Read it.

In a sane country, it would be unthinkable that the murder of a two-year-old boy would go effectively unpunished. And yet this is exactly what is happening in Germany. In January this year, a 28-year-old Afghan asylum seeker—Enamullah Omarzai—launched a brutal attack on a group of toddlers on a daycare outing, at a park in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria. With a large kitchen knife, he began stabbing two of the children—a two-year-old Moroccan boy and a two-year-old Syrian girl. One of the female teachers, as well as two male passersby, attempted to intervene, allowing the remaining teacher and children to escape. In the struggle, one teacher had her hand broken, while the two men were stabbed. The little boy and a 41-year-old man both died from their injuries.

Last week, as the trial for this case culminated, Judge Karsten Krebs decided that Omarzai could not be held criminally responsible for his actions. The court-appointed psychiatrist testified that Omarzai was suffering from a severe mental illness, and had heard voices in head that instructed him to attack the children. It was also apparently highly likely that Omarzai would commit more “highly aggressive acts,” if he was not detained in a facility. He had also previously been prescribed medication, which he refused to take, and had repeatedly been released from psychiatric care, apparently because he did not pose any risk to others.

The details of this case will be grimly familiar. Omarzai arrived in Germany in 2022, after travelling through Bulgaria, Austria, and France. His asylum claim was rejected and he had been under a deportation order since 2024. But, by January this year, he was still in the country. He had also had numerous run-ins with the police, including for assault and property damage. Between the deportation order, the mental-health services, and the interactions with police, there were plenty of opportunities for Omarzai to be kept off the streets. The failure of all these agencies led to the deaths of an innocent child and a man who was simply trying to do the right thing.

Read it.

Since October, Danish farmers have been required to feed their cows Bovaer—a methane-reducing additive intended to make agriculture more climate-neutral. However, several farmers have reported that some animals have become ill or died after consuming the supplement, Danish media, including Nyheder TV2, reports.

The new regulation, effective from January 1st, 2025, mandates that all farms with more than 50 conventional dairy cows feed Bovaer for at least 80 days a year. Many farmers began using the additive on October 1st. Reports describe cows suffering from fever, reduced milk output, or sudden death shortly after consumption. One farmer said he lost several cows, each representing a financial loss of about 10,000 Danish kroner (€1,300).

Bovaer, developed by the Dutch company DSM-Firmenich, contains 3-nitrooxypropanol (3-NOP), a compound that inhibits methane-producing enzymes in a cow’s digestive system.

The Foundry.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is fighting a federal criminal probe over alleged “selective enforcement” in cases she brought against President Donald Trump’s business and the National Rifle Association, court documents unsealed Friday reveal.

James’ effort to block subpoenas issued by the Department of Justice touches “on matters of national concern, with implications that stretch well beyond this action,” Judge Lorna Schofield, an Obama appointee, wrote in her order making the filings public Friday.

“Unsealing this action is not only permissible but compelled,” the judge wrote. “One simple fact drives this conclusion: the information at issue is not secret.”

Read it.

The Democrat Party is “an elitist institution” that’s “way out of touch” with the country’s working class, according to liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

In a wide-ranging interview for The New York Times Opinion series, Sanders said he learned “there is no Democratic Party” when he ran for the 2016 presidential nomination.

“One of the things that I learned is there isn’t much of a Democratic Party. There are people on the top,” Sanders told Times Opinion editorial director David Leonhardt.

Gee, there’s an echo in here….

Well, he ought to know.

Newsbusters.

Two of the three major broadcast networks, ABC and NBC, attempted to depreciate the ongoing Islamic genocide against Christians in Nigeria during their morning programs on Monday. Over the weekend, President Trump threatened U.S. military intervention if Nigeria’s government failed to stop the mass-slaughtering themselves, while also ignoring comments from Nigeria’s president being open for the military assistance.

The mainstream media started to pay attention to the atrocity only because Trump made it newsworthy. Both networks fixated on Trump’s guarantee to enter the region “guns-a-blazing” in the absence of swift action by Nigerian authorities over the last several months.

On ABC, Good Morning America co-host Michael Strahan and chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce didn’t deny the existence of violence in Nigeria, but described it as a religiously-neutral phenomenon.

Read it.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins joined Fox News on Sunday and addressed the American people about the USDA’s massive effort to combat fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Rollins said that the Trump administration sent letters to all governors prohibiting illegal aliens from accessing benefits, with a historic request for state data to be audited alongside the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). She said only 29 states cooperated, primarily red and some blue states.

She said her team and DOGE found some of the most shocking fraud ever, resulting in the purging of 700,000 ineligible recipients since the president’s inauguration, and arrested 118 individuals.

Read itl

Federal prosecutors say an ISIS-inspired terror plot was hatched in Michigan but stopped before it could unfold.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a newly unsealed complaint that reveals a “major ISIS-linked terror plot” involving multiple suspects arrested in the Eastern District of Michigan.

Bondi said the men had AR-15 rifles, tactical gear, and a detailed plan “to carry out an attack on American soil.”

Read it.

The Trump administration has banned the media from an area of the White House they previously had access to after some reporters were discovered surreptitiously capturing video of sensitive information.

Officials revealed that reporters have also been found ‘spying’ on private, closed-door meetings in the White House and wandering into already restricted areas near the Oval Office, in order to “ambush” Cabinet officials after private meetings.

