THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Michigan’s Muslim-majority city council approves animal sacrifice for religious purposes.

Could human sacrifice be next? Dogs and cats living together? (I’d say after the last three years, the mass hysteria portion of the scenario is well established.)

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Gavin Newsom is Delusional.

California is the fifth largest economy on the planet. It is blessed with one of the world’s most amiable climates, vast stores of human capital, and abundant natural resources. It is also plagued by a crippling inferiority complex—a condition best exemplified by the state’s governor. Gavin Newsom has developed an unhealthy obsession with Republican-led states like Texas and Florida, and he cannot help but define his state’s identity almost solely in opposition to how other states do business.

So Newsom is a reactionary, as are most leftists, something Roger Simon has been pointing out for years now.

SPACE LAW: SAUDI ARABIA IS WITHDRAWING FROM THE MOON TREATY. The Moon Treaty, which banned private exploitation of space resources, was always pretty much a joke, but this is an indication that the Artemis Accords are moving people very much in the other direction.

Much more here.

SPACE JUNK: European firms partner for LEO collision avoidance demo.

IT SEEMS CLEAR THAT THE VACCINES WERE WILDLY OVERSOLD: Pentagon Finally Ends Covid Vaccine Mandate: It’s time to have an honest science-based discussion on whether the mandate should have ever been imposed on the military in the first place. They don’t keep you from getting Covid, they don’t keep you from spreading Covid, and those are things we normally expect vaccines to do.

BUTTIGIEG CAN’T FAIL; HE CAN ONLY BE FAILED: Axios: Historic transportation crises haunt Buttigieg.

PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Solar flare hat trick: Sun unleashes another powerful X-flare in less than a week!

AND AGAIN: Biden aides find second batch of classified documents at new location.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., reacted on social media minutes after the NBC News report on the new documents, tweeting out the words, “Special counsel.”

Faster, please.

DEMS LOVE POLITICAL VIOLENCE, THAT’S WHY THEY WANT TO DETER THEIR OPPONENTS FROM DOING WHAT THEY DO:

SHOCKINGLY, JULIETTE “BALDILOCKS” OCHIENG IS suffering from stage fright. Drop by and buck her up if you have a minute.

THIS IS DEEPLY UNFAIR TO DRUNKEN SAILORS, WHO ARE GENERALLY SPENDING THEIR OWN MONEY: Gavin Newsom gives drunk sailors a run for spending money.

DOING ITS JOB WAS NOT AT THE TOP OF THE FAA’S PRIORITIES: Aviation Groups Have Complained for Years About the Outdated FAA Alert System That Crashed Today.

I WONDER IF IT WORKS IN PEOPLE? COPD Prescription Drug Roflumilast Prescription Drug Appears to Recover Lost Memories in Mice. I guess we’ll find out.

THE CONTINUING CRISIS: White House Extends COVID Public Health Emergency.

We should have a rule that during any declared emergency, all federal salaries are reduced by 10% for the duration. There will never be another.

EXPOSING THE WHITE HOUSE CENSORSHIP MACHINE and various other examples of government misbehavior.

WELL, GOOD: Mom fatally shoots home invader to protect her 2 kids.

RIP TO AN ELECTRIC GUITAR MASTER: Rock icon Jeff Beck dead at 78 after bout with meningitis.

More at Variety: Jeff Beck, One of the Guitar Masters of the Rock Era, Dies at 78.

Beck recently completed a tour supporting his collaborative album with Johnny Depp, “18.” He received seven Grammys for instrumental performances, and an eighth for his 2009 work on Herbie Hancock’s “The Imagine Project.”

A fleet, imaginative soloist, Beck brought formidable instrumental firepower to British band the Yardbirds, which he joined in 1965 as a replacement for Eric Clapton. Entirely at home with the group’s blues roots, he burnished their pop hits with an adventurous and virtually unprecedented use of feedback, sustain and fuzz.

After a precipitous exit from the Yardbirds — where he had been joined by another future guitar star, Jimmy Page — he established his own band, the Jeff Beck Group, which was fronted by vocalist Rod Stewart, soon to become a solo star. The unit proved as unstable as it was powerful, and lasted for just two albums.

During the ’70s, Beck assembled a second, more R&B-oriented edition of his group, and briefly formed a short-lived power trio with bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge and Cactus.

He reached the probable apex of both his critical and commercial success with a pair of mid-’70s all-instrumental albums, “Blow by Blow” and “Wired,” that found him moving into jazz-fusion terrain. The latter LP was recorded with keyboardist Jan Hammer, formerly of the top fusion act the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

From the early ’80s onward, the temperamental Beck — a notorious perfectionist in the studio and a prickly band mate — would sporadically reappear, retrench, retire and reappear again. His latter-day work ranged from an homage to rockabilly singer Gene Vincent to instrumental sets reflecting the influence of techno, electronica and ambient music.

Nobody outside of Ravi Shankar on the sitar could find more tiny microtones between the conventional music scale when bending notes than Beck. Absolute legend.

