IN THE MAIL: From Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity.

Plus, today only at Amazon: 51% Off Select H&R Block Tax Software.

And, also today only: Up to 30% off Gaiam Balance Ball Chairs.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 968.

SEVEN TECH TRENDS TO WATCH IN 2016.

TAKE THAT, BITTER CLINGERS: Obama’s Climate Deal Leaves Blue-Collar, Rural Voters Out in the Cold.

HEY, HILLARY, HOW’S THAT “RESET” BUTTON WORKING OUT FOR YOU? Smart Diplomacy: For 1st Time, Putin Officially Names the U.S. as a Threat. If only it were true.
. .

Related: Moscow’s current tone is “reminiscent of Soviet days”; If anyone is stuck in the Cold War mentality, it is the Russians. Hey, Barack, the 1980s called — they want to know if we’d like to borrow their President.

OBAMA IS PRESIDENT, AND DEATH RATES ALWAYS GO UP UNDER SOCIALISM: America’s Self-Destructive Whites:

Why is Middle America killing itself? The fact itself is probably the most important social science finding in years. It is already reshaping American politics. The Post’s Jeff Guo notes that the people who make up this cohort are “largely responsible for Donald Trump’s lead in the race for the Republican nomination for president.” The key question is why, and exploring it provides answers that suggest that the rage dominating U.S. politics will only get worse.

For decades, people in rich countries have lived longer. But in a well-known paper, economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case found that over the past 15 years, one group — middle-age whites in the United States — constitutes an alarming trend. They are dying in increasing numbers. And things look much worse for those with just a high school diploma or less. There are concerns about the calculations, but even a leading critic of the paper has acknowledged that, however measured, “the change compared to other countries and groups is huge.”

The main causes of death are as striking as the fact itself: suicide, alcoholism, and overdoses of prescription and illegal drugs. “People seem to be killing themselves, slowly or quickly,” Deaton told me. These circumstances are usually caused by stress, depression and despair.

Fundamentally transformed.

UPDATE: Psychologists say that depression is anger turned inward. What happens if it turns outward?

POLITICIZING THE ROSE BOWL GAME: “Meet the man behind the ‘Trump is disgusting’ skywriting,” according to CBS:

A millionaire real estate developer — who also happens to be a donor to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign – is behind the aerial messages at the Rose Bowl calling GOP front-runner Donald Trump “disgusting” and he says that there’s more to come. Much more.

“There’s no place for him,” said Stan Pate, from Alabama. “He needs to go back to one of his tall towers and build buildings and whatever else he does. He’s a despicable man.”

“I want to see America wake up and say this is not what we expect,” he added.

Those hosting a tailgate party at the Rose Bowl on New Years Day might have been surprised to look up to the sky and see messages blasting Trump. Multiple planes spewed cloud-like messages castigating the GOP front-runner, such as “AMERICA IS GREAT, TRUMP IS DISGUSTING. ANYBODY BUT TRUMP.” The messages quickly went viral on social media and created a buzz for those attending the 127th Rose Parade, the annual ritual on New Year’s Day in Pasadena, California.

The NFL has become far too politicized over the last decade. I guess it’s time to expect the same from college football as well, as yet another formerly politics-free zone is violated — there aren’t many of those left at all these days, it seems.

(Via American Power.)

FROM TIGERHAWK, predictions for 2016. #2 already failed to pan out. . . .

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Overwhelmed by ‘Migrants,’ Sweden Throws in the Towel as Europe Faces ‘General, Permanent Terror Threat.’

ANALYSIS: TRUE. On Guns, The Democrats Aren’t Serious.

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ROGER SIMON ON 2016, THE YEAR OF THE CHINESE CURSE:

It’s not just because I have been reading the English translation of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission  that I sense we are heading for some sort of apocalypse in 2016.  The novel, ironically published in its original French the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre (7 January 2015),  all too realistically describes an election and near civil war in France in 2022, ending in a Muslim takeover of the state (through an alliance with the left).  Not even a year after its publication, and the more recent events in Paris and San Bernardino, this riveting book seems, if anything, a bit tardy in its time frame.

As the famous supposedly-Chinese curse goes:  ”May you live in interesting times.” (Yes, I know the curse is apocryphal and about as Chinese as a fortune cookie, but it makes the point.)

In 2016, no matter what happens, it is my suspicion that we will all be cursed as never in our lifetimes — and I am not young.   We will be yearning for a little boredom or, as the Chinese really do say, ”Better to be a dog in a peaceful time, than to be a human in a chaotic (warring) period.”

Others have made specific predictions.  That is not my purpose here.  I’m not good at prognostications anyway. (We will be arguing between A and B and it will turn out to be C.) I only want to examine the zeitgeist going into 2016, why it will be, to adopt yet another cliché, a year of living dangerously.

Read the whole thing.

Earlier: “When You Believe In Nothing, Islam Becomes Something — One of France’s best known writers weaves a believably dystopian tale where cultural passivity leads to Islamic dominance in the heart of Europe.”

ANALYSIS TRUE: Former Socialist Justice Warrior explains how SJW “communities thrive on self-loathing disguised as elitism.”

See also: Dunham, Lena — or in her case, is it the other way around?

(Via Ace.)

MICHAEL BARONE: Obama Reshapes Presidential Politics — But Maybe Not to Democrats’ Benefit.

One thing that’s striking about the presidential race, which, finally, officially begins soon, is how much the race has been shaped by Barack Obama. The course of the contests for both the Republican and the Democratic nominations would be inconceivable absent the course of the Obama presidency.

