GROWTH: Donald Trump’s Pledge to Loosen Regulations on Businesses Is a Heavy Lift.

Mr. Trump has said his administration will take aim at regulations across industries, and he will be backed by congressional Republicans eager to undo some of the more controversial Obama administration initiatives. Big targets include power-plant regulations and regulatory rules imposed on banks and financial institutions after the financial crisis of 2008, though the effort will also reach deep into the federal bureaucracy to include rules involving labor, telecommunications and health care.

Mr. Trump has a handful of ways to reach his goal, but they mostly point to a slow death of attrition for the Obama rules rather than an immediate elimination. He can opt not to defend rules currently tied up in court. His federal agencies can write new rules to justify revoking the ones he wants to eliminate. He can work with the GOP-controlled Congress to nullify recently completed regulations and restrict funding to certain parts of departments as a de facto way to hamstring a rule’s force.

The mere promise of regulatory easing ought to get money moving back off the sidelines. Delivering on the promise would really get things going.

IT’S OFFICIAL: Trump Picks Former Texas Governor Perry as Energy Secretary.

This should cause more than a few sleepless nights throughout the Department.

ERDOGAN’S PURGE: Turkey detains over 550 suspects in anti-terror sweep.

A total of 568 people have been arrested across Turkey on terrorism charges since Monday, the Interior Ministry announced on Tuesday.

Anti-terror operations, which began Monday, were carried out in 28 provinces to detain the suspects that included members of the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), who had allegedly participated in activities organized by the PKK terrorist organization and spread propaganda on its behalf, the ministry said in a statement.

The suspects included HDP officials from Adana, Balikkesir, Sanliurfa, Mersin, MAnisa, Eskisehir and Gaziantep.

How many of these arrests are actually connected to terrorism is impossible to know, because “anti-terror” is Erdogan’s Turkey is often just a cover for “anti-Kurd.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How the 404 Error Created the World Wide Web.

NATURALLY: After their big election victory there is nothing to stop Republicans from dismantling Obamacare. So naturally they’re figuring out how to blow it.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. It is completely normal for heterosexual men to see women they are sexually attracted to as sex objects.

More from Dennis Prager:

My last column was titled “Is Donald Trump a Misogynist?” After reading reactions throughout the internet, I realize how important it is to elaborate on the subject of how men view women.

One of the proofs that higher education makes those who attend college more foolish, more naive and often even more ignorant about life than those who never attended college is the widespread belief among the well-educated that when men sexually objectify women it means that they are misogynists, haters of women.

So, here is a list of eight truths about males and sexual objectification for those who have a degree in any of the “social sciences.”

Read the whole thing.

I’d just add that it feels nice to be thought of as a sex object.

THE RETURN OF KING DOLLAR: U.S. import prices post largest drop in nine months.

It’s like getting a raise every time you fill up the tank or buy something stamped “Made in China.”

GOOD LORD: Nearly half of all websites pose security risks.

According to a new study of the top one million domains, 46 percent are running vulnerable software, are known phishing sites, or have had a security breach in the past twelve months.

The big problem is that even when a website is managed by a careful company, it will often load content from other sites, said Kowsik Guruswamy, CTO at Menlo Park, Calif.-based Menlo Security, which sponsored the report, which was released this morning.

For example, news sites — 50 percent of which were risky — typically run ads from third-party advertising networks.

I’ve stopped relying on ad-blocker plugins and use a Java Script blocker instead, which allows you much more discrete control over what, exactly, is allowed to run in your browser.

THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING: Gun Control Crew Remains ‘Optimistic’ after Trump Victory.

At the six month anniversary of the Pulse night club massacre, gun control advocates were optimistic about the future of their gun control agenda.

John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, noted that voters in three states approved ballot initiatives strengthening gun control. The initiatives in Nevada, Washington and California — which were strongly opposed by the NRA — prevailed on the same day that Americans elected Trump, who has vowed to pass gun-friendly laws at the federal level.

“State by state is the way we’re going to win it,” Feinblatt said.

Stay on guard, of course, but changing opinions against gun control has been perhaps the biggest grassroots success story of the last 30 years.

LEGALIZATION: Marijuana Is Harder Than Ever for Younger Teens to Find.