Read it.

Almost 800,000 New Yorkers are planning to flee the city if Democrat candidate Zohran Mamdani wins Tuesday’s mayoral election, according to a poll carried out by J.L. Partners for the Daily Mail.

The survey found that 9% of New Yorkers would “definitely” leave the city, which currently has a population of some 8.5 million.

If those numbers were to depart, it would be equivalent to the entire population of Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, or Seattle fleeing the city.

Read it.

The Israeli government is considering approving the safe transit of about 200 Hamas terrorists, who were trapped behind the Yellow Line in tunnels in the Rafah area, to the area vacated by the IDF, according to reports in Arab and Hebrew media.

The Qatari government-affiliated Al Jazeera outlet reported that the terrorists are trapped in several “pockets” within the Rafah area, with some of them staying in underground tunnels which have not yet been destroyed by the Israeli military.

Arab reports said that “mediators” of the ceasefire were requesting the Israeli government to allow the terrorists safe passage to the Hamas-held side of the ceasefire.

New York Post.

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers are prepared to bolt from the Big Apple if socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani wins Tuesday’s mayoral race — potentially setting the stage for the largest population flight in US history, an alarming new poll warned early Monday.

Around 765,000 people of the 8.4 million residents who call New York City home are preparing to leave, with about 9% of New Yorkers sharing that they would “definitely” leave the city if Mamdani is elected the 111th mayor, the Daily Mail reported, citing a survey conducted by J.L. Partners.

If those residents were to leave, it would be equal to the population of Washington, DC, Las Vegas, or Seattle fleeing the city.

Another 25% of New Yorkers — about 2.12 million — said they would “consider” packing up and leaving.

Read it.

I was one-shotted in my teens by the way Guns, Germs, and Steel explained everything? and I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since. At this point honestly half the books I’ve reviewed could probably be described as arguments against Jared Diamond. But that’s okay. I can stop any time. Just one more sweeping transdisciplinary exploration of global history. Just let me see a map of British coalfields next to a chart of GDP per capita and I promise I’ll go back to that book about esoteric writing. C’mon, bro, I won’t ever talk about the Hajnal Line again, I swear. Just let me have one more study of an under-appreciated causal factor for the differing trajectories of human societies and I’m done. I have this under control.

Believe me, they are VERY expensive.

Power Line.

If you created a list of the worst people in public life during modern American history, John Brennan would be near the top. As CIA Director, the (allegedly) former Communist betrayed the American people to a greater degree than any other public employee I can think of.

On Thursday, Brennan participated in some sort of conference, during which he was questioned by a guy who was in the office of the Director of National Intelligence and was involved in the intelligence work surrounding purported “Russian influence” in the 2020 election. The questioner didn’t get far, as Brennan just kept saying “bullshit,” even though what the questioner said was correct. The crowd was on Brennan’s side, and the moderator moved on.

Read it.

At the time of writing, it seems fairly likely that a Somali Muslim named Omar Fateh will shortly be elected mayor of Minneapolis, and it looks almost certain that a Ugandan desi Muslim named Zohran Mamdani will be elected mayor of New York City.

Dearborn, Michigan already has a Muslim mayor, but the city has a majority Muslim population, so that makes sense. In contrast, Muslims in New York and Minneapolis are a minority. A substantial and rapidly increasing minority, but still a minority.

So how do those cities manage to elect Muslim mayors?

In order to be elected mayor of a major American metropolis, a Muslim candidate has to persuade a large number of non-Muslims to vote for him. Those infidel voters will include many African-Americans, but the votes of plenty of white people will also be needed. In order to persuade all those kuffar to pull the lever for a Muslim, the would-be mayor and his handlers will need to convince them that the candidate is just the man they need to deliver everything they want. That requires the candidates to be less than truthful in what they tell the voters.

I’ve been observing the mendacious public utterances of prominent Muslims for more than twenty years, and continue to be impressed with the ease with which they deceive their non-Muslim audiences. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a.k.a. the “Ground Zero imam”, comes to mind as a consummate master at fooling the infidel, but the “Swiss philosopher” Tariq Ramadan — now sadly incarcerated in a French prison — is no slouch, either.

Messrs. Fateh and Mamdani have an easier time of it, since they have risen to their current prominent positions as Democratic Socialists, whose secular adherents are also systematically dishonest in their dealings with the electorate. Like devout Muslims, they believe that the ends justify the means when it comes to building the socialist state. Their willingness to elide the truth, not just out of expediency but as a matter of principle, makes them like Muslims without Allah. Their paradise is an earthly one, and may or may not offer seventy-two virgins as one of its rewards, but the ideology is much the same.

The Telegraph (UK).

The £33m aid project was designed to help poor Ugandan farmers deal with the impact of climate change.

But the reality saw their crops and homes destroyed in an “inhuman” project that left them “on the brink of starvation”.

Local government officials, who were guarded by armed security forces, razed crops, trees and homes as they claimed to be re-wilding wetland in a project run by the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which has received £2.6bn in UK taxpayers’ money.

It is one of a number of controversial projects uncovered in a seven-month investigation by The Telegraph into how the Government is spending £11.6bn in International Climate Finance (ICF).

