SKYNET SMILES: Europe faces Robocop-style dystopia by 2035, EU police claim.

Angry mobs of unemployed citizens riot in the streets against the hordes of service robots that have stolen their jobs. Police officers armed with “robo freezer guns” and “nano net grenades” shoot down swarms of drones deployed by terrorists to attack electricity and water supplies.

This is not the plot of a new Robocop sci-fi film but what may await Europe in the next 10 years, according to a report from the EU’s police agency.

The 48-page Europol document details how law enforcement will need to tackle robots and unmanned systems (drones, satellites and remote-controlled boats) in a dystopian vision of the future.

Experts have dismissed the predictions as fanciful but the EU believes its report outlines “plausible future scenarios”.

While the EU scares its subjects over Robocop scenarios, it’s fully prepared to implement futuristic dystopian strategies of its own: Chat Control: The EU’s Plan to Read Your Messages — All of Them.

In Europe, the controversy surrounding what is popularly known as the “Chat Control” project — proposed EU regulation officially aimed at combating child sexual abuse material — has, for months, been crystallizing massive opposition on both technical and civic fronts.

The core principles of the legislation are clear:

“Detection software would be embedded in the messaging app or the operating system to scan chat content and automatically forward any material flagged as prohibited to law enforcement agencies.”

The automatic scan of private content (texts, images, videos) sent through messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram, or prompts sent to AI platforms (e.g. ChatGPT) would take place “client-side,” before its encryption, meaning directly on your phone, tablet or computer. Welcome to 1984. In the first proposal for a Chat Control project in 2022, such scanning was mandatory. In the current proposal, it is optional — but strongly recommended.

Whenever there is a desire to expand control over European citizens, “terrorism” or pedophilia is invoked. It is a clever tactic: who would want to be perceived as supporting terrorists or sympathizing with pedophiles?

Of course, however, that does not seem to be the regulation’s true objective. The real issue appears to be the government’s desire to control, regulate, police and monitor European citizens down to their smallest gesture.

Exit quote: “I happen to be the happy father of an 18-month-old girl. For professional reasons, her mother and I do not always live together, and we constantly exchange photos of our daughter — up to ten times a day. All it would take is for an algorithm to flag a single image, just once, for us to become suspects, quietly entering countless criminal databases, justifying surveillance, official intervention, and more. Even East Germany’s Stasi never dreamed of such power.”

SOMALI PIRATES UPDATE:

A former TSA Agent blows the whistle on what she saw:

Somalian immigrants flying out of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport carrying suitcases stuffed with millions of dollars and passports.

The level of fraud goes deeper and deeper pic.twitter.com/v2Leg5xDf9

— David M. McIntosh (@DavidMMcintosh) December 12, 2025

Full interview here.

I’m so old, I can remember flying with large amounts of cash was a surefire way to trigger the authorities: Carrying A Lot Of Cash Through TSA Comes With One Unpleasant Risk.

If you’re like lots of folks, paying for something means pulling out your card or phone and tapping away. Same thing goes for traveling abroad, even in countries typically overlooked by travelers in lieu of big-name destinations like Italy or Spain, cash seems to be less and less common. Nonetheless, cards aren’t universal. As a traveler, having some cash is still a good backup in case your cards stop working — just don’t carry too much. If you’ve got over $10,000 on you when you’re trying to cross country borders, you’re going to have to declare it to Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The idea of carrying $10,000 in your wallet may seem ridiculous to plenty of people. Especially considering that a cash amount of $50 to $100 per day per person is considered generally reasonable for a vacation. But if you do have loads of cash on you for some reason, $10,000 is the United States’ threshold for declaration. Within the national borders of the U.S., like crossing from state to state, you don’t have to declare your money. However, when traveling in or out of the U.S., you do.

And: More Than $100K Seized After K-9 Officer At Dallas Love Field Airport Sniffs Out Bag.

