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Hollywood has mastered the art of moral performance. Award shows have become political stages where actors speak with the confidence of prophets and the certainty of philosophers. But beneath the applause lines and emotional crescendos lies a contradiction that becomes impossible to ignore: the courage they demand from others is courage they themselves will never have to summon.

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Let’s pretend you are a liberal living in a red state. If you feel aggrieved about the condition of the world and believe that conservatives are to blame, you can find a few like-minded souls, print up some signs covered in half-clever phrases, and go protest. In most cases, unless you chain yourself to a railing on the courthouse steps or attack the police, you will usually be ignored.

That’s democracy, a system under which 51% of the people can pee in the soup of the other 49% and the latter can’t do a thing about it—unless they have a Constitution like that of the U.S., which most countries don’t, the fools.

On the flip side, let’s pretend you are a conservative living in a deep blue state. If you don’t like the school policy, E.V. mandates, high electricity prices, or restrictive gun laws, and you dare to complain, not only will you not be ignored, but you might be harassed, shunned, or canceled. Your solution to the hard blue insanity is a four-letter word: move.

And that’s the difference between the Left and the Right. When the Left protests, the Right ignore them. When the Right protests, the Left responds with violence.

Now let’s pretend you live in a state with a blue megalopolis somewhere over the horizon, but you don’t want to move. Let’s also pretend you have lived in your community all of your life and have roots there — a job or a farm or a business that would be difficult to replicate somewhere else. Why should you suffer because once upon a midnight dreary, councilors to a long dead king or a few drunk senators drew a line on a map that ignored rational boundaries?

And once those boundaries are drawn, you’re stuck. Current boundaries can depend on everyone who has a vested interest in the status quo, and that’s enough. Absent something like the Civil War, which is the only way West Virginia could even hope to split off from Virginia, you’re stuck.

Ever since the founding of the republic, various groups and political movements have sought to redraw state boundaries. Some have been successful. Maine was originally part of Massachusetts, and the states of Kentucky and West Virginia were created from land originally part of Virginia. Other partitions to existing boundaries have been suggested, but none has been adopted. The reason is that the Constitution requires both the blessings of the partitioned state and the U.S. Congress.

Ask yourself a simple question. Why would any state governor or legislature willingly give up territory if it is not forced to? The serfs — excuse me, taxpayers — there help balance the state budget. How they feel about their lives or the number of potholes in their roads is secondary to ensuring that state budgets are met and the state programs, even those for non-citizens, continue.

Which is why discussions such as these are moot. Sure, I enjoy them as much as anybody, but NOTHING WILL EVER HAPPEN.

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California has always sold itself as more than a place. It is a promise. The weather helps, the coastline flatters, and the mythology does the rest. Come here, build something improbable, become unimaginably rich, and you are not merely rewarded with money. You are crowned. For decades, Silicon Valley’s greatest fortunes were treated as proof that California’s gravitational pull was permanent, that the state could mint billionaires and keep them in orbit through prestige, proximity, and a sense that leaving would be culturally unthinkable.

That story is now unfolding with a quieter ending than anyone expected, written not in moving trucks and farewell speeches, but in trusts, addresses, and entities that change jurisdictions with the ease of a signature.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin called California home from around 1995 onward, long before Google became a verb and long before the Bay Area turned into the modern cathedral of tech wealth. They arrived as students, built Google in the late 1990s, and spent nearly thirty years as the cleanest embodiment of the state’s dream. California did not simply host their success. It framed it, legitimized it, and amplified it into a cultural export. If you had to name two men who should be untouchable by the politics of exit, it would be these two.

There’s a classic fable about killing the golden goose that probably applies here.

Supporters argue the state is staring at the loss of about $100 billion in federal healthcare funding over the next five years, a drop that could hollow out services, close facilities, and erase as many as 145,000 healthcare jobs. Their pitch is moral and urgent. Make the richest pay once, so the system does not break.

Whose fault is it that the system was built to depend on a source of funding that might go away? Well, they didn’t think it could go away. Politicians live in the present. If you’ve got money, you’ll always have money, so go ahead and spend it. “There are still checks in my check book, so my checking account can’t be out of money!”

The California 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is a measure designed to feel politically elegant. A concentrated tax burden on a tiny number of people, paired with a public benefit that touches almost everyone. In theory, it could raise something like $100 billion over five years, with 90% earmarked for healthcare and 10% for K-14 education and food assistance, as pointed out by Baker Botts. The message is clean. If California is about to have billions less to spend on healthcare and education, then billionaires should help absorb the shock.

Note the Aggregation Fallacy. “If California is about to have billions less…” Uh, no. It’s the California government that is about to have less, not California. And when politicians don’t have as much to spend as they think they ought (and especially when they don’t have enough to give the people who voted for them Free Stuff), they look for a deep pocket to steal from. The problem is that pockets are mobile, and deep pockets are more mobile than most.

