THE DIPLOMACY OF SELF: President Trump relieved financial markets yesterday telling the World Economic Forum in Davos that he will not use military force to take Greenland away from Denmark. “We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be frankly unstoppable … but … I won’t do that,” he said.

  Later in the day Trump suddenly announced that he had reached the framework of a deal with NATO over Greenland’s future. Details were not revealed.

  Trump received tepid applause after his rambling speech of an hour and fifteen minutes repeating his claims of brilliant leadership, developing the greatest economy, calling Joe Biden the worst president, and, predictably, denouncing wind power.

  He called the Greenland matter “a very small ask,” saying the US basically owned Greenland during World War II and graciously gave it back to Denmark. 

“All we’re asking for is to get Greenland including right, title, and ownership because you need the ownership to defend it,” he said. “You can’t defend it on a lease. … psychologically who wants to defend a license agreement or a lease.” If it was a building with his name on it, he would. 

  At one point Trump confused Greenland with Iceland.

  Trump said he would build his “Golden Dome” anti-missile system in Greenland.

“Now what I’m asking for is a piece of ice,” he said, “cold and poorly located that can play a vital role in world peace and world protection.

  Ending that subject with a threat he said, “You can say no, and we will remember.”

  Historian Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic, “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him.” 

WHITE MALE WISDOM: For a few minutes Trump’s Davos speech drifted into outright racism, starting with the social services corruption scandal rooted in the Somalian community of Minnesota. “Can you believe the Somalians?,” Trump said to the conference. “They turned out to be higher IQ than we thought. And we say these are low IQ people. How did they go into Minnesota and steal all that money?”

  Minutes later he praised and called for the preservation of white European culture. “Situation in Minnesota reminds us that the West cannot mass import foreign cultures which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own,” he said. 

  “Let me tell you, the explosion of prosperity and conclusion and progress that built the West did not come from our tax codes,” Trump went on.  “It ultimately came from our very special culture. This is the precious inheritance that America and Europe have in common.” He said, “We have to defend that culture and rediscover the spirit that lifted the West from the depths of the Dark Ages to the pinnacle of human achievement.”

ICE, ICE BABY: A medical examiner in El Paso, Texas found that a 55-year-old Cuban immigrant in ICE custody died of asphyxiation January 3^rd at the hands of law enforcement officers. The autopsy listed the cause of death as “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.”

  A federal official said Geraldo Lunas Campos had tried to kill himself, was restrained by officers, and died after they tried to resuscitate him. 

SNOWMAGEDDON: A massive winter storm sweeping from the southwest through New England is expected to bring ice to the south and deep snow up through new England over the weekend. Road travel is expected to be dangerous and even impossible in some areas. Already there’s a run at the grocery stores.

THE REGIME: 

— Members of the Supreme Court by their questioning yesterday appeared to doubt that President Trump has the power or even the justification to fire a member of the independent Federal reserve board that sets interest rates. Trump has been trying to fire member Lisa Cook in his campaign for lower interest rates by accusing her of mortgage fraud before she joined the Fed. 

— The Trump administration has started an immigration enforcement sweep in Maine, targeting Somali immigrants in the state, The NY Times reports. 

— The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is pulling back from protecting the environment, has eliminated the practice of calculating the monetary value of human life when setting industrial regulations for emitting pollutants. For years under multiple administrations the value of a single life has been in the millions of dollars. The EPA now plans to calculate only the costs to companies of complying with pollution regulations.

THE OBIT PAGE: Rifaat al-Assad, the brother of then Syrian ruler Hafez al-Assad who put down a 1982 uprising by leading the killing of 40,000 people, has died at age 88. He became known as “the butcher of Hama” and his brutality inspired the term “Hama Rules” for the crushing of dissent through mass killing, torture, and destruction of neighborhoods.  

THE SPIN RACK:  Former Uvalde, Texas police officer Adrian Gonzales was found not guilty yesterday of abandoning or endangering children in the 2022 elementary school massacre in which 21 children and adults were killed. Gonzales was the first officer to arrive at the school and in an unusual case was charged with 29 counts for failing to act decisively to save lives. — The House Oversight Committee voted in support of holding former president Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress day after the couple refused to appear for closed-door depositions for the committee’s investigation into the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The full House would have to vote on whether to pass the recommendation on to the Justice Department for prosecution. Laughably in the current climate of governmental lawlessness, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said, “No one is above the law.”

BELOW THE FOLD: The outline of a human hand painted in red pigment accompanying other artworks in a cave on an Indonesian island is estimated to be at least 67,800 years old.

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