Read it.

The Navy will sideline 17 ships to contend with a shortage of civilian mariners, the Military Sealift commander said last week, prompting concerns from the Marine Corps about how it will support and transport its own forces.

Rear Adm. Philip Sobeck, the MSC commander, told reporters on Thursday that the move to dock more than a dozen ships was meant to give overworked and understaffed civilian mariners a break as the command looks to get “the foundation back intact” for ship maintenance.

While Sobeck said this plan would take place “over the next two years,” he wouldn’t say how long it will take to get ships back in the water. The result is that ships that support the Marine Corps will not be available, causing worries for the amphibious service that will compound existing challenges getting Marines to the field.

Daily Signal.

I don’t always agree with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, but I can’t help but feel a bit of healthy schadenfreude at the prospect of America’s corrupt health care establishment getting the bitter taste of well-deserved disruptive medicine.

Kennedy isn’t exactly a conservative. He’s on the record supporting abortion, and he has a long track record of working not just in environmental conservation (which I support), but in advancing climate alarmism, which I consider not only wrong, but disruptive for freedom, prosperity, and environmental protection.

Yet Kennedy also represents the inquisitive spirit that the medical establishment has fought tooth-and-nail to suppress, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Big Health’s recent scandals make the kind of shake-up Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promises not only necessary, but also a just retribution.

Read it.

TOPLINE: Taxpayers have spent $15 million on security services for Dr. Anthony Fauci in the past two years, after he had already returned to life as a private citizen, according to a new report from OpenTheBooks.com.

KEY FACTS: The security agreement took effect in January 2023, and extended to September 2024. The agreement states that the contract could be extended. OpenTheBooks.com asked the U.S. Marshals Service for clarification, but they didn’t respond.

The price tag includes salaries and benefits for the U.S. marshals guarding Fauci, a private chauffeur, law enforcement equipment, and more.

Read it.

Americans spend over $500 billion per year defending themselves against the IRS.

That’s spitting distance from the $800 billion the Defense Department spends protecting us against foreigners—well, failing to protect, in the case of the border.

Read it.

With the changing of the guard, it’s time for long-promised accountability over the unprecedented COVID scam. Not only has Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) promised to hold feet to the fire as the head of the Senate’s government oversight panel, we may actually have a shot at a special counsel investigation and more with Trump’s incoming Attorney General pick, Pam Bondi – a loyalist who’s on record supporting the lab-leak hypothesis.

As regular readers vividly recall, ZeroHedge paid a hefty price for our early reporting on the pandemic, after we suggested that a Chinese lab playing weaponized God with bat COVID might have “something to do” with the COVID outbreak across town.

Millions in ad revenue evaporated. Corporate media (brought to you by Pfizer!) penned numerous hit-pieces, and various companies such as PayPal, Amazon and Mailchimp dropped us like a hot rock; other outlets suffered similarly. However brave reporting from journalists like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Paul Thacker and Lee Fang – armed with factual evidence from Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) and various FOIA lawsuits, has provided more than just breadcrumbs.

Now, four years later, the entire charade has been exposed piece by piece.

Read it.

Of all the celebrities promising to leave the country if Donald Trump won this month’s election, at least one has already kept that promise and decamped to supposedly greener pastures. The actress and filmmaker Eva Longoria recently told Marie Claire that she, her husband, and her son now split their time between Spain and Mexico.

…

Eva Longoria doesn’t know this, but she’s not leaving the United States because of Donald Trump. She’s leaving because of Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, London Breed, and all the rest of the party-machine politicians, who see this nation’s cities and states not as places where people live and desire to live well but as opportunities to ply their ideological biases and fulfill their personal ambitions.

Donald Trump is not the dictator his detractors want us all to believe he is. But even if he were, there is nothing he could do to the people of San Francisco that is worse than what London Breed, Edwin Lee, and Gavin Newsom have done to them. There is nothing he could do to the people of Chicago that is worse than what Brandon Johnson and Lori Lightfoot have done to them. There is nothing he could do to the people of New York that is worse than what Eric Adams and Bill DeBlasio have done to them.

Read it.

Campaign season brought with it a steady stream of accusations that various parties and platforms were spreading misinformation and disinformation.