But what makes California powerful is also what makes it fragile. The state’s finances are unusually dependent on the ultra-rich. Personal income tax accounts for about 62% of the General Fund, and the top 1% of earners typically contribute around 40 to 45 percent of those receipts. This is a structure that prints cash in boom years and becomes brutally volatile when markets soften or when the most valuable taxpayers decide their best move is to stop being taxpayers here.

The only thing to wonder about is that it took them so long to figure that out. Politicians in California are overwhelmingly Democrat. The people who elected them are all Democrat. They ought to know what Democrats are like, and what they do when they don’t have enough money to pass out the Free Stuff for which they were elected.

Trump tells Epstein protester: ‘F— you’ (The Telegraph [UK])

Donald Trump Has Been Acting ‘Unconstitutionally’ on ICE Raids | Washington State Attorney General

THE View: Whoopi Shouts Down Any Idea that Renee Good Was in the Wrong

The Nazi Slogans Are Not an Accident (Jonathan V. Last/The Bulwark)

An unraveling Justice Department appears to be coming apart at the seams (Steve Benen/MS NOW)

Department of Labor under fire for language similar to Nazi slogan (Kathryn Palmer/USA Today)  ‘Similar’ means ‘not the same but we want you to believe the smear anyway.’

In Secret Testimony, Republicans Derided Trump’s Stolen Election Claims (New York Times)  It was so secret that the New York Times knew about it.

Fact check: Trump litters Detroit economic speech with numerous false claims about economy (Daniel Dale/CNN)

House Democrats Move to Block Funding for ICE  Good luck with that.

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If you went searching for the origins of meaning, you would probably start with brains, languages, and culture. You would not start with twenty enzymes whose name looks like the result of a keyboard being sat on. Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases—aaRSs, whose acronym is almost as unwieldy as their name—are widely regarded as the least glamorous molecules in biology. Students meet them once in a lecture and immediately move on with their lives.

Yet tucked into their protein folds is one of the deepest stories in biology. Long before organisms competed, before genomes condensed into chromosomes, this small community of molecules learned to coordinate. They did not evolve muscles or membranes. They evolved something stranger: a way of agreeing what patterns should mean.

Textbooks invite you to think of the genetic code as a neat chart—“AUG” means methionine, “UUU” means phenylalanine—as though the mapping were imprinted into the structure of matter. But a codon is simply a sequence of three nucleotides, a pattern. Nothing inherent in “AUG” connects it to methionine. On a comet or in a prebiotic pond, a triplet of bases has no meaning at all.

Meaning for codons appears only inside a working translation system, in which some entities reliably enforce patterns. In cells, those entities are aaRSs. An aaRS is the physical bridge that bonds a specific amino acid to its matching transfer RNA (tRNA). They do not think, but each of them enacts a rule. Together, they stabilise a correlation that matters. If DNA is a script, aaRSs are the actors.

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Americans who remember how an incident in Minneapolis six years ago plunged the whole country into a summer of rioting—then years of elevated criminal violence—should think carefully about where the protests over the death of Renee Good are leading.

Like the killing of George Floyd, Good’s tragedy is being exploited for a political purpose, with the radical activists who then called for defunding the police now demanding an end to Immigration and Customs Enforcement—not only the agency, ICE, but the enforcement of the nation’s democratically enacted immigration laws.

It’s the protesters’ veto, an assertion by activists of a right to cancel laws they don’t like.

And it’s already cost lives, including Renee Good’s.

She was shot and killed by an ICE officer when she drove her car toward him.

Why was she having any interaction with ICE at all?

She wasn’t a bystander—she and her wife were activists trying to prevent ICE from doing its job.

“We had whistles, they had guns,” Good’s widow said in a statement that reveals more than she intended.

Law-enforcement officers are supposed to have guns, after all—they risk their lives when they confront criminals.

But the whistles?

Their purpose is to alert the criminals that law enforcement is approaching.

The Goods had whistles to help illegal immigrants evade officers of the law.

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Michael Copeland sends this reminder that the repellent collective behavior of Muslims is not incidental, but rather emanates from the core tenets of the Islamic faith as applied in Islamic law.

Christians are instructed to love everybody. Muslims are instructed only to love Muslims.

The American Mind.

At the time of his death in the summer of 1987, James Burnham was falling into obscurity. Today, though, his work has surged rapidly in prominence on the Right, especially among some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. The reasons for this merit close attention.

At one time, Burnham was widely known as one of America’s sharpest Marxist intellectuals. His most recent biographer, intellectual historian David T. Byrne, ably captures the young Burnham’s contradictions in James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography: a professor of philosophy at New York University, unapologetically bourgeois and completely in his element at black-tie dinner parties, he could respectfully engage Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Yet he was also a militant Marxist and a trusted protégé of Leon Trotsky, whom he met and befriended in the 1930s. Distraught over the mass unemployment that was then sweeping across the United States, he admired the ferocious determination of the Marxist revolutionaries who promised an overthrow of America’s supposedly irredeemable capitalist system. Byrne writes that he “loved the idea of violent revolution.”

