RACISTS: Think Progress sees fit to disparage the statement: “Today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role in ending racism.”

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DANIEL CALLAHAN IS A LIVING EXEMPLAR OF WHY THE PROFESSION OF BIOETHICS IS STUPID. Here’s his latest effort. Some related thoughts here and also here.

I THINK WE SHOULD DRAFT PEOPLE TO BE BELTWAY PUNDITS, AS RANDOMLY-CHOSEN AMERICANS COULD CLEARLY DO JUST AS GOOD A JOB: Dana Milbank: Restore The Draft.

UPDATE: Michael Lotus emails: “Can you imagine if the same thugs who are using the IRS to harass and intimidate their political enemies had the power to conscript people? There is zero prospect it would not be politicized and used to punish opponents of this administration. These people cannot be trusted at all, about anything. It would be insanity to grant them further power.” True.

CHANGE: Revolutionary Zeal Returns To The Streets Of Ukraine.

The future of Europe’s second-biggest country was hanging in the balance last night as hundreds of thousands of ­people flooded cities across Ukraine, demanding revolution in protest at the President’s decision to snub the European Union for Russia.

In the biggest show of anger yet against President Yanukovych’s decision to pursue a deal with Vladimir Putin, protesters defied a hastily passed law banning demonstrations. They gathered in huge numbers, with 500,000 believed to have taken to the streets of the capital, Kiev.

A half-million people at an illegal pro-Western protest is a big deal.

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FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION TALE, RIGHT YOU GUYS? RIGHT? Scientists increasingly moving to global cooling consensus.

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Plus, markdowns on Men’s Watches.

OUCH: “In order to boast how far the federal site has come, HHS laid out how bad it used to be.”

SCIENCE: On your wedding day, you know in your gut if your marriage will be a happy one, study suggests.

MEOW: Norwegian soccer player’s wife criticized for post birth body. “Caroline Berg Eriksen posted a picture of herself in her underwear four days after giving birth. Some were outraged by the picture but one doctor advises ‘life is unfair.'” We must have a government program to remedy that, or at least to ban publication of photos that might make other women feel bad about themselves.

CHANGE: Sun’s magnetic field will soon flip, presenting us with a light show.

CHINA PREPARES TO LAUNCH ITS first Moon-rover mission.

A LOOK AT Google’s new anti-aging company, Calico.

STOCKING STUFFER: Getcher Handmade Leather Saps Right Here.

WAR ON SCIENCE: Muzzling of federal scientists widespread, survey suggests. “Twenty four per cent of respondents said they ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’ were asked to exclude or alter technical information in federal government documents for non-scientific reasons. Most often, the request came from their direct supervisors, followed by business or industry, other government departments, politically appointed staff and public interest advocates.”

Luckily, this is in Canada. I’m sure nothing like this could happen in our federal government.

EASY ASIAN RECIPES at RasaMalaysia.com.

THE STARS MY DESTINATION: Plotting the Destinations of 4 Interstellar Probes.

READER BOOK PLUG: It’s A Wonderful Death. Set in Bedford Falls.

FASTER, PLEASE: Black silicon slices and dices bacteria. “Originally discovered by accident in the 1980s, black silicon is silicon with a surface that has been modified to feature nanoscale spike structures which give the material very low reflectivity. Researchers have now found that these spikes can also destroy a wide range of bacteria, potentially paving the way for a new generation of antibacterial surfaces. . . . This represents an exciting prospect for the development of a new generation of antibacterial nanomaterials that could be applied to the surfaces of medical implants, making them far safer.”

IS IT TIME TO ditch the keys and get a smart lock?

WHAT DO MILLENNIALS WANT?

IN THE MAIL: From Oren Litwin, The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Stories of Political Possibility.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 206.

MEGAN MCARDLE: A Fight Over Contraception Won’t Help ObamaCare.

I gather that both supporters and opponents of the mandate think the Supreme Court will probably rule that corporations (at least closely held ones such as these two) are going to be granted an exemption from the mandate if they have clear religious objections.

Social media was on fire over this when it happened, and I confess that I am struggling to see why. There was a lot of outraged talk about how corporations aren’t people, of course, but a lot more about employers trying to control their employees’ sex lives, treating women as second-class citizens and so forth. To judge from these reactions, you would think that birth-control pills were a scarce resource that could only legally be obtained through employers. In fact, generic birth-control pills are available for $25 a month through a Costco pharmacy, $50 if you want a brand name.

