Read it.

Senior civil servants—permanent state employees—advising Britain’s elected home secretary would widen the range of targets for counter-extremism policy, all while downplaying the proven, lethal challenge posed by Islamist groups. While institutions often fail to prevent actual violence, ‘the blob’—the nickname given to the current crop of woke, publicly funded yet largely anonymous policymakers—has been revealed as keen to redefine thoughts and words as dangerous.

Last week Home Secretary Yvette Cooper denied incorporating an extensive and now-public rogues’ gallery of types of wrong-think (and worse) into policy. Yet it was she who in August 2024 commissioned a “Rapid Analytical Sprint” approach to extremism, prompting her advisers to cook up a hit list of problematic ideas. Security minister Dan Jarvis also briefed Parliament that, while he didn’t know which Whitehall materials had been made public by the think-tank Policy Exchange, he would still distance them from current government policy.

Regardless of precisely which draft of the report was leaked to authors Andrew Gilligan and Dr Paul Stott, it is clear that Whitehall chiefs are seeking to centralise greater power for the authorities. Extremely Confused: The Government’s new counter-extremism review revealed

Read it.

President Donald Trump on Thursday directed the Federal Aviation Administration to assess safety standards, including evaluating hiring practices, in the wake of the midair collision over Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Wednesday night.

The presidential memorandum comes after Trump suggested the military helicopter that crashed into an American Airlines regional jet may have been due in part to the FAA’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

All 67 people aboard the two aircraft were killed.

“President Trump swiftly signed a memorandum directing an immediate assessment of the Federal Aviation Administration to ensure the federal government is maintaining the highest personnel and policy aviation-safety standards,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

UPDATE: December FAA Report Cites “Urgent Need To Modernize Air Traffic Systems” I remember Newt Gingrich, at that time the new Speaker of the House, pointing out on television how far behind in technology the FAA was — and that was thirty years ago.

UPDATE: On MSNBC, Former Biden FAA Boss Doesn’t Dispute Trump’s Hiring Claims

Read it.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been undermined by repeated leaks of his comments and policy changes since agreeing to dismantle the censorship regime at Meta. That’s not a coincidence.

Zuckerberg announced on Jan. 7 that his platforms would cut ties with pro-censorship fact-checkers, allow free speech on “topics like immigration and gender,” and make other changes to reduce censorship on the platform. Since that announcement, Meta employees have repeatedly leaked Zuckerberg’s internal communications to the media.

Among the leaked content are announcements of additional changes to dismantle woke elements on Meta platforms and even Meta’s plans to step away from discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has waded into the politicized debate over NPR and PBS, ordering up an investigation that he said could be relevant in lawmakers’ decision about whether to continue funding the public news organizations.

Brendan Carr, the chairman, said in a letter to NPR and PBS on Wednesday that the inquiry would focus on whether the news organizations’ member stations violated government rules by recognizing financial sponsors on the air.

Mr. Carr said that NPR and PBS stations operate as noncommercial broadcast organizations, but that they may be airing “announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”

“To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for-profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements,” Mr. Carr wrote, “then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars.”

Note: No mention of ideological bias. Just focusing on those nasty smelly slimy ‘for profit’ connections.

UPDATE: FCC Chair Brendan Carr Opens Up Probe of NPR/PBS Advertising, or ‘Underwriting’

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

She obviously misses the good old days in East Germany.

She just couldn’t stay silent.

Angela Merkel — three years after stepping down as chancellor — lit a fire under Germany’s election campaign by choosing now to finally speak up.

And it was to criticize her own side.

In publicly chastizing the leader of the party that she spearheaded for more than two decades, and barely three weeks before voters go to the polls, Merkel faces questions over whether her intervention will end up doing the very thing she warned against: boosting support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

For Politico, there is no right but the far-right.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

As Mark Zuckerberg and other tech titans have embraced President Trump and muffled internal dissent at their companies, their mostly left-leaning employees have objected with subtle acts of defiance.

