Read it.

Wealth Tax Details

• The bill would impose an annual excise tax of 1.5% on the worldwide net worth of every full- and part-year California resident that exceeds $1 billion, starting this tax year.
• Come Jan. 1, 2026, the state would tax wealth that exceeds $50 million at a rate of 1% each year, with an additional 0.5% tax on assets valued at more than $1 billion.
• Part-time residents would be taxed on a pro rata share of their wealth based on the number of days they spend annually in California.
• The tax would also apply to nonresidents who have recently left the state.
• Democrats exempted real property from the tax as a favor to their high-end real-estate industry and Hollywood donors.
• To spread the wealth around to plaintiff-bar donors, the bill would apply the state’s False Claims Act to wealth-tax records and statements. This means plaintiff attorneys could sue affluent individuals on behalf of the state for allegedly under-reporting assets. Plaintiff attorneys would be entitled to a share of the state’s recovery.

Time to leave.

New York Times.

ying nine passengers was captured in Somalia on Wednesday by the terrorist group al-Shabab after making an emergency landing in an area controlled by the group, two Somali officials said.

Six of the passengers were captured, while two escaped and one was killed, according to the two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. There were foreigners among the passengers, one of the officials said, though their nationalities were not known.

The helicopter, which was attached to the United Nations Support Office in Somalia, landed in the Galgaduud region in central Somalia on Wednesday. It was not immediately clear why the helicopter had to land. The fates of the two passengers who fled were still unknown, one of the officials said.

Read it.

The world’s fifth richest person, with a fortune worth almost $127 billion – and one-time would be sparring partner of Elon Musk – says his goal is to “create some of the highest quality beef in the world” on the island of Kauai.

“The cattle are Wagyu and Angus, and they’ll grow up eating macadamia meal and drinking beer that we grow and produce here on the ranch,” said the unlikely cowboy-cum-data-wrangler via his Instagram account.

Alex Tabarrok.

Why do today’s dishwashers typically take more than 2 hours to run through a normal cycle when less than a hour was common in the past? The reason is absurd energy and water “conservation” rules. These rules, imposed on dish and clothes washers, have made these products perform worse than in the past, cleaning less well or much more slowly. One of the best things that the Trump administration did (other than Operation Warp Speed, of course) was creating a product class–superwashers!–that cleaned in under an hour and were not subject to energy and water conservation standards. The Biden administration reversed these rules but the 5th circuit just ruled that the reversal was “arbitrary and capricious.”

Unfortunately, he gives no clue as to how to buy one of these marvelous machines.

Read it.

This year, seven blue states are pursuing even higher tax rates on the top 1 percent of earners, despite the evidence that these policies are detrimental to their citizens.

One such state is Washington. Once an importer of talent and brainpower because of its no-income-tax status, the Democrats who control all the levers of power in Olympia just enshrined a 7 percent capital gains tax, and the Democratic Washington Supreme Court strangely ruled that it’s constitutional. This is one of the highest taxes on the sale of assets in the country.

State Sen. Noel Frame (D-Seattle) wants a 1 percent annual tax on financial intangible assets—such as cash, stocks, and bonds—valued at more than $250 million. And then they wonder why one of the world’s richest human beings, Jeff Bezos, has moved to South Florida.

Read it.

The University of Michigan continues to exponentially grow the number of staffers dedicated to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, with at least 241 paid employees now focused on DEI and payroll costs exceeding $30 million annually, according to an analysis conducted for The College Fix.

The payroll costs are $23.24 million for salaries and $7.44 million for benefits, or $30.68 million, an amount that would cover in-state tuition and fees for 1,781 undergraduate students.

Thirteen DEI staff members earn more than $200,000 and 66 earn more than $100,000 when factoring in benefits.

Read it.

A U.S. appeals court on Jan. 6 allowed a judge’s ruling that blocked California from enforcing a new gun-control law that bans the carrying of firearms in most public places on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.

Which it obviously is.

UPDATE : Ore. Judge Enters Final Order Striking Down Gun Control Law

New York Post.

Students at a Brooklyn high school were kicked out of the classroom to make room for nearly 2,000 migrants who were evacuated from a controversial tent shelter due to a monster storm closing in on the Big Apple.

The city made the move amid concerns that a massive migrant tent at Floyd Bennett Field would collapse from torrential rains and gusting winds — packing them instead into the second-floor gym at James Madison High School five miles away.

The school’s neighbors were not keen on the last-minute decision.

