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Cruises are fertile ground for community and wholesome, silly fun. People aboard ships, free from work, news from the outside world, and other adult responsibilities, get into all kinds of joyful mischief. They hide rubber ducks around the ship for others to find, decorate their cabin doors, and leave notes of appreciation when someone's room is especially well decorated. Groups also wear matching shirts and other ridiculous outfits.One such group tradition has made cruise ships around the world a little more colorful: people, in droves, have been dressing up as the iconic Three's Company character Mrs. Roper.Played by Audra Lindley, Helen Roper was famous for her quick wit, sassy demeanor, and extraordinarily loud outfits. Notably, in the long-running sitcom she was usually seen wearing a caftan—a long, flowy robe or tunic—along with wide, boldly shaped glasses, chunky beaded necklaces, dangly earrings, and, of course, her signature short, curly hair.Though the character had a popular run in the late '70s and early '80s, Mrs. Roper experienced a renaissance in the 2010s, when she became an icon in the LGBTQ community. Dressing as Mrs. Roper at Pride celebrations and other events became popular around 2013. People embraced the character's open-minded, progressive personality, as well as the way she challenged societal norms for older women on television in her era.It's also, let's face it, just plain fun to dress up in such a wild and unencumbered outfit.More recently, hordes of Mrs. Ropers have been spotted aboard cruise ships, with the best and brightest of these meetups known as "Mrs. Roper Romps." Parade magazine reports that nearly every Royal Caribbean sailing has featured a sizable romp over the past few years. @kynsleesmom #mrsroper #carnivalliberty #cruise In social media groups and cruise forums, Ropers-in-waiting meet up to plan their romps. They might organize a bar crawl, a deck walk, or a dance party. Of course, no romp is complete without plenty of photo ops.The dress-up meetups have been popular on land for years now, but being at sea allows fans to take the gag to a whole new level. Being on vacation, in international waters where "anything goes," and buoyed by a hint of onboard anonymity allows people to truly let loose once they don the signature muumuu.But what is it about Mrs. Roper that inspires so much flirtatious sass? The New York Times writes: "By 2023 standards, the show might be considered retrograde in its attitudes toward feminism and homosexuality. But when it aired, its randy suggestiveness pushed broadcast boundaries. Mrs. Roper was its progressive Pole Star: Freethinking and voluptuary, she pooh-poohed her husband’s anti-gay slights and illustrated for Janet and Chrissy how an older woman could have sexual agency. ... That attitude has made the character into something of a cult figure today, particularly among gay men and straight women, who make up most of the Mrs. Roper Romp crowds."Planning romps with strangers allows passengers to connect with like-minded new friends and make their vacations even more memorable. - YouTube www.youtube.com Not everyone, however, is a fan of cruise-based "Mrs. Roper Romps."When you're on a cruise ship, it's hard to escape the crowds and constant hustle if you're not participating. That's why the romps have received some pushback from passengers annoyed by gaggles of Ropers taking over the pool deck day after day.In fact, the "controversy" has drawn so much attention that key cruise line figures have been forced to weigh in. See on Instagram Carnival's longtime brand ambassador, John Heald, recently took to social media with a simple plea."I'm sorry, but this Cruise phenomenon of dressing as Mrs. Roper is getting out of control and needs to be stopped now.!!!" he wrote in an Instagram post.Of course, in the very same post, he posed in a bright orange muumuu, a curly wig, and a humongous beaded necklace. See on Instagram Love it or hate it, the atmosphere on a cruise ship is special and hard to recreate anywhere else.They're like massive, floating resorts, but being on the open ocean adds an extra nautical twist to the typical vacation experience. The rooms are small, so passengers spend all day and most of the evening out and about. And while cruise ships are big, they can't compete with the size of an open beach. The relatively close quarters have a way of fostering even more community. You run into the same people over and over and frequent the same spots on the ship.And all the while, most passengers have little to no access to their cell phones or the internet (unless they've paid a hefty fee for spotty service). With distractions and responsibilities removed, carefree fun thrives.In divisive times, a cruise is almost the perfect escape. In fact, in 2024, one cruise line announced plans to offer a four-year "skip ahead" voyage for anyone who wanted to more or less check out of the news cycle for the foreseeable future."Mrs. Roper Romps" may not be everyone's cup of tea, and getting caught in one while trying to grab a drink at the pool bar can be a hassle, but the loud, proud celebration of joy and self-confidence is something everyone can get on board with.

