YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE: Massachusetts Gov. Cbarlie Baker: QR code vaccine passport coming soon.

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: De Blasio opening first legal shooting galleries for drug users in the US.

JOY BEHAR: It’s Time To ‘Tweak’ 1st And 2nd Amendments Because Founding Fathers Didn’t Have AR-15s And Twitter.

As Charles C. Cooke wrote in 2015, “here’s the million-dollar question: What the hell are they waiting for? Go on, chaps. Bloody well do it. Seriously, try it. Start the process.”

This will involve hard work, of course. You can’t just sit online and preen to those who already agree with you. No siree. Instead, you’ll have to go around the states — traveling and preaching until the soles of your shoes are thin as paper. You’ll have to lobby Congress, over and over and over again. You’ll have to make ads and shake hands and twist arms and cut deals and suffer all the slings and arrows that will be thrown in your direction. You’ll have to tell anybody who will listen to you that they need to support you; that if they disagree, they’re childish and beholden to the “gun lobby”; that they don’t care enough about children; that their reverence for the Founders is mistaken; that they have blood on their goddamn hands; that they want to own firearms only because their penises are small and they’re not “real men.” And remember, you can’t half-ass it this time. You’re not going out there to tell these people that you want “reform” or that “enough is enough.” You’re going there to solicit their support for removing one of the articles within the Bill of Rights. Make no mistake: It’ll be unpleasant strolling into Pittsburgh or Youngstown or Pueblo and telling blue-collar Democrat after blue-collar Democrat that he only has his guns because he’s not as well endowed as he’d like to be. It’ll be tough explaining to suburban families that their established conception of American liberty is wrong. You might even suffer at the polls because of it. But that’s what it’s going to take. So do it. Start now. Off you go.

Have at it, Joy.

THIS CAN’T POSSIBLY END BADLY: Witch Hunt Targets The Oil Companies.

President Biden has issued firm instructions to FTC Chair Lina Khan to investigate whether big oil should be held legally accountable for the recent runup in oil prices. The fact of some price increase seems beyond dispute. The average monthly Brent crude price dropped as low as $18.38 in April 2020, at the onset of the COVID crisis, but had risen to $83.54 in October 2020. But look just a little bit further and matters are not so simple, for by November 19, 2021, that price had dropped to $78.60. Indeed, this nineteen-month period witnessed wide fluctuations in price. Nonetheless, without referring to any price data, Biden broadly claimed that the “mounting evidence of anti-consumer behavior by oil and gas companies” should trigger an investigation into potential collusive behavior.

Given that “gasoline prices at the pump remain high, even though oil and gas companies’ costs are declining,” such alleged behavior, Biden assumes, has allowed big oil companies to double their profits since 2019, thereby allowing for stock buybacks and dividends in the coming year. “Hard-working Americans”—a tried and true appeal to populist instincts—should not be “paying more for gas because of anti-competitive or otherwise potentially illegal conduct,” he said, which is why he has urged the FTC to bring “tools to bear” to ferret out and punish any possible wrongdoing.

Meanwhile: Buttigieg says once families own electric cars, they will ‘never have to worry about gas prices again.’

CHRIS CUOMO SUSPENDED FROM CNN ‘Indefinitely:’

Chris Cuomo has been suspended indefinitely as a result of the fallout from the latest revelations from the New York attorney general’s investigation of his brother, disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Despite repeatedly claiming he was not helping his brother, text messages released by the New York attorney general’s office showed Cuomo was in regular contact with Melissa DeRosa, the governor’s top aide, assisting with his brother’s response to the allegations and exploiting his media connection to dig up dirt on Andrew’s accusers.

“The New York Attorney General’s office released transcripts and exhibits Monday that shed new light on Chris Cuomo’s involvement in his brother’s defense,” a CNN spokesperson said Tuesday evening. “The documents, which we were not privy to before their public release, raise serious questions.”

“Suspended indefinitely” is an interesting phrase, considering Jeffrey Toobin was eventually allowed to return to CNN.

DEVELOPING: CNN Suspends Chris Cuomo Indefinitely.

THE BEARS ARE WHO WE THOUGHT THEY WERE! Chris Cuomo Is Exactly What He Claimed He Wasn’t:

“I never attacked nor encouraged anyone to attack any woman who came forward. I never made calls to the press about my brother’s situation.” I guess Chris Cuomo thinks texting doesn’t count.

