IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: This Sneaky Senator’s Insider Trade Isn’t the Most Corrupt Part of This Story.

NATO’S NEW NORTHERN FLANK: Russia warns of tension as Finland shuts last border crossing.

The northern crossing at Raja-Jooseppi closed for two weeks at 14:00 (12:00 GMT) on Wednesday, after Helsinki accused Russia of channelling asylum seekers towards Finland.

Finland says it has become the target of a Russian “hybrid operation”.
Some 900 asylum seekers have crossed the border this month.

The influx is dramatically higher than the previous number of barely one a day and Finland’s border guard says before August 2023 Russian authorities barred foreign citizens from travelling to the area without the necessary visas.

The takeaway here is that a nation of fewer than six million people was willing to close their border over 900 illegals and to get the job done in a matter of weeks.

HOLIDAY DEAL: BISSELL Little Green Multi-Purpose Portable Carpet and Upholstery Cleaner. #CommissionEarned

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Medical schools now sell credentials, not knowledge, scholars argue. That’s how most schools are going these days.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: How Many European Women Will Be Raped Before Their Leaders Do Something About Those ‘Refugees?’

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Over 100 Yale students, faculty pledge to risk arrest to defend students accused of anti-Semitism.

I am amused to see their sudden opposition to “doxxing” and support for free speech. But that’s not how the New Rules they made work.

BE CAREFUL WHO YOU’RE VOTING FOR: The Real Political Parties (VIP)

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Satellite imagery reveals explosion at China’s Jiuquan spaceport. “The explosion is far from Jiuquan’s launch infrastructure and is unlikely to impact other launch-related activity at the site. CASIC meanwhile uses transport erector launchers for its rockets.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Jack Smith Is Our ‘Fascist Thug of the Year.’ “Merrick Garland will never stop abusing his power to punish Republicans for keeping him off of the Supreme Court. The people running Joe Biden’s brain knew what they were doing when they nominated him to be the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. Of course, his minions like Jack Smith aren’t enforcing the law now, they’re just making it up to ruin the lives of anyone who disagrees with them politically.”

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Washington Post Says “Involuntary Layoffs” Could Be Next.

One hundred and twenty Washington Post employees have accepted the buyouts the publication announced last month, interim CEO Patty Stonesifer told staffers in a memo Tuesday morning. Stonesifer contended that the Post needs 240 people to accept the “voluntary separation package” to “help restore The Post’s financial health.”

In a followup e-mail to staff, Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee told staff that only 36 newsroom employees had accepted offers, about “30 percent of our goal across the News department of 119 acceptances of the voluntary buyout package.”

Sad. You’d think a bunch of leftists would be more willing to make sacrifices for the greater good.

NOTICE WHAT IS NOT SAID: The Hill is widely read on Capitol Hill and often provides solid reporting on who is up and who is down in Congress. But check out this piece today that reports Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) must find a way to compromise with his holds on nearly 400 military promotions or face “getting rolled by GOP” colleagues. Note that nowhere in the story is there any suggestion that anybody other than Tuberville faces the necessity of compromising.

What about the Pentagon, which is paying for female service members’ abortion travel expenses — a violation of long-standing federal law against using tax dollars to support abortion? Why isn’t anybody pressuring President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to sit down and negotiate a compromise with Tuberville?

FULL SELF DRIVING WILL HAVE TO WAIT A BIT LONGER: GM to slash spending at Cruise by ‘hundreds of millions of dollars.’ “Barra and CFO Paul Jacobson said Wednesday there would be more specific information in the coming weeks about what this new Cruise will look like following the outcome of two independent safety and incident reviews that are already underway.”

CHANGE: As crime surges, ‘Defund’ morphs to ‘Defend’ the police.

IT’S THE 21ST CENTURY. ACT LIKE IT. Europe’s Entitlement Bird Looking for a Place to Roost.

A problem I had with most of the “foreign policy folks across the pond” that I worked with was their incredibly blinkered view of the USA, and specifically U.S. domestic politics.

Directly or indirectly their view of the USA comes from the Washington Post or the New York Times. If they have been to the USA, it is usually somewhere on the Acela Corridor or California. They have no idea not just how large the USA is, but how broad our domestic pollical scene is – and what is hard enough for Americans to understand is an undecipherable language to them.

That wouldn’t be a problem if they were self-aware of their lack of understanding, but it is just the opposite. There is a kind of aggressive weaponized ignorance that reminds me of the Norwegian Army Major who was very insistent that he understood race relations in the American South because, “I know your country. I spent a year at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.”

You can see that blinkered view on great display on the domestic U.S. coverage of political issues in The Economist. It isn’t malignant, just ignorant.

Oh, sometimes it’s malignant. Plus: “Just when Europe needs Germany to step up, she lacks not just the leadership to do so, but may not have the industry to do it even if she wanted to.”

It’s as if the leadership of the West, collectively, wants to make the West poor and weak.

Related: Europe is Whistling Past the Graveyard on Defense. “The European Union is, to put it bluntly, a bunch of states in a trenchcoat pretending to be a foreign policy superpower.”

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND THE LEFT CONTINUES: UC Berkeley Sued, Harvard Under Investigation and Sen. Schumer Pins Rampant Anti-Semitism on the Left.

