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Rogan To Lindsey Clancy Fans: Look At The Crime Scene

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Rogan To Lindsey Clancy Fans: Look At The Crime Scene

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Joe Rogan has had enough of the women lining up outside a Massachusetts courthouse in pink to cheer a mother who strangled her three children to death.

Sitting with comedian Brian Simpson, he refused to accept the “Free Lindsay” spectacle as a mental-health awareness campaign.

He treated it as a grotesque inversion of basic human instinct: hundreds of adults, overwhelmingly women, performing solidarity with a child murderer.

“If those ladies could see the crime scene and see those dead kids with their vacant eyes staring up because their mother took their life, the last thing that they saw was their mother standing over them, choking them to death, I don’t think they would feel so bad,” he said.

“People are out of their mind. People are showing up in support of a woman who killed her children. I don’t care how rough it was. The ability to kill your children is crazy,” Rogan further urged.

“Anyone who has kids knows how much you love them, what you would do to save them, what you do to protect them from harm,” he added.

Rogan suggested to imagine if a single father had done the same thing. “He wouldn’t get this same sympathy.” And if Lindsay Clancy is found not criminally responsible and walks, “her supporters should have to let her babysit.”

Simpson was cruder still. She went three-for-three on the strangulations, he said, then chose a sloppy method when it came time to kill herself. “Why not strangle yourself? You are definitely good at that.”

That is the conversation the country is now having while a jury of nine women and three men sits in Plymouth, unable so far to agree whether Clancy was a murderer or a woman so far gone mentally that she cannot be held responsible.

Clancy does not deny the killings. The trial is about why. The defense, led by Kevin Reddington, says postpartum psychosis, command hallucinations, and a blizzard of medications left her unable to understand the wrongfulness of what she was doing. Prosecutors say she cleared the house on purpose, acted with precision, and later built a psychosis story around a planned crime.

That is the legal fight. Outside the building it became something else: a fandom.

Hundreds of supporters, almost all women, have gathered outside Plymouth Superior Court in pink. Shirts and signs read “She Needed Help,” “Peace For Lindsay,” and “Believe.” Organizer Renee Kimball, who has no personal connection to the family, told reporters the point was to stand “in peace” for a woman she said any of them could have been.

“Any one of us who have dealt with mental health, anxiety, depression, postpartum – I think we just know that any one of us could be sitting in her chair,” Kimball said.

April Vincent, a paralegal from Rhode Island, framed it as systemic neglect: “Women are being dismissed, neglected and ignored when we speak up.”

That language has been the constant. Not “she killed three children.” She needed help. The system failed her. I could have been her.

A USA Today columnist who had raised four children under six wrote that she was “perplexed.” Millions of women endure exhaustion, pain, and the grind of early motherhood without wrapping exercise bands around a toddler’s neck.

The online version of the fandom went further than the courthouse: “I could have been Lindsay Clancy,” Substack essays, “Same, Lindsay” videos filmed with living children in frame, GoFundMe money flowing to the parents of the woman who killed their grandchildren.

Bill Maher, no one’s idea of a MAGA culture warrior, looked at the same footage and asked the question the pink shirts refuse to.

“What I don’t get is why does she have fans?” he said on his August 28 show.

“There are so many women now who are, like, outside the courthouse. It’s a little like Luigi. I understand the frustration. Don’t understand why the fans.”

He compared the courthouse crowds to the women who treat Luigi Mangione as a folk hero. Frustration with systems is one thing. Building a fan club around a person who ended three young lives is another.

Then he widened the lens: not many women kill their children, “but a lot of them are not afraid to say, ‘I don’t like being a mom.'” The Clancy trial became a permission structure for a broader, fashionable disgust with the job of mothering itself.

Rogan and Simpson arrived at the same observation from the other direction. Society always finds a softer story when the defendant is a woman. A father who strangled three children would be a monster without question. There would be no silent pink line and no Etsy “Team Lindsay” shirts.

As of Wednesday, the jury was back for a fifth day of deliberations. On Tuesday they sent Judge William Sullivan a note: after many hours they could not reach a unanimous decision. He sent them back, citing the length of the trial, more than 80 witnesses, and more than 300 exhibits.

The panel of nine women and three men has now spent the better part of four days and more than 20 hours on a case that admits the acts and argues only about criminal responsibility.

Options include first-degree murder, a lesser homicide verdict, or a finding that she lacked criminal responsibility. An NCR finding would not automatically mean she goes home. A judge can still commit her to a psychiatric facility if she is found dangerous.

Defense attorney Reddington has called the prosecution “a mess.” Prosecutors have argued this was not a woman in the throes of psychosis so complete she could not form intent: she got her husband out of the house, she completed the killings, she chose a method that worked on the children and then a method that failed on herself.

That last detail is what Simpson needled and what Rogan would not romanticize. Whatever was happening in her mind, three children are dead and a crowd showed up to make her the protagonist.

None of that requires a street festival for the person who carried out the killings.

The “I could have been her” line is the tell. It converts a specific, horrific crime into a generic female grievance. Once that conversion is made, the children become props in a story about neglected women. The father becomes a suspect in the comment section. The exercise bands become a footnote.

A society that cannot say, without a thousand caveats, that strangling your five-year-old, your three-year-old, and your baby is an evil act has lost the plot. The jury may yet hang. The women in pink already have.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/03/2026 – 09:04

“Save Us From Our Traitor Gov’t”: Massive Madrid Protests Erupt Over Socialist Regime’s Handling Of Ceuta Invasion

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“Save Us From Our Traitor Gov’t”: Massive Madrid Protests Erupt Over Socialist Regime’s Handling Of Ceuta Invasion

Spain’s Ceuta border invasion has morphed into a major political headache for Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Tens of thousands of Spaniards took to the streets of Madrid to protest the government’s handling of the crisis, potentially accelerating the political shift identified by Nomura analysts, who expect right-wing populist movements to gain traction across Europe during the next 18-month election cycle.

