SORT OF LIKE WHAT TRUMP’S DOING WITH THE IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY: WATCH: IDF Confuses Syrian Missile System and Returns the Missiles to Sender.

DID YOU SEE THE FOUR THUGS TRY TO BURN DOWN THE EPOCH TIMES’ PRESS? Freedom of their press only? The Washington Post and the New York Times have yet to report it, but four thugs busted into The Epoch Times’ printing facility in Hong Kong earlier this week and tried to burn the place to the ground. They failed, but the intended message from the totalitarians in Beijing was clear enough.

The Epoch Times vows to continue publishing the truth about Hong Kong, China and everything else. Yes, I’m biased, but not because I string for The Epoch Times covering Congress. I’m biased because I love the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free and independent press, which the Post and NYT once proudly illustrated. And could again if they were more like The Epoch Times.

HAS ANYONE SEEN HUNTER BIDEN RECENTLY? Burisma Founder Suspected Of Embezzling Ukrainian State Funds, Whereabouts Currently Unknown.

I WASN’T EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: The Morning After: SpaceX blew the top off of a Starship. You learn from failures, and in the rocket business failures are often explodey.

MY STARTING PRESUMPTION IS THAT ALL THESE REPORTS ARE HOAXES, AND I’M SELDOM WRONG: Syracuse U. says report of white supremacist manifesto was likely hoax. In 2019, the demand for white supremacists far exceeds the supply.

HEH: Biden Complains Moderators Keep Giving Him Ample Time To Speak.

WHY IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM, AGEISM, AND SEX DISCRIMINATION? Establishment-Backed DNC Candidate Discriminated Against Employees Based on Age, Race: Ada Briceño called non-Hispanic employees ‘gringos,’ ‘f—ing old ladies.’

WELL, CHINA’S A BUNCH OF COMMIES, AND EVERYONE THE LEFT DOESN’T LIKE IS A WHITE SUPREMACIST, SO: China: Care about Uighurs? You must be a white supremacist.

AHEM. EVERYTHING THE LEFT DISLIKES WAS ABOUT SLAVERY. No! The Electoral College Was Not about Slavery!

SIGNS POINT TO YES: Will 2020 Dems Turn Off More Faith Voters in Fifth Debate?

Related (From Ed): Far-Left Rachel Maddow Demands to Know If Pro-Life Dem Belongs in the Party.

#GREENFAIL: IndyGo electric buses having battery problems, can’t handle the cold.

2013 FLASHBACK: Franklin Templeton in $5 billion Ukraine debt gamble.

THE BOLSHEVIKS AS RELIGIOUS FANATICS:

[Historian]Yuri Slezkine’s most valuable insight is to treat the Bolsheviks as members of an apocalyptic millennial cult, without God. He draws parallels in Christian history between them and religious movements that sought to build heaven on earth, no matter how many so-called evildoers had to be liquidated to do it. If you think of the Bolsheviks as religious fanatics, their bizarre, cruel acts make a lot more sense. And to be frank, so do the words and deeds of the social justice cultists of our own time and place.

Which brings us to: Tom Steyer Vows to ‘Declare a State of Emergency on Day One’ of Presidency to Address Climate Change.

As Tim Blair joked when AOC was evoking FDR and WWII during her disastrous unveiling of the Green Nude Eel, “Fair enough. Nuking Hiroshima it is, then.”

ADVANTAGE: JOHN SOLOMON. Witnesses Confirm Reports by Journalist Frequently Cited in Impeachment Probe. “Solomon’s reporting is inseparable from the impeachment proceedings because President Donald Trump’s requests to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a July 25 phone call can all be traced back to articles that Solomon wrote for The Hill, an online newspaper. In several columns over the course of two years, Solomon exposed an appearance of a conflict of interest on the part of former Vice President Joe Biden, detailed actions taken by Ukrainian officials to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and chronicled a tense relationship between the U.S. Embassy in Kiev and Ukraine’s prosecutors due to pressure from American officials to back off from prosecuting select individuals and groups.”

SO WHEN YOU TREAT IT, YOU’RE TREATING THE COUPLE? Erectile dysfunction puts post-menopausal women off sex more than low libido. I was going to write a snarky headline about everything being men’s fault, but the piece is actually more sensitive than that.

PRIVACY: Police can keep Ring camera video forever, and share with whomever they’d like, Amazon tells senator.

WaPo link if you’d rather not click, and anyway the headline tells the story.

STUNNING NEW EVIDENCE of China’s Dictatorial Repression.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Mackubin Owens: President can’t ‘subvert’ foreign policy.

President Trump and his defenders have long railed against the “deep state,” a name they apply to the entrenched federal bureaucracy working from within to bring down his administration. Of course, the president’s critics mocked the idea of a deep state as a right-wing conspiracy theory. I personally have never been a fan of the term, preferring “administrative state” to describe what I believe is the fourth, unconstitutional “branch” of government to which Congress has delegated its legislative powers.