Most recently, the scandals at FEMA over avoiding homes with Trump signs was quickly slapped with a “misinformation” label…until FEMA itself admitted it had happened. MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki suggested “laws have to change” to combat the scourge.

With the misinformation category being weaponized across the political spectrum, we took a look at how invested government has become in studying and “combatting” it using your tax dollars. That research can provide the intellectual ammunition to censor people online.

Read it.

Death certificates have always provided broader and more accurate data than the FBI’s figures, but the gap between them has grown sharply under the Biden administration. This may indicate that local law enforcement agencies, states, and/or the FBI are undercounting murders.

Furthermore, the Biden administration FBI inexplicably revised its pre-Biden murder data all the way back to 2003, elevating the counts in certain years by up to 7%. The FBI made these unprecedented alterations without so much as a footnote to inform the public.

As a result of those factors and others, the gap between murders reported by the FBI and the number of homicides recorded on death certificates has grown from a low of 16 killings in 2003 to an average of 3,711 killings per year during Biden’s presidency.

Considering that such statistics are used by Deep State bureaucrats as a basis for public policy, this ought to bother everybody.

Read it.

People eagerly give money to rich environmental groups. The Natural Resources Defense Council has $463 million in assets.

It claims it uses law “to confront the climate crisis.”

What it really does is pay lawyers to torture people who try to do useful things.

Example: America needs minerals like copper and silver to make things. Even President Joe Biden made a speech saying America will need 400-600% more such minerals to make “solar panels, wind turbines and so much more!”

An iPhone alone requires aluminum, iron, lithium, gold, copper …

But when investors dare try to dig up such minerals in America, the NRDC objects and uses political connections to stop them.

So, actually, it isn’t America that blocks new mines, but government that blocks them. An important distinction that ‘journalists’ ought to keep clear but seldom do.

Read it.

It was recently reported that corrupt Pentagon officials are “scrambling” to wipe all evidence of DEI before President-elect Donald Trump steps back into the Oval Office on Jan. 20, 2025.

Reported! That’s as good as proof to the Narrative Media.

Breitbart News wrote in its exclusive article that its sources stated that the Pentagon is in “absolute disarray” with “generals scrambling” because Trump plans to fire far-left senior military leaders who pushed DEI and other woke policies instead of taking care of combat readiness.

One source compared the organization’s situation to a hornet’s nest being kicked over, adding that “DEI pages are starting to disappear off the main websites.”

“They’re being archived as we speak. They are full-bore focused on cleaning up anything DEI-related,” the source stated.

Archived! DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE!

Read it.

There aren’t any new models available under $20,000 in the for American car buyers anymore, but emerging auto markets like India have plenty of cheap cars to go around. One of these budget cars just proved that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to be safe.

But you’ll still never see it for sale in the U.S., thanks to government regulations.

Read it.

Last year, the FBI official who oversaw the initial investigation into who planted the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill pipe bombs told Congress that cell phone data from that probe was “corrupted.”

“We have complete data. Not complete, because there’s some data that was corrupted by one of the providers—not purposely by them, right,” former FBI official Steven D’Antuono told the House Judiciary Committee in a transcribed interview.

“It’s just unusual circumstances that we have corrupt data from one of the providers. I can’t remember right now which one. But for that day, which is awful because we don’t have that information to search.”

It turns out, D’Antuono—who oversaw the FBI’s 2020 Gov. Whitmer kidnap case before being transferred to Washington DC just in time for Jan. 6—may have perjured himself.

The House Oversight Subcommittee said Thursday that it has found no evidence to support the claims from D’Antuono, who is now retired.

Read it.

Research led by scientists at Emory University in Atlanta found that while tetanus and influenza vaccines prompt the body to produce long-lived plasma cells that generate antibodies, COVID-19 vaccines do not.

The mRNA vaccines cause the body to produce short-lived plasma cells that can only generate antibodies for a period of time before dying off.

Vaccines like tetanus give long-lasting immunity, with antibodies persisting in the body for up to 10 years. COVID-19 antibodies rapidly wane three to six months after vaccination, often resulting in breakthrough infections.

