Eli Lilly's Mounjaro added to China's state insurance list for diabetes treatment

 

 Eli Lilly's popular drug Mounjaro will be added to China's state-run health insurance scheme from January 1 for patients with type 2 diabetes, the National Healthcare Security Administration said in a website notice on Sunday.

Inclusion in the national reimbursement list makes drugs more widely available to the public in a country with a population of 1.4 billion, but an increase in sales volume is often mitigated by lower prices.

Mounjaro, a once-weekly injectable therapy, was introduced in China in January this year following

 the launch of Ozempic, a similar diabetes therapy from rival Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk, in 2021. 

Ozempic was first added to China's reimbursement list in 2022. 

Sales of Ozempic in the greater China region rose to 5.76 billion Danish crowns ($898.5 million) in 2024, according to Novo's annual report. 

Lilly did not immediately respond to a request for the price of Mounjaro as a diabetes treatment under China's reimbursement list - a figure negotiated with the government. 

Mounjaro is also sold for obesity and obstructive sleep apnea in China.

Patrik Jonsson, Eli Lilly's international president, said in an October earnings call that Lilly had seen an "initial stocking" in the markets it had launched Mounjaro outside the U.S., with the big ones in the second quarter being China, Brazil, Mexico and India.

"Since then, we have seen a lift in the performance also in those markets in Q3 and a continued very strong performance globally," he said during that call.

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/eli-lilly-s-mounjaro-added-to-china-s-state-insurance-list-for-diabetes-treatment-ce7d51ddda80f427

Over 20,000 Pounds Of Cocaine Seized By US Coast Guard

 More than 20,000 pounds of cocaine were seized by the crew of USCGC Cutter Munro, the “largest at-sea interdiction in 18+ years,” the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) said in a Dec. 5 post on X.

“Through #OperationPacificViper, @USCG has accelerated counter-narcotics operations across the Eastern Pacific and delivered historic results in the fight against narco-terrorists,” the post stated.

“Our maritime fighting force is leading America’s drug interdiction operations, protecting the Homeland, and keeping deadly drugs out of American communities.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a Dec. 5 post on X that 20,000 pounds of cocaine was enough to create over 7.5 million potentially lethal doses of the drug.

Naveen Athrappully reports for The Epoch Times that Operation Pacific Viper directs U.S. forces to the Eastern Pacific region to counter criminal and cartel organizations, essentially cutting off drug and human smuggling activities before they reach U.S. shores, the DHS said in a statement on Aug. 20.

At the time, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said that “80 percent of illicit drug seizures occur at sea.”

Another major drug seizure this week took place on Dec. 2 when a Coast Guard Station Miami Beach law enforcement boat crew seized roughly 3,715 pounds of cocaine, estimated to be worth $28 million, from a vessel suspected to be used for drug smuggling, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said in a Dec. 5 statement.

“Disrupting maritime narcotics smuggling like this demonstrates the power of teamwork in safeguarding our nation and holding criminals accountable,” said Andy Blanco, executive director of CBP Air and Marine Operations Southeast Region.

“Smugglers should be warned that our whole-of-government team is watching, and they will be caught.”

Lt. Matthew Ross, Coast Guard Station Miami Beach commanding officer, said this was the “largest USCG Small boat station cocaine seizure since 1995.”

Crackdown on Drug Trafficking

Under the Trump administration, military activity against alleged drug traffickers has intensified. Strikes against suspected drug trafficking boats began in the sea around Venezuela, and have expanded into the eastern Pacific Ocean near the Colombian coastline.

One of the recent strikes was carried out on Dec. 4 against a drug trafficking boat in the Eastern Pacific. The action was taken after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered a “lethal kinetic strike” on the boat, the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) said in a Dec. 4 post on X.

The boat was traversing international waters and was being operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization, SOUTHCOM said, which oversees military operations in the Caribbean and near Latin America.

“Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” according to SOUTHCOM.

