Victor Davis Hanson.

None of these decades-old rationales for Middle East intervention remain relevant today. The Cold War is over. China is using cash, not arms, to seduce Middle East regimes to lease out ports and facilities for its Belt and Road Initiative, an extravagant neo-imperial global project that grows ever more dubious in a strictly cost-to-benefit analysis, especially as China bogs down in a trade war with the United States and seems to be offering round-one concessions to try to end it. With a million Muslims in Chinese reeducation camps, and its clumsy diplomacy abroad, Beijing may eventually become as unpopular in Arab capitals as Moscow was during the Cold War.

I think that the question is not ‘Must America be in the Middle East?’ but rather ‘Must America linger in the Middle East?’.  Our technological superiority is such that if some development in the Middle East threatens an American interest, we can just go in and blow it all to Hell, kill the people who are causing the problem and then back off — no need for ‘boots on the ground’, just a demonstration that if you cross us you wind up dead, and we don’t care what form of government rules over the rubble.

Babylon Bee.

That would certainly save a lot of effort.

An answer that is occurring to many men nowadays.

Read it.

When someone picked up a handgun and turned it toward him, Smith reacted immediately.

In one swift motion, he knocked the gun away. Then he grabbed it, dropped the magazine, cleared the chamber, and replaced the magazine before handing it back.

Excellent.

Read it.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer David Solomon issued the latest ultimatum Thursday from Davos. Wall Street’s biggest underwriter of initial public offerings in the U.S. will no longer take a company public in the U.S. and Europe if it lacks a director who is either female or diverse.

Sounds like a good reason not to do business with Goldman Sachs.

This is, of course, on its face racist and sexist. But I don’t think anybody will be suing them any time soon.

Read it.

Big technology companies have begun dabbling with RISC-V, which replaces proprietary know-how in a key part of the chip design process with a free standard that anyone can use. While it’s early days, this could create a new crop of processors that compete with Intel Corp. products and whittle away at the licensing business of Arm Holdings Plc.

Read it.

Protesters rallying outside court in Vancouver, Canada, this week in support of embattled Huawei finance chief Meng Wanzhou turned out to be paid actors – who said they thought they were extras for a film or music video.

Each person in the group held a white or red-colored poster that carried messages such as “Free Ms Meng Equal Justice!” or “Bring Michael home, Trump stop bullying us.”

Read it.

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

California files lawsuit to remain a National Security Risk

Soros-Linked Group Joins MSM To Censor And Purge Climate Change Skeptics On YouTube

Want to stop climate change? Embrace the nuclear option.

Feminist Author Demands Germans Stop Having Babies To Save The Planet

Climate activist who climbed Big Ben has ‘Extinction Rebellion psychosis’, judge says

Climate change advisers call for steeper air travel tax to reforest country

World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency – Jan 2020

Mnuchin Slams Greta Thunberg: ‘Who Is She’ to Give Economic Advice?

“Let’s Talk After She Finishes College” – Mnuchin Slams Greta Thunberg

Secret Science Under Attack — Part 2

Al Gore Compares Climate Change to 9/11 Attacks

Elizabeth Warren Demands Banks Provide Their Climate Disaster Plans  I’d like to see their Warren disaster plans.

Donald Trump accused of corrupt scheme to ‘cheat’ in 2020 election at impeachment trial

Matthews Wails: ‘Bugs Bunny’ McConnell ‘Always Gets Away With It’  Poor baby.

Hollywood Hit Jobs: 6 Times TV Shows Fantasized About Removing the President from Office

Jerry Nadler Criticizes Republicans Over Impeachment: ‘A Cover-Up By Definition’

Amazon Flooded with Trump Impeachment-Related Products Ain’t that America?

OOPS: Lesley Stahl Says Fox News Didn’t Exist for Clinton Impeachment

Rodin: What Is the Standard for Removal when No Crime Is Alleged?

Eric Ciaramella Is the ‘Whistleblower’ and Other Things You’re Not Allowed to Say

Salon’s Marcotte: Impeachment Defense Full of Lying ‘White Dude’ ‘Villains’

Florida Man Murders Pro-Trump Boss, Places American Flag Next To Body: Affidavit

Surprise: Adam Schiff Misrepresented Evidence In Senate Trial’s Opening

MSNBC’s Stengel Compares Trump’s Treatment of the Media To Stalin  Yeah, just count up all of the journalists who have been taken out and shot … oh, wait….

Trump tapes help incriminate the President at his own trial  CNN.

