DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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“Humans are still evolving,” Dr. Scott Solomon, an Associate Teaching Professor at Rice University specializing in ecology, evolutionary biology, and scientific communication, wrote in his forthcoming book Becoming Martian: How Living in Space Will Change Our Bodies and Minds.

Sure, over the last 10,000 or so years, our physical alterations have been relatively muted compared to the changes seen in society and on our planet. Essentially, we’ve shrunk a bit, and our jaws have weakened. But even a little change is still change, and it begs a question: “In the far-flung future, what will happen to us, evolutionarily speaking?”

It’s a question that Solomon considered in his 2016 book, Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution. He surmised that our ultimate evolutionary fate could follow one of three basic trajectories.

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Democrats like to say, for a lack of a better term, that Republicans hate sick people. I have cystic fibrosis: a chronic, life-threatening genetic disease, and I’m sick and tired of Democrats lying and fear mongering to people who are already sick and tired.

The Affordable Care Act was fundamentally flawed from the start, and was never designed to function without massive, unsustainable subsidies. It ultimately was doomed to fail. The ACA drove up costs, narrowed provider networks, and reduced access to care.

In fact, the ACA is one of the main reasons I kept working even when my doctors told me I was too sick to do so.

I had to maintain my private insurance. Without it, I would have lost my doctors, faced longer wait times, lost the flexibility to complete treatments outside the hospital, and been cut off from the quality care I needed, not just to stay alive, but to remain a functioning member of society.

And somehow, Democrats are now pushing something even worse than the Affordable Care Act: universal health care.

On paper, universal health care sounds great. Everyone has access. It’s “free.”

But I’m a first-generation American from Cuba, and I know exactly what happens when the government takes over essential systems.

When bureaucrats are inserted into systems best managed by the private sector, quality inevitably declines. Health care is no exception.

Quillette.

I acquired the concept of a “captive audience” only a few months ago, thanks to one of the students in my free speech and hate speech class. The student had been following the controversy surrounding Jayson Gillham, a pianist contracting with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO). Gillham used some of his time during a recital to make remarks about Israel’s “targeted assassinations of prominent [Palestinian] journalists.” In response to complaints from members of the audience, the MSO made a statement describing Gillham’s conduct at the recital as “an intrusion of personal political views.” Gillham, who is now suing the MSO for wrongful dismissal, posted to social media: “I am fighting for freedom of expression for all artists… and for the right of all employees and contractors to express their political belief in the workplace without fear of discrimination.” In the MSO’s view, Gillham did something unprofessional, hijacking the recital in order to do personal advocacy. In Gillham’s view, he did not, because everyone should be free to bring their politics to work, and that’s exactly what he was doing.

Certainly you have the right to bring your politics to work. Your employer also has the right to fire you if you do. Artists and other ‘creatives’ are all about THEIR rights, but tend to ignore the rights of others.

Quanta magazine.

here’s scarcely any corner of Earth in which life hasn’t gained a foothold. Living organisms shape the clouds, the climate, even the rocks. But how life first appeared on a barren planet some 4 billion years ago remains one of the biggest questions for science. Many researchers believe that self-replication — an ability to reliably store and copy genetic information — is life’s most core ability. If that’s true, then the earliest life-forms would presumably have needed the sorts of biomolecules that life uses to store and copy genetic information today.

The DNA molecule is the star of this process; it encodes the forms of the protein molecules that enable chemical reactions in cells. To translate the genetic information in DNA into the chemical structure of proteins, cells use RNA. The trouble is, in modern cells, proteins are involved in every step of this process: They duplicate DNA when cells divide, they transcribe DNA into RNA, and they help to use RNA for making more proteins. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem: Useful proteins can’t be made in cells without DNA, but proteins are needed to make DNA in the first place.

A discovery about RNA in the late 1980s seemed to break the deadlock. Researchers found that, in addition to helping to convert genetic information into proteins, some RNAs can act as catalysts that enable chemical reactions. These were christened ribozymes, in reference to the protein catalysts called enzymes. The existence of ribozymes suggested that RNA can both carry genetic sequence information and act as a catalyst, thereby doing the jobs of both DNA and proteins. That makes it plausible that in its very earliest days, life — or the complex chemistry that preceded it — was all about RNA. According to this picture, championed by the physicist-turned-biologist Walter Gilbert

Fortune, a Voice of the Crust.

