DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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.”

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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….

Read it.

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.

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The Netherlands is negotiating with the US over the erosion of the powers of the International Criminal Court (ICC). This erosion is so drastic that, according to legal experts, it would amount to the dismantling of the Court. The Rights Forum has learnt this from diplomatic sources in New York, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The restrictions that would be under discussion include: a) granting immunity to heads of state; b) excluding the Court’s jurisdiction over nationals of non-state parties, even when they commit crimes on the territory of a state party; and c) denying the Court’s jurisdiction over cases covered by national legislation.

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• Labour is making affordable energy a central priority as high electricity prices undermine British industrial competitiveness.
• Decisions on North Sea drilling and electric vehicle targets are testing the government’s commitment to net zero.
• Ministers face pressure to reform electricity levies while balancing economic growth against long-term climate goals.

Funny how that happens.

Texas Tribune, the Voice of the Left in Texas.

Democrats vowed to end the state’s education savings accounts, which give more than 18,800 students with disabilities public funds for private school and homeschooling.

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British universities are now openly advertising government-backed “interest-free” student loans designed around Islamic finance rules.

The Alternative Student Finance product, based on the principle of takaful, replaces interest with a mutual “contribution” that is ring-fenced to fund other students on the same scheme rather than flowing back into the Treasury.

Official forecasts already expect nearly half of student debt never to be fully repaid, so British taxpayers will underwrite the shortfall while the ring-fenced pot serves a program primarily aimed at Muslim students, the Telegraph reports.

Read it.

It was a meeting of the Monday-Only Millionaires on The Daily Show when Jon Stewart interviewed Rachel Maddow to promote her latest book, Department of Fate, on the latest bad liberal joke: that the Department of Justice should be nonpartisan. As if modern Democrat presidents practiced that.

Funny how more of Trump’s supporters (anybody remember the January 6 witch-hunts?) are in prison than his enemies.

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Denmark’s Finance Ministry added up the taxes paid and the public spending on each resident and sorted the results by origin: immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey cost the state a net DKK 74,000 (about $11,000) each in 2019, while immigrants from Western countries paid in DKK 52,000 (about $7,700) a head more than they drew.

The numbers, published in 2023, resurfaced overnight in a post on X calling them “brutal,” with a 76-second video whose narrator calls the claim that “the economy needs migration” “probably one of the most brazen lies ever told.”

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The Financial Times gave a so-called “economist” a platform to rebrand democracy or democratic socialism with a spicy new term: “anti-fascist economics.”

Isabella Weber, director of the nonprofit Essential Economics gGmbH, sat down with FT’s Martin Sandbu to discuss anti-fascist economics.

…

Weber’s views go well beyond bolstering the West’s failing welfare state. She now wants big government to reshape the economy in how essentials are produced and supplied, including building public housing.

Which is the very definition of the economic program of fascism. It ain’t what these people know, it’s what they know that ain’t so.

Read it.

Spain’s first general strike in 14 years, called by left-wing unions with the backing of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist government, ended in riots in Madrid and Barcelona on Nov. 11.

Protesters blocked highways and industrial areas across Spain from early morning, while public transport ran on reduced schedules. Thousands marched in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Valencia, Zaragoza, and other cities.

Spain’s two largest unions, CCOO and UGT, joined tenants groups in calling a 24-hour strike over wages and rising housing costs, drawing criticism from conservative politicians, who called it an attempt to sway the vote 18 days before the snap general election.

Newsbusters.

There is a new twist in the ongoing saga of Rony Alexander González Alberto, the twice-deported illegal alien who somehow boarded a United Airlines flight and attempted to hijack the plane by claiming to carry a bomb in his backpack. The Elitist Media have buried this new development just as they buried the rest of the story no sooner his immigration status became public knowledge.