Jake Tapper Mocks GOP Senators Creating ‘Alternate Reality’ for Trump

Impeachment Week: It’s OK to be Bored; Not OK to be White

Bipartisanship in Washington: Senators from both parties break impeachment trial rules with Apple Watch

CNN Analyst Defends ‘Making Up’ Story About GOP Senators Talking Impeachment

Politico Fantasizes About ‘Goldwater Moment’ Forcing Trump Resignation  Except there isn’t any Goldwater in the Congress these days.

Hacks at CBS: Will Impeachment Managers Get Through to Lazy, Sleepy GOP?  Not without a better performance than we’ve seen so far.

Backfire: Frequent Defector Lisa Murkowski Says She Was “Offended” By Obese Jerry Nadler’s Claim That Anyone Voting Against Their Demanded Rules-Changes Was Engaged in a “Cover Up”

Soros Speaks Live From Davos, Slams “Conman, Narcisist” Trump  Hostes humani generis.

Republican Senators Are Literally Playing With Kids’ Toys During The Impeachment Trial Can’t say that I blame them when the alternative is listening to Pencil-Neck Schiff.

Chuck Schumer Attacks Fox News At Impeachment Press Conference

Did Telemundo (Again) Stage A Protest Shot For Its Impeachment Coverage? 

GOP Group: Senate Should Replace Trump With Mike Pence  Crustian cuck Bill Kristol is at ot again. Evidently Trump isn’t starting enough wars overseas.

Former Clinton WH Spokesman and Current CNN “Analyst:” Okay I Just Flat-Out Lied About Overhearing GOP Senators Talking About How Great the Democrats’ Case Was, But That’s Okay Because It Was “A Joke” and Also You’re All Liars

George Soros: Facebook Conspiring to Re-Elect Trump  And if you believe that one he’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

There must be clarity about the character of possible conflict with Iran. The flawed strategies applied over the last 19 years in Afghanistan and Iraq are not the answer to waging war with Iran. Those strategies involved deploying hundreds of thousands of ground forces in the region to conduct prolonged occupation, nation building, and counterinsurgency operations—none of which would be applicable to Iran. Rather, any action against Iran should be modeled after the decisive take-down of Iraq applied in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, when aerospace power was used for 43 days. Only four days of that operation used ground forces to reoccupy Kuwait, and that will not be required in an Iranian effort. We have to stop equating strategy with the number of U.S. boots on the ground. Large numbers of U.S. ground forces in the Mideast plays into Iran’s hands and could lead to unnecessary and unwanted “endless wars.” Rapid accomplishment of desired effects should be the goal.

Read it.

Is this a great country or what?

Read it.

Prediction: Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Before 2002, during the various Palestinian intifadas, Israel suffered hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries from suicide bombers freely crossing from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel.

In response, Israel planned a vast border barrier. The international community was outraged. The Israeli left called the idea nothing short of “apartheid.”

However, after the completion of the 440-mile border barrier — part concrete well, part wire fencing — suicide bombings and terrorist incursions into Israel declined to almost nil.

Read it.

Brexit is here.

Read it.

In terms of seriousness, I realize that this question ranks right up there with “Why is There Air?” (which was a pretty funny comedy album from back in the 60s). There have been hundreds of books and articles which have examined the “roots of progressive rage.” At times I believe that we have seen so much progressive fury that we have almost become inured to it. Like most people, I usually adhere to the philosophy of “fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and progressives gotta rant.” However, during the holiday season, I ran across two instances that caused me to re-examine my own thinking about our current social and political environment.

ZMan limns the decline of our elites.

The career path of Mx. Weiss is what you see in a decaying ruling class. Her reason to have an exalted position in the media is she was willing to slander BDS activists while a college student at Columbia. Her hard work as a skirmisher in that never-ending Bronze Age conflict landed her a spot at the Jewish Forward. Two years later she is at the Wall Street Journal and then a few years later the New York Times. That’s quite remarkable for someone who cannot outwit Joe Rogan.

Of course, Mx. Weiss is not where she is because of her intellect. She is where she is because she can be relied upon to repeat the talking points popular with an ossified ruling elite. She has been assigned to the department charged with repeating the blood libel against white Americans with regards to Jews. Her first book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, is a collection of talking points Max Boot threw away, because he thought they would make him look deranged.

…

As Steve Sailer recently noted, it is impossible to find a bright and curious person in the woke intellectual class. They are not even clever in how they present the tired dogmas of multiculturalism and intersectionality.

