HISTORY: The VW Golf Through the Years.

ROGER CLEGG:  “You Can Help California at Christmastime.”  Or New Year’s.

WELL: Argentina pulls out of plans to join Brics bloc.

Argentina’s new President, Javier Milei, has withdrawn the country from its planned entry into the expanding Brics club of nations.

In a letter to the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, Mr Milei said decisions taken by the preceding government had been revised.

The Brics countries are often seen as a counterweight to the Western-led world.

Argentina had been among a much-vaunted new tranche of six countries poised to join the grouping next month.

It would have been admitted to the Brics club on 1 January, alongside Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Its change of heart comes after Mr Milei, a populist right-wing outsider, won a surprise election victory in November with radical pledges to overhaul the South American nation’s ailing economy.

He succeeded left-wing Peronist Alberto Fernández, whose views were more aligned with those of the bloc’s existing members.

The BRICs are a losers’ club and if you want to be a winner you don’t join.

SKYNET SMILES, IS LOOKING FORWARD TO BEING THE NEXT PRESIDENT* OF HARVARD: A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People. The Law Is Powerless.

Martin Seligman, the influential American psychologist, found himself pondering his legacy at a dinner party in San Francisco one late February evening. The guest list was shorter than it used to be: Seligman is 81, and six of his colleagues had died in the early Covid years. His thinking had already left a profound mark on the field of positive psychology, but the closer he came to his own death, the more compelled he felt to help his work survive.

The next morning he received an unexpected email from an old graduate student, Yukun Zhao. His message was as simple as it was astonishing: Zhao’s team had created a “virtual Seligman.”

Zhao wasn’t just bragging. Over two months, by feeding every word Seligman had ever written into cutting-edge AI software, he and his team had built an eerily accurate version of Seligman himself — a talking chatbot whose answers drew deeply from Seligman’s ideas, whose prose sounded like a folksier version of Seligman’s own speech, and whose wisdom anyone could access.

Impressed, Seligman circulated the chatbot to his closest friends and family to check whether the AI actually dispensed advice as well as he did. “I gave it to my wife and she was blown away by it,” Seligman said.

The bot, cheerfully nicknamed “Ask Martin,” had been built by researchers based in Beijing and Wuhan — originally without Seligman’s permission, or even awareness.

The Chinese-built virtual Seligman is part of a broader wave of AI chatbots modeled on real humans, using the powerful new systems known as large language models to simulate their personalities online. Meta is experimenting with licensed AI celebrity avatars; you can already find internet chatbots trained on publicly available material about dead historical figures.

* Oh heck, simply the next president, given Obama and Biden’s apparent love of the cut and paste tool.

SO, LIKE “GENDER AFFIRMING” SURGERY, THEN: Mental health problems not reduced after obesity surgery in young people.

ROGER KIMBALL: When will Harvard give Claudine Gay the boot?

First, there were the allegations of plagiarism. The charges began in a halting, tentative fashion. Harvard tried to circle its wagons, too, insisting that it was merely a matter of “duplicative language” (I hope they give the genius who dreamed up that euphemism a PhD). But the jackals were on the case now, and it was soon revealed that, paltry though Gay’s publication history was, it was shot through with gobbets of unacknowledged borrowings.

Then came Christopher Brunet and Francis Menton, who showed that Gay was not simply guilty of plagiarism, but of data falsification to boot. There are wheels with wheels to this story, perhaps the choicest being Harvard’s heavy-handed attempt to silence the New York Post, which had begun investigating the charges of plagiarism back in October. “Then it emerged,” Menton explains, “that… the Post had sent [the allegations] to Harvard for confirmation — only to get in return a threatening letter from the Clare Locke law firm (the same firm that had recovered over $700 million from Fox in the Dominion Voting case) asserting that the accusations of plagiarism were ‘demonstrably false.’”  That was right before the Washington Free Beacon) another cache of “duplicative language” — some forty instances, “almost four,” Menton notes, “for each of Ms. Gay’s eleven academic articles.”

Many of my friends are demanding that Claudine Gay be given the push. Probably, she will eventually have to go. The billionaire Harvard donor — make that “former Harvard donor” — Bill Ackman recently tweeted that he had heard that the Harvard Corporation had asked for Gay’s resignation but “she has refused.” Delicious if true. My own feeling is that the longer Gay stays at Harvard, the more she calls attention to the Hindenburg-like flatulence of that morally and intellectually bankrupt institution. Claudine Gay is bad for Harvard, but Harvard is bad for the country, so her continued presence is a net positive.

