POLITICS MAKES YOU SAY DUMB THINGS: The Fast Company article on Parler that Stephen posted earlier has some good info but is hilariously biased against Parler and concludes thusly:

On some level, then, this is the internet working as intended: Hate speech will still exist, but after Parler failed to moderate the worst of it, it’s being pushed to the margins.

There is no level on which censoring speech those in power deem “hateful” is the Internet working as it was intended. It stuns me that someone could write this. Then again, maybe it’s just another example of saying the quiet part out loud – this is how the converged establishment intends the Internet to work now.

#UNITY: Within hours of calling for unity, Biden smashes norms to reward Big Labor.

UPPER-CLASS JOE: Pipefitters Union Gets Shafted With Biden’s Keystone Pipeline Cancellation.

FLASHBACK: Liberals Versus Political Speech. To be fair, they only want to put people behind bars for political speech they disagree with.

JOE BIDEN: THE NEW GEORGE WALLACE.

What is really at play here with President Biden, as with George Wallace, is identity politics. The original identity politics was slavery. After the abolition of slavery came the next installment of identity politics — segregation. The identity politics of today is the new segregation — identity politics being the son of segregation and the grandson of slavery. It’s all about race, and its practitioners can easily be called racial supremacists.

As I long ago detailed in this space, racism has been the political fuel for the Democratic Party since its inception.

The party was founded by slave owners. It wrote one platform after another supporting slavery. At its first convention after the Civil War, in 1868, with slavery abolished and segregation the new party doctrine, the party’s slogan was:

This is a White Man’s Country, Let White Men Rule. 

The point, of course, was to use race to win elections.

Nothing has changed with the Democratic Party. Today’s identity politics is nothing less than the politics of racial supremacy. Race trumps all.

Read the whole thing.

Related: How bad minorities became ‘white.’ Black and Latino Trump voters have been accused of suffering from ‘multiracial whiteness’.

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS TAKING A WELL-NEEDED REST: Dem Govs Flout Own COVID Restrictions to Attend Biden Inauguration. “Michigan’s Whitmer banned outdoor gatherings of more than 25 people before attending event.”

GOOD LUCK: University of Iowa struggles to convince court its officials aren’t liable for unconstitutional actions.

LEFTIST USEFUL IDIOTS NO LONGER QUITE AS USEFUL: Twitter suspends Antifa accounts with more than 71K followers.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: One Day With Joe Biden and Everything Has Gone to Hell Already.

Insanity Wrap needs to know: What do you do with a billionaire who brags that the guy he voted for is bad for business?

Answer: Seriously. We need to know. Because tar and feathers are just so unfashionable.

Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.

• A different billionaire — Warren Buffett — gets his first big payout for supporting Biden
• Dems struggle to put their Antifa/BLM genie back in the bottle
• It’s scientific fact that Dr. Fauci has reduced himself to a partisan hack — science!

Bonus Sanity: Soldiers still sleep whenever, wherever.

And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Temple counts BLM investment among ‘proudest moments’ of 2020, right alongside Alheizmer’s, HIV breakthroughs.

THE SUSPENSE ISN’T EXACTLY KILLING ANYONE: Facebook sends Trump suspension to its oversight board. “The former president’s account will remain blocked while the board makes its judgment.”

HMM: National Guard Mysteriously Booted From Capitol Now Told They Can Return.

WILL CODE FOR FOOD: Apple and Google execs applaud Biden’s immigration plan.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Nothing says, “This was a perfectly normal election, and now it’s time to come together as a united nation,” like having your swearing-in behind 12-foot-high razor wire surrounded by 25,000 troops whose loyalty you doubt.

BLUE STATE BLUES: Former Cisco CEO John Chambers says his start-ups are skipping over Silicon Valley.

GEORGE KORDA: A TRUMP PARTY?

THEY DON’T EVEN PRETEND ANYMORE: Media gush: Bidens restore ‘love’ at the White House, ‘we missed that.’

SPEAK UP: Biden Can’t Snuff Out the Truth of America’s Past. “Joe Biden disbanded the 1776 Commission, but he cannot silence its members.”