“This is f—ed up,” said a local resident who identified himself only as Rob. “It’s a litmus test. They are using a storm, a legitimate situation, where they are testing this out. I guarantee you they’ll be here for the entire summer.

Well, you voted for these clowns….

The problem with government schools is that they belong to the government, and the government can use the schools for whatever they choose. If they choose to use it to store homeless people or drug users or illegal immigrants, the actual students and their parents need not be consulted.

Read it.

Was special counsel Jack Smith illegally appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland and is his prosecution of former President Donald Trump unlawful?

That is the intriguing issue raised in an amicus brief filed in the Supreme Court by Schaerr Jaffe LLP on behalf of former Attorney General Ed Meese and two law professors, Steven Calabresi and Gary Lawson, in the case of U.S. v. Trump.

I knew Stevfe Calabresi when we were undergrads at Yale. He’s a sharp guy. His uncle, Guido Calabresi, was Dean of the Yale Law School and a Federal Appellate Court Judge.

Read it.

Following a private meeting between Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Border Patrol agents in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Monday, sources in the room told Fox News’ Bill Melugin that “Mayorkas admitted that the current release rate for migrants caught crossing the border illegally is ‘above 85%.’”

Refusing to do his job sure sounds to me like an impeachable offense.

Read it.

“Electrification would require sweeping changes to the nation’s power grids. Under the scenario visualized above, total electricity demand in the United States would roughly double by 2050, even as overall energy use went down.” ….  “To meet that demand, electric utilities would need to add staggering amounts of new emissions-free power while making sure that all those newly electrified cars, homes and factories don’t strain the system and cause blackouts. “

Read it.

San Francisco lawmakers will vote Tuesday on a proposal urging an Israel-Hamas ceasefire, as Bay Area activists insist failing to pass such a resolution would be racist and “pro-genocide.”

The resolution, which includes just one mention of the “brutal attack” by Hamas militants, cites the “armed violence” that has taken place since Oct. 7 and calls for “a sustained ceasefire in Gaza, humanitarian aid, release of hostages, and condemning antisemitic, anti-Palestinian, and Islamophobic rhetoric and attacks.” It cites the growing number of labor unions and other blue cities calling for a ceasefire as its justification.

San Francisco’s proposal is the latest high-profile attempt by a blue California city to wade into the conflict and comes after anti-Israel protesters have shut down the state Democratic convention, Sacramento’s annual Christmas-tree lighting, and the state assembly. San Francisco lawmakers on Monday spent nearly six hours adjudicating the resolution even as their city faces an $800 million deficit while dealing with crime, homelessness, and drug and economic crises.

Proglodytes are compelled by their sociopathy to stick their noses into everybody else’s business. It’s part of their self-identity.

Read it.

Michelle Obama has said that she is kept awake at night by the thought of Donald Trump winning in 2024, in comments have already led to speculation that she could replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.

And she has every right to be, since Donald Trump as President would put another nail in the coffin of the race-hustler industry, of which she and her husband are poster children.

Read it.

Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) published its official figures for 2023 on Monday, January 8th, revealing that asylum requests have increased significantly compared to 2022.

The data shows that there were nearly 352,000 asylum applications submitted in Germany last year, an increase of 51.1% compared to the 218,000 applications in the year before. The figure includes 23,000 ‘subsequent’ applications from migrants who have already been rejected at least once.

The statistics also make it clear that Ukrainian refugees are not included, as they are provided with a separate scheme to apply for asylum in the country. Germany hosts the largest population of Ukrainian refugees in Europe at nearly 1.2 million, or close to 29% of all people who fled Ukraine for the European Union.

Read it.

A convicted people-smuggler in Italy moonlighted as a mujahid. Who would have suspected?

Milan is the #1 hotbed of cultural enrichment in Italy as far as I can tell, based on the various translated articles posted here in the past fifteen years or so.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Liberals love to blame inanimate objects for their own policy failures. Guns are responsible for homicides; Hyundais and Kias are responsible for being stolen; and now, bus companies are responsible for New York City’s illegal immigrant crisis.

Read it.

In a January 2023 preprint in The Lancet, the New Zealand government released a study showing a 70 percent increased rate of kidney injury following two doses of Pfizer mRNA vaccines. Even more telling of injury was the dose-dependent effect. That is, one dose of Pfizer showed a 60 percent increased rate of injury within three weeks post-injection, while two doses showed a 70 percent increased rate of injury three weeks post-injection. “Acute kidney injury” was not defined by the authors but is understood in a clinical setting to include measurable changes in lab results and/or serious signs and symptoms such as bleeding, pain with urination, kidney stones, nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, or other renal dysfunction.

