November 11, 2025
AN IDEA SO CRAZY, IT JUST MIGHT WORK!
Did they consider not lying for political gain? https://t.co/f8nuy1ZMjB
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) November 11, 2025
HIS EVIL TRANSCENDS TIME AND SPACE:
I can’t believe how Trump created and passed Obamacare. That bastard. https://t.co/InATeoMX93
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) November 11, 2025
OPEN THREAD: Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the open thread that day, I can tell you!
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: When You Can’t Take the High Hand.
The resignations underscore the violence of the impact. Interestingly, BBC director Tim Davies actually makes a version of the “fake but true” argument. In his resignation statement, Davies says, “I have to take ultimate responsibility [for lying but] … I am proud that the BBC remains the most trusted news brand globally.” But, alas, in “these febrile times” I have to go. “In these febrile times” is one of those wonderful British phrases that roughly translates to “in this lynch mob atmosphere where people are a-hootin’ and a-hollerin’ fer my scalp” and conveys his slightly wounded feeling of having been punished for what is no big deal. Or didn’t seem a big deal at the time. Because even if the documentary was fake, it was true. Davie’s concluding line — “I will always be a passionate cheerleader for civilised society” — is a proclamation of innocence. You would understand what I did and forgive it if you were civilized. And he would have a case if it were but an error among gentlemen sipping whiskey at a club. But it is also a confession of profound ignorance. Davies is the director of a great bureaucracy, and his careless handling of January 6, an event that some observers call a foundational rupture in American politics, is careless to the point of recklessness.
Unlike ordinary people, MI5, MI6 and the BBC have a duty that ordinary people can dispense with. They have to act with a solid appreciation of the situation, not out of morality but because it is their job to preserve the British state from the consequences of stupid mistakes.
Read the whole thing; though I don’t think many at the BBC care much about “preserving the British state,” and haven’t for quite some time.
THIS WILL END WELL: Fannie Mae removes minimum credit score requirements from DU.
Fannie Mae‘s November 2025 Selling Guide, released on Wednesday, detailed several updates, including expanding Fannie’s Day 1 Certainty offerings to include representation and warranty relief for undisclosed non-mortgage liabilities, expanding the eligibility for the age of credit document exception for single-closing construction loans and removing minimum credit score requirements from Desktop Underwriter (DU).
As a result of the latter update, Fannie Mae will remove minimum credit score requirements for loans submitted through its DU system starting Nov. 16. This means that the current 620 minimum representative or average median credit score will be removed for new loan case files created on or after that date.
Other related updates will apply to files submitted or resubmitted beginning the weekend of Nov. 15, 2025, an announcement from Fannie Mae said. Instead of applying a minimum score, DU will use its own analysis of borrower risk factors to determine loan eligibility.
Fannie Mae also updated requirements for documenting nontraditional credit and homebuyer education. The DU system will notify lenders when they need to establish a nontraditional credit history or require homebuyer education in cases where a borrower has no traditional credit or installment account on record.
Don’t worry, I’m sure this time around it will work just fine.
RIOTS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME, PARTE DOS: Mexican president rejects new U.S. border wall construction.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Friday voiced strong opposition to the construction of a new segment of the U.S. border wall in the state of New Mexico, calling it a unilateral move by the U.S. government.
Speaking at her daily press conference, Sheinbaum emphasized that Mexico is not involved in the project in any way and is not contributing funding.
“They’re building it on their own. We don’t support the wall. We’ve achieved a safe border through cooperation and coordination, not walls,” she said.
Sheinbaum described the construction as a decision made solely by U.S. President Donald Trump and emphasized Mexico’s preference for development-based cooperation and respect for Mexicans living in the United States.
—The Hans India, July 18th.
But Sheinbaum does support some walls:
MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: America at 250 Needs Energy Overhaul. ARC Is the Place To Start.
Aimed as a corrective to the “Green New Deal” priorities that took hold during the Biden administration, the ARC [“The Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy Security Act”] would direct federal agencies to reorder their policies with attainable objectives aimed at increasing attainable and cost-effective domestic energy production – and providing benchmarks allowing for effective congressional oversight.