SHOCKER: Biden Labor Pick Paid Biden-Linked Firm Tens of Thousands Prior to Nomination.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Impeach #NotMyPresident Joe Biden Also Plus #Resist. “I’m no United States Inauguration Day historian, but I can’t off the top of my head remember a new president taking over and thinking that killing jobs was a great way to kick things off and endear himself to his people. Honestly, I’m not sure that a mentally competent Joe Biden would have thought so either.”

Things may get a whole lot worse before suddenly falling apart.

BECAUSE IT WAS MADE A PARIAH BY COMPANIES AND INTEREST GROUPS DOING EXACTLY WHAT THEY ACCUSED PARLER OF DOING: Here’s why Parler is still struggling to come back online.

FLASHBACK: Have you hugged a fracker today? Our oil expansion keeps us safe from Iranian meddling.

ARE COLLEGES Covid Superspreaders? “The analysis of 30 large U.S. universities indicated that in 18 of them, a peak in campus infections preceded a peak in the surrounding county by less than 14 days, suggesting infections were translated from the campus to the nearby community. In some cases, the home counties of these large colleges had infection rates much greater than the rest of their state.”

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Child Sex-Trafficking Victim SUES Twitter in Federal Court, Says the Site Facilitated His Abuse.

OREGON PREFERENCES PEOPLE OF COLOR FOR COVID VACCINES: I don’t know, I’m just an Okie but isn’t that a violation of the equal protection clause? Hans Bader, who isn’t an Okie but is a Harvard Law guy, says it is.

YEP: A Government Of Politicians, By Politicians And For Politicians.

Nothing says “peaceful transition of power” like barbed wire, barricades and 25,000 troop standing by. . . .

Political Washington puts inordinate taxpayer assets on the line when it is, itself, being protested. There are FBI billboards across the country, at who knows what cost, asking for information about those who went into the Capitol Building on Jan. 6. I do not remember our politicians sending in National Guard troops or spending millions on billboards when American cities, government buildings and people’s businesses were burning all across America last year. But when there is the slightest threat to them, there is no limit to the amount of your money they will not spend to protect themselves.

There are more troops in Washington protecting politicians than we have in war zones across the world, all in an overreaction to a small fraction of marauding knuckleheads who ran amok in the Capitol. These self-absorbed career politicians should get over themselves. I have long supported term limits, and I feel further that no elected official like Schumer, “Plugs” Biden or Pelosi should serve more than one face lift or one hair transplant.

25,000 National Guard troops for an inauguration no one will attend? This is the only personal security detail bigger than the one that looks after Beyonce and Jay-Z. Thank goodness Trump brought so many of our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan to be able to staff this.

There are folks in burned-out “protest” cities who wish Washington politicians protected them the way they protect themselves. And for Democrats who say fences do not work and we should not have guns, it seems they have a lot of fences and guns around them.

Do tell.

TRUMP WAS NO REAGAN?

In the 1980s, the Democratic Party of Tip O’Neill bore little resemblance to the party that Trump had to confront as his relentless enemy. Back then Democrats were still a party of blue-collar workers (a class that Trump tried to bring into his populist movement). Tip O’Neill was an Irish Catholic ward-heeler from Boston, who represented a working-class base; Nancy Pelosi by contrast speaks for culturally radical San Franciscans in a transformed Democratic Party, which today features LGBTQ demands, anti-white hysteria, Green New Deals, and which fights the gender identity war. Why would anyone think that Trump would not have gotten along with Tip as well as Ronnie did; or that Reagan would have enjoyed a better relationship with the present Democratic Party than Trump has? We are speaking about different forces of opposition to the GOP in two different eras.

Although Reagan faced critics in the leftist media, as someone who briefly served in his administration, let me assure Mr. Lavin that this sniping was nothing like the nonstop, venomous attacks to which Trump was subjected from the moment he declared his candidacy for the presidency. I have no idea how anyone but an absolute saint would not have exploded in the face of such slander; and it was directed not only against the president but also against his wife and young son. Never in my long life have I seen such a feeding frenzy.

