OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA: Obama Expands War With Al Qaeda to Include Shabab in Somalia.

I’m old enough to remember when Democrats thought it was illegal to bomb countries without going first to Congress.

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: Hard times for the Sanctimonious White Lady Party.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are becoming more ideological, or at least more openly and self-consciously ideological, as the party’s progressivism becomes more and more a catechism. This has the effect of making the Democratic party less democratic. American progressives have a long and genuine commitment to mass democracy, having supported not only various expansions of the franchise but also many instruments of direct democracy such as the ballot initiative, but they also have a long and genuine commitment to frustrating democracy when it gets in the way of the progressive agenda, which is why they have spent the better part of a century working to politicize the courts, the bureaucracies, and the non-governmental institutions they control in order to ensure they get their way even when they lose at the ballot box. Democrats did not pay much attention when they started suffering losses at the state level, because they were working against federalism and toward a unitary national government controlled from Washington. And they did not fight as hard as they might to recover from their losses in Congress while Barack Obama sat in the White House, obstructing Republican legislative initiatives and attempting to govern through executive fiat — an innovation that the Democrats surely are about to regret in the direst way.

For the moment, the stylistic convergence — the Republicans becoming a little more like the selfish-coalition Democratic party, and the Democrats becoming a little more like the ideological Republican party — works to the Republicans’ advantage, though there is no reason to believe that always will be the case. The GOP had a very good run of it as a highly ideological enterprise.

The GOP shunned ideological candidates in the last three presidential elections, but only won when they nominated a candidate able to peel off one of the segments of the Obama coalition. It remains to be seen what the sometimes/sometimes-not conservative party does with this expanded coalition — if it proves effective enough to dial back the progressive ratchet of the last eight years, or if it succumbs to Democrat-style infighting.

I suspect we’ll see enough of the former to make real progress, and enough of the latter to worry us every step of the way.

NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS: Fashion Designer, Son of Sex Pistols Manager Burn $8M+ in Punk Memorabilia.

HERE’S SOME MORE OF THAT OBAMA LEGACY FOR YOU: Jobless by choice — or pain?

The work ethic is such a central part of the American character that it’s hard to imagine it fading. But that’s what seems to be happening in one important part of the labor force. Among men 25 to 54 — so-called prime-age male workers — about 1 in 8 are dropouts. They don’t have a job and, unlike the officially unemployed, aren’t looking for one. They number about 7 million.

Just what role, if any, these nonworking men played in Donald Trump’s election is unclear. What’s not unclear is that these dropouts, after being ignored for years, have suddenly become a hot topic of scholarly study and political debate. There’s been a sea change. In the mid-1960s, only 1 in 29 prime-age male workers was a dropout. The explosion of dropouts strikes many observers as dire.

The “detachment of so many adult American men from the reality and routines of regular paid labor . . . can only result in lower living standards, greater economic disparities, and slower economic growth,” writes Nicholas Eberstadt of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “It is also a social crisis — and . . . a moral crisis. The growing incapability of grown men to function as breadwinners cannot help but undermine the American family.”

There’s also the permanent erosion of skills and productivity, which would otherwise be helping the economy to grow and reducing the strain on social services.

YEP, THIS IS CNN, ALL RIGHT: CNN mocked over glaring error in Fidel Castro obituary story.

LIVE FEED: Ohio State Campus Shooting.

GENERALISSIMO FIDEL CASTRO IS STILL DEAD: Castro Dead – Good Time to Talk About “Fake News”

“Journalists” are writing about “fake news” as if “bullshit” was something new.

If you don’t know the name “Herbert Matthews,” but you think you know anything about Fidel Castro, you don’t know shit. Matthews was the master of journalistic fiction, and he and the New York Times are why you even know Castro’s name.

Matthews covered the Italian invasion of Ethiopia for the New York Times. He didn’t even try and hide his bias in favor of the Italian Fascists. He wrote, “[i]f you start from the premise that a lot of rascals are having a fight, it is not unnatural to want to see the victory of the rascal you like, and I liked the Italians during that scrimmage more than I did the British or the Abyssinians.” He admitted that whichever side was “right” was of no interest to him. For throwing in with Mussolini, he became known as a “fascist.”

