APOLOGIZING ISN’T REALLY IN THE SPIRIT OF THE RAZZIES: Razzie Awards Apologizes For Nominating a 12-Year-Old Girl for ‘Worst Actress.’

THE COUNTRY IS IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Controversial expert is appointed to Biden food panel after claiming that obesity CAN’T be treated with exercise and good diet because it’s genetic – will now tell Americans what to eat. “Dr Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician at Mass General Health in Boston, was appointed to the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which will develop new recommended eating habits for Americans over the coming years.”

TO BE FAIR, HE SAYS A LOT OF STUPID STUFF: Biden Said Sending Tanks to Ukraine Would Start World War III.

Email Shows Bucks County School Closures Weren’t Just Bad For Kids, They Were Illegal.

Emails uncovered by concerned parents in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, home of the state’s third-largest school district, reveal district leaders knew they were violating state law when they locked students out of the classroom after the 2019-2020 academic year. Years later, it’s finally coming to light.

In July 2020, an email from then-Central Bucks Superintendent John Kopicki acknowledged the legal limits to online instruction for the upcoming school year.

“Hybrid options and staggered schedule options are NOT legal as of today, absent a waiver or legislative change,” the email read. No waiver from the state house ever came, but the schools shut down anyway.

Apparently, they cared about law almost as much as they cared about the kids.

SOME SOLID PICKS HERE: McCarthy Reveals Who Will Be Investigating Biden’s Weaponization of the Federal Government.

INSULT TO INJURY: Soldiers Fired For Refusing Covid Vaccine Forced To Pay Back Recruitment Bonuses.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Meanwhile we’re having recruiting shortfalls now. This won’t help. It’s almost like they want to break the system.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: There’s Nothing Beyond Meat: Plant-Based ‘Meat’ Sales Take a Serious Pruning. “Fake cattle, it seems, graze in the Uncanny Valley.”

BUY AMERICAN: European Food Will Now Contain Crickets.

If you’ve not yet consumed crickets, you may soon — particularly if you’re a partaker of European fare.

The European Union is putting the “pow” in “powder.” It’s giving eaters an explosion of insect compliments of a pinch of arthropod. From now on, those overseas will be bound to eat ground cousins of grasshoppers.

Following a three-year review, Implementing Regulation (EU) 2017/2470 went into effect Tuesday. It allows food producers to put cricket powder in flour-based products.

Previously: “The plan to convert us all to insect-eaters is real.”

FINALLY! Footage of the Paul Pelosi Hammer Attack To Be Released.

A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: Parents feel ‘villainized’ by teachers who think they know best. “Jessica Bradshaw’s daughter — now a son — was diagnosed as on the autism spectrum, as well as with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, PTSD and anxiety, the California mother told Baker. Her teenager ‘had struggled with loneliness during the pandemic’ and ‘repeatedly changed his name and sexual orientation.’ School officials had put her child ‘on a path the school wasn’t qualified to oversee,’ rather than let the family decide what was best, Bradshaw said. She resents being made to feel like a bad parent.”

Plus: “As several autism experts have explained to me, those on the spectrum tend to fixate, and when a contagious idea is introduced to them — such as the notion that they might be a ‘girl in a boy’s body’ — they are particularly susceptible to it.”

IKE WAS RIGHT, BUT IT’S THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY I’M MORE CONCERNED ABOUT: Ike Was Right: The Military-Industrial Complex Has Become a Serious Problem.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: How Hollywood Helped Create, and Destroy, ‘Time’s Up.’

Producer Harvey Weinstein’s fall from grace handed Hollywood a golden opportunity.

Stars who preferred virtue signaling to hard work could now do something powerful, and necessary, for the culture.

Bring other Harvey Weinsteins to justice. And, as we learned in the weeks following Weinstein’s downfall, Hollywood is chock full of unsavory types.

And, sadly, so is the culture at large.

That’s why Time’s Up, which officially shuttered days ago, began in the first place. The nonprofit, sparked by lurid accusations against Weinstein, vowed to prevent other predators from getting away with their crimes. And, hopefully, send a message to men eager to prey on the fairer sex.

You’re next.

Actresses like Kerry Washington, Ashley Judd and Reese Witherspoon rallied to a cause that spread far beyond Tinsel Town. They helped pour millions into the startup, but some went a step further.

Witherspoon, Natalie Portman, Laura Dern, Alyssa Milano, Amy Schumer, Julianne Moore, Brie Larson, Jessica Chastain and Tessa Thompson joined its advisory board, eager to take a more hands-on approach to the group’s work.

Except those famous folks stood down when it mattered most.

Read the whole thing.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Good News — School Choice Is Back on the Agenda for Republicans. “My personal dream would be to do away with the Department of Education altogether, but I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. Expanding choice wherever and whenever possible is the first step in weakening the power of the public education indoctrination mills.”

WELL, SHE ISN’T: Journo tells KJP ‘you don’t seem a good fit for this job’ to her face during presser.

HMM: CNN Drops a Huge Bombshell in Biden Classified Documents Scandal. “According to a new report from CNN, of all places, Biden wasn’t originally willing to consent to have the Justice Department search his home and only agreed to it after Justice Department indicated it would seek a warrant if necessary.”

LOS ANGELES IS A Predator’s Paradise.

While the last few decades have seen an increase in human trafficking, women at all three of the anti-trafficking groups I spoke with across California agreed: nothing compares with the stunning rise in trafficking they’ve witnessed in recent months. Powell, formerly a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Vice Division, knows the city’s streets intimately. Over the last six months, the number of prostitutes has doubled, she says. “On Figueroa, between 68th and 75th, in an hour, you might see about 30 girls out there. Now, you can see 60 to 65 girls in an hour.”