The Hill.

The Pentagon on Friday failed its seventh audit in a row, with the nation’s largest government agency still unable to fully account for its more than $824 billion budget, though officials stress they are making good progress toward a clean audit in 2028.

The Department of Defense technically earned a disclaimer of opinion, meaning it failed to provide sufficient information to auditors to form an accurate opinion.

The goal is to earn an unmodified audit opinion, or a clean audit that says the financial statements are accurate. A qualified opinion says there are omissions and concerns but the finances are generally reliable.

Read it.

The Department of Homeland Security is rolling back progressive internal policies in anticipation of a second Trump presidency, according to internal agency documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

One example, described as “superfluous signaling” by one senior career staff member, is a memo entitled “Commitment to Nondiscrimination in Department of Homeland Security Activities.” That memo, which will no longer be released, largely focused on behavior that is already outlawed in the federal government, such as forbidding any “reliance on generalized stereotypes involving any individual characteristic.”

“It’s not clear why this memo was ever even written,” said one senior DHS official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We can’t discriminate against anyone, but I guess this is what they prefer we do instead of deportations. But now I guess they don’t want to piss anyone off.”

Read it.

The number has grown each year, and represents 6 to 7 percent of ICE detainers issued in those years. Each declined detainer represednts a deportable criminal alien who was released back into the community and given the opportunity to prey on more victims. The number reported by ICE include detainers declined by the law enforcement agency with custody of the alien, cases in which the local law enforcement agency provided insufficient notice to ICE to arrive before the alien’s release, and early releases of aliens despite a detainer.

Read it.

Two days after the election, a federal court in Texas ruled against President Joe Biden’s latest unauthorized scheme to subvert immigration law: “parole in place” for illegal aliens who are the spouses of U.S. citizens.

In a 73-page decision, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas upheld a challenge by 16 states to the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to create the parole program by administrative rule.

Introduced by Biden back in June, “parole in place” for spouses was built on a legal house of cards, as my BorderLine column explained at the time. In promulgating the order, Biden’s government created another administrative runaround to dodge the lawful visa process.

Read it.

Recently, legacy outlets Politico and The Washington Post reported on, and appeared to sympathize with, an amendment co-sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) that would continue the work of an anti-free speech State Department program, the Global Engagement Center (GEC). In response, the Media Research Center relentlessly sought answers from the potential Senate majority leader candidates. The Media Research Center reached out to Cornyn, Thune and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL).

The GEC, for its part, was shown to have aggressively worked to censor free speech on social media platforms, including targeting users of platforms as being a part of foreign influence campaigns. For example, Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi has reported that the GEC has smeared Twitter users by accusing them of acting on behalf of the People’s Republic of China. The GEC gave Twitter a list of “5500 names” that included CNN employees and “multiple Western government accounts.” The GEC has also been caught working with, and even giving $100,000 to, the George Soros-funded anti-free speech Global Disinformation Index (GDI). In Feb. 2023, Washington Examiner Investigative Reporter Gabe Kaminsky exposed the GDI for seeking to “defund conservative media” by cutting them off from their advertising funding.

The Media Research Center called Cornyn’s D.C. and district offices 12 times, in addition to sending two emails and a text message to Cornyn Press Secretary Tatum Wallace about the amendment. At no point did any Cornyn staffer address the amendment or even agree to speak on the phone. A staffer from Sen. Thune’s office informed the Media Research Center that Sen. Thune did not have a comment on the amendment. The Media Research Center also passed on concerns about the amendment to a staffer at one of Sen. Scott’s regional offices.

I believe I shall vote against Senator Cornyn if it runs again.

Read it.

Yesterday, news broke that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) focused on radically restructuring federal spending during Donald Trump’s presidency. What parts of government will be some of the easiest targets?

Using data from the OMB, 24/7 Wall St. identified the government agencies wasting the most taxpayer money. The 13 federal agencies on this list are ranked by the dollar value of overpayments made in the government’s 2023 fiscal year. All supplemental data in this story also came from the OMB report. Among these agencies, overpayments range from about $16 million to nearly $99 billion.