TIME MAGAZINE’s 2025 MAN OF THE YEAR CONTINUES TO KNOCK IT OUT OF THE PARK: Washington Post’s AI-generated podcasts rife with errors, fictional quotes.

The Washington Post’s top standards editor Thursday decried “frustrating” errors in its new AI-generated personalized podcasts, whose launch has been met with distress by its journalists.

Earlier this week, the Post announced that it was rolling out personalized AI-generated podcasts for users of the paper’s mobile app. In a release, the paper said users will be able to choose preferred topics and AI hosts, and could “shape their own briefing, select their topics, set their lengths, pick their hosts and soon even ask questions using our Ask The Post AI technology.”

But less than 48 hours since the product was released, people within the Post have flagged what four sources described as multiple mistakes in personalized podcasts. The errors have ranged from relatively minor pronunciation gaffes to significant changes to story content, like misattributing or inventing quotes and inserting commentary, such as interpreting a source’s quotes as the paper’s position on an issue.

Which means that the WaPo’s AI is currently behaving like most flesh-and-blood journalists at the WaPo. And as Glenn wrote last year after Google’s AI declared that we are all National Socialists now (classical allusion), “Of course, the thing about AI is that AI keeps getting better, while people stay about the same.  (Indeed, there’s some evidence that the average person is getting dumber, which if true will only close the gap faster.)  At a sufficiently advanced level of technology, AI will be super-effective at manipulating people, and they won’t even know they’re being manipulated.” So AI should continue to clear the gap between man and machine at the WaPo surprisingly quickly.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Woman given a new 3D-printed windpipe in a world-first.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

● Will Star Trek-Style Matter Transporters Ever Exist?

—ThoughtCo., January 10th, 2020.

● Florida Man claimed he ‘teleported’ into stolen BMW before 130 mph crash, deputies say.

—Fox 35 Orlando, Tuesday.

KURT SCHLICHTER: There’s Nothing Funnier Than Fussy, Furious Euroweenies.

Hearing disturbingly feminine, Somali corruption-curious Minnesota governor Tim Walz complaining that, because of Donald Trump, people are driving by his house shouting “Retard!” should’ve been the funniest thing that happened over the last few news cycles, but our European friends have done it one better. Actually, they’re not our friends. They’re annoying layabouts who do nothing but whine and complain as they feed off the corpse of the civilization they inherited like cultural trust fund babies. They have gotten very upset because Donald Trump’s national security strategy accurately recognizes that Europe is unable to defend itself and is increasingly unworthy of us squandering more time, blood, and treasure to do it for them. So, they’re lashing out, threatening to be responsible for their own defense.

Yeah, that’ll show us. Throw us in that briar patch, Horst. There aren’t enough “LOLs” on the Internet for how funny it is to see you stomping your feet because we’re done picking up the check.

This is personal to me because I’ve spent a substantial part of my life doing the jobs that Europeans would not do. From November 1988 to April 1991, with a multi-month tangent to the Persian Gulf War, I was part of NATO in what was then West Germany. It’s always great to have people tell me how important NATO is when I was part of it, and they weren’t, but let’s put that aside. I was there at the end of the Cold War. We were still doing things like having REFORGER exercises and going out on alerts at 3 a.m., where we would shiver in our assembly areas knowing that if the balloon really went up, our role was to die in place so the locals could continue to consume strudel and bitch about Ronald Reagan. Then, for a year between 2004 and 2006, I left Irina with a little kid and went to Kosovo to keep those Europeans from killing each other. I got a non-Article 5 NATO medal out of that. None of this makes me some sort of hero – in Germany, I ran a heavily armed car wash, and in Kosovo, I largely shared my legal and business experience with the locals. But I was away from America and my family, cleaning up Europe’s messes for the Europeans. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a little gratitude for my time – and the time of millions of other Americans.

