A LOOK INSIDE A PRIVATE STASH OF RARE MUSCLE CARS: This stash of COPOs, Shelbys, and Hemi-Powered Dodge and Plymouth muscle is not open to the public.

Tucked away in a large building in Salem, Oregon, with no external signage and no obvious entrance from the street, is a truly large and astonishing car collection and museum. It is not publicized, and is hard to find. Most significantly, it is not open to the general public. Those who are fortunate enough to get in usually arrive by pre-arranged tours through special car clubs or, recently, as a fundraiser for a local charity group. The operation of the museum itself is unique. Its location is known, though there are no efforts to publicize it. The identity of the owners is a closely guarded secret. (Several websites have claimed to know, but they are likely in error.) Word is the brothers that own it do have some plans eventually to open the collection up to more public view, but that’s some time off. For the time being, tours can be arranged for a fee, with the proceeds going to charity.

In its more than 117,000 square feet of display area are housed some 600 automobiles, all in fully restored condition, including more than 350 muscle cars from the 1960s onward to the present era. Seen in its entirety, the collection is eclectic, and includes various classics from the Thirties, vintage cars from the Forties and Fifties, exotics from across three decades, and even a couple of wooden hydroplane racing boats—one a Ferrari and one a Maserati—from the 1950s.

If your name isn’t Al Gore, Greta Thunberg or, alas, Boris Johnson, read the whole thing.

I’M MORE INCLINED TO BELIEVE THIS THAN I WAS JUST A FEW YEARS AGO: Insider Tells Tucker Carlson That CIA Was Directly Involved in JFK Assassination.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NO ONE IS ASKING: Who is ready for Blue Origin Space Rangers?

Variety reports that a production company co-founded by Michael Strahan, who flew to space on New Shepard in December 2021, is working with Blue Origin to develop an animated space adventure series for kids. It will be called “Blue Origin Space Rangers.” Stop laughing. I’m being serious over here.

Coming soon to Amazon Prime? … The show will include appearances of an animated Jeff Bezos as well as Strahan, a former NFL star. That might make it worth tuning in to, at least once. According to the producers, the show will “create multiple touchpoints for kids and families to explore, learn and deliver a one-of-a-kind space experience.” I’ll try to be positive and say it’s great to try to get kids interested in STEM. But I certainly hope this is not a distraction to all of the other work on Blue Origin’s plate.

Distraction? Blue Origin has yet to launch a single gram into orbit — it would be fair to ask after all these years if they ever had any focus.

ICYMI, FOR OUR VIP SUPPORTERS: Musk Is Cutting Twitter to the Bone, and the Lamentations of the Karens Are Glorious. “The story could begin — and end — with what Musk did when he found dead-ender execs racking up six figures worth of chartered jets right before he bought the company. But the story just keeps getting better, even after that.”

HOLIDAY DEAL: DEWALT 20V Max Cordless Drill. #CommissionEarned

THIS IS SILLY: Trump’s new NFT collection is already losing value in the secondary market.

THIS IS IMPORTANT: Trump vows if elected to crack down on left-wing censorship, reclaim free speech in America.

In the first policy-related announcement of his 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to sign an executive order after being elected that would ban the federal government from “colluding” with groups that impede free speech and ban federal taxpayer dollars from being spent on government-led efforts to label speech as misinformation or disinformation.

He promised to fire federal employees who have tried to censor “lawful speech” and block federal funds from going to universities that wrongfully curtail speech.

Timing is everything.

Trump is usually such a consummate showman that I don’t understand why he timed the silly NFT release to step all over an important policy statement.

DISPATCHES FROM THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: James Lileks on “dragphobia.”

Oh look, a new word.

There is no such thing as “dragphobia,” unless it falls under coulrophobia, or fear of clowns. From the Cleveland Clinic:

 Coulrophobia brings on feelings of fear when you see clowns or clown images. It’s a specific phobic disorder that causes anxiety, a racing heart, nausea and profuse sweating. Most people can avoid clowns. Some need exposure therapy, a type of psychotherapy, to help manage their reactions to clowns and clown images.

Most people can avoid clowns. Not these days.

“Dragphobia,” like all the faux-phobias, is meant to delegitimize dissent. If you have a specific objection to a behavior, an idea, a means of practicing one’s religion, you are reacting irrationally.