About 72,000 migrants, many reportedly military-age men, invaded the Spanish enclave from neighboring Morocco in late July. The scale and apparent coordination of the invasion raised concerns that Ceuta had been targeted through weaponized migration flows. The influx plunged the enclave, which has a population of approximately 84,000, into utter chaos for weeks.

By mid-August, a second wave of military-age men attempted to storm the Ceuta border, but that effort largely fell flat.

Although most of the migrants were quickly returned or repatriated, the surge overwhelmed local resources, left at least 90 people dead and sparked serious questions about Madrid’s open border policies. Italy’s continued border checks on arrivals from Spain further show how the Ceuta crisis is reverberating well beyond Spain’s borders.

About a month and a half after the first migrant wave, the political backlash against Sánchez and the Socialists in Madrid is mounting. AP News reported that more than 50,000 protesters demonstrated against the Socialists over the lack of border enforcement on Wednesday. 

Waving Spanish flags, demonstrators shouted, “A united Ceuta will never be defeated,” “Sánchez to prison” and “Invaders, go home!” referring to the thousands of migrants still in the city.

Reuters reported that the number of Spaniards who demonstrated against the Socialist government was closer to 80,000. The protest coincided with the annual Ceuta Day. Demonstrators waved Spanish flags and blew whistles as they chanted, “Ceuta is not for sale; Ceuta must be defended.”

One demonstrator’s sign read, “SOS. Europe, save us from our traitor government,” while some demanded that authorities “expel the invaders” and others called for Sánchez to resign.

“The response has been inadequate, late and, to top it all, has involved a complete dereliction of duty on the part of the government. We cannot be second-class citizens, and our border must not be sidelined,” said David Hernandez, a 45-year-old teacher who demonstrated yesterday.

Sánchez told lawmakers on Thursday that there was no evidence that the border invasion had been orchestrated or carried out by Moroccan authorities.

“I can assure you that no institution, not the diplomatic service, the European Commission or any international body, has provided the Spanish government with any solid evidence that Morocco planned or carried out the incident. None whatsoever,” Sánchez said.

The growing outrage against Sánchez and the Socialists in Madrid only builds on the expanding backlash across Europe. Nomura analyst Andrzej Szczepaniak now expects right-wing parties to make significant gains across Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland and the UK over the next 18 months.

The right-wing Alternative for Germany is poised to win Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt election this Sunday, while other polling data show that Marine Le Pen has a good chance of winning the French election next year.

The blowback against left-wing governments in Europe has also been spreading like wildfire across South America. Right-wing Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro is neck and neck with Socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of next month’s election. Much of South America has already rejected socialism, including in Colombia’s recent presidential election, which ushered in a Trump-backed president.

By mid-2026, South America had already flipped. Argentina under Milei, Chile under Kast, Colombia under de la Espriella, Peru under Keiko Fujimori, Ecuador under Noboa, Bolivia under Paz and Paraguay under Peña all sit on the political right.

The larger theme is that nation-killing socialism is being rejected.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/03/2026 – 07:20

President’s Party Up Against Poor Odds In The Midterms

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President’s Party Up Against Poor Odds In The Midterms
President’s Party Up Against Poor Odds In The Midterms

The Republican Party is controlling the House, the Senate and the presidency at the moment, but the midterm elections coming up at in November have the power to change this Status Quo.

Congressional and presidential approval are near all-time lows as the Trump administration’s wars are proving unpopular, but the party is also up against a historical precedent at the same time: The president’s party rarely does well in the midterms.

As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, using data by The American Presidency Project, there are only two presidents of the modern age who could expand their party’s showing in both chambers in the midterms or at least not lose ground: Bill Clinton during his second term and George W. Bush during his first, when he managed to flip the Senate in his favor while holding on to the House just one year after 9/11. Against these few success stories stands a long line of defeats.

Infographic: President’s Party up Against Poor Odds in the Midterms | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

President Donald Trump himself is no stranger to this. During his first term from 2017 to 2020, the Republican Party lost 41 House seats in the midterms, among the top 5 highest midterms losses since the 1960s. This lost the party control of the chamber, while it gained two seats in the Senate, holding on to it. Trump’s predecessor and successor, Joe Biden, fared similar in 2022. The Democrats lost only 9 House seats then, but with the same outcome (they also kept the Senate).

Similarly, back in 2010, Barack Obama lost control of the House just two years into his eight-year term and suffered another major setback in his second midterms when he lost the Senate as well. Bill Clinton in 1994 lost control of both chambers of Congress by the middle of his first term and never won them back in the six years that followed despite the gains he made in his second midterm election. After George W. Bush’s successful first midterms, debacle followed four years later as he lost both chambers in 2006 amid fall-out from Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq.

While the proof of midterm losses for sitting presidents is resounding, the reasons behind them are more muddled.

Nobody really knows why the midterms are so hard for incumbents irrespective of the political climate. Depending on how a president is perceived by his voters, he could be hit by either apathy or disappointment.

Other than 9/11, which helped George W. Bush succeed, other national crises have not proven a good predictor for midterms success, which leave two more possible culprits: presidential approval and the state of the economy. Both will likely not work in Trump’s favor come November.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/03/2026 – 06:55

Ukraine’s Drone Warfare Devouring 4% Of Global Germanium Demand As China Chokes Supplies

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Ukraine’s Drone Warfare Devouring 4% Of Global Germanium Demand As China Chokes Supplies

Our coverage of rare earths dates back to President Trump’s first trade war, when we warned that “Rare Earths Are China’s Most Potent Weapon In A Trade War.”

