Zman looks ahead.

One of the more interesting things to occur while waiting for Trump to be installed as the new ruler of America has been Elon Musk taking on Europe. First, he wrote an essay in support of the political party Alternative for Deutschland, which sent the German political class into a panic. Then Musk attacked the British government for covering up the Pakistani rape gangs. He also demanded the release of Tommy Robinson and said Nigel Farage should quit and let a real man take over the Reform Party.

Stupid people said he was doing this to distract from the dustup over H1B visas, but stupid people say stupid things like this. The world’s richest man, close confident of the new ruler of the American empire, does not need to distract from anything and he does not take aim at the provincial leaders in Europe to hide from a meaningless internet spat over immigration policy. It is safe to assume that what Musk is doing is both deliberate and with the support of Trump.

The first thing to note is that Trump does not like Keir Starmer. No one likes Starmer, but Trump has reasons beyond that to attack him. Starmer was on the anti-Trump train, and he sent people to help Harris in the election. This was a huge blunder that Trump will never forgive. Given that Starmer is as popular as rectal cancer right now, Trump can easily put his government in crisis. We already see this with the Musk attacks on Starmer over the rape gangs.

Keep in mind, that this is happening against the backdrop of Justin from Canada resigning from office after Trump made fun of him. Trump started talking about tariffs on Canada and Trudeau immediately flew to Mar-a-Lago to patch things up only to have Trump call him the governor of Canada. This kept up until the Trudeau government essentially collapsed, forcing Trudeau to resign. The collection of pipsqueaks that make up the European political class certainly noticed this.

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In June 2023, I wrote about the exodus of entrepreneurs from Norway after Kjell Inge Røkke, a fishing magnate turned industrialist, announced his move to Lugano, Switzerland.

“My capital will continue working in Norway,” wrote Røkke, whose wealth was estimated at $5.1 billion.

Røkke’s departure was projected to cost the Norwegian government 175,000,000 kroner annually (roughly $16 million), and he was just one of dozens of billionaires and multimillionaires to leave Norway following passage of its wealth tax.

Critics had warned Norway’s wealth tax would “trigger capital flight and threaten job creation,” and that’s precisely what happened. Norwegian reporter Rupert Neate noted that more “super-rich people” left Norway in 2022 than “during the previous 13 years.”

A reasonable person might expect that this exodus of wealth would have prompted Norwegian lawmakers to reconsider their confiscatory tax policy, but that’s not what happened. Instead, Norwegian lawmakers decided to double down on efforts to soak the rich, passing a new law that taxed unrealized capital gains for individuals leaving the country. This so-called “exit tax” is triggered when a resident relocates from Norway. The rate is 37.84 percent and is calculated based on the unrealized gains in shares and securities. Anti-capitalists wrote approvingly of the law.

The U.S. has a similar ‘exit tax’ laid on people who renounce their citizenship, typically because they live and work abroad and are tired of paying U.S. taxes from which they get no benefit.

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Jews were the target of the majority of hate crimes in New York City last year, according to statistics reported Monday by the NYPD.

Data compiled by the department showed that there were 345 anti-Jewish hate crimes across the city in 2024, nearly 54% of the 641 total hate crimes tallied. The next-largest category of hate crimes were those related to sexual orientation, at 78.

The number of antisemitic hate crimes in 2024 was slightly larger than in 2023, when police recorded 323 total anti-Jewish crimes. That year’s total was driven by a recorded surge in antisemitism following Hamas’ invasion of Israel and the outbreak of the Gaza war on Oct. 7 of that year. The increase in antisemitism year over year comes as the total number of hate crimes in the city decreased slightly from 2023 to 2024.

Gothamist.

Time to leave.

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In October, I reported on the release of the largest research project ever on universal basic income (UBI). The study’s results were disappointing for advocates of the idea. In short, the research showed that many people who received the income reduced their hours working and increased leisure time. Furthermore, people didn’t use their leisure time in any of the productive activities advocates often claim (e.g., self-improvement, entrepreneurship, time with family).

In December, a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study on UBI authored by economists Sidhya Balakrishnan, Sewin Chan, Sara Constantino, Johannes Haushofer, and Jonathan Morduch was released.

The study examined 2,097 households in Compton, California. They gave around one-third of the households a guaranteed monthly income of an average of $487 and examined how recipient households acted relative to the non-recipients.

The most obvious impact of a guaranteed income is going to be on a recipient’s work decisions. Predictably, many people who received the guaranteed income reduced their working hours.