On Dec. 2, President Donald Trump said that land strikes in Venezuela against drug trafficking groups were under consideration.

“We’re going to start doing those strikes on land too,” Trump said. “We know where they live. We know where the bad ones live, and we’re going to start that very soon.”

Criticism has been raised against the Trump administration’s strikes on suspected drug boats. On Dec. 4, Congress held classified briefings regarding a deadly strike on an alleged drug boat in September in the South Caribbean that killed two people.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters that the video he saw during the briefing was “one of the most troubling things” he’s seen while in public service.

“You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, killed by the United States,” Himes said.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who also attended the briefing, said he “didn’t see anything disturbing” about the video.

“What’s disturbing to me is that millions of Americans have died from drugs being run to America by these cartels,” Cotton said.

Meanwhile, drug seizures hit a record in November, according to a Dec. 4 statement from the CBP. Nationwide, 54,947 pounds of drugs were seized last month, up by 33 percent from October.

Methamphetamine seizures totaled 21,935 pounds, up by 118 percent, with cocaine seizures jumping 40 percent to 8,240 pounds.

Authorities seized 1,543 pounds of fentanyl, a 59 percent jump from October and the “highest monthly total since last October,” CBP said.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/over-20000-pounds-cocaine-seized-us-coast-guard

AI Illiteracy

 by Mark Bauerlein via The Epoch Times,

In the old days, English class meant two things: one, reading Shakespeare, Tennyson et al., and two, learning to write. The classics plus grammar and punctuation—they made English a serious subject respected for its content and skills. Of course, it’s not like that any longer.

The traditional literary canon is ever less central to the field, which now spends lots of time on “media literacy,” critical thinking, “informational texts,” and other topics unrelated to literary history. Those changes have come about from above, we should note, from experts in curriculum and assessment.

As for writing, the changes have been even more dramatic and taken place in just the past few years. Artificial intelligence (AI) has upset everything. It has swept into education so suddenly and profoundly that teachers are scrambling daily to cope with its effects. This time, it’s not the experts who are leading the way—it’s the kids. They aren’t writing anymore; AI does it for them. Some keywords, a few clicks, an adjustment or two, and “Voila!” the paper’s done. What late-teen can resist?

If they’re going to “meet students where they are,” as the ed school saying goes, teachers cannot assign any out-of-class writing tasks and expect students to do the work themselves. The lure is too strong, the process too easy. It’s safer than plagiarism, too, because AI creates a unique script for every student who requests one, not a borrowed script that can be unearthed through a Google search by the teacher using any unusual sentences that pop up in a paper as clues. Also, AI produces such authentic student prose that teachers haven’t the time or energy to scan each submission for subtle signs of AI usage.

The whole practice of English must change—it already is doing so.

No more out-of-class-writing, no extended research papers (AI does research as well as composing sentences), and no more in-class writing such as essay exams using computers. Blue books are back! One teacher told me recently that he plans to give oral exams to each student one-on-one at the end of the semester (his classes are small enough for him to do so). It’s a good idea, because in an oral exam, he can probe the student’s knowledge of specific elements in “The Great Gatsby” and other works on the syllabus, thus verifying that the student actually read the book and not just an AI summary of it.

Unfortunately, however, no amount of AI avoidance on the part of the teacher can replace what has been lost—namely, sustained, independent composition, a youth in a dorm room or the library spending two hours on his own verbalizing ideas, polishing sentences, and smoothing transitions. Those hours are a value in themselves, for writing is developed by practice, not by study. It’s an exercise, not a content. Reading a book on prose style will not make you a good stylist. A skilled wordsmith has spent years building vocabulary, acquiring a feel for sentence length and paragraph structure, and recognizing when to show and when to tell, what diction best suits this and that topic, and where irony and figurative language might be effective. It’s a plodding progress with lots of trial and error. Common errors are persistent (misplaced modifiers, oblique descriptions, too many passive verbs and prepositional phrases, etc.). An attentive coach is needed.

