Read it.

…now they are coming for your meat. Global warming, the universal excuse for left-wing policies designed to make your life worse, demands that modern agriculture be shut down. If you think that is an exaggeration, talk to anyone in Sri Lanka or the Netherlands.

Read it.

Gun manufacturer RemArms, previously known as Remington Arms, will close its manufacturing facility in Ilion, New York, next year, a decision that Republicans are blaming on Democrats’ anti-gun policies.

Read it.

Having a day off work for Christmas and Easter is evidence of Canada’s ‘colonialist’ history, a publicly funded human rights body has claimed.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission, which is funded by the federal government, said that the public celebration of major Christian festivals is rooted in religious intolerance.

“Discrimination against religious minorities in Canada is grounded in Canada’s history of colonialism,” the group said. “An obvious example is statutory holidays in Canada.”

Read it.

As any observer of contemporary geopolitics will have noticed, the values upheld by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are diametrically opposed to the values of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, free enterprise, and the rule of law, which conservatives in Europe seek to defend. Since 2004, China has successfully undertaken a large-scale initiative of cultural diplomacy, through which it seeks to undermine these quintessentially Western values. The primary means by which the CCP is putting this plan into action are the Confucius Institutes (CIs), which have proliferated globally within a mere two decades, creating CCP footholds within academic institutions throughout the West.

Washington Free Beacon.

The presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT appeared before Congress on Tuesday to discuss the rising anti-Semitism on their campuses. It did not go well for them.

Faced with hostile questions from the Republican-controlled House Committee on Education and the Workforce, whose members include Harvard alumna Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), the presidents struggled to explain why their institutions—which have repeatedly denounced, disinvited, and punished professors for airing conservative views—suddenly discovered the value of free speech when students and faculty began defending Hamas.

“In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) asked Harvard president Claudine Gay. The school’s diversity administrators had thrown a fit when Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, stated on Fox News that there are only two sexes, causing such a firestorm that she had to take a leave of absence. Gay didn’t answer the question.

Doudenal ulcer. Not Fun.

Hospital dreams are strange dreams.

Again, blogging will be light and variable until these issues are resolved.

My apologies.

Read it.

On April 27, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree that provides a path to Russian citizenship for people living in the parts of Ukraine which are under Moscow’s control. Those who opt out face the prospect of losing their property rights, and risk being displaced from their homes.

The decree covers four Ukrainian regions that Russia has occupied: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. Individuals holding ‘passports’ issued by the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic will be considered foreign nationals if they fail to obtain Russian passports by July 1, 2024. Oleksandr Pavlichenko, the executive director of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union for Human Rights, claims that those who fail to register will be removed, resulting in the loss of property ownership: “This property ownership right can be declared invalid. It can be revoked, meaning they will lose their rights to that real estate.” Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing war has had a massive impact on civilian property and energy infrastructure, to say nothing of other human rights concerns in the country.

Gates of Vienna.

One of the conclusions emerging from the International Crisis Summit 4 in Bucharest is that the experimental mRNA treatment intended to mitigate the effects of infection with the Wuhan Coronavirus actually increased the incidence of mortality due to COVID-19.

Read it.

You’re not paranoid. The global ruling class really does want to stop you from eating beef. And pork. And chicken.

Freeberg nails it.

When the communists switched from hot wars to propaganda as their tools of trade, Americans, who thought they’d defeated the scourge for good, were swamped with TogetherWeCanDoThis agitprop. Being a proud people with good hearts, they generally took this as benign advice on how to be good stewards of the earth. There arose a common theme: If you change your household management and consumer behavior, it may seem like a negligible effect, but imagine the cumulative result of all of us doing it. We can save the planet! So recycle!

And…get you some new light bulbs with mercury powder on the inside, that create a hazardous spill site if they ever shatter. Multi-use heavy plastic grocery bags. Paper straws. Electric cars. If you want to keep your gas-powered car, all sorts of new gizmos and doodads under the hood for “environmental regulations” that wear out & kick on your check-engine light…just when you thought you were about to have all your bills paid.

TogetherWeCanDoThis!! Toad tunnels under the freeway so the frogs don’t get run over by the cars when they cross. Little tiny trampolines under the trees so the squirrels don’t hurt themselves when they fall. It’s the only planet we have!

Surcharges built into everything. Sweet, sweet surcharges. Upon your power bill, your gas bill, your water bill, your sewage bill, your cable television bill…America has become the perfect mixing pot for communism and capitalism. We promote the communism, being very careful to never use the actual word, and then we use it to rake in the moolah making just a few people fabulously wealthy, at the expense of everyone else. Interesting. It’s exactly the opposite result from what communism is supposed to achieve. With capitalism as the tool. But it isn’t really capitalism if we didn’t order it; we’re just repeatedly falling for it.

