Read it.

Was one of them named Climate Change?

UPDATE: Blowtorch-Wielding Illegal Immigrant Has at Least Three Prior Los Angeles Arrests—and a History of Violence

Read it.

We had an inexpensive life-saving solution both before and during the pandemic…

The inconvenient truth is that even at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a very simple, inexpensive and effective treatment was available that could have saved the majority of lives lost (1-3). All that the WHO and public health bureaucracy had to do was to recommend and support people taking sufficient Vitamin D3.

I took D3 throughout the Pandemic Panic, didn’t wear a mask unless forced to, and still have never had COVID (though my  wife, whom I smooch whenever I have an excuse, has had it twice).

This failure to act traces back to the unscientific bias and pro-vaccine obsession of Dr. Anthony Fauci. And once again the legacy media, while being paid by the US government and the pharmaceutical industry to promote vaccination, acted by censoring, defaming and suppressing the ability of physicians to inform people of scientific truth. The disease you suffered, the loss of life among your family and friends, could have been greatly reduced by simply getting enough Vitamin D3. This is another example of what happens when unelected bureaucrats are allowed to control free speech. Crimes against humanity.

Still waiting for some justice-obsessed individual to Do The Right Thing re Fauci. I’d do it myself but it would be Too Much Like Work.

Read it.

For the latest proof that we’re all living in a black comedy about the leftist-led destruction of the West, cast your eyes on a woke theater in “gay Paree.”

In December, the Gaîté Lyrique theater held a conference titled, “Reinventing The Welcome For Refugees In France.” Fittingly, more than 250 African migrants showed up, were welcomed — and then refused to leave. Five weeks later, they’re still there, along with 50 more who’ve piled inside.

Read it.

Why does nobody care about anything? The world is full of stuff that could be excellent with just 1% more effort. But people don’t care.

Have you been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.

Ever used a piece of software that’s buggy as hell, looks bad, but still costs money, presumably because the company behind it has found some regulatory capture to justify their existence? The programmer who wrote it probably doesn’t care. Their manager definitely doesn’t care. The regulators don’t care.

You might think “something something incentive systems”. No. At my big tech job I had the pleasure of interviewing a few programmers who worked for a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture. Let me assure you: They. Do. Not Care.

I’ve met a few people that work for municipal governments. Not politicians, just career bureaucrats deep in the system. I ask them what their favorite part of the job is. They all say “stability” or “job security” as their #1. It takes 18 months to get the city to permit your shed? They. Do. Not. Care.

Read it.

Is your home on fire because your local fire department is run by three lesbians named Kirsten and there’s no water because that department is also being run by a diversity hire?

Sorry, maybe you should have bought diversity insurance.

Biden Races to Cement His Legacy Through a Series of Actions (New York Times)

Certification of Rescission of Cuba’s Designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (The White House)

Biden moves to lift state sponsor of terrorism designation for Cuba, part of deal to free prisoners (Associated Press)

Biden Administration to Lift Cuba’s State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation (NewsMax)

Biden Throws Cuban Curve Ball Days Before Trump Enters White House

Florida Dems: Mistake to Remove Cuba as Terrorist State (NewsMax)

Sen. Cruz Rips Move to Lift Cuba Terror Designation (NewsMax)

Biden Solidifies Anti-Oil Legacy With Flurry of Lame-Duck Attacks on Drilling and Mining

No One Wants A Biden Presidential Library (The Federalist)

‘Sinking the Democratic Party’: Florida Dems Rip Biden for Delisting Cuba as Terrorism Sponsor

Larry Correia.

Listen, epic fantasy readers, real talk time. I know you had a good thing going with George. At the beginning of your relationship there seemed like there was so much potential there, like he really cared, and he’d provide a satisfactory end to your relationship. Only George is fat and lazy, and once he got that sweet sweet HBO money, he didn’t need you anymore. So then you turned to Pat, only he was even sleazier, gas lighting you, promising you a new chapter if you paid his rent, stringing you along for a decade.

The swine.

George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss have totally fucked over an entire generation of new authors. That will be their real legacy. They wrote some books that got super popular. These books dominated their genres for a lot of years, and hundreds of thousands of readers were glued to them, waiting for the next installment. Only because they are both apathetic sacks of shit with zero work ethic, their fans have been left waiting for over a decade for them to fulfill their promises.

