LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Violence, attacks on doctors plague Venezuela hospitals.

After a woman died while connected to a respirator at a hospital in central Venezuela last month, one of her relatives punched the attending doctor in the chest, blaming her for the woman’s death.

“They think when there’s no equipment or antibiotics that it’s the doctor’s fault,” said the doctor at the Hospital Central in Maracay, 130 kilometers (80 miles) west of the capital Caracas. She requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Hospital Central was one of 62 percent of hospitals across the country where doctors say they have suffered attacks by frustrated patients’ relatives, as violent acts in Venezuela’s decaying medical system have become increasingly common, according to a study published on Thursday by a doctors advocacy group.

In addition, 45 percent of hospitals reported robberies and shootings, the report showed, in the latest sign of how Venezuela’s five years of recession have left the country’s hospitals, once among the best in Latin America, in dire straits.

Yesterday: Venezuela Economy Contracted 29.8 Percent in Third Quarter.

This is Reuters, so I guess one man’s “recession” is another man’s “total economic collapse caused by socialism.”

SURPRISING EXACTLY NO ONE WHO’S BEEN PAYING ATTENTION: Japan preparing to put US-designed stealth jets on an ‘aircraft carrier.’

Japan is preparing an order for roughly 100 US-designed F-35 stealth fighter jets in a deal that could potentially upend the balance of power in Asia, according to sources familiar with the process.

That order would include a version of the jet that can take-off and land vertically, a feature that could prompt Japan to transform some of its existing ships into aircraft carriers so that it can operate the fighters at sea — a capability they have not had since World War II, a source close to the F-35 program told CNN.

“With short take-off vertical landing capability you are now able to operate at sea. You are able to penetrate areas and reach ranges in a shorter distance which is an important capability,” the source said.

This move would put Japan back in the power projection business in a way it hasn’t been since the Great Mariannas Turkey Shoot of 1944.

Full background on Japan’s “helicopter destroyers” here.

JAZZ SHAW: Well, Look Who Was Sneaking Into The US With The Caravan.

You’ll never guess. Or maybe you will:

When the media was showing all of the pictures of women and children in the caravan and chastising the White House for saying the group contained gang members, I guess the photographers somehow missed this guy. The US Border Patrol picked up one of the “migrants” who had already snuck over the border in California last Friday and the “job opportunities” he was seeking in America probably weren’t listed in any help wanted ads in the local paper. As the Washington Examiner reports, the guy was an admitted member of MS-13 who had come here looking to make a name for himself.

The only places I was able to find any references to this story was at the right-leaning Washington Examiner and the blogosphere.

Apparently, this kind of thing isn’t “real” news.

DAILY CALLER EXCLUSIVE: Google Employees Debated Burying Conservative Media In Search.

Google employees debated whether to bury conservative media outlets in the company’s search function as a response to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, internal Google communications obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation reveal.

The Daily Caller and Breitbart were specifically singled out as outlets to potentially bury, the communications reveal.

Trump’s election in 2016 shocked many Google employees, who had been counting on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win.

Communications obtained by TheDCNF show that internal Google discussions went beyond expressing remorse over Clinton’s loss to actually discussing ways Google could prevent Trump from winning again.

“This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote in a Nov. 9, 2016, post reviewed by TheDCNF.

Byer falsely labeled The Daily Caller and Breitbart as “opinion blogs” and urged his coworkers to reduce their visibility in search results.

How can we be sure Google isn’t manipulating their search results already?

TOM HARRIS AND DR. MADHAV KHANDEKAR: New U.S. Climate Report a ‘Scientific Embarrassment.’ “The NCA’s projections are simply not borne out by the data.”

SHOT: What Is Chuck Schumer Thinking? “The Democrat keeps trying to make deals with Donald Trump—even if might mean funding the president’s odious border wall.”

CHASER: 62% Believe Legal Immigration Good But Illegal Immigration Bad. “Eighty-nine percent (89%) of Republicans believe illegal immigration is bad for the nation. That view is shared by 82% of Independents and 70% of Democrats.”

