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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.

Watch it.

If YouTube were run by the government, what would be different?

This is why the 14th Amendment guarantee of Due Process is so important. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t apply to social media….)

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Video footage has recently emerged taken by journalist James Longman advising ‘rebels’ in Syria that the ISIS logo on their uniforms will be misunderstood by Western audiences. Longman, who is ABC News’ Chief International Correspondent, demonstrates a trend of American journalists going to war zones to essentially coach combatants on how to better present themselves to the outside world. Mainstream media has for many years pushed the myth of “moderate rebels” in Syria seeking to topple Assad, which they finally did this month.

One of the militants, who might be a member of the US-designated terror group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or possibly another hardline Islamist faction, attempts to claim to the US journalist that the emblem does not represent ISIS. Still, the man wearing the ISIS patch seems to take the hint and dutifully removes it for the camera. They swear to ABC’s Longman that they are not Daesh (or ISIS), even while openly sporting its symbols.

Having examined the disturbing video, Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada – who speaks Arabic – has issued the following reaction: “I’ve seen this video circulating today, along with the claim that James Longman told the fighter to remove the ISIS patch. He does not do that in this video clip. But it’s not much of a ‘confrontation’ either. And however Longman intended it, the fighters appear to interpret his comments as friendly advice on how to present themselves and in fact remove the patch. Understandable that this is reminding people of how Western media colluded in the rebranding of the Azov Battallion in Ukraine that they had been accurately describing as hardcore Nazis just months earlier.”

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

At least, this is what CNN is determined to share with us. You know how the Narrative Media are.

Here’s the part that sticks out like a sore thumb:

Rupnow was believed to have had “a turbulent home life,” according to court records, “which show that her parents divorced and remarried multiple times and that she had been enrolled in therapy,” the Washington Post reports.

“A Washington Post review of court records points to an unsettled childhood for Rupnow, whose parents’ custody agreements sometimes forced her to move between their homes every two or three days,” the newspaper reports.

Emphasis added.

Rupnow’s parents – Jeff and Mellissa Rupnow – have not responded to repeated requests for comment by the Washington Post or CNN.

Gee, I wonder why. Perhaps because anything they say can and will be used against them in a court of law and especially in a partisan Narrative Media.

The two rules of Modern Society: Don’t say anything to the police and don’t say anything to the media. You Will Surely Regret It.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen: How long before they asset that It’s All Trump’s Fault?

UPDATE: The Networks Are Struggling to Cover The Motive Behind The Madison School Shooting

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The Iowa production line is at once essential and an exemplar of industrial atrophy. It illustrates why the richest military on Earth could not keep up with the demand for artillery ammunition after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. At that time, the U.S. was manufacturing about 14,000 shells a month. By 2023, the Ukrainians were firing as many as 8,000 shells a day. It has taken two years and billions of dollars for the U.S. to ramp up production to 40,000 shells a month—still well short of Ukraine’s needs. A big part of the reason is that we still make howitzer rounds the way our great-grandparents did. There are better, faster, safer ways. You can watch videos online of automated plants, for example, operating in Europe. Some new American facilities are starting up, but they are not yet at capacity.

The problem isn’t just howitzer shells. And it isn’t only that the U.S. can’t build drones, rockets, and missiles fast enough to meet the needs of Ukraine. America itself lacks stockpiles of the necessary components. A massive rebuilding effort is now under way, the largest in almost a century, but it will not—cannot—happen fast. And even the expanded capacity would not come close to meeting requests the size of Ukraine’s, much less restore our own depleted reserves. Take drones, for instance. In December 2023, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, called for the domestic production of 1 million annually to meet war needs—and Ukraine has met that goal. In the meantime, the supply of drones provided by the U.S. to Ukraine has numbered in the thousands, and many of those have not fared as well on the battlefield as Ukraine’s homemade, often jerry-rigged models and off-the-shelf Chinese drones. Other allies have stepped up with materiel of many kinds—artillery, armored vehicles, aircraft—but fighters in Ukraine are still coping with disabling shortages.

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Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, even for lawyers. This raises the question: Why are these documents written in a style that makes them so impenetrable?

MIT cognitive scientists believe they have uncovered the answer to that question. Just as “magic spells” use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude.

In a study appearing this week in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that even non-lawyers use this type of language when asked to write laws.

“People seem to understand that there’s an implicit rule that this is how laws should sound, and they write them that way,” says Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the senior author of the study.

