Steven Hayward of Powerline leads us on a merry tour of the Zoo.

I especially like the term ‘romper-room socialism’.

I didn’t know that ‘speciesism’ was  a thing. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure it’s a prog fantasy.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

I suspect that’s why most movies these days suck.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it.

Immigration attorney Linda Vega appeared on “Fox & Friends” Friday to explain how a 19-year-old illegal immigrant can use her newborn anchor baby to achieve U.S. citizenship.
The pregnant mother from Honduras scaled a fence near the southern border to have her child on American soil in November, to exploit the loophole of birthright citizenship.
“What happens now is she will be processed either to determine whether she has a credible fear to remain in the United States for a political asylum claim,” Vega said.

But you have to remember that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his time in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

Thousands of American Girls At Risk As Judge Strikes Down Federal FGM Ban

British teenager arrested for spying in Egypt over photo taken from plane window

Firefight after Israeli special forces’ cover was blown ‘nearly triggered new Gaza war’

Egyptian actor Rania Youssef charged with public obscenity after wearing ‘revealing’ dress at film festival  Sometimes, when you push the envelope, the envelope pushes back.

Welcome to Jinwar, a women-only village in Syria that wants to smash the patriarchy  The problem with smashing a social institution is that there are all these leftover pieces with sharp edges that can cut you if you’re not careful.

The Killer Kenyan of St. Augustin

The Bremen Town Assassins

Shrinking territory of Isis forces its leaders into the open, and into the crosshairs

ISIS Leader Tied To American Beheading Killed In Missile Strike

The View’s Joy Behar Flips Out on Meghan McCain For Saying that Tributes to G.W.H. Bush Ought to be Genuine Tributes to Him, and Not Barely-Disguised Attacks on Trump  Not that she doesn’t tend to do that.

Israeli army launches operation to uncover Hezbollah cross-border tunnels

Israel Launches Operation to Destroy Hizballah Attack Tunnels

Yemen government and Houthi rebels agree prisoner swap deal ahead of UN-brokered peace talks

Asia Bibi Protest Organizer Charged With Sedition And Terrorism In Pakistan

SOMALIA: Prosperity Propels Islamic Terrorists

Saudi Arabia loses right to host international chess tournament after banning Israeli players

ISIS-Supporting U.S. Solider Sentenced To 25 Years For ‘Betrayal’

Clarion Project: ‘Obama Administration Dropped A Huge Terror-Funding Case ‘

Inside the Hezbollah tunnel that Israel never found

Turkey Sides with Hamas on U.N. Resolution Condemning Rocket Attacks

Criticizing Islam is turned into “hate speech” on Facebook

Iran suicide bombing: At least two killed and 15 injured in attack outside police headquarters in Chabahar

Read it.

The detention in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s CFO and the daughter of its founder, is further inflaming tensions between the US and China. Her arrest is linked to a US extradition request on undisclosed charges, but China says it’s a human rights violation and is demanding her swift release.

Behind this very public drama is a long-running, behind-the-scenes one centered on western intelligence agencies’ fears that Huawei poses a significant threat to global security. Among the spooks’ biggest concerns are:

Read it.

I’m sure Donald Trump is somehow to blame.

Read it.

President Donald Trump is expected to name current State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert the next ambassador to the United Nations on Friday, according to multiple outlets.

Nauert would be replacing outgoing ambassador Nikki Haley who announced her resignation back in October, Fox News reported. Nauert was named as one of Trump’s top candidates for the vacancy in the days after Haley’s resignation became public.

As Usual, It’s All About Donald Trump

Trump says he doesn’t care about predicted US national debt explosion because ‘I won’t be here’  And once again Trump is being bashed for telling the truth that no other politician in Washington dares admit.

Spare me America’s tears for Jamal Khashoggi – this excuse for Trump-bashing ignores the CIA’s past crimes

Cuomo Condemns Racist Lemon For What He Said He’d Do To Trump At HW’s Funeral If He Was Obama

Journalists Disgrace Themselves By Using Bush Memorial To Bash Trump

ABC News Hosts Speculate On Trump’s Funeral While Watching Bush’s

Stephen Colbert translates the ‘anti-Trump’ elements of George HW Bush’s funeral

Victor Davis Hanson watches things slide.

