Authored by Susan Crabtree via American Greatness,

California Republicans appeared down but not out on Wednesday after enduring a resounding defeat on Prop 50, handing Democrats a potential gain of up to five House seats in next year’s midterms and giving Gov. Gavin Newsom a huge win to boost his 2028 presidential ambitions.

California GOP Chairwoman Corrin Rankin filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday seeking to immediately block and ultimately cast aside the newly approved map of state congressional seats, which passed in Tuesday’s election by roughly 28 percentage points. With 77% of the estimated vote total counted in California, the redistricting measure was ahead 63.9% to 36.1%.

Brushing off calls for her resignation from a few influential conservative voices and enduring ridicule from Newsom, Rankin forged ahead, arguing in the GOP lawsuit that the new map illegally uses race as a factor to favor Latino voters, thereby violating the Constitution’s equal protection and voting rights guarantees.

“This is about the Constitution – it’s about the rights that our ancestors have fought so hard for in this country,” Rankin, the first African-American to chair the state GOP, said at a Wednesday morning press conference.

“It’s about sticking with the Constitution, and it’s about equality and fair and equal treatment. And we believe that Californians, no matter what color your skin is, no matter what your socio-economic background is, you deserve to be treated fair. You deserve to be treated equally.”

Newsom’s office provided a snarky response to the lawsuit, noting that they hadn’t reviewed it yet but commenting, “Good luck, losers.”

Proposition 50 tossed the state’s U.S. House district maps, which were drawn by an independent commission in a lengthy deliberative process after the decennial census, and replaced it with new maps quickly drawn by Democratic lawmakers and their consultant, Paul Mitchell. The voter-approved gerrymander was designed to neutralize a GOP-favoring redistricting plan in Texas.

The lawsuit was filed by the Dhillon Law Group, a California-based firm founded by Harmeet Dhillon, who now serves as assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice. It argues that the new map-making process was rushed and didn’t follow the multi-step process required. The attorneys cited the 1986 Supreme Court case Thornburg v. Gingles, which established a three-pronged test based on the Voting Rights Act, including a written analysis of the current maps showing voter dilution of minority groups when redistricting.

Mike Columbo, the attorney who drew up the complaint on behalf of the California Republican Party, pointed to comments Mitchell and Democratic leaders in the legislature made that the redistricted maps “increase [the] power of Latino voters.”

The attorneys asked for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to prevent Prop 50’s maps from going into effect. The lawsuit requires both sides to submit evidence to a three-judge panel; whoever loses that argument will appeal to the Supreme Court, which they predicted would need to make a decision by Dec. 19 so candidates for Congress can determine which districts they want to run in. That’s the deadline that candidates can begin collecting signatures to offset filing fees for the 2026 midterms.

Already, the new maps are setting off a scramble by Democratic candidates and incumbent House Republicans who are evaluating which district best suits them. In at least one case, the redrawn maps are already forcing sitting GOP members into contentious face-offs in a survival of the fittest contest for the competitive Republican districts.

Rep. Ken Calvert, the longest-serving California Republican in the House, announced he would challenge incumbent Rep. Young Kim for Californian’s redrawn 40th district, which was gerrymandered as safe for Republicans, while Calvert’s was redrawn to favor Democrats.

Marni von Wilpert, a Democratic San Diego city councilmember who turned the city’s most conservative district blue in 2020, announced she would challenge longtime GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, an 11-term incumbent.

Republican Kevin Lincoln, former mayor of Stockton, who already announced a rematch against Democratic Rep. Josh Harder, whom he lost to in 2024, is now eyeing switching districts and challenging Rep. Adam Gray, whose district under the new map is gerrymandered to include part of Stockton’s downtown.

State Assemblyman David Tangipa, a rising star in the state GOP, accused Newsom and state Democrats of weaponizing the redistricting process and diminishing the voices of some demographics to benefit Latinos.

Lauding California’s ethnic diversity as “beautiful,” Tangipa said he is “appalled by what has happened.”

“This whole process was a sham,” he said.

In the 24 hours after Prop 50 passed, Newsom focused his messaging on President Trump, arguing the big win “sends a powerful message” to his longtime political foe, casting it as a “repudiation” of Trump and a victory for the Democratic Party.

“What a night for the Democratic Party – a party that is in ascendency, a party that’s on its toes, no longer on its heels,” he said at a midnight press conference after the win.

Meanwhile, Rankin, who was elected to chair the California GOP in March, rejected calls for her to step down, arguing the party did everything it could to defeat the measure in a short time frame.

