Off-Guardian.

It’s the abuser’s Swiss army knife for the empty-headed. Multipurpose, its meaning has near-infinite elasticity. You can be labelled ‘fascist’ if you say that there are only two biological sexes, or that women should not have to undress in front of men, or that men should be excluded from women’s sports, or that men can’t get pregnant, or even if you voted for Trump.

Such is the ignorance of the 1930s and 1940s that in contemporary discourse, ‘fascist’ has lost all meaning.

Yet, in a very real sense, New Zealand is now Fascist. If this seems an extraordinary statement, consider Mussolini’s widely reported (though not documented), definition :

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

This definition may not be to everyone’s liking, but has the virtue of simplicity and clarity. Moreover, it is an accurate description of what is happening in America, Europe, Australia and – as I shall show – New Zealand.

Read it.

In March, Chicago’s Progressive Caucus made a painful observation: voters believe that city government just isn’t functioning. Following the defeat of the Bring Chicago Home campaign, which would’ve raised real estate transfer taxes to combat homelessness, the caucus observed that “[v]oters who opposed the referendum told us that their vote represented their current distrust, frustration, and disappointment with government… Chicagoans deserve and transparent and responsive government that gets things done.”

It’s hard to argue with them. On issue after issue, it feels like government is either performing worse than it has in the past, or we’re spending a lot more for the same results.

Jerry Pournelle was fond of saying that the purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers.

The American mind.

As much as this election was affected by voters’ concerns about the economy and their dissatisfaction with the past four years, the most decisive factor in Kamala Harris’s loss may well have been a massive cultural transformation currently happening in America. Despite their obsession with vibes, no one on the Harris team seemed to notice the actual vibe shift happening across the country. Briefly put, we are beginning to see a collective rejection of the fake in favor of the real.

It’s no great revelation that major TV and movie studios have been pumping out repetitive, overproduced, and unimaginative tripe for some time. But whereas big-budget schlock used to be accepted as mildly amusing by a public with few better options, TikTok and the smartphone have totally changed the game. As critic Ted Gioia pointed out in a recent essay, viewers are increasingly turning their attention from “official” sources of entertainment to homemade clips by amateur creators. There are obvious dangers in this, as Gioia points out. But there’s also opportunity: what’s driving people to choose the phone screen over the big screen is a newfound interest in the raw, the real, and the direct. Fake is out. Live is in.

This dynamic was at work in the election as well. Harris’s campaign was like the television series The Acolyte that streamed on Disney+ earlier this year. The show had an ambiguously ethnic but painfully dull actress playing the protagonist, an equally diverse and uninteresting surrounding cast, a big well-known franchise (Star Wars), an aggressively progressive feminist narrative (complete with communist space witches), and a massive budget to make everything look legitimate. In other words, the show was appallingly fake. Consequently, it tanked and was not renewed for another season.

ZMan does a deep dive.

A central feature of the democratic society is mendacity. The more democratic the culture, the less honest the participants. The reason for that is simple. The goal in a democratic system, whether it is a marketplace for goods and service or a political system for setting public policy, is to win the crowd. You do not necessarily have to win a majority, but you need enough to lie about having a majority. To do that you must say anything to bring the mob to your side.

This is the reason we know or care about Socrates. Ancient Athens was a democratic society, where rhetoric was the prized skill. The reason for that is status was rewarded to those who could win over their fellow citizens through argument. Inevitably the truth stopped mattering very much, as people tend to believe a good story, especially one that flatters them, over objective reality. Socrates skillfully argued in favor of the truth over rhetoric, so the Athenians voted to kill him.

Lying is a funny thing as everyone lies about something, usually in a moment of weakness or in an effort to be prudent. As a result, normal people think of lying as a thing you do reluctantly. You lie about not having broken something at work, even though in the long run honestly would be your better option. You tell the friend that his new car is great, even though you think it is ridiculous for a middle-aged man to be driving around in a Miata. It hurts to say it, but friendship requires it.

Read it.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vented his displeasure Monday after two Democratic-appointed federal judges reversed their decisions to retire in what appear to be efforts to stop President-elect Trump from nominating their successors.

McConnell called the unusual decisions to forgo retirement following Trump’s sweeping victory last month a “partisan” gambit that would undermine the integrity of federal courts.

“They rolled the dice that a Democrat could replace them and now that he won’t, they’re changing their plans to keep a Republican from doing it,” McConnell said on the Senate floor.