Read it.

The National Park Service withdrew a proposal Monday to take down a statue of William Penn at a Philadelphia historical site as part of a renovation that touched off a torrent of criticism over the legacy of the man who founded the province of Pennsylvania.

Read it.

The long-awaited tort action from the family of Ashli Babbitt has now been filed in Southern California. Babbitt was shot and killed on Jan. 6th and her family is seeking $30 million in a wrongful death action.

Equally important, the lawsuit could force additional answers to why Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd shot and killed the unarmed protester as she attempted to climb through a window near the House Chamber.

Read it.

Four more heat pump manufacturers have successfully developed cold-climate prototypes as part of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Residential Cold Climate Heat Pump Challenge.

To take part in the Challenge, manufacturers’ heat pumps must deliver 100% heating capacity without the use of auxiliary heat, with significantly higher efficiencies at 5F (-15C), and ideally operate at -15F (-26C), among other specifications.

In December 2022, Johnson Controls, now officially part of the Challenge, announced that it had developed an air source heat pump prototype that can operate in temperatures below -20F (-29C) as part of the DOE’s challenge.

The Foundry.

Our nation’s capital is a model of dysfunctional, clueless blue city governance. Nothing highlights that better than the explosion of crime—and especially carjackings—since 2020.

The official 2023 year-end tally of carjackings in Washington, D.C., ended up being a staggering 959, twice the number of the previous year. There were 152 carjackings in 2019. That number more than doubled in 2020, and it has been soaring ever since.

What’s particularly hard to believe is that 65% of the carjackings last year were committed by perpetrators under the age of 18.

Perhaps I need a new Category: Blue State Blues.

Babylon Bee.

Chances are, if you’re reading The Babylon Bee, you’re already on a watch list of some type. But now that the FBI listens in on all of your phone calls, you can at least come up with some creative ways to mess with them.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it.

Since its synthesis in 2009, graphene has been dubbed a wonder material with applications in electronics, medicine, and energy, among other industries. On the other hand, graphyne — a similar material with subtle differences — has long evaded synthesis by chemists and chemical engineers. However, these tiny differences, researchers have hypothesized, would make graphyne a better choice for designing faster electronics.

In research published in Nature Synthesis, scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder and Qingdao University of Science and Technology have reported the synthesis of bulk amounts of graphyne. Like graphene, it exists as a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a symmetric lattice. Unlike graphene, whose atoms are tethered by single and double bonds, the carbon atoms in graphyne are bound to each other in single, double, and triple bonds.

The American Mind.

The seeds of this movement were planted long ago, but its blooming flower bears only a superficial resemblance to the seed. Progressivism was once the seed. The term is still in use on the Left; but the flower of progressivism today is identity politics. It needs to be identified as such. Affirmative action, too, was once the seed. The term is still in use on the Left; but the flower of affirmative action is more appropriately named spiritual eugenics, as I have written elsewhere. In this twenty-first century version of eugenics, the impure identity groups—whites, Asians, Jews—must be purged; and the innocent victims must be elevated, whatever their scholarly record, perhaps even to the rank of university president. It is long past time for the spiritual eugenics that is now at the heart of higher education to be identified and repudiated. If left unchecked, it will someday yield real purges, involving bloodshed.

Let us be clear-headed about what our colleges and universities have always been. Almost every institution of higher education in America founded prior to the twentieth century was religious from the outset. Their seed was Christianity. Harvard, Yale, Princeton—all of them were self-consciously Christian. And from that seed grew the flowers, from which other seeds sprang: the social gospel movement of the late nineteenth century; Progressivism in the early twentieth century, which as I indicated above provided the germ from which identity politics grew. All of these movements would have been inconceivable had our colleges and universities not provided the soil for their growth. Not by accident has Harvard been ground zero for the growth of all the quasi-religious “social movements” that have transformed America. From the seed of its Calvinism has come the flower of identity politics. And it is not good.

Read it.

A teacher in Connecticut filed a lawsuit alleging his school district disciplined him after he voiced opposition to a mandatory educator training that focused on critical race theory and “privilege.”

Read it.

Don’t you dare call it an insurrection….

Newsbusters.

Even those who voted against Obama nevertheless felt his victory made a profound statement about the country. Polls showed both blacks and whites expected “race relations” to improve. But after Obama’s eight years in office, both blacks and whites thought race relations got worse. What happened?

