COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Study links excessive social media use with lowered academic aptitude.
Archive for 2025
October 15, 2025
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Etekcity Camping Lanterns for Power Outages 4 Pack. #CommissionEarned
PUT HASAN IN A CAGE:
Another Hasan Leak:
“I don’t give a shit if they bite Kaya, it’s hilarious when she’s afraid” pic.twitter.com/Qw5sAOXBxz
— TECTONE 🇺🇸 (@Tectone) October 15, 2025
LONG LIVE THE KING: The Democrats Are Running Out of Feet.
Plugging my own article for a change.
WILD: Loon Launching Loving Lasso Lacks Legitimacy, Lands Litigation.
Loving County is not only the least populated county in Texas, but with 64 official inhabitants as of the 2020 census, it’s also the least populated county in the entire nation. (Kalawao County, Hawaii, on an island that was formerly a leper colony, comes in second.) Flat desert land up along the New Mexico border, Loving doesn’t have much to recommend it except splendid isolation.
And oil.
It’s that last little bit, Loving’s notable oil wealth, that probably inspired a carpetbagger gadfly from Indiana to try to take over Loving County.
Read the whole thing.
SOMETHING NEFARIOUS GOING ON:
Obama is in London again.
Last time Obama made a trip to 10 Downing Street to meet with UK officials was when…
They all got caught in the spying operation on Trump.
Wonder who he’s meeting with now?
The snake.pic.twitter.com/PTfEd8tNeA
— C3 (@C_3C_3) October 14, 2025
A PROFILE OF MICHAEL WALSH’S LATEST BOOKS: Valor, Virtue, And Manliness Can Rescue Civilization.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: You Realize, of Course, This Means War (With Trump). “The drug cartels basically said out loud this week that they want war. They might just get one. Before we get to war and other niceties, here’s why they might have just opened a can of military-grade whoop-ass directly into their own faces.”
BEN RHODES FROWNS: Former Obama Official Ben Rhodes Can’t Bring Himself To Give Trump Credit For Israel-Hamas Deal.
“It’s not really a peace deal in the sense that we still don’t know who’s going to govern Gaza. We still don’t know if Hamas is going to disarm,” Rhodes continued. “We’re at phase one, quite literally, of what would be a very long road to some kind of lasting peace. So, look, I think a transactional — and, you know, it’s interesting to reflect on that quote you put up, I mean, a transactional style of diplomacy, it can get you that kind of short-term win, right? You know, you take care of a piece of business, but it’s not necessarily designed for the kind of patient follow-through and painstaking work that is necessary to address something as deep as the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.”
Trump terminated the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran in May 2018, calling it “a horrible deal that should never, ever have been made.” The 2015 agreement faced backlash from critics of the deal claiming it “paved the road” for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
No wonder Rhodes is unhappy with Trump’s role in securing a hostage exchange and (likely temporary) ceasefire, as Jewish Insider noted in July:
Rhodes said, “If you think you can continue to take money from AIPAC, whether you’re Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer or whomever, AIPAC is part of the constellation of forces that have delivered this country into the hands of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.”
“And you cannot give them a carveout,” Rhodes continued. “And we need to have this fight as a party because these are the wrong people to have under your tent. I’m usually a big-tent person, but the kind of people who are supporting Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump, I don’t want them — my leaders of my political party — like, cozying up to those people.”
During his time at the White House, Rhodes was one of Obama’s closest advisors and masterminded the public relations push behind the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He told The New York Times in 2016 that he “created an echo chamber” of experts who would feed reporters positive analyses of the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” Rhodes stated.
Rhodes was a strident critic of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly earning himself the nickname of “Hamas” in the White House. In his 2019 book The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, Rhodes wrote that Israel was “driven by the settler movement and ultra-Orthodox emigres” and that Netanyahu used “political pressure within the United States to demoralize any meaningful push for peace, just as he used settlements as a means of demoralizing Palestinians.”
As Lee Smith wrote at the beginning of 2020: Obama Passed the Buck. Trump Refused to Play. “The Iran deal was never meant to stop Iran from building a bomb—it was supposed to delay it until disaster happened on someone else’s watch.”
SPOILER: HAMAS WILL DO NONE OF THESE THINGS.
Statement from Adm. Brad Cooper, CENTCOM commander: pic.twitter.com/9nhijzThvb
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) October 15, 2025
SPACE: How we sharpened the James Webb telescope’s vision from a million kilometres away.
Hubble started its life seeing out of focus – its mirror had been ground precisely, but incorrectly. By looking at known stars and comparing the ideal and measured images (exactly like what optometrists do), it was possible to figure out a “prescription” for this optical error and design a lens to compensate.
The correction required seven astronauts to fly up on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1993 to install the new optics. Hubble orbits Earth just a few hundred kilometres above the surface, and can be reached by astronauts.