His next posting was in Spain, covering the Spanish Civil War. He arrived still somewhat Right-Wing, sympathizing with Franco’s forces over the Republicans. However, somewhere along the way he became friends with Hemingway, and switched polarities. Hemingway based Robert Jordan, the main character in For Whom the Bell Tolls, on Matthews. From then on, he was considered to be a dear friend of the Left.

Read the whole thing.

THE INTERNET OF THINGS: SF Transit Hacker Demands $73K.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Trump and Enforcement of the Immigration Laws.

Trump emissaries assert that the president-elect will step up border enforcement and prioritize the deportation of criminal aliens – i.e., those who’ve committed serious and/or repetitious state and federal crimes, not just immigration-law violations. Trump detractors, including Democratic mayors of major cities, respond with indignant vows to protect “undocumented” members of their communities who are living peaceful, essentially law-abiding lives.

If you’re thinking the Democratic response is not, well, responsive, you’re onto the game. The immigrants they make a grand show of protecting are exactly the people not being targeted by the Trump camp’s deportation plans. If Democrats oppose Trump on his own terms, they risk being revealed as champions of criminals preying on Americans. So the Left is going demagogue – turning a “right versus wrong” issue into “us versus them.”

Isn’t that always the case?

In either case, do read the whole thing.

MANNERS: Outrage as Prince Harry is forced to take part in an unplanned minute’s silence for ‘murderous’ Cuban dictator Fidel Castro during his trip to the Caribbean island of St Vincent.

Prince Harry was left in an awkward position when he was asked to take part in a moment’s silence after the death of Fidel Castro – despite some describing the Cuban leader as a ‘murderous dictator’.

The silence was observed when the prince attended a drinks reception on the island of St Vincent, during his Caribbean tour.

He had been at the reception as the guest of honour to present Duke of Edinburgh awards to young people.

But the country’s governor general Sir Frederick Ballantyne, who was hosting the event, asked his guests to mark the death of the international figure.

A source close to Harry said that the silence was not planned in advance and was called for by the Governor General.

Tory MP Alec Shelbrooke told MailOnline that forcing Prince Harry to join the minute’s silence was ‘very unfair’ and the government should make clear it was unacceptable.

‘Castro was a murderous dictator. He is dead, and good riddance,’ he said.

The politicalization of everything, up to and including a Caribbean cocktail party, continues apace.

IT’S ALL RELATIVE: Scientists to test theory about light that could completely change our view of the universe and prove Einstein wrong.

If the new theory is right and the speed of light was higher just after the Big Bang, the spectral index will have a very precise figure – 0.96478, according to a new study.

Current estimates of the spectral index are already close to this, at around 0.968 with some margin for error.

Lead scientist Professor Joao Magueijo, from Imperial College London, said: “The theory, which we first proposed in the late-1990s, has now reached a maturity point – it has produced a testable prediction. If observations in the near future do find this number to be accurate, it could lead to a modification of Einstein’s theory of gravity.

“The idea that the speed of light could be variable was radical when first proposed, but with a numerical prediction, it becomes something physicists can actually test. If true, it would mean that the laws of nature were not always the same as they are today.”

Maybe, like “Slower Traffic Keep Right,” the laws of nature are mere suggestions.

TANTRUMS SHOULD NEVER BE TOLERATED. Dakota Pipeline: Army Corps orders protesters out.

Protesters fighting pipeline construction must vacate property near the Cannonball River in North Dakota — the location of a large campsite for demonstrators — by December 5 or face arrest, the Army Corps of Engineers said Friday.

“This decision is necessary to protect the general public from the violent confrontation between protestors and law enforcement officials that have occurred in this area, and to prevent death, illness, or serious injury to inhabitants of encampments due to the harsh North Dakota winter conditions,” Col. John Henderson of the Corps said in a letter to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe leader.

On Sunday, the Corps issued a new statement saying it wants a “peaceful and orderly transition to a safer location, and has no plans for forcible removal.”

The “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” doesn’t include a right to violence, or to obstruct the lawful actions of others.

FASTER, PLEASE: Iraqi forces say 1,000 Islamic State fighters killed in Mosul.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Democrats, Not Trump, Racialize Our Politics.

