WHAT IS BEING DONE IN OUR SCHOOLS IS MORE EFFECTIVE AT PREVENTING THE KIDS FROM READING:  Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read.

AT LEAST THIS ONE WAS CAUGHT?  Chinese Researcher on US Visa Charged with Smuggling E. Coli Into the Country.

THE FED GIVETH, THE FED TAKETH AWAY:  Trump official freezes millions in SBA aid to Minnesota, slams Walz’s policies as breeding ‘endemic’ fraud.

Which is why you should never ask the fed for anything.

WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS IS NOT NECESSARILY TRUE:  For everybody saying that the United States doesn’t have a working railgun we do. “The system works. It stopped because it wasn’t, you know, fieldable in an operational environment. The reliability aspects of it, right? But in terms of the technical challenges, the technical challenges have been solved. It’s pulling it all together and making it so soldiers and sailors can operate it”.

AND FOR THE X-CANCELLED:  

OF COURSE IT IS A PEOPLE PROBLEM:  People Problem, not a Gun Problem.

FOR BOOK LOVERS:  Books for Thought (and Christmas Gifts!)  Know a book lover? Here is one author’s picks of some of his favorite books covering history and science that would make perfect Christmas gifts.

SURELY DREADFULLY ABUSED BUT THANK GOD THEY’RE BACK:  Christmas miracle: Kidnapped Catholic school kids in Nigeria freed.

HIRING FOR ANY REASON THAN COMPETENCE ALWAYS RESULTS IN INCOMPETENCE:  Savage’s ‘Lost Generation’, or: Thoughts on the DEI scam and what happened after 2015.

APPARENTLY WHEN IT COMES TO UK CENSORSHIP, SUBSTACK IS CHOOSING TO BE GOOD GERMANS:   This Torygraph article is good as a piece that points out how bad the UK is, and AIUI, how bad Australia is becoming as they go down a similar path.  But… Not entirely to my surprise, substack appears to be being good germans and going along with the laws instead of actively resisting them.

OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves in the comment section, on the eve of Christmas Eve.

OCEANS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS; Golden Fleet of Trump Class Ships to be Built:

If you haven’t heard about the new Golden Fleet, behold this piece from the U.S. Naval Institute News:

The centerpiece of the Trump administration’s revamp of the U.S. Navy is the largest surface combatant America will build since World War II.

The U.S. Navy will buy two new “battleships” as part of the “Golden Fleet” effort, President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan announced Monday at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump said the Navy will start by purchasing two ships and eventually purchase 10, with a goal of 20 to 25 in total for the class with the start of construction planned for 2030.

“The U.S. Navy will lead the design, along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person,” Trump said.

As a triple Trump voter, I give myself permission to state that Trump is a very aesthetic person. You may think he is a douche-canoe but he does have an eye. The ships will be pleasing to the eye AND with unsurpassed lethality. More from U.S. Naval Institute News:

“The future Trump-class battleship – the USS Defiant – will be the largest, deadliest and most versatile and best-looking warship anywhere on the world’s oceans,” Phelan said during the presentation. “Now there will be work for shipyards everywhere from Philadelphia to San Diego, from Maine to Mississippi, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast, and for manufacturers that will build components for this battleship in every state.”

America’s Newspaper of Record has printed a helpful cutaway guide to the state of the art technology to be deployed on these soon to be nautical legends: Check Out These Amazing Features On The New Trump-Class Battleship.

(Classical reference in headline.)

HAYEK’S RULES FOR AI:

LLMs, much like human societies, are dynamic systems. With every retraining cycle, they receive an updated feed from the ever-changing internet, incorporating larger and larger subsections of the evolving digital world. Many models also incorporate explicit human feedback, e.g., Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback, to shape their behavior. Even small changes to the input or the training process can lead to unpredictable, large-scale effects on the model’s overall output and functionality.

The dynamic, complex nature of LLMs finds a compelling parallel in Friedrich Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Lecture, “The Pretence of Knowledge,” in which he explored economic and political systems characterized by billions of variables and interconnections. This structure aligns with the organization of LLMs. Hayek concluded that while we can understand the general principles that govern complex systems and predict the abstract consequences of interventions, we cannot predict the specific outcomes or the precise states of all their elements. In his broader theory of complexity, Hayek defines two types of order:

• Taxis: A conscious, central design or constructed order. Traditional software falls into this category.
• Kosmos: A complex, emergent, spontaneous, and functional order that arises from decentralized interactions and vast, unstructured data. LLMs function as kosmos.

The power of LLMs lies in their emergent behavior, which is far more complex than any human could consciously design. Treating LLMs as a form of kosmos represents the key conceptual breakthrough that has accelerated AI development.

Read the whole thing, despite my “accidentally” having had ChatGPT create an illustration of the wrong Hayek to accompany this link. (And I have no idea why there’s text on the back of her laptop. Was it over when ChatGPT bombed Pearl Harbor?)

