COFFEE: IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Best News of 2021: Coffee Is Incredibly Good for You. Maybe your New Year’s resolution should be an easy one: drink more coffee.

LONG READ FOR THE LAST DAY: Everything Is Clear From Up Here – The Good Citizen.

You will see from up here that there are no free markets, no stable currencies, no guarantee of food on the shelves where you shop tomorrow. You will come to realize that if the last two years can be planned, engineered, and carried out with no consequences and such utter disdain for humanity, there is nothing they won’t do to terrorize or kill innocent people for their ends. You will see there are no sciences uncorrupted, no academics who can’t be bought, no doctors who wouldn’t mechanically suffocate your grandmother after destroying her kidneys for a chance to increase their salary and keep their license. No corporate entity or government agency that wouldn’t lie, cheat, steal, gaslight to keep the truth from you, and you from the truth. You will see that liberty is not an assumption, it cannot be assumed anywhere on earth if not fought for constantly, while its gates can never be unguarded ever again. You will see that if you want any semblance of liberty again you will have to depend only on yourself, and trust none of those you once trusted who have not made it to the mountain top yet, who cannot yet see all that you see with perfect fearless clarity. In this profound realization, you will feel alone, but you must know that you are not.

Read the whole thing.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: AOC Responds to Miami Beach Photo Controversy: ‘Where’s DeSantis?’

DeSantis’s spokeswoman, Christina Pushaw, told Fox News the governor was accompanying his wife, Casey, to cancer treatment on Wednesday, when critics began accusing him of dodging his responsibilities. DeSantis announced in October that Casey had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Pushaw also tweeted out a picture of the governor’s public schedule in response to criticism from MSNBC host Joy Reid.

Marc Caputo of NBC tweets that “DeSantis plans to attend the Orange Bowl game tonight in Miami. He’s scheduled to have an on-field event.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teachers union press release raises today’s deep question: Is our educators schoolin’?

The point of the press release was to demand more protection for teachers against COVID-19 transmission as a condition of reopening schools in Virginia, the epicenter of the parents-rights movement. As the New York Post gleefully suggests, the letter raises the more basic question of whether parents ought to send their children to Arlington schools at all:

Despite the letter only consisting of five paragraphs, the Twitter teacher spotted roughly 20 blunders and highlighted them in green pen.

Addressed to Arlington Schools Superintendent Dr. Francisco Duran, the union letter highlights the recent spread of the coronavirus and argues for a delayed resumption of classes in January to address the issue.

The document also asserts that continuing with indoor lunch in the midst of the surge creates “super-spreader” events inside schools and that teachers are having to make the “ultimate sacrifice” as Omicron cases multiply.

The “ultimate sacrifice”? That’s not a grammar failure; it’s a rhetorical absurdity. Teachers have had all the opportunities to get vaccinated that everyone else has — and more, since they were prioritized while vaccines were still being rationed. Furthermore, Omicron has barely moved the needle on deaths, and it’s still not clear that we have any more than a handful of cases worldwide where Omicron caused a death. Or even one, as Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea point out (video NSFW), nor are teachers unions the only one indulging in rhetorical absurdities:

Related: CNN Brian Stelter Upset Gov. Ron DeSantis Says People Should “Assume” Corporate Media Lies.

FAREWELL TO 2021, 2020’S DULL HANGOVER:

Joe Biden, meanwhile, spent much of 2021 slipping on banana peels and trying to pass it off as rhythmic gymnastics. Spring brought gas lines and inflation and crime, the 1970s without the gnarly sideburns. Hot Vax Summer was canceled as the delta variant made itself comfortable. The troops finally left Afghanistan, yes, but not before the Taliban had occupied Kabul, driving home just how little progress we’d made in that country. Pressed for answers, Biden’s Democrats seemed unable to do anything except spend money, and even then their Build Back Better package ended up in the Senate’s legislative graveyard.

2021, then, really was like the 1970s, in that it felt like a collective hangover, like we were too ensnared in entropy and sclerosis to solve our own problems, or even grasp what the solutions should be. We couldn’t beat Covid with masks; we couldn’t whip inflation with government dollars (huh?); we couldn’t remake Afghanistan into a Madisonian democracy; we couldn’t even keep Kim and Kanye together for the love of God. Zoom in the lens and you saw more quarantines, more canceled plans, a collective sick-day sigh as we sprawled back on the couch and flipped on episode 724 of the 42nd season of Friends — again.

