AT AMAZON, shop Holiday Deals.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: “My fifth-grade science project was to type everyone’s blood in my class. My oldest son’s fifth-grade science project, four decades later, was the equivalent of number-painting a comic book.”

LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Massachusetts Hate Crimes Task Force Member Accuses Israel of Genocide, Says Jews Control The Media.

THEN THEY SAID “NO, IT’S THE CHILDREN WHO ARE WRONG.”

Protesters Shouting Down Children Singing Christmas Carols Briefly Wonder If They're The Bad Guys https://t.co/aWylO64hpd pic.twitter.com/XcE8JSdWiV

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 30, 2023

THE NEW SPACE RACE: With another record broken, the world’s spaceports are busier than ever: No turning back? We can expect even more launches worldwide next year.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Five Great .38 Special Revolvers.

I WILL FEAR NO EVIL: Transferring and Rejuvenating Brains As a Path to a Problematic Form of Physical Immortality.

AN ENGINEERING TRIUMPH: The Mars helicopter Ingenuity is an amazing success. NASA’s already testing tech for the next generation (video).

LIFESTYLE PLAYS A ROLE, BUT LONGEVITY IS MOSTLY ABOUT HEREDITY: Charlie Munger ate peanut brittle, drank Diet Coke, and refused to exercise — and still lived to 99. Did that make him a SuperAger?

HMM: Actively monitoring cervical lesions linked to heightened long-term risk of cervical cancer. Is it really surprising that substituting “monitoring” for actual treatment produces a worse result?

STEALTH DISCRIMINATION: Top Law Firm Collects Photographs of Potential Applicants, Raising Discrimination Concerns.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Medical schools now sell credentials, not knowledge, scholars argue. That’s how most schools are going these days.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Over 100 Yale students, faculty pledge to risk arrest to defend students accused of anti-Semitism.

I am amused to see their sudden opposition to “doxxing” and support for free speech. But that’s not how the New Rules they made work.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Washington Post Says “Involuntary Layoffs” Could Be Next.

One hundred and twenty Washington Post employees have accepted the buyouts the publication announced last month, interim CEO Patty Stonesifer told staffers in a memo Tuesday morning. Stonesifer contended that the Post needs 240 people to accept the “voluntary separation package” to “help restore The Post’s financial health.”

In a followup e-mail to staff, Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee told staff that only 36 newsroom employees had accepted offers, about “30 percent of our goal across the News department of 119 acceptances of the voluntary buyout package.”

Sad. You’d think a bunch of leftists would be more willing to make sacrifices for the greater good.

CHANGE: As crime surges, ‘Defund’ morphs to ‘Defend’ the police.

IT’S THE 21ST CENTURY. ACT LIKE IT. Europe’s Entitlement Bird Looking for a Place to Roost.

A problem I had with most of the “foreign policy folks across the pond” that I worked with was their incredibly blinkered view of the USA, and specifically U.S. domestic politics.

Directly or indirectly their view of the USA comes from the Washington Post or the New York Times. If they have been to the USA, it is usually somewhere on the Acela Corridor or California. They have no idea not just how large the USA is, but how broad our domestic pollical scene is – and what is hard enough for Americans to understand is an undecipherable language to them.

That wouldn’t be a problem if they were self-aware of their lack of understanding, but it is just the opposite. There is a kind of aggressive weaponized ignorance that reminds me of the Norwegian Army Major who was very insistent that he understood race relations in the American South because, “I know your country. I spent a year at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.”

You can see that blinkered view on great display on the domestic U.S. coverage of political issues in The Economist. It isn’t malignant, just ignorant.

Oh, sometimes it’s malignant. Plus: “Just when Europe needs Germany to step up, she lacks not just the leadership to do so, but may not have the industry to do it even if she wanted to.”

It’s as if the leadership of the West, collectively, wants to make the West poor and weak.

Related: Europe is Whistling Past the Graveyard on Defense. “The European Union is, to put it bluntly, a bunch of states in a trenchcoat pretending to be a foreign policy superpower.”

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND THE LEFT CONTINUES: UC Berkeley Sued, Harvard Under Investigation and Sen. Schumer Pins Rampant Anti-Semitism on the Left.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: ‘We’re taking it out of hide’: Pentagon says it has no money for Middle East buildup.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Dean of Columbia Law School Resigns Amid Anti-Semitism Scandals: Gillian Lester’s likely replacement is David Schizer, a former dean who helped deepen Columbia’s ties with Israel.

