LIMITED TIME DEAL: Beats Solo 4 – Wireless On-Ear Bluetooth Headphones. #CommissionEarned

WAR AND PEACE: EU’s roughly $105B loan allows Ukraine to keep fighting Russia, changes dynamics of any peace deal.

The outcome, which was the result of difficult and uncertain negotiations, provides dramatic support to Ukraine’s medium-term fiscal viability. It means Kyiv can continue paying soldiers, maintaining domestic weapons production, and resist the temptation to accept an early and unfavorable settlement with Moscow.

The loan is structured so that repayment is designed to be covered by future Russian reparations or proceeds from frozen Russian assets.

The European Union and over 30 other countries signed what is known as the Council of Europe convention establishing an international claims mechanism for Ukrainian losses, a plan designed to increase pressure on Russia and reduce the possibility there could be a “normalization” of the country’s relations with Ukraine without consequences.

Exit quote: “The loans are likely to provide enough support for the Ukrainians to continue their fight for another year or more. And perhaps just as significant, they represent a rare example of European states acting in their own interests without any outsourcing to Washington.”

Trump’s tough-love approach to Europe is working.

INTELLECTUAL NEUTRALITY: Surprise! Duke Names Longtime Anti-Gun Advocate to Run Its Center for Firearms Law.

CHANGE:

🚨 HOLY CRAP! The U.S. military recruitment numbers under President Trump are the highest in 15 YEARS

Got what I voted for again!

SEN. MULLIN: "[Lloyd Austin] was more worried about DEI and having some dude in a dress…Hegseth said, no, we're talking about lethality, and we're… pic.twitter.com/y5pNIaPMCY

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 24, 2025

ROBERT SPENCER: Cops Avert the ‘Deadliest Terrorist Attack in UK History’ — Guess Who the Target Was.

WHY ISN’T IT NUCLEAR? CDR Salamander: So, we have a USS Defiant (BBG-1).

NO, REALLY:  Let It Go.

FUN STUFF:  Curiosity’s exploration of boxwork on Mount Sharp.

OUR COLLEGES ARE A PROBLEM. THE FASTER WE MAKE THEM IRRELEVANT, THE BETTER:  Toxic ideas fueling far-left terrorists came straight from our college campuses.

PEOPLE’S “PARADISES” ALWAYS MAKE THEIR PEOPLE PRISONERS:  Stopping The Drain.

THIS IS URGENTLY NEEDED:  GOP governor lays out plan to ‘purge’ terrorists and terror supporters from state. ‘Any organization that supports terrorism, that harbors people who have provided material support for terrorism, is not allowed to exist in our state,’ said Abbott.

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.”