National Bureau of Economic Research.

Is the top tail of wealth a set of fixed individuals or is there substantial turnover? We estimate upper-tail wealth dynamics during the Gilded Age and beyond, a time of rapid wealth accumulation and concentration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using various wealth proxies and data tracking tens of millions of individuals, we find that most extremely wealthy individuals drop out of the top tail within their lifetimes. Yet, elite wealth still matters. We find a non-linear association between grandparental wealth and being in the top 1%, such that having a rich grandparent exponentially increases the likelihood of reaching the top 1%. Still, over 90% of the grandchildren of top 1% wealth grandfathers did not achieve that level.

Emphasis added.

Real Scientists aren’t taken in by the Aggregation Fallacy.

Read it.

The underlying strength of economics is that (when approached honestly and with respect to the data) it can give us a relatively accurate measure of progress versus cost. If the rewards outweigh the costs after careful calculation then that economic endeavor will bear fruit. The ability to gauge production, innovation and prosperity with an unbiased eye is essential to true economics.

The problem is that economics is not only a mathematical science, it is also, for lack of a better term, a social science. One has to understand individual psychology and mass psychology. You have to be knowledgeable in the inconsistencies of human emotion and desire as much as you are knowledgeable in the hard realities of supply and demand. Furthermore, not all people that engage in economic study do so for the benefit of humanity.

There is a contingent of financial elitists that seek to use their understanding of the psychological side of economics to socially engineer political outcomes. We’ve heard it said that nuclear science or genetic science offer a power so terrible that they could wipe out civilization if exploited by the wrong hands. I would argue that economic science in the wrong hands outdoes every other competitor because it can be used to enslave humanity forever.

Read it.

Last week, the captain and first mate of a Mexican fishing boat are in federal custody after brawling with U.S. Coast Guard members attempting to board their vessel, according to Border Report.

The clash occurred last Sunday off San Diego’s Mission Bay after a federal Joint Operations Center in Imperial Beach flagged the boat as suspicious.

The boat, with six occupants and an “excessive number” of fishing poles, was under surveillance by U.S. Border Patrol near Dana Launch. Agents observed four passengers disembarking, later identified as Mexican migrants. They were instructed to sit on the pier while agents searched for the boat’s operators.

The Border Report article says agents spotted two individuals hiding near public restrooms, but the pair fled back to the boat, quickly unmooring and escaping before they could be apprehended.

Read it.

A raging war in Ukraine and a smoldering Middle East did not stop outgoing president Joe Biden from touting his foreign policy successes in a farewell State Department speech on Monday. His administration, Biden said, successfully averted major conflicts across the globe and left the United States “more capable” and “better prepared” than ever before.

“Our adversaries are weaker than they were when we came into the job four years ago,” the octogenarian said before a crowd of diplomats at the State Department. “America is more capable and, I would argue, better prepared than we’ve been in a long, long time.”

Biden touted his support for Israel in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah, though the one-term president did not mention his administration’s efforts to handicap the Jewish state by withholding critical arms shipments, forbidding it from entering Hamas-run areas in Gaza, and pressing it to ink a preemptive ceasefire with both terror groups.

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I am not going to bury the lead in this article: fantasy armies are simply terrible when it comes to conducting security operations. It certainly builds tension with the audience when one side is on the cusp of losing a battle, quickly followed by a moment of pure exhilaration when an ally arrives unexpectedly and saves the day, but nothing infuriates me more than when I see this happen on-screen. This is because the opposing army is apparently great at tactical operations right up until the point the script requires them to not be. Where is their reconnaissance element? Where are the pickets? Where is the lone scout who can warn their commander an enemy army is like to arrive in force within the next half hour?

According to Field Manual (FM) 3-98, Reconnaissance and Security Operations, Security Operations are to “provide early and accurate warning of enemy operations, to provide the force being protected with time and maneuver space within which to react to the enemy, and to develop the situation to allow commanders to effectively use their force;” this essentially means security operations keep a force from being surprised or they protect a force if they believe contact is likely to occur. Whether it is the fault of the tactical Commanders on screen or the military advisors off it, it is painstakingly obvious neither have ever glanced in the direction of FM 3-98. Fantasy warfare would be far more realistic, but much less exciting, if armies conducted proper security operations during an engagement.