Why is GLAAD giving the aura of a penumbra of an emanation of appearing to be pro-grooming?

GOOD: Pitt students to launch conservative newspaper in response to ‘left-leaning paper.’

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: ‘For all we know he was some sort of sex slave:’ Son of Paul Pelosi’s alleged attacker says his father is not evil, believes in human rights and is ‘hardly a right-wing conservative.’

REMEMBER THE ‘I’M PRO-LIFE PERSONALLY BUT’ DEMOCRATS? The Washington Stand’s Ben Johnson points to the emergence of the “I’m Pro-Marriage Personally But” Republicans.

GO AWAY: The Public Health™ Empire Strikes Back: Oakland, Other Cities Float Reinstating Forced Masking in Public.

TWITTER, SHOW ME SOMEONE CRAZY:

Twitter: Okay.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR FALSE ACCUSATIONS OF RACISM, HOW MANY WOULD THERE BE? Images debunk accusation professor used blackface for MJ ‘Thriller’ Halloween costume: Picture, video shows professor in traditional zombie makeup, not blackface.

A TWITTER FILES FOOTNOTE: “The Twitter Files reveal the suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on Biden family corruption at the behest of the deep state authorities with whom Twitter was collaborating. The absurd letter by 51 former intelligence officials reported by Natasha Bertrand and published by Politico was a key piece of the puzzle (to the extent it was a puzzle). Holman Jenkins takes it up in his Wall Street Journal column ‘Hunter Biden’s Laptop and 2020’s First Big Lie.’. He puts it this way: ‘The absurdity of the intelligence veterans’ claim was obvious at the time. The people who run America’s major news outlets (at least those who aren’t idiots) knew it. So obvious was the lie that America’s biggest news organizations have to remain silent now because of their own complicity.'”

For all their bleating about “our democracy,” America’s ruling class was so eager to shut down Donald Trump’s presidency that they were willing to do root-structural damage to that very democracy to do so, at the cost of destroying tens of millions of Americans’ faith in our institutions’ basic fairness and honesty. On the other hand, it’s now clear that that faith was misplaced.

And now they turn to making Elon Musk public enemy #1, because they hate and attack any effective resistance.

AFTER MAXING OUT OUR CREDIT CARDS FOR MONTHS, SOMETHING HAD TO GIVE: Retail sales fell 0.6% in November as consumers feel the pressure from inflation.

THE STRANGE ATTACK ON BLIND REVIEWING OF ACADEMIC PAPERS. In my years at FIRE, one thing I learned is that the best way to judge what academic institutions of any sort are up to is to determine what they would do if they were the moustache-twirling villain caricatures right-wingers think they are, and assume they are doing that. (With the important modification that, while it happens less often, they’re happy to steamroll left-leaning dissenters as well.)

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Federal Government Reminds Arizonans Why We Hate It. “I have spent all of my life living closer to the Mexican border than most people who make United States immigration law, the majority of it here in my native Arizona. The reason I led with that is because I wanted to establish my perspective cred.”

THEY HATE ANY EFFECTIVE OPPOSITION: The media’s deranged obsession with Ron DeSantis — even before he declares for 2024.

It’s poised to be a long two years for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Fresh off a nearly 20-point re-election win, and not yet having even announced his intention to run for president in 2024, DeSantis has become media enemy No. 1.

Take the case of Rebekah Jones, a pretend whistleblower who alleged with zero evidence that Florida was hiding its true COVID death rate. This week, in a deal with prosecutors, she admitted illegally accessing a state computer. She’d been a media darling because of her attacks on DeSantis.

On her website, Jones helpfully compiled a list of credulous media outlets that ran her false claims without checking. CNN, The Washington Post, MSNBC, Yahoo News, The Miami Herald and so on all fell for her lies, some many times over.

Much is made of Republicans choosing poor-quality candidates but Jones was most recently the Democratic nominee for Congress from Florida’s 1st Congressional District. She lost, thankfully, but that was just weeks before her guilty plea.

Have any of the media outlets repented? Apologized? Of course not. Stopping a potential DeSantis presidential candidacy is their first priority and admitting they were had, or complicit, in Jones’ lies would be a setback.