While some of this money is recoverable, taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for much of that wasted spending. The agencies on this list recovered a reported $25.2 billion in improperly made payments in fiscal 2023, some share of which was paid in error in a previous year. Still, this amounts to only about 14% of the total overpayments made in 2023. (These are the companies that receive the most in government subsidies.)

Read it.

No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse.

Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. It broke. Once the news leaked that the shot didn’t stop infection or transmission, the planners lost public support and the scheme collapsed.

It was undoubtedly planned to be permanent and nationwide if not worldwide. Instead, the scheme had to be dialed back.

Read it.

Got them ol’ Deep State blues….

Nearly a month ago highly classified US intelligence detailing Israeli plans for a retaliation attack against Iran appeared online. The pair of documents were prepared by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the leak immediately kicked off a massive federal investigation and hunt for the leaker.

On Wednesday federal prosecutors have revealed an arrest, with the NY Times reporting that “The man, Asif W. Rahman, was indicted last week in federal court in Virginia with two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information.” He had worked for the US government overseas, and is being charged with two counts of violating the Espionage Act. The Times has followed with an update identifying him as a CIA official.

UPDATE: CIA Officer Arrested in Cambodia for ‘Deadly Serious’ Leak of Classified US Docs on Israel

The Washington Poop.

Voters in Montana, Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania — states that Donald Trump won on Nov. 5 — also voted for Republicans to take over Senate seats currently held by Democrats, helping Republicans secure control of the upper chamber.

After these flips, only Maine, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will send a split-party delegation of one Democrat and one Republican to the Senate. That is the lowest number since Americans began directly electing senators more than a century ago.

The 17th Amendment was a mistake, a big step on the road toward twisting our Republic into a Democracy. Of course Democrats loved it.

Financial Times.

That will get a bunch of panties in a wad.

Read it.

The complaints directed at FEMA leadership keep coming weeks after Hurricane Helene ravaged North Carolina and the 2024 presidential election flipped U.S. leadership.

Savage Operations founder Adam Smith, whose group assisted hurricane relief, claimed FEMA led with a culture of “fear” under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris amid the reported skipping of homes with Donald Trump campaign signs.

“And one of the interesting thing was, is it was stated that, Hey, we can’t have our fingerprints on this, which I think leads back to the actual question, which is, What sort of culture and what sort of fear is there in place at some of the lower levels of FEMA personnel where they’re afraid they’re going to lose their job if they don’t speak up against actions that are blatantly not aligned with what the organization is supposed to be doing?” Smith said in a TV interview, as reported by Mediaite.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Good.

Public Notice, a Voice of the Crust.

We really dodged a bullet when this guy didn’t make it onto the Supreme Court.

It has often been said that Donald Trump was running for president to keep himself out of prison. Mission accomplished.

But the fact that Trump wasn’t behind bars long ago, that he didn’t suffer any consequences for his criming and now likely never will, can be laid squarely at the feet of one man: Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland dragged his feet on prosecuting Trump for election interference and pilfering classified documents, making it easy for him to run out the clock.

Coming in on the heels of a literal insurrection, Garland was a bad fit for his job from the jump. He made clear early on that he didn’t see addressing issues from the Trump era as a priority, declaring that he would not look backward. Garland is an institutionalist, leading him to see his real job as protecting the Department of Justice rather than imposing any consequences on Bill Barr and others who turned the DOJ into a corrupt playground.

Apparently his chief fault was not being a more thoroughgoing Democrat tool.  Good to know.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that police (yes, that includes the FBI) can lie like a rug to you and face no consequences (other than perhaps a promotion), while if you lie to them you could go to jail. (Paging Martha Stewart….)

CBS News, a Voice of the Crust.

A federal judge on Thursday struck down a Biden administration program that would allow unauthorized immigrants married to American citizens to get legal status and a streamlined path to U.S. citizenship, declaring the policy illegal.

U.S. District Court Judge J. Campbell Barker, an appointee of President-elect Donald Trump, found the program violates U.S. immigration law, agreeing with a lawsuit filed by Texas and more than a dozen other Republican-led states.

The ruling is a major defeat for the outgoing Biden administration, which argued the policy, known as Keeping Families Together, promoted family unity among mixed-status households. When it was announced earlier this year, officials said roughly half-a-million undocumented immigrants were likely eligible for the program.