IF SANTOS SHOULD RESIGN, SHOULDN’T THE WASHINGTON POST AT LEAST APOLOGIZE? The Mainstream Media is working up a frenzy demanding the resignation of newly elected Rep. George Santos (R-NY) for misrepresenting, or to put it less delicately, lying, about the past.

So, I ask in my latest PJ Media column, now that six academic data wonks analyzed the evidence and concluded the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election was an abject failure, shouldn’t the Post, which got a Pulitzer for its Russiagate coverage, and all the rest of the Mainstream Media that inflicted years of Russiagate-based lies on the American public, return the awards and apologize to America?

BURYING THE LEDE: In “The boring journey of Matt Yglesias,” the WaPo waits 10 paragraphs to note how popular Yglesias is with the Biden administration:

“I don’t always agree with Matt, but he always makes you think with his unique and sharp insights,” says Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, via email. Klain has liked and shared multiple Yglesias tweets, usually ones that praise White House actions in defiance of wailing liberals or henpecking conservatives. Yglesias, Klain adds, “offers ‘unconventional wisdom:’ He’s not afraid to break with others and put his views out there — a perspective that is hard to find in a dialogue dominated by conventional wisdom.”

* * * * * * * *

But enough serious people take Yglesias seriously to negate the many people who don’t. His Substack was tied for most-followed newsletter by members of the Biden transition team, according to digital strategist Rob Blackie, and Yglesias himself was No. 4 on the list of most-followed journalists. Some of Yglesias’s posts on policy — particularly one on Build Back Better negotiations in February — have reportedly circulated among White House staff.

“There’s a broad sense that he’s a public intellectual, and they take his ideas like they’ll take other ideas,” says a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss outside influences on the administration. “He’s not super influential, but he’s a prominent normie liberal, just like Joe Biden is a normie liberal.”

Prominent normie liberalism on display:

And:

Don’t bother looking for those tweets: The Ultimate vox.com Workplace Accident? Vox co-founder Matt Ygelsias has deleted several thousand tweets:

Including this classic:

MAYOR PETE’S PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES:

Almost a year ago, the Federal Aviation Authority, under the helm of transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, announced that the aviation briefing known as NOTAM, or Notice to Airmen, would undergo a name change. NOTAMs are unclassified notices distributed from an aviation authority to all pilots that contain essential information regarding conditions, hazards, system concerns, or other flight operations. NOTAM, Mayor Pete’s Department of Transportation declared, wasn’t gender inclusive and, as of December 2, 2021, it should henceforth be referred to Notice to Air Missions, not Airmen.

While Mayor Pete preoccupied his department with scrubbing the bigotry out of an acronym, it never occurred to the Biden administration’s Chief Diversity Hire that the system itself might need some tending-to. That was until this morning when an outage caused the NOTAM system to fail and all flights in the US were grounded for several hours, something that hasn’t happened since 9/11.

Today’s FAA system failure came just weeks after Southwest Airlines ruined Christmas when its outdated computer system led to thousands of canceled flights — something that the transportation secretary brazenly mocked, seemingly unaware that the Biden administration had given billions of dollars in handouts to Southwest, with no oversight. As he wagged his finger at the airline, Mayor Pete was oblivious that his own computers might need a tune-up.

It’s a textbook example of what Victor Davis Hanson once dubbed “The Bloomberg Syndrome.” As VDH wrote in early 2011 when then-New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg failed to adequately remove a foot and half or so of global warming from his city streets:

It is a human trait to focus on cheap and lofty rhetoric rather than costly, earthy reality. It is a bureaucratic characteristic to rail against the trifling misdemeanor rather than address the often-dangerous felony. And it is political habit to mask one’s own failures by lecturing others on their supposed shortcomings. Ambitious elected officials often manage to do all three.

The result in these hard times is that our elected sheriffs, mayors, and governors are loudly weighing in on national and global challenges that are quite often out of their own jurisdiction, while ignoring or failing to solve the very problems that they were elected to address.

Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official [or presidential cabinet official] holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate*, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.

* And racist roads and bridges. Don’t forget the racist roads and bridges.

UPDATE:

A STROKE AT 26 IS BAD LUCK: Hailey Bieber reveals mental health struggle after mini-stroke. “At the hospital, Bieber said she was found to have a small blood clot in her brain, which she said doctors categorized as a transient ischemic attack.”

READER FAVORITE: GTHUNDER Digital Night Vision Goggles Binoculars for Total Darkness. #CommissionEarned

VIDEO: What Is And Isn’t Useful Kit In Ukraine.

In: Mini hot water bottles, ghillie kettles, combat tourniquets and machetes.

Out: Fancy optics and Rambo knives.

Much more at the link.

RIPPED OFF BY THE THOUGHT POLICE. The Twitter Files show how censorship’s supporters got snookered.

JOANNE JACOBS: Teaching with AI: Can the bot be a useful tool?