Nobody enjoys it, not the student who stares at the blank page in dismay or who rereads a paragraph he’s just written and knows it’s awful, and not the English teacher who feels the student’s dismay and joins the struggle to squeeze some eloquence out of that disjointed paragraph. I remember many sessions with students in office hours, the two of us going over a rough draft sentence by sentence as I directed her attention to a comma or a “which” or a verb tense and asking, “Is there anything wrong there?” and waited for her to figure it out. I had to be patient. She had to concentrate. Time slowed down. By the finish, she sighed and smiled weakly, while I looked forward to happy hour.

There’s no replacement for this humanistic boot camp, however. Most people can’t learn to write in any other way. If AI saves them from this unpleasant, plodding training, happiness will go up, but competence won’t. The impact will spread far beyond the campus, giving us an AI-dominant culture and a low-literacy society.

We might see in the coming years a curious irony: As AI does more and more of the work of communication, those times in which a more meaningful, unusual, impressive communication is needed—for instance, when a politician strives to deliver a rousing speech at a time of crisis—will make those few individuals who did get strong literary formation appear as rare assets.

Message to parents: Encourage your kids to keep a diary and write the day’s events in it every night.

https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/ai-illiteracy

ASH: AstraZeneca's dual-wielding CAR-T shows promise News

 Less than two years after buying Chinese biotech Gracell for its cell therapy platform, AstraZeneca has reported encouraging clinical results with the lead CAR-T from the deal, GC012F (now AZD0120), for multiple myeloma.

At this year's ASH congress, the results of the phase 1b/2 DURGA-1 of AZD0120 – a dual BCMA and CD19-directed CAR-T therapy – gave the first view of activity in a Western population to complement earlier data drops in Chinese patients.

The open-label, single-arm study, carried out in US patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma – some of whom had been previously treated with anti-BCMA treatment – looked at two dose levels of AZD0120 given as a one-shot therapy.

The results revealed an objective response rate (ORR) of 96%, with a median time to response of 28 days. The combined complete response rate and stringent CR (sCR) rate was 78.3%, while the partial response (PR) rate was 17.4%. It's a strong result, given that the subjects in the trial had been treated with a median of four prior therapies.

Lead investigator Shambavi Richard of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai told the ASH congress that treatment with the CAR-T was generally well-tolerated – with no deaths, grade 4 or higher infections, or dose-limiting toxicities – adding that it had a profile that made it suitable for outpatient administration.

Median progression-free survival and overall survival (OS) were not reached with a follow-up period of more than 36 months.

Like all CAR-Ts, AZD0120 caused cytokine release syndrome (CRS) – a potentially serious reaction – in around two-thirds (62%) of recipients, with most cases grade 1 and one case grade 2, at the milder end of the spectrum. There were no cases of neurotoxicity, which is another recognised adverse event associated with CAR-Ts.

AZD0120 is based on Gracell's FasTCAR cell therapy manufacturing platform, which enables the therapy to be manufactured in days, whereas other CAR-Ts typically take weeks to produce. It is also being tested in clinical trials in autoimmune disorder systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and amyloid light chain (AL) amyloidosis.

AZ paid $1.2 billion to take control of Gracell in February 2024, in a deal that also gave it control of the Chinese firm's TruUCAR technology for making off-the-shelf (allogeneic) CAR-Ts, and SMART CART technology for CAR-Ts that can target solid tumours.

Earlier this year, AZ doubled down on its aspirations in cell therapy by acquiring EsoBiotec, which is focused on in vivo CAR-Ts that do away with the need for lengthy manufacturing processes by reprogramming immune cells inside patients' bodies to produce them. It also has a CAR-T alliance focusing on solid tumours with AbelZeta.

https://pharmaphorum.com/news/ash-astrazenecas-dual-wielding-car-t-shows-promise

Yardeni Pivots to Underweight on Mag 7 After 15-Year Tech Bet

 

Yardeni Research now recommends effectively going underweight the Magnificent Seven megacap technology stocks versus the rest of the S&P 500, expecting a shift in earnings growth ahead.

