PREHISTORIC CHEESE: Humans made cheese 7,500 years ago, researchers say.

POLIWOOD: Roger Simon talks about his new play, The Party Line. On YouTube.

HMM: Jovan Belcher shooting triggered by paternity issues?

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Arrogant Unilateralist Obama Defies the UN . . . and thank goodness he did.

The U.S., along with Canada, the UK, and a handful of other sensible countries, has walked away from the deranged plan to “occupy the internet” strongly supported by that wonderful thing, the “global community.”

The International Telecommunications Union (“committed to connecting the world”), another innocently named UN bureaucracy with great destructive potential, won’t be a vehicle to strengthen the repressive powers of UN members like China, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba. . . . Of course, autocracies can still try to control the internet domestically, and they can even try to cooperate with other friendly autocracies. But it appears they won’t be able to leverage the UN to help them do it. Harebrained schemes like taxing international internet traffic, legitimizing government censorship, and putting UN bureaucrats in charge of running the internet have been warded off for now.

This shows that on the issues he cares about President Obama is as much of a cowboy as Ronald Reagan. Indeed, cowboy American unilateralism isn’t confined to the Right. Remember that Ted Kennedy voted against the Kyoto protocol.

Alas, the threat is only halted, not abolished.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG IN THE ATLANTIC: What Can We Do To Stop Massacres?

We must find a way to make it more difficult for the non-adjudicated mentally ill to come into possession of weapons. This is crucially important, but very difficult, because it would require the cooperation of the medical community — of psychiatrists, therapists, school counselors and the like — and the privacy issues (among other issues) are enormous. But: It has to be made more difficult for sociopaths, psychopaths and the violently mentally-ill (who, in total, make up a small portion of the mentally ill population) to buy weapons.

People should have the ability to defend themselves. Mass shootings take many lives in part because no one is firing back at the shooters. The shooters in recent massacres have had many minutes to complete their evil work, while their victims cower under desks or in closets. One response to the tragic reality that we are a gun-saturated country is to understand that law-abiding, well-trained, non-criminal, wholly sane citizens who are screened by the government have a role to play in their own self-defense, and in the defense of others (read The Atlantic article to see how one armed school administrator stopped a mass shooting in Pearl Mississippi). I don’t know anything more than anyone else about the shooting in Connecticut at the moment, but it seems fairly obvious that there was no one at or near the school who could have tried to fight back.

More at the link.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Gun-free zones provide false sense of security.

GLOBAL WARMING UPDATE: IPCC Admission Has Climate World Buzzing. “So the IPCC, at the moment at least, stands ready to admit that the evidence supports a much larger role for solar activity, and a correspondingly much smaller role for CO2. Of course, other sections of the report implicitly contradict this admission.” Hmm.

ROLL CALL: Michigan Fight Symbolizes Coming Changes In Delegation. “Michigan once served as a national bastion for organized labor, economic prosperity and moderate Republicans. Not anymore.”

AGAIN WITH THE BLOOD LIBELS: Michael Moore: “The NRA Hates Freedom.”

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Steven Crowder Files Criminal Complaint Against Pro-Union Protester.

PIERS MORGAN, PLEASE TAKE NOTE: British Culture of violence: Gun crime goes up by 89% in a decade. Despite draconian gun-control laws.

BOB ZUBRIN TO THE GOP: Don’t Jump Off The Cliff: “Better to take the deal on middle class tax cuts now and work for something better later.”

STILL WONDERING what kind of guns Rupert Murdoch’s security team carries.

LOOKING DEEPLY INTO THE MEANING OF “Cornball Brother.”

IT’S NOT SOLUTIONS THEY’RE AFTER: Dr. Keith Ablow: “..Those who call for gun control after incidents like this contribute nothing to the solution.”

“PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS” IDENTIFY WRONG MAN AS NEWTOWN SHOOTER, THREATS ENSUE. The story headline blames the “Internet,” but that’s not really what happened, is it? “CNN, the Huffington Post, Slate and other news organizations” are not the Internet.

And it’s not a question of “where on the internet the misidentified innocents can go to reclaim their online reputations.” They should go to court and sue. This sort of feeding frenzy — which we’ve seen before — is the very picture of “reckless disregard.”

STACY MCCAIN: Chris Rock Was Right.

ROGER KIMBALL ON THE NEWTOWN SHOOTINGS:

Details about the horrible school shooting in the Sandy Hook section of Newtown, Connecticut are still emerging. According to some reports, the shooter had “a dispute” with his mother, and so targeted her and her kindergarten class. As of this writing, it seems that 20 children and 7 adults, including the 20-year-old mad man who murdered them, are dead.

What can one say? The horror is particularly close to home for me and my family if only because until this year our son went to school in Newtown (but not at Sandy Hook). Mute horror seems appropriate as a first response to such obscene displays of malevolence. But already one is hearing the predictable homilies about “gun control,” as if depriving people of their liberties would somehow contravene evil.

It’s magical thinking. Or an effort to take advantage of people who engage in magical thinking.

ARE AMERICANS “OVERTAXED AND UNDER-REPRESENTED?”

THIS, MY BOY, IS WHAT WE CALL “CHANGE:” The USA Probably passed Saudi Arabia as the Number One Total Oil liquids Producing Country in the first week of December 2012.

JOHN PODHORETZ: Gehenna In Connecticut. “The idea that civilization is dedicated to the protection and preservation the weak and the innocent, and not about fulfilling evil impulses to defile and destroy innocence, is the root and core of the West.”

IT IS NOW FOUR DECADES SINCE WE LEFT THE MOON. But we have a lot of social-welfare bureaucrats on the payroll that we didn’t have back then.

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