TIM BLAIR: RUSSIAN INTERVENTION EXPOSED!

Dearest Dimitri

I am pleased to report that phase one of Operation Cankles is total success! Soviet implantation of stupid American woman resulted in birth today of hefty girl-child destined to be unelectable candidate 70 years from now.

Child is basically just ankles and head, similar to sturdy and hard-working female stock from adored Ilmensky Mountains. In decadent America, nobody will ever vote for such a noble being.

Yours in Soviet solidarity,

Sergei

Needless to say, read the whole thing, comrade.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 99 Reasons 2016 Was a Good Year. They leave out Trump’s election, but whatever.

HMM: A Very Depressing Paper On The Great Stagnation. That we are in a period of comparative stagnation is pretty clear. My own feeling is that it’s a lull, and that — if government policies don’t ruin things — we’ll see a new era of explosive growth as new technologies like nanotech, biotech (and hey, maybe the EM Drive!) kick in. I hope I’m right, anyway.

HAM SANDWICH NATION: California man fights DUI charge for driving under influence of caffeine.

AMERICAN IMPROVISATION IN THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE: White sheets as winter camouflage. The sheet-draped GIs look cold and tired. Compare the improv to the winter camouflage uniforms featured in this photo posted December 16. Note the “Marching to St. Vith” photo has another correction — 23rd Armored Infantry Battalion (7th Armored Division). Several StrategyPage and Instapundit readers think the soldiers are from the 1st Infantry Division. Both divisions arrived in the battle zone on December 17.

THIS WILL END WELL: Berlin Terrorist Urged Muslims to Launch Attacks ‘Within Their Means.’

FIRST CENTURY MEDICINE: Indian Villagers Are Drinking Cow Urine to Cure Acne.

FASTER, PLEASE: A Major Breakthrough In Modern Medicine: Regenerative Medicine Is Finally A Reality!

WELL, HE’S A SUPERNATURAL BEING, SO . . . Does Santa’s Diet, Lifestyle Earn Him a Stocking Full of Coal?

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: “…how could a tune with the line ‘guilty feet have got no rhythm’ ever take off?”

Forget it, Jake – it’s MTV-town.

WHY ARE DEMOCRATS SUCH FANS OF PROSECUTORIAL OVERREACH? “Never let it be said that Kamala Harris gives up after being told her totally bogus legal crusade is totally bogus. She’s now filed brand new charges against the execs who run Backpage.com — despite having the very same lawsuit thrown out a few weeks ago.”

POST-CHRISTMAS, YOU CAN STILL Give the Gift of Amazon Prime.

THE GREATEST SPIROGRAPHS IN THE WORLD.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Robotic Kiss Transmitter Lets You Smooch a Loved One From Afar.

I’M STILL WAFFLING ON WHETHER TO DO THIS: British Futurist In Charge of U.S. Cryogenic Facility Reveals Plans To Freeze His Own Head. The upside is that if it works, I won’t be lonely, as a lot of my tech-y friends have already signed up.

FASTER, PLEASE: “Yes, I know good news is hard to swallow,” Michael Ledeen writes in a timely column headlined “Bye Bye Obama,” “but we are living in a revolutionary moment, of which the Trump election is a dramatic symptom.  The crisis of the Islamic Republic would be a fitting end to the Obama era. He dreamt of a glorious strategic alliance with Iran, and a definitive lethal blow against Israel. How fitting with the Divine sense of humor to have the Palestinians and Iranians to wreck their own enterprises.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: University of Oregon illegally violates free speech in Halloween costume punishment. “The report’s findings of ‘harassment’ are nonsense. Courts have ruled that far more offensive behavior does not rise to the level of illegal racial harassment.”

CHRISTMAS IN BASTOGNE 1944: Paratroopers walking past their dead comrades. A poignant photo. Over the weekend StrategyPage posted some other photos in its Battle of the Bulge commemorative series. I’ll try to post them later in the day.

RELATED: An Instapundit reader gets a thank you for helping correctly identify the Ardennes locale in a battle photo. Note the webmaster says he’ll contact the National Archives.

CHINESE AIRCRAFT CARRIER TAKES A SPIN THROUGH THE SOUTH CHINA SEA: It isn’t the first time. But we will see more of this.

Influential state-run Chinese tabloid the Global Times said the exercise showed how the carrier was improving its combat capabilities and that it should now sail even further afield.

“The Chinese fleet will cruise to the Eastern Pacific sooner or later. When China’s aircraft carrier fleet appears in offshore areas of the U.S. one day, it will trigger intense thinking about maritime rules,” the newspaper said in an editorial.

A trigger warning from Beijing?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1326: Delay In Koskinen Impeachment Is Discordant Note In Kumbaya Between Trump And GOP Congress.

FISH DON’T KNOW THEY’RE WET: The New York Times turns to Media Matters to get to the bottom of that whole “Fake News” controversy.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: UN Vote on Settlements Can’t Hide Palestinian Collapse.

Many Palestinians and many of their sympathizers would like to see this vote as a landmark victory for the Palestinian cause in a long campaign to isolate Israel diplomatically and to delegitimize it morally in the eyes of the world. The vote is certainly a propaganda victory for the Palestinian cause, but it does nothing to help the Palestinians in practical terms. Indeed, a sober look at the situation suggests that the Palestinians have not been this weak, this divided or this helpless in many decades. Almost everywhere one looks around the world, the net effect of the policies of the Obama presidency has been to undermine the movements and the values that the President hoped to support; the cause of the Palestinians and the quest for the two state solution are no exceptions to the rule.

Palestinians have been organizing to fight Zionism for well over 100 years; during all that time the fundamental problems of the Palestinians have come from the weakness of Palestinian political leadership and the lack of capacity of Palestinian institutions. During the Mandate period when Palestine was under British rule, the Jews organized a proto-state and a political leadership that was able to make the numerically smaller Jewish community much more effective and powerful on the ground than their Palestinian Arab rivals. The Palestinian Arabs were cursed by family and clan divisions, and perhaps most of all by the incompetent leadership of the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini, and were politically divided, militarily impotent and diplomatically inept in the most critical hours of their history. . . .

The Sunni Arabs, the most natural if always self-interested and undependable allies of the Palestinian cause, are so weak and divided that they look to Israel as a defender of the Sunni world against the Persians and the Shi’a. The European Union has never been less able to exert influence beyond its frontiers. The incapacity of the United Nations to do anything concrete in the Middle East has never been more obvious; ask the people of Aleppo how much of a player the United Nations really is. The end of the Obama administration would have been a setback for the Palestinians even if Hillary Clinton had been the next President; with the succession of Donald Trump the United States appears to be shifting toward a pro-Likud orientation in its Israel policy. Putin has broken from the Russian tradition of sympathy for the Palestinians; Erdogan at least for now is prioritizing his need for Israeli support over his instinctive sympathy for the Palestinians and in any case, his identification with Hamas threatens to perpetuate rather than to heal Palestinian weakness and division.

Meanwhile, inside Israel, the pro-settlement Right senses that this unprecedented moment of Palestinian weakness offers a historic opportunity.

No vote in the impotent echo chamber of the Security Council can change any of these facts.

Well, good.

FASTER, PLEASE: Obama’s Israel Vendetta Opens the Door for Trump to Defund the UN, Roger Simon posits.

Why are we still a part of that corrupt pro-totalitarian organization anyhow?

WHY EUROPE ROSE and others did not. Soon to be followed by “why Europe fell?”