She pushed back against intra-party criticism that the California GOP botched the campaign against Prop 50 and defended the party’s get-out-the-vote efforts.

State Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, who has spent years heading the grassroots group Reform California, complained that the party sent out expensive direct mail pieces that were not targeted daily or at all to Republicans who had yet to vote.

“During the last three weeks of the ‘No on 50’ campaign, the California Republican Party raised and spent $11 million, and we left it all on the field,” she said. “We did a robust mail program. Our job is to message Republicans and make sure Republicans are turning out. We sent out 10 mailers, we spent millions on digital ads, on YouTube ads, and a text-messaging campaign.

“I think we did an excellent job – I’m very proud of our grassroots effort. All of our central committees throughout California were getting out the vote every single weekend. We were phone-banking every weekend. We were door-knocking every weekend … everyone worked incredibly hard.”

Asked about the non-targeted expensive mail campaign, Rankin said she is planning an “after-action” report.

DeMaio and Mike Netter, who co-chair Rebuild California, argue the party squandered the more than $11 million it spent on the effort on expensive direct mail pieces that blanketed the GOP instead of a targeted texting campaign focused on Republicans who had yet to vote and should have updated that list on a daily, if not hourly basis.

Netter, a plaintiff in the CA GOP’s new lawsuit challenging the new maps,  told RealClearPolitics that he received a direct mail piece from the California GOP the day after the election.

When it comes to the texting campaign, most Republicans across the state didn’t receive a text from the California GOP, but they did receive at least one from Demaio and his Reform California group. One explanation is that the California GOP was texting only those who had opted in to receive texts from the party, while other groups were using cell phone numbers culled from the voting rolls to blanket all registered Republicans.

Both DeMaio and Netter said the “No on Prop 50” messaging was disparate and uncoordinated, with no nationally recognized figure leading it.

Newsom, Netter told RCP, used Prop 50 as a distraction to avoid talking about his record on the real issues in California, high gas prices and cost of living, homelessness, and crime. Newsom had a singular and jarring message: Stop Trump, while the “No” side tried to use logic and reasoning.

“Gavin Newsom, by creating all these car wrecks, is taking everybody’s attention off the fact that the car is defective to begin with,” Netter said. “Newsom staged a car wreck called Prop 50, to take everybody’s eye off the fact that what we voted on last night will not affect our daily lives one bit.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company doesn’t have enough electricity to power all its AI GPUs, underscoring one of the biggest challenges in the current AI boom: energy supply. Speaking on the Bg2 Pod with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nadella explained that the problem isn’t too many chips but too little power to run them, according to Tom’s Hardware, who summarized the interview.

“The biggest issue we are now having is not a compute glut, but it’s power,” Nadella said. “If you can’t do that, you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in. In fact, that is my problem today. It’s not a supply issue of chips; it’s actually the fact that I don’t have warm shells to plug into.”

By “shells,” Nadella was referring to unfinished data center buildings — empty facilities that lack the necessary infrastructure, such as power and cooling, to host and run GPUs at scale. The shortage of available power has become a growing concern across the tech industry as companies like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI race to expand AI infrastructure.

Tom’s Hardware writes that Altman added that future consumer devices could one day run advanced AI models locally. “Someday, we will make a[n] incredible consumer device that can run a GPT-5 or GPT-6-capable model completely locally at a low power draw,” he said.

Their comments highlight a key tension in the AI sector: while hardware and model development are progressing rapidly, the physical and energy infrastructure needed to support them is lagging behind. Analysts warn that unless power generation and data center capacity scale up, the AI industry could face serious slowdowns — or even a correction — in the coming years.

Watch the full sitdown here:

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, wrote in his annual letter to shareholders that he will be “going quiet” after he steps down as the company’s chief executive at the end of 2025.

In the letter, dated Monday, the 95-year-old said that he will no longer speak at the company’s annual meeting or write his yearly letter. Buffett added that he is now the longest-lived member of his family.

Buffett also said he would be hastening the pace at which he hands over his Berkshire Hathaway shares to family foundations, including ones runs by his family.

The famed investor converted 1,800 of his Class A shares into 2.7 million Class B shares on Monday, a move worth approximately $1.35 billion. Of the shares, 1.5 million was sent to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, and The Sherwood Foundation, The Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and the NoVo Foundation each received 400,000 shares.

“The acceleration of my lifetime gifts to my children’s foundations in no way reflects any change in my views about Berkshire’s prospects,” he wrote.

“Greg Abel has more than met the high expectations I had for him when I first thought he should be Berkshire’s next CEO.”