Reconnaissance is the defining job of light cavalry, and has been since men started riding horses.

Steve Graham.

Sometimes I really disappoint myself. It’s already January 13, and I have only bought two rifles this year.

Minnesota Star-Tribune.

Minnesota House Democrats were sworn into office Sunday evening in a private ceremony at the Minnesota History Center, a “covert” move that Republicans criticized as illegitimate.

The swearing-in is the latest twist in a contentious run up to the 2025 legislative session, which House Democrats are promising to boycott for several weeks without a power-sharing agreement with Republicans.

DFL leader Melissa Hortman said in a statement that they wanted to make sure their members were “properly and legally sworn in” if they don’t show up for session on the first day Tuesday. Members are typically sworn into office as the legislative session convenes.
“Any attempt to subvert that is illegitimate,” said GOP House Leader Lisa Demuth,

esponding to the news Sunday that Democrats had secretly sworn in their members. “This move is a slap in the face to the institution and to every voter who expects their elected officials to act in good faith and uphold the integrity of the legislative process.”
Democrats lost three seats in the state House in the fall election, leaving the chamber tied 67-67. But Republicans successfully challenged in court the residency of a Democrat who won a Roseville-area seat, leaving the chamber with a 67-66 GOP edge pending a special election on Jan. 28.

Have you ever noticed that Democrats don’t seem to like actual democracy very much?

UPDATE: The Pitched Battles for Partisan Control in State Legislatures (New York Times)

Read it.

Recent reports in Politico and The Guardian make a now-familiar but false claim: California’s wildfires, particularly the devastating events around Los Angeles, are evidence of an accelerating “climate crisis.” The claims made in these stories are false. Data do not show wildfires are getting worse. The stories rely on oversimplified, headline-grabbing narratives that blame climate change without examining other critical variables. In addition, they continue to make the most basic mistake of conflating weather events with long-term climate change.

California’s landscapes have evolved alongside fire for millennia. Long before industrialization, periodic wildfires swept through these ecosystems, clearing out excess vegetation and promoting biodiversity. This is not conjecture, rather it is well-documented in history. Native American tribes understood this and used controlled burns to manage the land.

The problem today is not that California has fires—it always has. The problem is that modern fire suppression policies disrupted this natural cycle. For much of the 20th century, aggressive efforts to extinguish all fires, combined with the abandonment of Indigenous fire management techniques, allowed vegetation and underbrush to accumulate to dangerous levels. Other factors include a shift in forest management philosophy leading to decline in logging, resulting in overgrown forests with build-up of fuel, and increasing numbers of people moving to areas historically prone to wildfires. This surplus fuel creates the conditions for catastrophic fires and the increased population and all the buildings that come with them, leads to greater tragedy and cost when fires occur.

Read it.

Months after President-elect Donald Trump drew attention to an illegal immigrant gang that has taken over apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado, the city is working to immediately shutter one of those complexes as gang crime reaches its “breaking point.”

City officials in Aurora have filed a petition for injunctive relief and emergency closure of The Edge at Lowry Apartments as gang violence persists at the complex, 9News reported. While the city and the property owner, CBZ Management, already reached an agreement last month to shut the complex down, the filing may fast-track the closure.

You may ask, how did they get control of it in the first place? And why did it take until now?

In national elections, Aurora leans to the left and the Democratic Party, though not as much as neighboring Denver but more than other suburbs in the Denver metro area. Northern and Central Aurora, due to an extremely racially and culturally diverse voter base and high density for a suburban city, are some of the most Democratic areas in Colorado and vote similarly to Denver and Boulder; southern Aurora, similar to neighboring Centennial, used to lean Republican but has swung Democratic entering the 2020s. — Wikipedia.

New York Tmes.

China’s vast exports in 2024 exceeded its imports on a scale seldom seen anywhere except during or immediately after the two world wars.

‘Trade surplus’ is a concept much beloved by those who don’t understand economics. Trade always balances. If China sends us stuff, they get something in return; nobody just sends us stuff for free. In the case of ‘trade surplus’, the balance is in terms of capital flow–they send us stuff, and we send them dollars, i.e. the little pieces of paper that the Deep State is so merrily printing in Washington. We wind up with iPhones and EVs, and they wind up with a big pile of paper that is worth only as much as Washington can convince people that it’s worth.