“We see more competitors coming for the juicy profit margins of the Magnificent 7,” and expect that the productivity and profit margins of the rest of the S&P 500 will be boosted by tech, said Wall Street research veteran Ed Yardeni. He added that in effect, “every company is evolving into a technology company.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-08/yardeni-says-underweight-mag-7-in-shift-from-tech-after-15-years-miwgrfr2

'Bond vigilantes are now the arbiters of AI capex - BofA'

 With Oracle (ORCL) set to report earnings this week and capital expenditure plans closely watched, BofA says there's a new sheriff in town when it comes to spending.

Strategist Michael Hartnett said in a note that bond vigilantes are now the "new regulators of AI capex" and they are saying "slow the growth."

Investors should look to AI adopters rather than spenders as credit spreads rein in capex, he said.

Capex at hyperscalers like Oracle, Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) (GOOG) and Meta (META) will jump from 50% cash ($240B) in 2024 to 80% ($540B) in 2026, Hartnett said.

 

BofA
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/topstocks/bond-vigilantes-are-now-the-arbiters-of-ai-capex-bofa/ar-AA1RTGvZ

Incyte Gets FDA Breakthrough Therapy Fast Track For Rare Blood Cancer Drug

 Incyte (INCY) said Sunday that the Food and Drug Administration has granted Breakthrough Therapy designation to its experimental treatment for a rare blood cancer. The biotech also released updated Phase 1 trial results for the drug.

Incyte's INCA033989 is an experimental monoclonal antibody to treat a specific form of essential thrombocythemia, a rare blood cancer that causes dangerously high platelet counts. The patients carry a Type 1 mutation in the CALR gene and can no longer tolerate or don't respond to standard treatments to suppress blood cell production.

The FDA's decision followed initial Phase 1 results from earlier this year that showed sustained platelet reductions.

Also Sunday, Incyte presented updated Phase 1 results at the 2025 American Society of Hematology annual meeting. That included further safety and efficacy data for essential thrombocythemia as well as new data for patients with myelofibrosis.

https://www.investors.com/news/technology/incyte-stock-fda-breakthrough-therapy-fast-track-rare-blood-cancer-drug/

China Successfully Operates World's First Thorium Molten Salt Reactor

 By Haley Zaremba of OilPrice.com

An experimental Chinese nuclear plant reportedly just crossed a historic threshold, successfully operating the world’s first thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR). The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics has broken a major scientific barrier by successfully converting thorium to uranium in a historic first.

The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reports that the breakthrough, which took place at an experimental reactor out in the Gobi Desert, is “poised to reshape the future of clean sustainable nuclear energy.” 

The process works by using a “precise sequence of nuclear reactions” in which naturally occurring thorium-232 absorbs a neutron, becoming thorium-233. Through a decay process, that isotope breaks down into protactinium-233 and then finally into uranium-233, a potent form of nuclear fuel that can sustain chain reactions for nuclear fission.

While this breakthrough was just publicized this month by a report by Science and Technology Daily, the TMSR has apparently been operational for years. Li Qingnuan, Communist Party secretary and deputy director at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, told the outlet that “since achieving first criticality on October 11, 2023, the thorium molten salt reactor has been steadily generating heat through nuclear fission”.

If the reports are true, this breakthrough would signal an incredible leap forward in a nuclear technology race that China is already winning handily. Although the United States is still the world’s biggest producer of nuclear energy, that status won’t last much longer. In the same time period that the United States built the overdue and over-budget Plant Vogtle, China built 13 reactors of similar scale, and has 33 more on the way. Beijing is also making major forays into the nuclear sectors of emerging economies, with particularly concerted efforts in Africa.