Still holding onto his values. The post The one singer Eddie Vedder called his musical guiding light first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

“Wake up!” The post ‘Celebration of the Lizard’: The Doors’ performance piece that nearly completed ‘Waiting for the Sun’ first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Over the weekend and into Monday afternoon, there was an interesting flurry of news reports indicating that Tim Walz’s political career might be ending even sooner than we thought…   ? BOMBSHELL: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is set to resign within the next week, according to multiple reports from within the Walz campaign. pic.twitter.com/plbqZsg73P — TalkRadio 77 WABC (@77WABCradio) January 11, 2026 Tim Walz to RESIGN from Office After Somali Scandal, Newsom in PANIC Over Our Fraud Investigation… https://t.co/cpoUy6oWrE — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 12, 2026 It seems that Walz is being thrown under the bus by his own party, something which carries not just great entertainment value but also the prospect of an interesting lesson… Jacob Frey after months of Democrats claiming there’s no fraud: “Everybody could have done more to prevent fraud. The fraud is real. The fraud is very real.” Ohpic.twitter.com/iLiblzJMEP — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 12, 2026 This would all put us back to where we were a week ago, before a deranged woman decided to block a street to prevent ICE from transporting an arrested illegal alien to a detention center, and, when ICE officers moved in to arrest her, drove at one of them. His reaction was to neutralize the threat to his person that the moving vehicle presented, and the result was a bullet to the head of Renee Good. (RELATED: When Law Enforcement Becomes Political) Who the American Left instantly committed to creating as White Girl George Floyd. (RELATED: Who Gets Canonized — And Who Gets Condemned?) Look, it’s a bad thing that this woman died last Wednesday. Nobody is or should be happy about it. But just like in the case of St. George of Fentanyl, Renee Good is dead because of Renee Good. And effectively, thanks to the Democratic Farm/Labor Party of Minnesota’s exploits, she sacrificed herself so that Tim Walz and the rest of that party’s political class could buy a distraction from the multi-billion dollar Somali welfare fraud scandals that were eating them alive both inside and outside that state. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Minnesota Goes to Hell (Again)) Did it work? Not really. ICE has now flooded officers into Minneapolis in response to Walz’s threats to call out the Minnesota National Guard in order to “protect” his state’s “citizenry” from federal law enforcement officials. It doesn’t look like Walz is offering much in the way of a muscular response. What he’s offering is a… lawsuit. BREAKING: In a DESPERATE attempt to stop ICE and DHS from deporting their new voter base, Minnesota has just announced a lawsuit against the feds. He is following in Tampon Tim’s footsteps and called DHS activity a “FEDERAL INVASION OF MINNEAPOLIS.” He let the INVADERS INVADE… pic.twitter.com/4eguRsZ4Yn — Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) January 12, 2026 There are protesters in the streets in Minneapolis, and it has certainly gotten weird there, but it’s nothing like the Floyd riots. It turns out that the Left can’t bring itself to true hard-core violence unless there’s a racial angle, which is a terrible commentary on who they are, but also a hopeful sign, in that some of their most long-time loyal supporters seem to be getting tired of the old tactics. (RELATED: The Moral Blackmailing of the American People) That the people willing to riot for Floyd, a career criminal who once held a knife to a pregnant woman’s belly in a fit of rage and threatened a double murder, won’t riot for Renee Good gives you an indication of where middle-class white women, even if they’re lesbians of recent vintage, truly sit on the intersectional totem pole — the answer being “not quite so high.” And no amount of apology for white privilege will buy the loyalty of the woke communists — or at least it doesn’t quite get you arson at federal courthouses or bloody mayhem outside tire stores. Everyone else is watching and scowling. And the Somali fraud scandal just grows and grows… U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was told over the weekend that a new Nick Shirley video being released soon — maybe even as early as Monday — is “ten times worse” than the “Quality Learing Center” daycare scam. In Shirley’s previous video, he and his source, David Hoch, who has been investigating this billion-dollar-plus scam for years, discovered multiple daycare centers in one building without children in them for years. And this is where Hoch says is the heart of the ongoing continuing criminal enterprise. Hoch says the new video will show that most of these companies are Somali-owned, and his and Shirley’s visit to these companies found zero companies. “What I believe is the core of all this is this non-emergency medical transportation. A search showed that Minnesota recognizes 1,020 NEMT [Non-Emergency Medical Transport] companies. Almost 900 of them are Somali-owned,” he told Bessent. Hoch went on, “In the second video, Nick Shirley and I went to 16 of them — I’ve actually been to about 70 of them.” At this point, he held up his papers and leaned forward to Bessent to emphasize, “THEY DON’T EXIST.” They visited the NEMT companies to find the addresses went to places with “no vehicles.” Fronts included, “an apartment building. One of them is a liquor store. Another one is a wire transfer. Another one is  totally unrelated — it’s a grocery