Heather Mac Donald:

The most absurd Democratic meme to emerge from the party’s ballot-box defeat is the claim that it is Donald Trump, rather than Democrats, who engages in “aggressive, racialized discourse,” in the words of a Los Angeles Times op-ed. By contrast, President Barack Obama sought a “post-racial, bridge-building society,” according to New York Times reporter Peter Baker. Obama’s post-racial efforts have now “given way to an angry, jeering, us-against-them nation,” writes Baker, in a front-page “news” story.

Tell that valedictory for “post-racial bridge-building” to police officers, who have been living through two years of racialized hatred directed at them in the streets, to the applause of many Democratic politicians. Black Lives Matter rhetoric consists of slogans like: “CPD [Chicago Police Department] KKK, how many children did you kill today?” “Fuck the police,” and “Racist, killer cops.” Officers have been assassinated by Black Lives Matter-inspired killers who set out to kill whites in general and white police officers in particular. Gun murders of law enforcement officers are up 67 percent this year through November 23, following five ambushes and attacks over the November 18 weekend that left a San Antonio police officer and a U.S. marshall dead. A few days before those weekend shootings, anarchist wannabes in Austin led a counting chant based on the template: “What’s better than X dead cops? X + 1 Dead Cops.”

President Obama welcomed Black Lives Matter activists several times to the White House. He racialized the entire criminal-justice system, repeatedly accusing it of discriminating, often lethally, against blacks. At the memorial service for five Dallas police officers gunned down in July 2016, Obama declared that black parents were right to fear that “something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door”—that the child will be shot by a cop simply for being “stupid.”

OBLIGATORY:

My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing.

— jon gabriel (@exjon) November 24, 2014

MAD DUCK: Federal agencies push ‘midnight’ rule-making flurry under Obama.

Despite the likelihood that US President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress would kill any controversial late-in-the-game moves by Mr. Obama, federal agencies under the Democratic president are pushing for a flurry of so-called “midnight” regulations on everything from the environment to transportation and financial marketplaces.

The White House was reviewing as many as 98 final regulations, as of Nov. 15, that could be implemented before Mr. Trump takes office, including 17 with an estimated annual economic impact of $100 million or more, Politico reported. But lawmakers have warned agency heads to avoid rushing to finalize rules or regulations before Obama leaves office.

“Should you ignore this counsel, please be aware that we will work with our colleagues to ensure that Congress scrutinizes your actions – and, if appropriate, overturns them,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R) of California, wrote in a letter last week.

Several of the new rules slated for installation before Trump assumes office include environmental protections that critics argue hamper business interests and economic potential.

Perhaps President Trump should call some of these agency heads into the Oval Office in January, and ask them to justify their budgets.

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING LEGACY: Goodbye to Barack Obama’s world.

Whatever precise form Mr Trump’s administration takes, we know this: Mr Obama’s legacy will be purged. In many cases all it will take is the stroke of Mr Trump’s pen.

The Obama erasure will go far deeper than undoing domestic laws, or foreign deals. Mr Trump will repeal Obamacare, or alter it beyond recognition. He will “keep an open mind” about whether to pull the US out of the Paris agreement on climate change and quite probably blow up the US-Iran nuclear deal. These acts would undo Mr Obama’s most visible achievements. Less obvious ones, such as the ban on Arctic drilling and enhanced interrogation techniques and the intention of closing Guantánamo Bay (never completed) will also be consigned to the dustbin. It will be as if Mr Obama was never here.

FLASHBACK: Clinton, Obama spar over Reagan.

Both Clinton and her husband have taken Obama to task for telling the Reno (Nevada) Gazette-Journal: “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. He tapped into what people were already feeling, which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want, you know, a return to that sense of dynamism and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

Obama will leave the White House with a resumé almost as thin as the one he came in with.

VOX’S TAKE IS CUTE, HOWEVER: Barack Obama is officially one of the most consequential presidents in American history.

“A FRIEND OF AFRICA:” Africa is not conflicted about Fidel Castro’s legacy.