Read it.

I guess even climate activists like Sigourney Weaver aren’t safe from the green mob.

Read it.

Ah, California lawmakers are at it again, pushing the boundaries of legal absurdity with a bill that would allow victims of natural disasters to sue oil companies for damages. Yes, you read that correctly—wildfire victims could now take ExxonMobil to court as if hurricanes and forest fires suddenly started appearing the moment someone filled up their SUV?.

Read it.

A French newspaper boss has been forced to quit after ‘liking’ posts on LinkedIn written by right-wing politicians like Sarah Knafo and Marion Maréchal. The thought police did their work: after being forced to self-criticise in Stalinist mode, he ended up resigning.

The alarm was raised by the investigative newspaper Mediapart, notorious for its left-wing activism. In an article, Mediapart ‘revealed’ that Philippe Carli, head of the Ebra press group, France’s leading regional daily press group, which manages large-circulation titles such as Le Progrès and Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, regularly liked posts on his LinkedIn account from Reconquête MEP Sarah Knafo, personalities from the Rassemblement National (RN), and reposted videos from the CNews news channel.

“The boss of Ebra cherishes the far-right,” concluded Mediapart, expressing its indignation. Philippe Carli, caught in the act of thoughtcrime, offered several explanations in an attempt to defend himself. First, he claimed that his LinkedIn account was managed by another person, with whom he said he was “very unhappy.” However, he then changed his tune and launched into a full-scale self-criticism. An article signed by him appeared on Sunday, January 26th in the nine regional titles published by his group by way of apology: “Yes, my hasty use of social media was clumsy. I’m sorry about that. This is not who I am as a man and as the head of an independent press group,” it read.

Read it.

The decision to bring back Mt. McKinley’s name touched off outrage from those who insist that Mt. Denali was the original ‘indigenous’ name for Mt. McKinley.

But which “indigenous” name?

The National Park Service notes that, “no fewer than nine Native groups… used unique names for the mountain. There are five Athabascan languages surrounding the park, each with its own oral place name.”

And Mt. Denali is not even the right tribal name.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who co-sponsored the bill to change Mt. McKinley’s name to Mt. Denali, attacked President Trump’s decision to rename the mountain because Mt. McKinley “must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial.”

But the Athabascans don’t call themselves that, they use the name ‘Dena’. Athabasca is actually a lake in Canada. The name was wrongly applied by Albert Gallatin, President Jefferson’s brilliant but erratic French immigrant Treasury Secretary.

But ‘Dena’, like ‘Denali, has no great significance. Dena means ‘people’ and Denali means ‘tall one’. The Koyukon were giving pragmatic names to the world around them. It’s Westerners who romanticize them as exotic and spiritual antidotes to industrialization and development.

No one ‘stewards’ a 20,000 foot mountain and “time immemorial”, a phrase often used in land acknowledgements, would only date back to the tribal crossings across the Bering Strait. The history of this group of the Athabaskans traces back around a thousand years, “time immemorial” turns out to be around less than 500 years before the European discovery of America.

The fact that the Wicked Witch of the North is pig-ignorant is no surprise.

Read it.

After years of “unprecedented man-made global boiling” propaganda pushed by woke scientists, far-left corporate media outlets, grifting ‘green’ billionaires, and climate change warrior non-profits, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg have a lot of explaining to do after this January across the Lower 48 could shape up to be one of the coldest in years if not decades.

“With an average temperature running 3.6 degrees below normal, this is currently the coldest January nationally (lower 48) since 1994,” meteorologist Kevin Williams and founder of private weather forecasting firm Weather-Track, wrote on X.

Still rooting for a new ice age….

Read it.

On the first day of his administration, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders which promise to end hysteria over fearful narratives.

The American Mind.

hijacking the review process for K-12 history and civics curricula. Educators and radicals, in league with one another, are conspiring to turn students against America’s traditional cultural and political institutions.