And now we make us a start.

Read it.

You can’t make this shit up.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

waiting period between the presidential election and the installation of the winner, if the winner is not the incumbent. In most countries with elections, the transition happens within a week or two of the election. In America, the new president has months to wait for his turn at the wheel and the outgoing administration has months to do their worst, often with the goal of hobbling the next president.

The latter was on full display after the 2016 election. The last months of the Obama administration were used to set up the Russian collusion hoax, along with other schemes to prevent a smooth transition. The Trump administration was crippled right out of the gate, forced to go through the absurd theater of a special counsel to investigate what everyone knew was a political dirty trick. Between November and January, the fate of the Trump administration was sealed.

That is something to keep in mind this time. Like 2016, the political class was sure they had fended off the invisible army of orange Hitlers, only to find that their blue wall had crumbled once again. Unlike 2016 there was no way for them to claim it was fraudulent or illegitimate, since the results were conclusive. This may explain the relative quiet this time compared to 2016. By the standards of presidential elections, this was a trouncing in both the electoral college and popular vote.

I still remember the arrested adolescents of the Clinton administration stealing the ‘W’ key-caps from the typewriters in the White House on their way out. Most Democrats seem to top out emotionally at age sixteen.

Read it.

The death of a squirrel has somehow intruded on the news cycle in the relentless last days of a presidential election.

Last week, the New York state government seized P’Nut the pet squirrel and a pet raccoon named Fred from owners Mark and Daniela Longo in Pine City, New York, in what was reportedly a five-hour raid.

Shortly afterward, the two animals were euthanized.

Read it.

Election Day is accompanied by some major voting controversies in battleground states, with lawsuits and investigations looking into alleged voter registration fraud, overseas ballots, and complaints about how some jurisdictions follow election law.

Both Democrats and Republicans brought lawsuits.

Some matters already have been settled. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court sided last week with Virginia by allowing the state to remove the names of 1,600 noncitizens from the voter rolls. And in Pennsylvania, Republicans successfully sued to extend early voting hours.

Read it.

Astonishing.

Read it.

Multiple counties in California’s San Francisco Bay Area region reinstated mask mandates in health care settings starting Nov. 1, while other municipalities have recommended face coverings.

Counties with mask requirements for employees include San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, Napa, and San Mateo. But Santa Clara County, which includes San Jose, and San Mateo County also require visitors and patients in those health care facilities to wear masks.

Those mandates, which were announced weeks or months ago, run from Nov. 1, 2024, until March 31, 2025. A similar mandate was imposed across the Bay Area during the 2023–24 winter and spring months.

Just to remind you what a Harris/Walz regime would be like.

Read it.

The latest crime reported by the Kenner Police Department on Oct. 29 involved a 17-year-old old illegal immigrant who was arrested for sex crimes involving two minors in the city. Two additional minors were also found to be abused, Police Capt. Mike Cunningham told The Epoch Times on Oct. 30.

Luis Renan Bonilla-Alfaro allegedly inappropriately touched four minors aged 4 to 13 and performed sexual acts with them in a trailer park.

Bonilla-Alfaro confessed and admitted that he filmed the acts with the minors. Kenner Police found sexually explicit videos on his phone of him and the minors.

“We have identified two additional victims, one of whom was the unidentified we found on [the] suspect’s phone,” said Cunningham. “A total of four victims, all under the age of 13, all males.”

Thank you, Joe Biden. (You too, Kamala.)

Read it.

Make no mistake, the recent scourge of inflation and high interest rates has been a heist buried beneath economic jargon.

It has transferred a tremendous amount of wealth from hardworking Americans to the federal government.

The root cause of this disaster—reckless government spending and money-printing—should serve as a reminder that the federal deficit is the bank robber, the Fed is the getaway car driver, and you are the bank.

The past few years have seen consumer goods prices increase more than they had in the prior 30 years, while staggering price increases for construction materials have helped push homeownership out of reach for tens of millions of Americans.

Read it.