…

Our own Curtis Houck provided an earlier rundown cataloguing the media’s many omissions as this story unfolded, omissions that continue even now across the dial. But let’s face it. An Elitist Media already uninterested in covering an illegal alien hijacker was always certain to absolutely BURY the story once it became known that the aforementioned hijacker gamed the political asylum system in order to stay in the country.

Obviously a Democrat….

Read it.

On the night of the 2020 Presidential Elections most Americans recall going to bed feeling certain that Donald Trump had pulled off another solid victory. With Joe Biden drawing mostly small crowds on the campaign trail and spending most of the cycle rarely engaging with the public, it seemed as if Trump was a lock.

When everyone awoke the next morning, they were shocked to discover that Biden was awash in votes from an overnight spike, largely due to mail-in ballots and absentee ballots (at least, that was the narrative). Some called it unprecedented, and the shift completely bucked the vote counts that had been trending throughout election day.

Millions of Americans cried foul; suspicions over the results led to the January 6th protests (which turned into riots after Capitol Police fired rubber bullets and tear gas into the otherwise peaceful crowd). It felt like a coup, and when the Democrat crackdown over the pandemic escalated, it felt like the end of the country was near.

The same feeling is thick in the air after the 2026 Midterms. The most common retort is that this is now the go-to response for any election loss. Democrats claimed the 2016 election was stolen, Republicans claimed the 2020 election was stolen, the accusations arose again in 2024 and today everything is circling back. But does this mean the suspicions are wrong?

Trump recently ignited media outrage when he suggested that some midterms results were fraudulent. In the case of Texas, he might have a point. Something’s not quite right about these Midterm numbers. Let’s examine the facts for a moment…

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Medical assistance in dying (MAID) would rank as the fourth-leading cause of death in Canada if deaths involving the procedure were counted separately, figures from Health Canada and Statistics Canada show.

MAID would rank behind only cancer, heart disease, and accidents – Canada’s three leading causes of death in 2024. Cancer accounted for 85,589 deaths, followed by heart disease at 57,982 and accidents at 20,415.

The 16,499 Canadians who received MAID that year outnumbered those who died from several other major causes. A total of 13,680 Canadians died from cerebrovascular diseases, 13,202 died from chronic lower respiratory diseases, 7,658 died from influenza and pneumonia, 6,874 died from diabetes, and 5,294 died from Alzheimer’s disease.

However, Statistics Canada does not count MAID as a separate cause of death. Instead, deaths involving MAID are counted under the medical conditions that led people to seek assisted dying, such as cancer or neurological diseases.

This means MAID deaths are already included in the totals for other causes of death. The figures can’t be added together, and MAID’s fourth-place ranking is not an official classification.

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Iran is continuing to signal that it could at any point formally withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). If so this would certainly trigger alarm in the West, and might result in Israel launching a swift attack to ‘prevent’ the Islamic Republic from obtaining nukes.

Iran’s Assembly of Experts – which is the nation’s top clerical and advisory body connected to the Supreme Leader – has stated that withdrawing from the international treaty on nuclear weapons has become “an unavoidable necessity” and “a public and national demand,” according to national broadcaster IRIB.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing. When has a Muslim country ever given a shit about a treaty? They have no more respect for a treaty than Hitler or Stalin did.

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Iran has been using oil terminals and storage facilities in China to ship its oil to its biggest buyer and keep sanctioned tankers operating despite the U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil exports, Iran International reported on Monday, citing top-level confidential correspondence of the former Iranian leaders.

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Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier on Tuesday issued an investigative subpoena to the Democratic Socialists of America, saying his office is examining whether DSA accepted contributions or support “from foreign sources of concern, including the regimes in Cuba and China,” and whether its fundraising from Florida donors has been “fully transparent and lawful.”

In a video announcing the probe, Uthmeier said the subpoena was issued under Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and the state’s laws on the solicitation of funds. It covers “recent DSA delegations to Cuba, where national leaders and national political committee members met with Cuban government officials, as well as a delegation to China,” he said, along with travel fund solicitations that “sought tens of thousands of dollars to cover costs for those trips and related activities involving Florida chapters.”