Attacks on Trump as another Hitler and calls for assaults on him became commonplace over the last four years; and I strongly suspect that if Reagan has been forced to deal with such adversaries his approval rating and his temper would both have taken a hit. Reagan left office with a 63 percent approval rating, which by 1989 went up to 68 percent. We might ask what that approval rating would have been if the media threw dirt at him incessantly and if his congressional opponents incited riots against him throughout his presidency. Please note these attacks occurred not just because the Donald was intemperate in his language. The Left wanted power, and it was necessary to destroy Trump’s presidency to achieve it.

Finally, I would note that, unlike Reagan, Trump tried to be a transformative president who took his own party kicking and screaming into the populist form that he gave it. Although an honest, dedicated leader, Reagan transformed nothing.

Well, you don’t transform things by handing them over to an establishmentarian like George H.W. Bush.

OPEN THREAD: Mama just don’t understand.

THE SPACE REVOLUTION CAME IN 2033, WHICH WAS RATHER LATE FOR ME: Humans could move to this floating asteroid belt colony in the next 15 years, astrophysicist says.

IT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: The Making of a Molotov Cocktail: Two lawyers, a summer of unrest, and a bottle of Bud Light.

IT’S MEWE, AND I’M ON THERE: Hmmm: New Facebook Competitor Adds 2.5 Million Subscribers — In A Single Week.

HMM: ‘Exercise protein’ doubles running capacity, restores function and extends healthy lifespans in older mice.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Nothing says, “This was a perfectly normal election, and now it’s time to come together as a united nation,” like having your swearing-in behind 12-foot-high razor wire surrounded by 25,000 troops whose loyalty you doubt.

THE RETURN OF ETIQUETTE AND DECORUM WE WERE PROMISED? Biden Snipes at Reporter Questioning His Vaccine Plan. “The president did not engage further, [and] got up and left the room as an aide broke up the proceedings by urging reporters out.”

Related:

HANDMAIDENS OF TERROR: Feel The Healing: MSNBC Analysts Discussing Banning Republican Speech, Years Of “Detox” For The Right.

NOT MENTIONED: BLACK LIVES MATTER. 2020 Saw Unprecedented Murder Spike In Major U.S. Cities. Though, shockingly, there’s this from Bill de Blasio: “it’s certainly related to the fact that the criminal justice system is on pause and that’s causing a lot of problems”.

Do tell.

MATT MARGOLIS: Biden Administration Tear-Gassed ‘Peaceful Protesters’ Just Hours After Inauguration.

BRONZE AGE CASH: Objects suggest Europeans used standardized money 4,000 years ago.

CHINA PUSHING HARD TO CLOSE MILITARY DRONE GAP WITH U.S.: The Epoch Times’ Eva Fu has an exclusive report, based on a leaked file. Beijing’s military build-up is on all fronts.

JOURNALISM IN THE TRUMP ERA: Slouching Toward Post-Journalism: The New York Times and other elite media outlets have openly embraced advocacy over reporting. Also the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden eras, but it’s getting worse with each iteration.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD. The mom suing a Nevada high school for compelled speech in a class based on “intersectionality” is asking for support. According to the complaint, “Plaintiff William Clark’s first graded assignment for the class … required him to reveal his racial, sexual, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities and religious identities” (and later, of course, dealt with his alleged “privilege”). FIRE dealt with a similar situation at the University of Delaware back in 2007. It was bad then and it’s bad now.

TRUMP’S FOUR YEARS REALLY WERE FULL OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Issues & Insights takes a look back and compiles an impressive look at Trump’s record. How long before “Miss Me Yet? photos of Trump proliferate?

JUST WHAT YOU NEED FOR HOME DEFENSE: Review: Tippmann Armory Gatling Gun 9 mm.

LIVE IN FIVE FOR OUR VIPS: Live Chat with Kruiser, Preston, VodkaPundit.