Yet Burnham was too intelligent and humane to remain impressed with the Soviets for very long. In 1940, his life took a decisive turn when he broke with Marxist-Leninism. Trotsky and his acolytes denounced him as a nefarious traitor. But Burnham would go on to compose what Byrne correctly identifies as “two of the most successful political works of the 1940s”: The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943). He became a public intellectual, appearing regularly in journals of the Left-liberal New York intelligentsia such as the Partisan Review. He was even recommended by George Kennan to help with anti-Communist efforts at the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.

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Al-Qaeda’s branch in Africa’s Sahel region has been laying siege to Mali’s capital city, as well as other areas of the country. The Algerian-based Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and its affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (Support Group for Islam and Muslims, JNIM) are cutting a wide swath of terrorist operations across West Africa’s Sahel region. This coalition of Jihadist groups now threatens the sovereignty of Mali and several other Sahelian states.

Islamist operatives now control all the main routes in and out of Bamako, Mali’s capital city, cutting it off from fuel, food, and friendly neighbors. JNIM militants have also targeted Mali’s transport, communications, educational network, and economic infrastructure in rural regions. Some towns in Mali are negotiating deals with Jihadist groups to secure some semblance of liberty and save their lives by agreeing to adopt Islamic Sharia law and pay “protection taxes” (jizyah) to Islamic officials.

Burkina Faso and Niger, two other Sahel states, landlocked like Mali, are also under severe pressure by the al-Qaeda affiliated JNIM to surrender their sovereignty to hardcore Sunni Islamic extremists. All three countries, once colonies of France’s West African Empire, have in the past five years expelled French troops who had been assisting the host governments. All three are governed by non-democratic military juntas with little popular support, and thus have been unable to deal effectively with their common Jihadist threat.

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When  priciples meet money, money always wins.

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Macomb County Clerk Anthony G. Forlini announced Monday that noncitizens have been appearing in the Michigan county’s jury pool “at an alarming rate” and many of them are registered to vote. The data indicates that many noncitizens have potentially sat on juries and/or illegally voted in elections.

During a press conference in the courthouse jury room in Mount Clemens, MI, Forlini stated that an internal review of the county identified 239 noncitizens selected for jury duty over a four-month period from September 5, 2025, to January 8, 2026.

The jury pool is drawn from the Michigan Secretary of State’s driver’s license database, which does not consistently flag citizenship status, allowing noncitizens—such as lawful permanent residents with green cards—to be included.

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What Americans are witnessing—large-scale welfare and child care fraud, weak enforcement, political paralysis, and rising public anger—is not random. It is the predictable downstream result of decades of policies made by people who would never have to live with the consequences and who faced few personal costs for getting it wrong.

To address this moment honestly, several truths must be held at the same time, without flinching and without allowing the conversation to be deliberately mischaracterized.

Trump’s war on the Federal Reserve heads to the Supreme Court next week (Ian Millhiser/Vox)

Going Full Spartacus: Democrats Hold Chest-Thumping Press Conferences To Fuel Anti-ICE Rage

RINO Alert: Murkowski calls for Congress to investigate DOJ over Fed ‘coercion’ (Al Weaver/The Hill)

Trump DOJ fires prosecutor who declined to pursue James Comey case (Carol Leonnig/MS NOW)

The growing list of probes into officials Trump has criticized (Jennifer Hassan/Washington Post)

Embracing Impeachment — The case against Trump and his cabinet keeps growing … (Jill Lawrence/The Bulwark)

The extraordinary criminal inquiry of a Fed chair, explained (Amber Phillips/Washington Post)  Come get your Narrative, right here.

Federal judge orders HHS to restore $12m in funding to American Academy of Pediatrics (Nathaniel Weixel/The Hill)

NPR Critic: 2026 Media Scene Looks ‘Ominous’ If Trump Isn’t Thrashed

Abolish ICE–For Real This Time (Brian Beutler/Off Message)

GoFundMe Ignores Own Rules by Hosting a Legal-Defense Fund for the ICE Agent Who Killed Renee Good (Dell Cameron/Wired)

Meet Bill Pulte, Trump’s unlikely attack dog (Axios)

Warren: Trump Trying to Install ‘Sock Puppet’ to Lead Fed

Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen and other past officials say Trump using ‘prosecutorial attacks’ to undermine Fed (Jeff Cox/CNBC)

Either ICE Is Abolished or It Will Kill Many More Renee Goods (Spencer Ackerman/FOREVER WARS)

Why ‘PBS News Weekend’ Won’t Be Missed: ICE Actions Are a ‘Threat to Democracy’

Transcript: Trump Explodes at GOPers as Defiance of Him Visibly Grows (New Republic)

Federal Judge Rules Trump’s Energy Project Cuts Are Unlawful (Shifra Dayak/NOTUS)

Minnesota Moves to Block Trump Immigration Enforcement Push Following ICE Shooting  History shows that whenever a state pushes back against the feds, the state loses.