From the beginning of Obama’s presidency until its end, the man America’s considered a unifier played one race card after another. He enraged American law enforcement by falsely accusing a white Cambridge police officer of “acting stupidly.” He implied the officer was racially motivated when he gave to a reasonable and lawful order to a black Harvard professor, who resisted it. When black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, Obama said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” The jury found the defendant not guilty, and the jurors said race played no role in the encounter. But Obama, who later embraced Black Lives Matter, again advanced the false narrative of anti-black “systemic racism.” Never mind studies showing cops more reluctant, more hesitant to pull the trigger on a black suspect than a white suspect.

In an interview, the man who said he would not blame race if he lost the election said: “The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives — you know, that casts a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it. … Racism — we are not cured of it.” Obama invited the race-hustling Al Sharpton to the White House over 70 times.

The American Mind.

Early on in the pandemic, we were told—by government, the media, Big Tech, and Big Pharma—that an equally dangerous contagion was spreading in parallel to the novel coronavirus. An “infodemic” of “misinformation” about the virus, and about the official response to the virus, was putting lives at risk and threatening to prolong the crisis further. Publications like National Geographic drew comparisons with “decades” of climate change “denial,” flying in the face of scientific “consensus,” and noted how experts in and out of government were drawing together sophisticated techniques to ensure people had access to information they could trust, without falling prey to “dangerous” narratives that licensed non-compliance.

Although it was obvious from the start that government, the media, Big Tech, and Big Pharma were working in tandem to control the flow of information and guide public behavior in a way that had no precedent, the depth of this collaboration, and the methods employed, took some time to become clear. Investigations by brave individuals, publications, and organizations like Big Brother Watch provided vital information. They revealed that huge amounts of data, including personal data that should have been off-limits to government, were being collected and monitored, and even how military-grade psychological-warfare techniques were being used on the public through units such as the British Army’s secretive 77th Brigade and the Canadian Joint Operations Command.

As we near the fourth anniversary of the start of the pandemic, none of this is news—or, rather, none of it should be. It should be no surprise, either, to learn that the parties to this brave new world of information control have not surrendered their powers or ceased to collaborate with one another now that the pandemic is officially over.

HotAir.

Lloyd Austin was in the hospital for days; apparently, nobody knew. He was in intensive care and is still hospitalized. He was unable to perform his duties for much of that time, suggesting he was drugged or unconscious.

His Deputy, who apparently was “ready” to serve in his stead, was on vacation out of the country. She didn’t know that Austin was out of commission.

The White House didn’t know. The National Security Council didn’t know. Apparently, only Austin’s direct staff knew.

…

But leave all that aside for the moment. I fully expect the fallout from this fiasco to be epic, but let’s keep our eye on the ball for a moment.

The Secretary of Defense can disappear, and nobody notices.

During several wars, a crisis in the Red Sea, American troops and assets abroad getting attacked, the Secretary of Defense could disappear for a week, and nobody noticed.

OffGuardian.

Will 2024 be the year the Deep State’s exercise in controlled chaos finally gives way to an apocalyptic dismantling of our constitutional republic, or what’s left of it?

All the signs seem to point in this direction.

ZMan has some fun.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the massive food fight that erupted among the worst people over how the allegedly best people cheat like crazy. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard, was supposed to be a proof of concept for the egalitarian blank slate religion of the Cloud People. In reality she was as synthetic as their empathy for people of color. Claudine Gay was a modern lawn jockey. Instead of standing on their lawn with a lantern, she held up her diplomas.

Then we have Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund guy who started this when Gay made unpleasant noises about Israel. He first threatened to withdraw funding and when that did not work, he went after her credentials. In a world of credentialism this was a declaration of war on the system. Soon the internet dug into Gay’s background and found examples of alleged plagiarism. Harvard then demoted her to being a million dollar a year political science instructor.

In response, MIT decided to get into the fight, and they leaked dirt to Business Insider about Ackman’s wife, who supposedly had a cut and paste problem too. It is ironic that people who are immune to the charge of hypocrisy thought they could use the charge of hypocrisy against people famously immune from the charge of hypocrisy. It is an example of how the hive mind operates. Once Ackman was declared outside the hive, he was no different from Trump or Hitler to the hive.

Read it.

Six Americans who were seized during the Oct. 7 terror attack in Israel remain hostages of Hamas three months later due to a lack of adequate political pressure brought to bear by the Biden administration, military analysts say.

Read it.

“Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together,” Rep. Barney Frank, whose prostitute aide ran a male brothel from his Capitol Hill home, once observed.