What followed was predictable. During the 2025 trade war, Beijing steadily tightened its control over exports of gallium, germanium, antimony, tungsten and a growing list of other critical industrial metals to the West and its allies. These restrictions represent another weapon in Beijing’s economic-warfare toolkit, aimed squarely at the most vulnerable chokepoints in Western defense, semiconductor and advanced-manufacturing supply chains.

The latest signals suggest that bilateral tensions are once again deteriorating. China was the sole G20 holdout on language addressing trade imbalances and an unsustainable export-oriented economic model, while Treasury has widened its Iran sanctions campaign to include Chinese entities, refiners and shipping networks.

The response from the Trump administration and other Western governments has been to accelerate efforts to restart dormant mines, expand processing capacity and build critical minerals supply chains outside Beijing’s control.

Our coverage of this trade began with an April 2024 note titled “Next Big Mineral Trade Revealed By Morgan Stanley,” which identified MP Materials as one of the miners best positioned to benefit from the Trump-era push to restore domestic critical material supply chains.

By early July 2025, we again highlighted MP Materials as one of the clearest stocks for positioning around this decoupling theme. Just weeks later, shares of the rare earth miner surged from around $30 toward triple-digit territory.

Wall Street may not fully recognize the decoupling theme until regulatory restrictions translate into physical shortages. Some analysts are beginning to understand the grim outlook facing the West. But Beijing does not need to announce a formal trade embargo to shock markets into a crisis. Slowing export approvals, restricting volumes, or denying shipments to select end users have already made it clear that the West must rebuild critical supply chains outside China, either domestically or through friend-shoring.

Another indication that Western critical material supply chains could become a major decoupling theme for Wall Street is the emerging global rearmament cycle.

BMO analyst George Heppel noted that the Russia-Ukraine war is expected to account for more than 4% of global germanium demand this year, with an estimated 15 million drones set to be deployed in an environment where China has weaponized critical materials supply chains, given its control of much of the space. 

“With a staggering 15 million drones estimated to be deployed in the Russia-Ukraine war this year, it is safe to say that the world has entered the era of mass drone warfare,” Heppel said.

Heppel explained: “Our analysis suggests that gallium, germanium and NdFeB magnets are the most important enablers of drone warfare, with gallium and germanium (alongside heavy rare earths) also being vital components required for counterdrone systems.”

“Consequently, we expect gallium, germanium and rare earth supply security to continue to be a major priority in the West in the face of this growing threat,” he added.

Heppel said the massive deployment of drones has opened a new front in the global scramble for germanium, gallium and rare earth magnets. These critical materials are used throughout the drone and counter-drone parts ecosystem, including in systems designed to detect, track, jam and destroy one-way attack drones.

The numbers surrounding drone-driven demand for critical materials are staggering:

  • Drones now account for more than 80% of enemy targets destroyed by Ukrainian forces.
  • Governments and military alliances have pledged roughly $150 billion for drone and counter-drone capabilities since 2025.
  • About one-third of that planned spending is directed toward counter-drone systems.
  • Drone warfare could consume 4.3% of global germanium demand this year.

Heppel said this is only the beginning of a “high-volume, high-precision” era of warfare that combines industrial-scale drone production with precision-strike capabilities. The transition in warfare technology is making militaries increasingly dependent on these obscure metals, much of whose production and processing is controlled by China. That represents a major vulnerability for the West.

Heppel estimates that the average FPV drone contains 46 grams of neodymium-iron-boron magnet material, 0.1 gram of gallium and 1 gram of germanium. Across 15 million drones, this translates into annual battlefield demand of roughly:

  • 690 metric tons of NdFeB magnets
  • 1.5 tons of gallium
  • 15 tons of germanium

Global germanium demand was estimated at just 343 tons in 2025, meaning the Russia-Ukraine battlefield could consume more than 4% of worldwide supply this year. That source of demand did not exist before the war. 

The Squeeze On Prices…

Germanium is used in thermal-imaging lenses and in the fiber-optic cables attached to tethered one-way attack drones.

China’s grip on germanium supply is becoming increasingly alarming (read here) as the US and allied governments commit an estimated $150 billion to drone and counter-drone capabilities.

Heppel told clients that several publicly traded companies offer exposure to the critical minerals theme:

  1. MP Materials (MP-NYSE; $54.75; Outperform rated by Max Yerrill and Raj Ray) stands out for its NdPr magnet materials business, production of strategic rare earths such as samarium and gadolinium, and efforts to support drone manufacturing through Project Swarm.
  2. Neo Performance Materials (NEO-TSX; $31.38; Outperform rated) provides downstream exposure through rare earth separation, magnet production and refined gallium products.
  3. Energy Fuels (UUUU-NYSE; $14.75; Outperform rated) offers leverage to the redevelopment of a domestic US rare earth supply chain.
  4. For gallium, Rio Tinto (RIO-LSE; £76.74; Outperform rated) and Alcoa (AA-NYSE; $49.95; Market Perform rated) are emerging as prospective Western suppliers, although gallium is unlikely to become a major revenue driver for either company.
  5. For germanium, Teck Resources (TECK.B-TSX; $94.51; Restricted) remains a key non-Chinese producer and is evaluating a capacity expansion. Ivanhoe Mines (IVN-TSX; $12.11; Outperform rated) provides indirect exposure through the germanium- and gallium-bearing Kipushi deposit and its potential role in future US critical-mineral supply chains.

“As a result, we expect drone and counterdrone technologies to become another important driver of government efforts to secure domestic production, strengthen processing capacity, and reduce dependence on vulnerable foreign supply chains,” Heppel explained.