Quod abit circum venit circum.

Read it.

Federal agents are arresting a record number of individuals on the terrorist watchlist at the northern U.S. border, including a Jordanian national with ties to terrorism who recently was removed from the country after illegally entering from Canada.

Border Patrol agents in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Blaine Sector apprehended Jordanian national Mohammad Hasan Abdellatif Albana, 41, near Lynden, Washington, a few miles from the Canadian border.

Lynden is roughly 22 miles to Aldergrove in British Columbia. There are 13 land ports of entry at the U.S.-Canada border in Washington, including the Lynden-Aldergrove Port of Entry. The port of entry is famous for the 1979 murder of U.S. Customs inspector Kenneth Ward, who was shot while performing a vehicle inspection by members of far-left domestic terrorist group the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Albana illegally “entered the U.S. without being admitted, inspected, or paroled by a U.S. immigration official,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. He would have been considered a “gotaway” if he hadn’t been caught. Gotaways is the official CBP term for foreign nationals who illegally enter between ports of entry to intentionally evade capture and aren’t caught.

Read it.

A panel of three judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of Texas in a lawsuit filed over its concertina wire barriers.

The court ruled 2-1 on Monday in a case that may set the tone for two other cases before the court related to Texas’ border security operations.

Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan wrote for the majority, with Judge Don Willett joining him. Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez dissented, arguing Texas did not meet “its burden to show a waiver of sovereign immunity or a likelihood of success on the merits.” (Duncan and Willett are appointees of then-President Donald Trump. Ramirez is an appointee of President Joe Biden.)

The ruling was issued 13 months after Texas sued the Biden administration after it destroyed concertina wire barriers it erected on state land.

Read it.

America and Russia are now at war. Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed as much in September when he commented on the news about President Biden mulling over a decision to grant Ukraine authorization to strike deep inside Russia with U.S.-supplied missiles.

Read it.

Even though California never had slavery.

This is anti-white racism, straight up.

Read it.

You may ask: What need does Qatar have for a warship? What enemies does Qatar have, other then perhaps Iran, in any conflict with which this vessel would have a short life?

I have no answer to that question. HOWEVER, it is nice to see small rich countries experiment in a space usually dominated by large stupid working-on-being-poor countries, like the U.S., U.K., and Russia.

Navy Matters.

The starting point in this discussion is the recognition that the entire transgender issue in the military is predicated on a faulty basis as demonstrated with this statement:

Service members with a diagnosis from a military medical provider indicating that gender transition is medically necessary will be provided medical care and treatment for the diagnosed medical condition … 

This statement pre-supposes that gender transition is a medical necessity rather than a choice. A medical necessity is, by definition, a procedure or treatment that, if not administered, will threaten the life of the patient. A desire to change gender is not a medical necessity. Failure to do so does not threaten the life of the patient. Thus, again by definition, it is a choice and the military should not be in the business of providing elective procedures that are not medically necessary.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

Throughout american political history, two capable, qualified, experienced women have run for president on a major-party ticket. Both have lost to Donald Trump, perhaps the most famous misogynist ever to reach the highest office. But in 2024, what was even more alarming than in 2016 was how Trump’s campaign seemed to be promoting a version of the country in which men dominate public life, while women are mostly confined to the home, deprived of a voice, and neutralized as a threat to men’s status and ambitions.

The two women in question were neither capable nor qualified. Both owed their positions in both life and politics to the men to whom they attached themselves. Trump’s ‘misogyny’ is merely an oft-repeated slur slung by the deranged proglodyte Left in the hopes that the dimwitted will accept it without question.

Read it.

Don’t listen to what they say — watch what they do.

Huffington Post.

Allegations! That proves it!

Newsbusters.

Oh wait, it’s just another prestigious university gone rotten and a self-congratulating “academic” who’s too enthralled by the smell of her own BS to recognize that nobody outside her Cambridge cocoon wants a whiff of her woke garbage.

Dr. Ally Louks, an instructor at Cambridge University who studies “Olfactory Ethics” recently took to the internet seeking praise for completing her PhD thesis.

Huffington Post.

John Dean, the former White House counsel who helped bring down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, urged President Joe Biden to go further with his pardons.

Biden on Sunday pardoned son Hunter Biden, who was found guilty in June in a firearms case and pleaded guilty in September in a tax case.