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Democrats preparing to launch sweeping investigations of President Donald Trump’s administration when they take control of Congress in January could face significant legal obstacles stemming from Supreme Court rulings that have strengthened presidential authority, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Those rulings could limit lawmakers’ ability to obtain documents, compel testimony and investigate certain presidential actions, potentially setting up a constitutional confrontation between Congress and the White House.

Democrats, who captured both the House and Senate in last week’s midterm elections, have signaled plans to investigate administration policies and alleged wrongdoing involving senior officials.

Potential targets include presidential pardons, cryptocurrency transactions, military operations, Justice Department investigations of Trump’s political opponents and the acceptance of a luxury aircraft from Qatar.

But the administration could resist congressional subpoenas and invoke executive privilege, forcing lawmakers into lengthy court battles with uncertain outcomes.

In an analysis published Thursday, Adam Liptak, the Times‘ chief legal correspondent, outlined three major legal obstacles that could complicate those investigations and potentially determine whether congressional Democrats can obtain the information they seek.

Newsbusters.

Facing backlash from media noting that there are laws prohibiting religious discrimination, Democrat Colorado State Senator Iman Jodeh has deleted online posts advertising an internship available only to people who “Identify as a Muslim” or hailing from predominately Muslim countries.

The first qualification listed in the internship ad promoted on Instagram and Facebook by Sen. Jodeh was:

“Identify as a Muslim and/or as Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian.”

Libs of TikTok first drew attention to the discriminatory qualifications in a post at 12:56 am Wednesday, tagging the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., suggested Democrats could consider impeaching Supreme Court justices as well as President Donald Trump and senior administration officials when they take control of Congress in January.

The New York Democrat told CNN that “all options are on the table” as her party prepares to launch investigations into the Trump administration following its sweeping midterm election victories, according to Breitbart News.

Her remarks came during an interview Tuesday with CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju, who questioned her about possible impeachment proceedings against Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“There are so many criminals in this administration, it’s hard to figure out who should be, you know, the order of operations,” said Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive Democrat seen by some political observers as a potential Democrat standard-bearer in the 2028 presidential election.

“There are going to be many, many, many investigations. I imagine many subpoenas, and we have to follow wherever the evidence takes us,” she said.

Quillette.

Human activities that impact the Earth are often portrayed in a bad light. But a new study in Science gives us reason to be grateful for our newfound powers. Humanity seems to have interrupted the beginnings of the next glaciation—commonly known as an ice age. We have long suspected our activities might postpone the return of continent-sized ice sheets. The extraordinary suggestion now is that the process had already started, and that we stopped it.

Researchers examined the Barnes Ice Cap—the last surviving remnant of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet—on Baffin Island, high in the Canadian Arctic, and found that it began expanding again roughly 2,000 years ago. They interpret that renewed growth as the first stage of the next glaciation. Around 1960, however, human-caused atmospheric warming seems to have reversed the trend, and the ice began retreating. In their reading, humanity interrupted the next glaciation in its infancy.

The Antiplanner.

Public comments are due today on a proposed high-speed train between Vancouver, BC and Portland, Oregon. The idea is still in its early planning stages, but one early estimate is that it could cost as much as $150 billion due to the need for extensive tunneling through the major cities along its route.

As an op-ed in yesterday’s Seattle Time observes, $150 billion is enough to buy the entire U.S. airline industry (ungated version). Even if that estimate is a little high, the real question is why does the Pacific Northwest need high-speed rail when we already have planes that are faster, automobiles that are more convenient, and high-speed rail will be more expensive than both?

Trains take you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be. They became the thing because they were faster and better than horses. We don’t use horses any more, and there’s no further need for trains.

Read it.

This post began as an update on the migrant invasion of Ceuta, but as I read through the available recent material, it became more of an analysis of what happened in the Spanish North African enclave last summer.

New York Post.