This is most apparent in the phenomenon that goes by the name of Donald Trump. Trump’s gratuitous insults of rivals reflect the coarseness of Obama’s nonstop insults of Republicans and anyone who does not share his views and priorities. Despite his pre-presidential promises of nonpartisanship, Obama has been the most grating and vitriolic partisan president of the last 60 years. Trump’s more outlandish proposals — making Mexico pay for a border wall, making common cause with Russia in Syria — can be seen as a variation on Obama’s insistence that climate change is the nation’s No. 1 problem and his acquiescence in, well, making common cause with Russia in Syria.

And the adoring crowds that throng Trump’s monster rallies — what do they remind you of? The crowds that cheered Obama in 2008 as he promised to fundamentally transform America and stop the rise of seas.

Yep.

THE REVOLUTION EVENTUALLY DEVOURS ITSELF: Big City Machines Losing Control of the Monster They Created.

PREDICTION FULFILLED:

Shot: https://t.co/Hu2liKW9e1 Chaser: https://t.co/qPbxJG3Gv6

— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) January 2, 2016

FLASHBACK: Bernie Sanders Recants 1972 Article on Women’s Fantasies of Rape.

DON SURBER: What Schools Can Do To Reduce Gun Violence. “I think Duncan and the others know what they are doing by undermining discipline. Frankly, the Democratic Party must somehow benefit from ghetto violence because every city they run seems to have a Third World-level homicide rate.”

RON RADOSH: WHAT ISRAEL POLICY DOES HILLARY CLINTON ACTUALLY FAVOR?

Whatever purports to give her the most votes, popularity, and (especially) power at that given moment.

FLASHBACK: Why Online Anonymity Frightens Progressives.

Despite its importance to the evolution of liberal societies, or perhaps because of it, anonymity is intensely disliked by today’s trendy, progressive commentariat. Lance Ulanoff, editor-at-large of Mashable recently argued that anonymity should be abolished across the entire internet. SJW darling Wil Wheaton demanded the same for online videogames. Feminist academic Danielle Citron wants web companies to remove the “privilege” of anonymity at will.

Even I once wrote a column along these lines before coming to my senses and realising the value of anonymous and pseudonymous debate online.

Centres of anonymous culture, such as reddit, 8chan and 4chan, are the subject of particularly fearful narratives. 4chan is described as the “cesspool of the internet,” 8chan is a “troll forum,” and Reddit is a “worse black hole of violent racism than Stormfront.”

The commentary isn’t just detached criticism. Many of the writers engage in horrified, hyperbolic rhetoric, presenting anonymous commenters as dangerous evildoers in need of punishment. Ulanoff branded anonymous critics of former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao “sub-human cowards” who “spew hate,” and urged Reddit to record their personal addresses. Adding real-world accountability to Reddit, according to Ulanoff, is the only way to stop its “disgusting, hateful, and racist content.”

But Pao’s critics weren’t racist. They were concerned with free speech, and resented the former CEO for watering down the site’s previous commitment to that ideal. Ulanoff’s use of the word “racist” typifies the progressive approach to discourse: argument via scarlet letters, shaming, and “isms” instead of robust debate.

With influential columnists throwing around career-ruining allegations so casually, it’s little wonder that Redditors and 4chan users are so wary of abandoning their anonymity.

Lefties are a minority that relies on punishing speakers to ensure that the majority doesn’t realize just how big a majority it is. That’s why they hate free speech, and especially anonymous free speech. It’s why many campus groups demand that universities block Yik Yak.

Remember: They’re not well-meaning people who are just a bit overzealous. They’re horrible, nasty, awful people who want everyone who disagrees with them to be silenced and afraid. Keep this in mind, and respond with the appropriate level of respect and politesse.

THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT.

Then: “Bearded God-Killers” of the late 19^th century taught Europeans to think “beyond good and evil,” paving the way for the immense bloodshed of the morally relativistic 20^th century. (And inspiring a legion of American “Progressives” along the way.)

Now: Europe is having to teach bearded potential killers “the difference between right and wrong,” as the New York Times notes:

“The biggest danger for everyone is silence,” said Per Isdal, a clinical psychologist in Stavanger who works with the foundation, which developed the program Mr. Kelifa attended in Sandes.

Many refugees “come from cultures that are not gender equal and where women are the property of men,” Mr. Isdal said. “We have to help them adapt to their new culture.”

The first such program to teach immigrants about local norms and how to avoid misreading social signals was initiated in Stavanger, the center of Norway’s oil industry and a magnet for migrants, after a series of rapes from 2009 to 2011.

Henry Ove Berg, who was Stavanger’s police chief during the spike in rape cases, said he supported providing migrants sex education because “people from some parts of the world have never seen a girl in a miniskirt, only in a burqa.” When they get to Norway, he added, “something happens in their heads.”

You don’t say.

Related: Populist Parties Are Rising In Europe Because Mainstream Conservatives Have Failed.

(Via Philip Schuyler.)

POLITICO: Get ready for a Ted Cruz-Nikki Haley ticket. And a GOP establishment freak-out in January.

Come to think of it, Politico’s freak-out over that ticket would be fun to observe as well.

#MALEPRIVILEGE: Young Man Crushed To Death Saving Woman From Falling Elevator.

FASTER PLEASE: Sensors Designed for Prosthetic Hands Could Lead to New Textile Standards.

WHAT ENTRENCHED INTERESTS DO TO REMAIN SO: Renewable Cronyism.

WORLD WAR I WAS ALMOST 100 YEARS AGO: But the west is still bleeding.  So anything about it fascinates me. Trench Railways – Supplying the Front

ABOUT TIME. THE SMOD/CTHULHU 2016 TICKET NEEDS AT LEAST ONE CAMPAIGNER: Giant Squid Captured On Camera In Japanese Bay, Swimming Alongside Divers.

