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Many researchers have tried to understand longevity in humans and what could be done to improve it. However, this is a difficult topic to study because it takes a long time to collect data on human life spans, and many different factors can contribute to mortality. One key distinction is between extrinsic mortality (violence, accidents, infections, etc.) and intrinsic mortality due to genetic mutations and/or aging-related diseases. Shenhar et al. analyzed more than a century’s worth of data from three different Scandinavian twin cohorts and concluded that the current estimates of longevity heritability are much too low (see the Perspective by Bakula and Scheibye-Knudsen). In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when these study cohorts were born, extrinsic causes played a large role in mortality, but once those are excluded, longevity appears to be about 50% heritable, similar to many other traits. —Yevgeniya Nusinovich

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The markets have been rocked by news of a possible intervention to control the Japanese yen slump, after it reached a forty-year low relative to the US dollar. Fixing the yen and any other fiat currency is simple: Implement an Austrian approach; eliminate constant deficit spending and monetization of government outlays; and implement clear, sound money policies that support the purchasing power of the currency.

Letting rates float and having zero deficit would help.

However, no government seems to want to control spending and eliminate constant artificial currency creation, even knowing that, by doing so, they would limit the risk of financial crises, excessive risk-taking, and erosion of citizens’ wage purchasing power.

The best a citizen can expect today is a mild form of Keynesianism that aims for lower taxes, relatively lower spending, and a constant expansion of money supply as the driver of economic growth. Even this “lesser evil” approach ends with malinvestment, financial crises, and more politicians demanding “public investment” as the solution.

Governments avoid sound money and controlling spending because these choices can hurt them politically right away, while using inflation and interventionist methods allows them to take a lot of wealth from citizens and give it to themselves and their favored industries.

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And, like the last one, it was started by Democrats.

History rarely “repeats” but our modern political dynamic rings rather familiar. Many of the tactics used by the leftists in Russia in the early 20th Century are being used today in the US. In fact, I would argue they are almost exactly the same and that a Bolshevik-style revolution is happening right now.

Interestingly, the Bolsheviks were a tiny minority within the Russian population. At their peak in 1917 they had only 400,000 “official” members. They were supported politically by an estimated 23% of the population, but that is still a small movement compared to the 150 million Russian citizens trying to live their lives from day to day.

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Last Saturday night a mob of leftists went on a rampage in the Italian city of Turin, burning vehicles, throwing stones, and attacking police. A group of Antifa thugs beat a policeman severely, sending him to the hospital.

The events in Turin brought to mind an essay I had just read by JD Hall (hat tip WRSA). He was writing about the actions of Antifa in Minneapolis and other American cities, but the process he described is identical to what is unfolding in Italy….

The Telegraph (UK).

Lord Cameron has accused Labour of taking a “spite-laden wrecking ball” to British education..

In a rare intervention, the former prime minister claimed Sir Keir Starmer was “systematically dismantling” reforms by successive governments that had made English schools world-leading.

The Tory peer also condemned Labour’s decision to scrap dozens of planned free schools in some of the country’s poorest regions, including one backed by Eton College, his alma mater.

Watch it.

Carl Benjamin (“Sargon of Akkad”) explains it as clearly as I have ever heard anyone do.

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Following the release of immigration figures for 2025, the French Interior Ministry has published crime statistics for the past year. These figures dramatically coincide with the French people’s perception that they are living in an increasingly dangerous and violent country. Furthermore, cross-referencing this data with immigration figures confirms another intuitive observation: foreigners are over-represented in crimes of all kinds.

Apart from burglaries, absolutely all crime indicators rose between 2024 and 2025: 5% on average for physical violence and homicides, and up to 8% for sexual violence. This increase is not new: it is a significant trend, as analyst Marc Vanguard points out. As far as assaults are concerned, there has been a 25% increase since 2017, when Emmanuel Macron came to power. For sexual violence, the increase is as high as 132%.

Import Turd World people, get Turd World problems.

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What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks:
“How are you enjoying your drive so far?”
Annoyed by the interruption, and even more behind schedule, you dismiss the prompt and merge back into traffic.
A minute later it does it again.
“Did you know I have a new feature? Tap here to learn more.”
It blocks your speedometer with an overlay tutorial about the turn signal. It highlights the wiper controls and refuses to go away until you demonstrate mastery.
Ridiculous, of course.
And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.
I’ve started to think of this as backseat software: the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software as a channel that operates on you. Once a product learns it can talk back, it’s remarkably hard to keep it quiet.

