Read it.

For millennia, elderberry juice played a role in homegrown medicinal treatments. As it turns out, there may be merit to the use of the juice as a therapeutic beverage that can help lower blood sugar, make weight management easier, and increase a person’s immune system.

In a 2024 trial (via Nutrients), participants were asked to drink elderberry juice for one week. Afterward, their fecal matter was examined to identify any positive gut microbiome changes. Researchers found that the participants’ blood glucose levels had dropped by 24%, potentially because of flavonoids found in elderberry juice called anthocyanins. “This is the first human clinical trial to demonstrate that daily consumption of EBJ [elderberry juice] for one week significantly increases gut microbial communities associated with health benefits for the host,” according to Christy Teets, a scientific assistant from Washington State University who worked on the project (per Nutraceutical Business Review).

This is why your father smelled of elderberries.

Read it.

Many of today’s refrigerators and air conditioners have a fundamental flaw. Most coolers operate by vapor compression, relying on a fluid to absorb heat and wick it away. Vapor compression tech is cheap and proven, but it’s also inefficient and about as downsizable as a 1950s vacuum-tube computer. Plus, its workhorse fluids—in particular, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)—often enter the atmosphere as potent greenhouse gases.

Fortunately, there are a few solid-state alternatives to vapor compression that avoid these problems. More than just cleaning up refrigerators’ acts, the alternatives could create cooling devices in miniature, small enough to fit in a pocket. One such alternative relies on solid materials that change temperature under an electric field: what scientists call the electrostatic effect.

Researchers have now created arguably the most successful demonstration yet of an electrocaloric component. Relying on a ceramic multilayer capacitor, this regenerative heat exchanger (a.k.a. regenerator) features a difference in temperature more than 50 percent greater than any electrocaloric that preceded it.

Read it.

New York Times columnist Masha Gessen joined NPR host Michel Martin on Wednesday’s edition of Amanpour and Company on PBS, where he attacked the Supreme Court for not listening to the left’s preferred “experts” on the case involving Tennessee’s ban on so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors.

Martin declared, “You have some interesting things to say in a number of the columns that you’ve written about how this is also about a kind of loathing or resistance to expertise,” before inviting Gessen to “Say more about that, why you say that.”

Read it.

The Department of Education under President Joe Biden spent more than $1 billion on DEI-driven grants to public school districts, universities, and nonprofits since 2021, according to a report released by watchdog group Parents Defending Education (PDE).

The 162 grants funding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives were aimed at hiring, educational programming, and mental health training, according to PDE. Total price tag: $1,002,522,304.81. PDE said that’s a conservative estimate.

“These numbers are based on available data and not exact. The number of districts and students is likely much higher. Some districts, such as Miami-Dade County Public Schools, is connected to multiple grants and is therefore only counted once in the numbers,” PDE wrote in its report.

Steve Graham.

My first effort at deep frying in a propane cooker is behind me.

My wife likes wings, so we had them on hand. I also bought legs and thighs. I decided to make hush puppies as well, simply because I could.

…

The instructions say to keep the fryer far from your house. Well, of course they do. This fryer does not have a thermostat, and if you walk away and leave it running, which could happen if you drink while you barbecue, the oil can get so hot it bursts into flame, and then your house burns down.

Steve Graham: “Division gets a bad rap. It’s actually a huge blessing. Associating with degenerate people is harmful.”

ZMan reviews the ch-ch-ch-changes.

One of the things that got the “new right” buzzing in the closing months of the election was the sudden pullback by corporations on the DEI front. A bunch of large companies announced they were terminating these programs. This led to the online wing of the “new right” to confidently say “we are winning!” It was part of a wave of pro-Trump confidence that kicked in during the final six weeks of the election. After the election, the same forces sense they can clear the field of DEI.

That is the subtext to this post by Christopher Rufo, who has made a lucrative career out of opposing the DEI machine. It is a letter to the Trump transition team urging them to reverse the various executive orders creating the DEI bureaucracy within the federal bureaucracy and replacing it with a “colorblind” evaluation system. By acting quickly, Rufo thinks, the new administration can deal a death blow to the DEI movement, while momentum is on their side.

Rufo is smart to point out that public sentiment has shifted strongly against DEI, so Trump would not be battling with a hornet’s nest if he does this. Rufo frames his approach as low hanging fruit that would make Trump’s voters happy without spending too much political capital. On the other hand, the closest thing to eternal life is a government program, regardless of origin. Every president has dreamed of killing at least one government program. None have succeeded.

Quillette.

Is there anything left to say about Ta-Nehisi Coates and his ten-day reporting trip to Israel last year? The Message—now in its eighth week on the New York Times bestseller list—has been widely celebrated on the Left for its truth-to-power indictment of the Jewish state on multiple counts of apartheid, genocide, and white supremacy. But his account has also been thoroughly vivisected by critics, who have sliced their way through the text, correcting errors, supplying missing context, and making the case for Israel that Coates impatiently dismisses as disinformation force-fed to gullible innocents like him for years.

