Read it.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) predicts the agency’s case backlog will peak at 400,000 in 2024. So, a report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which said VA resources have been used to process claims for medical care of illegal immigrants since 2020, is causing backlash from several legislators and veterans’ agencies.

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Conservative media outlets and social media users are outraged by New Year’s Eve attacks on the emergency services—mostly committed by young Muslim men—which authorities and politicians have hailed as a more peaceful “return to normal” when compared to last year.

Authorities in Berlin described New Year’s Eve celebrations in the German capital as more peaceful than in 2022. “Only” 390 people were detained and 54 police officers injured. After last year’s riots—when mainly young men of an African or Middle Eastern background targeted and attacked officers, firefighters, and medical personnel with fireworks—Berlin and other major cities were much better prepared.

As we reported, German municipalities planned to deploy many more police officers on Sunday in order to prevent the levels of violence seen the previous year.

Easily fixed: (1) Arrest them, (2) Deport them.

Read it.

Democratic senator Ben Cardin (Md.) is blocking the upper chamber from advancing a bipartisan bill that would sanction Iran’s leadership for its role in mass human rights crimes, prompting outrage among Iranian-American dissidents who have been lobbying in favor of the legislation for months.

Cardin, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, informed activists at the end of last year that he would not be moving forward with the MAHSA Act, named after 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who was killed by Tehran’s morality police in September 2022. Amini’s death sparked nationwide protests that are still percolating more than a year later.

The bill, which overwhelmingly passed the House last year with more than 400 votes, would sanction Iran’s supreme leader and his inner circle for decades of human rights abuses. Those include the murder and torture of anti-regime dissidents, including those detained by the country’s security forces for protesting Amini’s murder.

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As a record number of migrants invade the U.S., wreaking pain on New York City and other communities, one group is winning big time: the public advocacy lawyers. Their business is to constantly sue to win more so-called rights for migrants. Rights to shelter, rights to meals, rights to health care, even the right to vote in local elections.

Who pays the bills on both sides of these lawsuits? You do. Taxpayer money largely funds these legal combatants, which include the Coalition for the Homeless, The Legal Aid Society, and Vera Institute of Justice.

You’re paying to be legally coerced into providing more for migrants, even at the cost of cutting vital city services—kind of like hiring your own assassin. It’s absurd, but it’s about to get worse.

Read it.

The Methodist Church in the UK has issued an ‘inclusive language’ guide, advising followers to refrain from using terms such as ‘husband’, ‘wife’, ‘brother’, and ‘sister’, reasoning that some people might find them “hurtful”.

You can’t make this shit up.

Politico.

Before we blame the individuals on center stage, however, we should look at the structural causes that brought us to this moment. A big reason for our disenchantment is that the job of a university president no longer prioritizes being a pioneering thought leader, but instead requires the skills of a savvy lobbyist. For most large universities, administrators’ attention has increasingly focused on outside funding and large revenue generators and away from student instruction and traditional scholarship.

One significant reason — one that has been wholly unappreciated but is growing in importance — is the role many universities play in our nation’s health sector. Universities with health systems are better understood as health systems with universities. As such, they are highly dependent on the graces and whims of policymakers, and their leaders are structurally restrained from asserting independence against, or challenging the wrongheaded politics of, elected leaders. In the end, academic freedom is the big loser.

Watch it.

Musical notation certainly discouraged me from learning how to do music other than at the ‘by ear’ level.

I do love people being dyspeptic, though. And this is a fascinating look at the history of music.

National Geographic.

On the fourth floor of the Museum of the Bible, a sweeping permanent exhibit tells the story of how the ancient scripture became the world’s most popular book. A warmly lit sanctum at the exhibit’s heart reveals some of the museum’s most prized possessions: fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient texts that include the oldest known surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible.

But now, the Washington, D.C. museum has confirmed a bitter truth about the fragments’ authenticity. On Friday, independent researchers funded by the Museum of the Bible announced that all 16 of the museum’s Dead Sea Scroll fragments are modern forgeries that duped outside collectors, the museum’s founder, and some of the world’s leading biblical scholars. Officials unveiled the findings at an academic conference hosted by the museum.