I don’t want to save this planet anymore.

Read it.

The National Health Service in the UK has come under increased scrutiny after it rolled out a new £450 million IT system that only allows midwives to register the ‘gender identity’ of newborn babies, rather than their biological sex.

The Foundry.

A new report is documenting a drastic rise in anti-Christian hate crimes across Europe. The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe published its annual report last week, detailing a 44% increase over the course of 2022 in social hostility toward and violent attacks against Christians as well as acts of vandalism and desecration against churches.

According to the report, 748 anti-Christian hate crimes were committed in Europe last year, 38 of which were violent physical attacks and three of which were murders. Arson attacks were also more common than in years past, and churches were targeted for firebombings and vandalism, especially in France and Germany. In fact, arson attacks nearly doubled over the course of one year, rising from 60 attacks in 2021 to 106 in 2022.

The report noted that “there had been a surge of clear extremism-motivated attacks.” The majority of these attacks were committed by groups with far-left, satanic, Islamic, feminist, or LGBT affiliations.

Doctor’s appointments.
Hours and hours and hours waiting for government employees.
Medical tests.
Waiting all day for a plumber or electrician to show up.

Read it.

A demonstration for the International Day of Violence Against Women in Rome over the weekend turned violent itself when the feminist protesters vandalized and threw Molotov cocktails at the national headquarters of the pro-life group Pro Vita & Famiglia.

“The mask has fallen, showing the true face of transfeminism: an aggressive, violent, dangerous and ideological movement that does not tolerate those who think differently than them and that does not care about poor women who are victims of femicide,” Pro Vita & Famiglia said in a statement.

Organizers of Saturday’s march and local politicians responsible for allowing the demonstration have failed to commend the violence of this group of participants, the Italian newspaper Il Giornali noted.

The Register.

China is offering foreign influencers access to its vast market in return for content that sings its praises and helps to spreads Beijing’s desired narratives more widely around the world, according to think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

In a policy brief [PDF] published today titled “Singing from the CCP’s songsheet,” ASPI analysts Fergus Ryan and Daria Impiombato – along with independent contractor on contemporary Chinese politics and media Matt Knight – analyzed the output of over 120 foreign influencers who operate active accounts on Chinese video-streaming platforms such as Bilibili, Douyin, Xigua, and Toutiao.

Some, the report observes, have tens of millions of followers on Chinese social media, after discovering that “appealing to Chinese audiences’ sense of nationalism can provide a fast track to gain popularity, increase their online presence and, ultimately, generate more revenue.”

“Indeed, China’s internet regulations encourage users to actively promote party propaganda – so many influencers have adapted to thrive in that system,” the policy brief adds.

So far, so entrepreneurial.

But also not possible – unless influencers are enthusiastically pro-Beijing.

Read it.

A. Gun owners are never trained enough so are dangerous and shouldn’t be armed at all.

B. Gun owners who do train are crazy psychos living out their wannabe fantasies itching to shoot someone.

C. Even though it takes orders of magnitude more effort to become marginally effective with martial arts than a gun, you are better off using martial arts and not having a gun.

D. *Real Men* use their hands. This is why your mom and grandma shouldn’t have guns either.

E. Twitter randos who have never been punched in the face are experts on real life violence, and whatever you have personally experienced doesn’t count.

Larry Correia is pretty hardcore.

Quilette.

“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” This observation, which seems to have already receded over history’s lost horizon, came courtesy of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan barely one week before Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel. Speaking at the Atlantic Festival at the end of September, Sullivan described a new Middle East in the making. In recent years, he explained, a burst of diplomacy had established the political and economic conditions for a new equilibrium from the Persian Gulf to Gaza. The implications for the de-escalation of old conflicts were profound. A truce in Yemen, Iranian attacks against US forces down, American involvement in Iraq “stable.” Although regional problems remained, the diminished chaos of the Middle East was allowing the Biden administration to turn its attention to more pressing concerns in other parts of the world.

Read it.

Intersectionality red in tooth and claw.

Read it.

There are two annual traditions that make up Thanksgiving. One is the ancient and venerable tradition of thanking the Creator for our bounty while the other is the more recent leftist tradition of turning the day into a festival of grievances, a ‘festivus’ during which they pick political arguments with family members and launch into screeds about how Thanksgiving is the product of imperialism and colonialism.