The former congressman claimed that he had no idea his boyfriend was running a male brothel and most people don’t know the government had racked up $34 trillion in debt.

Sometimes the things we do together are really the things being done to us.

Back in 2020, the national debt was at $26 trillion and that amounted to $80,885 for each of us. Now, after three years of the “adults” being “back in charge”, our share of the debt is $100,000 each. Or $100,696, if you want to be exact, and $257,275 per household.

In the four years since 2019, a whopping $12 trillion was added to the national debt.

Read it.

The morale and willingness to fight among Russian troops continues to plummet. One reason for this is the heavy losses, about 350,000 dead, Russia has suffered in Ukraine so far. Since late 2023 Ukrainian troops have increasingly encountered Russian troops who would surrender at the first opportunity and often do it in a dramatic fashion. This included dropping their weapons during their first encounter with Ukrainian soldiers. In other cases, Russian troops were encountered who had already dropped their weapons and were looking for someone to surrender to. While troops can be motivated or compelled to fight, they are often ineffective. That means they suffer a lot of casualties while still unable to gain much ground.

Read it.

The Wall Street Journal fired some serious shots at Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Saturday night, dropping a lengthy hit piece accusing him of illegal drug use to an extent that has worried executives and board members while potentially jeopardizing Musk’s various federal government contracts.

The article relies heavily on anonymous sources, described, for example,” as “people who have witnessed his drug use and others with knowledge of it.”

Read it.

This week in 1995, a new GOP-controlled Congress was sworn in to office, the first time since the early 1950s that Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate. The sweeping conservative victory in the 1994 midterms had shocked liberals, but within weeks the media elite were fully engaged in disparaging the new majority as mean-spirited, racist, dumb and dangerous.

Journalists zeroed in on the incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich, caricaturing him as a “Scrooge” and “the Gingrich who stole Christmas” (Newsweek) for suggesting modest reductions in the rate at which federal spending would grow in the future. Time’s Jack E. White approvingly relayed one Democratic Congressman’s smear that Gingrich’s plan would “actually cause black children to starve.”

Writing in Rolling Stone, PBS’s William Greider branded Gingrich “a world-class demagogue” engaged in “rancid populism.” NBC’s Bryant Gumbel cued up House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt to expound on his description of Gingrich and his “ilk” as “trickle-down terrorists who base their agenda on division, exclusion and fear.” The Los Angeles Times wrote that “from the bottom of the income ladder, the prospect of the Republican revolution is chilling.”

Of all of the things I do with my ‘phone’, making (or receiving) a call is at the bottom of the list.

Read it.

As a child of the ’80s, I recall with great fondness the Christmases of my youth: full of stinging cold winters and reassuring fireside warmings up; snowball fights and tobogganing; turkey dinners and endless festivities. They provided the perfect segue into the new year, with its accompaniment of bonfires, piping hot jacket potatoes, and mesmerising firework displays. I don’t think it’s naïve to say I cannot recall a single violent episode, save for a very British exhibition of tutting one year, over the lack of queuing etiquette witnessed at the hotdog stand.

I must be mistaken, however, because the festive season no longer looks anything like that. Christmas markets are increasingly facing cancellation, on the pretext of ‘public safety.’ Those that remain are becoming ‘winter’ markets. Choirs and Santas have been replaced with armed guards; presents with metal detectors and concrete bollards, because you never know when those self-driving cars are going to get uppity again, do you?

Meanwhile, New Year’s Eve has become less celebration, more conflagration. Last year’s Europe-wide festivities were particularly un-Christian in this regard. In Germany alone, there was widespread rioting across Berlin, Hamburg, and North Rhine-Westphalia, where several hundred people were arrested. With 41 emergency service personnel injured, clearly it was essential to identify where the aggression was coming from. “Apparently predominantly young men in groups, often with a migration background,” was the furthest the authorities were willing to go.

Reuters.

A federal appeals court on Saturday allowed a judge’s ruling that barred California from enforcing a new law that bans the carrying of guns in most public places on the grounds that it was unconstitutional to take effect.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dissolved an order by a different 9th Circuit panel from a week earlier that suspended an injunction issued by a judge who concluded the Democratic-led state’s law violated the right of citizens to keep and bear arms under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment.

Odd–usually the 9th Circuit (which Rush Limbaugh used to call the ‘9th Circus’) is only too happy to support any totalitarian scheme that California comes up with.

New York Times.

An interesting story about a ‘journalist’ (working for a Narrative media outlet) who deliberately downscales and then uses that experience as a typical Crustian ‘all about me’ source of ‘content’.

