New York Times.

Today, farms are growing saffron in California, Washington, Texas, Pennsylvania and Vermont. Martha Stewart (of course) has saffron planted on her farm in Katonah, N.Y. And the Philipps have sold more than $1 million worth of corms to 24,000 customers.

Saffron’s fragrant, crimson threads have played a key role in many of the world’s great cuisines since ancient times. They add a golden color and subtle bass note to Indian sweets, Moroccan tagines, Spanish paellas, French bouillabaisse and tachin, a classic Iranian rice dish layered with meat and dried fruit. Today, Iran is the largest producer of saffron in the world, but because of trade restrictions, shoppers in the United States will find the spice imported from countries like Spain, India and Afghanistan.

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Some states reinstated mask mandates as so-called health “experts” claim holiday social gatherings have caused an increase in four different types of viral infections, the Daily Mail reported on Thursday.

The “quad-demic” consists of a surge in infections caused by the flu, COVID-19, the respiratory illness RSV and norovirus, commonly called the stomach flu, according to the outlet.

Headlines about the quadruple threat emerged just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, fresh after talk about the risk of bird flu fell flat.

The Daily Signal.

Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, the man who drove a car into New Year’s Eve revelers on Bourbon Street after praising the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, had been a member of a Houston mosque where an imam claimed that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler massacred Jews because they controlled the economy.

Jabbar’s terrorist attack claimed the lives of 14 people, and he died in a shootout with police during the attack. His attack injured more than 30 people.

Masjid Bilal in Northern Houston, where Jabbar had been a member, sent a message to the community about the attack. The mosque urged the community, “It is crucial that we stay united at this time as we condemn these terrible acts.”

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The Judicial Conference of the United States said on Jan. 2 that it is not referring U.S. Supreme Court Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), rejecting complaints from a former government official and two U.S. senators.

Russ Vought, who led the White House Office of Management and Budget during President-elect Donald Trump’s administration and is set to lead the office again, filed the complaint against Jackson.

…

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) asked the conference to refer Thomas to the DOJ.

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When a pregnant woman had her blood sampled back in 1972, doctors discovered it was mysteriously missing a surface molecule found on all other known red blood cells at the time.

After 50 years, this strange molecular absence finally led to researchers from the UK and Israel describing a new blood group system in humans. In September, the team published their paper on the discovery.

“It represents a huge achievement, and the culmination of a long team effort, to finally establish this new blood group system and be able to offer the best care to rare, but important, patients,” UK National Health Service hematologist Louise Tilley said, after nearly 20 years of personally researching this bloody quirk.

While we’re all more familiar with the ABO blood group system and the rhesus factor (that’s the plus or minus part), humans actually have many different blood group systems based on the wide variety of cell-surface proteins and sugars that coat our blood cells.

Our bodies use these antigen molecules, amongst their other purposes, as identification markers to separate ‘self’ from potentially harmful not-selves.

Donald Trump and the great Panama Canal tantrum (Al Jazeera)

Panama celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Panama Canal handover as Trump wants to take it back (Associated Press)

The Panama Canal has a big problem, but it’s not China or Trump (The Economic Times)

How a long speaker fight could impact Trump’s ability to start his next term (Politico)

Mike Johnson Speaker Vote Looms As Trump Tries To Wrangle Roy

In Last-Ditch Executive Order, Biden Plans To ‘Permanently’ Handicap Trump’s Offshore Drilling Agenda

Alleged Cybertruck Bomber Was ‘Big’ Trump Supporter: Source (The Daily Beast)

“Trump Is Not Wrong” – MSNBC Finally Admits Massive Spike In Illegal Immigration Under Biden

‘We Dug It, We Own It’

Musk rocks U.K. politics with attacks on PM and support for far right (Dave Lawler/Axios)

Trump Transition Live Updates: Speaker Johnson Faces Crucial Vote (Catie Edmondson/New York Times)

Trump falsely links New Orleans terror attack to migrants after erroneous Fox News report (Brian Stelter/CNN)

Trump Goes All in On Mike Johnson in Bid to End MAGA Chaos (Juliegrace Brufke/The Daily Beast)

Forget Biden and Big Tech. We’re Supposed to Fear ‘Trump’s Media Censorship Arsenal’

The resistance to Trump is different this time. Just look at immigration. (Politico)

McCabe’s Treasonous Attack On Trump

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The Muslim invasion of Christendom proceeds at full speed.

