ALLIED AIR SHOW OVER THE ENGLISH CHANNEL: A Royal Air Force F-35 Lightning II, a USAF F-15E Strike Eagle and a French Air Force Rafale trail a USAF KC-135 Stratotanker during an exercise held Nov. 27, 2018. The caption points out the exercise was an opportunity for fourth-generation fighters (F-15E and Rafale) to exercise with a fifth-generation fighter (the F-35).

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21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Why Jewish Men And Asian Women Are Magical Together.

UNSUSTAINABLE: We Might Not Have Enough Materials for All the Solar Panels and Wind Turbines We Need. Actually, we don’t need very many of them. We need nice, clean nuclear plants.

DO VENDING MACHINES DESERVE EQUAL PROTECTION? Professor Glenn links here to a College Fix article questioning the legality of having the abortifacient “Plan B” available on college campuses.

What I want to know is given the spurious but oft-unchallenged statistic that 20% of all college women are “rape victims”, why aren’t rape kits (also OTC) available in the same machine?

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Hundreds Rally for USC Dean Fired by School President, Who Cited Lack of Diversity.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Maroon 5 and How the Super Bowl Halftime Show Became Music’s Least Wanted Gig.

Up With People, tanned, rested and ready.

GRISWOLD’S STRANGE LEGACY: Yale’s emergency contraceptive vending machine would violate state law.

UTEXAS: UT gets sued for punishing ‘biased’ and ‘rude’ speech.

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No. 10 DOWNING STREET: Yesterday, I got a special tour of 10 Downing Street, courtesy of my friend Helen, who is a member of the No. 10 staff. Fun fact: Prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher among them, leave their mark on the building in curious ways. Above one of the interior doors is decorative molding with swirls and curls. At the end is the tiny image of a “thatcher” on a ladder carrying thatch for a roof.  Cool.  (Thank you, Helen!)

PAUL BEDARD: Jared Kushner ‘indispensable’ on prison reform, model for future Trump fights.

Top Trump adviser Jared Kushner is winning bipartisan praise for driving a 20-year effort to reform prison sentencing and criminal justice to the finish line and ignoring repeated declarations that it was dead right up to last week.

Liberal and conservative advocates for justice reform are giving Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, credit for cobbling together — despite his inexperience in Washington and with politics — an unlikely coalition that has the package on the verge of Senate passage.

“Jared has been indispensable to this process in navigating through a complex set of relationships and issues, which have been a part of getting us to where we are today and holding together a delicate coalition which has undergirded this effort,” praised Marc H. Morial, president of the National Urban League.

On the other side of the aisle, Republican Sen. Rand Paul said, “Having worked on criminal justice reform in the Senate for the past six years, I was pleased to see President Trump’s White House fully engaged in bringing this important issue to the forefront. This would not have happened without Jared’s personal involvement, interest and perseverance. Jared and I both share a more ambitious criminal justice reform vision, but this was the first step, and we look forward to building onto it in the next Congress.”

And Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, one of the groups in the fight the longest, said, “It’s a big win for Jared. For anybody who thought, ‘That’s the New Yorker, out-of-town guy,’ he managed this effort through the House and the Senate.”

According to several officials, Kushner repeatedly dismissed claims that the effort was dead and instead worked with key lawmakers, interest groups, pastors and even celebrities like Kim Kardashian to keep the effort alive and make changes to the “First Step Act” to reduce opposition.

As it faced delay in the Senate, he and others worked through the final concerns and the president personally pushed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to clear the way for action on the Senate floor, which he did this week. It is expected to pass.

His Saudi diplomacy has been pretty successful, too.

JOSEPH BOTTUM on how A Christmas Carol is overrated. I disagree. It’s a chilling cautionary tale of an admirably sound business man who was overcome by mawkish sentimentality.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: MIT Figured out a Way to Shrink Objects to Nanoscale.

INDEED: Twitter isn’t real.

What if Twitter isn’t real?

By that, I don’t just mean Russian bots talking to other Russian bots, liberal satirists fooling gullible conservatives, and cynical opinion-mongers conjuring panics out of nothing. There’s clearly a lot of literally fake news on Twitter, and it’s a problem.

Notwithstanding these flaws — or perhaps because of them — Twitter is still taken seriously as a medium. It’s supposed to be extraordinarily powerful and influential, able to make and break reputations at unprecedented speed.

But what if it isn’t? What if Twitter is mostly a closed ecosystem, relevant only to and within itself? What if its ability to shape the real world is, as they say, greatly exaggerated?

#BringBackOurGirls wasn’t exactly a smashing success.

Related: Social Media as Social Disease.

ON THIS DAY IN 1773:  The Boston Tea Party.  Think about that as you drink your morning coffee.

NEWS YOU CAN USE:  Salmon Chanted Evening….

Re: DEMOCRATS HAVE ALWAYS OPPOSED GERRYMANDERING IN STATES WHERE THEY DON’T CONTROL THE PROCESS:  The Democrats’ power grab in New Jersey.

THESE PEOPLE WOULD ALSO THINK IT’S UNCLEAR WHY THE SUN RISES IN THE MORNING:  NYT: ‘Unclear’ What Motivated Gunman Who Yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ Before Attack.

THAT THE WEAK SURVIVE AT ALL IS A WONDER OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION:  “Tools for the Weak.”

WOMEN USED TO AT LEAST BE MORE DISCREET ABOUT THIS KIND OF ARRANT STUPIDITY:  Woman wants to use sperm donor to have kids because her husband isn’t ‘attractive enough’.