“GRADING AIN’T JUST GRADING” SAYS AU: American University is sponsoring a seminar urging writing teachers emphasize antiracism when grading student writing, rather than actual writing skills. The seminar leader “will discuss the ways that White language supremacy is perpetuated in college classrooms despite the better intentions of faculty, particularly through the practices of grading writing.” The College Fix reports.

Somebody needs to point out to minority students at AU that the university doesn’t give a damn about improving their writing skills and that they would be better off taking their tuition dollars to a school that does.

OPEN THREAD: First weekend of 2019!

FORGET THE WALL — DEMOCRATS NOW HATE THE BORDER ITSELF.

Well, they are transnational “Progressives,” after all. As Bertolt Brecht famously asked about an East German populist uprising in 1953, “Would it not be easier, in that case, for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Northridge Teacher gets 2 years for sexual relationship with student. “A former Northridge teacher has been sentenced to two years in prison after she had a sexual relationship with a former student. Kristen D. Grow, 39, of 5184 Pleasant Valley Road, Newark, pleaded guilty to one count of sexual battery, a third-degree felony in Licking County Common Pleas Court Thursday morning. . . . Grow was the fifth school employee Licking County has prosecuted for similar crimes, Sawyers said.”

TRUMP: RASHIDA TLAIB ‘DISHONORED’ HERSELF, COUNTRY WITH PROFANE TIRADE.

President Trump hit back Friday at a freshman House Democrat who called him a ‘motherf***er’ and promised to impeach him.

After she was sworn in on Thursday, Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan spoke to a crowd of supporters near Capitol Hill and described an exchange she had with her son after her election victory.

“When your son looks at you and says, ‘Mama, look, you won. Bullies don’t win.’ And I said, ‘Baby, they don’t,’” Tlaib said. “Because we’re gonna go in there; we’re gonna impeach the motherf***er.”

“I thought her comments were disgraceful,” Trump told reporters Friday afternoon outside the White House. “This is a person that I don’t know. I assume she’s new. I think she dishonored herself and I think she dishonored her family, using language like that in front of her son and whoever else was there. I thought that was a great dishonor to her and to her family. I thought it was highly disrespectful to the United States of  America.”

Tlaib, a Detroit native, is the first Palestinian-American woman to be elected to Congress. A self-described democratic-socialist, she won the Democratic primary in Michigan’s 13th Congressional district before winning the general election to take over for retiring representative John Conyers, who had held the seat since 1965.

Pretty fascinating response from Trump to someone who comes from a culture of honor and shame.

UPDATE: Dems livid after Tlaib vows to ‘impeach the motherf—er.’ Party leaders fear such explosive talk only gives ammunition to the GOP.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: No, Conservatives Are Not Angry That AOC Danced on a Rooftop.

Which Republicans are saying that? Can AOC name them? Can any of the reporters asking her about it name them? No, and nobody expects them to, because the narrative reinforces what they already believe.

Kick off your Sunday shoes, cut loose — Footloose! — and read the whole thing.

DR. STRANGEGREEN: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB. As Tom Wolfe wrote in 1989, after writing The Bonfire of the Vanities, all satirists eventually run into Muggeridge’s Law:

While Malcolm Muggeridge was editor of Punch, it was announced that Khrushchev and Bulganin were coming to England. Muggeridge hit upon the idea of a mock itinerary, a lineup of the most ludicrous places the two paunchy, pear-shaped little Soviet leaders could possibly be paraded through during the solemn business of a state visit. Shortly before press time, half the feature had to be scrapped. It coincided exactly with the official itinerary, just released, prompting Muggeridge to observe: We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.

Yesterday, I linked to Tim Blair’s remark that if radical environmentalists believe that global warming is truly the equivalent of WWII, “Fair enough. Nuking Hiroshima it is, then.” Today at Power Line, Steve Hayward finds a column by self-described “aspiring writer / tired activist / reluctant student @UniofOxford” Samuel Miller-McDonald who believes, as Hayward writes, “perhaps the only hope for avoiding catastrophic global warming is for a nuclear war to reduce human population and consumption.” Here’s Miller-McDonald:

[A nuclear] exchange that shuts down the global economy but stops short of human extinction may be the only blade realistically likely to cut the carbon knot we’re trapped within. It would decimate existing infrastructures, providing an opportunity to build new energy infrastructure and intervene in the current investments and subsidies keeping fossil fuels alive. . .

Like the 20th century’s world wars, a nuclear exchange could serve as an economic leveler. It could provide justification for nationalizing energy industries with the interest of shuttering fossil fuel plants and transitioning to renewables and, uh, nuclear energy. It could shock us into reimagining a less suicidal civilization, one that dethrones the death-cult zealots who are currently in power. And it may toss particulates into the atmosphere sufficient to block out some of the solar heat helping to drive global warming. Or it may have the opposite effects. Who knows?

What we do know is that humans can survive and recover from war, probably even a nuclear one. Humans cannot recover from runaway climate change. Nuclear war is not an inevitable extinction event; six degrees of warming is. . .

It is a stark reflection of how homicidal our economy is—and our collective adherence to its whims—that nuclear war could be a rational course of action.

Back in 2014, I wrote a piece over at the PJ Mothership on “The Rise of the John Birch Left:”

The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 by businessman Robert Welch, and named after a Christian missionary shot by Communist forces in China in 1945, whom Welch named as the first casualty of the Cold War. The Birchers’ core principles, that Communism is evil, its expansion needed to be stopped, and that communists had infiltrated American government (see also: Hiss, Alger) were laudable. But the group’s zeal to defend them drove them to paranoid levels, to the point where the Birchers were accusing President Eisenhower of being a crypto-commie, leading to Russell Kirk’s hilarious rejoinder to the Birchers, “Ike’s not a communist, he’s a golfer!”