WHY DID THE PAST LOOK LIKE THE FUTURE: The far-out sci-fi costume parties of the Bauhaus school in the 1920s.

THEY’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER SHOE: Humongous Sea Spiders From Antarctica Baffle Scientists.

NOT TO TAKE AWAY FROM THE POINTS: About male initiation and male institutions, but this could be reading too much into one of the most hackneyed setups in the history of plotting, no? ‘Star Wars’ and the Crisis of Masculinity.

CHOOSING THOSE FACTORIES OF RAPE THAT ARE CO-ED SCHOOLS: Or perhaps they don’t believe their own nonsense? The Rising Campaign Against Single-Sex Education.

PROTECTING THE YOUNG FROM THINKING FOR THEMSELVES: The Community Cost of Reading ‘Huck Finn’.

THE BLUE IS BLUE: The larger meaning of Rahm Emanuel’s woes.

AND ON EVERYTHING ELSE, THEY’RE DELUSIONAL: On Guns, the Democrats Aren’t Serious.

IS THIS MULTIPLE CHOICE, OR AN ESSAY QUESTION: Why America is right to think Obama’s losing the War on Terror.

AT THIS POINT, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? Hillary Clinton’s $13M fail as Secretary of State.

LOOK FOR THE UNION LABEL: Teachers got jobs back after in-school make-out session, but still sue.

BALDILOCKS: “Black Lives Matter types. . . . love you, Collective White People. How do I know this? Because they care so much about what all of you think of Collective Black People; they care about how Collective Black People look in your collective eyes.”

UPDATE: And this remains evergreen, alas:

SHOCKING COINCIDENCE: Bill Clinton Made $8 Million From Speeches To Companies With Matters Pending Before Hillary’s State Dept.

TO BE FAIR, THEY HAVE A COMMON ENEMY IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION: The Shame And The Disgrace Of The Pro-Islamist Left.

GET OUT OF DEMOCRATIC PARTY LOCKSTEP, PAY THE PRICE: How Bill Cosby’s moralizing to black youth helped land him in criminal court. And this WaPo article pretty much characterizes it that way.

Related: Ebony Editor: We’d All Be Easier on Cosby IF He Supported #BlackLivesMatter.

UPDATE: “Open your mouth, go to jail.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Times Square Olive Garden was right to charge $400 for New Year’s Eve dinner:

Like Uber and the airlines and many other businesses (including drivers of New York’s yellow cabs, who commonly switch off their availability lights and negotiate individual fares on New Year’s Eve), Olive Garden uses surge pricing: When lots more people want something that’s severely limited in quantity, prices go way up.

Is this practice “fair,” though? Certainly. Does it constitute “gouging” or “ripping off”? No. Businesses charge whatever the market will bear and are in no way obligated to forgo value by selling something for less than its worth, a figure that may depend greatly on timing: There’s a reason, say, why commuter rail fares are higher at rush hour, or why movie tickets are discounted at matinees.

If Olive Garden were charging its regular prices for New Year’s Eve in Times Square, it would have sold out long ago. The seats would have been gone in the first few minutes after the restaurant started accepting reservations, meaning the slots would effectively have been distributed randomly, to whoever managed to get through to the reservation desk.

If you think random distribution to the lucky at below-market prices is morally superior to selling to the highest bidder, why not support that in every other area of life? Because then all of life would be a free-for-all. Buying a tube of toothpaste would be like Walmart after they open the doors at midnight for the Black Friday sale. Having prices rise and fall in response to changing demand makes for an orderly society where things go to those who really want something.

See also: Toilet paper in Venezuela, a bankrupt state brought down by an economic system that Bernie Sanders is likely studying as a how-to guide.

IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID: “Trump’s best state is West Virginia; West Virginia also happens to be the only state in the U.S. where (as of March of this year) less than half of the adult civilian population is employed.” And “economy,” to most voters means jobs, not Wall Street bonuses.

THIS IS CNN:

• ‘Don Lemon is straight up hammered on CNN right now!’: Anchor’s New Year’s Eve antics — including telling Kathy Griffin she has a ‘nice rack’ — prompt Twitter to suggest he maybe enjoyed himself a little too much.
• Kathy Griffin Continues to Poke Fun at Anderson Cooper on New Year’s Eve – by Spray-Painting His Face!
• “OK, I have one question. How far is your sexual relationship with Caitlyn Jenner gone?” Griffin asked Cooper, who is openly gay. “Like is it first base?”
• Anderson Cooper investigates: Is Kathy Griffin hotter without her shirt on?

You stay classy, Time-Warner-CNN-HBO.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: New NRA video mocks Clinton’s gun-control push, has her laughing at Constitution. “It is the first in what the NRA said will be a series of videos ‘devoted to exposing the hypocrisy of the gun control agenda. This one pokes fun at Hillary Clinton’s ignorance of firearm issues and the Second Amendment.’ The video shows a desk cluttered with $1,000 bills featuring the face of ardent anti-gunner Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, and a woman writing out her New Year’s resolutions on Hillary Clinton Campaign letterhead.”

AT AMAZON, New Year, New You!

Plus, New Releases in Military History.

A NICE STORY FROM KNOXVILLE: MooYah’s reopens after accident; staff got paid during 12-day shutdown.

Nick DeVore lost 12 days of business during the height of the Christmas shopping season at his MooYah Burgers-Fries-Shakes restaurant on Kingston Pike, all because of a suspected drunken driver who slammed her car through the eatery’s front wall on Dec. 18, then drove away before anyone could get her name or license plate number.