The Miami Herald, unable to give up its solidarity with Jones, this week even ran an incorrect headline alleging, “Charges against former state health department worker dismissed after she admits guilt.” The admission of guilt is just one of the six special conditions Jones will have to meet, including paying a hefty $20,000 fine and attending therapy, before those charges get dropped in two years.

For over two years, the media held up Jones as evidence DeSantis hadn’t managed the pandemic as successfully as it seemed. Now they should admit DeSantis was right and the pro-lockdown blue-state governors they so love were wrong.

They should do a lot of things, many of them anatomically impossible.

Flashback: Ron DeSantis has emerged as America’s awesome ‘shadow president.’

SICK: Ukrainian orphan girl denied life-saving surgery because she’s unvaxxed.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: The Daily Beast ponders: Why Young Men of Color Are Joining White-Supremacist Groups.

(Link safe; goes to Ace of Spades.)

MICHAEL BARONE: Are the Silicon Valley fraudsters today’s robber barons?

Are these Silicon Valley scammers the second coming of the robber barons? Maybe, but you should remember that the so-called robber barons were christened and criticized by turn-of-the-century muckrakers with axes to grind and twentieth-century Marxists who regarded all capitalists as criminals.

While some business titans of yore profited from frauds, most benefited society by transforming great technological advances — the greatest ever, tech historian Vaclav Smil argues in his book, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact — into workable industrial processes producing goods and services of near-universal benefit.

Andrew Carnegie’s steel built civil and transportation infrastructure. John D. Rockefeller’s kerosene saved the whales, and his gasoline fueled the auto revolution. J. P. Morgan’s financing created the industrial might that Alan Greenspan would later hyperbolically claim won World War II.

They didn’t amass fortunes by robbing people. And indeed, they gave back, too. Carnegie’s libraries helped educate generations; Rockefeller created modern research hospitals; Morgan set an example of fine arts connoisseurship. Silicon Valley’s billionaires have yet to match these examples.

The “Robber Barons” gave us steel, railroads, electricity, etc. This generation gave us Facebook, and a bunch of even worse products. We should be so lucky as to have robber barons again.

LUDDITE TEENS: The Only Thing Better Than A Flip Phone Is No Phone At All. “The kids — and the NYT? — seem to find it adventuresome and quirky to go to the park and to read. Those seem like perfectly ordinary things to do, but maybe young people these days are so bonded to living through screens that it’s a huge accomplishment — a breaking free — to put the phone down.”

But other kids are angry. Apparently if you want to put your phone away, that’s “classist.”

SPACE: SpaceX launches NASA’s water topography satellite into orbit.

LAST NIGHT, ELON SETTLED ALL FAMILY BUSINESS: Twitter bans journalists including Aaron Rupar and Keith Olbermann.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Oregon’s Governor’s Last Act of Political Sabotage. “Though Kate Brown has spent her years in office winnowing down the number of death row inmates from 34 to 17 and releasing violent murderers and rapists from prison, she chose this week to abolish the death penalty entirely in Oregon and ‘dismantle’ a death chamber in Oregon that hasn’t been used in decades. And here’s why: she’s bugging out of office in mere days and handing over this time bomb to the newest woke governor to deal with. She did all of it without the consent of Oregon voters.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: John Podesta Made a Fortune Consulting for Green Energy Billionaires. He Now Oversees a Federal Fund That Could Make Them Rich.

RAND PAUL CALLS ESTABLISHMENT REPUBLICANS OUT FOR SUPPORTING DISASTROUS BUDGET BILL.

YOU DON’T SAY: The Fed could be facing a nightmare scenario. “There is a much more worrisome scenario, however, in which US inflation remains stubbornly high, perhaps because the combination of continued tight labor markets and elevated living costs fuel persistent rapid wage growth. Such a wage-price spiral would pose a difficult conflict between the policy needs of the US economy and those of the rest of the world. Further increases in interest rates would be essential to bring down US inflation and inflation expectations. But at a time when many of our trading partners were mired in recession, further policy tightening could create grave problems abroad: substantial job losses, widespread defaults and disruptions in international financial markets.”

Left unsaid: The federal government can’t afford prolonged tightening because of increased interest payments on $31 or so trillion in debt.