But a strange thing has happened: lately the president’s critics have decided that not only does the deep state exist, but that it is a good thing! They praise an alleged “whistleblower,” a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, and the various ambassadors and deputy secretaries of state who have testified before Congress, expressing their concerns about President Trump’s handling of Ukraine as “heroes” and “patriots” who “understand their oath.”

But it is the press that has truly seen the light. Michelle Cottle, a member of the New York Times editorial board, opined about the denizens of the deep state that “They Are Not the Resistance. They Are Not a Cabal. They Are Public Servants. Let us now praise these not-silent heroes.” . . .

There’s a major problem with this argument. It ignores Article II of the Constitution, which grants to the president, in conjunction with Congress — not unelected bureaucrats — the power to make U.S. foreign policy. Unelected bureaucrats do not have a right to undermine the policy of a duly elected president, simply because they disagree with it. But the denizens of the deep state think they do.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman is a perfect example of this mindset. He complained that “he was deeply troubled by what he interpreted as an attempt by the president to subvert U.S. foreign policy.” Read that again. The problem here is that the Constitution grants to the president, in conjunction with Congress, the power to make U.S. foreign policy, giving him broad authority to conduct foreign affairs and negotiate with leaders of other nations. It does not grant any such power to unelected bureaucrats to undermine the president’s foreign policy — even when they are “deeply troubled” by it.

Last month, I wrote a column on the “perils of praetorianism,” the belief that military officers should form a phalanx around the duly elected president “for the good of the country.” The fact is, the deep state is praetorianism on steroids.

Is it a good idea for us to normalize the view that unelected bureaucrats are the protectors of republican government? If so, we shift power from voters to the deep state, a concept at war with the very idea of republican government.

Well, the Democrats are, in fact, at war with the very idea of republican government.

TO BE FAIR, THAT SEEMS LIKE A LOW BAR: He Was Born a Poor Black Child: Biden Tries to Out-Black Booker at Dem Debate.

I’M SURE GRETA THUNBERG WILL BE SHOWING UP TO SHAME THEM NEVER: China Ramps Up Coal Power Again, Despite Pressure to Cut Emissions. “China is set to add new coal-fired power plants equivalent to the European Union’s entire capacity in a bid to boost its slowing economy, despite global pressure on the world’s biggest energy consumer to rein in carbon emissions. Across the country, 148 gigawatts of coal-fired plants are either being built or are about to begin construction, according to a report from Global Energy Monitor, a non-profit group that monitors coal stations. The current capacity of the entire EU coal fleet is 149 GW.”

Related: “While China now produces more CO2 than the United States and the European Union put together, the Asia-Pacific region (which does include a few industrialised countries, like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, but is mainly in the “developing” category, with China, India and Indonesia the most prominent examples) emits nearly twice as much CO2 as the United States and the European Union combined. And rising.”

WEIRD HOW LITTLE ATTENTION THIS IS GETTING WORLDWIDE: Leaked Documents Show Xi Jinping’s Secret Speeches About China’s Uighur Crackdown.

U.S, most European countries and Japan have officially called for the camps to be shut down, but China’s allies in the U.N. have pushed back, issuing their own statement in support of what they called “counter-terrorism and de-radicalization measures.” The countries who defended China include Russia, Belarus and Serbia, along with some Muslim-majority countries Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, CNN reported.

The strongest response so far has come from the U.S., which in October put visa restrictions on Chinese officials and blacklisted Chinese tech firms with links to government surveillance of Uighurs. But the Trump administration’s effort to condemn the mass detention has been complicated by trade negotiations, and some have criticized the president for not speaking out more directly against China.

On the other hand, one of my liberal friends was complaining about Trump “shitting on China,” so I guess he can’t win. If we had a more competent intelligence and foreign policy apparatus, we might be doing more about this, but it’s quite clear that we don’t, and not even certain that efforts to do more wouldn’t be sabotaged by the bureaucracy.

Related: During all the Russia hacking hype, China is rising in influence: While Russia’s role in the 2016 election dominates the news, China’s spying and alarming influence within our borders is too little noticed.

ONE LAST ONE FROM JERRY POURNELLE:  The Best of Jerry Pournelle.

SHORT STORIES BY A MASTER OF SCIENCE FICTION! Includes over a dozen stories by SF legend Jerry Pournelle, and remebrances by Pournelle collaborators and admirers.

For the better part of five decades, Jerry Pournelle’s name has been synonymous with hard-hitting science fiction. His Falkenberg’s Legion stories and Janissaries series helped define the military sf genre, as did his work as editor on the There Will Be War series of anthologies. With frequent collaborator Larry Niven, he co-wrote the genre-defining first contact novel The Mote in God’s Eye, which was praised by Robert A. Heinlein as “possibly the greatest science fiction novel I have ever read.”

Now, for the first time, all of Pournelle’s best short work has been collected in a single volume. Herein you will find over a dozen short stories, each with a new introduction by editor and longtime Pournelle assistant John F. Carr, as well as essays and remembrances by Pournelle collaborators and admirers.

BEHOLD! MY SHOCKED FACE!  In Spite of Recent Polling Surges, Pete Buttigieg Not Doing Well With Black, Hispanic Voters.