KIDS THESE DAYS: Snowflake Millennials Butthurt Over New TV Show Portraying Them as Snowflakes.

AFTER NATIONAL ANTHEM PROTEST, COLIN KAEPERNICK DREADFUL IN LOSS TO BEARS: “With snow falling, Kaepernick failed to generate anything through the air and had one completion, a 4-yarder to tight end Vance McDonald midway through the second quarter. Kaepernick finished 1-for-5 for 4 yards and ran six times for 20 yards. He was sacked five times for losses equaling 25 yards and finished,” the Chicago Tribune reports. Unlike successful quarterbacks, the retired 49ers’ QB turned SJW waited until after the game to start heaving bombs:

Some in the crowd of 46,622 jeered Kaepernick when he and teammate Eli Harold kneeled during the anthem, something Kaepernick has done before games to protest what he believes are wrongdoings against minorities in the United States.

“I will continue to do it,” Kaepernick said after the game. “There are a lot of issues that still need to be addressed.

“And I do think there is significance in being here (Sunday) seeing it’s the anniversary of the assassination of chairman Fred Hampton,” continued Kaepernick, who was wearing a T-shirt with a photo of Hampton, a leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party who was killed during a raid by Chicago police on Dec. 4, 1969. “Being in Chicago, being able to acknowledge that a black figure, a black leader like him is very important and his role in being a leader in this community and bringing this community together is something that needs to be acknowledged.”

Huh – Colin Kaepernick morphed into Leonard Bernstein so slowly, I hardly even noticed.

JUST A FEW WEEKS AGO, THEY WERE SAYING THAT ABOUT THE POLITICS OF OLD, WHITE MEN: The Evangelicalism Of Old White Men Is Dead.

I WONDER WHO’S FUNDING THAT? NGOs are smuggling immigrants into Europe on an industrial scale.

THIS WILL TURN OUT WELL: Lucasfilm President Says She Doesn’t Need to Cater to Male ‘Star Wars’ Fans.

SECRETS OF THE INSTAPUNDIT CO-BLOGGERS REVEALED! This just in: In addition to his blogging, podcasting, columns, and books, Austin Bay has some serious piano chops. I’m not sure about his rhythm guitarist, however…

(Photo taken earlier today in my new project studio, soon to be the subject of a few PJ Media Lifestyle articles.)

DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE: Mook Attempts To Defend Clinton’s ‘Joyless Campaign.’

A FITTING END: “The vehicle carrying Fidel Castro’s remains during his funeral parade broke down yesterday. Soldiers had to push it through the streets. How symbolic!”

ECONOMICS: Why Luxury TVs Are Affordable when Basic Health Care Is Not. “It’s not that complicated, folks. If you want good services, good products, innovative ideas, and low prices, you need competitive markets. The more you control, the higher the prices and the worse the results.”

Yes, but more control produces more opportunities for graft.

FLASHBACK: ANTITERRORISM IN THE AGE OF OBAMA: “One person working in the neighborhood told a local outlet he had seen numerous Middle Eastern men in the area but did not report anything to avoid racial profiling. Another man told a local broadcast station that an unspecified person saw purported suspicious activity — including the couple getting numerous deliveries and working in the garage at odd times — but, again, did not want to be seen as involved in racial profiling.”

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Kitchen and Housewares.

Plus, deals on Musical Instruments.

ITALY: The Latest: Renzi resigns after losing reforms referendum. Despite the Austria re-vote, the populist surge in Europe seems to be continuing.

SPACE: Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity Spaceship Makes 1st Solo Glide Flight.

BUT DON’T QUESTION THEIR PATRIOTISM: The Chilling Reason Why Black Lives Matter Memorializes Fidel Castro. “Castro killed thousands of his own people, imprisoned many more, caused 1 million refugees to flee to the United States, and even canceled Christmas. But Black Lives Matter celebrated him — because he provided a refuge for cop killers.”

HOW DO YOU THROW THE BOOK AT AN ALGORITHM?

When, in the mid-1990s, the world wide web transformed the internet from a geek playground into a global marketplace, I once had an image of seeing two elderly gentlemen dancing delightedly in that part of heaven reserved for political philosophers. Their names: Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek.