“But that’s expensive for a young woman on a budget!” you are about to cry. And I am about to answer that it doesn’t get less expensive because an insurer buys it. Regular, predictable expenses such as birth-control pills cannot be defrayed by insurance; they can only be prepaid, with a markup for the insurer’s administrative costs. The extra cost is passed on by the insurers to your employer, and from your employer to you and your fellow workers, either by raising your contribution or lowering the wage they are willing to offer. There’s obviously some cross-subsidy from your fellow employees who don’t use birth control, but overall, there’s no particular reason to force insurers to cover a minor and predictable expense.

The administration didn’t force employers with a religious objection to offer contraception because it made financial or medical sense; they did it because it had great symbolic value to Barack Obama’s political base. And much of that symbolic value seems to actually come from the willingness to coerce people who object to buy the stuff.

Obama, and his supporters, quite clearly take joy in coercing those seen as enemies to do things they find objectionable. It is indicative of a deep psychological disorder. Call it the “smell the glove” presidency. . . .

REMINDER: In 2009, President Obama “Joked” About Having The IRS Audit His Enemies.

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THIS NEW YORK TIMES PIECE ON THE OBAMACARE DEBACLE — WHICH IS CLEARLY MEANT TO BE SYMPATHETIC — REVEALS AN INEPT AND OUT-OF-TOUCH WHITE HOUSE. Key bit: “The story of how the administration confronted one of the most perilous moments in Mr. Obama’s presidency — drawn from documents and from interviews with dozens of administration officials, lawmakers, insurance executives and tech experts working inside the HealthCare.gov ‘war room’ — reveals an insular White House that did not initially appreciate the magnitude of its self-inflicted wounds, and sought help from trusted insiders as it scrambled to protect Mr. Obama’s image.”

Initially? According to the story it took them a month to start taking the problem seriously.

END-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s Maduro accuses 99 percent of businesses of “price gouging,” vows to punish more “capitalist parasites.”

SHOCKER: That Viral “Poverty Thoughts” Essay Is Totally Ridiculous.

You see, Linda Walther Tirado, or “KillerMartinis,” as she’s known on her Kinja screen name, wrote this brain-grating essay, and it’s all about being subjected to the pitfalls of poverty. Linda’s not actually poor, though, nor was she raised in what most would describe as poverty. Unless you consider a boarding school education as a marker for poverty, anyway.

The inferences on what it’s like to be poor — from the roach-infested living quarters to the lack of wholesome food — would almost be laughable, if they weren’t such freakin’ gross stereotypes written by a person who has never experienced true poverty. That little fact takes it from laughable to infuriating.

What’s also infuriating is that Linda — who is panhandling for $100,000 worth of donations on GoFundMe — wrote this piece, and the comments and rebuttals to it, while masquerading as a “poor person,” but has now decided to clean up the mess by copping to her past as a person from a much different background.

It’s Potemkin villages all the way down. But hey, there’s good money in telling lefties what they want to hear.

THE WAGES OF “QUANTITATIVE EASING:” Central bank money-printing has impoverished a generation of older, small savers.

Intergenerational unfairness is one of those intellectually sloppy complaints that nevertheless commands a strong following among a certain cadre of privileged young metropolitan types. It even has its own think tank – the grandly named Intergenerational Foundation. . . .

Yet for those who continue to insist that the baby boomers have had it cushy, consider the following. Say you have done the right thing throughout your working life, and saved when means allowed. . . .

One reason for these now painfully low annuity rates is rising life expectancy. Yet the bigger explanation is officially sanctioned, ultra-low interest rates. Central bank money-printing may or may not have saved Western economies from ruin in the aftermath of the financial crisis, but it has also disfranchised a generation of older, small-time savers.

Just as the main demographic bulge of post-war retirees come to buy their pensions, they find themselves – thanks in part to these interventions – confronted by the lowest rates of return in history.

A recent report by the management consultants McKinsey tried to put hard numbers on the consequences. Their findings were shocking. Since 2007, the world’s four most influential central banks have injected more than $4.7 trillion of new money into the world economy.

