Read it.

U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry lashed out at a reporter who asked him about his “carbon footprint” at the World Economic Forum’s Davos conference on Tuesday.

Read it.

The federal government asked financial institutions to rummage through customer data if terms such as “MAGA” or “TRUMP” were used in transactions, the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed Wednesday.

Read it.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday reversed an order requiring Texas to move a floating barrier on the Rio Grande that drew backlash from Mexico – the latest development in legal battles between the Biden administration and Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) prepared to alert state and local officials to an emerging connection between heart inflammation and COVID-19 vaccines, but ultimately did not send the alert, according to a new document obtained by The Epoch Times.

I would encourage him to do so. Sauce for the goose….l

Read it.

“Courtesy cards,” are cards given out by the NYC police union (and presumably elsewhere) to friends and family who use them to get easy treatment if they are pulled over by a cop. I was stunned when I first wrote about these cards in 2018. I thought this was common only in tinpot dictatorships and flailing states. The cards even come in levels, gold, silver and bronze!

Democrats didn’t invent modern political corruption, but they are certainly perfecting it.

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Thomas Molnar (1921-2010) was a Hungarian-born philosopher, a professor at Brooklyn College, a friend of Russell Kirk, and the author of more than forty books, including Politics and the State: The Catholic View, originally published in 1980 by Franciscan Herald Press. In 2018, that work was reissued by Cluny in the edition under review herein: an affordable softcover volume titled The Church and the State, published with ecclesiastical permission and with the subtitle The Catholic Tradition as an Integral Element of Western Political Thought. The work is divided into a brief preface, an expansive introduction, and five chapters.

The preface begins by identifying a philosophical circumstance peculiar to American political thought. Molnar argues that Americans are reliant upon manifest pragmatism to determine the range of their political theory, as a consequence of their scepticism regarding such theories. Consequently, in America, there is a widespread acceptance (or quasi-acceptance) of only four conservative approaches to political theory: one derived from interpretations of The Federalist, one based upon the theories of Leo Strauss, one based upon the theories of Eric Voegelin, and a half-respectable, somewhat un-American one in the form of Marxism. The last of these, Molnar observes, “in spite of the popularity of its advocates in some academic circles, has not entered the mainstream of American political thought”—a statement that still rings true today, albeit less certainly than when it was originally published in 1980, now that congress finds itself beleaguered by a squad of far-left Marxists.

The problem with ‘conservatism’ is that it isn’t really an ‘-ism’, i.e. an ideology that strives for a certain end-state, like progressivism or Marxism. As Russell Kirk famously pointed out, ‘conservatism’ is actually anti-ideology, in that it reflexively opposes ideological movements of any kind.

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The commanding officer of the USS Georgia sub’s blue crew — Capt. Geoffry Patterson — was relieved by Rear Adm. Thomas Buchanan, the commander of Submarine Group 10, “due to a loss of confidence in his ability to command,” the Navy said.

Patterson appears to be the first Navy commander to be removed from command this year.

Suggesting that we can look forward to others?

The USS Georgia is homeported at King’s Bay, Georgia. According to data from the Camden County Sheriff’s Office, where King’s Bay is located, Patterson was arrested in the early hours of Jan. 9 on charges including driving under the influence and improper lane change.

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The US military spends about $10 billion on small-arms ammunition annually. The most common caliber ammunition used by the US military is the 5.56x45mm NATO Standard round. On average, an American soldier carries around 210 rounds of ammunition for their primary weapon, which is usually an M-16 or M-4 automatic rifle. U.S. military depots store an estimated 15 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition. The Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky is the largest US military ammunition storage facility.

Small arms ammunition typically remains in storage for up to 20 years. The US military uses a variety of small-arms ammunition in combat, including 5.56mm, 7.62mm, and .50 caliber rounds. The US military replenishes its ammunition stockpiles on a regular basis, based on usage and demand. New military ammunition undergoes extensive testing and evaluation to ensure reliability, accuracy, and performance.

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In a following video, a young “French” woman gives her followers a crash course on how to game the French welfare system in order to make as much money as possible without ever having to work.

