SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE WAS LAST SEEN WITH A BOTTLE OF XANAX: The FBI Paid People to Go to the J6 Riot. “The corporate media is ballyhooing one of the highlighted findings of the Inspector General (IG) as being proof that the FBI had nothing to do with the riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Nothing could be further from the truth. There were scores of federal and local assets from not only the FBI at the protest and riot that day but plenty of other three-letter federal and local agencies. Metropolitan Police had active agents provocateur on the ground. DHS, ATF, and other Beltway three letter agencies were on site that day.”

KRUISER: Just Sayin’ — I Never Asked to Be Pardoned for Crimes I Haven’t Committed.

The people being mentioned as being in need of “Get Out of Jail Free” cards in the next month haven’t been publicly lobbying for themselves, but it’s an almost certain bet that they’re jumping up and down screaming, “Me next!” behind the scenes.

As Scott wrote last week, Adam Schiff, Liz “I’m Just Like Lincoln” Cheney, and alleged physician Anthony Fauci headline the group of people most in need of an assist from President LOLEightyonemillion.

Schiff and Cheney are sweating bullets because they were members of the J6 House Soviet Select Committee on Daddy Issues, a pathetic un-American charade that only succeeded in wasting the taxpayers’ money.

Anthony Fauci is on the list for being Pol Pot, M.D. during the pandemic, of course. Four years later, we’re still waiting to see if he told the truth about anything other than the spelling of his name in 2020.

Read the whole thing — and I might have to steal “Pol Pot, M.D.”

WHOSE EMOTIONAL SUPPORT ROBOT FOR KIDS IS IT, ANYWAY? Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds.

Embodied blamed its closure on a failed “critical funding round.”
…
The company didn’t provide further details about the pulled funding. Embodied’s previous backers have included Intel Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, Sony Innovation Fund, and Vulcan Capital, but we don’t know who the lead investor mentioned above is.

When it first announced Moxie in April 2020, Embodied described the robot as a “safe and engaging animate companion for children designed to help promote social, emotional, and cognitive development.” It advertised play built around “best practices in child development and early childhood education”; changing weekly themes, like empathy, friendship, and respect; and activities like meditation, reading, and drawing with the bot.

But soon, none of those features will be available, making the pricey children’s toy virtually useless. According to Embodied, Moxie can’t perform core functionality without cloud connectivity. Worse, owners apparently have an uncertain and limited amount of time until the devices are bricked.

Teach your kids the value of on-device functionality before you buy them a cloud-enabled emotional support robot.

Either that or tell them to play in the yard with the dog.

VETTING: Trump Surgeon General Pick Parrot’s the Left’s Gender-Bender Propaganda.

BIDEN’S PARTING GIFTS:

EXCLUSIVE: Weeks before Trump takes office, Biden is racing to auction off unused border wall materials.

Video shows trucks hauling wall materials off the border to a government auction site, where a massive amount of wall is waiting to be sold. pic.twitter.com/ogaQMBHw7R

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) December 12, 2024

Full story here.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Gray Swans, Regime Collapse, and the Kremlin.

Last week, 50-plus years of the Assad family’s Ba’ath Party rule ended after an 11-day lightning campaign by rebel forces that nobody saw coming. Could Vladimir Putin’s regime suffer a similar fate? Authoritarian regimes appear strong, invincible even, right up until the moment they disappear in a gray swan event.

In a Substack essay this week, Charles Hugh Smith defined a gray swan event as “an event that is known and possible to happen, but which is assumed to be unlikely to occur.” The most recent example is the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria last weekend. People are right to marvel at how quickly it came undone but only after nearly 14 years of civil war. And there had been very little movement since March 2020.

Nevertheless, a gray swan appeared from nowhere two weeks ago, and 11 days later, Assad was history.

Much more at the link.

GORGEOUS:

Starship ready for testing ahead of Flight 7 pic.twitter.com/urGAsbQSR8

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 12, 2024

Flight 7 is set for no sooner than January 11.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: Pittsburgh Man Converts to Islam, and — Yes, AGAIN. “One thing you can say about Jack Molloy: he loves his mom. Molloy, a Pittsburgh resident who is now facing up to eight years in prison on terror-related charges, told his mother about his ‘master plan,’ and now that plan is part of the reason why he has come to the attention of the feds.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: McDonald’s Surpasses FBI In Number Of Shooters Apprehended In 2024.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: 50 Nations Sign NASA’s Artemis Accords Pledging the ‘Responsible Exploration of Space.’

