EVEN FASTER, PLEASE: Congress set to vote on bill that promises to speed up drug approval.

AGING: Emma Morano, world’s oldest and likely last living person born in 1800s, celebrates 117th birthday.

Italy is known for its centenarians – many of whom live on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia – and gerontologists are studying Morano, along with a handful of Italians over 105, to try to figure out their longevity. Bava has credited Morano’s long life to her genetic makeup, “and nothing else.”

One of her sisters lived to be over 100 and another to nearly 100.

“Her longevity is a genetic fact, nothing else,” Bava said. “She is a person who from a young age had a difficult life that would have sapped the energy out of anyone.”

He said Morano’s husband beat her and she lost an infant son to crib death at 6 months. She supported herself working in a factory making jute bags, then in a hotel, working well past retirement age.

“She abandoned the husband in the Fascist era, when women were supposed to be submissive. She was always very decisive,” her doctor said.

Bava, who has known Morano since she was 90, also praised her emotional stability.

“She is always a very serene. The beauty of Emma is that it is normal that she smiles, but also in difficulties, she is very decisive,” he said. “But perhaps this tranquility comes with age, which becomes wisdom. Who knows?”

Indeed.

PARENTING: You Can’t Enjoy Your Children if They Are Out of Control.

SENATOR MIKE LEE: Conservatives Should Embrace Principled Populism.

For all the challenges a President Trump may present conservatives during his term, his populism need not be one of them. Far from contradictory, conservatism and populism complement each other in ways that can change history — as did the most successful populist in recent decades, Ronald Reagan.

The chief political weakness of conservatism is its difficulty identifying problems that are appropriate for political correction. Conservatism’s view of human nature and history teaches us that problems are inevitable in this world and that attempts to use government to solve them often only make things worse.

This insight actually makes us good at finding solutions. At our best, conservatives craft policy reforms that empower bottom-up, trial-and-error problem-solving and the institutions that facilitate it, such as markets and civil society. At our worst, though, we can seem indifferent to suffering and injustice because we overlook problems that require our action or resign ourselves to their insolvability.

Populists, on the other hand, have an uncanny knack for identifying social problems. It’s when pressed for solutions that populists tend to reveal their characteristic weakness. Unable to draw on a coherent philosophy, populists can tend toward inconsistent or unserious proposals.

The rough terms of a successful partnership seem obvious. Populism identifies the problems; conservatism develops the solutions; and President Trump oversees the process with a veto pen that keeps everyone honest.

It’s telling that this message comes from Mike Lee, whose small-government/constitutionalist credentials are perhaps unequaled in today’s Senate.

OPEC TALKS UPDATE: Iran Says It Won’t Cut Oil Production as Talks Remain Deadlocked.

Our OPEC friends can’t afford to cut production, but they can’t live off today’s prices, either.

PHILIP KLEIN: Here’s how Trump’s HHS pick wants to replace Obamacare.

Given that Trump offered scant details on healthcare during the campaign, [Tom] Price could have outsized influence on the incoming president’s health policy. Price happens to also be close with House Speaker Paul Ryan, who he succeeded as chair of the Budget Committee. Both of the men have similar attitudes on health policy, including overhauling Medicare and Medicaid. During an interview I did with Price for my 2015 book “Overcoming Obamacare,” we discussed his basic philosophical approach to replacing the law.

Two things should stand out to those trying to understand the thinking of the next HHS Secretary (assuming Senate confirmation).

Price told me unequivocally that reforming the system has to start with fully repealing Obamacare: “It needs to be fully repealed, because the first step out of the gate for Obamacare is a step in the wrong direction and that is for government control over every aspect of health care, so it’s hard to fix the system that they have put in place without ending that premise that government ought to be running and controlling health care.”

When Adam Smith wrote “There’s a lot of ruin in a nation,” he might as well have been prophesying America’s hundred-trillion-dollar (give or take) entitlement crisis — which remains my number one issue.

