Arthur Fiedler & The Boston Pops - Christmas Album

You don't get more traditional Christmas music than this.

Jimmy Buffett - Mele Kalikimaka

A great Parrot Head version of the song made famous by Bing Crosby.

Dad Joke CCCXLVIII

Which reindeer likes to clean?  Comet.

Sir Christopher Lee - Jingle Hell

This is a little different, as Christmas music goes.  We've seen Christopher Lee here before in Christopher Lee: Metal Rocker and Total Badass. There's a lot of background in that post about his badassery, but also about his collaboration with the Metal band Rhapsody of Fire.

This 2013 song was released when he was 91 and went to #22 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, making him the oldest person ever to enter the music charts.  That's pretty badass right there, over and above his SAS career killing Nazis.

 

Badass.

Note: I do believe that this is the first ever Christmas post here that I've tagged "Badass".

Trump Administration to up cyber attacks overseas?

This is interesting:

President-elect Donald Trump's team wants to go on the offensive against America's cyber adversaries, though it isn't clear how the incoming administration plans to achieve this. 

...

"We have been, over the years, trying to play better and better defense when it comes to cyber," Waltz said. "We need to start going on offense and start imposing, I think, higher costs and consequences to private actors and nation state actors."

There's no question that attacks on US critical infrastructure have massively increased during the last decade, and there's also no question that foreign governments often take the stance that "Shucks, it must be criminal gangs".

The idea of threatening higher (retaliatory) costs to another country seems very Trumpian.

 

Quote of the Day - Hawaii 2nd Amendment nullification

From Francis Porretto:

The irony here is that the issue of concern to the author is an explicit element of the Constitutional contract, rather than an arbitrary change to it or a dismissal of one of its terms. Had the federal government passed a law asserting that the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to Hawaiians, that would have been a violation of the contract; the Hawaiian government would be right to oppose it. But the facts are the other way around. By applying for statehood, Hawaii agreed to abide by the Constitution as it stands; it could not claim afterward that it agreed “except for that inconvenient ‘right to keep and bear arms’ stuff.”

I have no idea what would follow were Hawaii to announce that it is seceding from the Union. In the fantasy case of a successful secession, Hawaii would no longer be bound by the Constitution’s prescriptions and proscriptions. In the real world as it stands today, Hawaii has agreed to the Constitutional contract; therefore, the Second Amendment is binding on Hawaii. Nullification and Interposition are irrelevant to the matter. Charlton Allen should not have mentioned them at all. I cannot imagine why he did so.

Read the whole thing which discusses how the Civil War did not establish nullification.

Yo-Yo Ma and Alison Krauss - The Wexford Carol

He plays like an angel, she sings like one. That's why this video has 6 million views.

Faith Hill - Where Are You Christmas?

The Queen Of The World and I watched the 1999 live action Grinch movie and quite enjoyed it.  This song got prominent play, for obvious reasons.