Read it.

The bewildering truth behind human technological enslavement is that it is impossible without the voluntary participation of the intended slaves. People must welcome technocracy into their lives in order for it to succeed. The populace has to believe, blindly, that they cannot live without it, or that authoritarianism by algorithmic consensus is “inevitable.”

For example, the average person living in a first world economy voluntarily carries a cell phone everywhere they go at all times without fail. To be without it, in their minds, is to be naked, at risk, unprepared and disconnected from civilization. I grew up in the 1980s and we did just fine without having a phone on our hip every moment of the day. Even now, I refuse to carry one.

Why? First, as most people should be aware of by now (the Edward Snowden revelations left no doubt), a cell phone is a perfect technocratic device. It has multilayered tracking, using GPS, WiFi routers, and cell tower triangulation to track your every step. Not only that, but it can be used to record your daily patterns, your habits, who your friends are, where you were on any given day many months or years ago.

Then there’s the backdoor functions hidden in app software that allows governments and corporations to to access your cell’s microphone and camera, even when you think the device is shut off. The private details of your life could be recorded and collated. In a world where privacy is being declared “dead” by boasting technocrats, why help them out by carrying something that listens to everything you say and chronicles everything you do?

Anybody who wants to track my movements needs to get a life.

Read it.

Last week, I was able to generate from artificial intelligence a fake study that proved that eating waffles increases baldness. It was filled with footnotes, citations, and complicated math and models. It was kind of scary to see how credible the results felt. You had to look carefully to see the problems. I shared it with others who immediately said something like, “I can believe it.”

Think of this. We’ve never before been in the position to generate such seemingly scientific content on any subject under the sun within a matter of seconds. This power has only existed for two years. Many people do not even know it exists, much less how easy it is. Bad actors are in a position to use this power anytime they want. They can count on legacy levels of trust in “science” to pass off such fakery as real.

No hair looks as good as waffles taste.

Read it.

Fresh court revelations have ripped the scab off Chicago’s festering wound of criminal coddling. The 50-year-old predator accused of dousing a 26-year-old woman with gasoline and igniting her on a Blue Line train this week had racked up at least 72 prior arrests before this horrifying crime.

Read it.

Newly unsealed court documents describe federal allegations that a Chicago man connected to the Latin Kings placed a $10,000 bounty on U.S. Customs and Border Protection Cmdr. Gregory Bovino.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the affidavit was released at the direction of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow ahead of a hearing next week, when attorneys for Juan Espinoza Martinez plan to seek his release from custody.

Federal investigators say Espinoza Martinez was a ranking member of the Latin Kings when he offered payments for information on Bovino and a larger reward for killing him.

Read it.

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) warned Bill and Hillary Clinton Friday that if they continue to ignore deposition subpoenas regarding their history with Jeffrey Epstein, he will initiate contempt proceedings.

Good luck with that.

Democrats seek police action on Trump’s ‘threatening’ social media posts (Washington Post)

CNN Hacks Tearing Hair Out to Explain Trump Economy It Spent Months Saying Was ‘Terrible’

Watch: Construction Sites In Charlotte Go Dark As Illegals Hide From ICE

Judge puts hold on IRS sharing taxpayer info for immigration crackdown (Danny Nguyen/Politico)

Vance Urged Bezos to Make the Washington Post Even More MAGA (David Gardner/The Daily Beast)  There’s taht MAGA guy again—and apparently he worlds for the Washington Poop. Who knew?

Military Court to Look Into Democrats’ ‘Sedition’ Video

Is Trump Giving Illegal Orders? Dems Just Blew the Question Wide Open. (Greg Sargent/New Republic)  Greg Sargent loses his shit.

Ariz. AG Seeks to Revive Case Against Trump’s 2020 Allies

Chicago Rejects DOJ Grants Tied to Trump’s Immigration Policies

MS NOW Guest Insinuates Trump’s a Pedo, Might Start War to Distract From It

The Long Con Comes To An End (Phillips P. OBrien/Phillips’s Newsletter)

The Murky Plan That Ensures a Future War (Anne Applebaum/The Atlantic)

New Jersey may stop paying federal taxes under new governor (Daniel Han/Politico)

Capehart Bristles At The Idea That Calling Trump An Authoritarian Is Bad

White House blew past legal concerns in deadly strikes on drug boats (Washington Post)

Has Trump’s Power Peaked? (Norman Eisen/The Contrarian)

Media Strike at Trump as Trump Strikes Narco-terrorists

The Real Reason Trump Is Fawning Over Saudi Arabia’s Ruler (Noah Shachtman/New York Times)  Lots of mind-readers in the Narrative Media these days.

The Other McCain.

Read it.

The idea that global warming could paradoxically shut down the Gulf Stream, plunging Europe into a new cold spell—a scenario popularized by the film The Day After Tomorrow—is a powerful narrative.

