MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: On Weather Forecasts and “Trusting the Science.” Notes from a blizzard that didn’t happen. Plus a few thoughts on the current political situation.
As always, if you enjoy these essays, please take out a — preferably paid — subscription. Thanks!
I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE: The pandemic’s hidden toll: Millions of chronic conditions left undiagnosed.
HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS TIKI BAR: The California Post heralds a new era for the Golden State — we will fearlessly tell you the stories that really matter.
As I wrote in August, when the New York Post first announced a West Coast edition, they’ve got to do a better job than the L.A. Times, which for decades has been dull-as-dishwater, despite being located in a town that supplies an endless stream of over the top celebrity news.
OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Govt gave $3.3 million science grant to Northwestern for ‘safe space ambassadors.’
“The funding is designed to address the dearth of under-represented minorities in the life sciences,” the news release stated.
However, Christopher Neefus, spokesperson for Open the Books, told The College Fix that the tax dollars spent on the project detracted from real scientific inquiry. Open the Books is a fiscal watchdog organization based in Illinois where Northwestern also is located.
“The extravagant spending highlighted by Senator Paul comes at the expense of more funding for essential, truth-seeking science,” Neefus said in a recent email. “Rigorous pursuits are too often being sidelined in favor of ideologically charged, discriminatory projects that have nothing to do with research and development.
“Those fighting changes to the status quo have lamented ‘attacks on science,’ but safe spaces and ‘inclusive excellence’ hardly qualify,” he told The Fix.
Yes, but it provides makework for otherwise unemployable lefties.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION HASN’T COVERED ITSELF WITH GLORY IN ITS GUN-RELATED STATEMENTS ON THE PRETTI SHOOTING: This piece from Bearing Arms parses things pretty well.
UPDATE: Larry Correia has thoughts, too. Excerpt that captures his inimitable style:
That whole Noem/Patel narrative is bunk. Lots of Americans exercise their 2nd Amendment rights in public, even when there’s some dumb ass “protest” going on.
What law abiding gun carriers DON’T DO however is fuck around with cops while armed, and if they do willfully fuck around with cops, getting arrested or shot shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone.
A big part of every CCW class is about what to do when dealing with law enforcement, and none of that involves following them around, tailing their cars, honking horns in their ears, throwing shit, breaking shit, meddling in their arrests, “directing traffic”, obstructing traffic, biting people’s fingers off, or just being general fucking weirdo nuisance temper tantrum throwers to provide cover for illegal alien rapists as a diversion because your democrat governor just got caught giving billions of tax dollars to imaginary Somali children and the democrats really want to win the midterms so they can get back to destroying America forever.
That was a run on sentence, but these people are really fucking stupid. And it appears that they’ve had a Signal chat for MN government officials to coordinate this fuckery with the useful idiots too.
Did this particular dude do all that? No. Did he do some of that? Yes. So again, getting shot is a bummer, but not at all shocking.If you want to see who is honest and who is a lying partisan hack dipshit in situations like this, watch for the people who ignore all the context, history, and events which set the stage for a particular incident, who then focus instead on minutia and playing back video frame by frame in ultra slow mo.
Like I said yesterday, just off math and basic probability, if you provoke chaotic encounters against the same bunch of feds, day in and day out, over and over, hoping for a violent altercation, eventually you’re going to get a violent altercation. Duh.
Yes. Indeed, getting that altercation may or may not have been Pretti’s plan, but it’s definitely what the organizers of these riots wanted to happen.
INSURRECTION AND FOREIGN COLLUSION: Anti-ICE Signal Chats: Walz Administration Implicated, Foreign Funding Revealed.
THE EASIEST TIME TO CRUSH AN INSURGENCY IS IN THE BEGINNING: What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest.” It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook.
And they generally collapse when you cut off the external support and funding.
SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE: “[San Diego] County Flags to be Lowered in Recognition of ICE-Related Deaths in Minneapolis.” (Paywalled, but the headline says it all.)
THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO SHOW UP: Yeah, So China Just Imploded. “‘Imploded’ might be too strong a word, but Communist China just entered the growing ranks of nations with a fertility rate below a single birth per woman — less than half the replacement level. The implosion might not be here quite yet, but it is coming.”
KENIN SPIVAK: “The Campaign Against ICE Is All About Open Borders.”
CHANGE: Trump says he’s sending Tom Homan to Minnesota tonight, saying Homan will “report directly to me.”
That should certainly soothe Obama’s nerves about the Minneapolis situation, right? In 2015, he awarded Homan “the Presidential Rank Award, [which] is bestowed each year by the President upon a small group of career employees and is the nation’s highest civil service award.”