Only this post ain’t about them. I don’t know what makes up the assortment of their particular bag of nuts, or why they suck at doing their jobs now. As a writer who has retained his dairy farmer roots interpretation of what it means to have a work ethic, fuck those guys.

I second that emotion.

ZMan:

Anyone who has had anything to do with the American healthcare system knows that it is both amazingly good and amazingly insane. If you have a treatable form of cancer, you can be cured of something that within living memory killed people. On the other hand, if they find some trivial ailment during your physical, you can be subjected to endless hustles to pump you full of prescription medications.

From my limited experience with the system, it appears to be a system created by organized crime, but some of the members found Jesus and wanted to help people, so the compromise was gangsterism mixed with altruism. The frustrating part of it is you are never sure which end you are experiencing. Often it feels like it is both at the same time, which should be impossible.

One reason for this is we do not treat medicine as a business. The medical professions, even the bullshit administrative stuff, are full of people who have nailed themselves to the cross as a sacrifice to the rest of us. Any suggestion that they are acting from anything other than the your best interests is treated as blasphemy. They are “care givers” who sacrifice for the rest of us.

Popular culture does not help, as it is full of movies and television shows that portray these people as altruistic angels, sent here to serve humanity. This took a massive hit during Covid, when we learned that the chubby nurses were making TikTok videos in empty hospitals when they claimed to be saving lives. This change in public perception had no impact on their view of themselves.

…

This confusion about the reality of the medical business lies at the heart of the debate of health care reform. The “universal medicine” people are sure that the problem is the profit motive, so they want to remove it. They think this will turn everyone into angels who live to serve us. Instead, it will turn them into the sorts of people who will never be fired for the Los Angeles wildfires.

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist.

It’s well known that the voting methods we use are highly defective, as they fail to meet fundamental criteria like positive responsiveness, the Pareto principle, and stability. Positive responsiveness (monotonicity) means that if a candidate improves on some voters’ ballots, this should not reduce the candidate’s chances of winning. Yet, many voting methods, including runoffs and ranked-choice voting, fail positive responsiveness. In other words, candidates who became more preferred by voters can end up losing when they would have won when they were less preferred! It’s even more shocking that some voting systems can fail the Pareto principle, which simply says that if every voter prefers x to y then the voting system should not rank y above x. Everyone knows that in a democracy a candidate may be elected that the minority ranks below another possible candidate but how many know that there are democratic voting procedures where a candidate may be elected that the majority ranks below another possible candidate or even that democratic voting procedures may elect a candidate that everyone ranks below another possible candidate! That is the failure of the Pareto principle and the chaos results of McKelvey–Schofield show that this kind of outcome should be expected.

Almost all researchers in social choice understand the defects of common voting systems and indeed tend to agree that the most common system, first past the post voting, is probably the most defective! But, as no system is perfect, there has been less consensus on which methods are best. Ranked choice voting, approval voting and the Borda Count all have their proponents. In recent years, however, there has been a swing towards the Borda Count.

UnHerd.

Vaccination rates against childhood diseases have been on a downward slide for the past few years in the United States. Nationally, for example, the share of kindergarteners with completed records for the measles vaccine dropped to 93 percent last year, down from 95 percent in 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Polio, whooping cough, and chickenpox vaccination rates have likewise slumped since the pandemic.

Vaccines are one of the marvels of modern science, allowing our species to overcome some of our oldest microscopic adversaries. The erosion of public support for childhood immunisation is thus lamentable, not to mention dangerous. Yet public-health and government authorities looking for someone to blame for growing vaccine scepticism might wish to look in the mirror: Their Covid and gender excesses have done a great deal to sow distrust among parents.

Read it.

For a change, we get to see producer prices first this month (before tomorrow’s CPI extravaganza). While central bankers are sure this resurgence is a blip – a transitory rebound on the way to 2% – analysts are far less convinced with expectations signaling a big jump in inflation in December data.

Analysts were right on direction but not on magnitude as headline PPI rose 0.2% MoM (+0.4% exp), pulling the YoY PPI up to +3.3% from +3.0% prior (but below the 3.5% exp) – the highest since Feb 2023.

Read it.

