Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

The corruption of science by progressive politics proceeds apace.

Read it.

•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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

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.

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.

Read it.

On Monday, X filed an objection in The Onion’s bid to buy InfoWars out of bankruptcy. In the objection, Elon Musk’s lawyers argued that X has “superior ownership” of all accounts on X, that it objects to the inclusion of InfoWars and related Twitter accounts in the bankruptcy auction, and that the court should therefore prevent the transfer of them to The Onion.

The legal basis that X asserts in the filing is not terribly interesting. But what is interesting is that X has decided to involve itself at all, and it highlights that you do not own your followers or your account or anything at all on corporate social media, and it also highlights the fact that Elon Musk’s X is primarily a political project he is using to boost, or stifle, specific viewpoints and help his friends. In the filing, X’s lawyers essentially say—like many other software companies, and, increasingly, device manufacturers as well—that the company’s terms of service grant X’s users a “license” to use the platform but that, ultimately, X owns all accounts on the social network and can do anything that it wants with them.

“Few bankruptcy courts have addressed the issue of ownership of social media accounts, and those courts that have were focused on whether an individual or the individual’s employer owned an account used for business purposes—not whether the social media company had a superior right of ownership over either the individual or the corporation,” Musk’s lawyers write.

Read it.

It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without turkey, long lines, and people browsing their phones for Black Friday deals in which the products had their prices raised by 80% and then cut by 80% before being stealthily replaced by Amazon with identical looking Chinese knockoffs.

And it also wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without the media launching another round of shots in its endless war on America with ‘explainers’ claiming that the Pilgrims were racist and that we should be ashamed of the holiday.

Raw Story, a Voice of the Woke Fringe.

With Donald Trump set to return to office, the Christian nationalist far right is already plotting how to take control of the schools, and indoctrinate children with “mindless obedience” for their cause, Amanda Marcotte wrote for Salon.

I guess woke people object to non-woke people doing what woke people routinely do.

Read it.

A German man who described a judge as “obviously mentally disturbed” — after the judge issued a light sentence to a Syrian who raped a 15-year-old girl — was slapped with a €5,000 fine for “insulting” the judge. This fine given to Paul S., whose name has been changed to protect his identity, was fine almost double the fine given to the Syrian rapist. The Syrian not only did not have to serve prison time but was even complimented during his trial by the district judge for his integration efforts.

Daily Signal.

“The Census Bureau’s review of the 2020 Census revealed substantial miscounts and discrepancies tending to benefit Democrat-run states,” House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said in a statement to The Daily Signal. “Congress has a responsibility to conduct oversight of these massive errors to ensure they are not repeated in the 2030 census.”

U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Santos, an appointee of President Joe Biden, is set to testify at the hearing.

“Additionally, current integrity issues with the Census must be addressed,” Comer said.

Read it.

Whereas we can understand how a political agenda can find its way into government institutions, how does this happen in the private sector?

What motivated these corporations that operate in a free marketplace and are owned and controlled by private stockholders to incorporate a political agenda into their business and operating practices, and what is motivating them now to back off these programs?

Has management of these corporations changed their minds regarding the business efficacy of these programs? Or did they put them in place initially to curry favor with a political regime once in power and now they are backing off to curry favor with a new regime?

Let’s recall, again, how profoundly our culture has changed.

ADP.

On November 15, 2024, a Texas federal court struck down a U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) rule that raised the minimum salary required to be paid to most employees classified as exempt from overtime and minimum wage requirements under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The court’s order invalidates the rule nationwide effective immediately.

…

On April 23, 2024, the DOL released a final rule that would have raised the minimum salary required to be paid to most employees classified as exempt from the FLSA overtime and minimum wage requirements (the salary level test). The final rule specifically impacted those employees classified as exempt under the executive, administrative and professional employee exemptions.

The final rule raised the minimum salary in two phases. First, the final rule raised the salary amount from $684 per week ($35,568 annually) to $844 per week ($43,888 annually) effective on July 1, 2024. A second increase would have raised the salary amount to $1,128 per week ($58,656 annually) on January 1, 2025.

