ASHE SCHOW: “This is a thread about the current commercials I HATE.”

AT AMAZON, Countdown to Cyber Monday.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Certain beers are ‘very healthy’ for gut health, scientist says.

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: Contagious urine shipment leads to evacuation of Washington State movie theater.

(Classical reference in headline.)

FINALLY! U.S. Special Forces Take Huge Step Toward Developing an Underwater Bullet.

HE IS ALTERING HIS GENDER. PRAY HE DOESN’T ALTER IT ANY FURTHER: Star Wars Star Billy Dee Williams Comes Out as Gender Fluid, Uses Both He/Her Pronouns.

We need a complete and total shutdown of Cloud City until we can figure out just what the hell is going on there.

HOW DARE YOU! British yacht skipper wiped out the carbon emissions saved by Greta Thunberg’s sail across the Atlantic by flying out to the US to help her.

Related: Greta Snaps: ‘Change Everything,’ ‘Climate Crisis’ About ‘Colonial, Racist, And Patriarchal Systems Of Oppression,’ Fossil Fuel ‘Literally’ Killing Us.

UPDATE: “And just like that, it never actually was about climate. It’s always about changing society into a Marxist utopia and every one of these movements prove it,” the Daily Wire’s Jeremy Frankel tweets.

THERE IS NO WAY ANY SATIRIST CAN IMPROVE UPON REAL LIFE FOR ITS PURE ABSURDITY:

Shot: Bloomberg: Darned right we need to tax the poor.

—Jazz Shaw, Hot Air, Friday.

Chaser: “The press went with it without explaining that it was an April Fool’s joke. Patsy Schroeder referenced it on the floor of the House of Representatives, a bunch of other Democrat and liberals. By the way, the condition of the poor has vastly improved since the tax the poor update. That was April 1st, 1991, by the way.”

—“20th Anniversary Flashback: Rush Demands We Tax the Poor,” Rush Limbaugh.com, July 31, 2008.

WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF SEXISM? Baltimore Will Have Bought-a-Less: The City’s Museum of Art Announces it Won’t Buy Any Works if They’re Made by Men.

I’M SURE THE MEDIA WILL IMMEDIATELY RALLY BEHIND A JOURNALIST BEING VICIOUSLY ATTACKED FOR DOING HER JOB: Fearing Negative Coverage, ‘American Muslims for Palestine’ Conference Ejects Legal Insurrection Reporter.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, ADMINISTRATIVE BIGOTRY EDITION: Law professors question university’s punishment of Christian professor for ‘vile and stupid’ views. “A university spokesperson emphasized to The Fix that [Provost Lauren] Robel was not attacking Christian beliefs in her criticism of Rasmusen’s expressed views. But some of those views are hard to separate from the professor’s orthodox Christian faith, particularly on sexuality.”

If you say, as Robel does, that you’re protecting someone’s first amendment rights, and then subject them to differential treatment based on their views, you’re not protecting their first amendment rights. Robel should know better, and, I fear, probably does.

BRITISH “JUSTICE.” Revealed: Six of London Bridge terrorist Usman Khan’s fellow Stock Exhange bomb plotters have also been freed from prison since 2012.

QUESTION ASKED: Will The Epstein Story Ever be Fully Told?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Impact Of The SAT Adversity Index On Median SATs — A School-By-School Analysis.

This is eerily like the People’s Republic’s “privilege score” in Kurt Schlichter’s books.

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Also, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

LIFE IN HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS: Man Accused of Hate Crime for Refusing To Have Sex with Transgender Who Has Male Genitalia. Remember when it was all about consent, which could be revoked or withdrawn at any time for any reason? But the rules have to change constantly because reasons.

QUESTION ASKED: Is it possible to impeach a president in a full employment economy?

A STRONG REVIEW OF KURT SCHLICHTER’S COLLAPSE, from our own Bill Quick. Excerpt: “Speaking of which, not so long ago most of his progressive characters would have seemed ridiculously over-the-top, cardboard caricatures running 1984-style nightmares nobody would imagine could ever occur in the real world. Today, those nightmares are becoming normalized in the headlines of our approved propaganda dissemination outlets.”

I ALWAYS ASSUME THAT PEOPLE GOING ON ABOUT THIS LATELY ARE CHINESE INFLUENCE AGENTS: The Myth of the ‘Opium War:’ The vast majority of opium users in China were not the desperate addicts portrayed by proponents of prohibition.

MORE DEBUNKING BY ANOTHER PROMINENT HISTORIAN: An interview with historian James Oakes on the New York Times’ 1619 Project. “Identity is very much the ideology of the professional-managerial class.”

Plus: “This is one of the things I find so disturbing about the argument that slavery is the basis of capitalism. Slavery made the slaveholders rich. But it made the South poor. And it didn’t make the North rich. The wealth of the North was based on the emerging, capitalist internal market that allowed the North to win the Civil War. It’s true that cotton dominated the export market. But it’s only something like 5 percent of GDP. It’s really the wealth of the internal northern market that’s decisive. That depends on a fairly widespread distribution of wealth, and that doesn’t exist in the South. There’s a lot of evidence from western Virginia, for example, that non-slaveholders were angry at the slaveholders for blocking the railroads and things like that that would allow them to take advantage of the internal market. So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth.” This is really worth reading, and it’s astounding that you have to go to the World Socialist Website to find such comprehensive debunking of the NYT’s twaddle.

