DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

I’ve thought hat since I was an undergraduate and had to listen to a lecture by James Tobin.

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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?

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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.

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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.

Popular Mechanics.

The average adult human body contains 206 bones—the hardened mixtures of calcium, minerals, and collagen that provide the biological scaffolding that walks us through our day. While we may not think of them much, bones are incredibly resilient. But if they do break, they have this nifty trick of regrowing themselves.

Teeth, however, are not bones. Although they’re made of some of the same stuff and are the hardest material in the human body (thanks to its protective layer of enamel), they lack the crucial ability to heal and regrow themselves. But that may not always be the case. Japanese researchers are moving forward with an experimental drug that promises to regrow human teeth. Human trials began in September 2024.

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Say a homeowner or bank or landlord discovers somebody occupying their property without authorization. They could call the police, though officers might not come. Police tend to shy away from tenancy disputes, leaving them to the civil courts. The property owner could go ahead and file an eviction lawsuit, but that can drag on for months.

Or they can call Jacobs.

For a fee, Jacobs will surveil the place and force out the people inside of it using a complex concoction of homespun arms and militarized tactics.

Jacobs’ team will often complete a job in a matter of days by boarding up the joint and moving in temporarily themselves, to make sure the squatters don’t return. But if they do, Jacobs is prepared for battle.

ASAP Squatter Removal is not alone. There’s a cottage industry in California that helps property owners force out squatters. There’s Squatter Squad, based in Southern California, and a handful of other companies, most established over the past couple of years.

In a properly-ordered society, the police would be doing this job. But—hey!—it’s California, so….

Jacobin, a Voice of the Looney Left.

Mitt Romney recently published a New York Times op-ed arguing for higher taxes on the rich. When he was in a position to actually sculpt the GOP platform and the tax policy of the US, Romney was an ardent supporter of cutting taxes for the wealthy.

My, what a surprise. Why doesn’t he just write the government a check? Takes about two minutes.

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Wireless technology and data being stored in “The Cloud” may lead you to think information is pinged around the globe via satellites. Only a very small portion is. Instant communication, like texts, phone calls and websites, is made possible by copper and fibre-optic undersea cables which carry data between countries.

97% of the internet travels through these cables. All the undersea fibre-optic cables across the world span approximately 1.2 million km (750,000 miles): combined they could wrap around Earth 30 times!

Subsea fibre-optic cables are critical infrastructures that support our global networks. They are essential for our communication, commerce, government and military functions because they securely transport messages and information. The importance of undersea cables means control or disruption of them can have political and economic implications.

In peace, they are a prime target for espionage.

In war, they are a prime target for destruction.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

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Everyone knows that AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini can often hallucinate sources. But for the folks tasked with helping the public find books and journal articles, the fake AI bullshit is really taking its toll. Librarians sound absolutely exhausted by the requests for titles that don’t exist, according to a new post from Scientific American.

The magazine spoke with Sarah Falls, the chief of researcher engagement at the Library of Virginia, who estimates that about 15% of all emailed reference questions that they receive are generated by AI chatbots like ChatGPT. And the requests often include questions about fake citations.

What’s more, Falls suggests that people don’t seem to believe librarians when they explain that a given record doesn’t exist, a trend that’s been reported elsewhere like 404 Media. Many people really believe their stupid chatbot over a human who specializes in finding reliable information day in and day out.

Of course, they would say that….

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I recently overheard a conversation in a River Falls, Wisconsin, coffee shop that has stayed with me.

A person was venting to a friend about being forced to use AI—likely Microsoft Copilot—within a work spreadsheet. After several rounds of frustrating trial and error, she eventually gave up and finished the task manually. In the end, the “shortcut” had cost her more time than if she’d just done the work herself from the start.

To many, this looks like failure, but I see it as a green flag. It is a sign that the system is working exactly as it should: by keeping a human in the loop, much like a pilot in a cockpit. Being frustrated is proof, to me, they’re effectively using this amazing tool in the real world.

