Read it.

Liberal governments like those running California, New York, and Detroit are rolling out reparations proposals that treat Americans differently depending on their skin color. That’s a constitutional problem.

The 14th Amendment says that governments cannot deny “any person” the “equal protection of the laws.” This means, as the Supreme Court says, that the law applies to everyone “without any differences of race, of color, or of nationality—it is universal in its application.”

The problem that equal protection poses for reparations is obvious: Reparations discriminate by race and make one group more “equal” than others.

Which has been the elephant swept under the rug since the advent of ‘civil rights’ laws in the mid-1960s. Until that time, Americans had a Right of Free Association, by which one could associate with other people or not according to one’s preference. The various cake and photogapher suits by the Alphabet Mafia who don’t choose to work for pervert celebrations are merely the reductio ad absurdam of that trend.

Read it.

After many years of a massive refugee influx into Europe from Middle East wars, especially going to back to the height of the 2015 migrant crisis, several European countries have ordered a halt to processing asylum applications from Syrians. This comes after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria.

The UK, German, and Austria have confirmed they are freezing their applications. Germany alone has taken in some one million Syrians. Other countries halting their process includes Italy, Norway, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Finland.

Austria has gone the furthest, with country’s interior minister, Gerhard Karner, saying, “I have instructed the ministry to prepare a program of orderly repatriation and deportation to Syria.”

It would appear that Europe might be waking up to the fact that offering themselves as the Universal Mommy for the dregs of the Turd World might not be a good policy.

Read it.

A decade of misery Americans experienced did not stem from an angry God. A careful reading of the facts of the period suggests they stemmed from bad economic policies, ones initially passed by President Hoover that grew worse under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In a highly readable Explainer, Shlaes illustrates the economic mistakes of the Great Depression – which famously included government slaughtering and burying 6.5 million pigs to keep prices high while millions of Americans were going hungry – were even more nonsensical than you realized.

Read it.

On X, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a new gun buyback event on Long Island for Saturday. The post was heavily ratio’d, with the usual X users in the reply section bashing the progressive politician and arguing how ineffective gun buybacks are at reducing crime. Meanwhile, it seems like James’ office has learned from previous gun buybacks how not to be exploited by the 3D-printed community.

“On Saturday, December 14, we’re hosting a gun buyback event in Bohemia at the True North Community Church from 10AM-1PM,” James’ post read, adding, “No ID is needed, and no questions will be asked.”

However, in small italicized font, James’ office wrote:

“Anyone bringing homemade or 3D-printed guns will be paid a total of $25, regardless of how many are turned in.”

Leftists don’t understand markets and how they work, which is why fiascos like this are supported with taxpayer funds. For example, if a government tries to reduce the number of rats by offering a bounty for them, it will actually increase the number of rats because people will start raising rats for the purpose of claiming the bounty.

The Hill, a Voice of the Crust.

A federal court in North Dakota has blocked Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage for immigrants that came into the U.S. illegally as children, also known as “Dreamers.”

U.S. District Judge Daniel M. Traynor on Monday granted Kansas, alongside 18 other states, a stay regarding a final rule from the Biden administration allowing some Dreamers access to the ACA marketplace, according to court documents. He also granted Kansas and the other states a preliminary injunction barring the federal government “enforcing the Final Rule against” them.

Read it.

Anti-Israel radicals smashed a University of Michigan regent’s window and painted “Divest” and “Free Palestine” on his wife’s car early Monday morning—the third time he’s faced such vandalism this year.

Jordan Acker, a Jewish regent, said two mason jars filled with urine thrown through his window woke up him, his wife, and his three young daughters. The paint on his wife’s car also included a red triangle, a symbol commonly used by Hamas.

“This is the third time that I—and now my family—have been the target of these Klan-like tactics,” Acker wrote on Instagram. “We all need to call out this cowardly act attacking my family and my home for what it truly is—terrorism.”

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

Read it.

A onetime Black Lives Matter leader called for “Black vigilantes” in the wake of the not guilty verdict Monday of Marine veteran Daniel Penny, on trial for choking to death a subway agitator in New York City in 2023.

Hawk Newsome, who co-founded BLM New York and led daily protests outside of the courthouse for the duration of the trial, reportedly shouted “it’s a small world” inside the courtroom after a jury acquitted Penny of criminally negligent homicide.

Outside the courthouse later, Newsome called for “Black vigilantes,” adding that “everybody else” has these vigilantes and “seeks justice on their own,” according to the Washington Examiner.