ZMan explains it all to you.

One of the difficult things for most Americans to accept is that the people on the ballot every election have little role in public policy. The way the system is supposed to work is that the voters select their elected officials, who then meet and agree on new laws and changes to the law. They also pick the people in charge of the many agencies that carry out the laws passed by the elected officials. In reality, the people in those elected offices play almost no role in legislation and policy.

The easiest place to see this is in foreign policy. In the last election, there was little mention of foreign relations. Trump pledged his unconditional support for Israel, which every candidate is required to do in America, but otherwise he had little to say about what is happening in the world. Those running for House and Senate seats were mostly silent of foreign affairs, aside from pledging their loyalty to Israel. We are in a proxy war with Russia and China, and no one talks about it.

One main reason for those House and Senate candidates not saying much of anything is they have no role in the process. Many of them could not find Ukraine on a map, despite cheering wildly for Zelensky when he spoke to Congress. Only those who have been around for a decade or more understand why Ukraine is an issue. Some of them have been invited to get a taste of the side action, which is the primary benefit to sticking around in Congress for a long time.

Foreign policy is the domain of the executive, but it is obvious that the President has little role in the process. Joe Biden was a vegetable for his term in office. So much so that decisions on most things were delegated to various appointees. Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken ran foreign policy, but even they were only in charge of a small portion of what the world sees as American foreign policy. The reason for that is much of it is now done off the books, outside the official system.

Gothamist.

Police say three suspects have been on a months-long crime spree throughout the city, stealing cars and using them to boost ATMs from local stores.

The trio has been behind 49 incidents across more than two dozen precincts in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, according to the NYPD.

Since September they’ve stolen cars and changed plates, then traveled to stores with cash machines and lifted them into a vehicle, according to police. The suspected bandits then took off in separate cars, officials said.

The most recent incident reported to police occurred on Dec. 23, when two people in hooded sweatshirts, balaclavas and gloves were pictured on security footage removing an ATM from a Queens bodega and carrying it out of the store.

In Texas that would get you shot.

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The Judicial Conference of the United States said on Jan. 2 that it is not referring U.S. Supreme Court Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), rejecting complaints from a former government official and two U.S. senators.

Russ Vought, who led the White House Office of Management and Budget during President-elect Donald Trump’s administration and is set to lead the office again, filed the complaint against Jackson.

…

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) asked the conference to refer Thomas to the DOJ.

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The Muslim invasion of Christendom proceeds at full speed.

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Glue work” is an concept Tanya Reilly came up with in 2019. The idea is that there’s a large amount of unglamorous work that every team needs in order to be efficient: updating the docs and roadmap, addressing technical debt, onboarding engineers, making sure people talk to their counterparts on other teams, noticing strands that are getting dropped, and so on. Practical, naive engineers gravitate to this work because it’s obviously useful, but at promo or bonus time they’re ignored in favor of the engineers who did more visible work (like delivering new features).

I think this concept is excellent. It’s why I keep saying that shipping projects is so hard – if you’re the kind of engineer who’s used to just putting their head down and writing code, you won’t have the tools to do the glue work that is actually needed to deliver anything successfully. Pure hackers don’t ship. You need to be able to actually deal with the friction in a large organization in order to deliver value.

So why doesn’t glue work get you promoted, if it’s so crucial to shipping projects? Are companies stupid? Are they deliberately leaving value on the table? No, I don’t think so. Companies don’t reward glue work because they don’t want you prioritizing it. And they don’t want you prioritizing it because they want you shipping features. Glue work is hard. If you’re capable of doing glue work well, they want you to use that ability to deliver projects instead of improving general efficiency.

The core problem is that you’re deciding for yourself what the company needs instead of doing your job. Isn’t it your job to make your team run smoother? No! Your job is to execute the mission of your company’s leadership. It is better to execute that mission at 60% efficiency than to spend all your time increasing efficiency in general (or even worse, to execute some other mission at 100% efficiency). Why? For two main reasons: first, you’re inevitably going to burn out, which will be bad for everyone; second, it’s better to let your team get used to operating at the base efficiency level of the company instead of artificially removing friction for a brief period.

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Law enforcement sources said the gunfire erupted near the Amazura event hall at 91-12 144th Place in Jamaica, within the confines of the 103rd Precinct, at about 11:20 p.m. on Jan. 1.