Those of us who avoid ‘social media’ tend not to have smartphone addiction quite this badly; I use my iPhone to make (and, more often, receive) occasional calls and texts, but my ‘phone’ is used primarily as a Kindle reader, calendar, camera, and calculator.

One of the most significant indicators of the world in which a Crustian ‘journalist’ lives comes near the end:

“More and more people are starting to see that these platforms, these products are intentionally designed to be addictive,” said Camille Carlton, a policy manager at the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit in California founded by former tech employees to raise awareness about the negative effects of the kinds of products they worked on.

Ms. Carlton compared smartphones and social media apps to junk food and tobacco, and suggested that lawmakers should regulate the design of these products to protect our health. Britain’s rules for tech products aimed at children, discouraging the use of infinite scroll, autoplay and addictive design features such as Snapchat streaks, were “fantastic,” she said. (Similar laws in the United States have been challenged by tech companies as unconstitutional.)

Apparently the first thing a Crustian reaches for is government action to ‘solve’ a perceived ‘problem’ that ought to be left as a matter for individual choice in any rational society. Sad, but there it is.

Read it.

The difficulties in talking about causes in biology have been recognized for over two centuries.1 It’s just that the issues were largely set aside in the era of molecular biology due to the expectation that our rapidly growing powers of minute analysis would bring full causal understanding. Biology would soon be rid of its troublesome language of life in favor of well-behaved molecular mechanisms. And yet today, after several decades of stunning progress in molecular research, the struggle to fit our understanding of living activity into the comfortable garb of familiar causal explanation looks more hopeless than ever.

Read it.

Hezbollah on Saturday initiated what it announced as “an initial response” to Israel’s assassination by drone of Hamas deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri, which happened in a south Beirut neighborhood last week.

The Lebanese paramilitary group backed by Iran unleashed large salvos of missiles that bombarded military bases as well as communities in northern Israel (many of which have long been evacuated), triggering alert sirens among some 90 towns and settlements.

The Hezbollah statement declared that the assault was “part of the initial response to the crime of assassinating the great leader Sheikh Saleh al-Arouri.”

Business Insider.

“I’m always looking for someone who has a stable career, who is preferably well off,” she said, “not to say that I’m looking for sugar daddies but someone who can take care of themselves.” On LinkedIn, she figured, she could fairly assess whether a romantic prospect’s employment history, education, and career aspirations lined up with the kind of partner she envisioned for herself. At the very least, she would know whether the man had a job.

Can’t argue with that.

Read it.

The president of France’s supreme audit institution admits to deliberately delaying the release of a report on illegal immigration costs until after the parliamentary debate—and vote—on immigration law. The report, just released by the Cour des Comptes, shows the exorbitant sum of €1.8 billion charged to illegal immigration in 2023.

Published on Thursday, January 4th, the report is a harsh indictment of government policy, in particular the actions of Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who boasts of having taken a tough stance on managing illegal immigrants. Darmanin claims to have introduced an effective policy for expelling illegal immigrants and says the expulsion rate of delinquent foreigners is up by 30%.

The first president of the Court, former socialist minister Pierre Moscovici, would normally have published the report in question on December 13th—two days after the vote on the motion to reject the first version of the immigration law—but preferred to remain temporarily silent on a document that is damning for the government. He defended himself by explaining that he did not want “this publication to interfere in any way with the political debate.”

Read it.

We constantly hear the justification, [it (whatever it is)] will free up [something else] for other, more important duties. For example, the LCS will free up Burkes for more important duties. Or, the Constellation will free up Burkes for more important duties. That sounds fine on paper but, in reality, it’s just buzzword garbage. What are these other ‘more important duties’? I’m looking around and I don’t see Burkes conducting other ‘more important duties’, do you?

We have 86 Burkes/Ticos. Are they really all tied up on unimportant duties and need freeing up? Are there really ‘more important duties’ that are going unattended because Burkes are being wasted on less important duties? Most of our Burkes sit pier side most of the year. Are we really short of Burkes for ‘more important duties’?

Many use this justification to promote smaller carriers; if we had smaller carriers we could free up the supercarriers for ‘more important duties’. Again, what are these ‘more important duties’ that our carriers are currently foregoing in favor of less important duties? Remember, we have 11 carriers and most of the time only one or two are deployed. Do we really lack sufficient carriers for ‘more important duties’?

Read it.

How could this get funnier? Azerbaijan, once described as the nation where it rains oil, has just appointed a state oil company veteran as COP29 President.