Now that Critical Race Theory (CRT) is being exposed as ahistorical indoctrination, a new permutation of neo-Marxist theory is gaining currency in our schools. It’s called postcolonialism. Its stated mission is to fight “settler colonialism,” a term used to describe any society supposedly built upon the oppression and genocide of indigenous people. Examples of “settler societies” include Israel, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the United States. The recent student activism against Israel, which denied the country’s right to exist and celebrated terrorist attacks against it, demonstrated the true nature of postcolonialism and its power to inspire hatred on campus.

Whereas CRT is largely an American phenomenon, postcolonial ideology developed within a broader global context, emerging out of the various movements to end empire around the world—much as CRT emerged as a mutation of the movement to end racial segregation in America. What the civil rights movement is to CRT, the decolonization movement is to postcolonialism. The intellectual forefather of postcolonial ideology is the Marxist intellectual Frantz Fanon, whose writings glorified Algeria’s violent resistance to French control in the middle of the 20th century.

Read it.

In January 2020, the top law enforcement agency in the state of Oregon launched a “Bias Response Hotline” for residents to report “offensive ‘jokes.’”
Staffed by “trauma-informed operators” and overseen by the Oregon Department of Justice, the hotline, which receives thousands of calls a year, doesn’t just solicit reports of hate crimes and hiring discrimination. It also asks for reports of “bias incidents”—cases of “non-criminal” expression that are motivated, “in part,” by prejudice or hate.
Oregonians are encouraged to report their fellow citizens for things like “creating racist images,” “mocking someone with a disability,” and “sharing offensive ‘jokes’ about someone’s identity.” One webpage affiliated with the hotline, which is available in 240 languages, even lists “imitating someone’s cultural norm” as something “we want to hear” about.
It is not entirely clear what the state does with these reports. While the hotline cannot “sanction a bias perpetrator,” according to its website, it does share “de-identified data” with the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, a body that develops “public safety” plans for the state, and connects “survivors” with “resources” like counseling and rent relief.

Read it.

Let me think, I seem to remember that there’s a term for that sort of thing … I believe it starts with an “R”….

Read it.

Amy Wax, the tenured law professor who was sanctioned for her controversial remarks about racial issues, sued the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday for breach of contract and race discrimination, putting a dispute over tenure and academic freedom that has dragged on for almost three years into the hands of a federal court. The complaint comes after Wax was suspended for a year at half-pay and stripped of her named chair, penalties the lawsuit says are “illegal multiple times over.”

“The imposition of academic discipline violates the University’s contractual promise to Professor Wax to abide by the principles of the First Amendment,” the lawsuit reads. And “the University’s Speech Policy, which is the basis of that discipline, unlawfully discriminates based on the race … of both speakers and targets of speech.”

The complaint advances a novel legal theory that could have major implications for universities as they brace for the incoming Trump administration. Wax argues that Penn engaged in race discrimination by punishing speech that offended racial minorities but not speech that offended Jews, citing a litany of cases in which the school declined to discipline professors who deployed anti-Semitic tropes and called for the destruction of Israel.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

In the year preceding the devastating Los Angeles county wildfires, big oil fiercely lobbied to kill a “polluter pay” bill that moved through the California senate and would have forced major fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate disasters.

Fossil-fuel industry lobbying in California spiked to record levels during the 2023-24 legislative session, and the polluter pay bill was among the most targeted pieces of legislation, a Guardian review of state lobby filings found.

…

The measure would have required the state’s largest carbon polluters to pay into a fund that would be used to prevent disasters or help cover cleanup efforts. The effort to thwart it leaves taxpayers for now shouldering much of the cost of catastrophes in part fueled by big oil’s pollution.

“The latest fire shows exactly how Californians are paying for climate destruction, not just with budget dollars, but with their lives, and it shows exactly why we need … to put the cost back on polluters” said Kassie Siegel, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, which has lobbied in support of the bill.