It took that long for DeVore to get insurance adjusters, a contractor, and a repair crew out to the store, and get a temporary wall built so he could reopen.

Even though DeVore will take a big financial hit from the incident, none of his 15 employees will. They came back to work Wednesday morning with smiles on their faces after a nearly two-week, unplanned paid vacation that included Christmas Day.

That’s because DeVore, the store’s owner and operator, decided to keep paying them even while MooYah’s was closed.

A nice gesture, and I’m glad he could afford it.

SHOCKER: New Classified Email Contradicts Hillary’s Claims.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Hide a Hanging TV’s Unsightly Wires for Less than $15.

IS THERE NOTHING HE CAN’T DO? Documentary: Chuck Norris Helped Open Communist Romania to West.

ULTIMATE RUBE SELF-IDENTIFIES: Clinton emails: Billionaire Soros said he regretted backing Obama.

Still though, he must have found the chaos he financed over the last eight years to be awfully exhilarating.

“DEMOCRACY IS LIKE A STREETCAR. WHEN YOU COME TO YOUR STOP, YOU GET OFF,” Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan once said — and now we know which stop he chose for his final destination: Berlin.

Berlin in 1933: “Turkey’s Erdogan, Seeking a More Powerful Presidency, Cites Hitler’s System,” the New York Times reports:

ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who is pushing to imbue the largely ceremonial presidency with sweeping executive powers akin to the United States or France, gave a new example of an effective presidential system late Thursday: Hitler’s Germany.

After returning from a trip to Saudi Arabia, Mr. Erdogan was asked by the Turkish news media whether a presidential system was possible given that the government is now organized under a prime minister.

“There are already examples in the world,” Mr. Erdogan said. “You can see it when you look at Hitler’s Germany.”

Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany in 1933, assumed the presidency in 1934, a move that allowed him to consolidate power to become the Führer.

While Mr. Erdogan did not elaborate, his comment is bound to raise concern among critics who view him as increasingly authoritarian.

Despite the Times’ early Pollyanna-ish dismissal of the post-Weimar socialist leader as a totally cool and dreamy “New Popular Idol,” whose “anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded,” I’m guessing this doesn’t bode well for Turkey — on the plus-side though, Obama promised voters plenty of change in the Middle East…

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Disney right now: “George Lucas doesn’t like the new Star Wars movie. Do we have room for that in the promotional material?”

—James Lileks on Twitter, yesterday.

Related:

The hourlong interview, broadcast on Dec. 25 and released online this week, focused on Mr. Lucas’s legacy, which was celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors this month. But he was harsh in criticizing the film industry for focusing on profit over storytelling.

At one point he said that filmmakers in the Soviet Union had more freedom than their counterparts in Hollywood, who, he maintained, “have to adhere to a very narrow line of commercialism.”

Nahh — Stalin always kept the final cut. In more ways than one.

(And as Stephen Miller tweets, “Name the Soviet Union filmmaker who is now a billionaire several times over.”)

GQ PUTS HILLARY AT #5 ON ITS LIST OF 2015′S WORST PEOPLE — AHEAD OF BILL COSBY AND JARED FOGLE.

Remember Cool Hillary Clinton, back when she was checking her phone with her sunglasses on like a BAWSE and getting drunk with foreign dignitaries on Instagram and shit? Yeah, that Hillary Clinton is gone, kids. Hopelessly corrupt pander-bot 2008 Hillary is back! And remarkably, she seems to believe—yet again—that her lengthy history of cynical, bought-and-paid-for leadership somehow entitles her to the presidency, as if her entire campaign strategy is “I didn’t betray my principles and sell out every last one of my constituents NOT to be president, you guys!” I hope she keeps that Gmail account open. She’s gonna need it after blowing this election.

Consolation: She beat Jeb, too.

TNR ON DONALD TRUMP AND THE POLITICS OF DISGUST:

Last week, Donald Trump was once again disgusted. Commenting on Hillary Clinton’s awkward bathroom break during the last Democratic debate, he said, “I know where she went, it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting, let’s not talk.”

It’s not the first time that Trump has been perturbed by a bodily function. As Frank Bruni noted in his New York Times column, Trump has been publicly disgusted by Marco Rubio’s sweat and by the idea of pumping breast milk. Then there was his notorious comment about Fox News host Megyn Kelly, in which he conveyed an almost visceral revulsion: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

The Trump campaign has stunned bemused pundits by growing in strength with every controversy and outrageous policy proposal, like banning foreign Muslims from entering the United States. It has finally forced them to admit that his success comes not despite these things, but because of them.

What if disgust is a distinct part of that?

It’s an interesting angle, though I’m not sure if a magazine which in 2013 advised President Obama to roll the tanks in and start shelling the GOP-controlled Congress during the fall budget sequester is the best publication to be proffering it.

Related: David Gelernter asks “What Explains the Vicious Left? When politics becomes a religion, nonbelievers must be punished.”

TNR apparently prefers the T-34 tank to get the job done.

THEY CAN’T VET TERRORISTS, BUT THEY’VE GOT TIME FOR THIS: FBI offers $5,000 reward after bacon found at Vegas mosque.

Put a crucifix in urine, meanwhile, and you can get an NEA grant.

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN CITIES SUCH HELLHOLES OF CORRUPTION, RACISM, AND VIOLENCE?

• “District Of Columbia Ends 2015 With A 54 Percent Spike In Homicides.”
• “Chicago Rings in New Year With First Homicide.”
• “How bad is Rahm Emanuel? He makes Bill De Blasio look good.”
• “In Denial About Crime — The Brennan Center and other liberal groups pretend that murders and shootings aren’t spiking in many cities.”