On Friday, The Telegraph revealed how the public has paid for a £52m road to nowhere through the jungle in Guyana, rusting solar panels on schools in Zimbabwe and condoms in the Congo all under the guise of climate aid.

Read it.

In 1831, President Andrew Jackson dispatched the USS Lexington to the Falkland Islands to respond to attacks on American fishing vessels in the area. The Lexington rescued the American vessels and American citizens, and took some of the locals, loosely aligned with British and other local authorities, prisoner as punishment for seizing the American ships.

Jackson did not pursue a declaration of war which, in any case, would have involved a fairly nebulous authority in Buenos Aires, or more dangerously, with London, although after having already dispatched the USS Lexington, he suggested to Congress that “they may clothe the Executive with such authority and means as they may deem necessary for providing a force adequate to the complete protection of our fellow citizens fishing and trading in those seas.”

The Falklands Incident, as it was known, 194 years ago, was one of many interventions by American forces against, as Jackson put it, “bands” linked to governments, without being part of them that were attacking, looting, smuggling (including carrying slaves) or otherwise causing injury to our national interests. President Trump’s attacks on drug trafficker boats follows almost two centuries of military interventions against non-state forces beginning with President Thomas Jefferson’s war against the Barbary pirates who attacked American ships in the name of Islam.

TimesNow.

A recent surprising discovery has revealed that eating Oreo cookies may be twice as effective at reducing LDL or bad cholesterol compared to high-intensity statin therapy. The ground-breaking experiment, conducted by Oxford University, aimed at testing the Lipid Energy Model – a potentially revolutionary theory that can make experts understand the metabolism of lipids better.

The innovative experiment, held by Nicholas Norwitz – a Harvard medical student with a doctorate in metabolism and nutrition from the University of Oxford – focused on observing the diverse effects of Oreo cookies and statins on cholesterol levels in a unique group known as Lean Mass Hyper-Responders.

Nick Norwitz was valedictorian of his class at Dartmouth, then went to Oxford and got a PhD in metabolism, then returned to Harvard Med School for an MD. He is both smarter and more educated than you or me. I trust what he has to say about metabolism. His YouTube channel is one of the most entertaining on my playlist.

Read it.

Welcome immigrants. Many, but not too many. Mostly educated and skilled. Always legal.

That is the answer. Or at least a short version of an answer. What’s the question? I’m coming to that.

For decades, Canada enjoyed all-party, across-the-spectrum support for immigration. The arrival of new people at consistently higher rates than in Western Europe or the United States did not drive political polarization. This country took in far more immigrants than America relative to the size of its population, and had been doing so for decades, without signs of backlash. Instead of a Left-Right clash on immigration, there was a boring all-party consensus.

When Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency for the first time, visceral anger over immigration was central to his campaign. Perhaps his success with so many voters should not have surprised. By 2016, the share of the American population born outside the country was 13.5 percent, the highest level in more than a century. Maybe a backlash was inevitable.

In Canada, however, it has been well over a century since immigrants were that low a share of the population. In 2016, immigrants were 22 percent of Canadians and rising. That was higher than the U.S. at any time since the Civil War.

Read it.

Automotive giant Stellantis is expanding its U.S. operations. Any sign of an investment turnaround in Germany, which Chancellor Friedrich Merz touted just weeks ago, is nowhere to be seen.

The European carmaker, home to brands like Opel, Peugeot, and Citroën, is turning away from its European sites. On Monday, Stellantis announced it will invest $13 billion in the U.S. over the next four years, increasing American production by 50%. The expansion will create 5,000 new jobs across plants in Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana.

The concrete impact on German production remains unclear. Stellantis offered no comments on potential layoffs, but it’s safe to assume significant parts of production will shift to the U.S. in the coming years. High energy costs and U.S. tariffs likely influenced this decision.

CEO Antonio Filosa emphasized that this largest investment in company history will create American jobs and systematically expand U.S. manufacturing. The U.S. will now be Stellantis’ top priority.

Wall Street Journal.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago was scrambling to close a $369 million deficit in 2013. The inception of ObamaCare offered an enticing target for cost shaving: retiree health coverage.

The city expected to spend $194 million that year subsidizing health insurance for its retirees, many of whom were too young to qualify for Medicare. Such costs were projected to increase to $540 million by 2023 at the same time as pension payments were ballooning. While courts in Illinois and other states have held that public employee pensions are legally protected, governments have more latitude to make changes to medical benefits.

So Mr. Emanuel dumped his city’s retirees onto the nascent ObamaCare exchanges, where federal subsidies can reduce premium payments. Voilà, Chicago’s $2.1 billion unfunded retiree healthcare liability vanished. Now U.S. taxpayers pick up the tab for Chicago’s retirees in their 50s and early 60s.

Chicago isn’t alone in trying this neat fiscal trick. Detroit, Stockton, Calif., and San Bernardino, Calif., also saved billions by shifting pre-Medicare retirees to ObamaCare when they filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in the 2010s. That minimized cuts to workers’ compensation and pensions. Detroit’s $170 million annual retiree healthcare bill made up nearly 20% of its general fund budget, one of the city’s biggest costs.

Other municipalities may move retirees to ObamaCare to avoid layoffs and tax hikes. ObamaCare could soon became a safety valve for underwater cities.

