POWERLINE: Almost Blacklisted By Google. “Even if Google owes nothing to your publications, it certainly owes good faith to the users of its search. Intentionally hiding conservative and/or libertarian websites from the customers is an obvious breach of good faith.”
If the GOP were like the Democrats, a bunch of State AG’s would be investigating this. But, even though there are now many more Republican AG’s, that’s not happening.
LOTS MORE MISTER NICE GUY: Mitt Romney planning to run for Senate if Orrin Hatch retires.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Should we be buying Iodized salt?
WHAT CAN DONALD TRUMP LEARN FROM MARCO RUBIO? Beware of deals with Chuck Schumer.
YOU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: Michigan Farmer Prohibited From Selling Apples Because He Opposes Same Sex Marriage.
EXPERTS — WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT THEM? Will China and Russia support oil sanctions on North Korea? Experts are skeptical.
A BOLD WAY TO FIGHT RACISM: Daryl Davis, a black man, explains how he defeats the Ku Klux Klan with open dialogue, not violence.
THAT WENT WELL: Plaintiff suing GrubHub over employment status gets dismantled on cross-examination. There are some serious questions to be raised over the difference between an employee and a contractor in the changing American workplace (I explore some of them in this paper), but this guy was not the ideal candidate for poster boy for the “gigs are employment” side.
ANTIFA VERSUS FASCISTS, THE EARLY DAYS: Stalingrad Remembered.
HMM: Did a Saudi prince secretly visit Israel?
According to a report by the Israel Broadcasting Corporation, a senior member of the Saudi royal family held high-level talks with Israeli officials during a clandestine trip to the Jewish state.
“A prince from the Royal Court visited the country in secret over the past few days and discussed the idea of pushing regional peace forward with a number of senior Israeli officials,” the IBC reported, citing the Russian Sputnik media outlet.
Both Israeli and Saudi foreign ministries refused to comment on the report.
The report came a day after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu claimed that relations between Israel and the Arab world were better than ever before in Israel’s history.
“What’s happening now with the Arab bloc states has never before happened in our history – even when we signed agreements,” said Netanyahu.
“What we have now is greater than anything else during any other period in Israel’s history.”
On Sunday, the IUVM Online Arabic news outlet identified the Saudi official who reportedly visited Israel as Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia and heir apparent to the throne.
If the mystery guest was the newly-installed Crown Prince, then his visit is very big news indeed.
KAROL MARKOWICZ: DeVos is totally right to roll back insane ‘anti-rape’ rules.
WELCOME TO IAIN MURRAY, long-time blogger and generally smart guy, who’s joining our happy crew here at InstaPundit. He’s VP of strategy at CEI, and is the author of such books as Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You
Longtime InstaPundit readers may remember his original blog, The Edge of England’s Sword, now defunct, alas. But that’s our gain here at InstaPundit!
IN THE MAIL: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character).
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals
MY FIRST 9/11 COLUMN: Written the day of the attack.
The column includes this line:
Waging this war requires a national consensus to bear the responsibility of common defense and a commitment to common purpose.
I think that’s true. I don’t think we’ve done it.
For what it’s worth, here’s a column I wrote in January 2001 about intelligence failures. Donald Rumsfeld had raised the issue in his confirmation hearings. I believe the column ran January 23, 2001 in The Washington Times. The San Antonio Express-News also published it sometime that week.
MEGAN MCARDLE: Here’s Why Silicon Valley Loves Big Government: The tech industry assumes others will bear most of the costs.
Silicon Valley titans, suggests Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times, are really quite liberal. But there is one major exception to their liberalism: They aren’t very fond of regulation. Especially, one might add, regulation aimed at the tech industry.
This supposition is based on a single paper that is still under peer review. But I suspect that Manjoo was willing to write about it because it fits his anecdotal impression of these people, counterexamples like Peter Thiel notwithstanding. It certainly fits with mine. . . .
Why is the tech-industry so government-friendly? And why, if they think that government would do such a splendid job at regulating the distribution of wealth in society, do they not think that it would do an equally splendid job regulating them?
One reason that Silicon Valley moguls may be more redistribution-friendly than the old robber-barons has to do with a fundamental difference between their industries. The Gilded Age tycoons had largely come up in businesses that had considerable variable cost to their operations. If you wanted to make more steel, you had to hire more workers, buy more iron ore and coal, and pay railroads to ship all those raw materials in, and your finished product out.