The New Neo.

Well, the wheels of justice grind slow:

Grammy-winning rapper Prakazrel “Pras” Michel of the Fugees was sentenced on Thursday to 14 years in prison for a case in which he was convicted of illegally funneling millions of dollars in foreign contributions to former President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Michel, 52, declined to address the court before U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced him.

In April 2023, a federal jury convicted Michel of 10 counts, including conspiracy and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. The trial in Washington, D.C., included testimony from actor Leonardo DiCaprio and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Justice Department prosecutors said federal sentencing guidelines recommended a life sentence for Michel, whom they said “betrayed his country for money” and “lied unapologetically and unrelentingly to carry out his schemes.”

Note he was charged prior to Trump becoming president.

Newsbusters.

Dominating the cover is a sparkling Taylor Swift on stage somewhere, with guitar, arms flung wide open, big smile on her face as she apparently is singing one of her hit songs.

Just below her are six previous TIME Person/Man of the Year covers from over the decades. They feature:

• “The Guardians and the War on Truth: The Staff of the Capital Gazette on December 9” – Prominently listing the murder of journalist 
• President-elect  Jimmy Carter (in January of 1977 for 1976, the year Carter came from political nowhere to win the presidency)
• Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono as “The Good Samaritans” for 2005
• The American Soldier featuring three uniformed soldiers in fighting gear for 2003.
• Greta Thunberg: The Power of Youth in 2019
• President-elect Barack Obama in 2008

Read it.

Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst came out swinging at Democrat-led states for allowing hundreds of millions of government food aid to be spent at fast-food establishments.

“The ‘N’ in SNAP stands for nutrition — not nuggets with a side of fries,” said Ernst. “I wish I was McRibbing you, but $250 million per year at the drive-through is no joke and a serious waste of tax dollars. I hate to be the one to say McSCUSE ME, but something needs to be done because taxpayers are not lovin’ it.”

Ernst said her review of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program found $524 million in allowed purchases “almost exclusively” at fast-food restaurants under program regulations approved by Democrats administering the program in nine states.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Justice Samuel Alito temporarily restored the state’s new map — expected to net Republicans up to five seats in the 2026 midterms — while the Supreme Court weighs a lower court’s decision to toss that map altogether.

Alito’s move allowing Texas officials to continue to prepare for primary elections under the new map came just after the state asked the Supreme Court for an urgent ruling to revive the redistricting plan adopted at the urging of President Donald Trump.

,,,

The emergency application went to Alito in the first instance because he oversees urgent matters arising in the 5th Circuit, which includes Texas. Alito, who is expected to refer the stay request to the full court, appeared to put it on a fast-track by giving the civil rights groups that sued to block the new map a deadline of 5 P.M. eastern time Monday to file a response.

Read it.

New, disturbing revelations show just how far Joe Biden was willing to go to target his political enemies. In 2022, his Justice Department secretly seized more than two years of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan’s personal phone records. Fox News Digital obtained a subpoena that exposes the depth of Biden’s weaponization of the government against his enemies.

The subpoena shows a federal prosecutor — who later joined Jack Smith’s January 6 team — ordered Verizon to cough up Jordan’s records dating back to Jan. 1, 2020.

“The request appears to be the most expansive yet of the publicly known subpoenas targeting senators and current and former House members during Arctic Frost, the investigation that led to Smith bringing election-related charges against President Donald Trump,” Fox News Digital reports.

Read it.

The old joke goes: A-list actor is having lunch with studio chief. Studio chief says, Didya hear so-and-so (well-known Hollywood agent) dropped dead this morning. His heart. A-list actor says, Gee, I didn’t know he had one.

Kind of brings to mind the late Veep Dick Cheney, who actually did have a heart, but one so grotesquely diseased that he had his first near-fatal infarction at age thirty-seven, followed by surgeries galore, and finally, at age 71, a heart transplant that, quite remarkably, kept him going another thirteen years — long enough to function behind-the-scenes as a senior Deep State cheerleader and strategist through the Trump years. Daughter Liz Cheney, of course, did the political dirty-work, most notably on Nancy Pelosi’s sketchy J-6 Committee, prior to being voted out of office in the 2022 Republican primary for Wyoming’s at-large U.S. House seat with 28.9 percent of the vote to Harriet Hageman’s 66.3 percent.

And so, yesterday, Dick Cheney’s funeral took place at Washington’s National Cathedral, the greatest assemblage of bloodsuckers since the Hammer Film Studio went out of business in 1979.