Enter Democrats in Congress, who are refusing to reopen the government unless Republicans agree to extend the pandemic-era ObamaCare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year. The news is filled with stories of people who will have to pay modestly more for their insurance, never mind that the feds would still pick up roughly 80% of the cost for a typical plan.

The reality is that extending the sweetened subsidies will encourage more states and cities to follow the lead of Chicago, shifting the healthcare costs of their young retirees to national taxpayers. It’s a backdoor bailout.

Newsbusters.

Last weekend 460 patients and their associates were massacred at Saudi Maternity Hospital in el-Fasher, Sudan. This was acknowledged by the World Health Organization last Wednesday, when they reported that the RSF, the Rapid Support Forces, a Sudanese paramilitary force, in other words, terrorists, had committed the heinous act, as well as other slaughters in and around Darfur. One would think that this kind of horror would be widely reported on. When it comes to the nightly newscasts on CBS and ABC, one would be wrong.

Let’s start with the CBS Evening News. They did not mention the attack even once all week — that’s zero seconds — but they did have time for plenty of Halloween stories. On Friday evening, which was Halloween, the broadcast spent one minute on Halloween weather around the country. They ran a two minute package on “spooky” Halloween decorations, and the debate over whether or not they are too scary for children. And the best for last, a three minute segment on toilet paper being used by mischievous trick or treaters using toilet paper to ‘decorate’ homes and businesses in Heflin, Alabama, something the police are understandably not happy about. Bari Weiss, are you watching?

Over on Friday’s ABC’s “World News Tonight”, they could muster only 19 seconds of coverage of the hospital slaughter and the ongoing killings in Sudan, as anchor David Muir told his audience, “Overseas tonight a horrific scene unfolding in Sudan. Allegations of genocide in Darfur. Mass killings reported over a 72 hour period. Rebels storming a hospital this week, massacring hundreds of patients, visitors and medical staff. Reports of gunmen going door to door. Rebels claim they captured the final holdout of the Sudanese army in Darfur.” Then it was on to him promoting a Halloween story, coming up next!

The Sudan Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is a powerful paramilitary group that originated from the Janjaweed militias active during the Darfur conflict. Formed officially in 2013 under the government of Omar al-Bashir and commanded by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), the RSF gained significant power over the years. It has been accused of severe human rights abuses including war crimes, ethnic killings, sexual violence, and forced displacements, particularly against non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur. The RSF fought alongside and against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in the ongoing civil war that began in April 2023.

Newsbusters.

This past week, Fox News updated viewers on the search for domestic terrorists who ambushed immigration agents after they raided a marijuana farm by blocking agents’ vehicles and aggressively attacking them with large rocks, shown in a disturbing video that went viral during the summer.

As Fox covered a press conference by U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli in the aftermath of several key arrests, MSNBC not surprisingly ignored it since the network downplayed the violence and did not show the graphic video in the aftermath of the July 10 raid.

Read it.

Scott Adams, the 67-year-old Dilbert creator, will publicly ask President Donald Trump on Monday to intervene and save his life. In a post on X, Adams said he is “declining fast” from metastasized prostate cancer and needs Trump, who once offered help, to force Kaiser Permanente of Northern California to schedule a critical treatment immediately.

Kaiser has approved Adams for Pluvicto, a newly FDA-approved radioligand therapy that targets advanced prostate cancer cells, but has failed to book the brief IV infusion, according to Adams.

I subscribe to Coffee With Scott Adams. Today there was a note saying “No show today. At ER.”

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

A mayor in Mexico ’s western state of Michoacan was shot dead in a plaza in front of dozens of people who had gathered for Day of the Dead festivities, authorities said.

Local politicians in Mexico are frequently victims of political and organized crime violence.

The mayor of the Uruapan municipality, Carlos Alberto Manzo Rodríguez, was gunned down Saturday night in the town’s historic center. He was rushed to a hospital, where he later died, according to state prosecutor Carlos Torres Piña.

I think we can safely call Mexico a ‘failed state’. I also think we can safely include it in the Turd World.

Read it.

President Donald Trump is set to host Syria’s self-appointed interim leader later this month for talks in Washington, marking the first ever visit by a Syrian head of state to the US capitol. Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who once fought alongside foreign fighters while killing American soldiers in Iraq, will enjoy his red carpet reception in Washington on November 10.

This will also mark the first time a former ISIS member will be hosted in the Oval Office, an absurdity which would have been hard to believe a mere decade ago. But the US-Saudi-Israel axis reached its regime change goal in Damascus, which overthrew the secular Arab nationalist leader Bashar al-Assad, which resulted in the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) taking over.

Politics makes strange bedfellows.

Read it.

As we’ve for many months been documenting, the Western mainstream media continues the trend of turning on Ukraine, and on President Zelensky in particular, now that it’s clear that ‘victory’ against Russia will not be a reality. It seems that every time Ukraine’s military suffers major setback and defeat at a strategic location in the east – as is again unfolding currently – the unusually ‘negative’ MSM articles suddenly appear.

It wasn’t very long ago, and especially during the opening couple years of war, the MSM treated any criticisms of Zelensky or the Ukrainian Army as totally off-limits. This was the comically absurd era of concert halls in Europe canceling famous classical Russian ballads, or op-eds calling for reading courses to ban Dostoevsky. But fast-forward to late 2025 and Politico is out with a story entitled The dark side of Zelenskyy’s rule.