The final rule also increased the salary amount for certain highly compensated employees (HCEs) who are paid a salary, earn above a higher total annual compensation level, and satisfy a minimal duties test. Employees meeting the requirements of this alternative HCE test, are also exempt from the FLSA overtime and minimum wage requirements. The final rule increased the amount required to be paid to HCEs from $107,432 annually (including at least $684 per week paid on a salary or fee basis) to $132,964 annually (including at least $844 per week paid on a salary or fee basis) effective on July 1, 2024. A second increase would have raised the amount to $151,164 (including at least $1,128 per week paid on a salary or fee basis) on January 1, 2025.

Finally, the rule would have provided for an automatic update to the minimum salary and HCE amounts every three years.

UPDATE: Small business owners breathe easier over labor costs after decision to strike down overtime rule (Associated Press)

UPDATE: Overtime Rule Blocked by Court, Salary Level Takes Big Drop to $35K (HRMorning)

UPDATE: What employers should know now that the 2024 overtime rule is vacated (HRDive)

Marginal Revolution.

It’s been said that the radical left often ends up duplicating the policies of the radical right, just under different names and justifications, e.g. separate but equal, scientific thinking is “white” thinking and so forth. Here’s another example from Salim Furth: the re-creation of redlining. Redlining was the practice of making it more difficult to access financial products such as mortgages by grading some neighborhoods as “hazardous” for investment. Either by design or result, redlining was often associated with minority populations.

Salim shows that Massachusetts has created a modern redlining system.

The American Mind.

It did not take long for the Left to demand a consolation prize for their failed leader Kamala Harris. The opening bid was replacing Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor with “Justice” Harris. What joy that would be. But it’s also mercifully implausible. Not only would the Wise Latinx Justice need to retire to make way for a proud black Brahmin, but Chuck Schumer would have to wrangle a one-vote majority that includes departing former Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. In his lame duck era, Schumer doesn’t really have the ability to rally this captious crowd behind any nominee. But for Harris? Please.

We must go back to the beginning of our quest: how to console the hapless Harris? She’ll have to do what she always does: fail upward. And there’s only one logical next step on that path: the governorship of California.

The ghastly Gavin Newsom is termed out in two years. Unless California Rs get their stuff together in a big way, he will inevitably be followed by another progressive D. And there is no bigger progressive D in Cali Town than Kamala D. Harris, D-San Francisco.

Washington Free Beacon.

Up to one million migrants are expected to have entered the United States under the controversial CPB One program by the time President Joe Biden leaves office, with the figure already nearing 900,000, according to internal Department of Homeland Security data obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

CBP One allows migrants who want to claim asylum in the United States to apply for the program in their home country using a mobile phone application. Those migrants are then given court dates, which are often scheduled years later. The Biden administration broadly expanded the program last year under the belief that it would ease pressure on the southern border.

That decision prompted criticism from Republicans who said CBP One was nothing more than a way to facilitate illegal immigration and mask the true number of individuals entering the country. Migrants who enter the country via CBP One are not counted by law enforcement agencies as traditional border crossers.

Daily Signal.

In June, illegal alien Victor Martinez-Hernandez was charged with the murder of Rachel Morin, a mother of five in Maryland. Police in Oklahoma tracked the accused repeat offender down with a sample of his DNA recovered from a Los Angeles home invasion in which a 9-year-old girl and her mother were assaulted.

Police say Martinez-Hernandez came to the U.S. illegally to escape prosecution for at least one other murder in his native El Salvador in December 2022.

“That should never have been allowed to happen,” said Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler, referring to the numerous missed red flags the case presented. His office apprehended Hernandez in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

New York Post.

So now we know that the cop who fatally shot unarmed Donald Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, 36, during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot was rewarded with a promotion and a $36,000 bonus.

There were no ill consequences for his rash actions that day. Instead, Capt. Michael Byrd, 56, was held up as a hero of democracy, despite the fact that he had a lengthy disciplinary record that includes leaving his loaded handgun in a public bathroom in the Capitol Visitor Center, “improperly” firing his gun at a car near his home while off duty and abusing a Maryland cop who tried to stop him entering a high school football field as a “racist a–hole,” again while off duty, according to a letter released last week by the GOP-led House Administration Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight.