That isn’t to say 2021 was all bad, of course. We managed to annoy the French, which is always great fun. The judiciary held up well: our juries put away some bad guys and acquitted some not-so-bad ones, while the Supreme Court looks poised to strike down the most heinous legal precedent of the 20th century. And it’s worth emphasizing that the worst many of us had to endure this year was another socially distanced brunch. I don’t mean to downplay the very real grief of this pandemic, but the Black Death this is not, and we should be grateful for that.

Marking a bad year should always be a comparative exercise, and so it is that we turn to the historians, who say the worst year in human history was not 2020 but 536 AD. That was when the world literally went dark thanks to a mysterious fog that researchers now attribute to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. This caused temperatures to drop, which caused crops to die, which caused mass famines.

I blame the lack of federal emission standards on sixth century SUVs.

JON GABRIEL: Why New Year’s Eve might be the worst day we celebrate.

New Year’s Eve just isn’t a holiday for introverts. Gathering with loved ones around a turkey or a tree is great, but strangers spilling cheap beer on my jacket while screaming “isn’t this awesome?” doesn’t spark a celebratory mood.

Another reason I don’t care for New Year’s celebrations: They’re filled with drunk people who shout “Wooo!” I don’t like being in places where people shout “Wooo!” It’s like the partiers are trying to convince themselves (and everyone around them) that they they’re having fun, but even they don’t believe it.

This is the same reason I avoid Vegas. If you’re into gambling, drinking and … other activities, just do your thing. But if you shout “Wooo” at me, I’ll return the favor tomorrow as you nurse your hangover.

To be fair, I don’t object to people who are culturally Wooish and only observe the high holidays:

RIP, SUE ANN: Betty White, Dead at 99. “A source close to Betty tells TMZ … she didn’t have any sudden illness, nor was she battling any particular ailment. We’re told she’s believed to have died from natural causes. Beloved actress, comedian and American icon Betty White has died, just weeks before a milestone birthday … TMZ has learned. Law enforcement sources tell TMZ … Betty passed away at her home just before 9:30 AM Friday.”

IRONY CAN BE AWFULLY IRONIC SOMETIMES: MSNBC Worries GOP Is ‘Politicizing’ School Boards.

YET ANOTHER BIPARTISAN ENDORSEMENT OF RON DESANTIS! AOC pictured dining maskless in Miami Beach as Omicron cases soar.

The Team DeSantis Twitter account was quick to troll Ocasio-Cortez over her visit to the Sunshine State.

​​”​Welcome to Florida, AOC! We hope you’re enjoying a taste of freedom here in the Sunshine State thanks to @RonDeSantisFL’s leadership​,” read a post from late Thursday night.

“​P.S. We recommend the Rock Shrimp Roll and the Aoki Tai the next time you decide to dine in Miami. Cheers!​,” read a follow-up tweet.

In February, Ocasio-Cortez called on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to step down after he took his family on a trip to Cancun while Texas was in the throes of a deadly winter storm that knocked out power to millions.

Curiously, the many MSM-DNC sources who were quick to dunk on Cruz’s escape to Cancun during Texas’ “Snovid-2021” week remain silent on AOC’s departure from her home state.

GOSH, THAT WAS FAST: U.S. ends case against Jeffrey Epstein’s jail guards. “U.S. prosecutors decided to end their criminal case against two Manhattan jail guards who admitted to falsifying records on the night the financier Jeffrey Epstein killed himself on their watch…Epstein’s longtime associate, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted on Wednesday of helping recruit and groom underage girls for Epstein to abuse over at least a decade. Maxwell is expected to appeal her conviction.”

(Bumped, by Glenn, because this deserves to be noticed.)

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Ocasio-Cortez staffer calls Israel a ‘racist European ethnostate’ that was built on ‘stolen land.’

A staffer for “Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., referred to Israel as a “racist European ethnostate” on social media.

Hussain Altamimi joined Ocasio-Cortez’s office in November as a legislative assistant, posting shortly after a picture of him and the congresswoman on Instagram with the caption “New beginnings.”

Then, last week, Altamimi targeted Israel in an Instagram story calling the U.S.’s key Middle Eastern ally a “racist European ethnostate.”