The bill would formally require government regulators to prioritize these three words when evaluating energy projects: Is it affordable? Is it reliable? Is it clean? Most politicians give lip-service to these concepts, but under current law they are left open to interpretation by the executive branch and they shift from one administration to the next, Balderson points out. His bill would essentially codify a true “all of the above” energy approach – and would benefit all Americans regardless of their ideological leanings.
If enacted by Congress and signed by the president, his legislation would require the Department of Energy, Department of the Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency to submit a report to Congress within 180 days documenting what they are doing to incorporate all-of-the-above into our national energy strategy. Windmills and solar farms wouldn’t be suddenly sidelined. (On the other end of the energy scale, neither would coal.) But this bill would virtually assure that all viable, affordable, and reliable energy sources – including nuclear power and natural gas – remain in the nation’s energy mix. In other words, it replaces old habits and ideological fads with practicality as a way of supporting American families and businesses.
I don’t question liberals’ commitment to a cleaner environment. But Democrats campaigned this autumn on the need for “affordability” – and found a receptive electorate. This legislation would turn that rhetoric into action. And just as important to poor and middle-class families, it fuels our nation’s efforts to rebuild and onshore the energy sector that fuels economic growth.
Greater reliance on natural gas and nuclear power will deliver green and clean dividends. ARC is a win, win, win. The status quo is a lose, lose, lose.
Diversity of energy production is always welcome. As a wise woman once said, drill baby, drill!
RIOTS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: Minneapolis City Councilman Carjacked in His Own District.
While I have long thought that the residents of [Minneapolis] had an outsized ego regarding its nearness to paradise, I have to admit that on many levels it punched above its weight. While not especially beautiful, and far less “cultured” than it believed, it has been a decent place to live until COVID hit.
Far too liberal for my taste, and often annoying, but what city isn’t? We should have moved to the suburbs, but we were younger and dumber then.
Since COVID and the George Floyd riots, the city has rapidly gone downhill, although there is still enough resistance that Omar Fateh lost his bid to oust Mayor Jacob Frey, meaning that the city is governed by a progressive rather than a radical.
Still, the city is struggling. Property crime is still off the charts, and while carjackings have been slowly declining, the decline has been from record levels. Until recently, carjackings were so rare that the police didn’t even bother to count them as separate crimes, and the state didn’t have a law specifically aimed at the crime. They were lumped in with theft and robbery. It was only in 2023 that the legislature created the crime of carjacking and made it a felony with severe sentences.
I’m not at all surprised that Osman has locked down replies to all of his tweets: The Minneapolis City Council is being irresponsible with public safety.
The decision by a majority of the Minneapolis City Council to strip critical funding from the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) is not only shortsighted — it’s a huge blow to the stability and safety of our community. The MPD is but one part of an entire public safety ecosystem overseen by the Office of Community Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette, and includes behavioral crisis response teams and neighborhood safety teams. While Mayor Jacob Frey’s public safety team, including Commissioner Barnette and MPD Chief Brian O’Hara, is committed to public safety reform with the goal of balancing and integrating all of these public safety resources to provide the right response from the right team at the right time and place, the City Council is undermining that goal.
By slashing vital recruitment budgets, Council Members Emily Koski, Elliott Payne, Robin Wonsley, Jeremiah Ellison, Jamal Osman, Katie Cashman, Jason Chavez, Aisha Chughtai and Aurin Chowdhury have effectively reversed the modest but tangible progress the MPD was making toward restoring its ranks and reforming its operations. These council members also diverted $1.8 million from the MPD along with $1.1 million in funds from coordinated citywide beyond policing work to ward-specific projects with no proven track record in handling the urgent public safety needs of Minneapolis.
—The Minnesota (nee: Minneapolis) Star-Tribune, December 19th, 2024. (Emphasis mine.)
(Classical reference in headline.)
OFFLOADING YOUR MENTAL TASKS TO DEVICES HAS ITS PRICE: Memory Problems Are Surging in Adults Under 40, Large US Study Finds. Cognitive offloading leads to cognitive atrophy.
OVERPRODUCTION OF ELITES: Grade Inflation Produced Mamdani’s Proletariat: Unemployable college grads blame capitalism, but the real culprit is higher-ed subsidies.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp attributed Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York mayor to a reverse class warfare: “I think the average Ivy League grad voting for this mayor is highly annoyed that their education is not that valuable, and the person down the street who knows how to drill for oil and gas, who’s moved to Texas, has a more valuable profession.”