When I hear the word ‘triggering’ I reach for my revolver. (With apologies to Hermann Göring.)

Read it.

Is this a great country, or what?

Read it.

Let’s see whether anybody pays attention.

Read it.

Seventeenth-century scholars were horrified by how much ancient knowledge had been lost when the monasteries dispersed.

Read it.

“In a spirit of conciliation, the Legislature of West Virginia hereby extends an invitation to our fellow Virginians who wish to do so, to join us in our noble experiment of 156 years of separation from the government at Richmond; and, we extend an invitation to any constituent county or city of the Commonwealth of Virginia to be admitted to the body politic of the State of West Virginia,” HCR 8 read.

Joel Kotkin.

Despite an increasingly large lobbying and public relations effort, the oligarchs are in danger of squandering their once near universal political support. Some 70 percent of Americans, notes a recent Pew study, believe social media platforms “censor political views.” In California, just over the past year, the percentage of voters thinking tech firms need to be more heavily regulated has been rising to over 70 percent in both the Bay Area and Southern California.

Steve Sailer.

From The Guardian news pages, a pretty funny Coalition of the Fringes circular firing-squad story that is useful in quantifying how it’s basically all a big hissy fit over money. It’s about a heavily-promoted novel, American Dirt, about a Mexican mother and her children who flee Mexico’s Tragic Dirt for America’s Magic Dirt.

Steve Sailer covers this stuff so you don’t have to.

Not that ‘woke’ women have any interest in men, of course….

Read it.

Hammer tech.

Read it.

The Mexican government continues to fend off hundreds of Central American migrants who are trying to cross its border in order to reach the U.S., an indication of how much Mexico has stepped up its own immigration enforcement measures.

UPDATE: ‘Removed, Returned, Repatriated’: DHS Chief Issues Warning To Members Of Migrant Caravan

Read it.

The federal government knows a lot of troubling things about two prominent American Islamist organizations. Curiously, the same federal government continues to seek out partnerships with those same radical organizations and even awards them taxpayer-funded grant money.

Liberal Hacks: CNN Hails Schiff as ‘Effective Orator’ Making ‘A Pretty Compelling Story’

Impeachment Quick Hit: MSNBC Loves Dem ‘Evidence’ vs. GOP ‘Rhetoric’

CBS Slimes Trump’s Legal Team: They’re Not Behaving Like Lawyers

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough Hypes ‘Devastating’ CNN Impeachment Poll

Trump is the Enemy!

Democrats’ Impeachment Strategy Is Bore Everyone To Death  Mark Levin made this same point.

CNNers Gush About How ‘Very Smart’ Dems Were on Day 1 of Senate Trial

Impeachment Circus Update

Adam Schiff Caught “Mischaracterizing” Evidence Day One Of Senate Impeachment Trial

21 AGs Tell Senate: Reject Trump’s Impeachment

Schiff Caught Twisting Impeachment Evidence; Media Fact-Check Trump Attorneys, Instead

YouTube Stops Impeachment Trial Livestreams from Conservative Organizations

Michael Bloomberg Shifts Massive Ad Campaign to Support Impeaching Trump

DC Attorney General Sues Inaugural Committee For Using Non-Profit Funds To Enrich Trump Family

Republican Sen. Jim Risch Becomes First To Take A Snooze During Impeachment Trial

Arctic sea ice can’t ‘bounce back’  More panic based on ‘climate models’.

Kiribati Man is Back: UN Rules Climate Refugees Cannot Be Rejected  Well, let’s see whether they can enforce that.

Summer Sea Ice Could End This Decade: The Voyage to the End of Ice

Judges Explain Why They Are Knocking Down Enviro Attempts To Sue Oil Companies Into Oblivion

Green Economy Is The New Black At Davos 2020  All abord the virtue-signaling train!

“I Don’t See Her In Beijing Or Delhi” – Niall Ferguson Slams Davos’ “Virtue Signaling” Greta Fanboys  They would use her for spare parts.

Prince Charles makes radical call for green taxes after flying to Davos on private jet

Read it.

With its SMR design, which is “just one-tenth the size of a typical large-scale reactor site,” a pressurized water reactor is enclosed with robust safety layers that are still far smaller in volume than the reactor space in a traditional nuclear plant. The reactor is oriented vertically, so gravity helps to move the hot and cold water around. Despite its much smaller size, the reactor will produce an expected 450 MWe, compared with 600 MWe at each of the two reactors at the existing Dungeness B plant in Kent.

Read it.