The law school has been battling accusations of anti-Semitism ever since Hamas’s Oct. 7 rampage through southern Israel, which Lester initially described as the “violence that erupted in Israel and Gaza.” Her statement, which did not mention Hamas or anti-Semitism, touched off weeks of damage control at the elite law school, where pro-Palestinian students recently occupied a campus building and disrupted class in violation of school policy. Columbia declined to break up the protest or say whether the students would be punished.

Though the law school has not announced Lester’s replacement, an alum with ties to the administration said that David Schizer, who served as dean from 2004 to 2014, is the leading candidate. A scholar of tax and energy law, Schizer was tapped this month to help lead Columbia University’s task force on anti-Semitism. As dean, he also helped deepen ties between the law school and the Jewish state, opening a Center for Israeli Legal Studies in 2006 that brings prominent Israeli scholars to campus.

Nice to see some pushback against the hate that has infested that institution.

ABOUT TIME: Europe in Open Revolt: Geert Wilders’ landslide victory in the Netherlands has shocked the chattering class. It shouldn’t have. Plus: How to save France.

That the anti-immigration populist now leads the largest party in the Dutch parliament is indeed a stunning outcome given his status as an outcast from the mainstream of Dutch politics.

But zoom out and his victory is entirely in keeping with a continent-wide trend. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni has been in office for a year. In Germany, the right-wing AfD party is rising in the polls. In France, Marine Le Pen is more popular than Emmanuel Macron.

In 2016, the twin electoral wins for Donald Trump and Brexit were said to herald the arrival of a populist moment. That was seven years ago. This populist moment now seems to be lasting an awfully long time.

And yet serious, good-faith examinations of why outsider parties are faring so well are hard to come by. Instead, we must wade through unhelpful, knee-jerk descriptions of everyone from an Argentine libertarian to an Italian Catholic national-conservative to a Dutch agnostic nativist as “Trump-like.” The comparison usually prefaces a shallow, parochial analysis.

Read the whole thing. And “shallow, parochial analysis” is all they’re capable of — or at least, all they’re willing to produce.

OF COURSE THEY DO: Federal Agencies Neglect Anti-Asian Discrimination in Education. “Discrimination against Asian-American students in admissions at selective universities has been an open secret for decades. An entire cottage industry even coached ambitious applicants on how to be less Asian. Data produced in litigation showed that for applicants with academic credentials in the top 10 percent of Harvard’s pool, the odds of admission were 56.1 percent for African Americans, 31.3 percent for Hispanics, and 15.3 percent for whites, but only 12.6 percent for Asian Americans. In emails uncovered in the parallel lawsuit against the University of North Carolina, admissions officers were candid about preferring applicants of other races over Asian Americans. . . . Yet the federal agencies charged with enforcing civil rights laws prohibiting this discrimination largely have done nothing in response.”

HIS NEWSPAPER LIKES BIDEN BUT HIS WALLET PREFERS DESANTIS: Jeff Bezos Will Save Billions In Taxes By Moving To Miami.

DISCIPLINING THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE: NCLA Triumph in Unlawful Charter Boat Surveillance Rule Case Leads Gov’t to Pay Attorneys’ Fees. “NCLA has represented more than 1,300 federally permitted charter boat owners in this class-action lawsuit against the Final Rule, which required every boat to install an onboard Vessel Monitoring System tracking device that continuously transmitted its GPS location to NMFS. The Rule forced charter boat captains to pay for these devices, which tracked boats whether they were being used for a charter-fishing trip or something else. This 24-hour surveillance was unnecessary, unduly burdensome, and violated the Fourth Amendment by searching without probable cause or a warrant. It also exceeded NMFS’s authority under the Magnuson-Stevens Act and was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. NCLA also complained the rule required reporting data that the agencies had nowhere specified in proposing the rule for comment. The Fifth Circuit largely agreed with NCLA’s analysis and held that the GPS-tracking requirement was unlawful for several reasons.”

Reminder/Disclosure: I’m on the NCLA Advisory Board.

UK MINISTER STATES THE OBVIOUS: “Remember when you were a crazy conspiracy theorist who needed to be censored if you believed the WuFlu was made in a Chinese lab?”

Plus: “Now that a few governments are looking back on the damage done to people and society in the fruitless battle to fight COVID, the UK government has been defending their execrable performance with a new excuse: it was super-hard to do so because the virus was likely man-made. That’s a take. It doesn’t actually explain why they screwed up so badly and caused so much avoidable damage, but at least it is a vaguely plausible take.”

IT’S ONLY FAIR, HE’S A MEMBER OF A DESPISED AND ABUSED MINORITY THERE: Straight White Male NYU 1L May Proceed Anonymously In Law Review Discrimination Case.