Read it.

“House to test Trump on wall.” So reads the headline (paper edition) of the lead story in today’s Washington Post.

The statement is true. However, it’s also true that Trump will test the new House. I think the test he poses might be the stiffer one.

The Democrats have a constituency — government workers — that will clamor for an end to the shutdown. Trump has no such constituency. Not as long as the partial shutdown is managed well enough to prevent ordinary folks from experiencing pain or significant inconvenience.

But the more salient point is that Trump probably has more flexibility than Nancy Pelosi.

Trump is going to play these toads like a cheap guitar. I’m looking forward to it.

Big Oil’s Monster Decade Reveals Why Energy Experts Are Not Very Good At Making Predictions

Read it.

Most color printers have a secret tracking or forensic code added to every page that lets governments and others know when and where the page was printed.

Audacious Epigone welcomes the new year.

What the partial shutdown is making clear is just how superfluous so much of the federal government is. Most people have no idea what exactly is shut down or how it effects them–because it doesn’t effect them. The impending government shutdown is the new Y2K bug.

Apparently Senator Kamala ‘MostlyWhite’ Harris thinks that ‘lynching’ ought to be a ‘federal hate crime’.

Really? Lynching is murder. Murder is a capital crime, in those states that still kill people for killing other people. What, exactly, does making it a ‘federal hate crime’ bring to the party? A lot of virtue-signaling, that’s what.

If we don’t need the federal government, perhaps we don’t need ‘federal hate crime’ laws, either.

Something to think about.

Read it.

But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in offie.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

Economists Alex Tabarrok looks at an interesting wrinkle.

Kevin Williamson fires back at a critic.

Will Wilkinson is a kinda-sorta libertarian associated with the Cato Institute, which (if you follow such things) ought to know pretty much where he’s coming from.

I do not have the hatred for Kevin Williamson that ZMan has, and this article illustrates why.

Read it.

Trump is an expert at drawing connections that his enemies find uncomfortable.

Read it.

Left as an exercise for the reader: Detecting the ones that were staged.

Extra credit if you can name the political agenda being served by each one.

Read it.

I guess you’re not a Real Woman unless you’re non-white.

If that rule were followed everywhere, what a blessedly peaceful place it would be.

The organizers of the annual Women’s March have decided not to hold a rally in Eureka on Jan. 19, as previously planned, because they say participants do not represent the diversity of the area.

They said organizers will continue to meet and discuss how to broaden representation to create an event that represents Humboldt County.

As Steve Sailer points out, Humboldt County was 1.1% black in the 2010 census. Pretty sad if they can’t even scare up 1.1 black woman per 100 marchers.

UPDATE: Upcoming Women’s March Deemed ‘Too White,’ So Organizers Cancelled It

Steve Sailer has some fun with search engines.

Apparently, Google thinks American scientists are uniformly African; Bing admits a few white folks to the party.

The search engine I use, Duck Duck Go, agrees with Google.

Steve Sailer pokes behind the curtain; beware, Polonius!

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust.

— John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed

Read it.

That’s the first positive thing I’ve ever heard about Facebook. I doubt that it’s true, of course (whose turn is it to play the victim?), but I keep my hopes up.

Steve Sailer does his usual inconvenient truth.

This is what worries the Establishment most about Trump: the terror that he might ask some common-sensical but verboten question like:

Why do we give Israel so much money?

Why don’t black guys try committing fewer crimes?

If we take in dumb immigrants, won’t they have dumb kids?

Read it.

My question is, how many black people were murdered in Chicago, Baltimore, or D.C. — all Democrat-ruled cities — during that same time period? Just for perspective.

Read it.

Glock for me. But your mileage may differ.

And Democrats want these people in charge of our health care.

Read it.

They all look alike to me….

(Judean People’s Front or People’s Front of Judea? We report, you decide.)

Read it.

I always figured they ran away with the hangers.

That last part is pure scientific fact. The phenomenon of the missing office spoons once proved so consternating to a group of Australian public health researchers, in fact, that they conducted a whole study on it.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts.

— Robert Gascoyne, Cecil, 3d Marquess of Salisbury

Read it.

It don’t mean shit. Small things on the periphery, chiefly those that inconvenience taxpayers, will shut down. The rest of it will go on as usual.

Trump can end the conflict by winning or caving. Which one do YOU think he’ll do?

Taki speaks for me.

Perhaps it sounds stuffy, but I am nostalgic for the good old days when manners were exquisite. You might think that this is a bit much, but not really. Things are so bad at present that even returning to the time of strict etiquette, I find, would be a blessing. Manners, you see, are as important as morals, and have very little to do with a man’s outer attributes—birth, rank, or education—but rather involve his inner qualities of character and behavior. At present, people take phony offense at anything and everything, yet rudeness is de rigueur and boorishness a virtue. It is hip to be discourteous, trendy to act primitive, and “in” to be coarse.

Eric Worrall elucidates the Narrative.