Greg Abel, who will replace him as Berkshire Hathaway’s next CEO, is the vice chairman of non-insurance operations at Berkshire and was named as Buffett’s successor in 2021.

“He is a great manager, a tireless worker, and an honest communicator. Wish him an extended tenure,” he wrote.

As he has in the past several letters, Buffett also praised the U.S. economic system and told the Berkshire shareholders to “remember to thank America for maximizing your opportunities.”

He also provided an update on his health, saying, “I generally feel good. Though I move slowly and read with increasing difficulty, I am at the office five days a week where I work with wonderful people.”

Since the start of the year, Berkshire Hathaway’s shares have risen more than 10 percent to $498.65 per share. As of Monday, the company had a market capitalization of $1.08 trillion.

Berkshire, which Buffett acquired in 1965, owns a number of other businesses, including Benjamin Moore & Co., BNSF Railway, Business Wire, Dairy Queen, Fruit of the Loom, Geico, Pilot Flying J, and See’s Candies. The company also has significant investments in major companies such as Apple, Bank of America, and Coca-Cola.

Last week, Berkshire warned that videos using AI-generated images of Buffett are circulating on YouTube, featuring comments he never made.

Berkshire said in its warning on Nov. 6. “Mr. Buffett is concerned that these types of fraudulent videos are becoming a spreading virus,” Berkshire said on Nov. 6. “Individuals who are less familiar with Mr. Buffett may believe these videos are real and be misled by the contents of these videos.”

Buffett in May announced he would be stepping down at the end of the year.

“Choose your heroes very carefully and then emulate them,” Buffett wrote to end his letter, adding, “You will never be perfect, but you can always be better.”

Read the whole letter below:

Authored by Victoria Taft via PJ Media,

Like many of you, after the initial shock wore off, it became quite clear that something nefarious was behind the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol Complex. Things were too pat. Narratives were set and eagerly parroted by the media within hours. Buses filled with non-MAGA people were reported and verified by congressional reps. And there were “bombs” found at the Democratic National Committee and later at a club near the RNC. Impeachment talk was openly discussed. 

Suddenly, questioning the obviously hinky 2020 election was a criminal act against democracy. Trump must go to jail, the left said. And then they went about making that happen. A Hollywood producer soon was under contract to produce Congress’s January 6, The Movie! where no exculpatory information was allowed. 

The word “insurrection” became quickly affixed to all news stories, though no one knew what really happened. President Donald Trump’s slow response in urging people to go home was seen as an admission of something nefarious. And his words spoken at the Ellipse were clipped, taken out of context, and all exculpatory words he spoke were mysteriously left out of the discussion. 

And the fix is still in. On Sunday, two executives at the BBC resigned in disgrace after the popular British news program Panorama was caught making egregious edits in Trump’s speech to make him sound like he was encouraging a run on the Capitol Building. 

🚨HOLY SHlT! It’s being reported that according to a whistleblower memo that the BBC had DOCTORED Trump’s Jan. 6 speech.

This is how they started the “Trump incited a riot” narrative.

The Fedsurrectionists need to be ARRESTED and IMPRISONED!pic.twitter.com/579dasD2Yq

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) November 3, 2025

Someone, many someones, flooded the zone with quickly buttoned-up narratives that didn’t fit with anything that had happened on the right before. It looked like an Antifa free-for-all, which we’d seen hundreds of times before. This time, however, we were led to believe that Antifa had miraculously missed its first riot in D.C. in years. 

We know better, however. 

New York City Antifa member Talia Jane Ben Ora was at Jan. 6 in a MAGA costume. She was never charged with any crimes that day. https://t.co/8YLWkAeolg pic.twitter.com/anfkyR9P3z

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) October 11, 2025

Four people, all MAGA supporters, died that day. Ashli Babbitt was shot to death, and Rosanne Boyland was overcome by chemical spray and, according to witnesses, was beaten by a female police officer as she lay unconscious on the ground. Two other men were overcome by the chemicals and pepper spray eagerly shot into the crowd by police and suffered a stroke and a heart attack. 

Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died the next day of a stroke. 

The media and congressional leaders lied about all of it. 

And if all that wasn’t your red pill moment, sit down because you may go from red to black pill by the end of this story. 

A flood of new information has come out in the last few days, thanks in large part to The Blaze, but also another source who has been parsing video evidence from January 6 for years. Both have taken their findings to DOJ officials but have not made this information public. Catherine gave us a brief overview when the story broke, but now we have more information.

It’s now believed that the person who planted the apparent dummy pipe bombs outside the DNC and a club near the RNC is a former Capitol Police officer.