Perhaps a change in management is long overdue:

OBAMA’S “STREISAND EFFECT” PRESIDENCY, as diagnosed by Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard. “When you say there’s peace and security in Syria, you’re not convincing anyone that’s the case…Recall that Obama told Bill O’Reilly in his Super Bowl interview a few years back that there was ‘not a smidgen of corruption’ at the IRS…What about ‘Obamacare is working’?”

Unless you’re already on Team Obama, this kind of denial is polarizing at best and infuriating at worst. So why do they do it? Well, the general rule in Washington is never assume malice when incompetence and arrogance will suffice. It’s more than possible that Obama and those in his administration are in a bubble. Indeed, that was heavily suggested by the recent fracas when The New York Times reported—then memory-holed—a report where Obama said he underestimated how much the recent ISIS attack in San Bernardino had spooked Americans because he didn’t watch cable news.

The more sinister reading would be that this is the Obama administration brazenly lying because that’s how their theory of “stray voltage” works:

Read the whole thing, which helps to explain, as Bill Whittle noted in one of his Firewall videos in 2014, why it often feels to Americans as if they’re being gaslighted by the Obama administration:

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HAPPY NEW YEAR! Space: The Visionaries Take Over. “Today future directions are being set by private companies with growing technical experience and competing visions.”

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Washington state top court: some knives are likely constitutionally protected ‘arms,’ but paring knives aren’t.

CHECK OUT AMAZON PRIME VIDEO with a 30-day Free Trial.

TRUE: “What stands out to me after reading the whole article, however, is that Trump obviously has a lot of support among a wide range of people, including many that you wouldn’t expect if you’ve been relying on mainstream media for information: women, well-educated people, Hispanics. There needs to be much more serious analysis of what is going on. American politics is outrunning the pundit class.”

Well, most of it.

Related: “Trump is Al Czervik bringing the hoi polloi to the Bushwood Country Club.”

Plus, confidential Trump video.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: We spend more and more time assessing what we do, and fewer and fewer hours doing it – just to give administrators something to do for their gold-plated salaries.

STAR WARS’ TROUBLING UNASKED MORAL QUESTIONS: Are Droids Slaves? “In the Star Wars universe, droids are slaves. Once you see this truth, it’s difficult to look at Star Wars the way you did as a child. . . . Droids are clearly sentient life forms.”

CROWDFUNDED STAR TREK MOVIE DRAWS LAWSUIT FROM PARAMOUNT, CBS: As the Hollywood Reporter notes, Star Trek: Axanar, “the subject of a lawsuit filed on Friday in California federal court, is no ordinary Star Trek film. The forthcoming feature film (preceded by a short film) is the source of more than $1 million in crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Indiegogo.”

Perhaps the crowdfunding aspect of this production and the amount of money raised so far sent up a giant red flag with Paramount’s lawyers, who in the past have been remarkably laissez-faire when it comes to the prolific amount of video Star Trek fan fiction, such as Starship Exeter, Star Trek Continues and the long-running Star Trek: Phase II series. The latter two productions have featured a number of actors who’ve appeared on the various real, Paramount-produced Star Trek TV series and movies, sometimes playing their original characters.

I hope the filmmakers and the studio come to a mutually amicable arrangement, as the trailer looked pretty awesome:

IN THE MAIL: From Newt Gingrich & William R. Forstchen, To Make Men Free: A Novel of the Civil War.

Plus, today only at Amazon: 50% off Saucony Running Shoes.

And, also today only: 44% off FitDesk v2.0 Desk Exercise Bike with Massage Bar. We have the earlier model FitDesk and like it.

Plus: Up to 67% Off Featured “The Twilight Zone” Collections.

And: Up to 80% Off Kindle Books to Jump-Start the New Year.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 965.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Sanders’s and Clinton’s Fake Middle Class.

Is $250,000 a year in household income “middle class”?

That sort of income puts a family in the top 5 percent of American earners, which seems like an overgenerous definition of “middle class.” Why, then, are Democrats so allergic to raising taxes on people who make less than this fabled cutoff? Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders want to spend money on a lot of stuff: single-payer health care, more generous Social Security benefits, universal preschool, free college, worker training. They are probably not going to be able to pay for it with the piddly sums one can raise from even large tax hikes on the very highest earners. Yet both of them seem wedded to the idea that taxes should not rise significantly for anyone who makes less than $250,000 a year.

In the New York Times, Bryce Covert of ThinkProgress argues that this is a mistake. The middle class is suffering, she says, and it’s time to tap the merely affluent as well as the fantastically well off. She does a good job of making the case that Democratic priorities can’t be funded without broader-based taxes. What she does not do, however, is explain why Democrats are avoiding this obvious arithmetic.

One answer is that they get a lot of their support in high-cost states where, say, $125,000 a year does not feel like riches beyond dreams of avarice. Over the past five years or so, the commentariat has been periodically convulsed by arguments over whether high earners have any right to feel pinched because their “basics” — a decently sized home in a good school district, a diet filled with lean protein and fresh produce, and an amenity-filled coastal city nearby in which to enjoy their hard-won socioeconomic status — are very expensive.

Living in a coastal city is actually not a civil right; it is a consumption good, and therefore, yes, you are still very affluent if you make $250,000 a year and choose to spend it on living near Manhattan. But this is neither here nor there; most people do not feel this way, in part because they compare themselves with people they know, and their own expectations from growing up, not everyone in the country. Those people are going to freak out if you tell them that they have to pay higher taxes.

And Democratic priorities, particularly Sanders’ plans, would cost a great deal of money.

