LEARN TO CODE: Elon Musk Just Sent a Huge Warning Shot to ‘Woke’ Twitter Employees Ahead of Buyout Deal Expected to Close.

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk just send a huge warning shot to ‘Woke’ Twitter employees ahead of his buyout offer for the social media giant, a deal that is expected to close next week.

“Twitter’s workforce is likely to be hit with massive cuts in the coming months, no matter who owns the company, interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post show, a change likely to have major impact on its ability to control harmful content and prevent data security crises,” the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

“Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000,” the report added.

DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Black Canada Lynx Caught on Camera For The First Time, And There’s Video.

Meanwhile, on of my Facebook friends was just sharing video of a cougar in the Smoky Mountains. Are they back, or did they never leave? When I was hiking as a teenager we came across a deer carcass with pawprints the size of my hand. They looked like mountain lion prints to us.

UPDATE: Fixed a typo, but it will live forever in puns in the comments.

WELL, IT’S MADE FROM BEANS AFTER ALL: Coffee: Just As Healthy As Vegetables. “Coffee is as nutritionally valuable as practically any vegetable, something that should be given the same respect as kale, chard, lima beans, broccoli, or any of the other traditional powerhouse vegetables nutritionists (including me) are always attempting to shove down your throat. Coffee is probably the main supplier of polyphenols 43 in the American diet, and probably the rest of the world’s diets, too. Accordingly, it’s one of the healthiest things you can pour down your gullet.”

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Adam Carolla, Dr. Drew Reveal Exactly Why We Mistrust Mainstream Media.

They replayed Biden’s 1987 comments as well as a news report skewering his lies.

“That’s who he is,” Carolla said of Biden, noting the disparate treatment afforded his predecessor. “But you gotta watch out for Trump. That guy’s a liar.”

They followed up the news flashback with far-Left anchor Jake Tapper lobbing softballs at President Biden during a recent interview.

The subject?

First son Hunter Biden, the target of an FBI probe. The feds have “voluminous evidence” of criminal activities, according to press reports.

He notes how Tapper must ask Biden about his troubled son. Otherwise, the anchor’s bias would be so obvious Sen. Bernie Sanders would cry foul. What he does, though, is throw a generic question at the president sans follow-up.

And that’s precisely what Tapper did.

“He must check the box, otherwise people will say, ‘you’re not a reporter, you’re in the bag for Democrats,’” he said. “He must ask it, and he will, but who cares?”

It’s like a cop charged with investigating a suspicious man’s trunk, the comic podcaster said. The officer could pop the trunk and peer inside, or he could ask the driver about the trunk’s contents and take his word for it.

The latter is Jake Tapper’s approach.

To be fair, the CNN anchor did ask a follow-up question, one that would make Woodward and Bernstein grind their teeth.

“You’re about to turn 80 next month, Happy Birthday, ahead of time,” Tapper said.

“If you wanna know what I’ve been talking about, look no further than that,” Carolla said. Later, Carolla added a scenario that highlights media mistrust even further.

“It’s not the politician. It’s the news anchor, the reporters, they’re not doing their job,” Carolla said.

The problem is so ingrained in journalism today that we expect Tapper to fall down on the job.

“If Jake Tapper followed up with the Hunter Biden thing and really squeezed him, we’d all be like, ‘oh my God, why did he do that? See what he did?’” Carolla said.

Although Tapper would be devoured by the left on social media for actually doing his job: “NBC reporter’s comment about Fetterman draws criticism,” notes…AP.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Mehmet Oz Now Running Neck And Neck And Neck With John Fetterman.

NOT THE CURRENT TWIT, AN EARLIER ONE: King Charles Demands Gunsmiths Help Him Develop a Gun Registry.

“SOD OFF SWAMPY,” BUT IN GERMAN. Hilarious: This May Just Be the Best Response to Climate Change Radicals.

The young woman with pink hair is bordering on hysterical as she tries to convince people of the importance of their actions.

The usual reaction to people like this has been to cut them loose or free them from the glue and arrest them.

