Category: General Interest

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Margaret Thatcher On Statism

Margaret Thatcher On Statism

“When the state does everything for you, it will soon take everything from you. You will then have no basis for personal freedom, political freedom, or economic freedom.”

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The ‘Pindia Challenge’: A Stark Warning To The West

Pindia Challenge

A viral game on Google Maps has laid bare one of the most glaring cultural realities of the modern world.

Drop a Street View pin anywhere in India and try to find a spot free of garbage, rubble, plastic waste or worse. The “Pindia Challenge” has taken off precisely because it is almost impossible to win. Mountains of trash, rivers of sludge, and streets buried under filth appear with depressing consistency.

But what was once dismissed as a problem isolated to ’over there’ is now increasingly visible on Western doorsteps through mass migration, turning once-tidy, well maintained neighbourhoods into open-air dumps.

The ’Pindia challenge’ is a game on Google Maps where you drop a street view anywhere in India. The goal is to find an area completely free of trash or rubble.

It’s almost impossible to win on the first try. pic.twitter.com/UFvRt7kfs7

— Memes (@Basedgoymemes) August 14, 2026

The challenge itself is simple and brutal. Players zoom into random Indian locations on Google Maps Street View and screenshot the result. Trash piles, discarded packaging, construction rubble and human waste dominate the frames.

Participants report failure after failure, even in mountainous areas where refuse somehow still appears.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/pindia-challenge-stark-warning-west

The solution is simple. We need t oraise the environmental awareness and responsibility of all humans to improve our stewardship of our home and care of ourselves and each other.

Here is the best tool I have found to do that: https://www.thewaytohappiness.org/

If we all share this link we will contribute to improving the lives and homes of many!

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Romeo Dallaire

Romeo Dallaire

He sent a one-page fax to the United Nations warning them exactly what was coming. They told him to stand down. Three months later, it happened exactly as he said it would.

On January 11, 1994, Roméo Dallaire received an informant. The man had trained the Hutu militia. He told Dallaire his people could kill 1,000 Tutsis in 20 minutes. He showed Dallaire a secret weapons cache. He revealed that every Tutsi in Kigali was being registered — and that he believed the lists were for killing.

Dallaire wrote to United Nations headquarters in New York that same night. One page. Marked most immediate. He asked permission to raid the weapons. He ended the fax in French. Peux ce que veux. Allons-y. Where there is a will, there is a way. Let’s go.

The reply came back the same day. Do not raid anything. Stay inside your mandate. It was signed through the office of Kofi Annan — then head of UN Peacekeeping Operations. Annan would become UN Secretary-General in 1997 and win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001. He has since publicly accepted responsibility for the response. Remember that reply.

Roméo Dallaire was born on June 25, 1946, in Denekamp, Netherlands. His father was a Canadian sergeant. His mother was a Dutch nurse who had watched friends die in the Holocaust. The family moved to Montreal when Dallaire was six months old. He grew up French-speaking in an English country and knew from childhood what it felt like to be the wrong kind of person in the wrong place.

He joined the Canadian Army. Artillery. A career soldier. When he asked for a UN posting, they gave him Rwanda.

The job looked straightforward. Two sides had signed a peace agreement. His mission was to watch them keep it. Dallaire asked for 5,000 troops. He received approximately 2,500 — lightly armed, short on fuel, food, medical supplies, and functioning vehicles. His rules of engagement did not permit the use of offensive force.

He arrived in Kigali on October 22, 1993, as Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda. What he found over the following months alarmed him deeply. The January 11 fax was not a guess. It was a warning with a source, a location, a method, and a timeline. New York read it and told him to take his concerns to the President of Rwanda. The President’s own party was arming the militia. UN officials warned Dallaire about “unanticipated repercussions” and rebuked him for exceeding his mandate.

On April 6, 1994, at approximately 8:20 in the evening, a missile struck the plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana over Kigali. The killing began within hours — exactly as the informant had described three months earlier.

Dallaire sent 10 Belgian paratroopers to protect Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. Government forces intercepted them, disarmed them, tortured them, and killed all 10. The Prime Minister was murdered the same morning. Belgium withdrew its remaining forces. Other nations followed.

On April 21, 1994, the UN Security Council voted to cut Dallaire’s force from 2,500 soldiers to 270. He was ordered to leave Rwanda. The order came three times. He refused three times. He called it an immoral order.

He kept approximately 450 men — Ghanaian soldiers, Tunisian soldiers, a handful of military observers. His deputy, Ghanaian General Henry Anyidoho, refused to withdraw his troops either. Dallaire wrote back to New York: it would be unethical to leave this terrible scene.

So he stayed. With 450 soldiers and no mandate to fire their weapons.

He packed civilians into a stadium, a hospital, a church, and a hotel. That hotel was the Hôtel des Mille Collines. You may know it as Hotel Rwanda — the 2004 film in which Nick Nolte plays the UN colonel who keeps showing up to pull people back from the edge. That character is Dallaire.

He drove into towns at night and extracted people. He sat at tables with the men directing the killing. He shook their hands. He kept people alive an hour at a time.

In Washington, officials were still debating vocabulary. A Pentagon document dated May 1, 1994 — now declassified and publicly available — warned staff to avoid using the word genocide, because a formal genocide finding could legally commit the United States government to act. The CIA had internally classified the situation as genocide on April 23. The word was not said publicly by US officials until late May.

