NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Build a Catapult.

OUT ON A LIMB: Lie of the Year: ‘I Will Shut Down The Virus.’ Biden’s COVID-19 death count passes 400K.

Exit question:

HOW TO TRAVEL WITH YOUR GUN.

TOP SELLER: AN Weighted Blanket 20 lbs, (60” x 80”, Queen Size) Adult Heavy Blanket.

‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Legal Edition.

FORMER PRINCETON HISTORIAN SAYS SCHOOL LEFT HIM TO ROT IN PRISON: An Iranian prison that is, according to Xiyue Wang, who was encouraged by the Ivy League school’s powers-that-be to study for his doctorate in Tehran. He did and things went seriously bad thereafter.

“In a lawsuit filed last month, Wang accuses Princeton of trying to keep his wife from publicizing his case following his arrest in order to protect its reputation and to maintain political ties in Iran,” reports the Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross in the first media coverage anywhere of the litigation.

“Wang blasted Princeton and its Iran Center for heeding the advice of  “pro-regime activists and academics” before and after his arrest. Wang alleges that Princeton lawyers and administrators urged him not to seek refuge in the Swiss embassy in Tehran after he began to fear for his safety,” Ross writes.

HE ISN’T ALL THERE: Biden Tricked Into Agreeing With ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ During NORAD Event.

JOAN DIDION, THE GREAT CONTRARIAN:

Joan Didion, who inspired a generation of young writers including this one, died Thursday. She was a lot of things, but one of them: she was a brilliant contrarian. My favorite of her pieces skewered the trendy movements around her.

When hippies were cool, where was Joan Didion? She was writing the darkest portraits of the movement that were ever made. She was showing readers the preschool-aged child whose parents gave her LSD. She went to the beating heart of the utopian progressive movement of the era–in the heart of the city where I was born and raised–and she showed what the unmooring looks like up close.

In “Where the Kissing Never Stops,” Didion gives us a hilarious take-down of Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, where well-meaning young hippies wander glassy-eyed across her pages. Here’s Didion on Baez’s right hand man:

“Ira Sandperl is a forty-two-year-old native of St. Louis who has, besides the beard, a shaved head, a large nuclear-disarmament emblem on his corduroy jacket, glittering and slightly messianic eyes, a high cracked laugh and the general look of a man who has, all his life, followed some imperceptible but fatally askew rainbow.”

Here on Baez: “To encourage Joan Baez to be ‘political’ is really only to encourage Joan Baez to continue ‘feeling’ things, for her politics are still, as she herself said, ‘all vague.’”

She ends the piece with Baez standing in front of the refrigerator eating potato salad with her fingers.

The Didion I read would quietly find the flabbiest bits of American culture. She was ruthless and funny. She was not on your side. She wasn’t on anyone’s side. If Didion had been working these past few years, I have no doubt who she’d be writing about.

Related: Didion on Woody Allen, at the peak of his career in 1979: “Most of us remember very well these secret signals and sighs of adolescence, remember the dramatic apprehension of our own mortality and other ‘more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe,’ but eventually we realize that we are not the first to notice that people die. ‘Even with all the distractions of my work and my life,’ Woody Allen was quoted as saying in a cover story (the cover line was ‘Woody Allen Comes of Age’) in Time, ‘I spend a lot of time face to face with my own mortality.’ This is actually the first time I have ever heard anyone speak of his own life as a ‘distraction.’”

MICROBIOME NEWS: Strains—not species—of gut microbes hold key to health and disease.

MORE THAN 3,000 FLIGHTS CANCELED WORLDWIDE AS AIRLINES CITE COVID-19 STAFFING ISSUES.

BIFF DIDDLE’S YEAR-END REVIEW: You don’t want to miss this one!

THIS YEAR’S FLU SHOT WAS A WASTE OF TIME: No more annual flu shot? Researchers find new target for universal influenza vaccine.

On the one hand, a universal flu vaccine would be great. On the other, say it works for several decades and then a strain of flu evades it. Wouldn’t it be an ugly “virgin field” epidemic at that point?

OUT ON A LIMB: The government is not your God.

Politics is a bad religion.

People may argue about the purpose of religion. For some it is a moral code—a set of principles that provides guideposts to living a virtuous life and that helps man to win the fight against his own human nature. For others, it creates a sense of purpose or belonging to a community.

Of course, wherever there is a religion that people follow and a related deity to worship, there are sure to be bad actors that try to exploit others’ faith. Any religion has to balance that potential for downside against its upside.

Now, I am a person of faith, and while I can’t tell you exactly where you can find God, I am willing to stake a large bet that God is not in Washington, D.C.

Politics has come to encompass both the veneration and exploitation that happens in religion. Politics has all of the bad aspects of what can go wrong with worship, following and faith, with absolutely none of the good.

Since we’re currently living in the version of the Matrix that was programmed by Tom Wolfe before his death in 2018, it’s worth quoting from in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s current love of paramilitary cosplay.)

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA, private space industry may reach new heights in 2022.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Florida’s Plague Is the Media’s Cold.

Now it can be said: Covid-19 isn’t going away. CNN’s Brian Stelter lectured his audience Sunday on “what living with Covid really means.” He cited “a highly transmissible variant” that has caused “many, many, many cases . . . here in New York City,” and said: “It seems that in some media circles this was the week that getting Covid became an inevitability.”

All the right people are coming down with what BuzzFeed’s Julia Reinstein dubbed the “media variant.” Suddenly getting Covid is cool. “You have about 12 hours left to get covid if you want to stay on trend,” tweeted Business Insider’s Jake Swearingen. “I don’t think this means shutting back down,” tweeted podcaster Lydia Polgreen. “I think it has to mean accepting that getting COVID is just a thing that’s going to happen to all of us, so behave accordingly (and get vaccinated).” Even President Biden is easing off, with his speech Tuesday stressing the importance of keeping schools and businesses open.

But when the virus was surging in the South this summer, media figures took a different tone. Covid could be stopped, they insisted, if only those rubes would behave correctly. Florida was a particular target because its governor had ended lockdowns and mandates early and was pushing for schools to stop requiring masks. A typical piece, by CNN’s Chris Cillizza, was titled “ Ron DeSantis ’ priorities on Covid-19 are all screwed up.” A chastened Mr. Cillizza tweeted last Friday that he had learned the vaccine “can never do what I had hoped: Ensure no one I loved will become infected,” and that “I realize I am way behind lots of other people in doing that.”

That’s for sure. A lot of the information that media types finally seem ready to accept has been available for some time. The World Health Organization said in September that the virus will continue to mutate like the flu. “People have said we’re going to eliminate or eradicate the virus,” said Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s emergencies program. “No we’re not—very, very unlikely.”

The reason it took so long for this reality to penetrate the media bubble is political. Journalists believed red states would get sick while blue ones would be spared. Some still do: A Dec. 17 Washington Post piece by columnist Paul Waldman was headlined “The red covid wave is here.”

Earlier: The Corporate Media Freakout Over The Omicron Variant Isn’t Normal, It’s Psychotic.

TOP SELLER: Rockport New Men’s Weather Or Not Waterproof Boot New Tan Leather. #CommissionEarned

SCIENCE! New studies say Omicron COVID-19 variant appears milder than Delta strain. As evolutionary theory would predict.

GOODER AND HARDER: Seattle Police, Fire staffing critically low and the vaccinated are getting COVID.

GETTING RID OF DEBLASIO AND CUOMO MIGHT HELP: Can New York reverse its record-setting pandemic-era population drop?

But one problem for all our deep-blue urban areas is that after nearly 30 years of improvement, people have been reminded that they’re all one election away from collapsing back into chaos and disorder. The bottom is lower than most had assumed, and that isn’t going to make people as willing to move there or invest as they were a few years back.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE:

TOP STORY OF THE DAY: Gosh, How Can I Get Readers to Pay Attention to the NFL’s COVID-19 Policy? “Why isn’t Tucker Carlson booking Rachel Bush as a guest? This is the spokeswoman we need at this crucial moment in our nation’s history, and if you follow her Twitter account, you’ll find that she’s still speaking out for freedom, especially since Cole Beasley (‘Bease’) got banned from Sunday’s game with the Patriots.”

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Jill Biden breaks White House rules to go maskless as Joe is accused of staging bizarre dancing nurses show at the White House to distract from his catastrophic failure to order enough COVID test kits.

I’m having bad flashbacks to last year:

● After telling GOP to downsize convention due to COVID-19, N.C. governor marches in crowded protest.

● NJ governor admits COVID-19 double standard, says recent protests are different from business owners’ complaints.

● De Blasio: Large Group Protests Are Acceptable, Religious Observances Are Not.

● NPR: Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” they wrote.

● ‘Did I miss the memo?’: Hospital workers in full PPE applaud George Floyd protesters as they march past.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘Trial of Kyle’ Convicts Media of Gaslighting 101.

MEGAN FOX: Body Language Expert Analyzes Pedophile Seeking Visitation With Child. “This report is part 28 of an investigative series looking into reported corruption in the Missouri Judiciary and family courts.”

HO HO HO, FREE SUBSIDIZED CELL SERVICE FOR HOUSEHOLDS MAKING…$198,000? As long as your income took a hit from COVID. I am not 100% sure this is the best use of tax dollars, but I guess it beats giving the Taliban $80B of weapons.