The story documents how Ukrainian society, and especially what’s left of the ‘accepted opposition’ (after long ago Zelensky banned all opposition political parties deemed too ‘pro-Russian’ in a country where some one-third of the population has Russian as their first language) is slowly turning on the US/EU-backed leader.

Instead of calling them ‘conspiracy theories’ we ought to call them ‘spoiler alerts’.

The Telegraph (UK).

A prominent Syrian influencer living in Denmark said she has been forced to return home to protect her children from being taught about LGBT rights in school.

Salma Naddaf fled the civil war in 2014 and built a new life in Denmark as a refugee, gaining millions of online followers for DIY home improvement content.

The 36-year-old mother announced this week that she had left her adopted homeland because the Scandinavian country had made gender transition “part of education”, arguing the country no longer reflected her family values.

In a tearful video, she called it the “hardest decision” she had ever made in her life, but said she was “absolutely convinced that my children shouldn’t grow up in a place where neither the customs nor the traditions are like ours”.

Savor the irony.

The Telegraph (UK).

The US has released drone footage showing what it claims is Hamas hijacking an aid truck in southern Gaza.
The video shows a number of men appearing to move the driver from the cab of the vehicle then leaving him inert in the road’s central reservation.

It was published by the US Central Command, which has recently set up a multinational headquarters in Israel.

The incident took place while Gen Dan Caine, the US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was on an official visit to Israel as a guest of the IDF chief of staff.

Israel has long argued that Gaza’s hunger problems in the first half of the summer were primarily caused by Hamas’s widespread looting of the aid supply, although this was denied by the United Nations and other aid organisations.

Centcom said in a statement that its new Civil-Military Coordination Centre “observed suspected Hamas operatives looting an aid truck travelling as part of a humanitarian convoy delivering needed assistance from international partners to Gazans in northern Khan Younis”.

The Telegraph (UK).

It is just after nightfall in Bislett, a quiet student neighbourhood in central Oslo, when two children armed with hand grenades step off a bus and approach their target.

As undergraduates pile out of bars and stumble to their dorms, the 13-year-old boys arrive at a nail salon and hurl the grenades at the shop front.

The blast shatters windows, riddles brick walls with shrapnel and triggers a bomb alert on Oslo’s emergency text message system. The boys vanish into the night.

…

Since it was founded in Stockholm around 2010, the syndicate has proved virtually impossible to dismantle. Rawa “Kurdish Fox” Majid, the syndicate’s leader, issues his orders from Iran – where he lives under the protection of the Ayatollah’s regime.

A legal loophole in Denmark, Norway and Sweden means that children under the age of 15 cannot be prosecuted for even the most serious offences, such as murder – making them ideal recruits.

Read it.

Stupidity can at first be a derogatory term, it can also seem judgemental when cast from others and indeed it can be somewhat subjective. In Artificial Intelligence and behavioural economics we are very interested in stupidity. As Amos Tversky quipped:“My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence; me, I study natural stupidity.”

My curiosity into the subject of ‘stupidity’ was triggered based on a specific type of stupidity, which is a different concept to irrationality. Danny Kahneman used to differentiate stupidity and irrationality by saying he was more interested in peoples “susceptibility to erroneous intuitions.” Likewise, stupidity is not ignorance, which I define as lack of knowledge and understanding.

Here we are in the 21st century, we can launch and catch rockets descending from the sky, we have instant communication systems, we can buy and sell goods globally with a click on our incredibly powered personal computers, our money is transferred in nanoseconds, our medical advancements are helping to cure diseases, we have self-driving taxis that have covered millions of miles. Yet, we still have a myriad of shortcomings and imperfections, especially around choices and decision making, systematically across governments, institutions, business and personal. The crux lies in the quality of these decisions: are they optimal and aligned with human aspirations, the laws of nature, and societal norms? If they are, we can deem them wise; if not, they fall into the category of “stupidity”.

As Ron White used to say, “You cain’t fix stupid.”

The Economist.

In the history of medicine, a few drugs tower above all others. Humira for rheumatoid arthritis; Prozac for depression; statins to prevent heart disease and strokes. All have helped patients far beyond doctors’ initial expectations and continue to benefit millions of people every day. A new class of drugs is set to join their ranks and has the potential to eclipse them all—glp-1 receptor agonists.

These drugs mimic the action of a naturally occurring hormone, glucagon-like peptide (glp-1), and for decades have been used to treat diabetes. More recently they have become a wildly popular way for people to lose weight. But in March semaglutide (a glp-1 receptor agonist sold as Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for weight-loss) was approved in America for cardiovascular disease in overweight people. In April tirzepatide (sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound) showed positive results in late-stage trials for sleep apnoea, a breathing disorder. In other trials it seems to reduce chronic kidney disease.

This is just the start.

NBER.

(Remember: If you can’t measure it. it’s not Science.)