The effect has been to help drive both short- and long-term interest rates to record lows. The chief beneficiaries, as you might expect, are governments with big deficits. In the UK alone, ultra-low interest rates are reckoned to have saved the Government some $120 billion since the start of the crisis.

Highly indebted households will also have derived a major benefit. Without these interventions, many would be facing foreclosure. What tends to be forgotten, however, is that most households are net savers, not debtors. On the McKinsey figures, households as a whole have lost out to the tune of $110 billion – a massive transfer of income from people to government, amounting to nearly half of what the Government collected in income tax last year.

It’s financial repression. And it’s produced a Senior Squeeze that, in this country at least, would be getting a lot more media attention under a Republican administration.

SHADES OF WHAT P.J. O’ROURKE SAYS, BELOW: Nearly Half Of All Taxpayers Are Over 45.

P.J. O’ROURKE: “Whenever anything happens anywhere, somebody over 50 signs the bill for it.”

His new book is The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault) (And I’ll Never Do It Again).

WHEN I SEE ONE OF THESE THINGS NOW, MY PRESUMPTION IS THAT IT’S A FAKE: Shocking discovery in hoax bias incident at Vassar College.

Reports of bias incidents at Vassar College that involved hateful messages left on students’ doors were actually elaborate hoaxes — and the perpetrator is none other than the student member of the Bias Incident Response Team, The Daily Caller has learned.

This fall semester at the liberal arts college in New York saw a curiously high number of bias incident reports. On Nov. 14, the college sent a mass email to students advising them that Bias Incident Response Team (BIRT) had received at least six reports in the last few months of hateful and insensitive messages being scrawled and spray painted on student residences. Messages included “Avoid Being Bitches,” “Fuck Niggers,” and most prominently, “Hey Tranny. Know Your Place.” . . .

Five days after the email was sent, Vassar President Catharine Hill sent a follow-up email announcing that the bias incidents were hoaxes perpetrated by two students. The students wrote the vile messages and then filed the reports themselves, claiming to be the victims of unknown haters.

Well, if you wait around for real hate incidents of this time, you might wait a long time. Then people might wonder if they even need a Bias Incident Response Team.

MARK STEYN ON THOSE SUSPICIOUS IRS AUDITS: Dissent Is The Highest Form Of Tax Bracket.

A couple of weeks back, cancer patient Bill Elliot, in a defiant appearance on Fox News, discussed the cancelation of his insurance and what he intended to do about it. He’s now being audited.

Insurance agent C Steven Tucker, who quaintly insists that the whimsies of the hyper-regulatory bureaucracy do not trump your legal rights, saw the interview and reached out to Mr Elliot to help him. And he’s now being audited.

As the Instapundit likes to remind us, Barack Obama has “joked” publicly about siccing the IRS on his enemies. With all this coincidence about, we should be grateful the President is not (yet) doing prison-rape gags.

Obama’s a putz, and the people at the IRS who are implementing this should have their names, and their boss’s names, and their grandbosses’ names publicized.

THE NEXT DETROIT? WaPo: Puerto Rico, with at least $70 billion in debt, confronts a rising economic misery.

A THANKSGIVING LEG OF LAMB REPORT FROM HERSCHEL SMITH: “Followed your recipe. Everyone loved it. Done on the outside (like I like it), and very rare on the inside (like some of my clan like it). It’s very hard to get it to 140 degrees F for a large piece of meat.” Yeah, I used to rely on a meat thermometer, but now I just slice into it to check when it seems about time. Crude, but effective.

Here’s the recipe. Also, for the turkey this year, I sprinkled the surface with curry. That worked out well.

SARAH HOYT: Measuring Up Outlets For Indie Publishing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: American Lawyer: ‘White Flight’ Hits Nation’s Law Schools.

GOALPOST-MOVING AT HEALTHCARE.GOV: If you can set the goal at the point of seeing how far you’ve gotten when the deadline arrives, doesn’t that make the whole notion of a deadline pretty much a scam?

MY EARLIER POST ON CHEAP BOURBONS PRODUCED THIS FROM ROGER SIMON:

So you might want to share “Sazeracs a la Simon” with your readers. This is an absolute killer drink. If you have more than two you will be in the ICU and it’s somewhat more pricey than the cheap bourbon… but, hey, it’s the holidays.