Alpha School, the network of AI-driven private schools charging parents up to $75,000 a year, has won backers from Silicon Valley to the Trump administration. Its own data show most of its students aren’t reaching the model’s central promise.

Only 42% of Alpha students met the network’s goal of learning twice as fast in both math and reading, according to internal data first reported by The New York Times. The findings land as Alpha pushes into public schools, where districts are adopting its software in hopes of fitting more learning into less time.

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Sixty-six years ago, the journal Science published a peer-reviewed study confirming what many know today: a distressing share of the academic literature is nonsense prattle among the elite – even as scientists continue to fawn over “peer reviewed research” like holy scripture. Back in 1960, professors at the University of Illinois published a 4-page paper predicting the human population might grow so large that we would all perish in a global crowd crush on Nov. 13, 2026.

Follow the Science! Until it changes….

Read it.

Liu Jun, a prominent statistician who left Harvard for Beijing’s Tsinghua University, is recruiting other Chinese-born math and science scholars in the U.S. to follow him, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

Read it.

Republican strategists say ending the war in Iran won’t be enough for the party to win in 2028 unless the costs of gas and groceries decrease.

Exit polling showed that the war was a top factor in the GOP’s recent midterm losses. Vice President JD Vance posted a statement the day after the election blaming the war, launched by the Trump administration, for the defeats.

GOP strategists told the Daily Signal that the party’s eventual nominee in 2028 must be able to point to a clean exit from the conflict but, more importantly, offer voters a plan to lower costs.

“The haphazard tariff policy and rollout was also an economic disaster, putting aside whatever you may think of tariffs,” one strategist said. “A fair and comprehensive view of the inflation / affordability issue as it played out earlier in the month should include both the war and Liberation Day,” the strategist said, referring to the April 2025 announcement of sweeping tariffs.

By 2028, Vance will be tied to the war by opponents and voters, the strategist said, adding that the conflict must end in order for the GOP to have a chance in the next election.

“Either way, it’s clear that we need to get out to be viable in 2028,” the strategist said. “There will always be consequences for things like this. It’s too early to know how things will look in 2028, but the sooner we find a way out, the more runway there will be for those effects to fade.”

Read it.

The Foundry.

• While the prevailing wisdom is the economy drove the election results, the author argues it was more the cultural embrace of socialism.
• Two generations of Americans have been indoctrinated into the belief that “Marxism is good, America is bad.”
• Conservatives need to continue to fight this front in the culture wars.

Quanta magazine.

gets a whiff of an unripe, green tomato, he finds himself in his childhood home in Bavaria. Under the tilted ceilings of the bedroom that he shared with his two older brothers, there were three beds, a simple table and a cupboard. “My mother put those green tomatoes on the cupboard for them to ripen,” said Hummel, an olfaction researcher at the Carl Gustav Carus University Hospital in Germany. “They have this very specific smell.”

It’s grassy, green, pungent, rough and bitter, he said. When he passes by a bin of tomatoes at the market today, “it is always to some degree emotional,” he said, “like every smell is emotional.”

Smell is deeply tied with the emotion and memory centers of our brain. Lavender perfume might evoke memories of a close friend. A waft of cheap vodka, a relic of college days, might make you grimace. The smell of a certain laundry detergent, the same one your grandparents used, might bring tears to your eyes.

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There is a curious sense of minority entitlement which seems to have grown exponentially in recent years. It was absent when my father migrated from Egypt to England in the last century and met my mother. Although he considered himself a Muslim, he had a somewhat lackadaisical approach to his inherited faith – as did many Westernised Muslims of the time. He was proud of his faith, but he did not place being a Muslim at the forefront of his identity. Like many of his fellow émigrés, he wanted to escape the more oppressive religious aspects of his home country.