“The Chinese are moving very, very fast,” Mark Hibbs, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and expert on the Chinese nuclear sector, told the New York Times. “They are very keen to show the world that their program is unstoppable.”But while China has invested huge sums of money and manpower into becoming a global nuclear energy innovator and superpower, the nation lacks sufficient uranium to power its lofty goals. While nuclear power production growth is dominated by China, uranium supply chains are dominated by Russia, which is home to nearly half (approximately 44 percent) of all global uranium enrichment capacity. 

China has been buying up more and more of Russia’s uranium, but reliance on exports is both risky and antithetical to China’s ethos of domestic energy independence and international energy dominance. Russia’s outsized presence in the nuclear fuel supply chain has resulted in some degree of risk and market volatility, as the Kremlin has shown that it is not afraid to use enriched uranium for political leverage.

“The nuclear energy supply chain sits atop the clean technology risk pyramid,” warned a recent article from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Beyond standard supply chain considerations, nuclear exports are subject to a suite of safety and security concerns, and overreliance on a single technology or fuel provider can create significant dependencies given the limited number of suppliers and distinct intellectual property (IP).”

By sidestepping the uranium supply chain issue by using thorium instead, China is leaping over a critical hurdle and straight over the finish line for global nuclear power sector domination. Thorium is much more accessible and abundant than uranium, and could theoretically solve all of China’s nuclear fuel problems. According to the South China Morning Post, just one mining site in Inner Mongolia “ is estimated to hold enough of the element to power China entirely for more than 1,000 years.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/china-successfully-operates-worlds-first-thorium-molten-salt-reactor

The EU-US Battle Line

 

By Clarice Feldman

UK’s Labour Censorship Initiative

As economic and cultural suicide stalk Western Europe, it has initiated efforts to hobble America's technological advantage and diminish our freedoms. The first documented attacks on our open dialogue came from the UK and began in 2018 when Morgan McGreevy, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff (then Labour Together’s managing director), began and funded an outfit called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). Recognizing that the online news purveyors could best be silenced by depriving them of funds, it first targeted UK outfits, but moved on in an attempt to starve U.S. outfits like American Thinker, Breitbart, Zero Hedge, and the Federalist of advertising revenue, and astroturfing defamation of such sites. 

In June 2020, a booster of SFFN’s campaign tagged Ford’s UK twitter account, noting that its ads were appearing on Breitbart. Ford UK’s twitter account responded that it was “investigating the ad placement” and confirmed that Ford “does not share the views expressed on the website.” By 2021, SFFN expanded to target Breitbart’s YouTube account. “Breitbart, who have: consistently denied climate change, promoted sexism, published racist conspiracy theories have a monetised YouTube channel,” SFFN complained in July.

SFFN encouraged advertisers generally to block their ads from appearing on Breitbart’s YouTube content. In order to scale up its demonetization campaign, SFFN hosted an excel spreadsheet “blocklist” on its website for years. It listed the URLs of “fake news” websites that advertisers could import into their Google AdSense profiles to block sites en masse from receiving their advertising. This included Breitbart and a host of other alt-right and conservative U.S. sites such as Zero Hedge, The Federalist and American Thinker from 2020 onwards, alongside The Canary and Evolve Politics. SFFN also provided a handy “how-to” guide for advertisers and brands, walking them through how they could add SFFN’s targets to their own personalised blocklist. By December 2020, the list had expanded to include 28 sites, including two platforms linked to the far-right British agitator, Tommy Robinson, most notably Rebel News.

Another of SFFN’s initial targets was the right-wing UK website Westmonster, which had been set up and funded by Arron Banks, a controversial pro-Brexit campaigner. SFFN accused Westmonster of being a “propaganda channel” for the Brexit Party and its leader, Nigel Farage. The Brexit Party was renamed Reform UK. On current polling, Reform is set to form the next UK government with Farage as leader. SFFN claimed that Westmonster’s coverage of Farage and the Brexit Party was disproportionate. The campaign’s evidentiary threads included allusive imagery of Farage standing with Trump, accusing Trump of peddling “toxic post-truth politics.” In one remarkable thread from May 2019, SFFN urged readers not to vote for Brexit Party candidates in the UK’s upcoming European Parliament elections.

