MATTHEW CONTINETTI ON THE LAMEST DUCK:

We have entered a most dangerous period of the Obama presidency. It’s not just that every rogue actor from Kim and Putin and Castro to Maduro and Khamenei and Xi knows he has one last year to behave badly without fear of reprisal. It’s that the president and his team are isolated, aloof, detached from reality.

They think a climate deal is a rebuke to terrorism. They think the response to jihad in San Bernardino is to ‘close the gun-show loophole.’ They think a new communications strategy will convince the public that the war against ISIS is going well. I don’t question Obama’s sincerity. I question his sanity.

Read the whole thing.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Inexpensive transparent conductors from correlated metal nanostructures.

SUBPRIME 2.0: Fannie Mae Rolls Out Easy Mortgage, Catering To High-Risk Immigrants, Investor’s Business Daily notes:

The White House is rolling out a new low-income mortgage program that for the first time lets lenders qualify borrowers by counting income from nonborrowers living in the household. What could go wrong?

The HomeReady program is offered through Fannie Mae, which is now controlled by Obama’s old Congressional Black Caucus pal Mel Watt. It replaces the bankrupted mortgage giant’s notorious old subprime program, MyCommunityMortgage.

In case renaming the subprime product fails to fool anybody, the affordable-housing geniuses in the administration have re-termed “subprime,” a dirty word since the mortgage bust, “alternative.”

So HomeReady isn’t a subprime mortgage program, you see, it’s an “alternative” mortgage program.

But it might was well be called DefaultReady, because it is just as risky as the subprime junk Fannie was peddling on the eve of the crisis.

That’s going to end well — I wonder on who’s watch it will go off?

(Via Ace.)

HMM: How Training Without Helmets Could Reduce Head Injuries.

SO I GOT AROUND TO INSTALLING THE FIRE STICK TV WITH VOICE REMOTE and, as promised, here’s my review. First, installation and setup were super-easy. One minor disappointment: It’s only sort of a “stick.” It plugs into the HDMI port on your TV, but apparently the HDMI bus doesn’t really provide enough power so there’s an external power supply. You can use it without the external power, I gather, but it doesn’t work as well. There were complaints about wifi reception, but it worked fine for me — but it’s pretty close to the router. Picture was great, signing in to Netflix was easy, and everything worked fine.

The Alexa feature works fine, too. You push the voice button and ask it to do things — play music, tell you the weather, etc. — and it does them seamlessly. Not bad for the price.

HMM: Swedish pool makes splash with gender jacuzzi split.

The move follows reports by increasing numbers of women, who claim they have been groped by men as they relax in the giant bubble baths.

Sweden may have an international reputation for promoting gender equality, but the Eriksdalsbadet complex – home to one of the most popular public swimming pools in Sweden – is introducing segregated hot tubs for the first time.

The move follows reports by increasing numbers of women, who claim they have been groped by men as they relax in the giant bubble baths.

“We’ve got a lot of requests, especially from women, to split the jacuzzis,” Sara Franzén Shilwan, the head of unit at Eriksdalsbadet told The Local, but refused to reveal the number of complaints made.

However she confirmed that there had been a noticeable rise in November and December last year.

Why, whatever could have changed in Sweden that might account for this?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Escape Rooms—a Fun and Challenging Way to Maximize Your Entertainment Dollar.

ALWAYS A PLUS: Pyro Geniuses Make a Roman Candle Minigun; Surprisingly, they manage not to blow themselves up. The video is pretty cool, though it’s not actually a Gatling.

WELL, SOMEBODY HAS TO: The Times: Breitbart London Brought The Truth About Cologne To The Global Public.

DER SPIEGEL: Chaos and Violence: How New Year’s Eve in Cologne Has Changed Germany. “For some, the events finally bring to light what they have always been saying: that too many foreigners in the country bring too many problems along with them. For the others, that which happened is what they have been afraid of from the very beginning: that ugly images of ugly behavior by migrants would endanger what has been a generally positive mood in Germany with respect to the refugees.”

AN ARMY OF BILL CLINTONS:

And, like Bill, they have a bunch of Hillary-types trying to run cover and blame the accusers.

NEWS YOUR DM CAN USE. Practiced In The Arts of Deception: Moe Lane on the Art of Lying in a RPG.

BERNIE SANDERS: Bill Clinton’s behavior ‘totally disgraceful and unacceptable.’

What he doesn’t mention is that Hillary’s behavior in attacking Bill’s accusers was just as bad.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 975.

WEENIES IN THE FIRE: 40 years ago, Tom Wolfe was asked by his interviewer, “Why do your critics despise you so? What have you done to merit such contempt?” He replied:

Intellectuals aren’t used to being written about. When they aren’t taken seriously and become part of the human comedy, they have a tendency to squeal like weenies over an open fire.

Or in the case of the socialist justice warriors, they first scream like weenies over an open fire, and then they go running en masse to the playground safety monitor:

However, “Twitter Unverifies Outspoken Conservative Journalist. It’s Unlikely It Ever Expected This Response in Return.”

FISH DON’T KNOW THEY’RE WET: Academics Are So Lefty They Don’t Even See It, Megan McArdle writes.

How bad is it? “University of Missouri Faculty Declare Support for ‘Muscle,'” Jonathan Last adds:

Note that last bit about freedom of speech and the First Amendment. When the left wants to build “safe spaces” and stamp out “hate speech,” the First Amendment is an outmoded, retrograde element that needs to be bent into submission. Last fall, for instance, Brenda Smith-Lezama, the vice president of Mizzou’s student body, went on MSNBC to defend Click by explaining that, “I personally am tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here.”

When denying the First Amendment rights of the student journalist Click targeted for muscle didn’t work, the faculty decided to try to wrap the First Amendment around Click herself.

It all sounds like nonsense until you remember this: Free speech, hate speech, whatever. Nobody on the left actually cares about principle here. It’s all about power.

Indeed.™ — or at the very least, attempting to survive the apocalypse.

THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS SMILE: In Germany, Reality Sets In.

In 2015, as more than a million refugees and migrants streamed into Germany, many pundits and industry leaders initially praised Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “welcome policy” as not only being humane but also economically savvy. But now, as Politico reports, a new reality appears to be setting in as the German analysts have a closer look at just who the migrants are. The official government line continues to be that migrants could take some of the unoccupied jobs caused by Germany’s declining labor force (there are as many as one million such jobs). But the director of the Munich-based Ifo Center for the Economics of Education is quoted in the story that “[f]rom everything we know so far, it seems that the majority of refugees would first need extensive training and even then it’s far from certain that it would work out.”

The Politico story also notes that, according to the OECD, on average, an eighth-grader in pre-war Syria had a similar level of education to a third-grade student in Germany. And an official from the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce is quoted as saying, “[s]omeone who comes from Eritrea and says he was an electrician might have repaired a radio or laid a cable there, but he might have never seen a fuse box, as we use it in Germany.”

Plus: “Only a tiny percentage of these asylum seekers are well enough educated to hold down a middle-class enabling professional job in an economy like Germany’s.”

Then there are the cultural differences, which dwarf the educational shortfall.