American voters and legislatures increasingly are allowing medical and adult recreational use of marijuana, but as home-growing spreads and retail stores open, younger teens are reporting the scarcest availability in at least 24 years.

Explanations remain theoretical for the surprising trend in the face of widespread liberalization of cannabis laws. But it appears clear that fears about children finding the drug easier to acquire have not become a national reality, at least not yet.

In 2016, 8th-grade and 10th-grade respondents to the large Monitoring the Future survey gave the lowest-ever indication that marijuana was easy to get if they wanted it, a question posed to the groups every year since 1992.

Only 34.6 percent of 8th-grade students said it would be easy to get marijuana, down 2.4 percentage points. Of 10th graders, 64 percent said it would be easy to get, also the lowest rate ever, though not a statistically significant annual drop.

High school seniors, asked the question every year since 1975, reported greater accessibility with 81 percent saying it would be easy to acquire, a non-significant increase from 2015, which saw that age group’s lowest-ever rate.

Black market dealers have no reason to respect age restrictions; legal retailers do.

FAKE NEWS: NY Times Debunks Its Own Reports That Claimed NY Prison/Parole System Is Racist.

That’s Andrew McCarthy reporting for PJM, so you’ll want to read the whole thing.

STAY WARM: Polar vortex expected to bring ‘dangerously’ low temps to U.S.

PROBABLY, BUT PROBABLY NOT FOR VERY LONG: Can OPEC Send Oil To $70?

The latest, by hedge fund manager Pierre Andurand, is that crude will reach US$70 by June 2017. Andurand made this call before the weekend deal between OPEC and external producers was announced, noting that the Vienna agreement reached among the members of the organization was a “major turning point”.

Three months ago, Andurand had forecast that crude would reach US$60 by the end of the year and US$70 in 2017, so he’s now just repeating his earlier prediction, with a sounder basis this time. Back in September, he had said that Saudi Arabia is aware of the long-term implications of a depressed oil market and was ready to take steps to avoid a deficit in the longer run.

And if OPEC and the major non-OPEC states actually stick to their cuts, that’s just more $60 or $70 oil we get to sell to a thirsty world.

FRACK, BABY, FRACK: Trump to choose Perry as secretary of Energy, sources say.

WELL, GOOD: Alphabet’s self-driving car may keep the steering wheel after all.

Google’s parent company does not yet have the courage to build a car with no steering wheel or pedals, preferring to put its self-driving technology into existing cars from traditional auto manufacturers.

Thats the conclusion of news site The Information in a report published Monday citing people close to Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle project.

The technology is moving closer to market, and the company no longer considers it a “moonshot,” the head of its “X” research lab Astro Teller told The Wall Street Journal in October.

It’s over a year since it appointed former head of Hyundai U.S. John Krafcik to oversee its autonomous driving activities, which it began accounting for as a separate business on Jan. 1.

But now, The Information said, the company is moving away from plans to build and sell cars itself, preferring to partner with existing auto manufacturers to put its technology in their cars alongside traditional driver controls.

I don’t care who builds it or how intelligent the automation is — it’s going to be a long time before I get into a car with no steering wheel.

THIS LIST SEEMS SHORT TO ME. DOES IT SEEM SHORT TO YOU? 10 Childish Behaviors from the Left in the Wake of Trump’s Election.

NIALL FERGUSON: I was wrong on Brexit.

For years I have argued that Europe became the world’s most dynamic civilization after around 1500 partly because of political fragmentation and competition between multiple independent states. I have also argued that the rule of law — and specifically the English common law — was one of the “killer applications” of western civilization.

I was a staunch Thatcherite. I was a proud Eurosceptic. So what on earth, many old friends wondered, prompted me to take the side of “remain” in the referendum on EU membership?

A part of the answer is that I sincerely convinced myself that the costs of Brexit would outweigh the benefits. But I too readily trotted out the doom-laden projections of a post-Brexit recession from the International Monetary Fund, the Treasury, and others. I accused the proponents of Brexit of being “Angloonies” as opposed to Eurosceptics. My most desperate sally was to compare Brexit to a divorce — desperate not because the analogy is a bad one (it still fits rather well) but because I myself am divorced.