Related: “Interesting fact about Gerald Horne, the historian whose work is most commonly cited as basis for the ‘1619 Project’ (or at least the claim that the ‘real’ goal of the American Revolution was to preserve slavery): he’s an actual, pro-Soviet Communist.”

Also, Gordon Wood weighs in. “I was surprised, as many other people were, by the scope of this thing, especially since it’s going to become the basis for high school education and has the authority of the New York Times behind it, and yet it is so wrong in so many ways. . . . I think the important point to make about slavery is that it had existed for thousands of years without substantial criticism, and it existed all over the New World. It also existed elsewhere in the world. Western Europe had already more or less done away with slavery. Perhaps there was nothing elsewhere comparable to the plantation slavery that existed in the New World, but slavery was widely prevalent in Africa and Asia. There is still slavery today in the world. And it existed in all of these places without substantial criticism. Then suddenly in the middle of the 18th century you begin to get some isolated Quakers coming out against it. But it’s the American Revolution that makes it a problem for the world. And the first real anti-slave movement takes place in North America. So this is what’s missed by these essays in the 1619 Project.”

More: Prominent historians criticize the NY Times’ 1619 Project as ‘biased,’ ‘anti-historical.’

Plus: Americans Have Almost Entirely Forgotten Their History. This is not by accident, but by design.

TROJAN SMOKE OVER NELLIS: A USMC T-28 Trojan aircraft pops smoke over Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, during a parachute demonstration with U.S. Special Operations Command Para-Commandos. Photo taken Nov. 15, 2019.

OPIOID HYSTERIA IS RUINING THE LIVES OF PEOPLE WITH CHRONIC PAIN. I KNOW SOME OF THEM PERSONALLY. Some of us actually need painkillers. Can doctors ease up on us?

Hi, Orthopedic Surgeon, it’s me. Your patient, who’s having double knee surgery for two torn menisci and two Baker’s cysts. You saw my MRIs and diagnosed the tears. So can we acknowledge I’m not some random ER patient complaining about indefinable back pain?

You know what I’m also not doing? I’m not exhibiting the drug-seeking behavior of a potential abuser. But do I want some opioids for my injury? Yes, please, absolutely. Five to eight pills would be perfect.

I know a meniscus tear is a fairly common knee injury. After all, everyone has a meniscus, a crescent of cartilage under one’s knee that cushions the friction between the upper and lower leg bones. It’s nice to have that padding for climbing stairs, running, kneeling, squatting — all that fun stuff you might do multiple times a day but don’t think about until it hurts to do it.

I’m not overly sensitive to pain. On the contrary, I’m that patient who didn’t go to the orthopedist months ago, when my left knee first started aching and throbbing. I kept exercising, assuming I had early-onset arthritis because of all those marathons. I didn’t even go when I felt an egg-sized lump in the back of my knee. (For the curious: A Baker’s cyst, named for William Morrant Baker, the 19th-century British surgeon who first described it, is one of your body’s responses to a knee injury.)

The pain isn’t unbearable, most of the time. It starts throbbing after I’ve walked a few blocks and, sometimes, it’s a dull all-around ache. It’s enough to wake me up if I sleep with my knees bent. Eventually, it became strong enough to stop me from normal exercise. So I made an appointment. Got the MRI. And the diagnosis. Now, I’m icing. Resting. Taking ibuprofen and naproxen. Except I’m not supposed to take ibuprofen or naproxen the week before surgery, because they are blood thinners.

This constant, nagging pain is bringing me down. Yes, I’m having surgery soon. It would be tomorrow if it were up to me. But until then, I still need to use my knees. Chase after my kids. Go to a friend’s wedding. Get groceries.

But in this era of epic prescription-painkiller abuse, many doctors seem to view all patients as potential junkies not to be trusted with even the smallest amount of respite from the pain of a diagnosed injury.

That’s an awful reality for many Americans. At the Justice Department’s opioid summit in October 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions crowed that opioid prescriptions were at an 18-year low. But in tandem has come a flood of patients complaining about doctors failing to treat their pain.

Opioid abuse doesn’t come from prescriptions anyway, for the most part. It comes from recreational users who get it illegally:

Right now, the overprescribing seems to have prompted an overcorrection. I like to think I have an enormous sense of social responsibility, but right now, I’m looking out for me. I don’t want opioids so I can get high or do drug sales. I want them because they can temporarily combat the relentless drag and occasional depression that accompany injury pain. And forget about me, what about other people with far more intense and/or chronic pain, such as cancer patients, whose suffering tends to be undertreated even without the new wariness of writing opioid prescriptions?

The thing is, there are millions of Americans who aren’t an addiction liability just because they want a narcotics prescription post-injury or post-surgery. Yes, the government says nearly 80 percent of heroin users first misused opioid prescriptions, but the research being cited refers to people who illegally obtained those prescription opioids. Not patients.

Our government seems incapable of reacting without hysteria. Maybe it should take a chill pill.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot: Mischief-makers with an agenda promote ‘gun sanctuaries’ in Virginia.

—The Washington Post, Friday.

● Chaser: In Trump’s Washington, the rogue actors are the real players — and the experts are increasingly irrelevant.

—The Washington Post, November 23rd.

● Hangover: Sanctuary cities don’t ‘breed crime.’ They encourage people to report crime.

—The Washington Post, April 24, 2018.