He has a point. Colleges are graduating a surfeit of young people who lack hard or even soft skills. Even as employers complain about a dearth of qualified workers, a growing college-educated proletariat can’t find jobs they want to work. They believe their degrees aren’t being adequately rewarded by the free market and blame capitalism.
The real culprit is enormous government subsidization of higher education, which has distorted the labor supply. More than seven million bachelor’s degree recipients have entered the labor force since January 2020. Meanwhile, the number of workers without college degrees has declined by about 200,000 and those with associate degrees has shrunk by 1.1 million.
As baby boomers in blue-collar professions retire, labor shortages are growing in industries like construction, trucking and manufacturing. President Trump’s deportations compound the problem. Nearly 50% of small-business owners reported few or no qualified job applicants last month in a National Federation of Independent Business survey. “Finding qualified workers is proving to be impossible,” a Missouri manufacturer told the NFIB. The sentiment was echoed by a California auto shop: “We need to teach the trades in high school again. Trade jobs can pay well, but there is a real shortage of people willing/able to do the job.”
Too many young college grads are unemployed because they aren’t willing or able to do the jobs that are available. As of October 2024, 30.4% of 20- to 29-year-olds who had earned bachelor’s degrees that year weren’t working, compared with 21.9% for those who had earned associate degrees during the same period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Fortunately for many college grads, they have parents with the means to support them financially while they search for the perfect job. Young adults with lesser pedigrees may not be as picky about jobs because they can’t afford to be. They will deliver packages for Amazon or man a supermarket cash register to pay their bills.
Recent college grads view such drudgery as beneath them and think employers are too demanding. “For Gen Z-ers, Work Is Now More Depressing Than Unemployment,” read a New York Times op-ed headline last week. “The entire process of getting and keeping an entry-level job has become a grueling and dehumanizing ordeal over the past decade,” the author writes. Young people grouse that employers are monitoring their productivity with “surveillance state technologies” and expect them to “do six jobs in a 40-hour workweek.”
Heaven forefend that they be asked to complete multiple assignments in a week—like kids in grade school once were expected to do before schools started banning homework. And how dare employers refuse to pay them for scrolling TikTok?
It’s understandable that grads might feel indignant about employer demands after having earned stellar GPAs for little effort and mediocre work. A recent Harvard report found that A’s account for about 60% of grades, compared with 25% two decades ago. Some 80% of grades awarded at Yale in 2023 were A’s or A-minuses.
It almost requires an effort to get a C. In a Substack essay, Johns Hopkins political scientist Yascha Mounk observes: “In one of the oldest jokes about the Soviet Union, a worker says, ‘We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.’ To an uncomfortable degree, American universities now work in a similar fashion: Students pretend to do their work, and academics pretend to grade them.” Parents and students who pay $80,000 a year expect high marks in return.
Yep.
I CERTAINLY HOPE THIS IS TRUE:
🚨BREAKING: Keirs Starmer's government is completely falling apart behind the scenes tonight, per Bloomberg
Starmer has days left… pic.twitter.com/2Q0XgJWXHh
— Inevitable West (@Inevitablewest) November 11, 2025
BRENDAN O’NEIL: BBC’s Trump deception is a stain on all of Britain — and it’s just one bit of its bias.
In November 2024, just days before the US presidential election, the program aired a shocking clip of Trump on Jan. 6 saying, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell.”
Only one problem: Trump never said that. The BBC was lying.
It spliced together two entirely different remarks, made 54 minutes apart, to make it look like he was marshalling the mob into a frenzy of violence.
What Trump actually said was that people should march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol and “make your voices heard”.
By deleting his “peacefully” comment, and replacing it with a comment he made almost an hour later about “fighting like hell” against corruption, the BBC painted him as a demonic instigator of chaos.
The seriousness of this cannot be overstated.
The BBC doctored the footage. It twisted the truth to serve ideological ends.
These were Pravda levels of manipulation.
The BBC’s London headquarters honors George Orwell with a statue outside the building.
Yet the modern Beeb seems hell-bent on emulating Big Brother, Orwell’s most monstrous fictional creation, which likewise mangled reality for political purposes.