But if we want to phase out human-in-the-loop systems for AGI, there is one critical problem we must solve first—at least, if we care about society. Beyond the technical hurdles, the real challenge is taxes.

Governments are funded by people, not software. Our schools, roads, and healthcare systems rely on the taxation of human income. When a worker is removed from the equation, that tax base vanishes with them. At scale, the “efficiency” of AI creates a massive shortfall in public revenue. The results are predictable: crumbling infrastructure, reduced services, and an even heavier tax burden on the few workers who remain.

If you think that governments won’t figure out a way to tax them anyway, then you’re delusional.

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Hint: Not much. Unfortunately, the people upon whom we are depending for information about this program are the same people who are responsible for the flying train wreck called F-35. So I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the U.S. to actually produce a plane that will beat the Russians and Chinese.

Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).

Of course, the nternet makes some political activity easier and cheaper. But it does so for everyone. And if everybody speaks, who will be listened to?

And that underlines the chief problem with ‘democracy’ as a concept and especially with the way people (who ought to know better) deal with it.

The major premise of democracy is that every person’s vote is of the same value. There are various philosophical justifications for this, but the simple fact is that none of us is willing to concede that somebody else’s vote ought to be of more value than ours. The problem with that approach is that every one of us knows people whose vote, we are convinced, is in fact of less value than ours. This inherent contradiction between philosophical theory and actual reality is the root of every conflict over what ‘democracy really means’.

The cognitive dissonace between those two mental states is what causes most of the trouble in the modern world. It’s entertaining at times, but rarely useful.

Watch it.

An Impulse induction range runs about $7,000, and I really want one. But I can’t justify paying that much for a cooktop.

Maybe if I win the lottery….

As with most tech innovations, the market will initially be upper-income early adopters, but I’m hoping that it will eventually use economies of scale to reduce the price over time.

(CCOS: I was much saddened by the amount of vocal fry used by the people talking in the video. *sigh* California….)

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U.S. Congress quietly rewrote the rules for military service, veterans’ benefits and troop transitions in 2025, forcing legislative changes on everything from tuition bills, foreclosure protections and toxic exposure records.

Between January and late December, Congress passed 14 laws reshaping military and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) benefits in accordance to rising costs, ongoing deployments, and pressure from veterans’ groups. The laws take effect on staggered timelines into the new years, occurring with less fanfare and without the political theater that derailed previous bigger congressional battles over issues like immigration.

The lawful measures range from automatic increases for disability and survivor benefits; in-state tuition for Selected Reserve students to new foreclosure protections; repayment guarantees for stolen benefits; and required separation counseling for troops leaving the force. Several also fold in wildfire aircraft transfers, clinic construction, and major changes to tax and border spending.

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Researchers at UC San Francisco used the gene editing technology CRISPR to turn ordinary white fat cells into “beige” fat cells, which voraciously consume calories to make heat. The work is funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH).

Then, they implanted them near tumors the way plastic surgeons inject fat from one part of the body to plump up another. The fat cells scarfed up all the nutrients, starving most of the tumor cells to death. The approach even worked when the fat cells were implanted in mice far from the sites of their tumors.

The approach’s reliance on a common procedure could speed its use as a new form of cellular therapy.

New York Times Magazine, a Voice of the Crust.

It happened the first time over dinner. I was saying something to my husband, who grew up in Paris where we live, and suddenly couldn’t get the word out. The culprit was the “r.” For the previous few months, I had been trying to perfect the French “r.” My failure to do so was the last marker of my Americanness, and I could only do it if I concentrated, moving the sound backward in my mouth and exhaling at the same time. Now I was saying something in English — “reheat” or “rehash” — and the “r” was refusing to come forward. The word felt like a piece of dough stuck in my throat.