SFFN also accused Westmonster of fueling “anger & hatred” towards migrants by “publishing a stream of scare stories about immigrants in other European countries [which] deliberately create the impression of hordes of violent foreigners on the doorstep of Britain.” In April 2019, SFFN said Westmonster “stoke[d] fear of migrants” because it included stories about Channel Crossings -- journeys made by asylum seekers on make-shift boats across the English Channel to seek refuge in the UK.

EU’s DSA

In 2022, the European Union got into the muzzling act when its Parliament passed the infamous Digital Service Act. Noted liars Hillary Clinton and John F. Kerry endorsed this, urging the EU to force Elon Musk to censor us after he bought Twitter.

For years, some of us in the free speech community have warned about the threat of the European Union to free speech, particularly in the enactment of the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). The EU has virtually declared war on free speech and is targeting American companies. That war just began with the first DSA fine. Not surprisingly, X was the chosen target -- a company blamed by many in the EU and the U.S. for rolling back free-speech protections.

 

This is not the first effort by the EU to deal with the challenges to their autocratic rule created by Elon Musk’s $44 billion dollar purchase of Twitter and making it the world’s most widely available free speech platform. During the last presidential election, the EU issued a formal letter to him demanding that he censor a Trump interview. More recently they offered Musk “an illegal secret deal” to quietly censor users’ speech.

He refused. “At the time, a person with knowledge of the issue told Pirate Wires the Commission wanted X to hire a team of people in the EU that could number in the hundreds to remove “misinformation” on the platform. X would have no recourse in these removal decisions. Now, one year later, the Commission has followed through with their threats, fining X $140 million (the first-ever penalty under their Digital Services Act).”

The EU preferred the pre-Musk Twitter, where only posters they favored got blue checks (wider reach and greater credibility) and they could shut up dissenters.

Response to the EU’s Outrageous Overreaching

France’s digital minister hailed the action, as did Germany’s digital minister. Not that they matter as much in the end as the responses of U.S. Administration officials and Congress to the EU’s demand for what Peter Hague correctly dubs “dragnet surveillance.” Vice-President JD Vance warned against using “censorship” to attack U.S. firms. He called it “A fine for not engaging in censorship,” adding, “The EU should be supporting free speech, not attacking American companies over garbage.” Secretary Marco Rubio fired “The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.” Howard Lutnick stated: “The digital services act is designed to stifle free speech and American tech companies. We have made our position clear to our counterparts in Europe.” 

The U.S. has a number of diplomatic tools to counter the EU, U.S. pressure in trade talks and increased scrutiny of EU regulatory bias among them.

Congress has under consideration a GRANITE Act which would give us citizens who are targeted by the EU or UK with fines the right to countersue in U.S. courts.

The Administration is well aware of the European censorship drive and its consequences there. Last Month the U.S. government released a National Security Strategy paper which reports this about Europe:

American officials have become used to thinking about European problems in terms of insufficient military spending and economic stagnation. There is truth to this, but Europe’s real problems are even deeper.

Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP -- down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today -- partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.

But this economic decline 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. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau also notes the absurd contradictions of our role in NATO and the EU:

The US has long failed to address the glaring inconsistency between its relations with NATO and the EU. These are almost all the same countries in both organizations. When these countries wear their NATO hats, they insist that Transatlantic cooperation is the cornerstone of our mutual security. But when these countries wear their EU hats, they pursue all sorts of agendas that are often utterly adverse to US interests and security -- including censorship, economic suicide/climate fanaticism, open borders, disdain for national sovereignty/promotion of multilateral governance and taxation, support for Communist Cuba, etc etc. This inconsistency cannot continue. Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not. But we cannot pretend that we are partners while those nations allow the EU’s unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels to pursue policies of civilizational suicide.