The Guardian (UK).

The aim is ambitious: to complete a functioning reconstruction of the extraordinary Sutton Hoo burial ship by 2026 and test it on the river and sea, hopefully providing fresh insight into what life was like in Anglo-Saxon times.

But the project, being run by a small charity, is struggling to source the right sort of British oak to finish the build and is calling for donations, worried that if it does not get the wood from the UK, it may have to look overseas.

The historian Dan Snow is among supporters who has backed the plea for British oak from the Sutton Hoo Ship’s Company, saying it would be a shame if they had to look overseas for wood for such a project.

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Picture a future where the Thanksgiving turkey on your table didn’t grow up on a farm but instead grew inside a bioreactor. Science fiction or an anticipated reality?

In 2013, the world’s first cultivated burger took center stage at a news conference in London. The Dutch scientist Mark Post of Maastricht University had grown this burger from stem cells from cows and provided the serum and other factors needed to drive these cells to form strands of muscle tissues. It cost $330,000 USD to create. The high price tag did not stop the cultivated meat industry and instead spurred even more innovation in this area.

So how did we arrive at the $330,000 burger, what has happened since, and where is the cultivated meat industry going? We spoke with Sonalie Figueiras, Founding Editor of Green Queen Media and the Food & Ag Track Chair at SynBioBeta 2025, to find out.

Newsbusters.

Democrats are slowly, but surely, building a permission structure for progressive activists to kill those they determine are bad. From the rise of antisemitism to, now, the murder of an insurance CEO, few Democrats seem capable of condemning violence without adding a “but.”

To their credit, Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania have condemned both without buts. Unfortunately, when President Joe Biden condemns antisemitism in the United States, he cannot help himself but muddy the water with equal condemnations of Islamophobia. No one is chasing Muslim students off college campuses. Progressive activists are turning violent, and too few Democratic leaders want to condemn the violence without adding caveats.

Luigi Mangione’s alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has also been met with lots of “buts.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren could not help but justify Thompson’s murder on television with MSNBC’s Joy Reid: “Violence is never the answer. This guy gets a trial who’s allegedly killed the CEO of UnitedHealth, but you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands.”

“You can only push people so far,” she reasoned. Warren is a supporter of Obamacare, the present health care system in the United States that people hate. In fact, Americans’ hatred of health care in this country has grown since passage of the legislation Warren supports. God forbid people connect the dots and decide Democrats are the ones who pushed people too far by breaking the health care system.

The American Mind.

In the hamlet of Remsenburg, Suffolk County, Long Island, New York lies a small cemetery behind the chapel of the Remsenburg Community Church. There one finds the modest final resting place of a great American, marked by a substantial rectangular headstone with a large open book sculpted on top, in which is inscribed from top to bottom:

Jeeves

Blanding’s Castle

Leave it to Psmith

Meet Mister Mulliner

Beneath this on the wide headstone you see the name of the great American:

Sir Pelham Grenville

WODEHOUSE

At the very bottom of the headstone are the words:

HE GAVE JOY TO COUNTLESS PEOPLE

ZMan lays it out.

One of the more difficult things for people to accept is that sometimes things happen that benefit no one and for reasons under no one’s control. Other than natural disasters, people just assume that everything happens for a reason and someone wanted it to happen because they gain to benefit from it happening. Conspiracy theories are born when it is not clear who made something happen. This need to know the who and why for everything gets filled by the conspiracy theory.

The collapse of Syria is a great example of this. Everyone just assumed this was another American regime change operation. Then we got stories about how it was the Turks who backed the rebels and wanted Assad gone. Once the Israelis started grabbing land, the usual suspects came in with their usual theories. There is even a theory that the Russians wanted Syria to collapse to create a quagmire for the Americans to manage in the Middle East.

All these theories make some sense, if you ignore the things that make no sense whatsoever, like the dangers of creating chaos in the region. The Israelis might be happy Assad is gone for emotional reasons, but having a bunch of Islamist warlords operating on their border just added a lot of new costs to their budget. The United States now has a new problem to manage. Guarding those Chevon oil fields suddenly got more expensive and more complicated.

The Foundry.

Even before we knew the targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione was politically motivated, many leftists were justifying, celebrating, and rationalizing the shooting. There’s a real debate going on in some quarters of the progressive Left over whether slaying CEOs is a bad thing. And it’s unsurprising.

