Welp: Surgeon general calls for cancer-risk warning label on beverages with alcohol.
I got nuthin’. What say you, Vodkapundit?
Update (from Steve): I’ll take my chances, Charles.
Archive for 2025
January 3, 2025
THREE-YEAR MED SCHOOLS ARE COMING. IS DOOM NIGH? I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, med school appears to have a lot of pointless scut work that is meant not to educate but to weed people out. On the other, you do have to worry about lowered standards. That said, your perspective on doctors changes a bit when you get older and you realize that the dude who was no smarter than you are and who you last saw doing a keg stand at “The Hazards of Duke” party in 1997 is now a respected cardiologist.
CAUSE AND EFFECT REMAIN A MYSTERY FOR CERTAIN GROUPS: Seattle Set Minimum Wage Over $20 and You’ll Totally Believe What Happened Next.
HIGHER EDUCATION: 3 reasons to be optimistic for 2025.
PART OF ME WANTS TO SAY “NOW THEY TELL US,” but on the other hand, it’s not like the previous administration would have done anything about it. On His Way Out, IG for Afghanistan Drops Truth Bombs.
WINNING:
For a decade, I’ve argued that so-called “net neutrality” regulations are unlawful (not to mention pointless). Today, the Sixth Circuit held exactly that. You can read the court’s excellent opinion here: https://t.co/3za2KOk7ou
It’s time for regulators and activists to give up… https://t.co/HzEnKUDpal pic.twitter.com/QbFgLEViUQ
— Ajit Pai (@AjitPai) January 2, 2025
Flashback: Obama gave Netflix net neutrality. Netflix gives Obama a television show.
It was one of the largest and certainly most undisguised acts of corruption in US history, and virtually ignored by a press that continues to act as though Obama were sainted.
I CONFESS I DON’T FULLY UNDERSTAND WHAT’S GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA, BUT IT’S MESSY: South Korean investigators suspend efforts to detain president after dramatic standoff. “Investigators from the Corruption Investigation Office (CIO) approached within a couple hundred meters of Yoon’s residence, but were blocked by a ‘human wall’ of around 200 soldiers and members of the presidential security detail, CIO said Friday afternoon. There were also several altercations of ‘varying intensity,’ the office said. . . . Yoon, who was stripped of presidential powers after lawmakers voted to impeach him last month, is wanted for questioning in multiple investigations, including accusations of leading an insurrection – a crime punishable by life imprisonment or even the death penalty.”
I’M SPECULATING, BUT I SUSPECT THAT THE MOTIVES AREN’T JUST ELECTORAL. We’ve seen a lot of high-level Brits at the BBC, etc., implicated in pedophilia. I suspect that a lot of the political class is also involved, and that they acted to shut it down to protect themselves, and also because they were being blackmailed.
Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak both tried to shut social media down.
Now we can see why.
Elon Musk's publicizing of Rotherham makes the scandal impossible to avoid.
It is being shouted from every corner of the digital sphere.
And unlike British broadcasters and their hosts -…
— Alexandra Marshall (@ellymelly) January 2, 2025
If you devote your career to protecting paedophiles, maybe one day you could be prime minister too. #inspiring pic.twitter.com/lN7cPJ0J48
— Andrew Lawrence (@andrewlawrence) January 3, 2025
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I Can’t Wait for All of That Biden Decency and Dignity to Go Away. “What the Biden family brought to the White House was embarrassing tawdriness. It’s like some backwoods, low-rent criminal family hit the political lottery and couldn’t wait to trash the joint. I wonder if Jill Biden has hit up Hillary Clinton for pointers on how to steal stuff on her way out the door.”
OPEN THREAD: Happy New Year!
QUEERING HISTORY: Students in Boston U. ‘Medieval Trans Studies’ Course Learn About ‘Gender Fluid Angels.’
Boston University is offering a graduate-level “Medieval Trans Studies” course for the upcoming spring semester that explores how “medieval texts speak to the historical, theoretical, and political concerns that animate contemporary trans studies.”
The course has drawn criticism from scholars who argue that it reflects modern ideological biases rather than historical accuracy.
It considers “the deep histories of transgender embodiment” through an examination of texts stemming from the Middle Ages, according to the course description.
Students will read about “alchemical hermaphrodites, genderfluid angels, Ethiopian eunuchs, trans saints, sex workers, and genderqueer monks,” according to the university.
Adam Kissel, a fellow with the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, told The College Fix via email, “It is a mistake for the course to misinterpret Medieval texts by indulging modern obsessions.”
It isn’t a mistake. It’s Marxian propaganda.
INVESTIGATE THOROUGHLY: FBI should investigate Jan. 6 charges against Liz Cheney: Poll.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What Will You Miss the Least About Joe Biden?
VDH: Germany’s New Morgenthau Plan.
Once-dominant European giants Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes are now bleeding customers and profits. Their own government’s green and electric vehicle mandates ensure they will become globally uncompetitive.
