December 16, 2025

HILL GOPERS DEMAND FEHBP STOP FUNDING ABORTION: Members of Congress and their staffers are covered by the same Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) that covers executive branch civil servants. Congress has passed laws barring FEHBP from paying for abortions, but a couple dozen GOP senators and representatives say the bureaucrats found a sneaky way around the ban. And they want it stopped, now.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Mark Tapscott

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Animal Farm — This was Probably a Bad Idea.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

21ST CENTURY WARFARE:

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

LANGUAGE: ‘Slop’ crowned Merriam-Webster word of the year, defining era of AI-generated content.

Merriam-Webster said that the word slop originated in the 1700s to mean “soft mud” before the meaning evolved to “food waste” in the 1800s and, eventually, “rubbish” and “a product of little or no value” in colloquial terminology.

“The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, ‘workslop’ reports that waste coworkers’ time… and lots of talking cats,” Merriam-Webster said in their announcement. “People found it annoying, and people ate it up.”

I liked the talking cats.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

THIS CALLS FOR TRIALS, AND MAYBE HANGINGS:

Posted at 1:25 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ROGER KIMBALL: America’s free-speech war on the EU.

I think Musk is correct: “The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people.”

The EU is desperately attempting to preserve its undemocratic prerogatives by clamping down on free speech and extending its regime of censorship. Meanwhile, the White House just released its 2025 National Security Strategy report. Europe’s economic performance and military posture are dismal. But that is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Economic decline, the report says, is

eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.

All of which means that the odds favor Elon Musk. The question is not whether the EU will collapse but when. My book has good odds that it happens before the end of Trump’s second term.

Faster please, because the striped trousers crowd in Belgium are getting far too big for their britches:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

PROBABLY MORE THAN ONE, BUT YEAH: Authorities May Be Covering up a Key Detail About the Brown University Shooting. “Social media has been flooded with reports that the gunman yelled ‘Allahu Akbar.’ That’s not a minor detail.”

Related:

Posted at 1:19 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THIS IS THE SITUATION THROUGHOUT THE WEST:

Posted at 1:15 pm by Glenn Reynolds

“EXPEDIENCY” REMAINS HER WORD OF THE DAY: Wait, Nancy Pelosi Just Said WHAT? “What’s it mean when an impeachment-happy former House Speaker suddenly announces that impeachment is off the table?”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Stephen Green

THEY CERTAINLY DON’T WANT THEM TO: The Left thinks poor kids can’t learn.

“Progressives” seem hostile to the idea that schools can teach low-income students, writes Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. Once moderate Democrats like Barack Obama backed reforms they hoped would improve achievement and provide upward mobility. Now, critics from the left “tend to dismiss any plan to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students.” They “support public schools as community centers and providers of child care and secure middle-class jobs,” but not as places to educate children.

Mississippi implemented “a set of educational reforms including teacher training, testing, retention (i.e., whether kids move forward or are held back), and a mostly phonics-based reading instruction,” and moved from 49th in the nation to the top 20 in a 10-year-period, Chait writes. “Adjusted for race and income, Mississippi now does a far better job of teaching literacy than do many northern states seen as leaders in public education.”

But left-wing critics of education reform aren’t cheering.

How will they keep them ignorant, dependent, and voting Democrat if they’re educated and upwardly mobile?

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green

I MEAN, HE’S NOT WRONG:

Posted at 12:25 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GREAT MOMENTS IN LAW ENFORCEMENT: Bondi Beach hero helped disarm terrorist before police mistakenly shot him: report.

A man who rushed in to help disarm one of the terrorists who fired at a crowd celebrating Hanukkah in Australia’s famous Bondi Beach was mistakenly shot by police and tackled by bystanders, according to a new report.

The heroic civilian, who was only described as a Middle Eastern refugee living with his Australian wife and kids, was in Bondi Beach when Naveed Akram, 24, and his father Sajid, 50, allegedly opened fire at a crowd of Jewish revelers.

At least 15 people were killed in the attack and dozens others injured.

Harrowing video shows the moment the good Samaritan runs up the bridge where the gunmen were firing from after one of them was hit by police returning fire, the Daily Mail reported.

The man quickly sneaks up on the downed shooter and begins kicking his rifle out of reach before the gunman can grab it.

The quick-thinking civilian then begins to raise his hands and back away from the scene, but gunfire continues to ring out as he shouts, “Don’t shoot.”

The man was shot during the chaotic scene that followed, with video showing members of the public running in and attacking him as they mistook the hero for one of the assailants.

The injured man was pinned to the ground by the mob, with police running in to break up the scene and secure the area.

As Iowahawk notes:

Especially when coupled with: Police ‘Froze’ As Terrorists Massacred Jews on Bondi Beach, Eyewitness Accounts and Videos Suggest. “New South Wales police commissioner Mal Lanyon said police did ‘a fantastic job.’”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Texas Charges TV Makers With Consumer Surveillance.

“When families buy a television, they don’t expect it to spy on them. They don’t expect their viewing habits packaged and auctioned to advertisers.”

That allegation, taken directly from Texas’ lawsuit against Hisense, sits at the center of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s legal action against five major television manufacturers accused of secretly monitoring consumers inside their homes.

Paxton has sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense, and TCL Technology Group Corporation, alleging the companies unlawfully collected and sold consumer viewing data from Texans through Automated Content Recognition technology, known as ACR.

I hate this stuff.

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green

SAD:

Posted at 11:25 am by Stephen Green

JACOB SAVAGE: The Lost Generation.

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.

In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man—and then provided just that. “With every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And when you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder, and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you—in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”

As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. “Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating,” explained Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker. “But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone.”

This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about diversity have considered the issue by cohort.

This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014—born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.

Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Bumping this post up, and including the related tweet that Steve linked to earlier today:

UPDATE (12/16/25):

To boldly go where Howell Raines had boldly gone before: Raines had his famous Freudian Slip in 2001 that the New York Times’ hiring campaign “has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.”

Posted at 11:22 am by Ed Driscoll

GREAT PACIFIC WAR PREVIEW: Ukraine Hits Russian Sub in First Underwater Drone Attack.

The strike carried out by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) with its “Sub Sea Baby” drones hit the submarine in the port of Novorossiysk where Russia has rebased many naval vessels to put them out of reach of Ukrainian strikes.

Footage published by the SBU showed a powerful explosion erupting from the water at a pier near where a submarine and other vessels were docked. Reuters confirmed the location of the video using the port’s layout and piers.

Alexander Kamyshin, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wrote on X that it was the first time in history that an underwater drone had neutralized a submarine.

I don’t know which will be the first nation to destroy or disable an enemy sub at sea, rather than at port, but it will happen.

Posted at 10:39 am by Stephen Green