The Telegraph (UK).

Labour announced plans earlier this month to deny millions of people the vote, leaving some with no say over who controls their local services and council tax for up to seven years.

Elections have been cancelled at 30 councils over claims that a looming reorganisation of local government makes holding ballots expensive, complicated and unnecessary.

The Telegraph has launched a Campaign for Democracy, calling for ministers to be stripped of their legal powers to cancel local elections without a full vote in Parliament.

A remionder that it’s the Left, not the Right, who love to cancel elections—and, considering that Britain is about five years closer to disaster than the U.S., what might happen if Democrats control the national government aftert Trump steps down.

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man was arrested after repeatedly crashing his car into the Chabad Lubavitch world headquarters in New York City on Wednesday night while people were gathered for prayer at the deeply revered Hasidic Jewish site.

No one was injured when the driver struck a door of a building in the complex before reversing and striking it several more times. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that while it was too early in the investigation to speculate on the driver’s motives, the incident was being investigated as a possible hate crime.

“This is deeply alarming, especially given the deep meaning and the history of the institution to so many in New York and around the world,” said New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who called the crash “intentional.”

Video of the crash that was posted online shows a car with New Jersey license plates moving forward and backward on an icy driveway leading to a building in the complex and ramming its basement-level doors.

The driver, who is wearing shorts, emerges, shouts to bystanders that “It slipped” and says something to police about trying to park.

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.

Atlas Press.

Take history books. The average ancient historian led troops, tutored a prince, governed a province, advised a king, made a fortune, fell from favor, was exiled, and buried 7 of their 10 children. The average modern historian passed a few tests then wrote a book on their laptop next to their cat. And worse, they all passed the same tests at the same institutions. And they all wrote the same statements on their applications to get into those institutions. And while attending those institutions, they all adopted the same opinions. Anyone who did otherwise was filtered out before they could become a professor with a publishing deal. Everything is like this now.

Meanwhile Xenophon was an Athenian student of Socrates who joined a Greek mercenary group that marched 1000 miles into Persia to overthrow the King of Kings on behalf of the King’s brother. When the King’s brother died and the group’s commanders were all killed by Persian treachery, he led the troops 1000 miles home himself while being constantly harried by hostile armies. He then tried to establish a colony on the Black Sea, survived a mutiny, raided the Thracians, fought for the Spartans, was exiled by Athens, and settled down to manage an estate and write it all up.

Contrast Xenophon with Mary Beard, who studied at Cambridge and now teaches at Cambridge. She holds the same opinions as everyone else at Cambridge. She’s remarked before that, “I actually can’t understand what it would be to be a woman without being a feminist.” This seems like a peculiar failing for an ancient historian. After 9/11, she wrote an article saying that many people thought “the United States had it coming,” and that “world bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.” That caused some controversy on the world stage, but earned her a promotion at Cambridge. I don’t know if she’s ever talked publicly about religion or democracy or climate change or immigration, but I could tell you exactly what she thinks about these things anyway. So why would you bother reading what she thinks about Rome? The answers are just as predictable.

Times News (UK).

As immigration rules have tightened in recent months, some migrants already working in the UK, whose visas have been cancelled, find themselves in a precarious position. Agents are selling a workaround, offering to arrange fake jobs which can be used to obtain real visas, in exchange for exorbitant fees. The Times went undercover, posing as a migrant facing deportation, to expose how this black market is operating.

The Telegraph (UK).

Sir Keir Starmer led a legal case that opened the door to hundreds of British soldiers being pursued for alleged war crimes, The Telegraph can disclose.

The now Prime Minister worked free of charge alongside his close ally, Lord Hermer, now the Attorney General, and the now disgraced solicitor Phil Shiner on a human rights claim in 2007 that reshaped the law governing troops in war zones.

Court documents unearthed by The Telegraph reveal Sir Keir was a lead barrister on the case, which ultimately led the Ministry of Defence to order fresh inquiries into deaths in Iraq. It triggered years of criminal investigations into soldiers who had been wrongly accused, at enormous cost to the taxpayer.