The German economy actually shrank in 2023. And the diminished Ruhr can no longer save the German economy from its own utopian politicians.
The German military is all but disarmed and short thousands of recruits.
German industries do not produce enough ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft to equip even its diminished army, navy, and air force.
Just a few hundred miles from Germany in Ukraine, more than a million Ukrainians and Russians are dead, wounded, or missing—in the costliest European battle since the horrors of Stalingrad.
Yet the once postwar German dynamo nation now lacks the manpower, munitions, and money to aid Ukraine in any meaningful way against an ascendant Russian invader.
More than 1 million immigrants have entered the country illegally, the vast majority of them from the Middle East. Many of them are hostile to European values and culture, as recent terrorist killings have shown. One-fifth of the population was not born in Germany.
The shrinking German people are growing angry, divided, and depressed. Their 1.4 percent fertility rate is one of the lowest in the Western world.
A tragic irony now abounds.
After World War II, the Truman administration rejected the notion of a pastoral, deindustrialized, and insecure Germany as a cruel prescription for poverty, hunger, and depopulation.
But now the German people themselves voted for their own updated version of Morgenthau’s plan—as they willingly reduced factory hours, curtailed power and fuel supplies, and struggled with millions of illegal aliens and porous borders.
Germans accept that they have no military to speak of that could protect their insecure borders—without a United States-led NATO.
Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected wrecking the defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing—and destroying—itself.
Earlier: High Electricity Prices Have Europe Facing Deindustrialization; Don’t Let It Happen Here.
Including a surprise in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign from Scientific American deep in the 2024 election cycle:
PUTIN’S STUPID WAR (YEAR-END ROUNDUP): Russian forces gained 4,168 square kilometers, largely comprised of fields and small settlements in Ukraine and Kursk Oblast, at a reported cost of over 420,000 casualties in 2024. “Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi stated on December 30 that Russian forces suffered 427,000 casualties in 2024. ISW has observed geolocated evidence to assess that Russian forces advanced 4,168 square kilometers in 2024, indicating that Russian forces have suffered approximately 102 casualties per square kilometer of Ukrainian territory seized. ISW previously observed that Russian forces gained 2,356 square kilometers in exchange for an estimated 125,800 casualties during a period of intensified Russian offensive operations in September, October, and November 2024. Russian forces made 56.5 percent of their 2024 territorial gains during the September through November 2024 period. Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev claimed on December 24 that 440,000 recruits signed military service contracts with the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) in 2024, suggesting that Russia is likely recruiting just enough military personnel to replace its recently high casualty rates one for one.”
Here’s to hoping Trump can wring some peace out of this wreck.
THIS ISN’T EVEN SURPRISING:
A researcher who worked for the UK government tried to whistleblow about the grooming gangs but was sent to diversity training course instead
You cannot make this stuff up. We are beyond parody and satire https://t.co/tqQRDHH3yc pic.twitter.com/29xsc9nuyD
— Melissa Chen (@MsMelChen) January 2, 2025
FBI: Largest Number of Pipe Bombs Ever Found (And You Won’t Believe Where They Found Them)
While most of the country was following the news of two terror attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas yesterday, another story broke based on an incident that happened in December in Virginia. According to the FBI, agents found what they’re calling the largest stockpile of “finished explosive devices” in the history of the agency at the home of 36-year-old Isle of Wight County resident Brad Spafford.
It appears that Spafford has been on their radar for a while.
Usually, we only hear that someone was on the FBI’s radar after they murder a bunch of people.
THE INCONVENIENT TRUTHS CONTINUE: Climate the Movie, Part 2: Natural climate change and extreme weather.
JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Is AI really a ‘deal with the devil?’ The medieval story of Faust continues to infect how we think about technology. “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe fiddled with his version for decades, but completed it in 1831 just before his death. This Faust is an aging scholar who also makes a deal with Mephistopheles: The devil will serve him on Earth, but if Faust finds a moment of complete satisfaction, his soul belongs to Hell. Faust pursues various ambitious projects and finally finds satisfaction in a project to reclaim land from the sea. He dies, but his constant striving for betterment and final act of working for humanity’s benefit saves his soul, which ascends to Heaven.”
IT’S A HOWLING VOICE: Wind turbines and a voice in the wilderness.
ALL RIGHT-WING POPULISTS ARE BORN TO ‘IMMENSE PRIVILEGE’ THEREFORE VANCE … Leftist Magazine Tries to Claim Vance Was ‘Born to Immense Privilege’.
In a way they’re not wrong. Every American, of any color or politics is born to immense privilege historically. But of course that’s not what the Anti-American party means.
RAISING THE THRESHOLD FOR A MOTION TO VACATE THE SPEAKERSHIP? Republicans Poised to Change House Speaker Rules and Democrats Are Not Happy About It.
THE OTHER TIME THAT WE KNOW OF: Flashback: That Other Time a Damning Photo of a Democrat Was Also Suppressed.