Read it.

Criticisms of pro-market policies, such as lower corporate taxes and deregulation, are often rooted in a form of discrimination rarely acknowledged: upward classism. This prejudice against people of higher socio-economic status misrepresents the contributions of “the rich” and distorts discussions about public policy. While these policies are castigated as benefiting the wealthy, they have demonstrable benefits for broader economic growth and living standards.

For example, research by Suárez Serrato and Zidar—“Who Benefits from State Corporate Tax Cuts?”—reveals that reducing corporate taxes encourages business expansion, resulting in job creation and improved local economies. Similarly, Gordon and Young, in another paper, emphasize that efficient tax systems, including lower corporate rates, are essential for sustaining long-term economic growth. Far from being self-serving, pro-market policies are foundational to fostering an environment in which businesses and, by extension, workers and consumers, can thrive.

Nevertheless, critics berate pro-growth tax policies for favoring “rich people” on the basis that they are not paying their “fair share” in taxes, yet the evidence suggests otherwise.

Read it.

The always thoughtful, clearheaded and logical Democrat ‘squad member’ U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal is under fire this week for mocking victims of the Los Angeles wildfire.

It’s another sad ‘par for the course’ incident for the far left, who has become so attached to identity politics and toxic ideology that even after getting trounced on November 4th, they can’t seem to see that when one finger points out, there more point back at them.

Rather than focus on the victims and solutions of the devastating fire, Jayapal took the tragedy as a cue to spew anti-capitalist climate change rhetoric on social media, according to KTTH.

Wirepoints.

In defense of the everyday Chicagoans that continue to be pummeled by higher taxes, fees and fines – and a city that’s increasingly at risk of some form of insolvency – Chicago Public Schools should reject the Chicago Teachers Union’s four-year contract demand for 9% yearly raises (6% raises plus step increases of around 3%). Instead, the board should implement a salary freeze immediately.

We can hear the long list of objections now. Don’t you get it – the school board that’s negotiating with the CTU was hand-picked by CTU-activist-turned-mayor Brandon Johnson? The union would never go for it. They’d go on strike anyway.

We get all that, but we’re still going to make four arguments for a freeze anyway. Because at some point, cuts have to happen. It’s just a matter of when.

New York Post.

The homeless man tackled and zip-tied by onlookers who say he was trying to start fires with a blowtorch near a Los Angeles wildfire is an illegal immigrant who will likely be protected by California’s sanctuary city status, according to sources.

The suspect is Juan Manuel Sierra-Leyva, a Mexican national who is in the United States illegally, sources told The Post.

He was chased and taken down by residents of Woodland Hills after they allegedly saw him torching old Christmas trees and debris on fire with what one resident described as a “flamethrower” soon after the massive wildfire began Thursday.

The real danger of Trump’s Greenland gambit (Vox)

NATO would be ‘compelled to respond’: Former U.S. ambassador on Trump’s threats to buy Greenland (MSNBC)

JD Vance says there’s “a deal to be made in Greenland” (Axios)

Canada’s election is about to have an Elon Musk problem with Trudeau’s exit (The Guardian)

Canada the 51st US state? Trudeau says ‘not going to happen’ (BBC)

Trump’s ‘51st state’ comments a distraction from tariffs, Canada’s retaliation plans, Trudeau says (Politico)

‘51st state? Not going to happen’: Trudeau slams Trump annexation threat (MSNBC)

PBS’s Barron-Lopez: ‘Disinformation’ for Trump to Blame Dems for Wildfire Response

In Parting Gift To Trump, Biden Sends Oil Prices Soaring With Russian Sanctions Days Before Inauguration

DEEP STATE GEARING UP: Nearly Half of Federal Employees in the Swamp Plan to Resist Trump, Poll Finds

Trump’s thuggish response to the California fires is a bad omen (Noah Berlatsky/Public Notice)

The corporate lobbyist who will run the Trump White House (Popular Information)  As opposed to the ones who ran the Biden White House. (And the Obama White House.)