Johnny Mercer, the former veterans minister, accused Sir Keir of “unleashing the witch hunt against British troops”.

As part of the 2007 case, Sir Keir and Lord Hermer urged the courts to order a fresh inquiry into a British soldier who had already been cleared twice of murder over the death of an Iraqi man in 2003 (see extracts below), telling judges that earlier investigations had been “perfunctory” and “wholly inadequate”.

My, what a surprise.

Read it.

Where have the amateur researchers gone, and how do we bring them back?

We used to have a broad class of people who didn’t Have To Work For A Living, and the Left has devoted the last 150 years to make such people impossible. (They haven’t succeeded yet, but they’ve reeduced it to a bare remnant.)

Read it.

First off, if you had a picture of a guy with a five o’clock shadow and a cowboy hat on a wanted poster, I’ll have to disappoint you. I’m talking about a historical practice by governments, most notably Rome and England, of declaring someone outside the protection of law. In US history, the phrase “Wanted Dead or Alive” comes to mind.

What it comes down to is that the government has declared in some official way that a person is outside government assistance: no police protection, no right to trial. In our later, cozier times maybe even no ambulance service.

Someone aware of being in this situation could be expected to behave accordingly. The world becomes a prison yard, and being hyper aware of any threatening behavior by others or, in gang parlance, being “disrespected,” requires an over-reaction to everything if you don’t want to look like a target. You’re in enemy territory and help is not coming. Anyone menacing needs to be made an example.

In Minnesota and elsewhere, the police have been instructed not to assist ICE in any way. The practical impact of this is that ICE agents now have to make arrests expecting to be followed in vehicles and surrounded by hostile crowds, some of whom expect prestige by pushing things that much further. No one’s going to expect the crowds to conform to a Chronic Demonstrator’s Code of Conduct.

The agents are very much in a hurry: get in, get out, and expect no help from the police. Put yourself in this situation. You’ll respond, “I wouldn’t put myself in this situation.” Okay, understood. But I’m betting you wouldn’t behave as if you were in Dragnet, you’’d more likely act as if you were in Blackhawk Down.

I propose that, if we want everyone safer, it would be good for the politicians at the state and local level to expect the ICE agents to be treated as citizens, and to receive similar protections. That would mean having professional local cops on site, which would pay benefits beyond the immediate increase in safety. It might reset the agents’ expectations of the pace they have to proceed and the aggression they have to bring to the situation. They might even develop working relations with the police, who have thousands of hours’ more street time and might come to serve as the role models I’ve often considered them. There are complaints of ICE’s inexperience — well, here you go. Experience rubs off.

Oh, and it would be nice if the places where they were eating and sleeping received a normal amount of protection also. That is, if we don’t want them to behave as if they’re in a war zone.

Power Line.

The entire establishment in Minnesota has mobilized against ICE’s presence here. Renee Good, who ran her vehicle into an ICE officer, apparently on purpose although we will never know for sure what she was thinking, is treated like a second Joan of Arc. Meanwhile, the local, national and international “news” media consistently lie about the men and women of ICE, smearing them as fascist predators.

A classic instance is the five year old boy whom ICE officers saved from possibly freezing to death after his father abandoned him, whereupon the international press falsely alleged that they had “arrested” or “kidnapped” or “detained” the little boy, or “used him as bait.” Absolutely disgraceful.

Who speaks for the men and women of federal law enforcement? Well, American Experiment for one. Check out our podcast, which has been unapologetically pro-law enforcement from the beginning. Clips from our podcast, which you can see here, have gotten tens of millions of views just since January 1, predominantly on Facebook but also on Instagram and other platforms. We are the most significant outlet supporting federal law enforcement in Minnesota, but the popularity of our products shows that there is a hunger for the truth among a silent majority of Minnesotans.

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Arizona’s Democrat Attorney General Kris Mayes’ public advice that people in Arizona could use the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law to justify shooting federal officers – especially masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents – has been roundly condemned by the Arizona Police Association (APA).

“Law enforcement is inherently dangerous work. Recent public comments by Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes have the potential to make it even more dangerous,” APA explained Thursday in a statement denouncing Mayes’ comments in a local television news interview.