There’s no indication of the young lady’s ethnicity, and with her burka and hoodie it’s hard to determine much about her appearance. She speaks rapid, clipped French, which may help a native French-speaker identify her background. I can usually understand at least a little bit of a French-language video, but in this one I was lucky to pick out one word in ten, even with the French text right there on the screen.

So I’m betting she’s a culture-enricher, eager to milk the kuffar for everything she can get.

Muslims consider what we would see as welfare fraud to be their ‘jizya‘ right under shari’a law.

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

Contrary to allegations leveled by a Democrat Congress member and the Biden administration, the Texas Military Department (TMD) asserted on Jan. 14 that the bodies of one adult woman and two children had already been recovered from the river by Mexican authorities before Border Patrol agents requested access to a fenced-off 2.5-mile stretch of the southern border in Eagle Pass on Jan. 12.

TMD, which runs the National Guard, provided additional details about the incident in an updated statement on Jan. 14, once again calling the allegations “wholly inaccurate.”

“At the time that Border Patrol requested access, the drownings had occurred, Mexican authorities were recovering the bodies, and Border Patrol expressed these facts to the TMD personnel on site,” the TMD stated on Jan. 14.

Democrats lie. It’s what they do. (And they complain about Trump?)

Read it.

There are no civilians in Gaza.

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My foray into the workforce was a minimum-wage job making pizzas and washing dishes at Pizza Hut.

The money I earned supported my spending as a new driver and taught me how to budget and save for the future. And the experience I gained—everything from teamwork to customer service to safety standards—has stuck with me throughout my career.

If I were growing up in California today, though, that same job opportunity probably wouldn’t exist.

As a 16-year-old without experience, I couldn’t produce $20 per hour of value for Pizza Hut—or probably any company. But $20 per hour is where Assembly Bill 1228 in California sets the bar for fast-food workers. After factoring in mandatory employment taxes, that comes out to more than $48,000 per year for a full-time employee.

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When Congress voted to spend hundreds of billions to switch electricity production to solar and wind, it forgot something: transmission lines. New ones will be needed going to the locations of the new power sources, but nobody bothered to figure out who will pay for it or how much it will cost.

When has Congress ever cared “how much it will cost”?

Congressmen Sean Casten (D-IL) and Mike Levin (D-CA) introduced a bill last month to fix their omission, largely at your expense. The bill has already picked up 76 co-sponsors, including eight from Illinois.

Read it.

If it ain’t broke, break it.

That’s Joe Biden’s guiding principle. He took President Donald Trump’s much-tighter southern border and ripped it as wide open as a gutted trout’s belly.

Biden turned Trump’s energy independence into begging Iran and Venezuela to pump more oil. And Biden devolved Trump’s peace in the Middle East into a five-front Arab war on Israel, even as the ayatollahs’ Houthi pals ignited the Red Sea with anti-ship missiles and anti-American drones.

And for his next trick, Biden wants to impersonate a Latin autocrat.

We are living through Atlas Shrugged. I’m sure Ayn Rand would be pleased, if there were a God and an afterlife.

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Eight months after anonymously blowing the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital’s transgender program, a surgeon has gone public with a tale of relentless persecution by the Biden administration.

Dr. Eithan Haim would have preferred to remain anonymous, but he said the Biden administration’s “blatant attempt at political intimidation” forced him to go public, after a federal criminal investigation buried him and his wife in $250,000 of legal fees without ever filing charges.

“We spent the entirety of our retirement, investments, savings, and almost all of our disposable income to pay the legal bills to keep the case alive,” Haim explained. “Although we have given this case all we have, there simply isn’t enough to keep up with the hundreds of thousands we currently owe in legal bills or the potential million[s] it would cost to fight this case through trial.”

Read it.

The White House hosted its first information session for President Joe Biden’s “American Climate Corps” program on Thursday to tout the program and solicit feedback from prospective participants.

Ali Zaidi, the White House national climate adviser, joined Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and other White House officials to preview the American Climate Corps, a de facto green jobs training program that is expected to begin churning out cohorts this summer.

The government officials marketed the program as a key tool to push sweeping societal action to counter climate change, while civilians logged on to the virtual information session made suggestions and asked a range of questions about the program and the shape it will take

A good start to the day consists of taking a nap. After breakfast, of course.