Other changes began to push into my speech. I realized that when my husband spoke to me in English, I would answer him in French. My mother called, and I heard myself speaking with a French accent. Drafts of my articles were returned with an unusual number of comments from editors. Then I told a friend about a spill at the grocery store, which — the words “conveyor belt” vanishing midsentence — took place on a “supermarket treadmill.” Even back home in New York, I found my mouth puckered into the fish lips that allow for the particularly French sounds of “u,” rather than broadened into the long “ay” sounds that punctuate English.

My mother is American, and my father is French; they split up when I was about 3 months old. I grew up speaking one language exclusively with one half of my family in New York and the other language with the other in France. It’s a standard of academic literature on bilingual people that different languages bring out different aspects of the self. But these were not two different personalities but two separate lives. In one version, I was living with my mom on the Upper West Side and walking up Columbus Avenue to get to school. In the other, I was foraging for mushrooms in Alsatian forests or writing plays with my cousins and later three half-siblings, who at the time didn’t understand a word of English. The experience of either language was entirely distinct, as if I had been given two scripts with mirroring supportive casts. In each a parent, grandparents, aunts and uncles; in each, a language, a home, a Madeleine.

It’s astonishing how many people who write for publication these days are the children of divorce.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

On 24 October 2024, a brief post was shared on the social media network LinkedIn. In it Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s airship company LTA Research finally announced Pathfinder 1’s first if brief untethered flight at Nasa’s Moffett Field in California, part of the space agency’s Ames Research Center. “This morning, Pathfinder 1 reached another milestone: untethered outdoor flight. This successful test marks another important step in our journey, and we are excited to build on this achievement through our rigorous testing program.”

Airships are hard to hide. Despite the secrecy, one YouTuber filmed it from the road and uploaded it to the video-sharing site.

“Pathfinder 1 is a pretty amazing vehicle,” says Alan Shrimpton, editor of the Airship Journal. “It is the first fully rigid airship, certainly of that size, for a very long time, and there was a great expectation that it would fly shortly after it began its outdoor testing programme.

“But Alan Weston [founder and former CEO of LTA Research] always said the biggest fault with rigid airships was that people in the past rushed their development and they were not going to make that same mistake. They were going to check it and check it again – and they did.”

Read it.

The most complex engineering of human cell lines ever has been achieved by scientists, revealing that our genomes are more resilient to significant structural changes than was previously thought.

Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Imperial College London, Harvard University in the US and their collaborators used CRISPR prime editing to create multiple versions of human genomes in cell lines, each with different structural changes. Using genome sequencing, they were able to analyze the genetic effects of these structural variations on cell survival.

The research, published in Science, shows that as long as essential genes remain intact, our genomes can tolerate significant structural changes, including large deletions of the genetic code. The work opens the door to studying and predicting the role of structural variation in disease.

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Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp last week announced that his university has surpassed even the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now has the nation’s largest nuclear engineering research department.

And just in time, because Sharp also announced that Texas A&M is offering land near its RELLIS Innovation and Technology campus, located on 2,400 acres in Bryan, Texas, to several nuclear reactor companies to build small modular reactors (SMRs).

“Plain and simple,” said Sharp, a former State Comptroller and former member of the Texas Railroad Commission, “the United States needs more power. And nowhere in the country, other than Texas, is anyone willing to step up and build the power plants we need.”

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Last week, I finished reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestselling 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. While I usually do not read books from the “Millennial Sad Girl Navigates Modern Life” genre, I was compelled to see what all the fuss is about. Suffice it to say that I was not impressed. But I could not quite put my finger on the source of my disdain until, several days ago, it hit me: Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator walks away learning absolutely nothing.

The fault of this particular novel might be with Moshfegh’s nihilistic outlook on life, but the problem cuts even deeper. Today, the publishing industry as a whole turns its nose up to narratives that promote objective meaning.