Read it.

Democrats paid controversial elections lawyer Marc Elias hundreds of thousands of dollars in a failed bid to help Sen. Bob Casey (D.) overturn the results of the Pennsylvania Senate election, according to campaign records.

The Casey campaign paid $36,435 to Elias’s firm, the Elias Law Group, from November 15 to November 25, campaign finance disclosures show. The campaign contributed $2.2 million to the “legal fund” for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which in turn paid the Elias Law Group $313,776 on November 20. The firm represented the Casey campaign and the DSCC in lawsuitsin multiple Pennsylvania counties to count mail-in and provisional ballots.

The Democratic National Committee paid the Elias Law Group $305,000 for “legal services,” records show. It is unclear if all of those funds went toward Elias’s work on behalf of Casey, but the first payment of $100,000 was made on November 8, the day Elias joined the Casey recount effort. In all, Democrats paid the Elias Law Group more than $650,000 in the weeks after the election.

Read it.

When police searched the home of two Students for Justice in Palestine leaders, a pair of sisters at George Mason University, their allies painted a sympathetic picture.

The students were targeted, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), for engaging in “anti-genocide events on campus.” The Intercept reported that police found “antique firearms” registered to the students’ brother and brought gun-related charges as a result of his family’s “pro-Palestine activism.”

Excluded from those descriptions was the crime the sisters are suspected of committing. A group of student radicals defaced George Mason’s student center in August, spray painting messages that warned of a “student intifada.” In its coverage of the incident, the Washington Post wrote that “activists spray-painted words on Wilkins Plaza outside the university’s Johnson Center.”

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

Vox, a Voice of the Crust.

Since Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, pundits and politicians have been trying to figure out why the country’s working class is moving to the right.

“Donald Trump Won as the Champion of Working-Class Discontent,” read one headline. “How Donald Trump Gave Democrats the Working-Class Blues,” read another. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders gave Democrats a scathing post-mortem: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he wrote in a statement after the election.

But what often gets lost in these conversations is this simple fact: There isn’t a single neat definition of “working class.” Some analysts focus on someone’s education as an indicator of class; others look at people’s incomes or jobs. A more traditional definition of “working class” encompasses both blue- and white-collar workers alike. (Many pundits also had a tendency to erroneously conflate the working class with the white working class when explaining Trump’s rise in 2016.)

Read it.

When the TV system is run by the government (UK residents are obliged to buy a license to watch TV), you can do that.

Under measures unveiled on Tuesday, ads showing “less healthy” food and drinks will only be allowed to be aired after the 9:00 pm watershed from October next year.

According to the National Health Service, obesity is rising among British kids with one in 10 four-year-olds now considered to be obese. And one in five five-year-olds suffers from tooth decay from eating too much sugar.

Also included on the government’s list — which uses a scoring system based on each item’s sugar, fat and salt content — are pre-packaged popular sugary breakfast foods such as croissants, pancakes and waffles.

Read it.

The claim that “60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck” comes from a survey by the fintech company LendingClub. The company refuses to release its survey methodology, but we can get a general idea from its website, which says: “For those Americans, [living paycheck to paycheck] means that they need their next paycheck to cover their monthly financial outflows.” So what LendingClub is probably claiming is that around 60% of Americans don’t have enough cash in their bank accounts to live off of for one month.

But LendingClub’s survey is probably just flat-out wrong about this. The Federal Reserve does a very careful annual survey called the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, or SHED.1 This survey asks whether people have a “rainy-day fund” sufficient to cover at least three months of expenses. And it pretty consistently finds that over half of Americans do have such a fund

…

If more than half of Americans have enough money to cover three months of expenses if they lose their job, then mathematically it cannot be true that 60% of Americans lack enough money to cover just one month of expenses.

It ain’t what you know, it’a what you know that ain’t so.

Read it.

As some of my readers know, I have been working for the past two years on a book about homemakers. The working title is No One at Home: What America Lost When Her Homemakers Went to Work, but I’m sure a real editor who wants to sell books would hate it.

Right now, I’m working on a chapter about how homemaking lost its social value in the second half of the twentieth century. Post-war America essentially stopped valuing the work of the home. Even in the 1950s, when the craft of homemaking seemed to reach a peak, I would argue that it was not valued per se, but turned into a status symbol instead. Thus, you got scenarios where a husband took the train to Manhattan, attended a three martini lunch, thereafter “worked”1 in a comfortable office, and came home to a wife who had spent the day raising their five kids, and yet was expect to serve him another cocktail, because he had been working, and she had not. No wonder we got second wave feminism. I’d have revolted also.

