NO ONE HAS EVER ACCUSED SPENGLER OF NOT BEING A CONTRARIAN BEFORE: Once Again, President Trump is Magnificently Right — This Time About Russia.

ARE THESE THE 5 BEST NATURAL ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD: Ok, believers and skeptics, go for it on HillFaith! (But be nice to each other, please). And if you have one or more better arguments, please provide links. Ditto if you think you know five for the negative proposition.

PRIME DAY: 50% Off Prime For Students.

THIS IS FROM A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, BUT IT’S CIRCULATING AGAIN ON FACEBOOK FOR SOME REASON AND IT’S WORTH REPEATING: Enforcing The Law Is Inherently Violent.

Law professors and lawyers instinctively shy away from considering the problem of law’s violence. Every law is violent. We try not to think about this, but we should. On the first day of law school, I tell my Contracts students never to argue for invoking the power of law except in a cause for which they are willing to kill. They are suitably astonished, and often annoyed. But I point out that even a breach of contract requires a judicial remedy; and if the breacher will not pay damages, the sheriff will sequester his house and goods; and if he resists the forced sale of his property, the sheriff might have to shoot him.

This is by no means an argument against having laws.

It is an argument for a degree of humility as we choose which of the many things we may not like to make illegal. Behind every exercise of law stands the sheriff – or the SWAT team – or if necessary the National Guard. Is this an exaggeration? Ask the family of Eric Garner, who died as a result of a decision to crack down on the sale of untaxed cigarettes. That’s the crime for which he was being arrested. Yes, yes, the police were the proximate cause of his death, but the crackdown was a political decree.

Law is force. If you don’t like people being subjected to government force, you should desire a minimum of law.

HATE YOUNG PEOPLE? TRY A MINIMUM WAGE: More evidence of the harm minimum wages are doing to young people trying to gain job skills, this time from Minnesota:

Following the minimum wage increases limited service restaurant employment fell by 4% in Minnesota relative to Wisconsin. Further, youth employment fell by 9% in Minnesota following the minimum wage increases, while it increased by 10.6% in Wisconsin over the same time period.

Oh, and restaurant food prices started increasing after they’d been falling for years.

VOX: To be clear: Trump only won the presidential election in 2016 because of the Electoral College.

CARL KOZLOWSKI: Meet the Other Side of Movie Star Dennis Quaid. “The veteran actor finds his inner rock star and shares why you won’t hear him getting political anytime soon.”

MAKING A DOG’S BREAKFAST OF BREXIT: Last week, Teresa May’s government released a paper explaining how it would approach negotiations over Brexit with the European Union. The strategy appears to be to give away the shop. My reaction is here, and those with an eye for the detail can read Brexit expert Lee Rotherham’s in-depth discussion here. As I note, the negotiating stance will likely make a UK-US free trade deal impossible, but that’s not even the silliest thing in the paper. As Lee notes,

For some reason, the Conservative Government is endorsing the Social Chapter [on labor and employment rules] as a core part of future economic policy, and a baseline of its negotiating strategy. This is beyond not wise.

Indeed.

The good news is that the howl of betrayed Brexit voters over the weekend appears to have been heard, and May has backed down on some key parts of the strategy that are up for a vote in Parliament this week.

For any other Prime Minister, this would probably be fatal. Teresa May, however, appears to have no intention of resigning.

NARRATOR: IT’S A CHRISTMAS MOVIE. Bruce Willis officially declares that Die Hard is not a Christmas movie.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The American Nobility Pays No Price For Its Failures: Accountability shouldn’t just be for the little guy.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “I asked a question so he would look at me.”

WELL, I DON’T THINK I EVER POSTED A VIDEO WHERE PEOPLE DIDN’T MAKE FUN OF MY HAIR: Women Making Science Videos on YouTube Face Hostile Comments.

Two points: (1) Never read the comments; (2) They were just jealous bald guys.

But the headline exaggerates the downsides: “There were some positives for women as well. Female on-camera hosts elicited more comments, likes and subscribers per view than the other categories. They even received a slightly higher percentage of positive comments compared to male hosts.”

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Worldwide Elites Still Don’t Understand Why They Keep Losing. “Yet so far the liberal world order has made no serious intellectual effort to understand the Wave, leaving the task to late-night comedians. They have preferred to depict it as the product of subhuman, bigoted minds whose feeble arguments can be contemptuously dismissed by symbolically floating rubber blimps over London; or by falling back on explanations such as Nazism, despite the fact we are in the wrong century, without a recent world war, in the middle of an economic boom and the beneficiaries of too many decades of politically correct instruction for that thesis to be easily accepted.”

Read the whole thing.

HUH: Study: Same-sex marriage legalization may not have improved health. “The researchers said they were surprised to find that legalization of same-sex marriage did not lead to higher rates of health insurance and improved access to health care for lesbians, and they want to take a closer look at that.”

WHY DID TRUMP TOSS THAT SERVER WRENCH INTO MUELLER’S INDICTMENT MACHINE? Journalists, Never-Trumpers and Obama partisans are going absolutely ape-you-know-what over President Donald Trump’s Helsinki questions about what happened to the Democratic National Committee’s server and those 33,000 destroyed Hillary Clinton emails. It is Trump Derangement Syndrome at its most virulent since election night 2016.

But Trump is posing the very questions his critics don’t dare ask because they fear the answers will finally and definitively explain who actually colluded with Russian interests in 2016. I won’t say the name but how much you want to bet it’s spelled C-L-I-N-T-O-N?

BLUE ON BLUE: Rhode Island Progressive Democrats Threaten to Topple Party Leadership. “Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo faces a tight race in November against GOP challenger Allan Fung, but first faces a party insurgency.”

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21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Snyder’s rule of thumb for men: Try to get more orgasms in bed with your wives than in front of the computer. Reynolds’ rule of thumb for women: Work to make sure this happens.

THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: The Strange And Curious Case Of The Deadly Superbug Yeast.

OUCH: Bombshell Bourdain interview is published one month after his suicide: Celebrity chef unloads on ‘rapey, gropey and disgusting Bill Clinton and hopes Weinstein is ‘beaten to death in jail.’

HOMOPHOBIA TO OWN THE CONS! NYT’s Trump/Putin ‘cartoon’ one of the vilest things you’ll see today:

Ever notice when the Left wants to make a dig at someone they disagree with they often times fall back on making a gay joke or slur? And here we thought they were the party of tolerance …

Homophobic much, New York Times?

Why are Democratic-monopoly institutions such cesspits of homophobia?

ASHE SCHOW: Henry Cavill Caves, Apologizes For #MeToo Comments.

GARY TAUBES, CALL YOUR OFFICE: New research could banish guilty feeling for consuming whole dairy products. “Our findings not only support, but also significantly strengthen, the growing body of evidence which suggests that dairy fat, contrary to popular belief, does not increase risk of heart disease or overall mortality in older adults. In addition to not contributing to death, the results suggest that one fatty acid present in dairy may lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, particularly from stroke.”

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Gym Profs Shun ‘Team Sports’ to Promote Social Justice.