Joe Biden was there, perky as all get-out for somebody with stage-four prostate cancer, shaking hands with Mike Pence, who pulled him over the finish line in 2021. John Brennan, coupster superbus was there. Ditto John Bolton (awaiting trial). Most cheekily of all, Dr. Fauci, the father of Covid-19 and its little helper, the Covid vaxx, was seated next to MSNBC’s loss-leader, Rachel Maddow, who famously declared in 2021, “The virus stops with every vaccinated person!” (Not.)

Edward Luttwak:

The clearance mechanism of CIA rejects all possible candidates of any value. If you are the kind of young American who could serve your country in the CIA, they won’t let you into the CIA. That’s a simple fact. Everything else follows downstream.

Then there is the fact that people who do get into the CIA are like municipal employees with handsome pensions before the city goes bankrupt. These people come in who cannot deliver and do not deliver, and they make demands, and one of the demands is that they refuse to serve under cover.

…

In fact, one of the fundamental aspects of the CIA is that their people don’t know languages. I was in Kazakhstan many times. And one time in Astana, I ran into the CIA director of the station and said, “How many of you people speak Kazakh?” “We don’t. There’s no need for it. Everybody here speaks Russian.” That’s what they said.

…

At our station in Tajikistan, nobody knows Tajik; our station in Turkmenistan, nobody knows Turkmen; our station in Kazakhstan, nobody knows Kazakh; and in Uzbekistan, nobody knows Uzbek, because “they all speak Russian,” except they don’t, and the CIA guy doesn’t even speak Russian! We have lived with this scandal.

And I blame the State Department, because these Foreign Service officers of the State Department, who do have the qualifications they need for their jobs, they do a cover-up. They cohabit in these missions all over the world with CIA people, and they know they’re clowns.

But somehow, they don’t talk about it. They’re the ones who should find a proper, legitimate way to inform their fellow citizens that the CIA is a fraud, that the so-called human intelligence, all the people they send overseas, all their so-called CIA officers overseas, and their NOCs are frauds. They’re all frauds and I’ve never met one who is not a fraud.

And that is why we can’t ever have nice things.

Watch it.

Trump plays Mamdani like a guitar. The master at work….

Read it.

I find it difficult to talk about the history of the computer. The actual record is dreadfully short: almost nothing of consequence happened before the year 1935. We keep looking for a better story, but we inevitably end up grasping at straws.

Just look at what we’ve done so far. The “father of the computer” is no longer Konrad Zuse (Z1, 1938) or John Mauchly (ENIAC, 1943). Somehow, we pivoted to Charles Babbage — a 19th century polymath who never constructed such a device, and had no luck inspiring others to try. Not content with this injustice, we also turned “computing” into a meaningless word. On Wikipedia, the timeline of computer hardware includes mechanical clocks, dolls, weaving looms, and a miniature chariot from 910 BCE. It’s historical synthesis run amok.

To me, the calculator is a particularly regrettable casualty of this expansionist approach. Of course, the development of the calculator is intertwined with the history of the computer — but it deserves to be treated as a story of its own.

Read it.

To test whether humans still use auricular muscles — which once helped move our primate ancestors’ ears to funnel sound — scientists attached electrodes to the sides of people’s heads, and asked them to listen closely to an audiobook. Different challenge modes were imposed, with the sound coming from different angles, and other competing sounds. The scientists found that, the more difficult it was for participants to hear the audiobook, the more the superior auricular muscles activated, as if participants were trying to prick up their ears like a dog or cat. When sounds came from behind a participant, the posterior auricular muscles contracted as if attempting to point the ears in that direction.

If you can wiggle your ears, you can use muscles that helped our distant ancestors listen closely. These auricular muscles helped change the shape of the pinna, or the shell of the ear, funneling sound to the eardrums. Millions of years ago, our ancestors stopped using them, so humans’ auricular muscles are only vestigial. But now scientists examining the function of these muscles have discovered that they activate when we’re trying to listen to competing sounds.

“There are three large muscles which connect the auricle to the skull and scalp and are important for ear wiggling,” explained Andreas Schröer of Saarland University, first author of the study in Frontiers in Neuroscience. “These muscles, particularly the superior auricular muscle, exhibit increased activity during effortful listening tasks. This suggests that these muscles are engaged not merely as a reflex but potentially as part of an attentional effort mechanism, especially in challenging auditory environments.”

Watch it.

In case you’re interested.

PBS Recruits Bishop to Bash Trump on Immigration, Is Chided on Church’s Trans Stance

Trump Expands Offshore Drilling, Colliding With Newsom

Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump From Deploying National Guard in D.C. (Zach Montague/New York Times)

Judge rules Trump’s National Guard deployment to D.C. is illegal (Joe Walsh/CBS News)

Democratic hawks defiant after Trump accuses them of ‘seditious’ act (Mark Satter/Roll Call)

Trump accuses Democrats of ‘seditious behavior, punishable by death,’ for urging military to ignore illegal orders (NBC News)

Our Depressing Vaccine Future Laid Bare on the C.D.C. Website (Jessica Grose/New York Times)

Karoline Leavitt Defends Trump’s ‘Quiet, Piggy’ Insult By Suggesting We Should Be… Grateful? (Lydia O’Connor/HuffPost)  You ought to be grateful that he talks to you at all.

