LACK OF LEADERSHIP IS AN IMPEDIMENT IN A LEADER:  John Thune’s Push to Lead Senate Republicans Again Is Getting Bogged Down.

SO LONG AS DEMOCRAT-RUN SCHOOLS TEACH THE VIRTUES OF SOCIALISM REPUBLICANS WILL HAVE TO EXPLAIN WHY SUCH POLICIES ARE ILL-CONCEIVED:  Republicans Keep Screaming ‘Socialism.’ Ron DeSantis Says That’s Not Going to Cut It.

A DEM, LIE ABOUT MILITARY SERVICE? INCONCEIVABLE!! WES MOORE, RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, MARK KIRK, TOM HARKIN, AND TIM WALZ ARE EXCEPTIONS PROVING THE RULE:  Maryland Dem. Governor Might Have Lied About His Military Service.

IF YOU THINK WE’VE GOT TROUBLES, CONSIDER: Any minute now, Europeans are going to go to the old barn and find grandad’s jackboots.  Germany: Activists Replace Iconic Unity Flag at Reichstag With Palestinian Colors.

DRAWING THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS FROM A PROFOUNDLY FRAUDULENT ELECTION:  Mullin Signals Openness to DACA Deal as Trump Faces GOP Backlash.

IT’S THE RUSSIAN WAY OF WAR: Granted, burying the enemy in a mountain of your own corpses worked better when Russia had a growing population. But cultural habits die hard. 450,000 Russians Dead In Ukraine?

JOURNALIST PROVES HERSELF IGNORANT. MUST BE TUESDAY:  AG Blanche clashes with CNN anchor asking whether it’s his ‘job’ to defend the Trump admin.

FOLLOW UP ON THAT:  Chewy and other companies pull ads from ‘I’ve Had It’ podcast after hosts laugh at ‘insensitive’ Charlie Kirk joke.

THE LEFT DROPS ITS MASK AND REVEALS ITS HIDEOUS FACE:  Evidence of Evil.

THEY’RE GOING TO BE A PROBLEM:  China Finds its Back Yard Vibe. …keep your range rings on…

SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED. GAMBLING? IN THIS HERE ESTABLISHMENT? 2020 History/Facts Sterling & Raffesperger provided false information to the J6 Committee when telling them there was no double scanned ballots and claiming that the hand count matched the machine count.

IT’S THE LAST THING I WANT TO DO, BUT I’M AFRAID IT MUST BE:  Let’s Talk About Fraud.

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

FREE SPEECH SO OFTEN DEPENDS ON A CONCERNINGLY SMALL NUMBER OF PEOPLE WILLING TO STAND UP. Not just for themselves, but for the other guy as well.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Dave Chappelle joins the pack of lefty haters with a fetish for political violence.

CALLING OCCUPANTS OF INTERPLANETARY CRAFT: Send your name to Saturn’s moon Titan with NASA’s upcoming Dragonfly mission.

HMM: Amyloid Fibers Have an Unexpected Role in Sperm, Scientists Discover.

I HAD A POST ON THIS A FEW DAYS AGO BUT IT’S WORTH REPEATING: Scientists Discover Climate Change May Have Stopped Earth’s Next Ice Age.

As I mentioned in other posts, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes’s Fallen Angels takes place in a world where the Greens got their way, carbon emissions were slashed, and an ice age ensued. Naturally the Greens’ response is to double down.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

When we say that school isn't great for boys, it's in part because they are increasingly taught by people who hate them.

A pipeline of young women has been brainwashed into despising males—so much so that some are comfortable saying publicly that we should abort all boys. She… pic.twitter.com/e6kGMVZKOa

— Erika Sanzi (@esanzi) November 9, 2026

Don’t trust your kids to people who hate them.

NOT AS FILTHY AS YOU THINK: How dirty and unhygienic were people in the Middle Ages?

SIGN ME UP: Legendary sci-fi magazine ‘Starlog’ returns as a yearly release, just in time for its 50th anniversary. “The legendary sci-fi mag went dark back in 2009 as part of the wave of popular publications folding due to years of declining readership and subscriptions. But as of Nov. 13, this geek favorite periodical returns as an annual print edition, and it’s available for pre-order now.”