ZMan pulls back the curtain.

One of the strange aspects of the so-called information age is how little information there is relative to what was expected at the start of this age. At the dawn of the internet, everyone assumed we were on the cusp of a great democratization of information, where everything was available to the public. Not only would the sum of all human knowledge be made available to everyone, but the ability to conceal information, like government secrets, would be near impossible.

It has not turned out like that at all. In many ways, people are more ignorant now than fifty years ago, despite having access to the great data stream. It turns out that you must want the information in order to have it and most people just want to be told what to think. Faced with the great firehose of information called the internet, most people simply find a narrative source to trust. Instead of gathering up the available facts to understand what is happening, people just trust the news.

This was always true, but prior to the internet there was some competition inside the media for an audience. That meant doing genuine reporting. The local newspaper had lots of information about what was happening. One unexpected result of the internet is a mass convergences of mainstream news sources and a narrowing of what is presented to the readership. Look at a aggregation site like this one and you can see the echo chamber that is mass media quite clearly.

The Other McCain.

One of the hallmarks of any totalitarian regime is that the leaders proclaim obvious falsehoods — kulaks and saboteurs are to blame for the famine! — and compel everyone to repeat these lies, with punishment aimed at dissenting truth-tellers. The purpose is “not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate,” and once you understand this function of totalitarian propaganda, you are less surprised by the ability of someone like Christopher Wray to speak blatant lies with apparent sincerity. Only skilled liars could flourish in the Biden regime.

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New York Times columnist Charles Blow joined MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Thursday’s installment of The ReidOut to react to the reaction to the New Orleans New Year’s truck attack by an ISIS supporter that killed 14 people where he claimed that the big problem is that the attack was “one crime committed by one name that sounds exotic,” and that allows people to ignore the “really big problem, which is young white men in America.”

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Note that lying to the FBI is a crime, but the FBI lying to you is not a crime.

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After a New Orleans terrorist attack by an ISIS supporter from Houston, Texas, and amid intensifying warnings of Islamic terrorist threats within the U.S., a resurfaced clip showing hundreds of American children in Houston wearing traditional Islamic dress, chanting references to Iran’s supreme leader, pledging allegiance to him, and praising martyrdom has reignited concerns over growing homegrown Islamic extremism.

The chilling video, aired by Iranian state media in 2022, raises concerns about the spread of various forms of Islamic extremism within the U.S., highlighting ideological influences that extend beyond specific groups like ISIS or Iran’s regime.

The perfect term for January 3d.

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Archaeologists once believed the ancient Amazon rainforest was an inhospitable place, sparsely populated by bands of hunter-gatherers. But the remains of enormous earthworks, pyramids, and roads from Bolivia to Brazil discovered over the past 2 decades have proved conclusively that the Amazon was home to large, complex societies long before European colonizers arrived. Now, there’s evidence that another human society—the oldest yet—left its mark on the region: A dense network of interconnected cities, now hidden beneath the forest in Ecuador’s Upano Valley, has been revealed by the laser mapping technology called lidar. The settlements, described today in Science, are at least 2500 years old, more than 1000 years older than any other known complex Amazonian society.

Lidar, which allows researchers to see through forest cover and reconstruct the ancient sites below, “is revolutionizing our understanding of the Amazon in pre-Columbian times,” says Carla Jaimes Betancourt, an archaeologist at the University of Bonn who wasn’t involved in the new work. Finding such an ancient urban network in the Upano Valley highlights the long-unrecognized diversity of ancient Amazonian cultures, which archaeologists are just beginning to be able to reconstruct.

Read it.

Around the world, people celebrate Public Domain Day on January 1, the day in which copyright expires on some older works and they enter the public domain in many different countries.

In the U.S. Constitution, copyright terms were meant to be very limited in order to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” The first copyright act, written in 1790 by the founding fathers themselves, set the term to be up to twenty-eight years.

But since then, powerful corporations have repeatedly extended the length of copyright to promote not the progress of society, but their profit. The result is that today in the U.S., work only enters the public domain ninety-five years after publication—locking our culture away for nearly a century.