Gee, why would a Capitol Police officer be planting dummy bombs that were miraculously found moments before the timer “would go off” at the time Congress was set to confirm the Electoral College votes? The effort waylaid an audit that Sen. Ted Cruz was set to request.

The publication reported that the former officer, Shauni Kerkhoff, produced a 94% match with a gait computer program used by federal investigators. The former Capitol Police officer is also a former professional soccer player who suffered a career-ending injury and had surgery that left her with a permanent, mild limp, which shows up in the J6 bomber video released by the FBI. The publication said that Kerkhoff’s gait matches the video obtained of her at work at the Capitol. 

Kerkhoff served as a training officer in less lethal weapons and had access to training objects, which included dummy pipe bombs. 

On January 6, Kerkhoff is seen at the Capitol Building firing volleys of less-than-lethal ordnance at protesters. She testified in federal court against people at the Capitol on January 6. Six months later, she left to take a job at… the CIA, in campus security.

Kerkhoff appeared to be a suspect early on, but for whatever reason, the investigation into the J6 pipe bomber case went cold for years until the Trump 47 administration dug into it.

The Blaze reported that former FBI whistleblower, Kyle Seraphin, “realized Friday that he was doing surveillance next door to the woman now suspected of being the Jan. 6 pipe bomber.” [emphasis added]

“The FBI put us one door away from the pipe bomber within days of January 6, and we were deliberately pulled away for no logical or logically investigative reason,” Seraphin told Blaze News Friday. “And everything about that tells me that they were involved in a cover-up and have been since day one.

[…] “There’s a personal reaction to it, which is the complete vindication that the things I’ve been saying and my recollection of being briefed on this stuff has been accurate for years and I’ve never changed my tune,” he said.

On January 6, Nancy Pelosi, who admitted to her daughter, the documentary filmmaker, who was following her mother around that day, that she should have had more security at the Capitol. She turned down the National Guard that Donald Trump requested. 

Pelosi’s friend, Aaron Black, who worked with Lisa Fithian to create Occupy Wall Street, yet another leftist information operation, is alleged to have been photographed at the Capitol melee on January 6. 

After the protesters and rioters were chased out of the Capitol, Pelosi called for Capitol Police Chief Stephen Sund’s resignation, claiming he had never spoken with her about the issues that day. He claims to have spoken with her three times during the breach.

It could be that Pelosi was setting him and everyone else up for her infamous wrap-up smear. 

The objective was to imprison Donald Trump and to make him and MAGA radioactive forever.

When Trump announced for the 2024 election, within weeks, the Get Trump lawfare pogrom began. 

The details we’re learning about this case make you shudder. Calling it “worse than Watergate” doesn’t quite capture the treachery. 

As fighting has intensified in the eastern city of Pokrovsk, and with Russian troops having already penetrated some districts of the key logistical hub in the Donbass region, President Volodymyr Zelensky appears to be in denial.

On Monday he issued a statement on X claiming that Putin and his forces are at a “stalemate” and that the Russian president is more unpopular within his own country than ever. And yet even Western pundits consider that the writing is on the wall when it comes to Ukrainians seeking to hold on to Pokrovsk.

“Putin is in an impasse when it comes to real successes on the battlefield. The situation looks more like a stalemate for him,” Zelensky wrote. He went on to say, “First, he has radicalized public opinion toward this issue through information. Second, he promised objectives he has not achieved, so he needs to show some gains.”

But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has responded by saying that while Russia wants Ukraine conflict to end as soon as possible, it is only the prospect of peace negotiations which have stalled, and that the situation “stalled not because of us.”

Meanwhile the Amsterdam-based Moscow Times paints a dire picture for the Ukrainian side: “Western military analysts say Russian troops have steadily edged into Pokrovsk’s southern outskirts, wearing down Ukrainian defenses and using worsening late-autumn weather to move men and equipment closer to the front,” the report says. “The fight, they note, has settled into a grinding contest of attrition that has stretched Ukrainian units thin.”

One Ukrainian soldier in fresh statement described that “The main problem is logistics” as “The roads are completely choked by Russian drones. No vehicle can enter or leave the city without being immediately detected.”

The man told The Moscow Times, “They send about ten armored vehicles at once toward our positions” and that “Normally, we can destroy them quickly, but with the fog, rain and low winter clouds, our reaction time is slower. We destroy most of them, but some still manage to break through and drop off troops inside the city.”

While Zelensky is trying to offer Pokrovsk as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance, the reality is that it is being encircled. Kiev officials have over several weeks sought to deny this.