Of course, if any MAGA professors or journalists were online publicly defending the killing of perceived political enemies, there would be thousands of wringing hands lamenting the menacing rhetoric of conservatism. And rightly so.

But the unhinged demonization of the health care insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and Big Oil are now the norm. A generation of college students has been indoctrinated into believing the profit motive is killing people when the opposite is true.

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BioWare, developer of the wildly popular Mass Effect and Dragon Age video game series, is at the center of a new battle.

Following the failed launch of two costly triple-A titles, the studio was banking on a win. Its latest offering is the fourth title in the Dragon Age series; the last was released 10 years ago.

Initial reactions to trailers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard were decidedly negative. Longtime fans of the series criticized the softer, stylized art of the new game, comparing it to a Disney-Pixar movie.

But after BioWare invited a group of streamers and critics to a private, hands-on demo of the game, hope was rekindled. Those who had experienced Veilguard firsthand were generally positive, and encouraged fans of the series to wait for the full release.

Days before its release, clips of Veilguard were leaked, revealing that the game was rife with transgender ideology and messaging based on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

One scene showed a character doing pushups as penance for forgetting to use “they/them” pronouns, and then lecturing about how a simple apology was not enough for the crime of “misgendering.”

Another scene, in a high fantasy setting with dragons and elves, showed a character revealing to her parents that she identified as nonbinary.

The game’s character customization system does not allow for the creation of curvy female characters but it does allow players to add mastectomy scars.

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The U.S.-Mexico border has long been a hotspot for crime and illicit activity. Certain gangs come and go on the border. All gang-affiliated detentions are recorded on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s website, which we used to bring you a list of the gangs that are increasingly becoming a problem at the U.S. Border.

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New York’s population could decline by more than 2 million people over the next 25 years as fewer people are born in the state and more people move out, according to a new report.

The study by Cornell University’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy’s Program on Applied Demographics projects that New York faces a significant population decline due to low fertility rates and aging that has not been offset by new arrivals.

“The projections confirm what we have been seeing for some time, which is that if the demographic trends in the state do not change, its population will continue to decline,” Jan Vink, lead analyst for the study, said in a statement. “Conservative estimates suggest a population decrease of 1 million by 2050, but we think an even greater decline is more likely.”

Time to leave.

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A 20-year-old woman has filed suit against California hospitals and doctors, saying they rushed to conclude she suffered from gender dysphoria and then “fast-tracked [her] onto the conveyor belt of irreversibly damaging” medical interventions that included puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and a double-mastectomy at age 14.

According to the complaint filed in Los Angeles, Kaya Clementine Breen says she was sexually abused as a young child and that, around age 11 or 12, “began struggling with the thought of developing into a woman and began to believe that life would be easier if she were a boy.” When she shared those feelings with a school counselor, the counselor told Breen that she must be transgender, and then called her parents to push the same assumption as a fact.

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Lawmakers in Michigan—one of the most fiercely contested battleground states in the 2024 presidential election—will consider an amendment to the state Constitution to ensure that only citizens vote.

Michigan state Rep. Bryan Posthumus, the No. 2 Republican in the House as floor leader, says that next month he will propose a constitutional amendment requiring prospective voters to produce proof of U.S. citizenship during voter registration and a government-issued photo ID when casting a ballot.

Current Michigan law allows either an ID or a signed affidavit.

Posthumus’ proposal is in response to a Chinese national who cast a ballot this year in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during early voting.

Although the Chinese national reported himself, local officials said the vote was still counted because there is nothing to be done after a ballot goes through a tabulator. He was charged with illegally voting and perjury for falsely stating in an affidavit that he was a U.S. citizen when registering to vote.

“They can no longer say this is a right-wing conspiracy theory. A foreign national voted in Michigan,” Posthumus told The Daily Signal. “The reason we know he voted is because he stood up and told on himself. Now that people know it can be done, what’s to stop others from trying to illegally vote again?”

The Michigan proposal also comes after eight other states enacted laws or approved constitutional amendments on the November ballot to ensure that only U.S. citizens can vote.