…

But never mind. Coates believes that morality trumps facts, and he derides invocations of “complexity” by Israel’s defenders. “I would sooner hear a defense of cannibalism,” he declares, “than I would hear any brief for what I saw with my own eyes in Hebron.” Try to explain the whys and wherefores of Israeli policies to Coates and you’re no better than Chico Marx’s con-man in Duck Soup: “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Coates the reporter claims that his powers of observation are all he needs to achieve moral clarity. And on that basis, he need not consider the views of his opponents because no context or explanation of Israeli conduct could possibly be exculpatory.

Read it.

Check out the headline and lead sentence of the front-page story on the Daniel Perry acquittal in Tuesday’s New York Times, “Jury Acquits Man Who Was Choking Rider On Subway Cleared of Homicide — Split Reaction in a Case Reflecting Tensions in New York City,” by Hurubie Meko and Anusha Bayya.

Yes, a man just randomly choked an innocent subway “rider” in New York City — not a loud, threatening disruptor with a long criminal record who posed a potentially deadly threat to other passengers.

The lead was no better. Again what a bizarre way to describe Daniel Penny’s brave subduing of Jordan Neely.

Read it.

This past week, several MSNBC hosts pushed a sore loser narrative that the Republican House majority was won because of “rigged” congressional districts, with one host even claiming Republicans had been “cheating basically.”

After Joe Scarborough first started pushing the “rigged” election line on Tuesday by invoking gerrymandering, fellow hosts Nicolle Wallace, Lawrence O’Donnell and Chris Hayes joined him on Wednesday after outgoing Democrat Congressman Wiley Nickel published an op-ed in The News & Observer complaining about North Carolina Republicans redrawing his home state’s districts, and Jonathan Capehart jumped in on Friday night.

And, even though Republicans are heavily short-changed by California’s district maps, O’Donnell spoke of the liberal state as if it were a model for how districts should be drawn.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

A week after Donald Trump won the presidency again, I sat across from Chris Murphy in his minimalist but well-appointed D.C. office. The Connecticut senator sounded like a man who had done a speedrun through all five stages of grief and was ready to talk about what comes next: how his party could learn from its loss and win over—or win back—voters in 2026 and 2028. “I have thought for a long time that there’s a race between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party,” Murphy told me. “And the question is: Does the Republican Party become more economically populist in a genuine way before the Democratic Party opens itself up to people who don’t agree with us on 100 percent of our social and cultural issues?”

…

Murphy is doing his best to make sure that his side of the aisle beats the Republicans, but he seems far from certain that it will. In an MSNBC interview after the election, the senator sketched out something of a road map for Democrats: “We should return to the party we were in the ’70s and ’80s, when we had economics as the tent pole and then we let in people who thought differently than us on other social and cultural issues.” Murphy was quick to add that this reinvention—or rather, reversion—will be challenging to pull off. “That’s a difficult thing for the Democratic Party to do, because we’ve applied a lot of litmus tests over the years,” he observed. “Those litmus tests have added up to a party that is pretty exclusionary and is shrinking, not growing.”

Read it.

Origin of COVID: Almost since COVID first appeared, a debate has raged about whether the virus’s emergence was zoonotic (transferred from an animal to a human) or whether it was the result of a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The subcommittee concluded that “the weight of the evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis.” If anything, I would say that is an understatement. The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the zoonotic emergence supposedly occurred, is about seven miles from the WIV. For a coronavirus to have naturally evolved within seven miles of a lab working on gain-of-function (GOF) research on coronaviruses would be one of the most remarkable coincidences of all time.

…

Suppression Tactics: The report argues that most of the non-medical suppression efforts, principally masks, social distancing, and lockdowns, had, at best, a limited impact on the spread of the virus and probably did more harm than good. It also suggests that public health officials had little scientific data to back up their guidance concerning their non-medical suppression efforts.

…

Vaccines: The subcommittee lauded the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed for the unprecedented speed in spurring COVID vaccine development. However, it pushed back against vaccine mandates, citing that the data never showed the vaccines would suppress transmission. It noted the toll the mandates took on the military and healthcare workforces at a critical time.

UPDATE: Bill forcing hospitals to administer ivermectin, other requested treatments nears finish line

Read it.

As a member of Columbia University’s top disciplinary body, Joseph Slaughter helped draft guidelines meant to provide students with a “contemporary understanding” of school rules on campus protests. As an English professor, he delivered a lecture that lauded a string of terrorist plane hijackings as “spectacular” and “remarkable,” according to audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

During his Oct. 9 talk, titled “Hijacking Human Rights,” Slaughter referenced “pretty spectacular” footage of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) plane hijackings from the early 1970s. He suggested those hijackings were peaceful, saying, “nobody dies except one of the hijackers.” He also said the hijackings were part of a “national liberation imaginary” and lauded their terrorist perpetrators for feeding their captives.