Slate. a Voice of the Crust.

A gunman dressed in dark clothing and wearing a mask over his lower face ambushed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday morning in midtown Manhattan, where Thompson’s company was hosting a conference. The New York Police Department said the shooting was a “targeted attack” and that the gunman remains at large, but few other details have been released. Surveillance video captured the moment the shooter calmly approached Thompson, pointed a pistol equipped with a silencer, fired multiple shots, and fled on an electric bike. Police are now combing through video footage to track him down, including at a nearby Starbucks the shooter visited.

Many who noted the details of the shooting had an immediate question: Is this what a professional hit looks like in real life? The NYPD has said nothing of the sort, but that didn’t stop speculation from running rampant online. Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has decades of expertise studying professional killers, has a unique perspective on that. He’s spent years dispelling myths about contract killings born of movies and Law & Order episodes. He told me he found aspects of the attack peculiar and agreed to talk to me while emphasizing that it’s too early to draw definitive conclusions about a crime for which very little information has been released. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Read it.

In the past, progressive elites were not generally threatened by the campaigns of the old center and center-right parties because those groups have long been managed by fake conservatives with no intention of disturbing the deviation of the Overton Window to the radical left. But of course, times have changed. Legitimate opposition to the far-left is rising in the form of political parties fighting for secure borders and anti-wokeness initiatives, and the progressives are furious.

They’ve had a taste of near total power, and though they claim to be the patron saints of Democracy they are openly adopting authoritarian ideals in order to keep that power.

In the US the far-left has been pursuing an all out propaganda war and has abused the legal system for years as a means to stop conservatives from returning to government. The lawfare tactics utilized against Donald Trump were unprecedented, but ultimately failed. In Europe, though, leftists are finding more success.

Read it.

few decades ago, and still kicking about in more American right-wing circles, the discussion of ‘bioethics’ took on national proportions. George W. Bush himself initiated a President’s Council of Bioethics, stacked with then-rockstar intellectuals such as Michael Sandel, Francis Fukuyama, and Leon Kass. The general message was, predictably, “No!”—with more or less embarrassed Biblical footnotes. ‘Transhumanism,’ one of the concerns of these bioethicists, is probably less a concept than a rhetorical device or the name for a vague cultural atmosphere, much like ‘globalism.’ The recent TERF wars have sparked renewed interest in the body and its malleability. J.K. Rowling is certainly an able rhetorician, and Mary Harrington has written what is almost a natural theology of the anatomy, even seeking to recast the post-war consensus on the pill.

There is likely little more exciting to 20th and 21st century political theorists than words like ‘embodied,’ ‘subjectivity,’ or ‘intersubjectivity.’ One really must control oneself. And it is certainly dramatic to write about transhumanism or cyborgs in Blade Runner-sounding jeremiads. What I want to present in the following is not more conceptual weed-killing. Rather, I want to suggest, in very undramatic terms, why technology—in the much more limited, much more Greek sense of craftsmanship—might be not only harmless, and be not merely useful, but be a help to being ourselves.

Read it.

By the early date of 1830, Alexis de Tocqueville had already uncovered the tensions that lie within democracy. He saw that although the gap between rich and poor was smaller than ever, the new closeness bred hatred where there had once been mutual respect. Now, only force could keep the peace. He concluded in despair: “Each feels the ill, but no one has the courage and energy needed to seek something better . . . we have destroyed an aristocratic society, and having stopped complacently amid the debris of the former edifice, we seem to want to settle there forever.” As Teslas glide past tent cities in Los Angeles, the West still stands paralyzed at the end of history.

New Trader U, a Voice of the Crust.

This site is pretty apparently run by proglodytes:

The growing wealth disparity between middle-class and upper-class families in America isn’t just about individual choices—it’s deeply rooted in systematic patterns and economic structures perpetuating financial patterns of being stuck or wealthy.

“Systemit patterns”! “Economic structures”! “Financial patterns”! You’re not to blame! No “individual choices” will get you out of the pit into which you’ve fallen! We need (wait for it) Government Action!

If only it were that simple….

Fortune, a Voice of the Crust.

Gee, I wonder why?

Read it.

When now President-Elect Donald Trump was convicted, the thrill-kill atmosphere around the courthouse and the country was explosive, but no one was more ecstatic than liberal columnist and former prosecutor Harry Litman.