DECLINE IS A CHOICE:

Sweden Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy Ebba Busch stated today that "she's furious with Germany" for dismantling its nuclear power plants, causing a spike in energy prices in Sweden.

Southern Sweden has record-high energy prices today due to having send electricity… pic.twitter.com/2YOvyCHyhz

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) December 12, 2024

Full text:

Sweden Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy Ebba Busch stated today that “she’s furious with Germany” for dismantling its nuclear power plants, causing a spike in energy prices in Sweden.

Southern Sweden has record-high energy prices today due to having send electricity to Germany via undersea power cables today.

Cold weather coupled with no wind has driven up the demand in Germany from other sources than wind. EU regulations force Sweden to send that electricity to Germany, driving up prices in southern Sweden today to be nearly 200 times higher than they are in northern Sweden.

A 10-minute shower in southern Sweden costs around USD 5 during today’s price spike.

Ebba Busch added that Germany’s decision to dismantle its nuclear power plants has also other detrimental effects for Europe:

“I’m furious with the Germans. They have made a decision for their country, which they have the right to make; it’s their right to decide. But it has had very serious consequences, also for the EU’s competitiveness because we see that German competitiveness has dropped significantly.”

She said that Germany’s actions have also reduced its ability to help Ukraine.

– “After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they still chose to dismantle their nuclear power plants… I respect that people can have different opinions about nuclear power plants, but we could have kept it. They are important because they are baseload power plants.

Having access to such baseload power plants would have increased the transmission capacity from Germany to other electricity price areas in Europe, driving down prices for all of us.”

Sweden — and the rest of Europe — need to understand that Germany is no longer a reliable partner.

Build more nukes.

BIDENFLATION:

Not only did wholesale inflation for Nov come in red hot, but the last 3 months were also revised higher; headline exploded 0.4% M/M, pushing Y/Y to 3.0% while core (pictured here) jumped to 3.4% Y/Y and continues rising much faster than the pre-Jan '21 average: pic.twitter.com/whyLnc7aXI

— E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. (@RealEJAntoni) December 12, 2024

I’ve been arguing for a while now that there’s still plenty of inflation baked in, thanks to Biden’s big spending bills — especially (and ironically) the Inflation Reduction Act.

More: IRA, Meet DOGE.

It’s no secret that the IRA was designed to achieve an “energy transition”—after passage, it was proudly hailed as the Green New Deal. According to the Biden administration, the law is “the single largest investment in climate and energy in American history.” True: in inflation-adjusted terms, it will cost more than it did to prosecute World War II.

It’s hard to overstate the inflationary impact of such a staggering scale of government spending, not to mention the massive opportunities for waste and fraud. And, in no small irony, the IRA promotes and subsidizes technologies and programs that will make energy more expensive, which will also fuel inflation. For evidence that such efforts radically raise energy costs, look across the Atlantic, to Germany and the United Kingdom, both further down the “transition” path the IRA envisions. High-cost energy in both countries has caused consumers to suffer and businesses to flee, with Germany in particular undergoing de-industrialization.

The DOGE boys have their work cut out for them, particularly since, as the article notes, IRA money “goes to all 50 states, with ‘red’ states being the biggest beneficiaries of the government gusher.”

Biden screwed us pretty good.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Democrats Exploiting CEO Shooting by ‘Never Letting a Serious Crisis Go to Waste.’

WINNING: Biden: I’m Going To Force Taxpayers To Pay For Illegal Alien Healthcare. Federal Judge: Like Hell You Will.

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS ENJOYING A SPA DAY:

🚨 WTF?! Joe Biden just pardoned multiple Chinese spies and an individual convicted of possessing child p*rnography

WHY?

39 MORE DAYS UNTIL THIS CRAP IS OVER. pic.twitter.com/W8QWIP7ajQ

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) December 12, 2024

Disgusting? Sure. Surprising? Not so much.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A good question.

We all know Biden had nothing to do with working up the pardon list.

The question is: who did? https://t.co/PNkGRVnYcy

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) December 12, 2024

THE DEEP STATE WILL NOT GO QUIETLY: Christopher Wray Is Preparing to Sabotage Trump and Patel.

WELL, GOOD: Data Show There’s No ‘Epidemic Of Violence’ Against Trans People. “Looking at each of 29 such reported cases in 2024, the three most common categories are domestic violence (6), altercations (6), and accidents (4). Of all cases, four did not have sufficient information reported by authorities to make a determination on what kind of violence occurred. The deaths also included a suicide, the highly publicized death of Dagny (Nex) Benedict, a victim of a mass shooting, and a random act of violence.”