The Nation magazine recently proposed replacing it with a ‘Truthsgiving’ during which we will all confess our crimes and ponder how much better life would be if the Pilgrims had never come to America, and the Nazis and Communists had won WWII and gone on to exterminate 70% of the population of the planet.

Wrecking Thanksgiving, like the family, womens’ sports and Star Wars is just one of those things lefties do. The perpetual teenage tantrums that began with Karl Marx and ended with Cousin Jan screaming at the Thanksgiving table about how nobody understands Hamas and how inspiring she found Osama bin Laden’s letter are the essence of the movement.

Read it.

The European Parliament will most likely approve a report on Wednesday, November 22nd, that seeks to amend the treaties of the European Union, liquidating member states’ veto rights, and giving more power to EU institutions in what conservative forces are describing as a dangerous power grab.

As we previously reported, the proposals were put forward by the so-called ‘Verhofstadt Group’, a circle of MEPs led by the Eurofederalist Guy Verhofstadt from the liberal Renew group. The plans would see a massive transfer of competences from a national to an EU level, and the unanimity voting system—veto rights of member states—would almost completely be abolished, to be replaced by majority or qualified majority voting.

The EU would be exclusively responsible for issues concerning the environment, public health, industry, and education. There would be shared competences with member states in the areas of energy, foreign affairs, external security and defence, and external border policy.

Read it.

In the movies, safe deposit boxes are magic: Located in bank vaults, they’re depicted as the most secure things in the universe. Thieves targeting safe deposit boxes must plan for decades and bring in dozens of experts. If a character wants to keep something absolutely safe (whether it’s jewels or important documents), they stick it in a safe deposit box and no force in the universe can disturb it.

Unfortunately, that isn’t actually true. Safe deposit boxes aren’t very safe; banks increasingly regard them as more trouble than they’re worth, and they’re not well-regulated. There are exactly zero federal laws covering safe deposit boxes, and they largely operate in the murky world of lease agreements. And if you actually read the (probably very brief) rental agreement you sign with the bank, you’d likely discover that the bank has restricted its liability to a ridiculous level.

Most surprisingly, according to the Office of Comptroller of Currency (OCC) your bank can “drill” your safe deposit box open (removing the contents) under a wide range of conditions, including court orders and search warrants, failure to pay fees, because of branch closure—or because the bank messes up their records. So if you have a safe deposit box and it gets drilled, what can you do?

Notice the question on your Federal tax return about whether you have a safety deposit box, which (if you answer honestly) tells them that there is something there to drill for.

Blogging will be light and variable until they are resolved. My apologies.

Female Boxer Refuses Bout Against Transgender (Fake Woman) Opponent

The Root Cause of the Insanity on College Campuses Is Older Than You May Think

3 Conservative Justices Dissent As Supreme Court Refuses To Reinstate Florida Drag Show Law

Virginia Dems Seek to Establish Abortion as Right

Up In Smoke: California’s Largest Pot Distributor Collapses Amid $17 Million In Unpaid Taxes

EU’s Digital Identity Wallet Is An Electronic Leash With Which Brussels Wants To Control Its Citizens

Democratic machine looms large in race to unseat Menendez (Washington Poop)

Transgender woman footballer quits and threatens to sue for discrimination because rivals refuse to compete against her after she left opponents ‘terrified’ and broke knee of a player ‘blocking her shot’ (UK Daily Mail)

Stop Funding University Programs Contrary to US Interests

Winsom Newsom’s Kamala Word Salad Recipe

‘Decolonisation’: A Polite Word for Ethnic Cleansing

Trans Swimmer Sets NJ Women’s School Record

NYC Mayor Cuts Migrant Funds to Spare NYPD, FDNY, Sani. Dept.

Thousands Sign Petition to Boycott Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade Over Trans Agenda

Trump: Dems’ Opposition to Voter ID Exposes Them

NBC Poll: Gun Ownership at Record High  Gee, I wonder why.

Federal appeals court strikes Maryland handgun rule (The Hill)

Federal Court Rules Against Maryland’s Gun License Law

Read it.

MEPs, bored between negotiations on arms deliveries to Ukraine, have found a new enemy: the wooden boxes used for Camembert. These little wooden rounds that contain one of the jewels of French gastronomy are under threat from the zeal of Brussels officials, who accuse them of a crime that is unforgivable these days: they cannot be recycled.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Of course, Americans had long known that something had gone wrong at their colleges. They had increasingly encountered college graduates who were poorly educated in basic skills and lacked general knowledge—and yet highly politicized, and intolerant of different views and opinions. Ignorant but arrogant is a sad way to start an adult life.

