NEWS YOU CAN USE: 4 Tell-Tale Signs of Low Testosterone You Shouldn’t Ignore.

Plus, #5: You work for Buzzfeed.

THE LATEST STRATEGYTALK ON CHINA: The Emperor Backed Down: The COVID Lockdown Explosion And Fallout. Runs 28 minutes. Includes new theme music!

VERY RELATED: Xi’s China faces push back from everyone and everywhere. The December 9 China update — background for the podcast.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: Controversial ‘orgasmic meditation’ class lauded by Gwyneth Paltrow REBRANDS as science-based practice with EEGs tracking ‘healing effects’ – despite ongoing FBI probe and Netflix doc that exposed dark side of sex therapy empire.

JAMES BOVARD: FBI Cointelpro is Back and Worse Than Ever.

Elon Musk has opened the floodgates to expose the FBI’s latest war on Americans’ freedom of speech. The FBI massively intervened to pressure Twitter to suppress accounts and tweets from individuals the FBI disapproved, including parody accounts. The FBI and other federal agencies also browbeat Facebook, Instagram, and many other tech companies.

Thus far, most of the American media has ignored or downplayed the story, known as the Twitter Files. Since many of the individuals who the FBI got squelched were pro-Trump, the violation of their rights is a non-issue – or a cause for quiet celebration. At this point, it is difficult to know whether the scant reaction to the Twitter Files is the result of political bias, collective amnesia, or simply a total ignorance of American history.

The history of the FBI provides perhaps the best guide to the abuses that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’ marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations. The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts.”

While many people are aware of how the FBI hounded Martin Luther King, Jr., and pressured him to commit suicide, that was not even the tip of the iceberg of the FBI’s racial persecution.

I think the media folks are ignoring the story because they’re complicit.

Meanwhile, note what appears at the top if you search it on Google:

Compare Bing:

And DuckDuckGo:

MERRY CHRISTMAS, JAY:  You da man.  Thanks for saving two dozen lives during the Buffalo snowstorm.  As a torts professor, I can tell you that you committed no legal wrong by breaking into a school during an emergency (Ploof v. Putnam), but that (technically at least) the school can force you to pay for any damage you caused (Vincent v. Lake Erie Transportation Co.). But don’t worry, they won’t.  Today, they love you.  (And if they do try to make you pay, I’ll cover it.)

A MEASURE OF SANITY: MIT faculty adopt free expression statement that protects ‘offensive’ speech.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty have adopted a resolution that defends freedom of speech and expression — even speech some find “offensive or injurious.”

The “Free Expression Statement,” approved by the faculty senate Dec. 21, states that “Learning from a diversity of viewpoints, and from the deliberation, debate, and dissent that accompany them, are essential ingredients of academic excellence.”

The statement was approved by a vote of 98 to 52, a source close to MIT told The College Fix.

“We cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious,” the statement reads.

It wasn’t close, but it should have been less-close.

LIGHTENING DEAL: EUREKA All in One Wet Dry Vacuum Cleaner and Mop for Multi-Surface Self-Cleaning System. #CommissionEarned

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Value of graduate degrees is going down, reports argue: Analyses of graduate degrees suggest that many programs are ‘cash cows’ for colleges and universities, including online master’s degrees and certificates.

If only there had been some sort of warning.

THE CUP THAT CHEERS:

In one study, over 700 male and female social drinkers were divided into groups of three strangers and instructed to drink for 36 minutes.

The participants thought the drinks were a prelude to the experiment, but researchers were observing what they did at the table. Initially, the strangers did not smile much. But as they consumed their vodka cranberry drinks, their expressions changed. They not only smiled more, but also caught each other’s smiles, and spoke more in succession. And they shared more of what researchers called ‘golden moments’ when all three strangers smiled as one.

As Edward Slingerland notes in his magisterial book, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, alcohol and the social bonding it creates may be the reason for civilization.

XI JINPING TAKE NOTE: The Year Putin’s Imperial Dream Became a Nightmare of Destruction

We know why Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine. Once upon a time (as recently as late February 2022), Vlad dreamed a splendid dream of imperial Russian glory restored.

In Vlad’s grand reverie, the architect, commander and instrument of this repair of the Russian Empire’s Soviet Union-era crackup would be… Vlad.

As grandiose, narcissistic hallucinations go, Vlad’s brain fever empire did have self-serving calculations and semi-informed parameters. I’m sure he’s read the great historical theoreticians or, since he was an intelligence agent, at least had an aide give him the bullet points.

Was that last sentence a shot at big ego intel officers? You bet it was. Look at all the U.S. intel types who called Hunter Biden’s laptop disinformation. Sneaky usually aligns with sleazy and that goes triple in the so-called intelligence communities.

Read the entire essay to get the theoretical gist.

WE ARE GOVERNED BY CROOKS AND MORONS:

TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY: “Asked in a new Rasmussen Reports survey if the incoming GOP House majority should release the taxes of Democrats who voted to reveal Trump’s taxes, 54% said yes.”

THIS CAN BE FIXED:  The ABA is trying to strong arm Hofstra University’s law school into hiring faculty by race and sex.  The same thing is happening here at the University of San Diego.  The Supreme Court won’t be able to stop this kind of overreach just by issuing a strong opinion in the Harvard and UNC cases.  But in the future Congress can stop it.

(By the way, dear readers, if you know of other cases, in the last ten years or so, of accreditors attempting to dictate diversity to the schools they accredit, please let me know.  I am trying to collect that information.)

SPACE: SpaceX launches Israeli reconnaissance satellite, lands rocket in final flight of 2022: The launch and landing marked SpaceX’s 61st flight in 2022.

SO MANY MYTHS: The Myth of American Income Inequality.

IT’S GOOD TO BE JOE BIDEN, Caribbean vacation edition. “Holy schamoly, have we ever had a president as disengaged as this?”

REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Of all places, how did Buffalo, NY not know what WINTER STORM meant?

It’s a characteristic of today’s Democrat-run jurisdictions that most people don’t do their jobs very well. If at all.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE!!! Nearly 50% of participants in ‘Monkeypox in women’ study were biological men.

Maya Forstater took to Twitter to point out that it was hardly surprising that the findings showed women having similar clinical features as males when almost half the ‘women’ studied were male. . . . Others suggested that publishing such a study would undermine the public’s trust in the medical world.

“Same people doing these studies are the folks angry that people are not trusting medical authorities and consuming ‘misinformation’,” tweeted Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.

Right?