Occasionally he would visit one of England’s seven mosques, which adequately serviced the needs of the fifty thousand Muslims at the time. The West was still largely ignorant of Islam. Britain’s grasp of what it represented was minimal, to say the least, but my father did not move to England in the expectation that its denizens were fluent in Muslim culture or that there would be a mosque on every street. He did not feel that his human rights, by not being specifically catered to, were being violated. It was quite enough to find accommodation and work, rather than inventing grievances.

The thought of complaining, or being a victim, would have seemed incongruous to him — presuming there had been anyone to complain to — because, he said, at last he felt free.

He was not alone in thinking this way. As my family grew, my father made friends with other Muslim migrants and their families, who felt the same as he did.

Playing a “victim card” would have been deemed not only impolite and unappreciative, but woefully narcissistic. If any Muslim pressure groups or support networks had existed, he would most certainly have shunned them. Like many of his generation, he was far too proud to wish to appear needy. He even refused anything the fledgling benefits system had to offer, despite — as our family grew — being eligible for help. It would have been an affront to him to ask for assistance or even to have someone speak up on his behalf. He certainly did not want my (English) mother to wear a burka or a hijab.

Not the Bee.

The House Judiciary Committee released a report on how states like New York are protecting illegal immigrant criminals from ICE and subsequent deportation, and they offer the state’s training materials as evidence.

For example, in order to avoid convictions, the prosecutors are instructed to offer plea deals to illegal immigrants for impossible crimes.

Since the Supreme Court has already ruled that a person cannot be convicted of an impossible crime, it keeps the criminal illegals out on the streets and out of ICE’s grasp.

This seems to be a pattern for blue districts, covering for crimes of illegals.

My, what a surprise.

Read it.

Europe has an Islamophilia problem.

On some half-forgotten bookshelf downstairs is my English translation of French author Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel, Submission. In it, a coalition of lefties and a new Muslim Brotherhood party with a charismatic leader conspire to deny Marine Le Pen and her nationalists the chance to win the 2022 presidential election.

If that sounds familiar, you didn’t need to read the novel – earlier this week I wrote about a similar coalition forming in the real world next year to deny Le Pen and National Rally from winning the 2027 presidential election.

The Muslim Brotherhood candidate – Mohammed Ben-Abbes – wins in Submission and quickly moves to end the Fifth Republic and create Europe’s first Islamic republic.

Houellebecq wasn’t even the first to go there. Australia-based author John Birmingham published Without Warning in 2007, where an unexplained cosmic event wipes out 95% of the U.S. population – plus swathes of Canada and Mexico, too – on the eve of the 2003 Iraq War. A side plot involves French elites sensing which way the wind will blow without the American hyperpuissance, and aligning their country with Islam.

But you don’t have to indulge in speculative fiction to see which way the wind blows in France today.

Houellebecq, now 70, faces up to a year in prison and/or a 45,000 euro fine for “complicity in provoking discrimination, hatred or violence” against Muslims for comments made during a 2022 interview.

The Foundry.

Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers is fighting for Americans to have the right to know which foreign adversaries are funding universities.

On Oct. 1, the Trump administration was poised to enforce Section 117 of the Higher Education Act and release foreign entity counterparty data, but the Association of American Universities, a higher education industry group representing 72 schools, sued the Departments of Education and the State Department to block the effort.

“This is a dispute between this Association of American Universities, which represents some of the Ivy League and other prestigious colleges,” she told the Daily Signal in an exclusive interview, “and the federal government, on what the American people are allowed to know.”

Rogers said a strength of the American university system is the open scientific research environment.

“The federal government funds and supports a lot of cutting-edge scientific research, whether it’s in defense, dual-use technology, healthcare technology, etc.,” she said. “But that strength can also be exploited.”

Read it.

According to P85 forms (the paperwork you file when you tell the taxman you’re gone), almost 69,000 taxpayers told HMRC last year they were done with the nonsense and leaving Britain for good.

That’s up from 52,000 the year before – a 32% jump in a single year.

These are the productive, the mobile, and the solvent. They ran the numbers on the British “tax deal” and concluded, quite rationally, that rape wasn’t for them and they could do better elsewhere.

When a country’s most capable citizens start voting with their passports, look at who benefits from making them go.

