TOM HARRIS AND DR. TIM BALL: Extreme Environmentalists Are Anti-Human. “We must oppose these advocates of human suffering at every turn.”

AMATEURS STUDY STRATEGY, PROFESSIONALS STUDY THIS: Pentagon Say Military Logistics System Not Ready for War With China or Russia. “Defense Science Board warns military supply system ‘decayed’ and needs rapid upgrading.”

OH, GOODY: New Ebola-like virus discovered in a bat in China. “The potentially dangerous filovirus, known as Měnglà virus, comes from the Rousettus bat in Yunnan Province, China, and can lead to fatal fever diseases in humans, according to findings published Monday in Nature Microbiology.”

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO SUPPORT OUR PREFERRED NARRATIVE: New York Times: Angela Davis Says She’s ‘Stunned’ After Award Is Revoked Over Her Views on Israel.

Let’s get a few basic facts out of the way. Angela Davis was a long-time Soviet apologist (and VP candidate for the Soviet-controlled U.S. Communist Party) who was implicated in the murder of a  judge, though a jury failed to convict despite strong inculpatory evidence. She has never met an anti-American totalitarian dictatorship or terrorist group that she didn’t like.

In short, she likely belongs in prison as an accomplice to murder, and she certainly doesn’t deserve any awards.

An Alabama civil rights organization nevertheless planned to give her an award. Some members of the Jewish community, apparently, objected. With regard to Jews in particular, she has long been complicit in antiSemitism. As recounted in his book Chutzpah, when Alan Dershowitz, who worked on her legal defense, asked her to speak out on behalf of Soviet Jews imprisoned as dissidents, Davis responded that they were all “Zionist fascists” who deserved their fate. She also had a long “professional” association with radical black antiSemites such as Stokely Carmichael.

The New York Times, rather than recounting any of this relevant history, essentially publishes a Davis press release, suggesting that no one could possibly have any objections to her beyond her advocacy for “Palestinian rights.”

And the “mainstream media” wonders why a large segment of the American public doesn’t trust it.

BUT THE HASTILY IMPROVISED NARRATIVE! No, Economists Don’t Agree a 70 Percent Top Marginal Tax Rate Is a Good Idea.

Hell, Paul Krugman and Paul Krugman can’t even agree on it.

DID SPOCK HAVE A BEARD? BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE COOL: New Paper: A ‘Mirror Image’ of Our Universe Existed Before The Big Bang.

ASHE SCHOW: He Was Found Not Guilty In Court Of Sexual Assault. His School Still Expelled Him.

Saifullah Khan, an immigrant who grew up in an Afghanistan refugee camp, won a full scholarship to Yale University. He would later be accused of sexually assaulting a female classmate in 2015 – an accusation that, in a rarity for campus accusations, actually resulted in a criminal trial. During that criminal trial, Khan was found not guilty, based on video evidence that showed him an his accuser walking arm-in-arm and smiling, as well as key-card evidence that supported his story that the woman invited him back to her dorm after he left, and then asked him to check on her friend who was actually too drunk.

Activists, working on emotion and not evidence, concluded that the system failed (because women, we’re told, never lie about sexual assault), and demanded Yale expel Khan anyway, ignoring the evidence in his favor.

Despite being found not guilty in a court of law, Khan still had to go through a campus tribunal, where he was not granted full due process rights (Yale is a private university and has more leeway in denying constitutional rights to students).

Show them a man, to misquote Lavrentiy Beria, and under Title IX they’ll find a crime.

AT AMAZON, Winter Survival Essentials.

TYLER O’NEIL EXCLUSIVE: Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’ Would Cost More Than the GDP of Most Countries. “3,600 times the cost of the border wall.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Get Rid of Termites: In many cases, you can treat termites yourself, and for a lot less than it costs to go to the pros. My house is of an age where it probably had chlordane around the foundation anyway. . . .

My dad looked into buying black-market chlordane, which is apparently a thing, for his cabin back in the ’90s. It works!

IT AIN’T OVER YET: Sears chairman given more time to save company, keep it out of liquidation.

SAFETY FIRST: SpaceX Pushes Back ‘Especially Dangerous’ Dragon Test: The test for manned commercial spaceflight will now be in “about a month.”

IF BEING ANTI-COMMUNISM IS A HATE CRIME:  Then I guess I’m guilty.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK:

That’s unfair to Herman and Lilian Munster, who were a lovely, loving couple.

JOE BASTARDI HAS BEEN SAYING THIS FOR A WHILE: Long-range weather expert still sees flip-flop to colder weather this month.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: “In what could be a first for the nation, an Alabama Emergency Management Agency issued a public service warning this week telling people not to eat hundreds of chicken tenders spilled across a state highway.”

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Can Democrats Explain Why The Border Wall Is ‘Immoral?’

J.D. TUCCILLE: Please, TSA Workers, Don’t Come Back. And take the rest of your federal colleagues with you.

Along those lines, it’s nearly ideal that the federal sick-out has begun among TSA employees, since their agency is so astoundingly incompetent and abusive at its assigned tasks and is skilled only at angering travelers of all political persuasions. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) may be more explicitly malevolent, but their fans and detractors tend to break down along ideological lines. Even the Internal Revenue Service can find boosters among whoever it is who keeps weeping over those regurgitated press releases about how hard it is to be a tax collector. But sharing vicious comments about the TSA clowns squeezing people’s junk is a game we can all play while suffering in line at the airport.

