DID YOU NOTICE IT SNOWED IN HOUSTON? Yes, Houston, as in Texas. According to the National Weather Service, the home of the NFL Texans got it’s earliest-ever recorded snowfall on November 13. Naturally, the weather pundits there dubbed it “Snow-vember.”

But there’s far more significance to the Houston snowflakes than a mere interesting fact, according to American Thinker’s Brian Joondeph. He cites multiple other instances of unexpectedly early cold in the U.S. and points out that “perhaps the closed-minded climate warriors should entertain another possibility, that the climate is indeed changing, but not in the way they are assuming. Data from NASA suggests it’s global cooling, not warming that we should be concerned about.”

Why, it’s enough to freeze Al Gore at an inconvenient time!

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Are we living in Fallen Angels?

SO YOU’RE SAYING IT’S GOING TO BE RUINED, TOO: Meet The Woman Bringing Social Justice To Astrology.

EVERYTHING IS RACIST: Chipotle Fired Manager After Admitted Dine-And-Dasher Called Her Racist For Requesting Proof He’ll Pay.

• The maker of a viral video alleging racism by Chipotle bragged on Twitter about dining and dashing at restaurants.

• Masud Ali objected to Chipotle employees wanting proof that he would pay after the employees said he had previously made off without paying.

• Chipotle fired its manager despite knowing about the subject’s Twitter admissions and without reviewing Ali’s history of theft.

Chipotle screwed up — and Qdoba has better meats.

ISN’T ANYONE TAUGHT TABLE MANNERS ANYMORE? Train for Thanksgiving With Our Angry Uncle Bot.

#METOO AS A DRIVER FOR THE SEXBOT INDUSTRY: UNCANNY VULVAS.

The current political climate around courtship and interactions between the sexes is more powerful than the market forces that are replacing jobs, because escalating costs aren’t transparent and neither is the punishment for not paying them. If a business owner wants to adhere to employment laws, he reads them, the costs of courtship are codified nowhere.

The average single man paying attention to contemporary social fashions will struggle to understand the new rules of meeting, courting, or having sex with women. Something as banal as trying to converse with a woman wearing headphones is now often considered harassment. A man’s chances of mating success increase when he approaches many women, but so too do his chances of a gaining reputation as sexist, exploitative, or immoral. To take a fraught example, how does a man know that a woman is genuinely consenting to sex? A lack of ability to pick up on cues can incur catastrophic costs.

Men high in conscientiousness, who are sensitive to social disapproval but who nonetheless have difficulty reading subtle social cues, could make good husbands for women. These men are unlikely to want to take the risk of approaching women. As substitutes like sex robots and virtual companions become better and cheaper, they will monopolize the attention of such men.

As I’ve said before, today’s “sex robots” are basically just dolls, but they’re improving every year. Evolution gave real women a headstart, but they’re not improving, and in some ways are actually becoming less attractive to men than in the past. The consequences of this change are likely to be significant.

Plus: “Underpinning feminist anxiety is the specter of female replaceability. Having long been concerned with governing male desire, the feminist project now faces the possibility of being routed around. Men can build alternatives to a sexual market that has been made less navigable because of ideology. Substitutes are built and bargaining power dissipates. Sex robots are to gender politics as scabs are to labor relations.”

WILL IT ALSO COME WITH A LECTURE ABOUT HOW BOYS ARE BAD? Disney’s Star Wars park will come with original music from John Williams.

I WOULD BE WILLING TO PAY AS MUCH AS A DOLLAR A YEAR, THOUGH I REALLY THINK THEY SHOULD GIVE USERS A SPLIT — SAY 50% — OF WHAT THEY GET FOR SELLING THEIR DATA: To save itself, Facebook must start charging users.

RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: Tijuana protesters chant ‘Out!’ at migrants camped in city.

THURSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM: Midterms show Dems the party of the elite, not the middle class.

(Headline from 2004, which shows how long Democrats have been the party of the elite, not the middle class.)