“I’d like to show you what a hijacking looked like in 1972. A PFLP hijacking, a Palestinian hijacking in 1972, where the PFLP hijackers, nobody dies except one of the hijackers,” he told a crowd of mostly student attendees. “What’s remarkable about the historical footage from this thing is the way that the PFLP hijackers are helping people off the airplane and taking them over to tables to eat.”

“This is a national liberation imaginary that is just so different from the moment that we are living in that it’s really, I think, important to try to conceive of a different structure of feeling,” he continued. “There is no place in the reporting in the 1970s where any of the people who are doing the hijackings are called terrorists. They’re called guerrillas, they’re called liberation fighters, they’re called liberation movements.”

Read it.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) blasted the “vile” health care system in response to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, saying the public’s “visceral” reaction “should be a warning” to everyone in the industry.

“The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system,” Warren told HuffPost when asked about the numerous posts on social media celebrating Thompson’s death.

“This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone,” Warren added.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) also condemned the health care system in response to Thompson’s death.

UPDATE: Sunny Hostin Makes Excuses for Assassinating Healthcare Executives

UPDATE: ‘This Is A Warning’: Warren, Sanders Address Sympathy For UnitedHealthcare CEO Killing (Huffington Post)

UPDATE: Progressivism & The Murder Of A Health Insurance CEO

UPDATE: Progressive lawmakers say the reaction to the UHC CEO killing is a ‘wake-up call’ (Business Insider)

UPDATE: NYPD Probes ‘Wanted’ Posters Showing CEOs

The Foundry.

President-elect Donald Trump has once again promised to “end birthright citizenship” for the U.S.-born children of illegal and nonimmigrant aliens.

But can he do this without amending the Constitution?

Yes, he can—at least according to the original meaning of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which, as I explained at great length in an earlier law review article and a pair of Heritage Foundation Legal Memos, is far different from the interpretation offered by most modern scholars.

Read it.

In a memorable April 1995 video, Apple founder Steve Jobs declared, “The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach, and administrators run the place, and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible….”

Then in January 2006, John Stossel’s eye-opening documentary, Stupid in America, was aired.

The investigative ABC show was billed as “a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America’s public schools, and it’s about time we face up to it…The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from poorer countries that spend much less money on education, ranking behind not only Belgium but also Poland, the Czech Republic, and South Korea…This should come as no surprise if you remember that public education in the United States is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.”

Associated Press.

Democrats: Releasing criminals onto the streets whenever they can get away with it.

Read it.

A decade ago, thermoelectric heating—which relies on the thermoelectric effect, in which electrons are pulled from one material to an adjacent material when both are heated—still required toxic or rare materials such as lead and tellurium. Because the thermoelectric effect is reversible, it also opens the door to cooling, with none of the environmental impact of using liquid refrigerants, or requiring industrial waste heat to be recovered as electricity.

However, the thermoelectric effect is so small in most materials and for small temperature differences that its real-world use so far has been mostly in space vehicles and for precisely controlling the temperature of donated organs for transplant. Researchers use a dimensionless quantity called ZT to describe the strength of the thermoelectric effect in any combination of materials. Two decades ago, combinations such as lead and tellurium yielded ZT values of around 1. After ten years, the search for new, more complex, and more effective materials had yielded ZT values of 2. In 2009, thermoelectrics researcher Cronin Vining wrote in Nature Materials that “commercial quantities of materials and/or efficient devices…does not seem imminent.”

But since then, materials scientists have been reporting more and more materials, such as tin selenide, and half a dozen other combinations, that lend themselves well to the thermoelectric effect.

Trump wants to end birthright citizenship. Can that really happen? (Politico)

Why the US has birthright citizenship and how Trump could challenge it (CNN)

FactChecking Trump’s ‘Meet the Press’ Interview (FactCheck.org)

Manhattan DA urges judge not to toss out guilty verdict in Trump hush money case (Politico)

Scoop: RFK Jr. pushes his daughter-in-law for CIA deputy director (Axios)

Biden: Trump’s tax and tariffs plans are a ‘major mistake’ (Adam Cancryn/Politico)

How Catholics can urge Joe Biden to commute death row sentences before leaving office (Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy/America …)

“President-elect immunity does not exist:” Prosecutors on Trump hush money case (Avery Lotz/Axios)

Politico Foreign Affairs Reporter Wants to Drag Trump into Syria Mess

Scarborough Exploits Penny Acquittal To Suggest Trump Fairly Convicted In NYC

How Trump could try to deport immigrants to countries other than their own (Nicole Narea/Vox)

Here’s How Manhattan DA Plans To Keep Trump Case Alive

White House Threatens Biden Veto of Bipartisan Bill to Add New Judges (Carl Hulse/New York Times)

New York prosecutors urge judge not to toss out Trump hush money conviction (NBC News)