Why? The answer is partly that 14 years of living in the United States had taken their toll. Americans since the 1960s have wanted the Brits inside the EU to counterbalance the French, whom they do not trust. I had started to think that way. But a bigger factor — I must admit it — was my personal friendship with David Cameron and George Osborne. For the first time in my career, I wrote things about which I had my doubts in order to help my friends stay in power. That was wrong and I am sorry I did it.

I think if Ferguson spent more time here in Flyover Country, he’d find that the Americans who “wanted the Brits inside the EU” are mostly clustered in the Blue coastal enclaves, where many other bad ideas go to flourish.

RED LINES: Facing Reprisals, Aleppo Civilians Plea for International Help.

Antigovernment activists and Aleppo residents said at least 80 people have been killed since Monday, most of them either caught in the regime’s advance or discovered hiding in their homes. Regime firing squads killed most of them, they said.

“The Assad militias are maybe 300 meters away, no place now to go, it’s the last place,” Abdulkafi al-Hamdo, a teacher, said in a live video feed early Tuesday morning.

“I hope that you can do something for Aleppo people, for my daughter, for the other children. I hope you can do something to stop the expected massacres,” he said.

The United Nations called again Tuesday for an end to the fighting and the establishment of humanitarian corridors to allow people to flee safely. “Thousands with no part in the violence have literally nowhere safe to run,” the International Committee of the Red Cross also said.

Activist group Aleppo24, which has a network of contacts in the city, said regime forces had burned more than 15 women and children alive. Another group, the Halab News Network, alleged that regime forces were killing all wounded patients left in field hospitals.

As I’ve been writing for a year or two now, “If you think the Syrian Civil War is bad, just wait for the reprisals.”

And here they come.

Also in today’s WSJ is this tangentially related report by Gerald Seib:

If you happened to be listening carefully, Donald Trump told us something important a few days ago about the profoundly different approach he intends to take toward the Middle East and the threat of Islamic extremism.

The president-elect’s message was largely overlooked because it came in the middle of a typically raucous and rambling “thank you” rally in Cincinnati. News reports focused on his announcement that he would nominate as secretary of defense Gen. James Mattis—“Mad Dog Mattis” as he seems destined to be called by his new boss.

In a separate passage, one in which Mr. Trump clearly was following a script rather than freelancing, he said: “We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments, folks.”

After wasting “$6 trillion” in Middle East fights, he said, “our goal is stability not chaos.”

He added: “We will partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism…In our dealings with other countries, we will seek shared interest wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding and goodwill.”

“Peace, understanding and goodwill” are all likely to run face first into Middle Eastern realities, but the rest has the potential for a healthy dose of realpolitik.

GOOD LORD: New York should seize Trump Tower.

Maybe it’s a mistake to read too much into an opinion piece published by the Washington Post, but they’ve gone full Trump Derangement Syndrome today, between that Catherine Rampell suggestion above, and Eugene Robinson’s right here: “Trump is assembling an anti-government. Did Russia help get him here?”

The manic frothing going on up and down the BosWash Corridor has got to be unhealthy.

THIS DEAL KEEPS GETTING WORSE ALL THE TIME: Iran to build nuclear marine propulsion after U.S. ‘violation’ of deal.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani ordered on Tuesday the head of Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to start planning the development of nuclear marine propulsion in reaction to what he called the United States’ violation of the nuclear deal.

Such propulsion would to be in marine transportation,” he said in a letter published on state news agency IRNA.

Uh-huh.

WESLEY PRUDEN: Trying to overturn a free and fair election.

Desperation pursues despair, and the Democrats are stumbling from inanity to insanity in search of a way to block Donald Trump’s path to the White House. Hilary Clinton’s remnant of a campaign has endorsed an attempt by a handful of members of the Electoral College — 9 Democrats and a rogue Republican — to get the “intelligence briefing” they think might derail next Monday’s scheduled day for the members of the Electoral College to vote for president, 306 of whom are honor bound to vote for the Donald. That’s 36 votes more than he needs.

“The bipartisan electors’ letter raises very grave issues involving our national security,” John Podesta said Monday. “Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed.

“Each day our campaign decried the interference of Russia in our campaign and its evident goal of hurting our campaign to aid Donald Trump. Despite our protestations this matter did not receive the attention it deserved by the media in our campaign. We now know that the CIA has determined Russia’s interference in our elections was for the purpose of electing Donald Trump. This should distress every American.”