The then L.A. Times columnist told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that it was a “majestic day” and “a day to celebrate.”

A lawfare advocate, Litman excitedly laid out how Trump could be barred from office, declaring that the raid in Mar-a-Lago was the “whole enchilada” in ending Trump’s political career.

Trump’s Biggest Lies From His ‘Meet the Press’ Interview (Peter Wade/Rolling Stone)

Trump’s FBI pick co-hosted a show for a conspiracy-filled, far-right media organization (Brandy Zadrozny/NBC News)  For the Narrative Media, there is no right but the far-right.

Trump Wants Jan. 6 Committee Members Imprisoned (Peter Wade/Rolling Stone)

Trump is stacking his White House roster with uber-rich backers (Kevin Breuninger/CNBC)

Trump says he can’t guarantee tariffs won’t raise US prices and won’t rule out revenge prosecutions (Associated Press)

Former Secret Service Agent Warns Trump Likely To Be Attacked Before Inauguration

Trump says RFK Jr. will investigate the discredited link between vaccines and autism: ‘Somebody has to find out’ (NBC News)

GOP Senator calls out NBC for ‘selectively omitting key words’ from 14th Amendment in Trump interview

Trump Vows to Deport U.S. Citizens in New Immigration Policy (Daily Beast) I have a little list .. they never would be missed.

Trump suggests deporting families with mixed immigration status (Axios) Well, either the family stays together, or it doesn’t. You can’t have it both ways.

Trump aims to end birthright citizenship, says American citizens with family here illegally may be deported (NBC) There’s an echo in here.

Trump’s business empire has expanded. Here’s where he could profit in his second term. (Jane C. Timm/NBC News)

The J. Edgar Hoover precedent for weaponizing the FBI (Public Notice)  As if Obama and Biden hadn’t already done that.

Kash-ing in: The money-making schemes of Trump’s pick for FBI Director (Popular Information)

Meet the Trump Nominees Selling Vitamins on the Side (Dominique Mosbergen/Wall Street Journal)

Transcript: Trump’s Private Rage at “Traitors” Reveals Dark 2025 Plans (New Republic)

Trump has a new family separation problem (Aaron Blake/Washington Post) It’s not a problem for Trump; it’s a problem for the illegals.

Activists Call on Biden to Clear Death Row Before Trump Takes Office (New York Times)

Trump sees the investigators, not the rioters, as the Jan. 6 criminals (Philip Bump/Washington Post)  As, indeed, they are.

What is birthright citizenship and the 14th amendment? Explaining Trump’s desired changes (Kinsey Crowley/USA Today)

Ana Navarro: You ‘Can’t Be Relaxing and Enjoying Christmas’ Because Trump

Schiff: Trump jail threat ‘about sending a message that no one better hold him to account’ (Joanne Haner/The Hill)

The World Is on Fire. And Trump’s About to Be President. Feel Better? (Michael Tomasky/New Republic)  An obvious rhetorical question.

Trump’s NIH pick wants you to believe he’s a victim of government censorship (Mike Masnick/MSNBC)

Shouting match breaks out on ‘The View’ as hosts clash over Trump threat (Sarah K. Burris/Raw Story)

DC Council Alters Progressive Bill Titles To Evade Scrutiny From Trump, Congress

Miller outlines how Trump administration would prioritize mass deportations (Axios)

Nobel Laureates Urge Senate to Turn Down Kennedy’s Nomination (Teddy Rosenbluth/New York Times)

Daniel Greenfield.

The Left is a religious movement. Its manic enthusiasms are fueled by the conviction that it can and will save the world. But what happens if the world does not want to be saved by the Left?

That is the dilemma of the 2024 election for believers in the ‘right side of history’.

In 2000 and 2016 leftists resorted to conspiracy theories to explain not only to us but to themselves why they did not really lose, but the 2024 election was a landslide in which not only the electoral college, but the popular vote, not only straight white men, but the entire spectrum of the electorate rejected not just Joe Biden, but his black female girl power ringer

When the Left lost the working class, it blamed the loss on racism. The factory workers and coal miners, the proletariat on whom generations of leftists had pinned their hopes for a national regeneration, were cast out for their whiteness. Henceforth, minorities would be the standard bearers for transforming the national culture and inheriting power at the dawn of the new age.

Now that virtually every minority group except black women has turned on them, what’s left?

Apart from the essays explaining why black women and ‘trans kids’ are the only virtuous minorities still out there (often written by straight white men) there isn’t a backup plan.