Three entries in Byrd’s internal affairs record are missing, wrote subcommittee Chairman Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) in a letter to Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger.

Read it.

Former military Commander-in-Chief and Ukraine’s current ambassador to the UK, Valery Zaluzhny, has warned that World War Three is already underway in a recent interview published by Politico.

“I believe that in 2024 we can absolutely believe that the Third World War has begun,” he said. He referenced the greater internationalization of the war with the presence of North Korean troops, and Iranian technology on the battlefield, as well as Chinese support to Moscow.

Read it.

As you might expect, they’re all Blue states.

The Foundry.

People eagerly give money to rich environmental groups. The Natural Resources Defense Council has $463 million in assets.

The NRDC claims it uses law “to confront the climate crisis.”

What it really does is pay lawyers to torture people who try to do useful things.

Read it.

As the Biden administration winds to a close, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is aggressively expanding its influence in South America. On Nov. 14, Xi Jinping and Peruvian President Dina Boluarte inaugurated a $3.6 billion port in Chancay, Peru, marking another major step in China’s economic foothold in the region.

Earlier this year, Boluarte traveled to Beijing to strengthen Sino–Peruvian ties, cementing Peru’s position as the second-largest recipient of Chinese foreign direct investment in Latin America. Notably, this includes China Southern Power Grid’s acquisition of Peru’s electricity distribution, placing 100 percent of this critical infrastructure under CCP control.

In stark contrast, the White House failed to engage Boluarte during her 2023 visit to Washington, missing a key opportunity to counter Beijing’s growing influence. The port inauguration coincided with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Lima, where U.S. President Joe Biden and leaders from 21 member economies convened. The timing underscores a stark reality: while the United States watched from the sidelines, the CCP was actively drawing Latin America deeper into its orbit, delivering a clear and humiliating message to the United States about its waning influence in the region.

Washington Free Beacon.

When patients turn to professional societies like the AMA or the American College of Physicians or the American Association of Pediatrics for vital health information, one might expect that the information is based on publications in prestigious medical journals of carefully designed and meticulously interpreted studies. Dr. Marty Makary, in his book Blind Spots, shows how wrong these assumptions can be.

Makary is a frequent commentator on health-related topics. He is a surgeon and surgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Blind Spots consists of several examples where the medical establishment has perpetuated a myth often based on a single academic’s opinion that became ingrained in the culture as “truth” despite the flimsiest of evidence. Using examples like avoiding exposure to peanuts in infants, producing an epidemic of peanut allergy, or denying the benefits of hormone replacement therapy in perimenopausal women, resulting in premature deaths and suboptimal health outcomes, Makary proves his case against groupthink in medicine. He goes on to rail against the overuse of antibiotics because of their potential for altering the microbial composition in the GI tract. Recent research shows that this effect of antibiotics may contribute to serious complications, including risks for cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Newsbusters.

The progressive perverts of the Left are banking on the idea they can claim the minds of our youth while they’re most impressionable.

What do you remember learning when you were in Kindergarten? Was it shapes? Arithmetic? Learning how to read or spell your name?

For New York’s public schools, creepy sex abnormalities are the most important thing your 5 year old must learn during this formative stage of development.

That’s why Hillside Elementary school is forcing their Kindergarteners to endure a new “gender curriculum” that “focuses on Hillside’s core value of respect and aims to center discussions on gender identity.”

Lesson: Don’t send your kids to a government school.

New York Times.

Jared Bernstein, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, was a leading architect of “Bidenomics.”

What would you think of a medical doctor whose wrong-headed ideas made people sick?

Calling in from Paris on Friday after serving as chair of an economic meeting of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation at the Château de la Muette, Mr. Bernstein, a longtime Biden confidant, spoke with The New York Times about how he is making sense of the moment.

Just roughing it.

Read it.

Probably the most useful thing he could do.