ALSO FOR OUR VIPS: Gird Your Loins, Libertarians. The Biden Admin Is Going to Be Keeping an Eye on You. “Former CIA Director John Brennan let the cat out of the bag during an MSNBC appearance Wednesday, saying that the Biden administration is laser-focused on rooting out ‘insurgency movements’ in the U.S., cracking down on pernicious malefactors like (gasp!) libertarians. No, really.”

I BLAME #ORANGEMANBAD AND ANTI-MASK RED-STATERS: China reports more COVID-19 cases in Beijing, Shanghai.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Another Woman Gave Me An Orgasm At A Strip Club Bachelor Party.

REGULATIONS: New FAA Drone Rules: What Recreational and Commercial Pilots Need to Know.

QUESTIONS: How does SARS-CoV-2 get in your head and destroy your sense of smell?

HEY, JOE, CAESAR CHAVEZ WAS A VIRULENT FOE OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION: Maybe our 46th chief executive should spend more time reading journalists like The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson.

QUESTION ASKED: Can Biden Sec State Continue the ‘Tougher Approach’ on China?

President Joe Biden’s incoming secretary of state, Antony Blinken, agrees former President Donald Trump’s administration got communist China right.

During his Jan. 19 Senate confirmation hearing, Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China. I disagree very much with the way that he went about it in a number of areas, but the basic principle was the right one. And I think that that’s actually helpful to our foreign policy.”

Blinken knows the Chinese Communist Party endangers America and the world.

But can the Biden administration continue “the tougher approach” with Hunter Biden’s China investment scandal lurking in the diplomatic and criminal background?

Read the entire essay.

HEALTH: New trial finds arthritis drug tocilizumab no better than standard care for severe COVID-19.

ZERO PLUS ONE: Joe Biden, Who’s Been Accused of Sexual Misconduct, Announces Zero-Tolerance Conduct Policy for Administration.

CHANGE: U.S. sees 5-fold increase in methamphetamine overdose deaths.

DNC-MSM CONTINUING TO ENJOY FOUR YEAR SLUMBER: Hey, Remember When Executive Orders Were Controversial? Not Anymore!

I THINK THE EXPERTS HAVE HIT THE NAIL ON THE HEAD HERE: Collaboration Between Government and Big Tech Giving Rise to Totalitarianism, Experts Warn.

THE NEW CIVIL LIBERTIES ALLIANCE, ON WHOSE BOARD I SERVE, argued before the 5th Circuit in Michelle Cochran v. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. You can listen to the oral argument here.

NEW PRESIDENT, NEW SENATE, NEW ANTITRUST BALLGAME:

U.S. antitrust enforcement may be due for a shot in the arm as Joe Biden takes office, backed by Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress and led by lawmakers who have vowed to increase funding for competition enforcement and push other reforms.

Even before Democrats retook the Senate with victories in Georgia’s runoff elections on Jan. 5, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota had been confident Congress would get more aggressive on antitrust enforcement.

Regardless of whether she would continue as ranking Democrat on the Senate antitrust subcommittee in a GOP-controlled chamber or ascend to the chair if her party took over, Klobuchar said in November she would push for reforms she has introduced over the years, including bills making it easier to contest mergers.

“This was never a partisan issue,” Klobuchar said at the time, arguing antitrust concerns, especially about increasing market concentration, are not limited to the major technology companies that are currently facing scrutiny.

The head of the House antitrust subcommittee, Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., said in separate remarks around the same time that he would be working on competition legislation in the coming weeks.

Of the various reforms currently circulating, Cicilline said those with the most bipartisan support include calls for more funding for the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as prohibitions against platforms favoring their own products and excluding competitors.

The Trump Administration was more friendly to antitrust than traditional Republican administrations, so this isn’t as big a shift as it might be.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Megyn Kelly Cheers Formation Of Legal Group Fighting Critical Race Theory. “Today, President Biden doubled-down on critical race theory in the federal government. In response, I am announcing a new coalition of legal foundations and private attorneys that will wage relentless legal warfare against race theory in America’s institutions. The fight is on.”

ROGER SIMON: An Inauguration in the United States of North Korea.

I tried not to break the pledge of my previous columns to avoid the inaugural, but you couldn’t escape some of the images of the event out of the corner of your eye as you went about your day.

