VIDEO: Rep. Louie Gohmert Goes Off on Mueller During House Floor Speech.

EVERYONE IS BIG BROTHER: Inside China’s Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking.

In 2014, the State Council, China’s governing cabinet, publicly called for the establishment of a nationwide tracking system to rate the reputations of individuals, businesses, and even government officials. The aim is for every Chinese citizen to be trailed by a file compiling data from public and private sources by 2020, and for those files to be searchable by fingerprints and other biometric characteristics. The State Council calls it a “credit system that covers the whole society.”

For the Chinese Communist Party, social credit is an attempt at a softer, more invisible authoritarianism. The goal is to nudge people toward behaviors ranging from energy conservation to obedience to the Party. Samantha Hoffman, a consultant with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London who is researching social credit, says that the government wants to preempt instability that might threaten the Party. “That’s why social credit ideally requires both coercive aspects and nicer aspects, like providing social services and solving real problems. It’s all under the same Orwellian umbrella.”

The evil genius behind “social credit” is that it gives the impression of turning users into electronically empowered Big Brothers, when in fact it turns users into willing Winston Smiths.

WEIRD, THAT’S NOT THE IMPRESSION I GOT FROM NEWS COVERAGE: Roll Call: Trump Used Twitter to Praise and Blame Congress, Yet the Hill Agreed With Him Most of the Time.

The results showed a president who is comfortable both complaining about and praising Congress, sometimes on the same day. Overall, the president had more tweets mentioning Congress in a positive way than a negative one — though the positive tweets weren’t any more or less likely to earn a large number of retweets. . . .

Despite the president’s mixed, and sometimes erratic, attitudes in his tweets about Congress, the more typical measurement of presidential support votes shows the legislative branch almost always sided with him.

Some moderately interesting graphics at the link.

HEALTH: Older Adults’ Forgetfulness Tied To Faulty Brain Rhythms In Sleep.

During deep sleep, older people have less coordination between two brain waves that are important to saving new memories, a team reports in the journal Neuron.

“It’s like a drummer that’s perhaps just one beat off the rhythm,” says Matt Walker, one of the paper’s authors and a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. “The aging brain just doesn’t seem to be able to synchronize its brain waves effectively.”

The finding appears to answer a long-standing question about how aging can affect memory even in people who do not have Alzheimer’s or some other brain disease.

“This is the first paper that actually found a cellular mechanism that might be affected during aging and therefore be responsible for a lack of memory consolidation during sleep,” says Julie Seibt, a lecturer in sleep and plasticity at the University of Surrey in the U.K. Seibt was not involved in the new study.

I started taking tryptophan and melatonin a few weeks ago, and have been sleeping better than I have in years. Now I’m wondering if doing so can help prevent or forestall this de-syncronization.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Stop Tailgating, It Only Makes Traffic Jams Worse.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: “2016: ‘I was the craziest year ever.’ 2017: ‘Hold my beer.’”

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Amtrak Crash, Tax Reform, RUSSIA Update and Much, Much More.

RICH LOWRY: Trump’s First Year Is Starting To Look Like A Big Win. “As the year ends, President Trump is compiling a solid record of accomplishment. Much of it is unilateral, dependent on extensive executive actions rolling back President Barack Obama’s regulations, impressive judicial appointments and the successful fight against ISIS overseas. The tax bill is the significant legislative achievement that heretofore has been missing. For much of the year, Trump’s presidency had seemed to be sound and fury signifying not much besides the welcome ascension of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Now it’s sound and fury signifying a discernible shift of American government to the right.”

Given that Lowry was pretty solidly anti-Trump, this is a significant shift.

PUSHY: 5 Chinese warplanes enter Korea’s air defense zone.

The flight into the KADIZ [Korean Air Defense Identification Zone] came just two days after President Moon Jae-in returned home from his four-day state visit to China during which time he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders to discuss issues related to the deployment of the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system and other challenges.

The JCS said Seoul countered by sending fighter jets including F-15Ks to the area, noting that the Chinese aircraft also flew into the Japanese Air Defense Identification Zone (JADIZ).

The aircraft then left the KADIZ and flew back toward China, the JCS added.