store. There are no vehicles.” He said, “The vast majority of these companies exist on paper only. They are not real.” He said that the average NEMT company in the United States has about “20 vehicles and each vehicle generates about $70,000 a year.” He said that if you run those numbers, “800 companies, 20 vehicles, $70,000 a year? It’s an enormous sum of money that’s going out.” Americans have been through too much in the past six years to be raised to hysteria over Good’s death. She doesn’t turn out to be a very sympathetic plaintiff, even post-mortem, and as the country is informed — grudgingly, and not with the participation of the legacy propaganda press — that she was part of an organized cabal of left-wing termagants trained to use their vehicles as weapons against federal law enforcement officers in order to protect illegal aliens from deportation, the case gets harder to make. (RELATED: The Media Are Agents of Propaganda) The country is looking for prosperity. It’s looking for cultural renewal. It wants the illegals to go home and the radical leftists to shut up. And at the end of the day, when it looks at Minnesota, what it has to say is not “we stand with Renee” but rather “where did all of our money go?” Walz and Frey and Minnesota’s gangster attorney general, Keith Ellison, who never paid a price for organizing a kangaroo court for Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the wake of Floyd’s death, don’t have a good answer for that. All they have is a promise to eventually close the barn door now that the horses are gone. (RELATED: Chauvin Trial Judge Amplifies the Obvious Injustice) But that isn’t good enough. Republicans in Minnesota, who are generally speaking a very hapless lot but very often come a lot closer to winning elections there than they get credit for, finally see an opening to punching through and turning the state purple if not red. That would be a good result from the foolishness, horror, and rebellion we’ve seen in that state. If ever there was a party whose politicians deserved a very swift kick in the ass from the voting public, it’s the Minnesota Democrats. Renee Good doesn’t seem to be an antidote to that. Unlike with Floyd, this time the federal law enforcement officers are running into the melee the Left is ginning up. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: Minnesota Goes to Hell (Again) You’ve Never Heard of the Citgo Six, and We’re Going to Change That Right Now The Toppling of Villains Has Begun in Earnest. It Must Continue. Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

The classic film, Doctor Zhivago (1965), offers a cautionary tale about what happens when collectivism threatens and confiscates private property. In this way, it provides a revealing lens through which to view the direction of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s housing agenda — and a warning about where such policies can lead if taken to their logical conclusion. In the movie, following the Russian Revolution, Yuri Zhivago — a doctor and poet portrayed by Omar Sharif — returns home from World War I’s Eastern Front, but his family house is quite different. The once palatial estate, symbolizing the family’s warmth and generosity aside from wealth, has fallen into disrepair. Vibrancy is dulled. Boards are exposed behind the walls. Strangers are occupying the premises. And local communist authorities — members of the Residents’ Committee — greet the young doctor with skepticism and coldness. The only sympathetic, yet pained face he meets is his betrothed, Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin). Yuri quickly realizes the truth: the home is no longer his own. Under Soviet rule, it belongs to “the people.” Private property is no more. Confronted with this reality, he adapts to survival mode, placating to their assertions and untruths, such as the censorship of a typhus outbreak in Moscow. After his brief interrogation, Yuri and Tonya head to their tight living quarters, yet one officer shouts, “There was living space for thirteen families in this one house.” Acknowledging the accusatory slight, the doctor cautiously responds, “Yes, this is a better arrangement, comrades. More just.” The exchange captures collectivism’s inherent envy — and its proclivity to warp and destroy not only homes, but human souls. Cea Weaver … has openly supported seizing private property, and equated homeownership to a “weapon of white supremacy.” This scene bears an uncomfortable resemblance to rhetoric increasingly heard in New York City politics. Cea Weaver — Mayor Mamdani’s appointed tenant advocate — has openly supported seizing private property, and equated homeownership to a “weapon of white supremacy.” Prior to her appointment as executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, Weaver also advocated for electing more communists, rent control, and closing eviction courts, among other anti-private property policies. (RELATED: Mamdani’s Rent Control Plans Will Make the Rental Market Worse for Working People) Likewise, Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has called for a citywide rent freeze and expansive public housing construction in order to address affordability concerns. To him, these are pragmatic solutions — though there are legal obstacles that could possibly obstruct the realization of this vision. Nevertheless, his vision — and Weaver by extension — ultimately treats private ownership and wealth accumulation as morally suspect, and, at worst, racist. Moreover, as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) argues, the policies could cause “the deterioration of the regulated housing stock into a full-blown crisis.” (RELATED: From Solidarity to Statism: Mayor Mamdani’s Vision for New York City) Still, Weaver’s