2019 was the year in which new works were finally scheduled to enter the public domain, ending this long, corporate-dictated cultural winter. And as that year drew closer, it became clear that these corporations wouldn’t try to extend copyright yet again—making it the first year in almost a century in which a significant amount of art and literature once again entered the U.S. public domain, free for anyone in the U.S. to read, use, share, remix, build upon, and enjoy.

Ever since then, we’ve been celebrating Public Domain Day by preparing some of the year’s biggest literary hits for you to read on January 1.

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Today, UN voting behavior is dictated by the most powerful group of states in the General Assembly, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), to which 56 Islamic states belong and which thus largely dominates the group of non-aligned states (120 in total), which have a majority among the 193 UN member states. This means that resolutions proposed by the Islamic group of states against Israel automatically have a majority in the General Assembly. In the UN Security Council it is different; here any resolution can be overturned by the veto of the permanent members. Thus explicit condemnations of Israel by the Security Council are rarer than by the UN General Assembly.

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The human brain is one of the most metabolically active organs, accounting for about 20 percent of the body’s total energy expenditure. This high level of activity generates significant waste. Smaller byproducts, such as carbon dioxide, urea, and ammonia, diffuse into capillaries and are cleared through the bloodstream. Larger neurotoxic proteins—including beta-amyloid and tau, both widely associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, cannot be eliminated through the bloodstream alone due to their size.

In the past, it was believed that the brain lacked a lymphatic system to remove waste and relied solely on internal mechanisms for clearance.

However, in 2012, researchers discovered a specialized mechanism within the brain, analogous to the lymphatic system and capable of flushing out larger waste products from deep within the brain. This system was named the glymphatic system, a portmanteau of “glial” (referring to glial cells) and “lymphatic.” It is also known as the pseudo-lymphatic system.

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Germany’s cities once again had to endure a night of aggression, as young men were allowed to wreak havoc by launching fireworks in public areas, setting buildings ablaze, and attacking emergency services during New Year’s Eve.

Though major news agencies failed to name the perpetrators, videos circulating on social media made it quite clear that young migrant men were to blame, with right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party pointing the finger at the failed migration policies of the past.

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In video footage taken by Hamas itself and released by the IDF, Hamas operatives were filmed planting explosives about 45 metres away from the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, to where patients from Kamal Adwan were moved.

Using a hospital for military purposes is a war crime. It turns such a hospital from a protected space into a legitimate military target under international law. In Britain and America, however, the media did not report the hijack of Kamal Adwan hospital as a war crime. There was no outcry over the gross abuse of medical facilities that had turned a place of healing into an active war front and put patients at risk. Instead, media outlets faithfully parroted Hamas propaganda and accused Israel of burning the hospital down.

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Evan Wolfson was a classmate of mine at Yale. He was a slimy little weasel then,  and I doubt that he’s changed much over the years.

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A group of mischievous Afghan youngsters in the Swedish city of Kristianstad celebrated New Year’s a few days early by gang-raping a 20-year-old girl over the weekend. Now the errant youths are being brought up on charges, and I expect the Swedish judicial system to throw the book at them — they’ll probably get at least a month in detention for their unfortunate behavior.

Read it.

accused Jews of engaging in a “Hitlerian project” for claiming descent from ancient Hebrews during an appearance on a podcast hosted by a professor at Pakistan’s University of Lahore.

Massad said the idea that Jews are descended from ancient Hebrews is a “bogus claim” and called them a “strange European group” during a March 25 episode of InFocus with Ejaz Haider titled “Busting Zionist Myths.” Both Massad and the host, Ejaz Haider, a senior resident fellow at the University of Lahore’s Center for Security, Strategy, and Policy Research, have praised Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack. The podcast is hosted on a platform sponsored by the university, which itself endorsed “the Palestinians’ fight for freedom” in a statement issued one month after the attack.

“The idea that European Jews are somehow direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews is, of course, a bogus claim,” Massad said. “Even if Jews believed somehow [they had] some lineage, at least a religious or spiritual lineage [to ancient Hebrews], by the 17th and 18th centuries, this idea amongst European Christians would become important, especially to estrange European Jews from Europe, and they begin to cast them as ‘Asiatics’—people who have come from Asia originally.”

“What is special here about Zionism is not only the invention of ancient Israel and the invention of Jews as descendants of the ancient Hebrews, it’s almost like a Hitlerian project to speak of Jews genetically in this fashion,” Massad added. “And it only becomes fashionable, of course, in the 19th century, with the rise of racial science and the biological sciences.”