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Last year in Ireland, a ten-year-old girl in state care was raped by a man the government had already ordered to deport. The government brushed it off as a “regrettable oversight.” The apology was so rehearsed it could have been written weeks before the crime.

There was no national outrage. No emergency debate. No resignations.

The public was told to stay calm. The reaction was labelled “far-right hysteria.” The government called it “misinformation.” This came as a surprise to no one, because in Ireland, the apology always arrives quicker than the accountability.

But that case did something the political class didn’t expect. It cracked the surface. It made people ask what else is being buried under government PR, staged compassion and fear of saying the obvious.

The truth is, this wasn’t an isolated failure; it was the latest entry in a pattern Ireland has perfected.

We apologise to children after the damage is done.

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The modern gynocentric social order makes it impossible for most men to find and pair with women, and most women to find and pair with men that they find acceptable. Feminism has substantially succeeded in turning girls into virtual men, boys into virtual women, and our culture into compost.

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A dormitory in Amsterdam intended to promote “coexistence” between asylum seekers and local students has faced repeated incidents of violence, sexual assault, and drug-related offenses, yet the municipality has ruled out an early closure. The “Stek Oost” integration project, launched in 2018, now looks set to continue until April 2028.

The 250-resident dormitory house is half allocated to Dutch students and half to asylum seekers. A buddy system was introduced to foster cohesion between the groups. However, reports indicate that violent incidents, including sexual assaults and knife threats, have occurred in shared spaces. In one case, a Syrian resident involved in a sexual offense in 2019 was only removed in 2022 after committing a second sexual offence. He was later imprisoned.

Housing association Stadgenoot, responsible for the facility, requested an action plan from the municipality and police as early as 2019. Despite these warnings and staff threats, the municipality maintained that it could not abruptly displace 250 people.

The Foundry.

On Tuesday at The Heritage Foundation, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, and former Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield shed light on how health officials and President Joe Biden’s administration sought to suppress the COVID-19 lab leak theory.

Miller-Meeks told the audience that the Biden administration worked backward from its preferred conclusion rather than grapple with the “spillover” outbreak theory.

“Either I was stupid, and everybody else was vastly more intelligent than I was, or people don’t want people to know, because science isn’t consensus, and I think that’s the biggest thing,” Miller-Meeks said in her opening remarks, noting that dissenting opinions on the origins of the virus should have been welcomed rather than suppressed.

“Science is a hypothesis. It’s an idea. You do a study, you get a conclusion, you repeat the study to show validity, but it’s not a consensus,” Miller-Meeks added.

Redfield told the audience that “almost every public health decision we made in the first six months of the pandemic was mainly wrong.”

The New Neo.

Ohio immigration courts may be subject to bribery:

At the center of the operation is Patricia Golder, who, according to the footage, has turned the alleged manipulation of the asylum process into her business. Golder says she takes a portion of the pay given to the Mauritanian migrants in exchange for helping them navigate the system, and she claims she can bribe judges to rule in the migrants’ favor. The footage also suggests that many of the migrants involved neither embrace nor intend to adopt core American values, even as they access public resources designed to protect legitimate asylum seekers. …

“You get the lawyer and you say, ‘Okay, we have this sheet of paper. I need you to ask the judge how much to carry these people two more year in this country? Probably until we get this project done.’ He say, ‘Okay, give me $50,000.’”

That $50,000 will get split up between everybody, Golder says.

I have long assumed this sort of thing goes on, plus lesser forms of deception and gaming the system. I really don’t see how it could be otherwise, and not just in Ohio by any means.

A great many articles discussing this mention that bribery is standard operating procedure in many parts of the world. So of course immigrants from such countries will consider it both necessary and noncontroversial. And that’s where we are.

Read it.

The controversial French euthanasia bill was passed by the National Assembly in May 2025 and is currently being reviewed by the Senate. Despite being considered more conservative, the Senate has unexpectedly decided to dramatically speed up the debate. Two bills are currently on the table: one on euthanasia and active assistance in dying, and the other on the development of palliative care. In a shake-up of the schedule, the Senate has chosen to examine the first bill first for reasons of ‘priority,’ counting on the mobilisation of senators, while the second bill is unlikely to interest parliamentarians who will be eager to return to their constituencies in the run-up to the next municipal elections.

