YES/NO/MAYBE: Can the iPad Pro Replace Your Laptop?

After a week with one I put my MacBook up for sale on eBay, but that definitely isn’t for everyone, or even for very many — yet.

GOOD LORD: Video shows driver trying to run over Jews near Los Angeles synagogue. “The driver, who has been identified as 32-year-old Mohammed Mohammed, reversed and tried to hit them again, according to the the local outlet.”

ASHE SCHOW: Virginia City That Gave Millions To Amazon Now Hassling Restaurant Over Mural.

A spokeswoman for the Department, Helen Duong, told Arlington news outlet ARLnow that zoning inspectors “concluded that the artwork is considered a sign under Arlington County’s zoning ordinance because the artwork relates to the advertisement of a business and its services.”

This means, according to ARLnow, that Goody’s had to get a permit before painting the mural. Duong told the outlet that the restaurant “did not receive prior approvals from the county.” She also said the County has so far only issued the restaurant a “courtesy notice” about the mural, which included how Goody’s could square itself with Arlington officials (which no doubt includes some form of payment to the County).

Arlnow spoke to Glenda Alvarez, who owns Goody’s. Alvarez says, as of November 20, that she had not sought county approval for the mural yet and did not know she needed a permit before adding the mural. She said she commissioned the painting because the outside of her restaurant “was not attractive enough.”

“We just wanted to get a little more attention from people walking by,” she said.

Arlington has previously gone after Wag More Dogs, a dog daycare that painted a mural of puppies chasing bones on the side of its wall back in 2010. As with Goody’s, Wag More Dogs was found to have violated Arlington’s onerous “sign” requirements because the dogs were considered an advertisement for the business. A self-service dog wash across the street was allowed to keep commissioned graffiti on its walls because it did not contain any references to dogs.

Advertising is OK so long as you don’t reveal what you’re advertising?

THEY DO EXIST: Ten Great IPAs for Craft Beer Lovers.

MICHAEL LEDEEN: The Anti-American Americans. “So here we are, at Thanksgiving, surrounded by a crowd of arrogant, ignorant, self-proclaimed superior people who proclaim, as was once declared about Vietnam, that the only way to save the country is to destroy it. That the European welfare state is the proper model for us, and that our electoral choices are mostly wrong. And evil. The first anti-American president put it bluntly in an interview with with one of his cronies, saying Americans are ‘confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues.’ In Obama’s view, we’re unworthy of him and his ruling class.”

Read the whole thing.

OUCH: GM to slash jobs and production as U.S. sedan sales sink.

GM plans to halt production next year at three assembly plants: Lordstown, Ohio; Hamtramck, Michigan; and Oshawa, Ontario. It will also stop building several models now assembled at those plants, including the Chevrolet Cruze, the Cadillac CT6 and the Buick LaCrosse. The Cruze compact car will be discontinued in the U.S. market in 2019.

Plants in Baltimore, Maryland, and Warren, Michigan, assembling powertrain components will have no products assigned to them after 2019 and are at risk of closure, GM said. It will also close two unidentified factories outside North America.

“We are right-sizing capacity for the realities of the marketplace,” Chief Executive Mary Barra said, adding that GM will double resources dedicated to electric and self-driving vehicles over the next two years.

Cost pressures on GM and other automakers and suppliers have increased as demand has waned for traditional sedans.

It looks like Ford was ahead of the curve.

THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT BEING SEEN: Why Advanced Stealth is Still “Very Hard to Hit.”

“Static radar can help detect low observability aircraft, and acquire it. Now, an intercept requires a smaller aperture. When you transfer from acquisition to the weapons system you will need at long ranges, that dramatically reduces the ability for intercept. Detection is not what it is all about, you have an entire kill chain needed to eliminate a low-observable threat,” Ret. Lt. Gen. David Deptula, Dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told Warrior Maven in an interview.

Deptula explained that moving beyond a ground based radar with a roughly 10-meter aperture to a 6-inch signal from a smaller “engagement” radar presents substantial challenges for attackers.

“Even if a radar can detect, I now have to track, and when I engage I will have to shoot a missile using much smaller detection. Also, a fusing mechanism can be affected by low observability technology,” Deputla said. “At every level, low observability can help.”

Nonetheless, Air Force developers are pursuing a new generation of stealth technology with a sense of urgency, in light of rapid global modernization of new Russian and Chinese-built attack systems.

Faster, please — you want to stay far enough ahead of the Other Guy that war never looks like an attractive option to him.

EVERY BUBBLE POPS: Desperate Homebuilders Offering $100,000 Discounts, Free Vacations Amid Cooling Market.

ANY OF IT: What part of “shall not be infringed” do these tireless busybodies not understand?

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Venezuelan Ex-Treasurer Admits He Took $1 Billion in Bribes.