Apparently, Obama believes that all of Trump’s successes are due to Obama, and all of Trump’s setbacks are his own.

There used to be a custom that ex-Presidents went off to play golf or something and didn’t attempt to continue meddling publicly in politics, and especially refrained from making any comment about their successors.

That hit the trash can with Bill Clinton, who is apparently is incapable of life other than as the center of attention. It stepped back a notch with Bush younger, but the election of a second Democrat narcissist as President has apparently made it one with the snows of yesteryear. (François Villon — great poet.) And I suspect that this is one custom that President Trump will consider an area in which he will not hesitate to push back, as he is wont to do.

So. The world changes. We slide down the slippery slope, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, and wonder what is waiting for us at the bottom. I suspect that it will not be pretty.

Read it.

For the past 50 years, scientists have been studying climate change and the possibility of related sea level changes resulting from melting ice and warming oceans. Despite the common belief that increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in our atmosphere could result in catastrophic sea level rise, there is no evidence to support this fear. Tax monies spent trying to solve this non-existent problem are a complete waste.

There is another widely held misconception: that all the oceans of the world are at the same level.  In reality, sea level measurements around the world vary considerably, typically by several inches. Prevailing winds and continental instability are among the variables that make measurements difficult, but the varying results of rising sea levels are extremely accurate.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States updated its coastal sea level tide gauge data in 2016 at the request of the previous administration. These measurements continue to show no evidence of accelerating sea level rise.

They keep rising, but they never get here.

I’ll believe in rising sea levels when rich people start selling their beachfront property.

Read it.

This is mostly confirmation bias — some people are unwilling to admit that negative events are the result of fumbling rather than intelligent design. Anyone who has seen Mark Zuckerberg in a social situation could rationally peg him as semi-autistic, based mainly on his body language and facial expressions.

Read it.

Still waiting for the Usual Suspects to get all hot and bothered about this threat against a Journalistic Colleague.

Read it.

Beth Kulow, 35, was arrested on Monday for falsifying public records and three counts of second-degree theft, according to The Associated Press on Thursday. She was released from jail with a court appearance pending for later in December.

Southwestern Community College hired auditors to look into Kulow’s spending history after she said she attended a training in Ohio that never happened, The AP reported Thursday. An audit found she stole $15,000 from the school between 2015 and 2018, and sent altered emails so she wouldn’t be caught.

I wouldn’t care to be this woman’s husband.

Read it.

Thanks for the laugh — I needed that.

Read it.

Jeff Bezos isn’t going to make the Microsoft Mistake.

Read it.

That’s where the money is, as Willie Sutton famously said.

Read it.

The easiest way to sum up the failure of the Weekly Standard is this: Why would anyone on the right offer financial support to the Weekly Standard when CNN will call us a racist for free? And why would anyone on the left offer financial support to the Weekly Standardwhen CNN will call us a racist for free?

Sarcasm aside, that is the Weekly Standard’s primary problem. In the age of Trump, the publication offers nothing we cannot get everywhere else in the elite media, nothing we cannot find at the far-left Washington Post, MSNBC, New York Times, CNN, etc.

Smug virtue-signaling and superior Trump-bashing are the cheapest commodities in today’s news business. They are literally everywhere. And so, instead of offering a unique voice and perspective in an ocean of left-wing media, the Weekly Standard instead chose to sit in the middle of this ocean and sell saltwater.

They were living, breathing examples of the cuckitude with which ZMan has so much fun.

Sure, we all understand why the corrupt media found this “important voice” valuable: it allowed them to exploit the Weekly Standard and its contributors as a club against Trump from the right, and there is no species on earth the media find more useful than a narcissistic Republican bashing one of his own.