Confirmation Hearings Open in a Test of Trump’s Hold on Senate G.O.P. (Carl Hulse/New York Times)

‘I Think Things Are Going to Be Bad, Really Bad’: The US Military Debates Possible Deployment on US Soil Under Trump (Michael Hirsh/Politico)

CBS Host Asks Newt If Trump Refugee Limits Might Block the Next Einstein from America  Einstein was a Jew. Nobody is talking about limiting the number of Jews. (Name me a Mexican Nobel Prize winner.)

Scoop: House Dems plan $10 million opening salvo for 2026 (Andrew Solender/Axios)

Defense pick Pete Hegseth repeatedly criticized removing names of Confederate generals from US bases (Andrew Kaczynski/CNN)  I like him already.

Don’t Call Kennedy a Vaccine Skeptic. Call Him What He Is: A Cynic. (Paul A. Offit/New York Times)  We could use more cynics.

Incoming Trump Team Is Questioning National Security Council Staff Over Loyalty (Associated Press)  Are you on the Trump Train? Or are you agents of the Deep State? A reasonable question to ask.

Top Radical Leftist Canadian Lawmaker Threatens Trump: “We’re Ready To Fight Like Hell” Against U.S.  Your turban tells the truth — it is for sale, to people like you.

Despite Trump’s win, ‘election integrity’ activists still seek sweeping voting changes (Miles Parks/NPR)  Because progressive will still try to cheat if they think they can get away with it.

Elon Musk Is an ‘Evil Person,’ Steve Bannon Says (Matthew Mpoke Bigg/New York Times) Steve Bannon is an evil person, all the Narrative Media have said.

Trump’s deportation vows only for ‘rabid’ Republicans and will fail, says Newt Gingrich (Martin Pengelly/The Guardian)

MSNBC Attacks Trump And Musk For Telling The Truth About Suspicious LA Fires

Group of Experts Says R.F.K. Jr. Would ‘Significantly Undermine’ Public Health (Sheryl Gay Stolberg/New York Times)

John Browne: Trump Faces 4 Threats

Should You Be Prepping for Trump? … Juli Gittinger keeps a bag packed with iodine pills and a machete. (Olga Khazan/The Atlantic)

Hegseth’s views on women in combat, infidelity and more – in his own words (Lolita C. Baldor/Associated Press)  Hard to take seriously anything written by a Lolita.

Gov. Abbott Orders Flags Raised for Trump Inauguration

Pete Hegseth Is a Test (Rebecca Traister/New York Magazine)

Trump’s return puts Medicaid on the chopping block (Phil Galewitz/CBS News)

CBS News’ Margaret Brennan Compares Illegal Aliens To Einstein

Bannon’s Rage at Musk Suddenly Goes Nuclear as MAGA Meltdown Worsens (New Republic)  Except that Bannon has nothing to do with MAGA (the New Nigger) except in his dreams.

Team Trump Suddenly Backtracks on Key Campaign Promise (Hafiz Rashid/New Republic)  Was it really a ‘promise’? Or just a Democrat delusion that they were sure Hitler would want to do?

MSNBC Ups Rachel Maddow to Five Nights, Sends Alex Wagner Into Field for Trump’s First 100 Days (Brian Steinberg/Variety)  Gotta have a lesbian in the lead!

Begun, the MAGA Wars Have (Jonathan V. Last/The Bulwark)  Tiresome the Kristol Krew have become.

Rachel Maddow Will Return to Nightly Shows on MSNBC for Trump’s First 100 Days (Michael M. Grynbaum/New York Times)  You’re in good hands with the Narrative Media!

DNC Hires Team to Combat Misinformation From Trump WH

Republicans Considering SNAP Benefit Cuts As Part Of Deficit Reduction Plan (Arthur Delaney/HuffPost)

As Trump prepares to take power, MAGA can’t stop the ugly infighting (Aaron Blake/Washington Post)  At least in the eyes of the Narrative Media.

Suddenly Donald Trump doesn’t want to talk so much about the economy (James Downie/MSNBC)  After all, it’s not as if he had anything else to do.

House GOP crafts bill to let Trump purchase Greenland (Andrew Solender/Axios)

Dems should hold Trump nominees ‘accountable’ at hearings, Schumer says (Jordain Carney/Politico)  Accountable for what?