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As a member of Columbia University’s top disciplinary body, Joseph Slaughter helped draft guidelines meant to provide students with a “contemporary understanding” of school rules on campus protests. As an English professor, he delivered a lecture that lauded a string of terrorist plane hijackings as “spectacular” and “remarkable,” according to audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

During his Oct. 9 talk, titled “Hijacking Human Rights,” Slaughter referenced “pretty spectacular” footage of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) plane hijackings from the early 1970s. He suggested those hijackings were peaceful, saying, “nobody dies except one of the hijackers.” He also said the hijackings were part of a “national liberation imaginary” and lauded their terrorist perpetrators for feeding their captives.

“I’d like to show you what a hijacking looked like in 1972. A PFLP hijacking, a Palestinian hijacking in 1972, where the PFLP hijackers, nobody dies except one of the hijackers,” he told a crowd of mostly student attendees. “What’s remarkable about the historical footage from this thing is the way that the PFLP hijackers are helping people off the airplane and taking them over to tables to eat.”

“This is a national liberation imaginary that is just so different from the moment that we are living in that it’s really, I think, important to try to conceive of a different structure of feeling,” he continued. “There is no place in the reporting in the 1970s where any of the people who are doing the hijackings are called terrorists. They’re called guerrillas, they’re called liberation fighters, they’re called liberation movements.”

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In a memorable April 1995 video, Apple founder Steve Jobs declared, “The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach, and administrators run the place, and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible….”

Then in January 2006, John Stossel’s eye-opening documentary, Stupid in America, was aired.

The investigative ABC show was billed as “a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America’s public schools, and it’s about time we face up to it…The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from poorer countries that spend much less money on education, ranking behind not only Belgium but also Poland, the Czech Republic, and South Korea…This should come as no surprise if you remember that public education in the United States is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.”

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Lawmakers released the draft text of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025 on Saturday, and the House intends to vote on it on Thursday, according to Breaking Defense.

While proponents of sex-change treatments for minors argue that cross-sex hormone therapy and various other procedures are effective treatments to counter gender dysphoria, opponents have argued that there is no durable scientific basis for that claim and that medical professionals are effectively mutilating minors for life with medical treatments like puberty blockers. Notably, a four-year review of transgender medical studies published in April found that there is “weak evidence” supporting the use of puberty blockers by transgender-identifying children.

Moreover, Dr. Susan Bradley—a Canadian psychiatrist and pioneer in child gender dysphoria treatment—told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a 2023 interview that puberty blockers are “not as reversible as we always thought, and they have longer term effects on kids’ growth and development, including making them sterile and quite a number of things affecting their bone growth,” adding that she and her team were “wrong” to have suggested otherwise.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The immigration surge of the past few years has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing the great immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, according to a New York Times analysis of government data.

Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.

That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.

UPDATE: Legacy Media Pretend There’s No Cost to Biden’s Mass Importation of Illegal Immigrants

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Think of it as evolution in action. Slowly but surely we are weeding the incompetent out of the gene pool.

UnHerd.

“The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Writing those words as the introduction to his 1995 anti-technology manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, Ted Kaczynski couldn’t have known that they would someday spawn an entire genre of memes. But so they have.

Eighty years old and serving eight consecutive life sentences in federal prison for his career as the Unabomber, Kaczynski has been revived as an online folk hero. Spend enough time online and you’ll stumble across the ‘Ted-pilled’ community, where “Uncle Ted” is a prophet who predicted the Silicon Valley-created dystopia we live in.

Kaczynski’s online popularity has coincided with a flurry of Unabomber-related content in recent years, including three separate TV or film projects: a four-part Netflix documentary, a dramatised Manhunt series on the FBI’s investigation, and Ted K, a feature-length biopic set on location near the infamous Lincoln, Montana cabin where Kaczynski built the bombs he used to kill three people and injure 23 more.

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On the most recent meeting of the Christian Democratic Leader’s Roundtable (Brussels, December 3), I was asked to speak on electoral fraud in Latin-America and on illegal migration as a weapon. These are two seemingly separate topics, but, as we shall see, they are conceptually interconnected.

Modern electoral fraud was developed in my country, Venezuela, by Hugo Chavez, with the support of Cuba. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Castro-communism, which directed and supported the armed violence of the guerrillas throughout Latin-America, decided to change its strategy, founding political parties, financing them with drug money, and perpetrating electoral frauds as a new form of coup d’état.

In other words, guerrillas such as the Colombian FARC,and coup perpetrators such as Chavez, abandoned their weapons while maintaining their hatred for democracy, for capitalism, and for the values and principles of Western Christian civilization.

