AT AMAZON, January Deals in Hunting & Fishing.

ALIEN GNOMES: Over a Decade Later, NASA’s Long-Dead IMAGE Satellite May Have Come Back to Life. “A $150 million NASA satellite which died from systems failure just five years after its launch has somehow reactivated and is still broadcasting, Science reported Friday. Astronomer Scott Tilley was searching for signs of Zuma, a classified U.S. government satellite of unknown purpose that officials declared a ‘total loss’ shortly after its launch, when he was surprised to discover a signal from a satellite labeled ‘2000-017A.’ In a blog post earlier this month, Tilley wrote that he was able to confirm that the object was indeed NASA’s long-lost Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration satellite by matching it to its orbit.”

IF YOU CAN’T KILL ‘EM, AT LEAST SCARE ‘EM: Swatting at Mosquitoes May Help You Avoid Bites, Even if You Miss. “Remembering the smell of a particularly defensive individual with a propensity to swat is important for a bug’s survival. One good smack to a mosquito stuck biting, and splat. Knowing who smells like a splat-maker means mosquitoes can seek out potentially less risky hosts instead. Dr. Riffell thinks learning about odors helps drives these decisions.”

DANIEL GREENFIELD: Guns Are How A Civil War Ends… Politics Is How It Starts. “That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war. . . . You can hate the other party. You can think they’re the worst thing that ever happened to the country. But then you work harder to win the next election. When you consistently reject the results of elections that you don’t win, what you want is a dictatorship. Your very own dictatorship. The only legitimate exercise of power in this country, according to the left, is its own. Whenever Republicans exercise power, it’s inherently illegitimate. The attacks on Trump show that elections don’t matter to the left.”

KOREAN WAR MEMORIES: Yonpo Airfield, December 1950. A USMC Corsair prepares for takeoff.

UNFORTUNATELY RELATED: U.S. Marines prepare to withdraw from Chosin Reservoir.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Sorry, Blue States: You Can’t Fix the Tax Bill.

It’s an unhappy time to be a high-income professional in a blue state — or their governor. The new tax law, which caps the deduction for state and local taxes at $10,000, amounts to a roughly one-third increase in their effective state-and-local tax rate. That will be an ugly hit to the pocketbook.

They will fiercely resist any attempt to raise taxes further, bad news for mayors and governors who are often facing big pension holes that are eventually going to need to be filled with taxpayer money. Worse still, they will probably put pressure on said politicians to lower taxes. And some of them may start shopping for residences in lower-tax locales, taking their valuable, taxable incomes with them if they go.

Small wonder that officials in high-tax states are desperate to find some way to undo what congressional Republicans have wrought. A number of proposals have been floated in the last month, all of them interesting, none of them likely to work very well. . . .

The defenders of the new law will probably say “We’re not going after people for their political associations; we’re trying to curtail the subsidy to high-tax states.” And Dorf thinks that argument is likely to prevail.

Jonathan Adler, who teaches law at Case Western, was even more pungent, and succinct. While we don’t know what form the complaint will eventually take, since the states haven’t yet drafted it, “What we have seen [so far] would suggest that there is some sort of constitutional right to a SALT deduction. To state the claim is to refute it.”

Which won’t stop Cuomo et al. from making it.

SPACE X AIMING FOR A February 6 launch date for the Falcon Heavy.

THINK OF THEM AS THE LADIES’ AUXILIARY FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Why won’t liberal feminists defend Nikki Haley and Melania Trump?

It’s always been about power, not about women.

RECOVERING ADDICT: “SAFE-INJECTION SITES” WON’T END OPIOID EPIDEMIC: Matt Mossburg was a rising political star in Maryland in the mid-1990s but then an opioid addiction changed everything. He’s learned a lot since then and one thing he’s certain about is the new wave of treatments like safe-injection sites and variations thereof that give addicts limited doses of their drug.  Continued addiction, not sustainable recovery, is the result. Mossburg explains in today’s LifeZette.

FAKE NEWS: 15 Times Major Media Outlets Used a Statistic about Plastic Straws Based on Research by a 9-Year-Old.

AT AMAZON, Save on Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.

Plus, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

Also, Kindle Daily Deals, and today’s Digital Deals.

UNEXPECTEDLY! NYT: Weird how for the first time since the financial crisis, the economy is really taking off.

GOOD ADVICE FROM ANDREW MCCARTHY: President Trump Should Refuse A Mueller Interview Request. “And as president, he shouldn’t even be asked.”

