JOURNALISM: Sports Illustrated Caught Using AI Generated Articles Written by Fake Authors.

CHANGE: Vietnam upgrades ties with Japan to highest level.” The move underlined Vietnam’s increasingly strategic role as an important link in global supply chains amid trade tension between China and the West, which is helping to bring foreign investment to the southeast Asian country as some companies relocate operations from China.”

BUREAUCRACY: U.S. Doctor Stripped of Citizenship for a Ridiculous Reason.

CHANGE: Volkswagen says its core VW brand is ‘no longer competitive’ financially.

“With many of our pre-existing structures, processes and high costs, we are no longer competitive as the Volkswagen brand,” Thomas Schaefer told staff during a meeting at the German carmaker’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, according to a post on the company’s intranet site seen by Reuters.’

The company has been working to improve the financial performance its globally popular namesake car brand, a company spokesperson said. The process is especially important as the VW Group, the parent company, shifts to production of more electric cars.

I hate to break this to you, Mr. Schaefer, but going all-in on EVs is not going to make Volkswagen more competitive.

On the plus side, my best friend recently bought VW’s all-new Golf R — his second — and it’s well made, comfortable, has all the gizmos, and is a kick in the pants to drive. It’s also reasonably priced — if you can get one at sticker price, which has become impossible.

Maybe VW could build a few more gas-burners that people will pay a big markup for.

EASIER SAID THAN DONE — BUT IT MUST BE DONE: Professor Calls for Reform of ‘Failing’ Woke Education System.

BLUE ON BLUE: Kamala Harris v. Gavin Newsom: The Coming Democratic Civil War.

When Biden named Harris his running mate, he conferred on her heir-apparent status. The pick made sense. VP nominees are mostly about pulling together party divisions or offsetting the nominee’s weaknesses. As an old, white male Catholic, Biden running with a minority female checked some important identity boxes. And, in 2020 with a campaign hobbled due to covid restrictions, Harris did just fine. The “not Trump” campaign worked.

However, given an opportunity to establish herself as the next Democratic hope, Harris has proven rather maladroit. Something about her isn’t quite right. Her speeches are mediocre, with poorly thought-out ad libs. Her awkwardness with voters is positively Hillary Clintonesque. After spending her life in the progressive hothouse of California, Harris has shown little ability to build appeal in the other more centrist 49 states. Given the unpleasant portfolio of illegal immigration early in the administration, she failed to distinguish herself. If she has any real policy responsibility today, it’s not apparent.

But what must rankle Harris the most and speaks to how badly she must be viewed in Democratic power corridors is the utter lack of interest in her replacing Biden on the ticket. Joe Biden’s numbers are bad, very bad. His approval has been under water for the past two years. He is running behind Trump on multiple ballot test polls — despite Trump’s myriad problems. The double-minority woman Harris replacing Biden should be the talk of the town. But it isn’t.

As he almost always does, Biden chose poorly with Harris. In fact, aside from Stacy Abrams, it’s difficult to imagine a worse Veep pick after Biden promised to choose a woman of color.

But if the Democrat-Media Complex manages to pull that hapless pair over the finish line just one more time, President Kamala Harris (shudder) will almost certainly fill out part or even most of Biden’s second term.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Want to Know How to Support Israel? This Palestinian Group Has the Shopping List for You! “Apparently, buying anything from Kit Kats to Le Labo perfumes to Vaseline (and wouldn’t that make for a weird weekend) helps ‘Israel killing Muslim children with your money.'”

SAD: Liberals Once Embraced Interracial Marriages Like Mine. What Changed?

There were not a lot of interracial couples in those years, and even fewer from backgrounds as disparate as ours: Sonya, the black woman from inner-city Houston; me, the white guy from an Iowa farm. Like our future children, Barack Obama was the child of vastly different experiences—a Kenyan father and a white mother born in Kansas. I told Sonya that night that our kids will see Barack Obama and grow up with a cultural worldview similar to his own.

We held hands at the promise of it all. America, progressing.

I remember the summer of 2020, too. By then, our daughter, Harper, was 11, and our twin boys, Marshall and Walker, were nine, and we didn’t know what to make of America’s progress.

It had started to harden into something ugly. Progressivism had abandoned its open-mindedness and color blindness and insisted on the unavoidability—the supremacy—of color. According to the new dogma, only black people could understand black people.

The black NYU students who demanded they be housed in segregated dorms. The POC Berkeley students whose off-campus housing barred white people from entering. The Boston University professor and best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” And, closer to home, the white mother in our neighborhood, roughly my age, who approached me at a backyard barbecue and whispered, “I don’t know how you can raise black children right now.”

It was suddenly as though, because of my skin tone, I no longer had the right to parent my own kids.

To be fair, progressives don’t want anybody raising their own children.

Also, Obama’s racial healing BS was a con that set back race relations by decades.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Hamas Lovers Want to Ruin Christmas Now. “This was all happening in very blue places, but how long before this behavior goes nationwide? As I’ve written a few times, the public education indoctrination mill has been quite successful, and those schools are everywhere. If there is anything that we have learned since 2020, it’s that we should probably expect the worst.”

PRE-DISCREDITING THE 2024 ELECTION RESULTS IN CASE THEY LOSE: Conservative judges have come for what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.