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As some of my readers know, I have been working for the past two years on a book about homemakers. The working title is No One at Home: What America Lost When Her Homemakers Went to Work, but I’m sure a real editor who wants to sell books would hate it.

Right now, I’m working on a chapter about how homemaking lost its social value in the second half of the twentieth century. Post-war America essentially stopped valuing the work of the home. Even in the 1950s, when the craft of homemaking seemed to reach a peak, I would argue that it was not valued per se, but turned into a status symbol instead. Thus, you got scenarios where a husband took the train to Manhattan, attended a three martini lunch, thereafter “worked”1 in a comfortable office, and came home to a wife who had spent the day raising their five kids, and yet was expect to serve him another cocktail, because he had been working, and she had not. No wonder we got second wave feminism. I’d have revolted also.

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A mysterious illness in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been dubbed “Disease X.” There have been over 400 cases and up to 143 deaths linked to the illness since late October, according to Bloomberg.

On Sunday, the World Health Organization provided an update on Disease X, indicating the illness has been reported in the Kwango Province, in the southwest part of the Central African country.

“Panzi health zone in Kwango Province of Democratic Republic of the Congo recorded 406 cases of an undiagnosed disease with symptoms of fever, headache, cough, runny nose and body ache,” the WHO wrote in the disease outbreak report.

What will they call it? COVID is already taken.

Victor Davis Hanson.

This unprecedented pardon is not aberrant. It is characteristic of the left’s recent contempt for the rule of law.

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The corruption of science by progressive politics proceeds apace.

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•In 1906, the first FDA (Food and Drug Administration) was created in response to massive public protests against adulterated food and drugs (e.g., rotting food partially preserved with food additives or counterfeit consumer products). To stop it, food industry lobbyists attempted every tactic imaginable, eventually taking over the Department of Agriculture and in time forcing the dedicated public servant leading it (Harvey Wiley) to quit. Because of this, many toxic food additives Wiley fought against gained “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) status and remain in use today.

•The handicapping of the FDA came to a head in 1962, when thalidomide was just barely prevented from devastating America’s children, prompting Congress to give the FDA much broader powers to police the safety and efficacy of drugs.

•Unfortunately, this law backfired, as the FDA created an impossible to reach standard of efficacy that it selectively enforced to protect the pharmaceutical industry and simultaneously began utilizing increasingly brazen (and illegal) police tactics against anyone promoting effective natural therapies.

•Because of this, many life-changing medical therapies (discussed throughout this article) were blacklisted by the FDA and faded into obscurity. This, along with the FDA’s tendency to push unsafe and ineffective therapies (e.g., vaccines or antidepressants) onto the market regardless of how much data argued against doing so, led to the FDA becoming the most protested agency in the federal government.

•Nonetheless, every attempt to fix the FDA failed. In this article, I will review the structural issues that have perpetually caused the FDA to succumb to incompetence and corruption. I propose potential solutions that can utilize the unprecedented window created by the Make America Healthy Again movement to end the FDA’s war against America’s health.

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Nationwide demand for raw milk has never been higher, as out-of-control bureaucrats in their ivory towers in Washington, DC, exploit bird flu outbreaks in dairy herds to financially crush small farms while ensuring that large-scale farms owned by mega corporations, which produce questionable/unhealthy food (hence America’s obesity crisis), remain in control of the nation’s food supply chain.

The latest overreach in the war on raw milk comes as the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) ordered dairy farmers to work with the federal agency to test for bird flu (H5N1).

On Friday, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack wrote in a statement, “This new milk testing strategy will build on those steps to date and will provide a roadmap for states to protect the health of their dairy herds.”

Leave No Action Unregulated.

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The Biden-Harris experiment in dissolving the U.S. border has wrought massive changes to American society, most of which will not be understood for years, if not decades. Since 2021, U.S. border officials have had at least 10 million “encounters” with migrants, many of whom were allowed to enter the country. There is no telling how many more aliens entered the country without encountering enforcement agents. The population of the United States may have increased by as much as 15 million people in just a few years.

This massive flow of humanity crosses multiple national borders, involves every mode of transportation, accounts for billions of dollars paid in fees to smugglers, and describes a fantastically complex economy of suffering and hope. In an effort to get a handle on this human tide, noted muckraker James O’Keefe – known for his hidden camera “gotcha” interviews with abortionists, media executives, progressive nonprofit executives, and other degenerate types – traces the migrant onrush from its source, and seeks to trace the machinery of profit and influence that is conducting it from great removes.