We have already highlighted Piper Sandler’s coverage of LightPath Technologies, whose germanium-free infrared materials offer a synthetic alternative for the West as Chinese export restrictions tighten the global germanium market.

Beyond the critical materials covered by Heppel, Jefferies analysts initiated coverage on several critical minerals companies earlier Wednesday, including Almonty Industries. Jefferies assigned Almonty a “Buy” rating, highlighting the miner’s direct public-market exposure to Western tungsten supply. 

Read more here.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/03/2026 – 05:45

EU’s Kallas Says No Progress On Zelensky’s Cash Infusion For Patriot Missiles

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EU’s Kallas Says No Progress On Zelensky’s Cash Infusion For Patriot Missiles

On Wednesday EU leadership revealed that the Zelensky government has formally asked the European Commission to provide several billion euros from the EU’s €90 billion ($105 billion) support loan to purchase US-made Patriot air defense missiles.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced just ahead of a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, “It is worth several billion euros and would cover Ukraine’s air defense needs, including high-end PAC-3 air defense systems.”

via EU Council

At the same time, the EU’s top foreign affairs official, Kaja Kallas, is coming off a meeting of the bloc’s defense ministers wherein she cited no progress made on the Patriot funding plan.

“There were calls and talks about these missiles but there was, unfortunately, no concrete success today regarding this,” the EU top diplomat had spelled out Tuesday. “Patriot missiles about to expire [by Nato standards] should be sent to Ukraine.”

Looking back further, the last time that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in the White House, he pleaded with President Trump for a “winter package” of 300 Patriot missiles. 

Zelensky has long been warning that cities remain largely unprotected against Russia’s more advanced ballistic missile arsenal – a problem that only mass supplies of Patriots can remedy.

Ukraine’s supply have run dry, with batteries sitting in some locations, unable to be fired.

In mid-August, here’s what a CNN team observed on the ground in Ukraine:

CNN was the first media outlet to be given access to a Patriot on Ukrainian territory so Ukrainian officials could reveal one fact: the country has pretty much run out of interceptors. CNN agreed not to reveal details of the Patriot model or its location.

The 16 tubes of the system that CNN saw show signs of regular use, but its chief engineer in Ukraine, who gave only his first name Dmytro for security reasons, said he had not seen a Patriot launcher fire for six weeks. Ukraine has been reluctant to specify exactly how many interceptors, if any, it has left – President Volodymyr Zelensky says the country needs 5% of the US stockpile to survive the winter, but currently only has 1%.

There have notoriously been immense backlogs when it comes to Patriot production, and there’s said to be great global demand among US allies, especially given depletions which have come as a result of the Iran war.

Taking it back? Trump earlier talked about giving Ukraine a license to make Patriot systems…

Trump had announced in July that Washington would give Ukraine “the right to make Patriots” – after Zelensky had for at least six months been relentless in requesting this, framing it as urgent and for the protection of cities and civilians. But such local production would take years to tool and set up, with the reality of a nightly air war making the prospect daunting.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/03/2026 – 04:15

COVID-19: The Great Forgetting

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COVID-19: The Great Forgetting

Authored by John MacLeod via The Critic,

We have repressed the memories of the pandemic that changed all of our lives…

It is a little drawer in a cabinet by my bedside and I have not opened it in years. I have to steel myself to open it now. And, yes, they are all there yet in every variety – black, chequered, colourful.

The ear-looped face-coverings behind which I spluttered for two long years, tugging on and off as needs be, as we queued obediently outside supermarkets, danced on and off pavements, or chilled if anyone in the vicinity so much as coughed.

Obediently protecting the NHS by, um, not using it. And, for weeks on end in 2020, biddably stood outside our front gates to hail its endeavours each Thursday evening, clapping our hands and banging saucepans.

The initial weeks of panic, when hand-sanitiser, soap and masks were nowhere to be had. An inexplicable run on toilet-rolls. The later, weird scarcities: flour, yeast, eggs.

On all sides the shuttered shops and restaurants, many of which would never reopen. The funerals you could not go to and the weddings that never happened. Untold rings, accordingly, engraved with the wrong date.

I have the sort of bardic, Highland memory that could immediately tell you something interesting that happened in my life in, say, August 1976 or September 2002. I’d struggle to detail much between March 2020 and April 2022.

Those were months without form, and void. Without the usual milestones of big social occasions and family celebration. In hindsight, they have a nightmarish hue.

I was trapped in Edinburgh shielding two elderly parents, one living with cancer. I lurched out on my lonesome for daily needs and the weekly Big Shop, three debit-cards in my wallet.

In the early weeks – I was fifty-four; had a bit of a tummy – I was wholly resigned to catching Covid; darkly confident I would die. Time and again I washed my hands, till they were raw; sometimes I was tempted to wash the groceries – and I know of households where husbands, returning from such an outing, had to strip in the porch before being granted admittance.

Nicola Sturgeon? Gaw, that woman never seemed to be off the box. Nightly my mother tuned in for her latest and-furthermore-I-say-unto-ye lecturettes, screened live on telly by our reverent broadcasters and without the First Minister’s political rivals granted any part whatsoever.

In a particularly North Korean moment, STV even broadcast online sickly footage of assorted Scottish children mewling, “Thank you, Nicola, for keeping us all safe,” and variants thereof. (It was belatedly pulled, after an outcry.)

I still remember the worst moment. A Saturday evening in October 2020. It had rained all day. Our brief re-opening had ceased after a sustained uptick in infections: the First Minister (who, weeks earlier, had been braying to all Europe how Scotland had eliminated coronavirus) had announced a “16-day re-set” with renewed restrictions.