Since the last general election, the Treasury has reached for nearly every lever on the panel. Each one was sold as modest, targeted, and fair. But when added up, they’re a sustained assault on anyone who saves, builds, employs, or plans for the next generation.

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France has finally done what European governments have been reluctant to do for far too long. On November 10, Paris formally accused the Iranian regime of conducting cyberwarfare against French citizens, attributing attacks on more than 700 supermarket sites to an offensive cyber unit affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The consequences were extraordinary. Hackers manipulated refrigeration systems, destroying food worth tens of millions of euros and causing fires. This was not ordinary cybercrime. It was state-sponsored industrial sabotage on French soil.

Newsbusters.

The secular leftists are always amazing for how they throw around the name of Satan for humor. Especially when it’s two people who love abortion, like Katie Couric and Rachel Maddow. On Couric’s Next Question podcast on Thursday, she spurred Maddow into peals of laughter when she compared new White House chief of staff Stephen Miller to Satan.

“I have to ask you about Stephen Miller, because I I had to laugh — if [Congresswoman ] Virginia Foxx of North Carolina is described as ‘Satan’s Meemaw,’ is Stephen Miller like Satan’s grandbaby?” Maddow tilted her head skyward in delight.

“I mean it is so crazy to me that — I mean nothing is crazy to me at this point, Rachel — but that he is going to have the most powerful position in Washington particularly after there was such a repudiation of these draconian immigration policies of ICE, and he’s like the mastermind — he’s like Dr. Evil behind the scenes coming up with all this stuff and now he’s in charge. What?!”

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Who could have guessed a decade ago that Harry Potter, of all things, would become a central battleground for the cultural zeitgeist? The political left’s obsession with the franchise is complicated, but it largely stems from writer J.K. Rowling’s “betrayal” of the progressive cult when she criticized the idea of transgender women (men pretending to be women).

Rowling probably never expected that her devout following of liberal fans would one day turn out to be her worst nightmare and the source of numerous death threats. When a popular leftist doesn’t toe the line and support the woke agenda fully, they become a heretic – a more serious threat than any conservative. Not to mention, leftists covet Rowling’s massive platform. They think her audience belongs to them.

Once the writer turned against the trans agenda, she was marked for destruction by the mob. This is why it’s important for conservatives to stop ignoring pop culture and understand the power and influence inherent in entertainment. Leftists know the value of culture, which is why they have spent incredible time and energy seeking to control it.

You might see fantasy books, superhero flicks and video games as “kids stuff”, but these things are actually the key to political dominance. Pop culture expressions tap into the mythologies of the western mind; they have the power to inspire good, or inspire degeneracy and evil.

This brings us to the world of Harry Potter fanfiction and a character which has sparked viral outrage among leftists and the media, and even caught the attention of the Department of Education: Malfoid.

Newsbusters.

It wouldn’t be the LGBTQ community, or The Alphabet Mafia as I like to call them, if they weren’t happy about other people’s misfortune. You can lump in feminists with the previous group, as they’re pretty much equally hateful people.

The “Proudly LGBTQ+ Owned and Operated” Outsports recently published an article stating that women and gays are rejoicing at the fact that Kansas City Chiefs kicker and proud Christian Harrison Butker has been having a less-than-stellar season.

The Foundry.

New York Post.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week signed a law that serves as a test case of getting away with constitution-defying socialism.

Passed quietly through the City Council, and watered down from an earlier version vetoed by Mayor Eric Adams, the Community Opportunity for Purchase Act still tramps all over property owners’ right to sell to a bidder of their choice.

As only the second law Mamdani’s deigned to sign so far, it clearly carries great meaning for the mayor as both a policy win and an ideological keystone.

Starting Jan. 1, it will stop the private owners of about 2,100 properties (rent-regulated buildings with sufficient code violations) from simply selling their properties on the open market: When they reach a price with any buyer, they must then give “qualified nonprofits” (essentially, ones run by Mamdani allies) 90 days to make an offer.

That is, the landlord is required to sell to favored bidders if they match the price.

Notice: This isn’t creating any opportunity for the community, as the law’s title pretends, but only for the interests that control the nonprofit.

I would advise avoiding New York.

New York Post.

