VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Angela Merkel Takes Germany Down a Suicidal Path:

Germany has bragged of its compassionate capitalism — a mix of private enterprise and paternalistic statism that supposedly checks the exuberance of cowboy profit-seeking and better redistributes the largesse more equably among the population.

But the Volkswagen cheating reminds us that statist capitalism is more, not less, likely to encourage corporate law-breaking than a supposedly selfish American strain of free-market economics. Competition, a more transparent and independent media, and an adversarial rather than partnered government do a better job of checking corporate outlawry.

Who or what might eventually deter the territorial ambitions of Russian president Vladimir Putin? Germany has become the most powerful of the European nations largely by creating a lucrative Eastern European trade empire. The former nations of the Warsaw Pact and many of the breakaway republics of the former Soviet Union sell resources to the German economic juggernaut. In exchange, they buy German consumer and industrial goods — and expect German leadership and protection from an aggressive Putin.

But profits can outweigh German principles. Apparently, the only deterrent that may stop Putin from invading more countries is not watered-down German trade sanctions, but American troops flown into Germany’s backyard from more than 3,000 miles away.

The Greek-German debacle, the migrant mess, the Volkswagen cheating, and the Putin aggression remind us that too often Germany’s professed good intentions are eclipsed by German self-interest — an all-too-familiar experience.

Read the whole thing.

THIS IS CNN: Is democratic socialism the right path for America?

No need to read beyond the headline for the answer, given that the entire history of the network — down to Eason Jordan, CNN’s disgraced former chief executive praising Fidel Castro as the inspiration for CNN International — is the championing of socialism as the right path throughout the entire world. (CNN can do without the democratic part, needless to say.) Just allow CNN to run the two-way telescreens and the memory hole, and they’ll be exceedingly happy campers in the Bloodlands.

FASTER, PLEASE: The FDA Just Approved One Cancer-Killing Virus. Expect More.

AT AMAZON, Save up to 57% on “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Sonic Tractor Beam can levitate and manipulate objects in midair and will scale up to levitate and move soccer ball sized objects.

Of course, I could do that with my Johnny Astro when I was a kid.

A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL?: Ben Domenech, “This Boehner-Obama Deal is Getting Worse All the Time.”

IT’S ALIENS: Modern Mystery: Ancient Comet Spewing Oxygen.

STEPHEN GREEN: Jeb Bush: Obama-Era Republican. “When your best strategy is ‘hunker down with all the money and wait until it’s all over’ then you have no means of dealing with a sensation like Trump — like hiding under the house in the storm cellar when a typhoon comes. Then there’s Rubio.”

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Robots Can Now Teach Each Other New Tricks. “The ability to acquire and then share knowledge is a central component of human culture and civilization. A small milestone in the exchange of robot knowledge has now been demonstrated by two bots working in different academic research labs”

MOVE OVER STANDING DESK: This One Reclines. “Let’s just say that if Captain James Tiberius Kirk had worked at a startup, this would be his desk.”

ED MORRISSEY: Hillary Clinton’s Unbridled Ambition Trips Her Again.

A COUPLE OF DECADES LATE: China Ends Its One-Child Policy Amid Fears Of Aging Population.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 903.

CHANGE: Paul Ryan Elected Speaker.

OUR CREDENTIALED-BUT-NOT-EDUCATED POLITICAL CLASS:

FUNNY, THEY WERE PRAISING HIM JUST A FEW MINUTES AGO: Democrats Gearing Up To Bash Paul Ryan Again.

As Demo­crats send wist­ful good­byes to out­go­ing House Speak­er John Boehner, they’re of­fer­ing a less-warm wel­come to the man slated to re­place him. On im­mig­ra­tion, the budget, and the fed­er­al work­force, GOP lead­er-to-be Paul Ry­an is quickly be­com­ing a chief Demo­crat­ic vil­lain in Wash­ing­ton.

Even be­fore he takes the gavel—or gets elec­ted by the House—Demo­crats’ mes­saging on Ry­an has quickly shif­ted. Once the “adult in the room” who rep­res­en­ted the House’s best chance at or­der, Ry­an is now the budget-slash­ing fiend he was dur­ing his vice pres­id­en­tial cam­paign.

I dunno, a “budget-slashing fiend” sounds pretty good to me.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: Crime Lab Scandals Just Keep Getting Worse. How many people are in jail based on faked data?

DA TECH GUY: Bacon Panic + Poor Math Skills = Easy Money.