Trump’s Worst Nightmare: Jennifer Rubin Leaves Washington Post To Launch ‘Pro-Democracy’ Website

Jen Rubin leaves the WaPo (The New Neo)

Village People to perform at Trump rally in DC, inaugural ball (Brett Samuels/The Hill)

Some military officers worry that Pete Hegseth could turn a blind eye to U.S. war crimes (NBC News)

Trump’s Greenland plan: US House Republicans seek support for bill on possible purchase (Kanishka Singh/Reuters)

Gavin Newsom and California Democrats reach $50M deal to Trump-proof the state (Politico)

Read it.

Which schools are supported by parents, who are also taxpayers, paying twice, once for schools that barely educate children and stuff them full of woke nonsense, and once again for the religious schools that actually train their children to be moral adults.

Read it.

With trust in mainstream news at all time lows after a decade of anti-Trump propaganda, media darlings Chuck Todd and Jenn Rubin are reportedly leaving their outlets just one week before President-elect Donald Trump is set to retake the Oval Office.

According to Semafor, NBC host Chuck Todd has “quietly been meeting with Washington media organizations about his post NBC-future,” reportedly telling top editors and leaders from other media organizations that he’s outta there when his contract is up this year, and has discussed potential roles with the network in both broadcast and digital media.

UPDATE: Chuck Todd’s Exiting NBC, Exploring His Options After Being Replaced on Sunday  You can’t fire me! I quit!

Victor Davis Hansen.

The Los Angeles apocalypse was a multisystem, green-woke collapse—and a disastrous reminder that when Soviet-style, anti-meritocratic ideology permeates all aspects of modern life in California, disaster is inevitable.

First, note that the culprit of the catastrophe is not climate change; it is not Donald Trump. Those are excuses for arrogant incompetency and disdain for the public. And it is not racism or homophobia to fault those who paraded and virtue signaled their tribal identities so extraneous to their actual responsibilities for public safety.

Note that all California statewide officeholders are left-wing. The California left holds supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Only 17 percent of California’s huge congressional delegation of 52 seats is Republican. California’s judiciary is the most left-wing in the country. There is not a single Republican on the 15-member Los Angeles City Council.

Add it all up, and the woke socialist state has been eagerly deindustrializing, decivilizing, and retribalizing its way into what is now a veritable peacetime Dresden on the Pacific.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Among the many laws that took effect at the beginning of this new year is one in New Jersey that will astound and should anger people with children in the state’s public schools. It’s called Act 1669 and it removes a requirement that teachers pass a basic reading, writing and math test to be eligible to teach. The law was signed by Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) last June.

The rationale, if one can call it rational, is that New Jersey is not attracting enough teachers to the profession and so standards must be lowered so more will apply. This reminds me of what the Army has done for physical fitness requirements. In 2022, the Army lowered the physical fitness standards for women and older troops in its annual physical fitness exam to attract more enlistees. Where did the idea come from that lowering standards might produce higher achievement?

“O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today? I doubt it seriously. Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution warehouse. Not even the school commissioners, who commissioned it and approved the plans, can figure out how it happened. The main thing is to try to avoid having to explain it to the parents.”

Wolfe, Tom. From Bauhaus to Our House (p. 1). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Read it.

Democrats lie; they can be depended upon to do so, early and often.

Time to leave.

Read it.

I guess she was tired of losing her shit for other people and decided to go into business for herself.

ZMan is delightfully dyspeptic today.

“A dog who will bring a bone will carry a bone” is an old-time expression that usually is meant to say that someone who will steal for you will steal from you. More generally it means that an immoral person on your side will eventually let you down or go over on the other side. The underlying assumption is that even in an adversarial environment, there are rules. The person who violates those rules can never be trusted, even when their rule breaking favors you.

This “lack of a code” lies at the heart of the traitor in wartime. The person who makes a deal with the enemy is harshly punished, usually executed, not because of the practical aspects of their crime. It is not that they gave the enemy an advantage or useful information. It is that they violated the code that holds everyone together in the fight. They have excluded themselves from the company of men who can be trusted to uphold the code when no one is looking.

