FREE ON KINDLE TODAY: Target: Santa (A Holiday Black-Ops Campaign). (Bumped).

THE STORY ISN’T DEAD: Benghazi Questions, State Department Answers. According to a spokesperson, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was recuperating from “a really painful bunion” and was thus unable to comment.

BY ITS FRUIT THE TREE IS KNOWN: 440+ School Age Children Shot in Gun-Controlled Chicago. “In a gun-control-utopia such as this, you’d expect school-age children to be safe from all harm, if you buy into the theories of Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Yet the truth is more than 440 school-age children have been shot in Chicago in 2012. This is not to say that 440 school-age children died, simply that more than 440 school-age children were at least wounded. The number of school-age children killed is reported at approximately 60.”

COOL: SpaceX’s reusable rocket lifts cowboy into the air and lands vertically. In Alex Pournelle’s words, “As God and Robert A. Heinlein intended.”

RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS POST ASSASSINATION HIT LIST. “In fact, the newsletter conveniently provides the names, addresses and phone numbers of the assassination targets.”

UPDATE: Reader Warren Bonesteel writes: “The ‘narrative’ is about making it socially acceptable to start killing Republicans and conservatives. This type of ‘narrative’ is always a precursor to such events, historically speaking.” We do seem to be hearing a lot of eliminationist rhetoric lately.

CLASSY: Intimidation: NY Newspaper Publishes Names, Addresses of Gun Permit Holders. I guess nobody could object to people putting the newspaper staff’s addresses on the Web now, right?.

UPDATE: Sauce for the goose. Meanwhile, several readers suggest that it’s mean to the non-gun-owning populace to post the gunowner list, since burglars and home invaders can now just check their addresses against the list to ensure that they’re safe to rob. . . .

You know, other newspapers have done this sort of thing, and they’ve pretty much all gotten terrible PR out of it. You have to wonder why people keep doing it. I can’t help but feel that they’re not trying to maximize shareholder value.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jeff Brown writes: “So is that NY newspaper going to pay to relocate the women who have gun permits due to stalkers and abusive spouses now that the paper has revealed their new addresses? What about the children who will now spend Christmas in a shelter or motel because their mother had to run?”

MORE: Moe Lane: “You know who should be ticked about this? People in those counties without handgun permits. Because burglars are gonna burgle.”

GOOD TIDINGS TO YOU, AND ALL OF YOUR CRONIES: While Much of America Suffers with Stagnation, Washington’s Political Class Is Having a Very Merry Christmas. “Why should ordinary taxpayers be coerced to subsidize Washington’s high-flying parasite economy? Redistribution is a bad thing in most circumstances. But when you redistribute from poor to rich, that’s utterly perverse.”

A WHITE HOUSE PETITION: Press charges against David Gregory for possession of a 30-round, high capacity assault rifle magazine in Washington D.C.

UPDATE: Well, it’s easy to see where Gregory gets his scofflaw attitude: Hey David Gregory, Wasn’t Your Wife a Fannie Mae Executive?

JACK REACHER sounds better than I expected.

THE AUDI electric bike.

OOPS: Toddler Hides Eggs In His Closet; Hatches 7 Deadly Snakes.

LARRY CORREIA: An Opinion On Gun Control. (Reposted).

OKAY, SOME PEOPLE PREFER REAL BOOKS TO KINDLE BOOKS, AND I’M COOL WITH THAT. But this is pretty darn cool, too: Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, All 6 volumes plus Biography, Historiography and more. Over 8,000 Links (Illustrated) — for $2.99. And particularly apt reading these days.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Great timing. A friend and I were just bemoaning the state of public education yesterday, and I commented to him that I did a huge (for me, then), foot-noted, research paper on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in HIGH SCHOOL. Handwritten notecards, drafted longhand, and transferred to typewriter. That was in 11th grade, I think, about 1976 or 1977, and I picked the book. I remember only one volume, so it must have been an abridged version, but it was still well over 1000 pages.

From what I read of today’s education system, I can hardly imagine a college student doing this, never mind a high schooler. The kid would probably sue if assigned today.

Decline and fall, indeed.

I’m sure there are high schools where this is done. But, yeah.

PRINCE HARRY KILLS TALIBAN.

FLIPFLOP: What Obama said about mass murder after the Aurora massacre, at the second presidential debate. “If reelection gives special weight to Obama’s policy preferences, we should hold him to what he said to [get] the votes.”

SCIENCE: Study: Women With Larger Breasts Are Smarter.

A BOOK THAT SHOULD BE GETTING MORE ATTENTION AMID TODAY’S MEDIA FUSILLADE: The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines. (Bumped).

UPDATE: And here come the copycats. “Four volunteer firefighters responding to a pre-dawn house fire were shot Monday morning, two fatally, leading to a shootout in suburban Rochester, N.Y. with the alleged gunman found dead the scene, police said.” It was apparently set up as an ambush.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Chuck Simmins has much more. Including this: “Chief says Spengler, as a convicted felon, not allowed to possess weapons.”

MORE: Professor Stephen Clark writes:

Spengler is perfect example of Correia’s point that government will not be the last line of defense against the bad guys. Bad guys don’t care about law, they break it; it’s what they do. As for the copy-cat effect, so noted. But…and I keep hammering on this…characters like Spengler are not the only ones watching.

Correia mentions Mumbai. Might the people who produced Mumbai be watching us; watching how our society reacts? What lessons are they drawing? If you are a terrorist organization and want to provoke an overreaction by the state and federal authorities that might, just might, provoke a backlash apropos the last part of Correia’s post, what would you do?

Just another thing to worry about.

WAR AGAINST THE YOUNG: Debt obligations will hit young hardest.

REASON TV: A Joe Biden (War On) Christmas.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Putin Whistles In The Dark As Russia Declines:

President Putin is doing his best to spin the numbers on Russian demography. After catastrophic declines in population since the death of the Soviet Union, Russia saw births outnumber deaths last year and, temporarily, the demographic numbers look better. As the Financial Times reports, the ebullient sounding President remarked that the solution to Russia’s demographic problmes ar at home: “Our women know what to do, and when,” he remarked.

In 2012, births outnumbered deaths in Russia from January through September — the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union that this has happened. Putin would like to claim this as a long term trend that could reverse Russia’s geopolitical slide, but there are two reasons for doubting that the baby boomlet means what he says it does.

The first is numbers: demographers note that the increase in Russian births this year reflects the coming of age of the relatively large generation of Russian millennials. These children of the optimistic perestroika years are now having children. Russia had something of a baby boom in those joyous and optimistic late Soviet days when the doors to a better life seemed to be opening wide. As the privations, lawlessness and social collapse of the ensuing era appeared, Russian women cut back on child bearing and once the echo of the perestroika baby boom fades away, Russia is looking at decades of shrinking numbers of women of child bearing years. The demographic good news is a blip, not a trend.

Much worse from President Putin’s point of view, one suspects, is the question — not addressed in the FT article or mentioned much in polite company in Russia — of just who is having babies in Russia today.

Read the whole thing.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: White House Wavers on Hagel, Considers Others for Defense.

THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS: 卐mas Caroling: The Extremes Hitler Wanted to Go To in Order to Replace Christianity with the “Religion” of National Socialism.

John Gibson, call your office!

AT AMAZON, Year-End Deals.

Also, today only, MP3 albums for $1.99 or less.

REASON TV: Grandma Got Indefinitely Detained.