2016, MAN: David Duke responds to Jenna Jameson’s ‘massive crush’ on Bibi Netanyahu.

FASCISM IS ALWAYS DESCENDING ON THE UNITED STATES, BUT ALWAYS LANDS… ANYWHERE ELSE: Two movies China desperately wants to hide.

This week, two extraordinary Canadian films — one a chilling documentary, the other a riveting drama based on its findings — were released for sale on iTunes.
…
The documentary, “Human Harvest,” won the coveted Peabody Award for its exposé of an unspeakable crime against humanity. In 1999, Chinese hospitals began performing more than 10,000 organ transplants annually, generating a vast and lucrative traffic in “transplant tourists,” who flocked to China on the assurance that they could obtain lifesaving organs without having to languish on a waiting list. China had no voluntary organ-donation system to speak of, yet suddenly it was providing tens of thousands of freshly harvested organs to patients with ready cash or high-placed connections. How was that possible?

The evidence, assembled by human-rights researchers and investigative journalists, added up to something unimaginable: China was killing enormous numbers of imprisoned men and women by strapping them down to operating tables, still conscious, and forcibly extracting their organs — and then delivering those organs to the hospital transplant centers that have become a major source of revenue. Chinese officials claim that organs come from violent criminals on death row. But “Human Harvest” makes it clear that most of those killed are peaceful citizens persecuted for their beliefs: Tibetans, Uighurs, Christians — and, above all, practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddhist-style spiritual movement of peaceful meditation and ethical commitment.

The dramatized version starring Anastasia Lin is called The Bleeding Edge.

OIL WARS: OPEC Production Cuts and the Illusive Power of Dealmaking.

Arguably, the most influential event that led the price collapse was the shale revolution. In June 2014, the U.S. became the leading global oil producer, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia for the first time since 1972. In effect, America took on the role of the global swing producer – it can increase or decrease production in response to price fluctuations faster than other countries. At its height in early 2015, U.S. oil production reached 9.6 million barrels per day. As a result of the price drop, it has since fallen by 900 thousand barrels – but American companies can quickly rekindle output to 10 million barrels and beyond. One of the main reasons for that is a technological feature of shale deposits: due to their small size, drilling new wells is not capital intensive. As a result, production volumes can be quickly increased. This is quite different from the big wells on traditional deposits – oil fields in western Siberia, for example.

But let’s assume that OPEC gets its act together and delivers on its promises to enforce production cuts (a big if). Let’s say that Russia follows suit and takes its small share of 300 thousand barrels a day off the market (another big if). What would happen then? The market, impressed by exporters’ discipline, would react with a modest rise in oil prices (modest because the declared cuts are modest, too). But then higher prices would allow the U.S. to pump increased volumes of crude. This oil would eventually fill the market niche vacated by OPEC and thus effectively make the production cuts meaningless. Back to square one. Welcome to the world of shale economics!

Indeed.

None of this is news to Instapundit readers, but have you hugged a fracker today?

GOOD LORD: 4 Quit After OK Veteran Dies With Maggots in Wound.

Four staff at the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs resigned after maggots were found in the wound of a Vietnam veteran who died in October. Another VA staff member insisted that the maggots did not cause his death.

Raymie Parker identified the man as his father, 73-year-old Owen Reese Peterson. “During the 21 days I was there … I pled with the medical staff, the senior medical staff, to increase his meds so his bandages could be changed,” Parker told the Tulsa World. “I was met with a stonewall for much of that time.”

Executive Director Myles Deering explained the maggots were discovered while Peterson was alive, but did not cause his death. Rather, the man came into the VA hospital with an infection and died “as a result of the sepsis,” complications from that infection. Nevertheless, Deering must have hated saying the words, “He did not succumb as a result of the parasites.”

That there were any parasites involved is a disgrace, and the staff members who resigned must have known it.

Abolish the VA and give vets vouchers for the private health coverage of their choice.

I CAN’T HANDLE ANOTHER 2016, MAN.

pic.twitter.com/PqJOEybkcF

— Stacey Lennox (@ScotsFyre) December 5, 2016

STIMULUS: Forget Ghost Cities, China Builds 10-Billion-Yuan Replica Titanic.

According to Google Translate, it’s part of a Chengdu tourism project which “will also present the first giant man-made sky waterway commercial street, the world’s first interactive high-tech three-dimensional theater cinema, the largest salt brine hot springs in Asia and other products.”

This Titanic appears to be land-based and at very little risk of sinking — unlike many of China’s state-directed investments.

