Read it.

The pettiness of proglodytes never ceases to amaze me.

On the other hand, the fact that Ryan can use the House gym during the ‘shutdown’ suggests that the government is not, in fact, shut down.

Read it.

The pews are emptying virtually everywhere in the higher-income world. The Catholic Church is divided and enmeshed in scandal, unable to prevent even historically cleric-dominated Ireland from liberalizing abortion. The once vibrant evangelical movement is losing momentum in the developed world while the more established Protestant and Jewish congregations are shrinking, some at a rapid rate.

Yet rather than an end to faith, this fading of religion may presage the radical re-invention of spiritualism. Just as Christianity replaced paganism at the end of the Roman Empire, rising new faiths—built around notions of social justice, the environment, and technology to extend life or even achieve immortality—may supplant the old ones.

GoFundMe account looks to buy ‘ladders’ to scale Trump’s border wall

Chris Christie compares Trump to ‘a 72-year-old relative’ who always thinks they’re right  He’s certainly more right than Chris Christie.

We Watch CNN’s Terrible Media Show So You Don’t Have To

Trump’s 12 Days Of Christmas

Adam Schiff Will Subpoena Mueller Report If White House Tries To Block Its Release  Of course, there’s no evidence that the White House is even considering doing that, but the Democrat gaslighting has to start somewhere.

Michael Bloomberg attacks Trump over government shutdown and warns ‘beginning of the collapse’ has begun  I’m sure that’s what he hopes is happening.

Read it.

Are they serious? I doubt it. But it makes a great excuse and an excellent ‘teachable moment’.

Check it out.

Read it.

So is the current party-line of Political Correctness requiring people who are stressed out already to have to cope additionally with weirdos, Social Justice Warriors, and people (both native and foreign) who can barely speak English. Nobody appears to care about that, either.

Read it.

Well, that’s a relief.

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.

The new journalism.

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?

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all. Not every country considers ‘activists’ to be bullet-proof.

Read it.

Lies and the lying liars who tell them.

Read it.

On December 13, the Village of Hempstead, N.Y. hosted the Long Island Toy Gun Exchange Program, modelled after so-called gun “buybacks” that target real firearms. According to a report from local newspaper Newsday, each child received one politically correct toy in exchange “for whatever water pistols, Nerf guns and other toy guns they turn[ed] in.”

The toys for the turn-in were supplied by local businessman Sean Acosta, who made clear that the program is intended to influence impressionable children against firearm ownership at a young age, with the goal of shifting American public opinion against guns. As reported in the Newsday article,

“It has to start at a young age,” Acosta says of changing gun culture. “If we can get them to say, ‘It’s not cool to carry these toy guns,’ then maybe when they get older, they won’t ever carry a real gun.”

It would be amusing if someone were to shoot him. With a toy gun, of course.

Steve Sailer lays out the problem.

What’s a Social Justice Warrior to do?

It’s good training in gaming the system, however.

UPDATE: Checking the Racial Box

Read it.

Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants. If solar and nuclear produce the same amount of electricity over the next 25 years that nuclear produced in 2016, and the wastes are stacked on football fields, the nuclear waste would reach the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (53 meters), while the solar waste would reach the height of two Mt. Everests (16 km).

UPDATE: If Solar Panels Are So Clean, Why Do They Produce So Much Toxic Waste?

John McWhorter deals out some inconvenient truth.

Just as the first and second waves of both feminism and antiracism transformed social structures, third-wave antiracism may seem parallel to third-wave feminism in moving on to a different form of abuse, psychological rather than institutional. But this focus on the psychological has morphed, of late, from a pragmatic mission to change minds into a witch hunt driven by the personal benefits of virtue signaling, obsessed with unconscious and subconscious bias. As noble as this culture of shaming genuinely seems to many, it’s a dead end.

Steve Sailer shadows the New York Times on this vital issue.

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.

For Trump, ‘a War Every Day,’ Waged Increasingly Alone

‘A rogue presidency’: The era of containing Trump is over

US government shutdown: Trump border wall row puts 380,000 employees on unpaid leave over Christmas  Note the media spin that this is Trump’s border wall row, despite the fact that it’s actually Schumer’s border wall row.

Trump rebuked by Macron over Syria troop withdrawal: ‘An ally should be dependable’  Really? How many French soldiers are in Syria? None that I’ve heard of.

Trump calls aides ‘f****** idiots’ as presidency risks spinning out of control  It’s so hard to get good help these days.

Leon Panetta: Trump Presidency Causing ‘Too Much Chaos’  And whose fault is that?

