NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Ocasio-Cortez Says She Feels Like An ‘American Revolutionary,’ Gets Mocked.

The Babylon Bee is right — Occasional Cortex really does need to watch the entire run of Schoolhouse Rock.

THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21st CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: NASA chief says US within 10 years of continuous manned presence on moon. 

Faster, please.

I FORESEE ANOTHER BUBBLE BURSTING: Millennials in China Are Using Nudes to Secure Loans.

RIP: Gloria Katz, American Graffiti Writer and Star Wars Script Doctor, Dies at 76.

Lucas wanted her husband “to write about cruising for American Graffiti, and I sort of came with the package,” she recalled in a 2017 interview.

She said that Lucas had “a lot of reservations” about his script for his follow-up, Star Wars (1977), as filming was about to begin. “He said, ‘Polish it — write anything you want and then I’ll go over it and see what I need,'” she said. “George didn’t want anyone to know we worked on the script, so we were in a cone of silence.”

Katz noted she and Huyck tried to add as much humor as possible and wrote about 30 percent of the film’s dialogue. They also shaped Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia to be a woman who “can take command; she doesn’t take any shit … instead of just [being] a beautiful woman that schlepped along to be saved,” she said.

Wait, all the best people told me that the Star Wars franchise didn’t discover feminism until The Last Jedi.

HOW LONG BEFORE OBAMA JUMPS UP TO TAKE CREDIT? The Atlantic: The Beginning of the End of the Korean War.

BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS: How Restaurants Got So Loud. Even if you want an open, minimalist, hard-surfaces look, you can put sound-absorbent material on the ceiling. And you should, you really should. I’d also like to see progress in area-based active noise cancelling, though that’s hard.

CREDENTIALED, NOT EDUCATED: Our Culture War Is Between People Who Get Results And Empty Suits With Pristine Credentials. “Donald Trump declines the authority of the cultural sectors that most assertively claim it. That’s the real conflict going on.” In America, we disguise class warfare as cultural warfare.

SHOT: What Is Chuck Schumer Thinking? “The Democrat keeps trying to make deals with Donald Trump—even if might mean funding the president’s odious border wall.”

CHASER: 62% Believe Legal Immigration Good But Illegal Immigration Bad. “Eighty-nine percent (89%) of Republicans believe illegal immigration is bad for the nation. That view is shared by 82% of Independents and 70% of Democrats.”

DAVID MAMET: “Hollywood is, at best, the cultural capital of Los Angeles. There is no literary salon. There is no need, as nobody can read.”

But read the whole thing for much, much more than snark.

TRUMP: I’m Cancelling My Meeting With Putin. “Based on the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine from Russia, I have decided it would be best for all parties concerned to cancel my previously scheduled meeting.”

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Fixing Facebook: Zuckerberg falls short of his New Year’s goal.

Over the year, Zuckerberg published a series of notes outlining what Facebook’s done to combat election meddling, as well as hate speech, misinformation and other offensive content. The social network pulled down more than 1.5 billion fake accounts, launched a database of political ads and announced the creation of a Supreme Court-like independent body to oversee content appeals.

But in many ways, Zuckerberg fell short of his New Year’s resolution. United Nations investigators said Facebook played a role in spreading hate speech that fueled ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Media outlets found loopholes and errors in Facebook’s political ads database. Users questioned whether they should #DeleteFacebook after learning that Cambridge Analytica, a UK political consulting firm with ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, gathered data on up to 87 million Facebook users without their permission.

In short, Facebook’s problems ballooned out of the the company’s control.

“They created a platform where sharing was mindlessly easy and interacting with each other required almost no forethought at all,” said Woodrow Hartzog, a law and computer science professor at Northeastern University. “As a result, there was massive sharing, including gushing of personal information that put lots of people at risk.”

That’s a feature, not a bug, and vital to Facebook’s business model.

FLASHBACK: Why President Trump Should Channel Teddy Roosevelt And Bust Some Trusts.

Make Antitrust Great Again!

CHANGE: NFL Player To Promote US Israeli Relations With His Cleats.

ENGLISH RULES ARE “TOO BIG A RISK”: Employers can be held responsible for their employees’ misbehavior in all sorts of ways. They can be sued for sexual harassment. They can lose customers if their employees are viewed as rude. The best way to manage these risks varies from workplace to workplace. But sometimes English-speaking supervisors have required their bilingual employees to speak English on the job, so they can assure proper workplace decorum is being upheld and so customers and fellow employees don’t freak out (“They’re talking about me; I just know it!”) Courts have repeatedly upheld this. But these days it often doesn’t matter what the courts do; the EEOC can and does make employers with English-only rules miserable.

Last night I ran across a web site advising employers to avoid such rules. It says it’s “too big a risk,” and that may be right. Alas, there are so many different bodies of “law” at work these days. There is the law as Congress enacted it. Then there is the “law” as a court would interpret and apply it if there were a case before it. Then there is the “law” as interpreted by the EEOC. Unless and until the EEOC actually sues, that “law” is procedurally tricky to get in front of a court. Instead, the EEOC’s strategy is usually to investigate a non-compliant employer to death. The wiser course for employers is usually to comply.

AT AMAZON, Historic Men’s Jackets, etc. from Buzz Rickson.

FAKE NEWS: Despite Claims of Suppression in Georgia, Registration and Turnout Increased Under Kemp.

KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE: Trump threatens to declassify ‘devastating’ docs about Democrats.

EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATICAL: Michigan Lawmakers Condemn ‘Girl Toys’ and ‘Boy Toys’ at McDonalds. “‘This is a significant issue,’ resolution claims.”

No, it really isn’t.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: In academia, censorship and conformity have become the norm.

SOMETHING ODD GOING ON IN MARYLAND’S EMOLUMENTS SUIT AGAINST TRUMP: Earlier this year, Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh found a federal judge willing to give the green light to his suit claiming the chief executive violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause by accepting foreign gifts.

The New Reform Club’s Seth Barrett Tillman says what isn’t happening in the litigation is more significant than what is. The District of Columbia government has also joined in the suit. Frosh is from deepest blue Montgomery County and is a hyper-partisan liberal Democrat who has also joined in suits challenging Trump’s immigration executive orders, 2017 tax cuts, Obamacare repeal and replace, and much, much more.

PETER INGEMI LOOKS BACK, ON THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF DATECHGUY BLOG.

OF COURSE THEY ARE: Google Is Developing Dossiers on Students Using Their Classroom Products, Disclosures Show. “And the Dept. of Education is encouraging schools to use technology to monitor—and modify—student behavior.”

I raised this issue at my son’s school (where the kids are required to use Google Docs and Gmail), and what I got was a shrug and, “It’s free.”

CHANGE: ESPN Has Lost 14 Million Viewers In 7 Years Thanks To Cord Cutting.

People would find other ways to watch ESPN if they still liked what they saw there.