Regardless, the media’s ability to use the Weekly Standard as a propaganda weapon did not make the Weekly Standard more interesting to the everyday news and opinion consumer. In fact, the Weekly Standard became so predictable in its reactionary response to all things Trump (and his supporters), so predictable, it ceased to be interesting (a problem the Weekly Standard shares with last-place CNN).

Fortunately, we still have an economic system in which losers fail.

The Other McCain puts the boot in:

What’s the value-added of your journalistic product, as a conservative magazine, if your essential message is, “Liberals are right”? It is possible to dislike President Trump or to criticize his policies without joining Bill Kristol, Rick Wilson, Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry in the #NeverTrump chorus of sore losers whose basic argument is that the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for Trump were wrong to do so. According to the #NeverTrump chorus, because their favorite candidates did not win the GOP nomination, therefore Hillary Clinton should be president. They have devoted themselves to delegitimizing Trump’s presidency, and are we surprised that this message was so unpopular with conservatives that the Weekly Standard became a publication without a readership?

Read it.

The UN Migration Pact will be signed in a few days in Marrakesh. At the rate potential signatories are dropping away (Bulgaria announced against it yesterday), the nawabs of the UN will be able to seat the assembled delegates around a couple of card tables for the ceremony.

They’ll still claim that it’s now International Law and noogie countries that don’t comply with it.

Scott Johnson of Powerline looks at the Elizabeth Warren Industry.

The Times story is itself illustrative of the absurd racialism that has returned to control the Democratic Party and its media adjunct. The Times story presents the intellectual crosscurrents — to use a neutral term — roiling the Democratic Party. Even though they contradict each other, each is presented as the effectual truth of the matter. Thesis: Race is all-important. Antithesis: Race, like sex, is a social construct. If you challenge either thesis or antithesis, get ready for the Two Minutes Hate from the Democrats and their media adjunct.

Elizabeth Warren is a poster child for the sort of person who grows up in East Butthole, Nowhere, and escapes to one of the Left Coasts as quickly as possible. New York City and Los Angeles is full of such people, which is why those cities are traditionally described as Millions Of People Being Alone Together, and why one of the great occupations of young people in such places is trying to assemble an affinity that will replace what they shit-canned on their way to the big-time.

Freeberg is at a loss as to why anybody would watch The View in the first place.

I perceive there is a plot to revoke Women’s Suffrage, and to discredit women at large from holding positions of influence. I could be wrong, but if I’m right, The View must be linked to it. Every time I catch a glimpse of it I end up wondering who else is watching, and at the end of it what they think of letting women run things. It almost looks like a propaganda drive. It would be quite natural and fitting for a chyron to appear onscreen, right before the commercial break, asking the viewers if they’d want a panel like this to make decisions about their health care, their kids’ school curricula, the taxes they pay on each gallon of gas…

Yeah, if you’re arguing that women don’t belong in control, The View is good propaganda, just as Chuck Schumer is every Nazi’s wet dream of a crooked manipulative Jew. Make’s you wonder who (on the other side) is actually in charge.

The Bankruptcy of #NeverTrump

Kimmel Compares Mueller To ‘The Godfather’ And Says He’s ‘Crossing The T In Treason’  Actually, he’s crossing the ‘T’ in ‘Toothless’, because there isn’t anything there. I want to watch Kimmel’s face when the Nothingburger appears.

Michael Bloomberg Uses George H. W. Bush’s Death To Criticize Trump  There’s a lot of that going around.

Now, Now. Let’s Not Have Any Of That’ — Media Uses H.W. Bush’s Death To Take Shots At Trump

Montage: Liberals Use George Bush’s Funeral to, Get This, Attack Trump

George HW Bush given emotional send-off by son at funeral – as Trump is given the cold shoulder

Read it.

An apparent smuggler has been caught on camera appearing to throw two migrant children over an 18-foot (5.5 metre) tall border fence between Arizona and Mexico and into the arms of their families. The video footage of the nail-biting moment was released by US Border Patrol on Monday.

The footage captured the moment a suspected smuggler attempted to help a Guatemalan family cross the border by climbing the fence. In the video, the smuggler dropped the family’s three children—who were the ages of 2, 7, and 10—from the top of the wall for their adult relatives to catch them from 18-feet below on the other side of the border fence.