I remember, when I was in the Navy, getting together with my colleagues to discuss what we were going to do for the day. We called it “Quarters for Muster”.

The Register.

And it couldn’t happen to a … nicer group of people.

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As a result of this history as well as current events, I was asked by a member of my congregation to sit outside during services that Saturday. I, of course, said yes. So that morning, myself and another member showed up before services, got a couple of chairs, and placed ourselves outside the main doors of the Synagogue.

We were, again of course, both armed, though his wife asked us not to bring rifles. We complied, but next time we may have a couple of ARs staged at the door, just in case.

…

During services, a member came outside to check on us and see if we needed anything. Right before he went back inside, he asked if we had whistles or some other type of noisemaker to alert those attending services if there was trouble outside.

My fellow sentry and I exchanged a knowing glance and assured him that A) we did, in fact, have noisemakers, and B) they would certainly be loud enough to be heard inside if we needed to use them.

We found out later he was completely unaware of the types of noisemakers we were carrying. After he left, we shared some good natured banter about “noisemakers.”

Read it.

The Nation magazine’s Palestinian correspondent is being investigated by the London Metropolitan Police after saying “we must normalize massacres as the status quo” during an anti-Israel demonstration last weekend.

Mohammed El-Kurd, who is described as the Nation‘s “first-ever Palestine Correspondent” on the left-wing magazine’s website, also denounced the existence of Israel and said “we must root [Zionism] out of the world” in his speech at the London rally.

The Metropolitan Police said it was “aware of the remarks” and was “assessing the matter and as part of that assessment will be seeking to speak to the individual concerned.” The U.K. has strict laws relating to discriminatory speech and incitement to violence.

Heated car seats are a cornerstone of civilization.

BBC.

It’s a common sight at many retail stores: a queue of people, waiting to use a self-checkout kiosk, doing their best to remain patient as a lone store worker attends to multiple malfunctioning machines. The frustration mounts while a dozen darkened, roped-off and cashier-less tills sit in the background.

For shoppers, self-checkout was supposed to provide convenience and speed. Retailers hoped it would usher in a new age of cost savings. Their thinking: why pay six employees when you could pay one to oversee customers at self-service registers, as they do their own labour of scanning and bagging for free?

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn’t living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it’s worth.

That’s in addition to people such as myself who object to them on principle.

Read it.

Like other “sanctuary cities,” New York has learned that being a refuge for illegal immigrants is a bad thing if they actually show up. So New York is buying them airplane tickets to go elsewhere.

Read it.

In this era of hoaxes, euphemisms, obfuscation, and lies, I once again offer the following as a public service.

• *Ableism: the unfounded and bigoted belief that people who are capable of doing a certain job should be hired over those who are not.

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A key reason that Yemen’s Houthis are unlikely to halt their attacks on Red Sea shipping as well as Western warships parked there is because immense pressure on the global transit waterway can be kept up, while it costs little to persist with such launches.

Many of the Houthis drones which are capable of reaching vessels far off the Yemeni coast have been estimated at not more than $20,000. Some of them are as low as a few thousand dollars to build. They can easily be intercepted by US and UK coalition warships, but at an immense cost for these Western militaries.

I don’t do surveys.

Read it.

Americans were stunned on Sunday afternoon after Fox News reported the Federal Aviation Administration, overseen by Mayor Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Transporation Department, rolled out a new “Diversity and Inclusion” program to hire people with “severe intellectual disability” and “psychiatric disability” (among various other disabilities), just days after the latest mid-air near-disaster involving a Boeing 737 Max heightened the public’s attention to the potentially deadly impact of woke Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in the skies.

I will not set foot on board an airplane until sanity returns.

Not holding my breath….

Read it.

For those who are not doctors, which happens to be most of us, we depend on those few who have dedicated years of their lives to the scientific and medical fields to help inform us so we can make good decisions about our own health. Heading into the pandemic, a public largely jaded toward media and the government still placed high trust in their doctors. That trust has largely been betrayed during the Covid-19 pandemic years. CDC and FDA consultant Dr. Paul Offit’s response to concerns that the mRNA Covid shots may not be safe is an example of that betrayal.

Wall Street Journal.

Businesses are often sued for selling allegedly faulty products that aren’t actually defective. Last week a California appeals court ruled that businesses can also be sued for failing to develop a product. Behold California’s new tort standard: You should have built that.