“MUST-SEE TV”: This morning at 10:AM, the House Committee on Weaponization of the Federal Government will livestream the testimony of muckraking journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi who yesterday published a story that anyone even remotely interested in the collusion (yes, I used that word) between the government and scummy faux-“disinformation” outfits who are raking in the dough, some of it — surprise, surprise — coming from taxpayer funds.

You thought The Green Nude Eel was a boondoggle? Son, you’re just a dog-faced pony soldier. That’s all about politicians lining their pockets (and those of their donors) while @ss-raping American industry. Soros smiles.

No, my friends, this (IMHO, anyway) is far more insidious. If we are prevented from being heard discussing — heaven forbid challenging — the Permanent Washington Narrative, it’s lights out, game over. There’s a reason the First Amendment is, well, you know, first.

Again, here’s the link to watch the hearings.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: ‘We’re taking it out of hide’: Pentagon says it has no money for Middle East buildup.

DIGITAL FISHING EXPEDITION: Did You ‘Like’ or ‘Retweet’ Anything Trump Tweeted? You’re Under Investigation.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Dean of Columbia Law School Resigns Amid Anti-Semitism Scandals: Gillian Lester’s likely replacement is David Schizer, a former dean who helped deepen Columbia’s ties with Israel.

The law school has been battling accusations of anti-Semitism ever since Hamas’s Oct. 7 rampage through southern Israel, which Lester initially described as the “violence that erupted in Israel and Gaza.” Her statement, which did not mention Hamas or anti-Semitism, touched off weeks of damage control at the elite law school, where pro-Palestinian students recently occupied a campus building and disrupted class in violation of school policy. Columbia declined to break up the protest or say whether the students would be punished.

Though the law school has not announced Lester’s replacement, an alum with ties to the administration said that David Schizer, who served as dean from 2004 to 2014, is the leading candidate. A scholar of tax and energy law, Schizer was tapped this month to help lead Columbia University’s task force on anti-Semitism. As dean, he also helped deepen ties between the law school and the Jewish state, opening a Center for Israeli Legal Studies in 2006 that brings prominent Israeli scholars to campus.

Nice to see some pushback against the hate that has infested that institution.

ABOUT TIME: Europe in Open Revolt: Geert Wilders’ landslide victory in the Netherlands has shocked the chattering class. It shouldn’t have. Plus: How to save France.

That the anti-immigration populist now leads the largest party in the Dutch parliament is indeed a stunning outcome given his status as an outcast from the mainstream of Dutch politics.

But zoom out and his victory is entirely in keeping with a continent-wide trend. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni has been in office for a year. In Germany, the right-wing AfD party is rising in the polls. In France, Marine Le Pen is more popular than Emmanuel Macron.

In 2016, the twin electoral wins for Donald Trump and Brexit were said to herald the arrival of a populist moment. That was seven years ago. This populist moment now seems to be lasting an awfully long time.

And yet serious, good-faith examinations of why outsider parties are faring so well are hard to come by. Instead, we must wade through unhelpful, knee-jerk descriptions of everyone from an Argentine libertarian to an Italian Catholic national-conservative to a Dutch agnostic nativist as “Trump-like.” The comparison usually prefaces a shallow, parochial analysis.

Read the whole thing. And “shallow, parochial analysis” is all they’re capable of — or at least, all they’re willing to produce.

THEY ARE: Jamie Dimon worried US economy in a ‘sugar high,’ says lower-earning Americans should be ‘p—ed off.’

OF COURSE THEY DO: Federal Agencies Neglect Anti-Asian Discrimination in Education. “Discrimination against Asian-American students in admissions at selective universities has been an open secret for decades. An entire cottage industry even coached ambitious applicants on how to be less Asian. Data produced in litigation showed that for applicants with academic credentials in the top 10 percent of Harvard’s pool, the odds of admission were 56.1 percent for African Americans, 31.3 percent for Hispanics, and 15.3 percent for whites, but only 12.6 percent for Asian Americans. In emails uncovered in the parallel lawsuit against the University of North Carolina, admissions officers were candid about preferring applicants of other races over Asian Americans. . . . Yet the federal agencies charged with enforcing civil rights laws prohibiting this discrimination largely have done nothing in response.”

HIS NEWSPAPER LIKES BIDEN BUT HIS WALLET PREFERS DESANTIS: Jeff Bezos Will Save Billions In Taxes By Moving To Miami.

DISCIPLINING THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE: NCLA Triumph in Unlawful Charter Boat Surveillance Rule Case Leads Gov’t to Pay Attorneys’ Fees. “NCLA has represented more than 1,300 federally permitted charter boat owners in this class-action lawsuit against the Final Rule, which required every boat to install an onboard Vessel Monitoring System tracking device that continuously transmitted its GPS location to NMFS. The Rule forced charter boat captains to pay for these devices, which tracked boats whether they were being used for a charter-fishing trip or something else. This 24-hour surveillance was unnecessary, unduly burdensome, and violated the Fourth Amendment by searching without probable cause or a warrant. It also exceeded NMFS’s authority under the Magnuson-Stevens Act and was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. NCLA also complained the rule required reporting data that the agencies had nowhere specified in proposing the rule for comment. The Fifth Circuit largely agreed with NCLA’s analysis and held that the GPS-tracking requirement was unlawful for several reasons.”

Reminder/Disclosure: I’m on the NCLA Advisory Board.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Russia’s Coming Implosion (and Ours, Too). “At a time when Russia needs every able-bodied young man making babies with every willing and able gal, scenes like this one have become common across the country.”