CUE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN: Tim Walz is crumbling, along with his 2028 hopes.

The past year has not been kind to Walz. Kamala Harris’s recent book, “107 Days,” makes clear she was thoroughly disappointed by Walz’s performance as running mate. She describes watching him in the vice-presidential debate on TV and saying, “You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.”

After the debate, when Walz tells Harris that he wishes he had done better, she reassures him — but fumes in the book that she thought, in choosing Walz, she was getting an experienced politician who’d know what he was getting into. In the acknowledgments, full of effusive praise for her campaign staff, Harris writes simply, “To Tim Walz, thank you for joining me on this journey.”

Walz’s approval rating in Minnesota as governor is evenly split, as of September. But keep in mind, this is a heavily Democratic state. The gubernatorial primary isn’t until June. If you’re a Minnesota Democrat, do you really want to roll the dice on a not-so-popular guy going for a rarely pursued third term? Republicans are likely to nominate Lisa Demuth, the state’s House speaker, who’s already hitting Walz because he “let fraud run wild.”

Of all the schadenfreude in this report, my favorite part is that Walz actually had — has? — 2028 hopes.

THE NEW SPACE RACE:

NASA Administrator Nominee Jared Isaacman delivers a powerful and urgent opening message at his confirmation hearing:

“The last time I sat before you, I introduced myself, my qualifications, and the challenges and opportunities ahead. This time, I'm here with a message of… pic.twitter.com/DRsJFxt9ZY

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) December 3, 2025

SCOTT PINSKER: PR Fallout of the Tennessee Special Election: Here’s What the Media WON’T Tell You

HMM:

I cycle between ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, and Gemini on a daily basis.

ChatGPT is politically correct.

It’s safe.

It’s sycophantic.

It has a clear left-leaning bias.

I can’t trust it.

These aren’t computing issues – they’re values issues. https://t.co/QlvoyETd3e

— Kaizen D. Asiedu (@thatsKAIZEN) December 2, 2025

I haven’t noticed GPT showing any bias — but it wouldn’t for what I use it for. I keep GPT in what I call “sandbox mode,” where it helps me edit longer pieces for structure and flow, but never for content.

For facts and news, I haven’t found anything better than Grok. On the other hand, Grokipedia is riddled with obvious factual errors. As always, caveat emptor and double-check every LLM’s work.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINES: Resist the AI apocalypse: Students want to be ‘capable humans, independent thinkers.’

Like many other humanities professors, he’s retooled his classes. “An A.I.-resistant English course has three main elements: pen-and-paper and oral testing; teaching the process of writing rather than just assigning papers; and greater emphasis on what happens in the classroom,” Rotella writes.

Professors are using more short quizzes to hold students accountable for doing the reading. He now tells students to “scan and turn in their mark-ups — underlinings, marginal notes, highlighting — of the hard copy they’re reading, which is as close as I can get to watching them think as they read.”

Some “emphasize teaching the process of writing — breaking it down into a series of steps that a teacher can see and respond to — rather than simply grading the product.”

Rotella has students write brief responses to the reading that can be turned into first drafts and then final drafts. Reading all the drafts is more work for him, but it means he’ll notice if the final paper doesn’t reflect the student’s thinking. He’s also added “a conference in which the student tells me about conceiving and writing a paper.”

Smart.

CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN:

🚨#BREAKING: An 18 year-old in Charlotte NC is being held on a staggering $5.3 MILLION bond after he was charged for 16 (!!!) shootings across Charlotte.

This is his 3rd arrest in 3 months…

…AS AN 18 YEAR-OLD!!!

Due to Iryna's Law, he's being held in jail. pic.twitter.com/bKu380iseL

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) December 3, 2025

IT ISN’T REALLY ABOUT DENZEL: Washington’s Spending Train Is ‘Unstoppable.’

IT’S COMPLICATED: The H-1B Scam. “I think the $100,000 via application fee should kill most (but not all) the abuses. Another reform could be to set a minimum threshold of a $150,000 salary for an H-1B job, which will probably price Cousin Sanjay out of the market. And more scrutiny from the three agencies involved in the H-1B process (Departments of Labor, Homeland Security and State) should help cut down the chain migration problem.”

Lots of good info at the link.

WAIT, WUT? Illegal Alien Policeman Busted by ICE… Returns to Duty?!

SPACE: Sugars, ‘Gum,’ Stardust Found in NASA’s Asteroid Bennu Samples.

The asteroid Bennu continues to provide new clues to scientists’ biggest questions about the formation of the early solar system and the origins of life. As part of the ongoing study of pristine samples delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft, three new papers published Tuesday by the journals Nature Geosciences and Nature Astronomy present remarkable discoveries: sugars essential for biology, a gum-like substance not seen before in astromaterials, and an unexpectedly high abundance of dust produced by supernova explosions.

Scientists led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan found sugars essential for biology on Earth in the Bennu samples, detailing their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience. The five-carbon sugar ribose and, for the first time in an extraterrestrial sample, six-carbon glucose were found. Although these sugars are not evidence of life, their detection, along with previous detections of amino acids, nucleobases, and carboxylic acids in Bennu samples, show building blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the solar system.

