NEWS YOU CAN USE: Something in Dark Chocolate Could Slow Aging on a Genetic Level.

COMRADE SCORPION MEET COMRADE FROG: Mamdani Goes Full Antisemite on Day One.

GLENN HAS A TAG FOR THESE BUT I DON’T REMEMBER IT. IN THE MEANTIME, MEAN KITTY: Predator Watch: Fatal New Year’s Mountain Lion Attack in Colorado.

Pro tip: don’t act like prey.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The tag is David Baron, call your office. Especially relevant here.

MARC THIESSEN IN THE WASHINGTON POST: The 20 best things Trump did in 2025: The accomplishments of a stunning year can’t be captured in just 10 items.

SOMEHOW I HAD MISSED THIS WHEN IT CAME OUT: How Police Let One of America’s Most Prolific Predators Get Away. The prosecutor who lost her job for pursuing a guy who was clearly being protected by the authorities is my former student, Kat Dahl. A very brave and determined woman who paid a serious professional price for trying to pursue justice.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI CANNOT FAIL, HE CAN ONLY BE FAILED:

We are one day in and already at the "good tsar, bad boyars" stage. pic.twitter.com/quQeT6voXq

— Noam Blum (@neontaster) January 2, 2026

NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: Building the City of Mammon.

PUT AIR IN YOUR TIRES: Airmoto Tire Inflator Portable Air Compressor. #CommissionEarned

HAHA: “I was really surprised,” parent Felicia Russel told WNCN. “I thought that women teachers were getting smarter and better.”

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: This Hypercar Brain Could Change How Even Affordable Cars Are Built.

BECAUSE OF COURSE: Spielberg Schindler’s List Foundation Now Funds Anti-Israel Groups.

LIMITED TIME DEAL: TurboTax Desktop Deluxe 2025, Federal & State Tax Return. #CommissionEarned

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Mamdani Dethrones Gavin Newsom As U-Haul's Top Salesman https://t.co/FY9aOnJWWf pic.twitter.com/Xat8I0QeYs

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 2, 2026

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Despite What You See on Social Media, Not Everything Sucks.

HAPPY NEW YEAR: Oil and gas prices expected to stay significantly lower through 2026.

Oil and gasoline prices are expected to decline next year, according to a recent forecast from the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The EIA published its Short-Term Energy Outlook in November, which projected that the price of Brent crude oil will decline from $69 a barrel in 2025 to $55 a barrel next year. That would be well below the $81 per barrel that prevailed in 2024.

Gas prices are also projected to continue their decline into next year. Retail gas prices averaged $3.30 a gallon in 2024 and are at $3.10 a gallon this year, but are projected to decline further to $3 a gallon in 2026, according to the EIA’s report.

U.S. production of crude oil picked up this year and is expected to remain at the level in 2026, with the EIA finding the U.S. produced 13.2 million barrels per day in 2024. The agency projected crude oil production will be 13.6 million barrels per day in 2025 – the same as in 2026.

Only tangentially related, but the EV bubble continues deflating: Ram’s TRX Supertruck Is Back with SRT Badges and a 777-HP V-8

TRUMP  IS MR DEREGULATOR: Rod Martin turns over his Substack column space for a day to Americans for Tax Reform founder and chief Grover Norquist, who provides a comprehensive cataloguing of the many ways President Donald Trump is draining the regulatory swamp in Washington, D.C.

ROGER KIMBALL: The Somali Fraud Scandal is a Turning Point.

What made Shirley’s video the tipping point, the tocsin that finally shook the world awake? The legacy media has largely avoided covering the issue. Indeed, it has savaged reporters such as James O’Keefe who exposed elements of the fraud in 2020, and did the same to activist Christopher Rufo who has done so more recently.

But for reasons that are not entirely clear, those earlier exposés, while hard-hitting, failed to generate the near-universal outrage that Shirley’s matter-of-fact reporting has.

I say “near-universal” because there are dissenters. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, for example, pulled out the “white supremacist,” “racist” and “Islamophobic” cards in response to Shirley’s video. The accusations fell completely flat. Why? Egregious overuse. People are no longer frightened by those content-free, rhetorical boogeymen. Such accusations are merely epithets designed to end conversation, not acknowledge the truth.

Confronted with the fact that Somalis have systematically pilfered billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money in order to enrich themselves, bribe politicians and fund terrorist activities in Somalia, the public are outraged – and rightly. They see now how Democrats coddle illegal immigrants, lavish them with taxpayers’ money and then cultivate them as Democratic voters. And speaking of voters, did you know that Minnesota has same-day voter registration and that one registered voter can “vouch” for 8 others in his precinct who do not have ID?