And what I caught glimpses of more than anything else was a massive display of guard troops, not quite what you would see marching through Pyongyang to commemorate Dear Leader’s birthday, but enough to make you wonder what kind of state you were in, democratic or autocratic.

The putative excuse was to avoid violence and a repetition of the occurrences of Jan. 6, but a hundred troops or so would have been more than sufficient to have blocked entry to the Capitol that day, had they been so empowered.

For the inauguration we had twenty to twenty-five thousand troops, an army of greater size than Lincoln employed to prevent the invasion of Washington during the Civil War.

All this with no known threats, at least none reported. (The actual “insurrection” at the Capitol was far less than your average weeknight tussle in Portland for the last six months.)

The attendance estimates at the inaugural were around two thousand, less than many high school basketball games.

What was the purpose then of all this saber rattling on a day that was supposed to be a celebration of the peaceful transfer of power in a democratic republic other than an ominous show of force, a reminder to the unruly masses that “stability” had returned and you had better accept it?

The Uniparty was back or, as they would put it in North Korea, Juche!

At least for the moment, Americans can still mock Fearless Leader:

Related: Comments ‘Turned Off’ On Biden White House YouTube Video.

ZHEY AREN’T WASTING ANY TIME: Just like that … The White House website’s contact form now asks for your pronouns.

FINALLY: At last, America has a gaffe-prone president again.

‘Folks, I can tell you, I’ve known eight presidents, three of them intimately.’ So said then vice-president Joe Biden in 2012. A month earlier, he had assured a crowd in New York that President Barack Obama could, in Teddy Roosevelt’s famous words, ‘speak softly but carry a big stick’ when it came to international relations. ‘I promise you,’ he said. ‘The president has a big stick.’ The crowd started laughing at the double-entendre. Joe wasn’t joking. ‘I promise you,’ he repeated, gravely.

That is just Joe being Joe. The 46th president is someone who quite often has no idea what he is saying. Curiously, everybody seems relieved about that. We’re told Biden’s presidency will mark a ‘return to normalcy’. Really it will mark the triumphant return of the gaffe-prone president.

For decades, Biden’s verbal blundering has been the stuff of legend. His presidential campaign of 1988 died because he plagiarized a Neil Kinnock speech. As a senator, he was called ‘the gaffe machine from Delaware’. Or as the Washington Post once put it: ‘Joe Biden isn’t a gaffe machine. He’s the Lamborghini of gaffes.’

Democratic Party loyalist Robin Williams certainly enjoyed dunking on Biden:

And Biden is so old, so did Johnny Carson during the 1988 campaign season:

WOW: Paralyzed mice walk again after cytokine treatment.

YOU MAY NOT BE INTERESTED IN WAR, BUT WAR IS INTERESTED IN YOU: Deadly suicide attack rocks central Baghdad, first in three years.

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM: Johns Hopkins probes pro-Palestinian TA who tweeted about lowering Jewish students’ grades.

SO WHAT? VIOLENCE DOESN’T MATTER WHEN IT’S NOT BY REPUBLICANS: Oregon’s Democratic Party offices vandalized amid post-inauguration protests.

Police arrested eight people on Wednesday after the Democratic Party headquarters in Portland, Oregon, was vandalized hours after President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

The building’s doors and windows were smashed, a small dumpster was lit on fire, and graffiti reading “Breonna Taylor deserves justice” and “F— Biden” was sprayed on the outside walls, according to videos filmed at the scene mid-afternoon by reporters for NBC Portland affiliate KGW.

Portland police said some of the group of about 150 people carried weapons “including Molotov cocktails, knives, batons, chemical spray and a crowbar.”

Some members of the crowd met in southeast Portland before heading to the Democratic Party offices dressed in black and carrying banners reading, “We don’t want Biden, we want revenge! For police murders, imperialist wars and fascist massacres,” and “We are ungovernable,” according to a photo published by The Oregonian.

Mostly peaceful.

#UNITY: Antifa Riots On Inauguration Day In Portland And Seattle. Antifa Banners Read “We Don’t Want Biden–We Want Revenge!”