The system being installed is specifically tailored to the type of ground along the northern border. Unlike the barrier between Israel and Gaza, the system in the north doesn’t include an underground wall.

Read it.

An elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander has been shot dead by masked assailants in front of his house in southwestern Iran. Crucially, he was a mid-range to possibly top commander of the IRGC’s hardline domestic wing, the Basij militia, and a close ally of recently assassinated Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani, reports state news IRNA on Wednesday.

The details clearly suggest that it was an assassination — at this point by an unknown entity or group — given two men riding a motorcycle drove by and essentially executed him in the street.

He must have had dirt on the Clintons.

Read it.

Hoo boy. $315K in legal fees alone and there are still several investigations ongoing with other invoices yet to be received. How big is San Antonio’s budget these days? Granted, it’s sizable, but nobody can afford to just flush away cash in amounts that are quickly approaching a half million.

And all for what? To stop a fast food joint with a huge following from opening up a franchise at the airport. Good to see San Antonio’s elected leaders are really tackling the big problems.

Blue pustule politics.

Read it.

I’m sure Gabbard’s impending suicide will be covered on the evening news.

UPDATE: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Hillary Clinton Over ‘Russian Asset’ Remark

UPDATE: Tulsi Gabbard Hits Hillary Clinton With $50 Million Defamation Suit

UPDATE: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Hillary Clinton for Defaming Her as a “Russian Asset”

Read it.

Thereby making sure that no major employer ever locates there.

Read it.

So far as I can tell, not a parody. Although these days, you never know….

One of the most tedious aspects of modern life is the prevalence of the ‘here, let me make you a better person’ impulse. This headline put me over the edge: How can we create a workforce full of lifelong learners? My immediate response was: Who is this ‘we’? And what business is it of ‘ours’ whether the ‘workforce’ is full of ‘lifetime learners’ or not? Did you ask the ‘workforce’ whether they wanted to be ‘lifelong learners’? Betcha didn’t.

This is a fundamental irritating aspect of the proglodyte mindset: Changing things just to be changing things, usually because they aren’t the (better) way the actor wants them to be. Hey, how about just STFU and leave stuff alone? How about minding your own business for a ‘change’?

Sheesh.

Read it.

The islands of Lesbos, Samos and Chios staged a general strike, shutting down shops and public services and rallying in central squares, many protesters waving Greek flags.

“We want our islands back, we want our lives back,” was the main slogan.

Asylum-seekers “should be shared out across Greece,” 72-year-old Lesbos pensioner Efstratios Peppas told AFP.

“And Europe must assume its responsibilities. It too must take migrants,” he said.

The largest camp of Moria on Lesbos island, with a capacity for 2,840 people, hosts more than 19,000 asylum seekers.

“You can’t walk alone outside after dark, people get stabbed,” Mr Peppas said.

Sounds as if they need to send these ‘migrants’ back where they came from.

Read it.

ThoughtCrime is alive and well in the E.U.

Read it.

Three years ago, the Women’s March brought a million anti-Trump protesters to Washington D.C.

This year, 25,000 people signed up online. That was unrealistically optimistic because organizers had only obtained a permit for up to 10,000 protesters. And they only ended up with thousands.

Impeachment should have encouraged a bigger turnout, but the snowflakes couldn’t handle the snow.

Read it.

Homes in 74% of the country, mostly the large metro areas, are unaffordable for the average worker. At least three-quarters of millennials will never own home as they’re drowning in student debt, auto loans, and credit card debt.

Renting has also become too costly for many in large metro areas like San Francisco. Millennials have already moved into campers and tent cities to escape rising rents, but there could be a new solution called “pod living.”

If they could live in a college dorm again, they would.

Read it.

I am starting to get the feeling that James Hodgkinson wasn’t a one-off. James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has been conducting an undercover investigation of the Bernie Sanders campaign. We wrote here and here about a Project Veritas investigator’s conversations with one of Sanders’ “top tier organizers” in Iowa. The Bernie Bro expressed admiration for the Soviet Gulags, said billionaires should be sentenced to breaking rocks, and suggested that anyone who opposes Sanders’ revolutionary policies would be shot.

It turns out there are more pro-violence Bernie Bros where Hodgkinson and the first organizer came from. O’Keefe has now released another video, this time of a South Carolina field organizer. It’s weird: I had no idea that there are at least two admirers of Russian Gulags in the U.S.

Read it.

Is whiteness a commodity that can be allocated like money or social services? Maryland’s wealthiest suburban counties are embarked on race-based school policies that will not end well. Busing is back in a big way in suburban Maryland.