Yellen: Trump’s Tariffs Could Derail Inflation Progress, Raise Costs

LA Times Columnist Quits Amid Owner’s Trump Support

Biden Says Trump Economic Plan Will Be ‘Disaster’

Bragg says Trump’s crimes and ‘history of malicious conduct’ are too serious for his hush-money case to be dismissed (Laura Italiano/Business Insider)

The GOP’s top priority for 2025: Repeal the laws of arithmetic (Catherine Rampell/Washington Post)

CBS Rehashes Misogyny Attack Against Hegseth, OMITS Support Letter

‘FAKE NEWS’: Pete Hegseth’s Former Colleagues Speak Out Against Corporate Media Smears

Trump’s intellectuals will betray his base

Trump plots to steal Congress’s budget authority (Liz Dye/Public Notice)

Playbook: Inside Trump’s game of Senate hardball (Politico)

By All Means, Jail My Colleagues, Mr. President! (William Kristol/The Bulwark)

Transcript: Trump Lawyer Alina Habba Gives Away His Border Scam on Fox (New Republic)

Prosecutors Are Fighting to Make Sure Trump Remains a Convicted Felon (Nikki McCann Ramirez/Rolling Stone)

RFK’s Anti-Vaccine Zealotry Is an Existential Threat to Public Schools (Casey Quinlan/New Republic)  I like it already.

Exclusive: RFK Jr.’s secret push to prove CIA killed uncle (Axios)

You Should Be More Worried About Trump’s Planned Military Purge (Don Moynihan/Can We Still Govern?)

Colbert Spews Fake News About Hegseth’s Views On Women In The Military

Justice Department’s storied Civil Rights Division will fight DEI under Trump (CNN)

CNN Poll: Most Americans approve how Trump is handling his return to the White House (Jennifer Agiesta/CNN)

Trump outran the law. His allies haven’t. (Politico)

Read it.

On Sunday, December 8th, 11,000 Syrian migrants entered the Christmas market in Essen, Germany, chanting “Allahu Akbar” and firing shots.

Since the beginning of the week, smartphone videos of the scene have proliferated on social media, sparking a number of angry and worried reactions to the scale of the demonstration, the behaviour of the participants, and the poor police response.

This latest gathering of Syrian migrants was known to and prepared for by the police. But the planned demonstration grew in size as the fall of Bashar al-Assad was confirmed, followed by his flight from Damascus, the Syrian capital. The numbers far exceeded advance estimates: with only 300 participants expected, ultimately, thousands of Syrians lined the streets of the city carrying flags.

In the videos circulating on social media, the contrast between the aggressiveness of the demonstrators and the festive, family atmosphere of the Christmas market is striking. Online, some have asked if the choice of location was random or deliberate. They see the targeting of the Christmas market as an offensive by the demonstrators against a symbol of Christian civilisation.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

Daniel Greenfield.

In a stunning win for freedom, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni terrorist organization defeated the Assad regime and its Shiite terrorist groups to take over Syria. HTS is led by Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, a Saudi former associate of the caliph of ISIS who has a $10 million reward on his head from the U.S. while Assad was supported by Hezbollah whose leaders had multi-million dollar rewards on their heads until Israel killed them (but didn’t collect the money.)

Assad was backed by the Shiite terror state of Iran while HTS is backed by the Sunni terror state of Turkey. Geopolitical experts say that Sunni Islamists defeating Shiite Islamists to rule the pile of rubble that’s left of Syria is the biggest win for human freedom since the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt and parts of North Africa (before being ousted from Egypt and some other parts of the region) in the freedom phenomenon known as the Arab Spring.

The media broadcast scenes of Jihadists praising Allah for helping them defeat the other Jihadists who also praise Allah (but not in the right way) and liberating political prisoners to shortly replace them with other political prisoners (assuming that they even bother taking political prisoners or any kind of prisoners.) Talks are underway between the terrorists of the former regime with the terrorists of the current regime to see if they can work it out.

Read it.

Lawmakers released the draft text of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025 on Saturday, and the House intends to vote on it on Thursday, according to Breaking Defense.

While proponents of sex-change treatments for minors argue that cross-sex hormone therapy and various other procedures are effective treatments to counter gender dysphoria, opponents have argued that there is no durable scientific basis for that claim and that medical professionals are effectively mutilating minors for life with medical treatments like puberty blockers. Notably, a four-year review of transgender medical studies published in April found that there is “weak evidence” supporting the use of puberty blockers by transgender-identifying children.

Moreover, Dr. Susan Bradley—a Canadian psychiatrist and pioneer in child gender dysphoria treatment—told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a 2023 interview that puberty blockers are “not as reversible as we always thought, and they have longer term effects on kids’ growth and development, including making them sterile and quite a number of things affecting their bone growth,” adding that she and her team were “wrong” to have suggested otherwise.

Read it.