Not to mention all that business about fluoride in the water, which Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern had loads of fun satirizing in Dr. Strangelove. All of which led William F. Buckley to banish the Birchers from the postwar conservative movement he was building, leaving them a marginalized fringe group. (They’re still around, and still coming up with zany conspiracy theories.)

Who knew that the left would now be using Dr. Strangelove as a guide to jumpstarting a green economy? Mr. President, if we were to immediately launch an all out and coordinated nuclear attack on all their coalmines and oil fields, we’d stand a damn good chance of catching ’em with their pants down!

CHANGE: Trump May Soon Withdraw Troops From Afghanistan.

I WONDER THIS REGULARLY, AND I’M NOT EXACTLY A FASHION PLATE: How Did America Become a Nation of Slobs?

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Plus, Winter Deals in Tools and Hardware.

DOWNLOAD IT EARLY AND OFTEN: My paper, Crime Follies: Overcriminalization, Independent Prosecutors, and the Rule of Law, is now #2 on the SSRN Top Ten Downloads list. (Bumped).

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): 2018 Sex Scandal Teacher Starting Lineup.

In 300 B.C., Aristotle famously said, “Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.” In 1933, Albert Einstein said, “Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.” And in 2018, 53-year-old teacher Deborah Lowe said to her 15-year-old student, “Who else can I be a slut with?”

Who else, indeed? That time is upon us once again. When we look back at the year just past in Sex Scandal Teachers, a tradition truly unlike any other.

As far as I can tell, the first Sex Scandal Teacher Starting Lineup was back in 2009. Like I’ve mentioned before, I thought to myself, “Gee, there’s been a lot of crazy teachers sleeping with their students lately,” and just to put a sports spin on it, organized them into a batting order. I figured it would be a one-off thing. Because surely there couldn’t be an endless supply of these stories, like the sex-crazed educator version of the unlimited, refillable fountain drink. But how wrong I was. A day or two later, a Stoolie emailed me one I’d missed. Then came another. And another. So I made Grading the Newest Sex Scandal Teacher into a regular feature, with a lineup at the end of the year.

And there’s never a shortage of material.

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ DANCING VIDEO WAS MEANT AS A SMEAR, BUT IT BACKFIRED:

When the dance video emerged, many internet users wondered what exactly was incriminating about a windswept Ms. Ocasio-Cortez twirling enthusiastically. The footage was from a four-minute-20-second dance video made by Boston University students in 2010, when Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was an undergraduate.

A dubbed and edited version of the original footage surfaced when a Twitter account called AnonymousQ1776 published it online. “Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is,” read the tweet from AnonymousQ1776, which incorrectly described it as a video from her high school days. The account has since been deleted.

The lyrics speak of watching mania “grow like a riot.” Eric Calvin Baker, who can be seen dancing in the video with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, wrote on Twitter that the scrutiny on the new lawmaker echoed the “mania” after which the song is named.

Many social media users [on both sides of the aisle — Ed] came to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, and the video has inspired memes.

Including this Twitter account: “AOC Dances To Every Song.”

Whatever her reactionary politics today, AOC looks cute as the dickens in this video from her college days. As Ann Althouse writes, “The attacks are so stupid I wonder if they’re false flag, but I’ve seen enough to believe the AOC haters are this stupid.”

Related: Backstory on the video’s history. And as Jonah Goldberg noted early last month, “Ocasio-Cortez Takes a Page from Trump’s Playbook — Being hated by the right people is the best way to get a big and intensely loyal following.“

POLITICO DUBS RACHEL MADDOW THE “NEW DEMOCRATIC KINGMAKER.”

I wonder what her MSNBC colleague Al Sharpton, the old Democratic kingmaker, thinks about that?

INSPECTOR JAVERT HARDEST HIT: KC Johnson has the news that today yet another actual court found that a college student accused of sexual misconduct must be allowed to actually face his accusers in campus court, dealing another blow to the “single investigator” model of Title IX discipline. Colleges may yet catch up with the ancient Romans on this right, if and when the Education Department’s proposed Title IX regulations go into effect.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Woman jailed for six years for forcing little girl to perform a sex act on her.

DR. HELEN: Women’s Magazines Dying? Good Riddance!

A LOOK AT THE NEW Glock G43X. Ten rounds instead of six.

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Plus, save on Vitamins and Dietary Supplements.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: The 20 Most Annoying Liberals of 2018.

ANDERSON COOPER, APPEARING ON CBS, DOESN’T OBJECT WHEN ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ COMPARES HERSELF TO LINCOLN AND FDR.

Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines grooming the next Obama, and it all makes sense.

THIS ISN’T NEW: Younger men at higher risk for testicular cancer, experts say.

DISPATCHES FROM PRIME MINISTER ZOOLANDER: Trudeau demands organic garden, apiary, treehouse (with zip line) and more for Harrington Lake residence.

How is he fixed for spirit gum?

ON THE ONE HAND I’M SAD, ON THE OTHER HAND WE’VE TRANSFERRED AN AWFUL LOT OF TECH TO THE CHINESE ALREADY, AND THEY’RE NOT OUR FRIENDS: Bill Gates’s Experimental Nuclear Power Plant Halts Construction in China: Gates cites the Trump Administration’s aggressive stance for having to pull out. “The Department of Energy then announced it would deny any new licenses from U.S. companies wishing to work with the Chinese government, and current licenses would not be given extensions. The department cited the indictment of the Chinese state-owned nuclear corporation in 2017 alongside Taiwanese-American Allen Ho, who was eventually jailed for assisting the Chinese state on nuclear issues.”