Massad also said ancient Israel was an invention of archaeology, a field he tied to colonialism.

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The UK’s Labour party is under fire for its refusal to back a public inquiry into historic sexual abuse by grooming gangs in Oldham, with critics accusing the party of prioritizing political optics over justice for victims.

The decision has sparked outrage, with Elon Musk branding it “disgraceful” and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch calling for a long-overdue national inquiry into rape gangs. “2025 must be the year the victims start to get justice,” Badenoch declared.

At the center of the controversy is Labour’s safeguarding minister Jess Phillips, who insisted that the decision to launch an investigation was “for Oldham Council alone.”

This comes despite a 2022 report revealing that children in Oldham were failed by agencies meant to protect them amid allegations of grooming by “predominantly Pakistani offenders” in council homes, shisha bars, and taxis.

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Famed British evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins has resigned from the Freedom From Religion Foundation after it censored an article supporting the belief that gender is biological.

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Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the Islamic terrorist who killed 14 people in the New Year’s Eve attack on New Orleans, lived near a Houston mosque led by a radical imam who once preached that Hitler massacred Jews because “they like to take control of the economy,” video footage shows.

The Jewish people “have many problems, but that’s one of the main problems—they like to take control of the economy,” Imam Eiad Soudan of Houston’s Masjid Bilal mosque said in November 2023, according to footage released by the Middle East Media Research Institute. “Everywhere they go, whatever is the rule, as long as they get to the goal, the means don’t matter.”

“They seek corruption in the land,” Soudan continued. “Hitler hated the Israelites so bad because of the economy thing, they were in control of the economy.” He referred to Hitler as “this guy … with the nice moustache.”

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On Wednesday during NBC’s special rolling coverage of the Islamic terror attack in New Orleans, correspondent intelligence community tool Ken Dilanian chose not once or twice, but three times to tie Islamic extremism to “extremist ideologies” like “far-right extremism.”

The most notable came during NBC Nightly News and anchor Lester Holt — who was the only network evening newscast anchor working a rare holiday — asking a simple question: “What does this tell us about the state of ISIS as we launch into 2025?”

Sure, Dilanian started by saying “the FBI director and others, Lester, have saying for some time that the threat from ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks is greater than it’s been for a long time, particular post-October 7 in light of the war in Gaza.”

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President Joe Biden’s Department of Education reached an agreement Thursday with Rutgers University to settle civil rights complaints alleging that Jewish students faced discrimination on campus since October 2023. The school didn’t admit wrongdoing and agreed only to underwhelming measures, such as reviewing its nondiscrimination policies.

In the resolution, Rutgers agreed to “provide training” to campus police officers and “employees responsible for investigating complaints and other reports of discrimination.” The school also agreed to conduct “listening sessions” and “develop a climate assessment” meant to evaluate “the extent to which students and/or employees are subjected to, or witness discrimination, including harassment, based on national origin, including shared Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim ancestry.”

“Rutgers has reached a voluntary agreement with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights to continue to take steps to clarify, communicate, and review its policies and procedures related to discrimination and harassment, especially around national origin,” a university spokeswoman told the Washington Free Beacon. “The Rutgers community stands firmly against discrimination and harassment in all its forms, and the university will always strive to strengthen the policies and practices that protect our students, faculty, and staff. Rutgers is grateful to the Office of Civil Rights for its guidance.”

The agreement settled three civil rights complaints but involved nearly 400 reports of discrimination against Jewish students. In one instance, an anti-Israel protester identified where a Jewish student lived and called for him to be killed. In another, a swastika was drawn on a Jewish student’s dorm room door.

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The Palestinian Authority (PA) announced Wednesday the suspension of Al-Jazeera’s operations in the Palestinian West Bank, citing alleged violations of Palestinian laws and ‘interference’.

The major Qatar-based outlet is accused of “manipulation, interference in internal affairs, and dissemination of misleading and incendiary reports,” according to a statement in the official Palestinian news agency WAFA.

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Wikipedia editors quietly deleted an entry claiming that Hamas has won nearly every battle against Israel since Oct. 7, setting off a fiery debate about the online database’s bias and inability to accurately portray the war.

