GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: What Blue Zone Collapse Looks Like.

In 2019, a house started burning on Bethel Island, out at the eastern edges of the Bay Area. The East Contra Costa Fire Protection District — which no longer exists, for reasons that will be clear enough — had been eroding for years, closing one fire station after another as funding ran short. In 2019, ten firefighters (three each on three fire engines plus one battalion chief) covered 250 square miles, much of it well-populated. Bethel Island no longer had a fire station. Scroll to page two on this later report that discussed the reform of fire agencies in Contra Costa County, and you’ll find the fire department’s average response time to major emergencies on Bethel Island: a little under 14 minutes for the arrival of the first engine. So there was a house fire, which spread and turned into several house fires, and that cluster of fires was finally brought under control about three hours after the first house started burning. But the fire department existed. It didn’t collapse. In a serious emergency, an adequate response could be summoned in an hour or two.

One you start looking for this — government agencies that exist but are entirely inadequate for the performance of their basic responsibilities — you can find it everywhere.

Read the whole thing.

WELL, THEY STILL HAVE THURSDAY AND FRIDAY TO GO: ‘The View’ Sinks to a New Low… and Then Another. “Once again, ABC proved it has no shame by not only airing this garbage but not correcting the record in any meaningful way.”

THE EV BUBBLE CONTINUES TO DEFLATE: Report: Mazda Delays Next EV to 2029, Switches Focus to Hybrids.

LONGEVITY: Tiny improvements in sleep, nutrition and exercise could significantly extend lifespan, study suggests.

REDNECK NATION: Justice D E-I Cites “Black Codes” Which Stripped Post-Civil-War Blacks of Right to Bear Arms As Good Law In Order to Justify Endless Gun Control.

Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris’s response to Justice Gorsuch’s question on the relevance of the Black Codes was spot on:

“It is 2026, and it is somewhat astonishing that Black Codes, which are unconstitutional, are being offered as evidence of what our tradition… pic.twitter.com/Xt9Bg7HY0K

— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) January 20, 2026

Straight out of Redneck Nation, and more recently, Ryan Long’s “When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything” video:

THE DEMOCRATS’ SHOCK TROOPS WITHOUT UNIFORMS:

Federal agents who are doing nothing more than carrying out our immigration laws are being verbally and physically assaulted in blue states, Minnesota and California in particular. Don’t try to convince us these are organic protests with only the purest of intentions.

It’s a generously funded insurgency inflamed by the Democrats, cynics who see a political opportunity to create havoc. The combatants are not in uniform, but they serve the same purpose as shock troops who are on the front lines of a revolution before the occupation forces move in.

Confrontations between ICE agents and protesters have been common for nearly a year. We’ll stipulate that some are simply demonstrating peacefully. But many are there to obstruct, and some of them have violence on their minds. We’ve seen the toxic brew result in at least one death — for now.

It’s foolish to think there won’t be more. There’s a lust for blood. Just this past weekend, a horde attacked a counterprotester in Minneapolis, reportedly whacking him in the head with a flagpole and chasing him as if he were prey. Videos show a man whose life is being threatened. He was bloodied because of his opinions.

Another man was harassed in Minneapolis by an anti-ICE crowd, apparently for having offended the rabble by wearing an American flag hoodie with the word “Freedom” on it. “Take it off and you won’t get hurt!,” his tormenters told him.

This is only a sampling of recent events over the course of a much longer reign of terror.

Which all seems so odd, considering that in 2016, CNN cheerfully went on a ride-along with ICE, and the prior year, Obama awarded Tom Homan “the Presidential Rank Award [which] is bestowed each year by the President upon a small group of career employees and is the nation’s highest civil service award.”

🚨 WOW: "Obama's ICE chief gets award for 920,000 removals. Trump's ICE chief is called a Nazi…"

"…SAME GUY, TOM HOMAN, was in charge in Obama!"

Tom Homan is a national treasure.

He is a HERO and even the mainstream media ADMITTED it. What changed?pic.twitter.com/vSxcdxDaKx

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 20, 2026

Abby Phillip: “ICE raids [are] controversial, always have been, always will be.”

Ben Ferguson: “Not really. When Obama was doing them it wasn't controversial. You guys [CNN] did ride alongs.”
pic.twitter.com/SUyvrnhzG0

— RedWave Press (@RedWave_Press) January 21, 2026

Since we mentioned Jerry Seinfeld earlier today, here’s his “rooting for laundry” riff on pro sports in the era of free agency, which applies even more so to the left when someone changes party allegiance:

But then, the left is always rioting about something: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’”

GOOD QUESTION: Why Do We Let Commie Chinese Pilots Train in America?

TRIM YOUR NAILS: XGIZMOO 360° Rotating Toenail Clippers. #CommissionEarned

THIS IS THE WAY: GOP Officials Warn Climate Activist Group To Stop Pressuring American Companies.

A coalition of Republican attorneys general, led by the state of Florida, said Wednesday that a major climate group may be violating their states’ antitrust and consumer protection laws by artificially pressuring companies to adopt climate activist policies, according to a letter obtained by The Daily Wire.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier warned the Boston-based nonprofit organization Ceres that it may be illegally pressuring companies to adopt net-zero policies. He said the organization was pursuing policies that were an “assault on American families and businesses.”

“Ceres’ efforts to artificially move entire markets and sectors — and in turn artificially change the output and quality of the goods and services produced by those sectors — toward Ceres’ own preferred policy goals bears all the trappings of the ‘adverse, anticompetitive effects’ that antitrust laws seek to prevent,” the attorneys general wrote in the letter.

