HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Diversity Administrators – Higher Education’s Lucrative New Scam. “During a recent appearance on FOX News, Manhattan Institute scholar, Heather Mac Donald, noted that the Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of California, Los Angeles makes over $400,000 dollars a year. In other words, the top diversity administrator at UCLA makes more than the president of the United States. Nice work if you can get it, as they say. What do these administrators do, exactly?” Mostly stuff that universities would be better off without.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: House Passes Billions for Wall, Mattis Down and Much, Much More. “The House approved a bill with $5B for border funding; now it goes to the Senate. A very small part of gov’t could shut down if the Senate doesn’t sign and no one will notice.”

WILLIAM E. SIMON, JR. & JAMES PIERESON: In Defense of Philip Anschutz. “It does not require a marketing degree to know there would never be a large audience for a conservative magazine with a single-minded mission to bring down a right-leaning president. That audience was more or less what the editors banked on when they embarked on their anti-Trump editorial position even before he took the oath of office. As the editors soon discovered, the market for their re-tailored magazine was an exceedingly small one.”

MY LATEST CREATORS SYNDICATE COLUMN: Congo’s December 23rd election and your lifestyle. (Bumped.)

RELATED: Cocktails from Hell, Chapter 6: Congo: Anarchic Violence, Cyclic Intervention, and Mineral Wealth

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: The Emoluments Lawsuit: What The Media Are Not Reporting. “This has not been reported much in the media. The Plaintiffs (i.e., the Attorneys General for DC and Maryland) have moved to voluntarily dismiss (without prejudice) their individual capacity claim against the President, and to move forward exclusively with their official capacity claim against the President (in reality a claim against the government, not Donald J. Trump). It is not yet clear if the President will consent to the dismissal! The President’s private counsel might take the position that the matter has been fully briefed for nearly 7 months. . . . The President’s brief is due later today—then we will know the President’s position. This is all a stunning turn of events. The media is not reporting it.”

TANK PLATOON ON A PATROL: A USMC Abrams tank platoon participates in a simulated security patrol during Exercise Trident Juncture 18 in Storas, Norway Oct. 27, 2018.

JUSTICE: Deer poacher sentenced to watch ‘Bambi’ every month during a year in Missouri jail. “The man was one of a group of poachers found to have illegally killed hundreds of deer, sometimes taking only their heads and leaving the rest to rot in fields.”

My preferred activity for poachers would be a most dangerous game.

FLASHBACK: Actually, Things Are Pretty Good.

MAKERS OUTDONE BY TAKERS: Swamp’s gold: 6 of 10 richest counties in America are DC suburbs, 10 of the top 20. “The area is not a manufacturing or Internet hub, and instead is the home of much of the federal government. . . . Federal workers in the Washington area earn an average of about $110,000 a year, about $25,000 more than the average federal salary. And that is before benefits like 40 days off, 18 percent retirement matching, and ample health care insurance choices are added in. Many households have two federal workers, and many more have former federal workers receiving a pension now working for federal contractors, “double-dipping,” so to speak.”

MORE ON THE MATTIS RESIGNATION AT VICTORYGIRLS.

Plus some thoughts from Byron York:

Nonetheless, I’ll miss Mattis. He’ll be hard to replace.

Plus:

Too cruel to the Syrians. That would be deploying a Weapon of Mattis Destruction.

UPDATE: Seen on Facebook:

HMM: Jason Chaffetz Says Trump’s border wall may get funding after all (thanks to this dirty little Washington secret).

President Donald Trump, to his credit, has worked hard to get his wall funding properly authorized. But he may ultimately do exactly what presidents before him have done: take advantage of the broken Congressional process.

Washington’s dirty little secret is that unauthorized spending is not even uncommon anymore. As a freshman member of Congress, this truth stunned me – and I was not alone. By my estimation, there were many in the body who disapproved of the practice. But to our disappointment, the body as a whole was not inclined to address the issue.

The Democrats may feign exasperation with the president potentially spending “unauthorized” money on the wall, but they have enthusiastically participated in the budgetary games that will make it possible.

Sticking it to Nancy Pelosi while fulfilling his signature campaign promise would surely excite Trump’s base — and go a long way towards straightening up yesterday’s mess.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Heh:

ANOTHER REASON WHY OUR POLICY SUCKS: Today’s Drug Abusers Did Not Derive From Yesterday’s Patients.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A RICHER INVESTOR: Many vegans want to destroy the modern food system. Investor Chris Kerr wants to use it to take plant-based products mainstream.