Wait… did I just say “Chris Cuomo thinks”? That’s obviously ridiculous. But just because he’s stupid, that doesn’t mean he can’t be mendacious. He did exactly what he claimed he didn’t do.

What will happen to Chris Cuomo for this clear breach of journalistic ethics? Presumably, the same thing that happened when he broke COVID quarantine and lied about it:

Nothing.

If CNN didn’t fire Jeffrey Toobin for whacking his pud on a work Zoom call, why would they fire a guy who actually makes money for them? Because they have journalistic standards? Because they take their ethical responsibilities seriously? Don’t make me laugh.

Cuomo lied because Cuomos lie. CNN knows and doesn’t care.

Of course, all of this should be moot, because Andrew Cuomo should be in jail already for his negligently disastrous handling of nursing homes during the pandemic. Not that these women accusing Cuomo of sexual harassment don’t deserve justice, but so do the people whose elderly loved ones died because of Cuomo’s incompetence and dishonesty.

With the eager assistance of his brother Fredo.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Maskless Joe Biden Caught Violating Mandates (Again).

“The president was seen inside Murray’s Toggery Shop on the island of Nantucket Saturday with his mask around his neck and not covering his mouth despite a visible sign outside the door instructing patrons to wear a mask,” Fox News reports. “According to the White House press pool, Biden walked out of the shop at 4:45 p.m. with his mask down and drinking what appeared to be a milkshake.” (The store’s sign doesn’t say “unless you’re drinking.” It says to wear a mask.)

In the still frame shown above, you can clearly see the president maskless while others inside are wearing masks—including a young child almost certainly at far less risk from COVID-19 than Biden.

This isn’t Biden’s first time flouting COVID-19 mask requirements. In October, the president and his wife violated Washington, DC’s mask mandate when visiting the posh Georgetown restaurant Fiola Mare. Video shows them walking through the restaurant maskless while staff clad in black masks surround them.

The Bidens are, unfortunately, no outliers. Literally dozens of politicians have been caught violating their own pandemic policies and mask mandates. So, too, media figures that have advocated mask mandates don’t always practice what they preach, as recently exposed by FEE’s Jack Elbaum.

In 2020, as mass urban riots were cheered on by hospital employees who only a month prior urged us all to lockdown and “social distance,” it was obvious that COVID was smart enough to avoid Democrats, so such a maskless Joe Biden was fine. Then came the superspreader event a few months ago that was Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard birthday party. Given Kamala’s poll numbers, I hope (P)resident Biden’s handlers are looking out for him.

ENDORSED — NUKE THE ENTIRE SITE FROM ORBIT; IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO BE SURE: With Kamala Harris looking unelectable, the Democrats are considering the nuclear option.

BIDEN STANDS UP FOR CHINA: Top Biden Staffer Led ‘All Expenses Paid’ China Trip Sponsored By Communist Influence Group.

Laurence Wilson – a senior aide to President Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra – accepted a trip to China sponsored by a leading Chinese Communist Party-linked propaganda group flagged by for its efforts to coerce American leaders to “take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing,” The National Pulse can reveal.

Wilson – who currently serves as the Scheduling & Advance Representative to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary – previously worked as the National Advance Lead on Biden’s presidential campaign.

Posts unearthed from Wilson’s social media accounts reveal the Biden official participated in a 2015 delegation to China sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) as an advisor to a cohort of college students.

CUSEF was founded by the Vice-Chairman of the “highest-ranking entity overseeing” China’s United Front, which the U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission notes the country weaponizes “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign governments to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing.”

Related: Joe Biden’s son helped China get control over vast cobalt mine in Africa: Report.

Earlier:

● Biden Infrastructure Czar Advises Pro-China Group. Mitch Landrieu will oversee $1.2 trillion in infrastructure spending.

● Hunter Biden emails boast ties to White House and China.

Classical reference in headline:

WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM? Twitter’s New CEO Parag Agrawal Has Disturbing Anti-American, Anti-White Tweet History.

More at the link. As Roger Simon wrote earlier this year when Jack Dorsey was still Twitter’s CEO: Quit Complaining about Twitter and Quit Already.

TITANIA MCGRATH: Orwell: my self-help guru.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.”

I read these powerful words just the other day in a motivational self help book by George Orwell. It contains some incredible recommendations about how we ought to run the world.