MICHAEL YON: Washington, D.C. — Now Effectively Under Martial Law.

I am a war correspondent. Many years experience across the world. I am American.

Now, troops are everywhere. D.C. is locked down tighter than Beijing or Hong Kong. I got kicked out of Hong Kong last year, and greatly doubt China will let me back into Mainland, or back to Tibet without arrest.

D.C. and this mayor are like something from 1984. Which I decided to read again during pandemic 2020. Read it.

This is my first post on Rumble. I am targeted elsewhere.

How’s that return to normalcy thing workin’ out for ya?

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Professors donated heavily to Biden. Many now hold key admin posts.

GHOSTS OF MILLIONS OF ABORTED BABIES HAUNT U.S.: Indeed they do. Nathaniel Blake, writing in The Federalist, observes:

“Most people’s consciousnesses are not as seared as those of the zealots of ‘Shout Your Abortion’ and similar campaigns, so, for the majority of abortion supporters, any rhetorical dodge will do if it avoids invoking the violent reality of abortion. They prefer to cover abortion in the moral haze of a necessary evil in an imperfect world, and then not think about it.

“They justify abortion as the distasteful protector of the individual autonomy, personal achievement, material riches, and sexual satisfaction that our culture glorifies. But the effects of abortion are not so easily ignored. It is, of course, obvious how abortion has broken our politics.”

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Earth to Joe Biden: Canceling Keystone XL Pipeline Is a Gift to China and Russia.

UPDATE: Biden Administration: Yes, We Are Following Through With a Fracking Ban.

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Walter Russell Mead in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

Well.

WATCH: Joe Biden Violated His Mask Mandate Within Hours of Signing It.

Rules are for the little people.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE:

Shot: Biden’s Cesar Chavez bust in the Oval Office signals a new era for Latinos, activists hope: ‘It shows that he’s authentic.’

—The Washington Post, today.

Chaser:

On March 31, 1927, Cesar Estrada Chavez was born in Yuma, Ariz., to parents who had come north from Mexico as children in the 1890s. He went on to found the United Farm Workers union, and by his death in 1993 had become an icon for Hispanic activist groups and the Left in general.

And his views on border control would be a perfect fit in the Trump administration.

As a child working with his family in the California fields, Cesar quickly learned the reason farmworkers were paid so little and treated so poorly: As his biographer Miriam Pawel writes, “a surplus of labor enabled growers to treat workers as little more that interchangeable parts, cheaper and easier to replace than machines.”

Chavez acolytes today try to explain away his hawkish pro-border views as coming from a different historical context, applicable only to specific strikes and the strike-breakers that farmers tried to import. But this is false.

In fact, even before he started the union and fought against illegal immigration, he was opposed to the bracero program, which legally imported cheap, disposable labor from Mexico at the expense of American citizens (of Mexican and other origins) who had been working in the fields. Pawel quotes Chavez as saying, “It looks almost impossible to start some effective program to get these people their jobs back from the braceros.”

—“Hail Cesar!”, Mark Krikorian, NRO, March 31, 2017.

Hangover: The Jonestown-like madness of Chavez’s final days.

—The Atlantic, July/August 2011.

UPDATE: Joe Biden honors prominent slaveholders as well as America’s most anti-immigrant president in Oval Office redecoration.

DON’T BE EVIL: There’s Still No Sign of Privacy Labels for Most Google iOS Apps.

Google has not updated its major apps like Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome, and YouTube since December 7 or before, and most Google apps have to date have not been updated with the Privacy Label feature.

The Google Translate, Google Authenticator, Motion Stills, Google Play Movies, and Google Classroom apps do include privacy labels even though they have not been updated recently, but Google’s search app, Google Maps, Chrome, Waze, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Home, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Assistant, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, Google Slides, Google One, Google Earth, YouTube Music, Hangouts, Google Tasks, Google Meet, Google Pay, PhotoScan, Google Voice, Google News, Gboard, Google Podcasts, and more do not display the information.