“Israel is a racist European ethnostate built on stolen land from its indigenous population!” Altamimi wrote on Christmas Eve, according to a screenshot obtained by Fox News Digital.

Funny how this keeps happening to AOC: AOC chief of staff criticized for wearing shirt touting Nazi collaborator:

WELL, THAT’S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK: Why 2022 won’t be anything like the 2022 of Soylent Green. “So why isn’t 2022 for us going to be anything like the 2022 of Soylent Green? Well, the pessimists back then got a lot wrong.”

Finally, as always, the ingenuity that democratic capitalism allows and enables meant we learned to do more with less. When the price of resources rises, we search harder for more of that resource and for substitutes. Tomorrow is rarely like today thanks to invention and innovation. For example: The notion of Peak Oil became a punchline thanks to the Shale Revolution. Another example: the Julian Simon-Paul Ehrlich wager of 1980 over resource scarcity, won by the former when the prices of copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten all declined over the subsequent decade. And in the excellent More from Less, Andrew McAfee cites research finding a “dematerialization” of the American economy since the early 1970s with a decline in the absolute consumption of key commodities such as steel, copper, fertilizer, timber, and paper. “Total annual US consumption of all of these had been increasing rapidly in the years prior to Earth Day.” As McAfee explains:

We invented the computer, the Internet, and a suite of other digital technologies that let us dematerialize our consumption: over time they allowed us to consume more and more while taking less and less from the planet. This happened because digital technologies offered the cost savings that come from substituting bits for atoms, and the intense cost pressures of capitalism caused companies to accept this offer over and over. Think, for example, how many devices have been replaced by your smartphone.

Of course, we have more to do. Still too many poor people and hungry people. Still too many of us unable to more fully realize our human potential. But looking at why 2022 isn’t 2022 should give us some hints at how to better create a better future.

Read the whole thing.

WHOLE LOTTA GASLIGHTING GOING ON THIS WEEK:

● Wait a minute … now Mayor de Blasio claims he doesn’t ‘believe in shutdowns?’

● Chris Hayes: We shouldn’t reorient our lives around something that looks like the flu.

● CDC Director Drops Bombshell Calling COVID Testing Protocol Into Question.

And:

I’d like to think this is triage on a very bad wound — too many people will remember the past two years come November. (But as always, don’t get cocky.)

MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: South Africa lifts curfew as COVID wave peaks in fourth wave driven by Omicron.

MARYLAND DOCTOR SAYS PEOPLE ARE ‘GOING TO DIE’ AFTER BIDEN ADMIN USES FAULTY DATA TO SNUB ANTIBODY TREATMENTS:

A doctor in Maryland said he had to cancel potentially life-saving monoclonal antibody infusions for about 250 people over the last week after the federal government stopped distributing treatments made by Regeneron and Eli Lilly because they aren’t effective against omicron, even though the delta variant, which the drugs are effective at treating, was still dominant at the time.

The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response halted the allocation of those two antibody treatments last Thursday amid the rise of omicron, which the CDC had said days earlier was responsible for 73.2% of all new cases.

But the CDC backtracked on that alarming estimate this week, revising it down to just 22.5% for the week ending Dec. 18, more than a 50-point drop.

The delta variant, which Regeneron and Eli Lilly’s treatments are effective against, was actually responsible for 77% of all new cases when the federal government stopped distributing those antibody drugs.

Now, one doctor says the government’s massive miscalculation cost lives.

Read the whole thing.

ROGER SIMON: Do You Trust Your Doctor Anymore?

Do you trust your doctor anymore? Honestly?

I don’t mean Dr. Anthony Fauci. How can anybody trust him, with all the prevarications, constant shifts in policy and deceptions, not to mention hiding American taxpayer support for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Virology Lab and other aspects of the doctor’s dark past revealed in great detail in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book?

I’m talking about your own personal doctor, the man or woman who has been your friend and trusted counselor for years, maybe decades. How do you feel about that person? Has it changed?

What many are perceiving as a growing mistrust of physicians is one, among many, of the tragic fallouts of the pandemic.

How that happened is not that difficult to trace.

* * * * * * * *

I was not talking about all doctors, obviously. Many are brave, not just the well known signers of the Great Barrington Declaration and other eminent physicians interviewed here at The Epoch Times, quite a few local doctors as well, including some who practice something known as “functional medicine.”