In Castro, nonetheless, African activists found a leader willing to share flaming rhetoric as well as practical guidance to freedom at a time when Africans had few political allies. Those liberation leaders became the founding fathers of modern Africa, and they never forgot Cuba’s help.

In grainy black and white images, Castro is seen smiling with Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Angola’s Augustinho Neto and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere. Castro’s influence can be seen in Mozambican independence leader Samora Machel’s army fatigues and vociferous speeches. Cuba also became home to young African activists in exile.

In his own country, and to many in the West, Castro’s regime was a repressive, single-minded pursuit of a communist revolution, no matter the human cost, even while acknowledging his dynamic impact on the course of history over the last six decades. Many Africans, however, look to his leadership as one that sought equality and development, and they joined Castro in blaming sanctions for Cuba’s difficulties.

Continued Castro-worship and the sad, post-colonial condition of much of Africa is no coincidence.

THEY ALL DESERVE EACH OTHER: How Iran, Russia Could Derail Oil-Production Deal.

Iran and Russia have emerged as potentially deal-breaking obstacles to cuts in global oil production as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries engages in a last-minute blitz of diplomacy ahead of a meeting on Wednesday.

OPEC agreed in September to trim production to reduce a global oversupply of oil but left the details of who cuts how much to Wednesday’s meeting in Vienna. The gathering comes two years after OPEC decided to step aside and let prices fall, as the market plummeted to historic lows that ushered in a period of cheap prices for consumers.

Russia, which isn’t part of OPEC, said last week it was willing to hold its production steady and forego output increases next year but stopped short of agreeing to cut its output, which is the highest of any country. Iran said on Saturday it was negotiating an exemption from cutting its output, the third-highest in the 14-nation OPEC cartel behind Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of kleptocratic petrostates.

LET’S GO GET CARNITAS AND NOT PAY: Man robs Chipotle, gets only a burrito, Iowa police say.

A man entered the restaurant at about 6:30 p.m. CT Wednesday in suburban Des Moines. He got in line and ordered a burrito, a female cashier told police.

When the man approached the cash register, he said he had a gun in his sweatshirt, opened a bag and demanded the cashier put money in it, according to the report.

The cashier told police she got scared and ran into the back room without giving the suspect any money. The man then grabbed his bagged burrito and ran out the front door, police said.

(Classical reference in the headline.)

WELL, THIS IS STILL 2016, YOU KNOW: Domino’s training reindeer to deliver pizzas in Japan.

GOOD GIRL: Dogs Have Better Memory Than You Realize.

For the episodic memory study, the researchers trained 17 dogs to copy human actions through the “Do as I Do” method. Next step, the dogs were taught to lie down purposefully after the watching an action performed by a person. After the dogs learned to do this, they were suddenly given a “Do It” command without any prior warning.

Surprisingly the dogs were able to imitate the action even though they weren’t alerted beforehand to remember and repeat it.

The dogs were able to recall the action performed by the person and repeat it when they were asked to do so. It is therefore clear that the dogs exhibit episodic-like memory.

The researchers tested the dogs after one minute first, then after an hour. They discovered that the dogs were able to do the actions after both short and long stretches of time. However, their memories declined more with time.

I can’t think of a single one of my domestic routines that my dogs don’t remember at least as well as I do.

THIS IS CNN? CNN accidentally broadcast 30 minutes of hardcore porn last night.

Actually, just one CNN provider in Boston:

Yesterday night at 11PM EST, some viewers getting ready for a brand new episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown on CNN were surprised to see that scheduled programming had been replaced by 30 minutes of adult entertainment.

The mess-up only affected people in Boston, as CNN’s broadcasting there is provided by RCN, a local television provider. Even though the news channel was sending through the right video signal, RCN managed to mess it up and provide viewers with something quite different.

Parts unknown, indeed.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): To be honest, “Wolf Blitzer” always sounded like a porn name.

CUE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN: Oil Slides As Saudis Refuse To Attend Non-OPEC Producers Meeting.

HEALTH: Scientists Believe They Finally Have The Cure For The Common Cold.

Just make the NyQuil D available again without a high-level security clearance and we’ll be fine.

IT’S A TRAP! Romney must apologize to Trump if he wants to be his secretary of state.