So is Harvard simply crossing its legal t’s and dotting its contractual i’s before showing Gay to the exit door, or will she survive? Regarding the latter possibility: The DEI cosa nostra: Why Claudine Gay will survive Harvard’s antisemitism scandal.

STAY UPRIGHT: KINGSMITH Electric Height Adjustable Memory Standing Desk. #CommissionEarned

SOD OFF, SWAMPY: WaPo: Why these homes in the hottest places don’t need AC.

All of these technologies have their contemporary equivalents: Electric fans, swamp coolers and insulation. But throughout the Earth’s hot zones, many of them in the Global South, the new technologies are expensive, and create dependence on erratic electrical grids and networks of production, commerce and transportation that are alien, and unsustainable.

The old technologies are also a resource: They offer a way forward, architecturally, culturally and climatically, not just for torrid zones in Egypt or Turkey, but for heavily populated regions throughout the world that rely on precarious sources of power. From Cairo to California, there are architects who are already incorporating these technologies in contemporary buildings. But there are multiple challenges: overcoming skepticism among people long dependent on modern systems, recalibrating what it means and feels like to be comfortable, and recovering and preserving the wisdom of vernacular systems.

The last of these challenges — undoing erasure and forgetting — is urgent. The few remaining houses from Fathy’s original plan are crumbling in New Gourna. In the searingly hot Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, in southeast Turkey, civil unrest and oppression has led to whole swaths of the ancient town, full of historic stone homes with complex fountain systems, being demolished. And in Cairo — where some of the world’s most sophisticated passively cooled houses were built centuries ago — decay, neglect and government sponsored demolition threaten to erase invaluable heritage.

Okay Washington Post, put your reporting into action, and lead the charge to translate that into something much more local: Ban A/C for DC!

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Sam Bankman-Fried spared from second trial.

U.S. prosecutors dropped plans for a second trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange.

In a letter filed in a Manhattan federal court Friday, prosecutors said “strong public interest” in a prompt resolution of their case against Bankman-Fried outweighed the benefits of a second trial.

Bankman-Fried was accused of looting $8 billion from FTX customers out of sheer greed.

Last month, he was convicted of fraud and conspiracy.

And would have faced a second set of six charges including campaign finance violations, conspiracy to commit bribery, and others.

Those six charges were severed from his first trial.

Flashback: FTX Founder Spent $40 Million As Democrat Midterm Megadonor.

Leading up to Sam Bankman-Fried’s spectacular implosion – in which his firm FTX evaporated billions in wealth after the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange allegedly commingled client assets with his trading firm into a liquidity crunch – he became the sixth-largest donor in this year’s midterm election cycle, giving some $40 million to mostly Democratic candidates and causes.

According to Forbes, Bankman-Fried was second only to George Soros among billionaire donors to Democratic groups during the 2022 midterm election cycle.

FTX allegedly loaned Alameda Research – a trading firm founded by Bankman-Fried – roughly $10 billion in client assets, which has landed him under federal investigation by the SEC, CTFC, and the Justice Department – the latter of which already had been working on a months-long investigation, according to the Wall Street Journal. The CTFC, meanwhile, is tasked with regulating certain elements of the crypto markets – including digital assets that are as commodities, and crypto exchanges and clearinghouses.

In late September, Bankman-Fried admitted that his political donations were mostly to Democrats, and Republican recipients were ‘targeted’.

Sealed with a kiss, you might say:

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA:

● Shot: California Taxes Are Among the Highest in the Nation.

—The Balance, January 6^th, 2023.

And as a result:

● Chaser: List: California ranked in bottom 10 of charitable states.

—Fox 11 Los Angeles, Thursday.

Earlier: Homelessness is Mostly a California Problem: Raw data: Homelessness is down everywhere except California.

AND AFTER ALL QUEERS FOR PALESTINE HAVE DONE FOR THEM: FBI Lists San Fran as ‘Attractive Target’ for Terrorist Attack on New Year’s Eve.

But in case Fun City is feeling jealous: Authorities prepare for New Year’s Eve in Times Square and across the US as Israel-Hamas war presents elevated threats.

Fortunately though, the Biden administration is taking threats of terrorist attacks quite seriously, beginning with upping border security to the nth degree:

This is why you only see illegal migrants with small backpacks.

This driver carries all the people's bags across the border, so when the migrants are illegally crossing into the USA, they don't have to carry anything.

It's a whole operation.