We characterize the distribution of suburban homeowners’ preferences for housing unit density. To measure welfare changes under counterfactual increases in density, we first construct a novel house-level measure of exposure to density and identify its price effects in a boundary discontinuity design. On the borders of municipalities with larger minimum lot sizes, lots are 3,000 ft² larger and houses are $40,000 costlier. We exploit the systematic variation in density exposure induced by these discontinuities to estimate price effects. We then connect these estimates to a structural hedonic model of housing choice to retrieve individuals’ preferences for density. Overall, we find an average welfare loss among incumbent homeowners from a 1/2 unit per acre increase in density (which is equivalent to a 0.3 standard deviation in density) of about $9,500, with significantly larger losses under counterfactual increases solely from rental units. There is other noteworthy heterogeneity in these preferences, too. Most households have only a moderate preference over density. The median welfare loss is only 55% of the average, implying a long, left tail of those with more extreme aversions to density. This tail disproportionately contains households in affluent, low density neighborhoods. In sum, our results document an important foundation of the demand for density regulation across U.S. suburbs that we hope serves as a valuable input into future research into the considerable costs of that policy.

Read it.

When I read biographies, early lives leap out the most. Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14 years old. Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, by 11. Vladimir Nabokov published his first poetry collection at 16, while still in school. Andrew Carnegie finished schooling at 12 and was 13 when he began his second job as a telegraph office boy, where he convinced his superiors to teach him the telegraph machine itself. By 16, he was the family’s mainstay of income.

Readers (and some biographers) tend to fixate on the celebrity itself, the inflection point when people achieved fame. But their early lives often contain something more revealing than their successes. Before you grasp, you have to reach. How did they learn to reach?

In my examples, the individuals were all doing from a young age as opposed to merely attending school. And while they may not have wanted to work, the work was nonetheless something that they, their families, and society felt was useful, purposeful, and appreciated. In a sense, they had useful childhoods.

Do children today have useful childhoods?

The optimal long-term outcome of the shutdown (Scott Lemieux/Lawyers, Guns & Money)  Progs live an an interesting fantasy world. I’m sure it’s more fun that reality.

The MAGA Right’s Antisemitism Problem (Dominic Green/Wall Street Journal)  Not just any Right, but the MAGA Right. See whether you can find the difference.

These are the U.S. ships and aircraft massing off Venezuela (Washington Post)  This is the ‘big stick’ that Teddy Roosevelt was talking about.

Voters divided on midterms despite broad Trump disapproval, poll finds (Washington Post)  Yeah, that’s a real head-scratcher, all right….

PBS Plugs Jon Karl’s 4th Anti-Trump Book, Comparing Trump to ‘Breaking Bad’ Kingpin

Food Stamp Cuts Expose Trump’s Strategy to Use Shutdown to Advance Agenda (Tony Romm/New York Times)  Oh, and the Democrats aren’t? I see….

Trump’s MRI scan raises specter of secrecy in presidential health (Nathaniel Weixel/The Hill)

Trump’s Retribution Campaign Leaves D.C. Prosecutor’s Office in Crisis (Alan Feuer/New York Times)

Republicans re-up trans attacks on Dems that worked for Trump in 2024 (Washington Post)

Border Patrol’s strong-arm tactics are the new norm in Chicago as Trump moves to sideline ICE leadership (Chicago Tribune)

We’re Norman Rockwell’s family. Trump’s DHS has shamefully misused his work. (USA Today)  USA Today has very little to do with Today and even less to do with USA. I would suggest that they get the beam out of their own eye before worrying about specks in ‘Trump’s DHS’.

MAGA’s war within: Right-wing purity tests (Tal Axelrod/Axios)  There’s that MAGA guy again. MAGA is the New Nigger.

Supreme Court has expanded presidential powers under Trump. How far will it go? (Justin Jouvenal/Washington Post)  The Supreme Court has done no such thing. The expansive powers given to pervious Democrat Presidents (all in A Good Cause, of course) are merely hurting their butts now that they are being exercised by a Republican.

‘We’re not a violent city’: Chicago locals take on ICE block-by-block (Heather Schlitz/Reuters)  Fooled me.

PNAS.

Using a dataset linking administrative government data to the online behavior of Danish Twitter users, this study estimates the associations between hostility in social media interactions and offline individual-level dispositions and childhood environments. The study shows that users with many more criminal verdicts, more time spent in foster care, better primary school grades, and higher childhood socioeconomic status are more hostile on social media, in part, because such factors predict online engagement in political discussions, which is a major correlate of hostility. This research not only broadens our understanding of the drivers behind social media aggression but also suggests that interventions to reduce online hostility must consider the complex interplay of online and offline lives.

Check it out.

I doubt that most college graduates (especially Grievance Studies majors) today could pass it.

Read it.

“Cadillac Desert” (1986) by Marc Reisner correctly pointed out that within the limits of natural precipitation, we’ve expanded habitation in the West close to its maximal extent. Nearly 40 years after he wrote, however, the answer to shrinking flows of the Colorado and ever more demand for living space is not to stage some kind of retreat from land otherwise blessed with climate, solar power potential, mineral and human capital wealth. The answer is to flex our industrial might and finish what the irrigators began a century ago, and bring water in vast quantities to the high desert, to terraform a few select valleys in Nevada, and build a 21st century aesthetic vision.

 

Read it.

Generative AI commodifies the manipulation of digital information. It may take half a century, but I believe it will eventually lead to the extinction of office and administrative support jobs like administrative assistants and financial clerks. The entire purpose of these jobs is to lower the cost of transmitting and storing information. In the long-run, AI will drive the cost of “routine” information processing down to nearly zero, eventually eliminating the need for most human labor in those jobs (although we will need a lot more energy efficiency to get there!)