By contrast, Webb is roughly 1.5 million kilometres away – we can’t visit and service it, and need to be able to fix issues without changing any hardware.
This is where AMI comes in. This is the only Australian hardware on board, designed by astronomer Peter Tuthill.
It was put on Webb to diagnose and measure any blur in its images. Even nanometres of distortion in Webb’s 18 hexagonal primary mirrors and many internal surfaces will blur the images enough to hinder the study of planets or black holes, where sensitivity and resolution are key.
AMI filters the light with a carefully structured pattern of holes in a simple metal plate, to make it much easier to tell if there are any optical misalignments.
We wanted to use this mode to observe the birth places of planets, as well as material being sucked into black holes. But before any of this, AMI showed Webb wasn’t working entirely as hoped.
If you’re at all interested in the technical details behind the fix, there are tons of them at the link.
“THE WORSE, THE BETTER,” LENIN ADVISED: Doxing Law Enforcement Officers Isn’t How You Get Your Way, But It’s Getting Worse.
LEARN SOMETHING NEW: Bread Baking for Beginners: The Essential Guide to Baking Kneaded Breads, No-Knead Breads, and Enriched Breads. #CommissionEarned
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Public Health Destroyed Its Own Credibility Long Before RFK Jr. Arrived.
We need spend little time remembering the unscientific, patronizing and erroneous advice and dictums issued from the medical and scientific establishment regarding the coronavirus during the pandemic. Social distancing, masks, school and business closures — almost all of it was unnecessary. These totalitarian measures saved relatively few lives, cost our nation trillions of dollars, and imperiled the educational and social development of an entire generation.
Yet who, exactly, has admitted their errors or paid any serious price for their disastrous “expert advice” and “recommendations”? The unflappable and unrepentant Anthony Fauci has paid no price for his errors, nor has former Planned Parenthood president and WaPo contributor Leanna Wen.
Admittedly, I myself am a bit hesitant when it comes to RFK Jr.’s medical assessments and recommendations, which also seem to sometimes lack sufficient evidence and rely more on foregone conclusions about the harmful effects of certain drugs or foods than unbiased, longitudinal research. That said, to accuse him of eroding public distrust in our nation’s medical establishment is risible. RFK Jr. didn’t vitiate the medical establishment’s reputation. They did it to themselves.
Much more at the link, but I’d add one thing.
GenZ — including my sons, whose education and attitudes were deeply impacted by the lockdowns — trends much more conservative than any other postwar generation. Maybe there’s no better way to discredit big government than to have one — and let Dems go wild with it for a couple of years.
SIGN TAPPED:
taps sign https://t.co/ffvvM7ZSbH pic.twitter.com/X9IYoIC1AU
— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) October 15, 2025
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Hundreds of colleges could lose federal student loans due to default rates, economist says.
LIVING HISTORY: Trump’s Power Success Obama-Biden’s Wages Of Weakness
How fortunate for peace and stability to have an American president who knows how to use American power to achieve positive change in supposedly intractable international problems.
Way way down the essay:
On the U.S. domestic front, a jealous, condescending former president, Barack Obama, won’t give Trump credit for his momentous, decadal diplomatic achievement. Understand Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing. Barack isn’t stupid. He knows his prize was a sham — and Trump’s success turns his sham into a historical wound.
Just the facts.
OUCH: Russia’s seaborne fuel exports sank 17% in September after drone attacks.
Russia’s seaborne oil product exports fell 17.1% in September from August to 7.58 million metric tons due to less fuel production as various refineries were impacted by drone attacks, data from industry sources and Reuters calculations showed.
Several major refineries were attacked by drones in August and September, including Surgutneftegaz’s Kirishinefteorgsintez refinery, Lukoil’s Volgograd refinery and Rosneft’s Samara group of refineries.
The resulting unplanned outages at a number of key refineries curtailed fuel exports and drove up crude oil shipments, market sources said.
Not bad, considering Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries only began in earnest around mid-August.
If anything can get Putin to the negotiating table, maybe it’s a loss of energy revenue.
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE PUZZLING: Of the latest trends in American church attendance — young men outnumber young women — plus a bit of a progress report on HillFaith.org. As I contend in my latest Substack column, you don’t have to be a Bible-thumper to appreciate the public policy differences in perspectives represented by the Sermon on the Mount and Critical Race Theory.
LIGHTNING DEAL: Under Desk Elliptical with 12 Adjustable Speed Quiet & Portable Peddler. #CommissionEarned
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Now the Big Question — Will Hamas Beg to Be Finished Off? “Perhaps Hamas leaders don’t have the internet and are completely unaware of how Israel and President Trump have said this is going to play out if they run afoul of the plan. Israel is going to systematically destroy what remains of the organization, and President Trump has promised the full blessing of the United States in its efforts to do so.”