THERE’S A TON MORE GOING ON WITH THE LABOR SHORTAGE:  The welfare state has gotten even more insane.

But let’s face it, the only things government does well is kill their own people and take their money.

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP:   A self-proclaimed psychic on Tik-Tok claims to have learned from her tarot cards that a certain University of Idaho history professor is behind the recent murders of four students there.  Her Tik-Tok videos on the subject have reportedly racked up millions of views.  As far as I can tell, the police are not exactly jumping on this daffy unusual new lead.  Instead, the history professor (who appears to be the world’s leading academic expert on gay rodeo) is now suing for defamation.

OPEN THREAD: Happy Boxing Day.

VIDEO: A History of Abbey Road’s Studio One, where symphonies by Edward Elgar and Sergei Prokofiev, the Beatles “A Day in the Life,” and the soundtracks to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lord of the Rings, and multiple Star Wars movies were all recorded:

A video look at Abbey’s Road Studio Two, where the Beatles recorded 95% of their songs:

Earlier:

● ‘if These Walls Could Sing’ Opens the Doors to Abbey Road Studios.

● Remixed revolver to Reveal New Layers of the Beatles’ Extraordinary Musical Powers.

● Recording the Beatles: Looking Back at the Deepest Dive Ever Into the Sound of the Fab Four.

SPACE LAW: Speeding up the satellite regulatory machine.

DAVE BARRY’S YEAR IN REVIEW: 2022 was the opposite of good. But it had some positives.

The best thing we can say about 2022 is: It could have been worse.

For example, we could have had nuclear Armageddon. This briefly appeared to be a possibility, at least according to the president, who broke the news in October at (Why not?) a Democratic Party fundraiser at the home of a wealthy donor in New York City. That must have been an exciting event! One moment everybody’s standing around chewing hors d’ oeuvres, and the next moment WHOA WHAT DID HE JUST SAY?

The next day, after the news media ran a bunch of scary headlines, the White House Office of Explaining What the President Actually Meant explained that the president wasn’t suggesting that we were facing Armageddon per se, but was merely, as is his wont, emitting words, one of which happened to be “Armageddon,” and everybody should just calm down.

So we dodged a bullet there.

And there were other positive developments in 2022:

▪ Millions of Americans on social media realized — it took them a while, but they finally got there — that nobody wants to know how they did on “Wordle.”

▪ For the 13th consecutive year, the New York Yankees failed to even get into the World Series.

▪ Best of all, the looming apocalyptic threat of catastrophic global climate change was finally eliminated thanks to the breakthrough discovery that the solution — it has been staring us in the face all this time — was to throw food at art.

So 2022 had some positives. Which is not to say that it was good. In fact it was the opposite of good, specifically, bad. The economy continued to stagger around like the last stoner out of Burning Man. We lost Angela Lansbury, Sidney Poitier, Loretta Lynn, Gilbert Gottfried, Christine McVie and Meat Loaf. Democracy died at least three times.

Maybe Armageddon wouldn’t have been so bad.

Anyway, it’s over. But before we move on to 2023, it’s time to don surgical gloves, reach deep down inside the big bag of stupid that was 2022, and see what we pull out, starting with …

Exit quote:

On the political front, there’s a refreshing new “vibe” in Washington as the two major parties, finally past the toxic nastiness of the midterm elections, look forward to the new year — an opportunity to end the cynical partisan gamesmanship and instead seek common ground in a sincere effort to solve the problems that the American people actually care about, such as the epidemic of illegal drugs that we apparently ingested before writing this sentence.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

(Bumped.)

DON SURBER: They got covid 100% wrong…

On April 3, 2020, the Daily Breeze reported, “Malibu surfer in handcuffs after enjoying empty, epic waves.”

Los Angeles County sheriff deputies arrested a man who was by himself in the ocean, in the name of stopping the spread of covid. The deputies were unmasked. It was a crazy time in which authorities erred on the side of authoritarianism to stop the spread of a virus.

