IT’S COMPLICATED:

JUST IN🚨

Iraqi parliament voted to allow the Prime Minister to order deployment of the Iraqi military into Syria. Tens of thousands of Iraqi Army troops currently stationed on the Iraq-Syria border will enter the Deir Ez-Zor region of Syria tomorrow morning. This is going to be…

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) December 5, 2024

From the replies: “Imagine being an Iraqi soldier and being ordered to go die for the regime of the man who used to smuggle Al-Qaeda fighters into your country.”

As I said, it’s complicated.

WELL, IT’S PROMISING:  Trump picks billionaire and private astronaut Jared Isaacman to run NASA.

UH:  Okay…

AS IF ANYONE PAYS ATTENTION TO THE MSM ANY MORE:  MSM silence as health coalition urges governments: Stop the jabs now.

IT’S NOT WHAT THEY DON’T KNOW, IT’S WHAT THEY KNOW THAT JUST AIN’T SO:  Staggering ignorance that scuppered sterling and the stock exchange.

THE NY SLIMES ONLY VIOLATES SOME PRIVATE EMAIL:  Pete Hegseth’s Mother Sets the Record Straight After ‘Despicable’ NYT Published Private Email.

Penelope Hegseth said she wrote the email out of haste due to her anger in the heat of the moment. She pointed out that she apologized to her son hours later in a second email—which, of course, had not been leaked.

Penelope exposed the scare tactics the NYT used, threatening her with consequences if she didn’t make a statement.

“They call you and threaten you. They say, ‘Unless you make a statement, we will publish it as is,’” she continued. “I think that’s a despicable way to treat anyone.”

‘NO SWEAT PETE – I’VE ANNOUNCED A PLAN B THAT WILL SCARE THEM EVEN WORSE’:  Trump Called Pete Hegseth. Here’s What He Told Him.

I UNDERSTAND THIS. AND THOSE POOR COWS:  Calls to Boycott Dairy Products From Cows Given Anti-Methane Supplement Grow in UK.

I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM WITH CALIFORNIA IS, BUT FIXING IT STARTS WITH FAIR ELECTIONS. WHICH THEY DON’T HAVE:  Gov. Gavin Newsom Wants $25 Million from CA Taxpayers to Engage in Lawfare against Trump.

SHE HAS A POINT:  “No Child Should Have to Think About …”

DONALD TRUMP MUST REMEMBER THIS:  Mark Zuckerberg was confirmed to be with President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. But let’s never forget who he is…

RESPONSES FROM ACTUAL CO-WORKERS ON RECORD:  “100% Bulls**t”: Hegseth Hit Piece Debunked By Over A Dozen Current And Former Fox Employees.

ANYONE WANT TO SEND THIS TO ELON TO PASS IT TO TRUMP?   Trump campaigned on getting the economy going again. To do that, he can eliminate outdated transportation regulations, like the Jones Act, that keep the cost of shipping goods high.

CAPTAIN ALFRED DREYFUS IS NOT SURPRISED BY THIS BEHAVIOR FROM THE FRENCH:  French President Emmanuel Macron says he will hold a conference with Saudi Arabia on the creation of a Palestinian state.

GOVERNMENT MANIPULATING INDUSTRY AND BUSINESS HAS A NAME: FASCISM:  “Ressentiment”.

PEER REVIEWS SCIENCE SAYS THE BIOTECH VACCINES HAVE LOTS OF DNA IN THEM AND IT CAN REPLICATE:  The most comprehensive study on Vax DNA sails through peer review.

SOMETIMES I GET A BIT ANGRY:  The Despicable Lords of Utopia.

OPEN THREAD: Please don’t stop the music.

RIP: Marshall Brickman, Annie Hall and Manhattan co-writer who helped reinvent Woody Allen.

Born of multiple rewrites and a free-ranging shoot, Annie Hall assumed haphazard shape in the edit suite, as Brickman later recalled: “When I saw the rough cut, I thought it terrible, completely unsalvageable. It rambled and was tangential and just… endless.”

Yet the more incisive 93-minute release version expanded comedy’s horizons, principally by allowing for the prospect of romantic failure and disillusionment. Critics were wowed; cinemagoers stirred to the extent that it remained Allen’s biggest hit for the next 34 years. With the director-star a no-show at the 1978 Oscars, Brickman duly collected a screenplay gong, one of four wins on the night, including Best Picture.

Manhattan drew from a comparable well of personal experience, its protagonist a gagman who has quit television to try and pen the great American novel. Even in 1979, the relationship between the 42-year-old hero and a 17-year-old schoolgirl raised eyebrows – Pauline Kael wondered: “What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?” – but the movie’s lustrous look seduced critics, audiences and awards voters alike.

