Read it.

In June 2023, I wrote about the exodus of entrepreneurs from Norway after Kjell Inge Røkke, a fishing magnate turned industrialist, announced his move to Lugano, Switzerland.

“My capital will continue working in Norway,” wrote Røkke, whose wealth was estimated at $5.1 billion.

Røkke’s departure was projected to cost the Norwegian government 175,000,000 kroner annually (roughly $16 million), and he was just one of dozens of billionaires and multimillionaires to leave Norway following passage of its wealth tax.

Critics had warned Norway’s wealth tax would “trigger capital flight and threaten job creation,” and that’s precisely what happened. Norwegian reporter Rupert Neate noted that more “super-rich people” left Norway in 2022 than “during the previous 13 years.”

A reasonable person might expect that this exodus of wealth would have prompted Norwegian lawmakers to reconsider their confiscatory tax policy, but that’s not what happened. Instead, Norwegian lawmakers decided to double down on efforts to soak the rich, passing a new law that taxed unrealized capital gains for individuals leaving the country. This so-called “exit tax” is triggered when a resident relocates from Norway. The rate is 37.84 percent and is calculated based on the unrealized gains in shares and securities. Anti-capitalists wrote approvingly of the law.

The U.S. has a similar ‘exit tax’ laid on people who renounce their citizenship, typically because they live and work abroad and are tired of paying U.S. taxes from which they get no benefit.

Read it.

Governing German authorities are suggesting unintegrated migrants from Syria could be sent home if they are not in employment, a policy that could mean re-migration for nearly half a million people.

Read it.

Jews were the target of the majority of hate crimes in New York City last year, according to statistics reported Monday by the NYPD.

Data compiled by the department showed that there were 345 anti-Jewish hate crimes across the city in 2024, nearly 54% of the 641 total hate crimes tallied. The next-largest category of hate crimes were those related to sexual orientation, at 78.

The number of antisemitic hate crimes in 2024 was slightly larger than in 2023, when police recorded 323 total anti-Jewish crimes. That year’s total was driven by a recorded surge in antisemitism following Hamas’ invasion of Israel and the outbreak of the Gaza war on Oct. 7 of that year. The increase in antisemitism year over year comes as the total number of hate crimes in the city decreased slightly from 2023 to 2024.

Read it.

Switzerland enacted a law at the start of the year that prohibits anyone from wearing burqa coverings in public.

The Swiss people voted in favor of the ban four years ago but were met with backlash from the current government who called the ruling racist.

Yet, Swiss law requires the government to adhere to referendums and the government was overpowered by the people.

Swiss People’s Party (SVP) introduced the initial legislation, and while they did not directly call out Islam, they called full facial coverings a form of “soft extremism.”

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Jurors for a high-stakes defamation suit against CNN appeared open to forcing the network to dole out a 10-figure payout, the latest setback for the left-wing network as it attempts to avoid a costly—and embarrassing—conclusion to the case.

Plaintiff Zachary Young is suing CNN in a Florida court for $1 billion in damages, accusing the network and anchor Jake Tapper of falsely portraying him as an “illegal profiteer” during America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Young, a Navy veteran, says CNN damaged his reputation and destroyed his contracting company, Nemex Enterprises, in November 2021 by airing false and defamatory claims about his efforts to get Afghans out of the country as the Taliban took control.

Read it.

Economics works whether you like it or not.

Newsbusters.

As ABC’s The View returned from its holiday break today, hosts took to the table to discuss the incidents of January 6th, 2021. Sunny Hostin and Whoopi Goldberg expressed their worries of the day being “whitewashed” from history. It’s undoubtedly a low moment for America, but many exaggerate it far more than the ones who “whitewash” it.

Associated Press.

Four years after launching a push for more diversity in its ranks, McDonald’s is ending some of its diversity practices, duding Lowe’s and Ford Motor Co., suspended their participation in an annual survey by the Human Rights Campaign that measures workplace inclusion for LGBTQ+ employees.

Newsbusters.

PBS News Weekend blamed Fox News and “far right” websites for the Capitol Hill riot (or as both PBS and their also tax-funded NPR guests insisted, an “insurrection”) on the eve of the fourth anniversary of that terrible day in the nation’s capital, on January 6.

Read it.

Aspiring public school teachers in New Jersey are no longer required to pass the state’s basic skills exam in order to be certified.