College, the public knew, has certainly eroded from our cherished idea of a four-year idealized respite from adult employment. It once was intended to be a place where youth learned to be open-minded, tolerant, skilled, and eager to learn the nature and traditions of Western civilization, art, literature, languages, philosophy, and history.

Instead, all too often “college” has now descended into a six-to-seven-year misadventure that nationwide often results in only half those enrolled ever receiving degrees. Nearly all sink deeply in student debt. And yet for all the borrowed tuition money, few prove capable of writing analytically, speaking articulately, or knowing the general referents, past and present, of their very civilization.

Rotten apple: New York dubbed ‘least free state’ in country in new study (Fox News) Worse than California? There’s an accomplishment.

New York continues to be ranked one of the ‘least free’ states, new survey shows (Fox Business)

How Free Is Your State? (Cato Institute) Not very, I’m guessing.

NY ranked ‘Least Free State,’ with high taxes, debt, regulation: study (N.Y. Post)

NBC News Loves Deep State: Laments GOP Halting ‘Coordination’ Between FBI, Social Media

Newsom Ad Targets DeSantis’ Six-Week Abortion Ban  I guess he’s running for President.

Conservative Think Tank Reveals Best, Worst States For Freedom In Education

Senate Dems stake their 2024 hopes on last 2 red-state incumbents (Politico)

D.C. Combating Car Thefts, Carjackings With Dashcams, AirTags

¡Afuera! WashPost TRIGGERED ‘Far-Right’ Javier Milei Won Argentina Presidency

Obama’s Diversity Push in Air Traffic Controllers Is Eventually Going to Get People Killed

Do Or DEI? Federal Judge Finds Policies Are Mandatory And Unconstitutional In California Case

Wisconsin Governor Vetoes $2 Billion Republican Tax Cut

Even Census Bureau Is Pushing Radical Gender Ideology

Why TSA’s Implementation of Facial Recognition Is More Dangerous Than You Think

The New American Credo: When The Truth Hurts, Lie

Cardi B Turns On Democrats: “B**ch, We’re Going To Be Drowning In F**king Rats” 

Read it.

The voting machines America is currently using need to go. They breed mistrust, and there’s a reason for that: They are not trustworthy. They are also inherently undemocratic.

No, I’m not talking about 2020–well, not as such. I’m talking about all the past elections since we started using these machines, as well as all the future ones until we come to our senses.

The recent Presidential election in Argentina had 30,000,000 paper ballots, and they were all counted (and the result reported) within one day. But no American county can do that.

The use of insecure, un-auditable voting machines appears to be designed to encourage fraud.

Denver spends millions on transporting migrants to other parts of US (Fox News)

NYC’s Adams Urges Rich: Fill Budget Gaps Amid Migrant Costs (NewsMax) Rich to Adams: Send them back where they came from–we’ll give you money for that.

Oregon’s First-in-the-Nation Drug Decriminalization Law Faces Pushback

Investigators Found Fire and Safety Hazards on Land Under I-10 in Los Angeles Before Arson Fire

Lessons from Britain’s National Extinction—Its Deep State Is As Bad As Ours

Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Positive Views of Science Continue to Decline  Hardly surprising, as science becomes more and more politicized.

Let The Donor Revolution Begin

Cats Are No Match for New York City’s Rats

Yet Another Leftist Journalist Arrested On Child Pornography Charges

San Francisco Mayor Reminds Everyone To Get Their Christmas Shoplifting Done Early (Babylon Bee)

Gang crisis shaking Sweden  And they are heavily Muslim.

Dorothy Bishop on the prevalence of scientific fraud

No One Wants to Pay Anymore

Read it.

“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” The sentiments underlying Joe Biden’s mid-2020 statement would be affirmed today not only by center-left American opinion but also those significant segments of American conservatism that have fallen seriously out of love with free markets.

Friedman died on November 16, 2006. His influence at that point upon economics and economic policy remained considerable. Friedman’s ideas on topics ranging from school choice to monetary policy were a major reference point for the American right, but also parts of the left. Exemplifying the latter was former Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration Larry Summers. He went from regarding Friedman as a “devil figure” in his youth to seeing him as someone whose ideas on many subjects merited respect.

The awe in which Friedman was held started unraveling after the 2008 financial crisis, and there’s little question that some of his ideas lost traction over the subsequent decade. That is part of the background to a new biography of Friedman. In Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, Jennifer Burns, a Stanford history professor and research fellow at the Hoover Institution where Friedman spent the last three decades of his career, has authored a comprehensive study of the economist’s life in the world of ideas.