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: Exercise is great but exercise studies…not so much. “It’s easy to believe that exercise or physical activity is beneficial over a lifetime, it’s hard to believe that 5 min/day (the equivalent of walking 400 meters) reduces death by 30%.”
Well, to be fair, if you can’t walk 400 meters you probably won’t live as long.
CHANGE: Five ways weight-loss jabs are changing spending habits.
“My weekly food shop’s really gone down,” says Sam Gillson, 38, from Shropshire, who got in touch with BBC Your Voice. He’s lost more than four stone using weight-loss jabs since June.
“I’m definitely buying more fresh foods, and fewer unhealthy ready meal/easy dinner options like pizza, chips and nuggets.”
In the last few weeks, supermarkets The Co-op, Morrisons and Marks and Spencer have brought out nutrient-dense ranges of ready meals, and Ocado now sells a 100g steak, which it said was in response to the growing number of customers seeking smaller portions.
Sam says eating less means he wants to make sure that “the smaller quantity does contain all those nutrients and vitamins you need”.
And it’s not just portion size. It’s also the kinds of foods.Protein-rich products have been appearing on the shelves as smoothies and snacks.
Jonny Forsyth, food and drink strategist at consumer research group Mintel, says many of these trends are part of a wider shift, with health becoming more important, particularly for younger consumers.
He thinks GLP-1 drugs are “changing the culture”, making it fashionable to eat more nutrient-dense foods and “adding oxygen to existing trends”.
That’s all kinds of good news.
A NEW LOW SO FAR: The Left’s Gun Rights Hypocrisy Just Hit a New Low.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Lenovo IdeaPad 15.6″ Laptop Computer – 20GB RAM. #CommissionEarned
DAVID HARSANYI: Sorry, AOC — protest culture is un-American.
Every loudmouth ignoramus with an opinion has a First Amendment right. You’re not special.
Yet modern left-wing protesters believe their passion and anger imbue them with moral license to demand things and speak over their fellow citizens.
Just watch the video of those self-righteous “activists” disrupting church services in St. Paul the other day, or global-warming cultists shutting down traffic in major cities, or college students using their heckler’s veto to disrupt speeches and debates.
As we’ve seen with two recent shootings in Minneapolis, protest culture can have deadly consequences.
Then again, most of these efforts aren’t organic or spontaneous expressions of political anger anymore.
They are well-funded and well-managed by organizations that see political benefit in creating chaos and turning our country into a revolutionary battleground.
From Lenin to Alinsky, forced confrontation has been a tactic of Marxist activism.
Indeed.
UTAH IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE: University of Utah class explores ‘Black Trans Lesbian Marxists’ and radical literature.
YES:
Two things can be true at the same time.
🕯️ Alex Pretti’s death is a real and devastating tragedy, and there are several investigations appropriately occurring into the circumstances behind his killing
🎯 A far-left organizing network put Pretti in harm's way and then turned him… pic.twitter.com/lOSv3bDo6Y— Asra Nomani (@AsraNomani) January 26, 2026
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CLIMATE CHANGE? Issues & Insights has been watching the weather reports closely and noticed something that doesn’t seem to be prompting comment in all the usual places.
BLUE STATE UPDATE: Minneapolis Police Chief: Yes, the Mob Should Rule.
MINNESOTA INSURRECTION: A Special Forces Operator Has Seen This ‘From Anbar to Helmand.’
GRAY-ZONE WARFARE: Researchers say Russian government hackers were behind attempted Poland power outage.
Last week, Polish Energy Minister Milosz Motyka told reporters that the attempted cyberattack on December 29 and 30 saw hackers targeting two heat and power plants, as well as trying to disrupt the communication links between renewable installations, such as wind turbines and power distribution operators.
Motyka called the incident the “strongest attack” on Poland’s energy infrastructure in years, with the Polish government blaming Moscow for the attempt. Local media reported that the attacks could have knocked out heat and power for at least half a million homes across the country.
On Friday, cybersecurity firm ESET said it obtained a copy of the destructive malware, which it calls DynoWiper. This type of malware, known as “wiper” malware, is designed to irreversibly destroy data on computers to prevent them from working.
ESET attributed the malware with “medium confidence” to the hacking group known as Sandworm, a unit within Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU, based on a “strong overlap” with its previous research into Sandworm’s past malware, including the group’s use of destructive malware to target Ukraine’s energy sector.
Tangentially related: Poland sends hundreds of generators to Ukraine as Russia strikes energy system.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