So there’s no real attempt to show that ‘Big Oil’ (does it have a membership card) was responsible for the wildfires, except the bogus Narrative about ‘climate change’ and the proglodyte dogma that anyone who (a) has lots of money and (b) is in a line of business which (though legal) proglodytes don’t like, is ripe for government-enforced plucking.

I have a thought: Democrat-supported proposals have to be paid for by those who vote for Democrats, and Republican-supported proposals have to be paid for by those who vote for Republicans. Put your money where your mouth is.

Read it.

Three doctors are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent a California agency from investigating them over their opposition to state-approved COVID-19 policies.

Persecution for non-government-approved views? What persecution?

Read it.

You know, as they do.

Raw Story, a Voice of the Crust.

And the Woke Witch Hunt contines.

Read it.

Criticisms of pro-market policies, such as lower corporate taxes and deregulation, are often rooted in a form of discrimination rarely acknowledged: upward classism. This prejudice against people of higher socio-economic status misrepresents the contributions of “the rich” and distorts discussions about public policy. While these policies are castigated as benefiting the wealthy, they have demonstrable benefits for broader economic growth and living standards.

For example, research by Suárez Serrato and Zidar—“Who Benefits from State Corporate Tax Cuts?”—reveals that reducing corporate taxes encourages business expansion, resulting in job creation and improved local economies. Similarly, Gordon and Young, in another paper, emphasize that efficient tax systems, including lower corporate rates, are essential for sustaining long-term economic growth. Far from being self-serving, pro-market policies are foundational to fostering an environment in which businesses and, by extension, workers and consumers, can thrive.

Nevertheless, critics berate pro-growth tax policies for favoring “rich people” on the basis that they are not paying their “fair share” in taxes, yet the evidence suggests otherwise.

Read it.

Which schools are supported by parents, who are also taxpayers, paying twice, once for schools that barely educate children and stuff them full of woke nonsense, and once again for the religious schools that actually train their children to be moral adults.

Read it.

One of the first acts of the Republican-led 119th Congress was to pass a bill that would sanction officials attempting to arrest or investigate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed in Gaza.

The “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act” passed on Thursday in a 243 to 140 vote, with 45 Democrats joining the majority of Republicans. Rep. Thomas Massie was the only member of the GOP caucus not to vote in favor of the bill.

Read it.

History will remember this era as the moment when America’s most sacred principles collided with unprecedented institutional power – and lost. The systematic dismantling of fundamental rights didn’t happen through military force or executive decree, but through the quiet cooperation of tech platforms, media gatekeepers, and government agencies, all claiming to protect us from “misinformation.”

Read it.

Washington’s Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) is mandating staff attend a four-hour, in-person training featuring the documentary *Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,* which argues the U.S. was founded on white supremacy.

Some employees have criticized the requirement, claiming it amounts to indoctrination, according to 770 KTTH.

The training, held on January 9, includes a screening of the film followed by a Q&A and dialogue with its producer, Jeffery Robinson, a lawyer and founder of the left-leaning “Who We Are Project.” The AOC describes the nonprofit as promoting awareness of historical anti-Black racism and white supremacy in the U.S. The event costs $5,000.

The KTTH report said that the AOC’s decision aligns with a June 2020 letter from the Democrat-led Washington State Supreme Court, issued during the Black Lives Matter movement.

Associated Press.

Four years after launching a push for more diversity in its ranks, McDonald’s is ending some of its diversity practices, duding Lowe’s and Ford Motor Co., suspended their participation in an annual survey by the Human Rights Campaign that measures workplace inclusion for LGBTQ+ employees.

Read it.

Famed British evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins has resigned from the Freedom From Religion Foundation after it censored an article supporting the belief that gender is biological.

Read it.

The state of New York will charge carbon-emitting companies an estimated $75 billion in climate damage they allegedly caused between 2000 and 2018 under a law enacted on Dec. 26.

This is the very poster child of an ex post facto law.

Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the Climate Change Superfund Act into law on Thursday. The law is certain to be challenged in court as a state preemption of federal regulatory oversight.