Spoiler: There’s never going to be any gratitude. There can’t be. The fact that we uncouth hicks from the New World had to come back to unscrew the mess the Europeans have made of Europe was never going to get us anything like a simple danke schön. That they needed us grated on them then, and it grates at them now that big, loud Yankees were the only thing keeping their sorry butts from chaos.

British expat Charles Cooke adds: Europe Is Delusional.

Criticize a European from America and you will immediately be hit with a wall of undeservedly self-righteous disdain. This should not be mistaken for pride; rather, it is that peculiar, negative, defensive sort of hauteur that is focused less on the positive virtues of the speaker, and more on his deeply held conviction that, whatever his deficiencies, at least he’s not you. That, at root, is the contemporary European mantra — At Least We’re Not American — and, like many mantras, it is impervious to fact or repudiation. What about the massive gap in GDP that has opened up between the U.S. and Europe since 2008? At least we’re not American. What about the anemic performance of European companies relative to those in the United States? At least we’re not American. What about the gulf between GDP per capita in Europe and GDP per capita in the United States, or about the U.S.’s great advantages in biotech and energy and advanced semiconductors, or the fact that, if most European countries were to join the U.S., they’d have a lower standard of living than people do in Mississippi, or that the average European is six times more likely to die from a lack of heating or air conditioning than an American is from a gun, or that most European countries are unable to usefully project military power? At least we’re not American.

As Cooke concludes, “Why, pray, do Europeans tell themselves that? Because, if they didn’t, they might have to account for their failures, and because that would require a capacity for introspection that they simply do not possess.”

It’s been a lopsided battle for quite some time. A quarter century ago, Tom Wolfe wrote: “European labels no longer held even the slightest snob appeal except among people known as ‘intellectuals,’ whom we will visit in a moment. Our typical mechanic or tradesman took it for granted that things European were second-rate. Aside from three German luxury automobiles—the Mercedes-Benz, the BMW, and the Audi—he regarded European-manufactured goods as mediocre to shoddy. On his trips abroad, our electrician, like any American businessman, would go to superhuman lengths to avoid being treated in European hospitals, which struck him as little better than those in the Third World. He considered European hygiene so primitive that to receive an injection in a European clinic voluntarily was sheer madness.”

KAMALA REACHES STAGE FIVE OF THE KUBLER-ROSS MODEL: Did Kamala Just Admit That Her Political Career Is Over?

Instead of being unburdened by the past, as she so often exhorted us to be, Harris seems content with her place in it. “I understand the focus on ’28 and all that. But there will be a marble bust of me in Congress. I am a historic figure like any vice president of the United States ever was.”

This isn’t conceit or braggadocio. It’s a simple statement of fact. There are actually busts of all the vice presidents, from the first, John Adams, right up to “Richard B. Cheney,” in the Senate wing of the Capitol. There are no busts yet of Old Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Kamala, or JD Vance, but they’re likely on the way.

This is not precisely an honor; it’s just a list, an observation that these people held a certain office. This is clear from the fact that all the vice presidents from Adams to Cheney are included, including Spiro Agnew, even though he resigned in disgrace (and was actually a tardy addition for just that reason); Aaron Burr, even though he shot and killed Alexander Hamilton; and J. Danforth Quayle, even though he couldn’t spell “potato.”

Kamala Harris’ pointing out that her bust will one day join this illustrious company was tantamount to saying that her political career is over. And maybe it is. So even if her 2028 presidential run is already a bust, she can console herself with the fact that she’ll always have her bust.

Still though, we’ll have to thank Kamala for inadvertently giving Herbert Hoover’s long-forgotten veep some new and well-deserved recognition: Fact check: Charles Curtis holds spot as first person of color as vice president.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LASER FOCUSED ON THE BIGGEST OF ISSUES: Mario Rubio Orders the State Department to Ditch Its Woke… Font.