Can Patrick Shanahan handle the madness of King Trump?  The question is, can he handle the madness of the media?

Read it.

Yeah, she looks as if she has a stick up her butt all the time.

Steve Hayward at Powerline makes an exciting discovery.

Like our coveted Green Weenie Award, we could cover academic absurdities on an hourly basis these days. To paraphrase Will Rogers, there’s no trouble exposing the rot of our universities when so many faculty are working full time for you. So we limit ourselves to the most extraordinary or novel expressions of academic rot.

Like the idea that conventions in writing are—wait for it, you know what’s coming—raaaacccist!

I have always suspected it.

From 1930 onward, a small intellectual army passed over to the Communist Party with scarcely any effort on its part. Within a decade, simply by pursuing the careers that ordinarily lay open to them, these newcomers would carry the weak and stumbling American Communist Party directly into the highest councils of the nation, would subtly (or sometimes boldly) help to shape the country’s domestic and foreign policies. They would, at last, in a situation unparalleled in history, enable the Soviet Government to use the American State and Treasury Departments as a terrible engine of its revolutionary purposes, by the calculated destruction of powers vital to American survival (like China), or by creating power vacuums (like Germany), which breached the American political outworks abroad. Meanwhile, the party’s agents, working in the communications field, tirelessly justified those catastrophic betrayals to the nation as necessary acts of good faith to an ally (the Soviet Union whose philosophy denied the principle of good faith), or as prerequisites of permanent peace, or, if momentarily threatened with detection, as simply the unhappy blunders of American diplomatic innocence.

— Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1953)

Read it.

I’m comfortable not re-opening the government. How about you?

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.

Steve Sailer points out one of the elephants in the yard.

It’s really hard these days for followers of the conventional wisdom to think in terms other than of Good People and Bad People. Good People to do Good Things, so if undocumented workers (definitely some of the Good People) are littering and Tucker Carlson (a very Bad Person) is criticizing them for it, then littering must be good. Or if littering is bad, Carlson must be hallucinating in accusing the Good People of doing a Bad Thing. Or let’s not think about it and get Carlson banned from television so we don’t have to ever think about it.

In reality, of course Latino immigrants litter a lot, both at home and here.

Read it.

For over a century, American Jews have eaten American Chinese food on Christmas. This pastime has evolved to a near-holy tradition, parodied on Saturday Night Live, analyzed in academic papers, and reaffirmed by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.

I didn’t even know this was a thing.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Hogg was accepted into Harvard, despite scoring a 1270 on his SAT and having previously been denied entrance into schools such as UCLA and UC Irvine. Hogg’s acceptance is likely to bring more attention to Harvard’s admissions practices that have been criticized as discriminatory and un-meritocratic. Harvard is currently being sued after allegedly discriminating against Asians in favor of other minorities and white people with lower test scores.

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.

Trudeau Blames Trump For Canada’s Illegal Immigrant Crisis  Yeah, if we’d just shut up and take in all those vagrants, Canada wouldn’t have to.

Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star vandalised again – this time with swastikas  These people just refuse to grow up.

Stephen Colbert Prays For A Trump Reboot Of Richard Nixon’s Last Month In Office

NYT: Crazed Trump doesn’t understand that Forever Wars mean forever

Trump is irresponsibly worrying about American border rather than Syria  I mean, really.

US government shutdown: ‘Trump temper tantrum’ halts work at string of departments after $5bn border wall demand rejected  ‘Temper tantrum’ must be the new Democrat talking point, all the ‘journalists’ are using it.

The Other McCain is a bit steamed.

The New York Times has published the most anti-American column imaginable on the subject of immigration, with this astonishing headline: None of Us Deserve Citizenship.

Certainly the people who write for the New York Times don’t, as this demonstrates rather completely.

Read it.

They left out the part about PETA and vegan heads exploding. That’s the best part.

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

Read it.

With the proliferation of different camouflage uniforms since the 1960s it was only a matter of time before someone collected images and data on the thousands of different camouflage patterns that have been put to use in the last century of so. The site in question is camopedia.org and it organizes the patterns by nation with another section for non-military patterns (for police mainly). The adoption of camouflage patterns for uniforms accelerated after 2003, in part because so many of them could be seen via digital pictures posted on the Internet. That proliferation of camouflage patterns led to their use for non-camouflage uniforms. In other words work and dress uniforms began to use camouflage patterns. And so it continues, but the process was not without its bumps, detours and utter failures.