Read it.

John wrote here Sunday about the “National Vote Compact” (NVC), the proposal of the goo-goo (“good government”) reformers to get around the electoral college by having a majority of states agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. I agree with John that it is a loopy idea, though I’d love the spectacle of California someday having to cast its electoral votes for a narrow Republican national popular vote winner when the present system would elect a Democrat with California’s lopsided electoral vote bloc. I’m sure the compact would go down well in that case.

Read it.

It is striking how ‘far-right’ has become an all-purpose insult in Europe and the West. It is a label slapped on anybody who stands outside the narrow conformism of woke politics. Whether it’s parents protesting against drag queens preaching trans ideology to children, or citizens concerned about anything from the EU’s crusade against cars and farmers to the imposition of vaccine passports or mass migration, they are all apparently ‘far-right’ now.

The message is always that ‘these people’ are basically scum, beyond the limits of respectable debate, and should not be engaged with. Instead they should be cancelled, arrested or banned altogether.

Little wonder then that the police, politicians and media seized with relish on the ‘far-right’ counter protest in London on Armistice Day last weekend. They focused on a few hundred white working-class football fans who briefly skirmished with police near the Cenotaph on Whitehall (before respecting the two minutes’ silence for the war dead), as a welcome distraction from facing the truth about the massive ‘peaceful’ pro-Palestinian demonstration up the road, which was really an anti-Israeli, often antisemitic, hate march.

Read it.

The Jews are just a warm-up. Many people have made this observation, but this is a nice data point: earlier this year, Minnesota’s legislature enacted a statute that requires “Ethnic Studies” to be incorporated into every single class from kindergarten through 12th grade. Including math and biology.

And Minnesota is not alone. The “Ethnic Studies” dodge started in California, but it is expanding across the country. And “Ethnic Studies” is just one arrow in the Left’s quiver. The teachers’ unions have converted our public schools into anti-American propaganda centers, and this was well underway long before “Ethnic Studies” came along.

Read it.

When I see hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating, rioting, carrying signs, organized and following some kind of leadership, I always wonder: who paid for this? In the case of the anti-Semitism that currently is sweeping across America, there seems to be a pretty simple answer.

…

In general, the radical left is not a grass roots movement. It exists due to the largesse of a tiny number of rich leftists.

Read it.

In 1957, Albert Memmi addressed the question of the Left’s relationship with terrorism in his book, The Colonizer and Colonized. Memmi was a Tunisian Jew, equally committed to socialist Zionism and anticolonialism. The Left tradition, he observed, “condemns terrorism” as “incomprehensible, shocking and politically absurd. For example, the deaths of children and persons outside the struggle.”

But Memmi’s suppositions were outdated even as he wrote. The history of the modern Left’s romance with terrorism—not the “old-fashioned” version aimed at czars or imperial officials, but the kind directed against unarmed civilians—had already begun. It started with the Algerian War and gained momentum throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and beyond with the emergence of the Red Brigades, the Baader Meinhof Gang, the Irish Republican Army, the Japanese Red Army, the Weathermen, and the panoply of organizations included in the Palestine Liberation Organization and, especially, its Rejectionist Front. The latter held pride of place: “For the Sixth International, the Palestinian resistance is a banner … an inspiration for the revolt of the dispossessed, both in its ends and in its means,” proclaimed Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, a prominent Egyptian leftwing intellectual and activist.

It was at this time that the oxymoronic and ethically repellent concept of what the late Middle East scholar, anti-colonialist, and socialist Fred Halliday criticized as “progressive atrocities” gained credence on the Left, particularly within the Palestinian movement and among the groups supporting it. Of course, the Palestinian national project—like Zionism—has always contained a variety of ideologies ranging from peaceful coexistence to the elimination of the other. (The latter tendency is appallingly prevalent among many members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government.) But it is no exaggeration to say that the Palestinian movement, even before the founding of Israel in 1948, has been defined by terror more than any other, and that terrorist groups have always been prominent within the movement.

Groups fear faculty that defended Hamas could set California standards: ‘Institutionalization of antisemitism’ (Fox News)

Suppose They Threw a Cage Match Between Fascism and Democracy and Nobody Cared (Slate)

“Extremely Painful” NYC Budget Cuts Will Lead To Fewer New Police Hires, Reduced Trash Pickups  But not less immigration nor less government nannying.