Heh. If I were a GOP candidate, I’d ride the populist wave by going after these folks, and call it a “Yuppie tax,” because everybody hates yuppies. And then I’d go farther and target all the well-off Democratic constituencies: Push an outright ban on private jets — they’re bad for the planet! — an excise tax on homes over 4000 square feet, a punitive tariff on imported automobiles, and so on. You want class warfare, baby? You got it! Make the Democrats defend the rich!

Oh, and end the Hollywood tax cuts, while taxing the blue zones!

HAPPY NEW YEAR IN 2016? MAYBE NOT IF YOUR STATE IS DEEP IN DEBT: If California’s debts all come due this year, residents will have to cough up an additional $32,600 in taxes. Only 11 states have more assets than debts. Check out the spreadsheet to see how your state fares, courtesy of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group. But be forewarned: If you celebrated a bit too much last night, maybe you should wait to check until that throbbing in your head eases.

YES. Texas’ big new gun law: Is the state a model for modern open carry? Of course, Tennessee has had open carry for years — a carry permit in Tennessee is just a carry permit, open or concealed is up to you — without any particular incident.

I think what gun-controllers hate about open carry is that it undercuts their efforts to denormalize firearms ownership.

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FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Pew: Huge surge in single parent homes, 26% now vs. 9% in 1960.

I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Scientific Journal Publishes Fake Study On Whether Mommy Boo-Boo Kisses Really Work.

In their study, the authors claim to be members of the Study of Maternal and Child Kissing (SMACK) Working Group, which they say is a subsidiary of Procter and Johnson, Inc., the maker of “Bac-Be-Gone ointment and Steri-Aids self-adhesive bandages.” Procter and Johnson, which is not a real consumer goods company, is an obvious mash-up of Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson, two consumer packaged goods companies which sell health care items like bandages and ointments. The only contact information for the study’s authors disclosed in the research paper is a Gmail address. Bac-Be-Gone ointment and Steri-Aids also do not appear to be actual products available for sale. Additionally, many of the academic research references listed at the end of the study–including one article entitled “So what the hell is going on here?”–also appear to be fake.

The research article was published online on December 29, 2015. A manuscript of the paper was accepted by the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, a real publication owned by John Wiley & Sons, on December 10. John Wiley & Sons is a well-respected publisher of multiple academic and medical research journals.

After reading an abstract of the study on the website of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a federal health agency that funds academic and medical research, The Federalist purchased a full copy of the study from the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice in order to confirm that it was actually published by a peer-reviewed academic journal. According to the journal’s website, articles that are published online prior to being published in a full edition of the journal “have been fully copy-edited and peer reviewed[.]”

None of our institutions seems to be covering itself with glory these days.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Katherine Timpf: Hillary Clinton Is Not A Feminist.

Since Hillary announced that her husband would be joining her on the campaign trail, people have been debating whether or not it’s fair for the GOP to attack Bill’s sexual misdeeds in order to indirectly attack her.

This makes sense. After all, we’re talking about a guy who has been accused of the sexual assault of more than ten women. Think about it: How is her appointing him really any different than if she’d appointed Bill Cosby?

But here’s the thing: The real issue isn’t whether or not to attack Bill to indirectly attack Hillary — it’s about directly attacking Hillary for how she herself treated the women involved. Hillary Clinton claims to be pro-women, yet has actively worked to ruin lives of so many of them. She’s running on a “feminist platform” — she’s even dared to say that sexual-assault survivors have a “right to be believed” — despite the fact that what she did to the women who accused Bill went far beyond not believing them. She attacked them. When allegations of sexual misconduct emerged during Bill’s 1992 presidential run, she’s reported to have said “Who is going to find out? These women are trash. Nobody’s going to believe them.” Multiple people also report that she called the women “sluts” and “whores” — you know, for daring to be raped. A private investigator named Ivan Duda claims that, after Bill lost his second governor’s race, Hillary told him: “I want you to get rid of all these b****** he’s seeing . . . I want you to give me the names and addresses and phone numbers, and we can get them under control.”

She’s a real charmer, that one.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! White House Delays Imposing New Sanctions on Iran for Missile Program.

OH HEY RAHM — NICE NEWS DUMP.

MILO YIANNOPOULOS: Coming For 2016: All-Out War On So-Called ‘Social Justice.’

In 2016, battle lines will be drawn. On one side, people of all colours, genders and orientations are rallying around the flag of freedom of speech. On the other, a nasty set of authoritarians are rallying around a flag that identifies as a flag only on Mondays, uses they/them pronouns and will try to get you fired or expelled from school if you forget it.

Let me explain. In 2015, I saw the seeds of a movement begin to sprout. Across the internet, and even in fear-gripped halls on campuses, young people began to stand up and challenge the humourless, divisive, identity-obsessed elites that have taken over our cultural discourse. People of seemingly disparate interests and politics — gamers, pundits, metalheads, comic book and science fiction fans, atheists, Catholics, conservatives, libertarians and even many disaffected liberals — came together to agree on only one thing: art and culture should be left alone.

That movement is called cultural libertarianism. It stands against any authoritarian, from the right or the left, who suck fun and freedom from the world like some kind of vampire without the cool factor, and who use faux grievances and exaggerated victimhood to get what they want. Cultural libertarianism rejects the fainting-couch feminism and race-baiting of the Left in favour of deliberately provocative joyfulness and exuberance. It also predicates facts over hurt feelings, turning anecdotes into “lived experience” — which we are then expected to treat like scientific data.

While college campuses retreat into safe spaces, emotional coddling and treating the leaders of tomorrow like primary school children, cultural libertarians think of new ways to provoke and offend people. In a culture of control, conformity, and coddling, cultural libertarians are the true counterculture. . . . It’s now clear that progressives, lecturing the rest of us on how we ought to live from their bully pulpits in the media, academia and the entertainment industry, are terrified of the internet and don’t want to know what we have to say. Well, tough. In 2016, it’s time for that counterculture to go to war.

