NO SH*T SHERLOCK:  Watchdog finds DEI, CRT baked into accreditation rules for hundreds of university social work programs.  The body tasked with accrediting social work programs has raked in over $40 million in fees since 2016.

COUGH IT UP!  Plaintiffs win $10M settlement against CU Anschutz School of Medicine over COVID-19 vaccine exemption denials.

IT’S NOT LIES. IT’S DOGMA. THEY’RE A RELIGION:  The lies they believe.

GOVERNMENT MATH ISN’T REAL MATH:  QotD: Austerity versus “austerity”.

I KEEP THINKING OF THE BOOK “THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE”:  Guest Author: Dr. Simon Goddek on the Reality in Europe Today.

The problem is their media lies even more than ours, so they think we’re more controlled than they are. The arguments I get into when I visit….

A SOUND AROSE AS THOUGH A MILLION CHOCOHOLICS CRIED OUT IN ONE VOICE: Take my money.  Cocoa Piles Up At Ivory Coast Ports As Buyers Face Cash Shortage

FADING IN TIME:  An Inconvenient Memory.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED:  Mamdani Drops New Video Teaching New Yorkers How to ‘Stand Up to ICE’.

YOU DON’T SAY:  Nature Journal Retracts Climate Alarm Study After Data Errors Surface.

IT’S A FOREIGN PSYOPS, TRYING TO SELL THIS TO THE RIGHT IN THE US:  America Last: How Fuentes’s Coordinated Raids and Foreign Fake-Speech Networks Inflate His Influence.

I knew that, because only leftists and foreigners think that the American right is the same as the hard European right. It’s stupid, and insane, but they think they know this.

IT’S ONE OF THE STUPIDEST THINGS YOU CAN DO:  Threatening to Prosecute Your Opponents When They Give Up Power Is a Bad Idea.

SOMETIMES I THINK THAT I’M NOT SO MUCH A WRITER, AS A THING WRITING HAPPENS THROUGH:   The Stars in the Sky – Free, complete Short Story.

I mean one minute I’m writing along and the next minute a Spatine appears. What the heck is a Spatine? Eight hours later I have a short story and just as much writing in notes on what Spatines are as a branch of the Space Force of Britannia. Also my head hurts. I’d just very much like to know why me.

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

REALLY, REALLY FIRST-WAVE FEMINISM: Female gladiators shocked the ancient Roman world — but not for the reason you think.

PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Sun unleashes intense X-class solar flare, triggering radio blackouts across Australia: The powerful X1.1 solar flare from sunspot region 4298 sparked strong radio blackouts on the sunlit portion of Earth at the time of eruption.

YES, NEXT QUESTION? Were the late ’80s and early 1990s “the best time in recent years to be alive?”

RE: A Golden Age

Mrs. Dr. Publius and I were just discussing how awesome the mid-to-late ‘80s and early '90s were, in general, as the best time in recent years to be alive (full disclosure, for each of us this was our favorite time to be alive), and we were wondering if:

"Are…

— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) December 8, 2025

ACE OF SPADES: Supreme Court Seems Likely To Rule That the President Has Control Over, Get This, the Executive Branch.

Related:

Repeat after me. There is no 4th branch of government. There is no such thing as an "independent" agency. https://t.co/bD0mUaqiTR

— unseen1 (@unseen1_unseen) December 8, 2025

ANDREW FERGUSON: Getting Intimate With Updike.

When he was a young writer—[John] Updike was astonishingly precocious, becoming a regular contributor to the New Yorker when he was barely out of Harvard—the protagonists of his fiction tended to be sex-obsessed young men. As he grew into middle age, the protagonists evolved into middle-aged men obsessed with sex. Entering his dotage, full of honors and years, he somehow conjured up older, materially successful protagonists who were obsessed with sex. One of the great American stylists, he nevertheless managed to write sex scenes that were unbearably cringe-making. The meticulous, magical gift for poetic physical description that led him (for instance) to describe a snowfall at night as “an immense whispering” was misapplied to the mysteries of sex. A year before his death in 2009, the British magazine Literary Review, famous for its annual Bad Sex in Fiction competition, simply threw up its hands and gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.

And yet it would be a mistake to call him the horniest writer of his time. It was quite a time. And he had lots of competition—an entire class of phallocrats, as they were sometimes called. These were male novelists who were too old to have enjoyed the vanguard of the sexual revolution, led by youthful baby boomers, and who were making up for lost time. In the 1990s, the novelist David Foster Wallace lumped several of them together—Updike, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Frederick Exley, Charles Bukowski—under the heading GMNs, the Great Male Narcissists. As Wallace pointed out, however, Updike was the one who evoked an especially intense mockery, at least among Wallace’s own contemporaries (Wallace was under 40 at the time, Updike in his 60s). One of Wallace’s feminist friends called Updike “a penis with a thesaurus,” a deathless tag that followed him to the grave.

Heh, indeed. It’s Andrew Ferguson, so definitely read the whole thing.

HMM: A Fasting-Style Diet Seems to Result in Dynamic Changes to Human Brains.

I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE: COVID School Reopenings Quickly Cut Childhood Anxiety, Depression, and ADHD.

ROGER SIMON: Our AI Future Has Its Problems: Ask Freud.

OUT TOMORROW: Kurt Schlichter’s latest Kelly Turnbull novel, Panama Red.

HEAVY DRINKING? Nordic people know how to beat the winter blues. Here’s how to find light in the darkest months.

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: The Beginning of the End.

UPDATE: Hollywood has only themselves to blame:

TO BE FAIR, WHICH GRANNIES WERE WE SUPPOSED TO PULL OUT OF THEIR HOMES?

Charlie was killed almost 3 months ago. No Antifa raids. No major network arrests. No financial takedowns. But we have seen a lot more left-wing violence.

Dems were dragging grannies out of their homes almost immediately after J6 and going full CSI: Capitol Hill on anyone who… https://t.co/b0qqBJAN78

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) December 8, 2025

Snark aside, the Right does need to punch back — but I’m not sure what role Congress has to play here.