4 parts Rittenhouse rye (best rye around and for a mid-range price $25.99 – all prices BevMo)

1 part Kubler Absinthe (good, clear absinthe for $44.99…but you won’t need much. Some recipes call for only swirling it, but I say go the whole Van Gogh, hence one part… I mean-what do you need two ears for anyway?……Nevertheless, if you find this bottle going down quickly, see a doctor fast)

Dash of Angostura bitters – but if you don’t have, no one will notice

Shake in a Martini shaker, Mr. Bond, and pour into a glass with ice and a tiny bit of sugar. Extra points, if you have one of those block ice things.

Enjoy, but make sure you have a designated driver. Secret of this drink: the Rittenhouse is 100 proof and the Kubler is 106.

As you can tell, I’ve already had one myself. Second one: no email.

Celebrate!

GORGEOUS COLOR PHOTOS from World War II.

CAR AND DRIVER: 2014’s Best Cars.

FLASHBACK: Four Pony Cars, Two Different Eras.

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READER APP PLUG: Reader Glenn Howes writes: “I notice that sometimes you’ll publicize a reader’s book or something similar. Well, just today, I published a free children’s app, Frog Draw, which I’m quite proud of and put everything I’ve learned in 20 years of being a pro coder into. It’s aimed at 6-8 year olds and is a shape drawing app that amongst many other features allows you to put funny hats on people, although I hope children will find more creative uses for it.”

CHARLOTTE ALLEN: Silicon Chasm: The class divide on America’s cutting edge. “You can laud this underbelly barrio as vibrant immigrant culture or you can decry it as an instant-slum product of untrammeled illegal border-crossing, but it represents an important fact on the ground: These are the people who earn their livings tending to the needs of the high-tech ‘creative class’ that has made Silicon Valley famous. I could see them on Atherton Avenue, the amanuensis class heading up from Menlo Park in their wee panel trucks and Dodge minivans and their Ford flatbeds fitted out with racks for garden tools among the Bentleys, BMWs, Audis, and Lexuses that are the standard Atherton vehicles. . . . Master and servant. Cornucopian wealth for a few tech oligarchs plus relatively steady but relatively low-paying work for their lucky retainers. No middle class, unless the top 5 percent U.S. income bracket counts as middle class. Silicon Valley is a tableau vivant of what many economists and professional futurologists say is the coming fate of America itself, a fate to which Americans, if they can’t embrace it as some futurologists hope, should at least resign themselves.” Hopey-Changey!

This might profitably be read alongside Joel Kotkin’s Entrepreneurs Turn Oligarchs.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Cheap Bourbons, Ranked. Doug Weinstein was always a fan of Evan Williams in college, but he drank his bourbon with Coke. I always sprung for Jack Black, or Old Weller.

YOU SURE ABOUT THAT, CHAMP? Obama: People Do Think I’m Trustworthy.

PERSONALLY, I FAVOR N.C. WYETH: Kitsch or Kitchen Sink?: Illustrating Conservatism with Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Kinkade. I have Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company, with N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations. Interestingly, this was a huge bestseller in its day — rivaling Ben Hur — but is barely remembered today. Probably too politically incorrect and manly or something.

SHOCKER: ObamaCare Website Reportedly Off To ‘Rocky Start’ On Deadline Day.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Genetically modified cells monitor blood fat levels and release hormones to make you feel full, tested on obese mice help them lose weight.

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WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: How NASA might build its very first warp drive. “That’s a significant change in calculations to say the least. The reduction in mass from a Jupiter-sized planet to an object that weighs a mere 1,600 pounds has completely reset White’s sense of plausibility — and NASA’s.”

But note the key caveat: “Mathematically, the field equations predict that this is possible, but it remains to be seen if we could ever reduce this to practice.”

ANNALS OF THE REGULATORY STATE: Topless Barber Charged With Unlicensed Cosmetology.

SHADY SCIENCE: Investigation reveals black market in China for research paper authoring.

TODAY’S THE LAST DAY TO ENTER Victor Davis Hanson’s November Military History Challenge.

I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Study Linking Genetically Modified Corn to Rat Tumors Is Retracted.

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader J.J. DiBenedeto, A Box of Dreams (the collected Dream Series, books 1-5). $7.99 on Kindle.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Drug-carrying nanoparticles that can be taken orally in pill form.