Adopted by lawmakers in June, the law—which goes into effect in 2028—will annually assess large companies’ carbon emissions across those first 19 years of the 21st century to “repair damage caused by extreme weather” they said aggravated by greenhouse gas emissions.

Wonder how they’re going to apply this to companies that don’t do business in New York.

This will have no practical effect. It’s just virtue-signaling, which a side order of we-can-sue-them-if-we-don’t-like them.

Read it.

Listen to any speech given by Democrats in 2024, and you’ll be bombarded by buzzwords, sloganeering, euphemisms, and phrases that provide a constant diversion from answering truthfully.

During this election cycle, the language is changing so fast that we need this updated glossary of terms to understand exactly what they’re talking about.

Read it.

The world is full of people who think that they would spend your money better than you would.

OF COURSE it’s ‘irresponsible’; why should you have to be ‘responsible’ to somebody else for how you spend your own money?

OF COURSE it’s ‘selfish’; what’s that to you? He isn’t harming anybody, except the hand-wringers who worry about the Climate Change grift. He’s actually provided $450 million of employment to a lot of people for a number of years. A yacht doesn’t just fall from heaven–it’s built, by real people who have real families who are thereby being fed, clothed, and housed.

Read it.

The View’s Sunny Hostin is arguably one of the most racist personalities in the liberal media these days. She white people, particularly white women, are among her favorite hate objects. White women who marry black Republicans also get the brunt of her hatred. She does all this while also claiming it’s America writ-large who’s the truly racist ones.

From decrying Senator Tim Scott’s engagement to a white woman to lashing out at female athletes for being “white” and “pretty” to denying the existence of black Republicans, listed here are some of Hostin’s most racist moments of 2024.

Presenting in chronological order are nine of those moments and one deeply ironic revelation about Hostin’s family that came to light this year.

Really, black people would be lost if it weren’t for AWFULs to tell them when they’re being oppressed.

Read it.

Last week, we caught Joe Scarborough sounding like Bernie Sanders as he banged his desk in frustration, inveighing against “billionaires” and wondering how the Democrats could possibly have missed the “layup” of beating the Republicans in November’s election, given the disparity in income between those billionaires and working-class Americans.

On today’s Morning Joe, Scarborough made it clear that he has signed on to the project of rebuilding the Democrats. He brought in two critics of capitalism: Kurt Andersen and Daniel Chandler. The former wrote Evil Geniuses, a book condemning conservatives who want to reduce taxation and regulation. The latter has written Free and Equal, a book recommending that the Democrats embrace the philosophy of John Rawls–which at its core calls for the redistribution of income.

Scarborough claimed to be a “proud capitalist” and then came the “But.” He added “But I am a proud capitalist with guardrails that capitalism used to have. And I understand, people don’t want to talk about income redistribution. I’m not a big fan of income redistribution. I’m especially not a big fan when the income is being moved from middle class Americans to billionaires.”

So if the middle class flock to Amazon for their shopping, is that a “redistribution” of income to Jeff Bezos? Or is that the middle class finding the best price? Scarborough thinks just like the Democrats, that letting people keep more of what they have earned is the same as welfare programs taking money from those who have earned it and giving it to those who have not.

Read it.

Racism is the intentional mistreatment of someone on the basis of their race – at least in the normal world. But in academia, racism is anything producing disparities, according to Professor Ibram Kendi.

What follows is a long list of people, places, actions, and other things declared racist this year by higher ed, though a few came from K-12.

If something needs “anti-racist” action or “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” it follows it must be racist, or else it would not need correction.

Read it.

An Indiana University class required students to determine their “privileged” and “dominant” identities—like being white or male—so that they could “address issues of oppression.” The mandatory exercise was part of a course that fulfills the school’s “social and historical studies” requirement needed to graduate.

Students were instructed to write an “in-depth reflection of two parts of [their] identity: one subordinate identity and one dominant identity,” according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The final assignment for the eight-week course, worth 26 percent of the final grade, assumes that each student has at least one identity group that gives them power over their peers and another that leads to their oppression.

