The "fifteen-minute cities" are already shrinking. The governments of both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have banned walking in the woods province-wide:

This would appear to be in breach of Henry III's Charter of the Forest. But then at the dawn of the thirteenth century your average horny-handed peasant was not so in awe of government experts that he presumed they had the right to prevent him taking a stroll. As the popular idiom has it: You can't see the wood. Period.

This is supposedly because a perambulating Nova Scotian would risk setting the trees alight.

On the other hand, if you intentionally set Canada alight...:

Saskatchewan volunteer firefighter who set 30 fires in a month sentenced for arson
Logan Sieben sentenced to 18 months of probation, 200 hours of community service

So twenty-eight grand versus two hundred hours of community service. As it goes metaphorically in the rest of the west, so it goes literally in Canada: the logic of the justice system is that you might as well burn it all down.

~We are at the height of the summer season, when many tourists grab their copy of Frommer's Europe on Five Gang-Rapes a Day, and head for the Old Continent.

In Florence, the city which launched the Renaissance, an era of huge advances in art, science and philosophy, they've ditched all that crap to focus on their core business of stabbing:

Munich is world-famous for its beer gardens - whoops, I mean its sex attacks on young women. In or out of your lederhosen, every day is Rapetoberfest:

Sex-Attacke und Glasflasche ins Gesicht: Teenager in München angegriffen

If you're headed to France to watch the dazzling football stars of Paris-Saint-Germain in action, don't commit the social faux pas of visiting the capital in August. That's the month when sophisticated Parisians head south to go and get stabbed by Algerians in Lyon.

Come to Norway and see the beautiful fjords, lined with breath-taking madrassahs where Muslim women take their saunas in full burqas:

And, of course, in a London rich in pageantry and tradition, they're changing the guard:

~Speaking of the above, it's the first day of the week, and you know what that means: time for our regular and increasingly obnoxious feature, "As I wrote twenty bollocking years ago". From a certain "niche Canadian"'s column in The Daily Telegraph, written in the wake of the London Tube bombings, August 2nd 2005:

In the weeks after 9/11, Mr Bush rethought forty years of US policy in the Middle East. The Prime Minister [Blair] has a more difficult task: he has to rethink forty years of British policy in Leicester and Bradford and Leeds and Birmingham.

He has to regain control of Britain's borders from the EU and of Britain's education system from the teachers' unions and of Britain's welfare programmes from wily Somalis and others. In twenty years' time, no one will remember whether Tony Blair abolished the House of Lords or foxhunting: that's poseur stuff. They'll judge him on whether or not he funked the central challenge of the times. If 'the images of ruin and destruction' come to pass, it will not be because of the bombers but because of a state that lacked the cultural confidence to challenge them.

Well, twenty years have gone by, and the images of ruin and destruction are here on a daily basis, in the above-mentioned towns and many more, including the capital. Who needs bombers? The government's "anti-terrorism" tools, introduced in the wake of the Tube attacks, are now used on Kathy Gyngell at The Conservative Woman, among many others: there are now more referrals to "PREVENT" for members of the "extreme right" than for "Islamism". In the evil bleephole of contemporary Britain, your taste in sitcom reruns is enough to get you marked down as "far right":

Last month, it was revealed how Prevent training documents listed sharing the view that Western culture was 'under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration' was a 'terrorist ideology'.

And in 2023, it emerged that popular British sitcoms, including comedies Yes Minister and The Thick Of It, were marked as 'key texts' for white nationalists.

Of course, my column carelessly assumed that Mr Blair (as he was then) ever wished to govern in the interests of his country's people. So now the Home Office itself has been hollowed out by Islam: while transient politicians come and go, the civil service has crossed over to the other side.

But on the ground things are changing. What was that first town I mentioned? "Rethink forty years of British policy in Leicester"? From Leicester over the weekend:

~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with my column on the Great Moronisation. On Saturday there was the latest edition of my weekend music show, while Rick McGinnis's movie date offered Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You. On Sunday, my Song of the Week got its grass skirt out, and our marquee presentation was our latest Tale for Our Time: Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short story, The Final Problem. Click for Part One, and for Part Two.

If you were too busy this weekend celebrating diversity, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.