For the majority of the war Pokrovsk has acted as the logistical hub and rear operations base for Ukraine’s eastern defensive lines. It sits astride both a key railroad juncture and the highway to Ukraine’s fourth-largest metro, Dnipro.

Another urgent appeal for the Western allies to “close the skies” over Ukraine:

We’ve been talking about closing the sky since day one of this war. We understand that it’s our vulnerability. And we realize that Putin had a huge number of missiles, while we had very few air‑defense systems and only a small remaining stock of Soviet‑era missiles. These systems…

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) November 10, 2025

The loss of the primary rail lines and highway routes in and out of Pokrovsk would cut resources to Ukrainian units across the Donbas and possibly force them to retreat before running out of supplies. This would mean an immediate and sweeping Russian advance all along the eastern lines. 

The city’s defensive positions are a final obstacle to Russia’s access to most of the region. If Pokrovsk falls Russian forces will indeed be able to more easily flank entrenched troops in the north and south of the country.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

Winter Storm Watch

“We live in the dumbest of times and Democrats are truly led by the dumbest of all of us.”

– Sean Davis, The Federalist

You can suppose the government will re-open this week, and then what?

It could close back down in January when the latest funding patch runs out. And then what?

Another shut-down and another continuing resolution?

The nation hopscotches toward insolvency and breakdown.

The sorrows of Mr. Trump mount as his enemies devise ever-novel punishments for the people of this land. The mutual animus of the two parties spirals upward like the vortex of a developing superstorm.

It’s the nature of crisis that the outcome is uncertain and the possibilities seem mostly dire. And so it is the nature of heroic action to overcome all that and stick a landing in some safe place out of harm’s way.

Can we convert the economy of financial chicanery to an economy of purposeful production without provoking a ruinous crash of assets and debt obligations?

The most thoughtful observers doubt it.

It’s really only a question of time when the floor you were standing on gives way and suddenly everything is in freefall.

The precious metals are sending out a distress signal in the futures charts this morning, even while the equities markets worldwide melt up. That’s got to be a bad combo. Something is going wrong with money everywhere. The overarching question is: will money continue to be money? (That is, will it be worth anything?) Money that is increasingly worthless leads to some of the worst social and political outcomes imaginable.

The authorities of the money world only pretend to be in control of the forces behind money and its movements. Money is subject to the laws of physics like everything else: actions and reactions. . . momentum / inertia . . . entropy. As economist Herb Stein sagely observed a half-century ago: “Things that can’t go on, stop.” An awful lot of things in our world need to stop if we want to continue the project of civilization. We can see, to our distress, that many things are actually stopping: Truck shipments of goods, idle freight trains, stores closing, closed down construction sites, restaurants empty. That tends toward rents, loans, mortgages not being paid. That leads to daisy-chains of broken obligations. Inflation reverses to deflation. Money starts to disappear.

In a deflation, money will stop losing its value. The catch is, people will have less money. There will be less of it around, chasing whatever goods get produced. Some people will have no money at all. The government will almost certainly attempt to counter that by giving them money created out of nothing. It will also give money to broke institutions like banks, and perhaps to businesses deemed “critical” to society. That will cycle back into money losing more value. We’ve been through this cycle a number of times in this young and turbulent century.

You’ve probably noticed that our country is seething with pissed-off citizens. All the machinations of the money authorities pretending to manage money have produced perversities, distortions, and spooky unintended consequences. Things manifest strangely. For instance, medical care is a godawful mess, namely, the ACA, Affordable Care Act. Got an acute problem like abdominal pain? We can give you an appointment three months from now, the HMO says when you call? Are they insane? Do they not hear themselves speaking? And you’re paying, like, $20-K-a-year for the family’s health insurance, so-called. (Hey, you can always go sit in the ER for eighteen hours with plenty of illegal aliens to keep you company.)

Mr. Trump just proffered a novel gambit: take away federal subsidies and tax credits from the ACA-linked insurance companies and send the money to US citizens to spend directly on doctors, drugs, and surgeries, or on private insurance outside the orbit of Obamacare.

Nobody really knows how that might work, but you could allow that sometimes horrible problems call for far-out responses. Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) was a major plank in the president’s campaign platform. Everybody knows that Obamacare functions as an obstacle to being healthy. The entire purpose of it was to make medicine both unaffordable and unavailable. It’s been operating for going on fifteen years, failing spectacularly in plain sight.

The Democratic Party proposed to fix it, via their shut-down stunt, by enrolling onto Obamacare the millions of illegal aliens they ushered into the country at the cost of a trillion-plus dollars.