Freeberg makes up new words when the need arises. This is one.

To ostracize a person faction or thing, not out of malicious intent, but as a necessary act of exclusion against a chaotic agent, a prerequisite first step to getting something done.

I can see where this would come in handy. Read the whole thing.

Sarah Hoyt shares some insights.

You see, part of the problem is the mental framework. To the left any money earned anywhere in the country automatically belongs to the government. This confirms my suspicion that at heart, deep inside, they think of the normal form of government as feudalism. This is because I’ve seen very old land deeds and other documents from when Portugal was a monarchy and it read something like “his majesty, graciously allows his subject so and so to exert ownership over this parcel of land” the underlying conceit being that the whole land of the whole country belonged to the king, and it was in his purview to hand it out to whomever he pleased for as long as he pleased, while it still belonged to him. (The documents I saw were for things like house plots, not fiefdoms, incidentally.)

The left seems to be going off the same book when they say things like “How will you pay for the tax cuts?” as if the government is OF COURSE entitled to all your money, and if you’re getting some back, that part must be compensated for.

This goes hand in hand with their idea only the government does anything worthwhile, including demanding the president (at least if Republican) do something about things over which he has no power. “What are you going to do about unemployment?” “What are you going to do about anti-semitism” or “What are you going to do about hurricanes?” (The later and the whole antropogenic global warming climate change obsession, btw, give new meaning to the “everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it” joke.)

Because of these frameworks, they miss what taxes cost.

The rest is well worth reading but I’m attracted by the connection of the Left’s mental model of property rights with that of — well, not feudalism, actually, but the ancient Roman concept of dominium. This concept, which the U.S. inherited from Britain, underlies such legal institutions as eminent domain — if all land belongs to the sovereign (i.e. the government), it has the right to take it for its own use (although the Constitution requires adequate compensation under the 5th Amendment, which the owner sometimes gets and sometimes doesn’t).

This fits in with my long-held believe that the Left isn’t really ‘progressive’ so much as it’s ‘regressive’ — it keeps trying to return to some sort of Good Old Days when people used bikes and trains and didn’t burn coal and oil.

Read it.

Much of the attention the Minerva Project received around its much-watched launch in 2012 focused on the start-up’s lofty goal of creating an elite “Ivy League 2.0” university, with top traditional-age students doing immersive stints at campus locations around the world while also taking online courses.

But Minerva’s biggest success so far is its curriculum, which the university describes as a systematic rethinking of the liberal arts. The nonbuzzy approach hearkens back to higher education’s roots with a focus on practical, vocational knowledge, and is drawing attention from both traditional academics and would-be disrupters.

Read it.

One of the problems with treating individuals as merely intersections of their various attributes, such as race, ethnicity, sex, etc., is that it promotes the ignorance of individual behavior and capabilities, such as (in this case) prior evidence that the perp felt at liberty to ignore (a) the law and (b) the rights of others. Expecting somebody with ‘cognitive disabilities’ to be able to overcome these sorts of predilections is setting things up for a huge failure — which actually happens.

Read it.

People of Color behaving badly — what are the odds?

Read it.

Democratic Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said the “Green New Deal” plan she supports would be used to achieve liberal “economic, social and racial justice” goals along with fighting global warming.

“[W]e can use the transition to 100 percent energy as the vehicle to truly deliver and establish economic, social and racial justice in the United States of America,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a Tuesday panel discussion alongside Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and environmental activist Bill McKibben.

No details, of course, about just how that is going to happen. Cynical me, I suspect it will happen by getting people used to being bossed around by SJW bureaucrats. Even if that’s the plan, don’t expect them to explain that any time soon.

While light on details, proponents said the “Green New Deal” could create millions of jobs in renewable energy and address many “social justice” issues typically on Democrats’ radar.