Some 24,000 patients have sued Gilead Sciences in California state court for failing to introduce an allegedly safer version of an HIV drug. The Food and Drug Administration in 2001 approved a life-saving HIV medication by Gilead. The plaintiffs don’t argue that the drug is defective or lacked adequate warnings.

They claim that Gilead should have launched sooner an alternative HIV treatment that carries fewer bone and kidney side effects. They say Gilead delayed developing the new drug to maximize profits from its other HIV medication. Gilead disputes these claims and says it wasn’t clear from its early studies that the new drug would be safer or more effective.

My Torts Professor at Indiana, realizing that nobody was up for serious work on a Friday, would devote that day’s class to discussing the most recent bozo ruling by the California Supreme Court. Every week there was something new.

UPDATE: Crazyfornia Gets Crazier

Check it out.

We created Justwood for one purpose: to give you the very best chance of completing your project quickly, easily and perfectly!

There are many woodworking plans, guides, and books available on the internet but scattered all over the place!

We tackle the research work for you and provide you as many woodworking PDF plans, guides, and books as we possible could and all in one place!

And of course, all these plans are free because they are already free elsewhere!

Full disclosure: I have no connection with these people other then wishing them every success in life.

Read it.

Pro-Hamas protesters sought to rip down a reinforced fence outside the White House Saturday night. The assault on the White House constituted the culmination of their march. It looks something like what Democrats call an “insurrection” (video below).

…

For some reason: “No arrests were made.” Perhaps the authorities were busy defending the ramparts. Perhaps President Biden admires the “passion” of the protesters, or the “passion” of the “protesters.”

Read it.

Pigs! They’re not just for breakfast any more….

Under the Laws of the Forest, there were four types of venison or ‘beasts of the chase’: The red deer, the roe deer, the fallow deer, and the wild boar. Hunting any of these required a license from the King. These laws are the basis for modern hunting and game laws in the U.S.

Watch it.

White people are the only people in America who aren’t allowed to prefer living among people who look like them.

Read it.

The chairman of Hamas’ decision-making body urged Muslims across the world to “build on” the horrific terrorist attacks on Israel of Oct. 7, which he characterized as a “victory,” and to send money to Hamas in what he called a “financial jihad.”

Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’ political bureau, spoke at the International Union of Muslim Scholars on Tuesday. The union, an international body of Muslim theologians that forms the supreme authority of the Muslim Brotherhood, met in Doha, Qatar, where Haniyeh lives.

“The people of Gaza constitute our frontline trench for defense, as well as for offense,” Haniyeh said, according to a translation from the Middle East Media Research Institute. “They are not there only to defend, but also to attack. What was October 7 if not a frontline trench for an offensive by our nation? We must not let this moment slip away.”

New York Times.

The odds of the NYT writing anything intelligent about either ‘rich Republicans’ or Trump is vanishingly small. Still, it’s good to know what the Uniparty’s propaganda arm is thinking.

Read it.

A news article in the Wall Street Journal explains the stakes in the 2024 elections in terms of federal taxes over a decade: The Republicans want to extend $4 trillion in tax cuts, while Democrats want to impose $2 trillion in tax increases.

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In 1996 in the Tazmanian city of Port Arthur a man by the name of Martin Bryant killed 35 people using semi-automatic rifles in what would later be known as the Port Arthur Massacre. This singular event was quickly used as a rationale for the banning of most firearms for Australian civilians, but the new regulations were not a product of Port Arthur. Rather, anti-gun politicians had been pushing for restrictions and confiscation for many years prior; Port Arthur simply gave them enough public panic to get their legislation passed.

This is the modus operandi of the typical anti-gun lobby – Wait for a tragedy and then exploit it to punish all law abiding citizens for the crimes of a handful of deranged people. It doesn’t make much sense unless you realize that gun control laws are not meant to thwart criminals, they are meant to thwart good people who might object to government trespasses.

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You still bump into the stickers from time to time: “Six Feet of Distance.” It’s weird and anachronistic at this point. No one pays any attention anymore. Still it would be nice to know where this came from. Oddly, we don’t really know.