THEY STOPPED PUSHING THAT LINE AWFULLY SUDDENLY: Son of Paul Pelosi Attacker Just Torched the Media’s Narrative About the Assault.

It seems forever since David DePape hammered Paul Pelosi in one of the most bizarre home invasions ever to occur on American soil. The attack unfolded in late October. DePape broke into the home, though there is no evidence of forced entry. The police body cameras are not being released, nor is the footage collected by the Pelosi residence security cameras. DePape, who wore nothing but underwear, just waltzed into the home armed with hammers and attacked Mr. Pelosi, who was also able to abscond to the bathroom to make an emergency call, describing DePape as a “friend.” Also, Mr. Pelosi was the one who let officers in before DePape reportedly hit him on the head with a hammer, which required brain surgery.The liberal media was off to the races, seeing QAnon postings from DePape and trying to make the right-wing lunatic narrative come alive, but it quickly died on the vine. For starters, DePape is an illegal alien who suffers from mental illness—he tried to buy a birdhouse for a fairy he was in contact with daily. He had rantings about the 2020 election, so you can see how the media was hoping this guy was a conservative. He isn’t based on the paraphernalia at his alleged home, which was decorated with ANTIFA, BLM, and gay pride flags. Over at PJ Media, DePape’s son described his father as a progressive and Green Party supporter. . . .

A Green Party progressive, who supports BLM and Antifa, is also a right-wing lunatic influenced by too many GOP ads attacking Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, which led to the home invasion. Can you see how the liberal media’s narrative quickly evaporated into the ether? And now his son has delivered the kill shot about this being a conservative-influenced assault. DePape was reportedly asking where Mrs. Pelosi was when he entered the residence. She was safe in Washington, DC.

The assault on Mr. Pelosi was perpetrated by a mentally ill left-wing zealot staying in the United States illegally—an illegal alien progressive nutjob hammered Paul.

California is full of nutjobs.

And only some of them hold office.

VERY MERRY DEALS are here. #CommissionEarned

METAL AF: Navy Unleashes Controversy By Naming Next Warship USS Fallujah.

LINCOLN BROWN: Is Woke Fatigue Finally Setting In? “For years, from the office of the president of the United States to the local school boards and every office, activist, bureaucrat, and administrator in between, people have had racism, trans, and every other phobia and ‘ism’ pounded into them at every juncture. People who have known they are not racist are tired of defending themselves every minute, except perhaps when it comes to their children. And they also know that discussion is simply impossible. And even the true believers may be growing weary of confessing their sins with every other breath.”

GIVE THE GIFT OF ANTI-COMMUNISM:  I was thinking about my 7^th teacher today.  God bless Mrs. Naoma O’Neill.  One day out of the blue she insisted that I read Animal Farm.  I thought it sounded like a children’s book, so I was a bit skeptical.  But she was adamant that this was the right book for me.  If there is a 7^th grader in your life, maybe it’s time for Animal Farm.  And following up with The Black Book of Communism wouldn’t be a bad idea.  I have a feeling there aren’t many Mrs. O’Neills teaching in the public schools anymore.  You might need to fill in for them.

GREEN IS A JEALOUS DEITY:  Green Germany Haemorrhaging €1.5 Billion per DAY to Keep the Lights On.

IT’S EVERYWHERE:  Today’s blacklisted American: Conservative students and pro-speech law firm slandered and threatened at University of Kansas.

THE ADMINISTRATION IS WORKING TO FRAME THIS AS “AMERICANS PURSUING DEEPER SPIRITUALITY, ESCHEWING MATERIALISM THIS CHRISTMAS”:  Retail sales drop sharply at start of key holiday shopping season.

NO QUESTIONS. RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE:  Questions Arise About How Disgraced ‘Non-Binary’ Biden Official Received Top Clearance.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED:  American Cities Using Federal COVID Relief Funds for Guaranteed Income Projects.

I’M SEEING THE SAME IN THE US:  ZDF reportage on “working poor” in Germany.

BREAKING THE FIRE ALARM DOESN’T MEAN YOU’RE SAFE FROM FIRE: Comfort and Safety.

WELL, DUH:  Greenhouse gasses are good.

THE FICUS* AND THE LEFT’S VERSION OF HISTORY:  Argle Bargle, stolen people from Africa. Bah.