“SADISM” DID NOT MAKE THE LIST: Why Airlines Don’t Want You to Fly Basic Economy. “Carriers have a vested interest in making this bargain-basement travel as inconvenient as possible.”

NAME THAT PARTY: Lance Mason: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know.

A former Ohio lawmaker, Cuyahoga County judge and Cleveland city official is suspected in the stabbing death of his estranged wife, sources told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Lance Mason, who spent time in prison after being convicted of domestic violence, was arrested after Aisha Fraser was killed her Shaker Heights home, the newspaper reports.

Mason, a 51-year-old former Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court judge, has not yet been charged in connection with Fraser’s death, but was taken into custody Saturday morning, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. Three sources told the newspaper that Mason has been accused in the fatal stabbing of Fraser, who was a beloved teacher in Shaker Heights.

Mason had been working for Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson as a minority business development director, but the city announced Saturday that Mason had been fired. He was hired to the $45,000 per year job after his release from prison following the 2014 domestic violence conviction in a move by Jackson that generated controversy.

CTL-F, “Democrat” turns up zero results until the comments section, unexpectedly.

GOOD: Parents are lining up to join a lawsuit being planned by Pacific Legal Foundation. The lawsuit will oppose the new policy of New York City schools that is intended to make it especially difficult for Asian American students to attend New York’s most academically elite public high schools—Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. It doing so, the lawsuit will be opposing New York City’s notion that there are “too many” qualified Asian American students out there.

Here comes my constant reminder: Schools are not doing students any favors by admitting them to academic programs where their academic credentials put them at the bottom of the class. Students learn more in programs where they are competitive with other students. The research I’ve seen is at the college and university level, but I strongly suspect it applies to elite high schools too. See Want to Be a Doctor? A Scientist? An Engineer? An Affirmative Action Leg Up May Hurt Your Chances and A “Dubious Expediency”: How Race-Preferential Admissions Policies on Campus Hurt Minority Students. Race neutrality is not just the principled thing, it’s the practical thing too.

DAVID HARSANYI: Dear TSA, Please Stop Molesting Kids At The Airport. “It’s bad enough that the government wastes our time. Children shouldn’t be props in its Security Theater.”

The other day, after slogging through a check-in line at one of the nation’s busiest airports, dutifully removing my shoes and belt and checking my bag and pockets for other potentially dangerous items (water and loose change), I was pulled aside by a crack Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent so he could further investigate the contents of my carry-on. While waiting, I took this picture of what looked to be a ten-year-old boy being molested by a 250-pound man.

Now, normally I would have reported this incident to the proper authorities. Inappropriate contact with a child, inside or outside his clothing, is a criminal act. But, in this case, the proper authorities were the ones feeling up the kid and the father had already protested the frisking—although, like all of us, he probably understood that no matter how vociferously he objected to this bit of state-sanctioned criminality it wasn’t going to change anything.

As far as the TSA is concerned, we’re subjects not citizens.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: CNN’s Kirsten Powers declared all Trump supporters to be racist this past Friday.

Speaking with the chyron “Why Trump Resonates With White Women” below her on “CNN Tonight” with Don Lemon, Powers said Trump’s racist rhetoric from his campaign to the present was too vast to summarize as she assessed white women who support the president.

“They’ll say, ‘Well, I’m not racist. I just voted for him because, you know, I didn’t like Hillary Clinton,'” the former Clinton administration official said. “And I just want to say that’s not—that doesn’t make you not racist. It actually makes you racist. If you support somebody who does racist things, that makes you racist. So, I just want to establish that.

Powers was a bit more nuanced in 2014, when she was a liberal employed by Fox News:

In their latest video, as Noah Rothman writes at Mediaite, RCP’s Carl Cannon takes Kirsten Powers of Fox News out for a spin, which produces this interesting moment:

Cannon began by asking Powers how she is treated by her Fox colleagues. He recalled that New York Times’ conservative columnist David Brooks was not well-received when he first started writing for the Times and asked if Powers had encountered a similar experience.

“People are really nice at Fox,” Powers revealed. “It’s been good for because I – before that, I lived in a real liberal bubble.”