There was very little ‘science’ behind the panicked response to COVID by all levels of government employees.

Read it.

Social media users are pressing ahead for continued boycotts of Western brands as the US and its allies pound Yemen with air strikes and missiles to neutralize Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

“Boycott these brands that support the invasion of Yemen,” X user Naila Ayad said in a post viewed more than 1.6 million times.

…

One X user pointed out, “None of these brands have anything to with Yemen and the US didn’t invade Yemen, also why is their idea of a boycott just targeting snacks.”

Read it.

Superior Court Judge William Clark nullified the results of a Democrat mayoral primary in November 2023 and ordered a new election. The ruling was based on hours of video evidence showing hundreds of illegally harvested absentee ballots being stuffed into drop boxes in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

“The videos are shocking to the court and should be shocking to all the parties,” Judge Clark wrote in his ruling.

A California judge overturned the result in a 2021 Compton City Council run-off race that was initially decided by one vote.

Block Club Chicago.

The city is considering installing bollards in retail sectors across the city as thieves continue to crash cars into luxury and local businesses before ransacking them, two alderpeople said.

The news comes after a smash-and-grab Monday morning at a Prada store on the Gold Coast, 30 E. Oak St., which resulted in a shootout between two police officers and a 33-year-old man now charged with attempted murder and burglary.

Smash-and-grabs have been thrown into the spotlight as videos often circulate online of people breaking into stores and leaving with as many items as they can carry. In the past year, this has included using a stolen car to smash through a window to get inside.

Other stores hit in recent months include a West Loop luxury boutique and several streetwear stores.

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The technical term for this approach is passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC), so named because it doesn’t require an injection of energy into the system to disperse heat. The surface emits its own heat into space without being absorbed by the air or atmosphere, thereby becoming several degrees cooler than the surrounding air without needing electrical energy.

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Since we live in democracies, our view of justice is colored and shaped by a democratic bias. The source of right for us is the proposition that all are created equal, and over time we advance and demand ever-greater political and social equality. To see what true justice is, and also what we are, clearly and free of prejudice, we must discover and confront our political (mis)education: we must turn our heads around, see, and cross-examine those hidden puppeteers of our cave. Liberal education is the opposite of political ‘education,’ or propaganda: it is education that liberates.

It is for this reason that David A. Eisenberg’s ambitious book, Nietzsche and Tocqueville on the Democratization of Humanity, is so welcome and needed. In it, he examines the grand democratizing sweep of Western history and its consequences for human life and thought. In the book’s opening chapter, we confront our greatest puppeteers: the philosophers who most advanced democracy and did so with almost prophetic power, given the great inequalities between men then. From Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes, down through Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, Eisenberg argues they “all . . . reduced man to a common denominator in order to ground their philosophic visions. Uniform drives and appetites were rendered paramount.” Even Hegel, at first glance an exception with his master-slave dialectic, eventually resolves that fundamental conflict “so that the outcome of the historical process was one where uniformity supplanted man’s deep-rooted dichotomy and did so, moreover, in favor of the slave.”

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The legendary historian Will Durant famously wrote that civilizations are born stoic and die epicurean. He meant that through a warrior ethos and a propensity to endure and ignore pain, out of chaos a people might create order—the definition of civilization—which eventually grows, first prosperous, then decadent, and, finally, gives itself over fully to pleasure. It forgets the outside world and ceases to strive for higher purposes, indulging in the sensual and material as the only goal in life. Then a new group of stoics comes and conquers them. The most famous example of this phenomenon is, of course, the fall of the Roman Empire. But Indian history, however unknown in the West, actually illustrates this point clearly with its three and a half thousand years of continual invasions by younger warrior cultures: Aryans, Greeks, Kushans, Ghurid Sultans, Mughals, and Brits, who relieve one another of power once their predecessors have grown decadent in the steamy climate of the subcontinent.

Navy Matters.

Reader ‘Robtze’ just thoroughly embarrassed me in a comment with an incredibly astute observation that I completely missed. He observed/asked whether the Houthis were executing the same mission the Marine Corps envisions with their island/coastal missile shooter concept.

To address his comment, yes, this is almost exactly the mission set. Let’s take advantage of this remarkable similarity and examine how the coastal ‘missile sniping’ concept is working out.