Read the whole thing.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Five Keys to Make 2016 Your Best Year Ever.

FREE FROM SARAH HOYT: Three Fantastic Surprises.

Also: Three Tales Of The Usaians.

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HEH: Ohio State Republican Law Faculty Holiday Party Enjoyed By Both.

HAPPY NEW YEAR: Two Munich Train Stations Evacuated Over Potential ISIS Threat. Contained.

MARK JUDGE: Star Wars and the Crisis of Masculinity.

GEORGE WILL: Goodbye to 2015, The Year American Institutions Became Parodies of Themselves. Fundamentally transformed!

FIVE WORDS? NEXT YEAR WILL BE WORSE.

Related: “President Obama is preparing to unleash a wave of new regulations in 2016 as he looks to shore up his legacy on public protection issues during his final year in office.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, JAPANESE LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Japanese Law Schools Facing ‘Unprecedented Crisis’ Amidst 84% Applicant Decline.

What if that happened here? The horror.

JON GABRIEL: IS NEW YEAR’S EVE THE WORST HOLIDAY?

Eventually I figured out why I didn’t care for New Year’s celebrations: They’re filled with people who shout “Wooo!” I don’t like being in places where people shout “Wooo!” It’s like the partiers are trying to convince themselves (and everyone around them) that they they’re having fun, but failing.

As Gabriel asks his readers, “What do you think: Is New Year’s Eve overrated or do you have a celebration planned that will change my mind?”

GEORGE LUCAS APOLOGIZES FOR ‘WHITE SLAVERS’ REMARK ABOUT DISNEY:

Lucas has expressed conflicting feelings about selling the “Star Wars” franchise to Disney for $4 billion in 2012.

He and Disney had different visions for the future of the franchise, which helped him make the decision to move on, though he still refers to the “Star Wars” movies as his “kids.”

“I loved them, I created them, I am very intimately involved in them,” Lucas told [Charlie Rose] about the franchise.

Lucas then quipped: “I sold them to the white slavers that takes these things, and…” Lucas trailed off with a laugh and didn’t finish his sentence.

Gee, as opposed to your kids being conscripted into the Vietcong, the inspiration for the original Star Wars?

Related: Man who pockets four billion dollar golden parachute bemoans evils of “capitalist society.”

MILO YIANNOPOULOS: “I can’t help but share this amazing anonymous smackdown of the odious cult of social justice with readers. It’s currently doing the rounds on Twitter and reddit.”

AMAZON PRIME VIDEO ADDS THE WORLD AT WAR: I’m not sure when the 26-part 1973 series was added to the free programming available to those with an Amazon Prime account, but I noticed it on the roster for the first time while clicking through the Amazon video applet on the Roku box earlier this month. 20 years before the launch of the History Channel, the World At War played frequently on American TV in the mid-to-late 1970s. But for those who’ve never seen it, it’s arguably the best video introduction to World War II that’s ever been released. Produced by Thames Television beginning in 1969, the series featured the sonorous narration of Lawrence Olivier, powerful background music, loads of newsreel footage, and most importantly, interviews with all sides — soldiers who were still only in their 40s, and surviving former world leaders and politicians. (Contrast that with today’s History Channel documentaries, which struggle to find surviving WWII infantrymen who are now in their late 80s and 90s.

We’re very lucky that the World At War has been grandfathered into today’s world of PC history — just imagine how today’s SJWs and their love of both the airbrush and Black Armband History would have told the story of WWII. As I wrote back in 2013 in my introduction to Civilisation, another landmark British TV documentary series produced shortly before The World At War (and equally impossible for the left to make today):

The World At War was made at the perfect time — television documentary techniques were sufficiently developed by 1969 when production on the series began to tell the story properly, and it was only a quarter century after WWII concluded, and enough survivors were still around, still sharp, and able to appear on camera. But of equal importance is that it was made before political correctness had sapped the cultural confidence of the West. If the BBC or Thames’ successor network were to remake the The World at War today, it would have a very different tone to it, probably far closer to Oliver Stone’s “Springtime for Hitler and Stalin” Showtime series than the BBC would care to admit.

Also, the interviews and the contemporary non-newsreel footage were shot in color. We take that entirely for granted now, but when the show first went into production, color TV was still a new phenomenon to many English viewers; BBC2 had only begun broadcasting in color in 1967, and BBC1 not until 1969. It’s tough to conceive of something like Monty Python‘s Flying Circus as being shot in black and white, but as late as 1967, its immediate predecessor, a show with the classic title of At Last, the 1948 Show, was a monochrome production.

Of course, the one problem with The World At War is that those who need to see the series the most will likely never watch it:

I ASKED STEPHEN GREEN ABOUT THIS AND HE SAID, “WATER?” Should You Filter Your Water? “Using the right water filter can help further reduce pollutants like lead from old water pipes, pesticide runoff in rural areas and byproducts of chemicals like chlorine that are used to treat drinking water. Radon, arsenic and nitrates are common pollutants in drinking water, and trace amounts of drugs including antibiotics and hormones have also been found. Certain filters may help remove these impurities as well.”

IT’S ABOUT JUSTICE DON WILLETT, NATCH: Tweeter Laureate rocks social media from judicial post.

DISPATCHES FROM THE PARENTHESES STATES: California, Leading from Behind, Victor Davis Hanson writes:

California somehow has managed to have the fourth-highest gas taxes in the nation, yet its roads are rated 44th among the 50 states. Nearly 70 percent of California roads are considered to be in poor or mediocre condition by the state senate. In response, the state legislature naturally wants to raise gas taxes, with one proposal calling for an increase of 12 cents per gallon, which would give California the highest gas taxes in the nation.

