The latest gender critical panic is not attached to reality.

What the hole is going on?

In a place like Washington—small, interconnected, erudite, gossipy—being well-read can create certain advantages. So, too, can seeming well-read. The “Washington bookshelf” is almost a phenomenon in itself, whether in a hotel library, at a think tank office or on the walls behind the cocktail bar at a Georgetown house. And, as with nearly any other demand of busy people and organizations, it can be conjured up wholesale, for a fee.

ONE OF THE enduring mysteries of the 2020 presidential election was Mitch McConnell’s apparent lack of interest in helping to reelect President Donald Trump. From the perspective of the White House, the political press corps, Democrats, and effectively everybody watching the race, there was one major thing they thought would go a long way to delivering four more years for Trump, and that was a major round of stimulus in the weeks before the election, complete with checks destined for voters. Given that a swing of fewer than 100,000 votes in the right states would have flipped the election to Trump, it’s fair to say that such a stimulus could indeed have turned the tide for Trump. Yet McConnell stood in the way. We now know with certainty that the Senate majority leader is well aware of the political value of stimulus checks. “Kelly and David are getting hammered,” McConnell told his Republican flock, explaining why the party would be agreeing not just to a historic-sized piece of legislation, but also to one that included $600 checks for everybody with under a certain income. “Kelly,” of course, is Kelly Loeffler, the wife of the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, appointed to the Senate to replace the retiring Johnny Isaacson, and “David” is David Perdue, the former CEO of Dollar General. Both Loeffler and Perdue are facing runoffs in January, and both have used their perch in the Senate to acquire financial information they used to profit on stock trades. But that’s not why they’re getting hammered. They’re getting hammered over checks. Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock have been blasting away for weeks at Perdue and Loeffler for blocking another round of stimulus, and in particular for blocking checks. And so McConnell bent to political reality, doing what he didn’t want to do in order to keep control of the Senate. But if it was a price he was willing to pay for Kelly and David and control of the White House, why wouldn’t he pay the same price to keep control of the White House? The option was available to him. Even if Democratic leaders would have preferred to pass the stimulus after the election, their obstruction beforehand would either have been politically untenable or, if held firm, politically suicidal. So McConnell had the option to press the button, and he knew the button would help Trump, yet he didn’t press it. The only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that McConnell did not want to help Trump win.

The dangerous conflation of a cyber intel operation into a life-or-death situation is more about domestic politics than reality. written by convicted pedo Scott Ritter

The law arrived in the dawn light on December 8th, ready to sweep the house and board it up. They didn’t expect a response like this.

Jim McCall, a retired fashion designer, has 34 mannequins on his front lawn, assembled in a Christmas display that fascinates his neighbors.

L.A. County is testing to see whether a potentially more contagious coronavirus strain is in the community. Mayor Eric Garcetti says it appears likely.

Some American expats take a very condescending attitude to Germany - especially when it comes to race and gender. It reeks of a subtle cultural imperialism.

The U.S. government has reinforced media restrictions at hospitals, reducing the flow of disturbing images of the pandemic.

ROCKFORD, Ill. (AP) — A gunman opened fire inside an Illinois bowling alley, killing three people and injuring three others Saturday night in what authorities believe was a random attack.

Rabbi Yehuda HaKohen is someone who brings hope to refugees from the liberal consensus, whether they’ve run to the right or to the left. He’s what appears when the center crumbles.

A white high school student withdrew from her chosen college after a three-second video caused an uproar online. The classmate who shared it publicly has no regrets.

Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the record-setting electoral shellacking he received in November have been both increasingly brazen, and increasingly desperate — so much so that the very real dangers posed by an unstable autocrat doing his best...

Evidence from bones found at one of the world’s most important fossil sites suggests that our hominid predecessors may have dealt with extreme cold hundreds of thousands of years ago by sleeping through the winter. The scientists argue that lesions and other signs of damage in fossilised bones of early humans are the same as those left in the bones of other animals that hibernate. These suggest that our predecessors coped with the ferocious winters at that time by slowing down their metabolisms and sleeping for months.