Among other fatuities, this led to the Navy adopting a blue-green based camouflage pattern, nicknamed ‘blueberries’, that seemed specifically designed to make sure that if somebody went overboard on a cruise they would never be found by rescuers. Seriously, what need has anybody on board a ship for a camouflage uniform? Who are they going to be hiding from, their CPO? This was sure and certain proof, if anybody needed it, that the people in charge of determining what sailors wear are on some serious drugs.

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.”

Read it.

Milk-bone. Works every time.

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

My first wife would have loved it.

Read it.

Considering the amount of lies and distortions that ‘journalists’ perpetrate every year, I’m astonished that it took this long.

Chuck Schumer: Trump Is ‘Throwing A Temper Tantrum’ And It’s Leading To A Government Shutdown  This is a common smear trotted out whenever a Republican fails to cave to Democrat pressure.

Chicago Dem Says Trump Administration Would Have Let Baby Jesus Die  Chicago water turns people insane. I blame Putin.

‘This Could Be A Critical Moment’ — Maggie Haberman Hints Republicans Could Turn On Trump Impeachment  Don’t count your impeachments until they’ve hatched, girl — it isn’t over till it’s over.

CNN Chief Media Correspondent Declares Trump Untrustworthy  I cannot take seriously anybody who looks like a character from Seinfeld. Sorry, just can’t do it.

Washington Melts Down Over Trump’s Syria Withdrawal

#PsychicNewsNetwork Democratic Congressman: Trump ‘As Disloyal To Allies As He Is To Melania’  The notion of a Democrat opining on disloyalty is pretty amusing.

James Mattis resignation over Trump foreign policies sparks panic: ‘I’m legitimately frightened’  One of Trump’s great virtues is that he scares the right people.

Trump ‘flipping out’ as conservatives turn on him over border wall crisis and Mattis resignation  Another attempt at remote mind-reading by a ‘journalist’ who substitutes fantasy for facts.

Read it.

Multiple reports detailed the Russian government-backed Internet Research Agency spent up to $100,000 on Facebook advertisements throughout their entire disinformation operation. As The Daily Caller News Foundation reported Wednesday, billionaire-backed Democrats “created more than a thousand Russian-language accounts that followed [Roy] Moore’s Twitter account overnight.”

The group of Democrats behind the “elaborate ‘false flag’ operation,” as described in an internal report obtained by The New York Times, also created fake conservative Facebook accounts for the purpose of convincing voters not to support Republican candidate Roy Moore.

Apparently you can’t tell the Russian Bots without a scorecard.

Read it.

Apple employees especially ought to move to the new Austin campus. You can hang out with the same old arrested-adolescent socialists without having to pay California taxes or California prices.

Read it.

“Shame on everybody that separates children, that allows them to stay at the other side of the border fearing death, fearing hunger, fearing sickness,” Gutierrez said angrily. “Shame on us for wearing our badge of Christianity during Christmas and allow the secretary to come here and lie.”

“Calling me a ‘liar’ are fighting words, I’m not a liar, we’ve never had a policy for family separation — I’m happy to walk the gentleman through it again,” Nielsen responded, meeting Gutierrez’s anger.

“A policy of family separation would mean that any family that I encounter in the interior, I would separate,” she continued. “It would mean that any family I found at a port of entry, I would separate. It would mean every single family that I found illegally crossing, we would separate. We did none of those.”

The notion of a Democrat Congressman calling anybody a liar is pretty amusing.

Read it.

Anything that inconveniences Democrats has my vote. They certainly cause enough inconvenience for me.

Read it.

Proglodytes are experiencing the powers of the Administrative State being used against them and they are not happy.

I, on the other hand, am hugely enjoying myself.

Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller defended the president’s position on troop withdrawals during a Thursday night CNN appearance.

“This president got elected to get our foreign policy back on the right track after years of being adrift,” Miller told CNN host Wolf Blitzer. “One foreign policy blunder after another in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya hasn’t worked out for our national interest.”

“Wolf, when did the American people sign up to be in every war in every place in every side of every conflict all over planet earth?” he asked

I’d love to have every Democrat in Congress (and maybe every Republican too) be forced to answer that question.

Kim Strassel lays out what we know so far and what the next step ought to be.

House and Senate investigators get pride of place for unraveling one of the greatest dirty tricks of our political times, in which a Democratic administration, party and presidential campaign either co-opted or fooled the FBI into investigating the Republican campaign. Lawmakers got to the bottom of this despite partisan attacks and institutional obstruction. Congress has taken that probe about as far as was ever going to be possible. The next steps are up to the White House.