Sources familiar with the investigation reported that the hall was hosting a private party at the time of the shooting. The event apparently was in honor of a known gang member in the community slain last October whose birthday coincided with New Year’s Day.

As around 90 people partied inside the Amazura, about 15 people lined up outside waiting to get into the Wednesday night event that was at capacity. Law enforcement sources said four suspects walked eastbound along 144th Place and began firing indiscriminately at the crowd.

“Four males opened fire over 30 times in the direction of the group standing outside the event space, striking multiple victims. The males fled on foot westbound on 91st street towards 143 Place, where they entered a light-colored sedan with out-of-state plates,” NYPD Chief of Patrol Philip Rivera said during an early morning press conference. “Police officers responding to the multiple 911 calls found a total of 10 victims– six females, four males–which were taken to area hospitals. All of the victims are expected to recover.”

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The Mexican organized crime group accused of fueling the United States’ fentanyl crisis is now making the deadly drug in Africa, according to local and international law enforcement agencies.

The Sinaloa cartel has chosen South Africa as a major operational base, they said, largely because of its strong trade links to China, which produces the chemicals used to make the synthetic opioid.

“At this stage, there isn’t a big market for fentanyl in Africa, so much of this drug that’s being made in underground labs on the continent is being smuggled into the United States, the biggest fentanyl market in the world,” said Lt. Gen. Godfrey Lebeya, chief of The Hawks, South Africa’s top police investigative unit.

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Boasting an estimated 175,000 members, drug cartels are the fifth largest employer in Mexico, according to a new study by research center Complexity Science Hub, ZME Science reported.

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Armed members of the Tren de Aragua gang have been trying to force their way across border crossings at El Paso and are planning another attempt to break through on New Year’s Day, according to a leaked Texas Department of Public Safety memo.

Read it.

A man is in custody and being questioned after another man was pushed onto the subway tracks in a New Year’s Eve attack in Manhattan.

Watch it.

Britain is the poster child for what the U.S. would be under the Democrats.

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Few people worked harder over the past few years to put Donald Trump behind bars than Liz Cheney, the former (alleged) Republican congresswoman from Wyoming.

Seeking revenge for Trump’s longtime criticism of her father’s “weapons of mass destruction” lie, Cheney sought to settle a family score by imprisoning Trump over the events of January 6. “No one is above the law!,” Cheney, in her grating sanctimonious style, frequently insists.

Well, except for her.

New York Post.

We went from 13 to 1,000 [members] back then within a period of a year,” he said. “Because the need was there. The need is here now once again. We’re going to step up. We’re going to make sure we have a visual presence just like we had in the ’70s, 80’s and ’90s.”

Ever since last week’s shocking slaying, “hundreds of citizens” have requested the Guardian Angels return to patrol the subway cars, Sliwa claimed.

“We’re covering the actual trains from front to back, walking through the trains and making sure that everything is okay,” he told The Post on Sunday. “We’re doing this constantly now. Starting today. that’s going to be our complete focus because the subways are out of control.”

Note that all of the most expensive places are Blue states.

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For the past three years, I was a substitute teacher in the public schools of Warren County, Virginia. I served both as an aide in classrooms with a regular full-time teacher and as a substitute alone in the classroom.

Warren County schools are probably typical of public schools everywhere: Most teachers love the students and are very frustrated that they can’t actually do what they signed up to do: teach. At the same time, many parents don’t understand why their children are not learning. Here are my insights as to why.

This, of course, just applies to government schools, which everybody assumes is what people talk about when they talk about ‘kids learning’. Savvy parents either send their kids to private schools or, if they’re really hardcore, homeschool. That’s quite a different story–but good look finding where to read it.

NPR.

Achievements? Say rather derelictions. I remember those years. ‘Stagflation’ was the keynote of his Presidency. For most of my life, he was universally considered the Worst President Ever, until Obama and Biden came along to save him.

UPDATE: 20th Century’s Worst President Dead at 100

UPDATE: The Regime Media Rewrite History For Jimmy Carter’s Passing

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Three firefighters and a dozen passengers were injured in Florida on Saturday when a fire truck with its lights flashing drove around rail crossing arms and into the path of a high-speed passenger train after waiting for another train to pass, according to video of the incident and a person briefed on what happened.

The crash happened at 10:45 a.m. in crowded downtown Delray Beach. In the aftermath the Brightline train was stopped on the tracks, its front destroyed, about a block away from the Delray Beach Fire Rescue truck. Its ladder was ripped off and in the grass several yards away, The Sun-Sentinel reported.

