrat-controlled House Select Committee and the legacy media.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy granted "Tucker Carlson Tonight" an exclusive first look to over 40,000 hours of security camera footage from the Capitol Building that were hidden from the public for over two years. On Monday, Carlson offered the first glimpses of footage involving key figures from that day.