“The Museum of the Bible is trying to be as transparent as possible,” says CEO Harry Hargrave. “We’re victims—we’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud.”

Read it.

Everybody’s ‘concerned’, but nobody’s doing anything about it.

Read it.

The Associated Press’s latest foreign donor wants to transform journalists into “community activists on climate change.” The AP doesn’t seem interested in publicizing that.

The KR Foundation, a Danish nonprofit that seeks the “rapid phase-out of fossil fuels,” gave the equivalent of $300,000, to the Associated Press in December 2022, according to the charity’s annual report. Though the AP says it is committed to the “highest practicable degree of transparency” regarding its backers, the news outlet added the KR Foundation to its list of current philanthropic supporters only this month, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of the AP website.

It’s the latest left-wing charity to fund the Associated Press, which says it is read by four billion people each day. Philanthropies that support packing the Supreme Court, defunding the police, and other left-wing initiatives have contributed millions of dollars to the AP in recent years, the Free Beacon reported.

Read it.

Former Pentagon official Michael Maloof is predicting that Congress and the Pentagon are in for a “tumultuous” start of 2024, as the ongoing standoff over Biden’s billions more in Ukraine defense aid highlights the reality that there’s “no stomach” any longer to fund Ukraine.

The ex-senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense issued the words in a fresh interview with Russian media, wherein he also emphasized that the only way out for Kiev is through negotiations based on the current dire realities of the battlefield, which has seen setback after setback for Ukraine forces.

Read it.

The Biden administration brags about the number of jobs being created, but given our rather slack economy it is reasonable to wonder what kind of jobs they are. At the Wall Street Journal, Allysia Finley has a sobering answer:

Drill into the nation’s 3.7% unemployment rate, and you’ll find a growing welfare-industrial complex beneath the seemingly strong labor market. Government, social assistance and healthcare account for 56% of the 2.8 million net new jobs over the past year, and for nearly all gains in blue states such as New York and Illinois.

Freeberg explains it all to you.

In 2012, the incumbent President Barack Obama received 65,915,795 votes and His challenger, Mitt Romney, received 60,933,504. That’s a total of 126,849,299.

Four years later, 62,984,828 people voted for Donald Trump, and 65,853,514 voted for Hillary Clinton, which adds up to 128,838,342.

So among just these four candidates, in four years, there was an increase of 1,989,043 votes.

Suppose the increase was the same between 2016 and 2020. That would mean there were 130,827,385 votes legitimately cast between Trump and Biden, right? We can probably believe the 74,223,975 going to Donald Trump were legitimate, because there certainly wasn’t anybody behind the scenes putting thumbs on the scales for his sake. So that would mean Biden legitimately received 56,603,410 votes, which would be less than his “official” take of 81,283,501 by a difference of 24,680,091.

Why should we doubt these twenty-four million?

Three words: Vote by mail. We have a national tragedy of loudmouth people running around talking about how the 2020 election was the most honest in American history, and they have no idea what sort of loopy statistics they’re trying to sell. They have no idea how much the electorate swelled, if you’re buying into the idea that each of Biden’s 81 million votes came from a unique and authorized voter and was entirely legitimate. They don’t know what they’re saying.

The electoral base leaped from 128 million to 155 million? When in the previous four years it swelled modestly from 126 million to 128 million?

The swelling between 2016 and 2020, exceeded the natural swelling between 2012 and 2016…by 1,240 percent?

Read it.

When Bobby Kennedy talked about writing this book a couple of years ago, I asked him, why?

Mindful of how the truth about everything Covid (and much else) was being memory-holed, he said he wanted to create an accurate historical record of what happened, for the future.

I thought that was a good answer.

Read it.

Migrants in Berlin performed their annual act of New Year’s Eve cultural enrichment by setting fire to cars and attacking police and firefighters with projectiles, leading to 15 officers being injured.