*Fraud In Chief of the US!

A TINY PORTION OF THE FRAUD, YES:  Arizona 2022 Midterm Elections and Election Fraud – Ballot Harvesting.

INDEED. BUTTER. MOUTH. NOT MELTING:  Isn’t Drafting Women an Imperative of Equality?

A TINY LITTLE BIT OF SANITY:  Senate Votes to Ban TikTok on Government Devices.

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED:  AOC Climate Change Movie Sinks Faster Than Titanic.

THE ONLY THINGS GOVERNMENTS ARE GOOD AT IS KILLING THEIR OWN PEOPLE AND FLEECING THEM:  FBI’s Vetted Info Sharing Network ‘InfraGard’ Hacked.

At everything else, they range from “barely competent” to “laughably bad.”

BREAKING: Congress Passes Record NDAA, Rescinds Troop Vax Mandate, But…

GOBBLEDYGOOK:  “Washington State Education Board Wants a ‘Cultural Shift’ to ‘Indigenous Pedagogy.'”

OH, CANADA:

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Gulp: Stock market drops sharply as retail sales show biggest decline in months.

OPEN THREAD: Have fun, kids!

TONIGHT ELON SETTLES ALL FAMILY BUSINESS:

● Cue lefty meltdown while people guess why Twitter suspended Aaron Rupar. (Permanently?)

● Well DAMN! Many OTHER lefty accounts (including Keith Olbermann) have been suspended.

● Huge Suspension Drops on Twitter, Liberal Meltdown in Progress.

● GMTA:

● Elon Musk Vows ‘Legal Action’ Against Trackers; Clarifies Private Jet ‘Doxxing’ Policy.

● “It appears [Rupar] shared info for a website for ElonJets that was banned for doxxing, good riddance.”

● Taylor Lorenz locks down her Twitter account.

ROCKET SCIENCE INVOLVES A LOT OF FAILURES: Historic first launch of Chinese private methane-fueled rocket ends in failure.

JULIE BURCHILL: Whoever persuaded Bono he could sing?

There are a few pop stars whose work I can’t help liking in spite of myself – their song-writing, that is. I’d be happy never to see the faces or hear the voices of Mick Hucknall or Chris Martin again, but the moment ‘Stars’ or ‘Trouble’ starts, I’m mesmerised – only to wonder crossly the minute the song ends: ‘Why couldn’t they have given it to someone with a decent voice?’ Think about it: dancers have choreographers and actors have scriptwriters, so why should we assume songwriters can sing? Bono’s another. I love some of his songs (‘One’, as performed by Johnny Cash, and ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, by the Pet Shop Boys), but when faced with the awful actuality of his yowling, I remember what Prince once said about him: ‘You know what I’d do with a voice like that? Become a janitor.’

Surrender comes in at a whopping 563 pages, and I was already beginning to feel quite enervated by the time I’d read the press release informing us that Bono is an ‘artist and activist’ who has written an ‘honest and irreverent, intimate and profound’ book – which we’re lucky he got around to, considering his ‘more than 20 years of activism, dedicated to the fight against Aids and extreme poverty’. But isn’t having your press release calling your book ‘profound’ rather like giving yourself a nickname? Wait for someone else to do it.

Related: Bono is perceived as pompous. Why? “Why do people hate Bono? In a nutshell, the answer probably ultimately revolves around the fact that he is perceived as pompous, a self-ordained savior of rock and the world living the highlife afforded to him by his earnings and status. Why does everyone hate Bono? Consider the fact that the man was once known as Bono Vox. You wouldn’t name your cat that and expect it not to receive humiliation across the neighborhood. While this likely deserves a chuckle, also consider that most of rock n’ roll, no matter under which genre banner it has been paraded under has been just as ridiculous throughout its decades-long existence.”

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE BLAMES TRUMP FOR BORDER CRISIS, CLAIMS BIDEN IS SECURING THE BORDER.

Related: ‘Gaslighting’ Is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year.

OLD AND BUSTED AT THE WAPO: Woodward and Bernstein.

The New Hotness? Taylor Lorenz Lashes Out at Younger, More Successful Journalist in Cruel Anti-Semitic Tirade.