“All my friends were liberals and I grew up in a really liberal family,” she continued. “I had a lot of ideas about conservatives and then I got to Fox and just, I was like, ‘Oh, they’re not all evil and stupid.’”

I realize she’s speaking glibly and off-the-cuff, but the inference is that on some level, Powers actually did believe that all conservatives are evil, thus butting up against fellow Fox News pundit Charles Krauthammer’s law of politics from over a decade ago. “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil,” Krauthammer wrote in 2002.

And Powers is back to believing that all conservatives are evil — at CNN, she’s safely back in the bubble.

Related: A Cold Winter for White Women.

THANKSGIVING NEWS YOU CAN USE: I Cooked A Frozen Turkey (Not Fake News).

DOG ACCUSED OF HATE CRIME:  Bow wow.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Why President Trump Should Channel Teddy Roosevelt And Bust Some Trusts.

THE RATCHET MOVES RIGHT FOR ONCE: Wisconsin Republicans Ready to Rein in Executive Branch Following Democrats’ Victories. “That means several of Evers’ campaign goals such as Act 10, the law that limits union powers and pushed Gov. Walker onto the national GOP stage, will be close to impossible to accomplish.”

BRUCE BAWER: The Most High-Profile Apostate Yet.

Now 25 years old, Zayn Malik was born and raised in a working-class household in Bradford, England, the son of a Pakistani Muslim father and an English mother who was an Islamic convert. When he was 17, he and four other singers who were competing on the British show The X Factor were teamed up into a boy band by Simon Cowell and another judge. The band, called One Direction, quickly became the biggest of international acts. What set Zayn apart was that he identified as a Muslim. Oh, and his sultry good looks. Harry Styles was boyishly handsome, but Zayn was sexy.

Depending on your point of view, this teen heartthrob was either good or bad PR for Islam.

Fascinating story.

LEONARD LEO: George Conway’s anti-Trump club for conservative lawyers is ‘offensive.’

A top Republican lawyer finds George Conway’s group of conservative attorneys for speaking out against the Trump administration to be repugnant.

“I find the underlying premise of the group rather offensive,” Leonard Leo told Axios in a report published Sunday. “The idea that somehow they need to have this voice because conservatives are somehow afraid to talk about the rule of law during the Trump administration.”

“And my response to that is, no, people aren’t afraid, many people just don’t agree that there’s a constitutional crisis and don’t agree with the people who have signed up with this group,” Leo added, making the comments in a personal capacity rather than as the right-leaning Federalist Society’s executive vice president.

Exactly.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? With Hospitalization Losing Favor, Judges Order Outpatient Mental Health Treatment.

WHY ARE MILLENNIALS HAVING SO LITTLE SEX? THIS COULD BE A REASON: “He couldn’t escape the sense that hitting on someone in person had, in a short period of time, gone from normal behavior to borderline creepy.”

Plus: #MeToo, women hardest hit: “The 2017 iteration of Match.com’s Singles in America survey (co-led by Helen Fisher and the Kinsey Institute’s Justin Garcia) found that single Millennials were 66 percent less likely than members of older generations to enjoy receiving oral sex. Which doesn’t bode particularly well for female pleasure: Among partnered sex acts, cunnilingus is one of the surest ways for women to have orgasms.”

ALLIES: Erdogan vows to crush US allies in Syria.

“The Turks are concerned that the United States is digging in for the long haul in Syria to secure a region for the Kurds from where it can maintain its military foothold with a view to containing Iran,” reports Idiz. “Expectations were high that the planned meeting between [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan and [US] President Donald Trump in Paris over the weekend would help to iron out remaining issues. The differences over northern Syria, however, remain very much in place and may have become more intractable after [US Syria envoy James] Jeffrey effectively gave notice to Turkey that it will have to come to terms with the US-YPG/PYD alliance.” The PYD is the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to “crush the terror outfit,” referring to the US-backed YPG, east of the Euphrates in Syria, propelling Ankara further along on a collision course with Washington.

Note that doing so would aid Iran’s aims in what was once Syria.