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Fixing Facebook: Zuckerberg falls short of his New Year’s goal.

Over the year, Zuckerberg published a series of notes outlining what Facebook’s done to combat election meddling, as well as hate speech, misinformation and other offensive content. The social network pulled down more than 1.5 billion fake accounts, launched a database of political ads and announced the creation of a Supreme Court-like independent body to oversee content appeals.

But in many ways, Zuckerberg fell short of his New Year’s resolution. United Nations investigators said Facebook played a role in spreading hate speech that fueled ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Media outlets found loopholes and errors in Facebook’s political ads database. Users questioned whether they should #DeleteFacebook after learning that Cambridge Analytica, a UK political consulting firm with ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, gathered data on up to 87 million Facebook users without their permission.

In short, Facebook’s problems ballooned out of the the company’s control.

“They created a platform where sharing was mindlessly easy and interacting with each other required almost no forethought at all,” said Woodrow Hartzog, a law and computer science professor at Northeastern University. “As a result, there was massive sharing, including gushing of personal information that put lots of people at risk.”

That’s a feature, not a bug, and vital to Facebook’s business model.

FAKE NEWS: Despite Claims of Suppression in Georgia, Registration and Turnout Increased Under Kemp.

EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATICAL: Michigan Lawmakers Condemn ‘Girl Toys’ and ‘Boy Toys’ at McDonalds. “‘This is a significant issue,’ resolution claims.”

No, it really isn’t.

OF COURSE THEY ARE: Google Is Developing Dossiers on Students Using Their Classroom Products, Disclosures Show. “And the Dept. of Education is encouraging schools to use technology to monitor—and modify—student behavior.”

I raised this issue at my son’s school (where the kids are required to use Google Docs and Gmail), and what I got was a shrug and, “It’s free.”

CHANGE: ESPN Has Lost 14 Million Viewers In 7 Years Thanks To Cord Cutting.

People would find other ways to watch ESPN if they still liked what they saw there.

FINALLY: 2020 Jeep Gladiator Pickup Truck: Everything You Need to Know, and Then Some.

ONE HAND WASHES THE OTHER: Dem Campaigns Paid SEIU-Owned Bank $2.2 Million in Fees, Interest This Cycle. “Labor union spent millions of dollars backing liberal campaigns in 2018.”

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: No Khashoggi Smoking Gun and Much, Much More. “The media and the left are looking to blow up the US’s relationship with KSA over Khashoggi’s murder, which was conveniently leaked to the world by Turkey, who is aligned against KSA/Israel/US and aligned with Iran. Wild, right?”

HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Mom Dresses Six-Year-Old Son As Girl, Threatens Dad With Losing His Son For Disagreeing.

Six-year-old James is caught in a gender identity nightmare. Under his mom’s care in Dallas, Texas, James obediently lives as a trans girl named “Luna.” But given the choice when he’s with dad, he’s all boy — his sex at birth.

In their divorce proceedings, the mother has charged the father with child abuse for not affirming James as transgender, has sought restraining orders against him, and is seeking to terminate his parental rights. She is also seeking to require him to pay for the child’s visits to a transgender-affirming therapist and transgender medical alterations, which may include hormonal sterilization starting at age eight.

There’s child abuse going on here, and it isn’t coming from the father.

WE CANNOT SIMPLY DRILL OUR WAY TO LOWER PRICES OR WHATEVS: Why Oil Prices Took Such a Tumble—and What Comes Next.

The International Energy Agency now predicts oil inventories will exceed their five-year average in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries imminently. If they keep rising, that could put even more pressure on prices to fall the way they did in 2014, when inventories swelled.

High inventories are a headache for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which began cutting output in January 2016 to drain the last supply glut and stabilize prices. It worked for two years. But OPEC’s efforts are now clearly starting to falter. This has fueled expectations that the cartel will agree to further cut output at its meeting on Dec. 6.

