OPEN THREAD: Ring out the long weekend.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA astronauts take new moonsuit for a swim | Space photo of the day.

THEIR WHOLE STRATEGY DEPENDS ON THE U.S. BEING PASSIVE — OR, AS IN THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S CASE, BRIBED: Why Venezuela’s allies Russia and China are slinking away as Trump ramps up pressure on Maduro.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Teacher with 8-week-old baby pleads guilty to having sex with her student, 15. “Rae claimed to have been unaware that the boy was underage, despite the fact that he was a student at her school, according to reports. . . . Rae pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a teenage boy, possessing child abuse material, grooming a child for unlawful sexual activity and committing an act with the intention of perverting the course of justice, the ABC reported.”

CYBER MONDAY DEAL: NEENCA 2 Pack Knee Braces for Knee Pain. #CommissionEarned

AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK: Fetterman Counters Dem Strategist James Carville’s Grand Political Agenda With Three-Word Plan.

STAY TUNED: Pass the Popcorn: Kash Patel Has Intriguing News About Comey Case and Those ‘Burn Bags.’ “We reported at the end of July on the stunning news that they found a room at the FBI with the bags, which had Russia probe documents in them. That raised a lot of questions as to what might be in those documents. Patel said all of that information is going to come out, so that we will be able to see it.”

CYBER MONDAY DEAL: Kiehl’s Super Multi-Corrective Eye Cream. #CommissionEarned

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Ideological Erosion of College Readiness. “The report points to pandemic disruptions, the removal of standardized tests like the SAT, and grade inflation masking academic weakness. But these are symptoms, not causes. The deeper problem is an ideological takeover of America’s K-12 system — an approach that dismisses standardized tests as ‘products of white supremacy’ and inflates grades to preserve the illusion of success. It’s an approach that relies on a teaching philosophy that promotes activism in the classroom for causes like decolonization (‘down with America’) and anti-racism (solving racism with more racism), all at the expense of core academic proficiency.”

THE SUNDAY PROMO POST ABIDES:  Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

CUTTING EDGE IN ITS DAY: The Lexus Flagship That Once Had an Optional Built-in Fax Machine.

CYBER MONDAY DEAL: Crest 3D Whitestrips Professional Effects. #CommissionEarned

THIS IS CNN: The Way CNN Tried to Spin the DC Shooting Is Just Sick.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Elevated Holiday Threats Require Heightened Awareness, Packed Heat.

THEY NEED AN EPI PEN FOR THEIR TRUTH ALLERGY: Kash Patel Drops a Truth Bomb on James Comey.

CYBER MONDAY DEAL: Apple 2025 MacBook Air 13-inch Laptop with M4 chip. #CommissionEarned

NOT REAL COMMUNISM, TAKE 43: Death In the Street: Aside From the Obvious, There’s a Big Problem In Cuba.

I MEAN, WHAT IF YOUR FACE FREEZES THAT WAY, THOUGH? Is crossing your eyes really bad for you? We asked an optometrist.

UM: OpenAI says dead teen violated TOS when he used ChatGPT to plan suicide: OpenAI’s response to teen suicide case is “disturbing,” lawyer says.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX launches 140 payloads in rideshare program from California.

MARK PULLIAM: The Canary in the Tennessee Coal Mine. “Has the cultural rot evident in blue states spread to Tennessee? The December 2 special election in TN-7 is a canary in the coal mine.”

HIPS BUTTS DON’T LIE: Buttocks’ shape could help predict diabetes risk, other aging factors.

THANK FRAUD ALMIGHTY: Liftoff achieved!

I would like to say “we have achieved liftoff” in drawing national attention to the massive public-program frauds committed by a large cast of Minnesota Somalis. But “we” would be misleading. Attention has been drawn by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo in their City Journal column “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer” (the headline is a quotation).

They first drew President Trump’s attention in a big way. Now comes the New York Times in Ernest Londoño’s long story “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch” (“Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible. President Trump has drawn national attention to the scandal amid his crackdown on immigration”). The story has clearly been in the works for a while, but Trump’s attention has intensified its newsworthiness.

As Steve Guest, the former political communications adviser for Ted Cruz, tweets:

Very telling that the Times is more concerned about “giving Republicans a line of attack” than acknowledging the depth and depravity of what Walz has allowed to happen in Minnesota.

— dj_deathproof (@dj_death_proof) November 29, 2025

Evergreen:

Related: Great moments in vetting:

The interesting thing is they ran the very man at the center of this scandal as last election's candidate for vice president of the United States.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) November 30, 2025

UPDATE: This is CNN.

Some have observed that the New York Times has essentially given establishment journalists permission to discuss Minnesota's Somali fraud scandal. CNN had the senior senator from Minnesota on this morning. Could have brought it up. Didn't. Focused on Trump instead. pic.twitter.com/zjz7jYv5oF

— Byron York (@ByronYork) November 30, 2025

Unexpectedly!

BLACK FRIDAY DEAL: Shark PowerPro Reveal Plus Cordless Vacuum. #CommissionEarned

JOHN PODHORETZ: Tom Stoppard, 1937-2025.

[A]ccording to his official biographer Hermione Lee, he read a novel by a Croatian writer named Dasa Drndic called Trieste. A character in the novel, writes Lee, “lacerates real historical figures whom she describes as ‘bystanders’ or ‘blind observers.’ They include Herbert von Karajan, Madeleine Albright, and Tom Stoppard: people who discover their family history, but turn a blind eye to it. Her ‘blind observers’ are ‘ordinary people’ who “play it safe. They live their lives unimpeded.’”

This hit Stoppard hard. Writes Lee: “He thought: yes, actually, she’s right. He felt that Drndic was justifiably blaming him for excluding from this ‘charmed life’ all those others who had ‘disappeared.’ He took it as an intelligible rebuke. He felt regret and guilt….He went back over his family history, and his Jewishness. It began to seem to him that he had been in denial about his own past. He increasingly felt that he should have been rueing his good fortune in escaping from those events, rather than congratulating himself. As a playwright, he needed to inhabit those lives he never lived, in his imagination. He started to think about a play which would answer the rebuke.”

That play is Leopoldstadt, and in every way, it is a miracle. It is the greatest play of our time, and the greatest play Stoppard ever wrote, and perhaps the greatest literary work written by an octogenarian. It is set not in Czechoslovakia but in an apartment in Vienna we see at four moments in time—1899, 1924, 1938, and 1955. Over the course of the first three scenes we meet 20 members of the extended Marz-Jacobowicz family. In the final scene, only three remain; all the others are dead, either directly or indirectly, due to the Holocaust. One of them is Stoppard’s stand-in, a young British writer who has no memory of his youth in Vienna from which he was removed by his widowed mother’s fiancee until he is reminded of a scar on his hand. He cut it as a little boy and had it stitched up by a now-dead uncle in that very apartment. He dissolves into tears. His cousin, a survivor of the camps, says to him, “You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.”

Read the whole thing.