In the 1960s, my father worked on desegregation plans in Tennessee and Mississippi as a civil rights attorney with the USDOJ Civil Rights Division. He said there was an implicit understanding among those who worked on these plans about a psychological “critical mass” in white communities. That meant that when a formerly all-white school reached or exceeded a certain percentage (“critical mass”) of black students, “white flight” would ensue and the schools would rapidly re-segregate. As a matter of law, these plans had to be implemented no matter what because the segregation was de jure and there was no way to simultaneously mandate entire communities to exchange residences to achieve residential integration so the schools were always a principal focus. So “white flight” was widespread.

Read it.

In Lakewood, Wash., some of the city’s homeless and other residents have made a habit of stealing shopping carts from various grocery and retail outlets and dumping the carts on road verges and other public-facing locales. The number of cart-related complaints made to the municipal government increased 40 percent in 2019, and Lakewood officials claim the scattered carts make the city appear “blighted.”

The city’s proposed solution to this state of affairs, which residents say threatens property values, is not to punish the vagrants — whose theft and subsequent disposal of private property inconveniences the stores and the broader public — but instead to fine the stores from which the property is stolen.

How very ‘woke’.

East coast cities, such as New York and New Haven,  have long prevented this problem by putting a line of concrete-filled metal posts round their exits, wide enough apart for a normal body to pass through but too close together for a cart to fit.

On the Climate Road to Serfdom

UN Panel Says Climate Refugees Can’t Be Returned Home

Davos Elites Warn “Climate Action Failure” Biggest Global Risk In 2020

The Green Swan: BIS Urges Climate Action to Prevent a new GFC

Ozone-depleting substances caused half of late 20th-century Arctic warming, says study

PBS Science Correspondent Blames Global Warming for Australian Wildfires  As they do.

Thunberg Calls Climate Change ‘Real Crisis’ in Davos Talk

‘Climate Puppet’ Greta Thunberg Shames Davos Attendees For ‘Doing Nothing’

Central Bankers’ Core Mission Now Includes Climate Change  Oh, really?

CNN poll: 51% say Senate should remove Trump from office

Lemon: Impeachment trial to begin under cover of darkness  duh-duh-DUHHHHHH….

Presidential Hopeful Elizabeth Warren Wonders How the American People Could Ever Vote for a Known Liar for President  Ask her if she voted for Bill Clinton. Or Hillary.

Was Nadler Just “Playing” Dumb On The Sunday Talk-Shows?

Kimberly Guilfoyle to Newsmax TV: ‘Sham’ Impeachment Helping Trump Fundraise

We See What You Did There: CNN Awkwardly Links Disgraced Republicans to Trump

House Manager Declares President Guilty Of… “Attempted Bribery”

Texas Teacher Forced to Remove ‘Jail 45’ License Plate

Taking Orders: MSNBC Touts Biden ‘Warning’ Press to Ignore ‘Debunked’ Trump Claims

NBC Discovers ‘Impeachment Fatigue,’ Worried Dems in Swing States

Curb’s David Uses MAGA Hat as ‘People Repellant’ in Premiere  Certainly for people like him.

BET’s Ed Gordon: ‘No Reason We Got To Go Through Another 4 Years of This Fool’

US: Iran’s $3 Million Bounty for Killing Trump Is ‘Ridiculous’

Ivanka Trump Blows Off Jim Acosta’s Impeachment Questions In Davos, Switzerland

Warren Pledges DOJ Task Force To Investigate Political Opponent

NBC Hypes ‘Outraged’ Dems Calling Impeachment Rules a ‘National Disgrace’

Hollywood Admits They’ll Accept Nothing Less Than Trump’s Removal Except that no one else is paying attention.

CNN Analysts Rage: GOP Planning ‘Farce,’ ‘Joke’ Trial  Too late.

ABC Provides Megaphone to Dems Crying ‘Cover-Up’ on Impeachment

Joy Behar Pushes Impeachment Conspiracy: McConnell, Trump Lawyers ‘Hiding’ ‘Something Gross’

Read it.

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

Scott Adams pointed out on his Periscope today that the DemLegHump media just showed pictures of white people, while other media outlets showed a lot of black people there with guns.

Read it.

The Mexican government continues to fend off hundreds of Central American migrants who are trying to cross its border in order to reach the U.S., an indication of how much Mexico has stepped up its own immigration enforcement measures.

Mexico is a country, not a road.