“Notable what gets framed as a ‘buzzy media startup,'” Lorenz seethed. “If u start off rich, have a rich spouse, rich friends, don’t follow any journalistic ethical rules, and focus your content solely on serving the interests of extremely powerful rich ppl, you can go far!”

A number of Twitter users observed that Lorenz’s rant was rife with projection and petty jealousy. [Bari] Weiss is younger*, better looking, and more successful as a journalist and as a human being. Why wouldn’t Lorenz be jealous? But that was hardly the most scandalous aspect of the so-called reporter’s public tantrum. Weiss also happens to be Jewish, and Lorenz’s tweet was a textbook example of an anti-Semitic trope about how all Jews are rich and powerful, conniving, and immoral.

Lorenz has a history of targeted harassment against Jews. Earlier this year, for example, she publicly identified—or “doxxed”—the anonymous woman behind the popular Twitter account “Libs of TikTok.” Doxxing is an explicit endorsement of physical violence. The woman who operates the account is Jewish. Lorenz also attempted to ruin the lives of four Instagram influencers by revealing their true identities. They are the daughters of a prominent Jewish political activist. Coincidence?

Related: Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

Flashback: Are There Any Adults at the Washington Post?

WHENEVER YOU THINK THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Now That They’ve Actually Looked, Scientists Discover Snakes Have Two Clitorises.

DAVID RANDALL:  “The Sign in Lee Jussim’s Window.”

LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: No Safety in Chicago: A daylight robbery highlights danger in urban crime wave. “Crime in Chicago is now so completely out of control that even in his neighborhood — where every home on the block is worth $1 million or more — nobody is safe. And the city’s relentless wave of terrifying violence will almost certainly get much worse next year, when the ironically named ‘SAFE-T Act’ goes into effect.”

A $100K bounty on armed robbers shot at the scene would put an end to this soon enough.

LET’S HOPE: Judge Benitez’s Latest Order in Miller v. Bonta Sets the Stage for Taking Down California’s Assault Weapons Ban.

BE PREPARED: LEATHERMAN, Raptor Rescue Emergency Shears. #CommissionEarned

WELL, SOMEBODY SHOULD BE: Swimming in Testosterone, and Proud of It.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: “In a surprise to absolutely no one, scientists have discovered that literally smearing testosterone onto the skin of young straight dudes makes them unbelievably horny.”

But wait, there’s more: How Addressing Testosterone Deficiency in America Will Help Our Healthcare System.

DAVID STROM: Fusion “breakthrough” a total dud. “In simple terms the lasers delivered X amount of energy to ignite the fusion process, and the fusion process delivered about 1.5X coming out. But in order to deliver that X amount of energy (about 2 million joules) they needed 150X to generate it.”

OUR RULING CLASS HAS GOTTEN TOO COCKY: CEO of Union-Owned Amalgamated Bank Touts Her Plans for Backdoor Gun Purchase Tracking at NY Times Conference. “Amalgamated Bank CEO Priscilla Sims Brown was the special guest at the Times’ DealBook confab and was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin.”

OH: Subaru warns Ascent owners to park outside due to fire risk. “This week, Subaru announced a recall for more than 271,000 Ascent SUVs due to a potential fire risk. Although owners won’t be formally notified until early February, Subaru says that model year 2019–2022 Ascent SUVs should not be parked in garages or car ports or under other structures. Subaru also says owners should not leave their Ascent running unattended, and if they notice or smell smoke coming from the dash or driver’s footwell, they should immediately turn the car off and not attempt to restart it.”

READER FAVORITE: Shark IZ483H Vertex Cordless Stick Vacuum. #CommissionEarned

THE ARMY’S NEXT HELICOPTER ISN’T: Tilt-Rotor, Take Two. “The cruise speed is almost twice the 175 mph of the Black Hawk it’s replacing, and significantly faster than the competing Defiant X design (265 MPH). It also has higher troop carrying capacity than the Black Hawk (14 vs. 12). ‘Firstest with the mostest’ is still hugely important in combat. And though the V-280 carries considerably less than the V-22, it has a much longer combat range.”

I’ll take two.

LIVE AT 3PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ with Kruiser, VodkaPundit, Special Guest Kevin Downey Jr.

