BIDENESQUE: Moscow finds another way to replenish troops, UK intelligence.

The Russian authorities have decided to write off loans for those willing to sign a contract. The Russian army will be replenished at the expense of bank debtors, the UK Ministry of Defense informs.

According to the report, at the end of November 2024, Russia passed a law allowing military personnel who joined the armed forces after December 1, 2024, to have their loan debts written off. The debt write-off will cover loans of up to 10 million rubles (approximately $100,000) and will also apply to spouses.

This measure will supplement the existing loan holiday program for Russian military personnel. The independent Russian media organization Mediazona reports that 411,000 repayment holidays have been arranged for mortgages and personal loans since October 2022.

I hope Russians are ready for an even worse bout of inflation.

DOG BITES MAN: The Media Spins Carter’s Death As a ‘Win’ Against Trump

ON THE PLUS SIDE, YOU CAN LOOK FORWARD TO ALL THOSE “UNEXPECTED” UPWARD REVISIONS DURING TRUMP 47:

Another 653,000 fake jobs revised away by govt statisticians. They were faking the data during 2023 and 2024 to try to boost Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

In the revisions, they have also admitted to 818,000 fake jobs being removed from the 2023 data.

Now the truth is coming… https://t.co/ugFjndy7vZ

— Wall Street Mav (@WallStreetMav) December 30, 2024

Was anything real under Biden? Aside from punishing debt and overregulation, that is.

YOU STAY CLASSY, JOE: In Eulogizing Carter, Both Biden and Trump Show Their True Colors.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Jimmy Carter Was a Terrible President — and an Even Worse Former President. “Carter’s true legacy is one of economic misery at home and embarrassment on the world stage. He left the country in its weakest position of the post–World War II era. After being booted out of office in landslide fashion, the self-described ‘citizen of the world’ spent the rest of his life meddling in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United States and its allies in a manner that could fairly be described as treasonous. His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him.”

Carter only gets partial credit for deregulation and appointing an inflation hawk to chair the Fed because those things were going to happen under Reagan, anyway.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Yes, Absolutely Biden Should Have Stayed in the Race. “‘Style’ was Biden’s problem on June 27 — yeah, that’s the ticket. Yet it’s the theme threaded throughout WaPo’s excuse-mongering report on a failed president, with reporter Tyler Pager going deep to sell the fiction that Biden was a success on substance but doomed to a single term by a country obsessed with mere style.”

ROBERT STERLING: H-1B Mega Thread.

I downloaded five years of H-1B data from the US DOL website (4M+ records) and spent the day crunching data.

I went into this with an open mind, but, to be honest, I’m now *extremely* skeptical of how this program works.

Here’s what I found.

Lots to dig through, most of it damning.

Exit quote: “You can see where I’m going with this. A casual perusal of the data shows that this isn’t a program for the top 0.1% of talent, as it’s been described. This is simply a way to recruit hundreds of thousands of relatively lower-wage IT and financial services professionals.”

DRAIN THE SWAMP: Help Get This Simple Fauci Prosecution Playbook to Trump, Please. “This guy, being Fauci’s top capo, knows where all the bodies are buried — proverbially and possibly literally.”

FAIL, BRITANNIA: Labour to make national curriculum more ‘diverse.’

Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has begun a review to “refresh” what is taught in schools, pledging to “breathe new life into our outdated curriculum”.

The new curriculum will be compulsory in all state schools, including academies that were previously free to opt out.

The Telegraph can reveal that the Department for Education’s terms of reference for the overhaul explicitly say that the department (DfE) aims to create a curriculum that reflects the “diversities of our society” and help produce young people who “appreciate the diversity” of Britain.

This newspaper has also seen suggestions for changes to the curriculum that have been submitted to the review by unions and other teaching groups, including for how to “decolonise” subjects which have been branded too “mono-cultural”.

Unions aren’t a teaching group.

Previously: Starmer handed horrifying early Christmas present as petition demanding ‘immediate’ General Election FINALLY exceeds 3 million signatures.