There’s a lot to unpack in that claim, but it is no accident that the publishing industry shies away from books that illustrate “the good life” in the Aristotelian sense. Reared on the postmodern spirit that dominates colleges and universities, publishing professionals favor ambiguous, open-ended narratives to stories with clear redemption arcs. But, at its core, literature should not only teach us to think critically but also to live our best lives.

The Telegraph (UK).

Shamima Begum has had her bid to come back to Britain revived by a challenge from European judges.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has asked Britain to justify its decision to strip the 26-year-old of her citizenship in 2019 after she travelled to Syria to join Islamic State (IS).

The ECtHR intervention was hailed by Begum’s lawyers as an “unprecedented opportunity” that could pave the way for a fresh legal battle between the Strasbourg court and the Government.

The European judges have asked the Government whether it broke human rights and anti-trafficking laws by blocking her return to the UK – Begum’s key legal argument.

Begum was born and raised in Bethnal Green, east London, before travelling to Syria at the age of 15 with two other friends from school to join IS in 2015.

Rory Sutherland: “Every politician knows what to do, they just don’t know how to be re-elected after they do it.”

I happen to love fruitcake, myself. Don’t dare eat it, of course….

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The United States Postal Service (USPS) has adopted a final rule (FR Doc. 2025-20740) adding Section 608.11, “Postmarks and Postal Possession,” to the Domestic Mail Manual (DMM). The rule formally defines postmarks and identifies the types of markings that qualify as such. Its primary purpose is to improve public understanding that while a postmark confirms the USPS possessed a mail piece on the date inscribed, that date does not necessarily align with the date the USPS first accepted possession of the item. The rule clarifies that the USPS does not postmark all mail in the ordinary course of operations and that the absence of a postmark does not imply the USPS did not accept custody.

In many ways, the USPS illustrates everything deleterious about how the U.S. government currently operates. This ought to be the first thing mentioned whenever anybody wants the government to do something (as VA health care is the immediate counter-example to any government-provided health care system).

The Telegraph (UK).

Mass protests have erupted across Iran calling for “death to the dictator” over the regime’s economic crisis.

Tear gas was deployed to disperse protesters as shops shut across the republic, students chanted pro-women slogans in rooftops and the Iranian rial plummeted to record lows, while Iran still faces threats from Israel and the US.

On Monday, security forces fired tear gas to disperse protesters in Tehran while residents in Malard, 28 miles east of the capital, were faced with motorcycle-mounted armed security.

In several cities, people went on to their rooftops and chanted slogans against the Islamic Republic and Ali Khamenei, its supreme leader.

The protests have been cheered on by Israel, whose foreign ministry hoping for Mr Khameni’s overthrow welcomed the action with “open arms”.

Holy Hypocrisy! Orlando Sentinel Christmas Editorial Swaddles Illegals: MAGA Must Repent!

MS Now Guest Credits Trump’s Foreign Policy Approach

UGLY IN PINK: PBS Turns to Boston Globe Jerk to Accuse Trump of ‘Jim Crow’ Racism

Newsom Folds: California Ends Lawsuit Against Trump Admin Over High-Speed Rail Funding

NY Times, WashPost Alarmed Over Trump’s Christian Messages, But Were Fine With Biden’s

The most volatile group of voters is turning on Trump (Christian Paz/Vox)

What we learned about the state of the Trump coalition in conversations with 50 voters this year (Ben Kamisar/NBC News)

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My, what a surprise.

The amount of fraudulent billing in Minnesota’s Medicaid programs could be as high as $9 billion, Assistant United States Attorney Joe Thompson said Dec. 18.

FBI Director Kash Patel announced the agency was already sending additional resources in an X post Sunday, saying the deployment occurred before a 42-minute video of independent journalist Nick Shirley visiting various day care centers went viral Friday.

Quillette

For decades, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, was regarded as one of the world’s most trusted humanitarian organisations. Its authority rested on a strict commitment to medical neutrality—the principle that humanitarian medicine must remain independent of political causes, even in war. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, MSF became synonymous with ethical restraint and institutional credibility.