Not that there’s any point to all of that groping beyond the purely recreational aspect. Undercover investigators were able to smuggle weapons and explosives past TSA agents 95 percent of the time, according to a 2015 Homeland Security Investigator General report. . . . They really aren’t getting paychecks at the moment, but I can’t really think of a good reason why their jobs should exist at all.

Airport security is a joke, and always has been. Plus:

And maybe they could take their federal colleagues—including those at the ATF and the DEA—with them.

“ATF operations nationwide employed rogue tactics, including tapping those with mental disabilities … then charging them with gun crimes,” the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported in 2013 as part of a series of horrifying stories on the federal agency. Among the failures of the agency tasked with regulating firearms, “ATF agents lost track of dozens of their own guns.”

The DEA “has existed for more than 40 years, but little attention has been given to the role the agency has played in fueling mass incarceration, racial disparities and other drug war problems,” the Drug Policy Alliance notes. That’s what DEA agents do when they’re not enjoying “‘sex parties’ with prostitutes hired by local drug cartels,” as The Washington Post puts it.

Without even turning to the larger federal apparatus, isn’t a widespread sick-out among government workers sounding like a pretty attractive idea right about now?

Yes.

YES, IT DID: Media Fabricated Narrative About Conservatives Mocking Ocasio Cortez Dance Video.

(Bumped, by Glenn).

NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: AOC’s ‘Green New Deal’ Is a Century-Old Product of Ideological Recycling.

I THINK THEY MEANT “DISCREETLY”: Navy Quietly Fires 20 Hyper Velocity Projectiles Through Destroyer’s Deckgun. “The test, conducted by the Navy and the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office as part of the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2018 international exercise, was part of a series of studies to prove the Navy could turn the more than 40-year-old deck gun design into an effective and low-cost weapon against cruise missiles and larger unmanned aerial vehicles.”

OUR BRAVE “FACT-CHECKERS” BUST TRUMP FOR AN UNDERSTATEMENT ON BORDER RAPES, THEN SCRUB IT FROM THEIR REPORT BECAUSE IT HELPS HIM: CBS caught Trump in a lie. Hilarity ensues.

CBS decided to help Democrats by fact-checking in real time President Trump’s address on the need for a wall.

CBS reported, “Fact check: Number of women sexually assaulted on trip to border.

“CLAIM: The president claimed one in three women have been sexually assaulted traveling to the border.

“FACT CHECK: Between 60 percent and 80 percent of female migrants traveling through Mexico are raped along the way, Amnesty International estimates.”

Hilarious. Who is in charge? Ralph Wiggums?

Thanks for making the president’s point.

The network later scrubbed that from its fact-check.

Sad. But remember:

SO LONG AS THIS DOESN’T HURT HIS SPACE COMPANY: Jeff, MacKenzie Bezos Say They’re Divorcing After 25 Years. “The couple met when they worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and married in 1993. He founded Amazon a year later. Bezos, 54, is worth $137 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world’s 500 wealthiest individuals.”

THE STAKES IN CONGO – LIVES AND LIFESTYLES: My latest Creators Syndicate column, bumped and updated with breaking news (see below) plus a relevant observation in a recent review.

Column kick-off:

If you advocate electric vehicles and dote on cellphones whose manufacture depends on Congo’s minerals, then the Democratic Republic of Congo’s flawed Dec. 30 presidential election matters because it can affect your digital lifestyle.

Congo’s stability also matters if you value human life. In Congo’s last civil war (Great Congo War, 1996-2003) some three million to five million people died in anarchic combat and from starvation, disease and exposure exacerbated by war.

UPDATE: Riot police deploy in Kinshasa (Reuters).

“We don’t want people to die when they announce (the results), blood to be spilled,” said Kinshasa resident Ohn Kabamba. “We are fed up, we are tired and we are waiting for a peaceful announcement which will allow us to rejoice rather than cry.”

This is a situation where you prefer to be wrong, not right. But my column ends pessimistically, with the thought that if Kabila attempts to remain in power Congo and central Africa should “prepare for a major bloodletting.”

VERY RELATED: Chapter Six, Cocktails from Hell: Anarchic Violence, Cyclic Intervention, and Mineral Wealth. The chapter gets into China’s interest in Congolese cobalt. Check out Glenn’s USA Today review and James Jay Carafano’s National Interest review.

A quote from Carafano’s review is pertinent:

The fifth of Bay’s “wicked problems” is the Congo, where ongoing cycles of violence and meddling by external powers continually threaten to spin out of control. Unfortunately, these conditions don’t describe the Congo alone. Bay could have picked Venezuela or any number of other troubled states.

Congo’s real-time cocktail from Hell is breaking news.

MARC THIESSEN: “And, most important, Pelosi and Schumer failed to use the one word that millions of Americans were longing to hear — compromise. But Trump did. That is why the president won the night. Schumer and Pelosi appealed to their base, while Trump made an effective appeal to persuadable Americans.”

I’m not sure how many people in the audience were persuadable, but Trump did seem to be talking about America, while Schumer and Pelosi seemed to be talking about federal employees. That they also tried to cover themselves by repeatedly praising “border security” adds to my sense that they know they’re losing on this issue.