If Price can successfully gut and replace ObamaCare with something that works, it might give him (and Trump) the necessary clout to tackle the Medicare/Medicaid albatross.

JILL STEIN IS THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING: Dems fear recounts help Trump, hurt rebuilding plans.

The Democrats hope to regain competitiveness in the Rust Belt after suffering surprise losses there fueled by the defection of white working class voters who supported Democratic candidates for decades. They worry that the possibility of elevating Trump’s image through pointless recounts, and giving him in effect another win, is not a good first step.

“We should all want to know the final count of this election, which was closer than many people realize, and identify any voter suppression or irregularities that are subverting our democracy,” Rodell Mollineau, a Democratic operative who previously advised Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, said Monday in an interview.

“However, by waiting two weeks, we have undermined our credibility with the public and will be seen as sore losers,” Mollineau added. “And the last thing Democrats should be doing is giving the American people any reason to feel sympathy for Donald Trump.”

Democrats haven’t exactly been giving the American people any reason feel sympathy for Democrats.

UPDATE:

Yesterday, we found out Wisconsin will charge us $3.5M—an outrageous increase from the initial estimate of $1.1M for #Recount2016.

— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) November 29, 2016

You might consider throwing a couple bucks her way, just to help keep the charade going.

CORN, POPPED: In OPEC Poker Game, Iran and Iraq Call Saudi Arabia’s Bluff.

Together, Iran and Iraq pump more than 8 million barrels a day, up from about 6 million barrels a day from late 2014 when OPEC adopted its current pump-at-will oil policy. Saudi Arabia remains the largest producer at more than 10.5 million barrels a day.

“The reality is that only Saudi Arabia and perhaps the U.A.E. and Kuwait are prepared to make any cuts, and those will be modest and short-lived,” said Bob McNally, founder of consultant Rapidan Group in Washington. “At best, Iran and Iraq will sign for production freezes.”

Perhaps with that in mind, Khalid Al-Falih, the Saudi oil minister, tried over the weekend to change the OPEC narrative. Oil prices will stabilize next year, “and this will happen without an intervention from OPEC,” he said in Dhahran, eastern Saudi Arabia, on Sunday, according to the Saudi newspaper Asharq al-Awsat.

That may be nothing more than wishful thinking:

“If OPEC does not come up with a credible agreement to cut production on Wednesday oil prices will end the year below $40 a barrel and be chasing down $30 a barrel early next year,” said David Hufton, chief executive officer of brokers PVM Group Ltd. in London.

If oil prices do rise, then American frackers will reap much of the benefit — and cap that increase at $50 or $60. If prices fall or merely stay the same, that’s cheap gas for us and slashed budgets for the OPEC nations.

After decades of the Saudis having us over a barrel, it’s nice to be on the other side of the “heads I win, tails you lose” scenario.

HELSINKI SYNDROME. ‘We Learned a Lot from Fidel’: Supporters Defend Castro’s Legacy.

BRING A GUN TO A KNIFE FIGHT? How universities train students, faculty for ‘active shooters’

Attacks like the one at OSU remain relatively rare across the nation. However, campus police chiefs and other officials all said authorities would be remiss if their universities did not continually train and educate faculty, staff and students on what to do — and what not to do — in an active shooter scenario. This week, UC will host to “shelter-in-place” workshops. Just last week, Xavier University Police Chief Joseph Milek trained about 30 staff members in an active shooter seminar.

“Who would have known that less than a week later, we would all be watching it live on TV,” Milek said. “The main goal is to get people thinking in advance. It can be little things, but they are important: How many exits are there to get out of your area? Where are they? We get complacent; but this isn’t rocket science.

“But you do have to put effort into preparing,” he said. “It just pays off.”

It seems unkind to mention that yesterday’s “shooter” was wielding a machete, but I will remind you that here in Colorado we take a somewhat different approach to campus safety.

TURNING SOCIALISM AGAINST ITSELF: The Secret, Dangerous World of Venezuelan Bitcoin Mining.