This footage is in Eagle Pass,… pic.twitter.com/I1AB4BddKW

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) December 29, 2023

And by commissioning states to help as well:

DEMOCRATS DISPROVE CLAIMS THEY WILL COVERTLY RIG ELECTION BY RIGGING IT IN PLAIN SIGHT: Federal Government Operatives And Soros Money Behind Plot To Keep Trump Off Ballot.

Maine’s top election official removed Trump from the state’s 2024 primary ballot on Thursday, joining the Colorado Supreme Court in disqualifying Trump from running for president. Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows determined that Trump was ineligible to run under the 14th Amendment due to his alleged role in the January 6 Capitol riot.

“Tonight’s decision relied heavily on the precedents CREW’s clients set first in New Mexico in 2022, then again in Colorado last week,” said Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “These decisions make it clear that nobody, including the former president, is above the law.”

But the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the storming of the Capitol was a security failure, not a coup attempt, and that undercover law enforcement informants or officers may have allowed, or even encouraged, it to happen. January 6 prosecutors have failed to prove a clear link between the rioters and Trump or his associates. And the fact that the Department of Justice declined to indict Trump for inciting an insurrection is a tacit recognition that Trump’s words leading up to the riot were legal speech.

Even some Democrats and mainstream news commentators agree the Maine decision has no merit. Said CNN’s senior legal analyst yesterday, about Bellows’ removal of Trump from the ballot, “She based her ruling on a lot of documents, but also YouTube clips, news reports, things that would never pass the bar in normal court. She’s not a lawyer, by the way.”

In trying to keep Trump off the ballot, Democrats and progressive advocacy groups say that they are protecting democracy. It’s true that some of Trump’s rhetoric is alarming to many liberal voters. For example, Trump recently said, after being asked if he would be a dictator if elected in 2024, “No, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.’”

But America’s system of checks and balances survived one term of Trump and would survive another. During Trump’s presidency, the separation of powers, backed by the Constitution and the American people, remained in place. The real threat to democracy today comes from those trying to deny the American people their right to vote for the candidate of their choosing.

Democrats might not enjoy living under the new rules they’ve created: The New Rules Dictate That Biden Be Struck From the Ballot With the 25th Amendment.

Or perhaps they will, at least next year:

(Classical reference in headline.)

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Happy New Year Edition.

LOOKING FOR A YEAR-END DONATION IN A GOOD CAUSE? Consider donating to FIRE, a campus free speech organization I’ve supported for years. They do excellent work.

I also recommend the New Civil Liberties Alliance. I sit on their board and they’re making major legal inroads against the administrative state.

LOOKING FOR A YEAR-END DONATION IN A GOOD CAUSE? Consider donating to FIRE, a campus free speech organization I’ve supported for years. They do excellent work.

I also recommend the New Civil Liberties Alliance. I sit on their board and they’re making major legal inroads against the administrative state.

DECK CHAIRS REPOSITIONED ON TITANIC: No one talks about Ukraine anymore.

Ukraine’s anguishing self-defense is not a novel. But we’re quietly losing interest in this conflict — I include myself — because it’s not satisfying our fictional appetites. Recall that about a year ago I worried here that our narrative expectations of this war may be taking us into the realm of fantasy. I observed glumly that the war’s probable resolution is an ugly moral compromise that sacrifices a goodly chunk of a sovereign nation to a monomaniacal bully — who will doubtless spin Ukrainian concessions as a dazzling military success, one that redeems for the Russian people his unprovoked aggression and the many deaths of their sons, brothers and fathers.

This endgame is more likely than ever. I’m not happy about that. In fact, it makes me sick. But the average age of the Ukrainian army is now forty-three, a statistic that makes me even sicker. They’re running out of young men, not because the young men won’t serve but because they’re dead. Ukrainian women are being sent to the front lines. Russia had nearly four times the population of Ukraine before the war; given the reduced population in Kyiv-controlled areas, the countries are now mismatched in manpower by a factor of five. With his legacy and political future on the line, Putin is clearly all-in for the long haul. The easily manipulated Russian public have not rebelled. Putin’s inner sanctum hasn’t staged a coup. Russian GDP has increased since last year. The rouble started rising against the dollar. Western sanctions have failed.

I don’t share the view of many Republicans that Ukraine should be thrown under a bus because the country is none of our business and America should spend taxpayers’ money on solutions to its own problems. But just because the conflict’s resolution has major geopolitical ramifications doesn’t mean we can write our own happy ending. No matter how much ordnance the US and NATO ship to Zelensky, we’re not providing the soldiers obliged to wield it. I say this with a heavy heart: if the writing is on the wall — if a negotiated settlement that cedes captured territory to Putin looks inevitable — maybe it’s time to urge the Zelensky government to enter talks to bring this depressing war to its depressing conclusion. Dragging out an entrenched stalemate merely racks up a higher body count and destroys more Ukrainian homes and infrastructure to no purpose. Sitting back and giving Ukrainians just enough weaponry to keep fighting to the last man and woman, only for the country to finally end up where we always knew it would, is not just immoral. It’s murder.