Musk cut to the chase: “The Democrats are so upset about the situation because they’re losing – you know if we turn off this gigantic money magnet for illegal immigrants, then they will leave and they’ll lose voters.” Bingo. There are some 80,000-100,000 Somalis in Minneapolis alone. How is it that they live so well?

The canny chap who writes under the name Cynical Publius may well be correct that “in large swathes of humanity, there is no actual concept of ‘fraud,’ particularly fraud against the government.” Instead, there is a categorical imperative to get away with whatever you can “to help yourself and your tribe.” The problem is, notes Publius, that “introducing a fraud-based culture based on tribalism into America is like introducing some sort of lethal virus into a population that has no natural immunity. The virus will spread and grow, unchecked, because it is so alien to the host.”

The virus must be neutralized or it will destroy the host. . . . And as much of the “Somali community” as possible should be repatriated to where it belongs: Somalia. That is why God made Tom Homan.

Indeed.

UPDATE: From the comments: “If the Left truly cared about social programs helping people, then the Left should be the most upset about fraud. Every dollar going to fraud is a dollar not going to someone who legitimately needs help. The fact that the Left is always excusing fraud is telling.”

TREAT THE SHOULDER PAIN: Shoulder-Heating-Pad-Heated-Wrap. #CommissionEarned

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: More than half of UC Berkeley disability accommodations are ’emotional.’

At UC Berkeley, this year has the most students registered as disabled since 2020, according to the data.

The data, which only goes back to 2020, shows the number of students who received disability accommodations increasing every year. In 2020-2021, there were 4,153. The following year there were 4,585. This year, there are 5,711.

The greatest percentage of disabled students this year have “psychological” or “emotional” impediments. There are 2,528 registered, representing more than 50 percent of all students with disabilities at the university.

The next most common is ADHD/ADD, with 1,675 students. According to the data, 287 students have a learning disability, 290 face mobility problems, 71 struggle to hear, and 63 have impaired vision.

When most people hear “disability,” they imagine the total of 424 students in wheelchairs, or with hearing or vision loss.

A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION MASQUERADING AS A POLITICAL PARTY: Washington State AG Warns Citizen Journalists to Stop Investigating Somali Daycares or Face Potential Hate Crime Charges.

(Classical reference in headline.)

VINDICATION: Real-life experiment shows Niels Bohr was right in a theoretical debate with Einstein.

NOW WHO’S BEING NAÏVE, KAY? Zohran Mamdani Can’t Ruin New York City.

In the mid-1990s, New York was well past its industrial and shipping heyday, but the signs were still all around. The city was grittier than it would soon be—we were right on the cusp of the major decline in crime that would sweep through nearly all American cities. It was so gritty, in fact, that my parents forbade me from applying to college in New York. They thought the city was too pricey and dangerous, even though they loved it.

Today, the city is much richer and fussier than it was. Parents are still fretting about its dangers and expense. Mayors come and go—remember when Rudy Giuliani was “America’s mayor”?—and New York remains fundamentally itself.

Zohran Mamdani won the 2025 mayoral election on a platform that included fare-free buses, city-owned grocery stores, and a rent freeze for rent-stabilized units, plus equity-centered education policy and an oddly status-quo policing plan for a one-time defunder/abolitionist. As this issue of Reason unpacks, there are many reasons to fear such policies will be ineffective at best and deeply counterproductive at worst. And as my parents’ diktat shows, when governance and policy get bad enough, that can scare off potential residents and visitors alike.

But a single mayor can’t ruin New York City, because New York City is not reducible to policy choices.

John Lindsay has just entered the conversation: “In the midst of an economic boom, crime exploded. Instead of reforming what had, in fact, been the best big city school system in America, he left it in tatters. He promised to better incorporate African Americans but left the city polarized.”

NICE WORK: FBI Stopped ISIS-Inspired New Year’s Attack in North Carolina.

SCIENCE: Cardiovascular risk score identifies risk for ocular disease.

HE’S CERTAINLY EARNED HIS RETIREMENT: A 5 million percent return in 60 years leaves Warren Buffett’s legacy unmatched. “From 1964 — the year before Buffett took control of Berkshire — to 2024, the one-of-a-kind conglomerate delivered a compounded annual gain of 19.9%, nearly double the S&P 500′s 10.4%, resulting in an overall return of more than 5.5 million percent, according to the company’s latest annual report. The shares added another 10% to that return in 2025.”