There were two snipers posted inside the second floor of the AGR building used by alleged gunman Thomas Crooks to shoot at Donald Trump. Both failed to spot Crooks before his assassination attempt.

Ever since then, excuses have been made for the failure of the local snipers, Greg Nicol and Mike Murcko. Local officials have insisted that the snipers didn’t have a vantage of Crooks, and would have had to lean out of their windows to see him on the rooftop. Meanwhile, some media members have reported rumors that Nicol locked himself out of the building while searching for Crooks—and that the shooting happened right when Murcko went downstairs to let him back inside.

However, a time-stamped transcript of encrypted radio communications from July 13 tells a different story—showing that both Murcko and Nicol received warnings about an armed man on the rooftop at least seven seconds before he opened fire, and that Murcko radioed that Crooks was down after the shooting. The transcript further reveals other new details about the July 13 Butler rally, raising still more questions in the process.

Read it.

At least a dozen women’s and girls’ sports teams have forfeited games against teams with biological male players without consequences, but one team has been kicked out of its league for almost a year for refusing to play a team with a transgender-identifying player.

Mid Vermont Christian School in Burlington, Vermont, forfeited a girls’ high school basketball game in November 2023 against a team that had a male athlete playing for it. The Vermont Principals’ Association resultantly kicked Mid Vermont Christian out of the association and denied it public funding through the state’s tuition program.

But other teams across the country have faced no penalties for declining to play teams with biological male players.

Read it.

Not only were only 12k jobs created, all of the jobs were in the public sector (government). Private payrolls dropped 28k.

Read it.

Los Angeles County has sued beverage makers PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, accusing them of polluting the most populous U.S. county with plastic bottles and misleading the public about the environmental impact and recyclability of their containers.

Read it.

Rail transit officials in California’s Bay Area have been ordered to pay more than $7 million to transit workers who were fired because they refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine years ago.

On Oct. 23, a federal jury in the U.S District Court for the Northern District of California sided with six former San Francisco Bay Area Regional Transit (BART) workers who had refused to get the vaccine for religious purposes.

BART was ordered to pay the group more than $7.8 million, with each individual receiving between $1.2 million and $1.5 million, the Pacific Justice Institute, which represented the transit workers in the trial, said in a statement on Oct. 24. The institute, a law firm representing the six former employees since 2022, said the eight-person jury deliberated for two days this week before returning the verdict that awarded the employees the compensation.

Read it.

Six former Bay Area Rapid Transit District Employees who lost their jobs for refusing COVID-19 vaccinations will each receive more than $1 million after a federal jury sided with them in a discrimination lawsuit.

Read it.

A small but growing number of American schools are reducing or delaying access to advanced courses. Most often, these changes have been enacted in the name of reducing achievement gaps between demographic groups. However, rather than helping marginalized students, these policies deny educational opportunities for gifted students of all backgrounds.

“Detracking” is an increasingly popular proposal among educators that attempts to reduce the degree to which students are separated by academic ability. It typically takes the form of removing advanced course offerings or delaying the introduction of these offerings. Supporters claim that marginalized students are often wrongly placed—or place themselves—in less advanced courses and that these students often stay on a less advanced curricular path.

In San Francisco, public schools have eliminated accelerated math courses in middle and high school since 2014, and several Seattle schools had rolled out detracking efforts by 2016. Earlier this year, a Detroit-area school district eliminated middle school honors math classes, while schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts, began phasing out advanced middle school math in 2017—though the district announced it would reverse course in August. Outrage erupted in February when one Los Angeles–area school eliminated honors English courses for ninth- and 10th-grade students.

Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut.

Tyler Cowen.

Over-regulation was the enemy at many presentations, but this wasn’t a libertarian conference. Everyone agreed that safety, quality, the environment, etc, were important and should be regulated for. They just thought existing regulations were colossally stupid, so much so that they made everything worse including safety, the environment, etc. With enough political will, it would be easy to draft regulations that improved innovation, price, safety, the environment, and everything else.