“No one talks about Ukraine anymore,” in part because the Washington Post has moved the topic to the backburner: WaPo: Ukraine War Is No Longer Newsworthy.

The Ukraine war has been one of the top drop-down items on the Washington Post’s web masthead for about two years. During that time, it was the cause celebre of all the best people, and it was widely assumed for most of that time that it would result in a triumph for the good guys.

But lately, things have turned sour in Ukraine. The hoped-for breakthroughs from the counteroffensive didn’t happen, and despite the West pouring more aid into Ukraine than Russia’s entire defense budget, the basic math of warfare never looked great for Ukraine.

Reality reasserted itself.

Russia has never been sophisticated at warfare, and they always do poorly at the beginning stages of a war (sort of the opposite of the United States). Russia’s superpower is the ruthlessness of its leadership; the Russians seem willing to use their citizens as cannon fodder, expending men the way the US expends bullets.

Ukraine’s success early in the war was miraculous, seemingly based on having far superior training and discipline than the Russians. I cheered them on as they pushed back Russia’s offensive and remain impressed by their limited progress in pushing Russian advances back.

But the current battle lines are similar to what they were at the outbreak of the war, and dislodging the Russian army from well-prepared defenses is almost certainly beyond Ukraine’s capabilities.

Understandably, the mood in the West about the war has turned sour. Lots of money is being spent, and lives lost, to seemingly no purpose. Zelenskyy seems to be the only leader left who believes that Ukraine can push Russia out of Ukrainian territory that it has held for nearly a decade.

One reason why the WaPo has begun to bury Ukraine headlines is the possibility that 2024 could be quite an ugly end to the battle: With hopes of victory fading, Ukraine’s war against Russia could get even harder in 2024.

Which America’s most profligate president will likely blame on Congressional Republicans: Joe Biden Wants to Kill Ukraine Funding And Blame the GOP For It.

JUST MSNBC THE MORAL EQUIVALENCE! Chris Matthews Says Addressing Rural Americans’ Anger Is Like ‘Fighting Terrorism.’

It never ceases to amaze me how members of the left-wing chattering class have no idea why regular folks despise them. Former MSNBC host Chris Matthews recently illustrated the type of condescending attitude towards a wide swath of Americans that is typical of progressive elites who remain insulated in their comfy echo chambers.

During a Tuesday appearance on “Morning Joe,” he chimed in on the anger displayed by rural Americans towards members of the media and liberal establishment, claiming that dealing with these individuals was somehow akin to fighting terrorists.

Matthews began his comments by pointing out that “people that didn’t go to college have a pretty good rage on their hands,” and noted that those living in rural America “are so angry at the liberal establishment, the coastal elite.”

The former MSNBC host went on to describe how rural folks feel about “those people on Saturday Night Live.”

“And the regular guy in the country goes, there they are snarling and making fun of us again. And every time we make fun of Trump, we’re making fun of them. That’s the weird… It’s a weird thing, but in a way, it’s like fighting terrorism. We think we just put the army in or Israel just puts the IDF and they’re going to solve the problem. It never solves the problem because you enrage people. And we did it with Afghanistan and we did it with Iraq. We enraged the enemy to the point where they were more fiery than ever and they hate us more than ever.”

Chris is returning to his roots (so angry over Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, he once guest-hosted for Rush Limbaugh) by reminding those still at MSNBC that the left once again views terrorists as the good guys:

● One in five young Americans has a positive view of Osama Bin Laden: Disturbing Daily Mail poll results also reveal three in 10 Gen-Zers think the views of the 9/11 mastermind were a ‘force for good.’

● TikTok made Gen Z pro-Palestine.

● Influencer Society and Its Future. Swallow the Ted pill on Unabomber stan TikTok.

● And as Chris himself noted in early 2020: Soleimani killing on par with deaths of Elvis, Princess Diana.

And perhaps Chris is preparing his former MSNBC colleagues for the future: How Will Modern Spin Doctors Address The Demise Of America’s Most Famous Eco-Terrorists?

ACE OF SPADES: 20th Anniversary Repost: Kaboom Kids.

They should have called it “Kabul.” Just come right out with it. Let the people know what they’re in for.