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THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS IS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? This Map Shows How Large Europe’s Refugee Crisis Really Is.

ROGER SIMON: CNBC And Jeb Bush Commit Suicide In Boulder. “The big story — the A-story — on Wednesday night — the actual full blown case of seppuku — was CNBC. The network will never seem the same. Their moderators — Becky Quick, John Harwood, and Carl Quintanilla — were so obviously biased you would have thought it was a parody, if you hadn’t known it was real, a kind of black comic nightmare out of a leftwing theatre of the absurd. Ted Cruz superbly caught the temper of the evening when he called them out, specifying how they had attempted to poleax each of the candidates one-by-one. This turned the already alienated audience completely against the moderators with the candidates abandoning their competition and joining forces as well against the moderators in a red versus blue color war. It was fascinating to watch and quite amusing.”

Plus: “Harwood did something extraordinary. He lied about Rubio’s tax plan in the exact same way not once but twice — once at the debate and once about two weeks before the debate. What made it extraordinary was that Harwood had apologized for that same lie the first time on Twitter on October 14 and then lied again Wednesday night as if he didn’t remember his own apology and correction.”

As Ed Driscoll notes below, even journalists who usually make excuses for media bias were appalled. Or as AllahPundit tweeted: Tonight’s the night the rest of the media learned that media bias is real.

UPDATE: The Gang That Couldn’t Bias Straight. “I’ve watched a lot of debates in which liberal media bias has been evident. But I have never seen it unite Republican presidential candidates like it did last night. They rose up in revolt and called out the moderators for it – led by Ted Cruz and followed effectively by Rubio, Christie and Trump. it was an epic moment, and I think it rattled the cages of mainstream media types everywhere.”

Good. These people are not your friends. They work for the other side. If you’re smart, you’ll treat them accordingly. Glad to see that the candidates got smart last night. Much more here.

WE HAVE OUR FINAL SIX: “Trump, Carson, Rubio, Cruz, and maybe — just maybe — Fiorina and Christie,” Jonathan Last posits at the Weekly Standard. “And as for Bush? Jeb’s dead, baby. Jeb’s dead.”

Heh — read the whole thing.™

WHAT CITY JOURNAL WROUGHT: In honor of his magazine’s 25 anniversary, Myron Magnet, City Journal’s founder and editor-at-large looks back at the worst of New York’s Bad Old Days, and how the city gradually turned itself around, at least for a time:

In 1983, the Mobil Oil Corporation, to show Mayor Edward Koch why it was contemplating leaving New York, videotaped the sordidness around its 42nd Street headquarters, near Grand Central. The camera caught the rotting trash, the pee-filled potholes, the degradation of the homeless hordes—some crazy and some shiftless—through which Mobil employees had to pick their way into the then-shabby, billboard-plastered station to catch trains home to their orderly suburbs, fragrant with new-mown grass. After shots of corporate headquarters located in similarly bucolic suburbs, the wordless video closed with the written question: “What do we tell our employees?”

Mobil’s answer, in 1987, was to move to Fairfax, Virginia. More than 100 of some 140 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Gotham in the 1950s asked the same question and reached the same conclusion, pulling out their tax dollars and leading their well-paid workers into greener pastures in those pre–Rudolph Giuliani decades. They were among the million New Yorkers, many of them the elderly rich and the well-educated young, who fled Gotham in the 1970s and 1980s.

The squalor was only one problem. Another was crime. Of course, much of the disorder—the open dope-dealing, the public drinking, the streetwalkers serving every almost-unthinkable taste, the three-card-monte cardsharpers and their pickpocket confederates preying on the crowds they drew, the window-rattling boombox radios—was itself against the law. But these minor crimes deepened as a coastal shelf into burglary, car theft, armed robbery, assault, rape, and murder—one killing every four hours every day of the annus horribilis 1990.

Read the whole thing. Though curiously missing from a CTL-F search of Magnet’s article is the word “Blasio.” Perhaps someone might want to convert Mobil’s 1983 videotape to DVD or upload it to YouTube, as everything old is new again in the Big Apple. (Don’t mind the maggots.)

ASHE SCHOW: Media Selectively Ignore Harassment To Paint People They Don’t Like As Misogynists:

While most of the mainstream technology media insist that the online movement known as GamerGate is a harassment movement, that same media ignores the actions and accusations of those claiming to oppose such harassment.

It’s all about the narrative. More here.