Students were given a chart showing examples of “dominant” identities—like being white—and “subordinate” identities—like being black—and separated them by “manifestations of social oppression,” such as classism, racism, and heterosexism. Effectively, the chart shows that straight, white, Christian males are dominant over everyone else. Or, put another way, everyone else is subordinate to straight, white, Christian males, according to the chart.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

America’s political divide is likely to get even wider thanks to a new real-estate platform that lets potential buyers see the political affiliations of their future neighbors, as well as other social data and local demographics.

This will not end well.

Pandemic Action Network.

Avian influenza A (H5N1) — or highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) — emerged as a growing concern in recent months as H5N1 has spread, particularly in the United States. Pandemic Action Network (PAN) began monitoring the situation through weekly tracking in early 2024. As we look toward 2025, we’ve taken stock of our reporting and observations of H5N1’s rise as well as media coverage and policy action (or lack thereof.) These weekly snapshots of zoonotic transmission and response documented in real-time over the past year show how H5N1 spread first from birds to other species — notably, dairy cows — and then to humans. A review of the year’s coverage underscores that the world is not adequately paying attention or preparing for a potential H5N1 pandemic threat. There are clear priorities for urgent action — particularly for the incoming U.S. administration.

The threat of a more severe H5N1 emergency or pandemic demands immediate efforts to strengthen surveillance, expand testing, and implement targeted vaccination campaigns, making it imperative for countries — particularly those most affected like the U.S. — to take decisive action now. The clock is ticking, and failing to act swiftly could have devastating consequences for public health and global security.

PAN urges prompt and decisive global action in preparing for and responding to the H5N1 outbreak, reinforcing the following key recommendations from global experts to avert a widespread health emergency or another devastating pandemic.

Emphasis added.

The Branch COVIDians are at it again. PREPARE TO PANIC!

Read it.

The team behind the Scripps National Spelling Bee whacked a hornet’s nest when it identified specific words for potential competitors to ponder.

Its list of “50 challenging third grade words” includes giraffe, groceries, and jigsaw. So far, so good. But beneath the “preferred spelling” of women, a permitted option appears: “womyn.”

Naturally, this feminist twist on “women” avoids the reference to those pesky purveyors of patriarchy: men. And what better place than third grade to pound the feminist drums?

Read it.

Shopping’s bizarre new Christmas advertisement, featuring a hairy man prancing around in women’s clothing and makeup.

It turns out, the strange Algerian boxer look-alike “non-binary influencer,” Cyrus Veyssi, who goes by the pronouns “they/he.” And he… I mean… they…or, he (ugh) likes to ridicule women for wanting their own bathrooms.

Veyssi, a 30 year old co-host of the Amazon Prime talk show “Influenced” marked November’s “Trans Week of Visibility” with a post blasting a female social media user for defending “the right to be protected when going into a female bathroom.”

“HIII, DIVA!” they/he condescendingly responded to the girl in a video that received nearly 68,000 likes.

Read it.

He hadn’t done that yet?

Read it.

Amy Wax, the tenured law professor who was disciplined by the University of Pennsylvania for making controversial remarks about race and gender, told Penn on Thursday that she will sue the university for race discrimination if it does not drop the sanctions against her, according to a letter from Wax’s lawyers obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. It’s the latest salvo in a nearly three-year-long battle between Wax and the Ivy League school, which announced in September that it was suspending her at half-pay for one year.

Penn has until December 19 to “conclusively disavow” those penalties. “Should you fail to do so,” the letter states, “Professor Wax will file suit against the University.”

Because Penn promises its professors academic freedom, the letter argues that the school breached its contract with Wax by punishing her for protected speech. It notes that Penn took no action against professors who spewed anti-Semitic bile after the October 7 attacks. And it uses Penn’s double standard to make a creative legal argument: By punishing speech that offended racial minorities—but not speech that offended Jews—the university engaged in unlawful race discrimination when it singled Wax out for punishment, the letter says.