Short of voting to leave the EU, European citizens have no way to remove and replace the EU leaders who have driven this to a crisis, but the Streisand effect seems to be at play. Since the fine was announced, X reportedly has become the number 1 news app in France, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Estonia, Slovakia, Malta, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Slovenia.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/12/the_eu_us_battle_line.html

'Peacekeeping in Chicago'

By Mike McDaniel

Democrats don’t limit themselves to adherence to reality. Morally and intellectually superior beings, the self-imagined elite create their own reality and demand everyone else live in it. So perfect are they, their beliefs and policies are non-falsifiable. They can’t possibly be wrong and there can exist no evidence that can convince them otherwise. They’re also long-term thinkers, because rejecting reality mystically allows them to see things as they ought to be and will be when their policies inevitably correct the errors and inherent deficiencies of Normal Americans.

One manifestation of this kind of superiority is the “Defund the Police” Movement, which has never entirely died. However, it has been such a disaster that even a few blue cities have had to backtrack while pretending they’re not backtracking at all. Others have tried to replace the police with “Violence Interrupters” or “Peacekeepers.” That too has been disastrous.

The problem is people of good will and actual ability aren’t going to work for a blue city that won’t give them the training, equipment and backing to protect their lives as they journey out into the worst neighborhoods to do the jobs sane people know require police officers. Accordingly, the self-imagined elite usually hire criminals for those positions on the apparent theory they know all about violence and other criminals will surely obey them. They’re right about the violence part and tragically wrong about the rest. To be fair, some well-intentioned people are also involved but quickly come to realize we’re lucky to have competent cops.

It will come as no surprise to learn Chicago has had such a “Peacekeeper” program for several years, and while Illinois Governor JB Pritzger and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson claim that program has miraculously reduced crime, reality has, as it tends to do, asserted itself:

There has been debate in Chicago over the wisdom and effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the Windy City’s so-called “peacekeeper” program for years. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) touted its supposed effectiveness back in April, while critics have noted that some of the former gang members and ex-convicts who are members of the program have gone on to commit more crimes.

Over the last four or so months alone, it would seem that the critics’ point has been strengthened after multiple arrests among some of the members on allegations that they’ve committed violent crimes.

Like one Michael Nash:

Graphic: X Post

Why anyone would hire someone like Nash for a pseudo-police job surely pushes the boundaries of reality:

Court records show Nash’s felony history includes two years for aggravated unlawful use of a weapon last year, eight years for being a felon in possession of a firearm in 2019, three years for the same offense in 2014, one year for possession of a controlled substance in 2012, three years for attempted robbery in 2008 and three years for possessing a stolen motor vehicle in 2007.

This Peacekeeper took a swing—on camera—at a Chicago cop: 

Graphic: X Post

Sure Governor, Chicago needs more people like Alexander and this guy:

Graphic: X Post

Six days after a photo was taken of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker posing alongside a Peacekeeper, court records claim the man was part of a violent crash-and-grab burglary on Michigan Avenue and a crash that killed a young father, the ABC7 I-Team has learned.

Chicago police said it was a squad of seven who shattered the Magnificent Mile storefront of Louis Vuitton and sped off with hundreds of thousands worth of designer goods on September 11 before one the alleged getaway cars crashed into Mark Arceta’s vehicle, killing the expectant father whose son was born the next day.

It turns out this particular “Peacekeeper” was exceptionally well-qualified, if outstanding warrants and a stellar criminal record count as qualifications:

Graphic: X Post

Mayor Johnson is particularly fond of such people:

Graphic: X Post

A Newsmax story revealed that over $60,000,000 in taxpayer funding had been poured into this program over the last three years.

Planning to visit Chicago anytime soon? You might want to put those plans on indefinite hold.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/12/peace_keeping_in_chicago.html