Some fix.

This is why they are known as the Party of Chaos. You can depend on the Democratic Party to always make a bad situation worse.

The shut-down has even led to chaos within the Democratic Party itself as members now denounce their own leadership.

This would be a good time for President Trump to beat them with a stick as hard as possible. Ending the silent filibuster would be a good start — since the Democrats aim to do it anyway. Of course, that is up to Mr. Thune, the Senate Majority Leader. A fire needs to be lit under his well-tailored ass. Then, pass some really juicy legislation starting with election reform entailing proof-of-citizenship to vote, paper ballots, end of mail-in ballots (except for traditional absentee voting), and do away with the janky vote-counting machines. That would be an excellent start. Proceed from there.

As for those troubled financial markets and shaky money venues, they will do what they will do. If they wobble and crater, great opportunities will open up to decisively fix so much that has gone wrong in our country. You might not know it, considering the drift of recent years, but there are still a lot of capable people in this country ready to roll up their sleeves and go to work repairing what is broken.

*  *  *

Now live: JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Amusing excerpt from the book at this link.

Building on last month’s report that Apple had “sharply” scaled back iPhone Air production amid soft demand while ramping up orders for the iPhone 17 base and Pro models, a new report reveals that the next-generation iPhone Air, initially slated for a fall 2026 launch, has been postponed. 

The Information, citing people familiar with Apple’s production plans, reports that the company is now “delaying the release of next year’s iPhone Air” after “sharply scaling back” production of the first-generation model, which debuted this fall, due to sluggish demand.

Despite marketing the iPhone Air as Apple’s thinnest and most durable phone, reviewers criticized its short battery life, underwhelming camera sensor, and unimpressive speakers, clear trade-offs made to achieve its ultra-slim profile.

The model accounted for only 3% of iPhone sales in September, compared with 9% for the iPhone 17 Pro and 12% for the Pro Max. Much of its inventory remains unsold.

In mid-October, Nikkei Asia was the first to report on underwhelming iPhone Air demand, leading to “adjustment to production plans.” 

However, demand for the non-Air iPhones has remained strong, prompting Goldman analysts led by Michael Ng to ask in a recent note, “Are we in an iPhone supercycle?“

Here’s additional color from The Information on Apple’s Air problem:

Foxconn, one of two companies that assembles the iPhone Air for Apple, has dismantled all but one and a half of its production lines for the first version and expects to halt all production by the end of the month, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation. Luxshare, the other company that assembles the device, halted all production at the end of October, according to people with direct knowledge of the developments. In contrast, Foxconn and Luxshare have dedicated dozens of production lines to top-selling models like the iPhone 17 Pro.

. . . 

The failure of the iPhone Air to sell well is the latest demonstration of Apple’s struggle to come up with a new variant of the iPhone that is popular with consumers. Apple experimented with a cheaper iPhone with a smaller display known as the iPhone Mini in 2020 but killed that in favor of the iPhone Plus in 2022, which had weaker specs paired with a larger screen. Neither of these variants sold well, and the iPhone 14 Plus faced similar production cuts just weeks after its initial release because of slow sales.

. . . 

Apple planned to launch the second-generation iPhone Air next fall alongside the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro models and Apple’s first foldable iPhone. But recently, Apple managers notified engineers and suppliers that they were taking the next iPhone Air off the schedule without providing a new release date, the people said.

The report ended:

However, taking a major iPhone model off the release schedule at this stage in development is a rare if not unprecedented move, according to current and former Apple employees. Apple began working with manufacturing partners on the next-generation iPhone Air this summer just as it was ramping up production of the first model, which debuted in late September.

Hmm.

Uh oh…I’ve been using iPhone Air pretty heavily, but down 50% battery in THREE HOURS?? Ooph pic.twitter.com/Mo7OjKoydN

— Stephen Robles (@stephenrobles) September 22, 2025

📱My #iPhoneAir Review:

Bad battery, average haptics, useless speaker.

Missed 30+ calls while driving just because the ringtone disappeared inside my pocket.

Great job, iPhone Air.

Verdict: Highly not recommended. Buy it if you are tech stupid or you use a secondary phone. https://t.co/D6Y46OfrIi pic.twitter.com/YoslMmiJiD

— iPhone Sickness ® (@iphonesickness) November 1, 2025

Biggest disappointment of iPhone Air lol. It has the same battery life of iPhone 16 Pro. They could’ve easily gotten rid of some to put in a speaker. https://t.co/XUHlV6TxyJ

— Vadim Yuryev (@VadimYuryev) September 9, 2025

Add the iPhone Air to the list of duds, including Vision Pro and smarter Siri, Apple Intelligence. 