Crowd yells ‘cowards!’ after federal agents crash into a car and fire tear gas in Minneapolis (Associated Press)

They say they’re monitoring ICE arrests. Feds say they’re breaking the law. (Washington Post)

Bill Ackman Gave $10,000 to ICE Agent GoFundMe Created by User Linked to Nazi Salute Image (Jacqueline Sweet/The Intercept)

Minnesota and Illinois Sue Trump Administration Over ICE Deployments (Mitch Smith/New York Times)

Return of the Silver Shirts (Samuel Freedman/Liberal Currents)

Minneapolis ICE Shooter Told Longtime Neighbor He Was a Botanist: ‘I Had No Idea He Was an ICE Agent’ (Exclusive) (People)

DoJ Charges Venezuelan Illegal Over Border Patrol Vehicle Ramming Attack

F.B.I. Inquiry Into ICE Shooting Is Examining Victim’s Possible Ties to Activist Groups (New York Times)

Minnesota sues Trump to block ICE agent surge in Minneapolis (Aaron Pellish/Politico)

Minnesota sues federal government to try to end deployment of immigration agents (Tim Stelloh/NBC News)

Trump’s Attack on the Fed Is Already Backfiring (Jason Furman/New York Times)

Donald Trump Is Losing in Court (The Contrarian)

New Documents Detail Jack Smith’s $20K Bribe To Informant

Why Vance Committed So Hard to the Minneapolis Shooter (David Frum/The Atlantic)  David Frum can read minds like nobody’s business.

A Breathtaking Week of Pure Trump Id (Jonathan Lemire/The Atlantic)

Trump Suggests Renee Good’s ‘Disrespectful’ Attitude Justified Fatal ICE Shooting (New York Times)  Not to mention her felonious obstruction of federal law enforcement agents, and her felonious attempt to flee the scene.

Obama Judge Orders HHS to Restore $12M Pediatric Grants

‘Because I was Latino, that’s it’: ICE rams car in south Minneapolis while profiling driver (Andrew Hazzard/Sahan Journal)

CBS Reporter, Inciting Further Violence, Calls MN Shooting a ‘Murder’

Why ICE agents face far less accountability than police (Russell Contreras/Axios)

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Much of the Left’s agenda focuses on creating feel-good but nonfunctional programs for the supposed downtrodden and oppressed, while ensuring that they—and their allies—share in the spoils of government largesse.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani could very well be a maestro at giving his leftwing base exactly what they want while doing nothing to solve the problems he says he intends to address.

Mamdani has really stressed the problem of “affordability” and abusive landlords in his so-called “rental ripoff” tour.

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All Somalis granted temporary protective status (TPS) by the United States will have that status revoked, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Citizenship and Immigration Services announced on Tuesday.

The American Mind.

The alternate reality Democrats have constructed is falling apart in real time. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the following when asked to comment on an ICE agent’s shooting of a woman in Minneapolis who was attempting to run over him with her car: “What we saw today was a criminal murder a woman and shoot her in the head while she was trying to escape and flee for her life.”

She then called “disgusting” the “editorializing” of those who argue that the ICE agent was in front of the car as it was accelerating, just before he fired. “Watch it for yourself, watch it for yourself,” she concluded, with supreme confidence that any viewer would see with the same skew of her own lenses.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey went even harder over the rhetorical cliff in responding to the shooting. He classified interpretations of the ICE officer’s action as self-defense as “bull***t” and demanded that ICE “get the f**k out of Minneapolis.” Mayor Mamdani in New York followed suit, calling the event a “murder” and a “horror.”

It is a stark bit of evidence of how American society has been warped by the twisted rhetoric of the radical Left regarding political conflict in our country.

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A Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, government agency is promoting an upcoming class by local leftist groups on “civil disobedience” from its social media accounts.

The city’s Commission on Human Relations (CHR) reposted a joint announcement on Saturday advertising the event by the Pittsburgh chapters of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the 50501 Movement on Instagram and X.

The three-hour Tuesday evening talk will feature an unnamed “practitioner and trainer with extensive experience” and civil rights lawyer Mike Healey, according to the posts.

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Renee Nicole Good, the activist shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis last week after the vehicle she was operating made contact with the agent, appears to have been following aggressive tactics promoted by the leftist-funded organizing group Defend the 612.

Good, 37, had joined ICE Watch, a loose network of activists tracking and aiming to disrupt ICE activities, after discovering the network through her son’s charter school, The New York Post reported.

“MN ICE Watch,” an Instagram page, shared screenshots from a “de-arrest” primer, which gives agitators advice on how to prevent law enforcement officers from taking someone into custody.

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Melissa Martin, a veteran Texas educator with some 30 years of experience, was thrilled when the state passed a law in 2025 that required the state’s 9,000 public schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

For Martin, it was a bright spot—a swing back toward classical education rooted in Western civilization in an otherwise liberal teaching environment.

Her excitement quickly turned to disappointment at the Houston-based public charter school in which she works.

“I was real surprised when they didn’t jump at putting the Ten Commandments up,” she told The Epoch Times.

?Texas’ Senate Bill 10 has sparked the nation’s largest state-led effort to put the Ten Commandments into schools—and it is facing concerted legal challenges. A hearing on the constitutionality of the new law is scheduled before the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this month.