Read it.

As the Democrat party becomes ever more radically left-wing, I often wonder how they get half the population to vote for them. I mean, not everybody is a lesbian sociology professor at Amherst. How do anti-American radicals maintain the support of people who are neither stupid nor communists?

Another interesting feature of the modern Democrat party is how it presents its radical agenda. Thirty years ago, Democrats spoke mostly in euphemisms, avoiding clear explanations of their goals. Now that their goals are widely understood to be destructive and crazy, they have to be even more careful about discussions of specific policies. They avoid those discussions if possible, of course. For example, Kamala Harris really never clearly explained what she intended to do if she were to be elected president. She wanted to get elected, so she couldn’t, obviously.

But what if you work for the Democrat party? What if your job is to explain to American citizens what Democrat policies are, and why they are superior to the Republicans? What if it’s up to you to explain away the catastrophes which result from Democrat policies, and distract attention away from the successes of Republican parties? I refer, of course, to journalists. What if you are a journalist?

It’s easy for Kamala to refuse interviews. But if you write for The New York Times, you do have to say SOMETHING. And everything you say has to present Democrats in a positive light, and it has to make at least some sense.

Now THAT is a challenging job.

Read it.

A mysterious illness in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been dubbed “Disease X.” There have been over 400 cases and up to 143 deaths linked to the illness since late October, according to Bloomberg.

On Sunday, the World Health Organization provided an update on Disease X, indicating the illness has been reported in the Kwango Province, in the southwest part of the Central African country.

“Panzi health zone in Kwango Province of Democratic Republic of the Congo recorded 406 cases of an undiagnosed disease with symptoms of fever, headache, cough, runny nose and body ache,” the WHO wrote in the disease outbreak report.

What will they call it? COVID is already taken.

Read it.

It finally happened. The New York Times’s ego-maniacal and perpetually wrong economics columnist is finally divorcing himself from his propaganda-mill column after nearly 25 years.

The Times Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury drafted the company eulogy for Krugman’s career there, and the over the top praise for his faulty economic crystal ball was nothing short of comical.

“The authoritative voice. The lively writing. The direct style. The clear hand guiding readers through a thicket of policy, data and trade-offs,” read Kingsbury’s slobbering statement. “Paul is an important figure in the recent history of Times Opinion. Time and again, he took on the big fights, grappled with policy deeply and seriously, held the powerful to account and spoke hard truths.”

Cue the canned laughter.

Read it.

Left wing activist Darcie Bell, who spent years on social media railing to “Defund the police,” has gone viral after her U-Haul truck was stolen in San Francisco and the cops did nothing.

“If you see a 26 foot uhaul truck with the Arizona plate AL50003- would you let me know because it had like everything I own on it,” she wrote on X.

Bell, who goes by “Jerque Costeau” on X, and whose bio reads “will respond to all bad faith arguments w/ad hominem attacks,” blasted the police hours after filing a police report for not immediately finding her stolen items.

Quod abit circum venit circum.

UPDATE: ‘Defund the police’ activist goes viral after begging for help when everything she owned was stolen in San Francisco: ‘The cops didn’t do s–!’ (Jared Downing/New York Post)

Victor Davis Hanson.

This unprecedented pardon is not aberrant. It is characteristic of the left’s recent contempt for the rule of law.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

They feel frustrated by the status quo, and they’re fed up with the system. They don’t trust politicians, and they want revolutionary change.

They are men, many of them younger, who are looking for a champion. Once, they liked Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont as a presidential candidate. This election, they voted for Donald J. Trump.

The number of Sanders supporters who have gone MAGA is most likely a sliver of the electorate. But they illustrate an important pattern in American politics, political scientists say, one that might help explain Mr. Trump’s success with young men in particular. For certain voters, political preferences are defined not by party, but by their attitudes about the ruling class — whether they trust people in power, or think they’ve rigged the system against ordinary people.

Read it.

Just a few weeks before a poorly-publicized Jan. 1 deadline, a judge has issued a nationwide injunction barring the enforcement of a controversial mandate that would compel tens of millions of small and large businesses to file beneficial ownership reports with an obscure federal agency. The ruling doesn’t kill the requirement altogether, but it does bar the Treasury Department from enforcing it until lawsuits challenging the requirement’s constitutionality are fully resolved.

“There are now CTA cases pending in the Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits,” notes attorney and Forbes contributor Kelly Phillips Erb, posting as @taxgirl on X. “It’s looking more like it could end up at the Supreme Court.” There’s also the possibility that the next Trump administration — either unilaterally or via cooperation with Congress — could find a way to kill or at least narrow the requirement.