NPR: Warning To Democrats: Most Americans Against U.S. Getting More Politically Correct.

FROM SARAH HOYT WRITING AS SARAH D’ALMEIDA, DAY THREE OF THE HOLIDAY EXTRAVAGANZA:  The Musketeer’s Seamstress at 99c.

Aramis emerges from the water closet to find his lover, a duchess, murdered on her bed. The room is locked, and Aramis is the only one who could have entered it. He’s sure he didn’t do it, but no one else believes him. Even Monsieur de Treville, Captain of Musketeers, doubts Aramis’s word. Aramis must leave Paris and go on the run, entrusting the solving of the murder, and the defense of his honor, his freedom and his very life to Athos, Porthos and D’Artagnan. Can “one for all” carry the day when every powerful person in France believes Aramis a murderer and when powerful interests would gladly frame Aramis for it?

HMM: Veterinarians Face Disproportionately High Suicide Rates, Study Says.

John Ellis noted here a couple days ago that suicide rates are shockingly high for members of the media, too.

JIM MEIGS: A Gaslight Unto the Nations: How a word became the cliché of the Trump years.

“Gaslighting” feels like one of those trendy words that becomes au courant for a couple of years and then devolves into a punch line. (“How many men’s rights activists does it take to change a lightbulb?” one online meme asks. “None, they still use gaslighting.”) But the term’s growing popularity hints at a deeper change in political language, not just in the words we use, but in how we use them, in the goals we are trying to accomplish when we speak.

Disagreements over political issues used to hinge mostly on factual questions. (At least that was the ideal to which both sides claimed to aspire.) Does a higher minimum wage help or hurt the poor? Will tax cuts boost inequality or lift all boats? Good-faith advocates for either side would marshal their evidence and make their cases. To be sure, some debates got nasty. But, underneath the vitriol, people generally accepted that winning the argument required having a more persuasive set of facts.

There is another style of argument, one that doesn’t trouble itself with pesky facts at all. British writer C.S. Lewis dubbed this style “Bulverism,” after a fictional character he called Ezekiel Bulver. He imagined Bulver as a child overhearing his mother dismiss a point made by his father with the words, “Oh you say that because you are a man.” At that point, Bulver later recalls, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of your argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet.”

Lewis conceived Bulver as a stand-in for the Freudians and Marxists of his day who dismissed their opponents’ positions by attributing them to deep-seated—even unconscious—biases. If you disagreed with a Freudian, you were “projecting” or “in denial.” Question the inevitability of socialism and you were just a victim of “false consciousness” showing how deeply you’d been brainwashed by capitalism.

If we were to drop Ezekiel Bulver into a modern-day Twitter debate, he would feel right at home. Bulverism is now the norm.

Yep. But read the whole thing, which is great.

IT’S A MADHOUSE, A MADHOUSE! Perez nixes ‘undercard’ debates for 2020 primary.

With the prospect of upward of 20 Democrats running for president in 2020, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez announced on Thursday that the party would split up candidates by random selection and host debates on consecutive nights if there were too many candidates.

The decision will allow the DNC to avoid attempting to fit the expected bumper crop of candidates on one stage or sorting debate appearance by polling numbers.

Perez said he didn’t want any voters to feel that the party was toying with the debate or debate schedule to help out certain candidates. “The critical imperative is making sure everyone feels their candidate got a fair shot,” Perez said. He said the logistics of dealing with so many candidates is a “first-class challenge to have.” The committee did not say how many candidates constituted too many for one stage.

Putting the fringe candidates in with the more mainstream contenders (I’m being generous with the word “mainstream”) might exacerbate something I wrote about here yesterday: “Primary election pandering to small groups of niche — and I do mean niche — voters could end up being a real turn-off for the Obama-to-Trump voters who decided the last election.”

NO OTHER REASON IS NECESSARY: U.S. Cites Sovereignty as One of 5 Countries to Vote Against UN Migration Compact.

WITH THIS KIND OF HIT-AND-RUN TACTIC, IS HE TRYING TO BEAT OUT BETO O’ROURKE? Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) Berates ‘Remorseless’ Nielsen for 6 Minutes, Leaves Before She Can Respond.

WELL, THIS IS RATIONAL:  Baltimore Woman To Use Buyback Cash To Buy Bigger Gun.

YEAH.  VERY NON-PARTISAN. SOMEONE FIND MY EYES.  THEY WENT ROLLING AGAIN:  Soros Gave $1.35M to ‘Nonpartisan’ Watchdog Inundating Trump with Lawsuits.