The Delray Beach Fire Rescue said in a social media post that three Delray Beach firefighters were in stable condition at a hospital. Palm Beach County Fire Rescue took 12 people from the train to the hospital with minor injuries.

Oops.

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And will, until Democrats wake up or Republicans win power.

Time to leave.

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Let’s see: Foreign government actively collaborates in an attempt to circumvent U.S. laws.

Sounds like a good case for economic sanctions to me, starting with a hard close of the border.

UPDATE Mexico Concerned Trump May Order Military Strike on Cartels  And who could blame him?

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In a Dec. 24 press release, Hochul’s office bragged about alleged “Online Safety Legislation.” One bill in particular, S895B/A6789B, “Requires Social Media Companies To Disclose Their Terms of Service Relating to Hate Speech.” But “hate speech” is a vague and easily abused term, often weaponized by anti-speech leftists like Hochul and Big Tech censors as justification for draconian censorship.

In the release, Hochul’s office detailed how the S895B requires social media companies to inform users about terms of service, while also requiring social media “to submit to the [NY] attorney general certain terms of service reports,” and offer “remedies for violations.”

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board voted unanimously to fire Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez without cause.

Johnson’s entire board resigned unanimously in November when Johnson told them to fire CPS CEO Pedro Martinez. Johnson sought to terminate Martinez because Martinez didn’t support Johnson’s push to take out a high-interest loan to cover CPS’ $300 million shortfall.

The Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) proposal includes annual raises of 10-12 percent after factoring in cost-of-living adjustments. And the union demands 13,000 new positions despite falling school enrollment.

Martinez filed suit on his removal from the CTU negotiations because his contact calls for 180 days extension if he is fired without cause.

The Foundry.

Victor Davis Hanson, historian, commentator, and Hoover Institution senior fellow, said Thursday on his podcast that he believes all of President Joe Biden’s family members will be next in line to receive pardons.

Since the president’s announcement Dec. 1 that he would pardon his son Hunter Biden of criminal charges,he has faced pushback after months of adamantly telling the press he would not do so.

On “The Victor Davis Hanson Show,” Hanson said he believes Biden has been pardoning people based on what benefits the family and what provokes public outrage.

“It works like this. He just said, ‘I’m going to pardon people, and I have two criteria for pardoning them. Whatever they can do for the Biden family or the larger friend and associate of the Biden consortium, I’ll do it,” Hanson said on his podcast.

“And whatever makes people angry, because I’m going to be a puny little Samson that’s going to pull down the temple when I go out. Give me as much chaos and nihilism as I can. Make it symbolic and the more egregious the pardon, the better.’”

“Wait till we get to the last 48 hours, Jack. I expect [daughter] Ashley Biden, I expect [brother] Jim Biden, all of them get pardons. They all get pardons,” Hanson said. “They know they’re going to get pardons, because if they don’t get pardons, when you write a check and you say ‘repayment, $250,000,’ somebody in an honest DOJ, if the statute of limitations is not over, is going to say, ‘Wait a minute, you transferred $250,000 to your brother? Did you pay gift tax on it? Did you pay income tax? Where did you get the money?’”

Read it.

Time to leave.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

In Albuquerque, the state’s largest city, homeless encampments clutter the sidewalks and the highway underpasses. In neighborhoods like the International District, people in drug-induced psychosis wander into busy streets and parking lots, oblivious to traffic. At one store in that neighborhood, there have been seven murders since 2020 and one shootout that injured a police officer.

The AntiPlanner.

Light rail suffers the highest crime rates of any mode of transit and this is largely due to the honor system of fare payment. St. Louis Metro is addressing this by adding gates to its light-rail stations. Unlike most cities, St. Louis can do this because its light-rail system is entirely separated from streets and sidewalks.

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DARIÉN GAP, Panama—The grind of heavy machinery breaks the silence of the Darién jungle, where the Pan-American Highway ends at Yaviza, Panama.

Construction workers have cleared towering trees to make way for a steel and concrete bridge mighty enough to withstand flooding from the Chucunaque River.

…

The new project has worried some who fear that completing the road into the Darién Gap will be a win for China and a loss for the United States.

Michael Yon, a former war correspondent, has been covering mass migration through Panama for several years and has used social media to bring attention to the bridge’s construction and its implications.