ABC, CBS OMIT Arrest of Suspect In Death Of Pro-Israel Protester, NBC Weirdly Sandwiches Coverage Between Other Stories

NPR Host Inskeep Asks Jeffries About ‘Extreme Right Wing,’ Avoids Talk of Democrat Radicals

Don’t just be horrified. Ban AR-15s, bump stocks and large magazines. (Washington Poop)

Playbook: The case for triangulation on immigration (Politico)

The hidden biases at play in the U.S. Senate (Washington Poop) “People of color get significantly less representation than White voters. And that’s not the only way the Senate is skewed.”  The Narrative, straight up.

Nebraska Teen Slits Son’s Throat, Reddit User Blames Lack of Abortion Access

Target Doubles Down, Faces Conservative Backlash As ‘Woke’ Christmas Decor Hits Shelves

CBS News Reporter Faces Possible Contempt Charges

How UN Undermines Parental Rights by Pushing Gender Ideology

The View, Ed. Secretary Cardona Decry State Control of Curriculums

Good Guys (and Gals) With Guns Still Out There, as These 12 Examples Show

Teachers Conference Lecture Declares Math a ‘Tool of Oppression’

Newsom Is Mandating Education in Disinformation—While Spreading It Online

MCC: EU Abuses LGBT Rights to Discipline and Undermine Member States

New York Times.

It has been 20 years since scientists put together the first rough draft of the human genome, the three billion genetic letters of DNA tightly wound inside most of our cells. Today, scientists are still struggling to decipher it.

But a batch of studies published in Science on Thursday has cast a bright light into the dark recesses of the human genome by comparing it with those of 239 other mammals, including narwhals, cheetahs and screaming hairy armadillos.

By tracing this genomic evolution over the past 100 million years, the so-called Zoonomia Project has revealed millions of stretches of human DNA that have changed little since our shrew-like ancestors scurried in the shadows of dinosaurs. These ancient genetic elements most likely carry out essential functions in our bodies today, the project found, and mutations within them can put us at risk of a range of diseases.

EU Launches Online Platform To Attract Millions of Labor Migrants

UN Condemns France Over Homeschooling Ban

Make St. Nicholas More Moroccan, Says Belgian Mayor

BKA Report: Sharp Uptick in Violent Crime Committed by Migrants Against Germans

Democrats Introduce Bill To Restrict And Track Ammo Sales While Criminalizing “Straw Purchases”

Maryland Teachers Union ‘Milking’ Taxpayers While Test Scores Plummet 

Judge Blocks California Colleges’ Inclusion Rules

Gavin Newsom Gave Millions to Mosques that Cheer the Annihilation of Jews

This Anti-Israel Terrorist Organization Found A Home In A Left-Wing Nonprofit

Oakland A’s Move to Las Vegas Approved  Fleeing California–and California taxes.

Absolute Nonsense: Obama Again Claims To Be First Amendment Absolutist While Supporting Censorship

Anheuser Marketing Chief Out as Bud Light Sales Tank

Mo. AG Seeks Accountability for Soros-Backed Attorney

The Postcolonial Left’s Blindness to Islamic Homophobia  The term ‘useful idiots’ applies.

Quilette.

In September, a new statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky was erected in the Moscow suburbs outside of the headquarters of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki (SVR). Dzerzhinsky was the Polish creator of one of the world’s great repressive political machines. In 1917, he had been instructed to create the SVR’s forerunner, known then as the Cheka, by Lenin himself, who much admired the toughness of the man who became known as Iron Felix. The organisation would be called many names—the GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB—and it is now split into the SVR and the domestic Federal Security Service or Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB).

Iron Felix was Heinrich Himmler plus competence.

Read it.

Initially introduced in the 1980s to reduce labor costs, self-service machines transferred the work from employees to customers. They gained popularity in supermarkets in the early 2000s, especially during the pandemic, as they allowed shoppers to avoid close contact with others, according to the Yahoo report.

However, retailers are now reassessing self-checkout due to its association with increased merchandise losses, both from accidental errors and deliberate theft, a phenomenon known as “shrink.”

I don’t go into a store to do the work that store employees ought to be doing. I’m surprised they haven’t started forcing shoppers to restock the shelves for them.

Read it.

Our historically twisted view that wars don’t happen here at home, interrupted by Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11, 2001, may require our immediate and stone-cold sober attention.

Our borders have been wide open since Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas took up his post in 2021 with over seven million illegal immigrants invading us since his confirmation.

As incredulous as it is, he still hasn’t been impeached.

California program to lease land under freeways faces scrutiny after major Los Angeles fire (Associated Press)

Arson Damaged Vital LA Freeway

This Checkered Terrorist Durag Is Literally Exploding on the Fashion Scene. Is It More Than Just an Inti-FAD-a?