Authored by Dave Huber via TheCollegeFix.com,

A reportedly transgender high school history teacher in Virginia is on leave after posting an image to his Instagram of a “rainbow gun” pointed at a person’s head and the demand “PUT THE PRONOUNS BACK IN THE EMAIL.”

The image, posted on X by Libs of TikTok, depicts an arm holding a pistol (both colored as a rainbow) held at the back of a man’s head, with the “pronoun” demand written directly above.

According to WSET, Sabrina Morris (pictured) teaches at George Washington High School in the Danville Public Schools (Virginia) district. A district spokesperson said local police are involved in the matter, and that Morris “will not be present on school grounds while this matter is under investigation.”

Sabrina Morris; Libs of TikTok/X

“We are aware of a recent social media post involving one of our employees that has caused concern within our school community. We take such matters very seriously, as the content shared does not reflect the values or expectations of professionalism that guide our division,” the spokesperson said.

“Danville Public Schools remains committed to providing a safe and respectful environment for all students and staff. Due to this being a personnel matter, no additional information can be shared at this time.”

Libs of TikTok/X

The school district appears to have scrubbed Morris’ information for the George Washington HS website, and his Instagram — which notes he uses “she/her/hers” pronouns and describes himself as a “PhD / teacher / millennial / kinda cute” — has been set to private.

Based on text posted alongside the gun image (below, highlight circle added), it appears Morris got it from the Dream for America Instagram account, which purports to “inspir[e] young Americans to defend democracy & fight fascism online, on-campus, & across the country.”

Libs of TikTok/X

The College Fix asked Dream for America chief William He via email if the image indeed originated from his organization’s social media, and he replied that it indeed was “briefly shared” on the Dream for America account “but it was intended as comedic commentary on recent events — not as an endorsement of violence or hostility toward any group.”

He added “Once we realized how the image could be interpreted, it was immediately removed” and that his group “stands firmly for inclusion, empathy, and respect […] never to mock, threaten, or devalue others.”

Authored by Daniel Lacalle,

Socialism has never reduced prices or improved affordability. Never. Interventionism is the root of all inflationary and scarcity problems. Only competition, open markets and technology can reduce prices and ease the bottlenecks created by governments through asphyxiating regulations and taxes.

Zohran Mamdani stated that “there is no problem big enough that the government cannot solve.” The evidence is the opposite. There is no problem that government intervention does not make worse. Government intervention is the cause of inflationary crises, not the cure.

Uncontrolled spending is printing money and inevitably leads to the destruction of the purchasing power of the currency, lower real wages and higher inflation. Add to it regulations that limit competition and affordable supply and taxes that make small business uncompetitive and the distortions created by governments playing God led to chronic inflation.

The explanation is simple. Economic challenges require competition, creative destruction and open markets to generate benefits for all citizens. Giving increasing economic power to bureaucrats that have no skin in the game and always resort to higher taxes and more spending is the recipe for stagnation and a debt crisis.

Mamdami fails to explain that socialist France has the biggest government in the OECD, the highest taxes, and a hugely intervened economy. It is in stagnation; it has a deep debt crisis, a high cost of living, and soaring social discontent. Not only France. The evidence of the failure of the “social state” is clear in Germany, the UK, Canada and many other developed economies that forgot that wealth is not a cake to divide. You either create wealth or destroy it.

Many cite China as an example of socialism that works. However, China does not prove that socialism works; it proves that abandoning socialism works. China’s economic system is what many socialists, like Mamdani, Sanders or AOC, call “rampant capitalism”. In fact, some of China’s most complicated challenges, like overcapacity, come from state central planning.

At the core of the problem is the idea that the government is a better allocator of wealth and prosperity than the market. The evidence is overwhelming. An interventionist government will always overspend, malinvest and pass the cost to taxpayers and citizens because the politicians do not suffer the consequences of their mistakes. Socialism is always justified based on its alleged good intentions, while capitalism is criticised for its worst results. The trick? Once you try socialism, you cannot get it out when it fails, as it always does.

Interventionism always erodes prosperity, undermines freedom, and destabilises the very foundations that politicians claim to defend. However, by the time citizens realise they have been tricked, the politicians’ power is too large.

Mamdani’s sentence rests on the view that bureaucratic action can overcome any obstacle by sheer will and allegedly unlimited resources. However, history repeatedly shows that attempts at imposing big government control led to negative consequences. Government spending is out of control and interventionist administrations refuse to cut expenditures or balance budgets. Instead, they increase bureaucratic power, betting on limitless spending, knowing the long-term costs are passed down to citizens rather than politicians.