According to Wired contributor Daphne LePrince-Ringuet, the kind of anti climate policy protests which rocked France can be prevented with a few government handouts, and by convincing ordinary people of the good intentions of government.

The traditional handouts are bread and circuses.

Read it.

Now, apply this to what you see Donald Trump doing.

Over the past decade I’ve watched that dark side take hole in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. A region that once supported a thriving, prosperous middle class has been transformed into something that resembles a Third World banana republic, with an obscenely wealthy ruling class, a vast and growing underclass, and not much in between.

— Dan Lyons, Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us

Read it.

Among the videos “meant to enrage or provoke” that prompted Glaser’s censorious mission were what she describes as “several misleading animations that showed a fetus that looks like a sentient child in the uterus,” women explaining why they regretted their abortions, and videos of former abortionists explaining what takes place medically and surgically during an abortion procedure.

Such videos are, of course, every pro-abortion activist’s worst nightmare. Because they reveal the unmistakable details of what takes place in every abortion — details that Glaser rightly, albeit dismissively, describes as “gore” — they’re written off as “dangerous misinformation.” Lest unsuspecting viewers risk running across this “gore” and oppose abortion as a result, true believers like Glaser insist that this type of content should be drowned out by videos from news outlets and “credible reproductive health-care providers” whose mission is to airbrush away the reality of abortion.

There are a whole lot of things I’ve never done, and quite frankly I’m good with that.

The Other McCain peeks behind the curtain.

Glenn Reynolds has an excellent round-up of reaction to President Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and reduce the force in Afghanistan by half, which was apparently the reason that General James “Mad Dog” Mattis resigned as Secretary of Defense.

Ace headlines it, “Trump Has Succeeded Where George W. Bush Failed: He Has Turned the Anti-War Left Into Passionate Neocon Warhawks and Intervention-Adventurers,” and cites Dave Reaboi’s observation: “The left has no foreign enemies and wages no foreign wars. They only have domestic enemies and domestic wars. When they’re pretending they care about a foreign war, that only means they are contriving justification for waging the real war on their domestic enemies.”

One of the most common hobbies of ‘activist’ is the ‘demonstration’, during which a greater or lesser number of rude and ugly people wander the streets shouting and whining and waving signs and inconvenience ordinary people.

If you should happen to encounter one such, ask a participant what they are demonstrating. If you even receive an answer, it will be in the form of ‘demonstrating for [whatever]’. Respond, ‘I didn’t ask you what you were demonstrating for, but rather what you were demonstrating. If I demonstrate a pen, I show how it is used. If I demonstrate a washing machine, I show how it is used. So what actual use are you demonstrating?’

It ought to be fun.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

The events of the last 72 hours may be bringing the Trump Doctrine into sharper focus. Is there a “Trump Doctrine”? Trump would say it means “America First,” but his move to withdraw American forces of Syria and, it was reported late Thursday night, perhaps a large drawdown of American forces in Afghanistan, suggest he really means it.

What a shock. A President who puts America first.

Read it.

We can blame Mickey Mouse for the long wait. In 1998, Disney was one of the loudest in a choir of corporate voices advocating for longer copyright protections. At the time, all works published before January 1, 1978, were entitled to copyright protection for 75 years; all author’s works published on or after that date were under copyright for the lifetime of the creator, plus 50 years. Steamboat Willie, featuring Mickey Mouse’s first appearance on screen, in 1928, was set to enter the public domain in 2004. At the urging of Disney and others, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, named for the late singer, songwriter and California representative, adding 20 years to the copyright term. Mickey would be protected until 2024—and no copyrighted work would enter the public domain again until 2019, creating a bizarre 20-year hiatus between the release of works from 1922 and those from 1923.

This is how our political process becomes corrupted. The Social Justice Warriors running Disney these days don’t hesitate to use their monetary muscle to screw the public.

Read it.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to shut down the government over funding for his border wall. But as the question of money for his campaign proposal once again roils Congress, one man thinks he may have found a solution: Crowd-funding.

Steve Sailer reads the zeitgeist.

The prestige of the intersectional is pushing respectable opinion in anti-science directions, as seen in the resurgent prestige of astrology and witchcraft. Granted, perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much what lowbrows who like horoscopes and spells are into, but it probably does matter that actual sciences such as genetics, which had been the glamour field of the new century, are starting to be castigated by the prestige press as deplorable “race science.”

Read it.

Critics of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke worry his recently announced resignation will leave his department governed by a less-publicized technocrat.

Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt could likely lead the Department of the Interior (DOI) after Zinke departs at the end of the year. Bernhardt is known to be hard-working and has years of experience navigating the DOI’s bureaucracy as a federal employee.

Democrats and critics worry Bernhardt will be just as or more efficient than Zinke at implementing President Donald Trump’s agenda without attracting as much media and watchdog scrutiny.

Be careful what you wish for….

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

“I early learned that the root cause of panics was Democrats.’ — Whittaker Chambers, WITNESS

“Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, ‘social justice.’”
— Thomas Sowell