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Historians of the future, grilling beaver-tail paninis over their campfires, will look back in wonder and nausea at the madness of America — and other regions of Western Civ — in the raging 2020s. It will be clear by then that it was largely a female hysteria, like other departures from social sanity in the annals of the Homo sapiens, such as the outbreak of witchery in the Massachusetts Colony, 1692, the Dancing Plague of Strasbourg, 1518, and the lunacy of Meowing and Biting Nuns that spread through the convents of Europe in the 1400s.

The Lefty-left has devised what’s called a “permission structure” for women to take the lead in acting-out the concocted grievances of their show-runners in the Democratic Party who, in times gone by, once had a coherent political program, but are now chiefly concerned with staying out of jail. I speak of those two orbiting moons, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and their many subalterns, such as John Podesta, Lisa Monaco, Norm Eisen, Adam Schiff. . . you know the huge cast of characters.

In 2020, they put their African-American clients in the vanguard, hoping to provoke Mr. Trump into a bloody suppression of the George Floyd riots. Didn’t really work, though the riots were a grand distraction from Marc Elias’s behind-the-scenes nefarious setup to queer the balloting process in that year’s election — a thumping success! All that mischief propelled brain-dead “Joe Biden” into the Oval Office, the perfect stooge to front for Hillary and Obama in their campaign to disorder the US body politic.

AWFULs are cosplaying revolutionaries in the sure and certain knowledge that nobody is allowed to hit a girl.

Ms. Good’s female wife, Becca Good, wailed in the aftermath, “I made her come down here, it’s my fault.” Come down to do what? To play a part in the show. To use Renee’s Honda Pilot to block the street so that ICE agents couldn’t do their job (which is removing illegal immigrants for processing and deportation). Who told Becca that was a good idea? The Lefty-left’s permission structure told her. So, Becca played her part in the show, ostentatiously recording a video of the scene, yelling taunts at the officers, telling her wife, Renee, to disobey the officer’s command to “get out of the car” and instead to drive away. Becca will have that on her conscience forever, alas. Bet you wouldn’t want to be her.

Sometimes, when you push the envelope, the envelope pushes back—hard.

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Venezuela is not poor due to sanctions. It is poor because the Chavez-Maduro regime stole hundreds of billions of dollars and demolished the productive fabric of the economy.

Venezuela had 12,700 private companies when Chávez came to power, according to Conindustria. Only about 3,800 manufacturing industries are still operating, of which around 3,200 are privately owned and 600 are state?owned.

The assault on private property culminated with the expropriation of more than 690 companies in twelve years. Government-run businesses failed, and large state-owned companies in Venezuela are technically insolvent or heavily loss-making.

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The majority of debanking cases in the US are a result of government pressure, rather than individual banks’ policies, according to a new report from the American think tank the Cato Institute.

Cato Institute analyst Nicholas Anthony explained in a report on Thursday that debanking could take several forms: religious or political, the idea that a financial institution closes accounts solely due to political or religious belief or affiliation; operational, when a bank chooses to close a customer’s account as it’s no longer in the bank’s interest; or government, when a government pressures a financial institution to close a customer’s account.

“While media and political narratives often attribute these closures to political or religious discrimination, this study finds that the majority of debanking cases stem from governmental pressure,” he said.

The Antiplanner.

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When the Zohran Mamdani campaign promised to “shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods”, there was little response and even less outrage in the media.

Had any politician campaigning to run a major city promised to punitively target any other racial group, it would have been a major national story and a future civil rights investigation.

Instead, Mamdani was allowed to go on MSNBC and try to clean up the message by claiming that it was a “description of the neighborhoods” not an “intention of where we would tax New Yorkers” and that “nothing can be worked backwards from some kind of racial goal in this city.”

Times News (UK).

“It is sinister, discriminatory, racist and people have been allowed to get away with it for too long.”

Jewish Bristol MP Damien Egan being axed from a secondary school in his own constituency due to a pro-Palestine campaign is another example of “exclusion” that makes life “difficult” for Jews in public spaces, says Director of Investigations and Enforcement at the Campaign Against Antisemitism, Stephen Silverman.

The Telegraph (UK).

Telegraph obtains unredacted plans showing how close the underground complex will come to cables carrying sensitive British financial data.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Beef tallow, a fat that both cardiologists and the federal government told Americans to avoid for nearly half a century, has become an unexpected breakout star in the new federal dietary guidelines.

Folow the Science! Except when it changes … then Follow the New Science!

We’re from the government, and we wouldn’t steer you wrong. (Right….)

Sometimes the old ways are best.

The rendered beef fat has been quietly growing in popularity over the past few years among cooks who like how it crisped fries and doughnuts, beauty influencers who smooth it on their skin and others who favor it for high-fat diets or believe it’s healthier than oil pressed from seeds.

On Thanksgiving in 2024, it was thrust onto the national stage. A barefoot Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulled a turkey from a vat of boiling beef tallow and declared, “This is how we cook the MAHA way,” referring to the “Make America Healthy Again” movement he leads.