Quillette.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805­–1869), the great French diplomat, essayist and political thinker, did not live to see the age of identity politics, social media, grade inflation, concept creep, safetyism, the mental health crisis, mass rewritings of history and a public culture increasingly preoccupied with grievances, moral outrage, sanctified victimhood and bottom-up modes of censorship. But, though he never names them in those terms, all these related symptoms are already apparent and crystallising into something of a cultural syndrome in his study of American democracy in the 1830s, and his analysis of the changing historical conditions that led to the French revolution of 1789. Tocqueville’s work traces the roots of grievance culture to human nature itself, and to the pre-modern cascade of social transformations that culminated in novel, American forms of tyranny: a tyranny of the entitled masses, of the kind that contemporary Tocquevillians and postcolonial theorists alike might recognise as stemming from the elite ethos of North American campuses, via the infrastructure of social media. But this story is much older, and points to a timeless, universal human dilemma.

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After Lori Lightfoot was voted out of the mayor’s seat in Chicago following her calamitous tenure, I dearly hoped that the residents of Chicago had come to their senses about progressive mayors and would vote for someone who had some understanding of fiscal responsibility and the role of a big city mayor.

It was not to be.

The mayoralty of Brandon Johnson has been, to say the least, a disaster. Witnessing his rejection by boards, committees and the residents of

That would be a good idea for an annual contest: Worst Mayor in America. Of course, it would always be won by a Democrat from either New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. (Maybe cameo appearances from Seattle, Portland, or Detroit.)

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

OffGuardian.

Wondering what to expect from the government in 2025?

So far, it looks like it will be more of the same ill-advised, costly, greedy, taxpayer-funded, dunderheaded power grabs, saber-rattling, graft, corruption, and make-works programming that leaves us no better off than where we started.

Indeed, we’ve been down this road so many times before that there should be no surprise when, no matter who occupies the White House, we find ourselves subjected to more of the same when it comes to the erosion of civil liberties and the increasing power of the government and its corporate partners-in-crime.

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist.

I would say we have not yet figured out what is the best U.S. policy toward Greenland, nor have we figured out best stances for either Greenland or Denmark. I am struck however by the low quality of the debate, and I mean on the anti-U.S. side most of all. This is just one clip, but I am hearing very much the same in a number of other interchanges, most of all from Europeans. There is a lot of EU pearl-clutching, and throwing around of adjectives like “colonialist” or “imperialist.” Or trying to buy Greenland is somehow analogized to Putin not trying to buy Ukraine. Or the word “offensive” is deployed as if that were an argument, or the person tries to switch the discussion into an attack on Trump and his rhetoric.

C’mon, people!

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Los Angeles landlords are being accused of raising rents as the supply of homes in the Southern California metropolis drops amid the fires.

It would be a really useful thing if people were required to study elementary economics in school. Just sayin’.

Read it.

Conservative media company The Daily Wire made headlines recently by parting ways with Brett Cooper, one of their most popular pundits, and the host of The Comments Section YouTube channel.

Brett Cooper’s sudden departure from The Daily Wire has thrown into doubt the future of several Daily Wire productions – namely, Mr. Birchum. To top it all off, Brett Cooper’s Snow White and the Evil Queen movie appears to have been canceled.

Not to be confused with Disney’s upcoming Snow White movie featuring Rachel Zegler, Snow White and the Evil Queen was set to star Brett Cooper as Snow White, and was originally planned to release in 2025 through Bentkey, The Daily Wire’s streaming app for children.

A teaser trailer using stock footage and featuring Brett Cooper dressed as Snow White was even released as an alternative to the Disney footage being released around the same time. The CEO of Daily Wire, Jeremy Boreing, claimed the reason for the movie’s existence was because Disney was promoting “all the worst excesses of the woke left.”

However, the provision for Brett Cooper to star as Snow white was written into the contract which was made void when she exited the company. The exact reasons for her departure are unclear as of now, but one thing that is certain is that there are a lot of hard feelings between Cooper and the company.

That would be a pity.

Read it.

Envy is an ugly thing. And even uglier is the number of people who think they ought to be allowed to dictate to others what those others spend their money on.

This site, The Cool Down, bills itself as “Your personal guide to a cleaner, cooler future.” I suppose that’s a reference to the Climate Change Hoax.

