THEY DON’T ATTACK YOU BECAUSE YOU’RE FASCIST; THEY CALL YOU FASCIST SO THEY CAN ASSAULT YOU:  Former Antifa Member Reveals Why the Group Keeps Calling People Fascists.

THE SHOCK IS NOT THE DOCUMENTS EXISTENCE, IT’S THEIR DISCOVERY:  Bombshell: Defending Ed Drops National Education Association Docs Detailing Radical LGBTQ Agenda.

A PERMIT OF OCCUPANCY WAS APPROVED – FOR AN APPLICATION PRE-DATING THE FIRES:  California Media Tout News About Pacific Palisades Rebuilding. There’s Just One Problem.

YOU DON’T SAY!  Ex-FBI Assistant Director: The Bureau Had Many Chances to Stop Trump’s Would-Be Assassin.

UH. BUT THEY HAVE ALL THOSE DEPENDENT ILLEGALS TO COMPENSATE!  California Losing One Taxpayer Every Minute as Residents Flee Failed Policies.

RUNNING THE NUMBERS: are discovering that as a family’s income rises from $40k to $100k/year they get poorer thanks to the way government programs/subsidies end:  Part 1: My Life Is a Lie. How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America.

The biggest problem with that article: it thinks everywhere in America is the same. I’m perfectly willing to believe you are poor in New Jersey at 140k salary. But what about the rest of America, where people can live decently on half that.
The solution, other than stopping government intervention is to do away with the ridiculous Return to the Office policies!

AMERICAN SUCCESS HAS A TYPE:  Who was Cornelius Vanderbilt?

GOOD:  Taking out Hamas’ million-dollar ‘root’ tunnel is game changer, analyst says.  Tunnel contained about 80 hideouts, stretched beneath UN compound and manned by hundreds of militants and commanders.

EXCEPT UNLIKE THE DAVINCI CODE, IT SEEMS TO BE BASED ON SOMETHING REAL:  DAILY ART FIX: The Matrix Meets The Da Vinci Code – Peer-Reviewed Study Reveals Mysterious Mathematical Pattern in Art Throughout History.

AND THEN THERE’S THIS:  Elon Musk probably doesn’t even know the earthquake he unleashed in Iran. Because of the country location update, we now have a full list of regime supporters inside Iran who are so important and valued that they get to enjoy VPN free social media.

And for the X-cancelled.

YES, THE GAME IS RIGGED, BUT IT’S THE ONLY GAME:  Go On, Do It.

YES, A LOT OF US HAVE SEEN THAT:  We Won’t Be Fooled Again!

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Wicked changed the colour of Dorothy’s magical ruby slippers.

It may seem like sacrilege, but Wicked director Jon M Chu is actually being faithful to L Frank Baum’s original Oz novel by opting for silver crystal shoes instead of red. The colour was changed in the 1939 MGM movie so that Dorothy’s heels could be a pop of vivid scarlet as the creators took advantage of the glorious new three-strip Technicolour film.

Another, rather less artistically profound reason for Chu to avoid painting the town (or least the shoes) red is a copyright issue. MGM reportedly owns the rights to that version of the shoes, but Wicked is distributed by rival Universal Pictures. As Chu explained to Variety in 2024: “We had boundaries of what we could reference or not. We never use the ruby slippers.” He added that the distinctive spiral shape of the Yellow Brick Road is also copywritten, so Wicked “had to do a circle that continues to show it’s not where the road ends”.

Related: The Critical Drinker asks and answers: Wicked For Good — Is It Actually Good, Though?

SPACE JUNK: Space junk strike on China’s astronaut capsule highlights need for a space rescue service, experts say.

INVESTIGATING A POSSIBLE SCAMMER IN JOURNALISM’S AI ERA:

Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They’re taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud—where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more “content” have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.

Freelance journalism in 2025 is an incredibly difficult place to build a career. But, it turns out, it’s a decent enough arena for a scam. On their website, Outrider says they pay $1,000 per article. Dwell’s rates start at 50 cents a word—a fee that’s difficult to justify if you actually want to interview 10 of the top designers in the world, but a healthy payday if you only need to enter a few words into ChatGPT.

Not every Victoria Goldiee story I looked at raised the same questions. A writer by that name had, in fact, spoken with actor Nico Santos for a story in Vogue Philippines, according to his publicist. Others were impossible to debunk with certainty. Had Victoria actually interviewed an incredibly elusive Korean production designer for a story in Architectural Digest about how people were, apparently, redesigning their rooms to match K-dramas? I can’t say for sure, and Architectural Digest did not respond to questions about the story. A story she published in October headlined “20 iconic slang words from Black Twitter that shaped pop culture”—which was syndicated across dozens of small-town American newspapers desperate for content, from northeast Mississippi to Waynesville, North Carolina—contains lines like “‘Brazy’ is another word for ‘crazy,’ replacing the ‘c’ with a ‘b.’” Is that story written by AI? It’s impossible to know and, frankly, impossible to say if it even matters.