But the folks at Volkswagen may just have had the best response ever to this kind of idiocy.

Sixteen members of “Scientist Rebellion” (which looks like an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion) went to the Porsche pavilion at Volkswagen’s Autostadt in Germany. Nine of them glued themselves to the floor, they also had six other people, and one of the glued “scientists” claimed that some were “on hunger strike until our demands to decarbonize the German transport sector are met.”

Hope they ate well because that’s not happening anytime soon. He’s a “researcher in social psychology” but he’s a “scientist” wearing a lab coat?

But hold on, here comes the best part. Rather than calling the police, getting them loose, and having them arrested, the Volkswagen people left them there and closed, turning everything off, with them glued to the floor, without food, heat, and as, they complained, any way to go to the bathroom.

Gianluca Grimalda later clarified that if the support people went out, they couldn’t get back into the building. Too bad, so sad.

It says something about this group that they claim to be “scientists” but they couldn’t consider and account for the various possibilities here, including defecation. People mocked them into next week for this.

Earlier: Joel Kotkin: Environmentalism is a Fundamentalist Religion.

And Michael Shellenberger has a thread on the intersection of apocalyptic environmentalism and exhibitionist narcissism that’s well worth a read:

THE 21^st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED*: Aldi considers selling edible insects to help families through the cost-of-living crisis.

Budget supermarket Aldi is considering selling edible insect recipe kits as the cost of living crisis hits families.

Bugs such as crickets are known to be a cheap and sustainable form of protein.

Now Aldi is weighing up whether to stock products by Yum Bug, which make the insect recipe kits.

Yum Bug founders Aaron Thomas and Leo Taylor, both 28, are competing against other start-ups to get their product on the supermarket’s shelves.

The duo were picked from hundreds of applicant’s to appear on Channel 4’s ‘Aldi’s Next Big Thing’ tomorrow.

Toss in some Christmas Dinner in a Can if you really want to splurge during the holiday season!

* But it is the future I was promised in the 1970s:

KINSLEY GAFFE: Biden says John Fetterman’s wife will be ‘great lady in the Senate.’

President Biden raised eyebrows Thursday when he said that Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s wife would be a “great lady in the Senate” — appearing to imply that the Democrat would be unable to serve due to his poor health.

“John, thank you very much for running, I really do appreciate it,” Biden said at an event in Pittsburgh. “And Gisele, you’re going to be a great, great lady in the Senate.”

Fetterman had a stroke in the same week that he won the May 17 Democratic Senate primary and continues to experience health issues, though he and his campaign insist he’s well enough to hold office.

Some of Biden’s detractors suggested the 79-year-old president’s words may have signaled more than a Freudian slip.

“Biden’s dementia often has him blurt out what his handlers are planning,” tweeted former Trump Treasury Department official Monica Crowley. “Here he is, telling Fetterman’s wife that she’ll be ‘a great, great lady in the Senate.’”

Why, it’s like she’s the de facto candidate or something.

Exit question: “Joe Biden and John Fetterman are currently flying together on Air Force 1. Is the conversation between the two of them the most unintelligible in American political history? I vote yes,” Clay Travis tweets.

Related: Bad Medicine: Doctor Granting Fetterman Clean Bill of Health Is a Campaign Donor. Dr. Clifford Chen has given tens of thousands of dollars to Democrats, including Fetterman.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Invisible Hand or Iron Fist? The RealClearInvestigations guide to politicized capitalism identifies the chief perpetrators (Michael Bloomberg, Larry Fink, climate pressure groups, the Business Roundtable) and the leaders of the resistance to it.