SciTechDaily.

Transitioning to a green economy demands significantly more critical metals—such as copper, rare earth elements, and cobalt—than current supplies can meet. To address this shortage, it is essential to discover new metal resources formed through different geological processes in previously unexplored regions.

New research published on January 8, 2025, in Nature, led by Dr. Chunfei Chen during his postdoctoral work with the Earth Evolution research group at Macquarie University, sheds light on where and how critical metals likely accumulate. The study identifies the margins of ancient continental cores as promising locations for these metal deposits and explains the geological mechanisms behind their formation.

“These cores are the thickest, bowl-shaped, parts of tectonic plates. Melts that form below their centers will flow upwards and outwards towards the edges, so that volcanic activity is common around their edges,” says Chen.

WIRED, a Voice of the Crust.

The recent spate of discoveries has both compounded the mystery of superconductivity and heightened the optimism. “It seems to be, in materials, that superconductivity is everywhere,” said Matthew Yankowitz, a physicist at the University of Washington.

The discoveries stem from a recent revolution in materials science: All three new instances of superconductivity arise in devices assembled from flat sheets of atoms. These materials display unprecedented flexibility; at the touch of a button, physicists can switch them between conducting, insulating, and more exotic behaviors—a modern form of alchemy that has supercharged the hunt for superconductivity.

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You might not be able to rely on your firefighters to save you from a burning building, but at least they look like you!

Having a queer female fire chief will apparently “give” you “a little bit more ease” as you watch California’s wildfires burn your family and pets alive.

ZMan:

This coming week could be a lot of fun, as it is the runup to Trump being installed as the new ruler, so the crazies could be out in force. On the other hand, the crazies have been weirdly quiet since the elections, so maybe it is a peaceful week. It is the old line about the dog that did not bark. Everyone keeps waiting for the crazies to do their thing, but they remain quiet and no one in official media seems to be noticing the lack of noisy weirdos.

The sudden quiet tells us that much of the craziness of the last decade or so was nothing more than a fad that has now run its course. Instead of women suddenly wearing a particular type of clothing or getting their hair done a certain way, it was mostly women picking up deranged political causes. There were men involved in the madness, but it was clearly a female led thing. It was obvious if you looked carefully at the Antifa mob. The girls were in charge.

Of course, these things do not happen overnight. You could tell that the steam had run out of the various crazy causes, even though there were still plenty of crazies. This follows the pattern of women’s fashion, where a fad pops up overnight, peaks, begins to fade and then just like that, it is gone. Antifa has become the denim suit. By the end of this year, the people we call the left will deny it ever existed in the same way old people deny having worn denim suits.

Naval Gazing.

Buying something as expensive as a modern warship is inherently going to involve politics, which limits engineering options.

…

Unfortunately, the practice of abstracting away a lot of detail seems to be spreading to the Pentagon, in particular with the adoption of the Navy’s new Distributed Maritime Operations concept. The problem is that while a lot of the buzzwords involved sound fine when you’re looking at a powerpoint, it doesn’t work quite as well when you sit down and start to ask what ships are carrying which missiles and how they’re getting targeting data. Despite this, the Navy appears to be investing heavily in the concept, presumably because former SecDef Mattis finally met an enemy he couldn’t defeat: PowerPoint.

This discusses (in greater detail than I have patience for) what I call the Aggregation Fallacy, which underlays most political and military decisions these days. “Follow The Science!” doesn’t work when you have several to pick from and you pick the wrong one because it’s less effort.

Read it.

It’s not proglodyte incompetence, it s CLIMATE CHANGE that’s to blame!

UPDATE: Three Hard Truths About California’s Fire Crisis

Read it.

The historical significance of food security cannot be overstated. After the devastation of World War II, European nations understood the fragility of their food supplies. Hunger, shortages, and economic instability plagued the continent, prompting the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC). A key component of this new cooperative effort was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), established in 1962. Its purpose was clear: to ensure stable, sufficient food production, reduce dependence on imports, and protect citizens from the specter of future shortages. It succeeded in turning Europe into a self-sufficient agricultural powerhouse while upholding high standards of food safety and quality.