If Hindus don’t like it they can go back where they came from.

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A Waymo was caught on camera driving down Phoenix light rail tracks this week, forcing a passenger to flee the car before it continued along the tracks near an oncoming train.

Video taken by a bystander near Central and Southern avenues shows the moment the self-driving car stops on the tracks just before an oncoming light rail approaches. The passenger runs out of the vehicle before the car continues to drive down the tracks near another train.

“I actually felt a little sorry for the car. It obviously made a bad decision and got itself in a difficult place,” said Andrew Maynard, an emerging and transformative technology professor at ASU.

Maynard said while these situations are rare, they do happen. “This is exactly one of those edge cases, what we call them. Something unexpected where the machine drove like a machine rather than a person,” Maynard said.

Not yet ready for prime time.

Golden Globe Celebrities Wear Pins Protesting ICE No surprises here. People who make their living attracting attention to themselves automatically signal whatever ‘virtue’ is fashionable.

New Federal Probe Opened Into N.Y. AG Letitia James

Trump’s motorcade in Florida rerouted due to ‘suspicious object’ (Associated Press)

Trump Regrets Not Seizing Voting Machines After 2020 Election (New York Times)

Celebrities wear pins protesting ICE on the Golden Globes red carpet (Associated Press)

Mark Ruffalo, Natasha Lyonne and other stars protest Renee Good death with ‘ICE Out’ pin at 2026 Golden Globes (Daily Mail)

Bill Pulte Seen as Key Instigator Behind Powell Subpoena (Bloomberg)  Instigator!

Superbad: Director Judd Apatow Claims USA is a ‘Dictatorship’ at Golden Globes  If that were true, he would be in jail.

Trump Says Civil Rights Led to White People Being ‘Very Badly Treated’ (Erica L. Green/New York Times)  ‘Civil rights’? Say, rather, anti-white race hatred.

‘Brace for impact’: Trump turns fraud into new weapon against blue states (Politico)  Of course, it wouldn’t be such a useful weapon were fraud not so pervasive in Blue states. “Leave our criminals alone!” is the proglodyte slogan.

Trump purges ‘lame duck’ claims with brute force, retribution and play for global domination (Stephen Collinson/CNN)

Kill, smear, cover-up (Judd Legum/Popular Information) Riot, lie, and obfuscate.

The violent “randomness” of ICE’s deportation campaign (Christian Paz/Vox)  They can only deport the ones that they can catch.

Trump is getting creative to bypass Congress (Madison Mills/Axios)  As all Presidents have done, like Wilson and Roosevelt.

The Rare Republican Who Brawls With Trump — and Is Ready for More (Michelle Cottle/New York Times)

‘Completely bonkers’: Trump’s Greenland mining dreams collide with reality (Matt Egan/CNN)

Under Trump, U.S. Adds Fuel to a Heating Planet (Lisa Friedman/New York Times).

Trump appalls with attack on Civil Rights Act: ‘White people very badly treated’ (Alexander Willis/Raw Story)  Which is the literal truth.

DHS Blasts Anti-ICE Protesters Sharing List Of Hotels Allegedly Hosting Agents

MAGA is weirdly thirsty for Barron Trump (Amanda Marcotte/Salon)  So, I gather, is Amanda Marcotte.

Renee Good’s Killing Has Unleashed MAGA’s Misogyny (Jeet Heer/The Nation)  Misogyny! Is there anything it can’t do?

ICE’s Reign of Terror and Violence Must End (Jennifer Rubin/The Contrarian)  Jennifer Rubin loses her shit.

Crickets from MS NOW Hosts As Squad’s Ayanna Pressley 3 Times Accuses ICE Of ‘Murder’

Trump, 79, Answers Simple Question With Bizarre Word Salad (Janna Brancolini/The Daily Beast)

‘Nuance Speaking’: Whoopi Claims All ICE Agents Are ‘Violent Criminals’

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As of 2025, a stamp for a letter costs $0.78 in the United States. Amazon Prime sells items for less than that… with free shipping! Why send a postcard when you can send actual stuff?

I found all items under $0.78 with free Prime shipping — screws, cans, pasta, whatever. Add a free gift note. It arrives in 1 or 2 days. Done.

You’re not only saving money. It’s about sending something real. Your friend gets a random can of tomato sauce with your birthday note attached. They laugh. They remember you. They might even use it!

I think I’ll send My Brother the Socialist a lemon for his birthday.

Read it.

Cea Weaver makes Zohran Mamdani look like Jeb Bush.

New York City’s neo-Marxist mayor tapped Weaver, 37, as his Tenant Czarina. The alumna of Housing Justice for All became ensnared in scandal as she took over the Office to Protect Tenants.

Weaver’s social media posts and videos have surfaced to haunt her. Collectively, they are an e-book of “The Communist Manifesto” and a digital cry for help from a white woman who hates white people, especially white males.