In its article listing “military engagements during the Israel–Hamas war,” Wikipedia declared Hamas and its terror allies the victors in just about every key battle with Israel over the past year, according to multiple archived versions of the entry.

UPDATE: Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia (Molly White/Citation Needed)

5 things we know and still don’t know about COVID, 5 years after it appeared (Associated Press)

Five years on, have we learned the lessons of covid-19? (New Scientist)

COVID-19 epidemiological update (World Health Organization)

COVID Turns 5: Facts and Remaining Mysteries About the Virus (Newsweek)

Eyeing Potential Bird Flu Outbreak, Biden Administration Ramps Up Preparedness (Sheryl Gay Stolberg/New York Times)

Masks Return: Quadruple Virus Surge Strikes US

The chief justice takes a swipe at JD Vance (Washington Poop)

As Trump’s return looms, chief justice warns against defying courts (Politico)

Matthew Livelsberger Named Suspect in Vegas Blast (Newsweek)

Las Vegas police say Cybertruck that exploded at Trump hotel had fuel containers, large firework mortars (Fox News)

‘Trump is Annoyed’: Insiders Say ‘Shadow President’ Elon Musk Starting to Irritate Trump (Diana Falzone/Mediaite)

Knife-wielding Tren de Aragua gangbangers are repeatedly attacking border crossings in desperate move to force their way into US before Trump takes office (Jennie Taer/New York Post)

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser Says She Had ‘Great Meeting’ With Trump (John Harney/Bloomberg)

Trump ally Laura Loomer on Musk: ‘Nobody wants to cross this guy’ (Juliann Ventura/The Hill)

D.C. Mayor Bowser Met With Trump as Second Term Looms

Palestinian Leader: Trump Will Help ‘Destroy Iran,’ Hamas  Well, here’s hoping.

Trump Set to Flip Arguments in Supreme Court Cases

Biden WH Trying to Stop Trump’s Drilling Plans in Nevada

Republicans Admit MAGA Civil War Is a Total ‘S***show’ (Nico Hines/The Daily Beast)

Trump Faces Federal Employee Unions in Government Efficiency Battle

‘Trump is a little guy, Musk is a big guy’: historian predicts trouble for president-elect (Martin Pengelly/The Guardian)

The President Trump Is Pushing Aside (Russell Berman/The Atlantic)

Chris Sununu still believes the GOP is bigger than Donald Trump (Lisa Kashinsky/Politico)

Sanctuary Cities Prepare for Trump Migrant Deportations

Trump Voters Are in for a Rude Awakening (Robert McCoy/New Republic)

Musk Confirms “Large Fireworks &/Or Bomb” Exploded Cybertruck At Trump Vegas Hotel

Chris Sununu: Trump Admin Not ‘Evil Dictatorship’

Let’s Try Something Different in How We Deal With Trump (Tom Suozzi/New York Times)

Pro-Palestinian activists lambasted Biden and Harris. Trump will be an even bigger dilemma. (Irie Sentner/Politico)

Trump uses New Orleans attack to rant about ‘Democrats and the Fake News Media’ (Tom Boggioni/Raw Story)

Jack Be Gone: Special Counsel Withdraws From Classified Documents Case Against Trump Co-Defendants

Enshittification Comes to Washington (Jason Linkins/New Republic)

Elon vs. Elmo: New York Times Pits Republicans Against Sesame Street Again

Top DOJ Officials Leaked Non-Public Info To Media “Days Before An Election”: Inspector General

Trump Falsely Suggested New Orleans Suspect Was an Immigrant (Maggie Haberman/New York Times)

1 Dead After a Cybertruck Explodes Outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas (New York Times)

Texas sues to impose bigotry on the rest of the country (Lisa Needham/Public Notice)

Biden is giving the 2nd highest civilian award to the leaders of the Jan. 6 congressional committee (Colleen Long/Associated Press)

Comedian Roundup: Kathy Griffin Says Catch Me ‘Before I’m In One of Those Internment Camps’

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An Islamist terrorist killed fifteen people and injured thirty more after ramming his vehicle into a crowd of people who were celebrating the New Year in New Orleans.

The FBI—whose local spokesperson initially denied a terrorism link—is now investigating the incident as an “act of terrorism” after finding an ISIS flag inside the vehicle and pro-ISIS videos posted by the attacker. The Bureau said that the perpetrator, 42-year-old U.S.-born Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who was shot and killed by police, may have had accomplices.