Anxiety is mounting among pro-life advocates at the prospect of the bill being definitively adopted. Its content would make France one of the most permissive countries in the world.

The March for Life demonstration, organised in Paris on Sunday, January 18th, highlighted the semantic fraud behind the bill: the text describes euthanasia and assisted suicide as “care,” creating an obligation for doctors, with terms deliberately chosen to mask the purpose of the act, which is to deliberately cause death.

Doctors used to take the Hippocratic Oath, the first provision was “Primum non nocere” (First, to do no harm.) Apparently that’s no longer the case.

Read it.

For much of the past half-century, California benefited from a powerful first-mover advantage.

Dense networks of talent, capital, and research institutions allowed the state to absorb policy mistakes that would have crippled competitors. High spending and taxes, restrictive housing rules, and regulatory complexity were treated as nuisances rather than binding constraints, because growth could outstrip their costs.

That margin of error has narrowed dramatically.

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Keir Starmer’s government is playing directly into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, having on Tuesday given approval for Beijing to build its new embassy in London.

The huge (215,000 square-foot/20,000 square metre) site near the Tower of London has been suitably dubbed a ‘mega-embassy’ and is indeed set to become the biggest embassy in Europe.

Critics say it will amount to a “spy hub in the heart of our financial capital.” More than a week before the Labour government gave its seal of approval, The Daily Telegraph revealed what it described as “detailed plans for an underground complex below the vast diplomatic site in central London, which Beijing has sought to keep from public scrutiny.” This would be built alongside Britain’s most sensitive communication cables.

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Germany’s schools are experiencing a historic rise in students with a migration background, while the financial burden of unaccompanied minor asylum seekers continues to grow. According to the German Federal Statistical Office, in 2024, 29% of students in general education schools had a migration background, meaning almost every third pupil was either a migrant or a descendant of migrants. This represents a steady increase from 26% in 2019. Only 59% of students come entirely from non-migrant backgrounds.

Despite the growing number of migrant students, the teaching workforce remains predominantly native, with only 11% of teachers in general education schools having a migration background.

Meanwhile, the financial impact of unaccompanied minor asylum seekers (UMAs) continues to escalate. Figures obtained by AfD MP René Springer reveal that since 2015, Germany has spent at least €12.2 billion on accommodation, education, and care. These costs are typically covering housing, food, clothing, medical care, schooling, language courses, and youth services. In some federal states, the per-minor cost reaches nearly €100,000 annually, such as in Lower Saxony, while North Rhine-Westphalia and Thuringia exceed €80,000 per minor.

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Import Turd World people, get Turd World problems.

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Following the dramatic Africa Cup of Nations final between Senegal and competition host Morocco, clashes broke out in several European cities late Sunday evening after the game ended with Senegal’s 1–0 victory in overtime. Unrest was reported in Belgium, the Netherlands and France, with riot police intervening in multiple locations.

The Antiplanner.

As I’ve pondered the linkage between housing affordability (meaning the ability of the general public to afford housing) and affordable housing (meaning subsidized housing for people too poor to afford any housing), I’ve sometimes wondered if there isn’t a deliberate effort to make housing unaffordable in order to force more people to live in government-owned or subsidized housing. Clearly, making housing expensive through growth boundaries has the support of those who want to densify cities. But does it also have the support of socialists who want to end private homeownership?

Watch it.

Vanessa Wingårdh details how our world is degenerating.

Reagan-Era Judge Calls Trump ‘Authoritarian’ As He Prepares To Block Deportations (Katelynn Richardson/The Daily Caller)

Right-wing media are describing pro-immigrant Minnesota activists using the language of war (Media Matters for America) The Left would never do that, of course.

The Companies Behind ICE (Sludge)

Live Unfree Or Die (Paul Blumenthal/HuffPost)

Biden-Appointed Federal Judge Blocks Trump Admin’s Move To Withhold Minnesota Food Stamp Funds

DERANGED: Acosta Floats Choking CBS’s Dokoupil, Welch Says ICE Is Like ISIS

Trump’s DHS has shot 11 people during immigration enforcement operations since September (NBC News)

How Republicans criticize Trump without criticizing him: From the Politics Desk (NBC News)

Patty Murray to White House: No Funding Increase for ICE (Pablo Manríquez/Migrant Insider)

Judge rules feds in Minneapolis immigration operation can’t detain or tear gas peaceful protesters (Associated Press)  Good luck finding a ‘peaceful’ protester.

