STAY THIRSTY, MY FRIEND: ‘Most Interesting Man in the World’ Slams Trump, Misses Obama: ‘I Love the Guy.’

ANY DAY NOW: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: We’re All Going To Die From Climate Change.

The report seems extreme on its face, and critics were quick to point out that the computer models used to predict the “thousands” of deaths may be outdated, but leftists, including Ocasio-Cortez, soaked up the report without question, inciting mass panic.

“People are going to die if we don’t start addressing climate change ASAP,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “It’s not enough to think it’s ‘important.’ We must make it urgent. That’s why we need a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, & why fossil fuel-funded officials shouldn’t be writing climate change policy.”

The U.S. Global Change Research Program makes no recommendations on how to curb “climate change,” but it’s quite clear that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes the only way to make real in-roads on the subject is to enact a massive, socialistic environmentally focused legislative package, using taxation and other “incentives” to help Americans cut down on fossil fuel usage, while pouring millions into “green jobs” and “alternative energy.”

The newly elected, far-left, Congresswoman-elect wants to vastly increase the scope, power, and expensive of government on flimsy pretext? I did not see that coming.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: How Fracking Turned OPEC Into The Walking Dead.

OH: Internal documents Facebook has fought to keep private obtained by UK Parliament.

Six4Three, which has been engaged in a yearslong legal battle with Facebook, were the makers of “Pikini,” a controversial app that allowed users to find pictures of their friends wearing bikinis.

The app did not breach Facebook’s terms and conditions when it was released in 2013. But in 2015 Facebook changed its policies about how it shared information about its users with third-party app developers such as those behind Pikini.

Prior to the change, Pikini and other app developers were able to access information not only about their users, but also about their users’ Facebook friends, including users’ friends’ photos.

When Facebook restricted access to friend data, it destroyed Pikini’s businesses, Six4Three alleges.

While a crude app that searched out bikini photos, and which shut down years ago, might not be noteworthy on its own, the fact that Six4Three has access to internal Facebook documents — currently under court seal — is.

Facebook ought to know better than to trust sensitive information to Facebook.

WHY SHOULDN’T COLLEGE STUDENTS HAVE THE EQUIVALENT OF MIRANDA RIGHTS? If colleges are going to put students on trial — and they are — they’re going to have to make it as fair as they can. And what George Leef describes in this article isn’t it.

WELL, THEY’RE ACTING AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY SUPER-PACS NOWADAYS, SO PROBABLY YES: As Mississippi runoff approaches, could colleges sway results?

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Amnesty Gone Wild and Much, Much More. “Mexico says it will deport the 500+ invaders who tried to breach the US-Mexico border. Good, try breaching a border in another country and see what happens to you. After you land in De Gaulle or Heathrow airports and just run right past customs and see if they let you into their country once they catch you and lay you flat.”

FLASHBACK: Donald Trump must bust today’s Internet monopolies like Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts of his day.

COLD WAR II: China’s Tactic to Catch a Fugitive Official: Hold His Two American Children.

When Victor and Cynthia Liu landed with their mother on a tropical Chinese island in June to visit an ailing grandfather, they thought they would soon be on a plane back to their East Coast lives — he to start his sophomore year at Georgetown University, and she to work at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company in New York.

Instead, within days, police officers detained their mother, Sandra Han, who, like her children, is an American citizen. They moved her to a secret site, commonly known as a black jail. The children discovered at the airport that they could not leave China, even though the police had said they were not being investigated or charged with a crime, the children told American officials and family associates.

By holding the family hostage, they said, the police are trying to force the siblings’ father to return to China to face criminal charges. The father, Liu Changming, a former executive at a state-owned bank, is accused of being a central player in a $1.4 billion fraud case.

The children say their father severed ties with the family in 2012, but the Chinese authorities have still held them for months under a practice known as an exit ban — a growing tactic that has become the latest flash point in the increasingly rancorous relationship between the United States and China.

Flashback: Yes, It’s Cold War with China — So Win It Like the Last Cold War. “The problem is NOT what the Chinese are doing, but we are AREN’T doing.”

FLASHBACK: Border Agents Pepper Spray Rock-Throwing Migrant Crowd — Under Obama. Nobody was shrieking in outrage then, because Lightworker.

PAUL BEDARD: Trump report card: Best approval rating yet, but problems linger.

CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS OUST ALMOST 130, INCLUDING 9 TEACHERS, OVER CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECKS: I can’t tell for sure from the story what the circumstances were, so I am unsure whether this was a good move or not. Given how large the number was, I have my doubts. My point is that it ought to be the school system’s (and not the federal government’s) decision.

Nevertheless, the EEOC’s 2012 Guidance on criminal background checks says that because these decisions have a disparate impact on African Americans they potentially violate Title VII. It essentially says that it gets to decide whether an employer’s policy on hiring (or retaining) ex-felons is permissible.

If the EEOC had direct jurisdiction over state and local governments, I suspect it would already be bringing a Title VII lawsuit for “race discrimination” here. Fortunately for Chicago Public Schools, only the Department of Justice can initiate federal pattern or practice lawsuits against it under Title VII, so we’ll see ….

I am sympathetic to the notion that we need to do things to re-integrate ex-cons back into society (and I support the modest tax deduction available to employers who make voluntarily hires). But the EEOC’s policy of bullying employers into hiring ex-felons against the employers’ better judgment—which I discuss and critique here—is wrongheaded for all sorts of reasons and was never intended by Congress.

THE UKRAINE WAR: Tension escalates after Russia seizes Ukraine naval ships.

Two gunboats and a tug were captured by Russian forces. Ukraine says they were fired on and six crew were injured.