Authorities are also investigating whether the attack is connected to a vehicle explosion outside a Las Vegas hotel owned by President-elect Donald Trump, which killed one person.

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

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Glue work” is an concept Tanya Reilly came up with in 2019. The idea is that there’s a large amount of unglamorous work that every team needs in order to be efficient: updating the docs and roadmap, addressing technical debt, onboarding engineers, making sure people talk to their counterparts on other teams, noticing strands that are getting dropped, and so on. Practical, naive engineers gravitate to this work because it’s obviously useful, but at promo or bonus time they’re ignored in favor of the engineers who did more visible work (like delivering new features).

I think this concept is excellent. It’s why I keep saying that shipping projects is so hard – if you’re the kind of engineer who’s used to just putting their head down and writing code, you won’t have the tools to do the glue work that is actually needed to deliver anything successfully. Pure hackers don’t ship. You need to be able to actually deal with the friction in a large organization in order to deliver value.

So why doesn’t glue work get you promoted, if it’s so crucial to shipping projects? Are companies stupid? Are they deliberately leaving value on the table? No, I don’t think so. Companies don’t reward glue work because they don’t want you prioritizing it. And they don’t want you prioritizing it because they want you shipping features. Glue work is hard. If you’re capable of doing glue work well, they want you to use that ability to deliver projects instead of improving general efficiency.

The core problem is that you’re deciding for yourself what the company needs instead of doing your job. Isn’t it your job to make your team run smoother? No! Your job is to execute the mission of your company’s leadership. It is better to execute that mission at 60% efficiency than to spend all your time increasing efficiency in general (or even worse, to execute some other mission at 100% efficiency). Why? For two main reasons: first, you’re inevitably going to burn out, which will be bad for everyone; second, it’s better to let your team get used to operating at the base efficiency level of the company instead of artificially removing friction for a brief period.

ZMan looks ahead.

One of the challenges with making predictions the last few years was that every year seemed to be wilder than the last. It was tempting to hope that crazy things you want to see happen would happen. This year, it feels like we are headed to a more normal time, but that probably means we see some important things begin to happen, now that the crazies are going into hibernation. This could turn out to be a less dramatic year than 2024, but a much more substantial one.

Every year there is an important topic that is bubbling under the surface, either in the ruling class or amongst the rabble, that suddenly breaks through. In 2024, we moved from “securing the border” to “mass deportation now” as the growing sentiment against immigration of all types finally broke through. The 2025 issue will be the collapsing birth rates around the world. It is a thing that gets discussed in certain circles, but 2025 will be the year it goes mainstream.

We will have to suffer from the usual slop from the commentariat, who will try to make money applying the old slogans to this issue. The public nuisances we call influencers will pollute the waters too. But by the end of the year, the educated debate will settle on the four D’s of human destiny. Diet, Development, Divinity and Deracination will be the focus for what is causing the fertility collapse. The most important issue in the world will suddenly become import…

Read it.

A Syrian culture-enricher ran amok today in Berlin and stabbed several people in a supermarket. Fortunately, no one was killed.

Police say the mischievous youngster may be — surprise! — mentally ill, and that there is no indication that the unfortunate incident had anything to do with terrorism.

Read it.

Earlier this year, officials from across the Biden-Harris administration reviewed intelligence detailing Iraq’s central role in a billion-dollar Iranian oil smuggling scheme. But they largely ignored that intelligence, according to those briefed on the matter, giving Tehran what one former U.S. official described as a “free pass” to evade American sanctions and rake in illicit cash.

Officials from the State Department, Treasury Department, and intelligence community received the 45-page intelligence report in April and sat for multiple briefs on its material. Assembled by a number of international intelligence agencies and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, the report identified Iraq, the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, as central to an Iranian “oil and fuel smuggling” operation that significantly expanded in 2022.

Iran generates roughly $1 billion from the smuggling scheme annually, Reuters reported, money that is “directly funding the Iranian threat network,” according to the intelligence report. The briefing on that report came just months after Iran-backed terror group Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, sparking a war that later spread to Lebanon, where fellow Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah launches near-daily missile barrages at the Jewish state.

But the Biden-Harris administration apparently did little to act on the intelligence. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which administers and enforces trade sanctions, responded to the report by drawing up sanctions packages targeting Iraq—but never actually put them in place, according to a former U.S. official briefed on the matter.