The PBS News Hour avoided the nihilist-leftist take of too many media and social media liberals in its Monday evening segment on the capture of a suspect in the murder in Manhattan of UnitedHealthCare chief executive Brian Thompson.

Co-anchor Geoff Bennett strongly condemned the murder — but the interview also took a cheap shot at the Elon Musk-owned social media platform X (formerly Twitter) for the heartless comments, without noting they were coming almost exclusively from left-wing X users (there’s also plenty of left-wing pro-assassination ghoulishness on the “alternate” platform BlueSky: see Taylor Lorenz). That’s quite unlike the News Hour’s treatment of allegedly hateful comments and “disinformation” from right-wing social media, which are dutifully labeled with “extreme right”-type warning labels.

Bennett reported that the suspect, Luigi Mangione, was found carrying a document that “criticized health care companies and suggested violence as the answer. And that part of the story, the connections to the health care industry, has touched a nerve, sometimes with ugly results in the days since his murder.”

Newsbusters.

The mob of men in dresses aren’t really making their case for being welcomed in women’s bathrooms.

33-year-old James McIntyre figured he could convince lawmakers that men aren’t a danger to women’s bathrooms by…violently assaulting a woman.

“I was physically accosted tonight on Capitol grounds over my fight to protect women,” posted Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) to her X account on Tuesday.

Daily Signal.

“Washington is still operating as if it’s March 2020. The headquarters of most agencies remain largely abandoned,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, wrote in a report released Thursday that paints a dystopian picture of the federal workforce inside the vaunted beltway.

It’s been nearly five years since COVID-19 knocked on America’s door. Most schools and businesses opened up years ago. But federal government operations in Washington, D.C., are behind the flyover states.

Because of COVID-19, President Joe Biden campaigned from home in 2020. But after American classrooms and businesses reopened, Biden has been a frequently absent executive since he took the oath of office. Ernst figured Biden “was out of office 532 days over the last three-and-a-half years, about 40% of the time he was expected to be in the Oval Office.”

Democrats don’t get elected to office to work for the people. Democrats get elected to office to collect government pay and perks.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

The senator Elizabeth Warren will introduce a bill in Congress on Wednesday aimed at shifting corporations away from “maximizing shareholder value” and towards giving more support to workers and other stakeholders.

The Accountable Capitalism Act proposes a series of reforms to increase corporate responsibility, strengthen the voices of workers and others in corporate decisions and shift companies away from their focus on shareholders.

In the 1980s, the largest corporations in the US dedicated less than half of profits to shareholders, reinvesting the rest into the company, according to a fact sheet on the bill provided by Warren’s office to the Guardian.

Apparently an attempt to codify into law the progressive notion that businesses don’t exist to make money for their owners but rather to provide jobs and assist in social engineering by the government.

Daily Signal.

New job numbers are out and—hilariously—payrolls jumped 227,000, yet persons employed dropped 355,000. Are they just making it up?

The numbers are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which—thanks to the power of imagination—reports that jobs are booming, yet the unemployment rate is … worse, rising to 4.2%. It’s actually 7.3%, using the wider U-6 unemployment number that the legacy media only report when the president is a Republican.

The Hill, a Voice of the Crust.

Republicans are expected to rescind the Biden administration’s contentious nursing home staffing rule before it is set to take effect.

The move would come as a relief for the nursing home industry, which has argued the mandate doesn’t appropriately address current workforce challenges. But consumer advocates and public health experts who have fought to protect the rule fear repealing it will harm residents and long-term care facility workers alike.

Newsbusters.

ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel reported on his Tuesday show that several members of his staff have become infatuated with UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s alleged murderer. During his monologue, Kimmel read several text exchanges between the staff and their friends and family, including ones who promised to bake him cookies and those who desperately wanted to get on the jury.

Kimmel declared that, “So many women and so many men are going nuts over how good-looking this killer is, and there’s a huge wave of horny washing over us right now. It’s like we’re one of the guys you work with says, ‘I had a dream about you last night.’ When it’s the FedEx guy with the big muscles and rolled-up sleeves, you’re like, ‘Oh,’ but if it’s the bald IT guy wearing Crocs with black socks, you’re on the phone with HR, it’s kind of that same dynamic.”

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The immigration surge of the past few years has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing the great immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, according to a New York Times analysis of government data.

Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.

That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.

UPDATE: Legacy Media Pretend There’s No Cost to Biden’s Mass Importation of Illegal Immigrants

ZMan digs into history.

While most see the collapse of Syria as just another Middle East country thrown into chaos by the American government, it is a good lesson in the dangers that come when a distinct minority rules over the majority. The ISIS rebels get the credit, but the real blame lies with the way in which the Syria state was structured. Until now, Syria was ruled by one of the many minorities in the region. That minority is a mysterious ethnoreligious group called the Alawites.