Politicians benefit from increasing state power; this incentive perpetuates cycles of intervention that leave a trail of debt while politicians reap the benefits.

Socialism has only one objective: control. The goal is to create dependent citizens that must bow down to politicians and keep quiet because they have no power. Only the few politically connected thrive at the expense of the middle class, small businesses, and workers, who suffer the costs of inflation, taxation, and lost opportunity.

Socialist politicians always blame the rich, but the wealthy are not their objective, as they know they can leave the country and settle elsewhere. What socialist politicians really want is to destroy the middle class, because independent and economically free citizens are critical and do not want more government intervention. The middle class must be obliterated and create a dependent subclass.

The easiest way to end the middle class is with massive state spending on so-called “stimulus plans” that bleed small businesses dry and destroy the middle class via inflation, taxes, and bureaucracy, leaving only debt and stagnation.

One of the most destructive outcomes of government intervention is chronic inflation. Rothbard explains how the government, by issuing currency to pay for rising deficits, imposes a “hidden tax” on everyone who holds money or earns wages. Politicians are never concerned about debts and deficits because inflation stealthily erodes obligations by devaluing currency, shifting the financial burden to working families. This constant debasement is not a fatality but a deliberate policy choice that allows states to live far beyond their means, become larger, and create a dependent subclass through the erosion of purchasing power and the impoverishment of society.

Governments in social democracies have exceeded their three limits:

• Economic Limit: Government interventionism distorts prices, weakens real wages, and perverts incentives. Rothbard shows that state intervention necessarily misallocates resources because it cannot rationally price goods or services absent market signals. The result is inefficiency, waste, and lost opportunities for innovation and prosperity.

• Fiscal Limit: Interventionists operate under the illusion of unlimited fiscal resources, running chronic deficits, and claiming they can “stimulate” economies without cost. But as government liabilities rise, interest expenses soar, limiting growth and crowding out private investment. Tax increases are not a tool to reduce debt but to justify it, and the end result is stagnation and a debt crisis.

• Inflationary Limit: To finance their ambitions, states print ever more money, perpetuating inflation. No interventionist government voluntarily reduces spending or cuts debt; they simply debase their currency, eroding savings and wages. Thus, they undermine confidence in money itself, destroying the economy in a short period of time.

Instead of enhancing equality, opportunity, or prosperity, state interventionism erodes them. Socialism, under the disguise of protecting the most vulnerable, destroys the middle class and makes the poor even poorer. Policies to force equality via intervention only “level down”; bureaucracies grow while innovation and productivity slump.

Government control does not lead to progress but to stagnation and currency destruction.

Chronic inflation, fiscal imbalances and economic stagnation are not solved by government intervention; they are created by it. Furthermore, when citizens find that socialism fails, they cannot escape from it.

FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker resigned last Wednesday morning, less than 12 hours after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race over Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, according to the Daily News and Firehouse.

In a letter to Mayor Eric Adams, Tucker said his final day will be Dec. 19. “Between now and then, I will continue to lead the greatest fire department in the world and will ensure an orderly transition,” he wrote.

A department source said Tucker has had no discussions with Mamdani’s team about remaining in his post.

The source added that Tucker, who is Jewish and a Zionist, believed he wouldn’t align well with Mamdani, a Democratic socialist who faced criticism during the campaign for remarks some viewed as anti-Semitic.

The report notes that Tucker, CEO of a private security firm and longtime member of the FDNY Foundation board, was appointed commissioner in August 2024, succeeding Laura Kavanagh, the department’s first female commissioner.

Tucker’s resignation marks another major shift within city leadership following a heated election season that highlighted deep political divides. Mamdani, a Queens assemblyman known for his progressive stances on housing and policing, ran on a platform of redistributing city resources and increasing public investment in social services. His victory signaled a sharp turn from Adams’ more centrist approach to public safety and governance.

During his brief tenure, Tucker focused on strengthening the FDNY’s recruitment pipeline, modernizing training programs, and improving firefighter wellness and mental health resources.

He also oversaw initiatives to expand diversity within the department and enhance coordination during large-scale emergencies, earning praise from union leaders and city officials alike.

On Wednesday, Tucker was traveling to Israel to meet with the Israel Fire and Rescue Authority and is expected to comment on his resignation upon returning.

Mamdani is now set to become New York City’s first Muslim and youngest mayor in a century, having won 50% of the vote in Tuesday’s election.