HEH: Alex Jones Threat Spurs Facebook ‘Don’t Click’ Button.

JORDAN PETERSON ON THE “BACKLASH AGAINST MASCULINITY.”

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY: White Supremacist Extremists Skirting Social Media Bans. “They ‘continue to leverage social media to communicate, organize, and spread propaganda, despite the efforts of mainstream social media companies to remove extremist content from their online platforms’.”

Unexpectedly.

CAMPUS CENSORSHIP? MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Is there another area of civil rights in which academics will point to hundreds (upon hundreds) of documented incidents and yet happily tell you it’s no big deal because, hey, think of all the people whose rights haven’t been violated?

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Comedy Central Inc. Calls Trump Admin Racist. “The company’s latest Tweet is Resistance on steroids, with a dollop of free speech denial.”

I’m so old, I remember when Comedy Central was about providing comedy.

AT AMAZON, save on Men’s Socks. Also Men’s Underwear.

Plus, summer deals on Bras for Women.

HOW WEIGHT LOSS can stop Type 2 Diabetes.

EMBRACE THE POWER OF “AND”: Why Prof. Bryan Caplan is proud to be pro-market AND pro-business.

“THE POLICEMAN ISN’T THERE TO CREATE DISORDER; THE POLICEMAN IS THERE TO PRESERVE DISORDER.” Analysis: True: It’s time to hold Democrats responsible for Chicago’s violence.

Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office in 1931.

(Classical reference in headline.)

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT VOTER FRAUD IS A MYTH: 670 ballots in a precinct with 276 voters in Georgia’s primary.

Update: Link was missing before. Fixed now — sorry!

THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: We’ve Been Wrong Before: The Expanding Earth Theory: Did the continents spread apart because the planet itself is expanding? No, but a lot of good scientists used to think so.

HMM: ‘Exculpatory Evidence’ Found in Classified Docs Should Have Been Presented to FISA Judge, Nunes Says. “Also, keep an eye on Bruce Ohr — he’s about to become a more important figure.”

ESQUIRE: PEOPLE AT NBC KNEW ABOUT MATT LAUER FOR YEARS.

[T]he Esquire piece adds a bit of support to the claim by former Today co-host Ann Curry that she warned NBC execs about Lauer’s behavior toward women back in 2012 after a female staffer came to her for help. The Washington Post confirmed Curry’s account with the woman who came to her and NBC did not deny Curry’s claim directly, though the network did deny having a record of such a complaint.

This seems like another situation where nearly everyone working around Lauer knew what he was up to but since he was the most powerful person on the show, people left it alone. If NBC execs didn’t know it’s probably because they didn’t want to know.

Related: Obama Calls on Men to Stand Up to Sexual Asssault [sic].

—Headline, complete with typo (Freudian slip?) at NBC News, September 19, 2014.

GEORGE KORDA: In Tennessee, negatively campaigning – positively – was a triangulation winner.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Time to Ground the Blue Angels? A Navy Flier Responds.

The Seattle Times published an opinion piece entitled Time to Retire the Blue Angels, which argued that the U.S. Navy demonstration team should not fly at Seattle’s annual Seafair exposition. The author, Patrick Pilcher, wrote that he found the display “in poor taste,” that the air show was a waste of money and a “display of military muscle-flexing that seems a bit outdated.” Pilcher also believes that flying the jets is insensitive, since they “can be a reminder of the terror of death raining from the sky in the form of cluster bombs or other weapons” for “many recent immigrants from war-torn countries.”

The author of the Seattle Times article fails in a huge way to recognize what these flight demonstrations do for the nation. Not only the Blue Angels, but the USAF Thunderbirds, Canada’s Snowbirds, and numerous other flight demonstration squadrons and organizations show the public what their tax dollars are producing. In a time of cynicism and waste, the professionalism, training, and dedication of these men and women are, as the saying goes, some if the best this country has to offer to the world. The visits to schools, hospitals, veterans groups and organizations the pilots and maintainers of the Blue Angels perform at nearly every air show belies the waste this author claims exists. And since he wants the Navy to engage in community service, well, that’s exactly what the Blue Angels do.

Indeed. Although I suspect the real motive, or at least one important motive, behind efforts like these is to damage the military’s esprit de corps.

DAVID FRENCH ON THE UNPERSONING OF ALEX JONES:

There are reasons to be deeply concerned that the tech companies banned Alex Jones. In short, the problem isn’t exactly what they did, it’s why they did it.