On January 5, Google told TechCrunch that the data would be added to its iOS apps “this week or the next week,” but both this week and the next week have come and gone with no update. It has now been well over a month since Google last updated its apps.

To lightly paraphrase former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: If your data harvesting is something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

DOUBTFUL: Biden put on a show of ‘unity’ — will he stick to it?

Related: To move on, drop the Trump impeachment trial.

By the way, I don’t think you can impeach an ex-President anyway. The only remedies in impeachment are removal from office and disqualification to hold positions of “trust or profit.” The disqualification vote can’t take place until after the removal, and you can’t “remove” someone from an office they don’t hold. (Also, the offices from which disqualification disqualifies people aren’t elective offices, but appointed ones, something on which Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tillman have managed to change my mind).

SO NOW THEY’RE OFFERING TO HELP? Amazon offers to help the incoming Biden admin with COVID response.

WE HAD HERD IMMUNITY LONG BEFORE WE HAD VACCINES: We Will Get to Herd Immunity in 2021…One Way or Another. “Long before we reach herd immunity, however, the infection and death rates will fall.”

Plus, from the comments: “It might help if the CDC didn’t take federal holidays. If they take off President’s Day, we’ll know how serious they are. They didn’t bother to update their statistics page between the 16th (as of 6 a.m. on Friday) and Tuesday evening (as of 6 a.m. on Tuesday). Three day weekends don’t say ‘national emergency.'”

REMEMBER, “SPREADING MISINFORMATION” AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES IS BAD AND MUST BE RESTRAINED: Hillary Clinton: I would love to see if Trump ‘was talking to Putin the day that the insurgents invaded our Capitol.’

OUT: A FREE SOCIETY IS ONE IN WHICH IT IS SAFE TO BE UNPOPULAR.

IN:

THE UNPERSONING OF AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT: Twitch’s Trump ban sustained after leaving office.

PAUL BEDARD: “House Democrats turned the Inauguration of the 46th president of the United States into just another day of fundraising.”

DUNNO. DOES IT ALSO REPLACE SUN SPOTS AND BRING TECTONIC PLATE MOVEMENT TO A HALT? Engineers have built machines to scrub CO₂ from the air. But will it halt climate change?

HOUSE DEM FRESHMAN WANTS TO ABOLISH ‘AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM:’ Looks like Critical Race Theory has another proponent in the Democratic House of Representatives. We just don’t understand how evil we are until we listen to our betters like Rep. Jamaal Bowman. But The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz is not impressed.

TRANSGENDER DÉJÀ VU: I am waiting to see if (or rather when) the Biden Administration re-issues the Obama Era transgender Title IX bathroom guidance. My amicus brief in the Gloucester County School Board v. G.G. case still demonstrates why that guidance misstated the law and why, under the actual law, school districts have the discretion in this area. Bostock v. Clayton Co. (2020) does not conflict with my analysis. Its hyper-textual analysis arguably bolsters it.

#JOURNALISM: NY Paper Retracts Piece Mocking ‘Childless’ Elise Stefanik.

WELL, YES: Von der Leyen: big tech firms need to be reined in despite Trump’s exit.

The end of Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House was celebrated by the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday, as she warned that the former US president’s rise highlighted the need to confront the internet giants who helped him spread “conspiracy theories and fake news”.

The European commission president spoke of her relief at Trump’s departure, but warned that the outgoing leader’s movement still existed, and that the digital platforms used to spread hate needed to be tackled.

Please note Von der Leyen’s tacit admission that she thought it was Big Tech’s job to determine the US election.

RULING CLASS: Michael Lind: The New National American Elite: America is now ruled by a single elite class rather than by local patrician smart sets competing with each other for money and power. “The rising ruling class in America is found in every major city in every region. Membership in it depends on having the right diplomas—and the right beliefs.”

Plus: “More and more Americans are figuring out that ‘wokeness’ functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter.”

Related: ‘Luxury beliefs’ are the latest status symbol for rich Americans.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Everyone But Kamala Harris Is Hoping Biden Stays Healthy. “The Democrats, however, are the ‘be careful what you wish for’ party. Whenever the Democrat who sane people like us think we want gone finally is, there is a ninety-nine percent chance that his or her replacement will be even worse. Seriously, those people have a never ending supply of awful gushing forth from wherever they’re spawned.”