Dick Cheney’s Long, Strange Goodbye (Susan B. Glasser/New Yorker)

Trump DOJ Defies Another Court Order in Abrego Garcia Case (David Kurtz/Talking Points Memo)

House Dems Report Trump’s ‘Death Threats’ to Capitol Police

Split Screen: ‘MySafeSpace’ and the Collapse of whitehouse.gov (Azza Cohen/The Contrarian)  Evidently ‘contrarian’ means ‘fully invested in the proglodyte Narrative’.

Catholic clergy, nuns sue Trump admin over Communion access for ICE detainees (Jack Jenkins/RNS)

Vance pleads for ‘patience’ on the economy in sharp departure from Trump’s rhetoric (Adam Cancryn/CNN)

PREDICTABLE: Nets Trumpwash Congressional Democrats’ ‘Seditious’ Video

Senate Democrats Investigate Kennedy Center Deals With Trump Allies (Katie Benner/New York Times)

‘HANG THEM’: Trump Boosts Message Calling For Executing Democrats In Congress (Jennifer Bendery/HuffPost)  The delusion is strong in this one.

Democrats fear political violence after Trump accuses Congress members of ‘seditious behavior, punishable by death’ (The Independent)

Congressional Republicans Begin to Look Beyond Trump (Carl Hulse/New York Times)

Radio Free Europe’s Hungarian service shuts down after Trump funding cuts (Justin Spike/Associated Press  As the name makes clear, Radio Free Europe was founded to transmit real news behind the Iron Curtain. Last time I looked, the Iron Curtain no longer exists.

Supreme Court to Weigh Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order

Party of one: Trump chews up and spits out his inner circle (Neal Rothschild/Axios)

Federal Judges Uphold Several North Carolina US House Districts Drawn by Republicans

Trump’s All-but-Forgotten Border Wall Reaches an Angry Laredo, Texas (New York Times)  If you get an outfit, you can be a cowboy too.

Grenell Hits WH, NY Times on Kennedy Center: ‘We’re Making Money’

Trump’s Angry Tirade Calling for “Death” to Dems Just Backfired Badly (New Republic)  They hope.

Pentagon Pete’s War Goons Accidentally Invade Mexico (Adam Downer/The Daily Beast)

Jake Tapper on President Trump’s suggestion that 6 Democratic lawmakers be executed for sedition (CNN)  Trump, of course, made no such suggestion.

Judge Shreds Lies and Provocations of ICE Barbie’s Goons (Tom Latchem/The Daily Beast)

Trump’s Policy Failures Are Even Worse Than We Realize (Bill Scher/Washington Monthly)

Brace Yourself for … Full. Blown. Panic. (William Kristol/The Bulwark)

Sorry, George Washington Would Not Have Hanged Them. (Joyce Vance/Civil Discourse …)  But Lincoln would have.

Transcript: Trump’s Tirade Calling for “Death” to Dems Backfires Badly (New Republic)

Another Undaunted City (Jennifer Rubin/The Contrarian)  Jennifer Rubin loses her shit. (Apparently ‘contrarian’ now means ‘fully invested in the proglodyte Narrative’.)

NFL Coach Schools Trump After He Trashed Rule Change (William Vaillancourt/The Daily Beast)

Trump had a bad week. Fox News polling suggests things are going to get worse. (Philip Bump/MS NOW)  They hope.

Swalwell Announces He’s Running For Governor As Kimmel Calls Trump ‘Horrifying’

MAGA Disarray And The Accumulated Debt Of Corruption (Brian Beutler/Off Message)  Seems pretty on message—for the Narrative—to me.

‘Look In The Mirror, F*** Face’: Stewart Rants At Trump-Supporting Mamdani Critics

Politico Senior Writer Now Admits Epstein Files Release Unlikely to Harm Trump

30-Year JAG Veteran Schools Democrats for Video Calling for Sedition in the Military

Watch it.

Carl Benjamin (“Sargon of Akkad”) does a deep dive.

Read it.

Presenting the findings on Thursday, Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) said the trend “has been solidifying for years.” The BKA registered almost 266,000 victims of domestic violence last year, including more than 187,000 women and girls. That represents a 3.8% rise on the previous year and a 17.8% increase compared with 2022.

Non-German suspects were again “clearly overrepresented,” Dobrindt said, noting that 37% of those accused of partner violence did not hold German citizenship. Victims show a similar pattern: around one third of all victims were non-German nationals, far above their share of the population.