So successful was the16-day re-set it lasted till the spring of 2022. That October evening – I could not return to my own home; I was totally trapped; my parents had been in particularly foul temper that day – I stood at the kitchen sink and wept.

Weeks later, it was announced that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine had been successfully trialled. Great-grandparents were enjoying their first armfuls by Christmas.

I had my own in March 2021 – for which I had to motor home, at last, to my Hebridean lair, by sleepy streets and through a deserted countryside, past fraying posters for 2020 Highland Games and agricultural shows that had never taken place.

I never caught coronavirus. Nor did my parents, nor either of my brothers. Even in my widest social circle, I only know of four people who died – all of them infected in hospital or care-home settings, and who may well have died with it rather than of it. In a national emergency that bore most brutally on schoolchildren and young adults, the average age of Covid mortality was eighty-two.

The abiding sense that Britain had a particularly awful pandemic under a particularly useless Government is not fair. We were among the first countries to have a reliable test for Covid-19. Humiliated the EU with our rapid development, testing and rollout of an effective vaccine.

Our world-leading research early identified useful treatments. (One, Remdesivir, in October 2020 might well have saved President Trump’s life.)

In terms of excess deaths, we fared better than Italy, Spain, Greece, the United States and indeed most of central and eastern Europe. Five European nations did worse than us: eight better.

Britain had three vulnerabilities: considerable population density, especially in England; a high BAME population, many in cultures of extended family in crowded homes; and, in London Heathrow, the world’s busiest international airport.

Yet appalling British mistakes were made and Sweden, which refused to lock down, had the lowest excess deaths of all.

Haplessly, back in 2011 and when detailed plans were laid, we had prepared for the wrong pandemic – influenza.

You might think flu and Covid much of a muchness. There are key differences. Flu has a briefer incubation period. It is potentially dangerous to children and in a bad year – our last was 2018 – can carry off over 30,000 people. (In 2020, seven British children of nine or younger died of flu: only three succumbed to Covid-19.)

Bluntly, more children, trapped out of sight in awful family situations, were ‘murdered’ as a consequence of coronavirus than would die of it.

There had been two fundamental mistakes.

One was that we were rather slow to grasp that many with Covid had no symptoms – after we had blithely decanted thousands of elderly hospital patients into eventide homes.

The other was the belief, in the early months, that Covid-19 was primarily spread by “fomites”. Things you touched that infected people had touched.

That’s certainly true of maladies like norovirus – the winter vomiting bug – but, in fact, coronavirus is essentially an airborne respiratory infection.

We would have been far better throwing our windows open and did have one great stroke of luck: the spring and summer of 2020 were exceptionally fine.

It took me time, after it was all over, to unlearn some habits, like raising my left hand in me-Tarzan-you-Jane greeting as I was being served in shops – the mask denied staff the dazzle of my disarming smile – or daring to press buttons on cash-machines and at pedestrian-crossings with a naked finger, rather than using the “Covid key” that long dangled from my belt.

Yet by the late summer of 2022, even as normality resumed, the public clamoured for vengeance and the most convenient scapegoat was Boris Johnson

Toppled hastily from power not on account of Covid misjudgements, but revelations as to how life in No 10 – at the height of the pandemic – had become something of a wine-fuelled Lower Sixth disco.

A far more extraordinary aspect of Covid-19 is how comprehensively it has been forgotten.

Most great affairs of moment are immortalised in our culture, and often for many years. Our broadcasters were still making Second World War dramas in the Eighties. John F Kennedy’s presidency and murder yet shift books and films. The 1936 Abdication crisis remains a lucrative cottage-industry for authors and screenwriters.

But there are no coronavirus movies. There may be no poems and novels – in stark contrast to the Aids pandemic, wherein more young Americans died than had fallen in Vietnam, and whose notable British casualties alone included everyone from Derek Jarman, to Freddie Mercury, to Bruce Chatwin.

There was much related fiction, drama and cinema, and as recently as 2021 we had Russell T Davies’s powerful Channel 4 drama, It’s A Sin.

But Aids – and this is in no way to belittle its victims, or those who loved them – tended to endanger a specific demographic. It was precisely because Covid-19 terrified the bejapers out of all of us that it has been collectively repressed as a memory.

Incredibly, given the huge decisions made around it and how these blew up our economy, the pandemic, its handling and those decisions were not even points for discussion at the 2024 general election.

There is an evident reluctance, too, in high places to discuss Covid-19’s origins – likely, far more sinister than some random in Wuhan nipping out for bat and chips.

And there is, in fact, a precedent for this strange amnesia.

The so-called Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, all the worse because it coincided with the last vital months of the Great War and the vast transport of American troops, killed – globally – some thirty million people.

At a conservative estimate, at least 550,000 Americans – 195,000 of them in just thirty-one days. In October 1918 11,000 perished in Philadelphia. The city ran out of coffins: at night, corpses were collected from porches by horse and cart, in scenes straight out of the Black Death.

In my late father’s native district on the isle of Lewis, forty people died in just five weeks, with four or five funerals every day. In a village further south, that November, my maternal grandfather lost a beloved sister to “influenzial pneumonia”.

That influenza – first noted in Kansas, brought to Europe by sniffling American doughboys and mutating to new horror amidst the filth and decay of the Western Front – was of special dread because it could kill with extraordinary speed and, rather than the very young or the very old, most who died were in their twenties – husky youths and bonny lasses, in the very prime of life.

“If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration,” physician Victor Vaughan chilled that dreadful autumn, “civilisation could easily disappear from the face of the Earth.”

It did not, of course. By 1919 it was already in retreat and by March 1920 had burned itself out: like pandemics everywhere, it simply ran out of people to infect.