What should distress every American is the way the left, the liberals, the progressives and their handmaidens in the press have discarded reasonable conversation to try out every absurd alarm, one after the other, to see whether one could stick, to undermine and undercut the results of what everyone agrees was a free and fair election on Nov. 8. None has worked. More than a month later, the republic stands.

As I noted earlier this hour, if Moscow did attempt to hijack the recent election, they haven’t been the only beneficiaries of the resulting chaos. The Democrats don’t seem to be above a little subversion themselves.

NEW YORK MAG’S DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Trump May Have America, But the City Is Still Ours.

The city was always an asylum. On television on Election Night, the world they used was bubble. But what a bubble.

New Yorkers woke up on November 8 in what seems now like a fairy-tale fog, convinced, as ever, that the future belonged to us. By midnight, the world looked very different, the country very far away (and the future, too). Eighty percent of us had voted against the man who won, and 80 percent, it seemed, were already hatching plans to leave — for Canada or Berlin or anywhere else we imagined we could live safely among the like-minded. That was when the text messages began coming in from old friends in Wisconsin and Texas and North Carolina and Missouri. They were watching the same returns we were, in the same apocalyptic panic, and all making desperate plans to come to New York. For them, the city was still the same fairy tale.

And for us, those 80 percent in denial and despair, the city itself was a consolation. The human traffic on the streets that next morning was funereal, but it did proceed, commuters stuffed shoulder-­to-shoulder on subway cars, crying. More amazing, here: They were looking each other in the eye as they bawled. There were hugs among strangers, and many more bleary-eyed nods, on streets that seemed dusted with ash. It was a bubble, of course, but after the election, the city unbubbled us too — popped us out of our blister packs of despair.

Man, you went full Pauline Kael. You never go full Pauline Kael.

LEE SMITH: What Game Is Russia Playing?

As far as the first question, it’s hardly a stretch of the imagination to believe that Moscow is behind the hack. Russia has a long history of interfering in the political processes of foreign countries, especially throughout Europe where it has reportedly supported various parties, left and right, and has funded France’s National Front and perhaps other parties as well. The American intelligence community has believed for some time now that Moscow was responsible for the DNC hacks but, as the Post reports, was “cautious for months in characterizing Russia’s motivations, reflecting the United States’ long-standing struggle to collect reliable intelligence on President Vladimir Putin and those closest to him.”

So what changed? Or, to move to the second issue, how is it that, according to the Post and the Times, the intelligence community now believes Russia was trying to get Trump elected? The problem with the assessment is not just in collecting intelligence on targets like Putin but is rather about the nature of information operations. These are blunt instruments. Competent intelligence services know not to task information operations with too much detail because they take on a life of their own regardless of what their authors intended. For instance, if the purpose of leaking Clinton’s emails was to embarrass her and throw the presidency to Trump, the follow-on effect has served the opposite purpose.

The point seems to be to discredit the entire American political process, and then reap the benefits of the ensuing chaos.

It would also seem that Moscow is not the only beneficiary.

AND THE COVETED VODKAPUNDIT SEAL OF APPROVAL: Parents Are Pretty Excited About This ‘Happy Hour Playset’ for Toddlers.

GUN CULTURE: Gun Control Thriller ‘Miss Sloane’ Has One of the Worst Opening Weekends Ever.

Miss Sloane‘s story follows a lobbyist, played by Chastain, who joins a firm working with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence to get new federal gun control measures passed despite opposition from the “gun lobby.” The movie has garnered mixed reviews, with praise for Chastain’s performance despite complaints that the plot is too unrealistic. The film currently has at 69 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

The poor opening did not stop the Brady Campaign from championing the film in a live-streaming event on its Facebook page. The organization featured discussion with Kris Brown, one of the group’s lobbyists, about how the movie compares to real-life lobbying for gun control.

The group, which consulted on the production of the film, said they were open to participating in more projects with the makers of Miss Sloane as the movie continues in theaters.

Brendan Kelly, press secretary for the Brady Campaign, said the group’s work on Miss Sloane represents a new frontier in its work to influence Hollywood on gun issues.

If the Brady Campaign and Hollywood want to continue dumping money and effort into “gun control thrillers,” then who are we to stop them?