A brazen vagrant has seized a patch of prime Manhattan real estate, setting up a sprawling encampment right in Hizzoner’s daily path — steps from City Hall.

Mark Roggemann commandeered roughly 200 square feet of busy Centre Street walkway across from the Brooklyn Bridge entrance about six weeks ago — and has wasted no time making himself at home as he exploits loopholes in the city’s lax new homeless-sweep rules.

He’s plopped down a plywood-box bed and built a makeshift fortress around it, complete with aluminum clothing rack, potted fake plants, a rolling bin he says stores hot and cold water, and Amazon delivery totes for storage. When it rains, he covers his home with a cream-colored plastic tarp.

I recommend avoiding New York.

The Telegraph (UK).

Russia has said Britain must stop using nuclear weapons to protect its European allies if it wants peace in Ukraine.

The proposal is on a list of requirements drawn up by Russian negotiators for talks about ending the long-running war.

Moscow’s policy document calls for Nato to withdraw its forces from Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, remove Finland from the alliance and commit to not sending troops to Ukraine before Vladimir Putin will consider a ceasefire.

The paper seeks to end “the supply of any type of Western weapons and military equipment and products to Ukraine”, while blocking the war-torn country from joining Nato.

After the war, Russia would keep Ukrainian territories it has occupied, gaining control of large areas of the country.

Read it.

SpaceX’s Starship made a triumphant return to Earth on Saturday, caught in midair by giant mechanical arms where its journey began 22 hours earlier.

It was the grand finale that Elon Musk and his team hoped for — the first capture of a Starship flying back from space. But with the first-stage booster exploding shortly after Friday’s liftoff from Texas, the company fell short of its desired double catch.

Wreckage remained in the Gulf of Mexico, cordoned off by buoys, as the stainless steel, bullet-shaped spacecraft lowered itself upright at the launch pad.

The dramatic, sci-fi-like capture helped blot out the booster’s messy miss. Cameras panned the spacecraft up and down as it hung high above the ground, supported by the arms of the launch tower.

“Can you believe it?” SpaceX commentator Dan Huot shouted, dragging out each word. “Look at her! Baby, she’s back!”

All thanks to the guy that Democrats want to put in front of a firing squad. Elon Musk has done more for American space flight than NASA ever did. Unbelievable.

Newsbusters.

The irony was thick enough to cut with a butter knife.

On Friday’s Morning Joe, Scarborough lectured the GOP for living in an “echo chamber” of X and friendly TV that only fed them what they wanted to hear—while sitting on the set of the ultimate liberal echo chamber. 

Republicans, Scarborough lectured, were “wrong on every major issue,” from war to tariffs to data centers and AI.

…

How does Scarborough know that every Republican fails to consume hostile elitist media? Or maybe, they come to NewsBusters to get a disgusting digest.

But wow, talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Morning Joe’s guest roster has long been a closed loop of Democrats, Never Trumpers, and left-leaning analysts who share the hosts’ premises. An actual non-Never Trumper conservative (someone who supported Trump in 2016/2020/2024 and didn’t spend years on the anti-Trump circuit) has not appeared as a guest in living memory

Republicans live in an “echo chamber” about transgender activists and illegal aliens. But when Morning Joe’s panels consist almost entirely of people who agree with Scarborough on the issues, it is simply “informed discussion.”

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Nothing good, that’s sure.

Migrants are lining up at the border now that Democrats have won the midterms, according to Mark Krikorian, Center for Immigration Studies president.

“What Border Patrol agents have seen is that the Democrats aren’t even in yet, but once they won the election, the number of illegal immigrants trying to get across has gone up,” he told the Daily Signal.

Trump made a similar claim this week on Truth Social.

“Here we go again! With the perceived loss by the Republicans in the Midterms — I WAS NOT ON THE BALLOT — the INVASION of our Country is taking place again,” Trump said. “Huge CARAVANS are forming and beginning their illegal march through Mexico.”

When people believe they will have positive outcomes if they cross the border, they are more likely to try, Krikorian said.

“There’s always been caravans, even during the first two years. But they understood that they couldn’t get across the border, and even if they did, they wouldn’t get much out of it,” he said. “So they were basically trying to come through Mexico to get to what amount to staging areas, so that when the Democrats get in, they’d be able to rush across.”