The group of newly elected left-wing insurgent lawmakers, dubbed “The Bloc,” gathered on the steps of the Capitol Building Thursday to pose for cringey, yearbook-style photos.

Reps.-elect Darializa Avila Chevalier (D-NY), Claire Valdez (D-NY), Brad Lander (D-NY), Melat Kiros (D-Colo.), Adam Hamawy (D-NJ), Donavan McKinney (D-Mich.), Daniel Biss (D-Ill.), Dan Koh (D-Mass.), Chris Rabb (D-Pa.), Angela Gonzales-Torres (D-Calif.), Frederick Haynes III (D-Texas) and Patty Garcia (D-Ill.) were among the crew of progressives that huddled together during a break from the orientation programming.

…

The gang — which is apparently differentiating itself from the “Squad” group of lefty pols led by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — represents just a fraction of the more than 70 new Democrats elected in the midterm blue wave.

Rep. Analilia Mejía (D-NJ), wearing a bright blue dress, stood front and center of the incoming “Bloc” members. Mejía, a former top campaign aide to democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, was elected to replace Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District last year.

When the photo shoot wrapped, several of the lefty pols shared selfies on social media that gave off strong first-day-of-school vibes.

New York Post.

Greta Thunberg just gave away what a fraud she’s always been, though her devoted fans may be too drunk on the Kool-Aid to see it.

“Really!” she exclaimed of activists still engaged in the weekly protests that launched her fame — “They still do that?” before dissolving into uncontrolled giggles.

It was always obscene that the climate-armageddon-alarmist movement fetishized a special-needs teen as some kind of morally superior idol when Thunberg launched her “Fridays for the Future” protests in 2018, skipping school to stage a solo sit-in outside the Swedish parliament.

The Telegraph (UK).

A migrant caravan is making its way to the US border from southern Mexico.

Around 2,000 people – mostly Central and South Americans – set off walking from Tapachula, a city in southern Mexico, on Tuesday, according to media reports.

First, they aim to each Mexico City, a journey of more than 600 miles, which will probably take several weeks. It is another 600 miles to the nearest major US-Mexico border crossing.

The Telegraph (UK).

Across Africa, Britain has been called an oppressor and confronted with demands for slavery reparations.

But one nation is celebrating the British Empire as a liberator.

Malawi suffered from the brutality of Arab slavery, with its people captured by rival tribes and shipped to the Middle East, part of a 1,200-year-long traffic in human commodities that is often overshadowed by Europe’s transatlantic trade.

The War Zone.

The Czech Republic could supply Ukraine with up to 16 Aero L-39NG Skyfox aircraft, potentially giving Kyiv another option for countering Russia’s Shahed-type attack drones. The proposal includes four aircraft previously agreed to for transfer and 12 more that Czech officials are now discussing with their Ukrainian counterparts.

Czech Deputy Prime Minister and Industry and Trade Minister Karel Havlí?ek raised the expanded arrangement during a visit to Kyiv yesterday, where he met Ukrainian Prime Minister Serhiy Koretskyi. Havlí?ek described the discussions as encouraging but did not announce a finalized agreement for the additional aircraft.

Skyfox is based on the Cold War-era Aero L-39 Albatros jet trainer, a rugged and reliable Soviet aircraft that was produced in the thousands and served all over the globe. The new L-39NG was reworked and modernized in the 2010s in an effort to recapture jet trainer market share that had waned as the Soviet design was increasingly passed over for more modern alternatives. Many L-39s are also flown privately in the United States and are used for contracted air support services for the U.S. military. One of the firms that uses them, Draken International, actually assisted in the L-39NG project and acted as a U.S. anchor for the program.

Read it.

Advocates for stricter gun laws are pushing for new legislation as Democrats are set to take control in Congress and several states after the midterm elections.

Groups such as Everytown for Gun Safety, Brady United Against Gun Violence, and Giffords hailed the Democratic wins, with Brady United vowing to “counter the Trump administration’s deadly ‘guns everywhere’ agenda, which has put millions of lives at risk.”