JOHN HINDERAKER EXPLAINS WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON: Supreme Court Rules on Guard Deployment. “As noted above, the administration relied only on 10 U.S.C. §12406(3), and not the Insurrection Act, in justifying its National Guard deployment. The Insurrection Act, 10 U.S.C. §§ 251-255, broadly authorizes the use of federal troops to maintain order. . . . The riots and violence that have taken place in Chicago and elsewhere, specifically targeting the enforcement of federal laws, cry out for relief under the Insurrection Act. Cities like Chicago have seen ‘domestic violence’ that ‘opposes or obstructs the [immigration] laws of the United States.’ The Insurrection Act therefore authorizes the President to use either regular Army forces or the National Guard to maintain order and permit the enforcement of our laws.”

Much more at the link.

US DENIES VISAS TO EU EX-COMMISSIONER, FOUR OTHERS OVER TECH RULES:

The measure targeted Thierry Breton, the former top tech regulator at the European Commission, who often clashed with tech tycoons such as Elon Musk over their obligations to follow EU rules.

Breton was described by the State Department as the “mastermind” of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a major piece of legislation that imposes content moderation and other standards on major social media platforms operating in Europe.

The DSA has become a bitter rallying point for US conservatives who see it as a weapon of censorship against right-wing thought in Europe and beyond, an accusation the EU furiously denies.

The DSA stipulates that major platforms must explain content-moderation decisions, provide transparency for users and ensure researchers can carry out essential work, such as understanding how much children are exposed to dangerous content.

Breton, who left the European Commission in 2024, on X slammed the ban as a “witch hunt,” comparing the situation to the US McCarthy era when officials were chased out of government for alleged ties to communism.

Well, it’s nice of Breton to self-identify, but then, as James Lileks wrote twenty years ago, “‘McCarthyism’ today doesn’t mean false accusations of communism; it apparently means calling self-identified communists by their proper name.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Byron York: Trump’s most important achievement.

Second, this month, the Department of Homeland Security announced the departure of more than 2.5 million migrants who were in the country illegally. “Since January 20, 2025, DHS enforcement operations have resulted in more than 605,000 deportations,” the department said in a statement. “DHS has prioritized removing the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to return law and order to the United States. Additionally, thanks to the comprehensive efforts of DHS law enforcement, 1.9 million illegal aliens have voluntarily self-deported since January 2025.”

The first number — 605,000 deportations — has astonished some immigration enforcement veterans. In the past, the government’s deportations were in two categories. One was the number of illegal immigrants removed from the interior of the country, and the other was the number who were simply apprehended at the border and turned around back into Mexico. Obviously, the first category requires a lot more work for immigration enforcement.

Former immigration judge Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter immigration controls, noted that the high-water mark of removals from the interior of the country was 237,941 in 2008-2009. (Arthur attributed that number, at the very end of the George W. Bush administration, to an effort by Bush to increase interior removals, appearing tough on immigration, in hopes of persuading Congress to approve an amnesty deal.) The total number of removals was then “padded,” in Arthur’s words, by the number of illegal border crossers who had been turned around upon arrival at the border and sent back to Mexico.

Now, Trump has virtually stopped the flow of illegal crossers at the border, so the administration’s number of deportations — 605,000 — is virtually all people removed from the interior. That is a huge number; Arthur called it “epic.”

Still though, those are rookie numbers. You’ve got to pump those numbers up.

DISPATCHES FROM THE LOST GENERATION:

Until around 2015, there was a kind of guy — he probably lived in Brooklyn, maybe he had an MFA. He wrote literary fiction and some of these guys had book deals and others were trying to get them. They were very passionate about books and talked endlessly about Thomas Pynchon… https://t.co/EBiWR6tV2W

— Daniel Friedman (@DanFriedman81) December 21, 2025

AT AMAZON, Shop Same Day Delivery. #CommissionEarned

COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Mental health conditions linked to higher risk of unintentional injury.

NEWS YOU CAN USE? Ready, Set, Shop: Use My Favorite Last-Minute Christmas Gift Ideas.

ACTUALLY, THESE BILLIONARES ARE WORSE THAN SCROOGE: The Scrooges of 2025. The original Scrooge was a miser, but he did plenty of good for the poor without harming them — unlike the Scrooges in my City Journal article: George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Tom Steyer.

THEY’RE NOT THE ONLY CARS WITH THOSE: Report: Tesla Doors That Won’t Open Have Led to 15 Crash-Related Deaths. And I don’t like them. I like mechanical door latches that work regardless of power or software issues.

SPACE: James Webb Telescope Unveils A Dazzling Map Of The Early Universe.

THEY AREN’T SAYING IT’S ALIENS, BUT…: We didn’t find answers in 2025, but UFO researchers say the search continues.

THREE REASONS 2026 COULD BE HUGE TRUMP WIN: No President since FDR has approached the New Dealer’s massive 1934 mid-term congressional election triumph. But, as I explain in my latest PJMedia column (and first in several months, by the way), there are three solid reasons to expect Trump to have a similar win next November.

MERRY CHRISTMAS — IT’S A VIP THURSDAY ESSAY ON TUESDAY: ESSAY: Trump’s Big, Beautiful Battleships Are… What, Exactly?