China would benefit through an alternate trade route around the Panama Canal, which is essential to global trade. But for the United States, it could open the floodgates to migrants from South America, he told The Epoch Times.

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The bait was apparently too tantalizing to pass up. In the early morning darkness, an Amazon package vanished off the stoop of an ornate Greenwich Village townhouse. Whoever took it was likely unaware that a tracking device was placed inside. It showed that, in a matter of hours, the package took a long, pretzel-shaped route through the Holland Tunnel to Newark, New Jersey, then back through Manhattan, following the contours of the 2 train into the North Bronx.

Roughly 14 miles away in South Richmond Hill, Queens, a security camera captured the moment a hooded figure in a blue surgical mask swiped another Amazon box from the porch of a modest two-story home in South Richmond Hill. This time, a tracker showed the item making a circuitous journey down the commercial corridors of nearby Jamaica, Queens before landing blocks from where it was stolen.

Package theft has become a ubiquitous fact of life that — according to criminologist Ben Stickle, who studies the phenomenon — appears to be getting more organized, and more bold.

In Republican Plano, Texas, we don’t have this problem.

Where are you going to find a pub that’s open on Christmas Day?

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“May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace.”

Those words, from Disney’s new Snow White actress Rachel Zegler, came shortly after half of the country, roughly 77 million Americans, voted for Donald Trump.

Only a few weeks ago, Kamala Harris and her supporters were rallying the country to choose “love over hate.” Now, the “joy” is gone. Tis the season of the liberal hate-fest.

As Washington prepares for the inauguration, we are seeing a return to rage.

Read it.

Climate anger can lead to action—or curdle into despair: Researchers find out why

by Samantha Stanley, Iain Walker, Teaghan Hogg and Zoe Leviston, The Conversation

Man charged with murder after woman set on fire on F train in Brooklyn (Gothamist)

Man Faces Murder Charges in NYC Subway Burning Death (NewsMax)

Man Suspected in Burning of Woman on Subway Previously Deported (NewsMax)

Migrant Accused Of Setting Woman On Fire In NYC Subway Car Is Here Illegally, ICE Confirms

Thank you, Joe Biden.

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Seven Chinese nationals were arrested recently for illegally entering Guam around the time of a recent U.S. missile interception test on Dec. 10 and 11, according to Guam authorities.

The Guam Customs and Quarantine Agency said at least four of the seven were found “in the vicinity of a military installation” and that the investigation is ongoing.

The Chinese nationals had arrived on a boat from Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, according to authorities.

The Antiplanner.

In order to qualify for tax-deductible donations, non-profits must persuade the Internal Revenue Service that they are a charitable organization. Such organizations, says the IRS, are “organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, educational, or other specified purposes.”

But there are two kinds of non-profits. First are private non-profits that get most of their funding from private donors. These are charitable organizations because the donors expect no compensation, dividends, or other rewards other than a tax deduction and the good feelings they get from helping to promote causes they consider to be worthwhile.

Second are public non-profits that get most or all of their funding from government grants. These are anything but charitable because few if anyone put up their own money to fund these non-profits, the staff members are often paid far more than the average American white collar worker, and while the work they do may seem altruistic it is often at a much greater cost than the same work could be done by private industry.

Public non-profits are so different from private non-profits that they hardly deserve to use the same name. But certain groups have a habit of taking the name of a good idea and applying it to a bad idea to give that idea extra credibility.

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The Super Hornet, assigned to aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75), was flying over the Red Sea when guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg (CG-64) fired upon it, according to the CENTCOM statement.

“Both pilots were safely recovered. Initial assessments indicate that one of the crew members sustained minor injuries,” reads a statement from CENTCOM.

“This incident was not the result of hostile fire, and a full investigation is underway.”

A Navy official told USNI News the incident occurred around 3 a.m. local time on Sunday or about 7 p.m. East Coast time on Saturday. The Super Hornet was assigned to Carrier Air Wing One, and embarked aboard Truman, an official told USNI News. While the CENTCOM statement didn’t specify the squadron, the only two-seat F/A-18F squadron embarked aboard Truman are the “Red Rippers” of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 11 from Naval Air Station Oceana, Va.

Your tax dollars at work.

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A dark money fund backed by Hollywood elites is the lead benefactor of Climate Defiance, the environmentalist group known for blocking highways and disrupting high-profile events in Washington, D.C., and across the country, according to the fund’s annual filings.