Family Minister Karin Prien (CDU) warned that the true scale of abuse is likely far higher. “We assume that one in four women will experience intimate partner violence in her lifetime,” she said, pointing to a major underreporting problem.

The Foundry.

A vote to condemn the “horrors of socialism” passed on a mostly party-line vote Friday, with 98 Democrats voting against it and 199 Republicans voting for it.

The bill passed 285-to-98. No Republicans voted against the bill, although 20 Republicans did not vote.

On the Democrat side, it was far from unanimous, with 86 members voting in favor, and 98 against. Two Democrats voted “present” and 27 did not vote.

Read it.

Tensions between Bosnia’s Serb authorities and international envoy Christian Schmidt deepened after a Serb minister sent a Nazi-era SS helmet along with an incendiary letter to the German administrator.

The Bosnian Minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations sparked controversy on Thursday, November 20th, with the stunt, which he shared on Instagram. Staša Košarac disputes Schmidt’s mandate in Bosnia and Herzegovina—which his party claims is not approved by the United Nations Security Council, meaning Schmidt is operating in the country illegally.

Read it.

The House Democrats on the Oversight Committee, whose header is a picture of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, released a cache of emails that they claimed indicted Trump. Instead the emails again confirm that Trump had broken ties with Epstein and wanted nothing more to do with him.

The Democrat members of the committee showed no interest in why members of their party in three states, New York, Florida and New Mexico, covered up for Epstein and kept him off the sex offender registry. That’s not something Trump, who didn’t even hold public office until six years later, could have done. If the House Dems on the Oversight Committee really wanted to know, they could have asked one of their own members: Rep. Melanie Stansbury.

At the recent ‘No Kings’ rally, Rep. Stansbury claimed that “America has no kings.” America may have no kings, but New Mexico had two influential ones.

The Washington Poop, paper of record for the Deep State.

More accurately, ‘spending the most on politics’. Leftists have this delusions that spending money equals influence, which for them I guess it does, but Michael Huffington can testify that spending more than your opponent doesn’t guarantee a win.

The 20 most prolific donors on the Forbes billionaires list have collectively given nearly $5 billion between 2015 and 2024, spending on everything from state ballot measures to congressional elections and presidential races. Some have concentrated on supporting issues of interest. Finance billionaire Jeff Yass has poured millions into supporting pro-school-choice candidates in his home state of Pennsylvania and across the country.

While some billionaires have given similar amounts to both parties, the most prolific donors gave almost exclusively to one party. In federal races, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman gave just under 90 percent of his total donations to Democrats and liberal committees; all the other top 20 donors were even more lopsided. Nobody gave over $5 million to both Republicans and Democrats.

Considering how much power the government has over the economy, who, having money, wouldn’t spend it to influence the people who could confiscate all of that money if they had a mind to?

Newsbusters.

New York Times Houston bureau chief J. David Goodman sounded aggrieved in his Texas-based story in Wednesday’s paper, “Texas Declares Muslim Civil Rights Group a Terrorist.” This is how liberal papers routinely describe leftist agitators. They’re “civil rights groups.”

As for the phrase “Muslim Civil Rights Group,” the Times is actually talking about the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Hamas-linked Islamic pressure group. “Civil rights group” should not describe a radical group whose national executive director Nihad Awad declared himself happy about the October 7 massacre by Hamas — a story covered by the Times in December 2023 but ignored in this new story. “I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land,” Awad said.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has also designated CAIR a terrorist group.

Read it.

While former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock calls for a fight against climate-driven global apocalypse at COP30, Brussels is being forced into political restraint by pressure from the US and Qatar. On the horizon, the end of the EU’s grand climate machinations is becoming visible.

November 13, 2025, could mark a turning point in European Union history. We may have witnessed the beginning of the end of European climate socialism.

Media coverage of the day in Parliament downplayed its significance, focusing instead on the reform of the supply chain law, while fundamental changes unfolded at a different level.

Politically, the event cannot be overstated; perhaps it should even be called a singularity in recent EU policy: The European Parliament paved the way for a dramatic dilution of corporate reporting obligations under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the so-called due diligence rules (CSDDD). The unstoppable march toward a climate dictatorship has been abruptly halted.

Read it.

Across the free world, people are exhausted, institutions appear unresponsive, and leaders feel distant. Politics remains an endless quarrel. In this climate, a new idea is taking hold, that perhaps the machines can do better.

Billionaire technologist and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has publicly cautioned against this temptation while acknowledging why it is on the rise. When democracies fail to deliver, he notes, people naturally look for something—anything—that promises competence.

Surveys from 2025 even show that many citizens now trust artificial intelligence (AI) systems to make decisions on their behalf more than their elected representatives. It’s a striking shift, but it reveals something more troubling than the technology itself.

I’d trust an A.I. before I’d trust a Democrat, for sure.