The rule imposed by the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) swept the vast majority of “legal entities created to do business in the United States” into a new bureaucratic net, directing them to dump information about themselves and their “beneficial owners” into a federal database managed by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) — which most Main Street businesses and single-member LLC’s have probably never even heard of. Those who failed to comply faced severe penalties, ranging from civil fines of up to $591 a day to criminal consequences of up to $250,000 and a five-year prison term.

Read it.

Read it.

State Attorney General Rob Bonta requested Dec. 4 that Californians report to his office any violations of state laws that limit state institutions, agencies, and local law enforcement’s ability to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement actions.

Senate Bill 54—passed in 2017 and known as the California Values Act—blocks state and local agencies from using resources to assist immigration enforcement by arresting, detaining, detecting, interrogating, or investigating individuals suspected of entering the country illegally.

The appeal came in an announcement that courts, health care facilities, libraries, and other public institutions in California were advised to craft policies meant to make it more difficult for federal law enforcement authorities to deport illegal immigrants.

Perhaps they don’t remember what happened the last time a state tried to nullify Federal law.

Read it.

Concerning the big decisions in the economic realm, we are in a somewhat better situation than national security analysts and policy-makers. Although certainty about possession of the truth remains beyond human reach, although the exact instrumental value of economic freedom and property rights for prosperity and economic growth remains debatable, we do know something. Adam Smith has taught us that the hope to acquire property is an important incentive for eliciting work effort. Ludwig von Mises has added that we need private property rights in land, factories, and enterprises for scarcity prices and a rational allocation of resources to apply. Finally, Friedrich August von Hayek added that the exploitation of human knowledge requires decentralized decision-making. Together these arguments imply that central planning is a road to misery.

Read it.

The corruption of science by progressive politics proceeds apace.

Read it.

•In 1906, the first FDA (Food and Drug Administration) was created in response to massive public protests against adulterated food and drugs (e.g., rotting food partially preserved with food additives or counterfeit consumer products). To stop it, food industry lobbyists attempted every tactic imaginable, eventually taking over the Department of Agriculture and in time forcing the dedicated public servant leading it (Harvey Wiley) to quit. Because of this, many toxic food additives Wiley fought against gained “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) status and remain in use today.

•The handicapping of the FDA came to a head in 1962, when thalidomide was just barely prevented from devastating America’s children, prompting Congress to give the FDA much broader powers to police the safety and efficacy of drugs.

•Unfortunately, this law backfired, as the FDA created an impossible to reach standard of efficacy that it selectively enforced to protect the pharmaceutical industry and simultaneously began utilizing increasingly brazen (and illegal) police tactics against anyone promoting effective natural therapies.

•Because of this, many life-changing medical therapies (discussed throughout this article) were blacklisted by the FDA and faded into obscurity. This, along with the FDA’s tendency to push unsafe and ineffective therapies (e.g., vaccines or antidepressants) onto the market regardless of how much data argued against doing so, led to the FDA becoming the most protested agency in the federal government.

•Nonetheless, every attempt to fix the FDA failed. In this article, I will review the structural issues that have perpetually caused the FDA to succumb to incompetence and corruption. I propose potential solutions that can utilize the unprecedented window created by the Make America Healthy Again movement to end the FDA’s war against America’s health.

Dunh dunh DUNHHHHHHH….

Beneath the icy expanse of Antarctica, an advanced submersible uncovered stunning underwater structures that could rewrite what we know about polar ice. But just as its groundbreaking mission reached new depths, the vessel vanished without a trace. What secrets lie hidden beneath the ice—and what could have caused its mysterious disappearance?

Blame it on Trump.

Read it.

and California is still counting the votes. And will go on counting them until the Dems win.

Considering Trump’s landslide victory, California had a difficult task ahead of it, but it has already managed to flip the seats held by Rep. Mike Garcia, Rep. Michelle Steel and just stole the seat held by Rep. John Duarte.

In Duarte’s 13th congressional district, California Dems have taken a month to count a little over 210,000 votes. That’s an impressive achievement considering that the proverbial Florida Man seems able to count the votes on Election night. Even third world countries seem to do it.

It took Democrats ‘counting’ a full 3 weeks to get the Democrat challenger to finally take a lead. Four weeks later, they are declaring victory after finally having ‘found’ enough ballots.