As John Podhoretz wrote in the Weekly Standard in his 2006 review of Allen’s Match Point, “‘The heart wants what it wants,’ Allen notoriously said after his girlfriend Mia Farrow found nude pictures of her 17-year-old daughter–the same girl who was a sister to the two children he had with Farrow–in his dresser drawer in 1992. Nobody, not even Farrow, had any right to be surprised by Allen’s shrugging dismissal of the moral opprobrium that greeted his conduct. He had already made it clear through his art that he did not believe that there were any consequences for engaging in immoral behavior.”

VDH: Yes, Mexico Knows Exactly What It Is Doing.

In La Raza literature of the past, and in Mexico’s chauvinistic moments, illegal immigration was envisioned as the ironic response to the ancient “theft’ of the American Southwest. The problem with that thesis is that most Mexicans, as polls have shown, would prefer to live in an American Southwest than a Mexican south.

And it is also increasingly likely that Mexican-Americans will be more prone to vote for border security than open borders—again further proof that their self-interest as patriotic Americans trumps Mexico’s cynical attempts to use them as political pawns. If those trends continue, the American Left and the Mexican government may well lobby for a secure border, in fear they are only augmenting a growing MAGA constituency.

In sum, Mexico understands the myriad ways that an open border, the destruction of U.S. immigration law, illegal immigration, and emigration of millions of its own citizens to America are entirely in its own interests and so hopes to see the continuation of the Biden-Harris-Mayorkas appeasement.

But, given the huge numbers of human trafficking, the chaos, the drugs, the violence, and the financial costs of supporting millions, an open border is increasingly seen by Americans as not to their advantage—as we saw in the recent Trump victory. That reality, not the rhetoric of Mexican presidents, will govern all future negotiations—a truth that President Sheinbaum should digest before she sounds off about a border that she knows her country has done so much to deliberately destroy—and to America’s detriment.

It’s VDH, so read the whole thing.

COMING: Trump’s unfinished business: An independent Space Force.

ENEMIES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC.

Super weird how our enemies keep trying to take out the people who are also hated by our intelligence community https://t.co/9Sm5iZOSFa

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) December 4, 2024

YES.

Daniel Penny not only deserves to walk free but should be praised by NYC leaders.

You want to encourage bravery like that.

Instead, they punish him and send a clear message to others not to step in when a maniac threatens to k*ll innocent people.

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 4, 2024

ON THIS DAY: Led Zeppelin made the decision to break up following the death of drummer John Bonham.

[44] years ago today — on Dec. 4, 1980 — Led Zeppelin made the difficult decision to break up, two months after the death of drummer John Bonham.

The band was supposed to begin an extensive tour in the fall of 1980 when Bonham passed away.  The tour was canceled and rumors swirled about whether the band would continue on with a new drummer.

However, the surviving members ultimately decided that it was not right to continue with someone else playing drums.

“We wish it to be known, that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family, together with the deep sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were.”

Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones have occasionally worked and recorded together, but reunions of all three have been few and far between.

Related: The Hammer of the Gods: The First Critical Biography of Led Zeppelin Finally Available on the Kindle.

My latest, on Stephen Davis’ somewhat infamous 1985 look at Zeppelin’s now infamous very much non-#metoo-approved debauchery, over at Ed Driscoll.com.

BYRON YORK: The damage Biden has done.

Joe Biden will be president for the next 47 days. That’s enough to make anyone nervous. The 82-year-old president had to be forced, by his own party, to withdraw from the 2024 race because he is no longer mentally and physically up to the job. But, of course, he is still in the job. With a world full of dangerous conflicts, that Biden is in charge for 47 more days, especially with Vice President Kamala Harris in a deep post-defeat funk, is deeply worrisome.

The immediate problem will end on Jan. 20, 2025, when Biden leaves office. But the United States, and the Democratic Party, will be dealing with the damage Biden leaves behind for years. There is a reason voters, for 40 years, were never interested in electing the openly ambitious Biden president of the U.S. — until the bizarre circumstances of the 2020 election. They knew for decades that he would not be a good president. And he has proven them right.

Leave the damage Biden has done to the U.S. — the massive migrant influx, the decline in the standard of living for millions of people, and the chaos abroad — for another day. Right now, a new analysis shows the damage Biden has done to his party, and it is immense.

Exit polls show that in the 2024 presidential election, 35% of voters identified as Republicans, while 34% identified as independents, and 31% identified as Democrats. In addition to a big jump in the number of self-identified independents, the news is that in 2024, Democrats slipped to third place in party ID.

“For the first time since the Watergate era, independents surpassed one of the major political parties to rank second in terms of party identification,” writes Republican pollster David Winston, who has just finished an in-depth study of the election results. “In this presidential election, the percentage of the electorate that self-identified as Democrats came in behind independents. … This means that, in this election, Democrats are de facto more a third party than a dominant party in the electorate.”

Flashback: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.