Read it.

Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has grown impatient with what he regards as a dangerously misguided national conversation about manufacturing in the United States, one that continues to fixate on bringing back the factories and jobs that disappeared four decades ago, when the far more consequential opportunity lies in dominating the complex, capital-intensive, software-defined hardware industries that will shape the rest of the century.

Apparently ‘billionaire’ is some sort of credential these days.

Read it.

The Transportation Security Administration has introduced an $18 fee for airline passengers who reach airport checkpoints without acceptable identification, a policy that strengthens REAL ID enforcement as holiday travel picks up.

The agency’s notice says the fee applies to travelers who lack documents such as a passport or a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license. The program creates an alternative identity-verification process that may allow passengers to enter the sterile area of an airport if TSA can confirm their identity.

The fee is nonrefundable and covers the government’s verification expenses.

Yet another reason not to fly … at least on a commercial airling.

If I were President, my first action would be to abolish the TSA.

My Motto: CHANGE IT BACK!

Read it.

Very true. Economics is downstream from politics, as politics is downstream from culture.

The doctrines of socialism have been with us for more than 150 years, but no one had really tried it in a total way until the advent of the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the early 1990s. During that period, a number of communist/socialist revolutions occurred in Asia, Cuba, and Africa, all of which provided a laboratory to observe how these socialist economies would perform.

The socialist economies failed spectacularly, as Ludwig von Mises had predicted. His works on socialism published in 1920 and in 1923 show that, as an economic system, it was doomed before it ever was implemented because it had no practical system of economic calculation. Despite the propaganda beamed at people both from socialist governments and the western media that socialist economies were lifting vast numbers of people from poverty, the reality of socialism was what Mises had predicted.

By 1989, even die-hard socialists like Robert Heilbroner had to admit that socialism had been a huge failure. Indeed, by the mid-1990s, the only countries attempting to continue with the socialist experiment were Cuba and North Korea, and neither economy was one to be envied.

City Journal.

Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone. Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots.

In many cases, the fraud has allegedly been perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s sizeable Somali community. Federal counterterrorism sources confirm that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab. As one confidential source put it: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”

UPDATE: Report: Minn. Tax Dollars Allegedly Funneled to Al-Qaida Affiliate

Read it.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has sued Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton to stop Texas from designating their group as a “foreign terrorist organization.”

“CAIR-Texas and the Texas Muslim community are standing up for our constitutional rights by directly confronting Greg Abbott’s lawless attack on our civil rights. We are not and will not be intimidated by smear campaigns launched by Israel First politicians like Mr. Abbott,” CAIR-Texas said in a statement.

“Mr. Abbott is defaming us and other American Muslims because we are effective advocates for justice here and abroad. We plan to continue exercising our constitutional rights, defending civil rights, and speaking truth to power, whether in defense of free speech, religious freedom and racial equality here in Texas or in defense of human rights abroad.”

Read it.

Three more Republican members of the Indiana Senate reported this week that they were targeted in swatting incidents, as national GOP leaders continue urging Republican holdouts to reconsider their stance on redistricting, Fox59 in Indiana reported Thursday.

GOP state Sens. Dan Dernulc, Spencer Deery, and Rick Niemeyer each said they were targeted in separate swatting attempts, which Indiana State Police confirmed they are investigating.

Sen. Gregory Goode also reported a swatting incident over the past weekend.

Read it.

Chicago homeowners are demanding answers as property taxes rise without visible improvements, according to Fox News. In Lawndale on Chicago’s West Side, residents told ABC7 Chicago they’re paying more but seeing little change. Community leaders and the Lawndale Christian Development Corporation held a “property tax bonfire” to voice frustrations.

Resident Milton Clayton said, “There’s been a divestment in this community for the most part, but it seems like now that people have found an interest in reclaiming the neighborhood, now it’s like we’re being taxed for prosperity.”

Fox News writes that another resident, Thomas Worthy, said his bill rose by $977 and added, “The tax increase is tied to a TIF that I have no idea why… It’s collecting money from our neighbors and our streets, but we’re not being notified for why it’s in the bill.”

Newsbusters.

As she did just over a year ago, Alyssa Farah Griffin, the faux conservative for ABC’s The View, came to the defense of Vanity Fair editor Olivia Nuzzi, the liberal journalist who cheated on her then-fiancé Ryan Lizza with Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. During Thursday’s episode, Farah Griffin proclaimed floozy Nuzzi was “one of the best writers of my generation” and hoped she “will come forward and defend herself” from new allegations of sleeping with another politician and a former MSNBC host.

Near the top of the segment, moderator Joy Behar was perplexed that people had a problem with a journalist having affairs and sleeping with their sources: “And her ex-fiance, who’s also a political reporter, is writing a blog claiming that she had an affair with yet another politician. Okay. (…) So, what’s wrong with that?”