Newsbusters.

The mob of men in dresses aren’t really making their case for being welcomed in women’s bathrooms.

33-year-old James McIntyre figured he could convince lawmakers that men aren’t a danger to women’s bathrooms by…violently assaulting a woman.

“I was physically accosted tonight on Capitol grounds over my fight to protect women,” posted Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) to her X account on Tuesday.

Read it.

When the TV system is run by the government (UK residents are obliged to buy a license to watch TV), you can do that.

Under measures unveiled on Tuesday, ads showing “less healthy” food and drinks will only be allowed to be aired after the 9:00 pm watershed from October next year.

According to the National Health Service, obesity is rising among British kids with one in 10 four-year-olds now considered to be obese. And one in five five-year-olds suffers from tooth decay from eating too much sugar.

Also included on the government’s list — which uses a scoring system based on each item’s sugar, fat and salt content — are pre-packaged popular sugary breakfast foods such as croissants, pancakes and waffles.

Read it.

In the past, progressive elites were not generally threatened by the campaigns of the old center and center-right parties because those groups have long been managed by fake conservatives with no intention of disturbing the deviation of the Overton Window to the radical left. But of course, times have changed. Legitimate opposition to the far-left is rising in the form of political parties fighting for secure borders and anti-wokeness initiatives, and the progressives are furious.

They’ve had a taste of near total power, and though they claim to be the patron saints of Democracy they are openly adopting authoritarian ideals in order to keep that power.

In the US the far-left has been pursuing an all out propaganda war and has abused the legal system for years as a means to stop conservatives from returning to government. The lawfare tactics utilized against Donald Trump were unprecedented, but ultimately failed. In Europe, though, leftists are finding more success.

Read it.

As the Democrat party becomes ever more radically left-wing, I often wonder how they get half the population to vote for them. I mean, not everybody is a lesbian sociology professor at Amherst. How do anti-American radicals maintain the support of people who are neither stupid nor communists?

Another interesting feature of the modern Democrat party is how it presents its radical agenda. Thirty years ago, Democrats spoke mostly in euphemisms, avoiding clear explanations of their goals. Now that their goals are widely understood to be destructive and crazy, they have to be even more careful about discussions of specific policies. They avoid those discussions if possible, of course. For example, Kamala Harris really never clearly explained what she intended to do if she were to be elected president. She wanted to get elected, so she couldn’t, obviously.

But what if you work for the Democrat party? What if your job is to explain to American citizens what Democrat policies are, and why they are superior to the Republicans? What if it’s up to you to explain away the catastrophes which result from Democrat policies, and distract attention away from the successes of Republican parties? I refer, of course, to journalists. What if you are a journalist?

It’s easy for Kamala to refuse interviews. But if you write for The New York Times, you do have to say SOMETHING. And everything you say has to present Democrats in a positive light, and it has to make at least some sense.

Now THAT is a challenging job.

Read it.

Just a few weeks before a poorly-publicized Jan. 1 deadline, a judge has issued a nationwide injunction barring the enforcement of a controversial mandate that would compel tens of millions of small and large businesses to file beneficial ownership reports with an obscure federal agency. The ruling doesn’t kill the requirement altogether, but it does bar the Treasury Department from enforcing it until lawsuits challenging the requirement’s constitutionality are fully resolved.

“There are now CTA cases pending in the Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits,” notes attorney and Forbes contributor Kelly Phillips Erb, posting as @taxgirl on X. “It’s looking more like it could end up at the Supreme Court.” There’s also the possibility that the next Trump administration — either unilaterally or via cooperation with Congress — could find a way to kill or at least narrow the requirement.

The rule imposed by the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) swept the vast majority of “legal entities created to do business in the United States” into a new bureaucratic net, directing them to dump information about themselves and their “beneficial owners” into a federal database managed by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) — which most Main Street businesses and single-member LLC’s have probably never even heard of. Those who failed to comply faced severe penalties, ranging from civil fines of up to $591 a day to criminal consequences of up to $250,000 and a five-year prison term.