WHY DAVOS LOVES COVID: Against the Great Reset. The World Economic Forum’s totalitarian scheme for “resetting” the world’s politics and economy may sound like a ridiculous fantasy from the Davos globalists, but it’s already underway, as you can see in this new book edited by Michael Walsh. It includes essays by Michael Anton, Jeremy Black, the late Angelo Codevilla, Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Douglas Murray, and a dozen others. I’ve got one examining the Covid lockdowns and mandates as a trial run of the Great Reset — and a disaster, of course. The economic consequences are summed up in an essay by David Goldman, the deputy editor of Asia Times: 

The Great Reset is not a scheme for implementation in the distant future. It’s happening now, in the form of the most radical transformation of world economic policy in modern history, with the possible exception of World War II. The economic landscape that has emerged after the COVID-19 recession of 2019–2021 is radically different from what preceded it. The world economy has already been reset, and the perpetrators of the Great Reset want to make these changes irreversible.

One-fifth of the industrial nations’ GDP shifted to the balance sheet of governments during the COVID-19 pandemic, by far the biggest and fastest transfer of financial resources to governments in world history. Except for a few communist revolutions, no such transfer of economic power to governments from the private sector ever has occurred and never on a global scale.

Read the whole thing.

FOR A CHANGE, CAMPUS ACTIVISM IN A GOOD CAUSE: Fighting Fordham’s Vaccine Mandate. The university wants to force students, faculty, and staff to receive a second Covid booster shot—but it’s meeting resistance.

WHEN YOU CALL PEOPLE WHO SAY SENSIBLE THINGS “FAR RIGHT” THE OUTCOME MAY NOT BE WHAT YOU HOPE FOR: Gruesome killing of 12-year-old girl shocks France and sparks far-right backlash: Far-right politicians have lashed out at French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist government and blamed its immigration policies for the schoolgirl’s death.

MAKE CLEANING EASIER: Shark Handheld Vacuum. #CommissionEarned

SAYING GOODBYE TO THE AUDI R8. “The R8 is still a sports car, the seating position is low, and getting in and out is more of a heave and a tumble than a red-carpet arrival, but the seats are soft and adjustable while still looking sporty. It’s a roomy car, with space for larger pilots and passengers but with no pillow requirement for those of us less blessed with height. The Spyder lacks some of the storage capacity of the coupe, but a savvy packer could get a weekend’s worth of junk in the frunk, and road trip snacks in the hidden back console. Truly, what more do you need? Maybe a few more years of opportunity to buy a new one.”

Nice car.

LIVE AT 4PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ with Kruiser, VodkaPundit, Special Guest Larry O’Connor.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Carolla, Dr. Drew Reveal Exactly Why We Mistrust Mainstream Media.

PANIC TIME: Dems Shifting Campaign $$$ Away from Safe Seats to Protect Safer Seats. “It doesn’t often happen that Democrats appear to be writing off a district that Presidentish Joe Biden won in 2020 by nine points, to shore up a district that Biden won by 13 points.”

READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation). #CommissionEarned

FIGHT THE POWER: Ducey to Biden on border containers: Best I can do is nope. “Arizona has refused the federal government’s demand to take down double-stacked shipping containers it placed to fill gaps in the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, saying it won’t do so until the U.S. moves to construct a permanent barrier instead.”

SO SORT OF LIKE THE FBI AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS THEN: Corrupt endothelial cells found to protect blood cancer cells from chemotherapy.

BAD MEDICINE: Doctor Granting Fetterman Clean Bill of Health Is a Campaign Donor.

BY THE TIME ELECTION DAY ROLLS AROUND, THERE WON’T BE A SINGLE ONE OF HIS CONSTITUENCIES HE HASN’T ALIENATED: Wut? Joe Biden Says ‘Yes, There Should Be’ Restrictions on Abortion.

Alternate take: Wait a moment for the inevitable walkback by the White House staff who actually make Joe’s decisions.

SOME PARTS OF AMERICA STILL WORK: SpaceX launches 54 Starlink more satellites, lands rocket in 100th mission from Florida pad: Thursday’s launch was SpaceX’s 48th orbital mission of the year so far. It’s barely even news when this happens now, which is the best news of all.

IT ALWAYS ENDS BADLY FOR THE SQUIRREL IN THESE STORIES, THOUGH: Squirrel blamed for power outage affecting nearly 2,000 in Oregon.