New Jersey Democratic Governor Phil Murphy passed Act 1669 as part of the state’s 2025 budget in June to address a teacher shortage, Read Lion reports. The law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2025. Individuals seeking an instructional certificate will no longer need to pass the Praxis Core Test, a basic skills test for reading, writing, and math that is administered by the state’s Commissioner of Education. Candidates still do, however, need to pass the Praxis Subject Tests that are specific to their degree.

“We need more teachers,” Democratic Sen. Jim Beach, who sponsored the bill, said in May 2024 when the chamber cleared the bill in a 34-2 vote. “This is the best way to get them.”

China’s latest virus surge is the human metapneumovirus (HMPV), which has also seen spikes in the U.S. Here are the symptoms and whether it could be the next pandemic (Fortune)

What you need to know about HMPV (BBC)

No need to panic over HMPV cases, says Tamil Nadu health minister (Deccan Herald)

Jharkhand Health Department Issues Alert As HMPV Cases Rise In Four States (Zee News)

Read it.

The Combat Information Center (CIC) is the nerve center and tactical brain of a U.S. Navy surface combatant. These high-tech floating command centers and their watchstanders have been put to the test over the last year, unlike any other time in history, as missile and drone barrages from Houthi rebels in Yemen have plagued the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. With this in mind, TWZ spoke with multiple surface warfare officers (SWOs) about the realities sailors face when fighting their ship from within the CIC, including what factors come into play, what mistakes can arise during tense, time sensitive engagements, and the effects of being on patrol in a free-fire zone for months on end.

Actual combat! Not just drills! What a concept! Good training, though….

Read it.

There’s electricity in the air over at the University of Massachusetts Amherst — both the literal and metaphorical varieties.

A team of engineers at the institution have discovered a method of successfully harvesting energy from air humidity in a predictable and continuous manner, and they say the technology can be scaled up and applied broadly. They published their findings last month [January 2023] in the journal Advanced Materials.

“This is very exciting,” lead author Xiaomeng Liu said in a UMass Amherst news release. “We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air.”

Read it.

In Singapore the patient is the customer. More than that, the patient is the customer waving real cash money at the people thinking about treating them. As people like cash money, the patient gets treated in a manner that leads to the money flowing to the people doing the treatments.

Yes, it’s that foul idea of treatment not being free at the point of consumption. Except that foul idea does lead to what is seemingly desired — a joined up health care system that treats people efficiently.

In one sense the system’s not all that different to Britain’s. Nearly all of the hospitals are government owned and run. You pay a tax – akin to national insurance – for access to medical care. But the big difference is that your taxes go into your healthcare account to be spent by you. Anything you don’t spend over a lifetime gets added to your pension — an incentive to spend enough on health care to live long enough to spend the pension. As your tax pays your healthcare you are, when entering a temple of healing, a cash waving customer and therefore gain the same attention as a maitre d’ gives in an expensive restaurant. OK, perhaps less fawning than known big tippers but still.

FreeThink.

Tiny “biobots” made from human windpipe cells encouraged damaged neural tissue to repair itself in a lab experiment — potentially foreshadowing a future in which creations like this patrol our bodies, healing damage, delivering drugs, and more.

The background: In a study published in 2020, researchers at Tufts University and the University of Vermont (UVM) harvested and incubated skin cells from frog embryos until they were tiny balls.

They then sculpted the spheres into specific shapes — dictated by an algorithm — and added layers of cardiac stem cells to them in precise locations.

Read it.

Three Israelis were killed and eight wounded in the northern West Bank after Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a key highway that runs through the area.

The attack is the latest in a year that has seen heightened violence in the West Bank alongside Israel’s wars with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. In Monday’s attack, the gunmen fired on two Israeli cars and a bus that were passing through the Palestinian town of Al-Funduq on Highway 55, which runs from Israel into the West Bank through Palestinian and Israeli areas.

The attack ended when an Israeli civilian fired on the shooters. According to Israeli reports, the gunmen killed two women in their 60s as well as Elad Winkelstein, 35, a police officer who was driving with his son. Winkelstein, an investigator in the Israeli settlement of Ariel’s police station, lives in northern Israel and was reportedly previously the security coordinator of the West Bank settlement of Kedumim. The attack also wounded the driver of the bus that was targeted.

When it comes to atrocity, any Jew will do.

UnHerd.

The statistics behind the rape gang scandal — let’s banish the wholly inadequate word “grooming” — are staggering. For over 25 years, networks of men, predominantly from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds, abused young white girls from Yeovil to London to Glasgow. The victims’ accounts are beyond depravity, unthinkable in a supposedly advanced Western democracy.