The countries blame each other for the incident. Ukraine’s government said it could declare martial law.

The crisis began when Russia accused the Ukrainian ships of illegally entering its waters.

The Russians placed a tanker under a bridge in the Kerch Strait – the only access to the Sea of Azov, which is shared between the two countries.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called an urgent meeting of his “war cabinet” over the incident, his spokesperson said.

Plus: Ukrainian Armed Forces website is now down. Maybe that happens on occasion. But recent experience would suggest Russian cyber intrusion.

JON GABRIEL: Twitter Slides Further into Irrelevancy. “Twitter used to be interesting. I signed up a decade ago and quickly became addicted. You could meet smart people with similar interests, funny people with disturbing interests, and get breaking news a day before the cable nets got around to it. A lot has changed in 10 years. Today, Twitter is mostly dumb people yelling at each other and self-appointed hall monitors trying to shut down accounts they don’t follow.”

BECAUSE EVERYONE IS AFRAID OF THE MUSLIMS: Asia Bibi and the First Freedom: Why Hasn’t She Been Granted Asylum.

SOCIALISM: Venezuela Is Leaking Oil Everywhere. “The once-mighty PDVSA is polluting waterways and farmland, unable to clean up its messes after years of neglect, scant investment and corruption scandals.”

The spills are conspicuous signs of what has gone so horribly wrong at once-mighty PDVSA. The state-owned company doesn’t publish statistics, but environmentalists, analysts and workers keep seemingly endless lists of examples of wayward crude—unleashed by busted valves, ripped gaskets, cracked pipes and on and on—that they say has polluted waterways and farmland and probably has seeped into aquifers.

PDVSA’s cleanup policy is, on paper, strict, because “if spills aren’t quickly attended to, they become environmental liabilities,” said Carmen Infante, a Caracas-based industry consultant. But resources are spread so thin that responses are rarely swift or comprehensive; trunks of nance trees near the three tanks in Anzoategui state are buried in crude more than 10 months after the leak was discovered.

According to workers in the field, many of the services contractors that specialize in sponging up spills, with trucks equipped with giant vacuums, have gone out of business because they’ve had such trouble getting paid by PDVSA.

You know who else has or had lousy environmental protections? The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Communist China, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

As I’ve said elsewhere: If you want to protect the environment, you’d better embrace free-market capitalism.

PRIVACY: European privacy search engines aim to challenge Google.

Sites such as Britain’s Mojeek, France’s Qwant, Unbubble in Germany and Swisscows don’t track user data, filter results or show “behavioral” ads.

These sites are growing amid the rollout of new European privacy regulations and numerous corporate data scandals, which have raised public awareness about the mountains of personal information companies stealthily gather and sell to advertisers.

Widespread suspicion in Europe about Google’s stranglehold on internet searches has also helped make the continent a spawning ground for secure searching. Europe is particularly sensitive to privacy issues because spying by the Nazi-era Gestapo and the secret services in the Soviet Union is still within living memory.

“For us, it’s all about citizens and citizens have the right to privacy,” said Eric Leandri, chairman of Paris-based Qwant. He said that view contrasts with the mind-set across the Atlantic, where internet users are seen as consumers whose rights are dictated by the terms of their agreements with tech companies.

I have good luck with DuckDuckGo, and use Bing as my fallback on the rare occasions that DDG doesn’t deliver.

MANHATTAN DA WON’T BE FILING FINANCIAL CHARGES AGAINST HARVEY WEINSTEIN: “Weinstein, however, still faces predatory assault, rape and other charges related to two victims, production assistant Mimi Haleyi and an unidentified woman.”

RACIST: Mexican Mayor Blasts Migrants, Calls Them ‘Pot Smokers’ And ‘Bums’ As 108 Caravan Members Are Arrested.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS: Navy May Have to Choose Between New Ballistic Missile Subs or 355 Ship Fleet.

When asked by USNI News what the future holds for fleet size and ballistic missile submarines now that the Democrats control the House, Frank Rose, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former assistant secretary of state for arms control, he said: “There is not enough money” for both, and “priorities need to be taken.”

Rose and Jim Miller, a former undersecretary of Defense for policy, came down firmly on the side of building the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, the replacements for the current Ohio-class, in setting priorities for Navy spending.

For the U.S., the ballistic missile submarines “secures the second strike” in event of a nuclear attack. “It really is the backbone of our nuclear force now and for the next 70 to 80 years,” Rose said.

The Navy shouldn’t be allowed to say, “sorry, we ran out of money” when it comes to paying for the ballistic missile submarine because the shipbuilding account was used for other kinds of warships. “The Navy needs to step up to that bill,” Miller said.

That line of thought is not confined to think-tanks.

Rep. Adam Smith, (D-Wash.), who is expected to become chairman of the House Armed Services Committee when the new Congress convenes in January, has long expressed skepticism over the Navy’s shipbuilding plan leading to a fleet of 355 warships. He has several times at recent public events referred to it as “simply a number thrown out there.”

Navies are expensive and time-consuming to build, plus the expense of crew training and maintenance. But for a global trading power, it’s an absolute necessity.

And Congressman Smith should know better, if he’s expected to become Chair of the House Armed Services Committee. The 355-ship figure was not just “thrown out there.”

IT’S AS IF ALL THE GREEN PANACEAS ARE FAILURES: Driving electric cars won’t make a dent in global carbon emissions, and may even increase pollution levels.

You know what works? Nuclear power and fracking.

WEIRD: Biodiesel requirement, championed by Greens and Nancy Pelosi, is wrecking the planet while enriching many shady businesses.