To be fair, though:

Calibri sucks ass. It's a cuck font. https://t.co/FjDosbVYIk

— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) March 6, 2017

NEW DEATH STAR FLAK TOWER NEARING COMPLETION:

Classic Obama: my gift to Chicago is a $1 billion East German-style eyesore built on what used to be public land. You're welcome. https://t.co/zZnJVfoqX2

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) December 11, 2025

Sure, it looks intimidating, but it’s got to be tough enough to survive the neighborhood:

Obama taking a lot of heat for his brutalist presidential library, but people forget that only this type of construction can withstand that tough Chicago weather of strong wind, big temperature swings, and near constant spray of stray bullets. https://t.co/NvnzI7xsgY

— Jarvis (@jarvis_best) October 14, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTALISM: AOC splurged nearly $50K on pricey hotel stays, dining and renting Puerto Rico concert venue where Bad Bunny performed.

In all, the campaign forked over $15,489.77 for lodging in Puerto Rico between July 1 and Sept. 30.

At least $10,743.13 was spent on meals and catering services on Aug. 25 and Sept. 29, per the FEC filings for that period.

Elsewhere on the island, the 34-year-old Bronx and Queens Democrat danced alongside Brooklyn Rep. Nydia Velázquez at an Aug. 10 Bad Bunny concert held in San Juan as part of the anti-ICE rapper‘s “Residency tour.”

Is this some sort of On the Beach-style last minute blowout decadence while waiting for the world to come to an end? Because otherwise, based on her many doomsday pronouncements in 2019, it doesn’t sound like an environmentally friendly way to spend one’s free time. To coin an insta-phrase, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. And in the meantime, I don’t want to hear another word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint.

GOODER AND HARDER, SILICON VALLEY:

I want to stress again that California is not in a situation where it's gaining tech jobs at a slower rate than the rest of the country (like 2021/2022), but is outright losing tech jobs as the rest of the US gains

Cali is down 75k tech jobs from peak & nearly 20k from pre-COVID pic.twitter.com/EiaZ4nrKdw

— Joey Politano 🏳️‍🌈 (@JosephPolitano) December 11, 2025

To revise and extend the remarks by the late P.J. O’Rourke, you can’t get good Chinese takeout in China, Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba, and tech employees are fleeing California. That’s all you need to know about communism.

DAVID MARCUS: Somali power surge raises the question Minnesota avoids — where’s assimilation?

SKYNET SMILES: Time’s 2025 Person of the Year: The architects of AI.

2025 was the year when artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back.

For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the… pic.twitter.com/mEIKRiZfLo

— TIME (@TIME) December 11, 2025

Time magazine has unveiled its 2025 Person of the Year: The architects of AI.

“2025 was the year when artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back,” Time said in its announcement on Thursday morning. “For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year.”

The magazine released two covers for its Person of the Year issue.

One, created by digital artist Jason Seiler, is a recreation of the “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photograph from 1932, replacing its ironworkers with executives at leading tech and AI companies, including Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Lisa Su (Advanced Micro Devices), Elon Musk (xAI), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Sam Altman (Open AI), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind Technologies), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), and Fei-Fei Li (Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute). The other, by illustrator and graphics animator Peter Crowther, features the same leaders amid construction scaffolding that surrounds the letters AI.

The magazine has bestowed its Person of the Year title annually since 1927, though it was formally called Man of the Year (or Woman of the Year) until 1999.

“Person of the Year is a powerful way to focus the world’s attention on the people that shape our lives,” Time editor in chief Sam Jacobs wrote in an essay explaining the choice. “And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI.”

No doubt, AI’s potential is as bottomless as the PC was when it debuted in the mid-1970s, before Time declared it the “Machine of the Year” in 1982. But as usual in the post-Henry Luce era, the magazine plays it safe, and doesn’t wish to alienate its readers on the left. Because there was a far bolder option available to them:

The only one who should be the Time Person of the Year: pic.twitter.com/UPa9U8KRan

— Planet Of Memes (@PlanetOfMemes) December 10, 2025

CHANGE:

Addressing the people justifying Charlie Kirk's murder on the basis of his beliefs, Erika Kirk said: "You're sick. He's a human being. You think he deserved that? Tell that to my 3-year-old daughter."@MrsErikaKirk sat down with @bariweiss for a CBS News Town Hall, just days… pic.twitter.com/8P31w4JQQR

— CBS News (@CBSNews) December 10, 2025

60 years ago, Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr were claiming on air that Barry Goldwater was a crypto-Nazi, so the fact that CBS can now show empathy to an actual Republican is significant progress. I hope they can continue in this fashion.