Why were they celebrating? Because they saw in the internet a technology that would validate their most treasured beliefs. Smith saw vigorous competition as the benevolent “invisible hand” that ensured individuals’ efforts to pursue their own interests could benefit society more than if they were actually trying to achieve that end. Hayek foresaw the potential of the internet to turn almost any set of transactions into a marketplace as a way of corroborating his belief that price signals communicated via open markets were the optimum way for individuals to co-ordinate their activities. . . .

Spool forward two decades and the only thing that hasn’t changed is the evangelical rhetoric of the tech industry. The online economy has been utterly transformed. It’s dominated by huge companies that vacuum up the digital footprints of all their customers and feed them into algorithms that determine prices, respond instantly to competitors’ prices and decide what should be offered to each customer. But the rhetoric of perfect competition, sovereign consumer, free markets and the dangers of government regulation remains locked in the era of Hayek, if not of Smith.

Enter Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke, two distinguished scholars specialising in competition law, who decided to ask if the online emperor has any clothes. Is the veneer of competitiveness provided by the vigour and diversity of our online marketplaces just an illusion?

Stucke is my colleague at UT Law, and the book under review is Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy. Donald Trump has promised more antitrust scrutiny of big tech companies; this would be a good place to start.

HEALTH: Older Americans Still Skipping Vaccinations.

It’s an ongoing and vexing public health problem: People once vigilant about vaccinating their children aren’t nearly as careful about protecting themselves as they age, even though diseases like influenza, pneumonia and shingles (a.k.a. herpes zoster) are particularly dangerous for older people.

“Trying to prevent these common and often debilitating conditions is incredibly important for older adults,” said Dr.Carolyn Bridges, associate director for adult immunization at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet in the C.D.C.’s 2014 and 2015 reports on vaccination coverage, she said, “we really didn’t see much change.”

Most Americans over 65 get an annual flu shot, but the proportion actually declined a few percentage points last season to about 63 percent. The C.D.C. estimates that of the 226,000 people hospitalized for flu in an average year, 50 percent to 70 percent are over 65; so are the great majority of those who die from it. “Older adults take the brunt,” Dr. Bridges said.

Similarly, in 2014, about 61 percent of older adults had received one or both of the two pneumococcal vaccines, which protect against pneumococcal infections that can lead to pneumonia and meningitis. That represented no improvement, leaving millions of older people still vulnerable.

I’m meticulous about keeping my shots up.

ANOTHER E.U. DOMINO FALLS: Italy’s Renzi loses referendum on constitutional reform: exit polls. Assuming the exit polls are right, and this time they probably are.

‘WE’RE TEACHING UNIVERSITY STUDENTS LIES’ – AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. JORDAN PETERSON:

My primary interest has always been the psychology of belief. Partly religious belief, and ideology as a sub-category of religious belief. One of Jung’s propositions was that whatever a person values most highly is their god. If people think they are atheistic, it means is they are unconscious of their gods. In a sophisticated religious system, there is a positive and negative polarity. Ideologies simplify that polarity and, in doing so, demonize and oversimplify. I got interested in ideology, in a large part, because I got interested in what happened in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution in China, and equivalent occurrences in other places in the world. Mostly I concentrated on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I was particularly interested in what led people to commit atrocities in service of their belief. The motto of the Holocaust Museum in Washington is “we must never forget.” I’ve learned that you cannot remember what you don’t understand. People don’t understand the Holocaust, and they don’t understand what happened in Russia. I have this course called “Maps of Meaning,” which is based on a book I wrote by the same name, and it outlines these ideas. One of the things that I’m trying to convince my students of is that if they had been in Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis. Everyone thinks “Not me,” and that’s not right. It was mostly ordinary people who committed the atrocities that characterized Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Part of the reason I got embroiled in this [gender identity] controversy was because of what I know about how things went wrong in the Soviet Union. Many of the doctrines that underlie the legislation that I’ve been objecting to share structural similarities with the Marxist ideas that drove Soviet Communism. The thing I object to the most was the insistence that people use these made up words like ‘xe’ and ‘xer’ that are the construction of authoritarians. There isn’t a hope in hell that I’m going to use their language, because I know where that leads.

Read the whole thing.

(Via SDA.)