SALENA ZITO: Democrats dancing with insanity.

That is how many of Nancy Pelosi’s colleagues it took to vote her back into power despite having lost her third consecutive chance at winning back the majority from the Republicans.

Her win over Youngstown Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan for Minority Leader proved two-thirds of those House Democrats have more interest in someone who is a deep-pocket fundraiser than someone who perhaps could have made the party more competitive in swing districts or more cohesive in their message to the voters.

Or perhaps both.

Their decision was arrogant, tone deaf and a smack in the face to the voters who once proudly supported this party and were waiting to see if someone would lead them back out of the progressive wilderness.

Kevin Lawson, 22, is one young Democrat who would have preferred Ryan over Pelosi, “We need a message that resonates not only with young people, but a much broader swath of the country,” he said. “Ryan talked about the economy in his local race, but the overall message from the party was flat and uninspiring.”

It was a joyless campaign, but that kind of tone starts at the top.

THE FREEDOM TO BE SHUT UP: French Court Bans ‘Disturbing’ Anti-Abortion Down Syndrome Ad.

FASCISM IS ALWAYS DESCENDING ON THE UNITED STATES, BUT IT ALWAYS LANDS… ANYWHERE ELSE: In fear after attacks, gay Bangladeshis retreat into closet and flee abroad.

Seven months after al Qaeda-linked militants hacked Bangladesh’s most prominent gay activist to death, the South Asian country’s LGBT community remains in hiding, while more than a dozen LGBT people have fled abroad.

“The whole community has been sent back to the closet,” a gay activist in exile told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety.

“Any kind of work – whatever we had been doing – it has been completely shut down. There is no movement, no visibility, no work. It is a horrible situation. We have never imagined the situation would be like this.”

Bangladesh’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community was already marginalized, with gay sex being illegal, punishable by a maximum of life in prison.

PROCUREMENT BLUES: LCS Program ‘Broke’ the Navy.

In an era when other major-dollar acquisition programs such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Gerald R. Ford-class carrier have dominated headlines on account of delays and budget overruns, the sternest rebukes in Congress may be reserved for the embattled LCS program.

“The experience of LCS, it broke the Navy,” said Sean Stackley, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition. “… We have our program managers pretty much under a microscope right now, and we’ve taken things like cost and we’ve put cost into our requirements so that you don’t get to ignore costs while you’re chasing requirement. Just like speed, range, power and payload, if you start to infringe on the cost requirement that we put into our documents, you have to report to [Research, Development and Acquisition] and [the Chief of Naval Operations] just like you do if you infringe on one of the other requirements.”

In prepared testimony for the hearing, the Pentagon’s director of Operational Test and Evaluation, J. Michael Gilmore, gave a damning accounting of where the program stands, saying neither of the two LCS variants now being built by competing contractors is expected to be survivable in combat, a fact that undermines the whole concept of operations for the ship class.

Heads should roll.

MAD DUCK: Dakota Pipeline Project Halted as Obama Administration Denies Permit for Last Leg.

The Obama administration said Sunday that it had denied a permit needed to complete the last leg of an oil pipeline across the Midwest, prompting cheers from opponents but warnings that the move could be short-lived since President-elect Donald Trump supports the project.

The nearly 1,200-mile Dakota Access pipeline, extending from North Dakota across parts of South Dakota and Iowa and ending in Illinois, is nearly complete, except for a 1,100-foot crossing of a Missouri River reservoir.

And:

Pipeline experts said it was extremely rare for an administration to intervene in a permitting process typically handled by career civil servants. The advanced stage of the project’s construction made the Obama administration’s move even more unusual, and experts said they believed it could be easily overturned.

“Clearly this is being directed politically from the administration,” said Brigham McCown, a former top pipeline administrator for the Transportation Department during the George W. Bush administration. “What it says is that even if you have your permits in hand, the government might change the rules on you once construction is almost done.”

Obama has begun the last leg of his “Screw You, America” tour.

Of course, “live by the pen and phone, die by the pen and phone.” President Trump can undo Obama’s whims at will.

I’LL HAVE WHAT THE GENTLEMAN ON THE FLOOR IS READING: Columbia Room Has a Cocktail Literally Made With Old Books.

Columbia Room has played around with plenty of unusual ingredients, like fig leaf milk and potato water, in its cocktails. But “In Search of Time Past” — the third drink on its current tasting menu—is the most Portlandia yet.

That’s because it includes a tincture made of old books. Literally. Really literally.