Rather than applying objective standards that resonate with American law and American traditions of respect for free speech and the marketplace of ideas, the companies applied subjective standards that are subject to considerable abuse. Apple said it “does not tolerate hate speech.” Facebook accused Mr. Jones of violating policies against “glorifying violence” or using “dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants.” YouTube accused Mr. Jones of violating policies against “hate speech and harassment.”

These policies sound good on first reading, but they are extraordinarily vague. We live in times when the slightest deviation from the latest and ever-changing social justice style guide is deemed bigoted and, yes, “dehumanizing.” We live in a world where the Southern Poverty Law Center, a formerly respected civil-rights organization, abuses its past trust to label a host of mainstream organizations (including my former employer, the Alliance Defending Freedom) and individuals as “hate groups,” “white nationalists” or “anti-Muslim extremists,” based sometimes on disagreements about theology or sexual morality or sometimes on outright misreadings and misrepresentations of an individual’s beliefs and views.

Exhibit A of how wrong the center has been: In June, it paid Maajid Nawaz $3.375 million for labeling him an “anti-Muslim extremist.” This is rich, considered Mr. Nawaz is a former Islamist turned Muslim reformer.

Yet Big Tech still listens to the Southern Poverty Law Center and takes action to punish its targets.

A few points: (1) This is absolutely the first stage in a coordinated plan to deplatform everyone on the right. It’s not really about Alex Jones at all. (2) Aside from its free-speech* implications, which are serious indeed, this also looks like an antitrust violation: Media companies, which compete with Jones for eyeballs, colluded to get other media companies to shut him down. Were I Jones, I’d file an antitrust suit. This is more than arguably conspiracy in restraint of trade (and possibly a conspiracy to deprive him of civil rights). (3) This is proof that we need to break up these big tech companies, which exercise way too much power via their near-monopolies. That they coordinate in the abuse of those monopolies only makes it clearer.

Related: Roger Simon: InfoWars And The Rise Of The Tech Fascists.

* Note that I say “free speech” and not “First Amendment.” The First Amendment only limits government, but “free speech” is — or at least until very recently was — a broader social value in favor of not shutting people up just because we don’t like their ideas or politics. As for the “private companies can do what they want,” well, that’s not the law, or the custom, and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s especially not true where the companies have, as these companies have, affirmatively represented to users and shareholders that they don’t discriminate based on viewpoints.

RASMUSSEN: Voters More Likely to Credit Trump for Economy Over Obama.

Weird how Obama didn’t get his Recovery Summer until he’d been out of office for a year and a half.

MORE OF THIS PLEASE:  Stephen has already posted the story that the Trump Administration will now require hospitals to post standard prices online.  Hallelujah!  I wish the Administration would extend this to nursing homes.  My mother recently spent seven months in such a place.  My sister and I never did figure out the pricing structure–even after I met with someone from the finance department to try to figure it out.  There was no way to price compare. And the charges were extraordinary (even with Medicare and long-term care insurance).

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The next step in criminal justice reform is fewer laws: Donald Trump has supported the First Step Act to reduce minimum sentences, but more can be done. For one thing, we need fewer crimes.

ROGER SIMON: InfoWars and the Rise of the Tech Fascists.

Read the whole thing.

CYA: Journalism Org Sends Out Tutorial Explaining How to Delete Offensive Tweets.

QUESTION ASKED: Is Gov. Kasich Trying to Torpedo Ohio Congressional Candidate on the Eve of a Critical Special Election?

THE REALITY IS IT’S MOSTLY HYPE: The Reality Behind Voice Shopping Hype.

Amazon and Google both tout voice shopping—the ability to make purchases and check on the status of orders with verbal commands—as significant features of their smart speakers. Some forecasts call for annual voice shopping sales to reach $40 billion in just a few years.

But it appears that only a small fraction of smart speaker owners use them to shop, and the few who do try it don’t bother again. The Information has learned that only about 2% of the people with devices that use Amazon’s Alexa intelligent assistant—mostly Amazon’s own Echo line of speakers—have made a purchase with their voices so far in 2018, according to two people briefed on the company’s internal figures.

Echo speakers are so inexpensive, it’s a good guess that Amazon sells them break-even at best, hoping to make the money back on extra spending or on consumer lock-in. But even that premise seems dubious, if this report is correct.