Krikorian said a rise in violence will follow increased immigration.

“There’s simply no question that without better enforcement, you’re going to have more tragedies and more crime,” he said.

If Democrats win the White House in 2028, they will make the whole country a sanctuary city, Krikorian said.

They’ll certainly try their damnedest.

The Foundry.

Republicans’ dismal showing in 2026 has made their 2028 presidential primary much more interesting.

It has long seemed likely the 2028 GOP presidential nomination would be decided by President Donald Trump. He has dominated Republican Party politics for a decade. The GOP base adores him for bucking the amnesty-pushing GOP establishment and numerous accomplishments.

This seemed to suggest that Trump would endorse a presidential candidate, putting him or her on a glide path to the nomination. The most likely candidate was Vice President JD Vance. His position made him the obvious successor. He’s extremely intelligent and well-spoken. Like Trump, he doesn’t strictly adhere to GOP orthodoxy.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also distinguished himself. He served as acting director of the U.S. Agency for International Development and slashed its wasteful grants. He’s helped move key Western Hemisphere allies, like Panama and Mexico, away from China. In October, he stood in front of the Acropolis in Athens and delivered a stirring defense of Western civilization and its values.

…

Democrats haven’t been shy about their desire to reshape American institutions to cement their grip on power. If Democrats win the presidency in 2028 and retain their congressional majorities, they are likely to pack the Supreme Court and add two left-leaning states to cement their Senate majorities. Their idea of defending democracy is changing the rules to ensure they never lose power.

This has created an opening for other candidates. Outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tops that list. He’s been America’s best governor for the last eight years. He passed massive tax cuts and reduced state debt. He signed a ban on gender-mutilation surgeries for minors and protected parental rights. Florida’s economy has boomed, along with its population.

DeSantis transformed Florida from the country’s most important swing state into a deep-red bastion. It showed Tuesday. Florida elected a new Republican governor, and Republican candidates did well in down-ballot races.

Indeed. I would have said that the choice would be between Vance and Rubio and I would be good for either one. Vance surprised me by his performance despite minimal prior government service and Rubio has delighted me with the way he stepped up to the plate and did a lot of the heavy lifting. With the result of the recent election, I’m thinking that Republicans might do better with an experienced executive like DeSantis at the top of the ticket, perhaps with Rubio as his #2. In any event, it will get Very Interesting.

Read it.

An astonishing collapse is happening right now, one that was easily foreseen five years ago but which still defies belief. The world’s longest-running industrial resource cartel has fallen apart due to technological innovation. The resource is diamonds, the company is De Beers, and the reason for the upheaval is lab-created diamonds which are indistinguishable from natural ones to the eye. Only a professional can tell based on imperfections.

The New Neo.

Back in the 20th century, hijackings were mostly the thing. But they were attempted by outsiders, not insiders. With 9/11, the pattern of takeover changed; it wasn’t a hijacking exactly, it was a pilot substitution by a group of fanatics bent on mass murder and suicide, accent on the “murder” part. One of the results was fortifying of the cockpit. But much like a virus, the incidents have morphed in order to respond to changing defenses, and in recent decades we have the phenomenon of pilots themselves committing the mass murder and suicide.

Not all Muslims are terrorists, but surprisingly often almost all terrorists turn out to be Muslims. Think about that.

Read it.

Police in England and Wales recorded 3,145 honor-based abuse offenses in the year ending March 2026 – the highest figure since comparable records began.

Female genital mutilation offenses rose 52 percent to 166. The number track the arrival and growth of communities in which family “honor” and control over female behavior routinely override individual rights.

The Home Office published the statistics on November 5. They mark a 7 percent increase on the previous year’s 2,949 offenses.

The Foundry.

Just as it’s always ‘far-right’, but never ‘far-left’.

Stephen Miller’s appointment as White House chief of staff came with one very routine adjective: “hardliner.” To elitist media operatives, that is defined as “anyone who dramatically disagrees with us.”

Take this Nov. 7 Associated Press headline summarizing Miller’s positions: “In his words: Stephen Miller is an immigration hardliner and a bombastic critic of Democrats.”