“The problem is that’s unethical under journalism standings,” co-host Sunny Hostin had to explain to her. “I mean you can’t sleep with a source because there’s an immediate conflict of interest in your reporting. And she gave glowing reports – She wrote glowing reports about the two men that she allegedly had affairs with.”

Read it.

Five years after Boston Dynamics introduced the cute but creepy “Spot” robot dog, the 5-pound German Shepherd-sized robot dog is finding work.

With its ability to climb stairs, open doors, and dazzle inebriated suspects, police are now using it in situations including armed standoffs, hostage rescues, and hazardous materials incidents – things where sending in a human or a real dog could be life-threatening.

According to Bloomberg, over 60 bomb squads and SWAT teams in the US and Canada are now using Spot, Boston Dynamics has revealed.

‘Lies, smears and AI deepfakes’: DHS tackles fake news about ICE (Anna Giaritelli/Washington Examiner)

Jen Psaki Exploits Epstein Victim in Failed Attempt to Implicate Trump

Judge Reopens Contempt Probe of Trump Deportation Flights

Judge Boasberg says “justice requires” him to continue contempt inquiry into Trump admin (Chris Geidner/Law Dork)

Judge Boasberg to resume contempt proceedings over Alien Enemies Act deportations (Politico)

DOJ Sues California Over Mask Ban, ID Rules For Feds

The Trump Steamroller Is Broken (Jonathan Lemire/The Atlantic)  He hopes.

Trump Derangement Syndrome Is Real And It’s Driving Therapists Crazy

NBC Promotes Churches Hosting ICE-Spotting Seminars

Family Affair: Commerce Secretary’s Sons Cash In on A.I. Frenzy (New York Times)  Like the Biden Crime Family?

The word Trump hates to say (Politico)  According tot he mind-readers at Politico, anyway.

Trump-Marjorie Taylor Greene breakup shakes MAGA: ‘Mom and Dad are separated’ (Hannah Knowles/Washington Post)  Apparently Gossip Girl writes for the Washington Poop.

The lame duck dictatorship (David R. Lurie/Public Notice)

How the FBI Became the Face of Deprofessionalization (Don Moynihan/Can We Still Govern?)

Is Trump Starting to Correct His Course? (Karl Rove/Wall Street Journal)

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

My inbox is regularly deluged with story pitches, so I considered one that came on Sept. 15 with my usual dose of skepticism.

A publicist was offering “a potential exclusive” regarding “a highly sensitive, confidential matter,” involving a collection “lost to the world for decades.”

It sounded almost too titillating to be true. So I agreed to get on the phone and hear more.

Thus began my journey of reporting on the 137-carat Florentine Diamond, which had been missing for 100 years and was assumed to have been lost, stolen or recut and sold in pieces. It turned out the diamond had been under our noses all along: in a bank in Canada, where the Hapsburg family had stored it in a vault for security.

Jewels! Secrecy! Royalty!

Who could ask for anything more?

Quibble: The Order of the Golden Fleece is NOT the “Habsburg family house order”, which is the Order of Maria Theresa.

The Order of the Golden Fleece (Toison d’Or) is one of the oldest chivalric orders in Europe, originating in the Duchy of Burgundy in the 15th century and making it’s way to the Spanish Habsburgs over the course of time. During the War of the Spanish Succession it was claimed by both the King of Spain and the Archduke of Austria (Holy Roman Emperor), and it has been doubled ever since—any formal portrait of King Felipe will show him wearing it. (Since he’s a Bourbon, he wouldn’t be giving such pride of place to a “Habsburg family house order”.)

(But, really, who expects a scribbler for the NYT to get the facts straight?)

Watts Up With That.

he article doesn’t say it was a battery fire, but from the video in the BBC article above, it was a pretty impressive blaze for a simple electrical fault. Of course the intensity of the fire might have been caused by all the disposable single use petroleum based plastic used to construct the climate conference pavilion.

The UN seems determined the conference will continue, but with the conference almost at its end, no significant leaders in town, and many conference center evacuees likely relocating to the nearest wine bar to calm their nerves, there is a good chance a lot of people will pack up and go home early.

Well, we can hope. Let their private jets trail CO2 across the skies….

The Foundry.

On Tuesday, the media was filled with stories that a three-judge panel had voted 2-1 to issue a 160-page order blocking the Texas legislature’s new congressional redistricting plan.

The order claimed the redistricting was unlawfully based on race as opposed to partisanship—a claim at odds with what we all saw happen in the partisan political fight within the state legislature, which included a walkout by Democrat legislators.

What wasn’t attached to the order was the dissenting opinion by Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith, a 37-year veteran of the federal judiciary who is greatly respected for his legal acumen. His 104-page dissent came out a day later and marks the most scathing denunciation I have ever read of another judge.