Fast forward to today, and the situation could not be more different. The European Union (EU), driven by unelected bureaucrats in the European Commission, has turned its back on its founding principles. Under the guise of environmental sustainability and climate policy, the EU has declared war on its farmers, implementing measures that force them off the land. These policies, varying by country but united in their destructive outcomes, are choking the life out of European agriculture. In the Netherlands, nitrogen emissions are the scapegoat; in Germany, farmers are being taxed into oblivion. The result is the same: despair, financial ruin, and a troubling rise in farmer suicides.

I guarantee you that ADM and Cargill aren’t feeling any pinch.

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The term, ‘conspiracy theory’ became part of common parlance during the ‘Covid era,’ but although all of us know what it refers to – and who are supposed to be the ‘conspiracy theorists’ in question, namely those people who saw through the ‘pandemic’ scam and everything it entailed – the precise nature of the ‘conspiracy’ is probably less clear. When I ask individuals what they understand by it, they usually answer in more or less vague terms. So what is it?

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered two respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine manufacturers to include a potentially paralytic side effect warning related to nerve damage on product labels.

The manufacturers, GSK and Pfizer, manufacturing Arexvy and Abrysvo vaccines respectively, must now include a warning stating a risk of Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) following vaccination, according to a Jan. 7 statement from the agency.

GBS is a rare disorder in which the immune system ends up damaging nerve cells, which leads to weakness in the muscles and potential near-total paralysis, depending on severity.

RSV is a common respiratory virus that infects the throat, nose, and lungs, and typically spreads during fall and winter seasons. Infected people can experience symptoms similar to that of a common cold such as a runny nose, congestion, sneezing, and coughing.

Newsweek, a Voice of the Crust.

The 2024-25 California state budget, which Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law in June 2024, slashed funding for wildfire and forest resilience by $101 million as part of a series of cutbacks according to an analysis by the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office.

However overall, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE)’s wildfire protection budget has increased sharply from $1.1 billion in 2014 to $3 billion in 2023, much of which took place after Newsom became governor in 2019.

Speaking to Newsweek, a spokesperson for Newsom said that under the governor’s “leadership” the CAL FIRE budget had doubled from $2 billion in 2018-19 to $3.8 billion in 2024-25, whilst the department’s personnel went from 5,829 to 10,741 over the same period.

UPDATE: MSNBC’s Jansing Puts On Climate Alarmist to Blame LA Wildfires on Fossil Fuels

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The first example is columnist Paul Krugman, the Princeton professor of economics who spent an entire year dismissing inflation, even though inflation was so terrible it likely explains why Trump won the presidential election. The second exemplar of Times silliness is columnist Zeynep Tufekci who fabricated science to support “masks work” dogma throughout the pandemic, and is now spitting out alternative facts about Trump’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health.

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A resident of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, who was among the first to draw national attention to the massive influx of Haitian migrants into his small town, is now locked in a legal battle with a local food packaging plant that employs primarily migrants from the third world. Eyes on Charleroi first appeared when President-elect Donald Trump highlighted the town’s staggering 2,000% surge in its migrant population before the presidential elections. The resident is also planning a class-action lawsuit on behalf of hundreds of residents, demanding accountability from those responsible for the migrant invasion.

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One of the first acts of the Republican-led 119th Congress was to pass a bill that would sanction officials attempting to arrest or investigate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed in Gaza.

The “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act” passed on Thursday in a 243 to 140 vote, with 45 Democrats joining the majority of Republicans. Rep. Thomas Massie was the only member of the GOP caucus not to vote in favor of the bill.

Newsbusters.

It would be very ugly in the Narrative Media.

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Transgenic mice with increased amyloid-? (A?) production show several aspects of Alzheimer’s disease, including A? deposition and memory impairment. By repeatedly treating these A?-forming mice with scanning ultrasound, Leinenga and Götz now demonstrate that A? is removed and memory is restored as revealed by improvement in three memory tasks. These improvements were achieved without the use of any therapeutic agent, and the scanning ultrasound treatment did not induce any apparent damage to the mouse brain. The authors then showed that scanning ultrasound activated resident microglial cells that took up A? into their lysosomes. These findings suggest that repeated scanning ultrasound may be a noninvasive method with potential for treating Alzheimer’s disease.