THE INTERNET OF DANGEROUSLY CONNECTED THINGS: Iran blamed for fridge hacks.

France has accused Iran of being behind an “unprecedented” cyber attack on its supermarket fridges that spoilt food worth millions of pounds.

Jean-Noël Barrot, the country’s foreign minister, vowed to retaliate against Tehran as he blamed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for the Oct 11 and 12 hacks. He also summoned the Iranian ambassador.

“I can confirm that this attack was carried out by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” said Mr Barrot.

“This attack is unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression,” he said, adding: “We will implement sanctions at the European level against all those responsible for this attack.”

From August: Iran-Linked Cyberattack on US Water Systems Explained. “The cyberattack on US water supply systems has once again shown how severe lapses in critical infrastructure security can be. At least seven states, including Michigan and Minnesota’s Water and Wastewater Sector (WWS) companies, reported issues to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). There has been degraded water operations caused as a result of the activity.”

As Glenn likes to say, I do not trust the Internet of things. Particularly very big things, such as supermarket freezers and the control of local water supply systems.

THE DEMS UNDERSTAND TAKING AND EXERCISING POWER:

#whoremembers when the GOP House impeached Mayorkas and it was blocked BY A GOP Senate as unconstitutional? Does anyone think a Dem-backed Senate would do the same? https://t.co/Unrsq0HK8s

— Jay (@OneFineJay) November 9, 2026

HMM: Anthropic IPO Sounds Like Total Bullshit.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: Russell Brand and the tyranny of the Greater Good.

Brand is the Jimmy Savile of the liberal elite. He’s the pig whose sexist blather and misogynistic behaviour they were ‘willing to overlook’, just as their stiffer, posher forebears of the 1980s media establishment overlooked the tsunami of rumours about Savile. In both instances, a blind eye was turned in the name of the Greater Good. In Savile’s case, that ‘good’ was his charity work, his primetime ratings, his position as an elder statesman of BBC pop and his chuminess with royalty. In Brand’s case, it was his saucy leftism, his frisson of ‘revolution’ in an era of Cameroon Toryism, his sprinkling of debauchery at a tired BBC and his chuminess with the bourgeois press. The result was the same, though: female safety traded in for fleeting moral gain.

[Owen] Jones [of the Grauniad] is not alone. There are numerous reports and allegations that media bigwigs were ‘willing to overlook’ Brand’s comments and behaviour on the grounds that he was a cash cow, the great spicer-up of their bland output. It is alleged that as early as 2013, Channel 4 executives considered reducing the number of female production staff on Brand’s shows, so that they wouldn’t be victimised. The BBC failed to investigate Brand after he flashed his penis at a female member of staff in its LA offices in 2009. As Konstantin Kisin says, ‘the fact that Brand [was] a rapist’ was an ‘open secret’ in British comedy circles, yet little was done.

This is pure Savile territory. The wilfully blind might be different – younger, less stuffy and more ‘hip’ than the BBC suits who ignored whispers about Savile’s depravity. But their instinct was the same: to stare at their shoes as rumours swirled because their man was just too damn useful, whether because he was making gains for the crappy Labour left or money for TV execs. In both cases we witnessed the tyranny of the Greater Good – the horrors that can flow, or at least go under the radar, when elites prioritise riches or ideology over decency.

“This is pure Savile territory,”  for several reasons, as Kisin tweeted today. “[A] lot of people commenting on the Russell Brand case don’t understand how defamation law works in Britain…If you publicly make a claim about another person, that person can sue you for defamation and you will reliably lose and have to pay them huge damages, as well as their legal costs and your own, unless you can prove that your claim is true. Large media organisations like major newspapers will sometimes risk publishing claims they believe to be true on the basis that a story is in the public interest and an honest opinion but they regularly lose defamation cases and pay out millions in lost and settled cases. So, when I say that Russell Brand being a rapist was an ‘open secret’ on the British comedy circuit – that is a fact that is perfectly compatible with the fact that people didn’t say anything about it in public. From memory, some tried and were threatened or even sued into submission.”