A January 2, 2026, Financial Times article reports that O-1B visas for extraordinary artistic ability are increasingly granted to influencers and OnlyFans models, using metrics like follower counts and subscribers as evidence. Approvals rose over 50% from 2014-2024

I sincerely don’t understand why online prostitutes need visas. Isn’t their whole business model that they are online? Plus, don’t we have enough of our own? What’s the point of bringing them over physically?

Is there any way this immigration system can ever be fixed?

One thing that makes my job feel a lot harder than it needs to be is my propensity to forget that there’s a procedure for everything. I keep trying to come up with solutions but that’s not necessary. All I need is to find the relevant procedure. Or a person who knows the procedure.

For example, today one faculty member demanded that I take a course away from another faculty member and give it to him. They have a conflict of some sort, and the last thing I need in my life is arbitrate between the two of them. But I don’t have to because there’s procedure.

I love the blessed procedure.

In the meantime, Zohran Mamdani’s housing advisor says that white people should lose the housing they own.

We’ll transition from treating property as an individual good to a collective good… Whites especially… will be impacted.

Far be it from me to make jokes about anybody’s appearance, so I will simply post the picture she considers to be a good portrayal of herself:

There’s a whole phenomenon of unconventionally looking, let’s put it that way, women flocking to flamboyant gay guys and becoming very subservient to them. This is one of those situations.

Some additional good news:

The Government of Cuba has announced that 32 Cubans were killed in the recent military operation by the United States to capture Venezuelan President President Nicolás Maduro, most of which were likely part of the security team protecting Maduro. Two days of mourning have been… pic.twitter.com/M00xp9qlXx

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) January 5, 2026

Protecting him is a way of speaking. On orders from the Russians, Cubans were preventing Maduro from fleeing. Like he tried to do in April 2019. Had an airplane on the tarmac, all ready to go. Russians had him dragged back, the poor sod.

Cuba is another country I love deeply. I have visited several times. I have personally heard from Cubans in Cuba what the regime is doing to them. It’s a good day when at least a few of the henchmen of the dictatorship get their due.

The removal of Maduro by the US is not unprecedented. A very similar operation was conducted in Panama in 1989 when dictator (and CIA operative) Manuel Noriega was removed in an almost identical way.

The biggest difference is that the 2026 process was a lot more effective, quick, and less destructive. And Black Sabbath music wasn’t used.

Why people keep reaching for clumsy analogies with Iraq and Afghanistan when there’s a clear and meaningful analogy with an identical operation in the same region, I have no idea.

The results of the Panama incursion can be observed by anybody with two eyes. Or even one eye with astigmatism. For a Central American nation, Panama isn’t doing that badly. And all that was needed was to remove this one asshole. Venezolanos and panameños are largely the same people, so the prospects for Venezuela aren’t terrible if we look at the history of the region and not at something completely different in another part of the world.

And yes, Venezuelans can still fuck it up royally. But they are definitely better off today than at any time since 1999. Nobody is going to give them a perfectly functioning country on a silver platter. It’s now all up to them.

I’ve known for a while that Matthew Shepard’s murder had nothing to do with homophobia. It’s one of the perks of becoming a conservative that you are allowed to know what actually happened in a host of news stories. So yes, I’ve known that the Matthew Shepard case was a precursor of George Floyd. It’s a standard liberal trick to misrepresent a tragic death as being a result of identity-based “hate” and use it to advance a political agenda. Like George Floyd, Shepard died because of drugs and not because anybody hated him for his identity. Like Floyd, Shepard was elevated to a saint-like status and his crimes (including sexual molestation of small children) and his outré lifestyle were concealed. Like Floyd, Shepard was used to inculcate guilt in a group that had no culpability in his murder. I have known all this for a while.

What I didn’t know is the wealth of details that journalist Stephen Jimenez provides in his investigative report on Shepard. The only reason why Jimenez could even write the book is that he himself is gay and very politically liberal. Even that, however, didn’t spare him from being insulted and accused of all sorts of things by liberal organizations and media outlets. Jimenez is brave and honest and didn’t buckle under the pressure to conceal the truth behind politically useful lies. Not every story has a champion like Jimenez.

The Book of Matt is very well-researched and gives truly shocking details about everything that happened. That such an egregious hoax was perpetrated against the public, that history was falsified to such a terrifying extent, and that children were taught terrible lies in school (and are still taught them in many places) is a disgrace. Many journalists abandoned truth to become a wrecking crew at the disposal of dishonest politicians. We are all lucky that Jimenez made a different choice and that he happened to be gay or we still wouldn’t know the facts behind the Matthew Shepard murder.

Venezuela about to become the next:

Germany
Japan
South Korea
Panama

Sometimes it works, stop basing everything on the Middle East, that fails for other reasons.

— Peter B (@realpeteyb123) January 5, 2026

Panama, OK, makes sense. But Germany or Japan? Have people met… people?

I truly despair sometimes. If you reached the age of adulthood and you haven’t figured out that you can’t turn a Venezuelan into either a German or an Afghani no matter what you do because humans are physical beings, then that’s just sad.

It’s not surprising people are failing to grasp why men can’t be women.

Totally understandable and reasonable, but I can honestly say that nothing I've ever experienced has grown me more as a person than being stretched to my absolute limit with a hard baby

It's not like a normal trauma or hardship, it is much more likely to produce good things IMO https://t.co/5YFQhXAMxT

— Mason (@webdevMason) January 4, 2026

My baby was extremely easy after birth but required me to undergo the discipline of a military regiment and the physical suffering of hellish torture before birth. And yes, I will go to my grave grateful for the experience because it let me discover that I deserve to respect myself.

Nothing good is free in life. Neither is life itself. Suffering is baked into the recipe, and everybody gets their measure.

Are people aware that Maduro instituted a regime of sexual terror against dissidents? Peaceful, unarmed protesters, men and women, were raped in jail in ways that you don’t want to know. It was not an occasional thing, it was a policy.

Is this not general knowledge?

It’s hard to believe one can be such a cynical, dishonest person:

The United States has now given Russia, China, and anyone else who wants to give it a try an even clearer road map for invading countries that displease them.https://t.co/OPSNTsLyBf

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) January 3, 2026

Russia has been conducting an invasion of Ukraine for eleven years. In Mariupol alone, a hundred thousand civilians were murdered during a two-month siege. And this little bitch completely denies that this happened to make some utterly stupid, partisan point.

I’ve seen this point made about a trillion times since yesterday. “So if Putin tries to kidnap Zelensky, that would be fine?” He did, you stupid bastards. He did many times. He failed. It’s OK not to know but then maybe use the material you are familiar with to make your points. Putin has believed that it’s very much OK to do it long before Trump sent troops into Caracas. It ain’t Trump who opened that can of worms. All Trump did is avoid killing civilians in the process. Which, to me, is a massive improvement but maybe I’m just being sentimental.

The reason why the US has been funding Ukraine’s war efforts isn’t because Russia is vaguely bad and Ukraine is vaguely good. And it isn’t because of some utterly invented international law. But simply because the US signed an agreement to do so in case of Russia’s aggression and in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nukes. If that agreement hadn’t been signed, there would be neither a war in Ukraine nor a country called Lithuania right now. But that’s a different issue.