Washington Poop, a Voice of the Crust.

The amendment — introduced Thursday by Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vermont) and outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin III (I-West Virginia) — would impose 18-year term limits on new justices appointed to the court, so eventually there would be a new opening about every two years.

Welch, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the goal of the amendment is to restore confidence in the high court and promote judicial independence. “Most people see the court as political. In fact, I do as well,” he said. “The question is, ‘How can we restore confidence?’”

Thursday’s joint resolution is the latest and most ambitious step in the years-long effort to make substantive changes to the Supreme Court following outrage over ethics scandals involving Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. and rulings from the 6-3 conservative supermajority that have overturned legal precedent.

Said ‘scandals’ being ginned up by Democrats, and any ‘loss of coifidence’ being caused by constant calumnies in the Narrative Media. Democrats are just tired of losing, and are attempting to change the rules in the middle of the game, as they always do.

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Few liquids are more precious than printer ink, but that’s not because ink is expensive to make. How can HP— and its handful of competitors in the highly concentrated printer market—get away with charging these kinds of markups?

Simple: It’s a combination of monopoly power, wacky laws, and consumer-hostile tech.

New York Magazine, a Voice of the Crust.

After her mother was diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer, Anna watched for years as she fought both the illness and the health-care system until her death in 2020. “The fight with the insurance companies was, in many ways, worse than cancer,” Anna says. “It took over my entire family’s life.”

She recalls her mother’s time-consuming struggles to get new treatments approved. “It was just so maddening to know they were shaving years off my mom’s life because of the paperwork,” Anna recalls.

So on Wednesday morning when she heard the news that UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead in Manhattan, she had a perverse reaction.

“I am ashamed to admit it, but there was a little surge of Schadenfreude,” says Anna, who, like several others in this story, asked to use a pseudonym to protect her privacy.

In many cases dealing with insurance companies is like dealing with welfare-state agencies: Charged with providing benefits but fenced around to make sure that such benefits don’t go to enrich the Undeserving, it too often winds up as a mud-wrestling match between bureaucrats and the underclass who depend upon assistance to get through life.

The Foundry.

“Pretty disgusting” and “grotesque.” That’s how a Florida parent described an online session for students on “gender” provided by two K-12 virtual public schools in November—a session that virtual school officials held without first informing parents.

These schools’ attempt to sidestep families is just the latest in a long list of examples demonstrating that some educators and academic publishers will simply go around parents to push lewd content on K-12 students.

Yet this particular incident has implications for local, state, and even federal policymakers.

This ought to come as a surprise to nobody.

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A scathing and detailed new watchdog report has found the condition of the Navy’s amphibious ship fleet — the fleet Marines rely on to be America’s rapid deployment force — is so degraded that it has already cost the Marine Corps decades of training and deployment time.

Half of the Navy’s 32-ship amphibious fleet is considered to be in “poor” condition by the Navy’s own standards, according to the Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday. “In some cases, ships in the amphibious fleet have not been available for years at a time,” which also means that “these ships are not on track to meet their expected service lives,” the agency said.

The figures come at a time when the sea service has become increasingly tight-lipped about the state of its fleet as a whole and insights into the state of amphibious ships come only when they publicly and visibly break down on camera. However, even then, officials have downplayed the issues actually facing their ships.

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America’s ports have fallen behind. Not a single one ranks in the top 50 worldwide.
A big reason is that dock unions stop innovation.

This fall, the International Longshoremen’s Association shut down East and Gulf coast ports, striking for a raise and a ban on automation. They got the raise.

Now union president Harold Daggett says longshoremen will strike again in January if they don’t get that ban on automation.

ZMan does some parsing.

In the 18th century, no one could have imagined a jury drawn from vagrants, imbeciles and lunatics, so there would have been no need to provide against it. Juries were composed of respectable people, almost always men. Since crimes were all state crimes, it made sense to defer to the states on the process. By the time the Constitution was adopted, every state had a court system, and they were generally modeled on the English system for obvious reasons.

This is one of the many flaws in the Constitution. It was created by men who lacked the imagination to provide for the rise of a universal and timeless moral code that included men pretending to be women and drug addicts having an unquestioned right to roam the streets, harassing the citizens. They failed to appreciate the need to have two-digit IQ people, barely able to dress themselves, sit on juries in cases involving complex technical issues in narrow technical fields.