That, of course, immediately raises a simple, shocking question: why did British police services turn a blind eye to the gang rape of tens of thousands of young girls? I should have a fair idea. I was a police officer for 25 years, including five as a detective in the Met’s anticorruption command. Working on sensitive investigations into police wrongdoing, I saw first-hand how law enforcement responds to scandals and crises. I’ve watched senior officers, faced with uncomfortable truths, wriggle like greased piglets. I’ve witnessed logic-defying decisions for nakedly political reasons. I am firmly of the view, then, that the whole scandal has unambiguously revealed rank cowardice by constabularies across the UK, where the most senior whistleblower in the entire country was a lowly detective constable.

Capitol heavily secured for election certification as Trump’s Jan. 6 pardon plans remain largely a mystery (NBC News)

Congress to certify Trump’s election win on January 6 riot anniversary (CNN)

How Jan. 6 will be different this year. And, who took home a Golden Globe award (NPR) NPR – always on top of the important news.

What we’re watching: A (presumably) peaceful Jan. 6 (Politico)

Congress is ready to certify Trump’s election win, but his Jan. 6 legacy hangs over the day (Associated Press)

For Donald Trump, the Only Loyalty Is Fealty (John R. Bolton/New York Times)  The sound of sour grapes.

N.Y. Judge’s Ruling Shows How Legal Issues Will Follow Trump Into Office (Maggie Haberman/New York Times)

ABC Panel Mourns Trump Defeat of Weaponized Prosecutions

Trump Weighs Jan. 6 Clemency With Congress Set to Ratify His Win (Bloomberg)

‘Sickening, Slime, Abomination!’ MSNBC Meltdown Over Trump Mar-a-Lago Meeting

Leftist TILT: PBS Labeling of ‘Extreme Right’ GOP Congress Continues Into 2025

Kash Patel Believes the FBI Planned Jan. 6th (Thomas Joscelyn/The Bulwark)  And he might be right.

What Americans should remember about Jan. 6 (Joe Biden/Washington Post)

NPR Arrives Late to CNN Defamation Story, Injects Trump for No Reason

DOJ: 200 Jan. 6 cases pending as Trump prepares to retake office (Kyle Cheney/Politico)

Trump Takes Aim at Kamala’s ‘Illegal’ Pre-Interview Campaign Payments to Sharpton, Potentially Spelling Trouble for Comcast’s Bid To Spin Off MSNBC

No, Trump wasn’t “confused” about the New Orleans attack (Noah Berlatsky/Public Notice)

Four years later (Matthew Yglesias/Slow Boring)

Trump plays reluctant referee (Rachael Bade/Politico)

Biden says it is awful that Trump is seeking to do away with US birthright citizenship (Jeff Mason/Reuters)

Jan. 6 and the path not taken (Don Moynihan/Can We Still Govern?)

Don’t Let Trump Whitewash the Truth About Jan. 6 (Timothy L. O’Brien/Bloomberg)

Trump aides ready ‘universal’ tariff plans – with one key change (Jeff Stein/Washington Post)

The lost year: How Merrick Garland’s Justice Department ran out of time prosecuting Trump for January 6 (CNN)

I Was Nearly Killed on Jan. 6th. Four Years Later, I Feel Betrayed All Over Again. (Aquilino Gonell/The Bulwark)  Ashli Babbitt could not be reached for comment.

The January 6 “Insurrection” that Wasn’t

Biden Uses 72-Year-Old Law to Give Trump a Slap in the Face Before MAGA 2.0 (Leigh Kimmins/The Daily Beast)

Gothamist.

Time to leave.

Read it.

In October, I reported on the release of the largest research project ever on universal basic income (UBI). The study’s results were disappointing for advocates of the idea. In short, the research showed that many people who received the income reduced their hours working and increased leisure time. Furthermore, people didn’t use their leisure time in any of the productive activities advocates often claim (e.g., self-improvement, entrepreneurship, time with family).

In December, a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study on UBI authored by economists Sidhya Balakrishnan, Sewin Chan, Sara Constantino, Johannes Haushofer, and Jonathan Morduch was released.

The study examined 2,097 households in Compton, California. They gave around one-third of the households a guaranteed monthly income of an average of $487 and examined how recipient households acted relative to the non-recipients.

The most obvious impact of a guaranteed income is going to be on a recipient’s work decisions. Predictably, many people who received the guaranteed income reduced their working hours.

ZMan explains it all to you.