But there is no Spanish flu fiction. There was no subsequent cinema. It is remembered within families – earlier this summer, my 94 year-old uncle spoke sorrowfully of that aunt he had never known – but, collectively, and as a society, we wiped that tape.

“It is in the individual memory of a great many of us,” author Alfred W Crosby mused in 1998, “but it is not in the collective memory. That for me is the greatest mystery, how we could have forgotten anything so horrendous – so massively horrendous, which killed so many of us.

“Why was our reaction to forget it? So awful, so frightening, people just got rid of the memory. But it always lingers there, as a kind of uneasiness.”

Like those masks in my drawer – clung to, still, just in case…

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/03/2026 – 03:30

Spain & Greece Have The Best Pension/Salary Replacement Rate In The World

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Spain & Greece Have The Best Pension/Salary Replacement Rate In The World

How much of your paycheck would a pension replace in retirement?

Depending on the country, the answer ranges from more than 80% to less than 20%.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, ranks countries by their projected gross pension replacement rate, based on data from the OECD. The rate compares pension benefits with pre-retirement earnings, with both measured before taxes and contributions.

Estimates are for an average earner entering the workforce at age 22 in 2024 and include mandatory public and private pensions, but exclude voluntary private retirement savings.

Spain Leads the Ranking

Southern European countries dominate the top of the ranking, with Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Italy all placing in the top 10. Spain and Greece stand out at 80.4% and 79.6%, respectively.

Rank Country Pension Replacement Rate
1 🇪🇸 Spain 80.4%
2 🇬🇷 Greece 79.6%
3 🇱🇺 Luxembourg 75.6%
4 🇨🇴 Colombia 74.8%
5 🇳🇱 Netherlands 74.7%
6 🇦🇹 Austria 74.1%
7 🇩🇰 Denmark 72.7%
8 🇵🇹 Portugal 72.4%
9 🇮🇹 Italy 70.6%
10 🇲🇽 Mexico 69.6%
11 🇹🇷 Türkiye 69.1%
12 🇨🇷 Costa Rica 65.7%
13 🇸🇪 Sweden 63.7%
14 🇸🇰 Slovakia 58.0%
15 🇫🇮 Finland 57.8%
16 🇫🇷 France 56.6%
17 🇭🇺 Hungary 51.9%
18 🇨🇱 Chile 49.7%
19 🇳🇴 Norway 46.1%
20 🇸🇮 Slovenia 45.9%
21 🇬🇧 UK 44.7%
22 🇨🇿 Czechia 44.2%
23 🇮🇸 Iceland 43.9%
24 🇧🇪 Belgium 43.5%
25 🇮🇱 Israel 42.8%
26 🇨🇭 Switzerland 42.4%
27 🇩🇪 Germany 42.1%
28 🇦🇺 Australia 40.8%
29 🇺🇸 U.S. 39.7%
30 🇳🇿 New Zealand 39.5%
31 🇱🇻 Latvia 38.7%
32 🇨🇦 Canada 37.1%
33 🇯🇵 Japan 36.5%
34 🇰🇷 S. Korea 33.4%
35 🇪🇪 Estonia 29.3%
36 🇵🇱 Poland 28.6%
37 🇮🇪 Ireland 24.3%
38 🇱🇹 Lithuania 17.4%
— 🌐 OECD Average 52.0%

National prosperity is not a reliable predictor of pension replacement rates. Mexico and Türkiye are both near 70%, while Germany stands at 42.1% and the U.S. at 39.7%, reflecting substantial differences in how national retirement systems are structured.

At the bottom, Lithuania’s replacement rate is just 17.4%, less than one-quarter of Spain’s 80.4%. South Korea and Japan also rank relatively low, at 33.4% and 36.5%, respectively.

Where Low Pensions Meet High Senior Poverty

A low replacement rate does not automatically mean high senior poverty, but several countries near the bottom of the pension ranking also have elevated old-age poverty rates. In Lithuania, more than 20% of people aged 65 and older live in relative income poverty.

The pattern extends across the Baltics. Old-age poverty exceeds 30% in Estonia and Latvia, compared with an OECD average of 14.8%. In the U.S., the rate is also relatively high at 22.9%.

At the other extreme, the Netherlands combines a 74.7% replacement rate with an old-age poverty rate of just 4.6%. Denmark, Finland, and Norway also have poverty rates at or below 5%.

Replacement rates are only one part of retirement security, but these comparisons show how differently pension systems replace workers’ earnings across the OECD.

To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on the annual cost of retirement by state.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/03/2026 – 02:45

‘Horrible Violence’: Quiet Dutch Village Turns Into A Battlefield

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‘Horrible Violence’: Quiet Dutch Village Turns Into A Battlefield

Authored by – Remix News Staff – via Remix News,

A suspected underworld revenge attack linked to fugitive drug trafficker Jos Leijdekkers, known as “Bolle Jos,” left a security guard dead and two police officers wounded in the quiet Dutch village of Overasselt in the early hours of Sept. 1, 2026.

Surveillance cameras captured vans full of masked men carrying assault rifles during the attack, which is raising fears that Netherlands is devolving into a narco-state.

Around 4:00 a.m., two vans pulled up and a large group approached a farmhouse previously tied to a drug lab. The surveillance footage shows the group approaching a parked car with its interior light on. Five shots were then fired, according to the Dutch police report on the incident.

A 51-year-old man from nearby Wijchen, hired as a security guard after an earlier attack on the property, was murdered. Neighbors reported hearing dozens of shots, with one neighbor telling Dutch media he heard 37 shots before police arrived.

The first officers responding to a report of a suspicious situation came under immediate fire. Colleagues dragged the wounded officers to safety while still being shot at. One officer initially suffered life-threatening injuries; both were later reported out of danger.