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Within days of its founding in early August, a mysterious company called Save Our Home Planet Action, Inc. managed to get ahold of nearly $2.2 million—funds that it promptly handed over to a collection of major Democratic super PACs.

Corporations can legally contribute to super PACs if the donated funds are earned through regular business activities. But it’s unclear what Save Our Home Planet Action did to earn the nearly $2.2 million it passed onto the Democratic groups after its founding in August through October. The company has neither an online presence nor a file with the Better Business Bureau or any other corporate databases.

Federal Election Commission records show the mysterious company shares an address with Patagonia, the self-proclaimed “activist company” that has committed to donating $100 million every year to combat climate change and uses the “Save Our Home Planet” slogan in the clothing it sells. And California business records show Greg Curtis, a former Patagonia legal officer who now heads the retailer’s parent nonprofit, signed documents on behalf of Save Our Home Planet Action.

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Law enforcement sources said the gunfire erupted near the Amazura event hall at 91-12 144th Place in Jamaica, within the confines of the 103rd Precinct, at about 11:20 p.m. on Jan. 1.

Sources familiar with the investigation reported that the hall was hosting a private party at the time of the shooting. The event apparently was in honor of a known gang member in the community slain last October whose birthday coincided with New Year’s Day.

As around 90 people partied inside the Amazura, about 15 people lined up outside waiting to get into the Wednesday night event that was at capacity. Law enforcement sources said four suspects walked eastbound along 144th Place and began firing indiscriminately at the crowd.

“Four males opened fire over 30 times in the direction of the group standing outside the event space, striking multiple victims. The males fled on foot westbound on 91st street towards 143 Place, where they entered a light-colored sedan with out-of-state plates,” NYPD Chief of Patrol Philip Rivera said during an early morning press conference. “Police officers responding to the multiple 911 calls found a total of 10 victims– six females, four males–which were taken to area hospitals. All of the victims are expected to recover.”

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In a recent discussion on the Shawn Ryan Show, former CIA targeting officer Sarah Adams warned of a potentially devastating attack planned by Al-Qaeda terrorists on American soil.

The interview offers significant insights into what may be unfolding, as Al-Qaeda sleeper cells could be activating in the wake of the New Orleans terrorist attack and a possible vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) in the rear of a rented Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas just hours later.

Ryan asked Adams: “I just want to clarify. You are 100% certain that there are 1,000 plus Al-Qaeda-trained fighters within the US borders?”

Adams, currently a global threat advisor with extensive experience in Middle Eastern affairs, responded: “Well, Al-Qaeda says they trained and deployed a thousand for this attack. First off, I think there are more than a thousand Al-Qaeda members in the United States, but for the Homeland Attack, that number is based on what Al-Qaeda is saying, so they could exaggerate it; however, they did have about 1,400 in the Hamas Attack so the number is not off from what they did in the first round of attacks.”

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Over the last 250 years of American political gamesmanship, both parties have played year-end games into the arms of a new incoming administration. In early 2000, the incoming George Walker Bush team discovered that every keyboard in the White House and other administrative offices was missing the “W” key.

The outgoing Clinton staff had removed all the “W” keys to annoy the new administration after an extremely contentious election.

The damage was small, estimated at $15,000.

But the bigger message here was that when the party that runs the White House changes, the outgoing administration will leave some proverbial “time bombs” for their successors.

While the damaged keyboards were more like a bad joke, what Biden is doing to Trump now is serious business. The outgoing administration has opened the spigots table max to get every penny out the door while they can under the existing budget.

It’s almost like they are looting the Treasury before they leave town.

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Foreign jihadists have been appointed in senior positions in the new Syrian military, which is now led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an offshoot of al-Qaeda that led the offensive that ousted former President Bashar al-Assad.

Syrian sources told Reuters that the foreign fighters appointed to the military include Uyghurs, a Jordanian, a Turk, and an Albanian. “This is a small token of recognition for the sacrifices Islamist jihadists gave to our struggle for freedom from Assad’s oppression,” an HTS source told the media outlet.

Among the Uyghurs is Abdulaziz Dawood Khudaberdi, the commander of the Turkistan Islamic Party’s (TIP) forces in Syria. The TIP’s stated goal is to create an Islamic State in China’s western Xinjiang region.