One of the difficult things for most Americans to accept is that the people on the ballot every election have little role in public policy. The way the system is supposed to work is that the voters select their elected officials, who then meet and agree on new laws and changes to the law. They also pick the people in charge of the many agencies that carry out the laws passed by the elected officials. In reality, the people in those elected offices play almost no role in legislation and policy.

The easiest place to see this is in foreign policy. In the last election, there was little mention of foreign relations. Trump pledged his unconditional support for Israel, which every candidate is required to do in America, but otherwise he had little to say about what is happening in the world. Those running for House and Senate seats were mostly silent of foreign affairs, aside from pledging their loyalty to Israel. We are in a proxy war with Russia and China, and no one talks about it.

One main reason for those House and Senate candidates not saying much of anything is they have no role in the process. Many of them could not find Ukraine on a map, despite cheering wildly for Zelensky when he spoke to Congress. Only those who have been around for a decade or more understand why Ukraine is an issue. Some of them have been invited to get a taste of the side action, which is the primary benefit to sticking around in Congress for a long time.

Foreign policy is the domain of the executive, but it is obvious that the President has little role in the process. Joe Biden was a vegetable for his term in office. So much so that decisions on most things were delegated to various appointees. Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken ran foreign policy, but even they were only in charge of a small portion of what the world sees as American foreign policy. The reason for that is much of it is now done off the books, outside the official system.

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

Carter’s Panama Canal pragmatism saved global trade. Trump’s greed could upend it. (The Hill)

Elon Musk’s New Threat Over Vegas Cybertruck Explosion Makes No Sense (The New Republic)

Trump 2.0 Is About Punishing the Vulnerable and Enriching the Mega Wealthy (Rolling Stone)

Trump Sees the U.S. as a ‘Disaster.’ The Numbers Tell a Different Story. (Peter Baker/New York Times)

‘A Day of Love’: How Trump Inverted the Violent History of Jan. 6 (New York Times)

A different and more dangerous world awaits President-elect Trump (Dan Balz/Washington Post)

Donald Trump is about to get the Jan. 6 that he denied Joe Biden (Kyle Cheney/Politico)

Fears grow for voting rights as Trump plots to reshape US justice department (Sam Levine/The Guardian)

Trump’s Propaganda Victory: The Rewriting Of Jan. 6 (S.V. Date/HuffPost)

As Trump rewrites history, victims of the Jan. 6 riot say they feel ‘betrayed’ (Tom Dreisbach/NPR)

As Trump’s election is certified, Americans should declare war on stupidity (Rex Huppke/USA Today)

Sen. Adam Schiff says the New Orleans attack shows Kash Patel shouldn’t lead the FBI (Alexandra Marquez/NBC News)

Read it.

Humans born in 1900 witnessed a startling stream of technologies that transformed their everyday lives and their understanding of the universe. Cars, telephones, and the internet overturned where we lived, how we worked, and whom we knew. Other scientific feats took the breath away by their sheer might—most of all, the atom bomb and a man on the Moon. Whatever else, rapid innovation ensured that the 20th century was never boring.

But those witnesses’ grandchildren have seen comparatively little change, as all that dynamism has devolved into stagnation and repetition. Infinite digital novelty distracts from the lack of progress in the physical world; look up from your phone, and everything is in stasis, or even decay. Energy density, transportation speed, and crop yield have hardly budged in half a century. Scientific productivity has declined, and we haven’t gone to the Moon in decades, let alone Mars. Our culture is worn out, too, hooked on sequels and reboots. Is there a way out of this endless present?

Watch it.

The best advice for the new year.

Read it.

In September, Canon shipped the first commercial version of a technology that could one day upend the making of the most advanced silicon chips. Called nanoimprint lithography (NIL), it’s capable of patterning circuit features as small as 14 nanometers—enabling logic chips on par with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia processors now in mass production.

The NIL system offers advantages that may challenge the US $150 million machines that dominate today’s advanced chipmaking today, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography scanners. If Canon is correct, its machines will eventually deliver EUV-quality chips at a fraction of the cost.

The company’s approach is entirely different to EUV systems, which are made exclusively by Netherlands-based ASML. The Dutch company uses a complex process that starts with kilowatt-class lasers to blasting molten droplets of tin into a plasma that glows with a 13.5 nanometer wavelength. This light is then steered through a vacuum chamber by specialized optics and bounced off a patterned mask onto a silicon wafer to fix the pattern onto the wafer.

In contrast, Canon’s system, which was shipped to Defense Department-backed R&D consortium the Texas Institute for Electronics, seems almost comically simple. Put simply, it stamps the circuit pattern onto the wafer.