But as Steve noted yesterday, Bari’s got her work cut out for her, and large percentage of staffers who openly despise her for not being as far to the left as they are: Bari Weiss Named a New CBS News Anchor, and the Response Is the Funniest News Ever.

UPDATE: Given how painfully Cronkite leaned into his biases on the air, this is absolutely perfect:

I can only assume the ghost of Walter Duranty was not available.

— Physics Geek (@physicsgeek) December 11, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Median Democrat. https://t.co/VBD0qlD5Oz

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) December 10, 2025

DRILL, BABY, DRILL! In Astounding Coincidence the “Experts” Cannot Explain, US Oil Production Hits Record Highs as Gasoline Prices, Inexpicably, Fall to Lowest Levels Since the Chinese Engineered Bioweapon.

TRIGGERNOMETRY: Jimmy Carr: A Revolution is Coming!

NEWS YOU CAN ABUSE: The Dave Barry 2025 Holiday Gift Guide. This year, give the gift of: Huh?

Thus we can assume that the mood in the stable was already pretty tense when the three Wise Men showed up. The New Testament tells us that they brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Gold makes sense as a gift, but we have to wonder about frankincense and myrrh, which according to Google are kinds of tree resin, a “thick, sticky, semi-liquid substance” excreted by conifers. No doubt the thought was sincere, but this does not seem like a super-appropriate gift for a newborn infant. The last thing you want, as a parent, is for your baby to get his hands on a blob of tree goo.

The New Testament does not say how Mary reacted to these gifts, but if I know anything about women, by which I mean my wife, Mary was mortified that she didn’t have any gifts to exchange with the Wise Men, so she pulled Joseph aside and ordered him to go out immediately, find a conifer and bring back some gift resin. She probably also wrapped the gold in different paper and regifted it to the Wise Men. And thus the holiday tradition of exchanging gifts was born.

Thousands of years later, we’re still dealing with the stress of holiday gift-giving — the constant nagging worry that we won’t have enough gifts to retaliate against everybody who will be giving gifts to us. Wouldn’t it be great if you could drop out of this insane holiday competition? Well you can! The trick is to stop trying to give your loved ones thoughtful and appropriate gifts. Instead, you want to give them gifts that are so stupid or inappropriate that they will never want to exchange gifts with you again, and in fact may enter the Federal Witness Protection Program to avoid running that risk.

Where can you find gifts that bad? Right here, that’s where, in my annual Holiday Gift Guide. This is a carefully curated selection of real products that you can actually buy; in fact these products are all 100 percent tax-deductible if you write about them for business purposes in your professional humor Substack. So grab your credit card and prepare to be underwhelmed, because here comes this year’s lineup of gift candidates, starting with:

THE ORIGINAL TOILET MIRROR

Don’t be fooled by copycat toilet mirrors: This is the original toilet mirror, which is a mirror that comes with some adhesive strips so you can mount it on your toilet lid.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

THE TIPPING POINT: Democrat Congressman: Yes, the US Is the ‘Great Satan.’

Democratic Congressman Calls America 'The Great Satan' in Wild Rant https://t.co/Ran8yn47Nx

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) December 10, 2025

In a sane world, propagandists like Dean Obeidallah would try to find somebody a bit less retarded than Hank Johnson to make the moral case to his audience that Orange Man is being bad by killing terrorists, but we now live in a world where it is pretty normal for lefties to describe America as a Nazi country filled with roving bands of white supremacists killing brown people for sport.

