SOUTH KOREA PREPARES TO HOST WINTER OLYMPICS:

Just five months from now, South Korea will host the 2018 Winter Olympics. But tensions with North Korea have caused considerable problems for organizers of what is supposed to be a global celebration of sports.

The Games are set to begin in February, but with North Korea in recent months testing missiles and what Pyongyang said was a hydrogen bomb, ticket sales for the event have remained disastrously weak.

Stay tuned.

STEPHEN KRUISER: Hillary’s Media Criticisms Are a Perfect Snapshot of Why She Lost.

What has struck me most about Clinton’s book at media tour is her tone. When she casually dismissed a quarter of the American electorate as “deplorables” and, worse, as “irredeemable,” Clinton revealed a contempt unworthy of a candidate for any office. That was a far worse character smear than Mitt Romney’s political judgement about the “47 percent” who he believed would never vote Republican. Clinton’s casual contempt, probably more than any other single factor, cost her what should have been a gimme election.

But she doesn’t seem to have learned anything, if her book and recent statements are anything to go by. Clinton not only thinks that Trump is an inexcusable disaster, but her book indicates that she places the blame for him (while blithely comparing herself to Cersei from Game of Thrones) on those same deplorables, still so full of “anger and resentment.”

So while there’s always good fun to be had at the expense of a clueless politico, the idea of a sitting President filled with that much contempt for her fellow Americans ought to make one shudder.

FROM MY FORMER STUDENT GEORGE SPENCER, 365Courage, a blog dedicated to, well, courage.

LAME:

This isn’t the GOP majority I was hoping for, but it is the one I’ve come to expect.

(Full story here.)

IT’S GOOD TO BE RICH: Hurricanes may be getting bigger, but death toll is shrinking.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Deplorable Book, Deplorable Person.

Nearly a year after she lost the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton is promoting a book about how her defeat is everyone else’s fault. So much, so familiar.

What’s striking is that even though she has barely begun her book tour, Clinton has already given the game away, reverting to her self-pitying idea that half her countrymen are “irredeemable” and “deplorable.”

Remember that riff she got into at a 2016 private fundraiser? No? Well here it is, to freshen your recollection.

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

Clinton later issued a half-cocked apology for casting aspersions on tens of millions of her fellow citizens. She didn’t repeat exactly those words this past weekend when trying to flog her book, but she might as well have done. In an interview with Jane Pauley, she said Trump “was quite successful in referencing a nostalgia that would give hope, comfort, settle grievances, for millions of people who were upset about gains that were made by others.” She then clarified that she meant “millions of white people, yeah.”

This is actually an uglier comment than the one for which she pretended to apologize during the election. It’s a characteristically self-centered and selfish remark that should remind the nation why it can be glad Clinton didn’t become president and never will.

Every day Trump goes on not being President Hillary, and every day that makes me happy. Hillary’s clueless book is only making me happier.

Plus: “Between 2009 and 2017, Democrats and the Left forgot how to make arguments for their political positions. They leaned on Obama’s blackness, and argued that all his critics must ipso facto be racists. It was facile to make the accusation, but it seemed worthwhile at the time because it obviated the need for the sort of clear-eyed introspection that can make people, even politicians, question their beliefs and come up with fresh ideas. But convenient though it was to hide behind unthinking charges or bigotry, it eroded the Democrats ability to back their policies with facts and cogent reasoning. It was always a weak argument. Voters saw through in two midterm elections and again in 2016. But how much more contemptible it is to see that same racial crutch used by to prop up the amour propre of a whiter-than-white, uber-privileged politician who rode into public life on her husband’s coattails.”

In cosmic irony, though, she ignored Bill Clinton’s “mansplaining” of the election to her, and as a result, lost.

GOOD QUESTION: What Kind of History Did Hillary Clinton Make?

“Hillary made history by winning the nomination” is another way of saying “Hillary made history by managing to not lose the nomination with institutional advantages that no other candidate is likely to enjoy for the next few decades.”

And then she headed into a general election with another slew of institutional advantages: her campaign spent twice as much as Trump’s did, the media detested Trump, and the Republican nominee stumbled from one mess to another. Many prominent Republicans skipped their party’s convention in Cleveland while the Democrats’ gathering in Philadelphia went off without a hitch. Clinton may complain about FBI Director James Comey’s last minute reopening (and re-closing!) of the bureau’s investigation of her, but it’s not like Trump had a smooth final month with the revelation of the Access Hollywood tape in early October. Sure, the first line of Hillary’s obituary will mention she was the first woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination. But it’s likely to continue, “and the loser in the most shocking upset in American political history.”

She was a terrible candidate — and aside from Barack Obama, the best the Democrats have put up since 1996.

