MICHAEL WALSH: NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS FOR THE WHITE HOUSE; not least of which is:

Build the “danged fence.” Finding the funds won’t get any easier next year with the opposition party controlling the purse strings, but if the slow-motion invasion from Latin America isn’t a matter of national security, what is? The president insists he’s prepared to keep the government partially closed until he gets the $5 billion he’s requested, and he’s also floated the idea of using the military and its fungible budget to build it, which may turn out to be his best option. But build it he must: nothing will dishearten Trump’s base more — and ensure his defeat in 2020 — than welshing on his promise to end illegal immigration.

Read the whole thing.

BECAUSE IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT: Greenpeace’s iconic ‘Rainbow Warrior’ ship chopped up on third-world beach, sold for scrap.

POOR HEARING IS NOT JUST AN ANNOYANCE: Hearing Loss Threatens Mind, Life and Limb.

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WHAT’S THE SAYING? TO FIND OUT WHO RULES YOU, FIND OUT WHO YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO CRITICIZE?

Also:

IRRESOLUTE: Most people give up New Year’s Resolutions by January 12, study claims.

“I WON’T BACK DOWN” IS NO LONGER A TOM PETTY SONG: Kanye West Reaffirms His Support of Trump in His First Tweets of 2019.

“Trump all day,” he wrote, followed by dragon emojis — likely calling back to tweets from April in which he said he and Donald Trump share “dragon energy,” which he defined as “natural born leaders,” “very instinctive” and “great foresight.”

“They will not program me. Blacks are 90% Democrats,” West tweeted. “That sounds like control to me.”

“One of my favorite of many things about what the Trump hat represents to me is that people can’t tell me what to do because I’m black,” he said. “From now on I’m performing with my mutherfucking hat on.”

Fight the power! And yes, that’s exactly what he’s doing.

AT AMAZON, Year-End Deals All Week.

SO MANY REASONS: Why Don’t We Just Run Internal Combustion Engines on Hydrogen?

AT RECALL-AND-SAFETY SITE WHYSTLE, 2018 IN REVIEW: PET, TOOL, APPLIANCE, ELECTRONICS, MEDICAL, AND OTHER RECALLS.

ON FACEBOOK, STEVE (S.M.) STIRLING COMMENTS: “It’s a pity Bob Heinlein can’t see this. He would feel -so- totally vindicated!”

SPACE: New Horizons completes flyby of Ultima Thule. But bandwidth limits mean we’ll have to wait for the goodies: “It will take about 20 months for New Horizons to transmit the estimated seven gigabytes of data it collected during the flyby. The next few days will see some high-resolution images, Stern said, although the sharpest images — with an estimated resolution as good as 33 meters per pixel — won’t come down until February. Some initial spectral data will also be returned this week.”

ELIZABETH WARREN FOR PRESIDENT?: Yikes. This article exposing her bogus research on bankruptcy should have been enough to sink her political ambitions back in 2006. But it wasn’t.

I would say that she doesn’t have a chance. But I said that about Barack Obama and Donald Trump, so I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of American politics.

PERSONAL DEFENSE PLANNING: Always Have An Exit Strategy.. I’ve always instinctively done the back-to-wall near an exit thing, and it seems to run genetically with the men in my family.

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ROD DREHER: Learning From The Spanish Civil War.

Lengthy, but well worth a read.

THAT’S BETTER THAN THE TRADITIONAL AZTEC TECHNIQUE OF LOWERING BLOOD PRESSURE BY CUTTING PEOPLE’S HEARTS OUT: Ancient Aztec ‘superfood’ could lower blood pressure, study says.

THE HOTTEST OF HOT TAKES: Was Low-Dose Radiation From the Atomic Bombs Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Beneficial?

NO SURPRISE HERE: Report: College students at highest risk for developing meningitis B infection.

THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS: The Year in Review, McLaughlin Group Style.

P.C. CULTURE EXPLAINED: People adopt made-up social rules to be part of a group.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: ‘Tolerance’! SNL alum’s CNN New Year’s resolution is to ‘make sure the Republican party dies’

As Kyle Smith tweets, “If it dies I’m guessing Jane Curtin is not going to be its killer.”

She certainly wasn’t during the heyday of the original Saturday Night Live four decades ago, where five years of the original (and most watchable) cast’s transgressive humor preceded the election of Ronald Reagan. And more recently, eight years of the now-venerable franchise’s Obama worshipping non-entities preceded the election of Trump.

But regarding the network where Curtin appeared last night, I’m so old, I can remember when CNN’s John King got the vapors because someone uttered the word “crosshairs” regarding Rahm Emanuel’s political future shortly after Gabrielle Giffords was shot in January of 2011. But a CNN guest figuratively wishing that half the network’s potential audience dies? Crickets.

Related: Anderson Cooper Gets Drunk On Tequila On CNN’s New Year’s Eve Broadcast.

As with his viewers, even Cooper needs to be drunk to tolerate his palaver.

AVIATION: Will the Defiant Be the Helicopter That Finally Replaces the Black Hawk?