Garcia, Steel and Duarte were all leading on Election night until late-arriving mail drop ballots showed up.

What Republicans and Democrats Get Wrong About Crime (Jennifer Doleac/New York Times)

The fascinating – and important – Florida and Ohio Senate appointments (Aaron Blake/Washington Post)

Welcome to the New Dark Ages (Austin Sarat/Salon)

How Trump’s transition could end up hamstringing his agenda (Alice Miranda Ollstein/Politico)

Trump hesitates to personally lobby for endangered Cabinet picks (Washington Post)

Hegseth and Collins’ push for cutting veterans health benefits alarms servicemembers and veterans groups (CNN)

Now Is the Time for Courage – One month after the election of Donald Trump I feel more certain … (Marc Elias/Democracy Docket)

How RFK Jr. can win over a skeptical medical community (Marc Siegel/The Hill)  Don’t rock the boat.

Trump’s team weighs withholding massive research grants from universities that are too ‘woke’: Report (Gustaf Kilander/The Independent)

‘It’s like Game of Thrones’: Inside the jockeying for Trump administration jobs (NBC News)

Trump isn’t back in office but he’s already pushing his agenda and negotiating with world leaders (Jill Colvin/Associated Press)

Revealed: the tech bosses who poured $394.1m into US election – and how they compared to Elon Musk (The Guardian)

Democrats inch toward the anger phase of their election loss (Holly Otterbein/Politico)

Want a Job in the Trump Administration? Be Prepared for the Loyalty Test. (New York Times)

Climate Activists Need to Radically Change Their Approach Under Trump (Arnab Datta/New York Times)

Federal employees scramble to insulate themselves from Trump’s purge (Washington Post)

And about time.

Marginal Revolution.

The latest sought-after home amenity? Personal fire hydrants. The logic is that when there’s a major disaster there may not be enough fire engines to protect every house in an area. If homeowners have their own hydrant ready to go—along with hoses, nozzles and adapters—and are trained to use it all, that could help reduce the number of homes destroyed.

…

Victoria Waldorf is the listing agent for a five-bedroom, three-bathroom, 4,691-square-foot house that is for sale for $1.775 million in Agua Dulce, Calif. She says she points out the personal fire hydrant to everyone who comes through for a viewing. “There’s relief in people’s faces,” she says.

My house is only about fifty feet from a city hydrant, so I think I’m good.

Read it.

Nationwide demand for raw milk has never been higher, as out-of-control bureaucrats in their ivory towers in Washington, DC, exploit bird flu outbreaks in dairy herds to financially crush small farms while ensuring that large-scale farms owned by mega corporations, which produce questionable/unhealthy food (hence America’s obesity crisis), remain in control of the nation’s food supply chain.

The latest overreach in the war on raw milk comes as the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) ordered dairy farmers to work with the federal agency to test for bird flu (H5N1).

On Friday, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack wrote in a statement, “This new milk testing strategy will build on those steps to date and will provide a roadmap for states to protect the health of their dairy herds.”

Leave No Action Unregulated.

Read it.

The Biden-Harris experiment in dissolving the U.S. border has wrought massive changes to American society, most of which will not be understood for years, if not decades. Since 2021, U.S. border officials have had at least 10 million “encounters” with migrants, many of whom were allowed to enter the country. There is no telling how many more aliens entered the country without encountering enforcement agents. The population of the United States may have increased by as much as 15 million people in just a few years.

This massive flow of humanity crosses multiple national borders, involves every mode of transportation, accounts for billions of dollars paid in fees to smugglers, and describes a fantastically complex economy of suffering and hope. In an effort to get a handle on this human tide, noted muckraker James O’Keefe – known for his hidden camera “gotcha” interviews with abortionists, media executives, progressive nonprofit executives, and other degenerate types – traces the migrant onrush from its source, and seeks to trace the machinery of profit and influence that is conducting it from great removes.

Read it.

Isaac Schorr at Mediaite penned an opinion piece titled “CNN Should Apologize for Its Obscene Fearmongering Over Trump Outlawing Gay Marriage.”

On Friday morning’s CNN Newsroom, CNN host Pamela Brown (daughter of John Y. Brown, the former Democrat governor of Kentucky) played up the alleged threat of Trump outlawing gay marriage — even though Trump never touched it in his first term.

Proglodytes are binary thinkers — people on the other side from them on any issue are presumed to be on the other side from them in all issues, even in the absence of any shred of evidence. They hate Trump, therefore Trump has to be a Nazi, has to be a racist, has to be a misogynist, has to be plotting to reverse all of the proglodyte ‘advances’ achieved under any proglodyte administration. He just has to, you see.

