WON’T. IT’S ALWAYS WON’T. What the Media Can’t – Or Won’t – Tell Us About Armed Self Defense.

IT WILL COME BACK UNDER A DIFFERENT NAME: MMT Is Dead. It Must Now Be Buried for Good. “We are all Keynesians because the government’s out of control spending has forced us to be. In the latter sense, we are not Keynesians because that spending has decimated our financial well-being. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is essentially an offshoot of Keynesianism in that government can spend ad nauseam and commensurately print money without any ill effect. With the historic inflation we are now experiencing, MMT has been thoroughly repudiated. MMT is dead–it must now be buried.”

IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN: TurboTax Deluxe 2022 Tax Software. #CommissionEarned

ENDORSED: Dear Restaurants: Shove Your Damn QR Codes. “And while I’m ranting about things that infuriate me, having you rate your transaction when ordering at the counter, before you’ve even received your food, is so unacceptable that I always give them the lowest rating possible when they make me do that.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Breakthrough for Finding Asteroids and Tracking Space Debris.

ALIENS: Mysterious gamma-ray emitting bubbles around the center of the Milky Way explained.

FALLOUT: Japan’s ‘anti-Russian course’ makes treaty talks impossible – TASS.

Russia and Japan have not formally ended World War Two hostilities because of their standoff over islands, seized by the Soviet Union at the end of the war, just off Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido.

The islands are known in Russia as the Kurils and in Japan as the Northern Territories.

“It is absolutely obvious that it is impossible to discuss the signing of such a document (a peace treaty) with a state that takes openly unfriendly positions and allows itself direct threats against our country,” Rudenko told TASS in an interview.

“We are not seeing signs of Tokyo moving away from the anti-Russian course and any attempt to rectify the situation.”

Tokyo has gone more than 77 years without a formal peace treat with Moscow — I think they can wait a while longer.

THE GIFT OF THE BEES: “Surprising” – Researchers Have Found That Honey Improves Key Measures of Cardiometabolic Health. I don’t consume much honey.

WATCH: Fetterman’s Painfully Awkward Swearing-in Renews Doubts About Ability to Serve.

POWERLINE: The World According To Tom Cotton. I think this was posted on Instapundit yesterday but it’s worth a re-link. In Scott Johnson’s discussion of Senator Cotton’s book and Walter Russell Mead’s recent commentary on the book, you’ll find a link to this 2015 Powerline post: Nine years later, Tom Cotton’s letter to the Times. Well worth re-reading.

THAT SEEMS RATHER FAST: Doctors: Quitting smoking provides health benefits within minutes.

FUN PHOTO: Santa Helps With At Sea Replenishment An ensign and lieutenant (jg) bring the North Pole to the Arabian Gulf.

RELATED: A USAF lieutenant-colonel plays Santa with C-130s for “reindeer.” Or are they sleds? Whatever. It’s Operation Christmas Drop 2022.

Seven C-130 aircraft from the U.S. Air Force, Royal Australian Air Force, Japan Air Self-Defense Force, Republic of Korea Air Force and Royal New Zealand Air Force delivered 209 bundles weighing a total of more than 71,000 pounds as part of Operation Christmas Drop, an event meant to assist remote island communities in the Federated States of Micronesia and Republic of Palau.

Diplomacy by C-130. Photo snapped at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam.

DETAILS, DETAILS: A Mad Rush to Build More EV Factories, But Where are the Minerals?

If you hand out enough free money and incentives you can spur the building of nearly anything.

If people balk at buying the cars we will need still more free money to entice them to do do.

And then when the complaints come in there are not enough charging units, we will need to give away more free money.

Where we get the Lithium, nickel, cobalt, Manganese, and graphite to build all the batteries for the EVs without driving up the cost is a mystery.

Hint: There is no mystery. The plan, such as it is, is to price most Americans out of private vehicle ownership.

MY 2023 STRATEGIC CHALLENGES COLUMN: 2023’s Strategic Challenges: Introducing Big Debt

An extract for Instapundit readers:

Challenge No. 4: The pervasive corruption of influential but venal individuals and venal institutions in democratic nations. The corruption is so internally corrosive to these nations that timely and effective political and military response to Challenges Nos. 1 through 3 is systemically delayed, undermined or immobilized.

2023 comment: 2022’s Twitter revelations exposed extraordinary corruption in the U.S., in the FBI, the so-called legacy media and the Biden family in particular. Hunter Biden’s laptop is not Russian disinformation; it is hard and detailed evidence that exposes corruption tainting the highest levels of American governance.

Major 2023 U.S. Diplomatic Penalty for Corruption: Hunter Biden’s blatant corruption has real-world national security costs. If defending Ukraine is a U.S. security interest — and I think it is — then the Biden family’s corrupt activities and the government’s failure to penalize their corruption undermines American efforts to address Ukrainian economic corruption.

Read the entire essay.

BRAD THOMPSON: The Birth of the Laissez-Faire Constitution.

REP. MIKE GARCIA: ‘Day One of Being in the Majority Feels an Awful Lot Like Being in the Minority.’

DON SURBER: Let’s Not Have World War III.

WELL, GOOD: Bills’ Damar Hamlin seems to be improving, family says.

ERWIN CHEMERINSKY ON THE PROBLEM OF FREE SPEECH DEAD ZONES.

NOT THE BEE: You’ll understand why big companies have gone woke after you read this fascinating thread about Coca-Cola and the DC Swamp. “We (Coke) will give you money. You need to paint opponents of us as racist.”

PAULA BOLYARD: Here’s the Line That Brought Down the House During Ron Desantis’ Inaugural Speech.

NEW YEAR DEAL: Presto 08800 EverSharp Electric Knife Sharpener. #CommissionEarned

GARBAGE PEOPLE SHILLING FOR GARBAGE PERSON: Media Creates Trans Martyr Out of Death Row Inmate Who Stalked, Raped, Murdered GF.

ALTERNATIVES TO AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN HIGHER ED. With any luck, this will soon become a pressing concern. Also makes an interesting point: while the U.S. population has increased by around 50% since the 1970s, the number of “prestigious” schools, and the number of students they admit, has barely budged. This lends a lot of credence to the idea that, despite their protests, they’re selling prestigious credentials, not education.

WHY IS HIGHER EDUCATION SUCH A CESSPIT OF HATE AND VIOLENCE? Trustee apologizes for saying faculty who challenge DEI should be taken to ‘slaughterhouse.’