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State Attorney General Rob Bonta requested Dec. 4 that Californians report to his office any violations of state laws that limit state institutions, agencies, and local law enforcement’s ability to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement actions.

Senate Bill 54—passed in 2017 and known as the California Values Act—blocks state and local agencies from using resources to assist immigration enforcement by arresting, detaining, detecting, interrogating, or investigating individuals suspected of entering the country illegally.

The appeal came in an announcement that courts, health care facilities, libraries, and other public institutions in California were advised to craft policies meant to make it more difficult for federal law enforcement authorities to deport illegal immigrants.

Perhaps they don’t remember what happened the last time a state tried to nullify Federal law.

Axios, a Voice of the Crust.

The proglodyte dogma that having a lot of money is a sure indicator of moral depravity is on full display.

The Foundry.

A House task force probing the attempted assassination in July of Donald Trump held a final hearing Thursday that contained some fireworks, promises to improve, and unanswered questions.

Ronald L. Rowe Jr., acting director of the Secret Service, was the only witness to appear before the task force, which includes eight Republicans and six Democrats. Rowe replaced Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned after the first assassination attempt against Trump on July 13 at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The panel, formally called the House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump, focused primarily on the attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania. A second assassination attempt occurred Sept. 15 at the former president’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida.

After the hearing, the panel voted unanimously to make its final report available to the full House. It wasn’t expected to be made public immediately, however.

God forbid ordinary taxpayers should be allowed to read it.

Read it.

The University of Michigan has eliminated diversity statements from its hiring, promotion, and tenure processes, Provost Laurie McCauley announced Thursday morning. The decision comes hours before the board of regents is expected to weigh changes to the university’s bloated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) program, a consideration that has spurred protests and intense debate on campus.

The University of Michigan has one of the most aggressive DEI programs in higher education. A New York Times Magazine investigation published in October found that the university’s efforts have cost more than a quarter-billion dollars over a 10-year period. More than half of that was spent on salaries and benefits for DEI staff.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion are three of our core values at the university. Our collective efforts in this area have produced important strides in opening opportunities for all people,” McCauley wrote in a statement Thursday. “As we pursue this challenging and complex work, we will continuously refine our approach.”

The provost’s decision follows an eight-member faculty working group’s Oct. 31 recommendation to end the statements, arguing that they limit free expression and diversity of thought.

Oh, ya think?

UnHerd.

Discussing Donald Trump’s election victory with a panel of TV pundits, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude explained it with reference to race. “There’s this sense,” he said, “that whiteness is under threat.” He went on to elaborate, if not elucidate, what he meant by this. “All these demographic shifts,” he said, “all these racially ambiguous children on Cheerios boxes.” They are “confusing the hell out of” white people, and these white people, confused by children’s faces on Cheerios boxes, and threatened by this confusion, reacted against this “sense” of threat by voting for Trump. Glaude gave no evidence of white people confused by children’s faces, or of the feelings of threat these young faces were supposedly causing.

You’d think this professor would feel an even greater need to ground his claim in real evidence this election year, given that Trump did better with black and Latino and other non-white voters than any Republican presidential candidate in recent memory. But apparently not. When another panelist suggested that inflation better explained why Trump was elected, Professor Glaude was both derisive and adamant. The idea that Trump won because of inflation — historically a cause of trouble for incumbent parties — was nuts. The scientifically obvious answer was whiteness, threatened as it is these days by racially ambiguous children on Cheerios boxes.

Glaude’s claim seemed both obviously wrong and symptomatic of the extreme insularity of progressive elites, who talk in abstractions like “whiteness” as they consult each other, even as those abstractions look like delusions to the less sophisticated people who merely consult things in the real world. He aired his apparent delusion for these regular people, who mocked and scorned him on social media.