The killing lasted 100 days. More than 800,000 people were murdered. Two million became refugees. Dallaire and his 450 soldiers saved an estimated 30,000 lives.

Then it came for him. He later wrote that death became a desired option. The Canadian Army medically released him in 2000. In June of that year, at age 53, he was found in a park in Quebec City — under a bench, drunk, alone.

He got back up.

In 2003 Dallaire published Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. It won Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2004. He testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda against the men who planned the genocide. In 2005, Canada appointed him to the Senate. In 2007 he founded what became the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative at Dalhousie University — an organisation that trains soldiers and police across Africa and Latin America to recognise and protect child soldiers. It is still running today.

Roméo Dallaire is 80 years old. He is still working.

He warned them three months in advance. In writing. With a name, a location, and a method. They told him to stand down. They cut his force. They ordered him to run. He stayed with 450 soldiers who were not allowed to fire their weapons and saved 30,000 people anyway.

The fax he sent on January 11, 1994 is a public document. Anyone can read it. It is one page long. The last line is the only one written in French. Where there is a will, there is a way. Let’s go.

New York read that line and wrote back no.

Thirty-two years later, he is still going anyway.

Tag someone who needs to know this name. Like and share for Roméo Dallaire.

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Elisabeth Bik

(Tom: Gosh I love people with talent, courage and integrity!)

Elisabeth Bik

Elisabeth Bik is a Dutch microbiologist. PhD from Utrecht in 1996. Fifteen years at Stanford medical school working on microbiomes.

An ordinary scientific career. Right up until 2013.

That year she found out somebody had plagiarised a piece of her own published work.

So she started hunting plagiarism. Nine months of it. Then she opened a PhD thesis that had lifted text from somewhere else, and her eye caught something different.

A duplicated image.

She sat there thinking, wait. That happens?

That same evening she opened a handful of papers in PLOS One. She found more before bed.

She had discovered something about herself. She can see things in images other people cannot.

A duplicated patch. The same cell photograph appearing twice in one paper under two different labels. A band on a gel copied, flipped, and pasted back in.

January 2014. She found duplicated and altered images across a set of papers from an American medical school.

So she started doing it in her spare time. Evenings. Weekends.

Then she decided to find out how common it actually was.

She sat down and went through 20,621 published biomedical papers. Forty journals. Twenty years of the literature.

By eye. There were no tools for this. She just looked.

She found inappropriate image duplication in 782 of them.

One in 25.

And 196 of those were not honest mistakes. Those were figures that had been altered. Rotated. Flipped. Shifted. Somebody sat down and did it on purpose.

Her own reaction was flat. One in 25 papers I looked at had image problems. I thought that is a lot.

Now the part that says the most about the system.

She wrote to the researchers. She wrote to the journal editors.

Mostly nothing came back.

So in 2016 she published the whole thing herself, with Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang, in the journal mBio.

Understand who was not doing this work.

Scientific publishing is an industry worth billions. There are editors. There are peer reviewers. There are universities with entire research integrity offices.

Nobody had been looking at the pictures.

One woman with good eyes was doing it unpaid, after dinner.

And these are the papers medicine is built on. Every drug your doctor reaches for sits on top of this literature.

2018 she left her job in industry and made it her full time work.

Nobody employs her. She is funded by strangers donating through a subscription page.

Since then she has raised concerns about more than 7,600 papers. By late 2024 that had fed into more than 1,300 retractions. Over 1,000 corrections. Hundreds of formal notices of concern.

Papers by senior figures. University presidents. Institute directors. Drug company research.

Then in 2020 she looked at hydroxychloroquine.

The Marseille professor Didier Raoult had published a study reporting success using it against Covid. The claim went around the world. Governments moved on it. Millions of people took it.

Bik went through the paper and raised problems with the methodology and the missing patient data. Then she raised concerns about dozens more papers from him and his institute.

29 April 2021. A lawyer acting for Raoult and his colleague Eric Chabrière filed a criminal complaint with a prosecutor in Marseille.

Aggravated moral harassment. Attempted blackmail. Attempted extortion.

She denies all of it. The payment remark they pointed to was a joke, she said, and her donation page is public.

Her inbox filled with threats. Anonymous accounts went after her appearance. Somebody promised her justice in a real prison in France.

She posts under her own name. Almost nobody else in this field does.

Then more than a thousand researchers signed an open letter standing behind her.

2021 she was given the John Maddox Prize. 2024 the Einstein Foundation Award. She gave that prize money away. It funds other people doing the same work.

Now the honest caveat, because she would want it there.

Her method has real critics. The digital forensics expert Hany Farid has argued that eye-based analysis cannot be audited. You can’t audit her brain, is how he put it. A validation exercise put her accuracy at around 90 percent, which means roughly one call in ten needs another look.

Fair. And it does not touch the number underneath.

One in 25.

Because here is what has not been fixed.

Ten years on, many of those original 782 papers are still sitting in the journals. Uncorrected. Some of them well past anything you could blame on an innocent error.

She is still going. Still unpaid.

An industry worth billions had nobody looking at the pictures.

She did it in the evenings, for free, and they tried to have her charged for it.