Weaver did not daydream these comments during Political Theory 101 at Bryn Mawr, her alma mater. She was a grown woman, at least 27, when she shared these insights via social media.

Daily Record (UK).

A Dublin man who seemingly went on a rampage in two separate incidents in summer has pleaded guilty to eight charges, including setting fire to Conor McGregor’s pub.

Surveillance footage captured the moment Abdullah Khan set the front of the Black Forge Inn, Drimnagh Road, Dublin 12, owned by the famous UFC champion, on fire on July 25, 2025.

Days later, the court heard how he went on to wield a knife at Dublin gardai.

The 24-year-old, whose address cannot be revealed due to a court order, was arraigned on eight counts relating to the two separate incidents.

Import Turd World people, get Turd World problems.

Read it.

Few arguments are as self-evident as this one: To learn about some place, you should travel there; traveling makes you learned, and the learned are well traveled. But as so often with truisms, this is not true. I claim that those who stay at home and occasionally read about foreign places on the internet are better informed than those who go somewhere far away on vacation.

To test this theory, try the following experiment. Ask someone who just spent 10 minutes on the Wikipedia article for Turkey for an interesting fact about the country, then ask someone who just came back from a 10 day vacation to Istanbul. Probably both will tell you something equally interesting, with the former being more generally relevant and the latter being more charming or topical. Of course this is wildly unfair—we should give the web surfer 10 days of reading time and ?100,000 to spend as well, but they simply don’t need it to win.

Back in the Good Old Day, when only about 10 percent of the population underwent any schooling, and those were upper class people (or people who wanted to become upper class people) who would have an outsized effect on what direction their society would take, education (in the sense that most humanities professors would use the term) was a good thing. Travel was considered part of that process, certainly in the age of the Grand Tour (which has degenerated into the modern Gap Year). But the advent of pervasive technology and the world that depended on it has converted ‘education’ per say into just a synonym for ‘training’, from which (arguably) more people have the ability to profit.

Daily Record (UK).

A mother is sharing her heartbreak after her husband drowned their daughter in a shallow lake in an alleged ‘honour killing’.

Sumaia al Najjar and her family sought asylum in the Netherlands, fleeing Syria in 2016. However, after eight years of peaceful living, their world was shattered when al Najjar’s daughter, Ryan, was brutally killed.

Ryan was drowned by her own father, Khaled al Najjar, accused of becoming overly westernised.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, al Najjar said: “He has destroyed my whole family.”

Quilette.

When Zohran Mamdani took office as the mayor of New York City on 1 January, he promised to usher in a transition from “the frigidity of rugged individualism to the warmth of collectivism.” It was a bizarre and stilted choice of words. “We will govern expansively and audaciously,” he told the people. The message was clear: New York’s political culture was about to change. Mamdani would institute free buses, a rent freeze, universal childcare, and higher taxes on wealth.

The people around Mamdani have been unusually candid about what the new mayor meant by “collectivism.” The Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, Cea Weaver said, “the reality is that for centuries, we have really treated property as an individualised good and not a collective good. And we are going to transition into treating it as a collective good and toward a model of shared equity.” Weaver was clear that this won’t be costless. “It will mean that families, especially white families but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”

But once you get into the mechanics of this, you quickly run into problems. New York contains eight million people, making millions of daily decisions: where to live, what rent to charge, which job to take, how to run a small business. Each decision rests on local knowledge—information that exists in fragments, held by individuals who understand their own circumstances and priorities in intimate detail.

It is possible to be a collectivist in an individualistic society.

It is impossible to be an individualist in a collectivist society.

That’s the bottom line.

Quillette.

This video essay examines Australia’s growing difficulty in confronting antisemitism when it emerges from within Islamic ideological and theological traditions. While public authorities and civic leaders routinely condemn antisemitism in the abstract, they have often proved reluctant to address its specific sources when doing so risks offending multicultural sensibilities or religious constituencies.

Read it.

Two brutal attacks occurred within the space of an hour near the Termini station in central Rome on Saturday night, December 10th. The violence left two people severely injured and prompted an immediate strengthening of the security presence at the central train station, with additional soldiers and police deployed, authorities said on Sunday.

The first attack came around 10:00 p.m., just a few meters from the entrance to Termini station. A 57-year-old Italian man was reportedly surrounded and beaten by a group of attackers. Surveillance cameras captured the brutal aggression, showing seven or eight people encircling the victim and repeatedly striking him, mainly in the face, before dispersing.

The violence was so severe that the man was left lying in the street, bleeding and apparently lifeless. Emergency medical workers rushed him to hospital, where he was admitted to intensive care with extremely serious, life-threatening injuries.

Read it.

Germany’s online Frankfurter Rundschau (FR) just published an article titled: “Why the cold winter is no evidence against warming.”

The article explains why severe winters in Germany do not contradict global warming. The core argument lies in the distinction between weather (short-term events) and climate (long-term trends). That of course gets ignored by the media when there’s a hot summer day.