For life on Earth, the sugars deoxyribose and ribose are key building blocks of DNA and RNA, respectively. DNA is the primary carrier of genetic information in cells. RNA performs numerous functions, and life as we know it could not exist without it. Ribose in RNA is used in the molecule’s sugar-phosphate “backbone” that connects a string of information-carrying nucleobases.

It’s almost as though the solar system was wired to produce life.

GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY:

USPS EV fleet behind schedule with $3B in taxpayer funds spent — and only 612 trucks built https://t.co/0vJI3TJ2DK pic.twitter.com/amrTr3vSO2

— New York Post (@nypost) December 2, 2025

It’s a Biden-era program, so good luck figuring out where the money really went.

I CAN IMAGINE QUITE A BIT: Imagine There’s No Socialists. I Wonder If You Can.

DUCK AND COVER: Scientists discover 53 powerful quasars shooting out jets up to 50 times wider than our Milky Way. “These monster objects, known as Giant Radio Quasars, are part of a clutch of 369 radio quasars recently discovered by Indian astronomers in data collected by the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT), an array of 30 parabolic dishes located near Pune, India, as part of the TIFR GMRT Sky Survey (TGSS). The TGSS covered around 90% of the celestial sphere above Earth, with the telescope’s wide-sky coverage and high sensitivity making it the ideal instrument to spot distant gigantic radio-emitting structures like Giant Radio Quasars.”

BACK TO THAT TENNESSEE SPECIAL ELECTION ONE MORE TIME:

Some will be mad at me for this but I say it out of love for our country… We won the TN special election by less than we should have.

If you’ve been to this area, you know it should have been a blowout. And this isn’t a knock on Matt Van Epps. He had lower name ID to begin with…

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) December 3, 2025

Key takeaway: “We need to right the ship or voters will sink our ship in 2026. Enthusiasm from 2024 is gone. The blind trust is gone. They want action. The people in Congress need to realize that they aren’t Trump and he isn’t there to carry them on the ballot in 2026. They need to deliver now. And even then we likely have to run ‘26 like a Presidential election with Trump going around the country.”

A special election with a radical and unappealing Dem in an R+10 district should have been a blowout, but Democrats are angry and energized — while the RNC seems largely oblivious. The RNC needs to wake up, because not even Trump can be everywhere and do everything.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend writes:

You know what I think people are missing about the special election in TN? Not unlike NYC, Nashville is now filled with both 20somethings who really cannot afford to live there and are susceptible to all this affordability nonsense and blue state migrants who are gonna import their politics. Both are more highly motivated to vote in these special elections. As for the former: elite overproduction is a thing. Lots of these 25 yo folks who hit all the marks and got their NYU degree are pissed when they look around and see some dude who went to Alabama or Tennessee and studied accounting or see trades people earning more than they are tending bar. Then I think their impulse is to go into politics and figure out how to expropriate it.

Yes.

I WONDER IF THOSE OLD WEAPONS PIPELINES ARE STILL UP AND RUNNING: Is Ireland About to Erupt Into a Civil War Over ‘Illegal Immigration’?

SCHLICHTER EXPLAINS IT ALL:

Long explainer:

Let’s examine the emerging “scapegoat” narrative, because it demonstrates the true objective of the Democrat/Regime Media/Fredocon axis – to hurt Trump politically and to stop the changing of the Pentagon from a leftist-supporting social pathology Petri dish back…

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) December 2, 2025

A bit more:

Let’s examine the emerging “scapegoat” narrative, because it demonstrates the true objective of the Democrat/Regime Media/Fredocon axis – to hurt Trump politically and to stop the changing of the Pentagon from a leftist-supporting social pathology Petri dish back into a patriotic war-fighting force that can effectively prevent the eventual color revolution they are working toward.

At the threshold, let’s understand that there was nothing illegal here. Even under the facts as alleged, which change as they keep shifting the goalposts, there was no violation of the law of war. There was no violation of any Geneva Convention, not least because no Geneva Convention applies here. So, everything I say here is simply taking their story du jour and testing it to see if it makes internal sense. It does not, because it’s all baloney. They don’t care. It’s the lie that’s important.

So, just last week, we had a bunch of Democrats claiming they were just helpfully explaining to our troops that our troops cannot follow illegal orders. The whole basis is that you were going to be issued an illegal order by some Trump higher-up, and that you should disobey it because it’s illegal. This was part of a narrative to tee-up the current fake scandal.

Read the whole thing.

SHE IS TRULY AWFL:

This is going to shock you, but after she lost, Aftyn Behn called up Van Epps and nagged him.

This may be the most AWFL thing I’ve ever seen. And I saw that clip from Jennifer Welch’s podcast yesterday. https://t.co/HpEsvrU9iU

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) December 3, 2025

“Hey, I know the people chose you, but do what I would have done if they’d have chosen me.”