For example, consider supersonic flight. Supersonic aircraft create “sonic booms”, minor explosions that rattle windows and disturb people underneath their path. Annoyed with these booms, Congress banned supersonic flight over land in 1973. Now we’ve invented better aircraft whose booms are barely noticeable, or not noticeable at all. But because Congress banned supersonic flight – rather than sonic booms themselves – we’re stuck with normal boring 6-hour coast-to-coast flights. If aircraft progress had continued at the same rate it was going before the supersonic ban, we’d be up to 2,500 mph now (coast-to-coast in ~2 hours). Can Congress change the regulation so it bans booms and not speed? Yes, but Congress is busy, and doing it through the FAA and other agencies would take 10-15 years of environmental impact reports.

Gee, government regulations screw everything up? Hooda thunkit?

Read it.

Nearly 1 million illegal aliens in the United States have benefited from “quiet amnesty” by the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration court system, according to a report released Thursday.

Over 700,000 illegal migrants have had their cases administratively closed, terminated, or dismissed, allowing them to remain in the country “indefinitely” without being subject to immigration consequences, according to a report released by the House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

The findings, which the committee dubbed as “quiet amnesty,” come amid record levels of illegal immigration into the country under the Biden-Harris administration.

Read it.

Years ago, I began to notice how household items were not working anymore. The showerheads are federally regulated to restrict flow, as are the toilets and garbage disposals. The mandated designs and blueprints make all the products worse.

The new gas cans are awful, while the old ones sell for a premium. I was mowing the lawn and found that it kept getting clogged because of a lack of airflow. Sure enough, the functioning was hobbled by safety regulations that forced the cage ever lower to the grass surface, to the point that the machine does not do what it is supposed to do.

Indeed, it is hard to think of a single product you use that is not trapped in some kind of forced design emanating from a federal bureaucracy. This pertains to everything in your house but also to every business, all the way down to the fabric of the aprons in every restaurant. These are just federal laws but state and local ones also add to the burden.

Ask any real estate developer and he will tell you the reason for the housing shortage.

It comes down to extreme controls on every single step in hiring and building. The customer ends up paying in two ways: higher prices and less choice.

Gorsuch notes: “If you’re a budding pasta entrepreneur, take note: by federal decree, macaroni must have a diameter between 1.1 and .27 inches, while vermicelli must not be more than .06 inches in diameter. Both may contain egg whites—but those egg whites cannot constitute more than two percent of the weight of the finished product.”

Read it.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an Anglo-U.S. non-governmental organisation, set out its main “annual priorities” from March to October 2024 in bullet-pointed lists. It aims to “Kill Musk’s Twitter,” a goal backed by an “advertising focus”—i.e., a campaign to deter advertisers from using the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Screenshots from a CCDH monthly planner, obtained by Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi, outline this censorious phrase. More detailed suggestions include reminders to lobby for U.S. and European Union regulation to be tightened, or at least deployed, against ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate’—suitably loosely defined to mean things that the campaigners disagree with. “Social media companies erode basic human rights and civil liberties by enabling the spread of online hate and disinformation,” asserts the CCDH website.

“This is war,” replied Elon Musk, following the publication of the leaked documents. He later added, “This violates U.S. criminal statutes against foreign interference in elections. We are going after CCDH and their donors. AND their donors.”

The Register.

Fake review writers are officially on watch – the US is now enforcing a new rule to ban the practice and is promising a crackdown.

“As of today, @FTC’s final rule banning fake online reviews and testimonials has come into effect,” the head of the agency Lina Khan wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “If you encounter any of these prohibited practices, you can report them to @FTC at: https://reportfraud.ftc.gov.”

And then what? How are they going to identify the perpetrators? How are they going to identify the perpetrators with the surety that legal rules of evidence require? Or are they just going to do the Deep State dance and hit people with penalties on the basis of rumor and suspicion?

Naval Matters.

Pivoting our thinking away from the ship-sinking role for the PT-ish boat (we’ll use the term ‘PT boat’ in a generic sense for the rest of the article) and keeping in mind that the most effective use was as barge-busting gunboats and ISR, we could easily imagine a very useful PT boat component in the Navy, today. For example, we could flood the Persian Gulf with PT boats to monitor and eliminate Iran’s maritime harassment, ship seizures, and ship mining. Of course, that would require us to have the will to use force, as necessary, otherwise there would be no point.