Read it.

What if a clinician could 3D print something through your skin, constructing an implant or replacement organ underneath layers of tissue? The world of medicine would be transformed: a host of surgical procedures, which come with a variety of risks, could be performed without ever lifting a scalpel.

A collaborative, NIH-funded team is working to make this Star Trek-like fiction a reality. Their work, published today in Science, outlines a method to print biocompatible structures through thick, multi-layered tissues. The principle? Focused ultrasound, combined with a novel ultrasound-sensitive ink.

“Focused ultrasound has been used for decades to treat a wide variety of conditions, underscoring its safety and utility as a clinical tool,” said Randy King, Ph.D., a program director in the Division of Applied Science & Technology at NIBIB. “This potential new application, built on years of technology advancements, could set the stage for something previously thought impossible: through-tissue 3D ultrasound printing.”

Read it.

The Obama legacy was on full view in New Orleans as an apparently sentient adult, the FBI agent in charge, made the patently asinine public assertion that the mass murder in New Orleans by a Sharia supremacist was not “terrorism.” Andy McCarthy explains the mindset in great detail in the article quoted above. The FBI teaches its personnel the bizarre notion that terrorist groups like ISIS, a very wide swath of religious authorities and the several Muslim national governments that expressly endorse violent jihad are mere exceptions to real Islam, and therefore represent a false religion somehow unrelated to Islam.

In stark contrast, pro-lifers, small government advocates, Second Amendment supporters, parents opposed to drag queen story hour and presumably everyone on Ricochet are part of a seamless ideological entity responsible for creating a threat of extremist violence. There is no equivalent of “false religion” when looking at the political right.

Read it.

While everyone was celebrating Christmas and New Year’s, the Great Jihad remained active. The following report concerns four Moroccan “youths” in Spain who were apprehended and detained before they could carry out a planned terrorist attack on the Basilica of Elche.

Judge upholds Trump’s felony conviction, but does not plan to order jail time (Shayna Jacobs/Washington Post)  No, just being able to call him a ‘convicted felon’, as they did during the campaigh, serves their purposes.

Trump: Democrats ‘giddy’ about half-staff flag for inauguration after Carter death (Julia Mueller/The Hill)

Chris Hayes Gang: Democrats Can’t Stop Tagging Trump as a ‘Fascist’ Threat

Trump to be sentenced for conviction in New York “hush money” case before inauguration (Graham Kates/CBS News)

Bad News for Trump’s Legislative Agenda (Russell Berman/The Atlantic)

Judge Upholds Trump’s Conviction but Signals No Jail Time (New York Times)

NY judge says Trump will face no penalties in his criminal hush money case but upholds conviction (CNN)

Judge orders Trump to be sentenced in hush money case on Jan. 10, but says he won’t be incarcerated (NBC News)

Wash. Post Cartoonist Quits After Bezos-Owned Paper Kills Trump Satire Piece

Johnson’s Reward for Keeping His Gavel: An Impossible Job Delivering for Trump (Catie Edmondson/New York Times)

Trump is days away from having to confront the kinds of crises he’s long been railing against (Politico)

Biden Attempts To Sabotage Trump’s ‘Drill Baby Drill’ With Proposed Ban On New Offshore Drilling In Atlantic, Pacific  Examine the map closely.

MSNBC Rants ‘Arc of Justice Has Been Crushed’ Ahead Of Trump Sentencing

Trump’s tax cuts are about to unleash chaos on the Hill. Here’s how. (Brian Faler/Politico)

Trump calls for New York judge to be disbarred after hush money conviction advances (Steff Danielle Thomas/The Hill)

Trump has taken in ‘a staggering sum’ in cash from donors since winning re-election: NYT (Tom Boggioni/Raw Story)

Former Capitol Police officers call Trump’s vows to pardon Jan. 6 rioters ‘a betrayal’ (Ashleigh Fields/The Hill)

Gothamist.

Police say three suspects have been on a months-long crime spree throughout the city, stealing cars and using them to boost ATMs from local stores.

The trio has been behind 49 incidents across more than two dozen precincts in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, according to the NYPD.

Since September they’ve stolen cars and changed plates, then traveled to stores with cash machines and lifted them into a vehicle, according to police. The suspected bandits then took off in separate cars, officials said.

The most recent incident reported to police occurred on Dec. 23, when two people in hooded sweatshirts, balaclavas and gloves were pictured on security footage removing an ATM from a Queens bodega and carrying it out of the store.