That reputation is now under serious strain.

This video examines how MSF’s response to the war in Gaza reflects a marked departure from its long-standing principles. It analyses the organisation’s adoption of activist language, including public accusations of genocide against Israel, while remaining conspicuously silent on Hamas’s documented war crimes, including the October 7 massacre and the systematic use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes.

Any group whose name incluldes “Without Borders” is implicitly gobalies (i.e. implicitly proglodyte),

“Amnesty International” suffers from the same flaw.

Gothamist.

For decades, the subway fare and the pizza slice — two New York City commodities — cost almost exactly the same amount. But that “pizza principle” is rapidly disappearing.

As the MTA prepares to increase the transit fare to $3 on Jan. 4, pizza prices across town are substantially higher than the cost to ride the train. The typical price of a plain slice of pizza in New York City now approaches $4, according to a decadelong survey of hundreds of slice joints conducted by this reporter across the city. Pizzamakers and experts who have followed the rising prices point to the COVID-19 pandemic and rising inflation as the cause of the increasing disparity between the price of a subway ride and that of a regular slice of pizza.

When I worked in NYC in the late 70s, subway rise were 25 cents. So inflation has been 10x since that time.

Time to leave.

ATQUE: Subway surfing deaths persist despite efforts of MTA, NYPD  Think of it as evolution in action.

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A chilling revelation from a former MI6 operative exposes the ticking time bomb of Islamist sleeper agents embedded across the UK, ready to unleash devastation rivaling 9/11 or 7/7—all fueled by disastrous open borders policies that prioritize radicals over citizens’ safety.

Aimen Dean, who spent eight years infiltrating Al-Qaida for MI5 and MI6, knows the enemy inside out. As a former member of the terror group himself, he formed bonds with operatives and even served as a “kind of spiritual coach” to terrorists in London, gaining insider access to their plots.

His espionage thwarted attacks like a bid to bomb the New York Subway. But Dean pulls no punches on the current danger: there are “hundreds” of sleeper agents lurking in the shadows, primed to strike.

Newsbusters.

Saturday’s edition of The Weekend on MS NOW ran a segment that began with clips of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries repeatedly saying that the Democrats’ philosophy is “strong floor, no ceiling.”

Turns out, Jeffries had cribbed that phrase from Oliver Libby, author of a book with that title. The show had Libby on as a guest, and though he is a center-left Democrat, both hosts pushed back against Libby’s belief that there should be no ceiling on the success of Americans.

Substitute host Molly Jong-Fast began the attack, skeptically asking, “is no ceiling really appropriate; is no ceiling really the play?” She finally worked up to suggesting, “Maybe there should be a ceiling!”

Read it.

Just another “normal” day in a Democratic paradise…

A viral photo of a notice posted at a McDonald’s in Uptown Minneapolis has renewed attention on rising crime in the area, Fox News pointed out this week.

The sign reads: “Attention guests, effective Friday, December 5th, our dining room doors will be locked and attended [to] during our normal business hours of 5am-10pm to ensure a safe environment.”

It adds: “We will deny access to any individual who we consider a risk to maintaining a safe environment for our guests.”

McDonald’s confirmed the notice. Local owner Mike Darula said the restaurant has “proudly been part of the Uptown community for more than 30 years” and explained, “At our Uptown restaurant, we’ve made some updates to our security measures to help ensure a safe and welcoming environment for both our crew and customers.”

The Times (UK).

Sir Keir Starmer’s plans to clamp down on migrants crossing the Channel appear to have stalled because French police refuse to intercept small boats.

Police unions are blocking an agreement to stop the dinghies, arguing that officers could be prosecuted if their interventions lead to the deaths of migrants.

After months of negotiations, President Macron agreed in July to allow French police to intervene to stop boats in shallow waters.

Look for … the Union label….

Watchdog Group Says Trump Is at Risk

Watchdog group demands answers after ‘unbelievable security lapse’ by Trump’s Secret Service team (Geoff Earle/New York Post)

Donald Trump’s top 25 lies of 2025 (Daniel Dale/CNN) It would be more difficult, of course, to assemble a list of CNN’s top 25 lies; difficult to choose, that is.

New Marching Orders? Code Pink Signals “Gaza-Style” Cuba Flotilla Aimed At Trump’s Gunboat Diplomacy  Meaning one that is solely for the purpose of virtue-signaling rather than actually having any effect or—God forbid!—helping the people who serve as the excuse for the exercise.

How Trump Became the Unlikely Champion of Easing Marijuana Restrictions (Josh Dawsey/Wall Street Journal)

Netanyahu’s New Slant To Lure Trump Into War With Iran  We have been at war with Iran since they seized our embassy in Tehran in 1979. The government just refused to do anything about it.

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Italian prosecutors said on Saturday they had arrested nine people on suspicion of financing Hamas terrorists through charities based in Italy, in an operation coordinated by anti-mafia and anti-terrorism units.

The suspects are accused of “belonging to and having financed” the Palestinian terrorist group, which ?the European Union designates as a terrorist organization, prosecutors in ?the northern Italian city of Genoa said in a statement.

Those arrested allegedly diverted to Hamas-linked entities around 7 million euros ($8.2 ?million) raised over the last two years for ostensibly humanitarian purposes, prosecutors said. Police seized assets worth more than 8 million euros.

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A tragic story came about out of Canada. A 44 year old man died after waiting more than eight hours in an emergency room with chest pain, blurry vision, and a blood pressure of 210.

This story establishes the human cost of delayed care. No one involved acted maliciously. Not the doctors. Not the nurses. Not the triage staff. They were inundated, operating exactly as the system is designed to function under extreme load. This is also unfortunately not a unique experience, as over half a million Canadians leave the ER every year without being seen.

That leads us to some uncomfortable truths.

Healthcare is a scarce resource. If an emergency physician is seeing one patient, they cannot simultaneously see another. The same constraint applies to clinic appointments, operating rooms, imaging slots, lab capacity, ICU beds, and nursing attention. Scarcity is unavoidable.

And if a resource is scarce, it must be allocated.

A minor cough and a major heart attack are competing for the same finite pool of time, staff, and space. The only real question is how that allocation occurs.

In a modern society, there are only two ways to allocate scarce resources: price signals or central planning.

Canada has government-provided health-care that is even more broken than the UK system.

ATQUE: The UK Health Care Disaster Is A Cautionary Tale For America’s Rising Class Of Armchair Socialists

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Over the last few decades, a societal war on men has been waged. Masculinity is now toxic. Recently, young while males were locked out of much of the white-collar job market. Boys are in an educational crisis. Marriage and fatherhood are being devalued. Noticing these trends is discouraged, and opposition is disparaged.

The Relentless War on Masculinity: Does it Ever End? by David Maywald documents what is happening and why. He shows the legacy modern misandry has created, the tools fourth-wave feminism uses to maintain a gynocentric culture, the struggles men and boys face today, and what solutions exist.

Maywald opens the book by showing that in Western cultures — Anglosphere and Nordic societies especially — gynocentrism is real. He documents how courts, politics, education and job markets are stacked against men and favor women, often unfairly. He uses hard facts and statistics to buttress his arguments.

Read it.

In 2022, Dr Dawn Wright, a professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University, said humans are ‘irrevocably’ changing the planet.

When it comes to exploring the deep sea, unless you suffer from thalassophobia (the fear of large bodies of water), it can be quite fascinating.

But Dr Wright’s strange discovery proved we needed to understand our planet better to preserve it.

Enviro-Nazis won’t be happy until humans become extinct.