Police launched a nationwide manhunt involving helicopters, dogs, special intervention units, and roadblocks on the A73 and A76. Warning shots were fired during searches of cornfields, gardens, and other sites. The operation led to the arrest of 34 suspects at multiple locations, including a cornfield near the scene, Nijmegen train station, and highways in Limburg. The suspects included Dutch, Belgian, French, and Algerian nationals. Weapons, vehicles, and data carriers were seized. A large-scale investigation team (TGO) has now been formed, with all detainees remaining in custody.

The incredible violence has sparked reactions all the way from local police officials to the country’s justice minister.

Deputy Police Chief of the East Netherlands unit Jolanda Aalbers described the night as “indescribable.”

“For colleagues this is a truly intense incident. Colleagues were wounded and they were brought to safety by other colleagues at risk to their own lives. It was a real act of heroism. We are grateful that the wounded colleagues are out of life-threatening condition.”

Justice Minister David van Weel condemned “horrible violence” and said “we do not tolerate this,” according to Dutch news outlet NOS. He also described the scale of the violence as “unprecedented” for the Netherlands. “The fact that you have hordes of dozens of young people walking through the streets of a village and immediately opening fire on the police is unprecedented and new,” he said. He spoke of a suspected criminal settling of accounts involving international drug cartels that operate across borders.

Deputy Chief Prosecutor Monique Vinkesteijn called it a “long-running conflict.” She said that suspects face charges including murder or manslaughter, attempted murder, conspiracy, and preparation of a kidnapping. She described ten different crime scenes, underlining the sprawling and complex nature of the crime. She said investigators were working to link each suspect to specific locations.

Mayor Joerie Minses of Heumen municipality, which includes Overasselt, called the violence “un-Dutch,” “completely unacceptable,” and something that “goes beyond all bounds.”

“What happened last night does not fit Overasselt,” he stated.

He now says he may want to close the farmhouse entirely, which has a documented history of trouble.

In 2019, a professional drug lab was found in shipping containers near the farmhouse after a fire. In 2024, armed men were found at the gate of the house.

In July 2025, an attacker fired at least 25 rounds from an AK-47-style rifle at the house, resulting in the conviction of a 21-year-old from Amsterdam. Residents then hired private security.

What sparked the latest attack?

There are now questions about what prompted such a large-scale attack from the drug gangs. Dutch media, citing police sources, linked the attack to a dispute over an 812-kilogram cocaine shipment seized on Aug. 29 at the French-Spanish border. The drugs were in a Dutch-registered truck traveling from Africa via Portugal.

The masked gang members may have been seeking a missing portion of the load or confronting an intermediary connected to Leijdekkers’ network. Leijdekkers, one of the Netherlands’ most-wanted fugitives, has been convicted in both the Netherlands and Belgium, including a 14-year sentence in the Belgian Costa case involving Antwerp port cocaine trafficking. He faces decades in prison for other crimes as well. He is believed to be in West Africa. Police have not officially confirmed the Leijdekkers link.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/03/2026 – 02:00

The Two Lineages Of Liberty

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The Two Lineages Of Liberty

Authored by Philippe Lemieux via Mises Institute,

Liberty’s history is often presented as a direct consequence of the Enlightenment: inherited authority was subjected to reason, persecution gave way to toleration, monarchy to constitutional government, and privilege to individual rights. In this account, classical liberalism leads naturally to Austrian economics and modern libertarianism. That sequence is useful but incomplete.

Liberty developed through the convergence of two lineages. The first is the modern lineage of Enlightenment criticism, which required political power to justify itself before reason. The second is an older realist tradition, running from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas through the School of Salamanca, Richard Cantillon, Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard. These thinkers did not form a single school, nor did they agree on every question. What connects them is a shared orientation: reality has an intelligible order, human action has a structure, and political power cannot be abolished either by command.

The relevant difference is not between the Enlightenment as a whole and an older tradition, nor between reason and faith. Important currents within the Enlightenment, especially the Scottish Enlightenment, recognized that custom, law, money, and markets could arise without deliberate design. The deeper conflict is between a constructivist current within modern thought and an older causal-realist approach to social order. Friedrich Hayek identified the pinnacle of this constructivism as the “fatal conceit,” the erroneous belief that man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes. The realist tradition emphasizes the intelligibility and causal structure of social phenomena, while the constructivist tendency places greater confidence in deliberate organization and direction.

The danger appeared when criticism of inherited institutions hardened into confidence in consciously-designed ones. Locke was not Marx, and constitutional government was not socialism. The continuity lies in method: once social order is treated primarily as an artifact of design, political disagreement increasingly turns on the identity of the designer, the objective of the plan, and the permitted range of control. This tendency appears in social planning, price controls, central banking, licensing, regulation, and the administrative management of economic life.

The older lineage begins from a different premise. Aristotle started with beings as they are and the ends toward which they tend. Human beings choose, deliberate, employ means, form households, exchange goods, and enter associations. Thomas Aquinas carried this realism into law and politics. A command does not become just simply because a ruler issues it. Human law derives its normative order from principles that political authority does not itself create.

Many late Scholastics, particularly the Spanish Scholastics associated with Salamanca, extended this framework to property, exchange, money, and political authority. They increasingly identified the just price with common estimation, shaped by utility, scarcity, and market conditions, rather than with an objective measure of production costs. By situating economic phenomena within moral agency and commutative justice, they placed limits on the arbitrary exercise of political authority in economic life. Within this tradition, thinkers such as Juan de Mariana also articulated strong limits on taxation, confiscation, and monetary debasement.