SPACE JUNK — BETTER PUT UP MY UMBRELLA: Space debris expert: Orbits will be lost—and people will die—later this decade.

Meanwhile, here’s a piece that Rob Merges and I wrote about orbital debris removal a while back.

THEY ONLY SUPPORT IT IN CHINA BECAUSE THEY KNOW IT WON’T HAPPEN: Democrats Defend Free Speech for Chinese Citizens but Support Censoring Fellow Americans.

A YEAR LATE AND A TRILLION DOLLARS SHORT: WHO eyes end to Covid emergency in 2023.

AND WITHOUT ANY LOCKDOWNS TO BLAME: US Industrial Production Annual Growth Slowest Since March 2021.

AT AMAZON, LEATHERMAN, Raptor Rescue Emergency Shears with Strap Cutter and Glass Breaker, Black with Utility Holster. #CommissionEarned.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Government Warns That With Elon Owning Twitter They Will Only Control 97% Of The Media.

SO WOULD WE ALL:  Kash Patel wants to know about the role of Wray and Barr in the FBI and DOJ liaison with Twitter.

JEFF DUNETZ: Rampant Retail Theft In Big Box Stores-Raising Prices And Closing Locations.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: It’s Time to Rehabilitate ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside.’

I’ve seen one glimmer of hope that “Baby It’s Cold Outside” might finally be getting the rehabilitation it deserves. MSN — nobody’s idea of a cultural conservative news outlet — published a piece by Kenneth Partridge last week on the “complicated, controversial history” of the song. I read the article, waiting for the eventual condemnation, but it never came.

There’s a brief mention of having “more substantive conversations about the very real issues underlying the discourse,” but that’s about it. There’s a discussion about John Legend’s sanitized version, but even Legend calls his reworked lyrics “a joke.”

For those of us who don’t need to make jokes — the ones who know how to be civilized grownups and take part in civilized grownup delights — I offer to you what is in my mind the definitive version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

Much more at the link.

CHANGE: After backlash, China stops counting asymptomatic COVID-19 cases. “There are signs that the government in scaling back on its strict policies. In the past few weeks multiple testing facilities that would screen citizens before they were allowed into public spaces have been shut down. On Monday China discontinued an app the government was using to track travel and quarantine individuals who had visited high risk areas.”

RENT-SEEKING: Young Montana Entrepreneur Is Being Legally Barred from Hauling Trash Because Established Players Don’t Want the Competition.

ELON TURNS TABLES, DROPS VIDEO OF ‘CRAZY STALKER’ WHO LOOKS LIKE ANTIFA: “The video posted by Musk on his Twitter account now has 8.4 million views as of this writing. Chances this guy gets nailed soon if he hasn’t been already? I’m going to guess that he isn’t going to last out the day without being identified. The real question, if this is in California, is whether this guy will suffer any consequences at all for his actions.”

BIGLY! Trump ridiculed for ‘major announcement’ that he’s selling digital trading cards.

Former President Donald Trump is being mocked over his “major announcement” that he’s selling digital trading cards featuring himself depicted as a superhero.

“MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT! My official Donald Trump Digital Trading Card collection is here!” Mr Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social on Thursday.

“These limited edition cards feature amazing ART of my Life & Career! Collect all of your favorite Trump Digital Trading Cards, very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting,” he added. “GET YOUR CARDS NOW! Only $99 each! Would make a great Christmas gift. Don’t Wait. They will be gone, I believe, very quickly!”

Twitter users were quick to mock the announcement.

As Michael Walsh recently described Trump: ‘A Man Who Could Have Been Great.’

THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE ON THE SIDE OF INFLATING AWAY THEIR DEBTS: Democrats Are Getting Very Nervous About the Fed’s War on Inflation.

DON SURBER: Groomer is the word of the year. It’s “the word of the year because it serves as the dividing line between the sane who live in this country and the insane people who run its government…The word is powerful because it calls out what is behind this wave of sexualizing very young children. And that is why liberals do not want us to use it. Too darned bad.”

ABOLISH THE CDC: Emails Show CDC Removed Defensive Gun Use Stats After Gun-Control Advocates Pressured Officials in Private Meeting.