“The election of so many candidates who have made evidence-based gun violence prevention strategies a priority is an opportunity to make meaningful progress toward a safer country,” Brady president Kris Brown wrote in a Nov. 4 statement.

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Anthropological studies show that slavery in the Western Hemisphere existed in virtually all native tribes. In Canada, from coast to coast, indigenous people enslaved other indigenous people. Some of the best records of this tradition are those concerning Northwest Coast Indians in today’s British Columbia and Oregon. In Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America (1997), anthropologist Leland Donald argued that slavery was essential to Northwest Coast culture.

Regarded as property, indigenous slaves were used in the labor-intensive work of coastal societies: building boats, houses, and weirs; preparing food; carrying water; collecting firewood; and nursing children.

The main source of slaves came from raiding parties, but some slaves were “bought and sold after the fashion of dogs and horses.” The transactions involved “money-shells”, blankets, food, or other property.

Cue call for ‘reparations’.

Power Line.

In a race that reflects the gravity of the GOP midterm debacle, Democrat LaKesha Womack defeated Republican incumbent Tim Moore in North Carolina’s 14th Congressional District by more than 6.000 votes. Womack’s victory celebration may have been crimped by a pending criminal case charging her with failing to return a rented 2019 Toyota 2019 Corolla worth $20,000 from a Budget Car Rental location in Charlotte.

Womack was served a felony summons three weeks before Election Day. The summons was originally issued in 2020 but was returned unserved before being reissued on October 11. The summons included an order for Womack to appear at the Mecklenburg County Courthouse yesterday at 9:00 a.m.

Read it.

Read it.

From northern Illinois to Nebraska, two farmers share why they’re turning to drones to seed cover crops into standing corn. Here’s what they’ve learned about timing the rain, beating compaction and making the math work.

Babylon Bee.

Customer service, that’s their motto.

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About 66 million years ago, the asteroid that ended the age of the dinosaurs paved the way for a spectacular expansion of new animal species. During this period, ants rose to ecological dominance. Today, they form the largest family of social insects with more than 15,000 species worldwide. New research now published in “Science Advances” shows that ants benefited from so-called transposable elements in their DNA, which are often referred to as “jumping genes”. The study was conducted by an international research team led by Dr Lukas Schrader from the Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity (IEB) at the University of Münster.

Jumping genes are DNA sequences that can move and replicate within a genome. For a long time, they were regarded as “genomic parasites” that, similar to viruses, multiply in the genome without benefiting their host and, in the worst case, can even cause diseases. However, they are now increasingly recognised as engines of evolutionary innovation. The new study shows that those ant lineages carrying the most transposable elements in their genomes are also the most species-rich today. Even more striking, the researchers identified independent bursts of transposable element activity in the ancestors of the largest ant groups in the early Palaeogene (about 66 million years ago), shortly before these lineages diversified into the thousands of species living today. “The asteroid impact had dramatic consequences for the environment. We have now found the genomic mechanism that connects these ecological upheavals to the subsequent rapid diversification of the ants: transposable elements,” explains Lukas Schrader. Comparable patterns have been identified in other animal groups, with studies showing bursts of jumping gene activity during more recent phases of increased speciation, for example in primates and bats.

Newsbusters.

Now that the election is over, it’s time for Democrat voters to sit down and shut up and let their betters pursue their socialist agenda.

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth awarded the soldier who reprimanded him and members of his staff at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier a Joint Service Commendation Medal on Thursday.

“We love soldiers. We love standards. Well done, Specialist,” Hegseth said in a post on social media. “Carry on Patriots.”

A Pentagon official confirmed that Hegseth welcomed the 3rd Infantry Regiment, known as The Old Guard, to the Pentagon “where he proudly awarded Specialist Iglesias the Joint Service Commendation Medal for the execution of his duties at the Tomb of the unknown Soldier on November 11, 2026.”