Daniel Penny is on trial for his life in New York City and his fate will be decided by people who may not be able to read at a high school level. New York City is now famous for madhouse juries, lunatic judges and ideological prosecutors who use the former two conditions to persecute their ideological enemies. Everyone outside the ideological fever swamps understands that Daniel Penny is on trial because he is a white and the crackhead was black.

Read it.

It’s hard to wrap your head around just how grotesque it is that many medical associations and the federal government have adopted the idea that it’s healthy to sterilize children in an attempt to “affirm” a stated transgender identity. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will shed much-needed sunlight on this medical scandal of epic proportions.

Tennessee Solicitor General Matt Rice will explain how activists conspired to flip the Hippocratic Oath on its head. Meanwhile, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio—a male who says he identifies as female—will argue that Tennessee’s law banning Frankensteinian medical experiments on kids violates federal law by discriminating on the basis of sex.

The Supreme Court is hearing the case because of this discrimination argument. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit upheld Tennessee’s law, finding that it doesn’t entail discrimination. But the Biden-Harris administration appealed that decision, and the Supreme Court took up the case—now known as U.S. v. Skrmetti after Jonathan Skrmetti, the Republican attorney general of Tennessee.

ScienceAlert.

Environmental and lifestyle factors can trigger these methylation changes, which can be passed onto future generations, and blood biomarkers can provide information about both recent and historical exposures.

“We previously identified associations between marijuana use and the aging process as captured through DNA methylation,” Hou said.

“We wanted to further explore whether specific epigenetic factors were associated with marijuana and whether these factors are related to health outcomes.”

Off-Guardian.

It’s the abuser’s Swiss army knife for the empty-headed. Multipurpose, its meaning has near-infinite elasticity. You can be labelled ‘fascist’ if you say that there are only two biological sexes, or that women should not have to undress in front of men, or that men should be excluded from women’s sports, or that men can’t get pregnant, or even if you voted for Trump.

Such is the ignorance of the 1930s and 1940s that in contemporary discourse, ‘fascist’ has lost all meaning.

Yet, in a very real sense, New Zealand is now Fascist. If this seems an extraordinary statement, consider Mussolini’s widely reported (though not documented), definition :

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

This definition may not be to everyone’s liking, but has the virtue of simplicity and clarity. Moreover, it is an accurate description of what is happening in America, Europe, Australia and – as I shall show – New Zealand.

The American mind.

As much as this election was affected by voters’ concerns about the economy and their dissatisfaction with the past four years, the most decisive factor in Kamala Harris’s loss may well have been a massive cultural transformation currently happening in America. Despite their obsession with vibes, no one on the Harris team seemed to notice the actual vibe shift happening across the country. Briefly put, we are beginning to see a collective rejection of the fake in favor of the real.

It’s no great revelation that major TV and movie studios have been pumping out repetitive, overproduced, and unimaginative tripe for some time. But whereas big-budget schlock used to be accepted as mildly amusing by a public with few better options, TikTok and the smartphone have totally changed the game. As critic Ted Gioia pointed out in a recent essay, viewers are increasingly turning their attention from “official” sources of entertainment to homemade clips by amateur creators. There are obvious dangers in this, as Gioia points out. But there’s also opportunity: what’s driving people to choose the phone screen over the big screen is a newfound interest in the raw, the real, and the direct. Fake is out. Live is in.

This dynamic was at work in the election as well. Harris’s campaign was like the television series The Acolyte that streamed on Disney+ earlier this year. The show had an ambiguously ethnic but painfully dull actress playing the protagonist, an equally diverse and uninteresting surrounding cast, a big well-known franchise (Star Wars), an aggressively progressive feminist narrative (complete with communist space witches), and a massive budget to make everything look legitimate. In other words, the show was appallingly fake. Consequently, it tanked and was not renewed for another season.

ZMan blows the whistle.

Over the long holiday weekend, President Joe Biden pardoned his crooked son Hunter, which surprised only the enemies of Donald Trump. Everyone else knew that the old man would not leave office without cleaning up the mess of his son. Say what you will about Joe Biden, but he loves his kids, perhaps too much. At some level, you must respect his family loyalty. There is an old world gangsterism about his willingness to help his family loot the political system.

