September 13, 2026

START BY USING WORDS CORRECTLY. These are not ‘homeless camps:’

Given the slim possibility that words might still mean something in public discourse, perhaps homeless camps should be called what they really are. They are drug camps, or the tented bivouacs of down-and-out drug addicts.

“Homeless camp” is too misleading and just results in the constant and just as misleading enabling that permits the associations to continue, to nobody’s benefit, especially the down-and-out and desperate.

They are drug camps that move, like forested bogs that float around big lakes and land at the whim of the wind. Drug camps float around in big cities governed by a disappointing political class often responsible for words that deceive. Drug camps end up on littered boulevards, or in a copse of trees in [St. Paul, MN’s] Pig’s Eye Park, or, most recently, in the woods between the Mississippi River and Shepard Road at the foot of Randolph Avenue. There is a handsome apartment complex there, Waterford Bay, whose renters now know that they have been joined by addicts, not campers. Campers hold s’mores over the fire and sing ditties. Addicts hold needles.

Wouldn’t calling them what they undeniably are – drug camps – heighten public sensibilities as to the true nature of the problem? We spend millions of dollars on beds, beds under a shelter roof, in a building with a furnace and running water and air conditioning. But those beds are mostly empty. Help will have to be invented out of whole cloth. Something new, innovative and helpful will have to be created. Is [St. Paul’s] Mayor Kaohly Her up to it? The city council?

Then there’s word “homeless” itself. Over 20 years ago, Thomas Sowell explored how “Politically Correct Terms Replace Honest Words:”

Another word that the left has virtually banished from the language is “bum.” Centuries of experience with idlers who refused to work and who hung around on the streets making a nuisance — and sometimes a menace — of themselves were erased from our memories as the left verbally transformed those same people into a sacred icon, “the homeless.”

As with swamps, what was once messy and smelly was now turned into something we had to protect. It was our duty to support people who refused to support themselves.

Fast-forward to today, and it’s as if: The worse it gets, the better it is: American leftism is thriving on its own failures.

Posted at 5:53 pm by Ed Driscoll

QUESTION ASKED: If someone suggests using a Nazi concentration camp for their opponents, aren’t they in fact the actual… Nazis?

Who are really the actual Nazis? While visiting Dachau concentration camp, a smiling leftist made the following remark as she stood in front of the crematorium ovens.

North Carolina Democrat state legislative candidate Shelly Headen posted a Facebook story from a vacation showing her in front of ovens in a German concentration camp memorial, saying,

“Visiting Dauchau [sic] Concentration Camp in Germany… This is where Trump supporters belong.”

… In social media photos, Headen is seen smiling as she stands in front of what appears to be crematorium ovens, which were used by the Nazi SS to burn the bodies of Jews and other prisoners who died or were murdered at the camp.

Headen faces incumbent Republican state Rep. John Blust in a suburban Guilford County district. On her Facebook page, Headen says she is a CPA and business owner “running to restore human decency,” an ironic statement after saying political opponents should be in concentration camps while posing and smiling in front of ovens at a Holocaust memorial site.

Indeed. Doesn’t this beg the question: if someone is a Nazi, or a neo-Nazi, isn’t the logical conclusion that it is the ones suggesting using (ahem) a… Nazi concentration camp for their opponents?! Wouldn’t they be the prime candidates?!

Exit question: “Has it occurred to any leftist that it might be time for an Are we the baddies moment?” 

Posted at 4:54 pm by Ed Driscoll

ROGER KIMBALL: The Madness of the Anti-AI Crowd.

In the course of these hebdomadal bulletins, I have often had occasion to mention Charles Mackay’s 1841 masterpiece Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The title should be inscribed as a talisman somewhere in the homes of the credulous. Mackay’s account of various “moral epidemics”—the South Sea Bubble, Tulipomania, Witch Hunting, etc.—is amusing until one steps back and realizes that we modern sophisticates are just as susceptible to the sorts of “folly and delusion” Mackay anatomizes as was any seventeenth-century Dutchman who mortgaged his house to purchase a single tulip bulb.

Certain insects undergo periods of dormancy before suddenly erupting in a destructive swarm. So it seems to be with society’s appetite for panic. How long can we go without indulging in the catharsis of a panic? How many society-wide panics have we witnessed in the last few decades? There was the “global cooling” scare when we were warned that a new ice age was upon us. Then there was the “global warming” scare, which is still going strong. “Some say the world will end in fire/Some say in ice.” Al Gore is going with fire. Chicken Little warned about a “population bomb” in which untold multitudes would precipitate mass starvation and lead governments to force sterilization upon their polyphiloprogenitive charges. Now we are being warned about a terrifying birth dearth. I can imagine that, should a new Charles Mackay arise, such episodes would be included in an updated edition of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.  

Curious how the doomsday messages invariably heat up (pardon the pun) when there’s a Republican in the White House:

 In accordance with the prophecy: Experts Warn We Have Only 12 Years Left Until They Change The Timeline On Global Warming Again.

—The Babylon Bee, August 1st, 2019.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

U.S. LINKS CHINESE SATELLITE IMAGERY TO IRANIAN STRIKE THAT KILLED THREE TROOPS:

US officials have linked satellite imagery supplied to Iran by Chinese entities to an Iranian attack that killed three American troops at a base in Jordan, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

Tehran acquired high-resolution images of the installation both before and after the July attack, according to officials familiar with the incident. They described the findings as the strongest evidence yet that Chinese support for Iran during the war has had deadly consequences for American forces.

The officials declined to identify the suppliers and did not accuse the Chinese government of direct involvement.

The July 17 strike hit sleeping quarters at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in northeastern Jordan, killing three soldiers and wounding four others. It was one of three missile attacks on the installation within 24 hours.

Related?

 

Posted at 12:48 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN NEW YORKERS MEMORY HOLED 9/11:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll