DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

The Foundry.

Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul released the latest edition of his annual “Festivus” report Tuesday detailing over $1 trillion in alleged wasteful spending in the U.S. government throughout 2025.

The newly released report found an estimated $1,639,135,969,608 total in government waste over the past year. Paul, a prominent fiscal hawk who serves as the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a statement that “no matter how much taxpayer money Washington burns through, politicians can’t help but demand more.”

“Fiscal responsibility may not be the most crowded road, but it’s one I’ve walked year after year — and this holiday season will be no different,” Paul continued. “So, before we get to the Feats of Strength, it’s time for my Airing of (Spending) Grievances.”

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’ve felt for years that the U.S. was heading toward something like a civil war. It could be as serious as the unpleasantness of the 1860s, just different. The red people and the blue people in the U.S. really dislike each other; they can’t even talk to each other. When things get to that stage, things are typically solved by force; I expect that’s what’s going to happen. Very likely during the next three years, while Trump is still in office. He’s the perfect catalyst.

It’s going to be exacerbated by the long-term migration trends. If we look 100 years down the road, it’s pretty clear that with modern travel and communications technologies, the migration of people from poor countries to rich countries all around the world will accelerate. Eventually, the U.S. won’t even exist in its present form. Of course, that’s true of every country. The colors of the map on the wall have been running since Day One.

I hope a catastrophic upset doesn’t happen in the near future for any number of reasons. For one, it won’t be any fun. For another, I’m a huge fan of traditional America. It was a unique institution in world history—the only country ever founded on the concepts of free thought, free markets, and individualism. A civil war—regardless of what form it takes—would likely overturn those things.

While I hope things mellow out, hope isn’t the best foundation for making plans.

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Two men inspired by Islamic state ideology were convicted on Tuesday in Manchester, England, of plotting what prosecutors said could have been one of the deadliest antisemitic attacks in British history.

Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, were both found guilty of preparing terrorist acts between December 2023 and May 2024. Saadaoui’s brother, Bilel Saadaoui, 36, was found guilty of failing to disclose information about an act of terrorism.

Prosecutors told jurors that Saadaoui and Hussein had “embraced the views” of Islamic State and had a “visceral dislike” of Jewish people.

Jewish Telegraph Agency.

On the first day of AmericaFest, Turning Point USA’s convention in Phoenix, Ben Shapiro lit into a host of conservatives that he said were “frauds and grifters.”

He listed Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Steve Bannon as “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” Together, he said on Thursday, they presented a danger to the conservative movement.

Shapiro was extending an assault that he began earlier in the week during a speech at the Heritage Foundation, a heart of conservatism that has been thrown into turmoil by its president’s backing of Carlson after Carlson hosted the Holocaust denier and avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes on his podcast.

An Orthodox Jew and avowed supporter of Israel, the conservative pundit has been mounting a public effort to repudiate antisemitism and similarly aligned forces within his own party. His campaign comes as the GOP’s younger flank have become increasingly disillusioned with American support for Israel in the aftermath of its war in Gaza.

The reason it’s Not Going Well is that “The Right” doesn’t have the same dog in this fight that Ben Shapiro and the Jewish Telegraph Agency do.

I understand that Jews in general are very sensitive to sniffs of antisemitism because they’ve been on the receiving end of genocidal expressions of the same, but that doesn’t justify going all Hunt for Heretics and Sinners on people who have different points of view that, quite frankly, don’t actually comprise meaningful antisemitism.

This is the same sort of CrimeThink expedition in which the Left has been engaged for the last fifty years; it doesn’t look any better when worn by pro-Israel people, and actually hurts the cause they nominally support by providing fodder for the real antisemites who are watching from the sidelines rubbing their hands with glee.

UPDATE: Vance declines to draw a line against rising influence of antisemitic figures in Republican party  Let the panic begin!

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1. Notice that these three are all women.
2. Notice that what these Karens do is exactly what the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center does.

UPDATE: US bars five Europeans it says pressured tech firms to censor American viewpoints online (Fatima Hussein/Associated Press)

UPDATE: US Bars 5 Europeans Over Tech Censorship Push

UPDATE: U.S. Bars 5 European Tech Regulators and Researchers (Steven Lee Myers/New York Times)

UPDATE: Trump Admin Bans Anti-Free Speech EU Globalists From Entering US

The Times (UK).

Taxpayers will be kept in the dark about how much public money is being spent so that union officials can have paid time off work, under the government’s workers’ rights reforms.

Despite new figures showing that last year almost £107 million was spent on so-called facility time, Labour has scrapped powers to cap it and removed the requirement for public bodies such as the NHS and schools to declare it in the future.

At the same time, the right to be paid to carry out union duties has been extended to equality representatives in workplaces to allow them to focus on equality duties.

Democrats pull this shit all the time in the U.S. Fortunately our Constitution gives is tools to pry this sort of information out of them, and a political system that enables people like Trump to erase it.

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A federal judge ruled Monday against a California school district’s policy ordering teachers to hide kids’ transgender identities from their parents, in a ruling that a lawyer hails as the definitive end to gender secrecy policies in the Golden State.

“The court has fully and permanently dismantled gender secrecy policies across the state of California,” Paul Jonna, a partner at LiMandri and Jonna LLP and special counsel to the Thomas More Society, told The Daily Signal on Tuesday.

The office of Attorney General Rob Bonta, D-Calif., told The Daily Signal that it filed an application to stay the injunction.

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A 14-year-old boy was molested by an Egyptian culture-enricher at a bus stop in the northern Italian city of Reggio Emilia. The alleged perpetrator has been apprehended, and is now in custody.

Read it.

The military reported its best recruitment numbers in more than 15 years in 2025, according to the Pentagon.

“In 2025, the department exceeded our annual active-duty recruitment accession goals across all five services,” Undersecretary of War for Personnel and Readiness Anthony J. Tata said Monday.

Tata credited President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth with the influx of new recruits.

Trump and Hegseth “are focused on our troops and our mission, and on ensuring that we remain the most lethal fighting force on the planet,” Tata said.

The Other McCain.

For many years, conservatives criticized “liberal bias” in the news media, but the bias is not ideological so much as it is partisan. Most journalists seem to wake up in the morning, pour themselves a cup of coffee, and then go looking for ways to help the Democratic Party or, conversely, to hurt Republicans. Every aspect of major media coverage is shaped by this crude partisan calculus, and none of the allegedly objective journalists acting as “Democratic operatives with bylines” seem to have the slightest shame about their completely one-sided coverage.

The Foundry.

The Washington Post published an article Monday that fabricates two quotes attributed to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.

Roberts sent an email Sunday to Heritage staff announcing personnel changes at the organization. Washington Post reporters Jacob Bogage and Isaac Arnsdorf claim to have obtained the internal email, although the two quotes they cite from Roberts are noticeably different.

Below are the quotes from the Post’s article compared to Roberts’ email (emphasis added).

CATO.

Over half of Americans (55%) don’t know how Social Security is funded. Less than half (45%) know that today’s workers pay for current retirees, and that future workers will pay for their benefits when they retire. Nearly a quarter (23%) believe that their Social Security taxes are saved in a personal account for them. Another third (32%) say they don’t know how Social Security is funded.

It’s Free Government Money! What could possibly go wrong?

The Cato Institute’s August 2025 Social Security Survey of 2,200 Americans, conducted by Morning Consult, reveals that many Americans are deeply confused about how Social Security works, what it’s for, and what the future holds. Despite the program’s central role in retirement planning, the public lacks a basic understanding of how it’s funded or how much it pays.

And yet these people have a vote that is equal to yours. (By definition, half the population of any area are below average IQ.)

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When Donald Trump was kicked off social media in 2021, liberal pundit Matthew Yglesias tweeted, “It’s kinda weird that deplatforming Trump just like completely worked with no visible downside whatsoever.” Two years later, Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) celebrated that “deplatforming works,” though she worried about the long-term implications.

“I also kind of feel like I’m waiting for the cut scene at the end of a Marvel movie after all the credits have rolled, and then you like see the villain’s hand reemerge,” said Ocasio-Cortez.

As it turns out, every major star gets a sequel. Trump is back in the White House, and Carlson has a bigger audience than ever before.

What we’ve learned is that deplatforming doesn’t work.

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Ziroth runs a YouTube channel that keeps an eye on technological advances. Nothing needs technological advance more than the energy storage area.

The reason gasoline is so pervasive is that it is very energy-dense, pretty stable as commonly stored, reasonably safe (movie car gas tank explosions to the contrary notwithstanding—it’s actually very difficult to get liquid gas to explode), and we’ve got an extensive industry devoted to getting high quality stuff to consumers quickly and cheaply.

The use of electricity for transportation is hampered by the fact that electrons can’t just be stuffed into a tank for later use. You either have to generate them on-site (which is how hybrids operate) or store them chemically (via batteries). Energy storage for electrons is neither cheap nor efficient. So I keep an eye out for discoveries that will make our lives easier in this respect.

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Warren Smith of the Secret Scholar Society podcast doesn’t treat Fuentes as a punching bag but tries to have an actual conversation with him, something I doubt you’ll have the opportunity to see anywhere else.

Why is everybody running around in circles and jumping up and down about Nick Fuentes, who is (let’s face it) a fairly fringe figure whose only real talent seems to be for winding up The Usual Suspects? Like Andrew Tate, Fuentes appears to be the New Osama Bin Laden, the boogeyman that the Left needs to leverage in order to get paid. Incomprehensible.

Welcome to the Real World of Disappointment, kid.

National Catholic Register.

On the heels of the skull of St. Thomas Aquinas touring the nation, a new study released this week gives Catholics a glimpse at what the “Angelic Doctor” may have looked like.

Liam Neeson, apparently. (What’s your guess?)

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Slavery is often discussed in fragments—confined to one region, one trade route, or one time period. However, the global slave trade was an interconnected system that spanned continents and lasted for centuries, reshaping societies, economies, and cultures in ways that still reverberate today. From the transatlantic slave trade to the lesser-known enslavement of Europeans and Asians, the movement of human lives under force has left an undeniable mark on history.

However, human trafficking existed in many forms across the world. The Barbary slave trade, active from the 16th to 19th centuries, saw an estimated 1.25 million Europeans captured and enslaved by North African pirates. The Crimean-Nogai slave raids devastated Eastern Europe, with an estimated 3 million people enslaved between 1441 and 1774.

Bet you didn’t know that.

In the Ottoman Empire, slavery was deeply entrenched in society. Between 1450 and 1700, approximately 2.5 million Europeans were sold into bondage. The Arab slave trade, spanning over a thousand years, trafficked millions from Africa across the Middle East and Asia. These markets, though lesser known, left an enduring legacy on the demographic and cultural fabric of many regions.

Slavery was a universal human institution since time out of mind down to the early 19th century. That it is today considered exceptional rather than business as usual is the result of a bunch of British activists who actually took their Christianity seriously. (Islam, by contrast, never had—and, if truth be told, still doesn’t have—a problem with slavery.)

Check it out.

I am a sucker for maps. Granted that ‘the map is not the territory’, a good map will pull knowledge together like nobody’s business. One of the benefits of living in an advanced technological society is that a huge amount of knowledge can be pulled together in one convenient package.

Quanta magazine.

The standard sperm-meets-egg story posits that sperm cells are hardly more than bundles of shrink-wrapped DNA with tails. Their mission is simple: Deliver a father’s genes into a mother’s egg for sexual reproduction. Just about all other aspects of a developing embryo, including its cellular and environmental components, have nothing to do with dad. Those all come from mom.

But nearly two decades of studies from multiple independent labs threaten to rewrite that story. They suggest that dad’s gametes shuttle more than DNA: Within a sperm’s minuscule head are stowaway molecules, which enter the egg and convey information about the father’s fitness, such as diet, exercise habits and stress levels, to his offspring. These non-DNA transfers may influence genomic activity that boots up during and after fertilization, exerting some control over the embryo’s development and influencing the adult they will become.

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Did the Second Vatican Council betray Roman Christianity? Or did the Holy Spirit inspire the fathers of the council to dare a radical restart of the Church? Few ecclesiastical events of the twentieth century have generated as much controversy as the Second Vatican Council. More than sixty years after its conclusion, Vatican II still continues to divide Catholics, theologians, and observers of the fate of Western civilisation. For some, it represents a necessary aggiornamento, a courageous opening of the Church to modernity, which allowed Christianity to survive in a rapidly changing world and to flourish in parts of Africa and Asia even after the end of colonialism, when it seemed for a while all traces of Western traditional presence would be ejected. For others, it marks the beginning of a dramatic loss of substance, authority, and form, accelerating the collapse of religious practice and belief throughout Europe, the old core territories of the Catholic faith.

…

And it is precisely here, in the attitude towards history, that the fundamental and frankly astonishing error of Vatican II becomes apparent. For the council’s original sin was not a fundamental lack of faith but a profound lack of historical understanding, probably one of the last things one would have expected from an institution so steeped in history, tradition and continuity that its capacity of thinking and handling time not in years, but in generations, even centuries, had become proverbial. The Council of Trent, convened in response to the Reformation, took an impressive eighteen years to articulate a thoughtful and coherent answer, while all around, Europe seemed to fall apart and urgency was—or should have been—the utmost priority. And crucially, it did not respond to those challenges by imitating Protestantism but by clarifying, affirming, and sublimating precisely those aspects that had been attacked. The Roman rite was standardised rather than fragmented into national variants; sacred art was consciously cultivated as a dignified and splendid framework for the contemplation of God rather than replaced by iconoclastic austerity; doctrine was sharpened, not relativised; mission aimed at reconverting the lost sheep rather than affirming that everyone might be saved ‘in their own way’; the liturgy reached a fully composed symbolic richness instead of being reduced to a supposed essence; religious orders were renewed, not dissolved; the clergy was subjected to stricter discipline rather than emancipated from authority.

In 1965, the opposite occurred. After barely three years of discussion, the Church launched a general overhaul from which it has not recovered even sixty years after. That such a deeply un-Catholic haste could sweep through the universal Church, and that the conciliar fathers were willing not merely to permit but actively to encourage an unprecedented process of self-deconstruction, suggests an uncomfortable truth: the crisis did not originate with Vatican II. The worm was already in the apple, and the council was not the cause of the Church’s collapse but its symptom.

The Antiplanner.

As of April 1 of last year, New York City had more than one million apartments, but 47,720 were vacant. That’s up from about 27,000 in 2015 and 45,000 in 2023. A recent article in City Journal argues that landlords leave many of these apartments unrented because rent control, excessive government regulation, and the high cost of doing business in New York City makes it unprofitable to take in tenants.

Gee, whoda thunkit.

This is only going to get worse thanks to New York City Council member Lincoln Restler, who last week persuaded the rest of the council to pass an ordinance giving the city’s residents a right to be cool. That means that landlords will be required to install sufficient air conditioning to keep apartment temperatures at or below 78 degrees with 50 percent humidity in the summer months.

In hearings on the ordinance, experts testified that meeting the twin goals of 78 degrees and 50 percent humidity would be “prohibitively expensive.” Such targets are normally set only for “laboratory, medical, and other sensitive building programs” and the technology does not exist to retrofit residences to meet both targets. The council passed the ordinance anyway.

A common proglodyte delusion is that just passing a law somehow alters the nature of reality to make the impossible possible and the unaffordable affordable.

Time to leave.

Read it.

“UK grooming gangs and Islam”, a new paper by Dr Mark Durie, Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne School of Theology that explains much about the sad litany of abuse we chronicle here

“Holy Hell — Islam’s Abuse of Women and the Infidels Who Enable It” by Mark Tapson at Front Page Magazine, November 24, 2025

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When environmentalists first claimed that polar bears would be extinct by 2050, it seemed like a fairly safe bet. The claim made in 2007 was pegged to 43 years away. Practically an eternity. By 2050, we’d have flying cars, colonies on Mars and Martian environmentalists protesting them.

Media headlines blared “Most Polar Bears Extinct by 2050.” Public school kids were barraged with crying polar bear propaganda and told to recycle or all the cute white bears would die.

But nearly twenty years later, global warming has a major problem. The bears are still here.

With another 25 years on the clock, you would think that there would be signs that a major species is disappearing. Instead the 22,000 polar bear population from 2007 is now estimated at 26,000. The numbers for polar bear extinction, like Gaza genocide, are going the wrong way.

Victor Davis Hanson.

We’ve had a lot of incidents worldwide of Islamic terrorism or threats of Islamic terrorism. The most egregious is in Bondi Beach, Australia, where two gunmen, a father and son, killed 16 people and wounded 40.

How that happens in front of police who reacted very quickly I don’t know. They were only stopped by a heroic Syrian immigrant who tackled one of the shooters and disarmed him.

The problem with all of this is that there was no needed reaction from the prime minister of Australia. We didn’t hear: We have to be very careful about radical Islam. These two people got two guns legally that they should not have had since they were on a watch lists with terrorist activity, and there was no reason that he, this one shooter, the father, had six guns, among them semi-automatic weapons.

One of the most gun-controlled societies in the world. We didn’t hear that.

Instead, we heard that they condone all extremism. This is not who we are. In the utmost—you know, the whole boilerplate. And then they said, we oppose all extremism. And it was a nanosecond before they said white extremism that had nothing to do with this.

Some ‘phobias’ are rational and justified. I disagee with Dr. Hanson’s use of the term ‘radical Islam’, as I would disagree with someone using the term ‘radical National Socialism’. Sorry, no. It’s turtles all the way down.

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Critical Race Theory will get you if you don’t watch out.

A recent report from Defending Education has found that more than half of collegiate social work programs appear to embed anti-racism and diversity, equity, and inclusion standards into their core competencies, admissions requirements, and field work evaluations.

This is not by accident. The sole accreditor of these schools, the Council on Social Work Education, requires adherence to these standards.

This means, in practice, that left-wing ideologies—many of which promote discrimination on the basis of race—are de facto orthodoxy in most of the nation’s social work programs, just so the institution can remain accredited.

This accreditation is required for graduates of these programs to gain licenses necessary to work in their fields.

So, what are students in college and graduate school learning in their social work programs?

The Foundry.

The American experiment has not failed. It was hijacked by the progressive movement more than a century ago.

Over the past 100 years, the federal government has usurped roles never intended for it: family formation, moral instruction, income distribution, education, overregulation, even meaning itself, aided and abetted by the media/entertainment/advertising-industrial complex.

As the state grew more behemoth, church and community institutions were hollowed out; which was the cause and which the effect may be arguable, but the correlation is indisputable.

The “little platoons” that once formed Americans into responsible citizens have been crowded out by self-perpetuating bureaucracies fueled by massive, unsustainable debt.

The challenge of our time is to return the government to its constitutional limits, enabling families, churches, and community organizations to once again fulfill their historical responsibilities.

Daily Record (UK).

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has reportedly suffered another setback as his gun licence has been revoked. It’s understood that the former prince agreed to surrender the certificate following a visit from the police to his Royal Lodge residence in Windsor.

This comes as a “real blow” for Andrew, who has already been stripped of his royal title despite maintaining his innocence. He will no longer be able to participate in shooting at the parties he frequently attends, reports the Manchester Evening News..

Andrew has been under scrutiny for several years due to his connection with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, with more files being released over the weekend. The 65 year old has faced allegations that he sexually assaulted teenager Virginia Giuffre after she was trafficked by Epstein.

Why don’t they just brick him up with a cask of Amontillado and be done with it?

Watch it.

The idea of a drone that can operate both in the air and underwater ought to be worth something.

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FOR MANY YEARS, doctors and technicians who performed medical ultrasound procedures viewed bubbles with wary concern. The phenomenon of cavitation—the formation and collapse of tiny gas bubbles due to changes in pressure—was considered an undesirable and largely uncontrollable side effect. But in 2001, researchers at the University of Michigan began exploring ways to harness the phenomenon for the destruction of cancerous tumors and other problematic tissue.

The trouble was, creating and controlling cavitation generated heat, which harmed healthy tissue beyond the target area. Zhen Xu, who was working on a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at the time, was bombarding pig heart tissue in a tank of water with ultrasound when she made a breakthrough.

The key was using extremely powerful ultrasound to produce negative pressure of more than 20 megapascals, delivered in short bursts measured in microseconds—but separated by relatively long gaps, between a millisecond and a full second long. These parameters created bubbles that quickly formed and collapsed, tearing apart nearby cells and turning the tissue into a kind of slurry, while avoiding heat buildup. The result was a form of incisionless surgery, a way to wipe out tumors without scalpels, radiation, or heat.

Sen. Paul: Oil Tanker Seizures ‘A Prelude to War’

Vance tries to weather the MAGA storm at Turning Point (Andrew Howard/Politico)  MAGA is the New Nazi.

ABC News Breathlessly Joins Fake ‘Cognitive Decline’ Drumbeat

The Trump Vibe Shift Is Dead (Ezra Klein/New York Times)

Colorado Leaders Appeal Trump’s Denial of Disaster Declarations

Hundreds of Big Post-Election Donors Have Benefited From Trump’s Return to Office (New York Times)

JD Vance is ‘walking a tightrope’ on raging Israel debate within MAGA (Natalie Allison/Washington Post)

MAGA’s Manly Manufacturing Misfire (Paul Krugman) The vacuum speaks.

JD Vance Finally Loses It Over Attacks on His Wife: ‘Eat S**t’ (Cameron Adams/The Daily Beast) I’m surprised it took this long.

Congolese rape survivors search in vain for medicine after USAID cuts (Katharine Houreld/Washington Post)  Because, as we all know, Congolese rape survivors are TOTALLY the responsibility of the U.S. government—and the U.S. taxpayer.

How President Trump reshaped capitalism in 2025 (Maria Aspan/NPR) There is, of course, no such thing as ‘capitalism’; what people are bitching about is ‘industrialism’, which would be the same under socialism, as the history of the Soviet Union makes clear.

Peter Navarro, Trump’s Ultimate Yes-Man (Ian Parker/New Yorker)

‘Our MAGA Civil War Is Spreading’ (Asawin Suebsaeng/Zeteo)

Trump and Co. Can’t Keep Their Lies Straight (William Kristol/The Bulwark)

CBS and CNN Are Being Sacrificed to Trump (Franklin Foer/The Atlantic)

Heritage staffers walk out amid latest strife at MAGA institution (Washington Post)  MAGA is the New Nazi.

Read it.

More than five years ago, I wrote in these pages of a growing trend on the left toward compelled speech – the forcing of citizens to repeat approved views and values. It is an all-too-familiar pattern. Once a faction assumes power, it will often first seek to censor opposing views and then compel the endorsement of approved views.

This week, some of those efforts faced setbacks and challenges in blue states like Washington and Illinois.

In Washington state, many have developed what seems a certain appetite for compelled speech.

For example, Democrats recently pushed through legislation that would have compelled priests and other clerics to rat out congregants who confessed to certain criminal acts.

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If you thought the alleged Medicaid fraud in Minnesota by Somalis, which federal prosecutors say could reach $9 billion, was insane, wait until you read the latest report from The Maine Wire: the head of a local nonprofit is accused of lashing out at a local journalist over an investigation, while members of his family allegedly put a bounty on the head of a journalist in Somalia for sharing the reporting.

Read it.

An ISIS-affiliated Islamist and two accomplices sexually assaulted women, targeted the Jewish community, and planned to carry out abductions, police said in a statement on Friday announcing the indictments against the three men, who were arrested in August.

The men — Waleed Khan, 26, Osman Azizov, 18, and Fahad Sadaat, 19, all from Toronto — face a total of 75 charges for “offenses targeting women and members of the Jewish community” involving sexual assaults and attempted abductions. The indictments followed a joint forces investigation, the Toronto Police Service said in a statement.

In a separate statement, federal authorities said Friday that Khan had provided funding and “social media accounts” to ISIS and was charged with “terrorism-related offenses.” The federal statement did not mention the two remaining defendants.

Khan was already charged in August with 33 offenses related to kidnapping, firearms, and auto theft, at around the same time as the arrest of his alleged accomplices. The terrorism charges brought against Khan and the indictment against the two alleged accomplices are new.

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Washington Post uncorked their alarm on the front page on Friday when the Trump administration declared it would ban federal funding from any hospital that provides gender-denying care to minors.

The Post headline was “Trans care for minors targeted.” The Times headline was “U.S. to Halt Care for Trans Youth.” The surprise here was neither of these stories used the Orwellian term “gender-affirming care” in their left-tilting dispatches. “Gender transition care” or “gender-related care” were the replacements.

The Times story – penned by Azeen Ghorayshi, Amy Harmon, and Reed Abelson – was more panicked. “The administration’s action is not just a regulatory shift but the latest signal that the federal government does not recognize even the existence of people whose gender identity does not align with their sex at birth.”

Actually, I have no problem with it. Parents who are willing to mutilate their children in the name of fashion deserve to have their genes removed from the gene pool. Tough on the kids, of course, but it’s traditional in such circumstances to murder your parents.

Newsbusters.

As they love to do.

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Yeah, unrestricted immigration from the Turd World will do that to you.

Coming to a Blue State near you—a lot sooner than you think.

Read it.

Unrestricted immigration from the Turd World will do that to you.

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Britain’s newly appointed equalities chief has triggered a political backlash after dismissing concerns about mass migration and defending the increasingly controversial European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Mary-Ann Stephenson took over this month as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), an unelected quango with wide influence over equality and human rights policy in Britain. In her first major interviews, she urged politicians and the media to stop “demonising” migrants, arguing that describing migration as a danger to Britain makes life “very, very difficult” for migrants and ethnic minority citizens.

Stephenson dismissed growing calls to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, despite withdrawal now being backed by parties representing a large share of the electorate. Reform UK, currently leading in the polls, has pledged to withdraw from the convention, arguing it enables activist lawyers to prevent the deportation of dangerous migrants. After months of prevarication, the Conservatives later followed suit.

Her remarks mark a clear departure from the stance of her predecessor, Baroness Falkner, who warned last year that integration in Britain was failing amid record levels of legal and illegal migration.

Claire M. Lopez.

Only now are some of these reports about how the Biden administration provided millions of dollars to jihadi and terror-linked groups around the world coming to light. The good news is that with exposure, such funding can now be ended under the second Trump administration.

Concern remains, though, about the new White House team’s belief that jihadis can somehow be wooed with friendly outreach and financial incentives.

Read it.

I have a confession to make: I’m a misogynist. At least, I certainly hope I am in the eyes of those who pontificate on such things, and clearly have no idea what the word actually means. I know that women don’t have cocks; that they are distinct from men; and that they are unlikely to best men in almost any endeavour, unless the men are sufficiently hamstrung by the rules of engagement. By all means, let’s have the debate on that – but I warn you, I wrote the goto book on the subject, and I’m all out of chivalry and kid gloves just now.

I’m an inveterate misogynist when it comes to the Jess Phillips of this world – those who would criminalise misogyny, given half a chance. I have no objection to ‘hating’ women where appropriate either, criticising them when they are wrong (Zac Polanski, you’re a prick), explaining things on the rare occasions I actually know something (sorry, ‘mansplaining’), and generally treating them equally – as the feminists claim they desire.

The ‘plan’ to deal with people like me (not the rapists and murderers, obvs), is to tackle misogyny head-on in the playground. Concerned that toxic ideas are ‘going unchallenged’, our beneficent Labour ‘government’ has dragged itself away from Netflix repeats of Adolescence, and unveiled plans to send boys as young as 11 on ‘anti-misogyny’ courses if they exhibit ‘toxic’ or ‘harmful’ behaviours. What behaviours you ask? Sharing intimate images and showing violence towards siblings – so that’s basically every teenage boy you’ve ever met.

Read it.

Well, comparatively speaking….

Jewish Teleraph Agency.

The activist group StopAntisemitism has awarded the conservative personality Tucker Carlson its ignominious honor of “Antisemite of the Year,” citing his frequent invocation of classic antisemitic stereotypes.

The announcement comes as Carlson sits at the center of controversy on the American right about whether extremists should be welcomed in the Republican Party. It also marks the second year in a row that StopAntisemitism has selected a right-wing figure for its accolade, after years of awarding the mantle to mostly left-wing figures.

“Carlson mainstreams antisemitism by platforming and praising Holocaust revisionists and Nazi apologists, while hiding behind irony and plausible deniability,” the group said in a statement. “By legitimizing extremist voices and weaponizing conspiratorial imagery at massive scale, he has helped drag antisemitic ideas back into the mainstream.”

This is obvious nonsense, surpassed perhaps only by the urge by every Woke Karen on the Left to find racism under every bush. No matter what kind of nutjob Candace Owens has turned into, Tucker Carlson is just doing what he thinks as his job as a journalist, and the CrimeThink inquisitors on both the Left and Right just can’t tolerate any dissent.

Any selection of an Antisemite of the Year that doesn’t name the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, or perhaps somebody from CAIR,  is infantile.

CarBuzz.

German automakers have a decades-long reputation for forcing people to buy specialty tools. BMW has managed to take that specialty tool requirement and crank it up to a level we’ve never seen before. Its latest patent uncovered by CarBuzz is for a new screw head that will have mechanics seeing red. Or maybe that’s seeing blue and white? Either way, it’s a screw with a head that is the BMW roundel logo, and it can’t be removed with normal tools.

Another good reason not to drive a BMW.

Read it.

This isn’t my first long road trip in an EV, but some of the challenges I had in that first trip happened here. About half of the Electrify America stops had at least one broken charger. Few of the chargers delivered close to the 200kW max recharge rate of the Buzz, but that was probably due to VW’s battery limits in winter conditions.

One key difference between my 2022 trip and this 2025 trip is that thankfully almost every charger had a card reader on it so I could tap to pay and charge instantly. Back in 2022, I was forced to use an app for every charger network that required you to have an account attached to a credit card and that sometimes took 10 minutes to set up at each new charger I hadn’t been to before.

Twice on this trip, I got to a charging station only to find it was full and had a line of people waiting to charge, so I had to look elsewhere. My biggest blunder was seeing a fast Rivian charger in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, Price, Utah on Apple Maps. When I drove up to the location, I found out it wasn’t done being built yet. So I had to use a slower 75kW ChargePoint station that took almost an hour to charge the battery back up because I was on my last 20 miles of range. Oops.

Rory Sutherland (whom I respect a great deal) is of opinion that anyone who drives an electric car won’t return to a gas-powered car, and that ‘range anxiety’ with respect to electric cars is overblown. I have my doubts about both of those positions. My wife and I drive hybrids, and I doubt that I would be happy falling back to a gas-powered car, but the advantage of a hybrid over an all-electric car is that you take your charger with you.

The Royal Society (UK).

Abstract
It is conventionally assumed that all evolutionary adaptation is produced, and could only possibly be produced, by natural selection. Natural induction is a different mechanism of adaptation. It occurs in dynamical systems described by a network of interactions, where connections give way slightly under stress and the system is subject to occasional perturbations. This differential adjustment of connections causes reorganization of the system’s internal structure in a manner equivalent to associative learning familiar in neural networks. This is sufficient for storage and recall of multiple patterns, learning with generalization and solving difficult constraint problems (without any natural selection involved). Various biological systems (from gene-regulation networks to metabolic networks to ecosystems) meet these basic conditions and therefore have potential to exhibit adaptation by natural induction. Here (and in a follow-on paper), we consider various ways that natural induction and natural selection might interact in biological evolution. For example, in some cases, natural selection may act not as a source of adaptations but as a memory of adaptations discovered by natural induction. We conclude that evolution by natural induction is a viable process that expands our understanding of evolutionary adaptation.

The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.

The Danish postal service will deliver its last letter on 30 December, ending a more than 400-year-old tradition.

Announcing the decision earlier this year to stop delivering letters, PostNord, formed in 2009 in a merger of the Swedish and Danish postal services, said it would cut 1,500 jobs in Denmark and remove 1,500 red postboxes amid the “increasing digitalisation” of Danish society.

escribing Denmark as “one of the most digitalised countries in the world”, the company said the demand for letters had “fallen drastically” while online shopping continued to increase, prompting the decision to instead focus on parcels.

It took only three hours for 1,000 of the distinctive postboxes, which have already been dismantled, to be bought up when they went on sale earlier this month with a price tag of 2,000 DKK (£235) each for those in good condition and 1,500 DKK (£176) for those a little more well-worn. A further 200 will be auctioned in January. PostNord, which will continue to deliver letters in Sweden, has said it will refund unused Danish stamps for a limited time.

The Telegraph (UK).

Father Christmas is too white and should stop putting children on the naughty list, a museum has said.

Brighton and Hove Museums claimed Santa Claus needed to be decolonised in the name of diversity, in a blog on its website.

The blog also said that Santa should work alongside elves in the name of equality and a “Mother Christmas” would help tackle the patriarchy.

The Telegraph (UK).

The new head of the equalities watchdog has attacked those who describe migration as a risk to Britain.

Mary-Ann Stephenson, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), used her first major intervention since taking the job at the beginning of December to warn against the demonisation of immigrants.

Ms Stephenson, who was chosen by Sir Keir Starmer’s administration to succeed Baroness Falkner of Margravine, also said that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – the treaty that has been blamed by critics for blocking migrant deportations – would be a mistake.

Our future, unless Trump can prevent it.