Watch it.

The Carmelite Monks of Wyoming carve and install the Gothic Portal of their Chapter House.

Apparently these are Carmelite Friars of the great mendicant order, but a local religion community in this particular diocese.

We have the technology.

Read it.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear arguments in a case that hinges on whether, as a legal matter, Congress can blend powers the Framers of the Constitution carefully kept separated.

In Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) v. Jarkesy, the justices will determine the constitutionality of the agency’s system of in-house administrative law judges (ALJs), bureaucrats who often act as judge and jury in the agency’s enforcement actions. Since many federal agencies—including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Postal Service—utilize ALJs, the case’s outcome will reverberate across the administrative state.

George Jarkesy, whom the SEC accuses of securities fraud, argues that the ALJ system violates the Seventh Amendment, which guarantees the right to a jury trial. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled for Jarkesy in 2022. Should the Supreme Court do likewise, countless Americans would regain access to a foundational constitutional protection.

Read it.

I’d characterize this as a tragedy, except that all of the great popular science magazines I knew as a boy (Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Popular Electronics, Scientific American, National Geographical) have long since gone Woke and turned to crap. It is, however, a pity.

Vanity Fair.

Why anyone would be interested in Monica Lewinsky’s opinion on anything under the sun is beyond me, other than the fact that Narrative media publications need eyeballs desperately and her name will inevitably attract them.

The article itself is merely a vapid regurgitation of every liberal talking point you’ve ever heard from a political class smarting from not being allowed to do what they want do, all within a Clever Plastic Disguise called ‘democracy’.

For all of her alleged vast ‘research’, it’s obvious that The Mouth That Roared learned absolutely nothing. The reason there aren’t any anti-insurrection provisions in the Constitution is because the Founders knew that people wouldn’t vote for a insurrectionist. The relevant provision in the 14th Amendment was put there because Congress realized that, in the South, that traditional logic would no longer apply, so it had to be stated. Everybody (except fever-dreamers for the Narrative media knows that the President can’t pardon himself, which is why no President has ever attempted to do so–and if he did his ass would be impeached so fast you’d think that the Concorde had come back from the dead.

I would encourage you to pinch your nose and read the article, just to see how stupid and venal our Narrative media can be. It is not a pretty sight.

Read it.

The German Ministry of the Interior has proposed a draft amendment to its Residency Act to redefine what constitutes human trafficking into the EU—a move which could criminalize the work of ‘search and rescue’ NGOs operating on the Mediterranean Sea, EU Observer wrote.

Existing German laws already prohibit facilitating irregular entries into the EU for the sake of financial gain or personal advantage, which means NGOs can ferry migrants from the Libyan and Tunisian shores to Europe under the term ‘rescue’ unobstructed.

While several EU countries, including Italy and Greece, have already passed legislation to clamp down on the systemic abuse of sea rescue regulations observed when it comes to North African migrants, Berlin remained the biggest defender—and financier—of these shady NGOs.

About fargin time.

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.

Racebaiting superstar Ibram X. Kendi remarked on a panel recently that white people—globally—have failed to “reckon with how much their own personal identity is shaped by constructions of whiteness.” He went on to explain how “that construction of whiteness prevents white people from connecting to humanity.”

…

As I have suggested before, the discourse about “whiteness” comes in whole-cloth from the rhetoric of classical antisemitism. Ever wonder why Kendi-style racial debate sounds so familiar? You just have to substitute “white” for “Jew” and it all falls into place.

Indeed id does.

Read it.

Detectives from the Metropolitan Police Department’s Carjacking Task Force the FBI Washington Field Office Violent Crimes Task Force announce a juvenile has been arrested in connection to an armed carjacking of a federal agent in the 100 block of 12th Street, Northeast.

…

On Monday, December 5, 2023, 17-year-old Devonta Lynch, of Southeast, DC, was arrested and charged, as an adult under Title 16, with Armed Carjacking (Gun).

Federal agents cannot feel secure against crime even in our nation’s capital.

What does it say about our government when our capital city is becoming famous as a behavioral sink?

Read it.

Two weeks have passed since the murder of Thomas in Crépol, and the case—the subject of a vast enterprise of political manipulation—has found new heralds. The mayor of the town of Romans-sur-Isère, who is politically classed as ‘miscellaneous Right’ (divers droite), i.e., on the Right but with no party affiliation, has decided to raise her voice to defend the facts and what she has been subjected to for so many years in her municipality. She now faces a death threat.

Death threats are what Muslims do best.

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.

Read it.

There are better adverts for Islam than Mohammed Hijab, but he is one of the biggest in contemporary Britain. A “debater and public speaker” with enough self-awareness to call himself “Instigator-in-Chief” on his Twitter account, he is a very 21st Century Islamic evangelist. Charismatic and quick-witted, he also enjoys being at the centre of a fuss.