Ceres is an advocacy group that says it is “working to accelerate the transition to a cleaner, more just, and resilient world.” In emails obtainedby the House Judiciary Committee, it has described its work as “the Army ground troops” and “an ‘air cover’ strategic and silent bombing campaign by a newly funded division of the Air Force” fighting a war for net zero emissions.

It’s the left’s old friend, the moral equivalent of war!

Meow [the Moral Equivalent of War] has many cynical political uses: If every political opponent is the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler, if every political initiative tantamount to D-Day, then there is much that can be excused in the way of underhandedness, rhetorical excess, demagoguery, and the like. As [Jonah] Goldberg reminds us, war and war alone has been the great champion of socialism, because it provides an emergency pretext for the authoritarian project of reorganizing an organic society in accordance with the necessarily synthetic model decocted from ideology, bias, bigotry, eccentricity, and the self-interest, always unavoidable, of the planners empowered with drawing up the blueprints of this or that brave new world or utopia.

Since the century-old moral equivalent of war has long been the moral equivalent of a quagmire, it’s great to see sensible GOP attorneys general declaring a ceasefire.

LOL: Canada Got Only a 12 Percent Compliance Rate In Its Compensated Gun Confiscation Test Run.

HEH: Hawaii Basing its Defense of Vampire Rule Carry Restrictions On the Black Codes Didn’t Go Well in SCOTUS Arguments.

BREAKING: Trump Announces Greenland Deal Framework.

CNN, LOL: CNN’s New Kid ‘Apologizes’ for Telling a Complete Whopper About Trump and Then Makes It Even Worse.

READER FAVORITE: GORILLA GRIP Heavy Duty Stainless Steel Smooth Edge Manual Can Opener and Bottle Openers. #CommissionEarned

ADRIAN VERMEULE: The ‘Trial’ and Martyrdom of Louis XVI.

This is a previously published essay of mine in memoriam Louis XVI, which I plan to republish annually on January 21 — the day in 1793 when, as Pius VI put it, “[b]y a conspiracy of impious men, the most Christian king Louis XVI” was put to martyrdom. Americans have particular reason to hold his memory in reverence, as explained below.

On this day in 1793, Louis XVI was executed by guillotine in the Place de la Révolution, now the Place de la Concorde, in Paris. The United States might well never have come into existence without the massive aid, military and financial, provided by Louis’ government; and the budgetary strains incurred by that aid contributed rather directly to the calling of the Estates-General in 1789 and thus to the Revolution itself. Hence it is fitting for Americans to honor Louis’ end. What follows is a bibliographic essay in memoriam, presenting a set of sources, written in or translated into English, on the pseudo-trial of the King and his subsequent martyrdom.

Louis’ eloquent last will and testament is helpfully provided by Andrew Cusack. The King forgives his enemies (while rejecting the legitimacy of their actions), asks for the forgiveness of anyone he has offended, professes his Catholic faith, and exhorts his son that “should he have the misfortune of becoming king, to remember he owes himself wholly to the happiness of his fellow citizens.” It reveals a monarch sincerely devoted to his family, to the welfare of his realm, and to the Church.

That the trial of Louis was indeed a sham — a proceeding for which “one can find neither pretext nor means in any existing law,” as Louis put it in his testament — is not seriously contestable

Read the whole thing, and understand that the French Revolution is where modern leftism got its start.

LET ME JUST GET OUT AHEAD OF THE STORY AND SAY THAT GHISLAINE MAXWELL DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE: Maxwell to Face House Grilling — Virtual Deposition Set for February 9.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Thermomagnetic generator harvests ocean temperature differences to power maritime sensors.

IT’S COME TO THIS:

It’s a protest about nothing. https://t.co/7nbhZNUAcb

— Ilya Shapiro (@ishapiro) January 20, 2026

Flashback: Jerry Seinfeld Compares Free Palestine Movement to the Ku Klux Klan.

Spytec GPS Tracker with Up to 140 Day Extended Weatherproof Heavy Duty Magnetic Battery Case for Cars, Trucks, Business Vehicles. #CommissionEarned

CHANGE: Trump Signs EO to Block Wall Street From Buying Single Family Homes.

YOU’VE BEEN WARNED, AMERICA:

Before you go writing off Virginia know this, Abigail Spanberger has been groomed to run for President(the new Hillary).

Being governor is just a stepping stone. So while everyone is distracted with Gavin she is the plan.

The VA Legislature will push crazy, radical stuff&she…

— Michelle Maxwell ™ (@MichelleMaxwell) January 21, 2026

Related (From Ed):

Spanberger just put KKK/Blackface Northam on the VMI Board of Visitors …

After she called him a bigot in 2019.

She's a joke.
A fraud and a liar https://t.co/Dtt98nc4hu pic.twitter.com/YXpAHSiox5

— The🐰FOO (@PolitiBunny) January 21, 2026

I’M TOO OLD TO WANT TO, FOR SURE: With winter storm ahead, how old is too old to be shoveling snow?

Doctor Developed Wrist Brace. #CommissionEarned

AS IF ON CUE: Month after Bondi Hanukkah attack, Australian MPs pass stricter gun, hate crime laws. “On firearms, Australia will set up a national gun buyback scheme, tighten rules on imports of firearms and expand background checking for gun permits to allow input from intelligence services.”

THE ARTIC SMOKESCREEN: The most dangerous mistake about “Greenland is believing it is about Greenland.”