IS SEX BETWEEN CONSENTING ADULTS A PRIVATE ACT: Of course it is. But as the Colson Center’s Brook McIntire explains, it’s all but impossible to avoid the reality that there can be public consequences for all of us.

UNLOCKING ACHIEVEMENT: HERD IMMUNITY. Covid-19 Vaccines May Cut Transmission as Well as Symptoms.

Once again, the Covid-19 health message is getting muddled. Even as officials and scientists urge the public to get vaccinated, they warn that after vaccination, we’ll still have to go on isolating and wearing masks.

It’s a mistake to oversimplify this way. We should be talking about using the vaccines to end the pandemic — not filling people with dread that they will be stuck with isolation and masks forever. The evidence is compelling that a strong, rapid vaccination campaign could render SARS-CoV-2 less of a threat than seasonal flu through building herd immunity.

Without herd immunity as a shared goal, some might skip the vaccine, influenced by scare stories about side effects and rare allergic reactions, especially if they are young and face only a small chance of dying from the virus.

Expect to see a lot more positive messaging from the press now that Orange Man Bad is out.

FROM AMIE GIBBONS:  Scorpions of the Air (The Elemental Demons Urban Fantasies Book 2).

There are more things in Hell and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy

Not even magic can trump terror…

Sarah Blakely fought off demonic possession last month, discovering she has powers she can use against the demonic forces of evil.

She’s ready to celebrate her birthday with a bang. But when a deadly variation of meningitis strikes Chattanooga schools without warning, the party isn’t the only thing shut down.

Children are dying, the doctors have no cure, people are panicking, and Sarah doesn’t believe anything about the sickness and fear drowning the city is natural.

With the entire city against them, and questions piling up, can Sarah and her friends stop the invisible specter haunting the city before it gets what it came for?

*And yes, although indies cannot for now circumvent Amazon, I’m working on something that will let you buy “pre-release” copies.  Give me a few months. And I plan to bring Amie along! (As well as other liberty-minded indies) – SAH*

A LAW SCHOOL DISGRACES ITSELF: Is This Law Professor Really A Homicidal Threat? “You would expect, given the sanctions that the University of Illinois at Chicago’s John Marshall Law School piled onto Professor Jason Kilborn, that he had done something horribly disgraceful. Disgrace there is in abundance, but it belongs to the school’s administration. Indeed, in this story, Kilborn is the only one who looks good.”

John Marshall Dean Darby Dickerson has an alleged history of bigotry where dealing with faculty and staff is concerned.

CHINA’S NORTHEAST BEING RAVAGED BY COVID: If you think our lockdowns are draconian …

I’VE GATHERED AROUND ME UPPITY LIBERTY-MINDED WOMEN: Not Today! – A Guest Post by Amie Gibbons.

And men too. And I’m very proud of that.

NOT AS MUCH AS A SOCIALIST USA WILL:  Study: Global Warming will Impact Children’s Nutrition.

Socialism/Communism/Collectivism: Bad for children and other living things.

TYRANTS ALWAYS WANT UNITY:  Biden and Harris: The Great Uniters?

Free societies are havens of dissent and disagreement.

THE LEFT PLAYS THEIR EMPTY SHOWS FOR NO ONE:  Jill Biden Is Media’s New Fashion Queen.

NO ONE’S PRESIDENT:  Inauguration of FICUS Biden – Citizens Not Invited.

And it wasn’t an Inauguration. It was a perjuring.

THE LEFT’S SPECIALTY:  Projection.

One of my fans called it “Like a drive-through IMAX”.

IT’S NOT PARANOIA:  The Dangerous Boomerang of Political Paranoia.

The dolts really are out to get us.

IT’S BIZARRE ACTUALLY:  An empty Biden inauguration for a false victory.

For us, children of the Cold War, it’s like watching the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, juxtaposed, like someone took a double exposure.
Nothing is what it seems.