NIALL FERGUSON: Donald Trump’s New World Order.

Donald Trump therefore enters the Oval Office with an underestimated advantage. Obama’s foreign policy has been a failure, most obviously in the Middle East, where the smoldering ruin that is Syria—not to mention Iraq and Libya—attests to the fundamental naivety of his approach, dating all the way back to the 2009 Cairo speech. The President came to believe he had an ingenious strategy to establish geopolitical balance between Sunni and Shi’a. But by treating America’s Arab friends with open disdain, while cutting a nuclear deal with Iran that has left Tehran free to wage proxy wars across the region, Obama has achieved not peace but a fractal geometry of conflict and a frightening, possibly nuclear, arms race. At the same time, he has allowed Russia to become a major player in the Middle East for the first time since Kissinger squeezed the Soviets out of Egypt in the 1972-79 period. The death toll in the Syrian war now approaches half a million; who knows how much higher it will rise between now and Inauguration Day?

Meanwhile, global terrorism has surged under Obama. Of the past 16 years, the worst year for terrorism was 2014, with 93 countries experiencing an attack and 32,765 people killed. 2015 was the second worst, with 29,376 deaths. Last year, four radical Islamic groups were responsible for 74 per cent of all deaths from terrorism: ISIS, Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. In this context, the President’s claims to be succeeding against what he euphemistically calls “violent extremism” are absurd. Much opprobrium has been heaped on Donald Trump in the course of the past year. But there was much that was true in his underreported August 15 foreign policy speech on the subject of Islamic extremism and the failure of the Obama Administration to defeat it.

The “Obama Doctrine” has failed in Europe, too, where English voters opted to leave the EU in defiance of the President’s threats, and where the German leadership he recently praised has delivered, first, an unnecessarily protracted financial crisis in the European periphery and, second, a disastrous influx to the core of migrants, some but not all of them refugees from a region that Europe had intervened in just enough to exacerbate its instability.

Take the time to read the whole thing.

Obama was elected in no small part because he was the “UnBush.” That and his near-personality cult with leftists around the world gave him something approaching carte blanche to pursue a naive (at best) and wildly destructive (almost everywhere) foreign policy. If he backs down from his silly campaign promises to shake down NATO, then as the UnObama, Trump may prove — even to his harshest critics in Europe and elsewhere — to be welcome and stabilizing change agent.

RED LINE: Assad, allies aim to seize all Aleppo before Trump takes power.

Note to Reuters: In this country, we call it “taking the oath of office” not “taking power.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Fidel Castro Bet On The Wrong Horse And Died A Failure.

On the other hand, if Castro’s goal was to live a long life enriching himself at the expense of his brutalized people while setting up his family as a North Korean-style communist royalty, then he succeeded admirably.

PERSONNEL IS POLICY: Tom Price, Obamacare Critic, Is Said to Be Trump’s Choice for Health Secretary.

If President-elect Donald J. Trump wanted a cabinet secretary who could help him dismantle and replace President Obama’s health care law, he could not have found anyone more prepared than Representative Tom Price, who has been studying how to accomplish that goal for more than six years.

Mr. Price, an orthopedic surgeon who represents many of the northern suburbs of Atlanta, speaks with the self-assurance of a doctor about to perform another joint-replacement procedure. He knows the task and will proceed with brisk efficiency.

Mr. Trump has picked Mr. Price, a six-term Republican congressman, to be secretary of health and human services, Mr. Trump’s transition team announced Tuesday morning.

Give that man a giant scalpel.

CHANGE: An Ayn Rand-Loving Banker Huddles With Donald Trump.

While less known than his peers at big banks, Mr. [John A.] Allison ranks as one of the most legendary bank CEOs in recent history, said Christopher Marinac, director of research at FIG Partners LLC. “He’s head of the class,” said Mr. Marinac. “A lot of folks didn’t understand the conservatism of BB&T until the crisis, but they appreciated it after.”

Mr. Allison’s worldview was shaped when he was a college student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and stumbled across a collection of essays by Ms. Rand.

