CRACKDOWN: YouTube tightens the rules around creator monetization and partnerships.

This might assure marketers that their ads are less likely to run on random, fly-by-night channels, but as Google’s Paul Muret writes, “Of course, size alone is not enough to determine whether a channel is suitable for advertising.”

So in addition, he said:

We will closely monitor signals like community strikes, spam, and other abuse flags to ensure they comply with our policies. Both new and existing YPP channels will be automatically evaluated under this strict criteria and if we find a channel repeatedly or egregiously violates our community guidelines, we will remove that channel from YPP. As always, if the account has been issued three community guidelines strikes, we will remove that user’s accounts and channels from YouTube.

Muret also described changes planned for the more exclusive Google Preferred program, which is supposed to be limited to the best and most popular content. Vlogger Logan Paul was part of Google Preferred until the controversy over his “suicide forest” video got him kicked out last week — a story that suggests some of the limitations to Google’s approach.

Moving forward, Muret said the program will offer “not only … the most popular content on YouTube, but also the most vetted.”

And you can be sure that these new rules will be applied fairly and without bias.

SANCTUARY STATES AREN’T CHEAP, YOU KNOW: Incoming New Jersey Governor Wants to Create an Entire Agency to Protect Illegal Immigrants.

BUG: Chromecast and Google Homes reportedly overloading home Wi-Fi.

WiFi is great, but for streaming HD or 4k video, I prefer Roku Ultra or Apple TV which both have ethernet ports.

IN TIME, THAT PROBLEM WILL GO AWAY: Revolutionary new cancer treatments won’t be available in many rural areas of the U.S. I mean, X-ray machines were once scarce in rural areas.

TREY GOWDY: ‘I Have Seen No Evidence of Collusion Between the Russians and President Trump.’

CALIFORNIA IN A SINGLE HEADLINE: Anaheim to evict homeless to make way for flood-control project and preserve bike path.

And the video in the post at Twitchy of ten speed-bicyclists in full spandex Lance Armstrong Tour de France gear and GoPro-equipped helmets videotaping themselves riding past an endless row of homeless tents is California in a single video:

Ayn Rand didn’t write The Return of the Primitive as a how-to guide.

JOE KATZMAN: How To Trump The Media: Avoid Conservatives’ Biggest Mistake.

Do you really think it’s a coincidence that leftism and its “Diversity Pokemon Points” amount to a full caste system?

Do you have any doubt about The left’s hatred for those who will not stay in their assigned status?

Have you noticed their quickness to turn on their own allies? Fail to follow the latest fad, and your status is demoted.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that endlessly callous virtue signaling is the identifying badge of our modern try-hard Striver Class.

Maybe that’s because American public education is now a 20-year Milgram Experiment. Where the meta-message inside political correctness is to override your own judgement, in favor of deliberately-shifting judgements from people with higher status.

These aren’t accidents. They’re clues.

Leftism isn’t a policy machine or an economic machine. Its economic results would tell you that much in a hurry. But the machine keeps running. Which means it must work for something. The correct question is: in what way does it work?

Read the whole thing.

JOE PAPPALARDO: Someone Could Definitely Hack the Emergency Warning System. Here’s Why They’d Do It.

HOW TO HANDLE THE LEFT: British Channel 4 interviewer attempts to ambush Canadian professor who espouses heretical views and gets shellacked. As Douglas Murray says, “That isn’t news. It isn’t even interviewing. It is grandstanding. This nation’s broadcasters should feel ashamed.” Not just the British nation’s…

PAULA BOLYARD: The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), Ohio’s largest online charter school provider, could shut down as early as next week.

YOU WOULD THINK: ‘Getting Completely Naked’ In Ansari’s Apartment Is A ‘Pretty Solid Non-Verbal Cue.’

FASTER, PLEASE: Biologists’ new peptide could fight many cancers. “MIT biologists have designed a new peptide that can disrupt a key protein that many types of cancers, including some forms of lymphoma, leukemia, and breast cancer, need to survive. The new peptide targets a protein called Mcl-1, which helps cancer cells avoid the cellular suicide that is usually induced by DNA damage. By blocking Mcl-1, the peptide can force cancer cells to undergo programmed cell death.”

WHY IS #THERESISTANCE SUCH A CESSPIT OF VIOLENT MISOGYNY? “Portland’s Resistance co-founder Gregory McKelvey was jailed six years ago on suspicion of strangling and kidnapping an ex-girlfriend while he was an 18-year-old student at Oregon State University, records show”.

HEH: Why Are the Iranian Protesters Islamophobes? “Criticizing sharia? What a bunch of bigots.”