HOW SMALL IS SMALL? The Nanoscale Explained In One Chart.

VIDEO: The bunny has been watching the dog herding; now bunny thinks he can herd too.

UKRAINE: Police Break Up Pro-Europe Protests With Tear Gas and Clubs. A reader in Ukraine reports that the President’s chief of staff has resigned in protest, though that’s not in the story.

UPDATE: Here’s a report.

IN THE MAIL: A Cosmic Christmas 2 You.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 205.

MICHAEL BARONE: Welcome to the Kludgeocracy.

How is it possible that Barack Obama did not know that his beloved healthcare.gov website was a botch? That’s a question many thoughtful people (including thoughtful Democrats) are asking.

We heard him say that he wouldn’t have boasted that it would be as easy to use as amazon.com or obitz.com had he known that it wouldn’t. I’m not “stupid enough,” he said at his Nov. 14 press conference. Most Americans agree that’s true.

One thing we do know is that this is a chief executive who does not want to hear bad news, or at least effectively discourages his subordinates from bringing it to him.

He made a decision to take the question of intervention in Syria to Congress after consulting, on a walk in the White House lawn, with his chief of staff. Any staffer with knowledge of congressional opinion on the issue could have told him that he didn’t come close to having the votes.

And it’s known that his White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, learned the week of April 22 from Treasury lawyers that the Internal Revenue Service had, in her words, “improperly scrutinized several … organizations by using words like ‘Tea Party’ and ‘patriot.'”

Evidently, she didn’t tell the president, who said he learned about the scandal only when it was made public by IRS official Lois Lerner May 10. Counsels to former presidents of both parties say they would have informed their bosses immediately.

Effective executives take special pains to ferret out bad news from the organizations they command. They know that most underlings like to tell their superiors that things are going fine.

“A culture that prefers deluding the boss over delivering bad news isn’t well equipped to try new things,” writes Internet pioneer Clay Shirky on his eponymous blog. . . .

Obama knows how to use words well. But he doesn’t seem to understand how the world works. “We’re also discovering,” he said at that press conference, “that insurance is complicated to buy.” Yup.

There is a reason public policy in industrial age America (and other democratic countries) moved toward greater regimentation and standardization. Centralized command and control was a good way to run assembly lines.

There is a reason also that public policy in the information age, elsewhere and here until 2008, moved toward more market mechanisms. Central planners have a hard time anticipating how IT systems and consumers will respond.

That’s especially true when chief executive doesn’t want to hear — and perhaps cannot imagine that there will be — bad news. Welcome to the kludgeocracy.

Indeed.

HARD SELL: Going Door-To-Door For ObamaCare.

WELCOME TO THE AGE OF OBAMA: Between Wal-Mart and Tiffany, No Middle Ground.

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BYRON YORK: Why is President Obama trying to politicize the holidays?

But the first floor of the Stasi Museum is not about spying. Instead, it is devoted to the propaganda that East German bureaucrats used to foster socialist consciousness in an unwilling public. One display explains the GDR’s efforts in the 1950s to politicize what in the past had been family and religious occasions. The state sought to transform weddings, confirmations, and other personal events into “socialist celebrations,” to be “committed collectively and aimed at a confession to socialism,” according to the awkward English translation of the exhibit.

The exhibition informs visitors that the project “did not gain popular acceptance.” Amazingly enough, people didn’t want to turn their family holidays into socialist celebrations.

Here at home, this Thanksgiving brings an effort by the Obama administration to turn a day of giving thanks into a day of discussion about the virtues of national health care. On Wednesday afternoon, just hours before Thanksgiving, President Obama’s Twitter account — which has more than 40 million followers — sent out this message: “Make sure everyone who sits down with you for #Thanksgivukkah dinner is covered.” (“Thanksgivukkah” refers to this year’s rare overlap of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah.)

The president’s tweet linked to a photo of a young man sitting at a table with a turkey and a menorah. The accompanying text: “Celebrating Thanksgiving. Lighting the Hanukkah candles. Talking about health insurance. Gotta love dinners like these.”

It’s revealing stuff.

DAVE SWINDLE: Why Kanye West Is An Antisemite.

OH, I WOULDN’T BE SO SURE ABOUT THAT: Obama: ‘I’ve Got Nowhere To Go But Up.’