My favourite “Victoria Goldiee” story is a piece she published in The Guardian just last month. It’s a first-person essay without quotes, and thus difficult to fact-check. In it, Goldiee—who told me she lives in Toronto, writes as an American in other work, enthuses about the daily jollof specials at a restaurant in Ghana in yet other writing, and lists herself as based in Nigeria elsewhere—vividly describes discovering underground music as she moves through life in 21st-century England. It follows her from a Somali football league in east London to “Morley’s fried chicken shops lit up after midnight” and “community centres that smell of carpet cleaner and curry.” It’s a rousing argument that real culture happens in real spaces, between real human beings, not in some cold, computer-generated reality. “The future of our music,” it reads, “is not written by algorithm.”

“Wonderful article,” reads one of many approving comments.

“Beautiful message that a lot of people aren’t trudging wide-eyed and brain-dead through this increasingly soulless, corporate-heavy… modern world,” reads another. “They are socialising, communicating, loving and laughing and making culture like real, thinking, feeling human beings.”

In the days after our conversation, Victoria’s online writer’s portfolio vanished. Her Muck Rack page (a listing of a journalist’s published works) was switched to private. An X account with her handle that had shared previous stories disappeared.

As I emailed the editors of the publications I’d been investigating, one by one Victoria’s articles came down.

Between “journalists” pushing out AI slop, and foreign rage farmers being exposed on social media, the Dead Internet Theory is looking less and less like a conspiracy theory every day.

OAKLAND’S ENVIRONMENTALISM COULD CAUSE IT TO GO BANKRUPT:

But here’s where things get really bad for Oakland. The long delay has caused major damage to the coal producer in Kentucky which was contracted to ship its coal through the new terminal. That company is now in bankruptcy. A bankruptcy judge has decided this is largely Oakland’s fault.

Last month, Bankruptcy Judge Joan A. Lloyd of the Western District of Kentucky ruled that Oakland’s “improper and unjustified conduct significantly disrupted and burdened” the Kentucky-based company that had been contracted to ship coal out of Oakland’s terminal, forcing it into bankruptcy.

The judge suggested the damages were between $654 million, before interest — what the coal company is pushing for — and $230 million, what Oakland’s own expert estimated the coal company had lost.

The exact amount hasn’t been determined yet but it looks very likely that Oakland is going to be on the hook for several hundred million dollars, maybe even half a billion or more. Needless to say, the city doesn’t have this money. It was on the verge of insolvency a year ago when it was looking at a budget shortfall just shy of $100 million. So there’s no possible way it can pay this judgment (which again isn’t final yet). If the judgment happens, Oakland will almost certainly have to declare bankruptcy itself.

Make the rubble bounce.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Variety (Accidentally) Confirms Woke Killed Movie Comedies.

Variety has graced us with the 100 top comedies of all time. The exhaustive list has plenty of films that are beyond reproach – “Blazing Saddles,” “The Naked Gun,” “Elf” and “Bringing Up Baby.”

What’s missing? Films from the last decade.

Yes, 2002’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” made the list (number 87), but it’s hardly a typical comedy. The one true comedy from the past decade, “Poor Things,” is both hilarious and original.

That’s it. Now, compare that to the number of ’80s films on the list – 20. The 1990s has 18 films.

What changed?

We know the answer, of course. Woke blossomed over the past decade, forcing comics to self-censor lest their careers crumble as a result. Big-screen comedies became safe, avoiding material that might be outrageous or offensive.

And Variety, in order to pander to their industry audience, will keep flucking that chicken:

Why Does 'The Wizard of Oz' Still Cast Such a Wicked Spell? Because It's the Movie That First Flipped the Patriarchy on Its Head https://t.co/ztr526FSR2

— Variety (@Variety) November 23, 2025

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Homeschooling Hits Record Numbers.

NO WORRIES, THERE ISN’T AN ELECTION FOR A YEAR: Washington state resident believed to be the first to die from a rare strain of bird flu.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Elon Musk’s zeal for truth reveals the online frauds aiming to divide us. Key bit:

We’ve heard a lot in recent years about “misinformation” and “disinformation” on the Internet, which officials in both the United States and the increasingly totalitarian European Union have used as an excuse to censor ideas they don’t like.

Inevitably, the ideas they dislike are those coming from their political opponents.

But Musk on Friday didn’t censor people for lying. He revealed them as liars.

Rather than repression, he chose illumination. . . .

Musk chose transparency over “security,” and in so doing he ripped the masks off tens (hundreds?) of thousands of fake accounts that have been doing real harm to America’s political discourse — without silencing anyone.

More effectively, too: Censoring deliberately divisive accounts makes it look like you’re hiding something.

Exposing fake ones makes clear who’s doing the hiding.

Learn from Elon. He’s a smart guy.

But read the whole thing.

BLACK FRIDAY DEAL: Dalstrong Fillet Knife – 7 inch Flexible Blade. #CommissionEarned

HOW CONVENIENT: Mystery of how turtles read their magnetic map solved: they feel the magnetism.

I WAS GOING TO ADD SOMETHING, BUT RHONDA SUMMED IT UP WELL ENOUGH:

They’re having two different conversations. And she’s stupid.

— Rhonda Rhoades (@NewWaveIngenue) November 24, 2025

WAYMO ROBOTAXIS EXPAND TO MORE CITIES. This will revolutionize things, but not as much as the Tesla robotaxis will.