Uh, just how is creating what are likely to be highly technical jobs in ‘renewable energy’ going to address ‘social justice’ issues? Fashionable victim groups are rightly famous for their lack of employable skills such that they have to get jobs based on skin color, native language, or sex rather than being able to compete in the normal way on talent. I smell a boondoggle aborning.

“We have injustices in this country. Those injustices are concentrated in frontline communities and indigenous, black and brown communities,” she said. “They’re the ones that experience the greatest depths of this injustice.”

Of course, were you to ask her to name some, she couldn’t do it. She’ll just wave her hands in the air and claim that everybody knows what they are.

There are times when ‘airhead’ is too kind a word to use.

Read it.

So what? Who cares? I don’t. Nor should our government.

The way Americans of the Chattering Class are going on, you’d think this guy was an American citizen.

In fact, more noise is being made about his death than about the deaths of actual American citizens at the hands of Muslim jihadists.

We could make a long list of foreigners who were directly involved in the casual murder of individuals, starting with Vladimir Putin right the way down to half of the government of South Africa, and nobody is making a big deal about it. What is it about Khashoggi that has the Cloud People in such an uproar?

Read it.

Leftism provides many of the same comforts that religion does without the expectation of personal sacrifice. Its adherents can feel that they’re caring for the “least of these” because they vote for policies that empower the government to offer more welfare to the poor. It is a lazy form of compassion, and it is appealing to those who want to pat themselves on the back without having to voluntarily spend of their own time, energy or money.

On a personal level, unlike Christianity, leftism doesn’t worry its adherents with sin and life-change. The only sin is to say there’s sin. The only wrong is to say there’s wrong. The highest virtue is one’s own happiness, and the only truth is that which one finds in themselves. This, of course, is antithetical to what the Bible teaches, which is part of why it is very difficult—if not altogether impossible—to be a Bible-believing Christian and a radical leftist.

Read it.

Perhaps if he’s executed this time he’ll stay out.

Read it.

Markets that are free to work undergo corrections every now and then as reality catches up to hype. It’s not the end of the world.

Read it.

A judge reportedly allowed an immigrant in court on drugs charges to leave through the back door to avoid immigration enforcement who had arrived to arrest him.

Shelley Joseph, a judge in the suburbs of Boston, is reportedly being investigated by a federal grand jury over the claims she helped the man – Jose Medina-Perez – escape arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The incident is said to have happened in April when Mr Medina-Perez was appearing before Judge Joseph’s court after being arrested on drug charges. Mr Perez-Medina was ordered to reappear before the court on the drugs charges in May and then allowed to leave.

The Boston Globe said the Dominican had already been deported from the United States twice before.

In the audio recording of the courtroom, Judge Joseph can be heard saying ICE “is going to get him” and “I’m not going to allow them to come in here” before telling a clerk to turn off the recording.

Read it.

How about that GREAT government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

Feel the Bern….

Read it.

Well, no, this is just what politicians do. They pretend that the Democrats would do the same (and haven’t done the same in the past), but it’s all hypocrisy.

It’s not a ‘power grab’ because they’ve already got the power. There’s nothing in the constitution or the law that requires them to sit on their hands until the next crowd take over. That’s what terms are all about.

Eric S Raymond has a fascinating take on American regional accents.

This is something I had never even suspected. I’m going to be watching a lot of old Western movies to see if I can pick out what he’s talking about.

Read it.

She certainly behaves as if she believes it.

Read it.

The letter campaign was organized by Democracy Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based foundation. Its wealthy benefactor is Pierre Omidyar, the Parisian-born son of Iranian expats who founded eBay and became a billionaire. Omidyar and his wife have a net worth of around $10 billion, and they’ve pledged to donate most of that fortune to charity. They fund an extensive network of nonprofits, programs and foundations around the world that underwrite everything from early education projects in Central America to microloans in Africa.

One of Omidyar’s charity cases closer to home is the NeverTrump movement, a loose collection of disgruntled “conservatives” and Republicans now partnering with the Left to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency, his family, and anyone else in the president’s orbit. Omidyar donated $250,000 to a NeverTrump political action committee in 2016. He remains a powerful foe of the president and—like everyone on the Left—inexplicably views Trump’s reign as a dire threat not just to American democracy but to the entire world.