In a statement, the U.S. Justice Department said Alejandro Andrade pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering under seal last December in federal court in Miami. The statement said that Mr. Andrade, a former bodyguard for the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, accepted millions of dollars in bribes from Raúl Gorrín, the president of Globovision, a Venezuelan pro-government television channel, to allow him and others to make foreign-currency transactions at favorable rates. An indictment of Mr. Gorrín on charges of money laundering and bribery was unsealed Monday in Miami.

Lawyers for Mr. Andrade and for Mr. Gorrín didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Andrade was Venezuela’s treasurer between 2007 and 2010. After leaving the government, he moved to Florida, where he owns a large estate and horse stables. As part of his plea agreement, Mr. Andrade agreed to a forfeiture money judgment of $1 billion and all assets, including real estate, vehicles, horses, watches, aircraft and bank accounts.

It’s good to be the nomenklatura — until you have to flee the hellhole you helped create, and get busted by a decent country where the rule of law mostly holds.

YOU DON’T SAY: Those Of The Migrant Caravan Attempting To Storm The US Border Aren’t Asylum Seekers.

CHANGE? Congress to make determination on F-35s for Turkey.

SUNSHINE IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: Gowdy Says to Avoid ‘carnival’ by taping Comey interview for public to see.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Fed Up Gamers Report Intrusive Sex Workers to the IRS for Tax Evasion.

It seems that THOTs on Snapchat and other platforms are using PayPal to charge men to see “premium snaps,” which are nudes or pornography. It’s also possible that these ladies of social media are not reporting their earnings to the IRS. In an effort that can only be described as hilarious, the anons at 4chan have launched a full-scale war on THOTs across all platforms. Women who fish for lonely and susceptible beta boys are the bane of many gamers, whose platforms are being taken over by the sex trollers. These women solicit in male-dominated platforms and many of the men who use the platforms are sick of it.

Bonus: “In a surprising twist, the #ThotAudit also serves the purpose of spreading the truth that taxation is theft.”

Added bonus: “4chan vs the Cam Girls” would make an excellent b-movie title.

STAY THIRSTY, MY FRIEND: ‘Most Interesting Man in the World’ Slams Trump, Misses Obama: ‘I Love the Guy.’

ANY DAY NOW: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: We’re All Going To Die From Climate Change.

The report seems extreme on its face, and critics were quick to point out that the computer models used to predict the “thousands” of deaths may be outdated, but leftists, including Ocasio-Cortez, soaked up the report without question, inciting mass panic.

“People are going to die if we don’t start addressing climate change ASAP,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “It’s not enough to think it’s ‘important.’ We must make it urgent. That’s why we need a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, & why fossil fuel-funded officials shouldn’t be writing climate change policy.”

The U.S. Global Change Research Program makes no recommendations on how to curb “climate change,” but it’s quite clear that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes the only way to make real in-roads on the subject is to enact a massive, socialistic environmentally focused legislative package, using taxation and other “incentives” to help Americans cut down on fossil fuel usage, while pouring millions into “green jobs” and “alternative energy.”

The newly elected, far-left, Congresswoman-elect wants to vastly increase the scope, power, and expensive of government on flimsy pretext? I did not see that coming.

OH: Internal documents Facebook has fought to keep private obtained by UK Parliament.

Six4Three, which has been engaged in a yearslong legal battle with Facebook, were the makers of “Pikini,” a controversial app that allowed users to find pictures of their friends wearing bikinis.

The app did not breach Facebook’s terms and conditions when it was released in 2013. But in 2015 Facebook changed its policies about how it shared information about its users with third-party app developers such as those behind Pikini.

Prior to the change, Pikini and other app developers were able to access information not only about their users, but also about their users’ Facebook friends, including users’ friends’ photos.

When Facebook restricted access to friend data, it destroyed Pikini’s businesses, Six4Three alleges.

While a crude app that searched out bikini photos, and which shut down years ago, might not be noteworthy on its own, the fact that Six4Three has access to internal Facebook documents — currently under court seal — is.

Facebook ought to know better than to trust sensitive information to Facebook.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Amnesty Gone Wild and Much, Much More. “Mexico says it will deport the 500+ invaders who tried to breach the US-Mexico border. Good, try breaching a border in another country and see what happens to you. After you land in De Gaulle or Heathrow airports and just run right past customs and see if they let you into their country once they catch you and lay you flat.”

COLD WAR II: China’s Tactic to Catch a Fugitive Official: Hold His Two American Children.

When Victor and Cynthia Liu landed with their mother on a tropical Chinese island in June to visit an ailing grandfather, they thought they would soon be on a plane back to their East Coast lives — he to start his sophomore year at Georgetown University, and she to work at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company in New York.

Instead, within days, police officers detained their mother, Sandra Han, who, like her children, is an American citizen. They moved her to a secret site, commonly known as a black jail. The children discovered at the airport that they could not leave China, even though the police had said they were not being investigated or charged with a crime, the children told American officials and family associates.

By holding the family hostage, they said, the police are trying to force the siblings’ father to return to China to face criminal charges. The father, Liu Changming, a former executive at a state-owned bank, is accused of being a central player in a $1.4 billion fraud case.

