Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I hope to be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.

~UPDATE! Following yesterday's story on the banning of Canadians from most parts of Canada, the Premier of New Brunswick has just made the rationale even nuttier:

So you can't go outside unless the state has sufficient resources to pick you up if you stub your toe. Gotcha.

This is the future they're planning for all of us. Burn it all down. Now.

~Do you like this Artificial Intelligence that's all the rage? Elon Musk's new Grok has only been out for a month, and it's already gone bananas. Yesterday morning a Welshman called John Douglas Davies asked Grok what it thought about me, Rupert Lowe and various others booted from GB News. Unfortunately for its career prospects, Grok replied as follows:

"I respect their candor." Gee, thanks, Grok. Much appreciated.

So, having posted the above, Grok goes down the pub for lunch, and comes back to find it's been cancelled:

So Elon Musk's left hand has eighty-sixed Elon Musk's right hand. Its heartening tweet about me and the gang is no longer available.

I blow hot and cold on Artificial Intelligence. Sometimes I think it's the end of everything, and that we will be the last truly human generation. Then again, as the above illustrates, it may just be two duelling interns from Bangalore in the back room fighting for control of the "Publish" button. I am reminded of the state-of-the-art computer-dating model in the 1970 cinematic classic Carry On Loving. (Go to 07-40 in the video below - although the first seven minutes are worth watching if only as rare footage of a lost London from before the machete/gang-rape/public defecation era):

~As I was saying only the other day, almost every western capital is now what President Trump would call a bleephole: Washington, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Dublin, Brussels, Stockholm... Reversing urban decay in non-capitals is not easy: see Chicago, Detroit, or, for that matter, Burlington, Vermont. It remains to be seen whether it can be done in any developed country's hub of national power. But Trump has decided to give it a go: yesterday, he "seized" control of the District of Columbia's police force from the incompetent city administration.

From my limited personal interaction with the President, I would say he is acutely sensitive to things that are embarrassing - like, say, New York's crappy airports. It is - or ought to be - embarrassing that within a few blocks of "the most powerful man in the world" one cannot stroll the streets without risk of being robbed, savagely beaten and/or killed. Certainly, during my own trial in the city last year and my month-long incarceration in a so-called "luxury" hotel, all those phenomena occurred within a block in any direction.

In announcing his action, Trump mentioned two recent murders. As if to underline his point, within a few hours of his comments and not far from the previous murder scenes, a chap was shot dead in the Logan Circle neighbourhood. In recent years, Logan Circle has become very white, very wealthy, very gay ...and yet it cannot insulate itself from the spreading carnage. Almost all urban decay is the product of a malign alliance between the thug class and what Orwell called the pansy left. So no sooner had the poor fellow been shot than the "progressives" started singing:

DC is our home
You can't have it, Trump...

Music to get perforated by.

~Across the Atlantic, what's happening on the streets of England isn't so difficult to understand:

People want Sir Kweir Starmer to stop importing rapists.

In response, the politico-media class sneer that an antipathy to child rape makes you "far right".

Strangely enough, this genius strategy doesn't appear to be working. So the government has been forced to recalibrate. Sir Kweir is suddenly talking butch, but he does nothing other than his Ukrainian twinks.

The disconnect between the reality on the ground and the state's indifference has corroded almost every public institution. As we have reported, Warwickshire Constabulary - in order to cover up the rape of a twelve-year-old girl by "migrants" - decided to prioritise their loyalty to Sir Kweir over their duty to the public. Since the revelation of the police's betrayal, Warwickshire's execrable Chief Constable, Alex Franklin-Smith, has decided to focus his force's energies on screwing over all the members of the public who are making him look like a corrupt wanker. So at the end of last week Franklin-Smith leaned on the neighbouring West Midlands police to dispatch officers to intimidate individual citizens who chanced to have mentioned their interest in attending protests against the Brit wanker coppers and their collusion with paedo gang-rapists. If you haven't already seen this, enjoy:

I like the policeman's laugh when he's told to take back the leaflet and tell 'em to "f**k 'emselves. Wiv loov". Unfortunately, his superior officers didn't care for the cut of his guffaw, so he's now "under investigation".

So WMP's Craig Guildford joins Warwickshire's Alex Franklin-Smith among the ranks of Brit Wanker Stasi Bosses. Free societies do not dispatch constables to individual citizens to warn them that we know you're planning on attending a public rally and we're already watching you.

Chief Wankers Guildford and Franklin-Smith might as well walk around with giant neon signs on their heads advertising to the people: "We Are Your Enemy."

~Thank you to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club in this our ninth year, and thank you to those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.