It’s not inaccurate to call Miller a “hardliner.” The media-bias problem is obvious when considering the opposite position. You can call Trump “Hitler” and the Republicans “fascists,” but that doesn’t make you a “hardliner” or “bombastic.”

Someone who chants “Abolish ICE” is somehow not a “hardliner.” When Beto O’Rourke told Chris Hayes in 2019 he would take down the border walls in El Paso, he was not a “hardliner.”

Read it.

According to the latest testimony given in a Spanish court by Moroccan whistleblowers, special military and police units on the Moroccan side organized last summer’s mass invasion of Ceuta, directing the migrants into the water for their swim around the breakwaters. They even regulated the flow of invaders, as if controlling an intravenous drip of cultural enrichment into the Spanish enclave in North Africa.

The War Zone.

There is no shortage of ways to shoot down a drone, but putting eight shotguns on a remote-controlled turret is one of the more unusual approaches. That’s exactly what the LIVET Remote Controlled Weapon Station (RCWS) brings to the counter-uncrewed aircraft systems (C-UAS) fight, combining a bank of Italian-made Benelli shotguns with AI-driven target tracking and remote weapon operation.

Rube Goldberg, call your office.

Read it.

Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to dismantle the NYPD’s roughly 600-officer protest unit could hand far-left activist networks, including NGOs linked to China-based Marxist financier Neville Roy Singham, a gift by weakening the city’s ability to respond to large demonstrations or riots.

The Foundry.

• French writer Michel Houellebecq was placed under formal investigation in France on Nov. 10, 2026, over comments about Muslims published in 2022.
• The Union of Mosques of France filed a complaint in 2023 over Michel Houellebecq’s interview with Front Populaire.
• Anti-speech laws are being weaponized against dissenters.

There is no freedom of speech anywhere in Europe, and never has been.

Read it.

Not the Bee.

In the Floyd Riots of 2020, woke morons destroyed a statue of Edward Carmack, a well-respected newspaper editor and United States senator, because the world was insane six years ago.

Now it’s 2026, and the folks in Nashville decided to replace the statue with an even more ‘Merican figure from the great state of Tennessee.

Newsbusters.

The PBS News Hour brought on Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed on Thursday night for the DEI occasion of the first Muslim PBS anchor to interview the first Muslim elected to the Senate. Amna Nawaz was just as pliant a Democrat talking point-enabler here as she was to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries.

Newsbusters.

Every three years, the committees that write America’s model building codes sit down and rewrite them. Every three years, the codes get longer. I have yet to find the cycle in which they took out more than they put in.

Regulation works like a ratchet. Each click tightens. Nothing ever gets loosened up. Every individual requirement sounds reasonable on its own, e.g., thicker insulation, another specialty breaker, ductwork pressure-tested by a contractor, a mechanical fresh-air system for houses the previous code made airtight. No one wants to vote against safety, and no one shows up at the hearing on behalf of the young couple who will be priced out of the house.

The National Association of Home Builders, in June, calculated that government regulation now adds $131,734 to the price of the average new home, more than a quarter of what the buyer pays. Code changes made over just the past decade account for $40,288 of that. Five years ago, the figure was $24,144. Many of the very companies whose products you are forced to buy to comply with the code have seats at the table drafting the regulations you must adhere to.

Newsbusters.

A school district-approved lesson plan recommended for second graders brands Thanksgiving a “day of mourning,” newly-exposed school guides for teachers reveal.

Virginia’s Loudoun County school district – already infamous for its radical progressive policies, mishandling of sexual assaults, gender bathroom policies and restrictions on parental rights – reportedly has a “Resources for Recognition Days & Months” guide for teachers to use when instructing their students about federal holidays.

One lesson plan for grades 2-5, titled “The Real Story of Thanksgiving” and obtained by The Washington Free Beacon, vilifies Thanksgiving as the catalyst for  “a long period of violence and discrimination”:

Read it.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joined CNBC earlier this morning to describe why the Secret Service has relocated him from his Washington, DC, home following Iranian death threats. There was no word on whether these new threats were connected to a plot reported in 2024 to kill then-President-elect Donald Trump and some of his closest allies.