The place to start is with the people. Syria has some of the oldest communities in the world, dating back to the ancient world. Maaloula, a village in western Syria, is one of the last remaining places where Aramaic is spoken. There are Christian communities that date back to Rome. Of course, Islam has been in the area now called Syria since the time of Mohamed. There is also the ethnoreligious group called the Alawites, which split from Shia Islam at some unknown point in the past.

The origins and identity of the Alawites are a mystery. There are roughly four million of them in the region. Their legends say they are descendants of the followers of the eleventh Imam, Hasan al-Askari. The reason he is called the eleventh Iman is because he was one of the twelve imams who claimed to be the spiritual and biological successors of the Mohamed. These are the founders of Shia Islam. Exactly how they became this distinct subgroup within Islam remains a mystery.

Read it.

These days, politicians routinely invoke the New Deal as a model of inspiration, without delving into the evidence of its effect. They do so even though the New Deal never, not even eight years in, met Roosevelt’s primary goal to “put America back to work.”

In reality, recovery’s absence in the 1930s is not so mysterious. Natural disasters contributed to the plight of the farms. The drought of the 1930s was unusually severe. The summers were unusually hot. While the “mighty wind” of the Dust Bowl resulted from a man-made eco-disaster: the overplowing of tens of thousands of acres.

The absence of a general recovery also can be explained. Recoveries, after all, are like people. They make choices. In each year of the 1930s, the recovery surveyed the economic landscape — and opted to stay away a while longer. Simple facts go a good way towards explaining why each year—and for slightly different reasons — the recovery absented itself. The same facts reveal the dangers of faith — not religious faith, but the political kind.

Read it.

Genes contain instructions for making proteins, and a central dogma of biology is that this information flows from DNA to RNA to proteins. But only two percent of the human genome actually encodes proteins; the function of the remaining 98% remains largely unknown.

One pressing problem in human genetics is to understand what these regions of the genome do—if anything at all. Historically, some have even referred to these regions as “junk.”

Now, a study in Cell finds that some noncoding RNAs are not, in fact, junk—they are functional and play an important role in our cells, including in cancer and human development.

‘Junk’ DNA = DNA we haven’t yet figured out what it does.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action. Slowly but surely we are weeding the incompetent out of the gene pool.

Alma T. C. Boykin:

Part of me once wanted to decorate my vehicle. The rest of me bashed that bit over the head until reason returned. One, depending on where you are, having certain tribal markings on the car will draw unwanted attention from passers by, and perhaps law enforcement. I don’t care to come out of a grocery store and discover that my car has been vandalized because of a sticker or logo. Two, getting fossilized decals off of cars is not always easy, especially now that plastic instead of steel and chrome cover everything. Three, having a vehicle that is clearly Alma’s Car might be a problem if I am ever trying to avoid someone or something. Like people who open carry a very unusual handgun, it signals things perhaps best kept quiet. That might be exactly what’s intended, as we see with highly political vehicles. Or it might mark the driver as a target for less-than-friendly attention if things get Interesting.

Read it.

Extremist armed factions across Syria are carrying out executions of civilians and soldiers amid the chaos following the fall of deposed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s government.

Al-Mayadeen reports on Tuesday that a video circulating on social media shows armed militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Al-Qaeda offshoot that took control of Damascus on Saturday, carrying out field executions of unarmed men in the village of al-Rabia in the countryside of Latakia.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

Read it.

The hardline and extremist Islamic groups Hamas and the Taliban have been among the first regional entities to offer congratulations to the Islamist-led ‘rebels’ and the Syrian people after the overthrow of the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Afghanistan’s Taliban government announced the following on Sunday soon after al-Qaeda spinoff Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) gained control of the presidential palace and government ministries and state media stations in Damascus:

“We express hope that the process of power transition be carried out in a manner aligned with the aspirations of the Syrian people, paving path for the establishment of an independent and service-oriented Islamic government,” a foreign ministry statement said, calling for Syria to be able to “move forward free from external interference”.

As long as Islam exists, ‘jihadis’ will be a problem. It’s been that way for 1400 years, and there is no indication that it will change. Whether our Ruling Class will continue prating how ‘peaceful’ Muslims are while ignoring the mass murder, or whether they will wake up and decide to do something about it, is an exercise left for the reader. (Exercise that doesn’t raise a sweat–my favorite kind.)

Read it.

The White House ordered the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal regulatory agency, to expand its use of “Indigenous Knowledge” on Monday, as part of a last-minute push in the federal government to embrace what scientists call pseudoscience.

The agency, according to a press release, signed a formal memorandum of understanding with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium to “advance Indigenous Knowledge” and “achieve strong climate resilience for our tribal nations.” The agreement will impact at least 35 accredited universities and “empower our tribal colleges and universities to be leaders in the ongoing response to climate change.”

“Indigenous Knowledge” is a discredited belief system posting that native-born peoples possess an innate understanding of how the universe works. While scientists have referred to its ideas as “dangerous” and a rejection of the scientific method, those criticisms have not stopped the Biden administration from ordering the federal government to consider “Indigenous Knowledge” when implementing rules and regulations.

