Read it.

Former New York Times reporter and Howard University professor Nikole Hannah-Jones has long been controversial as a writer who expressly rejects objectivity and neutrality in journalism. That was most evident in her “1619 Project,” which was ridiculed by historians and law professors in claiming that slavery was the driving force behind American independence. Nevertheless, the project was awarded the Pulitzer Prize despite glaring historical errors. Yet, this month, Hannah-Jones is back on the pages of the New York Times again rewriting history. This time, she is praising cop-killer and 1960s revolutionary Assata Shakur.

New York Post.

Scores of Zohran Mamdani fans who braved freezing temperatures to celebrate the new mayor as he was publicly sworn into office Thursday were left disappointed by the bash the socialist pol had promised.

Socialists are great on promises, very few of which come true.

Around 10,000 supporters stood outside City Hall during the event — billed as an “Inauguration for a New Era Block Party” by Mamdani’s staff — crammed into several barricaded pens without access to bathrooms or any food concession stands.

Welcome to life under socialism. Thought it was going to be better, didn’t you?

Read it.

Former TSA agents are sounding the alarm on Somali men routinely flying out with suitcases crammed full of cash, undoubtedly linked to massive taxpayer-funded fraud schemes that could be funneling money to terrorist groups overseas.

A former agent from Minnesota described witnessing “Somali men flying out of Minnesota with suitcases filled with cash” amounting to “$1 billion over 5 years,” including one instance of a suitcase “filled with brand new passports.”

These groups were “always waived through,” with a clear “trail” leading back to implicated parties, the former agent claims.

The Telegraph (UK).

An Islamist double killer who took a prison officer hostage has won a court case on human rights grounds because he was depressed after being put in solitary confinement.

David Lammy, the Justice Secretary, has agreed to pay £7,500 in compensation and foot a £234,000 legal bill for Fuad Awale, a convicted double murderer, after a judge ruled that his treatment in jail breached his human rights.

Awale was transferred to a special separation unit for the country’s most dangerous prisoners after he and another inmate ambushed the prison officer and threatened to kill him unless Britain released the hate preacher Abu Qatada.

The Telegraph (UK).

The National Trust blacklisted a volunteer after he pointed out spelling mistakes on its website.

Andy Jones, 71, a volunteer at the trust for more than a decade, sent a dossier of thousands of misspellings and factual errors to the charity’s director-general in the hope that they would be corrected.

After sending a strongly worded complaint to his local branch, in which he criticised the trust’s director-general for not responding, he was told that his comments were “not in line with our organisational values” and was banned from volunteering at any of its sites.

No good deed goes unpunished.

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

Finland has detained a ship and its crew after a critical undersea telecommunication cable connecting the country to Estonia was damaged Wednesday, Finnish authorities said.

Finnish police said in a statement that the vessel suspected of causing the damage was found with its anchor chain lowered into the sea in Finland’s waters, while the damage site itself was in Estonia’s waters. The police later named the vessel as the Fitburg, a Saint Vincent and the Grenadines flagged cargo ship.

The Finnish National Police Commissioner Ilkka Koskimäki said at a news conference on Wednesday afternoon that all 14 members of the ship’s crew have been detained, adding that the crew are citizens of Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

Incidents like this have become more frequent in recent years, raising suspicions they are the result of sabotage and prompting NATO to launch a project earlier this year specifically aimed at strengthening the protection of critical undersea infrastructure.

tReason magazine.

Only the government could spend 20 years creating a national ID that no one wanted and that apparently doesn’t even work as a national ID.

But that’s what the federal government has accomplished with the REAL ID, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now considers unreliable, even though getting one requires providing proof of citizenship or lawful status in the country.

In a December 11 court filing, Philip Lavoie, the acting assistant special agent in charge of DHS’ Mobile, Alabama, office, stated that, “REAL ID can be unreliable to confirm U.S. citizenship.”

Lavoie’s declaration was in response to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in October by the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm, on behalf of Leo Garcia Venegas, an Alabama construction worker. Venegas was detained twice in May and June during immigration raids on private construction sites, despite being a U.S. citizen. In both instances, Venegas’ lawsuit says, masked federal immigration officers entered the private sites without a warrant and began detaining workers based solely on their apparent ethnicity.

Many ‘libertarians’ are among the Useful Idiots of which Lenin was so fond.

Dan Wang.

One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.

If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie communes. Which of the tech titans are funny? In public, they tend to speak in one of two registers. The first is the blandly corporate tone we’ve come to expect when we see them dragged before Congressional hearings or fireside chats. The second leans philosophical, as they compose their features into the sort of reverie appropriate for issuing apocalyptic prophecies on AI. Sam Altman once combined both registers at a tech conference when he said: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Actually that was pretty funny.

It wouldn’t be news to the Central Committee that only the paranoid survive. The Communist Party speaks in the same two registers as the tech titans. The po-faced men on the Politburo tend to make extraordinarily bland speeches, laced occasionally with a murderous warning against those who cross the party’s interests. How funny is the big guy? We can take a look at an official list of Xi Jinping’s jokes, helpfully published by party propagandists. These wisecracks include the following: “On an inspection tour to Jiangsu, Xi quipped that the true measure of water cleanliness is whether the mayor would dare to swim in the water.” Or try this reminiscence that Xi offered on bad air quality: “The PM2.5 back then was even worse than it is now; I used to joke that it was PM250.” Yes, such a humorous fellow is the general secretary.

It’s nearly as dangerous to tweet a joke about a top VC as it is to make a joke about a member of the Central Committee.

Read it.

One cannot help but run into people who clearly fantasize about the following scenario: All the great geniuses of the past sit down and take some sort of culture-invariant IQ test, and then we get to line up the numbers and compare them, finally settling once and for all who was the greatest genius of humanity.

In this fantasy they imagine Voltaire in his study, finishing his fortieth cup of coffee (he used to drink around 50 a day), sharpening a #2 pencil at his desk, getting ready to fill in all those little bubbles. Is it A? Or D? Hmm, hasn’t been A in a while. . .

How the great geniuses of the past would do filling in these ovals perennially fascinates. Einstein would get a 160! Darwin a 180! Aristotle, 190! And while speculating about the numerical ranking of the long dead, IQ enthusiasts will refer quite regularly to IQs of 150 or even 200, presumably thinking that intelligence can actually be tracked at those numbers.