WE CAN HOPE: “It may be premature to forget about a potential revival of the nondelegation doctrine. For now, and for a majority of the Supreme Court Justices, it may be that reliance on the major questions doctrine has supplanted a rebirth of the long dormant nondelegation doctrine as the preferred means of cabining the exercise of administrative power within the bounds of congressionally delegated authority. But it’s worth pointing out there are still nondelegation doctrine challenges making their way through the judicial system.”

WHAT ARE THE LONGTERM EMOTIONAL EFFECTS OF GESTATING WITHOUT A MOTHER’S PRESENCE? The Real-Life Matrix: ‘EctoLife’ Artificial Womb Facility to Engineer, Grow Babies in ‘Factory.’

HOLIDAY DEAL: Quility Weighted Blanket for Adults. #CommissionEarned

META ACTUALLY HAD A POLICY ALLOWING THIS: Zuckerberg U-Turns on Facebook People Smuggling Posts Following Scrutiny.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is ending a policy that allowed illegal immigrants to use the platform to seek people smugglers to ferry them across the U.S. border, admitting that much of the activity is tantamount to “human exploitation” and “overlaps” with human trafficking.

You don’t say.

TRAINING TOMORROW’S NEWSROOM CENSORS: Like Professional, Like Student. The University of Missouri’s journalism school imposes an anti-speech diversity policy. In abandoning the First Amendment (once considered essential to the profession by journalists on the left as well as the right), Missouri is following the lead of Columbia University’s journalism school, which has been rationalizing censorship in the once-respected Columbia Journalism Review. 

FIGHT THE POWER: Legal group scores win in fight against bias reporting systems. “The University of Maine (UMaine) recently revised its bias reporting system following a demand letter from Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF). . . . UMaine is one of eight universities identified by SLF for its bias reporting form, which asked ‘any member of the University of Maine community’ to ‘report any possible bias-related incidents or hate crimes.'”

HOW NOT TO HANDLE A CITY SUFFERING FROM POPULATION LOSS AND DIMINISHED TOURISM: City Sidewalks, Busy Sidewalks: NYC Health Commissioner Wants Masks Back on the Streets.

THE ALGORITHM OF LOVE: The Woman Who Made Online Dating into a “Science.” The Atlantic’s profile of the anthropologist Helen Fisher, the world’s most-quoted authority on love. (Full disclosure: I am married to her.)

STEVEN MALANGA: The Biden Bucks Blowout. Local governments are spending hundreds of billions of dollars in federal handouts for dubious needs — like a new golf course for Palm Beach Gardens in Florida.

FOLLOW THE “SCIENCE:” Scholars work at ‘Decolonizing Light’ to combat ‘colonialism in contemporary physics.’

This is what you do when you have an academic job but are incapable of advancing actual knowledge.

I GUESS “THE CHINESE WAY” WAS TO PUT OFF THE INEVITABLE UNTIL THEY NO LONGER COULD: Covid cases explode in Beijing leaving city streets empty and daily life disrupted. “On Wednesday, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) gave up trying to keep track of all the new Covid cases, announcing it would no longer include asymptomatic infections in its daily count. It had previously reported these cases, albeit in a separate category from ‘confirmed,’ or symptomatic ones.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: DeSantis Won’t Let COVID Vax Charlatans Off the Hook. “At this point, people who still trust the government when it comes to public health should be institutionalized.”

FALLOUT: China bans export of its Loongson CPUs to Russia.

China is the subject of many semiconductor export restrictions, but it seems the Asian nation is also banning the export of its own Loongson CPUs to Russia and elsewhere. It’s likely to be a significant blow to Russia, which has been looking for an alternative to AMD and Intel processors since the companies stopped shipments to the country following its invasion of Ukraine.

Kommersant business daily (via Tom’s Hardware), citing sources close to Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development and in the electronics market, writes that the Chinese government has banned the supply of Loongson processors based on its own LoongArch architecture to the Russian Federation and other countries.

The reasons for banning the chip exports to Russia aren’t the same as other countries; it’s because they are used in China’s military-industrial complex.

I guess China doesn’t have the fab capacity to spare.

Related: ARM won’t sell its latest chip designs in China due to US and UK export controls.

REPAYING THE IMMUNITY DEBT, AS ONE MUST: U.S. faces onslaught of viral diseases heading into 2023.