One of Orwell’s best ideas is a thing called the “Memory Hole” into which we may consign all the horrific elements of our society and wipe them from history. These could include: the Daily Mail, all the Harry Potter novels, non vegan meals, the Conservative party, Sunderland and Toby Young.

It’s satire – or is it? Will Twitter Censor Images of Riots? “Will Twitter apply this policy even-handedly, or is its real purpose to get rid of Andy Ago? This language is not reassuring[.]”

REMEMBER HIM? ‘Joosie Smoolyay’s’ Delayed Trial for 2019 Race Hoax Is Underway. “Kamala Harris — you know, the former Senator and current VP — called the hoax nothing less than an ‘attempted modern day lynching’ and demanded that the rest of us, who had nothing to do with his race hoax, ‘must confront this hate.’”

Exit question:

NEWS YOU CAN USE? How To Talk Like An EU Baizuocrat:

The pod people who come up with this garbage must be repudiated at every opportunity. They are trying to change the meaning of … well, of reality, by the use of language. The thing is, they really can do a hell of a lot of damage by requiring people to do this, and making mastering the jargon the sine qua non of working for the EU bureaucracy (and eventually for woke capitalist entities). If I were European, I would vote populist, simply to vote for common sense and basic reality. If I had to work for the EC, I would have to keep my code-switching skills up so that I didn’t lose touch with humanity.

* * * * * * * *

Soon enough, there won’t be any Europeans left who remember the old way of speaking and writing, only the falsified one that destroys the concepts of family, church, and nation.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? Chinese Titan Lavished Hunter Biden With $80,000 Diamond and $30 Million To Spread Chinese Influence.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS REACHED A POINT WHERE EVEN THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS HAS STARTED TO NOTICE: Do Democratic Socialists have a Jewish problem?

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH ROLLING STONE IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Chris Cuomo Caught Doing Something That Would Get Any Other Journalist Fired. Documents released Monday reveal the CNN host was using his media sources to get intel on his brother Andrew’s accusers, and then funneling information to the then-governor’s top aide.

SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: Salvation Army withdraws guide that asks white supporters to apologize for their race.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot: Artists must confront the climate crisis – we must write as if these are the last days.

—Headline, the Grauniad, November 12^th.

● Chaser: President ‘has four years to save Earth.’

—Headline, the Grauniad, January 17^th, 2009.

OLD AND BUSTED: New York magazine columnist Tom Wolfe stumbles over radical chic elite New York party, brings back all the salacious details for sane readers to mock.

The New Hotness? New York magazine stumbles over radical chic congresswoman; editors putting together a book of essays on AOC’s beauty, rare authenticity, and social media greatest hits.

CFOS RETHINKING COST SAVINGS OF JUST-IN-TIME SUPPLY CHAINS:

CFOs are reexamining just-in-time production after the pandemic left many businesses unable to meet customer demand because of supply shortages.

Until some form of equilibrium is once again reached, CFOs should rethink how just-in-time is used, says Debbie Fogel-Monnissen, CFO of the Institute for Supply Management. The pandemic made clear the total cost of the supply chain, which includes safety stock to increase resiliency, is more important than just short-term gains for maximum elimination of inventory.

Companies that don’t have a resilient supply chain, she says, even as the economy recovers, might miss growth opportunities or even suffer permanent damage to brand loyalty if consumers can’t get what they want, when they want it.

“The pandemic caused rapid changes in demand and supply — a shock to the global supply chain ecosystem that threw the prior equilibrium out of balance, Fogel-Monnissen says. “Just-in-time by its nature requires some predictability and the pandemic interrupted that cycle.”

Related: The Origins of Just-In-Time.

Just-in-Time (JIT) is only one element of lean manufacturing, which is a broader philosophy that seeks to eliminate all kinds of waste in a process.  Although JIT is often considered an enterprise-wide philosophy of continuous improvement, I’d like to focus on the mechanistic aspects of JIT – that is, the development and operations of a production system that employs continuous flow and preventive maintenance. In an effectively implemented JIT production system, there is little or no inventory – which includes Work-In-Process (WIP) – and production is tightly coupled to demand.

The origin of JIT can be traced back to Henry Ford’s production line, in which he was keenly aware of the burdens of inventory. However, Ford’s production system generated large volumes of identical products created in large batches – there was no room for variety, and the system was not coupled to demand levels.