How Trump Is Using Violent Tragedies to Divide America (Mark Follman/Mother Jones)  No mention of how Trump-haters are causing violent tragedies to divide America.

Watch What They’re Doing: Trump Threatens to Make War on the States (Josh Marshall/Talking Points Memo)

Some Trump administration social media posts mirror extremist rhetoric (Jason Abbruzzese/NBC News)

I’m a Minneapolis sociologist who studies violence. Here’s how ICE observers are helping. (Nicole Bedera/MS NOW)

.Democrats grapple with ‘rising clamor’ for Trump impeachment ahead of midterms (Benjamin Siegel/Associated Press)  Which, without a majority in either the Senate or the House, is pure virtue-signaling.

Dem Sen. Coons Leads Delegation to Support ‘Kingdom of Denmark’  Democrats never forget which side they’re on, and that side is rarely America.

Dispatch from the occupation (Don Moynihan/Can We Still Govern?)

‘Maybe DHS Was a Bad Idea’ (Nick Miroff/The Atlantic)  Of course it was a bad idea. But after the 9/11 attacks, every politician and his dog had to be seen as ‘doing something’, including GWB, so (as usual) that urge produced stupid legislation.

Brooks Describes ICE in Minneapolis As Almost An ‘Armed Occupation’  Pseudo-conservatives at the New York Times are busy these days pushing the Narrative.

Trump, 79, Appears to Forget Name of Woman Who Just Gave Him Her Nobel Peace Prize (Jack Revell/The Daily Beast)

Well, President Donald J. Trump finally has his Nobel Peace Prize. … (Heather Cox Richardson/Letters …)

Algemeiner: Vance Can’t Be Silent on Antisemitism  Sure he can. Just watch him.

Trump’s Greenland Demands Spark Protest Rallies Across Denmark (Sara Sjolin/Bloomberg)  Dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

US federal forces blind two protesters shot in face with ‘less-lethal’ munitions (Roque Planas/The Guardian)

ABC, CBS Omit Shovel-Wielding Assailant In ICE Traffic Stop Shooting

Hundreds march in Greenland to support Arctic island in the face of Trump’s threats to take it over (Associated Press)

Trump Is Making China Great Again (Catherine Rampell/The Bulwark)  This appears to be the New Narrative at the Bullshitwark.

America’s myriad afflictions (Philip Bump/How To Read This Chart) Philip Bump loses his shit.

Minneapolis braces for march called by pardoned Jan. 6 rioter (Washington Post)

The Stupidest Trump Move So Far (Paul Krugman)  The vacuum speaks.

Of Course: MS NOW Compares Administration’s Minnesota Reaction To Hitler

This Is the Only Card Trump Can Play (Jamelle Bouie/New York Times)

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In Japan, workers rely on healthy lunch bowls for under $4. Japanese media literally tracks these prices because they’re a daily staple for working people. The Japanese media reported on a surge in their price from $2.63 to $4.25 in 2021.

In America, we track grocery prices. Restaurants are luxury goods.

The U.S. lacks this budget restaurant tier! There’s obviously demand for it. We’d buy $4 balanced meals if we had the option.

How does Japan’s restaurant market do this?

It’s not grocery prices; Japan’s grocery prices are ~18% higher than the United States.

It’s not hourly wages. Japan’s minimum wage ($6.68 an hour) is similar to America’s ($7.25).

Read it.

Renowned Attorney Larry Klayman, founder of Judicial Watch and later Freedom Watch USA, has long predicted (along with other top intel experts) increasing violence from the Left in a Marxist style Bolshevik Revolution.

Watch it.

Hint: Government is the problem, not the solution.

Moral: Always check to make sure the car comes with a spare tire.

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What Americans are witnessing—large-scale welfare and child care fraud, weak enforcement, political paralysis, and rising public anger—is not random. It is the predictable downstream result of decades of policies made by people who would never have to live with the consequences and who faced few personal costs for getting it wrong.

To address this moment honestly, several truths must be held at the same time, without flinching and without allowing the conversation to be deliberately mischaracterized.

Read it.