Watch: Officials Grilled Over San Fran’s ‘Miraculously’ Spotless Streets For Xi Visit

DC Mayor Declares Public Emergency as Crime Spirals Out of Control

Watch: UPS Driver Carjacked In ‘Grand Theft Auto-Style’ Robbery Near DC

MEET THE NEW BOSS: George Soros’ Son Alex Takes Over $25-Billion Leftist Empire. Here’s Why He Could Be Even Worse

Italian Leftists Move To Block Albania Migrant Outsourcing Deal

Macho Joe Scarborough Said He’d Beat Up Capitol Tourist—But Appalled By Senate Scrap

Read it.

Howdy — this is not a religious commentary, as I leave that (mostly) to the members of their respective organizations.

The Pope exists in the real world and is an influential force in human affairs, and so this atheist feels more than qualified to comment on that basis. This is the same basis on which I approve of Protestant reforms (raised Protestant) despite having no religious charter for my views. Also, I find some Protestantism more agreeable than others. So much for my preferences — that’s not the point. Wars have been fought over this stuff, nations dissolved and founded, and from my admittedly atheist perspective, most religious wars are just ordinary wars for power and security (or personal glory) using a different label than the other options of race, ethnicity, nation-state, geography, or “vocation” (meaning a given people’s way of getting on).

I remember when liberty had a great ally in a sturdy and forthright man of a Pope. Reagan, Thatcher, John Paul II — those were heroic leaders united in a global crusade against the pure evil of Communism, winning WWIII without plunging the planet into fire.

Marginal Revolution.

In Washington-speak the “Inflation Reduction Act” requires HHS to “negotiate” drug prices for Medicare Part D and Part B to establish a maximum “fair” price. In reality there is no negotiation–firms who refuse to negotiate are hit with huge taxes. The “negotiation” if you want to call it that is “your money or your life” and fairness has little to do with it. The IRA also requires very costly inflation rebates, i.e. a price control/tax. In essence, the IRA is a taking; for drugs with a large Medicare market it is similar to abrogating patents to 9 years for small molecule drugs and 13 years for biologics. For the included drugs there will be a significant reduction in revenues. Moreover, we don’t yet know whether the plan will be extended to more and more drugs. There is significant uncertainty affecting the entire market. What will be situation in 10 years? Will the US be like Europe?

Read it.

A November 3 post on X (formerly Twitter) from J.K. Rowling caught my eye recently. It was her comment on the decision of an Australian court to mandate that the ‘preferred pronouns’ of people identifying as transgender be used as a “matter of respect” to ensure “public confidence in the proper administration of justice.” As Rowling noted: “Asking a woman to refer to her male rapist or violent assaulter as ‘she’ in court is a form of state-sanctioned abuse. Female victims of male violence are further traumatised by being forced to speak a lie.” Indeed, forcing a woman to refer to the man who abused and raped her as ‘she’ seems a particularly grotesque form of gaslighting.

Rowling’s comment gets to the heart of something that is not commented on often enough: the manifest cruelty of the transgender movement. I’m not referring here to the mobs of trans-identified men that so often threaten violence towards women who dare to speak out—or, as in the case of Posie Parker’s visit to New Zealand earlier this year, actually perpetrate it. Nor am I speaking of the torrent of vile threats of rape that women like Rowling face from these vicious men in dresses. I mean the cruelty of the practices and policies imposed by those in power on women and girls in the name of the transgender movement, which have swept virtually every Western country in under a decade.

Gaza hospitals caught on front line of Israel-Hamas war (BBC)

Israel calls on Hamas to surrender Shifa hospital base as US strikes Iran proxies in Syria (Fox News)

Israeli Forces Near a Struggling Hospital They Say Covers a Hamas Complex. (N .Y. Times)

Charts show a stark difference in the human cost of Israeli-Palestinian conflicts over the years (CNBC)

Drastically Different Narratives Emerge Centered On Shifa Hospital’s Mounting Deaths

More than 180,000 people across France march against soaring antisemitism amid the Israel-Hamas war (Associated Press)

Media Worst: Israel’s Enemies Get Away With Murder—And Human Shields and Genocide

Jewish families leaving synagogue ‘targeted’ by pro-Palestinian demonstrators (UK Telegraph)

Another Snapshot Of Kiev’s Military Collapse: But It Ain’t Over Yet

Anatomy Of A Paris Demo

This Progressive Dark Money Behemoth Could Face Criminal Charges Over Anti-Israel Protest (Washington Free Beacon)

These Mosques Pray for the Annihilation of Jews. They Also Receive Money From the Biden Administration.