WOW: The incredible moment a meteorite bursts through the atmosphere and lights up the night sky over Detroit before causing an EARTHQUAKE as it crashes down to earth.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Faculty Salaries And The Extraordinary Cost Of Research At A Top 25 Law School. “Second, these gaps reveal that tenure-track law faculty are comfortable with high levels of income inequality. We may criticize income inequality in other contexts, but we are comfortable with that inequality in our own workplaces. We work daily with colleagues who share our academic and professional backgrounds, as well as our institutional aspirations and much of our workload, but who earn substantially less than we earn. It surely bothers them, but it doesn’t trouble us much.”

DENNIS PRAGER: 10 Thoughts on the President and the ‘S—hole Countries.’

As Guatemalan columnist Claudia Nunez wrote on Trump in the Guatemalan newspaper Siglio 21: “The epithets he uses to describe certain groups are unfortunate and exemplify the decadence of the current political scene. But he has also said things that are true, for example, that it is we citizens of migration countries who have accommodated ourselves to the need to export people, as we have calmly allowed excessive levels of corruption to grow for decades.”

Though many wonderful immigrants come from the world’s worst places, there is some connection between the moral state of an immigrant’s country and the immigrant’s contribution to America. According to data from the Center for Immigration Studies, 73 percent of households headed by Central American and Mexican immigrants use one or more welfare programs, as do 51 percent of Caribbean immigrants and 48 percent of African immigrants. Contrast that with 32 percent of East Asians and 26 percent of Europeans.

Those numbers validate a lot of complaints about our immigration priorities.

MISSILE DEFENSE TEST IN THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS: The Navy’s SM-3 IIA anti-missile missile “could add another layer of defense to Hawaii” against North Korean intercontinental-­range missiles. Note the qualifier “could.” The missile is effective against several the of IRBMs North Korea deploys.

VERY MUCH RELATED: Learning from Hawaii’s false missile attack fiasco. (bumped)

YET ANOTHER OPEN SECRET IN THE MSM: “Ann Curry said in her first TV interview since leaving NBC in 2015 that she would have been surprised if anyone at the ‘Today’ show didn’t know about her former co-host Matt Lauer’s pervy behavior with women, adding that there was a culture of sexual harassment at the peacock network.”

Earlier: ‘They all knew’: Media elites roared in laughter at obscene 2008 ‘roast’ sending up Matt Lauer’s office sexcapades.

QUESTION ASKED: What if diversity isn’t America’s strength?

I once heard Jesse Jackson explain that racial integration of the NBA made it stronger and better. He was right. But would gender integration of the NBA have the same effect? Would diversifying professional basketball by height? Probably not.

All of these analogies can take you only so far. Thomas Sowell once said, “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”

There’s a growing body of evidence that even if diversity— the kind that results from immigration — once made America stronger, it may not be doing so anymore. Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist at Harvard, found that increased diversity corrodes civil society by eroding shared values, customs and institutions. People tend to “hunker down” and retreat from civil society, at least in the short and medium term.

I think the real culprit here isn’t immigration or diversity in general, but the rising stigma against assimilation. Particularly on college campuses, but also in large swaths of mainstream journalism and in the louder corners of the fever swamp right, the idea that people of all backgrounds should embrace a single conception of “Americanism” is increasingly taboo.

Anyone of any race or national origin can be an American, but it requires effort and desire from both the individual and the larger society. There’s a shortage of both these days.

Indeed.

ROGER SIMON: Trump’s Not a Racist; He’s a ‘Scorch!’

A scorch was the kind of kid who, when someone muffed an easy fly in stickball, would scream out, seemingly totally incensed, “You [f-word]ing [derogatory word for Puerto Rican], how could you [f-word]ing drop that [f-word]ing ball, you dumb [f-word]ing [derogatory word for Puerto Rican] idiot?!”

Of course, no one paid that much attention because it was just one of our scorches – there were more than one, of all races and creeds – mouthing off and, soon enough, he and the Puerto Rican kid were heading off to the local candy store together – known, in my case, as Jesse’s Jip Joint – to share a cup of hot French fries with way too much ketchup, as if they were best buddies. Indeed, often, they were.

Read the whole thing.

CHANGE MORE OF THE SAME: Senate Dems at 50-Vote Mark to Block FCC’s Net Neutrality Repeal.

This report is from Bridget Johnson, whose unexplained and unacknowledged Twitter banishment remains unexplained and unacknowledged by Twitter management.

IT’S ALMOST AS THOUGH PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO BUY THINGS THEY DON’T WANT TO BUY: After Four Years of Obamacare Implementation, Uninsured Rate Hits 12.2%. “Uninsured rate highest for Americans ages 26 to 34 at 20.1 percent.”

SOMETHING TO WORRY ABOUT: Uh Oh: Normally Red District Turns Blue In Wisconsin Special Election, Spurring Wave Fears. My advice to Republicans: Get off Twitter, and get involved with a 2018 campaign.