Venezuela is not poor due to sanctions. It is poor because the Chavez-Maduro regime stole hundreds of billions of dollars and demolished the productive fabric of the economy.

Venezuela had 12,700 private companies when Chávez came to power, according to Conindustria. Only about 3,800 manufacturing industries are still operating, of which around 3,200 are privately owned and 600 are state?owned.

The assault on private property culminated with the expropriation of more than 690 companies in twelve years. Government-run businesses failed, and large state-owned companies in Venezuela are technically insolvent or heavily loss-making.

The Telegraph (UK).

Telegraph obtains unredacted plans showing how close the underground complex will come to cables carrying sensitive British financial data.

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With copper prices at new highs, attacks on communications and power networks have sharply increased, and telecommunications companies, power suppliers, and construction firms are sounding the alarm.

Copper was trading at roughly $6 per pound or $12,000 a ton at midday on Jan. 7, a more than 30 percent year-over-year increase, according to industry analyst MarketWatch.

The increase in price contributed to the more than 15,540 copper theft incidents in 2025, according to a report by the U.S. Telecommunication Association. The volume of thefts during the first half of the year was double the previous period.

“Today, bad actors typically target communications lines in search of copper,” the report stated.

Read it.

Amid reports that hundreds of anti-government demonstrators in Iran have been killed in recent days — and President Trump reportedly considering US intervention — tensions over the Iran crisis hit a flash point in Los Angeles on Sunday when a U-Haul truck with signage opposing the reinstallation of an Iranian monarchy drove through a group of marchers calling for regime change. The crowd quickly went from frightened screams to outraged violence, mobbing the truck after it stopped and pummeling the driver as police took him into custody.

The incident, which appears to spring from clashing views within the Iranian diaspora, unfolded at 3:40pm on Sunday afternoon, after a crowd of demonstrators had gathered in LA’s upscale Westwood. Along with adjacent Westside neighborhoods, Westwood forms the epicenter of LA’s prosperous Iranian-American population. At approximately 138,000, it’s one of the largest populations of Iranians in the world outside of Iran. As the crowd was in the vicinity of the Wilshire Federal Building, video showed a truck moving at a decidedly unsafe but not necessarily homicidal speed down Wilshire Boulevard as it was lined with demonstrators.

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A culture-enricher in the Dutch city of Nijmegen went on a rampage with an axe in a shopping center last Thursday, doing damage to a another man who may or may not have been a fellow culture-enricher.

Generally speaking, the preferred bladed weapon for sub-Saharan Africans is the machete. For North Africans, Middle Easterners, and South Asians it’s the kebab knife. But all of them will gladly use an axe when necessary, so the ethnicity of this particular perpetrator can’t be determined from the available information.

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If you find yourself squinting while driving at night, you’re not alone. The IIHS reports that average headlight brightness has roughly doubled in the last decade. The NHTSA receives growing consumer complaints regarding headlight brightness. There’s a real, widespread anger out there; there’s even a subreddit with over 44,000 members complaining about this growing and very real crisis.

The numbers support the public’s frustration. Older halogen bulbs produced approximately 1,000 lumens. Newer factory-fitted LEDs produce up to 4,000 lumens or more. Some aftermarket LEDs have been found to produce 10,000 lumens or more. But the problem is that the federal brightness standards for automotive headlights have not changed for decades.

The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 108 hasn’t had significant updates since 1986, with an addition allowing Adaptive Driving Beam (ADB) headlights coming only in 2022. The NHTSA last investigated the issue of headlamp glare in 2003. The current standards include huge loopholes for auto manufacturers to emit as much light as desired, as long as the manufacturer meets the requirements of the other parts of the regulation.

The Telegraph (UK).

A Labour council has been accused of building “socialist speed bumps” that scrape high-performance and luxury family cars.

Residents on an affluent street in Lewisham, south-east London, say the local authority has installed sleeping policemen that are prone to damaging the undercarriages of expensive private vehicles.

Motorists in Blackheath have even produced their own engineering report, which claims that 12 out of a sample of 15 new speed bumps breach Lewisham council’s recommended height limit. The council, however, insists they all meet national guidelines.

An excellent metaphor for how socialism deals with life generally. Socialism clings to ‘equality’, and since it is impossible to make low-quality people high-quality, the only method available is to make high-quality people in effect low-quality.

Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” is even more apropos to modern life than Orwell’s “1984”.

Read it.

An estimated 453,230 accounts were shut down in the United Kingdom in the last year, a stunning figure that has drawn outrage from the country’s leading conservative lawmaker.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called the shocking figure “appalling” and slammed European rules that he believes “makes it cheaper for banks to close accounts over unusual transactions.” Farage, who was elected to the British Parliament in 2024 and leads the conservative populist Reform Party, is no stranger to debanking, having had his accounts closed by Coutts in 2023.

So what’s the banks’ excuse? “Financial crime reasons,” they said, according to documents obtained by The Telegraph under Freedom of Information rules.

The Other McCain.

There are about a million things I could say about what happened Wednesday morning in Minneapolis, and the subsequent reaction, but before we get to the commentary, first let’s grab the news:

The woman gunned down by an ICE agent in Minneapolis has been identified as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, who described herself as a mother, a wife and a poet.
Good was identified by her mom hours after she was shot and killed when she clipped an ICE agent with her car during a protest against the federal agents, the Star Tribune reported.
“Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” her mother, Donna Ganger, told the newspaper. . . .
Video appeared to show her Honda Pilot making contact with an ICE agent as he opened fire. President Trump and other officials have said Good’s killing was justified as the officer was acting in self-defense.
Good was the mom of a 6-year-old boy and had recently moved to the neighborhood with her wife and son, according to her distraught spouse and a neighbor who spoke to the Tribune. She was killed just blocks away from her home, the outlet reported.
Her young son was left an orphan by the shooting, according to his shaken grandfather.
The child’s father, a comedian Good was previously married to, died in 2023, also at age 37. . . .

Gonna pause there a minute, because in none of the news accounts I’ve read is this explained: She was from Colorado Springs. The father of her child, Timmy Ray Macklin Jr., spent 14 years in the Air Force then tried to become a comedian before his death at age 36 (not 37). Less than three years later, the widow is living in Minneapolis with a lesbian “wife” and participating in radical protests? How does this happen? It’s hardly your typical Hallmark Channel movie plot.

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Spanish police have arrested 15 international bus drivers in Barcelona, accused of transporting illegal migrants between France and Spain in exchange for cash, exploiting their access to regular cross-border routes, according to reports by El País.

France appears to be immigrant-export-central for the E.U., sending them by the boatload to Britain and now by the bus-load to Spain.

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Zarai Maza survived a torched vehicle and a horrific car crash after peacefully protesting the Venezuelan regime, an unacceptable act in her home country, where speaking out could cost you your life or those of your family members.

She said she believes that the Venezuelan dictatorship was trying to kill her over her activism.

“They started the persecution against me in 2014, and it lasted until 2017,” Maza said. “They made three assassination attempts against my life, and after the last one, I was in the hospital. I couldn’t remember anything.”

Read it.

America’s interstate highways, the backbone of its economy and critical infrastructure, are increasingly traversed by an invisible fleet of truck drivers tied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Through lax enforcement of non-domiciled Commercial Driver’s Licenses (CDLs), Beijing-linked networks are exploiting glaring gaps in U.S. visibility and oversight, placing unvetted operators behind the wheels of 80,000-pound vehicles. This is not merely a safety issue—it represents a deliberate national security vulnerability.

At the center stands the Chinese American Trucker Organization USA Inc. (CATOU), a New York-based nonprofit whose chairwoman, Geng Hang, has held leadership roles in organizations affiliated with the CCP’s United Front Work Department, a known influence and intelligence arm.

Read it.

Attacks by leftist activists are rising in Germany, with the latest targeting Berlin’s power network and leaving tens of thousands without electricity in freezing winter conditions. The muted response from establishment officials has raised concerns that such violence is being systematically downplayed.

In the year up to November 30th, 2025, the federal government recorded 931 left-wing motivated violent crimes—an increase of approximately 45%. This finding, published in Junge Freiheit on Tuesday, was brought about by a parliamentary question submitted by the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland.

The Berlin power outage, which reports say will end after just over four days on January 7th, is already understood to have resulted in several vulnerable citizens dying. One CDU official even accepted on Saturday that the targeted attack could result in “hundreds to thousands of deaths.”