The experts sided with closing down the world.

The LA Times reported, “Kim Prather, a leading atmospheric chemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, wants to yell out her window at every surfer, runner, and biker she spots along the San Diego coast.”

She told the paper, “I wouldn’t go in the water if you paid me $1 million right now.”

Why?

Covid is a virus. Viruses spread from person to person — or according to those covering up for Red China, from bat to person. And yet the government ordered everyone inside.

That was dumb. But it is worse. We now know by staying indoors and vegetating, people made themselves weaker.

NPR reported two days before Christmas, “A regular exercise routine may significantly lower the chances of being hospitalized or even dying from COVID-19, recently published research shows.

…And they weren’t afraid to use their power to bend reality: The Twitter Files show the unholy alliance of state and corporate power.

Even if social media content is not protected by the First Amendment, and even if Twitter, as a private company, can create its own “terms of service” and just decide to banish whomever they want, a key question posed by the Twitter Files is: what if the government is telling this private company to do so?

Isn’t that just an end run around the First Amendment’s protections of our right to free speech? I’m no lawyer but it sure seems so.

And, even worse, what if the cozy relationship between government and social media evolves to the point that platforms censor users without needing to be specifically asked to do so by the government? Like a Mafia don ordering a hit with a sideways glance, no words are ever spoken, but the order is made clear.

Just like that, an unholy alliance has been created, with government and private companies working in lockstep to censor our guaranteed right to free speech.

There’s a name for when private companies and the government work hand in hand: fascism. Benito Mussolini said that “fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

As indicated in the Twitter Files, access to Twitter’s bureaucratic censors, de-boosters and outright platform banners was equal opportunity — Republicans could make a call just as easily as Democrats. But what is also made clear is that the Democratic Party loyalties of Twitter employees are close to 100 percent.

So who was being censored? Anyone who challenged Democrats. Which goes a long way towards explaining why those 11,000 people who questioned Covid lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates and vaccine effectiveness were given the boot.

“Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State,” to coin a phrase.

Related: Additional bonkers moments from 2020 here: Greater Exercise Activity is Tied to Less Severe Covid-19 Outcomes, a Study Shows.

NO, DO NOT MAKE JOHN BROWN AN EVANGELICAL HERO: Yes, unfortunately, there is a Woke movement among evangelicals and in my latest PJ Media column, I explain why it appears from a Christianity Today post in June that the magazine founded by the Rev. Billy Graham has been seduced.

GOT WOKE, SLOWLY GOING BROKE: Hollywood Lost More Than $500 Billion in Market Value in 2022.

Major studios, streamers, cable providers, and other media giants lost a combined $542 billion in market value in 2022, with left-wing studios the Walt Disney Co., Netflix, and Comcast accounting for the bulk of the bloodshed.

The Dow Jones Media Titans index, which tracks the performance of 30 of the world’s biggest media companies, shed 40 percent this year, with its total market value declining from $1.35 trillion to $808 billion, according to a Financial Times report.

The losses outpaced indices for other sectors, including banking, which saw a 14.5 percent drop for the year, and telecommunications, which fell by 11.2 percent.

Hollywood’s horrible year was the result of a one-two punch of a downturn in the streaming market coupled with consumers continuing to cut the cord by the millions. In addition, the advertising market has cratered as households cut spending as the costs of essentials like food and energy continue to skyrocket due to President Joe Biden’s (D) disastrous economic policies.

Woke companies paid the highest price in 2022.

As Rob Long wrote in the December issue of Commentary: The Good Times Lasted a Century. “From Herman Mankiewicz’s 1926 telegram [to Ben Hecht, in which he cabled, ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here. And your only competition is idiots.’] to the most recent depressing Warner Brothers Discovery earnings call, the business was doing, as we used to say when there was still a reason to say it, boffo business. Today, the worst thing you can do for young people trying to break into show business is encourage them. The number of movies in release has never been smaller, and studios are still trying to figure out the economics of the feature-film business in the age of streaming. They have only recently discovered that spending $100 million on a feature film that goes directly to streaming is a money-loser—but then so are multi-episode series that sit, unwatched, on the servers of Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, you name it.”