US, South Korea Plan Against North Korean Nuke Threat  Funny  how North Korea wasn’t a problem with Trump as President.

US Launches 3rd Round Of Airstrikes On Eastern Syria, But ‘Deterrence’ Failing  Remind me why we have troops in Syria.

This Is Not Your Grandfather’s Anti-Semitism

German Tax Dollars to Pay For Mosques?

Why Didn’t MIT Expel Violent Students?

WEAPONS: Adaptations

SUBMARINES: Borei-class SSBN submarines

Antisemitism, Good and Evil (Depending on Who Does It): Fault Lines in French Politics

EU Condemns Hamas’ Use of Human Shields; Tells Israel to Exercise ‘Maximum Restraint’

The Collapse of Russia’s Navy: The Four Seas Problem

Ivy League Student Arrested for Stealing Israeli Flag

Broadcast Networks Used Hamas as a Source in 66% of Evening Newscasts

New York Times Touts ‘Human Rights Advocates’ ‘Scoff’ at Israel, Like They’re Unbiased?

Why the Left Hates Israel and America

We were interviewing a Palestinian farmer. Then the drone and soldiers appeared (NPR)

Let’s Stop Paying Beijing to Steal Our Gene Code

Arrests on Campus

New Chinese institute lures top U.S., Western scientists to obtain advanced American technology

Video roundup

The absolution of Hamas

AP unfamiliar with Hamas way of war

3-Year Old American Among US Hostages In Gaza, White House Confirms “The American toddler’s parents were killed by Hamas during the Oct.7 attacks.”

‘Where Are You?’: Israeli Hostage Families Call Out Women’s Rights Groups, Silent on Kidnappings

Authorities in DC Preparing to Ensure Safety, Security at ‘March for Israel’

Alumni to Harvard: Address Antisemitism or Lose Donations

CNN Refuses to Ask Al Shifa Hospital Doc About Hamas’s Base Underneath

Suella Braverman, Britain’s hardline home secretary, fired as ex-PM David Cameron makes surprise return to government (CNN)

Wolves have returned to California after nearly 150 years. They bring an unexpected problem (The Guardian)

Four L.A. Sheriff’s Department Employees Commit Suicide In A 24 Hour Period

High Stakes And A Simple Choice: “I’m 94 Years Old & Saddened By What I See Happening To America”

Disney+ Will Shut Down in December, Losing Hundreds of Millions

San Francisco Slammed for ‘Band-Aid’ Clean-up Ahead of APEC

Liberals Using Museums to Push ‘Woke’ Marxist Agenda

10 Of New York’s 72 Billionaires Have Left Due To Taxation Since 2019

Marvel-ous Bomb: Disney’s Latest Social Engineering Attempt Is Box Office Flop

Petition Slams Macy’s Parade for LGBTQ Agenda

EU May Force Fast Food Companies To Use Washable Dishes

Anti-Free Speech Google Spent Billions Hiding Feature from Users

Stop Drinking the Political Kool-Aid, America: Voting Will Not Save Us

Police, Protesters Clash at Atlanta Training Center

Britain: Land of Anarchy and Tyranny

Newsom Assures Homeless They Can Resume Pooping On Sidewalks Once His Boss Leaves (Babylon Bee)

Obama Portrays Himself as ‘First Amendment Absolutist…’ Then Issues Disclaimer

Iowa Leads Way on Education Freedom

EU Official Hopes X Will Face “Peer Pressure” to Hire More Censors

Migrant Says ‘American Dream Doesn’t Exist Anymore’

Steve Sailer.

Remember the Education Reform juggernaut right before the Great Awokening? Various billionaires announced that to end racial inequality, All We Had to Do Is to Fix the Schools and that they’d just been to a conference in Aspen where they had a brainstorm about exactly how to do it, usually involving teaching public school students to think more like billionaires. Or something.

But that didn’t much work, although some Back to Basics efforts like KIPP seemed to do some good for some poor kids of good character. But then came the Great Awokening and it became racist to attribute racial gaps to anything other than Systemic Racism and to suggest any remedies other than jobs and cash handouts for blacks.

The Foundry.

Gov. Greg Abbott called the Texas legislature into a fourth special session on Tuesday with the aim of expanding K-12 options for families. Over the past few years, lawmakers from across the country have empowered families to find the best school for their children. Abbott, a Republican, seems resolved to create similar opportunities for Texas students.