Most people believe something when they see it; proglodytes see it when they believe it.

Read it.

CBS Saturday Morning’s has recently taken it upon itself to deliver gushing interviews of liberal heroes. First there was actress Jane Fonda, then there was Clinton strategist James Carville. This Saturday it was author Margaret Atwood’s turn, and co-host Michelle Miller was there to help her affirm the idea that the conservative-imposed dystopia she wrote about in The Handmaid’s Tale is no longer a work of fiction.

Miller, who also conducted the Carville interview and whose husband is the former Democratic mayor of New Orleans and current president of the National Urban League, declared in a voiceover that the book “struck a chord after the 2016 election and a promise to end abortion rights. Although written in the era of another Republican president, Ronald Reagan.”

The premise behind The Handmaid’s Tale is that America has fallen into dystopia, and women have become enslaved and solely exist to get pregnant and have children. It is quite ridiculous to pretend that describes America today, but Atwood claimed it does, “It seemed less of a possibility then certainly to some readers and some reviewers, who said, ‘Don’t be silly, this would never happen in the United States.’ And now, they’re saying, ‘This should not be an instruction manual.’”

Miller played along, “What is that for you to be witnessing?” and Atwood replied, “You know, I would rather have been wrong, given the choice.”

Read it.

Last week, the Biden administration passed a rule allowing for the government healthcare programs Medicare and Medicaid coverage of a class of weight-loss drugs that promises to help millions of people lose weight and become healthier. This decision by the White House begs the question: Why wait until after the election to pass a popular proposal that will help millions of working-class Americans afford weight-loss drugs they currently cannot afford to purchase themselves?

A lot of the press analysis portrays this White House decision as a shot by President Biden at the incoming Trump administration, forcing the potential new Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has cast doubt on the benefits of these drugs, to either keep this Biden era provision or take critical medical coverage away from millions of working-class Americans who rely on government subsidized healthcare.

But my clear understanding of the White House decision to cover GLP-1 weight loss and diabetes drugs like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic/Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro/Zepbound is that this was not a shot at the incoming Trump administration, but rather, a willingness of the president and the vice president to rebuke the progressive wing of the Democratic Party which has vociferously opposed this new policy. Indeed, lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont have waged a personal crusade against the makers of these drugs to reduce their profits.

Washington Poop, a Voice of the Crust.

The amendment — introduced Thursday by Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vermont) and outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin III (I-West Virginia) — would impose 18-year term limits on new justices appointed to the court, so eventually there would be a new opening about every two years.

Welch, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the goal of the amendment is to restore confidence in the high court and promote judicial independence. “Most people see the court as political. In fact, I do as well,” he said. “The question is, ‘How can we restore confidence?’”

Thursday’s joint resolution is the latest and most ambitious step in the years-long effort to make substantive changes to the Supreme Court following outrage over ethics scandals involving Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. and rulings from the 6-3 conservative supermajority that have overturned legal precedent.

Said ‘scandals’ being ginned up by Democrats, and any ‘loss of coifidence’ being caused by constant calumnies in the Narrative Media. Democrats are just tired of losing, and are attempting to change the rules in the middle of the game, as they always do.

Reuters.

Syrian rebels declared President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster after seizing control of Damascus on Sunday, ending his family’s iron-fisted rule after more than 13 years of civil war in a seismic moment for the Middle East.

The Islamist rebels also dealt a major blow to the influence of Russia and Iran in the region, key allies who propped up Assad during critical moments in the conflict.

Iran’s embassy was stormed by Syrian rebels following their capture of Damascus, Iran’s English-language Press TV reported on Sunday.

Syria’s army command notified officers on Sunday that Assad’s rule had ended, a Syrian officer who was informed of the move told Reuters.

But the Syrian army later said it was continuing operations against “terrorist groups” in the key cities of Hama and Homs and in Deraa countryside.

Assad, who had crushed all forms of dissent, flew out of Damascus for an unknown destination earlier on Sunday, two senior army officers told Reuters, as rebels said they had entered the capital with no sign of army deployments.

Read it.

The Canadian government announced on Thursday that it was prohibiting its citizens from owning another 324 types of firearms and is working to send them to Ukraine.

“As part of its comprehensive approach, on December 5, 2024, the Government announced the prohibition of more military-style assault-style firearms,” Canada’s Public Safety Department said in a press release.