In Texas that would get you shot.

Read it.

Keir Starmer’s Labour government is under fire for its refusal to set up a national inquiry into the phenomenon of so-called grooming gangs—organised rapists operating across multiple British towns.

Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk has amplified the row, claiming Jess Phillips MP “deserves to be in prison” over the “disgraceful” decision. Correspondence shows Phillips, the Home Office’s parliamentary under-secretary of state for safeguarding—who is responsible for addressing violence against women and girls—rejected calls for a government investigation into ‘historic’ sex abuse in Oldham, Greater Manchester, that would have the power to compel witnesses to testify.

Instead, Phillips has stated that the decision to conduct such an inquiry should remain the sole responsibility of the municipal authority requesting it. In effect, by trying to keep it local, Labour is blocking a public reckoning with Starmer’s role as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) during its investigation of the Oldham child grooming scandal.

UPDATE: British Man Arrested For Making Meme Offensive To Child Rapists (Bablyon Bee)

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The theory seemed sound: Stabilize financial markets, support the poor and promote a more secure, integrated world. But blue-collar workers were left behind.

It is impossible to ‘stabilize financial markets’ while generating inflation through printing money to support more and more welfare state spending.

Making people with no other options dependent on the government for the food, housing, and medical care is a very perverted notion of ‘supporting the poor’.

Getting the U.S. into wars in Europe and the Middle East doesn’t support a ‘secure, more integrated world.’

And, yes, the Crust left ‘blue-collar workers’ behind, because ‘blue-collar workers’ don’t have fancy degrees, work in universities or the media, and are mostly CrimeThinkers anyway.

They could’ve just asked me….

Lifehacker.

[I hate people who use ‘if’ when the correct word is ‘whether’.]

There are a lot of great uses for GPS tracking technology. But tracking technology gets dark fast when someone plants one on your stuff without your knowledge—like the police, who are increasingly using these devices to monitor the movements of people involved in investigations (the cops can even shoot one onto a car during a high-speed chase!). If you’re now paranoid about the cops tracking your car’s movements, here’s what you need to know.

It is 100% legal for the cops to place a tracking device on your car without your knowledge—but they must have a warrant giving them permission to do so. This was settled by the Supreme Court in United States v. Jones in 2012, which found that a warrantless GPS device violated the Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search.

However, attorney Andrew Flusche notes that it’s often very easy for police to get these warrants, and they can even get them issued by magistrates (who aren’t judges, and sometimes aren’t even lawyers) in some states. That means that the police can probably legally place a GPS tracker on your car even if you’ve done nothing wrong, as long as they’re willing to file the paperwork.

Of course, these trackers are easy to buy and to place by anyone, not just the police. But if you find one, you should be careful about your response.

Apparently, finding the guy who placed it there and shoving it up his (or her) ass is not encouraged.

ZMan:

What the internet reveals is that there is a sizable portion of the population, even in high trust societies, that need rules and a firm hand to have socially productive lives. Left to their own devices, their idle hands start doing the Devil’s work. They find ways to undermine order and make themselves an irritant to the rest of society. It is their nature. … All this is a reminder that there is nothing new under the sun. More precisely, there are no new ideas, just new ways of stating old ideas. One of those old ideas is that human society is only possible with order and order is only possible when it is imposed and enforced, with the general consent, on the portion of the population that needs that order imposed on them the most.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

But on Saturday, Mr. Biden will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 Americans, including some of the brightest lights of the old guard that Mr. Trump wants to tear down. In doing so, the 82-year-old outgoing president is sending an unmistakable message of support for a democratic order he has said is threatened by Mr. Trump’s re-election.

Among those receiving the award are Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, senator and secretary of state whom Mr. Trump threatened to jail; Robert F. Kennedy, the assassinated senator whose son has embraced Mr. Trump; and George Romney, the late father of Senator Mitt Romney, the Republican from Utah who repeatedly rejected Mr. Trump’s actions and philosophy.

As many presidents have done with the Medal of Freedom, Mr. Biden also will honor some of his party’s most prolific fund-raisers, including the man who looms largest of all among Democratic donors — George Soros, the liberal activist billionaire whom Republicans have cast as the party’s evil puppet master.

They also include the magazine editor and cultural figure Anna Wintour, who put the first lady, Jill Biden, on the cover of Vogue twice in the last four years while spurning Melania Trump during her husband’s presidency. Ms. Wintour is one of the leading fund-raisers in the fashion industry, having hosted events for Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign in London and Paris last year.

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.

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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