WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Amazon’s patent for a flying warehouse.

An Amazon patent available through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office details plans to create an “airborne fulfillment center.” Basically, a flying warehouse. According to CNBC, Amazon was awarded the patent on the fulfillment center in April.

The patent says the warehouse could remain at a high altitude, and drones “with ordered items may be deployed from the AFC to deliver ordered items to user designated delivery locations.”

The patent also says shuttles could deliver more inventory to the warehouse, as well as transport employees.

Drones and airdrops would be nice, but if you want real speed, you’ll have to wait for ballistic deliveries.

AIR AND GROUND COOPERATION IN THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE DOWNS A LUFTWAFFE FIGHTER: Today’s StrategyPage Battle of the Bulge photo — with an amazing story and a “warm” photo in the Ardennes snow. This is the first time I’ve heard this story, but apparently it is well documented.

RELATED: Hmmm. I was looking around StrategyPage and found an interesting photo that isn’t from the Battle of the Bulge photo. In fact, it’s quite recent. It isn’t something I would normally link to on Instapundit. However, the photo shows U.S. Army paratroopers in a very cold environment having a blast.

WILL TRUMP CALL CALIFORNIA’S BLUFF? Jerry Brown’s Sacramento and Donald Trump’s Washington are on a collision course:

Following the inauguration, California will continue to go its own way legislatively. A list of new laws for the new year include many of the various progressive fixations — more gun control, more aggressive climate-change targets, higher minimum wages and more employer mandates, new rules regarding bathrooms for transgendered people, higher smoking ages, etc. Expect more of the same, except that Democrats will have an easier time of things now that they control supermajorities in both houses.

None of that is anything new, but we could see some serious showdowns between the Trump administration and the newly energized California Democratic leadership over immigration policies and climate-change rules. The question is whether the new president will call California’s bluff. If he does, the face-offs could become entertaining. Will Brown and company stand firm if there’s a price to pay? Will the state’s leaders be willing to lose federal immigration or transportation funding if they choose to thumb their nose at the feds? Will federal immigration enforcement insist on having access to, say, gang databases and other records? If so, might we see county sheriffs — or even Gov. Brown — standing on courthouse or jailhouse steps refusing access to federal agents? The possibilities are endless. I wouldn’t bet on any profiles in courage here in Sacramento, but our state might find itself in the center of the national political conversation for the first time in years.

Trump could have loads of fun – and increase his appeal in the rest of the nation – by applying Alinsky’s Rule #4, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules,” and Rule #12, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” to the radicals in Sacramento.

CHECKMATE:

Good, but as with so much else, better years ago. Any Obama statue should read "too little, too late". https://t.co/okX5zc9Td0

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) December 29, 2016

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Obama Finally Wakes Up to Join the SpyWar at the 11th Hour. Well, when it was just a threat to America, Russian spying was no big deal. But now that it might be a threat to the Democrats, well, that’s serious.

WHICH IS GOOD, SINCE “HATE” JUST MEANS “DISLIKED BY THE LEFT:” No, the IRS may not deny tax exemptions on the grounds that a group is a supposed ‘hate group.’

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Incoming Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer on the Media: ‘Business as Usual Is Over.’

One more time: In the post-World War II era, the press has enjoyed certain institutional privileges based on two assumptions: (1) That it’s very powerful; and (2) That it will exercise that power responsibly, for the most part. Both assumptions have been proven false in this election cycle. Like many of the postwar institutional accommodations, this one will be renegotiated under Trump.

ALL LIVES MATTER: Ambushes in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and other shootings around the country led to a sharp increase in the number of police killed in the line of duty this year.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1331.

ANOTHER MONEYED ASSAULT ON CIVIL RIGHTS FAILS: Oops. Bloomberg’s $20M gun control bid in Nevada has fallen apart.

EMERGING? The left’s emerging ‘fake news’ problem.

Last week, many news organizations published stories about a man who claimed he was kicked off a Delta Air Lines flight solely because his speaking Arabic made other passengers uncomfortable. The story went viral.

Many outlets, however, negated to note an important fact: The individual in question was a YouTube prankster known for pulling similar viral stunts. Only after the prankster’s claims were disseminated across all corners of the internet did his past enter the picture in a meaningful way. Delta eventually denied his claim.

In recent days, such incidents have caused some observers to scrutinize those on the left.

“It baffles me how anyone on the left combatting ‘fake news’ can turn a blind eye to the clickbaiting within its own ranks,” CNN host Jake Tapper tweeted toward the end of last week. “HEAL THYSELF.”

And it wasn’t just Tapper. Some on the left also expressed concern with the trend of false stories being circulated in their political sphere.

If so, that would be a welcome change from pushing “fake but accurate” stories which fit the progressive narrative far better than they describe reality.

NICE WORK, BARRY: Hardline Islamists Gain Ground in Indonesia.

We wrote about the Indonesian blasphemy scandal last month; at the time, police had agreed to investigate the complaint and the governor apologized for his comments, in an attempt to cool the rising tensions. But these gestures have hardly had the desired effect. If anything, hardline Islamists have been increasingly emboldened as they exploit the scandal to build support for their cause.