NAH, IT’S WORSE: Biden’s Foreign Incompetency Is a Jimmy Carter Replay

BIDENOMICS: The High Price of Gaslighting.

This interpretation of the CPI report is profoundly dishonest. The 3.2 percent inflation rate is nearly three times the 1.2 percent rate that Biden inherited. It is down “65 percent” only because the Biden’s administration let it skyrocket to 9.1 percent before attempting to get it under control. That gas is “below $3.40” hardly compares well to the national average of $2.11 that prevailed when Biden was elected. As to wages, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that average hourly earnings (adjusted for inflation) for all employees stood at $11.05 in October, down from $11.10 in March of 2020, when the lockdown lunacy began. (READ MORE from David Catron: Trump Is Winning Ballot Access Cases)

There are just too many discrepancies between the President’s claims and the voter’s experience with the real world economy. According to the RealClearPolitics average, only 38.1 percent approve of his economic stewardship. Even worse, according to the NYT/Siena poll, swing state voters trust Trump over Biden on the economy by wide margins. Any president running for reelection must convince voters they’re better off than four years earlier. Biden isn’t making the sale. This is not merely politically perilous for him, it is a source of perplexity for the corporate media.

Their confusion stems from not being able to sell “The Guy Who Has Actually Had To Govern” today as well as they were able to sell him as “Not Trump” four years ago.

Related: How Will They Game the Election This Time?

CHANGE? Reports of Disney’s Death Are (Not?) an Exaggeration. “As Disney’s two-time CEO Bob Iger prepares to host the company’s annual town hall on Tuesday to provide ‘hints or guidance for what the next phase of ‘building’ will bring after the problem-solving phase,’ it’s time to ask if Iger is able “to ‘quiet things down’ after years of culture wars.'”

ICYMI: A Dirty Little Secret About Drudge.

THIS IS A FAILURE I WOULD HAVE LOVED AS A KID BUT JUST LEARNED ABOUT TODAY: Marty Krofft and Atlanta’s Colossal Failure. “In May 1976, the Kroffts opened The World of Sid and Marty Krofft, an indoor amusement park inside the Omni International Complex. It was an ambitious opening, with national fanfare, including a broadcast on the ‘Krofft Supershow’ featuring the park.”

ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH: Colorado ranks 17th in nation with $6.4K per capita in state, local taxes.

We’d be in even worse shape without the Taxpayers Bill of Rights (TABOR) — which Democrats in Denver continue chipping away at.

ELECTIONS DON’T RIG THEMSELVES, YOU KNOW: What Will Be the COVID of 2024?

FASTER, PLEASE: Groundbreaking biomaterial can regenerate bone and teeth, study finds. “The key breakthrough lies in the role of cobalt in osteoblast differentiation, a process critical to bone formation. Professor Willian Fernando Zambuzzi, a biochemist at IBB-UNESP and the senior author of the article, elaborated on their discovery, stating, ‘For the first time, our data produced sufficient evidence based on hypoxia [low levels of oxygen in tissue] that we may have a novel biomimetic material with the potential to regenerate bone tissue.'”

DON’T GET COCKY: Biden Camp and Dem Donors Appear to Give Up on Key 2024 Swing State.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Saturday’s November snowfall was Topeka’s heaviest in 135 years. How much snow fell here?

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: From the Shoulders of Giants: The World Has had Enough of Klaus F***ing Schwab.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER, THEN UNITE AND RULE: Lonely on campus: Students are siloed, silenced. “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ideology has made it harder for students to make friends with those who share similar interests but different ‘identities,’ he writes. They’re encouraged to focus on their differences, segregate themselves and see unintentional slights as ‘microaggressions.'”

RABBI MICHAEL BARCLAY: The Insidious Reason Why Hamas Is Releasing Hostages.

HMM: Elon Musk warns ‘something scared’ OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever as CEO Sam Altman’s return fails to answer key questions.

Elon Musk played a big role in persuading Ilya Sutskever to join OpenAI as chief scientist in 2015. Now the Tesla CEO wants to know what he saw there that scared him so much.

Sutskever, whom Musk recently described as a “good human” with a “good heart”—and the “linchpin for OpenAI being successful”—served on the OpenAI board that fired CEO Sam Altman two Fridays ago; indeed, Sutskever informed Altman of his dismissal. Since then, however, the board has been revamped and Altman reinstated, with investors led by Microsoft pushing for the changes.

Sutskever himself backtracked on Monday, writing on X, “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI.”

But Musk and other tech elites—including ones who mocked the board for firing Altman—are still curious about what Sutskever saw.

Late on Thursday, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who has ridiculed “doomers” who fear AI’s threat to humanity, posted to X, “Seriously though — what did Ilya see?” Musk replied a few hours later, “Yeah! Something scared Ilya enough to want to fire Sam. What was it?”

That remains a mystery. The board gave only vague reasons for firing Altman. Not much has been revealed since.

I suppose we’ll learn what really happened when and if Skynet decides to tell us.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Morning Briefing: About That ‘Migrant’ Thing. “We don’t need to resurrect Freud and Jung to figure out why Democrats love to cast a soft glow around criminal activity.”