Mr Hijab led demonstrations amid the communal discontent between Muslims and Hindus in Leicester last year. He has become a regular on Piers Morgan Uncensored — which is, one must admit, a good way not to be the most obnoxious man in the room. Now, a clip has emerged in which Hijab warns people who “attack the sacred symbols of Islam” that “we have Muslim gangsters … we can’t stop Muslim gangsters from dealing with you”.

Now, to be fair, we have to assume that saying “we can’t stop” implies that Mr Hijab doesn’t endorse the actions of these “Muslim gangsters”. Still, it is not something I would be proud to admit about my co-religionists.

ZMan is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Maybe this is for the best and the people making these decisions are right to do what they are doing, but they should then drop the fig leaf of democracy. If they are going to preach the glories of democracy, while ignoring the will of the people, then it is not going to be long before people lose faith in democracy. The great advocates of democracy have no one to blame but themselves for the crisis of democracy. The cause of that crisis is we were never asked.

If the guy who now finds himself driving his family past a strip joint every Sunday on the way to church knows who decided to put that strip joint in his community, he at least knows who to blame. He can appeal to that person or group of people to move that strip joint away from his church. Even if the guy deciding is actually in a swank Manhattan office and lives in a mansion in Connecticut, he is still a man who calls somewhere home and therefore he can be reached.

Read it.

“It just goes to show you that, at a time when these people are talking about telling poor countries to switch over to renewable energy, and people are starving, we also have folks driving the climate movement hosting ‘environmentally-friendly yachting’ panels,” Dan Kish, a senior research fellow for the Institute for Energy Research, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s absolutely classic… they tell everyone else to sacrifice while they host discussions on ‘sustainable yachting’ among themselves.”

 

Gates of Vienna.

The war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas has enhanced and made obvious the Jew-hatred that has been endemic among German Muslims for a long time. And, predictably, anybody who says anything negative about the behavior of Muslims in Germany is being called an “Islamophobe”.

Read it.

The Biden administration is demanding that Israel take even more extraordinary measures to avoid harming “innocent civilians” as it tries to eradicate Hamas. Around the world, politicians and others express dismay at the alleged number of innocent civilians who have been killed by Israeli bombardments, even while admitting that Hamas’s casualty numbers include its own terrorists, people killed by terrorists’ awol missiles, and so on.

But my complaint is more fundamental. Watching videos of Israeli captives being paraded through Gaza, and seeing “civilians” spitting on them, hitting them, joyously celebrating their capture, I have asked: where are these innocent civilians we keep hearing about?

Read it.

After the Holocaust, the American Jewish community, like most liberals, reduced the mass murder of millions of Jews to a problem of intolerance and prejudice. A massive effort was undertaken to educate about what had happened rather than what was happening.

While the first Holocaust museums were being built, the persecution and killing of Jews had mostly shifted over to the Soviet Union and its allies in the Arab Muslim world. American Jews failed to grapple with this shift much as they failed to come to terms with the reality that black nationalist groups were quickly eclipsing the KKK when it came to the domestic hatred of Jews.

These are the key ingredients that led to the current open climate of Jew-hatred in America.

Read it.

A city in Belgium has cancelled a scheduled Christmas event in which a black female ‘Santa Claus’ was set to reeducate attendees about “colonial ideology” and how “generations of Flemish people are racists.”

The Telegraph reports that people in Ghent have pressured the mayor to call off the appearance of one Queen Nikkolah, a character created by artist Laura Nsengiyumva, who would have ‘reworked’ Christmas fables about Santa for children at the event.

The report claims that the character was set to be dressed in the colours of the Palestinian flag (for some reason) while handing out gifts to children.

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.

Read it.

This father has been using spaced repetition (Anki) to teach his children how to read several years earlier than average.

Michael Nielsen and Gwern1 tweeted about the interesting case of a reddit user, u/caffeine314 (henceforth dubbed “CoffeePie”), who has been using spaced repetition with his daughter from a very young age.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Washington Poop.

The fate of an obscure provision of President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax package, which will be reviewed by the Supreme Court next week, has many experts panicked over the potential to destabilize the nation’s tax system. In addition, some say the outcome could preemptively block Congress from creating a wealth tax.

As you might expect, anything that gets in the way of the government taking any money it wants from anybody it wants scares minions of the Narrative media out of their socks.

UPDATE: Supreme Court Case Has Democrats Salivating at Possibility of Green Light for Wealth Taxes

Doudenal ulcer. Not Fun.

Hospital dreams are strange dreams.

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

My apologies.

A fate worse than death.