The underlying strength of economics is that (when approached honestly and with respect to the data) it can give us a relatively accurate measure of progress versus cost. If the rewards outweigh the costs after careful calculation then that economic endeavor will bear fruit. The ability to gauge production, innovation and prosperity with an unbiased eye is essential to true economics.

The problem is that economics is not only a mathematical science, it is also, for lack of a better term, a social science. One has to understand individual psychology and mass psychology. You have to be knowledgeable in the inconsistencies of human emotion and desire as much as you are knowledgeable in the hard realities of supply and demand. Furthermore, not all people that engage in economic study do so for the benefit of humanity.

There is a contingent of financial elitists that seek to use their understanding of the psychological side of economics to socially engineer political outcomes. We’ve heard it said that nuclear science or genetic science offer a power so terrible that they could wipe out civilization if exploited by the wrong hands. I would argue that economic science in the wrong hands outdoes every other competitor because it can be used to enslave humanity forever.

Read it.

Last week, the captain and first mate of a Mexican fishing boat are in federal custody after brawling with U.S. Coast Guard members attempting to board their vessel, according to Border Report.

The clash occurred last Sunday off San Diego’s Mission Bay after a federal Joint Operations Center in Imperial Beach flagged the boat as suspicious.

The boat, with six occupants and an “excessive number” of fishing poles, was under surveillance by U.S. Border Patrol near Dana Launch. Agents observed four passengers disembarking, later identified as Mexican migrants. They were instructed to sit on the pier while agents searched for the boat’s operators.

The Border Report article says agents spotted two individuals hiding near public restrooms, but the pair fled back to the boat, quickly unmooring and escaping before they could be apprehended.

New York Post.

The homeless man tackled and zip-tied by onlookers who say he was trying to start fires with a blowtorch near a Los Angeles wildfire is an illegal immigrant who will likely be protected by California’s sanctuary city status, according to sources.

The suspect is Juan Manuel Sierra-Leyva, a Mexican national who is in the United States illegally, sources told The Post.

He was chased and taken down by residents of Woodland Hills after they allegedly saw him torching old Christmas trees and debris on fire with what one resident described as a “flamethrower” soon after the massive wildfire began Thursday.

Victor Davis Hansen.

The Los Angeles apocalypse was a multisystem, green-woke collapse—and a disastrous reminder that when Soviet-style, anti-meritocratic ideology permeates all aspects of modern life in California, disaster is inevitable.

First, note that the culprit of the catastrophe is not climate change; it is not Donald Trump. Those are excuses for arrogant incompetency and disdain for the public. And it is not racism or homophobia to fault those who paraded and virtue signaled their tribal identities so extraneous to their actual responsibilities for public safety.

Note that all California statewide officeholders are left-wing. The California left holds supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Only 17 percent of California’s huge congressional delegation of 52 seats is Republican. California’s judiciary is the most left-wing in the country. There is not a single Republican on the 15-member Los Angeles City Council.

Add it all up, and the woke socialist state has been eagerly deindustrializing, decivilizing, and retribalizing its way into what is now a veritable peacetime Dresden on the Pacific.

Time to leave.

“O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today? I doubt it seriously. Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution warehouse. Not even the school commissioners, who commissioned it and approved the plans, can figure out how it happened. The main thing is to try to avoid having to explain it to the parents.”

Wolfe, Tom. From Bauhaus to Our House (p. 1). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Quillette.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805­–1869), the great French diplomat, essayist and political thinker, did not live to see the age of identity politics, social media, grade inflation, concept creep, safetyism, the mental health crisis, mass rewritings of history and a public culture increasingly preoccupied with grievances, moral outrage, sanctified victimhood and bottom-up modes of censorship. But, though he never names them in those terms, all these related symptoms are already apparent and crystallising into something of a cultural syndrome in his study of American democracy in the 1830s, and his analysis of the changing historical conditions that led to the French revolution of 1789. Tocqueville’s work traces the roots of grievance culture to human nature itself, and to the pre-modern cascade of social transformations that culminated in novel, American forms of tyranny: a tyranny of the entitled masses, of the kind that contemporary Tocquevillians and postcolonial theorists alike might recognise as stemming from the elite ethos of North American campuses, via the infrastructure of social media. But this story is much older, and points to a timeless, universal human dilemma.