Owner Derek Brown got the idea after visiting El Celler de Can Roca in Spain, where he encountered candied page fragments on the avant-garde tasting menu.
“He was morbidly fascinated by it,” says head bartender JP Fetherston. So, the team began working on a cocktail that would replicate the sensation of opening an old book or walking into an old library.

That old book smell is so delightful, I once bought a 19th Century geography primer in terrible condition, just because it smelled more like old books than any of my other old books did.

Fascinating, indeed.

APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION: Guns N’ Roses Called Audience Members Up on Stage to Beat Up a Trump Piñata.

Video at the link.

SCIENCE: Pooping in deep space has NASA stumped. The ‘Space Poop Challenge’ is your way to help.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration wants to boldly go beyond the adult diaper. The agency is seeking a system to manage fecal, menstrual and urine waste for six days — “a continuous duration of up to 144 hours,” as NASA wrote on its website. The technology, integrated into a spacesuit, would be needed for extended tasks in space as well as “contingency scenarios.” Even during space emergencies, after all, you’ve still gotta go.

How NASA solves this problem in part depends upon you. The agency tapped crowdfunding platform HeroX to source a system that can collect up to 75 grams of fecal matter and 1 liter of urine per day, for six days. It must be hands-free, operate in microgravity and prevent leaking precious oxygen. The reward is up to a $30,000 bounty, plus the knowledge that the fruits of your mind may one day gird an astronaut’s loins.

Space travel appears much more glamorous in the movies.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: December shaping up to be a busy month for rocket flights.

RELATED? United Launch Alliance’s Rocket Builder lets you configure your own Atlas V launch to any available orbit. Prices start at just $109 million.

A MARINE OF VISION: I Served With James Mattis. Here’s What I Learned From Him.

I checked into Third Battalion, Seventh Marines in Twentynine Palms, California in 1994. It was 125 degrees in July in the high desert; everyone was in the field. This was a hard place, for hard men training for the hardest of jobs.

Then-Colonel Mattis, the Seventh Marines regimental commander, called for me to come see him. I was not only just a brand-new captain, but an aviator in an infantry regiment. I was a minor light in the Seventh Marines firmament: I was not in any measure a key player.

I arrived early, as a captain does when reporting to a colonel, and waited in his anteroom. There, I convinced myself what this would be: a quick handshake, a stern few sentences on what I was to do while there, and then a slap on the back with a “Go get ‘em, Tiger!” as he turned to the next task at hand. This was a busy guy. Five minutes, tops.

Colonel Mattis called for me. He stood to greet me, and offered to get coffee for me. He put a hand on my shoulder; gave me, over my protestations, his own seat behind his desk; and pulled up a chair to the side. He actually took his phone off the hook—something I had thought was just a figure of speech—closed his office door, and spent more than an hour knee-to-knee with me.

Mattis laid out his warfighting philosophy, vision, goals, and expectations. He told me how he saw us fighting and where, and how he was getting us ready to do just that. He laid out history, culture, religion, and politics, and he saw very clearly not only where we would fight, but how Seventh Marines, a desert battalion, fit into that fight.

Many years later, when Seventh Marines got into that fight, he was proven precisely right. It would not be the last time.

Read the whole thing.

Trump's margin/Jill Stein's tally in the three decisive states, latest count:
MI: 10,704/51,463
PA: 46,765/ 49,678
WI: 22,177/31,006

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) December 1, 2016

Have you considered giving a couple of bucks to Jill Stein and the Green Party?

They’re stunningly effective.

METAFAIL: Media Fall For Fake News Story About Fake News Stories on Facebook.

DECLASSIFIED: Tons of OSS/CIA maps through the decades, now free to view on Flickr.

This is a treasure trove for cartography buffs.

STATEHOOD: The Kurds Are Nearly There.

The situation in Syria, at least on the surface, offers more grounds for hope. The outbreak of the civil war in 2011 led to the weakening of government control over the Kurdish regions in the country’s northeast corner, and the Kurds there were quick to seize their chance. Over the past five years the Syrian Kurds have steadily built up formidable institutions of self-rule. In contrast to Iraq’s Kurdish region, however, the regions currently controlled by their Syrian counterparts contain large populations of Arabs and other minority groups, and their presence might well complicate an aggressive push for independence.