Classical allusion in headline:

NOT LOVING IT: McDonald’s Pulls Christmas Advert After Criticism.

The Netherlands’ division of McDonald’s has pulled its Christmas advert following online backlash over its AI-generated content.

The advert, which was titled “the most stressful time of year,” featured a number of AI-generated people who all experience mishaps in the lead up to the festive season, including an exploding Christmas tree and presents falling off roofs.

In an email shared with Newsweek, a spokesperson for McDonald’s Netherlands said: “The commercial was produced for McDonald’s Netherlands, but we have decided to remove our AI-generated Christmas advert.”

What To Know

The advert faced criticism after it was published and quickly went viral online.

Matt Walsh, a conservative political commentator, wrote on X: “It sucks. It’s awful. There’s no artistry. No wit. No charm. No warmth. No humanity. You can tell it’s AI from a million miles away. I hate it. You should hate it. We should relentlessly mock and deride and bully anyone or any company that uses AI like this.”

The visuals are cringe-inducing, and the message is even worse — why is McDonald’s dismissing the Christmas season as “the most terrible time of the year?”

LOLOLOLOL https://t.co/mMFaxofzLJ

— Justine Bateman (@JustineBateman) December 9, 2025

Merrill Markoe, David Letterman’s former longtime girlfriend and producer, who created the format of his classic NBC late night show, said a decade ago that the postmodern irony that Letterman trafficked in throughout the ’80s had become so omnipresent on TV that it was “the language of advertising and corporate P.R. now:”

It is the voice of what [musician Andy Prieboy of the rock group Wall of Voodoo, her longtime companion] calls “Your buddy the corporation.” Everyone’s hip. Everyone’s ironic. Everyone who is selling you something wants you to know they have the same limitations and daily strife that you do. You definitely should be wary when you hear this voice now. It’s not to be trusted. Unless you’re in the market for an aluminum cookware set or an Apple watch.

The new McDonald’s ad begs the question: How long can that style of corporate irony keep twitching away in the advertising world like a long-dead zombie?

In terms of its visuals, this is the second Christmas-themed AI-generated ad by a world mega-corporation that’s bombed. Will advertisers abandon this format in the short-term until AI becomes harder to detect, or at least smoother in its execution? Great Moments in Quality Control: Coca-Cola’s AI ad just ruined Christmas… again.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of AI:

BREAKING: TIME Person of the Year reportedly leaked. pic.twitter.com/oe3okxsXoZ

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) December 10, 2025

If true, Skynet, Hal, and Colossus are all flashing smiles that would make Gordon Gekko proud.

JAMES MAY FINALLY DRIVES THE NEW PORSCHE 911T:

CHANGE:

Preliminary data on births and fertility show that Trump's mass deportation plan is working.

During Sept.-Oct., the number of foreign-born women having children in the U.S. declined in 41 states.

Free substack article here:https://t.co/dkWJeXGItQ pic.twitter.com/I8T18n3uIW

— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) December 9, 2025

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Starfleet Academy — What Is This Garbage? “Is it too much to ask to have a Star Trek that was written by and for adults? Because I have to ask, who in this world or the next was this teen drama of a show made for? I mean, anyone with even a vague understanding of Star Trek is going to be completely and utterly appalled by the weapons-grade retardation on display here. And anyone who’s looking for a high school drama about feelings and relationships is going to be instantly put off by the geeky science fiction backdrop. It really does feel like the worst of both worlds.”

DAVID FRUM GETTING AN EARLY JUMP ON NEXT YEAR:

Begun, the stolen-election theories have. https://t.co/uYlJZGBqOZ

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) December 10, 2025

Hey, you know what would really help prevent Trump from stealing 2026? Who are You? Voter ID law and election integrity should be top priority in new Congress. Voters want it, and with good reason.

DON’T GET COCKY:

Incidentally, where have you gone, Marty Peretz? TNR turns its lonely eyes to you.