WINNING: It Was a Very Trumpian 2019: Global Stock Markets Gained $17 Trillion in Value This Year.

Obligatory: PAUL KRUGMAN ON ELECTION NIGHT 2016: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

NICE: Oil Glut Is Real And Here To Stay.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Lecturer uses word ‘negro’ from black-authored source material, university apologizes to students.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make ridiculous. The gods must really hate higher education lately.

Related: Taxpayers Losing Interest In Funding Campus Kooks.

DECOUPLING: Pair of Apple suppliers seek funding to expand AirPods production in Vietnam, potentially allowing for more Apple products to be sourced from outside China.

RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH: Free speech experts slam university for policy requiring “respect for authority.” “The flyers were part of a series labeled ‘Common Sense’ and appeared on campus throughout the school year. The series featured satire and criticism of University President Kimberly Cline, as well as complaints regarding administration, mold in buildings, high administration salaries, poor campus food quality, and restrictions on freedom of speech.”

How can you expect to be respected, when you’re acting like silly twits? If President Kimberly Cline thinks this is going to improve her reputation, she’s wrong.

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KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Amazon’s Merry Christmas Bad News for Sanders, Warren, and Proggieland. “The most important takeaway from Amazon’s big Christmas is that this economy is still humming along. Every American over the age of ten knows that the economy is a Mt. Rushmore-sized Achilles heel. They spent most of last year hoping for a recession, and now they know that’s not happening. The best they can hope for is a tepid economy.”

CONRAD BLACK: Democrats Must Live with Consequences of Their Foolish Impeachment Farce.

LYIN’ LIZ: Elizabeth Warren’s Brother Reportedly ‘Furious’ She Claims Their Father Was a Janitor.

Perhaps the difference between a “maintenance man” and a “janitor” is in the eye of the beholder, and janitors do perform maintenance tasks.

But as Warren herself pointed out to The Globe, it’s a difference she seemed to recognize in her book, which makes no reference to her father being a janitor, but several references to him as a maintenance man. She also referred to her father as a “maintenance man” in a 2012 Senate campaign ad, and in a 2007 interview said that “maintenance man in an apartment house was his last job .”

“They always saw themselves as middle-class people,” Warren added. “They saw themselves as people who, for them the distinction was they used good English, they didn’t say ain’t.”

But in another 2012 speech, Warren got more specific about her father’s job at that apartment house, and her description did not sound very janitorial.

Again, the distinction may be a minute one, but the duties Warren described in that speech were those of an outdoor maintenance man, not a janitor. Janitor, though, has a more working-class ring to it.

Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t see through her schtick?

THEY KEEP TRYING TO TELL US THAT JESUS WAS A SOCIALIST, EVEN AS THE REAL SOCIALISTS ARE CLOSING CHURCHES AND REWRITING SCRIPTURE: In China, they’re closing churches, jailing pastors – and even rewriting scripture.

THIS COULD BE FUN: Why a Contested Democratic Convention Is Possible. I’m betting against it, though.

SOUNDS PLAUSIBLE: Britain’s economic growth to take off in 2020 – once final Brexit deal is complete.

FAKE NEWS: In supposed apology to Richard Jewell, Tom Brokaw revises history.

DON SURBER: How Virginia Democrats Would Destroy The USA.

JOHN TIERNEY: Journalists Against Free Speech.

Free speech is no longer sacred among young journalists who have absorbed the campus lessons about “hate speech”—defined more and more broadly—and they’re breaking long-standing taboos as they bring “cancel culture” into professional newsrooms. They’re not yet in charge, but many of their editors are reacting like beleaguered college presidents, terrified of seeming insufficiently “woke.” Most professional journalists, young and old, still pay lip service to the First Amendment, and they certainly believe that it protects their work, but they’re increasingly eager for others to be “de-platformed” or “no-platformed,” as today’s censors like to put it—effectively silenced.

These mostly younger progressive journalists lead campaigns to get conservative journalists fired, banned from Twitter, and “de-monetized” on YouTube. They don’t burn books, but they’ve successfully pressured Amazon to stop selling titles that they deem offensive. They encourage advertising boycotts designed to put ideological rivals out of business. They’re loath to report forthrightly on left-wing censorship and violence, even when fellow journalists get attacked. They equate conservatives’ speech with violence and rationalize leftists’ actual violence as . . . speech.

It’s a strange new world for those who remember liberal journalists like Nat Hentoff, the Village Voice writer who stood with the ACLU in defending the free-speech rights of Nazis, Klansmen, and others whose views he deplored—or who recall the days when the Columbia Journalism Review stood as an unswerving advocate for press freedom.

Well, to be fair, journalists were mostly in favor of free speech and civil liberties in general when it was communists and the like who were being targeted. Now that it’s communists and the like who are doing the targeting, their principles are slipping. Or perhaps being revealed as nonexistent.

DEKULAKIZATION: On this day in 1929, Joseph Stalin announced the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class.”

Who were the kulaks? They were “rich peasants” (a bit of a contradiction in terms). Kulaks were peasants who had a little more land than their neighbors … or maybe a couple more cows … or maybe they just weren’t as keen on collectivization as their neighbors.

Soviet leaders called them bloodsuckers and hyenas. (Here in America we might have called them yeoman farmers.)

Dekulakization meant that they would be killed or their property would be seized and they would be sent to prisons or labor camps in Siberia or elsewhere. Some were resettled on inferior land.  Robert Conquest, who was pretty meticulous about these things, wrote that as many as five million may have died between 1929 and 1933.

DEMOGRAPHICS IS DESTINY: Japan’s Births Decline To Lowest Number On Record.

HOW BAD DOES A DEMOCRATIC TV HOST HAVE TO BE TO GET THIS TREATMENT FROM THE WAPO? “She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings — a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.”

How bad? Rachel Maddow bad, that’s how bad.

Then there’s Tom Nichols bad:

SMUGGLERS SOUTH OF THE BORDER LOOK FOR NEW CUSTOMERS: They are finding them from, literally, all over the Earth.

THIS WILL END WELL: Virginia Governor Northam Increases Corrections Budget In Anticipation Of Jailing Gun Owners. On the upside, he’s increasing the likelihood that Trump will take Virginia.

JOHN PODHORETZ: Why I quit Twitter — and you should, too.

If I could find a way to participate simply by tweeting out articles and gnomish would-be witticisms, I would. But I can’t see how I would be able to avoid sinking back into the mire.

There’s a reason Twitter has ­defined this decade’s communications. It’s the most interactive ­medium the world has ever known, and it’s great fun.

But Twitter has an oversoul now, and the oversoul is poisonous. It ­rewards bad rhetorical behavior, it privileges outrage of any sort over reason of all sorts, and it encourages us to misunderstand each other. It’s the devil on our shoulder.

My last tweet was back in February.