“There is a determination from Saudi and OPEC to target inventories to avoid a big build like it happened back then (2014-2016),” said Giovanni Serio, head of research at Vitol Group, the world’s largest independent oil trader. “If OPEC continues to respond to fundamental conditions, we should be fairly confident that stocks are not going to explode.”

That’s more marketshare for American oil — thanks, Obama!

FAKE NEWS: ‘Junk Science’ Is Everywhere, And The Media Eat It Up.

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: French Court cites ‘cultural norms’ in acquitting Muslim rapist.

A Muslim refugee from Bangladesh was acquitted of the rape of a high school girl – with a French court excusing the sexual attack due to the young man’s “different cultural norms.”

The young Islamic migrant was also charged with sexually assaulting another young girl, but his defense argued that he should not be held responsible because he could have misinterpreted his aggressive sexual contact with the girl due to his Muslim “cultural codes.”

Excuses, excuses

The politically correct explanation for acquitting the rapist contended that he should not be accountable for the attack because of the way Muslim men traditionally sexually victimize and abuse women back in Bangladesh.

“Experts who investigated the man described him as narcissistic and self-centered and that in the male culture of Bangladesh – his country of origin – ‘women are relegated to the status of sexual object,’” the Voice of Europe reported.

And now they are in France, too.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela Economy Contracted 29.8 Percent in Third Quarter-Congress.

That was a sharper deceleration than the OPEC nation’s 16.6 percent contraction in 2017, according to preliminary data compiled by the country’s central bank. The economy has been in freefall since oil prices collapsed in 2014, quickening the unravelling of an already-faltering socialist system.

“Hyperinflation, the fall in oil production and the lack of confidence in the economic model are the reasons for the economy’s disastrous behaviour,” said opposition lawmaker Angel Alvarado.

The National Assembly has become the sole source of reliable gross domestic product (GDP) and inflation data since the central bank stopped publishing economic indicators in 2015.

Short of what happened to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945, that might be record for economic collapse — and it’s all self-inflicted.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Students Believe Conservatives Are ‘Evil,’ ‘Inhuman,’ UW Study Finds. “Beliefs that conservatives are evil only temporarily improved.”

Ghost of Charles Krauthammer, call your office.

OY: UN Officials: Caravan Rhetoric Violating ‘Right to Mental Health’ of Migrants and ‘General Public.’

POSTMODERN JUSTICE:

Any port in a storm of corruption, I suppose.

INITIATIVE: Meet the anonymous artist installing bus benches at neglected stops on L.A.’s Eastside.

On a Sunday afternoon earlier this month, I find him at Valley and Soto, laying out slabs of wood and power tools. He is decked out in a bright waq’ollo mask typical of the Peruvian Andes (imagine a balaclava with a mustachioed face embroidered on it). The mask is to protect his identity; he prefers to remain anonymous.

Over the past 11 months, the artist has surreptitiously installed more than a dozen wood benches around the Eastside, and he has it down to a science: He props a ladder next to the bus sign, slips a handmade wooden bench over the pole and proceeds to screw, hammer and glue it into place. In about 15 minutes, the stop has a brand-new bus bench.

“This is allegedly the new biotech corridor,” he says, gesturing at the neighborhood around us. We are less than half a mile from LAC+USC Medical Center. “But they don’t care about the health of the people already here. It’s like the city has refused to build benches for them.”

But:

Other benches (particularly those attached to sign poles) have been removed. Some disappear outright, others are broken into pieces and abandoned nearby — no easy feat, since the artist anchors them with cinder blocks and uses professional hardware.

“I work in the art industry as a carpenter,” he says. “I use specific hardware to attach the benches … so you really have to demolish it.”

Who would do such a thing?

VIRTUAL IS BIG. REALLY BIG. Fortnite bests Russia and Japan to become world’s 8th most-populated place.

AMERICA’S MOST PROLIFIC SERIAL KILLER? The FBI said that a 78-year-old man currently imprisoned in Texas has confessed to committing 90 murders across the country from 1970 to 2005.