Major cities in Germany routinely welcome in the new year by witnessing the assembly of thousands of migrants, most of them from the Middle East and North Africa, who cause absolute bedlam on the streets.

This year was no different.

Read it.

Hamas fired at least 27 rockets at the south and center of Israel in a barrage timed for midnight as Israelis celebrated the start of the new year.

According to The Times of Israel, the Palestinian resistance movement launched 27 missiles. Air defense systems intercepted 18, while nine fell in open areas. Loud explosions from the intercepts boomed through the sky over Tel Aviv, where crowds of partiers celebrated the new year Sunday.

Terrorism, straight up.

Newsmax.

Officials attempting to transport migrants from the southern border to New York City appear to have found a workaround to an executive order aimed at limiting the number of asylum seekers in the Big Apple.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday issued an executive order placing limits for on how migrants arrive in the city, The New York Times reported. It was an attempt to push back against Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s efforts to send asylum seekers to the city.

However, Politico reported Sunday that buses of migrants had arrived at various New Jersey train stations. The migrants then took trains to the New York City, Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy’s office said.

Adams’ executive order stipulated fines, jail time, and the possible impounding of buses. It did not address travel via trains.

USA Today.

President Joe Biden heads into the election year showing alarming weakness among stalwarts of the Democratic base, with Donald Trump leading among Hispanic voters and young people. One in 5 Black voters now say they’ll support a third-party candidate in November.

In a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, Biden’s failure to consolidate support in key parts of the coalition that elected him in 2020 has left him narrowly trailing Trump, the likely Republican nominee, 39%-37%; 17% support an unnamed third-party candidate.

When seven candidates are specified by name, Trump’s lead inches up to 3 percentage points, 37%-34%, with independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the top of the third-party candidates at 10%.

Chicago Sun-Times.

Hours after a plane from Texas carrying 355 migrants arrived early Sunday morning in Rockford, Mayor Brandon Johnson repeated his plea for more federal support to address the ongoing migrant crisis.

The plane landed about 1 a.m. at Chicago Rockford International Airport, then the migrants onboard were immediately put on buses headed for Chicago, escorted by Winnebago County sheriff’s deputies, the city of Rockford said on Facebook.

They were taken to Chicago’s “landing zone,” a Facebook post said, but Rockford officials did not share an exact address. A city spokesperson declined to answer specific questions about the flight, including who chartered it and where in Texas it originated.

In a statement, the city of Chicago said a private Boeing 777 from San Antonio, coordinated by Eastern Airlines, landed in Rockford carrying 350 people seeking asylum.

After landing, the passengers were put on eight buses chartered by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, according to a city of Chicago spokesperson. The buses dropped the migrants in the surrounding suburbs, and they are now making their way to Chicago via trains and other means, the spokesperson said.

Rockford and Winnebago County officials learned Saturday the plane was headed to the city. The Facebook post said the plane was landing in Rockford because of Chicago’s new ordinance cracking down on buses bringing migrants to the city.

Gotta love Greg Abbott.

Every clever saying has some asshole who is determined to screw it up.

Read it.

At least four police officers were hurt Saturday in what has been dubbed a ‘diversity riot’ in London.

The incident in Camberwell, South London saw a violent mob of stick-wielding hoodlums, some reportedly of Ethiopian descent and some Eritreans, attempting to stop a meeting inside a nearby theatre that was being attended by representatives of the government of the East African nation.

The footage shows that as police attempted to control the situation, they quickly found themselves under attack.

A major problem with letting large numbers of foreigners into your country is that they often bring their quarrels with them from The Old Country.

Strategy Page.

This is our annual summary of current war zones and an overview of where it is all heading. After this overview there is the alphabetical list of the war zones and a quick summary of how the local mayhem has been proceeding. Since we have been covering this sort of thing for over twenty years now, there are many war zones that have gone quiet. We left most of those in summary, with a note that those wars had gone dormant, and maybe extinct. History shows that dormant is more common than extinct. Forever wars, or at least multi-century ones, are an ancient tradition.