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Obama ‘tossed away’ George W. Bush’s Iraq War victory.

The Iraq War “was won and we were in a position, if we had just negotiated a status of forces agreement, to have an ally in the region, to have a base, to train their air force — that would have changed the course of the future,” he told The Daily Caller. “Instead, a decision was made by the new administration to evacuate, leaving a vacuum where Iran has come in, where al-Qaida thrives and al-Qaida actually has extended itself into Syria. This was all unnecessary — and all the result of the liquidation of a war that was won.”

Ideology required that the Iraq War be a failure, even if it needed a nunc pro tunc effort to make it so.

WHY WOULD OBAMA SAY HE’S NOT IDEOLOGICAL?

The president’s belief that little of what he does is ideologically driven suggests he is living with a pampered, unchallenged mind. He has been told he is so smart for so long that he sees only clarity in his actions and unchallengeable reason in his conclusions. The president’s belief in his own intellect makes him think that whatever he does is simply the only thing a thinking person would do. Nothing ideological about that. And as president, he is constantly flattered, and his confidence that his analysis and conclusions are superior to others is readily reinforced. Presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett tells us that Obama has been “bored to death his whole life.” Perhaps she is onto something. I guess there is something ho-hum and tiresome about being right all the time.

It appears that President Obama believes that dissenting views are irrational or the result of clouded, lesser thinking. Being blind to his own ideology makes him unable to respectfully deal with others who might readily embrace an ideological point of view. The president’s inability to effectively work with Congress, orchestrate Washington, or build strong alliances or even friendships overseas probably stems from his belief that others should defer to his clear thinking without many questions or objections. He doesn’t see politics as a great debate with multiple possibilities among equal voices.

After about five years as president, it is unlikely he will change his modus operandi. In fact, given all we have observed about Obama, it is safe to say that he cannot adapt and will never be able to produce win-win outcomes among competing interests and ideologies. For anything to get done, others must manage around him.

I suspect we’ll see more of that “managing around” over the next three years.

HE HAS LESS POWER TO PUSH THEIR AGENDA THEN HE USED TO, BUT HE ALSO HAS LESS POWER TO RESIST THEIR AGENDA THAN HE USED TO: The Hill: Liberals push wish list on Obama.

I DOUBT IT, BUT DON’T TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THESE PUTZES FOR A MINUTE: Gun-Control Supporters Say Momentum Quietly Building to Get a Bill Through.

Chuck, if you want to get guns “off the streets,” the proper approach isn’t background checks, but stop-and-frisk.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “Male friendships, we’re taught, are about finding or fleeing women; they are not valuable in themselves.”

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Plus, deals on Stanley Tools. Also Porter-Cable and Bostitch.

Also, New & Notable History Books.

And as you do your shopping, here’s a reminder: InstaPundit is an Amazon affiliate. When you do your Christmas/Hanukkah shopping — or any other shopping — through the Amazon links on this page, including the “Shop Amazon” tab at the top or the searchbox in the right sidebar, you support the blog at no cost to yourself. Just click on the Amazon link, then shop as usual. It’s much appreciated!

THAT’S MORE THAN OBAMA DID AT BENGHAZI: Josh Romney Saves Four American Lives.

THE TSA WAS A MISTAKE: Thanksgiving travels don’t have to be a hassle: Want transportation to be efficient? Don’t leave it in the hands of government.

Related: Congress should abolish the TSA — it’s time to privatize airport screening.

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE:

Ellen Richardson went to Pearson airport on Monday full of joy about flying to New York City and from there going on a 10-day Caribbean cruise for which she’d paid about $6,000.

But a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent with the Department of Homeland Security killed that dream when he denied her entry.

“I was turned away, I was told, because I had a hospitalization in the summer of 2012 for clinical depression,’’ said Richardson, who is a paraplegic and set up her cruise in collaboration with a March of Dimes group of about 12 others.

The Weston woman was told by the U.S. agent she would have to get “medical clearance’’ and be examined by one of only three doctors in Toronto whose assessments are accepted by Homeland Security. She was given their names and told a call to her psychiatrist “would not suffice.’’

At the time, Richardson said, she was so shocked and devastated by what was going on, she wasn’t thinking about how U.S. authorities could access her supposedly private medical information.

