LANGUAGE: ‘Slop’ crowned Merriam-Webster word of the year, defining era of AI-generated content.

Merriam-Webster said that the word slop originated in the 1700s to mean “soft mud” before the meaning evolved to “food waste” in the 1800s and, eventually, “rubbish” and “a product of little or no value” in colloquial terminology.

“The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, ‘workslop’ reports that waste coworkers’ time… and lots of talking cats,” Merriam-Webster said in their announcement. “People found it annoying, and people ate it up.”

I liked the talking cats.

“EXPEDIENCY” REMAINS HER WORD OF THE DAY: Wait, Nancy Pelosi Just Said WHAT? “What’s it mean when an impeachment-happy former House Speaker suddenly announces that impeachment is off the table?”

THEY CERTAINLY DON’T WANT THEM TO: The Left thinks poor kids can’t learn.

“Progressives” seem hostile to the idea that schools can teach low-income students, writes Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. Once moderate Democrats like Barack Obama backed reforms they hoped would improve achievement and provide upward mobility. Now, critics from the left “tend to dismiss any plan to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students.” They “support public schools as community centers and providers of child care and secure middle-class jobs,” but not as places to educate children.

Mississippi implemented “a set of educational reforms including teacher training, testing, retention (i.e., whether kids move forward or are held back), and a mostly phonics-based reading instruction,” and moved from 49th in the nation to the top 20 in a 10-year-period, Chait writes. “Adjusted for race and income, Mississippi now does a far better job of teaching literacy than do many northern states seen as leaders in public education.”

But left-wing critics of education reform aren’t cheering.

How will they keep them ignorant, dependent, and voting Democrat if they’re educated and upwardly mobile?

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Texas Charges TV Makers With Consumer Surveillance.

“When families buy a television, they don’t expect it to spy on them. They don’t expect their viewing habits packaged and auctioned to advertisers.”

That allegation, taken directly from Texas’ lawsuit against Hisense, sits at the center of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s legal action against five major television manufacturers accused of secretly monitoring consumers inside their homes.

Paxton has sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense, and TCL Technology Group Corporation, alleging the companies unlawfully collected and sold consumer viewing data from Texans through Automated Content Recognition technology, known as ACR.

I hate this stuff.

SAD:

Most people don’t truly understand how difficult it is for conservative students on campuses like Brown (and Cornell). It takes great inner strength to stand up to the social and social media pressures to conform, and those pressures come not only from other students, but from…

— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) December 15, 2025

THERE SHE GOES AGAIN: JK Rowling Strikes Again, Rips LGBT Crowd After Rapist Targets Girls in Mixed Gender Changing Rooms.

GREAT PACIFIC WAR PREVIEW: Ukraine Hits Russian Sub in First Underwater Drone Attack.

The strike carried out by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) with its “Sub Sea Baby” drones hit the submarine in the port of Novorossiysk where Russia has rebased many naval vessels to put them out of reach of Ukrainian strikes.

Footage published by the SBU showed a powerful explosion erupting from the water at a pier near where a submarine and other vessels were docked. Reuters confirmed the location of the video using the port’s layout and piers.

Alexander Kamyshin, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wrote on X that it was the first time in history that an underwater drone had neutralized a submarine.

I don’t know which will be the first nation to destroy or disable an enemy sub at sea, rather than at port, but it will happen.

I QUESTION THE TIMING:

It can now be said! https://t.co/IMBRuwSKD6

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) December 16, 2025

OOF: The Long Knives Come Out for Candace Owens.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: More than 60% of security clearance data was ‘not reliable,’ GAO reveals as it urges intel changes.

A newly released U.S. Government Accountability Office report highlights problems with the reliability of data used to oversee the federal government’s personnel security clearance process, raising concerns about oversight of how quickly and effectively clearances are granted.

The report last week found that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence lacks accurate and complete clearance data from dozens of federal agencies, limiting its ability to monitor performance and identify problems in the vetting of employees who must access classified information for their positions.

According to the GAO, over 60% of the clearance data it reviewed was “not reliable” across eight reporting requirements and seven agencies.

Good lord.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Let’s Globalize the End of the Leftist Fetish for Murderers. “Evidence abounds that the Democrats are delighted to be in bed with criminals, both of the domestic and illegal alien variety. They’re practically writing campaign ads for Republican candidates. During the last couple of elections, I wanted the Republicans to hammer the Dems on illegal immigration. The economy was easy pickings, too, but I was as close to being a single-issue voter as I ever had been. Now I want them to shout, ‘DEMOCRATS LOVE MURDERERS AND RAPISTS!’ from the hilltops.”

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS IN COMPLETE REMISSION: FBI to give Congress bombshell memos warning Biden DOJ didn’t have probable cause to raid Trump home.

The memos show the FBI’s Washington field office “does not believe they established probable cause” prior to raiding Trump’s Florida home, according to one source with direct knowledge of the memos about to be turned over to Congress.

It has long been rumored that some FBI agents disagreed with the decision to raid Trump’s home to look for classified documents at the request of the National Archives.

But the soon-to-be released emails will chronicle the specific concerns that DOJ under President Joe Biden had not met the standard for a search warrant, but proceeded anyway, officials said.

Of course they did — that’s how witch hunts work.