WELL, SURE. THOSE REFUGEES HATED COMMUNISM AND MIGHT HAVE VOTED FOR REPUBLICANS: Flashback: Jerry Brown, Biden and other Dems refused to accept Vietnamese refugees.

Remember, it’s only a humanitarian crisis if it results in more votes for Democrats.

TRUMP’S FIRST-YEAR BOOM IS LARGELY DUE TO DEREGULATION BUT THINK ABOUT THIS: Merely cancelling an expensive federal regulation doesn’t immediately convert the compliance cost into a potentially productive new investment. The capital has to be reallocated and some time is required for the new investment to produce sufficient return to offset the former compliance costs. Huh?

In other words: “It takes time for the economy to recover the costs of excessive regulatory compliance and to redirect capital to productive uses, so the gains seen during Trump’s first year are likely attributable in significant part to the expectations generated by his slashing the red tape. The full impact of the deregulation is still to be felt.”

And remember, the Trump tax cuts aren’t in effect until February. Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates regulatory compliance cost the U.S. economy $1.9 trillion. Trump can’t repeal all federal regulations but what if his tax cuts and the continuing positive impact of deregulation in coming years produces an economic boom that far exceeds the Reagan era? Ponder that one a bit!

MODIFIED LIMITED HANGOUT: Byron York: Justice Department withholds majority of FBI texts. “The Justice Department has given Congress less than 15 percent of the texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page – and that is all Congress is likely to get, at least until department experts finish an effort to recover an unknown number of previously lost texts that were sent and received during a key five-month period during the Trump-Russia investigation. There is much confusion over some basic facts of the Strzok-Page texts. How many are there? How many relate to the two most politically-charged investigations in years, the Trump-Russia probe and the Hillary Clinton email investigation? How many have been turned over to Congress? And how many are left to be turned over to Congress?” And how many will disappear into the aether along the way.

LEFTISM SUCKS, AND EVEN LEFTISTS ARE BEGINNING TO CATCH ON: Call-Out Culture Is a Toxic Garbage Dumpster Fire of Trash.

“Trash”—as well as its sister term “garbage”—has become the word du jour to describe everything from men to Tinder to, perhaps most frequently, Lena Dunham. It’s a term hurled, not tossed, and the feeling it seems to convey is “You are a terrible person/place/thing, no better than a pile of wet newspapers moldering in a roadside ditch.” While plenty of terms convey exactly the same thing (“scum,” “vermin,” “dregs”), “trash” has an extra bite to it, because it doesn’t just mean you suck, it also means you aren’t woke.

“Woke”—for those of you who don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter—indicates, roughly, that one is enlightened to the social causes of the day. You believe black lives matter (or you believe it enough to put a sign in the window of the palatial $1.5 million townhouse you just built in the Central District); you unequivocally support the #MeToo movement; and you would never, ever, ever, ever vote for Donald Trump (although you might vote for Jill Stein, which is basically the same thing). “Woke” may have entered internet consciousness in the last few years, but according to the invaluable internet resource Know Your Meme, “The earliest known instance of the ‘woke’ as slang for political or social awareness comes from an article in the New York Times Magazine. On May 20, 1962, the Times published a piece on white beatniks appropriating black culture by African-American novelist William Melvin Kelley entitled ‘If You’re Woke, You Dig It.’” Woke, today, is still being appropriated by white people, plenty of whom will happily tell you, if you’re not woke, you’re trash. . . . Progressives used to be able to handle dissent. The Democrats were the party of free speech and free thought. No more. Among far too many leftists, if you disagree, you are wrong. And if you are wrong, you are bad, and if you are bad, you are trash.

The ungrammatical phrase “get woke” indicates the intellectual level of the entire concept. But when sanctimony is your only coin, people will try to accumulate it.

GEORGE SOROS: Trump Presidency Will ‘Disappear’ in 2020 — or ‘Even Sooner.’

THE ORIGINAL LEATHERMAN POCKET SURVIVAL TOOL turns 35.

The original’s nice, but I like my Leatherman Skeletool.

UPDATE: In the comments, a reader makes a strong case for the Leatherman Juice, which includes a corkscrew.

There’s also this.

THE “PA DEUCE:” A Double Barreled Hand Cranked AR-15. Um. The comments are . . . less than favorable.

CULTURE OF HATE: What It’s Like To Live In A State Hostile To Gun Owners. We need federal legislation to protect the rights of innocent people targeted by hateful and discriminatory firearms laws.

FOR BLOG SWEEPS WEEK, a heartfelt tribute to the bikini. Wasn’t that a Simpsons gag?

ANOTHER OPEN THREAD, FOR YOUR DELECTATION.