Read it.

An anti-Israel agitator punched a visibly Jewish student in the face on Monday afternoon just outside of Columbia’s gates, where student group Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition held a rally.

The student, Jonathan Lederer, was wearing yarmulke alongside his brother and fellow Columbia student David, who held an Israeli flag. The assailant, who wore what appeared to be a Palestinian flag around his neck, called both students Nazis and ripped the Israeli flag out of David Lederer’s hands before taking off running. Jonathan Lederer ran after him, hoping to retrieve the flag. The assailant then punched Lederer, the Columbia student told the Washington Free Beacon.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

Read it.

New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D.) went on a fiery rant Tuesday blaming “the evil of white supremacy” for Daniel Penny’s acquittal in the death of Jordan Neely, a deranged black man whom Penny put in a chokehold on a Manhattan subway car.

“Whenever you feel discomfort from your whiteness, Black people are harmed or killed. And there is never accountability or justice. This is the evil of white supremacy. It spans across geography and political parties and sickens us all,” Bowman wrote, addressing his 12-post X thread to “White People.”

On Monday, a New York jury found Penny not guilty for the death of Neely, a homeless Michael Jackson impersonator. During the incident last year, Neely threatened passengers, shouting that he was hungry, ready to go to jail, and ready to die, according to witness testimony. Penny—a former Marine trained in how to subdue a dangerous person—placed Neely in a chokehold for six minutes. Neely was pronounced dead an hour later.

GOPers Suddenly Fear MAGA Nitwit MTG Is Creating a New Mess for Trump (The New Republic)

Republicans wonder if MTG’s new DOGE role will make her a leadership ally — or become a headache (Politico)

Elon Musk’s Stunning $250 Million Favor to Trump Should Wake Up Dems (Greg Sargent/New Republic)

Trump Says He Would Let ‘Dreamers’ Stay. But He Once Tried to Gut the Program. (Hamed Aleaziz/New York Times)

Playbook PM: A Jan. 6 insider on the transition team? (Bethany Irvine/Politico)

CALL DOGE: Taxpayer-Funded PBS Thinks NBC Wasn’t Hard Enough on Trump

Ron who? How Trump allies brought Hegseth back from the brink (Politico)

Biden to Warn Against Another Trump Tax Cut

Musk Warns Republicans Standing in Trump’s Way, or His

Trump’s DOJ Likely to Target DEI Programs

On Issue After Issue, Trump Promises the Moon. No Word on the Rocket. (Peter Baker/New York Times)

Republican-led states are rolling out plans that could aid Trump’s mass deportation effort (David A. Lieb/Associated Press)

Patel FBI plans spark concern over agency independence, retribution (Rebecca Beitsch/The Hill)

GOP senators feel weight of Trump’s loyalty test on nominees (Alexander Bolton/The Hill)

Bomb Threat Against Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene)

Kennedy’s War on Corn Syrup Brings a Health Crusade to Trump Country (Jonathan Weisman/New York Times)

Stewart Asks Aspiring DNC Chair How He Stopped GOP From ‘Diabolically’ Altering Wisconsin  By cheating, of course. That’s what Democrats do.

Elon Musk’s phishing attack on America (Jason Sattler/I Know How Much You Care)

Democrats demand answers from Trump pick Mehmet Oz on ‘Medicare privatization’ (Sahil Kapur/NBC News)  Medicare is effectively ‘privatized’ though the Medicare Advantage program.

State Department Scrambles To Scuttle $100M Censorship Network Before Trump Takes Office

NYC schools offer guidance to schools, immigrant parents ahead of Trump’s inauguration

Donald Trump Controls a Publicly Traded Company. Now He Will Pick Its Regulator. (ProPublica)

The slippery appeal of RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement (Keren Landman/Vox)

Fed Gov Rename DEI Positions to Fool Trump Admin (Daniel Greenfield/Frontpage Mag)

Trump’s mass deportation plan could threaten workforces in industries from agriculture to health care (Kate Rogers/CNBC)

Mass Deportations Will Start ‘Right Here In Chicago,’ Trump’s Border Czar Says (Mack Liederman/Block Club Chicago)

Anti-Trump Lincoln Project Paid Millions to Founders’ Companies

Acosta Takes Hegseth Out Of Context To Imply He’s Flip-Flopping To Get Confirmed

Trump’s Defense Pick Is Now Denying Things He Said on Tape (Edith Olmsted/New Republic)

Trump lawyers and aide hit with 10 additional felony charges in Wisconsin over 2020 fake electors (Scott Bauer/Associated Press)

Progressive Democrats demand major DNC reforms to reel working class back from Trump (Rachel Schilke/Washington Examiner)

Newsbusters.