“South Korea’s fighter jets that scrambled to the area indentified the types of the Chinese military aircraft,” a JCS official said, asking not to be named. “Our fighter jets took normal tactical measures until the Chinese planes left.”

In response to the Air Force’s warning messages through a hotline, Beijing said that the flight was part of a routine exercise and that it had no intention of infringing South Korea’s territorial airspace, the official said.

South Korea is a peaceful trading nation. If anyone in the region deserves the attention of China’s military, it’a the expansionist Kim regime in the North.

MICHAEL BARONE: How times – and the Times – change.

This Vanity Fair story, about the New York Times’s deliberations over sexual harassment against political reporter Glenn Thrush, is framed as a struggle between the New York headquarters, which reportedly favors tough action against Thrush, and the paper’s Washington bureau, most members of which feel Thrush should not be severely punished.

Those of us with long memories will recall an earlier struggle between the Times’s New York base and its Washington bureau. It’s the centerpiece of the brilliantly gifted Gay Talese’s book The Kingdom and the Power, published in 1969 about events that took place almost exactly 50 years ago and reprinted most recently in 2007. The issue there is different — the central struggle is between the Washington bureau’s James Reston, former bureau chief and hugely influential reporter and columnist in his day, and the New York editors who want to put their own man in as bureau chief.

The protagonists assume that this struggle is earthshakingly important, just as many observers today think the issue of sexual harassment and predation is earthshakingly important.

Well, it’s very important to them.

“Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?” Tavis Smiley refuses to go quietly into that good night after being sacked by PBS, reports ABC:

“If having a consensual relationship with a colleague years ago is the stuff that leads to this kind of public humiliation and personal destruction, heaven help us,” he said. “This has gone too far. And I, for one, intend to fight back.”

Smiley claims that PBS wouldn’t allow him to present any evidence or challenge the allegations. I’m not an employment law specialist, and there are quite possibly contract law issues in play here. To be sure, without facts it’s hard to make up one’s mind about PBS’ treatment of Smiley.

Nonetheless, it raises two important questions: First, has the combination of assumed guilt and trial-by-media in harassment allegations indeed gone “too far?” And second, even if PBS did not make a “statement” defaming Smiley, can an action (like publicly suspending or firing someone) be interpreted as a defamatory statement?
*Classical reference in headline.

GEORGE KORDA ON TENNESSEE’S SENATE RACE: Phil Bredesen vs. the Democratic Party.

WELL, GOOD: Trump to Boost U.S. Missile Defense to Combat Iranian, N. Korean WMD Threats.

“The United States is deploying a layered missile defense system focused on North Korea and Iran to defend our homeland against missile attacks,” according to draft language of the NSS viewed by the Free Beacon. “This system will include the ability to defeat missile threats prior to launch. Enhanced missile defense will not undermine strategic stability or disrupt longstanding strategic relationships with Russia or China.”

The document also outlines threats from state and non-state actors when it comes to weapons of mass destruction, otherwise known as WMDs.

While rogue nations such as Iran and North Korea are perfecting ballistic missiles, terror groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS are turning to cruder, but just as dangerous, weapons such as chemical and biological WMDs, according to the Trump administration’s new national security vision.

“We would face grave danger if terrorists obtained inadequately secured nuclear, radiological, or biological material,” the draft portion of the document states.

“As missiles grow in numbers, types, and effectiveness, to include those with greater ranges, they are the most likely means for states like North Korea to use a nuclear weapon against the United States,” the document notes. “North Korea is also pursuing chemical and biological weapons which could also be delivered by missile.”

China and Russia also are developing advanced weapons that could threaten America’s critical infrastructure, according to the Trump administration.

This reality has sparked the Trump administration to put a renewed focus on domestic missile defense systems, such as those used by Israel to protect citizens from rocket attacks.

The Trump administration also is prioritizing missile defense for NATO allies in Europe and elsewhere.

There’s eight years of Obama Administration preemptive surrender on missile defense to make up for.

DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS: “@ABC, @CBSNews, and @NBCNews ignore report that Obama sabotaged efforts to crackdown on Hezbollah for Iran.”

“RESISTANCE” HARDEST HIT: Trump Should Not Resign Over Allegations of Sexual Misconduct, Jones Says: Democratic senator-elect from Alabama committed to working on ‘the real issues.’