The president, who had previously vowed not to pardon his son, is facing criticism from both the left and right over the move. But Dean said he didn’t go far enough ? and urged Biden to issue blanket pardons to everyone President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to target when he returns to the White House next month.

That list includes those who have investigated Trump ? including Robert Mueller and Jack Smith and their teams ? as well as “all on Trump’s enemies list.”

Read it.

How convenient.

Politico.

It’s the most sweeping presidential pardon since Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, a grant of clemency so broad that even Democrats were openly criticizing the president today. Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter drew criticism from all corners the day after he issued it, underscoring for posterity an unflattering aspect of his presidency: For all Biden’s insistence that the rule of law was of paramount importance and his talk about restoring democracy, in the end he made it much harder for his own party to hold President-elect Donald Trump to account.

In the most recent instance, Biden and his aides repeated the same line over and over when it came to Hunter Biden’s legal troubles: He’s not considering a pardon for his son. Even if the charges seemed harsher because Hunter was the president’s son, the president’s commitment to the justice system was such that he’d allow the process to continue.

Now, we’ve learned none of it was true. And it’s created a thorny political problem for the Democrats who are still in Washington and are charged with cleaning up Biden’s mess.

Already, Trump has signaled he’ll use Biden’s pardon of his son as justification for his own desire to pardon Jan. 6 rioters. Trump had been largely silent on the Jan. 6 issue since his victory, which had loyalists worrying about his commitment to the pardons. But on Sunday evening, he posted on Truth Social, “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?”

Joe Biden: “Screw the party, screw the country, I’m doing what’s best for me.”
Donald Trump: “What he said.”

A Chinese national, charged with fraud by the SEC, just sent Donald Trump $18 million (Public Information) The implication, of course, being that Trump is being bribed. Unfortunately for The Narrative, 18 million is pocket change to Trump. The Narrative Media seem to believe that everybody is as much for sale as they are.

Kash Patel’s nomination signals how bad things can get (Public Notice)

No Background Checks, No Problem? (Politico)

Potential conflicts of interest may haunt Dr. Oz’s confirmation to run Medicare, Medicaid (Washington Poop) They would prefer, of course, somebody without any ‘conflicts of interest’ other than spending a life getting a government paycheck.

In Pardoning His Son, Biden Echoes Some of Trump’s Complaints (New York Times) Totally neglecting the fact that whatever he is complaining about was done by HIS ADMINISTRATION. This is as ironic as Kamala Harris campaigning on a ‘need for change’.

Trump press secretary pick removed post praising Pence on January 6, then ran for Congress as an election denier (CNN)

RFK Jr.’s past could haunt nomination process (Axios) They hope, they hope, they hope….

Swalwell tells Trump supporters to ‘sit out’ criticizing Biden pardon (Politico) This is the Eric Swalwell of the ‘Bang Fang’ fame.

Geraldo Rivera Slaps Trump Supporters With A Reality Check After Biden’s Pardon (Huffington Post)

Trump is targeting protections for almost 1 million legal immigrants (Vox) If they are legal, they are not threatened.

Trump’s Threats Against BRICS Are Based On False Premises  That never stopped Democrats.

California lawmakers to begin special session to ‘Trump-proof’ state laws (Associated Press) Good luck with that

Democratic senators urge Biden to try to limit Trump’s ability to use the U.S. military domestically (NBC) These guys need to do some research. Look up the Posse Comitatus Act.

We’re Entering a World Where the Rule of Law Is Turned Inside Out (The New Republic) He must have been asleep during the Obama and Biden presidencies.

AMERICA JUST FAILED THE TEST OF RESPONDING TO TRUMP’S POLITICIZED PROSECUTIONS (empty wheel)

ZMan blows the whistle.

Over the long holiday weekend, President Joe Biden pardoned his crooked son Hunter, which surprised only the enemies of Donald Trump. Everyone else knew that the old man would not leave office without cleaning up the mess of his son. Say what you will about Joe Biden, but he loves his kids, perhaps too much. At some level, you must respect his family loyalty. There is an old world gangsterism about his willingness to help his family loot the political system.

An interesting part of the pardon is that it is not just a pardon for specific crimes that have been alleged by the Department of Justice. It is a blanket pardon for all things he may have done since 2014. This does not cover state crimes like murder, but outside of something extreme like that, it means he has been given the sort of get out of jail free card reserved for important gangsters. Henry Hill, of Goodfellas fame, was given this type of deal so he would become a rat.