The California-based Climate Emergency Fund stated in its most recent annual report that it provided seed funding for Climate Defiance in 2023 and is “incredibly proud” to remain its lead funder. It is unclear how much money the Climate Emergency Fund donated—its tax forms reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon do not show direct contributions to Climate Defiance.

The fund’s filings, however, show that it wired $357,500 to the Oil and Gas Action Network, which trains climate protesters and manages a network of 30 climate disruption groups. The Oil and Gas Action Network in turn sent $296,000 to Climate Defiance Action, the 501(c)(4) that conducts the bulk of the Climate Defiance’s operations. Both the Oil and Gas Action Network and Climate Defiance solicit donations through the Action Network, an open platform previously employed by the Democratic National Committee and other progressive groups for fundraising.

That $296,000 grant represents more than half of the $542,056 that Climate Defiance Action pulled in last year via contributions and grants. A representative for the Climate Emergency Fund declined to comment, telling the Free Beacon that the fund “won’t have a comment on its financials or the activists it supports.”

You know, as they do.

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 … crucial services will continue without interruption. That includes all services essential for national security and public safety—such as the military and law enforcement—as well as mandatory government payments such as Social Security and veterans’ benefits.

The key fact, as the U.S. Department of Justice itself has said, is that when there is a short-term lapse in appropriations, “the federal government will not be truly ‘shut down’ … because Congress has itself provided that some activities of government should continue.” In fact, any claims that not passing a CR will result in a “shutting down” of the government “is an entirely inaccurate description,” according to the DOJ.

Such a lapse in funding would be neither catastrophic nor unprecedented, but it would pare down government services to those most essential for “the safety of human life or the protection of property.” That would not include the hundreds of billions of dollars in the federal budget that are constantly squandered and wasted on frivolous, unnecessary, and unneeded programs.

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Time to leave Turd World California.

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On July 7, 2023, a University of California faculty committee unanimously voted to reverse a highly controversial policy. No longer could high school students take Statistics and Data Science as alternatives to Algebra II to satisfy UC admissions requirements. The decision, made by the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS), marked a tide shift in higher education attitudes toward math.

Among the voices who had been critical of the data science courses was Stuart Russell, distinguished professor of computer science at Berkeley. “All the evidence shows that these courses were deliberately designed not to build on or deepen students’ understanding of mathematics,” he wrote in a letter supporting the BOARS decision. “Such a student could certainly not progress in the data science major at Berkeley. The University is therefore in danger of shutting a vast body of students out of careers in science and engineering by authorizing a misleading path to nowhere.”

Russell was not alone in his opinion. Since 2022, hundreds of faculty across California, including many from Berkeley, had signed a letter and a petition saying that the data science courses currently offered in the state were not rigorous enough to qualify as advanced math. Yet, much to their dismay, for years, UC had been quietly allowing students to satisfy their Algebra II admission requirements with these alternative courses.

But the BOARS decision also sparked renewed confusion about long-standing and fundamental disagreements over how to balance equity-focused initiatives and academic rigor when teaching math to high schoolers. Today, many still believe that data science and statistics courses offer more practical and inclusive options for students who may be less mathematically inclined.

At times, the debate over high school algebra has become so heated—and even personal—that it has ignited a new skirmish in the so-called “math wars,” pitting “traditionalists” against “reformists” in a protracted battle that has played out in social media spats, dueling open letters, opinion columns, and even resulted in a threat of police involvement. But while educators, policymakers, and even tech billionaires duked it out everywhere from the Twittersphere to the California State Senate, teachers, parents, and students have been left wondering what it all means for them.

The problem is the apparently inevitable drift toward the notion “everybody needs to go to college”, and so high schools have to focus on “college prep” to the exclusion of any other possible career path. This is nonsense.

Not everyone is suitable for college; the research I’ve seen indicates that one needs to have significantly above-average intelligence to profit from college-level education. In the days when most people didn’t go to college, this wasn’t a problem–colleges and universities weeded-out the people who wouldn’t fit during the admissions process. In my parents’ day, high school was as high an education as most people got, so it focused on Preparing For Life with training in trades and other useful skill, such as Home Economics for the girls and Shop for the guys. (My dad learned how to set type for letterpress printing in high school.) In Britain, still, ‘school-leaving age’ is sixteen unless one is headed for university, which option requires two years of ‘college-prep’ and a different qualifying exam.