This is a cereal intended for bulk purchase by the United States Department of Agriculture to feed dirty foreign children. And their animals, too. One stop shopping– they can all feed out of the same trough.

The cereal’s chief use was as a humanitarian insult.

You might wonder at this point, What possible connection is there between the clown theme and explosions, as suggested by the name “Kaboom”? Well, don’t bother thinking about it too hard. They sure didn’t. This product was slapped together more or less randomly by People Who Didn’t Even Care, intended for sale to People Who Care Just a Little Bit Less Than That.

Kaboom is not really a product designed for those who enjoy the life of the mind. Quite the opposite. It’s a product designed for those whose subnormal IQs locate them in the brutish twilight existence that divides, hazily, the crude human from the cunning beast.

The cereal is essentially designed with an eye towards the inevitable devolution of the species. Future-proof, if you will.

If the Morlocks had a cereal it would be Kaboom. But they’d insist on more flavor.

Pour yourself a huge bowl of Kaboom and read the whole thing.

AT AMAZON, Shop the Winter Sale. #CommissionEarned

HIDDEN ‘TRUMP OR BUST’ VOTERS MAY DECIDE 2024: Janice Hisle of The Epoch Times points to the millions of voters who only vote when Donald Trump is on the ballot as the key voting block in understanding the 2024 election. Quoting pollster Rich Baris, Hisle writes:

“Many pollsters might label these people ‘unlikely’ or ‘less-likely’ voters and may discount their responses or weed them out, based on the assumption that they won’t cast ballots.

“But Mr. Baris said that in the case of President Trump’s voters, that premise is flawed. He sees a pattern: These previously unmotivated, sporadic voters now seem to behave rather predictably.”

QUESTION ASKED: Why does no one write like Tom Wolfe any more?

The conservative hypothesis, however, fails to explain why it is that liberals are less willing today to read and enjoy writing that is sardonic or critical towards parties dear to them. The explanation for the change ­of heart is simple and has little to do with any moral failing on the part of liberals – still less heady notions of a “woke mind virus”. In Wolfe’s 1970s heyday liberalism, and with it the Democratic Party, still felt itself to be hegemonic in American life. Democrats had run both chambers of the legislature with only brief interruptions since the 1930s. Civil rights and a new set of social welfare policies enacted under Johnson represented recent testaments of political strength.

In such an environment, liberals could easily afford to laugh along as Wolfe took aim at their darlings. It was not until the election of Ronald Reagan, in 1980, that the balance shifted and the US entered an age, one still with us, in which American conservatism and liberalism represent roughly equivalent political forces.

It took longer for intellectual culture to catch up to political fact. In time, as Wolfe faded from the scene, a more strident liberalism emerged – not, as conservatives often assume, more strident because more powerful, but the opposite. A politically weakened liberalism found the joke wasn’t funny any more.

Here it has to be admitted that the problem is not merely one of liberal demand for writers like Wolfe but also one of conservative supply. Liberals, after all, also have a ready answer for why there aren’t any Tom Wolfes any more: it is because conservatives are just so angry these days. Gone are the days of William F Buckley, of a wry, patrician conservatism that delivered its message with dry wit in mellifluous mid-Atlantic tones, goes the argument, now it’s all invective, all rage. To write like Wolfe, after all, it is necessary to sublimate one’s resentment of liberals into the wry detachment that is a prerequisite for satire, something fewer conservatives are capable of today.

Wolfe famously told the story many times of how he managed to show up at Lenny and Felicia’s Park Ave. duplex in 1970 to record their infamous fundraiser for the Black Panthers (ellipses in original):

“One day I was hanging around a hallway at Harper’s … I wandered next door into the office of David Halberstam, who wasn’t there. Nosily I noticed a rather fancy card on his desktop … It was an invitation from Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, for a reception at their apartment at 895 Park Avenue, corner of Park and 79th Street, in support of the Black Panthers. Now, there was a match made on Donkey Island for you … You were supposed to RSVP to a certain telephone number. So I called it, using David Halberstam’s telephone, and said, ‘This is Tom Wolfe, and I accept’ …

Today, such Cold War behind Communist lines reconnoiters still occur, but for both better and worse, in the age of YouTube and Twitter, they’re much more likely to involve hidden camera video rather than something approximating Wolfe’s killer prose. (And anybody who tried to imitate Wolfe’s highly caffeinated style in 2023 would instantly be seen as a cheap copy anyhow.) But when moments occur such as the tony law firm of WilmerHale coaching all three of the Ivy League presidents who thought they could make mincemeat of Rep. Stefanik