If the 2014 start date seems important, that is because it is when the Biden family started feeding at the Ukraine trough. This was when the State Department engineered the Maidan coup that toppled the Ukrainian government of President Yanukovych, who refused to sign a deal with the EU. Once he was gone, the State Department helped put Petro Poroshenko in charge, who was followed by Volodymyr Zelensky. It is funny how so much has revolved around Ukraine for a decade.

“Tell me about a time you resolved a conflict.”
“I had a co-worker who talked all the time and nobody else could get any work done. I took him out to lunch one day, and so far as I know they never found the body.”

Lifehacker.

So you go to use your debit card to make a purchase or withdraw cash, or you try to pay a bill from your checking account, only to find out that your card has been declined, your transaction denied, and your access to your money cut off. The New York Times recently reported that banks are increasingly closing customer accounts without warning or authorization—and for no apparent reason. They’re not even required to notify you if this happens, which means some people find out only when they can’t use their cards or withdraw funds. While suspicious activity and fraud are considered one possible explanation, there’s also no data source to confirm exactly how many accounts are being shut down and why.

Read it.

But you knew that.

Who didn’t know that this was going to happen. Stand up so we can give you your sign.

Read it.

The far flung nation of Australia and its close neighbor New Zealand were widely considered two of the worst examples of authoritarian western response to the covid pandemic. The Australian public was locked down and under house arrest in the larger cities. In some cases only one person would be allowed to leave home at a time and could only travel a short distance to shop for necessities. People who went to public parks or beaches were fined or arrested. Covid camps were created to detain not only people who had traveled overseas, but also people who simply tested positive.

Most disturbing of all, Australian officials had people arrested who dared to criticize the lockdowns on social media. Australian news organizations widely defended such measures in lockstep with the government narrative. With the exception of a few minor complaints, journalists from the land down under acted as propagandists for the government and for Big Pharma.

It was these Orwellian conditions and similar attempts across the west that led to many personalities in the alternative media to speak out and become decidedly anti-establishment. One of those figures was podcaster Joe Rogan.

Read it.

The clock strikes 6 AM in a hospital room. An attendant barges in, disrupting precious sleep to swap out an untouched water jug. Soon after, a parade of nurses follows, each focused on collecting their designated measurements. Blood pressure. Temperature. Oxygen levels. In this flurry of activity, something crucial gets lost – the actual patient.

Miles away, in a classroom, a similar scene unfolds. A teacher moves mechanically through standardized material, focused on test scores and grade averages. Thirty unique minds sit before her, but what exists in the system’s eyes are just data points to be measured and tracked. The student, like our patient, has vanished.

These aren’t isolated problems. They’re symptoms of the same disease: our obsession with measurable outcomes has eclipsed the humans at the center of these systems.

Health care and education are the last two major fields of human service that haven’t been significantly automated, and thus require a lot of ‘personal service’. In any economic activity, the major cost factor is people — the more people involved, the higher the costs (which is why automation is increasingly the go-to method for improving the bottom line). In education, people (mostly taxpayers) aren’t willing to pony up for the high cost of getting really excellent teachers, and so our schools suck. In health care, people aren’t willing to sacrifice quality, so costs shoot through the roof.

Read it.

he work carried out by a team at the University of Science and Technology of China achieved a new record for storage density in diamonds, at 1.85 terabytes per cubic centimeter.

As impressive as the storage capacity is, the researchers believe this can be eclipsed by the staying power. It has been claimed the diamond system can hold data for millions of years, due to the technique used to encode information within the atomic structure of the diamond.

As published in Nature Photonics, the scientific breakthrough extends beyond the significant density capacity with marked improvement in read times. The team indicated high-speed readout showed a fidelity of over 99%

Read it.

CBC News is reporting that the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal has ordered the small town of Emo to pay damages after failing to hoist an “LGBTQ2 rainbow flag” in celebration of Pride Month. One problem is that the town of fewer than 2000 inhabitants does not have a flagpole (though you could presumably “show the flag” in other ways).

In a decision handed down last week, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario found that Emo, its mayor, and two councilors violated the Ontario Human Rights Code. The tribunal admitted in a later opinion that “the record indicated the Township did not receive many requests for declarations or proclamations or requests for display of a flag.”

Indeed, in a single 12-month period, they received only four — two from Borderland Pride.

Emo does not have a central flagpole, other than the Canadian flag over the front door of the Emo Municipal Office.