In this case, the judge being denounced is Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown, who wrote the majority decision, along with Judge David Guaderrama, who joined the opinion.

I know Jerry Smith. I would not want to be on the other side of him in an argument. I have seen it done; it is not a pretty sight.

The intersting thing is that this is a District Court decision but included on the panel Judge Smith, who sits on the Fifth Circuit. I can only assume that he was there to help out with the District Court load.

I have no doubt that this will be moved for a rehearing en banc, and I doubt that it will survive. If it survives that process, I am sure that it will be appealed to the Fifth Circuit; and, if I were a betting man, I would be that the Fifth Circuit will beat it into the ground like a tent peg.

What were they thinking?

Read it.

We saw this happen with racism. As long as I’ve been alive, it’s been bad to be racist in America. But over the decades, the minimum definition of racism went from something like “hating people on account of their race” to “having a private preference for one’s own group over others” to “supporting policies that have a disparate impact on a protected minority” to “not actively struggling to make yourself antiracist.”

Nobody ever wanted to be the guy to stand up and say we’re overrating the problem of racism, or that given its power we should define this word very narrowly. As a result, we got the madness of the Great Awokening throughout the 2010s, culminating in the Summer of Floyd and the events of the next year or two before things subsided and the backlash kicked in.

We see something similar happening with the concept of pedophilia. In recent days, I’ve been arguing that it is of course ridiculous to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile, and a lot of responses are along the lines of “you may be technically right but why die on this hill.” I’m convinced, however, that these distinctions are quite important.

He is absolutely correct. Pedophiles are interested in pre-pubescenty children. Ephebophiles, on the other hand, are interested in post-pubescent adolescents below the (sometimes arbitrary) legal age of consent. That’s why the age of consent was as low as 16 i some states and even 14 in others. (You can look it up)

But nobody cares about such distinctions any more, ore even any distinctions at all. What matters is having a rhetorical stick with which to beat the people you don’t like.

Feh.

Read it.

As is often the case, you have to watch the videos to really get a true picture of what happened at University of California, Berkeley on Nov. 10. In the days that have transpired since the event, many newspaper accounts have made it sound like a tempest in a teapot, as if a couple of hotheads disrupted the otherwise quiet, if intense, protests at a Turning Point USA event on campus.

No. The videos reveal, in fact, a slew of violence: smoke bombs and glass bottles flying, fights breaking out, angry students pushing back on police in riot gear, screaming obscenities and threats while lunging and shoving at people attempting to enter the event.

None of this was a surprise to anyone. If the founder of the Turning Point movement could be shot dead two months ago at one of the most sedate campuses in the country, it was pretty much a given that push would come to shove at a university infamous for its out-of-control protests in the name of “free speech.”

Read it.

The chief of staff of the French armed forces addressed the mayors of France with some highly controversial remarks this week. Acknowledging the threats currently facing the European continent and the weakness of French forces, he asked French families to “prepare to lose your children.” Given Macron’s weakness on the international stage and his loss of political credibility, this warmongering tone has not gone down well and has been unanimously condemned by both the Left and the Right.

During his visit to the congress of mayors on Tuesday, November 18th, the chief of staff of the French armed forces, General Fabien Mandon, spoke of the imminence of a military confrontation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The language used in his speech caused his audience to jump when he called on the country to “accept the loss of its children.”

The general sought to rouse the mayors of France by pointing out the lack of fighting spirit in today’s France, which is mired in endless stagnation: “We have all the knowledge, all the economic and demographic strength to deter the Moscow regime. What we lack, and this is where you have a major role to play, is the strength of character to accept that we must suffer in order to protect who we are,” he explained. Addressing local elected officials and calling on them to bear witness, given their proximity to the French people, he concluded, “You must talk about this in your cities.”

Read it.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is talking to “dozens” of Congress members about codifying the Education Department’s biggest step toward extinction.

The Daily Signal asked McMahon at Thursday’s press briefing if she was talking to members of Congress about her Tuesday announcement regarding moving certain functions of the department to other executive agencies.

“We’ve been talking to talk to dozens of members of Congress to explain to them exactly what we’re doing, to bring them up to speed,” she said in response to a question from The Daily Signal, “and to say to them, ‘look, when we have completed some of these transfers that we that are working incredibly well, then we will be looking for Congress to codify those.’”

Daily Record (UK).

A fire has spread through pavilions being used for UN climate talks in Brazil.

Attendees were evacuated from the Cop30 event, the day before it was set to finish up. Officials said that no one has been injured in the fire.

Pity.

Brazil’s Tourism Minister Celso Sabino told journalists at the scene that the fire started near the China pavilion, which was among several pavilions set up for events on the sidelines of the climate talks.

Well. There it is.