Omidyar is a former donor to the Democratic Party and a devoted Leftist whose main causes include promoting open borders, climate change, and racial politics. But his latest crusade, funded to the tune of $100 million, is to infect every corner and crevice of the public square with anti-Trump bias.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

If it sounds ominous, it’s because it is. What’s even more alarming is that a cabal of longtime influencers on the Right—the political world’s self-appointed moral superiors who now vilify Trump as a greedy, unprincipled charlatan—have their hands in the deep pockets of a Leftist billionaire while pretending to represent core conservative values they clearly have abandoned for political and personal gain.

This list features not only Bill Kristol (as I wrote last month) but others including Evan McMullin, Mindy Finn, Mona Charen, Matthew Dowd, and Linda Chavez. Former GOP officials such as U.S. Representative David Jolly (R-Fla.), former GOP governor Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff are all tied to Democracy Fund affiliates. All are reliable and frequent “conservative” critics of the president and his administration.

Colbert Taunts Trump With An Absolutely Savage Comparison To George H.W. Bush  Yeah, that’s news. Funny how he never had anything good to say about any Bush while they were alive.

CNN President Jeff Zucker Claims His Network Is Not ‘Anti-Trump,’ It’s ‘Pro-Truth’  Two lies in one sentence; way to go.

Georgetown University Law Professor Compares Trump’s Tweets To Mob Shakedown

Bruce Springsteen says Democrats have no ‘effective’ candidate to beat Donald Trump in 2020

Camille Paglia: ‘Hillary wants Trump to win again’

Behar Slams Fox News’ Trump Coverage  Wow, that’s news.

KERNS: Media Uses President Bush’s Death To Throw Shade At Trump

Camille Paglia: Democrats Only Message In 2020 Is ‘Trump Hatred’  Well, it’s what they do best.

The President Is “A Tariff Man”  Which, of course, he is not — more #PsychicNewsNetwork attempted mind-reading by people who ought to know better and who haven’t been paying attention. Trump regards tariffs as tools, and uses them to pry loose tariffs imposed by other countries to our detriment … like China.

Julie Kelly: NeverTrump is Fat With Leftist Iranian Cash

Read it.

The Ninth Circuit is the most overruled appellate court in the Federal system.

You can guess why.

Read it.

Advocates of open borders quoted in media coverage of the migrant “caravan” moving north through Mexico are part of a network of U.S.-based groups funded in the past by left-leaning foundations, according to tax and financial records.

Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a Chicago-based nonprofit whose name means People Without Borders, is widely credited with organizing the caravans of migrants that traveled from Central America on trains and buses and on foot this year and last.

Two United Methodist churches in Chicago appear to be bases for People Without Borders, which is led by one of the pastors, documents show.

Several organizations are “consistently connected on various websites” and “have overlapping people, most notably Emma Lozano,” said Hayden Ludwig, a research analyst at Washington-based Capital Research Center, naming the Chicago pastor.

Read it.

Sounds about right.

Seems as if they’re catching on.

Read it.

What do you do if you’re a supranational behemoth with a multi-billion dollar budget coupled with a vast number of subsidiary entities that focus on migration?

If you’re the U.N., you publish the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and seek to set up more supranational government entities to duplicate the work you’re already doing, at a gargantuan cost to (mostly Western) taxpayers.

Read it.

She said: “We will only get a grip on this problem when we know its scale and it is my sincere hope that the government will soon bring forward a legislative solution for the registration of children in elective home education so at the very least, we collectively know where these children are.”

On illegal schools, Ms Spielman added: “Until we are given proper powers to tackle these operations and the definition of a school is set out more clearly in legislation, we are fighting the problem with one arm tied behind our back.”

Britain — a place that can call a school ‘illegal’. I’m certainly glad I don’t live in such a country.

Of course, it’s For The Children. That seems to cover a multitude of statisms.

Read it.

One of these days he may even get one right. Won’t that be a shock.