Heavy taxation would thus considerably cut into your production. You couldn’t buy so many raw materials; you couldn’t afford so many workers; you would not be able to ship as much finished product to your customers. Taxation, in other words, had very high costs, not just to your personal wealth, but to the means by which you produced more of it. It’s true that if everyone had to pay the tax, your relative position among your fellow millionaires probably wouldn’t slip much. But the absolute amount you could produce would fall.
Silicon Valley, on the other hand, is among a growing number of industries where the variable cost approaches zero. Once you’ve written the software, you can sell a thousand copies or a million with barely any difference in the amount of money you have to spend on operations. A friend recently pointed out the curious dilemma that Google has: it has a core business that throws off enormous sums of cash and needs relatively little investment to keep doing so, and at the same time, it’s hard to imagine that anything they invested that cash in could generate a similarly massive income stream. The same could be said of Facebook.
Read the whole thing.
TRUMP: We Should Consider “Getting Rid Of The Debt Ceiling Altogether.”
That’s not a bad idea. The debt ceiling isn’t actually a ceiling, since it can be raised at will — and serves almost exclusively as a political grandstanding vehicle.
FLASHBACK: THE FALLING MAN. “In most American Newspapers, the photograph that Richard Drew took of the Falling Man ran once and never again. . . . The two most reputable estimates of the number of people who jumped to their deaths were prepared by The New York Times and USA Today. They differed dramatically. The Times, admittedly conservative, decided to count only what its reporters actually saw in the footage they collected, and it arrived at a figure of fifty. USA Today, whose editors used eyewitness accounts and forensic evidence in addition to what they found on video, came to the conclusion that at least two hundred people died by jumping—a count that the newspaper said authorities did not dispute. Both are intolerable estimates of human loss, but if the number provided by USA Today is accurate, then between 7 and 8 percent of those who died in New York City on September 11, 2001, died by jumping out of the buildings; it means that if we consider only the North Tower, where the vast majority of jumpers came from, the ratio is more like one in six.”
BRIAN WILLIAMS GOTTA BRIAN WILLIAMS: “Williams discouraged [Florida residents being pummeled by Irma] from going out in the harsh conditions, but at one point actually said ‘forward this picture on Instagram, pretend you shot it and pretend it’s yours. We’ll look the other way.’”
Which pretty neatly sums up how NBC executives treated Williams’ own fabrications, until they didn’t, and transferred him back to the farm team on MSNBC.
At least for now. I’m sure Williams still vows…
LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY, MUSICAL EDITION: British conductor sacked by US music festival after ‘innocent’ joke with his African-American friend was labelled racist. It doesn’t say who the officious “white woman” was who overheard two strangers talking and took it upon herself to tell the Stasi that she had witnessed badthink. But I doubt she was motivated by “good intentions.” More like self-importance and a desire to wield unaccountable power. She should make a public apology for this unconscionable act of big-brotherism.
SMALL WARS JOURNAL: Iranian Unconventional Warfare in Yemen.
This conflict represents a complex proxy war between Iran and the U.S./Saudi coalition. Iran provides support directly to the Houthis, but also via its proxy Hezbollah (both deny providing any support), while the U.S. provides support to Saudi Arabia in its operations in Yemen, which include both direct military action and foreign internal defense in support of the Yemeni government.
Complicating the analysis is the fact that rival armed groups, including local affiliates of Al Qaida and Daesh, are also fighting against the Yemeni government and sometimes each other, and that other states are providing support to the government. This creates a highly unstable security environment, which the Houthis could benefit from, but it makes planning more difficult and increases the number of possible adversaries. However, instability in Yemen is itself a valuable objective for the Iranian sponsor, since this creates friction for Saudi Arabia, other Sunni states, and the U.S., all of which represent a bloc against which Iran is seeking to balance.
Perhaps the old Arab adage is actually “The enemy of my enemy is my enemy,” but something got gained in the translation.
BUILD THE WALL, OF INDIFFERENCE: At campus bordering Mexico with 25,000 undergrads, pro-DACA rally musters three dozen protesters.
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YEAH, THAT’LL WORK: President Maduro of Venezuela “Caps Prices to Avoid Black Market.” As Duke’s Mike Munger says on Twitter, “I understand Maduro. He’s an idiot. But for the Times to report it credulously is criminal.”
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