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul beefed up the number of New York National Guard members patrolling NYC subway stations, marking the largest military presence in the city’s subway system since the aftermath of 9/11. This heightened security measure coincides with mounting public hysteria over unidentified drones in NJ-NY airspace and the rising threat of terrorism.

On Wednseday, Gov. Hochul told reporters that 250 additional Guard members will join the already deployed 750 Guard members to combat rapes, murders, and robberies that plague NYC’s subway system.

Time to leave.

The American Mind.

Trump opponents have sold the American public on an entirely bogus propaganda narrative. The key premise of their legal and rhetorical arguments is that TPS-protected people are fleeing home-nation death traps to which it would be cruel, inhumane, and deeply immoral to forcibly return them. Already, legacy news outlets have taken that ball and run with it, describing the many horrors that supposedly await the roughly 700,000 TPS arrivals that came in during the great Biden mass migration crisis (2021-present). These include the 350,000 TPS-covered Venezuelans who mostly crossed the U.S. Southern border, the 300,000 from Haiti who did the same, and 50,000 from Ukraine.

“Deporting people to dangerous countries could amount to a death sentence,” wrote Raul A. Reyes, a pro-illegal immigration editorialist in a November 25 column for The Hill. “Look at Haiti, which in recent years has suffered civil unrest, gang violence, earthquakes and hurricanes. Sending migrants back into such dire conditions would likely constitute a violation of basic human rights.”

But what Reyes didn’t say, and what most Americans probably don’t know, is that Haitians, Venezuelans, and Ukrainians never came from those terrible home countries and were perfectly safe for years in other prosperous countries that granted them asylum, residency, and work authorizations—or otherwise tolerated their presence off-book.

Read it.

Harvard magazine has an excellent interview with three scientists, Michael Mina, Douglas Melton and Stuart Schreiber, all highly regarded in their fields of life sciences, who have recently left Harvard for the private sector.

Why did they leave? Mina tells an incredible story of what happened during the pandemic. At the time Mina was a faculty member at the Chan School of Public Health, he is extremely active in advising governments on the pandemic, and he brings Harvard millions of dollars a year in funding. But when he tries to hire someone at his lab, the university refuses because there is hiring freeze! Sorry, no hiring for pandemic research during a pandemic. In my talk on US Pandemic Policy I discuss the similar failure of the Yale School of Public Health and how miraculously and absurdly Tyler stepped in to save the day. The rot is deep.

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In an age where environmental awareness has reached fever pitch, consumers are eager to invest in sustainable products and practices. However, this drive for eco-friendliness has, unfortunately, given rise to a shadowy world of ‘green scammers’—individuals and corporations that exploit the noble intentions of the environmentally conscious to deceive and profit.

The Other McCain.

Notice the slogan on Natalie Rupnow’s T-shirt: “KMFDM,” a reference to Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid (“no pity for the majority”), a German rock band whose fans included Columbine High School gunman Eric Harris. Lyrics to KMFDM songs were posted on Harris’s website, and fandom of KMFDM was part of Natalie Rupnow’s obsession with mass murderers — kind of a red flag, if anyone was paying attention.

According to The Post’s review of court records, Rupnow’s parents first married in 2011, about two years after she was born.

Mellissa Rupnow had been previously married and divorced, and she had another daughter with a different man to whom she was never married. Court records indicate that this girl — Natalie Rupnow’s half sister — had other permanent legal guardians. The Post was not able to reach the half sister, who is now 20.

Mellissa and Jeff Rupnow divorced for the first time in 2014, agreeing to joint legal custody of their shared daughter, Natalie, but specifying that she would live primarily with her mother.

The couple remarried in 2017 and divorced for a second time in 2020, again agreeing to share custody but, the court records show, dividing Natalie’s time more evenly between them. During this period, Natalie would spend two days with her father, two with her mother, then three more with her father, before reversing the schedule the following week.

Shortly after Rupnow’s parents split up for the second time, the couple remarried once more. But by April 2021 they were petitioning for a third divorce. A judge granted it a month later but noted that “parties [were] admonished concerning remarriage,” according to court records.

The surprise is that she didn’t do something amazingly stupid before this.

Read it.

As reported by Breitbart, the study from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) determined that there are at least 7.9 million illegals being protected from immigration authorities by these rogue jurisdictions, presenting possible complications for the incoming second Trump Administration.

The vast majority of these illegals, 6.3 million, are found in the states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Washington.

Another 820,000 are living in sanctuary counties located in states that do not have statewide “sanctuary” laws.