One issue that factored greatly in the tribunal hearings occurred during the debate over the flag proposal, which the council rejected by a vote of three to two. In the meeting. Mayor Harold McQuaker stated, “There’s no flag being flown for the other side of the coin … there’s no flags being flown for the straight people.”

Read it.

America’s top professional sports leagues have warned players about the growing threat of illegal alien criminal gangs targeting their mansions. This comes after a string of break-ins of athletes’ homes, including Kansas City Chiefs stars Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.

NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero published a note about how the sports league issued a “security alert” to teams after “organized and skilled criminals” targeted players’ homes.

The Foundry.

The 2022-24 rejection of Biden-Harris policies may or may not lead to an enduring Republican majority. However, it is, as the headline on an Ezra Klein postelection New York Times’ interview proclaims, “the end of the Obama coalition.”

The most major components of his supposedly ascendant Democratic majority, including record turnout and percentages among black voters, continuing supermajorities from Hispanics and Asians, and enthusiastic support from young people, have receded, and support from white college graduates has even cracked a bit. The 44th president, in his Kalorama mansion, 2.5 miles from the White House, has seen the arc of history bend toward Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago.

Smart Democrats are focusing on one cause of their party’s limited but, at least for the moment, decisive decline. Ruy Teixeira, coauthor of “The Emerging Democratic Majority,”which foresaw the Democratic Party’s triumph in 2008 but not its subsequent demise, writes that Democrats have moved sharply left on cultural matters, on racial quotas and preferences, on increasing rather than reducing immigration, toward stands that have repelled “the white working class” in the 2010s and now repel the nonwhite working class in the 2020s.

Read it.

Last week Marc Andreessen sat down with Joe Rogan for three hours, where the billionaire investor and founder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz dropped an aerial bombardment of redpills on the general public – spanning everything from the US government’s designs to completely control AI, to a weaponized government effort to secretly ‘debank’ 30 tech founders in an effort to destroy political opponents, particularly those in crypto.

Read it.

Civil asset forfeiture is an affront to anyone who’s sincerely committed to the American justice system’s cornerstone presumption of innocence. With law enforcement typically keeping some or all of the assets that are seized, the practice has rightly been called “policing for profit.”

I’ve previously examined the raw tyranny of civil asset forfeiture, spotlighting the story of a Mississippi man who took $42,300 in cash to Houston with the intent of buying a second semi truck for his fledgling trucking business, only to have it seized — or, in legal jargon, “forfeited” — by Harris County police, who pulled him over for allegedly following the vehicle in front of him too closely.

Now I’m compelled to share a new example of this legalized theft — the most brazenly unjust and opportunistic one I’ve encountered yet: In an ongoing, multi-million-dollar racket in Indianapolis, police are routinely seizing cash they find in FedEx packages that happen to be routed through that company’s second-largest hub.

Newsbusters.

Most opinion-based shows don’t stop to share legal notes.

Tell that to “The View.” Reading legal notices has become the norm on the far-Left showcase.

“The View” featured four such notes on November 22 alone, all related to President-Elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks. The show shared similar notes earlier in the week to avoid potential lawsuits.

The Foundry.

According to both CBS News and The Guardian, thousands of Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio, are rushing to Chicago, New York City, and other “sanctuary” locations before Trump is sworn into office and initiates his pledged mass deportation program.

Springfield, a city of less than 60,000, has been crippled ever since the outgoing Biden-Harris administration imported roughly 20,000 Haitian immigrants into the municipality starting in 2021. The city has seen a drastic rise in housing costs and traffic accidents and has been forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to accommodate the immigrants, who were granted “temporary protected status” by the Biden-Harris administration.

Many Haitians in Springfield have taken Trump’s promise of mass deportations—to be enacted by his new “border czar,” former Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director and immigration hardliner Tom Homan—seriously. Trump has vowed to terminate the temporary protected status granted to the Haitians, causing many to leave the Ohio city that Trump mentioned during a presidential debate. Popular destinations for the immigrants include Chicago, New York City, Boston, Canada, and even Brazil, where many Haitian migrants had previously been granted temporary asylum before illegally entering the U.S.

The Guardian.

We encourage anti-Trumpers not to reproduce. We don’t want them polluting our gene pool.

Read it.

The battle against Alzheimer’s has recently taken a controversial turn. Long-held theories about its cause are being challenged, sparking heated debates.

Now, emerging research points to the possibility that Alzheimer’s is actually an immune system disorder.