There is a clear analogy here to the impact of mechanization on farm labor. For most of human history, the bottleneck to increasing food production was physical power. Steam and electricity eventually relaxed that constraint, and farm work mostly disappeared because we only need so much food.

Similarly, the key bottleneck in business decision-making for most of modern history was a lack of information. Advances in information collection, storage and retrieval eventually relaxed that constraint, and now we are awash in data. Routine office jobs were created in a time of information scarcity, and they may no longer be needed.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

Six years ago, the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, in Manhattan, announced that it would become tuition-free for all students. The change was made possible in part thanks to a $100 million donation from Kenneth Langone, a Home Depot co-founder, and his wife, Elaine. “It would enable graduates to pick lower-paying fields like primary care and pediatrics, where more good doctors are desperately needed, without overwhelming debt to force them out,” Kenneth said in an interview at the time. In a triumphant report, the school declared, “The ultimate success of this tuition-free initiative will be measured over time by the clinical and research achievements of future graduates, as well as the improvements in diversity of the physician ranks.”

You might ask yourself why medical education is so damned expensive. It didn’t used to be.

The school’s shift to a tuition-free model has no doubt been a tremendous boon to those students fortunate enough to gain admission. But judged against the standards set out by the Langones and NYU itself, the initiative has been a failure. The percentage of NYU medical students who went into primary care was about the same in 2017 and 2024, according to an analysis by Chuck Dinerstein, the medical director at the American Council on Science and Health. The locations of the hospitals where students do their residencies—often a clue about where they will end up practicing long-term—also remained essentially unchanged. And although applications from underrepresented minority students increased by 102 percent after the school went tuition-free, the proportion of Black students declined slightly over the following years, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges and provided by Jared Boyce, a medical student at the University of Wisconsin. (The share of Latino students grew by a few percentage points.) Perhaps most alarming of all, doing away with tuition appears to have made the student body wealthier: The percentage of incoming students categorized as “financially disadvantaged” fell from 12 percent in 2017 to 3 percent in 2019.

Not many people become doctors to take low-pay jobs, and the ones that do will do that anyway. Most people become doctors because doctors can make big bucks. The reason for that is artificial government and professional restrictions on residency programs, which limit the number of doctors every year to about half of what we really need. That’s why so many “American” doctors are foreigners; foreign medical schools are dirt cheap compared to American ones.

New York  Post.

A Dallas-based biotech company has nearly completed its reconstruction of the Tasmanian tiger just two years into its de-extinction project.

The last known thylacine, commonly referred to as the Tasmanian tiger, died in captivity on Sept. 7, 1936. None have been spotted across Tasmania since, despite countless expeditions attempting to rediscover the tiger.

Without the top predator intact to maintain order and keep the foof chain in check, its former habitat has buckled under pressure as wildfires, disease and invasive species thrived unopposed.

Read it.

I wish people wouldn’t use the term ‘capitalism’ in the sense of ‘anything that isn’t socialism’.

Critics of Big Tech often describe ‘surveillance capitalism’ in grim terms, blaming it for all kinds of political and social ills. This article counters this pessimistic narrative, offering a more favorable take on companies like Google, YouTube, and Twitter/X. It argues that the downsides of surveillance capitalism are overstated, while the benefits are largely overlooked. Specifically, the article examines six critical areas: i) targeted advertising, ii) the influence of surveillance capitalism on politics, iii) its impact on mental health, iv) its connection with government surveillance, v) its effects on the rule of law and social trust, and vi) privacy concerns. For each area, it will be argued that concerns about surveillance capitalism are unfounded or exaggerated. The article also explores some benefits of the services provided by these technology companies and concludes with a discussion of the practical implications. Throughout, the article draws on empirical evidence relating to the societal and political impact of digital technologies.

Ars Technica.

Like nuclear fusion, the idea of space-based solar power has always seemed like a futuristic technology with an actual deployment into communities ever remaining a couple of decades away.

The concept of harvesting solar power continuously from large satellites in space—where there are no nights, no clouds, and no atmosphere to interfere with the collection of photons—is fairly simple. Large solar arrays in geostationary orbit collect solar energy and beam it back to Earth via microwaves as a continuous source of clean energy.

However, implementing this technology is not so simple. In recent years, in search of long-term power solutions and concerned about climate change, the European Space Agency has been studying space-based solar power. Some initial studies found that a plan to meet one-third of Europe’s energy needs would require massive amounts of infrastructure and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. At best, such a system of very large satellites in geostationary space might come online by the middle of this century.

In short, the plan would require massive up-front costs, with no guarantee that it all would work out in the end.

This was one of Jerry Pournelle’s fondest dreams.

Read it.

At first glance, the 400 acres of soybeans growing on the Preston family’s dairy farm in southern Michigan looks like a typical field. But these aren’t ordinary soybeans. They represent a breakthrough partnership with Michigan State University that’s saving the family tens of thousands of dollars a month in livestock feed costs—and it could change the dairy industry forever.

Power Line.

Arctic Frost was the code name under which the Biden FBI conducted a sweeping, illicit investigation of much of the Republican Party. Arctic Frost was intended as the basis for the criminal case that Special Counsel Jack Smith brought against Donald Trump, who was then out of power, relating to his efforts to “overturn” the 2020 presidential election. That case eventually was dismissed, deservedly so.

Read it.