Whatever you do, don’t upset progressives with statistics and facts.

ROBERT SPENCER: New UK Play Reveals the Gulf Between the Left’s Fantasies and Reality. “A play about the grooming gang scandal? It might have seemed for a fleeting moment as if the Sceptered Isle, which of late has been behaving more like the Blinkered Isle, was actually coming to its senses.”

CONSERVING CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY BY SEXUALIZING A COLD-BLOODED MURDERER:

A couple of days ago, JV Last made clear that he views immigrants as nothing but votes for Democrats and if they don't vote for Democrats than fuck them. Now, we have Tim Miller making jokes about the attractiveness of cold-blooded murderers. The moral preening Bulwarkers are… https://t.co/DixHBBL94G

— Boo (@IzaBooboo) December 11, 2024

From the replies: “If they are comfortable sharing this kind of thing in public, what the hell kind of nefarious shit goes on behind closed doors.”

You probably don’t want to know.

From Mussolini to Che to Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, there’s nothing new about leftists getting turned on by murderers — they just didn’t use to call themselves conservatives.

HMM: More Than 3,000 Drones Sighted Hovering Over New Jersey May Be From Iran.

DEMOCRATS: ActBlue Bombshell: Dem money platform tells Congress it didn’t block foreign gift cards until fall.

ActBlue, the massive online fund-raising platform for liberal causes, has informed Congress it did not automatically block donations made with foreign-bought gift cards until recently, a potentially significant revelation in an ongoing investigation into whether China, Russia, Iran or Venezuela routed illicit money to Democrat candidates.

House Administratrion Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., whose panel oversees election integrity, told Just the News on Tuesday that ActBlue turned over documents under subpoena showing a major change in September to its donor verification policies designed to protect against illicit money flowing into political campaigns.

ActBlue disclosed that it updated its policies on Sept. 9 to “automatically reject donations that use foreign prepaid/gift cards, domestic gift cards, are from high-risk/sanctioned countries, and have the highest level of risk as determined,” by its solution provider, Sift.

The change occurred just three days after Steil introduced the Secure Handling of Internet Electronic Donations (SHIELD) Act on Sept. 6 to ensure foreign money stayed out of online political fundraising. Before the change, Steil said, donations made with foreign gift cards were not automatically rejected by ActBlue before the change.

Good reporting but I don’t know how much of a “bombshell” the story actually is. Barack Obama opened the foreign money floodgates for his 2008 presidential run and wasn’t seriously punished for it. Why wouldn’t ActBlue do the same?

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Christoper Wray Is Busy Googling ‘No Extradition Treaty With United States.’ “He will leave behind a legacy that will only be viewed fondly only by the mentally unstable lefties who are still caught up in the J6 fever dream.”

BROUGHT TO YOU BE THE SAME PEOPLE WHO WON’T STOP YAMMERING ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY:

This is bad: after just two months into fiscal 2025, the US has already raked in a $624BN budget deficit.

This is the worst start to a year on record pic.twitter.com/Oeta4diK5Q

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 11, 2024

Something that can’t go on forever will stop.

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Sickening ‘Wanted’ Posters Targeting Corporate Execs Pop Up Across NYC.

HILLARITY ENSUED: What Happened When Oxford Anti-Semites Were Exposed to Facts.

The point here is not just the behavior of anti-Israel maniacs at the union or the fact that Sacerdoti, representative of the pro-Israel side of the public debate more broadly, showed grace and respect while standing his ground. It’s that the parts that drove the crowd to the brink of insanity were merely Sacerdoti’s reciting of statistics—i.e., facts. The mob’s contact with reality produced a chemical reaction that ought to be studied for decades to come.

About eight minutes in, Sacerdoti notes, in objection to the idea that Israel is purposely starving Gazans: “Israel has provided 700,000 tons of food to Gaza during this war. That is a daily average of 3,200 calories per person.”

To which a woman in the audience yelled: “You sick motherf***er!”

I don’t know if I’ve seen an exchange that so perfectly encapsulates the public debate over this Israel-Hamas war.

In the official Oxford Union video, you don’t get to hear that response at all. That is when the sound is cut out for 110 seconds, the length of time it takes the presiding official to regain order and allow Sacerdoti to continue.

This eruption was not caused by Sacerdoti saying something provocative or even delivering his opinion. It was his recital of statistics that sent the crowd into convulsions of fury.

You can watch the unedited video on X, naturally.