But the great masses of doctors have melted under the pressure of the government, following the party line on the pandemic. If you mention hydroxychlorquine and ivermectin or some other therapeutic or even, in some cases, the apparent superiority of natural immunity, they either don’t hear you or respond condescendingly, then point to the necessity of the vaccine.

At that moment, they are thinking of themselves, of their families, their incomes, their medical licenses, their relationship to their hospital or clinic, medical systems entirely dependent on cooperation, financially and legally, with the ever-changing diktats of the CDC and FDA.

Related: The Suicide of Expertise.

SHE’S SUCH A TERRIBLE RETAIL POLITICIAN*: Vice President Kamala Harris Dodges Question If It Was Wrong To Consider Inflation Transitory (Video).

* Fortunately though, she’s taking lessons on how to improve her public perception — in accordance with the prophecy:

Earlier: How Biden’s Agenda Is Causing Inflation.

What Ford, Biden, Warren, and Yellen have in common is a failure to understand inflation’s most important underlying cause, which the Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman was explaining with unique clarity back in the 1970s. ‘To understand the cause of inflation, you must understand that it is anywhere and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,’ said Friedman. Supply-chain issues and rising demand are factors too, but the biggest contributors come from the government and the Federal Reserve.

We’ve seen absolutely massive increases in government spending over the past two years, which have been paid for by printing money and historic boosts in the money supply. When you print money it means that there are more dollars chasing basically the same amounts of goods and services, which causes prices to rise. In just the past three fiscal years, federal spending has swollen to nearly $7 trillion a year, up from about $4.4 trillion in fiscal year 2019. Spending was $6.6 trillion in 2020, and $6.8 trillion in 2021.

Not surprisingly though, Biden — even before his brain became tapioca — thought he knew economics better than Milton Friedman.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Deadspin Deletes Racist Tweet Referring To ESPN’s Sage Steele As ‘The Black Candace Owens.’

Sports outlet Deadspin, which advertises its own brand on Twitter as “sports news without fear, favor, or compromise,” was forced to delete a tweet Thursday that referred to ESPN’s Sage Steele as “the black Candace Owens.”

“IDIOT OF THE YEAR #6: Sage Steele, the Black Candace Owens,” the original tweet read.

The Daily Caller’s David Hookstead was among those who called out Deadspin for the racist comment, sharing a screenshot of the now-deleted tweet with the comment: “What the hell is this garbage, @Deadspin? She doesn’t agree with your views so you launch a racist attack against MULTIPLE black women? There’s something seriously wrong with these people, and it’s downright pathetic.”

* * * * * * * *

According to the Deadspin article, Steele qualified as one of their top IDIOTS OF THE YEAR for 2021 because she happened to notice that the city of Chicago had a violent crime problem.

As of the time of this post, the URL of Deadspin’s Steele post still references the original headline:

Does Deadspin owner Ted Cruz know what’s going on at his publication these days?

HOW’S THAT WELCOME WAGON PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Millions of Americans Are Getting ‘Fresh Starts’ in Red States.

END OF AN ERROR: De Blasio leaves City Hall with broken promises, dashed dreams.

WELCOME BACK, CARTER: How Biden’s Agenda Is Causing Inflation. New video from Reason TV:

Earlier: Understanding Inflation, the ‘Mugger.’

“The Labor Department reported Friday that consumer prices in November rose 6.8 percent in the last 12 months, the most since 1982.”

I was told that there would be no math, but “since 1982” means we are talking about 40 years.

“This,” the unnamed editorialist wrote, “should be all the warning Democratic doubters need to shelve President Biden’s Build Back Better Act that could fuel more inflation.”

They like to keep things understated at the Journal. 

Still, mention of “fuel” reminds me of the Biden administration’s war on energy.

About the first thing Biden did on coming to office was kill the Keystone pipeline.

That cost tens of thousands of jobs and overnight assured that America would go from being energy independent to begging OPEC to pump more oil.

It also assured that Americans would being paying a lot more to run their cars and heat (or cool) their houses.

And let’s not forget Suale Omarova, the Russian-born Communist-sympathizing academic whom Joe Biden nominated to be head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Among much else, Omarova was looking forward to bankrupting major swaths of the oil, coal, and gas industries in order to “tackle climate change.”