In post-war Japan, Taiichi Ohno (“Father of JIT”) adapted the system at Toyota to handle smaller batch sizes and more variety in the parts that could be used to construct assemblies. In 1952, work on their JIT system was initiated, with full deployment of the kanban pull system by 1962. This was the genesis of the Toyota Production System, an elegant (and sometimes elusive) socio-technical system for production and operations. This approach bridged the gaps between production and continuous improvement and became the basis for lean manufacturing as it is known today.

Exit quote from the second post, which was written in 2010: “JIT is very sensitive to the external environment in which it is implemented. For a review of Polito & Watson’s excellent 2006 article that describes the key barriers to smooth JIT, read Shocks to the System: Financial Meltdown and a Fragile Supply Chain.”

(H/T: Ed Morrissey.)

PANIC IS A LIFESTYLE BRAND:

“There’s no reason to panic,” NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told CNN on Sunday morning, “but it’s a great reason to get boosted.” President Joe Biden did his best to relieve the stress that overtook opinion-makers on Monday.  “We’re going to fight and beat this new variant today,” he said. But “not with shutdowns or lockdowns.” Biden stressed that “this variant is a cause for concern, not a cause for panic.”

But there was a panic. And if you have investments in the market or need crucial elective surgeries in the state of New York, it was a damaging one. Why was panic the default response of so much of the news-consuming world over the weekend? And why have sobriety and circumspection now returned to both media and markets? In part because panic has become a lifestyle choice among an influential few.

The revivification of COVID as an acute emergency led some particularly active communicators to retreat into the comfort of existential dread. Of this, one instructive Twitter thread produced by Boston University School of Public Health Associate Professor Dr. Ellie Murray was indicative. Yes, she wrote, we must continue to promote vaccines, disseminate rapid tests, and approve promising therapeutics. But we must also restore masking mandates, prepare for business closures, provide paid pandemic furloughs, legislate a constitutionally viable moratorium on evictions, force airlines to absorb the cost associated with socially distanced flights, take all winter social gatherings outside, and develop “clear triggers to switch to hybrid or remote” learning in schools.

That is a lot of confidence to assign to these mitigation measures when there is almost no confidence in the newly identified threat they are supposedly designed to mitigate against. There may yet come a time to panic over the emergence of this or future COVID mutations, but that time is not now. This sort of display is explicable only as a psychological orientation, not a considered response to a two-year-old public health crisis. Those who exhibit this peculiar orientation have outsized influence over the national discourse. As the weekend’s anxiety suggests, it isn’t helping.

Our leftist elites, whose worldview is shaped by “the moral equivalent of war,” are desperate to keep the lockdown gloom of 2020 going as long as possible. On the other hand, even (P)resident Biden knows that a new lockdown would be the effective end of bumbling administration: New variant cause for concern, not panic, Biden tells US.

WEST SIDE CHANUKAH STORY (Video):

No word yet on whether this vicious street gang is representative of the Sharks or the Jets.

PRIORITIES: Israel Bans All Foreigners Except Beautiful Women Due to Omicron Variant.

Despite Israel being one of the first countries to close its borders due to concerns around the new Omicron COVID variant, it is still planning to host a cavalcade of beautiful women at the Miss Universe pageant at the Red Sea resort city of Eilat in December.

Tourism Minister Yoel Razvozov made the announcement on Sunday, a day after Israel said it was banning all foreigners from entering the country.

The minister told reporters that participants at the Miss Universe beauty pageant would be given waivers while possibly undergoing PCR testing every two days, as well as other precautionary measures.

“This is an event that will be broadcast in 174 countries, a very important event, an event that Eilat, too, is very much in need of,” Razvozov said before Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting. “We will know how to manage this event. So, by using the waivers committee, we will have events like this, to which the country already committed itself and cannot cancel.”

Newsweek has contacted the ministry for comment.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett gave a televised address during the cabinet meeting, in which he said Israel needs “to clamp down” on its borders to keep the country “open internally.”

Israel plans to host the competition for the first time on December 12.

It’s crucial to keep calm and stay focused during trying times.

WHOA: The Taliban had secretly infiltrated “every organization and department” inside Afghanistan’s government and universities years before Kabul.

Curiously, Marcel Duchamp was not enough to shift them towards a Western worldview…