appointment as housing czar should not be taken lightly. Despite the legal and constitutional challenges, she now wields a lever of power with the ability to mold New York City’s housing policy for years to come, as well as influence other Democrat-led cities. After all, the elimination of private property undergirds her worldview and is intrinsic in the communist, socialist ethos as expressed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848). Yet the Mamdani administration — under the guise of the “warmth of collectivism” — has failed to learn the lessons of history. As Doctor Zhivago illustrates, these radical ideas have led to societies’ ruination and, worse, the deaths of hundreds of millions. (RELATED: The ‘Warmth of Collectivism’ Comes to New York) The consequences of this agenda would be profound. Even conservatives such as George Will, who have suggested the need for a “conspicuous, confined experiment with socialism” to “crack it up again,” underestimate the risks. Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and others needed only a sliver of authority to unleash their destructive authoritarianism. A communist and socialist foothold in New York — one of the world’s premier metros — may be enough to embolden other like-minded movements elsewhere. Even now, California is considering a billionaire tax: a five percent fee on all wealth assets. While not directly attributable to New York City, such proposals are undoubtedly reinforced by the Mamdani administration’s insistence on taxing the affluent to finance its policy ambitions. Certainly, some New Yorkers recognize the gravity of these aims, with many leaving for other, less taxing states like Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina. But a generational struggle between free-market capitalism and communism is no longer looming — but here. And it is a battle no one can necessarily escape to greener pastures. Poll after poll, the young are increasingly embracing socialism. A December survey by The Economist/YouGov found 41 percent of Americans preferred capitalism to 21 percent favoring socialism, with younger demographics favoring the latter. A May Cato Institute/YouGov poll discovered 62 percent of Americans between 18-29 hold a “favorable view” of socialism, while 34 percent hold similar opinions of Communism. Similarly, an Axios-Generational Lab poll showed socialism besting capitalism among U.S. college students, with 67 percent of survey respondents saying they hold a positive or neutral association with the word “socialism.” In short, Mamdani’s rise — and Weaver’s sentiments — are bellwethers for America’s possible future, one rife with anti-capitalistic policies. Sadly, they are resonating with the young largely due to educational policies and affordability challenges. The 250th anniversary of America’s independence could not arrive at a more existential crux. An educational push to confront communism’s destructive nature must be imperative, and promote how free market principles have been the engine behind the country’s independence, economic prosperity, innovation, defensive strength, and charitable philanthropy. Indeed, capitalism is not merely an economic system — but deeply intertwined with America’s identity. Millions upon millions of immigrants, families, and individuals have benefited from this system, escaping poverty and achieving the American Dream. Yet this Dream can rapidly devolve into a national nightmare if current favorability trends continue. While mass starvation and political purges remain unlikely in the United States for the foreseeable future, socialist and collectivist policies reliably leave societies materially poorer. At its core, communism’s attack on private property threatens a primordial (or inalienable) aspect of humanity. Private ownership, indeed, is a right, reflecting the dignity of one’s work: that a person should keep what he or she has earned. Collectivism, conversely, erodes civil society and human dignity, stoking resentment and envy. Nations that have embraced this philosophy have deteriorated much like the once-grand home of Yuri Zhivago. Weaver, and Mamdani, embody and promote this liquidation, and their housing policies — rooted in communist ideology — will lead to capital flight and a reduced tax base, ultimately worsening affordability. That outcome would not be a “better arrangement” or “more just” for anyone. READ MORE: Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Utopian Future? The ‘Warmth of Collectivism’ Comes to New York From Solidarity to Statism: Mayor Mamdani’s Vision for New York City

At the very moment Portland needed a display of steadiness and command, its police chief stepped to the podium for a press conference and delivered a tearful collapse. His unraveling came as he acknowledged that the two individuals shot by a Border Patrol agent were illegal immigrants tied to the violent Tren de Aragua gang, yet he worried aloud about seeming to blame them for being shot. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the federal agent opened fire on both Luis David Nino‑Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano‑Contreras after Nino‑Moncada allegedly used his car as a weapon in an attempt to run over the agents while fleeing a traffic stop. Both individuals had long criminal histories that made the police chief’s emotional display even more jarring. According to Homeland Security and multiple news reports, the driver, Nino‑Moncada, had entered the country illegally in 2022 and had already been arrested for DUI and unauthorized use of a vehicle, with a final order of removal pending at the time of the stop. His passenger, Zambrano‑Contreras, had also entered illegally in 2023, and was identified by federal authorities as an active participant in a Tren de Aragua prostitution ring and a suspect in a previous Portland shooting. These were not innocent bystanders caught in random violence; they were individuals with documented criminal records and suspected ties to a violent transnational gang. That context makes the chief’s tearful press conference not just puzzling but emblematic of a leadership culture that seems more emotionally invested in criminals than in the safety of his own citizens. Most Portland residents are not looking for a chief who performs vulnerability for the cameras — they’re looking for someone who can articulate facts, project authority, and reassure a battered city that someone is actually in charge. Instead, the spectacle became a symbol of Portland’s deeper problem: a leadership class so consumed by performative empathy that it can no longer distinguish between genuine victims and the violent crime that is driving the city’s decline. A city already overwhelmed by violent crime cannot afford leaders who treat policing as a stage for therapeutic expression. What made the moment even more revealing was how perfectly it captured the broader cultural shift inside modern policing — a profession once defined by competence, authority, and a commanding presence now increasingly recast around emotional performance. In city after city, the metrics of leadership have been quietly rewritten: empathy is treated as the highest virtue, vulnerability as proof of authenticity, and public displays of emotion as evidence of moral seriousness. Competence, steadiness, and the ability to project control in a crisis have been pushed to the margins, replaced by a softer, more therapeutic model of policing that prizes feelings over facts. The Portland chief’s tearful press conference wasn’t an aberration; it was the logical endpoint of a feminized policing culture that has come to value emotional expression more than operational clarity. And in a city struggling with violent crime, that inversion of priorities is not just misguided — it has become dangerous. Unlike academia, where the feminized turn in institutional culture may be annoying but largely inconsequential to daily life outside the university walls, the feminization of policing carries real-world consequences. Policing had remained one of the last bastions of a traditionally masculine ethic — a profession grounded in the ability to impose order in moments of chaos. As Helen Andrews Compact Magazine essay, “The Great Feminization,” suggested, “The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.” Portland’s police chief, however, responded in precisely the way Andrews warns against — letting emotion dictate the narrative and recasting the offenders as the “victims” of a law enforcement officer who was just doing his job. It is essential to note that this cultural shift doesn’t require women to run police departments or occupy the chief’s office — although that is currently the case in some of the largest police departments throughout the country. In any institution, once enough personnel are hired from social science fields where therapeutic language, emotional validation, and consensus‑driven norms dominate, those habits begin to reshape the workplace itself. Policing is no exception. As police departments diversify their ranks and recruit females — often from university programs steeped in those values, the profession inevitably absorbs the softer, more emotionally expressive ethos of those environments. The result is a feminized culture of policing, not because women are in charge, but because the institutional center of gravity has moved toward the norms of professions where emotional display is treated as a virtue. And in a field that depends on composure and a commanding presence, that cultural drift carries real consequences. In the end, Portland’s press‑conference spectacle was not just an embarrassing moment for one police chief — it was a warning about what happens when an institution built to uphold order begins to prize emotional display over operational competence. A city already overwhelmed by violent crime cannot afford leaders who treat policing as a stage for therapeutic expression. The feminization of policing may win applause in elite circles that mistake vulnerability for virtue, but on the streets of Portland or New Orleans, or Chicago or New York City, it leaves citizens less safe, and the rule of law dangerously eroded. A police department that elevates compassion over command loses the capacity to do the one thing it exists to do: keep the public safe. READ MORE from Anne Hendershott: From Solidarity to Statism: Mayor Mamdani’s Vision for New York City Spite Repaid with Spite: The Metaphysical Roots of the Academic Massacre at Brown and MIT Unproven but Unfolding Whistleblower Claims of Somali Medicaid Fraud in Ohio Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

by Adam Sharp, Daily Reckoning: John Rich is a country music superstar. He’s known as a deeply Christian man and a big supporter of President Trump. And guess what? John’s a fellow silver bug, big time. I recently came across a very interesting post by John on X (Twitter). It was a long, detailed post […]

by Harold Hutchison, The Daily Caller: The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia (USAO-DC) has reportedly opened a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The investigation centers around the skyrocketing costs for the renovation of Federal Reserve headquarters, which greatly exceeded previous estimates of $2.5 billion. Powell confirmed the probe in a statement released […]

Ali Larter didn’t leave the 'Landman' set empty-handed — and she didn’t ask permission. From boots to bras, Angela’s spirit lives on. Continue reading…