Reality crept in, just a little bit, to Omarova’s confirmation hearings, so she had to withdraw her nomination.

But the fact that Biden could even think of nominating someone like her—someone, that is to say, who is both ostentatiously anti-prosperity and anti-American—tells us all we need to know about his priorities.

No, when it comes to inflation, most people agree with Ronald Reagan, not Jen Psaki.

“Inflation,” Reagan said, “is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hitman.”

Exactly right.

Related: Joe Biden, Milton Friedman, and the Tyranny of Tiny Minds.

KURT SCHLICHTER: The Establishment Wants to Crush You Uppity Peasants.

Some guy named Jared Schmeck recently mocked the senile old pervert who is masquerading as our president by getting His Crustiness to affirm “Let’s go, Brandon!” This humiliation of the regime figurehead, piled upon the myriad other humiliations he has brought upon himself – failing to pass infrastructure, Afghanistan, putting the “can” in “Vatican” – is intolerable to the establishment. This uppitiness must be stopped.

And it’s even less tolerable because “Let’s Go, Brandon” is a manifestation of the class warfare that increasingly characterizes American society. It’s the cry of the working class, bold and joyous, utterly uncontrollable. It has energy and cheer, while the pathetic moaning of the ruling caste’s spokescreatures is rote, boring, and bereft of any power. The regime-approved memes our elite’s minions repeat on cable and in social media are the chant of serfs.

So, the garbage regime and it’s ridiculous legacy media minions must try to stifle this rebellion. They especially hate that this in no Astroturf meme passed around on some media server list after being decreed from on high. LGB is infinitely more dangerous. It’s an organic response that is not pushed or guided, but that evolved totally outside the approved channels. They hate it because it is not theirs, and because they cannot direct it or tame it. So they try to squelch it. But it will come back even stronger. And worse, we’ll be laughing at them as we repeat it.

In his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses, Fred Siegel wrote, “The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. ‘Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class.’”

The Anointed understand that it’s for their own good, of course.

CRIME AND (LACK OF) PUNISHMENT: Portland Antifa rioter charged with assaulting police has case dismissed after 30 hours community service.

CRISES BY DESIGN: Killing Keystone XL: How Biden Destroyed American Energy Independence.

On his first day in office, President Joe Biden revoked the Keystone XL pipeline permit via Executive Order 13990.

With the stroke of a pen, Biden canceled a project that would have boosted U.S. gross domestic product by more than $3 billion, carried 830,000 barrels of oil daily from Canada to the United States, and directly and indirectly provided up to 26,000 jobs—11,000 of which were instantly lost.

Climate czar John Kerry lent a sympathetic voice to the plight of the newly laid-off workers: “Go to work to make the solar panels.”

Then-President Donald Trump had greenlit the project in 2017, after years of delay from the Obama administration.

Though the Keystone XL pipeline project received a favorable environmental review from the U.S. State Department, and construction had already started (crossing the Canadian-U.S border), the Biden administration bowed to radical environmentalists and the “religion” of climate change, leaving hardworking Americans in the cold.

Oil is the lifeblood of our economy and critical to our energy security, but the personal toll may be the highest cost of all: livelihoods, hopes, and dreams dashed in an instant.

Philip, South Dakota, is one of the many towns that the Keystone XL pipeline construction passed through. With the construction came construction crews, and entrepreneurs who provided both the workers and the pipeline project the services they needed—from pipe storage to places to live, eat, and work out. All of it is now extinguished.

“When they came in with a stroke of the pen, everybody was upset. That’s an understatement,” says Jeff Birkeland, chief executive of West Central Electric, which would have served pump stations across the Keystone XL route.

Earlier: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden:  As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”

Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.

Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned

Seen in Cleburne, TX, Christmas Eve:

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Foresthill CA residents, travelers rely on community as storm issues persist. “The record-breaking storm is dumping snow in lower elevations and leaving many in the dark. PG&E crews are working to restore power in Foresthill. Meanwhile, residents are using machines and manpower to clear feet of snow. Dave Tachera said he couldn’t use a snow blower because all the snow that fell from his roof is too compact. His home that has been there since the 1880s is buried, and it’s not easy work changing that. At Foresthill Veterans Memorial Hall, a room became a charging station for electronics and a place to stay warm for residents.”

(Classical reference in headline.)