An interesting part of the pardon is that it is not just a pardon for specific crimes that have been alleged by the Department of Justice. It is a blanket pardon for all things he may have done since 2014. This does not cover state crimes like murder, but outside of something extreme like that, it means he has been given the sort of get out of jail free card reserved for important gangsters. Henry Hill, of Goodfellas fame, was given this type of deal so he would become a rat.

If the 2014 start date seems important, that is because it is when the Biden family started feeding at the Ukraine trough. This was when the State Department engineered the Maidan coup that toppled the Ukrainian government of President Yanukovych, who refused to sign a deal with the EU. Once he was gone, the State Department helped put Petro Poroshenko in charge, who was followed by Volodymyr Zelensky. It is funny how so much has revolved around Ukraine for a decade.

Lifehacker.

So you go to use your debit card to make a purchase or withdraw cash, or you try to pay a bill from your checking account, only to find out that your card has been declined, your transaction denied, and your access to your money cut off. The New York Times recently reported that banks are increasingly closing customer accounts without warning or authorization—and for no apparent reason. They’re not even required to notify you if this happens, which means some people find out only when they can’t use their cards or withdraw funds. While suspicious activity and fraud are considered one possible explanation, there’s also no data source to confirm exactly how many accounts are being shut down and why.

Read it.

The clock strikes 6 AM in a hospital room. An attendant barges in, disrupting precious sleep to swap out an untouched water jug. Soon after, a parade of nurses follows, each focused on collecting their designated measurements. Blood pressure. Temperature. Oxygen levels. In this flurry of activity, something crucial gets lost – the actual patient.

Miles away, in a classroom, a similar scene unfolds. A teacher moves mechanically through standardized material, focused on test scores and grade averages. Thirty unique minds sit before her, but what exists in the system’s eyes are just data points to be measured and tracked. The student, like our patient, has vanished.

These aren’t isolated problems. They’re symptoms of the same disease: our obsession with measurable outcomes has eclipsed the humans at the center of these systems.

Health care and education are the last two major fields of human service that haven’t been significantly automated, and thus require a lot of ‘personal service’. In any economic activity, the major cost factor is people — the more people involved, the higher the costs (which is why automation is increasingly the go-to method for improving the bottom line). In education, people (mostly taxpayers) aren’t willing to pony up for the high cost of getting really excellent teachers, and so our schools suck. In health care, people aren’t willing to sacrifice quality, so costs shoot through the roof.

Read it.

CBC News is reporting that the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal has ordered the small town of Emo to pay damages after failing to hoist an “LGBTQ2 rainbow flag” in celebration of Pride Month. One problem is that the town of fewer than 2000 inhabitants does not have a flagpole (though you could presumably “show the flag” in other ways).

In a decision handed down last week, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario found that Emo, its mayor, and two councilors violated the Ontario Human Rights Code. The tribunal admitted in a later opinion that “the record indicated the Township did not receive many requests for declarations or proclamations or requests for display of a flag.”

Indeed, in a single 12-month period, they received only four — two from Borderland Pride.

Emo does not have a central flagpole, other than the Canadian flag over the front door of the Emo Municipal Office.

One issue that factored greatly in the tribunal hearings occurred during the debate over the flag proposal, which the council rejected by a vote of three to two. In the meeting. Mayor Harold McQuaker stated, “There’s no flag being flown for the other side of the coin … there’s no flags being flown for the straight people.”

Read it.

America’s top professional sports leagues have warned players about the growing threat of illegal alien criminal gangs targeting their mansions. This comes after a string of break-ins of athletes’ homes, including Kansas City Chiefs stars Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.

NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero published a note about how the sports league issued a “security alert” to teams after “organized and skilled criminals” targeted players’ homes.

Read it.

Last week Marc Andreessen sat down with Joe Rogan for three hours, where the billionaire investor and founder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz dropped an aerial bombardment of redpills on the general public – spanning everything from the US government’s designs to completely control AI, to a weaponized government effort to secretly ‘debank’ 30 tech founders in an effort to destroy political opponents, particularly those in crypto.

Read it.

Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi has announced the deployment of 600 additional police officers to Milan, citing concerns over integration challenges and rising crime rates, particularly in areas with significant immigrant populations.

Read it.

You didn’t think that the radicals would just give up and go home after Donald Trump won the election, did you? It took a little bit of time for the shock of Trump’s election victory to wear off, but now it appears that they are ready to cause widespread chaos.