Mr. Allison joined BB&T out of college in 1971 and became CEO in 1989. As CEO, he penned a 30-page handbook, “The BB&T Philosophy,” to give to employees on their first day of work. The first maxim was reality. “The existence of the law of gravity does not mean men cannot create an airplane,” he wrote. “However, an airplane must be created within the context of the law of gravity. At BB&T, we believe in being ‘reality grounded.’”

In 2006, Mr. Allison made headlines when he declined to lend money for commercial projects on private land seized by eminent domain—a government practice that Mr. Allison believed was an affront to individuals’ property rights.

And this:

Mr. Allison instilled a conservative lending culture. BB&T avoided negative-amortizing loans and complicated structured products that Mr. Allison called “esoteric” and “illogical.”

That meant BB&T was often overshadowed by North Carolina rival Wachovia Corp., whose risky mortgage loans fueled huge growth before the crisis—only to then cause its downfall. That bank was purchased during the height of the crisis by Wells Fargo & Co.

Seeking Alpha reports Allison might be under consideration for Treasury, which seems like a great fit for his talents.

More like him, please.

NOW I HAVE AN AR-15, HO HO HO: Gun Sales Hit Record High on Black Friday 2016.

CASTRO’S LAST LAUGH: Trudeau’s turn from cool to laughing stock.

Trudeau made himself synonymous with Canada. He made Canada cool again. It was fun while it lasted.

By the early hours of Saturday morning, Havana time, Trudeau was an international laughingstock. Canada’s “brand,” so carefully constructed in Vogue photo essays and Economist magazine cover features, seemed to suddenly implode into a bonspiel of the vanities, with humiliating headlines streaming from the Washington Post to the Guardian, and from Huffington Post to USA Today.

It was Trudeau’s maudlin panegyric on the death of Fidel Castro that kicked it off, and there is a strangely operatic quality to the sequence of events that brings us to this juncture. When Trudeau made his public debut in fashionable society 16 years ago, with his “Je t’aime, papa!” encomium at the gala funeral of his father in Montreal, Fidel Castro himself was there among the celebrities, as an honorary pallbearer, lending a kind of radical frisson to the event. Now it’s all come full circle.

To be fair to Trudeau, he’s only the most recent in a long line of Western leaders who get teh feelz for Castro.

HEH: Cuban Army Honors Fidel Castro With 21-Gun Firing Squad.

YEP, THIS IS CNN ALL RIGHT: Christiane Amanpour equates climate ‘deniers’ with proponents of ‘ethnic cleansing and genocide’

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What does a £15,000 whisky taste like?

Pretty good, I’d hope.

SEEMS LEGIT: Florida man hiding in pond tells deputies their suspect ‘went that way’

Florida Man was 2016 before it was cool.

UH-HUH. Rosie O’Donnell: ‘No ill will’ in suggesting 10-year-old Barron Trump has autism.

2016, MAN: A Japanese Skating Rink Froze 5,000 Dead Fish in the Ice. People Were Not Happy.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: After Trump Victory, Minorities Flock to Gun Stores.

According to NBC News, minorities are heading to the gun stores to arm up following the victory of Donald Trump in the presidential election.

After Donald Trump’s win, Yolanda Scott is upgrading the crowbar she keeps in her purse to a small-caliber pistol.

Scott, an African-American, is one of many minorities who have been flocking to gun stores to protect themselves, afraid Trump’s victory will incite more hate crimes.

“You feel that racists now feel like they can attack us just because the president is doing it,” Earl Curtis, the owner of Blue Ridge Arsenal in Chantilly, Virginia, told NBC News.

I hope and suspect we’ll see a decrease in racially motivated attacks, now that the Race Agitator-in-Chief is on his way out. But even if we don’t, there’s still reason to applaud any American for exercising their constitutionally recognized right to self-defense.

Also in the plus column: Watching gun-grabbers twist themselves into knots explaining why this time is different.