Sad.

AND WITH GOOD REASON: 78% Fear ObamaCare Site Security, Could Deter Signups.

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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Replacing the Western Canon with Gender Studies.

FLASHBACK: What International Air Travel Was Like in the 1930s.

FIRE ‘EM ALL AND PRIVATIZE: Crime Rate in Camden, NJ Going Down After Unionized Police Force Sacked.

HAPPY BLACK FRIDAY! Please do as much of your shopping as you can through Amazon Links on this page!

Meanwhile, some fave hands-on toys for kids: the Snap Circuits electronic kits, the Arduino microcontroller system, Penny Norman’s Inventions Kit, and, of course, there’s The Dangerous Book For Boys and The Daring Book For Girls.

And, of course, there’s always a Trebuchet. With maybe a copy of Backyard Ballistics thrown in.

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21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “A drunk woman can’t make correct decisions, but apparently, drunk men turn into Einstein.”

ACADEMIC POLITICS: UNC-CH faculty complain after conservative group seeks liberal professor’s email. The funniest comment I saw about this, on Facebook, was the suggestion that some conservative law faculty members at UNC could just talk to the conservative group and explain why this is a bad idea. Yet another argument for more diversity in academia!

SCIENCE FRAUD: “Are more people doing wrong or are more people speaking up? Retractions of scientific papers have increased about tenfold during the past decade, with many studies crumbling in cases of high-profile research misconduct that ranges from plagiarism to image manipulation to outright data fabrication.”

FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT? RIGHT? As temperatures drop, talk of ‘global cooling’ heats up.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Sexual Desire Forges Lasting Relationships. “People often think of love and lust as polar opposites—love exalted as the binder of two souls, lust the transient devil on our shoulders, disturbing and disruptive. Now neuroscientists are discovering that lust and love work together more closely than we think. Indeed, the strongest relationships have elements of both.” Is this really such a surprise? Some InstaPundit readers have known this for years.

I MAKE A UNIQUE DOUBLE-DECKER BURGER WITH A SAUCE MADE FROM THOUSAND ISLAND DRESSING AND MUSTARD. I CALL MY CREATION “THE BIG MAC.” The Hill: Kentucky Dem Senate Candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes appears to copy ‘family recipes’ from others.

Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes’s family recipes, posted on her website on Wednesday for the Thanksgiving holiday, appear to be lifted from other websites.

One, for cranberry-pineapple salad, is a near-exact copy of a Kraft recipe for “Festive Cranberry-Pineapple Salad,” as posted to the Motley Recipe Book blog in 2006. . . .

Another, for sweet potato casserole, also tracks closely with the measurements and directions for a sweet potato casserole posted on the website of the Hartzler Family Dairy in Wooster, Ohio.

Well, her policy prescriptions are half-baked, so it evens out.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How Much Weight Can You Gain From Thanksgiving Dinner?

FASTER, PLEASE: New Genome-Editing Method Could Make Gene Therapy More Precise and Effective.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 7 Tips to Survive Cold-Weather Camping. My tip is to stay home, in front of a nice fire, with a glass of Remy. But I guess that would be #8.

IN THE MAIL: From Sarah Hoyt, Darkship Renegades.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 204.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: America’s Coastal Royalty: The real national divide isn’t between red and blue states.

The road to riches and influence, we are told, lies in being branded with a degree from a coastal-elite campus like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or Berkeley. How well a Yale professor teaches an 18-year-old in a class on American history does not matter as much as the fact that the professor helps to stamp the student with the Ivy League logo. That mark is the lifelong golden key that is supposed to unlock the door to coastal privilege.

Fly over or drive across the United States, and the spatial absurdity of this rather narrow coastal monopoly is immediately apparent to the naked eye. Outside of these power corridors, our vast country appears pretty empty. The nation’s muscles that produce our oil, gas, food, lumber, minerals, and manufactured goods work unnoticed in this sparsely settled fly-over expanse.

People rise each morning in San Francisco and New York and count on plentiful food, fuel, and power. They expect service in elevators and limos that are mostly made elsewhere by people of the sort they seldom see and don’t really know — other than to influence through a cable-news show, a new rap song, the next federal health-care mandate, or more phone apps.

Read the whole thing.

NPR: How Republicans And Democrats Ended Up Living Apart.