CANCEL CULTURE SHOULD LOOK AT ITSELF IN THE MIRROR:  The tragic story of pianist Karlrobert Kreiten: how speaking one’s mind in private could be fatal in the Third Reich.

WHAT PART OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT DOES THE LEFT NOT GET:  Censorship.

WEAPONIZED — MINDLESS — COMPASSION:  Housing the homeless: “everyone deserves a granite countertop”.

THE ONLY ONES SNEERING OR LAUGHING AT THIS ARE THE ONES WHO DON’T HAVE LOW-FLUSH TOILETS:  Make Toilets Great Again, President Trump.

MARXIST OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES:  Media Year-in-Review: The Fail is Real.

JUST A FEW IDEAS:  How to Fight Back.

THEY’RE GOING TO NEED MUCH BIGGER JAILS: Virginia budgets gun confiscation.

AFTER THREE YEARS OF QUIET IT HAS BEEN PICKING UP STEAM THESE LAST TWO YEARS; EXPERTS BLAME TRUMP, CALL FOR IMPEACHMENT:  The world’s tallest active geyser won’t stop erupting, and scientists don’t know why.

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s colluding with Betelgeuse?

GIANT VARIABLE STAR, ONCE AMONG 10 BRIGHTEST HAS NOW FADED FROM TOP-20; EXPERTS BLAME TRUMP, DEMAND IMPEACHMENT:  ‘Betelgeuse’ star, part of Orion, due for explosive supernova.

SHOCKING THE BOURGEOISIE IS GETTING PREDICTABLE:  Parents Shocked at Alcohol-Fueled Drag Queen ‘Pre-Show’ Ahead of ‘Star Wars’ at Alamo Cinemas | Culture.

IN THE CASE OF PORTUGAL, ONLY IF YOU SOMEHOW MAKE SURE YOU DON’T NEED ANY EXTRAORDINARY MEDICAL INTERVENTIONS WHILE AGING:  Here are the 12 best countries to retire in.

A couple of years ago, I spent an afternoon — no longer sure why — looking through blogs of expats in Portugal. Most of them quit and come home when health goes weird.

THE EFFECTS OF CALIFORNIA’S WAR ON UBER SEEM LIKELY TO DESTROY SOME OF AMERICA’S MOST VIBRANT ON-LINE COMMUNITIES:  A message from the SB Nation MLB communities.

SOCIAL JUSTICE ZOMBIES TRYING TO INCREASE DIVERSITY BY ENFORCING CONFORMITY ARE UP TO IT IN ROMANCE, NOW:  Romance novelist Courtney Milan suspended for ‘racist mess’ claims.
ALSO: RWA Controversy Over Courtney Milan.   RWA and Courtney Milan, Pt. 2  AND  Update: Courtney Milan & RWA.
Apparently Courtney Milan was triggered on discovering a colleague had voted for Trump and proceeded to find “racism” in the woman’s 20 year old book.  Note that her claims of racism are incoherent, specious and STUNNINGLY ignorant of genetics, history, different cultures or… oh, yeah, sanity.

DEBLASIO’S NEW YORK: New York synagogue stabbing attack results in several injuries. Every synagogue should have armed guards. Also, the heads of all attackers should be displayed on pikes out front as an example to others.

Flashback (From Ed): Anti-Semitic attacks are rising in Brooklyn and seems like no one cares.

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UNEXPECTEDLY! Rank-and-File Workers Get Bigger Raises.

Wages for rank-and-file workers are rising at the quickest pace in more than a decade, even faster than for bosses, a sign that the labor market has tightened sufficiently to convey bigger increases to lower-paid employees.

Gains for those workers have accelerated much of this year, a time when the unemployment rate fell to a half-century low. . . .

Pay for the bottom 25% of wage earners rose 4.5% in November from a year earlier, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Wages for the top 25% of earners rose 2.9%. Similarly, the Atlanta Fed found wages for low-skilled workers have accelerated since early 2018, and last month matched the pace of high-skill workers for the first time since 2010.

“A strong labor market makes the bargaining power of lower-paid workers more like the labor market higher-wage workers experience during good times and bad,” Nick Bunker, economist with job search site Indeed.com, said.

Labor Department data paint a similar picture. Average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers in the private sector were up 3.7% in November from a year earlier—stronger than the 3.1% advance for all employees—implying managers and other nonproduction workers saw a 1.6% wage increase in the past year. The department doesn’t produce separate management pay figures.

Nonsupervisory workers earned an average of $23.83 an hour in November according to the Labor Department; managers earned about twice that rate.

Paul Krugman hardest hit.

DEVELOPING: Multiple victims reported after stabbing in synagogue in Monsey, NY. “According to [the ultra-Orthodox website Vos Iz Neias], a black male entered the synagogue and pulled out a machete, then removed its cover and started stabbing people. The Orthodox Jews Public Affairs Council of the area posted on Twitter that five people were stabbed,” the Jerusalem Post reports.

According to Wikipedia, Monsey, “a hamlet and census-designated place in the town of Ramapo, Rockland County, New York,” with a population of 18,000 and located just across the border from New Jersey, “has a large community of Orthodox Jews.”

UPDATE: A bit more at Fox News: New York synagogue stabbing attack results in several injuries: reports.

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CHOOSING SIDES: Democrats Just Betrayed Working-Class Americans To Appease Environmentalists.

DEBLASIO’S NEW YORK: Suspects released without bail after shocking attacks on Jews.

The Justice Department needs to look into what’s going on in New York City.

UPDATE: Man Who Sucker Punched NYPD Officer Released Without Bail; Police Unions Tweet Outrage. Soon everyone’s going to have to go to the Godfather for justice again, aren’t they?

STANDARDS DON’T MATTER. THE RULING CLASS LOOKS AFTER ITS OWN.

OPEN THREAD: It’s the last Saturday Night of the decade, so make it special.

SAD, BUT ODDS ARE YOU VOTE DEMOCRATIC, SO YOU’RE JUST GETTING IT GOOD AND HARD: I Built A Stellar Career As One Of The Only Women In Geek News, But California’s New Law Could Destroy It All.

WHEN HE’S RIGHT, HE’S RIGHT.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Dominic Green: Want to know the secret of ‘Jewish genius?’

There I was, watching my old VHS copy of The Boys from Brazil while idly reading the lab reports on the swabs I took from my gentile neighbor’s kids when he wasn’t looking, and revising the bassoon part of a concerto I’ve been working on, and I saw something alarming trending on Twitter. Not ‘eugenics’, but ‘Bret Stephens’.

‘What’s he done now?’ I asked in six languages, two of them not from the Indo-European language family.

In today’s New York Times, Bret Stephens discusses Norman Lebrecht’s excellent new history of the Jews in modern times. Lebrecht describes the unparalleled contributions of notorious underachievers like Marx, Freud, Heine, Disraeli, Herzl, Trotsky, Kafka, Wittgenstein and Einstein but, inexplicably, he fails to mention the contributions of members of the Green family — a lacuna that I, with my inherited Ashkenazi acumen, can already see him correcting in the paperback edition.

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™