DOZENS AND GROWING: Universities Rejecting American Studies Association’s Academic Boycott Of Israel. But that’s not enough. Attendance at ASA conferences, and purchase of ASA publications, should be defunded. Lessons must be taught.

From Prof. Jacobson:

Universities need to do more than just denounce the academic boycott. They need to contain the academic nuclear explosion set off by the ASA by applying university open access and non-discrimination rules to on-campus events.

That is why we will continue to raise the issue of how UT-Austin could host and sponsor the NAISA annual meeting when that group signed onto the BDS academic boycott and will conduct that conference in a discriminatory manner.

And we will raise that issue on every campus where the academic boycott groups hold conferences.

The kind of vicious idiocy perpetrated by the ASA happens in large part because it’s largely cost-free to the perpetrators. Change that, and the behavior will change as well.

SPYING: Stanford Researchers: It Is Trivially Easy to Match Metadata to Real People.

On the other hand, there’s this: NSA Struggles to Make Sense of Flood of Surveillance Data: Spy Agency Drowns in Useless Data, Impeding Work, Former Employee Claims.

Downside: They can’t find terrorists by data-trawling, but if they’ve identified someone in advance, like, say, a political enemy, they can easily find dirt on them.

WELCOME TO THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: This Political Cartoon From 20 Years Ago Was Disturbingly Prescient.

NO, THE SUBJECTS JUST CHANGE TO SUIT PEOPLE’S OTHER AGENDAS: America’s Culture Wars Will Never End.

HOW CONSUMERS CONTRIBUTED TO CHRISTMAS DELIVERY PROBLEMS: “We are a nation that buys a lot of stuff late.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Glenn, good link regarding the role of buyers in the FedEx/UPS problems. There’s blame all around. However, what’s big enough to affect both companies so much? Draw a line straight from “deliveries were late” to “more than half the country is already covered in snow” and you’re onto something. I work at a FedEx Ground/Home terminal and if it got to us. it got delivered, despite our three consecutive record days the week before Christmas (normal peak is around 12,000 on the heaviest days of the season, where this year we topped at 14,400-odd). We had a day, though, when there was not much because of weather, and those heavy days were heavier than they’d have been due to weather (pumping through more at the hubs to make up for stuff having piled up). It’s essentially a just-in-time system. The 2nd biggest hub in the world shut down for 3 days. When the stuff flooded through, one of the nearest other terminals to us ended up with trailers parked in their yard, unable to process and send it all out on vans, and apparently never caught up. A new terminal in the state, being less experienced, had 10,000 packages backed up in their yard but got them all out on the 23rd and 24th because those days were light. We kept up so well (we’re one of the highest paid terminals in the country for a reason), I didn’t realize just how crazy it was until the same day the “UPS and FedEx are evil and incompetent” news hit big.

I thought global warming would have fixed that by now.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Area educators arrested.

KYLE SMITH: The Ten Best Conservative Books Of 2013. Number One on his list is Gregory Zuckerman’s The Frackers, which — surprisingly to me — hasn’t gotten as much attention on the right as I’d expect. It’s a story of capitalism saving the world, so you’d think it would have made a bigger splash among people who support, you know, capitalism.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Putting Our Toe Back In The Water In Iraq.

L.A. TIMES: Hollywood’s new financiers make deals with state tax credits: Brokers take the credits given to studios for location filming and sell them to wealthy people and companies looking to shave their state tax bills.

I say, repeal the Hollywood tax cuts! And the state tax credits, too. Thoughts on that subject here.

IT’S JUST AN INDIVIDUALLY-IMPOSED TAX: Crazytown: L.A.’s Over-the-Top Parking Tickets Spark Revolt.

HEH: Pere Ubu Frontman David Thomas Bewilders A Fan by Obdurately Believing Markets are Proper for Art. “I get a weird pleasure of watching supporters of the obscure arts, whose fans lean overwhelmingly liberal-prog-commie, get increasingly bewildered as their heroes obdurately refuse to ratify their politics for them, forcing them to confront the unbelievable: decent worthwhile humans I admire might disagree with me about core elements of my politics!”

REPUBLICANS USED TO LAG DEMS ON THE GENERIC CONGRESSIONAL BALLOT. NOW THE GOP IS WAY AHEAD. “Whoa! 2 months ago the Dems were up by 8 and now they are down by 5? That’s a 13-point change in the spread. . . . Get ready for the anti-Obama Democrats. What will they look like? Perhaps they’ll grind away at him from the left on issues like the NSA surveillance and drone warfare. They could say Obamacare was devised as a sop to Republicans who outrageously avoided all responsibility for it when it failed, and single-payer was always the only good answer, and it’s where we must go now.”

Good luck with that. But don’t get cocky, GOP. You could still blow it. You excel at that. . . .

ADVICE: Be prepared: Wall Street advisor recommends guns, ammo for protection in collapse.

Related: Why Gold Would Be Useless in an Economic Apocalypse. Once the recovery begins, though . . . .

DAVE SWINDLE: The 10 Best Conservative Columnists Of 2013.

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SCIENCE: Professor admits faking AIDS vaccine to get $19M in grants. But there’s a stiff penalty: “Han agreed last month not to seek government contracts for three years, the register said.”

A GUN WOULD HAVE BEEN EASIER, BUT A KNIFE WORKS, TOO: New mother stabbed home intruder to death with a steak knife after he broke in with plans to VIDEOTAPE raping her. She’s a CrossFitter, which may have helped. But my advice for the future is to buy a gun.

FALSE FLAG: This conspiracy-theory account of Mandela’s funeral is just intended to distract from and discredit reports of what’s really going on. Wake up, sheeple!

HEH: A&E is now cancelling “Duck Dynasty” and replacing it with a new show about life in the White House. It will be called “Duck Responsibility.”

ARE PEOPLE CARRYING GUNS? Ruger LCP Sales Are Huge. It’s a nice little gun once you break it in. It’s easy to add the Crimson Trace laser sight to it, too.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “He wasn’t looking at her vagina at all. It was her imagination.”

WELL, AS DISTRACTIONS GO, IT’S BETTER THAN INVADING THE FALKLANDS: Argentina Launches A Rocket While Its Infrastructure Collapses.

LOOKING AT THE 2015 Ford Mustang.

DIESEL DELIGHT: Looking At The BMW 535d.

POST-CHRISTMAS CLEARANCE: Year-End Deals at Amazon.

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