HMM: The US might end up tolerating India’s $5 billion deal for Russian missile systems.

India’s purchase of the Kremlin’s S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile system is subject to potential U.S. sanctions under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, a measure that was signed by President Donald Trump in 2017.

The deal and possible sanctions could come up this week, when India’s defense minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, holds talks with Defense Secretary James Mattis. The U.S. Defense chief stressed on Monday that this wouldn’t be the first time India has purchased weapons from the Kremlin.

“India has been spent many, many years in its nonaligned status, and it’s drawn a lot of weapons from Russia,” Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon ahead of Sitharaman’s arrival Monday. She is slated to leave Washington on Tuesday.

“We are here today to talk about all the issues that bring us closer together and we’ll sort out all those issues here today and in the days ahead,” he added, when asked about India’s S-400 purchase.

India does have a long history of buying Soviet/Russian hardware — although you’d think they’d have learned better by now.

That said, India isn’t likely to bolt for some new Moscow-led bloc, and we need them as a counterbalance to China. So as long as they aren’t expecting to buy any F-35s from us in the future, they should probably get their waiver.

BUT OF COURSE: UN Climate Summit to Emit More CO2 Than 8,200 American Homes Do in a Year. I think the United States should demand that the UN immediately cut its air travel in half, for the planet.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: There’s No ‘Obvious Candidate’ Who Could Beat Trump In 2020. “You need someone who can speak some of the same language [as Trump] … and the Democrats don’t have an obvious, effective presidential candidate.”

It will be fun watching the many, many candidates try out variations on Trumpism in Iowa next year.

SOCIALIST THUGS DECREE A LOT OF THINGS: Maduro Orders Price of Venezuela’s ‘Cryptocurrency’ to More Than Double.

Following Maduro’s Thursday announcement, Venezuelan economist Leonardo Buniak explained that the petro “was worth 3,600 Bs.s because the Dicom dollar cost 60 and the oil cost 60,” Atodomomento publication reported. He added, “now a petro is decreed at 9,000 Bs.s … you have just devalued the sovereign bolivar with respect to the petro and by more than 100%.”

Buniak also asserted that “the petro cannot be called a cryptocurrency because the value was given by President Maduro and not the interaction between supply and demand,” the publication conveyed.

Furthermore, the wallet for the petro is still unavailable. The links to download them for Windows and Linux still pop up the message: “This wallet will soon be available for your operating system.” In addition, Tarek El Aissami, the country’s economic minister and former vice president, previously explained that Google has removed the Android app for the petro wallet from the Google Play store.

So the petro is a cryptocurrency you can’t mine, backed by oil Venezuela can’t recover, to bolster an economy which has already basically ceased to exist.

As I said, socialist thugs decree a lot of things, but what they plan and what takes place ain’t ever exactly been similar.

GOOD NEWS: Xi Tells Trump China Will Schedule Fentanyl: China, world’s fentanyl source, to finally control drug.

DAVID CATRON: The left’s nauseating love affair with “Beto.”

Part of O’Rourke’s popularity is due, of course, to the amount of sycophantic media coverage he has received pursuant to his failed bid to unseat Senator Ted Cruz. The volume and tone of this coverage should not be contemplated during or immediately after eating. Politico, for example, just published a lengthy piece comparing Beto to Abraham Lincoln. I’m not kidding. And Politico is by no means the only publication to do so. In fact, O’Rourke has himself suggested a none-too-subtle connection between his own career and that of the Great Emancipator. Three weeks ago he published a solipsistic blog post about a morning run, which took him (Surprise!) to the Lincoln Memorial:

I walked over to the north wall and read Lincoln’s second inaugural address. My body warm, blood flowing through me, moving my legs as I read, the words so present in a way that I can’t describe or explain.… Picked up my run as I headed due East, now on the south side of the reflecting pool. Snow in my face, the flakes smaller, more biting now, maybe sleet. It had changed. My knee no longer hurt.… I wondered if the winds had changed too.

You can’t say you weren’t warned if you are now wiping vomit from your screen. It goes without saying that O’Rourke’s self-indulgent verbal slush fails to note that the inaugural address which so moved him would never have been delivered if Lincoln hadn’t defeated his northern Democratic opponent in 1864. The ability to recognize such irony requires the kind of intellectual subtlety with which Lincoln was so generously endowed and which neither nature nor education has provided Beto. Such subtlety has also been cruelly withheld from his media boosters as well as his star-struck supporters, who actually believe he has Lincoln’s greatness plus Barack Obama’s voter appeal.

Yes, but he would make an excellent president because he has such large teeth, says the Party of Science.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: “In our haste to dismantle walls we have made local conflicts international.”