“Sitting in sediment at the bottom of the ocean at the Earth’s deepest point: a beer bottle. It had traveled more than 6.7 miles to the darkest depths of the Pacific, label still intact,” Dr Wright explained.

“This discarded trash had managed to reach an unsullied part of our world before we actually did – a symbol of how deeply and irrevocably humans are affecting the natural world.”

Taking to X, she also reinforced her belief that we need to protect the planet better.

I swear, she must think that humans are some alien species come here just to discard sandwich wrappers or something.

For what it’s worth, it looks like a Heineken.

Naval Gazing.

This week has seen the announcement by the Trump Administration that they are going to be building “battleships”, a subject that is well within my beat, so I figured I would take the time to start by saying that these are nothing of the sort. Defining the battleship is slightly tricky, but the best version I have is that it is a large, gun-armed armored warship. This proposal is certainly large, but it doesn’t really classify as gun-armed, in that the guns are clearly secondary weapons, and there’s been no discussion of armor at all. So whatever these are, they aren’t battleships. Their closest cousin in the Soviet Kirov class, which likewise are somewhat hard to classify, but in the finest tradition of the USN, I’m going to go with “Large Missile Cruiser” for these. But the fact that they’re being called by the wrong name, while personally extremely annoying, is just the tip of the iceberg.

First, a look at the announced specs, as given above. The dimensions are somewhat large given the displacement, as they’re a pretty close match for Iowa, which is 50%+ heavier at full load, although they’re also not too far from the Alaskas, of roughly the same displacement. The length might make sense if they were going for nuclear power, because a very long hull would minimize power requirements, but it seems that it’s IEP instead. But then we get to armament, and things get weird. It starts with the new ship-launched nuclear cruise missile that Trump has been pushing since his first term. This is basically a replacement for the nuclear Tomahawk, and whatever the logic for or against such a program might be, there’s the problem that I’m pretty sure there’s no need to have this new “battleship” to use the missile. Details on the missile are very sketchy, but given that the base program is targeted at submarines, it probably can just go in the VLS with everything else. If it can’t that’s a requirements problem, and we should change those instead of spending money on this thing. I’m sure the crews will love it, too, given the need to guard the VLS all the time to avoid letting anyone know if there are actually nukes aboard.

Second, there are cells for Conventional Prompt Strike, which is the current hypersonic weapon that they’re pushing. It’s not in service yet, and I’m skeptical how much real value it will deliver. I’m also not entirely sure how many missiles will actually be aboard. Zumwalt recently got four tubes in place of her forward gun, each of which carries three missiles, and I could see either four tubes/12 missiles or 12 tubes/36 missiles, with the latter maybe making more sense given the size of the ship. The graphic provided by the Navy (below) is curiously unhelpful about this, almost like it was put together by someone who doesn’t understand any of this stuff.

Such as the people currently in charge of our naval procurement.

Read it.

This headline is delightfully ambiguous.

There’s a lot of crowing in certain quarters about the 2% decline in U.S. electric vehicle sales in 2025 compared to the year before. Francis Menton, the lawyer who writes the Manhattan Contrarian blog, for instance, claims vindication for his prediction in February 2023 that electric vehicles would not “sweep the country and become the dominant form of transportation.”

The reasoning behind his forecast: “It is always wise to bet against central planning of the economy.” In this case, central planning amounted to state CO2 emissions goals, CAFE mileage requirements and federal and state tax subsidies. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act ended the $7,500 tax credit for EV purchases, and President Trump on Dec. 3 issued an order to roll back CAFE standards “to levels at which combustion vehicles can comply.”

Like Menton, I don’t like central planning. Nor do I support mileage standards or subsidies. Americans have proven in the past that the best route to prosperity and health is free competition without government meddling. Unfortunately, that is not what we have anymore.

Our own government is denying Americans the opportunity to buy the cars of their choice by imposing huge tariffs on low-priced electric vehicles, which are pouring into the rest of the world.

It’s what governments do.