What shifted? The answer, the anti-trafficking advocates told me, is Senate Bill 357. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in July, the measure decriminalized loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. The bill did not officially take effect until January 1 of this year; but, from the moment it became law back in July, these women say, the on-the-ground reality changed. “The minute the governor signed it, you started seeing an uptick on the streets,” Powell said. “And on social media, the pimps were saying: ‘You better get out there and work because the streets are ours.’”

The pimps were right: police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged. The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring. “As a police officer, you need probable cause to stop and investigate,” Powell explained. “So if I have a law that says you can’t loiter in this area, with pasties and a G-string, flagging down cars, I could stop you for that because you’re loitering. But if I just say I’m stopping you because you look kind of young, that’s a little weak. So, it takes away a tool.” Without the statute, police hands were suddenly tied. Henceforth, questioning the girls—and potentially provoking a violent confrontation with pimps—came to seem a Pyrrhic gamble, one that California’s police officers would now avoid.

By overwhelming majorities, women in California vote for this.

VICTORIA TAFT: Gavin Newsom’s ‘Suicide Pact’ With the Truth. “California Democrats pass more gun restrictions while at the same time passing easy-on-crime laws that favor people breaking the law.”

BREAKING: Meta to Allow Trump Back on Facebook.

AMAZING STORY: Navy Pilot Who Secretly Killed Four MiGs On One Mission Finally Recognized. “Capt. E. Royce Williams shot down four Soviet MiG-15 jets in a single mission over Korea, but his achievement was obscured for decades.”

ELI LAKE: American Nomenklatura.

Call it the “content-moderation industrial complex.” In just a few short years, this nomenklatura has come to constitute an implicit ruling class on the Internet, one that collectively determines what information and news sources the rest of us should see on major platforms. Talk about “free speech” and “the First Amendment” may actually be beside the point here. The Twitter that Musk bought was part of a larger machine—one that attempts to shape conversations online by amplifying, muzzling, and occasionally banning participants who run afoul of its dogma.

The existence of this nomenklatura has been known for a few years. But thanks to Musk and his decision to make Twitter’s internal communications and policies available to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and others, more detail is now known on why and how this elite endeavors to protect us from all manner of wrongthink.

The unspooling of Twitter’s secrets—in a series of long Twitter threads—has been revelatory for many reasons. It turns out that despite armies of human content moderators, artificial-intelligence tools to weed out everything from health misinformation to hate speech, and an expanding set of internal rules, a handful of senior executives still made the most consequential decisions on what Twitter’s users were allowed to see.

You’ll never guess which way they all lean.

DUCK! Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies are already merging. “Someday in the far future, Andromeda will shine brightly in our sky, getting bigger and bigger as it approaches us. The eventual merger of our two galaxies has actually already started, despite the fact that they are still 2.5 million light-years apart.”

HEH: New Jersey Army Vet Falls In Love with Jihadi. It Was An Explosive Affair.

COLORADO: Legislative Democrats want to give $1,400 tax credit to retired public employees 55 or older.

Meanwhile: How Colorado’s Cage-Free Egg Law Could Impact Prices. “Egg prices may be the perfect way to understand both the causes and the effects of inflation. ‘In the case of eggs, you have rapidly increasing market prices of corn or whatever it is that they eat, and that drives up the cost of feeding the chicken, which drives up the price of eggs, which drives up prices for American consumers,’ Isabella Weber, an economist at UMass Amherst told Vox. When you consider that the price of eggs also affects the prices for all the products that contain eggs, the ripples extend even further.”

Denver is much better at looking after bureaucrats and chickens than voters and their families.

Gooder and harder.

TRAINED FROM AN EARLY AGE TO HATE THE COUNTRY THAT ALLOWED THEM SUCH PRIVILEGE: Turns Out the Atlanta Terrorists Are Children of Privilege.

YES: Our Classified System Is A Joke.

In 2022, a woman named Asia Janay Lavarello, a civilian employee of the Defense Department, took materials that included classified documents to both her home and hotel room to help write a thesis project she was working on. She was fired, fined, and sentenced to three months in prison. In 2021, Izaak Vincent Kemp, a contractor with the Air Force, was found to have 112 classified documents among the papers in his home, “[d]espite having training on various occasions on how to safeguard classified material.” He was sentenced to a year in prison. In 2017, a man named Weldon Marshall was sentenced to three years in prison for having classified documents on a disc from his time in the Navy.

There are hundreds of similar examples.

None of these people, as far as I can tell, attempted to sell state secrets to the Russians or the Chinese. Most had merely mishandled documents for personal reasons — perhaps even accidentally. But the Espionage Act (or Presidential Records Act) offers a pardon for cooperating with authorities or for having good intentions or for making mistakes. Those who break laws governing classified documents are subject to strict liability because it’s the mishandling, not the motivations, that matter. Hillary Clinton wasn’t selling top-secret documents when using her illegal private server, but she should have known there was a high probability that foreign governments would be able to hack them. Which is why her disregard for the law was worse than any other official in memory.

Anyway, these laws have long been arbitrarily enforced. If you’re a political official sworn to uphold the nation’s laws, you’re probably going to be fine. If you’re some technocrat at the Pentagon, on the other hand, your life might be destroyed. But, thanks to Merrick Garland, we have some new standards to ponder.

Read the whole thing.