Experts, the FR reports, emphasize that a single cold winter is merely a statistical fluctuation, while the global trend points upward. “Weather is what you see outside; climate is the statistics over a long period of time,” the FR reports. “A cold winter does nothing to change the long-term warming trend.”

Read it.

After the latest wave of exposes made Somali fraud a national story, Democrat state officials from Minnesota to Washington to Maine scrambled to conduct cover-ups and threaten anyone exposing the fraud.

The head of Seattle’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, Hamdi Mohamed, “the first Somali woman elected in the state”, convened a meeting with Gov. Bob Ferguson, representatives of Attorney General Nick Brown, Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans, as well as other elected officials, who promised to protect Somalis from investigations and enforcement.

Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson, a radical leftist, declared that she stands “in solidarity with our Somali and Muslim communities” who are facing ICE as well as alleged “doxxing, harassment, and hate” which is how investigations of Somali fraud have been described.

Read it.

With copper prices at new highs, attacks on communications and power networks have sharply increased, and telecommunications companies, power suppliers, and construction firms are sounding the alarm.

Copper was trading at roughly $6 per pound or $12,000 a ton at midday on Jan. 7, a more than 30 percent year-over-year increase, according to industry analyst MarketWatch.

The increase in price contributed to the more than 15,540 copper theft incidents in 2025, according to a report by the U.S. Telecommunication Association. The volume of thefts during the first half of the year was double the previous period.

“Today, bad actors typically target communications lines in search of copper,” the report stated.

The Telegraph (UK).

New toy has eyes that gaze slightly off-centre and bendy wrists for hand-flapping.

Sounds like a lot of Democrat Congresswomen.

The Telegraph (UK).

The White House has attacked Sir Keir Starmer over his refusal to ban cousin marriage.

Sarah Rogers, Donald Trump’s free speech tsar, said Labour’s failure to back legislation outlawing the practice was an example of “civilisational” concern.

First-cousin marriage, which is particularly prevalent among South Asians, is legal in Britain but increases the risk of children having genetic diseases.

The Times (UK).

Fancy that.

Read it.

Amid reports that hundreds of anti-government demonstrators in Iran have been killed in recent days — and President Trump reportedly considering US intervention — tensions over the Iran crisis hit a flash point in Los Angeles on Sunday when a U-Haul truck with signage opposing the reinstallation of an Iranian monarchy drove through a group of marchers calling for regime change. The crowd quickly went from frightened screams to outraged violence, mobbing the truck after it stopped and pummeling the driver as police took him into custody.

The incident, which appears to spring from clashing views within the Iranian diaspora, unfolded at 3:40pm on Sunday afternoon, after a crowd of demonstrators had gathered in LA’s upscale Westwood. Along with adjacent Westside neighborhoods, Westwood forms the epicenter of LA’s prosperous Iranian-American population. At approximately 138,000, it’s one of the largest populations of Iranians in the world outside of Iran. As the crowd was in the vicinity of the Wilshire Federal Building, video showed a truck moving at a decidedly unsafe but not necessarily homicidal speed down Wilshire Boulevard as it was lined with demonstrators.

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A showdown between the U.S. Department of Transportation and the State of California reached a breaking point on Wednesday after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will withhold approximately $160 million in safety program money from the state.

The move follows California’s failure to meet a January 5 deadline to cancel more than 17,000 commercial truck driver’s licenses that Duffy asserts were unlawfully issued by the state to foreign truckers.

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In yet another major blow to the German automobile labor market, Mercedes has announced it will be relocating production of its A-Class from Rastatt, Germany, to Kecskemét, Hungary. While Hungary’s foreign minister is taking a victory lap, Germany’s largest opposition party is sharply crticizing he government as signs grow that Germany’s automobile market is faltering.

Trade Minister Péter Szijjártó has officially confirmed Mercedes move, writes Budapester.

Szijjártó credited the success to “an economic policy based on sound common sense and a stable government that continually attracts new investment projects from global companies in America, Asia, and even Germany.”

Get Woke, go broke….

Read it.

Not content with launching a dizzying cascade of international conflicts, Trump just lobbed a nuke at the Fed.

While Trump’s vendetta against the Fed’s Lisa Cook set for a January showdown before the Supreme Court, the Trump admin dramatically raised the stakes on Sunday when the NYT first reported, and minutes later Fed Chair Jerome Powell confirmed that the US central bank had been served grand jury subpoenas from the Justice Department threatening a criminal indictment, in what Bloomberg said was a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s attacks on the Fed.

As the NYT first reported, the US attorney’s office in the District of Columbia has opened a criminal investigation into Powell over the central bank’s renovation of its Washington headquarters and whether the Fed Chair lied to Congress about the scope of the project. The inquiry, which includes an analysis of Powell’s public statements and an examination of spending records, was approved in November by Jeanine Pirro, a longtime ally of President Trump who was appointed to run the office last year, the NYT sources said.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed US attorneys offices to look into cases of potential taxpayer abuse, said one of the NYT sources. In comments broadcast by NBC, Trump said that the DOJ’s Fed subpoenas “nothing to do with interest rates” and denied any involvement in the legal matter.