Several arson attacks took place in Leibertingen (Baden-Württemberg) last week. According to the police, a 22-year-old man threw Molotov cocktails at a car and two neighbouring houses. He also attacked police officers and other emergency services with incendiary devices. It has now emerged that the attacks were probably politically motivated. Among the victims of the arson attempt was Michael Koppatz, a former politician and active member of the AfD (Alternative for Germany).

The mother of the alleged perpetrator, Tobias K., is the mayor of a neighbouring town.

The suspect first set fire to Koppatz’s wife’s company car in the parking lot. Firefighters managed to extinguish the fire in time before it spread to Koppatz’s house. Shortly afterwards, he allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the window of Koppatz’s house, but it did not cause any damage. The former MP retired from politics some time ago because he no longer agreed with some of the party’s policies.

While police officers and a firefighter were investigating the scene of the fire, another Molotov cocktail was thrown at them, landing a few meters in front of them and exploding on the street.

Read it.

Amid the furious debate over the government shutdown and the incoming freeze of SNAP food benefits, one important factor is often overlooked – Why are 42 million Americans, a number larger than the entire population of Canada, dependent on government subsidized groceries? Isn’t this a time bomb waiting to explode regardless of a federal shutdown?

There have been a few temporary food stamp programs from the Great Depression through the 1950s, but they were limited in scale and funding was minimal. It wasn’t until LBJ’s “Great Society” project in 1964 that food stamps slowly became a permanent mainstay of American life. By 1969, food benefits were in full swing, yet, only 1.4% of the population used them. Strict eligibility requirements kept the participation rate down until 1977.

Candidates had to have a gross income below the poverty line. Their liquid assets (including vehicles) had to have limited value. They had to put some of their own money into a portion of the stamps in order to get the “bonus” stamps. Able bodied adults without children were largely excluded. College students and immigrants were barred from the program. Able bodied adults had to work or be in training. Monthly income and expense verification was required. Food stamps were paper, creating a “shame factor”. Just because someone was under the poverty line did not mean they could qualify.

Most of these barriers have been absent from SNAP in the past few decades, which is why the percentage of users spiked from 1.4% to as high as 15% of the population. Today, the rate stands at 12.5%, which is still extraordinarily high. Approximately 19 million SNAP users have been on the program for longer than a year, and over 80% of people on the program are able bodied and below retirement age.

Read it.

Some of the most prestigious medical journals are refusing to publish corrections to papers that contain demonstrably false claims about ‘gender medicine.’

That’s the main finding of Dr. J. Cohn, author of ‘Censorship of Essential Debate in Gender Medicine Research.’ She noted the ‘low or very low-certainty evidence for the benefits of medical gender interventions’—echoing last year’s Cass Review—including suicide prevention. Despite the facts, academic medical journals continue to publish demonstrably false claims about gender medicine.

Since 2022, when these dubious ‘facts’ appeared online or in print, including in the JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Pediatrics, Cohn has submitted corrections: a normal part of the peer review process. Typically, journal editors responded with assertions about their confidence in the articles and their parallel doubts about the rigorous scholarship cited by Cohn.

Read it.

In the West there is a tradition of thinking through absolutely everything all the time like a skilled rogue dismantling every theoretical obstacle and combative conundrum.* Free speech developed from the tradition of logically thinking through every idea and example your professor threw at you.

Islam since al-Ghazali has given up on using reason to figure out the Q’ran, G-d or philosophy. Blind submission is required. There is an illuminating discussion where an imam debates a Christian and the entire debate is an exercise in avoiding how a part of the Q’ran makes sense. The Muslim Apologist uses logical sounding words to avoid the Christian talking about the Q’ran but the Muslim tries to avoid logical arguments.

While I’m far from an expert on these matters, every ex-Muslim I’ve listened to has said that they were never taught critical reasoning. They were taught to memorize the Q’ran even though they had no real idea of what the Q’ran meant and then not to question anything. I find that off-putting but it has an alien appeal to many others.

My personal opinion is that Islam was deliberately created by Satan as a tool to suppress (if not destroy) God’s Chosen People, the Jews. Muslims don’t like Christians very much but they REALLY HATE Jews, for no discernible reason other than that The Recitation Says So. (If you want a fun trip, investigate the story of the so-called Satanic Verses.)

Read it.

The 2024 election season featured an unprecedented number of Asian Americans, from Vivek Ramaswamy’s rise in the Republican primary to soon-to-be second lady Usha Vance, to the Democratic candidate herself, Kamala Harris. Just a few years ago, this would have been a cause for celebration on the political left: Asian Americans have reliably voted for Democrats for decades. But the election results revealed that racial and ethnic minorities are not as loyal to the Democratic Party as previously believed. Much like Hispanics, Asian American voters made a major shift to the right.

Asians are denigrated as honorary white people rather than as fellow fashionable minorities by the Left.

Nationally, 2020 and 2024 exit polls from the Washington Post show a 9-point shift to the Republicans in the presidential race among Asian American voters relative to 2020. In some states, such as Nevada and Texas, the polls suggest that Trump won the Asian American vote outright. The NBC News exit poll found a 5-point shift to the right nationally among Asian Americans relative to 2020. And in their survey of Asian American voters prior to the election, Asian Americans Advancing Justice saw a 7-point shift away from the Democrats relative to 2020.