AT A GLANCE it looks like a semi-pleasing printing error. Or a photo taken by mistake, filled with claustrophobic depth of field, shadows and murk – like so many accidental 'closeups' of the inside of a camera bag. But to those who know what they are seeing, this image bears a distinctive visual fingerprint shared only by a relative handful of others. And its makers believe this could be the most remarkable example of all. The lines climbing the image are a recording of the sun’s path across the sky, rising and falling with the seasons. Eight full cycles of them, in fact – exposed through a pinhole aperture onto a piece of photographic paper inside a cider can, which almost a decade ago was pointed at the horizon and attached to a dome at University of Hertfordshire’s Bayfordbury Observatory. Then forgotten about. The camera was rediscovered in September this year by a technician, and the image inside successfully retrieved. Now, it's believed that at eight years and one month, it could be the longest photographic exposure ever made.

One of the government’s most egregious powers is civil forfeiture, which lets police confiscate—and even keep—private property without ever charging the owner with a crime. But in 2015, New Mexico completely (and unanimously) abolished the practice and replaced it with criminal forfeiture, which requires a criminal conviction to forfeit property. Just as important, New Mexico banned agencies from padding their budgets with forfeiture revenue, and instead directed all proceeds to the general fund. Law enforcement was apoplectic and warned of dire consequences. The New Mexico Department of Public Safety feared that the bill would have “a negative impact on public safety,” and could trigger a “reduction in criminal investigations.” “This bill directly jeopardizes the most basic and fundamental key to successful narcotics investigations,” the department claimed in a 2015 bill analysis. The chair of the New Mexico Sheriff’s Association was even more blunt, warning that without civil forfeiture, “You’ll get less law enforcement.” “The end result of this is the cartels are going to ramp up their money laundering and cash exchanges in the state of New Mexico tenfold,” he predicted. Thankfully, those predictions haven’t come true. Five years later, reality is quite different. A new study from the Institute for Justice, Policing for Profit, “detected no significant increase in crime rates that could be attributed to the reforms, indicating the reforms had no negative effect on public safety—and strongly suggesting civil forfeiture is not an essential crime-fighting tool.”

Adrian Tam, a 28-year-old gay Asian American son of immigrants, defeated a leader of the Hawaii chapter of the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group, to become the only openly LGBTQ person in Hawaii’s Legislature. Tam, a first-time candidate, took 63 percent of the vote against Nicholas Ochs. “It feels really good to know that someone who is openly LGBT can win,” Tam told NBC Asian America. “There was a time when people like me could not win. I’m glad that I can bring that representation to the capital.” Tam described what was a nerve-wracking election season, from trying to connect with voters amid coronavirus, to narrowly taking down longtime incumbent Tom Brower in the August Democratic primary, to facing an overwhelming amount of hate from Ochs and his supporters in the general election. “It’s almost to a harassment level,” Tam said, noting that Ochs' supporters bombarded his campaign’s social media to the point where the messages from his own voters were drowned out. Ochs told NBC News he also faced harassing messages from Tam's supporters and that he was disappointed the two didn't get a chance to debate. He said that he is not racist. Ochs’ campaign page was removed by Facebook in September for posts that violated the platform’s terms of service and community standards, local station KITV reported. He has been criticized in the past for offensive posts toward Black, Jewish and LGBT communities. Facebook did not respond to NBC News' request for comment.

Robert Logan once said: "China created what was probably the most sophisticated system of nonabstract science the world has known.” There is a deep connection to nature and a key to an almost physical way of thinking in the composition of Chinese characters, which then reveals itself in language so vivid and direct those who experience it for the same time will feel a jolt, before being taken to a wholly difference mode of experience. For example, the old Imperial Academy may be referred to by this abstract term, but the name in Chinese is "Forest of Pencils." Or: a mouth and a dog means “bark” (吠). 口+犬. The word for "mountains" and the word for “rivers” make the word for "landscape" (山水). You never lose track of these original meanings, the way we have long ago lost track of the origins, for example, of the word “sincerity” (without wax).

With theaters and concert halls shuttered, unemployment in the arts has cut deeper than in restaurants and other hard-hit industries.