Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Time to leave.

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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?

Read it.

“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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

 … 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.

Read it.

Time to leave Turd World California.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

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….)

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.”