Britons elected a hard-left government and were somehow shocked when it started governing from the hard-left.

THIS IS CNN: A CNN Panel Tried to Defend Biden’s Legacy. Scott Jennings Let Them Have It.

WELL, BYE: Some Justice Department Lawyers Look for Protection—and the Exits.

Justice Department lawyers who have angered President-elect Donald Trump and his allies are facing tough decisions about whether to stay in government—and how to best protect themselves from threats of retribution after Inauguration Day.

Dozens of prosecutors and agents have worked on cases that potentially make them vulnerable, such as special counsel investigations of Trump, prosecutions of hundreds of his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and contempt-of-Congress cases that sent top Trump associatesSteve Bannon and Peter Navarro to prison this year.

Their concerns are part of a broader wave of uncertainty that has swept through the Justice Department since Trump’s re-election, as he and his appointees openly float plans to fire career employees and bring the department more closely under presidential control.

You mean, like DOJ was under Obama “wingman” Eric Holder and Biden Cabal enforcer Merrick Garland?

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Obligatory ‘Say Something Nice About Jimmy Carter’ Post. “Most of Carter’s presidency happened while I was finishing up high school. I wasn’t much of news junkie then, but I was aware enough that Carter was the first president and candidate I ever voted against when I was old enough.”

HMM:

🚨 Strikes are breaking out in Tehran, as shop owners protest impossible living conditions.

Why does this matter? Because Bazaars and markets in Iran are massively important for the economy, and strikes can truly suffocate the regime if they spread.

Will update. pic.twitter.com/1QsCmQhKvW

— 𝗡𝗶𝗼𝗵 𝗕𝗲𝗿𝗴 ♛ ✡︎ (@NiohBerg) December 29, 2024

Details:

Today, Sunday, December 29, 2024, large sections of Tehran’s bazaar went on strike in protest against crippling price hikes and skyrocketing currency rates. They organized a protest march, urging other merchants to join the strike.

The strike and protest began in the Shoemakers’ Bazaar and quickly spread to the Rasteh Bazaar, Small Charsu, the Fabric Sellers’ Bazaar, Bagh Sepahsalar, Seyyed Vali Passage, Hammam Chal Passage, and the Coppersmiths’ Bazaar. Shortly afterward, the fabric sellers in Abbasabad Passage, Sepah Bazaar, and Mellat Passage also joined the strike. Protesters chanted: “Courageous merchants, support, support!” “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, shut it down, shut it down!” and “You can’t do business with an 80,000 toman dollar!”

In a statement, the merchants cited several reasons for their strike, including the shortage of raw materials due to soaring currency rates, severe economic stagnation caused by exorbitant prices, lack of liquidity in the market, and heavy taxes.

Developing…

GOOD: Court Orders Biden to Stop Selling Off Border Wall Materials.

THAT ’70S SHOW: Guardian Angels resume NYC subway patrols for first time since 2020 after shocking arson murder.

The Guardian Angels are resuming their patrols of the Big Apple’s subways as if it were crime-riddled Gotham in 1979, after the horrifying arson murder of a sleeping straphanger on a train last week, founder Curtis Sliwa said Sunday.

The red-beret-wearing volunteer vigilante squad is beefing up its ranks to its level 45 years ago, Sliwa said.

“We’re going to have to increase our numbers, increase the training and increase our presence as we did back in 1979,” Sliwa said at the Stillwell Avenue-Coney Island station in Brooklyn where the woman was killed.

“We went from 13 to 1,000 [members] back then within a period of a year,” he said. “Because the need was there. The need is here now once again. We’re going to step up. We’re going to make sure we have a visual presence just like we had in the ’70s, 80’s and ’90s.”

Mister, we could use a man like Rudy Giuliani again.

UGH: Gruesome Details Emerge About the Horrific Conditions Faced by Hostages in Gaza.