Try—just try—to imagine a Democrat doing that. I can’t. Democrats want Hegseth impeached.

Hegseth, his wife, chief of staff Ricky Buria, deputy chief of staff Patrick Weaver and senior adviser and deputy assistant Tami Radabaugh were taking photos in front of the tomb after a Veterans Day ceremony on Wednesday at Arlington National Cemetery when some in the group were heard laughing and chatting after the photos were taken. The soldier patrolling in front of the tomb, Spc. Thomas Iglesias, stopped walking and faced the group.

“All visitors will maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times,” Iglesias called out.

Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell later said of the incident that the soldier “correctly and respectfully reminded everyone to maintain decorum.”

Well done, that man.

The New Neo.

First, just to clear something up: I don’t abhor the idea of conspiracy in voting fraud, although of course I abhor fraud if and when it occurs. I’ve written a huge number of posts on the subject of voting fraud and I believe several things about it. The first is that of course it sometimes occurs. The second is that it tends to occur in geographic areas dominated by blue cities offsetting redder rural areas. The third is that much of the supposed “statistical” evidence for it is weak. The fourth (and perhaps most important) is that if it’s done well it’s almost impossible to detect.

Even more important, perhaps, is something I’ve written many many times: when voting security is lax – and in particular with the use of computers rather than hand-counting of paper ballots, as well as universal or widespread mail-in ballots – trust in the integrity of the voting process becomes fatally flawed whether there is significant fraud or not. That’s happened in the US; trust is very much broken. Once that happens, each side tends to think an election where they lost was stolen by the other side.

Read it.

Construction Physics.

One of my ongoing research interests is understanding the nature of technological progress: How does new technology come into the world and improve over time? What sort of factors affect it? How, in general, should we think about it? I’ve come at this question from a few different angles: posts looking at the operations and legacy of Bell Labs, posts looking at how specific technologies improved over time, posts looking at how frequent multiple invention is and how long we wait for new inventions, and so on.

My current line of thinking is that creating some new technology is best thought of as a search process. A given technology can be thought of as a point in some high-dimensional “design space” or “technology space,” which contains every possible technology: every conceivable arrangement of parts, materials, natural phenomena, and so on. The job of the would-be inventor is to navigate this space, sifting through the arrangements of elements that don’t work to find the ones that will.

This search process is made difficult by the fact that, as with any situation where you’re enumerating the possible combinations of a large number of elements, technology space is incomprehensibly vast. In “Are Technologies Inevitable?” economist Matt Clancy notes that Wikipedia listed 272 “named equations” that describe various regularities in the world, ranging from the Navier-Stokes equations (which describe the motion of fluids) to the Arrhenius equation (which describes chemical reaction rates as a function of temperature) to the Exner equation (which describes how sediment gets deposited in a river). If we use this as a (very rough) estimate as to the number of different phenomena that a technology can leverage, it implies an enormous number of possible technologies that could be created.

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In 1960 Science published a curve fit that sent world population to infinity on Friday, 13 November 2026. The date has arrived, the population is about 8.2 billion and slowing, and the method lives on in Ehrlich, the Club of Rome and RCP8.5.

Newsbusters.

On Tuesday, shocking news broke about a Monday night United Airlines flight from Newark, New Jersey, to New Orleans, Louisiana, in which a twice-deported illegal immigrant from Honduras — who claimed to be transgender — attempted to hijack the plane.

Normally, the “Big Three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC obsessively cover every clipping of plane tails, near-collisions on the tarmac, or unruly passengers. But when it came to this story, they had no interest in telling their viewers about it.

ABC’s World News Tonight came the closest on Tuesday with a 70-second story, but said nothing about the suspect’s origins or criminal record. Never one to completely skip airline headlines, anchor David Muir even teased three times in less than three minutes about “a possible hijacking alert” of a man who “tried to storm the cockpit.”

My, what a surprise.