HUH. FIRST HE WAS HITLER, THEN HE WAS INCOMPETENT, NOW THIS: Trump administration earns cautious praise for early response to hurricanes. “Facing off against a pair of historic storms — first Harvey in Texas and Louisiana, then Hurricane Irma through the U.S. Virgin Islands and Florida — Trump’s administration has earned bipartisan praise for coordinating the federal response with state and local officials, avoiding the type of catastrophe that marked the Bush administration’s response to Katrina, a storm that killed more than 1,800 people.”

And don’t forget Obama’s botching of Sandy, “Katrina on the Hudson.”

WE NEED STATUTORY DAMAGES OF $1500 FOR EACH CUSTOMER WHOSE DATA IS LOST: State AG to sue Equifax over ‘brazen failure to protect consumer data.’

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Continues Tax Reform Crusade and Much, Much More.

CREDENTIALED, BUT NOT EDUCATED:

ANGELO CODEVILLA: Establishment GOP Puts Cronies over Country on Missile Defense.

LIFE IN DE BLASIO’S NEW YORK: Gene Simmons to NYC’s young women: ‘Band together, don’t go anywhere alone.’

GOLDEN STATE BLUES: San Diego is awash with ‘fecal matter’ due to lack of public toilets and surging rates of homeless people, health officials warn as they try to control the hepatitis A outbreak.

Officials declared a public health emergency in the city after the outbreak killed 15 and infected close to 400 people.

Hepatitis A is a viral liver disease that can spread through ingesting food and drinks that have come in contact with feces from people who are already infected.

County health officials told the city that they needed to come up with a plan to fix the ‘fecally contaminated environment’ that is in the downtown area.

Officials first attempted to contain the outbreak by providing vaccinations to people and improving educational methods, but the virus continues to spread.

The city is now implementing street washing every other week and an extension on public restroom hours to stop the spread of the virus that has affected the homeless population the most.

Lovely.

WHY ARE BLUE CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF PEDOPHILIA? Seattle Mayor Ed Murray resigns after fifth child sex-abuse allegation.

ALLIES: Turkey Chooses Russian Missile Defense System.

Turkey’s moves have made the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) apprehensive of a non-NATO missile defense system being deployed in a NATO country. The Alliance’s concerns are that a non-NATO country that sells Turkey its missile defense system—especially China or Russia—could then remotely use that complex to gather information on NATO’s alliance-integrated missile defense system and develop ways to either disrupt the system or develop countermeasures to evade it.

Ankara argues that many NATO countries already employ various Russian weapons. And indeed, this is not for the first time that an Alliance member state has sought a Russian-made missile defense system. Notably, Greece operates the S-300, and the bilateral Greek-Russian partnership in the military sphere has been growing (Strategic-culture.org, November 5, 2016). This is worth mentioning as Greece and Turkey are at loggerheads with each other over a territorial dispute in the Aegean Sea. As a March 2017 article by Colonel (ret.) Andrei Akulov, a Moscow-based international security expert, suggests, Russia could try to insert itself as a mediator between the two countries to resolve the issue. And Russia might then try to use that momentum to create some kind of alliance with Turkey and Greece—two NATO countries (Strategic-culture.org, March 10).

NATO’s southern flank was always troublesome, but now it might be disintegrating. But as I’ve written before, post-Cold War NATO is an unserious alliance — big enough to feed Russian paranoia, but perhaps no longer strong enough to contain it.

GOP LAWMAKER ON U.S. POT POLICY: ‘We’re Completely on Our Asses.’

RUSS ROBERTS:

The current state of the country and the current state of political and intellectual conversation depresses me in a way that it never has before. You have to understand — I’m never happy with the state of the country — that’s the inevitable fate of holding an ideological position that rarely gets any traction — I’m a classical liberal who’d like government to be dramatically smaller than it is now.

But the world today feels different. Everything feels angrier. . . .

Maybe it’s paranoia but it’s been a long time since I felt the thinness of the veneer of civilization and our vulnerability to a sequence of events that might threaten not just the policy positions I might favor but the very existence of the American experiment.

Yes, a lot of civic rot has been revealed.

IN THE EMAIL FROM ALMA BOYKIN:  Shikari: Shikari Book One.

IT’S BEEN TIME FOR DECADES.  IT MIGHT BE POSSIBLE NOW:  Is it Time for Conservatives to Create an Alternate Culture?

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT:  The Founders on property and liberty.

ABOLISHING CHILDHOOD INDEPENDENCE IS ABOLISHING THE POSSIBILITY OF ADULTHOOD:  Qu’ils marchent a l’ecole.  (Don’t worry.  Only the title is in French.)

THESE ARE ALMOST AS GOOD AS QUOTES FROM ONE OF JIMMY CARTER’S BOOKS:  Some Choice Quotes from Hillary Clinton’s Book About Collapsing In the Street (And Also, Losing a Presidential Election).

MORE LIKE AN OLD INANITY:  Just Price: An Old Question.

A POX ON BOTH YOUR (STATIST) HOUSES MUST FOREVER BE THE OPTION OF FREE MEN:  “Both sides are bad”.