The children say their father severed ties with the family in 2012, but the Chinese authorities have still held them for months under a practice known as an exit ban — a growing tactic that has become the latest flash point in the increasingly rancorous relationship between the United States and China.

Flashback: Yes, It’s Cold War with China — So Win It Like the Last Cold War. “The problem is NOT what the Chinese are doing, but we are AREN’T doing.”

THE UKRAINE WAR: Tension escalates after Russia seizes Ukraine naval ships.

Two gunboats and a tug were captured by Russian forces. Ukraine says they were fired on and six crew were injured.

The countries blame each other for the incident. Ukraine’s government said it could declare martial law.

The crisis began when Russia accused the Ukrainian ships of illegally entering its waters.

The Russians placed a tanker under a bridge in the Kerch Strait – the only access to the Sea of Azov, which is shared between the two countries.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called an urgent meeting of his “war cabinet” over the incident, his spokesperson said.

Plus: Ukrainian Armed Forces website is now down. Maybe that happens on occasion. But recent experience would suggest Russian cyber intrusion.

SOCIALISM: Venezuela Is Leaking Oil Everywhere. “The once-mighty PDVSA is polluting waterways and farmland, unable to clean up its messes after years of neglect, scant investment and corruption scandals.”

The spills are conspicuous signs of what has gone so horribly wrong at once-mighty PDVSA. The state-owned company doesn’t publish statistics, but environmentalists, analysts and workers keep seemingly endless lists of examples of wayward crude—unleashed by busted valves, ripped gaskets, cracked pipes and on and on—that they say has polluted waterways and farmland and probably has seeped into aquifers.

PDVSA’s cleanup policy is, on paper, strict, because “if spills aren’t quickly attended to, they become environmental liabilities,” said Carmen Infante, a Caracas-based industry consultant. But resources are spread so thin that responses are rarely swift or comprehensive; trunks of nance trees near the three tanks in Anzoategui state are buried in crude more than 10 months after the leak was discovered.

According to workers in the field, many of the services contractors that specialize in sponging up spills, with trucks equipped with giant vacuums, have gone out of business because they’ve had such trouble getting paid by PDVSA.

You know who else has or had lousy environmental protections? The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Communist China, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

As I’ve said elsewhere: If you want to protect the environment, you’d better embrace free-market capitalism.

PRIVACY: European privacy search engines aim to challenge Google.

Sites such as Britain’s Mojeek, France’s Qwant, Unbubble in Germany and Swisscows don’t track user data, filter results or show “behavioral” ads.

These sites are growing amid the rollout of new European privacy regulations and numerous corporate data scandals, which have raised public awareness about the mountains of personal information companies stealthily gather and sell to advertisers.

Widespread suspicion in Europe about Google’s stranglehold on internet searches has also helped make the continent a spawning ground for secure searching. Europe is particularly sensitive to privacy issues because spying by the Nazi-era Gestapo and the secret services in the Soviet Union is still within living memory.

“For us, it’s all about citizens and citizens have the right to privacy,” said Eric Leandri, chairman of Paris-based Qwant. He said that view contrasts with the mind-set across the Atlantic, where internet users are seen as consumers whose rights are dictated by the terms of their agreements with tech companies.

I have good luck with DuckDuckGo, and use Bing as my fallback on the rare occasions that DDG doesn’t deliver.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS: Navy May Have to Choose Between New Ballistic Missile Subs or 355 Ship Fleet.

When asked by USNI News what the future holds for fleet size and ballistic missile submarines now that the Democrats control the House, Frank Rose, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former assistant secretary of state for arms control, he said: “There is not enough money” for both, and “priorities need to be taken.”

Rose and Jim Miller, a former undersecretary of Defense for policy, came down firmly on the side of building the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, the replacements for the current Ohio-class, in setting priorities for Navy spending.

For the U.S., the ballistic missile submarines “secures the second strike” in event of a nuclear attack. “It really is the backbone of our nuclear force now and for the next 70 to 80 years,” Rose said.

The Navy shouldn’t be allowed to say, “sorry, we ran out of money” when it comes to paying for the ballistic missile submarine because the shipbuilding account was used for other kinds of warships. “The Navy needs to step up to that bill,” Miller said.

That line of thought is not confined to think-tanks.

Rep. Adam Smith, (D-Wash.), who is expected to become chairman of the House Armed Services Committee when the new Congress convenes in January, has long expressed skepticism over the Navy’s shipbuilding plan leading to a fleet of 355 warships. He has several times at recent public events referred to it as “simply a number thrown out there.”

Navies are expensive and time-consuming to build, plus the expense of crew training and maintenance. But for a global trading power, it’s an absolute necessity.

And Congressman Smith should know better, if he’s expected to become Chair of the House Armed Services Committee. The 355-ship figure was not just “thrown out there.”

MEXICAN STANDOFF: Dems Look to Leverage Votes on Spending Bill to Protect Mueller. “Trump hints at shutdown if he doesn’t get funding for the wall.”

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Kimmel Scolds Celebs for Nonstop Trump Bashing.