* * * * * * * *
Trump is now threatening the BBC with a $1 billion lawsuit if it doesn’t issue a “full and fair retraction” of the lies it broadcast.
Good on him.
What the BBC did was nothing less than electoral meddling — the grotesque slandering of a presidential candidate on the eve of an election.
Just ask employees of the BBC, who are taking this moment to brag about how big a footprint their state media has in the US:
JOHN NOLTE: Newsom, Democrats, and Jon Stewart Furious Needy Will Receive Food Stamps.
The fury from far-left elected Democrats, and socialists like Jon Stewart, over the federal government reopening tells you they don’t give a damn about the poor going hungry.
They wanted the government to remain closed. Even though if the government had not reopened, millions would not have received their monthly SNAP payment, which is the federal government’s food stamp program.
Here’s oh-so compassionate Jon Stewart speaking for the Democrat party as he rages against reopening the government…
“They fucking caved on the shutdown, not even a full week removed from the best election night results they’ve had in years,” Stewart screeched. “You had the wind at your back, election victories all over the country… Democrats, you sold out the entire shutdown not to get what you wanted but for a promise not to get what you wanted later.”
Here’s the Democrat party’s 2028 presidential frontrunner, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, on the vote to reopen the government: “Pathetic. This isn’t a deal. It’s a surrender. Don’t bend the knee!”
The Democrat party as a whole was so opposed to reopening the government and ensuring people got their food stamps that the U.S. senators trotted out by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to finally break the filibuster are the senators least vulnerable to a primary challenge. They are not up for reelection next year.
It just goes to prove that Democrats, including people like Jon Stewart and the party’s base of activists and fundraisers, really were and are willing to see needy people go hungry if that’s what it takes to ensure taxpayers foot the bill for illegal aliens to receive health care and the wealthy to continue to receive Obamacare subsidies.
Meanwhile, we’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Dick Durbin(!) is a voice of sanity: Wow –> We Could Watch Little Dickie Durbin Throw His Own Party Under The Bus All Day Every Day (Watch).
GOODER AND HARDER CALIFORNIA: Lefty California lawmaker and ‘drag queen advocate’ defends trans wife-beater in LA gym locker room row.
Tish Hyman, a Grammy-nominated musician who went viral after posting a shouting match with transgender woman Alexis Black after the incident at a Gold’s Gym, confronted state lawmaker and self-described “drag queen advocate” Scott Wiener at a town hall-style meeting.
“As a lesbian woman who was attacked in the women’s locker room at Gold’s Gym this week by a self-identifying trans woman with a documented history of domestic violence, I’m deeply concerned about women’s safety in female-only spaces,” she said from the front row just feet from Wiener.
“We want everyone to be safe. And we also know that we have trans people, both men and women — who are men and women,” he responded.
“What would you say to women who are seeking assurance that their safety will be protected from men, who by California law, can self-identify as women in women-only spaces. Sir please tell me,” she pleaded.
Wiener stammered in a word-salad defense of Black, who was sentenced to a year in prison in 2022 in Ohio after pleading guilty to savagely beating his then-wife. The male lawmaker even attempted to explain what a woman is.
“So trans women, are women,” he added.
Hyman maintained her composure, complimenting Wiener on his legislative accomplishments while urging him to take the matter seriously.
“I’m telling you now, millions of women across America are being harassed and sexually assaulted in locker rooms. I’m a lesbian black woman, I’m not transphobic, I’m not homophobic … but I do see a lot of these bills you’ve passed that are dangerous for women and young children,” she said.
Wiener, 55, who is openly gay, is described as “one of the strongest LGBTQ civil rights champions in the nation” on his senate profile.
Wiener is willing to go full Orwell to defend men in women’s locker-rooms:
Anyone else notice how he said “women and cis women”…. ? 😳He’s making it abundantly clear that now men are the women and real women must take the new ideological name.
His priority is the men in women’s locker rooms and prisons and sports. @listen2tish https://t.co/JI9ZJTBDIu
— Kim Shasby Jones (@KimJonesICONS) November 11, 2025
As NRO’s Will Swaim warned on Saturday: Scott Wiener Makes Pelosi Look Normal, and He Wants to Fill Her Seat.