GET READY FOR THIS AGAIN WITH THE BUSH FUNERAL, I FEAR: Flashback: Sen. John McCain’s funeral put Washington’s vicious political hypocrisy fully on display.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Pitzer College Professors Vote to End School’s Partnership With the University of Haifa. “A despicable effort to impose their hateful anti-Semitic agenda.”

Somewhat related flashback: Every Time You Wish Someone ‘Happy Hanukkah’ You Acknowledge The Historic Jewish Claim On Jerusalem.

Happy Hanukkah.

A FAILURE FOR LAWFARE: US Top Court Snubs Environmental Challenge To Trump’s Border Wall.

AT AMAZON, Holiday Deals in Automotive.

Plus, save on Handbags and Shoes.

INSTAPUNDIT WILL BE DOWN FOR MAINTENANCE for about an hour, around midnight Eastern time.

CULTURE MATTERS:

Libertarian intellectuals and activists know that culture matters. If I had a hundred bucks for every time I’d heard someone chalk up poverty to a black box called “culture” or demand that we “change the culture” or complain that Hollywood or the universities or the media or women in general are culturally biased against markets I could buy a vacation home. And not a cheap one, either.

That culture matters isn’t controversial. The real issue is that most libertarians simply aren’t terribly curious about how culture works. They treat it as an instrument—a tool for promoting or hampering the advancement of their political ideas—rather than a phenomenon worthy of its own careful observation and analysis.

Libertarians and classical liberals know and care about government. They know and care economics. They don’t know or care about culture.

One result is that, when faced with cultural outcomes they dislike, people who surely know better fall back on explanations that sound eerily reminiscent of how leftists and populists describe markets. Either a small group of powerful people determine the public’s attitudes and behaviors or somewhere there’s a magic lever and if we could find it and pull it everybody would agree with us. We just need a good documentary film and more celebrities!

But culture is not a tool. It is not a machine. It is an emergent order, as complex, dynamic, and intellectually interesting as the economy—and thoroughly entangled with it.

It’s Virginia Postrel, so read the whole thing.

‘LATE CAPITALISM’: THE SADDEST FAITH.

As the late Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.”

BOB MCMANUS: It’s not hard to figure out Cuomo’s gameplan for 2020. “Presidential campaigns rarely begin out in the open; first there must be hypocrisy. And in this respect, Andrew Cuomo is ramping up his game.” And to be fair, it’s always been one of his strengths.

DONALD TRUMP, MELANIA salute George H.W. Bush’s coffin.

THE LIBERTARIAN MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL? In The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Everyone Just Wants to Be Left the F*ck Alone, according to Katherine Mangu-Ward. Language Alert — as Mangu-Ward’s headline suggests, there are F-bombs galore in the latest edition of Reason TV:

MAUREEN DOWD: Curtains For The Clintons. It’s clear that, now that the Democrats have no further use for them, the Democrats’ media arm is tossing them under the bus. Which they deserve, but they deserved it 20 years ago, too, when the media were propping them up.

OPEN THREAD: Enjoy the miracle that is Disqus.

LEGOLAND’S PLASTIC STRAW BAN IS THE HEIGHT OF ENVIRONMENTAL VIRTUE SIGNALING: Plastic toys, sí! Plastic straws, no!

THIS IS NO SURPRISE: Study suggests vaping may help smokers avoid relapses.

ACTUALLY, I’M PRETTY SURE THERE ARE SOME PRECEDENTS: Photos show Paris streets erupting in protest and ‘extreme and unprecedented violence.’

Also: Macron Bails On Climate Summit As France Melts Down.

Plus, thoughts from Richard Fernandez:

UPDATE: The Real Significance of the French Tax Revolt.

Yet none should doubt the long-seething precursor to this conflagration despite the impossibility of capturing winnowed domestic budgets and severe fiscal hardship on film. Furor arising over a life circumscribed by bad luck or adverse conditions is considerable; that which results from unquestionable bureaucratic decrees is ultimately incendiary.

The public reaction to the incremental repression of life’s expression by state coercion at a certain point becomes immediate and visceral. It is playing itself out in the streets of Paris right now.

Consider the larger stakes here. For more than 100 years, European governments have built their invasive states, with the public sector controlling ever more of life. The promise of combining security and prosperity through state enhancement has failed to achieve its promise. And what does the political class propose? More government power, this time in the name of green energy.

That’s their solution to everything. If they ever propose lowering taxes and firing bureaucrats in response to some announced crisis, I’ll believe they’re serious. . . .

BOARDWALK EMPIRE, THE NEXT GENERATION: FBI, IRS Raid Atlantic City Mayor Frank Gilliam’s Home.

Earlier: Atlantic City mayor, councilman filmed brawling outside casino.

GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE: NHS whistleblower forced to withdraw claims after being threatened with ‘life changing’ costs.