After the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was caught on Tuesday, MSNBC’s Joy Reid was extra Joy Reid-y on The ReidOut. She gleefully noted that people on the internet are not angry at the murder, and when she welcomed progressive author and radio host Thom Hartmann, wondered how such reactions could be made in the same country that just elected Donald Trump. For his part, Hartmann declared that the reason why America does not have a socialist healthcare system is because of racism.

Reid began by pretending to be shocked that liberal Twitter sleuths are not eager to find lefty assassins, “Something a bit unexpected has happened following the murder… I don’t want to call it glee but, say, not unhappiness. Especially online, where the internet sleuths who often dedicate themselves to tracking down people accused of racist behavior in public places, criminals including January 6th fugitives, and more have actively been refusing to help.”

Salon, a Voice of the Crust.

Florida state Rep. Susan Valdes switched her party registration from Democrat to Republican on Monday, bolstering the GOP’s largest-ever majority in the House, The Tampa Bay Times reported.

“In the House, I have long known that no one has a monopoly on good ideas,” Valdes wrote in a statement posted on X. “I will not waste my final two years in the Florida Legislature being ignored in a caucus whose leadership expects me to ignore the needs of my community.”

A former Hillsborough County School Board member, Valdes first ran for House as a Democrat in 2018 and was elected to represent District 64, outside of Tampa.

…

“I want to roll up my sleeves and work. I want to be part of solving problems for West Tampa. I’m tired of being the party of protesting when I got into politics to be part of the party of progress,” she wrote, adding that she won’t agree with her fellow Republican House members on every issue.

LifeHacker.

There are more sorts of vending machines than ever before—and they dispense a wider range of products than you might imagine. While no country can compete with Japan in terms of sheer vending machine mania, even here in the U.S., vending machines have become much more varied. If you think vending machines only sell drinks, candy bars, and chips, it’s time to read about these 11 items you can find in vending machines.

Jeff Somers is also an excellent SF writer. Check him out on Amazon.

Marginal Revolution.

Donald Trump wants to create Freedom Cities. It’s a good idea. As I wrote in 2008, the Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF) for more [N.B. the vast majority of this land is NOT parks]. Thus, there is plenty of land to build new cities that could be adopted to new technologies such as driverless cars and drones.

I would add only one suggestion let’s call this Trump City.

 

UnHerd.

“The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Writing those words as the introduction to his 1995 anti-technology manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, Ted Kaczynski couldn’t have known that they would someday spawn an entire genre of memes. But so they have.

Eighty years old and serving eight consecutive life sentences in federal prison for his career as the Unabomber, Kaczynski has been revived as an online folk hero. Spend enough time online and you’ll stumble across the ‘Ted-pilled’ community, where “Uncle Ted” is a prophet who predicted the Silicon Valley-created dystopia we live in.

Kaczynski’s online popularity has coincided with a flurry of Unabomber-related content in recent years, including three separate TV or film projects: a four-part Netflix documentary, a dramatised Manhunt series on the FBI’s investigation, and Ted K, a feature-length biopic set on location near the infamous Lincoln, Montana cabin where Kaczynski built the bombs he used to kill three people and injure 23 more.

Read it.

On the most recent meeting of the Christian Democratic Leader’s Roundtable (Brussels, December 3), I was asked to speak on electoral fraud in Latin-America and on illegal migration as a weapon. These are two seemingly separate topics, but, as we shall see, they are conceptually interconnected.

Modern electoral fraud was developed in my country, Venezuela, by Hugo Chavez, with the support of Cuba. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Castro-communism, which directed and supported the armed violence of the guerrillas throughout Latin-America, decided to change its strategy, founding political parties, financing them with drug money, and perpetrating electoral frauds as a new form of coup d’état.

In other words, guerrillas such as the Colombian FARC,and coup perpetrators such as Chavez, abandoned their weapons while maintaining their hatred for democracy, for capitalism, and for the values and principles of Western Christian civilization.

ZMan pulls back the curtain.

An interesting bit of subtext to the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO is how the reactions to it reflects the shifting politics in America. Twenty years ago, the general reaction online would have been what you see in television police dramas. The vast majority of the public would have been cheering on the police as they searched for the killer, while his family was paraded in front of the cameras. The dead guy would have been the unquestionable victim of a terrible crime.

On top of that, the people we call conservatives would have been waddling about in their comfort fit chinos, beating their chests about crime and the demonization of capitalism by the people we call the left. As soon as it was clear that the perpetrator was a white male, the people we call the left would have been tub-thumping about the need for gun control and maybe white male violence. Both sides would have done their act in front of predictably adoring audience.

Both sides have tried their normal act, but the world has changed and that means the audience is not as interested in the old shows. The people we call the left got this right away and stuck to giggling about the victim being the head of one of those evil health insurance companies they have been demonizing for decades. They were sure the killer was one of their own, due to his wearing a dark hoodie. In fact, a lot of people in the dissident camp assumed it was an Antifa too.