OffGuardian.

Wondering what to expect from the government in 2025?

So far, it looks like it will be more of the same ill-advised, costly, greedy, taxpayer-funded, dunderheaded power grabs, saber-rattling, graft, corruption, and make-works programming that leaves us no better off than where we started.

Indeed, we’ve been down this road so many times before that there should be no surprise when, no matter who occupies the White House, we find ourselves subjected to more of the same when it comes to the erosion of civil liberties and the increasing power of the government and its corporate partners-in-crime.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

You might not be able to rely on your firefighters to save you from a burning building, but at least they look like you!

Having a queer female fire chief will apparently “give” you “a little bit more ease” as you watch California’s wildfires burn your family and pets alive.

Read it.

The historical significance of food security cannot be overstated. After the devastation of World War II, European nations understood the fragility of their food supplies. Hunger, shortages, and economic instability plagued the continent, prompting the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC). A key component of this new cooperative effort was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), established in 1962. Its purpose was clear: to ensure stable, sufficient food production, reduce dependence on imports, and protect citizens from the specter of future shortages. It succeeded in turning Europe into a self-sufficient agricultural powerhouse while upholding high standards of food safety and quality.

Fast forward to today, and the situation could not be more different. The European Union (EU), driven by unelected bureaucrats in the European Commission, has turned its back on its founding principles. Under the guise of environmental sustainability and climate policy, the EU has declared war on its farmers, implementing measures that force them off the land. These policies, varying by country but united in their destructive outcomes, are choking the life out of European agriculture. In the Netherlands, nitrogen emissions are the scapegoat; in Germany, farmers are being taxed into oblivion. The result is the same: despair, financial ruin, and a troubling rise in farmer suicides.

I guarantee you that ADM and Cargill aren’t feeling any pinch.

Read it.

A resident of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, who was among the first to draw national attention to the massive influx of Haitian migrants into his small town, is now locked in a legal battle with a local food packaging plant that employs primarily migrants from the third world. Eyes on Charleroi first appeared when President-elect Donald Trump highlighted the town’s staggering 2,000% surge in its migrant population before the presidential elections. The resident is also planning a class-action lawsuit on behalf of hundreds of residents, demanding accountability from those responsible for the migrant invasion.

Read it.

Time to leave.

UPDATE: Nation Gets Preview Of Gavin Newsom Presidency (Babylon Bee)

Read it.

“February was the wettest month in downtown Los Angeles since 1998. With over 12 inches of rain drenching the city, it was the fourth-wettest February — and the seventh-wettest month overall — in the city’s nearly 150-year recorded history,” said Judson Jones’ report on Los Angeles’ weather on March 2, 2024, in The New York Times. Just under a year later, Los Angeles is on fire and the fire hydrants have run dry from a lack of water.

Read it.

Quantum mechanics has long classified particles into just two distinct types: fermions and bosons.

Now physicists from Rice University in the US have found a third type might be possible after all, at least mathematically speaking. Known as a paraparticles, their behavior could imply the existence of elementary particles nobody has ever considered.

“We determined that new types of particles we never knew of before are possible,” says Kaden Hazzard, who with co-author Zhiyuan Wang formulated a theory to demonstrate how objects that weren’t fermions or bosons could exist in physical reality without breaking any known laws.

Fermions encompass fundamental particles that ‘build’ atoms, such as electrons and quarks. In more precise terms, they have a property that prevents them from occupying identical quantum states, effectively ensuring no two matching fermions can fill the same space.

Gothamist.

A rash of burglaries targeting New York City bodegas has led the United Bodegas of America to offer a $5,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the perpetrators.

The crime spree, which the NYPD attributes to a group that bodega owners have dubbed “The Midnight Smashers,” has struck 49 locations across more than two dozen precincts in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens between Sept. 19 and Dec. 26, according to authorities.

Police said the thieves have been using stolen vehicles to break into businesses and remove ATMs, among other property. One such incident, captured on video on Dec. 23, involved the group forcibly entering a commercial property at 75-10 31 Ave. in Queens and fleeing with an ATM in an unknown direction. There have been no injuries reported in the incidents.

The UBA, representing the city’s bodega owners, held a press conference on Thursday to demand stronger action.