Khudaberdi was named a brigadier general in the Syrian military, and two other Uyghur fighters were appointed colonels.

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The Mexican organized crime group accused of fueling the United States’ fentanyl crisis is now making the deadly drug in Africa, according to local and international law enforcement agencies.

The Sinaloa cartel has chosen South Africa as a major operational base, they said, largely because of its strong trade links to China, which produces the chemicals used to make the synthetic opioid.

“At this stage, there isn’t a big market for fentanyl in Africa, so much of this drug that’s being made in underground labs on the continent is being smuggled into the United States, the biggest fentanyl market in the world,” said Lt. Gen. Godfrey Lebeya, chief of The Hawks, South Africa’s top police investigative unit.

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One day in the near future people will look back on this era as the moment that America snatched common sense back from the jaws of unmitigated insanity. Get Woke, Go Broke is becoming a cleansing wind as thousands of companies across the US abandon DEI and social justice programs in an effort to avoid total financial collapse. That said, the last organizations you probably expected to see dumping their woke initiatives are colleges and universities. After all, these “institutions of higher learning” have been ground zero for the woke mind virus for decades.

Surprisingly, even universities are now accepting the reality that social justice is a dead ideology walking. The University of Iowa is following this trend after recently announced that it will be shutting down two social justice related departments and it will eliminate its social justice major as part of an effort to streamline and restructure some humanities offerings.

Read it.

Boasting an estimated 175,000 members, drug cartels are the fifth largest employer in Mexico, according to a new study by research center Complexity Science Hub, ZME Science reported.

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Armed members of the Tren de Aragua gang have been trying to force their way across border crossings at El Paso and are planning another attempt to break through on New Year’s Day, according to a leaked Texas Department of Public Safety memo.

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Homeless rates in the U.S. reached record numbers in 2024, due in part to immigrants who entered the country illegally and had trouble finding housing in the nation’s sanctuary cities, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

With a majority of his caucus now calling on him to resign, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on a ski holiday, reflecting on whether to stay or go.

Trudeau is way down in the polls and facing challenges from within his party about whether he’s the right leader to unite Canadians. His decision comes as Canada braces for a tariff war when Donald Trump returns to the White House in three weeks.

Canadians will head to the polls in 2025, a federal election that could be triggered in late January if Trudeau’s foes topple the minority government when the House returns from break.

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Biden administration officials had previously said the site was simply being improved, but nearly all the accountability info from the site was removed and hasn’t returned.

“Federal union executives have taken advantage of the four years under the Biden administration, which adopted a ‘whole of government’ approach towards promoting and entrenching unions in the federal bureaucracy, to attempt to insulate themselves from a second Trump term,” Max Nelsen, a labor policy expert at the Freedom Foundation, told the Center Square.

As the Center Square previously reported, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management has for years updated a website to track unions’ “official time.”

Official time is a practice protected by federal law that allows federal employees to do certain union activities while being paid by the federal government, and therefore, on the taxpayers’ dime.

To make sure that workers and unions do not abuse this provision, the OPM has maintained a public accountability site tracking how that time has been used.

Biden’s administration removed the accountability website with promises to refurbish the online presence of the information.

In 2023, an OPM spokesperson told The Center Square that “previous reports on official time are not currently available because OPM is reorganizing our website to improve navigation and customer experience.”

Now, however, about two years later, the site is still gone. Lawmakers have blasted the OPM for the change.

Read it.

Inquiring minds want to know.

The rest of us? Not so much.

ISLAMOCOPIA THURSDAY:

Moment New Orleans attacker enters busy street in pick-up truck (BBC)

2 Baton Rouge natives, Lafayette man among 15 killed in Bourbon Street attack (WAFB)

FBI identifies suspect in New Orleans attack that killed at least 15 people (CNN)

Authorities probe possible military link between suspects in New Orleans attack and Trump Tower Cybertruck blast (NBC News)

Live updates: Authorities probe possible terror links to New Orleans attack that killed 15 people (NBC News)

Authorities suspect Cybertruck driver had military background (CNN)

Sources confirm to News5 driver of the Cybertruck in Las Vegas explosion lived in Colorado Springs (KOAA)

Suspect in New Orleans Attack Is Identified as a Texan and Had an ISIS Flag With Him (New York Times)