ICYMI: Ignoring Islamic Threat, Aussie PM Vows Tougher Gun Laws After Bondi Beach.

Related (from Glenn):

How does a 24-year old Muslim male who is known to the government for being affiliated with ISIS get to possess not one, but SIX firearms, in a country where guns are essentially banned?

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) December 15, 2025

Australia 🇦🇺…
When you don’t wear a mask VS when you shoot a bunch of Jews. pic.twitter.com/NINJFAJ23Y

— EducatëdHillbilly™ (@RobProvince) December 15, 2025

AGREED: ‘Financialization of All the Things’ is Parasitism, not Capitalism.

Friend-of-the-blog Alexandria Brown offered up a recent X/tweet addressing the financialization of, well, everything in business and commerce, and how it should be viewed in relation to the ideal of capitalism. Specifically, Alex wrote: ”Here’s a fun question to which I have not made up my mind even a little bit: is the financialization of All The Things a form of capitalism which is at least tolerable or is it so reductive of human life and endeavors as to be past a limitation on acceptable commercial behavior?”

Those of us who advocate for free markets understand that capitalism also presents an opportunity for bad actors to misbehave within the system. Be it 20th century snake oil salesmen peddling patent medicines, or 21st century Wall Street investment bankers selling pools of subprime mortgages as high-quality securities, there have always been bad actors exploiting the opportunities within a free market.

But just because we conservatives endorse capitalism doesn’t mean we must endorse – or even tolerate – the worst practices that occur therein.

In my opinion, the “financialization-of-all-the-things” is a form of parasitism that does not create wealth, rather it serves to extract the accumulated wealth from entities where wealth has previously been created.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S NASTY STUFF: Trump Designates Illicit Fentanyl ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction.’

FASTER? PLEASE! 5,000 FPS? “I assume many in the gun community will see a bullet that light out of a barrel that small as nothing more than a novelty, but 5,000+ fps is nothing to sneeze at.”

SHARKS GOTTA SWIM, BATS GOTTA FLY…: Soros Foundations Funding Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex Lawfare on Americans’ Gun Rights.

KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON: Everything Is Going to Hell — Cheer Up!

CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN: More than 9,500 commercial truckers taken off U.S. roads nationwide. “More than 9,500 commercial truckers have been taken off of U.S. roads for failing English-language proficiency checks, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.”

BECAUSE OF COURSE: Ignoring Islamic Threat, Aussie PM Vows Tougher Gun Laws After Bondi Beach. “Those poor, overworked gun laws — never accomplishing what sensible government and responsible citizens are supposed to do, and always called upon to do even more.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China plans 2026 debut of new rocket for crewed lunar and LEO missions

The Long March 10 and Long March 10A are being developed as part of China’s next-generation human spaceflight plans. The former, a three-stage rocket featuring a triple-core first stage with 5.0-meter-diameter cores, is designed to launch a new crew spacecraft (Mengzhou) and a separate lunar lander into translunar orbit as part of plans to land Chinese astronauts on the moon before 2030.

The latter, the 10A, is a two-stage, single-stick variant for low Earth orbit (LEO) launches, designed to send a LEO variant of Mengzhou to the Tiangong space station. LEO Mengzhou is designed to be partially reusable and can carry more astronauts to Tiangong.

China’s human spaceflight agency, CMSEO, hinted in October at a planned first flight of the Long March 10 and the Mengzhou spacecraft in 2026, with a logo design competition for the Mengzhou-1 crew spacecraft mission.

CALT’s statement does not make clear if the debut flight will be crewed or uncrewed, nor did it explicitly state the mission will be an integrated launch of the Long March 10A and Mengzhou spacecraft.

When’s that next Starship flight test, Elon?

SAD:

One of the unspoken reasons for the decline in marriage and births: young men of marriage age had their careers derailed in favor of diversity hires.

DEI is economic genocide. https://t.co/0CKmbiP7Ju

— Peachy Keenan (@KeenanPeachy) December 15, 2025

ERIK FLORACK: About Rob Reiner and His Wife’s Murder: Drugs, Terrorists, and Gun Laws

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: This is Why You Should Never Trust a CNN (Or Any Mainstream Media) ‘Expert’ Analyst…About Anything.

CNN’s Chief Law Enforcement and Intelligence Analyst John Miller:

What we’re told from law enforcement sources now is that the seized two firearms from this 24-year-old suspect [in the Brown University shooting]. One of those firearms, we are told, was equipped with a laser sight device.

This has significance because number one, that’s a fairly sophisticated device for a handgun where when you aim it, a red dot goes where you want to target, and if you fire at that point, the bullet goes where the dot is. It’s the kind of thing used mostly by professionals, tactical people, military people.

Are they now?

A BILLION-DOLLAR LOSS IS STILL CHEAPER THAN STAYING IN NEWSOM’S CALIFORNIA, I GUESS:

🚨 WOW! Devastating loss for Gavin Newsom as Valero suffers $1 BILLION dollar loss so they can flee California by 2026.

They’re sick of the mandates and regulations. That’s how bad it’s gotten.

America — pay attention. He wants the White House. pic.twitter.com/rvnPvmWd97

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 14, 2025

UPDATE (From Ed): “Tim Waltz got caught. Gavin Newsom got a presidential campaign.”