“They have initiated death threats against me,” Bessent said during a CNBC Squawk Box interview this morning. “I’m not going to be cowed.”

Bessent continued, “You know what I got to say, Joe, is F the Iranian leadership. I’m not going to be cowed. They have initiated death threats against me,” adding, “Why am I going to be afraid when our, the brave military personnel in the Gulf, President Trump, constantly receive death threats?”

Newsbusters.

Considering how many black Democrat politicians have turned out to be crooks or fools (or both), it would be a reasonable objective—if true, which of course it is not.

On Wednesday’s CNN This Morning, we caught the Democratic strategist branding Stephen Miller a “full-blooded racist extremist.”

On Thursday’s edition of the show, he reached for language that was even more inflammatory, accusing Republican congressional map-drawers of racially gerrymandering “for the purpose of exterminating and eliminating black political representation” and starting in the South.

It sounds like Mr. Seawright’s been spending too much time hanging out with Rev. Al Sharpton on his show Keepin’ It Real. This is how they define “real,” applying dual verbs of annihilation to describe adding white voters to the majority-minority districts. This was a solo interview, not their “Group Chat.” No one was going to be able to disagree.

Seawright cast decades of redistricting as one “long-term play for Republicans” designed to keep black voters from shifting “the tectonic plates in this country.”

Read it.

John Eastman opens this symposium with a provocative and thoughtful essay on the meaning of the American Revolution and its implications for birthright citizenship. He argues that under the common law, the rule of “birthright subjectship” was that anyone born on the king’s soil was under the king’s protection and necessarily the king’s subject in perpetuity. The U.S. Supreme Court made the same claim in Trump v. Barbara when it concluded that in England, a foreigner who had a child there and who left the next day would have produced a birthright subject.

Eastman then argues that the American Revolution rejected perpetual allegiance by birth and adopted a conception of government as a social compact, founded on the consent of the governed. On this foundation, Eastman argues that the 14th Amendment’s understanding of citizenship requires parents to owe a complete political allegiance to the country.

I think Eastman both concedes too much and goes too far.

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Welcome to the Starter Marriage Retirement Plan, where one party contributes the house, the 401(k), and the cash flow, while the other walks away with a potentially spectacular IRR.

Tonight, iBankerU examines the modern marriage market through the lens of Wall Street: hostile takeovers, asset stripping, liquidity events, and the most expensive due diligence failure of your life.

While love may be priceless, divorce has a valuation.

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Traders reached for fax machines, Japan’s finance ministry pinned paper notices to the wall, and the AI assistants meant to automate the office went dark right along with the inbox.

For more than 18 hours, the AI agents Silicon Valley says will soon do your job couldn’t read your email, because nobody could. A Microsoft 365 failure that began Thursday knocked out Outlook for businesses and governments in more than 70 countries and took Microsoft’s own Copilot down with it, along with the Microsoft connectors that Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT use to reach users’ mail and calendars.

“Put it in The Cloud!” Famous lasts words….

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I have a new piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In September, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came first in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. Within hours, people on X were arguing about what AfD voters were really upset about. Soon they were passing around a chart from the Financial Times. It showed that in last year’s federal election, the AfD did better where fewer residents were foreign nationals. Some people took that as proof that the voters’ real grievances lay elsewhere. The economist Tony Annett even put the AfD’s gains down to rising inequality, austerity and the loss of cheap Russian energy. A few days later, he shared the chart and wrote, “It’s not actually immigration. It’s blaming immigrants for being left behind. It’s neoliberalism.”

The historian Anton Jäger later made a subtler version of the same move in a New York Times essay. He acknowledged that Europeans care about immigration, but argued that the deeper reason for their preoccupation is that “Europe doesn’t know what it is.” Well, that looks like a lot of smart words to end up treating a policy disagreement as a question of European identity.

So why do we see more anti-immigration votes in places with few immigrants? This common correlation mostly shows who lives where. Educated professionals tend to favor immigration wherever they live, and they cluster in big cities, where the high-skilled jobs are. In surveys that follow the same people over time, people don’t become more pro-immigration after moving to a big city.