BREAKING: Here’s What We Know So Far About the Fiery Plane Crash in South Korea.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: My Mind Was Blown by His New High Score. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, Florida Man earned a new personal best, Florida’s ‘Grumpy Old Men’ reboot, and Delta Airlines has gone to the dogs.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China suffers commercial rocket failure but sets record for annual launches.

The launch was China’s 68th launch attempt of 2024, surpassing the national record of 67 launches in a calendar year, set in 2023. The 68 launches include two failures, both of commercial solid rockets: Kinetica-1 and Hyperbola-1 from iSpace in July.

China is second for launches in 2024 behind the U.S., with over 150 launches including Rocket Lab launches from New Zealand, and ahead of Russia, with 17 launches. U.S. launches were dominated by the SpaceX Falcon 9, while Russia’s annual launch activity continued to decline, from 25 in 2021, 22 in 2022 and 19 in 2023.

China overall fell well short of a 100 launches forecast by state-owned main space contractor CASC early in the year.

SpaceX (so far) accounted for 125 those 150+ US launches, plus three Starship test flights.

WAIT, THEY CAME OUT AFTER HUNTER’S BLANKET PARDON? New Photos Emerge Showing Biden Corruption at Work.

YOUR QUADRENNIAL/OCTENNIAL REMINDER THAT HOMELESSNESS IS ONLY A PROBLEM WHEN THERE’S A REPUBLICAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE:

ahhhhh right on time, the media rediscovers these strange GOP cicadas emerging from hibernation https://t.co/eDuujnSXKh

— NeverTweet (@LOLNeverTweet) December 27, 2024

UPDATE (From Ed): When James Taranto was editing the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web Today” column, his recurring leitmotif on the DNC-MSM and homelessness was:

Homelessness Rediscovery Watch

“If George W. Bush becomes president, the armies of the homeless, hundreds of thousands strong, will once again be used to illustrate the opposition’s arguments about welfare, the economy, and taxation.”–Mark Helprin, Oct. 31, 2000

Sic semper erat, et sic semper erit.

BAD IDEA: Candace Owens Challenges The Babylon Bee to a Fight or Something.

CORN, POPPED: Two of ABC’s top stars at war as ‘historic tension’ between them is revealed.

ABC News legends David Muir and George Stephanopoulos secretly loathe one another and are mired in a ‘historic’ feud, it has been claimed.

The two newsmen have been known to have tension and now are barely seen on screen together as a result, as revealed by Oliver Darcy in a holiday edition of the Status newsletter.

‘There certainly has been historic tension — to put it lightly — between the two anchors,’ Darcy wrote in response to a question about the dynamic between Muir and Stephanopoulos.

‘That has resulted in headaches for the network’s bosses. But viewers may notice that, for the last few years, Stephanopoulos has been absent during politics-focused special coverage, such as Election Night. Those duties now fall squarely to David Muir.’

The two news anchors have reportedly had a professional rivalry for years, which widened when Joe Biden’s advisors chose Stephanopoulos to conduct the first interview with the president following his disastrous debate performance.

They deserve each other, but judging by ABC News’ ratings, fewer and fewer people deserve either one of them.

BRAVO: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe phones home after surviving historic close sun flyby. It’s alive! “The spacecraft is programmed to send home a more detailed status update on New Year’s Day, Jan. 1. It’s only then that scientists will know whether the spacecraft indeed collected the expected observations of the sun from the flyby, Michael Buckley, a spokesperson at JHUAPL, which oversees the Parker Solar Probe mission, told Space.com in an email. ‘This gives the team a better picture of overall spacecraft and subsystem/instrument health, including whether Parker’s data recorders are full.'”

THERE’S DOUBLING DOWN ON STUPID AND THEN THERE’S HOWEVER MANY TIMES THIS IS: You Won’t Believe Who Jen Psaki Thinks the Future of the Democratic Party Is. “Psaki believes the Democrats missed a ‘big opportunity’ by passing over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) in favor of Rep. Gerry Connolly for the top spot on the House Oversight Committee.”