Related:

Dem candidate: I hate Nashville!

Nashville: pic.twitter.com/i0kTbRF5ha

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) December 3, 2025

And what’s with her shirt? Was she trying to disguise herself as someone who doesn’t hate Nashville? Nashville Dems voted for her regardless, so I suppose they hate Nashville, too.

Previously: Crazy Tennessee Dem Has Meltdown, Runs for Congress, Won’t Win, Will Blame Patriarchy.

DANCING WITH TEARS IN HIS EYES: This Dude Does a Lot of Dancing for Someone With a $50 Million Bounty on His Head.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Chinese reusable booster explodes during first orbital test, in failed bid to catch SpaceX.

A private Chinese space firm successfully sent its Zhuque-3 rocket to orbit but failed in its historic attempt to re-land the rocket booster Wednesday – the first such trial by a Chinese firm as the country’s growing commercial space sector races to catch up with American rivals like SpaceX.

Beijing-based LandSpace, one of the sector’s leading firms, launched its Zhuque-3 rocket into space from a remote, desert launch site in northwestern China.

The rocket entered orbit as planned, but its first stage – the portion of the vehicle that propels it at liftoff – did not successfully return to a landing site, instead crashing down, the company said in a statement.

“An anomaly occurred after the first-stage engine ignited during the landing phase, preventing a soft landing on the designated recovery pad,” the statement said. “The debris landed at the edge of the recovery area, resulting in a failed recovery test.”

Space is hard. Recovery is harder.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: There’s a Lot of Entertainment Value in Mark Kelly’s Implosion. “I have been watching Kelly closely for five years now, and I’m still surprised at the fact that a former fighter pilot and astronaut can be such a mediocrity. His two Senate campaigns consisted mostly of ‘I’M AN ASTRONAUT!’ and some blather about how much his parents loved him. His time in office hasn’t exactly made him stand out. He fits the standard modern Dem mold, which values grandstanding and publicity stunts over crafting coherent policy. “

DRILL, BABY, DRILL: Responding to pressure from US, International Energy Agency forecast sees no end to oil demand.

The International Energy Agency appears to have bowed to threats from the U.S. to pull its funding if the agency didn’t realign its forecasting toward unbiased, policy-neutral projections.

In the middle of the COP30 United Nations Climate Change Conference last month, the agency released its annual “World Energy Outlook.” Unlike previous iterations, the report doesn’t base its forecasts of future oil demand on scenarios that assume nations’ commitments to net-zero emissions by 2050 will be met.

As a result of the change in forecasting, the agency no longer predicts “peak oil,” a century-old theory that the world will stop using petroleum because either it runs out or transitions to other technologies.

Cool. Now do nuclear power.

ICYMI: Just When You Thought Tom Nichols Couldn’t Possibly Go Fuller Tom Nichols. “This is where your Friendly Neighborhood VodkaPundit blinked harder than Marty Feldman during a gnat infestation.”

“SAFETY”: India tells smartphone makers to put state-run cyber safety app on new devices.

India has ordered all new smartphones to come pre-loaded with a state-run cybersecurity app, sparking privacy and surveillance concerns.

Under the order – passed last week but made public on Monday – smartphone makers have 90 days to ensure all new devices come with the government’s Sanchar Saathi app, whose “functionalities cannot be disabled or restricted”.

It says this is necessary to help citizens verify the authenticity of a handset and report the suspected misuse of telecom resources.

The move – which comes in one of the world’s largest phone markets, with more than 1.2 billion mobile users – has been criticised by cyber experts, who say it breaches citizens’ right to privacy.

Under the app’s privacy policy, it can make and manage phone calls, send messages, access call and message logs, photos and files as well as the phone’s camera.

“In plain terms, this converts every smartphone sold in India into a vessel for state mandated software that the user cannot meaningfully refuse, control, or remove,” advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation said in a statement.

That’s bad enough, but then there’s this:

Amid the growing criticism, India’s Minister of Communications Jyotiradtiya Scindia has clarified that mobile phone users will have the option to delete this app if they don’t want to use it.

“This is a completely voluntary and democratic system – users may choose to activate the app and avail its benefits, or if they do not wish to, they can easily delete it from their phone at any time,” he wrote on X.

The minister did not, however, clarify how this would be done if the app’s functions cannot be disabled or restricted.

Simple: He’s lying.

Will Delhi’s mandate crater the market for new phones, or will they figure out how to force the tracking app on existing phones, too?

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU CODDLE MENTAL CONDITIONS INSTEAD OF TREATING THEM: TSA Agent Who Say’s He’s a Woman Claims ‘Civil Right’ to Grope Women.

IT ISN’T JUST THE AIRLINES NICKEL AND DIMING YOU TO DEATH ANYMORE: TSA announces $45 fee for travelers with no REAL ID. “This fee is part of the agency’s next phase of the REAL ID implementation process and will require individuals to verify their identity through a biometric or biographic system if they don’t have a compliant form of identification before they’re permitted to cross through the checkpoint.”