For many years, the world’s most populous Muslim nation has resisted the siren call of fanaticism. That increasingly appears to be changing, with the rising influence of hardcore forms of Islam. Apart from its effect on Indonesia’s domestic politics, this changing climate could have significant effects on the Asian power balance. Indonesia is a key link in the group of coastal Asian countries, from India to Japan, that have tried to balance China’s rising power. Even shifts in the political balance in relatively small countries like the Philippines can ripple across the region; a shift in Indonesia would be a much bigger deal.

The ongoing radicalization in Indonesia also suggests that the intellectual foundations behind Obama Asia’s policy were weak. Obama’s pivot was grounded in the belief that non-Chinese Asia could be rallied around Western ideas of international law and democratic development. This is conspicuously not happening.

If the West looked like the “strong horse,” it would be. But under Obama, Merkel, etc., it looks weak..

QUESTION ASKED: How should blockchain be regulated?

This month, the Federal Reserve joined a long list of government institutions across the world in releasing its views on blockchain. This distributed ledger technology, which underpins the well-known and controversial bitcoin cryptocurrency, is essentially a recordkeeping system that can replace a periodically-updated central database—a design that underlies most financial systems used today—with a clever distributed database that updates in near real time.
…
Yet regulators have struggled to strike a suitable posture in response to blockchain developments. On one hand, there is nothing yet to regulate, with no known commercial-scale financial blockchain applications. On the other hand, it is still unclear why or how regulation should change in anticipation of technological development.

Do you care to imagine the state of software today if in 1979 “the Federal Reserve joined a long list of government institutions across the world” seeking to regulate VisiCalc?

QUESTIONS THAT ANSWER THEMSELVES: With Obama in charge of all our intelligence agencies for the last eight years, why are we so easy to hack?

Related, seen on Facebook:

THE ECONOMY IS DOING JUST FINE: Almost all the US jobs created since 2005 are temporary.

MAKING SCIENCE GREAT AGAIN: Climate researchers hope Trump administration will allow scientific debate instead of enforcing green dogma. James Varney at RealClear Investigations:

Researchers who see global warming as something less than a planet-ending calamity believe the incoming Trump administration may allow their views to be developed and heard. This didn’t happen under the Obama administration, which denied that a debate even existed. Now, some scientists say, a more inclusive approach – and the billions of federal dollars that might support it – could be in the offing.

Of course, the Left’s war on science will continue, because the many scientists-turned-activists and their journalistic allies aren’t going to let up their witch hunts against “deniers,” and there’s too much money at stake. Apocalyptic visions are good for research budgets (and for  green-energy companies dependent on corporate welfare). Varney quotes Richard Lindzen, the MIT atmospheric physicist.

Even if some of the roughly $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars currently spent on climate research across 13 different federal agencies now shifts to scientists less invested in the calamitous narrative, Lindzen believes groupthink has so corrupted the field that funding should be sharply curtailed rather than redirected.

“They should probably cut the funding by 80 to 90 percent until the field cleans up,” he said. “Climate science has been set back two generations, and they have destroyed its intellectual foundations.”

The field is cluttered with entrenched figures who must toe the established line, he said, pointing to a recent congressional report that found the Obama administration got a top Department of Energy scientist fired and generally intimidated the staff to conform with its politicized position on climate change.

“Remember this was a tiny field, a backwater, and then suddenly you increased the funding to billions and everyone got into it,” Lindzen said. “Even in 1990 no one at MIT called themselves a ‘climate scientist,’ and then all of a sudden everyone was. They only entered it because of the bucks; they realized it was a gravy train. You have to get it back to the people who only care about the science.”

Another swamp to drain.

BRUTAL: Ralph Peters Sums Up Obama’s Mideast Policy in Six Words.

WITH NEW YEAR’S EVE COMING, it’s worth recycling Stephen Green’s advice on how to have your second third cocktail.

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EIGHT YEARS DISTILLED DOWN TO 140 CHARACTERS OR LESS:

Barack Obama is a smart man who's been educated in our finest universities to a high level in things which are simply not true, indeed false

— John Schindler (@20committee) December 30, 2016

OUCH: Britain, edging towards Trump, scolds Kerry over Israel.

In an unusually sharp public rebuke of Obama’s top diplomat, [Prime Minister Theresa] May’s spokesman said that Israel had coped for too long with the threat of terrorism and that focusing only on the settlements was not the best way to achieve peace between Jew and Arab.

London also took particular issue with Kerry’s description of Netanyahu’s coalition as “the most right-wing in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by its most extreme elements.”

“We do not believe that it is appropriate to attack the composition of the democratically-elected government of an ally,” May’s spokesman said when asked about Kerry 70-minute speech in the State Department’s auditorium.

That’s been a hallmark of this administration.

UPDATE: Australia, too.

GOVERNMENT: Scandal-plagued federal agency looks to ‘act with integrity, honesty and respect.’

The federal agency accused of widespread misconduct and whistleblower retaliation at several of its offices is now attempting to create an organizational culture built on several ethical pillars.

Last month, the Social Security Administration’s Office of Disability Adjudication and Review began a “conversation” with employees about the kind of culture the agency wants to promote in 2017.

I recommend firing the worst 10% of employees. Then do it again next year.

JAYVEE: Child Jihadists Hunt Down, Execute Bound Prisoners in New ISIS Video.

WHAT IT TAKES TO GET THE ACADEMY TO DEFEND FREE SPEECH: Drexel issues new statement about professor’s “white genocide” tweet.