Because oil prices have crashed, state bureaucrats apparently believe that the public won’t notice the tax increase in their fill-up costs* – even though special California fuel mandates already help make gas prices 25 percent higher than the national average.

Consider California’s upside-down logic.

The state wanted to discourage driving and promote hybrid vehicles by upping taxes on carbon fuels. It worked, though it cost the public dearly. People drove less and bought more fuel-efficient cars. But now, because less gas is burned, fewer taxes are collected. So the state wants to reward motorists for their green sacrifices by raising their taxes even higher to make up for missing revenue. If state motorists drive even less and cram into two-seat commuter cars, will California further reward them with even higher gas taxes?

Meanwhile, in the other big blue parenthesis state, “Cigarette tax revenue plunges as smokers buy outside New York:”

New York state cigarette tax collections have plunged by about $400 million over the past five years…sales of taxed cigs in New York are off by 54 percent in the past decade, which is also cutting into the profits of local store owners peddling smokes. In that same period, about 19 percent of New Yorkers stopped smoking, a pace well below the huge sales dip.

“The Germans call it ‘schadenfreude’ when you take pleasure from another person’s misfortune,” noted Dan Mitchell, a tax expert at the Washington DC-based Cato Institute, commenting on the New York smoking tax fiasco.

Mitchell added, “I confess that I get a certain joy from this story because politicians are being punished for their greed. I like the fact that they have less money to waste.”

To paraphrase VDH’s conclusion, both states have governments that ultimately serve one purpose — reminding Americans what not to do.

*And they’re counting on their Democrat operatives with bylines not to point that out — who are all too eager to follow their marching orders.

YESTERDAY’S POST ON EARTHQUAKE PREPAREDNESS BROUGHT THIS RECOMMENDATION FROM A READER: Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country: How to Save Your Home, Business, and Life.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

● “Obama: Nihilist or Just Incompetent?”

—Victor Davis Hanson, October 4th, 2015.

● “Obama to Seinfeld: ‘I Always Wanted To Be In a Show About Nothing.’”

—Tammy Bruce.com, yesterday.

“IT’S TIME TO SAY NO TO OUR PAMPERED STUDENT EMPERORS* — The Rhodes statue row can be blamed on a generation raised to believe that their feelings are all that matter,” British columnist Harry Mount writes in the London Telegraph:

The little emperors have grown up. The babies of the late 90s – mollycoddled by their parents, spoon-fed by their teachers, indulged by society – have now reached university. Some of the brighter ones are now at Oxford, demanding that the Cecil Rhodes statue at Oriel should be torn down, because of his imperialist, racist views.

We shouldn’t be so surprised. If you’ve had a lifetime of people saying “yes” to you, of never being told off, you remain frozen in a permanent state of supersensitivity. I wasn’t offended by the Rhodes statue when I was at Oxford 20 years ago. But, even if I had been, I wouldn’t have thought my wounded feelings should be cured by tearing apart the delicate fabric of a beautiful university.

Universities are reaping the whirlwind of two decades of child-centred education. That whirlwind has imported imbecilic trigger warnings – when academics have to warn students that western European literature, from the Iliad on, is full of sex and violence. It has also brought the pernicious idea of “no-platforming” – when students refuse to give a stage to anyone who doesn’t fit with their narrow view of the world.

Read the whole thing.

Related: “Remy: Students United! Collegians everywhere are asking tough questions: Why is our tuition so high? Where are our jobs? Can’t you see your words hurt me, you dumb piece of sh*t?”

* Personally, I prefer Iowahawk’s “Screaming Campus Garbage Babies” description, but perhaps that’s too provocative a characterization for the Telegraph.

“THAT’S NICE [SINCE] SHE HELPED DESTROY THEIR COUNTRY:” “Samantha Power, United States ambassador to the United Nations, wants to welcome refugees into the country with open arms. The next time you think you’re being clever by asking Power how many Syrian refugee families she’s taken in, keep in mind that she’s taken in one family more than you have — for dinner and a photo-op — and just might have them back for her Super Bowl party.”

DUBAI INFERNO: FLAMES SHOOT UP 63-STORY HOTEL. “As some million people packed Dubai for the emirate’s notoriously spectacular New Year’s fireworks displays, an inferno lit up a 63-story luxury hotel downtown,” Bridget Johnson writes at PJM. “Witnesses said the fire broke out at about 9:30 p.m. local time on the lower third of the building and spread quickly. The hotel was evacuated and there were no immediate reports of injuries.”

No victims? Well, that’s what they want you to think, Allahpundit conjectures. “From what I saw, the blown-out parts ran around 10 stories high and a good 10 or so windows across. (The hotel is 63 stories tall and not quite 1,000 feet high.) Unless literally everyone inside the hotel was out on the streets celebrating New Year’s Eve, there are victims.”

So what caused it? “One Twitter user captured an image showing only a very small fire at the start; local authorities tell CNN that it started on the exterior of the 20th floor. Could fireworks from the ground have misfired? Stay tuned,” he writes, adding in an update, “One reason to think this might be accidental rather than arson is that the hotel is near the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. If you were a terrorist or pyromaniac looking to maximize the impact of your crime, wouldn’t you target the Burj instead?”

In February, a fire devastated another Dubai skyscraper, a 79-story residential structure with 676 apartments carrying an unfortunate moniker — “The Torch.”

As Nathan Wurtzel remarked on Twitter concerning the two fires, “We can make one assumption, but don’t rule out the sh**ty construction assumption.”