NO WONDER THEY WERE SO CRANKY: Joint Diseases Plagued the Ice Age’s Fierce Predators: Sabertooth Cats and Dire Wolves.

Also that cold weather probably aggravated their rheumatism.

PROBABLY SHOULDN’T HAVE STARTED THAT WAR: Gaza, smashed by Israeli strikes, sees new threat: Disease. After the FA, the FO.

I’M GONNA SAY THAT MAYBE HYPOCHONDRIACS ARE ACTUALLY LESS HEALTHY: Hypochondriacs die earlier than those who worry less about their health—what might explain this paradox?

EXCEPT FOR ONE SMALL THING: Hunter Biden is Exactly The Kind of Gun Criminal Joe Biden Has Said He Wants to Find and Prosecute.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Bloomberg: No One Wants Used EVs, Making New Ones a Tougher Sell Too.

CHANGE: Choosing Higher-Fat Dairy May Help Lower Your Prediabetes Risk, Study Finds.

HMM: Colon cancer is rising in young Americans. It’s not clear why. I wonder if there’s a viral component.

AT AMAZON, shop Today’s Deals.

CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT: Harvard withholds racial demographics of Class of 2028 early admits: Legal experts said the decision likely was ‘politically motivated.’

Harvard’s racist admissions behavior calls for continuing judicial supervision to assure that there’s no illegal racial discrimination.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Catholic university offering ‘safe haven’ for Jewish students amid rise in anti-Semitism.

PROF. JACOBSON: VIDEO – Campus Antisemitism Crisis: Cornell, The Ivies, and Beyond. “The way I would term it is we’re not here to talk about October 7th. We’re really here to talk about October 8th and 9th and 10th, and the reactions on campuses that I think shocked a lot of people.”

ICYMI: Civilizational Jenga: Bit by bit, our ruling class is eliminating our societal safety margins.

NIMBYISM AND DEINDUSTRIALIZATION: Why the U.S. steel industry is dying: It’s not because of foreign competition. “So why did this happen? Why did the U.S. go from a steelmaking powerhouse to an also-ran? As usual, there are a bunch of competing explanations — import competition, bad management choices by steel companies, and unions raising wages to uncompetitive levels. But while these were factors, the biggest reason the U.S. steel industry went into terminal decline was that we stopped building things that used lots of steel.”

Deindustrialization began, in general, right after the Nixon “regulatory explosion” that gave us the EPA and OSHA, among many other federal impediments.

DON SURBER: Merry Christmas, Matt Drudge: Did you flip because you were bored, you sold the site, or you feared the FBI?

THOUGHTS ON THE RECRUITING CRISIS: Ideology, not lack of funds, is behind our military’s recruiting crisis.

America’s military is in crisis, and it’s not one caused by the threat of a foreign adversary. Rather, the crisis we refer to is completely self-made and cannot be fixed by force. It is the fact that fewer and fewer young Americans are willing to sign up and join.

One presidential candidate recently raised the issue of re-expanding the Navy’s fleet of ships. And yes, rebuilding our navy is critical. But ships do not man themselves. What happens when we no longer have enough men and women willing to operate those ships? Nor is this problem exclusive to the Navy. What happens when we no longer have the manpower to operate artillery, drive tanks or fly and maintain fighter jets? . . .

It should really come as no surprise that our current military is having trouble bringing in new recruits. The lingering impacts of politicized vaccine mandates, as well as story after story about troops being brainwashed with divisive ideologies like woke gender theory and critical race theory, are damaging morale and discouraging potential volunteers. President Biden’s Pentagon brass seem more interested now about making sure that our military personnel are socially indoctrinated than that they are lethal.

This obsession with radical politics is diverting our military from its primary purpose, its core mission: to confront and defeat America’s enemies and defend our homeland, our interests and our way of life.

The military is trying to correct the problem by throwing more money at it in the form of bonuses. But all the money in the world is not worth doing a job you do not want to do. Putting your life on the line is not something most people just do for a paycheck. Those who treat it as such never stay long and they never go far. The question at hand is how we make the job something that people want to do again.

Young people join the military and take the oath of enlistment because they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. The problem now is that the “something bigger” has become something entirely different than it used to be and something entirely foreign to most average Americans.

Plus: “This isn’t just a problem for the military. We have to look at what young Americans are learning before they ever walk into a recruiting station or see an ad. America’s public school system is rife with openly anti-American curricula that turn people away from the thought of military service. How can we expect people to want to fight for a country they are told is not worth fighting for?”

Maybe entrusting our most important institutions to people who hate western civilization was a mistake.

Related: The US Army discovers woke doesn’t win wars — but is it too late?

Plus: Disinformation starts at the top — with America’s elites.

OPEN THREAD: Let the Christmas weekend begin!

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Intuitive Machines delays first lunar lander launch to February.

FROM THE EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM DEPARTMENT: Scientists Reveal What a Nuclear Explosion Would Do to an Asteroid.

WELL, YES:

That Dr. Gay is Black gives this an especially bad look. If she stays in her job, the optics will be that a middling publication record and chronically lackadaisical attention to crediting sources is somehow OK for a university president if she is Black…. Are we to let pass a tacit idea that for Black scholars and administrators, the symbolism of our Blackness, our ‘diverseness,’ is what matters most about us? I am unclear where the Black pride (or antiracism) is in this. . . .

It’s wherever the Narrative needs it to be at the moment.

IT’S GREAT TO BE DIVERSE: Revealed: Harvard cleared Claudine Gay of plagiarism BEFORE investigating her — and its lawyers falsely claimed her work was ‘properly cited’.

The Post’s disclosure of how Harvard cleared Gay without investigating her, then aggressively tried to cover up the probe, thrusts the actions of the head of its governing body, billionaire Hyatt heiress Penny Pritzker into the spotlight.

How Pritzker — the Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation who was a commerce secretary under Pres. Obama — handled the crisis will now come under scrutiny. A member of her household staff told The Post Thursday that Pritzker was not available to comment. Harvard declined to confirm Friday that she knew the contents of the legal letter before it was sent.

Pritzker is coming into focus, just as the plagiarism storm finally gains attention from left-leaning media including CNN and the New York Times — whose opinion writer John McWhorter demanded Thursday that Harvard fire Gay over “the sheer amount of plagiarism.” If it won’t, she must resign, he wrote.

It’s not over.

PROF. STEVEN CALABRESI: The Supreme Court Denies Cert. in United States v. Trump: We won. “I won my campaign to get the Supreme Court to deny Special Counsel Jack Smith’s petition for certiorari before judgement. I had argued in an amicus brief that Jack Smith lacked standing to represent the United States because his appointment as Special Counsel was unconstitutional. I therefore urged the Court to deny his petition, which it did.”

HMM: The Chrononutrition Effect: The Easy Way To Reduce Cardiovascular Risk. “Research indicates that eating earlier in the day and extending night-time fasting can lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases, based on a study of over 100,000 individuals.”

TAXES: Shohei Ohtani’s Contract Could Save Him $100 Million In Taxes — And Start A Silicon Valley Tax Planning Trend.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: How to Stop Your Clingy Pup from Killing Your Sex Life.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Is it soup yet?