Richard Cantillon advanced this analysis by placing entrepreneurship, uncertainty, production, and market-price formation near the center of economic life. Merchants and retailers bought at known or fixed prices and later sold at prices they could not foresee, while farmers committed themselves to fixed rents without knowing what their output would command. Profit, loss, and bankruptcy therefore arose from judgment under changing conditions of demand, competition, weather, and consumer preference.

Carl Menger marked a decisive transition within the Austrian tradition. Much of British classical economics, especially in the Ricardian tradition, explained long-run exchange value primarily through labor and production costs. Menger instead began with human needs and with the economizing individual’s knowledge of, and command over, goods capable of satisfying those needs. Value was not a substance stored inside an object; it arose from the relation between an individual, his needs, and the goods available to him. Market phenomena therefore had to be traced to individual judgments, choices, and exchanges. Prices, money, and other social institutions could emerge from economizing activity even when no one intended the resulting order.

Böhm-Bawerk extended the analysis to capital and time. For him, social or productive capital consists of intermediate goods used in time-consuming processes of production before final consumer goods become available.

Mises generalized the Austrian insight through praxeology, making economics part of a broader science of human action. The starting point was not an aggregate, a class, or a governmental objective; it was the acting individual employing scarce means to attain chosen ends. Exchange, prices, profit, loss, money, capital, and production are intelligible only within this structure of purposeful conduct. Mises presented praxeology as an a priori science grounded in the category of human action, with implications that could be developed through deductive reasoning independently of particular historical experience.

The extent to which this epistemology should be understood as Kantian, however, is contested. Jörg Guido Hülsmann has argued that Mises is better understood as a representative of Aristotelian realism. Although Mises employed the language of the a priori, Hülsmann points to the method of Mises’s actual economic analysis, which repeatedly seeks to identify the nature and necessary relations of economic phenomena. Hülsmann therefore places him within the broader Austrian realist tradition of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, arguing that his affinities with Kant should not be overstated. On this reading, Mises occupies an intermediate position within the lineage developed here: his epistemological vocabulary is partly Kantian, while the substance of his economic analysis retains an important Aristotelian-realist character.

Mises’s critique of socialism demonstrated the practical consequences of this method. Socialist calculation does not fail merely because officials are corrupt, uninformed, or unintelligent. It fails because abolishing private ownership in the means of production eliminates genuine exchange in capital goods. Without exchange, there are no market prices through which planners can compare competing uses of resources by means of monetary calculation.

A planning authority may collect technical information, issue targets, and assign accounting figures. Such figures, however, are not exchange ratios generated by transactions among separate owners. A statistical table can describe quantities, but it cannot determine whether steel should be used for bridges, machinery, railways, or buildings in a way that responds to consumer demand and alternative costs. The defect is not located in the personality of the planner; it is built into the institutional structure of the system.

Rothbard brought this lineage to its most systematic political conclusion. He combined Austrian value theory, capital theory, and economic calculation with a broader theory of natural law, natural rights, property, and the state. His philosophical foundation differed from Mises’s. Rothbard retained the praxeological method of deduction but interpreted the action axiom from an Aristotelian-Thomistic epistemological standpoint, grounding it in the nature of reality rather than in Mises’s neo-Kantian conception of the action axiom as an a priori category of thought.

Rothbard also rejected the convenient story that economics began with Adam Smith and advanced in a straight line toward modern science. In his history of economic thought, he restored the Spanish Scholastics, Cantillon, the French liberal tradition, and other neglected thinkers to a central place, arguing that their contributions had been obscured by the later dominance of British classical economics.

The administrative state shows what happens when the emancipatory language of the Enlightenment is separated from the limits imposed by human action, scarcity, property, and economic calculation. It speaks the language of rights while turning rights into permissions. It recognizes property and permits markets while reserving the power to direct their use through zoning, licensing, taxation, monetary policy, and regulation. It preserves elections while transferring decisions to agencies, central banks, and experts. The system remains liberal in vocabulary and managerial in operation. Failure is treated not as evidence of institutional limits but as proof that the machinery requires another adjustment, a new rule, a larger staff, or a wider jurisdiction.

The history of liberty, therefore, is not the story of one Enlightenment becoming more consistent, but of two converging lineages. One challenged inherited authority; the other emphasized the limits that human action, causality, property, and economic calculation impose on deliberate construction. Austrian economics stands where they meet. Social order emerges through individual action, exchange, calculation, and cooperation under conditions that no central authority can fully command.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/02/2026 – 23:25

Man Accused Of Trying To Set Portland Record Store On Fire After They Wouldn’t Buy His Records

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Man Accused Of Trying To Set Portland Record Store On Fire After They Wouldn’t Buy His Records

A dispute over a record sale escalated into threats and an alleged attempt to set a Portland record shop on fire, according to prosecutors.

Adrian Orange, 40, is accused of confronting the owner of Vinyl Resting Place in St. Johns on Aug. 27 after the store declined to purchase records he brought in, according to KATU ABC. Court documents say Orange threatened the owner, calling him a “dead man.”

Investigators say Orange later returned after the door had been locked, placed newspaper beneath the entrance, poured lighter fluid on it and ignited it.

A woman from a neighboring business intervened and extinguished the flames after Orange walked away. Authorities say he threatened her as well.

The KATU report says about 15 minutes later, Orange allegedly returned and kicked the store’s door while making additional threats, including, “One way or another, I’m getting to you.”

Police later located Orange outside a nearby bar. He acknowledged visiting the record shop earlier to sell records and had a lighter with him when officers found him.

Orange was arraigned on attempted arson, two burglary counts, coercion and menacing. A judge ordered him held without bail pending a preventive detention hearing.

Afterward, the store owner wrote on social media about his frustration with the broader mental health crisis, saying he felt he had exhausted his options for dealing with the problem.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/02/2026 – 23:00

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