Read it.

drone’s collision with a water-dropping aircraft fighting the Palisades fire in Los Angeles caused the temporary grounding of all aircraft working that fire and took out one of just the two amphibous planes capable of repeatedly scooping 1,600 gallons of water from the ocean and delivering it onto nearby flames, Cal Fire told The War Zone.

A Canadair CL-415 Super Scooper turboprop plane smashed into a drone around 10 a.m. local time, Cal Fire spokesman Chris Thomas told The War Zone.

The world would be a better place if we didn’t have stupid people. (But, hey, it’s California….)

Read it.

Five people have died, more than 2,000 building structures have been destroyed, and 29,000 acres have been scorched as wildfires rage out of control across Los Angeles County. With over 130,000 residents under evacuation orders, concerns are growing about the very real possibility of arsonists intentionally starting some of the fires.

According to an LA County fire chief earlier this week, the Palisades Fire began “as a very small fire in a backyard,” then spread up a ridge, was carried by high winds, and created an ember cast that ignited fires throughout the Palisades.

Apparently the homeless of L.A. figure that if they’re homeless everybody else ought to be homeless as well, certainly the rich people who live downwind.

Time to leave….

Read it.

This is how Germany got Hitler.

Steve Graham.

I saw some interesting stuff today, related to the California fires that are destroying the homes of entertainment people and other wealthy individuals. It looks like I was right to think leftism is the fundamental cause of the destruction.

Prager University posted a very interesting video. They say California has forced one of its big power companies to waste a huge amount of money on “renewable” boondoggle projects while failing to improve existing infrastructure. According to the video, failing power lines cause a lot of the fires, and one of the worst fires was caused by a power line built in 1921. So around 104 years ago.

I’ll embed the video, and you can judge for yourself.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Wednesday’s firestorm in a wealthy area of Los Angeles could be the final straw that breaks California’s insurance market.

The state’s insurance market has been teetering on the edge of insolvency for years thanks to catastrophic wildfires that have driven many insurers to stop writing new policies and drop existing ones. Wednesday’s wind-driven wildfires in a part of Los Angeles packed with multimillion-dollar homes could accelerate its collapse.

“It’s obviously going to be bad,” said Rep. Brad Sherman, the Democrat who represents the neighborhood between Malibu and Santa Monica where the Palisades Fire — one of six burning uncontained across the region — had destroyed more than 1,000 buildings as of Wednesday afternoon. “We’ve already seen big increases. And we’ve seen these increases not only in houses that are close to the brush, but in areas where you’re surrounded by other homes.”

Ane why is that: How long does it take to get approval for prescribed burns in California?

UPDATE: Los Angeles Fire Budget Cut, Hundreds of Hydrants Stolen for Scrap Before Fires

“These fire hydrant thefts are yet another sign of how crime is out of control in Los Angeles County,” said Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman to The Center Square before his November election. “Thieves know they’ll face little or no consequences if they are caught, so they’re willing to risk the public’s safety for a small profit.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who has been away on a taxpayer-funded trip to Africa as a member of a Biden administration delegation, recently cut the fire department’s budget by $17.6 million.

Read it.

Fortunately, the existence of Barack Obama and (especially) Joe Biden will keep Jimmuh from going down in history as America’s worst President.

Read it.

The United States is a nation built on the principle of law and order. But today, we face an urgent threat from illegal alien criminal gangs infiltrating our communities and undermining the safety and security we hold dear. The rise of transnational criminal organizations like Tren de Aragua, originally from Venezuela, highlights the chaotic border situation and the urgent need for decisive action.

Reports of human trafficking, drug smuggling, and violence linked to these gangs are becoming all too common. In Colorado, the Tren de Aragua gang has already been implicated in crimes ranging from jewelry store heists to shootings. Disturbingly, over 60 gang members were identified by U.S. Customs and Border Protection between 2023 and this summer. These are only those caught; many more have likely entered unchecked due to the Biden administration’s ineffective border policies.

A task force was set up in Aurora, Colorado, to identify if the gang had criminally taken over apartment complexes within the city. It’s a fact that criminal illegal alien gangs and organizations prey on migrant communities. As the illegal immigrant community grows, there has been a spike in crime by the criminal element that exists within it.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

The Muslim invasion of Christendom proceeds at full speed.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.