WELL, SO ARE POLITICIANS AND THEY DON’T EVEN PROVIDE THE OPPORTUNITY FOR A KISS: Mistletoe Is Actually A Parasite.

TWITTER FILES, COVID EDITION: How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate With Help From the White House.

Much more to The Twitter Files: Covid Editon than this introductory thread.

Follow-up piece to come next week, featuring leading doctors & researchers from Harvard, Stanford & other institutions. https://t.co/TeEeCvMZa2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 26, 2022

1. THREAD:

THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE

– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

SERVES ‘EM RIGHT: Celebrity-backed woke bail fund has closed after being sued for freeing a serial criminal. “The group posted a $3,000 bond for 24-year-old Rashawn Gaston-Anderson in December 2021. Just six days later, he shot an Asian waiter, Chengyan Wang, eleven times. Gaston-Anderson pleaded guilty and will serve seven to 18 years in prison. Gaston-Anderson was arrested in November 2021 for burglary and theft. After being released on bond, he went into a restaurant and opened fire on Wang, almost killing him. Wang is suing and targeting The Bail Project for paying the bond of a serial criminal.”

SO YOUNG FOR A HEART ATTACK: ABC News producer Dax Tejera dead at age 37: Producer for ‘This Week’ died of heart attack.

The Insta-Wife had a heart attack at that age, of course, but one presumes Mr. Tejera wasn’t on birth control pills.

HOW’S THAT “ZERO COVID” STRATEGY WORKING OUT FOR YOU, CHAIRMAN XI? China’s COVID cases overwhelm hospitals. “Jutard-Bourreau, who like Bernstein has been working in China for around a decade, fears that the worst of this wave in Beijing has not arrived yet. Elsewhere in China, medical staff told Reuters that resources are already stretched to the breaking point in some cases, as COVID and sickness levels amongst staff have been particularly high. One nurse based in the western city of Xian said 45 of 51 nurses in her department and all staff in the emergency department have caught the virus in recent weeks.”

ICE UNABLE TO ‘LOCATE’ 378K IMMIGRATION DETAINEE RECORDS: Perhaps somebody should check out the digital version of that warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones. This news story is what kept me occupied much of today.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: One astronomical object could be the best resource for future space colonies. “The metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche is a good possibility. Mining the interior of its estimated trillions of dollars worth of rare earth metals would also provide a radiation-shielded habitat, as long as rapidly spinning Psyche doesn’t cause it to fly apart. On this point, the concept looks promising. One study of spinning asteroids found that solid ones up to a few hundred yards in diameter should tolerate a spin rate fast enough to sustain artificial gravity up to half a gee or so.”

READER FAVORITE: EFAYCRR Steampunk Table Lamp. #CommissionEarned

LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Chicago News Is Dominated by Gang Shootings, Murders, and Carjackings.

Reminder: Chicagoans elected their last Republican mayor in 1926.

READER FAVORITE: The Original BenShot Bullet Rocks Glass with Real .308 Bullet. #CommissionEarned

HMM: Robert Oppenheimer Cleared of Being Suspected Soviet Spy. This seems fair to me, but I’m leery of the Hollywood angle.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, CHAIRMAN XI: China: Leaked estimate says 250 million people have caught COVID this month.

ACTUALLY ALL STATES SHOULD:  “Red States Should Embrace the Science of Reading.”

THEY’VE EVEN GIVEN UP ON LYING: China to stop publishing daily Covid figures.

AND IF YOU WONDER WHETHER TO CELEBRATE KWANZA: The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz has a succinct description of it as “a fake holiday with a racist goal, created by a criminal madman.”

HENCE THE EXPRESSION, “SNOT-NOSED KIDS.” Is your kid’s runny nose going on forever? Experts say it’s normal.