Even so, it is hard to overestimate the degree of international goodwill that the Syrian Kurdish forces have managed to acquire thanks to their muscular prosecution of the war against the Islamic State. Since the Assad government doesn’t seem especially keen on confronting the caliphate, the Kurdish-dominated forces have been supplying most of the fighters on the Syrian front of the war against ISIS. It is precisely for this reason that the Obama administration has recently begun directly supplying the Syrian Kurds with weapons. This would amount to an extraordinary departure from past practice, since providing arms would implicitly bolster the Kurds’ control over their part of Syria, and potentially bring them closer to independence—a prospect of which Washington policymakers have long been leery, since it would entail a fundamental redrawing of the borders of the Middle East.

Such caution is understandable. Yet US policy toward the Kurds will face a crucial test in the next few years—and it will almost certainly come from the Kurds of Iraq, who believe that their twenty-five-year experiment in self-government is approaching its logical culmination. The leaders of the Kurdistan Regional Government, based in Erbil, have explicitly declared that they have independence in their sights. Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Region of Iraq, has announced plans to conduct a referendum on statehood once the threat from ISIS has abated. Washington, meanwhile, doggedly maintains that nothing can be allowed to compromise Iraq’s territorial integrity, periodically warning its Kurdish allies not to test its resolve. In view of the long history of thwarted Kurdish aspirations, one has to wonder: When the day finally comes, will the Kurds really be willing to wait for permission?

Our Founders didn’t ask for independence; they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor — and declared our independence.

You get the feeling the Kurds are at least as gutsy.

I’LL HAVE A HALF DOUBLE DECAFFEINATED HALF-CAF WITH A TWIST OF LEMON: Howard Schultz Stepping Down as Starbucks CEO to Focus on Higher-End Shops.

Howard Schultz is stepping down as chief executive of Starbucks Corp. to lead an effort at the company to build high-end coffee shops that will charge as much as $12 a cup, his next attempt to revolutionize the way Americans consume coffee.

Mr. Schultz, 63 years old, is handing over the CEO role to Chief Operating Officer Kevin Johnson, who served as a director of the company for seven years before joining its executive team two years ago. Mr. Schultz, who is credited with taking the company from small beginnings to an international behemoth, began handing over daily oversight of the company to Mr. Johnson a few months ago.

Starbucks’s move toward high-end coffee, a project referred to internally as “Siren Works”—after the mythological creature in the coffee chain’s logo—is aimed at refreshing its brand, which has been facing increasing competition from specialty roasters such as Stumptown and Intelligentsia, as well as from mass coffee purveyors like Dunkin’ Donuts, which has been introducing more drinks such as cold-brewed coffee.

While it’s not for me, it is wonderful living in a country where $12 coffee is an option.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL FEMINISM: Escape From the Life of Julia.

FEWER BEATINGS AND ARRESTS? What Castro’s passing means for a rising generation of Cuban artists.

THE CHICAGO WAY: North Side beer bar drops MillerCoors over Trump.

Melani Domingues, owner of The Green Lady on North Lincoln Avenue, announced Wednesday on Facebook that she would sell off her last five cases of Miller Lite and Miller High Life for an inflated cost of $6 per bottle, donate all profits to Planned Parenthood in the name of Vice President-elect Mike Pence and then stop patronizing the company.

Domingues said she only recently became aware of the July fundraiser co-hosted by Pete Coors — who sits on the board of Molson Coors, the parent company of MillerCoors — and it struck her as an outlet to take a stand on Trump’s surprising win and what she feels has been an avalanche of negative discourse coming from the Republican Party.

“I’m not trying to judge anyone for what they do, but as a publican and a citizen, this is how I can stand up and be counted and model behavior for my 5-year-old girl,” Domingues said Thursday morning. “I’ve been struggling over the last few weeks with what to say to her when she asks how can so many people vote for someone so mean. I say that a lot of people are trying to figure that out.”

Domingues overcharging for bland beer then giving the profits to Planned Parenthood using the name of someone who opposes abortion in order promote “model behavior” to her young daughter hardly strikes me as nice.

HISTORY: Oldest living Pearl Harbor survivor recounts ‘Day of Infamy’ to Colorado Springs students.

Retired Navy Lt. Jim Downing joked with the kids at Lewis-Palmer Middle School about the fragility that comes with being a 103-year-old Pearl Harbor survivor. He asked one girl to help him stand from his powered scooter. She pulled, and came away with a rubber hand.

But Downing, who will spend Wednesday in Hawaii and plans to give a speech at Pearl Harbor, had a more serious lesson for the students. Preventing the next Pearl Harbor, he said, is their responsibility.

“Keep America so strong that no tyrant will ever be tempted to attack us,” said Downing, who is believed to be the oldest living survivor of the attack that plunged America into World War II.

Indeed.

Read the whole thing.